WOHNZIMMERGRÜN
by Chris Waywell
OTHER PEOPLE’S WINDOWS are always interesting, aren’t they? Not just for what they might reveal, but for the basic social dilemma they present. Are you allowed
to look in them or not? Are they purely for looking out of? Maybe people actually want you to look in? Adding photography to this paradox increases its complexity. Now you are being an active creep, a peeping tom, probably peering into the intimate domestic worlds of others to furnish the chambers of your own fantasies.
‘If they realised I was looking, or somebody was smoking a cigarette outside, down came the shutters,’ says Eva-Maria Lopez. ‘Because I’m observing a private space.’
From 2012 to 2016, the German artist took photos of people’s windows as they watched football games at home. She only knew that they were watching a match because their windows were lit a bright, grassy green, illuminated against the darkness by an unseen TV screen. The resulting series,
‘Wohnzimmergrün’ (living room green), is beautiful, sinister and suggestive: an arch conceptual take on the place (and literal location) of football in ordinary people’s lives, stripped of players, fans, pundits, referees, money. The politics remain, though, in a subtly allusory way. These images have many stories to tell.