karl /liebesraum

Lebensraum

directly translates to living space or living room. An innocuous word in itself, the term is historically loaded by Hitler's usage to justify invading Poland.

Liberty Cap-sule

the Liberty Cap is the red, conical hat used to represent the French Revolution, a common image in paintings at the time, as well as a symbol that appears in certain politics icons of the Americas, such as the capital emblems of Asunción, Paraguay and Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Thus the project confronts and analyzes the way in which history is created through symbols, words and images, and how those symbols accumulate new meanings and significations throughout history, and throughout different countries. This migration of historically loaded symbols across countries and generations shall be the research basis for the project, largely analyzing the expansion of European languages and histories into the identity and collective syntax of the Americas.

Yet, at the same time, the larger video/sound montages that will be projected into the Lebensraum will also confront the absence of historical moments of European and American events, and moreover of African, Middle-Eastern and Asian events, which are ignored or un-incorporated into the larger body of education and media, at least here in the Americas. These events, shall be the violent flashes that break the sometimes slow or frozen archival and fictional recreations of the well known historical events and moments of the last two centuries. Moreover, if certain historical events are almost completely lost in the body of accessible studies, then those events most be represented as their absence, a black screen to which the most minimal textual information is provided.

Furthermore, the inclusions of non-popular images such as personal interviews, and unmarked historical sites, will attest to the continuing replacement or redefinition of history and its relevance to today's society and the absence of physical and geographical referents; and the inclusion of personal photos of web-based social networks will allude to the marginalization of past historical experiences itself within popular consciousness, as the ability to construct constellations and archives of personal photos and experiences, largely consumption and/or social based, excludes the importance of a world outside of those isolated social world.

Thus, it is the purpose of such an extravagant body of images, sounds, and texts to help to prime and trigger the viewer's understanding of their position within history, on a conscious or unconscious level, as streams of associative fragments of popular culture help to contextualize or decontextualize certain historical images or representations.

The primed subject then will be able to articulate their position in history, whether in reference to the specific historical event playing within the Liberty Cap-sule, or a general insight or question that they have raised after their experience within the Lebensraum.

Outline

1-Liberty (1378)

liber (Latin) free

2-Textum (Latin) web