ILONA RUEGG

Plant Plast

Rather it seems as though a general law of intrusion can be discerned
at this point: there is no such thing as a single intrusion, as soon as an
intrusion occurs it is immediately duplicated, and identifies itself in constantly new and internal distinctions.

Jean Luc Nancy

The wrapped or potted root-balls in Ilona Ruegg’s series ‘Trees older than me, waiting’ (1997) were carefully uprooted and stored. Thus they are separated from their origins, and also insulated against their present location. ‘Uprooted matter’ is not just being stored here; the act of storage shifts it into contexts and arrangements in which roots are replaced by quite different linking forms. The hoses that water the trees make the storage arrangement into a network, extending the root strands into a supply system that ties them together and puts them on a equal footing.
The extended context combines and holds together, just as it also divides within this layout in anticipation of future dispersions. It thus constantly initiates other integration modes: being ‘uprooted’ no longer means detachment, it starts to indicate something else. Location is replaced by storage as a transitional position, with potential future locations inscribed within it.

In the same way, the labels that appear on some of the trees are not ascribing names or categories. They indicate other possible contexts that differentiate the trees and tie them into other evaluations and other possible locations, in anticipation of future replanting. What counts is not the link, but the possibility of it - the label that in ‘Trees older than me, waiting 4’ [ill. 1] is lying on the ground without a tree means that any category is merely possible, isolating the labels as free-standing elements in an open structure. In the image itself, the hoses allow themselves similar room for manoeuvre by disappearing behind trees and pots then popping up again somewhere else; they also seem to break off in the middle of the image, and in its foreground (‘Tree older than me, waiting 1’ [ill. 2]). Only the light that catches the hose here indicates the backward curve that continues the network, even if it is not intelligible in the form itself. The hoses or labels cannot simply be referred back to the garden or plot, of which only parts can be seen in the works, nor to the trees or their sequence. Instead, their various connectivities create a situation that is permanently open to sequences of events that can expand uncontrollably. De- and reterritorialization, old uprooting and new rooting overlap and arrest the trees in an intermediate space that can no longer be addressed in the dimensions of origin and belonging. It should instead be seen as an arrangement of different networks that occur contiguously, determining, cancelling and expanding each other.

Distinctions between organic and inorganic also blur when fluxes run through both, forcing their functions to relate permanently. If an organic element is a factor here at all, it is as part of an unbounded machinic assemblage linking heterogeneous elements in variable combinations and functions and thus integrating previous/original locations as well as future/virtual ones.2 The scarcely legible logo in the folds of the plastic wrapping on the central root ball in ‘Trees older than me, waiting 4’ dissolves these links (upside-down) as ‘plant plast’.

Flat multiplicities
A tree- and image-machine of this kind reaches out in two directions. It includes various groups of elements (trees, hoses, the surroundings they are tied into), and also duplicates itself in internal distinctions that constantly break up the groupings themselves. In ‘Trees older than me, waiting 4’, the trunks on the edge of the image do not belong to olive trees but to palms: these are deposited in the same collection but produce something quite different by disrupting the arrangements themselves. From the point of view of the palms the apparent alignment of olive trees becomes a mere accumulation of heterogeneous components, throwing the series back on itself and undermining any sense of unity.3

As far as the image is concerned, this means a juxtaposition that shatters its coherence, releasing other elements that can be linked to each other in many ways, without having to fit into a greater whole. The spatial co-ordinates are cancelled out by the profusion of visual information: one would have anticipated a horizon, which normally guarantees three-dimensional depth for the image. Here, as in other works in the series, there is an entanglement in which foreground middle ground and background mingle and co-ordinates become unclear; not in the form of stratification, for which the hedge could be seen as a background, but by making it an integral part of an amalgam.4 However, the image really opens up above and below the central zone, where the elements are deployed so that they can be reincorporated (in a different way) within the plausibility of the image. Just as the palms do not seem to belong in this olive grove, which is not one, the shoot revealed in the upper part of the image does not really belong to a trunk but is detached as a tree in its own right; what otherwise stands for the sky in the image is not a background for the branch within the spatial gradation of the image. It is just a capturing, framing element for the branch that makes it stand out as if back-lit.5 Then this ‘tree’, which could still just be part of the hedge, attaches itself as a branch of the baggedup trunk, which is thus no longer a stump (or at least not only); this makes the little tree’s position even less clear. A similar reclassification also occurs on the lower edge of the image: the protective sheeting is just peeling off the palms and making the uprooted element into a little landscape in its own right, inserting itself into the image as a trace of brightness, taking account of the otherwise unresolved horizon line and at the same time creating it for the first time.

