I’m back at the house on the Auf der Donau corner where you and I stayed during our first few trips to the Ruhrgebiet. It feels bare and empty. The trees and bushes carry no leaves. They are stripped of life. There is a little snow. It’s cold this winter.
This is where our trip started. I cooked chicken peas here and you baked eggs. We watched the recession take shape on CNN and looked at the map of the Ruhrgebiet. When we left at the end of our second trip I decided to put the technical camera on the corner of this street. We climbed on two different electricity structures and asked passersby to release the shutter. I put on my Americana blouse, the one with roses; you had on a purple shirt and were wearing the blue sunglasses of my dad. We took a simultaneous drag of our cigarettes when the picture was taken.

I think about the Auf der Donau-place a lot. The past months I’ve felt like returning to this place. Now that I’m back, I don’t feel much. It was new, but now it’s old. I’m an outsider to the place I once embraced –or that once embraced me.
There is a plastic green stem of a rose on the electricity structure that I stood on when we took that picture. The rosebud is gone. I put the stem of the flower in my camera bag and take a picture from the same point of view as four months ago.
Six people pass. Four men, two women, all in their thirties, all walking alone. One woman is walking a dog. Two men are smoking a cigarette. Five of them bow their head when passing by. The dog sniffs my feet. One man almost trips over.



What does a travel mean? What does a trip communicate? It is its own medium. It transfers something from one place to another. What is being transported? Travelers. Tourists. And so forth. From where to where? From here to there and back again. This is travel. This is tourism. That’s all.
But what is the essence inherent in trip? What does tripping mean? Isn’t it funny that the same word that is used for travel is also used to describe someone who trips over something, who stumbles, who falls, who fails? Isn’t failure the inherent essence of travel? Of a trip? How many times did we go on a trip and how many times were we disappointed to some extent? Didn’t we know from the beginning that our trip would be disappointing, that we wouldn’t find what we were looking for or that the place we tripped to didn’t meet our expectations? Isn’t trip a systematic failure? A pre-planned fall, a deliberate stumble? Why is planning so inherent in tripping? Why do travelers buy maps, make plans, fill up the car with a full tank, reserve seats before hand on planes, buses, trains, hotels?
Maybe it’s because the failure of a trip, a travel, a plan, is its essence, its destination. Its artistic manifest. How is trip connected to tragedy? To comedy? Why is the artist so fond of taking pictures on his travel? Isn’t it because he thinks it’s so funny? Or because it’s so dramatic?

What makes the artist on travel, the artist? Isn’t it because he is able to be the one that travels, that trips, that stumbles, and at the same time the one that watches his trip, his stumble, his failure? He can split himself in two. He can become non-original, and aware of his own in-authenticity. It is the ironic self-awareness of the artist that he must conceal or live within his own shadow.