fall better // Anna Shpak

In the organizer's words:

There was my bunch of keys. My bunch of keys, which bundles access to my apartment, studio, warehouse, bicycle and car on one ring. Like a portable map of our individual places that physically come together on the same ring. But the space in between remains invisible for the time being.
From this image, I look for symbols that connect places without being places themselves. Symbols that focus on the connection between places, which are perhaps even located in the spaces in between. This is how I became aware of the woven motifs on the seat covers during my daily journey from Düsseldorf to Essen, which accompanied me for quite a while as my everyday in-between space. This family of pictograms, made up of a factory, waves, windmill, elephant, heart and soccer, carries regional stories - right up to the anecdote about the elephant Tuffi, who fell out of the Wuppertal suspension railroad in 1950. The motifs create a regional identity between the Ruhr and Rhine regions and at the same time remain abstract through their schematic representation - open to different interpretations.

This openness sets the work process in motion: the pictograms are detached from their function, change scale and material, are scanned, collected, separated and recombined. The result is a process of translation: schematic signs become key rings made of Plexiglas, drawing templates, motifs in screen printing, traces that run through the room from the window. The work thus removes the seat covers from their role as fabric surfaces and transforms them into another form of spatial connection: as portable markers on a key ring, as a spatial trace in the exhibition space, as an interconnection of the two Baustelle Schaustelle locations(Düsseldorf/Essen) and as a diagram of an in-between.

Text by: Anna van Baarsen & Anna Shpak