MOBILISTAN
Manaf Halbouni and Christian Manss declare the first mobile state in the limited space of a vehicle in 2021. The art project starts its first business trip on September 15th at Pariser Platz in Berlin and leads to the Mahalla Festival in Istanbul in the week of September 24rd to October 1st.
What is a state? What is its territory? Do we accept the way they are defined? Who will need to recognize us, besides us ourselves? These are questions that keep reappearing in history. A case in point is the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, a de facto state in the north of the island of Cyprus that is not recognized by the international community except for Turkey – but the state does in fact exist. And it is not the only one of its kind: There are South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Artsakh or Transnistria, to name but a few. And, as an example from the realm of art: there is the art collective NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst) that in 1992 declared their transformation from a collective into a state ("State in Time"). All examples show that to create facts, a declaration of sovereignty as a state is often sufficient, acceptance by some majority is not mandatory. Viewed objectively, a state is nothing more than a social administrative structure.

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