Issue 2 - The Social Landscape

THE SOCIAL LANDSCAPE ISSUE TWO

ART/E/FACT

ISSN 2048-0946

FROM THE EDITORS Welcome to the second issue of ART/E/FACT. This issue is primarily created in response to the large amount of submissions about community work, urban planning and development studies that we received during the editing process for Issue 1: On Dialogue. Our mission as an open source, media-based publication is to further unravel existing mediations between the social sciences and the arts, as well as facilitate new ones.

Thus, to continue a dynamic dialogue between art and anthropology, this second issue of ART/E/FACT is called The Social Landscape; an inquiry into the connection between the individual, community and locale.

It is palpable that our own perception of a place – as artists, practitioners of the social sciences, and members of our own communities - is an experience that goes far beyond the breadth of a single perspective. In the interdisciplinary discourses touched upon by our contributors, we have attempted to facilitate an exchange of local knowledge and global theoretical analysis; each wholly unique in their approach. With this issue we do not wish to provide a definition of what the social landscape is. Rather, we

aim to present examples of what a social landscape can be, examining the connections between the social and the geographic. The character of each landscape contains an essence that is borne in its people, encouraging us to embrace local knowledge in a global context.

This issue of ART/E/FACT interprets diverse perceptions of social landscapes: Gareth Doherty’s discussion of the significance of the colour green in Bahraini architecture and design; Chris Barry’s photo essay on the vibrancy and agency of Aboriginal life in Alice Springs, Central Australia; Kenneth A. Balfelt’s practical experiences working with relocating socially marginalised people in the centre of Copenhagen; Katrin Bruder’s photographic critique of passive media consumption; Eva La Cour’s inquest into the tourist industry in Longyearbyen, Norway; Stefania Strouza’s exploration of modern ecology through installation art. As our contributors have revealed to us the diverse interpretations of the space wherein the social and the geographical connect, we hope you will find this to be an interesting journey through these social landscapes.

- Simone Cecilie Grytter & Ely Rosenblum

TABLE OF CONTENTS

01

THERE’S MORE TO GREEN THAN MEETS THE EYE Green Urbanism In Bahrain DR. GARETH DOHERTY

07

POOL Performance As Social Agency DR. CHRIS BARRY

21

RELOCATING An Interview with Kenneth A. Balfelt KENNETH A. BALFELT

25 27

ENCOUNTER

31

T he C ondition O f ( I m ) P ossibility

KATRIN BRUDER

THE TOUR E VA L A C O U R

STEFANIA STROUZA

01

T he r e ’ s M o r e to G r een than M eets the E y e G reen U rbanism in B ahrain

WORDS & PHOTOS by

D R . G a r eth D ohe r t y H A RVA R D G R A D UAT E S C H O O L o f D E S I G N

02

A s a colour, green does not exist by itself: it is a mix of blue and yellow. Colours, though, have subjective boundaries, and the point at which what we consider blue becomes green, or green becomes yellow, depends to a large extent on the culture and language of the perceiver, as well as the context.

Anthropologists Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, writing in 1969, speak of the relativity of colour across cultures; still, they found that a word for green almost always exists, even when a word for blue does not.1 It can be surprisingly challenging to identify and describe green in its own right, independent of objects that happen to be green. Alex Byrne and David Hilbert outline four main positions on colour in philosophy: eliminativists, the authors say, see colour as a sort of illusion; for dispositionalists “the property green (for example) is a disposition to produce certain perceptual states: roughly the disposition to look green”; physicalists, such as Byrne and Hilbert, regard green as a property of the selective reflection of incident light; and meanwhile, primitivists agree that objects have colours but do not agree that the colour is identical to the physical property of the object that is coloured.2 But green is more than colour; it is vegetation, open space, a type of building or urbanism, an environmental cause, a political movement, “the new black.” The colour of photosynthesis and chlorophyll, green is mostly regarded as life-giving, bountiful, and healthy (except when referring to the tone of human skin). Talk-show hosts relax in “green rooms” and doctors’ scrubs are often green (to contrast with red). As an adjective, green can mean naiveté, or something not yet ripe.

The Bahrain islands are the smallest, densest, and proportionately the greenest (in the landscape sense) of the Arab states of the Persian Gulf.

Ten miles wide by thirty miles long, the kingdom is smaller than London or New York and just about the same size as Singapore. As the city-state transitions to an intensely urban landscape driven by the demands of a growing population and limited land mass, the hues of Bahrain’s greenery are changing and with them the ecologies of society, politics, and infrastructure with which green is inherently intertwined. The gray-greens of the native date-palm plantations are being replaced with bright grass greens of roadside shoulders, roundabouts, and the lawns of new residential and leisure developments. To have greenery in such an intensely urban environment is not very green from an environmental perspective, given the resources often required to sustain it. Bahrain represents an extreme example of the impulse for urban greenery, an impulse that is both temperate and global.

Bahrain literally means “Two Seas” in Arabic. One sea, the Gulf, separates Bahrain from Iran on the east and Saudi Arabia on the west (to which it is linked by a 20-mile causeway). The other freshwater “sea” springs up from the Damman aquifer, which originates aboveground in Saudi Arabia and

flows eastward, running under the sea and perforating the seabed around the Bahraini archipelago, as well as the land, with a plethora of springs.3 As a result, Bahrain gained its regional importance disproportionate to its land area largely due to these sweetwater springs that sustained its greenery and its urbanism.

Though often considered an antidote to the urban, in arid environments green, through cultivated areas, often indicates the presence of human settlements. The villages that punctuated Bahrain’s greenery were sustained for millennia by the freshwater springs and orchards and vegetable gardens that existed between and within the gray-green date-palm groves, until the pressures of increasing population and development of the latter part of the twentieth century upset that relationship. Today Bahrain uses much of its water reserves on irrigating its remaining agricultural areas, which produce only 11 percent of the country’s food and less than 0.05 percent of the national income. This agriculture is a remnant of a time when the country was self-sufficient, albeit with a much smaller population; Bahrain has grown from 70,000 in the 1920s to more than 1 million residents today.

A complex system of irrigation channels, qanats, were fed by the freshwater springs and water distributed according to detailed customary irrigation laws that ensured fair access to water by farmers.4 “The Adhari Pond starves the nearby and feeds the far beyond” goes a Bahraini proverb referring to the irrigation system that because of topography and the pull of gravity supplied distant gardens rather than those close by.5 The proximity between the springs and greenery was further disrupted by the artesian wells drilled during the 1920s and 1930s (leading indirectly to the discovery of oil), which led to a rapid increase in greenery in Bahrain—by some accounts almost doubling green areas between the 1930s and the early 1970s6 —but eventually contributed to the overextraction and subsequent depletion and salination of the underground water reserves. Some of the gardens that are still irrigated from the depleted and saline springs bear exceptionally pungent fruit.

Groves of date palms are the most iconic and distinctive, yet rapidly diminishing, green spaces of Bahrain. Planning laws allow for the develop1

See Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 2–4.

2

Alex Byrne and David Hilbert, Readings on Color: The Philosophy of Color Vol. 1.

3

The sea-based springs induced a particular coloration of the green waters of the sea, as well as a particular luster on pearls, which were a mainstay of Bahrain’s economy until the 1930s.

4

See R. B. Serjeant, “Customary Irrigation Law among the Baharnah of Bahrain,” Bahrain Through the Ages: The History, edited by Shaikh Abdullah bin Khalid Al-Khalifa and Michael Rice (London and New York: Keegan Paul International, 1993), 471–496.

5

Ali Akbar Bushehri, personal communication, April 21, 2008. See also Nelida Fuccaro, Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 23. As Fuccaro suggests, the saying also cynically refers to the appropriation of Bahrain’s resources by foreigners.

6

See Mustapha Ben Hamouche, “Land–Use Change and Its Impact on Urban Planning in Bahrain: A GIS Approach,” Proceedings of the Middle East Spatial Technology Conference, Bahrain, December 2007. Retrieved on June 26, 2009, from: http://www. gisdevelopment.net/proceedings/mest/2007/RemoteSensingApplicationsLanduse.htm

03

04

ment of only 30 percent of agricultural areas (as opposed to all of nonagricultural areas), so many landowners seek to have land declassified as agricultural to be able to develop it. If the land is no longer green, it is no longer considered agricultural, so green must become as white as the desert sands through active neglect.

