The texts featured here were published into the two volumes catalogue "Losing You Tonight". The main idea was to invite curators to write short stories instead of critical texts. The stories are related with loss and darkness with obscure spaces and fictional memories. Thanks to all the authors for their kind and inspiring contribution.



Steffen Mues
Foreword
In 1955, the city of Siegen founded the Rubens Prize in remembrance of the painter Peter Paul Rubens, who was born in Siegen in 1577. Since 1980, a promotional award has also been bestowed in association with the city of Siegen’s Rubens Prize. In this way, the city aims to underline its interest in the promotion of young artists. The promotional award is conferred every five years, between the presentation dates of the Rubens Prize. For the winning artist, the promotional award also includes the realisation of an exhibition in the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen with accompanying publication.

The promotional award is being presented for the sixth time in 2009. The jury appointed by Siegen city council was unanimous in its selection of Diango Hernández as award-winner. The artist was born in Cuba in 1970 and has lived in Düsseldorf for several years. Hernández’ particular achievement lies in the translation of his personal experiences into a universally valid language of forms.

To quote the jury’s statement:
“Diango Hernández (...) represents a convincing artistic standpoint, working to enlighten the viewer and simultaneously handling the enigmatic and mysterious with remarkable subtlety.

In his space-consuming installations – combining found objects and materials, drawings and film projections, texts and sound into highly-concentrated ensembles –, politics and poetry enter into a very special union, which is typical of Diango Hernández.”

We are grateful to the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, Stiftung Kunstfonds, the Rhinegold Collection, the Friends of the Museum für Gegenwartskunst and RWE AG for their generous support of this exhibition and publication. We also owe a debt of gratitude to Ursula Frohne, Jörg Heiser, Veit Loers and Peter Piller for their commitment as jurors, and to Yilmaz Dziewior, Nuno Faria, Diango Hernández, Giovanni Iovane und Adam Szymczyk for their poetic texts in the catalogue. Thanks are also due to Eva Schmidt and the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen for its excellent cooperation with the city of Siegen. Finally, we would like to express our greatest appreciation to Diango Hernández, who has provided the city and our museum with such a fascinating exhibition.




Eva Schmidt
Stories about Loss in Darkness
Found furniture, found images and found texts are relics with the power to conjure memories. Functioning as a communicative link between the artist and the viewer, they represent both material and tool for Diango Hernández; he uses them to construct his poetic narratives expressing mourning and loss. Diango Hernández views the museum as a dark and lonely place: the rooms here are filled with enchantment, enigma and ambiguities, with mysterious found objects arranged for the viewer who wanders between the eras, beyond factual reality and yet inseparably connected to it by negation, by severance.

Born in 1970, Hernández grew up on Cuba and studied Industrial Design in Havana at the beginning of the nineties. A short time later, however, he realised that what really interested him was artistic work – solitary work that no one had asked him to do. In those years, as we all know, the world’s political blocks crumbled and Cuba’s trade relations with the Soviet Union collapsed. “Special Period” was the term coined for this new epoch, in the hope that the economic crisis would prove exceptional rather than lasting. Times of radical change tend to sharpen our observation; the ability to interpret inconspicuous details becomes necessary, so that we can comprehend changes and new circumstances. Everyday objects – and functional, technical and decorative furnishings and fittings – unfold magical powers in times of transition. For those who can read them, they represent the material from which stories can be woven – personal stories that may reveal more of the truth than official pronouncements.

The starting point of the exhibition Losing You Tonight is the memory of an event in Diango Hernández’s life: for the artist, the violent death of one of his fellow pupils just before school graduation threw a lot into question. Some weeks later, Hernández found a short text written by that boy; it was about his first encounter with art, in a very specific place, the museum in Havana. There, reality – according to the description in this text – was completely invalidated in a huge sense of timelessness. Hernández associates the memory of his friend’s death and the finding of this text with recollections of a school system that left little scope for the development of individuality. He takes up these various threads to weave a story using the means of art. He combines ideas about everyday representation, about the differing presence of official ideology in private and public spheres – and about the darkness in which objects disappear to make room for immense emptiness.

Hernández has created a series of atmospheric spaces for the exhibition Losing You Tonight, conceptualizing darkness and the disappearance of the present into memory in an special way; spaces in which the borders between fiction and reality are blurred. He also asked friends who are curators and theorists to write a short, personal story triggered by the idea of darkness. They continue Diango Hernández’s own working method, weaving a personal and open view of the darkness from which dreams emerge.




