martin pot

My work, both drawings and essays, is a—yet always interim—result of a decades-long, continuous search for our place and relationship to the surrounding (built) environment. The many frameworks of this search are diverse: from the relationship to the natural environment, broad technological developments, the encroachment on nature, the need for a more spiritual approach to our 'dwelling', to the necessity of collectively giving form and content to our artificial environment. 'To dwell', said Heidegger, is to live in peace, at a certain time, in a certain place. Yet that is exactly what constitutes a serious problem for many today; for the homeless, refugees, or other unwanted travelers. As philosopher/anthropologist Bruno Latour stated: “we live on the ruins of modernization, we grope in the dark for a place to live”.

Our building is a form of scratching at the surface of the earth; we ruin from the moment we put the first spade into the ground. We live on the earth, not with the earth. From that moment on, we lose the diffuse contact with the ground that offers us shelter, an existence. When our building loses its function after centuries, we do not give back but tear down roughly; there is no question of entropy. Yet history remains for a long time, the silent witnesses of habitation, of birth or death. Time does not heal everything; decay is not complete.
In my drawings, I use both a representation of history (photographs) and its embedding, its synthesis with the present. The use of materials aligns with this: a careful choice of paper and format, imagery primarily charcoal and ink, sometimes gouache.