Complexity in this image-machine is not produced by plunging into the depths or by stratification, but by multiple planes that permit heterogeneous juxtaposition, rather than an extended two-dimensional quality. Repetitions also take place across the dimensions of the work on these planes. As the young shoot in the upper part of the image can be said to double and thus deterritorialize ‘tree’, the different dimensions of the pictorial elements overlap ‘Trees older than me, waiting 3’ [ill.3]. The pile of earth in the background, as a mass of soil, recalls the root-ball in the foreground, but it is also an earth bank that aligns the trees, while itself being only another form of arrangement. Heap and alignment meet at the centre of the image at the pile of light-coloured sacks. These are inscribed into the structure as yet another form of deposit, thus expanding the arrangement repertoire almost diagrammatically.

The latitude these repetitions open up always links different time frames more or less explicitly as well. Even the title ‘Trees older than me, waiting’ deploys the trees between the poles of already-being-older and still-waiting; uncertainty about what belongs to what in the case of the young shoots and old trunks indicates that they too are involved in a contradictory chronology. The new shoots are always young and unhinge the dualities of duration and beginning, old givens and new occurrences: they are linked by the fact that the trunk is cut and by the new growth of the shoots to a point of intervention. It is an intervention that constantly creates beginnings and thus can always start all over again.6
So the trees occupy, in a fundamental arrangement of temporal and spatial shifts, variable positions that do not create a place/location, but a hybrid space that reaches out in all dimensions, thus also extending into the ‘me’ of the title. This is always included in the arrangement as a reference-point and opens the tree-picture machine on to a deterritorialized subjectivity.

Branches
The palm silhouettes in ‘Fair Town 5’ (2001) [ill. 5] are from the outset part of a much more temporary installation. Just as ‘Trees older than me, waiting’ is not landscape or even nature but a garden, ‘Fair Town’ is not a town, but architecture. The trees acquire their imposing quality not least from the apparent inappropriateness of the shifts they undergo. In ‘Fair Town’, as also in the ‘Town Town’ series that preceded it, architecture indicates nothing but its own horizon. It elaborates its encounter-forms as a free game, in which there can be no outside that it could stand out against, or that could counterbalance it as something Other. Even the palms in ‘Fair Town 5’ do divide themselves off from other elements, but at the same time, with their visible lath supports they are a prominent part of the architectural construction. Then within this construction, as imitations of nature, they in their turn link up with the bamboo fence that is leaning over in the lower part of the image and extends the lorry body to the conclusion of a space whose other end is formed by the palm façade.

The palm silhouettes are just as little palms as the bamboo screen is a fence or even a forest, but the view from behind that the work offers is not a glimpse behind the scenes but a view of another kind of arrangement that itself deals with visibility and its limits. This arrangement remains very close to the image, perhaps more clearly than elsewhere in Fair Town. The pictorial space is expressly organized only as a surface in which the foliage screen forms a background to the bamboo and palm outlines and repeats both of them in terms of surface quality and motifs. And so here the space stretching between them turns out to be a mere possibility created by shifting of elements.7 Any fixed horizon for this space is blocked by the foliage, then refused again in the horizontal arrangement of the palm silhouettes. Instead of forming the background, the line of palms is superimposed on it, and follows the edges of the image rather than an imagined horizontal, folding to meet those edges.

The various architectural arrangements in the ‘Fair Town’ series are always just one configuration of space and time, volume and structure among other possible ones. The white volume that runs through the series does not simply open on to an interior that is never really resolved as an inside space and often negotiates its borders. It is also bound into an interplay with other temporary features and containers, from the pavilion frame to the wastepaper bin. Even the permanent exhibition hall and tower (as far as even these can really be considered durable) appear here simply as a background that almost disappears in the reflection in their windows as pure light in the photographic image. Thus it always has to contend with the white skin that is not just stretched over its frame but always moves across the surface of the picture as well, thus competing with it. In this way connections emerge as extensions of the architectural quality, detaching themselves almost entirely from its arrangement.

Volume and surface undermine each other mutually in these deviations, but their shortened perspectives, and arrangements that are not parallel with the image, insist on occupying space in a wide range of different ways. Whilst the pavilion frame stakes out volume and structures space, the white skin for its part asserts and monopolizes that space without organizing it. Here totally different modalities are confronting each other, and the various elements of the ‘Fair Town’ series allow continued thinking about them in new ways.

