PROJECTS

Everything that is not film I call “projects” for the sake of convenience. A suitably vague and inclusive notion. Life itself is a project, of course. But this concerns everything drifting in the area between art and handiwork. Most of it is not stored in my numbered cabinets, but is lying around or hanging up somewhere.

It started in 1979 with a project I called Archeology: I carefully dissected a fat chunk of wallpaper I found in the house my father had just bought. I stuck a label next to it: 1979-1.

I have continued doing things like this on a fairly irregular basis. Seemingly trivial objects are treated with great precision, as if they were treasures. Which they are, to me. Around the same time, I think, I built a tiny temple for the remnants of my first teddy bear. The little bear had been badly eaten by moths, it was beyond salvation. I photographed it, and a slide of that picture is hanging in the back of the temple. A little glass box contains a piece of its skin. The small pillars are made of the stem of a neglected rose bush in the back yard that was also beyond rescue.