Dear Claudio, reading your notes “Barriers” and “Bouncing” remains me of two old msk7 projects “ping pong N-S-E-W” and “floating ping pong” you may like.
In the year 2006, msk7 went on the road in South Korea with their project “ping pong N-S-E-W” using four trucks and following a route from West to East parallel to the border between North and South Korea. The external surfaces of the trucks, their interiors and the ping-pong tables installed inside formed a platform for a complex interplay of linking and separating zones. http://msk7.org/pages-e/pingpong.html
Three years later (and twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall) msk7 is with “floating ping pong” again setting out in search of the tracks and traces between East and West, North and South. In the inter-space between the far side and this side of a border the subtle frontiers and limits of communication and of intercultural understanding are blanked out. The project takes place on the River Spree and thus on uncertain ground. http://msk7.org/pages-e/floatingpp.html
I used ping pong to make contact with people. The table is a few meters away from the housing module, but no one was using it because they didn’t have rackets. So I bought a couple myself and started playing with people (mostly male guys, and some kids).
Of course ping pong is also a metaphor, a metaphor about the guests’ situation. People do not feel completely here, some feel the risk that they may be deported, the ties to the country of origin are still very strong, it’s hard to make these spaces “homes”. Even talking to some social workers, they were telling me how people feel suspended, on hold, here.
That’s why I drew stylized little men/women on the rackets, in which the head is the ball, continuously in the air, from one side of the table to the other.
Lives here are kind of on hold, neither here nor there.
Dear Claudio, reading your notes “Barriers” and “Bouncing” remains me of two old msk7 projects “ping pong N-S-E-W” and “floating ping pong” you may like.
In the year 2006, msk7 went on the road in South Korea with their project “ping pong N-S-E-W” using four trucks and following a route from West to East parallel to the border between North and South Korea. The external surfaces of the trucks, their interiors and the ping-pong tables installed inside formed a platform for a complex interplay of linking and separating zones.
http://msk7.org/pages-e/pingpong.html
Three years later (and twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall) msk7 is with “floating ping pong” again setting out in search of the tracks and traces between East and West, North and South. In the inter-space between the far side and this side of a border the subtle frontiers and limits of communication and of intercultural understanding are blanked out. The project takes place on the River Spree and thus on uncertain ground.
http://msk7.org/pages-e/floatingpp.html
I used ping pong to make contact with people. The table is a few meters away from the housing module, but no one was using it because they didn’t have rackets. So I bought a couple myself and started playing with people (mostly male guys, and some kids).
Of course ping pong is also a metaphor, a metaphor about the guests’ situation. People do not feel completely here, some feel the risk that they may be deported, the ties to the country of origin are still very strong, it’s hard to make these spaces “homes”. Even talking to some social workers, they were telling me how people feel suspended, on hold, here.
That’s why I drew stylized little men/women on the rackets, in which the head is the ball, continuously in the air, from one side of the table to the other.