Yilmaz Dziewior
The Sky was as Black as Night
One night in 1973 – I was still a child – I sprang into a cold woodland lake. All was still, and I could feel slimy algae strafing my calves in the icy water. After a few powerful strokes, I reached the mossy bed and grabbed hold of the silver necklace that François had dropped there for me; then with a final push upwards, I broke the surface of the water, gasping for air.

Although François was considered more of a formalist than a realist – it was thought that he demonstrated more interest in construction and representation than in insights into actually existing reality –, he didn’t believe personally that either category applied to him. We had been shooting this film for no more than six weeks. It was obvious that disputes would arise, because we all had different expectations, characters and life-styles. The stress and jealousy were simply too much, not to mention the artistic differences among the adults, which became clearer as time progressed. The only thing that united us, really, was our passion for film. But despite these melancholy circumstances, later the film would be interpreted as a celebration – a celebration of life.

I have always asked myself why François chose me (nine years old at the time) for the role of the young Pole. Because of my dark hair and brown eyes, my appearance corresponded to my father’s Turkish side, surely, rather than to any ideas that might have been evoked by my Polish name. But whatever the reason, at that time in the summer of 1973, we were filming in Nice and the woodlands near the city. There was an endless series of technical hiccups. Organisational difficulties were part of the daily agenda, and the complexities of personal relationships increased from one day’s shooting to the next. Then, when one of the actors was killed, it looked as if everything would be over. Even today, I find it quite astonishing how François and his assistant Nathalie always succeeded in discovering new solutions, and in soothing the broken heart and other innumerable moods of the capricious Jacqueline; they showed the patience of angels and were father, mother and psychologist all in one. On top of that, François himself played the role of the director in this spectacular homage to filmmaking, which uncovered the mechanisms of the great machinery of illusion without taking away any of its glamour and mystery. On the contrary, the more of the processes and technical apparatus of his profession he revealed – and the actors’ (acted and true) emotions were ultimately a part of this – in a humorous and occasionally despairing way, the less he actually exposed of the magic and seduction he successfully employed to delight not only those of us on set, but also his future audiences. I was actually the youngest, of course, but it seemed that the adults in this film acted far more like children (hungry for love), who – in their trace-like state – were incapable of distinguishing between reality and the narrative, between true life and the story they were acting out.

They certainly found it much easier to give full vent to their feelings when the camera was switched on. It was only then that they were able to put across their concerns, emotions and wishes – far more convincingly than in reality.

At that time François used a special technique, whereby he placed a blue filter in front of the lens and dimmed the camera stop a couple of stages. Using this filter trick, he was able to pretend that our sequences had been filmed in the black of night, although shooting had been done during the daytime. The Americans called this trick “Day-for-Night”, while in Europe it has gone down in history as “American Night”.

Later, François cut my scenes out of the film. But I still have the necklace today, having misappropriated it secretly from the properties box. Although nothing came of my career as an actor, my fame being over before it ever began, at least in that necklace I have a lasting souvenir of the “night” so full of promise.




Nuno Faria
4 Short Letters about Image and Drawing, about Light and Darkness, for D.
-inadvertently-

Dear D.,
I am marking the start of a period of writing based on the theme of drawing, which is, as we both know, something which unites us and forms us and something which will remain of us, at the end. The skeleton.

Here, things enter, gradually, at the axes. These last months have been very tiring. However, this period is ending. We have moved to near Faro, to a very beautiful place, where I have peace and quiet to write and to think. The light is very bright, in the middle of an orange grove, near Ria. We are reviving and hoping for your visit. The boys are fine. They have played football and drawn every day (mainly Jaime). We could stay like this for ever, but the intense individuality of each of us makes us clearly glimpse the limits of osmosis at a time when we can still think of living with them.

Words have a magic of their own, an ability to transport. They incorporate a kind of driving force which enables something to happen. I am thinking of two words: drawing and displacement. Drawing incorporates design, an intention, a project.


The sparkle of words and concepts but, more important than this, the image which these words form in our imagination upon hearing them.

Drawing is metalinguistic by vocation: those who draw incorporate a series of processes in their technique which serve essentially to induce sensations, provoke determined perceptive states, guide attention, and which are processes of focus, dislocation, etc. A snail or a cyclist inside a drawing are ways of accelerating or slowing perception.

The drawing is the most sophisticated form of synthesis and the relationship which thought itself in making art has found and constructed to physically and mentally achieve a synthesis between the thing desired and the desiring body, between that which speaks and that which hears, between the apparatus of vision and that of the body. Drawing functions as interior, microgeological work, involving internal change, and does not get along with external forms, shapes, that which is image.

