©2017 arnoldsche Art Publishers, Stuttgart, David Bielander, Munich, and the authors [and translators!] ISBN 978-3-89790-487-3. A piece that makes reference to a carnival tradition in Basel.

Translation into English to be found in the enclosed booklet:

Silk Threads, by Benno Hungerbühler

Sometimes I wish you were me.

We call them ‘Larven’*. These forms that become papier-mâché faces, which tell us who we are. Which allow us a pupation, a transformation into something new, different, unfamiliar, proximate. There is no excuse for not experiencing this one time. It is wonderful. I am sheltered, not holdable and yet present, am not he, she, not it, am several. The gaze is inverted, becomes quite still, releases the familiar into a childlike wish. Moist breath, freshly lacquered nose. The world is small and distant, two holes into the beyond drawn by careful scalpels.

In my city this metamorphosis is a sad, tender, loud one. Do you remember? Rattle-clatter of music, reedy drumbeats of velvety darkness. Gentian-blue disorder. The diaphragm looks for new ways, organs are freshly assorted. Nakedness and covering in the shared dance, a dragonfly-hatching, voluptuously towards this odd, publicly celebrated state of incompleteness.

Only here do I understand this echo. In the vain semi-distance, in doing and desisting, is rootedness. Two times a stranger will not do.

I would not like to be without. A rebirth in my lifetime, raspberry homestead and wind music, but in odd meter! And then, again, the box is opened, the curtain rises, behind it, between nestling hills, our village, warm lights behind small windows. Grumbles, grunts, scraps of speech and magic sparks from motorbike exhausts. Paused and moved by silky threads of the imagination, of the eternally childlike, the smell of fur-warm friendship, yearning.

Sometimes I wish I was you.

*In Basle district the term ‘Larve’ can also mean mask