Wittenberger Labor – work in progress
On 28 August, before the first official day of the artist residency, the space will be pre-installed, the research base – the laboratory will be set up for all subsequent experiments. The left-hand shop window of the future library (facing the pedestrian zone) will be the screen for the laboratory silhouettes. To do this, I start by making several large silhouettes that shine through the frosted glass and partly depict or hint at the shadows of a laboratory room. These forms create an image of another experimental laboratory, one as a silhouette, the other a shop window, animated and constantly changing.
The shop window on the right allows viewers to look in and even participate. It becomes an interactive space where the laboratory technician/researcher can be given research assignments by the audience or devise them together. All the working materials for the five-day investigation are provided here – tubes, tables, equipment, funnels, laboratory supplies, organic and non-organic materials, a diverse range of possibilities for the experiments that follow. Behind the large shop window, the spectator/passers-by can see and witness the sometimes self-lost activities of the laboratory assistant.
From 29 August to 3 September 2022, the people of Wittenberg will be able to watch me – the laboratory assistant – explore materials, experiment with connections and perform alchemical actions. Various action arrangements will optionally take place spontaneously and in dialogue with the audience or according to a daily script created for this purpose, which develops and commissions itself in the process.
As in a dance, there is a choreography according to which allegorical actions are performed. The partly recurring theatrical fragments lead to a more or less narrative sequence. There is a beginning of the performed ‘object’, but not necessarily a result, a solution. Just as we know it, research also investigates research itself!
Playing freely: rebuilding, discarding, destroying, starting again and breaking off, making mistakes, mixing, filling and pouring, revitalising, charging and condensing, finding and losing again, cleansing, anointing and unsticking.
These are just a few of the moments that can be included in research.
To what extent can elementary be used to integrate unknown, new material into existing structures?
After several rounds of firing, the ashes of the unusable can be pressed into new forms, under incantation.
Everything is subject to an alchemical process of transformation, in which the possibility of a new approach (e.g. in a petri dish for observation) is contained.
Aggregate states, chemical compounds, matter that wants nothing to do with each other, personal and social forms can be changed in the creative process.
Experimenting in the laboratory is already the allegory I have chosen to approach situations and things, a special way of looking at the world, to perform it in an act of action/transformation and to proceed freely to my heart’s content.
It takes a bit of magic and enchantment, a bit of intention and intuitiveness to be guided by the material and to absorb inspiration.
A bio-chemical process that expresses itself, a social process that is reflected in the artistic action.
It works explicitly and joyfully with assertions, speculations and not-knowing!
Julia Neuenhausen 13.07.2022
