Saxa Loquuntur

In progress. Mixed media installation: Sculpey, Transformers parts, aluminum wire, magnets, lightbox pedestal , HD video projector

Saxa Loquuntur (Latin for ‘the stones speak’) is a mixed media installation that takes psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s former home and massive antiquities collection as its points of departure to explore how physical sites and objects are invested with psychic meaning. In 1938 the Jewish psychoanalyst was forced into exile from Vienna where he had lived and worked for 47 years. A life-size double video projection replicates photographer Edmund Engelman’s historic documentation of the birthplace of psychoanalysis, drawing attention to the present conditions of what is now the Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna. Sculptures and photo collages materialize in the gallery space the absent antique relics from the once over filled rooms at Bergasse 19. The installation presents a series of playful figurines and photographs that are composites of Freud’s archaeological plunder and Transformers® toy parts. This pantheon of “prosthetic gods,” which Freud claimed “man” had become in his terrible technological mastery, produce an imaginative modern-day mythology. Exiles, according to Edward Said, feel “an urgent need to reconstitute their broken lives.” Saxa Loquuntur responds to this predicament of the broken exile, asking what remains behind when one is banished from one’s home. Can the stones speak?