Liebe Zoe,
I was so glad to hear from you in your villa in Bavaria, to receive the images from your
studio and the video of the white-flecked surface of the river. Potami, Fluss, river: so many
words—their glue—for the moving image. Your title is on point: Der Flussss as a sound of
flux, it’s true. From my desk in Athens I keep looking at the image of the page from the
book—page 16, from Berthold Wulf’s Idee und Denken—that you sent. And the only
readable lines you left: “alle Körper sind ausgedehnt, so ist dies,” and then a few lines
further: “alle Körper sind schwer.” All bodies are extended, it’s true (like this letter, a kind of
hand, reaching out to you), and all bodies are heavy (like my thinking here, never fleet
enough, not the milky, swirling river it should be, to take the metaphor from your gluey
video). That’s not totally true, though: you also left this fragment: “des Subjekts Prädikat.”
Another subject (its glue): collagen. I’ve been reading about its material properties, so as to
better understand your new collagen-based works, those translucent masks or husks, skin
shaken off. In particular the smooth, honey-colored fragment, falling down the wall of your
studio like golden folds of some future, perfect skin. Or light (waves). Didn’t Thomas
Bernhard recall that “a man from Augsburg” was once committed to an asylum because he
insisted that Goethe’s last words were mehr nicht rather than mehr Licht? How far from
Augsburg are you? How far from Athens? Anyway, bodies: collagen is the main structural
protein in the connective tissues in animal bodies. (Alle Körper sind ausgedehnt.) The most
abundant protein in mammals, the main component of connective tissue.
Which connects well to your artworks, I think, with their abundant formal connections and
chemical affinities: material, mineral, linguistic, art-historical, emotional, or otherwise. That
collagen exists in “fibrous tissues such as tendons, ligaments, and skin” also makes sense, as
this is what your works conjure for me—they are the tissue “that connects.” Collagen comes
from the Greek κόλλα (kólla), or “glue,” and γέν (gen) or “producing.” Derived from (and
described by) this early image of production: Boiling the skin and tendons of animals—
horses, mostly—to produce, what, glue. I suddenly wonder what etymology is like for you,
Greek being your first (well) language. Is it is like reaching back (“reading back”) and into
your own pocket at once? What is in there. Leben, Zoe, life.
I am thinking about your materials, their reactions, the weather. (Let’s get to the bottom of
this—what—not pocket, not river, not this letter, not some glowing page, something else.)
In the installation that “sprawls” like an enigmatic infrastructure across the villa floor,
emerges from its cabinets, called by you, perfectly, ever so smoothly, Endless scrolling (let’s
get to the bottom of this) (2017), you include the following list of materials: “iron, cement
paving slabs, kaolin, plaster, ethyl-methacrylate copolymer, polystyrene, ethylacetat,
aluminium , vaseline, cloth found on cliffs in Crete, acrylic, silicon, books, reed (genus
Phragmites), enamel powder, petri dishes, and copies of GEO magazine from 1977 to 1979.”
Wulf’s book emerges like some pale meat between the cement paving slabs (alle Körper sind
schwer) and the material experiment they hold up, a kind of bridge, a kind of river, a kind of
tissue (of glue or refuse).
I keep scrolling through the images of production you sent me (in language, written or
pixels): from Bavaria, from Crete, from the villa and the chemical solutions, organic
powders, and resins you ordered in between. I am moved (not from my chair in Athens,
though) by the languages involved in the work The scar of our existence will be visible in the
rocks of tomorrow (2017), and its matter: “iron, polypropylene, ethyl-methacrylate
copolymer, ethylacetat, polyester, ink, hand towels, ytong block, schist stones.” Your trio of
sculptures in the villa’s decorous rooms appear frozen, cool, archaeological, hospitable,
hyper Gnostic. Like past and future instruments for past and future processes—or the
present. Spirit (language) and matter (language). Fountains of rupture, bodies, relics,
institutions, properties, ownership, slippage, bridges, borders, service, the glue that binds
us, the infrastructure of chance, of collapse, of transformation, all our “arbitrary mixes,” you
know.
Though early collagen was mostly made from the organs and bones of horses, you
mentioned that yours comes from pigs. This rhymes well with my experience of Bavaria, its
bestiaries. “Through the process of hydrolysis followed by denaturation, the collagen is
converted into a natural resin.” I am trying to see this. It is a wet image because, as you
wrote me: “Here I have difficulty in drying and stabilizing them because of the high level of
humidity and the low temperature. Resins often do not even react with the catalyst and it is
necessary to add large quantities of accelerator, everything is too slow. When I use the same
material in Greece the reaction is done almost automatically.”
What is a reaction, what is done, what is transformed and into what, what chemical or
catalyst, what organ, what is automatic? It is a wet image. The video of the river is dry but
the image is wet and the reeds that hug its shores and blow across its surface are an
invasive European species that was brought to the Americas in the 1600s, holding the
wetlands there in its long, thin, tenuous arms ever since. Reeds grow so tall—
automatically—that you cannot see the water. But it is there, flowing with the bones and
organs and tissues of the institutions and the animals, organizing itself into self-organizing
systems, into surfaces of matter and effluents, pale swirls and murmurs and reactions of
material languages that flow almost quickly, nearly slowly, almost automatically.
alle Körper sind ausgedehnt,
alle Körper sind schwer,
alles Liebe, von Athen,
Quinn
Text by Quinn Latimer
Courtesy of the artist
Photocredit Jürgen Schabel © Villa Concordia