David Wasch Painting Art Memory House Familiar

The Familiar – Phase I: Gastatelier De Vindplaats, 2025-26

The Familiar builds on my earlier research into memory and transformation and centers on a key theme in my work: the sense of home. In this project, I examine how what feels familiar can shift or dissolve when context, space, matter, perception, or the body changes. I am interested in how physical and remembered experiences overlap, shaping what we perceive as close, distant, or our own.

What makes a place home? How does memory influence what we experience as safe or recognizable? Often, this feeling is not fixed but a projection toward what was, or what is yet to come.

The project unfolds across two residencies: a social phase at Gastatelier De Vindplaats in Amsterdam, and a solitary phase in the abandoned bunker of Residency GinDS in Hoofddorp.

Phase 1 (september untill december 2025)

Working with children to explore the shared and shifting sense of home.

At Gastatelier De Vindplaats, The Familiar takes the form of a collective process. Together with children, I explore how memories and imagination shape our idea of home. Each day, a new group continues what the previous one has left behind: drawings, constructions, traces, and stories that gradually transform the space into a living memory.
Through play, collaboration, and repetition, the project reflects how what feels familiar is never static but constantly rebuilt through the eyes and hands of others.

During my residency at De Vindplaats, I work with children aged six to twelve in the Bos en Lommer neighborhood to explore what home can mean. For some, it is a place or a room; for others, a language, a memory, or a feeling. Their stories and images help the project grow as a living whole, shifting, transforming, and continually taking new forms.

The Big House

One of the projects during this phase is The Big House. Three different groups of children work together to build a single large cardboard-wooden house (2 × 2 × 2.5 meters). Each group works on a different day of the week, yet they all contribute to the same house.

The first group began with the idea of creating a real house, complete with walls, a window, and a doorway. They drew plans for the interior: windows, benches, lamps, and a doorbell. Subsequent groups add their own ideas, such as turning the house into a museum or adding new details to the inside and outside.

What strikes me is how the children constantly mirror or transform one another’s ideas, and re-use and transform whatever they encounter. Whether it is a drawing or object from another child, or a newly discovered item from the street brought into the studio, everything becomes material for the project. Like a miniature society building culture across generations, they observe, adapt, and creatively transform each contribution. In this way, ideas, objects, and memories circulate rapidly, layering, shifting, and evolving in a continuous dialogue between past and present.

To connect the different groups from each day, I provide tools that allow the children to pass messages to one another. Sometimes this happens through a secret box for drawings or small objects, sometimes through short audio recordings in which they explain what they have made or what they plan for the next session. In this way, a conversation develops between children who do not meet directly, yet still collaborate to build something together.

The house becomes more than a cardboard construction: it is a shared memory, built from layers of ideas, voices, and images. Everyone contributes something of themselves: a detail from home, a memory, or a wish, turning the house into a collage of what “home” can mean.

While the children build The Big House, they construct walls, windows, and rooms from cardboard, boxes, paint, canvas, transparent sheets, and leftover materials, adding, transforming, and reshaping what others have left behind. Their gestures, rhythms, and playful interactions create a constantly evolving space.

I work alone or collaboratively on a series of small house-shaped dioramas. I print images of fleeting, half-present moments in the neighborhood, the children’s stories or drawings, and my own image archive on transparent sheets. When I layer these sheets, new images emerge: a space between shadow and reality, between memory and matter.

The children’s work and mine resonate in a shared process of repetition and transformation. They adopt each other’s gestures, I gather echoes of their work, their stories and my own past. The miniature houses and the large cardboard house reflect each other as inside and outside, micro and macro. While the children build walls, windows, and doors in the physical space, I build the memory of that space, tracing the gestures, objects, and stories that take place there. Together, these worlds form an investigation into how home arises when it is not owned but shared, through time, matter, and light.

This process also mirrors how our brains reconstruct memory. Memories are never identical to the original experience; they exist in layers. Familiar elements resurface while new ones shift on top, transforming slightly, as in these collages. Together with the children, we build a stack of evolving images, responding, adding, and transforming them in a shared space of visual exchange. Each emerging image carries traces of others, sometimes distorted, sometimes sharpened by time, unfolding like overlapping transparencies in a play of absence and presence. What is visible simultaneously evokes what remains hidden.

In this way, the collage is not a fixed construction, but a momentary configuration, a crossroads where subconscious associations temporarily crystallize, open to observation, questioning, and reinterpretation.

Through painting, photography, text, and video, I investigate how something that almost disappears

— a home, a shadow, a memory, an echo -

can still remain tangibly present.

These collages focus on fleeting moments that take place just beyond sight, leaving traces that are not yet fully understood in the shifting relation between what we see and what we recall.