the text and images below are posted from beijing, berlin, buenos aires, hong kong, los angeles, new york, sado island, shanghai, tokyo and zürich. there are a few of us, and this is the space in between.

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什么是文化交流? | what is cultural exchange?

on projection at 玩世不恭文化交流BBQ a cynical cultural exchange barbecue, 家作坊HomeShop Beijing, 11 July 2009

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spam

iwishformorespam

(looking through the spam folder, in lack of other responses (sigh), oh the things you discover in the trash..! but i wish you would say something, dear reader.. how are you today? here it’s cold and grey again, they call it the summer.. hmm.. time for more coffee now, a soft-boiled egg.. good morning!

oh and please make sure to let us know in case you are ‘saa’, ‘penilopa’, ‘domainmaster’, ‘chad’, ‘uyit’ or ‘blogger’ and your message mistakenly ended up in our spam..)

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a little of switzerland or something in Vietnam

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I met my grandfather on my father’s side, who turns 96 this year, for the third time. In 1996, I went ‘back’ to Vietnam for the first time to attend my grandmother’s funeral. My mother’s parents passed away when she was still little. Simone and me visited ‘Gong’ (grandfather in Teo Chew, our Chinese Dialect from Shantou, 汕头 in Guangdong) in Ho-Chi Minh City for 5 days. I consider myself as an ‘Overseas Chinese’, because Chinese Culture/Tradition was passed on to us. However ‘Home’ for my parents has always been Vietnam, because they were born and grew up as ‘Overseas Chinese’ in Bac Lieu, South-Vietnam. We stayed with my uncle’s family who look after ‘Gong’ and everybody in ‘our’ neighborhood knew that the two of us were the relatives abroad from Switzerland. We went every day down to his room and were talking to him in Teo Chew. I was happy to see ‘Gong’, but in some ways he was a stranger to me, but I did notice similarities to my father. ‘Gong’ knew all the facts (school, profession, salary…) about his grandchildren and kept on asking us if it’s true that Binh, my second oldest sister, has become a lawyer. He also kept on asking if we really got the grant from Pro Helvetia and if we are really working on our project in Beijing. He said proudly that he is amazed how many languages his grandchildren speak. Somehow he thought Linh, my oldest sister, speaks Italian, what is NOT true…Pictures of us grandchildren and my parents were hanging on the wall. I recognize our old apartment in Solothurn, my Swiss hometown. I see family picture of us when we were little. All those pictures are part of my memories from Switzerland and are hanging on the wall in my grandfather’s room on the second floor at Binh Toi No133/5/3 in the 11th district of Ho-Chi Minh City – Saigon, how my parents still call the city! In the morning on our last day before we left for the airport we went down to ‘Gong’ to say goodbye. Both us took a picture with him to capture this moment. He wished us a save journey to Beijing and asked me: Is Beijing nice? I think he has never been to Beijing and has never returned to China since he moved to Vietnam.

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winnie and pillar and and and

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please don’t go, don’t go away


Research material from part of the PUBLIC project by Elaine W. Ho and Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga. Organized as a daily series of experiments, interventions and discourses, PUBLIC aims to examine the potentiality of latency and open spaces made possible in the relations between individuals and publics. Other activities are posted here. Some are open invitations to all, others are unannounced insertions in different locations throughout Berlin. PROGRAM – intitiative for art and architecture collaborations; 22 January – 1 February 2009.

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“can intimacy exist in public?”

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Secret communities tested in aleatory fashion, Acconci’s limitations are practical, too. Beginning at the site of the Bundesnachrichtendienst and arriving at the Auswaertiges Amt:

The subject was chosen walking past the site of the German Secret Service building (to be finished in 2012). A plywood construction blockade, there is hardly any graffiti here. One stencil of a walking man whose head is a surveillance camera.

[14:06] The subject has been spotted on Chausseestrasse walking south at a medium pace and smoking a cigarette with his right hand.

Getting on the U-bahn, Schwarzkopfstrasse.

