“While you are wondering if you know me , I am strolling through the city with a newspaper. Are you following? I am crossing the square, and turning the corner. I haven’t yet read the paper. I’ll propably use it this evening as a place-mat or else. I’ll swat mosquitoes with it. The newspaper gives me a refernce point. It’s a prop that gives me a role in a city fulll of passers-by. “ (Maria Barnas)

Somewhere in between an alternative travel guide, a manual for writing film scenarios and a criminal investigation method, the book ‘Any Resemblance to Existing Persons is Purely Coincidental ‘ (Stories of Mr. Wood) aims at providing its users with a tool for mapping alternative urban routes and inventing personae that, in their turn highlight the absurd and absolute nature of the very concept of border – whether this latter is geographical or of any other kind. As much as film characters are said to be fictitious, to which extent are we sure that our own identity is not in itself a fiction, a construction? Just as writers and investigators do, isn’t everybody constantly inventing stories and narratives that make sense of the world and of others? And what is the existential price the Other pays for existing as an entity conceptually unbound to one’s own identity? On the other hand, in an increasingly globalized world, the city has become most people’s natural environment. Yet, the question asked by Van Dam and Stig would be less ‘In which city are we living?’ than ‘Which city are we allowing to exist? What kind of city is living through us?’ Together Van Dam and Stig challenge the usual notions of what constitutes a genre, a reality, and an identity. They do so in order to insinuate the possibility of change; for, if we acknowledge our responsibility in creating our own reality, we might as well feel empowered to change it.

mit einem Text von Maria Barnas (englisch)