Nomads Settlers Settled Nomads publication

NOMADIC SETTLERS— SETTLED NOMADS

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Foreword

A b o u t t h e rollin g stone t h at g at h ers no moss Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Curator

Once upon a time, to paraphrase Chinua Achebe in Things Fall Apart, proverbs used to be the palm-oil with which words were eaten. Thus, it was more than normal that people had a few proverbs to accompany them, for one reason or the other, all through their lives. In my case, there is just one saying that caught my attention at a pretty tender age: “A rolling stone gathers no moss.” Curiosity has obligated me to research on why I especially kept this proverb in mind and if it in any way influenced my manière de vivre or not.

I guess at that tender age it was more an issue of pity I felt with the rolling stone which was not able to gather moss, as the proverb was usually used in rather non-positive contexts. Later, my interest shifted from pity to more or less inability to understand and a refusal to accept the reasons why the stone shouldn’t gather moss while rolling. Proudly trying to implement my newly acquired knowledge on motion I learned in physics classes, I challenged that it all depends on the speed at which the stone was rolling! Of course, I argued, if the stone were rolling at the speed of light it will gather little or no moss. But if the stone were to roll very slowly, it would gather moss.

Interestingly, this old proverb which is claimed to be an apophthegm derived from Publilius Syrus’ Sententiae about the fact that people who are always moving, with no roots in one place, i.e. NOMADS, avoid responsibilities, cultures and cares. A more contemporary interpretation attaches this saying stronger to economic terms, as it implies that a man who restlessly roams from place to place, or constantly changes his employment will never grow rich. Hence, this proverb claims that a NOMADIC life is synonymous to irresponsibility

and poverty, while a SETTLED life is synonymous to culturing and richness. So, one can conclude that the intention of the proverb is to condemn mobility or nomadic tendencies.

On the other hand, the meaning of this proverb tends to be ambiguous, as one can also see the moss growing on the stone as negative. Thus, mobile, agile or nomadic people pass in positive light as being the rolling stone means being in motion, avoiding stagnation and a subsequent withering due to a moss affliction.

On the other other hand, and coming back to my physics lessons, where I learnt that everything in the universe is in motion and motion is relative to reference frames, it is high time I looked at this rolling stone proverb in terms of velocity, acceleration, displacement, time and numerous other reference frames.

In this light, it seemed appropriate to invite 26 physical and spiritual rolling stones from 21 countries and 5 continents in the context of the exhibition Nomadic Settlers – Settled Nomads at the Kunstraum Kreuzberg / Bethanien in Berlin to deliberate on, research on, react on contemporary concepts of nomadism and settlement, thereby renegotiating the understanding of the rolling stone and the moss, as well as challenging the old or proposing new reference frames within which the “A rolling stone gathers no moss” can be contemplated.

The artists and collectives have conceptually been grouped in thematic frameworks that serve as compendiums and virtual common denominators for the project. Some of the reference frames in this exhibition Nomadic Settlers – Settled Nomads include, but are not restricted to DISPLACEMENT and IDENTITY; MEMORY and TRACES; MYTH, MYSTERY and MEDITATION; ARCHITECTURE / SPACE / URBANISM; INTERVENTION and REPLICATION / REITERATION; OTHERNESS and NARRATION. With interdisciplinary essays from sociology, anthropology, biology, art history, philosophy and architecture, further horizons and tendencies of nomadism and settlement are explored. An accompanying performance series will open more doors of reflection and grant new momentum to the rolling stones.

In the course of this research project, it will be important to see the nature in which the stones will be shaped, how fast the stones are set in motion, how much moss is gathered on the way and reflect on how much this proverb is the palm-oil with which words are eaten in the year of the lord, 2011.

“Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.” Things Fall Apart (1958), Chinua Achebe. Anchor.

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Index

NOMADIC SETTLERS – SETTLED NOMADS

5

Foreword

9

Introduction

DISPLACEMENT and IDENTITY

14 H a r l e m T h e n a n d N o w :

Concepts of Home 16 18 20 22 24

Antje Engelmann Roberto Duarte Christoph Ndabananiye Rudy Cremonini Cyrill Lachauer

M E M O RY and TRACES

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Migration of Animals

30 32 34 36 38

Magda Korsinsky Juan Duque Soavina Ramaroson Dalila Dalleas Paul Huf

M Y T H , M Y S T E RY a n d M E D I TAT I O N

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M o n o t h e i s m a n d Po l y t h e i s m : Philosophical Thoughts on the S o u l ’s S e a r c h f o r a n I n n e r P l a c e

46 48 50 52

Lan Hungh Lars Bjerre Satch Hoyt Michael Zheng

ARCHITECTURE, S PA C E a n d U R B A N I S M

56 E 8 0 : O n t h e R o a d t o B i n a t i o n a l U r b a n i s m 58 60 62 64 66

Microclimax Inês d’Orey Surya Gied Yasmin Alt Michael a’ Grømma

I N T E RV E N T I O N a n d R E P L I C AT I O N / R E I T E R AT I O N

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N o m a d i c Wo r d s

72 74 76 78

Bruno Jamaica Essi Kausalainen Christina Kyriazidi Yingmei Duan

OT H E R N E S S a n d N A R R AT I O N

82 L o o k i n g f o r t h e N o n - P l a c e – H “ e i m a t / H o m e” i n A r t s a n d L i t e r a t u r e 84 86 88

Márcio Carvalho Joris Vanpoucke Leena Kela

91 93 95

Appendix Curators’ Biographies Colophon Druckerei Hermann Schlesener KG

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Introduction

NOMADIC SETTLERS – SETTLED NOMADS Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Simone Kraft and Pauline Doutreluingne

Intro Ever since man has existed, he has had the urge to wander, to travel, to glance beyond his familiar horizon. Art and literature are full of works thematizing this human desire for foreign places. Just as manifold are the works dealing with the opposite subject: the human need for a home, a fixed intimate center of life where one can settle down and find shelter and security. Being settled and nomadic wandering, the desire for foreign places and the desire for a home are two sides of man that seem to contradict each other but still cannot be separated.

Romanticism almost paradigmatically thematizes this paradox whereby both human desires became central motives. Many paintings and texts focus on wandering and going out into the world including Caspar David Friedrichs’ Kreidefelsen auf Rügen / Chalk Cliffs on Rügen Island (1818) in which three figures, standing with their backs to the viewer, look far out over the sea. During the politically disturbed period of the late 18th and early 19th Century there is the need for a real home, the search for the core of the world as the home for all people. This is a central motif of Romanticism, an example being the poem by J. V. Joseph von Eichendorff, Mondnacht / Moon Night (1837): Es war, als hätt der Himmel / Die Erde still geküßt, / Daß sie im Blütenschimmer / Von ihm nun träumen müsst. / [ … ] / Und meine Seele spannte / Weit ihre Flügel aus, / Flog durch die stillen Lande, / Als flöge sie nach Haus.

It was, as if the sky had / quietly kissed earth, / thus she in flowers’ shimmer / of him now must dream. / [ … ] and my soul spanned / her wings wide, / flew through the calm lands, / as if it flew home.

Nomadic Settlers Vs. Settled Nomads: Home What is home? Where is home?

Is home the place of birth or the place of residence? Is it the village, the city, the country or the continent where you live? Or is the spatial home not just a facet of the very complex phenomenon that is familiar to everybody but which one only rarely thinks about consciously? Does not the social home – friends, family, traditions – at least play a similar role?

Having developed a settled way of life in the course of time, most people would certainly localize home as a spatial retreat in some way. A nomadic person, however, would find different answers: the whole world is home because you live with your group of people. Home gets a temporal connotation.

The connection to a geographical home arouses strong emotions such as love, pride, and patriotism. Which, for example, have been propagated in the big campaign “Du bist Deutschland / You are Germany,” prior to and during the Football World Cup 2006. These emotions are denied to nomads, not having a special, localizable home.

Yet the sense of home can change and degenerate; the (too) strong fixation on home gives rise to an excessive need for protecting one’s home. Foreigners become intruders which have to be held off, and one is forced to defend against “enemies and threats.” Home can cause discrimination, xenophobia and racism.

The nomadic way of living is usually approached with skepticism, but is wandering around really that foreign to today’s sedentary settlers? Traveling, relocation, commuting between abode and work – is this not also a form of nomadism?

Nomadic Settlers? Settled Nomads?

Nomadic Settlers Vs. Settled Nomads: Wa n d e r i n g / M i g r a t i o n By traveling to and meeting different places, countries and cultures, one’s understanding of the other increases. Moving geographically out of the habitual limits of home is accompanied by spiritual delimitation. Mutual acceptance and understanding grows, thus the figure of speech “Reisen bildet / Traveling educates.” Traveling immediately offers the chance to recognize and value one’s own home. “Only when being abroad, we learn what home means to us” (Theodor Fontane).

Historical Migration of both people and individuals are as old as mankind. The period of Migration (German terminus “Völkerwanderung,” literally translated as peoples’ wandering/migration) as a transition period from late Antiquity to early Middle Ages has become an established term. But as these movements of resettlement have often been accompanied by wars, destruction and material loss, the term “Migration Period” is usually associated with negative connotations.

By having this negative connotation, one ignores the fact that the migration of peoples, individuals and groups has considerably contributed to the distribution 9

of technical knowledge and culture. How else would knowledge have spread?

Exemplary are the medieval stone masons’ lodges who’s masters and craftsmen moved from one construction site to another. Without these migrations the Gothic style would not have expanded all over Europe so successfully within that short period of time.

Artists especially have lived nomadically through time by residing in a particular space for a finite period. They usually left to follow the call of a new client like Leonardo da Vinci going to the French court or Peter Paul Rubens who worked as a diplomat and artist in Spain, France and England. Often, artists moved on their own accord like most of the early Modernism artists: Pablo Picasso, Henry Miller, Man Ray, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst or Joan Miró, all of which were drawn to the art metropolis of their day, Paris.

To d a y Today, nomadism still globally determines everyday life. Chinese migrant workers travel from one megalomaniac construction project to the next just to work for a starvation wage, under perilous terms, and often with unsecured construction sites. In Dubai, Near Eastern low wage workers work menial jobs, live in barracks outside of the city with miserable sanitary facilities and are transported to their workplaces every day. Once somebody loses his job, he has to leave the country within 30 days.

But even in Germany migrant labor is a burning issue (again), there even exists a German neologism: Jobnomadismus / job nomadism. Job nomads are forced to travel for work and money and thereby leave their families, their social life and their intimate surroundings behind.

Nomadic Settlers? Settled Nomads?

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DISPLACEMENT and IDENTITY

Harlem T h en and N ow : C oncepts of Home Dorothea Löbbermann

In 1928, the middle of the period that came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance – the epoch of Black America’s entry into the international cultural and political stage, an epoch of racial formation as well as cultural hybridity –, Claude McKay, a writer with strong nomadic tendencies, entitled his new novel Home to Harlem. McKay was born in Jamaica but left as a young man to live in the U.S., Great Britain, France, Morocco, and to travel to lots of other places, among them Germany and the Soviet Union. Home to Harlem, which was written in France, describes the experience of two Black men (one American, the other Haitian) in Harlem, the “Mecca of the New Negro,” as the place had been nicknamed in the 1920’s. For the purpose of this essay, the exact nature of the characters’ experiences matter less than the fact that Harlem proves to be an extremely problematic, temporary home to them. Given the symbolic status of Harlem both then and today – when Harlem celebrates a comeback on the cultural map, through economic rise and gentrification, and as a tourist attraction – the contradiction of “Home” in the novel’s title and of the nomadic activities of its author and characters create a good occasion to think about the meaning of place in African American cultural memory. Generally speaking, it is an example for the cultural meaning of place for minority cultures and postcolonial cultures.

For the remembrance of the 1920’s New Negro Movement as the Harlem Renaissance, it matters little that the New Negro Movement was not limited to this neighborhood in uptown New York City. Many of its actors resided elsewhere, and the Chicago jazz scene predated and rivaled Harlem’s (Lewis 14

171ff). In addition, the fact that often Harlem’s reality did not live up to its reputation, an observation that writers made since the early 1920’s, has little impact on the importance of the place. On the contrary, looking at Harlem from the perspective of its symbolic value sharpens the awareness that a city is always more than abstract topography, or the “mere” materiality of streets and buildings.

It is also a “state of mind,” as sociologist Robert Parks phrased it in 1915 (1).(1) Harlem and the Renaissance evolved together: there was no place readily awaiting black artists and intellectuals. Rather, the social, material, and symbolic aspects of Harlem developed in a close net of interconnections. On the one hand, Harlem is a good example of the fact that places are made and remade by the people who live in it and who are, in turn, influenced (“made”) by the place: its diverse history started with a Dutch colonial village and then transformed to an upper-class suburb, to the “Mecca of the New Negro,” to the black ghetto of the 1940’s onwards, and to its contemporary economic revival. Given the malleability of a place like Harlem and the heterogeneity of this urban space even within these diverse periods, it becomes difficult to grasp the identity and meaning of place: which of its historical moments are we thinking about when we say “Harlem,” and which of its aspects? Doreen Massey touches upon these contingencies of space when she writes about space as a “product of interrelations,” a “coexisting heterogeneity,” and as “always under construction” (Massey 9).

On the other hand, place radiates an aura of “authenticity” and becomes a metonym for identity: it provokes feelings of “home,” of local pride or shame. To be “from” a certain place has a tremendous meaning for identity formation. It is in this sense – and in consideration of meaning of place for African American cultural history – that Harlem has become a symbolic place for Black America.

Yet while symbolic status brings about visibility and self-assurance, its oversignificance also brings about problems. For whom is Harlem a symbol, and what does it symbolize? What is the real Harlem, what is the myth? As early as in the 1920’s, these questions proved difficult to answer.

In African America’s symbolic geography, Harlem takes a significant position.(2) Robert Stepto has shown that 19th Century African American narratives typically describe a northern movement, in which the “North” connotes freedom, both in a political and a spiritual sense. The “ascent” to the North also symbolized a spiritual ascent. Titles of Harlem Renaissance fiction like Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven (1926), and Rudolph Fisher’s City of Refuge (1925), testify to Harlem’s symbolic value, as does Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem. In light of the history of displacement, Harlem offered to be a home to Black America. When fictional representations describe the disillusionment of the protagonists who had arrived full of hopes, this might be less the problem of Harlem, which turned out to be just another black neighborhood within a society dominated by racist ideologies, and more the problem of the notion of home. With the onset of modernity, “home” had become an idea fraught with nostalgia. If 20th Century African American literature has constructed an idea of home, it is that of the South, even if the South, as the site of slavery, has always

been an extremely ambivalent home.(3) Harlem, it turned out, did not solve this problem; to the contrary, the continuing discrimination proved even harder for the urban masses. Nevertheless, the question about Harlem as “home” remains interesting, since it points to the fundamental complexity of notions like place, race, culture, and belonging. In a paradoxical way, Harlem has become a symbolic place for black urban America and has revealed that “home” is an extremely complex, heterogeneous, and ambivalent concept. If Harlem has become a “home,” than this home is “anti-illusionary” and professes not to be nostalgic, but “authentic” and “real” (iconized in the figure of the street-smart ghetto youth).

At the same time as Harlem has problematized the meaning of “home,” it has created a new urban myth of belonging.

This throws new light on the question of place and authenticity. In the light of what has been called Harlem’s Second Renaissance (for instance, by then-mayor Rudy Giuliani), the question of who Harlem “belongs” to – for whom Harlem is the “authentic” place – can and should not be answered. The gentrification of Harlem that has been going on since the 1980’s signifies two contradictory things: on the one hand, it registers the economic consolidation of the neighborhood, the long overdue restoration of buildings, and a return of Harlem to public consciousness beyond the connotations of inner city ghetto and criminality; on the other hand, it means the displacement of thousands who can no longer keep abreast of the rising real estate prices. Harlem has attracted not only international tourists (see Löbbermann), but also new Harlemites: an African American middle class and young urban professionals from all ethnic backgrounds, along with a new wave of Caribbean and African immigration.

In many ways, the contemporary changes in Harlem are as drastic as those of the 1920’s and in this respect, the moniker “Second Harlem Renaissance” might have its validity. These changes pose theoretically important questions about the nature of place and shed light on the ongoing making and remaking of Harlem. Did the Harlem of the Renaissance belong to African Americans?

Had it belonged to European Americans before that? To whom does Harlem now belong? These questions concern place as much as they do race. In light of the history of Harlem, and in consideration of the theoretical problems of racial essentialism (a very non-“Renaissance” idea at that, see Gates, Watson), the notion of “ownership” must be rejected. Claiming that Harlem belongs to African Americans is as problematic as claiming that the country club belongs to European Americans. Yet it is exactly the racialization of space, in which prime real estate predominantly signifies whiteness (in which the country club remains “white”), that makes it necessary for African Americans to continue to fight for Harlem.

Theoretically, this example underscores the fact that space is both “lived” and “signified” (Keith 529); it is both the ground on which history takes place and which is already a cultural sign (in this case, a sign for black urban culture).

Michael Keith writes, “Places are both the conditions of possibility and the expressive modality of identities (529).” As such, Harlem has been, and continues to be, both the place where the Renaissance historically could and did happen,

and a site that expresses urban black identities. It is one element in the larger cultural geography of the Black Diaspora which, as Paul Gilroy has demonstrated, can think about place without being stuck with the notion of roots. Claude McKay seems to have been aware of this concept of space; Harlem could represent notions of home to the Jamaican expatriate in Paris and Marseille.

Dorothea Löbbermann, Ph.D, is affiliated with Humboldt University, Berlin. She is the author of Memories of Harlem: Fiktionale (Re)Konstruktionen eines Mythos der Zwanziger Jahre (2002) and numerous other publications in the field of American Studies. Her current project is called Figurations of Homelessness.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “Harlem on Our Minds.” Critical Inquiry 24.1 (1997): 1–12.

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993.

Keith, Michael. “Identity and the Spaces of Authenticity.” Theories of Race and Racism. Ed. Les Back and John Solomos. New York: Routledge, 2000. 521–538.

Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.

Löbbermann, Dorothea. “Productions of Ethnic Space: Tourism’s Narrations,” in: Postmodern New York City: Günter H. Lenz, Utz Riese (eds.), Transfiguring Spaces/Raum-Transformationen. Heidelberg: Winter, 2003. 111–135.

McKay, Claude. Home to Harlem. 1928. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987.

Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: SAGE, 2005.

Park, Robert E. “The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment.” The City. Eds. Robert E Park, Ernest W. Burgess, Roderick D. McKenzie.

1915/1925. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967. 1– 46.

Stepto, Robert. From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative.

Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979.

Watson, Steven. The Harlem Renaissance: Hub of African-American Culture, 1920–1930.

New York: Pantheon, 1995.

1) Harlem Renaissance author Wallace Thurman, in his novel Infants of the Spring (1932), took up the expression, but reversed Park’s optimism: “Harlem has become a state of mind, peopled with improbable monsters (222).”

2) I am borrowing the term “symbolic geography” from Robert Stepto’s From Behind the Veil, without following his detailed application of Victor Turner’s anthropology (66–69).

3) Stepto’s symbolic geography concludes with the “journey of immersion,” the turning away from the northern cities and the return South, an immersion into the “roots” of African American culture.

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A nt j e E n g elmann antjeengelmann.net 1980, Ulm, Germany Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

W h o needs W h om ?

A S h ort S tory a b o u t t h e ( R omantic ) R elations h ip b etween t h e A nt h ropolo g ist and t h e A rtist Susanne Weiß Everything is always about relationships. That´s for sure. When looking at Antje Engelmann’s body of work, one is looking at exercises of emotional care.

– One may think. Another one may look at it as exercises of emotional confrontation. Or a third one may see exercises of breaking taboos. And someone totally different may observe trials of reinterpreting history. Therefore we find in Antje Engelmann someone who constructs her own reality.

This strong ability marks the artists qualities as a performer, filmmaker, anthropologist, choreographer, dancer, musician and last but not least, as an actress.

But it is not only moving images which embody Engelmann’s universe, but also found footage and readymade objects, photographs and drawings.

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Her artistic approaches highlight her relationship to her subjects. By saying that, it is not entirely clear to me whether she plays with them or takes care of them. But it is obvious that her strong gestures are depicting an act of intimacy that is a part of relationships. It is important to say that she chooses (most of the time) a very humorous path of depicting relations – not just any relationship but her very own relationship to her personal history.

Therefore it seems impossible to look at Antje Engelmann’s work without looking at her life.

Living during the therapeutic era, the artist walks the brave path of catharsis. Self-perception encounters self-representation. Walking is not meant as a metaphor here. The artist literally walks back and forth and collects collective and private memory along that path. For her personal collection of material she leaves the “known” and enters “unknown” territories. Through traveling she becomes an outsider and changes sides at the same time. The sudden self-exposure reveals personal structures, which she analyzes in her own anthropological categories. Engelmann knows her advantage, her freedom as an artist to that of an anthropologist. In a way she is her own subject of examination, exotic enough for her own reference system. Similar to the work of an anthropologist she examines the exoticism in her own culture.

