The Art of Addressing by ciel grommen

Ciel Grommen

The Art of Addressing

Work.Master Paper HEAD GenĂ¨ve

2014 - 2015

For the ocean

- Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m a writer, so naturally, everyone calls me Writer for some reason - And what do you write about? - About the readers - Obvious there is nothing else one would write about - One could write about nothing at all â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Stalker, Tarkovsky

Preface This master paper is written in my second year of work.master at the university of arts and design, HEAD Geneva. Since two years this school is the context in which I encounter the world of visual arts, after six years of studying and working in the field of architecture and urbanism. Coming from another discipline, I have been facing many essential questions about art, the art world and the way artists work, in comparison to architects. This being-in-between-disciplines gives me an inspiring freedom, but also forces me to reposition towards some soperceived paradigms in both fields. I took this master paper as an opportunity to read a lot and to search for what I would like to do in the future. The theme grew very organically. A returning question the last years was the way to deal with the audience. As an architect one is most of the time asked to design something; you know -or choose- the people for whom you work. Architects are taught to position themselves into the world of the users. In the field of art, the audience is rarely openly articulated. Artists work out of a need or a necessity, they work for themselves. Though art is useful for others,it is impossible and harmful to measure its efficacy. Working on demand raises questions of autonomy. When there is no demand but a clear wish to address a specific audience by the artist, there is quickly the fear to become dominant, educational or even messianic. Is one doing a sort of art marketing if one envisions its audience? Maybe is â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;the audienceâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; not the ideal word for my concern. As an architect I very much enjoyed the analytical process of interviewing and observing people in a specific context. Be it their use of space, their choices of materials and decoration, their way of defining qualities and problems... It was always the starting point and main inspiration for a project. As an artist I continued working from a specific context by reading a place on different levels. Replacing myself in the world of actors that have different relations to this context remains promi-

nent. I am fascinated by the beauty of the diversity but also the conflicts that emerge because of people’s different perspectives and uses of the world. The works I make are often visualisations of imagined or real encounters that happen between people or/and objects, between this context and myself. ‘Negotiation’ or ‘the living together’ were words with which my tutor tried to capture my interest. I started searching for artists that work very explicitly with relations and debate. It led me to reading about relational aesthetics, urban activators, civic art, dialogical art ... Gradually I started finding out that for me it is not so important to effectively create a relationship or debate but that the intention to relate, the address alone, already creates poetics. I ended up choosing three interesting cases that deal with an address to the other. They are the starting point to apply philosophical concepts and perspectives on aesthetics to the intentions of the artists.

Contents

Preface

Introduction Elements of Address The Activity of the One(s) Addressed Addressing Issues The Art of Addressing

13 13 14 16 19

Case I.: Paul Chan, Waiting for Godot in New Orleans The Production of an Audience A Meaningful Experience The Expressive Object and the Environment of Production

23 24 26 28

Case II: Elemental, Quinta Monroy e Uquique Socialization Process A Sensitive Matter Another Diversity Organiser Participating as Citizens

45 47 49 51 53

Case III: Eric Baudelaire, Letters to Max & the Secession Sessions The letters: Questioning of Representation The movie: A Personalized Portrait of Abkhazia The sessions and the anembassy: Producing Knowledge Agency vs. Instrumentalization

63 64 65 66 68

The artist as an address Who can say now what art is meant to be? A Switching Subject-Object Relation Inquiry as a Project Artistic Consultancy

79 80 82 83 84

Conclusion

Sources

Introduction

Elements of Address What is an address? Thanks to an etymological analysis of the word1, I define some elements that characterise a process of addressing. “All art is an address.” This was what Charlotte Laubard concluded after a discussion on Outsider’s Art2 – her interlocutor defined art without an address as one of the main characteristics of outsider’s art. She didn’t agree. I was not immediately like-minded, since I thought about me writing in a diary in my teenage years. I used to tape it up so that nobody would be able to read it. This example didn’t convince her. “In writing there is an address. It can be like a message in a bottle that you throw in the ocean and you hope someone will find.” I like the idea of throwing away. Writing in a diary is a way to do away with the thoughts and feelings in your head. Ad in Latin means towards but also away. Addressing is first of all externalising something that is inside the subject. This something is the starting point of an address. In Dutch starting point means uitgangspunt, literally translated in English it would be output point. Let’s use this word: the output point, the something that comes out of the addresser and is the starting point of an address. This can be a feeling, a fascination, an idea, a critique, an assertion … Etymologically addressing finds, among others, its roots in the Middle English verb adressen that means to raise, erect, adorn. There is something that is put it into form. The form can be a letter, speech, but also a festival, an exhibition, an installation and so on. 1 Harper D. (2001-2005). Address (v.), Address (n.). http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=address. Last consulted on 14-01-2015. 2 Outsider’s art is called l’art brut in French. We discussed about this subject during a personal meeting in November 2014 in my studio in the University of Arts and Design, Geneva.

The form is directed towards… Directed towards … is the meaning of the Vulgar Latin verb directiare or the classic Latin dirigere, other primitives of the word addressing. The three dots point to an incompleteness of the sentence. It is a transitive verb; this means that ‘it requires a direct object to complete meaning’.3 This direct object is the audience in the case of an art project. In the case of architecture it is the users. Direct object, indirect object or simply just object? The audience or an audience? It becomes a tricky game of words. The question is if an address is directed towards an envisioned object or not per se. In case of the bottle in the ocean it isn’t: the person addressed is undefined and anonymous. I like to name this last object the one(s) addressed. The use of one(s) stresses the idea that the audience is a collective of different individuals. This individuality is well argued in the essay ‘The Emancipated Spectator’ by Philosopher Jacques Rancière4, in which he describes the particular activity of the one addressed while he is looking, reading or listening to the mediated message.

The Activity of the One(s) Addressed Rancière’s essay elaborating the role of the spectator, was in the first place addressed to theatre, because here exists, since Plato, a dubious attitude towards the audience. He calls it the ‘Paradox of the Spectator’: there is no theatre without spectators; though, spectatorship is seen as a bad thing. Looking is considered being passive. It is seen as the opposite of knowing. In his essay Rancière proposes to reframe this last idea of spectatorship, using the descriptions and propositions of intellectual emancipation, a pedagogical principle conceived by Jacotot in the 18th Century. Intellectual emancipation starts from the equality of intelligence: there is no gab

3 Harper D. “Address (v.), Address (n.)”. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=address, 2001-2005. Last consulted on 14/01/2015. 4 Rancière J. “The Emancipated Spectator”. Translated by Gregory Elliot. Verso, London, 2009.

between two forms of intelligence. A schoolmaster is not more intelligent than his student —the manifestation of intelligence can be different though—. Every human animal learns by comparing one thing with another thing, one sign with another fact. He learns the resemblance of what he knows and what he ignores. He can do it if, at each step, he observes what is in front of him, tells what he has seen and verifies what he has told. “From the ignorant up to the scientist which builds hypotheses, it is always the same intelligence which is at work: an intelligence which makes figures and comparisons in order to communicate its intellectual adventures and to understand what another intelligence tries to communicate to it in turn.” 5 Translation and counter-translation is another concept that is necessary to be aware of. “The distance that the student has to cover is not the gap between his ignorance and the knowledge of the master. It is the way between what he already knows and what he still does not know but can learn by the same process. To help him to cover it, the “ignorant master” needs not be ignorant. He only has to dissociate his knowledge from his mastery. He does not teach his knowledge to the students. He commands them to venture forth in the forest, to tell what they see, what they think of what they have seen, to check it and so on.” 6 What is the relevance with the question of the spectator? We are not more in the times when the dramaturges wanted to explain to their audience the truth and teach about the good way to deal with situations. On the contrary it often happens that the dramaturges or the performers hope the spectator knows what has to be done, if the performance changes him, if it sets him apart from his passive attitude and makes him an active participant in the common world. The idea of the equality of intelligence invites us to undo this gap between two positions. A dramaturge can act as the ignorant schoolmaster and the spectator as his student. This does not presuppose that the spectator is passive. Interpreting 5 Rancière J. “The Emancipated Spectator”. Translated by Gregory Elliot. Verso, London, 2009. Chapter 1, page 9. 6 Rancière J. “The Emancipated Spectator”. Translated by Gregory Elliot. Verso, London, 2009. Chapter 1, page 10-11.

the world is already a means of transforming it, of reconfiguring it. “The spectator is active, as the student or the scientist he observes, he selects, compares, interprets. He ties up what he observes with many other things that he has observed on other stages, in other kind of spaces. He makes his poem with the poem that is performed in front of him. She participates in the performance if she is able to tell her own story about the story which is in front of her.” 7 Therefore the addresser has to accept a dissociation between cause and effect: there is no equal, undistorted transmission of the cause. The spectator can see what the dramaturge did not see. The spectator sees something as an effect of his dramaturge mastery. But he might not see the dramaturge’s view. In a way spectatorship is our normal situation. Every spectator is an actor of his own story. In a theatre, or in front of a performance, just as in a museum, a school or a street, there are only individuals, weaving their own way in the forest of words, acts and things that stand in front of them or around them. The collectivity of an audience can only be understood as the collective power of every individual translating what they are all looking at. Do the cases of address, described in this paper, acknowledge the individual trajectories of the one’s addressed and provide openness, allow precarity?

Addressing issues This exposition of the meaning of addressing fits quite well with my intention to speak about the role of the audience/participants/users… in art and architecture projects. However, I cannot neglect that the verb addressing is often used in another way where there is in the first place something addressed instead of someone. Addressing an issue, for instance. This expression puts the matter-ofconcern in the centre. It leads me to the political theory of pragmatists Walter Lippmann and John 7 Rancière J. “The Emancipated Spectator”. Translated by Gregory Elliot. Verso, London, 2009. Chapter 1, page 13.

