Growing numbers of artists are using the internet as a playing field. In doing so, issues arise that differ little from those involved in documentary photography. Sometimes as an artist, you choose not to inform the portrayed person of your artistic intervention purely for the level of authenticity you want to achieve. On the other hand, you also bear a responsibility to the people you involve in your work. It is a continual weighing up of interests. At the time, I took the interests of that man with the dog too lightly. In contrast to the themes of the sterilised public arena, there was another recurring theme in your work. That was of saying goodbye to the world as we know it in Fare Thee Well!, in The Funeral, but actually also in Homo Desperatus. What do these two thematic lines have to do with each other? Those projects are about the relationship to the delusions presented to us of the apocalypse, of disasters, of the damaged areas of the world. I called Fare Thee Well! a visual requiem for this day and age. People looked at a news ticker through a telescope while listening to an operatic aria by Handel. The ticker displayed an endless series of notions that have dis appeared or could possibly disappear, such as consumer confidence, the welfare state, panda bears etc. Death is the other side of the coin of that sterilised space. Amid that clean comfortable world there is the fear that we are losing things: the peaceful times in which we live, our prosperity and our solidarity. People are afraid of losing their certainties. We design comfortable zones for ourselves based on that social paranoia. We have the tendency to hide what hurts. Therein lays my resistance to the elevator music. I think you are better exorcising your fears by looking them in the eye, not by putting them in the basement. Even if thinking about death makes you uncomfortable, I believe in its cathartic effect. “Show your wound and you will be healed”, said Joseph Beuys.
With a large group of assistants, we made 44 disaster locations; plaster models that we populated with ants. I hoped that the beauty of the scale models would make you look intently at the places you had not viewed with such concentration before. At the same time, there were so many that it became as abstracted as on CNN. People had an almost satanic pleasure watching the ants carrying their conspecifics to the cemetery – comparable with how you view it in a reptile house – while impervious to the fact they were looking at themselves. Moreover, you saw how the ants appropriated the plaster, for example by laying eggs in the nuclear reactor of Fukushima. That was also reassuring, that organisms always seek life despite how hopeless a situation may seem. While you more or less objectively displayed the dark areas of this world in Homo Desperatus, The Funeral was a lot more personal. In that, you literally carried to the grave a number of things that are disappearing from the world as if they were individuals... Yes. I was looking for a way to concretise the doom rhetoric of politicians and cultural pessimists. I thought, when there is talk that society is about to collapse then I should visualize that. To then be able to ask the question: have we really let something go, have those doom prophets opened our eyes, have we for example really lost our privacy, or should we be relativising this doom thinking? I wanted to be impartial, to bury the values without a hidden agenda; therefore burying the post-colonial feelings of guilt as well as the enfant terrible and multi-cultural society. You try to pay your last respects to the deceased as best you can, irrespective of who they were. The church does not differentiate between Betty Crocker and Joe Bloggs.
Which wounds did Homo Desperatus make us face? I wanted to talk about the view of human suffering on the whole, evoke the feeling that you have with CNN on all day long. The diarrhoea of disaster images is also a symptom of our times; it is impossible to comprehend the suffering of all the individuals involved. Through an overdose, that distress is given certain degree of abstraction. To a greater or lesser degree, we all become indifferent.
I used the form of a funeral service as a ‘ready-made’, in a neo-gothic church with an official hearse, members of the deceased’s family and church bells etc. The audience should enter the service devoid of irony, so that they could genuinely ask themselves how tragic that loss actually was. That is why there was also a confession of faith, in which the audience professes their faith together. At the funeral for the