This book is published in collaboration with Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin (Bruno Brunnet & Nicole Hackert). When the writer Oswald Wiener moved to Dawson City in Canada with his wife Ingrid in 1984, it was another act in his quest for knowledge. He himself thought he had left art behind after his epoch-making work 'the improvement of central europe, novel'¹. His first expeditions to Iceland at the end of the 1970s and his move to the Canadian wilderness were part of this, a strong statement away from the conventional, albeit 'avant-garde' cultural establishment, in the clear awareness that he could not escape it anyway. The Arctic tundra and the subarctic forests became the setting for an experiment in living on the edge of a now global culture. Dawson City was predestined for this. In this environment, the living and working environments, a house in the forest, the claims café they ran - a restaurant with Wiener schnitzel and apple strudel and the only Italian espresso machine on a territory the size of the Federal Republic of Germany - became sites of introspection and thus a practice of thinking beyond art, science and philosophy. As their long residency drew to a close in the early 2000s, as the times they spent in Europe grew longer and longer, and as interests shifted once again, there was an obvious need to map the innermost place of their work and long refexions. The house was captured in detail from the inside, and rather sparsely on the outside, in more than 300 photographs, thus surveying it as it were. It shows the couple's everyday living and working environment, Ingrid's loom is just as much a part of it as Oswald's books and their records. But the pictures go far beyond this and can be read as a document of a space of thought and perception - as a world unto itself in its factual validity. This series of pictures consists of prints that Oswald Wiener made during his lifetime, which he exhibited and which were subjected to an order. Individual photos were also given away - as his works of art, as it were - on special occasions. So it makes perfect sense to posthumously present them in a comprehensive exhibition and thus bring them into a larger context - both in art and intellectual history, and in Wiener's linguistic and intellectual oeuvre. It should not be concealed that Wiener also saw it differently when he exhibited the photographs in 2004 at the Charim Gallery in Vienna: I do not claim any art status for these photographs. If they are to go beyond suggestions for the spatial and temporal reconstruction of an anonymous situation - which may already suffice as a reason for existence - they have been for a certain interest in my person and that of my wife. Their status of innocent snapshots is not due to an artist's pose; the blurriness and apparent awkwardness are appropriate, since these images contain a great deal of unmanipulated information and discretion is desired.³. This contradiction will need to be explored. But it is also symptomatic of much of what led Wiener into the borderlands of his interests. His distrust was directed at the constructions of disciplines and fields such as literature or art, as well as society in general, science or philosophy. Peter Pakesch Lichtenberg, April 2022 (text abridged)weiterlesen