Entangled, by Ann Mackowski

“Entangled” explores how we communicate physically with space and with our memory, and the ways in which our own subjective experiences are inexorably intertwined with the mapping process. The installation is inspired by the world of electrical and washing lines and cables in the Gracia district of Barcelona, an area Mackowski became fascinated by during previous visits. Realised in quarantine during the Covid19 crisis in Spain, Entangled” explores the experience of a foreigner reconfiguring a space both familiar and unfamiliar in a process of recollection and reinterpretation magnified by limitations.

At the beginning of the residency the project was to be an investigation of the local community through an installation based on the history of the different wires and cables of the district’s buildings. In her works, one can see Mackowski’s creative process evolving and changing during the quarantine and lockdown period. The impossibility of going out pushes the artist to a reinterpretation of her research, and carries her to the world of memory. She starts to investigate the impact of illustrative limitations on our memories of places and how our visual recollections change after viewing alternate depictions. With deliveries of art supplies suspended, materials and colours stop being ancillary to Mackowski’s creative process, and rather control it, as she had just crayons, markers and coffee available to her for a period of time. The works realised present an interplay and continual self-reference between the subjects depicted and the materials used. A crayon scribble of a photo becomes a painting; depictions of tangled phone and electrical wires on 19th century façades turn into buildings woven of dyed strings. Mackowski’s works explore the warp of memory through a process of “rehydrating” physical space from pictures, illustrating the new reality that we are able to create when we visually communicating with our past.

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About Ann Mackowski