Stadtmitte, getting off.
Walking south on Friedrichstrasse, turning left on Krausenstrasse.

[14:16] Subject is noted to always look both ways before crossing the street.

Taking a left and turning into park.

[14:21] Subject missing.

[14:22] Subject 1 has most likely entered building number 40 at Leipzigerstrasse, and subject 2 is picked up at the point of departure, exiting from the building wearing high-heeled boots, blonde hair, carrying a black shopping bag in her right hand. She suddenly turns and walks the other direction. [14:26] Subject number 2 enters a jade coloured BMW 725i. We return to the point of departure of Subject 1. 40 Leipzigerstrasse. [14:28] Subject number 3 exits 40 Leipzigerstrasse. She walks east, wearing a multi-coloured scarf and black hat. Walking at leisurely pace, adjusting her hat.
[14:37] After playing Lotto, subject walks into the adjacent super market.

Blumenkohl, broccoli, kiwi.

[14:50] Subject 3 investigation is terminated in supermarket. Subject 4 recognised at 14:49 walking out of the market, carrying a large bottle of Pepsi.
[14:51] Walked inside Multipolster furniture store a few doors down. Appears to be working there.

[14:53] Subject 5 spotted walking west on Leipzigerstrasse. Subject 3 rediscovered walking west on Leipzigerstrasse. She is carrying groceries in a black nylon bag. Subject 3 investigation re-terminated.

Leipzigerstrasse 43. Subject 6 is spotted buying a small potted plant from the Blumen & Pflanzen shoppe. He wears a beige trenchcoat and red scarf, carrying a white and blue shopping bag and newly purchased flowers. [14:59] Subject meets a couple at the intersection of Leipzigerstrasse and Markgrafenstrasse. They all hold shopping bags and chat for a moment before trying to enter a restaurant door, finding it locked. The go to the next eingang and enter City Hotel.

[15:15] Subject 6 exits hotel accompanied by the same man and woman. He is no longer carrying the flowers and shopping bag. They walk north on Markgrafenstrasse. [15:23] Subject 6, accompanied by the couple, walks into the Auswaertiges Amt (Federal Foreign Office). He is seen removing his trenchcoat before security check. Subject 6 investigation terminated.

After some days, she didn’t feel the need to continue in the same way again, I mean, what is participation anyway, if it’s the same as tearing the sheet, sticking around to feed the birds or clicking——wordlessly——”add friend”. How engaged does one need to be to find intimacy, and what is participation in a group in which nobody notices? Taking part, you took part, again again… but what of inaction in the kinesphere, an allowance of space in regards to an other, not taking the responsibility. What can simply be, we were the worst at imagining a telos, so it just goes here to there nor there, our passivity is incremental. but why keep thinking of community and collectivity with such utopian ideals, anyhow. he asks, “can you imagine any form of positively created collectivity”? I thought of all my ill feeling; now, like a nearing in language or love, linking forward or a re-action may not require positives or negatives…

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today. you and we. happy birthday miss asuka

a year passes – 誕生日お目出度う happy birthday, aka-chan 生日快乐 – the day whiles away… late afternoon, almost evening… more space these days for time, for thought for re-collecting, gathering, re-organizing, arranging, and you, ever-preparing for an unfinished moment, future, now in a box, the a-4 papers placed on top as they don’t fit, remembering in april to prepare for may, but when? after ten? after twenty? alas the archive! a year passes – 誕生日お目出度う happy birthday, aka-chan 生日快乐 – the day whiles away… a day with the memory of you and your birthday, perhaps not so different from the year before just that we didn’t record or we didn’t say. so today we learn new things, we capture video, eat a good crispy jian bing, we wear things long forgotten, we receive a phone call from japan, do grocery shopping, cycle to the village, we watch dance, we buy more food in the village, apples, bananas, pears, peanuts mixed with raisins, two filled pancakes and an egg pancake, and we search for a picture of a birthday cake we don’t find, only the not so good one where the candle wasn’t lit and more food is visible on the table, while searching we collect other images, we stop for a moment, we miss you – a year passes – 誕生日お目出度う happy birthday, aka-chan 生日快乐 – the day nears its end… miss asuka-chan, how was your day?

