SOFT IMAGES

With the following artist:
Eike König.

text by Eike König,

As an exercise in concentration, my grandfather ‘recommended’ that I tried tufting rugs and he procured the necessary materials for me. That constant repetition of the tufting process, that slow evolution of a theme and the translation of a motif into a pixeled graphics file are destined to achieve various educational ends that seemed important to him as part of the education of young people, in preparation for their future lives. I personally hated it. Not the exercise in itself but the implicit pressure and the coercion associated with it. He even assessed and graded my results like a school project. The quality of the tufts, the theme and the statement it made. That constant assessment and the act of rewarding or punishing my performance at that young age made for a constant restlessness, produced the kind of personality that was constantly comparing itself with others and permanently doubting whether its own idea was good enough or could stand up to other people’s criticism. It took a great deal of personal effort and work to liberate myself from this pressure and to develop a measure of indifference. Not every piece of work that I do needs to measure up in that fabricated incentive system, whatever that might mean. After all, being able to refuse is something that we only learn to do after a number of painful experiences. However, the interesting thing about this is that refusing to say no does also make room for a new kind of yes, a yes for ourselves.

It was quite a few years before I was able to address myself to rugs again. The tufting gun played a large part in this and the subject also fitted in with the context of my show. After all, the dawn of the Industrial Revolution marked the transition from manual work to its mechanical equivalent. A technical extension of our organic bodies and their natural limitations. And yet a certain physical input is required, and it does take a certain amount of time to produce a rug of that size. On top of this, people tend to be plagued by doubts about whether the motif will actually work and often think about abandoning the process.

And so, Ich StrEIKE is a very personal piece of work. A kind of soft safe space measuring 120x160cm. It is designed as a wall hanging but one that is portable and that can be unrolled anywhere. Just like the imaginary HOLA, that place where players are ‘safe’ and cannot be caught. This peaceful kind of strike as a protest can be conducted in both private and public spaces and its purpose is perfectly obvious. The person sitting on this rug is on strike, is refusing to do what he or she is told or expected to do. They decline to follow certain procedures, question the latter and instead renegotiate them. We can find this irritating and annoying, but he/she has every right to do so; this represents a call for dialogue.