Did You Know That I can Breathe Underwater?: Did You Know That I Can Breathe Underwater - Collection Text
“Did You Know That I Can Breathe Underwater?” revisits an earlier body of AI works created with Stable Diffusion, works that predate later series such as identity machine, Good Hair, or the recent collage experiments. These images emerged in dialogue with the poetry of my grandfather and already carry traces of the materials that have become constants in my practice: hair, cloth, skin and the architectures of the city.
Their corruptedness is part of their language. Repetition, distortion, and collapse shape them into visual echoes: fragments of bodies caught mid-metamorphosis and submerged in layers of cloth, hair, or concrete. They recall staged fashion/editorial images but corrupted, glitched, and reimagined, producing a dream-logic where figures strain against systems of containment.
The title is both a question and an affirmation. It gestures toward the resilience of survival in impossible conditions, the ability to breathe even when submerged and feel all the more relevant today. These images are fossils of a moment when machine vision was still raw, when AI image-making produced glitches that felt closer to poetry than perfection.
This collection feels like a memory—an archaeology of my practice, uncovering earlier sediments that continue to inform the present.
On Poetry
My grandfather, born in 1920 in Germany, was a deeply creative man who, through war and through life simply not being very open to artists back then, wasn’t able to live his creativity to the fullest. He loved poetry, music—especially classical music, which later in life he found too depressive to listen to—languages, and more. At the same time, he was fascinated with computers and technology. My own tendency to have interests all over the place definitely stems from him.
He played the harmonica, the accordion, and later in life taught himself to play the piano. I also think that he was suffering from depression—if not as a general condition, then certainly as PTSD from the war, from Russian imprisonment and fleeing that imprisonment, from being separated from his parents again by the Wall in East Berlin, and never being able to see them again before their deaths.
His poetry feels this way: a profound sadness, but also a deep love for life. It is full of the lost years and opportunities taken by war. Still, he did so many things—also thanks to my grandmother. He traveled as much as he could, both for business and for pleasure with her. He spoke both French and English.
I decided to mint some of his poems because I think he would have loved to be read by a broader audience—even though it would also have felt a little too much and embarrassing for him. He wrote almost all of his poems in Sütterlin, a specific German handwriting style. Some words were quite difficult to decipher. I also refrained from trying to translate them—I don’t feel equipped to carry their meaning into English. But he was very much influenced by German Dichter like Heinrich Heine, Hölderlin, Schiller, Rainer Maria Rilke, Theodor Fontane, and of course Goethe.