During the opening-speech of the Art festival „Expect us!“, the curator (Christian Falsnaes) is verbally and physically attacked by an angry member of the audience (So:ren Berner). The argument between the two, is unfolding itself as a rap-battle between two competing superheroes. Meenwhile, a video of battles and illegal postering in the streets of Zürich is projected on the wall. Subsequently, the audience can vote for the winner of the battle per sms. In the end, a homo-erotic uniting is visualizing the economic win/win situation between Switzerland and USA, transforming a political relationship into a personal one.
Invisible Wholecar
Three guys with spraycans are appearing to paint graffiti (a wholecar) on a train at the Copenhagen central station in the middle of rushhour, but no paint is comming out of the cans. The wholecar is invisible. The happening was an attempt to place an absurd and surrealistic element in the everyday rushhour of the people travelling from Copenhagen to the suburbs every evening.
About KARGO: Since 2003, Bella Angora, Christian Falsnaes and So:ren Berner have been carrying out a number of different projects under the common name „KARGO“ next to their individual artistic practices, primarily in the fields of performance, installation and graffiti/streetart. KARGO is an ongoing investigation of the possibilities of performance in contemporary art contexts within the frame of collaboration experiments. Through an open exchange of ideas and experiences, KARGO aims at an unpretentious and entertaining, but still diverse and complex, approach to different themes. Most of their projects have dealt with social/cognitive norms, patterns and structures as well as the conscious decision to question these. In the process of such investigations, KARGO is sampling music, video, public happenings, graffiti and musical-style-shows with references to philosophy, art history and contemporary culture. The experiments and the investigative nature of the process is an important part of the KARGO performance projects. Not to be afraid to fail, to look stupid or to reveal mistakes.
KARGOLOGY The project: The performance/public intervention project KARGOLOGY is an investigation of information patterns in public space as well as the ways individual people experience the constant flow of information in the city. KARGO have been taking their starting point in the idea of an information free utopia. What if the city would be wiped clean over night? It would be an impossible task to delete all information, but the group have used one whole week in Vienna to delete as much information as possible, simply by painting signs, shops, commercials, pictograms, posters and maps white on their way. They have been painting white as an attempt to create a clean, open, free space. A public white cube. A space where every person in the city is free to insert his or her own information. KARGO has no intention of asserting a theory regarding the subject though. The project is more about carrying out an experiment and let the public react. Documentation of the experiment are presented along with thoughts on the subject in a performance with live music and video projections. . As the project will be shown more times, more public interventions will be made in the cities where it will be shown, and subsequently more documentation of street action will be integrated. An installation for the performance is constructed, in which the performance is live-recorded and played next to repetitions of the same performance again and again, thus allowing more and more layers of information and reflections to be assigned. KARGOLOGY has been shown at the Triangle Project in Istanbul as a part of the 10th Istanbul Biennal, as well as in MAK Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna.
Performance/installation by Bella Angora (A), Christian Falsnaes (DK) & So:ren Berner (DK)
Native American Supremacy
"White man, we are going to take your truth away!"
The same video is shown two times during the performance in two different contextual frames that transforms perception of the videos content drastically. It is shown how strong the presentation of any given material is shaping our perception of that material, as well as how we, as viewers, are used to allow transformations of meaning in accordance to continuous change of contexts.
Another metamorphosis present in the piece is that of the protagonists. Besides changing their cultural identity during the performance (they start out as native American Indians talking to the "white men" and end up as white men analyzing the statements of the native American Indians) they change view from subjective first person point of view to objective analyzing third person description. This change, though present in most people's lives, seems radical when displayed within the frame of one 15 minute performance.
