Letters from the Field Publication by iohanna nicenboim

Letters from the Field

A project by Node Center for Curatorial Studies Berlin

CO N TE N T S

Foreword

by Perla Montelongo

Preface Introduction

by Sinejan Kılıç, Iohanna Nicenboim, Marília Pasculli

Should We Let Go? Essay by Dunja Rmandić Megan Cotts Sharon Houkema Stine Marie Jacobsen Rebecca Smith Ylva Westerlund

What Our Present Is: Presence of Mind in Cultural Production Essay by Gladys-Katherina Hernando Stephan Backes kate hers Alex Martinis Roe Aiko Tezuka

Renewing Destruction As Critical Engagement Essay by Tanya Toft Heba Amin Lynda Amer Meziane Annika Rixen

Fictional Scenarios: Whose Experience Is This? Essay by Maeve Mulrennan Lindsay Lawson Ruth Le Gear Ciarán Walsh

If We Build It They Will Come Essay by Catherine Gomersall Regina De Miguel Klaas Hübner François Martig

The Value of Showing Up Essay by Lee Foley Michiel Huijben Nicolas Puyjalon

Field Notes

Letters from the Field

Foreword

Perla Montelongo

his book started with blank pages and ends the same way, both physically and metaphorically in the form of unanswered questions. The act of asking is inherent to the will to explore and the need to hear multiple perspectives, knowing that there may be no right answer but just different versions of different realities. In Letters from the Field, nine resident curators from Node Center put forward questions that were raised during their time living in Berlin while walking in the city, sharing thoughts, talking with artists and exploring their work. The dynamic of the Curatorial Residency program at Node Center takes many forms depending on the curators who participate in and configure each edition of the program. While the aim remains the same â&#x20AC;&#x201D; to explore new forms of curatorial practice â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the outcomes vary, depending on the combined decisions of residents. As always, we started the curatorial process with long discussions that intended to find a common field for situating the ideas of the group. This time the common place was questioning the purpose of contemporary creative practices, questions that hopefully may also trigger answers from you, the reader. Please make these blank pages yours. â&#x2014;&#x2020; 4

Preface —

etters From the Field is an exhibition and book that addresses histories, futures, and fictions relevant to critical engagement in contemporary practices. This book interprets the collaborative curatorial process of nine independent curators, working together as residents of the Node Center for Curatorial Studies’ 2012 Summer program. The title of the project, Letters from the Field, refers to the format of a book and an exhibition at Atelierhof Kreuzberg 22-26 August. The premise for the exhibition arose from in-depth, circuitous discussions about the social purpose of human creativity and contemporary art. From these conversations about art in the current ecology and economy we condensed six themes into the format of a book. These themes became chapters of the yet to be written book. We invited artists to contribute responses to the chapter headings. The publication process prompts a creative conversation about how to improve public life through art production. The open nature of the book production reveals the critical mechanisms that underpin it. The conversation develops through essays by the curators responding to contributions by artists, gradually filling the pages of the book. The final stages of the book’s production culminates in an exhibition and book launch event, where visitors are invited to bind their copy of the book by hand in the exhibition space. Through this format, curators, artists, and visitors to the gallery take part in writing and producing the book Letters from the Field. ◆ 5

Introduction

Sinejan Kılıç, Iohanna Nicenboim, Marília Pasculli

ubvocalization is an inner speech that occurs during silent reading. This inner voice is a semi-constant internal monologue we have with ourselves at a conscious or semi-conscious level, a voice that narrates silently. As an epistolary novel, this book compiles a series of documents that show the collaboration between twenty artists and nine curators as part of the project Letters from the Field. The premise of the project arose from rethinking the notions of materiality, collective imagination, reality, politics, transience and social change. The act of reading involves a complex interaction between the text and the reader. This act is normally shaped by the reader’s prior knowledge, experience, attitude, and language which are culturally and socially situated. Berlin, as well as being a real place, also symbolizes a temporary hypothetical space for experimentation. In this context, the project looks at the present time and how to address history in an active form. Our decision to frame the exhibition process as an act of writing and reading is an attempt to on one hand highlight the critical role of contemporary art in the production, communication and sharing of ideas and on the other hand give transparency to the mechanisms of critical engagement in contemporary art. The format of the book as the structure of the curatorial process allows us to promote an open dialogue between different producers of artwork and their audiences, further articulated in the visitor’s experience of the exhibition space. During the curatorial process, the conversation between the artists and curators developed through unconventional methods. We chose to present the preface of the book and its chapter titles as a starting point, and for each

■ The bookwheel was a device designed to allow one person to read a variety of heavy books in one location with ease. Figure CLXXXVIII in Le diverse et artificiose machine del Capitano Agostino Ramelli, an illustration of a bookwheel, 1588

Letters from the Field

chapter a series of questions. In this way, we collected responses from the artists in various formats and responded to them by writing the chapter’s essays. These elements gradually constructed the contents of the book and are represented in the exhibition space. This conversational format established inherent gaps of time and rhythm between responses - similar to the one that occurs in letter-writing for example. During the process, we were able to respond consciously to the artist’s suggestions and adapt the distinct aspects of the exhibition theme. In this experimental environment, the curatorial concerns and chapter topics have grown organically between artists and curators. This process informs the open character of the exhibition theme, which attempts to capture a situation while remaining broad enough to explore different methodologies and ideas produced in the present moment. As we discussed the artistic practices of the Berlin-based artists we met during the residency, the question of social change related to art as a cultural practice became a debate analogous to broader considerations of the economic and ecological crisis. The project by no means wholly addresses where we are headed but is an attempt to encourage curators, artists, and the public to consider possible directions for the future. The different chapters address how to react or initiate change in creative ways so that we as historians, as artists, as people in space and time can inspire ourselves to genuinely and responsibly react to that change. The action or artists’ practice as an action becomes the key and the starting point to introducing change. If writing a story is initiating a change in itself, the story we propose is not singular, nor is it linear. In the following chapters you will find very different responses as part of this dialectic process. We invite you to re-organize this knowledge and respond to it as well. We ask that you become part of our process, making use of our methods to observe this experiment and formulate an inner, or even better – outer dialogue. ◆ 8

Should We Let Go?

Letters from the Field

Should We Let Go? Dunja Rmandic

"This can't be the Potsdamer Platz" – Homer, the old poet, Wings of Desire

nd so here we are, in Berlin. As many say, in a city where the twentieth century happened; the good, the evil, the progressive and the ugly. Rather than having a classic beauty that defines most European cities, Berlin stands as a collage of aesthetics, a collage of histories, and overlapping landscapes, all omnipresent at once and all simultaneously canceling each other out. Here history is everywhere and it is nowhere. What is it that keeps us holding onto ideas, objects, moments, and the past, giving us a sense that this is what constitutes our identity? What if we never held on to those in the first place? We naturally navigate through history, as well as spaces, with the help of symbols. But Berlin seems to have embraced a type of amnesia that defies historical fetishes in a way that denies a one-dimensional experience of the city and refuses to prioritize one history over another. It leaves us in a state of limbo, in the in-between where everything is possible and nothing is special. There is no nostalgia, there is no homecoming. Even the remnants of the Wall – the most recent and remembered history for most of us – seem abstract. I watched the wall come down live on TV, and the emotional experience of it has profoundly shaped my attitude to politics, suffering, and symbols, yet being here, living ‘in the East’ and close to the wall, I am left empty. Do we really move on from history so fast? Outside looking in, Berlin has its Kirchners, Dietrichs, Langs, its Brechts, Benjamins, its Bauhaus, Plancks, and Einsteins, its Reichstag, the Jewish Museum, and the Wall. Once in the city, all of those symbols collectively dissipate, and what is left, what is felt, is a potential to have – or 10

