Dear Lidl,

Clearly our talks over collaborating at the site on Bornholmerstrasse have broken down. The former border-checkpoint (1961-1989, where the wall first fell) and then former used-car-lot (1990-1996, the first in East Germany) is also a good location for groceries and your business there is flourishing. So I too am moving forward, though in another direction.

Next week in London I will be making an exhibition. There will be an opening reception on Thursday the 17th and I will make a performance then as well. Anyone from your organisation is very welcome.

In this absence of communication, I’ve often thought of Gunter Grass’ thoughts on German reunification from 1990:

We should learn from our compatriots in the G.D.R, for they were not given freedom as a gift, as were citizens of the Federal Republic, but had to wrest their freedom from an all-embracing system. They have had to struggle to achieve it on their own, while here we stand amidst our riches, poor by comparison.

Kindly,

Jeremiah

In Jeremiah Day’s work questions of site and historical memory are explored through fractured narratives, employing photography, speech, and improvisational movement. A hybrid form of realism, Day appropriates historical incidents to serve as allegories and examples that might shed insight upon broader philosophical and political questions.

In writing about Day’s work with Simone Forti, Fred Dewey (elaborating on Hannah Arendt) coined the term “the non-fictional imagination” to describe a method in which evocation and investigation run in parallel. If You Want Blood presents new works continuing Day’s research into the mixed and unresolved legacies of the end of the cold war, part of a broader project commissioned by If I Can’t Dance (I Don’t Want To Be Part of Your Revolution) in co-operation with Site Gallery, Sheffield, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and Arcade, London. This is Arcade’s fifth presentation of Day’s work, beginning with the exhibition The Fall of The Twelve Acres Museum in 2008, and most recently in 2011 with a seminar on Hannah Arendt’s text The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Its Political Significance