One property developer told me that it is easy to reconstruct the greenery of the palm groves—that even though date palms are cut down for villas, green areas can be replanted with trees and greenery to regain the same effect. I wish it were that easy. There is something very green about these spaces that is an indispensible part of their appeal: the richness of the hues of green, the range of textures, and the variety and intensity of the shadows. The allure of green is more than the pull of nostalgia, much more than the resonance of a bygone era that can never be recovered. Many of these spaces, whether maintained or neglected, feel timeless and dignified.

They take much of their value from their history gathered over millennia of farming and gardening, as well as the microclimates that the plantations produce. The urbanity of that greenness cannot be recovered; it can be imitated, but not regained.

Writing about the social life of the Bahraini date palms, Fuad Khuri states that the culture of palms in Bahrain used to be as elaborate as the culture of camels among the pastoral nomads in central Arabia.7 There are more than 1,000 words for a camel in Arabic; I am not sure how many words there are for date palms or for greenery, but one Bahraini farmer told me that he gave the date palms close to his house names, like his children, and in this way they are treated like family members. It is considered a great honor for a visitor to be served dates from these trees. It was common for farmers to plant trees to commemorate their child’s birth. Shaikh Isa, the previous ruler, is credited with the saying, “The Palm tree is our mother, we can live under it.”8 Date palms provided building materials for traditional summer housing called barasti. Indeed every part of the palm had a use: the leaves, the trunk, and the dates all had particular roles. A diet of dates allegedly provides the basic nutrients the human body needs. The date season starts in May and extends to October or November, depending on the variety. The date palms offered just one layer in gardens with multiple levels of produce including pomegranates, bananas, mangoes, and alfalfa, all sheltered from the blazing sun by the trees. The date palms have the capacity to be urban in that they penetrate so many aspects of Bahraini life, providing food, shelter, building materials, social spaces, and social status as well as facilitating ancillary industries and produce, while serving as a focus for poetry and folklore.

While the date-palm groves offered sources of food and employment, they were also recreation grounds for the elite. With the shade they offer from the scorching sun, the palm groves create attractive spaces for so-

cial gatherings, especially during the summer months. Owning greenery in Bahrain had, and still has, complex social meanings. Large date-palm plantations were owned by city merchants, who invested in them not for income but for the status of ownership. Farmers were contracted to look after the gardens, supplying a couple of baskets of dates a week to the owners. Wealthy merchants from Manama, the capital, would bring their families to the palm groves on Friday afternoons and issue invitations to relatives and friends to join them there until the maghrib prayers at sundown. Sometimes visiting cards would be distributed, granting friends of the merchant permission to visit in their absence.9 It is important to note that the date-palm gardens of the past were not very profitable, as is the case today. One large property just outside Manama near Ain Adhari (a formerly important spring that has since dried up, to be replaced in 2008 with an artificial pool) was sold in 1943 for 40,000 rupees (about $1.2 million), while a shop in the souq in the center of Manama at that time cost 4,000 rupees. This land was then rented out at a rate of 27.5 rupees a month, thereby netting an annual rent of 330 rupees, or approximately 1 percent of the value of the property. This was not a good financial investment, and thus it seems fair to deduce that the purchase must have been made for the social prestige that ownership of the greenery would confer.10 While the owners of the gardens historically belonged to an elite group of ruling family members and merchants, the farmers who worked in them invariably belonged to the Baharna, the local Arab Shi’i community, the largest social group, who by and large lived in nearby villages. Green is also finely ingrained in Shi’i identity. During the commemoration of the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, on the first ten days of the month of Muharram, the center of Manama is clothed in green banners and flags and the streets strewn with sweet basil, mashmoom, since green is considered the colour of Hussein, and Islam. Every Thursday evening it is still common to bring green shoots of mashmoom to graves in Shi’i cemeteries.

Those Bahrainis old enough to remember the mosaic of date-palm groves often lament their destruction. It is important, however, not to overly romanticize the past and to recognize that the destruction of the date-palm gardens is not just a recent phenomenon, although the scale and pace of destruction has certainly accelerated. Curtis Larsen, in Life and Land Use on the Bahrain Islands: The Geoarchaeology of an Ancient Society, cites E.L. 7

See Fuad Khuri, Tribe and State in Bahrain: The Transformation of Social and Political Authority in an Arab State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 39.

8

See Fareeda Mohammed Saleh Khunji, The Story of the Palm Tree (Bahrain: 2003), 45.

9

Ali Akbar Bushehri, personal communication, April 25, 2008.

10

From the archive of Ali Akbar Bushehri.

05

06

Durand, the British Political Resident in Bushire, who made the following observation when visiting Bahrain in 1879: “Foremost amongst the trees is of course the date, and some of the date gardens are extremely fine. Many, however, are going to ruin, the result of bad Government, and indeed in some places that were once flourishing gardens, not a bearing tree remains.”11 Although the villages were intertwined with greenery, the center of Manama was not very green. Walking though the souq there today, one will not find much greenery apart from the odd tree or weed pushing its way through cracks in the pavement. There are many green shutters and occasional green doors, in partial compensation perhaps for the lack of soft greenery in the city. It was in the urbanization period of the early 1970s, right after full independence from the British, that greenery and city really started to mesh in Bahrain. Nelida Fuccaro links this to the oil crisis triggered by the Arab-Israeli war of 1973.12 It was during this period, when the green countryside with its villages and the gray and white city subsequently become one in the popular imagination, that city people stopped going out to the gardens at weekends. The garden was no longer “the other” and instead became “corrupted” and considered part of the city. The special greeness of the gardens was disrupted by the extensive development that has taken place over the past thirty years. Bahrain’s limited land mass makes the demand for land and the continuance of the past uses of greenery untenable. At the same time, the extensive distribution infrastructures for water and treated sewage effluent bring the possibility of greenery to much of Bahrain today.

Contemporary green residential compounds in Bahrain, with names such as Green Oasis, are partial compensation for the lost date-palm groves.

Together with the date palms of roundabouts, roadside shoulders, and median strips of VIP roads (roads designed for extra-verdant greenery but also with security in mind), they signify the green of contemporary Bahrain. Such residential and transportation infrastructural spaces are important because they are the greenery that most people encounter in everyday life. These green roadsides represent not so much the past—although the palms do symbolize this past—but speak more about Bahrain’s present, its place in the world, and its aspirations for the future. Typical ads for new developments, often on billboards positioned beside highways, will show most of an image as green rather than featuring the buildings they advertise.

At weekends and in the evenings, it is not unusual to see expatriates picnicking on the roadside shoulders despite the passing traffic. (I am told that Bahrainis would never do this.) The roadside palms, although of typically different species and hues of green than traditional plantings, still retain some of their social and agricultural value. The date palms at the Bahrain Financial Harbour, built on reclaimed land on the site of the former port in the center of Manama, are pollinated in the spring and the dates harvested in the fall by low-income expatriate workers for their personal use.

The date-palm gardens and the roadside shoulders and roundabouts have similar social values. Roadside greenery can be seen as the date-palm groves of the present era. Both have a certain type of production, although those productive qualities are obviously different: the palm groves are agricultural, whereas the green roadsides indicate economic productivity, a production of development, a landscape of transformation. The plethora of green roundabouts and median strips lined with petunias of the national colours of red and white celebrate the power and benevolence of the

state. As seen in the multitude of roadside billboards with pictures of the king, the prime minister, and the crown prince, invariably situated beside greenery, the rulers are happy to be associated with green.

“Together let us make Bahrain Green,” urged the organizers of the 2008 Riffa Views Bahrain International Garden Show, who also sponsored a garden design competition among Bahraini schools called “The Riffa Views Eden Challenge.” The International Garden Show, which runs for three days every year, is one of just three organizations in Bahrain under the direct patronage of the king, Hamad bin Isa Al-Khalifa. Green retains its position as a social catalyst, with the Gardening Club reflecting increased interest in things green and beautiful and, by association, royal.

The transformative power of turning desert to green is extraordinary. To convert desert into luscious green is to prove that dreams do become reality, to achieve the impossible, to show that paradise can be constructed on earth. Writing in The Social Life of Trees, Maurice Bloch, invoking Claude Lévi-Strauss, maintains that to be effective, a transformation needs to be of a certain magnitude.13 For instance, turning arid desert into gravel or concrete is not as potent a transformation as changing desert into green.

The presence of the desert, however, is not easily forgotten.