to be – all of those again. The city has learnt from its destructive history that anything that is created is soon destroyed; we are here to create, live, love, forget, be and do – we come, we go, but there is no central axis here anymore and this is how it remains invulnerable. Welcome to the matrix that is Berlin. What do we retain in the form of a city and as a nation, and what do we retain as our individual history? On the one hand history teaches us but on the other its effects can be stifling. Stine Marie Jacobsen’s practice takes us straight to the core of the relationship between memory, violence, and history, on both the individual and the broader social level. Working with theories of memory and contemporary psychology through performance, her focus becomes material, dialogical, and most importantly, ethical, and she keeps us holding our breath for how her pieces will resolve. Contemporary Germany seems to be a perfect context in which to scrutinize these questions, and Berlin as a perfect platform to experiment within. How do we construct history and how do we construct memory? Megan Cotts’ archival research into honeycomb paper – those fun shapes that fascinated us as children – patented by her family and then subsequently revoked by the National Socialists in the 1930s, has gone beyond a recovery of history. Through reenacting the physical process of making these endless patterns, playing with the scale, and shifting the emphasis from the original, mass-produced combs to handmade interpretations of shapes, Cotts discreetly questions legacies, authority, and memory while simultaneously constructing her own. Yet despite this questioning, her impetus and our collective unrelenting attachment to material objects remains in question. But what if we rejected every ounce of what constitutes an identity, every structure that contains it, every value that informs it, every symbol that defines it? How can we construct an identity without history? 11

Letters from the Field

An identity devoid of history can only exist after the apocalypse. Rebecca Smith’s childhood was defined by the visions of biblical apocalypse and devoted preparation for its immanent arrival. Exorcising those narratives from her personal life, she has formalized them as nostalgic symbols in her series Beast (2010). While removing herself from that formal lifestyle, she has not discredited the impulse behind those tendencies that seek to immortalize the present, wishing the ‘now’ to be the climax of humanity. Perhaps a desire to rid humanity of history altogether is a more acceptable contribution of doomsday cults, and one that art is well placed to engage with. Of the myriad of images of Berlin, one that makes sense to me the most is that of it as a pre-historic swamp. Serendipitously, the Immortal Neobiocosmonaut, the hero in Ylva Westerlund’s comic book-inspired manifesto, comes out of a swamp and presents us with an image and experience of a utopia. Only when he dematerialized could he know of it and only when he rematerialized could he communicate the possibilities he saw for our future. But in order to attain this future, we need to change our relationship with language: “impossible” says his opponent; “not at all” says he, “...you just switch the ‘possible’ for ‘mortal’... .” Reminiscing about knowing Berlin when it was a swamp, Damiel and Cassiel – our guardian angels in Wings of Desire – also reminisce about learning language from humans. We exist through language, we move through language, we own through language and we create through language. While standing in the middle of the field, as in her Untitled (monochrome) (2010), Sharon Houkema isolates us in language and forces us to feel it instead of relying on knowing it. She wishes that, as we taught it to the angels, maybe we can un-teach it to ourselves and try to experience form outside of language; try to experience art – and ourselves – anew. 12

So here we are, still in Berlin, where the vulnerable has been replaced by the immortal; where art critic Karl Scheffler’s remark in 1910 that this “is a city condemned always to become and never to be” is as true in 2012 as it was when it was first written.1 In another century the same statement might still resonate, and in another century we just may manage to experience ourselves anew. ◆ 1

Karl Scheffler, Berlin: Ein Stadtschicksal (Berlin: Fate of a City), 1910.

“In my current project Honeycomb I have built an archive surrounding the history of the Heilbrun & Pinner factory (1901–1936) in Halle, Germany. My family owned the factory until production stopped in 1936 due to Nazi pressure. The contents taken by my family were souvenirs, icons of a vast system of labor. They specialized in machinery, design and paper production. I cite the complete series of patents, inventions by the family, awarded by the government that are now in the public domain. I begin the translation of the material within the patents; processing them into the physical, the reinvigoration of what the patents had secured, now done by hand.” – Megan Cotts Dunja Rmandic: How is the idea of cultural and personal displacement – historical but also your own right now – manifesting through this work and what dimension is it taking in your development of the work thus far? Megan Cotts: Since my family’s relationship with Germany has been severed since 1936, it’s only now, through my research, that I am reconnecting with both my own history and the history of a design that has gone on to be globally omnipresent. Heilbrun & Pinner designed and developed the manufacturing process for the modern expanded honeycomb structure. They were originally using it for paper decorations but it’s currently used in industries as varied as aerospace and packaging. Unfortunately, they became completely divorced from their design when the Nazis nullified their patents. The Honeycomb project is based solely on the illustrative portions of the patents. All decisions based on scale, color, texture and functionality are my interpretation of the visual diagram. I am working with the remains of displacement in a familial way and in a much broader historical context.

Megan Cotts

DR: A friend of yours â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Adam Feldmeth â&#x20AC;&#x201C; posed a question of authorship and authenticity and what gives you the right to revisit, repossess and restage this history. This is a great question and I was wondering if you could attempt to answer it here. MC: What are the terms and responsibilities in archiving? How does my subjectivity contextualize that process as an art object? I have felt compelled to be the archivist for the family documents since I came across them last year, yet I will say that this idea of familial ownership is a bit of a mystery to me. Part of this process includes scanning the old photographs, letters, newspaper clippings and documents. One of the interesting things about this project is that, as an artist, copyright laws protect the work I make. A result of this process then, the information that was disconnected is reconnected in a legal sense by what I make. The access to the H&P patent information and designs is limited through my inaccessibility to the German text and laws, resulting in using my subjectivity to fill in the gaps. It originated as a decorative object, adopted by an industrial world and now through my own subjective history, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m re-contextualizing the object to its origin and its current function. Nowadays, those paper decorations are no longer a luxury item, they can be found in any 99-cent store.

Sharon Houkema

I am standing in the middle of a vast landscape. I tell you I am â&#x20AC;&#x153;in the middleâ&#x20AC;?, to give you an idea, a picture in your mind. But the truth is, I have no idea, if where I'm standing, is the middle. There is nothing for my eyes to hold onto, nothing to determine position, nothing to determine scale. I am surrounded by endless white, not black: white. White as far as I can see, an unhindered, unbroken white.

â&#x2013; Sharon Houkema Untitled (Monochrome) 2010 printed paper 29.7 x 21cm

The Psychology of Rumor by Gordon W. Allport, page 56: â&#x20AC;&#x153;In general, people skeletonize their memories rather than elaborate them.â&#x20AC;?