Dewey. These American philosophers request to turn politics more towards the pragmata, the Greek name for things. According to them, most schools of law and political science have been obsessed by the body and the state. They have been bothered by the ways to gather the legitimate people around some issue and the procedures to follow in decision-making. They have been drawing a sort of place, which might be called an assembly, a gathering, a meeting, a council, but what is brought into this place, a topic, a concern, an issue, is hardly discussed and has become problematic. Lippmann and Dewey notice that after the rise of new technologies of manufacture, transport and communication in the 19th and 20th century, some issues, “public affairs”, have become very complex: the scale of influence has expanded and the effects are harder to be linked to the cause. For too long, issues are wrongly portrayed as matters-of-fact. Politicians demand from scientists to bring in indisputable and unmediated information, but this is unfair and impossible. I think for instance about the public debate on nuclear power: one scientific report proves the limited dangers; another report proves the opposite. Dewey argues in his book ‘The Public and its Problems’ that democratic politics require a sustained attention to issues, where we publicly prove assertions against other assertions and come to a closure.8 Bruno Latour names it an object-oriented democracy or Dingpolitik and adds: “What we need is to be able to bring inside the assemblies divisive issues with their long retinue of complicated proof-giving equipment.” 9 Sociologist Noortje Marres10 reasons then “in a context in which the objects of politics are complex and mediated in nature, the quality of information about public affairs becomes the key issue for democracy.” However she finds out that Lippmann and Dewey do not consider this as a necessary condition for democracy. Lippmann writes: “The hardest problems are problems which institutions 8 Dewey J. “The Public and its Problems”. 1927. Cited in Marres N. “Issues spark a public into being” 10 9 Latour B. “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik”. In Latour B. & Weibel P. (eds). “Making Things Public”. MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2005. 10 Marres N. “Issues spark a public into being, A key but often forgotten point of the Lippmann-Dewey debate”. In Latour B. & Weibel P. (eds). “Making Things Public”. MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2005.

cannot handle. They are the public’s problems.”11 For Dewey the public emerges not only because of the inability of the institutions to deal with an issue, but because of the way in which it is implicated in issues. “A public is a grouping of actors who are affected by human actions, but who do not have direct influence in those actions.”12 A public is not a social community, because as long as a social grouping manages its own affairs, these affairs are not really the public’s business. To address complex issues democratically, one needs to engage with more unacquainted and dissimilar characters with whom it may easily seem undoable to socialise. Political democracy, assemblies, coming to a closure… we are getting far away from the simple gesture of addressing. Though there are some interesting entry points. What I like is the idea of a matter-of-concern. It is an issue that is concerning different parties and therefore making it a valuable public case — to throw it away into the ocean. The addresser is implicated in an issue: a specific context, a debate, a theme... The output point is a personal relation he has with this issue. The assertion is getting a mediated form and is addressed to someone(s). These someones have to be gathered in a circle. The address at the same time draws a circle for the ones concerned to be able to enter and approach the common matter-of-concern from their own perspective. I am about to conclude the same I did after reading Rancière’s Emancipated Spectator: an art of addressing is open for the other’s concern.

The Art of Addressing In this master paper I start from three art or architecture projects that affected me in the way they address another. I try to find out what makes these addresses so powerful by analysing them step by step using the previously defined elements

11 Lippmann W. “The Phantom Public”. Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick and London, 2002 (1927). Cited in Marres N. “Issues spark a public into being” 10 12 Dewey J. “The Public and its Problems”. 1927. Cited in Marres N. “Issues spark a public into being” 10

of address. They are starting points to enter into larger discussions on how to deal with an audience, participation and common matters-of-concern. The word art is used in its oldest sense: as a skill13, but at the same time refers thanks to its double meaning to the art context in which this thesis is written. It happens to be that the word address is sometimes used in the same sense. The website Wiktionary14 mentions: skill; skilful management; dexterity; adroitness, e.g. in the sentence: “At their turning-lathes, they employ their toes to guide the chisel; and, in these pedipulations, shew to Europeans a diverting degree of address.”15 The title of this master paper is therefore a repititio-in-terminis.

13 Early 13th Century English: “skill as a result of learning or practice,” from Old French art (10c.), from Latin artem (nominative ars) “work of art; practical skill; a business, craft” ... Harper D. “Art (n)”. http://www. etymonline.com/index.php?term=art. Last consulted 10/02/2015. 14 Unknown. “Address”. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/address. Last consulted on 29/01/2015 15 1813, “Customs, Manners, and present Appearance of Constantinople”, The New Annual Register, or General Repository of History, Politics, and Literature for the year 1812, p. 179 Cited in “Address”. http:// en.wiktionary.org/wiki/address. Last consulted on 29/01/2015

Case I: Paul Chan

Waiting for Godot in New Orleans

In November 2007 artist Paul Chan visited New Orleans, where three months earlier Hurricane Katrina had wrought utter devastation. As an activist, he has been travelling more often to those places of disaster and ruin. New Orleans’ devastated landscape was like any he had experienced before. In Baghdad, kids had been playing soccer barefoot around the concrete rubble; the same way kids had been playing on a ghostly Detroit side street during labour demonstration in 1999. New Orleans was different. The silence. Paul Chan recognised symmetry between the city’s post-Katrina reality and Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, “which expresses in stark eloquence the cruel and funny things people do while they wait—for help, for food, for tomorrow.” 1 The artist envisioned presenting this play outdoors in the middle of the desolate landscape. Therefore he contacted Creative Time, a nonprofit organization based in New York and supporting public art. They agreed to participate; Anne Pasternak, the director, and Nato Thompson, a curator, joined his team. Later the Classical Theater of Harlem was involved since, as talented a visual artist and political organizer Paul was, he admittedly knew nothing of directing theatre. Director McElroen invited some established actors that had already been translating the roles in a previous staging and some New Orleans-based actors. 2 By consulting the local population, the team decided that the play had to be part of a larger Godot-project. Someone suggested that the play should be staged in more than one neighbourhood, since the tragicomedy of waiting occurred also 1 Chan P. “Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: an Artist Statement” In Chan P. (eds). “A Country Road, a Tree, Evening”. Creative Time, New York, 2010. Page 2 (26). 2 The whole process is documented in a rich book that served as the main source for this analysis: Chan P. (eds). “A Country Road, a Tree, Evening”. Creative Time, New York, 2010.

beyond the borders of this place. The team decided to choose a crossroad at Lower Ninth Ward, where everything was destroyed and an empty surreal landscape remained, and the front yard of a house in Gentilly, where some houses were still standing up. Someone else thought it was important to involve the schools and some local organisations. Another rephrases powerfully “If you want to so this, you got to spend the dime, and you got to spend the time”3. It became an important moto. The team organised theatre workshop, courses on contemporary art, interviews and many potluck dinners. Lastly the project contained the commissioning of a movie and the set up of a Shadow Fund. This fund was almost a moral imperative because of the local scepticism towards the nonprofit recovery organizations that sucked up valuable assistance dollars and never visibly passed on to the citizens.

The Production of an Audience “The organizing involved in doing the project not only went into the actual production of the play, but also the production of a public, a public that is incredibly divided and tired and waiting still for things to come.” —Paul Chan4. Chan’s words point to the very transitive aspect of his address to the people of post-Katrina New Orleans: the play had to be completed by an audience. The completion happened by the very presence of one’s addressed as spectators. “There is no theatre without spectators (be it only a single, concealed spectator, as in the fictional representation of ‘Le Fils naturel’ that gives rise to Diderot’s ‘Entretiens’)… Being a spectator means looking at a theatre.” 5 The previously

3 Chan P. “Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: an Artist Statement” In Chan P. (eds). “A Country Road, a Tree, Evening”. Creative Time, New York, 2010. Page 2 (27). 4 Cited in Thompson N. “Destroyer of Worlds”. In Chan P. (eds). “A Country Road, a Tree, Evening”. Creative Time, New York, 2010. Page 2 (43). 5 Rancière J. “The Emancipated Spectator”. Translated by Gregory Elliot. Verso, London, 2009. Chapter 1, page 2.

discussed issue of the paradox of the spectator6, described by Jacques Rancière, considered the necessary presence of the audience in a theatre play as a fact. A more substantiated argumentation of the important role of the audience is given by Marcel Duchamp in his essay ‘The Creative Act’ 7. In the creation of art, he ascribes the spectator the same importance than the artist. “The spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.” More illustratively: “The artist may shout from all the rooftops that he is a genius: he will have to wait for the verdict of the spectator in order that his declarations take a social value and that, finally, posterity includes him in the primers of Artist History.” The spectator does not only have the last word, his intervention is necessary because the artist, in doing a work, passes from intention to realization by way of a struggle that involves “efforts, pains, satisfactions, refusals, decisions,” at least some of which remain outside his consciousness. Duchamp defines a “personal art coefficient,” describing it as “like an arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed.” 8 It is in this space between intention and expression that the audience does its necessary work. Without the production of a public, the work could fall into “the trap of spectacularizing the painful image of horror.” Nato Thompson means that “without a background of workshops, potlucks, meetings, and time spent among the residents of New Orleans, Waiting for Godot in New Orleans could easily have worked as yet another spectacle that the disaster tours digest so readily.” 9

6 Topic discussed in the introduction under ‘The activity of the one’s addressed.’ Source: Rancière J. “The Emancipated Spectator”. Translated by Gregory Elliot. Verso, London, 2009. 7 Duchamps M. “The Creative Act” 1957. Appeared in: Lebel R. (eds) “Marcel Duchamp”. Paragraphic Books, New York, 1959. 8 Seigel J.. “The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp: Desire, Liberation, and the Self in Modern Culture. “. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. 9 Thompson N. “Destroyer of Worlds”. In Chan P. (eds). “A Country Road, a Tree, Evening”. Creative Time, New York, 2010. Page 2 (47).

