Mirjam Thomann
27 Jun - 08 Aug 2015
© Mirjam Thomann
“Better Living”, 2015
Installationsansicht
Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin
Photo: Simon Vogel
“Better Living”, 2015
Installationsansicht
Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin
Photo: Simon Vogel
MIRJAM THOMANN
Better Living
27 June – 8 August 2015
We offer you a warm welcome. On this planning page,
you will find useful information for arranging your trip,
including getting here, finding your way around and to
our show––we wish you a memorable stay.
Dear Suitcase,
Of course it’s strange writing to you. You’re just a suitcase. But I’m concerned about you—I’ve had to deal with you for so long. Ever since I moved out, I’ve been pulling you behind me, having you stand beside me, you’re waiting for the next employment or the return. I hear you all hours of the day and at night, as well. And I watch you whenever I get the chance. I’ve noticed that many people don’t have a good grip on you. You often topple over if you haven’t been packed well, your wheels break if you’re too cheap, or the zipper jams if you’re too fat. Even when you do your job smoothly, moving around with you in one’s hand often looks strange. As if you were always standing in our way while simultaneously bringing us ahead. There’s this commercial in which a woman rides you like a horse, plays you like a guitar, hangs you over her shoulder like a handbag, and hugs you like a monstrous friend.
I need you. They want to make us believe that mobility is a game, an almost light-footed affair, but of course we both know that isn’t true. At times, our movements appear nothing less than choreographed, like a disciplined workflow. I really can’t remember the last time I spontaneously broke character or stepped out of line with you. The ideal of movement is apparently different than what we actually experience. Why is that so? Are there too many barriers? Does mobility love ambivalence? Is it an endless interplay of relief and hardship, leeway and restriction, dynamism and interruption, transgression and limitation? Many places spontaneously come to mind where there’s no way forward, where motion comes to a halt—for example, in waiting zones, deportation camps or border regions. And then there’s the projection onto the potential objects in the suitcase. In the press, there were recently two very different examples: an eight-year-old boy smuggled across the border from Morocco to the Spanish exclave of Cueta, whose huddled silhouette appeared in a luggage X-ray scan, and a bomb. But the latter was just a rhetorical question on the front page of a news magazine next to the photo of a suitcase left behind on a station platform.
Dear suitcase, you are the zero point of temporal and symbolic change of location, of an original moment after which all familiarity is lost and change and difference begin shaping life. A gallerist interviewed for a travel magazine went on record as saying: “I’m definitely a different person when I travel. Usually I’m really polite, but the first thing I tell the stewardess is: ‘Please don’t wake me up’. And then another one will come and ask: ‘Don’t you want champagne?’ I’m like ‘No, I don’t want your fucking champagne!’” – You’d really say “fucking champagne?” – Yeah, well... (laughs) maybe. I curse a lot, it just comes out. And then the next one will come and ask ‘But what about the biscuits?’ And I’m like ‘Fuck your biscuits!’ Keep your goddam biscuits! I want to sleep! I haven’t slept in three days!’”– Poor transnational professional assholes.
Better living is just a stale promise. That’s why I like to withdraw to the world of ideas. I imagine the movement of people, thoughts, images, objects, news, waste products, and money. That reminds me of the paradoxical state of always to a certain extent remaining at the place one started off. Movement is a state in which individuals are at once present and absent at a place, or are simultaneously in another place. One then has a relationship to both places. But one shouldn’t project all that much onto this state, I once read, neither being euphoric about movement nor scandalizing it are appropriate—one should instead understand it. A famous philosopher sees it similarly, but he also says: “My intensities are without exception motionless.” In his view, travels always have something of a false break about them, a break that is obtained too cheaply. He cites Beckett: “We’re stupid but not to the point that we travel for pleasure,” and adds with a peal of laughter that most people travel to find a father. And they even admit it – to find a father! Haha!
One always wished to come back changed. Maybe that’s why “global” rhymes especially well with “legal”, “mental” and of course “fatal”. At any rate, it doesn’t make sense to grasp you as a metaphor. You stand neither for the new beginning nor for the tragic end. Your narration is different: Something is always permanently in motion here and you have to do with that. You are a language and dynamism itself. You are what is out of the ordinary, out of the context and the invisible net of belonging. You are the feeling of sadness, sadness at leaving, sadness of parting and of memory. You are matter and mind. You are poetry: a movement, a process, a melancholy, the promise of learning something new, of getting rid of old knowledge, and forbidden nostalgia. You are the material reality of displacement, of flight, of exile and migration. You are the past that cannot be exchanged and the future that one cannot imagine.
But the world has long been explored, processed and conveyed. One click and we know where the journey leads to. We don’t even have to take it ourselves anymore. Perhaps that’s the newest luxury, the ultimate privilege: sedentariness. Don’t move. Don’t even travel failingly, have the entire world before your eyes and be everywhere without moving. In one way or the other we traverse space and time, circulate faster, and are today here with you more or less by chance.
See you soon,
Mirjam
Los Angeles, Berlin 2015
Sources:
– Tom Holert, Mark Terkessidis, “Was bedeutet Mobilität?”, in: Projekt Migration, exh. cat., Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne 2006
– The Anthology of Women’s Travel Writing, ed. by Shirley Forster, Sara Mills, Manchester 2002
– The Travel Almanac, Spring/Summer 2011
– Gilles Deleuze, “Voyages / Reisen”, video interview from 1996, Abécédaire, DVD 3
– Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma, London 2000
– James Clifford, “Traveling Cultures”
(http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic206050.files/Cultural_Theory_and_Cultural_Studies/Clifford_-_Traveling_Cultures.pdf)
– Praxen der Unrast. Von der Reiselust zur Mobilität, ed. by Jens Badura et. al., Berlin 2011
– https://www.artbasel.com
Translated by Karl Hoffmann
Better Living
27 June – 8 August 2015
We offer you a warm welcome. On this planning page,
you will find useful information for arranging your trip,
including getting here, finding your way around and to
our show––we wish you a memorable stay.
