May the circle remain unbroken, 2005
16mm film, wooden walls, radio, collages

In the 16 mm film of the installation May the circle remain unbroken a solitary hut next to a lake is portrayed from different angles.  The cabin represents the archetypical retreat for the dropout, a site of individual, anarchic freedom. As a place beyond social obligations for thoughts and actions the hut has served as a starting point for people like H.D.Thoreau* or the Unabomber** to develop a fundamental critique of society in both, word (Thoreau) and deed (Unabomber).
Within this area of conflict the installation suggests its own fictional propaganda movement, displaying cryptic fragments that appear to be connected to an unknown person and the hut.

These fragments are: maps that have been altered to visual manifestos, and which contain text passages taken from the manifesto of the Unabomber, the poems of Ralph Waldo Emersons, or the lyrics of psychedelic bands from the 60ies; a hissing radio which emits a monotonous voice*** from time to time, speculating about Aristocracy, Truth, Nature and the relationship between the individual and the society. A reworked etching depicts the process of coining, which could along with the radio and the maps, be retrieved from the hut, that is captured on the film, without revealing anything about its interior.

*H.D. Thoreau 1817 - 1862, probably the first 19th century dropout. Moves on 4th July 1845 to the woods of Concord Massachusetts for 2 years. During his time at the lake he starts writing the book „Walden (A life in the woods)” in which he chronicles his experiment in self-sufficiency. Besides the descriptions of his self-determined life in Nature, “Walden” also contains a harsh critique of society's increasingly materialistic value system. After several revisions the book is finally published in 1854.

**Unabomber, actually named Theodore John Kaczynski, born May 22nd 1942, mathematician, who withdraws from university life to a hut in the woods of Montana in 1969 where he lives until his arrest on April 3rd 1996. Kaczynski is a fundamental critic of the technological society, who sent mail bombs to various people over a period of almost 18 years, killing 3 and wounding 29. On September 19th 1995 the Washington Post publishes his manifesto: “The industrial Society and its future”, because Kaczynski had offered to stop the bombings in return. After a hint from Kaczynskis brother the FBI manages to arrest him. He was the target of the FBI's most expensive manhunt in history. Kaczynski is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole in the Federal ADX Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.

***These fragments are taken from speeches held by the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1867 –1959) to his students. Wright lived most of his life in a self designed resort named Taliesin, which was first situated in the rural Wisconsin countryside and later in Scottsdale, Arizona. In 1932 Frank and Olgivanna Lloyd Wright established the Taliesin Fellowship, a self-sustaining community of apprentices and architects who worked and lived with Wright, and where addressed by his Sunday morning monologues.