The first collaboration between Roland Hagenberg and Chris Mosdell uniquely unites language and image. While Mosdell has set international standards with his poetically avant-garde song lyrics, Hagenberg complements this work with expressive photographs that deepen moods and cultural contexts through visual means. Their collaboration creates a synesthetic connection between word and image—a fusion in which Mosdell’s poetry finds its visual counterpart through Hagenberg’s photographic gaze.
RRoland Hagenberg and Chris Mosdell lived for years as neighbors in Kyoto and Tokyo—without knowing it. They shared friends, frequented the same cafés, exhibitions, and parties, and yet worlds lay between them. This small bookbox/edition grew out of their first chance encounter, carried by humor, wordplay, and a shared sensitivity to the absurdities of everyday life. Conversations followed—about living between cultures, about paths taken and detours made, about artists they had encountered and who would come to shape them, often only in retrospect.
Released from their sometimes-original musical context, Mosdell’s texts appear here as lyrical fragments and stand on their own as poems. They speak of journeys, inner landscapes, and lived time. Hagenberg has not set these texts against illustrations but has chosen photographs that arose from the respective moods. These are images that respond associatively—personally inflected, sometimes contradictory, sometimes unexpectedly close.
In this way, an open connection emerges between word and image: not an explanation, but a dialogue. The photographs follow no narrative compulsion, but rather the feeling evoked by the texts. In this interplay, new narrative spaces open up, allowing readers to form their own connections and to trace the shared lines of life of the two artists.
Further information can be found at Chris Mosdell and Roland Hagenberg. Presse Release Third Eyes.
Authorship: Chris Mosdell and Roland Hagenberg