Heather Lyon

Heather Lyon

Berlin Blau

Heather Lyon was a guest at Lichtenberg Studios in March this year and, in addition to some performance projects, dealt with Berlin Blue.

The exhibition “Berlin Blue” opens August 31, 2023 and provides a glimpse into Heather Lyon’s work through November 5.

“Blue was the first modern pigment, accidentally created by a painter in Berlin in 1706 who was looking for red but used potash contaminated with blood.
The resulting crystals were a brilliant dark blue. This color has played an important role in my work for over a decade, and it was natural to look at this blue at its point of origin. I found it on the streets and in used clothing stores in cotton and wool.

Most days I set off by bike or on foot to the sea to embroider on deep blue fabric by the water, to take in the birdsong, to observe the subtle yet constant changes of spring. I collected used clothing from the neighborhood to use in my fabric work, sewing them together into new pieces and shapes, into small quilts, into a poncho for for a performance.” (Heather Lyon, 2023)

August, 2023

Javier Peñafiel

Fliegende Papierzeichen
In Lichtenberg I have walked around with papers whose function is to remove grease from the face. But I prefer to write on them.
I have treated them as if they were flying carpets, using a transparent and flexible foil that allows me to focus/title the place I pass by.
Lichtenberg is full of monuments and memorials. A signpost.
My papers seem to subtitle activities, events and people in history, forms of survival, attempts at emancipation. They are notes from a world that is interpretable but subject to fallacies.
The photographs I have taken of the hanging papers are leaps in the duration of time and also possible conversations.
In Berlin, aquariums always explode.


Rummelsburg depatrimonial
The group of drawings I have made at Lichtenberg Studios is fed by a series of stories drawn from my daily experience in researching the context in which I have lived.
The expulsion of the homeless from Rummelsburg Bay during the pandemic and the construction of the new aquarium hotel there.
The Rummelsburg labour camp and the last days of the war, from where the Mallorcan prisoner Sebastiá Santandreu left to place the Republican flag in Franco’s embassy and many other stories of those days.
The consultations in the museum’s archive – I had never slept on top of an archive before – revisiting the figure of Heiner Muller, whose scenography for his work Quartetto I made when I was very young, in 1990, has been a real reencounter.
My obsession with scores and chamber music that in Berlin holds up so well.
The texts that accompany the drawings are a poetic intervention, mediated by the translator. In a way they are introversions that respond to my infatuation with the beauty of the figure of the idiot, understood as the person who prefers the immanent life to any kind of snobbery or transcendence and lives ignoring all the zombie leisure that accompanies gentrification.

July, 2023