The Archive of Attentiveness

At the beginning of my studies I often drew in the evening what I had discovered during the day and memorized. I visualized the moments, scenes and events. Then I captured them in drawings. Drawing from memory and thereby "from a distance" turned out to be an advantage: it clarified what had been perceived, helped to distinguish the essential from the insignificant and reduced its complexity. It was through this procedure that I became aware of my attentiveness. I developed a feeling for what made me curious in everyday life. Only later did I translate the drawings into color. This second step enabled me to take a further level of putting myself in relation to what I perceived. Through the forms clarified in the drawing, I was able to more easily engage with the remembered atmosphere through the colors. But it did not stop there. What I wanted to show required painterly inventions. The brush glided sensuously over the canvas.

If I hung the pictures on the wall, narrations were created in the juxtaposition. The simultaneous visibility of the individual moments of experience told not only of the structure of my attentiveness, but also about my desire, my joy and the occassional difficulties.

The photographs are created in a similar way, but differ in detail: I capture moments that amaze me with my cell phone. I don't go out to take pictures purposefully, but rather record the moments that capture my attention with the camera. In order to document the respective situations, I often take several pictures, change my point of view, scan the scene in order to be able to select the most coherent picture later. By doing this for some years now I have hereby created a small archive of my attentiveness.

Tobias Loemke, June 2020

Find more on Tobias Loemke on his website.

Translation: Alexandra Miltner