Who are you?
What have you achieved in life?
Who will remember you when you die?
These questions can bludgeon you. If you look into a mirror, your reflection will look back, but you won’t find an answer there. Urgency and anxiety creep up your spine, and suddenly you are gripped with the need to identify yourself with the image that is looking right back at you. You blink. You grimace. You move your facial muscles in grotesque ways, hoping you’ll figure out who you are. You are suspended in a cloud of anxiety, and as you move your body, you realize you are seeing a physical manifestation of your consciousness in action.
The streets are teeming with people, with thousands of minds buzzing and swirling. As they stride across the streets they never crash into each other, a careful dance of sidestepping and contorting. Your space and their’s never touch, like the celestial bodies moving around the sun and atoms colliding into each other to form new compounds. But this is not enough.
What is that special substance each person carries within that makes them stand out from the rest? What is this inscrutable mystery that endows originality to each and every individual? Some call it the soul, a halo of light that envelops the body. We all know this self-awareness is one of the finer points of evolution and a function mankind has apparently mastered, and it has been explained by religion and science alike. You sigh with relief because you are proud of the particularities that distinguish you from the rest. You are not only a thinking, introspective and balanced being, you are also unique.
Is this constant doubt and out of body experience a pattern? You walk outside and you realize you’re not the only one who reads French literature in its original language, likes craft beer, and thinks The Velvet Underground is far superior to The Beatles. There are people out there who share the same thoughts and beliefs, but there is always something off that makes you a bit different from the rest.
As you sway in the subway carriage, you look up from your smartphone and realize you’re not the only one whose gaze is glued to their screen. You stop scrolling your newsfeed because everything just seems so pessimistic. You think over your political and social standing, and you know that if the chance presented itself, you’d vote for the green party.
Your political dissatisfaction, your radical views, dreams, aspirations, and desires are just some of a few aspects that you believe make you unique and identifiable; however, you don’t realize that these are reproduced like a pattern across an entire generation. You fall in love, you have wild sex, and you try drugs, and for a few precious instants you depart from your bodily cage to seek new experiences.
Why are we so afraid of belonging to a whole? Why are we so hellbent on identifying special characteristics that make us stand out from the rabble? Is it so terrible to be un-unique?
Claudia Rogge’s photographic work creates a dialogue that exposes this need to be unique. Her collages and patterns represent the triumph of the absurd over reality. We live in denial thinking ourselves unique, but we turn a blind eye to the fact that we live in a collective consciousness and as humans we crave the connection to others.
