Mutterseelenallein (All Alone)

Mutterseelenallein (All Alone). In 1989 Mucha created this large, complex installation at the Lia Rumma gallery in Naples; the German title, an expression that indicates a mood, combines the words “mother,“ soul ”and “alone.” The sixteen heavy display cases in wood, felt, aluminum, and glass are hung low on the walls, accentuating their weight, and they are illuminated by a series of neon lights positioned vertically between the cases. At the center of all but one of the cases is a black- and-white photograph of an empty chair .All different, the chairs are those used by museum guards or tired visitors at an exhibition in Düsseldorf. They suggest a deep void, the solitude of every individual, and yet they also celebrate the poetry of expectation, the specificity of each chair and each person. Indeed, like a person, the work grows and is transformed over time and measures the time of its exhibition. After Naples, it was located for many years in a museum in Frankfurt, where Mucha added wooden walls beneath the cases, as if vertically repositioning the parquet flooring. In the work ’s new installation for the collection of the Castello di Rivoli, Mucha, proposes to heap the left-over Frankfurt parquet into a pile at the center of the room, while the cement walls of the Piedmontese museum appear to have risen up behind the sixteen cases on the walls. The work does not exist outside time, but marks the rhythm of time through its transformations and consequently marks the rhythm of our time.