passé
Mensengesäß, 1996
Exposition du 25.10.19 au 1.12.19
passé
Mensengesäß, 1996
Exposition du 25.10.19 au 1.12.19
A soloshow by Alex Wissel
This photo was made during the 1000th year jubilee of the village where I grew up. Part of the celebration was a huge procession of the villagers dressed up in characters drawn on the village’s history. I played a person infected by plague in the middle-age section of the parade. It´s one of the most vivid memories I have — walking with almost the entire population in a seemingly endless time warp through the little streets of the tiny village. Somehow there was a diffuse atmosphere of greatness flying around the proud citizens, collectively overcoming the mechanics of time. People of all ages, classes and backgrounds were performing a kind of fake or imaginary history, because obviously there had been no real professional research conducted on the history of the village before staging the procession. But this didn´t really matter at all, because what was the most striking part in this crude appropriation process was that both – conservative and anarchical – projections of the past were performed together in the procession.
Twenty-three years later I´m more interested in the reasons we don´t know so many left-wing interpretations of the past. Where and when did right conservative powers started to perform national identity? How did right-wing ideas of nationality and history become hegemonial?
Starting with the exhibition at Forde, I will try to trace how this right-wing construction of the past was made by artists with a so called authoritarian personality in a national collaborative process between history painting, national monuments and storytelling at costume feasts in the 19th century. And how these old anti-democratic reactionary ideas are nowadays reactivated by the new right with the helping hand of neoliberal politics. Please come by, I will probably give a kind of lecture with an introduction to the topic during the opening!