One Line Portrait
Constanza Carvajal
Installation
Weimar, Germany
2019
"One Line Portrait" is part of the research project titled "Public Laundry, Hanging Territories". The project outlines how the banal, within a certain environment, becomes a symbolic statement of a culture and its spatial-social practices. The installation of a clothesline in the quiet cityscape of Weimar portrayed the presence of a different person every day for one week during June 2019.
Placed over a centric street intersecting private and public life, the Clothesline became a flag that resonating with the presence of an individual, directly in the public realm. By superimposing a clothesline in the German cityscape, the work expresses a state of ‘otherness’, and ‘foreignness’.
A clothesline is rather a territory that reflects living conditions and is a rigorous portrayal of people’s lives. It stands on the threshold of the public and private realm permeating the outlines of both, saying just as much with its presence as with its absence from public life.











