HELP

Public art installation, 14 x 7 m, driftwood, 2023

The Help sign is composed of collected pieces of wood that have washed up from the river. This wood silently tells the story of its journey from one place to another. The assembled sign looks as if it was assembled by a castaway trying to save himself from a deserted island. Its intention is to attract the attention of airplane pilots. In this case, however, the sign is set in an accelerated metropolitan situation, the lettering is in italics and refers to the sophistication of the environment, the pilots have been replaced by people in nearby apartments. The work reflects the paradoxical nature of big cities, where there is a high concentration of people, yet one can easily find oneself in a lonely situation or in a kind of liminal space. A space between the familiar and the completely unknown, in which one leaves the old life behind and the new one has not yet appeared. Loneliness, partly social isolation, partly the subjective experience of one’s own survival, is a growing trend today. Pandemics and enforced isolation have only contributed to this phenomenon.