Against the Romance of Community
Jerusalem, 2019
6-canal-audiovisual installation | HD video | sound | live perfomance
“We are situated in a place, where we hear nothing but
the noise
we produced ourselves. We only see the reflexion of what looks like us.”
we produced ourselves. We only see the reflexion of what looks like us.”
A visionless vision - how can we master our approach towards the unknown future?
How does a place sound which does not exist anymore?
How do we behave in an empty space? Is an empty space a vacuum?
In a wider sense this work is dealing with questions of what builds a community and what kind of image and understanding do we have of communities in general, how we naturalize and romanticize the idea of it and how we are longing for this identity shaping „thing“. The work is talking about the impossibility of community as unity, presence, communion, and the danger of attempting to fulfill such an impossible fantasy. But it also speaks about the connection between historical events and the present and about the connection we build with a singular and specific surrounding in a singular and specific time. Concretely spoken we see four people in the landscape of Jerusalem. Each in its own place, in its own screen. All of them having the same task of building a conversation with their environment. What occurs is a very personal and individual dialogue, a choreography which deletes time and takes us to the present. Those four creatures are embedded into a space shaped by two huge projections and several air conditioners modified into speakers, which reflect on different aspects of community: They research language, spoken and written, translated and transformed into imagery, create a sense of „urban fear“, an attempt to liberate themselves from fear through a certain playfullness and goofiness. Subtitles are not only protheses but they become part of the language. The imagery is accompanied by sounds and texts, which were created in direct reaction to the specific fragmentation of Jerusalem but which become an allegory for the scatteredness in general, of us as individuals, of us as so-called communities.This Installation comes with a performance which is site-specifically created to take place in this installation, which activates an additional layer inside the installation. The performance explores the interaction of video, space, audience and performers and tries to explore the boundaries and blending of those entities. That is why we would be interested to show this hybrid in both its states: as an independent installation and a performative space which interacts with its audience.