CLEAR MOONS at night W/ BJÖRN KNAPP

The fact that I can’t even comprehend how much I don’t know, don’t see, don’t get to experience in the world — especially at night — just so I can sleep. How much life there is outside and inside, in the dusty attic, beneath the floorboards of the old house, inside my flimsy[1]  mattress. It’s just the big, conceivable things that I cannot see and which I know I cannot see. The things I am capable of seeing under certain conditions (the curvature of the horizon is not among them). Sometimes the sun, the moon, the stars. Rarely the clouds from above, but never without assistance. In Vogelflüge, Flusser writes: The bird needs not conquer the space, it exists within it. I am beneath the space and look inside it, if I want to.

I used to dream that I could fly; so realistic were these dreams that today I’d say I am better at flying than driving a car, which I was never good at in my dreams anyway. I dreamt of flying as a physical experience, looking down at the treetops from above. With the permanent possibility of falling.

I’ve given it some thought and have come to the conclusion that there should be four moons. Just to be safe and because four is a good number.

As I flew and looked down at the treetops, I saw the earth, the land. Descending from air to land. What is a landscape? When does something (also) become a landscape? How small, barren, how false and artificial can it be? Can flesh become one? Or emptiness, or waste?

Do I have to be able to set foot on it?

I don’t mean just myself, I am brainstorming for everyone’s sake! In my dreams, I wasn’t a bird, I remained in my own body.

When I painted, I always used to think that a picture should be like a nice swamp full of flowers — or even better and worse: quicksand. Viewers should be drawn to it, like magic (I was told back then that, in an art context, the word ‘magic' should be used with caution or best not at all. Since then I have treated it with the utmost respect). And so they should be able to enter it, like  a swamp or quicksand. Only then, when it’s too late, should they realise that they fell into a trap — a pleasant and warm trap, one they didn’t mind sinking into. It should be a gentle sinking — like coming home on a winter’s day or briefly fainting in the summer heat — but also a consistent and irreversible one. That’s how I imagined painting; not the activity itself, but its purpose.

Today I cannot say how far or close I got.

Once, I dreamt I flew all the way to the end of the sky and bumped my head. They tried pulling me back down by my feet.

You don’t need much for a landscape, a sky or water. Sometimes it’s just a an accidental line or a brushstroke on a scrap of fabric or the wall. It takes a lot to imagine air as material or colour as space, or maybe it doesn’t, maybe it’s more important to be the first to fall into your own trap.

Maybe painting doesn’t need meaning, just as landscape doesn’t need land and not everything needs a label. Before you begin — with anything — it is important to make space and, before you know it, there’s debris and traces and remnants to start from.

I think seven moons would be better than four, but I’m not sure whom I should bargain that with. I’m bored, but most of the time I only think that when in reality I’m actually overwhelmed.

The moon and the sea.

The tides, which unlike time are not invented or artificially divided like land and countries. I don’t understand them, again: magic. I too wish to be dominated, by the sea, and above me: moons, several of them.

To be dominated also means to be at the mercy of, but it is not the same. And I didn’t know that the moon belongs to NASA.

The question of whether a painting stored somewhere in an attic could be an artwork, even though no one has ever seen it, is illustrated in my mind as such: the painting is propped upside down against the wall of a wood-panelled attic, coated in dust, the full moon gleaming through the window, quietly illuminating the secluded piece.

It is always night, and it is always a masterpiece.

Who takes responsibility for all the paintings that are none — bad, unfinished, forgotten? All the attempts to determine the direction yourself, the paintings full of trapped, failed attempts, figments of the imagination. Are they also illuminated by the moon?

The story I don’t want to write, but would like to.

For fear of sounding like a cliché: the best stories are those that hurt to write, like the paintings we are afraid of getting caught in.

In my dreams, it’s either forgetting my trousers or I am flying.

Shame and overview don’t work together.

I always get the feeling that the moon has something to do with me, like the rose that stood in my path the other day, almost begging to be taken. The flower seemed so perfect that I grew suspicious, and when I noticed its pristine thorns, I knew it was a trap.

When I was younger—I was young for a long time and I’m glad it’s over—I often watched a film that was cheesy and kitschy, but based on an interesting idea: a second Earth appears in the sky, next to the moon. Attempts to contact and communicate with this second world are successful and everything suggests that it is not only a parallel world, but actually a replica of our own.