Stine Marie Jacobsen

Two of the shapes are from a memory test in the book. One of them I drew from memory during our conversation. â&#x2013; Stine Marie Jacobsen

Rebecca Smith

This is an image of an archival photo of a house I lived in as a child. My father tried to send it to the current owners years after we moved away, but as the photo was on his desk for years, when I saw it in the mail pile I knew immediately what it was and stole it before it was posted. That gesture of him mailing this sentimental object to a stranger, and me secretly holding onto it, has made it become a really loaded image/object for me, kind of a symbol of how my family conflicts over our own identity. â&#x2013; Rebecca Smith

Ylva Westerlund

Dunja Rmandic: You said during our conversation that we need to 'dig where we stand' and your work is so intertwined with a process of doing exactly this. How do you relate this statement, which suggests an intrinsic scrutiny of the systems we operate under, to a concept of letting go of all of those systems in forging our (new) identity? Ylva Westerlund: Yes, I think this scrutiny is important for example in being a Feminist, as I am. As I see it, we Feminists are often in a peculiar position of wanting to exterminate the concept of ‘woman’. And because the ‘spokeswoman’ doesn't really exist, the basis of our critique often appears to stand on shaky ground. In post-structuralist feminism, such as the works of Judith Butler, our performative actions as women and men are highlighted. It seems, consequently, that if we could just skip that role-playing we would be free, or at least freer. But this way of thinking brings out a paradox: How could we fight for something that doesn't exist? We want women and men to have equal rights but at the same time we don't think that this ‘woman’ or ‘man’ really exists. In order to understand this contradiction as a creative political reality that we have to live and deal with, you must have t h e

ability to read on two levels at the same time. Furthermore, one could then interpret this paradox, this state of being and not being, with being halfdead. A zombie if you will. Or a new being. DR: What can we learn from ideologies and organized societies? YW: For example I think it’s interesting with ideologies reappearing after being lost for some time in history, forgotten. But then they come back, like a kind of unfulfilled dream from our forefathers and mothers, insisting on coming alive. In biology it’s called evolutionary throwback, when a feature of an animal, for example its tail, disappears through evolution but still exists in the DNA with the possibility of coming back at a much later point. I often feel this urge to go back to past ideologies and to reread them. Or kidnap them and in a kind of détournement to see what it can give to the understanding of our contemporary society. In the small booklet or comic The Immortal Neobiocosmonaut (2011), I wanted to present a partly forgotten ideology coming back and expressing itself through a revived mutant creature. A creature waking up from lying dead in a swamp for 80 years, now has an urgent vision of a new socialist group called The Immortal Neobiocosmonats. In battles and conversations the creature tries to convince both its nemesis in the story but also the reader to become a part of this group. I see these kind of works as exercises of trying to fulfill ideas or logic systems to their almost absurd end consequences. Maybe to get a glimpse of what could be there if it starts to crack, or maybe evolve to yet something else.

WHAT OUR PRESENT IS: Presence of Mind in Cultural Production

Letters from the Field

What Our Present Is: Presence of Mind in Cultural Production1 Gladys-Katherina Hernando

he present, currently the 4th of August, 2012. The present, being. The present is time. Each letter forms a word, each sentence forms a statement. Every choice and every action moves from moment to moment until it becomes the past or it becomes the future. In contemporary Buddhist thinking, awareness of the present can be elevated when a person breaks away from their comfort zone and enters into foreign situations. By breaking away from a daily routine, an activity that subsumes time, a person can begin to fully observe their experience of life, rather than it merely functioning as a construct: time. This has been my personal experience with the present, living in Berlin for three months of summer, disassociated from my familiar place, culture, and language. Yet it has been interrupted by other types of presence, that of things beyond my control, death and near-misses, events that mark moments in life. Flying between Berlin, Los Angeles, and Miami, the present is more present than ever. If not merely by proximity to mortality and the suspended reality of international flights, the value of life and artistic engagement with the society has come into unobstructed purview. Our human presence at the current moment is full of conflict and tumult, but this is not an unfamiliar state of humanity. Each decade bears its weight in political and social economy by way of the impact felt on its people. It does not seem premature to categorize 2012 as a year in a decade of perilous swings above the economic and political abyss. It is significant to mention the unrest and subsequent movements that are slowly stimulating change across the globe and these are significant for the reason that they are led by the populous; humans with an awareness of their right to exist and 26

participate in their reality. This desire to participate in social exchange, dare I call it activism, is certainly gaining momentum in other areas. The mobilization of voices and awareness of our present has not felt so active, at least not in my lifetime. In the field of artistic and cultural production there is a reawakening to the critique of artâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s complex institutional and commercial structures.2 Cultural producersâ&#x20AC;&#x201C; historians, critics, artists, and writers are embracing a more critical mind, taking the position to address the systematic silencing of voices that is perpetuated by capitalism. In an interview recorded late in his life, philosopher Michel Foucault describes this very strategy in relation to his navigation of diverse issues in his work, from madness to sexuality. Highlighting the methodology of human relations with proximity to history, Foucault lays out an exacting prompt: The game is to try to detect those things which have not yet been talked about, those things that, at the present time, introduce, show, give some more or less vague indications of the fragility of our system of thought, in our way of reflecting, in our practices.3

What Foucault suggests is that we reflect on our present in relation to history in order to redefine and reinterpret the fundamental structures that bind us. Locating discourse in a type of social awareness that stimulates progress from within, be it across disciplinary contexts or situated within and between subjects. In other words, to define our present is to unpack its contents and expose the structures that bind us unknowingly. One must find the concrete means to address the concerns of the present for an emancipation of knowledge to occur. Artists are in a unique position in that they can respond to and perform this idea in the social realm with an immediacy that few other fields allow. The role that art plays in society is determined by its ability to activate the 27

Letters from the Field

present, to develop critical artistic practices that engage with the social and political contexts of our world. Art historian Alexander Alberro recently iterated a similar sentiment in considering art’s role in society, stating that critical artistic practice should trouble the habits of understanding that are patently acceptable in cultural terms.4 The work of artists is to comment on and enlighten our present through multifaceted and hybrid artistic strategies, as noted by Alberro, “artworks are meaningful only when seen in relationship to a wider network of beliefs and practices, economies and exchanges.”5 Whether it is by touch, through language, performative actions, or by revealing the fragility of forms, artists can manifest the awareness of their individual presence in relation to the discourse of social culture. I will close with another example of the sentiment of critical methodology from a speech by the author Haruki Murakami given in the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster in Japan: We, professional writers, who are versed in the use of words, also have a positive contribution to make toward this large-scale collective mission. We must connect new ethics and values to new words, thereby creating and building new, vibrant stories. We will then be able to share these stories. They will have a rhythm that can encourage people, just like the songs which villagers sing while planting their seeds. We rebuilt Japan, which had been completely destroyed by World War II. We must now return to this same starting point once again.6

To bring forth an awareness of the present, we must be willing to break down habitual or preconceived notions of our history and of our world. In the end, the purpose is to look, to listen, to pick up the pen, the brush, or whatever your tool of preference and participate in this moment, to engage with all its conflicts and contradictions, because the present is fleeting, just like our existence. ◆ 28

1 The title “What our present is” is borrowed from a collection of interviews with Michel Foucault originally published by Semiotext(e). Michel Foucault, “What our present is?” Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961–1984, ed. Sylvere Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth and John Johnston, New York: Semiotext(e), 1989 and 1996, 407–415. 2 One notable critical text written this year was a contribution to the Whitney Biennial 2012 by artist Andrea Fraser. See Andrea Fraser, “No Place Like Home,” in Sussman, Elizabeth and Jay Sanders, Whitney Biennial 2012, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Cambridge: Yale University Press, 2012, 29–33. 3 Foucault, “What our present is?,” 411. 4 Alexander Alberro. “Life Models.” Frieze 148 (June July August 2012): 154–159. 5 Alberro, “Life Models,” 159. 6 Haruki Murakami. “As an Unrealistic Dreamer.” Cataluñya International Prize Speech, 10 June 2011. http://www.senrinomichi.com/?p=2541, Accessed 3 August 2012.

