In August last year, Liqen was invited to Kassel in Germany by Dustin Schenk who is already preparing for the Documenta in 2017, collaborating with SchillerViertel in a project called “KolorCubes” intended for regeneration and action in public space.
Titled “Blindness” (La Ceguera), Liqen’s mural represents the artists thoughts on how media and technology have take charge of our lives and consciousness. We become what Liqen calls “slaves of the digital gene”, our lives recorded on social media and by technological gadgets that define what we want to be, but that destroy our true memories and mind; “from their tastes to their feel; All swallowed the “big screen” and vomited it in the form of mental illness and evil acts.”
The mural depicts human figures, whose heads are trapped in concrete or stone blocks. On top of each block we see pipes and antennas that seem to feed from the minds of Liqen’s characters. They have been blinded and push the block directionless. This blindness is described by Liqen as follows:
Allegation-vision of blindness:
“No one wanted to stop the advance of a new world that seemed better and became sordid, obsolete in a matter of minutes, where cables and veins are confused. This new necro-science had no pity at the death of thought of the subdued and innocent.
In the time of the hunt all previous wisdom and knowledge had been eradicated, religious beliefs never ended up being a saviour of anything, appearing the first slaves of the digital gene, automata without conscience still maintaining something of flesh and bone that coexisted under a mantle of programmed and publicised smiles, they thought to be happy and loaded with an immovable reason, but all their fleeting life was already engraved in a disc of plutonium, in hands other people who plan to encode the remains of their souls …, from their tastes to their feel; All swallowed the “big screen” and vomited it in the form of mental illness and evil acts.
In the meantime, a few flew with their sense of distance, to emptiness or perhaps a star, escaping from the filthy gray mantle of the cities, only when they returned they unfolded the learned of the cosmic nature and they felt the crudeness of expressing everything that made them To see, leaving behind the suspicions and envy but not for that reason accepting the worldliness that advanced without mercy. They knew that they came from the celestial bacteria and would return to it. They thought: “Those who pretend man over man can not taste the flavors of nature.” And only in part it was so, if we also have the troubles.
Now all these times of wear and tear have passed, there are only a few bodies and animations that roam about a planet with hardly any life, with its head trapped in a concrete cube from where the survivor thought of each human materialized in different forms of technological advances … What was the land in multiplicities had become a tale; What was a story became a reality … and reality in a lost time that dies to give life, so over and over again.”
Author: Fran
Founder and editor of Urbanite. Street Art lover who after the finishing her MA thesis on the Mexican and Norwegian muralist movement in the 1920-50s, developed a fascination for street art and graffiti that eventually led to collaborations with different art blogs, including the creation of this one.
