Gadamer´s notions particularly played an important role in the continuing work with the interviews. During this time i was occupied in patiently and attentively listenening, watching, replaying and reflecting upon what was said and how it could be understood.
To begin with I had decided to work in a nonmethodological manner. However, without any graspable strategy, the material tended to be impenetrable. I therefore urged to find a model and began to identify key elements that could be used as rules for the conceptual design. Although Charlotte, Isabelle and Morgan are very different from one another, it was possible to identify similarities related to their collections, the act and purpose of collecting, and the perception of their collected objects. For instance, Morgan and Isabel envisioned their collection as creating a flow of objects, a movement of objects continually changing places through time. Both Morgan and Isabel showed particular interest in what could be described as the beauty of the fractured.
To Isabel this was developed almost as a criterion. The crack in an object would give her an evidence of the past life of the object, a place to fill with fantasy or history.
Among Charlotte’s collected photographs the one´s showing private situations from Germany during the Nazi occupation where particulary challenging. Everyday snapshots of daily life containing, often hidden in the image and difficult to discern, symbolic references to another perception of the time in history, left the observer affected once the meaning behind the image was reconstructed.
This juxtaposition was, for instance, represented in an image of a woman and a small child carrying a flag with the symbolic presence of a swastika.
The idea of juxtaposing objects and symbolic meanings into a new artifact was at the base of my research after having interviewed Isabel and Charlotte, yet it wasn’t until I met Morgan that the artifact’s concept solidified and began to take form. Morgan’s story about Christmas ornaments, love, friendship and beauty are formally and conceptually represented in the tinsel-o-matic, which in turn gives form to intangible ideas and sensations about the objects and the relationships, symbolic or affective, described by all three collectors alike.
