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American Embassies
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The American Embassy Project consists of a collection of photographs of United States embassies from around the world. The colors of the photographs have been inverted. | |
2 grids (2 x 42 mounted single photographies 9 x 13 cm) each 70 x 100 cm |
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The American Embassy Project (American Embassies 1+2, 2007) consists of a collection of photographs of United States embassies from around the world. The colors of the photographs have been inverted, i. . turned into negatives. The heavily protected building complexes attest to the need for the maximum protection possible against a nameless threat. In 2007 Christoph Keller collected observations on a paranoid undercurrent and its expressions in a series of works about threats, Internet grassroots movements, and about conspiracy theories in general. The breakup of stabilizing factors that provide meaning such as religion or even science since the late 20th century has resulted in the fact that every deviation from the norm has been seen as a threat. The associations of "good" and "evil" appear blatantly obvious, whereby "the evil," the threat often seems universal and the perpetrators remain faceless. Certain specific recurring interpretative patterns of a massive threat through terrorism or alternatively the conspiracy of a few powerful people "pulling the strings" behind the scenes are applied like a template to interpret things and make them understandable. Keller does not take a position regarding the substance of these theories, rather he comprehends them as illustrations of current societal states of affairs and balances of power – and presents them as such. "This disposition, which I call the "paranoid condition," led me to occupy myself with contemporary conspiracy theories. It seems to me that in a situation in which independent science has broken away as the authority deciding about true or false and which provides society an access to reliable information, every deviating narration can assume the traits of a conspiracy theory. I therefore also do not attempt to tackle them with the categories of true of false, but rather to see them as reflections of a specific societal situation. This is also interesting for art because it, too, is closely linked to the development of independent science due to its evolution in bourgeois society." |
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