Ivana Keser Battista was born in 1967. She studied at the Fine Art Academy in Zagreb (1987-92). Her work resides in the newspapers she writes, illustrates and publishes herself in which she carries news from private life, commentaries, brief articles and author's photographs into a public domain. Her project "The exhibition of the local newspapers" (started in 1994), in the form of exhibitions and actions, appeared in different local contexts. In her work she questions the borders between boredom and pleasure as well between the private and the common. Ivana Kesser has participated in exhibitions including Manifesta I (Rotterdam 1996), Aspects/Positions (Vienna 1999) and After the Wall (1999 Stockholm).
The fragility of human sense and communicating context lies at the heart of Ivana Keser's work, whether it is of metaphysical, political, social, or poetic reflection. She contributes a distinct form of performance interaction through the appropriation of the newspaper form. Where others might be tempted towards subverting the medium Keser bypasses this rather obvious game by engaging with the recycling nature of the media - stories, news, incidents – to deftly and playfully reaffirm our place in the cyclical rhythm of existence.
Producing newspapers as art works moves activity beyond the currency of object-hood and imbues the reader/audience with a very private and meditative communion with the artist. She also employs locally produced newspapers in Installations.
Kenneth McBride
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Local-Global newspapers, Rotterdam, 1996
LOCAL - GLOBAL
The future is doubtless the most expensive luxury. The thought of it gives rise to the group therapy of gathering, selecting and promulgating global values. In the veritable epidemic of life, with a population of five billion people on Earth, more people are living on the margins than in the centre. What all maps have in common is featurelessness. They show neither margins nor centres, because a map is not a territory. If there is a group of several thousand to several million people speaking a specific language, recalling the same figures from the past, the same names which they still use, and if they call one another barbarians, boors or yokels, and if they use the calendar backwards, and if they feel safe only when they are constantly expanding, then we are certainly dealing with a nation. Life follows the same patterns everywhere; the centre is where one is standing, and the margins are all around it. News readers do not spare their listeners and announce the "local" on all sides. Looking at it from this viewpoint, one cannot imagine any other dimension of reading the Earth. Issues are explicitly divided into local and global ones, but in reality there are only local issues, and the global is simply a consequence. Here is an obvious example: was it not the case that in one of the larger industrial margins, in the pathless expanses of Arizona, someone was solving his local problem by creating a new space to live in? Since then all the inhabitants of the Earth, even those on the opposite side of the globe, have been protagonists of the global; they are dealing with "somebody else's" local problem. Similar examples, with a different story, are those sailing the ocean on the way to China, as yet unconquered, in the shape of a ship loaded with parts of obsolete, but still workable parts of nuclear technological equipment. This kind of trade in local problems, operating on the principle of sell or fob off on someone, is part of the long-term interests which the inhabitants of the developed and underdeveloped countries are, for the first time, encountering together. This new phenomenon is called the local problem market. This market, along with all other institutions, signals a slow and sure mutation of the system. When a system is too big, it becomes ineffective, as in the example of the garbage collecting system. The global, divided community, which is becoming ever more homogenous with respect to garbage, will certainly be transformed into a new civilization of trash. This is what the present stage of the late twentieth century looks like.
A contribution to the civilization of trash
Since we have mentioned garbage, we must say what we mean by that term. True, the concept is very broad and has so far eluded definition, apart from saying that it refers to discarded or dilapidated objects which no longer serve their original purpose. Garbage, which becomes garbage when it loses its context, includes ideological and pornographic garbage, household waste, and so on. All together, this makes up the garbage of a civilization. The garbage we put into bags and leave on the doorstep is far less trashy than the garbage indiscriminately broadcast or published in the media, transmitted one-way from an individual to the public. The things and concepts that have escaped being labelled garbage and that have thus survived are called values. The hardest thing, of course, is to tell where garbage begins and where it ends. Values are generally accepted and may be inherited. Even those that are local in nature can become global when they prevail due to the support of the majority. This category includes all the talk of a one-sided respect for interculturality, which means taking everything that can be incorporated into the dominant local culture. All estimates are based on a local perception. Having some form of the news in front of us does not mean having the truth, but having an interpretation. The truth is interpretation. The meridian decides on what is the truth, and ambiguity is part of the nature of the media.