But she is not only observing and documenting what she sees, she is also overexposing it for her own dramaturgy. The freedom of judgment is her advantage. The artist and the anthropologist are both using methods of observation in order to make things visible. Both artist and anthropologist are true cosmopolitans, companions of cultures and privileged to access secrets. The artist has to leave the researcher inside when she starts to question the comparative anthropological perspective. In her narrative room she can shape her own relationship with the elements. Her anthropologist has to follow an ethical path and is bound to observe, compare and finally analyze systems. He or she should not interfere or inflict. His or her observations are elementary for the survival of culture. Knowledge about inner systems leaves the inside and affects the

knowledge production of the outside. After some time the artist and the anthropologist meet again: in a secret place to exchange experiences and new understandings. They start developing their own system of observation and forms of interference.

Under the title A Manual to Change the Past, a universal utopian dream, Engelmann seizes this approach by working with family history and its boundaries. Her last comprehensive journey in 2009 led the artist to Brazil. She did not travel alone, the anthropologist inside her traveled with her: to find her past in the present she traveled to Entre Rios, a Danube Swabian community of ca. 9000 people in southern Brazil. In order to cultivate corn, 500 families were receiving international subsidies to leave Europe in the 1950’s and to start a new life in a rather unfertile region of Brazil. With her journey to a preserved culture Engelmann looks at a hybrid breed of her own roots: the artists’ family are Danube Swabians (Donauschwaben). They settled around the rural area of Ulm after WWII. Especially the “donauschwäbisch” dialect and certain traditions are distinctive features of the specific culture Engelmann grew up with. Against this background she follows her family history in an abstract way.

She is balancing her roles as a constructor and deconstructor. She is the one who can compare and observe the developments within that community within a short time. The transformative tension between the hybrid and the tradition allows space of depiction – judgmental depiction. Her artwork depicts her as an in- and outsider of this culture at the same time. She finds the secret on her way out, seals it and preserves it for good. The credibility she gains through that always enables her way back in.

Her family and her past are partners in crime.

In her work How When Where Why (Wie Wann Wo Warum, 2007) she takes care of a family member who is in the period of adolescence. The loss of a little friend, a hamster, is a tragic event in her life.

Engelmann encounters the anthropologist and creates a ritual for and with her sister Laurin and her dead hamster. In her fifteen minute video essay we first witness how the tiny hamster is going to be put to sleep as he has cancer tumors all over his body.

We observe the sterile non-ritual side of our society.

The artist contrasts this with a ritual: she stages a cremation. By burning the dead body of the hamster close to a river in a forest I felt reminded of the holy city of Varanasy in India. The pictures of cremation sites along the Ganges are those of ritual passages of transformation. The ritual we observe is important for Engelmann’s work. With rituals and symbols she cultivates meaning for herself.

The field of biography is a delicate one.

Engelmann cultivates it with these means: by diving deep into her families history while being able to abandon it any time, by complementing reality with rituals and symbols, enjoying her artistic freedom to do so in contrast to the regulated approach of a researcher. Her playful, relieving methods of exaggerating and restating the setting allow for a better understanding of it and lead to a therapeutic effect on the artist´s and the anthropologist´s realm.

Susanne Weiß is a Museologist and works as a curator, art mediator and writer. She studied and lives in Berlin.

At present she is working on a catalogue raisonné for the German artist Chris Reinecke (1936). From 2009 to 2010 she worked in the United Arab Emirates as Robert Bosch Cultural Manager for the Goethe Institut with the Sharjah Museums Department. Before going to the UAE she curated the Diploma and Master Exhibition of Weissensee Kunsthochschule Berlin.

Kinder der Donau (Antje und Tim Engelmann), Ulm, 2011

Donaubier, Entre Rios; Donauschwäbische Siedlung, Brasilien, 2009

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R o b erto D u arte robertoduarte.de 1963, Santiago, Chile Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Untitled, Single Channel Video, Mini DV NTSC, Color, 11: 07min, Santiago, 2005–2011 For more than two years, Roberto Duarte walked through Santiago de Chile which was his home at the time (Desplazamiento, 2004). Everyday he walked, no matter where he had to go. Every time, he took his camera with him and took pictures of the smallest daily details of life. He captured more then 2000 photos, such that the art of Roberto Duarte became a way of living.

I was reading this text on your website where Nadine Schmid wrote that the difference between computers and humans is the fact that humans cannot go back to a tabula rasa and that machines can easily be reformatted. I thought that it was a very interesting perspective to describe your work: that you try go back to the very basics, to the elements.

Yes, to me this walking for two years was also to reset something. At that time I was working at the Art School in a University, reading a lot, and had the feeling that I had to do something not only intellectual, but physically demanding as well.

Intuitively I wanted to find a path, a connection.

Going back to human velocity and having a 18

very simple life was for me, a deep perceptual experience, a process of awareness.

When we were talking with Dalila Dalléas, another artist participating in the show, she was saying that for her, home was her own body. Does that count for you as well?

Yes, I was always moving around like a nomad.

I went with my family into exile when I was ten years old. We left to Mexico because of the military coup in Chile where I was born. I think this is a state of being I will probably have forever. I went back to Chile years later to study art, then I went back to Mexico, then back to Chile and then I came to Berlin. I have this kind of cycle. It is like sleeping with your suitcases under your bed. I know if I am somewhere it will never be forever. I started learning not to be attached to things.

But it is in the nature of human beings to be attached to things and to collect things, like all kinds of rubbish, right?

Well since I came to Berlin I have been collecting subway tickets to remind myself that I am not walking anymore (laughs)!

So going back to your personal history: you lived ten years in Mexico, then decided to go back to Chile to study art?

For a while we were not allowed to return to Chile. In the beginning of the Eighties the Chilean government started bringing out lists with names of people that were allowed to go back. At this time I was in the last year before going to university. I did not really want anything. I was a rebel, partying and drinking a lot. There was something missing in my life, in our life.

My father wanted to go back to Chile because he wanted to research poetry there. He asked me if I wanted to join him to resume my studies there.

I was very excited about the idea. I only lived there as a kid and heard stories from my family but I didn’t know how it was to live there. It was Pinochet’s last year in Chile.

This was a period of struggles and repression in Chile but it was a really good time to be in university there. Everyone felt united and we were in the streets all the time screaming, “We want this motherfucker out!”

It is like in Egypt nowadays …

It was a period of economic recession. I remember even smoking cigarettes was like a ritual, we shared everything and felt connected one to another. You felt the people in another way. It was very intense, relationships were deeper. We were living in this imposed dead culture. People were much closer to each other, hugging, touching, you needed the human warmth. It was beautiful to be part of this process.

The second time I went there at the end of ’99, i.e. after ten years of democracy and free market, things were so different. People were demobilized. It was a disappointment, like a place full of consumers, the connection and the beauty were gone.

If I listen to your stories, I am thinking about how things change with time. Maybe there is also a structural and societal Nomadism. Not only that we as people move around but also that the societies – in their form – move around and change.

It was not Chile alone, the whole world changed dramatically. Imperialism won and we didn’t realize it.

It seems like one hundred years of struggle vanished.

It was a dirty thing to see how Nixon, Kissinger, Edwards, the CIA, Ford and others pulled strings to undermine democracy and establish a dictatorship.

Things changed forever!

Since 1973 Chile was the experimental field to put Friedman´s extreme economic model into action. In the early implementation of the model, under the dictatorship, that is without congress and without opposition, economic groups seized all the strategic sectors of the country which were before in state hands such as the big mining, energy, water companies etc.

This model has now been spread worldwide, but this was not improvised. That was the plan since WWll and when the U.S. began to prepare the onslaught to stop global social processes.

Treaties such as the “TIAR” were signed (1948) that left the local armies technically and ideologically dependent on the United States. The School of the Americas was implemented, in which repressors learned from the Sixties to torture, kill and make the “internal enemy” (a name given to the social

activists) disappear. The elites were educated during the Sixties at the Chicago School of Economics to administer what would be the new model of extreme accumulation of capital just a decade later.

In the end, corporations run countries, and that is so clear in Chile nowadays.

I don’t know exactly how things could change on a social scale now, but on a personal level, to remain creative and aware is maybe a good start.

Anyway, there are new ideas out there …

Would you consider your video works as political?

They were for awhile more direct (NN 1993, NN 2 1996, 12 2004), although now they don’t deal with specific contingent political issues. Yes, somehow they are.

Fluss, Single Channel Video, Mini DV Pal, Color, 1:48min, Berlin, 2008

Untitled, Single Channel Video, Mini DV NTSC, Color, 11: 07min, Santiago, 2005–2011

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C h ristop h e N da b ananiye art-ndabananiye.de 1977, Lubumbashi, Kongo Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

The route/road plays quite an important role in your works, as it can be deduced from your works Strecken (Routes) or Spuren (Traces). Are you interested in the route/road covered so far or rather in the route/road still to come To me it is more about the route covered so far, i.e. traces from the past. Past experiences have to be revived in the present. I deal with the past and the present and capture these with the help of different artistic media. Like every other person, I do bear traces: places where I lived, different life circumstances, family, friends, trips, single facts etc. My goal is to make these traces visible and to keep the memory upright.

The concept of Spuren can be understood in many ways. On the one hand as traces/tracks in historical paths and on the other hand as hints in an investigation process. How do you relate to these concepts?

I see traces, above all, in the historical context – whereby these can be thoughts, ideas, objects, feelings etc. It is a steady search in the past. The “shoes” are an example. The room installation 20

Die Schuhe presents traces of my social network and places. At the same time the “personal” and the “impersonal” are put vis-à-vis. In the center of the installation, you find shoes of friends and acquaintances of mine. Each shoe refers to a personal story and grants a small insight into the world of the owners. Often, events are visualized in my works without concretely being portrayed at the same time. The traces treat and deal with a metalevel that is revealed in the expressions and above all through the materials used.

There is a saying that goes: “No scar, no memory.”

What role does memory play in your art works? Would you go as far as to describe your works as symbol/scar that keeps memory alive or restrains from amnesia?

Memory plays a very important role in my works. In fact, it is always about memory – be it my remembering of incisive events on which I worked, or be it numerous everyday motives which I photograph to remember. For more than two years now I have been documenting traces in public spaces with a camera (both photo and video), for example informative notes in show windows or

doors. Thus, I am not only interested in my own traces, but also in the traces of others.

My work helps me to keep my memories alive and to not forget. I can elaborate on events like the genocide in Rwanda or the death of close relatives through my artistic search for traces.

Seeing your drawing series Schlafende Menschen (Sleeping People), I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that the people “sleeping” seemed more lifeless than at rest. How thin is the line between these states of life?

The title is Schlafende Menschen, but indeed you can see rather lifeless people. I wanted to irritate.

I felt the deep wish that these people weren’t dead, that they were reanimated. I have seen so many people lying like this, dead, and I wished they were sleeping.

You talked to us about your installation Die Schuhe (The Shoes). I remember you said something quite interesting like “Show me your shoes and I will tell you who you are.” Is one’s identity reflected in his/her footwear? Could one thus influence his/her identity by purchasing a new pair of shoes?

Der Schuh – Persönlich Vs. Unpersönlich, installation at Sonderwerkstatt am Eurobahnhof, Saarbrücken, 2008, photo by Tobias Keunecke

The saying “Show me your shoes and I will tell you who you are” may often be true, yet this is not my intention. Personal stories are to be expressed through the shoes, but I restrain from every valuation. To me it is important to animate the traces of the single shoe, the single person. It is not about showing identities via shoes. Maybe one’s identity is reflected by the shoes, but whether you can influence it by buying new shoes? I don’t hope so...

You use enamel varnish to paint most of your paintings. How did this come about?

I was looking for a material to accompany me on my search for traces. I explored several materials, and finally I found enamel varnish which allowed me to make traces of the creative process visible. You can clearly see the aging. The series Selbstporträts (Self Portraits) is both about my personal way and about the traces which are left when working with the material of enamel varnish. Important aspects to me are change, aging, renewal, and life which I can express most distinctly by using varnish. One after the other, I apply several layers of varnish and

oil paint on wood before the first layers can fully harden. Thus the process of drying is slowed down.

The result is a wavy surface, similar to the aging human skin. The work is “alive” and changes with time. At the same time because of the varnish there is a reflective surface which makes the viewer become part of the painting. Thus in the series Selbstporträts, the watching of the “other” in the image also means watching oneself and thus it turns into an encounter with oneself – and leaves traces behind.

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R u dy C remonini rudycremonini.com 1981, Bologna, Italy Lives and works in Bologna, Italy

For Nomadic Settlers – Settled Nomads, you are showing one big painting Static Displacement (The Memories I have of you are Always Changing). It is telling us the story of an enigmatic nomad…

The protagonist of this story is a nomad who has been kidnapped. By whom? That remains hidden.

Irony of fate, when he was abducted from his home country where he lived with his people as a nomad, he was forced to start a long travel with others like himself.

He didn’t know the reason why he was kidnapped. The reason was to stop his wandering around. He had to travel a long way until the kidnappers made him stop. In this place, the kidnappers used tools to rid him of his nature – tools that were invented specifically for him by scientists who wanted to solve this enigma he posed to them.

One day, the doctors conducted another important experiment: they wanted to decompress his body. He asked them to raise the level of decompression until he fainted; he lost consciousness and continued to travel.

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Unconsciously this young man continues his journey through time and space – thanks to his image that is left to us.

You experimented with repetition of this image of the young man. Static Displacement holds similarities to a video sequence. What are your ideas?

In Static Displacement I wanted to create a parallel between the actual travel and the unconscious travel, between history and the fantastic, reality and dream.

I’m painting the same subject again and again, sometimes in the same frame, and every time it is changing – like people change when they are moving from one place to another. I’m living with this work, I’m trying to remember the face of this young man that I’m painting, but I’m not succeeding.

I’m painting his face to remember him, but his face is vanishing, changing. It is as if I am the settler, while he is the nomad.

Your work circles around the conflict between memory, identity and otherness, between the “officially perceived ways” and the “unconscious desires.” Showing human figures, mostly faces, your paintings are characteristically in black and white. What are your basic interests in your work?

For me, desire is at the basis of everything.

Identity has always interested me very much, as a fake and violent construction imposed onto the individual to exorcize that which is the “other,” to distract the attention from that which is, instead, untamable. At times, I have thought that identity as a constraint on a psychological level is a force that is inherent in the construction of character, which is perhaps inevitable, but surely never fully realized.

History teaches us that this “idea of identity,” driven to the limit as the extreme affirmation of something, is always accompanied by its opposite.

What is it that interests you in painting from photographed portraits?

I’m not interested in common contemporary photographs as everybody could take them. I’m looking for photos or video stills that could be considered as documents. That’s what intrigues me. The images I choose always reflect an event or a situation that had to be documented. For this,

photography has always been very helpful. And with paintings, you can give new life to this situation or this document. It is sort of a rebirth of the subject, of a memory.

Your artistic work started in a rather unusual context and in an almost unconscious way, as you said yourself. While working for a graphic studio in a consortium of funeral services…

While working for this graphic studio, I transformed the commemorative photos of the deceased into paintings. Surely, my employment has had an influence on the idea of archiving people, their faces and identity. I produced commemorative photos for funerals, so I re-elaborated at least ten portraits day to day. My artistic research was born in this context. I started to paint these photos, trying to capture the particular expression of the person presented in them. I’m interested in subjects that somehow, no matter the context, show a particular expression, that don’t seem to be at ease with themselves.

Then, I continued choosing images from the Twenties, Thirties, Forties, and for the most part of priests. I was interested in seeing the binding element of their personality. With the passing of time, my research has diversified, but it has retained this interest towards characters that could give me the feeling of psychological “bondage.” I wanted to represent souls that are bonded, mentally narrow, and that are forced to eliminate desire. I also wanted to represent repressed sexuality.

What possibilities does art offer you?

Art creates new visions of reality, it offers new and different points of view that consequently can influence – maybe change – the course of reality.

Art opens a lot of new worlds inside this world.

Static Displacement (The Memory I Have of You Changes All the Time), 11 pieces, 50Ă—50cm each, oil on linen, 2011 23

C yrill L ac h a u er cyrilllachauer.net 1979, Rosenheim, Germany Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

C osmetic s u r g ery Gregor Quack In 1907, Edward Curtis began working on what would become the labor of his life: the monumental photographic encyclopedia The North American Indian. By documenting dance rituals, studying tipi architecture and immortalizing some 1500 women and men in head-on portraits, Curtis hoped to preserve the stoic serenity and sense of honor he so admired in the members of these vanishing cultures. But if the Navaho, Apache or Comanche had ever been anything like the noble savages Curtis imagined them as, any resemblance had long been beaten out of them with the butts and bayonets of US army rifles by the time he arrived. Rather than freely roaming the prairies, the portrayed chiefs, warriors, women and children were reservationdwellers, robbed of their land, stripped of their rights and compensated only with shipments of numbing alcohol. With the nominal division between studio and documentary photography not yet established, 24

Curtis and others like him had no reason not to arrange subjects like fashion mannequins, propped up in stiff, eerie poses and dressed in the lavish ceremonial attire normally reserved for rituals that were now performed only for paying white audiences. Where the tools of today’s fashion photographers – strategic lighting and photoshop retouching – can wipe away wrinkles, pores and other imperfections to approximate an abstract ideal of beauty, Curtis similarly used his state-ofthe-art equipment to make the chiseled faces of his subjects evoke a sense of timeless dignity.

Cyrill Lachauer, for his Trickster series, covers the stony, mask-like faces of Curtis’ war-chiefs with another mask, one resembling iconic Looney Tunes rascal Wile E. Coyote. In the way that it can be unsettling to talk to a stage actor still wearing full make-up, it becomes difficult to focus on either the thin, translucent layer of pigment or on the image underneath. Lachauer works with silkscreen, the same medium Andy Warhol held so dear for its ability to effect “cosmetic surgery” on portraits of wealthy but seasoned clients, and achieve a contrary effect. While, like Warhol, making superficial adjustments to existing images, Lachauer’s goal is precisely not to eliminate irritations, but to cultivate them. Through the additional face-paint, the wrinkly but dignified visages of warriors are blemished with ridicule. What Curtis had been at pains to rid of any ambiguity begins to vacillate between romantic bon savage fantasies and recollections of shrill, industrialbrand comedy. Where Curtis had set out to present an ahistorical image of the Native American, concentrated in the warrior’s noble face, Lachauer’s incongruous addition obstructs our ability to read the images unequivocally.

It is fitting to position Wile E. Coyote, the Roadrunner’s determined but inescapably luckless adversary, as the agent to carry out this willful blurring of boundaries. Though fixed in the role of the relentlessly aggressive antagonist, the character is nevertheless designed to evoke in the audience an amused sympathy with its vain efforts to capture a bird unusual in both speed of movement and dullness of expression. By virtue

of its awkward existence between the good/ bad stereotypes so essential to the mechanics of most children’s cartoons, it becomes easy to identify the character with the anthropological archetype named in Lachauer’s title: the trickster.

In addition to being modeled after an animal of immense mythological importance to many Native Americans tribes, Wile E. Coyote also embodies many characteristics commonly attributed to those mythological characters ethnologists have described as tricksters. Presented as charmingly mischievous rapscallions, these characters were as incompatible with missionaries’ beliefs about heaven/ hell dualism as a smiling warrior would have been with Curtis’ Wild-West shmaltz. In nearly all early written records, trickster figures were thus either categorized as good or evil or just omitted from the stories altogether.

With just three bold strokes of the screen press squeegee, Lachauer not only introduces into the photograph a trickster-esque confusion about the various cosmetic changes made to the Native American reality, but also positions his own artistic act uneasily between two historically diametrical motives for painting over already existing images. Lachauer is certainly not out to apply finishing touches in the manner of William Turner (1789-1862), who famously made a habit of surprising his competition by applying the defining few brushstrokes only minutes before exhibitions opened. He is also, however, far from being motivated by the iconoclastic fervor that has driven both artists and religious fanatics throughout history. With his semitransparent addition neither beautifying nor disfiguring the original, and his own role neither fully productive nor damaging, it might, in fact, be appropriate to understand Lachauer’s own role as that of, well, a trickster.

Rache für Willy Stricker, Baryt Prints, 13 pieces, 14×20cm each, 2010 25

M E M O RY and TRACES

M i g ration of A nimals Dieter Overdieck

They never come back.

