Ink on Chinese paper (70 x 180 cm), printed folded booklet (A6 when folded, A3 when unfolded), polaroid photographs, 8.8 x 10.7 cm

2019 - 2021

This project emerged from a series of walks on Berlin’s Tempelhof field, a crisis and a concern with the ways that writing functions as a bearer both of meaning and of the silence of that which is not said. Its central point is a text, presented in printed form and as a visual work, consisting of a series of fragments dealing with forms of forgetting and losing of self. It roots itself in encounters with nature, reflecting how experiencing local flora - on a walk or a scientific expedition - blends and merges with ways that (personal and social) identity is made, dissolved and reassembled.

I keep writing without writing, I think about the language that I do not speak, I think about the languages I speak, the languages in which I think, I write without writing language and I run out of words, the same words return repeat themselves become an incantation invocation of something else I cannot say

I don’t know how to say words but we say words we exchange our words and they fall inside us and they fall around us and we let them fall we don’t collect them but we leave our words everywhere we go

They melt on the ground and become absorbed into the earth they penetrate the roots and grasses for which I have no name grow again with words of everyone who has walked there and exchanged some words

The vegetation has absorbed the languages we speak, the contexts that we come from, the senses and non-senses growing inside our words, our grammars and our syntaxes. The broken sentence that I could not form, the unfinished thought I heard you pause, the breaths between the words. That leaf contains the fragments of your sentence in its veins. The bush has grown from a conversation long ago. The eighty year old tree outside the door has many words in many languages imprinted on its rings. They go round and round and turn into an endless chain a chorus of the words that fell from people walking by.

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A list of words ordered according to class, genus and species, along a combined area, for the purposes of understanding of word distribution in the region. A list of locations, the names of words, and an extensive set of references linking to existing texts. Nowhere to be found. Traces. A collection of specimens was later found in a library.

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I found a leaf in a book.

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I found a word on a walk