Tat vam Asi
name of project: Tat vam asi / I Am That
location: Budapest 9th district
year of design: 2012
authors: Gilles Villandier, Dominika Tihanyi
music: Béla Műhely
Everyday we build borders. Borders that divide space, worlds, living beings...and develop safety for our lives. Mostly fluctuating between the picturesque image of an ideal world-city-window of globalisation and its real gaps, conflicts and contradictions, these borders speak about the way we move in the city.
Although always new digital technologies shake up the obstacles bound to time and space, they dematerialize and distance the way we perceive what is close and concrete. Yet we are Earthlings and share the common ground. So reinventing or crossing borderlines has to deal with time and giving up a bit of safety. Time we take to watch this plant, this situation, to speak with someone or to make experiences which will lead us to the unknown and redefine this safety. Voids in the city are places of uncertainty. Squares, streets, empty zones, wastelands are as undefined as we are deeply. All margins question our fears, freedoms, facilities to make links and inner fringes.
As termites deconstruct in order to reconstruct, this project would like to re-use and re-perceive our world. The daily process of walking, thinking, meeting people, connecting inhabitants, collecting: words, thrown away objects, perceptions, situations, imprints, feelings, stories, desires, ideas... in Budapest would display an ‘I’, but through this shared ‘eye’ become a ‘we’. Tat wam asi. A poetic installation and choreographic palimpsest: an impromptu that works with reality and imagination, revealing one month of collaboration, amusements and experience on where the community (bodies, bridges and birds...) could, openly and insecurely, meet.
