Gemma Draper, Francisca Kweitel & Nelli Tanner
Office of vanishing
On how we deal with loss
5–29 December 2024
This project started in common place: loss. In 2020 the three of us lost our fathers. We live in three different countries that could be thought of as different cultures, but this emptiness surpasses our own stories to become the stories of many. In fact, the stories of others become ours too.
There is a shared human capacity to use stories and rituals to integrate experiences that surpass our immediate knowledge of life marking events. We have taken some of these narratives, the records from others and our own accounts to try to listen to the absent(s).
The reflection has flowed from the personal, leaving the first overwhelming moments, to join a more common river. Often these, now shared, tales, the narrative materials that each of us has taken from our collective exploration were preliminary carried and nested in everyday objects, or simple gestures.
These suddenly emptied complicities, these modest objects left behind, asked to be taken in account, as marks, as references. We have done so, playing together the game that calls the missing part into the illuminated stage. This exchange has allowed us to turn into a tangible state all what was with us only as merely fragments of meaning.
Office of vanishing exhibition is a space-related installation displaying audiovisual new pieces and works. This project begun to unfold in Studio Mustanapa, in Rovaniemi, where we held the first set of pieces. From there, we continued its development to this point, where we stopped again, to reflect on how the works speak to each other and start to make sense in dialogue. The project aims to continue this exchange, this way of working together at distance. We plan to propose an evolving experimental installation, conceived as stages of this project, about how we deal with loss. These will be shown in their osmotic relationship in the next exhibition venues, including Barcelona and Buenos Aires.
Thank you
for Art Promotion Center Finland for supporting the exhibition.
#video #objects #installation
Contact details:
Gemma Drapper
gemmadraper (a) gmail.com
gemmadraper.com
@gemmadraper
Francisca Kweitel
https://www.instagram.com/francisca_kweitel/
https://franciscakweitel.wixsite.com/sitio
fkweitel (a) gmail.com
Nelli Tanner
https://www.nellitanner.com/
https://www.instagram.com/_nelli_tanner_/
info (a) nellitanner.com