An activist or an atavist
Most viewers or listeners cannot distinguish between an activist and an atavist. One can be both at the same time. As when armies of mobilized voyeurs sit in the grandstand rooting for their team. Voyeurs are omnipresent. There are always more onlookers than players. Enjoying another's activity is like sitting in a restaurant watching people eating, without eating yourself. In that case a game or a match is the voyeur's version of a fight, and he is a passive activist. The ultimate violent game is war. It resembles soccer, although no-one protests against soccer. There are fans and the war theatre. War as a genre is a 24-hour screening of a horror film free of charge, and is based on a permanent feeling of persecution. War can easily be reduced to a micro phenomenon. It can easily be localized. Because of its global - macro extent, literary voyeurism is somewhat more uncouth. How can one describe a crime without committing a crime, either in thought, or by reconstructing the possible, or by retelling what exists. The Bible, too, is full of crimes, and imbues the writer of classical pieces with the power to deal with crimes in books. The only defence for the mental staging and projecting of violence is an explanation of the context. In that case, violence is justified only if it serves an educational purpose. However, in practice it looks like this: the death penalty is a warning to others. Although the most widely read news are always stage-managed stories about violence, they are there to point out drastic examples. No-one sees events in the same order, and the natural selection arising from the recording of saints and criminals is conducive to today's civilization of garbage. After the historical screening, only the best and the worst remain. Everyday life has been swept away. History does not create on purpose. There is a formula according to which dates and places change, but the same events keep repeating themselves. Movement seems to be everything, and the goal is nothing. But there is the intuition according to which the main protagonists decide on the day of their appearance. Every tyrant, as well as every righteous person, has always known when it was time for a lottery, and when for Russian roulette. And it seems that nature has taken care to arrange today's course of events. They say nature protects species and sacrifices individuals. But nature does not take care of anything. There is only need. Neither does the species, especially the human species, take care of itself. It is only the individual who takes care of him or herself. Thus history is reduced to the sum of local stories. These differ in their precepts in nations and countries with 3.10 or 200 million inhabitants. Nations differ in the extent to which they are imperilled. While some have a nationality, others have a psychosis. All local issues may be classified into those concerning race, class and sexuality. That is what art deals with today: the planetary dimension with regional consequences: the sum of local frustrations. This social dimension is not something new; it has simply prevailed over the visual, together with which it made up the art of preceding centuries. Since the stage of abstraction was adopted in the early 20th century, what is now required of the individual is that he or she should not be passive, that he should not repeat to others, "You are the potter, I am the clay," but that he or she should take part in raising, understanding, and solving local issues, since, as has already been mentioned, there are always and only local issues, and global issues are the product of local ones.
An excuse for the future
The 20th century is the century of the impatient and the hyperactive. People tried everything in a seemingly short period of time: flying and walking on the moon. Leaders fell, nations grew and empires collapsed. In periods in which destruction was always more effective than construction, an Edison or a Tesla would spring up from time to time, discovering a thread to give light to the dark decades. Due to the dense population of the Earth, even local problems came together. Progress as a whole still looks uncertain. The inventor, who has a humane goal, is usually exposed to misuse, so that his name may be ingloriously and naively crowned with the laurel wreath of the "Winner in the race of fools". He will be the last to control his idea. The average person, the heir to the inventor's idea, yoked to ideas, will climb the stairs of progress, which lead to the abyss. Before falling in, the same person will not know whether the idea was there for his sake or whether he was there for the sake of the idea.
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Short texts from different newspapers
Utopia
Nobody ever spoke about Utopia before 1516. The word and the idea were completely unknown. Guess why. Everybody believed in paradise and then suddenly somebody was talking about the idealized place and vision. You can imagine the paradise: nothing is missing, nothing is too much. Compared to that, private utopia is just an attempt at a perfect measure. Therefore, find your own
island or mountain and make your own movie.
