| Sinopsis: |
Initially the project can be said to enquire into the politics of identity for people living in a foreign country, who are thinking about the relation they have to their place of birth and upbringing, and their new environment and place of residence.
In the case most of the speakers who are being ventriloquised are, from internal references in the comments that are spoken, from Israel; and they are often speaking about their lives in predominantly the urban settings of Amsterdam and Rotterdam.
The only strict division in the-personality-of the actors is the giving of genderd voices to both of them.
Already the word personality hovers into doubt, the old word, probably from Etruscan, relates to speaking through a mask, which the actor in the Roman theatre held in front of their own face, and thus per-sonare; to sound through something, the event of the self as a ritualized enactment. The performers too, the chosen actors, are both personalities and masks, the first level of self-effacement takes place, they become more visible in their degree of surrender, because on the split screen as one figure is speaking the other is held in freeze-frame. The Dyptich is a double icon, that flicks on and off, because of the vocalic confusion. They are literally speaking in different voices, again the rigours of identity require standardization: a name, a way of speaking, a detailing of the self, still taken at its most authentic in the signing of one's name.
In entering the space, you semi-automatically sign the book; register in that graphic trace a name. Somebody has entered the makeshift and highly interiors place, a box within a box, a mis-en-abime that belongs to the double framing of a truly illusionistic world.
The space becomes less dark as you sit and become engrossed in the various comments; frank, mocking, direct, sometimes anxious. Who is speaking here?
What is at issue? Only the trace of the voice and the echo in the room now takes on the signature of difference. It seems mysterious, comments and personal analysis, which seem to belong to the modern amalgamation of the photograph as the certificate of presence, and the documentary. Why break then with its most hallowed conventions? The purchase of credibility of the photographic by being present to the person interviewed, the subsequent role of the spectator in this contrived nearness, the intimacy at a distance that pervades the cool and pseudo-objectivity of the documentary, which does everything to conceal its own contrivance is left away.
Also effects of close up, through elimination of the interviewer, by the staging of a new spectacle for consumption by avid voyeurs, is absent.
A further consideration can be added, text on the wall speaks of a desire to be green.
At some point you see there is an elaborate visual complication, which folds into the animated and frozen screen, that flickers on and off; the colours of the space are waiting to become active. The green of which the title of the work speaks is a reference to the theory of colour complementariy. The issue of colour betrays a naturalistic fallacy that lies at the heart of all talk of the way different bodies can be said to join. Colours when mixed produce different Colours, depending on the light, even the green of grass looks yellow; depending on the mixture of intensities, and the colour saturations, a combination of yellow and blue gives you green. What the colour indicates is the very outer surface of any body, not something that is looked at, but what renders something as being visible.
Complete transparency would lead to complete invisibility. The artist has moved from what you think you see and hear, and subtly alluded to complex perceptual expectations that point to the political and architectural situation, which is being explored.
The tacit alliances of visible things speaks of other kinds of bodies and the immateriality of the voice, signed and masked, also speaks a willful kind of
self-abnegation, which is allied to a survival value, and closely mimics some dominant cultural themes and expectations, with their insistent and monotonous demand to integrate, and at the same time not to become too visible , or, as the idiom has it 'get beyond yourself'
The host culture demands exemplary conformity, which those who control the master narrative of the cultural are free to break in their own terms.
Many of the voices speak not of exile, or being a refugee, but rather a kind of transitory curiosity, and in some cases a slightly touchy melancholy, where the pathos of expectation has led to the need for an other kind of distance. There is clearly impatience with the setting up of the conversation on integration with the host culture, the demands to learn the language and culture, what is perceived as an overly insistent demand to surrender valued and cherished feelings from the self: the places of the self, nooks and cranny, places that are the memory of the profound solitude in which, as the philosopher Bachelard says, the simplest and the most powerful images of intimacy arise, the deepest sense that being born-is itself well-being, that home is where there is a peace of well-being in the respect and difference that not only makes a difference, but does not require of the other a kind of politics of persuasion, nor, the more ruthless demand of peace with surrender.
The host culture speaks of tolerance, and this does not mean welcome. It speaks of transparency, and is vastly over-weighted with burecratic demands. It speaks of the public and private domain, and leaves its windows open so that the two cannot be distinguished. It will carry on the discussion only after the conformity has been agreed. It can overlook infractions, which gives the rule of law an even more arbitrary and complicit edge. The situation can change at any moment, the practiced ambiguity does not emerge from what Weil called the properly human moment of hesitation, but offers strategic and other advantage, because as Marx once noted, "private interest has no memory".
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