The epistemology of the other by Ada Sbriccoli

1 The epistemology of the other For a cartography of memory and otherness ENGLISH VERSION ANNA MARIA GUASCH UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA

In spite of the negative aspects of the processes of homogenization that it has generated, globalization can be understood as a ‘machine’ or a ‘technology’ that helps to broaden our horizons by providing routes which connect us to other societies, other peoples, other ways of thought. It does so not only through the traditional or electronic media but through what Appadurai calls ‘mediated experiences’, ranging from travel and migration to experiences derived from dialogue, that is, ‘dialogical experiences’1. Therefore, globalization ceases to be an external, abstract, distant process which is always changing its coordinates and may even arouse fear, to become a vehicle – certainly with utopian elements – that broadens and projects horizons, expectations and local aspirations. It is then that we can speak of a ‘production of locality’, which is by no means innocent, and which may cause violent confrontations between the ‘two faces’ of globalization mentioned above. The local ceases to be something inert acted on by global forces to become something given which requires agency, purpose, vision, design: in Appadurai’s words, this is, more than anything else, a process and a project2. We can then understand the local not as a spatial structure, but as a ‘structure of feeling’, as Appadurai proposes, following Raymond Williams3, a critic known 1

Arjun Appadurai,”Minorities and the Production of Daily Peace. Interview with Arjun Appadurai”, in Joke Brouwer & Arjen Mulder (eds.), Feelings are Always Local, Rotterdam, NAI Publishers, 2004. 2

Arjun Appadurai, “The Right to Participate in the Work of the Imagination”, in TransUrbanism, V2_Publishing/NAi Publishers, Rotterdam, 2002, p.33. 3

Raymond Williams uses this concept for the first time in The Long Revolution (Williams, Raymond. The Long Revolution. London, Chatto and Windus, 1961), and returns to it in his later Marxism and Literature (London and New York, Oxford University Press, 1977). Williams used this concept to characterize the experience of quality of life in a specific space and time. And although it maintains a structural level, it operates at the most delicate level of our activities. Williams describes the “structures of feeling” as “social experiences in solution”. A “structure of feeling” corresponds to the Culture of a specific

especially for his contribution to the ‘Marxism of subjectivity’. The equivalent of this subjectivity is, for Appadurai, the role granted to the imagination, which he describes as something more than an individual faculty or a mere mechanism to escape the real. ‘Imagination’ would, therefore, be a collective instrument to transform the real, to create multiple possible horizons. Hence the ‘production of locality’ should be considered as a work of imagination rather than as a social construction. “Of course locality has a spatial dimension, a scalar dimension, a material dimension and a kind of embodied dimension, but I want to infuse them with the idea that in the world in which we live the imagination can actually reach into multiple scales and spaces and forms and possibilities. These then can become part of the toolkit through which the structure of feeling can be produced locally. Locality, in the end, may still have something to do with scale and place, and with the body (and without that it loses all its meaning) – but with the difference that the horizons of globalism, through media and the work of the imagination and migration, can become part of the material through which specific groups of actors can envision, project, design and produce whatever kind of local feeling they wish to produce4.

It is from this perspective – understanding the production of locality in a liberating sense defying all restrictions and stressing the global as a broadening of the horizon of the local, the locality of the ‘new minorities’ – that we understand the relation between memory and otherness, an otherness which is not isolated or unique or exotic because it is connected and, at the same time, is a part and a consequence of global networks. We aim to apply a third view of ‘otherness’: not the Romantic view inherited from the Enlightenment which stresses culture diversity and confers meaning on it, though always through the figure of the savage, the exotic and the authenticity of one’s roots, nor the ‘modern’ view that assumes that the ‘other’ abandons his or her ‘otherness’ and becomes involved in a process of assimilating and copying the culture of the West so as to be a part of universal modern culture. Through this third view the West no longer requires the ‘other’ to be exotic, traditional and tribal, or to express a pure authenticity; it discovers itself, recognizes itself “in the Other” on the basis of the idea of interactivity and cultural exchange. In historical moment, avoiding idealist notions of the “spirit of the time”, and suggesting a set of perceptions and values shared by a particular generation that is based on specific artistic forms and conventions. 4

