Having studied History before studying Visual Art I find the issue of a ‘legitimate’ history a compelling one. Spending 2006 studying in Weimar I was struck by the way in which one history was presented as more ‘right’ than another. Whilst Goethe and Schiller are seen as historical figures which are truly representative of German culture, the Third Reich is seen as some kind of aberration, a period which has no organic connection to the corpus of German history.

This led me to the idea of prosthesis as a metaphor. In many ways it seems that the Nazi period is treated as an extension on top of the German ‘body’, that there is no organic connection between this and the rest of German history. Exploring possible forms to express this uneasy relationship between different pasts I became interested in the power of the Hitler moustache as symbol for this period.

In an attempt to explore these concepts of organic connection and legitimacy I developed a video piece involving a slug that is initially positioned as a moustache. During the course of the video the slug moves from its position, explores the contours of my face and finally escapes to my hair. Although at first the moustache reference may be clear, through the passage of time and the transit of the slug, the references become more ambiguous.

Together with Dusica Drazic

A young woman stands by the side of the motorway. It has been raining, the woman is wet and the road is noisy. Off camera a voice addresses her: ‘Take three’. She leans forward seeming not really to hear but music starts playing and the woman starts to dance. The song is “Young Americans” by David Bowie. During the chorus a male voice joins in singing “Young Serbians” instead of “Young Americans”. The video lasts slightly longer than the song.

In the summer of 2006 I was studying in Weimar. The road that I walked to college along every day had been totally dug up, so it was a bit like walking through a building site with machinery, bricks and fluorescent plastic every where.

As well as studying I was also teaching English to earn some cash. This basically involved playing scrabble once a week with four fluent English speaking kids. On one walk to home I realised that there was a certain formal similarity between the new bricks being laid and the scrabble pieces.

I decided to make a scrabble set for the builders. Each night I stole a few bricks from the stack of bricks, took them to the studio, sprayed letters on them and returned them, making sure that the letter side was covered so nothing seemed amiss.

After about a month I had sprayed all the scrabble letters. On the last night I turned the bricks round so the letters were visible. The idea was that the builders would be able to lay words in the pavement, but these words would be invisible to everyone else as they were on the side of the brick.

However, in the space of time between uncovering the bricks and the builders laying them, passers by also started using the bricks as a kind of scrabble set, leaving messages for one another. Some bricks even started appearing at different spots around town, some even in people’s apartments! I am still not sure how many ended up in the pavement…