Return to Sender

What we will have seen in the works at Raum D on Saturday the 25th of June is an extension cord with plug sockets; a shelf; a telephone table; a sort of convenience appliance, suitable for a corporate environment, an office or hotel lobby maybe; some fixtures like blinds or borders. It is these things, that the things on display are not, while also not being something else (yet). The come very close to the things they potentially could be, some of them are quite literal, become almost indistinguishable from the things they imitate. Then, by what seems like a slip more than a choice, a sudden absent-mindedness, they interrupt the attempt to become what they imitate, they become exactly not that. Being unemployed, they are free to become everything else or exactly that, but they prefer not to at this moment. Some are about power, in the most literal sense. They happily refuse to fulfill these requests: establish a connection, transmit energy, answer a call, hold my glass, make a choice. And on a more general note: make the most of yourself, be contemporary, communicate. When, in the well-known story by Melville, Bartleby refuses all his bosses requests with the formula: „I prefer not to“, it is not Bartleby who goes mad, it is everyone around him. Bartleby remains immobile realty, a fixture, an autochthon, making everybody around him act; turning, with his formula, everyone else into a vagabond. Apparently the writer D.H. Lawrence at some point had pet tortoises. He wrote a whole book of poems about them. It seems he got very involved with them, projecting all his thoughts and feelings onto them, which they in turn seem to ignore. Maybe it is the same kind of madness that D.H Lawrence felt, as Bartlebys boss when he says: “Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance”. Text by Sophie Hammer