“With great joy I accepted an invitation from Berlin to collaborate with Robert Krokowski and Marlen Wagner and to participate in the project “Simone Weil Pavillon” in Geneva/Switzerland.

The texts taken from the book Gravity and Grace were partially blacked out (“black out poetry”) by Robert Krokowski and myself; on the pages edited by me, I left words or parts of sentences unblacked-out that seemed relevant to me or typical of Simone Weil.

Subsequently I intervened in the text by supplementing the pages I had worked on with excerpts from longer quotations by authors writing about her (Böll, Camus, T.S. Eliot) or by authors who were an inspiration to her (Teresa of Ávila, Aeschylus, Plato).

Thus, for example, one of the pages whose text by Simone Weil seemed to me personally almost relentless is over-embroidered with a quotation by Heinrich Böll referring to Simone Weil: “I am afraid of her severity.”

Another over-embroidering reads: “A great spirit of our time,” a quotation by Albert Camus.

I embroidered these additions over the black-out lines in a script invented by me – thus fictional – and some of the pages were provided not only with script signs but also with symbols, and thus commented upon through my perspective.

Both the undecipherability of the alphabet and the commentary-signs designed by me are intended to encourage visitors to engage mentally with the selected free = readable words between the blacked-out passages.

Reading a continuous text probably does not require as much mental energy as the question of what might be hidden / blacked out there, what the meaning of the content could be of which only individual parts (words, sentence fragments) are visible. And what the rune-like letters might mean.

My concern is to intensify this intellectual “friction” in the engagement with Simone Weil’s texts”.

Sonja Knoll

*1957 in Vienna
Austrian-Swiss psychologist, author and artist
After studying art history in Vienna, moved to Switzerland – long-term stays in various cantons, including three years in Geneva
Psychology studies completed with a lic.phil. degree in Bern
Psychotherapeutic training in Austria and Germany
Psychologist in the fields of public relations, assessment/personnel recruitment, coaching, addiction prevention, art mediation
Several years of artistic training in paper and textile work in Bern/Switzerland
Autodidact (mixed media, book artist)
Exhibitions in Switzerland

Sonja Knoll on Instagram