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acommuniqué number one :: hiroaki

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HK:丫:HK:丫:HK:丫:  vitamin space studio behind the star city hotel, guangzhou sunday 15:00, before catching another flight.  a conversation with 大明 turns out to be an exercise in grasping. As in holding on, we talked about it for so long, and in doing, he slapped at the computer and said “i hate this thing”, footage, a semantic exercise. It is not possible to ascertain whether one would have been more keen to remember naturally without it, as often suspected, but now all that is left are the remnants of feeling and machines. and oh yes the sparkle in his eyes.  [PUBLIC BUSa butterfly moving back and forth between the driver and the passengers seated in the front seats for the elderly or handicapped]  one may have bored already with all that talk of archiving and documentation (“don’t say that! it’s something i’m interested in!”), but in the presence of the oversignaled conversation, or a small pale blue notebook with careful letters, “home for lost ideas”, it became interesting to juxtapose the falsely alluded stability of ARCHIVE with MOBILITY (the more cities we will meet in…)  [MOBILE TELEPHONE picks up – “I’m driving, I’ll call you later.”]  An illusion, yes—-the restaurateurs sweat, i pore over how to make more space on the hard drive—-for the reels will always start to decay, the paper yellows and becomes brittle or moist with mildew, the archived item, like memory, takes a half-life, conscious of what it once was, now less than. Temporal processes (cooking, growing, getting ready) bear a physicality. These, yes, are continuities. The act of documenting disPLACEs the documented object from its subject, in terms of the mediated action, reality from its image or copy, and its positioning within the consciousness of the documentary maker.  [TAXIafter a long silence, he asks, “do people pick their nose in Beijing?”]  If we are to keep the archive moving, imagine the scenario of various speeds traveling simultaneously side by side, the tour de france, the armoured truck. it was the memory that caught up with us, and that idea, it seems somehow fantastic, slips into the corner of your vision, up through to the tip of your tongue, already in momentum, such that, as the fear goes, if i were to stop, it would keep going, taking its own trajectory, its own lifehood. they were never yours or mine, and we are merely trying, you perhaps just a bit more gracefully, to keep up.  [recreation of SUBWAY – ]“today on subway, she and i were talking about how we want to print our ribbons, with print on one end of ribbon or both. and i said that to put it on both would be more balanced.” “for sausage?” “yes. and she said, ‘different ideas of balance…’ we see the world in such different ways. she felt that if the print were all on one side, then the fullness would balance with the emptiness on the other side. and i said that’s not balance, that’s contrast. but that contrast creates balance for her, like positive and negative.” “yes, but contrast results to balance in the middle, no?” “and you know there is no original word for ‘logic’ in chinese. and i thought this amazing.” “you told me. oh, many japanese people here.” “the word is from english. but maybe it’s more true. because to think of logic is a kind of objectivism, maybe, which i should not forget is all too deceiving. i envy her a lot.” “oh. why.” “what do you mean about balancing in the middle?” “i guess what you were saying about outweighing each other.” “what was i saying about outweighing? what do you mean? trying to understand. …would like to understand something today.” “full and empty, positive and negative are not balanced, not symmetrical but the outcome in the center is 0. not sure if that makes sense…” “that’s a kind of balance, too, no?” “yes, so maybe hers is a kind of balance, too.” “i mean, i see what you mean in the sense that it’s also a kind of annihilation. and this is perfectly her, yes. it is a kind of balance, and that was a nice to see.” “a balance of difference and a balance of sameness.”  no, grasping was not the point. and yet if not, if there were no continuity in these relations, no sense of fulfilling, then do processes become reduced to mere transaction? does the momentary require a sense of place any more or less than the sedentary? would it be important, to imagine for all these words passed between, a compiled identity of all the possible words of a certain past and an uncertain future? and if we were to do so, would i be really able to see the world as you do, and would i stop moving?

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