„SO NOW ANOTHER VICTORY DESPOILS / OUR CITY ROME„

My visual worlds aim at linking myth and history with the present, using their narratives to extract and enact timeless, recurring patterns. They deal with the destruction of sacred spaces (the “holy”), and trace the mechanism of that destruction, questioning the opposition between myth and religion or enlightenment and modernity. Their narrative structure is associative, and the use of three parallel screens makes it possible to collapse the different times and places of a globalised world into each other. The works are primarily visual: as narratives without direct speech, the text accompanying them runs its own course, almost like a musical score playing over the filmic scenes; but it can also be ascribed to the main protagonists. Heiner Müller’s late texts, whose hermeticism has an almost sculptural quality, are perfectly suited for this kind of associative story telling. The characterisation of their protagonists is ambiguous: they appear as symptoms of a globalised world where the distinction between good and evil, past and present, has become difficult to draw because the cultural context to which we are exposed could hardly be more different. Thus Romans are always also Goths, in so far as not a few of civilisation’s achievements—such as the suppression of old age and death, or the mechanisation of killing—seem to many so utterly barbaric. And the Goths are also always Romans, in their claim to power, their vaunting of their own culture, their determination to enrich themselves, and their perhaps undisguised greed. Being a European with freedom to travel and a return flight ticket remains idyllic, and it is a privilege to be born in Germany in the unique historic constellation that has emerged since the Second World War. Only occasionally does the weariness of a civilised barbarian overcome me.