I always dreamed of entering Pink Floyd’s “The Wall.” That is, entering Roger Waters’ brain, like squatting in a trashed apartment that’s too big for me. I remember when this double album came out, there was incredible excitement, which was intensified by Alan Parker’s film. This musical novel was the first time I understood what the London Blitz was like (September 1940-May 1941). I think it’s useful that a great German artist explores the madness of bombing a foreign country, at the exact time when the same thing is starting again in Ukraine. What is destroyed is never really destroyed. Bombings are transformed into memories, which themselves trace reconstruction, the hope for a new world. This absurdity (art) is our only chance to keep on living.

I’d like to thank Gregor Hildebrandt and Almine Rech for making this experience possible. They’ve made miracles happen. Pink Floyd have broken up but I suspect that Gregor wanted to add another brick in the wall: his forms produced with recordings, like a backwards archeologist. Instead of digging through the ruins, he created his own. What is art, if not a way of recycling ruins to make new ones? I myself will recycle a phrase by Françoise Sagan: “I wonder what the past has in store for me.” Meanwhile, I hope that at the opening, there will be lots of alcohol so we can feel “comfortably numb” and I’m almost positive that Gregor will show up shouting “Is there anybody out there?”

— Frédéric Beigbeder