English

May 13th, 2008, 11:09 pm Marjolijn

I travel the world on paper and canvas. My experiences find repercussions in images. Since 1979 I have been reading the work of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and what others have written about it; I have also visited the places where Nietzsche stayed.

I draw on these experiences. My hand follows my thinking seismographically.

In January 2000 the series “denkbaar” arose out of my immersion in Nietzsche’s correspondence. Articulating what’s going through your mind means testing words and images against each other. Through identifying with the correspondents by copying out parts of their letters, I brought to mind the places that could be imagined.

The result was woven mats of words and images, veils of verbal concoctions behind which the landscape appears as a loaded place or shelter. The correspondence that most spoke to me was that between Marie Baumgartner (1831-1897) and Nietzsche. When at the age of 24 he became a professor of philology in Basel, she was the mother of his most talented pupil, Adolf. On many a Saturday afternoon Nietzsche visited Marie Baumgartner in the study of her house in Lörrach. A correspondence also arose between them. After Marie, who was bilingual, offered to translate Nietzsche’s work into French, he shared more and more of his mental world with her. Their letters evidence a strong intellectual impulse, affection, fellowship, recklessness and confusion. When Nietzsche set off for Italy in 1876 in the company of another maternal friend, Malwida von Meysenbug, and a male friend, Paul Ree, to take the cure in the hills around Naples, Marie stayed behind in Lörrach and continued to work on her translations.

In thanks, Nietzsche and his friends picked a bouquet of wildflowers on their daily walk in the hills and sent it to Marie in Lörrach. Her whole house smelled of Italy, she said, and it made her long to be among kindred spirits.

Sitting on sheets of drawing paper on which I copied out Marie Baumgartner’s letters with a dip pen, I made them my own. I stayed several times in Villa Rubinacci, the same pension in Sorrento where Nietzsche’s company had lodged. From there, I looked for a little road along which they must have walked, the Via Campagnano, and picked a similar wildflower bouquet on the same day 125 years later. Back in my studio, I let the dried flowers tell their story, and took us back, in my mind, to Italy, among kindred spirits. I did this by drawing, painting, cutting, stapling, and folding the drawings around myself:
incorporare.
The seelenreiche Brief (“soulful letter”, as Nietzsche called one he received from Marie) brought forth “Giftpflanze”, which led to an “étude des sources”:
an inescapable need to be swallowed up in intense, revealing handwriting, in
the hope of finding like-mindedness.

Marjolijn van den Assem
april 2007

My work is about imaginary journeys. With all my might I am searching for blissful, safe places. Where tree trunks light up, rocks are hollowed out by water, panoramic views loom up and flowers blossom. That is where I want to abide in thought, put down my stool to rest and look around, even though I know that nothing is what it seems. Often, my drawings recount my painful attempts to find the way to this place, sometimes I draw or paint the discovered place itself, rendering a view of the view.

My recent drawings are based on parts of letters of more or less well-known women acquainted with Nietzsche, which express a longing but also reveal the impossibility of like-mindedness. Superimposed on these text fragments I make drawings of places where real encounters between the correspondents could have taken place: the landscape as a witness. It becomes a search for the scope of language and drawing.

During the selection of quotations and copying letters, the places where the text may have been created, loom up. Through the action of drawing I can give an account of the line of thought. Seismic reaction or realistic Representation, through the interweaving of text and drawing into a plaiting texture my interpretation of longing is taking shape. Making word and image my own, adding, manipulating and making value judgements, I write, draw, paint, staple (using the stapler as an instrument of power) and cut an attempt to create kinship.

Marjolijn van den Assem
December 2002