Rosa Binaria() {
  Memories;
} //2002

Installation in collaboration with
Alessandro Cipriani and Nicolas Reichelt

Photo: Nicolas Reichelt>

The sight of filigree sculptures, installed on pedestals of varying height and linked at floor level, dominates the exhibition room. Viewed from close up, the individual objects, apparently covered with randomly printed strips of paper in plaster, turn out to be mysterious wrappings. Inside them are concealed various kinds of natural roses, each wrapped in the ASCII code of their likeness, and petrified at the point of their natural death, their digital images. Information about them is provided by the photographs on the surrounding walls, in which representations of the same roses in their original condition can be seen. Thus the exhibition room appears to the observer to begin with as a rose garden that can be walked through, but containing frozen, conserved flowers.

Photos: Anne Gold

"Memories" is a further part of the project series "Rosa Binaria" which Alba D'Urbano has been continually expanding since 1987. A recurrent and central motif in this series is the rose. For decades, the artist has been collecting rose objects of all kinds, cataloguing them and systematising them according to material and origin, and using this archive as the source of her installations. Many friends and acquaintances have assisted the artist in her obsession by taking an active part in the collection. With the installation “Memories” the artist renders thanks to those involved by personally dedicating a rose to each of them Thus the work is to be regarded as homage to these friends and acquaintances. Proverbially, each rose conserves a personal memory. For as soon as the visitor approaches a rose, he hears over a built-in loudspeaker the artist's voice, digitally altered in a different way in each case, giving information in a brief monologue on the individual and his/her relationship to the artist. In an experiment with her own memory, Alba D'Urbano attempts to remember events that took place between a month and thirteen years ago. The result is a collection of most intimate rose images.

Photo: Nicolas Reichelt

Collection, the primary activity, is followed by arranging, compiling and exhibiting the roses in the sculptural process. Here, Alba D'Urbano takes up the basic principles of the museum. By making legacy, retrospective and museum practice the topic of her contribution to the exhibition, she draws attention to the central statement of her work: memory, representing, saving, and reconstructing her own memories, but also collective memories The exhibited roses derive their significance and aura from the fact that they bear witness to the existence of human relations and networks As the artist presents the roses, arranged in large numbers as a work of art, the memories of the contexts of life to which the objects relate are conserved. With the aid of this memory, preservation also takes place on the artistic level. Art, and with it the museum, become the storage medium, and assert the claim to be able to call a halt to time and preserve certain moments in life from final transitoriness.

Using inconspicuous means such as paper, plaster and sounds, D'Urbano creates a feeling of community. We are moved, even though not personally affected.

Text by Alexandra Kolossa

Alessandro Cipriani: sound processing and music composition
Nicolas Reichelt: software developement and technical assistance
Jill Luise Muessig: photography
© 1995-2002 Alba D'Urbano