DIETER BEYELSCHMIDT
FROM THE HORSE'S MOUTH
2021
Full HD color video, 2-ch sound, 4:13 min [➚]
Director · Writer · Performance · Voice · Composer · Sound : Rosy Beyelschmidt
Writer · Camera · Sound Design · VFX · Editor : Dieter Beyelschmidt
During the liquidation of an antiquarian bookshop where I found only sadness on the last day, the elderly owner said to me « Look at the lost souls » and pointed to the tattered forest of leaves on the floor at the back of the room. « Take it, costs nothing – no one wants it. » On top of a pile was a small paving stone, with bluish tints. I asked about the paving stone : « where might it have come from? – Oh, the doorstop ; I’ve had it for ages, it came from the previous owner. Our conversation was abruptly interrupted – the empty shelves were picked up – I said goodbye, wishing her the best. In the evening I roughly sorted the book pages and cleaned the stone from its layer of dust. As I skimmed and sorted the pages of the book, an epic about a wrongly convicted armourer (1787), I detected an indefinable smell emanating from the pages with the painful lines. It was not the typical smell of old printed paper, but rather sweet-peppery – it seemed if the pages had been soaked. Also the stone in its kind – roughly hewn – found its face in the lamplight of that night, as I too revive in the nights. Musing in the night I thought I knew where I had registered the smell of the book pages before. In 1990 I was part of a residency/exhibition programme ‘Young Art in Europe, Foundation of Niedersachsen, Hanover’ and during this time I was housed in an old monastery complex just outside Hanover. I was assigned a room with only one huge bed, which stood on an old rather worn-out wooden floor. Here I remembered the same special smell, without being able to localise it at the moment. The large worn stone slabs in the cloister had particularly taken my fancy, matt-glossy in the evening light, in their simple beauty, when I spent there sometimes a few minutes at night. In my reflection I remembered ‘St. Mary’s in the Capitol’ an early Romanesque church building with a cloister not far from my studio, to go in search of clues the next morning – the video footage were also taken there; in one picture fragment the plague cross from 1304 can be seen. Although I tried to pick up the trail like a sniffer dog, I could not decipher the indefinable smell here either. Out of desire to give form to my world of thoughts, I began in the evenings to cover the walls of my studio completely with the pages of the book, in order to receive a reflection from this. Under this impression then I wrote down my 26 verses that reflect the feeling of that night.
For me, a search for answers is also always a self-questioning – the possibility of a correction of misinterpretations or communication in the sense of (one’s own) knowledge – eternal questions. From the horse’s mouth is also a dialogue with oneself in search of absolute purity.
at: L’ancien Réservoir de Guilheméry
6 – 31 avril 2022, Toulouse, FR
XXVe Rencontres Internationales Traverse
Capacité (presque) illimitée · (Almost) Unlimited Capacity
