Something Utterly Original 2025
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As a child I stared into a glass marble, fascinated by the refracted light and shifting shapes inside — a small world that reflected the outside in strange, unrecognizable ways. Those distorted reflections felt like a secret space, just beyond my reach. Now that world lies in pieces. Each fragment resembles an unevenly sliced cake, made of layers of biscuit, cream, fruit and jam. The topping? A series of miniature scenes, key moments that span fifty years of family portraits.
This project is a cartography of memory within the framework of national, cultural, political and social identity. In Something Utterly Original I investigate how personal history relates to broader cultural and historical structures. Where my earlier films and digital works questioned large-scale systems — financial markets, media mechanisms, speculative futures — here I reduce these observations to a microhistory. By mapping fragments of my family archive, I attempt to make visible the dynamics between individual experience and collective memory.
Within my project, cartography functions not only as a visual tool, but also as a conceptual model. I work with the tension between two cartographic approaches: intensive and extensive projection, and use both concepts.
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Intensive cartography focuses on internal relationships within a system, such as density, distribution and intensity. This ties in with how memories work: they are fluid, built up in layers, change in intensity and are not linearly measurable. This method approaches memory as a sedimentary structure in which some experiences swell and others remain fragmentary.
I use the orthographic lens as a specific modality within my framework of Intensive Cartography.
An orthographic projection in 3D modeling is a way to represent objects without perspective distortion. This means that: Parallel lines remain parallel, regardless of the distance to the viewer. Objects in the distance are shown as the same size as objects close by. And the spatial depth does not change optically. I instrumentalize this by animating my scenes through an orthographic lens. My drawings are organized as if they were slices of time, with layers stacking up in a non-linear but dense configuration. Miniature scenes are the same size and detail regardless of their place in time.
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Extensive cartography is based on external coordinates, scale, and measurable distance. This is similar to how perspective projection works in 3D modeling: objects become smaller as they move away from the viewer, and lines converge toward vanishing points. This creates an ordered, measurable space in which relationships between objects are determined by their position in a shared grid (time/space). This model reflects how memories are shared and ordered within a broader historical context.
The woman is wearing a light blue dress with a checked pattern, a button closure in the front and a hard pleat in the middle of the skirt. Her hair is short and blond and she is wearing sunglasses. She is holding an ice cream, her posture seems awkward, her feet slightly turned inward. The dress has a certain simplicity, something classic, something timeless. The moment that the photo captures - a summer, a journey.
In cartographic terms, this is an intensive projection: distance in time and space do not matter, the intensity determines the map. Just as a density map shows patterns without adhering to boundaries, so does memory work. Not an archive, but a field of fluctuations.
The fabric of her dress – which also forms my blouse – is more than a texture. It is a grid, a structure in which memory finds a place.By treating the family archive — slides, photographs, anecdotes — as a terrain of changing projections, a mapping emerges that exposes the layering of memory and representation. Something Utterly Original is an ongoing negotiation between personal and shared time, between the private and the political, between past and present.
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