021

Drawing (21) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"Where have you come from, where are you going? The River Weser at Horstedt in Lower Saxony, with porcelain tableware floating on it, gliding on its way to the North Sea. My granduncle’s house lies in the swamp behind the dyke on the other side of the river. In the front a place for mooring with a bell to call the ferryman, who then rowed over and picked us up. During the crossing, we had to scoop out the water that was entering through the gaps in the hull. None of us were able to swim. I can still hear our “Hellos” from back then reverberate within me, like those from Dreyer’s Vampyr. That was also the place from where I wanted to launch my handmade wooden crate so I could travel downstream, drifting around Europe and then along the African coast in the Atlantic all the way to Cameroon. From there, I would proceed on foot to the Sahara. Cameroon was also the name of the huge sand dunes close to our house that were carted away in the 50s for the reconstruction of Bremen. An epithet that was just another expression of the same Wilhelmine insanity that pervaded everything." (From: arsenal, october 16).

(1984) 

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