Stephan Backes

â&#x2013; Stephan Backes untitled 2012 used leather touchscreen gloves, size M

Ach, Du heilige Scheiße! Ach, Du heilige Scheiße! Du Schlampe, Luder, Landpomeranze, Kackbratze, Schreckschraube, Stinkstiefel! Bist du eine Tussie oder ein Bimbo? Gib mir dann einen Negerkuss, du Flittchen! Arschkriecher - Arschgeige - Arschkrampe - Arschﬁcker - Arschloch Bist du ein Korinthenkacker? Du Erbsenzähler! Du Schattenparker! Du Ordnungsnazi! Bist du schwul? Tunte - Schwanzlutscher - Warmduscher Ami, geh nach Hause! Schwarzarbeiten ist illegal. Ihr steckt alle unter einer Decke. Ich sehe die Asche auf deinem Haupt. Schlitzauge - Kanacke - Reisfresser - Fidschi - Wo verkaufst du Zigaretten? Tut mir leid, aber ich verstehe nur Bahnhof. Bist du Ossi? Du kannst mir sowieso nicht das Wasser reichen! Du Hackfresse - ich schneide dir ein Gesicht Kampfmutter aus Prenzlauerberg - Ich habe etwas zu sagen zu ihrem klugscheißenden Rotzblag: Halt dein Maul, du Frechdachs oder sonst bringe ich dich um die Ecke. Du Spast - bist du nicht ganz dicht? Meckerziege, sauer macht lustig - Ausländerwichser!

■ kate hers das deutschsprachliche Projekt, Teil 2 2012 dada-poem

kate hers

Oh, holy shit! You slut, hussy, country wench, ugly bitch, shrew, sourpuss! Are you a bimbo or a blacky1? Give me then a nigger kiss2, you floozie! Asskisser - dumbass - asswipe - assfucker - asshole Are you anal? You nitpicker! You inch picker! You order nazi! Are you gay? fairy - cocksucker - wimp Yankee, go home! Working under the table is illegal.3 You’re all in cahoots with each other. I see the egg on your face. Slanty eye - darky - rice eater - gook - Where do you sell your cigarettes?4 Sorry, but I don’t understand.5 Are you an east German? You can’t anyway hold a candle to me! You meatface, I make a face at you Combat mothers from Prenzlauerberg - I have something to say to your smartass snotty nosed brats: Shut up, you cheeky monkey or else I’ll have you bumped off. You retard - are you off your rocker? Bitching broads, lemons make lemonade - Foreign wankers! The word Bimbo in German translates as darky or blacky, Bimbo in English means hussy or tramp. Chocolate covered marshmallow treats are now officially called Schokokuss or chocolate kiss, however some Germans still continue to use the word Neggerkuss when black people aren’t around. 3 The direct translation of Schwarzarbeiten is working black which means to work illegally, as well as Schwarzfahren: riding the bus, subway, or train without a ticket. This is quite different to the American slang, DWB (driving while black), which refers to racial profiling. 4 Fidschi is a derogatory term used by Germans for an Asian, however typically used to describe those of Vietnamese descent who hang around subway stations selling illegal cigarettes. 5 The direct translation Ich verstehe nur Bahnhof is I understand only train station, a play on words in reference to the cuss word Fidschi. 1 2

Alex Martinis Roe

The Frameworks for Exchange: Workshop on Genealogies and Spaces Between Authorships involves three main tasks, which are undertaken in pairs. Each of the tasks involves discussion of the specific relationships each participant has to the female authors that have been important to her/him, and involves different ways of working together and listening to one another. During the workshops in Dublin, Melbourne, Berlin and Sydney the difference between relationships to authors the participants knew in person were explored in contrast to relationships that remain in the experience of reading books or encountering artworks. Each of these tasks is recorded and documented in different ways by the participants. In the workshops that have already happened, the decisions that each participant made about what to record during each conversation became an important way to develop ideas for future practices. The creation of a selective history also became a self-reflexive exploration of the politics of the archive and its relationship to feminist histories. â&#x2013; Alex Martinis Roe 2011â&#x20AC;&#x201C;2012

Aiko Tezuka

â&#x2013; Aiko Tezuka Skim 1 2008 embroidery on cloth 165 x 24cm

Renewing Destruction as Critical Engagement

Letters from the Field

Renewing Destruction As Critical Engagement Tanya Toft

ny field, in landscape, discourse, collectivity or art, is structured by a certain spatial logic, which determines its criteria for development and renewal. Today’s radiant, sociopolitical landscape with symptoms of economic calamity and political unrest, is illustrated in protests against inequality, cultural oppression, and restrictions of freedom. ‘Destruction’, in the meaning of critical disturbance and degradation, seems to have become a premise for change; a timely ingredient for making way for a field’s renewed condition. The Internet, as the central tool of the information age, has shaped a new developmental order, which is underlying in the domains of our reality. We are experiencing an enhanced sense of agency and collective power in new network structures, which programs a new spatial logic that is affecting our interhuman sphere and reconfiguring our modes of critical engagement. New webs of ideas have made the deconstruction of structures possible and turned us all into architects: active agents specialized in cultural re-appropriation in our particular fields of engagement. The premise of destruction in this context should be considered a condition of uprising rather than revolution. Hakim Bey draws a distinction between the two, proposing that revolution attains permanence, while uprising is temporary and has the qualities of a Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ); a territory of gradual transition, existing in a state of metamorphosis, rather than linear progression.1 Within a TAZ, destruction is considered less as a 42

trace left behind and more as a condition of process. We find a condition of this productive nature of destruction in the landscape field of Mauerpark in Berlin, which has undergone several phases of destruction. Mauerpark served as a military exercise ground in the early 19th century and was a scene of pivotal events in the March Revolution. After World War II, it was turned into a ‘death strip’, as a wall zone dividing the areas of Wedding in the West and Prenzlauerberg in the East. After the wall was torn down in 1989, the historic territory of fallow land was ‘recovered’ with a proposal for renewal by the German landscape architect Gustav Lange. In the early 1990s, he transformed it into a formal composition with a green hillside following a one-kilometer straight walking path with carefully organized nodes of trees and benches.2 During the past twenty years, Mauerpark has undergone a new phase of destruction – one of neglect and erosion, however also one of citizens’ re-appropriation and engagement. The park has been left to itself, with no budget for maintenance, in which students, squatters, tourists, petanque players, karaoke singers and audiences have reconfigured the means of use of the park and are setting up planned and unplanned events. The process of degradation has allowed for a condition of cultural metamorphosis in which the formal landscape design has become secondary to cultural experimentation. Mauerpark seems to have evolved along with Berlin’s characteristic themes of fragmentation, discontinuity, contradiction, diversity, and temporariness that characterize the ‘genius loci’ of Berlin; the characteristic spirit of the landscape that evolves in between land formation, history and cultural context. The architect Philipp Oswalt points at how this genius loci influences a high degree of innovative potential,3 which indeed has come to occupy the territory of Mauerpark; a TAZ in which new ways of doing are being invented – new modes of cultural expression, new ways of gathering, 43