A Meaningful Experience “It was about creating a meaningful experience,” writes Nato Thompson as an argumentation for the production of a public.10 This focus on experience brings me back to the American philosopher Dewey from the pragmatist school and his major writing on aesthetics: ‘Art as Experience’.11 As the title says, for Dewey the work of art is an experience and cannot innocently be confused with the physical object, which is a condition for the experience. The object, suggests Dewey, is more properly termed the “art product” while “the actual work of art is what the product does with and in experience”12. Experience occurs continuously; but only some experiences are complete and unified. When “the material experienced has run its course to fulfilment”, then we might say, “That was an experience”, for instance when a work is finished in a satisfactory way, a problem solved, a game is played through, a conversation is rounded out…13 An experience is individual and singular; each has its own beginning and end, its own plot, and its own singular quality that pervades the entire experience. Works of art are important examples for an experience. What makes an experience a work of art is not clearly defined though. A consequence of this conception, relevant in this case, is that a work of art is recreated every time it is aesthetically experienced.14 The play that transpired out of the project was staged 5 times: on November 2,3 and 4, 2007, at the in-

10 Thompson N. “Destroyer of Worlds”. In Chan P. (eds). “A Country Road, a Tree, Evening”. Creative Time, New York, 2010. Page 2 (44-45). 11 Dewey J. “Art as Experience”. The Berkley Publishing Group, New York, 2005. First published in1932. The work is regarded by many as one of the most important contributions to this area in the 20th century, though not not as widely discussed since his philosophical prose is often difficult and dense. Many secundary literature helps to grasp some insights. 12 Alexander T. M. “John Dewey’s Theory of Art, Experience, and Nature: The Horizons of Feeling”. State University of New York, 1987. 13 Unknown. “Reading Guide for Dewey”. http://www.rowan.edu/open/philosop/clowney/Aesthetics/ ReadingGuides/Dewey.ppt. Last consulted 12/2/2015. 14 Dewey J. “Art as Experience”. Penguin Books, London, (1935) 2005. Chapter 5: “Substance and Form”.

tersection of N. Roman Street and Forstall Street, and on November 9 and 10 in the front yard of a house on the corner of Robert E. Lee Boulevard and Pratt Drive. All evenings started in New Orleans style with gumbo and a second line band that would parade the crowd into the stadium seating built to hold eight hundred people. Despite these similarities, the work of art was different according to the location, according to the particular evening and according to every singular visitor. Both set designs were different: the one in Gentilly interacted very much with the ruinous facade, the one in the Lower Ninth Ward relied on the empty landscape. Every neighbourhood recalled different memories to the visitors. Thompson tells about white visitors that admit they had never been in that parts of the city, and about black former residents, still waiting to return and reserving seats for their former neighbours. He describes also how, on the first evening in the Ninth Ward, the crowd was so beyond-capacity that the team decided to let more people gather at the edges of the intersection. As a consequence Christopher McElroen, the director, had to cut the section of the play in which a disaster bus pulls up, since these people were blocking the road. Very particular and individual was also the personal experience of Robert Green, a local who continued to live in the neighbourhood in a FEMA trailer15. He commented “It’s strange to hear so much laughter here.”16 The book is full of little anecdotes and personal testimonies of the project. They make it very clear that the play was for every individual a different experience. Dewey would speak about a different artwork for every perceiver. It connects interestingly to Duchamps idea of the perceiver being part of the creative act. Dewey’s explanation of an aesthetic experience is also a argumentation for the reason why the audience had to be specifically the local population in its social and racial diversity. Another address, e.g. the international art public, or a nonexclusive audience, would have made the project totally different and less unified.

15 FEMA stands for Federal Emergency Management Administration 16 Thompson N. “Destroyer of Worlds”. In Chan P. (eds). “A Country Road, a Tree, Evening”. Creative Time, New York, 2010. Page 2 (48).

It is so evident since these are the people concerned and affected by the very emotion that made the artist do this. Remember that the same philosopher stated in a work on political philosophy that complex issues had to be addressed by the public that is directly or indirectly affected by it.17

The Art Product and the Environment of Production Although experience is the real work of art, the art product has an important place in Dewey’s aesthetical theory in a chapter called ‘The Expressive Object’18. The expressive object presented here is Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’ reinterpreted by director McElroen, the actors and artist Paul Chan. John Dewey believes that “the object should not be seen in isolation from the process that produced it, nor from the individuality of vision from which it came.”19 A work of art uses materials that come from a public world and they awaken new perceptions of the meanings of that world. Additionally the way the medium is composed connects the universal of the material with the individual experience of the artist. In another chapter however, Dewey describes the artist as “a live creature in contact with an environment”.20 The context is thus a very important element of art, and in this, he is quite different from those theorists who believe that art expresses the inner emotions of the artist. Tom Leddy’s example of Van Gogh’s painting declares much: “The expressiveness of a painting is the painting itself. The meaning is there beyond the painter’s private experience or that of the viewer. A painting by Van Gogh of a bridge is not representative of a bridge or even of Van Gogh’s emotion. Rather, by means of pictorial presentation, Van Gogh presents the viewer with a new object in which emotion 17 Dewey J. “The Public and its Problems”. 1927 — See Introduction. “Adressing Issues”. 18 Dewey J. “Art as Experience”. Penguin Books, London, (1935) 2005. Chapter 4: “The Expressive Object”. 19 Leddy, Tom, “Dewey’s Aesthetics”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Spring 2013 Edition. Chapter 2.5. — Online version: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dewey-aesthetics/. Last consulted on 10/02/2015. 20 Dewey J. “Art as Experience”. Penguin Books, London, (1935) 2005. Chapter 1: “The Live Creature”.

and external scene are fused. He selects material with a view to expression, and the picture is expressive to the degree that he succeeds.”21 We can recognize a similar attention to the environment in Paul Chan’s production process. He namely decided to move to New Orleans for four months. He went around and said: “I am in town doing a project that may or may not interest you. It would be nice if it did, but it’s cool if it doesn’t. In the meantime, I have skills and experiences that you might find useful while I am here.” So he started teaching in the local schools on contemporary art, on practical issues facing artists etc. Beckett and ‘Waiting for Godot’ were only a small part of these courses. He did not want to sell the project, nor did he want to convince the people that art had a social impact. He wanted to live and work in the other people’s time instead of having the people living and working in theirs. The relation became more than merely transactional; it did not depend on a quid pro non. “We trusted our ability to develop relationships with people, so that when they were ready to listen what we were up to, then they would ask us.”22 Next to this teaching, he met neighbours and went to community meetings to go beyond the social segregation. He was not alone doing this: the rest of his team invested a similar presence in the community of New Orleans. They were organizing many potluck dinners. The theatre of Harlem was doing theatre workshops and gradually developing the play including influences and experiences these meetings with the community. “Chris and I knew that we had to be exposed to the city as much as possible for the city to seep into our process” Paul Chan thinks that New Orleans made Chris direct Godot more musical. There was for instance one scene where Wendell would mimic Satchmo “and

21 Leddy, Tom, “Dewey’s Aesthetics”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Spring 2013 Edition. Chapter 2.5 22 Halbreich K. & Chan P. “Undoing, a Conversation Between Kathy Halbreich and Paul Chan.” 2009. In Chan P. (eds). “A Country Road, a Tree, Evening”. Creative Time, New York, 2010. Page 8 (308).

everybody got it”.23 Greta Gladney, a local community organiser, tells about her heavy emotions, being on the place, surrounded by her community, all sharing the same disaster. An emotional point in the play was for her “when Pozzo looks around and says something like, “Look at all this,” and he pulls out a little disposable camera and snaps a picture. ... It was so appropriate in the Lower Ninth Ward because there were so many outsiders and tour buses driving through the city ... Folks were just getting out and taking pictures, just like that.”24 Some other concrete examples of New Orleans seeping into the play, mentioned by Thompson and Gladney are the tattered clothing, the tricycle with a basket that could have been found among the debris os someone’s home, the hackneyed, cobbledtogether tree that could be construed as either dead, fake, or holding onto life... Nonetheless these influences, Paul Chan also attached importance to the austerity of the play. “It still felt foreign and that was important. ... What I appreciate most about what we did was this ability to embody both qualities: to have it feel at ease with the place while at the same time feel completely alien. Because that’s the truth of it.” —Paul Chan25 Thus the environment of production and of perception are the same, for both the artist and the audience. Paul Chan first perceived the landscape, experienced similarities with Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’ and then decided to stage it in there, merging these two resembling experiences, producing an experience for the people living in the place. By spending dime and time in New Orleans, the team and the play were familiarised with the environment. It enabled the local spectator to weave its own way through the forest of words, acts and things. The team’s very presence and engagement in the community had been creating these multiple relations between Beckett’s alien ‘Waiting for Godot’ and the post-Kat23 Satchmo is the nickname for Louis Armstrong, a jazz trumpeter, singer, and an influential figure in jazz music, from in New Orleans. 24 Chan P. and Gladney G. “I saw Chris. Interview with Greta Gladney.” 2009. In Chan P. (eds). “A Country Road, a Tree, Evening”. Creative Time, New York, 2010. Page 8(299) 25 Halbreich K. & Chan P. “Undoing, a Conversation Between Kathy Halbreich and Paul Chan.” 2009. In Chan P. (eds). “A Country Road, a Tree, Evening”. Creative Time, New York, 2010. Page 8 (311).

rina New Orleans. They had been creating relations by adapting the play to New Orleansâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; spirit but also by familiarizing New Orleanians with the visiting team and their cultural vocabulary. Maybe these relations are very simple: having lived in this neighbourhood, a theatre workshop one has done, a meeting with an actor during a potluck dinner in the street, the artist that made your computer once, the interview with the curator, one having installed the set â&#x20AC;Ś ?