The philosopher Christian Weidemann also speaks of possible “space-time-figments that exist parallel to our universe”, so there exists at least one other reality in which I did something that I didn’t do here and vice versa. According to him, however, this parallel world exists in a parallel universe, which means it is not possible that these two realities ever meet or overlap.

Another self; one I hope didn’t make certain choices, didn’t choose certain paths and didn’t have to experience certain things. Another self that will never know how much I want to know who they are. Untouched by those very experiences.

And it’s not because of the Kitsch (if you don’t like Kitsch, get out of the kitchen) that the film is bad, but because of this: just as the future is most often imagined to be a positive one, new worlds and time travel are commonly envisioned as places where something worse is prevented, where we encounter an optimised version of ourselves and the world, for an even better future, a purer self. One wonders whether some people would still be alive if, an hour later or earlier, this or that had happened, if a malfunctioned cell division hadn’t led to devastating consequences; whether, had I not gone there that day, I wouldn’t have suffered this or met that person, which led to that … but one does not wonder — or at least I have not done so until now — who or what would be missing today instead.

Had someone not woken up paralysed on the left side, not crossed the seemingly empty street in a moment of carelessness or if I had taken the same train I always did that day a man injured several people with an axe on the S6 … Life does not owe me, nor anyone else, a good time.

Just as the future owes us nothing, nor the universe, nor our children … it is already one of the greatest improbabilities that I (of all people) should be sitting here today—a fact I usually face with ingratitude and one I am only seldom at peace with.

Google can explain how the moon influences high and low tides, but not why. And the moon does have something to do with me.

The objects, people, spaces are only shifted a tiny bit to depict something new, something unique, to become part of a subject, pictorial space, a story—autonomous, indispensable.

Negotiations with your own body, yet not quite. Continuing the argument in your dreams that never even happened in reality and waking up angry.

What if I could see the moon again in my dreams, in games, in art, before anyone ever set foot on it? Before it became property, a mass to be conquered, instead of an infinite possibility for a new world?

The change would happen within myself, not in the moon: I would no longer know that it had already been walked on.

It would require a cataclysmic forgetting.

Perhaps this is the reason why writing is so exhausting, also physically: to imagine being someone who did XY instead of Z that specific day, who wouldn’t have gone down that path but a different one — to imagine not being myself with the same implicitness that I am indeed myself. And perhaps that is the reason why painting saps the energy from within: to see something on the 751st canvas, as insubstantial as anything else, and to pursue it in such a way that it then exists, like seeing something for the first time, something one has never seen—or seen a thousand times over without registering it.

To change, rethink or question even a single aspect, I must first locate it and then step outside my perspective to consider it from all angles — for which I must first be aware of my starting point. To recognise one’s own gaze as not neutral.

I need distance, room to act, I must know where I stand and where I came from.

Art is a sport.

It is a struggle for the liberation of attributions, a transition from a loose accumulation of visible things to a coherent snippet of one of the possible worlds—an expansion of surfaces and words into a space where life can be lived anew.

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Klare Monde am Abend is an exhibition by artist Björn Knapp and artist and writer Thea Mantwill, held in autumn 2024 at KM_159. Björn Knapp showed paintings, while Thea Mantwill presented a painting on carpet, which also functioned as part of an installation in which she read the text aloud.

Björn Knapp was born in Bensheim in 1988. He studied at the Karlsruhe Academy of Fine Arts under Prof. Gustav Kluge and Prof. Marcel van Eeden, and at the Düsseldorf Art Academy under Prof. Andreas Schulze, graduating as a master student under Prof. Thomas Scheibitz in 2020. He has since exhibited at venues including the Salon der Gegenwart 2020 in Hamburg, as part of the Vordemberge-Gildewart Scholarship at KIT Düsseldorf, and at NEW POSITIONS at Art Cologne. His works are held in numerous collections, including the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, the Museum Kunstpalast collection, and the art collection of the Deutsche Bundesbank Frankfurt. He lives and works in Düsseldorf.

Photos by: Jana Buch

Text & Concept by: Thea Mantwill

Translation into English by: Rebecca Grundmann