David Berridge, LEMONADE – EVERYTHING WAS SO INFINITE, 2011

‘Limonade xes war alles so grenzenlos.’ was one of Franz Kafka’s last sentences in his Aus den Gesprächsblättern published in Briefe 1902–1924. Hélène Cixous, who repeatedly wrote about this sentence, translated it as ‘Limonade xtout était si infini.’. This is translated in the english version of the Hélène Cixous Reader as ‘Lemonade xeverything was so infinite’.

Cixous’s translation of Kafka’s sentence ‘Lemonade xeverything was so infinite.’ forms the basis of a series of seven titles written by seven different writers / artists – David Berridge, Julia Calver, Emma Cocker, Rachel Lois Clapham, Marit Münzberg, Tamarin Norwood and Mary Paterson.

Each title explores one of the seven segments of this sentence – ‘Lemonade’, ‘x‘, ‘everything’, ‘was’, ‘so’, ‘infinite’, ‘.’.

This form of publishing does not only aim to investigate Cixous’s translation of the sentence, but also intends to explore the grammatical connection of the different elements within the sentence, the possible interconnectivity / collaboration of the different voices, the words in their own grammatically disconnected function etc …