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Drawing a portret of Ian in the FFM Bowl in 2017
June 2022
AMBIGUOUS SKATE NATION
Frankfurt Am Main, SKTWK
I was invited by one of my first skate homies, Ian. One day he just e-mailed me: do you wanna be in a skate show in Frankfurt? I was excited, as Frankfurt is the city where I properly learned to do tricks. Frankfurt is where I started to go to the skatepark regularly, alone, discovering a different layer of the city (if you know, you know this feeling). It's also I where learned to enjoy my own company, and to be fine with solitude.
This invitation was therefore very much appreciated and meaningful to me. Also, many other artists that also skate, showed work in this gallery. SKTWK organised events all around Frankfurt. It was a nice gathering.
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The work consisted of around 200 handcut stickers that the visitors could glue themselves somewhere on the gallery wall.
A web-looking network naturally started to form as the visitors came by and contributed to the composition (I realised they carefully took their time to look through the entire sticker pile before choosing one to stick on the wall! They also took their time to choose a spot to stick it. Some glued their sticker on the ceiling, on the trash bin or took one home. I enjoyed watching the visitors interact with the work so much!).
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I asked Ian if he'd mind if someone would stick a sticker on his work (the cartoonesque piece of what looks like a flatbar resting on a pair of shoes), and he said he actually would be delighted if someone would do that. But nobody did and I think his gallerist is glad about it.
A mix of logos, slogans, magazine quotes, Pinterest boards, Tumblr quotes, drawings and other pop-culture / skate related iconography is turned into a collection of stickers. The images are often edited, altered or transformed. They then get juxtaposed bit by bit, similarly to the sticker wall you'd see at the check out of a skate shop but then also not really as dense, obviously.
The stickers collection is a continuously growing image bank, a selection of accumulated pictures, screenshots and texts around skateboarding; its history, its visual identity, its historical documentation and its relation to gender and sexuality.
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