Private Utopia / Utopia Privada, Barcelona 2000
The Fear of Newcomers
Immigrant, Alien, Migrant, Migrant Worker, Refugee, Asylum Seeker, Quota Refugee, A Returning Migrant – Expatriate are official names for the people for whom Immigration Politics was created. While the immigrant, according to the categories of the United Nations, is a general concept used to describe “all the persons who have immigrated to the country”, for ordinary people migrants—regardless of intentions and status—are always and only strangers. And a stranger is every traveler who comes today and may stay with us tomorrow. “What makes people strangers?” is the question that I pose to the people who left their places of their own free will, which, for lack of other terms, they called homes. Displacement, assimilation, tolerance, ethnocentricity, prejudice, cultural stereotypes, ethnic discrimination, xenophobia, racism, are all notions which migrants face, to a more or less extent, everyday. Only idealists or black sheep leave their countries. People everywhere are equally indisposed towards action, remaining fixed and inactive there where they find themselves, up until some force compels them to move. There are people who are prone to repose and those who are prone to motion, but the basic question which strikes me is not why people migrate but rather why don’t they? When speaking about the law, people today often have considerably less freedom to move across national borders than do goods and capital. In the age of accelerated globalization attention should be turned to the difference between fiction and reality. Reality repeats itself while reason always prevails in fiction. Delbrück/Zolberg’s idea of the Open Republic can also be added to the contribution of fiction, which, in the era of all the more increasing migration of worldwide proportions, the concept of a nation-state is deemed to be obsolete. The Open Republic implies an acceptance of citizens of different ethnic, religious, and cultural backgrounds, with equal rights for all. The migrants, with whom I have been carrying on a dialogue via e-mail during the last year, are all located in different parts of the world. They have temporarily or permanently achieved a desired goal. Their motivation for going to the foreign countries is most frequently based on the search for new experiences, better professional possibilities, the need for change, or search for like-minded people. The newspaper-in-making entitled Migrants is my dialogue with the ten people who share the experience of more than one address, located most frequently on a foreign continent.
Migrants, Zagreb, 2002
A Place in The Sun
In the famed park of a certain king who, above all else, inspired yet tyrannized over his subjects with the orderliness of his landscape, you had to walk a long, long time to get to the palace that lay surrounded by flowery greenswards, bushes and avenues of trees, artificial lakes and fountains. This was the most striking of palaces, the model for which could be made out in those of defunct civilizations and in all the pale reflections created after the kingdom of this king. Everyone who went to the palace walked with a measured pace along the symmetrical walk, the view from which, to both left and right, could be anticipated from far away. The people, and not just any kind of people, didn’t much like going to the palace. And yet the palace was meant for them. Just as those who wanted to couldn’t get near the palace, those who needed to just had to go to the palace. The journey to the castle was difficult. In winter the wind whipped, and in summer the sun roasted. And everyone, apart from that, could be seen at a couple of hundred meters distance if he rubbed his eye or stopped to shake the pebbles from his shoe. Everyone wanted to get to the destination calm and decent. Although the way there was without any insurmountable obstacles, in the summer it would be cut by several stretches of the king’s rose garden, and so all the way to the palace one had to bow several times to every metal arch weighed down with scented sprays of ramblers. Although all of them knew of some more pleasant short cuts apart from the main path, no one used them. The paths and trails were there to be home for the many residents of the garden. There had to be places for every species. The characters of all the species went one after another, and from this whole confused mess even the gardeners would sometimes give up. The lowest life was in the falling leaves. Then there were the creepers and the mosses, the low plants and the ivy, then the seasonal flower beds, some tropical plants that could stand the continental climate, and at the top, the eternal plane trees and the high evergreen walls of bushes in the labyrinths of which the ladies and gentlemen lost themselves in chattering. Some of the plants loved the shade and the moisture, and some of them the sun and the dry soil. Some of them had their leaves cut off, and some were given nets to support them while they grew. And many of the species in this grandiose garden could not abide ea1ch other.
Garden Mirror, Luxembourg, 2001
Taste of the Mountain
All the more often we experience nature as an object of science, but it should be lived intuitively, physically, as the proto-element of the one and only and always the same breath which survives by flowing through the universe through all living beings. In nature, every microcosm can be as large as the macrocosm. The entire world can be contained within a mountain, but even the smallest particle of dust from the mountain contains the mountain itself. The idea that the smallest entity is equal to the whole assumes that the standard relations between things are illusory. Even the smallest garden and bonsai tree are convincing and real in their format just as the forest itself. Faithful pilgrimages always to the same destination to some mountain from hundreds of other possible destinations are enough to invoke the taste of the entire mountain.
Weekend Art newspapers, Kyoto, 2003
Sense of Silence
Emptiness is a sense of perception. You do not add to it or take away from it. A mountain can be silent and empty as if awaiting someone. On our mountain we covered a large span on a humid summer day, trampled carpets of leaves, and left tracks in the deep snow while heading towards tacit meetings with a birch, an oak, or fir tree. In order for us to find new things it was necessary to follow our old paths repeatedly in silence.
