ULI JON ROTH - Will North America See Him Live? Page 3
by Martin Popoff

"It's more enigmatic, isn't it?," teases Uli, when asked about how the last unpartitioned chunk of poetry dovetails with Metamorphosis, which is presented in 11 parts. "And for good reason (laughs). It gives you something to think about. Basically, I don't believe in spelling everything out. Sometimes a little bit of mystery isn't such a bad thing. It was only natural that Metamorphosis would get its own poem, but Metamorphosis being differently structured, and more weighty in size than any of the previous seasons, is simply bigger. The poetry in the Metamorphosis is more leaning towards our century, where some of the others, they are from a slightly different timeframe, although I'm juxtaposing timeframes all the time. This entire thing is only to be understood in this way: that you have to look at three different timeframes working at any given moment, that is, past, present and future, interacting. It's all about how things change; that's what metamorphosis is all about. It's about change, transformation, journey, how things evolve. And there's a lot of enigma and mystery attached to the very process of transformation. And that's what I was trying to capture in some of the poetry, and also definitely in the artwork, because the artwork is also constantly playing with that theme; you have completely different timeframes juxtaposed. Like I would take a Rembrandt painting and I would connect it with a 20th-century symbol. That's what basically makes up the fabric of the whole thing."