REPLIKANT

„I’ve seen things you people wouldn't believe... Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion... I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... Time to die.“

The last words of replicant Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) in BLADE RUNNER. He could not expand his lifespan.

In my series REPLIKANT, I remember seeing this film in the cinema for the first time in 1984 with my new lover who was very tall and very blond and looked a bit like Roy Batty. He adored the movie and watched it often. When he turned 25 a year later, he discovered the first small signs of ageing on his body that made him panic, he could not accept it and started to change a lot. He died that same year in a mysterious car accident while we were vacationing together. There were 8 victims, and my lover was the driver. Maybe he himself had a set lifespan, like the replicant, and knew it. By coincidence or premonition I was not in the car that night.

I was frozen for months, in my nightmares he would come back to me, sometimes slowly following me down a lonely country road, sitting in the wrecked car, an old white Mercedes-Benz, and asking me to get in. Or I found the wreck in a ditch, heard him calling for help, but I suspected he was just trying to lure me, to take me to the intermediate realm where he had been trapped since the accident. In my dreams, this in-between world looked like Blade Runner, Paris Texas or Blood Simple movie sets, and I began to enjoy meeting him there. In the winter I met a new man and those dreams stopped immediately.

„I Don't Know How To Respond To That.“ When a loved one dies suddenly, there are so many unanswered questions. One could go insane knowing that there will be no more answers. When my lover appeared in my nightmares after the accident, it was horrible at first, he seemed to want to harm me, tried to lure me into the afterlife. But after a few weeks I looked forward to the nights to meet him, to try to get answers to the questions as to why he left the world so early and so brutally, whether it was my fault too. This half year at home, isolated, almost always alone, was my healing time, after that I was ready for a new life.