Achim and Bettina




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Achim and Bettina, digital photograph, 2016


...Looking up from Achim’s legs, a space appears between his left cheek and the wide curve of the back of Bettina’s head and neck. It is a sort of warped architectural space: it frames, yet it is open; it is still, yet it makes the movement of the leaves and branches behind it very apparent; it is split, yet it is also a point of convergence; it is a hidden space, yet when you get close it is utterly explicit – it is at once homely and inhuman. These contradictions mirror this public sculpture’s larger strengths. It is a still point in a busy park that seems to direct the flow through it. The sculpture perhaps even lends drama to, or “stages,” the daily movements of passers-by. In doing so it gives a ghostly type of importance to the unthought, everyday traversings of the park. If you wish to step out of the thoroughfares criss-crossing the park, so as to orbit this object, you will automatically interrupt how people move past. You will generate a new laminar flow around the sculpture itself and your experience of it – you and the sculpture become a ball bearing falling through the liquid of other people and things rushing past...



This was a photograph and text work developed for Response to a Request, an online publishing project by Rebecca O'Dwyer.
The project invites writers and artists to produce a text on a particular image. These texts are then published online for a fortnight, then they disappear, making room for the next image/text contribution to appear.

A small sample of the text I produced for this is above.
The sculpture in question is Bettina und Achim von Arnim by Michael Klein, 1996.


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