Mark

Reading and Writing (A Shadow in the Shape of a House)
2023; Performative Installation

A Shadow in the Shape of a House was for its first time presented as an installation of a series of 121 letter cards. 
Visitors could take a lettercard and write it to themselves in the writing booth. They could post it there directly into a slit in the table. I had vowed to post them one year after they had been written. Over 100 letters were written. Some were sealed and some were left open for me to read.

In the course of the performative installation Reading and Writing (A Shadow in the Shape of a House), I presented an empty second set of all the cards once again.
I sat at a desk, silently reading the letters that had been left open and writing reactions to them that I would add into the envelope before sealing them, ready to be sent.
I wrote my reactions on copy paper, in order to place a copy of my response on top of the respective card on the wall.
By placing the responses on top of the cards, the changes in the installation started to mirror the changes that happened in the orginial participatory installation of the project.

Visitors could now look at the image, the orginial text as well as my associative response to what someone had written in reaction to it. The writing of the participating visitors, however, was not revealed publicly. In that way, the correlations between public and private, which formed one of the core concepts in the main project, were perpetuated.

Excerpt from video documentation






Reading and Writing (A Shadow in the Shape of a House)
2023; Performative Installation

A Shadow in the Shape of a House was for its first time presented as an installation of a series of 121 letter cards.
Visitors could take a lettercard and write it to themselves in the writing booth. They could post it there directly into a slit in the table. I had vowed to post them one year after they had been written. Over 100 letters were written. Some were sealed and some were left open for me to read.

In the course of the performative installation Reading and Writing (A Shadow in the Shape of a House), I presented an empty second set of all the cards once again.
I sat at a desk, silently reading the letters that had been left open and writing reactions to them that I would add into the envelope before sealing them, ready to be sent.
I wrote my reactions on copy paper, in order to place a copy of my response on top of the respective card on the wall.
By placing the responses on top of the cards, the changes in the installation started to mirror the changes that happened in the orginial participatory installation of the project.

Visitors could now look at the image, the orginial text as well as my associative response to what someone had written in reaction to it. The writing of the participating visitors, however, was not revealed publicly. In that way, the correlations between public and private, which formed one of the core concepts in the main project, were perpetuated.

Excerpt from video documentation


COPYRIGHT © 2024 Lena Holzer. All Rights Reserved
COPYRIGHT © 2024 Lena Holzer. All Rights Reserved