Weekend Art newspapers, Kyoto, 2003
The Tree and Haste
Not so long ago in China and Japan the kanji-symbol for tree resembled an actual tree. The tree had a trunk, branches and a root. Today, due to the speeding up of communications, the symbol for the tree has lost its root. In Europe, however, for centuries it was understood that a tree has a root, so that in pictures it simply stopped being shown, unless it was for scientific purposes. A tree is like a stream. When you remove stones from the stream, it loses its murmur and song. What a tree is like without its root, we will soon find out. Every tree contains a small world within itself. The root is, for those who have the luck to imagine it, the hidden reason of life. The rustling of leaves is its song. The annual rings of the tree trunk are its history. The branches are its peoples and nations, the leaves are inscribed lives, and their pores are the life stories.
Weekend Art newspapers, Kyoto, 2003
Collective Sense of Guilt
I can not remember exactly when I began perfecting my inborn sense of guilt. My environment nurtured that feeling in me because there was always a reason for some preventive apology. History is loaded with penitents and expressions of remorse. The oldest example I can think of now is that of Adam and Eve. They were so sorry for eating the forbidden fruit that they left paradise. Even history apologises for big mistakes like the inquisition, the burning of heretics, the crusades or for rejecting Galileo. It is always good for someone to apologise. Even if that someone is not directly involved or even if that someone is a multifaceted person such as the timely Ms. History. And now, as I write, there is a man apologising live on TV, once, twice, and the third time he even has a painful expression on his face. Maybe it is a good idea to take the precaution of apologising the minute we meet someone. Man is a three-dimensional being and you can never tell when an idea or movement might over step the limits of somebody’s sense of politeness. I feel so guilty for everything people have done that I sometimes think that guilt is the result of a collective heritage. Maybe this is a good opportunity to apologize for whatever wrong comes first to mind. For example, I publicly apologise for learning lies at school, among other things. I apologise to the reader too, in case my comments are not in accord with your own experience.
Obsessions and Frustrations, Vienna, 1999
Strangers in the movies
Who are these people? or Parallel Lives from a Dream Factory.
It is difficult to discern strangers especially if they are similar to “us”. The history of film and its related disciplines are an example of virtual reality. In virtual reality, identities play an all the more diminishing role. For planetary virtual communication your sex, religion, political orientation… are unimportant and the same applies to the world of film, but with one rule: you must have an acceptable name.
Even as a child Schmuel Gelbfisz1 thought about whether to stay in Warsaw or to leave to make his mark in the world. In the end he went to Hollywood and became famous. William Henry Pratt2 had it good in England but he wanted horror roles just like Bela Blasko3 and he left for the dream factory. During that era, Rodolpho Guglielmi4 died. It was said that Rodolpho was a lover without an equal. After his death, cowboys became popular and no one was a better cowboy than Marion Michael Morrison5. Sean O’Fearn6 only wanted Marion as a cowboy. And while Marion was famous for taming the wilderness, Elia Kazanjoglou7 sought urban heroes for his films. Doris von Kappelhoff8 was in awe of the fatal Margarita Carmen Cansino9 until she became sure of her own voice. Before her, Frederick Austerlitz10 and Margarita’s cousin Virginia McMath11 danced a duet. Once Doris, Betty Joan Perske12 and Issur Danielovich Demsky13 were talking about the Russian avant-garde and listening to jazz in the same nightclub as Eleanor Fagan14, sitting at a table next to them, talked about Cassius Marcellus Clay15, Michel Shahoub16 entertained his guests with stories, and Claus Detlev Sierck17 was presenting Jean-Louis de Kerouac18 with a notion that the latter was obstinately trying to contest. Ho Chung Tao19 watched all this with disbelief. Ivo Levi20 sang refrains with Edith Gassion21. And Alphonso D’Abruzzo22 joined their little table soon after. Vosdanig Manoog Adoian23 tried to take all their pictures. Issur searched for something in Turman Streckfus Persons’s24 book. Betty was leafing through film journals which all had something written on the new star Dino Crocetti25. Then Taidje Kahn26 appeared with a story about Krishna Bhanjiju27 and new actresses such as Raquel Tejade28 and Camille Javal29. ‘Who was Camille Javal?’ asked Issur and Betty aloud before returning to their cocktails. Around midnight Allen Konigsberg30 dropped by with news of his new film. Around 5 in the morning everyone stopped speaking when Walter Willison31 drew out his guns. Sari Gabor32 eased the atmosphere chatting about Rosita Alverio33 with Walter Matuschanskayasky34. While Charles Buchinski35 leaned over to get a better look at Willison’s guns, David Kotkin36 appeared out of nowhere performing his tricks, but this didn’t help Shirley Beaty37 find her brother. Joseph Levitch38 climbed the bar to give a toast to Norma Jean Baker39 while in the corner Adolph and Julius Marx40 laughed loudly teasing the rest of their brothers. Garik Weinstein41 and Chan Kwong42 were playing a game that was neither chess nor karate. When Michael Igor Peschowsky43 showed up, they all began to speak in a strange language. Maurice Micklewhite44 observed all this in silence. He couldn’t pronounce anyone’s name so he stood off to one side.
