• Items by Lamberty

  • The artist Janina Lamberty used to work as a surveyor, and these experiences with the professional field of geodesy also have an effect on her artistic and creative work today. Observing nature and measuring phenomena and processes in nature is an existentially important necessity that is inherent in the basic anthropological structure of human beings: for example, observing approaching weather changes was already an extremely important process for palaeontological hunter-gatherer cultures, and even more so for the later sedentary farming cultures.

    Without astronomical knowledge, the Phoenicians would not have been able to undertake sea voyages, the extent of which seems astonishing from today's perspective. To measure, one generally needs points of reference and scales, i.e. one needs comparative references. In the case of height measurement, this is the height of the sea level, the normal zero. In the aesthetics of antiquity, we then find an idealisation of the measured, the "even", and corresponding philosophical justifications. Thus the ancient Greek term sophrosyne, (soul, actually "health of the diaphragm") denotes an inner quality of moderation, i.e. the "golden mean" between austerity and indulgence, between pleasure and asceticism, between wastefulness and miserliness.... What then crystallised out of this constant desire to find the "right measure" in the history of aesthetics and art history over the centuries in terms of views on harmony is still significant for art and the conceptual design approaches of Janina Lamberty in our days.