CRASH!

State­ment on the exhi­bi­tion open­ing on 10 August 2023

Wel­come everyone,

It´s Judith writ­ing from her bed in Upper Aus­tria. I am very pleased that this way I can share some thoughts about our heart project. And so I´m going to inte­grate myself a bit, and make myself vis­i­ble this way.

I´m good at that, although I per­son­al­ly have the rare luck that many con­sid­er my sit­u­a­tion and find cre­ative ways in which I can still be present. And still: as a chron­i­cal­ly ill per­son I have mean­while shame­less­ly learned this inte­gra­tion exercise.

That one has to active­ly do this in many sit­u­a­tions, if one doesn´t want to dis­ap­pear, and that this can also be exhaust­ing, was already known by a gob­lin I real­ly like:

“Being vis­i­ble makes you tired,
Heav­en forbid!”

That’s what Pumuckl says. And:

“Pumuckl dis­ap­pears
nobody finds him
because what you can´t see
that doesn´t exist.”

The work of our stu­dio is aimed pre­cise­ly against this prin­ci­ple, against an “out of sight, out of mind”. Because we are con­vinced that what is oth­er­wise hid­den can be real­ly fas­ci­nat­ing, mov­ing and important.

More than two years of orga­ni­za­tion, often dur­ing health cri­sis mode, are now behind us — to say it was a chal­lenge would be an understatement.

Between fight­ing author­i­ties and symp­toms, the real­i­sa­tion of such a project with this dis­ease nat­u­ral­ly also means many cut­backs: being able to see your part­ner less, no exper­i­ments with med­ica­tion, even few­er breaks in a world where there is nev­er any vaca­tion any­way. Some days I felt like I was on a dou­ble ham­ster wheel — that of the ill­ness and that of the project.

It is also a par­tic­u­lar chal­lenge to show works by con­trib­u­tors who are cur­rent­ly fight­ing the mon­ster them­selves. Some of the artists shown here could not access their works them­selves or write texts, oth­ers unex­pect­ed­ly spent sev­er­al weeks in hos­pi­tal. Then it was about impro­vis­ing or cre­at­ing equiv­a­lent alter­na­tives. Hence the cre­ative con­di­tions of some works are also reflect­ed in our exhi­bi­tion. We are glad that we can still present them all — thanks to many unit­ed forces.

Because this is what it always boils down to. Great things are pos­si­ble with them — and noth­ing without.

I would thus like to thank every­one who helped with mak­ing our project pos­si­ble: my won­der­ful and tire­less part­ner, our project part­ners, all the artists and our friends. But also and espe­cial­ly all the strangers, who may have stum­bled upon our project coin­ci­den­tal­ly, and with­out know­ing “the mon­ster” yet.

Your inter­est and shar­ing of our project means a lot to me, as you are help­ing to cre­ate more vis­i­bil­i­ty, knowl­edge and exchange, but above all: being able to show impres­sive and spe­cial art.

I wish you a lot of great impres­sions — oh well: the Pumuckl would also like to add some­thing, namely:

“Any­one who has seen me once will always see me — invis­i­ble I am now only to oth­er people.”

With this in mind, we wish you a nice expe­ri­ence in the online ver­sion of our exhibition.