at the stations in india, people were selling packages of food wrapped in leaves. and when they had finished eating they threw the leaves out the window. in the city the cows came and ate those leaves with leftover food. i had put a pack of these plates in my 'skizzenkoffer'. i had two suitcases that i carried with me when traveling. in it i put all the things that i found interesting. as a multi-dimensional 'journal'. these are now owned by the firm harlequin in wiesbaden, which has a large collection of works by fluxus artists.
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i had a 'skizzenbuch', which was two-dimensional, a sketchbook. i also had all kinds of material that i wanted to show but i couldn't do that in that sketchbook so i had a suitcase in which i put the things that could be used in an exhibition. mostly things collected while traveling. one suitcase was not so big, it was black and lined with lilac silk. i had bought it at a market somewhere in india. at exhibitions, cloth, white cotton, were put on the floor and then all those things from the suitcase were put there so that you could see this whole collection.

i showed it in a gallery in heidelberg [mannheim - CS] I believe, at a private exhibition, in a small space. and i showed both suitcases at hoffmann, in friedberg near frankfurt. all the sketchbooks ended up in the staatsgallerie stuttgart, the whole convolute. a picture of the skizzenkoffer has also been included in a catalog of Groningen, of the leaf packages. with a list of titles i could still use, and it got more and more conceptual and eventually those titles became redundant. it was what it was. it was the beginning of things that i found, and that i could show. things that i also collected in that time. i no longer call it a 'sketch', i am collecting everything that is interesting to see at the moment. i notice that there is hardly anything that is not interesting to see. showing things then becomes virtually limitless. but i show them in part systematically, so that with small objects you can see the individuality in the crowd.

[source: herman de vries, bron (uitgeverij de zwaluw : den haag 2021) 150]