What to do when shadow falls upon your face? Attaches itself to your cheeks, sucks out your fat, extinguishes every color. Digs into the rings under your eyes which lie fallow like a field, forgotten and withered. When there is no time left to put things in order, to make provisions or even: to pack bags. When your thoughts decide to no longer be thoughts, but rather are tangled, jumping from sense to nonsense, from sparks to glimmering to going out to nothing. 

(c) Bild aus der Serie „eingesperrt – never forget“, Oskar Stocker, Ölfarbe auf Abfallkarton, 2015

When someone takes your house, pulls you out of your room, by the fireplace there is still the glass with the red wine. You searched long for this year, tasted and slurped, spit it out. You checked the streaks on the glass, cathedrals you said, do you see, smell how fruity, how old and velvety. The glass is still there by the fireplace. And what, but what? When nothing belongs to you anymore, not the glass, not the fireplace, not the house, nor the right to enter the house.

When the street is everything that remains and does not pass. What then, when your only certainty is, in addition to night and day and again night, in addition to the emptiness which comes and rules, spreads out, settles in, stretches out and shrinks at the same time in your stomach, in your head, in your soul. In everything.

And your education, which you think so much of: when it no longer counts. Doesn’t entitle you to anything, doesn’t enable you, doesn’t assure you, doesn’t feed you.

Then what?

It’s called take, don’t ask. Take what you get, be thankful, be quiet, be humble. Be invisible in the corner that you are assigned. Be happy that you have it. Its worth is greater than yours. You are a worm, even less. A misfortune overlooked by strangers. Pride rampages over your body, withers your mouth.

You think your are immune? No one is immune. No one is safe. Never. The next to go, the next to fall is you.

(Written for Oskar Stockers project „locked-in – never forget“, 41 alienated portraits of friends and family: what if they had to flee, how would their look change beeing locked-in in camps, in pain, in fundamental scarcity?)