BIOGRAPHY Gareth Doherty teaches in the departments of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning and Design at Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Doherty’s research and teaching focus on the intersections between landscape, ecology, urbanism, and anthropology. Publications include Ecological Urbanism edited with Mohsen Mostafavi (Lars Müller Publishers, 2010), which challenges urban practice to engage more fully with the arts, environment, government, public health, society, and technology-ecology in a broad sense. Doherty is a founding editor of the New Geographies journal and editor-in-chief of New Geographies 3: Urbanisms of Colour (Harvard GSD and Harvard University Press, 2011); supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for the Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the volume explores issues of identity, gender, power, and the design of space through colour.

Doherty is currently working on the effective integration of anthropological methods with design and planning. Recent projects include research on the notion of informal urbanism in favelas in Rio de Janeiro, and his doctoral dissertation on concepts of the colour green in Bahrain, the latter of which was supported by a Frederick Sheldon Traveling Fellowship from Harvard University. In spring 2012 with Prof. Steven Caton he cotaught “Design Anthropology: Objects, Landscapes, Cities,” a graduatelevel course. Doherty has a Certificate of Distinction in Teaching from Harvard University.

11

See Durand 1879 as cited in Curtis Larsen, Life and Land Use on the Bahrain Islands: The Geoarchaeology of an Ancient Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 22.

12

See Fuccaro, Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf, 229.

13

See Maurice Bloch, “Why Trees, Too, Are Good to Think With: Towards an Anthropology of the Meaning of Life,” The Social Life of Trees, edited by Laura Rival (New York: Berg Publishers, 1998), 39–40. Bloch cites the example of the transformation of wine to blood in the Catholic mass; the transformation would not be so intense if it were wine to whiskey.

07

POOL P erformance as S ocial A gency

WORDS & PHOTOGRAPHY by

D R . C h r is B a r r y UNIVERSI TY of MELBOURNE

08

T he municipal pool in Alice Springs is a multi-purpose facility incorporating extensive grassed areas, three swimming pools, trampolines, BBQ facilities, shop, and expansive sports grounds. A day at the local swimming pool is akin to a day at the beach. The town pool entertains children and teenagers from multifarious Aboriginal language groups and traditional communities (bush mob)—Yuendumu, Papunya, Kintore (north-west) Utopia (north-east), Ernabella, Fregon, Amata (south), for instance. Yirara, the local Aboriginal boarding school whose students are frequent visitors to the pool, houses students from the Pitjantjatjarra lands (south) and other surrounding communities, as well as those from Darwin, Top End (Arnhem Land), Katherine, and Tennant Creek (north). Local Aboriginal children (town mob) represent a demographic cross-section that includes town camps, housing estates, town flats, and immediate traditional lands situated on the outskirts of Alice Springs, such as Jay Creek (west) and Amoonguna (east).

January is the hottest month in summer, and temperatures can range from 25 degrees overnight to a maximum of 45 degrees in the shade. During the summer months, the municipal pool is populated by large numbers of Aboriginal children, and becomes the place where mixed networks of language groups are formed between children. In this way a type of inverted acculturation takes place, a re-colonisation of space, since the nonAboriginal children are forced to keep away from the site until the sun is less threatening, which is usually around 4.00pm or later. They have the wrong skin type. Thus the town pool becomes a site of intra-cultural sociality played out amongst a network of related kin and within a casual and causal inhabiting of public space. In fact, it was my observation of cultural life at the local swimming pool that first prompted my interest in Aboriginal life worlds being conducted in the public spaces and public utilities of Alice Springs, in contrast to that of traditional community life, as well as my interest in performance and the body politic—a theory of ‘presence’ and ‘occupation’.

In Aboriginal culture, children frequently wander the streets and public spaces of Alice Springs as an extension of their own home space. They generally remain free of parental surveillance. They are trusted to largely care for themselves. From a non-Aboriginal perspective, this is often perceived as irresponsible and uncaring parenting, and delinquent behaviour on the children’s part. However, from a cultural perspective, there is an internal hierarchy, dynamics, and logic, wherein older children are responsible for

younger ones, and the younger ones, in turn, mimic their older kin. They perform an internal sociality and sociability—enacting aspects of normal, daily, cultural life, within specific skin relations, and within their obligatory responsibilities. They enact their daily lives within the ethos of Aboriginal kinship.

P ool Pool, a suite of 28 photographic images taken from the series Out of Place (2001-2002), is a celebration of the vibrancy and agency of Aboriginal life worlds in Alice Springs/Central Australia. From a synechdotal perspective, wherein the whole of a culture is defined through its parts, Pool illustrates the currency and vitality of culture in situ. By using colour and rhythm, motion and stasis, pattern and repetition, identity politics are explored and performed through the physicality of bodies, shapes, and gravity.

Through the enactment of performance and gesture, bodies are arranged and re-arranged, in motion, or caught in stasis, in frame, or beyond the frame, and act as signifiers for cultural strength, agility, and resilience— characteristics that are generally associated with resistance and survival.

In this series, the body becomes a contemporary palimpsest that re-inscribes itself into place—by its prominence, visibility, physicality, and selfrepresentation. The body, then, becomes the sensual proof of culture, law, and sense of place. A tacit narrative of place and people is told within a framework of mobility, vibrant colour, and physical presence.

However, what does become interesting in this suite of photographs is the disregard the performers have for the camera. In spite of the camera’s presence and physical proximity, the children remain preoccupied by their own performances and their intra-cultural sociality; they exist and socialise amongst themselves. From a Rouchian (1979) perspective, the camera ‘provokes’ the athleticism and virulent activity taking place—participants performing for the camera—but there is no engagement between the camera (myself) and the performers. There is no opportunity for a ‘shared anthropology’ (Rouch, 1979), the interaction between both parties, to take place1. Instead, the performers successfully deflect the photographic/ethnographic gaze through their disregard and disinterest in the camera itself. They become their own protagonists, through their body politic, sociality, and through their mobility and athleticism.

Participation, in this instance, occurs within the act of mediation, whereby a ‘re-interpretation’ and ‘re-presentation’ of culture is conceptualised within the dynamics of movement and stasis. The photographic/ethnographic frame is ruptured by the activities taking place within it. Traditional forms of classification, what is included and excluded, are re-contextualised into a mass of bodies that won’t stay still—through their interactions, mobility, and constant re-organising of themselves. In this way an open-ended narrative is introduced, one in which there is no starting point, or sense

09

of closure. The images are presented as “identities-in-process”—un-sequenced and open-ended—they remain in a state of perpetual becoming.

They emerge out of an itinerant, haphazard, and unfixed territory that attempts to defy categorisation and classification. Hence, the intention behind Pool is to break down preconceived assumptions, conventions, and expectations: methodologies and fixed codes of representation that generally lead to cultural stereotyping and binary power relations. Movement is used as a trope to de-stabilise the colonial paradigm. This premise is further emphasised by the interjecting and interactive narratives that are told through the dramatic network of diagonal shadows—which exaggerate further the dynamics and movement captured in the ‘still’ frame.

T echnical D eterminants This suite of photographs was taken with a Nikon SLR analog camera, using a 50mm standard lens, hand-held, and no tripod. This meant that I was less than a meter away from the performers, whilst also having the freedom and mobility to move around amongst them. I was virtually on the edge of the trampolines, which became the only restriction to my photographing. The use of a standard lens also meant good depth-of-field; that all of the elements in the photographs would be sharp and in focus, to enhance the body politic. Shutter speeds were fast, 125th of a second, in order to capture the movements of the performers. Blurring, when it did occur, was intentional, in order to exaggerate the force of those movements. Sometimes shutter speeds were even faster, 250th of a second, due to the extreme weather conditions—hot, flat light that creates dense black shadows which, in turn, becomes a sub-narrative to this work.

I have always preferred to photograph in natural conditions, and, in this case, my objective was to capture the extremity of this climate—to record the accuracy of this light (and its shadows) and the harshness of the environment. These were the only premeditated technical determinants I had at the time of shooting. Like Rouch (1979), I have always kept my photographing to a bare minimum, preferring standard lenses, no flash units (to enhance the technical qualities of my work), and a preference to photograph outside under natural light conditions. In fact, I have photographed in this fashion for over 20 years. Hence, the act of shooting in the moment, fast, and on the run, and not repeating the event, has created a methodology of working with the materiality of what actually happened, and what I was able to record2.

