Collected Fears
Collection and assorted works, 2004 – 2005.
Dimensions and techniques variable:
Original notes: 683 x A5, 2004, pens and pencils
Childs’ scarf: 20 x 100 cm, 2004, goldthread.
Girls blouse: EU size 38, 2004, goldthread.
Billboards: 12 x A0, 2005, matte laminated prints.
Collected Fears was my graduation project. I asked people to write down anonymously what they were afraid of. Participants were approached in the streets, at work, at home or at school.
Initially, I displayed the original notes. But they turned out to be too personal to function as a work: The handwriting made the notes too personal (personal as in: belonging to someone else, someone not you). So I moved toward showing digital, more neutral version of the texts, hoping that the emptier form would offer more opportunity for readers to enter the texts.
In the end all replies were gathered together on twelve large billboards. All of the replies are used: The phoney and the evasive replies are an important part of this collection, as is the fact that some answers came back almost a hundred times and others turned up only once.
On the first three images below, the respective texts read:
loneliness
or that when you die you think: "i wish i had done everything differently"
afraid that my boyfriend liked his previous girlfriends better then he likes me now
for my mum to die
