Florian Wendler - Menhir
Words by photographer Florian Wendler
The process of removing a stone from its place of origin and relocating it to another area can be traced back to the earliest days of mankind. It may mark the beginning of plastic art and a first stubborn rebellion against a world that is hard and rough, indifferent and inaccessible like the the stone itself. It is not without reason that people turned against the stones with their resigned energies. They are the terrible other; an entire being without difference, without separation, a being, just like that, without any purpose. As such, it counteracts human freedom, which only begins precisely where life breaks down into a self and the world. Maybe the stone mirrors most clearly a longing for the dissolution of the fixed boundaries of the ego, for the loss of self, which is repressed into the unconscious. Survival in this sense means first and foremost self-preservation. Man repeats his own destiny with the stones: he wrests them away from their origin, breathes spirit into them, and gives them meaning.
By erecting the stones, an omniscient and ordering spirit that stands above all natural events becomes proverbially manifest. They are more than mere material, they are carriers of this strange and mysterious power, of a magic on which one's own life depends and in which it participates. With growing technical-rational control over the earth and its inhabitants, the human spirit increasingly recognized itself as this foreign power, and replaced magic with calculus. The stones that we encounter in the pictures are, if at all, perhaps still carriers of a profane prohibition. As a barrier they merely serve to prevent certain actions and as such escape our instrumental interest. The pictures of 'Menhir' are an attempt to revive the stones, to establish contact, start another dialogue about the reasons for the emergence of our modern culture and, finally, to revive ourselves.
