"It's the only way for me to understand why the world functions in this way"
Artist Grace Schwindt’s new work Remembering Home is a sculpture and audio artwork, created for IWM’s Refugee season. Each sculpture is based on a conversation with an individual refugee, in which they recalled their home before conflict. The sculptures are each accompanied by an audio piece, which is inspired by the sounds and events each refugee remembered.
I'm Grace Schwindt and I work with a lot of different media, mainly with sculpture and performance. I think I'm often after a certain tension or a certain balance of fragility and strength or so I kind of choose materials according to that. Basically I've been working with the subject of a family home yeah for a really long time. I called it Remembering Home as an overall title. 10 years ago I went to New York and interviewed mainly Jewish German people who either moved there or whose families moved there after the Second World War, during the Second World War and kind of looking from a geographical distance back to Germany, and also back to their time but anyways also this notion of home I've been really interested in and this yeah this kind of construction or fiction of, well, the need to feel safe somewhere and yeah and I don't know that this idea of belonging I guess, which is really um yeah depending on the context can be also unhealthy. So in this project I wanted to talk to people really tell, you know, tell stories and look at, kind of, share experiences as a really basic, you know, optimistic starting point. I talked to people and they all lost the home and then from that describing that's building then this kind of story unfolded and the idea was to give form to the conversation that I had with the people. So in a way the sculptures represent the conversation, you know, between that, the difference between different people and myself. For me it's to focus on one person, on one experience, is a way for me to... is the only way I think for me to try to understand why the world kind of functions in this way, why there's so many borders between people and countries and why there's the possibility of excluding people and groups, and I guess it's also the only way to for me to find options of suggesting or having encounters that are not led by violence. Maybe one specific, like, color or line or figure that I have in these sculptures can connect to someone in a way that would be against an existing way of how we're supposed to deal with this world and with others.
Revealing the way memories and emotions can change or distort over time, Schwindt explores the complex feelings which surround the idea of ‘home’ for displaced people. Grace Schwindt is a German artist based in London. Her work frequently addresses historical events and questions concepts of narrative, truth, and fiction.
Remembering Home was on display as part of Refugees: Forced to Flee at IWM London.
