Within this pandemic crisis there is a moment of wonder and clarity. We humans are not close to immortality and total control over this planet. In fact we are moving away from it as we destroy our own basis of life and the one of every other species. Our achievements through the revolutions of the last two centuries have given us a feeling of invincibility, but now this feeling becomes shaky, globalized economy is falling into pieces and all of a sudden we find ourselves locked up in quarantine confronted with only our flickering mind and nothing to distract from it. Our hectic lives suddenly come to a complete standstill. And in this big vacuum we start to understand that there is a dark and overwhelming fear, an incessant feeling of falling, of being disconnected from the world around us. Donna Tartt put it best, saying that there is a „loneliness that separates every living creature from every other living creature“.
There is this space between the notes that remains inexplicable, the silence between the rumble of time, there is this echo of perpetual collision, a slight and subtle but undeniable tremor between ourselves and the big Other. We humans try to understand everything, which is to verbalize everything, but language itself - as Lacan says - does not belong to us, is not a part of us. We are radically alone with our very perception of the world.
But between ourselves and the big Other there is a narrow gap called the Real that we lose as soon as we learn to speak and that we continuously try to regain ever after. We search for it in lovers or careers or material objects, but nothing can ever truly replace it.
The Real is the space before words, before control, the space of dreams and the subconscious. It is the space where the Sublime can emerge, where in small fragmented glimpses real beauty can occur. 
This work is an investigation of vulnerability and the loneliness between all living beings, a work created in the quest for the Real.

What doesn’t fit into a story, what doesn’t have a story

This is an experimental photographic conversation between my friend Nadja Ellinger and me during the time of corona.
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Being in isolation is a strong limitation of space: The world is closing in, to a few square meters of my bedroom, taking me hostage and restricting my encounters to online zoom meetings.
But while this claustrophobic situation might lock us in a limited physical space, we still have the opportunity to create new, imaginary spaces. Though divided between the distance between Berlin and Munich, Nadja and I are opening-up this transitional space, by exchanging one image every day as an answer to the previous picture.
The apertures of our cameras are creating a rapture in the border between the inside and the outside, like a door to the forbidden outside world. So even though taken in different cities, the images begin to exist in the same fictional realm, creating an impossible narrative connecting our both lives. (Text by Nadja Ellinger)
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There are two narrative threads, one started by Nadja, one started by me. 
This one was started by Nadja.

The space between - thread II

This is an experimental photographic conversation between my friend Nadja Ellinger and me during the time of corona.
​
Being in isolation is a strong limitation of space: The world is closing in, to a few square meters of my bedroom, taking me hostage and restricting my encounters to online zoom meetings.
But while this claustrophobic situation might lock us in a limited physical space, we still have the opportunity to create new, imaginary spaces. Though divided between the distance between Berlin and Munich, Nadja and I are opening-up this transitional space, by exchanging one image every day as an answer to the previous picture.
The apertures of our cameras are creating a rapture in the border between the inside and the outside, like a door to the forbidden outside world. So even though taken in different cities, the images begin to exist in the same fictional realm, creating an impossible narrative connecting our both lives. (Text by Nadja Ellinger)
​
​
There are two narrative threads, one started by Nadja, one started by me. 
This one was started by me.

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Nikolai Marcinowski