Ambivalent and polyvalent
Here binary oppositions do not go far enough, especially when two pairs of motifs are offered. Fixed and mobile, fixture and intervention, nature and artificiality constantly cancel each other out within the operation of the works and are replaced by structures of multiple categorizations and integrations.8

Just as in the ‘Fair Town’ works built architecture is always to be seen and thought of, or is relevant, only from the temporary grouping of the trailer caravans, ‘Fair Town’ does not present models for different architecture either. The model function is fundamentally different: in contrast with the non-places of Utopia, fair installations and exhibition centre architecture, the exoticism of palm trees and garden arrangements are spaces of a different kind. They fulfil genuinely physical and also metaphorical functions, and thus assert themselves metonymically (as concrete insertions) and mythically (as models).9 In Ilona Ruegg’s work it is precisely this ambivalence that is repeated and doubled when she makes arrangements, architectures and their impinging on each other into pictorial constructions in which space and time and image occur only blurred and interconnected. If in fact what we have here is something like a model for other places, then it is only as (pictorial-)spatial proposals for possible subjectivities that can occur in or through them.

Orientations
Slope and incline oscillate almost continuously. First of all, in ‘Hang und Neigung 5’ (2001) [ill. 5] there is a thicket in which the exploring eye gets lost in the filigree tangle of the branches, but physical orientation in relation to the picture space is tilted as well.10 And then the lamp, whose alien quality emerges imperceptibly, but then persistently, introduces another kind of (dis)order into this entanglement: it identifies the strip of light in the top right of the image as a stepped path from which the image disintegrates and rearranges itself again.

The lamp, as a bright point, at least promises the possibility of orientation, so the (visual) thicket and the sense of being lost in it have necessarily to be thought about and seen through the path. This opens up a very different entanglement over the whole surface of the image, made up of light patches and lines, drawn into various alliances by the lamp. The lamp illuminates the thicket by day,11 thus indicating visibility or the promise of it, but not redeeming that promise. The lamp also loses itself as a piece of brightness within the entanglement of the image to which it holds out the promise of transparency. The linking of lamp and paths, in terms of both form and content, is joined by the visual link with the light areas to the left of it. These are more prominent, but not round enough to be a lamp and not clearly enough placed to be a path. And it is from these areas that the roaming then continues: to the light areas on the lower edge of the image, and then again to the steps on the path and from them to the scrap of sky on the upper right-hand edge of the image; or also from the lamp to the tree-trunks, which are oriented in just the same way and just as bright as the lamp-post, but a little more irregularly shaped than it, and thus suddenly seem to be placed with a similar lack of motivation: its apparent arbitrariness is directly communicated to them. Even the weaker patches of light are charged as continuations of these series of elements, in which the whole pictorial field begins to shimmer.

The juxtaposition and opposition of the promises of orientation in the wood and the orientation of the view in the image produce a form of close-up that runs through the images as an almost haptic quality,12 at the same time remaining bound up within the collisions of the various legibilities. Orientation no longer holds here, because its different possibilities run up against each other, creating another kind of wandering that now takes place within the thicket of the image. The distinctions that the lamp is actually claiming are no longer clear; in fact the lamp is now entirely responsible for the confusion.13  It is not nomadic, it imposes a nomadic quality by constantly releasing elements and making the image approachable precisely between its different charges. Here orientation opens up to the quite different form of being somewhere without actually getting there.

In between

Visitors entering or leaving the Kunsthalle find there is something in the way, a volume about knee-high - or rather various, precisely matching volumes. They are immediately intelligible. You realize at once that certain “fenced” zones (over two thirds of the complete area of the entrance hall) are closed off, and that a path has been set out like a cross between them. The cross defines the co-ordinates of the “inserted” space. Visitors are guided to the corridor running along the longitudinal axis of the entrance hall, which has built-in loudspeakers on both sides. This work by Ilona Ruegg is called VOLUME/unpublished. The ambiguity of the word “volume” alone is a clear indication of the work’s multi-

