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.
“A room of one’s own” has been turned into a slogan. More than 85 years later, it still covers and expresses women’s needs. Some women have read and discussed feminist texts, others have not. The situation of women in contemporary societies has changed. Or has it ? Books have been published, activists’ meetings organized, influential interviews recorded, where have they all gone to ? Where to keep the past and how to act for the future ? Women keep repositioning their perspective on life. Where to find the sentences, the analyses and the examples of their lives to shape it ?
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.
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 a celebration 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'.
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.
Mounted on cards these clippings undergo a long process of dyeing, pressing and preserving. Cards turn out with fragments or even empty, others show the mould of a credit card. As a teenager I often asked my parents who had experienced the Nazi regime in Germany: ‘What did you know then?’ I intend to document what I have known (and not known) in my lifetime.
