Critical Cartography of Art and Visuality in the Global Age 1443860417, 9781443860413

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Critical Cartography of Art and Visuality in the Global Age

Critical Cartography of Art and Visuality in the Global Age

Edited by

Anna Maria Guasch Ferrer and Nasheli Jiménez del Val

Critical Cartography of Art and Visuality in the Global Age, Edited by Anna Maria Guasch Ferrer and Nasheli Jiménez del Val This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by Anna Maria Guasch Ferrer, Nasheli Jiménez del Val and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-6041-7, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-6041-3

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ..................................................................................... ix Acknowledgments .................................................................................... xiii Introduction ............................................................................................... xv The Semantic Codes of the Global Contemporary Anna Maria Guasch Ferrer and Nasheli Jiménez del Val Part I: Archives and Networks Chapter One ................................................................................................. 3 Deconstruction, Relational Aesthetics and Techno-Cultural Networks: 1990-2010 Anna Maria Guasch Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 19 Postcolonial Art: A Living Archive of Border-Crossings and Migrant Matters Celeste Ianniciello Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 35 Re-Performing the Archive: A Feminist Act El Colectivo Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 51 An Art of Condensation, a Political Relationship: Archiving the Crisis, Claiming the Future Elpida Karaba Part II: The Utopian Globalists Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 69 Utopian Globalists, Modernism and the Arts of Austerity in the 1970s Jonathan Harris

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Table of Contents

Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 91 DIY Utopias: The Rebel Urbanism of Madrid’s “Acampadasol” Julia Ramírez Blanco Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 107 WeltKarten: Panorama Laura F. Gibellini Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 123 The Ut(r)opian Globalization of Contemporary Central American Art: Tracing the Pale of History or (Furtively) Stealing from the Global Pie? Sergio Villena Fiengo Part III: Labour, Woman and Politics Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 145 Leaving Home: Stories of Feminisation, Work and Non-Work Angela Dimitrakaki Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 161 The Domestic Is Political: The Feminization of Domestic Labour and Its Critique in Feminist Art Practice Elke Krasny Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 179 From Pseudo-Emancipation to Outright Subjugation: The Representation of “Women’s” Work in Contemporary Hungarian Women’s Art Erzsébet Tatai Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 195 Decolonisation: Women and the Politics of Authenticity, between Sirens, Witches and Human Zoos…: Subverting the Labyrinth of Solitude, and Bringing Sincerity and Humour—Black and Exhilarating— from Santiago of Chile to Long Island Lynda E. Avendaño Santana Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 215 Towards a Socio-Political Ethics of Art and Technology in the Era of Globalization. Fighting Gender Violence in the Public Sphere Mau Monleón Pradas

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Part IV: Art and the Post-Natural Condition Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 243 Gardens Beyond Eden: Bio-Aesthetics, Eco-Futurism, and Dystopia at dOCUMENTA (13) and Beyond T.J. Demos Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 255 Global Latin American Art: An Eye on Earth Andrea Diaz Mattei Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 269 Mechanical Monsters of the Cyber-Technological Imaginarium: Technological Dysfunctions in Contemporary Art Juliana Gontijo Chapter Seventeen ................................................................................... 283 Towards an Ecological Hermeneutics of the Exhibition Space: The Case of Alberto Carneiro’s Envolvimentos and Ecological Art in the 1960s and 1970s Mariella Franzoni Chapter Eighteen ..................................................................................... 297 Transforming Ways of Looking by Using Technology, and Its Application in Contemporary Art Practice Salim Malla Gutiérrez Afterword ................................................................................................ 313 Global Interculturality for a Critical Cartography of Art and Visuality Anna Maria Guasch Ferrer and Nasheli Jiménez del Val Bibliography ............................................................................................ 317 Contributors ............................................................................................. 345

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 2.1. Mona Hatoum, Present Tense ..................................................... 21 Fig. 2.2. Mona Hatoum, Present Tense, detail .......................................... 21 Fig. 2.3. Mona Hatoum, Shift .................................................................... 23 Fig. 2.4. Mona Hatoum, Projection. .......................................................... 24 Fig. 2.5. Mona Hatoum, 3-D Cities ........................................................... 26 Fig. 2.6. Mona Hatoum, 3-D Cities, detail ................................................ 27 Fig. 3.1. First proofs of classification ........................................................ 42 Fig. 3.2. The Revolution line of performances. ......................................... 47 Fig. 3.3. A frame of the interactive cartography piece. ............................. 48 Fig. 4.1. Vangelis Vlahos, Nikos Temponeras .......................................... 54 Figs. 4.2 and 4.3. Vangelis Vlahos, Foreign Archaeologists .................... 55 Fig. 4.4. Y. Ioannidou and T. M. Díaz Nerio, Aula Intergalactica ........... 57 Fig. 4.5. Yota Ioannidou, Voice Over ........................................................ 59 Fig. 4.6. Lina Theodorou, Self-Redress ..................................................... 59 Fig. 6.1. Tahrir Square protest camp ......................................................... 92 Fig. 6.2. Acampadasol ............................................................................... 94 Fig. 6.3. Montage ...................................................................................... 97 Fig. 6.4. Acampadasol ............................................................................... 98 Fig. 6.5. Acampadasol. .............................................................................. 98 Fig. 6.6. Acampadasol. .............................................................................. 99 Fig. 6.7. Protest camps throughout the world, 2011. ............................... 104 Fig. 7.1. Laura F. Gibellini, New York City Panorama 11. ..................... 111 Fig. 7.2. Laura F. Gibellini, Study for (a) Landscape. ............................. 112 Fig. 7.3. Laura F. Gibellini, Expanding the Contours. 1962. .................. 113 Fig. 7.4. Laura F. Gibellini, WeltKarte.................................................... 114 Fig. 7.5. Laura F. Gibellini, The Shapes I Don’t Remember ................... 115 Fig. 7.6. Laura F. Gibellini, The Shapes I Remember From Maps. ......... 116 Fig. 7.7. Laura F. Gibellini, The Shapes I Remember ............................. 117

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List of Illustrations

Fig. 7.8. Laura F. Gibellini, Say It With Flowers .................................... 118 Fig. 7.9. Laura F. Gibellini, The Extended Contours of the Horizon....... 119 Fig. 8.1. Javier Calvo Sandí, Dis-/De- ................................................. 128 Fig. 8.2. Javier Calvo Sandí, El centro siempre está en el centro ..... 129 Fig. 8.3. Javier Calvo Sandí, Quiero ser un buen centroamericano........ 133 Fig. 8.4. Javier Calvo Sandí, Sólo yo ....................................................... 135 Fig. 10.1. Election campaign poster. ....................................................... 165 Fig. 10.2. Re-Enacting Unity ................................................................... 166 Fig. 10.3. Re-Enacting Unity ................................................................... 167 Figs. 10.4 and 10.5. Moira Zoitl, Chat(t)er Gardens Stories .................. 173 Figs. 10.6 and 10.7. Moira Zoitl, Chat(t)er Gardens Stories .................. 174 Fig. 11.1. Ágnes Eperjesi, Tiles............................................................... 182 Fig. 11.2. Ágnes Eperjesi, Slices of Self-Portraits .................................. 183 Fig. 11.3. Ágnes Eperjesi, Colour Fade-Out Washing Machine ............. 184 Fig. 11.4. Erika Baglyas, 100 Sheets. ...................................................... 185 Fig. 11.5. Kriszta Nagy, I Am a Contemporary Housewife ..................... 186 Fig. 11.6. Anna Fabricius, Tigress of Housekeeping (Eszter, 2/9). ......... 188 Fig. 11.7. Anna Fabricius, Tigress of Housekeeping (Judit, 6/9). ........... 188 Fig. 11.8. Anna Fabricius, Tigress of Housekeeping (Virág, 9/9). .......... 189 Fig. 11.9. Luca GĘbölyös, I Want to Get Married!. ................................ 189 Figs. 11.10 and 11.11. Luca GĘbölyös, I Want to Get Married! ............. 190 Fig. 12.1. Ana Mendieta, Body Tracks .................................................... 201 Fig. 12.2. Ana Mendieta, Imágen de Yágul. ............................................ 202 Fig. 12.3. Sharon Bridgforth, Delta Dandi .............................................. 204 Fig. 12.4. Diamela Eltit, El Beso (Zona de Dolor II) .............................. 205 Fig. 12.5. Jesusa Rodríguez, Cabaret Prehispánico: El Maíz ................. 207 Fig. 12.6. Josefina Báez, Dominicanish .................................................. 208 Figs. 13.1 and 13.2. Mau Monleón, Maternidades globalizadas ............ 221 Figs. 13.3 and 13.4. Mau Monleón, Contrageografías humanas. ........... 223 Fig. 13.5. Mau Monleón, Contrageografías humanas ............................ 225 Fig. 13.6. Lorena Wolffer, Si ella es México, ¿quién la golpeó? ............ 227 Fig. 13.7 and 13.8. ACVG: Arte Contra Violencia de Género ................ 229 Fig. 15.1 and 15.2. Graphic project for 8ª Mercosul Biennial ................. 258

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Fig. 15.3. 8ª Mercosul Biennial catalogue ............................................... 259 Fig. 15.4. 8ª Mercosul Biennial catalogue ............................................... 261 Fig. 15.5. Bernardo Oyarzún, Chivi, Xi’y, Chinguere, Kaguare ............. 262 Fig. 15.6. Bernardo Oyarzún, Koenyú ..................................................... 262 Fig. 15.7. María Elvira Escallón, Nuevas floras del sur .......................... 264 Fig. 15.8 and 15.9. María Elvira Escallón, Nuevas floras. ...................... 265 Fig. 16.1. Mariana Manhães, Thesethose. ............................................... 272 Fig. 16.2. Oligatega, El enorme............................................................... 277 Fig. 18.1. Salim Malla Gutiérrez, Correspondencias .............................. 298 Fig. 18.2. Salim Malla Gutiérrez, Correspondencias .............................. 298 Fig. 18.3. Clay Tablet, Map of the World of the Babylonians ................ 302 Fig. 18.4. Hieronymus Bosch, Table of the Mortal Sins ......................... 303 Fig. 18.5. The Presidio Modelo prison .................................................... 304 Fig. 18.6. The original data cloud............................................................ 306 Fig. 18.7. General transformation algorithm of coordinates.................... 307 Fig. 18.8. Example of a correspondence of coordinates .......................... 309 Fig. 18.9. Rhombicosidodecahedron and its development ...................... 309

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is the product of the enriching debates that took place at the international conference Critical Cartography of Art and Visuality in the Global Age, held at the University of Barcelona in April of 2013. We would like to thank the Department d’Història de l’Art at the Facultat de Geografia i Història, Universitat de Barcelona, for their support in the organization of this event; the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, MACBA, for providing us with the space and infrastructure to conduct the conference; Dr. Lourdes Cirlot from the Vicerectorat de Relacions Institucionals i Cultura of the University of Barcelona for her welcoming address at the opening of the conference; and the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación for their financial support of the event. Very special thanks go to each of the convenors of the four panels that marked the event, as well as to the keynote speakers for their addresses: Carles Guerra (convenor) and Oliver Grau (keynote speaker) on the “Media Art Documentation” panel; Anna Maria Guasch (convenor) and Jonathan Harris (keynote speaker) on the “Utopian Globalists” panel; Juan Vicente Aliaga (convenor) and Angela Dimitrakaki (keynote speaker) on the “Labour, Woman and Politics” panel; and Joaquín Barriendos (convenor) and T.J. Demos (keynote speaker) on the “Art and the PostNatural Condition” panel. We would also like to thank all the participants in the conference, from the individual presenters to the audience members who added interesting and pertinent questions to the debate. Thanks are also due to the Art, Globalization, Interculturality research group, and especially to Christian Madrid, Diana Padrón, Rafael Pinilla and Olga Sureda for providing the technical assistance for the event. This publication was made possible within the framework of the research grant HAR2010-17403 / MINISTERIO DE CIENCIA E INNOVACIÓN / I + D / 2011-2013 for the research project “Cartografía crítica del arte y la visualidad en la era global: nuevas metodologías, conceptos y enfoques analíticos”; and the Beatriu de Pinós postdoctoral fellowship BP-B 2010-00021, Agència de Gestió d’Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca (AGAUR). The Editors

INTRODUCTION THE SEMANTIC CODES OF THE GLOBAL CONTEMPORARY ANNA MARIA GUASCH FERRER AND NASHELI JIMÉNEZ DEL VAL

The recent irruption—and ensuing expansion—of the term “global art” in academia, arts practice, and curatorship has signalled an attempt to supersede the territorial limits imposed by the old parameters of Eurocentrism, Western dominance, and the monocultural project of modernity. In the early 2000s, art historians such as K. Zijlmans, David Carrier or James Elkins, driven by theorizations of the end of universal and national art histories, forwarded the proposition of a world and global art history. Following suit, curatorial projects developed by intellectuals and theorists linked to ZKM at Karlsruhe (Hans Belting, Peter Weibel and Andrea Buddensieg) introduced the concept of “global art” into art discourse as a way of going beyond the formulas of modern internationalism as well as postmodern new internationalism. In the first book of what would later become a trilogy, Contemporary Art and the Museum (2007), Peter Weibel and Andrea Buddensieg documented the impact that globalization has had on contemporary art in an attempt to make visible a phenomenon that in recent years had been limited, for the most part, to the so-called “peripheral biennales”: the will to supersede the concept of “Euro-Americanism” by championing the alternative project of a “beyond Euro-America”. Along these lines, Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg published The Global Art World. Audiences, Markets, and Museums in 2009, an exploration of the different processes of global art production. In this volume, Belting and Buddensieg distinguished between the concept of “World Art” and “global art”, the former referring to the world heritage of art spanning all periods and countries; the latter denoting a contemporary development of art that, like a phoenix, rises from the

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ashes of modern art towards the end of the twentieth century in clear opposition to the highly valued ideals of Western progress and hegemony. The present volume aims to contribute to this field of study through its engagement with, and problematization of, the new status of art and visuality in the context of global contemporary art. Resulting from a series of conversations that took place during the international conference Critical Cartography of Art and Visuality in the Global Age (Universitat de Barcelona, April 2013), the present anthology considers current debates in the context of cultural and identity-based histories as a way of expanding the territory of art into the field of culture. This volume also takes into account new approaches for the analysis of artistic practice within the context of a global cartography, and the (re)definition of the current parameters that shape contemporary art-theoretical discourse. The book seeks to locate new models of methodological interdisciplinarity that can serve to foster dialogue among scholars and practitioners from a variety of fields, such as art historians, film theorists, cultural geographers, anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, and cultural practitioners. In short, the volume aims to provide the reader with the coordinates for current debates in global art and to develop a cartography of the various conceptual and methodological intersections that global art studies is addressing today. In order to approach “the global contemporary” as a condition that has defined the study of art and visuality throughout the 21st century, it has been necessary to exercise a will to supersede all exclusionary forms of knowledge production in order to reclaim a presence in the art world that expands around the globe, challenging old geographical borders, and vindicating place and displacement narratives. In other words, Critical Cartography actively seeks out new forms of cultural practice that can transfigure the relationships between what is global and what is local, and that can serve to articulate the discourse of difference. Temporal dimensions and relational experiences bring to the fore new issues for the production and dissemination of art. As Nikos Papastergiadis suggests, the coda for contemporary artists is defined by the artist’s desire to be “in” the contemporary sphere, more so than to produce a reaction to the everyday. To be in the place of the “here” and “now”, to work with others in simultaneous and concrete practices, to contemplate the achievement of work through the experience of a connection, all this means to elevate the value of the “performative” aspect of arts practices and to displace the reflexive role of cultural production.1 In the current moment, contemporary artists no longer need to choose between remaining in a local context or participating in transnational dialogues.

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Once she penetrates the context of contemporary art, the artist becomes part of a complex process that circulates around the world and that is defined not only by the issue of difference, but also by the different ways of “being in the world”. Artists, continues Papastergiadis, widen the limits of their practice by defining their context and their strategies as the sum of paradoxes: museums without walls, cities as laboratories, living archives, the narratives of movement. These slogans are frequently used in the art world; they reveal a shared desire to extend the parameters of art by incorporating new technologies, new places and new perspectives. And in doing so, they expand the category of “the contemporary”.2 While it may initially seem that globalization is the new and improved version of postmodernity, insofar as both incorporate a clear will to periodicize, globalization is far from being a simple substitute for postmodernity. The differences between the two are notable, as the cultural theoretist Imre Szeman argues through his provocative observations regarding the role of culture in globalization understood as a neoliberal political project.3 Globalization, in contrast to postmodernity—considered an aesthetic category used to describe architectural styles, art movements or literary strategies—is a reality that has little to do with the concepts of aesthetics and culture such as they have been understood from a postmodernist viewpoint. There is no one “globalizing culture” in the same sense that we can describe a “postmodern culture” (nor a global architecture, a global art or a global literature). And if postmodernity seemed attractive because of the diverse formal innovations that it introduced, globalization inverts this relationship by emphasizing the restructuring of relations of power and politics, as well as re-dimensioning economic production from the national to the transnational in light of the operations of financial capital. With globalization, representation (the central category of postmodern debate) seems to have been suspended. In contrast, the relations that have always been considered to precede representation are made visible through globalization, and in this regard culture would only be one of the multiple aspects of the production of goods and commodities.4 Importantly, what marks the clearest difference between globalization and postmodernity is the public ambition of the concept itself: There is clearly more at stake in the concept of globalization than there ever was with postmodernism, a politics that extends far beyond the establishment of aesthetic categories to the determination of the shape of the present and the future—including the role played by culture in this future. Even if both concepts function as periodizing terms for the present,

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globalization is about blood, soil, life and death in ways that postmodernism could only ever pretend to be.5

How do these issues affect the areas of literature or art theory? Perhaps in this sense globalization’s major contribution has been to redefine its practices in light of a world of connections and transnational communications that supposes, to a certain extent, the end of the nation-state and the provincialism implicit in national culture. Consequently, many of the theoretical and visual practices of globalization are directed towards the transference and movement of culture: change from one place to another, recently discovered mobility, the de-contextualization and re-contextualization of new places, and the new concepts that this entails: diaspora, cosmopolitanism, the politics and poetics of the “other”, as well as the languages derived from postcolonial studies in general.6 As Terry Smith argues, the parallelism between contemporaneity and globality should suppose a stage in which the planet, its people and the things living in it can imagine a constructive mutuality based on the sharing of our differences: Contemporaneity and planetarity open us up to multiple interactions through which we constantly build our worlds-with-the-world, a world that is still in the process of being globalized but that, at the same time, displaces itself quickly beyond globalization.7

Here, Smith is referring to the art of “transnational transitionality” that includes at least three phases within the global contemporary: a reactive and anti-imperialist search for a national and local imaginary; a rejection of simplistic identitarianism and corrupt nationalism in favour of a naïf internationalism; and, finally, a broad search for a cosmopolitanism in context with a permanent transition between all types of things and relations. It is precisely the third phase—which must not be understood as a style, period or tendency—that proliferates under the radar of generalization. There is a noteworthy increase in the number of artists worldwide and in the opportunities that new technologies offer millions of users, directly affecting tentative explorations of temporalities, place, affiliation, and affect—the increasingly uncertain conditions of living within the contemporaneity of a fragile planet.8 Smith suggests, therefore, that contemporaneity is a phase in which the planet and everything within it (people and things) can imagine a constructive mutuality based on the adequate distribution of our differences:

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Contemporaneity and planetarity are words that I believe should be reserved for these kind of reflections. They open up multiple interactions through which ‘worlds within worlds’ can be created, a world that—as it is being globalized—seeks to go beyond globalization itself.9

With this theoretical framework in mind, the present anthology aims to provide the conceptual tools to understand globalization as the category of contemporary art that has characterized the past two decades. It is a type of art that expressly distances itself from postmodernity and, in doing so, requires the deployment of new narratives in order to write a new art history that takes into account cultural identity over aesthetic feeling, and geopolitical and institutional issues over matters of style, innovation and progress. It is a type of art that highlights the complicity between art and the social, religious and cultural realms. In this sense, Critical Cartography of Art and Visuality in the Global Age groups a series of debates arising from the current state of global art studies through an interdisciplinary approach forwarded by academics and arts practitioners from a range of geographical, disciplinary and institutional contexts. Seeking to mirror the structural and cultural dynamics of a globalized world, rather than focusing on geographical areas or following an area studies methodology, the book has deployed a topical approach that has allowed the contributors to locate points of intersection between their work and the work of others coming from different disciplines and/or analysing other geographies. In order to achieve this, the book’s main body is structured around four major theoretical topoi that inform current global art studies: 1) archives and networks, 2) utopian globalists, 3) women and labour, and 4) the post-natural condition. Each section is headed by a text authored by a renowned specialist in the area under discussion, and then followed by shorter essays by individual authors that consider specific problematics within the topic examined. Section One on archives and networks opens with Anna Maria Guasch’s essay “Deconstruction, Relational Aesthetics and TechnoCultural Networks: 1990-2010”, in which the author considers the importance of the archival turn, with a special focus on the archive as the expression of a desire “to transform hidden, fragmentary or marginal historical material into a physical and spatial fact characterized by its interactivity” (1). This chapter is followed by Celeste Ianniciello’s essay “Postcolonial Art: A Living Archive of Border-Crossings and Migrant Matters”, which looks at the relationship between the aesthetics of bordercrossings and the importance of a politics of remembrance through her analysis of artist Mona Hatoum’s work. The collective “El Colectivo” addresses the importance of reconfiguring and playing with the archive in

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their chapter “Re-Performing the Archive. A Feminist Act” through their proposal to “re-mix” the Re.act feminism archive. Elpida Karaba explores the centrality of archive art to the construction of resistances in the context of the Greek crisis in her chapter “An Art of Condensation, a Political Relationship: Archiving the Crisis, Claiming the Future”. Jonathan Harris opens Section Two on utopian globalists with an examination of austerity globalism and the possibilities for an utopian globalism as explored in the contemporary art of the 1970s in his text “Utopian Globalists, Modernism and the Arts of Austerity in the 1970s”. His essay is followed by “DiY Utopias: The Rebel Urbanism of Madrid’s ‘Acampadasol’”, Julia Ramírez Blanco’s discussion of the aesthetics of resistance in the context of 2010’s Acampadasol in Madrid, Spain. Artist Laura F. Gibellini explores the possibility of reconfiguring the map as a means to visualize utopian worlds via her alternative cartographies in the essay “WeltKarten. Panorama”. In “The Ut(r)opian Globalization of Contemporary Central American Art”, Sergio Villena examines the “ut(r)opian” impulse of Central American contemporary art in its aim to achieve worldwide projection and insert itself into the global networks of art. Angela Dimitrakaki leads Section Three on labour, women and politics, with a study on the relationship between gender and labour in the works of several contemporary artists. Her chapter “Leaving Home: Stories of Feminisation, Work and Non-Work” sheds light on the ideological investment in the feminisation of women’s work in general, and in women art workers in particular. Elke Krasny further elaborates on this topic in her text “The Domestic Is Political. The Feminization of Domestic Labour and Its Critique in Feminist Art Practice”, where she discusses the links between urbanisation and the feminisation of labour through four case studies: Vienna, Hartford, Hong Kong and Mexico City. In “From Pseudo-Emancipation to Outright Subjugation. The Representation of ‘Women’s’ Work in Contemporary Hungarian Women’s Art”, Erzsébet Tatai focuses on “shy feminism” and the representations of labour in contemporary Hungarian artists Ágnes Eperjesi, Erika Baglyas, Kriszta Nagy, Anna Fabricius, and Luca GĘbölyös. Lynda Avendaño highlights a decolonial approach to the state of women artists and the politics of authenticity in her essay “Decolonization: Women and the Politics of Authenticity”. Artist Mau Monleón Pradas discusses her own work in relation to the struggle against gender violence in the Valencian and global contexts in her text “Towards a Socio-Political Ethics of Art and Technology in the Era of Globalization”.

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Finally, in Section Four on the post-natural condition, T.J. Demos analyses the role of bio-aesthetics and eco-futurism at dOCUMENTA (13) by focusing on the post-natural condition of contemporary art in his chapter “Gardens Beyond Eden: Bio-Aesthetics, Eco-Futurism, and Dystopia at dOCUMENTA (13) and Beyond”. In “Global Latin American Art: An Eye on Earth”, Andrea Díaz Mattei focuses on the “globe”alization of the Earth following Borges’s metaphor of the intelligible sphere. Juliana Gontijo considers the monstrification of art in the works of Mariana Manhães and the collective Oligatega throughout her essay “The Mechanical Monsters of the Cyber-Technological Imaginary: Technological Disfunctionalities in Contemporary Art”. Mariella Franzoni’s chapter “Towards an Ecological Hermeneutics of the Exhibition Space” looks at Alberto Carneiro’s envolvimientos and their links to a post-natural condition and new ways of thinking of an ecology of culture and technique. The final chapter in this collection of essays is Salim Malla Gutiérrez’s “The Transformation of the Gaze through Technology and Its Application in Contemporary Art Practice”; in it, Malla Gutiérrez describes the production of his piece Correspondencias, which exemplifies the new ways in which artistic practice can engage with the global condition.

Notes 1

Nikos Papastergiadis, “Spatial Aesthetics: Rethinking the Contemporary”, in Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, eds. Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor and Nancy Condee (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), 363-364. 2 Ibid., 364. 3 Imre Szeman, “Imagining the Future: Globalization, Postmodernism and Criticism”, http://individual.utoronto.ca/nishashah/Drafts/Szeman.pdf. Accessed 25 February 2014. 4 For a more detailed discussion of the relations between postmodernity and globalization, see Szeman, “Imagining the Future”. 5 Szeman, “Imagining the Future”, 8. 6 See also Douglas Kellner, “Globalization and the Postmodern Turn”, http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/globalizationpostmodernturn.pdf. Accessed 25 February 2014. 7 Terry Smith, “Contemporary Art: World Currents in Transition Beyond Globalization”, in The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds, eds. Hans Belting, Andrea Buddensieg and Peter Weibel, Ex. Cat. (Karlsruhe: ZKM/Center for Art and Media, 2013), 192. 8 Ibid., 188. 9 Ibid., 192.

PART I: ARCHIVES AND NETWORKS

CHAPTER ONE DECONSTRUCTION, RELATIONAL AESTHETICS AND TECHNO-CULTURAL NETWORKS: 1990-2010* ANNA MARIA GUASCH FERRER It was not until the nineteen-nineties that a genuine turn, impulse or tendency was detected among artists, theorists and exhibition curators who began developing a view of the artwork “as an archive” that co-existed with other tendencies or turns focusing on the ethnographical or the micropolitical. This archival turn finds expression in a desire to transform hidden, fragmentary or marginal historical material into a physical and spatial fact characterized by its interactivity: “Archival artists make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present,” in the words of Hal Foster.1 In this sense, in allusion both to the architecture of archives (or physical collection of information) and to the logic of archives as conceptual matrices of quotations and juxtapositions, the materials of the artwork as archive can be found (images, objects and texts), constructed, but also public and at the same time private, real and also fictional or virtual. In this case, the medium typical of archival art is digital culture or the network of the Internet, which forces a displacement of “archival space”, together with its architecture, into “archival time” tied to the virtual nature of the Internet. At this point, archival data lose their spatial immobility in favour of adopting a dynamic operability and becoming a temporal index.2 This “immaterial information” follows a rationality that differs from material systems of memory, typically organized on linear principles. According to Joke Brouwer and Arjen Mulder,3 this alternate rationality is much closer to the labyrinthine and fuzzy logic of oral culture, that is, a culture without written records. Stories change as they are told and continue changing with each retelling, just as personal memories do. This process resembles how digital databases are made accessible through complex, interconnected technologies that work randomly based on the

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principles of flexibility and instability: “Digital archives are unstable, plastic, living entities, as stories and rituals were in oral cultures”.4 In addition to the earlier “archontic” quality of archives, digital culture generates a new “memory culture”. The digitization of stored materials involves trans-archivization: the organization of memory yields ground to arenas of circulation that are more constructive than reconstructive. And if we assume that the question of memory is only an effect of the application of memorization techniques (recall), then we may even reach the conclusion that in reality “there is no memory”: “The networked databases mark the beginning of a relationship to knowledge that dissolves the hierarchy associated with the classical archive. […] The generative archive, the archival paradigm, in genuinely digital culture, is being replaced by sampling—direct random access to signals”.5 Moreover, the constant of the archive goes hand in hand with the recent history/memory debate not only as a disturbance in our notions of the past, but also, as Andreas Huyssen notes,6 a fundamental crisis in our imagination of alternative futures. According to Huyssen, the price of progress, one of the most active impulses in modernity, has been the destruction of past modes of life. There was no liberation without active destruction. And the destruction of the past brought forgetting. Amid this “hypertrophy of memory” inherited from modernity, Huyssen reasserts memory (and forgetting), but not in any way as a complaint or wistful gesture (as occurred among the Romantics who saw memory as one of the best weapons against undesirable industrialization, urbanization and modernity). Rather, Huyssen claims them as resources to address cultural, political and social matters of global magnitude. After all, Huyssen maintains, the act of remembering is always a symptom of our cultural present. Hence, today’s contemporary obsessions with memory can be viewed as an indication that our way of living and understanding temporality is itself undergoing significant change. This is the context in which “historians” and “memoirists” wage battle, a battle that reproduces the academic debates of history vs. memory and that, in turn, should be understood in terms of the “seduction of the archive” and the desire for narratives of the past as felt by a large number of contemporary artists. Rather than a canonical way of doing history or using historiography as a tool of domination and ideology, artists seek to work with “discourses of memory” as essential to imagining the future and contemplating life and imagination in a consumer society.7

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For all of these reasons, we can affirm that the archive has become one of the most universal metaphors for all types of memory and of records and storage systems. However, the archive lacks narrative memory. In other words, the concept of memory under consideration has little to do with “telling stories”, with grand, all-encompassing syntheses or with the “exhaustive narratives” specific to modernity. Hence the importance of “secondary narratives”, which only become coherent by means of their discontinuous elements and a way of thinking that is both deconstructive and semiotic in nature. This explains the prominence of the index over the icon and symbol, the importance of serial photography and the value of the concept “now-time”. With respect to this last aspect, Walter Benjamin in the nineteen-thirties opposed the notion of the discontinuity of the moment (“now-time”) to homogeneous, linear time. Art, as a result, must not claim to affirm the tradition, but must find “something new” in each moment, a moment understood as “now-time” (independently of the causal nexuses established by historicism) that compresses within itself the history of the past.

Jacques Derrida and “Archive Fever” In the nineteen-nineties, the archival impulse (or fever) arose among artists, theorists and curators partly out of one of the most profound reflections on the concept of the archive proposed by Jacques Derrida in a lecture entitled “Le concept d’archive. Une impression freudienne”.8 In his lecture, Derrida sought answers to questions like: why should we, today, re-elaborate a concept of the archive in a single configuration that is at once technical and political, ethical and legal? Is it not necessary to distinguish the archive from what has all too often been reduced to the experience of memory, the return of forgetting, but also the archaic and archaeological, recollection or excavation; in short, the search for lost time? This lecture may be also be seen as one of Derrida’s most controversial essays on psychoanalysis, which grew out of debates between Derrida himself, Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan in response to two works by the American historian of Judaism Yosef Haim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory 9 and Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable,10 as well Sigmund Freud’s own text Moses and Monotheism (1939).

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The Material Condition of the Archive Derrida began by distinguishing the archive from what it is all too often reduced to, that is, the experience of memory and the previously mentioned return to the origin, to the archaic and the remembered. In Derrida’s view, the archive (from arkhe, which means both the commencement and the commandment) must not only be deposited in some place (exteriority of location), but this must also be a place of authority (the arkheion, i.e., the State) and have a method of consignment. For this to happen, however, we must first find the meaning of the word “archive”. The archive, Derrida says, represents the “now” of any type of power exercised in any place or time. It names both the commencement and the commandment and its name coordinates these two principles in one: the principle according to nature or history, there where things commence—i.e., the physical, historical or ontological principle—and also the principle according to the law, there where men and gods command, where authority and social order are exercised, the place from which order is given—i.e., the nomological principle. As with the Latin archivum or archium, the meaning of archive comes from the Greek arkheion: a house, a dwelling, an address, a residence of the chief magistrate, the Archon. Archons not only wielded power and stored official documents; they also had hermeneutic jurisdiction: the right to interpret the archives. Hence we can speak of the principle of “house arrest”, whereby a residence is assigned to stand between the private and the public, which is not equivalent to saying between what is secret and not secret. “There is no archive,” states Derrida, “without a place of consignment, without a technique of repetition and without a certain exteriority. There is no archive without an outside”.11 It is necessary for the archontic power to draw on the principle of “consignment”, a principle governed by the act of “gathering the signs”: Consignment tends to coordinate a single corpus into a system or synchronous relation in which all the elements are articulated into the unity of an ideal configuration […]. The archontic principle of the archive is also a principle of consignment, in other words, of gathering (which connects it to one of the senses of archive as hypomnema, a mnemotechnical supplement or representative, auxiliary or memorandum, which is associated with the compulsion to repetition in opposition to the so-called living or spontaneous memory, the mneme or anamnesis).12

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Hence the archive is not only a collection of documents gathered and guarded in one place, but also a system articulated in signs, without fissures, without discontinuities or distorting elements. However, the archive is not simply a place where a plurality of signs is gathered against a single backdrop. The archive contains the principle (arkhe) on which the law rests, in the sense that it is the place that you must go to consult the law, making direct or indirect use of the Archon’s power of interpretation. The archive is the exteriority to which we must turn for knowledge. The right of access to the archive is a privilege: the privilege to interpret the signs to recognize or “re-know” them. From this standpoint, the Archons not only act as guardians, ensuring the physical safety of the repository and its material supports, but also assume a hermeneutic jurisdiction: they possess the power to interpret the archives. At the same time, we need to consider the archive not as something aspiring to stability or perfection, but rather as something moving and unstable, an infinite and indefinite process. Rather than defining something specific, the archive may be explained as a tendency or an attempted form of being. Archives are never complete, because they are not a place or corpus in any absolute sense, but rather a tendency toward being one. The archive can be defined as a precise structure without a complete meaning, a structure associated with terms like institution, authority, law, power and memory. In brief, the archive’s condition as a material artefact stems from this necessity of a physical place for the existence of the “archive-continent”. By way of Derrida’s thinking, we then arrive at the metaphorical use of a place as museum or of a material artefact as artwork.13

The Immaterial Condition of the Archive Derrida himself added a further dimension of the archive, its “immaterial” condition, which related Freud’s psychoanalysis with the “spectral” nature of the archive in the Internet. In the same way that psychoanalytic theory turns a technical model of a machine-tool that represents the “outside” of memory, according to Freud, into a theory of the archive or, in other words, a theory of memory (through what is known as the Wunderblock or “magic slate”), so also the digital archive in the Internet is characterized by a constant flow of data (equivalent to the “impressions” in Freudian psychoanalysis), without geography or temporal restrictions, but with the resulting displacement of the notion of information storage and classification toward navigation and hyperlinks that relate distinct pieces of the same information. As Derrida noted: “In

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the past, psychoanalysis would not have been what it was if email had existed. And in the future, it will not be what Freud and so many psychoanalysts have anticipated, because email does exist now”. 14 As Derrida says: “Likewise, I single out email as of special importance because electronic mail is on its way to transforming the entire public and private space of humanity, and first of all the limit between the private, the secret (private or public), and the public or the phenomenal.15

Theories of the Archive Following Derrida The archival turn is the subject of an expansive critical literature. In recent years, it has given rise to various theoretical reflections and curatorial projects that I will proceed to discuss in the following sections.

Allan Sekula: The Photographic Archive Allan Sekula was one of the first writers to address the problem of the photographic archive from the standpoint of the history of photography, situating the archive in aesthetic, political and historical contexts. Sekula wrote two landmark papers, “Reading an Archive: Photography Between Labour and Capital” (1983) and “The Body and the Archive” (1986).16 Drawing on Michel Foucault’s thesis from Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la prison (1975), Sekula began by acknowledging that “archival ambitions and procedures are intrinsic to photographic practice”, then went on to analyse the honorific function (linked to bourgeois portraiture) and the repressive function (linked to police mug shots) in portrait practice in the nineteenth century, leading to what he called an all-inclusive “shadow archive” that situates individuals according to a socially proscribed hierarchy. This shadow archive ranged from the bodies of heroes, leaders, role models and celebrities to the poor, the ill, the mad, criminals, racial minorities, women and all other embodiments of the indigenous. Everything is measured according to two closely interlinked disciplines, physiognomy and phrenology, which use the body and especially the face and head to translate outer signs into inner character. Together with this general archive, Sekula argues, another, more sophisticated type of archive exists and it corresponds to the way in which the police used photography in the late nineteenth century and to the resulting loss of faith in the optical empiricism specific to generalist photography. The camera was now part of a system of bureaucratic / administrative / statistical intelligence, whose aim was no longer the camera itself, but the filing drawer: “The institution of the photographic

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archive received its most thorough early articulation in precise conjunction with an increasingly professionalized and technological mode of police work and an emerging social science of criminology”.17 And why was the model of the archive so significant for these related disciplines? The archive provided a vast collection of substitutions with a relation of general equivalence across images. In addition, the archive gave a standard gauge for the physiognomy of criminals and attributed to each criminal body a relative and quantitative position within a broader whole. As Sekula further relates in his research on the origins of archival practice in societies of the first half of the nineteenth century, this amalgam of the optical and the statistical found an exceptional proponent in Alphonse Bertillon, a Paris police officer, whose response to the demands of policing led him to invent the first modern scientific system for identifying criminals. Bertillon’s “bipartite” system cross-linked “microscopic” records (i.e., individual measurements and markings) with “macroscopic” records (i.e., group traits) in pursuit of the positivist aim of “defining and regulating” social deviance.

Benjamin Buchloh: The Anomic Archive On the occasion of the publication of the exhibition catalogue Deep Storage: Collecting, Storing, and Archiving in Art, Benjamin Buchloh produced the first and, at that time, the most comprehensive reflection on the archival turn or tendency among a group of European artists active since the mid-sixties who shared the use of the photographic medium as a common denominator. Among this group were Bernd and Hilla Becher, Christian Boltanski, Marcel Broodthaers and Gerhard Richter.18 Buchloh, in his piece, pointed to what he called the “enigmatic nature” or formally similar nature of the works of these European artists who had, since the sixties, “archived” collections of photos that were distinguished as much by their homogeneity and continuity as by their heterogeneity and discontinuity. Buchloh quickly came to the conclusion that the nature of these works and of works by many other artists in the subsequent generation (such as Thomas Struth) could not be understood or classified according to specifically avant-garde terms. Neither collage nor photomontage adequately described the apparent formal and iconographic monotony of the images in these photo collections. Nor did the terms traditionally used in the history of photography (documentary photography, topography, photojournalism) seem to fit.

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On the contrary, the photo collections of these artists, with their seemingly infinite multiplicity, capacity for serialization, the vast archival accumulations of their materials, and their aspiration toward comprehensive totality, clearly referred to a typology related to the notion of the archive. This notion was not far from the technical and scientific illustrations found in textbooks and catalogues, and in the archival organization of materials according to the principles of an as-yetunidentifiable discipline with few precedents in the history of the early avant-garde. This same text, together with a piece published in 1994 for the Gerhard Richter retrospective in Paris,19 formed the basis of Buchloh’s later work on Richter’s Atlas,20 in which Buchloh not only analysed Richter’s artwork from an archival standpoint (as an anomic archive), but also traced a series of genealogies (“Excursus on the Atlas”) to contextualize Atlas and identify its historical raison d'être. Buchloh cited the teaching panels of Malevich, Hannah Höch’s Scrapbook (an album of press clippings) and the Atlas Mnemosyne of Aby Warburg. As precedents of this type of knowledge organization according to didactic models of presentation and memoiristic repositories, we should distinguish between, on the one hand, the teaching panels produced by Malevich between 1924 and 1927 to illustrate the theoretical efforts of the Institute of Artistic Culture in Leningrad 21 and, on the other hand, the scrapbook of press clippings produced by the Dada artist Hannah Höch around 1933, a project which points towards artistic strategies that attempted to organize large amounts of found photographs in an archival manner. A new dialectic between the aesthetic of the collage/photomontage and the mnemotechnic and systematizing functions of the archive recurred, in Buchloh’s words, at the highest pinnacle of heroic photomontage in Weimar Germany and in the Soviet Union. Artists like Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch and John Heartfield in Germany and Gustav Klutsis, El Lissitzky and Alexander Rodchenko in the Soviet Union began to work with the randomness and arbitrary juxtaposition found in photomontage to develop a form of art stripped of political ideology and, increasingly, they drew closer to esoteric, aestheticist and ultimately anti-communicative approaches. The shift within this generation of artists brought the establishment of a figurative communication and a denotative referentiality that marked “a change in the function of the photograph toward the function of the archive”,22 the same referentiality that we find in the use of photography taken up by the artists in the sixties whom Buchloh mentions at the outset of his paper. These artists no longer treated the photographic object as the impression of a carefully crafted, singular image produced by the artist-

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photographer in the studio, framed and presented as a painting substitute, but rather as a snapshot produced cheaply and quickly, which would ultimately displace the earlier portrait of the bourgeois tradition: The form used for organization and distribution, then, becomes the archive or, in other words, the photo sorter, a freely organized accumulation of snapshots related to a particular subject.23

Hal Foster: The Archival Impulse Subsequent to Benjaman Buchloh’s reflections, Hal Foster published a paper entitled “An Archival Impulse” 24 in clear allusion to the title of Craig Owens’s essay “The Allegorical Impulse” 25 . In his piece, Foster undertakes a sceptical analysis of various instances of relational art based on the concept of post-production (secondary manipulation, editing, effects and other aspects). From this analysis, Foster points to the existence of a new paradigm in contemporary art, a sort of “archival impulse”.26 In addition, Foster establishes a genealogical line that puts the historical roots of this “impulse” in the pre-war period (Rodchenko and Heartfield) and follows it into the post-war period, from the pin-board aesthetic of the Independent Group to the information structures of conceptual art, by way of remediated representations from Robert Rauschenberg to Richard Prince. In Foster’s judgment, however, this impulse fits best within the so-called “electronic archive”, the conceptual frame of the artwork of digital information. Hence the ideal medium of the archive is the mega-archive of the Internet and the digital network, with the resulting appearance of new terms like “platforms” and “stations”, which evoke the rhetoric of interactivity. Foster, however, adds a qualification that the databases alluded to are not, strictly speaking, databases at all. They are expressly material in nature, more fragmentary than fungible, and they require processes of interpretation more than mechanical processors. Suggesting the notion of the “artist as archivist”, Foster poses examples such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Sam Durant, Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas, Liam Gillick and Rirkrit Tiravanija, artists working both within and outside the logic of the museum and the institutional system of art. In this respect, Foster claims, the orientation of archival art is often more “institutive” than “destructive”, more “legislative” than “transgressive”.27 And in all cases, this impulse could be explained as the flip side of a certain utopian ambition and of a desire to retrieve failed visions in art, literature, philosophy and daily life within alternative social

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relations that attempt to transform the “nowhere” of the archive into the “nowhere” of utopia. Unlike the allegorical impulse, however, the archival impulse and its commitment to “construct” rather than to “excavate” would also liberate the archive from the culture of melancholy that confuses the historical with the traumatic.28

Arjun Appadurai: The Archive as Aspiration Arjun Appadurai joined this debate over the concept of the archive in his essay “Archive and Aspiration”, 29 which took a line similar to the contributions of Paul Ricoeur 30 and Giorgio Agamben, 31 examining the renewed relationships between archive and memory. In the humanist imagination, Appadurai points out, the archive is no more than a social tool for the work of collective memory. It is a neutral, or even ethically benign, tool that is the product of a deliberate effort to secure the most significant portions of what is called “the prestige of the past”. Its quintessential expression is the document, a graphic trace, usually a written text, whose accidental survival has been reinforced by the protection offered to it by the archive. In this sense, the archive is an empty box, a place, a site or an institution whose role is the guardianship of the document. Following Appadurai, the central property of the archive in this humanist vision is to be found in the “ideology of the trace”, which is always the product of accident beyond any sort of design: The archive is fundamentally built of accidents that produce traces. All design, all agency and all intentionalities come from the uses we make of the archive, not from the archive itself. The very preciousness of the archive, indeed its moral authority, stems from the purity of the accidents that produced its traces.32

In this sense, it was Foucault who, according to Appadurai, destroyed the “innocence” of the archive and forced us to ask about the designs through which all traces are produced. Thus, after Foucault, we need a new way of looking at the archive as a collective tool, recognizing that the archive is not just a way to preserve the accidental, but also the precious traces of collective memory. As a result, we need to see all documentation as “intervention” and all archiving as part of some sort of collective project. Rather than being the tomb of the “trace”, the archive is more frequently the product of the anticipation of the collective memory. Thus, the term “recollection” (which belongs to a positive vision of the archive) needs to be replaced by the term “aspiration”.33

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The Archive and the Deconstruction of History: 1989-2010 As it goes about deeply interrogating the concepts of representation, authorship and subjectivity, the art of recent decades has deployed various strategies within the comprehensive framework of deconstruction, taking deconstruction as the most active postmodern impulse or ethos from which to question the values of high modernity. These strategies include appropriation, sometimes critical and sometimes allegorical in nature, and simulacrum. Since the beginning of the nineteen-nineties, a third alternative of even greater creative intensity has emerged—“archival fever”—both in its purely structural version (the “architecture” of the archive as sets of boxes, containers, etc.) and in its systematic and epistemological character. This strategy can be seen at work, for example, in Susan Hiller’s installation at the Freud Museum in London (1994), the installations of Mark Dion addressing the object typologies used in natural science museums (On Tropical Nature, 1991-1992) and the works of Ilya Kabakov (The Big Archive, 1993), Antoni Muntadas (The File Room, 1994), Thomas Demand (Archive, 1995) and Andrea Fraser (Information Room, 1998). For these artists and anyone participating in the strategy of the archive, the past is no longer a model to revisit, to cite oblique fragments and project allegorical meanings. The past is there in a raw state and the artist confronts it directly, compulsively, with the passion of a collector. In today’s renewed interest in the past, memory and history, the archival strategy is the one that bests represents the chief aspirations of the “unfinished project of post-modernity”, particularly Derridean deconstruction. Nothing is as intrinsically deconstructive as archives, with their relational and incoherent topology of documents awaiting reconfiguration. Archives that assume Foucault’s concept of archaeology understood as moment and genealogy and conceived as a process, that is, as a sum of discontinuities, fissures, disruptions, absences, silences and ruptures in opposition to the historical discourse that reaffirms the notion of continuity; archives that demand yet another return to the real, not as in Bataille’s account but according to the postulates of Jacques Lacan; archives that confirm Barthes’ concept of the “death of the author” and anti-subjectivity as a critique of the authorial function; archives that enhance the recourse to citation taken more as recollection, in the terms of Walter Benjamin, than as strict appropriation. The strategy of the archive also appropriates the need to retrieve memory as a third state between history and the present. However, these are not universal memories, like the memories emanating from the Holocaust, but rather global, deterritorialized memories. This explains how

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artists at different latitudes (e.g., Latin America, Asia and Africa) resort to the strategy of archive-memory in order to record their local memories within the global context. Andreas Huyssen puts it this way: The subliminal transformation of our temporal imagination has produced a de- and a re-territorialization of memory space which has so far largely eluded the critical analysis of memory and history.34

This process maintains and accounts for the existence of memory palimpsests that are constantly in flux, added to and erased as they move on over time. In this process new types of transnational memory constellations are generated and these constellations seem to be far more prevalent in literature, cinema and the arts than in academic studies, which until very recently have remained largely focused on national politics or ethnic identities.35 Resorting to the archive does not impose unique and repetitive formulas, but rather wide possibilities of use, approach and typology: possibilities based on the relationships between the archive and ethnography in the work of Mark Dion; possibilities centred on the relationships between archive, archaeology and photography in the work of Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky, Zoe Leonard, Peter Piller and Joachim Schmid; possibilities related to language and writing, exemplified by the works of Isidoro Valcárcel Medina; possibilities generated from the resources specific to the modus operandi of archival science, such as the index and the thesaurus, examples of which can be seen in the works of Ignasi Aballí, Pedro G. Romero and David Bunn; possibilities from working with the concept of the meta-archive, visible in the creations of Montserrat Soto, and possibilities from using the archive as a “cipher” to address power relations, as seen in the works of Fernando Bryce, Rosangela Rennó, the Atlas Group and Francesc Abad.

