Maintaining Stranger

«Maintaining Stranger» proposes an artificially cultivated, rocky desert as a designated cruising zone for strange encounters. Capitalizing on the desert as a space to face one’s insignificance allows for the perfect abandon, to measure up against the immeasurable.

A collection of secondary characters, as if selected from different casts yet all iconic in their own way, scaffold intimacies that hold no claim on future proximity. Without home, script or history the strangers here actively engage beyond colonizing, they maintain a process of de-possessing while mining the other. Unravelling the notion of the stranger from a foreign concept to a proximal nature this ‘community of strangers’ are still gathered with the pains and joys of togetherness but maybe not tethered.

Feeling estranged becomes a position from which to question existing structures that hold things in place. Structures such as the family, the Nation State and even the couple portend to hold difference under an umbrella of exclusive ideals that must be assimilated. We are perpetually estranged and yet there is a sublimated drive that demands us to belong, to maintain familiarity and remain inside normative structures. Feelings of estrangement begin personally but have the potential to reverberate and reconfigure the political ecologies of relations.

«Maintaining Stranger» tracks the weather and the weathered, drifts and gaps between people where intimacy is most intensely felt. Love is nothing personal, difference always is.