The essay is dedicated to the Berlin sculptor Jussuf Abbo, who went into exile in London in the 1930s and tried to continue working artistically and exhibiting there. Since the sculptor destroyed many of his works created in England, the number, aesthetic principles, materials used cannot be precisely named. This leaves many empty spaces and unanswered questions, which is not untypical for a work created in exile. Absence, the destroyed, the lost are thus part of an art historiography that does not understand displacements as an exception, but defines them as a constitutive element of a historiography of modernity.