The volume of two hollow hands, 2020
Installation (ceramics, text on paper)Ausstellung zum 44. Förderpreis Bildende Kunst (Städtische Galerie, Bremen)
How to exchange a smile for a flower?
the plant has its own agency.
take a branch for your room,
take it from the tree.
it starts to heal itself,
directing its forces in another direction, away from us.
Ashamed, you carry the fragment, put it in a niche.
See: the urge to form an instrument,
that became a container, which should not be empty,
so a vase,
that looked like a stone,
because maybe I meant sarkopharg,
you say organs,
or a cocoon,
a protection for something
in the process of transforming,
or maybe just a stone.
volcanic bomb, shaped by flight, shows its formation;
or rather, I write its story of formation.
it starts with a rupture:
igneous, sedimentary, metamorphic, silicate
surface
something sounding
something delivering
something in the way
something answering
some shapes leak.
They call a body: that site of passage and porosity
a vessel for the soul, so it was said.
I don‘t dissolve, but the outline unsteady
it might break,
that reading of this shape
how does something become solid?
in a clay sediment process hands, the heat,
they shape
the clay is wet,
hands heat it up,
beat it, water dissolves,
it stiffens; apply pressure from inside,
pressure from outside, testing its firmness,
like sediment it grows, layer by layer.
tiny ruptures,
announcing tension
burned, the structure is fixed
it offers resistance, temporarily
something withstands,
Must vibrate.
Must sound.
It is a condition, this shape.
Where do the holes lead to?
Darkness, turning many into one.
A humming,
entangled in the cavity or emitted by it?
the outside is folded within.
breath, wind, air,
a desire;
whose sounds?
the volume of two hollow hands;
my boundaries in the process, my desire to sound.
hiding something in one of them,
behind your back, they form a riddle,
they protect a secret.
who listens?
inside there is a flower, so this is a shrine,
a temple for something that left.
Or a trap.
it feels cool,
like a stranded whale.
and just as silent.
a stone sticking out, halfway erect
or fallen.
I knock,
knock
but no one opens.
I’d love to be a threshold but what if I’m rather the door?
I want to sing a song but the song sings me
What if my voice is also a soundscape?
above the signal, that are my words,
there is a noise, that are my desires
what I want from the instrument is to change me
but I built it and it still has my imprint on it
the forms are all made by me, a tool
for the dispersion of my voice into many
and the violence that might come with the thought.
I want to experience difference for my own contouring.
i breathe in
and i see the porosity
i breathe out
and i hear the sea
but I don’t understand a word
Photography: Franziska von den Driesch