The Infinite Archive: The Digital and the Virtual Pedro G. Romero, together with other artists such as Arnold Dreyblatt and Daniel García Andújar, presents us with a concept of “digital archive” in this age of “memory-culture” technology, which seeks new dialogues between digital technology, recollection and archivization, suggesting how the new media can contribute metaphors and models for thinking about the processes of memorization and the relations between memory, both in its literal sense and as “geopolitical” memory, and its “techno-prosthetic metaphors”.

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To speak about digital archives and new forms of access and navigation within the digital medium is, in the words of Wolfgang Ernst,36 to speak of the archive in metaphorical terms in the sense that its content is transferred from one place to another and this transfer makes it dynamic such as, for example, when text, image and sound are transferred on the Internet: “data streaming versus data download”. The units of past memory (data download) have now been replaced by dynamic and temporal forms of archive in a digital space (data streaming). Thanks to technical supports, Ernst maintains, memory is better understood in cybernetic terms now than through the historical tradition of semantics: “Today memory is made up of various media, with a profound impact on mnemo-aesthetics”.37 In today’s art world and in the world of technical supports, documentation and data storage in archives has become a universal practice. An additional new factor has also emerged in this era of data streaming and networked communication, generating a profound shift in perspective: the privileged status that Western civilization had bestowed on certain permanent values and traditions of the past (archive, library, museum, collection) is giving ground to a dynamic exchange, a “transfer” in the literal sense. From this perspective, archives provide feedback for a “social memory”, turning them into a site for what Joseph Beuys called a “permanent conference”.38 As Wolfgang Ernst notes in another text, entitled “Beyond the Archive: Bit Mapping”,39 cyberspace, seen from the viewpoint of media archaeology, no longer concerns image, sound and text. Rather, it concerns “bits” and this opens new horizons for search operations in the “Media Art Net”: not just addressing and linking image and text by alphabetical addresses, subjecting image and sound to words and external metadata once more (the archival classification paradigm), but addressing digital images down to the single pixel from within, in their own medium, allowing for random search (apparent disorder as an alternative economy of information). Archival order might thus be accompanied by “mapping time”, that is: mapping temporal, dynamic, procedural operations which differentiate traditional from electronic works of art.

Notes * Originally published in Spanish in Anna Maria Guasch Ferrer, Arte y archivo, 1920-2010. Genealogías, tipologías y discontinuidades (Madrid: Akal / Arte contemporáneo, 2011), with extracts from pages 161-254. 1 Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse”, October 110 (Fall 2004): 3-22.

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See Wolfgang Ernst, “The Archive as Metaphor: From Archival Space to Archival Time”, Open. Cahier on Art and the Public Domain. Special Issue (No) Memory. Storing and Recalling in Contemporary Art and Culture 7 (2004): 46-53. This issue explores the status of memory in art and the public domain. The public and collective forms of memory are definitely neither static nor neutral. Rather, they are subject to socio-cultural, historical, political and technological forces. 3 Joke Brouwer and Arjen Mulder, “Information Is Alive”, in Information is Alive: Art and Theory on Archiving and Retrieving Data, eds. Joke Brouwer et al. (Rotterdam: V2_Publishing/NAi Publishers, 2003), 5. 4 Ibid., 6. 5 Ernst, “The Archive as Metaphor”, 51-52. 6 Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2003), 2. 7 Ibid., 7. 8 Derrida delivered this lecture on 5 June 1994. Entitled “Le concept d’archive. Une impression freudienne”, the lecture was given at the international colloquium Memory: the Question of Archives, organized by René Major and Elisabeth Roudinesco. Other participants at the event included the Societé Internationale d’Histoire de la Psychiatrie et de la Psychanalyse, the Freud Museum and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. The lecture was published under the title Mal d’archive: une impression freudienne in 1995 (Paris, Galilée). We have consulted the Spanish edition Mal de archivo: una impresión freudiana (Madrid: Trotta, 1997). 9 Yosef Haim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1982). 10 Yosef Haim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). 11 Derrida, Mal de archivo, 19. 12 Ibid., 11. 13 Ibid., 10-11. 14 Ibid., 24. 15 Ibid., 25. 16 See Allan Sekula, “Reading an Archive: Photography between Labour and Capital”, in Visual Culture: The Reader, eds. Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall (London: Sage Publications and The Open University, 1999), and “The Body and the Archive”, October 39 (Winter 1986): 3-64. Article republished in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, ed. Richard Bolton (Cambridge Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1989), 313-353; Spanish edition: “El cuerpo y el archivo”, in Indiferencia y singularidad. La fotografía en el pensamiento artístico contemporáneo, eds. Glòria Picazo and Jorge Ribalta (Barcelona: Llibres de recerca, Museu d’Art Contemporani (MACBA), 1997), 135-181. 17 Sekula, “El cuerpo y el archivo”, 147. 18 Benjamin Buchloh, “Warburg’s Paragon? The End of Collage and Photomontage in Postwar Europe”, in Deep Storage. Collecting, Storing, and Archiving in Art, Ex. Cat. (New York: PS.1 Contemporary Art Center and Seattle, Henry Art

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Gallery, 1998), 50-59. A new corrected and expanded version of the article “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: The Anomic Archive” was published in the journal October 99 (Spring 1999): 117-145. The article to which we refer is translated into Spanish as “El Atlas de Gerhard Richter: El archivo anómico” in eds. Benjamin Buchloh et al., Fotografía y pintura en la obra de Gerhard Richter (Barcelona: Llibres de recerca, Museu d’Art Contemporani (MACBA), 1999), 147-167. An extract of the same article was published under the title “Fotografiar, olvidar, recordar: fotografía en el arte alemán de posguerra”, in José Jiménez, El nuevo espectador (Madrid: Visor, Fundación Argentaria, 1998), 61-78. 19 See Benjamin Buchloh, “L’archive anomique de Gerhard Richter”, in Gerhard Richter: Essais. La peinture à la fin du sujet, Ex. Cat. (Paris: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1994). 20 Benjamin Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: The Anomic Archive”, October 88 (Spring 1999): 117-145. 21 Benjamin Buchloh cites one of his bibliographical sources as Troels Andersen’s text Malevich. Catalogue Raisonné of the Berlin Exhibition 1927, Ex. Cat. (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1970). See Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: The Anomic Archive”, 118 and n1. 22 Buchloh, “Fotografiar, olvidar, recordar”, 68. 23 Ibid., 69-70. 24 Foster, “An Archival Impulse”, 3-22. 25 Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism”, October 12 (Spring 1980): 67-86 and October 13 (Summer 1980): 58-80. 26 Foster, “An Archival Impulse”, 4. Foster alludes to the “allegorical impulse” formulated by Craig Owens in his paper “The Allegorical Impulse: Notes toward a Theory of Postmodernism”. 27 Ibid., 5. 28 Ibid., 22. 29 Arjun Appadurai, “Archive and Aspiration”, in Information is Alive: Art and Theory on Archiving and Retrieving Data, eds. Joke Brouwer et al. (Rotterdam: V2_Publishing/NAi Publishers, 2003), 14-25. 30 Paul Ricoeur, Temps et récit, Vol. III (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1978). 31 Giorgio Agamben, “The Archive and Testimony” (1989), in Remnants of Auschwitz (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 143-146; Spanish edition: Lo que queda de Auschwitz. El archivo y el testigo. Homo Sacer III (Valencia: Pre-Textos, 2000). 32 Appadurai, “Archive and Aspiration”, 15-16. 33 Ibid., 16. 34 Andreas Huyssen, “Aplicaciones transnacionales del discurso sobre el holocausto y el colonialismo”, in La Memoria del Otro Ex. Cat. (Bogota: Museo de Arte de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia,10 September-7 November 2009; Santiago de Chile, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, 29 April-20 June 2010), 2627. 35 Ibid.

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Wolfgang Ernst, “Attention! Archives. Mnemoclassic Comments on the Cult of Memory”, in Arnold Dreyblatt. Inscriptions Ex. Cat. (Frankfurt: Judengasse Museum, 25 February-22 May 2005), 75. 37 Ibid., 76. 38 Ibid. 39 The text is available on the Internet at http://netzspannung.org/cat/servlet/ CatServlet?cmd=netzkollektor&subCommand=showEntry&entryId=141294&lang =, and corresponds to a lecture given by Wolfgang Ernst, one of the pioneers in “media archaeology” as part of the symposium Beyond the Archive: Bit-Mapping, held at the Karlsruhe Centre for Art and Media on 21 April 2004.

CHAPTER TWO POSTCOLONIAL ART: A LIVING ARCHIVE OF BORDER-CROSSINGS AND MIGRANT MATTERS CELESTE IANNICIELLO

Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy. —Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/la Frontera

The production of borders and the obsession for what we could define as a “geography of fortifications” has dominated Europe’s political agenda for decades, and can now be also considered a global phenomenon. As Wendy Brown1 points out, the border has become the material institution through which the declining power of the nation-state seeks to defend its presumed integrity against what are perceived as external menaces coming from contemporary reality: terrorists, poverty, epidemic viruses and, above all, poor migrants. In the age where the global fluxes of migration have gained the strongest intensification ever, borderlands are paradoxically turned into spaces of containment, regimes of arrest and immobility. The Italian sociologist Sandro Mezzadra 2 defines today’s borderland as the space of bio-power and “tanatopolitics”, a space where State power exercises control over migrant people through a capitalist dynamics of inclusion/exclusion based on the erection and patrolling of frontiers, which often causes death. The concept of “tanatopolitics” and the way it is exerted is strictly connected to colonial power and the concept of “necropolitics” elaborated by Achille Mbembe, 3 which highlights the fundamental racist trait and the lethal domain over bodies inscribed in that politics. This is what happens in the Mediterranean or in the desert borderlands between Mexico and the United States, just to name two of

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the most known examples. But, is it possible to think of the border(land) as other than the place where people die, where life stops? Is it possible to undermine and rewrite this deadening cartography of the limits drawn by, and drawing, Western power? I argue that some artistic productions and processes, where it seems impossible to separate space from time, geography from history, present from past, here from elsewhere, may represent an affirmative answer, proposing alternative cartographies of memory and belonging. In this sense I will consider these artworks as living archives of migrant memories and border-crossing geographies.

Changing Borders, Disorienting Maps I will start my analysis from the aesthetics of the Beirut born, Palestinian, London-based artist Mona Hatoum, where the exploration of the relation between place, space, identity, memory are profoundly informed by the experiences of exile, displacement, and the multiple languages and cultures to which the artist is differently related. Far from promoting itself as representative of a people, a land, a history, Hatoum’s art evokes the heterogeneous, differential, vertiginously ambiguous nature of an identitarian in-betweenness that can clearly be referred to the artist’s lived experiences, but it also concerns life experience as such. Hence, Hatoum’s art, simultaneously, evokes the risk of being too strongly rooted in our “home”, reminding us of Edward Said’s observation that “borders and barriers, which enclose us within the safety of our familiar territory, can also become prisons”.4 The culture and geopolitics of closure, confinement, wall-erection, is impiously questioned by Hatoum’s aesthetics of border-crossing. This is particularly evident in the different maps the artist has produced, of both Palestine and the world, blurring any distinction between closeness and distance, familiarity and strangeness. The memory of a “double vision”, of simultaneous dimensions and overlapping territories is impressed in Hatoum’s cartography. Time and space are inseparable, as in Present Tense (1996, figs. 2.1 and 2.2) that reproduces a map of the occupied territories to be returned to the Palestinians, drawn up at the Oslo Peace Agreement of 1993. Exhibited at the Anadiel Gallery, East Jerusalem, it consists of a grid of soap blocks, placed on the floor, like a carpet, on whose surface small red glass beads are impressed, like blood drops, to delineate the land borders, and an immobile present with them. The process of restitution has never taken place, Yasser Arafat having refused to sign the agreement whose map he was not allowed to see. In the secret, unilateral maps and projects of Israel and the United States is inscribed an

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Figure 2.1. Mona Hatoum, Present Tense, installation Anadiel Gallery, Jerusalem, 1996. Soap and glass beads, 1 3/4 x 94 7/8 x 117 3/4 in. (4.5 x 241 x 299 cm). Courtesy of White Cube and Anadiel Gallery, Jerusalem.

Figure 2.2. Mona Hatoum, Present Tense, detail, installation Anadiel Gallery, Jerusalem, 1996. Soap and glass beads, 1 3/4 x 94 7/8 x 117 3/4 in. (4.5 x 241 x 299 cm). Courtesy of White Cube and Anadiel Gallery, Jerusalem.

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imperialist desire of exclusive decision and possession, and a nexus between cartography, the constitution of property and colonial power, as Irit Rogoff (2000) underlines: Maps make property—they do so through […] laws, contracts, treaties, indices, covenants as well as plain old deals. Following on this same logic maps produce the “Law” […] through the establishment of such parameters as “the border” which sustains division between those privileged with rights and those outside of them.5

Hatoum draws maps too, but nothing in them responds to a colonial logic of division and control; they rather recall to the dangerous desire of free movement. Significantly, the soap functioning as a map in Present Tense is a traditional artisanal product of Nablus, whose fabrication has never stopped, even in wartime. For this, and also for its provisional materiality, it functions as a symbol of resistance against the barriers of power: the soap is destined to melt down, washing away those bloody borderlines encapsulated in an eternal present. Hatoum’s predilection for evanescent and slipping materials to draw maps is emblematic. Her Map (1998) consists of a big glass carpet, made of small clear marbles delineating the world map. But the high fidelity of the reproduction is under constant threat. A false step, a light touch, even the most imperceptible vibration of the floor is sufficient to decompose the territorial coordinates. This is a map with unstable borders, yet insidious, as the possibility of losing balance and falling down can hardly be avoided. The idea of decomposition of borders as an effect of movement is also what seems to emerge from the installation Continental Drift (2000). Here, the fragile stability of the terrestrial surface, once again made of glass, is constantly menaced by the sea, consisting of thin layer of iron filings, ruffled by a rotating magnetic arm placed below the work’s circular structure. The viewer has the sense that the iron wave could shatter the continental borders, thus irremediably altering the world’s physiognomy. Hatoum’s land is constantly adrift, under the inevitable erosive action of fluxes and movements, and their unpredictable effects. This artwork, like the more recent Shift (2012, fig. 2.3), evokes Jean Baudrillard’s observation that “there is no more system of reference to tell us what happened to the geography of things. We can only take a geoseismic view”. 6 Hatoum inaugurates a new system of reference that questions the solidity of the land beneath our feet, where it seems impossible to plant and cultivate the roots of belonging. This “new geography of things” is rather rhizomatic, to use a metaphor dear to

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Figure 2.3. Mona Hatoum, Shift, 2012. Wool, 59 1/16 x 102 3/8 in. (150 x 260 cm). Photo: Murat Germen. Courtesy of ARTER, Istanbul and White Cube.

Deleuze and Guattari: it crosses borders, tears off the roots, stirs the codes, composed, as it is, of spaces of both dispersion and convergence, deterritorialization and territorialization, of folds, fluxes, currents, vapors. Rather than relying on fixed points, beyond any logic of precision and “establishment”, Hatoum’s maps display what is rendered invisible by official cartography: the experience of geography, the personal geography of a life-path showing the precariousness of borders and the decomposition of spaces, a “subversive” route that leads to the threshold between the known and the unknown, the familiar and the untimely, the proper and the improper, exceeding any clear correspondence between territorial delimitation and identitarian identification. This relation between geography and biography is often, emblematically, recurrent in Hatoum’s art. The map Projection (2006, fig. 2.4) reproduces in two different kinds of paper pulp the perimeters of the continents according to the cartographic projections elaborated by the historian Arno Peters in 1973, reconfiguring, for the first time, the Mercatorian cartography, that is, the official map of the world tracing back to the colonial and imperial period. In the Peters projections the South is much more extended than its traditional image, showing how our image of the world corresponds to a distorted vision of its real proportions. Actually, the world’s map imposed

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Figure 2.4. Mona Hatoum, Projection, 2006. Cotton and abaca, 35 1/16 x 55 1/8 in. (89 x 140 cm) Photo: Ela Bialkowska. Courtesy of Galleria Continua, San Gimignano - Beijing and White Cube.

by the colonial European countries is, still today, a political and economic image coming from the North and privileging the North. Yet, it is precisely when the artist seeks to establish the right order of things that paradoxically she takes distance from any attempt to precision. In Hatoum’s artwork the earth is made visible through the different nuances created by the different qualities of the paper pulp used—thin and transparent abaca paper forming the recessed continents and thick white cotton for the surrounding areas: nothing but a shadow, a quite insubstantial shape, a hardly perceptible drawing, a light mould of an absent body, of a migrant. A connection between geography and biography opens up here: the historical and ideological marginalization of the south of the world is interlaced with the processes of migration and the bodies of the migrants themselves. Projection, for instance, is reminiscent of some antecedent artworks where the artist “projects” herself through the traces of her body: in Skin, Nail and Hair (2003), Hair Drawing (2003), Blood Drawing (2003), the artist impresses her skin, blood, hair, nails into the paper pulp of what can be considered her self-portraits. She announces in a way the aesthetics and technique of her maps, unfolding through fullness and voids, the rough materiality and the fragile indeterminacy of the trace, as a presence that affirms herself defiantly through her losses, her remains, her non-conform, imprecise identity. Recalling the feminist

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politics of location and the observations of the Palestinian philosopher Elias Sanbar, it is possible to think of both Hatoum’s maps and self-portraits as figures of a situated, material, yet becoming identity,7 where a political and existential agency, a form of resistance against the threat of appropriation, erasure and absence is inscribed. Here any pretention to neatly define the borders of both the self and the world, any attempt to possess them, is destined to succumb to the limits of the recognizable and appropriable. What Hatoum seems to propose is an “uprooted geography” whose disorienting maps can also be considered as “memory acts”. They directly recall the existing maps of knowledge and power established by the cultural and political economy of Occidental past and present colonialisms, and question their violent maintenance of “center” and “peripheries”, hegemonic and subaltern areas, “First” and “Third” world. Hatoum produces a counter-geography of estrangement that undoes and continually re-defines this persisting cartography of power. Another example working bluntly across and along the “struggle over geography” and its contested territories is the installation 3-D Cities (2008-2009, figs. 2.5 and 2.6), where printed maps of cities present geometrical cuts forming paper depressions and elevations, similar to roses or cones. But any association with beauty, choreography or playfulness results inappropriate, even disquieting, when, at a closer look, it is possible to see that the maps refer to Beirut, Kabul and Baghdad. Those cuts are more likely signs left by war, signs of violence. Against the modern cartography of differentiated powers, Hatoum’s maps create zones of ontological slippage, time-space interlacements, bonds between distance and proximity, personal and collective memories. Interrogating our position, our established procedures of recognition and definitions, the artist draws us into an alternative critical heterotopic space.8 Here, overcoming barriers, borders, enclosures, divisions in favor of traces, signs, folds, and unpredictable currents, we are propelled into the emergence of another challenging configuration.

Living Archives, Migrant Memories Another artistic example where the overlap between history and geography opens up critical perspectives on such notions of identity and belonging is the installation The Tomb of Qara Koz (2011) by the Bengali artists Ebadur Rahman and Ronni Ahmmed. I saw this artwork at the Venice Biennale, bumping into the diverse histories connected to it.

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Figure 2.5. Mona Hatoum, 3-D Cities, 2008-2009. Printed maps and wood, dimensions variable. Photo: Kleinefenn. Courtesy of Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, and White Cube.

Placed in a central spot of the Lido, this installation came to be part of the urban environment. It was a transitory presence, an impermanent monument, yet deeply rooted in that place, and visually evoking the invisible histories of ancient global connections. The pyramidal architecture recalled ancient funeral monuments, but the multiple narratives of which it was composed instead transposed the viewer into the polyphonic flux of life: The Tomb of Qara Köz recalls the campaign—from the maternal matrix/womb to entropic little deaths/tomb, at tangents and accords with transformative desire—of the Mughal princess Qara Köz, who exerted powerful influence in the Florence of the Medici. The Tomb is organized into three planes: the multifarious narrative of Qara Köz, established in the collective imagination by Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence (2008), is (trans)located between realities, into a per-formative architecture that activates an open network—and commons of emotion and memory— of Bengali (illegal) immigrants who are impacting the psycho-geographical tapestry of Venice. The second plane springs from a shifting layer of associations—the main body of the pyramid consisting of more than one thousand glasses recalls Calvino’s Marco Polo—invoking the tales of fluid

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Figure 2.6. Mona Hatoum, 3-D Cities, detail, 2008-2009. Printed maps and wood, dimensions variable. Photo: Kleinefenn. Courtesy of Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, and White Cube. Venice(s). The cartoonish drawings on each egg employ fragments of Jacopo Bassano, Veronese, Jacopo Tintoretto, Paolo Farinati, to recount the tale of Robert Coover’s Pinocchio’s adventures, Thomas Mann’s Aschenbach in search of purity, Mahler reading Li Tai-Po. The Tomb’s third plane pays homage to Ai Weiwei’s Documenta 12 project, Fairytale, where 101 Bengalis were invited to record/transmit their secret desires as these new immigrants pay alms and prays to the Tomb of Qara Köz to make their wishes come true. The Tomb of Qara Köz, in an uninhibited polyphenomenality of display, evidences lived live(s) in transformation, in polyphony; its synthetic/syncretic approach, is rooted in Opera Aperta, like traditional Bengali theatre, and attempts to stage a conceptual mise en abyme.9

The artist’s description makes clear how, by reversing the “necropolitics” inscribed in funeral monuments, the Tomb itself may become a creative tool for memory, an instrument that is able to highlight the complexity of

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the cultural dimension of memory. The act of remembering inscribes a remembrance, an exercise in composition and reconstitution, where gathering and reassembling do not correspond exclusively to unifying and depositing, but rather to reframing and transforming both the events and space. Significantly, during the Bienniale, the Tomb, with its thousand eggs provocatively “offered” to the public, was repeatedly vandalised and then promptly reconstructed. Thus, the unconscious involvement of people in the process of construction, destruction and reconstruction of the pyramid attests to the potential for a continuing regeneration enabled by the artwork. Inscribed in this artwork is the impossibility to rule and control reality. Ironically, the transparency of the plexiglass planes, intermixed with the painted eggs, conveys fluidity and hybridity, displaying the principle of life itself: movement, mobility, migration. In the Tomb of Qara Koz, the different narratives of the pyramid’s three planes attempt to retrace the artistic, mythic, historical and geographical syncretism between East and West, past and present, life and death, recalling a migrating patrimony, both tangible and intangible. The former is constituted by the westward flows, determined by global capital, of poor migrants mostly from the south of the world, such as the Bengali people. The latter consists of old, often repressed, intercultural connections whose narrative consistency, as The Tomb of Qara Koz suggests, seems to be constantly questioned by an errant, uncontainable tangle of fragments. This singular memorial questions the very possibility of a linear traceability of “our” geography, and the possibility to possess history in transparent, exclusivist and opportunistic terms. The Tomb’s narrative, in a Foucaultian sense, that is, against the continuity of history, “concepttualizes an opposing network of constant change: a system of relations, connecting different sites and conflicting subjects, in a vision of contemporary society based on heterogeneity and heterotopias”.10 Similarly, a sense of a heterotopic reality is what emerges from the Lampedusa Museum of Migrations. This project was born through the association Askavusa (literally “barefoot”) in 2009, after protests against the establishment on the Italian island of a Centre for the Identification and the Exclusion of Immigrants (known as CIE). With the intent of promoting the civic and multicultural growth of the community, Askavusa fostered the encounter with the migrants coming mostly from Tunisia, Libya and other African countries, especially after the Arab spring of 2011, for whom Lampedusa is the first landing place in their Mediterranean passage from Africa to Europe. The Museum was created by an active member of Askavusa, Giacomo Sferlazzo, a Lampedusa-based visual artist and musician, who has assembled and reworked the objects

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found in the abandoned boats left in the island’s public dump. He has literally salvaged, one by one, the remains of the shipwrecks and the landings that have happened on the shores of Lampedusa, in order not only to preserve the memories of the migrants from oblivion and carelessness in what is now known as the “cemetery of the boats”, but also to use them in the creation of new works of art. Like the island itself, the small room that constitutes the museum space is dispersed with images and tangible reminders of transit, without an apparent organization scheme at all. Odd shoes hang from a roof covered by a woven blue tarpaulin as if they were emerging from the deep blue sea or sinking into it; on the wall a buoy from a boat, then family pictures ruined by water, objects with Arabic words on them. Everything here brings travel and border-crossing to mind. “The museum is a space without boundary, a fluctuating search”, we can read on the museum’s website, “a meeting point in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea which witnesses the passage of human beings, animals, cultures and histories, incorporating transit into the reality of Lampedusa”.11 Against the representation of Lampedusa as a space of confinement and expulsion, and playing a crucial role in the political geography of borders and neocolonial governance, the Museum of Migrations reconfigures the island as a place for care and a “contact zone”12 of critical re-creation, operating on the principle of survival through contamination. There is an episode that sustains this idea: one day a young boy from Tunisia, hosted by Askavusa in the museum spaces, inscribed the word Allah onto one of Sferlazzo’s artworks, a gesture that speaks clearly of a never abandoned desire for free expression, a desire which has been satisfied by Askavusa even at the cost of an apparent defacement, because this contamination was read by the artist as a benediction. Avoiding the museum logic of plenitude, and subverting the humanitarian stereotypes of clandestinity, violence, frailty, and need, the museum and Sferlazzo transform human material waste into producers of memory and new meanings, highlighting the traces of a different humanity. Those lost objects, among which there are also sacred texts, private letters, are transformed into pieces of art and memory that come from the future of a distant location that has already arrived to question our traditions, our pretences of being the legitimate subjects of Europe. In this sense, we are reminded of the fact that, as Iain Chambers suggests in his book Mediterranean Crossings, “the precariousness of the migrant is also ours”, and we share with her an “uprooted geography”.13 The objects in the room coexist in a disordered, yet undoubtedly well-cared-for “tiny synchronic space”, where the lack of any archival organization (except for

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the private letters) does not impede the creation of a very ethical and aesthetic museum. Here, the un-invited, the un-predictable, the unarchivable, the un-manageable comes to muddle our history, our maps and visions of the world and of the limits through which our community and citizenship, our sense of heritage and belonging, are constructed. The margins of our nations are rendered mobile and permeable just like memory, which is entangled by new instances coming from other places and other times. We are reminded, for example, of the histories of passages and migrations in the imperialist period, and hence confronted with a complex and contested cartography of global modernity. Art irrupts into history and interrupts the totalizing and exclusionary maps of the world, transposing us into a living archive of postcoloniality, namely of migrant “matter”, both tangible and intangible, past and present. Therefore, if the history of modern art, like the history of modernity, is rooted in, and ordered by, imperial discourse, its narrative, which is historically linear, culturally homogeneous, geographically centralising and politically universal, is mined and exploded by the pressures of postcolonial narratives, discourses and expressions. In this sense, the Mediterranean region, with its migrant histories, serves as a cultural and epistemological paradigm of border-crossings through artistic production.

Cartographies of Difference The postcolonial idea of an uprooted geography brings me immediately to the post-humanist concept of counter-geography elaborated by Ursula Biemann through her videos, which I consider as another form of archive of migrant matters. The latter are about, as the artist herself explains, the process of materialization of difference, of “how difference comes to matter, how things materialize”, and what the role of art is in this process.14 Biemann focuses on the emergence of reality, of how the world is produced as a process of differentiation through movement, through the migration of matter (be it human, economic, molecular, chemical). The artist’s point of departure is a critique of the Euclidian notion of space, that is, of space as a neutral given where events take form. Her position represents a post-humanist critique to the humanist and illuminist concept of tabula rasa, the idea of reality as an abstract space, expecting to be connoted, and to the colonialist and imperialist one of terra nullius, the idea of place as void and inhabited, expecting to be given life. Space, according to Biemann, is itself an actor of production of events; it determines change; it has an autonomous power of action. Space is one of the factors of the production of the living reality in motion; other factors

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are intertwined with it: economy, historical conditions, epistemological and spatial practices, cultural specificities, ecological developments, and they all participate in a dynamic composition of reality. Biemann defines her videos as videocartographies, as they map the interconnections of all these factors as elements of the ecosystem of mobility, migration and territorial transformation. We can say that migration can be considered as the effect of the encounter and relationship between human and natural forces, between political, cultural, economic, social powers and biologic, organic, animal, vegetable, mineral, chemical powers, or to put it in Rosi Braidotti words, between potestas e potentia.15 Art here, as Biemann asserts, is an integral part in the process of reality formation. She, in fact, underlines the importance of her ethnographic methodology, as a form of direct material engagement with the world: “That is how artistic practice inscribes itself into the processes of materialization that is going all around. That is how I inscribe myself into the space of mobility which I document”.16 Thus, the artist and the artwork are part of a process of migration and transformation. For her video Egyptian Chemistry Biemann has been inspired by the quantum physics that conceives reality as an unlocatable energy made of particles and waves which acquire form through a performative act of measurement. Matter is generated by this differential act, where the observer and the observed are inseparable and part of the world in its differential becoming. Matter then emerges through an act of contamination, migration, bordercrossing. Difference is the process of mattering in which the world articulates itself differently. Egyptian Chemistry is a collection of videos where the artist explores the hybrid ecology of the Nile, the coalescence of water and other organic, natural elements with human, social and technological components. The art project is based on field research where water samples were taken in 16 locations along the Nile and around the Delta wetlands. Their chemistry was probed and the locations documented in their socio-ecological configuration. In a series of fairly short videos, Egyptian Chemistry brings the knowledge from multiple sources—from atmospheric physics to hydraulic modelling, peasant activism, agro-science, metaphysics and ecology—into a single forum, forming a sort of epistemological cartography. This is the production of an ecologic paradigm in stark opposition to the capitalist one produced by the Egyptian government. The core motif in Egyptian Chemistry is the collection of water samples at specific sites along the Nile, some of which are rural, some industrial, others urban. Another video, directly related to the first one, documents the same young Egyptian, this time in a white coat, as he

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brings the Nile water samples into the installation of Egyptian Chemistry at the Contemporary Art Forum in Alexandria where he rebottles them into chemistry lab glasses. Each sample represents an archive of multiple histories where human and non–human realities emerge together in a variety of formations. Biemann underlines the extraordinary, but often neglected, proximity between scientific naturalism and social sciences, but also between nature, chemistry and poetry, aesthetics, and the mythic imagination. It is not by chance that she uses the word “al kemia” for describing her aesthetic and epistemological approach: This more wholesome approach goes back to an ensemble of practices encompassing chemical, biological, metallurgical and philosophical dimensions, represented by the original name of “Al Khemia”, long before the epistemological division into disciplines and subdisciplines set in. Al Khemia happened to be the ancient word for Egypt, meaning the Black Land, possibly due to the muddy Nile floods periodically fertilising the land. The term alludes to the vision that, before anything else, the earth is a mighty chemical body where the crackling noise of the forming and breaking of molecular bonds can be heard at all times.17

Then, the project does not use geography as a coordinating principle; it draws on metachemistry as a theory that explains the transformation of matter in its molecular structure. Egyptian Chemistry confronts us with a living archive of hybrid matter and a hybrid consciousness of the world. It may represent an invitation to consider the possibility of an alternative cartography of reality as well as a new archive, able to account for a different humanism, a different political economy. The archives of the future should be able to register, as Biemann’s video-essay suggests, the elements of an untamable and unrepresentable ecology that reconnects to life as difference, unfolding from the encounter between nature and culture, bios and zoe, matter and technology, chemistry and magic. Perhaps a move from the limits of an anthropocentric vision to the possibilities of a post-humanist narrative, based on the recognition of an ecology of multiple belonging, is the path through which we can approach the dream of postcolonial thought. Strongly advocated by Achille Mbembe, this is the dream of a radical humanism, emerging from a responsibility toward our historical inheritance, and founded, above all, on the distinctions that differentiate us.

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Notes 1

See Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 2010). 2 See Sandro Mezzadra, La condizione postcoloniale: Storia e politica nel mondo globale (Verona: Ombre Corte, 2008). 3 Achille Mbembe, “What is Postcolonial Thinking?”, Eurozine 12 (2008), http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2008-01-09-mbembe-en.html. Accessed 20 March 2014. 4 Edward Said, Reflexions on Exile and Other Essays (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2000), 185. 5 Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 75. 6 Cited in Chris Philo, “Foucault’s Geography”, in Thinking Space, eds. Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 230. 7 Elias Sanbar, Figures du Palestinien: Identité des origins, identité de devenir. (Paris: Gallimard, 2004). 8 See Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias”, Diacritics 16 (Spring, 1986): 22-27. 9 Ebadur Rahman, “Curator’s Essay”, http://www.tombofqarakoz.com. Accessed 20 March 2014. 10 Lidia Curti, “Beyond White Walls”, in Cultural Memory, Migrating Modernities, Museum Practices, ed. Beatrice Ferrara (Milano: Politecnico di Milano, 2012), 188. 11 “Museo delle Migrazioni di Lampedusa e Linosa”, http://www.museodellemigrazioni.com. Accessed 20 March 2014. 12 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel, Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). 13 Iain Chambers, Mediterranean Crossings: the Politics of an Interrupted Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 68. 14 Ursula Biemann, “Egyptian Chemistry: From Post-colonial to Post-humanist Matters”, in The Postcolonial Museum. The Arts of Memory and the Pressures of History, eds. Iain Chambers et al. (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 209. 15 See Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006). 16 Biemann, “Egyptian Chemistry”, 211. 17 Ibid., 216.

CHAPTER THREE RE-PERFORMING THE ARCHIVE: A FEMINIST ACT HTTP://REPERFORMINGTHEARCHIVE.TUMBLR.COM/

EL COLECTIVO*

Introduction Memory appears to function as a rhizome of discontinuity and oblivion, yet recently in the Western context there has been an impulse to preserve each and every individual and collective experience. Fleeting moments, now trapped in the warehouse of institutions, become the myths that history is made of. For this reason, the mechanism of the archive has come under the scrutiny of several thinkers. Brazilian psychoanalyst Suely Rolnik questions the perks of the archival politics of artistic practices: whether the archive contributes to the possibility of keeping art alive even if the context changes or, on the other hand, whether archives are intrinsically neutralizers of poetic and political strength. Moreover, Rolnik, a theorist of desire that worked with Félix Guattari, raises two relevant questions: what problems arise while cataloguing poetics instead of documents or objects and, furthermore, what is the underlying cause of the contemporary urge to archive poetics?1 Its place of privilege and its relation to legitimacy makes the archive a system than institutes a patriarchal truth: it is conservative and by no means neutral.2 Based on this incitement, our collective analyses the limits of archival processes and methodologies, and seeks to activate the possibilities for the spectator-researcher to react affectively with exhibited archives. We take as a point of departure the exhibition-archive Re.act feminism: A Performing Archive (referred to as Re.act feminism or Re.act in the rest of the text below), hosted by the Antoni Tàpies Foundation in Barcelona

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between 15 November 2012 and 17 February 2013. For us it was an opportunity to rethink if an archive is intrinsically conservative and patriarchal, and to question what happens when it contains expressions of resistance to oppression. The Re.act feminism project started with a 2009 exhibition in Berlin entitled Performance Art of the 1960s and 1970s Today which included the work of twenty-six North American and European artists. It was one of a number of exhibitions and publications in the last decade that suggested a period of reflection on what is understood in North American scholarship as the second-wave era of feminist practices. In 2007 alone, the exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution was held at MOCA in Los Angeles; the Elizabeth A. Sackler Centre for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum’s inaugural show was Global Feminisms; while Lacy and Leslie Labowitz’s travelling Performing Archive documented women’s art produced between 1970-85. The inclusion of these exhibitions is undoubtedly the strength of the Re.act feminism project: to recover and represent an archive of performative practices that had been largely ignored (or even erased) from the memory of conceptual art, institutional critique, and body art, that continue to be dominated by key players legitimized through institutional art-historical discourse. This text aims to contribute to an unfinished and accumulating discussion surrounding the construction of methodological proposals that seek to react with such an archive. Where does feminism start and end? Who is the subject of feminism? Where does a performance begin and end? How can performance continue to resonate as a document and, more importantly, as an act of resistance? Our exercise in exploring the archive led us to establish a toolbox for shattering and reactivating the documents presented to us as certified and catalogued objects. Therefore, our main objective is to be affected by the archive, and we work with this emotion to redefine ourselves as navigators between method and desire. This approach seeks to blow up the apparatus of the archive or, failing that, to read it as a permeable, fragile apparatus of flimsy proposals that require a roadmap to provide elements that allow the works to speak, and that allow us to read the entity of the archive as a product of the meaning of its parts regardless of control data, index and conservation. Our dissection of this collection of feminist performance is based on the commitment to an archive that assembles itself, where one work calls on others, and the dialogue between them and the spectator-researcher constitutes new potential readings.

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The Toolbox For the methodology of this paper, Haraway’s concept of situated knowledge is crucial because it summarizes discussions of objectivity, subjectivity, perspective, constructivism and empiricism, and allows us to establish the methodological criteria by which we approach the archive. Situated knowledge opens a place to position ourselves, a perspective other than that of: Man and White, one of the many nasty tones of the world objectivity to feminist ears in scientific and technological, late industrial, militarized, racist and male dominant societies … I would like a doctrine of embodied objectivity that accommodates paradoxical and critical feminist science projects…3

In approaching the archive paradigm, we disengage from any relation to the “principle of provenance”, which attributes a certain neutrality to archives under the premise that they are based on origin rather than on the meaning of the documents.4 On the contrary, following Foucault as cited by Deleuze, an archive is an apparatus that provokes visibility and speech, the curves of visibility and enunciation.5 Thus, archives are traversed by power, and they construct a sense of truth based on a selection or discrimination of elements.6 With this clarification in hand, throughout our project we still faced a divergence of opinion on the concept of the archive as an apparatus traversed by power. Such divergence clearly represents the ambivalent perceptions that we, as users, experienced through our engagement with the Re.act feminism archive. That is, we oscillated between Gilles Deleuze’s and Giorgio Agamben’s reflections on the concept of apparatus. Both thinkers expand on Foucault’s conceptualization of the archive that relates the apparatus with disciplinary institutions such as schools, jails, and factories. However, for Agamben an apparatus is anything that has the capacity to modify, model, orient or condition behaviour.7 He states that the present phase of capitalism accumulates and multiplies a great amount of apparatuses which, in the end, separate us from ourselves and from our relationship with what surrounds us. As apparatuses proliferate, so do subjectivities and this, according to him, explains why subjectivity serves, in our time, as a mask to personal identity.8 Agamben summarizes: 1) [The apparatus] is a heterogeneous group that includes virtually everything, whether discursive or not: discourses, institutions, buildings, laws, police measures, philosophical propositions. The apparatus itself is

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Even if Deleuze recognizes power and the production of subjectivity as related to the apparatus, he has a less fatalist perspective. He agrees with Agamben in the idea that an apparatus is what separates us from ourselves. Yet “being” ourselves does not preexist but, rather, it is the product of several processes of subjectivation that are continuously taking place. With this in mind, he argues that an apparatus is constituted by a regime of visibility and a regime of enunciation (that continually suffers deviations, mutations and transformations), lines of force and lines of flight. Here, power appears as a third, and also variable, dimension of the apparatus. That is why in a philosophy of the apparatus, Deleuze rejects universals because they do not explain the variability and constant fracture and mutation within.10 Both Deleuze and Agamben coincide in seeing history as an apparatus that separates us from ourselves and that ought to be desecrated: one must play with what is reserved for the gods or for the spheres of knowledge that are considered “serious”. Through this case study we maintain that an archive must be a set of elements gathered according to their potential, and ready to provoke more than their simple sum.11 We argue that the archive in our study has the characteristics of a verifier apparatus,12 and that the result is the political neutralization of the elements it contains. We do this based on the feminist methodology of “situated knowledge”.13 This text proposes a playful way to approach the archive where the provisional rules of reading are the result of our reaction to its elements, thus connected to the archive and to ourselves. It is therefore not a methodology that can be overridden by arguments of relativism or subjectivity, for we propose an objective methodology whose scientific objectivity is not the tyranny of the gaze of the researcher on the object of study. The way to give life (and sense) to an archive is to use it, to play with it.

Re.act feminism as a System of Representation In 2009, the archive Re.act feminism contained the work of twenty-six North American and European artists of the 1960s and 1970s. It had incorporated some others, including the work of some Latin American performers of the time. As an entity, it collects a wide array of videographic and photographic material documenting the artistic strategies of

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performance emerging from different axes of feminism. This affords an opportunity to enquire, through a self-reflexive and memory-preserving gesture, into these artistic practices and into the subjects of feminism that they produce. What technologies of gender and body become visible in the works? Which systems of representation do they subvert or affirm? This extensive collection of documentation of performances, which by nature tends to be limited to small audiences, allows us to develop a first-hand dialogue with the archive in order to establish a map, to chart its lines of flight and explore new discursive “routes”. Re.act feminism can be contextualized as belonging to a broader institutional trend that uses the archival format creatively as its mode of systematization and representation of knowledge. In this sense, we consider the archival format as not merely a specific technique of cultural representation, but as a much more general apparatus that implies a complex network of relations and mechanisms between institutions and processes of subjectivation in a set of specific rules whereby power relations materialize. Thinking of Re.act feminism as an archival display-apparatus allowed us to open up a discussion concerning the extent, intensity and time projections within the specific exhibition logics, in a complex network of power relations among artists, institutions, audiences. Focusing on the ways these relations were activated, we observed the archive’s operating procedures, such as the artistic selection in relation to the conceptual statements of the curatorial discourse, the general concept of the material organization throughout the whole exhibition, the group tagging in the website as well as the whole curatorial display. What emerged from our approach was a structure that was stimulating and suggestive in many ways, but also an apparatus that controlled, captured, intercepted, moulded, oriented and sometimes determined the visitor’s gesture and experience. 14 In this sense, isolated hearing and viewing were privileged, and limited contextual information was provided. The whole exhibit’s surveillance mechanism aimed to protect intellectual property as well as videographic and photographic enregistrement preservation which reinforced the inclusion-exclusion consulting mechanisms of the archive. Because of the way it is displayed, it has the tendency to differentiate and dissociate its experimentation from other sorts of experiences in various processes of subjectivation. The way in which the performances are presented in relation to each other is that of autonomous discursive entities, as artistic works split from their productive matrix, that appear as mere performance techniques. This

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happens for example, in El Guante by Cecilia Vicuña, in which the artist weaves a glove on the streets of Santiago, Chile and after she finishes, starts touching people in the public space with the glove as a form of mediation between persons living under a dictatorship. But the archive does not say anything about the fight for democracy of Vicuña in this kind of performance. What results from this extraction from the geopolitical, emotional and artistic context is the reconstruction and reaffirmation of the categories of authorship, oeuvre and viewer. The archive uses an alphabetical order for organizing the artist’s name or surname, which allows for the identification of the works through their author and not their content, meaning or intent. This hierarchization also operates in relation to photographic and video documents of performances. Viewing the performance-document as a derivative of its author, trimmed of external textuality, means the work is seen as depoliticized and the archive as depoliticizing. This attenuates its perturbing and disruptive potential. Moreover, the protocol for viewing—the box-desks and the seating position of the viewer—imposes an isolated visual and aural experience, which constitutes an atomized spectator-subject. The spectator produced by the archive is a very different one from each spectator produced in each different, live or mediatized, performance. In an attempt to bridge out substantial gaps, the works were grouped or sourced according to labels (tags) attached to the documents: abstract linguistic-conceptual propositions such as “fear”, “desire”, “femininity”, “sexuality”, “the common”, “capital”, present themselves as descriptions of content. From behind the decontextualizing discursive veil of the archive, the politics of both the labels and performances appears to be neutralized. The imposition of a label obstructs the possibility of other readings as it is presented as a definitive classification and not as a simple game. For example, what is the meaning of the label or tag “femininity” in a feminist archive? Furthermore, the labels ignore the territorialization that necessarily occurs in the spatio-temporal context of each of the performances. The inquiry into feminist, gender-critical and queer strategies is addressed with an approach that is thematic (centralized), ontological (of the feminine) and causal (the trans-generational is understood as cause and effect), ignoring the concrete situations that produced the works as well as their distribution and their effect. Despite the fact that the works contained in the archive propose the critical reconsideration of the female as a subject, the archive operates through an organizing logic of ontological identity—a feminism of essentialism that focuses on the female subject from certain geographies

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(European and North-American) and within certain chronologies (consequences of the Second Wave). We consider that an archive might achieve a certain degree of objectivity when following Donna Haraway’s notion of situated knowledge: “objectivity turns out to be about particular and specific embodiment and definitely not about the false vision promising transcendence of all limits and responsibility”. 15 In the same vein, we observed there is only a partial critique of the category of race and the process of colonization, achieved by the inclusion of some performances beyond the limits of the white woman. What remains to be asked is if the works gathered in Re.act feminism retain their original poetic and political force, and if—and how—the archive achieves the re-generation of those sensory experiences. This question echoes the concerns on the politics of archiving suggested by Suely Rolnik in Furor de archivo: “How can we conceive of an inventory that is able to carry this potential in itself—that is, an archive ‘for’ not ‘about’ artistic experience or its mere cataloguing in an allegedly objective manner?”.16

This Is Not a Methodology The aim of this exploration of Re.act feminism is to create a cartography with which to approach the archive through a review of the affective effects of its parts. Each piece generates a key that allows us to form lines of flight—in the form of “itineraries” or “suggested routes” that aim to escape the order previously given by the curators. After discussing the limitations and the potential of the archival apparatus, we agreed on an initial strategy to review the works in their entirety and establish a general analysis of what Re.act feminism encompassed. From the beginning we set out to abandon the index data and labels proposed by the organizational methodology in order to suspend momentarily the given alphabetical, generational and geographical order. We wanted to let our readings be guided by the affective reception of our collective’s individuals rather than by a generalized thematic overview. The affective reception was translated into what we have called “triggers”: creative strategies, words or phrases summarizing the most powerful disruptive actions of each performance. These conceptual tags varied from piece to piece and from person to person. Once we completed the screening of the footage, we shared the results with the group and then collectively worked to create lines of flight by freely associating the terms and phrases with each other into multiple linear sequences that intersected at coincidental points when two people had attributed similar triggers to

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Figure 3.1. First proofs of classification of the archive made by El Colectivo in which we try to classify some performances based on random criteria of our selfinvented triggers and the country of production. Courtesy of the authors.

different pieces. These trigger sequences allowed us to read (or rewrite) different strata throughout the works and the apparatus of Re.act feminism. This creation of new lines of meaning discloses a roadmap that is capable of visualizing situational affinities between the performances based on their effect on the multiplicity of our collective, as we will explain further. The selection criteria for the triggers range from the conceptual to the descriptive, but always resonate with the personal experience of the spectator-researcher. As seen in the data base produced by El Colectivo as a first step of the cartography (available at http://reperformingthearchive.tumblr.com/base-de-datos), signifiers such as “bloody nails”, “orgasmic asphyxiation” or “tits and asses” refer respectively to pieces such as Zona de Dolor I/Maipu by Diamela Eltit, Weekend by Christina Kubisch and Klassenkampen by Kirsten Justensen. Thus, a reading from creative, situational and contextual notions of the performances within Re.act feminism is accentuated, rather than a reading organized through the classifying archival data. This is our proposal: the production of a cartography of the apparatus of Re.act feminism as a feminist act of re-performance capable of resuscitating multiple possible readings of the pieces and the strategies employed by the artists, of which many are hidden by the actual archival apparatus. In this regard, we bring to the fore some examples to illustrate the journey from viewing the footage to the choice of the triggers and the formation of the lines of flight. In Marina Abramovic’s Art Must Be Beautiful, the Artist Must Be Beautiful, the artist combs her hair emphatically for fifty minutes while saying “Art must be beautiful, the

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artist must be beautiful”, alluding to the command of female beauty which was questioned and deconstructed by various feminist discourses and practices. Highlighting the sense of this piece with the trigger “beauty hurts”, we refer to one of the commonplaces of a girl’s education, but at the same time we refer to the slogans used in feminist campaigns against this order of beauty. Thus, the horizon that this piece shares with a feminist genealogy is centred on the critique of gender stereotypes. Also, it refers to the construction of the regime of art as aura and beauty. Another way of choosing the triggers can be seen in relation to the work of Helena Cabello and Anna Carceller, entitled Un beso. The trigger “aggressive lesbians” manages to ironize the notion of violence that is produced by contrasting the sound and image in the work: we see two women passionately kissing each other while hearing the sounds of a violent argument between a couple in the background. During the 4:03 minutes of the video, the idea of a unique kind of lesbian, or of a unique kind of a lesbian relationship, is shattered through the separation of the image, the kissing, and the audio of violent discussion, in a way that does not reify the lesbian encounter. It is a relevant example of how a lesbian amorous encounter can also be seen as a violent moment for a spectator immersed in a homophobic context; for this reason, we associated it to the ironic trigger of “aggressive lesbians”. As we have emphasized, this methodology seeks to shatter the apparatus of the archive, but also to read the archive as a permeable apparatus that accepts and invites different approaches to consultation or readings. It is about getting closer to the archive and the resonances of Re.act feminism in our own bodies and embodied subjectivities in their multifariousness. First and foremost, we ask ourselves who is the subject of feminism that is being represented in this archive. In Haraway’s words, this subject corresponds to: the split and contradictory self […as] one who can interrogate positionings and be accountable, the one who can construct and join rational conversations and fantastic imaginings that change history. Splitting, not being, is the privileged image for feminist epistemologies of scientific knowledge.17

To approach the archive based on this question enables us to analyse the bonds between performances in a more diverse and shifting way, assuming that:

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By deploying the lines of flight we sought to reactivate the archive through a reverse reading that established the links between the triggers— those that had been abstracted from the works until that point—and the taxonomical information that the archive provides to describe the provenance of the documents. Here, we chose to present one line of flight that brings into focus a certain political intention. We named it the “revolution-line”, a category that came out of a collective creative process and does not intend to suggest any further meanings: Revolution line: Revolution - fight - activism - aggressive lesbians politics - schizo - resistance - passion - laughter - sex - this is not a performance - electrified body - orgasmic asphyxiation - blood - taboo.

