Escape to Berlin

This volume offers the autobiography of artist Adrian Piper (1948, New York). Established as a conceptual and minimalist artist as well as a performer on the New York art scene of the late 1960s, Piper traces in these pages – enriched with personal photographs, drawings and poems – his human and professional history.

“Do you want to know why I left the United States and why I refuse to return? This is why. (…) Instead the hard, stony layer of ego that separates the sprout within it from all the outer layers that surrounded it, begins to melt and disintegrate as it unravels, releasing its constricting death-grip on the tiny, now highly impacted sprout trapped inside it, allowing the sprout to inhale endlessly, to take everything into it, to expand without limit, to disperse and evaporate into everything it has ever been, everything that has ever surrounded it, everything it left behind when it began to unspool from its wrappings. Then you are really free. That is when you become the self you really are.”

Text in English and Italian.