On trust

Carmen Winant, poster made for Trust, the main exhibition for f/stop, Leipzig, 2021.

All of a sudden, I find myself in Leipzig, Germany, to install TRUST that I’ve been working on together with Susan Bright for the last year. It feels weird to travel and to be in another country. It doesn’t make sense that I am here without Susan but she can’t travel due to COVID restrictions from the UK. Nor does it make any sense that I have to be tested even though I’m vaccinated, that an official German directive says I must quarantine, while another says not to, or that one of the directors hurries to put on a mask whenever he sees me, as if I’m bringing the virus to him. I feel like a walking disease.

We work every day in a big, gorgeous hall. It’s so warm in there that the foil text melts off the wall and we have to think about new solutions for our exhibition captions. I want to break the spine of a book to place it in a vitrine and I ask the production manager for help, but he can’t, he says: ‘I’m German. We’ve destroyed enough books.’ This makes him smile with sad eyes, and I hurry to say that’s okay. I open the small book, This Means Love, by the French artist Laure Prouvost and lay it out in the vitrine. We both take time to look at the display and agree how fitting the book is for the show about trust.

We don’t mention it again, but the notion of the war is all around us, and all over the city. Its history is so present in this country. At the weekend I take the train to Berlin to see some shows, and for the first time I get to see Checkpoint Charlie. I walk past it on my way to a gallery. It’s usually so crowded, I’ve never stood in line to look at it. Here it is now, without anyone around, because no one is travelling and there are no tourists. I can stand as close as I want to the small crossing point between the east and the western world and reflect on this point in time, not too long ago, that it represents.

Back in Leipzig, my friend picks me up and we drive out to an exhibition opening at a small art centre, which is actually a camping van, placed in the middle of a field near the lakes. We enjoy the little sculptures, a glass of wine, and talk about how everything is slowly returning to normal, how the world is opening up. On our way back, we drive with the windows wide open, with music playing and it feels as if we’re young again.

Close to my hotel, I make a stop near one of the posters that Carmen Winant has made for the exhibition. They’ve been placed on light boards all over the city. What started out as a collection of pictures of the German actress Marlene Dietrich’s hands while performing, cut from a book given to Carmen by an elderly neighbour, grew to encompass thousands of other actresses’ hands. This one shows two hands making a scissor gesture, and to me this evening, they seem to be cutting through, as if to say, enough is enough to the constant reminder of the history and the pandemic. We’re done. We have to move on. This has to be the end of this long period of isolation and the start of better times for us all.

This text is from Visual Wanderings, Objektiv #23.