Case III: Elemental

Quinta Monroy e Uquique

Elemental started as an academic research at the Harvard University initiated by three Chilean architects (Anrés Iacobelli, James Allard and Alajandro Aravena) that wanted to do something to improve the standard of social housing. In a student seminar they developed an abstract housing typology that they believed would work well: the ‘Parallel Building’, a hybrid between a house and a collective building. In reality it was an updated version of the typical two-story house of colonial Latin America that has two doors for each lot facing the street: one leading into a house and then the courtyard on the ground floor and the other that opens into a staircase taking you to the upper floor unit. Their contribution was to make the house porous so that it allowed expansions to occur in the pores within the volume. So in a way they were providing one half of a house. The provided half contained the most expensive and difficult elements: the structure, a bathroom, a kitchen and a small multifunctional room. The other half was to be built by the residents themselves. The voids were measured to be large enough to accommodate future middle class standard rooms, yet small enough to allow for simple, low-tech construction. The maximum size was set out in line, but there was a relatively large freedom according to materials and layout. Since not everyone is gifted to build and willing to design, good construction techniques and possible layouts were suggested in optional workshops, but nothing was imposed in this respect. The completed half accommodated the personal taste of the individual family. The architects therefore call their ‘Parallel Building’ a diversity organiser. Figure 1 illustrates the key concept: “If the money can only pay for around forty square meters, instead of thinking of that size as a small home, why don’t we consider it as half a good one?” This idea of self-construction is in line with the architects’ desire that also social housing should be able to behave as an invest-

ment (increase in value over time) and not just as a social expense (like buying a car). Housing could then be used as a tool to ask for a loan that allows a family to start a small business, get better education for children, or simply enter into the market of social mobility…

fig 1: basic idea of Elemental1

With this typology they returned to the Ministerio de Vivienda (ministry of housing). Consequently the architects, now assembled in the official company ‘Elemental’, were hired to work on Quinta Monroy. Quinta Monroy was an illegal settlement of one hundred families in downtown Iquique, for which an appropriate solution had not been found after thirty years of failed initiatives. For a year Elemental worked to turn the abstract model into a real project, adapting to costs, complying with regulations and winning the acceptance of the families. 1 Aravena A & Iacobelli A. “Elemental. Incremental housing and participatory design manual”. Hantje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2012. Page 16

Every family was about to obtain a house for US$7500, but this money should also have to pay the land that was extremely valuable because of its central location. The choice to stay on the same location affected the final layout of the individual houses off course, however the residents considered the need to conserve the existing labour networks as very important and they voted to sacrifice a water heater. The whole process of developing the design, consulting the residents, obtaining subsidies, the public bidding process … is described in their ‘Incremental housing and participatory design manual’, a book of 500 pages, used as the main source for this analysis.2 I want to focus here on the process of communicating and involving the community of inhabitants, since they are the one(s) addressed in the architectural design of the neighbourhood. In the terminology of this thesis one would say that Elemental addressed the families of Quinta Monroy with the Parallel House as the ‘taking form’ for their idea of good social housing. The completion required by these families is very clearly the expansion, finishing, improvement and habitation (!) of the housing units. The outstanding pictures of the completed houses prove that the architects’ so called diversity organizer worked well -on the formal level at least-. This completion did not happen automatically of course; it had been preceded and accompanied by a whole process of ‘participative’ workshops and informative campaigns. Next to the building typology, these workshops are another form of address. In the next paragraph I summarised the socialization process as described by the architects.

2 Aravena A & Iacobelli A. “Elemental. Incremental housing and participatory design manual”. Hantje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2012.

Socialisation process3 Phase A: Design + Eviction + Survey 1. Communication • Communication of restrictions: the typologies in the construction market that were known to the families were put in equation with the available budget and land surface. The exercise showed the incapacity of detached houses and the terrible alternative of a multistory block typology. • Communication of institutions involved and their responsibilities • Communication of timeline: it is important to acknowledge that building processes can last long! 2. Design development • The design is communicated in abstract models and maps. • The final square meters were communicated, not the initial since it was difficult to know the exact funds in this stadium. • For the first time, residents were able to give comments. The design was adapted. 3. Communication of the final project in synthesized manner, including design conditions suggested by the professionals, the restrictions of the project, and the comments made by the family. One should obtain the approval of the families to proceed with the projects, the municipal permits and the bidding process. Phase B: Bidding The offer made by the contractor in the bidding process will tell precisely what parts of the house can be built with the subsidy and which parts must be dealt with later on by the families. This is why one should carry out, at the end of this process, an informative workshop in which the items included in the bid are broken down in detail. In the event that the project suffers a major change 3 Aravena A & Iacobelli A. “Elemental. Incremental housing and participatory design manual”. Hantje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2012. Page 124-135.

after the bidding in order to meet the costs, a specific workshop may be added to explain in detail the nature and pertinence of the changes made. Families should be given the possibility to suggest alternatives if, according to their opinion, relevant parts were left out. This phase can only be considered finished when families have signed a document accepting modifications. Phase C: Construction 1. Initial workshop: families are led to create subcommittees associated with the collective spaces or condominiums defined within the project. After two months of adjustments, the families had successfully defined their own housing assignment and future neighbours established valid democratic criteria. 2. Construction site visits: families are able to monitor the quality of the construction, visualize their future house 3. Expansion workshops: • Teaching about the technical aspects of the home • Identifying and locating daily activities and situations in the project, or orienting the inclusion of non-residential activities in the dwelling • Create awareness in the future owners, regarding their responsibility in the value appreciation of the complex. • Visualizing and anticipating the consequences of architectonic language. To avoid entering into the realm of taste, the idea is to concentrate on the form in which individual decisions can influence the value appreciation of the complex. 4. Collective space workshops: e.g. agreements on where cars are to be parked, sizing criteria for fences and front yards… 5. Co-ownership regulations: a code should be made based on the possible conflicts and agreements raised during the previous workshops. This code must anticipate and regulate, for example, conflicts related to the provision of public illumination services, the maintenance of public spaces, trash collection… Phase D: habitation 1. On-site design assistance to those families who require it. This is the moment for analysing individual cases where specific situations will be resolved. 2. Special attention and assistance to those cases in which there are sufficient re-

sources for a complete extension with the intention that they serve as an example for the rest 3. Support en enforce the authority of the co-ownership regulations. The architect in charge exercises the role of a quality supervisor.

A Sensitive Matter It is important to read the socialization process from a somewhat different perspective than the previous art projects. My experiences in the field of architecture/urbanism taught me that housing is a very sensitive matter. It determines somebodyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s everyday living environment and is in most cases the biggest investment in a lifetime and the largest amount of aid a poor family will ever receive from the state. In this case it is even more delicate since the whole neighbourhood was to be demolished and re-erected. The illegal settlement of Quinta Monroy had a difficult history; years of uncertainty and unkept promises had led to a profound distrust towards authority within the community. There is no notice of people complaining to loose their initial houses â&#x20AC;&#x201D;the families lived in horrible conditions: sixty percent of the spaces had no light or direct ventilationâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; but rather a fear of being unable to return. The location of the land downtown was precious and created a lot of opportunities for the families. Elemental had been striving to keep this location and the families have had to give up some rights in favour of this land. The book informs about a vote that was organised: water heater or land? Did the people prefer a water heater in their house and move to another neighbourhood or did they agree to abandon this in favour of the location? This kind of fake democracy works well to mobilize a community, but is very questionable. There is another essential difference with the previous art projects, namely that the one(s) addressed did not have a choice in taking part or not: their initial houses would certainly be demolished. To obtain a new house one had to participate. The architects cannot be blamed for this hard reality. They clearly acknowledge the extreme power imbalance in which they were working. I appreciate

that the book communicates the troublesome consequences of working in such a context, e.g. “one of the most delicate moments of the project where, with the help of the police, the last resisting families had to be evicted on site to be able to begin the construction of their own homes.”4 There is also the anecdote of three families not participating in the workshops and expanding their houses in the wrong way. Two expansions were by consequence demolished and one was facing a lawsuit for non-compliance with joint-ownership regulations. The architects mention that “these cases provided an opportunity for the community to test the legal tools available to them.”

Another Diversity Organiser Going through the different phases of the so named ‘participatory design process’, it is quite remarkable that much of the time was spent communicating and informing the families. “One of the objectives was to install a certain technical and organisational capacity. … We resolved to use the same materials, concepts and terms with the residents as in academic forums. We were convinced, (and still are) that there was no need to oversimplify things so that the families could understand them, nor make them more complex to appear more professional or academic. They simply needed to be discussed.”—Aravena.5 Many parallels can be drawn with Bruno Latour’s object-oriented democracy, as described in the introduction, and the new eloquence he is proclaiming.6 “It is great to be convinced, but greater to be convinced by some evidence.”—Latour.7 4 Aravena A & Iacobelli A. “Elemental. Incremental housing and participatory design manual”. Hantje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2012. Page 120. 5 Aravena A & Iacobelli A. “Elemental. Incremental housing and participatory design manual”. Hantje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2012. Page 123. 6 “What we need is to be able to bring inside the assemblies divisive issues with their long retinue of complicated proof-giving equipment.” — Latour B. “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik”. Appeared in: Latour B. & Weibel P. “Making Things Public”. MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2005. Page 11. 7 Latour B. “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik”. Appeared in: Latour B. & Weibel P. “Making Things Public”. MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2005. Page 11.

The workshops were formats of assemblies, invented by the architects, for the people to disagree, to research the architectural project accurately and come to a closure. Since the people were not only going to expand their houses, but really cohabitate, the workshops were to be developed into a committee with inhabitants as representatives discussing about ongoing concerns. Next to the building, this committee is a second diversity organiser that was realised. But is it working as well?

Participating as Citizens I am about to question the democratic aspect of the case. As experts, the architects namely have a lot of power in the debate. It leads me back to the pragmatist’s writings. Especially Dewey did worry about the power of experts, but according to Marres’ analysis of Dewey and Lippmann, the public attention paid to the issue and the representation of the issue as a matter-of-concern rather than a matter-of-fact already is a progress compared to the current public affairs.8 The use of the word participation, often used in the ‘participatory design manual’, is also quite questionable. In the different phases of the ‘participatory design process’, it is remarkable that the families were intensively guided and that the space for participation is much delimited. “Participation has become the default of politicians withdrawing from responsibility” is the critical voice of architect Miessen9 in his book ‘The Nightmare of Participation’. This is not really the case here: in a TED talk Alejandro Arageno is stressing the responsibility of the architects in every wrong and right use of the spaces. The responsibility was for the team of Elemental. Since Elemental is a group of architects and sociologists, it is a form of shared responsibility. Interesting in this respect is Thomas Hirschorn’s consideration of shared responsi-

8 Marres N. “Issues spark a public into being, A key but often forgotten point of the Lippmann-Dewey debate”. Appeared in Latour B. & Weibel P. (eds). “Making Things Public”. MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2005. 9 Miessen M. “The Nightmare of Participation”. Sternberg Press, Berlin. 2010. Page 14.

bility. The illustrating diagram he drew during a lecture in Lausanne is retaken in figure 2.10 Often, we think of shared responsibility as a responsibility that is divided into different parts, every party his spot. But according to him everybody is 100 percent responsible for the activity he is involved in. The shared responsibility is the overlap between these 100 percent responsibilities.

fig 2:

left: usual conception of shared responsibility right: shared responsibility acc. to Thomas Hirshorn

Participation and collaborative practise also had a consistent presence in the art of the last twenty years. Nicolas Bourrioud’s ‘Relational Aesthetics’11 and Claire Bishop’s critique12, Suzanne Lacy’s ‘New genre public art’13, Suzy Gablik’s ‘Connective aesthetics’14, Grant Kester’s ‘Dialogical art’15... to name some of them.

