BlackDays and WhiteNights

BLACK DAYS AND WHITE NIGHTS	FA 59 by FA+ - Ingrid Falk & Gustavo Aguerre -
+ The Art of Survival	For SAFE
at Blekinge Art Museum and Karlskrona Art Hall	Curated by Torun Ekstrand
June - August 2005	Karlskrona, Sweden

CHESS

Tenuous king, slant bishop, furious
queen, direct tower and shrewd pawn
over the black & white path
seek and engage their armed campaign.

They do not realize the determined hand
of the player governs their destiny.
they do not know that an adamantine rigor
governs their will and their journey.

The player, too is a captive
(the sentence is Omar's) on another board
of black nights and white days.

God moves the player, the player, in turn, the piece.
Which God beyond God begins the plot
made of dust and time and dream and agony?

Borges

AJEDREZ

Tenue rey, sesgo alfil, encarnizada
reina, torre directa y peón ladino
sobre lo negro y blanco del camino
buscan y libran su batalla armada.

No saben que la mano señalada
del jugador gobierna su destino,
no saben que un rigor adamantino
sujeta su albedrío y su jornada.

También el jugador es prisionero
(la sentencia es de Omar) de otro tablero
de negras noches y blancos días.

Dios mueve al jugador, y éste, la pieza.
¿Qué Dios detrás de Dios la trama empieza
de polvo y tiempo y sueño y agonías?

Borges


	SAFE
	> An exhibition about safety <
	The idea of safety includes, at least, two contenders, a possible attacker and a cautious defender. A balance of power. A constant confrontation. A never ending observation of the other. The use of a tactic, from brutal force to intelligence. The attacker and the defender need each other to keep their existence as such. They live in symbiosis. Who, what’s the enemy? How, when it will assault? Should we attack first to defend us? Should we build walls? Should we use barbed wire, surveillance cameras, sit-bells, helmet, gas masks, condoms? But how we protect us from the unexpected, the unknown, the unpredictable, the stuff that the dynamic of life is made of?
	The idea of safe it’s an illusion, a deception of the instinct of self-preservation, a self-fraud that we construct to be able to go out to the street without fear, to send the children to school without anxiety. We like to think that we are on control of our movements but there is a higher player controlling us who in turn have a higher player above…
	All the elements of this dilemma can be found in a very well known squared little room: The game of chess. Chess, the endless war that begun in the Orient long time ago. A battle among two kingdoms, two colors hating each other. A fight that, as a virus, has infected all the planet and which will continue even after the temporary winner or looser leaves the room and life. A game that mirrors another game that mirrors…


BLACK DAYS AND WHITE NIGHTS
- About the illusion of safety -
Into the Blekinge Art Museum’s room there is another room. A square room made of silk paper attached to the ceiling. The walls of the room are made with square paper sheets. The walls have no contact with each other or the floor. Each wall hangs free. The lightness of the paper make’s that the walls move as soon as somebody enters the room or goes close to it. The room changes shape and dimension all the time, You can’t enter the same room twice - As in Heraclitus river - You leave a different room then the one you enter. But apparently and un-reflected it’s the same room all the time, for everybody.

Into the paper room it’s another square room with clear glass walls. The floor of this room it’s divided in 64 square rooms: A chess board.
The glass walls mirror the chess board and the reflection of the chess board in the other glasses ad infinitum, creating more rooms made of light and air which shows up or disappears depending of your position in the paper room.

On the chess board the endless battle continues. In this case is the last game of Spassky vs. Fisher - East meets West - for 5 million dollar. The match it’s frozen in Fisher’s 5th move to defend himself against Spassky’s unusual attack with three pawns ahead in the same line.

	The battlefield (the board) has been updated. War may still be square but not only black and white as we are wanted to believe, but a complexity of gray nuances; some square are black and white at the same time, contradictions in these situations are common. The board it’s done whit the picture (which also it is their flag, coat of arms or emblem) of both challenger. The images are woven together as in a tapestry - they live in symbiosis - Standing in one or the other player position you can see printed on the opposite paper wall the icon of the competitor and identify it in the board. Both pictures are taken from Blekinge museum’s historical collection and belong to the 60’s Health Department’s pedagogic campaign on health and hygiene. These pictures were used to learn how to prevent the spread of virus/bacteria and contagious diseases. They are called: The self-exploding and The meat-choppers. Two different strategies.
	The meat-choppers	The self-exploding

		The meat-choppers

There are no more kings, queens or bishops in the battlefield anymore.
In today’s war 99% of the casualties are civilians. Genocide, massive rape of woman and children and mass arrest, torture and execution without trials are common weapons in ALL army’s tactics. The civilian population it’s the real target.
The figures in this board, instead of following the no more existent pattern of pawns, towers, horses and kings, are normal people and all in the same color. They get their place in the hierarchy depending on in which field they are when the game beguines, some have to be canon food to reach a higher goal. There is a “We” and there is a “Them”.

The small plaster figures are also objects from the collection of the museum. They come from the science of Phrenology, the study of the skull formation (or miss-formation) that tells the personality of the individual into that skull: criminal, jude, gipsy, all-around stupid and so on. You are there too. This “scientific theories” gave in turn a “scientific” base to the Nazi ideology to demonstrate the Arian superiority and to apply the “Race Hygiene” laws that in practice in Sweden had the consequence of the sterilization of women with the “wrong” skull, apply as late as into the 60’s.
This little figures were used to study and learn to recognize nature’s mistakes and lower races skulls conformations.

Click on the pictures to enlarge them

	And there they are, fighting against each other - dog eat dog - convinced that they are in the right side of the board and the safety of their living standards and ideals are depending of their movements through the board. They do not know that the hand of another player is designing their destiny. The players didn’t new either that another hand was deciding their fate.

	Spassky got the 5 million dollar. Both Spassky and Fisher lived in exile.

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