Forgotten Collection

White spots on maps refer to unknown, entirely unexplored areas. Black spots, so it seems, mark the historically unknown and forgotten. Black is an impression of life, the symbolic color of death, a hint of disappearance.
Pitch-black – the historical pre-line of human civilization. Time sluices open an access, that allows to melt the past with the present and the future. The backbone of our world is a wormhole, which allows us to travel through time and space. It constantly changes its shape, it turns from a table into a carafe and transforms into a chair. Looking at the roots of our culture, one may recognize material potentials for reactivation, to provoke a new ontological imagination – as a temporal response, or as an expression of the unease about the conditions of our time. This meant for us to challenge the imperatives and modern modalities of time, material, value, production and reproduction. Scrutinizing possible mistakes in the system – the transmuted processes – educed by modernity. Therefore we explored what is far away, but still not remote enough to pervade our memory. We were focusing on what is in remote, but still close enough in time and space to catch our attention again. Among this is birch-pitch, which can be called the first systematically produced thermoplastic material of mankind, verifiable manufactured for the first time around 220,000 B.C.

The materials we used are substances, that no one longer knows; for what they were made for, how they feel and smell, or how they lie in the hand. As ancestors of the petrochemical generated materials, they expose questions; about their disappearance, about what is existing and how we want to live. A simple thermoplastic composite of shellac and bamboo charcoal – raw materials of a past pre-industrial society. Heated, formed and transformed – the materials convert into the processes, that we’ve initiated. They become malleable, liquid – changing states of matter. The objects get into a state of flux or start to levitate. The substances are condensed, but not invariable. In our self-defined break-and-remake process they can liquify again and transform once more into another form. So the reminiscent space becomes an imaginary space. In a speculative sense, the clear constraints of use become liquid. The objects should act as prototypes, as an instruction
manual of memory, to (re-)view another possible reality. The results are essentials. Archetypes of use. These are our time sluices.

20 October – 06 December 2016, 24/7
Outdoor Showcase, UdK Berlin, Einsteinufer 43