From 2020 to 2022 I was living alone. During lockdown, my experience of domestic upheaval came in the form of living alone and being alone, being lonely, sometime for months on end.

It became crucial for me during this time to create space in my own space where I could connect to characters, spirits and memories of those who had become more present to me than physical friends I knew in Berlin and saw so seldom, if ever.

I had already been working on collages that could encapsulate, in a way, the essence of what it was to be my Granny Taylor, translated into collage objects and image fragments, sometimes entire photos from all of the pre-digital era books I had been collecting from thrift stores in the same goegraphic area my Granny was from and spent her entire life: Washington D.C., Virginia and Maryland.

Slipping into my Granny’s story, however, are a couple very different stories, though. One story about the white appropriation or fetishization of the Indigenous other, rampant in both America as well as, historically, in, say, the GDR. And the story of Lida Sal, the Guatamalen mestiza who one day decides not to die for a gringo romeo, settling instead on gender transition and becoming one of the most sought-after names in his profession.

Upon entering the expansive installation, one has the feeling of having entered a specific cosmos. Image arrangements combined with strange painted figures float on large-format paper. The carefully cut out, printed picture elements come from the artist's picture archive and were collected from the region where his grandmother spent her 94 years of life.

Painting as an evocative, ghostly experience, capturing the elements of a past life, and revealing the similarities between my ancestor’s life and my own.

“Atlas Aviæ” means atlas of the maternal grandmother (Atlas der Muttersmutter). This room tells the story of the intersection between my grandmother’s story and my own. It is also a space for ritual and healing, for being visually overwhelmed, for making or watching a performance, or for lying on the floor on a futon and staring at the paintings covering the ceiling, transforming one’s perception of up and down, wall and ceiling, rest and activity.

Beim Betreten der raumgreifenden Installation hat man das Gefühl, in einem spezifischen Kosmos gelangt zu haben. Auf großformatigen Papieren schweben Bildanordnungen kombiniert mit seltsamengemalten Figuren. Die sorgsam ausgeschnittenen, gedruckten Bild- Elemente stammen aus dem Bildarchiv des Künstlers und wurden gesammelt aus der Region des letzten Wohnortes seiner Großmutter. Malerei als beschwörende, geisterhafte Erfahrung, als Einfangen der Elemente eines vergangenen Lebens.