The Sun Is Still in My Eyes. Reflecting on the Constructiveness of Life

This article has the intention to build bridges between art, politics, and organizational work, by scrutinizing the process of identity construction (with its stages of selecting, compiling, and re-presenting) between the author and the artist in a recent movie project. Exploring a co-constructed biography as a film collage, we introduce a practice of coexistence that goes beyond the discourse of essence and establishes a surface zone where the self is transcending its narrowing borders of self-assessment and gets in touch with the other. This brings us to a second layer, where the article is about the aesthetics of mediation and how this detour of mediation helps us to talk and reflect about ourselves in new ways—also and especially in organizational contexts—protecting participants from becoming vulnerable targets in the dominant discourse when the workshop is over and the drive of the intervention fades out. The common ground of this practice is called externalization, focusing on inspiring relations instead of the core content, subject, and problem and embracing the irritation when witnessing ourselves performed by others. Taking serious the constructiveness of life, we learn to decipher even the treasures we find in the opaque rooms of our biographies as invitations to open new windows into the commonly owned possibility land and raising the question how this playful and dynamic approach to personal identification can also transform the way we deal with corporate identity in a world of permanent change.