Memory of the Week - Helsinki, Fujiwara, Identity
Not so long ago, I needed an escape. So I cashed in a mouldering pile of airline miles and flew from my sweltering corner of the desert in the American southwest to Helsinki. I had been to Helsinki once before. That was prior to the start of a global pandemic, which feels like so long ago. Pandemic time warp is real. There was the before time, the during time, and now the now time. Somehow. Not infrequently I look in the mirror and feel like a stranger. I ask myself, “How did you make it?”.
When I travel solo I imagine myself as a kind of apparition, disembodied, floating through a city with complete control of how and when I decide to engage the world. It is an imaginary sense of self, but what is self if not the tension between our imaginations?
On this trip to Helsinki I was able to visit the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Simon Fujiwara exhibition, “It’s a small world”. The exhibition revolved around the question, “What does it mean to be a “self” in the 21st century?”.
Fujiwara’s attempt to answer is both playful and disturbing.
“Who the baer” project was born during the first lockdown and it really came out of a feeling of desperation in that period when everyone was very confined and was experiencing the world through the internet and through television and it was just one horrible story after another. The baer then started to develop because I wanted a body to experience these violent pictures. The idea of starting from zero with a figure, with a self, was very appealing because I could then imagine the design of this character from the very start and start to think about how identity is formed, or could be formed, or how we think identity is formed.
Fujiwara also explored self-identity and the disproportionate nature of scandal.
How do i go from being a human to being a brand? And with Joanne we have the opposite which is how do I go from being a brand back to being a human? … Which is to say perhaps its not possible to de-brand yourself once you’ve been branded. And so the only tools that someone who has been branded has are more branding techniques.