dimensional qualities. “Volume” can be understood here as an abstract three-dimensional quality, as spatial content, as a book in a series (this interpretation is supported by the addition of “unpublished”) or - for French and English speakers - as sound volume. The volume in the entrance hall is not dull, solid, monolithic. Its ground plan consists of parallel lines, hatching, i.e. 10-cm thick boards set on wooden laths, forming a right-angled grid.In the space, these lines form 29 parallel obstacles or low walls that “cut across” all the other space-defining elements: the stone tables, the elevator indicated by a joint in the floor and the wall of the adjacent room. The tops of the walls (seen from the entrance) thrust into the main hall like battlements. The boards have a darker coating on one side, giving the impression of a “shadow side”. The width of the boards determines the relatively low height of the walls (60 cm). The material - insulation boards standing on their long edge - has an important technical quality as well: it is intended for sound insulation, and is used for this purpose in the construction industry - for sports hall ceilings, for example.1 The insulation boards in the entrance hall are not stacked, which would have made them much easier to handle. They are precariously balanced on their edges, then held together in blocks by “fences”. This suggests that the artist is not primarily interested in the idea of deposits, but in positioning: not “natural” sedimentation, but “artificial” installation; no horizontal stacking one on top of the other, but alignment dictated by a grid.

In his short text “Des espaces autres”,2 written for architects, Michel Foucault postulated that in the second half of the 20th century it was no longer time and history that were in the foreground; our epoch would be the “époque de l’espace”: “We are in the epoch of the simultaneous, we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, in the epoch of the near and the far, of being together and apart. We are, I believe, at a point in time where the world perceives itself not so much as a great life developing through time but rather as a net, linking its points and crossing over its entanglement. (…) Nowadays placing replaces the area that had replaced localization. Placing is defined by the neighbourhood relationships between points or elements; formally they can be described as rows, trees, meshes.” It is precisely these characteristics and motifs that are the key features of VOLUME/unpublished  by Ilona Ruegg. Like Michel Foucault, Ilona Ruegg resists an absolutist perspective arising from a continuous, closed space existing for itself. Space is seen or demonstrated instead as something relational, as the result of a process of arrangement. In the early 20th century the theory of relativity defined space (and time) as a dynamic quantity that can be influenced by everything that happens in it. This dissolution of the classical concept of space was reflected in fine art, in Cubism and Futurism, for example.

In his novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, which appeared in instalments from 1931, but is the (fragmentary) result of decades of work, Robert Musil describes the city as a dynamic quantity: “Cars shot out of narrow, deep streets into the shallows of bright squares. Pedestrian darkness formed cloudy strings. Where more powerful lines of speed cut across their loose haste they thickened, trickled faster afterwards and returned to their even pulse after a few oscillations. A hundred sounds were woven together into a wiry noise with individual points standing out from it from which clear tones splintered off and flew away, (…) The name of the city is not particularly significant. Like all great cities it consisted of irregularity, change, gliding by, not keeping up, collisions between things and matters, bottomless points of silence in between, made up of cleared and uncleared ways, of a great rhythmic pulse and the eternal disharmony and shifting of all rhythms against each other, and at the same time was like a boiling bubble resting in a vessel made up of the durable material that is buildings, laws, decrees and historical traditions.”3 Musil’s city is not made up of houses, a main square, a church, a market hall and a town hall; it is pure dynamics, rhythm, pulsation, noises, black-and-white drama, interaction. Nothing is rigid and definitive, everything is relative and relational. There are no people in Ilona Ruegg’s two series of city images Town Town and Fair Town: all that can be seen are “merely” temporary arrangements of human homes (caravans) and fragments of temporary cities within the city (leisure park). As in Musil’s description, we do not have this or that motif in the foreground here; it is about nothing other than shimmering relations between scarcely recognizable elements, light-dark contrasts, a complex spatial structure of insights, views and reflections. The busy human traffic, the dynamic of the city, that Musil describes, has transferred itself to the people looking at the images in Ruegg’s case. What they see does not correspond with any objective, clearly identifiable, comprehensible reality. They use their eyes to construct (each time) their (different) temporary spaces. They improvise on the basis of the rich possibilities offered by irregularity, change, gliding by, not keeping up, collision, silence, rhythm, disharmony and shifting. Ilona Ruegg’s photographic works link precision and indeterminacy in a paradoxical way: despite extremely precise focusing, Ilona Ruegg manages to leave a great deal open. Her cities and excerpts from nature are characterized by the fact that they cannot be grasped in principle, or more precisely, an indeterminacy or openness that only appears as subjective reality for the person involved in the observation process.

