We can't find the internet
Attempting to reconnect
Verbindung zu esel.at
My Wall is not Your Wall - Your Wall is not My Wall Event
Searching for the river, I come across a wall.
I measure it out with painful steps.
Still standing.
Doors to Paradise.
Petra Kap? alias OR poiesis (b. 1975, Slovenia) weaves her work among the arts of sound, radio, chrono-spatial poetry, poetic performance, books and reflection. Aside from the ethereal features of sound, she focuses on the physical presence of the body. She extends the word, her core medium, with sonic spheres of sonorous poetry. Kap? is interested in aural memory and the deep time of the body. Incorporating an (a)syntemporal presence through the digital sphere, she researches the possibilities of intimate radio and is concerned with the void ear of the internet listener. Her sound/radio/book works are located solitudes.
At the begining was a straight line
The base of the human condition is its own inner landscape, which spreads outwardly into the next landscape and into the next one and so it creates and destroys barriers into infinity of time. To cross or to erase all borders and frontiers is practically impossible but only constant trying makes us human..
The project and its main idea materializes in many works, from video, installation, paintings, performative action, frozen colour sculptures, photographies and prints.
Growing up and living by the border, separating East from West, one is undoubtedly conditioned by it. The border existed only in a geopolitical sense, not geographically. It is an everyday presence which makes you adept and modify your believes and questionings on daily basis. Crossing the border daily makes you realize that the border is actually not real, it is a phantom line. It does not exist in the reality even though it is physical and very touchable. Where the border line lives and thrives is in the thought and in the mind.
Today, when all the physical aspects of the borders, walls, fences, are gone, the line still exists and it might be even stronger than ever before. With the absence of its physicality, it grew stronger.
Furthermore, we are met by the enormity of a refugee and migration problem, which has not yet been witnessed at least not in our historical time line; we are forced to question our own borders, barriers, lines, walls, fences, that we bestow on ourselves and onto others. Borders create dualism. One exists only in the in-between space, between factitious and documentarian, between reality and imagination.
Out of this questioning sprung the idea for the project – At the beginning was a straight line?. I am questioning all kinds of lines and borders and their materialization. Likewise in art the dot extends itself into a line.
The base of the project is a site-specific installation, a line planted with cactuses on the actual border between Italy and Slovenia/Yugoslavia. In other works that follow suit, the line transforms and represents other kind of barriers and borders where it reflects on bordering and dualism.
Vanja Mervic
