last day in london

concentration camp

The air is dry. The only light is at the end of the long corridor. Flowers lie on the floors of individual cells in this empty prison barrack. Some seem to have been carelessly scattered, and others, merticulously placed. But they are all fake, plastic and very dead.

Tales of torture during WWII in this Sachsenhausen concentration camp flood through the grey, ugly audio guide hung around my neck. Chaos was the norm, and peace, the exception. Death... might be a relief.

Don't be sad. Don't feel. Don't reveal any form of vulnerability. I say to myself, wishing for a moment the stories I'm hearing are fiction.

The audio guide plays an interview snippet with an ex-convict, who relates how prisoners were given ropes and told to hang themselves. When asked why he didn't comply, he replies, "If they (the SS officers) want that done, they have to do it themselves."

The prison barrack suddenly seems warmer and colder at the same time.

go on, shout

Sometimes i feel like i am stuck in the pages of a trashy lifestyle magazine. everyone is shouting to be heard but noone - including myself - is saying anything extremely interesting.

that empty feeling

life is meaningless. you give it meaning.

and sleeping feels so good sometimes that i wish i'm awake to enjoy it.

andreas slominski

Sometimes, bits and pieces of conversations or events come together after the moments are gone, only making (more) sense with hindsight.

I was writing an essay a few weeks ago about Foucault and Habermas when I decided to use an art work by Slominski to illustrate one of my points. Basically, the work is called Streetlight with Tyre (1996) and consisted of a bicycle-tyre laid around the base of a street lamp. Instead of simply tossing the tyre over the lamp however, the artist has hired a team of workmen to uproot the light and disconnect all the cables, before ceremonially placed the tyre around the lamppost from below. After all that effort, what one can see is only a deflated tyre around the lamp. The tyre was stolen after two days.

Some has credited the work for revolving around the principle of "maximum effort for minimum effect," turning our usual reasoning of efficiency on its head. Instrumental reasoning has been resisted, in short.

When my friend told me about this work in the middle of the night about thirteen months ago, I frowned, not comprehending one bit.

Now, the work seems more interesting, even making its way into my essay. And this blog post is for memory's sake.