About projects

 

The Survival Identity Project

 

 

In the Survival Identity Project I question various aspects of survival and its relations with identity.

Man as an individual is faced by inner conflicts, fears, doubts and desires, as well as challenges of consistency and existence, as well as physical and (more importantly) intellectual survival, presented by the outside world. Research and presentation of these inner conflicts and external challenges are the main focus of this project. Burdened in a Sartrean manner with existentialist questions about the feeling of freedom itself and the freedom to choose, an individual is always trying to find new ways to preserve himself through change. Some of the basic questions presenting themselves are: whether and to what extent survival is dependent on preservation of one’s identity; to what extent may identity be changed, whether identity criteria are related to physical objects, and finally, if there are individual essences or if the qualitative indistinguishableness suffices for an identity. In relation to the above, there are two aspects of the project: identity and survival of a person and survival of physical objects. As a result, a series of interventions with the concept of symbolic or allegorical recreation emerge. The basic material I use is the “survival foil”, designed for saving accident victims. I myself have used it several times in extreme situations in the mountains, wherefore, in a way, it has become a sort of my personal survival symbol, expressing the essential need for “hibernation” and “preserving the heat” until the external unfavourable conditions have passed. As a painter, I “re-create” my works as a physical evidence of the artist’s presence in this world by wrapping them in the foil in various forms, temporarily changing their visual identity. I also apply this intervention principle to the objects with which I had no personal relation before, but in which I see a materialisation of social identity structures as well as social, urban, emotional, intellectual, cultural or religious transformations and evolution of the very survival in various time-space contexts. In this process questions of degradation and sinking into oblivion inevitably arise, but so do those of creating new forms of identity, structure and hope. Locations chosen are often abandoned and devastated spaces that have lost their former symbolism, function or power, unlimited mountain spaces, the perfect stage settings that I use as metonymy of an individual’s inner world in the material one. The focus, however, is still upon the Man, often puzzled, lost and anxious, still aiming to survive and constantly urging for a better world. For the major part of my installations and interventions, I take my travels as the starting point. Installations created at various locations (mountains, quarries, forts, botanical gardens, public monuments, industrial facilities, cemeteries, marine landscapes, etc.) have been recorded in the photographic form. Questions arise whether these, once important, places or forms, can continue their existence and survive the time continuum break.
These interventions affect various aspects of individuals and physical objects’ (objective reality), posing, thus, the questions of cultural, sociological, intellectual, emotional, visual, material, religious and other sorts of survivals.

Andrea Musa

 

 

Without a Point “B”

 

 

In my recent works, “Without a Point B”, I deal with the idea of movement as a constant and with constituting of landscape through the process of motion, as well as with the experience of space and the state of mind inevitably resulting from that and always subjected to change as the fundamental way of the essence of the nature. Travels create various links between the man and the space, but also a process of identification with the self. Constant changing of position always results in new perspectives. I understand travel as a synonym for freedom and the permanent quest of an individual to answer some of the eternal questions, even not expecting them to be answered, thus making travel both absurd and meaningful. The lack of the real target, that is, the “point B”, often makes these travels an end in themselves and focused to the idea that the aim is the travel itself. In order to show the complex mechanism of the human soul and intellect, the incomprehensible need of nomadism, I often use large spaces, such as mountain, wild, lonely areas, where the relation between the intellectual and the movement is clearer.

Andrea Musa