About Negotiation

Zurich-based artists Stefan Baltensperger and David Siepert explore social, cultural, and political themes in their work, providing fresh insight into existing relationships and so opening them up to renegotiation. In the video About Negotiation (2014), they meet a migrant worker newly arrived in a Chinese city and offer to buy all of his belongings. With their neo-colonial and immoral offer, Baltensperger and Siepert provoke a negotiation of emotional and material values as well as of cultural principles. The actual event serves as a pretext for establishing a space where debate can take place. How do individuals define themselves in a globalized world, and what are the cultural implications in the term “value?” The English subtitles for the negotiation – between the artists, the interpreter, and the migrant worker and his partner –reveal yet another layer of discourse on cultural and linguistic differences.