Recurrent aesthetic modification of forested areas brought to mind a formative aspect of my child-hood. The words gehen (go) and Wald (forest) once constituted my attempt to explore the conifer forest behind our house with the other children. Mother gave me a dictionary so I could translate it myself, and those two words were the fastest way to do so. Having arrived in Austria as a refugee family in 1992, we moved from place to place in the countryside during the following years. Wherever we moved, there was always a forest close by, a constant that offered us an interplay of imagination, construction, and playful exploration where we could create our own reality.
“Gemma Loga baun” (“Let’s go build a camp”) was the usual way to describe constructing primitive huts in the Vitruvian style in what was special terrain for us. Then and now, the area between the trees seems to me a space full of spaces as well as an archetype of naturalness. Temporary installations are produced at irregular intervals and implemented for personal and experiential as well as photographic purposes, then taken apart.
Safe space, landscape of imagination, perception and memory. Scenery and canvas. Always working according to the structure, dimensions and atmosphere of the chosen site, I add – lay, measure, hang, position and mount. While the spatial experience is never meant to be shared with public, the works I do exhibit are high quality, medium-format photographs, limited documents of the ephemeral situations.
The image above shows the forest behind the house we used to stay in 1992. I took the photo in summer 2019 when I visited this place for the first time in 27 years.
