Amaptocare

The importance of giving expression to everyday culture remains at the core of Gerz's recent public projects that are shaped by input from diverse publics who rarely have a voice in official culture. Those who are powerless and without a voice become the substance of these works...Testimonials, opinions and confessions are strung together to form a puzzle of clues to a social map. Whether incomprehensibly idiosyncratic or utterly banal, the assemblage of voices, like any oral history, forms a fragmented picture of an historic moment. The intention driving Gerz' recent public projects is to literally make people speak, in as many languages as possible.

Helga Pakasaar 1999

He is asking each donor a question: "If the tree could speak, what would it say about me? In the same way that you could ask of a person who buys a painting, what does the painting say about them? I'm like a medieval scribe. I write down in a nice way what they say to me. Something of what they say will be recorded on a lectern beside each tree.” … yet one can see the logic of his wanting to write poetry. He works with words all the time. He writes a great deal. The major part of his time is given over to words in one form or another. "Words are always present in the work," he says. "Words are written down, and then the writing travels through speech and different media, different stages. In everything I do, in public works, photo-texts, installations, I'm still taking words on a journey with me. More and more I exclusively make people speak. I try to get the public into a position of authorship.” In effect this is a redistribution of the balance of power in the transaction between artist and viewer, a change from the production-consumption model.

Aidan Dunne 2004

Gerz read Irish mythology, and found trees prominent in the stories. Yet Ireland, which was once amongst the most densely forested countries, had become "one of the least treed places in Europe. "In Ireland, there is almost a traumatic relationship to trees." … To participate, people had to come up with just under half of the cost of the tree, a minimum of €50 … The participants have contributed a total of €45,000. This contribution is key to Gerz's concept. By contributing to the project themselves, people gain ownership, and authorship, of it.

Colin Murphy 2005

Gerz has inversed the idea of imposed 'gifts' of social housing, institutional urbanism and cultural artefacts, which tends to view the residents as cultural and social recipients and contributes to the cycle of patriarchal bureaucracy, art for public places and ungrateful vandalism. Instead, Gerz invited the population of Ballymun to donate, to contribute by paying for their own environment.

Jeremy Hunt 2005

In this work, Gerz inverted the relationship between social welfare recipients and public sponsors. The impecunious residents of a suburb that for decades had only been a bad news story were now becoming sponsors, and as it were, narrators of their own history. The streets and public spaces become places in this text. Gerz calls its unsuspecting authors the "new elites" who belong to many different social, ethnic and religious milieus, and indeed to generations, who rarely express themselves collectively. The amaptocare project is characterized by its many layers, its polyphony, and also by atypical social cohesion. The outcome is a plural sculpture that has changed the atmosphere within the imposed rehousing scheme, which may explain why the donated trees have been less vandalized than others planted as part of the regeneration project.

Marion Hohlfeldt 2016