12. The Global Village - Bali

 

The title The global village is taken from a book by Marshall McLuhan from 1968. I am researching the island of Bali as a global node of mediation. I am doing this through photography, focusing mostly on already existing images in public space.
Bali is an island where the effects of globalization are clearly visible. With this project, I depict and ask questions about the globalized information society. The project is about Bali, but at the same time about the world we all live in and share, but not in equal matters. The situation is far from fair. Bali is a small island where several of the world’s richest investors own land. Over time, more and more gated communities and fenced areas have been developed and built on the island. At the same time with those barriers and walls, there are ideas of freedom, liberalism, and boundlessness getting expressed and fabricated on Bali in a neo-liberal manner.

When I organize a material of very many pictures that forms the basis of the project The Global Village - Bali, I use a program that does not operate perfectly all the time: the program freezes and the screen glitches. When I on one occasion could read Massage written in one of these glitches, I made a screenshot. Although I have read Marshall McLuhan, it was this picture that taught me that the title of McLuhan’s best-known book is The Medium is The Massage, not The Medium is The Message, which is his theoretical thesis and one of McLuhan's most famous statements. Although I know that the program malfunction, I continue to use it to generate more glitches. The glitches are of importance since they show the interface of the images that is otherwise hidden in the illusion of the photographs. It is similar to when I photograph pictures and the viewer becomes aware of the surfaces of the images, the scratches and the materiality. They are not see-through images.

13. The Backpack

 

27 March a backpack get placed on Charles de Gaulle airport in France around 14:30–15:00 as a deliberate act and an attack.

Charles de Gaulle is one of Europe’s most supervised airports. A person puts down and leaves a backpack in the airport. Before leaving, the person photographs the bag. This action shows the surveillance cameras that everything is intentional and that the backpack is not forgotten. The bag is closed and locked with a padlock in the zipper opening. This means that it cannot be easily opened. The backpack is meant as an attack in the airport.

“For security reasons, baggage left unattended will be removed and destroyed.”

Studies of art, photography, postcolonial theory and my own experience of traveling as a tourist in Asia are behind my decision to perform the action. I am convinced that the action is worth doing for a number of important reasons. Placing the bag like this at Charles de Gaulle airport can scare, shock and hurt individuals. A part of the airport may be blocked by the security guards and people on their way to or from their flights might be disturbed. The ethical problem of exposing other people to my actions is included in my calculations.

I justify the action with theories of how the system itself is so much more violent, wrong and destructive.

The contents of the backpack are pictures. These images consist of scanned material from travel brochures and travel commercials printed on photo paper and then cropped to a 10x15cm format. Nothing but a large number of these pictures lies in the bag. The selection is made to represent a typical representation of the world through a European travel commercial perspective. The backpack contains something that the tourism industry generates, images that constitute the current world order.

The security system, the structure, and the strictly disciplined architecture are tangible. I’m up in this with intentions about it as art. Flying with the bag containing only pictures is part of a performance work. Passing the bag through the X-ray machine at the airport worries me. Perhaps I will face suspicion and questions. I’m afraid to be remembered, or that security staff should notice this as something strange so that I can later be linked to the Charles de Gaulle airport attack and seized as a terrorist.

 

A performance work that asks questions about power-relations, representation, language, symbolic violence, and action. (Performance, text, video)

SPACE AVAILABLE

Space Available, from the project: The Global Village - Bali

There are no locals? Link: http://www.kristoffersvenberg.com/PDF/There%20are%20no%20locals%20K%20Svenberg%20Eng.pdf