Coal drawings, wooden frames with 1 cm distance to drawings, (21x) 150 x 200 cm. Vienna, Austria
The drawings have the size of the span of my arms, instead of flags, I hold two pieces of coal. The drawings have human size and became
into being through body movements.
The ear is dumb, the mouth is deaf,
but the eye learns and speaks.
It reflects the world from outside and the person from within.
J.W. Goethe
Europe has suffered from internal hostilities, fought, expelled people, divided countries
and after unimaginable cruelty has become reconciled with itself in order to pursue a shared path. Europe’s cultural memory encom-
passes Christianity, Judaism, fascism, national socialism, communism, capitalism, monarchy, colonialisation, revolution, enlightenment, dictatorship, democracy and the myth of pro-
gress flowing into the acknowledgement of an unpredictable future. After all, history has two conflicting faces: culture and barbarism, creation and destruction. The European Community is on a quest for a shared identity, that should be nourished by its past, with a present in which it identifies its needs and by a future towards which it projects its efforts. In the cultural terms this means understanding a unity which guarantees and promotes diversity and a diversity that fits into a unity. It is an awareness of conditions shared by all people. Perhaps Europe’s soul is actually unified by a shared respect for the subject it has constituted, education and the human condition.
For this project individual words that express feelings were signalled by flags (flag signalling alphabet). The selected words/feelings reflect both Europe’s historical field of consciousness and the internal, conflicting emotions of an individual that are generating political thought and action. Speech produces memory work, describes pain, safeguards experienced exis-
tence from oblivion, human suffering, things with tears. Learning to see, sharpening the day-to-day perception, thinking openly in the Brechtian sense of the term, seeing individual fate sink in a sea of tears.