Institute for Experimental TopoGraphies [IETG]

A. Program + Design

Topos <::> Graphein. Purpose of the “Institute for Experimental TopoGraphies” is to systematically expand upon known and recognised—and therefore inherently subjective—standpoints in contemporary graphics and sculpture, as well as theory and teaching. To this end an interwoven and ever more complex field of hetero-topical, a-topical and u-topical relationships and reveries will be developed. Simple and ascetic materials. Realms of tranquility.
Negative spaces. Dedicated to irrational contents.
Topo-Graphies of potentials + signaturum rerum.

B. Structure + Method

Ars Memoria. Works seen as attempted approaches to the world and to nature. Obsessions with form that emerge from the conditions, idiosyncrasies and constrictions of landscapes, woods, trees and their (intellectual) materiality. Memory configurations in the composition and referentiality of the repository of a personal stock of images. An “ars combinatoria” not limited to one’s own, remembered images, but which goes beyond memory—integrating image modules of various provenance: philosophical, mythological or mystical. A kind of pneumatic archaeology and aetiology that finds itself in a permanent relationship of change and tension with regard to fabulating thought.
(Self-)Awareness in a gesture of contemplation. Enlightenment as the highest form of body consciousness.

C. Heritage + Future

Wild being. In the sense of the phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) “d’être sauvage” is seen to be a fundamental compositional element of being. As “wild being”—including in the sense of being a stranger to one’s self—is not chaotic and senseless, but instead opens the senses. In the infinity of its differentiation it is a constituent factor in the overall creative process. And: It is beyond positivism and negativitism. Engaging with “the wild” is an encounter with the essence from which existence is continually being constituted and from which it emerges. A linguistic approach only seems possible in an indirect and simultaneously mimetic form. The criterion of truth is accordingly less a matter of the clear, the differentiated, the simple, and much more of the impenetrable, the complex and the mysterious, which can nevertheless still be the most familiar.

The Institute for Experimental TopoGraphies [IETG]
was established in 2006 by the current Dix-Foundation Professor Christoph Loos