Each trigger (from the list above) corresponds to the performances below in the same order as can appreciated in Figure 3.2: Charming for the Revolution by Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, 100 vs. 100 by Patrycja German, In Mourning and in Rage by Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Liebowitz, Un Beso by Anna Carceller and Helena Cabello, Them-me by Nisrine Boukhari, Feltboots by Mare Tralle, Lachen (Laughter) by Antonia Baehr, Dirty Sexecology by Annie M. Sprinkle and Elizabeth M. Stevens, Trisal by Gabriele Stötzer and El Arte de la Performance/Las cosas/ íntimo y personal by Esther Ferrer. With this exercise we opened up one route, a means of reading together performances that are associated with exploring the political and that find themselves more or less dispersed in the Re.act. Looking for a way to get closer to Re.act feminism, we tried to schizoanalyze the archive following the work of Deleuze and Guattari. We took the notion of schizoanalysis seriously, according to which the development and intensification of a new line of work always draws a new map, creates a new intellectual space and directly triggers agency.

From the Box to the Metro As the analysis continues we felt the need to create a different way of visualizing or conceiving the archive. We transformed part of the data base of the performances into a map to establish possible relations among them. We conceptualized:

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a map [that] is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation.19

Once the archive box had been opened and detonated, we saw its contents (even with the key word “Revolution”) as a constellation of crossing and conflicting flows—between “artist”, “performance”, “country of origin” and “trigger”. These flows allowed us to physically visibilize the components of the archive and its most strongly rooted modes of organization. At the same time, supposing that each work has multiple triggers, we created other lines of flight that bring together works such as 11 de marzo, Menstruation Wait and Un Beso, united by the strategy of the visibilization of taboos such as a homosexual kiss or menstrual blood. Throughout this exercise, we aimed to prove that there are many valid connections between the works. From the three performances mentioned above, we chose the two that are connected in the Re.act archive, (11 de marzo and Menstruation Wait) by the tag “femininity” which in this case functions as a euphemism for menstruation. In that way, we intended to create new lines of discourse. Following Deleuze, apparatuses are under constant mutation when confronted with processes of subjectivity.20 How might it be possible to visually represent the lines of triggers with their intersections, points of connection and dispersions? How can we recreate the archive in a sufficiently flexible way so as to access one point from whatever other but at the same time maintain its cohesion? Situating an archive in subterranean Barcelona—where its tunnels, invisible from the surface, are the triggers (lines of flight of construction) and the stations are the performances—offers the possibility to imagine the spectator as a traveller who is free to change metro line, bifurcate, leave, walk or remain on route. The metro map of Re.act feminism in Barcelona remains open— at times its lines intercross through triggers and other times they run from performance to performance, from meaning to meaning. Between the various lines of flight developed in the process of identifying the exhibited content in the archive, we decided to translate and critique the line “Revolution”. Anne Bean’s work Shadow Deeds: Drawing Life, is an act of recognition: an act of recognizing the falsity of the scientific method. We add to this the works of Esther Ferrer, Leslie Leibowitz, Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, and other artists that have denounced this kind of representation of history from the beginning. From Haraway 21 we also maintain an awareness that an analysis concordant with a feminist

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methodology should necessarily reveal the non-neutral ways in which the “real” is constructed—it should be capable of directing itself towards various disciplines, spaces and other realities. In this way, the works in the archive by Sandra Sterle, Gabriele Stötzer and Annie M. Sprinkle and Elizabeth M. Stevens help us understand this violence of construction by proposing alternatives using different techniques to the same end that reveal the force of epistemic violence. What we propose as feminist experimentation is related to one of the maxims of Haraway: “We need to learn in our bodies”. 22 With this in mind, we observed that many of the performances suggest taking our bodies to the extreme through self-injury in order to reveal strategies of visibilizing vulnerability and feelings of helplessness or physical exhaustion. Many of the artists construct a space or an apparatus that operates as a physically straining exercise. For example, Kate Gilmore tries to break through a wooden panel with the shape of a star to fit in it (Star Bright, Star Might) or Marina Abramoviü combs her hair mechanically (Art Must Be Beautiful, Artist Must Be Beautiful). They show their strength in order to arrive at an undetermined consequence— affective-poetic acts are presented as methodologies for self-determining somatic fictions. They are coming from an intimate realm that penetrates the political conformity that socially constructs itself through the organization of the senses. These fictions are constructed not only in the work of Abramoviü or Gilmore, but also in performances by Patrycja German, Christina Kubisch, Valie Export and others. Finally, we turn to another aspect of our choice to travel through the “Revolution” line that links many of the feminist performances contained in the Re.act feminism archive. The works analysed suggest an objectivity that begins from the affects of subjects in their specific spatio-temporal locations. That is how we find within the archive many artists whose work is conscious of disrupting the reification of subjectivities that the capitalist system seeks to present as natural. The works of María Teresa Hincapié (Vitrina), Renate Bertlmann (Die schwangere Braut im Rollstuhl) and Graciela Carnevale (El Encierro) suggest useful models. “Feminist objectivity means quite simply situated knowledges”:23 it is through this idea that we situate our journey through a cartography of the Revolution—one that critiques reality through the use of the body in order to create new meanings and other means of socially negotiating, acting and relating. Each of these works proposes a translation of the world, and from this we generate new lines of flight—other partial perspectives that we can work through actively.

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Figure 3.2. The Revolutioon line of perfformances anallysed accordin ng to their relations withh each other bassed on the assig gned triggers. C Courtesy of the authors. a

Seee You Latter Re.act: An A Open C Conclusion 24 Deleuze argues that thhe potential of the archive iss found in its revision. r Its value is nnot the collectiion or accumu ulation of objeccts and expresssions, but rather the liines of flight that shoot ou ut from it. Inn the words of o Michel Foucault in T The Archeologgy of Knowled dge, cited by D Deleuze:

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Figure 3.3. A frame of the interactive cartography piece is available at http://reperformingthearchive.tumblr.com/cartografia. Courtesy of the authors. A diagnosis understood in this way doesn’t establish a confirmation of our identity through a game of distinctions. It establishes us as difference— that our reason and rationality is the difference of the discourses, our history is the difference of times, our “I” is the difference of masks”.25

Here, the author observes the virtues of reading history as an archive: it doesn’t permit readings that are linear or determined through oppositions and difference, but rather discovers history as discontinuity. However, during our analysis we sometimes felt trapped: we observed that if we take into account the current models of feminist thinking and strategies, which go beyond binary distinctions of man/woman, the perspective and apparatus of display of the Re.act archive falls short. Ultimately the archive struggles to connect with, and provoke, queer readings and strategies. Another relevant aspect is related to the history of the archive that positions itself with an empirical objectivity that mismatches the situated reflections and situated knowledge that we sought. We have to question its capacity to be “reactive” and what kinds of systems or provisions it actually provides within the museum context to become an apparatus in the sense proposed by Agamben. In the end, we wonder if the archive is operating more as a machine of control that reproduces hegemonic discourses and even depoliticizing effects that operate as an obstacle to radical sensory experience.

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Notes *

Multidisciplinary group comprised of 16 researchers: Ana Emilia Felker Centeno, Mauricio Patrón Rivera, Sofía Lemos, Claudia Lorenzo, Carolin Maxime Ackermann, Daniel Medina Orland, Anyely Marín Cisneros, Aimar Pérez Gali, Paloma Gutiérrez, Andrea Silva, Javiera Silva Ahuyón, Magdalena Pérez Balbi, Renato Fumero, Rebecca Close, Ana Fernanda Cadena y Blanca Pujals. Everyone is part of the Independent Study Program at the Contemporary Art Museum in Barcelona from different origins such as Catalonia, La Rioja, Mexico, Germany, United Kingdom, Bolivia, Venezuela, Chile, Argentina and Portugal. Translated from the Spanish by Rebecca Close and Carolin Maxime Ackermann. 1 Suely Rolnik, “Furor de Archivo”, in Revista de Estudios Visuales (EV): Retóricas de la Resistencia (Murcia: CENDEAC, 2010), 115-129. 2 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996). 3 Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. (Oxon and New York: Routledge, 1991), 188. 4 Anna Maria Guasch, Arte y archivo, 1920-2010. Genealogías, tipologías y discontinuidades (Madrid: Akal/Arte contemporáneo, 2011), 16. 5 Gilles Deleuze, “¿Qué es un dispositivo?”, in Michel Foucault, filósofo (Barcelona: Gedisa, 1990), 155. 6 Deleuze, “¿Qué es un dispositivo?”, 155. 7 Giorgio Agamben, “¿Qué es un dispositivo?”, Revista sociológica 73: (2011): 249-264, http://www.revistasociologica.com.mx/pdf/7310.pdf, 257. Accessed 6 March 2014. 8 Ibid., 258. 9 Ibid., 250. 10 Deleuze, “¿Qué es un dispositivo?”. 11 Ibid., and Rolnik, “Furor de archivo”. 12 Agamben, “¿Qué es un dispositivo?”. 13 Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women. 14 Agamben, “¿Qué es un dispositivo?”, 257. 15 Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women, 190. 16 Rolnik, “Furor de archivo”, 116. 17 Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women, 193. 18 Ibid. 19 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mil mesetas: capitalismo y esquizofrenia (Valencia: Pre-textos, 1988), 18. 20 Deleuze, “¿Qué es un dispositivo?”. 21 Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women. 22 Ibid., 190. 23 Ibid., 188. 24 Deleuze, “¿Qué es un dispositivo?”. 25 Ibid., 160.

CHAPTER FOUR AN ART OF CONDENSATION, A POLITICAL RELATIONSHIP: ARCHIVING THE CRISIS, CLAIMING THE FUTURE ELPIDA KARABA

In December 2008 Athens was burning. The night of December 6th, Alexis Grigoropoulos, a high school student who was hanging around with his mates appeared as being suspicious to a policeman who, following a short conversation, shot him dead.1 The protests against this sudden and inconceivable death turned into a generalized disobedient rage that led to the burning of the centre of Athens. This was not an expression of mourning, but a collective acting out of a society which, at least for a moment, came into a state of being out of control. Although the “Grigoropoulos event” took place before the “official” burst of a disastrous economic policy, followed by generalized social destabilization, it seems to have been the outrider of a very stressful period for Greece. And this feeling of loss of control comes forth in many different ways since the outbreak of the crisis. As one would have expected, the economic crisis revealed once concealed aspects of Greek society that now burst onto reality: antidemocratic outbreaks, absurd state repression, racism, xenophobia. Of course, all the above reactionary attitudes and phenomena are not solely the side-effects of the Greek crisis. These phenomena are linked together and unfold throughout Europe as a bleak cloud above our heads. The destabilization of the European Union as a result of the crisis of capitalism has had a profound impact on the political and cultural spheres, which came to meet other sorts of failures of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Within the shadow of a fin de siècle context of successive collapses, archival art has met a particular flush. Different topoi faced with a severe

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political crisis accompanied by crisis of identity—a dislocated public sphere, economic collapse and deep condensation of values—challenged issues such as: identity, memory, history, power mechanisms and biopolitical apparatuses. Archives have been the regulatory apparatus par excellence of modernity,2 and archival art aimed at the very core of these methods by subverting the mechanisms in the same subtle way of using and manipulating power. Archive art 3 became one of many different forms—activist and performative forms of art, amongst others—connected in a creative way with the environment that arose from the deepening of the crisis and the practices of resistance that emerged from its ground. The works that will be presented in this paper focus on archival practice as it emerged in Greece, and they are gradually forming a body of works addressing the crisis in an immodest and critically reconstructive way. Archives are put forward as public works which do not claim only a natural space of preservation, installation and presentation, but try primarily to produce a conceptual space which enables identities, concepts and groups to be detached from specific, naturalised ideological images. In that sense, in the construction of an archive (whether it be artistic or not), and crucial categories concerning individuals and society, emerge, are revised, emptied and reformulated. Yet the relation of the archive to the public is not always as evident as it is in other artistic practices (works, monuments designed for a square, a construction of a park, performances, interventions in buildings, roads, squats, demonstrations, etc.). However, in archive art the questions concerning the public (space) find an interesting expression. An archive is a formation that allows “matters of fact” to become “matters of concern”, setting up the hegemony of a new paradigm. Thus, the space produced by an archive can be equally a theory or an identity, and it can confer meaning on words, terms, concepts, which have been emptied or yet in lack of meaning. The archive assumes a key role: it is the platform where material can be organised, preserved and distributed. The gathering of this material can be the first step to form a discourse around which certain groups can claim their position in history. In that way, the production of an archive can function as an act of emancipation, because it places anew this power at the disposal of agents, producing a “political relationship”. Thus, an archive, as Rancière would argue, is a conceptual framework which bears the paradox of simultaneous junction and disjunction and articulates a complicated relation between two worlds: visible and invisible, empirical distribution of power and the idea of politics, material logic and sensual imaginary.4 In other words, it is the construction of a paradoxical world that puts together separate worlds.5

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Archive art and its methods constitute an ideal place for these junctions and disjunctions to take place. Presented in this paper, the archives of Vangelis Vlahos, Yota Ioannidou, Mary Zygouri, and Lina Theodorou evoke in their special trope the “crises” of the contemporary condition as they have affected a particular locality—in this case Greece—but, at the same time, in their extension beyond it. For the project ArchivePublic/Patras, (an ongoing project addressing issues of particular topicalities in an attempt to interconnect them by using archives as a mobilization mechanism of an extended public sphere 6 ), artist Vangelis Vlahos produced an archive, which has been reduced to a sole piece of evidence. Vlahos reverses the exuberant understanding of the archive which translates into an obsessive collection of multiple pieces of evidence. Vlahos presents us only one image, the picture of a school chair, as if this sole image is the only content of the archive. This is a surprising reversal of the idea of the archive, as the place where one can find an extended body of information, material and data. The amount of collected documents minimises the importance of each data in the name of the plenitude of information. The levitating image that Vlahos presents us, out of context, out of time and space, questions the accumulative logic of the archive (fig. 4.1). This single piece of evidence imposes on us an insistent and critical reception of it, in the very process of decoding the meanings carried by any evidence. Vangelis Vlahos’ archive concerns a case which profoundly upset Greek society, the murder of the mathematician Nikos Temponeras (19901) during the occupation of a high school, raising questions concerning the undercurrent of reactionary elements that bedevil the city of Patras. The murder of the leftist mathematician becomes for a moment the empty signifier which binds together a chain of equivalences. In other words the reactionary, cold-blooded murder of the leftist mathematician, in 1991, brings forth equivalences to other reactionary murders happened in different times and places, as for example, the murder of the student Alexis Grigoroupoulos in Athens, in 2008, weaving a reactionary thread that interconnects different topicalities and different moments in history. At the same time, the high-school students’ revolts in the 90s are affiliated with present-day mobilisations related to the ongoing and doomed reforms of the Greek university. This archive, constituted around a reactionary murder calls on us to resist various reactionary attitudes: nationalist and non-democratic outbreaks appearing endlessly intensified, which unfortunately do not represent an exclusive negative phenomenon of the

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Figure 4.1. Vangelis Vlahos, Nikos Temponeras, 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

domestic landscape. Vlahos presents to us the “clause” of the archive—the picture of a pupil’s chair. Its forensic arrangement attempts to motivate us to pursue further research, to formulate questions and aporias and to posit ourselves regarding past and present events, and at the same time, as in detective novels, reveal the sociopolitical pathology. The provocative arcane character of the work challenges our analytic and synthetic faculties, underscoring that the archive is a contingent construction of equivalences among different elements that activates the connections between subjects, sites and conditions. On other occasions, Vlahos’ archives combine a literal aesthetic with a subtle form of sarcasm. His archive Foreign Archaeologists from Standing to Bending Position (figs. 4.2 and 4.3) comprises fifty three portraits of archaeologists who have worked in Greece over the last sixty years, and is derived from the archives of international archaeology schools based in Athens. Vlahos criticises the subaltern position of Greece (past and present), while he points at the possibility of an inversion. The artist exhibits a series of uncommented photos of archaeologists in standing and bent positions executing their usual practice of examining, measuring and surveying the archaeological fields. The factual, tedious presentation is

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Figures 4.2 and 4.3. Vangelis Vlahos, Foreign Archaeologists from Standing to Bending Position, 2012. Courtesy of the artist.

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opposed to the ironic gaze set upon what symbolises the long history of foreign powers surveillance in Greek internal affairs (as the foreign archaeological schools and their work in various archaeological sites were connected with power relations between Greece and its European allies).7 This also brings to mind the present surveillance status imposed on Greek economy. The banality of the standing and bending positions, the factuality of the photos deprived of any nostalgic air actuates a critical reflexivity on the roles of the subjects, both dominant and subaltern, involved in any crisis, political or economic. The construction of these archives, based either on dug-up and elaborated or fictional material, follows a process of research, collection, registration, organisation and making of items. In some cases, the archive is published as textual and photographic material combined with a curated exhibition. On other occasions, the research/archive assumes a reenactment, a lecture, an activist distribution, orthodox and unorthodox dissemination of the material. It may also assume the form of a performance, leaving behind documentary material or props that can be used at will in other versions of the project. Such a performance is condensed in Aula Intergalactica, Yota Ioannidou and Tereza María Díaz Nerio’s collaborative project (fig. 4.4). The project referred to a piece of research and its corresponding archive bearing on the work and action of the first Greek anarchist woman, Maria Pantazi, who took part in the Paris Commune. The artists, based on the lack of adequate information, engage in a reconstruction of Pantazi’s case, inventing and suggesting connections between past events in their extension to the present. The archival construction of Ioannidou connects the Bagua Massacre in the Amazon jungle in 20098 with the nine-hour movement in the 19th century and the episodes that occurred during the Paris Commune. The core of this archive is the minor story of a certain person. This story is deliberately related to a series of social struggles, producing a network that seems to evoke and invite populist resistance to capitalist domination and its social forms of appearance. Ioannidou participated in the project ArhivePublic/Patras with the presentation of RadioStation_A, an archive that opts for the practice of reenactment. Her project is dedicated to the radio station “Solidarity” set up by the fired workers in the occupied factory of Peraiki Patraiki in Patras in 1990. Ioannidou has gathered material from the programs of the radio station based on the narratives and the personal archives of people who took part in the mobilizations, and then she organised a re-enactment of the radio program. In this re-enactment, the voices of the past fired workers join the struggling voices of those currently fired, unemployed

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Figure 4.4. Yota Ioannidou and Teresa María Díaz Nerio, Aula Intergalactica, 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

and deprived of the right to work. In contemporary globalized societies, where changes spread rapidly and uniformly without any possibility of adapting to particular cultural contexts, such events become quickly disconnected from the history that gave rise to them and, hence, lose their contemporary relevance. In contrast, the construction of the archive and its re-enactment permits a reinvestment in these struggles, whose meaning is neither distant nor unrelated to the present condition. In this case, the archive becomes the nodal point of incomplete demands and the cause of subjects getting politically involved. For the project ArchiveRights9, performer Mary Zygouri studied the work and the remnants of the burnt archive of Maria Karavela, a leading progressive Greek performer, and created the documentary Opera Aperta: Paedagogic Performance for Adults. The work of Maria Karavela, who died in 2012 in an asylum, is connected with the revolutionary art against the Greek Junta in the 70s and with the formation of leftist discourse in the first post-Junta years. 10 Zygouri focuses on the pedagogical aspects of Karavela’s work that led to two of her notorious performances in the 80s. The archival documentary contains documents, interviews with Karavelas’s students, re-enactments performed by M. Zygouri, and inputs from instructed performances the artist organises in occupations, asylums and

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public spaces. The documentary reveals the aspects of the formation of the left-wing subject in Greece, lured by the condition of victim, retributory and hero, impersonated in the different personas of Karavela, bringing forth the riveting of leftist discourse 11 and prompting us to face the phantasms of our recent past. Moreover, Zygouri’s focus on the educator’s persona of Karavela expresses the investment in a problematized pedagogy, in an “artistic education” as proposed by Maria Karavela and developed further by contemporary performers, as the artist herself, in order to envision an emancipated and agonistic democratic future. Archival art takes up a dynamic function regarding the issue of an “emancipated education”. For ArchiveRights, Ioannidou organised a performative reading. Performative readings—part of the educational turn in art—focus on the performative, dramatized dissemination of knowledge beyond the formal versions and readings of history, economy or politics. Performative readings meet the need of all the more people to claim their own writing of history and their own position in the future. Her work Voice Over (fig. 4.5) uses material gathered from the archive of ISET,12 focusing on the turbulent Junta period in Greece (1967-1974), and trying in particular to spot any exhibitions that ended hastily. In this context, her performative lecture—linking past and current events—stresses the absurdity of repressive mechanisms and reveals the absurdity of political alliances such as Mao’s with Papadopoulos, the principal leader of the Greek Junta, while hundreds of Greek Maoists were rotting in exile. Anomy, repression and reactionary phenomena appear again and again in these archives that express the fall of the symbolic Law in times of crises and the demand of reclaiming it anew. Lina Theodorou’s archive for ArchivePublic / Patras, Self_Redress, Justice in the Hands of the Individual, is a quasi-journalistic archive constructed around the question of retribution by taking the law into one’s own hands (fig. 4.6). Theodorou opts for an indiscreet way of implanting the archive into the public space. The artist collects cases of severe retribution and turns the archive’s information into “typical” works of art, into oversized notice boards, which she “implants” in the formal agency of the law, in the law courts of Patras. Her coloured, oversized notice boards of a conceptual, minimalist aesthetic are inscribed with fragmentary pieces of information on the cases of retribution. The notices do not reveal only the anomy taking place in the social field; they “return” this anomy, loudly and provocatively in the form of a decorative “innocent work of art”, to the agency of the law, revealing cases of omissions made by the official agents of the law. Her archive, following the common practice of archival ventures, is “dis-

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Figure 4.5. Yota Ioannidou, Voice Over, 2013. Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 4.6. Lina Theodorou, Self-Redress, Justice in the Hands of the Individual, 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

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persed”, de-centred, and calls into question the rhetoric of a central perspective. Theodorou’s archive, in tandem with its “implantation” in the form of a work of art nailed on the wall in the natural public space of a court, is also organised in the virtual space of a website, producing a multi-channelled disposition of the archive. The hybrid character of these projects, advanced by the artist as their circulation among formal artistic agencies and combined with their presentation in conferences, festivals, NGO public events and other nonartistic activities, facilitates their visibility and their enriching by other discourses apart from the artistic. Exposing certain archives, histories and positions in different contexts enhances the distribution and the accessibility. In such a way different groups and histories are meant to be told and heard. This brings to mind Arendt’s argument that the exposure of certain claims opens the way for the occupation of a prominent position in the realm of human affairs.13 The exposure of claims, facts and struggles enables the “appearance” of particular subjects and particular demands to the stage of history through the archive, allowing to subjects to claim their own archive, their own version of events, in this case. Usually it is the story of the strong, the winner, the dominant that becomes history. The decision to say a different side of the story, using the same hegemonic apparatuses, as is the archive, in many cases, as for example happened with the colonial subjects, the female subjects etc., becomes effectively political. Different archives of Greek artists—such as those presented here— consider, in the context of the Greek paradigm, the impact of economic phenomena on the social condition and they reveal the immanence of leftist discourse, the role of international power relations, and a wider social destabilization. The (archival) collection of material and, through it, the disclosure of connections and equivalences, its dissemination in different ways to different and distant audiences, can be seen as an attempt of articulation. In that sense, the archive is an affirmative new edifice, an articulatory dispositif, itself a new structure. Organising archives of crisis—of social, economic and identity crises—raises questions of power and identity, as well provokes the will to create new structures. It is an instituent 14 practice aiming to shatter naturalized categories and raise new meanings. The production of such archives is an act that deliberately or inadvertently produces stories, in the same natural way in which construction is understood to produce tangible objects. We cannot unconditionally perform the articulation of different militant or precarious and subaltern subjects as an a priori positive development, but we should appreciate the decisive role of their public

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appearance through an archive and of the publicity and dispersion of their demands and their conditions of existence. Their public character consists of their appearance in the public realm and, more precisely, in the search of points of contact with the public, presupposing the wider social context as their field of reference. These points of contact appear in the modes of distribution of the archive, in the exploratory exhibition practices enacted in natural and virtual environments, in the potential mobilization of social networking mechanisms, in the archive’s diffusion through mass media, social networks, and in other similar practices activated as strategies of articulation of groups that put forward particular claims ready to defend a particular ideal of justice. In that sense, these archives are not an unquestionable, all inclusive structure fantasizing with utopian, nonconflictive universalism. On the contrary, they bring on the antagonistic elements of the political actuality that do not become evident in the other fields. They make the differences apparent, and they actuate a positiontaking. Resistance in this sense is not considered a loud action, but rather evidences that our attention can be turned to the very same methods that organise our senses and bodies in life. If archives have been the apparatus of biopolitical regulation, 15 archival art aims exactly towards the dismantling and rearranging of these very methods of regulation, and the construction of a new model. As an instituent practice, organizing archives is involved in the processes of creating new models, with an intention to dislocate the actual discourse and the practices through which the current hegemony constitutes and reproduces itself. These practices lead us to consider archives not as a passive accumulative structure, but as a dynamic form that extends further into activism, performances, virtual and physical networking. The form of new archives is not indexical but interconnected. The archives presented here are constituted within the horizon of the questions, the aporias and the demands of the contemporary condition, the struggles of conflicting forces and the particularities of certain locations. But at the same time they make apparent equivalences and potentialities. These archives take advantage of the subversiveness of parody and of the existence of scandalous affinities, while taking into account the importance of the slip and of desire. In this way, they “affirmatively” express the demand for social change in ways that seem “improper” within the current condition. The construction of these archives is not reduced to critique. It is not a manifestation of social complacency, but a triggering of a series of political consequences, seeking to constitute a different order of things-to-come. Nevertheless, as indicated from the intention to create a structure—as an archive is itself a structure—the making of archives is not

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marked by the revolutionary disposition to attack or to eradicate the ensemble of existing institutions. Archival works transcend the binary logic that opposes practice to theory, revolution to reformism, art to life. In this sense, the archive can be seen as an exercise, a performance, an “art of condensation” of different cases and different fields that may create a certain unbalance that could, in its turn, forward the drift towards certain naturalised social, political and cultural concepts. It remains to be seen whether these practices can gradually lead to even more differentiated and unexpected forms. In that case, one could think of new art practices which would activate tactics and strategies derived from activism, communal activities and direct confrontation (protests, demonstrations, occupations etc). At the same time, artistic practices could nourish a form of activism that doesn’t phantasize a total exodus from the anathema of power, an activism that can find productive resources in the same act of instituting16 and governmentality, using the metaphor, the parody, play and the poetics of artistic methods. In both cases this could lead to extended practices, of which still we cannot grasp their characteristics, and which would enable us to think that even now in a time of crisis, the design of a better future is possible. It is possible by reversing and taking by surprise the hegemonic apparatuses, by taking advantage of art and its visions, which in difficult times are all the more expedient in order not to surrender to a sterile pragmatism of the apparatuses and mechanisms of power. The writer’s participation in the conference Critical Cartography of Art and Visuality in the Global Age was supported by OUTSET. www.outset.greece

Notes 1

Alexis Grigoropoulos was a 15 year-old boy who was shot dead by a policeman. The incident happened in Exarcheia, a central neighbourhood with a strong political and intellectual character in Athens. Exarcheia is inhabited and frequented by students, young people, artists and intellectuals, but is also known as the place where many socialist, anarchist and antifascist groups are accommodated. Exarcheia has always played a significant role in the cultural and political life of Greece. When upheavals and protests are taking place, Exarcheia is always at the centre of actions against the symbols of authority and capitalism, such as the police station, banks etc. Therefore, Exarcheia is one of the most police guarded places in Greece. Grigoropoulos, was a teenager, living in an affluent northern Athens suburb, who went out for a regular evening with his co-students. As it is a habit amongst teenagers, they were sitting out in a small residential street, very near to the central square of Exarcheia, which is usually full of young people hanging around. Two special guards of the Greek police personnel were caught in a minor verbal clash with a small group of teenagers. Although they were ordered by the

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Greek police centre to leave the site, they decided differently, and engaged in the clash by shooting, according to their testimony, warning shots. According to some eyewitnesses, the shots were targeted directly at the youngsters. 2 Michel Foucault extensively examined how archives have been the bureaucratic and biopolitical mechanism of regulating lives and identity in modernity, that create productive, disciplined and economically useful humans and bodies. New technologies, indexical and forensic mechanisms were developed and utilized in order to ensure security and normality within the modern societies. Foucault’s analysis exploited the mechanisms and insoluble relationship of knowledge and power planted within these regulatory methods and apparatuses, such as the archive. Indicatively see: Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison/ The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge/ The History of Sexuality: The Use of Pleasure, / The History of Sexuality: The Care of the Self/ The Order of Things: Archaeology of the Human Sciences/ Archaeology of Knowledge, Routledge/ Abnormal, Lectures in the College de France 1974-5, and also Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Knowledge. 3 Archive art at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century met a mentionable flush. Therefore, in the last years many publications were dedicated to the archival turn, i.e. Knut Ebelingand and Stephan Gunzel, eds., Archivologie (Berlin: Kadmos, 2009), Panos Kouros and Elpida Karaba, eds., ArchivePublic: Performing Archives in Public Art: Topical Interventions (Athens: CubeArtEditions, 2012), Charles Merewether, ed., The Archive (London: Whitechapel Venture Limited, 2006), Sven Spieker, The Big Archive, (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), to mention some (for more please see the reference list for the article). Theorists such Benjamin Bucholoh, Hal Foster, curator Okwui Envezor and others, addressed the creative archives of art in challenging ways connecting them with the crucial shifts of the postmodern, postcolonial and post-Eastern block condition. See Benajamin Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter's Atlas: The Anomic Archive”, October 88 (1999): 117-145, Hal Foster, “The Archive without Museums”, October 77 (Summer 1996): 97-119, Hal Foster, “Archives of Modern Art”, October 99 (Winter 2002): 81-95, Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse”, October 110 (2004): 1-22, and Okwui Enwezor Archive Fever. Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art (New York: Goettingen, International Center of Photography and Steidl Publishers, 2008). 4 Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. (New York: Continuum, 2010), 27 and 39. 5 Rancière, Dissensus, 27 and 39. 6 Invited artists of ArchivePublic archive phenomena of immigration, retribution, of distorted identifications. Using material discovered and constructed, evidential and artistic, fictional and non-fictional, collective writing—conventional or experimental—of documents, and collectivity, real or virtual, create new and unexpected connections and analogies in order to critically rethink our position toward the phenomena of our times but most importantly to consider our position for the future to come. The outcomes of the research were published in Kouros and Karaba, ArchivePublic.

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The establishment of foreign archaeological schools in Greece that happened in two crucial historical moments, one in the 19th century and one after the World War II, has raised a lot of discussions about the real nature of the aiding role of the foreign powers in internal (cultural) affairs. Many believe that, the financial support and the presence of more neutral external specialists offered an invaluable help in the process of finding, preserving and promoting the ancient heritage, while others believe that their presence was an extension of colonial power defining the relationship between “centre and periphery”. 8 The Bagua Massacre refers to the killing of indigenous protesters in Peru’s northern Amazon province called Bagua. June 5th 2009 was the climax of the Peruvian Political Crisis resulting from the ongoing opposition to oil development in the Peruvian Amazon, with local Native Americans opposing Petroperu and the National Police. That day, Peruvian security forces opened fire from helicopters into the thousand protesters attempting to break through a road block, one of many throughout Peru, that the indigenous activists had set up to protest against the opening of the indigenous territories to mining, oil and hydropower development. 9 An ongoing project, ArchiveRights (curated by the writer) invites artist to study the archive of ISET and present the result project of their research. ISET (The Contemporary Greek Art Institute) is a research and exhibition centre founded in 2009 by members of the historic gallery Nees Morfes. Its main objective is to collect, preserve and elaborate creatively a comprehensive archive of post-war Greek art, contributing at the same time through various artistic, research and exhibition projects to the support and production of Greek contemporary art offering an intrinsic historical context. 10 The Greek military junta was a series of right-wing military juntas that ruled Greece, following the 1967 coup d’état. The Junta lasted from 1967 until 1974. It was the outcome of thirty years of national division between the forces of the Left and the Right that can be traced to the time of the resistance against Axis occupation of Greece during World War II. 11 The struggle of democratic forces against the Junta largely formed the identity and the political discourse of contemporary Greece. The protagonists of such struggles became key players in the political and cultural arena, contributing to the development of a more progressive face of contemporary Greece, but also bringing forth, as it happens many times in such cases, the contradictions borne in times of crisis and critical circumstances (for example, the contradictions in the leftist discourse and in the role of the left in contemporary affairs, its ambivalent relationship to power, separatism, etc.). 12 See endnote 8. 13 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Vita Activa) (Athens: Gnosi Editions; [ǼțįȩıİȚȢ īȞȫıȘ-Greek Edition], 1986), 297. 14 Gerald Raunig in the book Art and Contemporary Practices. Reinventing Institutional Critique (2009), gives an analysis of the term instituent, focusing on the shift from (art) practices of institutional critique (which are focused in revealing the power relations within cultural institutions) to instituent practices that hover between art and activism, aiming into a more direct involvement in the

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alteration of social affairs through art and its methods. Such an example is Park Fiction, a project that began in 1994, evolving out of a campaign by a resident's association against the development of a site in the harbour area of Hamburg, Germany. As a result of numerous (art/cultural) activities that resisted various developers’ planning projects, the action succeeded in the realisation of a public park in 2005. 15 As mentioned above, Foucault’s focus on the regulatory mechanism of the subject, developed through the idea of biopolitics, is based largely on the analysis of the apparatuses of power and control of minds and bodies within modern society, amongst which the archive holds a prominent position, see endnote 2. Also, for the archive effect on bodies and minds, Alan Sekula’s study The Body and the Archive is very influential. 16 See endnote 11 regarding the idea of instituting.

PART II THE UTOPIAN GLOBALISTS

CHAPTER FIVE UTOPIAN GLOBALISTS, MODERNISM AND THE ARTS OF AUSTERITY IN THE 1970S JONATHAN HARRIS

The date “1970”often marks the point at which modernism in the visual arts is deemed to have “ended”, or when it is claimed to have begun to subtend itself into the variants of its projected futural forms and appellations—“postmodernism” having been the favoured contender during the 1980s, although now, and definitively, superseded by the problematic of “contemporary art”. Any serious 21st century historical reassessment must include a consideration of the relations between modernism, understood to be in some substantive terms concluded and contemporary art of the last twenty years or so, however we may struggle to define and date the latter. Now, if modernism has ended, and if the social history of modern art project disbursed into its fragments of 1980s post-disciplinary subspecialisms, then the end of both was bound up with the globalizing capitalist neoliberalism emergent at the moment at the end of that decade and the beginning of the 1990s, when the husk of Soviet communism finally collapsed, accompanied by the differentially speedy capitulation of mainstream and oppositional socialist movements around the world. These “world-historical” developments constitute a core part of the condition of our global socio-historical modernity now. Through use of the term “utopian globalism” I will offer here such a re-assessment of modernism considered, in some fundamental senses, to be a concluded, historical entity. One of my objectives in the use of this neologism (and others) will be definitively to separate this account from the extant related, though different, orthodox historiographies of politicized revolutionary modern art in the twentieth century. These include studies of Constructivism, Dadaism and Surrealism (the so-called “historic avant-garde”), as well as of the institutionalized groupings and movements of artists, critics and administrators associated with self-

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proclaimed revolutionary socialist and communist parties and states, such as in Russia after 1917, Germany, the USA and Mexico in the interwar period, and the Soviet Union under Stalinist rule during the 1930-50s, in the period of doctrinal Socialist Realism. The history of these early to mid-twentieth century visual arts “political modernisms”, driven by increasingly divisive ideological motives and justifications, on both sides of the Cold War (linked to a number of globalizing projects of their own) certainly intersects importantly with the reassessment I propose below. But they are distinct; I will demonstrate how.* The US artist Douglas Huebler gave his 1969 Duration Piece No 13, North America-Western Europe a life of twenty five years. By 1995, Huebler decreed, the artwork would “no longer exist” if “the owner” did not come forward then and “fulfil that responsibility” which the piece’s conception had esta-blished. Huebler’s quarter century project began with him initialling one hundred one US dollar bills and sending them on to various destinations in North America and Europe. The piece would be deemed “completed” by 1995, if someone then—the envisioned “owner”—put an advert in “an international art magazine” listing all the serial numbers of these bills, and offered to redeem each bill for a thousand dollars each. The piece, Huebler noted, perhaps ironically, in principle had “a hundred thousand dollars worth of documentation” accruing out there in the world.1 Huebler’s project was intended to contribute, modestly, to the world and to the world of art. It was “a piece that does not use photography”, he observed ambivalently: It uses something that’s going on in the world anyway – dollar bills being circulated and accumulating value, perhaps. Art accumulating value and so forth. Systems being completed. Maybe I take ten photographs in ten minutes, or maybe this piece takes twenty five years to be completed. Maybe it opens up for the owner, or it does open up for the owner to have a responsibility in seeing it through, and so forth. What will finally happen to it, I have no idea. It doesn’t matter to me.2

Diffidence and ambivalence are salient tactics in Huebler’s works from the late 1960s and early 1970s, which is to say they are a characteristic element of his prose style and response to questions. The zeal for a programmatic mental setting of sometimes outlandish tasks and an envisioning of scenarios for future actions include, for instance, “map making” of various kinds established as an ostensible means through

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which to reconsider space and time in the experience and ordering of the natural and social worlds. Huebler appears to practice a form of “blank” radical voluntarism, a kind of mesmerized, zombie-globalist recognition of the world and its times and spaces. “I want people to see, you know, where the world’s at and where they are within it”, he intoned—but this vision seems to be wholly denuded of the manifest idealism that the actions of Lennon & Ono, Beuys and earlier utopian globalists, had demonstrated. Morris voiced something similar in 1969—a shift from a determined focus on objects to what he called “peripheral vision”, a preference for “the vacant all-embracing stare”.3 What might be called an austerity globalism in the visual arts, shorn or very shy of its utopianism, had arrived.4 Austerity globalism’s manifestations, on the whole, were muted, and sometime mute. They comprised (at one extreme) a set of absences and nay-sayings, a set of moves into relative invisibility and intangibility, a retreat into internal mental, or close-to-physical-body, worlds. And (at the other extreme) when actually out there in the world, in the large “earth works” of Smithson and Heizer, for instance, they were still more a matter of figuring loss and waste, of reducing the world and its objects to the human mental universe, than brandishing a mastery of both materials and the natural world bequeathed by western and eastern bloc industrialism in the era of the onset of the oil crisis in the early 1970s and the beginnings of recognition that the planet faced global environmental disaster. Huebler’s Duration Piece No. 13, North America-Western Europe might be thought “blankly” to parody spectacular capitalism and specifically spectacular capitalism in the art world. Its systems and circularities constitute an idea and model of the system of capital’s timespace flow, of its apparently accumulating “value”, of its ownership and property rights and rituals. But Huebler’s system signally did not offer any more actual commodities to be added to this system.5 Huebler’s work is anti-spectacular anti-spectacular art, in contrast to Smithson’s and Heizer’s brazenly spectacular anti-spectacular art. Huebler’s diffident theorizing was symmetrically modest. When asked whether or not he thought American society was going from an “objectoriented society” to a “systems-oriented society”, he replied: Yeah, well, I don’t know about the whole society […] And I don’t understand a systematized society. And I’m not trying to direct myself towards that possibility. As a matter of fact, it probably is dehumanizing. But maybe there are ways in which we can [sigh] learn to bear that too; I don’t know.6

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When asked whether the recent US Apollo landings on the moon had changed his thinking at all, Huebler demurred. The “grand heroic gesture” of locating one of his map points on the moon would be “too much”; he preferred, he said, “extremely mundane things, like a hundred dollar bills or an escalator moving up or down”.7

West/East – North/South In 1970 the first “Earth Day” took place, an event that marked the emergence of a global consciousness of the planet’s ecological predicament under the industrial mode of production predominant, though differently organized, on both sides of the Cold War divide. 8 Works produced in the late 1960s and 1970s designated as “land-” or “earth-art” appeared to mirror phases in the development of modern environmental thought in Europe and North America. That first phase had comprised a celebration of human domination of the land and consumption of its resources through large-scale industrial extraction and mass production techniques. Heizer’s and Smithson’s spectacular interventions, for example, in such works as Double Negative and Spiral Jetty, both entailed mechanical movement of hundreds of thousands of tons of earth. The second phase of environmental consciousness had involved beginnings of a recognition of the despoiling transformation wrought on the earth through ever-expanding human socio-spatial development. This had been coupled to an idealized representation of a pre-industrial—and “prehistoric” past—unspoilt natural world. In 1978 Dennis Oppenheim made Relocated Burial Ground, a landscape in the El Mirage Dry Lake in California, which he marked with a six hundred metre dark asphalt primer square cross carrying topographic but also symbolic, religious overtones. The primer itself, however, slowly eroded in the same way that traces of ancient burial sites over thousands of years become erased or hidden. In a related, “cosmic-utopian” direction, Nancy Holt’s 1973-6 Sun tunnels, her 1974 Hydra’s Head and 1977-8 Stone Enclosure: Rock Rings emphasized the world’s ambulant existence as a planet, relating the viewers of these works to the earth’s place within the solar system and to the firmament beyond.9 The third phase of ecological consciousness, dating from the midtwentieth century, has centred on attempts to slow down, stop or actually begin to reverse the damage human societies have done to the earth and its resources. This phase extends into our own time, of course, and artists have intervened since the 1980s, often with a mixture of practical, didactic and symbolic intentions, to attempt to ameliorate environmental problems

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and transform social attitudes toward its use and value. Hans Haacke’s Rhine-Water Purification Plant (1972) can be mentioned here. Helen Mayer Harrison’s 1972-82 project Lagoon Cycle, a set of photographs, texts, collages and drawings, drew attention to the role of water buffalo in the world’s ecosystem, showing how the animal was much more efficient and ecologically-sustainable than the tractor within agrarian production.10 In 1972 the Limits to Growth report was published by the “Club of Rome”, a group of European politicians, policy advisers and academic specialists. This was one of the first studies to set out both a radical critique of global industrial production and a warning of its potentially apocalyptic impact—environmentally and socially—within a world dominated by its accumulation processes in both West and East, based on ever-expanding materials extraction, production and mass consumption of goods. Significantly, the report’s analytic and socio-political perspective on the nature of the global order importantly attempted to shift, if it didn’t altogether displace, focus from the Cold War “West-East” axis to a consideration of “North-South” relations of affluence and poverty. Two years later the Mexico “Cocoyoc Declaration” and, later, the 1979 “NonAligned Conference” of small nations, proposed that the globalized market system, dominated by the Western and Eastern blocs, had produced a situation that left most of the world’s growing population in absolute or relative poverty. Conference members, consequently, brought forward proposals for a new international economic order aiming to unite in struggle the poor of “the South”.11 Doubts were raised about the reliability of the alarming predictions that Limits to Growth made concerning the future of the planet’s resources. These concerned, for example, the continuing availability of food for a population of several billions, the running out of raw materials such as crude oil for energy and the despoliation of land for cultivation. Nevertheless, the significance of the report really lay in its general perspective based on an analysis of the world’s dynamic and integrated systems. These echoed insights artists such as Huebler and the Pulsa group had offered obliquely in their practices and statements since the later 1960s. Limits to Growth helped to establish some of the core hypotheses of globalization theory. These included the proposition of an extending integration of world labour markets and the creation of an international division of labour with its central workforce—increasingly made up of women—forming a “global proletariat”. That global labour force, correspondingly, was divided into sectors based on a variety of primary factors—its proximity to productive materials, the relative education and skills acquisition levels of workers

