About Duffle Bags, Cars, and the Walking of a National Flag: Vladimir Mitrev
At the end of the video Vladimir Mitrev looks up, directly into the camera, sweating—beneath one sees the German national flag, whose colours he has just applied in four hours, or some ten kilometres, of walking. His video installation is titled Schwarz Rot Gelb (2009–2011) [Black Red Yellow]
The path to Germany is not an easy one.
We ask him about this path. He tells us the story of his installation, Illegal (2003), how he was accepted at the University of the Arts in Berlin, but no longer had a valid visa. He and his girlfriend purchased a cheap car and spent two weeks learning how to drive. They bought a duffle bag large enough for him to fit in, and then set off in the car. They drove to Sofia, Bulgaria, crossing five borders, where he would have to hide each time in the duffle bag, disguising his outline with clothes and books. Having made it back to Sofia, he found the staff at the German embassy in 1997 unwilling to believe that he really wanted to study Berlin.
Visa difficulties
[Transcription: They thought that I wanted to travel to Germany, buy old cars for little money and then sell them again in Bulgaria for a lot of money. It took several months until they granted me my visa. Which is why I started studying one semester late.]
We meet him at the Luxemburg Bar across from the Volksbühne Theatre.
The conversation begins with a certain amount of uncertainty on both sides: It is also our first interview. We ask him for a brief introduction, which he keeps very brief: ‘My name is Vladimir Mitrev and I’m an artist.’ His loud, resounding laugh breaks the ice.
Our questions to him are straightforward. We, too, are still learning. We ask about Black Red Yellow. The video installation is the concluding work in our exhibition—or the first, depending on how one chooses to go through it. The video is projected onto the floor, so that the visitors to the exhibition walk in sync with the artist for a brief stretch. The visitor chooses which colour of the flag to walk along and for how for long.
The installation is his arrival in another political and national reality. The question after more than ten years in Germany: Are these colours now also my national colours? Mitrev covers the length of the canvas in six paces. The three stripes have an area of twelve square metres. He walks back and forth for almost four hours. The video is 23 minutes long. How long does it take to arrive in Germany—not just physically—but mentally, too?
About "Black Red Yellow"
[Transcription: The background of Black Red Yellow is not really comparable with that of llegal, which had to do with a concrete story, something that really happened. Black Red Yellowcame about through thinking things over or as a result of earlier works, and what I found very interesting during this action was that the threshold between the painterly and the abstract was not so weighted down with substance, yet the image of the national symbol remains full of substance and meaning, so it does indeed have a concrete significance, so this threshold between the abstract and the painterly and of course my personal history on a symbolic level, too—that I go take this path to get somewhere, or, for all I know, to get integrated in some strange way.
I saw the installation as a test to find out if these colours had somehow really also become my national colours. It is probably possible to answer all of these types of questions with ‘yes’ or ‘no’, but like I said, questions about the image, too, like whether an imaginary, invisible picture results, and I just visualised it like that. But, yes, it is naturally also a sign of arrival on a symbolic level.
This is a meditative activity, like jogging, like endurance sports. I didn’t think about anything particular while I was doing it. Perhaps I just thought about whether it would work out. It took a long time, probably three and a half or four hours, and you’re totally sweaty when you’re done and you have bloody feet from all the walking. It was probably more than ten kilometres. It was really an endurance sports experience. (He laughs.)]
What we didn’t ask: Whether he thought he had truly arrived in Germany.
Where is the painting in the exhibition: Between rooms 12 and 1, between the ‘World in One’s Head and ‘The Court of Reason’, in the hallway between the last and the first rooms.
What else was said: That he had worked as a technician at the German Historical Museum for a long time.
What does he think of the exhibition concept: At first I thought it was some sort of advertisement for the European culture and art aimed at the rest of the world, but after I read the concept paper more carefully I really liked the fact that it is a critical encounter with European history.
When does he feel the most free:
[Transcription: ‘So what I am trying to say is that when I feel free, I always have to think about the times when I haven’t felt free, so that I can define the opposite of that. And I had times in my short life when I didn’t feel all free at all, but they were of course very brief, the shortest period of my life. But rest of the time I feel okay and free and that would mean that I feel the freest much of the time.’]
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