Light and Relic — Provenance Anchor I: Paradiesschmiede (Springe, Germany)

The first print of Light and Relic was intentionally produced in the Paradiesschmiede in Springe, a forge that carries the artistic lineage of Siegfried Prütz (1900–1939) and Jan Prütz (1931–2013). The site is preserved and maintained by Andreas Rimkus as an active cultural memory space within the framework of the “SchmiedeSchatz,” which includes approximately 500 original works by Jan Prütz and a digitally archived collection of over 7,000 works and materials by Siegfried Prütz. The forge is publicly recognized in the context of the European Heritage Days / Tag des offenen Denkmals, positioning it as a site of cultural and craft significance. The choice of this location marks the origin point of Light and Relic. The transformation of the artefact is not treated as a technical process but as a contextual and semantic transition. The forge served as a site of reclassification, where the object’s meaning shifted from that of a tradable game card to that of a cultural artefact embedded in provenance. The event in the forge establishes the first provenance anchor of the work—where physical presence, witness, documentation, and material environment become inseparable parts of the artwork’s identity. Light and Relic functions as a living provenance structure. Each phase of the project contributes to the work’s evolving identity through documentation, metadata embedding, timestamping, and archival continuity. The forge is not merely a backdrop but an active conceptual agent, shaping the semantic meaning of the transformation.