CHINESE IS A PLUS

Sylvie Boisseau's and Frank Westermeyer's videos and installations often revolve around the questions of community and inclusion as well as ostracism and the investigation of the performativity of identity and its constitution in language. In CHINESE IS A PLUS (2008), which we recently added to the program of arsenal distribution, they follow the participants of two chinese language courses, on the one hand children of chinese immigrants who want to improve their Chinese skills, on the other german adults, who learn Chinese as a foreign language. A recurrent figure in Westermeyer's & Boisseau's work is F., who serves as a kind of "neutral model of the self". While in CHINESE IS A PLUS F. takes on the part of an observer, in MOI VU PAR … (1999) his identity is put together through the images that others have of him and MY FAMILY AND I asks the question "What if I had been some other parents' son". In the Black Box we show JOIN A WORLD OF 150 MILLION FRENCH SPEAKERS – A VIDEO WITH LE GROUPE DU MERCREDI, CHICAGO (2005/2008), a "living sculpture" of the french speaking community in Chicago. (10.12.)