IKSIT 2020 – SYMPOSIUM
basic thoughts to the work
Identification arises through our physicality and everything related to it
stands, so everything that surrounds us, as well as the resulting feelings, also with the authority in us that thinks about it. At the age of 6 to 18 months a self-reference develops, the identification with the being in us that explores and acts from within. Lacan calls this stage of early childhood development the mirror stage. In this there is a distinction, a separation from the mother, from the unity arises a reference, a relationship.
First and foremost it is the family, and beyond that it is experiences in the extended environment, the school, the job, the region in which we grow up, the country, the nation serve to localize this identification.
All states that we experience in this context; all formative feelings, emotions, thinking as a process of information processing,
the intellect as the tool of the ability to differentiate and the development of new contexts of meaning up to the ability to read between the lines are integrated into the identification matrix.
Tradition plays an essential role in this identification matrix by passing on patterns of action, ideas, convictions within a group identification or an identification across generations. The passing on also takes place as a fixed act in itself, in that it comes to the playful performance of customs, practices, manners, etc., or these pass over verbally and in writing.
A few days before the start of the symposium, as I was walking through the streets of Innsbruck, a man turned in in front of me, he was wearing a Tyrolean walkloden jacket with a Tyrolean eagle and the words, honor, pride, strength. “Minded” ideologies distort the image of traditions in their favor and thereby disembodiment, so to speak, the essence of tradition. Because actually, that is my opinion, the essence of tradition serves to pass on cultural knowledge and wisdom in a conscious and unconscious way.
For the “Head Birth – Tradition” object, I chose an Egyptian canopic jar as a model, a vessel for storing offal during mummification. The mask, in Latin “persona”, plays with the identification of a person through their face. A poisoned atmosphere caused by the unreflective adoption of narrated or orally transmitted historical events that mix with traditions let colorful blossoms blossom. The structure at the head of this Tyrolean canopic is designed as a dream, in which figures, legends, landscapes and symbolic representations interact with one another in an archaic, futuristic construction based on the headdress of Tyrolean traditional customs.
