Following the death of the artist’s mother, home — a place already shared with others — took on a different meaning. Rather than trying to restore a previous state, the artist continued to live with people connected neither by blood nor by predetermined roles, learning to live with change rather than resist it. This experience is the starting point for Poetics of Relation – resonanz.
Rather than representing relations, the work sets up conditions in which living relations can emerge between people, objects, and places.
The space brings together objects from the artist’s everyday life and others newly encountered in Venice. People spend time there. They sit, use cups and tableware, talk, or remain silent. Objects are moved, people come and go, and the space shifts over the course of the exhibition.
Relation here does not begin only when conversation or interaction becomes visible. People, objects, and places already affect one another simply by sharing a space. Conversation and intimacy are only some of the forms this relation may take. Distance, silence, friction, hesitation, and periods in which no visible event occurs also remain within it. The work does not privilege any of these as desirable outcomes. It accepts them as different ways in which relation may take shape through being together.
The work therefore has no single final form to be maintained throughout the exhibition. Objects, people, and arrangements may change, yet Poetics of Relation – resonanz continues as the same work as long as the conditions remain open for people, objects, and places to affect one another and for new relations to emerge.
This also places the work in tension with the logic of conservation. Within exhibition institutions, preserving an artwork’s material state or reproducible configuration can be an important way of sustaining it over time. Here, sustaining the work means something different: allowing change without closing down the possibility of relation.
The exhibition is therefore not the endpoint of the work. It is one phase in an ongoing life, during which existing relations open onto new people, objects, and places. Some objects brought from everyday life return to it after the exhibition, carrying traces of what happened in Venice.
The title Poetics of Relation explicitly refers to Édouard Glissant, while resonanz draws on Hartmut Rosa. Glissant rejects the idea that relation requires the other to become fully transparent or comprehensible. Rosa describes resonance as a responsive relation in which both sides may be transformed, while the outcome remains beyond full control. The work brings these perspectives into the intimate scale of shared living and tests them through a concrete practice within the exhibition space.
In this sense, the way the work exists begins to mirror the artist’s experience of being together with others. To remain in relation with another is not to reduce them to something fully knowable or to hold them in an unchanging state. It is to remain open to being changed by the other and by the world, even when distance, friction, and incompleteness remain.
Poetics of Relation – resonanz ultimately asks one question:
What does it mean to be together without forcing an ever-changing other, or the world, into a fixed form?
___________________________
To own this work does not mean preserving the exact furniture or arrangement seen in a particular exhibition. The work is transferred through a certificate of authenticity and a reinstallation protocol issued by the artist. These define the conditions that must remain in place for the work to continue as Poetics of Relation – resonanz, as well as the elements that may change in response to different people, objects, and sites. What the collector inherits is not a fixed final form, but the conditions through which relations can continue to emerge in new contexts, together with the right to realize the work again.
Alongside the installation, the artist develops a series of drawings and diagrams as independent works. These are not simply technical plans for reconstructing the installation. They trace the movement of people and objects, the passage of time, forms of interaction, and the structures through which the work continues while remaining open to change. Spanning the period from initial conception to exhibition, transformation, and the work’s continuation beyond the exhibition, the drawings do not preserve a single completed state. Instead, they give visual form to the thinking and movement of relations that sustain the work itself.
