Cocktail Performance: Wildcard

Im Salon für Kunstbuch im 21er Haus – dem weltweit ersten Museumsshop, der als künstlerische Intervention geführt wird – inszeniert Bernhard Cella Dienstleistung und Unternehmertum als Grundlagen seiner künstlerischen Praxis.

Mit einer Lesung von: 
Walter Ego: Ich bin ein anderer

This book is a praise of failure and refusal. It goes against the paradigm to think positive and to present adequate and speaks about doubt, insecurity and weakness. In between of constant refusal but still not being able to realize oneself, we can meet Walter Ego. While taking a look into the abyss of his emotional state, he shares his drawings and notes that have come up during this process of radical self inquiry.

His story does not have a thread running through it connecting all its parts. His story has gaps and blank spaces to be filled again with new questions instead of answers. In that sense this book can be read as a palimpsest again and again, while retelling his permanent search for a way out without having a clear destination. This can go on forever until it all falls apart into fragments of the anti-hero who tries to withdraw and is never able to arrive.

In the end it deals with his overall strive toward the ability to love and to wish. His struggle is carried by a melancholic undertone, at some times subtle at others humorous, always intertwining with poetic and philosophical moments, shaped by a tireless longing for a resistive way of life beyond its instrumentality.
 
Walter Ego; the name says it all: „I fuck me up to save me. This is not a program!“

Walter Ego grew up in a very small provincal village of Austria close to the danube. He enjoyed being taught catholic and proletarian ideas mixed with rough farmers habits. He escaped to the city of  Vienna when he was older. Later he started to study art at the department of PsychoConceptualArtPractices because he had no permission for other universities. He finished some years ago. Never won a price, nor got any stipendia or fellowship, neither did a residency. 
He has never been ouside of Europe nor could he refer to longer residencies in other countries. That he has no gallery must probably not be mentioned. He is doing therapy now. A fortuneteller is currently telling him that he thinks too much. Occasionally he appears in public but he prefers to disappear and wander in emptiness lost in time without time.
Walter Ego is many: Petz, Prof. Haselmayer, Papa, Pedrito, Peter Haselmayer, Petrus, ...

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“They will admit you to the nut house.”
(„Do liefan´s di ein.“) His Mother