Stacked Interiors
Interview by Rosecrans Baldwin
TMN: How did you come to this project? Where do the settings come from?
Franziska Sinn: I have always been interested in rooms—I like to change them around. To order them like I wish and to give them a totally different structure is a lot of fun for me.
I look for diverse rooms, photograph them, then rearrange them. I like to observe how each of them change after my work of rearranging. The rooms are all found in Berlin. I asked everybody I know for rooms I could do my actions in. So the rooms belong to friends and people I knew and was connected to.
TMN: The gallery shows two photographs of each interior, one au natural, and one rearranged. Looking at the latter, I found the organized rooms to be oddly beautiful but very cold and not meant for humans.
FS: Yes. It is so interesting how different a room can look after rearranging or tidying. Rooms are an important part of our lives as we spend a lot of time in them. It is interesting to me to give them another function, to order them in a way nobody would do it or expect it. I think the results are beautiful.
TMN: I have to ask, what’s your own bedroom like?
FS: It is the bedroom in this series.
TMN: Would you say you’ve got a thing for rooms?
FS: Yes. Because rooms themselves are interesting objects to focus on. They are worth much attention. Because each room shows unique evidence of its owner, many things can be discovered in rooms. Every room even has its own character. I love to witness that character, and then change something in it.
Rosecrans Baldwin is a founding editor of
The Morning News. His first novel,
You Lost Me There, is coming out soon from Riverhead Books. He most recently wrote the
Letters from Paris column for TMN. His work has elsewhere appeared in
The New York Times,
New York,
The Nation, and on NPR’s All Things Considered. Someday his ashes will be tossed off Mount Desert Island. For more information, check out his
personal site or .
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