HORANT FASSBINDER – WORLDCIRCLE (2004)
Horant FassbinderWorldcircle (2004)
In the middle of the quire the large baptismal font. Its subtly concave basin, usually dark bronze, today in lucent turquoise. On the floor open parcels, packaging film, streaming like a waterfall from the carton. Empty plastic canisters. A small series of photographs, depicting two of them getting filled with seawater by an older Caucasian and a younger dark-skinned man. Curiously one reads the labels on the parcels. Each of them addressed to Swantje La Moutte, they come from the most diverse regions of the Earth. From Jakarta, from Lima and from Lisbon. Slowly one starts to understand that here, in the baptismal font, the salty water of three seas is united —of the Indian, Pacific and Atlantic Ocean. It is the impact of seasalt which has transformed the baptismal basin's old gold into aqua.
Rapidly our imagination crosses the three seas, encounters the distant coasts which welt them, and seeks to approach those cities whose names we read on the parcel labels. Indistinct and wraithlike remain the places, however we see human beings in front of us who cooperatively have sent the water hither: the artist who motivated others to take part; the ones who scooped the water, those who packed the canisters, disbelieving customs officials, aviators, transport operators, once more customs officials ... indirectly involved also the canisters' manufacturers, maintenance workers of the planes, the constructors and operators of public communication networks ...
The circular turquoise expanse reminds us of the globe, the blue planet, as it is shown to us by satellite imagery. Three quarters of it covered with marine waters, this highly astonishing substance from which all life originates and which can still be as life-threatening as it is simultaneously vital and essential. Even freshwater ultimately nothing but circulating seawater. Here, at the baptismal font, involuntarily we think about the numerous reports of the bible starring water: the annihilating deluge; the water-miracles which god induces time after time for both the salvation of his people and the extinction of his enemies; the manifold cleaning instructions; finally the baptismal water, the cathartic, entirely reviving water. Here as well as in water-epics and -myths from other cultures, in which our collective memory concentrates, water itself —the more so as seawater— is potentially as aggressive and destructive as it is gentle and life-sustaining, equally connecting and sometimes separating people; alway it is an indispensable companion of the human being.
Swantje La Moutte's work „Lebensvorstellung eines Kindes“ (“A child's vision of life”) draws attention to water as elemental condition of our existence. We are reminded of the circumstance that we can preserve it's life-giving, cleansing strength merely together and alleviate it's life-annihilating force but mutually. Across all oceans people join the artist in an, as it were, ritual action. The collective celebration of seawater becomes an allegory of mondial, collaborative activity.