ASYMPTOTE OF ARRIVAL

An asymptote approaches and never arrives.

Somewhere in Berlin there is a room that believes it is a ship. Its pilot is a mind divided. The Architect seals the walls — gaffer tape, cables, curtains — keeping out the U-Bahn's tremor, the rent, the slow gravity of the everyday. Inside the shield he built lives the Captain: commander of the vessel 7-7-Alpha, a desk of synthesizers and wire he knows to be the most advanced capsule in the universe. He cut his own tether. He calls it freedom.

Every day the Captain speaks into his Black Box — confessions no one will ever play back, loneliness retold as interstellar heroism. And the room answers: cables knot themselves into organisms, antennas weave webs across the corners, screens open like eyes that have learned to watch him back. The ship breathes because he needs it to.

Seven Metamorphoses

Refusal. Isolation. Myth. Confession. Conflict. Transgression. Rebirth — or fall. The performance moves through seven states of change, following Ovid: like Arachne, who wove the gods' failures into her cloth and was turned into a spider for it, the Captain weaves the flaws of reality into his own web — and wins the right to live inside it. Velázquez, smuggling Rubens' gods into Las Meninas, presides over the work as a quieter patron saint of insubordination.

When the fuel runs out, the signals cut. What remains is not a ship but a room — and a tired, earthbound man who must coil the cables in the morning. He will build it again. Arrival was never the point.

Performed and exhibited at 48 Stunden Neukölln, Berlin — two consecutive editions, June 2025 and June 2026.

Inspiration keys: eleuthromania — Lagrange point — periapsis.

A performance by Eralp Orkun Cihan (HPPDMS).