SCULPTURAL OBJECTS

Always Keep an Eye on Your Neighbours began in the fishing harbour where I kept my sailing boat. Part of the harbour still belonged to old fishing families who had worked there for generations. One of them was Connie Fischer. Fisherman, drinker, storyteller, adventurer, and a man with wicked, mischievously blue sparkling eyes.

Connie had two large old vessels. One was the Maria, a beautiful wooden trawler that flew the Jolly Roger and somehow seemed to be the flag itself. The other was another old trawler, Elke, retired and converted into one of the dirtiest and most outrageous bars in town. To be there already felt like being an actor inside a film.

Connie was either loved or hated, and most often both. He was too present to ignore. Many of his stories involved comic versions of being chased by the local police after he had closed the bar, late, very late at night. They knew him well, and he knew them too. Often they seemed to arrive out of duty as much as conviction, and around him there was always this strange give and take between authority, mischief and local tolerance.

The municipality also did everything within its power to close down the boat bar, which in itself became part of the comedy. Connie resisted, dodged, argued, laughed, and somehow continued. In the end they seemed almost to give up and do their best to pretend the bar did not exist. For that small bourgeois village, the boat bar was an embarrassment and a treasure at the same time. Whatever else the village had, it also had the best bar far and wide.

Connie’s evenings were built from stories, laughter, drinking and uncertainty. At some point he would start serving his terrible house potion, Die Schwarze Sau. Liquorice dissolved in vodka. It was disgusting, and he was generous with it. Free rounds appeared again and again, and the nights became long enough that the next morning one could never be entirely sure what had actually happened.

I went there to draw, to listen, and to watch the harbour theatre unfold. Eventually Connie asked me to make a pirate figure, something like a galleon figure, for the Maria. I was broke, as usual, and could not afford to refuse. The work took ages. Glass fibre is not a pleasant material, and I was paid miserably, though Connie compensated in beer and Schwarze Sau.

When the figure was finally finished, we mounted it on the Maria. But it did not belong there. It was always in the way of some piece of fishing gear, never quite fitting the working logic of the boat. In the end Connie moved it to the radar of the bar ship. Only then did the object find its place, not as a heroic figurehead, but as a watchman over the harbour, ridiculous, suspicious, comic and pirate-like.

That was when it became Always Keep an Eye on Your Neighbours. And it still does.