© NELE STRÖBEL

inside_out
a sugar_cube-installation

Introduction

The subject of this exhibition is the floating boundary between private and public spaces. Although access to the privately used plaza of the E.ON main administration building is restricted for security reasons, people can see into it from all sides, making it quasi a public space. A  street corner on Trinidad was digitally processed and reflected into the "white cube" floating inside it, and subsequently turned inside out. This creates a private room which is reminiscent of a public room.

The history of inside_out:

On the trail of V.S. Naipaul, I photographed a street corner in 1996 in Port of Spain, the capital of the sugar barons on Trinidad. The houses - which were still lived in - were so run down that their walls were little more than a membrane which could no longer create a boundary between public and private space. I digitally altered this Caribbean inside_out, mirrored it, and had it printed on the  inside of a white tent cube.

The tent object floats in the middle of the inside courtyard 40 cm above the ground. From the outside, this textile cube resembles a large Australian tetrapack jellyfish. Its measurements correspond to the proportions of a sugar cube - 6 m on the sides and 3.8834 m in height.

The unprinted, white outside is used as a projection surface for highly magnified, digitally altered microorganisms.
 Motives (radiolaria and diatoms) wander as projections throughout the room in order to display themselves on the sugar_cube installation.

The side walls can be folded up so that visitors can walk around inside.
inside_out generates a private sphere in the E.ON plaza, which can be seen into from all sides. Private interactions are protected here.
Once a week, a photographer comes to take pictures of employees in the apparent Caribbean ambiance - people in business suits standing on a street corner in Port of Spain, so to speak.