The Solitude of the Candle Dreamer – Die Einsamkeit des Kerzenträumers
The installation presented at the "Freigänger" exhibition at the former women prison in Lichterfelde, Berlin, 28.06. – 30.06.2019
A collaborative piece with Jens Jürgen

The piece centred on the idea of imprisonment as a manner of forced seclusion from the outside world, a state in which a person is forced to contemplate his or her own life and actions, and also gets more in touch with his or her feelings and longings.

The key element of the installation was a sound recording; Svantje Wascher read excerpts from the German translation of the 1961 essay La Flamme d’une Chandelle (The Flame of a Candle) by the French philosopher and epistemologist Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962).

The recording was based on various excerpts from chapter II, entitled "The Solitude of the Candle Dreamer", where Bachelard analyses the contemplations and reveries that arise when single human is dreaming in front of the flame of a candle.

The text taps into existential ideas about annihilation, with the key image of the moth that is drawn to the flame. This Empedocles complex, as Bachelard calls it, refers to the Greek pre-socratic philosopher Empedocles, who was said to have ended his life by throwing himself into the abyss of the volcanic crater of Mount Etna in Sicily, to become one with the nature that he had studied all his life.

The image of the moth spellbound by the brightness and beauty of the flame and thereby being annihilated can, in the times we live in, be interpreted as referring to the basic needs that drive our lives: the desire for love, power, wealth, fame, and engaging in various excessive behaviours to feel fully alive.

The last excerpt from the text asks the question, what is loneliness and solitude? “In what center of the soul, in what corner of the heart is man alone, really alone? Alone? Shut away or barricaded?"

Complete soundtrack from Installation piece, Die Einsamkeit des Kerzenträumers, text read by Svantje Wascher, 2019