2024

auf Anfrage zugänglich

Haus für Kinder, Theodor-Fischer-Straße 61, 80999 München

Rauminstallation in der Eingangshalle mit 93 Objekten aus Lindenholz, Stahlseilen und Stahlhaken, 1200 x 500 x 400 cm

Architecture: Architekturwerkstatt Vallentin, München

Landscape architecture: grünfabrik Landschaftsarchitekten Reingruber, Bücking, Kirchdorf an der Amper

Photos: Florian Holzherr

Text: Jenny Mues

The daycare center’s design is characterized by a large entrance hall that—as a central staircase—connects all the rooms on the ground and upper floor. The foyer acts as a daily meeting place for parents, children and educators. In the morning the children are welcomed here, and it is from here that they go to their playrooms, returning in the afternoon to be picked up. In the space above the hall, about one hundred carved wooden forms are suspended and connected via fine steel cables. In its horizontal and vertical lines of movement and communication, Jette Hampe’s delicate installation captures the children’s daily life in the daycare center.

When a child looks up, a sensory experience occurs and perception processes are stimulated. Something from the outside appears to have entered the daycare center through the roof. What do the long ropes mean? Are they part of a path between the objects? Do they unify these elements and propel conversation forward like sound waves? Things are linked, perhaps even communicated. What kind of creatures are these quasi animals and plants that are situated between musical instruments and vessels? Without being an actual language, they pose questions. Are the amorphous objects cocoons, small dwellings or nests for invisible creatures, or are they relics from another era? What sounds, music and language is being imparted, passed down here? Is this all just a game? Could you penetrate the holes with a stick or your pinky finger; could you look inside and explore what is hidden there? Are the holes perhaps ears?

The ropes are so tight that a message, a signal, a sound can be fictitiously passed on in all directions, to every corner. Jette Hampe’s installation “Schon gehört?” creates a completely open environment that encourages viewers to talk and exchange ideas. The work is based on a fundamental idea: all of us are a part of nature, and nature is worth protecting. Nature has been understood as a process of becoming and growing since the natural philosophy of antiquity, but also as an eternal emergence and passing away. Everything is connected to everything else; everything communicates with everything else. Like a network, everything is interwoven with everything and everything falls apart when a part is taken from the whole.

Like every child who takes his or her first steps into a larger community in the daycare center, each of the carved wooden bodies can be perceived specifically in its own way and uniqueness. The artist created the organic-looking forms in ceramic and instructed five wood carvers to execute them in linden wood based on the originals. The ductus of the chisel is more or less visible depending on the way the specific form is made. The transfer of the originals as replicas (and not as copies), the use of natural materials and the final implementation of the installation by the artist are essential design elements, because this is where Jette Hampe’s sculptural approach in the studio, workshop and room is expressed as a direct, creative and content-related engagement of art with the new building.