Karen Winzer/ Berlin/ Germany:
For me art is a tool to follow my questions and exploring them by diverse means and often with the people around.
I am very much interested in specific socio-spatial situations – buildings, streets, villages, cities – the interplay of their social, psychological, architectural, historical characteristics. I often take up methods from other disciplines and modify them, e. g. like in a psychological test I ask neighbours to draw their neighbours as animals/ I modify the sound of a showroom together with an acoustic engineer to prepare it for an experimental concert/ I involve people in a residential area in Berlin in urban planning, simulating the gigantic dimension of a planned construction site in their street etc.
I track down the specifics of a situation and work on them in a cooperative, investigative and interventionistic way – with the people on site. Their perspectives and personal skills become core part of the working process. The results are developed according to the input of the participants and the local conditions. They can appear in diverse formats: a common walk, a public concert, a record, a photograph, an interview or something built etc.
In Skagaströnd I ask residents to make two blots with me and to describe what they see in them. I record their interpretations/associations: What images lie dormant in the specific social surroundings? Which personal, social and political motives may become recognizable? How are the realities of life reflected in the interpretations? Is there something like a local subconscious? Can it be reached by blots?
In the meantime more than 70 blots have been made by residents of Skagaströnd and some of them have already been realized with diverse means: a giraffe, a scaphoid bone, a begging dog, a monster etc. – it’s an ongoing story…
For more information:karenwinzer.de and https://www.instagram.com/flecke__international and https://www.instagram.com/winzerkaren/