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and living standards conditioning levels of pay. Together, these human means and forces of production existed in dynamic relation to local sociopolitical systems which offered more or less attractive investment conditions for prospective multinational corporate and / or state economic penetration. Through these historical and contemporary circumstances the dominant Cold War West-East world-axis powerfully shaped the “rich North” and “poor South” world-axis. Limits to Growth concluded that the “world system”, dominated overall by structural alignments of state and corporate interests, was characterized by an exponential growth dynamic related to population and capital expansion.12 The world’s resources, however, were not infinite and could not accommodate an ever-extending population. Nor could capital expand limitlessly to irrigate such growth in terms of production and consumption processes. Anticipating later research on climate change, the report also noted that the “feedback loop processes” active in the planet’s self-regulating eco-systems, for instance, those concerning the impact of atmospheric gasses on temperature, were subject to long and perhaps dangerously misleading delays. Limits to Growth specified two rational responses to this recognition: either (1) fundamentally reduce or redirect the exponential forces (i.e., population growth and capital expansion) or (2) act to reduce the symptoms of their expansion. The former, radical, path seems to be beyond both societal control and political will. Since the end of the USSR in 1991, in fact, more of the world, especially China, has undertaken huge and rapid expansion, extending its assimilation of raw materials such as steel and precious metals for domestic production from across the rest of the world. 13 So world governments since the mid-1970s have mostly acted—when they have at all—to attempt to undertake the latter course of action. Limits to Growth also set down an early case for “sustainable development”: whatever the accuracy of its various projections for future potential environmental and social chaos caused by growth in the human population and its activities on the planet, a state of “equilibrium”, a self-renewing, self-controlling, but also much more equitable division of resources across the world, was the desirable option. Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and Spiral Hill, the latter erected in Emmen, Holland in 1971, and Ant Farm Collective’s 1974 Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo, Texas, all now evoke the conjuncture of the world oil crisis and recession in which the Limits to Growth report emerged. Spiral Jetty was overlooked by two shacks and a group of abandoned oil rigs—for more than forty years drillers had attempted to get oil out of the adjacent natural tar pool and a series of seeps of heavy black oil occurred just south of

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nearby Rozel Point. Smithson appeared to enjoy the sense of conjoined natural and human ruin. The pumps, he noted, were “coated with black stickiness rusted in the corrosive salt air. A hut mounted on pilings could have been the habitation of the ‘missing link’”.14 Smithson’s previously mentioned Spiral Hill, specifically designed to “reclaim” a previously active industrial site, was created out of earth over which top soil was laid. Sand was then spread along the edges of the rising spiral form—Tatlin’s symbol of hope and vertiginous dream of human advancement in the model for his 1919 Model for a Monument to the Third International. In Spiral Hill, however, the anti-clockwise path figured an ancient symbol of destruction, the site being that of an abandoned sand quarry.15 Three years later, Cadillac Ranch indicated the symbolic death and actual burial of a mode of industrial production and consumerism dependent on cheap and polluting oil. Ten gas-guzzling Cadillacs were half-embedded, tail fins up, in a wheat field in Texas. The work was made just after the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo, when a cartel of producers had reduced daily barrel production, hugely raising the costs of oil for US consumers. The shortage and price hike dramatized the absurdity of these cars’ energy inefficiencies and the concomitant fragility of the automobile industry, given its dependency on sources for fuel beyond American control in geo-politically unstable zones of the world such as the Middle East.16 All these artists’ actions in, and on, the earth both literally modified the land in which they were located and offered metaphoric commentaries on them and the conjuncture of natural, historical and social forces beyond them which had led to their de-formation. Heizer’s Double Negative, along with his earlier Isolated Mass, Circumflex # 9 of Nine Nevada Depressions and Rift (deteriorated) # 1 of Nine Nevada Depressions (both 1968), each 1.5 tonne displacements of earth from the bottom of Massacre dry lake in Nevada, particularly instance the massive scale with which some artists wished to, and were sometimes able to, work.17 By the later 1980s, however, critiques of the western environmentalist movement and its origins in the nineteenth century had begun to suggest some founding misconceptions. These included the (perhaps wellmeaning) arrogance of the view that the planet’s future in the universe, like its geological existence over the several billion years of its existence since the big bang, was somehow “entrusted” to, or in the gift of, the behaviour of human beings who had only been on earth for a few hundred thousand “earthling” years. 18 From this macro-scale critics and commentators moved to the geo-politics of the micro. What began as the “conservation” movement in the US, for instance, had actually been, they

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claimed, an attempt by a wealthy elite to preserve the American wilderness as a territory for their own leisure, against its use by the expanding lower classes and the surviving indigenous populations. These criticisms actually highlighted a global problem besetting environmentalists with both radical and modest ambitions. Calls made by those in the “developed” wealthy North for the world’s peoples to reduce and redirect growth and exploitation of resources undermined the reasonable aspirations for material improvements in life for those in the less- or “undeveloped” poorer South, where most of the unspoilt wilderness areas remain. Before, and then after the end of the USSR in 1991, the promise of US-style consumer-capitalist “freedoms” had been extended to many millions who had previously lived with lesser, if not completely dissimilar, expectations of that of which their lives could reasonably consist. There was a sense, then, that both environmentalist rhetoric and its programmatic accounts of what was necessary to “save the planet” tended to cut across, ignore or evade the question of immediate and legitimate human need, especially in the so-called Third World.19 Only months after the fall of the Soviet Union, the “Earth Summit” at Rio de Janeiro in Brazil took place, organized by the United Nations ostensibly as an attempt to formulate, for the first time, an agreed, coherent international policy on the environment. 20 This conference appeared tasked to do the impossible: both to formulate a plan to end the ecological destruction of the planet and to establish conditions that would improve the life circumstances of all the world’s peoples. Limits to Growth, twenty years earlier, whatever its inadequacies in matters of detail, had pointed out precisely the material and social contradictions this aspiration involved. Not surprisingly, many Earth Summit delegates and the people they represented saw the event largely as a public relations exercise carried out on behalf of the rich northern nation-states—and the Summit as a body that was never likely seriously to hamper the globallyoperating corporate capitalist polluters and industrial combines collectively responsible for most ecological crises. ‘Sustainable development’ became, increasingly, an empty if well-meaning mantra, rather like “Give Peace a Chance”: a form of desperate, self-deluding injunction issued in the face of obdurate material conditions and implacable attitudes from the vested interests determining interlocked northern states’ priorities. Greenpeace environmental activists unfurled a banner on the top of Rio’s Sugar Loaf Mountain during the conference with the words “Sold” and “Vendido” stamped over an image of the southern hemisphere. The actual socio-economic relations between North and South were here revealed: the North actually required the non-renewable resources of the

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South, and the labour of its globalized proletariat, in order to maintain both its industrial productivity and its people’s relatively affluent standards of living based on expanding, though increasingly credit-based, consumerism. At stake was the highly ideological notion of “development” and its real material conditions of industrial production and mass consumption. These had driven the western democratic capitalist societies since the late nineteenth century and then been mirrored in the Soviet communism of the Eastern bloc since the inception of Stalin’s “five year plans” during the 1920s. These two blocs had composed, for Debord, the symbiotically-related forms of dominating spectacle—“concentrated” in the East and “diffuse” in the West—despite in what other ways they may have been locked in conflict or exchanges of threat and counter-threat during the Cold War. By the 1980s, however, a unified, “integrated” spectacle had come to dominate the global order. To reiterate: “For the first time in contemporary Europe”, Debord noted in 1988, a few years before the formal end of the USSR but in the light of the radical decline of radical socialist oppositional parties in the western European democratic societies, “no party or fraction of a party even tries to pretend that they wish to change anything significant. The commodity is beyond criticism: as a general system and even as the particular form of junk which heads of industry choose to put on the market at any given time” 21 (my italics). The symbolic graveyard of cars in Cadillac Ranch comes to mind. Whatever the complexities of mapping “West-East” and “NorthSouth” relations onto each other, 1992 marked another anniversary. This was the 500th year since the “discovery” of North America by Christopher Columbus, agent of Iberian imperial conquest. Mexican Latino artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña noted at the time of the Earth Summit that a new sense of the world was needed, one no longer based on imperialist and neo-imperialist principles and history. Such a re-mapping would provide, he said, a radical “redefinition of our continental topography”.22 The map of the Americas might be reconceived without borders, or turned upside down, or redrawn with divisions based on factors other than those of historic “economic domination”. More than twenty years earlier, the austerity globalists had been there before Gómez-Peña, offering diverse models of such a radical re-mapping in their incipient critiques of the world, the world order, the system of interests that was determining global capitalism, and the place of art, the art market and its “public relations” systems within it.23

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Austerity Globalism’s Body-Politic If the human socio-spatial environment could be “re-mapped”, refigured and reconceptualised, placed within a wholistic account of economic, political, cultural and ecological systems, then so could the human body. At around the time of Smithson’s production of Spiral Jetty and Huebler’s Duration Piece No 13, North America-Western Europe, Charles Simonds created a “land” and “map”—and a kind of world—in a 1971 work made with his own body and clay he called Landscape-BodyDwelling. Simonds used his own bio-physical form to create an environment for imaginary, miniature inhabitants—the “little people”, living on his hip, reconfigured as a hillside habitat. “I lie down nude on the earth”, he said, “cover myself with clay, remodel and transform my body into a landscape with clay, and then build a fantasy dwelling—place on my body on the earth”. Gulliver-like in recalling Swift’s character’s travels to Lilliput where the people are, compared with him in terms of scale, pocket-sized, Simonds’ body-environments threaded visualsculptural allegories of existing and utopian worlds.24 Later works dealt with the sexual and social associations of the planet earth—of earth, along with architecture and the human body, reconceived as different but interdependent places of dwelling. Projects involved building “cities” for the figures of the little people in sites across New York, especially in derelict and abandoned buildings. Sometimes these works would be constructed in galleries and museums, such as the piece Dwelling erected out of clay, sand and wood at PS1 in New York in 1974. Simonds also had films and time-lapse colour photographs made of his body-environments. 25 When displayed in a city these suggested both vulnerability and persistence, alluding to small scale pre-industrial modes of life in the USA and elsewhere—to a sustainable “eco-balance”, that is, between human and natural systems and needs. Countercultural environmentalist political and philosophical influences seem active here. Simonds’ body-sculpture worlds figured mythic, idealized communities and ways of life integrated within nature—not the divisive social radicalisms of trades unionism and labourist mass parties gestated within alienated capitalist industrialism. Symonds’ body-environments evoke the symbolic terrain of Beuys’ own utopian focus on cultural identity, community and co-operative collaboration.26 Debord registered something of this, too, in his The Society of the Spectacle. The crisis followed what he called the failure of the “first proletarian assault against capitalism”—meaning the dictatorial selfproclaimed communist regimes that emerged in Eastern Europe under

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Russian tutelage, which were as committed, he believed, as the western capitalist states were to industrialism and aspired, similarly, to their ethos of mass consumerism. In reaction to this, the “rebellious youth” of the later 1960s had begun new kinds of protests. These were, he noted, “vague and confused” but clearly involved, a “rejection of art, of everyday life, and of the old specialised politics […] a new “General Ludd” who, this time, urges them to attack the machinery of permitted consumption” (italics in original).27 This New Left politics was concerned with an ever-widening gamut of possibly irreconcilable elements: political emancipation (including civil rights, feminism), internationalism (anti-colonial, anti-war), spiritual regeneration (peace and love), sexual liberation, alternative lifestyles, grass-roots and community democracy, ecological activism (including animal rights, sustainable farming), holistic medicine and much else beside. Artists along with others saw the practical and intellectual connections between some of these. Carl Andre and Hans Haacke, opposed to the war in Vietnam, were both interested, for instance, in agriculture and social uses of nature. In January 1970 Andre wrote a statement opposing the war called “Art is a Branch of Agriculture”, arguing that artists had to be “fighting farmers and farming fighters”. Haacke’s works at this time, preceding the aforementioned Krefeld RhineWater Purification Plant scheme, included the gallery cultivation project Grass Grows (1969) and the animal liberationist “eco-gesture” Ten Turtles Set Free (1970).28 Utopian and practical elements intermeshed within early 1970s Old Left, New Left and countercultural activisms, as well as within the artworks produced by the conjuncture’s austerity globalists. Sometimes this combination was harmonious, sometimes clashing or apparently contradictory. The “evolution”/“revolution” dichotomy provides an important instance. In the western democratic capitalist societies the older social radicalisms of trades unionism and party politics had centred, in practice, on an attempt gradually to improve existing wages and conditions—that is, only to evolve reform within the present social order of industrial capitalism. The “workers” movement” and “workers” interests” were the terms of social organization upon which this old radicalism was based. Yet the socialist or communist party perspectives of many of these activists and their supporters—especially that of the emergent New Left, the environmentalists and the internationalists—were focused on a social transformation qualitatively far beyond and different from the mere improvement and maintenance of present conditions. “Revolution” meant the replacement of this social order with an entirely

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new one, which raises the problem of the representation, in texts and artworks, of actual and projected future “ideal” societies. The appearance of this distinction as a necessary or inevitable choice— between “evolution” and “revolution”, between opposed notions of “movement”, “cause” and “interest”—masks the much deeper question and problem of how sets of changes made to an existing society might generate, at some stage, what could be recognized as an effectively wholly new kind of society. This issue of actual change was then, and remains now, really one of practical degree, rather than of some millenarian belief in a single, irreversible moment (or even process) of absolute transformational rupture. 29 In the early 1970s the generational tensions between older and emergent forms of socialist “movement”, “cause” and “interest” meant that recognition of this problem was even harder to achieve. This was especially vivid in cases, for example, where groups of old-style socialist or communist party workers, such as coal miners or railway workers, believed—correctly—that their self-interest in the maintenance of an industrial mode of production and its way of life conflicted with those, say, of radical environmentalists concerned with the survival of the planet and its eco-systems. Indeed, any sense of these two groups constituting a single movement, acting on an agreed set of principles and interests, was very hard and sometimes impossible to maintain at this time, and still remains so.30 Austerity globalism in socio-political realms beyond the visual arts implied, then, such a thinness, and thinning, of connections between older groups of activists and the so-called “new social movements”. A depletion of relatively broad and coherent opposition to western capitalist power that has occurred since the 1980s, both within the peoples of the “northern west” nations and worldwide. The “southern east” (the “Third World”) emerged as a new pole for resistant organization within a US-dominated globalizing economic order, especially after the end of the USSR in 1991. Large Russian and Chinese investments in African, Asian and South American economies and states over the past decade and a half have signalled this post-Cold War geo-political development-led by two powerful nations that have both, in reality, completely abandoned their formal allegiances to international communist revolution. 31 In another direction, feminist politics might seem a particular luxury of “affluent” northern-west societies, when matters of near absolute poverty still dominate the day-to-day concerns of the billions now comprising the “global proletariat”.

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“Development” Exposed Austerity globalism in the visual arts constituted a new level of awareness of the nature and scale of the crises facing the governments and peoples of the world in the world in the early 1970s.These were the twin and still on-going crises of political representation and socio-economic management within the global eco-sphere. Since 1945 the Cold War had bifurcated the earth into sectors of interest and exploitation dominated by state-elites claimed, chiefly by the establishments within these blocs, to be genuinely accountable to their citizens. In the western democratic capitalist societies led by the USA real and significant freedoms certainly existed—freedoms, for instance, of press and other means of communication, political association and expression in literature and the arts. These freedoms were repressed, abolished or had simply never existed in the USSR and the Warsaw Pact countries it dominated. Absolutely nothing is to be gained by asserting that these two Cold War blocs were either equally dictatorial or morally equivalent in their egregiousness. 32 However, the socio-historical forces and pressures that led to the Russian revolution in 1917 and then to its historic failure as an experiment in creating a genuine post-capitalist social order had their origins in the previous century, within a still largely feudal regime that had not acquired many of the very limited representative-democratic structures and strong independent “civic society” institutions found in countries in western Europe and North America. The Bolshevik leadership, as I have already noted, had been ruthless, practical and single-minded—not at all “utopian”—in its determination to pursue the industrialization of Russia and the integration of its peoples into a single union. The “polit buro”—the small group of executive decisionmakers which led the party and the Soviet state—was introduced, pragmatically, in the early 1920s precisely to circumvent the problems and delays caused by democratic consultation within the party apparatuses and beyond in the wider society. It was this allocation of power and command to a tiny group which enabled and encouraged dictatorial individuals to emerge. Though Stalin was by far the worst, his predecessors and top-table colleagues, during the later 1920s and 1930s (some of whom organized against him and most of whom he later ordered murdered, such as Trotsky) had defended the same dictatorial arrangements for pushing Russia in the direction of modern “development”. The Cold War era helped to entrench the “power-elites” in both the USSR and the USA. Mutual paranoia and hostility, of which official anticommunism in the latter was a symptom during the 1950s, undoubtedly

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brought the world close to the brink of atomic war several times. It led to many actual wars carried out across Asia and on other continents with one side claiming to be defending the world directly, or through proxy forces, from the encroachment of the malign interests of the other. Wars in Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan are only the best known of these, when the full list is extensive—including also the repeated military intervention of the USSR into its supposedly allied states to suppress popular uprisings during the 1950s and 1960s. The two superpowers also routinely carried out “covert operations” within both hostile and friendly nations throughout the period from the late 1940s to the early 1990s and beyond.33 By the 1980s the Soviet system was in serious decline—in terms of both what domestic active political legitimacy it could still command, following several attempts at internal reform, and a “command economy” heavily skewed towards military spending over several decades which had prevented sustained improvement in the quality of life for all its people. While the US remained a much richer nation, its economic decline during the 1970s reflected a globalization of the division of labour that was beginning to destroy millions of jobs in America and the dangers of a consumer-capitalism dependent upon finite, polluting and geo-politically insecure raw and processed materials required to maintain such a level of mass affluence. When the USSR was abolished in 1991 the crises the US state faced in the “new world order” were those of de-industrialization and economic stagnation at home, maintenance of its political legitimacy (at home and globally), and whether to take seriously predictions of impending socio-environmental catastrophe the likes of which reports such as Limits to Growth had warned.34 Beuys and others active in later 1960s New Left and counterculture movements had stressed the need for “self-management” and “direct democracy” in all aspects of individual and social organization. States, parliaments, polit-buros and corporations could not be relied upon to create sustainable ways of life able to educate people, feed and maintain them economically, keep them healthy, and enable them to manage and cultivate all aspects of their own lives and social relations within the places where they lived. Others in the 1980s and 1990s stressed that the mid-twentieth century technological advances of western society—TV, satellite, computer and internet devices—potentially enabled new forms of direct democracy and decision-making based on sophisticated communications media. 35 Genuine self-management, then, need not be confined to small-scale communities and organizations. It could be extended into the society and world at large, but required novel forms of

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contact and co-operation, given the scale of regional, national and continental populations.36 Such thinking now may sound completely unrealistic. That is to say, it seems to be based on a notional future moment utterly detached from our own and from what our own conjuncture could reasonably produce as a future. But in the 1970s the austerity globalists, in their sometimes oblique concentration on “system” and “point-of-view” awareness (though often appearing neutral or even neutralized themselves), were formulating a kind of new knowledge of historical and contemporary societies. Huebler’s and Smithson’s diverse mappings were related to perhaps arcane-seeming projects of “distancing” and “projecting”, and the political significance of these works at the time generally remained relatively mute. Others, concerned, for instance, urgently with ecological matters and corporate responsibility, began to push their assessment of social and productive systems into explicit critique and revaluation—with intended immediately practical benefits (although their political import was ambiguous). All these works helped to make problematic the highly ideological notion of “development” understood as a necessary singular process both within the affluent northern world and in the poorer south. But not only, or centrally, was this idea an implicit model of preferred socio-economic extension, with poorer “undeveloped” states becoming in time more like those of the north, through industrialization and mass consumption.37 This notion of “development”, masquerading as a neutral and inherently progressive process, actually presumed a continuation of north-western domination of the world via neo-imperialist, “postcolonial”, globalization processes reproducing an international division of labour, resources and power. In this scenario, the southern regions would “advance” the quality of life of their own peoples by servicing the north-western states through the production of raw materials, specialized food export crops, migrant and unskilled labour and tourism, while their superior partners would produce advanced technologies and finish off manufacturing processes. To reiterate. The Cold War had established a world order that, although ostensibly divided and competitive, actually enlarged and systemized an iniquitous single global division of labour, resources and power which hugely favoured the interests of the north’s Western and Eastern bloc states over everyone else. That this picture is now more complicated, with, for example, India and China powerful in certain areas of hi-tech production hitherto the prerogative of the north, doesn’t alter the essential power-relations which this historical pattern of development has ensured—instanced by the fact that the towering majorities of the world’s absolute and relative poor remain in the south.38 The extraction of raw

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materials and their basic processing for export—fossil fuels production and refining, timber manufacture, vegetable oils and food production— remain at the core of the economies of these poor societies and certainly generate work and income. But this industry enforces certain imposed priorities to the exclusion of others that could constitute genuinely local forms of planning and self-management for the needs and future “alterdevelopment” of local populations.39 Adorno’s account of aesthetic theory, published in 1970, gave a kind of proto-ecological priority to the interconnected themes of human domination over nature, the sufferings of mankind and utopian images of freedom. Looking back to the imitative, or the “mimetic impulse”, in art— think of the tradition of landscape painting, but also of the creative reradicalization of landscape-as-motif in the work of artists such as Smithson—Adorno believed that aesthetic mimesis: contained a utopian moment in its affirmation of sensuous appearance […] For natural beauty represented man’s dependence on an object not of his own creation; it was thus a paradigm of non-identity based on a tender and respectful relationship between man and nature.40

But the austere utopian globalists particularly interested in nonspectacular systems, such as Huebler, pursued an understanding and nonvisual mapping of the world of a kind that Adorno valued highly precisely because it destroyed the beautiful illusion of “organic totality” that the landscape painting tradition embodied. “Art would perhaps be authentic”, Adorno noted, “only when it had totally rid itself of the idea of authenticity—of the concept of being-so-and-not-otherwise”. Austerity globalist “point-of-view” awareness was adamantly incompatible with reified, non-dialectical, senses of authenticity and totality, insistently pointing to the intrinsic transience and perspectival nature of conventions of knowing and showing. Nevertheless, art was a definite materialization of experience based on both memory and anticipation which Adorno believed could act as a barrier against both the “ever-same” products of the capitalist mass culture industry and state systems of domination. While “eco-artists” of the 1980s drew practical attention to consumerist indoctrination and corporate-capitalist industrial environmental destruction, the utopian facet of globalist works—think of Denes Tree Mountain, but also of “Bed-in” and Beuys” actions such as I like America and America Likes Me—attempted to give form to what Adorno called “peace as a state of distinctness without domination”. That all three examples have been read as forms of a “cashing in”, actually complicit with capitalism and forms of spectacle, perhaps indicates the impossibility

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of separating out, finally, the utopian from the instrumental facets of artworks—a utopian distinction Adorno himself seemed committed to maintain at all costs.41 Smithson, for one, recognized that, while not all fictions were utopic, all utopias were fictions. The industrial-consumerist utopia of US society (the “American Dream”) around 1970 had run its course: the suburbs exist without a rational past and without the “big events” of history. Oh, maybe there are a few statues, a legend and a couple of curios, but no past – just what passes for a future. A Utopia minus a bottom, a place where the machines are idle, and the sun has turned to glass, and a place where the Passaic Concrete Plant (253 River Drive) does a good business in STONE, BITUMEN, SAND and CEMENT. Passaic seems full of “holes” compared with New York City, which seems tightly packed and solid, and those holes in a sense are the monumental vacancies that define, without trying, the memory—tracings of an abandoned set of futures. Such futures are found in grade B Utopian films, and then imitated by the suburbanite. The windows of City Motors auto sales proclaim the existence of Utopia through 1968 WIDE TRACK PONTIACS—Executive, Bonneville, Tempest, Grand Prix, Firebirds, GTO, Catalina and LeMans— that visual incantation marked the end of the highway construction.42

The art market, as well as the automobile market, functioned as a “microcornucopia / utopia” of commodities within this system. Morris noted that even those artists interested in non-gallery based site-specific art conformed to the “‘established style / variation’ mode characteristic of commodity object production”. This didn’t surprise him: all cultural production was part of the system and consumer-capitalist society’s “builtin obsolescence” characterized art world production as much as any other. 43 Spectacular production, Debord said, equally objectified its producers. The makers of luxury art objects constitute an “advanced economic sector” directly creating an “ever-increasing mass of imageobjects”. Austerity globalists tried in various ways to by-pass or undermine the market via tactics of “dematerialization”, but its intermediaries, gatekeepers and corporate owners had engineered conceptualism’s commodification by 1973. 44 The global art market expanded and became much more aggressive in its social relations and mediating powers in the period between the mid-1960s and the late 1980s—this despite the presence of dissenting artists within it, though many of these had been “anti-gallery” rather than “anti-market”.45 Christo & Jeanne-Claude, for example, financed their wrapped structure products by commodifying their preparatory drawings, paintings and related documentation. The wrapped structures themselves were not

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bought or sold directly, nor did their construction rely upon corporate or state funding. Temporary in conception, these wrapping events sought to combine (and thereby symbolically transcend) the divided media of sculpture, performance and documentation through drawn, photographic and filmic forms. Their “collective” nature, often involving the labour of hundreds of workers, the support of governments and officials centred on an institution or a portion of the land, might be thought to have figured something of an ideal human social totality. Any sense of a practical usevalue to this wrapping receded, however, as their utopian-epic character asserted itself in the act of material “trans-form-ation”. Though some of the first wrappings had been produced in the 1960s in Paris—the city to which Christo had emigrated to escape the Eastern bloc regime after the Berlin Wall was constructed—the long-planned Wrapped Reichstag project, only came to fruition thirty years later, after the Wall had gone.

Notes *My thanks to Inge Lise Mogensen Bech who invited me to take part in the conference “Reassessing Modernism in the 21st Century”, held at Aarhus Museum, Denmark, 23-25 April 2014. The event gave me the opportunity to formulate elements of this self-critique of my The Utopian Globalists: Artists of Worldwide Revolution, 1919-2009 (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2013). 1 Huebler had already had some success with earlier “duration” projects. Duration Piece # 12 Amsterdam, Holland, for instance, consisted of 12 photographs taken of a canal in Amsterdam on January 12, 1960 made in a sequence of time “whereby the interval between each photograph was doubled by seconds (beginning at ‘zero time’)”. Ten years later, Huebler announced that “The 12 photographs, (none identified in relation to its place in the sequence), join with this statement to constitute the form of this piece. Douglas Huebler, January, 1970”. In catalogue for exhibition, Douglas Huebler, Andover, Massachusetts: The Addison Gallery of American Art, May 8-June 14, 1970), n.p. 2 Huebler in interview with Norvell, in Recording Conceptual Art: Early Interviews with Barry, Huebler, Kaltenbach, LeWitt, Morris, Oppenheim, Siegelaub, Weiner by Patricia Norvell, eds. Alexander Alberro and Patricia Norvell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 149-50. See Robert Morris’ contemporary project Money (1969) included in the Anti-Illusion: Procedures / Materials exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 19 May-6 June 1969. Morris’ contribution was the proposal that the Museum invest $50,000 “as a work of art”. 3 Huebler in interview with Norvell, Recording Conceptual Art, 138; and Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture 4: Beyond Objects” (1969), reprinted in Jeffrey Kastner and Bryan Wallis, Land and Environmental Art, unabridged edition (Oxford and New York: Phaidon Press, 1998), 231. Referencing the psychoanalytic thinker Anton Ehrensweig, Morris appears here to be drawing attention to the fields of

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relations between things—“systems” of interaction—with all the socio-political, as well as aesthetic and art institutional, implications discussed in my previous work. 4 John Perreault noted in 1971 that “Conceptualism is a symptom of globalism and it is the first—Surrealism almost was—really international style” in “It’s Only Words”, Village Voice 20 May 1971, reprinted in Idea Art: A Critical Anthology ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1973), quoted in Alexander Alberro, Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 152. 5 Alberro’s pessimistic overview, in contrast, is that the “emergence of conceptual art is closely related to this new movement of advanced capitalism […] conceptualism’s unusual format features and modes of circulation in many ways utilize and enact the deeper logic of informatization”, Alberro, Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity, 3. His main targets, however, are Joseph Kosuth and Seth Siegelaub, rather than Huebler or Smithson, see n42 and n53. 6 Huebler in interview with Norvell, Recording Conceptual Art, 150. 7 Ibid. 8 See, e.g., Boris Frankel, The Post Industrial Utopians (Cambridge: Polity, 1987); Peter Gould, Early Green Politics: Back to Nature, Back to the Land and Socialism in Britain (Harvester: Brighton, 1988); and the extensive bibliography on environmentalism in David Pepper, Modern Environmentalism (London: Routledge, 1996). 9 See also, e.g., Robert Morris’s 1971 Observatory at Ijmuiden in Holland, Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field constructed in the high desert of western New Mexico (1977) and his Vertical Earth Kilometer, a 1.1 km long and 5 cm thick solid brass rod buried in the ground at the Friedrichsplatz in Kassel for the 1977 Documenta. 10 Significant early exhibitions concerned with land and environmental issues included “Earthworks” held at the Dwan Gallery in New York in 1968 and “Earth Art”, held at the Andrew Dickson White Museum at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York State, curated by Willoughby Sharp in 1969. See also Smithson, “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects” (1968), in Jack Flam, Robert Smithson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 100-133, for a vivid sense of the variety of issues this work articulated, and especially his attack on Michael Fried’s formalism dividing the “self and the non-self” (103).Wallis discusses the “Earthworks” show in Kastner and Wallis, Land and Environmental Art, 24. 11 Donella H. Meadows et al., Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind (London: MacMillan, 1979 [1972]). On Limits to Growth and related analyses, see Raymond Williams, The Year 2000 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 17-18 and 208-210. David Harvey valuably re-examines the notion of “limits” within human-nature interactions in The Enigma of Capital and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 72-84. 12 See Part 3: “Passages of Production”, in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 219-324; on labour specifically, “The New Segmentations”: 336-9, and on theories of global uneven

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development: 280-4. See also Immanuel Wallerstein, World Inequality: Origins and Perspectives on the World System (London: Black Rose Books, 1976) and World Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 13 See Wang Hui, China’s New Order: Society, Politics and Economy in Transition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), and Barry Eichengreen et al. eds. China, Asia and the New World Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 14 Smithson, “The Spiral Jetty”, 146. 15 See Smithson, “Frederic Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape”, 165-6. 16 See Kastner and Wallis, Land and Environmental Art, 103, 231. The sleeve photograph on Neil Young’s album On the Beach (1974), a meditation on ruin and corruption of varying kinds, also depicts a car tail fin protruding from the sand. Both evoke the final sequence in the film Planet of the Apes (1968, directed by Franklin J. Shaffner) when Charlton Heston’s astronaut encounters the millenniaburied Statue of Liberty on another desolate beach, sign of a disappeared civilization. 17 See Kastner and Wallis, Land and Environmental Art, 52-3. 18 See Stephen Gould, “The Golden Rule: A Proper Scale for our Environmental Crisis”, in Gould, Eight Little Piggies: Reflections on Natural History (London: Penguin, 1992), and for core problems in defining the “natural world”, David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crisis of Capitalism (London: Profile Books, 2010): 74-6. 19 For a critical discussion of both Cold War liberal and socialist “development discourse”, see “Illusions of Development”, in Hardt and Negri, Empire, 282-4; and Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). 20 “UN Conference on Environment and Development”, 3-14 June 1992. See the United Nations website documenting the event and its decisions at http://www.un.org/geninfo/bp/enviro.html and Ingemar Elander et al, Consuming Cities: The Urban Environment in the Global Economy after Rio (London: Routledge, 1999). 21 Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (London and New York: Verso, 1998), 21. 22 Guillermo Gómez-Peña, quoted in Suzanne Lacy, “Cultural Pilgrimages and Metaphoric Journeys”, in Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, ed. Suzanne Lacy (Seattle: Bay Press, 1994: 19-47), 19. 23 For a revised historical and integrated analytic perspective on the latter concerns, see the range of sections and essays in Jonathan Harris, Globalization and Contemporary Art (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). 24 Simonds (1974), quoted in Kastner and Wallis, Land and Environmental Art, 120. See Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (London: Odhams Press, n.d. [1726]). 25 Lucy Lippard, “Interview with Charles Simonds: Microcosm to Macrocosm/ Fantasy World to Real World”, Artforum 12 (February 1974): 36-9, reprinted in Kastner and Wallis, Land and Environmental Art, 239-40.

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On the co-optation of labour “movements” and “interests” within the capitalist democracies of the Cold War, and their relation to socialist theories and politics, see Williams, The Year 2000, 160-172. 27 Debord, Thesis 115, The Society of the Spectacle, 67-8. 28 Andre’s statement (in Artforum 9, September 1970: 35) quoted in Kastner and Wallis, Land and Environmental Art, 258; Haacke, discussed in same volume, 33. 29 Williams reflected (in an observation with relevance also to much “political Marxist” thinking fixated on Russian Bolshevism) that “What is most deficient in the strictly utopian mode is that this wholeness is essentially projected to another place or time. What we have to learn, beyond utopian thinking, is this impulse to wholeness without the accompanying projection […] The cultural analysis developed within and beyond Marxism in the last sixty years has rejected the idea of specialist ‘areas’ of society, each served by its specialist ‘discipline’. It is a central achievement of this analysis that it has developed forms of attention to a whole social order without any dogmatic assignment of priority to this or that determining force”, The Year 2000, 15. 30 At Documenta 6 in 1977 Beuys’ workshop discussions had tried to bring something of this range of groups together. The British Lucas Aerospace Shop Stewards Combine of workers, for example, had set out their plans for abandoning the manufacture of Cold War armaments and military aircraft in their factories in favour of socially desirable products. Caroline Tisdall, Joseph Beuys: We Go This Way (Violette Editions, 1998), 260-1. 31 See “The Death Throes of Soviet Discipline”, in Hardt and Negri, Empire, 2769; and Harvey, The Enigma of Capital, 200-1. 32 Hardt and Negri stress, however, the significance of Cold War propaganda within the West that worked to inhibit accurate knowledge of the complexities of the social orders in the Soviet bloc countries, especially the degree to which vibrant “civil society” existed within them and was instrumental in the collapse of their ruling bureaucracies. See Empire, 276-9. 33 See, e.g., William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (London and New York: Zed Books, 2004); and Oleg Sarin and Lev Dvoretsky, Alien Wars: The Soviet Union’s Aggressions Against the World, 19191989 (London: Presidio Press, 1996). 34 For valuable reviews of the new (dis)order, following the attacks on the New York World Trade Centre towers in September 2001, see David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) and Retort (Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Mathews and Michael Watts), Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (London: Verso, 2005). 35 See, e.g., Williams, “Culture and Technology”, in The Year 2000, 128-152. 36 See Williams, “Democracy: Old and New”, in The Year 2000, 102-127. 37 On labour exploitation in the global economy, see, e.g., Miriam Ching Yoon Louie, Sweatshop Warriors: Immigrant Women Workers take on the Global Factory (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2001); and Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk, eds., Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism (New York: New Press, 2008).

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See, e.g., David Smith, The Dragon and the Elephant: China, India and the New World Order (London: Profile Books, 2008); and Ming-Chin Monique Chu, The East Asian Computer Chip War (London: Routledge, 2011). 39 See, e.g., Stephen C. Hackett, Environmental and Natural Resources Economics: Theory, Policy and the Sustainable Society (Armonk NY: M.E. Sharpe: 2006); and Lyle Estil, Small is Possible: Life in a Local Economy (Gabriola Island BC: New Society Publishers, 2008). 40 See Martin Jay, Adorno (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 156. Remember, however, Harvey’s scepticism regarding this apparently clear separation, or border, dividing humanity and an “external” natural world, see n17 and 25 above. 41 Theodor Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music (Continuum: Frankfurt, 2007 [1947] trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster), quoted in Jay, Adorno, 157, 158-9. 42 Smithson, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey” (1967), in Flam, Robert Smithson, 72. 43 Morris, “Notes on Art as/and Land Reclamation”, 254-5. 44 Debord, Thesis 15, The Society of the Spectacle, 10; Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001 [1973]), xxi. 45 See Alexander Alberro, “Introduction: At the Threshold of Art as Information”, in, Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity, ed. Alexander Alberro (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003), 11.

CHAPTER SIX DIY UTOPIAS: THE REBEL URBANISM OF MADRID’S “ACAMPADASOL”* JULIA RAMÍREZ BLANCO

A recently created platform “in favour of civic mobilization”, named Democracia Real YA! (DRY) (Real Democracy NOW!), calls for a demonstration on May 15, 2011 under the slogan “we are not merchandise in the hands of politicians and bankers”. The date is a week before regional elections, and thousands of people protest against cuts in social spending and the lending of public money to the banks. According to the police, 20,000 people take to the street that day. DRY sets the figure at 50,000. The demonstration is big, cheerful and crowded, but it does not really stand out because of that—there have been larger demonstrations. What makes this one different is that at night, after the customary minor disturbances, a group of between thirty and fifty people decide to sleep in the Puerta del Sol (the main square in the centre of Madrid), upon which the march has converged and whence, in principle, it should disperse. They pass the dark hours in an assembly,1 lit by street lamps and electronic devices. The decision to remain in the square clearly has its inspiration in the series of revolutions that had just exploded in the Arab world (fig. 6.1). In Madrid, Olga Rodríguez, a journalist who has covered the Egyptian uprising, is phoned and asked what steps had been taken to enable the setting up of the camp in Tahrir Square,2 Following her advice, people ask for food from nearby establishments and look for cardboard boxes, sleeping bags and blankets in order to sleep (it is still cold). During the night, the group splits into five committees in charge of infrastructure, food, cleaning, expansion and communication. This method

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Figure 6.1. Tahrir Square protest camp, photograph by Jonathan Rashad, Wikimedia Commons. Printed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

of organization, which later came to be implemented in the whole square, comes directly from the squatted social centres, which are structured in working groups that form committees and which come together periodically in a general assembly.3

1. Setting Up Camp The inhabiting of the square starts in the early morning: while the first assembly is taking place, a group of about seven punks build a two-floor jaima, a sort of North African-style tent. 4 They use four containers, scaffolding and building-site canvas, insulating the interior with cardboard boxes. This element, not approved by a consensus of an assembly, is the first construction in a square where camping is prohibited by law. The next day a blue garden hut, with a small plastic window in its fabric walls, appears: it seems to have come from the Patio Maravillas, a squatters’ social centre not very far from the Puerta de Sol. It is situated next to the punk jaima. The hackers enter, connect their computers and in less than 45 minutes divert the signal and provide free internet to the whole square. The “hashtag” #spanishrevolution becomes a “trending topic” on the Twitter social network.

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The blue hut provokes the first conflict with the police, who demand its removal. In the square people wait to meet in assembly to give a response, and for the first time that month about one thousand people sit down together to debate in the open air. There is a consensus: no one publicly opposes the idea of disobedience. Eviction by the police takes place during the night. The authorities remove the jaima and the hut, leaving the space in tabula rasa. As dawn rises on May 17th the square is free of construction elements. The eviction has acted as a rallying cry and during this day the event becomes a mass phenomenon. At nightfall, the square remains full. In this context of empowerment, the first foundations of the camp are set. Small groups dedicate themselves to making space between the crowds, sweeping the ground with cardboard which they then stick to the pavement, thereby creating a kind of giant carpet, which is broken up to form pathways. At the same time, they start to tie cords to the lampposts and the equestrian statue, from which they hang canvas sheets to create a fabric covering. On May 18th, a big awning appears, too, giving shelter to the enormous number of people who came to the Puerta del Sol defying a prohibition which has just declared this meeting illegal during the pre-election period. It rains during the night, but people continue to stay there. The water obliges the complete renovation of the camp’s materials, and more solid structures are created:5 on May 19th a small city is completely formed. Some will call it the “City of Sol”. It is decided to stay camped out until after the elections, which take place only three days later. Although the square has been occupied as a protest against a corrupt and unfair system, sparked by the demonstration and the elections, the settlement also implies a proposal, an attempt to put into practice different ways of doing things. In a dual way, the Camp exists both in its own right and also in antagonism to and in dialogue with “the system” to which it is opposed. A small antithesis is camped out in the centre of Madrid.

2. Infrastructure In 2011 Acampadasol (Sol Camp) quickly becomes populated with all kinds of constructions which, taken together, deal with all the needs of a floating and varied population. To a great extent, the place functions like an intentional community. The food committee, which works on the basis of food donations and voluntary work, sets up three distinct stands in the square (fig. 6.2). Portable toilets are also installed, there is a committee for infrastructure and cleaning, as well as a place for lost items, a rest zone, an

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Figure 6.2. Acampadasol, 2011. Photograph by Julio Albarrán. Courtesy of the photographer.

area for camping, a children’s zone (comprising a library and a crèche) and a refuse-and-recycling point. The Action Committee seeks to plan actions, which are examined by Legal, comprised of lawyers who seek to “reinterpret the law from the perspective of rights”. Respect acts as a kind of police service, seeking to mediate peacefully in situations of conflict. The various nursing stands draw on the voluntary work of professionals, who take care of any medical problem. The Communication Committee uses the internet extensively: YouTube, Facebook and—above all—Twitter are employed to dissemi-nate information, photographs, videos. 6 The legacy networks of early social movements are profoundly renovated, creating a multitude of new platforms on the internet that are connected with previous nodes.7 In order to handle conventional media, short courses are given to train spokespeople, prepared to mediate with television and the press. The Camp’s self-government seeks to follow a system of direct democracy. As in the squatters’ social centres, the organization is through working groups, committees and general assemblies. A particular zone, next to the entrance to the station for regional and underground trains, is reserved for that purpose. This debating space synthesizes the very sense

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of the square as an agora. Approval, doubt or veto are expressed in sign language in order not to interrupt speakers. If at the beginning absolute consensus is sought as the basis for taking decisions, eventually the position is toned down to make the system more functional, with the search now for approval by a sizeable majority (four fifths). Beyond the different elements related to the configuration, the maintenance and the management of the Camp, a framework for thought and discussion—which is the true seed of the social movement—is generated. Around the square, people begin to come together to talk about problems and possible alternatives to the actual state of things, reflecting collectively on different topics: there are groups working on electoral systems, the economy, education, the environment, short-term and longterm politics, and a lot more. During the month of May, many people learn political theory and start to take decisions via systems based on assemblies. There is also strong reflection regarding culture: every social movement is also a cultural movement. The Culture Committee supports free licenses and the Theatre Committee calls for “less theatre in life and more life in the theatre”.8 Between May 18th and 21st a library is created with one section for adults and another for children; during the month it receives a donation of more than four thousand books. On Saturday May 21st a vegetable garden is planted in a piece of earth that surrounds the square’s two fountains. A placard proclaims, “The square puts down roots”, symbolically expressing a wish for permanence. These desires to stay are paradoxical in relation to a group that has the nomadic and the precarious as parts of its very constitution, central to its methods of construction and its forms of living. At the same time as the library, a Documentation and Archive Committee is also created: history is told from within the process itself. The same happens with the maps that are continually being drawn in the square, cartographies that are a frustrated attempt to represent a reality in perpetual motion.

3. Revolutionary Town Planning On the night of May 17th a sketch of a map of this environment is made, drawn on cardboard with an indelible felt-tip pen.9 As the committees and workgroups multiply, more stands appear that give a physical space to each of the areas of reflection and work. Mapping tries to advance at the same rate as construction, but its representations are out of date almost instantly in the face to the frenetic expansion of the Camp. They are documents that, at the time, allow people to orientate themselves in the

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complex space of the activist settlement, and which today have come to function as snapshots that show the impressive heights of spatial organization attained by the activist settlement (fig. 6.3). While growing organically, the Camp maintains at all times a series of pathways. There is also a division by zones which separates some of the spatial functions: areas for sleeping (the actual camp, strictly speaking), the area for rest and the perimeter reserved for the daily General Assemblies are clearly marked out (fig. 6.4). The West zone is always kept free, to allow the presence of ambulances in case any problem should arise. It seems that in security considerations of this kind, the role of the fire fighters has great importance. Before May 15th, they were already camped out to protest against the cuts: during the night of the 15th communication was established between both camps. Even though, as a group, they are not linked to the Puerta del Sol Camp there is an explicit level of personal support: the journalist Jessica Romero describes having seen maps made by fire fighters10 and the activist Nacho Miranda tells of how one of them works within the Infrastructure Committee. This committee receives all the materials with which the City of Sol is being built in an evolving manner.

4. An Aesthetic of Precariousness The Infrastructure Committee, however, does not want to set itself up as a group of specialists. Its role is more one of receiving and classifying materials that have been donated or gathered. The committee then hands them to those who need them: “It was always asked that it was done as a kind of DIY. These are the materials, do it as best you can” (fig. 6.5).11 Activist self-organization is accompanied by “do-it-yourself” construction: these processes require different practical skills from participants—in areas such as electricity—and the experience of those who come from the squatter movement proves fundamental. A structure of awnings protects against both sun and rain. Tied to the vertical elements like sails to a mast, it lends a certain maritime aspect to a city without a beach: blowing in the wind, the blue sheets at times evoke the movement of water. Below them an atmosphere of complete otherness is created, in a space that in Spain recalls the souks of the country’s Islamic past (fig. 6.6). In the tented zone even domestic sheets are added, creating intimate resonances in the public space.

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Figure 6.3. Montage by Julia Ramírez Blanco. Courtesy of the author.

The canvasses are partly held up by homemade pillars, mostly made out of rubbish and found objects. The Zuloark architectural group passionately praises the activists’ flexible and imaginative pragmatism: We have noted foundations made out of rubbish bins, water cans, wooden pallets and even a toilet bowl. The capitals that join the pillars to the sheets are equally ingenious and the solutions are completely multiple. And this is another of the most characteristic features, each and every one of the pillars of the Camp is completely unique but they all have the same constructive logic [...]. Separately, none of them is particularly noteworthy [...]. It is this multiplicity which is interesting.12

The ways of building in the square are in full compliance with the principle of recycling materials. There are numerous ensembles of objects that respond with extremely imaginative solutions to construction challenges. Cardboard becomes an omnipresent material. Its abundance has to do with the central location of the square, surrounded by big commercial stores that generate a particular kind of rubbish, largely composed of the remains of packaging. In the Sol Camp, cardboard serves as insulation, as

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Figure 6.4. Acampadasol, 2011. Photograph by Julio Albarrán. Courtesy of the photographer.

Figure 6.5. Acampadasol, 2011. Photograph by Julio Albarrán. Courtesy of the photographer.

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Figure 6.6. Acampadasol, 2011. Photograph by Julio Albarrán. Courtesy of the photographer.

construction material and as a support for placards. It lends the Camp an ochre tone that counterbalances the blue and white of the canvasses above. Of notable similarity to the aesthetic of the Camp is the work of Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorm, who claims to “love the power of forms made in urgency and necessity”, as they have “an explosive density”, and are “untameable and rebellious”. 13 He frequently uses materials such as cardboard, balsa wood, masking tape, plastic, rubbish. His clochard aesthetic is the same as that of the City of Sol. It is interesting to see how all this converges with a current in contemporary art which for some years had been interested in using rubbish and poor materials. To expose rubbish is to show the content of the latrines of consumer capitalism, the excrements that follow its path. Its use—whether artistic or not—is a form of resistance, a negative reflection of the promises of globalized capitalism, and an answer to them.

