Daniela Gugg
«I asked my grandfather how it felt to live on this world for one hundred years. That’s a hard question; he would have to think about it.»
The Swiss artist Daniela Gugg, who lives in Berlin, is a guest of the Sitterwerk in August. She is using the space here to develop and flesh out works that she has already started. One of them is the reprinting of the publication At Grandfather’s Kitchen Table, which she published in connection with the exhibition curated by Daniel Morgenthaler Geschichte in Geschichten (History in Stories) at the Helmhaus Zürich in 2015. They are stories of her contact and exchange with her meanwhile 101-year-old grandfather. Daniela Gugg occupied herself with her grandfather’s memories for several years based on two blank pages in his diary, which she came across by accident and aroused her interest. The time he left out were the years of World War II.Her newest work also deals with endeavoring to capture memories and make them visible. A former woman cigarette dealer from Berlin with whom she regularly meets shared her life story and told Daniela Gugg about the Vietnamese tobacco mafia. She is now in the process of giving the topic a form with the goal of making it possible to experience the ramifications of this story.
Another project is designing a booklet for the series Facetten on the invitation of the Canton of Thurgau. For it, Daniela Gugg will deal with the materiality of the medium itself: paper. In Belgrade, she met collectors of old paper and cardboard and followed them—as far as the recycling facilities. It is also their stories that interest her here. The stories of the collectors,but also the story of paper. In September 2015, she traveled to Belgrade again, a trip for which she did carefully prepare for a month in the studio of the Sitterwerk in summer 2015.
Daniela Gugg was born in Thurgau and has been living in Germany for fifteen years. After studying wood sculpture in Munich, she moved to Berlin, where she completed her studies at the Kunsthochschule. Since graduating in 2011, Daniela Gugg work has primarily been installation-based.