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I Didn´t Want to Get Involved

_ I Didn´t Want to Get Involved _ 200x360 cm 2016 Fotografie auf Natura PP Bannermaterial_

The work “ I Didn´t Want to Get Involved ” refers to a lack of civil courage.

The term civil courage was first used in France in 1835 as “courage civil”, the courage of the individual to make his own judgment, later (Le Gall 1898) as “courage civique”, civic courage.

The starting point of the work is the murder of 29-year-old Kitty Genovese, who was attacked and subsequently raped on her way to her home in New York in 1964.

The crime took place in two different places in her home and lasted about half an hour.

According to the police report at the time, at least 38 people from her house and the neighborhood noticed and observed the attack, but no one came to the young woman's aid.

Due to the peculiarity of this murder case, psychological investigations were initiated and a new term was coined:

the “Kitty Genovese Syndrome” or also called “bystander effect”.

This concerns the emergence of failure to provide assistance, more precisely: “the phenomenon of apparent inaction as part of a group”.

The title of the installation is the statement of one of the witnesses to the incident when asked why he did not come to the victim's aid. The three-part installation photo work shows images of sexual assault, violence, terror, war and the environment found on the Internet from the perspective of a peephole. Real holes were also added to the photographic "peephole" through which the viewer can look at the statements of inactive witnesses to an event, recorded and written down by the police. When looking through some of the holes, mirrors reflect the viewer's eye.

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