Like a Tear in the Ocean 2005
Welche Sprache spricht Europa?
Ceremonial act Junge Akademie Berlin,
Berlin, Germany 2005
Video (excerpt: 1:17 of 4:50);
Single channel video, 4'50'' or 27' loop, silence, b/w. Life-size projection. Brussels, Belgium
This work has been conceived for the ceremo-
nial act Junge Akademie Berlin (theme: What language does Europe speak?), Berlin, Germany
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 prog-
ress flowing into the acknowledgement of an unpredictable future. After all, history has two conflicting faces: culture and barbarism, crea-
tion 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 diver-
sity 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.
History
— Feeling (selected, flagged)
friendship / hostility
— tenderness / anger
peace / battle
— love / hate
integration / expulsion
— trust / horror
reconciliation / pursuit
— courage / cowardice
reunification / division
— calmness / madness
creation / destruction
— joy / tears
birth / death
— uncertainty / doubt
Flag signalling alphabet: shipping, international communication of information using visible signals, with each letter being assigned a differ-
ent position of the arms = flag signalling. Film as the medium: a night recording with flags made of reflective material. The moving flags appear to glow in the dark. A single person communicates from the loneliness of the night and is finally depending on his counterpart, the receiver, and that he will be able to decode his message. This decoding depends on the code of the specific culture. The flag waver’s speech is also pursued to a certain extent ad absurdum as it is not information that is being communi-
cated, but feelings. The ethic of understanding requires us to argue and not to condemn, that
is to say, to interiorise tolerance. If we discover that we are all fallible, fragile, inadequate, flawed beings, then we can discover our reci-
procal need for understanding. (Edgar Morin)
The title of the work Like a Tear in the Ocean draws on Manès Sperbers’ trilogy of novels which describes the political landscape of Europe between 1930 and 1945. The spiritual adventure of the Revolutionary holds centre stage. As Sperber wrote in his preface, ‘I have
no certainties to offer; I only make questions ready for decision’: this project is an attempt
of an approach.
Acknowledgements:
Camera & Light: Lothar Heinrich
Eva Natzke