Individuals of these species migrate only once. Some European butterflies behave like this: the Painted Lady, the Clouded Yellow Postillon, the Red Admiral. They come from the South in the summer, propagate in the northern regions and die. Their descendants migrate to the Mediterranean area, propagate there and die. And then their descendants fly to the North again and so on. Another kind of migration could be called “tactical,” which can for instance be released by overpopulation. The devastating migrations of migratory locusts in arid and semiarid regions already belonged to the Ten Biblical Plagues. Over three generations, the urge of North-African desert locusts to migrate increases until they build up enormous flying swarms. They then fly up to thousands of kilometers to the place where rain just fell. If the conditions are favorable there because of further precipitation, they propagate so much that, again, they have to set out for a new place with food because their location has become increasingly drier.

Neither time, nor place, nor direction is programmed. There is no way back for the migrating generation. Such migrations are not only typical for insects.

Lemmings migrate about every fourth year without changing direction when their population reaches a critical size. These small rodents must try to overcome big obstacles on their way.

They come back once.

The European Freshwater Eel migrates from rivers and ponds across the Atlantic Ocean westward into the Sargasso Sea where it spawns and dies. The young eels travel back to the home waters of their parents and only return to the place 28

of their birth after sexual maturity. The American Eel swims from Guyana in South America to the southwest of Greenland. Salmon migrate in a similar way but from fresh water to salt water and then back to fresh water to spawn. There are good reasons to assume that each river system, up to the smallest tributary, has its own characteristic smell which is committed to their memory before they relocate to sea. The Pacific salmon die after spawning as well as most of the Atlantic salmon. The precision with which the migrating fish species return to the place of their childhood is amazing; it is known that some species roughly orientate themselves by the sun and geomagnetic field lines. The migration back to home means – despite the long ways – that they do not copulate with individuals from other populations but find their partners among neighbors from their youth. Not only vertebrates show this behavior.

The Monarch Butterfly is the most famous wanderer among butterflies. In autumn some individuals fly 3600 km from North America to Mexico to overwinter there.

From there, they still return once to their former home for mating and egg deposition before they decease.

They repeatedly come back.

The annual migrations in Kenya and Tanzania of the big terrestrial mammalians gnu and zebra, accompanied by different kinds of gazelles, belong to the greatest and most impressive natural worldwide spectacles. According to elder estimations, two million individuals go collectively on a circular trip in search for rich pasturages from the southern Serengeti to the Masai Mara and back. The search for food also causes seasonal migrations, like it does for the Wapiti and mule deer who graze in different altitudinal belts in high mountains. Some whale species migrate through the oceans and cover the longest distances of all mammalians. They seem to orientate themselves along the magnetic field lines of the earth. For mating, they join again and again in the same place in offshore waters. Marine turtles also cover long distances across oceans but return back shortly, precisely for egg deposition on the beach where they themselves slipped out of an egg. Also spectacular – because many individuals join at the same time – are the diurnally repeated migrations of bats, birds, even snails and many other species. Normally they gather in dense groups for collective repose and therefore are better protected against enemies. At the beginning of the day or the night they separate again in order to search for food. Many amphibians migrate from an aquatic breeding ground to a terrestrial biotope for the rest of the year. The tadpoles develop in water where they use different food resources than they do later in life on land. For mating, the adults assemble again in high density, precisely in the waters of their birth, before they go their own way on land. The single amphibian can migrate several times.

Because it is relatively easy to call birds and because there are so many enthusiastic bird watchers, one knows most about the migrations of this animal group. Experts assume that about forty percent of all bird species in the Northern Hemisphere fly to southern winter habitats. In an extreme case, the White Stork migrates 10000 km from his breeding ground in northern Central Europe – along fixed routes which have precisely determined resting places – to its winter habitat of South Africa. This stork is guided by the solar altitude, the magnetic field of the

earth, and optical impressions from its first flights with elder fellows. Among the sandpipers there are species which fly from the far north of Canada to the tip of South America or from Northeast Siberia to South Australia and New Zealand.

Many African savanna birds also migrate but mostly to avoid food shortages in the dry seasons. Some species that breed north of the equator move south and some that breed south of the equator travel north towards the equator. At the beginning of the dry season, the African Abdim’s Stork flies from its breeding region in the northern savannas of Africa across the tropical rainforest to the savannas situated south of the forest zone. This is where the rainy season is just beginning and they spend their repose time there. However, there are also birds which follow the dry periods. The African Openbill Stork preferably eats fresh water snails and mussels occurring in drying riverbeds. As a rule in tropical rainforests or in evergreen mountain forests, birds and mammalians do not show such a distinct migration behavior. Their food production is less dependent on seasons and the available resources are consumed by the residents.

They migrate or migrated with men.

Individuals of a more or less longterm stationary animal species also migrate within their limited geographic range, whereas other individuals of the same species stay philopatric. The ecologic importance of that individual migration is comparably less understood than other forms of wandering. In any case, this leads to an active exchange of genes within the population. Men come from the savanna landscapes of Africa, as it is well known. There they first lived as hunters and gatherers and then spread by migrating. This species is widely distributed and as it is cosmopolitan, can migrate in all thinkable directions in groups or individually and thus, provide for genetic diversity inside its global range. On their way, men have often removed ecological and geographic barriers for animal species and still do it today by deporting them involuntarily or naturalizing them consciously. On the other hand, many species have also followed man because as they change landscapes through their activities, some animal species find new, comfortable living conditions there. The black martin, common house martin, barn swallow and common kestrel, which formerly bred on rocks, now use buildings as hatchery. The song thrush, merle, starling and common wood pigeon, all of which immigrated into parks and gardens, now belong to these synanthropic species. The already mentioned White Stork belongs to those animals that survive in areas developed by man. Presently, man is ruining the good living conditions of this stork species by destroying wet meadows initially created by himself. The list of house-and-supply, hygiene-pest species that accompany man everywhere is long. Among them are cosmopolitans like the common bedbug, cockroach, human flea, some louse species directly living on men, many spider species, the floor beetle, rice floor beetle, carpet beetle, common book louse, some mites, common house fly, house mouse, and the Norway migrating rat, etc. Economically important is the abduction of pests on crop and forest plants. Thus, the corn borer was brought from Europe to North America and to other regions with maize cultures. The San José scale insect from Asia to North

America and from there to Europe, the grape vine louse and the Colorado potato beetle from North America to Europe and so on. Once arrived in a new region with favorable conditions, they can propagate quickly and spaciously. For instance, shortly after hatching, most potato beetles leave their environment of development and migrate immediately to other regions. Naturalization can happen deliberately or accidentally. If introduced, animals can escape from captivity and settle, which can disturb the ecologic structure and framework significantly. This also holds true for deliberate introductions. Mammalians were brought to Europe for hunting and as a fur supplier, and fish and mussels as food supplements for men. The introduction of the fallow deer (Middle East), muflon (from the Mediterranean area), pheasant (Central Asia) and the rainbow trout (from North America) to Central Europe apparently had no obvious ecological consequences. However, the North American musk became a pest in Europe because it ruins dams and dikes by building underground passageways and chambers. Musk could spread rapidly along the banks of waters because it found advantageous climatic conditions, proliferates heavily, likes migrating, is passively transported by floodwaters, and has no enemies in Europe. The European wild rabbit introduced to Australia was comparably successful; it could quickly spawn there, create enormous damages on vegetation and soon become the competitor of grazers as well as of small to middle-sized plant eating marsupials.

The indigenous predacious marsupials there could not match up to these small rodents which can back down into underground nooks fast. New Zealand shows to which extent this can develop: initially there were only two mammalian species (bats) and now there are – including domestic animals that became wild – about thirty mammalian species causing ecological problems.

Conclusion Phases of expansion and migration fundamentally belong to the life history of all organisms. It may be occasionally possible that a species can survive for a shorter or longer period of time inside a limited living space. However, it can be taken for granted that each species is condemned to death if its individuals and descendants stay in the same place for the long run.

Dieter Overdieck, Dr. rer. nat., Professor Emeritus of TU Berlin, Fak. VI. Institute of Ecology. Born in Honnef/Rh., Germany. Studied Biology and Chemistry at University of Bonn (1966–1974) where he received his PhD in 1974. Assistant lecturer at TU Berlin (1974–1979) where he habilitated. 1979–1990 Academic Senior Counselor of Ecology at University of Osnabrück. 1990–2009 Professor at TU Berlin, special area of research: Plant Ecology (influence of climate change on plants).

Begon, M. E., Harper, J. L. und C. R.Townsend (Hrsg. Sauer K. P.), 1998: Ökologie. Spektrum Akademischer Verlag, Heidelberg, Berlin, S. 130–135.

Bick H., Ökologie, 1989: Ökologie. Gustav Fischer Verlag, Stuttgart, New York, pp. 61–69.

Colinvaux, P., 1973: Introduction to Ecology, Jojn Wiley & Sons. Inc., New York, London, Sydney,Toronto, pp. 457–470.

Tischler,W., 1976: Einführung in die Ökologie. Gustav Fischer Verlag, Stuttgart, New York, pp. 55–57, 185, 218, 223–224.

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M a g da K orsinsky artnews.org/magdakorsinsky 1981, Prague, Czech Republic Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

T ales of an I nnate F orei g nness Nico Anklam We wait for the linguistic knot to unravel, but it doesn’t happen. Magda Korsinsky leaves her audience clueless. We wait for subtitles but they don’t appear. This is what makes Korsinsky work Welcome (2007) remarkably successful. Only immediately at the end of the 10-minute-long video one of the protagonists speaks about being displaced in German. All other voices remain in Tigrina, the language spoken in Eritrea. This encapsulated the tension of the work. The title not only welcomes the audience to this piece of work, but introduces it to an impending feeling of displacement and foreignness. The video culminates with the realization that the viewer does not belong.

Korsinsky assembled, composed, and edited the documentary style clips from Eritrea with the intention of alternating interior and exterior as well as colors and shapes and thereby extend the 30

meaning of their content. Soldiers in green uniforms march across red earth. The blurry images of the crowd are followed by aesthetically similar shots on tree rows. Again, we are waiting for subtitles to understand but eventually we are left to guess the meaning of the scene from the gestures. The editing leads us from interiors and close-ups of the narrating faces to the outside. The piece directs our gaze to shots of a military parade in broad daylight and then a dance event with music outside at nighttime. Korsinsky examines masculine and feminine traits in the piece through images of girl’s braiding their hair or the military parade. That is when Korsinky interferes and unveils our inherent bias: the soldiers turn out to be troops of women.

In this autobiographical work, Korsinsky deals with her Eritrean roots but without any postcolonial criticism or migration-analyzing pathos.

The gaze of the camera mimics our gaze into a foreign world, which is just as alien to us as it is for Korsinsky. She also doesn’t speak or understand Tigrina. We are, like her, dependent on gestures and smiles to intellectually follow the people’s narration.

But like her, we fail. Only the tangible image and the intangible sound remain as a means for this piece to communicate. The last shot shows a landscape of rooftops. Rain is falling down on them. Visually, the rain washes away the linguistic confusion. The voices are phased out into the constant whooshing sound of the rain drumming on the rooftops. Korsinsky fades out the colors. The last shot almost resembles the black and white static at the end of a video tape.

Korsinky presents Welcome in a TV-set that is cloaked in a tent made of clothing. Formally this outer skin shows references to Tracy Emin’s Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (1995).

Both deal with notions of personal history or intimate relations. While coming from different backgrounds, they still operate in similar ways.

In her screen print series, Korsinsky exhibits clothing she wore and categorizes it according to the day when it was used. She offers an intimate insight to a very private world but distorts this by printing images of the clothes that create rather abstract forms and color fields. Korsinsky’s work

thereby gains an aesthetic autonomy through which it is removed from the sheer documental context of her daily life, just as her gaze on Eritrea is far more than just documentarian. And yet her work retains a part of reality. The tent around Welcome is clearly made of clothing.

The t-shirts and jackets, with which Korsinsky made the tent, came from her family’s possession and can be interpreted as a protectionist layer and an expression of withdrawal. The vast screen prints on the other hand seem like large, colorful mosaics rather than individual pieces of clothing.

Still, Korskinsky purposefully keeps traces of the original material intact and thereby preserves the indexical character of her media. It is exactly this interweavement of aesthetic super-positioning and the trace to reality that characterize Korsinsky’s work.

Art historian Nico Anklam works with the Deutsche Guggenheim, Edition Block and TANAS in Berlin. Since studying Art History and Cultural Sciences in London and Berlin he has among other things been awarded a Minerva scholarship residency in Tel Aviv and, most recently, been as a Fulbright scholar at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Translation by Lam Thuy Vo

Kleiderwoche, screenprint, 118.9×84.1cm each, 2008

Familienhütte, used clothes, metal, 185×250cm, 2007

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J u an D u q u e betweencorners.eu nucleo.be bamart.be/persons/detail/en/934 1974, Medellín, Colombia Lives and works in Gent, Belgium

L andscape M emories Juan Duque makes site-specific installations. He reactivates memories through interactions with places and explorations of its’ surfaces. Putting together tangible materials and leaving room for poetic abstraction, Juan Duque brings back textures and images of the landscapes he lived through.

With the eyes of an architect, he develops his ideas on in-situ works where the specific characteristics of a selected site are the starting point; they can be floor patterns and prints, grids, marks, cracks in the walls, spatial angles, light conditions … Due to the fact that he was not able to be on the exhibition site much in advance, he presents an art piece that is transportable – or seen in the context of this exhibition: “nomadic.”

Juan Duque is working on the notion of containers, displacement and vehicles as transportation of memories. Those ideas get crystallized in the physicality of cardboard boxes.

He started to explore this material and train of thought in 2010 for his solo exhibition Evasión at 32

Homesession in Barcelona. The box has always been in his mind as a curiosity he wanted to elaborate on and explore further.

He carries on with the idea of the cardboard box as remains, but also with the function of the box as a container to transport and move things from one place to another. At the same time the box gets damaged and worn out, especially the inside. These lines, cracks, landscape-like impressions are like topographical lines that start to appear.

Juan Duque makes scans of the memories of different boxes. Visually, the large-scale prints look like an aesthetically estranged and undefined landscape. The scanned boxes are printed on very thin paper, floating on the wall, as the notion of fragility fascinates him.

If you unfold a box you get a kind of grid. It functions as a mental map: when you buy a box, you get it as a grid that you have to fold together.

Juan Duque is interested in dysfunctional boxes.

He wants the viewer to be confronted with the two-dimensional image of a box and upon that, try to mentally fold the box to the point that it is not possible because there are accidents – there are parts of the boxes that are too much or that are missing.

In 2009, he did an art residency for two months at De Stichting Id11 Delft in the Netherlands, an institution that created a one year international art residence program. Placed in the Poptahof neighborhood, it was located in community housing blocks outside the city of Delft. Due to urban gentrification the housing blocks were going to be demolished and the former community, whom were mostly immigrants, relocated. Every time a flat was empty, Id11 called an artist to live and work with the community. Juan Duque created five in-situ installations with the following text as the introduction: A space …

How to approach it, making it your own …

Entering 636 flat at Poptahof, Delft for the first time brought about these questions: “How many times the doors have been opened and

Untitled, site-specific installation, white paper, thread, linseed oil applied on the walls, soya seeds growth in-situ, carpet found in-situ, presented at art residency Poptahof De Stichting id11, Delft (NL), 2009

closed? Under which circumstances in their inhabitants’ daily lives?”

Many people came to live in those spaces, many people left leaving traces.

I came as stranger, I observed, I imagined, I also had stories to tell …

I took the space as hostage, and worked there to render homage to those memories Re-appropriation is a territorial struggle …

Working with materials found in the 636 flat – wooden doors, frames, curtains, carpets, newspapers, I constructed in-situ installations that alter the space.

Yet, bit by bit, some things start taking place, having a shape, making sense …

Small Kitchen A room with a carpet A room with forgotten curtains A large seating room with a great view to the horizon …

Five small chapels …

Visitors come to make evident the cracks in the surface of the status quo.

Intruders Welcome to flat 636 …

Duque re-presents and re-appropriates one of those in-situ installations in the exhibition space of Nomadic Settlers – Settled Nomads. The installation is a landscape he made out of the remains of a leftover curtain hanging in flat 636, in which he goes back to his own memories of landscapes in his home country of Colombia.

This brings up the interesting question if sitespecific or in-situ works are really so site-specific?

The meaning of these works got constructed in a very specific location and context. What is the afterlife of the work if you bring it to another context? Does it become something totally different or is the meaning expressed so strongly through the piece that it could function in a different space as well? Objects, art works, they move from one exhibition to another in the same way their makers, the artists, move around the globe. Are they still the same if they settle themselves in a different place?

What is the dynamic between the projection of individual memory on a place and the narration it systematically implies?

The Helper, installation, 4 B/W inkjet prints on silver paper, A5 format, clay cast of the inside of the artist’s mouth, found wooden stick, presented at solo exhibition Fuego Fatuo at IPS Space, Ghent, BE, 2010 Untitled, site specific installation, curtains found on the site, gold spray paint, presented at art residency Poptahof De Stichting id11, Delft, NL, 2009

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S oavina R amaroson soavina.com 1977, Madagascar Lives and works in Paris, France

T h e N eo - in N eo C olonialism : Gettin g Gran u lar on a P refi x The commemoration of Africa’s fifty years of independence in the past years has taken a multitude of forms for expressing pride and joy, corresponding to just as much frustration and resignation. 2010 was a special year as every African was reminded of the fact that five decades ago, one of the “colonial masters,” France, was so nice as to let go of fourteen of its colonies (seventeen African countries, including Nigeria [from England] gained independence in 1960). While the presidents of many African countries were ironically quick to travel to their “former” colonial master’s home, Paris, to decorate the high tables of the Champs-Elysées and watch their troops parade on the French national day, Bastille Day; while the consulates and embassies of many African countries around the world threw extravagant parties (with money they normally claim they do not have) to mark this supposed mighty step into political, economic and 34

social freedom; while the world debated voraciously about the future of Africa and Africa’s position in the 21st century; while intellectuals like Prof. Achille Mbembe philosophized on the prospects of a post-colonial African society like in “Leaving the Dark Night – Essay on Decolonized Africa” (Sortir de la grande nuit – Essai sur l’Afrique décolonisée), a young African artist and architect based in Paris, Soavina Ramaroson (1977, Madagascar), wasn’t very sure about how to treat, classify and understand all this information, the discrepancies, and sometimes illogical positions. Born seventeen years after his country’s independence and thus, not having physically experienced a pre-colonial and postcolonial Madagascar to make any comparisons, he sought to understand these tendencies by getting granular on one of those prefixes usually used in conjunction with Africa, the neo-. What is the neo- in neo-colonialism? And how does this neo- differ from other prefixes also very much used in association with Africa today, e.g. the post-? Is the post- that prefixes Africa just as good as the neo-? When did the post-colonial Africa really begin and when did it end? And when did the neo-colonial Africa begin and when did it end? Or are we living in a neo-postcolonial or a post-neo-colonial period of Africa’s history? These questions that go around a migration of ideas and terminologies, these questions that evoke the perception that ideas and such terminologies are cardinally dynamic forced Soavina Ramaroson to take a subjective and non matter-offact look at the idea of a neo-, obviously using the weapon at his disposal … the camera.

In the series The Neo- in Neo-Colonialism: Getting Granular on a Prefix, Ramaroson portrays four wellbuilt, handsome young men with bodies striving for the perfection of some Greek gods. These men standing bare-chested in front of haystacks express a certain pride, hope and confidence. An expression and understanding proclaimed in the heydays of the African emancipation from colonial constraints. Of particularity are the shadows of their bodies on the haystacks, which give an illusion of time. Two minutes past twelve! Five minutes past twelve! Ten minutes past twelve… a migration of time. Indeed, fifty years

have gone by but the reality clock still shows an extremely slow and almost stagnant tempo. And the question resonates in the air: where have we gone to and what have we achieved in fifty years? Or was it just ten minutes?

In this same series, Ramaroson portrays a couple of school kids in front of the shadow of a pole and flag. The kids, who are the new generation, the future bearers, seem intimidated by the flag or the camera. The flag itself seems tired and fed up... almost resigned. And everything is out of focus. Is this the expression of today, an impression of the the neo- in neo-colonialism?

For the exhibition Nomadic Settlers – Settled Nomads, Ramaroson talked to us about his artistic background and the conception of his piece The Neo- in Neo-Colonialism: Getting Granular on a Prefix.

In the series The Neo- in Neo-Colonialism: Getting Granular on a Prefix, which you will be showing in the Nomadic Settlers – Settled Nomads exhibition, you consciously or unconsciously make a statement on your position towards colonization (including its prefixes like neo-, de-, post-, etc). If you permit, I would like to start this interview with a non-trivial question. Having in mind the current political situation in Libya, the Ivory Coast, Madagascar, etc., can one talk of an African independence?

