I'm Tired Of Choosing, So I'll Take The Middle

I'M TIRED OF CHOOSING, SO ILL TAKE THE MIDDLE is a video work that deals with the existence between two cultures. It shows the fictional myth of the fish children that I wrote. This myth arose from my own growing up in the diaspora in which the sea between Germany and Colombia forms the middle.

Fish children are therefore people who were born between two cultures. For me, fish take on nationless beings and become fluid identities that can swim across borders without bumping into the boundaries of what happens on land. It is thus a matter of freeing identi- ties from national boundaries and the associated categorisations.

In her book „Boarderlines/ La Frontera“, Gloria E. Anzaldua describes this feeling of being in between as „Nepantla“, a word from the Nahuatl language, which she herself adopted as a Latina in the USA:

„And now I call it Nepantla, wich is a Nahuatl word for the space between two bodies of water, the space between two worlds. It is a limited space, a space where you are not this or that but you are changing. You haven‘t got into the new identity yet and haven‘t left the old identity behind either (...).“

In the video, I enter the sea as a fish person (a hybrid of human and fish). I have a crab shell case with me, a fish phone and three Ocean Coins. Ocenan Coins are the transitions from land to sea. They are silver coins ground down by the sea.

„Whoever wants to move to the sea must do so at sunrise. Whoever decides to move into the sea will find that in the hour when the sun rises, time is slowed down by 60 per- cent. Before one can move into the sea, a call must be made to the sea. The digits on the fish phone, are only zeros, because that is the digit that most resembles the bubbles that the sea creatures produce under water. If no one answers, you can go into the sea. First you have to pay the customs duty, worth 3 Ocean Coins. These are thrown into the sea. Then you walk until you reach the deep, deep down.“

I'M TIRED OF CHOOSING, SO ILL TAKE THE MIDDLE
FullHD-Video, color, sound (Gregor Kieseritzky), 5:43