Unbound is an unfinished installation of drawings and poetry that works directly with markings left by anonymous inmates held in the secret Stasi remand prison, Berlin-Hohenschönhausen during the 1980s. The poetry in Unbound is an ambiguous collaboration between these individuals, and me.
Most prisoners at Berlin-Hohenschönhausen were interrogated by Stasi wardens and some were granted access to reading material as a reward. Although it was explicitly forbidden, many inmates used these so-called library books for covert self-expression and, at times, communication. They did this by indenting selected phrases with their fingernails: subtle acts of resistance and self-determination. Since encountering these texts in 2017 I have been documenting the phrases, observing both their symbolic content and material presence. Elsewhere on this site I feature my work with one of these books, the GDR version of To Kill a Mockingbird (Wer die Nachtigall stört).
Combining underlined fragments and phrases discovered in many different books circulated among the inmates, the poems in Unbound draw from the tradition of cut-up poetry. In the poetry, the diverse selections form meta-texts that reference the shared context of political confinement. In 2017 I distributed the poems at the Friends with Books book fair that took place at the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart. The phrases also provide conceptual themes for the large-scale charcoal figure drawings, which reflect on the many hidden texts that I came across in my research at this extraordinary prison.
Cut-up poetry was popular among the Surrealists and with William S. Burroughs, who said “cut the word lines and you will hear their voices” (1963). While Burroughs referred to literary authors, his thought about the method resonates with the challenge of locating furtive expressions among the fragments left by political prisoners of the GDR. Although many former inmates have spoken out publicly about their experiences, the messages found in these novels – and etched into the prison walls – communicate in a different register, something I explore in this article. For the poems, the phrases have been translated from German to English, emphasizing the global relevance of political imprisonment: these fragments could appear in any language, in any place, at many times throughout history.
