palimpsest wall

In 2001 in museum Jan Cunen in Oss (nl) I had the opportunity to build a wall in the baroque interior of the museum. A wall perforated by a window and door opening. A satellite photo from Oss and surroundings was glued on the wall. The river Maas is the black curling line in the top of the photo.



After two months a quotation from Ludwig Wittgenstein was painted on the satellite photo.
"Imagine the world as a white surface with black dots here and there... One can put a net with square meshes over the surface. The net makes it possible to describe the dots. It's a grid within the dots are related to one another. Only in the net the relations exist, not in the white surface. You can put different nets over the surface, with a coarse-mesh, a fine-mesh, triangular-mesh or circular mesh-work. Those nets are our theories of the world. They arrange the world so we can describe it. But they reveal nothing."



Again after two months on the citation from Wittgenstein a quote from Lieven de Cauter was painted. This text is a excerpt from his essay "the permanent disaster", and it reads like a poem.

"The ongoing explosion of world population, technological acceleration, global warming, the hole in the ozone layer, the melting ice cap, rising sea levels, the depletion of non-renewable resources, deforestation, the accelerated decline of biodiversity, the humanitarian disaster scenarios such as drinking water shortages in many places (aggravated by the privatization of the water), the growing inequality, the polarization of society under the pressures of neoliberal globalization, the growth of the fourth world, the continuing proliferation of AIDS, the uncontrollable growth of mega cities in the poorest regions of the world, the breakthrough of the criminal economy and organized crime, the powerlessness of the state, the disintegration of the welfare state, migration, xenophobia and fundamentalism, terrorism, protracted wars - all these themes can be difficult understood otherwise than as a catastrophic scenario".

The palimpsest wall is in fact not a real palimpsest, early layers weren't scratched out. It is an accumulation of texts on each other without wiping out the earlier text. So that is why in the Surface Research project the scratching out is the main subject of research. Which is a destructive and violent act. Well steered and kept in hand, but the surface is damaged. It is necessary to become clear about the fascination for those concepts as "destruction", "damaging", "tearing down" & "death". Those irresistible natural laws of destruction and creation. To create something new is to kill all earlier darlings which delivered satisfactory results. It is more than forgetting or getting over those earlier results, it can be a lust to destruct those earlier results.

It sounds heavy, it isn't that worse...