Dear Maria,
Time is going so FAST! Unfortunately I have problems with uploading images. So it will be only text this time. I will mail pictures to you.
The grey area is a condition or a place, which I do not feel comfortable to be in. It is not a place where choices are easy. The first picture comes to mine mind is a border zone, a danger place to be depending on circumstances. Borders are interesting, how do we define them, when they start and end?
Looking for images for borders I found interesting work of Francis Alÿs a Belgium artist living and working in Mexico City.His project Sometimes doing something poetic can become political and sometimes doing something political can become poetic, The Green Line. 2004 -2005 creates an interesting view on borders. The work is about the Palestinian and Israeli conflict but I think it contains some universal values and many layers.
In June 2005 Alÿs walked from one end of Jerusalem to the other carrying a can filled with green paint. The bottom of the can was perforated with a small hole, so the paint dripped out as a continuous squiggly line on the ground as he walked. The route he followed was one drawn in green on a map as part of the armistice after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, indicating land under the control of the new state of Israel. The original Green Line has since been considerably altered on the ground, with cataclysmic consequences for people on both sides.*
*http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/13/arts/design/13chan.html
Alÿs performance was filmed and shown at galleries to people with different backgrounds as a departure of discussion. Reactions were of course very diverse!
I found this comment about Alÿs action on:
http://simonsteachingblog.files.wordpress.com
“‘It’s also really wonderful because sometimes we get locked into how we see. It is a problem that the world doesn’t hear our story [the Palestinian story], isn’t it? Or our story gets manipulated, and turned on its head, but there is also a problem that we become stuck in the ways that we see things over and over again. So it’s also really wonderful to have somebody coming who is not coming to aggressively say who we are, or what things are, but is making an empathetic act, and at the same time is pushing us to maybe see things or to think about things in different types of ways. And the other part of it, I think, is that things here are so saturated and over determined in terms of representation and discourse, power and politics, that it’s extremely hard to find a way to break through that, in any way. I think poetic acts are one way of breaking through that.’
So the question is how can our collaboration (in the grey area) turn in to that kind of result, poetry and politics is this a good way? How can we create work, which makes difference, invite to dialog, open our mind and others?
Agnieszka
