Palast der Produktion 1st Viewing

*Rebbeca Horn, Weserburg Bremen

The nights are very quiet. Except for the trains and the old lady down the lane who keeps the TV far too loud. Sometimes teens run past the house. They always run, they whisper and they laugh. It’s sneakers on tar, tap tap tap tap. And then it’s quiet again and finally the old lady turns off the TV. Some windows are still lit. Rooftop windows, I read people behind them.

During the day everything depends on the weather. When it’s  sunny there’s color and flowers. When the sky is grey the flowers are gone. They turn to plastic behind those West German windows; windows that are solid, more like walls really. We talk about that a lot: windows. There is no getting in, there’s no getting out, the curtains have been starched. A display. Displaced. This is your place.  The windows facing the street are never open, except when they get cleaned. Each house has a small yard, some have a garden. The windows towards the yard and the terrace doors are left open in spring, in summer, until The Fall.  Are we were safer here, are we different people? I guess those who think evil comes from the outside certainly feel this way.

No matter what the weather is like, there are always two of my neighbors standing in front of their houses. One is a former sailor with faded tattoos and a restlessness in movements. The other one does not really talk to me . He just nods and I get the impression that everything in the world already has been said anyway. Every morning they smoke two or three cigarettes. Occasionally the smell is the first thing I notice when I wake up.

Next door lives a boy who, despite turning cooler by the minute, sings pop songs really loudly and really off-tone. He and his mum take all my packages when I’m at work. I pick them up, we have a chat. The boy says: “You get so many parcels!”

On late afternoons my child and I, we play Fussball with mostly Turkish kids at the playground at the end of the street. They have adopted us since the day we talked about Berlin Kreuzberg and that we moved from there. “Running can only get you so far,” I recall a girl saying.

During the nights when we sleep in the attic the television tower hovers outside the window. A peregrine falcon couple has been nesting there for years. I read an article about them, but I have never seen them.

Before sleep falls upon us, we wait for bats. And the child asks: “Did we take that, too? The Fernsehturm?”

Harriersand.

* Listen

(I don’t even remember which city. But I do remember you. We were quite taken.)

[INTERFACES, Lüneburg.]