I in German is I C H. As I live in a Geman speaking area, I decided to do ths Work in the language we speak here.
I have collected loose, square stones from crumbled limestone rocks in the area and engrave the german word ICH in them in my studio. I take the stones with the ICH on them back to one of these crumbling rocks to photograph them in the rubble. There, the engraved stones are meant to illustrate the symbolism of the lost sense of togetherness as egos, that have crumbled out of society.
From the many caves in limestone rocks along the upper reaches of the Danube, unimaginably old evidence of human art has been brought to light. The traces of our ancestors from a barely recognizable past show to us humans of today that we have everything we need to live here. With this understanding, the monstrous burden of having to survive on our own every single day and moment drops away from us.
We humans are only highly delicate and in need of protection as babies. As we get older, we quickly become robust, smart, cooperative and confident. But confidence in the human community is disappearing under the influence of omniscient A.I. and the self-image of Western society dominated by the internet and smart machines. A strikingly high proportion of patients in our psychiatric institutions belong to the professional group of computer scientists, people whose familiar surroundings are smart machines.
Whether symptom or cause, society is turning away from emancipation, responsibility and democracy. Money rules.
When little children start to become self-aware, they draw squares and right angles. At the same time, the “I” crosses their lips for the first time. With the word “I”, the child’s self-awareness is set in motion and with self-awareness begins the child’s detachment from the mother-child relationship. The square represents the ego.
There is nothing wrong with this “Me! Me! Me!” as long as it defines a phase of the infant’s development, but when a mass of adults get stuck in this phase, this results in a bad society, led by ego addicts and driven by ego addiction. This spoils humanity and life when the adults burst into a frenzy of “Me! Me! Me! fight each other in constant competition and don’t listen to each other at all.
As the individual today possesses so powerful means to realize its will, these means isolate it from the community much more than they cause it to develop solidarity and empathy with fellow human beings. Humanness wears out quickly and disappears, the more power the individual’s possessions gain over our community life.
Symbolically speaking, the community disintegrates due to ego-driven individuals, just as a grown rock under pressure and tension disintegrates into individual stones that remain detached from each other in the cone of rubble below the rock.
But what is going on with all the other stones on which no ICH can be read?
The egocentric point of view involves disregarding the billions of other people. All the many people outside the interest of the egocentrist are overlooked, ignored… and if someone uninteresting nevertheless comes into the focus of the egocentrist, the subject in question is punished with rejection.
The more I think about the ego, the more ambivalent my attitude towards it becomes.
Since Thomas Malthus, the egocentrists’ credo has been: “There are too many people.”
If it is correct that the egoism of the rich is the cause of the poverty of the too many, then it would be true that the far too many ignored people of the world would not be too many, if they all were rich.
The concern for the ecological future of the planet, that can be heard everywhere would therefore be unmasked as malthusian ideology and to be understood as a declaration of war on the whole world.
alternative title: “Cemetery of Human Rights”