However, to film (shoot) in the moment generally means extremely fast photographing—ad hoc, unstructured, indeterminate, and experimental—as well as a willingness to fail. Consequently, there is no time to make adjustments, to check light readings, or to take stock of the situation. The chaos of bodies jumping up and down, flying around, reverberating, as well as running off in different directions, meant taking risks and knowing that there was no other opportunity for re-shooting. The dense sociality

that was taking place at the town pool during that afternoon was a unique event amongst the Aboriginal families, with regard to the sheer numbers of people present. Consequently, my chances of failing were extremely high. My energy was absorbed into simply trying to capture the performances taking place on the trampolines. In that sense, I felt amongst the families through my close engagement and interaction with the performing bodies. In a Prattian sense, I was in a “moving position, already within or down in the middle of things” (1986, p.32) in dialogue, and amongst this sociality. Hence my presence was palpable and acknowledged by the families’ nearness—their proximity to both the events being performed and recorded, and in their relationship to me. However what did become interesting and surprising to the above activity, in spite of the chaos of the situation, was the precision and formality that was captured on film.

What I encountered were highly formalised tableaux and the specificity of a Cartesian perspective. A habitual, preconceived, and preordained way of seeing the world—and the inability to shift an embedded cultural conditioning caught in the act of composition.

The Aboriginal sociality captured on the trampolines has now completely disappeared. Pool effectually recorded a time when children could play together in an unregulated and unrestricted manner—and obviously in this case, fitting into an Aboriginal collective ethos based on extensive skin networks. These mesh trampolines were effectively the original ones installed at the same time when the pool was first constructed (circa 1970).

In the following year, these old trampolines were replaced by two black rubber versions that complied with the newly imposed strictures of public liability. These regulations enforced single occupancy and illustrated the individuated behaviour desired by western standards, and one that was highly monitored and regulated by pool staff. Consequently, these photographs have now become a historic record of another time in the history of the municipal pool—one that captured an Aboriginal collective and life world being performed in a public utility in the township of Alice Springs.

1

This, in fact, occurs when I return with the photographs in the following summer (2000) and meet with the mothers living at Morris Soak, an Arrernte/Luritja town camp on the western outskirts of Alice Springs, and seek their permission to exhibit the photographs.

This protocol was enabled by Erica Franey, who stepped forward that same afternoon, and took on the role of ‘mediator’—the person who was going to deal with me. This gesture could be interpreted as giving me a ‘skin name’. It is impossible for anyone to work within Aboriginal society without a skin name. What that skin relation should be is generally interpreted by the community. From Erica’s point of view, her position as mediator protected the rights and authority of the families involved in the photographs, so that Aboriginal culture and its values would be upheld, as well as making the conditions of our engagement palpable; where correct conventions would be observed and delivered.

In this case, to stay informed with the families and re-negotiate this arrangement as things developed or changed. And, in reciprocal terms, Erica became accountable for my behaviour and responsibilities to those families whose children I had represented. Hence we entered into a mutually satisfying arrangement that honoured both parties. This relationship has continued into the present.

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T he S pace of A ppearance Pool (2001-02) essentially triggered my on-going research interest in examining the public and social spaces and utilities of Alice Springs as sites of culture, presence, and occupation—providing intra-cultural zones of participation, belonging, and communicative possibilities—in spite of on-going hegemonic structures and strictures to remove this presence.

Belonging ‘socially’ equates with emotional, psychological, and physical security. These are the aligning tenets of kinship, and, by extension, the conditions of Aboriginal sociality—systems of attentive and attenuating social organisation that defines every aspect of cultural life and cultural maintenance. In Arendtian terms, these public sites could also be seen “as spaces of appearance” (Arendt, 1958), those spaces which can be reclaimed by performativity and by an embodied presence. When bodies congregate, lay claim to certain spaces, they actively reconfigure and reanimate the material environment—their embodiment re-contextualises the hegemonic control over public space and renegotiates what is deemed potentially exclusive (Butler, 2011). Pool, then, can be posited as an emergent relational space of creative intervention—one that privileges an Aboriginal world-view—and challenges the prevailing hegemony through “the space of appearance” and “the right to appear”.

Feld, S. (Ed). Cine-ethnography: Jean Rouch. (S.Feld, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2003, (p.7).

Rouch, J. The Camera and Man. In M. Eaton (Ed.), Anthropology—reality—cinema: The films of Jean Rouch (pp. 54-67). London: British Film Institute, 1979.

Pratt, M. Fieldwork in Common Places. In J. Clifford and G.E. Marcus (Eds.), Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography (p.32).

Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

From the Series: Out of Place (2001–02) Lightjet photographic digital prints 78.0cm x 108.0cm A cknowledgements Chris Barry would like to acknowledge and thank the following families: Erica Franey and Mickey, Julie, Clifford, Charmaine, and Michael Woodford; Vera, Frank, Lucky-Luke and Bradley Curtis;

BIOGRAPHY

Valerie Curtis, Craig and Corey McDowell;

Chris Barry is an independent artist and scholar living in Melbourne, Australia. She was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (University of Melbourne) in May 2009, entitled, “The Encounter of Culture: A Shared Space or Out of Place? Dismantling the Self in Central Australia”. For the past ten years she has been conducting research amongst specific Aboriginal families living in Alice Springs, particularly Erica Franey (an Arrernte/ Luritja speaker) and her family and extended kin. Her research explores the mediation between photography, performance, and auto/biography— within Aboriginal sociality and sociability—and the colluding space between culture and cultural production. Chris Barry has been a practising artist since 1986. Her work is represented in national and state collections, university collections, state libraries, and regional galleries throughout Australia. She exhibits both nationally and internationally—mainly in university galleries, public museums, and public galleries. Issues of marginality, ethnicity, contested homelands, spatial conflicts, and identity politics, continue to inform her practice and writing.

Paula Perkins and Paula Lawton;

B ibliography Arendt, H. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.

Butler, J. Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street. In EIPC (European Institute for Progressive Politics), 2011.

Jennifer, Richard, and Jethro Forbes; Karen, Shane, and Shane-Shane Franey; Audrey McCormick, Daryl and Darelle Taylor; Noeline Minarri and family; Julie Coultarde and family; Mervyn Franey and Diane Curtis and Russell, Brian, Cyril and Shelley Franey.

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Jean Rouch, following Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov, broke from cinema realism and created a new model which explored the materiality of filmmaking itself—that truth actually lies within the structural tenets of the filmmaking process—that these are the mediating vicissitudes that form filmic truth which he coined ‘cinema verite’. According to Steven Feld (2003), cinema-verite came to mean four things for Rouch: (1) that films comprise of first-takes and hence remain non-scripted and non-staged; (2) that films comprise of non-actors performing spontaneously and in spontaneous settings; (3) that the filmmaker use a lightweight, portable, and handheld synchronous-sound camera; and (4) that the filmmaker use an interactive filming and recording technique, through the viewfinder, and with no production enhancement. These, of course, are the tenets that I incorporate into my own methodology as a photographer.

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RELOCATING AN INTERVIEW WITH KENNETH A. BALFELT

WORDS by

K E N N E T H A . B A L F E LT

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ers and users. The feeling is palpable, rather than if you choose to put up a fence or separate benches. I believe the decisions regarding the physical aspects of the space can be a part of defining the way we act together in a certain space – but I don’t think this is enough. I really believe in processes, in engaging the people using the specific space as well as engaging the locals through public meetings, local newspapers and so on.

n September 31 2010 at 9.00, a corner of Enghave Square was closed to beer drinkers. The square, centrally located in Copenhagen, Denmark, closed because the city is extending it’s metro. A group of 30-100 drinkers who had previously used this space as their social network, had no place to gather. Kenneth A Balfelt initiated a relocating project for the beer drinkers. ART/E/FACT spoke with Kenneth about his role in this project and on the ownership of public space.

It is a public square and the feeling of the property as public is very strong.

There is something about the square; that people do not mind sitting on the same bench as a beer drinker; an attitude among the residents in the area that socially marginalised people also have a voice and a right to be there. But there was definitely also a change in ownership – for better or worse. My conviction is that involving beer drinkers in the actual process of building the place up gave them a feeling of ownership, but ownership where other people were still welcome - the square was still public property. We did have a situation once where a mentally unstable man thought he owned the urinals. However it was and has always been a very important value for the beer drinkers that the square should be open for everyone.

