To every place there belongs a story . . .
FRIEDRICHSKOOG
The LODE-Line crosses the geographic western border of Germany on the North Sea coast. The geographic boundary gives way to a landscape where territories have always been fluid and people and goods have moved as a result of trade for millennia. In one respect FRIEDRICHSKOOG is place that challenges the certain boundary between land and sea. This is a coast where places have been reclaimed from the sea, by virtue of practical engineering and an industrious spirit. This industrious imperative has also resulted in other kinds of environmental impact. The LODE-Line then passes across over a place where the border that separated Eastern Germany from the West had only very recently been removed, leaving a scar in 1992 that in 2017 is not so visible. In the hinterland of LUBECK the landscape flows away to the east, uninterrupted, until the Schengen Agreement area for the free movement of people ends at the border with Belarus and the Ukraine.
In 1992 the questions asked at this geographical edge of modern Germany, a country with huge influence in modern Europe, explores the idea of a common home that is not necessarily identifiable with a state.
The notion of being "European", is also questioned. Is being "European" an extension of the urban identity and how the urban identity does somehow easily adapt to what in 2017, everyone refers to as "globalisation".
Too many small states?
Nationalisms?
The "German pest" is how the printing press is described in Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris.
This will kill that!
Martin Luther was another pest as far as the old order was concerned, but he championed princes over the Anabaptists and other millenarian religious movements, some including a significant inherently anarchistic theological interpretation of Christian beliefs.
The Gutenberg Galaxy!
In 2017 the questions raised are still connected to the matter of personal or national identity, but now in the context of a complex crisis of identity. The loss of identity, or a sense of the loss of identity, can instigate a desperate search for the recovery of something that cannot be recovered. Violence and extremism often attend such situations. In 1992 it was clear that what was needed was a project to open up the concept of personal, social and political identity in the context of what are becoming new forms of social reality. This has not happened.
Nationalism and the Tribal Drum?
Marshall McLuhan in his influential analysis on the impact of communication technologies upon societies, Understanding Media, includes a chapter on Radio and that includes some challenging reflections on how this medium created an "echo chamber" that the national socialists in Germany exploited ruthlessly to gain power in 1933.
The question now is; how do contemporary media impact on the psychological and perceptual matrix among the societies of Europe now?
Is it a form of "nativism", rather than "nationalism", that is one of many spectres haunting Europe today?
Nativism?
This blog-post is a matrix that originates first in the context of an artistic activity that relates to this place, Friedrichskoog, and then connections multiply through processes of association, suggesting links, articulations and juxtapositions that the contemporary information wrap affords us, in a particular and contemporary type of consciousness, where the "loop" or "ricorso" helps the zig zagging necessary to see what is going on.
That's just the way it is . . . but don't you believe them . . .
The LODE-Line crosses the geographic western border of Germany on the North Sea coast. The geographic boundary gives way to a landscape where territories have always been fluid and people and goods have moved as a result of trade for millennia. In one respect FRIEDRICHSKOOG is place that challenges the certain boundary between land and sea. This is a coast where places have been reclaimed from the sea, by virtue of practical engineering and an industrious spirit. This industrious imperative has also resulted in other kinds of environmental impact. The LODE-Line then passes across over a place where the border that separated Eastern Germany from the West had only very recently been removed, leaving a scar in 1992 that in 2017 is not so visible. In the hinterland of LUBECK the landscape flows away to the east, uninterrupted, until the Schengen Agreement area for the free movement of people ends at the border with Belarus and the Ukraine.
In 1992 the questions asked at this geographical edge of modern Germany, a country with huge influence in modern Europe, explores the idea of a common home that is not necessarily identifiable with a state.
The notion of being "European", is also questioned. Is being "European" an extension of the urban identity and how the urban identity does somehow easily adapt to what in 2017, everyone refers to as "globalisation".
The "German pest" is how the printing press is described in Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris.
Martin Luther was another pest as far as the old order was concerned, but he championed princes over the Anabaptists and other millenarian religious movements, some including a significant inherently anarchistic theological interpretation of Christian beliefs.
In 2017 the questions raised are still connected to the matter of personal or national identity, but now in the context of a complex crisis of identity. The loss of identity, or a sense of the loss of identity, can instigate a desperate search for the recovery of something that cannot be recovered. Violence and extremism often attend such situations. In 1992 it was clear that what was needed was a project to open up the concept of personal, social and political identity in the context of what are becoming new forms of social reality. This has not happened.
Marshall McLuhan in his influential analysis on the impact of communication technologies upon societies, Understanding Media, includes a chapter on Radio and that includes some challenging reflections on how this medium created an "echo chamber" that the national socialists in Germany exploited ruthlessly to gain power in 1933.
The question now is; how do contemporary media impact on the psychological and perceptual matrix among the societies of Europe now?
Is it a form of "nativism", rather than "nationalism", that is one of many spectres haunting Europe today?
This blog-post is a matrix that originates first in the context of an artistic activity that relates to this place, Friedrichskoog, and then connections multiply through processes of association, suggesting links, articulations and juxtapositions that the contemporary information wrap affords us, in a particular and contemporary type of consciousness, where the "loop" or "ricorso" helps the zig zagging necessary to see what is going on.
That's just the way it is . . . but don't you believe them . . .
That's just the way it is . . . but don't you believe them . . .
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