Artist's residency at Stiftung-Kuenstlerdorf, Schöppingen, Germany 2022
"What is sovereign in fact is to enjoy the present time without having anything else in view but this present time" (Georges Bataille. The Accursed Share, vol2 1993 :199)
It is impossible to summarise the work I have been doing at the residency in an Instagram post because of the fragmented, multilayered and prolific nature of it. It involved negotiating with the place, a small German village, that for me as a Jew, of mixed race, an urbanite gay was completely alien to me and which by the end of the residency I fell in love with. It continued into a series of de’rive by foot and bike to bodies of water in a continent and a country that is drying up and ended up creating an online tourist information centre that includes these beauty spots around Schoppingen and some other attractions the village has to offer.
This meandering led to photographic documentation of the hunting booths [hochsitz] dotted around the fields and surrounding forest. This photography series was influenced, at the same time, by a critique of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s work. It includes another series of socially engaged photography works with Yanick, a gay refugee from Cameroon, a journey to Berlin for his first ever Pride and a series of conversations with him on how the colonial past is affecting his present.
These two separate photography series are united by their production during the residency but also by the necropolitics* that are affecting the subjects of both series of works and that have affected my and my family's history of displacement. I hope in the next few months to gather all these fragments into a cohesive form, online or as a publication. For now, some of this work can be viewed here.
These works in addition to the mixed media room installation "Interweaving Spaces" were exhibited in the Stiftung-Kuenstelrdorf gallery for two weeks, aiming to draw in local residents and visitors to see the work that is being taken place at the institute. Images from the exhibition can be seen below.
*see: Necropolitics, Achille mbembe 2019 & Queer Necropolitics, Eds Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman and Silvia Posocco, 2015]
