•  Ende Juni | 1999 | INFO

    END OF JUNE

    ENDE JUNI (End of June) was published in the monthly cultural supplement to the Munich-based newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung in 1999. Martin Fengel and Georg M. Oswald had chosen the same medium a year previously to present their collaborative work Besucher auf dem Prater (Visitors to the Prater). The work dealt with aliens who landed in the Prater park in Vienna.

    End of June
    Now and you’d better hurry up and totally and forever – or let’s see and your place or mine, and are we moving in together or not, hmm? There’s a fair bit of evidence to suggest that the whole love thing is as complicated as it gets. Of course that’s a banal thing to say, but then almost everything people say about love is banal. That’s why it’s true and it all fits and it has to be said. There’s only one problem left: where does a single moment stop and where does eternity start?
    Photographer Martin Fengel and author Georg M. Oswald went looking for happiness in a range of places – Munich, Hamburg, Piacenza, and London. As is also the case with love, the most improbable situations offered the most promise when looked at more closely: looking at empty meadows and into open shop windows, or looking at the empty faces of clowns and into the open eyes of one’s own reflection. They are puzzling pictures, and – just as it is not possible to know exactly what love can tell us about emptiness – the short texts are also fragments, stolen feelings, pilfered memories, pieces of a love story with an uncertain ending. Nobody knows exactly how the text fits to the pictures and how the sense of the words explains the nonsense of the images, but maybe this is precisely the uncertain journey that love will take sometime this summer, perhaps at the end of June.

     She asked herself if he was being serious or if he just wanted to impress her.
  •  He loved the poetry of Ezra Pound and was able to quote entire stanzas to her.
  •  He said that Fassbinder said that a woman is at home with a man.
  •  She was enthralled for some time by the things he showed her.
  •  In a letter she wrote to him, “I am not afraid of intimacy, but I don’t want to move in with you yet.”
  •  She tried to explain the difference to him how he differed from all his predecessors.
  •  He lay in front of the television and said, “Think about it, Michael Schumacher earned more this year than all the generations of my entire family have ever earned.”
  •  “In retrospect,” she said, “his lectures on what was OK and what wasn’t were always fairly exhausting.”
Ende Juni | 1999 | INFO

END OF JUNE

ENDE JUNI (End of June) was published in the monthly cultural supplement to the Munich-based newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung in 1999. Martin Fengel and Georg M. Oswald had chosen the same medium a year previously to present their collaborative work Besucher auf dem Prater (Visitors to the Prater). The work dealt with aliens who landed in the Prater park in Vienna.

End of June
Now and you’d better hurry up and totally and forever – or let’s see and your place or mine, and are we moving in together or not, hmm? There’s a fair bit of evidence to suggest that the whole love thing is as complicated as it gets. Of course that’s a banal thing to say, but then almost everything people say about love is banal. That’s why it’s true and it all fits and it has to be said. There’s only one problem left: where does a single moment stop and where does eternity start?
Photographer Martin Fengel and author Georg M. Oswald went looking for happiness in a range of places – Munich, Hamburg, Piacenza, and London. As is also the case with love, the most improbable situations offered the most promise when looked at more closely: looking at empty meadows and into open shop windows, or looking at the empty faces of clowns and into the open eyes of one’s own reflection. They are puzzling pictures, and – just as it is not possible to know exactly what love can tell us about emptiness – the short texts are also fragments, stolen feelings, pilfered memories, pieces of a love story with an uncertain ending. Nobody knows exactly how the text fits to the pictures and how the sense of the words explains the nonsense of the images, but maybe this is precisely the uncertain journey that love will take sometime this summer, perhaps at the end of June.