In terms of the creative process, this had to be seen closely with poetry and the type of physical construction, and is a form of decanting: the poetic method is paradoxically subtractive, words placed in the space of the sheet (a metaphor of thought, of speech) are not added, it is as if they are sculpted.

It could be asked, but I have never truly felt the need to do so, why I do not draw, if after all that which characterises my inner searching is drawing. Exactly, I think that I do not do any other thing that is not drawing. Even writing, listening, inventing relationships - in the physical space, in the space of the book, in the relational space of an ephemeral project – I try to guide myself by wisdom and simplicity, the bright evidence of drawing.

In truth, the reply to that question lies in the fact that drawing and writing originate from the same region of thought; neither of them is actually image – Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard – but both produce images.

But after all, today I am writing this letter about myself and writing about the meaning of writing, reflecting on how important it has been for me to write, throughout my life. A letter encloses itself like a tomb, engendered by and about delay. I, exactly, have always thought that writing was not a work concerning light, but rather a work concerning death. At the most, it enables us to see, or at least catch a glimpse, of our own death. A form of annunciation. Once more, a delay.

Before, many years ago, I had a motto concerning writing. It stated, “I write to die a little every day”. I have always felt closer to the writers who saw writing as an “experience of the limits”: Mallarmé, Bataille, Leiris, Artaud, Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Sollers and others.

Basically, writing dominates all my life, I speak in the same manner in which I write, which is what those who know me best say. But writing has for me become a relational field, a translation. Today I write to know, to reconnect, to establish an alliance with those for whom I write or with whom I write. From this point of view, it is ironical that it is you who has reminded me of that other territory of writing, which I abandoned without ever having truly submitted to it. To write for yourself.

-overflight-

I would like to bring to light an image which has been obsessing me. A photograph was taken in a clay pit, in a rural area in the Algarve in the South of Portugal. It shows a scarecrow, the most amazing figure of a scarecrow and as such, figure of language, I have seen until now. The scarecrow – perfect vanitas – attracts to expel, to summon to flight.

A bird, a sparrow, recently dead, it seems, since it has kept a semblance of physical integrity, hung on a fishing line with its feet in the air. The body of a real bird is the actual scarecrow. Is not this the most intimate and perfect image of the tenuous line which separates life from death? The recent words of Woody Allen come to mind: “Our greatest obligation in life is accepting that life does not wish to mean anything, that it is empty, that we are the result of chance and in the background a universe which also does not possess any meaning. That universe which, of course, will end with all the rest”.

-ligature-

A design – can one so call it strictly speaking? – concerning that which cannot be named. Some words of the author himself - but can we call him so? – about this drawing, by way of an attempted explanation. We are speaking of clarity – of that I do not doubt. How many times they have given us a drawing to study, when somebody has taken on this generous part. I quote Jean-Pierre Bertrand concerning a 1986 felt-tip pen drawing on paper:

“I simply had a rectangle in front of me, I wanted to go “within the paper” to create an inner space, to make a presence come. I wanted to show the interior of what we see. So I thought of mummies. I dreamt of a mummy which dreamt of me. Would not a mummy be a body that re-emerges, that impresses the ligatures, something material?

That was what interested me, making the marks on the paper re-emerge, making an extremely ancient thing re-emerge to the surface. There is a skin, a flesh, something hard, a black body and a substance impregnated on that. The mummy wishes to be reborn. Without doubt there was a death but this is not certain, a presence remains that I desire, on the paper (but this word is wrong, because this deals with another place), manifestly different, giving it another type of life. How much do we know us? That is the question which appears on the surface.

-Dis(encounter)-

How to reactivate the past without losing ourselves for ever? How to put into words that which cannot be told? What awakened my memory was a meeting, a sublime farewell between Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray, in Lost in translation. With the first chords of Just like Honey soaring, I did not know who I was or who I had been, or where I was. Strangely, I knew from where I had come. I had come from that time. I was certain that this was the film of our generation and that that generational feeling does exist after all. And yes, we can be saved by art, or whatever you damn well wish to call it. Even, or above all, by a 3:00 minute song which we heard for the last time, simultaneously but without being together, almost twenty years ago A 3:00 minute song written by two brothers with whom I would never sit down to drink a beer with...

yours,
Nuno




Giovanni Iovane
One More Thing
And “Immortality“ Mildews In the museum of the moon
Mina Loy, Lunar Baedeker, 1923
On the Moon, in a dale between two mountains, lay all those things that men lost or forgot on Earth.
It has been like this forever, or at least since the expulsion from Paradise.

