"Not a city that was"

Maria Appleton's work explores the relationship between body and space. She believes that every architecture is linked to rules and norms that trigger certain behaviours in people. Maria Appleton scrutinises these norms in her works. Her coloured lengths of fabric are laid over the space like coloured filters. The destruction of the city of Pforzheim during the Second World War played a major role in her work in Pforzheim: her installation "Not a city that was" was created in and for the former men's swimming pool of the Emma-Jaeger-Bad, one of the few surviving buildings from the pre-war period. However, as this location is only accessible virtually, her work deals with questions of presence, healing powers and imaginary worlds and also creates a link to the bathing culture in Baden-Württemberg. The installation of coloured fabric panels questions how we can revisit the unconscious effect that spaces have on people and at the same time make the virtual relationships between colour and matter tangible. To this end, she experimented with movements in virtual space, creating a constantly changing installation. In collaboration with a dancer from the Pforzheim Theatre, she also created a performance in interaction with the installation.

https://mariappleton.squarespace.com/nicht-eine-stadt-die-war

NOT A CITY THAT WAS
NOT A CITY THAT WAS

It is not about death
It is about the virtual and the real.
About the real and its nature.
It is about so natural that seems unreal,
and distortion that is true.
It is about bodies in spaces
In places looking for them.
It is about fabric, fluid, water like it.
It is not about death,
It is not about a city that doesn't exist
It is not about memory
But about a celebratory existence of the new.
About the present that is in front,
Rising, turning into future
In present space
Onde presencialmente estou
It is about physicality
About the dough
About the power of physics and scientific looking through
Reliable - Perspective - incapable of being from one point.
It is about a space that is always a continuum:
vertically and horizontally.
It is about healing,
Sanus per Aquam,
It is about you - diving,
Me - observing
It is about Connection Interconnection and Interstitiality.
It is about you towards the hole
Leaning against
or under the whole.
A space that partially was non-existent
If you didn't, in it, exist
Now that you do
It is matter forever
It is the chance
The possibility
Of a reality, conceived, understood
It is not about preconception
It is The allowance for free conception
By you
Rising a city
A city of new beginnings
It is not about a city that was,
Its is not about fixing
Its is not about death
It is a sacred - standing - manifestation on being present
on zeitgeist
on you in space.

Maria Appleton 2020

Maria Appleton comes from Lisbon, Portugal, where she completed a two-year training programme in textile design. She then moved to London, where she graduated in July 2019 with a degree in Textile Design from Chelsea College of Arts, UAL, in London. In 2018, she received a scholarship from Kyoto University of Technology for a research project in the field of textiles. She also developed a sustainable collection for children's clothing with Zara and designed shoe prototypes for NIKE. Maria Appleton currently lives and works in Lisbon.

maria-appleton.com