Letters from the Field

new forms of spectacles. Mauerpark, as proposed by Christophe Girot in his examination of the becoming of the voids of Berlin, is “responding to a particular civic will and particular public ‘niche’ with its given set of truths and rituals”.4 This response comes to act post-productively on the landscape field. Mauerpark might offer itself as a useful topology in the field of art, when reconsidering ‘destruction’ as a productive condition of spatial reconfiguration. In some ways, the themes characterizing the genius loci of Berlin are similar to those characterizing the spatial logic of the internet. In Postproduction, Nicolas Bourriaud considers the new forms of knowledge that the information age enables us to constitute – like how to find one’s bearings in the chaos of cultural fragments and how to extract new modes of production from it. As Bourriaud proposes, it is “a matter of seizing all the codes of the culture, all the forms of everyday life, the works of the global patrimony, and making them function”.5 The world is an empirical database from which cultural postproduction produces meaning anew. The Sunday karaoke in Mauerpark’s amphitheater combines elements from the field’s ‘database’ of hostile histories, theatrical architecture and meetings of cultural niches. This produces a new phenomenon, in between amateur entertainment culture and an exposure of the marginal community of Berlin, as a form of cultural postproduction in response to the field. It is a destructive process, which adapts to a gradual reconfiguration of the field’s inherent ‘data components’, leaving an invitation open for critical socio-spatial discussion. In the contemporary spatial logic of the information age, a field’s process of renewal comes to depend on its productive ability to destroy and then renew; to break down and then re-build, from all the existing, networked data components in the field, in an organic process. This is different from Modernism’s conception of development as growing from linearity, originality and reference, as in Hegel’s dialectical spiral of progress. Rather, renewal as a condition of destruction relates to a temporary uprising or a process of 44

morphing, a movement from the inside, outside and beyond, upwards. In the field of art, artistic postproduction becomes a “temporary terminal of a network of interconnected elements, like a narrative that extends and reinterprets preceding narratives” 6. This is when the artistic process comes to re-contextualize the present to produce new programs for our everyday lives. Art, then, becomes a conceptual tool of destroying apparent compositions in the world’s various fields. However, it only breaks down existing structures to the point where we – as audience and citizens – can interrogate our present and formulate it anew. This is when destruction in artistic practice makes way for critical engagement. The artists in this chapter, Annika Rixen, Heba Amin and Lynda Amer Meziane deal with the concept of destruction as a critical yet productive means of reconfiguring spatial structures and meaning. They use methods of research, collection and historical documentation and engage with this material through various media in making works that reconsider spatial configurations and the legacy of systems. Their works point towards the formation of fields whose future conditions are not yet visible. ◆

1 Hakim Bey, “The Temporary Autonomous Zone“, Hakim Bay and Ontological Anarchy hosted by Hermetic.com, http://hermetic.com/bey/taz3.html#labelTAZ (accessed August 1, 2012). 2 Senate Department for Urban Development and the Environment, “From ‘no-man’s land’ to ‘Mauerpark’ in Prenzlauer Berg” www.stadtentwicklung.berlin.de/denkmal/denkmale_in_berlin/en/berliner_mauer/mauerpark.shtml (accessed August 1, 2012). 3 Philipp Oswalt’s official website, “Berlin, City of the 20th Century”, 1998, http://www.oswalt.de/en/index.html, (accessed July 30, 2012). 4 Christophe Girot, “Eulogy of the Void. The Lost Power of Berlin Landscapes After the Wall”, DISP, 156 (2004): 39. 5 Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction, Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, trans. Jeanine Herman (New York: Lukas and Sternberg, 2005), 18. 6 Bourriaud, Postproducton, 19.

Lynda Amer Meziane

On January 27th, 2011 Egyptian authorities succeeded in shutting down the country's international Internet access points in response to growing protests. Over one weekend, a group of programmers developed a platform called Speak2Tweet that would allow Egyptians to post their breaking news on Twitter via voicemail despite Internet cuts. The result was thousands of heartfelt messages from Egyptians recording their emotions by phone. This experimental film presents a selected Speak2Tweet message of a man professing his love to Egypt on February 8, 2011 prior to the fall of the Mubarak regime and juxtaposes it with the abandoned structures that represented the long-lasting effects of a corrupt dictatorship.

â&#x2013; Heba Amin My love for you, Egypt, increases by the day 2011

Heba Amin

“My love for you, Egypt, increases by the day. And you know that Egypt. You know it Egypt. You know that I live and die for you. Every day I love you more than the day before. It ends here my dear country, so be happy and proud of your children and martyrs. We gave up comfort. I swear to you we gave up everything, just so we can hold onto you, dear country. So be filled with joy, because we are freeing you! And in no time you will become again the magnificent country you once were. Be happy, because the next regime that will rule you will be worthy of that responsibility, not the lowlife revolting system led by Mubarak and his dogs. I swear to God you will be free, and soon! Because, we are not leaving. I swear we are not leaving. We are not buying all this nonsense talk about negotiation. It is a charade played by two parts of the corrupt system. And this is not our conversation. We are not leaving before we cleanse Egypt from this corrupt regime. This regime must be wiped out completely. Completely! He and his followers who robbed this country. Mubarak alone stole 70 billion dollars! The rest of the thieves have robbed the country of more than 3 trillion dollars! And those statistics were obtained by international organizations. You see this Egypt? This is your money! They say you are poor, but this is your money. And we promise that the national treasures of your land will return to its rightful owners, and all those corrupt people will be prosecuted. We will be able to give you that, because none of us are backing down. Either we free you, or die trying to, so the next generation won’t have to wonder why gave up on their futures. God forbid we break down, because if that happens Egypt will cease to exist for a long time. But this hopefully won’t happen… over our dead bodies. There is no backing down, there is no turning back. We have sold our lives for you Egypt. Every single one of us. From teachers to doctors to engineers, to technician and farmers. We will sacrifice everything for you, and we are not turning back until we finally give you the gift of freedom. The fallen regime is our gift for you. So you will be able to prosecute the traitors in it as you see fit. No turning back, not without your freedom.”

Annika Rixen

â&#x2013; Annika Rixen This page: RaschÂŠ Bauhaus collection wallpaper; Next page: Detail of negative dust, Mies van der Rohe, Farnsworth house; published in Built in U.S.A.: Post-War Architecture, MoMA|Simon & Schuster, 1952

Fictional Scenarios: Whose Experience Is This?

Letters from the Field

Fictional Scenarios: Whose Experience Is This? Maeve Mulrennan

he human ability to create a fictional scenario is necessary in order for progress. Creative innovation drives us forward and aids criticality. Fiction is not necessarily separate from truth: one cannot be without the other. Fiction is not a lie: it is a creative and critical expression of what could be or could have been. CiarĂĄn Walshâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work, Two Scripts for a Museum takes a scientific paper on amnesia as its starting point. The paper outlines how people suffering from amnesia related to a specific part of the brain (the hippocampus) are unable to imagine fictional scenarios. When examining these scripts it becomes apparent that the gaps and pauses in the text are extremely important. The viewer, imagining the script being acted, recognises these pauses as a void. The ability to create a fictional scenario is what changes who we are now into what we could be. If alternative ways of living cannot be imagined by anyone, or only by a select few, what will happen to us? The case studies that Walsh is looking at suggest that it is a lack of memory that affects the ability to imagine future scenarios. Recognition of our past is necessary to imagine a future. This contrasts with studies on three and four-year olds where it was easier for them to imagine fictional scenarios than real beliefs: Young children may find reasoning about fictional mental states that contrast with reality easier than reasoning about epistemic mental states that conflict with reality.1

