Gallery wanted for a longform organic piece. Deeply personal.
Space: One large wall diagonally standing in the center of a main exhibition hall, minimum height of wall 2 meters. Connected screens work fine.
Both sides of the center wall exhibit different temes of loneliness and deeply personal pain.
The surounding three walls are framed with letters, same as the center divide. The surounding wall is seperated in lower hanging letters that are suitable for minors and children to read as well as encourage and invite their participation and higher hanging letters aimed at grown-ups. The audience is asked to contribite according to their own desire and ability and lust.
Three sided, two-themed.. The center wall an exhibition and commentary on loneliness and pain and social silence.
1: Wall one: Remember me?
Letters from victims of sexual or emotional abuse to their childhood or teenage abusers.
Letters from now middle aged people. As much time between trauma and present as possible. ‘Them’ now having families and maybe never even remembered you, or maybe they did. Probably mostly women but men and HBTQI folk as much invited to participate as anyone else. Those that were hurt and felt stupid or wrong or filthy or could not trust or love for years after. Angry or forgiving or questioning. Anonymized but encouraged to be hand- or machine written.
Every reply will be added anonymized.
If they deny. Forgot, accuse or justify. If they do not reply or if they ask for forgiveness.
A wall that grows and is an organic performance in itself.
2: Wall 2: Pissbottle bottom.
Pictures from chronically depressed and or suicidal isolated ones. Together with a letter describing breifly who they are, how they got to where they are now, what they hope for. Every participant commiting to 3 updates over a one year period. Every participant also required to leave a second contact person, in case of suicide, hospital or rehab commitment.
Some will be marked as dead, some will still be in hell after a year, but some will have gotten through, out or over whatever their loneliness and grief held them down. Via love or a new jobb, luck or faith.
A wall that grows and is a longterm organically growing performance in itself.
Wall 3: On hope
The surrounding wall will be a presentation of proposed solutions and actual attempts at affecting social change by means of the pen rather than the sword; from small and silly to everything from academic footnote systems, solving the middle east to learning how to take the best shit you have ever taken. The more fun and playful ideas and suggestions, on kids height (we’ll figure something out for wheelchair ppl and small folk) are also open for kids participation.
OBS:
These proposed solutions are NOT ARGUMENTS. They are a beginning and an invitation as well as a request to be either used or improved. From small to large, funny to deeply sensetive.
Audience participation is based on the criteria that any addition, contribution or response, WILL aim to ADD or IMPROVE or replace the often simplistic solutions with better ones. Arguing by improving, and so, each step towards any goal, being both shared as well as educational AND constructive!
Also:
There will be three small desks with two chairs facing each other. Visitors encouraged to sit down and tell each other about their own loneliness.
The button will be pressed three times.
1: At the first start of the clock, both strangers will be instructed to do nothing but look each other in the eye in silence. For two minutes.
2: The next press is done by the listener. Absolute secrecy guaranteed. No commentaries or interruptions.
3: The next press is done by the previous talker. Now taking their own 3 minutes as listener.
PArticipants are encouraged to not continue their conversations but take these home and keep them for themselves.
Also:
There will be other framed pieces with more information and aspects around each individual theme. Trigger themes, more information, suicide hotlines, information from and about organisations that work with depression and loneliness. etc, etc.
The center wall is open to grown ups only.
Based on a strong friend who felt wrong and stupid and was deeply set of course in her own selfconfidence and dozens of friends that have secret memories of such loneliness. Not her fault. decades of thinking herself ugly in the mirror.
A lovesong to those that have grown up deeply alone, guilty, self-hating and blaming and hindered in liking sex or herself. And yes, Kerens, of course any gender or human is welcome to participate. Plenty of sexually frustrated priests and mean boys, plenty of others that were used and abused by parents, sexually or psychologically.
A woman from former Yugoslavia told me of a spider after I’d stepped up to her to take the spider about to drop from her arty Hogwards colourful hat into her neck. She responded with such intensity and did me the deep honour of explaining herself over coffee. A seventy plus lady artist activist herb lover. That little hippie but charismatic and so genuine you don’t know in the beginning if it is naivety or strength. She told me that her mother, who simply was one of those high functioning autistic or deeply logical creatures with no mothers instinct in her. I sat outside a little cafe as this kinda enchanting older lady, who had told me that I had addressed her like a on old school True Belgrad gentleman after we shared a bussride into own, was now crying her eyes out at a summers day in a home when she was maybe four years old, maybe seven. A garden in the hot yugoslavia summer, a house that evoked roman villa beauty and size but mediterranean chaos and openness and life. Books and chores and playing in the garden
But she was terrified of the big spider down the end of that big beautiful garden.
Yeah..
So, one day when she had opened a kitchendoor she wasn’t allowed to open or something and her mother found out. Her mum grabbed her arm, dragged her down to the end of that garden, her tiny helpless terror too much and too much and too much, and put my new friends arm amongst the terribly big spiders that also bit and hurt her.
The mother simply and drily and calmly told her to not break the rules again. No need for any warnings.
Seventy years later, she still fell apart. That one move by a mother with her own issues STILL made astrong women break down in 2023 Sweden. A lifetime later.
THE WALL IS THE PERFORMER!
The letters themselves, based on the one my friend wrote to a man who was so much older when she was just a child, had drank some alcohol, felt herself be carried of, froze.
He maybe neither realized or thought she has enjoyed it. He maybe never thought about her. Or maybe he did. He has a wife and kids and I wonder if and what he replied. If he did.
Walls meant to encourage the audience to add their own letters, but also encourage shared conversation about loneliness and blame.
The idea is that some will commit suicide, many will stay depressed and some will find their way out.
Both the deeply personal windows into that other form of modern loneliness, as well as any suicides as well as ANY story of betterment or joy, falling in love, finding faith, by AA or new studies or new friends.
It would be a strong wall.
XX
Contact Alexander Buhnevici under Tungotal@gmail.com for more information, offers or collaboration.
Or sms me before calling on +46 0790558544