EVERYBODY IS AN ILLITERATE – THE ART OF LIFELONG LEARNING

To enhance proper thinking via reflecting

• I say Thank YOU to Pitch it! For inviting me coming here today and sharing this previwed performance and the following lecture with you.

– „Everybody is an illiterate – The art of lifelong learning“ is the topic of today and tomorrow conferences days. To understand „Everybody is an illiterate“ starts with the acceptance and understanding of myself being an illiterate as well as you being an illiterate as well as everybody here in this room, city, country, europe, finally all over the world being an illiterate.

– To reflect this ‘being an illiterate’ and what impact this has on me, my surrounding, our relationships, decission making and acting seems impossible to me without referring to the french structuralists such as Jacques Lacan, Foucault and Derrida. „Everybody is an illiterate!“ could be their words. Being an illiterate means not to be outside the structure. to citate JLacan: It means, dealing with a structure not being sovereign, not being the master of. In a way: Being a stranger at home. All the structuralists talking and writing started from this knowledge about Me being organized and influenced by a structure I, you, we do not overview, do not know. On the one hand this not knowing implicates the imagination of the others within the structure being overdimensional significant and wise, and the meeting point with my, your, our own insignificance, unconcsouiss, failure, up to social death. On the other hand the structuralists talking and writing gave example for: This Not knowing also contains the very wish and will to know, to understand! And within their rich number of philosohpical to psychoanalytic theories we can learn: To be able to understand – requires pure curiosity, curiosity and observation without predictions and immediate evaluation.

– This very wish and will to know, to become the sovereign, the master, the one who just knows is like petrol for a motor. But what is the direction the car should go to approach its goal?

– To reach out for and meet the unknown, the strange within my own structure as well as to follow my personal wish to get a deeper understanding as well as giving the chance to others to follow me, to comunicate with the strange, the abnorm, the uncool, the monstrious, the failure, the bad, the strong, powerfull aspects of a structure I will always be an illiterate of, cause our society is too big, our humans live to short, our brains too samll that any human being could understand and overview all interactions, developments, ‘dangers’ and everything. So, there is a need for strategies.

The performances, I just shared with you shall give you examples of one strategy I use doing art:

To enhance proper thinking reflecting contemporary trends

– THIS IS NOT A BURKA! Just clothes. , I read in the newspaper about the discussion if wearing ‘Burka’ should be forbidden in Austria started by the ministry for woman and family in Austria. I was really suprised by this idea of protecting female rights by making a law which forbids them to wear a certain cloth. So I searched for the development of this idea, arguments and political social positions the different parties engaged in this debate were dealing with. Having the feeling that nobody of these parties had any kind of overview, they seemed to be stucked in their predictions and their own perspectives angles as if they knew exactly what was the best for the strangers, the ones who had worn or who wanted to wear this cloth, they even called Burka even if the pictured ‘Burkas’ beside newspaper texts and television images were none. So I did an experiment to myself, to get a deeper understanding trying not to stay in my cultures and education predicitions but to really try it out. What happens then? How does it really feel? → 3 month a Burka in

public space.

– Stimmkörper I – The whistleblower

– Discussion

– the american whistleblower…

– Thinking about voice and body; being upset about the fact we as part of the ‘democratic’ european union face the probable transparency of politics just in form of the political buidlings glass fassades which stay in contrast to a secret negotiation the public is completely excluded from. And just gets informed via self determined official and so well designed press releases. So what does that mean for ‘The voices’ bodies’? What kind of voicebodies do interact, how is the voice separated from the body via the closed building, how does this separation permit what kind of relation to the outer world, the public, a public voicebody and how does the messages design influence and direct this relations?

– On the other hand did we learn about this new phenomen, another voices’ body, the revolutionary one → the traitor of a democratic structor should be the enemy of this same structure. But, he seems more like the phallus in Lacans chain of significants. The one everybody thinks he knows!!! And this one now is breaking through and just because everybody believes in his significancy, he actually CAN break through. But afterwards he will hide again but different from before.

– So I myself tried to analyze what s going on, to put myself again in the situation and to experience here and now what kind of voices’ body there exist, how they act and interact… to put all of us in the same situation but in one space, in an art space to be able to reflect it in a direct way.