Exchange

The work Exchange is an intervention within the American Academy in Rome, in 2008. It consisted of lifting the twelve stars of the European flag off the plaster of one of the walls. The material is removed and hold together by means of the technique used for removing frescoes. The walls of the American Academy are by international law an American territory. The intervention’s purpose is to create a zone of indeterminacy in which new rules are needed.

The process of lifting the plaster is repeated two times: by the first attempt only the first layers of the years-long overpainting are removed; by repeating it a two centimeters deep plaster is getting off creating a negative space into the wall.

The resulting works that came out of that double action show both an expansion in spatial and in temporal dimensions. The positive part of the relief has been shown for the first time 10 years later in Kunstraum Walcheturm, in Zurich. What we see now is the internal unseen part of the wall of the American Academy, as the stars show now their backside. While being lifted they have been reversed, and we are now not in front of the wall, but within the wall. The negative side becomes now the room itself of the new exhibition space.