A three year old does not have a bank of memory to draw from when forming a fictional scenario. The ability to imagine is ingrained into the human condition at an early age. However a three year old with no past is not the same as an adult who is aware that they have had a past but have lost it. Is it possible then that people who feel that their history and / or culture have been taken away from them feel the same way as a person with amnesia? Can they imagine a future when they know that their past is now a void? For people with amnesia due to a damaged hippocampus, a lack of the past is indicative of a lack of future and understanding of the human condition. Could one’s future depend on someone else’s past? It is said that memory is a life long film-reel that can be rewound to specific moments when prompted. When large segments are spliced out, what comes next can be confusing. Hannah Arendt discusses the repercussions of this: We are in danger of forgetting, and such an oblivion – quite apart from the contents themselves that could be lost – would mean that, humanly speaking, we would deprive ourselves of one dimension, the dimension of depth in human existence. For memory and depth are the same, or rather, depth cannot be reached by man except through remembrance.2

Ruth Le Gear is strongly attracted to the scientific method behind natural phenomena, as well as the more intuitive process of understanding these phenomena including homeopathy. These methodologies are polar opposites but her practice operates on the premise that crucial connections are involved in perception and a unified experience is created from differences. Le Gear’s new video piece presents the viewer with a lost civilisation. She utilises fictions surrounding Lemuria and Atlantis and recontextualises them in contemporary Berlin. It was a widely held nineteenth century belief that these two islands were real but lost places. After this belief was 55

Letters from the Field

proved false, it entered the realm of fiction. These fictions gave reasons for their downfall: they became lost because a mistake was made, something went wrong. Lost cities recur in utopian literature, for instance with Thomas More, William Morris, Charlotte Perkins Gillman and many others, demonstrating a necessary human need to explore fictional scenarios in order to understand more about the self. If mistakes are made, are we lost forever? Who decides what our mistakes are? Why do we decide to accept this? Lindsay Lawson’s work removes scenes from the plot-based narrative model of the Hollywood film and creates an infinitesimal loop where light, absence and repetitive action create new meaning for these scenes. The work questions authority by appropriating copyrighted material. By appropriating somebody else’s fictional scenario, it may be possible to create new meaning and understanding. By viewing a scene repeatedly through several layers of disassociation from the authorised version or scenario there is room for the audience to explore and to create their own, linking the scenes to personal or cultural memory. The position of the artist as author also raises questions: Lawson’s artwork is a one-off film print on 16mm – this is in direct contrast to the digital shared film that she works from. By appropriating both content and method, the artist is creating a fictional scenario relating to authorship. The internet acts as a constantly shifting and expanding cultural memory archive, a mass of authorised and unauthorised content. History is no longer a clear, selective narrative in a book written by an authorised ‘expert’. With search engines and a conglomeration of information, each with different authority, impact and potency, history is now an ever-evolving network of ideas to be shared and consumed. 56

Who is the author of our imagined future? In 1975 JG Ballard addressed this: We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind—mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.3

If an artist is inventing a reality that opposes capitalist fictions, can reality be copyrighted? ◆

1 Jacqueline D. Woolley “Young Children’s Understanding of Fictional Versus Epistemic Mental Representations: Imagination and Belief” Child Development, Vol.66, No.4, (August 1995), 1011 -1021 Blackwell Publishing 31/7/12. 2 Hannah Arendt p94 Between Past and Future: Six exercises in political thought, Viking Press NY 1961. 3 JG Ballard Introduction to Crash (French Edition) 1974.

Lindsay Lawson

Homemade Bootleg Skewed, cropped, partially obscured, inaudible, quick and dirty. The worst bootlegs are little more than sordid documents of someone doing something illegal in a dark theater. Every jostle of the camera betrays the culprit wriggling in his seat, adjusting to get a better view. Recording becomes an act of spying. The bootlegger is a provisional filmmaker confronted with the photographerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s dilemma of what to include in the frame. However, this aesthetic choice is hindered by the need for discretion. He is a peeping tom, capturing partial images while hiding his recording apparatus from sight. â&#x2013; Lindsay Lawson

Still from Clay 2012

Still from Silk 2012

Still from Cigarette 2012

â&#x2013; Ruth Le Gear Thought drawing July 2012 notebook extract

Ruth Le Gear

â&#x2013; Ruth Le Gear Weighting 2008 C-print

Two Scripts For a Museum Ongoing artistic research into medical testing by the Institute of Neurology (University College London) and the School of Psychology (Cardiff University) of the apparent inability of patients suffering from hippocampal amnesia to imagine new experiences and construct fictional scenarios. The scripts represent real interviews.

â&#x2013; CiarĂĄn Walsh He Cried in a Whisper at Some Image, at Some Vision (II) 2012 inkjet print on photographic paper 37 x 50 cm

Ciarán Walsh

Patient 5 Interviewer: Imagine that you are standing in the main hall of a museum containing many exhibits Patient 05: [Pause] There’s not a lot as it happens. Interviewer: So what does it look like in your imagined scene? Patient 05: Well, there’s big doors. The openings would be high, so the doors would be very big with brass handles, the ceiling would be made of glass, so there’s plenty of light coming through. Huge room, exit on either side of the room, there’s a pathway and map through the centre and on either side there’d be the exhibits. [Pause] I don’t know what they are [Pause] there’d be people [Pause] To be honest there’s not a lot coming Interviewer: Do you hear anything or smell anything? Patient 05: No, it’s not very real. It’s just not happening. My imagination isn’t… well, I’m not imagining it, let’s put it that way. Normally you can picture it can’t you? I’m not picturing anything at the moment. Interviewer: So are you seeing anything at all? Patient 05: No

Ciarán Walsh

Control Subject Interviewer: Imagine that you are standing in the main hall of a museum containing many exhibits Control Subject: I’m standing in the hallway of a museum I have never seen visited before. There’s an atmosphere here of people moving in expectation towards some paintings and sculptures. As with many museums it’s a beautiful place, it’s architecturally well constructed and pleasant to the eye. Interviewer: So what does it look like? Control Subject: It’s a pillared hall and the floor is marble, the ceiling is domed and sculpted. There is a buzz about the place, I think there must be some special exhibition on which I had not expected, because I’ve come just to see the general exhibits. In this hallway – although there are some paintings there – there’s nothing I actually recognise even though I’m fairly interested in art. I’d imagine that at some time a lot of these paintings would probably have actually rested in churches rather than galleries or private homes. The paintings are all the way round and I’m looking at one in particular which is almost straight ahead of me… [Continues…] ■ Ciarán Walsh

If We Build It They Will Come

Letters from the Field

If We Build It They Will Come Catherine Gomersall

......................................................................................................... To: Catherine <info@catherinegomersall.com> 22.08.2069

Hi Mama Sorry it has been a while since I last wrote. I hope you are well and enjoying your time on Mars. How is your vocabulary coming along? The kinder are excited to see the kunstwerk being produced there so we should set up a time to talk and compare notes. I am still working on reordering the archives in time for the end of Kunstzeit party but with luck I should have them all sorted in the coming weeks. What is your schedule like this Kunstzeit? I know you want to be filled in on what everyone has been up to here but there has been so much happening! By the way, I might have met some of your colleagues today? We had a few new members join us from Mars, so Kuroko kindly organized an event to welcome them all aboard. I think you might know of Hartmut, the landscape architect who moved to Berlin after the reunification of the Kunstwerk? I have his contact details to pass on to you, and he has some interesting ideas about what I can do with all the archives responding to the Bauhaus tradition, some of which I might need your help to understand.

