Every Word Casts a Shadow

Thomas Jefferson was many things: Enlightenment philosopher, president of the USA, founder of a university. He was also a proponent of the abolition of slavery, but only in theory. In fact, he himself held people in enslavement and numerous racist remarks can be found in his writings. Students at Leuphana University have repeatedly asked: Why Jefferson, of all people, in the foyer of Leuphana Library? What is the relation to Lüneburg? Especially at a University whose buildings mostly date back to the period when Lüneburg was being militarised by the Nazis, why should we so clearly favor dreams of the future to an engagement with the past? Who can and could ever dream of a future?

“Every Word Casts a shadow”, a quote by Yvette Christiansë, literally overshadows Jefferson’s quote, “I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past”. The new sentence updates the art work “Branding the Campus” (1996-98) by Christian Philipp Müller – an installation to which Jefferson’s quote belongs along with the numerous prints in the library and foyer, the display cases, the “Prototypes Shop” in the entrance of Building 7 and, last but not least, a comprehensive publication of the same name. For this installation in the library rooms, Christian Philipp Müller, Beatrice von Bismarck, Ulf Wuggenig, Diethelm Stoller, Astrid Wege and students of what was then known as the University of Lüneburg had focused their research on the University of Virginia campus, designed by Thomas Jefferson as the ideal campus, in order to compare the different locations of libraries on university campuses. The discussion of Jefferson arose in relation to the ever-present question of an ideal university.

The modification of the art work results from a seminar and workshop, “Beyond Jefferson’s Futures” (2024). Yvette Christiansë is a poet and professor of Africana Studies at Barnard College, New York, and was at the time Public Fellow at the Leuphana Institute of Advanced Studies in Culture and Society. While participating in the workshop, she uttered the sentence in a conversation: “Every word casts a shadow” – a sentence that seemed ideal to us to problematize the optimism of the quote by Jefferson. Christiansë has been researching the stories of enslaved people for over thirty years, has consulted archives worldwide, and is author of numerous works on slavery, including the poetry collection Imprendehora (1999), the poetic story Castaway (1999) and the novel Unconfessed (2006).

The “Every word casts a shadow” typography is reminiscent of sports branding and thus itself contains a refracted echo of the earlier “Branding the Campus” work by Christian Philipp Müller. It not only renders parts of Jefferson’s statement invisible. More than this, the sentence shakes up the posture of prominent quotations and distances itself from any form of faith in words. It was articulated by a writer and scholar whose work stands for inscribing overlooked and suppressed histories into every future.

Text: Susanne Leeb. Seminar and workshop participants: Anna Blecker, Charlotte Dansberg, Finia Dorenberg, Rasmus Gaida, Stina Fisahn, Philine Held, Linda Heydebreck, Frieder Janz, Kenneth Lühmann, Julia Knapmeyer, Anna C. Mulder, Lilli Ritter, Vanessa Spors, Katja Stafenk, Mika Steffan, Emil Weber, Annika Weiß. Guestspeakers: Verena Adamik, Yvette Christiansë, Sarah Kreiseler, Jenna Owens, Hannah Spahn, Ruth Stamm. In collaboration with Christian Philipp Müller and Stefan Sylvestri (typography).