We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order To Survive
Materials: 8 stones 28cm x20cm x 7cm Snowcrete, Silver sand, Jesmonite pigment, text, sound Temporary public intervention that took place on the foreshore of Troon beach, Scotland, January 2020 In an effort to explore individual and collective mourning I made eight concrete slabs and I engraved on each of them a word. Once they were put in the foreshore, they formed the sentence “We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order To Survive”, an appropriation of Joan Didion’s famous nonfiction novel. The foreshore or littoral zone is the area of the shore between the high and low watermark and it is property of the Crown Estate according to UK law. It is a dividing line between the sea and the land. It signifies a border of its own right, an ambiguous territory between ownership and public rights, citizens and sovereign. This foreshore becomes a political space, a grey area of exception, in which both jurisdiction and citizenship are performed by individuals and the governing bodies. Drawing from contemporary border politics and Agamben’s “Bare life”, a term that characterises human condition in its lowest levels, as well as “zones of indistinction” such as detention centres where migrants live without rights and citizenship, I attempt to understand their experience, honour their presence and mourn their absence by creating an anti-monument for the marginalised and excluded. This intervention signifies a “zone of anomy” between law and lawlessness, autonomy and sovereign. An action and ephemeral performance that rejects notions of power in the public space.
IN THE END THERE WILL BE MORE, 2019 (ONGOING)
Materials: 10-inch Red Latex Balloons, Helium, Air, Text, Red Ribbon
Wendy Brown in her “Undoing of Demos” unravels how Neoliberal reason has affected civic life and how democratic ideas could be under threat by shifting the political character of a democratic regime to the economic one of Neoliberalism. This work is an attempt to discover ways of resisting in an era where virtually anything takes a form of exchange. Exploring the notion of collectiveness, I asked my peers to trust me with their anonymous most secret desire in an exchange for someone else’s. Without reading any of the text, I placed the paper inside the balloons filled with helium and my own breath. These desires were placed inside a fragile, innocent and at the same time violent object. Popping a balloon is a violent act, the sound is very similar to a gunshot. I wanted to observe how many people were willing to keep the desires safe and how many were willing to act “violently” in order to exchange theirs with someone else’s. The majority selected the latter, resulting in the burst of the objects while only a few were happy to give away their desires without receiving anything in return. These fourteen non-human entities have remained standing, free and resilient to modes of exchange. They transformed into a temporary autonomous public sphere. They acquired a life of their own; with my breath and other people’s “voice”, through their temporality, they become eternal.
A Protest Song
02:05 minutes
This piece is a recording of myself singing acapella the song “World Love” by The Magnetic Fields, while I was emptying my studio space before the lockdown. This tender and popular song with its rather subversive lyrics fills a now empty room with the reverberation of my own voice. Accompanied by field recordings from my daily walking and the sound of the Aegean sea, a peaceful yet dangerous sound since it signifies a border crossing. The sound of the seashore marks the end of an adventure and the beginning of another one. This innocent song belongs to an ambiguous territory between a hope for political action, a farewell to the past and a way to adapt to or define the new “normal”.