Year: 2024-25

​

Duration: 11’

​

Written for and Performed by Peyee Chen, Eliane Tokeshi, Reese Chen, Andrés Hernández, and Jeanne Hourez

​

The text is a fragmentation and reconstruction of Walter Benjamin’s famous paragraph on Paul Klee’s
Angelus Novus:

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from
something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This
is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past.Where we perceive a chain of
events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of
his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm
is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close
them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris
before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History", Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken
Books, 1969: 249.

​​​