African Alltag is the third work out of my take a pic cycle. It´s a video installation with three screens mounted to an old wooden fruit crate. Again, the wooden crate is an hommage to analogue lifestyle I witnessed and came to enjoy upon my visit to Cape Coast.
The screens display three videos of everyday scenes I shot in Cape Coast, a parade to celebrate independence day, three guys working out in an outdoor gym using homemade weights, and a man fixing a tyre using very simple tools and pretty impressive muscular power. I tried to capture the very particular mood that is created by the strong colours typical for Cape Coast: the dusty ground´s intense red and brown wooden structures to complement the vegetation´s dark green and the clear blue sky mixed with the joyful yellow, red and light blue paintworks. But most importantly the videos show the routined sincerety that is typical for everyday actions, regardless of where people go about them.
To underline this theory, I exchanged the original soundtrack for recordings of similar situations in Germany. Namely the Oktoberfest parade, a gym and a tyre shop in Munich. When I showed my installation at the Kunstpavillon in Munich, people took quite a while to notice that the soundtrack was not original. Which made me happy, because it meant that the effect worked and there is some truth to the theory that people are pretty much the same everywhere and that differences are primarily superficial.
Today, I would like to draw your attention to the work of Bettina Blumenberg, who is rather brilliant with words and who was so very kind to write a comment on African Alltag for the exhibition catalogue.
And I would also like you to take note of the work of my co-student at the Munich Academy of fine arts, Fernanda Vilela, whose work was also presented at the Kunstpavillon and with whom I created the installation „me.beast“ at Galerie Stephanie Bender in Munich.