....after the first couple of days, I knew that I had arrived. What I was looking for was here. I simply needed to enter the streets and allow the mystery to unfold. The whole world was here and provided me with everything I needed to perceive myself as the one I was. None of the things I had learned and experienced until then could help me here. New York got out of me what I hadn’t even dreamed of being. It’s a risky thing to make your skin permeable. Membrane and catalysis.
And New York seems to be the catalyzer. A condensator, an accelerator of reactions both ways. Hights and lows are launched into space. The pressure turns into an endurance test.
I am at the predetermined breaking point. I get down into the street, the heat makes me forget what I came here for. The next moment an overwhelming thunderstorm. The ground below my feet melts into a torrent. I have to keep my balance not to be swept away. A mix of awe and terror. I lose control. Above and Below play cruel tricks on me. I gasp for air. Monkeys infest my eardrums. Ash turns to mud in my mouth. Wild boars eat the last scraps of paper from my hands. Elephants collect the broken glass from my skin with their trunks. Before I understand what has happened, the torrent becomes larger, calmer, almost peaceful. I have survived and nothing seems as it did before. The ocean connected to the waves inside of me.
A friend wrote to me, “New York is like the passionate lover you never manage to tear yourself away from, and who’ll never marry you.“
She didn’t know that this torrent would come and sweep me away, devour me, and spit me out again, if I was lucky.
Metamorphosis.
Moulting.
And that gradually, I will have become the lover myself.
--Taken from "View York: Nine Perceptions"
published and edited by °CLAIR Gallery and Kerber Verlag