Florian Schönerstedt

“I attest that I have collected and archived all of the refuse that my household (which includes my wife, my son and I) produced (with the exception of organic or soiled waste) from 1 January 2016 to 31 December 2016.” This founding protocol formulated by Florian Schönerstedt immediately points to a practice that combines a rigorous artistic approach and the experience of life itself. This porosity between the artist’s output and daily life is a central theme throughout his work, in which he views archiving as a committed “scientific” process. The artist uses counting, sorting and compiling as ways of exhausting reality in order to, if not understand it, at least experience it. Exhaustiveness, aided by the tools that make it possible (photography, scanning, databases…), therefore becomes a redeeming attempt at “raising awareness of one’s relationship to the world”. Florian Schönerstedt’s works adapt precisely to their field of study and manifest through installations, videos, animated films, photographs, and programmes, each of which functions as a sample that documents a specific reality.