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Eva Wohlgemuth began her collaboration with Andreas Baumann in 1989 and developed System 1-Around Vienna, a conceptual location sculpture that would take her around the world. Wohlgemuth and Baumann’s System is a mental network of objects, geographically located in very specific places. The documentation on all of these Location Sculpture Systems, now gathered on one website, is an indispensable extension of this project with no limits. Each of the ten Systems Wohlgemuth has realized (often in collaboration with Andreas Baumann) plays on dispersion and localization, and the world of networks should by now be contaminated with this artistic practice. Concretely, the systems are location structures developed around a central core and set in a natural space selected on the basis of historical and cultural considerations. Around the core a network of geographic points is formed, all of which are linked together in different ways: information flows, associations of ideas, transformation of materials, etc., so that each point in the network is a source of information in its own right, yet remains related to all other points. The individual positions are generally marked by attaching a plate onto them that carries information on the system. The twin plates of the fixed points combine to form a block, the "central unit" of the system. It is the "battery" that maintains the connection to the outer plates. Together with the documentary material, photos, and videos, it builds up a material, as well as an imaginary and emotional, network. Among those systems one might mention System II, A House, A Wood, A Lake, A Mountain and A Tunnel in Switzerland, five plates and points representing the idea of Heimat ("homeland"), or System IV, Moving Plates, where nine titanium plates pursue the idea of a global kinetic sculpture, since they were put on moving objects (a car, train, ice-cream cart, tree, elevator, satellite, mill, submarine, and boat). There is also System V, Red means yellow, yellow means red, two points and plates situated exactly on the opposite side of the globe from each other, one on Easter Island in the Pacific, the other in the Thar Desert in India. In setting up this network of sculptures, Wohlgemuth is not trying to topologically encircle the globe, but rather to structure the way a thing becomes detached from its origins. She thus manages to link the object back up with its conceptual gestation, and yet to abandon it. We see that by taking note of particular points on things all over the world, an imaginary relationship between objects and their localization is effected, creating the mental image of a sculpture. Simon Lamunière |