‘that which you wove out of light stuff i wear in honor of stone’ (2022)
(unprocessed cotton wool bale, ceramic tiles)
This piece merges a site specific intervention (tile ‘mosaic’) with a found sculptural object (cotton bundle, stored in the Bremen Hafen Museum and then moved into a dumpster). My interest in this gesture began when encountering two large mosaics in the city of Bremen– the tryptich ‘Tabakhandel’ in Hauptbahnhof as well as the entry of the Baumwollbörse (Cotton Exchange building). Both of these imageries act as a covering up, a way of mythologizing the exchange/trade of colonial goods as good vis-a-vis embedding those representats into architecture around the city. The visuals in the mosaics construct narratives which act as erasures of violent accumilations of wealth.
The tiles installed here in the supermarket (another site where this trade/accumulation becomes normalized) are traced outlines of the tobacco leaves represented in the Tabakhandle mosaic. Here they take on an active movement, escaping the mosaic. They become untethered– from a mythologized representation, from a narrative , from an architecture– moving between the column and cotton. The cotton sits in its shipping/storage form, tightly compressed and bound by metal straps. In this phase of the cotton’s material condition, it holds those contradictions– at once seeming weightless yet heavy as a boulder. While it sits in this forced block form it undergoes a process of entropic decompression, expanding outwards.
*the title of this work is an excerpt from Paul Celan’s epitaphic poem Death Shroud.
Documentation Images by Joya Bahkyi
(unprocessed cotton wool bale, ceramic tiles)
This piece merges a site specific intervention (tile ‘mosaic’) with a found sculptural object (cotton bundle, stored in the Bremen Hafen Museum and then moved into a dumpster). My interest in this gesture began when encountering two large mosaics in the city of Bremen– the tryptich ‘Tabakhandel’ in Hauptbahnhof as well as the entry of the Baumwollbörse (Cotton Exchange building). Both of these imageries act as a covering up, a way of mythologizing the exchange/trade of colonial goods as good vis-a-vis embedding those representats into architecture around the city. The visuals in the mosaics construct narratives which act as erasures of violent accumilations of wealth.
The tiles installed here in the supermarket (another site where this trade/accumulation becomes normalized) are traced outlines of the tobacco leaves represented in the Tabakhandle mosaic. Here they take on an active movement, escaping the mosaic. They become untethered– from a mythologized representation, from a narrative , from an architecture– moving between the column and cotton. The cotton sits in its shipping/storage form, tightly compressed and bound by metal straps. In this phase of the cotton’s material condition, it holds those contradictions– at once seeming weightless yet heavy as a boulder. While it sits in this forced block form it undergoes a process of entropic decompression, expanding outwards.
*the title of this work is an excerpt from Paul Celan’s epitaphic poem Death Shroud.
Documentation Images by Joya Bahkyi