10 Explained in a lecture by Hirschhorn T. ‘Théatre précaire’. Théatre de Vidy, Lausanne. 3/12/2014. 11 Bourriaud N. “An Introduction to Relational Aesthetics” Exhibition catalogue, CAPC, Musee d’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux, 1996. Cited in Lind M. “Complication; on Collaboration, Agency and Contemporary Art”. Public: New Communities. Issue 39. Spring 2009. 12 Bishop C. “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics”. OCTOBER 110, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Fall 2004. Page 51–79. 13 Lacy S. “Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art.” Seattle and Washington. Bay Press, 1995, pA3. Cited in Lind M. “Complication; on Collaboration, Agency and Contemporary Art”. Public: New Communities. Issue 39. Spring 2009. 14 Gablik S. “Connective Aesthetics: Art after Individualism” in Mapping the Terrain, p. 80. Cited in Lind M. “Complication; on Collaboration, Agency and Contemporary Art”. Public: New Communities. Issue 39. Spring 2009. 15 Kester G. “Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art”. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Cited in Lind M. “Complication; on Collaboration, Agency and Contemporary Art”. Public: New Communities. Issue 39. Spring 2009.

Art critics discussed and disagreed on the role of art in society and the ethics involved. Most interesting for this case is the definition of participation that art historian Christian Kravagna provided. The definition is part of a larger classification of the different methods seen in contemporary art with an interest in human interaction. “Participatory practice presumes that there is a difference between the producer and receiver, but the focus is on the latter, to whom a significant part of the development of the work is transferred.” 16Maria Lind specifies: “Participation is more associated with the creation of a context in which participants can take part in something that someone else as created but where there are nevertheless opportunities to have an impact.” 17 Do the inhabitants have a satisfactory impact? The formulation Thomas Hirschorn would make is powerful: it is the people helping the architects with their project, not the architects helping the people.18 The socialization process is therefore a word I prefer to use. Or maybe it is even more about empowerment? The architects write about “the population’s transition from squatter to citizen.” They organised a collective space workshop in which “a public consciousness of the consequences of their actions on shared public spaces was installed.” The insertion of families into the beneficial networks of the formal city was emphasised. According to Elemental, this focus was important since value appreciation has been one of the main goals from the outset and the importance of the surrounding environment on value generation is then undeniable. I appreciate the affirmative gesture for the workshop to take place at the Universidad Arturo Prat de Iquique; for many of the attendants, this was the first time they had been invited to a university. 16 Kravagna C.’Modelle partizipatorischer Praxis I Die Kunst des Offentlichen’ eds. Marius Babias & Achim Konneke, Amsterdam and Dresden:Verlag der Kunst, 1998. Cited in Lind. M. “Complication; on Collaboration, Agency and Contemporary Art”. Public: New Communities. Issue 39. Spring 2009. Page 54. 17 Lind. M. “Complication; on Collaboration, Agency and Contemporary Art”. Public: New Communities. Issue 39. Spring 2009. Page 54. 18 In all his ‘Presence and Production’-projects (e.g. the Bijlmer Spinoza Festival) he said that the visitors were helping him to realize the artwork, rather than him ‘helping’ the visitors with something. Explained in a lecture by Hirschhorn T. ‘Théatre précaire’. Théatre de Vidy, Lausanne. 3/12/2014.

December 2004

June 2006

Layout of square lots

First-level plan

Second-level plan

Case III: Eric Baudelaire

Letters to Max & The Secession Sessions

The last case of Paris-based artist Eric Baudelaire made me abandon the idea of dialogial art and instead focus on the poetics of the addressing gesture in particular. This former academic in political sciences started his art project out of a curiosity for the ‘state’ Abkhazia. Abkhazia is a disputed territory on the eastern coast of the black sea. It seceded from Georgia during a civil war in 1992-1993 and hasn’t been recognized by the vast majority of countries in the world for twenty years, with the exception of Russia, Nicaragua and a few others. Baudelaire gave this curiosity a form by writing a letter to Maxim Gvinjia (or simply Max), the former minister of foreign affairs of Abkhazia that he had met in an earlier fieldtrip around the area. This first letter was more about the form than about the content. Very poetically it contains all the necessary elements to be a letter. It was an impulsive experiment: if a mail to the unrecognized state of Abkhazia would arrive. And it happened to arrive; Max answered by E-mail since his post office isn’t recognized. It was the starting point for a very particular conversation in between these two people, with Eric sending letters by post to Max in Abkhazia and Max replying in audio recordings sent by Wetransfer. The particular use of the mail, an anachronistic medium in the Internet era, implies not only a confrontation with the world order –compelling an attempted forced recognition by international authorities-, it also introduces interesting gaps and delays in the conversation. A conversation? Actually maybe rather two one-sided conversations. Both have their own logic, since both conversation partners cannot directly interact into the other one’s speech. The two voices are also represented in two different mediums. The letters are bound together into a book.1 The recordings 1 Baudelaire E. ‘Letters to Max’. Poulet-Malassis, Paris, 2014. Consultable on http://baudelaire.net/secession/libretto-exhibition-program/, last consulted on 11/2/2015.

became the narrative voice-over in the film with images that Baudelaire captured in Abkhazia after the correspondence ended.2 Both artworks are addressed to an art audience in the ‘Secession Sessions’: an exhibition and symposium to investigate the question of statehood through the prism of the stateless state of Abkhazia. It took place in two cities: in Paris and in Bergen, Norway.3 In Paris, Maxim Gvinjia was present and could be consulted in the ‘Anembassy’.

The Letters: a Questioning of Representation When Baudelaire found out his experiment worked out well, he decided to write a letter to Max almost everyday from September 2012 on. He starts by asking very concrete questions about the living environment of Max, questions that turn around the things he remembered from his last trip to Abkhazia: “Do you still go up around the Belvedere above the city?” “I guess you had a driver when you were minister of foreign affairs? What about now?” After this, the questions become more fundamental on the notion of a nation state. “Is a state something you build? Or is it always there?” Baudelaire is imaging and communicating openly about the film he wants to make with and about Max. He asks him to record sounds, answer questions or tell stories by speaking into a microphone recorder, take photographs, make sightings, suggest shooting, as for the preparation of a conventional documentary work. Then, gradually one letter after another, since he still didn’t receive an answer, Eric Baudelaire’s questions become more open, leaving more place for Max to take part in directing the film to be made. “Did I ask you the right questions?” 2 Baudelaire E. ‘Lost Letters to Max’. 2014. 103 minutes. —The artist has sent me a link to see the movie on the Internet. Not open for public. 3 ‘The Secession Sessions, Un projet d’Eric Baudelaire avec Maxim Gvinjia’. Bétonsalon - Centre d’art et de recherche, Paris, 9/1 - 8/3/2014 and Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen, 17/1– 16/2/2014.

“If our roles were reversed, what questions would you ask me?” “What are the questions that I have not asked you, but that I should have asked you?” He asks himself: “What can a picture tell us about Abkhazia? About imagination?” “What roles should we play?” Next to the imaginary and fictional qualities of geopolitics, another theme becomes prominent: questions about creation, the process of narration of a story, of construction of a work of art.

The Movie: a Personalised Portrait of Abkhazia The movie is a rich document where we hear Max’s relaxing voice reading the letters out loud and subsequently answering with anecdotes and reveries. Baudelaire’s images accompanying these stories show us a geographical space of a country from afar. In the beginning we see empty houses and ruins, trees, a road, a green field ... with temperatures of a subtropical climate. It could have been almost anywhere. Except for a military vehicle, the overall image shows an atmosphere of peace, joy and everyday live: you see people walking in the street, IKEA, dancing courses, people playing board games. Symbolic actions pointing to nationalism appear now and than: a group of young adults exercising for an official military parade, gift shops with flags, some people with military uniforms ... Art critic Maria Mosing writes about an atmosphere of uncertainty and subjectivity, since you never precisely know when it is filmed and by whom.4 The images seemed to be randomly chosen at the beginning but then regularly we are surprised by some illustrations (or affirmations) of what Gvinjia is talking about. For instance: “Abkhazia can be seen as a small version of New York” and we see children driving plastic cars on the dike5 —Baudelaire has a sense of 4 Moseng M. ‘Found Letters and Lost Images’. Wuxia, Tidsskrift fûr Filmkultur, Oslo. Issue 1/2/2014. 5 Baudelaire E. ‘Lost Letters to Max’. 2014. 14 min.

humour too—. This skilful management makes that one doesn’t loose attention to the 1h43min of footage. The movie develops into a more personal story of Max: we see his family, its former office, his children and friends in the country he helped create. Once he is restaging the moment that he got to know about Russia’s recognition of Abkhazia. It’s hard to imagine though how this young man Gvinjia, whose idealism borders on romanticism, was ever taken seriously in the bellicose milieu. The letters aren’t always read aloud anymore. The answers aren’t always specifically any longer. But the silence then, and the avoidance of the questions –that are still displayed on the screen- create in interesting tension. Especially the case of the Georgian refugees is hushed up. The romanticism gets a layer of indifference. Ellen Mara De Wachter points to the colour of vulnerability in the film of the film: Gvinjia no longer has his job; he has separated from his wife; and his country is under constant threat from its neighbour, Georgia.6

