Nahr

The making of Nahr

The title ‘Nahr’ (flow), as it suggests, applies not only to this individual work, not to the specific time and space of this exhibition. Rather, I use it to raise the question of beginning and end, limitation and delimitation of time and space. The flow is not only content, but a (physical) movement, a method that reflects itself as well as the (post-digital) environment.

The topic of (invisible) post-digital work occupied me before the seminar accompanying the exhibition ‘post digital work’ and also led to (artistic) discussions in other contexts at the beginning of the year. What was certain for me was that, on the one hand, I was interested in making invisible work visible, but that my interest in it could not do without dealing with non-work, vulnerability and borderline areas of what falls under the concept of work.

Within capitalist contexts, efficiency is consciously and unconsciously ascribed a value that can be detached from meaningfulness or ethical, political responsibility, overrides such, numbs and destroys (co-)feeling. In the aesthetic approach and form for my sound work, I have captured my own flow and my incompleteness in artistic work, the struggle for expression.

The sound recordings, which were initially extracted from a film created from several sequences and in which my voice, the sound of drawing with charcoal and felt-tip pen on paper as well as ambient noises can be heard, are largely uncut and only slightly post-processed in terms of volume and loudness.

The sound recording for the exhibition was also preceded by two short videos that I worked on based on impulses in the seminar.

Processing

A refusal, A video recording that my friend made of me (without my knowledge) while I interrupted my reading in a café to think, a pause for thought? thinking is a work that can take place anywhere (?) when does thinking look more like work, when does it look less like work? And who sees the person who sees (me)?

Mechanism

My first visit to the museum in Lage was to create a short video showing a performance inspired by the (machine) environment. I recorded myself drawing on a notepad. My focus was not on what motif would appear on the paper – this was barely visible in the video – but on the movement of my hand, my arm, my shoulder and the sound made by the smooth glide of the fiber tip on the paper. I exerted a rather unusual amount of pressure on the paper and made jagged movements from left to right – something between writing (nothing) and drawing.

The handling of the surface was insensitive, disregarding, and it became increasingly rough until its limits were repeatedly exceeded in the mechanistic movement, or had to be exceeded in order to be recognized as such (the bending of the pencil at the edge of the page was the signal that was necessary to start again).

I opted for a physical performance in which the focus is not on sweeping movements, but on the small ones in which tension and alienation can become apparent. I am interested in the physicality of so-called ‘mental work’. It is not free of machine movements.

In my sound work for ‘Nahr’, I continued this principle in a certain way by reversing it. I observed architectures and heard the rhythms of functioning around me, but no longer imitated them in my performance, but rather behaved in relation to them. I marvel at how the wheels keep turning.

A Conversation with C.

One day it started to rain outside while I was recording the video. So I sat down in the covered outdoor area of a café in Paderborn and continued drawing (but without the video recording running). Immediately afterwards, I was approached by someone who introduced himself as C. and asked if he could sit at the table with me. I said yes.

It didn’t take long for him to mention his last trip to the Canary Islands and that it rarely rained there. He was also interested in my drawing and said that he had often seen people painting or drawing outside on his trip, but that this was rather unusual in Germany.

On the one hand, I was pleased about his interest and, on the other, something inside me resisted allowing an overly pronounced analogy between his journey into foreign lands, into otherness and my activity, which is also an attempt to expand the space in and through expression. I did not want to make myself available to a view that I could not yet define too precisely.

When I asked him whether he sometimes drew, he said that he had once taken a course, but that he rarely got in the mood for it in his everyday life. I replied that I actually find it very difficult to start drawing every time. That it was a conscious process for me to resist these everyday rhythms and architectures. When I offered to draw with him, he said that he was going to go anyway and that he might join me next time.

Art. Work.

It involves an unlimited amount of work to defend a life and an idea of it in which there is room for subtlety, dedication and playfulness. It is the conceptual and non-conceptual organization of dedication, the creation of (communication) spaces for and through dedication.

Making room? The voice of the protagonist, my voice.
The sentence breaks at a point where I talk about people who have to flee. I try to gradually step out of the exhibition space, but also out of the metaphor. I am struggling to find my expression and to make the signs and sentences I have put together physical, trying to transfer my body into signs and sentences that seek space in which bodies can be.

I end my sound work by looking for communication, even here and now, while I am writing, I am looking for it: bodies are not metaphors.
Neither are bodies numbers, even if the constriction, coercion and (slow) erasure of such is presented to us in the (digital) form of numbers in the multi-digit range. Among thousands are a thousand individuals, a thousand special ones, a thousand potential counterparts.

At the same time, it is the mass media, the culture industry and the capitalist exploitation and embedding of art and culture that, in their depiction and emotionalization of the individual and the moment, can sometimes obscure the fact that the individual and what affects the many individuals are not coincidences, destinies or natural disasters, but are embedded in historical, social and economic contexts and are political.

I and my work are not free from these logics of exploitation either. My body is not a metaphor either. It has already become an unreported case. I don’t want to freeze inside and outside the exhibition space and decorate the freezing. However, I can’t change the cold as an individual.

Every time I create, I also pretend. I am advancing towards something, I am not just writing about what is or what I already am. So in this game I am also a protagonist who not only reflects, represents, but also designs and initiates what could be under different conditions and who I could be myself, who we could be.

From a writing conversation with Elena, one of my father’s cousins, with whom I only formed a bond very late in life. Together, we often trace the ruptures in our family history, which was shaped by flight and forced displacement, as well as the ongoing processes of flight, which can also be seen in connection with the lack of communication and speechlessness we experienced, the continued suppression of language and speech in the diaspora. We are united by our passion for the artistic and, above all, the musical.