There is this magical word, ‘Melancholia’, which has ancient origins. It is a word derived from the Greek: μελαγχολία. It is composed of: μέλας (black) and χολή (bile).

In short, it means ‘black bile’. Hippocrates, the Greek physician, believed that the ‘black humour’ was the cause of a change in the spirit, which became gloomy and sad. A constant, heart-wrenching, profound, unheard-of and inexpressible sadness, melancholy has often been associated with women, regarded as a sort of ‘sin of weakness’ that had to be suppressed. However, it was precisely through this contemplative sadness that the feminist avant-garde movements of the 19th and 20th centuries embraced melancholy as a tool to challenge the power structures of social norms and to express their struggle for equality.

ERWARTUNG weaves itself into the flow of time through the figure of a feminine double, evolving at the boundaries of abstraction and figuration, the real and the imaginary, what appears and what is hidden, a manifestation of an inner complexity with a dual image and a bodily languor where everything fades away.