What you can talk about
(March 30 - May 15 2004)

Inspired by the applied design of tourist promotions or city communicational campaigns, Lise Harlev appropriates an established codified language that reinforces the spectator as a receiver and a consumer of any kind of messages in public space. In Hitz egin daitekenari buruz / De lo que se puede hablar (What you can talk about), the artist has employed two references that use these communicational devices in different manners. On one hand, this project gives associations to a communication strategy that the city department of San Sebastian carried out in the summer of 2002. In this campaign, images of citizens appeared next to comments and questions about the future of the city. Images of women, men and children in life-size cardboard silhouettes were spread all over town. On the other hand, Harlev's project carries references to Sony's recent advertising campaign in which young people are portrayed together with a description of their first project realised with a digital device from Sony. In Hitz egin daitekenari buruz / De lo que se puede hablar, a drawing of Harlev herself appears in various postures, combined with personal thoughts about her encounter with a cultural context like San Sebastian. The thoughts all evolve around the visitor's difficulties of fully understanding a foreign context and not knowing what you can talk about and what you can't in this place.

In her work, Lise Harlev examines the negotiation between the constitution of an identity and the belonging - or not belonging - in a cultural community. Harlev refers to her own personal experiences with living in a foreign culture, learning a new language, etc. and touches upon the insecurities, efforts but also curiosities related to the everyday process of adapting to a culture. Her work in general is developed from this personal thinking of how subjectivity is produced when it is fixed to a constant mobility. Harlev proposes a personal reading of the experience with a new culture, with a culture she has to adapt to or even idealises because of its exotic image. With her personal voice, Lise Harlev places herself in front of the official image of a culture, doubting what is otherwise taken for granted and using its clichés to subvert this image and suggest a new way of looking at it.

The project Hitz egin daitekenari buruz / De lo que se puede hablar is displayed in different community centres in San Sebastian, with Okendo Kultur Etxea as the main location. The other centres are located in Altza, Ernest Lluch, Lugaritz, Egia, Loiola, Larrotxene and Intxaurrondo Berri.

Poster 1. 18k
Poster 2. 19k