Secretaries

In the iconography of the laying out, the open circle with the transformed Berlin Senate telephones refers to a form of archeology or exhumation. Things were sort of “getting to the bottom”.

I found the Senate phones in 1988 at a scrap yard in Schöneberg. Each device had its own personal traces or signatures: for example, they were written on or covered with emoticons, cute fairy tale or cartoon characters, at least as seriously playful as the personal patterns or entries in a poetry album. Each device therefore seemed to have characteristics of its own 'personality'.

By adding a skull cast in plastic, I supported and illustrated the personification of each contraption. By combining and assigning various things as inlays, I completed the respective assumed "personal profile".

Through the combinatorial connection of things, imaginary dialogues or conversations should be associated or triggered in the viewer.

The form of the laying out seemed suitable to clarify my intention of the vanitas motif, which for me could be deduced from the transience of the apparatus, its design, its technology, its condition and where it was found.