Thomas Locher took inspiration for the title of this exhibition from Raymond Queneau’s book Cent mille milliards de poèmes. For this book Queneau composed ten sonnets. He then cut them up so they could be rearranged at will to form new sonnets. The one hundred-forty lines that comprise those
ten sonnets provide a total of one hundred thousand billion possibilities.
In this exhibition there is only one eponymously titled work. This work consists of sixteen cardboard cubes, each measuring ninety centimetres long, ninety centimetres high and ninety centimetres wide. A cube has six sides. Sixteen cubes thus have ninety-six sides. A phrase is printed on
each of these ninety-six sides. The phrases constitute five-thousand one-hundred and ninety letters. Those letters form nine-hundred and forty-four words, which in turn form a total of one hundred and thirty sentences.
‘what I thought, I didn’t think alone’, ‘the thought of the outside, the outside of thought’, ‘it is the order that determines the partition of what is common’ and ‘yes’ are some examples of sentences found on the cubes. Each cube is also printed in a colour. On each cube there is one colour for the background
and one or more colours for the text. Different colours are used in different combinations on different cubes. There are a total of five different colours for the texts and eight colours
for the backgrounds. This gives thirty-six possible colour combinations, not all of which are utilised (photo: Thomas Locher: „I AM NOT HERE WHERE YOU ARE YOU ARE NOT THERE WHERE I AM“, 2012.)