1 Samuel Goldwyn, 2 Boris Karloff, 3 Bela Lugosi, 4 Rudolph Valentino, 5 John Wayne, 6 John Ford, 7 Elia Kazan, 8 Doris Day, 9 Rita Hayworth, 10 Fred Astaire, 11 Ginger Rogers, 12 Lauren Bacall, 13 Kirk Douglas, 14 Billy Holiday, 15 Muhammad Ali, 16 Omar Sharif, 17 Douglas Sirk, 18 Jack Kerouac, 19 Bruce Lee, 20 Yves Montand, 21 Edith Piaf, 22 Alan Alda, 23 Arshile Gorky, 24 Truman Capote, 25 Dean Martin, 26 Yul Brynner, 27 Ben Kingsley, 28 Raquel Welch, 29 Brigitte Bardot, 30 Woody Allen, 31 Bruce Willis, 32 Zsa Zsa Gabor, 33 Rita Moreno, 34 Walter Matthau, 35 Charles Bronson, 36 David Copperfield, 37 Shirley MacLaine, 38 Jerry Lewis, 39 Marilyn Monroe, 40 Harpo and Groucho Marx, 41 Garry Kasparov, 42 Jackie Chan, 43 Mike Nichols, 44 Michael Caine
Migrants, Zagreb, 2002
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Texts by Ivana Keser, from the Weekend Art Newspaper, produced for the exhibition "After the Wall" in Stockholm, October 1999.
Friendship, Mountain, one meter from civilization
Aleksandar and me have climbed up the mountain voluntary since childhood. For the last fifteen years we have been conquering Medvednica together, tackling it from gentle, but not quite tame sides. We began our friendship with Tomislav in 1990’s, which has culminated in this performance. Tomislav Gotovac, a well known avant garde film-maker and author of the life concept "paranoia view art" has been conquering the mountain since he was a child. At a peak of his strength, when he could do a thousand push ups every morning, it took him only two and a half hours to run to the top of Medvednica from his home. Wandering around the mountains is nothing unusual in this region. Just about everyone does it, from the very young to the very old. Depending on the weather, hundreds of other citizens of Zagreb do events such as walking, resting or picnicking. Our collaboration can be seen as a sort of deviation from urbanity and a sign of the impossibility of a dialogue in public during these years. It is nothing new that people who declare themselves artists, apart from their art activity, must do a second job to earn their living. The questions remain: is the Sunday artist a true artist, and may a performance without an audience be called performance at all? For us, the answer lays in friendship and woods. During countless walks on the Medvednica hill near Zagreb and during endless talks, we lost the feeling of doing something under the imposed license of art - who are the artists; what is to be perceived as a performance - instead we developed a true dialogue. Instead of an egoistic possession of a certain area, we built a communication on all levels. Areas apparently historically conquered were transformed into a puzzle. These pieces built a comprehensive and relaxed image of an extremely simple dialogue: Hitchcock, the Marx Brothers, Ozu, Bresson, or Kurosawa. Each path in these considerably large woods was named for one of them, while we quite easily continued to walk, sometimes in a circle and stopping to take a shot. We were drawn by a certain sense of pleasure, which grew into a therapy, freeing us of tension. This unknown hill with its different paths offered numerous possibilities. Forced by the circumstances, we could go there only on Sundays (and we realized that we had become “weekend artists”), and we accepted our walks as Weekend Art. Since the start of 1995 until now, we have spent thousands of hours talking and I produced with the self-timer almost thousand self-portraits with friends.
