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To Repair, 1999 Silvia Gruner (2015)
As evidence of damage, a crack makes present the memory of a breaking point. In a gesture of restoration, Silvia Gruner transforms fissures in the floor into traces of experience, concentrating on reestablishing the unity of that which has been fragmented. The act of repair is a noble—yet naïve—attempt to contain the passage of decay and the urgency of deterioration. To stave off the ultimate consequence is an act of resistance that takes on an existential character.
More than an exercise in recovery, however, Repairing is a palliative process. Like a form of first aid, the strips of adhesive tape serve as a covering for the traces of time lived and of what has been lived through time. They do not seek to heal the wound; rather, they generate a mirage of duration, a delirium of permanence. The new arrangement of the fragments is nothing more than a temporary remedy whose marks reveal the fragile reality of what has been repaired, giving rise to an illusory sense of continuity and stability.
Seen from above, the scars of this provisional union appear as a rhizome: the multiplicity of fissures reconciled into a single structure, regardless of the sequence or scale of the fractures. Even as it remains a composition of fragments, the floor will never recover the solemnity of being whole. Now transformed into a network, its condition of unity is updated through the trace of its material afflictions. Resting upon the joints of these breaks is the absurdity of being complete in pieces—an illusion of transcendence that acknowledges damage and makes rupture a participant in existence.
Repairing reminds us that we are accumulations of fractured fragments, wholes assembled from pieces of experience and circumstance.