AREAL28
festival |
sa, 24.02., 20 uhr
ON HOME AND EVIL
"I did this, says my mind. I didn't do this, says my pride and remains remorseless.
Finally – the mind gives in."
Friedrich Nietzsche
From time to time we name various actions, people or plans 'evil'.
Sometimes we mark regimes, people or axes the incarnation of THE EVIL.
There seems to be a difference, if we call something 'evil' or if we name it a part
of the evil. If it's a part of THE EVIL, than it's thoroughly evil, and the good is
excluded, in principle the good is impossible. That's not the case with bad deeds
(even if they are very evil). THE EVIL is not simply wrong or condemnable, but the
end of moral discourse after all.
"The biggest evil is not radical, it has no roots, and because it has no roots it has
no limits, can develop in unimaginable extreme and spread over the whole world. (...)
To say it different, if something is forgiven, than it is not the crime that is forgiven,
but the person; with rootless evil there is no person existent that can be forgiven."
Hannah Arendt
THE EVIL goes beyond the scope of moral values. It seems to make the speech about crime
and punishment senseless. Therefor everything that is part of the evil is outlawed and
has no right of claiming mechanisms of the principle of rights. This idea seems to make
it important to ask, if we are really in the situation to point out, if something is a
part of the evil.
Hannah Arendt tried to define the horror of the holocaust with this concept. George W. Bush
uses the same concept to mark the enemies of America.
What are Arendt and Bush referring to, whereby can you recognise and measure, if something
is part of THE EVIL? A possible answer: EVIL is something, that makes home impossible.
To have a home means to comprehend single incidents in my life as meaningful and cohesive.
There are not only moments of familiarity with the world, but I knit them into a net.
Within this net phenomena like identity, character, freedom become possible. A human being,
that has no home, can not say, who he is. Only with a home I experience a permanent world,
enduring relationships towards people and lasting me.
Without home my life has no continuity, but a certain length which can be measured in years
and decades, but has no interior connection. Without home I can not say, if my life was
more than a progressions of separate events and things.
To have no home at all – to be homeless – is an extreme situation. There are two fundamental
extreme situations imaginable: one internal and one external.
The external border of home is death. The connection is very banal: the phenomenon home
belongs to life. Death is the singularity in which home ends.
The internal border of home is much more difficult to define and remains controvertible.
I think there politically and mentally homeless people. People who live forgotten and
isolated in camps and are killed, have to be called homeless. They are wholly and
completely abandoned. Every connection with the world is erased. Even the chance of
interaction and therefor the chance of home is lost. For those people there is no hope,
even from our consciousness they have been extinguished successfully.
Mentally ill people can be homeless in a different way. Fallen of the world, left alone
and with no hope of return, they live opposite every connection, like in a free fall.
Structures, beings or states, that prevent home systematically, might deserve it to be
called part of THE EVIL. The question remains, who can or is allowed to locate the current
situation?
"Lavoratori" – Tommaso Cotronei, Rom
"Zur falschen Zeit am falschen Ort" – Tamara Milosevic, Berlin
"To be in the city" – Linda Weiss, Berlin
"Buried alive" – Adam Geczy, Sydney
"New Samples" – Marina Landia, Berlin
"The Romanians" – Heidrun Holzfeind, New York
"407" – Ines Dehnel, Berlin
"Electricity" – Oliver Pietsch, Berlin/New York
"Privacy/Policy: Heidegger/Arendt " – Linda Weiss, Leipzig/New York
"home." – Claudia Heindel, München
AREAL28
Eberswalder Str. 28
10437 Berlin
Germany