Tuesday, August 10, 2010

“I offer him my congratulations as a European”

Wierdness for it’s own sake does not make it art. Yet another attention-seeking “don’t I just shock you?” type builds an “opera village” in Burkina Faso, one of the world’s poorest countries. They need food, not aliens bearing "culture". After all, they have plenty of culture of their own without Casper showing up to do a documentary about himself.

Why shove it down their throats? For oneself of course:

It's crazy, but I believe there is a sort of primal feeling which makes many people feel very connected to Africa. Perhaps because Africa is the cradle of humanity. We all long for our origins and in this context I find it very interesting that it was always in Africa that I experienced fear most intensely. Here at home we've made nests for ourselves and we're too scared to even go and buy a loaf of bread without life insurance, laptop insurance and dog insurance. At best we might throw caution to the wind by investing in one of those carefree holiday insurance packs for three weeks every year. But of course the inhabitants of our industrial world are suffering terribly because they are barely alive. I mean, how can you feel any sign of life when you are insured up to the teeth? And when someone is damaged enough to travel to Africa just to tell everyone how the world works, then it all becomes pretty grotesque.
It reads like the journal of a teenager who can’t wait to dye all of his clothes black, and find what they think to be a life experience – pandering to people just to want to have some reason to hate the folks back home.
In "Tunguska" my first full-length feature I sent avant-garde researchers to the North Pole to torture the Eskimos with German avant-garde films. This created the sort of friction which I have now grown into, but for a long time I had no feel of genuine autonomy and I am still scared today about falling out with people so badly that everything grinds to a halt.
I offer him my congratulations as a non-European, a non-Eskimo, or as a human with any sort of decency and capacity for shame, for that matter.

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