Lawrence Wells

Amerika, written between 1911-1914, was a fantasy projection of the idea of the United States from Kafka's perspective in Prague. Kafka's work operates as a metaphysical exploration of the human condition in which people are trapped in sadomasochistic power relations and unnamed bureaucrats can destroy lives with a flick of the pen. A nightmare world much like our own in which true justice remains elusive and man's search for meaning is often thwarted by powers beyond his control. In this world of old Europe, America, the proverbial “mansion on a hill”, seemed to many to be a place where these conditions could be overcome, where anything was possible, but Kafka's characters carry their baggage with them and find that even in the land of the free, cruelty abounds. America and the idea of America are basically the same, and they remain a blank canvas upon which we, much like Kafka, can project our ideas of this new world's possibility. This is the great strength of the American project, that it seems or seemed, at least until quite recently, to be a place of wide-open horizons and freedom in contrast to the stifling and calcified histories of Europe. As an American, I had to come to Prague and stay for many years before I began to understand this glittering promise of America, which acts as both an illusion and yet also as a living hope that longs for something different. Only Americans like me, it seems, make the mistake of leaving the country in search of what abounds there, an optimistic belief in the possibilities of the world. American expatriates are swimming against the stream, everyone else keeps trying to go there. But that is changing.

Despite having left, and despite this tragic Trump era which is hopefully drawing to a close, I haven't given up on the idea of America. I can't escape her anyway, as an immigrant I am reminded of my nationality, or at least otherness almost every day. These works from 2011 are my own fantasy projection of the idea of the United States from my perspective in Prague.

Contrasting two American archetypes, the astronaut and the indigenous Native American, in order to examine the tragic underpinnings of the colonialist technological project sometimes referred to as progress, although its legacy, we have come to learn, is global racism, alienation, and the climate emergency. This is the world so-called progress has made.

On one level, the figures inhabit an apocalyptic landscape lit by giant phallic candles in which sadistic rituals are enacted, with ever present skeletal figures of death looking on. On another level, the works are ironic, gently humorous surrealistic dream images. I wrote here about the promise of America. Americans, especially white Americans, like the land they come from, are full of contradictions. We carry all this colonialist, puritanical Jungian shadow material. These works were my attempt to shine a light on the active and actively-perverse American collective unconscious.

Christoph Brandl

“Fake Memories: The Lunatics are running the Asylum” is based on Karl Roßmann's experience in the unfinished novel Amerika by Franz Kafka. I developed a series of photographic works from topics I identified in the novel. The title of each work reflects one of those topics.

Lina Bertucci

AMERIKA IN THE BARDO

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

~ Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks

Uncertainty is the zeitgeist of the moment. This work is a metaphor for our nation as it emerges from the isolation of the Covid lockdown and confronts a critical election. It explores the impermanent and the illusory nature of phenomena.

The Bardo, in Tibetan Buddhism, is the intermediate state of existence where consciousness travels before it is reborn. It is an experience of being between death and rebirth, caught in an in-between, liminal state.

I shot this work as New York City emerged from isolation - into an Amerika forever changed - something had died, suspended in a transitional realm, dwelling in the Bardo.

The silhouettes of passersby, trees, and branches seemed to personify the loss, with stark, ghost-like figures and fragmented trunks and limbs. These cast shadows became symbolic for the shadow self of our nation.

Amerika today like the Bardo beings are both nascent, oscillating between the realities of despair and hope, isolation and connection, loss and transcendence, form and illusion.

In the end, there is an absence of what we thought was there. Things don’t live outside of us, but inside of us... constantly changing, moment by moment.

“Impermanence is not just an illuminator of loss. It is an illuminator of newness, the ever-unfolding present moment and its creativity.”

~Pema Khandro Rinpochei

Zvi Tolkovsky

" Say Joe, what do you recon is a height of stupidity?"....

"Give me a moment to think....What is your height?"

