Christian Jankowski
Christian Jankowski’s installation »Neue Idee II« addresses his and our consistent failure to achieve what we want to do in the time at our disposal. The visible sign of this shortcoming is the to-do list we that scribble down every night before going to bed, already knowing that we will not manage to get everything done. Francke, in his day and age, could still be sure he would, scheduling his whole day from when he got up to the moment he closed his eyes again. His so-called »diaries« bear an uncanny resemblance to today’s Moleskine’s and could be likened to 18th-century managerial agendas. Jankowski questions the certainty and organisation of time in today’s world. From smartphones and tablets to computers, we have countless tools and systems to manage time and put some order in the world. Systems which incorporate their own decay. Jankowski is showing their analog equivalent: the list, an essentially anachronistic undertaking for the global citizen. Yet it is precisely this anachronism that makes our collective weakness visible and sympathetic. An excerpt from Jankowski’s lists now stands as a neon sign on the balcony of the Francke Foundations: »Neue Idee II« Wasn´t there something there? Internet 2.0, software xyz 2.5, 3.7, 4 ...
It is no secret that personal notes often constitute the most reliable picture of our brain at work. Free of all the embellishments, prose refinements and orderly punctuation that characterise our writing when in communication with someone else, they possess a level of immediacy and time-sensitivity that make them impossible to decipher to all but the author.
Michele Robecchi, to Christian Jankowski, What I still have to take care of.
