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Martin Stoecklin
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There are moments and images that burn themselves into your brain, no matter how important, how good, how bad they are, they just do. They want to be there. They hit whatever combination is needed of your synapses in that moment to stay there. I had this particular moment with Martin. I was riding my bike home, when I was maybe 18, and there was this street that makes a nice S curve in Riehen, and in the upper part of the S I heard a voice calling my name, Martin’s voice. He sat in the back seat of a car riding by, and I had to look twice, because he looked strange, and then I realised that he was missing a tooth or two, and he yelled something, and then he was gone. And the amazing thing was, he seemed to be in a very good mood. It was in our skateboarding times. You looked (and most of us still do) at things differently, at benches, houses, walls, the city. The times when accidents were cool, blood was cool, pain was cool. You hit the concrete, and it hurt, it did, hell yes, but yeah, it hurt. You were alive (and in agony). Meeting Martin always happens in this mood of happy pain. He has this funny way of telling stories, sometimes they don’t even have an ending, but I like them. And I guess I am telling stories the same way when I talk to him. And we kind of dislike the same type of people. He dislikes them more than I do, but how can you tell how much somebody dislikes somebody else? And Martin is the only person I know who lives in the Lochergut, that famous anti-human Corbusier kind of building in Zurich where Pipilotti Rist and Max Frisch used to live. Where you get completely confused because there are floors missing, and you have several entrances next to each other and you are imaging how narrowly people must live there and then you go in and there is a staircase and it opens and it’s amazing, it’s not Zurich, it’s out of time and you don’t know if it’s in the past or in the future. And there is Martin, and there is Ruth. And you talk to them. And it’s good. And sometimes we send each other links of skateboard films for the pain, and the blood, and the coolness. And Martin does the covers of our 60pages which you can buy here (Amazon) or here.

People
Martin Stoecklin