Today has been the warmest day of the year so far. It’s April 2, 2011, and spring has finally heard our cries. Also, it is exam period. Ultimately, this is a call out for procrastination of the finest sorts. We had an extensive breakfast on the balcony, which was on the verge of turning into a brunch, but we averted that last minute. Instead of heading to our rooms to study, we decided to fulfill our weekly duties of bringing away paper, cans and bottles to the recycling station. Since the bins are next to our local Aldi, we decided to go in real quick, just to buy some fruits and snacks. On our way home, Caro, who has her exam on Monday, had the great idea to defrost our fridge. Since we’ve been planning to do that (by now one third of the fridge was completely iced) for quite a while, today with its 24°C seemed to be THE day. We emptied the fridge, put it out on the balcony, where by now Alexandra was sitting to study, cleaned the top of the lower fridge (we have two standing on top of each other), got rid of all the spider webs etc…when we finally decided there was nothing really left that we could do without feeling stupid because we’re not studying.

So we tried that for about an hour and then had lunch, barefoot, with tank tops, sunglasses and bright sunshine, the fridge thawing away next to us. Since the thawing took longer than we found reasonable, Caro went to get a hammer and screwdriver, and began pecking away chunks of ice. When I got my camera to film the scene, I saw a paperclip lying between the miniature ice floes. It got covered entirely by the chunks, but it was there, and this is already the end of the story. The bad part is, that now we have to clean the fridge and put it back up on top of the other fridge and sort stuff back in…and for some reason now it doesn’t seem to be as much fun anymore as this morning. So instead of doing that, I’m writing this.

 This was a story of procrastination.

 

A few weeks ago, my tutor took our whole group to the Academie Beeldende Kunsten Maastricht (ABKM). I should be more precise, and say, to the there-located Bachelor studies of Autonomous Art. Looking nothing like the main buildings of the Academy, the old monastery building is filled with wood, paper, pictures, cigarette stubs, electrical gadgets of all sorts, there was music in pretty much every room, or humming ventilators, paintbrushes, hammers, soil, and fabric. So, everything, scattered, but with a kind of order that was invisible to us at first. We met the graduate students, who all have their own studios, and were showing us their final works, made up of wood, paper, pictures, cig…you get the point. It was fantastic, most of us consider ourselves something like art aficionados and I had seen the opposite extreme, the European Fine Art Fair, only a few hours prior to this. I immediately knew which side of the art world I’d prefer for myself, but that was not relevant at this point. All the studios were white, but they lived, they were occupied spaces of other young people who could do with these walls what they wanted, and even if the art works, as the artists pointed out repeatedly, are far from being completed, we enjoyed all of it a lot.
But I don’t want to lose track.
I was assigned to Steffen Kraska, a German artist who is, if I can at all plaster his work into one sentence, making art about pictures. Aiming at the very core of photography, film, light-on-material, he showed me his projects and his previous installations, and his photographs, and a little booklet, a layout-version of a book he made with his photographs. The booklet was created entirely out of printer paper held together by a myriad of paper clips. To be honest, in that moment I was more about excited about the photographs and the light that came into the studio through the dusty window than the paper clips. But my task was to write an artist file about Steffen Kraska, and I couldn’t fit the paper clip book in there anywhere, and I regretted that, and therefore, Steffen, that booklet, the whole thing, including the paper clips, is incredibly cool, too cool for that box you store it in :)

www.steffenkraska.de