Residency: Wednesday, July 23, 2014 – Friday, October 10, 2014
In the city, you are in the company of strangers. Writing at the beginning of the twentieth century in Berlin, Georg Simmel identified this phenomenon as a central experience of the modern metropolis. “The stranger is near and far at the same time,” Simmel noted, “one who is close-by is remote [but] one who is remote is near.” Emphasizing on the notion of inner loneliness as impulse for the construction and reinvention of the public space as a dream world for subjective experimentation and fantasy, Be what you want, but stay where you are takes its departure from what fallows when mental moves remain in motion. Thinking about ways to maintain a non-linear or non-progressive working method which could be understood as involving the development of a series of parallel strategies and temporal structures moving in one direction or another, Be what you want, through it’s untouched intimacy, reveals room for doubt, and, most importantly, room for getting it wrong. Here, at the inter-crossings between art, therapy, the notion of “wellness” in a time of financial collapse and unforeseen conditions of fatigue, writing emerges as a point of contact between two events: when someone, through walking, attempts to imagine themselves as the perfect companion for a stranger, and then what happens when that stranger touches back.
Compossible = possible at the same time
Incompossible = not possible in one and the same world; possible only in parallel, other world
Ongoing Be what you want, but stay where you are activity and a complete project archive can be found at: www.bogdancheta.com
Part of programming for M:ST 6.5
Born and raised in Ploiești, Romania, Bogdan Cheta now lives and works in Calgary, Canada. Drifting between the surface of the printed page, the looseness of improvisable walks, or the meandering movements of large-scale installations, his projects usually gather in a search for how to use, and imagine the act of storying as an artisanal technology for place-making. He holds an MFA in Craft from Alberta University of the Arts (2019) and his research is oriented by an attention towards the atmospheric phenomenologies of lived spaces and their potential to re-activate alternative sites for political discourse and social engagement. Recent presentations of his work include projects at Balice Hertling in Paris, 67 Steps in Los Angles, the 12th Havana Biennial, and locally, at Stride Gallery, Untitled Arts Society, The New Gallery and TRUCK. With support from Canada Council for the Arts, this is Bogdan’s second presentation with M:ST, and his first joint collaboration with CommunityWise Resource Centre and the Calgary Queer Arts Society.
Co-presenters