The Sessions and the Anembassy: Producing Knowledge Letters to Max was complemented by “The Secession Sessions”: an exhibition, a symposium with international participants from the fields of art, politics and film, and the ‘Abkhazian Anembassy’. This all took place at Bétonsalon in Paris and Bergen Kunsthall, Norway. I wasn’t able to be present, so my observations for this part of the project are based on articles from those that had the opportunity. The ‘Anembassy’ etymologically is the ‘embassy without’; but it is also a reminder of Baudelaire’s former film project ‘The Anabasis of May’. Art critic Guillaume Désange described the set design of the exhibition as a television studio with freestanding walls and stage markings detailing the day’s various sequences ac6 De Wachter E.M. ‘Changed States. Collaboration and conflict in the work of Eric Baudelaire’. Frieze Magazine, London. Issue 164, Summer 2014. Page 144-147.

cording to a precise schedule. The anembassy was a simple rectangle taped on the floor with a plywood desk and chairs and some “props” to activate the conversation. There was the Abkhazian flag, a laminated map of the world showing in green the smattering of countries that officially recognize the Republic of Abkhazia (Russia, Nicaragua, and Venezuela among them); a set of postcards written and illustrated by some children, who came to visit the anembassy that morning… Maxim Gvinjia himself held public visiting hours. “A strange and serious comedy unfolds, in which the former diplomat plays himself, while also being the subject of the work by Baudelaire, without fundamentally doing anything but what he used to do as a minister: persuade, greet, and interpret official discourse... A realfake country, a real-fake public, a real-fake ambassador.” —Désanges7 The program of talks, public events and workshops that accompany the art pieces has similarities to the returning idea of creating a shared vocabulary or developing divisive issues. Going through the program, I recognize political scientists, anthropologists, artists exploring the issues of statehood that go beyond the question of Abkhazia per se. Eric Baudelaire is framing the case of Abkhazia in a larger multidisciplinary discourse, offering the audience a filter through which they can read the art pieces presented. One can discuss if the artist is acting like ‘the ignorant schoolmaster’ in its larger sense. The different entry points and perspectives in the talks and workshops can be considered as a wide offer of metaphors for every visitor to find a personal relation to the topic and to start constructing his own narrative of Abkhazia. It becomes even more prominent in the organized conversations with Maxim Gvinjia: nothing is scripted in advance; most of what occurs is the result of the construction of situations. This involves producing rather than reproducing knowledge. Or is knowledge not the right word since we are dealing with fictions? According to Rancière, documentary can be seen as a type of fiction film that, by taking 7 Désanges G. ‘Performing the Document: New Political Theatricalities’. Esse Magazine, Montreal. Issue 82, Automn 2014. Page 45.

the real as a point of contestation rather than an effect to be produced, opens up new possibilities for fictional invention.8 The state of Abkhazia is another fiction at stake. Fictions are not opposed to facts, but are ways of constructing the arena in which knowledge and facts are given meaning. Maria Museng elaborates in Wuxia magazine: “The politics of the documentary is not its explanatory power, its efficacy in delivering information. Rather, it is found in the forms of community that are implied by the possibilities of identification in the film. The aesthetic regime of art, according to Rancière, is also a new regime of historicity, in which the future is defined by restaging the past. This is where the personal account becomes important, because the production of meaning from fact is a capacity that belongs to everyone, and this capacity is also the possibility of creating new common worlds; of creating memory.”9

Agency vs Instrumentalization The whole project is mostly described as an exploration of representation, whether it is diplomatic, artistic or theatrical (Désanges7, Moseng9, Gratza10). The artist gives a representation of Abkazia, of a person and of a question. Or rather: Baudelaire represents the issue of Abkhazia by its former minister of foreign affairs, the romantic Maxim Gvinjia, that is in turn represented by a movie. The issue of Abkhazia is itself a representation for questions of nationhood, but also for questions of representation, identity, fiction and reality. The question of representation, Latour wrote in ‘Making Things Public’, is actually always threefold : who represents, what is represented and how is it represented?11 8 Rancière J.‘Film Fables’ translated by Battista E. Bloomsbury Academic, Oxford. 2006. Cited by Moseng M. ‘Found Letters and Lost Images’. Wuxia, Tidsskrift fûr Filmkultur, Oslo. Issue 1/2/2014. Page 87-88. 9 Moseng M. ‘Found Letters and Lost Images’. Wuxia, Tidsskrift fûr Filmkultur, Oslo. Issue 1/2/2014. Page 88. 10 Gratza A. ‘You’ve got mail’. 20/3/2014. http://www.artforum.com/slant/id=45741 Last consulted 11/2/2014. 11 Latour B. “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik”. Appeared in Latour B. & Weibel P. (eds). “Making Things Public”. MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2005. Page 6.

69 The use of the person of Gvinjia evokes questions of utilitarism or instrumentalism. Is Max not misrepresented? Is there a win-win situation for both parties? The questions are partly answered by art critic Ellen Mara De Wachter and her experience in the Anembassy: “In this space, Gvinjia was his own boss, a relaxed diplomat engaging with his interlocutors on topics ranging from food to politics. During my appointment, we discussed nationalist foundation myths, debated Baudelaire’s work and drew maps of the Black Sea countries. Gvinjia told me that the rarefied context of the contemporary art gallery suited the film, saying: ‘The work is my own personal story. I don’t want it shown too much on the internet.’ He added: ‘It’s also propaganda, but I didn’t think about it like that [at the time].’”12 There is no reason to believe that Max could not refuse the things at stake, the way he is represented and taking a role in the art show. Moreover Max’s freedom in the Anembassy provides him a remarkable agency. One starts to question: who is used by who? Agency, Latour defines, is when “the consequence adds slightly to a cause”, if “there is a supplement, a gap between the two.”13 Eric Baudelaire caused Max to be present as a diplomat in the Anembassy. The artist invented the format but wasn’t present as a mediator during the visiting hours. The consequences of this format, what was going to happen in there, was not fully descripted by the artist but in hands of Gvinjia and the visitors. We can conclude that in the ‘Secession Sessions’ an interesting double address was at stake. There was Baudelaire addressing the art audience and at the same time there is the diplomat addressing the same audience but from another output point. 12 De Wachter E.M. ‘Changed States. Collaboration and conflict in the work of Eric Baudelaire’. Frieze Magazine, London. Issue 164, Summer 2014. Page 147. 13 Latour B. ‘An Attempt at a “Compositionist Manifesto”’ New literary history, University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Issue 41, 3, Summer 2010. Page 482.

The Artist as an Address

In the former cases it has always been the artist that addresses others because of a common matter-of-concern. Sometimes it happens that the artist is addressed for its skills through art commissions. Artists are in general very reluctant for commissions. Demands are rare and ‘handled with care’ since they appear as a threat to the autonomy of art. In France I got into contact with some interesting frameworks through which artists can be addressed: the protocol of the New Patrons and the academic research group SPEAP. They prove that it doesn’t have to be contradictory to autonomy and that the pragmatist conclusions drawn in the former cases are as well applicable. Autonomy hasn’t always been intrinsic to art; it originated with the philosophers of the enlightenment. Immanuel Kant is considered as a foundational theorist of ‘autonomy’ with its paper ‘Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?’1 His well-known answer is that it is “man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity”. It is “emergent” because humanity for the first time became free to think without affirming predetermined values and predetermined institutions. That is, free to think critically, to think through the limits of reflection, and to develop this autonomy historically and within a new concept of the public. Marx’s ‘For a Ruthless Critique of Everything Existing’2 further developed the necessity of this project. He specifically focused on critique and how art can productively bring about dynamic change with a public that is free but undetermined.

1 Kant I. “Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?” 1784. Cited in Schneider B. “Autonomy in Conservative Times”. Appeared on http://www.artandeducation.net/paper/autonomy-in-conservative-times/. Last consulted on 24/01/2015. 2 Marx K. “For A Ruthless Critique of Everything Existing” 1843. Cited in Schneider B. “Autonomy in Conservative Times”. Appeared on http://www.artandeducation.net/paper/autonomy-in-conservative-times/. Last consulted on 24/01/2015.

Who can say now what art is meant to be?3 A first and iconic example is ‘Les Nouveaux Commanditaires’ or ‘The New Patrons’ that is operative in France, Belgium and Switzerland today.4 It is initiated by François Hers out of a desire to tackle the absence and silence of citizens in the arts. Democracy’s ideal is that everyone would be able to play a role in the field as fully-fledged player, as citizen. He believes that art is “a terrain where they could freely exert, test and solve their fundamental cultural needs.”5 The introductory quote on the website situates very literally the spirit of the ‘New Patrons’ in a historic process of emancipation and democracy, to which also the enlightenment has contributed: “Since the Renaissance, art has formed a political ambition of extraordinary audacity: the invention of individuality. Now that conditions are ripe, art can help shape a second ambition continuing on from the first: constructing a democracy.” —Hers4 The actions take place in the ‘art scene without walls’: it can occur anywhere and it is open for anyone. François Hers designed a protocol that defines everyone’s role and responsibility. The process starts with someone, or a group of people, that feels the need for an artwork. As patrons, they can then address an artistic mediator, gathered under an International Society of Nouveaux Commanditaires, to help them take responsibility for the commissioning of an artwork. This mediator is an expert in contemporary art. Next to technical knowledge and experience in funding, his/her main responsibility is to choose the artist. Ideally the artist is involved early in the debate about the patrons’ objectives and the most adapted mode of intervention. Together they will intensively discuss and define 3 Introductory phrase in every movie documenting a particular project. On DVD accompanying “Faire art comme on fait société-Les nouveaux commanditaires”. Les Presses du Réel, 2013. 4 All information comes from the website under headings: ‘About’. http://www.nouveauxcommanditaires. eu/. Last consulted 28/1/2014. 5 Hers F. ‘Our Mission’. Statement under ‘About’ section. http://www.nouveauxcommanditaires.eu/en/22/ about. Last consulted 12/2/2015.

