A three-channel video installation shows two women in an open landscape building a curious object. Several pieces appear to be part of a whole that never entirely takes shape or reveals its actual function. The women’s actions are accompanied by a female voice reading parts of SEcond Synopsis of Environmental Performance by the United Nations Economic Commission For Europe.
Altered in such a way that the names of countries are omitted, the language of law and policy-making that governs peoples’ lives takes on a functional quality and engages in self-performance instead of making sense.
Although inspired by a very concrete geographical context, namely that of former Yugoslavia, neither the image not the text, not the pieces and parts of an object dispersed in the space, give any hint of where and what they belong. A specific somewhere is thus turned into abstract nowhere, a could-be-anywhere, a state of flux or a heterotopia.
Part of Something Bigger and Better Than You critically reflects on the unequal distribution of power in the relationship between different territories. It questions transnational economic structures that define certain regions as peripheral or negligible, allowing others to profit from their environmental and economic exploitation.
(from exhibition catalogue Capitalo, Chutulu and a Much Hotter Compost Pile, Kunstraum Kreuzberg Bethanien curated by Lorena Juan, Lena Johanna Reisner and Anais Senli)