Arjun Appadurai, “The Right to Participate in the Work of the Imagination”, in TransUrbanism, V2_Publishing/NAi Publishers, Rotterdam, 2002, p.34.

this process which overcomes all the binary oppositions (centre/periphery, civilized/savage, learned/ignorant), cultures should be conceived as interacting, transgressing, and transforming in a far more complex way than traditional binary oppositions allow. Hybridization and linguistic multivocality are thus presented as the most powerful tools for dismantling colonization processes and for favouring the intercultural relation between the ‘one’ and the ‘other’. This is how Jacques Derrida conceptualised the issue in his text Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin (1998:40) – in part philosophical essay and in part autobiographic memoir, in the sense that he deals with his own relation to the French language – where he interrelates issues closer to linguistics with issues on cultural identity. ‘I have but one language — yet that language is not mine’: with this assertion Derrida explores, on the one hand, the structural limits, the wishes inherent to the act by which each individual possesses his or her language and, on the other, he bears witness to his acculturation as an Algerian Jew in respect of language acquisition and the dynamics of political and cultural inclusionexclusion; finally, he reveals the complex interaction of psychological factors associated to the wish of the subject of identity of recovering an original ‘lost’ language and to the ambition of adopting the language of the colonizer. “… the monolingualism of the other (also means) that in any case we speak only one language –and that we do not own it. We only ever speak one language – and, since it returns to the other, it exists asymmetrically, always for the other, from the other, kept by the other. Coming from the other, remaining with the other, and returning to the other.’ (Derrida:40.) To address these relations between memory and otherness inside what we will call the ‘post-colonial condition’, which obliges us to speak of the politics of consciousness, the politics of trust and responsibility (‘My home, my street, my life can change more visibly what proletarian revolutions have been able to achieve’), we provide an epistemological framework for some of the issues surrounding globalization. We will not be approaching them from an economic, a political or a strictly artistic point of view, but from a geographical, geopolitical point of view. We include the cardinal issue of identity, which can better explain these paradoxes and frictions between the “I” and the “other”. This takes place within a process of interculturality ruled by the following leitmotivs: ‘we are all exotic in the other’s eyes’, ‘we are all universal or no one is’, ‘we are all the one and the other’.

4 This epistemological approach, within a paradigm shift in which the art of the

periphery and the ‘erstwhile’ other have progressively taken the centre of the culture scene, is based on a series of concepts that can explain the new centrality of the postcolonial and the local, and establish differences vis-à-vis the identitary politics associated with post-modern anti-universalism and its relativism.

CONCEPT 1 (THE CULTURE-WORLD) We propose to work inside a kind of cartography in which places are occupied by a series of concepts such as what Gilles Lipovetsky terms the ‘culture-world’, touching on topics related to art, but also on culture and the economy understood as symptoms of the new era: the culture of techno-capitalism which operates at planetary level and invades all areas of society. As Lipovetsky holds, this is no longer the fixed cosmos of unity, of an ultimate meaning, of hierarchical classifications, but a cosmos of networks, of unlimited flows with no point of reference: ‘In hypermodern times, culture has become a world whose circumference is everywhere and whose centre is nowhere’5. In this culture-world, the ‘humanist universal’ makes way for the ‘specific and social universal’ and the economy-world conforms to a single model of regulations, values, and aims: the techno-capitalist ethos and system. It is a culture-world that addresses questions and issues of a ‘global’ dimension such as ecology, the economic crisis, immigration, poverty and terrorism, but also existential issues, such as identity, beliefs and crises of meaning, and personality problems: a world, in short, which becomes culture, and a culture which becomes world, as Lipovetsky holds. A cultureworld without territorial, economic or political borders, crossing the limits of the cultures derived from classical humanism. A culture-world which is neither a mirror nor a reflection of societies, but the principle that generates, constitutes and models them, and causes them to evolve. Binary oppositions such as high/low culture, anthropological/aesthetic culture, material/ideological culture are abandoned (or should 5

Gilles Lipovetsky & Jean Serroy, La Culture-monde. Réponse à une société désorientée, Paris, Odile Jacob, 2008, p. 8.

be abandoned), and the basic structures and the poles of the culture-world are freed. These structures nurture everything from techno-scientific culture to media and network culture and individual culture, and have generated – or vice versa – a new type of image creator/recreator/manipulator/communicator which we continue to call, out of habit or for lack of a better name, the artist.

