Then Berlin. The cold, the gray. A different kind of chapel. I walked into its veins, its cellars, its wet electric nights. Philosophy by day, skin by night — I tattooed symbols onto strangers as if I could carve meaning into flesh.
I paint. Because I don’t know how else to survive the image.
My studio is in Weißensee now. A dog, a wife, a few ghosts.
Greece calls in the winter, with olives and bones and the blinding white that forgives nothing.
This project — INFLUENCE: Objekt of Desire — is not a work.
It’s the hunger that remains when the miracle doesn’t come.
The Prison and the Nomos: On Peter, Paul, and the Body that Saves
In the Acts of the Apostles, Peter and Paul are imprisoned—not as criminals, but as witnesses. Their prison is not simply confinement; it is a space of suspension, of abandonment by law. It resembles what Giorgio Agamben calls the "camp," the "nomos of modernity": "the space that opens up when the state of exception begins to become the rule" (Homo Sacer, p. 168).
In this space, law is suspended, yet the force of law remains. Agamben writes: "The camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule" and where "bare life" (vita nuda) is exposed to power without protection or mediation. In this light, the prison of Peter and Paul is not just a historical detail: it is a prophetic space. It is what Agamben calls a "zone of indistinction" between life and law—a site where the logic of sovereignty reveals its truest, and most violent, form.
And yet, it is exactly here, in this suspended space, that the body of salvation appears. The angel who frees Peter, the earthquake that liberates Paul: these are not merely miracles, but signs that grace can break into even the most juridically abandoned zones. Agamben reminds us: "The state of exception is not the chaos that precedes order but rather the situation that results from its suspension" (State of Exception, p. 32). It is in this very suspension that the messianic moment becomes thinkable.
Where law recedes, the sacrament acts. The prison becomes the altar. The cell becomes the upper room. The chain becomes a chalice.
Agamben shows us how modern power isolates the body in spaces of pure exposure. But Scripture shows us that these are also the spaces where the body of Christ reappears—not in power, but in presence. In the flesh that refuses to be controlled. In the witness that cannot be silenced.
Thus the prison becomes a site of transfiguration: the very place where the body of Christ is born again, in those who suffer, who wait, who pray in the dark. As Agamben writes in The Time That Remains, the messianic is not a future promise, but "a remnant, a remnant that remains in the form of a life, a form-of-life that can only be lived in the now."