The Workshop: Sculpture of Memory

Discourse_Project [7]:

The workshop:

Sculpture of Memory

Introduction

How to remember a site, a place, a room, a workshop – when it is gone? The media artist returns to a site very important for him and realises that the feelings and moods related to that time in the 1950s are slipping away. He gets the idea of constructing the workshop space as a kind of model or sculpture and then transforming the sculpture into one or two photographs. That is the piece – and the outcome of the process of remembering using a transvisual method.

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The process of visualization

Fifty years later he came to think about what he remembers as happy hours working in the workshop, and he realised that it was difficult for him to remember and visualise the room and the time. First, he went back to the location. But the house had changed and was rebuilt and the annex building with the small workshop room had been knocked down.

Sitting in his studio he then tried to make a drawing from memory of his workshop in the fifties but he was not happy with the outcome. The successful part was the mood and ambiance created by the black soft crayon creating the strong contrast of light and darkness, but when drawing he realised that there was something totally wrong with the feeling of size and material.

The sculpture of the workshop

The sculpture was to be constructed in wood and cardboard in a 1:10 size. He wrote in his notebook:

This work process reveals what I will call the transvisual analysis of memory. The memory work is helped by the transvisual action of making the sculpture, not as a replica of reality in 1957 but as a tool in the memory work. Therefore I chose to make the outside of the ‘building’ in a raw manner so that one can see the cuts of the compass saw and the screws. And the non-illusionist expression is stressed by my choice of painting the sculpture with the neutral 30% grey colour. Do not be seduced.

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The two photographs

The media artist did not see the sculpture of the workshop as the final piece but he wanted to contextualise his emotional involvement with that time of his life and to trigger his memory by making photographs of the sculpture. The workshop construction was originally placed in a small courtyard where the low building was painted yellow and the exterior staircases that led to the first floor was painted red.

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