Actually, The Neo- in Neo-Colonialism: Getting Granular on a Prefix series is an idea that came up before all the uprising in North Africa… a few months before. In Madagascar, we studied about “neo-colonization” in history and treated the definitions in the lines of Francophonie and the Common Wealth. These are subjects that are hardly mentioned here in Europe. To answer your question I’ll talk about Madagascar, the country I know, but I think it’s similar in all other old colonies.

People in these countries experience and live under a big Western influence. Just an example I always quote: “Eighty-five percent of the richness of the country belongs to the banks; there is no Malagasy bank, only French…”

The Neo- in Neo-Colonialism: Getting Granular on a Prefix is actually a fusion of two independent series … a part of Les Lutteurs (2009) and a part of

The Neo- in Neo-Colonialism: Getting Granular on a Prefix, 80×80cm, 2009 and 2010

L’école D’art au Village (2010). Why did you decide to juxtapose these extremely proud, masculine, confident young men in Les Lutteurs with the blurry, almost intimidated kids in Les Élèves?

The theme Nomadic Settlers – Settled Nomads made me think about the exodus of Africans in Europe (as myself) seeking a better life. And my question was: does school really bring a better life?

So, I found it interesting to put those pictures in opposition. Maybe the solution is somewhere else?

The blurry, sandy character of the Les Élèves series wasn’t a digital treat. How did it come about?

The magic of art, let’s say. The camera I used was out of order, I didn’t know it. This series is photographically completely missed, according to me.

Your photographic work is, contrary to the school of thought of the likes of Cartier-Bresson, not spontaneous.

You do not wait for that moment to come but you carefully compose and orchestrate the moment, as seen in a series like Women Clichés. Does this have to do with your background as an architect?

What else to say than yes. In French, we say “déformation professionnelle.” By the way, until now, I didn’t consider myself as a photographer.

Looking at your series L’école D’art au Village, I wonder how you became interested in art. How important is art education to you?

I always remember my very first day of school in Madagascar. I was about three years old, pretending to cry because I didn’t want my father to leave me.

He said, understanding that I was faking:“You’re a real artist!”

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D alila D all é as himalaika.com 1974, Oran, Algeria Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Fraternité, pencil, water colour on paper, 30×40cm, 2011 You mentioned in one of our many conversations that what is sometimes referred to as contemporary nomadism, i.e. backpacker travelers who search for themselves on the road, is synonymous to home …

What did you mean by that?

What I mean is that many people travel because they are not comfortable where they are located (which may be their native country or city, for example). They feel the need to leave but especially to roam around the world as if they are looking for something. Or maybe what they need is a place where they feel good, a place just for them. The photographer Depardon calls that “the appropriate place.” Does the feeling of being like a fish out of the water come from the fact that they don’t know themselves or are they out of their body? This is the first physical knowledge and local power which allows us to inhabit a place.

In other words, if these people knew themselves and especially accepted themselves, they would not need to go elsewhere because their true research is that. The place they search is in themselves.

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Your recent art project is centered around memory.

Why do you think art is an appropriate vehicle to reflect on or treat the topic of memory?

I wanted to work on memory because I first realized a lack of it in the form of images (the fact that during the 1992–2002 civil war in Algeria there were very few images of the war). My first reaction was to want to fill this gap by creating images. To think about it, art has not been a choice, it was the only mode that I have ever.

Now, if I have to think about why art is a more appropriate mode of approach for this type of subject than another, I would say that art is more efficient because it surprises us in its form and therefore can achieve and create a movement in us because using another method of analysis, that the reason or intellect which we are accustomed to think, it managed to circumvent the barriers of resistance that our thought erected to face the fear or rather does not ‘face. And memory being an “organ” of the human whose operation is largely beyond the reason, art is more apt to act on it. This is true when the goal, that’s the case for

me, is to initiate the memory of waking up with consequences that will cause the reality, not just watch it.

Can you please give us a background as to what this project is about?

The Year 0 Algeria project approaches memory of the War of Independence (1954–1962) and the Civil War (1992–2002) in Algeria with various art forms ranging from drawing from archival footage, to photograph of memorial sites, the development of non-monumental memorials to the manufacture of a reference library about that part of history.

The idea of ​​this project was born in reaction to screening of the documentary film Algerie(s) made

by Malek Bensmail, Patrice Barrat and Thierry Leclere, which traces chronologically and without bias the events of the civil war. I was extremely shocked by this film and it has questioned directly my own memory and the history of my family where violence was always present. I immediately made ​​the connection between civil war and the liberation war, 20 years earlier. Therefore, my father was 20 years old during the independence war,

Untitled, pencil, stabilo on paper, 30×40cm, 2011

Untitled, pencil, stabilo on paper, 30×40cm, 2011

founding of the Algerian nation and of Algerian identity. Henceforth, doing this research on memory in Algeria had become a vital issue for me.

You were born in Algeria and grew up in France. The topic of your country of birth always reappears in your art works e.g. La bataille d’Alger, 2003, Les femmes d’Alger, 2003, Oran, 2004 or your recent works of 2011 on la memoire. If I may ask, why is Algeria so much an issue in your art… (especially when you hardly entitle your works specifically on France)? In other words: are you using your art as a kind of tool for the search of a “home” or localisation of an identity?

That is clear. The art made ​​me aware of the ambiguity and pain that plagued my identity, my sense of belonging to a country, a culture, a descent.

Previously, my studies in biology could not wake up me to that. But art was immediately used as a tool as you say it, leverage to raise this question of identity pain. Especially because, having grown up in France, former colonial power, ruler of Algeria, this identity pain was even more sensitive and offensive.

I do not feel to belong to France or Algeria. France, I could understand but Algeria, it was not acceptable.

Hence, I think this interest in my homeland.

In some of your art pieces you clearly make references to some milestones in art history.

Interestingly you make a “provocative” twist, so that the paintings gain a contemporary meaning, almost with a social and political impact. In the case of les femmes d’Alger, 2003 which refers to Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement, 1834 by Eugene Delacroix, you replace the black “maidservant” with a man. In Adam et Eve, 2005 which is reminiscent of the fresco Adam and Eve expelled from paradise, 1424-1425 by Masaccio, you make Adam black and completely leave out the angel. What are you conceptual intentions behind such works?

In both paintings, there is the question of the relation of man and woman and behind that, there is the question of domination with all the violence that this implies, of man over woman. And it also refers to all forms of domination and enslavement.

When I work on classical pictures, I am responding to a report established by former and still valid.

Women of Algiers by Delacroix is a​​ snapshot of

oriental women, which reflects the fantasy that the West had of the east, completely artificial. Featuring more black women to a level subordinate to Arab women. To break this pattern, I replaced the servant with a young man wearing a phallus in place of his head.

Since 2008 you have been working on the painting series Ciels. Is this meant to be “sky” or “heaven”? What is this project about?

It is a series of 40 skies, a symbolically important number. This project was born in Bordeaux where the sky changes a lot there. There are two aspects: first, it is an exercise in painting, a technical challenge that the painter needs regularly; how to paint the gray, blue and transparency. Second aspect, the desire to be in this sense of timelessness that sky provides. When I look at the sky, I am no longer in a specific place or at a specific time, I can be anywhere without the notion of time. This sense interests me.

How do you intend to position yourself in the context of the exhibition Nomadic Settlers – Settled Nomads?

What is important for me in a show like this which the title and concept are very strong, is to make something that will feed the concept while remaining close to my concerns. And especially avoid anecdotal.

I wanted to do this show because the concept of Nomadic Settlers – Settled Nomads touches me deeply and I thought I had something to say about it. I did not want to illustrate with a artwork what personal experience of these ideas I had (I already have a first emigrated from Algeria to France and then from France to Berlin). It seems more interesting to share what I feel as an unknown form of nomadic and yet shared by all. This is the concept of bird-man that I develop in the catalogue and which I used to do both parts that I present at the exhibition. In summary, our body is our own point of reference. Nomadic is the movement off-center that we do be out of our bodies.

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Pau l H u f paulhuf.de 1967, Guadalajara, Mexico Lives and works in Berlin and Munich, Germany

L ost L etters When we visited his studio on Richardstrasse in Berlin-Neukölln, Paul Huf was busy with the texts for his photo series entitled Road Stories. Generally, his conceptual practice is based on drawings, photography and words. Every Road Story opens with a short line of text. The narration is then picked up by photographs, taken from the perspectives of fictive characters that we don’t get to see. The protagonist of each of the stories, for some reason or another, needs to make a change. We join in their melancholy while passing by a familiar landscape for the last time or by leaving loved ones behind.

His photographs are sensual and insinuative of something we long for or lost on the way.

An atmosphere of mystery accompanies his work that turns the everyday into a story, the un-staged reality into a subtle drama. Paul Huf is a storyteller, his Road Stories are told from the perspective of a young woman – at least that’s what

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the artist says. Although, one can’t help feeling that we as spectators are the main character.

You told me once about a project you did in Mexico.

You were born in Guadalajara and after many years you went back to do an art project. Can you tell us something about that?

Yes, I was born in Mexico in 1967. My mother is from Canada and my father is German, both are painters. They got to know each other in 1965 in Mexico. We left Mexico when I was four years old but I still have memories of that time. We then moved to Spain for two years and later to Germany.

The story of my parents is funny – beautiful – very romantic and spectacular. I wrote down ten stories of theirs and transformed them into a short story form. Then I went back with these stories to Mexico, carrying with me a CD full of pictures of their time there which they had stored in a box. Back in Mexico, I looked for the people in the photos and the places where they had lived and then exhibited

and photographed them. With all the photo material and the short stories I restaged their life in Museum Carillo Gil by creating a twenty-six meter long wall with texts, hand-painted like Mexican advertising.

What type of stories?

Stories that my father often told me. For example, they ran out of money and had to separate. My father had always worked on a ship and decided to go back on the ship to earn money.

The ship went from Mexico to Florida and was caught in hurricane Betsy, the worst hurricane before Katrina. He had had such a horrible toothache before they got into the hurricane. Hours after getting out of it, he realized that he had totally forgotten his tooth pain! In Pensacola, Florida, he went to the dentist and the dentist removed the rotten tooth.

At the same time my mother was pregnant.

She had told my father about it in several letters and wondered why he didn’t get back to her news.

My father stayed a very long time on the ship and

Just before I left, I turned back just for a moment., part 3 of the Road Story with the title This Life Changing Information is Available Now, 2011

Girls do fall in love, I turned back just for a moment., part 2 of the Road Story with the title This Life Changing Information is Available Now, 2011

thought, “Damn, I had such a great year with that woman, but I don’t hear anything from her!” He left the ship in Amsterdam and his friend told him to finally forget that Canadian chick. But he couldn’t and went to the American Express office nevertheless, where a letter from her was waiting for him. Only then he understood that she had been sending loads of letters but somebody had stolen them because of the money that she had put into the envelopes.

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M Y T H , M Y S T E RY a n d M E D I TAT I O N

M onot h eism and P olyt h eism : P h ilosop h ical T h o u g h ts on t h e S o u l ’ s S earc h for an I nner P lace Andrea Heister

Starting point and dilemma The belief in the freedom of man is one of the fundamental pillars of today’s democratic societies, where one creates and chooses his/her own way of life and his or her’s own credos. The high-held value of the freedom of the human being in his actions is based on the conviction that human actions are self-determined and led by the belief in self-chosen ideals and values. One can conclude that the human being creates him- or herself.

But what exactly does this mean? What is the starting point from which the human being begins to develop? A point of origin is the conditio sine qua non for any kind of progress. Before a self can be formed and developed, a certain kind of self and self-consciousness needs to already exist.(1) From a historico-cultural point of view, the freedom of the human being is an achievement of The Enlightenment which detached and freed men from the dependence on political and divine superiorities, put it on its feet, and requested it to make use of its own mind. This goes in line with Kant’s 1784 quote that served as the guiding idea of Enlightenment: “Enlightenment is the human being’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolution and lack of courage to use it without the guidance of another. ‘Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding!’ is therefore the motto of Enlightenment.”(2)

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No one can force the human being to think, act, or be in a certain way.

But, human freedom only comes to realization when human action through an intellectual idea turns into reality – this becomes liberty.(3) A free decision means to conduct an action in a certain manner and thus build and shape oneself as a moral being, led by principles and axioms. The possibility to be free means not only to act responsibly, but is at the same time an obligation to take free decisions and to become an independent, self-determined human being.

The good feeling to be free and be able to create yourself turns into a strong obligation to do so! Through this obligation in turn, freedom gets lost. The human being does not have the freedom to choose not to be free!

Consequently, it seems as if freedom is not an absolute positive value but obliges and therefore can turn into a burden: a burden that overstrains man in daily life.(4) Ever since, the freedom overload has been one of the reasons for the search and turn to a higher being – it is supposed to assist the human with his or her decisions. On this eternal search for a guideline, an ideal, a higher law that offers assistance to take off the burden, the human has also addressed non-human, celestial spheres. This has happened not only for assistance in moral questions – the quest for guiding principles of actions because the human being feels insecure – but also in terms of origin, where they belong, where they originate from, where they should go and what they should strive towards. These are questions that inspired cultural production throughout all bygone eras. Famously done was the question treated by Paul Gaugin in his painting, Where do we come from? What are we? Where do we go to? (1897).

One of the most famous texts of the Italian Renaissance, De Dignitate Hominis by Pico della Mirandola, thematized the challenge of the human being during a fictional speech from God to Adam, the first human being ever: “I have given to thee, Adam, no fixed seat, no form of thy very own, no gift peculiarly thine, that thou mayest feel as thine own, have as thine own, possess as thine own seat, the form the gifts which thou thyself shalt desire. A limited nature in other creatures is confined within the laws written down by Us. In conformity with thy free judgement, in those hands I have placed thee, thou art confined by no bounds; and thou wilt fixed limits of nature for thyself. I have placed thee at the center of the world, that from there thou mayest conveniently look around and see whatsoever is in the world. Neither heavenly nor earthal, neither mortal nor immortal have We made thee. Thou, like a judge being appointed for being honorable, art the molder and maker of thyself; thou mayest sculpt thyself into whatever shape thou dost prefer. Thou canst grow downward into the lower natures which are brutes. Thou canst again grow upward from thy soul’s reason into the higher natures which are divine.”(5) Away from the center The center of the world is neither a concrete location, nor place to stay. It is a fictional, unreal place from which the human is asked to move away and become real. Between animal and god, between a life without intellect and pure

spirituality, the human being can and has to choose its way and feels at the same time torn between these two poles.

Where to go? How to live? What decisions to make? What do I want and who am I? The center of the world is the point of origin from which the human is supposed to move on and away from, from which it is able to observe the richness of life, but cannot bide. The freedom to choose to move in a direction is, again, an obligation. If the human doesn’t succeed in finding its own way, it feels sick. In Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard describes the sickness of despair and despair as “The dis-relationship in a relation which relates itself to itself. But the synthesis is not the dis-relationship, it is merely the possibility, or, in the synthesis is latent the possibility of dis-relationship.”(6) In the synthesis of finiteness and infiniteness, which is the human being, exists the possibility of dis-relation which, if it develops, renders the human being unhappy, profoundly sick and leads to death.(7) Freedom, Kierkegaard ascertains, is a being unto potential being that becomes actuality through realization and provides only then peace for the human being.(8) What becomes obvious by reading the past paragraphs is that the constitution of the human ontological state includes a fundamental challenge which one can describe as finding a balance and home for the soul.

Restlessness Our soul, different from our body, does not bear restlessness or motion. The nomadic groups always had a strong belief that kept them together and sane.

Differently said, the restlessness of the soul, or the eternal search chased the human from one place to the next. But this nomadism of soul, in a larger sense also the mind, is a state the human being wants to overcome. Everyone is looking for a protective place to be. Augustinus, who is considered one of the seven church-fathers of the Christian religion, expressed his desperate state in his work “Confessions.” He is searching and pleading for attention and the belief in God that will give him certainty about the God in himself. The Christian religion teaches the imperfection of man which is grounded in his/her being as a creature and the dependence of the creature on the Creator. Only through and in God the human being finds peace and becomes itself, .i.e. a human being.

Theorists and scholars from several centuries describe in different manners the internal search for god. The mystics from the Middle Ages, like for example Master Eckhart, mention a mystical unification between human beings and god through which the soul becomes undone, buried in the goddess. Only by being in gods nature will the soul find peace and become complete.(9) In monotheistic religions the soul’s home sickness is healed by finding a home in the One god. God turns into a emotive, spiritual lieu of safety and confidence.

If one goes back in historico-cultural consideration, one finds a completely different imagination of a divine world in the different culture areas. In the Greek imagination for example, the gods were numerous. Epic narratives such as the Iliad and the Odyssey by Homer (late 8th century A.D.) or the theogony by

Hesiod (ca. 740–650 A.D.) testify this. The Greek world was structured with a strict hierarchy with the most powerful divine couple, Zeus and Hera, at the top.

Below them existed leaders and several gods on different levels like Athena, Ares, Aphrodite, Artemis, Dionysus, Hades, Poseidon etc. Furthermore existed titans, half-gods, muses or messengers of the gods who also claimed their place in the system.

The defining characteristic of the Greek hierarchy of the gods is the similarity to human society and the human character traits each god has – they feel the same passions, they fight, they are jealous – but in the end they possess more power than humans. This polytheist structure of the world is designed by the gods leading, separating, and distributing different tasks. Each different area of the world is divided and a specific god is considered “responsible” for it. For every need the human has, he asks a specific god for help to assist not only mentally, but give inner strength and make what the human doesn’t seem capable of doing happen. The security the human is searching for can be called “handingover of the responsibility” of his actions. Said differently, the human thinks that through the pledge for help to the god, they did all they could to achieve it. They will then be given the advantage and must propitiate the gods.

Therefore the human created, through his sensed need for help, the feeling of subjection to the world, mostly natural powers. This is a system for getting assistance from the supernatural powers that are capable of helping in any situation and thus provide continuous inner assurance.

The critique of the polytheist Greek religion concerns the similarity of the divine with the human character. Together with this critique, the birth process of Greek philosophy was initiated, lead by the thoughts of pre-Socratic thinkers (from 6th century A.D. on) such as Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Pythagoras, Xenophanes and Zeno.(10) With the fall of the polytheist godly world and the approach of the One god in who the Christian believer searches for safety, confidence and a home, the human found peace for the next centuries. The spiritual settlement in the One god lead again to inner peace.

The destruction of the idea of the one god The philosophical critique – thinkers like Feuerbach and the Enlightenment movement – destroyed the safe place of the divine home. The words of the great dis-illusionist Nietzsche “god is dead,” reflect the human development of independence. The self-created idea of god exists only as long as somebody believes in it. But the old god – Nietzsche refers to the Christian God and everybody who once believed in it – doesn’t live any more. People then killed Him, abolished the idea of god and became godless. The subsequent state of Nihilism is not more that a state of transition, since Nothing is not a place where one can stay, where the soul can find peace. The search starts anew.

Atheism – the belief in no god – is today, for example in Germany, a widespread practice and state of mind. Young people particularly seem overstrained with the challenge of thinking about something higher than their 43

own reality. Today we live in a world without, with, or with many gods. The diversity of believing has, at least in the big cities, progressed well. The Christian church in Germany for example faces more and more church resignation over the last decades. Christian believers are a shrinking group. Does this on the other hand mean that people don’t search for help in the higher sphere any more?

Are we really mentally balanced and well settled? Did we really find the place in ourselves that gives us peace?

There is, for sure, one more phenomenon that one can observe: our gods of today are much more tangible and free of mysticism. We have a concrete idea about our life and the place of god in it. We don’t live in a world of god any more, the relation has changed the other way around: today we make some space for god in our thinking and living!

Today everybody is a single, unique being but not in the sense of Kierkegaard who proclaimed that everyone should stand alone in front of god with the responsibility for their own life. No, today everybody lives a singular and individual life for him/herself. Man’s search for an inner peace has become an individual one; the answer to the question where one belongs to is left up to oneself. In the ocean of liberty for thinking and possibilities, the answer is often difficult and short term. The question is if everyone captures the greatness of the challenge to find the answer themselves.

Andrea Heister was born 1979 in Munich, Germany. She holds an M.A. in Philosophy and studied art education, visual arts and media in Munich, Berlin and Montreal, Canada. For her Master in art education, she conducted a research project in Porto Alegre, Brazil concerning artistic expression of underpriviledged children in children’s drawings. After teaching art at a Secondary school, she is now writing on contemporary art, doing photography and visual arts. Together with Sophie Eliot she was a guest lecturer at Humboldt University on the Representation of African Art Today – International Exhibitions Since 1984.

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Helferich, Christoph: Die Geschichte der Philosophie. Von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart und Östliches Denken. 2. Ed. München 1999.

Kant, Immanuel: Groundwork for the metaphysics of morals. Ed. by Lara Denis, translated by Thomas Kingsmill Abbott, Original version: Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten. Broadview Press Ltd. Toronto 2005. 119.

