Rose belongs to lotus, 2, Circulation

Recently in Schaarbeek, Brussels I have seen many kids playing out on the streets and squares. The balls in the trees prove their play. The twigs are occasionally their goal keepers, they hold the balls like a net, like lines on paper keep some scripts and ends of words. But none of the balls here carry a name.

The Miandra piece consists of soccer balls that are turned inside out and sewn together in slightly extended forms resembling a ball in flight or maybe the organic shape of a ripening fruit. The only marks that these new shapes still carry are the name-tags of their former owners: Miandra, Alyse, David, Jeff, Nolan and Blake. All the balls were found in thrift stores in Seattle at the end of 2007 and beginning of 2008. While watching Barack Obama's inauguration speech and at the same time noticing Michelle's green gloves and the aggressive undertone of some of his words, I was stitching the ball halves and single patches back together and deciding to add a quotation to the title: America is bigger than the summer of your individual ambitions.

The tags seem to name the altered objects like the stickers on the oranges I am eating these days name them Aida.
A little later I was preparing a different piece for which I needed the balls' black bladders. While tearing their seams apart I stumbled across arabic pencil writing on the inside surface of one of them. This was a ball that had been played hard with. It had gathered moist and mold on its inside. I learned that the writing appeared to be in Arabic the name Irfan. It was impossible to identify the ball's origin because the imprint that normally states Made in India or Pakistan had disappeared over time. But here suddenly was the unlikely possibility that a marker pen writing on the outside marking an ownership could be mirrored with a pencil message on its inside. A message tracing the existence of a person across the globe who had been involved in the production of this ball. Some of the tags start by now to fade away as if in this case the objects' lives are longer than the mark that claims them. Irfan means knowledge and wisdom. Most likely this writing was never meant to be brought to light again.

— Heide Hinrichs