Somebody told me the civil war is paused. A pause resonating like everyday life I discovered. Like anything you expect of an auditive postcard, you could send home to your mom.

The intonation of a word almost tenderly disrupted the beauty of this everyday landscape. It was sunday morning. Not far from the presidential palace. I passed one of those empty houses with a gate wide open. Since there was a guard for the parking spots sitting across the street, I went over to him and asked him about the house. We talked a bit. He didn´t know who the house beloged to. I asked him: May I go inside?

His answer was a plain but polite: No. No, its private.

For me it was simply empty. His intonation of the sentence was framed by a slightly raised eyebrow. It told me a difference about empty and empty. All generations of empty houses – the empty streets of 21. Century apartments downtown, the torn towers from the 80´s, the ruins from before the war or the numerous unfinished houses were not my “insulation puffer”, they are part of the game. Insulation for sound is deadly, it can be used for torture. Gregor Jansen insulated a room in his “Haus Ur“. You just hear yourself there is no resonance at all.

But the empty houses here are private. A reserved spot. They are still part of the game, whether they are the unfinished houses, the ruins or the empty appartments. They function like the small empty spots on early analoge calculating machines.

Without the zero one cannot calculate.

A5, 42 Pages