CONCEPT 2 BARE LIFE Artists who adopt this culture-world define themselves as inhabitants of the global world and participants in this microworld: artists interested in the social discourse – not a class discourse, but a territorial discourse – not so much image creators as image researchers, who gather, create, question, narrate and present iconic or other information on universal topics, as individually or socially local, in a format that Western society, or ‘our society’, has classified and confirmed as ‘art’. An artist who uses this information not as the ‘sole object’ of analysis but as one tool among many, though privileged by its status as ‘art’, to unmask, reveal, denounce, analyse... censored, humiliated, or abused aspects of the modern world: democracy, justice, otherness, migration, rootlessness, diaspora... Topics which bear little or no relation to ‘ways-of-life’, but to a sacrificeable life banished from the world, reduced to survival, the bare life that Giorgio Agamben proposes in his ‘theory of marginalization’6, life driven out to the margins of the social, to which the political, legal and biological show no mercy; a life that alienates, if not disposes of, citizens, deprives them of their legitimate rights, leaves them stuck in the mire of corrupt legal systems, and turns the human being, in Agamben’s words, into the homo sacer, a deportee with no status in society, given over to nonexistent ‘gods’, ‘soiling’ society by his mere presence. This homo sacer and his bare life, with no gods to invoke, has paradoxically taken the spotlight (if not the leading role) away from gods, emperors, nobles, the bourgeois or revolutionaries who over the centuries have successively been the major figures of art7, as we can see in this proposal/exhibition. Rather than using art as protest, 6 7

Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer. El poder soberano y la vida nuda, Valencia, Pre-Textos, 1998.

See Anthony Downey, “Zones of Indistinction. Giorgio Agamben’s Bare Life and the Politics of Aesthetics”, Third Text, vol. 23, nº 2, March 209, p. 110.

propaganda or agitprop, the works presented here are created with an ethical and political dimension that reveals how limited human rights are and how vast is the area of exclusion, oblivion, and repression, the mire of the bare life and the undefined areas where power turns into control or terror: all this, however, without giving up the aesthetic (it would be unfair to do so, as this would mean vilifying what had already been soiled). This approach is close both to ‘political aesthetics’ of Agamben and the aesthetics of Jacques Rancière, and it expresses the configuration of the sensitive within the area of the new relations between politics and aesthetics. Since it is on aesthetic grounds – understanding by aesthetic not art theory in general as rooted in a Hegelian perspective but a certain regime of thought that combines doing and being and the forms of visibility, as Rancière holds – that the battle can be fought today. A battle which once focused on promises of emancipation and the dreams and disappointments of history, and which now reaches beyond the debates on the autonomy of art and its political submission, eliminating the control over what is seen and what can be seen and the distance between those with the ability to see and the status to speak, and those to whom these rights are not granted8.

CONCEPT 3. MOBILE IMAGE The artist represents or presents these undefined areas through the technologies of the mobile image, which allows him to work in the interstices that exist in the areas of documentation and art, as Boris Groys proposes in his work ‘Art as Documentation’9. Groys proposes documentation as a method for contemporary art which is not limited to the seemingly objective methods of the documentary but which unashamedly adopts the formats of interpretation in making explicit the role of the artist in selection, manipulation, synthesis and encoding of information so as to bring forth an author that is unrelated to the autobiographical subject: a subject who, dissatisfied with the public or corporate manipulation of information, uses the power of the images of the global world (some his own, others foreign or appropriated from television, cinema or Internet) 8

Jacques Rancière, La división de lo sensible. Estética y política (2000), Salamanca, Centro de Arte de Salamanca, 2002, p. 28. 9

