Karl Schulze

The fear of being forgotten or of forgetting is something I had to face more and more through personally impactful experiences during the year of 2024. With this work, I want to demonstrate that even a relatively short period of time, during which I actively care for and transfer energy, can have a profound and lasting impact on its surroundings. In this performative act, I used a heat-sensitive camera in a bird's-eye perspective and spent one hour heating up the floor solely with my body heat. The video, approximately three hours long, is projected onto a marked one-square-meter section of the floor, representing the exact space I heated during the performance. The video captures both the act of heating up the floor and the much longer cooling process, emphasizing how the heat lingers in the space after I have moved away. During the performance, the temperature of the floor rose by an average of 3-4°C, remaining visible for several hours. This thermal imprint serves as a reminder of our presence and the energy we transfer to the world, even in short moments. The idea behind this project is rooted in the subtle, often invisible traces we leave behind. These marks, visible with the right perspective, reveal the impact we have in space and in each other, showing that the traces we leave last longer than we expect. Through the thermal camera, I made these invisible traces visible, reflecting on the impermanence of memory and the lasting marks we leave on the world.