It isn`t healthy

It isn´t healthy

The close-up of the handle and lock of an iron gate opens Borjana Ventzislavova´s video It isn´t healthy. A woman´s voice is to be heard on the soundtrack postulating philosophical assertions: “The world is all, that is the case. The world is the totality of facts, not of things. The world divides into facts.” Accordingly, the iron gate would not be a thing, rather a fact (it is locked), just like the two boys who are playing football in the next shot, on the street in front of the house to which the gate belongs. But according to the same logic the entire video would be nothing other than a collection of facts and thereby the urgency of the question implied by the opening philosophical statements would only be confirmed: Does the world now divide into facts or rather does a world result from the totality of facts?
Borjana Ventzislavova escapes this logic of language philosophy through how the facts in her video avoid referring directly to a world and rather indicate a spatial and temporal constellation. The setting is the so-called Wittgenstein House, home to the Bulgarian Cultural Institute in Vienna since 1975. Ventzislavova shows people who work at the Institute, the super-intendant, the director, the employees, the cleaning lady, all going about the rounds of their daily activities while they speak sentences taken from the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The asynchronous synchronicity thereby established finds its spatial counterpart in the soccer game played by the boys who not only pass a ball but exchange contemporary (Bulgarian) political slogans. The slogans may well not be their own and therefore not facts, yet they are a means of recognizing as well as mistaking the world. (Vrääth Öhner)
Translation: Eve Heller


The Wittgenstein House, site of the Bulgarian Cultural Institute in Vienna, is the point of departure for an unconventional study of architecture, history and language. Through quotes from Wittgenstein, the institute is detached from its daily routine and confronted with the house’s history. In front of it, philosophy comes up against criticism of present­day Bulgarian politics: “Euro­Trash­Capitalism,” somebody remarks – and kicks a football.
Diagonale Catalogue