Why it must.  Water room (3)

To preserve what would be away, I had to do this. When the load of the moment takes over, words are the only way out. The white page, preferably in a nice notebook, is my ally. Is it my vanity that forces me to write or my drive to be immortal, to leave a legacy? For sure it is an inner urge, force. It is my salvation, my way of analysis and creation, my deepest joy.

From 2013 onwards the poems that would construct Weg/aWay originated. The first series came from an extremely heavy feeling of melancholy. They were written in a period during which I witnessed acquaintances, friends, and colleagues disappear from my daily life. With them, a vibe went away. With them also certain places disappeared where I had loved to spend time. Ever since I was a child the feeling of being homesick and melancholy has been strongly present in me. I want to keep.

Looking back on that period and the feeling with which the poems were written, I started to question myself on the solitary nature of this melancholy. Was my urge to preserve onesided? Would the places where I had experienced intense happiness, feel the same without my presence? The places where I had shown my creations were the ones I knew and of which I was convinced they could not be the same anymore because for one person at least they had a distinct meaning. They were mine because they had touched me because the most inner part of myself had stayed there for a while, looked upon through various eyes, lived by different souls - only because of this given I did not want to lose those places.

I also felt that maybe I was more homesick and I missed the people who had moved to other places more. I could not know if once in a while a thought of them went out to me, as so many thoughts of me went out to them.

I think now that I have wanted to adjure those encounters, volatile or less volatile, and the parting that followed. And of course, I have succeeded in this because they are present in various poems. In the exhibition, they are shown in what I call the water room. It is a room where the poems are worked out in a transparent material. Visitors have to make an effort to be able to read them - which is deliberate. I let a person try hard to search for and find the volatility of meeting and parting. This is my way of making this less volatile, of letting them penetrate and sink in into the reader. On the brightest side of the space are glass cylinders each filled with water in which a poem written in Chinese ink on chalk paper is immersed. As the exhibition progresses in time, the chalk papers change: they sink deeper into the water, curl, or fold. The words that are immersed (that are away) reflect sometimes or double by the breaking of the light and the water or by the mirroring in the glass. This form is my way of indicating the relativity of being away.

By building the exhibition I feel gratitude instead of nostalgia for the past encounters. Putting the letters lasered out of the transparent plexi works underneath those works shows that being away can result in a new presence at another place.