The audiovisual installation Erecting Tenderness consists of three parts: a video, a sound collage and a sculpture. The video takes the format of montage-film where speculative iconological research reassembles images and points to the links between the fake-news industry in the city of Veles, North Macedonia, the Slavic divinity of Volos (Veles) and the attack on the Capitol in the USA.
The ex-Yugoslav city of Titov Veles first became famous by WHO classment as the world
most polluted city because of its toxic zinc and lead factory located in the city center. The toxic
environment, with cheap and stable internet connection and a high unemployment rate,
encouraged a group of young people to create over 100 fake-news sites and influence the
elections in 2016 in the support of Donald Trump; thus created a new identity for the city of
Veles as the World Capital of Fake News.
The video is questioning the filmic representations of the city of Veles by citing two important
films I am from Titov Veles (2007) and Mirage (2004) that both deals with the dark and
suffocating ambiance of the city.
The sculpture is a structure of 13 superimposed mattresses and two simple metallic stairs put on two opposite sites and has a participatory character. The structure would stay stable only if two bodies climb the stairs simultaneously. The sculpture is a utopic, yet dangerous
affirmation on the ethic of tenderness, co-existence and mutuality.
The idea behind this audiovisual installation is to point to the impacts of a dynamic prosopon
(mask, face and a role) as a mimetic, rhetoric and impersonal play that happens when a body in
self-representation uses the moving image to exhibit, address and share the experience of
collective hallucinations. Erecting tenderness points to the struggles and resistances of the
insignificant, the small and the ordinary that can take place looking at operating images and its
surprising circulation systems that knit the World Wide Web.
