TOWARDS & AWAY
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There is a painting by Paul Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched.
The Angel of History must look like this.
His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has got caught in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the heap of wreckage before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.
Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History
Directions
Starting on 20/02/2020 Carina Riedl and Dieter Kovačič will walk 2200km from Vienna to Istanbul, i.e. the Eastern Balkan route into the opposite direction. Others, crossing their way on their journey to the North, are not allowed to do so.
When both of them talked about a possible project for the first time, they realized that for her the motivation is a situation of break-up and departure, a movement AWAY, while he is interested in the TOWARDS, the targeted, uninterrupted approach.
Those two movements will thus be fundamental driver and key-motive of the whole project: the “towards” and the “away”, the growing distance and the approach, the looking back and the looking ahead, the escape (AWAY) and the pilgrimage (TOWARDS), the personal and the political dimension, one direction and its opposite.
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One GoPro camera will be facing backwards, taking a perspective that, based on Walter Benjamin’s Angelus Novus description, could be called “looking back”. It's a perspective that one never has during walking. It creates a second, entirely new journey, which remains concealed during the trip itself.
The second goPro camera, however, is directed forward, to the direction of Istanbul, i.e. TOWARDS. This allows to open up a field of tension between the past and the future and to put the question how our past can be integrated: included into the present, without staring at it, without being tied up in it, but constatly moving.