Materials: Charcoal, graphite pencil, marker pen, found cups, HD video & sound, sound composition, interviews, live performance, gold paint

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The exhibition ‘Vacancies’ re-imagines the gallery as a flatshare or WG in German through the imaginal lens of ‘Post Otherness’, as proposed by Bonaventure S.B. Ndikung and Regina Römhild in the ‘Post-Other as Avantgarde’ (2013).

In the installation Rota, (etymologically meaning “wheel”), Dominique considers cleaning as an activity vital to any shared space. In its cyclical nature, the necessity to clean, reveals how mundane repetitions can be sources of tension, but also reveal the possiblity for transformation.

The work combines drawings in charcoal and pen that leave semi-permanent traces on the WG wall and floor. These surround an ordered chaos of innumerable ‘cups’, the markers of social interactions. Above is a video work Traces which tells the story of performance presented on the estate where the artist lived in London. The architect of this site, Berthold Lubetkin, was a firm believer in the possibility of utopian social housing: this act of soiling the communal space, reveals that cleaning, as opposed to leaving traces may be the interstice that allows for fleeting utopias in the moment of cleaning up together.

Using the gallery’s dishwasher, as a silent ‘co-laborator’ in this cycle, ROTA interweaves human / animate, technology / inanimate, memory and moment. It examines imperceptible resonances that arise in the day-to-day interchange within social spaces.

The installation was activated through a durational performance presented during Berlin Art Week.

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