'Exit II (Prolog)' by Tim Plamper at MÉLANGE, Cologne

Exit II (Prolog) Against the fear! Humid entrances leading into the unknown. How could I draw my thoughts and questions there? This clear, shiny dark mood. How do you show this? Does it have to be a movie? Could not what I associate with the film also be reflected in drawings? Monotonous movement. A cold suction. The inanimate as a mirror of the interior. Old values are shattering. What is left for us? What can we do? A human being descends to the limbo of his soul. There, his being is always fertilized with his deeply human origin. This place is not pure. Here a destructive stream floods the withering ground with fertile mud. It is the death that carries life. Orpheus? Europe I. Europe II. New Europe. The Dawn of Europe. Europe, your daughters! Portrait with coins on the eyes (Charon), electrolysis (gloves), raft, European flag, acid (weapons), techno, leather apron with hole. A hole dug in the gallery floor. A ladder made of melted cent coins – sky ladder? Symbolism? Weapons of molten money! A cunt as a curtain – you go through it! Security jacket full of small blades of nails (coins). New guardian deities. 

iPhone. Club Mate. Cigarettes. Orpheus.

A film about / next to the filming of the Orpheus material. Orpheus is not trying to liberate Eurydice from the underworld, but is looking for himself, his dark core (is there morality there?). He fails. Or is Eurydice the protagonist? Is the story told from her perspective? Or is the story a completely different one? The objects of the exhibition find their place in the film as part of the stage design / costumes. Two screens next to each other. At right angles to each other? There are subtitles. These do not necessarily translate the spoken word, but are an independent element. Sometimes they contradict. Are the two films going together at the end (or in the middle)? What is he turning to? Who is his lover? What is this picture? How is that to be interpreted? European pentagram flag, security jacket with euro coins, etc., security, fear, counterfear, singularity, serenity, geometry, mercury, same problem only from the other side. Underworld: Underground, wells? Meat, hole, spring, abyss, black hole, damnatio memoriae – as a way out inside. City wall, event horizon in your own heart. The passage into the underworld as a relentless journey to the inner self. Am I me? Or my picture of me? A stony and dark landscape, mud?, lava?, puddles! Ringing of the bells can be heard in the distance – blown by the wind until only slight gusts of wind can be heard. A bird is running through the picture. Cut. Moths fly around a lantern (Max Ernst).  Sharpness and panning on the street. A young man walks into the picture, stops. Gets upstairs. On a street (Paris?). Hair of a woman while walking from behind. A jolt goes through her. A shiver goes through the picture. In a car wash! Each opening (underground car park, car wash, door, well, underpass, etc.) gives the appearance of a maw. From them a suction effect goes out. Tälesbach, tunnel of the B296. A group of people bends over something that is not visible. Are you tugging at it?  What? Where does the idea show? Not in action directly! Not even in the light! Rather: in the ruggedness (directness) of the sitter. The idea (question) is currently not visible, but noticeable in their absence. Very clear (sharp) pictures. Almost too sharp in their aesthetics. Maybe slight slow-motion. The clarity is supposed to be threatening. The presence (of inanimate nature) go under the skin. So almost physically touch by the closeness that sets. Water trickles over concrete and stones. Plastic encloses organic. The sounds are completely pure, but also isolated, as if there were nothing (more) beyond. Things sound metallic. Everything seems to be in conflict. There is friction everywhere. The related power is noticeable everywhere. The existential hell corresponded to hell on earth. Their thinker was the Roman Lucretius, who made it through life poetically in the first century BC as an apologist of Epicurus. For suicidal Lucretius, hell was synonymous with fear associated with existence: death, sorrow, disease, punishment and conscience. »Everyone tries to escape from themselves, obviously without being able to do it,« wrote Lucretius. »He stays tied to himself and begins to hate himself. The end is death.« Small drawings, sulfur drawings, sulphurous pictures, flesh, head with coins on the eyes, hole in the ground, bull, electrolysis (glove), half an orange with a hand, underworld: underground, fountain as a way out. Always a way back to the past?). Meat, decaying capital, Europe, Orpheus = Ego, Charon and Cerberus = superego, Hades = id, Eurydice = Orpheus? The artist briefly defeats the dark but fails because of his fear. In the search for his (deepest) being, he briefly becomes one with himself. In the end, however, he fails because he is afraid or tries to keep control over his id (drive). The passage into the underworld as a relentless journey to the inner self. Am I me? Or my picture of me? My shadow? Orpheus does not try to liberate Eurydice from the underworld, but rather seeks himself, his dark core (is there morality there?). Homosexuality? Autosexuality? He fails. Eurydice is thus the inner essence of Orpheus’ (confer: image as image to the outside, also: psychological). When he turns to her (his inner [other?] being), she has disappeared. Was she ever there? Eurydice – she dies for no reason. (Or Orpheus dies for no reason). Who knows it! Or is his female part dying? His innocent (naive?) femininity? Or his attachment to the mother? Mother archetype (Characteristic of »the maternal« are »the kind, the fostering, the carrying, the growth, the fertility and the nourishment«, the »wisdom and the spiritual high beyond the mind«, the »magical authority of the female«. The archetype stands for a »place of magical transformation, rebirth«, for »the helpful impulse, the secret, the hidden, the dark, the abyss, the world of the dead«, but also the »devouring, seducing, poisoning, the disturbing and inescapable.« The sea and standing water, matter, the underworld and the moon, as well as »places of birth and procreation«, fields, gardens, rocks, caves, trees, springs, deep wells and the Christian baptismal font. »Helpful« animals such as cow and rabbit, but also many flowers, especially when they occur as a »vessel« [rose, lotus] or are picked up in mandalas, as well in general, any shape – reminiscent of the uterus – such as a pot, oven or even the [screw] nut.) Eurydice means »wide justice«. What is he turning to? Who is his lover? What is this picture? How is that to be interpreted? Into which underworld (figuratively) does he go. Or is he entering a foreign (new) world? Not in Hades / not in hell. Or to hell? To hell in it? In a strange hell? Into the strange hell (abyss) of his own self (interior)? How does Eurydice die? By the bite of a snake? In the fall, then? By knowledge? If yes: by what knowledge? (By recognizing the hopelessness?) Hopelessness out of what? She dies and he tries to bring her back (to bring to light, to lead to the light). To the light of the profane world? Shopping center (Ringcenter), broken people, cold consumption, bright neon light, cold and (lit) appropriate. Stainless steel and glass – but cheap. Everything follows the principle of utilization. (Exploitation / Capitalism / Neoliberalism), Cerberus.

