Down memory lane. Sounds rather cozy, when you put it like that. The kind of trip an afternoon with an old photo album on your lap can afford. But that is not the lap I have been taking, the road I just went down and took back. Not even a road, really, and certainly no one-way street.
I am talking real, physical travel by plane, train and automobile to meet with real people that, over the years, have become almost imaginary to me, so distant is the past I spent in their presence and so unreliable my recall of them by way of ephemera—a smattering of snapshots rather too random, selective and pixellated to seem true-to-life. You know, recollections turned into collectibles, keepsakes of what is lost—an ersatz of essence that leaves you with a sketchy, shifting narrative and a suspicion that the storytelling is being botched by an unreliable curator remiss in handling the responsibility of keeping and making sense of a life encoded in delicate objects that are imbued with an arcane knowledge lodged in the personal reminiscences of more than one person.
Quite a spaghetti junction, that fabled memory lane. Prosaically speaking, although that has never been my chosen mode of articulation, I recently returned from a visit to my native Germany—or the Bundesland of North Rhine-Westphalia, to be precise. As on my previous trip the year before, I caught up with family and friends, some of whom I had not seen in over forty years.
So as not to overshadow the momentousness of that rare occasion, I did not get to witness the once-in-what’s-left-of-my-lifetime solar eclipse, the spectacle of which we let pass us by while the three of us were ensconced indoors engaged in an exchange of memories. No ill-fitting goggles or colanders required.
Just as fittingly, the coincidence of that celestial event occurring on the eve of our remarkable reunion has been commemorated as a new beginning by one of my friends, who set up a WhatsApp group titled “Sonnenfinsternis 26,” “Sonnenfinsternis” being German for solar eclipse. We did not miss a thing—just each other and the opportunity to make new memories, until now.
I even spent a night—the first in thirty-nine years—in my former bedroom at my mother’s house, a 1970s bungalow I first revisited, albeit briefly, in 2022. During that reencounter, I set foot once more in the shared bathroom, virtually unchanged, where, for about a year, from May 1985 to June 1986, I photographed myself—or my body, at any rate—to image and imagine my queer identity.
A time capsule of 1970s interior design, demolished not long after my 2022 reencounter with it, the bathroom, and the poignancy of my experience of which, led me to conceive The Return of/to the Boy in the Avocado Bathtub, a narrative art project of which my current project, Enveloped, is a prequel of sorts.
Perhaps I protest too much when I insist that I am not nostalgic. After years of dismissing my past as either inconvenient or irrelevant, I have turned curious, as well as somewhat melancholy and remorseful, estranged as I allowed myself to become, after decades of living abroad, from the places and relationships of my youth, a dislocation albeit largely by choice—the presumably external and exorcized past from which I made an effort to be othered but which I am now reencountering as essential to my evolving sense of otherness.
What motivated, and indeed necessitated, this impossible journey “home” was an eagerness to get my hands on a box of envelopes dating from 1984/85, fragile wrappings with which, to my surprise, my friend Claudia had presented me at a restaurant in Cologne in the summer of 2025. Wrapped up in them is the story of my coming out.
“They are envelopes,” a friend here in Wales pointed out. “Can’t they be mailed to you?” No, indeed, that was not a viable option. Claudia had taken care of them all these years and determined that I had to collect them in person. I needed to commit to the project, and honor our friendship.
I had not seen Claudia, or those envelopes, since 1985, despite some attempts at catching up remotely via email some thirty years later. And there she was, inimitable, rather formidable and quite like the memories I had of her. And there they were well looked after and preserved: letters sent decades ago.
I, too, had kept and digitized Claudia’s letters to me dating from that time, and that despite moving from Cologne to New York City, and from New York City to Wales. As a result, our correspondence during that twelve-months period in the mid-1980s (and there was to be no epistolary exchange thereafter, the smattering of emails aside) has remained fairly intact.
Enclosed in those envelopes are letters I sent to Claudia while she was working as an au pair in New Jersey. Eventually, a few dozen letters later, I visited her in April 1985, which is when my love affair with New York City began to take root, if only gradually so.
The streets of Manhattan were none too glamorous in those days, and it took me a while to adjust my expectations to the reality of a teeming metropolis defined by inequalities and marked by crime. In a word, the place was filthy—at least to my picture-postcard trained eyes.
That first encounter with the Big if none too shiny Apple resulted in my relocation to the Upper East Side in 1990. Without Claudia, and without those envelopes, that part of my story would never have developed.
Where or who would I be now? Would I, a desperately unhappy health insurance clerk at the time, have lived, or have the desire to live and tell the tale, any tale, however tiresome or doleful?
