Ulrike Rosenbach
«For Ten Thousand years I Slept»

A large ring of salt, some six metres in diameter, has been strewn on the marble floor of the ballroom of the 'Neue Galerie' in Aachen. A smaller circle of fresh, green moss is visible in the centre of the salt ring. Dressed in white, clamped into a huge bow made of bamboo, I lie there on the soft moss. Like an arrow about to be fired, my body has buckled under the tension of the bowstring. On the floor round this ensemble is a narrow metal track on which a video camera is mounted, its lens observingly trained like a monitoring eye on the centre of the ring. A small recorder, mounted on a carriage, stores the video pictures and orbits round me like a satellite for three hours.
This performance is tranquil, motionless to the end. After three hours I clumsily rise from my cowering posture. I pick up a rod and short-out the power circuit that kept the video recorder going. Then I walk round the ring of salt with slow, measured steps and write one sentence in the salt: For 10,000 years I slept and now I have wakened.

Ulrike Rosenbach