Giaco Schiesser

Passion 5 – an Event*

In the event, one sees the intolerable of an era, and at the same time, the new possibilities for living that it implies. (Maurizio Lazzarato1)


Flags, red, spotless – an orange coloured road sweeper blaring out Labour Day slogans – an apparently autonomous zeppelin with a camera, flying through the space – a person, Yannick Fournier (real name: Yannick Fournier), computer scientist, programming desperately and despairingly, looking for assistance from the audience – a 12 meter high hydraulic lift with a huge screen on top showing Fournier as a continuously talking head.
In addition, flyers are suggesting downloading ringtones of Labour Day slogans from an internet server. Other flyers campaigning for Fournier, the expert, are inviting to pay a visit to his homepage and to collaborate on his project. Furthermore, a kind of sign, reminiscent of prohibitive or warning signs used at construction sites, is displaying an anonymous text fragment. The context: an old industrial factory transformed into a shopping mall.
Newly joined building blocks of the real - art? Ever since Duchamp's urinal – yeah, sure. But also somewhat dated, not quite fresh, a little worn, provocative perhaps? That was once.
Let's take a closer look. Passion, fervour. Red flags as hollow signs. The chanted Labour Day slogans – flat, worn-out, unreal – but still: passion can be felt even in the raving, collective chants, however lost and tied up they might be. The slogans – broadcast and simultaneously retracted by a road sweeper. An offer, once again rendered audible, only to finally be discarded on the waste dump of history. The floor remains spotlessly clean and neat.
The expert is passionate too, intensely trying to program the zeppelin and addressing the audience, turning himself over to the audience - seeking their assistance and demanding their collaboration.
"Passion 5" is a contemporary and up-to-date piece of public art. However it is a kind of public art that is galaxies away from public art as bonification, as a means of gentrification, as 'Kunst am Bau', or as a politically correct intervention into public space. "Passion 5" does not represent things, circumstances or events in public space. On the contrary, "Passion 5" challenges this idea. "Passion 5" sets out from the belief that urban public space and, by extension, public space in general, is not given to us nor is it constituted by consensus, but rather through conflict, and finally that public space is not a space (among spaces) but rather a principle: a principle of permanent dislocation.
The images, symbols and statements of "Passion 5" are not representative of something but appear in the paradigm of the event. They do not represent anything; they are not the solution to a problem, but rather the problem itself: the opening of a possibility. The factory hall and the staged complex "Passion 5" create new spaces of potentiality. The hollow symbols of long departed passions (Labour Day speeches) still refer to an unsatisfied lust for life behind the empty phrases. Second possibility: the lust for goods, the offer to download ringtones of Labour Day slogans as a suggestion to participate in a potential hype and its community, as an infatuating organization of modes of perception to prompt modes of living. Finally the option of the passionate scientist as a self-related entrepreneur. He does not represent the situation in which we increasingly find ourselves but he is the situation: the entrepreneur appears as a self-related entrepreneur because he collaborates, he has to collaborate with the audience (and the audience with him). Both fail if they don't. Conversely: collaboration as talking, communicating, questioning, and answering – in other words: in the collaboration as presentation a certain reality is bestowed onto a potential world. Languages, symbols, images, statements are “the potentiality, potential worlds affecting the souls (the brains) and have to be realized in the bodies” (M. Lazzarato).
What is left is the slightly displaced request-/ prohibition-/ warning! -sign. It reads: "Most important to our fortune is the fact that no places, no times on and in which we can express our beliefs, our opinions and subsequently our emotions and wishes are dictated to us. If this profanity of ours is represented, located, fixed or inscribed into a topological order, we will no longer be ourselves."



Footnote
1 http://www.republicart.net/disc/representations/lazzarato01_en.pdf

* In: Knowbotic Research: Room for Manoeuvre. Vehicles - white_sovereign, passion_cleaner, tiger_stealth, blackbenz. Ed. by Andreas Broeckmann und Stefan Riekeles. Ljubljana 2006. [= Katalog zur gleichnamigen Aussstellung in der Galerija Skuc, Ljubljana / Slovenia, October 5- 27, 2006].