Isa Genzken and everydayness
The interweaving of narrative in the spatial relationships between subjects and the attempt to share experiences becomes the basis of relationships between companion species.
They are stories in which multispecies actors, due to their differences, recycle ways of life becoming intertwined assemblages of matter, and tune into a possible interdependent constitution of species on the planet in every dimension of time, body and space. The entities, however, do not form a common whole, but constitute partial, sometimes temporary, solutions. In naturocultures, strategies for capturing fragmented content and ironic reversals are omnipresent.
The German artist Isa Genzken actively participates in the historical-cultural discourse in which the actors testify to the development of naturocultures as a product of the relationship between the subject and the landscape. Sculptural constructions taken directly from everyday life fit perfectly into the postmodern exhibition space of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, designed by the famous architect Mies van der Rohe. The sculptures are presented as collections composed of personal worlds, created using recycled materials, newspaper clippings, cardboard boxes and deconstructed concrete forms. The spectators, through the specular reflections on the surfaces of the objects, become participants, instruments and scales for measuring the exhibition space. In her sculptural practice, Isa Genzken experiments with the concept of the individual and inverts it, taking into account her experiences as an artist inserted in a specific historical and spatial context, addressing the legacy of Germany’s modernist architecture. Her experience is a tool for analyzing the ideas and types of production of Western culture, which is based on the heritage of modernism and on the comparison with the waste marked by the traces left by someone’s intense presence. Her sculptures are not perceived as solid or two-dimensional, but are treated in cinematic terms as a testimony to the collective imagination and memory. Isa Genzken, known since the late 1970s for her colorful wood sculptures and lei hi-fi systems, managed to shock the art world in the mid-1980s when she approached a new material: chalk. She initially created small plaster sculptures, to which she gradually began to add elements of wood, metal, paper, glass and even mosaics.
Over time, she began to experiment with various forms, resulting in tall, slender, vertical structures, such as Institut (Institut, 1985), which reference the architecture of skyscrapers. Simple cubic solids and nested structures look like assembled fragments or casts of facades. The artist creates these forms by actively modeling the surfaces of the sculptures, developing potential of their plasticity, moving away as much as possible from the rigidity of the forms, focusing on effects not dictated by rational reflection.
The result is an interaction between architecture, fluid aesthetics of the present and everyday life. Sewing, embroidering, repairing, working with plastic, and then capturing recycled materials and reinterpreting the contents of mass culture are daily practices that Isa Genzken refers to in her work and which, according to researcher Silvia Federici, can help to recreate the everyday life. They are organic processes and everyday works, given by creativity in the juxtaposition of heterogeneous, incompatible elements, endowed with an ephemeral specificity, as they are punctually forgotten or repressed in the landfills of collective memory. In the era of late capitalism, recognizing the valuable practice of working with used fabrics and materials is not easy, both economically and symbolically, because most of them are plastics or silicones that are difficult to work with or not reusable. It is from the shadows that the revolutionary potential of organic work emerges. In the process of craftsmanship, to be able to extract value from materials considered useless, it is necessary to invest time, attention and patience. Silvia Federici, in her book “Re-enchanting the world, Feminism Policy of the Commons”, wrote that these conscious daily gestures and choices regarding affective labor and manual practices have a revolutionary potential due to their organic and ephemeral specificity, and their strength lies in consistency, dedication, and conscious commitment to performing repetitive tasks:
“(…)These are the conditions not only of our physical survival, but of a “re-enchantment” of the earth, since they reconnect what capitalism has divided: our relationship with nature, with others and with our bodies, allowing us to not only escape the gravitational pull of capitalism but regain a sense of wholeness in our lives.”
In a world where the quantity of waste and leftovers from industrial production is constantly increasing, so much so as to threaten the biodiversity of the earth, everyone’s personal choices are put to the test every day, giving them the opportunity to redefine themselves. The global crisis situation of renewable sources requires us to think about possible new scenarios of coexistence with waste and to create an alternative space, far from the capitalist logic focused only on the desire for profit. To emerge from the crisis, it is worth focusing on strengthening the affective and organic work carried out, based on the reuse and repair of already existing materials, allowing the emergence of apparently very distant connections, thus creating a more empathetic and still possible world.
