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2003 - Saloni M swims East

 

Lady Gaby

"In my last life I could get on top of the Eiffel Tower without wanting to jump off it, I could get on a plane and never experience jet lag, I could be in ten cities at once, I never had problems chewing, I never forgot a one-night stand and I always said hello to myself in the mirror because time was on my side."

(DorfDisco Profile, May 2003)

Gaby Bila-Günther

Gaby Bila-Günther is a Berlin-based young writer who has been labeled ‘oddly poetic’ and ‘flamboyant and upbeat’ by The Age newspaper in Melbourne, Australia (where she was based between 1995-2002); and labeled 'provocative' by The Pill paper in Prague, Czech Republic; blushing she asks - why?

Bila-Günther, originally from Romania, arrived in Berlin via Melbourne where she would regularly perform her poetry in laundromats, beauty parlors, elevators, and trams. Her tales stretch from the primitive paths of Eastern Europe where her encounters with gypsies are true memoirs, to the shores of inner cities where her anger about urban decline is fairly potent. Widely published, her spoken-word, poetry, short stories and nonfiction articles have appeared in journals, CD compilations, magazines and literature anthologies in Australia, Germany and England. As a radio journalist she conducted interviews for Melbourne’s community radio, 3CR's Accent of Women, a show about multicultural women’s issues. Since 1999 she began responding to her urban and cultural environment with photos, postcards and zines layered by text and poetry. In 1998 she graduated with a Diploma in Professional Writing and Editing at the Holmesglen Institute of Art & Technology in Melbourne, Australia.

She is part of Urban Art, a group of artists who initiate projects in public realms, and co-founder of Flush artists’ group, who spontaneously perform their work in public spaces such as lifts, launderettes, train platforms and moving trams. She has performed and showed text based works in Australia, Germany, Austria, Sweden and Czech Republic. In 2000 on a ‘moving tram’ she launched her self-published book Validate & Travel, poems about tram travels and in 2002 her own spoken word filled with ambient techno beats debut CD, Off the Main together with music producer ZOG. Recently together with fellow writer Jessica Falzoi she formed the Poets’ Party, site specific performances where spoken-words meet every other artistic medium.

Check Gaby Bila-Günther's website. Or email Gaby.


 

Who are the true Barbarians?
The Governments and the Elite Religions?

Thoughts and Notes by
Gaby Bila-Günther, Berlin 2003


A Global Religion

We believe that West is the best and that Christianity is the only religion worth believing in…

Legal, illegal, migrant, black workers, refugees, the stars from Hollywood and the rest of the world. These are the names defining the status of people these days.

We’ve lost our names and have become labels. Isn’t this wrong?


A World without Prejudices

New home, new borders with new orders, stamps, papers and foreign bureaucracy

Relocating means displacement, strange traditions placed upon your own

Where do you belong? Where is your new home? Are you accepted? Understood with open eyes, mind and soul?

Or treated like foreigners who steal taxpayers’ jobs and stick to their own? Whenever I come home I think of who I am


A world without borders

Political asylum divides people and creates hierarchies, drives people to desperate measures in order to be heard:

sawing up their lips, floating on sinking ships, digging up their graves prematurely.


‘What is your future dreaming?’

Photographs layered with poems and texts explore future dreaming.

Text meets images explore emotional journeys people have been awake through. Through texts and images I interpreted their journeys and dreams about new directions and better realities for the future.

What is your future dreaming? is an ongoing project since 2000 where I invited the public to respond with concepts, futuristic dreams, journeys and aims for a utopian and positive future. Their dreams were recorded inside a book all the way from Melbourne to Vienna, Berlin, Prague and recently Malmoe.

These dreams have and will address universal issues that cover important social and political concerns, which reflect the complexity of our societies.

Peace, Equality, Freedom, Journeys are their dreams.

Displacement, Abuse, Addictions are their fears.

I believe these images and the dreams recorded answer very well to ‘Who are the true Barbarians?’ as the quotes explore people’s fears and realities about living in this current barbaric world, filled with wars, exclusions of human rights, manifestations of cruelty abuse and political garbage the common people must endure.

ARTIST: Gaby Bila-Günther, August 2003



One day, down with terror in Barcelona

by Gaby Bila-Günther, Berlin 2003

Football hooligans and enthusiasts wear sombreros and drink cheap beer, mainly come from England, wearing red jocks on their heads you can usually pick them

They are loud and obnoxious and they can’t leave this city alone

The locals step on the other side but they know that hooligans mean business and souvenirs without a soul are sold on cheap corners and inside liquor stores

Vulgar football hooligans mainly from Great Britain laugh at street performers, spit on their props and crack themselves open at porn on the racks by nudging each other…

Oi…Oi…Oi

They drink huge amounts of beer but most of them are two pot screamers, scream after two pots

Like true Barbarians, they spit out Cockney vowels and become unconscious on the bitumen floor

Blockading the streets and our rights

Police smash heads with batons aimlessly at union members troubled by globalisation

Rocks fly in the name of justice and anarchists demand rights and yell out

ASSASSINOS! CRUEL BLOODY MURDERS

Police in black attire wear darkness in their heads, inside their fists they clutch on rage and terrorismus, behind their shields they hide ignorance and obedience to the government above

Specks of violence lay onto Barcelona’s streets, on our minds and inside our petrified kids

Helicopters take revenge and keep control from above

The football hooligans have fled home a long time ago to make time and space

For justice veterans who want a guilt free global economy with no terrorism, no borders, no armies or cops behind bullets and a currency exchange of their own

FUCK THIS BLOODY EURO..OUR WORLD IS NOT FOR SALE..MAKE SPACE NOT WAR…

They scream and they feel

They know people should mean more than profits

DOWN WITH TERROR IN BARCELONA!


© Gaby Bila-Günther 2003.

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