In cAsE yOu mIsSEd It
This is going to be a little walk through, through my artist talk that I gave in Berlin, at the Pictoplasma Conference.
This was such a highlight of my life and I had so much fun and fear and anxiety!
I started it with a two minute video of whales. Because.. I‘ll explain later.
Since I also had a puppet for the talk, you will have to imagine that part where the puppet is nervously watching the screen of the whale video.
After that it comes to the imaginary friends. Because for me, my creatures are my imaginary friends. I know the definition would be that imaginary means you can‘t see them. But for me they are imaginary because I imagine life for them. And if I believe it, you can see it.
When I was a child it was hard for me to see the difference between a memory and a dream. I know that one of them is „real“. But what does real even mean?
I couldn't tell a memory from a dream/ a thought because in my head, both felt the same.
I still feel like this sometimes. The best example is my favorite animal, the whale. I am travelling only to see this magical creatures but as soon as I don‘t see them anymore, I forget how it felt like to see them. It feels like a dream, not reality anymore.
So with my blurry understanding of what is real, I might as well have puppets as friends.
Sigmund Freund described in an essay from the 1800s what the word Uncanny means. Unheimlich in german. Literally it would mean „not from home“ So something that is a bit scary would be something you don‘t know.
But the Uncanny is more. It is „something hidden inside a home or in something familiar that wasn‘t meant to come to life“
Like in something that would resemble a human, like a puppet. Dead Material with a spark of life.
The puppet became like the metaphor of the Uncanny by associating its presence to the questioning of dreams, of the double, of the mask, of treacherous appearances, of the strange and the bizarre.
Since puppets are the only ones who can be both, dead and alive. They are the perfect actors because their death is always real.
A puppet is perfect for projecting our feelings onto it. It touches us more than any real actor ever could (sorry) because it is empty and ready for us to fill it with emotions.
The austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke considers the puppet not as an imitation of mankind, but as a model for it.
He argues that the human being must learn to become a puppet, giving up the pretension to be the center of the world and become "a thing".
The strings that attach us humans to a puppet are mysterious. And the line that seperates us is sometimes easily lost.
My attachment to my puppets is huge. I trust them to create a character on their own and I love the connection between us. Sometimes I feel bad because they rely so heavily on me. I am the only one they have in their life.
So I think we can all agree that puppets can be friends. I love interacting, playing with them. I love creating them. And I feel responsible for them because when you create something you are responsible (FRANKENSTEIN!!!)
But I am not only working with puppets, I am working with many different mediums.
They are like hiding places for me. Different layers of the world I am creating and I am weaving away layer after layer to create that one big monster that can protect me from this world. A new moster world, a place to escape to.
Not only for me. I am creating this as an invitation for you too, to run away with me and join the circus.
