AMNESIA

I had read that Plato originated the idea of so-called anamnesis, according to which everything within us is rememberance, that our life was not what we saw and did, but what was whithin us and which we were destined to give rise to in thoughts and images and lend it expression

Gottfried Benn, The Glass-Blower

AMNESIA stands for a cycle of works that refers to the novella ‘Der Glasbläser’ by Gottfried Benn.
All sculptures and objects are made by human hair – sifted, pressed, layered, rolled – they have found their expression in the reflection on the thoughts and pondering of the hairdresser in Benn’s novella from 1947.
In the core is the social sculpture Ha[A]RVEST, which had been created in 2019 in cooperation with 120 hairdressers from Münsterland and their customers.

exhibition view Kloster Bentlage | 2020

… ‘The clients were already waiting. The gentlemen wanted a stilish look, no more bunches of hair peeking over the collar in back; the ladies, beauty: a grey strand over the forehead, get rid off skin pigmentation’…

‘A striving for perfection that leads to suffering; intuitions, surmisings, never a certainity. If one could put up with hunger, with thirst, with the fact that ones hand arn’t germ free after washing, that one’s mood don’t end harmoniously, that dreams sink away without becoming realities, that love suffers change and change is endless to the point of oblivion.

if this were thaught, this second thermodynamic law of existence, this apology of decay, this apology of decay, these universals of the soul – if we bowed our heads instead of senselessly holding them up – would such a teaching lead us out of ruin? is that what the above-mentioned writer meant when he spoke of the world being saved by the few?’

Gottfried Benn | The Glass-Blower
from The Ptolemean | translated by Joel Agee
The German Library