The acoustic component of the work VOLUME/unpublished consists of four distinct parts: music, spoken and sung textual fragments, and silent sections. Various speaking voices are heard (three men and two women) in three languages (German, French, English) and a duo (viola and cello). The “score” probably does not have a beginning and an end - the first spoken statement already announces the end: le temps qui nous reste -, but is conceived in such a way that it is possible to start listening at any point. The text of VOLUME/upublished  consists of a total of 27 quotations from 24 people. It makes up a conversation between artists, art agents, writers, film-makers, composers, philosophers, and also some completely unknown authors: Giorgio Agamben, Michael Asher, Samuel Beckett, Gilles Deleuze, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Gotthard Günther, Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet, Bethan Huws, Jean-Paul Jungo, Pierre Klossowski, Joseph Kosuth, Luigi Kurmann, Gary P. Leupp, Ulrich Loock, Paul Maenz, Charles Perrault, Raymond Pettibon, Martha Rosler, Joe Scanlan, Gregor Schneider, Franz Schubert, Kurt Schwitters and Lawrence Weiner. These people from a very wide range of periods, are given (other) voices - some sentences are even sung. Ilona Ruegg has now paraphrased these “quotations” in a parallel text called Fussnoten (Footnotes).4 She is the 25th
voice in this conversation and helps to make it even more complex.

Who is speaking? Whose voice are we hearing? When all that remains of a long conversation between Rémy Zaugg and Jean-Paul Jungo but one sentence taken completely out of context Que je laisse ou que j’élimine, and it is no longer possible to see what the reflexive pronoun que refers to, then we can assume that the author’s identity is not important. The statement could be by anyone. But it is different in the case of Je ne vois rien que le soleil qui poudroie, et l’herbe qui verdoie or Lass irre Hunde heulen vor ihres Herren Haus: Any French- or German-speaking person will inevitably know where these sentences come from. They are from the popular fairy-tale La barbe bleue by Charles Perrault and Franz Schubert’s Winterreise respectively, and are common cultural property. Even if we do not know who wrote these sentences, our memories will “speak” in these cases. The quotations as an excerpt from a text usually has an interpersonal aspect. X chooses a quotation from author Y, intending a positive or negative transfer between X and Y. Although the same person - Ilona Ruegg - has selected the textual fragments and paraphrased them as well, no individual perspective emerges. The privileged voice of Ruegg the author is not dominant, but many voices5, some of them contradicting each other, just as the whole variety of stylistic levels enjoy equal rights. The conversation is a polylogue involving highly diverse points of view that usually make “sense” only when related to each other constructively by the listener. Ruegg is not looking for either a synthesis or communicative unambiguity. Here complex textual networks have some characteristics of hypertext, here not consisting just of words and texts, but also of sounds, materials, spatial structures, indeed images. Hypertext is not linear text, but a complex of texts that are linked with each other. One of its essential characteristics is the discontinuity, the simplest classical concept that corresponds to it is the set-piece. In Ruegg’s photographic series Escalator the escalators are still packed up in plastic on the nocturnal street, and in the series Trees older than me, waiting, transportable olive trees with their roots wrapped in plastic sheeting with a little earth stand around in the landscape. Spatial (but also temporal: older, waiting) discontinuity are the actual theme of these two series: something that is supposed to go up and down (escalator) is lying motionless in a horizontal position, and something that in principle develops vertically (tree) becomes mobile and transportable. Discontinuity is created in VOLUME/unpublished by thrusting a space into an existing space, the interpenetration of these two spaces by (temporarily) setting upright normally (definitively) horizontally fixed elements, by deploying ceiling boards on the floor. The acoustic “set-pieces” in this work (the “quotations”, the music) also refer to something else. The assembled voices flow together from a wide range of sources and impinge on the listeners’ consciousness in the “intermediate camp” of the entrance hall and then escape again or make themselves concrete as “Footnotes” - whether these are Ilona Ruegg’s or our own, Ruegg takes full advantage of the hypertextual potential of language.

