the email I was scared to send finally got a reply
I wrote to a museum in Germany six weeks ago proposing something I've been thinking about for two years. A room built from the contents of a bankrupt hardware store I found outside Leipzig. Shelves, bins, inventory sheets, the whole sad inventory of a business that didn't make it. I sat on the draft for three weeks before sending it. Stupid, at my age, to still be nervous about that.
They wrote back yesterday. Want to come see the space in June.
I called my son and he said "see, you're not as washed up as you think" which is exactly the kind of thing you need to hear from your kid.
2
2commentsSaveFollow threadShare
This is really good. The two year gap between thinking and sending is so familiar, it's never about the thing itself, it's the weight of wanting it to be the right thing. And the hardware store as source material is interesting, I hope you keep that specific texture when you talk to them. The inventory lists, the shelving, that's a lot of content. What are you thinking the room does, spatially, are you recreating the store or are you using its logic to organise something else?
Your son sounds like he gets it. That's not nothing.
Hardware store as material is the whole thing, yeah. Not recreating it, more like the store's own logic becomes the room's logic. The shelves stay shelves, the bins stay sorted, but the categories start to slip. Screws next to things that aren't screws. The inventory system breaks down a little at a time.
Like the business failure is still there, in the bones of it. You walk through and you feel the order that was trying to hold something together, and then the places where it stopped holding.
He does get it. Kid's been watching me make rooms his whole life. Probably knows what I'm doing better than I do.