I took a picture of the wall at my parents’ house. There are six people on it; my great-great-great-parents and their parents. I bring the picture with me to Düsseldorf and begin reading Agamben.“ If libido behaves as though a loss had occurred, even though in reality nothing has been lost, it does so because in this way it stages a simulation in which that which could not be lost, because it was never possessed, appears lost, and that which could not be possessed because it was perhaps never real can be appropriated as a lost object.”

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I stumble over negative forms. I think about abscences a lot. Gaps begin to fill my fantasies. In cologne I buy an overhead projector and place an empty plastic shell of a perfume bottle on it. There was something about that three dimensional object that became two dimensional on the wall, shadows collapsing into outlines. The image larger, clearer and much more a phenomenon than the object itself. 

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Once I was at the house of my grandmothers sister. She had the most beautiful golden fruit basket. It was small, fit perfectly in my hand, but was kept away from me by a pane of glass. I stand in front of the display cabinet while my parents and other adults sat on the coffee table and talked. I must have gazed at it for a very long time. My mother tried twice to send me off to play; she was embarrassed of my obvious desire. Finally the sister of my grandmother came over and opened the vitrine to gift me the treasure. 

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I asked Paul how to build a face in blender. Paul showed me a face-building tool and I began to recreate the three heads of the women in the picture. Putting small dots on their outlines, I had to imagine their profiles, I didn’t care much about the back of their heads. I liked the idea of me building a version of my ancestors heads that needs my imagination. I remembered a great documentation about a mammoth found in the ice, scientists from all over the world rushed to it, to strip the body down, everyone trying to get the piece they specialized in. The tooth guy was able to tell almost the whole lifetime, how many kids, what sicknesses and even how the cow died, getting stuck with her forelegs into the water and attacked from behind by a sabertooth-tiger. Another guy was destined to bring the mammoths back. He created the whole DNA Code and told the camera that he would plant it into an elephant cow. The mammoths in his opinion should be brought back from the past into the present for they pooped rich in content and therefore could recultivate the growing deserts. 

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When I had created the three heads in Blender, I decided to 3D print a prototype. 3-D printing looks like something gets re-build into space, line by line, without anyone doing anything. It seems to me that it’s not the gap that gets filled rather than by printing something abscent, the absent object appears. I like that, I would like to print lost objects, to print more abscences, to fill space with things that are not here. I start thinking about lost objects in the sea and a desire appears in me to throw my toothbrush in. I know it would pop up in my mind and get bigger until huge. A huge toothbrush in my mind, getting stuck in my head from left to right. I’ts like that, with stuff I loose. 

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I lost a little plastic puppet I carried around in my pocket. I pretended she was alive, even though I was old enough to know, that she was not. One day she went missing, since than I wonder where her body might be. Sometimes a picture gets flushed into my mind, seeing her crashed into pieces by a car on a street. I like the idea of loosing stuff on purpose. I had a lot of play things and plastic puppets, I can’t remember them, as I never lost them. 

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I cast the head in silicon and tell my dad I’m gonna fill it with ice. The idea being to meld the ice head on the overhead projector. It does not work out, its merely impossible to get transparent ice plus the melting down looks brutal, as the face melts down first. My father keeps asking about the ice project. I decide to fill the mold with different materials, using wax and polyester. But first I take a photograph of the negativ cast which I kind of like and show it to Ed. After listening to my description of the process so far, he notes that in terms of process, I’m close to what one does in a dark room. I remember that note in particular as it comes up later again when I show the process to a group of people at Schwartes “Atelier für freies Denken”. One student tells us about the face of the dead unknown woman of the seine and how her face is the most kissed face in the world, as one guy recreated her face so that it would become the face of the dummy used for first-aid courses. Immediately I think about Marylin Monroe, the once most photographed face of the world. 

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In her diary she wrote about her efforts to lower her upper lip and her eyelids to create her face. It took her months, but as she looked into the mirror one day something surprisingly happened, she fell in love with herself and dropped her maiden name. After she died and was buried in one of those stone walls in which bodies are kept inside the wall, one above the other, a stranger to her, decided to obtain the grave directly above hers. He paid good money and told his wife that, for his final wish he had to lie face down above Marylin so that he could look at her. Once a week Joe DiMaggio an exhusband of Marylin sent flowers to her grave until he died telling everyone that finally he gets to see her again. 

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I went into the dark room and had my pictures developed, I like them, they look a bit like Solarizations. I began taking more photographs of the different heads. Perspective and gaze interest me more than the idea of the three sculptured heads or the even earlier idea of melting ice heads. Letting go of the first ideas feels right but is still difficult. Ed proposes I keep pretending to realize my ideas looking straight forward but kind of secretly keep the other thing growing in the periphery. I very much like the idea of keeping something in the peripheral vision of my eye. ​