photo by Jakob Wierzba
Performance Festival at Kleine Orangerie Berlin, 09.09.2023 at 7pm, as part of Stadt findet Kunst, curated by Steffi Weismann & Oliver Möst.
As a child I suffered from neurodermatitis to the bone. In sheer desperation, my parents put cucumber slices on my scratched-up body. Whether it really healed my skin, I can’t say. But it did help: I imagined that the cold healed me. That the wetness was settling between my dry pores. That it was nature that strengthened me. But perhaps it was simply my parents and their deeply human gesture of caring.
In every moment between asserting and relativizing, friction arises that for me is alive and dialogical in the best sense. In my artistic practice I want to unfold ambivalent forces, to fight unambiguity and to push back the presumptive. Wherever we think, we generalize. Without generalization, perceived reality would be just a disordered heap of random states; wild chaos.
Our language alone is only sufficient: How should we also think about things, if not in inappropriate frames and opaque containers? The cucumber as a cure? Open skin as sick? Parents as self-sacrificing caregivers? We are both reliant on and set back by generalization.
It takes a difficult construction of expenditure and identification to think and be at all. And very likely there is failure in each and every attempt. To bear our inadequacy, we care. About ourselves, about others, about the world. Pitiful.