Kierkegaard, Søren: “Sickness unto death“. Wilder Publications, Radford 2008.

Mirandola, della Pico: On the dignity of man. Translation by Charles Gelln Wallis, Paul W.J. Miller, Doulgas Carmicheal. Hackett Publishing, reprint 1998.

Vorsokratiker, Die I + II. Philipp Reclam jun. GmbH & Co. Stuttgart 1983.

Weißschedel, Wilhelm,: Die philosophsiche Hintertreppe. Die großen Philosophen in Alltag und Denken.

29. Ed. 2008, ©1966 Nymphenburger in der F.A. Herbig Verlagsbuchhandlung GmbH, München. See 234.

1) The problem of the setting of the self and ist onological state has been treated by the philosophers Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottlieb Fichte who can be considered antecenedents of psychology as a discipline that puts the question about the constitution of the mind in its centre of interest.

2) Kant, Immanuel: Groundwork for the metaphysics of morals. Ed. by Lara Denis, translated by Thomas Kingsmill Abbott, Original version: Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten. Broadview Press Ltd. Toronto 2005. 119.

3) Weißschedel, Wilhelm: Die philosophische Hintertreppe. Die großen Philosophen in Alltag und Denken. 29. Ed. 2008, ©1966 Nymphenburger in der F.A. Herbig Verlagsbuchhandlung GmbH, München. See 234.

4) Although the reason why we feel overstrained remains mostly unknown.

5) Pico della Mirandola: On the dignity of man. Translation by Charles Gelln Wallis, Paul W.J. Miller, Doulgas Carmicheal. Hackett Publishing, reprint 1998. 4–5 6) Kierkegaard, Søren: „Sickness unto death“. Wilder Publications, Radford 2008. 11.

7) See the explication to death l.c.

8) Weißschedel, 234.

9) Weißschedel, 103.

10) See Helferich, Christoph: Die Geschichte der Philosophie. Von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart und Östliches Denken. 2. Aufl. München 1999., 1–13.

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L an H u n g h lanhungh.blogspot.com 1976, Taiwan Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

For a couple of years you’ve focused on live art performance as the main element of your artistic perspective. How did you evolve this form of expression?

I never wanted to be only a performance artist.

Of course the word performance here is a general definition about live art or art action etc. This desire to be involved in performance comes from even before my theatrical music studies. I was shy, and I still am even during performances. Sometimes people say that I am doing this as a sort of selftherapy to fight with shyness. I think it is more about the research of which part of me is willing to perform, what condition can make me perform, and it is not about to change my personality. The live actions also pull lots of attention to interactions and reactions from the audience, which may possibly be lacking in my life sometimes.

Your actions are very often a sort of non-actions or reactions to yourself or the environment. How much are the Asian philosophies like Buddhism and Taoism an influence on your work?

Even though we learned in school or practiced in society some of the Asian philosophies, most of the time I am influenced directly from stories and 46

history, whether fiction or non-fiction. Kung-Fu movies, for example, describe very often that the power we don’t see is stronger. Like big masters normally stay very calm and are never moving too much. Whoever has more skills shows off less. Beside this, the thinking from Laozi also has “wu-wei,” which we can explain in different ways like one should only do ones own job, or like being free from everything, nothing changes. In my own explanation it connects very much to “less is more” and “anything goes” because this explains it from the more practical point of view and it is a possible and good direction to apply in art.

During your performance of Demolished Chair, you disguised yourself in the frame of an old armchair in the hope that people would sit on you and use you. Do you often objectify yourself? What does hiding mean to you?

The idea of hiding is a way to escape from social life. If I take out the verbal communication and the facial/visual communication, what will be left? Going to social occasions sometimes makes me feel this child-doesn’t-want-to-go-to-school feeling. Hiding in this sense is to pass the unnecessary part and to be as direct as possible (in this performance: I’m here to hug you and to be useful to you, but I don’t want to do small talk). If I do objectifications of myself, it is a question to the people: what am I? It is like an investigation of myself by looking at how people treat the objectified me.

You deal with sexuality in your work in a very playful and humorous way. Is it an important topic and question during your art research?

Sex and humor are both important topics for me. I like things which can make life more relaxing. I feel that in the world everything is too serious. Maybe there are some judgements or value measurements that don’t like such things as humor and sex? But I still consider them as the very nature part of human beings. If I want to be honest to my art, I have to deal with these topics or use them as a tool. In another way these are also very good strategies that will attract people at least “to see the art” – I don’t ask them to “to read the art,” but very often art is not even being seen, especially in Berlin.

You question: Is it the destiny of the artist not to be in his own country, or just a self-made illusion to run away from everything? What is your answer? Do you have the feeling you ran away from something or that you are looking for something?

I don’t think it is destiny but indeed lots of people run away and it really is better for them to do art. Take me for example, I felt too different from lots of people. I needed to run away to find the people like me, to ensure that I’m not alone, that what I do makes sense and is challenging for me. It might be a self-made illusion, but maybe art creations sometimes need an illusion as a base. I act differently when I’m in different places, here or there, so I would like to choose a place where I like what I do there.

6D Cube MKII, installation, fishing line, paint, 3D glasses, 2010

This is an Invisible Performance, still performance, 2010

Sorry I’m Late, performance,12hours, 2010 47

L ars B j erre larsbjerre.com 1975, Copenhagen, Denmark Lives and works in London, UK & Berlin, Germany

One of those obvious things about your works is that the titles are not a mere connotation or entitlement of the works, but could sometimes stand out on their own as poetry. How do you choose the titles of your works and what is your relationship to poetry?

Normally, the title of my work first appears when the painting is executed. And it is a process in itself to find a fitting title for the painting. I try not to use the title to underline anything, but rather as an extra layer of meaning often in a metaphorical way. When it comes to poetry in general, then it is a source of inspiration for me. I write poetry myself like a kind of sketchbook.

You draw influence for your painting techniques from the likes of Francis Bacon. What influence does art of the first half of the 20th Century, like Dadaism or Surrealism, have on your work?

I am not really influenced so much by Dadaism or Surrealism because I see the universes that appear in my work as realistic as life itself.

In your works you treat very timeless themes, like memory and forgetfulness, aging, etc. For the piece you will be showing in the Nomadic Settlers – Settled 48

Nomads exhibition, When Time was not an Issue, you draw back on Greek mythology. What is the background of this piece?

Well this painting has gone through a lot of thought before I finally started to paint it. And the idea is to try to transform the myth about “Leda and the Swan” into a more modern and untraditional version. In this work, the swan is reduced into a spirit of its self and tamed by the female protagonist. The roles have changed and for me, it is almost like a comedy (in a tragic way perhaps). For me, the swan stands as a symbol for not only Zeus’ transformation into a seductive character, but also for my home country Denmark, where the swan is the national bird.

Has time ever been an issue?

For me time is always an issue. But for Greek mythology time is not an issue, because a myth has the ability to live forever. And a painting has the same strength, even though time will make its mark.

Although one could rightly say your paintings are beautiful, you hardly treat beauty (in the normal sense of the word) in your works … Even beautiful people you sometimes include in your paintings are deformed and almost deconstructed. What is it about this deformation?

The human beings’ ability to change into different characters, especially looked at from a psychological point of view, is something I am very interested in. In my most recent paintings, I try to expose characters with an aura of ambiguity and changeability. I am strongly interested in revealing people’s ability to transform, their need to adjust, and their permanent escape into other roles by means of symbolic and allegoric facial coverage.

Blurring and wiping their skin, donning lively, abstract, or seemingly plastic masks onto their incarnate faces creates both an uncanny as well as an inhuman effect. The act of literally masking the character’s faces similarly intends to expose (and therefore unmask) their fractured psyche, their longings and their latent hypocrisies. My works are supposed to demonstrate conspicuous emotions such as solitude, peer pressure, or nostalgia, as well as the processes of identification formation, or – so to speak – the

pure fear of existence. In a number of my paintings, I employed a technique of long-exposure effects on my characters’ faces and bodies as to capture and frame a brief present moment, and even more a thought of an absent memory. I hope to be able to visualize their own and their past momentariness – juxtaposing coevally the absent and the present.

Ironing a Swan (study), 42×59.5cm, charcoal and pencil on paper, 2010

Before Time Was an Issue, oil on canvas, 150×360cm, (triptych, each panel 150×120cm), 2011

Before Time Was an Issue (study), oil pencil and red wine on paper, 62.5×87cm, 2011 49

S atc h Hoyt satchhoyt.com 1957, London, UK Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

If one were to categorize your works in (only) one of these two categories: a) Neutral/apolitical or b) Taking sides/positioning/political – which would you choose?

Political.

Do you think art can be neutral? Do you think there is such a thing as what Walter Benjamin termed l’art pour l’art?

No, I don’t believe art can be neutral in the same way that I don’t believe that human beings are neutral. If a person is staring down the barrel of a gun he or she will have an opinion, neutrality will evaporate.

In saying one is apolitical or that one does not have a particular view of the world is in itself a repositioning towards l’art pour l’art. Yes, hobbyists exist. The Sunday painters that uphold romantic ideas of what art is. Their art is a luxury. It’s a pastime, it’s what fairy tales are made of. What is it to be an artist? Being a practicing artist is not a choice, indeed at times it’s a burden, one has to bear the load, unravel, redefine and constantly reinvent.

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On the other hand how political can art be? Can art in itself attain objectivity or can art only be done or seen from a subjective perspective?

This is an individual choice. Activism in art as a layer or multiple layers is my chosen path. It’s the route I subscribe to. One can decide to use the art arena solely as a political forum, a soapbox situation.

In this instance I believe its better to drop art and wholeheartedly seek a position in politics. I believe that poetry and music are all part and parcel of the fine art practice. All great art works contain rhythm and prose, the dynamic balance between silence and crescendo.

Your art is in many ways trans-disciplinary and bridging cultural and geographical borders. Sometimes they are a hybrid of sounds from Africa, being played on European instruments, combined with images from America, posing in statues of Asians etc. How do you reconcile all these presumed differences in your works?

I am a hybrid navigator with a mixed ancestry but I firmly relate to my African Caribbean roots without negating my British, European roots. I exist in a multicultural multiracial environment, I speak three languages, well four, if I include Jamaican patois. I possess a knowledge of traditional African sculpture and music – the African canon, which is of equal importance as the European canon to me and my practice.

Although you express an universality in your works, what is still evident is the symbolism you use, reminiscent of black culture like in Say it Loud (2004/07), Ice Pick (2006) or Rimology (2009). Can you please give us an insight into these symbolisms and their framework?

The symbolisms that you are referring to are codes, quotidian codes, that are rooted in an Africanism utilized in the African diaspora born on the ships of the middle passage. I reinvent and retain these codes, employing my own individual post-black aesthetic in my life and in my art practice.

The codes are a crucial element in my lexicon, my language and my vocabulary. My endeavor is to make art that is all encompassing. This very much includes the grassroots where I come from. I hail from a working class background. I am autodidact

Rimology, 2009

Say It Loud, 2004

therefore my work is not solely directed at impressing the art elite or the academics. I hope that my work can spark questions and ignite critical discourse amongst the connoisseurs and the uninitiated because they can relate to the codes and language that I employ in my practice. Therein lies a mutual comprehension between viewer and art work. My works are successful if they create open accessible conversations.

In Ice Pick (2006), Slave (2009) and some of your other pieces, you indirectly thematize one of the most crucial periods of the last millennium, its after effects or allegories to contemporary activities: the slave trade and transportation of slaves across continents. This period in history can be seen as an epitome of forced migration and nomadism. What is it about this period and activity that interests you?

Many of us conveniently sweep the past under the mat. I have chosen to mine my history, which took its course on a slave ship. The historical layers employed in my practice have as equal an importance as the contemporary issues of which I speak about. If we don’t learn from the mistakes made in history we will continuously be haunted by the ghosts of the past and at the same time it was in these cruel chapters that a resilient brilliant legacy was born from slave ship to space ship.

Duke Ellington, Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, Aretha Franklin, Bob Marley, Public Enemy, J Dilla, to name but a few.

Undoubtedly the most important cultural jewel that the USA gave to the world is Jazz, a musical form born from slavery, the melding of African and European musical sensibilities.

In its conceptuality, your art is sometimes reminiscent of the likes of David Hammons or Stanley Brown. Do you see yourself in this line? Or if you were asked to draw an art genealogy map, where would you place yourself?

I consider it a great honor if people want to put my work into the Hammons Brown category.

Yes, there are similarities insofar as we possess similar codes, and like David Hammons I often take quotidian objects and use them as charged art supports, setting them in museum gallery

environments. Thus creating a new value system and a new meaning but at the same time the said objects retain their original identity often hailing from the black community.

Is there an art piece you have always wanted to do but for some reason you have not been able to realize? What conditions have to be fulfilled to get the piece realized?

I exist in the realm of possibility, therefore I believe that any and every piece that I want to execute will be produced at the right time.

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M ic h ael Z h en g michaelzheng.org 1965, Fujian, China Lives and works in San Francisco, USA

I ntervenin g L ife wit h A rt : D iscoverin g t h e “ O ri g inal F ace ” of T h in g s The video Groundbreaking shows the performance you did in San Francisco in 2003. What is it about?

One aspect of the performance traverses the border between life and death, personal catharsis and human ritual, the loftiness of artistic aspiration and the self-importance of the artist. Indeed, in the context of Nomadic Settlers – Settled Nomads, I think the traversal of these borders can be looked at from a perspective of nomadic restlessness and the search for equilibrium. But I’d prefer to hear your curatorial interpretation on how this video responds to the theme, on what it shows!

You will also do a live performance during the show …

I am still in the process of thinking about the live performance. I want to do a new performance and it will crystalize between now and July. One idea is doing the performance Group Stand – which 52

used to be called Uncomfortable Barrier. At an opening where people who know each other talk away in small groups, I would quietly come forth and position myself in a group as a total stranger, without eye contact but in their space, until one of them acknowledges me upon which I move onto the next group. Due to the interventionist nature of this performance it’s best not to describe it, announce it, or go beyond mentioning that I will be doing a performance during the opening and another one in the second week. But as I said, the idea of the live performance is still in process…

Interventions play a crucial part in your work. How so? What is it that you are interested in?

My intervention works aim to create an alternate vantage point to enable a possible way of perceiving the true nature of the subject.

I purposely stay away from my most familiar territory, i.e., high technology – I have worked in the computer industry for about ten years. That self-imposed challenge has proven exhilarating and difficult at the same time. The freedom from being unencumbered by the tradition of art and from my own background in technology was most exciting.

It allows me to come to art from both angles, of creativity and the critique of that very activity.

Gradually, I realize that my motivation in making art does not lie in creating beautiful objects. Rather, it lies in an existential search for life’s questions through art. Over the years, I find a consistent thread of need to intervene life with my art, either my own or life in general. I have just come to a revelation lately that the need to “intervene” myself has run through my entire life consistently.

You already mentioned it, you were born and grew up in China, where you spent your formative years.

Having studied computer science at the prestigious Tsinghua University in 1982 to 1987, you came to the U.S. with a scholarship and found yourself in the midst of the burgeoning dot com revolution. After ten years you left this business to become an artist.

How does your very own nomadic background influence your work?

After an exciting run of about ten years in the area of computer technology, I started to grow

an internal need to break out of that. I decided to become an artist with the hope of seeing the humanity in a deeper and larger way. And yes, of course, this background has been playing an important role in my work. I can think of the influence in two ways. First, it imposes a cultural dynamic that I have to deal with in my life and manifest in my work. Living in a Western culture with a Buddhist/Daoist heritage has been a constant challenge and source of inspiration for my work.

Many of my earlier works deal with these issues directly. For instance, the Enlightenment Guaranteed sculptural installation features a seated Buddha statue in a teaching mudra pose, legs folded; yet at the same time, two other legs in jeans grow out from underneath the seated figure. It speaks to the dilemma of living in the West under Eastern Philosophy, which serves both as a source of spiritual enlightenment and a cultural burden.

And secondly … … Looking at my body of work as a whole, I realized that even though I have lived in the West for more than twenty years and I have, consciously or not, made constant efforts to adapt to the culture and thoughts in the West, sometimes as a deliberate self-intervention, I continue to find that the influence of the Ch’an Buddhism has been deeply rooted in both my thinking and my work.

The tendency for me to approach my work from an interventionist angle has a lot to do with the need to get to the “original face” of things, as espoused in Ch’an Buddhism. Indeed, in many of my works, I set up a certain scenario that will function as a mirror that catalytically reflects and refracts the reality, in the hope that it enables an alternate path into the true nature of that reality.

Groundbreaking, performance, 2011

Utopia, sculptural installation, 2004

Enlightenment Guaranteed, sculptural installation, 2002–2007 53

ARCHITECTURE, S PA C E a n d U R B A N I S M

E 8 0 : O n t h e R oad to Binational Ur b anism Bernd Upmeyer

Just as bigamists marry a second time before their existing marriages are dissolved, binational urbanists start life in a second city located in another nation, without having said good-bye to their first city. Thus, binational urbanism is a particular form of transnationalism, a phenomenon which in sociology results from social interactions across national borders. In this article, binational urbanism has to be understood as a way of life of a person, who is related to two different cities at the same time. Ideally, a binational urbanist commutes continuously as a quasi-nomad between two cities and lives in constant transit between two Heimaten. Because of the recurring local changes, binational urbanists find themselves in a certain utopian condition that is characterized by a constant longing, and/or a constant homesickness for the other absent city. “The Heimat – the place of origin – becomes a Nichtort – a non-place – at the same time as a utopia. She is experienced most intensively if one is away and she is lacking; the actual Heimat feeling is that of homesickness.”(1) Binational urbanists can probably be best described as extreme commuters. Probably the most wellknown commuters are work commuters, people that commute continuously between their residential city and the city where they work. A country such as Germany, for example, counts approximately thirty million commuters,(2) which means that almost every second German leads a life between two places. In addition, binational urbanism emerges, above all, as a global phenomenon. Never before was the mobility of individual human beings higher than it is today. These days, people travel between continents, as they traveled between cities thirty years ago. Binational urbanism has the potential of becoming the ultimate way of life of the Twenty-First Century.

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1 . 8 M i l l i o n Po t e n t i a l B i n a t i o n a l U r b a n i s t s In this article binational urbanism is illustrated by a concrete example: a way of life made possible first of all by the connection of the European routes between Turkey and Germany. On those European roads thousands of people of Turkish origin oscillate back and forth each year between German and Turkish cities. Only at first sight do they seem to be firm residents of their host country Germany, yet they are in actual fact extremely mobile and use the best of both cultures in tandem. For many years they have been living, unconsciously or consciously, in a culture of binational urbanism. It seems as if Islam had to penetrate deeply into European Christendom in order to establish such a binary way of life.

In order to give an example of such a connection of European routes between Turkey and Germany, we should look at the road between the German city of Duisburg and the Turkish city of Istanbul. This connection in particular should be considered as a representation and a symbol of all other possible connections. At the same time, the car represents all other possible means of transport such as the plane, the train, the bus, or the ferry. The German city of Duisburg is particularly interesting because in no other German city has the proportion of Turkish inhabitants as high as there. Approximately forty thousand people of Turkish origin live in Duisburg, which represents around eight percent of the entire population of Duisburg.(3) The average proportion of inhabitants of Turkish origin in the largest German cities is four percent. Duisburg in general is an immigrant stronghold with immigrant numbers that are far higher than the German average. The city is located in the most densely populated and economically strong German Federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia where more than one quarter of all Germany’s migrants live. A third of the altogether approximately 1.8 million Turkish people in Germany reside in North RhineWestphalia.(4) Thus around 1.8 million potential Turkish binational urbanists are located in Germany. According to the data of the socio-economic panel (SOEP)(5) of the year 2002, for example, only 6.5% of the Turkish people living in Germany did not travel to Turkey, meaning that 93.5% did travel there once at least, which corresponds to a number of approximately 1.7 million. This number is comparable to the number of inhabitants of the German city of Hamburg (population 2006: 1,754,317).(6) Hamburg is – after Berlin – the second largest city in Germany and the seventh-largest city of the European Union which is not the capital of a member state. Thus, one may posit that each year a population the size of the city of Hamburg moves from Germany to Turkey and back again.

If you then consider the number of Turks who live in Germany and already have German citizenship, we arrive at a number of approximately 2.6 million potential Turkish binational urbanists.(7) Germany generally occupies in Europe an exceptional position with regard to her Turkish population, as around seventyfive percent of all Turks in Europe live in Germany. In all of Europe some 2.7 million Turks live.

