Insalted Books
Book, salt, paraffin | 2016–2023
The work deals with the topic of preserving knowledge in an ambivalent way. A book, like an encyclopaedia, processes and sorts knowledge. In contrast to the flow of temporal transience and changeability of things, it fixes them in terms and images, sorts and organises them. It saves them from the flow of Lethe, from oblivion, and seeks timeless availability. Salt as a preservative deprives the microorganisms responsible for the process of decomposition and decay of the basis of life: water. The moment of preservation is thus one that contradicts the processual nature of life. It attempts to preserve form against its temporality. The act of crystallisation renders the book unusable. It appears more or less as a rudiment or fossil of the past.
I created new book objects for the Brockhaus Conversation 4.0 exhibition. I still had a copy of the 15-volume Brockhaus encyclopaedia, which fell victim to my salting.
I grew up with Meyer's New Encyclopaedia from the GDR era. I enjoyed leafing through it and reading the individual entries about famous people who made important discoveries or inventions, about cities, countries, rivers, etc. An informed world of connections and explanations formed within me. As an adult, I compared some entries from Meyers Lexikon with those from Brockhaus and noticed differences, especially in political content. I realised how context-dependent even supposedly objective knowledge can be.
Nowadays, general encyclopaedias and dictionaries seem to have had their day and are being replaced by digital knowledge media such as Wikipedia or AI.
Presented at the Brockhaus Conversation 4.0 exhibition,
ars avanti Gallery, Alte Handelsschule Leipzig, 2–17 June 2023
Exhibition on forms of knowledge production, storage and distribution.
On the occasion of the 200th anniversary of Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus' death.
My work dealt with analogue media for knowledge storage, their possible significance and their importance today.
Many thanks to Barbara Röhner from ars avanti and Moritz Jähnig from the Verein Industriekultur Leipzig for organising the exhibition.
Insalted Books
Presented at the award winners' exhibition blind date, Produzentengalerie plan.d., Düsseldorf 2020
Presented in the duo exhibition Jour Fix,
Houloc, Aubervilliers/Paris, September 2019
Salt Books (Andreas Schröder), Banner (Evelyn Möcking)
enkýklios paideia
32 book objects (books, salt, various materials) arranged according to a specific system into four circles of different sizes, distributed differently throughout the space. The largest circle consists of the Encyclopedia of World Art, another of open or lying volumes of various encyclopaedias and lexicons (Meyers and Brockhaus), and the last two smaller circles are made up of an arrangement of non-fiction books and stacked Meyers lexicons.
Presented at the Enkýklios diploma exhibition, in the gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig, 2018
