Bernshammar, May 1, 2025
Dear Eduard, Esther, Kyle and Simon,
Thank you for the lines you sent me. My idea was to use them in a dialogue, as a fragment of a play. And that’s what I did. I titled it “Notes from a Conversation on a Rooftop That Never Took Place.” Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out very well. Nor did it improve when I invited a handful of others to join the conversation—only geniuses of course, most of them dead—such as Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus, Marguerite Duras, Ernst Jünger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Constance Debré. That’s why I’m writing this letter instead.
I have to admit that at first, I was a bit disappointed that several of your sentences were simply descriptions of what your paintings depicted. It felt like you took the easy way out. But now that I’ve read them several times, I think they’ve taken on a deeper meaning. Here is my favorite—I think it says a lot about life, at least about mine:
“Er gräbt und gräbt.” (Eduard Kiesmann)
When I read your lines and look at your works, which deal with different kinds of dwellings—for both the living and the dead, animals and humans—I’m struck by what a complex type of object the house is. Unlike many other objects, both its inside and outside are important. It affects both its surroundings and its contents. Simon, you write that “das Haus besitzt den Bewohner,” and remind us that the house is far from a passive object. We can use the house in different ways, but the house also uses us. (In that way, it resembles language.) The word “house” is also both a noun and a verb. Maybe that’s why Le Corbusier described it as “a machine for living.” The houses in your works look more like living beings than machines—sometimes expectant and welcoming, sometimes hostile, sometimes melancholically longing, as if they would rather be elsewhere; at other times, enigmatically ambiguous.
It is often said that the high-modernist building in glass and steel incarnates the Enlightenment ideals of reason and openness. But when I look at your works, Esther, I wonder if it wasn’t equally inspired by the birdcage.
Martin Heidegger began an essay in 1951 by asking whether we can truly dwell, whether we even possess that capability. I think we’ve generally become even worse at dwelling since he posed the question. That’s because homes are increasingly becoming less “heimlich.” Nowadays this happens in more sophisticated ways than through physical materials and design. What happens on the outside continuously flows in, and what happens on the inside flows out. As I write this to you, I grow increasingly unsure whether I’m truly where I think I am: at home.
How could we let it happen? Perhaps because we wanted to become free? But we didn’t.
Freedom is a big subject. And yet it can’t be avoided—it’s what your works gravitate toward with their motifs: Simon’s houses, the cages, Kyle’s walls and escape routes, Esther’s ambivalent rooms, Eduard’s gravestone... You can be imprisoned in many different ways. You can be trapped in your own thoughts and actions. You can be trapped in your own home like a bird or mouse in a cage. You can also be imprisoned in your time.
Freedom is often described as simply being independent—independent of others, and perhaps especially independent of place. Maybe that’s why the technocrats fantasize about leaving Earth and colonizing other planets? Maybe that’s also why the world’s leaders work so systematically to devastate nature—to somehow signal that they can manage without it, that they are completely free?
But maybe freedom is something else than a state of independence? Maybe it can be an event, something temporary. One of your paintings, Eduard, depicts the view from a rooftop in Berlin. When I, despite my fear of heights, have occasionally given in to the temptation to climb onto a rooftop, I’ve always been rewarded with an intense feeling of freedom. Partly because I defied my fear. But also, I think, because you are not really supposed to be on the roof. You are just a temporary visitor in the wrong place. In that moment, you are free. But still just as dependent as usual.
Sincerely,
Jens
Letter from Jens Soneryd to Esther Zahel, Simon Modersohn, Eduard Kiesmann, Kyle Fitzpatrick. Flickering Chambers. 2 May–31 May. Åplus, Berlin.
Å+ FLICKERING CHAMBERS.pdf
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