Book: Prendre la parole – on shame and the urgency of speaking at all or speaking anyway, 2024

This is my written archive and thought collection for my ongoing sculptural project.

Second Edition of 50 uniques (+ 5 AP): books printed with risograph, inks: scarlet and cornflower, 17×12 cm, 60 pages, side stitch binding
(first edition: 28 + 2 AP)

Layouted with Wiebke Grieshop
Printed with Risofort, Hamburg

Price: 15 to 25 Euros (or more to support my work).
shipping possible, price will be added.

Synopsis
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. With the written part, I invite you into my brain and show you what I think. The book can be read as a manual for me and my art. I introduce you to the topics and phenomenons I care for (shame, anger, longing for evolution and change, solidarity, ambivalence, and more) and share with you thoughts and ideas about how to adress them in the artworld and beyond. I intertwine emotional observations with political questions.
I situate my writing in autotheory and would describe it as intuitive, poetic and easy to read.

„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us to show ourselves more naked, more vulnerable, not hidden behind the patriarchal, cold, dry, disembodied theory and withdrawn into the weighing of objective categories.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.“