Becker Bleiben wo ich nie gewesen bin, 2024

Beneath the arcades of the Union area lies a blanket, unassuming, everyday, familiar, yet it becomes the carrier of an existential statement: „I want to remain where I have never been.“ With this work, the Frankfurt artist Justus Becker, also known as COR, refers to the writer Thomas Brasch, one of the great powerful outsiders of German-German post-war history. The sentence comes from Brasch’s poem “What I Have I Do Not Want to Lose” from the volume Kargo (1977), in which the lyrical self is entangled in a web of contradictions: between attachment and departure, love and distance, life and death.

Brasch, the son of a high-ranking GDR official, was imprisoned in 1968 for „state-hostile agitation“ after he had protested against the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops into Czechoslovakia. In 1977 he left the GDR; a step that meant liberation and loss at the same time. In his verse, the tensions of a life between belonging and alienation, between the desire to arrive and the impossibility of staying, build up.
Beckers installation brings this ambivalence back into the public space, to a place where movement, stay, and transience overlap daily. The ceiling on which Brasch’s text is to be read marks a provisional place of permanence: it stands for warmth and protection, but also for homelessness, for those who have nowhere to call home. Beneath the arcades, a transitional space between inside and outside, protection and publicness, the inscription unfolds a twofold meaning: it speaks of the place of longing one would like to linger in, and at the same time of the impossibility of ever reaching that place.
In Becker’s work, which often operates at the intersection of street art, political statement, and poetry, the poetic gesture is combined with social urgency. The installation is not a monument, but an invitation to reflection: about the relationship between place and identity, belonging and alienation.

Thomas Brasch’s quote here becomes a silent echo of the present. It reminds us of all those who are on the move, voluntarily or involuntarily, and whose stay can always only be temporary. At the same time, it points to the utopian core of human existence: the desire to arrive in a space that does not yet exist, „where I have never been before“.
Thus, Becker's work becomes a poetic intervention in the urban space: it transforms an everyday object into a symbol of both homelessness and hope, and illuminates Brachs's existential line as one of the most beautiful paradoxes of modern literature.