The city doesn’t exist, merely as a mind model on human scale, in form language.
At first the city rises on the horizon as a phantom and imbeds in my days until I meet her counterpart. This encounter is the beginning of my story. As I depart I start to shape her in my mind, an amorphous construction of stories, desires and expectations. I filter streets, buildings, bushes and skies looking for images that confirm my parallel shadow-city.
I start to investigate my new territory, zooming in on seemingly unimportant background details. During long strolls I collect and jot down ephemeral details of the cityscape. Fractions of conversations, a blossoming magnolia under a window, subtle changes in the colour of the sky above the city, the sound of rain in a park: poetical ornaments that are everywhere but define the character of their domain in the way they appear to me. These seemingly unimportant background sceneries enclose the dialect of the location. During my observations the border between the city and me slowly fades. If you are somewhere long enough you become the city itself. The process of becoming her I render in my work.
By rescaling and fine-tuning my archive of ephemeral details and moment I try to create a realm leaving out crucial information and capture the decoration of content using drawings and objects as a sceneries to remember. Al elements that - redefined and disentangled - act as links to moments in which the edge between me and my surrounding seamlessly faded, time froze and I was able to navigate trough the still in search for that one thing that defines me and the setting in a double portrait. The detail doesn’t reveal the story but becomes an observing witness and therefore contains the city’s patina. They become new crystallized landmarks for my miniature biotopes.
Lotte Geeven | Monday morning herbarium | 2009 Ink and lak on paper | Ink and lak on paper | Courtesy of the artist
