soon we return home

 

 

 

 

KP2 to KP: I will read it out loud to you, it is no problem...

 

Dear Ksenija,

 

We are really thankful for your interest in joining our team. We received over 229 applications and it was really difficult to make a choice for the top candidates and later to finally choice the person that would be able to take on all the responsibilities that the position calls for. Unfortunately, and regardless of the high quality of your resume, this time you are not the right person for us.

 

Sincerely,

 

Cultural Center REX team, Belgrade

 

KP :https://soundcloud.com/summeracademy/sound-of-disapointment-wma

 

............

 

The fear of returning home is something that just got stuck in my mind from the lunch talk that lecturing artist Sarnath Banerjee gave to us on Tuesday." The full letterbox with unpaid bills, dead flies in the window, will I have internet when I get back, and did I turn all the machines off..."  It echoes in me and I notice that everything that is happening now, here in Salzburg,has this melancholic element of something coming to an end. There is this element of the rush, students are working for the open day happening tomorrow, technical staff is coming in and coming out from the different doors and the photocopying machine seems to be working more than usual. Similar to the rush felt at the end of the part I but this time for some of us that were here from the beginning it is this final goodbye.

 

Sarnath Banerjee during the talk told us many different stories. He opened the talk by saying that he is not so good with words, possibly a trick to play the expectations down, but from the moment go we were transported into different world and words of Berlin and different cities in India. They all have a common element to them and that is  the style of the drawings, few repeating characters that accompany Sarnath Banerjee's column written for an Indian magazine. At the moment his writings are helping him get the sense of the city he lives in today. Feeling that he doesn't understand it, and maybe doesn't want to understand it, he decided to accept the invitation to write. Sometimes, similar like the character of Rambo, he receives the call telling him that the art world needs him and then he starts to feel like an artist. On other occasions, he is the graphic novel artist, writer of books, father, husband, slow bicycle rider.

 

"Is there next? Is there going back?"

 

With greater political sense and more immediate urgency these questions also echoed the lunch talk of lecturing artist Anna Jermolaewa. She moved from St. Petersburg to Vienna and slept on a public bench for five days. She used the same park bench and in her video "Research for sleeping positions" (2006) reenacted her attempt of sleeping on it. Without the biographical element this video would have a very humorous note attached to it but once the information was given to us the work receives a different meaning of different destinies, different cultures and this disturbing note of moving away in search for something better.

 

When you move you are still hoping that something back home will change. Unfortunately the ongoing project that Anna Jermolaewa started in 1996 "Five year plan " where the artist on her trips back home to St. Petersburg films her  metro station and people on the escalators, shows how little some things do end up changing or maybe ( to be a little bit positive here ) how slowly these changes happen. To the artist, once she showcased four channel video projects it was interesting to see just this.

 

The reality of her world is really an opposite to the reality we all seem to have here during the duration of the Summer Academy. This was more than evident in the video she showed to us "Methods of Social Resistance ". The existence of something else then this is what echoed in me, the idea of the unguarded space of the "real "world.

 

http://www.jermolaewa.com/works/video/methoden.html

 

The Summer Academy seems to be this little bubble from the rest of the things you know as yours. It is a welcomed change, escape for some and place of freedom, experimentation and art production. The things form the world you left behind at the start of it all slowly are creeping up for all of us here. Plans are discussed where to go next and what to do next, but until all of this happens the show of the works created in the second half of the Summer Academy is on display tomorrow. Three different locations, Hohensalzburg Fortress, Alte Saline and Stone Quarry will be places to be in. And then, we will again meet with the Heinzelmannchen who will , like with magic, make it possible for all to be reapeated next year.