Boris Groys, “Art and Documentation”, in Documenta 11_Platform 5: Exhibition, op. cit. p. 62.

to collect, process, interpret and disseminate information to the community10. And it is here that the use of film and video as creative tools and means becomes meaningful: a use which, though widespread in the 1980s and 1990s, is now a new instrument that reveals a subjective dimension deriving from the artist’s individual and empirical encounters with geography as a social and identitary space and from the processes of displacement inside an unstable world. This empirical factor, understanding experience as a ‘direct encounter’ which makes possible a ‘history from behind’, an ‘oral history’ or an ‘everyday history’, feeds on the ethnographic, and not on an abstract perception deriving from grand episodes and figures, a history which, as Irit Rogoff and Martin Jay propose11, ensures the authenticity of knowledge deriving from the ‘proximity’ to the real. Together with film and video, considered as fiction, life interaction, performance or tableaux vivants, there are other ways of working with mobile images and, specifically, images conceived as memory ‘flashes’ – synchronic and spatial rather than diachronic and temporal – or as an ‘index’ of an interest for the domestic and the family space that highlights problems of difference, identity, race, and ethnicity. We should bear in mind, though, that this use of video as subjective documentation, where the always fragmented ‘I’ of the artist-researcher-essayist appears in the first person in his dialogue with the ‘other’, does not imply a renewed cult of the Romantic-style ‘ego’. On the contrary: it is an active commitment to the world and to history conceived as a ‘horizontal archive’ where a multitude of nuances coexist without hierarchies, projected on local narratives within the framework of multiple ‘geographies of capital’. And they do so in permanent negotiation with aesthetic criteria in the form of political strategies, without avoiding symbolic relations.

CONCEPT 4. THE ‘MEMORY EFFECT’: MEMORY, HISTORY, ETHNOGRAPHY 10

Angela Dimitrakaki, “All that is solid melts into air but I can’t change anything. On the identity of the Artist in the Networks of Global Capital”, in Jonathan Harris (ed.), Identity Theft. The Cultural Colonization of Contemporary Art, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, Tate Liverpool, p. 2008, p.231. 11

Irit Rogoff, “De-Regulation: With the work of Kutlug Ataman”, Third Text, vol. 23, nº 2, 2009, pp. 175-176. See also Martin Jay, Songs of Experience, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2005.

8 To approach the topic of memory, or the ‘memory effect’12, we should consider

the ways in which in present-day art memory has become both a historical concern and an artistic and theoretical issue, and this has led to an obsession with memory, both instinctive memory (mnemé or anamnesis) and memory as an act of consigning or storage (hypómnema), both of individual memory and of collective or cultural memory. As Pierre Nora and Andreas Huyssen hold, works of art can be considered to be ‘repositories’ or areas of memory, taking for granted that the memories and stories that appear in them, either explicitly or implicitly, belong to different contexts and latitudes, to a specific time and place, to a site specificity. We can include under the Memory Effect a large number of contemporary artists, such as Ursula Biemann, Hannah Collins, Francesco Jodice, Rogelio López Cuenca, Dennis Adams, Jordi Colomer, Antoni Muntadas and Krzysztof Wodiczko, Kutlug Ataman, Francys Alys, Adrian Paci, Alfredo Jaar, Yael Bratrana, Olaf Breuning, Renzo Martens and Harun Facochi. Through fractured narratives they collect, recollect and present images and information about a world perceived as a cross-disciplinary database. To an extent these artists take up the methodological legacy of Aby Warburg, who in his project Atlas Mnemosyne (1927-1929) showed how the ‘memory effect’ underlies the temporal and spatial spirit of Western and non-Western art history on the basis of an eclectic, diverse and irregular collection or archive of visual fragments in which each image is a ‘fixed’ interval and the final reading can only be understood through the ‘montage” of these intervals. This ‘cross-disciplinary’ approach to memory has meant that ethnography, the cult of the present and interest in the spatial (which at one point were interpreted as the only claims of postmodernity) can today stand outside this question of time and memory. In other words, what used to be the exclusive interest of anthropology – the study of inhabited spaces through categories such as geography, borders, trade routes, migration, transportation and diaspora – associates itself with a universalist historical analysis and temporal continuities interested in the reconstruction of the past/present.

