Statement
Tales of Two Cities

 

 


"The parasite is a differential operator of change. It excites the state of system: its state of equilibrium (homeostasis), the present state of its exchange and circulations."
Michele Serres

"As regards ethnology: I find the lifestyle of natives so totally uninteresting and irrelevant, so distant as the life of a dog."
Bronislaw Malinowski


With its project Tales of Two Cities, the traveling formation of the P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. Museum of Contemporary Art is turning into an observational machine. We have before us a complex research project dealing with selected urban territories, their connections and interrelations, in short the topography and the ecology of everyday life. Here ecology is understood similarly as defined by Felix Guattari, i.e. as an interrelation between the environment, social relations and human subjectivity.
This does not comprise only the links between visual (and major) forces, but also micro feelings, knowledge and desires. The two cities, Ravne na Koroškem and Slovenj Gradec, are in this project a paradigm case of randomly chosen cities which, despite their great proximity, live completely different lives. The specifics are obvious at first glance: they are observable in terms of local relations, history, urban planning, local economies and culture.
In the 1920's, influenced by the then fashionable studies by Bronislaw Malinowski, Robert Park and Ernest Burgess of the Chicago School of Urban Ethnography made their students explore the city as though it were some far-away exotic environment. This component of "foreignness" is also typical of the Tales of Two Cities project. The researcher of a town is an exiled foreigner, just like an explorer of far-away, alien cultures is a foreigner. It is the viewpoint of a foreigner which establishes the differences and a critical view of a familiar environment. The Tales of Two Cities is based on certain conceptual requirements typical of the theory and practice of new parasitism: field work, mobility, random observations, hands-on research, and at the same time also imitation, appropriation, and an arbitrary use of methods from diverse fields. The latter can be understood as a critical attitude to analytical scientific concepts which, in their aspiration for totality, lose sight of their own context and position within the research. Among the several dozen photographs and documentary video shots we can observe the amply stocked and shiny interior of a new department store, posters calling for a workers' strike, go-go dancers at work, the ceiling of a local hospital, high-rise housing estates, clouds above a city, a volleyball match, garden gnomes, the feet and shopping bags of passers-by, city maps, factory halls, trash cans, the head of a stuffed fish, children at play, an old shoe-repair shop, living-room ornaments, a moisturizer ad, a football match poster, and so on and on. The jig-saw puzzle is complete. Everything remains open.


Tadej Pogačar

 





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