Jeanette Sendler: Feast of Salt

HOME	In the performance Feast of Salt-Ghost Letters III, Jeanette linked 33 empty rooms of Gertrud Seele Haus, a former sanatorium near Berlin with a 300 meter long red felted 'Lifeline'.

Lifeline

The following review by Jessica Hemming was published by the Selvedge textile magazine in issue no 03 Sept /Oct 2004

Near Berlin the installation “Red Line” uses a three hundred metre long felt rope to link thirty-three rooms in a former Tuberculosis hospital. Sendler explains that the line is a metaphor for life, but as Victoria Parry notes, “Fibre has often been called upon to describe and delineate the texture and perception of space, as have spider’s webs”

One wonders what sort of spider would have spun the rambling thread of this installation which slips though existing holes in the structure as well as burrowing its own.

Vaguely reminiscent of an unruly green garden hosepipe, the blood red rope snakes its way through a frozen tap, in and out of the snowy grounds, across walls and ceilings to finally arrive at a two dimensional heart shape resting on the floor of one of the interior rooms.

In some rooms attention is drawn solely towards the floor in a series of loops reminiscent of a mini-bicycle rack. In other spaces the felt snakes its way past the cracked and peeling paint of the walls and ceiling.

Like a surreal replacement to the electrics or plumbing of this unloved building, there is little evoked by this trail of thread that proves sinister. Instead, one feels as though they are witness to a child’s work, the uninhibited drawing of lines in space, marking both sites of interest and those of seeming disinterest that reconfigure this otherwise sad space.

Please visitwww.emergingproperties.de to learn more about the performances Ghost Letters I-IV

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