The role of public art – Statement by Sislej Xhafa
«The role of Public art is to generate symbolic imageries. Nevertheless, this condition is more complicated when the park is located in a neighborhood predominantly constituted of political refugees and foreigners. For an expatriate, the relationship between Meaning and Form is not obvious at best and dislocated at worst.
In this regard the project plays with the multiple potentials of associative meanings, continuously slipping between images, forms, symbols and functions. The title Y is participating in this logic of potential displacement of meanings, representing the project graphically – almost as a hieroglyph – rather than through conventional language – it is not the first letter of a word describing the project. The letter, in English, is also a sound, which represent in itself a question: “why”. Or in German Ypsilon, Italian Ipsilon, Albanian Ypsilon…
This slippage of multiple meaning, for viewer transplanted through different culture – as much from the Balkans refugee, than the influence of English on our European culture – is illustrated by the project, where the slingshot symbol of street resistance is radically changing scale and function. Should the new sculpture be interpreted as a symbol or as a functional swing structure, or a park lamp, as a present element of comfort and amusement or as a memory of resistance and conflict? Its ambiguous translucent materiality allows the object presence to be read differently depending on the position of the light, and the position of the viewer, varying from a solid during the day to a translucent light-emitting during the night.
The dislocation between image and Meaning is one of the great questions of our society since the cultural invasion of the television in the mid 60’s. The constitution of physical art objects expose the viewer to a dilemma between symbol, image, function, and allow each user to define its own meaning based on its own personal experiences. This is Y.» Sislej Xhafa
Wettbewerbsvisualisierung Y
