TREATMENT
The project lasts for one week. 151 people (male & female) from different society backgrounds (all living in the inner city of Madrid) get selected by a casting. They´re contracted to wear the specific cloths for seven days and receive a small compensation fee. The main condition for them to take part in the work is:
- they move around in the City of Madrid (in their daily routine)
- they fit the demanded profiles
THE REQUIRED PROFILES ARE
-50 joggers/sporty/young/healthy type
red „Paulo Virilio“- sporting dress/ longsleeveT-Shirt
-50 punk/“street level“ „Michel Foucault“-
military camouflage jacket with pink „Michel Focault“ -print
-50 hardrocker/tattoo/goth- „Giorgio Agamben“- hooded black sweater
- one doppelganger of Fred Phelps with body sign „Hell is Coming/World Ends Today“ (front/back) and black suit/hat
It is important, that all the characters lead there every day life all in a high visibility. Next to that, the Phelps-doppelganger will be standing around for one week in daytime (six hours daily, in the rush hours) on street corners/public places. The activity of the „Fred Phelps“-doppelganger“ is applied differently than the other elements remaining as a symbolic endpoint to contemporary discourse as a whole (fundamentalism).
DISPLAY
The whole activity will be documented in video and photography. Photos are being taken of the selected participants in there daily routine. The whole project will then be published (photographic prints, the cloths and the video on display) on a special website for the project.
In order to make this ephemere piece of visual art more visible to the interested public, the philosopher Dr. Andreas L. Hofbauer offered to accompany the project with a „lecture on the run“. Here is a small text he wrote to accompany this application:
As accompaniment to Andreas Templin’s “Hell is Coming/World Ends Today”. I shall offer video reports, a lecture with discussion panel, as well as escorting, on a case-to-case basis, some of the „mannequins“. The focus of this enterprise is not meant only as a partial documentary of the ongoing events but mainly as a casual mapping of the travels of those badly equipped and uninformed walking warheads/Sprengkörper, which are not at all without aim. With the presentation of fashion-like logos of the names of some important (and also fashionable) thinkers of our days (Virilo, Agamben and Foucault), some fundamental questions of today’s politics present arms: speed, (concentration) camp and power. In confrontation with down to earth fundamentalist statements, this shows nothing less than the weak impact and desperate struggle of some theoretical positions against the takeover of consumer ideology.
If one is most readily able to learn about society by watching its reactions across the spectrum, taking as an example those who would (unknowingly) challenge it by mirroring its own state of the art, one should be ready to accept a not very happy vision. Forms of alienation issuing from the commodity fetishism of modern market relations, i.e. global consumerist capitalism (in disguise of values, brand names, political correctness, religion, success et al.) can only be shown as they come across. This means in no way kritische Aufklärung, but offers resistance by double-crossing bare intellectual second-hand statements and ideological backlash.
Art sets in motion the aspect of Plasticity (or even better workability), instead of representing (or doubling) a commercial and ideologic/politically forced flexibility, which has been the mainstay in all forms of counter-cultural tactics.
Still: We should not forget that plasticity shapes form (form-giving and form-building) but also destroy all form (plastic explosive).
Asked how they’ll destroy dominant culture the Situationists answer: „In two ways: gradually at first, then suddenly“! Let’s start over again – first steps first.
TIME
The duration of the project is set for one week. In order to prepare it will be necessary to be there at least two weeks in advance.
I will come to Madrid 14 days in advance before the launch of the project in order to prepare it properly.
Timeline for the realisation of the project: The project needs five weeks to be fully realized
- Week one: preparation of cloths, printing
- Week two: Arriving in Madrid, preparation week
- Week three: casting
- Week four: execution of the project
- Week five: postproduction, website-production
The used cloths will be offered in the edition of each 50 via the Internet and through the website of the project. Of each cloth sold, 50 percent of the winst will be returned to Madrid Abierto.
08prtc1823, 08prtc1825