April 17 - 21
You Left This / Geh Nicht
by Aubrey Theobald
Strip back the layers of any material and you will find something raw, richer and more complex. The mundane parts of life, the daily objects we pass on the street or in our homes have collaged to a kind of canvased meaning which we have settled to accept as uniformly one dimensional. However, multidisciplinary artist Aubrey Theobald’s curiosity has led her to find the layers of artistry and meaning beneath life’s often overlooked materials and in doing so creates works that ruminate vividly around ideas of identity and connection.
BH: If you could tell us a bit about your practice to date?
AT: Of course. I am an installation artist who primarily works between repetitive hardscape sculpture, sound, and ephemeral materials to push a certain “mood” or emotion in an installation. My work is fueled by a compulsive need to understand the world around me. I like to look for intimacy in what is unfolding in the exterior (systemic, architectural, everyday) world as if it were one of my relationships.
I grew up a cellist, and a lot of the time, installation feels akin to composing a score with fragments of my own world as a method of communication. Fragments of attraction, labor, personal history, hostility, anxiety, social binaries, and cloying romanticization.
My practice mirrors my person, my own uniquely messed-up, beautiful relationship with perceiving the world around me (we each have our own). I navigate the world with a severe excoriation disorder that provides me with an intense fascination with “surface texture” and a drive to expel what is underneath. I also have this compulsive need to inject raw emotion into spaces that either feel as if they don’t have it or have it trapped beneath the first layer of perception. .
You describe in your text this term “locational empathy”, could you elaborate on this?
Yeah. I used this term first when I came to in my undergraduate thesis writing about the DMV (essentially the Bürgeramt or the Auslanderbehörder office), a common place riddled with an understandable sense of instability, tension, and waiting.
It's the “process of learning about a place through its minor details.” The logic, in my practice, is that studying history/affect of the overlooked objects in undersentimentalized places, or sites for irritation/obligation/repetition, will lead to some kind of informed, more meaningful, or empathetic interaction within them and the people in line beside you at them.
Later on in my practice, this became a way to simply go about the world with an attraction to the minor details that lead to a piqued curiosity, an intrigue, and a sense of romanticizing about the overlooked/everyday world that has simply given my life more purpose. It’s a practice of attunement and a kind of religion for me on some days; the more I access this, the more I can feel.
Lately I’ve been allowing this component of my practice to exist within my everyday rituals, sure, but manifest more in-depth in my writing practice. I am currently writing on the ubiquity of rubble, as linked to Berlin’s Trümmerfrauen, paired with an examination of double-edged female labor tropes in media and rubble’s astheticization in contemporary sculpture in regard to memory culture.
““The act of nesting, both instinctual and precarious, [here] becomes a metaphor for resilience: the ways in which belonging, love, and home are continuously sought yet never fully secured.” ”
This idea of plurality of materials and the inherent vs endowed meanings their given is interestingly explored in your work. What draws you towards certain materials?
As much as I love to theorise my own practice, I really think this concept is more felt than anything. You go about your everyday and you can feel in your heart and body that your curiosity is piqued, like the universally Berlin-experience of eye contact with a hot stranger. It's ~that unknown affect~ that so many of us write about. It's the frequency of returning and seeing it again and again that eventually can make you feel like you have a relationship to This Special Feeling Thing, not a singular encounter with something grandiose or awe-struck, it's more committed than that.
Being an installation artist has essentially been inseparable from my way of distilling the world; so, for me, my lens is materially focused, attracted to “obscure” materials that pull me quicker that place of unknowing, and also any material that takes me back to a feeling with someone I miss or long for.
For You Left This / Geh Nicht, it was the pigeon guard rails and their inherent double-edged meaning of hostility/protection. They are a known, ubiquitous barrier object for this region, but were seductive and obscure to me. This attunement happened at the same time that I was struggling to leave the house, and developing my relationship of ritual and observation with the two pigeons outside of my window, also a relationship brought from hostility/protection.
If you had to think about a Backhaus are there certain materials there that resonate?
Well, this question is funny, because I also know of “backhaus” as a surgical tool to fasten material to skin. If I am correct, this might be even more relevant to the parts of my being and practice that really resonate with a hostile relationship to skin, wound, touch, and surface imperfections.
