All You Can Feel

There is no such thing as the drug. Drugs exist in all colors and shapes. The charts of attributes the word drug entails range from natural, chemical, hard, soft, stimulating to consolidating, sometimes deadly. Yet the semantic instructions to separate the medical from the mundane or the endogenous seem artificially constrained. What combines the drugs is their index: escapism, excess, stabilization. Finding truth, living the dream, last but not least: freedom (its’ illusion). A golden ribbon connects the promise of drugs to the promise of love, art, religion. With one decisive difference: effectivity. What drugs deliver is condition-at-call, transcendence-to-go. Having said that, the drug is also an interlaced allegory on what we call normal. Allegedly, the convention can only be fully understood in the moment you go beyond, when you transgress it. In that sense drugs amount to cultural history. In the Fall of Man it is a substance external to man, which seduces her. Eva understood, “that the tree was good to eat and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and tempting because it made wise”, it says in the Genesis, which foreshadows the dialectics of drugs between the dissolution of boundaries and its following sanction. By the way, since the thing with the apple the tree of life is guarded by hybrid creatures carrying flaming swords. Let’s be honest: That is itself a bad trip. Later drugs were connected to the sound of the revolution. In his experimental report “On Hashish” Walter Benjamin, the silent pioneer of messianic Marxism, traced a linguistically mediated vision of redemption. And Benjamins political opponent, the wood kid Ernst Jünger sharpened his thoughts with the use of diverse substances (Jünger digged Acid!). His work “Annäherungen. Drogen und Rausch” mirrors his spiritual fatalism, the search for some primal (UR-)force, which he would later turn against liberalism.

All this can be regarded as the formative layer, a layer upon which Sarah Schönfelds work on drugs – All You Can Feel – unfold their efficacy. When Sarah first told me about her work, which was the beginning of this year, I wasn’t sure what to think. Hearing what she told me about the process sounded quite abstract, though she described it as being quite simple: “What I did was to mix the chemical components of photography and drugs. That means: I took the monochrome surface of developed negatives and threw a liquid drug substance on it.” The later interaction between the photo emulsion and the drug has produced incredible shapes and colors, which, lets say, behaved in some ways. “Basically, I used all substances I was interested in due to their club context or historical meaning. For example I took Ketamine or Speed from the club scene, LSD or Heroine as historical reverences. Then I went to through the normal photo process and got prints of the negatives.”

The outcome is a collection of uncanny images: circular patterns, which reminded me of strange, abyssal creatures from the ground of the sea. Watching those images against the backdrop of drugs creates the concentrated magic of mimesis: You actually start to believe that what to can see in those images correlates to the effect the visualized drug has on you, regardless if this imagination stems from personal experience, generally acquired knowledge or simple intuition. In interviews Sarah names two biographic experiences laying the ground for this project. 1. Her father contracted from schizophrenia in the age of 19. For Sarah, he was just always on drugs. 2. Sarah worked in Panoramabar for years, which gave her the opportunity to develop some sort of kaleidoscopic awareness towards different sorts of high – simply by watching.

If any of this made you curious, you should come by at Berghain-Kantine tonight around 8pm. The flamboyant artist Naneci Yurdagül will dedicate a performance for the official publication of Sarahs catalogue of All you can feel. Well, and yes, some of those residents will also be there. Sarah, we’ll miss you in your old job. But your new ways of making us FEEL is much more stimulating.