“Where do you want to go today?, 2024” at Mauer, Cologne

A bundle of joy 

She was running up and down the street a lot at the time. 

She made it even harder for herself with the shoes she used to wear, a pair of black patent leather kitten heels with tinny white ears and frizzy little whiskers, not the most efficient footwear when hunting down stars, bargains, and nick-nacks. Whenever things got hard the solution was to pack up your things and go. Put everything in a large sheet, wrap them up, hug them tight, and be on marry way. Put everything in bundles, throw them over your shoulder, and keep on moving at least until the next time you get a chance to rest along the way. 

Her bundles are quite similar to other ones, owned and carried for by a bunch of people on the run. They are warped contraptions of the sneaky kind, with their exact quantities and contents rather hard to pinpoint. Taglines and slogans appear on their outside surfaces, such as “fly human fly”, which might lead one to believe that objects, rather products, of similar origin are hidden within. However, what remains wrapped on the inside, what happened to find its way stuck in the tangled watery-ness of the mass accumulated is a trickier business than expected. 

Whenever the running got too much, she occasionally took off the kitten heels to rest on the side of the road. Carrying all this stuff, all this luggage over her shoulder was always going to be a burden and she knew that. She was well aware when she first started on this mission of going about town collecting a bunch of things and keeping them with her, that it could become impossible and very heavy to bear, carrying all these things around. However, the more time she spent with the bundled-up pieces of commercial joy the clearer it got. 

Transparent, lighten up, smitten with the joy of constantly being on the move, things often have a tendency to turn into stuff. Losing their purpose and function they transcend to the faceless field of matter, becoming discarded and used. For something to be used, a sense of ascribed purpose is needed. A TV has to be plugged in and showcase moving images and wavering sounds. If it doesn’t or doesn’t anymore, it must move up and move on. At that precise moment, its attributes become ever more visible. They were objects – made up matter with distinct shapes and functions – and became things of a lost voyage just to end up broken up and tied together in a knot; a bunch of stuff that lived a life. 

“Keep on and carry on, stay positive, be happy, live, laugh, love” words of a feather that feel empty ringing in her ears while the bundles come climbing up her shoulder as the break comes to an end. Factory-made, company-approved, produced, created, assigned to a feeling, and ready to make their way. These hollow promises are made to fill up purposeless needs and calls to action. 

With the weight of the world on her shoulders, she keeps on running, she has to keep this up, accelerating until the next big thing comes along her way. 

That’s how the system works, that’s what she must do too. 

The traumatic materials of this world are precious little things with unexpected beauty. One must stuff them in a bottle and find a way to always keep them on you. 

For a moment, just a quick moment, she dares to take a break. She knows it will only last a moment and she will have to continue, or else oblivion will take over. A bench suddenly appears right in front of her. It looks like the ones you would find in a train station or a doctor’s waiting room; the ones made to be comfortable promptly and force people to get up at some point. 

The bench feels like a scary thing, something almost repugnant at first, a way into forceful happiness with time sensitivity. And yet she takes a deep breath and has a sit.

Sitting with grief, going through it, befriending the nothing is sacrosanct in a world filled with fixed-up smiles. It is a dispersed event of a fraudulent nature to remain sited on a dusty old bench from the 1970s while the world around you keeps pushing you, something you are well aware you shouldn’t be doing for longer than allowed something that makes the whiskers on your shiny leather kittens dancing on top of your feet curl in ecstasy. Allowing the tears to take over is brilliant and freeing, she thought to herself; something she read in a self-help book once. Before you know it, it will be over, the kitten heels will come on again and she will be off to someplace else, stuff over her shoulder, bigger and better than before. 

The clouds are coming in, the rain catches her as she makes her way up to the next stop. 

Haris Giannouras