I think, though, you mean it as a Gemeindebackhaus or a community oven, related to the heart of your community-run space. With this, I really think of infrastructure that begets care.
One of the reasons I was drawn to Backhaus was its proximity to my home and its function as multidisciplinary function. Like many of my objects and materials I drew from for this exhibition, I passed your window so frequently it felt like a little ritual in itself and the exhibition came to follow that.
This work has a high contrast of stable building materials and ephemeral media, timed with the rise of spring heat. When it is over, I scrape and melt it all away. It's ephemeral in that way, and temporary (like how This Moment feels). A large-scale endeavor that gathered friends and forced new connections, all to be wiped away at the end of the day (like how I imagine a community oven functioning). Is that too cheesy? Sorry, that’ll happen sometimes.
You have used your art to allow audiences to focus on the mundane but contrastingly remarkable beauty in objects around us; could you tell us three spaces or objects that deserve more reverence and why?
Off the top of my head...
Maybe less reverence, but more attention to the interactions that are had within common spaces like the U-Bahn platform or the kind of “waiting areas” we occupy here in Berlin. It does feel like there is an untapped potential
Weeds. I’m attracted to unnameable ones, and often use bull thistle for their resilience and ability to not only grow, but thrive, within tumultuous conditions. They feel relevant to conversations about queerness and displacement.
The ground. I lot of people ask about my work's physical proximity to the floor - in past works, especially, this was critical to the reading of “paying attention to the ground beneath your feet,” because we are usually looking forward/backward (poetically). Especially in a city like Berlin, where part of living here is finding scraps/clothes/decorative objects from this culture of really quite specific, passive, object-exchange.
What would your dream collab be?
Some space like the U8/BVG transit system (but like inside of the trains or something, where they don’t let subjective works be pushed) or potentially a site like the “Departure/Arrivals” platforms at the airport.
Human dream collab would be some wild group show where Anicka Yi, Mira Lee, Tarek Atoui, Mika Rottenberg & Klara Hosendlova fill some abhorrently brutalist exhibition space and also we all kiss. Dreams are dreams, ya know.
Any Last words?
This work feels really raw to me. In contrast to the majority of my past work, I kept this show incredibly quiet and barely shared it with my closest friends until recently. Close to my chest, maybe.
This work was made in a temporary home that is not mine, in a place and with materials and objects that are completely new to me, outside of my traditional material palette and any comfort zones.
Once we solidified the show, Backhaus’ gallery became the vessel to catch this fluid, emotional, dramatic, and melty new work. It helped me get outside of my own head and envision showing it to an audience. So did this interview.
So, thank you.
In a lot of industries you’re told to condense an idea down, to present an elevator pitch, or a concise sentence of what it is. Picturing what you had in store for Backhaus was a pleasure to read in your submission. Do you think you’d be able to summarise the show in a sentence?
A dear friend, artist/writer Yasmeen Nematt Alla, wrote the press release for this show. She saw so much in the work that I couldn’t see as close as I am to it...
She said,
“The act of nesting, both instinctual and precarious, [here] becomes a metaphor for resilience: the ways in which belonging, love, and home are continuously sought yet never fully secured.”
You also described your shows, as gathering spaces for queer phenomenology. Could you elaborate on this?
I think of queer phenomenology through the lens of artists and writers like Gordon Hall (who interprets founders of the thought like Sarah Ahmed/ Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick), who has been a huge influence to me from a young age in my practice, through sculpture.
If I think of my simplest definition of phenomenology, it would be “why we orient ourselves to what we orient ourselves toward” - the ‘queered’ version of that, *to me* is “why we orient ourselves to what we orient ourselves toward that speaks to the askew, discarded, bruised, looked-over, powerful or whatever experience in the object-world that mimics your (queer) experience.”
Hall spoke of it once like being attracted to something vital, necessary, and fleeting. Kind of like that. They touch something rigid with softness, they make the power of an object “true,” and find themselves within both the object's connotative/felt meaning.
I approach, orient, and am attracted to objects like this in what I choose to draw out in the world through my installations, through my rituals, and practice. In installing them, it feels like a gathering. Or, how I typically phrase it, a gathering for queer phenomenology enlivened by ordinary affect; so, the overlooked/banal, offensive/abject, pure/filthy, romanticized/sterile binaries that prod at me in my own lived experience, represented in what I am forced to see everyday.
