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the expert, Part 1, 2006
Wallpainting, Projection
Sofie Thorsen
In 1962 the Danish Ministry of foreign affairs established the Danish International Development Assistance, Danida, with the purpose to coordinate the Danish development aid. During the following 50 years, Denmark sent out so-called "experts" to work in Danish and international projects in a number of developing countries.
The experts left Denmark with certain expectations and ideas about the culture they would meet. They applied very different strategies in the encounter with the local situation. After having returned back home to Denmark, they had to re-integrate their individual and specific experiences into their Danish biography, and to mediate their experiences into the Danish context, which mostly had little more than a generalised image of the places where the experts had been.
«the expert, Part 1» is the first part of the larger project «The Expert» which looks at these strategies of dealing with being a privileged alien, with a focus on central Africa. The project works with the image production and the notions about the African that have been produced on a public and semi-public level around former experts.
«the expert, Part 1» deals with the approach to the local African architecture. It is staged at a world bank secondary school in Zambia, and juxtaposes the building of a pavilion in a teachers garden with a assembly hall in the school.
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Sofie Thorsen
the expert, Part 1
(2006) |
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