Writing is a central part of my artistic practice. It is deeply connected to finding visual ways of speaking.

Prendre la parole – French, to take the floor, to speak up.

Prendre la parole is a conceptual work consisting of multiple layers or modules. It is a sculptural installation, a workshop, and a book.
The book can be read as a manual and thought collection for the installation, but it also exists on its own, as a poetic research introducing you to the topics and phenomenons I care for (shame, anger, longing for evolution and change, solidarity, ambivalence, and more). I intertwine emotional observations with political questions.
I situate my writing in autotheory.

„I feel a lot of shame. I feel ashamed of speaking at all, of telling a story, of expressing my opinion, of taking up space, even if others would disagree: but why? You talk all the time.

…
This is the shame of the attention-deficient and the uneducated or under-educated classes: we still end up believing we are stupid, awkward, irrelevant.

This is why I write about shame and the urgency to speak up (anyway). The two go hand in hand. The one fights and produces the other.

…
It’s about using writing and speaking, even though I don’t yet know exactly how to do it or what I want to say. …
I want us to show ourselves more naked, more vulnerable, not hidden behind the patriarchal, cold, dry, disembodied theory and withdrawn into the weighing of objective categories.

Just tell me how much you long for something. Tell me you’re angry, tell me what about. Come on. You don’t even have to learn how to mumble.“

Credit for the image below: Annika Grabold.