Library of Babel 2- “Successive Totems and other Stories”
Rafet Arslan is questioning the relationship between a Totem as an item of eternity and icons, that got pseudo Totems of our daily life and consumerism. The Chanel-bottle, Car-brands and genderbased icons got Totems of a lifestyle, that is falsly confused with an eternity it doesn’t include.
Library of Babel 1 – “Ziggurat Tamer”
The reference of the “Library of Babel” evokes a couple of associations. The famous short story of Jorge Luis Borges’ (1941) describes the architecture of a universe-size Library. The discussion following the text scrolled around the infinity of knowledge regarding endless possibilities of combining knowledge and creating new relations. Several artists have worked on this motive, while Borges himself named a collection of fantastic narrations his “Library of Babel” (1974).
Two young women meet in an explosive and highly emotional love story where love, art and revolution ignite.
In this film 9 women record themselves being alone. At times they get together as an experimental arts collective hotly debating the value of their private work and whether to do public performances. Two of them fall in love. One becomes obsessed with the other and simultaneously imagines an idealized love while the other wants her to find the revolutionary part of herself. Revolution of Everyday Life is a document of actresses playing actresses who play characters that fall in love. It is at the same time a love story that happens in the realm of fiction and in the realm of recorded reality. The result is a documentary film within a fictional one. The film becomes a site not for representation but discovery. It is a structure for things to happen, it becomes the site for performing, not acting, not re-presenting desire, but to enact it – it is a longing for politic of desire and an expression of its urgency.