Detention Center
In the 'aorta', the central corridor in the detnte center DC 16 Rotterdam, Mumenthaler has installed five 'passages'. Each passage has its own color: pink, blue, salmon-colored, green and yellow. They vary in length from over five (salmon colored) to almost thirteen meters (blue).
The passages act as landmarks for the building's passers-by and users or as stops or temporary shelters in the long corridor. This last symbolic "shelter" from the daily course of things is accomplished by the fact that the color covers the entire length of the plane as well as the wall, floor, ceiling and window. A huge photograph is inserted into each solid wall of each color plane. Or a second, Illusionic window, it's just how you look at it.
The photographic image is deliberately printed out of focus and represents a gray corridor system on which door and window openings lead. Through these 'windows' we see a romantically tinted, somewhat clichéd landscape. For example, in the green area you look out on pine trees and mountain ridges reflected in a ripple-free mountain lake, the yellow area offers a blazing sunset behind a burning lighthouse and the salmon-colored part of the corridor gives you a glimpse of an (uninhabited?) island adorned with palm trees.
They are indefinable places, which we all think we know. Mumenthaler derived the images from existing posters and postcards. If necessary she bought the image rights, photographed them again, but now placed them in a model of her own. Because, as a photographer, she adopted different standpoints in relation to the model and the photographs she had appropriated, the viewer of her works always seems to find himself in similar, but significantly different situations. As if you were lost. Of the idyllic pictures that you perceive through the windows in Mumenthaler's photographs, it remains unclear whether you are dealing with a painting or with an 'actual' view of the outside: is the border around the pictorial landscape a window frame or a frame around a painting? And aren't you looking at the doubling of the corridor you are in?
We digitized the handmade models. Together with the artist we first made samples to ensure a good and predictable end result. The panels were printed directly onto Dibond and then given a matte epoxy coating. The panels were first mounted with a frame in stone niches to make the panels vandal-proof.