ROOMS TO LET
is the programmatic title of a collaborative project by Andrea von Lüdinghausen and Mareike Poehling.
ROOMS TO LET // movement
We move from one place to another and use transitory spaces for production and exhibition.
ROOMS TO LET // spaces
We choose rooms in hotels, pensions, guest houses – spaces for people from abroad, designed and made for temporary use.
ROOMS TO LET // studio
These work production conditions modify our definition of “studio”. Our luggage includes, amongst other things, archive footage, which is, however, reduced to the essential, as well as working tools and materials. We use pictures, maps, moving images, objects and tools which could be useful for working there. We begin the sculptural process in packing this condensed, intense essence.
ROOMS TO LET // touch
The rented room becomes a temporary working space. Despite its pretend neutrality, its own aesthetics and its history it accommodates origins and points of contact for the surrounding world. Starting from here, the working process emerges out of our artistic biographies and our specific ways of communication, for example with the people in the neighborhood and surrounding areas, with rooms and spaces around us.
ROOMS TO LET // form
We identify and carve out borders, limits, special stories, details, atmospheres and oppositions.
Our research findings are transformed and cast in specific moulds. We examine the specific space from our works perspective and from this reversed view we ask new questions. Our photographs, sculptures, projections and site-specific interventions add a new reference system. What emerges is a permeable, concentrated atmosphere of staged instability.
LET ROOMS // restitution
At the end of each stay the hotel room – now altered, but still the same – will be showcased.
It is now an open, fragile entity, condensed from things, traces and pieces which may have been brought over, collected somewhere, found in town, cast away or used sometime before. We restitute the transformed room and present the narratives, stories and pictures we have found.
ROOMS // chapters
ROOMS TO LET is a book; the different places of residence are its chapters. Each station arises out of the previous one.