Germany, 1992
zoephiline.com
Thesis: My Title is a Blanket - on ideas as things
Untitled
My research and writing process began a year ago when I encountered a mattress on a square. It was a powerful image: the open platform, a familiar object! A product made for bodies. The mattress and the square became my sanctuary — the object: an imaginary platform that gathered my thoughts, building an archive of unofficial phenomenons. During the writing I (re-)discovered encounters and compared them to words. I dug in the history of those words and was led to newer thoughts about these and to even older memories. I found (out) simple objects can channel my true fascination with the relation of words and ideas, materials, concepts and things. The way I view and physically experience things; categorizing, measuring and matching them. Taking an object of discussion, holding it up to the face, turning it, hiding and showing it, tasting and dreaming of it. Looking for what it is made of and what it could become.
The past years I have been exploring the relationship body — surface — space. A garment can be a house/ a tent can collapse/ a scarf is never just a scarf. The way we surround ourselves with surfaces and project ideas onto them challenges my creative process. I aim to change, cut, fold, build, define, and explore the possibilities of these. Studying ways of cutting into paper, inventing terms such as ‘immediate textiles’. I aim to look at the constitution and condition of the mattress and the square, the exact way a tower is constructed, the proximity to my body as a scale. And then there is duration in my work: the bodiless mattress thrown out on the street, a garment without its wearer, the dismantlement of a pyramid. This makes me question the essence of things and if/ how they still exist after being used/ standing on their own (do they become bodies? are they a Fata Morgana?)
For my graduation project I have made a collection of objects that reflect on the exploration described above.
Stuck by the flatness of the textile pieces I made, I wondered if
perhaps they were concepts rather than objects or garments.
But in my view concepts don’t offer us shelter. Instead, they intend to explore, predict, explain, relate and define. They push us to trespass a comfortable surface into the unknown. Concepts can trigger, frustrate, activate, specify, hold, in my opinion. They do not need to answer requirements; they can make us look at things in a way we had never seen them. What constitutes a material thing, on the other hand, is its thingness, an intangible quality. So — lets say we think about a boat and jump on the table; in that moment, the table is not a table anymore, but a boat. The idea that we project onto a surface becomes tangible, real, and gains thingness itself! In that sense I have always tried to register which things belong to my imaginarium. The blanket used to be a cover, now its a home, tomorrow, who knows.