There are several different spaces – the bench, the park, the neighbourhood – and they all affect each other. Even though the local community is very open minded it is still a matter of communication to ensure everyone knows they are welcome – and that is a challenge. Often the public authorities think if they remove the benches they remove the socially marginalised people sitting on them – in Copenhagen the number of benches has been reduced from 10.000 to 3.000 – but off course this does not work. The perception that removing the space removes the people is what we are trying to change. We have established a rapport, recommending alternative processes and methods to work with socially marginalised people in the public space. But it is a really difficult subject and to many people, including myself, it is difficult to initiate a dialogue. When I decided to go speak to them the first time I suddenly had a lot of excuses for why it would be better talking to them later in the day or another day – it is a barrier that has to be overcome, and I think this is why many public authorities do not include the socially marginalised in their decision-making process, even when the spaces they inhabit are modified and they are directly affected.

Why did you get involved in this project and what role did you play in the development of the park?

I took the initiative to do the project. I went and asked the beer drinkers on the square if they knew what would happen when the square closed – they didn’t, so I asked them if they wanted help finding another place to be – they would like that. And that is basically how it started. I began with meeting Thomas Egholm from the Local Committee, Spektrum Architects and architect Chalotte Vad about finding a new place for the drinkers.

We created a process that to an extreme degree involved the beer drinkers; They participated in planning, building and choosing a new location, which ended up being in a mini-park another place on the same square.

An example of this involvement process was a situation where the municipality said no to building all the essential amenities; urinals, lighting, water pipes, fountains and a fireplace - even though we had got it financed elsewhere. Instead of us so called resourceful professionals decided what to do we took it down at the site to discuss it with the beer drinkers. They prioritized that a urinal was essential and argued that otherwise they would urinate all sorts of places, then the place would stink and others would not use the mini park. As we had stated that the goal of the build would be to promote an environment where the drinkers could coexist with the other park visitors, it was a decisive argument. We then went to the municipality, and after long discussions they went along with installing a urinal.

Would you say that the mini park and the square around it, as an architectural city space, is defined by the people using it – or is it the people defined by the space?

I believe it is an interaction. The physicality of the space has a lot to say – which is also why I use the physical so much in my projects. If you make a long bench where all kinds of people can sit, you add a conscious or unconscious feeling that you are sitting on the same bench as beer drink-

Would you say the project changed the feeling of ownership on the square?

Do you work with a specific method?

I have spent many years creating installations and pictorial art for galleries and museums – but I am just too impatient to work with the idea of creating a painting that someone sees which changes their way of thinking and acting, and thereby the world becomes a better place. It’s not that I don’t believe in this method, I just like working with art in a more direct way like in this project where my role was to act as a facilitator. It is difficult to define a specific method that I employ, as I never prepare one prior to beginning a project. I work within a situation, that is; I aim to work in the

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T imeline August 2010 - Meeting with beer drinkers to find a new place, workshop with beer drinkers.

Workshop where it was discussed what kind of facilities, furniture and architectural expression the site should contain. Over 150 pictures wereshown to the users, of which about 40 were selected as the inspiration for the project.

September 2010 - Open public meeting.

Meeting with local residents and other users of the site to inform about the project.

September-December 2010 - Design Process Spektrum Architects drew up a plan of Enghave Mini plads in close cooperation with users, and began a dialogue with the City of Copenhagen about permissions to users’ desires for the site. Users wanted urinals, weather shelter, benches and tables, lighting, grills, fountain, greenery, water line, cover facing Enghave road and electricity. These desires and functions were incorporated and further developed in the design of the space and equipment by Spektrum Architects. This was an ongoing process which was constantly adjusted in collaboration with the users.

November 2010 - Workshop Valbyparken Spectrum Architects designed a 45m long bench that follows the entire back of the site, and a small semi-circular bench to stand under with a canopy. This bench was the first building construction in the project, because the users did not have places to sit in the square. Copenhagen municipality, Center for Parks and Nature, gave some of the municipality’s old worn benches to build the new benches. The workshop took place in Valby, where we could work in one of the Center for Park and nature buildings, to remove the old wood from the benches metal profiles. The old worn mahogany wood was removed and was later sanded and used to build the cover of the urinal at the site. Burial of cement blocks, installation of metal frames and cement foundations were buried with great difficulty. The winter had set in with severe frost and snow. We placed insulation mats on the ground to keep the frost of. But in some places the soil was so hard that we had to use an axe to get the ground dug away. We decided to build half of the long bench, because the ground was too hard for further construction. The rest of the bench was built in the spring.

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context of the people and with the socio-political agenda of the project.

While I do conduct research before engaging in a project, but - against everything I have ever been taught during my education - I deliberately disregard my own ideas. In that respect I engage in the deconstruction of ideas to find the underlying structures. This is also why I call it ‘developing a situation’ – I don’t want to define a problem in advance. I use this method all the way through the process – even with regards to rhetoric. I use the term ‘beer drinkers’ instead of alcoholics and ‘users’ instead of abusers. I aim to find out what we can create together in a given situation without preconceptions about how people act. After 10 years I have stopped believing in the sustainability of ‘the good idea’. Within architecture and city planning there is often a paradigm that a good idea will work for everyone – but it never does. I only believe you can get closer to a solution by talking to the people who are confronted with their own unique challenges and concerns.

From an anthropological perspective, this sounds very familiar to involving ‘the other’ in the context of place-naming and development.

Can you speak to this?

Yes, but the difference is that I don’t work descriptively. I work with creating or producing something physical rather than something descriptive, analytical or critical. To me the process is about collaboratively changing the space with the people involved, and being dynamic enough to take that step – I am willing to take it, I am willing to change. This is also an element of spontaneity – when I don’t prepare and develop my own ideas beforehand I can be there for and with them. If you have a set plan it is difficult to be open to what will come unexpectedly and be spot on – and in these kinds of projects something always comes up unexpectedly. For example, when the municipality is planning to build something new and has developed a plan and then they have the mandatory town meeting, where the citizens produce 243 post-it notes. In that phase the municipality already have budgets, restrictions and other demands, and the 243 post-it notes just doesn’t always fit into that plan. That is why I try not to make any plans- in order to be open to what comes along. In many ways I also see this as an artistic method. Before I became an artist I worked in the cooperate business – and not planning anything certainly doesn’t come from there. It is my experience that with art you can try to plan how you want to create – say a sculpture or a painting, but when you start working with the material something unpredictable always happens, so you can’t ever plan something more than say 50 percent anyway. This is the experience I try to incorporate. It is an extremely valuable resource when people understand the process. You, I, and the anthropologists can analyse and observe, but

we will never understand the public space in the same the way the beer drinkers who sit there 8-10 hours every day do. We will not even come close. There are so many layers of understanding that we miss out on, and I think we reach a better result when we incorporate their understanding and their ideas instead of our own. I find it frustrating when urban planners, architects and anthropologists are not open to suggestions from the groups directly affected. I have a feeling that we have all the knowledge we need to solve most problems – I think we ought to use what we know and act with that knowledge. It is not because I don’t think we should be critical, but to criticize is to face inward– you can’t do anything about it, the only thing you can suggest is what to progressively change. I am not a philosopher: my thoughts are merely reflections of my experiences. I don’t have any preconceived notions, and I don’t have any commissioner – I am a free agent. Artists are professionally very free and can basically perform anything: from psychoanalysis to metal work, we are not bound to a set of paradigms like a social worker or an anthropologist is.

Does this mean that you find art is able to achieve better results than other professions?

No I definitely wouldn’t say that. I consider art a profession just like other profession. If you have a situation and you work with a carpenter, a social worker, a doctor, an anthropologist and me, you will get five different processes and results out of it. I only suggest that artists to a greater extent is incorporated in situations and projects where it will be an advantage that the artist doesn’t have to work with a stated objective. Another important factor is integrity, in the sense that everything an artist does or produces falls back at him or her. Therefore you can expect an artist to be 100% ethically inline with what he sends out. He or she newer uses the excuse that this was what the boss or a company commanded. There are of course other things that artists are hopelessly amateurs at. Artists never have the economy or format to create anything but ‘modest proposals’ a term coined by Charles Esche. A Famous artist like Olafur Eliasson has about 50 employees - which is hardly anything if you compare this to Coca Cola or Apple.

B iography Kenneth A Balfelt is a Danish visual artist. He holds a degree in Economy and Marketing from Copenhagen Business School as well as a bachelor degree in Fine Art and Critical Theory and a Master in Art History from Goldsmiths, University of London. He has worked with installations and visual arts, and now works with social art and urban planning projects.

