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Black Benz Race

The Blackbenz Race was outlined as a semi fictional car race starting from Zurich, with deviations to London and The Hague to Bari, Tirana, Tetovo, Pristina and return to Zurich, traversing roads which were used as support corridors during the Balkan War in Kosovo.
Since the end of the nineties Kosovo Albanian migrants, the second largest foreign population in Switzerland, have been heavily discriminated in the mass media as violent illegal racers on the Swiss roads. The banalities of black limousines as heavily coded signs are referring to political, economical and criminal contexts provoking different reactions and affects in the translocal space reaching from desire, admiration, to dazzle and contempt.
Migration contexts cannot enter visible into the focus of a highly regulated global city spaces like Zurich, a network node which prefers to visualize its status within economic networks but not through migration ones.

Invisible Race?

The BlackBenz Race was forced to adapt to the logics of the political coded and highly regulated spaces of European migration. Until now it was not possible to start the race throughout Europe, it is only possible to organize fragments of the race, test cases in certain areas.
The BlackBenz Racing drivers become visible in public space while disappearing immediately inside the dense white fog of the burning tyres, dissolving their fictive presence at European territory: Most of them without acces to Schengen Visa, performing a wild standstill, addressing their immobility concerning the translocal European space



http://www.blackbenz.ch

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