Dear Kate,
I have been thinking about what occurs to the work when is left alone in the city?
I wonder about the narrative it starts by interrupting the daily space. The spectator seems to have a radical role and importance within these appearances of pieces in public space. The perception goes necessarily far from the original idea, the piece is alive in the sense that the understanding of its significance mutates with every glance.
In public space the works transforms, it becomes part of the observer and it is the interaction that generates the piece. There are so many layers within this project, the readings are also multiple and the semantic is constructed as polysemy.
Again the palimpsest takes its course, this time in the multiple meanings of the piece. Our piece is not anymore one, but many.
Dear Naya,
Today I was talking with somebody about the Rose of the Winds on Griesplatz, and she gave me her reading of it: these jute sand bags heavy with the everyday experiences, these texts full of hope and yearning and disappointment between their lines, squashed by the heavy rock that lands on them – she asked, does their softness protect them, or make them vulnerable?
These layers of script that become illegible and merge into an aesthetic of their own, the daily vestiges of small lives that become a collective cultural memory…
And: if you push a sack and leave your indentation, your mark, a shallow dent, and then someone else comes and pushes it another way, does your mark still exist, does it still count, or has it been wiped out by the other’s action?
So strange to think that it never occurred to me to see the stone as oppressive, as perhaps a symbol of the disruption of war on these everyday lives, and yet it is not only a valid reading but an obvious one when you think about it.
Layers and layers and layers, and the layering of these readings into collective understandings in which the individual’s interaction coexists with and is enriched by others. You walk away from the piece, and leave it in the city, and only then it comes alive.