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ENCOUNTER

WORDS & PHOTOGRAPHY by

KATRIN BRUDER

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T he differentiation between the media, its content and a reality not based on media has a long tradition. Over time, different concepts of how to categorize the various zones of modern man’s surroundings have emerged.

To oversimplify, a certain reality is placed in contrast to a media reality.

Yet this dichotomy is no longer timely. The digital world, in particular the internet, increasingly permeates the daily life of our society, exerting such a strong influence that the separation into a “real” and a “virtual” world no longer makes sense. The conquest and exploitation of these new areas can be viewed as a product of cultural evolution and the increasing reliance on technology. The success of virtual space is the result of its social and cultural significance.

In their function as the transmission belts of communication, the media is essential to our society today. People’s main topics of interest in the real as well as virtual world remain life within the group and the search for the “true” nature of man. The success of the internet, and especially of Web 2.0 applications like social communities, speaks for itself; these virtual spaces satisfy human needs such as social interaction, attention and selfrealization. The users of these services are not reduced to mere consumers of content, but are instead given the opportunity to actively participate in content and to play a role in its development by themselves generating and altering content. They create culture: Internet culture and new opportunities for interaction, which are playfully explored and expanded.

This context references Johan Huizinga’s concept of “Homo Ludens” or “Man the Player,” who discovers himself through the act of playing. From today’s perspective, this can include playing with multiple realities and the various spaces they inhabit.

The essence of this anthropological perspective is that the use of media is largely determined by phylogenetically inherited perception and processing mechanisms. Therefore, instead of attempting to distinguish unilat-

erally between “reality” and “media reality” and to determine their relationship according to a pattern of true or false representation, we should instead look more closely at the respective constructive processes and their empirical conditioning.

D escription A family gathers in front of a television set placed in a meadow, surrounded by nature. The television shows a campfire, the scene adopts the visual language of the romantic and shows the young family in an idyllic, peaceful countryside at evening. However, there is one element that irritates: the camp fire blazing within a television.

In this image, the TV set symbolizes the world of media-based information and digitized emotion. Digital media appears to connect people to one another and quickly link us together, though in fact they increasingly alienate us; the individual is at risk of becoming isolated.

The gathering of the little family in front of the TV set makes manifest the absurd: it is the desire for familial security, their meeting before the virtual fire symbolizes the search for real warmth. And yet that warmth is denied to the family, it is visible, but cannot be felt.

BIOGRAPHY Katrin Bruder studied photography and painting at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and studied analog photography with Peter Kodera.

She works as a visual artist and uses both analog and digital methods of image creation. Katrin lives in Vienna and works as a portrait photographer in Austria and abroad.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Fahle, M. “Visuelle Täuschungen” in: Karath, Hans Otto & Thier, Peter (Eds.): Neuropsychologie, Berlin 2003.

Schmidt, S. “Die Wirklichkeit des Beobachters” in: Die Wirklichkeit der Medien. Eine Einführung in die Kommunikationswissenschaften, Opladen 1994.

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Schmidt, S. “Die Wirklichkeit des Beobachters” in: Die Wirklichkeit der Medien. Eine Einführung in die Kommunikationswissenschaften, Opladen 1994, (p.18)

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THE TOUR

WORDS & FILM by

EVA LA COUR

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M y film The Tour is a guided tour of an environment which most people only have travelled to imaginatively. The title relates to the fact that the structure and common tread of the film simply is a guided tour by Maxi Taxi, circling the settlement and valleys of Longyearbyen – the Norwegian and main settlement on the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard. The particular two hour long guided tour was recorded in February 2011 during my first anthropological fieldwork period in Longyearbyen and initially I thought of it as a test. Eventually however I appreciated the recording, and the way in which the abstract winter-scenery in the windshield of the car functions metaphorically as a screen on which a dreamlike unclear landscape is animated. That which is in clear focus and what which is heard is limited to the taxi-driver Martin and an australian guest. The camera is installed in an observational style at the back-seat of the car in a way where the taxi becomes an extension of the cinema-space. The camera ‘looks’ out through the front window of the car, but also out through the screen of the cinema.

Weaved into the guided tour and observational style of filming, are two other narratives, which primarily exist as verbal-auditive layers voicing the taxi-drivers Bent and Vadim. Bent explains the concept behind the and brand Arctic-Tapas, along with montaged images of representations of Svalbard present in Longyearbyen. Vadim explains his initial encounter with Svalbard stationed on the opposite site of Grønfjorden and the Russian settlement Barentsburg. His voice is heard along with a blackened screen.

Where the Maxi Taxi guided tour is a performance of the present, the story about Arctic-Tapas expresses anticipations for a near future, while the story of life in Grønfjorden recollects the past. The three narrative traces are all intimate but not private, subjective but not personal, and they are

not an attempt to represent the taxidrivers as a social community of colleagues and friends. Rather, they tend to illuminate how Longyearbyen is a settlement characterized by different social bodies, finding themselves in Longyearbyen on the basis of diverse driving forces of coincidences, family relations, break-ups or escapes, careers or personal desires. This matter relates to my general interest of research in Longyearbyen which, in short, has been concerned with the relationship between, imaginations tied to the Arctic – articulations, images and memories handed down and spread around – and experiences of being bodily present in and conditioned by the actual environment and local cultural real. As a particular and constructed configuration of things, people and information, I have approached Longyearbyen as a tourist destination impacted by a discursive body of representations and tourist performances. However I have also regarded the production of space at the level of the body in conjunction with technologies. Here, the taxi-drivers but also the photographer/ filmmaker can serve as examples. Both are physically and sensorially present in their environment, as much as they are mediators and producers of (material and immaterial) representations.

The Tour was initially created as a particular chapter for the written thesis “A tour of Ethnographic Encounters with Maxi Taxi” for the program of Media and Visual Anthropology at Freie University Berlin. But trained also as a visual artist, I am eager to regard it on its own right, as an experimental attempt to approach questions of representation in a meaningful way particular to audio-visual media. The subject matter and interest of research expressed above seem to lend itself relevant in a particular way to the cinematographic language, as this language potentially offers a number of distinctive expressive structures which written ethnographies does not. Here I consider the cinematographic language of both photographing and editing, as film of course not is limited to the camera, but also editing.

The process and possibility of editing renders analytical and epistemological potential of performativity and juxtapositions of strategies possible, where visual representation or translation seem to be limited to a series of propositional statements. Accordingly The Tour was edited associatively and analytically, in a way where the distinctive but mutually dependent elements of sound and image, interweave asymmetrically so that information of the one element is juxtaposed with information of the other.

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Drawing further on auto-ethnographic and experimental strategies, the photographing style of The Tour is handheld – except for the guided tour in the taxicab. This is of course a way to incorporate my own presence in the film and address the problem of the location of self within an image culture. But it is also a way to illuminate how documentary filmic realities, in a broad sense, indeed are guided by storytelling and performance.

Regarding The Tour as an ethnographic film I consider the written context of my Master Thesis, for which the film initially was realized, significant.

There are layers of information in the film which are not accessible without an introduction to the complexities of Svalbard’s virtual realities of history and politics, without thick descriptions of working conditions and considerations of the cold temperatures, changes of light or the demographic constellation in Longyearbyen characterized by a constant turnover of people and an extraordinary range of nationalities. Yet, I am interested in film also as a mobile object. Thus I am curious of the existence and circulation of The Tour and its ability, as film, to raise particular questions, considerations, ideas and associations depending on the context and situation in which it is presented: in different contexts, producing different kind of listening, watching, reading.

Within anthropology, the debate on context often refers to ‘the context of fieldwork’. But as the formats and definitions of visual and media anthropological work is shifting, from (often) being observational to cover more diverse formats of audio-visual work and various ‘contexts of presentation’ outside universities (paralleled by the distribution and development of new technologies, methodologies and subject-matters), it seems relevant to address this debate continuously. Contexts of presentation, such as for example ART/E/FACT (for this context The Tour has been re-edited and shortened to almost half the original length). The significance of explor-

ing the matter of context is to not run the risk of reinforcing uncritical assumptions of the gallery or the cinema as a neutral space, and regarding these as ‘real’ opposed to the ivory towers of the universities. Rather these must be regarded as particular contexts within reality, impacting the experience of the film in particular ways.

With good will, The Tour touches upon this by subtly illuminating a relationship between the taxi-driving guide and the photographing guide.

