It’s less than a week to go before the opening of the show, and there is hammering and drilling going on everywhere occasionally interrupted by some mellow jazz. It seems that the health and safety regs have gone out the window -if they ever existed here at all. I wake up every morning to the sound of construction work on the roof of the opposite building. My living room doesn’t have a curtain so I can see the workers (and they can probably see me). I put a spare bed sheet on my bedroom window. All this time we have been working in a building which is under renovation. Cables hanging over the staircase so that I had to duck under while carrying a chair upstairs. It’s great, though. It means people are getting on with their work at a much faster and more relaxed pace than in a similar situation in the UK where H&S issues sometimes seem to be more important than the work itself. This reminds me of my visit to the Venice Biennale last summer where the British pavilion was the only place I was told I could not sit in the walkway between the chairs as it’s an emergency exit.
It’s only an impression, though. The architect is here almost every day and the workers, even though they don’t speak English or German, are incredibly helpful.
More to the work though… the plan is to black out this 11.5m room to create a controlled environment with a TV monitor showing a video, some photographs and an armchair. All furniture items covered in white bed sheets that I got from a local charity GAB (amazing what you can get for free here, I am so impressed).The window seems to the biggest, quite literally, issue -it occupies almost the entire wall so it’s problematic to find the curtains that would fit such height. Besides, the light is incredible here and it would be a shame to get of it altogether. There has to be some sort of compromise that I am yet to work out. I may use the same sheets from gab to make a cover for the window, sew it together like a curtain but not sure it will look the way I want it to…
The floor is also a question mark… at the moment it’s painted that generic gallery type of grey colour. I am thinking that I should be bringing some element of domesticity into this installation… a cup or a carpet or something else.
Like I said at the beginning, I have been documenting pretty much everything around me all this time on my Holga camera, so now I have a pile of 15x15cm photographs, some of which are also being made into a small book by own very own graphic design team on site.