E80 The title of this article E80 represents the connection between all European routes that connect Duisburg and Istanbul, but also all other connections between Germany and Turkey. The actual connection between Duisburg and Istanbul consists of eight different sections of eight different European motorways: E35, E41, E45, E56, E57, E70, E75, and E80. Taking these roads brings one fast from Duisburg to Istanbul by car.(8) The total distance is approximately 2400 km and can be covered in twenty four hours. Thus it takes a full day of driving, without a break, at a speed of 100km/h from one city to the next. But only the last section of the road consists of the real E80 and as this section is 732 km long, thus the longest part of the journey from Duisburg to Istanbul, it was selected as a representation of the entire journey. The E80 is to be regarded as a Nichtort, which connects two different Heimaten. Thus, the E80 becomes the metaphor of the Heimat for the binational urban way of life and a plane of projection for any longings, hopes and dreams of the binational urbanist. The E80 is utopia and paradise at the same time.

On the Road to Paradise If one drives from Duisburg towards Istanbul by car, the real E80 constitutes the last part of the entire journey and begins in the Serbian border town of Nis, right at the Bulgarian border, and ends in Istanbul. However, the real E80 does not end in Istanbul, but about 1500 km further east in the region around the Turkish city of Dogubeyazıt, which is some 35 km from the Iranian border.

Dogubeyazıt is a small town of around 36,000 inhabitants in the outmost eastern part of Turkey and is an important transit town for travelers coming from and going to Iran. Even further east and directly at the border with Iran, but still in Turkey, is another even smaller town named Gürbulak with approximately 6,700 inhabitants. This marks the exact eastern endpoint of the real E80. Thus, the real E80 ends and flows directly into an area overloaded with religious myths.

Probably the most interesting religious myth of this area is that according to the first book of Moses – Genesis – the so-called Garden of Eden, and /or paradise, which can be found there.(9) Both Abrahamic religions, Christianity and Islam, have their roots in the Hebrew Bible,(10) which contains the first book Moses. Both Christianity and Islam base their respective interpretations on the Hebrew Bible. In Christianity the Garden of Eden is described as a place with no enmity between humans and animals and where humans can nourish themselves without trouble. Paradise is supposed to be a realm of peace and justice in which death, illness and trouble belong to the past and all humans are equal.(11) Islam describes paradise additionally as a place full of delight, with fruits and cool brooks and virgins.(12) In both Christianity and in Islam, there exists an earthly paradise, as described in Genesis, the Garden of Eden. Although it is located on earth, it promises not only sensuous pleasures, but also eternal life, whereby eternal life is limited and restricted to the stay in the garden.(13) This area of earthly paradise, the Garden of Eden, would be arrived at by the binational urbanists if they followed the E80 to its end and beyond. Thus,

the Garden of Eden becomes, just like the E80, the unmistakable metaphor for the binary way of life of the binational urbanist, in which all contradictions and contrasts in his life, and between his two hometowns, belong to the past and the two cities are equal. Simultaneously, the E80 becomes a metaphor for the feedback of humans as quasi-nomads into the Garden of Eden, from where they were, as climatologists state,(14) not driven out but forced out by immense changes in the climate. They were forced to give up their lives as nomads and were obliged to turn themselves to the hard and settled life of farmers, which is based on stockpiling.

Bernd Upmeyer is the founder of the Bureau of Architecture, Research, and Design (BOARD) and editor in chief of MONU – Magazine on Urbanism. He studied architecture and urban design at the University of Kassel (DE) and the Technical University of Delft (NL). In 1999 he was awarded with the prestigious biannual research award “Deutscher Studienpreis” donated by the Koerber Stiftung for a study project on new urban design methods and in 2000 he was awarded with an Architecture Scholarship by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Before opening his own practice, he worked in several Dutch architecture offices, including NL Architects and Bosch Architects. From 2004 until 2008 he taught and did research as Assistant Professor at the department for Urban and Architectural Studies at the University of Kassel. In 2010 he taught as Adjunct Professor at the department of Urban Design at the HafenCity University Hamburg. Currently, he is working on his PhD on Transnational Urbanism. (www.b-o-a-r-d.nl, www.monu-magazine.com)

1) Bernhard Schlink: Heimat ist Utopie, 2000, p. 32.

2) German Federal Ministry of Transport, German Federal Statistical Office, 2004–2007: In 2004 there were altogether thirty million commuters in Germany, of which approx. 360,000 employed weekend commuters (pupils, students, self-employed workers were not taken into account). 1.5 million of them drove more than 50 kilometers to their job and can therefore be considered to be remote commuters. The most frequently used transportation utility was the car at 66%.

3) German Federal Statistical Office, structural data and integration indicators on the foreign population of Germany in the year 2003. The actual percentage of Turkish immigrants in Duisburg was 8.2%.

4) German Federal Statistical Office: foreign population as of 31.12.2006 by native country: 1,738,831.

5) The socio-economic panel (SOEP) is a representative recurring opinion poll of over 12,000 private households in Germany. The poll has been held annually since 1984, questioning the same persons and families (= always the same panel).

6) Statistical office for Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein, www.statistik-sh.de.

7) German Federal Statistical Office, www.destatis.de.

8) www.viamichelin.com, departure: Duisburg, destination: Istanbul, vehicle type: automobile, route type: quickest, time: 23h21 including 18h33 on motorways, distance: 2407km including 2084km on motorways.

9) 1. Book of Moses, Genesis – Bereishit, the first Parashat of the first book of the Torah.

10) Martin Stöhr (Ed.): Abrahams Kinder. Juden, Christen, Moslems. Haag + Herchen 1999.

11 & 12) Sebastian Brock (Ed.), Hymns on paradise (Crestwood 1990).

13) Klaus H. Börner: Auf der Suche nach dem irdischen Paradies. Zur Ikonographie der geographischen Utopie. Frankfurt 1984.

14) Alessandro Scafi, Mapping Paradise, A history of Heaven on earth (London, British Library 2006).

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M icroclima x (Benjamin Jacquemet-Boutes & Carolyn Wittendal) microclimax.org 1972, Montpellier, France and 1977, Paris, France Live and work in Sète, France

R oots J’étais assez content d’être un déraciné. Parce que justement je craignais l’influence de la racine sur moi. Je voulais m’en débarrasser. Quand je me suis retrouvé de l’autre coté, il n’y avait pas de racines du tout puisque j’étais né en Europe, alors c’était facile.

J’étais là dans un bain agréable puisque je pouvais nager tranquillement tandis qu’on ne peut pas nager tranquillement quand il y a trop de racine, comprenezvous?

— Marcel Duchamp This is a wonderful line of thought by Marcel Duchamp to introduce your art piece ROOTS. Do the writings and art work of Duchamp influence your art practice in general?

Yes, as he is the founder of “readymade” and therefore a pioneer of “détournement” or misappropriation. But our projects are also nourished by our contemporary culture and daily lives – sampling, hybridization, cut/paste, remix…

Here the citation from Duchamp comes from The 58

Radicant, Nicolas Bourriaud’s essay on alter-modernity.

On the other hand, this allegory described by Duchamp is only applicable to physically dynamic bodies, i.e. bodies which have to move from place to place. In the case of plants (like in your piece) which are physically/geographically static or whose dynamism is defined in a different way, the more roots, the better.

How is this reflected in your piece ROOTS? The piece ROOTS is a physical proposal to help nomads (uprooted) in their daily lives as well as a metaphor for strategies of displacement, progression and the development of human beings using the references of botanic systems. It’s a proposal for a realizable utopia and an art installation.

ROOTS presents a prototype of a portable garden for nomads, an alternative for people who have no ground of their own to plot and cultivate and it’s also a temporary home to vegetables that have become consumption items – this is where they can return to the status of living elements. The saying “The more roots, the better,” doesn’t means static: What will happen to those living elements that grow in precarious environments? Roots are just a tool for returning to life, further than survival, for multiplication. Ideally some of the plants will be transplanted after the exhibition and will later make flowers, seeds, and proliferate... Plants are greats nomads! The dynamic of plants is not at the scale of the subject but at the scale of the species.

Since when does Microclimax exist and what is the story behind it?

Microclimax exists since 2000, there is no story behind it, just a project we did together to create “microclimates.” The idea was to offer small heated places in the cold city and develop a generous city.

To me your art inventions are very much about the art of surviving in the 21st Century. You reflect on the problems our society goes through and offer insightful ideas for creative invention. What are your ambitions in that matter?

We give a critique of our context – social, political, metaphysical – as well as design proposals for suitable uses induced by this context (at the scale of the object, furniture, architecture, land

or city scape and even social structures sometimes), suggesting possible constructive or subversive attitudes.

In many of your works you deliberate on discrepancies between the interior and the exterior. For example in the piece Kitchen, l’Espace Cuisine du Futur (Team Otonom), where you installed a kitchen in an open space. Why is there the necessity to bridge this gap between the private and the public? And how is this manifested in your other works?

Often the limit between private or public is a hard line, or to the best it is porous or flexible. We believe that it can be a space, a habitable area, a transition, an overlap. We call it the “thickness of the limit.” Many of our projects use this base to experiment with hybrid places and their uses in an urban context. Where everything slips and slides, we propose roughness and bumps.

I like most the simplicity and straightforwardness of your art. There are realizable ideas in daily life.

As a contemplator of your artistic propositions and sketches, I wonder why they are not implemented in our lives yet, for example, the Sarcobush for Freestanding Landscaper or Chessboard for Alice, Mobile Landscape.

We create or use existing opportunities, even at a very small scale, to implement these ideas into daily life and show that alternative uses of common space can be developed … But about Sarcobush, watch out! It is a critical ironic doom scenario more than a real proposal or a solution of any kind!

On the other hand, some of your creations are based on an utopian ideal … Take the case of Cinq Minutes de Paradis. I do not see as a physical concept but an imaginary one i.e. that one needs at least five minutes of paradise/dream daily. How important is the dream world for the human being as a sort of resort or place of refuge?

Again, Five minutes of Artificial Paradise is a critical and ironic project. Of course, dreaming is a basic need and should even be a basic right.

You are both architects, artists and urban designers.

As architects, what do your architectural designs look like? In your artistic work, you always look for a very close relationship with your natural environment,

5 Minutes de Paradis Artificiel, produced by les amis du Musée Fabre in Montpellier, 2008, presented for the exhibition Sète, état des lieux, Carré St Anne, Montpellier

the plants, and the people surrounding us. Are your designed buildings also that harmonic and natural?

It seems to us that architecture should be generated by the coalition of context, needs and desires. Non-contextual architecture is a drift mainly induced by market interests, political goals and the culture of security and space control.

So we avoid “Tabula Rasa” and analyze the context deeply, as well as the uses and users, to

generate architecture that will work or interact in the systems where it is implemented. Most of our architectural proposals contain an experimental, critical or manifest dimension.

We work on green design as we feel it is a natural and evident need, but since it is now very trendy and used everywhere as a marketing tool or for political manipulation … We try as well to concentrate on more social issues. Our design may

be “green” (because it is the base), but we do not claim for it.

What is the perfect house for a nomad?

An inflatable greenhouse!

And do we need a house?

A home yes! A house?

Microclimax is granted by the DRAC-LR, the Region Languedoc-Roussillon and the City of Sete.

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I n ê s d ’ O rey inesdorey.com 1977, Porto, Portugal Lives and works in Porto, Portugal

Faculty of Economy #1, 2011

“ P h oto g rap h y selects , foc u ses yo u r attention , and tells yo u w h ere to look . ” Porto Interior is an ongoing project of representing empty interiors of public and semi-public spaces in your home town of Porto, Portugal. What is your intention with Porto Interior?

Porto Interior functions as a collection of spaces that I search and find throughout the city. These interiors are photographed absent of any human presence. Familiar places like theaters, swimming pools or staircases, used by people on a daily basis, become stages for a story that is never clear, but that doesn’t need to be clear. I alter the photographs through digital manipulation subtly until I create the atmosphere I find appropriate.

Why did you become a photographer?

Photography, because it provides the possibility of communicating from a physical and objective reality at the same time, with a subjective subtext

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underneath. Those two elements put together create a really interesting provocation.

How do you choose your motifs?

There isn’t a rule. I’m inspired everyday by different sources that, at a certain point, come together and result in an idea.

In many projects you focus on architecture, on rooms and interiors, as well as “space” in general. Why? Until I finished my degree in photography, I had never been particularly interested in architecture. But then I started to work with an architecture photographer and was, in a way, “forced” to photograph space! That much delivery and exposure to architecture and being always surrounded by architects made me, slowly, start to acquire a special interest in it. And it reached the point of being, at the moment, my main interest.

What’s your interest when portraying architecture and buildings?

The beauty of the form and light, the curiosity of the functionality, the mysterious possibility of an unclear narrative.

The everyday usage of spaces tends to make them invisible, indifferent. The more you use the space, the more you ignore it. Photography selects, focuses your attention and tells you where to look.

In your own words: What is characteristic of your work and working method?

I want to trigger the viewer’s imagination: what strange story is happening here? I like to think that the viewer will feel, more than rationalize the photograph. I always plan and think through before I photograph. I never go out with my camera waiting for something to happen.

I think I could say that my work conceptually stages reality. I’m more interested in “creating” a moment rather than “catching the moment.”

S達o Jo達o Hospital #1, 2011

Palace of Justice #1, 2010

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S u rya Gied suryagied.de 1980, Cologne, Germany Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

keys , words representation, different stuff, selection, painting, drawing, reduction, form, striking, abstract, line-painting, not minimal art, spacelines, carry on, coming from elsewhere, to rest, moment, gone, tape, site specific, statement, imaginary structure, goes beyond, tape is line, trace, fast, direct, formal, overlay, precision, strict, landscape, spray, painterly, background/underground, colorfields, tape, image border, to follow, paint over, tape over, compositions, architectures, concrete, converge, diverse conditions, footprint, directions, gone, here, between finished and not finished, to relate oneself in a new way, colorful, pop, decorative, fast moving, non-specific, not modifiable, 62

always same, not painterly, boring, ordinary, banal, cheap, trash, monochrome, nondescriptive, linear, transparent, unformed, from behind, gliding, dislocating, geometrical forms, perspective, material, objectivism, basic commodities, partially hidden, partially laid open, leave traces, imprint, cover, processes are understandable, flat, overlying, salient, self sufficient, limit, straight, parallels, precision, even, opposite direction, simple, evanescent, gied.

V, spray and tape on frame, 50Ă—40cm, 2011

Birdfly, spray, adhesive tape and frame, 190Ă—270cm, 2011

Komposition Braun (Tragetasche), acrylic, aluminum bars, tape, frame, 270Ă—300cm, 2011

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Y asmin A lt settlednomads.wordpress.com/yasmin-alt 1978, Bad Schwalbach, Germany Lives and works in Dresden, Germany

A b o u t t h e M a g ic of B u ildin g Your works consist of different, yet inter-connecting elements that analyze similar principles. They are “spatial collages” which you build from very different materials – you build MDF structures, as well as photographic collages or light mosaics. What subjects are you interested in?

There is movement, or rather: the simulation of movement. This may sound contradictory, as I work with rigid objects mostly. Nevertheless, “frozen moments” or paused movements form an important part of my works. I am working with several means which are often contrary to the essence of sculpture and therefore I like to include little inconsistencies, like slight perspectival deformations. I also divide works to re-arrange them in a new way. The fragmentary plays an important role.

Furthermore I am interested in the architectural history of the most different epochs. Currently

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I have a weakness for gothic, but I am also very interested in industrial buildings and facades.

Where do you find inspiration?

Usually I start with very common, very “real” things you can find everyday, like a photograph in an old book which inspires me – I have a huge collection of antiquarian books about architecture!

– or it is a particular building on the highway that captures my attention somehow. Suddenly I notice something, I like it, and I want to analyze what it is that I like. Then I try to replicate it and in doing so, the object starts to develop, to change – just think of a different scale, for example.

You are building replicas of architectural examples.

You reduce them to their basics forms, their core structure and explore their “mode of functioning” – not how these buildings are used, but what happens when building them...

Maybe it is the monumentality, the sublime which inspires me, as I am interested in magnificent buildings in particular. Actually, the basic principles of architecture do not change, it is only the way in which buildings are used that shifts. And with this something about the architectural forms does change. While for a long time the biggest edifices were churches – vast halls and high towers for spiritual ceremonies – during industrialization splendid buildings were constructed, even though they are often underestimated. Not only did they build monumentality, but also visual diversion.

When studying “my” buildings, I am exploring their outer appearance. I do not build something useful, but a model, and maybe that is why the objects have to change. As a model, they follow different rules. This is what challenges me: to build models which have something exciting about them.

Collage, photographies, MDF – you are working with the most different materials …

Which materials I use is inspired by the idea that I want to express. Sometimes I need a certain visual surface property, then I use plastics like polyester.

But I prefer MDF, because you can quickly saw with a jig saw and fixate it with hot glue. You can even bend it. And I now started to cover the MDF with

epoxy resin which makes a better, more stable surface. Then sealing and grinding, sealing and grinding.

I do make a point of creating perfect surfaces and edges. As my works are very reduced, I do not want the way they are constructed to be visible.

There’s the need for a little magic!

Recently, you also started to focus on colors and the chromaticity of your objects.

Indeed, while I considered the chromaticity of an object as secondary for a while – and thus I preferred monochrome works – I started to explore the possibilities of coloring. Using spray paints I found many exciting ways of coloring designs which allow me to add another level of illusion to my works: to consider the object and the colors as two different, yet superimposing layers, improving the threedimensionality of objects and creating the illusion of spatiality where there is none … My work thus took a turn to a more abstract approach.

Plantation Memory, photo collage, 19×25cm, 2011

Because I Always Feel Like Running, MDF, wood, lacquer, 80×300×250cm, 2010 65

M ic h ael a ’ Gr ø mma agroemma.com 1983, Copenhagen, Denmark Lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark

“ I want to find t h e little kid inside people and make t h em u se t h at crazy ima g ination t h at is inside all of u s . ” In a way, your work stands under the signs of nomadism and home: being educated as a visual designer, you started painting only after a journey to the USA/California. So for you, the experience of a foreign country sort of “started it all…”

Indeed, it all started when I visited California. I loved the cities and I loved the whole vibe and feel of the place, but also the people living there. It inspired me a lot and when I got home I wanted to tell people about my experience. Painting was a very natural choice of expression, and many of my early motives are in someway connected to my experience in California. Other influences of my early works have been the “struggle” of growing up in a small boring town in the countryside of Denmark, and the wish to move to Copenhagen.

Last but not least I have played music most of my 66

life, and music has a big part in some of my paintings as well. For example I often use song titles as titles for my paintings.

When you started to paint, it was like “coming home” in a certain way – as your family, especially your mother, is closely connected with arts.

The thing is that my mom, Majken á Grømma, is a pretty well known painter here in Denmark – she is probably most known for her landscape paintings of the Faroe Islands. She also does ceramics, where she uses her paintings directly on the ceramic. And my dad paints as well, so I have grown up with it. I guess that’s why it came so natural to me. Then I am an educated visual designer, so looking at colors and compositions are not new to me. They just used to be on a computer screen.

Why painting and art? Why not, say, staying on the computer screen?

Because art doesn’t set up perimeters that I have to stay within; it offers total creative freedom!

We have been talking about your early experience in California which caused you to start painting. Over the past years your work has developed further, of course. Telling stories is an important point of your paintings. What do you want to tell the viewer?

I don’t work on creating a specific story I want to tell, I only set up the perimeters and give the viewer “tools“ to challenge his or her imagination. I don’t want to tell a specific story with my paintings.

If I wanted to tell people things, being an author would probably be a better choice of expression.

I want to find the little kid inside everybody and make them use that crazy imagination that is inside all of us. I want to make people think thoughts like “Whole cities can have rockets mounted and fly away,” or “Ships can have engines that run on ice cream instead of gasoline,” or whatever crazy thought I can put into people’s minds. Often I also have important agendas like environmental questions in my paintings, but I always try to do so in a way that the viewer can decide if that’s what he wants to see and think.

Your works are a combination of collaged photographs you took and painting. What are you presenting for Nomadic Settlers – Settled Nomads?

The theme of the exhibition is very natural to me. I work with nomadic people in almost all of my works, for example in the form of circus people traveling around who bring people happiness in the most obscure parts of the world. Or like when I have the all humanity travel to a new place because our world is drained of resources.

So the whole nomadic theme will be present in every work at the exhibition. Other than that, as I said before, I always try to create a place in my paintings where the viewer can challenge his or her imagination. I like to think of my paintings as a kind of abstract story in which I have added lots of elements to give the story potential to be great, but leave the actual story up to the viewer.

How do you come up with these “crazy“ stories you paint? What inspires your work?

Kids and how they think and how they draw!

I actually use my own drawings from when I was between 5 and 11 years old as an inspiration for a lot of my fantasy animals that I use in my paintings.

Some are even direct copies of drawings I did when I was a kid.

