Artist Blog

Every week an artist whose single image was published by Der Greif is given a platform in which to blog about contemporary photography.

imeo video_id="39631539" width="1000" height="563“] It had been dark for several days now; day turned to night and night to day without there ever appearing to be but brief glimpses of light, flashing momentarily. The skies rolled by furiously, swelling angrily in a strange twilight, crashing in waves that burst into pouring showers. Water ran in tiny rivers, steam rising upon impact. I come here almost every day — the glass roof amplifying the raindrops, comforting in their dramatic overtures. At least the weather seems to hear me, the rage, the grief. Inside and outside collide here, within this forgotten corner of the city. Birds fly in and out of the tipped panels — only the black blue sky and a blurry grey outline of the city visible through the sweating, dripping glass. The orchids, ferns and palms, with their Latin names on carefully placed signs, bloom proudly, oblivious to their lack of audience. I sound out these unfamiliar words, forgetting them as soon as they form a shape in my mouth. The air is so thick here it feels solid, acrid, sharing the vegetation’s breath. The silent statues look on with their artificially dismembered limbs, copies of gods and goddesses from another time. Stretched out Christs in the hundreds drape the walls of the adjacent museum — gaping mouths, silent cries. Pain veiled and unveiled in burnt gold, petrol, umber, the same story told and retold. Walking through these empty rooms to get to the glass-house, silent guards sit immobile at every corner as though cast, or carved, echoing the bodies they protect. Presumably this could go on forever, this wandering, the emptiness, the iron taste of apathy that coats my tongue. Language will return eventually, I know this, remember the last time, recall the dragging of feet, the pain along my spine, the flood of dread upon waking. This prior knowledge, this bodily remembering, this physical infidelity in the repetition of mourning, brings no relief. What was automated just last week, is now a complex chain of actions, requiring a will I no longer possess. The black of the storms have folded into night and the caretaker is locking each section of the glasshouse, maintaining their different temperatures and humidities. A girl at school had stopped speaking. Did not speak for years. Maybe whispering these words, reading the names of plants imported by an emperor, is an attempt to stop language leaving entirely. Grief takes hold anew each day, as though the fall of sleep withdraws all memory, and every day upon waking you die again and I with you. Like a knife he is lodged inside me. I read these words somewhere. Days spent in saunas, steam rooms, the world disintegrating in water vapour. Here within these other glasshouses, I lie back into the burning heat. This self-induced fainting, this willful drowning, delivers the delirium of falling away, of dissolving.