Along with the things, this dale keeps some particular beakers that contain the reason (the capacity to think) that abandoned the insane, both that which left by its own will or that seized by divine will.

The only person who ever found one of these beakers was, many centuries ago, the Englishman Astolpho (and he found precisely the one which contained Orlando’s reason). Nevertheless, the proof of existence of these beakers lays, by a negative deduction, in the fact that all the American astronauts who stepped on the Moon (or who saw it from close distance, between 1969 and 1972), once back in their white-collars have lost their mind, even if in different degrees.

It is obvious that if a certain region of the Moon keeps all the lost things, together with the reason of some humans, it must be a different world from that of the Earth. From this point of view, the Moon could well be a huge mirror that inversely reflects the images of the objects from our world; anyway, the Moon always has a shadowy area, a dark side.

It is also important to state further about the specificity of those things lost on the Earth and conserved on the Moon: it is very important that no one compares this place of the Moon to the Parisian Office of the Lost Objects.

All the gathered things (almost as if they were animated by a specific inner energy) on this Lunar dale correspond to those general directives promulgated, for the Christians, by Saint John Baptist or by God in person.

Things, objects or even images should belong to these figures of thought or of human physiology: vain desires, time wasted in gambling, tears and sighs of lovers, the long sloth of the ignorant ones, and all those disegni (in the Renaissance sense of the term, that means both projects and finished works, even artistic ones) that either were never done, or were erased or forgotten.

As you can see, all these things could well lead us to allude to Jacques Lacan’s figure of the Grand Autre, but this is not the correct place to do so.

During an – obviously – nocturnal flight on my hippogriff (a legendary horse is quite more agile and less post-neurotic than the Apollo 11), I collected some souvenirs of a quick expedition to the moon. After landing in the Sea of Tranquility, a burly Saint John headed towards me and entertained me for several minutes with a childish conjuring trick with a key and a coin (and I must confess I remained open-mouthed when my nose dropped a dozen of coins). Keys and coins must have been a sort of password, as in the following scene I was in the secret dale, moreover quite malodorous and crammed with seagulls.

As to confirm my new position, I sank my hands in the gigantic heap of stinky things on the top of which I was seating; this is a brief list of what I casually extracted. The first was the original photograph, taken in 1960 by Alberto Korda, of the Che Guevara encabronado y dolente. Actually, it was not that famous manipulated photo of the Che, which depicts him as an isolated and unique Guerrillero Heroico. Instead, it included another man and some palm leafs; as we all know, heroism does not contemplate an oblique or lateral gaze.

The second relic was the “handwritten” cake of Marcel Proust’s Recherche, that in the printed edition became the nauseating and commercial Madeleine. Going through a quick selection, I can then recall an edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia of 1952, whose pages of the “B” letter dedicated to L. Beria were torn up and ill-substituted by pages dedicated to the Strait of Bering (nevertheless the pages dedicated to the chief officer of the Police of Stalin were still conserved, folded in four, inside the volume, at the beginning of letter “D”). Then there were some photos, shot by David Douglas Duncan, of the dachshund Lump. The dachshund spent six intense and happy years with Picasso, from 1957 to 1963, when the painter wanted to revisit Las Meninas of Velazquez.

In the last of the six years he spent with Picasso, Lump got seriously ill and recovered in Germany (France, during those years, was inadequate to heal the specific illnesses of dachshunds). One year later Lump appeared as the model for some preparatory paintings and sketches of Picasso’s Meninas, and its active figure, bellow, right (and even annoying, as only a barking dachshund can be), contributes to render real – no longer symbolic – that tormented interplay of gazes of Velazquez’ painting.

And talking about gazes, I even grabbed René Magritte’s photomontage, Je ne vois pas la (femme) cachée dans la forèt, done in 1929, in which the image of a naked female is surrounded and framed by a group of surrealists, all with their eyes wide shut.

But the sentence that made me reopen my eyes was that which ended a novel by Raymond Carver. A sentence, as found many years after, non original but cut by his cruel and minimal editor Gordon Lish: “He said, ‘I just want to say one more thing’. But then he could not think what it could possibly be.”