Brant Kingman

I spent much of the summer of 2020 trying to make sense of my observations of the protests following the killing of George Floyd. I visited the smouldering remains of scores of more than 250 structures destroyed by arson during the protests. I submitted some of these protest paintings to the Isolation Collection when they called for work for their Description of a Struggle show earlier this year. Then in August I went up to the North Shore of Lake Superior and spent two weeks hiking. I was not prepared for what I saw. On a miles long segment of the North Shore Trail I saw tens of thousands of dead pine trees. Most were spruce and balsams less than 30 feet tall. I had hiked the section of the trail where I saw the dead trees a few years ago and all were alive. Areas of the trail that had been permanently shaded previously, now had sunlight filtering to the ground through dead branches and local deciduous plants (like thimbleberries) were beginning to grow. I'm not sure what precisely killed the trees, but I realized that warmer weather was probably involved. Coniferous forests were changing to deciduous forests. Centuries of consistency were being overturned. It immediately struck me that the protests were like the splash made in the water by throwing a rock into the ocean, but global warming was like a hurricane coming ashore. Then came the fires in the Western United States. I realized this is the true storm that's coming. It’s a firestorm. This firestorm is a harbinger of the enormous change that is about to upset harmony all over the world. And it’s caused by global warming.

Just as the assignment to submit work responding to Kafka’s Description of a Struggle seemed to be prescient of the George Floyd protests, the assignment to submit art relevant to Kafka’s novel Amerika seems equally prescient. Here’s why: The essence of Amerika is based on a short story Kafka wrote called The Stoker. This story is the autobiographical account of Kafka’s meeting with the man who was the stoker of the boiler on the ship that brought him to America. The stoker was the man who fed fuel to the flames that delivered Kafka to America. America was the promise land. So in Amerika, fire is the catalyst that enables transition to the new world, the promised land. There is a subplot in Amerika which is Kafka’s identification with downtrodden black men. This subplot metaphorically connects the plight of police brutality felt today and the fires of these protests, also the flames of these fires connect to the wildfires sweeping across the west here in America overturning centuries of consistency and fuelling a transition to a new world.

THE STOKER

In this pastel, we see the two main themes of Kafka’s Amerika, that of the stoker of the flames and the down trodden black man with whom Kafka identifies compressed into one defiant gesture of anger at domination and rebellion from it.

THE SURVIVOR

The Survivor is a metaphorical image of ourselves. We who can read this are the sole survivors of a world on fire. Though we may feel grateful to have survived, we feel isolated from the familiar by the storm of flames charring our environment beyond recognition. And we recognize the deep threat to life as we once knew it. This soul-level insecurity fuels other changes in our social structure. Unfortunately, we believe the threat comes from our fellow citizens, the ones with power, the ones who have what we do not. This is a misperception. Our shared insecurity comes from the disintegration of our social agreements and our expanded awareness that our social agreements themselves were flawed. This new perception is what inhibited protection by law enforcers in Minneapolis. I personally investigated what happened by talking with tenants of unburned buildings adjacent to burned ones. I discovered that during the first several days of most intense arsonist activity, police did not respond to calls for help. A local food co-op survived because some of it’s own members armed with assault rifles stood guard all night. Across the street a record store survived because the owner and friends stayed up all night armed with baseball bats. The looting and burning of the 3rd Precinct Police Station okayed by our Mayor. And, strangely, no one has even inquired about all the weapons that were stolen. What did it mean that law enforcement in Minneapolis couldn’t protect its own home base? The only conclusion I can come to is that authorities considered the very laws which imbued them with power to no longer be valid. Yes, little remains of the forest in which we, the survivors, once stood. We who have survived dominate the burned out landscape around us. As we look out over the charred stumps we must determine how do we reseed? How do we create a comfortable new living environment fair to all?

SUNSET OF AMERICA

This is a still shot of a painting used as a projection screen. It is a painting of a smokey, molten sunset over burned hills in the western United States. As I stared at the twisted shapes of the burned trees I’d painted (from my own experiences and newscasts), I noticed they made me think of other images. I decided to seek out representations of the images I was imagining and project those images on the scene. What I realized I was creating was an image not of a sunset in or over America, but the Sunset of America. In other words, this sunset signifies the beginning of the end of America’s world dominance through endeavours powered by greed and fear and the ascension of mindful awareness as the new power base.

