you make me shiver - I feel so tender, Labor Köln
let me out
Two old garbage bins stand in the space. At short intervals, a woman’s voice calls from one of them: “let me out.”From the other come the screams of a man. The voices evoke imprisonment, torture, war, or disaster—situations we usually experience from a position of apparent safety and distance.
When a viewer opens a lid to look inside, perhaps hoping to rescue the trapped person, they encounter not another human being, but their own reflection in a mirror.
The installation questions the comforting assumption that violence, suffering, and catastrophe happen only to others. It points to the fragile boundary between safety and danger, between observer and victim. The cries emerge from hidden spaces, yet the response is found not inside the bins but in the confrontation with oneself. let me outreveals how thin the distance is between “them” and “us,” and how quickly the belief that war, torture, displacement, or tragedy belong to someone else can dissolve.