Basement Sanctuaries by Gesche Würfel

Gesche W端rfel

Basement Sanctuaries

Grey Matters 4

Basement Sanctuaries Gesche W端rfel

Basement Sanctuaries: In her series of images, Gesche Würfel captures the freshness and honesty behind the decorative work created by superintendents residing in the basements of apartment buildings in Northern Manhattan, New York City. These images form a window to the environment in which the supers live and work, their personalized sanctuaries.

A migrant herself, Gesche came across the sacred spaces while apartment hunting with her husband in 2010, leading to this two-year photography project. Her background as a visual artist, urban planner, and sociologist helped her to approach the subject matter from various perspectives in a sensitive way, powerfully depicting the basements and superintendents.

The pictures present a great void. The people who inhabit these spaces are invisible: neither the supers nor their families, nor the people who live in the apartments are present. This premeditated void is intended to reveal the emptiness a migrant leaves behind in his or her home country. This void in the basement images is a form of remembering the absence left behind by the supers in their home countries by emigrating to New York City or the United States.

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Gesche evokes the presence of the supers by using the emotional relation they have with the decorative objects.

Inducing a similar emotional relation to the objects in the spectator allows her to infer that intimate and unique emotional relation between those objects and their owners.

The presence of the supers can be perceived by the connection made between the sensitization of the spectator and the emotional inference invoked by the artist. Gesche enables the spectator to make this relation through the inclusion of small architectural details, such as form, light, worldly and ordinary decorative objects of intense colors.

The decorations are based on the accumulation of personal objects and on a selection of objects that the apartment residents have discarded or given away. The super is the person who instinctively assumes the roll of decorator and curator while selecting the objects on view and constructing a collection; he gives life, light, and color to the basements, transforming the utilitarian spaces into personalized sanctuaries that express something about them and transport us into other worlds. Some objects and furniture reference the supers’ cultures or home countries, others their dreamscapes.

The objects used in the decoration are considered worldly and popular - landscapes, still lifes, flower arrangements, and folkloric scene paintings, plants, bird cages, fishbowls, colour and black-and-white photos, and portraits, as well as reproductions of posters, signs, and colourful plastic patio furniture. All are shown hanging on the rustic basement walls with cement finish, painted, mostly, in sanitized and institutionalized gray colours with glossy finish. The walls’ rusticity and the delicacy of the decorations create a disorienting dialogue that transports the viewer to another time and place. That is the case with untitled 11 (chair) - a white metallic chair with yellow back and red seat in front of a glossy gray wall, reminiscent of childhood and school.

The decorations are integrated with different architectonic elements present on the basement walls and ceilings. From simple plants in a row in a hallway, or pictures or mirrors over sinks, to complex compositions as in untitled 12 (baseball), which shows a white door, a picture of the Yankee Stadium between a flag of the United Sates and one of the Dominican Republic. The diamond shape of the field stands out. Also in the center of the door are two mirrors, one on top of the other, the mirror shapes resembling the game diamond and

Sótanos Santuarios transforming the basement into an action field. To the left of the door one can see an old map of the East Coast of the United States that includes the thirteen colonies, Florida and the Caribbean Islands; again, the Dominican Republic converges with the United States.

Another case of complex decoration is the photo entitled untitled 55 (beethoven), showing a poster of the German musician and composer hanging in the midst of the pipes with the giant gas meter underneath. There are two pictures of tones similar to the poster and the wall. This allows for tonal coherence in the installation as well as stability and symmetry.

The ironing board and the trash container give a utilitarian tone to the composition. Conversely, the picture of the laundry room (untitled 46) with its yellow and green colors and industrial shades, shows harmony, but lacks the personalized touch so vivid in the rest of the photos.

The untitled photos 52 (steps), 47 (mona lisa), and 25 (mirrors) show collections of landscapes, portraits, and mirrors that evoke a French Salon of 1890, where the art pieces were displayed in levels without any apparent order filling the walls and even the ceiling. The untitled piece number 4 (yellow green) is an interesting triangular composition. In the middle, there is a reproduction of the Zapatista mural from 1931 by the Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco. On both sides, there are two still life pictures with colorful flowers, and green foliage that echo the ocher and green tones of the wall and the objects that surround them: pipes, an electric box, and a plant.

Many images use the complexity of congested and cumulative decoration to great effect. For example, image untitled 57 (cage) shows a parrot cage, a small statue of a sailor playing the tuba, different flowers, and paper, plastic and live plants

Fabian Goncalves Borrega

on an indoor patio in which even the floor has been painted green. The Jesus figure, in untitled 56, seems to be giving communion to the clothes hanging on the wall, and in the bottom section, one can see the control panel of a laundry machine, in a juxtaposition of utilitarian and decorative sense, as Gesche has done in other photos. Without doubt, the untitled photo number 50 (workshop), which makes us think of an electrical and plumbing supplies warehouse, defines this sort of typology. This accumulative sense brings us closer to an intimate view that lets us witness the private and constant relation between the objects and their owner.

By using only the light available, Gesche wants to show the conditions in which the supers work and live. Shooting on film, utilizing long exposures and a tripod, means that she had to work slowly. She spent a lot of time investigating the spaces carefully. Her way of focusing on details is also evident in the interviews she conducted with the supers, revealing interesting details of their lives and dreams.

Gesche took a portrait of each superintendent. Each of them chose the location and posture. The images just show a small part of the environment that surrounds these characters.

Gesche presents them to us with the interviews, but she does not influence the spectator. She lets the sanctuaries identify and define the resident of each one of them.

Gesche’s Basement Sanctuaries are the confluence and contrast of her own urban planning background and the supers’ unplanned and spontaneous decorations, creating a syncretic image that captures the viewer’s imagination and evokes the following questions: Where are Gesche and the supers from?

Why did they emigrate to the U.S.? What were their dreams when they came to the U.S.? What are their dreamscapes?

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