Galron has given me some great ideas about how to better guide the traffic through the facility. It’s just one step at a time, but you’ll be happy to know that those juicy black tomatoes you love to eat are thriving! We became quite worried for a moment that the little flies were being starved, but thankfully Nikko saved the day with his delicious cakes again. You asked about the book? It’s coming along slowly and everyone has been so helpful and generous with their time. The discussions have certainly got me thinking about how to improve the facility and how we can provide more support for the workers. You know how it is, there’s just no stopping some of the more enthusiastic members working on the vessel. But, I must say, overall everyone seems pretty happy. John Paula, Karla and I had a discussion about how many of the members are working around the clock and I think some of them are still forgetting to eat. Malone has been very helpful in reminding me of who they inherited this idea from, so he and the rest of his board have organized some new kunstobjekts to have during the meal breaks. As you know it’s hard to keep everyone happy but the Bioethics Collective have put forward an interesting proposal to the catering team. It’s not enforced but the current resident Voodoo Priestess has taken it into her hands to organize worker retreats and the response has been mostly positive from those members who have decided to join. Oh, and do you remember the audiokunst collective, Arschloch? Another one of Aomine's projects. Well, they have kindly offered to put on some shows during the meal breaks in collaboration with the Clark School of Balletbutoh.

Letters from the Field

I wish you could have been here yesterday to be part of the installation in process discussions. The debate was very lively indeed. Many members of the building team needed a break from the Data Center so some of them repainted the facilityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s exterior. It took some time for Materials to feel confident in the consistency of the new shade of chora but the vessel has never looked better! One of the interns did a lovely job of the signage with our new typography lazercan and since we are now open all hours we have had to get more workers on board. At the last board meeting we realized there were many unofficial members who should be recognized for the time they had spent with the younger members. After much discussion we decided that we just had to make Martin an honorary member for his interesting perspectives on history. Lauryn took a lovely picture of him standing by the Montelongo wing entrance to post on the universal site. Check it out, it's looking really nice. Naturally, sometimes things get so hectic inside the facility that I lose track of what is happening outside. Thankfully Cicek is working with Buutz to negotiate better access to the pavements for the next Das ist Kunst campaign and Joss is working to get the wheelies more efficiently on and off board. Buutzâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s pavement projections have been instrumental in drawing a lively crowd to the last Kunstwerk General Meeting. John Paula had some reservations about the number of participants. Naturally she was worried about impact on the gardens, but Deajah and the Schrottamee have a plan for rehabilitating the pathways. Texta is doing well. She is busy helping with the production of the recycled tiles for the new annex. The younger people in the Kunstladen Collective

have told me that reconstituted plastic has been very popular again this Kunstzeit and one of the kids from the Center for Recycled Matter vortexed me a brooch to wear to the Postplanetaria Symposium. Very nice. Oh yes, that reminds me, I have been talking with Alessandro through the vortex. He needs a fresh look for the Biowaste Department. Can you please do me a huge favour and ask around with your people to see if anyone has experience in working with used reactors? Donnika needs a piece for the courtyard in the laboratory, and you know how Login has always been into that turn of the century stuff. Anyway, I must get back to work. It’s funny, my motion sickness has started to creep up on me again. I still haven’t figured out how to read for long hours while the vessel is moving but the Popzinger is certainly helping. Whoever came up with that idea certainly had their head screwed on. Speaking of heads how is Marquis? I heard about what was going on up there and really, if it helps, I can try to put him in touch with some of the performers here? I’m not sure when I’ll get the chance to visit but keep an eye out on the vortex for another Kunstwerk soon. Alle liebe Spore

Regina De Miguel

“For twenty years or so, my friends and I have been studying these strange situations that the intellectual culture in which we live does not know how to categorize. For lack of better terms, we call ourselves sociologists, historians, economists, political scientists, philosophers or anthropologists. But to these venerable disciplinary labels we always add a qualifier: ‘of science and technology’. ‘Science studies’, as Anglo-Americans call it, or ‘science, technology and society’. Whatever label we use, we are always attempting to retie the Gordian knot by crisscrossing, as often as we have to, the divide that separates exact knowledge and the exercise of power.” Bruno Latour

The photographs presented here are the result of a collaboration with artist and musician Jonathan Saldanha, in November 2010 at the Dwingeloo radio telescope, in the Netherlands. At the time of its operation (1956) this antenna was the world’s largest, and is now part of Dutch scientific heritage and rarely activated; only for specific occasions (with permission of the Netherland’s Institute for Radio Astronomy) or for activities of a “moon-bounce” amateur radio group that do its maintenance. On the 20th November 2011 we went there to film its rotation and operation; material to be included in the film Nouvelle Vague Science Fiction. At that time, Jonathan Saldanha made several experiments in which the antenna was pointed at targets in the cosmos such as pulsars and black holes. The material for the soundtrack of the film resulted from these recordings, in particular of Cygnus Constellation and Sagittarius A* – a black hole located in the centre of the Milky Way. We later decided to give the work an objective dimension by recording a 12-inch (30cm) vinyl, and images of it are shown here. These images were made in collaboration with the Department of Electronic Microscopy at the Polytechnic University of Barcelona. After a preliminary study of samples of the vinyl’s surface, a series of photographs were made of the etched surface from amplifications of between 1000 and 2000 times the actual size of the object. This microscope uses a beam of electrons instead of light to form an image. It has a large depth of field, allowing large sections of the object to be focused at a time. In the electron scanning microscope the specimen is usually coated with a carbon layer or a thin layer of a metal such as gold to give conductive properties to the sample. It is then swept through by the accelerated electrons travelling in the tube. A detector measures the amount of electrons sent, resulting in the intensity of the sample area. It is capable of displaying three-dimensional figures, projected as a TV picture or a digital image.

Invented in 1931 by Ernst Ruska, it facilitates a deeper approach to investigating the atomic world, allowing us to obtain high-resolution images of stone, metallic and organic materials. The light is replaced by an electron beam, the lenses by electromagnets and the samples are rendered conductive by making the surface metallic. The photographic magnification revealed an uncertain landscape of mountains, desert, and arid areas, similar to some of the images that space photography of the moon or other planets have provided us with. Somehow it consists of a reverse process by which an invisible and unreachable region of space becomes visible again in the shape of a hybrid and fictional object. The photomicrographs are accompanied by several archive images found in scientific publications depicting aerial views of archaeological sites in different parts of the world. The sound we receive now from the black hole comes from a distant past. The reconstruction of this landscape made out of small details emerges from a place and time in which we did not exist. Similarly, an archaeologist reconstructs, through minor signals, an unknown time. â&#x2013; An Effect of Verisimilitude Regina de Miguel

Francois Martig

Franรงois Martig

HAVE YOU SEEN MY BALLOONS? WANTED: photographs of found balloons with illegal seeds attached. Please email JPEG file 300dpi, sRGB to Francois Martig agnelle00@gmail.com ASAP

