The American Dream Project
From Sweet and Tender
[edit] The American Dream Project
Over the past several years, I cannot begin to tell you how many conversations I have had with people who tell me how much they would like to go to America and take a road-trip, buy a car, gamble in a casino, get lost in the desert, etc. To me, the images and associations that inevitably rise in these conversations, whether connected to film, literature, or some other medium, seem always to circle around some kind of intangible center -- a myth of sorts, residing within the western expanses of my country. So...wishing to probe this phenomenon further, but choosing to avoid the pretense of critical analysis, I present to you THE AMERICAN DREAM PROJECT
In this project, I would like to research the American Dream and the idea of Freedom, and I invite you to help me. I imagine a group of people from all over the world simultaneously descending in an uncoordinated fashion, upon the southwestern United states, sometime during the months of June and July of 2011, and following the bizarre idea they have always had about going to the USA.
This is an artistic project with no funding, no coordination and no plan.
Step 1:
Show up. During these two months, arrive somewhere in the South-Southwestern United states (Arizona, Nevada, California, Utah, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana). Figure out your own transportation. Communicate by mobile phone, internet or smoke signal. Wander from town to town, state to state, canyon to canyon. Hit the open road, spend your time in UFO-themed diners, try to break into secret military prisons, visit the world's largest non-stick frying pan, find the family of Eleanor Bauer in New Mexico, go camping.
Coordinate your plans as you go, do as you wish. Travel in caravan, take buses together, stay under the stars for one week, split up and travel alone. Plan to meet again in Carson City, go south and cross the boarder, spend midnight at the Oasis, do drugs at Burning man, be hippies and/or buy a gun and go shoot into the wind, find a school bus and travel as a group, join a cult. Go in a car with no roof. Spend your time together or alone for the entire period. Find a way to finance it yourself. Use your savings, paint Nike on your car for corporate sponsorship, or make up a dossier and get some fancy institutional support. This is not an equal-opportunity project, but equality is an American myth as well. You can either make all sorts of complex plans, or you can just find a way to get a ticket, get a visa and go.
Step 2:
Document it somehow....photos, video, text, sound recording, interviews....upload or link your documents to this AMERICAN DREAM PROJECT webpage and/or blog (to evolve).
Step 3:
We see what happens. Maybe there is a step 3 or maybe not...
And finally...
This project has no central support. It is not critical or rigorous in its methods. It must and should operate on the level of myth, of misunderstanding, of various interpretations of this nebulous American Dream and its particular notion of Freedom.
Tell your friends. Anyone can participate. For now, I just want to see if it looks possible that a loosely coordinated action like this might take place and what it would bring if all documentation connected or linked to this webpage and to a blog. Who knows, maybe this will become a great project...Or maybe it will just be nothing more than that trip you always wanted to take.
"Maybe we need to think more pathological, and I am talking about having visions, bizzare utopias, distant stars, travels to the core of the earth. I think there is a strong sense of danger when reality steps on the scene and gets things organised" - Georg Hobmeier (on the future of Sweet and Tender Collaborations)
"The future is unwritten" - Terminator 2 (on Georg Hobmeier)
For now, please just add your name to the list of participants below if you are interested in this (or names of friends who you know are interested). Don't worry, it is not a commitment, just a Wiki.
Tommy Noonan, Murielle Elizeon, Thomas Jeker, SuMi Jang, António Pedro Lopes, Tim Darbyshire, Hajime Fujita, Gui Garrido, Koen Vandendriessche , Dani Brown
