IMPACT
It is November when Impact is born. The result of a restless search for emotions, goals, meaning, pure coincidence and clear, precise and strategic planning.
It is November when Impact is born. The result of a restless search for emotions, goals, meaning, pure coincidence, clear, precise and strategic planning.
Winter, if you can still call it that, has already arrived, the house needs to be heated again, there is a lack of daylight, a lack of contrasts and reflections.
It announces itself quietly, this zero line. The absence of any ups and downs, the absence of highs and lows. Always around this time, always in winter, after an eventful summer, an intense fall. The plan now would be to smother this time in work, but this year is different.
The work of the last few years has been too intense, too much, too ruthless, the daily grind has drained me. I've given my all and received practically nothing of value in return, apart from the lingering feeling of emptiness and recurring disappointment after a success.
I am fed up with the corporation, the cheap politics in expensive shoes, company cars more valuable than entire departments. The preference given to individuals, not because of their qualifications, but because of the right connections, the right contacts, the right touring skis, the right false friends. The eternal repetition of mistakes, based on the inertia and ignorance of individuals, the pointing, pleading, begging for improvement, for the straw.
The commitment, the overtime, the more.
An operation slows me down to zero, pain, bed rest, the knee. Now it's all I can think about. In just three days, I have written down all the resentment, the anger, the pain, made a list and started the process of closure, mentally quitting my job now before I put it in writing in January.
Immediately this threatening calm returns, directly from an emotional up and down to the aforementioned zero line. It doesn't take long for me to realize once again that I have always avoided this calm by working, now I have forgotten how to deal with calm in general.
Instead of work, I need a new outlet, a quick way out. Experience waves again, feel something, feel myself. When the first pain-free attempts at walking, turn into short walks around the house and then degenerate into hour-long sessions on an ergometer in the basement, I realize that training is no longer a balance, no outlet, no option.
I struggle uneasily with this peace until I am asked during a phone call why I no longer take photos. I will be forever grateful to her for this question, this nudge. Anticipation, the zero line is interrupted by a brief high wave.
A soft click in my head, I have to go to the attic. The big clear-out, four days of dust, furniture, memories, good and bad. Fourteen bright blue garbage bags in the rain, it's getting empty under the roof, it's getting lighter in my head.
Every single container, every aluminum container, every neatly labeled plastic box is opened, the camera, every single lens, every light shaper, filter, every adapter, every tripod is unpacked, checked for function, and cleaned. The attic becomes a studio - just like in the cheap stories of my former competitors “when they started” as if this had ever really happened.
A perfectly preserved 1:18 scale model car stands on the table in front of me, Rosso Corsa color.
A chance purchase at a jumble sale, the 1969 design has convinced me to spend almost thirty euros on it. My thoughts revolve around the idea of depicting the vehicle as realistically as possible, to take away the viewer's understanding, the certainty that it is a model car, to alienate, to arouse interest.
The goal is achieved far too quickly, in contrast to reality, a small softbox from above is all it takes and the car looks like it does in the brochure
The review on the screen brings me mercilessly back down to earth: the paint is far too rough, the spokes of the car far too thick in relation to the rim, the deep-drawn plastic is cloudy here and there, the windshield shows waves.
Even before the light setting has been dismantled, the pictures are already in the digital wastepaper basket. Again no valve, no project, again this zero line. But I can't let go of the idea, even if I don't get a single meter further.
The solution is already lying two floors below the studio without me even knowing about it. Weighing four hundred grams, C45+ steel, a finely grained wooden handle, Japanese characters. More days of thinking, drawing concepts, losing myself in details, perspectives, line thicknesses, hatching to distract myself from the fact that I have no real idea. Restlessness, worries.
Chopping wood in the workshop. A coffee break in between. Enjoying the exhaustion, the sweat, the satisfaction of what has been achieved. The axe in your hand and the realization that everything now makes sense:
Impact
For five days I set up a new setting, precisely arranged, draped accurately, leveled with lasers, yellow neon tape on the floor with notes, characteristic values on it, tripods bolted together and positioned accuracy, flash heads fixed at an angle. A new standard for mass production is created - an
an assembly line, just like Ford.
It's a quiet Sunday. What is happening outside is no longer the center of my thoughts when the first impact occurs. Within a few milliseconds, a classic car from automotive history is deformed into a wreck.
Metal is cold-deformed, supporting structures break through, struts burst, paint chips off, the short, sharp bang as everything flies across the room.
Hours after the impact, emotions, relief, joy, but also astonishment at the awe and hesitation before the first swing with the Japanese forestry axe, which seems so comfortable with its new task.
More models follow. Classics, concept cars, legends from movies, bolides from modern times, smashed, broken up, torn apart and destroyed. The pleasure of feeling again, of experiencing waves and peaks again increases. I want more, I feel again.
Days pass and the number of neatly labeled storage boxes, each containing a destroyed vehicle and its parts, increases. The Ford assembly line is extended with backgrounds that match the paintwork of the vehicles. Even more flashes, more details, more perfection, more emotion.
Experiments with powder and water follow, various axes are tried out, I chop, hit and divide. Feelings, a mixture of power and awe. Destroying an object deliberately and purposefully fascinates me anew each time and I am now certain that this is my project, my outlet.
After more than four months of work, I am now sitting in my attic in front of my art book and am happy with my journey. I have created something absolutely unique and reinvented myself. The Impact project saved me.
After sweeping up countless fragments in different colors, fragments of rims of every vintage and trend, broken mirrors, steering wheels, shock absorbers and plastic discs from the floor, the setting is dismantled and stowed away.
I look at the block of semi-transparent boxes, a good forty centimetres high and one meter twenty long, each containing a vehicle, centered on adhesive tape with the year of manufacture and specifications. I feel honest pride and a great sense of optimism.
Satisfied, I turn to my left and see this wall of new, still sealed packages, full of real engine parts in dark brown oil paper, fuse covers, distributor housings, carburetors, intake manifolds, cylinders, the new project. Even more freedom, thinking, feeling.
Thank you