It is the moment when one is liberated from the drudgery and compulsion to work.

Interviewee: Christoph Schäfer

I believe that the moment where one is liberated from the drudgery and compulsion to work is a moment in which it is possible to reinvent your life and play yourself into certain situations, or indeed to create them. I think that this is where one can speak about transforming life into poetry. What I find interesting is that the city is part of this. The city as the place where condensing (Verdichtung) takes place, which in German, unlike the French, even has a wonderful etymological root: the Dichte (density) and the Dichtung (poetry). For me this is very much an aesthetic moment. The revolution in it, well it’s naturally long underway, but I would nevertheless identify it in the period in which we are now living. That is, from the peak of the industrial age, from the moment when the complete industrialisation of the cities had almost managed to eliminate the city and turn it into an appendage of the factory. As I see it, right in this moment the city returns. The loss of the city is bemoaned the most in the 1960s, counter models surface, from the beatniks to the subcultures, and this increasingly broadens its reach. All the changes taking place presently resonate with this. While I believe that the possibilities do exist, the chances of actually realising these counter models influenced from the 1960s are however minute.