A patient and useless labour came into existence as we began for the first time to read the world. (Alberto Manguel)
It topples, clanks, rattles. Far away from human control and prediction, layers and plates push against each other, wreaking havoc within our well ordered system. Pictures hang askew, shelves are slanted, shacks collapse like houses of cards. Objects are inundated by other objects. Harmless states of emergency or humanitarian catastrophes, followed in reliable regularity by reordering, reconstruction, layering and piling up. Each thing has its proper place and purpose, the stones one on top of the other, the pictures on the wall.
In almost any city – and we are definitely talking about something global – it doesn’t take a catastrophe of such magnitude in order to discover smaller and bigger formations that break with habitual principles of order. For example on building sites, where something is in process of becoming. Tomorrow it will be other than today. Or at so-called non-places. This curious denotation identifies precisely what is essential about such places; they are nameless, they can be subjected to no order, they come about at random or due to carelessness and are conserved by the same carelessness or simply by poverty. This is the abode of errors, the expelled, the irrelevant and ugly combinations.
Cindy Schmiedichen works on two sides. She collects things that have dropped from functional circulation, broken, superfluous, useless. On the other side, she purchases things intended to become something else, as yet virginal and formless, such as plaster, clay, sticky tape, full of glad hope to finally be assigned to some purpose. This double role is relevant to the way she works: industrial products encounter more or less helpless handmade ones and find themselves at an in-between place, subjected to a strange intimacy, or even a commingling. The gesture that is thus made allows the artist to recede behind her work, which finds a space with white painted walls, an abode for the errors, the expelled, the irrelevant and ugly combinations, a space for the random, for hope and happiness.
… for a few seconds only… everything rattled… like a drone…, wrote Cindy Schmiedichen in an email from Tokyo in 2008. A patient reading of the world, accompanied by a drone that keeps alternating between loud and soft, begins anew.
Rebecca Wilton