Charles Green, “The Memory Effect. Anachronism, Time and Motion”, Third Text, vol. 22, nº 6, November 2008, pp. 681-697.

9 The synchronic (a horizontal approach) and the diachronic (a vertical approach)

are no longer perceived as separate, or even opposed, categories; from the interstitial area of memory, acting both on history and the present, they occur in ‘parallax’. In Tristes Tropiques (1955), Lévi Strauss already talked of the close relationship between ethnography, a product of fieldwork mapping, of participatory observation, of journalistic inventory-chronicles, of confession books … and memory and forgetfulness, between ‘trace’ or ‘ruin’ and ‘recollection’. Years later this standpoint was endorsed by David Harvey in The condition of Postmodernity (1989), and by Andreas Huyssen, who, in Present Pasts. Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (2003) claimed that the growth in memory discourses was not only related to the debate on the Holocaust and its concept of ‘territorialized memory’ which had begun in the 1980s, but to the shift towards the memory of the ‘other’, in which cartographical (typical of synchronic thought) and the memorialistic (typical of diachronic thought) meet. Marc Augé goes one step further and describes an ethnological-social situation in respect of what he calls ‘pure time’, a dateless time absent from our world of images, simulation, reconstitutions and history. Once the ‘non-places’ in hypermodernity are defined – a postmodernity which accelerates history, retracts space and individualizes destinies – that is, the non-anthropological places which cannot be conceived as relational or historical identity spaces, it is time to specify ‘the places of memory’ inhabited by ruins, unorganized strata of rubble and monuments of the past, the places of a ‘pure’ and lost time, places not corrupted by the falsification of reality that seeks to turn place into a consumer good, the places of truth and life which for Augé are the jurisdiction of art. As opposed to traditional anthropologists who, faced with the quarry of reality before them, attempted to construct an inventory of lost objects from which to build their interpretative theories, historical sequences, and mythical episodes, ‘new anthropologists’ do not work with ruins as inanimate objects or skeletons from the past. For them and for the artists involved in this problem, considering and working with the ruins of reality does not mean embarking on a trip through history, but experiencing ‘pure time’ which is present time since it is not past: ‘In its past aspects, history is too rich, multiple and profound to be reduced to the stone sign that has escaped from it, a lost object like the ones that archaeologists recover in their spatial and temporal

sections. In the present aspects of time, emotion is aesthetic, but the spectacle of nature combines with the spectacle of the remains’13. Thus, artists not only work, analyse and communicate what lies before their eyes: towns, trampled fields, the colonizers and the colonized, potentates, the starving, natives, immigrants, men, women…, as for them making the ‘inventory’ of the dilapidated remains of reality is not an end in itself, not even an end; what matters is reinventing, reconstructing reality: ‘Humanity is not in ruins. It is a construction site,’ states Augé. ‘It still belongs to history. Often tragic, always unequal, but irreparably common history’14. We need to feel time again to be conscious of history: ‘At a time when everything conspires to make us believe that history is at an end and that the world is a spectacle in which this end is staged, we have to refind the time to believe in history. This, today, would be the educational vocation of ruins.’15

CONCEPT 5. TRANSLATION Negotiation between the synchronic and the diachronic, between the anthropological and the historical, is only possible through a further basic element, translation, understood as a tool that creates areas of cross-disciplinary understanding, and as a paradoxical concept, making understanding possible while at the same time pointing to the possibility of the untranslatable. This form of translation should not be understood as a means of fulfilling a linguistic function (as in the linguistic and ethnographical texts of the 1930s and 1940s) but as a cultural and political instrument, an instrument that not only makes the hegemonic incorporation of the ‘other’ possible, but shows the potentiality of resistance in the process of translating in itself. If, during the colonial process, translation was a source of interest especially because of its ability to build bridges across cultures, being perceived basically as an act of communication, nowadays the focus is on the ‘context’ of translation. Understood as 13

Marc Augé, El tiempo en ruinas, Barcelona, Gedisa, 2003, pp. 18 y 45-46.

