My soldier (my creature)
lecture-performance, 25 Min., 2008
powerpoint-presentation and sound
Excerpts from the show in museum of art, Lucerne
Starting in January 2006 I have been reading a weblog of a US-soldier who was at that time deployed for six months in Baghdad.
I found her blog through her pictures while I was looking for innocuous photos of dangerous places. My intention was to take those pictures and declare those as artwork of mine in a fictitious work-documentation for a competition in Swiss art sponsorship. What I found was a photography of a date laying on the ground. The caption said: "dates in Baghdad". From then on I was hooked. Almost every day I was following her diary and I downloaded all her pictures she took in Baghdad.
What stroke me most was her naive sense of awareness about the situation surrounding her in contradiction to the complex and horrible effect of war. Her interests were apparently mainly focused on her everyday sorrows as f.e. that she didn't have any comfort zone and privacy in her acomodation, her hairstyle, the position of her desk in the office, the weather, etc.
I took her photos and integrated them in a slide-show-like video and sang a song to her - in the attempt to get into a fictitious dialog with her. (you’ll find it under "videos“ -> you look like an angel)
In my performance I took mainly her "adventure-pictures" and confronted those with my own pictures of holiday-adventures to try to get on common ground. Basically I told the story of how I found her and why I was fascinated. The performance starts with a dance (I am wearing a real Swiss army uniform to get the feeling) to Yoko Onos "Everyman Everywoman", then the performance turns into a sec setting like a common lecture with powerpoint-presentation.
Until this day I haven't contacted her directly.