5. The Noble Art of Gleaning Architects and artists have spent decades pondering the constructive processes of shanty-towns as an architectural method which goes back to the very basis of construction.14 Some people have spoken of “enlightened

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shantytown-ism”,15 alluding to a construction procedure that is based on the most pressing needs. In this case, it is an ideological option, and those who at first set up the Camp do so out of choice, in contrast with the forced precariousness of those who live in shantytowns all over the world. The circle is closed when local homeless people install themselves in the Sol Camp. In her film The Gleaners and I,16 Agnès Varda brings together several examples of these two attitudes towards reuse: that which is chosen and that which is guided fundamentally by necessity. The film shows different forms of gleaning: the term originates from the rural practice of collecting what remains on the earth after the harvest, but Varda stretches the concept to include different forms of making use of what others have rejected, in an urban context as well. The filmmaker portrays people who collect food or objects, in a subjective catalogue of ways of living off of leftovers and of creating worlds through fragments. This is perfectly possible in a society of excess, such as this unbound capitalism, where the acceleration of production and consumption cycles means the daily disposal of tons of goods that are in a perfectly good state. In the Camp, the economic system is generosity (based on donations of objects or food) and gleaning (via the harvest and the recycling of all kinds of waste materials). Money is formally forbidden. Miranda relates the amazement that “one could make something so wonderful with what we had not bought, that we did not own, that which belonged to everybody and to nobody at the same time”. 17 Objects collected at the margins of direct situations of buying and selling perhaps could generate another kind of relationship with them. Miranda’s words suggest thinking of the collected material as “commonwealth”, that crucial concept which is the focus of the most recent book by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.18 In Sol, reuse opens a door of hope. Places such as the Camp raise the possibility of beginning to create a whole society on the basis of the excess which is left over by capitalism. Like gleaned fruit, the rejected materials belong to all of us. And so much is left over that this waste can be used to construct another world. By organising excess and reconstituting rubbish, one could build something different. This form of doing things implies a dialectical scheme, where the alternative approach depends on capitalism to provide the resources: nonetheless, such a scheme could establish itself as just the point of departure for an exploration of how to create a framework that is sustainable in and of itself.

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6. The Collage Principle These poor materials are appropriated by a crowd that works in an accumulating way, adding elements to a multi-coloured whole where anybody who wants to express him or herself can do so. In the square, the political heterogeneity of the multitude is also an aesthetic heterogeneity, and so the space becomes a kind of very eclectic mosaic. Neither the political nor the aesthetic seem to have “a direction, [or] possible guidelines”.19 The continuous advance is of a modular nature, in which the smallscale predominates: as large banners have to be approved by the Assembly, the aesthetic elements of the Camp essentially advance through small-scale horizontal growth with various points of concentration. Drawings, papers, paintings, interventions on advertising hoardings, puppets... All this is added in a palimpsest of signifiers that becomes difficult to grasp. This overabundance of direct individual expression could be seen as another manifestation of the crisis of political representation, where many of those in the square feel the overwhelming need to talk for themselves.20 Attempts to unify fail, and one of the few giant posters speaks of this nonbelief that a single element can speak in the name of everyone: a large area of canvas which has a portrait of Himmler with the ears of Mickey Mouse and a cap with the Euro symbol has “No nos representan” [“They do not represent us”] in giant letters. It is hung from an enormous advertisement for a brand of shampoo. The giant poster which shows Spanish actress Paz Vega with a shampoo for “Mediterranean hair”, is manipulated in an example of adbusting. What started out as an attack on a piece of advertising ends up becoming a détournement, a diversion that playfully appropriates the image in the service of a new meaning. By striking out and over-writing letters, L’Oreal becomes “Democracia Real” (“Real Democracy”). Above the silhouette of the actress is the call to action: “PEOPLE OF EUROPE RISE UP”. Beneath the giant photograph which has been converted into a collective mural, there is also a verbal node: a dense mass of banners nests in the scaffolding of the building where the advertisement is situated.

7. An Architecture of Signs The Graphic and Visual Arts Committee carries out work continuously producing banners and symbolic elements to display in the square. In contrast to the mobile nature of the placards, which move together with the

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people who carry them at demonstrations, the banners in the Sol camp contribute to the generation of a utopian space. There is an enormous profusion of written messages and many of the small handmade posters are made in situ: some are drawn on paper with ballpoint pen, or even pencil, in a vast range of calligraphies. The principle of a collective and evolving collage is applied to these spontaneous texts that sum up their meanings. The centrality of language in the camp could be related to its very centrality to the assembly-based system, which is government conducted through hours and hours of spoken words. In posters and slogans, this kind of popular reclaiming of language has two dimensions: that of recovering political language, restoring significance to words such as “democracy” or “crisis”, and reclaiming language as a vehicle for subjectivity and poetry, enjoying its playful-symbolic possibilities. Many texts speak of personal experiences. Others play with metaphor: an example of such creative usage is the rhetoric of sol, both the name of the square and the Spanish word for “sun”, which becomes a synonym of revolution. Posters create poetic meanings: “tenemos el Sol, ahora queremos la luna” (“We have the Sun, now we want the moon”) or “hace un día de sol precioso” (“It is a beautiful sunny day”). The square itself is renamed in the same spirit, and the Puerta del Sol is transformed into the SOLución (“SOLution”): the new DIY town planning is completed with changes of name for places that have become different throughout the activist event. A large number of posters talk of possible solutions to the country’s problems. Taken together, they imply an impressive body of collective political thought, with thematic points that are repeated again and again: the privileges of the political class, the chasm between institutional politics and the citizenry, the self-interested manipulation of the economic crisis, the parasitic nature of the governing classes, the need for a radical change. Some old slogans are revived, showing how demands that remain unanswered keep on coming back. In the Camp, written words invade everything: hanging from the ropes that support the canvas coverings, stuck to the walls of nearby buildings, on the tables of the committees, on the walls of their stalls. The square takes the form of an architecture of signs that once again recalls the textual and conceptual overabundance of the work of Thomas Hirschhorn.21 An architecture whose solidity is made out of messages and ideas, balanced between coherence and contradiction. Posters, and the concepts they express, grow in a rhizomatic fashion, using space in a spontaneous way within a textual horror vacui.22 Deleuze and Guattari claim that rhizomatic

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organization is inherently subversive. The horizontal organization of the Camp is translated into the horizontal arrangement of its messages. This also has much to do with a youthful population brought up with Web 2.0, where content is generated by users. The overabundance of essentially equivalent messages is proper to this phase of the development of the internet, where excess replaces exception. Written words enter an environment of perpetual assemblies, of spoken, shouted or chanted words, of old and new slogans, personal and collective, aggressive and enthusiastic.

8. Dismantling and Reorganisation The Camp lasts a total of 25 days, during which many events take place in a compact and intensely lively space. It is impossible to analyse the settlement as something static, as its definition resides in the undefined and in change. Nonetheless, it is useful to talk of two phases, within which there are various peaks and inflexion points. From May 15th to 22nd, when the elections take place, there is a period of uninterrupted growth, with an explosion during the weekend, when the biggest crowds attend, reaching 20,000 people on the night of May 20th. On May 22nd the Partido Popular, the most right-wing option, wins the elections. After this, a second phase starts, when the construction of the Camp’s infrastructure continues apace while mass attendance has largely stopped. The question of when to leave is raised in a pointed manner. Finally, it is resolved to dismantle this light and movable settlement on Sunday, June 12. All that is suitable in the square is carried away, with many elements taken to social centres in the city. Once the ground is cleaned and the space cleared, an attempt is made to leave a permanent information point and a monument on the ground: next to the statue of Carlos II a metal plaque is placed bearing the legend “Dormíamos, despertamos, plaza tomada 2011” (“We were sleeping, we woke up, occupied square 2011”). By now, there are already similar camps across the whole world. Occupying central squares has become a form of action that has spread like wildfire (fig. 6.7). The Madrid camp has translated the Arabic phenomenon into something Western: soon Europe and the US will witness hundreds of utopian countercultural settlements, where communitarian experimentation lives side by side with political demands. In Vers une architecture (Towards an Architecture), Le Corbusier stated that “the question of building which is at the root of the social unrest of today [is]:

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Figure 6.7. Protest camps throughout the world, 2011. Montage by Julia Ramírez Blanco. Courtesy of the author.

architecture or revolution”.23 The global camps of 2010-11 seem to resolve this opposition proposing (popular) architecture as a tool for revolt. The rebel cycle they started is still open, and we have yet to see the full consequences.

Notes *

This text is a shortened version of the article “The City of Sol”, which has appeared in Utopian Studies Journal. Both of them derive from the last section of my book Utopías artísticas de revuelta [Artistic Utopias of Revolt] (Madrid: Cátedra, 2014). 1 The first night of the assembly was completely recorded by Kamen Nedev. From the very start, this artist captures the sounds of the square using a binaural system; his recordings are available on the internet, http://soundcloud.com/acoustic_mirror. Accessed 18 August 2012 2 Olga Rodríguez is a journalist who covers the Egyptian revolution for the alternative publication Periodismo Humano (Human Journalism), which acquires a great relevance during May 2011. See the interview with Rodríguez by the collaborative project 15m.cc, “Conversaciones 15M.cc - Olga Rodríguez (15M.cc

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Conversations-Olga Rodríguez), http://madrid.15m.cc/2012/01/conversaciones15mcc-olga-rodriguez.html. Accessed 4 August 2012. 3 In the group that sleep the first night in Puerta del Sol there are people with experience in the squatters’ movement. See Miguel Ángel Martínez, “Ocupar las plazas, liberar los edificios (sobre el movimiento 15M y la okupación)” [“Occupy the squares, liberate the buildings (on the 15M movement and squatting)”], in press, http://www.miguelangelmartinez.net/?Ocupar-las-plazas-liberar-los. Accessed 15 September 2012. 4 Nacho Miranda, personal interview with the author. Madrid, January 25, 2012. During the camp, this poet is part of the Infrastructures Committee. 5 Juanlu Sánchez, personal interview with the author. Madrid, January 26, 2012. Sánchez is one of the journalists who has written most about the 15M, covering it for Periodismo Humano. 6 See Hacksol, “Cronología de las redes y los nodos del 15M” [“Chronology of the networks and nodes of the 15M”], on the 15M website, http://hacksol.toma laplaza.net/cronologia-de-las-redes-el-movimiento-15m/. Accessed 29 May 2012. 7 Within the anti-globalisation movement there is a discussion about “tactical media” and a reflection about the possible creation of dedicated media to counteract the hegemonic message. In 1999, the network Indymedia is created, which is believed to be a key precedent of the current framework of counterinformation. 8 General summing-up meeting, Puerta del Sol, June 12, 2011. 9 Juanlu Sánchez, personal interview with the author. Madrid, January 26, 2012. 10 Jessica Romero, personal interview with the author. Madrid, January 26, 2012. In May 2011 Jessica Romero works with Juanlu Sánchez in Periodismo Humano, also writing about the Madrid protest camp. 11 Nacho Miranda, personal interview with the author. Madrid, January 25, 2012. 12 Zuloark, “IC Sol 15M: los pilares de la #spanishrevolution” [“IC Sol 15M: the pillars of #spanishrevolution”], Inteligencias colectivas website, http://www. inteligenciascolectivas.org/ic-sol-15m-los-pilares-de-la-spanishrevolution/. Accessed 30 May 2012. 13 In Craig Garrett, “Thomas Hirschhorn, Philosophical Battery”, Flash Art 238 (2004): 90-93. 14 In the field of art, some examples could be Marjetrica Potrc or the favela designs of Atelier van Lieshout. 15 The term comes from the architects’ group Beatus Ille, to which belongs Alberto Araico Brito, author of the project for the information stall which stays for some time in Puerta de Sol. See Patricia Gosálvez, “Arquitectura de Guerrilla para el 15M” [“Guerilla Architecture for the 15-M”], El País, 17 June 2011, http:// elpais.com/diario/2011/06/17/madrid/1308309860_850215.html. Accessed 29 May 2012. 16 Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse [The Gleaners and I], directed by Agnes Varda, (2000, France). 17 Nacho Miranda, personal interview with the author. Madrid, January 25, 2012.

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Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Commonwealth (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009). 19 Marta G. Franco, personal interview with the author. Madrid, 17 January 2012. Marta G. Franco is part of the Communication Committee of the Sol Camp, and as a journalist collaborates with the newspaper Diagonal. 20 Jordi Claramonte speaks of the relationship between the Sol Camp and the crisis of representation. Personal interview with the author. Madrid, 2 March 2012. Claramonte, a former member of the activist art collective La Fiambrera Obrera, since the 1990s has been involved in a multitude of projects situated at the point where the aesthetic and the political meet. 21 Garrett, “Thomas Hirschhorn”, 90. 22 When the Camp is dismantled, all the posters that remained become part of the 15M Archive. Since then, they have been classified and digitized by this working group. See their blog, http://archivosol15m.wordpress.com/pancartas/. Accessed 20 February 2014. 23 Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture (Paris: G. Crès, 1923), 225.

CHAPTER SEVEN WELTKARTEN: PANORAMA1 LAURA F. GIBELLINI

This paper is the “translation” of an oral presentation that explored the relationship between theory-based research and art practice. It contemplates how theory can be incorporated into artistic practice and thus rendered visible.2 WeltKarten. Panorama explores the visualization of the bond between concepts and actions, between theoretical and factual practices, between ideas and the gestures that give concepts a specific (art) form.3 It seems important to start by pointing out the three fundamental thinking processes that converge in this paper—and in its public presentation as a “talk” in Barcelona. Firstly, my inquiries take the form of artworks that consider how maps represent existing places—but also reflect on how these same maps affect, create, and reconfigure the places to which they refer. Cartographical representations are forms of conceptual and instrumental knowledge about the world. Since they imply the convergence of theoretical and technical artistry, maps seem a natural matter for me to devote my investigations to. Secondly, such artworks should be considered as the constitutive elements of a broader thought process—that is, my practice as a whole. This concept is fundamental since it considers artistic practice itself as an ongoing phenomenon, one that involves the tracing of ideas and the development of lines of thinking. Along with marking, depicting, or conforming to a territory, my approach to mapping examines the relationship between thought processes and the gestures involved in creating images—the hand performing a perhaps indelible trace. The third element to consider is the format: the talk per se.

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The “Talk” Recently, I have grown more interested in exploring forms of expression that are not necessarily “artistic” or purely exhibition-related, but that are conversational and based in dialogues and ongoing private or public discussions.4 Discursive presentations and personal interactions require an immediacy normally missing in conventional exhibition practices. Conversations allow forms of understanding that can only occur in a dialogue, in the context of spoken words. I am interested in the potential of the space created by the back-and-forth of the conversation. This is why, in Barcelona, I considered my presentation as an exercise in process that explored the “talk” as an artistic form in itself. The lecture seemed an ideal avenue in which to reconcile intellectual and artistic practices, and it proved fruitful in the convergence of disciplines and set of ideas.

The Consideration of a Single Artist’s Artistic Practice as a Whole For some time now, I have found it fundamental to consider artistic practice (including my own) as a process in which specific artworks appear and manifest themselves as emergent nodes along an ongoing intellective and transversal means of comprehension. 5 This notion of process implies a negotiation between the idea and the gesture that gives this idea its particular form. Moreover, the consideration of a particular work of art as arising from a specific context, and the subsequent understanding of it in relation to its relative position within the other artworks that precede or follow it suggest a cognitive process that goes beyond the piece itself. Artworks are not self-sufficient or self-contained entities. They gain their full meaning when placed against the backdrop of the world(s) in which they exist. The question thus arises: how can the ongoing bond between theory and practice be rendered visible? From my perspective there are two fundamental thought processes involved in art praxis. One of them happens abstractly: it involves intellect and theory, sensitivity and even emotion. But there is another equally important kind of thought that happens in the being there of the “art making,” and in the very process of performing a gesture that takes on a particular aesthetic form—a form that never quite overlaps with the idea that prompted it. From this perspective, artistic practice implies a sort of applied thought that is as invisible as it is performative (I use the term performative as it

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relates to “performance” as an act, a (re)presentation, the rendering of a particular gesture), a thinking-while-doing that connects processes and favors unconventional ways of understanding. And creates worlds.

The Place of Cartographical Representations The series of works to which I would like to refer investigate the rhetoric and the grammar of maps. (And please, keep in mind the framework previously explored when considering the artworks). Recently, I have been contemplating the idea of “place” as becoming, as something that happens, and takes place, rather than existing independently from the use that we, human beings, make of it. 6 This implies that a place is a practiced, inhabited, performed, used, and unstable entity configured or constructed by the habits or gestures of those seeking to inhabit or make use of it in one way or another. “Places” emerge in the interstices between ideal and factual gestures, between the conceptualization of a place and the literal gestures that affect and modify the territory. It is in these interstitial relationships where a particular place (and not any other) materializes. Places thus appear in the being there, performing a gesture that never quite overlaps with the concept that prompted it. At the same time, the performative aspect of the gesture forces the real place to happen elsewhere, further away—as it is fundamentally unattainable—, in an ongoing process that reveals the gap between the mind and the hand (or the gesture performed by it), between the theory and the practice.7 This reflection on the complex nature of place seeks to comprehend the world around us, and points to an overwhelming impossibility, to the fundamental flaw that, as the philosopher José Luis Pardo would say, constitutes and defines every single place: any place can be defined by an absence (the hole in the clothes) or a surplus (the patch that artificially and temporarily covers the hole): in every place one is missing —the best, the authentic, the true—, and another is exceeding—the spy, the traitor, the sham—[…], it means that every place has a hole through which it threatens to fall, where it is at risk of losing its identity, a crack through which its nature and spirit escape and penetrates the putrid air of something that is not nature, which is not spirit nor is culture, something that is not the proper place and, probably, any other. This refutes the old belief, above mentioned, that there was a time when everyone was in place and there was a place for everyone. It is the contrary. The place was defined in its origin because one was missing and another was a superfluous, because not everything was in place.8

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The approach to place as an “ongoing search”, and its fundamental lack of “completeness”, has led me to consider the map as an object of study—an object that is in itself also a means of inquiry. Maps are visual renderings that gather “objective” data on a particular territory then used to “describe” that place. Simultaneously, maps ask us to confront their image with our personal experience, asking questions whose answers are to be found in the place itself. Maps imply the visual representation of the concept of a place, but they also engender territories in themselves and project particular visions of the places they represent. It is well accepted that maps represent specific forms of power and government. In fact the rules of mapping are influenced by the rules of those governing the cultural production of the map. A fundamental one is the rule of ethnocentricity, which led many societies (from pre-Columbian North American Indians to Christian Europe) to place their own territories in the center of the world maps. 9 However, in opposition to the conventional maps that seek to establish a status quo, other types of maps exist. These emerge far from the canonical political maps that name territories and impose the images enforced by their makers. These types of cartographies include those forged by the Situationists in their drifts (acts of dérive), or in Francis Alÿs’s strolls and wanderings; it is the map depicted by the Surrealists that subverts the shapes, dispositions, and proportions of conventional world maps; or the maps of Alighiero Boetti or Marcel Broodthaers, that re-conceptualize the political use and creation of maps, to name just a few. These maps serve as sites with the power to reconsider and revitalize conventional approaches to the world. They take the power of cartographical representations seriously while subverting the mechanisms used by maps to generate “reality”. Similarly, I intend to explore the conventions of cartography and challenge their dispositions by situating myself in a site, asserting resistance, with a resultant refusal to comply with their established forms of representation.

The (Art)Works 1. An Aerial Perspective Maps present and represent trans-atmospheric discussions. Drawn from an elevated point of view, they are essentially aerial recollections.10 Maps seek the translation or transposition of a territory, of a body of land, onto the paper. According to the Oxford Dictionary “translation” means both “the process of translating words or texts from one language into another” and “the conversion of something from one form or medium into another”. The translation used in maps involves the use of different

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Figure 7.1. Laura F. Gibellini, New York City Panorama 11, 2011. Digital print and gouache on paper, 21.5 x 28 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

means of projection and techniques, and implies the transference of an actual corporeal dimension into a flat abstraction. 11 As abstractions, as plain depictions with no depth, maps are meant to be observed, not inhabited. They demand a user devoid of body, a mere eye. Study for (a) Landscape (fig. 7.2) aims to subvert and challenge the flatness of maps by situating the spectator inside a specific cartography. The video is a literal immersion in a map that offers a three-dimensional approach to a commonly flat depiction of a territory. But the video also contemplates the fundamental elements of cartographical representations—the point, the line, and the color scheme.12 Points suggest specific locations; lines which represent the movement of a point in a particular plane, determine altitude while repeatable colors describe the specific characteristics of a territory—a wetland, a rocky mountain, a meadow… In the video, a succession of points leads to lines, which accumulate into a tri-dimensional entity determined by specific colors. Only when the camera zooms out do we gain sufficient distance and perspective on what we are seeing. Only from the air does the north make sense.

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Figure 7.2. Laura F. Gibellini, Study for (a) Landscape (clip), 2011. Digital video on DVD, 3 min 58 sec. Courtesy of the artist.

In its most extreme version, a map is the flat representation of a sphere, which implies an acutely imperfect overlap or rather a clash between reality and representation. The transposition of reality into representation requires the adoption of the various conventions that seem to circumvent this mismatch and lack of accuracy. Maps require mediation—they bear no direct relationship to reality. Expanding the Contours. 1962 (fig. 7.3) is the re-appropriation of an atlas of the world that depicts a very particular interpretation of the globe. As contemplated in this diagram, the unfeasibility of reconstructing the orb points to the inherent impossibility of matching cartographical representation to reality. This failure is disguised by technical and scientific modes of representation.

The (Art)Works 2. Projection(s) In 1569, Gerardus Mercator devised a system of projection fundamental and revolutionary to the period, as it facilitated navigation at sea. In his projection, the lines marking the latitude and longitude of the globe were kept parallel, so that lines of constant compass-bearing were straight. Mercator’s world map maintained the shapes of the continents as they appear on the globe, which created a striking image of the world that became popular as a decorative illustration. Mercator’s map grew to be a referential depiction of the world and engraved a particular image of the planet upon the minds of Westerners.

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Figure 7.3. Laura F. Gibellini, Expanding the Contours. 1962, 2013. Drawing on gridded paper, 21.59 x 39.4 cm each (diptych). Courtesy of the artist.

But the technical manipulations used in order to create such maps nonetheless face a fundamental dilemma, since both shape and size cannot be conveyed accurately at the same time. Thus Mercator’s projection incurs a fundamental distortion, which is emphasized in the poles: the size of the landmasses is disproportionate and as a result Europe, Asia and North America look bigger than they really are, while the continents in the South appear smaller—apart from also being placed in the bottom half of the world cartographies. Mercator’s image of the world, while seemingly objective and scientific, does not quite overlap with geographical reality. Rather, it exemplifies our distorted understanding of the world. Of course, this distortion of size is political as well as geographical; it unveils the power relationships that dominate the world.13 Maps presuppose the appropriation of territories and the power to bestow names and to place images where they did not exist before—and it is a well-understood coincidence that those imposing the names are also the ones governing. The blank spaces on maps correspond to unknown places that are yet-to-be discovered and thus lack images. Once discovered, regulated, and standardized on a map, such spaces will be colored the same shades as the lands of their conquerors—a process that

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Figure 7.4. Laura F. Gibellini, WeltKarte. On How Continents Overflow 1-4, 2013. Drawing and gold leaf on paper, 45.5 x 60.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

duplicates their patrons’ identities. Such duplication is also nominative; hence, the proliferation of diminutives or neologisms such as La Española, New Cadiz, New Guinea, New Caledonia, New Amsterdam (later New York) and many others. The series WeltKarte. On How Continents Overflow (fig. 7.4) is based on world maps of 1694, 1752, 1799 and 1844 respectively, all of which follow Mercator’s projection. The unfinished lines represent unknown, unexplored, and undiscovered places—hence the incomplete contour, the lack of closure. The absence of images reinforces the blankness of the paper in which land and sea blend and become part of the same. The last map of the series situates the American continent at the right hand-side, and, as we read left to right, emphasizes the dominance of Europe. All of the maps include an interesting detail: the continuity of the two sides of the globe is insinuated by the repetition of masses of land in their borders (see fig. 7.4). This suggests a fundamental intention to overcome the (conceptual) flatness of the picture and shows the possibility of encircling the globe.

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Figure 7.5. Laura F. Gibellini, The Shapes I Don’t Remember, 2013. Drawing and collage on found map, 21.7 x 31.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

The (Art)Works 3. “Truth” and Translation Maps are seen as mirrors of nature and are based in the idea of progress. They function under the belief that the application of evolved scientific methods can lead to an ever more precise representation of reality. The knowledge produced by maps is hence cumulative, probable, and verifiable. Maps seek a correct, precise, and objective translation of a territory. Expressed in mathematical terms, the flat transposition of a body of land onto a piece of paper appears as a fundamental truth that can be verified. The primary effect of a scientific principle is the creation of a standard and a normalization of the discourse. Maps generate recognizable forms and reproduce those that are already known. The Shapes I Don’t Remember (fig. 7.5) derives from a found map previously unknown to me, and whose shape I cannot recognize.

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Figure 7.6. Laura F. Gibellini, The Shapes I Remember From Maps, 2013. Drawing and collage on an atlas of North America of 1965, 32.5 x 23.7 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Such a map—an unremembered, previously unknown map—cannot evoke an existing territory in the mind of the viewer. This phenomenon suggests that images must belong to a formal recollection, and must be part of an already existing mental paradigm in order to be comprehensible. Maps shape mental structures and suggest the production of a transportable form of knowledge. Maps imply an occupation. Space is produced and reproduced through representation—a representation that itself entails the projection of a specific comprehension of something abstract, in this case of the world order. The Shapes I Remember From Maps (fig. 7.6) and The Shapes I Remember (fig. 7.7) depict two maps of North America whose shape is recognizable, known and repeatable. However, both have also been occupied by decorative elements, in an attempt to appropriate an already familiar form.14 Maps seek to transform the terrain into a civilized system that is both uniform and reproducible. The diptych Say It with Flowers (fig. 7.8) consists of two drawings based on Bartholomew’s equiareal projection.15 In the diptych, the landmasses have been drawn by following a continuous

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Figure 7.7. Laura F. Gibellini, The Shapes I Remember, 2013. Drawing and collage on an atlas of North America of 1976, 32.5 x 23.7 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

line along the meridians. As a result, the shapes in the diptych comprise all the land contained in the globe. A new world order, a unique continent, appears here—one consuming the entire planet.

The (Art)Works 4. (A) Sense of the World Maps generate a sense of the places of the World. They produce a formal index and create a hierarchy of space. Maps exercise their power mainly over the knowledge of the world—a knowledge that is mobile and mobilized and that requires a translation, a flow, a becoming (something else). Maps create a spatial Panoptic.16

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Figure 7.8. Laura F. Gibellini, Say It with Flowers (Bartholomew’s Equiareal Projection), 2013. Drawing on paper, 50 x 60 cm each. Courtesy of the artist.

Much of the power of cartography lies in its seeming neutrality. Yet, in fact, it is the business of a ruling State, following its own nationalist and ethnocentric dictates and imposing its own social order. The Extended Contours of the Horizon (fig. 7.9) comprises 195 drawings that redraw all the contours of each of the countries whose sovereignty is recognized by the US Department of State.17 In the series, the contours of each nation have been stretched and extended horizontally. The line in each drawing represents the extension of a country, as if we were to walk its borders and trace our steps. The coordinates on the upper part of the drawing indicate the nation’s relative horizontal position on the planet. The names of the countries appear in English, confirming the legitimacy bestowed by the US.

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Figure 7.9. Laura F. Gibellini, The Extended Contours of the Horizon, 2013. Gold leaf and drawing on paper. 14 x 21.6 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

The Extended Contours is a topographical index of the planet that is as objective as it is poetic. It exposes the inaccuracies inherent in cartographical representation (and the problems of representation in general). But, and perhaps more importantly, the series challenges our deep-rooted beliefs about the perceived world order. Within it unfolds the possibility of carrying us far beyond territorial misconceptions, attachments, and encirclements, towards unexpected possibilities. All these considerations manifest the relationship between theory and praxis. Or, as stated above, between the idea and the gesture that turns a concept into a specific (art)form. It engenders an image where one did not exist before. As it happens in maps—and also in the making of art.

Notes 1

The title of this presentation alludes to the panorama (or atlas) as a way to organize knowledge. Unlike the archive, which tends to imply a rather obscure succession or stack of data, information, images and realities, the panorama appears as a model of horizontal order. It spreads out in a plane that favors a direct visualization and access to its content as a whole. 2 On the occasion of this paper I have adapted (or translated) the oral presentation to fit in the specifics of a written format. Certain gestures, pauses, the flow and

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cadence as well as the general “tone” and the structure of the lecture had to be reworked in its written version. The same is true for the Spanish-English translation. Even if the text was reworked in English, rather than translated from the original Spanish, specific issues regarding language have arisen, and a great deal of editing was needed. In the process of writing I have found myself confronted to the inherent problems of translation, both between languages and between theory and practice. I am in debt with Mary Di Lucia for her invaluable help in the editing process, as well as for her capacity for asking fundamental questions. 3 I am contemplating the relationship between theory and praxis beyond the use of theory based material and diverse modes of documentation which, in processual art practices, tend to integrate diverse forms of research in a final product or art piece. 4 E.g. the panel “Constructing a Place” hosted by Independent Curators International, NYC, in January 2013. I invited fundamental representatives of a diversity of disciplines (ecology, poetry, sociology, urban planning, geography, choreography, etc.) to reflect on the overlap between their theoretical work and the implementation of these ideas in the territory, in the paper, in the artwork. For more information see http://curatorsintl.org/events/panel_discussion_construyendo _un_lugar_constructing_a_place. 5 When I use the term intellective I am not only referring to the rational processes of the mind but also to the overall abstract thinking (including irrationality and emotion) that takes place in the body but lacks of a physical and definitive form. 6 For an extended discussion in these ideas see Laura F. Gibellini et al., Construyendo un lugar / Constructing a Place, Colección Palabras de Imágenes, Sección Departamental de Historia del Arte III (Contemporáneo) (Madrid: Universidad Complutense, 2012), at http://www.laurafgibellini.com/wp-content/ uploads/2013/02/constructingaplace.pdf; and my doctoral dissertation Lo local en lo global. Paradojas posmodernas del lugar [The Local in the Global: Postmodern Paradoxes of Space], (Madrid: Complutense University, 2010), at http://eprints. ucm.es/12343. 7 These ideas have been developed before in the above-mentioned publication Construyendo un lugar / Constructing a Place. The manuscript reflects on the construction and representation of the idea of “place” by focusing on the basic elements implicit in representations: the dot and the line. 8 José Luis Pardo, “A cualquier cosa llaman arte (ensayo sobre la falta de lugares)”, in Informes sobre el estado del lugar, ed. Ignacio Castro. (Gijón: Caja de Asturias, Obra Social y Cultural de Oviedo, 1998), 179. Translation by this author (emphasis in the original text). 9 J. B. Harley, “Deconstructing the Map”, Cartographica 26 (1989): 5-6. 10 Jennifer L. Roberts, “Actual Size: The Refusal of Cartographic Abstraction in Audubon’s Birds of America”, paper presented at the conference Mapping: Geography, Power and the Imagination of the Art in the Americas, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, March 7-8, 2013. Maps cannot be drawn from the ground; they entail an aerial viewpoint.

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And in my work entails the use of transfer and tracing techniques and overlaps (superposition). 12 See a preview of the video at https://vimeo.com/28833623. 13 Take Africa, for example. It measures thirty million square meters, which makes it is roughly three times larger than Europe (including the Russian west side of the Ural mountains). In order to make up for such distortion in size, several projections have been devised since then. Among them is the controverted Gall-Peters projection, which represents the size of the continents more accurately even if incurring other misrepresentations: it lacks distance fidelity and keeps an extreme distortion in the polar regions. 14 The use of decorative patterns links to an ongoing reflection on decoration as a symbolic means of appropriation in my work. See the text Construyendo un lugar for more information. 15 That is, where the meridians remain equidistant while the lines of latitude increase their distance from each other in accordance to their distance from the equator; the farther they are from the equator, the farther apart the lines of latitude are. 16 The Panopticon was specific type of institutional building designed by Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century to allow a single man to observe the inmates of such institution (without them being able to tell whether they were being watched or not). Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish (1975), used the Panopticon as a metaphor to refer to modern "disciplinary" societies and their inclination to observe (and seek normalization). 17 The drawings are based on Gall’s stenographic projection—which implies less distortion of the landmasses than Mercator’s map.

CHAPTER EIGHT THE UT(R)OPIAN GLOBALIZATION OF CONTEMPORARY CENTRAL AMERICAN ART: TRACING THE PALE OF HISTORY OR (FURTIVELY) STEALING FROM THE GLOBAL PIE? SERGIO VILLENA FIENGO1

So the contemporary is, from one perspective, a period of information disorder, a condition of perfect aesthetic entropy. But it is equally a period of quite perfect freedom. Today there is no longer any pale of history. Everything is permitted. —Arthur Danto

How has contemporary Central American art been shaped? How has it been incorporated into the global art field? What is the specificity of the Central American in “the global contemporary game”? Since the mid-90s the “ut(r)opian” threshold of art in the region has been “to become global”, a challenge faced through a dual strategy to become simultaneously “contemporary” and “Central American”. An institutional frame has been developed in order to promote a “new” artistic production, along with discourses to find its meaning and expository strategies to make it visible. “Contemporary Central American art” has been created by putting together different local and national efforts, promoting the contemporary in the region and globally projecting Central American art. My purpose along this text is to discuss that process focusing on the constitution of a new institutional artistic network and the strategies implemented from the region to trace “the pale of art history”.2

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“The Central American”: Maps and Territories The setting of the regional on the isthmus dates back to the creation of the General Captaincy of Guatemala, a Viceroyalty of New Spain’s territory established by the Spanish crown in 1535. With the attainment of independence in 1821, a federation under the name of United Provinces of Central America was established, including the territories of Chiapas, Guatemala, El Salvador, Comayagua (Honduras), and the provinces of Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Shortly afterwards, Chiapas was incorporated into the Republic of Mexico and the other provinces resulted in five independent republics. The term “Central America”, in a historical context, designates that block of five nations. “Central America”, in a geographical sense, also includes Belize and Panama, Isthmian territories with their own particular history. 3 Belize, which was a Guatemalan territory during the colony, was incorporated into the British Empire in 1862 until its independence (1981), without leaving the Commonwealth. Meanwhile, Panama was part of the Viceroyalty of New Granada and was annexed to Colombia in 1821. In 1903, it became an independent republic. Yet, it remained under the U.S. influence until 1999, the year in which the administration of the Canal was recovered. The Spanish language and the Catholic religion prevail in the Central American countries. The only exception to this is Belize, where the official language is English, and it has a more diverse religious tradition. The term Mesoamerica includes the Central American isthmus and the southern states of Mexico which are Mayan territories: Chiapas—which was linked to the Captaincy of Guatemala—, Quintana Roo and Yucatan. Finally—and except for El Salvador—the seven countries of Central America—as well as Colombia, Venezuela, Suriname and the Guyana— belong to the Great Caribbean. Nevertheless, with the exception of Belize, which does not have a Pacific coast, the “official” Central American nations have turned its back to their Caribbean coast. This neglecting action is reflected in the preference for the official and popular use of the term “Atlantic Coast” over “Caribbean Coast”. The region’s cultural cartography is complex. It is fed by four traditions: on the one hand, the indigenous (Mayan dominance in the north and Chibchanin the south) and Spanish traditions, which are mainly located in the isthmian valleys and mountains and in the Pacific Coast; on the other hand, the African and English traditions, mainly located in the Caribbean coast. It gets even more complex due to immigration: Asian (Chinese, Indian and Arab), European (German, Italian and French), and South American (Southern Cone exiles in the seventies, refugees from

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Colombia and Venezuela recently). Also, migration flows between isthmian countries, together with the U.S. presence (military occupations in Nicaragua in the early twentieth century, “banana enclaves” in Guatemala, Honduras and Costa Rica; a century-old dominance over the “Canal Zone” in Panama),and mass migration to the United States.4 The region, which has also been the arena for imperial geopolitical disputes, has tried various ways to achieve integration, faced by the dilemma of unity and separatism.5 Throughout history, and according to the needs and the balance of forces prevailing at each time, integration was promoted from various instances in many areas: economic, political, cultural, and social. Nevertheless, it has not been possible to build strong institutional and cultural mechanisms of regional integration that benefit all countries, social strata, and cultural groups. Central American artistic regionalism is quite recent. The most relevant precedent is, in addition to the Floral Centennial Games (Guatemala, 1921), the First Central American Biennial of Painting (San Jose, Costa Rica, 1971). This Biennial, organized by the University Council of Central America (CSUCA, 1948) and the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sports of Costa Rica (MCJD, 1971), generated high expectations that were dashed when the international jury (Marta Traba, Fernando de Szyszlo, and José Luis Cuevas) evaluated that most of the works presented to them lacked artistic value and social commitment. As a result, a promising regional space for artists, critics, and art historians where they could exhibit their work and build networks, was lost.6 After the Sandinista victory in 1979, civil war broke out in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador, with repercussions in Honduras and Costa Rica. In addition, the debt crisis plunged the region—as the rest of Latin America—into a “lost decade” in economic and social terms, as the Economic Commission for Latin American and Caribbean (ECLAC) named it. In this turbulent scenario unfavourable for the regions’ visual arts, Nicaragua established a Ministry of Culture headed by Ernesto Cardenal, which promoted cultural development and democratization. Mural and graphic arts flourished thanks to the enthusiastic work of local and visiting artists. This process was interrupted in 1990. Here, the post-Sandinista government even destroyed much of the art created during the revolution.7 The construction of artistic regionalism re-emerged in the late twentieth century. The end of the Cold War and the “Washington Consensus” set off the configuration of global capitalism (neo-liberalism), accompanied by cultural (postmodernism) and techno-logical (the informational age) transformations. In Central America, the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas (1990) and the signing of peace treaties (El

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Salvador, 1992; Guatemala, 1996) marked the transition to democracy and the testing of new forms of integration. 8 At the same time, structural adjustments were implemented and the state apparatus and production structures were reconfigured according to the demands of global capitalist accumulation. Many trade agreements were also negotiated at this time.9 The post-war integrationist momentum in art and culture also drew on a climate of vindication of the “Latin American”. The indigenous opposition to the bombastic celebration of the 5th Centenary of the “Discovery of America” had a particular impact in Central America due to the Nobel Peace Prize given to the Mayan leader Rigoberta Menchú. The reconsideration of cultural diversity, as a component of citizenship and as a development factor, promoted by international organizations and agencies, cooperated with the openness that had been taking place in the field of art, both in the central and emerging scenarios.10 In this framework, the Havana Biennial, created by the Cuban government in 1984, played a key role in the articulation and circulation of the “new art” produced in Latin America and, more broadly, in the southern hemisphere. This “concrete utopia”11 was incorporated as a new instance to legitimate the art that came from the south, but also as a breeding ground for a new generation of artists, critics, curators, and art historians of Cuban art that later on would spread throughout the world. Unintentionally, due to the diaspora originated in difficult domestic conditions, the Biennial stimulated the creation of new institutions and art spaces, also providing qualified staff for that process.12 The emergence of “contemporary Central American art” is marked by several tensions. This involved a process of making the new regional context compatible with the new trends of the global art field. Its creative process is performed by different institutional nodes, away from the prevailing artistic paradigm in the region (“modernity”), promoting the contemporary paradigm at all stages of the artistic process (creation, circulation, reception) and establishing an open regionalism of variable geometry. For reasons of space, we devote the rest of this text to the invention process of Central America as an “artistic imagined community”, without discussing the definition of “contemporary artistic paradigm”, which is certainly far from being consensual, both globally and within Central America.13

Central America, “An Artistic Imagined Community” By 1997, Rolando Castellón pointed out that the invisibility was also internal: “culturally, the Central American isthmus is unknown even to

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ourselves, inhabitants of the area”,14 despite the international recognition of writers such as Rubén Darío and Miguel Asturias. Soon after, the growing cultural activity of multiple independent actors, supported by international cooperation and even by national states, produced some expressions of optimism. For example, the director of the Cultural Center of Spain in Costa Rica stated: “Central America is on the map”. 15 However, the absence of Central American artists in international art catalogues—for instance, the three volumes of Art Now published by Grosenick between 1999 and 2008—challenges this optimism. 16 Was Central America now really figuring on the map or was it just an illusion with no future? I will explore an answer to the previous question by studying the configuration process of the mapping (“artscape”) of contemporary Central American art. It starts in Costa Rica in 1996, when Virginia Pérez Ratton aimed to bring together and make visible Central American artistic production. She sought to reach this goal by proposing a concept of region that went beyond the nations within the isthmus. Therefore, a post-national project emerged from the visual arts. This project assumed the task of building an integrated region beyond its multiple and irreducible internal differences. This project takes distance from the regionalisms of resistance. It rather promotes an “open regionalism”, similar to that proposed by ECLAC in the economic sphere. This strategic integration aims to overcome the “neurosis of identity” and sees Central America as an “operational fiction” from which to negotiate “a place on the map”. Inspired by the ideas of Gerardo Mosquera, it proposes to globally create and place the “contemporary Central American Art” brand, which refers much more to the art from the isthmus than to the art of Central America.17 The institutional and personal networks in the process of creation were testing various strategies of production and placing a global circulation for “Central American” art. “Central American” artists, curators and managers were invited to take part of “Central Ameri-can” art exhibitions. These exhibitions took place inside and outside the region. The first institutional node was the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MADC), directed by Virginia Pérez Ratton, who assigned as curator of the museum a connoisseur of the mainstream: the Nicaraguan Rolando Castellón, cofounder and director of the “Gallery of the Race”, and curator of the Latin American art section of SFMOMA, both in San Francisco. In this period, Virginia Pérez Ratton was also supported by the Uruguayan artist Carlos Capelán.

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Figure 8.1. Javier Calvo Sandí, Dis-/De-, 2013. Photoperformance (sunburn on chest), 305 x 208 cm, MADC Collection. Courtesy of the artist.

