earthcore.world

UNTITLED by Theresa Patzschke
21.04. – 02.06.2023

The Myth of Progress

Sometimes only a small shift is required to get out of one situation into another. She had been past this store countless times before and it had never even occurred to her to go inside. But today a sweet temptation suddenly emanated from it. And her steps that had until a moment previously been plotting out an unswerving and purposeful straight line on the wet and shiny sidewalk changed direction from one second to the next, nudged by the confluence of various signals at some indeterminate place. When her foot glided over the threshold, the hem of her T-shirt fluttered once more in the damp bright wind and brought some movement into the dark, stale air, before her T-shirt, like all the other items of clothing in the space, hung limp, as if in a vacuum.

Theresa Patzschke "Cami de Ca’n Vives 11", 2023
Collage Book, Magazine Paper, Mixed Media 17 x 23,5cm

But maybe the story also went the other way around.

One more time: The sun blinded her intermittently from the right, punctuated by the trees on the side of the road. The road was striped and the asphalt alternately hot and cold and their bikes flew over both with such ease as if it made no difference. They flew and flew and she was ready for the delirium of the afternoon that had been triggered by the frequency of the trees passing in front of the sun. They would soon fly much, much faster and much, much further. But that’s not what happened. Instead everything else started moving.

Then we got to the place that one used to just hear in the night but never see. Again there was a shift in the relationship of inside to outside. Now there was more of both. And of course it’s still always possible to take what you have inside of you and just put it outside. Maybe street lights will illuminate the scenes individually like vitrines or aquariums one after the other and everything will be taken care of. When a street has new houses built on it, the street is a new street as well, and you are standing in the middle of somebody’s imagination even if nobody could have thought it up quite like that, not them either. I stepped out through a hole in the fence into the park that seemed suddenly to have aged several centuries. On the bridge I noticed a person on the other side of the street and nobody knew who was actually following whom. We walked through the dark streets in parallel for a pretty long time, quite unlike the cars. But then we ended up in the middle of the new-builds and I was so amazed at what everything looked like that I lost track of the other person.

When your bikini hangs from your shoulders like a jacket full of weapons or like the petal on the skin of an apple that has gradually expanded beneath it then flies off and the skin underneath becomes free and starts yelling. Or when you say a thought out loud and it leaves you like a drop of sweat from your forehead, reflecting a train of thought through its prism into the world. When the ketchup leaves the bottle and mixes under a tree with the hope of someone yearning. Perhaps the rest of the fries will find their way into the trashcan.

Translated from German to English by Alex Scrimgeour

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