Three meters of hanging cloth bale show the floorplan of Virginia Woolf’s "A room of one's own“ (using a drawing by Edith Friedl) and questions from Anja Westerfroelke were juxtaposed to quotes from this essay published in 1929.
"READING ROOM" - Installation, www, AudioCD, book
Commissioned by the Southern Alberta Art gallery, Lethbridge, Canada (1996 - 1999),
The over 140 stories found in the CD ROM 'Library' of READING ROOM are collected from European immigrants and their descendents to Western Canada at the turn of the century until now. They are, like most family stories, remembered and retold as acelebration of both the unusual and the ordinary.
A few of the stories situated anonymously among the rest, are invented.
These are reminders of the inaccuracy and subjectivity of memory and of history and of the curious relation between 'fact' and 'fiction'.
All of the stories are centered around a particular object from everyday life, some of which are stored in the object library of the gallery. These are labeled with identification tags and are connected to the cyber library by a corresponding catalogue system of numbers and drawings.
The user can feel free to "borrow" a memory by browsing in real or in virtual space.
This multi media installation about the nature of libraries, memory and information storage was presented in different disciplines.
A growing number of these cards, 21 x 10,5 cm each, belong to a long term archive called p_p (personal practice). I cut out images from printed flyers in my postal mail, which are sent to me by international aid organisations to inform me about the need to donate money.
