2025

auf Anfrage zugänglich

Erweiterung Karlsgymnasium, Am Stadtpark 23, 81243 München

Keramik-Emaille auf thermogeformten Platten aus Sicherheitsglas, 730 × 360 × 520 cm
Hersteller: Glasmalerei Peter Studios

Architecture: Holzfurtner und Bahner Architekten und Stadtplaner, München

Landscape architecture: TRR Landschaftsarchitekten, München

Photos: Henning Koepke

Text: Quirin Brunnmeier

Robust and fragile, floating yet firmly fixed in space, the atrium in the new addition to the Karlsgymnasium in Pasinger Stadtpark is home to a multi-layered sculptural object that utilizes natural light as its medium. The installation geCloud was created by Mexico City-born, Berlin-based artist Vanessa Farfán. The work defies a clear interpretation, navigating between analog and digital poles, between the natural and the artificial. The work traverses the interfaces of different materials, media, and content-related themes, exploring their inherent ambivalences.

For the installation, Farfán first digitally combined several photographs to create a photographic image of a cumulus cloud. The motif was then manipulated to appear less like a photographic document and more like a digital composition. In the next step, the artist rasterized this motif and translated it onto large-format 100 × 100 cm glass panels. These modules were printed with ceramic enamel and then thermoformed, creating an irregular surface. Installed on a system of wire ropes in the high school’s new atrium, the result is a floating, fragmented, and dynamic image that reflects and refracts sunlight, influenced by the angle of incidence and the individual perspective of the viewer. As an entity, this cloud is nearly impossible to grasp. Farfán’s work is interdisciplinary, situated at the juncture of art and science. She explores the way digital logics alter our perception of the physical and questions the relationship between the dimensions of real and digital space. Her approach is exploratory, often experimental, but never merely affirmative. This is also true of this work. The new atrium in the Karlsgymnasium is characterized by a modern, linear architectural language marked by strong axes and transparent surfaces that create create a sense of functional clarity. While the image of the cloud on glass incorporates some of these elements, it simultaneously subverts their logic. The installation overwrites the strict grid of the architecture with its own digital grid.

Farfán describes this approach as working with “analog analogies.” This refers to the transference of digital modes of thought into physical processes, as a play and reflection of digital and analog aspects. In the form of a fragmented cloud, these different perspectives merge. A cloud is a scientific phenomenon; the motif used is a digitally composed ideal image. In turn, it is physically integrated into the architecture on image carriers. The fact that the work cannot be fully perceived and is inherently unstable reinforces these ambivalences. From the ground floor, only fragments are visible; from the second floor, the overall form becomes somewhat clearer, but never definitively apparent. This cloud, like its ephemeral meteorological model, defies absolute comprehension. This approach is particularly relevant in a school where science and art are spatially intertwined. The installation does not offer a simple projection surface but instead questions the reliability of visual information. How are digital models translated into real space, and what happens when these processes run in the opposite direction? The work does not remain in a purely critical-analytical stance. Rather, this cloud also conveys poetic thoughts on transience and the preservation of beauty. A subtle humor resonates in the title: Who has “clouded” whom here, and why was this cloud uploaded to this particular atrium?