BRICKS AND CEMENT DON’T MAKE A HOUSE
2024, Multimedia Installation, Textile, Steel, Video Loop: 22:59 min, Sound
Vanessa Amoah Opoku & Joy Weinberger
Teaser: https://vimeo.com/1013888424
Voices: Vanessa Amoah Opoku,
Tape cassette recording by Kwabena Krah
Exhibition views: Roxana Rios
In the mid-1990s, Vanessa Amoah Opoku's grandfather sent his son a voice message on a tape cassette. He was very worried: his son had already emigrated to Europe a few years ago and the money he wanted to use to support the family at home had not yet arrived.
For Kwabena Krah, it was clear that his son would build a house in Ghana. Because that is something that everyone who emigrates does. A house at home. A house for the family. And a house to return to. Many migrant family stories are about rifts that people have to overcome in poverty, migration, class advancement, the racism of the Global North and neo-colonial structures. And overcoming them is not the end, but usually just the beginning of new barriers. How can bridges to home be maintained and rebuilt? How can one's own life be made understandable - both for the German family and for the family in Ghana? And how to build a home when the land has been expropriated by neo-colonial, capitalist and extractivist actors for the purpose of extracting natural resources?
Vanessa Amoah Opoku and Joy Weinberger's practice combines different disciplines and techniques to explore complex issues together. Vanessa Amoah Opoku uses 3D point cloud scans to explore the fragility and incompleteness of experiences in the diaspora. Joy Weinberger focuses on textile fabric structures and combines analog weaving processes with digital techniques.
Opoku's 3D scans, created with her smartphone, are central to her work. She moves through space, capturing her surroundings with Lidar Scanning, which is used in mapping landscapes and constructions sites. An infrared sensor strokes surfaces and reflects their light back into a camera lens, transforming the physical world into digital fragments. The scanned environment becomes a self-portrait, consisting not of a copy or dipiction, but a tangible representation of the physical space, that was mapped through touch.
Woven fabrics are grid-like structures that can produce technical and discrete images simultaneously and follow a binary order. The structure can be compared to technical images such as pixel/video images, in which a homogeneous surface is divided into small pixels that are present in a regular grid structure. In the case of textiles, the structure is determined by the warp and weft, so the information is transferred into an image-textile structure.
In the production of textiles, the grid is not imposed on an existing space or material surface, but the textile is the element that creates the surface itself: a matrix in which signs, patterns and figures can emerge. In this work, the two artists undertake an investigation based on the family history of one of them. They not only trace the stones, the earth, the clay and the unfinished houses, but also the perspective of a second-generation migrant in the diaspora, who tells of ways of communication and failure, of expropriation of land and the pain that no one talks about. They also talk about the hope of progress and a better life. And about the intergenerational return and ultimately about building a home.
Two textile works are shown at different positions between two steles. The first work shows photos from the Opoku family archive, which depict the three time levels in which the entire work takes place and at the same time mark different points in time of the return: The grandfather's time, the son's first return after migration, and finally the granddaughter's first visit to the grandfather's village. The textiles function here as mediators between the digital and physical levels. An analog photograph serves as the basis. This is transformed into a digital pixel image through the scanning process. This data, in turn, forms the basis for a web file that enables the return to an analog medium. The technology must adapt to the conditions of the loom: By reducing to eight color generators, the file is rendered in pixels consisting of the primary colors black, white, cyan, magenta, yellow, red, blue and green. Crossing points in the mesh correspond to the pixels in the image - materialized pixels are created. On the reverse side, the image dissolves into itself, losing its pictorial quality and bringing the material and color composition of the textile to the fore with its sculptural-looking surface.
The second textile work is based on point cloud scans that were taken at various locations in Ghana and reassembled. The result is a house made up of fragments of several unfinished houses. Each fragment can therefore stand for a similar story. Together they form a new, communal home. Textiles are often bound to the dimension of the surface. In order to conceive a textile construct from the virtual space into the physical, tactile space, a multi-layered textile is woven and then embroidered separately with the data from the point cloud scans. Transparencies and overlays are used to create a new image. At the same time, the textile picks up on the fragmentary composition of the scans and thus refers to the multidimensional arrangement of the points in virtual space.
The installation consists of 20 steles made of reinforcing steel, which is used in the construction of buildings. The arrangement of the steles is based on the floor plan of the grandfather's house. The reinforcing steel refers to modern house construction with cement and concrete: it stands for modernization and progress and is diametrically opposed to traditional house construction with clay and natural stone. Many homeowners leave reinforcing steel protruding so that they can later extend the building. As financial resources are often limited, construction is carried out in stages, with the iron serving as preparation for future construction phases.
In the center of the installation is another textile work, based on pointcloud scans of the ground from the grandfather's village. It is no coincidence that the position of the textile crosses the courtyard of a traditional Ashanti house. This is traditionally used for social gatherings, cooking and eating. Visitors are invited to sit down and linger there.
One focus of the installation is the connection between technology and the tactile level of textiles. Through the process of bringing the digital world back into physical space and vice versa, themes such as technological progress - both at the time of the first industrial revolution in relation to the weaving machine and the fourth industrial revolution in relation to digitality and the information age - gender roles and technology as well as immersion and physical touch and its absence are explored. This provides an opportunity to engage with the complex relationships between gender, art and labor. They show how these seemingly disparate fields interact and communicate with each other within the artistic sphere. In doing so, the artists benefit not only from their different artistic practices, but also from their personal experiences and identities.
The artists also see this process as a form of resistance to the categorizations that often restrict technology and textile work. The textile creates a physical medium that not only opens up new dimensions in its plasticity, but also adds a tactile level. Textiles can be felt, folded, pulled and arranged: Flexible structures intervene in a digital, pictorial representation, dissolve it and bring it back together again. The technique of point cloud scanning, which stores a fragmentary recording of reality, is brought back to a new, physically tangible level. Scanning touches the environment, documents and archives the moment. The textile brings this snapshot back into the space, allows it to be felt and thus creates a connection to the space and the visitors.
By bringing these disciplines together, the artists aim to blur the boundaries between them and thereby question their gender-specific and geographical connotations. This process is not only a technical exploration, but also a socio-political statement that aims to redefine the value and perception of these disciplines in art and society.