For if one is standing in front of a closed door

It’s not difficult to browse the internet and find a guideline on how to open a key-closed door and, likewise, it is not hard to ignore the mandator sentence we read at the beginning of these directions: ‘Only open locks which belong to you, or ones you have been given express permission to open’.
What you’ll read here is - obviously - not an introduction to the ‘art of lock picking’ as it’s only logic to understand that the guideline has by no means the intention to explain what will be revealed when the lock surrenders itself to its intruder: It just isn’t important to know what we’ll find on the other side of the wall.
But how to approach a work of art that, at first glance, does not seem to give an indication of the meaning of its existence? To permeate the im- permeable, we will have to make use of the only thing, the only object in our access: a hairpin.
Those who still have difficulties containing their curiosity will close one eye and peek with the other through the keyhole to get an idea of what lies behind, yet, they will merely get a vague and confined image of a spectrum. Another way not to seem ‘desperate-to-know’ is to resist the dive (deep deep dive) into a symbolical interpretation of this seemingly small and futile tool, as it will tell us nothing about the way to handle it best and, finally, to click the lock.
The/A solution here could be a delineation of the object’s ordinary nature as art gives us the capacity to traverse materialities. The formal existence of this pin, with its characteristic 180-degree bend after which the curves in mountain roads are called, is determined by its purpose, its function to fix, to attach, to model.
What if a form is repeated, the same, but different? Fluctuating its usabil- ity, scale, pliability - balancing between the functional and the ornamen- tal? How far can you go from the object’s original mold to the point in which the object’s conceptual meaning completely changes? What about the idea of space in relation to the attached and the unattached? And does it all end when the hairpin becomes a wall itself: a concrete, impervious, almost conceptual caricature?
We wonder – repeatedly pinning, deforming, and fiddling the lock, but then realize, only when it is silent you can hear the pin drop.

Oriana Lemmens
14/09/2021

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