Spanish Coast, 2017/2024

Laura Weissmahr interacts with the set of models from the Únete! Join Us! (2017) project, reciting a long monologue in different languages that intersperses Franz Kafka’s short story Das Stadtwappen (The City Coat of Arms, 1920) with various found or improvised texts. Kafka’s story tells how the collective project of building the Tower of Babel, a tower intended to reach all the way up to heaven, grinds to a halt due to the doubts and disputes that arise. The texts and the activity as a whole evoke a tourist landscape, converted into a kind of place of passage populated by nomads that oscillates between the illusion of a utopian site and the evidence of its short-lived trifles.

Spanish Coast, 2017/2024 was presented at the Spanish Pavilion, 57th Biennale di Venezia, 2017 and at ARCO, Juana de Aizpuru Gallery, Madrid, 2018. Variable length (approximately 3 hours).