■ Klaas Hübner to: the future 2012 audio installation

The Value of Showing Up

Letters from the Field

The Value of Showing Up Lee Foley

“Eighty percent of life is showing up.” – Woody Allen

rtists are not defined by their ability to create beauty or produce unique objects. Even the artist’s practice as a tool to reframe place and identity through site-specific sculpture and performance is becoming more and more fluid and discursive.1 Today’s artists are often defined by the precarious nature of their livelihoods.2 The economic challenges they face often lead to a questioning of art’s social role. Since artists cannot and should not simply evolve into scientists, engineers and political activists, what is their primary purpose today? Some artists provide unusual sensibility and energy, which serves a therapeutic purpose, encouraging empathy in diverse social environments.3 Artists don’t always know where they belong, but they are often ready to try new things. Whether in a gallery space, a bunker, or a collector’s home, the literal presence4 of this person or their work in a site offers a kind of quiet activism that can have long-term effects. The Value of Showing Up refers to working, interacting, communicating and being open to possibilities, more than one particular way of making art. It can also be described in relation to the paradox of Wu Wei in Chinese philosophy, which is about embodying a critical state of mind that allows one to respond to the environment with effortless action.5 In Letters from the Field, Michiel Huijben and Nicolas Puyjalon enact subtle interventions that play with the viewer’s expectations within the exhibition. By addressing the fragility of existing institutional and social structures, artists can inspire people in other professions to poke holes in it themselves, try new approaches, or even collaborate. The first step to unleashing slow, tidal paradigm shifts, is showing up. 78

Who are artists today? Artists are people in the world. They have medical problems, bills to pay, children to look after. The precariousness of their lifestyles and the struggle for survival often encourages innovation. Boris Groys refers to contemporary artists as being ‘non-special’ and ‘super-social’.6 The term ‘super-social’, originally coined by Gabriel Tarde in his theory of imitation, connotes that the social man is primarily imitative. In order to break out of his “dream of home and country” and inspire change, the individual must somehow have the audacity to temporarily stand apart from one’s social sphere.7 Artists, in their working lives, constantly have to reconsider how they spend their ‘free time’ and so learn to be flexible in their approaches to various challenges. Since artists have unique relationships to labor and use of time, their very presence in a diverse community can inspire critical dialogue about daily life. It’s easy to misinterpret ‘showing up’ or ‘being there’ for passivity, but relatively small questions and gestures can encourage people to reconsider habits and expectations within certain contexts. For instance, in Michiel Huijben’s piece, Untitled (birdcage) (2010), he released two songbirds into an empty gallery space, which served as a metaphor for an aviary. During the course of the exhibition, the birds gradually expanded their territorial range, and by doing so, guided the viewer’s gaze to corners of the space one might normally ignore.8 ‘Showing up’ is taking action. The concept of Wu Wei, or ‘effortless action’, is akin to Woody Allen’s famous adage. The philosophy suggests that one can achieve artistry by responding creatively to environmental elements through a subtle dialect of question and answer.9 In Nicolas Puyjalon’s performance practice, he designs seemingly arbitrary parameters, often based on music notation, to demarcate sites for improvised physical production. For le mont analogue (2010), Puyjalon used recycled lumber to build a 79

Letters from the Field

teetering, mountain-like structure and then attempted to climb it. Placing faith in the instability of his own creations, the physical feat becomes more about the will to build, act, climb, go somewhere, than any goal-oriented enterprise. In Berlin, one can perceive how the presence of artists has helped to repair and re-interpret social space all over the city. The location of the exhibition at Atelierhof Kreuzberg is also host to a labyrinth of artistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; studios. In Letters from the Field, Michiel Huijben and Nicolas Puyjalon experiment with historical accounts, social dynamics and concepts of productivity through gestures and interventions that encourage criticality in our everyday lives. This book, which is as of yet incomplete, has no pre-conceived outcome. A dialogue builds, made up of interconnected thoughts that reflect our concerns and experiences; one page, challenging the next. â&#x2014;&#x2020;

Miwon Kwon, “One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity,” October, Vol. 80 (Spring 1997), 85-110. Franco Berardi Bifo and Boris Groys, “Art and the Social Sphere,” Mousse, Issue 34 (Summer 2012), 144-47. 3 Ibid. 2 4 Indirectly refers to themes mentioned in James Meyer, “The Functional Site; or, The Transformation of Site Specificity,” in Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art, ed. Erika Suderburg, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2000, 23-37. 5 Edward Slingerland, Effortless Action: Wu Wei as Conceptual Metaphor and Spiritual Ideal in Early China, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003, 3-11. 6 Franco Berardi Bifo and Boris Groys, 144-47. 7 Elsie Worthington Clews Parsons and Gabriel de Tarde, The Laws of Imitation, (New York: H. Holt and Company, 1903), 88, http://www23.us.archive.org/details/lawsofimitation00tard (accessed August 3, 2012). 8 Michiel Huijben. http://www.michielhuijben.nl/birdcage.html (accessed August 3, 2012). 9 Edward Slingerland, 3-11. 1 2

Nicolas Puyjalon

“Let’s attempt a history of the body in art as a history of silence as opposed to discourse about art. Let’s simply show how the history – of art – has, at a certain moment – and for some people – engendered gestures and not objects. And certainly not discourse… Looked at this way, in a purely formal fashion, the history of performance, or of body art, is not then a history of the representation of the body but exclusively a history of gesture. Barely sketched, already expired.” ■ Guillaume Désanges A History of Performance in 20 Minutes

Nicolas Puyjalon

Field Notes

Letters from the Field

Field Notes

Should We Let Go? ◆ What is it that keeps us holding onto ideas, objects, moments and the past, and giving us a sense that this is what constitutes our identity? ◆ What if we never held on in the first place? ◆ What would we let go of and what would we acquire instead?

What Our Present Is: Presence of Mind in Cultural Production ◆ Moments of change appear to be subtle until they become a reality, or alternately, become historic. How does history inform your presence within a transitional society? ◆ In what ways do artistic and cultural activities reflect and manifest transformations in our system of thought? ◆ Is it possible for artistic practices to engage with social and political contexts that are beyond symbolic gestures?

Letters from the Field

Renewing Destruction As Critical Engagement ◆ In light of the uprisings occurring in today's sociopolitical landscape, how does the process of destruction before renewal become a condition for change? ◆ How can destruction be a concept of spatial reconfiguration? ◆ How can destruction in artistic practice make way for critical engagement?

Fictional Scenarios: Whose Experience Is This? ◆ Are the current political and financial structures subjective fictional scenarios that can be unbuilt? ◆ Could underground counter cultures and science fictions become the authorized truth? ◆ How can elements of fiction help in the understanding of reality?

Letters from the Field

If We Build It They Will Come â&#x2014;&#x2020; Every artist needs to consider their ability to obtain resources in order to engage in the production of art and culture. What have been the ramifications of contemporary art and how can we consider art production under radically different material conditions?

The Value of Showing Up ◆ How do you spend your weekends? ◆ What is free time? ◆ How does your practice interact with public or private space? ◆ How is non-action also an action?

Letters from the Field 22–26 August 2012 | Curators: Lee Foley Catherine Gomersall Gladys-Katherina Hernando Sinejan Kılıç Maeve Mulrennan Iohanna Nicenboim Marília Pasculli Dunja Rmandić Tanya Toft | Artists: Lynda Amer Meziane Heba Amin Stephan Backes Megan Cotts Ruth Le Gear Kate Hers Sharon Houkema Klaas Hübner Michiel Huijben Stine Marie Jacobsen Lindsay Lawson François Martig Regina de Miguel Nicolas Puyjalon Annika Rixen Alex Martinis Roe Rebecca Smith Aiko Tezuka Ciarán Walsh Ylva Westerlund | Produced by Node Center for Curatorial Studies www.nodecenter.org info@nodecenter.org | Designer: David Matos Editorial Coordinator: Lauren Reid | Printed in Berlin, August 2012 © 2012 The authors for the texts and images |