The MADC was created in 1994 by the State of Costa Rica in order to “place the country on the global art map by means of a dialogue between Costa Rica and the international arena”.18 However: the limitations of working solely from a national standpoint soon became apparent, and a new interest and strategy arose, intent on expanding the vision to include production from the entire area, identifying similarities and coincidences, in this new political post-war phase.19

That pragmatic turn was reflected in Mesótica II. American NonRepresentative (1996), “a regional showcase that aimed to overcome the physical boundaries and transcend traditional nationalist representations or country quotas”.20 This itinerant exhibition crossed the isthmus and toured several European countries to “show a new side of Central America”, as an area of cultural production and not as a region of conflict.21 The XXIV Sao Paulo Biennial (1998) was the first stage of international importance, where:

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Figure 8.2. Javier Calvo Sandí, El centro siempre está en el centro [The Centre Is Always in the Centre], 2013. Object (3) Spheres 2.5 cm in diameter, engraved stainless steel. Courtesy of the artist. [t]he desire to make a Place for and represent the non-existent from within began to take shape. […] Not only did Central America begin to appear as a cultural production space; its purely geographical boundaries seemed to disappear.22

The catalogue of the exhibition Central America and the Caribbean: A Story in Black and White, produced by the MADC and curated by Pérez Ratton, strongly criticizes the model of “national represent-tatives”. In addition, it points out the initiative of Paulo Herkenhoff, who offered an opportunity “to conceptually try to articulate national representations of Central America and the Caribbean [...]”.23Finally, the curator visualized this exhibition as an opportunity to redeem the region: it “not only should the show be somewhat coherent as a whole, the individual entries must have a life on their own, and it is also expected that it will counteract the negative aspects of national representations”.24 After Pérez Ratton and Castellón resigned MADC in 1998, the Museum has implemented important initiatives such as the Central American video art competition Inquieta Imagen (Restless Image, first edition in 2002) and the Muestra Emergente de Arte Centroamericano

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(Central American Showcase of Emerging Art, first edition in 2004). According to Ernesto Calvo, its creator: Inquieta Imagen […] is part of a broader program of support that showcases emerging and more experimental audiovisual productions, not only from Costa Rica but throughout Central America, which has been organized in the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MADC) of Costa Rica since last year.25

Through these and some other activities, MADC has remained a key node of the contemporary Central American art. In 1999, Pérez Ratton founded Teor/éTica. This private non-profit foundation, situated in Costa Rica, became an indisputable regional and international benchmark for “Contemporary Central American art”. Led by its founder and director, it had a prestigious board formed by international advisors, such as Paulo Herkenhoff and the Spanish Santiago Olmo; as well as locals, such as historian Víctor Hugo Acuña. Financed by international cooperation, it articulated several initiatives that independently emerged in several Central American countries.26 Teor/éTica started with the promising symposium entitled “Temas Centrales” (“Central Themes”, 2000).27 This event brought together artists, critics, and curators in order to ponder out the artistic production of the isthmus and to develop a regional strategy for international promotion of “Contemporary Central American Art”. This event started with an emphatic call from Pérez Ratton: We must assume our right to a complete membership in the international artistic community, and act responsibly, respecting our own context and conditions […].28

The main goal was not just to “give life to the invisible place that was Central America”, but to overcome its peripheral condition: Beyond the progressive erasure of the concepts of centre and periphery, it is about time [for] Central America… not [be] presented [any more] as a peripheral area, not only vis-à-vis the international arena, but particularly towards itself.29

Therefore, the programmatic challenge set by Pérez Ratton and Teor/éTica was “to reinforce the idea of centrality: to assume that Central America was no periphery, but its own centre”. 30 But she became even more ambitious, encouraging “to present Central America not only as a

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periphery in search of legitimation in the centre, but as a relevant centre that global manifestations could not fail to include”.31 In its beginnings, Teor/éTica organized a few exhibitions, such as Todo Incluido. Imágenes Urbanas de América Central (All-Inclusive. Urban Images of Central America, curated by Pérez Ratton and Olmo, Madrid, 2004), but mainly promoted the participation in international events. As a result, Central American artists and curators took part in the Latin American Biennials of Lima, Cuenca, Santo Domingo, and Havana. At the same time, artists and curators were also participating in emerging events outside the region and in other biennials such as the ones in Prague, Istanbul, Ireland and New York.32 The apotheosis came with the invitation made by the Swiss curator Harald Szeeman to participate in the 2001 Venice Biennale.33 Pre-viously absent from the Biennale, Central American artists were frequent participants from that year on, as guests of international exhibitions or in Latin American pavilions. Their participation and the awards obtained by them, have contributed significantly to legitimize the contemporary paradigm in the isthmus and Central American art in an international context. Golden Lions to Young Artist were awarded to the Costa Rican Federico Herrero (2001) and to the Guatemalan artists Aníbal López (2001, López is the only Central American artist invited to Documenta, in 2011) and Regina Galindo (2005). Moreover, Pérez Ratton took part as judge in 2001 and the Tate Gallery acquired “Auras de Guerra” (“War Auras”, exhibited by the Nicaraguan artist Ernesto Salmerón in The Arsenal, 2007). In 2013, three Central American artists participated in IILA’s pavilion and Costa Rica had its first national pavilion, coordinated by MADC and involving four local artists. Ironically, after fifteen years of regionalization, the first pavilion for Central America was not a regional pavilion. The largest event organized by Teor/éTica was Estrecho Dudoso (Doubtful Strait, Costa Rica, 2007). Artists from many places in the world exhibited in various venues during this event. Its purpose was to show that, beyond achieving access and recognition in some of the biggest stages in the world, Central America (Costa Rica, in particular) had become a new international art “centre”. According to a retrospective evaluation by Pérez Ratton: the event projected the region to the world, and fulfilled its mission to definitively break with geographic boundaries towards other latitudes, while maintaining and preserving a sense of Place and belonging in the Doubtful Strait.34

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Beyond these considerations—perhaps overly optimistic—, the curatorial discourse produced by Pérez Ratton and Díaz Bringas and structured around historical events of the region, seems to show that “Central America” has mutated from a “strategic fiction” into a new “identity neurosis.” In 2008, Teor/éTica opened a small museum to make public Pérez Ratton’s collection. This was a rare action in the region because most collectors prefer to restrict access to their patrimony, with a few exceptions such as Ortíz Gurdián Foundation in Nicaragua. Because of all these contributions, among which is to include a significant editorial work,35 Pérez Ratton obtained from the Costa Rican State the 2009 Magón Award; upon receiving it, she—who was also concerned with the “invisible” Caribbean component of Central America—declared that the isthmus had become “an artistic reality”. Her untimely death in 2010 put Teor/éTica in suspense, and the institution fell into a lethargy from which it is slowly recovering, although its recent activities seem to show that the “Central Americanism” it promoted in the past has dimmed a bit. Another important node is Landings, created on the basis of Zero. New Belizean Art (2000-2002). That 2004-2010 project, led by the Catalan curator Joan Durán and the Belizean artist Yasser Mussa (founder of Image Factory Art Foundation, 1995), produced ten editions in different locations, involving creators of the Great Caribbean (including several islands, as well as the Central American countries and Mexico) and toured the region, Central and North America, Europe and Asia, in order to “learn and share the art that reflects our vision of life” and: provoke excellence, eradicate fear, earn our respect not with a .38 caliber gun or with diamonds, but with the neatness and consistency of our work, the—sometimes—stunning and bold in our ideas and works.36

Landings, unlike the exhibitions organized by the MADC and Teor/éTica, not only exhibited Central American and Caribbean art, but encouraged collaboration, on site, between regional artists and local artists in all those venues where it took place, inside or outside the region. Meanwhile, the Bienal de Artes Visuales del Istmo Centro-americano (Visual Arts Biennial of the Central American Isthmus, BAVIC), a network-node that consists of corporate foundations, has organized six national biennials and one regional Central American biennial with roving headquarters in the capital cities.37 Created in 1998 as a Painting Biennial, it became a Visual Arts Biennial in 2002. This turn toward “the contemporary” was led meanly by international experts invited as judges

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Figure 8.3. Javier Calvo Sandí, Quiero ser un buen centroamericano [I Want to be a Good Central American], 2009. Photoperformance, 43 x 61 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

who evaluated the works and events according to mainstream value criteria. However, this change has been rather partial, because “national representatives” and—partially—the “salon” format still remain.38 By inviting international experts, the biennial was expected to contribute to the legitimization of the contemporary paradigm in the region. In addition, it was expected to create a network to promote the contemporary Central American art at an international level by summoning artists and systematically researching the art of the isthmus. Unfortunately, with the exception of the VI Biennial of the Museo del Barrio (New York, 2011) which included a showcase selected in the BAVIC 7 (Nicaragua, 2010), that expectation has been poorly fulfilled. Despite this, the biennials that have taken place (more than 45 national and 8 regional) have helped to build up a network of artists, curators and managers in the region, as well as to monitor the production of art, making it accessible to the Central American public. The XXXI Pontevedra Biennial (2010), entitled “Ut(r)opics” and the Biennial of the South. Summoning Worlds” (Panama City, 2013) also deserve to be mentioned. “Ut(r)opics”, dedicated to Central America and the Caribbean, capitalized on the experience, discursive elaborations and

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cooperative ties of its commissioners Santiago Olmo and Tamara Díaz Bringas. Beyond rigor in curatorship and production, its contribution to positioning the art of the region in European scenarios seems to have been restricted since the Biennale has taken a secondary place in the Spanish art scene. The Biennial of the South, “Summoning Worlds”, was sponsored by the government of the City of Panama, in order to convert it into a global arts city, following a model of “gentrification” tested in cities like Rio Grande do Sul and Bilbao. It brought together more than 200 artists from around the world and featured in the entire curatorial team of the Havana Biennial. Its explicit intention to commemorate the “V Centenary of the Discovery of the South Sea”, the muted resignation of the curatorial committee before the inauguration and various other organizational problems faced at that time, generated controversy in the Panamanian and Central American artistic community. Less controversial were exhibitions such asArtIstmo (2002, curated by Rolando Barahona and Tahituey Ribot, MADC), Dialogues and correspondences (2009, curated by Pérez Ratton, MADC) and the traveling exhibition Migrations. Looking South (2010, curated by Rosina Cazali from Guatemala, with support from AECI). Moreover, participation in fairs (ARCO, ArtBO, ArtBA, Art Basel Miami), promoted by various commercial art galleries, contributed to insert the isthmian art into the international market of contemporary art. The various fairs and auctions that are conducted in the region: Juannio (Guatemala), Valoarte (Costa Rica), Gala MARTE, and SumArte (El Salvador), Radarte (Panama), have also boosted the Central American art market. Many “theoretical events” have been also carried out. The most noteworthy are “Central Themes” (2000, Teor/éTica), “What Central America? A Region Brought to Discussion” (2006, MADC and Teor/éTica) and “Central Themes 2” (2012, Teor/éTica), all of which were held in Costa Rica with artists, critics, curators and promoters from the region, and some guests from outside to discuss the regionalization and the contemporary. With a lower profile, BAVIC has organized within the framework of national and regional biennials, multiple discussion forums and workshops. These “theoretical” events, unfortunately poorly documented, report on the state of the art production and the theoretical discourses that provide its meaning, but also on the management modalities and the positioning of “Contemporary Central American Art”.39 Ties to Mexico and South America have also been built. Teor/éTica organized two events to specifically discuss the “state of art” in Latin America: the group of lectures entitled “Latin American Art Situations”

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Figure 8.4. Javier Calvo Sandí, Sólo yo [Only Me], 2013. Videoperformance (sunburn on chest) Loop. Courtesy of the artist.

(2005) and the seminar “Latin American Art Situations 2” (2007). In addition to inviting experts in Latin American art (such as Herkenhoff, Mosquera and Camnitzer, among others), the region has also participated in various biennials and art fairs in Latin America, negotiating a place for the Central American inside the institutions working with Latin American art, such as the Patricia Helps de Cisneros Collection.40 One last regional node is the Espacio para la Investigación y la Reflexión Artística (Space for Artistic Research and Reflection; EspIRA, by its Spanish acronym), created in Nicaragua (2004) by the artist Patricia Belli, and based on the TAJO project (Spanish acronym for Workshop of Young Art). This non-profit organization operates in a weak area: art education in the contemporary paradigm. This is highly important due

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large absence of contemporary practice in art schools in the isthmus, which mostly remain anchored to“Fine Arts” or “design”. EspIRA aims to: educate the creative sensibility of student artists and visual artists with a professional vocation who bet on a form of art committed to building critical, theoretical, and technical skills generated within the framework of our cultural reality.41

It also aims to support “the pursuit of human development through intellectual and aesthetic activity, together with the exploration of an unknown beauty or the beauty in the known but not well esteemed” (Institutional Statement, web site http://espira.or). It carries out training and discussion activities, including specialized workshops, conferences, seminars, exchanges and exhibitions, as well as an international artist residency program. It is funded by ArtEDU, AECID, SDC and UNICEF.

Final Thoughts: Beyond Globa(nana)lization? These actions, repeated from various angles of the isthmus, meant that knowledge about Central America was beginning to sink in as an area of creative production that was certainly different and worked differently, but was just as valid as any other. In fact, what is really significant is the change in self-perception. Central Americans now see themselves as members of a global society and not a third world banana republic. —Virginia Pérez Ratton The fact that artists coming from the four corners of the globe participate in international exhibitions just means, in itself, a quantitative internationalization. The question is how they are helping to transform a hegemonic status quo towards true diversification, instead of being digested by it. I mean an acting plurality, well positioned and influential, but always in danger of being reduced to an extension of the “global”mallstock. —Gerardo Mosquera

“Synchronizing with the universal clock” and “appearing on the map” are two old but not outdated aspirations of the Latin American cultural elite. The process in Central America has overwhelmed the quest for recognition for some outstanding artists and their anxiety for appropriating “international styles”—usual strategies of artistic modernity in Latin

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America—,42 and has helped in the construction of a relatively autonomous institutional structure for regional art. From it, networks have been generated and artistic processes promoted. These networks have also operated as a means of circulation on the international field, helping to accumulate symbolic capital for the “Contemporary Central American Art”. The exploration of territories has been an arduous task undertaken with the spirit of a poacher, taking advantage of any available gap. Overall, showcases, meetings, biennials, residencies, and publications strengthened regionalism, stimulated ongoing reprocessing of curatorial discourses, reinforced the network of relationships with peers from other regions, and confronted the artistic production with that of other artistic circuits. During this process, Central American art, with a strong presence of women in various roles (artists, curators, critics, managers), has critically explored multiple themes—e. g. the status of women, daily violence, political corruption, national identity, and urban life—experimenting with new media and languages, photography and video, human body and performance, waste materials and conceptual language—just to name a few. On the other hand, criticism, history, sociology, philosophy, and anthropology of art have been largely absent. However, studies on contemporary visual arts have begun to emerge, as can be acknowledged by reviewing the recent writings of Vallecillo (2010), Mandel (2010), Villena (2011) and Hernández (2013), as well as RaRa magazine. There are also some blogs, such as “Imagentexto” by Ernesto Calvo and “Experimenta Magazin” by Luis Fernando Quirós. Outside the region, the Cuban magazine ArteAmérica has devoted a recent issue to contemporary Central American art (#31, 2013). Finally, in November of 2013, the Faculty of Arts and Letters of the University of Havana, carried out the event entitled “Project Reconciliations”, dedicated to Costa Rican artists who exhibited and spoke with Cuban artists and researchers in order to explore the possibility of establishing a Lectureship in Central American Contem-porary Art Studies. Certainly, tensions persist between the modern and the contemporary, the form and the attitude, between the national and the regional, the local context and the global requirements, the institution and the street, political commitment and artistic experimentation, artistic vocation and the conquest of the market, the expert eye and the profane look. But there has been a remarkable progress in building an institutional network and the renewal of artistic practices, despite the indifference of State institutions, the media, the “profane” public, and even the “academy”. In any case, it is

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necessary to go beyond what could be called “globananalization”, to appropriate a term coined by Nicaraguan artist Raúl Quintanilla to designate an uncritical subaltern globalization process. Perhaps the most important challenge is to consolidate an autonomous regional artistic field that can promote a strong artistic production and a powerful curatorial discourse, paying special attention to the Central American social context. This is essential in order to maintain a fruitful dialogue with the “global south” and to contribute to decolonizing the international artistic field. Therefore, the goal is to irritate the overall artistic field and influence cultural processes within the region itself, rather than simply stealing from the global pie or just feeding the stock in the global mall—to use Gerardo Mosquera’s expression when he referring to the globalization of Latin American art. It is time to trace the pale of art history from within Central America.

Notes 1

Translated from the Spanish by Fidel de Rooy in collaboration with Sofia Villena. 2 Following the famous “Anthropophagous Manifesto” written by Oswald de Andrade (1928), I appropriate here—in a cannibalistic way—the neologism “Ut(r)opics”, a fusion of Spanish words “utopía” (utopia) and “trópico” (tropic). The term was introduced in the XXXI Biennial of Pontevedra (2010). “Trópico”, of course, refers to the warm areas of the planet. 3 In Spanish, Centroamérica is used to designate the region in historical terms and América Central refers to the region in a geographical context in order to indicate the isthmus. According to the UN, the total area of América Central is 522.8 km2; the estimated population: 42 million (in 2010). 4 Migration to the U.S. boomed in the late twentieth century, spurred by armed conflicts and the deteriorating economic situation. The “northern triangle” (El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras) depends on remittances, and is also a territory of the “Maras”, transnational gangs. 5 There were tensions between Spain and England during the colonial period, between England and the U.S.in the late nineteenth century, and between the U.S. and the Soviet Union a hundred years later. China’s growing presence in the region could lead to a new imperial dispute. Central America, considered a “backyard” by the U.S., managed to defeat incursions by American filibusters such as William Walker (1856). 6 According to Pérez Ratton “that outcome retarded the regional artistic development in the following years, particularly in the Costa Rican scene”; Virgina Pérez Ratton, “Which Region? Pointing Toward a Doubtful Strait”, in Virginia Pérez Ratton.Travesía por un estrecho dudoso, eds. Víctor Hugo Acuña et al. (San José: Teor/éTica, 2012), 50. Hernández, on the contrary, conceives it as a “paradigm shift “, from a pro-government and indulgent art, to one that is more

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politically engaged; Pablo Hernández, Imagen-palabra. Lugar, sujeción y mirada en las artes visuales centroamericanas (San José: Iberoamericana-TeoréticaArlekin, 2013). In my opinion, the controversial ruling of the judges contributed to political commitment, but inhibited artistic innovation; the combination of political commitment and artistic innovation started to appear in the 90s. 7 See Otker Bujard and Ulrich Wirper, La revolución es un libro y un hombre libre. Los afiches políticos de Nicaragua Libre, 1979-1990 y del Movimiento de Solidaridad Internacional (Managua: IHNCA, 2009); David Craven, Art and Revolution in Latin America. 1910-1990 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); and David Kunzle, The Murals of Revolutionary Nicaragua, 1979-1992 (Los Angeles and Berkeley: California University Press, 1995). 8 The Central American Integration System (SICA by its Spanish acronym, created in 1991 and joined by Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Belize and the Dominican Republic) aims for “the integration of Central America in order to convert it into a Region of Peace, Freedom, Democracy and Development, based firmly on the respect, protection, and promotion of human rights” (see the referred website). 9 The Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) was signed by the U.S.A. and Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Costa Rica and Dominican Republic. The Puebla-Panama Plan (PPP) includes Central America and the southern states of Mexico (Puebla, Guerrero, Oaxaca, Tabasco, Campeche, Quintana Roo and Yucatan). The Reagan Plan for Central America (1982) included the Central American countries and some Caribbean islands, however excluding Cuba, Nicaragua and Granada, considered at that time as “colonies of the USSR”. 10 Such as, for example, the exhibitions entitled Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern (New York, 1984, directed by William Rubin) and Les magiciens de la terre (The Magicians of Earth, Paris, 1989, curated by Jean-Hubert Martin). See Anna Maria Guasch, El arte último del siglo XX (Madrid: Alianza, 2000). 11 Gerardo Mosquera, “The Havana Biennial: A Concrete Utopia”, in The Biennial Reader, eds. Elena Filipovic et al. (Bergen: Bergen Kunsthall, 2010). 12 Gerardo Mosquera, a member of the curatorial team of the Biennale in its early editions and later a Latin American Art expert U.S. resident, is a frequent visitor to Central America. Tamara Díaz Bringas, Ernesto Calvo and Clara Astiasarán have settled in Costa Rica, working extensively throughout the whole region, but also Tahituey Ribot Pérez, Aurelio Orta and Marta Rosa Cardoso. Nelson Herrera Yslas (curator of the Havana Biennial), José Manuel Noceda (curator for Central America of the Havana Biennial), Lupe Alvarez (based in Ecuador) and Elvis Fuentes (a U.S. resident) have been visitors and judges at Central American national and regional biennials. See Lilliam Llanes, Memorias: Bienales de la Habana 1984-1999 (La Habana: Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam, 2012); Mosquera “The Havana Biennial”; and Terry Smith, ¿Qué es el arte contemporáneo (Buenos Aires. Siglo XXI, 2012), especially Chapter 9: “El giro poscolonial”).

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I have analyzed an episode of this complaint on the contemporary in Central America in my book El perro está más vivo que nunca. Arte, infamia y contracultura en la aldea global (2011). A very interesting philosophical discussion on “the contemporary” can be found in Giorgio Agamben, “¿Qué es lo contemporáneo?”, in Desnudez, (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2011). Regarding the complexities of the contemporary artistic paradigm, see Arthur Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Mario Perniola, El arte y su sombra, (Barcelona: Cátedra, 2002); Terry Smith, What is Contemporary Art? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Terry Smith, et al. eds., Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Jacques Rancière, Sobre políticas estéticas (Barcelona: Museu d’ Art Contemporari, 2005); Anna Maria Guasch, El arte último del siglo XX (Madrid: Alianza, 2000); Kristine Stiles and Peter Howard Selz, comps., Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art. A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung, eds., Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009). On Latin American contemporary art see, among others, Luis Camnitzer, Didáctica de la liberación. Arte conceptualista latinoamericano (Montevideo: Centro Cultural de España, 2008); Gerardo Mosquera, Caminar con el diablo. Textos sobre arte, internacionalismo y cultura, (Madrid: Ex(it) Libris, 2010); Phoebe Adler, et al., Contemporary Art in Latin America (London: Blackwell, 2010); and Rosa Olivares, coord., 100 artistas latinoamericanos (Madrid: Ex(it) Express, 2010). 14 Rolando Castellón, “Centroamérica. El Mediterráneo y las Costas Bravas de América. En pos de una regeneración”, in Mesótica II / Centroamérica: regeneración, Ex. Cat. (San José: MADC, 1997), n.p. 15 Jesús Oyamburo, “Centroamérica está en el mapa”, in Visiones del sector cultural en Centroamérica, (San José: AECI, 2000), 7. This “Central Americanization” encompasses all the arts. See Isthmus magazine, published by the Network of Central American Cultural Studies. 16 Grosenick and Stange mention the Jacob Karpio Art Gallery (Costa Rica, 1982), a pioneer in spreading the contemporary in Costa Rica among the “best in the world”; Uta Grosenick and Raimar Stange, eds., Art Galleries: Post-war to Postmillenium, International Art Galleries, (London: Thames and Hudson, 2005). 17 In the 90s, the idea of a region based on its cultural identity and political resistance was questioned to rather propose the formation of “blocks” in order to access the global arena. In the cultural sphere, the intention was to waive the “Latin American identity” and build up a “Latin American cultural space”; see Manuel Antonio Garretón, coord., El espacio cultural latinoamericano. Bases para una política cultural de integración (Santiago de Chile: F.C.E., 2003). In the visual arts, Mosquera encouraged steps to overcome the “identity neurosis” and to think of an “art from Latin America”, instead of “a Latin American art”. 18 Pérez Ratton, “Which Region?”, 43. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid.

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As told by Pérez Ratton, “The theoretical meeting attended by the curators of the exhibition [Anteamérica, by Mosquera, Weiss and Ponce de León], as well as the renowned artist and theorist Luis Camnitzer, made it clear that one of the reasons for this absence [of Central American works in the exhibition] was the total lack of information and documentation about what was happening in Central America. At the MADC, this event gave rise to our questioning of that invisible existence. The scarcity led to the urgent need for a new visibilization of Central America, no longer as the setting form wars but as a creative space” (Pérez Ratton, “Which Region?”, 43). 22 Virginia Pérez Ratton, Del estrecho dudoso a un Caribe invisible (Valencia: University of Valencia, 2012), 67. 23 Virginia Pérez Ratton, “Central America and the Caribbean: A Story in Black and White”, in Centroamérica y el Caribe. Una historia en blanco y negro, (Ex. Cat. XXIV Sao Paulo Biennal, 1998), 5. 24 Pérez Ratton, “Central America and the Caribbean”, 5. 25 Ernesto Calvo, “Videoarte en Centroamérica”, interview by Daniel Ross-Mix, in http://www.latinart.com/spanish/aiview.cfm?start=1&id=180, n.d. 26 Among the financial supporters of Teor/éTica is Hivos (according to Pérez Ratton, this Dutch NGO, that also supported the MADC, has been the “godmother of all the regional independent projects” (Virginia Pérez Ratton, “Centroamérica ¿cintura (o corsé) de América?”, in Visiones del sector cultural en Centroamérica, San José: AECI, 2000, 297), as well the Prince Claus, Getty and Art Collaborative foundations. It would be interesting to undertake a comparative study of Teor/éTica and the Di Tella Institute in Argentina, and of Pérez Ratton and Romero Brest. 27 Notice that the word “centrales” refers to the concept of “central” that also relates to the notion of centrality implicit in the name of the region: Central America. [Note from the translator] 28 Pérez Ratton, “Centroamérica ¿cintura (o corsé) de América?”, 297. 29 Ibid.. 30 Pérez Ratton, “Which Region?”, 68. 31 Ibid., 74. 32 Iconofagia (Iconophagy) was presented at the Cuenca Biennial (Ecuador 2004, curated by Pérez Ratton and Díaz Bringas), in which fifteen artists from Central America and the Caribbean exhibited their works, winning three of the six awards. In 2002, the Atlantic magazine of CAAM (Canary Islands) published a special issue (“The doubtful isthmus: Central America”). The centre organized in 2003 the exhibition Centroamérica: Oscilaciones y Artificios/Central America: Oscillations and Artifices, curated by Vivianne Loría, with no relation to MADC or Teor/éTica. 33 Mosquera recounts that “When Harald Szeeman was organizing the 2001 Venice Biennial, she [Pérez Ratton] traveled to the celebrated curator’s home Switzerland and knocked on his door to ask him if he was planning on visiting Central America in order to takes the region’s art into consideration. Needless to say, the thought had never crossed through Szeeman’s mind. But Virginia convinced him, and he traveled to San Jose, visited studios there, and saw visual material by artists in the

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region. As a result, several of them were invited to the Biennial’s main show for the first time, and two of them won prizes” (Acuña, Virginia Pérez Ratton. Travesía, 268). 34 Pérez Ratton, “Which Region?”, 80. 35 In 2003 the ArtMedia magazine (no relation to Teor/éTica) was first published, producing eighteen quarterly issues on Central American art, of excellent graphic quality. There have been other magazines in the region, but they have been discontinued. RaRa magazine (Guatemala) is currently being published and continues to circulate. 36 Its venues have been Belize, Taipei, Mérida, Washington, San Jose, Taiwan, Havana, Guatemala, Barcelona and Badajoz. 75 artists have participated from Belize, Central America, Trinidad and Tobago, Aruba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, Mexico, the U.S. and Taiwan. 37 Participants: the Ortiz Gurdián Foundation (from Nicaragua, and it also supports the biennial in Honduras), the Páiz Foundation (from Guatemala; it also supports the biennial in El Salvador), the Entrepreneurs for the Arts Association (Costa Rica) and the AlemánHeally Foundation (Panama). 38 Pérez Ratton, who was a judge several times in BAVIC, was always critical of it; for example: “Visibilization and circulation structures such as national or Central American biennials could have a greater impact if there were permanent structures between one event and another, as well as improved and greater international presence. The quality of Central American Biennial is not dependent on the vision or criteria of a curator, but on local selection processes, which are not homogeneous […] In most cases, there is no support for the production of works or their proper installation […].” (Pérez Ratton, “Which Region?”, 85). Others have critically pointed out that invited experts usually do not know the region and its art scene. 39 There are neither published reports on What Central America? nor on Central Themes 2. BAVIC lacks a consolidated public record of its national and regional biennials and collateral activities. 40 See Kevin Power, ed., Pensamiento crítico en el nuevo arte latinoamericano (Madrid: Fundación César Manrique, 2006); and Olivares, 100 artistas latinoamericanos. This foundation promotes Latin American art in the U.S. (it is linked to the MOMA in New York and other museums and universities) and Europe (Tate Gallery, Centre Pompidou, The Prado Museum and Reina Sofia Museum). It has also provided some curatorial fellowships for research efforts in Central America. 41 Institutional Statement, web site http://espira.or 42 See Andrea Giunta, Escribir las imágenes. Ensayos sobre arte argentino y latinoamericano (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2011).

PART III LABOUR, WOMAN AND POLITICS

CHAPTER NINE LEAVING HOME: STORIES OF FEMINISATION, WORK AND NON-WORK ANGELA DIMITRAKAKI

Art Mobility / Labour Mobility / Gendered Labour In December 2008, at the onset of what was to be a protracted global financial crisis, Greece was swept by riots triggered by the police murder of a 15-year old boy in Athens.1 That same month the female secretary of the Union of Housekeepres and Cleaners of Attica (the greater populated region around densely-populated Athens) became the victim of a horrific acid attack, “of archaic and sexist connotations”, by two or four men as a response to her political action.2 Born in 1964 in Bulgaria, where she also got her university degree in History, Konstantina Kuneva moved to Greece in 2001, where she was to be an economic migrant. The assault on a migrant union leader as a result of her refusing to accept her “position”, opting instead to speak out (the attackers symbolically perhaps also forced acid down her throat) and radicalise other workers, mostly women, attracted comparatively little international attention. In Greece, where the financial crisis engendered unprecedently sharp social divisions, worsening at the time of writing (2013), the case of Kuneva quickly acquired symbolic status.3 The woman migrant, whose university education could not protect her from being demoted to a working-class subject in the European labour market, became the poster girl of the struggle against an emergent neo-fascist regime targeting migrant workers at large. In short, this is a neo-fascist regime implicated in the multi-layered, biopolitical attack of capital on labour and its principal function is the victimisation and disempowerment of a transnational labour body locked into literally obscene labour relations. Being a global project, the attack of capital on labour appears particularly successful when it finds an expression

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at the level of the local, of the national, and, if certain conditions are met, of the fascisistic. What Kuneva’s story of leaving home suggests is that the status of diminished citizen rights, or what has been dubbed the feminisation of citizenship, is in fact interwoven with the so-called feminisation of labour. Kuneva’s story is unusual, but not exceptional, in the global race for devaluing labour with the least possible resistance, a race where women’s “natural” qualities (endurance, patience, submissiveness, unconditional commitment) are to be counted on and exploited to the full. It is a story from the real world rather than the art world. Yet another story that circulated in the international press also in 2008 compels a rethinking of whether a contemporary feminist politics, even if located in the artworld, ought to be differentiating between the two. In March 2008 Italian artist Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo, also known as Pippa Bacca, began the collaborative project Brides on Tour with fellow woman artist Silvia Moro.4 The two artists set out to travel east, dressed in white wedding gowns: they would hitch-hike through Northern Italy, part of the Balkans, Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, arriving finally to Egypt. The materiality of the journey conveyed an implicit ideological message (in addition to the explicit one connected with art as peace pilgrimage): that women art workers had equal access to global space as a site of (artistic) labour. That the journey commenced on 8 March, or “international woman’s day”, stressed further the possibility of new, and happy, beginnings allegedly associated with the symbol of the wedding gowns and the ritual of marriage. On April 11, 2008 this collaborative artwork, premised on the artists’ mobility and realisable through the participation of drivers most of whom would be men (it is mostly men who drive trucks on motorways), came to a halt when Di Marineo was found raped and strangled in Turkey. The “incident” happened not too far from cosmopolitan Istanbul and near town Gezbe, and the perpetrator was a male driver who had picked up the (woman) artist, as reported by numerous news agencies citing Di Marineo’s sister: “Her travels were for an artistic performance and to give a message of peace and of trust, but not everyone deserves trust”.5 Commenting on the gendered exchange informing “trust”, in this case, was not something that the media was prepared to do. Such a reading was attempted a couple of years later by Kurdish female documentary filmmaker, Bingöl Elmas, who, dressed in black, continued from where the Italian artist had been brutally murdered to the Syrian border, only to affirm the transnational journey as an acutely gendered terrain of production. Elmas’s film My Letter to Pipa (2010, 60 min), funded by European organisations, was

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described by Elmas as very hard to make.6 Crucially, the global terrain as a site of labour was in need of positive feminisation. Having written elsewhere in greater detail about the gendered politics of travel, when the latter is a form of artistic labour of great import in the age of global capital, here I merely wish to claim a connection between the cases of Kuneva and di Marineo.7 It is a connection that puts a question mark on recent discourses concerning a re-invigorated and necessary cosmopolitanism as a demand raised in global capital’s accelerated modernity. The critique of contemporary art’s ethnographic turn, as put forward by Hal Foster and Miwon Kwon in the mid to late 1990s, eventually began being displaced by efforts to chart a critical cosmopolitanism as a major objective of contemporary art. 8 This objective began being considered when the voices advocating an imagined state of a universal citizenship grew louder. Theorists such as Nikos Papastergiadis (Australia) and Marsha Meskimmon (Britain) reclaimed a positively inflected cosmopolitanism, this time to be articulated “in the real conditions of existence” (Papastergiadis) and revealing its subject as “grounded, materially specific and relational” (Meskimmon). 9 But as Kuneva’s, di Marineo’s and Elmas’s testing of the ground illustrates, women’s project of leaving home remains fraught with risk. A positively inflected cosmopolitanism in indeed unthinkable when not premised on a positive feminisation of the gendered global ground where mobility is actualised. Di Marineo’s rape and murder during her journey was not a case of a temporarily defeated cosmopolitanism, a momentary disruption of an otherwise smooth enactment of a global citizenship pursued through art mobility. Rather, it was a work accident that re-asserts art making as historically, rather than essentially, gendered labour. Kuneva’s and di Marineo’s work accidents are steeped in patriarchal ideology. In traditional patriarchal parlance, Kuneva and di Marineo were “asking for it”. By being proactive rather than subservient, by claiming their right to work within the new conditions defining work (from being a cleaner to being an artist) in the risk-fraught globalisation on the ground rather than as a cyber-real, disembodied transnationalism, they exposed themselves to danger. Worse, the inverted picture provided by the same logic—within, for example, the value system of liberal feminism—would have us look at cases of heroic, exceptional individuals who happened to be women, rather than seek to understand how gendered conditions of production have shaped the terms of subordination and its negation. Yet for a materialist feminist history of art (which I see as a politically meaningful response to the historical specificity of global capital) 10 the issue is precisely that Kuneva and di Marineo are connected as women

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workers introduced into, and active in, the same historical moment. To flag up this issue suggests that feminism in art can no longer be about assisting the careers of women in the art world but about identifying, comprehending and transforming gendered positions implicated in the global organisation of production. Overall, production, and work at large, are now understood as feminised, when “feminisation” delivers principally negative effects on the workers. A ubiquitous term in the era of global capital, “feminisation” prompts a consideration of at least what the term “gendered position” draws into focus and what understandings might ensue as a result. Moreover, the feminisation of citizenship is interwoven with the transformation of the labour market overall, seen to rely on mobile, flexibilised, service-oriented or, more generally, “immaterial” labour. The unstable, insecure, often seasonal, low-paid work characterised as precarious labour now features regularly in anti-capitalist thinking, both within and beyond the art world. Yet precarity is of particular relevance to those involved in the art sector where 9 to 5 schedules are considered anathema to creativity and where “passion for what you do” is translated into unpaid, voluntary labour fuelling the industry of internships and the institution of “work experience”. In these conditions, it is particularly hard to organise and take collective action against exploitation. Importantly, the term “feminisation of labour” entails also the expectation that labour becomes individuated, that it is somehow hidden and made invisible (much like housework) within a system of production that nevertheless relies on it. The feminisation of labour is then associated not just with an organisation of production but with a subject formed around a “core” of production relations. As Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter stressed in 2009 “in its most ambitious formulation, it [the question of precarity] would encompass not only the condition of precarious workers but a more general existential state, understood at once as a source of political subjection, of economic exploitation and of opportunities to be grasped”, further noting that “related to this was [is] the question of the gendered nature of precarious work”. 11 Associated with a historically dictated condition of being, the subject of such production relations was apprehended by social theorists Vassilis Tsianos and Dimitris Papadopoulos in terms of “embodied capitalism, a concept leading to considering the possibilities of deterritorialisation and exodus beyond the concept of immaterial labour” (my emphasis).12 The crucial point made by these authors is that bodies at present produce an excess (primarily, of socially directed action) not captured by productivity. And this leads them to conceive of “a new model of subjectivity [...]”,13 which is not limited to

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what is useful to production, nor to forms of organised exploitation associated with it. Contemporary materialist feminism, largely visible outside the art history of the contemporary, both stresses the centrality of work for feminist politics today and guards against the gendered blindspots and amnesia often underlying theorisations of immaterial labour. Feminist scholar and activist Silvia Federici, associated with the legacy of Autonomist Marxism, has repeatedly questioned the assertion that through immaterial labour “capitalism is not only leading us beyond labor, but it is creating the conditions for the ‘commonization’ of our work experience, where the divisions are beginning to crumble.”14 Federici argues instead that this affirmation of precarious labour represents the interests of a privileged group of male workers in cognitive capitalism. Significantly, feminist studies of globalisation have stressed how “global indebtedness, structural adjustment policies, and the hegemony of neoliberal development strategies have directly intensified women’s triple roles in production, reproduction, and community management.”15 (my emphasis) “Community management”, or the prospect of transnational community building, is indeed a useful term when thinking about what Kuneva’s and di Marineo’s work shared. Yet, at present, a feminist art history implementing a transversal examination of gendered labour—that is, an enquiry into what connects a migrant female cleaner and a woman artist—exists primarily in the realm of fantasy. The deferred realisation of such a research project renders invisible the practices of refusal that women enact vis-à-vis reproductive work and their flight from domestic space overall. This imaginary (at present!) research project would set different objectives to those of the Autonomist tradition, as recently examined by Kathi Weeks who argues that women’s emancipation from domestic slavery should have never meant women’s “slavery to an assembly line”.16 I refer to Weeks’ critique in order to highlight the emergence of a discourse in materialist feminist research against the glorification of work. True, at present feminist research on production should not accept unproblematically the idealisation of paid work for women, when exit routes from capitalism’s wage and mortgage slavery machine are claimed as forms of ideological emancipation for both women and men. Yet although this perspective merits attention especially in the context of a feminist art history, where art has often been seen as play or non-alienated labour, the nebulous conditions of production in contemporary capitalism suggest—to me at least—that feminist research cannot afford to dismiss the aspiration of elucidating the shifting conditions of gendered labour—including what

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goes on in art. Here, despite feminist art history’s close attention to the private and public dimensions of women’s lives and work, we note that no feminist study of contemporary women artists (by which I mean artists coming of age after 1989) has systematically considered how their labour may in fact constitute practices of refusal, which may nevertheless be imbricated in relations instituted through capital. What I wish then to stress is that for a feminist art history in the early twenty-first century, the “gendering of work”, a major concern in feminist analyses of globalisation in the past ten years, must be as important as the gendering of signifying practices was in the feminist art history of the late twentieth century—for example, in the 1970s and 1980s.17 A concept such as “embodied capitalism” can be helpful insofar as it permits us to think about a co-articulation of external and internal sites defined by capital’s global drive (precisely as a master-narrative) and resistance to it. In the remaining part of this chapter, I will look at a very narrow selection of examples where women’s work generates art forms that accommodate feminised sites of resistance. I am purposefully deploying the term “feminised” here—in order to reclaim “feminisation” from its negative registering as a process of gradual, or even acute, disempowerment or loss of rights and status. What art, or art-inspired, practices can offer at this juncture is an effort to identify reclaimed spaces where feminisation may be associated with emancipation and alternatives to the passive acceptance of a patriarchal-capitalist status quo. Below I identify two such spaces— the street and the classroom—where feminist politics turns art and activism into a dialectic between work and non-work.

Feminising the Street What I wish to call “feminising the street”—including the square, for that matter—is a distinct direction in contemporary anti-capitalist politics, evident in the work of artists such as Marcelo Exposito (Spain/Argentina) and Moira Zoitl (Austria) to that of collectives such as Precarias a la deriva (Spain) and Mujeres Públicas (Argentina). The difference between Exposito and Zoitl, on the one hand, and Precarias a la deriva and Mujeres Públicas on the other, is that the first two partake of a politics of knowledge relying heavily on documentation whereas the latter two (the two collectives) take the street as the actual theatre of operations, explicitly prioritising activism over the representation of action. Exposito, working with Nuria Vila, has registered the actual use of codes of femininity by protesters in demonstrations staging anti-capitalist action. In works such as “Tactical Frivolity + Rhythms of Resistance” (2007)

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Exposito and Vila have drawn connections between the Suffragette body and the theatrical-political deployment of sensual (and often pink-coded) excess associated with the stereotype of an unhinged femininity. In projects such as “Exchange Square” (2002-2009) Zoilt has registered Asian domestic workers’ struggles to bring forth a public existence (as opposed to their housebound invisibility). Precarias a la deriva, a collective formed at the aftermath of industrial action in Madrid, articulate a very complex politics by queering—or possibly feminising—the malearticulated, earlier Situationist project in the temporality of the contemporary. 18 In 2003 Mujeres Públicas formed in Buenos Aires, two years after the collapse of Argentina’s economy that resulted in many taking to the streets in protest. Hard perhaps to imagine at the time, street protest cultures generated during national economy meltdowns (as witnessed in Argentina) or otherwise connected with economic inequality (such as the transnational, ongoing Occupy movement) were to become a hallmark of early twenty-first-century crisis capitalism. The impact of such turmoil on art and feminist activism is only beginning to raise lines of enquiry in art history. Mujeres Públicas admit that forming a collective was also intended to challenge the view, often encountered in progressive contexts as well, “that feminism is not politics”.19 But the question of course was, and is: what kind of politics can feminism be when seeking to re-define (as it must) the regime of politics? In their first formal introduction to the collective’s activities in English in the London-based intermational feminist art journal n.paradoxa, Mujeres Públicas acknowledged also an interrupted feminist art politics from the 1960s onwards in Argentina, though they appear very conscious of the new circumstances to which they respond.20 Picking up the thread of past feminist work does not just mean entering, but rather re-inventing, a feminist continuum, and it is in this context where a positive re-scripting of feminisation can tactically occur. In 2008 Mujeres Públicas participated in the feminist symposium Privilege Walk and the roving anti-capitalist European Social Forum, both in Malmö, giving as the collective’s raison d’être a feeling of “discordance” with un unfolding social reality. Arguing “we went out to the streets to destroy”, and self-identifiying as “women” and “lesbians”, they also declared “we went out in the streets to construct”. And yet, acknowledging the contradictions facing their practice (crossing art and activism), they stated a preference: “Mujeres Públicas is defined as a feminist (not a lesbian) group, because we understand that feminism implies the defense of the rights of all women without making any distinctions”.21 The above offers the key operating principle of a new form

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of feminist art activism: subject-positions are not invoked to safeguard difference and articulate singularity but to justify the social demand for solidarity, of acting with others (lesbians and heterosexual women) to transform a social subject that exists despite its heterogeneity.22 Mujeres Públicas enter, or exit into, the street as a space already claimed by the heterogeneity of contemporary protest cultures. Despite however their open self-identification as feminists, Mujeres Públicas share, with much anti-capitalist theory, a suspicion towards practices and contexts of institutional representation. In the Malmö text, they reject the museum (where feminist art historians have focused their energies in order to enable women artists’ access to it) as the “space of the legitimated word”, “the nameable” and “the showable”. De-legitimation of the obvious—often engaging tactics of parody where a concept is resignified against its dominant meaning—has been central to the collective’s art activism. Most of the collective’s work takes the form of provocative text and drawings entering the street space as posters or confrontational and unsolicited dialogical situations—when, for example, they burst into a public gathering, asking people what they think about heterosexuality. In their work method, the act of asking questions is a consciousness-raising activity prioritising risky confrontation over the safe distance that didacticism, imbricated with the authority of the teacher or the vanguard artist, connotes. In describing their very presence in the street as a means of “questioning bourgeois morals”, they explicitly characterise such morals as experiments on how to keep “us away from the street”. In the Malmö essay, who this “us” refers to is left purposefully vague: it can refer to the domestication of women but also to all those who succumb to domestication as an effect of technologies creating ultimately private—if interactive—individuals. The collective has made much use of the concept of colonisation, drawn in this case from the continent’s history. Their critique of western feminism is really an attack on academic feminism’s alliance with post-structuralism and the denial of “truth politics”—an alliance seen to sabotage the feminist cause in the Argentinian social context defined by the truths of, first, dictatorial rule and, a bit later, economic terror. Yet Mujeres Públicas also associate “colonisation” with the role of ideology in the re/production of a feminine subject characterised by passivity. “Colonised Women” (2004) consisted of publicly placed posters presenting instances of women’s bodies and minds occupied by patriarchal religion. A year later, the poster “Home Work” (2005) brought to the street the issue of women’s support of capitalist economy as unpaid and super-exploited home workers. Like most of the group’s posters, this one

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also made use of an accessible image-text style, combining figurative cartoon-like illustrations and short textual descriptions to offer a cumulative “visual effect” of a more ethereal economic reality: if time is money, here’s the time that women spend serving others for free. In 2009 Mujeres Públicas wrote—collaboratively—the book Choose your own disadventure: The incredible and sad story of any one of us, as a different format for exposing how women’s lives are typically produced through consecutive pseudo-choices (“available” only to that one gender).23 The narrative satirised the postmodern literary trope of the reader being invited to choose her own turn of events/fiction/ending. The Spanish text narrated and interwove the lives of the collective’s five original members (since 2009 only the three core members remain in the group) in an effort to expose the myth of individual achievements, failures and “life & career” choices. The implicit assertion that ideology, as internalised values, produces gendered biopolitical effects that in turn crystallise as subject positions is really what defines the work that Mujeres Públicas perform in public. Indeed, Mujeres Públicas consider the diverse life experiences, skills and expertise brought by different members key to their identification with autonomous social action rather than autonomous art— describing themselves as a “feminist group” operating in the terrain of “visual activism”. The public is always invited to take ownership of the work and “re-edit it”, as a strategy that has created “an important distribution and re-appropriation network […] in different provinces of the country and throughout other countries of Latin America”.24 The collective’s debut global art-world appearance comes only in 2012, on an invitation from Cuba’s Havana Biennial. The decision to accept the invitation came after much discussion, in the knowledge of the specific biennial’s alternative character but also out of the need to look outward and expand the sites of struggle.25 Crucially, the acceptance by Mujeres Públicas that creative work may not be a source of income, so prevalent in a Post-Fordist regime of generalised production, is in this instance an enabling factor for sustaining a relationship between art and activism, as activities roughly corresponding and yet irreducible to the sites of work and non-work. Mujeres Públicas’ project of transforming public consciousness while seeking to maintain a distance from the art market and the exhibition circuit as distribution mechanisms (with a price to pay) implies the deployment of different criteria for evaluating a successful feminist practice: here “feminist practice” marks a space of doing between life and work, being limited to neither. On the other hand, the collective appears aware that in its specific urban reality, many women, whom Mujeres

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Públicas wish to address, remain domesticated. Subjugated to the persistently undervalued work of care and reproduction, these women may be crossing the urban space where Mujeres Públicas place their action but may be less inclined to occupy it politically, as feminists. The relationship between private and public, a cardinal issue of second-wave feminism, can be seen to underlie Mujeres Públicas’ project of feminising the street, its centrality apparently unchallenged by the shift of focus from finding a language of representation to activating participation. Are Mujeres Públicas in the street as the site of women’s symbolic labour time-outside-the-home? Or are they there because like all activists, and unlike advertisers and IKEA designers, they have no access to the still private space where women are drawn to “become women” through the invisibility of their labour? Whereas posing, and answering, difficult questions has been a staple of a developing feminist intellect (not least in more analytical and deconstructive moments of feminist art history), Mujeres Públicas’ commitment to art as activism begins from the opposite direction: in effect, the question “how we can appropriate “feminisation” for a range of politically positive meanings?” arises as an outcome rather than a precondition of their practice.

Feminising the Classroom Swedish collective MFK, or Malmö Free University for Women, existed from 2006 to 2011 and was described by its two founding members, artists Lisa Nyberg and Johanna Gustavsson, as “an ongoing participatory art project and a feminist organisation for critical knowledge production”.26 In 2011 MFK published Do the right thing!, a bi-lingual (Swedish-English) manual explaining their practice and aspirations. Above all, the manual conveys the experience of experimenting with what feminist labour as grassroots action might mean today. MFK was an implicit acknowledgement that education (that is, its absence or cooptation into a broadly antifeminist culture) is at the heart of women’s oppression globally and an explicit acknowledgement of the “academisation” of feminist knowledge (a premise they share with Mujeres Públicas) and of the “industrialisation” of education advanced in neoliberal Europe. MFK started with no funding, by establishing a nomadic counterinstitution free to congregate wherever it was possible; moved on to a joint bank account, applied and received grants and, crucially, accepted full responsibility for the “failure” to ultimately sustain a steady stream of public funding. Their work was often dismissed by funding bodies on the

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grounds that it was not “enough art/culture oriented,” and “not democratic”, implementing instead “different forms of separatism”. 27 MFK was able to accommodate its two founders’ widely divergent approaches to economic survival, with one of the two artists (Johanna) enhancing her personal links to the art world while the other (Lisa) returned to a day-job—a return deemed necessary for sustaining her ideological independence. What I wish to note here is that the attempt to protect the collective, community-building project from folding forced an acceptance of precarious work conditions elsewhere. The pervasive ideology of project ownership, or artistic authorship— that is, initiating one’s own “work” rather than appearing as a follower of another artist’s initiative—made it hard to draw closer fellow artists. MFK saw the art institution as a “resource” which had to enable both the collective’s political intervention but, crucially, also MFK’s visibility within “art history”. And finally, MFK focused on “strategic separatism”, “intersectionality”, “collective dependency” and “utopia”—concepts said to inform both the ways in which the collective sought to collaborate with others and its philosophy of radical pedagogy. This alternative art-making prioritised duration, interdisciplinarity (in this case, of feminist and politically engaged research) and the commitment to generating feminist responses to contemporary problems—MFK’s workshop “Culture, Labour and Neoliberalism—How do we respond?” (9-10 May 2007) is an indicative example. In practical terms, MFK have stressed that “it wasn’t until we got a place of our own that we realised how important it was to have a physical place for work”.28 A physical space permitted MFK to borrow technical equipment when needed, to receive donated books and journals. Their pedagogical practice has been very coherent and involved “learning by doing”, sharing ideas and rejecting competition, “mak[ing] what you can from what you have” rather than waiting for funding to arrive, refusing to promote consensus but embracing conflict instead, a commitment to experimentation with different formats for activating a learning process, and the implementation of a “yes-policy (always say yes to submitted proposals) but where “a yes is followed by a how?”29 The publication of a “manual”, where self-reflection and analysis, organised into discrete chapters each of which concludes with bullet points offering structured advice based on the collective’s experience, is in its own right an answer to this “how?”. In a paper delivered at the University of Gothenburg titled “Essentially Experimental?”, MFK described “intersectionalty as a theoretical tool to formulate critical knowledge production and strategic separatism as a way

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to practice intersectionality”.30 Soon enough, and as a response to external enquiries concerning the right to participate in MFK activities, the MFK “all women welcome” policy was re-scripted: first, as “open to anyone who identifies as woman”, and soon after as “for and by any persons who now or at some point identify as a woman”.31 Practising other forms of separatism, and most notably class separatism, threw up similar kind of issues, as the MFK class sub-group pondered over imaginary scenarios where a choice would have to be made between admitting a working-class man or a middle-class woman to the collective. In essence, what the pedagogy espoused by MFK marked was its distance from entrenched “progressive” political correctness as the cornerstone and smokescreen of exclusion encountered in the capitalist “knowledge factory”.32 It is indeed hard to articulate an ideological context for MFK’s strategic separatism, apart from reiterating the Swedish state’s partial success at implementing gender equality or ameliorating class and racial forms of inequality (as the Stockholm riots of May 2013 were to aptly demonstrate). 33 On the one hand, MFK’s holding on to the identity “woman” made apparent the will to keep women central to a problematic addressing an aggressive, viral contemporary capitalism. Yet separatism entailed also in this case a strong pull towards identity and despite the impulse to actively queer processes of self-identification as “woman” and to encourage self-identification (and, by implication, the positive feminisation of a student body), it is questionable whether MFK managed to avoid the pitfalls of identity politics. Re-scripting the definition “woman” to foster inclusivity could expand indefinitely in a social context of liberal politics (such as Sweden), but as the MFK class group dilemmas made apparent, it was unimaginable that participation could be scripted along the lines of “open to anyone who feels or has felt working-class”. In this imaginary scenario, a solidarity based on someone’s material conditions and poverty would have been seriously challenged by the presence of those whose class privilege was an outcome of making other people poor primarily through labour relations. This means that in striving for solidarity through a feminisation of learners’ identity, as a pedagogical project in its own right, MFK overlooked the connection between difference, power and exploitation. Overall, it is easier to advocate “new and unholy alliances” (between women and feminised subjects) by practicing a pragmatism that seeks to challenge access to privilege rather than undo relations of economic exploitation embedded in how we work. Therefore questions concerning the limits of projects of feminisation remain, or are indeed complicated by class politics.

