Postdoctoral Research Scientist; Artist, Documentarist
CurrentThe project “Car/go/graphy” is situated at the interface between arts, cultural science and interdisciplinary research, it engages in an applied way with specific manifestations of current days’ global 2nd hand economy – the so called “Autocards”.These “autocards” – stuck to the windscreens of parked cars, inviting the owners to sell their vehicles – function as the constituting elements of a cultural field. But more than that. They also serve as a point of entrance for deconstructing this field alongside global dimensions of meanings and ideas of everyday cultural practices, the usage of objects and the people involved in this given context.At first sight, “autocards” point to an economic practice of people that is linked to ideas of economic independence, social advancement or a “better life”. Looking more closely, however, they also invite analysis of consumer behavior and waste disposal in a culture of the ephemeral (Appadurai 1996). „Car|go|graphy“ thus means to discover the aesthetic pulchritude of the cards, the genealogy of signs and the visual grammar of the symbols that in turn are only one part of the culture of the transient, the ordinary.The project focuses on the generation of knowledge and on the transfer of that generated knowledge by means of the visualization of hidden factors and actors. Methodologically, the deployment of a combination of different media formats and channels enables interactive knowledge transmission through artistic practice, leaving thereby behind more “classical” modes of knowledge transfer The idea was to dedicate ourselves to the topic of globalization in a special way, namely via things that are consumed (to the end) in the “west” – the so-called postindustrial society – and re-used or recycled in various ways in the “global South”. The goal is to transmit accumulated knowledge by artistic means and to critically examine matters of diverse connections between people, things and ideas/meaning.
