24 Hrs

'The ongoing project of texts and audible writings of the ‘24hrs’ series are a point of departure for everything I have done more recently. Handwritten footage of street observations translate into texts, audio and radio work. Translation processes continue between the ears of a listener: acoustic movies, moving images on inner (acoustically projected) screens. The work took place in cities such as Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo (2001/02), London (since 2002), Istanbul, Athens, Nicosia (2004) and Johannesburg (2006); it has been published in books, on film, as installation and on the radio. In recent articulation of the project, urban observation extended into, and was complemented by conversations, interviews and workshops (e.g. no-go-zones project 2007). The writings collect evidences of an obsessive relationship. It is a known obsession shared by many, walking in the city, drifting. The writings are dedicated to the obsession, the streets, the people of the city, and the drifters. Obsessive observation surrenders to a choreography of the street and copywrites it. The drifter becomes a dicta-phone, a seismograph. The machine of writing registers what escapes statistics, photography or film-making. It writes what is neither simply pictorial nor scenic nor accountable in numerical relations.

A forthcoming (2008) collaborative project with artist Nicolas Robbio will include a joint exhibition and a further exploration of a ’24 hrs’ text in an artists book .