The multimedia installation is an assemblage of a faithful reconstruction of a found object (the steel fence), rocks, a dried-out wooden branch, residues of reinforcement steel, and cables. It is a physical yet static reenactment of an absurd scene that I have found on a wasted property in downtown Amman. Although dysfunctional — the gate and the locks were missing, the fence was too short to close wall to wall — it was fortified with a bulk of rocks. Someone invested some labor to mark this lost space as “private property.”
The Story
Before my residence in Amman—it was fall 2019, no trace of Sars-CoV-II and its effect on the global political economy—Timo & I were studying recent discourses in social theory that were projecting possible post-capitalists futures ranging from the utopia of fully automated luxury communism (A. Bastani) over a digital upgrade of the classic socialist calculation debate (E. Morozov) on one side or more humble conceptions as Bruno Kern‘s version of Eco-Socialism keeping an eye on physical restrictions of economic growth or Zhao Tingyang’s tianxia-theory based on the Dao principle of coexistence and the understanding of total inclusion in the world. All these various thoughts merged together in a discovery that I made in Amman when I visited the downtown. Mohammad, my collaborator and I, came along a seemingly awkward place. It was a property that revealed nothing but a few ruins. Not much special since Amman—and especially this area of the city—is sporadically covered with ancient ruins. However, this place was nonetheless remarkable since it was noticeable as a gap in a continuous line of family townhouses.
The Gap
An entire house was missing. Only a rusty steel fence and the gate marked the place as private property. Mohammed noticed my interest and took some pictures of the place. His photographs stored details that vanished already from my memory. It shows that the gate to the courtyard, the former entry to the premises, was held by a loose cable that was hanging from the wall of the adjacent building. The cable might have been an electric power supply that once connected both buildings and it clearly shows that the ruin we found was very recent. The fence was stabilized by a few rocks; some of them may be of ancient times, who knows, but they were absurdly arranged in order to hold a steel fence that could not be of any purpose since there was no building anymore to protect. The site emitted the strange aura of an object overpowered by its future obsolescence.
The fable
Later we were able to meet a neighbor who could tell us more about the story of this place. According to him, the house was owned by a woman who inhabited the premises herself. After someone told her that according to archaeological findings and reports an ancient treasure was suspected to be buried underneath her home, the woman promptly decided to dig for this treasure. She consulted engineers and started digging, but she found a treasure. She hired a company that demolished the house to dig on the entire ground, but she found nothing. She dug, she dug, she dug…yet she found nothing. What she did not know is that according to a new law the property was considered too small for a more multistorey building as hers and the neighbors’ house. Finally, she was not allowed to re-erect the house and came out with nothing. No treasure, no house. End of the story…
Maybe not
Only on the first glance, the woman appears to be an idiot. On a second look, she is a hero who has an adventurous attitude that everybody needs to survive planet Earth under the conditions of the Anthropocene. She was ready to give up the comfort she had to attain something she wasn’t even sure about. This readiness for discomfort for the purpose to share a lower degree of comfort with others is demanded to solve the most urgent problems of a global civilization. The only problem is — she did it for the wrong cause. And this false motivation is the very detail that made me understand that we all carry the readiness for a substantial change in us. It is probably not despite but rather because we are subjects of capitalism that caused a lot of problems but also prepared us for the adventure to go ahead.
Ending Note
The adjective “private” derives from the Latin root privare, which relates to objects, territories, properties, and affairs in the sense of robbing, separating or liberating something. According to ancient Roman law, which is still one pillar of the Western cultural ID – private property qualifies as property that was taken away from the common property. A fence is needed to mark the separation when this property is immobile as a real estate or piece of land.