Creating space where there appears to be none between the foreground and the background of a drawing, an in-between dimension: through the rabbit hole we freefall to unfold the compressed space underlying a doodle over the papers of a politician. Duty-freed from the dire reality of their pages, Edi Rama’s doodles take on a repetitive form like that of a “reality planner” whose bird’s eye vision of a landscape demarcates neighbourhoods as zones of thought through the cartography of colour. The lines curve and curl, never remaining straight for too-great a distance, loosely binding the day-to-day. Over the past 10 years, these automated abstractions have connected the present to the otherwise unintelligible future.

In order to perceive this space, we can put ourselves in an inane position, by looking at the foreground through the background, reversing our perception of the drawing. In its dynamic equilibrium, there is a slight imbalance, a tipping only legible to the mind, the aesthetics of which at first glance make such a leaning unnoticeable. There is a concealed urgency in the background indicating a ripeness of the underlying issues: a pragmatic offspring of democracy has emerged, namely the hollow call for stability, which has postponed core issues at hand. Democracy has been hi-jacked under the guise of “well-intended” bureaucracy. The vote is suspected of being fraudulent, but the means to correct it are equally fraudulent. Tied up in a vicious circle, the content of democracy is at the mercy of its syntax. This is why the background, veiled by the doodle, but also camouflaged on another level by the call for stability, sends out a now-signal, even more so than before. The only way that we can make this now-signal visible is by reversing the drawing. The aim is not to swap the background for the foreground permanently, but to approach the invisible middle ground from both sides, in order to become aware of the ambivalence in-between.

This reversed perception of the drawing is possibly better explained by taking a landscape painting as an example. In the foreground, we have the action: a man killed by a snake, who is chanced upon by a frightened figure, who is witnessed in turn by a maid, who has dropped her laundry. In the background, we have the gradual semblance of stability: fisherman reining in their nets, bathers by the lakeside, and a citadel in the far distance. In the newly reversed painting, from the perspective of the perennial citadel, the dramatic instant of the man killed by a snake has been cloaked by the deceptive security of the new foreground. The flip-flopping of the illusory strata of the painting has made us lose touch with its main commotion.

Call the imagined inversion of the painting to a halt now, and let the fate of the man bitten by the snake return to the foreground. Translate this inversion into the doodle drawing. The political issues in the background move forward while doodle retreats into the background. The viewer no longer omits the once-political background.

After this exchange of the background with the foreground we are almost at the place of the author of the drawing, the artist. When he doodles, his gaze is absentminded, perhaps a few steps behind his thoughts. His doodle’s background overlaps with his mind’s foreground. What do we see when we are put in the seat of automatic creation? In fact, doodling is the opposite of absent-mindedness – it is the embodiment of present-mindedness, one could say, though the word doesn’t exist. The atmospheric perspective, the in-between dimension mentioned in the beginning, is made visible.

The muted space between his mind’s foreground and the focus of his gaze will be conveyed by a series of one-on-one conversations. From the differing perspectives of four positions, each tête-à-tête will be a relay, traversing the distance like the intermediary figures in the imagined painting of a landscape, who will in a matter of time bring to the citadel news of a man killed by a snake.

Anri Sala, 2010

About Change, Studio ist eine Initiative von Christiane zu Salms About Change, Collection. Die About Change, Collection fördert Ausstellungen und Begegnungen jenseits des Etablierten mit dem Ziel, Schnittstellen zwischen verschiedenen Welten zu ermöglichen. Änderungen in Begriffs- und Wahrnehmungsmustern können nur durch die Unterwanderung normaler Denkmuster ausgelöst werden. Für das About Change, Studio ist jeweils ein Künstler eingeladen, sich in den Räumen der About Change, Collection  mit dem Thema des Studios als Ort der künstlerischen Produktion und der Wiedergabe auseinanderzusetzen.