From November 2017 to January 2018, I completed an artist residency with the Leipzig International Artist Programme (LIA).  While in Germany, I visited the Albertinum Museum in Dresden and viewed several displays of broken objects from classical public sculptures that were once placed around the city. I was intrigued with these objects and how they were being displayed in glass cases. I was reminded about how objects are transformed within museums, taken out of their original context, and given a new meaning because of their physical lifespan and the history of their movement from one location to the next. This reminder was further enforced when I met an artist group from Mozambique whose practice involved recollecting and returning cultural artifacts from their villages that were taken during German East Africa colonial rule and placed within collections in the institutions of Leipzig.

I decided to devote my sculptural practice during my time at this residency to the idea of replacing objects and monitoring their lifespan to generate meaning and cultural memory. I paired the format of broken, displaced objects with a narrative for contract workers which I became aware of during my time at the Spinnerei. I learned that during the German Democratic Republic (1949-1990) many contract workers from Cuba, historically referred to as gastarbeiter meaning“guest worker”, were brought to Leipzig to fulfill temporary work placements within the spindle factories and other industries. These Cuban contract workers were brought to Germany as part of a trade agreement between the GDR and Cuba. This agreement assigned Cuban contract workers to live and work within Germany for fixed salaries, and they were not allowed to intermix with the German public. After the trade agreement was removed, the Cuban workers were uprooted from their locations in Germany and sent back to Cuba. I became concerned with the negative outlook of this narrative and decided to embrace it and explore a sense of replacement with the sculptural format I witnessed at the Albertinum Museum.

For the three months I spent in Leipzig, I created nine portrait busts from clay to represent displaced people. I had these clay works on display in my studio during the Sense of Place exhibition in the Spinnerei Winter Rundgang. After the showcase, I shattered the portrait busts and had them buried in a garden area within the Spinnerei campus. The burial ceremony was documented through video and can be viewed on YouTube or in select exhibitions. Parts of the broken busts were saved and later re-used within Sedimente, the LIA 10-Year Anniversary Showcase. These objects and the documentation of their lifespan continued my interest in object replacement, and they began to negotiate between the value of the object as a physical form and the value of the object's influence through its transformation from one location to another.

All exhibition photos are credited to Spinnerei and Walther LeKon.