KNUTTE WESTER

I want to be heard, I want to be found

 

Collaborative work/sculpture/video (2016)

 

In 2007 I made a sculpture together with six seven-year-olds at the Orphanage Ziemeli in Riga. When I returned in 2013 I found that all the staff and all the children had been replaced during the years that had elapsed, all but the siblings “A” and “G”. They still lived at the orphanage, now teenagers. We started a new project together; a concert with claybird instruments we made. When the girl we can call “G” was little we made a cast of her face, but the cast failed. She remembered this moment that had happened half a life ago, and now wanted to make a new cast. It became the starting point of a long sculpture project where G and A, the children at the orphanage and I made many casts of the siblings, the two people who had been at the orphanage longer than anyone else. We placed the figures on the same transport board we had used as the base of the sculpture we did six years earlier. Without solid ground beneath their feet, as shipwrecked, they sit and stand, back to back in a permanent awaiting of transition.