This was the year of (muddling through for the economy) (anti-nihilism) (turning the tide on human rights) (bringing a positive impact on your life) (sensitive content) (making the leap forward) (turmoil and normalisation) (aftershocks and unpredictability) (grieving for extended periods of time) (free and fair elections, finally) (being exhausted of living through major historical events) (breakout for batteries) (public cloud repatriation) (transition and strategy for businesses worldwide) (unhealthy starts) (the volunteer) (figuring out why you are still broke) (mixed-reality headset and not much else) (bringing images into the now) (bare minimum boycott lists) (verifying that you are human)
(…)
Gertrude Stein tells us that sugar is not a vegetable1 and I say, the new year begins now. Let’s make it a year of about 16% sugar, like the comfort of a red beet. As you are reading this, I am thinking about how someone’s face can be put back together simply by holding everyday objects. It could be a particularly flowery tea cup (my maternal grandmother), a cigarette (several lovers—depending on the type/brand of cigarette), or even a beet, yes a vegetable—not quite an object? It is in this process of magically anchoring haptic reality that a delicate facial hallucination may occur. It is in this escape, by manifesting someone you miss, someone who just went down the stairs, someone living a continent away, that you may accidentally leave your cigarette burn the inside of your arm. Like slipping a finger in the melted wax, a face will settle on a felt-description version of it, a suspension of belief nurtured in a feverish state of vulnerability.2
Do you ever wonder which item someone needs to be holding for you to take shape in their thoughts?
Objects have their own secret lives, too.3 And maybe they share a practice of subjectifying the living bodies—us, informing them, shaping them to the contours of their own wishes (Are you reading this on your phone?) I like the idea of a wilful object catching you (me) in the act (of longing?) Imagine being gifted the eyes of a Tama votive by a friend following their visit of Xanthi, how long until the tiny nickel plate would begin to blush, softening the boundaries between inside and outside—this delicate membrane-like endurance that makes you want to live in your dreams. How long until it eventually makes you kneel and shout: “What am I in this instant!?” The object held granting you fragility in its gaze, murmuring that this story doesnt require the protagonist (you) to overcome all obstacles to satisfy their desires.
Sontag (by way of Davey): “Photographs are, of course, artifacts. But their appeal is that they also seem, in a world littered with photographic relics, to have the status of found objects.”4
Every passerby a culprit, 2023
Series of fifty unique inkjet photographs printed between 2010 and 2013 in different photo kiosks throughout Los Angeles and Berlin, from negatives 🎶 All were shot with my Yashica T4 🎶 Each print is 95€ and comes with a signed certificate 😈 First come first served 🔒 Ask for larger higher res views and any other info 🎶🌪️🎶 Shipping Worldwide Included
In July I moved to Zagreb. Maybe the year began then and there. The point is, a lot of the characters I have been playing are fools forcing intimacy down the throat of logic, and surely lives have been ruined for less, so count your blessings that what I am telling you is true.
From the unremarkable corner of “Suggested for you,” re-count your blessings and point to someone—moisturized and unbothered by the soliciting of the scorching moment, that not only exists but also thrives. I wish I could direct you to that someone. I would tell you their name and I would embrace you both with arms opened as wide as the threshold5 of my new front door. I would bring you inside for coffee and cake, and as you enter you would read the disclaimer carved into the wooden frame
ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK LIKE AN INSULT
Imagine a place lodged in the wreck of time and burning with desire, a place that would afford the warmth of unhinged dancing to a poor connection. It is where I awake before it begins to rain and it is where my cat curls his paws if it is too early. I call it a poignant gesture of futile resistance, or a place of my own-ish. The private sphere has seldom been round and remains turbulent, and when people ask me why I’ve moved I tell them that economic growth accompanied by worsening social outcomes is not a success. So buy my work and I promise to walk to the Karakum Desert and like a careless whisperer or a superstitious saboteur, with elegance slapped on backward, I will livestream my blowing on the eternal flame of its crater—my private insta story accidentally becoming visible to everyone.
