Premio Combat Prize

When in 1882 the American poetess Emily Dickinson wrote “Those Dying Then”, the poem that lent its name to this video , she was deeply moved by a quandary she couldn’t solve: whether the indiscriminateness of who will die and the absence of a God ought to be accepted as an immutable given or not. Dickinson and Mares are united by an urge to constantly analyse the key questions of life, looking death straight in the eye because of its very veracity, however they remain in tumult because of its sheer unpredictability. Both, Dickinson and Mares, paint their soul images of unprotected nakedness, happiness, suffering and hope out of wilful, free and self-assured art.
Andreas Mares refreshes Emily Dickinson’s poetry by taking a contemporary perspective that transports the viewer into the summer of 2015 when the entire world was confronted with shocking scenes of unending migratory flows. With a sensitivity that is typical for him Mares has processed the events in a time of quiet and reflexion into a video, decidedly opposed to a society of mass culture which shamelessly markets world events and daily chronicles for the wide screen. Thus Emily’s messengers, three children, Emil, Mia and Paula, sleeping to the sound of the sea reach us; at a certain moment the three tumble from sleep into oblivion. Paralysis and agony, callousness towards other worlds which do not form part of our reality and loss of common values are the guidelines that Mares transforms into poetic, cruel and bold images. Metaphors that stand for the loss of an innocence that only lives in a child’s soul and at the same time for the ethical task of an artist, e.g. to detect the signs of the times, to bring them to mind and to act as a signpost; and simultaneously document these signs to make sure that the inconceivable may never happen again. ( Beth Vermeer).