K1  1997

Picture gallery (2)

The audience waits for the speaker in a darkened auditorium. A deaf and blind girl is taken to the platform under the spotlight. The girl puts on surgical gloves and performs the text in sign language. At the moment when she indicates that she is going to repeat the text, two consecutive flashes blaze behind her back and blind the audience. The girl repeats the speech. When the speech is concluded, she takes off the gloves, leaves them on the platform and leaves the hall, helped by the attendant. In the lobby the audience finds the performed text written in Braille:

"This ridiculously theatrical and pathetic situation is only a necessity in which you are involved. It is my privilege to convey to you in the least adequate manner what is constantly devastating and permanently burdening me. This speech will surely not change anything. It is only certain that it will remind us of what we already know. The manner in which this is conveyed releases both you and me from momentarily needless responsibility. We do not have to think now, in this moment, about what I am talking about. The responsibility is due later. That is why everything looks like a deception and any possibility of rational communication is cancelled. Thereby our egos are also cancelled as well as the possibility to judge it immediately. The willful disturbance of any communication is what I do because I expect you to feel with your body, eyes, skin, feet, palms of your hands. I want you to feel. To ask yourselves: what has really happened? What has really been said? You will find the answer by yourselves when you come to somebody whom you have always thought in need of help and find out that he or she is the only one that can help you."