alienSaints

A dutchman living in Berlin, have been involved with art in one way or another all my life: writing, photography, painting, 3D collages from found objects, journalism, studied general literature at the university. Right now photoshop is my weapon of choice.

I am working as a freelance designer in Berlin, mostly web, some print and photo-editing. Doing some art too, making collages using pictures in my growing photo library. I put everything I shoot in there, and I shoot things because I imagine they could be useful for my art but I know I will use some of it for my designs, too.

Lately I have been busy photographing the city of Berlin (those old cemeteries they have here, amazing…) and shooting people. Am obsessed with a quote from J.G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough:

“A register of al the incarnate gods in the Chinese Empire is kept in the Li Fan Yüan or Colonial Office at Peking. The number of gods who have thus taken out a license is one hundred and sixty. Tibet is blessed with thirty of them, Northern Mongolia rejoices in nineteen and Southern Mongolia basks in the sunshine of no less than fifty-seven. The Chinese government with a paternal solicitude for the welfare of its subjects, forbids the gods on the register to be reborn anywhere but in Tibet.”

How on earth did we do that: create a bureaucracy out of gods living in our midst? It beats me. If I look at the western culture I can not but notice that somehow we seem to be in need of saints, living saints, maybe even living as saints. But how can we combine that with all the destruction that we – as a human species – are capable of creating? And somehow this all seems to go back to people who live outside the boundaries of the society. Then you could say that today’s pop stars are our modern saints. But also punks with their beautiful colored mohawks, tattoos and other body modifications. This tendency goes back a long time, way before christianity.

I have been raised an atheist – my family was atheist for at least 3 generations. Maybe that is why it is so hard for me to grasp this.

Right now my art and design website is at annomedia.com but before long (long overdue actually) it should appear at aliensaints.com