[spectre] Search - public art installations by Darko Fritz made of mint at the trijunction of Slovakia, Austria and Hungary

[Darko Fritz]

Search
public art installation made of mint

September 2012
location: Rajka, trijunction of Slovakia, Austria and Hungary
curated by Zuzana Duscho for the Culburb project (Cultural Acupuncture Treatment for Suburb)

http://darkofritz.net/projects/migrant/search.htm

http://www.facebook.com/events/264601843656468/

Installation "Search" is set near Budapest, at the trijunction of Slovakia, Austria and Hungary, at the very national border, next to official sign "Slovensko" (Slovakia) at the highway. Since Slovakia joined EU, there is no border control any more. Artwork is  situated in environment of two road signs "Slovensko" (Slovakia), empty flag poles and absent custom border office in Rajka. 

Project consists of making, planting, maintaing and using the horticulture unit / art installation “Search”. Installation is build in the shape of the typical searching interface of internet browsers and other interactive electronic media. It consist of one 'empty' rectangular field, and another one, letter-designed button that reads “Search”. The installation is made in total size of 2.2 x 20 m, graphically shaped by paving stones and growing mint plants, surrounded by grass field that lay between two roads. Everybody may feel free to pick any of 670 mint plants from installation for personal use. Several kinds of mints are used: Mentha piperita 'Granada', Mentha piperita citrata (Lemon Bergamot  Mint) and Mentha gracilis Ginger. The paving stones will be given free of charge to local population after concluding the horticultural unit / art installation.

This project is part of "Migrant Navigator" project by Darko Fritz, where author question the notions of home and identity. As part of this long-term project (since 2002), he already setup the images of Home internet browser icons at national borders of Croatia, Slovenia, Hungary and Italia.

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Excerpts from the "Not Home" by Eric Kluitenberg:

Darko Fritz Migrant Navigator project series can be seen as an abstract machine - a kind of GPS for an impossible (because inaccessible) space: a space of dislocation. ... Hit the search button! The migrant will find anything and everything, except home. All that is a home, is temporary, provisional, simulacrum (copy without original), irreverent sign in a hyper-space of merely symbolic circulation - no referent adheres. Its noeme, contrary to photography as Barthes identified it, is this-has-not-been. The migrant home is only a negative proof, an inverted sign of absence that attempts to cover up, unsuccessfully, the ever present trauma of the loss of the lost origin.
Ever expanding communication networks produce ever increasing migration, and in this sense also produce a continuing devastation of the notion of home for a growing population in flux. Home becomes a floating signifier. ... The digital networks, of which the internet is now the most comprehensive example, are similarly migratory spaces of dislocation. Information travels in a non-space encoded in a digital code that has no analogy to its origin - it refers back only to itself. All that is visible within this non-space are temporary and fleeting appearances, hyperreal symbols, floating signifiers. Apparently stable appearances are mere simulacra of the purest sort. Meaning is constructed here in action, in dynamic exchange, through short feedback loops. The referent does not adhere as much as that it floats by. Thus, sense and meaning is produced in and through movement. Meaning in that sense is nomadic, it floats with the migrant / user, producing a highly useful space for tactical operation, but a very complicated space for strategic investment, yet also a space of control 'in flight'.
The migrant can float because control can now float with the migrant. The migrant, for the vested system of power interests, is a controlled exteriority, a dislocated, dis-informed and therefore dis-empowered entity. It poses no threat as such. The distributed structure of the migrants' dislocated life invites a new microstructure of contestation and conflict to which the notion of homeland defence just seems a hopelessly antiquated response.
The migrant's Romantic quest, meanwhile, remains an infinite one:
> Search: Home
> Response: 404


"Migrant Navigator" project by Darko Fritz: http://darkofritz.net/projects/migrant/navigator.htm

Eric Kluitenberg: Not Home, written for "Darko Fritz - archives in progress [ projects 1987 - 2007 ]". Published by the Croatian Association of Artists, Zagreb (HDLU) / Museum of Modern and Contemproary Art, Rijeka, 2007, and at Tactival Media Files, Amsterdam, 2011, http://www.tacticalmediafiles.net/article.jsp?objectnumber=54202


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Darko Fritz

http://darkofritz.net

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