Enveloped, as I said, is a kind-of origin story for Retroactive Selfies, which I exhibited at Gallery Gwyn, an exhibition space here in Wales a few years ago (12 Oct. – 23 Nov. 2024) as part of the group show Inter_Change, and which continues, virtually, on Instagram.
I am returning to the Gallery in October as curator of The Same Boat: Conflict and Compassion in Prints by Marcelle Hanselaar, an exhibition featuring etchings and aquatints by the Dutch-born, London-based painter-printmaker Marcelle Hanselaar, a mash-up of whose series The Crying Game and We’re All Bleeding I staged in 2023 with students of my curating module at the School of Art, Aberystwyth University.
Enveloped will probably have to wait until the spring of 2027, as I will be working on a narrative and catalogue for a show, which would have been a no-show had it not been for my friend Claudia.
“You can’t keep them,” Claudia told me as she plonked the box of letters in front of me when we met with a few friends at Pradels, a wine bar and restaurant in Cologne. In just a few minutes, after our meal, I rummage through that receptacle of memories, itself an original.
“I could do a show with those,” I exclaimed, somewhat prematurely, presumptuously even. Not that I thought the individual envelopes suitable for display in a gallery. It was the encapsulating, the enveloping—of a friendship, a former life, and past futurity—that intrigued me and that, I thought, might resonate with others.
Eventually, Claudia agreed to a loan of the letters, provided that I collect them in person at her rather remote summer house some miles outside of Cologne in a region known as Bergisches Land. I was staying at my aunt’s place, which, as it turned out, is not far from where the envelopes were to be retrieved. Just a couple of bus rides away.
Sure, Claudia and I met again a few days later at the same restaurant in Cologne—but that just would not have done. She, too had moved on, and was determined to meet me and her partner on her own terms, in a location of her choosing and of personal signifiance to her. And what an adventure it turned out to be.
Enveloped is meant to en- and unfold a growing-up and coming-out story. The story, rather than the artifacts, is the “it” that I am reluctant to call “art.” I am not confident the term fits—as I never identified as an artist, certainly not back then, in the mid-1980s, when I was an apprentice at a health insurance company.
Nor, as a belated art historian, am I comfortable with the designation “art,” the assumed and alleged divide between “art” and “design,” or indeed the remoteness of “art” and everyday life, which is why I am drawn to the anti-art movement of Dada and alternative visual/material culture as produced by Pop practitioners and creatives associated with Fluxus and Zero.
“Art” seems to imply or facilitate, since the Romanticism of the late-eighteenth and early-to-mid nineteenth centuries at least, interiority, whereas “design” is external. The envelopes featuring my designs may serve to question those assumptions. Making a playful display of crisis, they are veiled attempts at communicating them: find me, not merely inside, hidden from view—but outside, by design. See enclosed but look beyond.
However crude and awkward some of the week-by-weekly produced images,Envelopedwraps up—and unwraps—part of my queer life, my desire for change and redefinition just prior to coming out. Coded, circumspect and at times disingenuous, those envelopes are a product of identity formation. Enveloped tells a story of longing, of wanting to belong, elsewhere and otherwise, of being out there.
To this day, I am not certain whether queer identity is compatible with interiority, being that it is predicated on demonstrative otherness—the hard-earned and long fought-for right to openness, to having nothing up or down one’s sleeves. Being out there means pushing the envelope.
In the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, I aim to contrast the performativity of the envelopes—as surface, outward facing, out there—with the performance of the personal letters that contained them: a serialized, epistolary account of my life that is not quite diaristic.
Then as now, I am hovering on the surface. I have not yet reread any of those letters. Then again, if correspondence with my former selves came easy to me, such a project would not, I feel, be worth my while or anyone else’s. Not that I expect any revelations. My letters were more circumspect than those cryptic communications on the envelopes. I know who I was then: somebody afraid to get to know himself.
Remarkably, those desperate and anxious artifacts did make things happen. They changed the path of my life, and they allowed me to open myself up to new beginnings.
Not that this happened right away, mind. It took me six years or so—for starters, I finished my three-year apprenticeship and afterwards complete twenty months of mandatory civil service to my country—finally to relocate to Manhattan, where I would pursue my BA, Ma, and PhD, live and work for nearly fifteen years until moving on, in 2004.
It is with some misgiving that I am publicly revisiting this romance now that I am thoroughly disenchanted with the United States, a country I refuse to revisit in the current political climate. Then again, New York City was never truly representative of the States, and, I am glad to observe from afar, is even less so in 2026.
Well, that’s a wrap for now; but, as hesitant as I am at present to reopen those old letters, I shall no doubt feel compelled to disclose more about the development of Enveloped in the months to come.
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