“My name is Klara Hobza, I’m diving through Europe” – the first film about Klara Hobza’s long-term project Diving Through Europe opens with these words. The undertaking is scheduled to last 25 to 30 years and envisages a crossing of the European continent, in stages, by water. That the projects seems megalomaniacal is also part of its attraction: the radical idea and the unconditionality of the action both encountering an absolute openness in the progress of the project.

There is something magnetically attractive about Klara Hobza’s undertaking which stimulates our thirst for knowledge and generates totally new insight. Like someone possessed, she enters repeatedly into new contexts, analysing, penetrating and then fastening her actions onto them. Be it diving through Europe, returning the Sturnus vulgaris (European starling) or communicating with people in New York through Morse code – it is always a hopeless situation which demands a resolution or alternative solutions. As a result, new discoveries and surprises are just as inherent in a work as the preoccupation with a motif over a longer period of time. This gives the artist the opportunity to engage meticulously with the topic, and the recipient of the works the chance to become submerged in their cosmos and drift through a network of major and minor tributaries. Whatever about their apparent hopelessness, Klara Hobza’s projects demand concentration on the essential and an amateurish-modest implementation, both of which are touching. Her strength is to want the impossible, but to implement it by elementary-uncontrived means.

On the occasion of the exhibition Erste Anzeichen der Schwerelosigkeit (First Signs of Weightlessness), a book introducing Klara Hobza’s work will be published by Distanz Verlag.

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