Language is indeed not an accumulation of written or spoken words (dictionary), sentences, statements or texts, structured according to certain rules (syntax, literary categories, social conventions etc.) or trying to contradict the usual structures (poetry, metaphor). Language is an instrument of communication and cognition that creates relations between things and concepts, between signifiant and signifié, between texts (intertextuality), between the subject and the world, between people, between people and machines. It is obvious that language can never be completely adequate as an expression of these (real, possible, fictitious) relations. “The world”, people, thoughts, concepts, language itself are in a state of constant change: consequently their relations can never be considered concluded, constant, or, in brief: definitive. Anyway, language is only the visible/audible part of a much richer, text-external, extra-linguistic reality. Nathalie Sarraute coined the concept of sous-conversation, of infra-conversation, which consists of sensations, images, feelings, memories that can hardly be expressed in language. She tried to break through consciousness and get behind it “into these silent and dark regions into which not a single word has yet penetrated, on which language has not yet had a desiccating and petrifying effect, into something that is still uncertainty, virtuality, vague and embracing feelings, into this unnamed that resists words and yet demands them because it cannot exist without them.”6 Ilona Ruegg takes the inadequacy of language into account by using texts in VOLUME/unpublished 7 that do not have a beginning and an end, sentences without a verb, or a subject, even some monosyllabic utterances (e.g. the prefix dis from discontinue). Little is fully formulated, much is left open. There is an oscillation between deep structures and surface structures, to use Noam Chomsky’s terminology, between sous-conversation (pre-linguistic) and conversation (articulation), as Sarraute would say. The utterances are not just horizontal, i.e. they are in a temporal state, linked by the techniques of memory, premonition, repetition and reflection.

VOLUME/unpublished is organized polyphonically. In music, “polyphony” means a piece for several voices with an independent melodic line for each voice. The aesthetic quality of polyphony (known as counterpoint) lies in a constant comparison of the voices in terms of the form of their movement: in parallel, or shifted in various ways. The perception structure in VOLUME/unpublished is similar to that of a polyphonic work. Visitors hear certain sentences or words at the same time as others; they hear the composition as a whole. But to understand what the individual sentences mean they have to select the fragments that “appeal” to them and put others to one side. They pick up the conversation and the sous-conversation consciously, to an extent, but also subliminally. Adert’s analysis of Nathalie Sarraute also applies to Ruegg: “ La graphie de la narration sous-conversationnelle procède donc par empilage de voix qui s’enchâssent les unes dans les autres pour créer une moire au chatoiement extraordinaire: elle est une partition polyphonique dans laquelle les voix du locuteur, de l’interlocuteur et de tous les autres parleurs font retour sous la forme d’une pulvérulence de voix enchevêtrées. Au regard de l’histoire des formes, il est intéressant de souligner qu’il ne s’agit plus ici de monologue intérieur, car la sous-conversation ne déploie pas ce qui se passe dans la tête d’un sujet entre les répliques du dialogue; elle réalise en effet l’éclatement de l’unité factice du locuteur, l’effacement des claires délimitations entre soi, l’autre et les autres [...]”8 And so if we ask again who is speaking in VOLUME/unpublished we come to the conclusion that it is neither the author of the piece nor the individual authors quoted, but all these at the same time as each other, or shifted in space/time terms, i.e. contrapuntally. This game on many levels, the confrontation of voices and discourses, does not just mean the loss of the subject and of uniform logic, but also a loss of spatial unity. Polyphony has hypertextual characteristics and gives an impression of being in a complex, multi-dimensional space. It conveys an impression of depth, i.e. it promotes perception in time, without falling victim to an illusion.

Ilona Ruegg’s photographic series Hang und Neigung is based on the (illusory) attempt to present an image-parallel slope, without any principal motif that might help us to define top and bottom, front and back. Undergrowth, subliminal notions, lack of structure, of space, something merely in between becomes concrete as we look, and then escapes again. Perspective is scarcely hinted at. Everything is lacking in distance (within the image and in relation to the viewer). Maurice Merleau-Ponty interpreted distance phenomenologically as a personal investment in a spatial relationship: “… one can understand the perception of distance only as a being in the distance that joins it where it appears. (…) Distance can be experienced directly to the extent that we can find the living present at the point at which it reconstitutes itself.”9 More important than the incline or inclination in the image is the viewer’s inclination vis-à-vis the image. It is only when the image is actively acknowledged that it loses distance and gains depth. It is only by seeing that what is perceived acquires relations that were not prescribed but emerge only from the medium of contemplation. The image is not a copy, but a constantly changing result of a mental process that regenerates itself uninterruptedly. The text is merely pre-text (sous-conversation?) that has to be subjected to a subjective formation process that is always different in its nature. Temporarily setting up sound insulation boards creates an intermediate camp that is aimed at certain aesthetic, acoustic and spatial conditions. Ilona Ruegg makes pictorial structure, speech-locations, sound worlds, imaginative spaces available; the viewers/listeners are not just drawn into them, but have to conquer them and make a new decision about them each time: between light and darkness, between thicket and clearing, between location and mobility, between constraint and autonomy, between here and there, between published and unpublished, between volume and transparency. Du possible, sinon j’étouffe.