/ SPRING BREAK 2020 /
Mareike Dittmer
Garden of Rockets, Aleksandra Mir and Sarah Gavlak, John F. Kennedy Space Center, Florida, 2004. Photo courtesy of the artist.
CLOUDS OF THOUGHTS AT THE HORIZON
‘Memories seem to be the last resistance to arrange with reality. Though maybe it is rather wishful thinking to believe in the possibility of building barricades inside our heads that cannot be conquered.
The past is alien territory. Sometimes I think we might fall back into the ‘old’ present at every moment. And I'm not sure if I would fear or hope for that to happen.
When imagination becomes rampant, when it goes on thinking on its own terms, covering up facts and delivering its own truth then, almost unnoticed, memories start to return. Details keep jumping at me, out of forgotten corners of my brain, sometimes resisting, insisting on expectations I cannot understand any longer.
The songs of the monks have the colour of a grey autumnal sky. Clouds of thoughts at the horizon. Invading my mind, before I could even think of erecting barriers. The wildest dramas are not staged in theaters but rather in our heads and our hearts.’
Snippets from an attempt on a theatre play started long ago, unfinished, the remains now unearthed from the backlog on my computer I like to refer to as a quarry in waiting; like many others I have suddenly started to dive into abandoned projects, a repository of imagination, a landscape of wishful thinking. Looking backwards as a prologue to the actual task, for imagining a future after COVID_19. What is before and what is after and when will afterwards ever begin? Or did it already start, with Zoom and co. and the digital content avalanche streaming into our digitized living rooms?
We experienced the slow down and now in many places a full stop to public life as we knew it, while the forced acceleration of digital substitutes set up a racing schedule for academic curricula, working models, private communication. Emergency braking restart. Simultaneous standstill and acceleration. If we look at this as a choreography, we can see an arrested development that is charged with the current motion put on halt and the next movement yet to come. To hold the motion for moving on. Tacet. Dancers and musicians play with these tensions, this in between, being on hold. A distinct suspended bothness. Are we able to conceive our present situation within these simultaneously co-existing while still mutually exclusive certainties? Can we think playfully, embracing ambiguity?
If you once experienced the world, your world, the very structure of society, falling apart and life still going on; it is a lesson in ambiguity. Since 1989 – when within weeks my teenage world view was opening up and narrowing down at the same time, when the Iron Curtain came down and the German Democratic Republic, I was born into, fell apart while being integrated into the Federal Republic of Germany – ambiguity was a state of mind I curiously accepted and explored. As in: a dynamic inspirational ambiguity rather than a vacillating obfuscation.
Official papers - exams, certificates, money – considered worth less, even worthless, within weeks. Suddenly, I can visit my half-brothers. I pass my A-levels 2 years later as the first year in the reunited Germany with the red Eagle of the federal State of Brandenburg topping the certificate. Later I need to submit to the Berlin senate to devalue my grades for applying to university. Because in the former East, with new Western curricula, the grades where too good, compared to the former West. Because what must not be cannot be. All official papers relate to an official structure and once this structure is crumbling into pieces, they turn back into the printed paper they were before, waiting for a new agreement to attach a certain value to them. Or not. But that an official structure in power would feel the need to devalue their own certificates – that was another lesson in ambiguity. Imprinted and likely to fade over time, but to never fully leave.
When seeing the images of empty shelves and reading about rationed toilet paper sales these days, I remembered the days of the monetary union and the D-Mark replacing the Ost-Mark, and my teenage me returning from the supermarket, empty-handed, trying to explain to my mother that there was no way I could (ever) spend precious Western money on something as banal as toilet paper. The righteousness of teenagers can be fascinating. And our adult reactions encountering change are not necessarily rational.
Since then, the assured notion of ‘How things are’ or ‘How things should be’ seems not so easily available – the lesson is learned: we are walking on unsteady grounds, ready to fall apart and potentially to reassemble, or perhaps we won’t fall apart since we had never been put together in the first place – nothing is to be taken for granted and there is no ‘one size fits all’. This is not due to COVID_19.
Right now, we don’t even know if we are facing permanent change – we are in between, again, maybe thus my initial tendency to think in dualities, in opposites that are not opposed. Are we just looking for (financial) band aids to return to the status quo ante? Can we? Do we want to? Do we need less market, and more state intervention? State-ownership? Are we going to lament a world that was? Can I opt out? How much change are we honestly prepared for, and not only to facing this change, but to embrace it, to turn it into something meaningful? How to avoid landing in another ideological sandpit? And finally, as in most historical situations, when there are suggestions presented as solutions, soon, we shall not forget to ask: Cui bono?
Writing this, more questions are raised than answered. And I’m finding myself (again) in-between, leaving behind the idea to conceptualize the events and moving forward to engaging with them in a continuous dance, with breaks, lapses, backward jumps and forward moves, thoughts whirling around, and one thing for clear: in the near future I don’t want to be dancing with myself. Not that I was truly asking for solitude in the first place. But now that it is here, it creates a new sense of community. Being apart together. As re-reading Hannah Arendt reminded me that it is only through conversation that the world is created as something we have in common. (On humanity in dark times. Talk about Lessing. Munich 1960). Dance with me.
Since summer 2018 Mareike Dittmer is director of Art Stations Foundation CH / Muzeum Susch. Before she was the associate publisher of frieze magazine. Trained in cultural studies and communication at UDK Berlin, Mareike started working with frieze in 1999 and founded, together with Jörg Heiser, the frieze Berlin office. Since 2011 she is also part of the editorial team of mono.kultur, a Berlin based interview magazine. Over the years Mareike has been involved with several exhibition and book projects, most recently, together with Julieta Aranda, she became a chairperson of the 9th Futurological Congress 2016 - 2018. Since 2019 Mareike has been a lecturer at the Zurich art school ZHdK. She lives in Susch (CH).
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