2016
Print on paper, crystallized sodium tetraborate, resin, acrylic box 51 x 36 x 5 cm
edition of 1 each
This series of crystallized book pages form an ice-archived set of material that can be interpreted as fictitious found diaries. The quotes, taken from the last sentences or particular epitaph from science fiction novels from the 19th and 20th centuries, frame our journey with particular psychological postures.
““Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.” So goes the epitaph from Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. It is also one of the passages that Maridet has chosen for a series of crystallised book pages with last sentences culled from a handful of science fiction classics, including The Time Machine (H. G. Wells), Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury) and Solaris (Stanislaw Lem).
Returning to the Vonnegut epitaph, recovered here, as it were, from the permafrost after some great cataclysm has befallen the planet, it could just as well be referring to the picturesque travelogue, which in all its illusory completeness seduces us into believing in a sublimity that is devoid of pain.”
(Nadim Abbas, Blindspot Gallery exhibition catalogue, 2016)
“Now everybody — “
“South-south-west, south, southeast, east. …”
“When we reach the city.”
“I know nothing and I persisted in the faith that the time of cruel miracles was not past.”
“Everything was beautiful, nothing hurt.”
“And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers— shrivelled now, and brown and at and brittle—to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.”
“For there can be neither end nor beginning.”
“South-south-west, south, southeast, east. …”
