“Going Home”
2025
Video Installation/ Loop/ 10:00 Minutes/ Wood/ PlexiGlass/ Colour/ Sound
With Lennart Deuß & Levi Hartmann
"Return—for me, for you—don’t let our joy fade away.
The time that passes can never be reclaimed.
Oh, my beloved, I swear, wealth and riches are worthless
compared to the hell of loneliness and the pain of loss."
In a song by Mohammad Moshajaeel, titled Mohajer (Migrant), the Yemeni singer and oud player sings this verse, which follows me day and night.
His call for return—the homecoming of the one who has left, the migrant—carries within it the awareness of its impossibility. Time, once passed, cannot be reclaimed. And with it, whatever was left behind does not remain an elastic phenomenon, waiting to be restored.
The piece I am presenting is titled Going Home. The name is inspired by a composition by Alice Coltrane of the same name, whose sound I incorporate into the video. Coltrane’s piece, to me, holds a similar essence to Moshajaeel’s. It begins with the delicate sound of a harp, expands into orchestral passages, and yet always returns to the same harp arpeggios. A constant oscillation between tranquility, joy, sorrow, and melancholy. The contradiction of return—the longing for it, the impossibility of it, the illusion of it—is inscribed in this piece. It is this tension that particularly interested me while working on this video.
The wooden casket that houses the screen stands as a solid body—bearing the weight of loss, a loss that resists localization. The pain cannot be contained, so it is projected onto a surface, fragmented, displayed. Perhaps to be witnessed by others. Yet even then, it remains beyond articulation.
In the video, I show fragments of former racehorses—once bred for speed, now repurposed as therapy animals. They gallop, they walk, their bodies carrying traces of a past function that has faded. I attempt to shift longing onto these bodies—bodies that have been uprooted, extracted from their natural habitat, brought elsewhere, subjected to a specific function. Until they no longer do. Photos:
@eldeuss 
