Working title: The bodies into which the war flows
2024
Cassandra cycle
»In the midst of war, you only think about how it will end. And postpone life. When many people do this, the empty space into which the war flows is created within us.«
I have been following Cassandra’s trail since last winter.
Christa Wolf’s tale of Troy’s foreseeing king’s daughter gives form and expression to what is publicly disappearing in the fog even today: an analytical and moral force with regard to the currently prevailing language, social discourse and global logics of war.
Mount Ida
»When I close my eyes, I see the pictures. The Idaberg in changing light. [...] It was the world to us, no landscape could be more beautiful. [...] And our unbound existence, a new joy every new day. The citadel did not reach this far. They could not fight the enemy and us at the same time. [...] We lived poorly ourselves. We sang a lot, I remember. We talked a lot in the evenings around the fire in Arisbe's cave [...] We never stopped learning. [...] It became a festival of touch, where we touched and got to know the others, the others, as if by ourselves. We were frail. Since our time was limited, we couldn't waste it on trivial matters. So, playfully, as if we had all the time in the world, we went towards the most important thing, us.«
Mount Ida
160 x 100 cm, Mixed media on canvas
Cassandra craves knowledge and awareness with everything she has and everything she is.
‘She ‘sees’ the future because she has the courage to see the real conditions of the present,’ writes Christa Wolf in her prerequisites for a story.
Cassandra seeks this awareness on several levels: in herself and in the entanglements and tragedies of her beloved family. She struggles for it among her familiar, but in their blind hatred of the Greeks wrapped up, ‘own’ in Troy. She finally suffers them in the indescribable violence of war – turned into heroism by this or that side as they see fit.
Pre-war
120 x 60 cm, Mixed media on canvas
Pre-war
»You can know when war begins, but when does pre-war begin. If there were rules, they would have to be passed on. In clay, engraved in stone, handed down. What would they say? They would say, among other sentences: Do not be deceived by your own.«
The figtree
120 x 265 cm, Mixed media on canvas
The figtree
»At [Anchises], under the changing leaves of the mighty fig tree, our unconstrained life began, in the middle of the war, completely defenceless, in the midst of the still growing crowd of armed men.«
Heroes
»These poor victors must live on for all those they have killed.
I tell them: If you can stop winning, this city of yours will endure.«
Heroes
160 x 100 cm, Mixed media on canvas
Works of the Cassandra cycle
