The rats, inquisitive but shy animals, stayed within the circle, while visitors – supposedly superior beings – despite the smallness of the circle, were moved to enter into their domain and spy on them. Most of the time the rats hid. In a subtle way the visitor's spying on the rats reflected the aggressive nature of human behaviour. Whatever the political context, there are many everyday events that evidence an immense collective desire for self-determination and the rights of individuation.
Walde's work provides insights into places where the
Self and the world can no longer be securely accounted
for but only reinvented. Here we witness a complex
continuity/discontinuity game, offering no solutions
but possibilities. Continuity can bring about somnolence,
like a child lulling itself to sleep with the repeated
chorus of a song. Discontinuity, on the other hand,
acts as an interruption – it can bring about insomnia
with an endless spin of possibilities.Walde's work is not prescriptive: there are never instructions,
accompanying videos, text descriptions or
other guidelines as to the purpose or use or attitude
that should be adopted in the interaction with the
work. A courageous and, at times, truly dangerous
situation. Rather, the practice strives to connect with
a variety of less predictable and highly subjectivereactions on the part of its publics that can be as chaotic and untidy as the realities interwoven in the fibre of our everyday lives. By doing so, without working under the safety umbrella of a delineated context or within predictable and harmless forms, Walde is able to further the communication potential of each work in a less protected manner.
Another example are Walde's Handmates,
small palm-sized constructs with a hard inner shell
covered within a balloon casing filled with silicone in
different colours. They were exposed to handling by
each viewer, lending themselves to infinite interpretation.
Some were dismantled, others were squeezed
to the point of destruction, and others still were justexamined with perplexity. Similarly, in Tie or Untie, a huge coil of ropes of different kinds, users are induced into all sorts of different interpretations.
For the ARGE Kunst exhibition, To Actuality, held
in Bolzano, Italy, it has been decided to experiment
in art terms with a life form that occupies cities
throughout the world: pigeons, sometimes called
"rats with wings" in English. This proper bourgeois city of 250,000 inhabitants, located on the cultural
border of Tyrol and Italy, has a conflict-ridden past,
and a complex cultural and political present. In many
subtle ways, the past still lies just below the surface
of everyday life, and Bolzano does not provide a
welcoming setting for staging artwork.
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