Dear Suitcase,
Of course it’s strange writing to you. You’re just a suitcase. But I’m concerned about you—I’ve had to deal with you for so long. Ever since I moved out, I’ve been pulling you behind me, having you stand beside me, you’re waiting for the next employment or the return. I hear you all hours of the day and at night, as well. And I watch you whenever I get the chance. I’ve noticed that many people don’t have a good grip on you. You often topple over if you haven’t been packed well, your wheels break if you’re too cheap, or the zipper jams if you’re too fat. Even when you do your job smoothly, moving around with you in one’s hand often looks strange. As if you were always standing in our way while simultaneously bringing us ahead. There’s this commercial in which a woman rides you like a horse, plays you like a guitar, hangs you over her shoulder like a handbag, and hugs you like a monstrous friend.
I need you. They want to make us believe that mobility is a game, an almost light-footed affair, but of course we both know that isn’t true. At times, our movements appear nothing less than choreographed, like a disciplined workflow. I really can’t remember the last time I spontaneously broke character or stepped out of line with you. The ideal of movement is apparently different than what we actually experience. Why is that so? Are there too many barriers? Does mobility love ambivalence? Is it an endless interplay of relief and hardship, leeway and restriction, dynamism and interruption, transgression and limitation? Many places spontaneously come to mind where there’s no way forward, where motion comes to a halt—for example, in waiting zones, deportation camps or border regions. And then there’s the projection onto the potential objects in the suitcase. In the press, there were recently two very different examples: an eight-year-old boy smuggled across the border from Morocco to the Spanish exclave of Cueta, whose huddled silhouette appeared in a luggage X-ray scan, and a bomb. But the latter was just a rhetorical question on the front page of a news magazine next to the photo of a suitcase left behind on a station platform.
Dear suitcase, you are the zero point of temporal and symbolic change of location, of an original moment after which all familiarity is lost and change and difference begin shaping life. A gallerist interviewed for a travel magazine went on record as saying: “I’m definitely a different person when I travel. Usually I’m really polite, but the first thing I tell the stewardess is: ‘Please don’t wake me up’. And then another one will come and ask: ‘Don’t you want champagne?’ I’m like ‘No, I don’t want your fucking champagne!’” – You’d really say “fucking champagne?” – Yeah, well... (laughs) maybe. I curse a lot, it just comes out. And then the next one will come and ask ‘But what about the biscuits?’ And I’m like ‘Fuck your biscuits!’ Keep your goddam biscuits! I want to sleep! I haven’t slept in three days!’”– Poor transnational professional assholes.
Better living is just a stale promise. That’s why I like to withdraw to the world of ideas. I imagine the movement of people, thoughts, images, objects, news, waste products, and money. That reminds me of the paradoxical state of always to a certain extent remaining at the place one started off. Movement is a state in which individuals are at once present and absent at a place, or are simultaneously in another place. One then has a relationship to both places. But one shouldn’t project all that much onto this state, I once read, neither being euphoric about movement nor scandalizing it are appropriate—one should instead understand it. A famous philosopher sees it similarly, but he also says: “My intensities are without exception motionless.” In his view, travels always have something of a false break about them, a break that is obtained too cheaply. He cites Beckett: “We’re stupid but not to the point that we travel for pleasure,” and adds with a peal of laughter that most people travel to find a father. And they even admit it – to find a father! Haha!
One always wished to come back changed. Maybe that’s why “global” rhymes especially well with “legal”, “mental” and of course “fatal”. At any rate, it doesn’t make sense to grasp you as a metaphor. You stand neither for the new beginning nor for the tragic end. Your narration is different: Something is always permanently in motion here and you have to do with that. You are a language and dynamism itself. You are what is out of the ordinary, out of the context and the invisible net of belonging. You are the feeling of sadness, sadness at leaving, sadness of parting and of memory. You are matter and mind. You are poetry: a movement, a process, a melancholy, the promise of learning something new, of getting rid of old knowledge, and forbidden nostalgia. You are the material reality of displacement, of flight, of exile and migration. You are the past that cannot be exchanged and the future that one cannot imagine.
But the world has long been explored, processed and conveyed. One click and we know where the journey leads to. We don’t even have to take it ourselves anymore. Perhaps that’s the newest luxury, the ultimate privilege: sedentariness. Don’t move. Don’t even travel failingly, have the entire world before your eyes and be everywhere without moving. In one way or the other we traverse space and time, circulate faster, and are today here with you more or less by chance.
See you soon,
Mirjam
Los Angeles, Berlin 2015
Sources:
– Tom Holert, Mark Terkessidis, “Was bedeutet Mobilität?”, in: Projekt Migration, exh. cat., Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne 2006
– The Anthology of Women’s Travel Writing, ed. by Shirley Forster, Sara Mills, Manchester 2002
– The Travel Almanac, Spring/Summer 2011
– Gilles Deleuze, “Voyages / Reisen”, video interview from 1996, Abécédaire, DVD 3
– Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma, London 2000
– James Clifford, “Traveling Cultures”
(http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic206050.files/Cultural_Theory_and_Cultural_Studies/Clifford_-_Traveling_Cultures.pdf)
– Praxen der Unrast. Von der Reiselust zur Mobilität, ed. by Jens Badura et. al., Berlin 2011
– https://www.artbasel.com
Translated by Karl Hoffmann