Almost a cold war
The project ‘Almost a cold war’ treats an iconic building constructed by the French in Saarbrücken, Germany after the WW2. Conceived as an embassy (or more?) and to control the small state it lost its initial function already after a short time – and went almost forgotten. A storytelling animation with official/unofficial history and documents, portrays her memory and the neglect of the past in this region.
It challenges what she would describe as a political amnesia, revealing the forgotten while proposing an alternative infused with personal memory.
Yvonne De Grazia is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brussels, Belgium.
She was born in Saarbrücken, Germany – and studied fine arts in France, Germany and Italy.
Her recent work includes printmaking, textile design, manual drawing, video – the research conveys a visual proposal of a collective past and individual memory.
She gathers data and images– attracted by sensations for fear, death, life: fast web searches or choice of explicit items position the immediacy of searched results and are a contrast to a slow evolution of a collective past.
The search and found results replicates the pressure, speed of nowadays behavior and condition for a life with data and technology.
Low-res images or other are treated as dissimulated figures to generate a poetic or even surreal approach - a conversion process, which puts the artist into someone else’s skin.
Various actions such as recoloring, disguise, retrace, copying or analyzing colors – are done at the studio or in a nomadic way, keeping autonomy of the works in progress.
https://centrale.brussels/nl/expos/expo-brussel-yvonne-de-grazia/
