The history of the Amazing Citizens is a very long one. Only an excerpt can be reproduced here, but there are also some links that lead to further information.
The Amazing Citizens emerged as a concept in the first few years after the turn of the millennium. It was becoming increasingly clear in Western societies that the population would increasingly find themselves in a civil war. What was special at best was that this war was a secret one, one that – at the beginning – didn’t come with dead bodies in the streets. Nor was it an ideological war like that in young Spain under Franco, nor was it one of the so-called popular uprisings like those of the French Revolution or the American Wars of Liberation. But whether a house is taken away by economic decline and unfulfillable legislation or by a bomb, it amounts to the same thing.
Then and still people who call this war against the citizens as such, are named as cranks or idiots, at least as confused.
The respective contemporary art has always been a place for the social discourse that is so urgently needed. In the digital forum romanum there is no glad speech. It is too easy to filter what can be written and what should be read.
Art lags behind in terms of speed, but remains the winner in terms of its sustainability. Under favorable circumstances, paper lasts for more than 270 years, but the data storage of current cloud solutions certainly does not. If you ask a company about its history, it is often easy to document the time from 100 years ago, but if you ask about the last twenty, it becomes thin. Anyone who relies on the backup of data in the digital remains trapped in the digital and has to constantly copy and re-code. And yet everything comes to an end when the electricity no longer comes out of the socket.
The Amazing Citizens stand as a symbol for the citizen par excellence. The citizen as an idea is a full member of a society who has empowered himself and wants to live in harmony with his fellow citizens. He is basically an anarchist, even if he often refuses to use the word out of deluded ignorance. He doesn’t need a law to keep from murdering, he has no interest in wars. He is self-sufficient and his aim is the prosperity of his family and his projects. And he is well aware of the fragility of cohesion in human groups and how susceptible some are to the promises of demagogues. Only education can help, education that is nourished by the motivation of the growing youth and that is organized by the citizens themselves.
Despite all the difficulties, the citizen sticks to his own compass, his own morals, his ethics. And as faceless as he is today, he should be given a face here in art as an Amazing Citizen.
The “amazing citizens in dadaland” is a special edition related to a mail art project dadaland from Predrag Petrovic, a serbian artist living in Крагујевац. The paper was part of a 100 year old book. It is very fragile. Discover more about this book. This series is only available as part of the You are the artist! – bags, a limited edition of bags for the project social dada, available only here: CASAdelDRAGON, DeSouza Gallery, Bloom Gallery, Arteria Gallery Barcelona and Galerie Luzia Sassen.
When you hold such a citizen in your hands, you become part of this story, because basically it was and is always your own story that makes history. And the citizen in your hand is also a symbol that you are recognized, perceived for what you are, an amazing citizen in civil wars.