Riding the Storm

The title of this project RIDING THE STORM is stolen from the Doors. Riders on the Storm - that was a big success in the 70s and not without reason, because people began to suspect where the general promise of prosperity was leading.
hear the song and come back:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7G2-FPlvY58

The story here is that then nothing further happened.

The threshold of the unknown
Please listen:

The question of resistance is ancient. Dogma, rigidity, coercion, compromise, repression. The narrowness of (one's own) reality, that is, the narrowness of one's own existential circumstances, has always pushed people to make fundamental changes.

Literature is full of them. For example: The German-Swedish writer, painter, graphic artist and experimental filmmaker Peter Weiss (1916-1982) described in his book Abschied von den Eltern / Farewell to parents: "The situation of the citizen who wants to become a revolutionary and who is paralysed by the weights of old norms".

But these paralyses are no longer caused by norms today - we are too free. Or so it seems. And so we are told - we are even capable of deciding our own gender. You can hardly be freer!

But Peter Weiss' works are also about the question of what role art and culture can play as a breeding ground for political resistance.
This question is all well and good - but at the same time one has to ask what role art and culture held in being a breeding ground for strategic steps of colonisation.
And thus helped to install globalisation.

That would make art and culture a translator of ideological opposites.
But resistance is more than a discourse about antagonisms.

https://www.peter-weiss-stiftung.de/de/peter-weiss/

https://www.suhrkamp.de/buch/peter-weiss-die-aesthetik-des-widerstands-t-9783518456880

Lightning and low grey clouds. Brave riders. With courage. What a romantic and hopeful picture in the 70s.
The viewer's view of this apocalyptic scene was a view from the outside, from far away, or at least far enough away. How the view on the future has changed. Today we are no longer watching the storm - we are riding it - we are the storm - we cause the storm.

That is why this scene of apocaplypsis was to be captured with a dashcam today. In the past, yes, the storm was caused by the others. Today, we can no longer deny the connection between crisis and our own behaviour.

Many have recognised this and have already changed their behaviour or attitude. Just as many ignore everything, hope that the cup will pass them by, bury their heads in the sand.

A few turn on full throttle. Extra. Because there is only one life. Theirs. And then there are a few who turn every crisis into a success.
This is post-modernity. It is determined by plurality.

They say, our Western plurality refers to the multiplicity of life realities or better: to the right of different life designs as a basic constitution of society.

Plurality allows for different forms of knowledge and patterns of action. This is quite contrary to the great meta-narratives of modernity, which aimed at a unity of knowledge and a uniform truth. But is that still true today? Can these different life plans be realised at all? Doesn't it just remain a promise?

Is there really diversity of opinion and a culture of debate today?

Riding the Storm means being alert. But it also means necessarily disobedience, breaking the rules, refusal and this means resistance.
So our view of the future has changed - shaped by our concerns about an all in all incomprehensible world. Yet we lack a shared assessment of the situation. For the more unjust and chaotic the world becomes, the clearer it becomes how polarised we are. For the struggle for resources and power is rooted in our own individual greed. A trap we have set for ourselves.

Every current situation triggers new consequences. Unpredictable and uncontrollable. That is the only victory of globalisation.

People still think that they are helpless on their own and therefore without power. And this hiding behind one's own actions is the real tragedy. Because the small, daily, individual decisions and actions are an untapped potential.

Because the struggle for resources and power in the big world has its roots in our own individual greed. The cause of our storm is this unquenchable notion that man, with his intelligence and creativity, can always get a grip on his own discontent.

The storm is thus also a symbol of the question and definition of happiness and contentment. The more unjust and chaotic the world becomes, the clearer it becomes how polarised we are. We lack a common assessment of the situation.

This work, entitled RIDING THE STORM, is presented here as a fictional, fake yet fact-based accumulation of information that moves between the romantic image of the apocalypse from the 1970s and the flood of data on current situations. The following videos and images generated by algorithms illustrate the complex absurdity of our global situation.
This work also describes the small decisions and actions of individuals that feed the storm we are in - but also how it is possible to resist...

See the next pages:

start

The Storm