What you see here are pictures made based on travels to India, Argentina and Bolivia. These countries are so deeply connected with the history of European projections that, when one is there, these projections are projected back. The projections also provide arguments to accept the discrepancy between wealth and poverty as that which is the case. At the same time, this discrepancy is used to legitimate measures to eliminate it. These measures are an exercise of power, as is the omission of these measures. It is not the case that one could weigh or narrate in an uninvolved way these measures, their history, their welfare, and their gruesomeness. For, as an observer, one is part of what one looks at.
The “experimental set-up” of the pictures you see here repeats and repeats a situation that cannot be resolved. It acts as if it served to construct an apparatus: an apparatus serving to osmotically balance the pressure of wealth in the face poverty. One cannot equate poverty with the countries visited here, and wealth cannot be equated with Europe – as if there were no poverty here and no wealth there. Yet on the other hand, a history of exploitation indeed exists between these countries, which clearly goes in one direction, and a history of exotic longings and projections going in the other. This history belongs to the essence of the viewer; but it is also shared by the one returning the gaze.
The pictures on the wall are part of a legend. They serve to reveal to you the sources and materials of this apparatus – like a guided tour of a workshop and its instruments.