Marc Augé, op. cit., p. 19.

Marc Augé, op. cit., p. 53.

the process of incorporating the voice of difference, translation is based, according to Walter Benjamin’s 1923 essay ‘The Task of the Translator’ (Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers) on the impossibility of creating a ‘mirror-image’ of the original, and should be understood, as Derrida later claimed in his essay La différance (1968), as a flow, a transitory movement that produces a ‘supplement’ through its two poles. The function of this supplement is to deconstruct the cultural assumptions on which translation is based; and it would only be intelligible through the creation of a third term, different from the original and the translated. It is not a plus nor a minus; nor is it something external or the complement of the internal, an accident or an essence; and in all cases it provides a space for the dichotomy of a cultural model hinting at transgression within the framework of a broad encounter between different language interfaces, ways of speaking or understanding the world16.

CONCEPT 6. PARRHESIA Another common topic complementary to translation is the action of ‘making the other speak’ on the basis of the concept of ‘public speaking’ or ‘testimony’. As Wodizcko noted in an interview with Patricia Philips17, democracy would not exist without the ‘public speaker’, or the ‘fearless speaker’ (an idea introduced by Michel Foucault in his lectures at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1983 from the Greek concept of ‘parrhesia’). The artist becomes this “public-speaker’ with a clarification: while participating in the agora of contemporary public space he or she give a voice to others, to enable them to add their voices to this agora. History is not only the ‘official’ history of the winners. In this regard, moving ahead from his mute projections on public monuments, what Wodizcko does is allow histories (or rather microhistories) silenced by some specific trauma, to be represented and reinserted in the ‘public space’. Only thus, according to the artist, can both people and monuments overcome traumatic impacts and become operational in the public space. This is an artistic project, but also a political 16

Jacques Derrida, “La différance” (1968), essay in Marges de la philosophie, París, Éditions de Minuit, 1972. 17

Patricia Philips, Art Journal, 2003, 62,4, nºs 32-47

and ethical one, and a psychoanalytical and sociological one, also closely related to concepts of trauma therapy.

CONCEPT 7. EXPERIENCE In an article dedicated to Kutlug Ataman18, Irit Rogoff proposes a vindication of experience to reveal a subjective dimension derived from the individual and ‘experiential’ encounters of each artist with the multiple issues arising from ‘inhabiting’ the global world. Rogoff understands experience as a ‘direct encounter’ between artists and their works that makes possible a ‘history from behind’, an ‘oral history’ or an ‘everyday history’ beyond all abstract perception of great events and figures, the documents legitimized by archive structures and official voices. This is the context in which the ‘narratives of experience’ proposed by Rogoff to explain the work of Kutlug Ataman come into their own. And this is where ‘mediated experience’19 acquires its full meaning, ensuring the authenticity of knowledge deriving from the ‘proximity’ to the real. Hence, many of the images used by contemporary artists move between two poles: they are immediate, brief and transitory – typical of ethnographical methodology – and symbolical and interpretative, with specific characters becoming part of an inventory of myths which is the source of interpretative theories: ‘fear’ almost becomes a ‘myth’. This would account in many cases for the approximation of the camera to the different characters (treated with a certain formal and aesthetic preciousness) and closeups that focus more on expression (looks, voices, asides) rather than on message content (related to immigration, drug trafficking, exile, rootlessness). Memories are activated by a present that acknowledges them at each ‘moment’ (a time-image that 18 19

Irit Rogoff, “De-Regulation, Third Text, p.176)

links up with the ideas of Walter Benjamin on memory and history and the methods he used in his chronicle of his native city, Berlin, in A Berlin Chronicle). The conversations, the dialogues we see in all these videos work as a process that feeds and encourages memory, an inventory of multiple voices through which the private becomes collective, the individual social, and fears are finally ‘exorcized’ and become ‘universal’. Hence the interest of many artists in privileging knowledge or data that have been retrieved subjectively, rejecting official versions of history. As Gibbons holds, Benjamin conceives this retrieval in terms of archaeology, in which the archaeologisthistorian’s role is to retrieve or ‘redeem’ the common space, the poetics of the everyday, and the unremarkable.20

