Volker Gerling
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| April 2023 |
| Dear Friends of Flipbook Cinema, "Actually, the walker is not at home in space, but in time. He is his own master of the hours, he bathes in time as if he were in his element. He is a man of opportunity par excellence, time artist who passes by, flâneur of circumstance, who supplies himself with finds along the way," writes David Le Breton in his essay In Praise of Walking. This year marks the twentieth anniversary of my wanderings. For this reason, I am fulfilling a long-standing dream and will - to use Le Breton's words - set out on my longest dip in time to date: At the beginning of May, I will set off from Groß Dölln and walk via Brandenburg (in Brandenburg), Dessau, Halle/Saale, Weimar, Erfurt, Aschaffenburg, Mannheim, Kaiserslautern, Saarbrücken, Strasbourg, Freiburg, Basel and Zurich to the Great Walser Valley (Vorarlberg/Austria) and back home on a more easterly route. Among many other aspects, it is the walking back that will be new for me and seems important to me, also or especially because I imagine that the return journey will be very exhausting after a certain point. I expect to arrive back home around mid-November. At the Walserherbst, an interdisciplinary festival where I was already a guest in 2012, I will have a performance with my stage programme at the southernmost point of my journey. The exact date of the performance has not yet been fixed, but it will in any case take place towards the end of the festival around 8 or 9 September. If you are in the vicinity and would like to take the opportunity to get to know the Great Walser Valley or the festival (very worthwhile!), please feel very welcome. Besides the desire to photograph new flipbooks (I will meet some of the protagonists of my first wanderings again and photograph them once more) and the desire to "supply myself with finds along the way", I am interested in the question of which country I will be travelling in. When I think back to my first walking tour in 2003 and consider the issues we are dealing with today, I have the feeling in retrospect that I walked through a different country then. I will keep a detailed diary and feel the desire to write a book about this year's trek. I have been asked several times if there is a possibility to follow my journey. After a long struggle, I have decided to take a big step for me (whether this is a good and right decision remains to be seen) and report on my wanderings on Instagram. Here you can find me virtually (or in persona between May and November somewhere on the road, showing my flipbook exhibition or resting in the forest). I wish us all a beautiful and eventful spring, summer and autumn and, as always, I look forward to seeing or meeting you again! Volker Gerling P.S. It saddens me greatly that no exhibition, no work of art and no stage performance can prevent the suffering of the people in Ukraine and other crisis regions (that is far too small a word here!). A war like the one taking place (not only) in Ukraine brutally puts one's own actions into perspective and shows what an incredible luxury it is to be able to work with the medium of flipbooks for many years, following one's inner compass. |