Project 3

"HOME is about the image of architecture in personal and
collective memory. The project deals with the notion of an
,ideal place’ – the place one was forced to leave in the recent
or more distant past. People draw memories on a piece
of paper and document an element of imaginary reality in
the installations. The interviewed are no actors and their
accounts are not necessarily exceptional. Many people
all over the world have made similar experiences, live with
similar memories of houses full of sun, of gardens rich with
fruit that taste as nothing ever since, of parties full of
joy. While drawing the plan of the house and the alley that
leads to the porch, all the details become real again. It is
the architecture that gives them their proper place.(…)

In my previous projects 'Dying Gauls' and 'No Place like
America', I asked men in the street of Lahore about their
image of the world after death and again paradise was the
ultimate destination. The installation 'No Place like America'
showed young men with the dream of migrating to the USA talking
about their image of this place which they have never seen in
reality. The people spoke of it as if it were just around the
corner: you just have to die or to go to America and you will
enter paradise.

The HOME project examines the opposite situation: people
talk of places they left at a definite moment in time, but
while they remember it, time extends into eternity. I try
to translate this transformation into a spatial installation
combining imagined or remembered pictures with narrative
and a projection "screen". It is their "recherche du temps
perdu" which I have to express in sculptural terms.
Although the frame of reference of the interviews is specifrc
to context and people, I don't want to reduce the
work to a historical illustration. The question is: If and how
a time-specific personal memory translates into a general
image of our past and how this is carried on into the future
on a local and global level."