Vernissage November 26, 19 h
die raum - Oderberger Straße 56 - Berlin
A Darkness Machine does what it promises — it produces darkness. If you leave it on a green lawn to do it's job it will kill every living plant beneath it and leave a cloud shaped patch of naked soil imprinted on the ground like a sun print. Life stopped and naked skin. The darkness produced by a Darkness Machine is the kind of darkness that attracts us and scares us at the same time — somewhere between radical openness and no change whatsoever (sex and death). They take us to a place on the borderline between submission and perdition, where the system of the visible and understandable no longer rules.
For the exhibition at die raum the Darkness Machines are dormant and nicely folded. Two guards — one on the street outside and the other one inside the space of die raum — are watching over the Darkness Machines and making sure that they stay dormant.
To even get started to write this text I had to trick myself: How could I write about something which in it's core is unrepresentable? The trick was to think of the text as a woodcut or a lino cut — a graphic image in only black and white. Just like text is often black letters on white paper. Try to imagine the kind of information you get from a woodcut and then read this text through that. It is not between the black and the white that sense is made. It happens somewhere else — I am not sure where.
Henriette Heise, November 2011
e-catalogue for the exhibition:
