‘Shelter’ was the continuation of the ‘Measuring Berlin’ project developed in Künstlerhaus Bethanien. It also deals with the creation of physical objects based on the interpretation of analytical data related to us, but instead of focusing in the visualization of everyday experiences around us, it focus in how we remember that experiences in time, our personal and individual interpretation of the story.
Our memory stores everything, but we may not ‘remember’ that those memories are there; it is then that we link our personal experiences to items that we carry around every day in order not to forget… the item is thus not a visualisation, but a link, and the datum becomes more sentimental than functional; more important than the datum in itself, or its interpretation, is the fact that it is keeping a memory alive.
Throughout its history, costume jewellery – apart from any aesthetic value it might have – has retained its implicit value as an object, for what it represents, for what it says about us and about our experience… from the earliest tusk hanging at our breast and the pirate’s earring to today’s pins. Over time, some of the experiences that these objects speak of have ceased to be part of our way of life; some have fallen out of use, others have retained an aesthetic value which is a distillation of the original story; still others have evolved and been reinterpreted… and new ones appear every day; man has always had strong links with objects, so much so that one can even classify the kind of object that tends to be linked to different kinds of emotion, experience or memory…
After doing a research about which of these object-experience relations are more common, this project grouped a selection of such objects, small sculptures, with which we can forge a more personal relationship because they are in daily use. In the grey area between art and design, data visualisation invests form with content, even though each item can be read solely – and subjectively – by whoever knows what lies hidden in it. Eventually, these objects become a tiny shelter for our memories.
Our personal experiences, which render each object unique, are locked away in an industrially-marketed body; but in a world in which mass production threatened to remove the personal character of objects in favour of mass personalisation, would it not make more sense for these objects to convey the fact for which they matter to us; to be real histories rather than mere icons?
