WOHNZIMMERGRÜN_ OOF Magazine #14, 2024
Eva-Maria Lopez

 

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.

Trained as a sculptor, Lopez moved into print and photography, with a parallel practice in land art. Perhaps it was this direct intervention with the landscape that spurred her to look at football as a cultural phenomenon. ‘I was so curious, so amazed by football, and I wanted to make a work about it,’ she says. ‘One evening, I was walking through the streets and I realised that you can see from their windows if people are watching the same movie. And then I realised that that could be nice for football games. I was so fascinated by this transformation by the green: the green of the stadium grass goes down this cable and comes out as artificial green light in living rooms.’

But even finding these green squares posed a logistical challenge. Lopez chose Euro 2012 (hosted jointly by Poland and Ukraine) as her hunting ground, but despite the number of televised games, there were other factors: time of day, how dark it was, how many people would be watching a particular match at home, even the editorial decisions taken by the TV directors. ‘You only have a small window for finding the green,’ says Lopez, ‘because when the television shows the crowd or a player, then the window is blue or red. It was really difficult to catch the right moment. Sometimes I only caught one proper window in a night.’

The motif of stalking and capturing in ‘Wohnzimmergrün’ is both Lynchian in its awareness of what lurks in the shadows of the suburban night, and suggestive of nature photography, a kind 
of acceptable analogy to actual bloodsports. This last idea is tied to the symbolism of the colour green itself. Given that every football match takes place on 
a grassy field and discussions about the ‘state of the pitch’ are a reliable weapon in the punditry arsenal, its actual greenness – let alone the connotations of that – doesn’t often get noticed. Green is the hue of nature, but a football pitch doesn’t even attempt to be natural. It’s treeless, dead flat and perfectly rectangular. In a worst-case scenario, the whole field can simply be dug up and replaced with another one.

So the greenness of a football pitch is, in a way, as perfunctory as a snooker table’s, part of an atavistic illusion of a field of combat. Lopez sees this synthetic quality as something shared by football and art: ‘What players are paid is artificial,’ she says. ‘Like in the art scene. Some art is worth money, but I don’t know if it really has much to do with the artwork itself. It’s part of the economy.’

This sense of football being alien and remote is one of the strongest impressions conveyed by ‘Wohnzimmergrün’. There is also the physical act of looking up, which is the angle of the majority of the photos. With the series largely shot in Karlsruhe and Berlin, apartments are the dominant subjects. Their elevation is in the direction of the stars, of unknown worlds and alien lifeforms. Where will this green ray lead us?

These rooms are bathed in an ominous and seductive glow, but in not one of the images is there a shadow of a person. The 1950s cartoon shorthand for a party – chattering people silhouetted on the blinds – is not found here. In one photo, a half-drunk bottle 
of rosé sits on an outdoor table lit by the green glow, as if the drinkers have suddenly been abducted. The unseen watchers are forever bewitched by the screen, elsewhere. Their passions and emotions are acted out in a verdant capsule, as though part of an experiment in cultural conditioning under laboratory conditions. 
‘Wohnzimmergrün’ is a document of an intense, shared activity that is being separately and privately experienced.

Hence the political dimensions of the series. People not only pulled down the shutters if they caught Lopez training her lens on them; the work itself was received with hostility in some quarters. 
‘Some people don’t like the irony of it,’ she says. ‘They think I’m not taking football games seriously, that I’m taking an intellectual look at it.’ But it is the very impersonal nature of the series that is crucial to its success. ‘It might be Portugal against Germany, or France against Russia,’ says Lopez, ‘but you can’t tell from the window.’ 
‘Wohnzimmergrün’ stands apart from football – and by extension national – tribalism, reducing everyone to armchair coaches, greenwashed and anonymised by the same illusion and only ever participating in their own hopes, fears and allegiances from a safe distance.

OOF Magazine #14; 2024

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