"Collectors" #3 / Multimedia installation: Stool, 157,5 x 128 x 128cm, wood, Video, "Collectors" #3, *Settings*, 30 min., color & sound, Purple neon text mounted on the wall, ca 10 m2, Blanket, 484 cm x 260 cm, different cloth & perfume, Watch-tower, 410 x 140 x 140 cm, wood, / produced in 2002

In the years 2001/02, I produced multimedia installations titled "Collectors" #1, #2 and #3. They all deal with the notions of personal versus official and with the discrepancies that generate significantly different interpretations of human existences. "Collectors" #1 & #2 installations are dealing with the post-war trauma recovery process. Both installations have the intention to transport the visitors into the experience of The Other.

In the "Collectors" #3 multimedia installation, I construct a place where the poetics of my childhood experiences exist simultaneously with the cold war reality of the fifties. I find it important today to point out the enormous gap between these two realities, meaning that we have to persist in the protection of places and times for the human issues. Contemporary refugee concentration camps with the barbed wire fences, loudspeakers, watch towers, surveillance cameras, jails that are the fastest growing public housing project in the USA, etc... are the sites that are ever-present in our modern times. From the persecuted people we see and hear their personal stories of the survival economies and poetical wisdom that nourishes them. My view of the world from the below was probably as any view of a child wherever in the world. It is rewarding not to forget this viewing and the excitement in smelling the nearness – the eroticism of life. To climb up is fascinating but an overview lacks the danger of a haptic experience. Consequently, one's positioning is of decisive importance for one's feeling and reasoning. Metaphorically speaking, the "Collectors" #3 show is my reflection on my official-personal profile, it is a self-portrait. Nevertheless, the intentions of the "Collectors" #3 show are to generate an atmosphere for a visitor's transient experience of The Other "beyond there" and to open the channels for a sensitive and critical reflection on our situation and on people's prejudices that create, defend and support all kinds of borders. Human drive for life even pays any prize to gain the freedom of choice to survive or to die.

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Story from the archives

I was born "beyond the iron curtain". This I got to know when I was 18 years old and was living in the USA as an exchange student in the year1968/69 while the Vietnam War was going on. My first reaction to the iron curtain notion was that I wanted to see it as soon as I should be back home. How come that in my 18 years of life I never saw it? I even asked Americans: "Where is it"? I started to play in my imagination and had been envisioning a beautiful, semi transparent gigantic object that was spreading through the landscape. Later, I even made four meters high iron sculpture titled "Lines" meaning the iron curtain really. People that welcomed me were behaving strange for my reasoning. Of course, I did not know that I was an exotic person for them. They told me that the organization worked hard to get three of us "out from there" into the USA. The thing was that all three of us did not fit at all to their expectations of what they thought was the communist youth.

My experience of gaining the insight into the American understanding of the "outside" world is useful today in the time of high tensions between economically and politically divided world into the West and the Rest. I am actually surprised that it took us so long to get here. I still remember the event when in the High School, the teacher of the American history stated: "We can wipe out in five minutes any country in the world". I was shocked hearing such a statement in a classroom and when I asked, "Why don't you do it?" he demanded that I leave the room. The reaction-answer of the teacher gains today in the perspective of a suspended war, a dimension that points to his genuine belief in the statement. The political economy and the wars that both produce visible and invisible curtains do make an imprint on our existences. I tell you; my basic feeling is that we are deep in a jam, in a highly charged time and in the tectonic breaking process in the history of the globe.

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[Text from the press Rrelease of Duba Sambolec's solo show "Collectors" #3 at IKM Gallery, Grønland Kulturstasjon in Oslo, Norway in 2002]