An imprint demands pressure, thus it asserts force. An imprint is the residue of that force. My grandmother was born in Vienna in and left in Her grandmother stayed until she was forcedly removed and later, murdered. What remainsโthe residue of this forceโis imprinted on our collective memory and later, on the wall outside her apartment building in a small bronze plaque that reads:.
Inhabiting the city of Munich in Southern Germany, feels illicit and familiarโas if I were returning to the scene of a crime perpetrated as a child, that I do not fully comprehend. Swiss Artist Heidi Bucher spent much of her thirty five year career, occupying highly ambivalent institutional spaces, making latex skins of their architecture through a physically demanding labour. Heidi Bucher. The large, ageing latex Floor Skins that hang from the colossal central atrium refer to an altogether different architecture, but operate as a haunting and corporeal reminder of institutional violence.
Towering interior doors that make demands of the human body and gargantuan colonnades that hinder entrance, speak of a utopian vision built on access and refusal. In doing so, she is also confronting the history and ideological structures that held up the building, thus imprinting the architecture with layers, like palimpsest. For No River to Cross , she painted the walls in muted institutional green and mapped the original layout for the Degenerate Art exhibition in a darker shade.
Crowded together, chaotically hung, and fuelled by Nazi slander, the works in the exhibition were intended to reveal the debased nature of its contributors. For Bucher and Schlingelhoff, institutional architecture becomes an apparatusโan exposed frame from which to hang their works, like laundry, like bodies.
Peel off one skin after the other, discard it: the repressed, the neglected, the wasted, the lost, the sunken, the flattened, the desolate, the reversed, the diluted, the forgotten, the persecuted, the wounded. Charged by feminism, Bucher occupied spaces that blurred the line between public and private: a Swiss hotel resort and former state internment camp for Jewish women and children on Lake Maggiore; the Bellevue psychiatric clinic on Lake Constance where Freud treated the supposed hysteria patient Anna.
