Work Description

"At some point, my friend Daniel Spoerri had finished his series " Fadenscheinige Orakel ", and left me his perforated, gutted wall protectors with the words: "Nothing is waste, make something out of it, build something around the holes, Dräcksbüebli." That was at the time when I was suffering from a writer's block, no text would succeed, I was as empty and full of holes as this huge textile waste pile, which I picked up and which should not be garbage. That was around 2019. ​ The only thing I could still write, which I have been doing for years, are so-called "Tarnsätze" (camouflage sentences), pseudo wisdoms that sound as if they could be true, meaningful and helpful. I got that in turn from the author Wolfgang Herrndorf, who for a time collected the " Wisdom of the Fulbe" and placed them as mottos in front of the chapters of his adventure novel "Sand", invented sayings of a shepherd people in West African Nigeria. There are only a handful of these sentences by Herrndorf, thousands by me; every day I have to write a few to reassure myself of my existence, and that began pretty much simultaneously with the exhaustion of my writing energy. These sentences come out of my subconscious like metaphysical ants, it isn't me who seeks them, they find me, the diary of a sub-ego to which I have handed over control from the beginning. ​ I used the sewing machine to sew together Spoerri's scraps and stitched on them a few of my "Tarnstätze" (camouflage sentences), the sewing machine became my typewriter. And here too, just as with the sentences, I gave up control by leaving the guide foot up on the machine, that the machine often stitched the letters, words and sentences perplexed and disoriented, I only watched as the needle sometimes broke off and desperation knots formed. And how the subconscious, from which my sentences had previously trickled and been absorbed by me, combined with the helplessness of the sewing machine, I played there only the third role of the collector, the distanced watcher and suspicious observer." (Tex Rubinowitz)