Mega-cities as a place of future or where do we go?
Until now, land was stagnation, people with money, ambitions and visions would move to the city. The city is the result of our will to change, to envision us (living) differently, better. In 50 years, when 75% of us will live in urban conditions, the “elite” might live in the precious country. Nature will be luxury and it won’t mark us anymore. We will be urban beings. How will our inner landscape change, when the outer one is fully urban? What will we envision? Who will we become?
The Greeks used the natural landscape, the symbol for the gods, as a scenario for their tragedies. The scenario for this project is the Megacity, symbol for our times that seems too complex for one mythology. The Mega-city is a type of city, new especially in its dimension und rapid transformation. In the Mega-city past rubs against future, planning rubs against uncontrollable growth, national against global, virtual equality against increasing social gaps. You cannot describe a city of these dimensions anymore, you cannot nail it down to one identity.
„The visitor“ takes the spectator to cities that are already facing this famous urban age we are drifting to. This film is not a film about the exotic, the far away horror of dust and trash; it invites to wander and to wonder, about ourselves, about where we go. About a future where we become so many that the question of the individual, who is this single little person gets a different connotation. Does he or she really matter?
The city and the mind:
When you learn to access the city, you access human mind.
Taking this image most concrete, it becomes very exciting:
You may see the city as a book and human mind as its letters,
ASSIMILATION AND „THE OTHER“
Or: The dissolution of boundaries is something else than the loss of individuality.
As our living space, the cities, starts to look similar on a worldwide scale, it is getting harder and harder to recognize the place. What happens to our longing for the “other place” when cultures and environments assimilate to a point where “being in one place or the other matters not”? (Rosa Cuidad). And couldn’t one transfer this thought to human lives and start to wonder if being oneself or this random person in the streets of Mumbai or Moscow matters not? Did “I” finally become “the other”? Or did we just loose the notion of “the other”, the ability to see a deeper other than somebody with different qualities than oneself?
In “the visitor” a woman roams in the public space of different Mega-cities like Mumbai and Shanghai. She enters other people’s situation. She stands in others situations. She attends other people’s life. She is not communicating, interacting and exchanging. She is relating silently, physically, observing and melting into the other. She finally learns to be “the other”. What she wants, what she cares for is to learn to be one of them, one of us, not “herself”. Because this “herself” might not exist. In fact her identity may be completely interchangeable with any other of the people she met.
Clash of realities
In my city projects, I search for ways to approach reality with performance. And for a moment where something “real” happens, unexpected out of the ingredients of this specific time, place, people. I work with a “clash of realities” – mine as a performer with the reality of random people I encounter in the streets of foreign cities. All those other realities that influence me without that I ever physically meet them.
The spectators witness something that is created in this very moment. What they witnesses is not prepared, pre-cooked, but something that came together in its own organic, surprising way. What they are seeing is not determined. But in creation. And a creation always has a possibility of change.
So the encounters “in the visitor” are about the meeting of strangers. The strange and comic fact of people meeting and actually not knowing anything really or about each other, or about themselves is not covered by any role, policy, courtesy. It stays a strange fact. The fact of being strange.
In love, you meet as strangers and become one, you radiate a beauty that wouldn’t be there if you stayed the stranger. In love the strangeness is vanished by unity, the strangers melt rather than they clash, whereas in my perspective in the “encounters” both stay strangers, it doesn’t reveal the comforting beauty of unity but the melancholic beauty of strangeness. Its language is not the one of understanding but the irritating, funny language of misunderstanding. Even if there is an undeniable aspect of love for me in the recognition of each other as strangers.