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Import-Export Life Conditions

installation, mixed media, 2005-2006



What is the value of a body in Mexico City, a city with 20 million inhabitants in the tightest of places? What is the value of her own body in such a city? These are Witt’s initial questions in the project “Import- Export Life Conditions”. For an exhibition in Mexico City she picked up topics by two Mexico based artists, and reworked them in her own context. Francis Alys took pictures of street vendors pushing and pulling their merchandise on carts. Their input of physical labor stays in direct relation to the economic value of their goods. Witt bought one of these carts from a street vendor and brought it to Germany. What is the value of such an object, wrested from its original economic situation and replaced by another application of value? Santiango Sierra paid Cuban prostitutes to tattoo a line on their backs for the amount of a dose of heroin. Anna Witt continued this line on her own back. If I were to track these women down, and stand in line with them, we would produce one line, one picture. This begs the question: Do our bodies have the same currency?

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