WATER / Berlin / 2019
“I have worked on the typography Water for a long time. Over the period of several months I have drawn dozens of versions of the lettering. When I was happy with the design of the word, I started to paint with black, white and blue acrylics. Once the drawing was finished, as the very last step, I carefully applied the final writing to the canvas. It was a technical decision, but it was also because the content, the word, has such great meaning to me and I wanted it to be as perfect as possible. Behind the lettering Water, there is not only an aesthetic idea but my concern about how we use our resources. The meat industry, in particular, is a big problem - about 15,000 litres of water are needed for one kilo of beef. I have long eaten a completely vegetarian diet and I never missed eating meat - even when I was doing heavy physical work. There is nothing wrong with not eating meat. On the contrary! When I worked in Zanzibar, I ate with the local carpenteers in the canteen for weeks. There was never any meat on the menu and we were perfectly fit and we enjoyed the tasty dishes.Besides health and environmental aspects, it is also the suffering of animals that concerns me. I grew up in the countryside and learned that animals are very sensitive. That they can feel like we humans do. Even if I am not a strict vegetarian, I advocate that we finally give up industrial meat production. If we keep fewer animals in scaled-down agriculture, we could offer them a livable existence - and we would need less water, the element without which we cannot exist.”