ERAN SCHAERF - MIGRANTS & VARIANTS

Migrants & Variants presents 3 message-production systems in relation to their user: Endless Screen (folded), Scenario Data #14 (Continuous Recording) and Listener’s Voice (knot-less location, card). Endless Screen (folded) stages the question: What would happen if the persons featuring in a magazine would be taken for the speakers of the captions? Re-enacting a fashion-guide to Stockholm designed by ex-tennis professional Björn Borg for the sport-oriented British magazine ’Line’, Schaerf unfolds its pattern of speaker and what is said. Locations as stage sets for fashion shootings and archival images of the same locations were opposed by their captions suggesting a glamorous present as opposed to a boring past.

This supposedly unambiguous reading is now staged for a new reading in a screen-like architecture for combinations of endless space. The mechanical movement of slide projectors on turn-tables determines a choreography which unavoidably includes viewers as silhouettes. The impossible tracing of a responsible person within the message of an editorial teamwork like a magazine’s fashion-guide now takes this message towards a speaker and then away from her/him towards another. The dependency of identity on tense, timing and the location of transmitter and recipient becomes increasingly critical and is taken on in the continuous recording of Scenario Data #14 and in the knot-less location of Listener’s Voice.

A productive recipient is also an issue of Schaerf’s publication Listener’s voice, based on five scripts for radio broadcasts and/or spaces. Schaerf turns his concept of a radio-station, operated by an automatic moderator that is programmed to transmit listener’s calls, into an editorial/design principle. Six frequency-like tracks featuring the different scripts along the publication enable the reader to switch from one narrative to another. While the automatically operated radio-station Listener’s Voice questions the notion of programming and its consequences on the public character of the media, the publication and its undetermined reading direction address the reader as narrator.

The publication includes Scenario Data (Projektraum Kunsthalle Bern, 1999), Listener’s Voice (Bayerischer Rundfunk/Radio Drama and Media Art, 2002), As if Said. A theater or taxi play (a. o. MUHKA/BRTN-Radio3, 1997), War and Peace in the Dictionary (Manifesta 2, Luxembourg), Migrant & Variants (Kunsthalle Baden-Baden/argos Brussels, 2000/1), as well as Out of Place in an architectural Setting by Margrit Brehm and out of sync (few intros and outros) by Raimundas Malasauskas. Design: Claudia De Backer.

Published by argos editions in collaboration with Kunsthalle Baden-Baden.
Versions available: engl./dt., engl./dt./nl., engl./dt./fr. isbn
90-76855-06-4.