the raison d’être of the project so that they -the patrons in particular- will be entirely convinced of its validity and defend it at each stage. There is no open call. The artist is free not to accept to work on the project and the patrons are capable to question the choice of the artist. It is clear that the whole process is rather based on trust and intense dialogue than acts of authority and regulations. An iconic example is the case of Garches in Hauts-de-Seine, France. The Department of Anatomic Pathologies and Forensic Medecine of the Poincaré Hospital had done renovations of its labs. Some forensic doctors and the former director of the hospital thought it was a pity to have such modern facilities but a sinister ‘Salle des départs’. They wanted to associate with an artist that could change the space in a timeless way and help people in an honourable mourning process. Therefore they contacted the ‘Fondation de France’, for years supporting the New Patrons. They in turn charged Catia Riccaboni of the artistic mediation in association with Jérôme Delormas, adviser at the Ministry of Culture. Their impression of the space and interpretation of the commission led them to the ‘immaterial painter’ Ettore Spalleti. The Italian artist didn’t say yes immediately, since he never worked outside the context of galleries and museums. It took him a while defining the way he could interpret and contribute. Spalleti decided to create “a surrounding atmosphere, as if someone touched you, leaving something in you ...The protagonist in the space had to be the colour.” He communicated through coloured models with the group of patrons. The design developed by consulting architects and people working in the space. Once executed and in use, one of the agents had added a plastic plant because he felt something was missing. The artist thanked him to point on this shortage and reacted by providing marble vases which could be used for flowers. Finally the morgue changed into a frequently visited place without taboo. Negative reactions concerned the amount of money put into the space, but the team of patrons clearly defended their project, basing their arguments on the fact that they established a non-profit organisation for this purpose and that funds came from external institutions like the Foundation and the ministry.

A Switching Subject-Object Relation In the terminology of the thesis, this protocol describes the patrons as the addressers, concerned about a common issue, sharing a common desire, but motivated by individual interests. The artist is the one addressed. According to Dewey’s pragmatist theory the artist also has to relate personally to the issue at stake. This is not literally notified in the conceptual texts on the website of the New Patrons but it is remarkable in the some video reports of exemplary cases.6 For the case of Garches, artist Spiletti was a good choice. His work didn’t deal literally with dead but his oeuvre clearly evoked feelings of immateriality, serenity and transition that fitted well with the desired atmosphere the patrons had defined. The help of the mediator in addressing an artist is important since she is in contact with many artists and is able to estimate their interests and capacities. The patrons as addressers and the artist as the one addressed; so far the defined scheme is suitable, however it is the artist that is going to put in form the output point and not the addressers. This output point is a communal, rather than just a private, meaning that has to be outlined among all players. This and the individual responsibilities taken by each player are necessary according to Hers “to give rise to an art of democracy.” ‘The addresser and the addressed’ ... maybe this subject-object relation is not so relevant? The people are switching roles according to their responsibility. In an association people work and think together. People disagree. Anastassia Makridou-Bretonneau and Sylvie Amar, working as a mediator for the New Patrons in France, point to their task of proposing a format for people to associate to discuss and act together, to disagree and come to a closure.7 The independence of the mediator is important since he has to arbitrate and control the debate, guiding the people through the framework of the New Patrons. “It seems to me that this exercise is close to the ancient maieutic but in an effective commitment rather 6 On DVD accompanying “Faire art comme on fait société-Les nouveaux commanditaires”. Les Presses du Réel, 2013. 7 Amar S. & Makridou-Bretonneau A. ‘Les nouveaux commanditaires, le public et ses problèmes’. In ‘Faire art comme on fait Société’. Les Presses du Réel, Dijon, 2013. Page 723-740

than purely discursive”8 writes Amar. She stresses in this way her agreement with Dewey that there exist an intelligence in society that can be activated by collaboration, research and conversation. For Makridou-Bretonneau Dewey pointed out the importance of the association, since it is “the only place that is legitimate to the public, the only terrain where the democratic debate can occur, i.e. in action.”9

Inquiry as a Project Another interesting format, initiated in 2010 by Bruno Latour at the Sciences Po faculty in Paris, is a multidisciplinary master program for scientific, artistic and pedagogical experimentation, named SPEAP. It stands for Programme of experimentation in arts and politics. Young professionals are welcome from all disciplines, but in reality they come mainly from the fields of art, anthropology and political science. Even more literally than the New Patrons, the program is conceived in the spirit of the American Pragmatists’ philosophy. The main problem is the one of representation: not by who or where, but what and how to represent?10 —It declares why the program is so popular for artists, since art is very much linked to this question— Not an artwork is the purpose but ‘inquiry’ as the way to create a shared public space. The websites explains that inquiry is for SPEAP the collective observation, explanation and exploration of concrete societal and political issues.11 There is no conventional methodology: young professionals from differ8 Free translation from French: “Il me semble que cet exercice est proche de l’ancienne maîeutique mais dans un engagement effectif et non purement descriptif.” Cited in Amar S. & Makridou-Bretonneau A. ‘Les nouveaux commanditaires, le public et ses problèmes’. In ‘Faire art comme on fait Société’. Les Presses du Réel, Dijon, 2013. Page 728. 9 Free translation from French: “Dewey laisse entendre que le monde associatif est finalement le seul espace qui soit légitime auprès des publics, le seul terrain où le débat démocratique peut s’exercer réellement, c’est-àdire par l’action.” Cited in Amar S. & Makridou-Bretonneau A. ‘Les nouveaux commanditaires, le public et ses problèmes’. In ‘Faire art comme on fait Société’. Les Presses du Réel, Dijon, 2013. Page 735. 10 Latour B. “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik”. Appeared in Latour B. & Weibel P. (eds). “Making Things Public”. MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2005. Page 11 ‘Innovative Pedagogy’. http://blogs.sciences-po.fr/speap-eng/20-2/innovative-pedagogy/ Last consulted on 12/2/2015.

ent backgrounds bring their knowledge and methods in and put their convictions to the test, adapted to every particular situation. The methodology is very free and adapted to the particular situation. Students are encouraged to think through the consequences of their interventions. At the end it is about creating “new modes of expression for political, economic, ecological and/or scientific questions, questions that are necessarily controversial.” Since the master is still young and in full development, I cannot find official sources documenting concrete projects. Last year however I was lucky to be part of the class of Sarina Basta, teaching both in the HEAD in Geneva and for SPEAP in Paris. She organised an exchange12 with the faculty and I met a group of three young artists (a filmmaker, a performance artist and graphic designer) working on a village that had a very bad self-image. They did not know who had reported this problem. Someone had just addressed Bruno Latour. Contrary to the New Patrons, this commissioner thus disappeared as soon as the issue was assigned to a group, playing no important role anymore. The group told me to explore the issue by mainly interviewing the inhabitants. The storytelling was fascinating; for whom they were working, unknown. One artist hoped to install a kind of monument at the end, another thought rather about a kind of ceremony. But all of them were very much disputatious about the importance of an artistic intervention or not.

Artistic Consultancy Another case was explained to me by the artist Myriam Lefkowitz during a SPEAP-workshop I did in Geneva last month13. Her group was asked by a local town council to give an analysis of a neighbourhood that could server as an alternative for the urbanist study that was done and that didn’t reflect at all the dy12 The exchange took place at the Sciences Po Faculty in Paris. Spring 2014. 13 We researched the experience of CERN in the agricultural lands of Gex by registering what we saw during walks in the area. My discussions with Myriam happened in the evenings. Her words are transcribed by myself. ‘Workshop d’hiver, avec SPEAP’ organised by Théatre de l’Usine, Genève. 17-19/12/2014.

namics the council was familiar with. Lefkowitz was one of the first participants of the master programme in 2012 but she continued to be involved as an assistant up to now. Being involved and seeing the programme develop over the years, she had a personal and nuanced view on the working process. “Some people question if SPEAP is an instrumentalization of artists. This is a large discussion about autonomy and heteronomy. I wouldn’t deny that we offer services. In this case I felt like doing a kind of consulting. We were asked to give our view. The view of an artist that is maybe the view of a professional amateur, one that focuses on direct experiences and experiments with unconventional research methods.” She explained that they decided to organise ‘window sessions’: they spent some afternoons behind the windows of inhabitants and described together what they saw. These observations were communicated in turn to the town council. The artist considered this practise worthwhile. However as an artist she wasn’t satisfied. “I wouldn’t define this as my main artistic practise. I don’t have a problem, or yes, maybe I have one if we define ‘problem’ the way Bruno Latour defines it. My problem is a shortcoming I experience in my life and in society. In my personal practise I address this shortcoming. In SPEAP we are addressing problems of others that I do not really care about at the end.” When I asked if she couldn’t address her personal project in this particular context, Myriam answered that it seemed to much to realise. Out of Myriam’s experience, I conclude that the random attribution of issues to a group of creative researchers and agents is maybe not the most productive. The New Patrons more than Latour’s master program pay attention to the personal relation of the artist to the issue at stake. When the artist already had a practise around the issue, the project can rely on a foundation. However I do also agree that the careful and creative process of inquiry of a issue, where Latour focuses on, has the ability to discover or create a personal affinity to a context . Thinking of my own personal architecture practice, I have learned to elaborate returning personal questions and concerns in very particular contexts with particular conditions.