Diango Hernández
Tropical Gypsy, (The Museum of Silence)
Someone said “silence” and I wished that I could float so as not to hear my footsteps. Standing next to one of the many doors of the museum, the watch-woman wore a white blouse and a blue skirt.  She did her job in uniform, with austerity and visible exhaustion.  While I, entranced, ran through each line of The Jungle from Wilfredo Lam, I thought of the silence that this woman must practice every day, and from this idea of silent labor my thoughts quickly moved to the silence that inhabits the museum, and seconds later to real silence.  Silence is not the absence of sounds but what we keep quiet.  In silence I visited the white exhibition halls of the National Museum of Fine Arts of La Habana. It was my first visit to the museum which later became the house of my first love, with whom I am still madly in love.

The National Museum of Fine Arts of La Habana is located in Old Havana, the district that was once the center of La Habana and is now the most touristic area of the city and even of all Cuba. As a child what attracted my attention the most in Old Havana was not the museum but the ruins of a wall that appeared on either corner of its surroundings.

Later I learned that La Habana was once surrounded by a great wall and that at nine o‘clock at night a cannon was shot from the Cabaña fortress to alert Havana’s residents that the city gates would close. To this day, every night at nine o‘clock, the shot can still be heard. El cañonazo de las nueve or The Nine O‘Clock Shot, as it is popularly known, has become an Havana tradition as well as a touristic spectacle. However, for me it is an official ritual which testifies to the permanent confinement and isolation of our beautiful island.

I did not leave the National Museum as I entered it. When I opened the museum doors to leave, the city was also not the same. It seemed as if that day, while I was inside, someone had masterfully changed all the streets, trees, buildings and their colors.  Who had changed my city?  The question did not make much sense in that moment.  The real question was, „If right now everything is new, how do I find my way home?“

My first visit to the Museum was a magical accident that I understood to be a kind of blessing. Encountering such a building full of silent white walls, without furniture, without banal objects, without any trace of everyday survival fascinated me.  After this visit the only work I still remembered with accuracy is La Gitana Tropical (Tropical Gypsy Woman) by Víctor Manuel García, a Cuban modernist painter who painted it in Paris in 1929.  I know well that she was the one who changed my city.  She is also my first love and my painful limerence.

La Gitana Tropical is the portrait of a presumably Cuban dark-haired, young woman.  Her dark eyes insist on telling you serenely and absolutely, “I am beautiful, I am happy”.  I would have given everything to listen to her voice! I would have given my years, my city, my sea.  But I also think that her beautiful silence is worth all of that.  Maybe the Gypsy never existed.  Maybe Víctor Manuel in Paris, submerged in a subtle melancholy, painted her not with his brushes but with his memories.

Ramón



On the 23rd of July 1989, the last day of school before summer recess, I found this short story between the mattress and the frame of one of the dormitory bunks.  It was Ramón´s bed.  At that moment all the others had already left the room.  I had been assigned the job of leaving the bedroom ready for the next school year which would begin in September.  In the middle of that quiet summer afternoon I sat on Ramón´s bed, read his story, and could not help but recall Ramón, who had been stabbed by one of our roommates some months before.   

The night Ramón died is still indescribable for me.  It was neither night nor day, neither cold nor warm, we were neither human beings nor animals, neither awake nor asleep.  What happened?  I do not know! After the stabbing, Ramón lay on his bed and in the middle of a terrifying silence, where only his desperate breath was audible, he died.  That night Ramón died, a young man of seventeen, who was still in love with the Tropical Gypsy.

I read his story slowly. I went through his words as if they were never-ending highways and after a long trip through that sheet of paper, I arrived to a village called Silence.  I decided to write on its entrance the phrase that Ramón wrote in his story: Silence is not the absence of sounds but what we keep quiet.




Adam Szymczyk
The Lighter
The scene of the action is not yet a scene of action, and, unless particular circumstances arise – which they won‘t – never will be. A short section of the street between the now-closed cinema and the fifth streetlight from the left. The excellent lighting allows for a fairly detailed description. From the fifth streetlight there approaches the phantom of a woman draped in an overcoat, a shawl, and whatnot. She stops by the revolving door and enters a spacious lobby. After a brief wait she takes the elevator to the sixth floor (the attendant has only one button to press), finds room fourteen and enters without knocking.

A halo of heads leaning over a small flame that emerges from a thin metal flue set on a plinth of stone in the centre of the room. Other men, very many of them, stand by the walls, smoking and flicking ash onto the floor.

The stench is stifling, so she goes out onto the balcony for a breath of fresh air. Death wheezes serenely; smoking heaps of burnt leaves fill the space with a familiar scent. The moribund bustle about here and there. With some difficulty she goes back inside what is the strangest lighter she had ever seen. She regards her hands, beyond a doubt the hands of a corpse, of someone deceased, the only truly dead bitch among so many fading voices straining as they sing Mahler or some such shit.