Cornelia Stehling

-urine

The project Who Am I is subject to the question of one's own mirror image and is at the same time its construction. A field of tension arises between one's own role as an observer and the object of what is being observed. In this change of perspective the data collection for the analysis of the own self took place.
In order to maintain an objective viewpoint in this constellation, the data collection focused on purely physical and measurable facts. For seven days, the daily fluid intake and output was measured and recorded. To answer the question of one's own self with details about one's own urine is certainly in a certain sense an ironic maneuver to find a serious answer, but at the same time it is also a game with the culture of self-dramatization in an everyday context and thus the question "what image do I want to create of myself? The question "who am I" will probably never be conclusively answered for oneself. Accordingly, urine as such an obvious fragment of the ego is perhaps even less of an evasion than an honest answer.
Reducing the ego to the body as a kind of production unit was also exciting because two levels quickly emerged. On the one hand, there is the drinking behavior, which takes place in public, in society, and is seldom exclusively fluid intake. On the act of drinking, rituals, ambience, enjoyment and awareness are layered around the "right drinking behaviour", while the act of urinating takes place behind closed doors. The product to which the body processes what it absorbs disappears unseen and completely in the sewage system.
In this model, one's own body represents the intermediate black box into which one can pour anything one wants and as a result obtain different shades of yellow, quantities and degrees of urgency. The data collection around the center of the question "Who am I" is thus done from two directions.

/PROJECT 14, Who am I: Mein Innerstes