This week :::Terminal Beach::: will be at La Guillotine, Montreuil (Paris) presenting a sound/video installation inspired by Kafka's short story EIN HUNGERKUNSTLER as part of "Le banquet des politiques exquises"












A Fasting-Artist Eats His Words
UN ARTISTA DELLA FAME SI MANGIA LE PAROLE
UN ARTIST DE LA FAIM MANGE SES MOTS

Conceived and performed in the runup to the 2007 French presidential elections, Un artist de la faim mange ses mots aims to open up a space of reflection concerning the modern subject’s situation of having to select from, consume and digest a political menu (the menu of representative democracy) whose most obvious characteristic is the lack of real substance and choice it offers. When asked why he chose to express himself through ‘fasting’, the artist of Kafka’s story explains that it was simply because he had never found any food he liked.

While acoustically anticipating and mirroring the overhasty consumption and digestion of itself as an artwork, the installation nonetheless resists this process both by rendering its founding text only partly comprehensible and by the mechanical nature of its own eating, a withdrawal of subjective investment that lays bare the emptiness of participation in the forced choice of the election ritual.


(8 March/marzo 2007)