Fortuna Brevis
3 hours per day
05 to 10-02-2019
Kunstakademie Rundgang 2019
First floor, opposite to room 122
Düsseldorf, Germany
Fortuna Brevis is a durative, performative installation that portrays two bad scenarios that are given to a person by chance. The struggle of facing the bad and worse is represented and it remains a matter of interpretation which of the options is better and why in this performance.
Description:
The performer sits on a chair in a small room. Her hair is tied with a rope to the wall. In front of her is an iron with the hot part facing up. Outside of the room, above the room’s glass door facing the audience is a wheel of fortune with two options drawn on it: the rope and the iron. The wheel spins continuously and stops at random on a symbol. If the wheel points selects the rope, the performer’s hair is pulled back while she tries to reach the hot iron. When the wheel points at the iron, the performer touches the it until she cannot bare it anymore. The audience watches from the outside through the glass door.
Idea:
Is it goddess Fortuna that makes us kings and queens and at the same time is crushing us under her power? Or is there is an algorithm that determines us, a force that makes us take decisions and play our role, yet it could be complete randomness?
How is it that the same things that appear bad, can be good, and the ones intended for good can actually be horrible if not used in helpful way? In many situations we have to decide between two hardships. We expose ourselves to the indirect pain of having to decide our point of view.
If we are in the middle of a mechanism, it is very difficult to see how it works with us, how it uses us. Somehow we do not see its recurrent situations that will appear until we learned how to get out of the system.
Either the burn gets greater if it burns multiple times, or the repetition is just helping creating a bigger level of ignorance. In both cases the burn might hurt just as bad without resolving the situation.
Can we really understand what is good for us and is there any general good which we can grasp?
It is bad with the bad, but it’s worse without it.
Links: