This work was produced at the Air Berlin Alexanderplatz residency wih support of Flanders State of The Art. For more information of the context in which this project was undertaken(Air Berlin Alexanderplatz residency) as well as the other output please click HERE
ahistory.org is an archive of all cases I could find in which a person put themselves on fire in an act of political protest. To visit the archive website click on this link:
https://ahistory.org/
This website was born out of the desire to share the history of a phenomenon that deeply fascinates me. Creating it has been deeply educational, astonishing and difficult at times. This website is best conceived of as an archive with an interface that allows one to read it and interact with it in a non-linear way. Its creation is a step in a longer process of reflecting on these individuals and the history they create. I would like to pay tribute to to them for going to the limit of what is humanly possible. For their names to be known, and why they did it.
Public presentation of the website in Terms & Conditions space for the anniversary exhibition of
‘Jagers & verzamelaars. (click to read)
Jagers & verzamelaars. J&V was started by margot and Hanna de Graeve Loyson, and was centered around the sharing of unfinished work, in their living room. That was the context in which I talked publicly about my project for the first time and got a lot of amazing feedback, critique and discussion. I believe that, in a sense, I owe my time in Berlin to the event at Jagers & verzamelaars.
Now, one year later, they held a ‘birthday exhibition’ that featured the work of people who had been speakers in the previous year. It was presented in the space Terms & Conditions (@1.terms on instagram), an immense space in the middle of the European district of Brussels. of this vast room there was a chair, table, laptop and headphones. In the headphones there was static, grey noise and on the laptop was the homepage: https://ahistory.org
A personal reflection on this website and the creation of it. (click to read)
Reflections about the website.
I am very happy with how the website looks and feels right now. I don’t think many people will really feel the need to ‘comment’ on these cases, but that does not take away from its strength. If anything it adds to it if the person considers ‘‘what do I have to say to this?’’ to then decide ‘‘Nothing.’’ And there is no rush for people to comment things, it can take its time. It is a vast, accessible and particular archive. I am proud of creating this.
It deeply interests me how this work stands in relation to everything else I do and have done. It is
extremely dry and impersonal in the way it formally manifests itself. The website both in its functioning and interface, as well as the presentation in the space. I never thought I would create an archive of anything other than my own work. Especially not of death and pain.
I don’t consider this an artwork, but it is undeniably a production of me living my life. And many, if not most, other productions of me living my life have been artworks. So for me, it is in its singularity very interestingly positioned in relation to the vast body that constitutes the art that I have made.
In all that work, I have actively tried to celebrate the freedom that life allows, and celebrate life itself. The beautiful, ugly and how they intermingle in absurdity. It is an undertaking laced with personal expression, emotion and irrationality. In a sense it is infused with the fluids of my body, it is moist.
This website on the other hand, is dry. It is a desert, full of bodies that constitute some form of ruin. Creating this feels like profoundly deepening the undertaking that drives my artistic creation. By celebrating not the possibilities of my own life, but celebrating the capacity for others’ to engage with the possiblity of death. It is stepping outside myself to not celebrate my own capacity for life, but to push this undertaking to a limit, and thus celebrate the moment where life turns into its negative. Pushing it to the point at which one erases oneself. And to ‘celebrate’ it. This is articulating it in a very macarbe but, at least for now, honest way. Creating this has also felt like the opposite of what I am used to. Without a coherent ‘idea’ that can be judged as interesting or not. It is just what it is. And it is extremely slow, heavy and painful.
jacob lambrecht 