Cheer Up You Filthy Pig, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 100×120cm, 2011

The Day Fortune Ended and the World Went Mad, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 100Ă—120cm, 2011

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I N T E RV E N T I O N a n d R E P L I C AT I O N / R E I T E R AT I O N

N omadic W ords Joas Sebastian Nebe

Nomadic Words is a small collection of words that are meaningful for postmodern settlers and global nomads. Enjoy!

Wo r d s : When you hear your native language in a strange place where you have been staying for a long time and, since your arrival/upon arriving, you have been practicing another language without using a single word of your native language, suddenly you will have this intimate moment of feeling at home.

Tr a v e l : Life is traveling. Modern travel commodities allow long-distance travels in short periods of time. To not-travel means not being alive, being close to the end.

So everybody travels. That´s why our highways are so crowded.

D i g i t a l To t e m : Digital totems make people line up in order to meet the star of their favorite movie.

Cellphone: Cellphone cameras show others what you have seen and cellphone calls send others signs of life. If you lose your cellphone, you are dead, because nobody will be able to reach you and you will experience an hour of pure silence for the first time in your life (except the traffic sound rushing by you on the street).

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Tr a v e l b e h a v i o r : Knowing what to do when you enter an airport or a hotel is essential for nomadic living/the lifestyle of a modern urban nomad. Even more important than knowing how to handle a knife and fork at the dinner table (although this can be important too when the queen invites you to lunch!)

Urban Candy: Ninety percent of the worlds population lives in a metropolis. Only a few human beings stay in the country side (except for the weekends, of course, when everyone is out fox hunting). Living in big cities requires certain knowledge about how to interact with the sexes. There are TV soaps about this issue which can be used by the unexperienced metropolis inhabitants for education.

And there are cultural differences, too! So when you enter a previously unknown metropolis in a new country, you better sit down and watch the soaps before you start going out and having fun!

Joas Sebastian Nebe, born 1968 in Germany, is a self-taught artist and curator who holds degrees in Psychology and Literature. He has had exhibitions in China (Intrude Art & Life 366 Project, Zendai Moma), USA (Art Expos Architectural and Video Art Event), UK (Edinburgh Art Festival ‘08), Portugal (Focfest), the Netherlands (Shaping TI City), Thailand (Switch Media Eletron Pathiharn [supernatural ] Art Festival) and many other countries.

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Br u no Jamaica myspace.com/brunojamaica 1981, Carvide, Portugal Lives and works in London, UK

Atomic Magnolia Power of People, black elastic bands, painting, Óbidos, Portugal, 2010

“ T h e constant in life is c h an g e . ” Why did you choose Bruno Jamaica as an artist name?

Bruno Jamaica started as a nickname I was given by friends in the High School class of “Oficina de Artes” – we listened to music there and I often used to play Bob Marley. Later, at university, close friends and some teachers adopted it. The funny thing is that they prefer to use this name in exhibitions. And so it began … I keep it not only because to me Jamaica is a symbol of freedom fighters with their lyrics and music, but most important for me is that the nickname Jamaica is a tribute to all those close friends that we make in life and that, for different reasons, follow different destinies but we will always love and remember.

You touch on the big themes in life. Do you conceive your work as critical questions of our time and a state of civilization in crisis?

We are all creative poets! The political meaning or the social content is my personal paradigmatic way of expressing our 72

powerlessness – and equally importantly, our sense of powerlessness – in political decisions and our disengagement from the political process. When I create some work – even just a drawing – I am always concerned that my art should engage thoughts to build this change in our human condition.

To which extent can art change society?

In my opinion we don’t know yet if our thoughts come from energies that travel around in the air, or if they are caused by creative acts born in our interior selves inspired by life. I wish to see art having a more direct role in cultivating a peaceful way of living, working to the best of our human capacities. Art helps to propel people’s emotions.

Your practice is interventional, you even call your work “interventions in the planet.” How did you evolve to the artistic language you have?

Since I can remember I have always had this fascination for building new worlds, about a positive organization of different realities and their freedom.

I think probably the fact that I listened to “songs of freedom” in my first acts of creating art as art (I mean my first intentional drawings) helped to

shape my mind in that way. In the present time the work can be described as situationist, sometimes with a very obvious political message, sometimes more metaphorical using the sculptural and drawing language.

“The idea of a journey is a means and a pretext for the act of creation,” you wrote about your art practice.

To what extent do you consider yourself a nomad, a nomadic artist?

The constant in life is change. The journeys, the travels, the places where we live, they all make part of our chain of memories, feelings and experiences.

Nomad/Nomadic? Well … I was born in Portugal and I am living in London at the moment. My experience of London is that of a cohabitation of different people from different cultural backgrounds in the same space, sharing the same roof. And in that environment different ideas come together and create ways of seeing new things (not just new ways of seeing things). In my opinion it is a cutting edge time that we are experiencing. The result will be discovered in life’s philosophies of the future.

What means home for you?

Atomic Magnolia, black elastic bands, variable dimensions, 2009

Home is not just a place where we feel comfortable ‌ it is above all a place were we make networks.

What is the idea and the intention behind your actions planned for the opening of the exhibition?

Art inspires actions ‌ Humankind inspires art!

The basic social function of art is showing that the world is changeable and helping to change it.

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E ssi K a u salainen essikausalainen.com 1979, Finland Lives and works in Helsinki, Finland

In your performance Five Movements for Temporal Beings (2009), you are looking at the existential role and relationship between humans, plants and food.

What did you find out through the preparation and performance itself? It is a very interesting subject …

In Five Movements I was really interested in the very basics of life – the necessities of being.

What do we (all the living things) need for staying alive. Are the necessities same for a bird, a parsley, a human being? We all need nutrition, we need rest and we have the need to multiply. It was an extremely important insight for me that most of the living beings need the other to multiply. The other may not be from the same species at all, it could be an insect for a flower or a bird for a tree, but the thing is that we need to collaborate with other beings to be able to reproduce. Also our beings provide the nutrition for other species, we – the animals, plants, human beings, bacteria... – feed each other. So in many ways some kind of communication between different species is a necessity, too. And then, of course, there is death that connects all the living things and in a way – it is a necessity too.

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What does “being” mean to you?

I think the term and the idea of a “being” is a key to my work at the moment. The being refers always to something that is alive, a living thing. I am really interested in how we (human beings) are in this world – with this world. In what ways is our existence shaped by our bodies? How much of the being of a human is about being this kind of a body? And here it comes to the other sorts of living things: the animals, the plants, the bacteria... How do they exist? What are the things that connect and separate us? I feel it is very important to place human beings into this wider context of beings, to really understand something about living, of being alive.

How important is the role of the audience in your work? Is there any interaction or is the tension created through your interaction with the surrounding objects?

The role of the audience differs from piece to piece. I have done some works which were all based on the interaction, where there is no audience but participants. Then again I’ve also made a lot of works where the audience is just looking and listening to the different sorts of silences I create.

Still in every work my relation to the audience is gentle and respectful. I am very aware of the ways I treat the people coming to see my performance.

There is a big responsibility in the setting: what kinds of things do you want to offer to these people and in what ways? I expect my audience to be sensible and intelligent beings and the work I present should always respect this fact.

Is traveling important to you? In which sense does it influence your work?

I am based in Helsinki, but at the moment most of my performance work happens abroad.

It has been like this for some years already. And I think traveling around the world and participating in all these festivals has been crucial for me as an artist. I have learned a lot of different “languages” in performance art: how the local culture, religion, political situation can be commented and communicated through performance art. Also I have realized how universal the performance language can be. Traveling to different festivals has made me

a part of this international performance art family.

Wherever I travel I have my family, my tribe, there.

And we have this language that we share. This has really changed my worldview.

How is the performance art scene in Finland? Is it similar to Berlin?

I feel that the performance scene is somewhat similar everywhere: there is little money, but very passionate artists organizing ambitious and interesting events. In Finland there have been some very good programs for studying performance art in the local arts schools. For example, I have done both my BA and MA on performance art and theory. I’ve studied only performance art. I think this is quite rare. And of course this affects the whole scene: there are a lot of very good performance artists in Finland. But the situation seems to be changing all the time. The courses are cut down and things like that. But at the moment I’m very optimistic!

How did you find your artistic language? Was it always clear to you that you wanted to express your thoughts and take on the world through performance art?

I’ve been working with performances for ten years now. I really hope there has been some development in my work during this time! Still from the very beginning, it felt natural choosing performance as my medium. Somehow it just makes sense. Performance art is a form that enables me to examine the themes of being and living and body in quite a profound level. But still performance art is not my only medium: I also make video works, installations and drawings. Despite the media, all my work is connected to the body and being. My videos are also based on different kinds of performances, or gestures executed by a body (usually by myself). I guess what has most influenced my artistic language is the fact that I’ve seen so much good art: seeing all the performances has encouraged me to challenge myself and to trust my own expression.

Five Movements for Temporal Beings, performed in Performer Stammtisch, Berlin / TROUBLE-festival, Brussels 2009, photos by Mikko Kuorinki

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C h ristina K yriazidi christinakyriazidi.blogspot.com marinaioteatro.blogspot.com 1980, Athens, Greece Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Can you explain to us what the piece NO mad S is about?

I look back to my life, my desperate need to settle in a new place and at the same time to escape from settling, the wandering between different lands, cultures, languages and the only pure thing I can find is the longing, the first impulse for a change, an almost childish hope.

The performance NO mad S is about all the people like me, descendants of sailors and immigrants who are destined to run from place to place, carrying a nomadic history and an unsettled heart.

Once I wrote in my diary: “The best thing about arriving in a new place is the lightness of the first day; when the hope that this is the end of the travel, is born.”

The performance turns around a longing: the longing to travel, to change, to settle in a new land.

I use the language of poetry in order to bring to light a nomadic dream.

A poetry that lacks words, but instead places actions, sounds, fragmented songs and physical images within a claustrophobic space that evokes the unfulfilled longing of the open sea.

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A desert of salt within a room with the door closed.

A sea without water.

Or rather what is left from the sea, the leftovers of an old memory.

Colorful clothes adorn the sky like hopes within beautiful words.

Inside this white burning sea, the pieces of a mourning costume are buried.

Is it the end that is hanging over her head?

Or the flags of her new beginning?”

What brought you to performance/theater?

Since I remember myself, I have always wanted to make theater. I simply love stories and changing characters. The concept of playing, of a fictitious reality, of believing the invisible.

Theater is a non-existing world that carries the potential of being born every night in front of the eyes of strangers, and it is every night that you have to fight for this potential to come to light.

It is a constant struggle to trap others in your game; it takes a long preparation and it lasts for less than an hour. A contradiction that deserves a chance and demands dedication.

You told us that your real home is your body.

How essential is your origin to you?

Origin is essential to everyone, I believe, the same way that our body is the only home we have, whether we admit it or not. Origin and body are connected for it is my body that carries my history and it is through my body that I am composing my new origin every day. My origin changes the way my body changes and vice versa. I am confronted with my origins through my body and I meet my body through my origins.

Your pieces are based upon a specific technique.

Can you explain to us the background of it and what it means to you?

I was initially trained as a “speaking” actor, which means an actor who communicates a story through words and bases her presence on the creativity of the playwright and the quality of the text.

This kind of acting didn’t give me enough trust and pleasure, so I decided to become the writer of the theater story myself and studied playwriting.

After my meeting with Odin Teatret in the 14th ISTA (International School of Theatre Anthropology) and the chance to work in the multi-theatre-cultural project UR-HAMLET (2006, 2009), I discovered a different way of narration: not through words, but through actions and physical images and rhythms.

I currently create physical theater performances with very little text, usually in a language different from the one of the spectators. I am also using songs in different ways and in several languages: African, Greek, Italian, Polish, Serbian, Spanish, Yiddish... In my performances, I use a dynamic narration through physical and vocal actions. My body and voice is my theater language. Through the physical rhythm, I hope to awake personal associations to the spectators, and to evoke live images that are sensed and interpreted individually in the here and now of each performance.

Once relying on a theater narration through words, my work has now departed to a totally different direction. I have discovered the immense capacity of the body to relate several stories at the same time and to affect each spectator in an entirely personal way. The poetry of the words has been replaced by the poetry of the physical images.

How important is repetition for you?

I compose scores of physical and vocal actions, I memorize them and experiment with different costumes and objects, I adapt them to different spaces.

The repetition is essential to my work, it is the moment of incorporation of the initial impulses, the necessary digesting pot of my inspiration. Only through repetition can I find again the pleasure and light of each new born action and perform the act of montage.

The efficacy of my stage presence is based on repetition.

UR HAMLET by Odin Teatret, Ravenna Theatre Festival, Italy, 2006

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Y in g mei D u an yingmei-art.com 1969, Daqing/Heilongjiang Province, China Lives and works in Braunschweig, Germany

E very b ody is a S pirit u al N omad In the wake of the artistic renaissance in the East Village, an art commune on the outskirts of Beijing, China, Duan Yingmei was one of the young and active protagonists. The East Village reached international fame in the 1990’s when musicians, artists and critics found space to engage in a great deal of innovative and experimental art works there. Performance art in particular had gained a lot of international attention. Some artists worked on their individual projects and others were interested in collaborations. To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain is one of the most well-known collaborative events performed by artists from that area; of which Duan Yingmei was a part.

At that time Duan was focusing on painting selfportraits. Being based in the East Village widened her horizons, prompted her curiosity, and led to her interest in performance art. The final turning point came when she studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste (HBK) in Braunschweig, Germany 78

In Between, 15min, Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig, Germany, 2004, photo by Chengwu Luo

Sleepless, 14 days, BoulevART, Kunstherbst Berlin, Germany, 2007, photo by Jürgen Bernhard Kuck, Abhishek Singh and Chenyue Zhou

Rubbish City, 3 days for 3 hours, Lilith Performance Studio, Malmö, Sweden, 2008, photo by Elin Lundgren

from 2000 to 2004, where she met the seminal performance artist Marina Abramovic. She also studied and worked with the filmmaker and action artist Christoph Schlingensief for one year there. Since then, Duan has lived in Braunschweig and has dedicated her main artistic expression to performance.

Duan has a special interest in collaborative projects. She has collaborated with the likes of Márcio Carvalho, Verena Kyselka, Lan Hungh and Weidong Feng, just to name a few. To Duan, the semantics of the term “collaboration” carry their value in gold, as she sees collaboration as a clear division of work with mutual respect. Nowadays, she frankly says that without that, she prefers to do solo pieces.

At the epicenter of Duan’s works is interaction.

She interacts with the public, with other artists, and with objects, for which she has a particular affinity. Duan’s performances are not restricted to the narrow-minded realms of art galleries, as she interacts with people from all areas and walks of life in her performances. Her artworks are works in progress and are often stretched over long periods of time, both in creation and realization. There is no doubt that this plays a role in the poetry of her work.

Communication seems to be an essential topic for many performance artists. But in Duan Yingmei’s case, the issue of communication is a corner stone in her biography and thus, it has a very intense and particular role in her life. Until the age of twentyone she hardly spoke. Because of this she created a dream world of tales and myths for herself and developed the habit of communicating with different objects. She developed a fascination and an emotion to certain objects like her printer, tables, chairs and objects with a remarkable role in her daily life.

According to Duan Yingmei, objects have their own life and can communicate with one another just in a different way than humans. Duan’s impression is nothing new in philosophy or in physics, as it can be reflected in many directions and fields of thought. This ranges from Wittgenstein’s Theory on “Sachverhalt” in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, or in

Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation, with which the gravitational force of attraction – and thus communication – between two objects can be calculated.

In her performances, Duan creates a fascinating tension and relationship with objects. For the spectator, they seem to become alive and communicate; the objects get out of their passive role as background material.

Duan’s world of fairy tales developed during her twenty-one years of silence and still prevails today, as it has found its way into her works. In the summer of 2010, Duan did a residency at a Children Hospice in Sheffield, UK. There, for example, she worked on collaborative paintings and a book of self-written fairy tales inspired by all the different people she met there. She interacted with people at the hospice on a daily basis, but also arranged appointments with different families where she sat down and chatted about their own life and the life of their child.

Duan is a hard working artist but loves to sleep. Sleeping has become part and parcel for her, a workshop where she develops new ideas for her subsequent performances and where she composes new fairy tales. Sleeping in her own exhibition spaces has additionally become part of her work. It is a strategy to come in very close relations with the space of performance. She sleeps, lives, communicates and interacts very intensively with her environment, which makes her sometimes makes the exhibition space feel like home. It is mainly about the experience itself and what comes out of that.

Duan Yingmei is indeed a very remarkable artist.

Physical nomadism has always been a part of her life, as she comes originally from the North of China, has traveled a lot with her parents, and moved to Germany to study art. She has practiced art on four continents. She feels that her whole life is about moving.

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OT H E R N E S S a n d N A R RAT I O N

L ookin g for t h e N on - P lace – “ Heimat / Home ” in A rts and L iterat u re Frank-Thorsten Moll

It was not until the age of industrialization when the notion of “Heimat” – “home” – entered the arena of German arts and literature, never leaving it since then in spite of several changes of meaning. The notion has always been tightly connected to loss and misery, as the artists talking, writing or singing about home had lost their real home. To the seeker, “home” mostly appears like a phantom vanishing into air once he approaches the real place he once called home.

Indeed, the term “Heimat” refers to a fundamental connection between man and place, yet this connection can be everything: a region or a landscape, a village, a city or a country, even an entire nation. Moreover, language or a certain dialect can imply a feeling of home. Thus, home is not bound to a certain place, but it develops its dazzling impact with one’s identification with a subjective memory – which often is linked to childhood memories. Just think of Proust’s description of the odor of madeleines which made him feel like the child he once was.

It is interesting that the German term “Heimat” does not have an adequate translation in English – several words like “home,” “native place,” or “country” paraphrase its many facets.(1) But still, the English “belonging,” describing the emotional attachment to a place, works surprisingly synchronous to the German concept of “Heimat.” Both terms signify a kind of utopia – an “u-topos,” a not-place – which you want to find, but which you may never find. Artists focusing on this subject locate themselves in the neverland between “not anymore” and “not yet.”

With all the differences, there is one thing they seem to have in common: only the experience of foreign places turns “home” into utopia – or rather – 82

into an utopian place of longing. However, this utopian place does not yet exist and presents the seeker with the limits between hopelessness and becoming hopeful. This applies in particular to the experiences of exile and expulsion which made the authors, living far from home, want to resurrect the lost home in their writings. They wanted to describe home as realistically as their memories told them. Probably the most famous example is Homer’s Odyssey: all of the adventures only mask his fragile relationship to his home, even though this is the aim of his adventurous journeys – he feels foreign once he returns home.

Among the younger German literature, it is especially Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht and Alfred Döblin, but also the generation of Grass, Lenz, Koeppen and many more who coined the notion of “home” in the second half of the past century.(2) Characteristical is their tenacious struggle for the part of their own history which they had to leave behind in exile. Lenz’ Heimatmuseum (Museum of Home) is among the most insistent books of the time. In terms of Ernst Bloch, he describes home – the “not-being-here” – as the “not yet.” Home becomes synonymous for manic, yet an impossible project of reconstructing history.

Furthermore, one can find many references to fine artists in this literaric notion of home. First of all this applies to the aforementioned generation, many of whom even bear the name of the lost home in their own name, like Georg Baselitz. Baselitz, Richter, Polke and Uecker had been expelled from home, and they all found a new home in art. Being another utopian place, art made it possible for them to “illustrate” the utopian meaning of the lost home and thus capture it. This feeling of “not being at home” which Hannah Arendt assumed

to be the irrevocable condition of being human, drives most artists to this day. It seems as if mental agility and its deeply rooted interests in all “homeless” thoughts is the activator for countless efforts to “find home” in their art works.

Hannah Arendt suggested that man had to create a home or at least fixed points of reference to find home in the world, in a figurative sense. In many artists’ interviews, one can read that the artworks are considered the actual home. A commonplace? Probably not! Particularly German? Neither.

Artists constantly show us that “home” implies utopia rather than a point of origin, and includes the manifold facets of the whole world. Their artworks impressively demonstrate that the entire world is the home of man. One could even say that art is the utopian transformation of world into home.

The Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen is unique in Germany. Housing not only the biggest collection of airship aviation in the world, it also has a big art collection and is devoted to the connection of technics and arts – the only museum in Germany with such a focus. It is devoted to the inventor of the airship, Ferdinand Earl of Zeppelin, and thematizes topics between technical utopias and belief in progress, failure and catastrophe. Since 2009, Frank-Thorsten Moll is head of the art collection and curates exhibitions which add perspectives of contemporary art to the technical department.

1 & 2) Cf. Andreas Belwe, Heimat oder Unzuhause?, in: http://blogs.pm-magazin.de/PhilosophieBlog/ stories/8992/, status 16.01.11.

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M á rcio C arval h o marciocarvalhoartwork.blogspot.com 1981, Lagos, Portugal Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

In some of your performances, the “moment” as a spatio-temporal factor seems to play an important role.

