Birth! School! Work! Death!

“The scroll is beautiful, and a fine shrine shall be built for it at once…”
Ludwig Tieck

BIRTH! SCHOOL! WORK! DEATH! revolves around existential coordinates - birth, education, labor, and death - as well as what lies in between: The heart, understood as an inner shrine. The artistic collaboration between Steinwidder and Schwarz follows the poetics of the discarded. Their shared language is the revaluation of context - through disassembly, alienation, and reconfiguration.

At the center of the work is the shrine - a symbol of preservation, protection, and identity. Five sculptural objects embody the little house: Enshrouded, interwoven, sealed - yet at times open. A sixth object, a mask held in place by belts, alludes to restrictions on thought, hearing, and speech. The shrine is both a space of retreat and a chamber of resonance - a material container and an immaterial archive. What we choose to preserve is up to us. In this work, the shrine becomes a condensed vessel of emotion, a sanctuary for the self - personal, poetic, and defiant.

Education and work appear as inevitable anchors of a normative life path. In the Western paradigm, they give rise to obligation, pressure, and self-optimization. Thus begins the small life - caught between systemic expectations and the erosion of self. In contrast stands the shrine as an autonomous counter-world - a site of inner gathering. As an object, it remains ambivalent: Enclosure may signify safety, but also stagnation and rigidity. The little house becomes a metaphor for childhood, maternal presence, protection - and the need for liberation.

Steinwidder and Schwarz approach the theme from different angles. Their narrative threads run in parallel, at times complementary, at times contradictory - and it is precisely through this tension that a third space unfolds: A moment of emergence.

The origin of the project lies in suits filled with relics: dieschwarzarbeit.com/thekingisgone - wearable archives of biography and memory. Clothing as second skin, as nest, as dwelling of the vulnerable self. Their transformation into shrines shifts the focus from the body to the object – from wearing to encasing, from life to artifact. Materials used include textiles, metal parts, paint, mirrors, wood, ropes - embedded, interwoven, partially visible. What wishes to be told, is told. The rest remains protected, closed off, unavailable.

These shrines are not mere shells. They mark rupture, farewell, transition - a symbolic death. And: A space in which something new may begin.

Transformation of the project dieschwarzarbeit.com/thekingisgone (Stephan Schwarz 2013 - 2018) into the series BIRTH! SCHOOL! WORK! DEATH! with a concept by Anita Steinwidder and Stephan Schwarz (2018 - 2019) Textile works: Anita Steinwidder; Wooden constructions: Stephan Schwarz

• Anita Steinwidder, Stephan Schwarz 2019
• Photos: Klaus Fritsch