Nicos Auer was born in an unexpensive hotel room close to a cold lake surrounded by no trees in the eastern part of Western-Central Tibet. His family had ended up in that remote part of the world for going on a holiday trip they had won in a discount shop and that later turned out to be a concealed German-Chinese settlement project that aimed to populate the abandoned Tibetan highlands while strengthening the political relations of both nations.
Due to the lack of oxygen in the air that German settlers were not used to, speaking and especially singing was exhausting and therefore reduced to a minimum. Young Nicos however showed a great interest in the karaoke nights where the local Tibetans sang effortlessly on old Japanese DAM machines. Soon his dream was to become a professional Karaoke singer, but he knew he would not make it in the highlands and therefore begged his parents to move back into the flats until they gave in and went, poor as they were, on a long long journey down the Himalaya.
Being born in the highlands of Tibet, where time moves slower, moving back to Germany in the middle of his aging progress, Nicos’ age is obscured and hardly reconstructable. Therefore his parents decided to give him a symbol instead of a number to represent his age: a bitten apple, about to rot, but still appetizing, reminding Nicos of the fugacity of life: ︎. Up to the day Nicos is constantly carrying the symbol around with him on most of his electrical devices.
to be continued...