Conclusion

The art of using space – the negative (unused) space should have equally meaning as the used space, but we know how people tend to live at home and thereby indicate a concept of life which is reduced to a minimum of reproduction requirements: food, sleep and entertainment. Missing is above all a guest room and even more so a common room where everyone could meet and discuss. Too often private rooms become show cases instead of being memory cells to preserve and to sustain identity.

It is interesting to observe how often neglected space just as much as neutral space do not allow to bring about a kind of creative atmosphere conducive to do good work. Bacon wanted to have his atelier to be in a permanent stage of chaos in order to feel free to be creative himself. That is far removed from the Renaissance vision of space in which the individual seeks a place for himself by entering a dialectic between the incomplete and uncomplete (Michel Angelo). Over time artists like Matisse tried to define use of space by assuming the parts form a whole which determines all relationships, but here Adorno would say the whole is not the truth. Space is thus an ability to keep things open for further development. Michel Foucault would say, it is an art to create space without occupying it oneself.

Local identity can determine the responses as to what is happening in the world. By sending out messages, it can indicate what meaning spaces take on over time when their myth is not destroyed but enhanced by what happens and is created there. Myth means some expectations are fulfilled free of any disappointment over time. What grandfather and grandmother knew and experienced, may be the same three generations later when a young couple declares their love on the same bench where their grandparents did it. Yet in Kids Guernica as well as Guernica Youth any action undertaken does have a strong reference to Picasso's Guernica for the simple reason that war stifles the outcry of humanity, and once pain is no longer perceived in public, in open spaces, then a seeming order is imposed which has nothing to do with the lived human reality.

Hatto Fischer

Berlin 1.10.2016

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