This room appears as the result of an unrepresented rupture, the 'before' and the 'after' of an upheaval, a loss and recovery of psycho-spatial co-ordinates which have since resurfaced in a new, scrambled room. But what was this event that is alluded to and not pictured? What overturned the furniture? What is this unpictured event which nevertheless is the subject of the image?The impetus for Manuela Barczewski's Shifting Around series may have its roots in her experience as a refugee of the Spataussiedler, those "late refugees"- Germans who through a governmental program were relocated from Poland into Germany proper in the 1970's, decades after the initial wave of migration which directly followed the war. For Manuela, this meant that she and her family left a life in the countryside behind and were moved into temporary apartments designated for the 'late refugees' in Germany. Of course, the German government's official line was that this was to be a homecoming for estranged Germans- the effect was in fact the opposite- many felt like internally displaced strangers in their own country. For Barczewski this relocation was to be the first in a string of many tentative and improvised living arrangements, the most recent being here in London.No wonder then, that Barczewski's photographs of interiors rouse the feeling of waking in a strange anomalous room which we immediately scour for signs that might grant us the security of locating where we are, whether we have been there before, or perhaps even who we are. Yet we find instead that our glance is averted, that our questioning is challenged by the room itself, which seeks to interrogate its subject. These sets which Barczewski constructs and photographs often contain pieces of 70's era color schemes, furnishings, and household props- the period when Barczewski resettled in Germany. Objects are held together through tension, through mutual support and precarious balances of weight, using staples as the only fastener. This choice of (signifying) materials belies a process that begins with reconstructing the site of the trauma, and then shifts to turning this site into an object of formal play.Here the double-meaning of the word 'interior' is felt. Often when we cannot revert back to the state we used to enjoy, we settle for a symbolic reconstitution- setting the furniture back how it was before. Or obversely when one desires a reinvention of their domestic fantasy, accompanying changes in the domestic backdrop are sought. By turning all of the rooms of the past into objects of play, into Rubik's cubes that unfix the finitude of our previous habitations, Barczewski has developed a unique formula for redressing history.For as Nietzsche said " All 'it was' is a fragment, a riddle, a dreadful accident- until the creative will says to it, 'But thus I willed it.' The formalization of objects in the Shifting Around series is not the endpoint- it is not the objective of this process- it is the chosen method for turning unintegrated, irreconcilable contents into objects of play. Barczewski's formalization of the experience of being uprooted and transplanted is a means of resurrecting the past and saying 'thus I willed it'. In fact, she goes even further by using autobiographical-architectural fragments as a basis for proposing new and confounding histories, as if to say "But I could have willed it thus...”.The fact that these sets are shown only as photographs reinforces this notion, for as Manuela told me in an interview, one of the reasons that photography is an appropriate vehicle for this work lies in the fact that photography is "so connected to the memory system". The powerful depth of field offered by the large format camera leaves nothing out of focus, endowing a clearly inhuman presentness, a total attentiveness of vision that gets "rid of overwhelming thoughts about the past". The basic formal paradox of these images- that their very deliberate compositions are meant to resemble remnants of hurried chaos- is aided by the photographic context in which what is pictured is understood to be both ongoing and frozen in its development.Both the photographic frame and the apartment are four-sided units, bearers of the modernist grid which is so much a part of the organizational logic of Barczewski's images. But this modernist grid is not the same one that Mondrian knew, it is seen from a different historical perspective- here the modernist grid appears as something like a trellis- a framework which does not impart order, but rather acts as a nether-layer upon the ruins of which order may emerge. Noah Angell is a filmmaker, writer, and video-editor that currently lives and works in London.
MANUELA BARCZEWSKI