There’s a photograph from your work in Germany—water dripping through coal suspended in what looks like a destroyed building.
What am I looking at?
That’s Pendulum, from an installation called One Day Four Hours in Potsdam. The photograph highlights the two elements of the intervention: In the foreground is the suspended galvanized wire basket, the central ‘dark chandelier of opulence.’ In the background, the stairwell and an adjacent room were both blocked by seven horizontal layers of administrative forms, stacked on end, presenting organized yet random decay. These two paper walls became the decor, the wallpaper of the space.
Rainwater dripped steadily through the coal within the Pendulum basket, filtering through its porous structure into a disk of wood charcoal below, an Umbra Regis. As the water passed through, mineral stains built layers not only on the floorboards below but also on the forms themselves. The persistent sound faintly echoed through the empty space—a timepiece fueled by archaic geological determinism.
Why coal?
Why not just let the rain fall?
The building was the Officers’ Casino at a former military base (Deutsche Demokratische Republik / DDR). After Wiedervereinigung (reunification), it was rumored to have been deliberately burned—allegedly to destroy property records. Whether true or not, the building had been fire–damaged, and documents throughout were charred, forgotten, and left for dust.
Coal is what you get when organic material is subjected to geological pressure and heat over millions of years—compressed time. Water dripping through it, leaving traces, marking the floor—these are recording processes that can’t be undone by fire, the false notion of purification as transformative power.
So you were working in a building where records may have been intentionally destroyed, and you’re using materials that… record?
Exactly. In another room, I covered the floor with hundreds of charred document binders—the actual burnt and decomposed administrative materials from the building, arranged in interlocking east–west patterns. The paper spines were emptied of their contents, completely fragile.
Visitors had to navigate carefully to avoid disturbing them. They looked archaeological, ancient, but they were from the building’s active military period. Fire tried to erase institutional memory. The materials I used—coal, copper wire oxidizing green against charred floors, water, the burnt excavated documents themselves—they all record through physical processes. They can’t forget. Heraclitus would not be pleased.
How did you even get access to the former military base?
It really came down to pure curiosity and an instinct for a historically significant location. The place was loosely secured, so it just became my de facto studio, right next to an active arts center. I actually found out later that my access—which felt totally serendipitous—was part of a timed security guard loop that I wasn’t initially aware of.
The subsequent public opening was granted for four hours, which mirrored the rumored destruction timeline of the building. After the exhibition closed, the whole project was systematically demolished. It was slated to move into a German art gallery after that, but the site’s demolition meant that opportunity was instantly lost. That’s where the title comes from: “One Day Four Hours.” It references both that rumored destruction timeline and the precise four–hour window I had to work within the site each day for months.
Four hours to create a multi–room installation?
Four hours of access at a time, repeatedly, over a period. But that constraint shaped everything. You couldn’t stage outcomes; you worked with what the building gave you. The rainwater already coming through the roof became Pendulum, and the charred documents scattered in the recesses of the basement became Tug of War.
A galvanized bathtub was elevated high on a rusted girder against the open sky to collect rainwater—that was Ronda, named after the manufacturer’s stamp still visible on the sidewall. Bituminous coal is notorious for producing sulfur dioxide and leaching humic acid, a cause of acid rain. The tub couldn’t be used, couldn’t wash anything clean. It just collected contaminated water that mixed with rust, accumulating with nowhere to go.
There’s something almost absurd about a bathtub that can’t function as a bathtub.
The entire building was about functions that couldn’t be performed anymore. Military authority that dissolved. Oxidized ideologies. Records that may have been burned to erase institutional memory. Even the Officers’ Casino itself—a space designed for leisure and power—was now just burnt ruins.
Ronda, elevated and useless, simply made that visible. Time and corrosion can’t be washed away.
You mentioned copper wire oxidizing green.
There are these floor pieces—geometric patterns in green against the wood?
Three installations—Transition, Ouroboros, and Lineage—featured oxidized copper wire laid directly on the herringbone floors. Transition created fragmented linear patterns. Ouroboros formed a circle with a deliberate 100–millimeter break—the snake that can’t quite eat its tail, continuity interrupted. Lineage arranged parallel lines in segmented sections.
The copper’s green patina against the warm wood created stark marks, like institutional pathways or divisions made visible.
And now?
Can people still see this work?
The work that remains is Panel Circumspect—a limited–edition artist’s book, the final artifact of an hourglass project defined by destruction, discovery, and eventually erasure. Housed in a burnt, paneled construction that mirrors the installation’s debris, it contains eleven hand–printed photographs made with Elena Bouvier. Ironically, a work of time, purged by time. The building owner purchased one.
Today the site is a kindergarten.
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LUCARNE 