Description
The supporting publication for the award-winning Ulrike and Eamon Compliant, originally commissioned for the 53rd Venice Biennale by De La Warr Pavilion.
“This last decade, terrorism has been viewed through the prism of Islam, Manichean certainties, racial and linguistic divides. For Ju, Nick and I it seemed a good moment to revisit home grown terrorists who cannot be so easily distanced and whose legacy has recently become clearer. The Red Army Faction only officially dissolved in 1998, the same year as the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland.” – Blast Theory
Ulrike and Eamon Compliant starts in Palazzo Zenobio where you enter a wooden room, which has air holes drilled into it, and pick up a mobile phone. Over the next thirty minutes you receive a number of phone calls that lead you through the city, engaging you as either Ulrike or Eamon and prompting interactions.
Ulrike Meinhof (1934 -1976) was a German journalist who became notorious through her membership of the Red Army Faction. Her fraught relationship with fellow members Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin may have contributed to her suicide while awaiting trial in prison in 1976. Eamon Collins (1954 – 1999) was an active member of the IRA’s Nutting Squad, in charge of internal security, before becoming an informer on whose evidence large numbers of the IRA were prosecuted. He was murdered in 1999.
The book is designed by John Hunter and contains a foreword by Alan Haydon, former director of De La Warr Pavilion, biographies of Ulrike Meinhof and Eamon Collins, full transcriptions of the calls received by the participants, an essay by Richard Grayson and an artist statement.
The Ulrike and Eamon Compliant DVD is also available to buy on Unbound.
Blast Theory, 2009. 46 Pages, paperback.
ISBN 9780954325817
