“After you’re dead and buried and floating around whatever place we go to, what’s going to be your best memory of earth? What one moment from you defines what it’s like to be alive on this planet. What’s your takeaway?

There is silence. Tobias doesn’t get her point, and frankly, neither do I. She continues: “Fake yuppie experiences that you had to spend money on, like white water rafting or elephant rides in Thailand don’t count. I want to hear some small moment from your life that proves you’re really alive.”

–Douglas Coupland: Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, 1991

“Let us suppose that I have wept, on account of some incident of which the other has not even become aware, and that, so this cannot be seen, I put on dark glasses to mask my swollen eyes. The intention of this gesture is a calculated one: I want to keep the moral advantage of stoicism, of “dignity”, and at the same time, contradictorily, I want to provoke the tender question (”But what’s the matter with you?”); I want to be both pathetic and admirable, I want to be at the same time a child and an adult. Thereby I gamble, I take a risk: for it is always possible that the other will simply ask no question whatever about these unaccustomed glasses; that the other will see, in the fact, no sign.”

–Roland Barthes: A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, 1977

The exhibition has been supported by Alfred Kordelin Foundation.