Katinka Bock

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Katinka Bock

Work from “Februar” at Meyer Riegger, Berlin.

A Conversation between North and February

North: My constant is space, my territory immaterial. But time envelops my limbs. It reaches out for me, while I lay my breath on it. Here I exist in a subtle way. The passing of time is inscribed in the discrepancy between two chairs, one placed on an island in a park for a certain time, weathered and dull-edged, it bears evidence of my presence, my gusting and secret hunting on its skin. I never saw the other one. Would they recognize each other?

February: Their togetherness is destined to last for a certain duration, this duration is my body, I surround them with my definition of time. I am just as caught up in the temporary as you are, but with the period of time that I impart in my invisible demarcation, I also provide space to stay, to pause. A viewer can linger.

North: You are traversed by a horizon line of bronze-cool branches, your borders marked, along the wall, the ceiling, the coordinates that encircle you here and now. The points that mark me remain in the realm of the non-visible, if one even grants me such measuring units. Despite the limitation and definition of place, time, space: I grow continually, as movement. Within a single day, a person can take on my characteristics, climbing up to a balcony and dropping matter from it. The result is shaped by calculation and coincidence, it carries my vibrating, oscillatory driving force, even if we may not see the action nor the material being moulded. It is like an open game.

February: I need these boundaries, the beginning and the end. Without any firm definition I would be lost. That which flows does not lie in my power. You move freely. I develop in the liberty of this cave and surface, which I embrace with my body. I harbour caves like this here too, allegorically shaped out of clay, with wood, cloth and other soft materials… plastic footballs that are crumpled or bit apart by dogs, found or traded. Their jagged form nestles up to to my columns. My hollows are vessels for words. And then the open spaces, you spoke of the horizon. It defined the distance, the landscape, possibly even the border, where I may meet you, where our spirits convene. This blue sfumato line winds between stasis and its trembling dissolution in space. I feel close to you, kindred, although you make the end of my existence clear to me.

North: We are part of flux, we are processes. The transience of the moment and the limit of space; who would be we if they frightened us? They define us, just as we describe and fill them, as what they are and can be. The balls tell us stories, just like the chairs speak of reciprocal absence. Only their dissimiliarity within sameness reveals their shared orientation. They connect the two of us, and yet they are completely themselves.

February: Warmth and cold, light and dark. Space, surface. Time, space. We bear all of this inside ourselves, we reveal it in the counterpart that comes close to us. You selected the performance, I the exhibition. We encounter our roles. Trying them out may soften and sharpen our eye for experiencing time and space as what they are. They are us. Somewhere, children play with balls outside, they do not ask about February and they do not ask about North.

North: Your horizon is the beginning of my act. We will meet again in May” – Christina Irrgang. Translation by Zoe Claire Miller

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