Conclusion This paper started by drawing an arrow. The starting point was an artist that had a concern, an assertion or a feeling that was so strong or just worth to be externalised, to be thrown away, to be put in form. Then, this output was directed towards someone(s). This/These someone(s) complete the address —the transitive verb cannot exist without an object. But the completion by an object is not evident, for it to happen the addresser needed to be skilful. In the first case study, Paul Chan addressed the people of New Orleans. In the post-Katrina landscape he experienced a feeling of alienation and absurdity that was similar to the feeling he has had as a spectator of Beckett’s famous play ‘Waiting for Godot’. He decided to put this metaphor into form and started the production of this play in situ. Since the artwork was about creating a meaningful experience —in the spirit of Dewey’s aesthetics—, he consciously worked on the production of an audience as well. What an audience is, or rather what a spectator does, is explained by philosopher Jacques Rancière. A spectator is an active interpreter who try to invent its own translation in order to appropriate the story and make its own story out of it. It is a matter of linking what one knows with what one does not know. An artist builds the stage, experiments, plays and encourages the spectator to venture in the forest of words, acts and things that appear in front of him. Both Dewey’s theory of ‘Art as Experience’ and Rancière’s idea of ‘The Emancipated Spectator’ declare the working method of Paul Chan who consciously moved to New Orleans, ‘spent dime and time’ during months to let the environment seep into the play. This focus on the environment drew a context around the arrow of address. The pragmatist philosophers Dewey and Lippman would name this context the issue or the matter-of-concern. The issue concerns the public. The public is diverse in nature and the relations to the issue of every member of the public is different. Dewey and Lippmann’s political philosophy stresses the importance to address issues by collective and attentive inquiry. In the second case study, where the architects of Elemental try to involve the community of Quinta Monroy in the design of their social housing project, this inquiry takes

place in the different workshops of their socialization process. Very much attention goes to communication and the installation of a technical and organisational capacity in order to let the residents participate in a professional debate. Honourable for this attempt, the project is however questionable according to the actual agency of the residents. Agency is much more at stake in the third case where Eric Baudelaire addresses the question of representation and statehood through the case of Abkhazia. He sets up interesting conversations with Maxim Gvinjia, the former minister of foreign affairs of the unrecognized state. Baudelaire sending letters by post from Paris to Abkhazia and Gvinjia answering by voice recordings sent by WeTransfer over the internet constitute a first conversation. The anachronistic character of the post causes an interesting delay in the conversation. Instead of waiting for the answers, Baudelaire continues writing. His letters imagine possible responses of Gvinjia and become more open. They turn into a beautiful document of articulated address. Another conversation is set up in Bétonsalon in Paris under the format of an Anembassy. Here the art audience enters into the debate. People can subscribe for a meeting with Gvinjia and freely ask questions, use the available time. The format grants Gvinjia, as well as the visitors, agency. The question becomes: who is the addresser, who is the one addressed? The arrow of address is not unidirectional anymore. Different arrows can be drawn now, pointing in different directions. What happens when the arrow points clearly to the artist? Two interesting protocols for addressing artists are discussed in the last chapter. In the first place there is Bruno Latour’s master program SPEAP that appeals the unconventional and creative methodologies of artists in order to explore site-specific problems of representation. A second format is the one of the ‘New Patrons’ that envisions a way to involve citizens in the creation of art. With a particular focus on the assignment of roles and responsibilities, it can be seen as a new format to commission artworks. Dewey’s public becomes a group of commissioners. Their role is to define the raison d’être of the desired work of art in the shared context. Consequently an artist is addressed with the help of a professional mediator. The artist

is finally responsible for the creation of the form. Little case studies of both protocols seem to confirm the insights of the former cases. Paul Chan, Elemental and Eric Baudelaire had to envision and accomodate individual relations of the ones addressed to the issue at stake; the same way here, the initiators/commissioners have to recognize and explore artistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; personal affinities for a context. But for both protocols too, the arrow does not stay pointed in one direction. Once the artist at work, he takes as well the position of the addresser, searches for its personal output point readdresses the issue and the people involved. The New Patronsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; distribution of roles fosters exchange. SPEAPSâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; methodology fosters engagement with a very specific context of everyday life. A skilful address finally seems to depend on the geniality of the protocol. All cases presented in the thesis are creations of formats to relate, reflect or to question common matters-of-concern. The final form is still important, but the focus is on the format. The format generates the form. The form that exists as a separate entity and is a product of an environment, a concern and a diverse group of people involved.

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Audiovisual Sources Baudelaire E. ‘Lost Letters to Max’. 2014. 103 minutes. —The artist has sent me a link to see the movie on the Internet. Not open for public. DVD accompanying “Faire art comme on fait société-Les nouveaux commanditaires”. Les Presses du Réel, Dijon. 2013 Hers F. & Poggi J. ‘The New Patrons of Garches’. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=8ukJ9Wl1VHU. Last consulted 12/2/2015

Personal Communication Personal meeting with Charlotte Laubard. HEAD, Boulevard Helvétique, Geneva. November 2014 Exchange with Sarina Basta at the Sciences Po Faculty in Paris. Spring 2014 Evening discussions with Myriam Lefkowitz. “Workshop d’hiver avec SPEAP, Le Pays de Gex.” Organised by Théâtre de l’Usine, Geneva, 17-19/12/2014 Lecture by Hirschhorn T. ‘Théatre précaire’. Théatre de Vidy, Lausanne. 3/12/2014

Pictures and Illustrations Page 21: Illustrative drawing ‘Message in a bottle’ by author. Page 22: Illustrative drawing ‘Taped up diary’ by author. Page 33: Tree, 2007, pencil on paper. From Chan P. (eds). “A Country Road, a Tree, Evening”. Creative Time, New York, 2010. Page 2(34) Page 34-35: Robert, 2007, picture from Chan P. (eds). “A Country Road, a Tree, Evening”. Creative Time, New York, 2010. Page 5(157) Page 36: (top) Christophe McElroen and Paul Chan at John McDonogh High School, 2007, picture from Chan P. (eds). “A Country Road, a Tree, Evening”. Creative Time, New York, 2010. Page 4(125) (bottom) Paul Chan lecturing at Lusher High School, 2007, picture from Chan P. (eds). “A Country Road, a Tree, Evening”. Creative Time, New York, 2010. Page 4(128) Page 37: (top) Rev. Jeff Conor’s potluck dinner at the Martzell Methodist Church welcoming Paul Chan and the Classical Theatre of Harlem, 2007, picture from Chan P. (eds). “A Country Road, a Tree, Evening”. Creative Time, New York, 2010. Page 4(135) (bottom) Moments at Lusher, 2007, picture from Chan P. (eds). “A Country Road, a Tree, Evening”. Creative Time, New York, 2010. Page 4(124) Page 38: (top) Bikes and signs in the Lower Ninth Ward, 2007, picture from Chan P. (eds). “A Country Road, a Tree, Evening”. Creative Time, New York, 2010. Page 6(196) (bottom) The Pinettes leading the audience to the Gentilly site, 2007, picture. from Chan P. (eds). “A Country Road, a Tree, Evening”. Creative Time, New York, 2010. Page 6(219)

Page 39: (top) Second night in the Lower Ward, 2007, picture from Chan P. (eds). “A Country Road, a Tree, Evening”. Creative Time, New York, 2010. Page 6(197) (bottom) Chicken bones, 2007, picture from Chan P. (eds). “A Country Road, a Tree, Evening”. Creative Time, New York, 2010. Page 6(201) Page 40-41: It’s getting late, 2007, picture from Chan P. (eds). “A Country Road, a Tree, Evening”. Creative Time, New York, 2010. Page 6(208) Page 42: Scene views of Gentilly play, 2007, pictures by Tuyer Nguyen from Chan P. (eds). “A Country Road, a Tree, Evening”. Creative Time, New York, 2010. Page 7(123) Page 43: L0 Staging version 1, 2007, pdf from Chan P. (eds). “A Country Road, a Tree, Evening”. Creative Time, New York, 2010. Page 2(37) Page 55: (top) Aravena A & Iacobelli A. “Elemental. Incremental housing and participatory design manual”. Hantje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2012. Figure 11 Page 55 (bottom) Aravena A & Iacobelli A. “Elemental. Incremental housing and participatory design manual”. Hantje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2012. Page 154 Page 56: (top) The Minga workshop. Aravena A & Iacobelli A. “Elemental. Incremental housing and participatory design manual”. Hantje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2012 . Page 131. (bottom) The site visits. Aravena A & Iacobelli A. “Elemental. Incremental housing and participatory design manual”. Hantje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2012. Page 125 Page 57: (top) Aravena A & Iacobelli A. “Elemental. Incremental housing and participatory design manual”. Hantje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2012. Page 111 (middle left) Aravena A & Iacobelli A. “Elemental. Incremental housing and

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participatory design manual”. Hantje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2012. Page 125 (middle right) Aravena A & Iacobelli A. “Elemental. Incremental housing and participatory design manual”. Hantje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2012. Page 111 (bottom) Aravena A & Iacobelli A. “Elemental. Incremental housing and participatory design manual”. Hantje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2012. Page 343 Page 58-59: Comparison 2004 and 2006: (top) Aravena A & Iacobelli A. “Elemental. Incremental housing and participatory design manual”. Hantje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2012. Page 148-149 (bottom) Aravena A & Iacobelli A. “Elemental. Incremental housing and participatory design manual”. Hantje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2012. Page 158-159 Page 60: Aravena A & Iacobelli A. “Elemental. Incremental housing and participatory design manual”. Hantje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2012. Page 125 Page 157 Page 61: Maps in Aravena A & Iacobelli A. “Elemental. Incremental housing and participatory design manual”. Hantje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2012. Page 101 Page 72-73: Printscreen of online-view of edition: Baudelaire E. ‘Letters to Max’. Poulet-Malassis, Paris, 2014. Consultable on http://baudelaire.net/secession/libretto-exhibition-program/, last consulted on 11/2/2015 Page 74-75: Stills from the film (printscreens by author): Baudelaire E. ‘Lost Letters to Max’. 2014. Page 76: Picture in De Wachter E.M. ‘Changed States. Collaboration and conflict in the work of Eric Baudelaire’. Frieze Magazine, London. Issue 164, Summer 2014. Page 145 Page 77: Last page of ‘Exhibition program’ Bétonsalon- centre d’art et de re-

cherche. Paris. 2014. http://baudelaire.net/secession/libretto-exhibition-program/

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The Art of Addressing written by Ciel Grommen printed by Ciel Grommen in HEAD Geneva first print in 8 exemplars 13/2/2015 Thanks to Charlotte Laubard Wilfried Grommen Jon Rouvrois Myriam Lefkowitz