Marce Odenbach: Die Couch
Choose a single object of special significance from you working or living environment
Choose a single object of special significance from you working or living environment
Almost two metres long, 90 centimetres wide and between 44 and 55 centimetres tall; built around 1930 to a design by my grandfather; upholstered in artificial animal skin with a black and white leopard skin pattern.
This couch stood in my grandparents bedroom and served as my bed when I was allowed to sleep over at their house. What could be better, as a small child, than sleeping in the grownups room? And I can still remember every sound, the smell and being plagued by mosquitoes in the summer.
Due to the couchs slight lengthways curve, a form that was really quite unpractical, one was automatically rolled up in ones sleep, lying in an almost foetal position.
For me as a child, the couch was really nothing other than one big cuddly toy that offered protection and familiarity. It could be stroked and given affection. As they later told me, I used to call it woof-woof.
Since my grandparents death in the mid-1970s, Ive been lugging this beast of a piece of furniture around with me. To this day, I cant bring myself to have it reupholstered, although it is now more than worn out not just from the thousands of caresses it has had to endure.
As its new owner, I first used it as a place to sit in my student digs and again as a place for guests to sleep. In the mid-1980s, it even featured as an extra in a short television play and as part of a video installation.
Later, it came to my studio where it was a place to put things and a place to think. After that, I moved it to my office at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, where it was used to therapeutic ends by students who came to see me. Now it stands in my study and has returned to being just a piece of furniture, essentially functionless, purely a keepsake.
Sleep, then, as the ultimate withdrawal from the world. Sleep as an image of solitude. Oblomov curled on his couch, dreaming himself back into his mothers womb. Jonah in the belly of the ship; Jonah in the belly of the whale. Paul Auster,
The Invention of Solitude (1982)
Translated by Nicholas Grindell
