Tonight:
Pegasus Project – the beginning of a journey
Final preparations for Press Day in Frankfurt / Main

Tomorrow:
April 18th 2015 at 2 pm
Landing of the Pegasus
Senckenberg Museum Frankfurt / Main
Official starting of the Pegasus blog  http://www.art-pegasusproject.com

For the Future:
All humans are genetically endowed with a longing for safety, security, and protection. The German performance artist Mia Florentine Weiss has spent the past 15 years asking people on all continents about their own private sanctuaries: “What is your place of protection?” She has incorporated their answers into a multi-media installation that shows us how natural catastrophes, political crises, and one’s own personal fate can instantaneously change an individual’s life. And how threatened we humans actually are in today’s global world.http://www.art-protector.com
The “Pegasus-Project” that will be presented to the larger public during Venice-Triennale at the Palazzo Albrizzi (home to the German-Italian Culture Association Venice, ACIT) deals with these places of protection and with the increasing threats they face in out geopolitical reality. With her room installation, Mia Florentine Weiss takes aim at the condition of exclusion and the worldwide migration triggered by hunger and terror. And she’s found a strong metaphor for it: a white wingèd steed behind a barbed-wire fence. The sculpture stands poised with its powerful wings, which the trailblazing artist assembled out of the various objets trouvés she brought with her from her worldwide performances. Here, the refuge turns into a prison, the wings get entangled in the barbed wire, the longing for freedom ends in entrapment. The installation is her political statement: THE HUMAN BEING – BORN INTO THIS WORLD – AT HOME ON EARTH – DESTROYED BY HIS OWN CURSE!

Before sweeping into ‘lagoon city’ for a couple of months, “Pegasus” travelled along the edges of Europe, in Turkey and Greece, where, on his journey from the artist’s atelier in Frankfurt, the steed followed the paths of illegal immigrants who sail across the sea to Europe. The magic metaphor of “Pegasus” was what prompted the artist to set off on her performance odyssey—a performance that addresses central questions regarding national borders, refugees, and expulsion due to political and economic factors.

After arriving in Venice, “Pegasus” will circumnavigate the canals of the city in a wooden boat during the Preview of the Biennale di Venezia from the 6th to the 8th of May, 2015—a appeal for help in the wake of an ongoing human catastrophe in the Mediterranean; thereafter, Pegasus will take temporary refuge at the Palazzo Albrizzi—70 years after the end of World War II—before travelling on to the Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt on the 12th of November, 2015, where Pegasus will again spread his wings in admonition.