Residency at HomeBase V Berlin

Day twenty two. Final night at the studio

It seems surreal thinking about a crowd of people basically ‘invading’ the space that has somehow became mine over the last couple of weeks. It took a while to settle in. Maybe only after a week of being here I felt that I could be in the studio as the main working space, which when it happened felt great.

This is what my studio looks like right now. The objects covered in white, the TV and the carpet are part of the installation, the empty packet of cereal and the bags obviously aren’t. The carpet made all the difference. It is the same carpet that appears in the video and the photographs, and comes from my room here in Pankow. Despite my passionate dislike for the colour red it has become the equivalent of coziness, so that when I decided to make it part of the installation the studio regained it’s charm. I stayed there for a while reading Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro (trying to finish the last few pages before donating is to the project library) delaying the moment I have to leave the studio. It’s interesting how now and then what is being said in the book echoes the events or my thoughts at the time, especially here.

A couple of days ago I suddenly that this is the only reality that exists at this given moment, and there is nothing beyond it.

I can hear Coldplay from outside. How odd. That’s definitely not the local radio station, they are into techno etc.

Tomorrow we open to the public…

Good

Not good…

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.

Whatever happens here does not exist elsewhere and is therefore unreal. The events that take place here will not affect the order of things back there. No one can get hurt here. Everything is temporary here and will not have a permanent resonance there.