 | Kader Attia (AL, D, F)
The Myth of Order #1
| |
The Myth of Order #1, 2010
Intervention with Couscous Video screening Kindly supported by Infoscreen Austria Gesellschaft für Stadtinformationsanlagen GmbH, Wien
Information screens at Jakominiplatz and in the tramways
"I imagined a both poetical and political gesture that will evoke reality, desire, ubiquity, dream, fear, exile, and the failure of contemporary political projects to handle the 'Transnational Spaces', from Graz to Istanbul, from Frankfurt to Calcutta, from Qatar to Vienna etc., because the reality of a boundary is that it both separates two spaces as well as it binds them.
This work is a statement made on the ground that will evoke the problematic of what I felt in Graz.
With couscous, I will draw a straight long line from one side of the square to the other, dividing it in two parts.
The biggest pain of immigrants, whose reality is that they left everything behind them to have a better life, is the feeling of boundaries … boundaries that separate them from their home, their past, their culture …
This happens especially when they start to understand that the established bourgeois class is in fear of them, because they are afraid of losing their privileges. Therefore they don’t give them access to their areas, by keeping them away from them, in other neighborhoods. Immigrants then spend the rest of their life dreaming of this possible existence they could have had. A Turkish guy told me in Graz, in a Kebab restaurant on Griesplatz, where he works: “I came from Turkey, but my future plans are to finish my studies here and then go to London to work in a bank.”
Jumping over boundaries?
It is important for me that this line disappears, eaten by birds or taken by the wind. It will show that separation, boundaries, have been thought up by human mind, and produced in order to manage human social behavior in the public sphere. Nature doesn’t care about this physical and symbolic distinction between two political spaces. Having this line, this border erased through a natural element (the wind, the birds, etc.), this performance recorded with a DVD camera, will illustrate and testify to how unnatural any boundary is."
Kader Attia
Commissioned by steirischer herbst
In co-operation with the Center for Social Research at the Karl-Franzens University Graz & Institute for Contemporary Art (IZK) of Graz University of Technology
With thanks to Hans Kupelwieser
Project supporter Land Steiermark
Project sponsor Think!, Gebrüder Weiss & Alpenländische Schilderfabrik
 |
