EXHIBITION LATENTE

They still exist. Rooms that remain incognito, waiting to be discovered, or that are already being used quietly like a well-kept secret.

One such place – how could it be better – is right above our heads. An attic, unused, with its typical smell of old beams and adventure. This is not a place where you want to hang your laundry. Pots and bowls catch the rainwater. Chipboard covers broken wooden floorboards. With every step, dust swirls up to your knees. A mummified pigeon serves as a totem for this place.

In the summer of 2024 we started making collages from advertisement posters in our attic atelier. We searched for motifs in the piles of posters we collected from Berlin billboards. Several layers of posters were often stuck on top of each other, so that we had to soak them in water before being able to carefully peel off the layers.

The allure of the hidden was literally in our hands: colors, shapes, typography waiting to be revealed. Just as André Breton described décollage in his 1938 Dictionnaire du Surréalisme: ‘[...] tearing down a poster to reveal fragments of the poster or posters underneath, and experimenting with the alienating or confusing effect of the whole.’

Until the last light of summer and for as long as the autumn temperatures permitted, we created collages in the attic. Ultimately, we sealed the surfaces with a layer of dammar resin varnish. That marked the completion of the work. For the time being. The idea of an exhibition already begun to germinate in the dark winter months. But the artworks needed a title.

Since we kept coming across poetry in the poster fragments, we decided to reproduce it in the form of haikus. This is a Japanese form of poetry consisting of three lines with 5, 7 and 5 syllables respectively. In their condensed form, we captured our urge for associative expression in relation to what we saw in each work. A projection. A sketch of self-reflection. Through us, onto the work and reflected back again, put into words. Fragments of introspection. A contemplation of what already exists, revealed in a new light.

Michael Wismar and Eleonora Paradise