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On Feminisation, Work and Non-Work The stories of Mujeres Públicas and MFK differ significantly from those of Kuneva and di Marineo, though in reality, all four narratives presented here involve women seeking to generate, and implement, radical ideas and ignite the desire for protest, action and freedom in other women. The gendered experiences of “doing” followed in this chapter are about how women make things happen outside the home—and how, in the last instance, such actions are either about more women claiming their right to exist, as productive subjects, outside the home or else address the conditions these women themselves encountered in leaving home. The dilemmas faced by Mujeres Públicas and MFK suggest that a feminisation of the street and of the classroom—of women’s action outside the home and where politics is shaped and acted out—is fraught with contradictions and difficult choices, which cannot be smoothed out through an appeal to collectivism or what Federici addressed as a (false) process towards “the commonization of work”. As we saw, in the realm of art committed to radical politics by example (by how and where the artists act), the main dilemma faced is whether to opt for situating such action in a grey zone between work and non-work—since the artists receive wages from other forms of labour. As long as austerity policies are the dish of the day served transnationally, we can only expect a greater degree of acceptance of the fact that our most genuinely productive energies will remain formally outside remunerated labour. What then it means to be an artist in these conditions, when “artist” has been a professionalised identity for so long, is worth rethinking—beyond the terms “day job” and “my passion”. Has radical art become a route for affirming the ideology that sustains a move towards more unpaid productivity, and is feminism in the arts implicated in this? Or is the work as non-work undertaken by Mujeres Públicas and MFK a textbook illustration of Tsianos and Papadopoulos’s argument that “a new model of subjectivity [...]” is being engendered: one “which is neither effect of production nor is it identical with the conditions of its [work’s] exploitation”? Should we see in this radical art— questioning the artist as professional but also questioning the amateur culture that has in the past typically assimilated and neutralised women’s creativity—a rehearsal for how we can overcome the regime of work as the very framework of our productivity? If so, does feminism have something to suggest here? Is crafting a collectively articulated space of non-work a practice of refusal of both capital-controlled labour and the invisibility of housework? Although answers to these questions are not

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immediately available, we can begin by reminding ourselves that women have a long history of doing hidden work, or work that is not recognised as such at all but is nevertheless vital to the reproduction of capitalism. Yet the projects of positive feminisation flagged up here can also be seen as platforms where critical forms of visibility are pursued. Yet the visibility sought is not—when achieved—conferred to the artist but to issues as well as to the subjects on whose side the artist enacts her political positioning. In a contemporary context, projects of positive feminisation entail an activist dimension that is not necessarily compatible with access to the identity of the professional artist and the choices this identity is typically premised on. The precarious relations of Mujeres Públicas and MFK with the art institution, where professional identities are arbitrated, emanate from an ambivalence vis-à-vis the latter. Yet, following Federici, this can hardly be received as an instance of capitalism “moving us beyond labour”. Artistic labour continues to be ratified as such in specific and institutionally delimited sites, if it is to be remunerated. How then the demand for securing the right to work (i.e. make a living) as feminist artists is to be reconciled with the demand to safeguard the desired autonomy of feminist interventions is hardly answerable at present, in a global context where the very definition of production, and its connection with traditional models of either work or non-work, are subject to redefinition. Looking at how feminist politics intersects with the spheres of art, community building and activism can at least suggest an expanded terrain of material and ideological investments in pushing against old boundaries but also evaluating, politically, the ones that take their place.

Notes 1

On the events and their international visibility see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ 2008_Greek_riots. Accessed 27 June 2013. 2 See Chris Walsh, “Women on the Left: Konstantina Kuneva”, International Socialist Group (Scotland), 12 February 2013, http://internationalsocialist.org.uk/ index.php/2013/02/women-on-the-left-konstantina-kuneva/. Accessed 27 June 2013. 3 See Effie Avdela et al., ǼʌȚıijĮȜȒȢ İȡȖĮıȓĮ, ‘ȖȣȞĮȚțİȓĮ İȡȖĮıȓĮ’: ȆĮȡȑȝȕĮıȘ ȝİ ĮijȠȡȝȒ IJȘȞ ȀȦȞıIJĮȞȓȞĮ ȀȠȪȞİȕĮ [Precarious Work, ‘Women’s Work’: An Intervention on account of Konstantina Kuneva] (Athens: Nefeli, 2009). In 2014 Kuneva was among the non-party members running with Greek left party SYRIZA in the May elections to the European Union parliament. 4 For a discussion of this project see “Brides on Tour by Silvia Moro and Pippa Bacca” (© 2007. Museum of Contemporary Art Republic of Srpska) at http://msurs.org/en/index.php?sid=content&cid=27. Accessed 1 August 2012. On

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this site the itinerary given is: “ITALY • 2008, 8 MARCH: Leaving from Byblos art Gallery, Verona, Italy. Meeting with Francesco Giusti, photographer • Venice , 9 MARCH • Nova Gorica/Gorizia (10- 12 MARCH) SLOVENIA (12 MARCH) • Ljubljana CROATIA • Zagabria BOSNIA (13-16 MARCH) • Banja Luka • Sarajevo BULGARIA (17-19 MARCH) • Sofia TURKEY (20-25 MARCH / 26-29 MARCH) • Istanbul • Ankara SYRIA (30-31 MARCH) • Damascus LEBANON (1-4 APRIL) meeting with photographer JORDAN - (9-15 APRIL) EGYPT (21 APRIL) • Cairo RETURN by air or ship”. 5 Quotation from “Missing Italian Woman Artist Found Dead in Turkey”, Associated Press, 12 April 2008, http://www.foxnews.com/story/ 0,2933,350970,00.html. Accessed 10 April 2009. 6 A. Saglam, “Continuing the Journey of Peace Bride Pippa Bacca”, Hürriyet Daily News, Istanbul (February 18, 2010), http://www.asminfilm.com/Basindetay.aspx?cid=25. Accessed 10 June 2011. 7 See Angela Dimitrakaki, Gender, ArtWork and the Global Imperative: A Materialist Feminist Critique (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). A more detailed discussion of Mujeres Públicas and MFK, discussed in this essay, can be found in the concluding chapter of the book, where however the link to practices of feminisation is not pursued. 8 I am referring to Foster’s essay “The Artist as Ethnographer” in his Return of the Real, 1996; and Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another, 2004. There have been many criticisms of cosmopolitanism as a viable position in the age of capitalist globalisation. See for example Iain Chambers and Lidia Curtis, eds., The Postcolonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons (London and New York: Routledge, 1996). Numerous re-appraisals of cosmopolitanism have taken place beyond the confines of art in the past decade. See J. Nederveen Pieterse, “Emancipatory Cosmopolitanism: Towards an Agenda”, Development and Change 37/ 6 (November 2006): 1247-57. 9 See Nikos Papastergiadis, Cosmopolitanism and Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press 2012) and Marsha Meskimmon, Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination (New York: Routledge, 2010). 10 See Angela Dimitrakaki, “Gendering the Multitude: Feminist Politics, Globalization and Art History”, in Women, the Arts and Globalization: Eccentric Experience, eds. Marsha Meskimmon and Dorothy Rowe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). 11 Ibid. 12 Vassilis Tsianos and Dimitris Papadopoulos, “Who’s Afraid of Immaterial Workers? Embodied Capitalism, Precarity, Imperceptibility” (2006), http://preclab. net/text/06-TsianosPapadopoulos.pdf. Accessed 18 October 2011. 13 Tsianos and Papadopoulos, “Who’s Afraid of Immaterial Workers?”. 14 Silvia Federici, “Precarious Labor: A Feminist Viewpoint”, Variant 37 (Spring/Summer 2010): 23. 15 Richa Nagar, Victoria Lawson, Linda McDowell, and Susan Hanson, “Locating Globalization: Feminist (Re)readings of the Subjects and Spaces of Globalization”, Economic Geography 78/3 (July 2002): 257-284. Here 262.

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Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University, 2011): 124. 17 Nagar et al., “Locating Globalization”, 271. 18 See Precarias a la deriva, “Adrift through the Circuits of Feminized Precarious Work” (April 2004), http://eipcp.net/transversal/0704/precarias1/en. Accessed 27 June 2013. 19 Mujeres Públicas in electronic interview with the author, 7 December 2011. 20 See María Laura Rosa, “Our Bodies, Our History: Mujeres Públicas’ Activism in the City of Buenos Aires”, n.paradoxa 30 (July 2012): 5-11. 21 Quotes taken from “Paper read at the European Social Forum, Malmö and Privilege Walk Symposium, organised by the Malmö, Sweden 2008 YES! Association and Lilith Performance Studio”, http://www.mujerespublicas.com.ar/. Accessed 23 June 2011. 22 One example were the papers presented at the Common Differences symposium held in Tallinn in May 2010 and especially Katja Kobolt’s paper “Feminist Curatorial Practices and Feminist Canon-Building Strategies as Political Actions.” Kobolt was co-director and programmer of the City of Women Festival in Ljubljana and is currently co-coordinator of the Cross Border Experience project at the Peace Institute Ljubljana. On the symposium see http://common-differences.artun.ee. Accessed 8 December 2011. 23 An engaging review of the book appeared on the blog “Just Seeds: Artists’ Cooperative”, bringing together artists from North America and Mexico. Just Seeds stresses the significance of a feminist art collective appropriating the novel motif to produce a consciousness-raising narrative. See http://www.justseeds.org/blog/2009/02/choose_your_own_dis_adventure.html. Accessed 8 December 2011. 24 “Choose Your Own Dis-Adventure”. 25 This issue is discussed in more detail in Rosa, “Our Bodies, Our History: Mujeres Públicas’ Activism in the City of Buenos Aires”, published when the Havana Biennial was already over. 26 See http://mfkuniversitet.blogspot.gr/. Accessed 27 June 2013. 27 MFK, Do the right thing!, A manual from MFK (Malmö 2011): 22. 28 Ibid., 10. 29 Ibid., 14. 30 Ibid., 41. 31 Ibid., 33-34. 32 See Stanley Aronowitz, The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning (Boston, Mass: Beacon Press, 2000). A more Deleuzian approach, drawing a connection between the university and the art world, is assumed by Gerald Raunig in his recent Factories of Knowledge, Industries of Creativity (New York: Semiotext(e), 2013). 33 See “2013 Stockholm Riots”, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Stockholm_ riots. Accessed 27 June 2013.

CHAPTER TEN THE DOMESTIC IS POLITICAL: THE FEMINIZATION OF DOMESTIC LABOUR AND ITS CRITIQUE IN FEMINIST ART PRACTICE ELKE KRASNY

When urban historians or urban planners speak of urbanization, they rarely discuss housework and domestic labour. When art historians or philosophers analyse feminist art practices and their critique of feminized domestic labour, they rarely address urban growth or new models of urbanization. 1 Yet, there are significant links between new models of urbanization and the transformation of domestic labour. I would argue that major urban transformation processes and major transformations of domestic labour are not only concurrent, but, in fact, co-dependent. These links between urban growth and the rise of feminized domestic labour are the subject of this essay. Urbanization, historically equated with modernization, relies on the reserve army of domestic labour. Urbanization takes command2 at the intersection of the two scales of the urban and the domestic. Yet, for reasons of ideology and power, the divide between these scales, which also represent the different spheres of public and private, is upheld. This becomes a continuation of the earlier separate spheres ideology capitalizing on the feminization of domestic labour. In this essay I examine the relationship between urbanization and the feminization of domestic labour through two sets of interrelated cartographies. The first cartography relates shifts in the expansion of domestic labour to shifts in urban growth patterns. The second cartography relates the feminization of domestic labour to women’s-, labour-, and immigrant rights struggles and to its critique in feminist artistic practices. Examining three distinct models of urbanization, the European city at the turn of the nineteenth century, the North American city after World War II, and the Asian and Latin American City today, I will establish the links within the cartographies. The first model is the entrepreneurial urbanism at

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the turn of the nineteenth century in Vienna. The second model is the Fordist urbanism in North America after WWII. The third model is the global urbanism in Hong Kong and Mexico City today. 1900 Vienna, capital of the multi-national Austro-Hungarian Empire, drew on peripheral-to-urban migration for the provision of cheap domestic labour. Women, and men, in search of work flocked to the urban metropolis from rural areas and peripheral regions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. PostWorld-War II North America was characterized by a reinforced gendered division of labour constituted by the renewed ideal of the nuclear family. Housewives, who were widely discouraged to work outside the home, constituted the massive and unpaid domestic labour population. The global city today is characterized by immigrant domestic labour performed by an ever increasing number of women who leave behind their own countries, and often their own families and children. They, like the countries of origin, depend on the flows of remittances sent back home. Again, it is the recurrent issue of scale which surfaces here. This international division of labour reorganizes domestic labour based on the feminization of the global migrant work force. According to common perception, urban growth is a public affair, visibly taking shape in front of the eyes of the urban citizens. Feminized domestic labour, on the contrary, is considered a private affair, well hidden from public sight. It is, strategically, interiorized and invisibilized. This juxtaposition between public and private, visible and hidden, closely resembles the traditionally dominant separate spheres ideology which prescribed spatial, cultural, economic and political roles for men and women. According to the separate spheres ideology the difference between men and women was considered natural. This construction of naturalization led to a gendered division of public and private. The resulting spatialization was then, consequently, considered natural. The feminist movement of the 1960s arrived at “the personal is political”, a postulate which laid bare these processes of naturalization and politicized them. Today, we need to arrive at the domestic is political. The dominant narrative of urban historiography is based on upholding the separation of spheres through a separation of scales, as I want to argue. This highly ideological narrative continues to have far-reaching political and economic implications. The separate sphere narrative successfully arrived at division of the domestic sphere from the urban sphere, which precluded that the real engine behind urban growth, the domestic sphere and its massive feminized labour population, are recognized as such. Consequently, a feminist critique of the gender implications and the inherent injustice of the separate spheres ideology cannot stop short at the scale of the urban.

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The critique of the feminization of housework and domestic labour is pertinent to a critique of how urbanization takes command. “Why did Marx so persistently ignore women’s reproductive work?”.3 It is relevant to understand how the still prevailing narrative of separate spheres, the division between public and private, precluded that domestic labour became a public issue. By denying it its status as a public issue it was not fully recognized as the engine behind urban growth. The separate spheres ideology led to the separate scales ideology resulting in a divide between the urban and the domestic which reproduces the politics and ideologies of the divide between the private and the public. The separate spheres ideology dominated thought about men and women throughout the 19th century in the West. The world at large was understood as a world of public men roaming freely, be it in metropolitan streets or the new resource frontiers in the colonies. It is a world on the male move, which we find in Charles Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life, written at the heyday of Hausmann’s modernization program for Paris. Baudelaire writes about “the artist, man of the world and man of the crowd”:4 For the perfect flâneur, the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of the movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world and to be the centre of the world and yet remain hidden from the world – such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince and everywhere rejoices in his incognito. The lover of life makes the whole world his family.5

Interestingly enough, house and home are at the heart of Baudelaire’s description. They are significantly expanded in both meaning and scale. As a metaphor, the home signifies familiarity and the ease of ‘being at home’, as a metonymy, the home embodies both the urban space in its totality, and the whole world. Metaphor and metonymy join forces to create a vision of “freed from home”, in its domestic scale, only to be ready to make the city and the world a home. Central is the vision of freedom and independence. This comes at the expense of leaving the home and the cumbersome sphere of domestic labour behind, consequently declaring them the opposite of freedom and independence, namely unfree and dependent. Independence, freedom and expansion turn the world into a home.6 The ideology and practice of the separate spheres model turned the world into a home for “the man of the world” and denied this home to “the woman of the world” by turning the world into an unhomely (Freud’s

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term unheimlich resonates strongly here), unsafe, and potentially dangerous place. Concurrently, the home was defined as safe and sheltering. At closer inspection though, this separation of spheres was always more of an ideology than the depiction of an empirical reality. Not only did women move in the world, especially the women who became the domestic labour force in private homes. Needless to say, these private homes and houses were anything but safe and non-violent. Domestic labour was defined by exploitation and abuse. The urbanization of European cities from the midnineteenth century onwards relied on a constant flow of female migrants to urban centres. The 19th century is referred to as the century of the flâneur. It could also have become known as the century of the maid.

Vienna 1900 The first model of urbanization in my cartographies is 1900 Vienna’s entrepreneurial urbanism and its rise of a multi-ethnic domestic labour force. The rapid urban expansion of the last third if the 19th century is referred to as Gründerzeit. At that time, women travelled long distances from far-away regions to seek gainful employment. They became the metropolitan reserve army of labour. In 1893 house maids, chamber maids, laundry maids, kitchen maids, scullery maids, cooks, nursery maids and nannies, young and old, the majority of them migrants to the city of Vienna from remote villages or peripheries of the multi-lingual and multiethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire, took to the streets. For months on end, they demonstrated every Sunday and put forward their claims to basic labour rights, a restriction of working hours, a right to sleep, a right to health insurance, etc. The site they chose to demonstrate were the Rahl Steps, a wide staircase at a central location in Vienna. The domestic work force, considered invisible, made their claims to rights public. This political maids’ movement exposed feminized domestic labour and the social urban injustice as the inner workings of entrepreneurial capitalist urbanization. On January 22nd 2011 a group of art students of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, with whom I had worked on public space, resistance, feminist politics of memory and oppositional publics, took to the streets in Vienna. They congregated at the Rahl Steps where the maids had held their manifestations. The students’ artistic strategy was a re-enactment of historic demands of fair payment for domestic work. Based on research, they performed the claims of the past. Their actions attracted quite an audience. The students staged a demonstration; they held up pickets and banged on pots. They took the domestic to the streets and made it public.

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Figure 10.1. First attempts to politically mobilise and organise domestic workers in Vienna started in 1893 and led to the 1991 foundation of Einigkeit, Verband der Hausgehilfinnen, Erzieherinnen, Heim- und Hausarbeiterinnen Österreichs. (Unity. Association of maids, governesses and domestic workers) This election poster campaigns for the Socialist Democratic Party in Austria and advises domestic workers that they can and should not vote like their mistresses.

Today’s public mistook the readings from the past for claims of the present. This laid bare the striking similarities of the entrepreneurial capitalist urbanization of late 19th and early 20th century Vienna and its domestic labour force with Vienna’s feminized global domestic labour force today. The audience regarded the political claims not as historical, but as current. This paradoxical tension between the past and the present was central to the feminist strategy of the art students’7 re-enactment of domestic servants’ voices from 1893 onwards. The students positioned themselves at the bottom of the very staircase and on the steps which had been used for the political rallying and the collective self-organization of the female domestic workers more than a hundred years ago. The street and public staircase were a very well chosen location. The historic maids’ movement succeeded in establishing a Home for Domestic Workers (Hausgehilfinnenheim) at Rahlgasse 2, which happened to be next to the first middle school for girls in the Austrian Empire, founded by women’s rights activists in 1888.8 Both, the maids in the late 19th century and the art students at the beginning of the 21st century created a “space of appearance”: 9

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Figure 10.2. Re-Enacting Unity, performance, Vienna Rahlstiege, 2011. Students in my course on Art and Public Space at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna reenacted the political demands put forward by the domestic workers in 1911. Photograph: Elke Krasny. Courtesy of the author. Hannah Arendt […] claimed that all political action requires the “space of appearance”. She writes, for instance, “the polis, properly speaking is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter, where they happen to be.” The “true” space lies “between the people,” which means that as much as any action takes place in a located somewhere, it also establishes a space that belongs properly to the alliance itself. For Arendt, this alliance is not tied to its location. In fact, alliance brings about its own location, highly transposable. She writes: “action and speech create a space between the participants which can find its proper location almost anywhere and anytime.10

The space created between the maids, cooks, nannies and other domestic servants was a space of radical public appearance. The women who formed the dispersed reserve army of domestic labour, otherwise hidden from public sight and isolated in private homes, created the Rahl Steps as a political space to fight for domestic workers’ rights. The space between

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Figure 10.3. Re-Enacting Unity, performance, Vienna Rahlstiege, 2011. Students in my course on Art and Public Space at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna reenacted the political demands put forward by the domestic workers in 1911. Photograph: Elke Krasny. Courtesy of the author.

the participants Hannah Arendt speaks of became expanded over time in the re-enactment by the art students in January 2011. The re-enactment created a form of solidarity between domestic workers and their past claims and domestic workers and their precarious situation today since the public perception of the manifestation mistook the past with the present. “Human action depends upon all sorts of supports—it is always supported action”. 11 The public staircase and the street, Rahlstiege and Rahlgasse Vienna, created the site-specific support system. The staircase and the street linked the events of the domestic workers’ manifestations with the art students’ re-enactment and created the support structure for a localization of feminist political urban history: At such a moment, politics is not defined as taking place exclusively in the public sphere distinct from a private one, but it crosses those lines again and again, bringing attention to the way that politics is already in the home, or on the street, or in the neighborhood. […] So when we think about what it means to assemble a crowd, a growing crowd, and what it means to move through public space in a way that contests the distinctions between

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Coming to the assembly from their domestic spaces, the female servants were most certainly acutely aware of the relationship between space and support. The private homes, their places of work, were in constant need of their support. The homes needed support. So they understood, strategically, how the public place of the street and the staircase acted as their public support system to make their claims heard and seen. The domestic workers’ protest pointed to a radically new direction of political struggles. The reach of political mobilization of the working class initially stopped short at the domestic. Factory workers, already assembled in one place, were easier to reach and mobilize. The domestic workers place of work was the individual home which made it more difficult to find ways of instigating collective political action. Therefore, it is of importance that the bodies of women working as domestic workers took to the streets in the late 19th century. They made visible the domestic work force as a work force and not as individuals working in individual homes. The domestic workers' bodies demonstrating in public became a representation of the reproductive labour force. They put forward a collective political claim overcoming the isolation of the domestic factory. Therefore, they made the domestic political. They manifested the feminised labour as labour necessary for the city to function.

Hartford Wash, 1973 The second model in my cartographies is the Fordist model of (sub)urbanization and its reinforcement of the gender divide of the separate spheres ideology in post-World War II North American cities. Through the lens of the performance Hartford Wash: Washing Tracks, Maintenance: Outside by Mierle Laderman Ukeles By turning housework into art, the hegemonic binaries of visible/invisible, public/private, art/work, labour/feminized labour are profoundly troubled. I am addressing the issue of the separate sphere and, as I want to argue, the separate scale ideology. The separate sphere ideology had continued to garner steam in the conservative turn of the 1950s and centred on a new cult of domesticity. Betty Friedan’s 1963 The Feminine Mystique was based on the critique of this gendered ideology, which, in fact, was perpetuated through this critique. Friedan analysed the unhappiness of women in the 1950s and

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1960s. Firmly tied to their homes and the chores of domestic reproduction, white middle-class women had no opportunity of escaping the confines of the materially secure home and the duties of household chores. They were denied a public life. Woman's destiny was to be a wife and mother. Friedan never went so far as to include men in the equation of housework. The suburban model and with it the ideal of private homeownership had become the footprint of urbanization. Friedan criticized the loneliness and isolation, the boredom and the repetitiveness of suburban female existence, which was denied access to public life and its creative expressions. “the new image this mystique gives to American women is the old image: ‘Occupation: housewife’”. 13 The model of the suburban home became the idealized model of the domestic in general. Again, it is the home and its domestic labour force, this time personified in the middle-class white housewife, that lies at the heart of urbanization. Early on, Friedan’s feminist critique was exposed in its class and race bias. In particular, bell hooks put forward a critique of race and middleclass bias, and the negative stereotyping of housework as such. hooks points to the fact that work, seen as liberation by white middle class women, was already the everyday condition for the majority of non-white women, and had neither lead to their liberation nor to their economic independence from men: Many women in the job market do service work, which is either lowpaying or unpaid (i.e. housework). Housework and other service work is particularly devalued in capitalist patriarchy. Feminist activists who argued for wages for housework saw this as a means of giving women some economic power and attributing value to the work they do. It seems unlikely that wages for housework would have led society to attribute value to these tasks since paid service work is seen as valueless. (…) Were women to receive wages for housework, it is unlikely that it would ever cease to be designated “woman’s work,”and it is unlikely that it would be regarded as valuable labour. (…) Since so many male children are not taught housework, they grow to maturity with no respect for their environment and often lack the know-how to take care of themselves and their households. (…) Girl children, though usually compelled to do housework, are usually taught to see it as demeaning and degrading.14

Second-wave feminism is characterized by its polarization with regard to its attack on the hegemonic separate sphere ideology. bell hooks’ critique of Friedan points to what has later been developed as intersectional feminism15 and the need to include multiple systems of differences and ensuing discrimination. Gender, race, class, age, ability, sexual orientation, and, more recently, religious orientation, have to be included in the

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struggles against oppression. Even though the feminist movement and the feminist art movement are considered public manifestations of a collective struggle, it is important to note that there are a wide range of feminist art strategies drawing on the one-person manifesto. Mierle Ukeles Laederman’s 1969 Manifesto for Maintenance Art is a point in case. Laederman uses the manifesto as an artistic format. The manifesto is an established method of avant-garde artistic positioning, such as the Suprematism Manifesto, the Surrealism Manifesto or the Situationist International Manifesto. The manifesto is also central to the history of political ideas, such as the Manifesto of the Socialist League of 1885 or the Communist Manifesto of 1848. Manifestos stand both for collective action and individual manifestation. Mierle Ukeles Laederman's manifesto is an individual artist's manifesto that addresses the collective problem of feminised domestic labour which at once precludes the time to produce artistic labour and is not recognized as (artistic) labour at all. Feminist art historian Gudrun Ankele speaks of the complications wrought by the artistic singularity of these radical feminist manifestos and the tensions they cause within feminist historiographies of collective struggles. Again, as throughout this essay, it is a troubling of scales that occurs between the individual manifestos and collective struggles: First, the text genre of a manifesto defies an unambiguous description. Manifestos, as they have been used by feminists, and also in various other emancipatory movements, have poetic, artistic, performative, as well as political aspects, which defy clear classification. Many of the feminist manifestos I have examined are neither purely political nor purely poetic, but rather deal with political/feminist issues that go beyond cold analysis, since their demands and utopias are radical and impossible. Where these manifestos for a new type of social interaction come from also plays a role: not from a secure political, organized position, but from the margins of the political arena, where diminished political influence can evoke a greater potential for unrealisable ideas. (…) Second, these manifestos were written by women who were not legitimized by a political position or a position as activists. They come from artists, writers and philosophers whose scope for action, even in their own artistic field, was acknowledged only to a limited extent.16

In 1969 Mierle Laderman Ukeles wrote her manifesto Maintenance Art—Proposal for an Exhibition. She profoundly challenged the separate sphere ideology which also governed the art world at the time. Laderman joined the domestic sphere of housework, associated with women, and the public sphere of art work, associated with men, by proclaiming herself a maintenance artist. She posed the radical (and still unanswered) question

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“who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?” 17 Maintenance, for Ukeles, is the realm of human activities that keep things going, such as cooking, cleaning and child-rearing. In 1973 she performed, amongst other maintenance activities, the floor wash at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford Connecticut. 18 She not only made housework visible, but also rendered the institutional power structures public. Again, the physical support, the steps leading up to the museum and its floors, are of significance. They are the spatial link between maintenance and support. The political and cultural significance of the steps is not to be underestimated. 19th century museum ideology held the museum to be the place of the muses. The steps leading up to museums’ entrances embody the threshold dividing the profane from the world of art. The steps mark the visitors’ spatial passage into the museum where s/he leaves the everyday behind to become elevated, cleansed and reformed. The ideology of reform and the dirt of the public stepping on the museum’s floor are dialectically mirrored in Laderman Ukeles’ housework as art work. “For hours she scrubs on her knees, removing the dirt left behind by the steps, or the shoes of the art-enjoying museum visitors, purifying and educating themselves.19 Laderman Ukeles emptied the bucket of dirty water. The steps leading up to the Wadsworth Atheneum became her support system to demonstrate her action of maintenance. What is normally hidden from sight and interiorized in the domestic realm, the importance of unwaged housework and reproductive labour, is in public view of the audience present at the time and beyond, captured in a photograph. When emptying the cleaning water, Laderman Ukeles situated her body at the entrance into the museum, at the threshold between the profane and the art. She created a strong image of the spatial divide. It is the division of labour and it spatialization which the artists’ body at work performs. Mierle Laderman Ukeles performed that which previously was excluded from being exhibited, the invisible art work by women artists and the invisible feminized housework.

Hong Kong, 2002-2008; Mexico City, 2012The third model in my cartographies is that of global urbanism shown in the two examples of Hong Kong and Mexico City. On Sundays the Exchange Square in Central, Hong Kong, turns into the gathering place for the Filipino maids. Around 140,000 Filipinos work in Hong Kong, the majority of them as foreign domestic helpers. On their day off, tens of thousands of maids meet at the foot of the Hong Kong and Shanghai

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Banking Corporation’s headquarters. This iconic landmark building was designed by Sir Norman Foster. My argument of the domestic labour as the engine behind urbanization is directly expressed in spatial terms here. The correlations between a global flow of bodies and a global flow of money, a global division of domestic labour and global urbanism is made public. The maids create an Arendtian space of appearance. Their Sunday public space of the Exchange Square joins support and maintenance. Not only do the Filipino maids become a powerful collective public presence of female foreign domestic helpers, they also use the get-togethers for political self-organization and demonstrations for their rights. Austrian artist Moira Zoitl’s 2002-2008 Chat(t)er Gardens Stories by and about Filipina Workers is a pivotal work on spatial politics, spatial order and migrant self-empowerment. In the Exchange Square Exhibition Zoitl brought together publications, videos and installations including a 1:1 replica of domestic worker Theresa Maria Hamto’s room. The interiorized and invisible space was juxtaposed with the maids’ public appearance in Hong Kong’s renowned financial and shopping district. Scale is pertinent to the Exchange Square and Zoitl’s art project: By situating their personal experiences within a wider context of local and global inequality and power, migrant women become and see themselves as much more than maids. They have, in their own words, become WISER. […] They marched in support of the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions’ demands for a minimum wage for all Hong Kong workers, and also waved posters that formed the letters WISER. Each letter was contained within the circular section of the female symbol, and each letter stood for one of five demands: Worker’s rights, Increased wages, Social services, Employment protection and Rights of Workers.20

The second global urbanism example are interiorized and invisibilized domestic workers’ rooms in Mexico City. The rapid urban growth and the urban expansion is paralleled by a rise in the underpaid labour of domestic workers. Mexican architect Arturo Ortiz Struck has launched a critical research of discrimination by architecture. Not only are the domestic workers’ rooms hidden in the basement of homes from public sight, their very existence is denied through their erasure from the architectural plans. Ortiz Struck explains why the spatial conditions of the domestic worker’s rooms shame architects and homeowners alike and compares the living conditions of the live-in maids to “cuartos para esclavas”:21

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Figure 10.4. Moira Zoitl, Chat(t)er Gardens Stories by and about Filipina Workers, 2002-2008, Exchange Square, 2002. Photograph: Moira Zoitl. Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 10.5. Moira Zoitl, Chat(t)er Gardens Stories by and about Filipina Workers, 2002-2008, 2005. Maria Theresa Hamto performing BABAE/WOMEN, video 10 min., video still. Courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 10.6. Moira Zoitl, Chat(t)er Gardens Stories by and about Filipina Workers, 2002-2008, 2005. Theresa’s Room Exhibition View, Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck, Austria. Photograph: Rainer Iglar. Courtesy of the artist. Figure 10.7. Moira Zoitl, Chat(t)er Gardens Stories by and about Filipina Workers, 2002-2008, 2005. Exhibition View, Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck, Austria. Photograph: Rainer Iglar. Courtesy of the artist. En México los cuartos de servicio son una exigencia para los mercados inmobiliarios residenciales. Los grandes arquitectos mexicanos, que suelen vincular práctica profesional a estándares internacionales, son contratados para hacer casas o edificios habitacionales, los cuales requieren de cuartos de servicio. Pese a su prestigio y capacidades como arquitectos construyen cuartos de servicio que son húmedos, que no tienen buena iluminación natural, que su vista es ridícula (un lavadero, por ejemplo), que su recámara es fría y gris, que no tienen buena ventilación y que además de todo están, literalmente, en el peor lugar de la casa ya que en ocasiones están junto al estacionamiento, o el cuarto de máquinas, o detrás de los tinacos, o en un sótano oscuro. Resulta que la legitimidad cultural que un arquitecto puede tener por su ilustrada, sensible y caprichosa práctica, puede ponerse en duda en los cuartos de servicio y sus condiciones; no sólo eso, aquellos responsables de brindarle a la arquitectura una legitimidad cultural también están legitimando relaciones fundamentadas en la discriminación. [In Mexico, service rooms are a requirement in the residential real-estate market. The most renowned Mexican architects, who usually hold their professional practice to international standards, are hired to build houses or

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habitational buildings that require service rooms. In spite of their prestige and capacities as architects, they build service rooms that are damp, that lack good natural light, that have a ridiculous view (the washing area, for instance), that have a cold and grey bedroom, that are poorly ventilated and, on top of everything else, that are in the worst place in the house, sometimes next to the parking space, or the machine room, or behind the water tanks, or in a dark basement. It follows that the cultural legitimacy that an architect holds in esteem of his or her enlightened, sensitive and whimsical practice can be questioned when it comes to the service rooms and their conditions; moreover, those responsible for providing architecture with cultural legitimacy are also legitimizing relationships based on discrimination.]22

This spatial discrimination is not only expressed on the scale of the house, but also on the scale of transport systems delivering maids to the back doors, strategically keeping them in the back lanes and alleys, out of public sight.23 The growth path of global urbanization is concurrent with the rising demand for low-paid service work and, especially, low-paid domestic work. As I have shown with the sites of in Hong Kong and Mexico City, this economic injustice is expressed in spatial terms. The flows of bodies in search for low-paid work are constitutive for fuelling global urbanism: It seems reasonable to assume that there are significant links between globalization and women’s migration, whether voluntary or forced, for jobs that used to be part of the First World woman’s role. In this way, global cities have become places where large numbers of low-paid women and immigrants get incorporated into strategic economic sectors. […] Meanwhile, as Third World economies on the periphery of the global system struggle against debt and poverty, they increasingly build survival circuits on the backs of women … sending remittances back home. […] Such circuits … can be considered a (partial) feminization of survival.24

Urbanization takes command at the productive intersections of the two scales of the urban and the domestic. Yet, the divide between them still governs conventional narrativization, rendering it an ideological continuation of the earlier separate spheres model. Domestic workers’ political struggles for rights, both past and present, women’s movements, and feminist art practices attack this strategic disconnect of the two scales. Their demonstrations expose the feminization of domestic labour which I understand as prerequisite for urban transformation processes. Hegemonic historiography of urban transformation veils the co-dependence of domestic labour and urbanization by successfully invisibilizing and interiorizing it. The issue of changing the perception of scale is crucial.

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With urbanization taking command, feminist criticism has to claim that the domestic is political.

Notes 1

Henri Lefebvre's seminal work The Production of Space, first published in French under the title La production de l’espaces analyses the relation between the development of industrialization and capitalism and the elaboration of an urbanized society. The nature of space is at once understood to be produced and productive. According to Levebvre the urban is social. However, the connections between “the urban is social” and “the personal is political” with regard to the reproduction of space and bodies in the domestic urban interiors is yet to be more critically explored. An in-depth feminist reading and feminist critique of Lefebvre's writings has yet to be produced. Feminised domestic labour has to be understood as a form of urbanized labour and as a driving force behind urban transformation processes. Feminization then not only becomes part of urbanization, but appears at its very foundation. Dolores Hayden’s 1982 The Grand Domestic Revolution. A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods and Cities remains exceptional in its bridging of scales from the domestic to the city. In 2011 and 2012 the Utrecht-based institution Casco - Office for Art, Design and Theory critically revisited The Grand Domestic Revolution in its current implications bringing together living research residencies, town meetings and affinity actions to amend precarious living conditions. See http://www.cascoprojects.org/gdr/. 2 Urbanization takes Command is the title of a curatorial research project I am currently working on. It joins perspectives of urban historiography, feminist theories and feminist art practices to examine the logics of urbanization and its farreaching political and cultural implications. The title echoes Siegfried Giedeon’s 1948 Mechanization takes Command in which he analysed the effects of mechanization on everyday life. I try to work out the effects of urbanization on everyday life from a feminist perspectivation. 3 Silvia Federici, “The Reproduction of Labour Power in the Global Economy and the Unfinished Feminist Revolution (2008)”, in Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero. Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland: PM Press, 2012), 94. 4 Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays”, in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne, (London: Phaidon Press, 1964), 1-41, 5. 5 Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life”, 9. 6 Feminist art historians Janet Wolff and Griselda Pollock wrote about the absence and the impossibilities of a female flâneur. Janet Wolff, “The Invisble Flaneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity”, Theory, Culture and Society 2 No. 3 (1985); Griselda Pollock, “Modernism and the Spaces of Femininity”, in Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histoires of Art (London: Routledge, 1988), 50-90.

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The class I taught at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna was called Art and Public Space. Participating students were: Georg Breinesberger, Dominique Eidenböck, Johanna Forster, Karin Haberfehlner, Heike Jooss, Kathrin Keinrath, Bernhard Kreuzer, Malgorzata Lagger, Karoline Maisch, Cana Sophie Semra Meier, Helena Margarita Mundschitz, Jaime Nagl, Isabella Pessl, Werner Prokop, Laura Reinprecht, Lisa-Maria Reiser, Jula Maria Stauber, Julian Paul Stockinger, Ira Tauchen-Rohrweg, Melanie Wurth, Zwirschmayr and Cornelia Zobl. 8 The self-organized support system amongst women in 1900 Vienna was exemplary, and ranged from privately organized pension funds to tuition scholarships. In 1900, lesbian poet Marie von Najmajer donated a stipend of a free place at this middle school for women for a female student in need of financial support who otherwise would not have been able to afford the school’s tuition at Rahlgasse (Rahlstreet). 9 Judith Butler, “Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street”, in Sensible Politics. The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Activism, eds. Meg McLagan et al. (New York: Zone Books 2012), 118. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 117. 13 Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), 92. 14 bell hooks, “Rethinking the Nature of Work”, in bell hooks, Feminist Theory. From Margin to Center (London: Pluto Press, 2000), 103f. 15 Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins. Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color”, Stanford Law Review, Vol. 43 No. 6 (1991): 1241-1299. 16 Gudrun Ankele, “Collection Strategies and Interventions in the Canon. Panel 1”, in Women’s:Museum. Curatorial Politics in Feminism, Education, History and Art, eds. Elke Krasny et al. (Vienna: Löcker Publishers, 2013). 17 Mierle Laderman Ukeles, “Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! Proposal for an exhibition ‘CARE’”, http://www.feldmangallery.com/media/pdfs/Ukeles_MANI FESTO.pdf. Accessed 15 April 2014. 18 Laderman Ukeles’ performance was part of Lucy Lippard’s 1973 all-women show c. 7,500 which opened at CalArts in Valencia and then became a touring exhibition which gave the artist the opportunity to realize a number of maintenance performances. Interestingly enough the Wadsworth Atheneum is the oldest public art museum in the US with its long-standing commitment to the avant-garde. 19 Elke Krasny, “Demonstrations between Criticism and Crisis“, in 30 Artists/30 Rooms, ed. Institut for modern Art et al. (Nuernberg: Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2012), 76. 20 Moira Zoitl, Exchange Square. Activism and Everyday Life of Foreign Domestic Workers in Hong Kong (Berlin: Jovis 2008), 8. 21 Arturo Ortiz Struck, “Desde la arquitectura, la discriminación”, Nexos http://www.nexos.com.mx/?P=leerarticulo&Article=2102642. Accessed 15 April 2014. 22 Ortiz Struck, “Desde la arquitectura”.

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Arturo Ortiz Struck has asked me to join him as a curator and researcher in his critical research project on the spatial conditions of the everyday life of maids in Mexico City. The correlations between the scale of the domestic and the scale of the urban lie at the heart of the investigation of spatial injustice and gendered discrimination. 24 Saskia Sassen, “Global Cities and Survival Circuits”, in Global Woman. Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy, eds. Barbara Ehrenreich et al. (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company 2002), 255f.

CHAPTER ELEVEN FROM PSEUDO-EMANCIPATION TO OUTRIGHT SUBJUGATION: THE REPRESENTATION OF “WOMEN’S” WORK IN CONTEMPORARY HUNGARIAN WOMEN’S ART ERZSÉBET TATAI

Certain statistics would lead one to believe that the position of women in Hungary is reasonably acceptable. However, closer scrutiny reveals a different story. But in spite of the “pseudo” character of emancipation, there seem to be few Hungarian women artists dealing with gender issues. Nevertheless signs of a certain “shy feminism” still prevail. In the course of the twentieth century, more and more women in Hungary were taking on paid jobs; a tendency that lasted until the 1980s. Concurrent with this, schooling figures also considerably improved, and even in higher education women were participating in greater numbers, albeit in varying concentrations depending on profession; a tendency that continues to this day. 1 However, still extremely few women hold key positions in government, the non-profit or business sectors, higher education or industry, and their involvement in politics is also low. In the harshest years of Communist dictatorship (1949-1953), female employment was not widespread even in spite of state propaganda. (In the 1950s 12% of transport workers, 27.7% of industrial workers, and 37% of retail workers were women. The state sought to raise this to an all-industry average of 52% by the end of 1951.)2 In spite of proclaimed equality, by 1960 still only 22.8% of graduates of higher education were women. In spite of this, the number of working women rose steadily; yet domestic chores – still considered to be “unmanly” – continued to be performed by women, in their “second shift”.3 This is reflected in the highly popular 1960s book by Ilona Faragó that lived to see countless editions,

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hammering home traditional female roles, bearing the title “From Wooden Spoon to Evening Dress” (1947). Following the revolutions in Eastern Europe in 1989, the transformation of gender roles took a conservative turn in Hungary (and other countries, including Poland4). This was in part due to the absence of Communist ideological pressure, and in part to the extensive and rapid spread of unemployment. This led to old patriarchal ideology making a comeback with a vengeance, citing essential female roles as: back to the household and family. 5 Consequently, many women opted for being a housewife rather than being unemployed. To be a feminist in Hungary—where sexist discourse is rife not only in the street but also in Parliament—is synonymous with being disadvantaged or handicapped; and the Hungarian brand of equality before the law is deeply rooted in patriarchal practice. In 2012, 50.6% of women were employed in Hungary. Only Italy and Malta have fewer female workers in the European Union, at 46.5% and 41% respectively. However, the gender gap is narrower in Hungary, given that male employment, too, is only 62.9%. The EU average employment rate is 70.1% for men and 58.5% for women.6 The financial and economic crisis visibly reduced employment among women and men across Europe, but a graph shows where European women currently stand (below Hungarian men) and where Hungarian women (at the very bottom of the scale).7 While these are tell-tale figures, they say nothing about the sectors in which women are actually employed, in what proportion they are represented in well-paid and key jobs, and neither do they shed light on the participation of men and women in unpaid domestic work. Over 73% of house-work is done by women in Hungary (women spend 27 hours a week doing house-work, men 11 hours), yet, 61% of women believe this to be fair, 21% think they work slightly more than would be fair, and only 16% think they work considerably more.8 While the proportion of female higher-education graduates has progressively increased in the past 60 years, this is not reflected in the gender ratio of males to females in leadership and top management positions – particularly not in universities 9 and in the share of political power. In Hungary, only 8.8% of the Members of Parliament are women. According to 2012 statistics, this places Hungary 117th (of 137) in the world and next to last in Europe. 10 This clearly shows the position of women in Hungarian public life. While the number of woman artists has grown significantly in the past two decades, and today there are more women than men in higher art education, all of this is indicative of the devaluation of the artistic career, rather than the true emancipation of

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women. This is in keeping with the sociological cliché that well-paid jobs in society are characterised by male dominance. Feminised jobs/careers are undergoing devaluation and, in turn, devalued jobs/careers are becoming feminised.11 Very few woman artists reflect on gender roles or the subjection of women, and even the best of them claim that they are not feminists, as they realise that such a statement would put them at a disadvantage in a male chauvinistic field. So it is “subtle”, “latent”12 or “shy”13 feminism that prevails in Hungarian contemporary art. Nevertheless, works of art have begun to appear that question traditional gender roles. My examples focus on work traditionally regarded as female (domestic) work. 14 Employing the means of contemporary visual culture, these works of art challenge the boundaries between public and private, paid and unpaid, creative and reproductive work.15 Interestingly, however, this firstly raises the question of what makes these works subversive. What are the visual means that make them more than “descriptive” or narrative images, investing them with critical powers? And secondly, what messages do the different artistic attitudes and the representations of domestic work generate? Ágnes Eperjesi has dealt with gender issues, and more specifically female roles, since 1996. Most of her output concerning household work consists of what she calls “recycled pictures”. In these works she plays two different meanings of the traditional concept of stereotype off against each other, one being the sociological-psychological meaning—that is, the actual topic of the work (work-related stereotypes associated with women) —and the other the batch of “technical meanings”—that is, the visual (and often verbal) clichés constituting the work itself, in other words the concept of stereotype that involves unchanged repetition, the stereotype block in printing. Eperjesi’s visual clichés are, as it happens, ready “printing blocks”.16 While the technique is often irrelevant, it is extremely important in Ágnes Eperjesi’s works (fig. 11.1). She uses the transparent wrapping material of mass-produced, retailed products as a photographic negative in such a way that she enlarged the images they contain to the required size. This is important for three reasons: 1. Eperjesi employs the vernacular of a visual culture that is highly widespread, common and which nobody bothers to notice, because everyone looks through these images—both literally and in the abstract sense—and invariably they land in the bin. 2. Eperjesi, however, reuses these images, bringing the issue of recycling

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Figure 11.1. Ágnes Eperjesi, Tiles, 2000. Recycled images, c-print. Courtesy of the artist.

into play. Without being didactic, she acts as an environmentallyconscious housewife. 3. Moreover, these images are not only schematic in type but are also “reduced” in visual terms. 17 Because they become negative images in the photographic developing process, what we see is not familiar, as Eperjesi has rendered the “language” visible. (And she has preserved this type of translation even since using computer software.) In this way, by technologically creating a remoteness, she offers the viewer a critical distance. Eperjesi does not conceal the source of her image; she does not touch up her images, but enlarges18 them as they are, errors and all. From these she produces images that present women in what are, or refer to, stereotypical roles. Her series consisting of pictures with text are shifted to contexts which, in terms of topic, are stereotypically related to the original, but have become enriched. She covers every area: wiping (Busy Hands, 2000), cooking (Weekly Menu, 2000), cleaning (Slices of Self-Portraits, 2004, fig. 11.2) and washing.

