20 | hans overvliet | distant suffering XXE by Hans Overvliet

distant suffering XXE difference and repetition i.d. of shared liquid mobility

www.hansovervliet.com

www.hansovervliet.com curiositas@zeelandnet.nl

We are grasping for who we are, dangling between between the 53 identities Facebook reserved for us in 2019. In the past we were voyagers. We had a purpose and a direction, we knew how far we were from home, who we were and where we belonged. Now we changed into tourists. We settle down for a moment and gain fast experiences, but we aren’t connected to anyone or anything. We lack purpose other than dissolve deep boredom. We interchange totally different countries & cultures almost as easily as we change the coffee brand or anything else we consume. Literally by accident, we occasionally come across our counter tourists when they arrive on a beach that we had just booked. Asylum seekers profiting from the same liquid mobility.

distant suffering XXE difference and repetition i.d. of shared liquid mobility work two Dutch newspapers [ NRC-Handelsblad / de Volkskrant ] wallpaper paste Perfix non-woven paint: Histor black 6372 – matt two Faller rowing boats blue / red Artitec H0 Steel A387.09-BL approximately 50 x 33 cm. four threaded rods | Ø 5 mm

distant suffering XXE

difference and repetition i.d. of shared liquid mobility

published in the Zeeuws Art Magazine decreet also in public space of Middelburg | Canal / municipality

part of ‘Koele Wateren’ / ‘Cool Waters’ | 10/11/’20 – 07/03/’21 het Markiezenhof | Steenbergsestraat 8 | Bergen op Zoom

distant suffering XXE

difference and repetition i.d. of shared liquid mobility

personal context | content

Welcome to liquid mobility Every day updating the necessary elements for building your identity is central in what is your design of your life. So you find yourself in the midst of the pushing aspect of liquid modernity1 as described by Zygmunt Bauman. A liquidity that can be described as infinitely mobile in which everyone and everything has become a 'product' and everything and everyone competes with each other for the right to exist. Add to this the steady breakdown of state-fueled social security in many countries and the shifting of responsabilities from global problems onto the shoulders of local, free, rational individuals and we complete the picture of liquid modernity. This might be the source of our fundamental uncertainty and fear: major problems such as climate, economic inequality and differences in mobility are global problems for which local solutions cannot be solved due to the nature of these problems. Waste production in the broad sense of the word is at the heart of modernity, according to Bauman in Wasted Lives2. Characteristic for that waste production is

Lives2. Characteristic for that waste production is the remorseless speed with which also human waste is produced, whereby all the redundancies are mercilessly cut away. S0 we update our programs, our profiles, our identities, we update just about everything on every moment of the day and night. Apparently we all have a deep desire to be seen. We are all afraid of being left out, not being noticed. Those who are not present sidetrack themselves and become invisible. With the ultimate consequence to become an unsaleable product. Comply or become obsolete. On top of the pushing, there are the pulling aspects: fugitives are held back at E, firestorms in F, bus accident in G, populist H accuses I from doing J, floads in K causes L damage, mass-shooting in M, banking crisis in N., etc., etc., etc. You recognize the infinitive repeating news waves. What ever we do - we can't get a break from the ever lasting pushing & pullng updates. Returning to Bauman, together with Verilio3, he emphasises that this daily updates result in institutionalization of fear. As an example: the most obvious result

updates result in institutionalization of fear. As an example: the most obvious result of the anti-terrorism policy was the rapid increase in the magnitude of the fear that saturated society.4 Bauman wrote. Perhaps that policy of fear becomes even more visible when we look at the category mobility. Because here the two sides of the same coin are most clearly visible. The current tourist flows mainly consist of huge numbers of northerners, Chinese and Japanese who can freely move around the globe. Nobody notices that this is an incredible privilege; forgetting is the by product of the obvious. Asylum seekers and economic migrants are, in old-fashioned photographic terms, the negative of the tourist flows - they are the flip side of that fluid mobility - in the globalized world. Both groups - asylum seekers and the tourist elite alike - are using, or - in the case of asylum seekers, trying to make use of global mobility. As for the tourist flows: Baudrillard5 taught me in his The Fatal Strategies:

taught me in his The Fatal Strategies: “We live in the age of hyperreality, in a multimedia consumer society in which images and objects lead a life of their own. Thát reality has nothing to do with reality, it is a collage-like video clip; we live in a spectacle society.” We don't buy things because we need them, but because of the make-believe world they evoke in us. The result: “I am because I am talking and what I am talking does not matter much.” In this context the tourist in addition to environmental and cultural damage, yields only an empty nullité ( zeroness ).

1. Zygmunt Bauman o.a. Liquid Times, 2007 2. Zygmunt Bauman in Wasted Lives, 2003 3. Paul Virilio & Bertrand Richard, in The administration of fear, 2012 4. Zygmunt Bauman in: Liquid Fear, 2006 5. J. Baudrillard & M. Nio in De fatale strategieën, 2002

distant suffering XXE | i.d. of shared liquid mobility This work is developed for the exhibition COOL WATERS by the M5 project, a partnership of five Dutch city museums: Museum Gouda, the Markiezenhof in Bergen op Zoom, Gemeentemuseum Het Hannemahuis in Harlingen, the Westfries Museum in Hoorn and the Stedelijk Museum Zutphen. This exhibition takes place in the Markiezenhof in Bergen op Zoom from November 10, 2020 till March 7, 2012. Organised by the Arsis Art and Society Foundation West Brabant.

distant suffering XXE/2 | i.d. of shared liquid mobility A second version – with red boats – was developed for the exhibition in Luxfer Open Space in Česká Skalice in the Czech Republic which ran from June – September 2021.

Since 2013, Hans Overvlie investigates the role of the mass media with regard to reporting on (military) violence and the fading me-mories of violence by means of an ongoing art series: distant suffering. As a reporter, Overvliet was an eyewitness of the events in the Middle East during the 1980s. These experiences resonate in distant suffering. The title of the project is taken from Luc Boltanski’s book Distant Suffering, Morality, Media and Politics. Overvliet employs an apparently controversial strategy: that of poetic images, inspired by the words of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 – 1822): Poets are the unacknowledged legisla-tors of the world. Overvliet uses a various range of media, symbols and codes, bringing together seemingly dichotomies like beauty and violence, refinement and brutality, the sublime and the vulgar. Aspects of power, politics, exclusion, censorship and the connection between artist, artwork and viewer seemingly effortlessly infiltrate his multifaceted conceptual oeuvre. The language-image relationship and references to (art) history are always present.

distant suffering XXE difference and repetition i.d. of shared liquid mobility