Weibel, Peter: Non-place. Freedom (2014)

plexiglass, mounted film letters
Gift of the artist, 2019

The work consists of a series of letters applied horizontally to the front and back of three rectangular transparent plexi-glass sheets. The characters are arranged in alphabetical order, with white letters on the side of the plexiglass closer to the viewer (recto) and black letters on the back (verso), so that the letter lines, written one below the other, contain one blank character per line, similar to letter puzzles. In place of the missing letters the plexiglass is perforated, where the absence of material reveals one word per plate, read from top to bottom: UTOPIA, SZABADSAG, DEMOKRACIA (utopia, freedom, democracy). The work uses letters of the Latin alphabet without accents, yet the holes (the lack of characters) spell out the words in the title in Hungarian. The letters that make up the three concepts relating to the human world are thus drawn from the absence of characters, revealing a strange, contradictory relationship between the meaning of the words and their feasibility. Two of the three concepts (freedom, democracy) are in a way interdependent, while utopia is linked to them as a possibility or a reality: are freedom and democracy mere utopias, a mere wordplay? The text, which emerges as a blank sign, a lack of signs, feeds back to the title of the work (Non-Place), which is also an ambiguous term. On the onehand, it expresses the actual nonlocality of words as components of linguistic signs (that it is precisely the character gaps that constitute words), and on the other hand, it refers to Marc Augé’s anthropological concept of locality (places and non-places). An important aspect in the work is the relationship between sign and signified: the artist plays with the meaning of the written sign while he removes the physical carrier of the written sign, the letter. József Készman