In Defense of the Misremembered: Orality and the Weather in the Work of Katinka Bock

<p>“I’m longing for an exhibition whose quietness is regularly disturbed by the agitation of the world outside, the irritations, the discontents, the itches of the times.” So wrote Katinka Bock in an email to twelve of her friends in June of 2019, inviting them to contribute to a newspaper she was planning to publish in collaboration with Thomas Boutoux and Clara Schulmann, as part of her exhibition <em>Commotion in Higienópolis</em> at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris. The idea was that a newsroom would be set up in the exhibition space, and – with an editorial board of local high school and college students – each edition would be produced and printed on-site, within a single day.</p> <p>In this exhibition, Bock was installing a large-scale sculpture built out of hundreds of copper panels which had originally formed the dome of the Anzeiger-Hochhaus building in Hannover. When the panels of the dome were being replaced, Bock managed to salvage the old ones, which had lived outside for almost a century, oxidising and turning green with verdigris while accruing scratches and imprints from bird claws, the weather, and WWII bomb fragments. Bock is drawn to objects that have been around; surfaces that carry marks of time and exposure. When she learned that the Anzeiger-Hochhaus had once housed the offices of a number of major German newspapers, she decided to also make her exhibition into a newsroom, to try to bring real-time inscriptions of world-exposure – “the itches of the times” – into the exhibition…</p>