Quasikunst is systemic-performative research, since a couple of years it accentuates coordinates, accelerates and performs contradictions. In 2015, with »I like Trees and Human Rights«, it devoted itself to trees: Contexts question other contexts and enter collectives with trees and living as well as dead humans. The »Fog Ballet« of 2016 equated actors with a network structure: A human figure projected onto fog, as a projection within dissolution. Within an equalising levelling a counteracting »dialectic turn« was proclaimed, as a refusal of the human to disappear. In 2017 »Iceberg/The Entity« a massive 2-ton ice block was to perform itself in the darkened STWST and created a »Bedeutungstheater« (Theatre of Meaning) of irresolvable contradictions. The project was about contexts and contradictions concerning nature and technology and in relation around ice – and staged a 48-hour meltdown for the audience. As a reflection and a systemic approach there has been a definition of »negative entropy«, which means an »acceleration of complexity« into an »acceleration of contradiction«.
Alongside this trajectory, such nearly immaterial »materials« soil, fog and ice will be followed in 2018 by wind, focusing on air, transparency, inaccessability and widening of distance. Air and wind are breathing and thinking, corporeal as well as abstract, indicating mind and spirit and inaccessible masses – unconnected and far-reaching. In »Windlines« air gets blown through the STWST building, as a puff of air of free respectively liberated perception, in a world increasingly dominated by rigid networks. Questions about new forms of the organisation of thinking and feeling are posed, and we claim: better blown than networked. »Movement A« makes reference to Walter Benjamin‘s Angel of History. With eyes wide open he stares at the explosion of history, while at the same time getting blown backwards into the future. After a first storm of history a figure walking reversed wanders over the place – forever and in geometric patterns; an impression on video as a trace of rememberance within structural oblivion. In »48 Hours of Drifting« a nearly transparent flag blows in the wind – for a land of large inner and outer distances, for a drifting land without territory, for a Land of Unconcsiousness, for poorly defined conditions under the network. The coordinate »Disappearing (50.000)« by contrast does not want to be exposed anyway. Therefore we do not elabortate it.
With those four coordinates and especially with wind as a medium Quasikunst means more: Not going into a mine to win nature out of the mountain in order to make culture out of it. Quasikunst plays with wind, especially this year, with a strategy integrity and a re-naturalisation of artificially created opposites, aiming at an acceleration of contradiction and a widening of distance, with the freedom and messiness of air molecules, with a paradoxical view on the past and on future. At any rate, we do not want to have each atom carefully related to each other – observed and having its freedom denied.
A reflection on these projects will follow in an upcoming issue of the Versorgerin. Some aspects are already adressed in the conversation that follows.
Quasikunst by Tanja Brandmayr. quasikunst.stwst.at, stwst48x4.stwst.at
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