A country in which nobody has been yet: homeland
Mittelstrimmig/Hunsrück 31. 8. – 3. 9. 2006
For our annual meeting 2006 we choose a region, which is also the starting point of Edgar Reitz famous movie Heimat. This complex, iridescent, also burdened term served as a wide hortizon for our talks and presentations during the meeting in Raffael Rheinsberg’s and Lilli Engel’s studio.
What does Heimat/homeland mean in times of fugitive modernism, of accelleration and place-independence of communication by the internet, diminishing distances? The ever present technique of the net in alliance with the media culture makes it possible for the artist to take part everywhere and always at artistic events; artists and works belong by all means to the jet-set and travel, whether economy or first class, through the world. On the other hand the history of the arts is also a history of emigration, of diaspora where one always is living as a foreigner. Sure, art became more cosmopolitan all the time, exchange and communication between different countries seems to be without borders, at the same time in global modernisation nests the loss of the cultural other, and the rhetorics of universalism neglecting the differenciation of remote and near, remains abstract. Sense and the construction of sense are also linked to history, to remembrance, to locations and the planetarian civilisation generates quite often the loss of orientation and feeling of deficiency. Beyond any sentimental rehabilitation, the question “what means homeland” unfolds a base for a manifold reflection in the imigration country? Germany: Between the utopia of homeland not as a place but a perspective which is to create and the sensual experience of a neighborhood, a landscape, a flavour, beweenn the longing for arrival and the instrumentalisation in worldwide conflicts where the claim for territory changes into terror. In this wide frame our discussions took place during the intensive, inspiring Hunrück days and also the presentation of art pieces discussed the tension of the work between place and no-place, which is priming the question for the own and the strange culture nowadays.
Partcipants:
Diana Mercedes Alonso, Renate Anger, Monika Bartholomé, Dorothée Bauerle-Willert, Jens Brand, Monika Brandmeier, Terry Buchholz, Harald Hofmann, Hetty Huisman, Silke Leberkühne, Eva Löfdahl, Rune Mields, Markus Mussinghoff, Phill Niblock, Norbert Radermacher, Raffael Rheinsberg, Eva-Maria Schön, Radomir Stancic, Anna Tretter, Andreas von Weizäcker,
Michael Willhardt
Guests:
Lilli Engel, Michal Murin