Blue pill-red pill

Blue Pill-red pill
2007
Vitrine 60x70x130cm
Mixed media
Pill shaped objects, hand sewed out of multiple blue and red soccer balls (logos removed), display with a movie dialogue quotation.

The name and its allegory “ Blue pill-red pill”, goes along with an text quotation, that I borrowed from “The Matrix”- an science fiction movie produced 1999, written and directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski.
The movie describes a future in which reality-as perceived by humans-is actually a simulated reality. The story’s protagonist that senses this illusion is on its search for truth and meets like-minded characters. One of them is the mysterious Morpheus which offers him the choice to swallow either a blue or a red pill in order of his persuade- the blue one to forget everything about his quest and the red one in order to proceed his search towards knowledge.

“You take the blue pill
the story ends, you wake up
in your bed and believe
whatever you want to believe.

You take the red pill
you stay in Wonderland
and l show you how deep
the rabbit hole goes.”

The allegory is also found in Charles Lutwidge Dodgson´s novel “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland” (1865) and the story of a girl named Alice who falls down a rabbit-hole into a fantasy world populated by peculiar and anthropomorphic creatures and in order to survive has to eat and drink multiple body and consciousness altering substances.

Pharma CV

Pharma CV
2006
Glass blown oversized test tubes, selection of ball specimens sorted by colors

I often feel a natural distrust towards competitive sport, and particularly against competitive sport at the international level. This is not an argumentation against individual, or collective achievement, player and teams trying their best to win, but the problem is if the method of achievement is competition at whatever cost. Western thinking and conception of life is highly dramatic. Everything hangs on the competition. Heaven or hell, win or fail.
Passion is the thing that the artist shares with the athlete, it keeps us going and at the same time to enjoy our profession. Art and sport on their best are and should be primary motivated.
In my works this issues come often in disguise of happy colored and playful objects from the world of play and sports but they also point to a dark underlying current.
Curriculum stems from the Latin word for racecourse, referring to the course of deeds and experiences through which children grow and mature in becoming adults. Pharmacology
(From Greek, pharmakon,”drug”, and–logia.) is the study of drug action. The Pharma CV comes here in the color of a rainbow but the glass test tubes hint also to a hidden and more sinister aspect. One could not phrase a better example as a quotation from the article (The Convicts of the Road) by the French journalist Albert Londres.
Following the Tour de France in 1924 he recalled the following interview with the previous year's winner, Henri Pélissier, his brother Francis and a third rider, Maurice Ville -that all had pulled out after a row with the organizers. Henri explained the problem - whether or not he had the right to take off a jersey - and went on to talk of drugs.

"You have no idea what the Tour de France is," Henri said. "It's a Calvary. Worse than that, because the road to the Cross has only 14 stations and ours has 15.
We suffer from the start to the end. You want to know how we keep going?
Here..." He pulled a phial from his bag. "That's cocaine, for our eyes. This is chloroform, for our gums."
"This," Ville said, emptying his shoulder bag "is liniment to put warmth back into our knees."
"And pills. Do you want to see pills? Have a look, here are the pills." Each pulled out three boxes.
"At night, in our rooms, we can't sleep. We twitch and dance and jig about as though we were doing St Vitus's dance..." Henri spoke of being as white as shrouds once the dirt of the day had been washed off their bodies, then of being drained by diarrhea, before continuing:
"There's less flesh on our bodies than on a skeleton, Francis said,
“The truth is, that we keep going on dynamite!"