Wash and Fold

In 2020, Selina Ursprung accessed the world's largest directory of publicly accessible surveillance cameras via the internet platform Insecam.org and observed laundromats. What she saw was not what is staged in advertisements or Hollywood films. People are sleeping, smartphones are running hot, coffee cups are left lying around. Cleaning takes place at off-peak hours. Tiled floors everywhere and washing machines and dryers lined up in long rows. Weeks of observing laundromats in Paris, Tokyo, Moscow and other cities have resulted in a collection of 2,222 screenshots. A selection was made from the flood of images. Light and shade were removed from the scenes, which are characterised by cultural idiosyncrasies, uniqueness and plastic bags. In her subtle picture-text compositions, Selina Ursprung makes digitales present and deals with the boredom of everyday life in artful sentences and drawings. In the process, the reader's curiosity is aroused about seemingly banal things. Unlike the photographs by cameras, the images and poetic sentences published here do not convey supposed reality, vouched-for information, but are drawn from distorted perspectives of space and time. Traces are followed with a socio-anthropologically sharpened eye, details grow into stories. In "Wash and Fold", surveillance itself is scrutinised and the voyeurism of the observers is reflected upon. In this book, Selina Ursprung provides an artistic insight into a world that is to be questioned in the context of the Corona pandemic, digitalisation and global surveillance.