PURPLE PATH: Inauguration of "My Floating Home" by Karolin Schwab

Location

entrance free

What does it mean to be at home? "To be physically present in a place, anchored in the moment and yet far away with your thoughts," is how the artist Karolin Schwab describes it herself. In her project My Floating Home, Schwab, who was born in Stralsund in 1987 and lives in Berlin, explores the question raised here with site-specific intervening sculptures that are reminiscent of the outline of a house and stand in water. In Niederwiesa/Braunsdorf, the artist places red powder-coated square tubes in situ in the Mühlgraben, a bypass of the Zschopau, like a fleeting, three-dimensional sketch of a house. While Karolin Schwab's first sculpture My Floating Home stands a few hundred metres away from the Danish Arken Museum of Modern Art on the wide, reflective surface of the Baltic Sea, the work conceived for Braunsdorf squeezes itself between the embankments of the ditch created to operate the nearby grain mill. As the seasons change, constantly changing images are created in the water between the red outline of the house and its surroundings, both literally and figuratively.

Niederwiesa is a place of seeming contrasts between the baroque Lichtenwalde Castle with its art collections, parks and water features and the textile industry, which settled in the Braunsdorf district around 1800 and put Saxony's first machine spinning mill into operation. What connects art and labour is the Zschopau, which meanders through the landscape. Its water feeds the baroque fountains in the Lichtenwalde Landscape Park as well as the former cloth and yarn factories and the flour mill that still exists today.

With greetings from:

• Raik Schubert, Mayor, Municipality of Niederwiesa
• Representative, City of Chemnitz
• Representative, Free State of Saxony
• Stefan Schmidtke, Managing Director, European Capital of Culture Programme Chemnitz 2025 gGmbH

Introduction:

• Alexander Ochs, Curator of the PURPLE PATH