Whenever people experience themselves in social art projects, they experience the – common – moment of doing, of action. Then they connect the work with what they have experienced themselves. One’s own action is perceived as spontaneous, direct and immediate. Attention is focused on the moment.
Nevertheless, there is always a story before the story, a story of the idea, the concept, the preparation.
This is the story of the preparation of the series “ARTEFACT – WE ACT DADA 2023” for the art project ARTSURPRISE.
The story begins in spring 2023 with a call from a dispatcher at a wood processing company. He asks if there is interest in a larger quantity of prefabricated olive wood sticks. A customer dropped out and now you have this batch in stock.
At the same time, there was the concept of a series of stamps that should be conveyed to people interested in art via ARTSURPRISE. After many experiments with rubber stamps, the only question that remained was how to produce a variation in the series and how to produce a stamp as an object.
The factory’s chopsticks were the right size. In this way, 240 small wooden plates could be sawn.
The rough-sawn, untreated plates then had to be ground on a band saw. Each tile has 6 sides, that’s 1440 grinding processes…
In order to avoid overheating of the device, this work had to be spread over several days.
In the next step, the stamp rubbers were produced with an LED laser and the stamp bodies were inscribed.
One goal of the ARTSURPRISE project is to produce works of art as unique pieces in small series. The choice of work equipment, material and process should produce works of art that are as individual as possible. The choice of the stamp body alone – 500-year-old olive wood from Valencia – makes each object unique. It also transports its own history (what has happened in the last 500 years in eastern Spain?). And it connects the owner to a much larger project, the artist residency CASAdelDRAGON and the attached COLOR GARDEN.
The manufacturing process of rubber stamps requires care and several work steps. First, the foam rubber is “written” with the laser – the text appears in the negative and is rotated horizontally. Then all 12 different stamps are cut out with the laser and glued to the stamp body. It takes more than 45 minutes to produce 12 stamps, considering machine set-up times and setups. A total of around 50 working hours were required to realize this project.
This project is specifically linked to a contemporary communication platform that has made headlines in recent years: TWITTER. The lucky owners of these special stamps are encouraged to act and use the stamps and to document this use. Using the respective hashtag for their own stamps, they can mark their tweet, search for this hashtag at the same time and thus experience the forming community (#WEACT, #WELOVE, #WEKNOW…). The use and the documentation manifest themselves in a place that – at least temporarily – is in the focus of the discussion about freedom of expression. With their use, the owners set an example. It is a commitment to the will to remain in action. And with this statement in public space, the sender of the message gains something of what is at stake: freedom of speach.