“Throughout our lives, we spend a lot of time and even more money engineering pleasant experiences. We book airline tickets, visit beaches, admire glaciers, say hello to penguins, watch elephants drinking, and so on. In all this, the emphasis is almost always on the experience itself, which lasts a certain amount of time and then is over... We are not assiduous or devoted cultivators of our past experiences...They happen, and then we're done with them. They do sometimes come back to us, unbidden. We may be on a boring train ride to work but suddenly, an image of a beach at dusk comes to life. Or, while we're having a bath we remember climbing a flower-covered mountain with a friend a decade before. But little attention tends to get played to such moments. We don't engineer regular encounters with them...We should learn, regularly, to travel around our minds and think it almost as prestigious to sit at home and reflect on a trip we once took to an island as to trek to this island encased in our cumbersome bodies. Part of why we feel the need for so many new experiences may simply be that we're so bad at absorbing the ones we've had... There is a camera in our minds already that is always on. It takes everything we've ever seen. Huge chunks of experience are still there in our heads, intact and vivid, just waiting for us to ask ourselves leading questions like, 'Where did we go after we landed?' or, 'What was the first breakfast like?' When we can't sleep, when there is no wifi, we should always think of going on memory journeys... We can remain in touch with so much of what made them pleasurable, simply through the art of evocation...We can, right now, shut our eyes and travel into and linger amongst the very best and most consoling and life-enhancing bits of our past.” -“How to travel in your mind” by The School of Life . We hope that this great group exhibition “Fernweh” at Bildhalle Gallery helps you to do that. If you’re in Zürich, do not miss it! . 2 July - 22 August 2020
