DISKO ROBOT– Fensterstopper

For his work on evidence of colonization, Ingo Albrecht has portrayed a collection item in the style of his pseudonym DISKO ROBOT. The object depicted, a plastic clamp used to hold windows and doors open, reminds the artist of his childhood in Halle-Neustadt, where he lived in apartment 41 on the eleventh floor of Block 844. A yellow window stopper usually lay on the windowsill, at the child's eye level, making it a potential toy. Completely unclear in its function and use, the strange shape of the object exerted a special fascination. And this fascination is also transferred to us when we look at the ink drawing. The proportions are unclear; the clamp is more reminiscent of a futuristic spaceship, a robot, or brass knuckles than a mundane household item. In DISKO ROBOT's drawing, the window stopper is anthropomorphized and takes on a life of its own. The internal lines and detailed structures—from hard hatching to precise screening to soft blurring—emancipate themselves from the outline that defines them. The image derives its tension and presence from this difference between the original and the image, the outer line and the inner forms. And, together with the artist's biographical information, it refers to the peculiarity of things, which take on completely different forms, sizes, and meanings in our memory. It is no coincidence that DISKO ROBOT's drawing is reminiscent of the eerie figure in Franz Kafka's story The Caretaker: "One would be tempted to believe that this structure once had some practical purpose and is now simply broken. But this does not seem to be the case; at least there is no sign of it; nowhere are there any joints or breaks that would indicate anything of the sort; the whole thing appears meaningless, but complete in its own way. Incidentally, it is impossible to say anything more about it, since Odradek is extremely agile and impossible to catch."