feldarbeiterin

What if the knees aren’t just one’s own, but always those of someone else too – knees that ache during fieldwork, that drag the children down to the cellar, that tremble at the sound of air-raid sirens, that give way in old age, that are always kneeling in the flowerbeds? The poetry cycle feldarbeiterin explores memory as a process inscribed in the body and across generations. In the poems, time does not pass linearly, but follows the search for a memory that jumps back, fails, and inscribes itself in objects, gestures and the surrounding landscape. Experiences of female care and loss become a transgenerational kit. The ‘I’ and ‘you’ in the text belong to one another yet remain elusive to each other in the present, due to the impossibility of a shared memory. Yet the body of the addressed ‘you’ in the text is still embedded in the landscape, in the work, in the land itself – whilst the poetic ‘I’ rediscovers this years later as an insurmountable trace upon itself.