There has been and always will be nostalgia for days gone by. For those simpler times where neighbours swapped stories over the fence, shopkeepers knew each customer by name and families gathered on the porch to tell stories as the twilight faded into night. To bring these human values back in life we have created spheres of exclusive living where „to be at home” means to feel at home again…
Europe is experiencing a rise in closed, gated and guarded residential areas, named „gated communities.” At the same time, Europe itself is getting closer to this model of exclusion by the day. The analogy between Europe and the gated community is not far fetched. Around the constructed utopias of the gated communities, the „Island Europe” is being fenced in.
The film LiveSafelyinEurope starts as a commercial for a gated community.
The initial text taken from real commercials for such residential
communities is combined with a montage of nostalgic images of childhood,
historical views of the Berlin Wall and citations from the film „Stepford
Wives”. In a kaleidoscope of scenes filmed in gated communities, at
the European borders, in migrant ghettos and closed spaces in the virtual
world of the „second life”, the film questions the concept of
security and shows the ambivalence of this constructed reality. It dwells
on the blind spots and on those who are excluded by the social model
of the „gated community”, be it in the small version, or on a
European level. The text that leads the spectator through the film is
a combination of commercials for gated communities and official EU-documents
on border control and security.
To live inside a gated community means security, service and conformity for some and insecurity for others. Europe, just as the gated community, has an underlying structure which creates clear hierarchies and produces subjects without civil rights, who live in a perpetual state of emergency. Europe’s borders, just as the gate of any European gated community, open up for mobile workers who have to go back behind the borders when their job is done, as opposed to their privileged employers. As long as they work, they live deprived of civil rights.
The film LiveSafelyinEurope connects different forms of segregation.
In Ceuta, a Spanish exclave on the African continent, one of the outer borders of the European Union, the film enters the „Ethnoscape” of a Chinese community. This showcases a not very visible form of segregation: the owner of a Chinese restaurant talks about migration, competence, the near border to Morocco and her marginal contacts with her own socio-geographical surroundings.
The film shows that even in Cyberspace, where there is supposed to be
an „area” with a utopia without frontiers, one can find very traditional
forms of borders. Virtual areas (buildings, islands, properties…) in
the „Second Life” are secured by invisible detectors. If an Avatar (virtual
identity of a participant in Second Life) tries to cross one of these
invisible borders, a „no entry” banner appears, and in most cases the
Avatar is removed from the property by teleport. The film links Video-footage
shot in the virtual world of „Second Life” with real footage taken from
CCTV-cameras along the border-fence between Spain and Morocco. In an
aesthetic that reminds you of video games, you see people trying to
cross the fence with self-made ladders, while the border police do everything
to push them back. One of those who made it across the fence of Ceuta
and the Gibraltar Strait to the European continent meets in the montage
of the film, Mr. Laitinen, Executive Director of Frontex (European Agency
for Border Control). Here you see two perspectives on migration that
are intertwined but could not be more opposed at the same time. What
to one is a struggle for survival is described by the other, in technocratic
words, as a mission to secure the borders.
Opposed to that, the film shows residents of gated communities in several European countries searching for secluded tranquillity, scared by the outside world. The residents talk about the advantages of their exclusive life in gated communities, the servants in the same communities, about their precarious jobs and their aspirations for the future.
Gated communities offer an illusion of participation which, in reality, only concerns minor decisions. A resident of a French gated community explains how the community decides over the uniform colours of window- shutters. Similarily, the European Union and its member states build on a placebo-democracy which suggests that participation is possible, while a very small group takes the big decisions, closing out, violently if necessary, other interested parties. This decision-making takes place in fenced-off spaces, temporary gated communities. The film shows the meeting of the G8 near the German town of Rostock, where mobile walls made of policemen walk towards demonstrators as if under remote control and so form a temporary, impenetrable border. In front of this remote-controlled bio-border, thousands demonstrate, wanting to reach the fence behind which the participants of the summit discuss and decide over the fate of billions who are not invited. The fence, 2.5 meters high and equipped with Nato-barbed-wire, meanders 12 kilometres and reaches into the sea on both sides, effectively closing off the area. The pictures show that the urgent need for security expressed by the participants of the summit might not be without reason.
A growing number of Europeans looking for security leads to further transformation processes in residential living, analogous to the rise of the gated communities. The gated community ensures that service workers will not stay in the community and will not get the same status as residents. At the same time, any residents who do not fit in are isolated and excluded. The same processes take place in European society as a whole. The film shows a Roma area in the Bulgarian town of Kazanlak which was fenced off in communist times with a high concrete wall and so excluded from the surrounding population. Similarly, a part of the migrant, non-conforming population in Padua, Italy was isolated by a steel fence three meters high to prevent contact with the „normal” neighbourhood.
The film closes superimposing images of gated communities, CCTV cameras and the flag of the European Union, creating a vision of a society fenced in by their own fears. Aliens of any kind, be they geographically, or socially different from the fragile project of a European identity based on uniformity are excluded.
Credits
Cinematographer: Emanuel Danesch
Piano: Sven Sauerwein
Editing: Emanuel Danesch
Effects: Benjamin Thörmer
Announcer: Julie McCarthy
Production: Margarethe Weiss / Emanuel Danesch
Interpreter: Italy - Else Prünster, Spain - Elsa Garcia, Bulgaria - Maria Dimitrova Kuschelieva
Translation: Spain - Elsa Garcia, Bulgaria - Maria Dimitrova Kuschelieva
Footage: Nils Olger, Camino Media
With Support of: City of Vienna, BKA, Land Tirol,
SOHO, TKI