Self-Care

Self-care is an attempt to do one of the things that is most difficult for me—and probably for others as well: to practice self-care in an atmosphere of constant hassle, where we're stretched thinner and thinner by both external and self-imposed demands. It’s also an attempt to reconfigure, nurture, and reconstruct oneself in the aftermath of breakups and other life difficulties and hindrances. In the room, I have furniture from my own apartment that I modified for the installation.

There’s a box in the room—an acrylic box with seven levels, each representing one year of the relationship with my ex-fiancé. At the bottom of the box lies the ring from our failed engagement, along with photos of the exact Google Maps location where I last saw him during our final fight, where I threw the ring at him. When I returned, he was already searching for it. We looked for the ring in the dark for three hours until we found it. That was the last time we saw each other. I later sent the Google Maps location to a friend so she could go there and take photos of the place. She told me, "Wait—that's just a few meters away from The Ring Bar." I was shocked to learn that, just three months after our fight, a new bar called The Ring had opened right where this happened, near Sonnenallee and in Berlin.

The box is placed in front of The Monk by the Sea by Caspar David Friedrich because my ex-fiancé proposed to me in front of this painting at the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin. At the time, I thought, This is the most unromantic painting that has ever existed. A lone monk stands before the vastness of the sea and sky, filled with heavy clouds, in what appears to be the moments just before a storm. There’s even a rumor that Friedrich painted a gun hidden beneath the monk’s cape. I wondered, If this doesn’t work out, we’ll both be like that monk—alone, standing before the sea and sky, thrown at the mercy of life and the elements. Last year marked the 250th anniversary of Caspar David Friedrich, and now I will forever have a deeply personal connection to this painting. For the anniversary, I did an interview with Hanje Cantz about it—you can read it here:

https://shorturl.at/878Po

You can sit and marvel at this masterpiece of Romanticism from a leather sofa, with pillows printed with images of my shingles—gürtelrosa—that I developed multiple times during periods of stress. Nearby, there’s a simmering pot with essential oils and spices that I use to reconfigure and nurture myself at home, in this incubator-like space I’ve created—a room turned into my subconscious. I’m very much gesture-influenced by Dalí. After all, I’m Catalan too, and he’s forever part of my subconscious. There’s also something David Lynch-esque in the atmosphere—something that reminds me of his surreal worlds.

On the sideboard are all the photos I gathered over our seven-year relationship, printed on transparent sheets, fading into the dark like a cabinet of my memory. The wooden vanity, my own, where I applied makeup thousands of times at home, has been altered—I removed the mirrors and replaced them with three screens. They display conversations about my ex-relationship with ChatGPT. Only ChatGPT’s replies are shown, forming an arch, a narrative that can be read between the lines—an analysis of the beginning, climax, and decline of a modern relationship. It reflects the liquid nature of love in these commitment-phobic, hookup-culture times, where many people avoid attachments or relationships to keep more options open, liquid love, as the sociolgist Zygmunt Bauman describes. It captures the reflections, struggles, grapplings, hurts, conclusions, and questions this reality generates.