2011 | Settlement
kioskshop, Berlin (Mitte-Nord), Germany.
4 digital prints mounted on aluminium
This work is part of a group exhibition of 12 artists who are concerned with the effects of global capital and unequal power relationships between various nation states. The actual space uses a permanent installation which retail simulates “simulates on one hand a Berlin typical neighbourhood store and on the other hand it plays with the perception of product world and its distribution.” These 4 images are both aesthetic documents and meditations on what Stephen Graham refers to as ‘complex imaginative geographies’. Examples include of systems of organised, political violence which are legitimised and sustained through an ‘imaginative geographies’ – binaries of attachment to place.  A few examples would be: The U.S. administration’s re-imagining geographies of urban spaces as US ‘homeland’ in opposition to those ‘Islamic’
cities – ‘terrorist’ threats against US interests. So ‘homeland’ spaces are then sites where ‘national security’ is enacted. As Edward Said argued, imaginative geographies have been crucial in sustaining Orientalist treatments of the Arab (cities) and then seen as little more than ‘terrorist nest’ targets, justifying them as simply ‘battlespace’ within post 9/11 doctrine.

The other being the the territorial ambitions of the Israeli settlers and how they chose to perceive the ‘arab semi human’ occupants within the West Bank as a lethal zone of imaginative geographies.

Note: I am not implying that all Israeli people support these illegal (re)settlements. In fact there is ongoing non-violent opposition to this from within Israel. > ICAD <
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kioskshop is now transformed into Supalife Kiosk

Gianni Wise, “Settlement”, 2011 (digital print on acid-free stock). Image courtesy of the artist