What the film tries to capture is not reality, but the ways in which reality is constructed discursively. Not facts, but the ways in which narratives articulates facts. Not truth, but the matter of truth-effects. The addressed relationship between place, practise and representation, illuminate mediation and experience as simultaneous and mutually dependent processes.

B I ography Eva la Cour is currently living and working as an artist in Copenhagen and Brussels. She holds a master degree in Visual and Media Anthropology from Freie Universität, as well as from the Jutland Art Academy. During her time of study she has been a guest-student at the Art Department of the University of Tromsø (NO) as well as at The New School. In 2009 she was an artist fellow at Skowhegan School of Sculpture and Painting and in 2010 at the international program ‘The Artic Circle’ which inspired her to return to the Arctic region for her master thesis in Visual & Media Anthropology. This year she is among other activities a participant at the program for Sound and Image Culture (SIC) in Brussels, in the framework of which she is working on a performance and film anchored in northern lights research and visits to the Museum of Akureyri on Iceland, exploring the relationship between artistic and scientific production of knowledge.

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T he condition of ( im ) possibilit y

WORDS & PHOTOS by

S tefania S t r ou z a A C A D E M Y o f F ine A rts , V ienna

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C apitalism began with an event. This event took the form of an eviction. It was when the common lands and agricultural holdings were destroyed and people were forcibly removed from their territories and ways of life. This act of separation of nature, society and culture, known as primitive accumulation, has been one of capitalism’s essential traits. Depriving people from their means of production, it destroys, or better employs for its own benefit, the complex network of relationships between the environment, socio-economical and cultural structures: what is namely understood as ecology. The essential point to grasp is that this process of division of the natural surroundings from society persists until today as a constantly reproduced form. Therefore, any contemporary discourse on nature should not dispense the complex political relationships and the charged ideologies that accompany it.

In the last two decades, the dominance of globalization has had an even more profound impact on the way we think about politics, society and democracy. It has also deeply affected our concept of nature and the notion of ecology. During the current economic crisis, the above terrains of thought and action are perpetually exposed to conflict, under the emergence of a neo-liberal eco-governmentality. It is more than obvious that what controls, subverts and undermines these terms, as well as the spaces they occupy, is the capital itself. In an on-going circle of production and consumption, the system sustains itself by reproducing – or perhaps staging- its own collapse and resurrection. This mechanism, which is often referred to as the “strategy of tension”, enables it to exert and reproduce violence, as a recuperative response to external acts of resistance.

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However, the event of the global economic crisis has respectively opened up another terrain of thought: that of “un-productivity”. By “unproductivity” I am referring to the ethico-aesthetic practice that negates evergrowing production and consumption as dominant models of existence.

Of course such a process cannot envisage itself outside the framework that initially makes its enunciation necessary. Therefore, it cannot claim complete autonomy in relation to the politics of space that follow globalization.

In the following text the term “unproductivity” is examined in relation to the notion of the “third landscape”, as that has been theorized by landscape architect G. Clement. The latter is here perceived as a potential terrain where a discourse between the concepts of environmental and social justice can be set forth. Within this frame the work “The condition of (im) possibility” -outcome of my research into Clement’s theory- is introduced as a materialization of such discourse in an artistic context. What I am interested in exploring here is how such an “ecosophical” perspective could reveal a new form of political ecology: one that operates as a counteraction to the systemic control over the environment, whether that is natural, institutional or social.

E victions Any “ecosophical” practice, has first of all to examine what is exactly at stake, in order to act against prevailing models of production. It is important to clarify that when referring to “production”, I do not consider only the products of material labour but also the whole terrain of knowledge production in the fields of science and culture. This aspect of capitalism, known as “cognitive“ capitalism, acts as a catalyst for the configuration of individual and collective desires. Thus, it promotes specific codified models of action that the domains of politics, art, and nature are susceptible to.

I will attempt to address two main issues that rise as effects of such policy of control.

Firstly, it is the artificial homogeneity that is imposed upon the sociopolitical and natural environment. More specifically, a fundamental prerequisite for liberal economy to take place successfully is that markets must necessarily destroy and supplant more complex forms of human relationships. What is the consequence of such a policy in social and environmental ecology? Under these conditions, the notion of democracy is being gradually altered to conform to a global liberal model. Instead of its constitution on disensus, it is orientated towards an abstract consensus on the dominance of the market. Such notion of artificial positivity is respectively applied to nature, perceived as a homogeneous, commercialized entity, in direct relation and dependence to the system of production. The second point of discourse is the fact that capitalism’s effort to erase negativity, debate and to justify its violent spatial politics, is facilitated through the reproduction of a rising ecology of fear. This form of ecology is linked to the notion of the “other”. Fear of the “other” serves fundamentally as a justification of systemic violence, on whatever form that might take. Under the prism of the current economic crisis and the larger schisms that it has produced, the rise of liberal-fascism, racism and other forms of segregation, can only be considered as “natural” products of such an ecology.

What I am interested in highlighting, however, is the spatial implications

of such politics. A fundamental aspect for the survival of neoliberalism is the implementation of a new form of colonialism, the colonialism of real estate. Such a process, whose origin lies in the reasons mentioned above, is being manifested predominantly in the urban environment as a series of precise, targeted “interventions”. For such a mechanism to take place successfully the market employs the term “land value”. This term operates as an abstract definition, detached from the complex social, environmental and political attributes that in the first place make the term legitimate.

“Land value” is, therefore, utilized by regeneration strategies as means to impose consensus over the mechanisms for the production of space. Of course, under this facade of unanimity lie violent processes, in the form of evictions in urban space and nature. What is actually taking place is a wider policy of displacement that acts as part of large-scale gentrification projects. However, it is not only the urban centres that are affected by such policies. As J. Skinner writes in his text Poetics of The Third Landscape: “Pastoral is easily read as a production regime - or a regime of the real estate, debt or other forms of speculation-which I group under ‘production’ ”1.

In the work “The condition of (im)possibility”, this notion of displacement is the starting point for a spatial intervention inside the gallery space. The installation consists of a 3.60m long freestanding wooden corridor with a single 30 cm wide opening. Inside it lies wild plants, also known as weeds that have been randomly collected from several wastelands outside Edinburgh. This wild vegetation is left to grow with the help of neon lights.

Through the spatial juxtaposition of an architectural construction with the wild plants, the work seeks to explore the notion of the “unwanted”. The latter is here implied through the tensions created between the controlled environment of the gallery, the restrictive character of the corridor and the organic, anarchic nature of the weeds. It is also suggested by the fact that the term “weed”, irrespectively of the type of plant, is not considered a botanical term. Rather, it is a term used to describe any form of vegetation, which is not desired in a specific context (agriculture, gardening etc.). Perceived as a social and cultural construct, and consequently one embedded with antagonism and conflict, the “unwanted” or the “other” becomes here the core element of artistic production.

Returning to the notion of “productivity” in a wider environmental context, one has to examine what could the possible paths of a new political ecology be. I would suggest perhaps that instead of competing for an alternative production, another path would be to raise un-productivity as a radical mode of operation. Or, respectively, as a model of resistance against the current call for renewal of production due to the effects of the economic collapse. It is important to highlight here that in this context unproductivity and creativity are not necessarily opposed. Rather, unproductivity opens new ways and possibilities for developing a creative insight over everyday life and labour. Creative contemplation becomes a potential path of subversion against the capital’s obsession with production.

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Critical Ecologies Article: Resources and further inquiries related to Jonathan Skinner, “Poetics of the Third Landscape”, 2010

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G ardens of resistance So where such an “aesthetics of refusal” could manifest itself spatially? One does not have to look far to find such spaces. As landscape architect Gilles Clement suggests, these lie, not outside - as one would expect - but in the margins of the anthropogenic landscape. He refers to them as the “third landscape”. For him, these territories consist the locus of an alternative social imaginary, against the prevailing model of production/consumption/ preservation of space.

Clement’s definition of the “third landscape” is that of spaces that issue from the neglect of previously exploited ground. Their origin can be extremely varied: agriculture, industry, tourism etc. However, despite the fact that these fragments of landscape have no common origin, they involve all space, since they are by-products of any human activity upon nature. They form the type of landscape that had a function within a certain economy, only to be rendered “inactive” due to structural changes in the production system. One could therefore say they are “unwanted”, even if that is for a limited amount of time. During the current economic crisis, one can notice that many of these undetermined territories seem to enjoy a moment’s respite, away from the threat of development.

