meltdown
Multiply crises keep us in suspense: financial crisis, wars, global warming and diseases put us in a diffuse nervous condition with no orientation. The media flood our perceptions with complex, rapidly changing information, which we can not bring into relation with ourselves. A sense of a state of emergency is spreading in our present. The future is a blind spot, we do not know what to expect. Nervousness, panic and uncertainty paralyze our passions and blind our introspection. System-related causes of suffering remain concealed. It seems essential for us to take a step back and question our own close involvement with this dominant ideology: What are the errors in the system that leads us to all these current crises and collapses?
The Neoliberal economics, for example, uses states of emergency in order to enforce radical market reforms as ‘there is no alternative’. The so-called free market is the result of a series of shocks and crises.
We are interested in how our passions and intensities – when we cease reacting to panic, or attempting to control panic – support and promote the knowledge of one’s own existence and one’s own consciousness. As crises and uncertainties also offer the chance to overcome the current situation and pessimism – the future option of a just world appears. This includes being aware of our own self-blindness to the obvious dangers of society, not to be afraid, and to present ourselves together in the public.
For the project “meltdown” we are going to build a set of different sizes and shapes of flashing lights, as we know them from ambulances, the police, or the fire department. The lamp-covers are made from different ice forms, with flashing lights inside. Presented as an installation, this collection of diverse lights slowly start to melt. While the performer Oshin is singing, the melody based on a rescue siren song (merry, positive and forward) will be looped until the ice has melted and the light sockets are exposed freely in clear water.
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Oshin Sarisa
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Key features of our artistic practice are dialogically participatory strategies, our collaboration with communities and the interplay between documentary and fiction as an attempt to open up and explore new possibility space. The connection between social reality and artistic autonomy, as well as between art and non-art contexts within a project is also characteristic of our work. We use games and performance to create self-contained situations and new experiences.
(Methods and medias: performances, interventions, docufictional videos, multimedia installations
Topics: criticism of economic conditions, labour relations, gentrification, situationism, ghosts and other undead, democracy, the concept of utopia, parapsychic phenomena)
bankleer
using both documentary and fictional techniques we produce films, installations, performances and exhibitions on urbanity, the media, economy and philosophy. through contextualized artistic interventions, we try to create an awareness of the growing influence of economic processes on public life. we have consistently worked the parallel between economic, political and media structures and physical games, athletics and fitness as a way to engage the ‘body’ in social critique. we integrate humor and empathy into the often heavy-handed and conceptually handicapped discourse of political art. in this way strong images, participation, and social awareness form an easily understood nexus of dissent.
CV
The residency is supported by Cultural Exchange Program of the Berlin Senat, Germany.