IM LIMBO LEBEN

Our surroundings, we are accustomed to them, they make us blind we do not perceive the permanent, only the changing in exile every be- haviour is new at first, the flood of perceived information is unfamiliar, it carries no meaning in this stage, exile is uninhabitable in order to survive it, you must learn to transform the raw data into a message that signifies data processing is thus another form of creativity.

The word ‘limbo’ can be used to describe a complicated situation where one has no control and is somehow not going anywhere. Melanie Garland understands this chaotic meantime as a personal moment that we all have experienced in one situation or another. Melanie’s conceptual point of departure is her experience of migrating from Chile to Berlin as well as her current work with women and children, many of them Syrian, living in the Berlin neighbourhood of Moabit.

Her works abstractly express a tension between peoples’ memories of their past home and a present position that is at once located inside and outside of their new geographical limits. You may read her works as landscapes, structures, imaginary dreams, soft or hard fences, real time materiality...

Old codes do not necessarily work in a new context. Melanie tries to give little insights and hints towards new ways of operating.