How time flies

HOW TIME FLIES

A performance on the occasion of Mara Loydvedt-Hardegg`s exhibition AS A CHILD.

….everything changed,

everything stayed the same….

There is something that is the same in each life:

Each life has a certain amount of time in which it happens.

Each life starts with the birth and goes through, depending how long it is, different stages of development.

Each life is defined through the circumstances in which it is born.

Our very personal biography develops within the huge context (of history) of age. And also this is part of something bigger, a complex rhythm, which exists from the beginning of a lifetime.

The performance:

Objects from the past are arranged in the background: an old baby carriage, a wooden ladder next to a tower of stacked stools, in the very top one sits a metal bucket.

I take a pile of paper out of the baby carriage. They are enlarged photographies, which are separated through a layer of fine white paper. I show the photos around the audience: three old women sitting on a bench looking happy towards a baby; a boy with a ring of candle lights on his head, seemingly absent-minded; adults and children on a sofa and one of the women is wearing the same dress that I wear at that moment;  a double exposed shot from a village; children playing; portraits of couples of different ages. The photographs are old and seem to come from far away.

Layers get separated.

Picture by picture gets attached to the baby carriage, the white paper gets collected on a pile.

I get on the ladder and fix the paper on the very top stool.

There I place a snowball.

I start a cassette recorder.

You hear the rhythmic sucking sounds of a baby on the breast.

Now I start rocking the baby carriage back and forth.

I am rocking history, what was and what we still carry with us.

Meanwhile the ice finds its way.

2011, Gallery Futura, Berlin, Germany