Evasion Machine/ Apparat der Ausflucht

An installation by Christian de Lutz, 2008

at space untitled and Atelier Sambo-Richter, Berlin 28 November - 7 December 2008

wall text (part of the installation):

Evasion Machine (an Installation in Fragments)

Two works on video, several prints, an installation made up of broken wood, wire, detritus and text: algorithms regarding population, movement, migration. The installation itself takes place in two locations, and involves a journey. Migration is pure movement, geographical locations present a point of stoppage (almost always temporary). Video, looped, is movement, implying a form of eternal return. The print petroleum lines is made up of satellite images, static records of moments and locations, stolen from their original location, remade within a new visual system.

* * *

The Mediterranean presents a permeable barrier. Those who reside to its north cross southward with few, if any, problems. Travel in the opposite direction is another case entirely. Boats brimming over with migrants from the African continent falter in storms. The unlucky wash up dead on Southern European shores.

* * *

The 'apparatus of capture' is a term suggested by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to describe a situation on which a conquering imperium takes possession of a new land, overcoding existing systems and structures. The remnants of this can be seen in Andalusia, the once vital border region of a culture that spread from the Pamirs to the Pyrenees. In the twentieth century we have the post-colonial mega city such as Kinshasa or Calcutta…

* * *

In one video a young woman (perhaps aptly named Scheherazade) recites broken words. English, the so-called international language, fails upon her tongue. The words, a collage of virtual utterances appropriated from the internet, suggest a migrant's memories of the Maghreb, spoken before a backdrop, filmed on Spain's southern coast. In the other a single Arabic phrase (Inshallah) is elongated to seven times its length - and accompanies the dawn.

* * *

Yuri Lotman divided his system of linguistic environments (or semiospheres) into centre and periphery. The centre (metalanguage) controls, but is sterile, bereft of innovation. It is the periphery, ripe with outside influences, where creativity bears most fruit. Yet the periphery also seeks to constantly escape the control of the centre.

* * *

The apparatus of capture describes an early stage. But what of the later imperium? What of a globalised era designed, however superficially, in the image of the late modernist west, but replete in multiple forms, codes, languages. Here the vitality is located not in the conservative centre with its laws, power structures, sterile markets, but at the edges where migrants of many sorts meet, exchange, intermingle.

The evasion machine is a means of escaping control (or capture). The act of evasion as a most subtle (and violent) loss of identity, a region of the broken (or manifold) tongue. Evasion becomes a necessity for (temporary) survival, and of avoiding an inevitable tragedy.