26 September, arrival in Zeitz for IPIHAN #16:
When everything disappears beneath a thick layer of dust, it becomes part of the same history. Though I’m not entirely sure yet which history, or which story, that will turn out to be. In the meantime, I clearly belong to that story too — my own search for inspiration, which on this particular spot seems to be deafeningly absent. If I wait here long enough, perhaps everything eventually turns into fossilised traces that together sum up the whole history, my search included. Maybe that forms an image that lets you look differently at everything to be found here, or precisely what’s missing.

Photo’s: Maryna Semenkova

Inspiration can come from a can
So there I sit, behind a dusty, self-built little desk made from a greyed-green door taken from the neighbouring toilets, in a building without inspiration, in a city that is likewise searching for that same inspiration. Where fantastic spaces, wrapped in beautiful brick, built with blood, sweat and tears, could have borne witness to a history and a future with so much to tell. But they’re gone. They’ve made way for gigantic parking lots, waiting for hundreds of cars that will probably never come. Here I want to show you how I see and experience this place.
So it’s no surprise that I look for my inspiration here in the small things, the small remnants that still tell me that people once lived and worked here too, sitting there picking their noses while waiting for an inspiration that came about as often as those cars. Because that’s what I do: I search for traces of people, literal traces, but also traces of their behaviour — sociological, political, recreational, whatever. I don’t judge them, I always claim, I merely observe them, as though those were two fundamentally different things.
I look for the small deviations and interrogate them, or let you interrogate them. And as if that weren’t enough, it’s actually a bit more complicated than that. So complicated that I myself don’t always understand how it works. I carry them around in my head, sometimes for days, sometimes for years, and then bring them to my studio — or in this case: the first floor of this deathly boring, dust-filled building. The last remaining building of the old Oettler brewery, no less. It was probably so uninspiring that even the demolition contractor overlooked it. This building isn’t meant to be just my source of inspiration. For the coming weeks it’s also my temporary studio, the place where the so-called magic is supposed to happen. Where I abstract my thoughts and observations, roughly shape them into visual poetry, and eventually turn them into art — that’s the intention, anyway.
And so here I sit still, at that filthy, hastily cobbled-together desk, which is itself quite thoroughly devoid of inspiration, as if even the furniture has decided not to cooperate. With bags of M&Ms, bottles of cola and beer, and found dented cans — my very last hope of finding some inspiration in there.
Truly everything here seems to have been stripped of colour by time, as if the past, if you wait long enough, will naturally appear in black and white. More likely, it’s the thick layer of dust covering everything that binds it all together, swallowing the whole history of this place and turning it into one whole — a kind of natural preservation, like ancient fossils. The original fluorescent tubes that have flickered off the ceiling, the trampled heating elements, the graffiti, the dented beer cans — together they form a single mass under a thick, grey cloak. And now I belong to that too. To that same history of this building, where people worked, drank, fucked, and argued. If you wait long enough, everything disappears beneath the dust and eventually turns to stone — not like those fossils. Me too, if I can’t find the inspiration in time in those dented cans lying in front of me, on a desk that is slowly dissolving into that same thick layer of dust. Waiting for that one brilliant flash of insight that brings it all together: the poetry, the abstraction, the wonder.
Searching for inspiration in the fact that all inspiration is absent here.