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

The actual topic I had in mind when I found the last paper clip was of much greater concern than the various mice and critters living in our house (funny story: the day I wrote that post, a mouse came out of a trash bag I was just carrying downstairs, and I accidentally stepped on it, without shoes; it’s living somewhere in our walls now).

At a random breakfast morning, a few of us debated on the recent change of Germany’s position on nuclear energy. Why this relates to our house? We came to a fast conclusion that in order to “save the planet” as one might say, we simply have to cut down on our energy consumption. We figured the same counts for alternative sources of energy. Thus, if we want energy that does neither stem from nuclear plants or coal power stations, we need to start saving energy. By now, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung has written a report on Germany’s balance on energy production and – hey! – the country could switch to green energy without taking cold showers or reading a book by candle-light. Nevertheless, to change the world, we’d still need to cut down. In our house, though, we pay all inclusive rents, a flat rate for gas, water and electricity. So what we do when our renting agency doesn’t fix the shower, the mold on the wall or the broken sink/oven/lighting, is consume. And that’s awful, and we know it. The worst part is: our agency doesn’t care. They actually want us to leave on the lights in the hallways, and I have so far failed to find a light switch for the entrance area. (I am, by the way exaggerating. We do care not to waste energy as much as we can most of the time.)

So here is me, in a seldom moment of peace-willingness towards the agency and a tad of goodwill, I unplugged the cable of my laptop, put on some candles and switched off the light. The other day someone turned off the light in the kitchen during the daytime, and to our surprise, there was still light (we DO have windows). In our house, I am obviously not the only one with environmental concerns (otherwise the discussion wouldn’t probably have started), and yet there is this gigantic invisible threshold to simply use less energy.

But now there was this realization, there are the candles and spring is coming up, so I’m keeping my hopes high. Maybe the agency will be nicer to us, too...

I was just about to start typing a post declaring the end of the paper clip as such – we are more of a stapler generation – when I found a clip right in front of the door to my room. And don’t worry, I am certain it’s not one I’ve written about before, because I usually don’t pick them up unless I need one. The paper clip in my house gives me a fantastic opportunity to talk about this curious place. As of the moment when I moved in here, my housemates and I (or at least those talking) were absolutely certain this house is alive. It has become a kind of organic entity, acculturated to the soil it stands on. Ivy is growing up the walls, the windows, into the kitchen. Green moss and mold lives on the shower window and under the lacquer of the bathroom door and one time, we were in the uncomfortable situation to witness the decay – nay, composting of the cellar. As of lately, when water and mold have transformed one of the walls in my room into a yellow/blackish eye-catcher, I decided to buy pretty plants in pots to distract our views from it. Needless to say, organic entities, especially those with mechanic heating systems, attract not only plants but also animals. When I found the first silver fish under my bed and took a picture of it, I was astonished by its anatomical distinctness. It was the first such critter I’ve ever seen. Only later I learned that these animals aren’t usually as big that one could photograph it without a macro lens. Also, mouse traps have become an item of interior design in our kitchen, hallways and even rooms. We share pasta packages and flour with them, and pretend we don’t notice. One time, we thought we might have trapped one in the oven (by accident, of course), but then we hadn’t. The organic trash can has become the mice’s breeding or family vacation spot, or maybe they discovered it as transportation to paradise.

However, all these things we’ve come to terms with, we’ve fought it, we’ve yielded, we’re sort of cool with it (except that wall in my room). Once, we gave names to the mice, but I forgot what they were. We buried our dead gold fish in the back yard, as if to give back something to the soil. Our house is as fragile yet indestructible as the annoying wild mulberry plant in the yard. All this wasn’t even the point why I started thinking about our house in the first place. But I’ll save that for next time.

As my time in Budapest came to an end, I stopped searching for paper clips. In fact, the only reason to stop looking for them was that I knew exactly where they would be found: In the street where I lived, between the copy shop and the university. Quite obvious and obviously boring. My last night (not to be confused with the last night before Christmas…) brought me a last paper clip though, at Szimpla. I was brought to Szimpla by a chain of unfortunate events. First and most gravely, WestBalkan was closed again due to a mass panic two nights before, in which three people died.  Secondly, it was a Monday and therefore the only day Instant is closed. Thus we landed at Szimpla, which is not the worst thing that could have happened.

As ever so often in Budapest, I decided to have one drink only and be home around 1am. As ever so often in Budapest, whenever we said that, we stayed until closing time. As never so often in Budapest, I found a paperclip, on the floor in front of the cinema chairs we sat on. It is unimportant who was there, and how long everyone was there. I remember feeling a bit like in Garden State, I just sat and watched people coming, saying hi, and going, saying bye, for the last time. At some point we were four people remaining and were shoved out of the first floor by the big, big bouncer with the black jumper jacket. Downstairs, we re-settled on the very old, very dusty red velvet sofa across the post-office, where Tim and I were almost led to buying ridiculously expensive Szimpla-Postcards and stamps to have them sent to our own homes. Instead, we ordered a water pipe. The smoke mixed with the dust and it smelled like dried out fruit tea and we barely saw the cigarette-stained table. Pretending this wasn’t goodbye, we laughed and learned Finnish from Leila, and Leila learned curse words in German, but all I remember is takk, which is not even Finnish but Swedish (sorry Leila). Kippis means cheers and that is Finnish but I’ve known that before that night. My knowledge of Hungarian is still embarrassingly rudimentary, but when the big, big bouncer came around the corner again, we decided it was time to go, and he seemed to strongly agree with us.

As I arrived in my parents’ place in Italy, where I first found paperclips, I was disappointed with all the paperclips laying around everywhere. EVERYWHERE. I’m led to believe that the ones I found in Budapest’s bars were left there by Italians.  

I found a paperclip in the snow a few weeks ago, and have since puzzled how to tell its story. Unlike with all other clips, I know this one’s story, or at least the end of it. I found it in the snow, picked it up and turned to my brother and sister, who were with me. They smiled, and we knew what the story was. It will not get better by letting time pass by, so here it goes.

It all started with the unexpected death of my Opa shortly before Christmas. My sister and I had been driving down to Ingolstadt for the funeral; my brother flew in from the States. We were allowed to stay at my other grandma’s empty apartment, a big moment for siblings who rarely see each other more than once a year. Our parents were with our grieving Oma, and generally, my brother and I stood out very much with red shirts that we had thoughtlessly been wearing for the journey. The three of us took advantage of the apartment to find out about a possible birthday present and memories re-awaking for my grandma, and we ravaged through boxes and boxes of old photographs. On an old desk, in a room that we assume is empty most days of the year, everything remains as it has been for years – except that I took away the lamp a few years ago. As we were getting ready for the funeral with an old fur jacket, a black tie that belonged to my grandfather, who died 21 years ago, and…my brother’s belt that did not fit. In the end, we looked both adequate but splendid. Before leaving, Andy walked to the old desk and grabbed a rusty paper clip. He fastened his belt with it and we were ready to go.

The paperclip witnessed the funeral pass by, and the next thing we know is that it was lying on the snow near the cemetery’s exit. It must have fallen off when we left the grave and went back to the car. Opa’s car, that we had to push out of a heap of snow with six persons. We found it the next day, when Andy, Tanja and I decided to pay another visit to his grave and we found it covered in frozen flowers and snow, close to an open field and under a tree. In a small pile of snow, rusty, twisted, a memory.