Tobias Becker and Astrid Piethan
Krisenskulpturen, sculpture/photography, March/April 2020 

The current situation of quarantine forces us to withdraw into our own four walls. The homeliness of one’s own space, after a time of forced confinement, is not a gift, since it is always formulated in correspondence to the outside, which has suddenly fallen away. The homely is taken away from the familiar and living spaces slowly become blurred with internal worlds of thought. No conclusion can be found, since there is no end. Unteathered thoughts take over in this everyday life that has gone out of control, they stand as speculative objects in the room, charged but without direction.

The modelling of negative moulds in clay is an act of searching. One works blindly, attention entirely focused on the sense of touch, which is experiencing a strange renaissance these days. The gestures of this search are manifested in the plaster cast. They become tangible as sculptures, but do not explain themselves. On the contrary, they carry an uncontrolled life of their own because they enter into a dialogue with the space that surrounds them. As unpredictable actors, they infiltrate everyday rituals and courses of action and thus fuse physical and psychological space.