Location: Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam - February 2001
The title Wild Zone was not chosen by us. It was the title of a group show at Rotterdam’s Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, where we were asked to contribute a new work. When we heard the title, we remembered a text by Deleuze in which he describes a ‘Wild Zone’ as a group of outlaws who live outside society. According to his text, those within society want to keep outlaws out because they are scared of them. This fear is caused by the outlaws’ roles a prediction of all kinds of things which can go wrong within a society. For that reason, society actually needs outlaws. Outlaws enable society to become aware of its own profound problems. The way that I am explaining Deleuze’s theory simplifies it, but essentially we wanted viewers of Wild Zone to despise us and feel scared of us. We wanted the reaction to be as negative as possible.
Source: L.A.Raeven in conversation with Ana Finel Honigman, Saatchi Online, April 18, 2008
This installation is made possible by the Mondriaan Fonds