ARRIVAL OF THE ALCHEMIST

The Arrival of the Alchemist is dominated by two main figures both of which are surrounded by a myriad of shadows, reflections and illusions. In the left canvas of this diptych, we, the author of our own experience, see ourselves as the black man, sacrificed saviour, projected on the sail and mast of the boat in which he has just arrived on Amerika's shore. The prow of the boat rests on the beach where an indistinct figure has started a fire that casts long shadows. The stern still rests in waters beneath whose surface we see frightening images. In both the dark yet-to-be-explored promised land and the sea we find reflections of our own presence. On the right is the hooded Alchemist with a raven on his shoulder tending the flames of a fire bursting from a chimera. A chimera is defined as: 1. (In Greek mythology) a fire-breathing female monster with a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail. 2. a thing that is hoped or wished for but in fact is illusory or impossible to achieve. Amerika may be a second sort of chimera. One of its rear cloven hooves and both of its front claws pin down the neck of a prostrate black man lying at the foundation of the illusion burning above him.

KRISTEEN YOUNG

ft. David Bowie

American Landfill, the song, is a re-creation, re-imagining, re-production of a song I wrote and recorded in the aughts (called Saviour). It is a song about over-indulgence and arrogance at every level. I wrote it as a duet for David Bowie and myself (after he attended one of my shows) and I was lucky that he loved the song and agreed to record it with me. Unfortunately, at the time, when we shopped it around to labels no one was interested in me (“we’ve already got a girl on our roster”) and we were told that David Bowie was “irrelevant”. But, as we know, time changes perspective.

Last year (2019) I started thinking about remaking the song because, frankly, I thought it was too good of a song to languish in the nothingness of a 2004 self-release. Hardly anyone had heard it. I asked the extremely talented producer, Justin Raisen, to remake it with me. And he said “yes”.

Initially American Landfill, the song, was supposed to be released on Record Store Day in April 2020. But the pandemic pushed this, and most everything else, back. This enabled me, gave me time, to make the video. I’d only started making videos a year prior. I’m not an extremely tech savvy or tech loving person. I’m tactile. So, I’ve been easing myself into the video making world. I’m still not at the point of using PROFESSIONAL tools. I shot the American Landfill video (as with all my prior videos) on my iPhone and edited it in iMovie using a couple of video apps (like Video Leap) for some effects. Since we were in pandemic lockdown at the time….the items used in the video were things I already had in my apartment…or apartment building: Literally (or litter-ally) “trash". Also in this time period (March and April 2020) people were talking about how the Earth seemed to be repairing itself because of the much needed break of human interaction. The birds came back to New York City and ...dare I say….the aroma outdoors was….fresh??? This informed much of the content of the video. What is landfill? What do we treat as landfill? What is REALLY landfill? Are people the same as our trash?

Rosemary Rollins

My take on this subject is straightforward inspiration by the Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel Amerika.

He himself was inspired by photographs of places and people of Amerika as he never visited New York or any other part of Amerika during his life. I found few old photos on internet that were supposedly direct inspiration for his novel to him, and I used some of those pictures for the creation of my painting. Just as Franz Kafka never just described the photographic reality but gave it new twist, I also approached the subject freely. What I wanted to point out most are the points of novel I can relate to. The theme of immigration and sliding down the social ladder. As I myself emigrated from Czech Republic to UK all alone, I can feel with the struggle of young Karl who was sent to Amerika by his parents without support. Kafka in his novel touched the subject of racism in America when Karl in his new workplace accepted the name Negro. On one photograph that inspired this amazing writer is a dead black man hanged on a tree. Under the tree is a group of white men with cowboy hats.

On my painting I used the name Karel instead of Karl because Karel is the Czech form of the same name and it’s also my father’s name. In the painting I wrote it on the Karl’s suitcase which in the novel had been lost by Karl at one point. It’s been also all that Karl had.

The statue of liberty holding a sword is very interesting image or idea which is used in the novel by Franz Kafka and I used it in my painting. The other parts of painting are blend of street view, sea view and ships and some sign of a lift-boy uniform inspired by old New York photographs.

Antonia Alexandra Klimenko

Katerina Barabasova

I first visited America when I was 26 years old. I’ve traveled over five months between the Washington state, California and a Hawaiian island called Kauai. Impressions of those times accompany and incite me till this day.