being foreign without being foreign

 

​

The modern world presents itself as a global village. Yet, we are still strangers, almost everywhere.

 

The loss of Heimat and feelings of being caught between haunt us in the most varied places, not only in non-places (Marc Augé) like ariports or shopping malls, but also at places we consider to be our homes. The longing to feel “arrived” has become an omnipresent phenomenon of our time.

 

Migration has always been part of human history. The ways in which migrants find a new home - whether in the form of a place or a feeling - are as multifaceted as their biographies. In this project, the duo Matthias and Hsinmei, migrants themselves, approached and treated their feelings of being caught between through literature. Figures from fictions are taken out of their literary homes and placed into the duo's fantasy worlds set in the reality. In doing so, they anchor their inner landscapes, enriched with literary nourishment, in the outer world.

​

​

The poetic pictorial spaces of Hsin-Mei Chuang and Matthias Messmer

​tell in artistic and high-contrast staging of fremd sein ohne fremd zu sein

and remind me of a sentence by Eduard Führ: "Home is a quality of

adoption of the world, it is an aspect of Work, that is, taking in and

changing reality." fremd sein ohne fremd zu sein is an expression of a

transformation between desire and reality. The transformation between

the two perspectives becomes a prerequisite for a possible change

in reality.

----Isa Rosenberger, artist

​

​