Demon of the pit. Devil’s helmet. The skin. The water. Exit. 

— Tim Plamper 2019

by Lara Konrad

Eventually I decide to sit down at the edge of my hotel bed and begin to finger myself, assuming it will make me feel like I can belong to the external world I have been part of these past days, ever since having arrived to this stranger city that until now hasn’t grown into anything of my own.

A place that is memoryless because it is new and therefore empty in meaning, is a place that is silently vicious in its seemingly eternal sameness. And this type of anesthesia always feels like it will last forever. It is funny and cruel, but mostly I think it is strange how we only ever live for the memory of it all. Do I just feel purposeless inside this hotel room and inside this city, because no place here can make me love the past and therefore love my future? Anticipating new worlds, it is here when I have been happiest, as it is purpose that keeps alive during the moments we forget that we have always been dying.

I rub my fingers against the walls of my cunt, fast and hard and without feel. Like fingering myself is the only thing I can do if I wish to remember my body that is alive yet some place far, and maybe no longer humanly reachable. How do we know if we are living, living just enough for it to mean that we are actually real in our nature? I finger myself harder and look through the window without really looking anywhere. Cars and people, they continue to come and go. The hostility of our simultaneous existence suddenly overwhelms me. While I try to fuck myself inside my hotel room, people outside pass through life like water. That vast distance, residing in-between our geographic closeness – the absurdity in all of that. We are together, but we are together in such collective singularity, I do not know how to consciously stop belonging to this in-built loneliness that chooses to breed everywhere I decide to exist.

When the exterior world becomes part of our own world, I think it is only ever here when human loneliness begins to spread. Fast and gloriously real, running our bones empty of reason. How the presence of people has always been able to take away every kind of existential pain, simultaneously reminding us that we are forever hopeless in our individuality. I think this is why within the warm, impossible arms of nature, we are able to carry on with our human truth without meaning to falter. The city is the place where we realize never having escaped any of it. I want to cum with my fingers while sitting on the edge of my hotel bed, because it will prove that I can make a home within my very own fragility. My home that is my body in which desire for myself – and myself only – can grow, and grow so much further that for a moment I shall feel complete within my human incompleteness, suddenly forgetting what it is like to have ever needed anyone. I want to cum so I can live. And I want to live every day, like none of it lasts.

The moments I have been frightened by being alive and living, it was not the future that paralyzed the certitude of my reality. The few and many times I have died of hopelessness, it was always the present I was present within the most. The same way it is happening right now, right here. Inside this hotel room, that is inside this city, that is inside this country, that is inside this life that I live, but do not know how to belong to. The last time I knowingly belonged somewhere was when mother and I got into the car, while saying goodbye to my uncle and his wife. And I feel bad, because I cannot really explain why. It was something about that very threshold between his and our reality – I could feel it unfold so vividly right then, a certain sense of freedom building inside my nostalgia that suddenly had materialized because all I wanted was to continue desiring my past that was suddenly such a lovely past. Humans, how we are such complex bastards the moment we are born. For nothing felt more comforting than being able to leave behind my uncle’s misery, aware of the incredible luck that makes life into the life it is. The sudden sweet shelter his misery granted for my then child-world. And in a way, I felt so grateful. Years have passed, and by now I know what it is like to have installed this type of temporary home in others. It feels so terribly real, people realizing they are better people.

I feel, but mostly hear, the wetness growing in between my legs and my fingers and my cunt. Water, it begins to flow because life is near. There is such tenderness in knowing that one’s body is about to let go of being a body after being its mostest. Muscles abate. The mind is neither memory, nor a newly-built house of questions that just keeps collapsing because our awareness of living only keeps on changing. Now, when there is nothing else except wanting to cum because I know I can cum, I fuck myself hardest because all I want to is to survive.

I cum and while I cum, I am not sure any of it means I have changed. Outside, everyone still knows how to live, meanwhile inside here I have exhausted everything I am without beginning a new type of history that leads to another kind of ending. How do I postpone my ultimate reality if it not only ever wishes to stay? I want to be good at living, not just better. And maybe it begins and ends right here – inside this life of mine that will forever ask what it means to have survived when all I ever did was live.