Open Space 2023
8 February 2023 - 28 April 2023
Charlotte van Alfen
Designer Charlotte van Alfen has 66,000 photos on her phone. In the six years she's had the phone, she has never attempted to organise, categorise or delete these images, and every week she adds 140 new photos. She therefore identifies as an image hoarder. Through her work Into the Pile, she saw a chance to discover the origin of this urge to hoard photos. Surely she can’t be the only person who’s curious about this?
Into the Pile
The difference between a hoarder and a collector is a lack of organisation. Hoarders hoard for the sake of hoarding and this is what she does. In researching this phenomenon, Charlotte dived into her own process, questioning why she takes and saves and makes so many images, but still avoids throwing any of them away. These questions resulted in intensive research, which included interviewing subjects from diverse age groups and occupations, in order to see how they treat their own image archives. What was appealing, is that they all shared that they often felt overwhelmed by the amount of images they have, but feel they can not get rid of them. There are many reasons for this contradiction like nostalgia, denial and other emotions. Charlotte tried to capture this contradiction in her video, and make tangible in her installation. The visuals are made using one month of screenshots of her camera roll, an attempt to repurpose the Pile.
About Charlotte van Alfen
Charlotte van Alfen is a graphic designer and illustrator working mainly from Rotterdam. Her work is on the border between the hoarding of and her fascination with happenings in daily life. From an accidentally pleasant colour combination of plastics on the street, to a beautifully designed storefront. By carefully looking and capturing these little things she tries to tackle life’s ‘bigger issues’.