CONCEPT 8. AESTHETICS So this is not a strictly documentation project, nor openly political, nor yet another version of a CNN documentary. Rather than using art as protest, as propaganda or agitprop, the works selected tend towards the ethical and political, without renouncing the aesthetic, in a sense close both to Agamben’s and Badiou’s ‘political aesthetics’ and to the aesthetic of Jacques Rancière when he talks about the shaping of the sensitive within the framework of the new relations between politics and aesthetics. It is in the aesthetic arena – understanding by aesthetic not art theory in general as rooted in the Hegelian perspective but a certain regime of thought that shapes the ways of doing and being and the forms of visibility, as Rancière claims – where the battle is fought today. This battle once referred to promises of emancipation and the hopes and disappointments of history, and goes beyond debates on the autonomy of art and the subordination of art to politics, eliminating the control of what we see and what can be seen, and the gap between those with the ability to see and the status to speak and those who are not granted this right21. 20 21

(Gibbons:102).

Jacques Rancière, La división de lo sensible. Estética y política (2000), Salamanca, Centro de Arte de Salamanca, 2002, p. 28.

CONCLUSION: INTERCULTURALITY

The issue of translation as a means for capturing the ‘traces’ of the other (a common practice among artists in The Memory of the Other, such as Jodice, Muntadas or Wodiczko) in oneself when working around the ‘confines’ of the context of such traces and working through the tension between difference and identity, respecting the individuality and originality of the presence of the ‘other voice’, leads us to another key issue in present-day art and in our proposal/exhibition: the dialogical situation. Some of the works presented here (Biemann, Collins and López Cuenca) show how some of the concepts usually used in the field of social and culture stratifications are no longer valid. The paradigm of postcolonial culture, especially Western postcolonial culture, which examines the culture of the ‘others’ using terms – concepts – such as ‘second’ and ‘third’ world is no longer valid; nor is the Western paradigm on identity formation in the Western environment. These are unidirectional paradigms which should be interpreted (and this is how art interpreted and practised them) as bilateral processes affecting – to use these words paradoxically – both ‘colonizers’ and ‘colonized’. Within the context of this fundamental bilateralism, a dialogue between cultures that expresses a relation of the kind ‘me-you/you/me’, in which each part recognizes in the other a ‘person’, that is, an ‘end’ in itself and not a ‘means’ to achieve something, acquires its full meaning. This dialogue would make it possible to go beyond the multiculturalism stage thanks to the political philosophy of ‘interculturalism’, that is, cultural exchange through inter-national processes, achieving a new critical reappropriation of the national. We should, therefore, move ahead towards the ‘intercultural’ that overcomes the old dichotomy between identity and difference dichotomy, towards dialogues between the different national contexts that stress subjectivities, that is, the particular realities of each human being beyond the concept of

the ‘ethnic’ – an intense and productive dialogue between the universal and the local, understanding the local more in a relational and contextual rather than in a scalar or spatial sense. As opposed to the multiculturalist, who distances himself from the ‘other’ via a privileged universalism, the interculturalist blurs distinctions in the name of a shared universalism: ‘We are all universal or nobody is’; ‘We are all exotic or nobody is’. In the empty space of intercultural encounters, the ethnic disappears and universal human identity emerges with its creativities and potentialities. As the Iranian philosopher and writer Ramin Jahanbegloo claims, every culture discovers itself in the others, and vice versa, by perceiving likenesses and differences simultaneously. The dialogue with the other, as we have presented it in this proposal/exhibition, is a dialogue with oneself. And this is how each culture sees the other: as an ‘event’, an ‘open door’. The presence of a different culture is essential to create and guarantee new possibilities22.

Ramin Jahanbegloo, Celebrating Diversity, http://www.indiaseminar.com/2007/569/569_ramin_jahanbegloo.htm.