What is it, however, that makes these spaces valuable? And for whom? In the terminology of real estate and regeneration strategies, they are nothing but wasteland waiting for a developer’s strategic intervention, for them to attain a certain existence and status in the market. However, from an “ecosophical” perspective, these fragmented landscapes, that unfold between garden/wilderness, production/preserve, work/leisure dichotomies, contain a certain power. They posses a complex identity, or more specifically, an environmental, sociopolitical and aesthetic impact.

From an environmental perspective, they are valuable sources of biodiversity, plots of land where nature is left to develop self-sustainable ecosystems. It is a territory for a multiple of species with nowhere else to go.

Clement characterizes the “third landscape” as a “privileged site for biological intelligence”2. They are sites with an inherent antagonism, since they undergo an ongoing conflict as part of a process of constant adaptation. In these terms, abandoned sites are critical for facilitating and understanding the survival strategies of other species and the migrations that lead to new speciations. This last feature, the migratory character of the plants that occupy these spaces, is also what exactly enables them to multiply. That is succeeded irrespectively of the surrounding economic or political conditions. Consisting from different types of weeds, one could claim that these spaces reveal an almost “tactical” manner of survival. They are gardens in motion that, instead of developing a symbiotic, dependent relationship with the surroundings, manage to accommodate a self-sufficient system of a local economy.

How could, however, one claim that such traits can aspire to an alternative understanding of market economy and its relationship to spatial politics?

A key point to that comprehension is the paradoxical relationship such spaces have with the notion of “production”. While themselves unproduc-

tive, according to current economic terms, they have a direct link with production. For example, in the urban sector they correspond to land waiting for the executions of projects suspended through budgetary cuts or political disputes. They exist, therefore, as by-products of an economy of excess and at the same time as indicators of its violent fluctuations. Being in a state of transit, they are characterized by certain elusiveness in economical and political terms. That is because their land value cannot be adequately defined in real estate terminology. Consequently, the “third landscape” consists of spaces stripped from function that escape the system, even temporarily, because of their inherent ambiguity.

Dealing with the artistic potential of such territories, the work “The condition of (im)possibility” is a response to Clement’s theory within the context of an exhibition. The gallery is consequently addressed not as a closed system of fixed relations but as a locus of open possibilities. Therein a space that is located between the artificial and the natural is materialized.

By introducing the “third landscape” within the environment of art, the relation of unproductivity and creativity becomes a central perquisite. In this case, the creative process consists in the collection of the plants and the formal decisions for the production of the architectural construction.

The work, however, continues to develop independently after its installation. Due to the adaptation of the plants and the life forms they encompass to the conditions of the gallery, a temporary ecosystem is gradually developed for the whole duration of the exhibition. Artistic production, therefore, lies in the act of highlighting the existence of those contingent spaces, which resist their delineation within a specific institutional or environmental framework; or, phrased differently, of simply creating the conditions for their spatial manifestation.

Due to this certain elusiveness in institutional and spatial terms, the “third landscape” has therefore an ambivalent yet crucial relationship to power.

Clement himself states:“The third landscape refers to the third estate, the space expressing neither power nor submission to power.”3 There is a paradox here. On one hand, such landscape consists a place of possibility. It encompasses positivity, since it is an “empty” place with the potential of a series of events to unfold within it. At the same time, it is charged with negativity and conflict, because through its chaotic evolution and subversive nature, it resists closure. It reflects the inability of the system to control all space. Resisting homogenization or a general consensus over its function, the identity of the “third landscape” remains open to contestation.

Or, to paraphrase C. Mouffe, the conflicts and antagonisms of secondary landscapes form the conditions of possibility for the existence of a pluralist space. At the same time, they constitute the condition of impossibility of its final achievement.

2

Gilles Clement, Manifesto of the third landscape, Paris, 2005

3

Ibid

4

Critical Ecologies Article: Resources and further inquiries related to Jonathan Skinner, “Poetics of the Third Landscape”, 2010

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T he condition of ( im ) possibility

BIOGRAPHY

The “third landscape” maintains its powerful meaning due to its dual, contingent nature, which I will call “the condition of (im)possibility”. Though one could claim that it is a direct product of evictions in space, it is manifested in a surprisingly “democratic” way. This is due to the fact that any site could potentially become a “third landscape”. This attribute is what leads to my understanding of such territories as a new form of common lands in the post-industrial era. However, the term “common” does not allude in this case to a site of material production but, rather, to a space where incidents and encounters outside the norm occur. It is these encounters that could contribute to the formulation of an alternative collective imaginary, concerning nature and the everyday.

Stefania Strouza is an artist living and working in Vienna, Austria and Athens, Greece. Originally trained as an architect, she has received in 2010 her MFA from the postgraduate course Art, Space and Nature in Edinburgh College of Art. Concerned with the relation of spatial politics and aesthetic practices, her work has addressed the ambiguities and conflicts such a relationship entails. Through the media of installation, drawing, silkscreen and text, she explores how objects and spaces closely affiliated to societal practices could be gradually defamiliarized and transformed into a field of contemplation. Her work has been supported in 2010 by the A.Grant Travel Award for a research project in Megijima, Japan. In the same year she has completed a residency programme in the Mooney Foundation in Chicago, USA. While in Chicago she has also collaborated with artists D.Petermann and Elise Campell for the public event “Dig for Victory : Three Garden Discussions” in Experimental Station. Strouza is currently developing new works while continuing her studies in the Akademie of Fine Arts, Vienna.

Of course the condition of the “third landscape” does not only entail a space of continuous potential. It also alludes to the risks that such a space is subject to. The primary risk is its gradual recuperation by the system that has created it in the first place. Primitive accumulation and terrains of subversion (in this case the “third landscape”) are not separate substances.

Rather, they are linked by social and economical dynamics, which underlie both of them. During the current economic crisis, however, such dynamics are once again open to contestation. Therefore, “the condition of (im) possibility” is not solely a point of closure; it can be also the key point for reinventing processes that take into account this ongoing cycle of accumulation and deviation. What I am referring to here is a conceptual practice based on the assumption that every exclusion inevitably produces a sphere of inclusivity, however temporary or contingent that might be.

In the work “The condition of (im)possibility”, this relation of exclusion and inclusivity consists the key point for the viewing experience of the installation. The semi-artificial garden is revealed only when the visitor moves to the backspace of the gallery. Accordingly, the narrow dimensions of the corridor physically exclude her/him from a direct experience of the wild plants. The act of engagement lies, however, exactly in this act of recognition and reinvention of a relationship based on common exclusion. The space of the work is therefore that created between the viewing subject and the revealed “garden”, there where an unorthodox encounter takes place.

Since the “third landscapes” are spaces of events, of temporary action or even of non-action, they consist of sites of a potential labour of subjectification. Revealing the limits of human agency, undermining any notion of authority, they evoke a new aesthetic understanding of nature. Such an understanding perceives aesthetics as an act of seeking unorthodox contacts, of mixing practices of various origins or of simply recognizing what is already there. Could the act of non-intervention consist of an “existential event”, deriving its power from its mere insignificance? The “third landscape”, embodying “the condition of (im)possibility” , is not meant to affirm or negate such a potential transformation. Rather, emerging from the chaotic realm of the everyday, it provides us with the potential “to live the given materials of time and space less materially”4.

B ibliography Certeu, M. The practice of everyday life, University of California Press Ltd, London, 2000 Condoreli, C. You have a future in common use, Static , London Consortium , November 2006 Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. Anti-Oedipus : Capitalism and Schizophrenia, The Athlone Press, London, 2004 Deutsche, R. Evictions : Art and Spatial Politics, the MIT Press, Cambridge, 1996 Foucault, M. Of Other Spaces, Diacritics, 1986 Guattari, F. The three ecologies, The Athlone Press, London, 2000 Lefebvre, H. The Production of Space, Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Oxford, 1991 Lorey, I. Becoming Common, e-flux Journal 17, June-August 2010 Margolin, V. & Smith, S. (Eds) Beyond Green: Toward a sustainable art, Smart Museum of Chicago, University of Chicago, 2005 Mouffe, C. Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces, Art & Reserch, Vol. 1, No. 2, Summer 2007 Mouffe, C. On the Political, Routledge, London, 2005 Radical Nature Catalogue, Barbican Art Gallery, London, 2009 Ranciere, J. The Politics of Aesthetics : the Distribution of the Sensible, Continuum, London, 2004 Vidler, A. Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2001.

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