Souvenir

Iva Kirova, Andres Londoño,

Angela Parslow, Yomayra Puentes-Rivera,

Luisa Roa & Haiyue Tao

This small intervention, based in the city of Leipzig, was a collaboration between six artists from diverse cultural backgrounds. Being new to Germany (in particular eastern Germany) we used it as an opportunity to demonstrate the collision of own cultural identities with the city of Leipzig.

The piece was comprised of six individually A6 postcards that functioned like a souvenir. These self-made cards featured political quotes from our home countries (Bulgaria, Colombia, China and UK) that were then roughly translated with Google Translate into German and displayed on a typical retailer’s postcard stand on Augustusplatz (located at the east end of the city centre).

Dealing with the ephemerality of meaning we question how does the passing of time affects reception and interpretation. The result was an almost incomprehensible display of political and contextual absurdity that emulated our own sense of cultural displacement.

The A6 postcards.

° Andrés Londoño (Colombia) designed his postcard based on the words pronounced by the Colonel Alfonso Plazas Vega in an interview, after coordinated a military action between 6 and 7 November 1985, when the M-19 guerilla made an armed assault on the Palace of Justice of Colombia.
His words were: "Maintaining the master democracy, here they are not going to frighten us or to attack any of the powers or against any of the branches of the public power, at this moment this is an attack on the jurisdictional branch and that must be made very clear;" "That the army is in a position to keep all branches of public power functioning because this is a democracy and for that we are, to make it respected."

° Between 1990 and 1994 Jaime Garzón (a Journalist, lawyer, peace activist and political satirist) worked at the Casa de Nariño, the Presidential House of Colombia, he helped in the translations of the new Colombian Constitution of 1991 into the indigenous languages and as a presidential adviser in communications.
Yomayra Puentes-Rivera (Colombia) designed her postcard based on the translation of the indigenous Wayúu del Article 12 of the Colombian Constitution compiled by Jaime Garzón, which reads: Articulo 12: “Nadie podrá ser sometido a pena cruel, trato inhumano o desaparición forzada.”

Translation of the indigenous:

Piece ten Two: "No one will be able to carry above his heart to anyone, or make him ill in his person even though he thinks and says differently."

° Luisa Roa (Colombia) designed her postcard based on the translation of one sentence in the speech of Jorge Eliecer Gaitán a candidate in 1946 for the presidential elections in Colombia.

"Ellos quieren tener un país paria e imbécil, que trabaje para sus intereses…"