site-specific installation at Klosterruine Berlin, steel 350x350x3mm | 2025
TARDYARRIVAL refers to the concept of Crip Time—a temporality beyond normative notions of productivity and linear life courses. Its starting point is Walter Benjamin’s short text “Tardy arrival” in which the motif of being late appears not as a mere failure, but as an existential experience of alienation and invisibility. This feeling of being outside the intended rhythm becomes a symbol of structural exclusions in the cultural sphere. Not only physical but also temporal barriers—age limits, career expectations, linear educational paths—exclude those whose lives are shaped by care work, illness, migration, or interruptions. The work is a metal clock without hands, its letters, rather than numbers, forming the words “arrived too late” Installed at the side entrance to the monastery ruins, it points to alternative approaches and to “too late” as a resistant form of time.
Tardy Arrival
By Walter Benjamin, translated by Howard Eiland
The clock in the schoolyard wore an injured look because of my offense. It read “tardy.” And in the hall, through the classroom doors I brushed by, murmurs of secret deliberations reached my ears. Teachers and students were friends, behind those doors. Or else all was quite still, as though someone were expected. Quietly, I took hold of the door handle. Sunshine flooded the spot where I stood. Then I defiled my pristine day by entering. No one seemed to know me, or even to see me. Just as the devil takes the shadow of Peter Schlemihl, the teacher had taken my name at the beginning of the hour. I could no longer get my turn on the list. I worked noiselessly with the others until the bell sounded. But no blessedness crowned the toil.