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- 29 08 2001 - 21:02 - katatonik

tricky traveling tiny

Cleaning up a massive pile of photographs and other picturesque paraphernalia of the last few months’ existence, I found again this little card, about 7×4 cm, dispensed at an exhibition of Dagmar Höss (not really any information about her available online, sorry) at this year’s “SOHO in Ottakring”.

a postcard that is no postcard is no postcard


The exhibition showed lots of such tiny cards – visually disadvantaged visitors could borrow a magnifying glass -, pinned to the wall with nails in a way that left them suspended, sometimes veiled behind tiny sheets of gauze or other, sometimes coloured, almost see-through materials. Dagmar Höss’ object “remind me” captures this atmosphere of light, hidden, suspended clarity quite nicely. you seem to like the word “suspended” an awful lot lately. – shut up sock, or i’ll get you some nice SUSPENDERS!
You walk in. You think this is about traveling. Alienated picture postcards, strange colouring, pixelized impressions. Traveling as a frame of constantly blurred memories, something like that. You walk around. Until you notice that there’s something not quite right: postcards with “Schloß Schönbrunn” printed on them that show pictures of the Eiffel-tower are, well, somewhat unreal. Other cards were less straightforward. But what is straightforward about alienated pictures of places that you do not know?
In camp catatonia, such moments count as divine: realizing that something in one’s habits of perceiving reality, of thinking reality, is not quite right while at the same time knowing that this is not simply a matter of replacing lie with truth, illusion with fact; rather, it’s a matter of continuing your irritating habits, because you don’t really have a choice, but at the same feeling how that machinery in your mind starts rotating and opens up a road of thought that runs parallel to unsettled, and unsettling, images. That’s traveling all right. Tricky, eh.

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