How do you integrate this factor into your work?

My artistic work is based on a multidisciplinary practice in which the potential of crossing disciplines becomes a necessity. For three years, I have been focused on art projects that can be presented live yet involve several disciplines such as video, photography, text, painting, and sculpture between others. I don’t repeat my performance works often because they evolve from space and context necessities which can hardly be applied to other circumstances. That fact makes this “moment” between me and the audience unique and an ephemeral event that needs to be documented in specific ways in order to extend and recreate its existence.

My work is always composed of a mixture of objects, live actions, and video footage often considered as memories. In the composition of all these materials, the aim is to understand the discourses that they might raise by testing their dialogues physically and conceptually.

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I don’t rehearse, i. e. I don’t repeat the same actions for several times in order to highlight movement qualities. Most important is the action itself and its attempt to create discursive possibilities.

In the moment when I am performing I am making decisions, not improvising, but creating spaces of appearance.

You are interested in the ephemerality of performance art and also in capturing the moment.

What role does documentation play in your artistic working process?

Documentation is today’s subject brought by, especially by, live art questioning what stays after such an ephemeral action and what are the historical, objective, or documental qualities of it.

My performative work, as I mentioned before, does not aim to be repeated, and that fact raises questions concerning the importance of live action and how it can continue to exist.

In preview performances I asked for no external documentation of my work in order to “document” it from inside. By taking photos of my actions with a Polaroid as part of the performance plot, I aimed to question the value of post-performance documents.

The idea was to create such documents and to release the question: is it still documentation or can they become autonomous, a piece of art?

Every sculpture or painting is made from a sequence of actions and research, having, in the end, a final form chosen to be the presentation’s focus. In the performance, I propose the opposite by assuming the performance as the main focus, but creating objects as final forms of the work.

In the end there is no physical documentation that proves the existing sequence of actions, but instead there are photographical compositions that can work in an autonomous way.

Because I am very interested in the subject of documentation, I started to work on a critical text about the existence of, what I call, the three A’s of documentation: Academic Documentation Archive Documentation Artist Authorship Documentation

It will be released between July and August 2011.

Where do you come from and where do you live now? What – or where – is the most perfect place to live for you?

I come from Lagos, Portugal, and I have been based in Berlin for three years.

“There is no place like home” is a very common expression for those who leave their homes momentarily. Being away from Portugal for five years makes me think that home is what I carry with me.

I believe that all the experiences I have had outside my home country made me better understand its landscape and cultural qualities. I miss Portugal a lot, especially my family and the sea landscapes – but even then, I think there is no perfect place.

Traveling is a big part of my work in the moment where ethnology, especially field work, is creating very interesting forms. The communication with other cultures and landscapes fulfills my creative objectives of working with things that are near me and that I can establish relations with. On Nomadic is my first work series based on traveling experiences of trivial quotidians, notions of cultural and popular legends and myths. My conceptual and physical work relies on these forms of knowledge in the format of essays presented live, combining reality with fiction, documentary and personal interpretation.

I just figured out that you did art work and a residency in my hometown, Kortrijk. How was your meeting with this city?

In Kortrijk I worked in Buda Kunstcentrum residencies. There I developed the second form of the Appointment project. This work opened a lot of perspectives on my personal practice. The field work notion came from it.

Kortrijk is a very small city but really interesting.

A place of encounter where I proposed to meet and work with the forms I could find during my walks. In the end I could do a portrait of the city by experiencing its landscape, by living the space.

How connected are you as a performance artist to your environment versus yourself?

Most of the time my work is context-related.

It is the context that creates my energy to create.

What I can perceive from a place, its landscapes, its fluxes and its behaviors are research materials for my work to happen.

The space doesn’t need to tell me the whole truth. I am more interested in what my experiences are in relation to other people’s experiences in the same time and space.

You state about yourself that poetry and metaphors are the forms that you use to build your actions and performances. Do you actually write poetry or do you only perform poetry in actions?

I’ve been writing poetry since I was young. It is a practice that I will carry on forever. It is written in Portuguese, my mother tongue. It is about memory and how parts of it can be related to without the border of time.

In my performances, I often use a similar structure that doesn’t apply to a lucid sequence that leads to an end. I am not interested in telling stories but in a method of creation that starts with simple things becoming complex.

You made a performance called Homework in the framework of the festival Home sweet Home. How was this performance for you?

This was a great performance for me. It was about the memory of the house. Memory is a big concept in my personal practice, maybe the one that I’ve been working on for the longest time now.

I did a couple of interviews with my parents in order to recreate their memories in a live form. I am interested in several kinds of memories. The ones we have, the ones we forgot and which sometimes resurface, the ones we invent when others tell a story, the ones that belong to dreams and not to reality. I am interested in the blur around memories, to create from this blur something clear that becomes real.

ON NOMADIC: Issue 1, Still There, 2011, photos by Bartosz Wójcik

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Joris V anpo u cke jorisvanpoucke.blogspot.com 1983, Hove, Belgium Lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium

An undefined period from the past breathes through your drawings. I wonder if this feeling of melancholy is due to the effect of pencil and graphite on paper or if it is a conscious inspiration drawn from historical documents, photography and painting?

I consciously choose existing images as a base for the drawings. Mostly images of archives about 50 years ago. Images of nowadays focus too much on the digital aspect. I prefer the feeling of analogue photography and images from 36mm films. After the search for these images I start working with them to see which elements I can use to make a proper drawing. This causes a nostalgic touch to my work, but the melancholic atmosphere is inherent to my work. It is a part of me and my work.

I work with graphite because I like the material very much and it often makes this desolate feeling even stronger.

You sometimes take sides on some world political issues in your works like Question or Consume. This melancholy or downside of you work, does it in any way relate to the history of your home country of Belgium?

And maybe even the status quo of this nation?

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To this point I’ve never done anything that is related to the history of Belgium. Although, there is a sad evolution to nationalism, which has opened doors to a subtle evolution and to more and more extreme thinking, only because it has become socially acceptable to think that way. The taboo that was there is slowly fading …

The melancholy in my work comes from a much more personal and humanistic point of view.

Another aspect in some of your works, at least for quite a while, was about homesickness, which you reflected upon in multiple dimensions – more or less about leaving, but with an open end of coming back or not, as it can be seen in the high waves and storm of The Sea. Three paintings are inspired by The Call of the Wretched Sea by Ahab. If you agree with me, why is this an issue in your art research? And where does this skepticism come from?

This theme was based on a drawing I was making: The Story of the Fisherman, which was a metaphor for the love you feel for a place you leave.

If you just leave you start thinking about home and what or where it is. The three paintings in

The Sea were part of this story I was working on back then. To say it in a few words, it is about the attraction of the sea, the wildness and vastness, just to get overwhelmed by it.

Recently you made a performance/exhibition for the preview of the retrospective exhibition of Luc Tuymans in Bozar, Brussels. You described it as an attempt to express the creative process of Luc Tuymans.

How did this project came about and do you often collaborate with Luc Tuymans? How are your drawings related to his work?

First of all this was not a collaboration with Luc Tuymans. With his retrospective exhibition in Bozar, a certain company bought one of the nocturnes and wanted it to be an exclusive night. Then Luc asked Jens Verstrepen (filmmaker) and me if we would like to make something for this evening. So we started working from there. The result is a pavilion, designed

by Michael Doom (architect), in which I lock myself up as I do a lot in my atelier. But in this case my drawing was projected through a window with a spectacular play of shadows.

National Security Site (1, 2 & 3), graphite on paper, 95×85cm, 2011

My work is not related to Luc Tuymans. He chooses his themes very carefully and does a lot of research; and when all the preparations are done, he paints his painting in almost one day. My work instead can – at this moment – be seen as broader research about the autonomy of images, I try to get a look into the mythology of the images (you can compare it to what Barthes did with literature).

Your drawings make very realistic references to the urban and especially to the harbor city character of Antwerp, the city where you live and work. It also reminds me of the literature world of The Process by Franz Kafka or Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. How important are the influences from your daily surroundings, literature and cinema for you?

I get inspired by everything I see. I am very attracted to industry, harbors, desolate landscapes, and the beginnings of industrialization which made the world as it functions now. It is not always a positive evolution.

I feel a connection with Kafka’s work. I read a lot of his books and very much like the impossibility of finding what you search for, because the deeper you

go into the labyrinth the more obstructions appear.

Fritz Lang is a little too surreal for my taste, Jacques Tati gave a better view on the position of mankind.

In this way I actively search for ideas in literature, especially the deconstruction theories of 20th Century philosophers. My realistic approach is there because I have to know what I draw, even my more abstract works are still based on realistic images.

Do you already know what you will present for Nomadic Settlers – Settled Nomads?

Yes, the returning element is an ash cloud from the Volcano Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland.

It is an interesting image and has an even more interesting story connected to it. At the moment I can’t go deeper into the subject, because subjects always go through some changes while I work.

You are one of the few, if not the only artist, that has been in all three shows of this trilogy: This World is Not my Home, Consciences and Frontiers and Nomadic Settlers – Settled Nomads. How do you think your work has developed over these four years in the context of these concepts?

I must say it has evolved a lot. Since my arrival in Berlin three years ago I have been searching to find out what I wanted to do My work evolved from more illustrative work – due to my background – to more conceptual, but still very realistic, work.

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L eena K ela leenakela.com 1979, Kuusamo, Finland Lives and works in Helsinki, Finland

What do you mean by performance art pedagogy?

I have studied two degrees of performance art. First I did my BA in 2003 and last year I finished my MA in Live Art and Performance Studies. Since studying the subject with many different performance artists, and at the same time wondering how to teach and learn performance art, I ended up studying the subject of pedagogy myself. For me as an artist, teaching performance art is also a learning experience every time. When giving workshops and following exercises, I get very inspired and expand my own notion on how to do things in performance art. Because there is not one right technique, there are as many techniques as there are artists. I don’t teach very much nowadays since I am working as a Regional Artist of Performance Art at the Arts Council of South-West Finland, but I do organize workshops by inviting visiting artists to teach. The workshops are for local artists to support their professional development. I think that getting new input through participating in workshops is important in every stage of one’s career.

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Why are you fascinated by the other and otherness?

I started to concentrate on the subject of other and otherness when I worked with human-animal relationships in my performance series Goldilocks. I tried to embody the animal, to become other by changing myself from my performance character Goldilocks to a bear and back and sometimes staying in between the two. In another project called Alter Ego, I decided to try to embody another person, to become other than myself. I am interested in otherness because for me the other is equal to the unknown. No one else can have access to my corporeality and neither can I have to anyone else’s. I can imagine how the other thinks and feels, but it is always my interpretation of what I see and sense. I am in an ethical relationship with the others, but we are always different. By finding the other from myself, I can examine different ways to exist. I have approached those different existences by visiting a Hypnologist for a few years to practice regression therapy, to find out about my past lives and to experience how it feels to act in another person’s body and life. The question, if those past lives I’ve experienced are true or false, doesn’t interest me. I am interested in the experience of being another person.

Is the Leena Kela that does performances an alter ego?

Maybe one could say so, or rather the performance artist Leena Kela is one of my social roles. Anyhow, she is definitely a different person than Leena Kela, who is for example a mother and many other things. I became interested in alter egos through the concept of social roles. How one complete identity is a false belief since we consist of different roles which also change according to different periods and sectors in life.

Could you tell us what your performance Airplane! is about?

Airplane! is a performance series which I started a few years ago when I was traveling a lot by flying.

At the same time climate change was becoming more and more the main topic of discussion in all possible medias. I felt guilty. By flying I was helping

the progress of global warming, my carbon footprint was growing and growing and to the same extent I felt my guilt increasing. I built a performance character out of this guilt, an air hostess, whose bad conscious I created from guidelines the media was offering on how to live a more climate friendly life. During the flights, I followed very carefully the safety demonstrations the air hostesses were giving and from those I created choreography for my air hostess character. But the flights of my flight company C02 never arrived to their destination, since they always ended up in chaos. The ingredients of the catastrophes I picked up from the 80’s comedy Airplane!. These I combined with the series of everyday confessions like “To be honest, I didn’t give a fuck about the Baltic Sea getting dirty and poisoned. Of course I flew to the other side of the world at least twice a year to take a holiday if I had enough money. Sometimes I bought Spanish tomatoes. I used to throw the organic waste into the normal bin. I loved to buy silly plastic objects which were made in China.” These elements created a performance series Airplane! in which the protagonist air hostess is a sort of alter ego, who consists of a collective need and the compulsion to feel guilt. She tries to survive in the constantly growing chaos by stumbling and at times, loosing her self control. But all the while she’s serving the passengers with an everlasting smile on her face.

In this coming performance, Departure, she is a contemporary nomad, constantly in the air, never landing. She is in between the different lands, but also in between different ideals.

You combine a very interesting mix of sarcasm and nostalgic innocence which creates an intriguing tension in your works. This feels like a very Nordic, Finnish humor. Is this too general to say?

I would say yes, it is too general to say so. It is hard for me coming from this culture to see it from outside, or even to see that my humor and way of thinking is very Finnish. And of course it is, but it is also influenced by many other mainstream and sub cultures, my other references. To which extent what influences depends on the work I am doing. For example, the Goldilocks performance

series is very much influenced by my Northern heritage and experiences, but at the same time the classical story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears and Lynchian surrealism.

To what extent are you influenced by your regional versus global culture?

I mostly get ideas from the everyday life around me, the local issues. But when researching the subject I use many different sources to expand my knowledge. Internet is nowadays my main source of information in addition to books. And what is the global culture anyhow? I would say it is a culture dominated by Western and capitalist thinking.

How is humor related to otherness?

If thinking about otherness, humor is not a politically correct way to approach the subject. But I think that humor is a powerful tool to make us people realize our own prejudices. Parody has been used a lot among artists working for example in the early feminist movement and queer performances.

There is a strong difference if one laughs at oneself or at the other. In my performances, I use humor but it is often hidden and a bit strange. One doesn’t know if one should laugh or not, or if it is ok to laugh at someone else’s mistakes. I myself enjoy that feeling a lot, it challenges me to think what I am laughing at rather than laughing because everyone else laughs too.

Did you ever make a performance about a nomad?

No, not until now.

Film history seems to be an inspiration for a lot of your work. Which kind of films are you interested in?

I watch quite a lot of film classics and I get very irritated by obviously funny films. Maybe that is the reason why I end up watching the worst of the humor films and borrowing elements from those for my own performances. Airplane! is a good example of that. I hate that movie.

Airplane!, performance series, photos by Roope Pellinen

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Appendix

C u rators ’ Bio g rap h ies Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung Founder and Art Director of the art space SAVVY Contemporary Berlin aimed at fostering the dialogue between “Western Art” and “Non-Western Art.” (savvy-contemporary.com) Project Initiator and Editor-in-Chief of SAVVY art.contemporary.african, a bilingual art journal intended to be a platform for critical positions on contemporary african art with a focus on Germanophone countries. (savvy-journal.com) He has been the curator of several international exhibitions and has published corresponding catalogues. He studied and earned a PhD in Food Biotechnology, Medical Biotechnology and Biophysics in Berlin, York and Montpellier.

Simone Kraft Art and Architecture Historian based in Heidelberg, working as a Curator, Journalist, Editor and Copyeditor. She publishes in several Art and Architecture medias and is the host of the successful blog deconarch.com which focuses on Art and Architecture.

She received the Wolfgang Hartmann Preis 2011 for Curators, with the concept of (In)Visible Cities which will be realized in Autumn 2011 at the Kunstverein Wilhelmshöhe Ettlingen.

She curated several international exhibitions and has published corresponding catalogues. She studied Art History, History and Philosophy at the Universities of Heidelberg, Tübingen and London (SOAS) and is currently writing her dissertation about “Deconstructivist Architecture.” (skraft.wordpress.com, deconarch.com) Pauline Doutreluingne Pauline Doutreluingne is an independent Curator, Visual Researcher and Sinologist based in Berlin, Germany.

She studied Sinology at Ghent University in Belgium and did her Master Thesis on experimental Chinese Art and Post-Orientalism. She went to Beijing in 2004 to do a Masters Degree in Art Criticism at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. After her studies she founded the Borderline Moving Images Festival (borderlinefestival.org) in Beijing and became Assistant Director at Platform China Contemporary Art Institute (platformchina.org).

In 2007 she moved back to Europe with Berlin as her base to continue her curatorial work: realizing international exhibitions, writing for museum catalogues (FRAC NPDC), contributing to art magazines and organizing film screenings.

Recently she undertook the visual research for the film Problema as part of Mindpirates, a group of artists and creative people in Berlin.

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C olop h on This catalogue is published in conjunction with the exhibition Nomadic Settlers – Settled Nomads International Group Exhibition July 2nd to August 28th, 2011 settlednomads.wordpress.com Curated by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Simone Kraft and Pauline Doutreluingne A Project of SAVVY Contemporary Berlin in collaboration with Kunstraum Kreuzberg / Bethanien Mariannenplatz 2 10997 Berlin kunstraumkreuzberg.de Edited by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Simone Kraft and Pauline Doutreluingne

Published by Revolver Publishing

Immanuelkirchstr. 12 D – 10405 Berlin Tel.: +49 (0)30 616 092 36 Fax: +49 (0)30 616 092 38 info@revolver-publishing.com revolver-publishing.com Printed in Germany by Druckerei Hermann Schlesener KG (schlesener.de) © 2011 All who contributed content to this book The exhibition was sponsored by

Translations by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Simone Kraft, Pauline Doutreluingne and Lam Thuy Vo Text contributions by Nico Anklam, Pauline Doutreluingne, Surya Gied, Andrea Heister, Simone Kraft, Dorothea Löbbermann, Frank-Thorsten Moll, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Joas Sebastian Nebe, Dieter Overdieck, Gregor Quack, Bernd Upmeyer and Susanne Weiß ISBN 978–3–86895–175–2 Exhibition design by Sebastian Keller Book design by Easton West (highculturelowclass.com) Copyedited by Lauren Coats Press by Claudia Lamas Cornejo Acknowledgments to Stephane Bauer, Lauren Coats, Meike Dölp, Hans Harrow-Sandmann, Sebastian Keller, Claudia Lamas, Heike Salchli, Marc Schamuthe, Boris Selle, Easton West, Marion, the authors, and of course, the artists.

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Through continuous investments in the latest technology and constant staff trainings, Hermann Schlesener KG ensures a professional and efficient partner in print.

Products and Services The Schlesener KG specializes in premium-quality products in offset printing.

Whether you are looking for art catalogues, glossy brochures, image flyers, folders or business stationery, Schlesener provides efficiently produced prints in the highest quality.

The range of services is complemented by a modern digital printing machine for individualized printing products as well as a fully equipped media design department and a wide range of in-house subsequent processing steps and refinements.

Schlesener Quality The Schlesener printing quality is certified by the Prozess Standard Offsetdruck (ISO 12647). This printing standard ensures consistently high, reproducible quality.

The establishment’s latest investment is the Sublima screening. This innovative screening technology guarantees ultra-brilliant pictures and reveals all the details.

There have been a number of successful collaborations with artists in the company’s history, for instance with painter Giuseppe Madonia. Schlesener printed his art catalogue “Giuseppe Madonia – Mezzo Tempo” in honor of the painter’s fiftieth birthday. In addition, Schlesener invited art friends to visit Madonia’s exhibition “Veduta Interiore – Interior Views” in the exhibition rooms of the company.

Another cooperation arose with graphic designer Reinhard W. Eckardt.

During a perennial stay at the Mediterranean Sea, he created a variety of works that were presented in the exhibition “ReiseBilderBücher,” which took place on the premises of the Schlesener KG. The printing company complemented the event with the production of a booklet which showed a number of works from Reinhard W. Eckardt.

Contact Druckerei Hermann Schlesener KG Ullsteinstraße 108 12109 Berlin Fon +49 (30) 70 79 36 – 0 Fax +49 (30) 70 79 36 – 99 info@schlesener.de schlesener.de

Schlesener Climate Initiative The Schlesener KG assumes environmental and social responsibility. The production of printing plates is carried out without the use of chemicals. Through investments in the latest machines, paper consumption during the setup can be reduced up to ninety percent. Furthermore, the use of process colors without mineral oil conserves scarce resources. The company is also certified according to FSC principles and criteria and offers carbon neutral printing products.

Schlesener Service Schlesener customers have their own personal assistant who guides them from their first idea to the delivery of the final product. The consultant works in close cooperation with the customer to find the ideal solution for every individual requirement. In addition, the Schlesener Service includes sending free paper and product samplings, file checking and error correction as well as flexible delivery.

Art at Schlesener The Schlesener KG has been cooperating with museums, galleries and individual artists for many years. Those occasions allowed Schlesener to demonstrate their expertise and unconditional commitment to quality.

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