Pillars of Salt

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2024

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„Ihr habt es gehört", begann Noah nun von neuem. „Übermorgen wird die Flut etwas sein, was gewesen ist. […] „dies hier bedeutet es. Wenn nämlich die Flut übermorgen etwas sein wird, was gewesen ist, dann heißt das, dies hier, nämlich alles, was vor der Flut gewesen, wird etwas sein, was niemals gewesen ist. Nein, niemals. […]„Weil es, wenn die Flut morgen kommt, fürs Erinnern zu spät sein wird und zu spät fürs Betrauern. Und weil es dann niemanden mehr geben wird, der sich unser wird entsinnen können, und niemanden, der uns wird betrauern können. […] Weil kein Unterschied sein wird zwischen Weinenden und Beweinten […] Wenn ihr hier vor euch stehe, so weil ein Auftrag an mich ergangen ist. […] Drehe die Zeit um - sprach die Stimme zu mir, - nimm den Schmerz schon heute vorweg, vergieße die Tränen im Voraus! […] Denn übermorgen wird es zu spät sein! 

 

 

 

The world seems to be permanently ending. 

 

The feeling of eminent disaster, however, is not new, as we continue to periodically cycle through different versions of an apocalyptic Zeitgeist. One could even go so far and say that this fear might be as old as humans, with each present crisis seeming more worrying than all the previous ones. 

 

The project „Pillars of Salt“ deals thematically with this fear; it tells stories of the Ends - both old and new - and carries the title based in the apocalyptic story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Lot´s wife is told to flee and not look back at the destruction. But she did look back and was turned into a pillar of salt. Although the moral of the story is to accept faith or get punished for being disobedient, it has increasingly become our moral obligation to look, to react, even if it does petrify us. And so we should find a new love for Lot´s wife who, Vonnegut¹  writes, was the only one who got punished, yet the only one human and compassionate enough to look back.

 

An old proverb goes: „Dwell on the past and you’ll lose an eye. Forget the past and you’ll lose both of them.“ It seems that in regards to the future, the proverb also rings true - focus on the future and face a new kind of anticipatory grief; ignore the future and face the consequences.

 

The word Apocalypse literally means „uncovering" or „unveiling“ (from ἀπό (apó, meaning the prefix „un-„) and καλύπτω (kalúptō, „to cover”, „to conceal“)).

For the project „Pillars of Salt“ I used Cyanotype: a technique which, quite literally, reveals an image by shedding light on things. Created during the darkest period of the year, in the winter months, these cyanotypes uncover the plurality of possible faiths which are still before us. The drawings aim to create space, in which the spectators are invited to pay attention, to reflect, to think about responsibilities, excuses, inevitability - as such actions, perhaps, survive better when we linger over them.

 

The fear of the sky falling on our heads has maybe always preoccupied the imagination of our predecessors. And yet, are their feelings really that similar to ours? 

„What if“, Srećko Horvat² argues „it is not so much just about the ´sense of an ending´, but about the fact that this is not an end as any other end? It is the end of the very imagination of the end, because after this end there will be no one left to imagine.“ The difference between us and our predecessors, he also points out, is that the sense of an ending that we are facing today consists not only of threats that are completely out of our control (volcanoes, comets…) but also of final catastrophes which are our fault, and perhaps still - at least to a certain degree - controllable. 

 

Another significant difference is that we aren’t being warned about the apocalypse by mystics or cult leaders, but by scientists, as the End-Time scenarios seem to be constantly multiplying: the nuclear threats, the environmental collapse, the pandemic, plastic pollution, locusts swarming through parts of Africa and Asia fueled by climate change, wildfires, authoritarian governments on the rise… We also seem to be the first generation to be constantly confronted by the fear of the End, as it has never been more integrated in our day-to-day lives. With the ever developing media, catastrophic and warning articles and images, live and in full color, reach the palms of our hands almost instantaneously as they occur. This naturally creates anxiety - and leads to the difficulty, or rather impossibility, of coping with the irreversible loss. We are easily reached by these information, but are we truly available? Why should we look? Do we still have the capacity to react or are we apathetic? Shock and compassion are unstable feelings; they wear out. Compassion, stretched to its limits, is going numb.³

 

The journal „Science“⁴ warns us about the toll ecological disaster is taking on the mental health of the scientists working on disappearing ecosystems. The daily contact with the destruction of our planet results in a grief for the future. The term „solastalgia“ is coined to describe this „anticipatory grief“, or future-oriented nostalgia. To fully understand this new kind feeling, we need an exercise in temporality and forget the notion of time as something linear; as a progression. „Extinction already happened if we continue with the current barbarism“, Horvat⁵ writes, „Not only did the Apocalypse as „revelation“ already happen, it is the end itself […] that happened in the future if we are unable to understand the „revelation“ of the rapidly unfolding planetary events and if we are not capable of radically reinventing the world in the time that remains.“

This shift in temporality is illustrated in Günther Anders Die beweinte Zukunft - through a reimagined version of the biblical flood story (quoted in the beginning of the text) and the use of the Futur II (future perfect, also called die vollendete Zukunft, or future antérieur), Noah tells us a cataclysmic future that already happened. Frustrated by the fact that all of the warnings of the flood have been ignored, he walks through the city covered with ashes, while wearing a sackcloth - which was only permitted while in mourning for a child or spouse. When people saw him, they asked him who had died, and he answered that they themselves are dead. When they asked when this happened, he replied that it already happened tomorrow and that they had to mourn today, because the day after tomorrow it will be too late. 

 

Günther Anders also spoke about a „naked Apocalypse“: „Today, the fact that we have to live under the threat of a self-made apocalypse raises the moral problem in an entirely new way. Our moral task arises because we ourselves, through our own doing, are responsible (not as judges, but nonetheless) for deciding whether our world will remain or disappear. We are the first to expect not the kingdom of God after the end, but nothing at all“. 

 

Imagine the future scenarios as a deck of tarot cards. The cards are, Stefano Harney writes: „designed to secure, change, or see a fate, restore the future, but the constant practice of this fate work has the opposite effect. It produces more and more fates and even for the single person having her fate told, repeated readings generate fates rather than holding one steady.“ We keep pulling more cards and the possible futures are many, and yet lately they all seem to end in a disaster. Is another end of the world still possible?

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1) „Pillar of Salt“, cyanotype on paper, 80x105cm, 2024

2), 3), 4) Untitled (from "Pillars of Salt"), cyanotype on paper, 50x50cm, 2024

5) "After Midnight", cyanotype and charcoal on paper, 80x105cm, 2024

6) "After Waking Up" , cyanotype and coffee on paper, 80x105cm, 2024

7) "After the Fire", charcoal on paper, 80x105cm, 2024

8), 9) "After the Flood", charcoal and ink on paper, 80x105cm, 2024

10) "After the Storm" , cyanotype and charcoal on paper, 80x105cm, 2024

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