Natural Surroundings
Over the last ten years the south-eastern region of Europe, due to the war and various other circumstances, has seen a sudden release of an aggressive Hellenic spirit characterized by a ridiculously overblown cult of sport and military deftness. Here, once again, muscles and endurance have become the epitome of ideal man. In the general fear of anything different, in the grip of set mediatic and ideological models, cosmopolitan artists have remained listed as undesirable social elements. They are forced to find shelter elsewhere, as the dictates of the official political line, devoid of any vision, have driven them to the very margins of society. In the scanty remaining space of personal freedom they are obliged to develop their sense of hearing, so as not to over-develop their sense of obedience. In the meantime, so as not to become an end to ourselves, Tomislav, Ivana, and me, set off into the outskirts of our city. Forests full of leeches, grass snakes crushed on the asphalt and swarms of wasps in the hollow trees, provided the idyllic basis for us turning our backs on the city. Our decision to return to nature following in the footsteps of cave-men, was an easy one to make after experiencing the degradation of the role of art in society. In the forest, all three of us, having found a tolerant environment, felt less superfluous than in the city.
Weekend Artists
We became weekend artists slowly and noiselessly, by spending all week doing unexpected and irreconcilable jobs. These would provide us with sufficient material means to spend our Sundays being what we in fact are. Doing all sorts of things is nothing unusual. Persevering in amateur conditions, on the other hand, is quite hard. Therefore, the idea of Weekend Art is like a perceptual inversion, something like an axiom of life whereby a hopeless situation can be turned into an advantage of friendship and dialogue. Initially, our Sunday outings had more of a therapeutic character than an artistic one. At the same time, even the first few photographs Aleksandar took in the spring of 1996 on Medvednica, showed clearly that this fictive site of activity, barely marked on the superficial map of Europe, would, to us, become the center of the world. We chose Brestovac as our first destination. Brestovac is a rather derelict place overgrown with moss and undergrowth. This once lively complex, a sanatorium for tuberculosis sufferers was a health center frequented, it seems, by those concerned more with cerebral activity than muscle tone. Brestovac was a refuge for all major Croatian artists. By the end of its eighty years of existence the sanatorium was a complex employing a staff of two thousand. In the 1970s this complex slowly began caving in and was deemed undesirable and unhealthy for the morality of the inhabitants of the nearby city. Life surrounded by wilderness acted as a spur to literary, but also, sexual appetites. So it is not surprising that the sketches of the most important Croatian works of art were created here, on the ideal altitude of this Austro-Hungarian sanatorium. "Weekend Art, Hallelujah the Hill" was also shown as an Internet project at the Frac Languedoc Roussillon. website (www.fraclr.org/weekend.html) in collaboration with the curator Ami Barak. During one year, (from June 28 through October 18, 1998), every Monday, the day after outing, the new photographs as a sort of a diary have been sent and shown at the Frac L.R. website.
Performance without an audience
From the very belly of Weekend Art and as a participant of this friendly threesome, I admit that as a civilized being I am deeply troubled by the knowledge that I cannot do without the mountain, but the mountain can do without me. To be deep in the woods at dusk, far from the sound of engines, with no demarcations and with the suggestion of a few hours of walking to the first asphalt leading to the center of town, means at the same time to be nowhere. These all day wanderings around the woods, intercepted by performances without spectators, are accompanied by long conversations whose contents often inspire the situation recorded on the slides. Weekend Art, therefore, shamelessly tries to compensate for the whole working week following the instructive example of the ubiquitous E.T.A. Hoffmann who, during his lifetime two hundred years ago, set certain days aside for practicing music, others for composing, others for writing, and ended up by painting on weekends. Sundays reveals complex relations between nature and urban life, work and leisure, especially artistic work and its position at the labour market. Private - Public project Weekend art was interpreted by writers and critics in various ways, from a kind of political act to the pure hedonism, but for us it is an inspiring friendship.
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Installation notes
The installations in Pisa and New York's Central Park both use newspapers local to their geo-context. In Pisa, Tuscan newspapers were measured and wrapped by weight with a label attached – 5000 grams of political news. “As information is interpretation for me, calculating the truth in newspapers in relation to their weight becomes a form of interpretation.”
In New York local papers were laid out in a circular form. “The circular shape expressed the idea of recycling news. I am fascinated by the fact that events always repeat themselves: only people's names, places, and dates change. The word ‘news' is a linguistic, utopian trick: each letter indicates a compass point. Only power centers are able to censor news: they have a monopoly on disinformation.”
