crossXwords

MARINA LANDIA: Enjoy business, 2007 (18′45″)

Marina Landia, born 1960 in Tbilisi, Georgia, is a video and performance artist and lives in London. In her videos and workshops, she explores and reflects current social, economic and political trends. Enjoy business is the first part of an ongoing interview series with members of the global business elite.

In the last third of Marina Landia’s video one of the interviewees says: “You put together teams of people […| with similar values […] so that you can cause the money-making to take place”. That’s what this video confronts me with. I see a series of individuals giving their statements and I feel urged to consider them as a group. A fraction of a loose group that is shaping the world in the most global way. But what do they actually have in common? Are there shared values, or does their common simply emerge through the similarities of local restraints and opportunities?

With this in mind, Landina’s interviews seem very well focused. In order to understand the global influence of business, the personal level is at least as important as the systemic aspects. (sb)

Un récit ? Non, pas de récit, plus jamais
Maurice Blanchot, La folie du jour

Miloš Tomić (*1976) is a Belgrade based artist and animation filmmaker.
Take a look at his website.

ERIC VAN HOVE: Abreaction in Shanghai (2004)

Eric Van Hove was born in 1975 in Algeria and spent most of his youth in Yaoundé (Cameroon). He was educated in Belgium and Japan, studying Contemporary art and Traditional Japanese Calligraphy, now being a Doctor of Arts from the Tōkyō University of the Arts. Van Hove’s current work, both heterogeneous and eclectic, often questions the limits and “moral competence” of Contemporary Art as a western institution once brought outside of the art context, to what he sometimes calls the “audiences of the border.” At times insubstantial and subversive, his interventions often question sociological, political and ecological issues. Migrant by choice, he is based between Europe, Africa and Japan.

Abreaction is a series of urban interventions that could be described as conceptual poetry. In as different cities as Alexandria, Dakar, Leuven, Shanghai, and Tehran, Eric van Hove bent down to chalk a long line of associative writing on the street. As he used languages that were not necessarily understood by locals, he made sure to have a translator with him. The Video above documents his Shanghai action, whereas the following text reflects what the american writer Joseph Badtke-Berkow witnessed during the Alexandria action. (sb)

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For his project Pali-Nation, Johannes Paul Raether visited shopping areas of five German cities. He asked every person who wore a scarf in the design of an arab keffiyeh for a picture. When clicking on one of the banners above, you will see the resulting photographs, mixed with black or white fields. A black field stands for a person that didn’t want to be photographed, a white field indicates a person, that was seen in the street, but could not be asked.

What do the individuals wearing this scarf in the streets have in common? A friend of mine tried to explain to his 10-year-old daughter the history of the scarf being a symbol for the palestinian national liberation movement. “Papa, I don’t care, I just want to wear it, I’m an emo.”
The last peak in occurence of the keffiyeh in Germany must have been in the eighties – so what happens now might in fact be a phenomenon of retro fashion. Which means that the actuality of the struggle in the middle east is overwritten by the history of its signs in the west. Does this have anything to do with “contextual translation”, as Rada Ivekovic put it in her text on this forum?

(sb)

Archive of Translocality (2006)

A photo series by ALEXANDRA FERREIRA

The archive of translocality integrates different sources and material, like photos, maps, texts and objects that deal with phenomena of interconnected spaces in various ways. As the notion of place and belonging is challenged and blurred when being in a “state of translocality”, the archive tries to visualize this notion by portraits of “non-places” and “liminal spaces”: corridors, construction sites, city areas transformed through impacts of migration or the longing to create a global “Imagecity”.

Alexandra Ferreira’s photo series is part of the ongoing project “State of Translocality” she initiated 2006 together with Bettina Wind as a platform for reflection and interaction in the vast field of translocality.

Alexandra Ferreira (* 1972 in Estoril, Portugal) studied Fine Arts/Sculpture at the Art Academy in Caldas da Rainha. Since 1999 she has been creating sculptures in public space, transforming furniture and objects of daily life by using wood, stone and metal, e.g. “Chaise longue” and a collection of shoes in marble. For the Centre of Landscape Interpretation in Alentejo she created “Jardim Comtemplativo” (2005). Her video installations, animations and photos have been presented at different venues and festivals in Lisbon, Centro Cultural de Fundao, Evora and Montemor-o-Novo. 2006 she realized the solo exhibition “Alles unter Kontrolle” about border performance in Studio Bomba Suicida, Lisbon before entering the “State of Translocality”.

Selection of works