Emanuel Layr

NIKLAS LICHTI
Concrete quarterly
25 January – 7 March 2020

“I said that although hanging Colby was almost certainly against the law, we had a perfect moral right to do so because he was our friend, belonged to us in various important senses, and he had after all gone too far.”
Donald Barthelme

If these two video pieces were people, they would be sisters. And as sisters they would be Irish twins. At least in American vernacular, being conceived merely 6 months apart from each other. As siblings they would be forced to inhabit the same space and challenged to carve out their own interests and identities. They would be commenting and testing each other, constantly measuring the limits of what is bearable to the other. But they would support each other and care for each other. They would keep each other company, filter and break down codes and conventions together and create a language that contained each of their respective idiosyncrasies. Both would inhabit a world that is first and foremost mediated and one would channel the other. They would tease and strain each other’s patience by piling up platitudes and truisms and still both of them would understand why. But they wouldn’t be able to mediate between themselves. They would fight and one would bully the other, they could be cruel to each other, one more than the other.

If these two videos were siblings, they would try to ignore each other as much as possible. Both would get territorial, one more expansive than the other. They would hackle and threaten each other until eventually one would get her way and tower over the other. And just like knight and knave from the popular riddle the sisters would have opposing approaches to the truth. While one would be bound by her kind heart or noble nature to always tell the truth, the other – for equally inexplicable reasons – would be driven to deceive at any cost. And together they would be ignorant as to who was a knight and who the knave, because they only had each other to answer that question.