David Wasch Painting Art Memory House Familiar

The Familiar Phase II: Residency GinDS Bunker, 2025-26

In the underground bunker of Residency GinDS, The Familiar turns inward. This phase shifts from a social perspective toward a more introspective exploration of space, memory, and inner time.

The isolation of the space allows for a slower, more reflective process, a dialogue between inner and outer worlds.

Working with light, sound, and layered materials, I explore how memory leaves traces in space and how the familiar can quietly emerge in a place of absence.

Phase 2 (march untill june 2026)

In the second phase, at the bunker of Residency GinDS, I focus on the introspective and bodily dimensions of home, while building on and relating to the insights gathered during the first phase. The architecture of the bunker, with its thick walls, confined light, and echoing acoustics, becomes part of the research: how does space itself shape our sense of presence, absence, and belonging?

In both phases, the familiar remains central: what makes something a recognizable place, a safe space, or an emotional anchor? And how does that sense change or become strange when context or perception shifts?

Seeing is never direct or complete; it always mingles with belief, doubt, and interpretation. The same happens in the collages: the layers remain visible, yet never fully revealed at once. The image unfolds in fragments, depending on where the gaze comes to rest. Memories work in the same way: never a single, clear picture, but assembled, half visible, half believed.

What becomes visible always goes hand in hand with what remains unseen. Each collage carries traces of blindness; there is always something that withdraws from view. Yet that very hiddenness forms part of the whole, much like memories evoke something that is never entirely present.

When light shines through the collages, this play between visible and invisible becomes tangible. The light both reveals and conceals: what illuminates one area casts another into uncertainty. The image becomes a living surface in which time and memory continually move and reconfigure themselves. Light functions not only as a means of seeing, but also as a metaphor for consciousness – the attempt to understand what can never be fully grasped.

Absence makes meaning possible. What is not directly seen or remembered works as a void or a shadow against which everything else takes shape. It is through what is missing that what is present gains meaning. I often think of how I remember a face: a smile appears sharply, while the color of the eyes fades. That vagueness, that sense of something missing, is part of the experience itself.

Shadow of a late arrival

I say I, and somehow I’m already someone else.
Maybe because I’ve changed — a little or a lot, I’m not sure.
Or maybe someone else has quietly taken my place while I wasn’t looking.
He stands where I stood, says the same words, and they sound just as real coming from his mouth.

I say this, but it’s already that.
Some other thing, not identity, but different..

I say here, and it is elsewhere
I’m no longer certain where that is.

I say now, and it is already later
I repeat day. but it feels as night
I try tree, and a house appears instead

The same words I use to hold the world in place,

simple words, familiar ones,
are also the ones that quietly undo it.

Just a faint suggestion that something down there moved.

Monument Valley
During my journey through Monument Valley, I photographed rock formations that have remained after millions of years of erosion: remnants of what was once a flat plateau, now isolated black masses rising like shadows from the landscape. In the black-and-white images these forms appear almost entirely black, monumental, closed, and inscrutable, like holes in the image.

What was once a gently sloping landscape has crumbled into islands of stone, fragments of something larger that is no longer visible. The darkness that renders the rocks so black was, at that moment, caused by a passing cloud, a brief event that evokes a sense of lasting obscurity in the photograph.

The stone appears as residue of what once was, not a reconstruction, but a remainder. Just as memories are often not what truly happened, but what has been left behind in the image. What water, wind, and time did not take away remains visible as form and as emptiness, much like the layers in my transparent collages.

In the GinDS rescidency at the Bunker I would like to contintue this approach. The walls, like the rocks or the layered transparencies, reveal traces of presence and absence, of what endures and what withdraws. Light passes through the space as it passes through the collages, revealing some layers while leaving others in shadow.