Joshua: I thought that god couldn’t have pulled it off but Keng Sen did.
On my first day in Myanmar, I started to grow restless. I asked if anyone knew what we were in for. I asked the more senior members. Nobody knew.
Joshua: But perhaps on another more profound level, it is beautiful project. Something approaching the Arthurian quest for the hHoly Grail, or the search for Nirvana. But ir eaalised later, we were supposed to pruging ourselves of all we have done and all we were planning to do. Call it a confession, if you will.
Joshua: HDB stands for Housing Development Board, or Housing Done Badly.
Joshua: My wife thought it was damn creepy. But I actually felt touched that my mother-in-law had come back and checked the rice bin to make sure it was full.
Other projects: Private Poverty, created from discarded wooden garbage from the neighbourhood (a commission from People's Association, good lord). Another work consisting of a simple mural written in by interns, reading: VERTICAL SUBMARINE EXPLOITS US FOR FIVE DOLLARS AN HOUR TO PAINT THIS SIGN WHILE THEY ARE BEING PAID AN UNDISCLOSED SUM FOR THIS PROJECT. AND THIS IDEA IS NOT EVEN ORIGINAL.
Joshua: As Marilyn Manson sings:
"Everybody's someone else's nigger
I know you are so am I
I wasn't born with enough middle fingers
I don't need to chose a side"
Then a series of unrealised projects: a work for the Jakarta Biennale called Time Travelling with a Backseat Driver, consisting of a back-to-front car, defying their experience of Jakarta's traffic jams. The proposal was accepted, but lack of expertise and budget made it impossible.
Joshua: The way to increase the curiosity of our readers would be to declare these books banned.
Joshua: Sometimes we feel like blowing things up. This wasfor a club in Mexico City.
Every day there would be some explosive event: fireworks, riots, fighting in clubs. Something like the image of a huge bomb came up, something that Wile E. Coyote could order from ACME.
But when faced with something that looks from a bomb, how do we know it’s the real thing?
We couldn’t just put it on a oedestal. Then you would know it was fake. So we had to think like a terrorist.
Marinetti: So let them come, the gay incendiaries with charred fingers! Here they are! Here they are! . . . Come on! set fire to the library shelves! Turn aside the canals to flood the museums! . . . Oh, the joy of seeing the glorious old canvases bobbing adrift on those waters, discolored and shredded! . . . Take up your pickaxes, your axes and hammers and wreck, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly!
Joshua: Hence no one would whine about the lack of democracy.
Joshua: Hence no one would whine about the lack of democracy.
Joshua: After the workshop I felt we had nothing to offer then. Here we are with all these concepts and words, but what do we have right now?
Joshua: Here we are trying to create more awareness about our projects about the division of class, and yet here is a residue of the capitalist system tugging at my sleeve. True, it might make her worse off. But on the other hand, she wouldn't be hungry.
So while we’re caught up in the production of nothing, and it’s a beautiful project, I’m not sure if it’s what the Burmese need now. In fact, they’ve had nothing for decades. They’ve had nothing but nothing.
Like our bomb that never goes off and our play that crumbles to dust, I feel that Vertical Submarine is completely redundant to this project. Thank you for listening anyway.