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Grief changes how a home and its objects are read, and in London, Antonia Fischer works that shift into Trauer Tragen, Carrying Grief, a steel chair etched from castings of her grandparents’ home.
The chair began with a death. After Antonia Fischer’s grandfather passed, the atmosphere of her grandparents’ home shifted, its worn fabrics and surfaces still holding the traces of daily life. Fischer took silicone castings of those surfaces, textiles, walls, floors and objects, then carried the impressions into steel through acid etching.
Fischer describes a step where “acid captured a ghost-like moment while destroying parts of the surface.” The title carries the same double charge. In German, Trauer tragen means both to grieve and to wear mourning, and the work considers the burden of memory as emotional, but also as spatial and material. The chair becomes a threshold between presence and absence, where grief turns tangible.
The chair is made entirely of steel and held together with rivets, and every plate was etched on both sides. Each etching derives from moulds of that home, embedding its material traces directly into the structure. Bent and riveted into the form of a chair, the plates become what Fischer calls “a spatial translation of the home.”
Fischer’s practice runs on phenomenology and a close attention to materiality, drawn to what she calls the “felt-space” of everyday rooms and objects. Here the making mirrors grief, an ongoing negotiation between holding on and letting go. A book accompanies the chair, gathering process documentation, spatial mappings and a set of essays on loss and the difficulty of releasing what remains.
Made as her graduation project for an MA at the University of the Arts London, the chair was later shown with UKURANT at 3 Days of Design in Copenhagen. Fischer writes that “memories can never be recreated, only translated to be slowly lost.” Rather than reconstructing the past, the work translates what remains into a physical form of mourning.