Models of Adaptation (S5E6 H-3), 2023, Wood, foam, fabric, latex, hardware, filled capsules, 100 x 60 x 8 cm
Hereditary Genius, 2023, An autofiction performance
Or my dad, Francis Galton, played by Steven Warwick hustles in trying to sell my work on the occasion of the opening of the group exhibition Mental Hot Spot curated by Tim Plamper and hosted by OOW, Berlin. Right image courtesy Felix Deiters
There was a time when I would be scrapping up the dirt from underneath my nails each time I’d return home after fucking someone. I would keep these traces like relics in a little drug bag I would find at the park or on the platform of the train. Like Jane Bowles not giving dates to her diaries, I would offer no names. Dormant snorting, the way I wish I could download the scents of lovers as easily as I can view their pics.
Nostalgia is seductive, can you hear the blaring bells of this addictive impostor?
How come we still need more proof that what is happening has nothing to do with safety, security, and the well-being of anyone? I am exhausted of having to share this earth with all these war maniacs, nationalists, and other profiteers shelling out hundreds of thousands to build safe rooms and bunkers while we bargain all our objects of drudgery to some fantasy tune called Home. Now let’s smear actual shit on the windows that say that there’s always money for war.
NO REMISSION OF (...)
WITHOUT THE SHEDDING OF (...)
And whenever the new year comes to spell itself, I will find the hip bone of my lover and I will use it to break the eggs for our breakfast while she laughs. I will stand next to the counter while I watch the omelet blister and I will tell her—my words staggering around their meanings like a sophisticated rumour: “You have me.”
La Reprise (Dérive), 2020-ongoing, still from the film
This experimental film began on June 20, 2020. It is an exercise in continuity and distortion. As of December 17, 2023, it is 183 min / weeks long. Every week, a subsequent minute is produced by combining scenes shot that week with archival material from the past years. Footage and sound are consistently recorded with the same single device (an iPhone)
Eventually, I told her that the questions I answered best were always the ones conferred like orders by a lover, questions without interrogation points, permissions really. As if possessing a strange talent like drawing blood simply with their fingers touching my skin. Conjuring veins for a laugh, or a fuck, and never expecting words.
She would attempt a dispute, insisting that a questionnaire is always like an armor to the one who asks. The one who asks doesn’t have to endure any of the arrows yielded in return, she yelled at me.
I remember how I stroked her hair, consoling her fantasy of opting out by saying that she needed to commit more dramatically to the source of the conflict by spending even more time on Quora. Finally, she kissed me with a smile.
I remember having said something like how in his genius, Bob Flanagan had gotten rid of the power of decision-making by stealing all of the arrows. Turning his curse into something better than any audience when he had raised this army of Saint Sebastien longing for his embrace.
Perhaps questionnaires are the ultimate aporia between words and meaning, they suggest the most imperceptible forces, from moon tides to the incomprehension of decay. They force a collaboration like a hieratic plot, so deceptively arbitrary yet often bearing a scheming motive, that when a question eventually satisfies the curiosity, it induces the rattled wish to have had an entirely different one asked.
Excerpt from The Questionnaire, written to accompany the eponymous solo exhibition of Felix Deiters at SOX, Berlin, October 14 - December 1, 2023
Fine. Now what.
Intervention, yet-to-be-titled solo exhibition at Efremidis in Berlin, September 2024
Attachment Issue, Every passerby a culprit, series of 50 unique photographs, each 90€ > Buy
Handwritten, (I breathe deeply into the page), epistolary commission for Department of Love Letters > Read
Worship, Twists (a visitor arrives), artwork for KREIDLER’s seventh long-playing record > Listen
Intervention, “I intend to outlive you,”
Project Space, Dedić, a display on the threshold of my apartment in Zagreb. The current exhibition is by Sophie Yerly
Profile, studio visit for Berlin Art Link by Olivia Ladanyi and Ryan Molnar > Read
And as always, I'd love to read you.
Love,
Fette
KREIDLER, Twists (a visitor arrives), LP artwork
Gertrude Stein, from Tender Buttons, 1914
“If you want it you should put a face on it lol,” probably said Matt McMullen to his roommate at some point back in 1994, and look where we are now. I mean I just want to know how much glucose is contained inside the fresh natural Latex collected from Xida Farm located in Chengmai County, Hainan Province, China, before I start licking my True Companion Robot’s skin
The Metamorphosis of Birds, directed by Catarina Vasconcelos, 2020
Moyra Davey, from Index Cards, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2021 (p. 50)