SONG WITHOUT WORDS/ TEXT WITHOUT NARRATION

Song without words/ Text without narration

research grant Fonds Darstellende Künste 2023

imagine si ceci un jour ceci
un beau jour imagine
si un jour
un beau jour ceci cessait
imagine

imagine
if this, if this one day,
one fine day,
if one day,
one fine day
this will end,
imagine

Samuel Beckett, Mirlitonnades, Flötentöne, 1981

On 16 May 2022, a Monday, I suffered a severe stroke. I was in a coma in the intensive care unit at the Charité hospital. I learnt that there is a will to survive, that people can be tough and don’t give in to death so easily.
Whilst I was in a coma, some impulse in my body must have told my brain that it was supposed to stop swelling. It worked and I survived.
I am now on a quest. I am reinventing myself from the fragments and dreams and debris of my old self. The old me no longer exists, and a new me emerges, threatens to disappear behind the horizon again, is within reach in the night, stays with me, nestles up to me like the old, dead father in Beckett’s radio play Embers /Schattenglut. Disappears fleetingly like a betrayed hope, like a promising future.
At that time, there had already been a war in Ukraine for three months.
I had spent the previous summer surviving, with short periods of wakefulness, then later in a rehabilitation clinic in Berlin Tegel, with temperatures often around 35 degrees.
It’s hot, stuffy in the room, I can’t sleep at night. To this day, I’m still struggling, unable to understand the horror, unable to make sense of the near death.
I spend hours writing this short text. I have half-sided facial paralysis. My left hand is paralysed. I have survived.
My head is full of fragments, memories, vague plans that are once tangible, then fleeting again. My head is a pile of broken pieces, a forest in which a storm has raged. Now it’s time to clear the broken branches and uprooted trees out of the way. To make room for plans that have not been forgotten, but which often still lie beneath the surface of consciousness.
I wanted to make music recordings. In 2021, I had done a long piano performance at the Fete de la Musique in Berlin’s St Matthew’s Church. I had transferred working titles by Joseph Beuyss into Morsealphabeth. Some things have already happened. I want to continue working on it.
I have been researching the Berlin architect Bruno Taut. I’m planning a live film performance about his work DIE AUFLÖSUNG DER STÄDTE, together with the performer Claudia Split, with whom I already collaborated in 2021 for the piece Seltsame Materie. I worked with photo watercolours, hybrids of photography and watercolours. That will also be continued.
I work as a visual artist and musician primarily in the medium of live film performance. The performance series SELTSAME MATERIE is a good example of the multimedia approach of these LIVE FILM SHOWS. In 2021, the Strange Matter performance HEL ON EARTH was supported by the Dakü Fund.
Now I can and want to work again despite the restrictions.
I am the shadow of myself. I am more than the shadow of my self. I am a text that continues to write itself, without action, the text of an AI bot that circles around itself, forming a spiral, a LABYRINTH. The labyrinthine is a theme in my research.

Imagining cessation, a dense, short Beckett text, a proposal, an idea, eloquent in its reduction, opening up and yet denying itself, the plot a mock plot, a discourse.
One fine day everything may come to an end. But that day is not yet here. Or it already has been and the text is that of someone who has been. More likely, however, is the projection into the future.
The text without a plot is accompanied by songs without words by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, the name perhaps invented by his highly talented sister Fanny Hensel; these are pieces of music for piano that are like songs, speaking melodies of a song that sounds inaudible. The singing is there, present, but not yet heard. They are compositions of an omission.
The damage is omnipresent, but negotiable.