Gessnerallee
Zürich

In «Maintaining Stranger» an artificially cultivated, stony desert is designated as a cruising zone for encounters among strangers. This is where a series of supporting actors meet, who seem to have been chosen from different casts, and yet are iconic in their own fashion. In the artificial wasteland, they are confronted with their personal insignificance and shallow intimate relations that in no way approximate closeness – because long ago they stopped measuring themselves against the immeasurable. With no homeland, script, or story, these strangers take the place beyond colonization, cultivating a process of expropriation while the “other” is dismantled. Although the notion of the «stranger» has been demystified by an alien concept and declared to be of a proximal nature, this community of strangers is assembled by the pain and joys of being together – but disconnected.

«Maintaining Stranger» follows the weather and the weathered as well as the drifts and gaps between people, where intimacy is most palpable. Because love is not something personal, it is always about the differences.