Fragment, 2'46''
The work is composed of 9 single videos of my colleagues (my home community), shot individually while eating a hot soup meal. All separate sequences are tightly montaged next to each other within the projection frame. Each segment shows a single action – the eating of the hot soup by each individual participant.
The project is meant to familiarize the viewer with a certain professional community that has a specific nature, with some of its members and their reactions to the challenging necessity to formulate a new type of behavior in a fast changing social environment. The hot soup here serves the function of a metaphor for the current reality, for the adaptive action. Everybody eats soup at lunch. Some blow on it to cool it off, others wait, and still others like it hot – a matter of preferences. The participating individuals are faced with a concrete task. They have to eat the soup. And they do it but in different ways. Thus they are defining their own substance and attitudes towards the offered possibility. Motivated by their desire for expression they are prepared to either reject or replace, or often impose on others, their own ways.
The professional environment (my home community) exists through the artist's activities. But its structure is still soft. Often it is subjected to some internal contradictions and external attacks. It doesn't have a distinctly built up image yet. That's what motivates the comparison with the hot soup or with such a challenge.
Installation view Bulgariaavantgarde, Künstlerwerkstatt Lothringerstrasse 13, Munich 1998
