Famillionaire Matters
Lindau, DE 2019/ Winterthur, US 2022
Paint on wood, Kevlar bobbin, Gunpowder tin, 16mm film, handdrawn animation, drawings
Large scale installation, variable formats
The project started as early as in 2012 when I was a post graduate apprentice at the Fabric Workshop & Museum in Philadelphia. On a trip to Winterthur, Delaware I was intrigued by the large and luxurious estate and the museum collection. In particular the old silk curtains stored in the basement were of interest to me as I studied textile art in New Zealand and my grandfather was the owner of Lindauer Dornier, a factory producing industrial looms in southern Germany. One thing puzzled me at Winterthur that day. It was the lack of contextualization regarding the history of the owners; the Dupont family. So, in the aftermath of that trip to Winterthur I was curious and started to do research. I learned about their gunpowder business, their involvement in the US Civil War and I was especially fascinated by one of their later inventions which is Kevlar fibre. This material is known for its bulletproof attributes but for my purposes Kevlar functions as an intersection (a knot, so to speak) in a web of complex relations that unfolded. Some of the weaving machines of my grandfathers company are specialized to weave Dupont’s bulletproof fibre into fabrics. Coincidentally, like Dupont, Dornier also had been involved in war and produced both mitlitary as well as well as civil products . Because I saw parallels between both mine and the Dupont family, I became more interested in their history, their, lives and in the materials they made and continue to make.The bulletproof fabric made of Dupont Kevlar and woven by Dornier weaving machines was one point of departure for my research. When I learned that early bulletproof vests were made of layered silk, I immediately was reminded of the silk curtains that I saw hanging in rows, layered, in the basement archive of the Winterthur mansion/ museum. In addition Kevlar is an improved artificial descendant of natural silk. I am deliberately using the word descendant, a term usually describing a family status, in order to establish that the surreal relationships between disparate materials, machines, families across time and space are yet a very close knit complex that should be seen as such.
The Dupont blackpowder mills for example used to be cotton mills once, foreshadowing at a structural relatedness of the textile materials they made later ( Kevlar fibres). And there were many more of such eerie intersections between different materials, machines and families involved and lastly the irony of a company starting off with gunpowder and then inventing a bulletproof material also contributed a lot to becoming increasingly involved in all of this.
I began to draw the yellow silk curtains of Winterthur and let them take other shapes like bulletproof vests, rifles, bullets, baroque pools outside the mansion and so on. I also related the story to the weaving machines of my grandfather and his history of aviation and military. For my Masters (Diploma of Media Art) at the Academy of Fine Art in Leipzig which I visited from 2016-2019 I created an art installation featuring my surreal drawings of curtains and other things. In hand drawn animations of different materials and objects transforming into each other, I emphasized on their relatedness. A 16mm film I shot in the garden of my grandparents was enhanced by digital animations of a number of characters ranging from Dupont to Dornier and on the floor of the gallery I put a large scale painting on wooden boards resembling a garden environment with a black pool at its center. The pool was inspired by the reflective pool outside the Winterthur mansion but now it had a baroque shape reminiscent of two bulletproof vests. On the walkways of the painted garden stood an actual spool of Kevlar which I got from my family and a rusty Dupont gunpowder-tin which I bought on eBay. Those two objects, both related but also enemies, were facing each other diametrically.
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