Cut, burned, and reassembled paper records repeated effort rather than resolution. Marks and damage remain as evidence of process. A recurring image of a small boat moving through waves appears as a fragile, lyric trace of persistence amid instability.
Archive of Attempts . The evidence of Trying, 2026
Mixed Media Installation
20x20cm
350 EUR
This work functions as a compressed archive of repeated effort. Paper is cut, folded, burned, marked, and reassembled, not to arrive at resolution but to register the act of trying itself. Damage is treated as information: scorch marks, misalignments, interruptions, and fragments of instructional text remain visible rather than corrected.
Within the fractured surface, the recurring image of a small boat moving through waves appears and disappears. It does not resolve into narrative. Instead, it operates as a fragile, lyric sign—an unstable passage through resistance, repetition, and uncertainty. The boat is not symbolic in a declarative sense; it persists as an image that survives damage, like the act of trying itself.
The work resists completion. Each layer suggests a decision tested and abandoned. What remains is not an outcome, but evidence: of effort, of persistence, and of continuing despite instability.
“Men are blind throughout their lives.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust I
Embedded within Archive of Attempts. The Evidence of Trying, the line reads not as judgment but as condition. Blindness here is not absence of vision, but the necessity of proceeding without certainty—trying, failing, correcting, and continuing despite limited clarity. The work accepts blindness as inseparable from effort, and effort as inseparable from life.