SABINE SCHASCHL:
I believe that an important "building block" of your
works is "staging" spatial installations or strategic
settings that allude to psychological mechanisms
eliciting human actions. How much strategy in fact
is involved in this; or are your "stagings" simple
ways of referring to your everyday observations?
When presenting any of my works for the first time, they
are at the beginning, nothing but an assumption or a
claim. This claim may be incomprehensible, fragmentary,
or even "erroneous". It is onh when this "working
fragment" comes in contact with the visitor that
I learn something about its potential. Putting a work
on display, no matter what, is a strategy. I experience
my work, I don't create it; it just evolves. Visitors interfere
and change it even though they remain passiv e,
i.e. don't do anything at all. The manner in which the
work develops is influenced by a manipulation applied
either individually or collectively. There are many experiences
that are important for future "conditions",
but I don't want to infer a general methodology from
these experiences. Also, it is difficult for me at the
start to assess the potential a given work harbors. For
this, I need to show the same work again and again, I
need to experience it myself and take part in it. This
results in a chain of events on which the setting may impinge at any point in time. So yes, there is a staging,but it is not derived from the subject's potential and the functional requirements of the works.
How are these notions put into practice?MW:Each setting develops differently and starts from very
different conditions. Shrinking Bottles / Melting Bottles,
for example, is a script that consists of about thirty
single-page storyboards. The same scene is repeated
over and over again. We find ourselves in a parallel
universe that offers shrinking bottles as products.
As soon as the bottle is empty, it shrinks. In another
world there are melting bottles. Empty bottles are
melted in a melting compactor at home. Single-page
scripts describe these fictitious bottle products in
trivial everyday scenes featuring banal domestic
squabbling. Originally, this was a script for a series
of videos that revolved around the question as to what
a world of shrinking and melting bottles may actually look like. I began to work on a simple arrangement
designed to demonstrate the way in which the Melting Compactor functions. The following question
