Archive of Feelings – HELLERAU, Selfisolation

The artist in residence Gizem Aksu has been working in HELLERAU for several weeks and now presents her work in collaboration with the residents* of Hellerau in the Gartenstadt. You can experience a special walk where you can get to know the district better, view photographs and listen to additional sounds using the digital map.

“Let’s feel our fleshy yet transparent bodies more deeply and walk this path with microscopic attention toward the very details of the environment.“ (Gizem Aksu)

More information, map and sounds, you can find here.

The tour is free of charge.

Gizem Aksu explains the background of her work:

Hello,

I am Gizem Aksu, an artist-in-residency from Istanbul staying in Hellerau-European Center for the Arts. For this residency, I was interested in collecting feelings from daily encounters, collective meetings, communal sharing, social observations and personal experience in public spaces. I wanted to research how feelings bodily manifest, circulate, transform and  transmit in public spaces in daily life encounters.

Because of COVID-19, self-isolation days started; public spaces were emptied. There was almost no chance to encounter publicly and experience the public spaces as  spaces for (un)expected relations,  (un)intended interactions and (un)usual communalities. Yet, physical distancing does not have to bring social distancing. I was inspired to invite our neighbors in Hellerau to collectively build a temporary, open air, artistic space for art. How can art transform itself into a public space for social interaction and affective exchanges?

I have produced these photographies with micro-bodies (0.005 cm ) in the environment of Hellerau in these self-isolation days. Self-isolation can be an opportunity to pay microscopic attention to the very details of our bodies and our daily environments.  With microscopic attention, it may be even possible to feel  transparency within our opaque bodies; as Wilhelm Röntgen shared in 1895 ‘All bodies possess this same transparency, but in varying degrees’.  Self-isolation can be an opportunity to remember that self is always bodily in relation to its environment and surrounding. As our breathful bodies, our fleshy bodies leave transparent traces in public spaces, how can we connect to our feelings?

Can we feel transparency as an inner quality of our bodies;

Can we feel transparency in the physical presence of our breath;

Can we feel transparency as new forms of intimacy in our social relations;

Can we feel how public spaces are changing with the transparent traces of our bodies?