“SELFPORTRAIT“

Group Exhibition

35 Artists

A short catalog of things a writer believes himself (not) to be

There is a little boy who dreams of writing stories about a lion escaping the jungle because he is made of gold. The boy is eight and has absolutely no idea about anything, he reads to his friends, they want more and so does he.

There is a young teenager. He is scared easily; his nails are bitten and his hair is greasy. He often believes himself to be completely mad. He cries in his bed and writes about a young girl who tries to find out who killed a few of her classmates. She manages to arrest someone and this is where the story ends, without the protagonist nor the writer understanding that she was the murderer all along. A teenager learns that truth is subtle and yet very painful to look at.

There is a seventeen-year-old boy, he does not know how to roll cigarettes properly, but he smokes them anyways. He wanders around his village a lot, dreaming of big cities, queer sex, and interesting friends. He writes about people his age who are exactly what he is not – he dresses their portrait convinced to be the only one in the world capable of doing so. The seventeen years old does not know how to compose a sentence yet, however; the only things he has felt for now in his life are longing and nausea. He will soon enough understand that this is how home will always be like.

There is a boy, and he is about to turn twenty. He managed to move to a big city, and he wants to be free of people’s knowledge of who he once was. After all, he’s finally been in love and one of his short stories has been published. The boy does not know how to cook pasta properly but will fill his journal every day; to not talk about what happens to you is to betray the person you once were, he proudly affirms. Not so many people are here to listen, though.

There is a twenty-two-year-old boy. He travels a lot, reads critical theory, and fears that he will never be able to be smart, even if he can easily make people believe that he is. He seeks tenderness exactly where he once escaped it. A young adult often mistakes solicitude for solitude.

There is a story, it is about a Selbstporträt. The writer of the story freaks out. He wears an oversized jacket and messy hair. Sitting in the U-Bahn, he finds pride in believing that the self does not exist.

The man is sealed in his view of life, believing that we invent who we are to convince ourselves of our worth in the middle of the meaninglessness.

What this truly means is that life as a linear progression is something he wants no more of. However, he looks at fragments and bleeds. His reality has created an attack on itself.

“But”, asks the man, “will there be anyone to read it?

Text by Hugo Scheuble