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What do we tell ourselves? What do we tell each other? How do we speak at all? And what about? Memories and encounters? About impressions, feelings and emotions? Last week’s shoe shopping spree? Time unwilling to pass, yet never enough? Levantine cuisine, tan lines, fleeing and displacement? Mindful astrology apps, espresso martini, Spotify discoveries, incapacitation, balcony furniture? About pain, doubt and loss? Confidence and longing, joy?  In soliloquy, direct address and veiled dialogue, Paul Celan’s »dark things we tell each other« and Ingeborg Bachmann’s »I, alone by myself, am a dark story« make it seem possible that works of art bring an absolutely subjective experience of the world into a palpable and communicable form—perhaps void or obscure, mysterious or near unspeakable, but no less valid and an example of how to endure life’s abstrusity in this flawed world.  (Although, the distance on a sofa, from which you look at and talk past each other, at times is vaster than the tacit expanse between city and country side in the same night, in the same faded colors of 3AM.)  Bachmann’s and Celan’s story thus gave the impetus to ask how images enable such encounters. How individual experience »speaks« through images »into the open, where language can also lead to encounters.« What we tell ourselves, tell a ›you‹ or say together with them, hopes for resonance. In a trembling voice, self-assured or with borrowed words, every expression is a sort of relating-oneself-to-someone. Always unfamiliar, disconcerting, new. Sensuous and immediate: Who are you? Who am I? Wherefrom? Whereto? What’s one’s own, the other’s, the mutual?  In such encounters, one’s own world is given a hold and grounding for a few brief moments—be it understanding, recognition, bewilderment. All of a sudden, disparate and opposing times, places, bodies, inside and outside unite in a transient state of potentiality. Entangled and present. Until they separate again or almost inexplicably continue their shared tale.