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Figure 11.2. Ágnes Eperjesi, Slices of Self-Portraits (I read somewhere that cleaning is all about hope. But doesn’tendless cleaning mean losing hope?-3/14), 2004. Recycled image, c-print. Courtesy of the artist.

This eager repetition and amassing of stereotypes19 throws the viewer off balance (even disregarding the psychoanalytical interpretation of repetition): the literal interpretation offers itself in a fragmented way in the context of the contemporary art establishment in and outside of which the woman artist exists. The stereotypes presented in this way practically cause themselves to shatter, but in any case they undergo devaluation. The premise of Ágnes Eperjesi’s exhibition There Will Always Be Fresh Laundry (2009) 20 is an eternal truth, with an added linguistic paradox. Taking a scientifically systematic approach, Eperjesi conducted experiments in colour science, creating objective, mechanical images. Firstly, she made public an activity women have until now performed hidden from the public eye, and secondly, she developed a chromatic system specifically for professional laundries and housekeepers. Embodying a synthesis of colour science and domestic science, her works transfigure the undignified and the inferior, and challenge the lofty and the sublime. Eperjesi’s feminist criticism is subtly ironic: she plays the

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Figure 11.3. Ágnes Eperjesi, Colour Fade-Out Washing Machine, 2009. Interactive installation. Courtesy of the artist.

housewife and elevates domestic chores to the level of art. Her interactive installation (Colour Fade-Out Washing Machine, 2009, fig. 11.3) is not a device for washing, but a means to demonstrate colour science. If the viewer is able to open the (micro)cosmically round glass door of the washing machine cleverly enough, he or she will break the magic of eternal return by means of “word wizardry”, that is, the two colourful circular inscriptions of “There Will Always Be Fresh Laundry”, projected on the wall, will be aligned and the phrase consisting of complementary colours will be cancelled out, thus hampering the eternal circulation of laundry. By contrast, Erika Baglyas transfigures her topic. Her installation 100 Sheets (6-10 p.m. 18 November 2004, fig. 11.4) filled the hall of an unused industrial building at the Csepel Iron and Metal Works, once a place where men used to work. Projected on a giant screen consisting of

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Figure 11.4. Erika Baglyas, 100 Sheets, 2004. Video-installation. Courtesy of the artist.

one hundred sheets, the video by Erika Baglyas shows her mother washing ad infinitum, when in fact this unglamorous breadwinning job sustained her family and helped her sick relatives. This work moves female chores from their original invisible place and erects a staggering monument to her mother. The invitation to the one-night installation included a statement by the artist’s mother. Having read the text, mother and daughter, washing and artistic work became inseparable: My name is Margit Bajnok. I am a Leo. I am fifty-two years old. I have a medical condition that prevents me from having a job. I’m told I am a‘per son with a reduced ability to work’ and following my doctors’ advice I try and live with this. For over 20 years I have woken every morning with physical pain. I don’t look unhealthy. I’ve had two children who helped keep me alive at the start of my condition. All of my time is taken up by household work. Having no other choice, for ten years now I have been nursing my sick relatives [...] For ten years now I’ve been dealing with other people’s bodies [...] washing sheets and bedclothes soiled with human faeces, urine, blood and pus [...] I have never received anything in return for my troubles. I’m now involved in an artistic action where the

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Figure 11.5. Kriszta Nagy, I Am a Contemporary Housewife, 1998. C-print. Courtesy of the artist. person of the artist is irrelevant. I shall bleach and wash one hundred spotlessly clean linen sheets. It will be like absolution. I shall hang out the sheets to dry in an unused Csepel industrial factory hall.21

Kriszta Nagy claims she created her I Am a Contemporary Housewife, the series (1997, fig. 11.5) and the exhibition (1998), when she found herself, as a painter, going to the market, cooking, etc. in the daytime, and realised she was more a housewife than a contemporary painter. In her pictures she ironizes by painterly means and added texts. “The fridge should be conciliated”, “The variety in household work is that after a pink men’s underwear you can wash a striped white one”. Or she defined herself as an “intersexual girl”, and represented herself stitching and winking.

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Anna Fabricius’ photographic series Tigress of Housekeeping (2007, figs. 11.6, 11.7 and 11.8) reconstructs situations in which housewives struggle to cope with their many roles, and the furnishings, the environment in which they are set serve to highlight parallel domestic activities. At the same time, it seems as though the artist has caught these women in a critical psychological moment (one might say “pregnant moment” à la Lessing22): tension or restlessness permeates the images, or as if an unexpected event outside the viewer’s sight had disturbed the peace of these homes. In this respect and in terms of narrativity these works are reminiscent of Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills, yet the role-plays are also expressive of the drama/play character. The protagonist is both on the inside and the outside, so the viewer is and isn’t able to identify with her, by which Fabricius alienates the viewer from the picture and, as she does, these women are freed from their stereotypical roles. Perhaps most cunningly, photographer Luca GĘbölyös produced a 5part film and a series of photographs I Want to Get Married (2010, figs. 11.9, 11.10 and 11.11) which is a professional cookery show, with the beauty, set and props and drama of such TV shows. However, in her cookery show—featuring herself as the cook—she presents superstitious folk practices about how to find Mr Right, how to charm Mr Right and how to get Mr Right back if he dumps us, as well as ways to get rid of Mr Right. By visualising folk superstitions (e.g. feeding Mr Right a piece of hair and fingernails to chain him to us, or pee on his left sleeve to dump him), she brings some hideous ingredients to mouth-watering food, making the viewer’s stomach turn.23 While apparently she is the “true” woman and a modern repository of ancient lore, she is essentially spoofing cookery shows and quietly buries the roles she is playing. The presented latent feminist works on housework themes add subtle detail to the notion of feminist and post-feminist art, contributing to the global discourse of feminism. Employing strategies of irony, sarcasm, respect or sophistication, these works tend to fall in line with contemporary visual culture rather than display belligerent opposition. Shy feminist attitudes and artistic strategies in Hungary (and Eastern Europe) do not refer to the passage of the confrontational, early period of feminist art, but rather, to the fact that these issues still require a careful approach in these parts.

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Figure 11.6. Anna Fabricius, Tigress of Housekeeping (Eszter, 2/9), 2007. Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 11.7. Anna Fabricius, Tigress of Housekeeping (Judit, 6/9), 2007. Courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 11.8. Anna Fabricius, Tigress of Housekeeping (Virág, 9/9), 2007. Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 11.9. Luca GĘbölyös, I Want to Get Married! (TV-show, Part 1 Finding True Love), 2009. Courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 11.10. Luca GĘbölyös, I Want to Get Married! (TV-show, Part 3 Getting Married), 2009. Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 11.11. Luca GĘbölyös, I Want to Get Married! Fingernail Biscuits (TVshow, Part 2 Charming and Changing Him to Ourselves), 2009. Courtesy of the artist.

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Notes 1

1. The breakdown of graduates of higher education, by gender, 1941–1990: men % women % 1941 87,7 12,3 1949 84,0 16,0 1960 77,2 22,8 1970 68,8 31,2 1980 60,0 40,0 1990 53,9 46,1 Tibor Valuch, Magyarország társadalomtörténete a XX. század második felében [The Social History of Hungary in the Second Half of the 20th Century] (Budapest: Osiris, 2005), 152. 2. The change in the ratio of female students, 1946–2006: 1946/47 1950/51 1955/56 1960/61 1965/66 1970/71 1975/76 22,0 % 23,8 % 24,0 % 33,0 % 39,1 % 42,8 48,3 % 1980/81 1985/86 1990/91 1995/96 2001/02 2005/06 49,7 % 53,5 % 50,3 % 54,2 % 55,0 % 58,0 % Béla Pukánszky, “NĘkép, nĘi szerepek és iskoláztatás a második világháború után”, [“The Image of Women, Their Roles and Education after World War II”] Educatio 4 (2007): 551–564, 563. 2 Mária Palasik, “NĘk tömeges munkába állítása az iparban az 1950-es évek elején”, [“Putting Women to Work en Masse in the Industry in the Early 1950s”], in Házastárs? Munkatárs? Vetélytárs? A nĘi szerepek változása a 20. századi Magyarországon [Spouse? Co-Worker? Rival? The Change of Women's Roles in 20th Century Hungary], ed. Mária Palasik and Balázs Sipos (Budapest: Napvilág Kiadó, 2005), 178–100. 3 Bojana Pejiü sheds light on the ambivalences on women‘s role during the communist era. Bojana Pejiü, “Proletarians of All Countries, Who Washes Your Socks? Equality, Dominance and Difference in Eastern European Art,” in Gender Check. Feminity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe, ed. Bojana Pejiü (Wien: Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, 2009), 16. 4 Piotr Piotrowski, “Gender after the Wall”, in Gender Check, 200-204. 5 Mária Neményi, “Miért nincs Magyarországon nĘmozgalom?“ [“Why There Is No Women’s Movement in Hungary”], in Férfiuralom [Masculine Domination] ed. Miklós Hadas (Budapest: Replika Kör, 1994), 235-245; “A nĘk 1996 Magyarországán” [“Women in Hungary in 1996”], Pódiumbeszélgetés, RésztvevĘk [Participants of the round-table discussion]: Mária Adamik, Erzsébet Barát, Zsuzsa Ferge, Mária Joó, GyĘzĘ Lugosi, Eszmélet 32 (1996): 11-26. 6 “Employment rates for selected population groups, 2001-2011”, http://epp. eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index.php?title=File:Employment_rates_ for_selected_population_groups,_2001-2011_(%25).png&filetimestamp=2012103 0183007. Accessed 29 June 2013.

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EC (2010a: Table 17. M1: Employment rate in Europe), Mária Frey, “NĘk és férfiak a munkaerĘpiacon, különös tekintettel a válságkezelés hatásaira” [“Women and Men in the Labour Market, with a Special Focus on the Effects of Crisis Management”] www.tarsadalomkutatas.hu/kkk.php?TPUBL-A-934/publikaciok/ tpubl_a_934.pdf, 22. Accessed 29 June 2013. 8 Judit Acsády, “Változó szerepek, változatlan értékek”, [“Changing Roles, Constant Values”], Lecture in the series entitled Growing opportunity (Szombathely, 2008). 9 Éva Kissné Novák, “NĘk felsĘfokon”, [“Women on a Higher Level”], in Mária Palasik and Balázs Sipos, 141-149. 10 Employment rates for selected population groups, 2001-2011 (%).png http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index.php?title=File:Employm ent_rates_for_selected_population_groups,_2001-2011_(%25).png&filetimestamp =20121030183007. Accessed 29 June 2013. 11 For example, when in 1989 Hungary changed to a market economy, law degrees became extremely popular due to new possibilities of well-paid jobs for lawyers. The number of male law students increased dramatically. 12 Zora Rusinová, “The Totalitarian Period and Latent Feminism”, Praesens: Central European Contemporary Art Review 4 (2003): 5-12. 13 Nóra Schleicher, “Women Managers Communicating Gender in Hungary”, in Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies eds. Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek and Louise Olga Vasvári (Purdue: University Press, 2011), 233. 14 It is worth considering the forerunners’ works, for example Mary Kelley’s PostPartum Document (1973-79), Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Maintenance Art (since 1973), Martha Rosler‘s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975, 6'29") and Bringing the War Home: House is Beautiful (1967-72), and installations of contemporaries like Mona Hatoum’s Homebound (2000) or Ilona Németh’s Invitation for a Visit (2001). 15 Helen Molesworth, “Cleaning Up in the 1970s: The Work of Judy Chicago, Mary Kelly and Mierle Laderman Ukeles”, in Rewriting Conceptual Art, eds. Michael Newman and Jon Bird (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 107-122; Helen Molesworth, “House Work and Art Work”, October 92 (Spring, 2000): 71-97. 16 Erzsébet Tatai, “Sztereotípiák a kortárs mĦvészetben és vizuális kultúrában. Eperjesi Ágnes: Családi album”, [“Stereotypes in Contemporary Hungarian Art and Visual Culture. Ágnes Eperjesi’s Family Album”], in Nyelv, ideológia, média 2 [Language, Ideology, Media 2], eds. Erzsébet Barát and Klára Sándor (Szeged: SZTE Könyvtártudományi Tanszék, 2009), 94-104. 17 Anikó ErdĘsi, “Most kezdjem újra az életem? Eperjesi Ágnes két kiállításáról” [“‘Should I Start My Life from Scratch?’ On Ágnes Eperjsi’s Two Exhibitions”], BeszélĘ (May 2004). www.sztaki.hu/providers/eper/articles/erdosi_aniko_most_hu.html. Accessed 29 June 2013; Edit András, “Gigantikus képregény. Eperjesi Ágnes kiállítása a Millenárison” [Gigantic Comics. Ágnes Eperjesi’s Exhibition on the Millenáris], Új MĦvészet, (January 2005): 37; Ágnes Berecz, “EltĦnt idĘ, talált kép” [“Lost Time, Found Picture”], Artmagazin 13 (2006): 26-29. http://www.eperjesi.hu/

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texts/berecz-agnes-eltunt-ido-talalt-kep-artmagazin-2006-marcius?id=28. Accessed 29 June 2013; Arthur C. Danto, “Embodied Meanings as Aesthetical Ideas”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65 (2007 Winter): 121-129. http://www. eperjesi.hu/texts/arthur-c-danto-embodied-meanings-as-aesthetical-ideas-journalof-aesthetics-and-art-criticism-2007-winter?id=22. Accessed 29 June 2013. 18 ErdĘsi, [“‘Should I Start my Life from Scratch?’”]; Berecz, [“Lost Time, Found Picture”]. 19 Tatai, [“Stereotypes in Contemporary Hungarian Art”]. 20 Budapest, 2009. Anna Gács, “Eperjesi Ágnes: Mindig lesz friss szennyes” [“There Will Always Be Fresh Laundry”], Balkon No. 8 (2009): 27-28; Ágnes Eperjesi and Katalin Ízinger, eds. Eperjesi Ágnes: Színügyek. [“Colour Affairs”], (Székesfehérvár: Szent István Király Múzeum, 2009), 4-27; Erzsébet Tatai, “Domestic Strategies by Women in Contemporary Hungarian Art”, Art Margins, 12 October 2010, http://www.artmargins.com/index.php/2-articles/602-domesticstrategies-by-women-in-contemporary-hungarian-art-article. Accessed 29 June 2013. 21 Erzsébet Pilinger, “Száz lepedĘ – MĦvész mint magánember, mĦvészet mint magánügy” [“100 Sheets – The Artist as Private Individual, Art as a Private Matter”], 12 November 2004, http://artportal.hu/magazin/artguide/szaz-lepedo--muvesz-mint-maganember--muveszet-mint-maganugy. Accessed 29 June 2013. 22 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon: An Essay on The Limits of Poetry and Painting, trans. William Ross (London: Ridgeway, 1836), 152. 23 Hedvig Turai, Férjhez akarok menni! – I want to get married! Ex.Cat. comm. Luca GĘbölyös (Budapest: Knoll Galéria, 2010), 4-11.

CHAPTER TWELVE DECOLONISATION: WOMEN AND THE POLITICS OF AUTHENTICITY, BETWEEN SIRENS, WITCHES AND HUMAN ZOOS…: SUBVERTING THE LABYRINTH OF SOLITUDE1, AND BRINGING SINCERITY AND HUMOUR— BLACK AND EXHILARATING— FROM SANTIAGO OF CHILE TO LONG ISLAND LYNDA E. AVENDAÑO SANTANA

…to see others not as ontologically given but as historically constituted. —Edward Said

The body is the hiatus where different civilising mechanisms express themselves, while at the same time it can be the site from where concepts, ranging from subjectivity, humour, sincerity and affectivity to power in all its dimensions, emanate. Historically, non-white women’s bodies—Native Americans, African Americans and Mestizos—in the USA and Latin America have been colonised. They have been exploited and segregated as part of the logic of commerce and the market of desires in a capitalist context. This has been taking place since the arrival of Europeans to America. We understand historical capitalism here, as described by Giovanni Arrighi,2 as a recurring mode of conduct extending from the 15th century until the present day in a succession of systemic cycles of accumulation. Its main protagonists are enterprises and hegemonic powers, whose interaction defines their own economic characteristics and the fundamental traits of the international system in which both operate.

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More consistent with the contemporary aspiration of building global citizenship from cultural particularities, since the 1980s the works of Ana Mendieta and others have questioned and led to other approaches on femininity in current sociocultural contexts. These new understandings break with the stereotypical traits of what being a Latin American or African woman means. In this sense, there are performance artists such as Sharon Bridgforth, Jesusa Rodríguez, Diamela Eltit, Josefina Báez and Marga Gómez, who move away from neo-colonist discourse towards concepts such as sincerity. Their displacements involve a break with socially constructed subjectivities towards other discursive possibilities based on introspective processes in parallel to the inquiry of, and immersion in, the discriminatory cultural plots from where they proceed. In this way, through policies of authenticity—which involve an ethics of authenticity3—, and through the idea of resistance to, and removal of, worn logical concepts, these artists have made us question the types of women that need to be built. They have generated different alternative and imaginary orders, offering an opportunity to rethink different social structures through performance as an instrument capable of accounting for the decolonised female body’s contemporary experience and its possibilities. In order to understand this, we have to consider several issues which may allow us to elaborate on what decolonising a female body in America means. For some people, the very fact of its mestizo nature poses a problem, while for others this very condition opens up its true possibilities. What do the colonised bodies of women in America entail? What has the decolonising process of Latin American and African women’s bodies in Latin America and the USA implied?4 What kind of performance tactics have different artists put into effect in order to decolonise their own and other women’s bodies?

I. Between Sirens, Witches and Human Zoos As Edmundo O’Gorman has argued, America was invented,5 and since the arrival of Columbus in 1492 (and after being named America in 1507, in honour of Amerigo Vespucci6 who recognised it as a “new” continent) the official European world filled it with mythological images they could recognise. As shown in the American Bestiaries,7 facing the unknown this way was undoubtedly rooted in the fear of getting to know other types of people. Therefore, America has a “before” and “after” the arrival of Spaniards and Europeans. A before, only known by its original inhabitants and of which only remains are left, and an after, pervaded by the distorted

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judgments that the European worldview produced when confronted with the unknown. An after on which religious as well as political rules were imposed, censuring what was perceived as uncivilised: the naked bodies of its inhabitants, its gods and wishes… In America, the colonisers saw—without seeing—monstrosities: “men with dog heads and claws for fingers, who barked when speaking”,8 and American women were seen under a mythological bias that placed them in-between the enigmatic and the puzzling, just like sirens. On 9 January 1493, Columbus sighted sirens, which were in reality manatees…9 American sirens were, to European eyes, those desiring and desired beings that hypnotised men through their song, as described Theodore de Bry (1528-1598) in his engraved illustrations.10 Due to that condition, they had to be dominated, enslaved and even caged, just as, metaphorically, speaking, religion attempted to do. Other reasons for their mandatory destruction were that they were man-eating, carnivorous beasts or witches. Those women who practiced rituals linked to indigenous religious practices in ritual gatherings or Voodoo ceremonies were punished. White women who did not fully live by the Puritan religion were also considered witches. Additionally, those women who developed non-conventional sexual practices were considered sinful and diabolic. In 1701, 28 year-old Esther Rodger from New England was sentenced to hang for having fornicated with black men and aborting their children.11 If to desire all signs weren’t enough, religion, especially the Protestant variety, and the laws in America would systematically control it from a racist bias to eliminate the possibility of bastard offspring. Converted into sirens, half-human and half-animal, into witches, or into carnivorous beasts, American women wouldn’t be included in the category of “person” during colonial times, despite the fact that by the end of the 16th century the American Bestiaries12—a heritage from European folklore—would be eliminated from the chronicles and geographic relations of the Old World. Furthermore, women would not be raised to that category until the 20th century, despite having established their status as persons in the 18th century.13 Since 1492, the continent has been subjected to a brutal exploitation of its natural resources and, in order to export these resources, many Native Americans were enslaved while the rebels were sacrificed in mass. However, the implementation of the New Laws of the Indies for the Good Treatment and Preservation of the Indians (1542), a legislative treatise issued by Charles V,14 sought to improve their conditions, primarily by modifying the Encomienda system (a legal system to regulate Native

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American labour and autonomy). The treatment of Native Americans as wild animals was therefore forbidden, at least on paper. However, thousands of Native Americans died because of the epidemics brought over by the Europeans, a phenomenon that worked against the economic interests of the Old World. As a result, the import of African slave labour began. The first slaves were introduced towards the end of the 15th century, and a couple of hundred had arrived up until 1518, when the Spanish Crown granted the first licence to bring 4000 Africans to the Indies over the next eight years.15 This resulted in enormous sources of income for European merchants. The arrival of millions of people as slaves, mainly in Brazil and the USA, coincided with a period of predatory capitalism, where economy prevailed over the value of any human or animal species, with the exception of the “White Man”. 16 This view has been slightly changed through the centuries and taken other directions, but it has remained an underlying line of thought still difficult to dissolve today. The introduction of slavery as a determining factor in colonial America implied that American women would often be treated as mere merchandise or tools of sexual pleasure for the dominating classes, for example, by the application of the Droit du Seigneur or Droit de Cuissage. 17 In Latin America, the Droit du Seigneur––a European phenomenon known from the feudal period—, describes a historic practice of sexual abuse, which involves an asymmetric relationship between masters and generally poor women. Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala describes this practice in his Nueva Crónica y Buen Gobierno (ca. 1600-15): Encomienda grantees, parish priests, Lieutenants of the Governor and chief magistrates deflower the maids. And so they are lost and become whores and bear many little mestizos and the Indians don’t multiply [...] and so there is no remedy in the entire kingdom.18

This practice, forbidden by Ferdinand the Catholic in 1486, has remained in effect in some areas even today,19 as described by Mario Vargas Llosa: When I was a boy in the 1950s, I heard many times in Piura and Lima, at my friends of the neighbourhood or the school bragging about having lost their virginity to the housemaids at their house. They didn’t say it in such a scientific way, but rather they used an expression which summarised all the racism, machismo and brutality of a social class which in the Peru of that time was shown off without the slightest degree of embarrassment: “banging the half breed”. So, the boys didn’t make love to their sweethearts who had to be virgins for their wedding, and so for their sexual longings they would choose between the prostitute and the housemaid.

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Needless to say, many parents preferred the latter option, afraid that the former would lead their offspring off the straight path.20

It should be emphasized that during the end of the 19th century and until the mid-20th century, a certain disdain was shown to indigenous communities by both the American states governed by pure whites (direct descendants of Europeans), and by the European states, manifested in the perpetuation of human zoos well into the 1940s. In September of 1881, eleven Kaweskars from Tierra del Fuego were exhibited at the Jardin d’Acclimatation of Paris. The same occurred later to a group of Mapuche families. They had been kidnapped from the shores of the Magellan Strait by Johann Wilhelm Wahlen, a German sailor, who took them out of Chile legally. They were exhibited in an ostrich compound in Berlin. On the way to Zurich one of the women died: Grethe. There is evidence that the women were raped by the guards, who infected them with venereal diseases. In the exhibition itself, there was no clue to indicate that they were a canoeing people, but rather they were presented as territorial nomads.21 In fact, the Kaweskar, as well as the Yagana and Ona, women paddled and made fire in their canoes, their natural place par excellence. They were also expert swimmers, divers and shellfish gatherers, who dove naked to unusual depths, emerging like sirens from chilled waters with temperatures reaching Antarctic levels. Among other attractions at the 1889 Exposition Universelle of Paris, dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution, there were several African families as exhibits, 22 as well as a kidnapped family consisting of eleven Selk’nams; who had peacefully survived for 10,000 years before the Europeans arrived. They were caged and fed raw horse meat thrown at them by the visitors to the Exposition, but in fact it was a bizarre food for a people that consumed mostly fish and seafood. They advertised them as cannibals.23 Around 1927 in Latin America, Uruguayan women were granted the right to vote,24 while in the USA African Americans would not be granted this right until 1965.25 This produces a complex panorama, where women in America have been at the centre of historic harassment, as shown in the recent genocide and rape of women of Ixil Maya ethnicity in Guatemala under José Efraín Ríos Montt,26 or the killing and disappearance of women in Juárez City (Mexico).27 All this has marked a difficult path where every step towards gaining certain freedoms and liberties, such as civil rights, has been a tremendous achievement in response to a hostile environment, where the condition of imposed otherness becomes manifest in a particular way: “otherness” applies to the majority of Americans—who discriminate each other even amongst themselves—, and it is also a double discrimination

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for women. They are discriminated once for being women, and twice for being indigenous, mestizo or black. Not to mention if they are poor… In this setting, the aforementioned artists problematize the cultures which have originally defined them, analysing not only the creation of culturally imposed subjectivities, but also their own cultural conjunctions. They bear in mind that culture, as Marcuse28 points out, is a background which questions us, and where different human causes confront and challenge each other under affective, passionate, rational and irrational, ideological and political reasons. It is interesting that their works open us up to new horizons beyond conventionalisms, highlighting Said’s argument that: “Far from building a calm spot of harmonic cohabitation, culture can be an authentic battlefield where causes are brought to light and enter into competition with others”.29

II. Tracing the Routes of Decolonisation. From Santiago of Chile to Long Island 1. Subverting the Labyrinth of Solitude. Ana Mendieta. Rebelliousness She spent her childhood and youth in 1960s Iowa, a state marked by sexism, racism and the stereotyping of who was different. Nevertheless, her untamed, studious and analytical spirit, and her ability to see herself from a safe distance and to redefine herself as an individual belonging to two worlds (Body Tracks, 1974, performance; fig. 12.1) would lead her down a critical road to the dominating cultural system, a path soaked with the discovery of her creative skills and abilities. This position becomes clearer in her own words: In the Mid-West, the people looked at me as an erotic being (the myth of the hot Latina), aggressive and in a certain way diabolic. This created in me a very rebellious attitude, until it, in a manner of speaking, exploded inside me and I become aware of my being. ... This discovery was a way to see myself separated from others, alone.30

This solitude leads her to analyse her identity, compare it to the cultural context, and defend and formulate new possibilities as in her piece Imágen de Yágul [Image from Yagul] (1973, performance; fig. 12.2). From her complicated biography she conceived instruments she handles in an innovative way, her principal weapon of creation being her

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Figure 12.1. Ana Mendieta, Body Tracks, 1974. Performance, Iowa, U.S.A., sequence of 4 stills from Super-8mm colour, silent film transferred to DVD; running time: 1:01 minutes. © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C. Courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York.

own, frail body, which she systematically would convert into a vulva or original goddess—Alma, Silueta en Fuego, 1975, site-specific intervention, Iowa, USA31—, in a lock and key principle. Through this she elaborates a way in which she problematises being a racial exile in the USA, and displays her power of self-control beyond the world that surrounds her. She has become a fervent public supporter of creative and life-giving forces coming from Mother Earth, such as cultures like the Taína of Cuba, and the pre-Columbian cultures of Mexico. She has also become a ferocious opponent of the deculturalisation process instituted by the USA. This would lead her to take up contemporary Cuban and Mexican cultures again. Around the 1980s, her work picks up aspects of productions such as Glass on Body Imprints, 1972, performance, Iowa, U.S.A., University of Iowa,32 to refer to a gender issue raised in the field of daily contingency in the USA in relation to the exclusion of non-white women within North American feminism. In the exhibition catalogue Dialectics of Isolation (AIR Gallery), she writes:

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Figure 12.2. Ana Mendieta, Imágen de Yágul [Image from Yagul], 1973. Performance, open Zapotec tomb in the ancient city of Yagul, outside Oaxaca, Mexico, lifetime colour photograph 19 x 12 1/2 inches (48.3 x 31.8 cm). © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C. Courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York. Do we exist? Questioning our cultures is questioning our own existence, our human reality. Confronting this fact means acquiring consciousness of ourselves. This might turn into a search, a questioning of who we are and who we will become. During the decade of the 1960s, the women of the United States politicised and united in the feminist movement with the intention to end the domination and exploitation of the White Man’s culture, but they forgot about us. American feminism, such as it is, is basically a movement of the white middle class. As non-white women our fights are on two fronts. This exhibition doesn’t necessarily show the injustice or incapability of a society that didn’t want to include us, but it indicates a personal willingness to continue being “different”.33

Her defiance and obstinacy led her to series like Untitled (Silueta Series), 1973-1980, Iowa-Mexico, 34 where she generates a creative dialogue that bears the questions what is otherness and what does that otherness imply

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besides the established cultural signs which predispose us to act. It then blurs into a deeply organic, subterranean aura of the female condition, undominated and unnamed, only comparable to the symbolism of the Gorgon. Hence, the insolence of her works. So Mendieta35 is “…the other [that] refuses to disappear; it subsists, it persists; it is the hard bone on which reason [which readily gives way to unreason] breaks its teeth”. Antonio Machado.

2. Negritude. A Reencounter with the African Diaspora. Sharon Bridgforth. How to go, how they go, how I go-o-o-o, I can’t remember… United States writer and performance artist Sharon Bridgforth works with Jazz as well as Blues, and their sociocultural and musical implications. Her work also relates to blackness, from where she reflects on, and sentimentally and poetically blends into, African—American culture. Her reflections bring back the history of the black Diaspora and its meaning today. She also deals with gender issues.36 In Delta Dandi (2009, performance; fig. 12.3), a project which is part of the theatre piece Solo/Black/Woman, 37 where only black women participate as performance artists, she recounts her life as an American of African descent it in a loving, painful and understanding form. She does this through a staging where she appears dressed in white, surrounded by the projection of an image of the artist as a child, alongside an altar where we see water glasses, glasses with clear bottles and other items, and a small image (remembrance of the mother earth, of blood and African culture, and its world view), among a group of participating spectators. They are invited to interact through the random reading—basically monosyllabic—, of her childhood memories. They come out in fragments she calls out desperately, as if trying to recreate meanings that a fragile memory eventually forgets. Through her voice—with the poignant black sound—, and her sometimes intentionally awkward movements, she invokes images of her mother when she was cooking, or giving her religious advise: “always pray, praying always, this is what I know…”. These images appear like daydreams that vanish, and the artist desperately tries to rescue them by using broken sentences and cacophonies. Bridgforth exclaims “I can’t remember, to the left… to the right, to the right, right. How to go, how they go, how I go-o-o-o, I can’t remember... Circle, circle, circle”. These words oppressively surround us and let stories

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Figure 12.3. Sharon Bridgforth. Delta Dandi, 2009. Performance, Chicago, Department of Performance Studies, School of Communication of Northwestern University, Annie May Swift Hall Studio. Courtesy of the artist.

emerge from the artist’s body through minimal body gestures, becoming small, deeply expressive displacements. The image of the mother, turned into spirit and memory, blends into many lives. In her rises the legacy of the African Diaspora, which society seeks to eliminate by omission, but it is living flesh in Bridgforth as an African descendant, desiring memory and a future based on it. The question that this performance poses, due to which Delta Dandi is part of the jazz theatre ritual, and invokes the transformation and the love, is: what must we do to heal the soul?38

3. Risky Artistic Practices. Diamela Eltit. Resistance and Affection In 1980, under a dictatorship that mutilated Chile, securing the interests of the high social class, destroying the middle class, and generating widespread economic and cultural poverty, evident in the closing of universities, the burning of books, and the torture of citizens from different social classes, writer and artist Diamela Eltit,39 along with

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Figure 12.4. Diamela Eltit, El Beso (Zona de Dolor II) [The Kiss (Pain Zone II)], 1980. Performance, Santiago, Chile. Photograph by Lotty Rosenfeld. Courtesy of Diamela Eltit and Lotty Rosenfeld.

Lotty Rosenfeld, would initiate a series, later titled Salidas a la Ciudad [Outings into the City],40 in which they looked into the centre and outlying edge of Santiago—the upper class had isolated itself after 1973, reaching the foot of the mountain range—which became a marginal and underprivileged area during the dictatorship. At that time, Santiago was transformed into a grotesque shadow of itself, with curfews and the prohibition of gatherings and social organisation. Eltit explored and researched this Santiago, and she who descended from the heights of the city and experiencing its most extreme areas: brothels, hospices and prisons. In Zona de Dolor I [Pain Zone I] (1980, performance, Santiago, Chile), Eltit cuts her legs and arms, like Gina Pane, and reads with scarred extremities parts of her book Lumperica 41 in a whore house on Maipú Street, in the city centre of Santiago. Two images of her face are projected opposite to this, and finally she ends the performance with an expiatory gesture, cleaning the sidewalk where the brothel is located.

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In El Beso [The Kiss]42 (1980, fig. 12.4), she incorporates the premise of human contact, and in a minute, elusive gesture, with no prejudice, she forever breaks the structures that mould the human soul: she kisses a beggar on the mouth as if he was a lover. This gesture takes us back to the original conception, where the affective dimension separates itself from the cultural matrix. These works produce an understanding between space and the people who exist at the boundaries of social structures. She handles her creations with a certain affective, complicit and committed sensitivity –she called her works: arte de la intención (art of intention) 43—, where she clearly, and critically, dissects, explores, breaks and questions historical patriarchal codes and universal policies which divide humans from one another. At the same time, she places the raw Chilean context centre stage.

4. Discourse of Disobedience. Jesusa Rodríguez. Poetry of Compromise Considered the most irreverent and influential cabaret/performance artist in Mexico,44 her work is defined by political parody, a biting and ironic sense of humour, and a critical inflection about the role of women in Mexican history. She is also an activist with the LGBT community, indigenous groups, environmentalists and the political left-wing opposition.45 In Cabaret Prehispánico: El Maíz [Prehispanic Cabaret: Corn] (2005, performance; fig. 12.5), interpreted and directed by Jesusa Rodríguez, the staging consists of eight songs played on the piano by Liliana Felipe, and it addresses contemporary economic-political contingency emerging from a poetry of political commitment. Here her naked body helps to invoke a Mesoamerican aesthetics, through which she performs a rite inspired by the value given to maize as source of life by pre-Columbian cultures.46 Jesusa emulates the god Quetzalcóatl using a jade mask, offering a sacrifice with incense; she bathes in grains and talks to us in Náhuatl. The ceremony is a journey to the underworld to save the environment from the transgenic industry. She redefines the enormous cultural and symbolic relevance of maize, showing that the disappearance of its diversity is a menace to the cultural heterogeneity of Mexico. The representation offers the possibility to contrast the official voices of capitalism with the appearance of the, until then, forgotten natives. Through Jesusa, they become polyphonic narrators who show their position regarding the players on the political scene, breaking the silence47 to which they were condemned.

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Figure 12.5. Jesusa Rodríguez, Cabaret Prehispánico: El Maíz [Prehispanic Cabaret: Corn], 2005. Performance, Belo Horizonte, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics of New York University, Encuentro: Performing “Heritage”: Contemporary Indigenous Performance and Community-Based Practices. © Photograph by Lorie Novak. Courtesy of Jesusa Rodríguez and Lorie Novak.

5. Problematising Interculturalism. Josefina Báez. A Dominican in NY Báez, actor, writer, educator, founder and Director of the Ay Ombe Theatre, in her performance Dominicanish (2009, under the direction of Claudio Mir; fig. 12.6), appears dressed in blue, and she stages the journey like a wish unfolded by immigrants entering the USA, referring to navigation between the Dominican Republic and NY.48 She does so with gestures typical of Afro-Caribbean women, relating to a rhythm that is actively reflected in expressions that expand with subtlety and power, as if they were dancing mambo. The completely dark stage has a projection that accompanies the artist. It displays images of a city mixed with texts such as: “Cogido por la Guardia de Mo…” (“Caught by the Guard Mo…”), to

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Figure 12.6. Josefina Báez, Dominicanish, 2009. Performance, NY, Harlem Stage. Photograph by Luisa Sánchez. Courtesy of Josefina Báez/Ay Ombe Theatre.

the trumpet sound of Ross Hulff. This work, the formal heir of United States’ theatre tradition, has vital acts of transference taken from the artist’s autobiography. It depicts gender, class, migration, negritude and spirituality issues, for which Báez uses her biomechanical experience of theatre and yoga, her knowledge of Central American culture and music, literary processes, calligraphy, African dance and tea culture. She is a powerful black voice with inflections that mix Dominican Spanish with English and New York City slang, transmitting memories, social knowledge, and a sense of identity through repeated actions that tell us about migrations and the absorption of new cultures. Báez’s performances, which she correctly calls autologic and panthematic,49 are based on her experience as immigrant, as she explains in her Levente no..., 2012, performance, Madrid, Casa de América.50 In it, she represents several everyday situations of loving to the sound of mambo. There is a piece where a Dominican woman, in the proper voice of the Dominican middle classes, whose vocal fluctuation is almost musical, explains to her lover in Spanish and English her affectionate and

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sexual tastes in everyday life, which, as it is so simply and explicitly, yet subtly, told, brings the audience to laughter. Báez invites us to recognise that every effort of cultural understanding requires going against ideas of an easy access, decipherability and easy translatability. Instead, a spiritual effort is needed to overcome the obstacles of languages and cultures. Therefore humour first opens a common territory that goes past the norm and allows us other interpretative possibilities. The performance is here conceived as an epistemic practice that can be a means for reality to intervene.

6. We Are Everywhere. And We Vote! Marga Gómez. Sincerity and Hilarious Black Comedy at Long Island Iced Latina An original member of the Latin group Troupe Culture Clash, Marga Gómez was born and raised in Manhattan speaking English despite her father being Cuban and her mother Puerto Rican. A well-known performance artist—who problematises and clearly plays with her condition as a lesbian—, she has developed several creations following the United States stand-up comedy tradition, where she stands alone on stage and talks about her personal circumstances through humour and satire. In Long Island Iced Latina, 2009, performance, NY, U.S.A., Stage Fest Theater,51 Gómez serves a tall drink which contains a high dose of cultural confusion. She says that this was provoked by the unstable relationship with her mother, and by her memorable history, which she recounts in a hilarious dark dialogue. In it, she indicates that she was the only darkskinned girl in the white school she attended from the age of four, forcing her to lose her Latinity. After that, her performance changes pace and she offers a non-conventional manifesto, which is proof of her selfdetermination to recover substantial aspects of what is Latin American, without falling into folklore. Her manifesto is intoxicating, she laughs hilariously and openly, understanding both herself and the Latinos who don’t speak Spanish, don’t dance salsa and suffer from blonditis, but identify themselves with a Latin American way of being. She recognises it as a new political and cultural force in the USA. In this sense, she expresses: “We are everywhere. And we vote!”. So her works—with a pop aesthetics—entail the notion of selfchallenge, which exceeds her in Long Island Iced Latina, showing her in her most extreme privacy. This is moving because of her sincerity and the application of a sort of humour, which integrates the funny notion of Bergson:

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III. Conclusion The face, citing Lévinas, means respect.53 Therefore ethics—as Derrida reminds us54—is what must eliminate any kind of violence that consists in repressing the face, in ignoring it, in reducing respect towards another. Ignored or rejected because they are “inferior”, the face and the body of American women have been fully suppressed or compressed for more than 500 years for being native, mestizo or black, or simply for being oblivious to the demanded cultural models. In this context, the performances by the mentioned artists have among their main components the capacity to give rise to a declaration, where the authors state their origin and the cultural complexity that defines them, like the subject— women they outline. So their works seem to echo what Anaïs Nin once wrote, without pretence, in Diario: “It is the woman who has to speak. And not only does Anaïs, that woman, have to speak, but I also have to talk on behalf of many women…”.55 The aforementioned artists do this as well. They use their revealed bodies as instruments they get rid of. They carry us back from neocolonial ideologies, breaking with the creation of passive subjects by the West. Their practice of tenacity and resistance can be shown as infiltrations into the Empires’ culture, 56 through politics of authenticity, which imply sincerity and a complex cultural position, where the strength of their representations establish voices that introduce a diversity of viewpoints. They break with the aphonies naturalized by neo-colonial ideology, allowing the possibility of listening to and contrasting the voices of them and the, until then, mute inhabitants instituted since colonialism. In their productions we see the undertaking of complex journeys to a close or distant past in search of denied or stolen fragments that need to be changed. In them they produce tremors about the implications of living in the world. They recover what has been banned or confined to invisibility with gestures that don’t require daydreaming, but rather an opening, to give way to a free dialogue between the numerous cultures which intrinsically belong to them.

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Notes 1 Octavio Paz, El laberinto de la soledad (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1950). 2 Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (London and New York: Verso, 1994). 3 Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (London: Harvard University Press, 1991). 4 See Edward Said, Orientalism. (New York: Vintage Books, 1979); Mabel Moraña, et al. eds., Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Aníbal Quijano, Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y América Latina (Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2000); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak? (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988); Robert C.Young, Colonial Desire. Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995); and Enrique Dussel, Un proyecto ético y político para América Latina (Barcelona: Proyecto A Ediciones, 1998). 5 Edmundo O’Gorman, La invención de América. El universalismo de la cultura de occidente. (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1958). 6 The name appears for the first time in the abstract Martin Waldseemüller, Cosmographiae Introductio. S. D. (Sanctum Deodatum), VII Kl'. maij anno supra sesquimillesimum VII, 25 aprilis 1507; and in the wall world map of Universalis Cosmographia of Mathias Ringmann (cartographer). See: Mathias Ringmann and Ritter von Franz Wieser, Die Grammatica Figurata des Mathias Ringmann (Philesius Vogesigena). (Faksimiledruck. Strassburg: Heitz, 1905). 7 See: Gonzalo de Fernández Oviedo y Valdés, Bestiarios de Indias. (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1999). 8 Alfredo Jocelyn-Holt Letelier, Historia general de Chile. Tomo I: El retorno de los dioses (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 2000), 171. 9 Felipe Garrido, Crónica de prodigios: La naturaleza. (México, D.F: Asociación Nacional de Libreros, 1990), 13. 10 See Henry Keazor, Theodore de Bry's Images for America. Print Quarterly, XV, 2 (June 1998): 131-149. 11 Dwight Conquergood, Lethal Theatre: Performance, Punishment, and the Death Penalty. Theatre Journal 54, 3 (2002): 347. 12 de Fernández Oviedo y Valdés, Bestiarios de Indias. 13 See Dale K. Van Kley, The French Idea of Freedom: The Old Regime and the Declaration of Rights of 1789 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); and the thoughts of Immanuel Kant. 14 Joaquín García Icazbalceta, Colección de documentos para la historia de México. (México: Editorial Porrúa S.A., 1971). 15 Esteban Mira Caballos, “Las licencias de esclavos negros a Hispanoamérica (1544-1550),” Revista de Indias, Vol. LIV No. 201 (1994): 273-297. 16 See Herbert S. Klein, Los esclavos africanos en América Latina y el Caribe (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1986); Eduardo Galeano, “Haití: la maldición blanca”, http://www.archive.attac.org/attacinfoes/attacinfo535.pdf. Accessed 1 March 2014.

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“Right of the Lord”. See Marie-Victoire Louis, Le droit de cuissage, France, 1860-1930 (Paris: Éditions de l'atelier, 1994); Alain Boureau, Le droit de cuissage, la fabrication d’un mythe, XIIIe-XXe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995); Geneviève Fraisse, Femmes toutes mains, essai sur le service domestique (Paris: Seuil, 1979). 18 See Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, Nueva Crónica y Buen Gobierno (Lima: Casa de la Cultura del Perúғ , 1969). 19 Lourdes Arizpe S., La Mujer en el desarrollo de México y de América Latina (México D.F.: UNAM, 1989), 29. 20 Mario Vargas Llosa, “Derecho de Pernada”, El País, 17 July 2011. 21 See Christian Báez and Peter Mason. Human Zoos: Photographs of Kaweskars from Tierra del Fuego and Mapuches in the Jardin d’Acclimatation of Paris. 19th Century (Santiago of Chile: Pehuén Editores, 2006). 22 Pascal Blanchard et al, Zoos Humains et Exhibitions Coloniales: 150 ans d'Inventions de l'Autre (Paris: La Decouverte, 2011). 23 Jorge López, “Zoos humanos: la vergonzosa ‘exportación’ chilena”, La Nación, 13 June 2008. 24 See Saúl Moisés Piña. La primera vez que votó la mujer en Sudamérica. Almanaque 2006 (Uruguay: Banco de Seguros del Estado, 2006), 146. 25 See David J. Garrow, Protest at Selma: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). 26 See María R. Sahuquillo, “Díez Días de Justicia”, El País, 26 May 2013. 27 See “OEA/Ser. L/V/II.117. Doc. 1 rev. 1. 7 marzo 2003. “Situación de los derechos de la mujer en Ciudad Juárez, México: El derecho a no ser objeto de violencia y discriminación”, Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos de la OEA, http://www.cidh.org/annualrep/2002sp/cap.vi.juarez.html. Accessed 15 March 2014. 28 Herbert Marcuse, Ensayos sobre política y cultura (Barcelona: Ariel, 1970). 29 Edward W. Said. Cultura e imperialismo (Barcelona: Anagrama, 1996), 14. 30 Charles Merewether, “From Inscription to Dissolution: An Essay on Expenditure in the Work of Ana Mendieta”, in Ana Mendieta; Gloria Moure et al. (Santiago de Compostela: Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Poligrafia S.A., 1996), 101. 31 Soul, Silhouette on Fire; silent film originally recorded with a Super-8mm color. Running time: 3:07 minutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6ANvcBENQo. Accessed 12 April 2014. 32 Documentation: lifetime color photographs. 33 Moure et al., Ana Mendieta, 100. 34 Untitled (Silhouette Series). Her silhouettes were deployed in a range of sitespecific interventions that were simultaneously earth body interventions, landscape interventions, and sculpture. 35 See Lynda E. Avendaño, “Ana Mendieta. Trazas de cuerpo-huella que obliteran improntas”, http:// artglobalizationinterculturality.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/ 11/Lynda-Avendanio_Ana-Mendieta.pdf. Accessed 10 December 2013. 36 See “Sharon Bridgforth”, http://sharonbridgforth.com/s/. Accessed 6 December 2013.

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E. Patrick Johnson and Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, eds., Solo/Black/Woman: Scripts, Interviews, and Essays (Evanston, III: Northwestern University Press, 2013). 38 “Sharon Bridgforth”, http://sharonbridgforth.com/s/. 39 In 1979 with Raul Zurita, Fernando Balcells, Diamela Eltit, Juan Castillo and Lotty Rosenfeld founded: CADA (Colectivo de Acciones de Arte (Art Collective Actions)). See: Nelly Richard, Arte En Chile Desde 1973: Escena de Avanzada y Sociedad (Santiago de Chile: FLACSO, 1987). 40 See Daniella Wittern, “Re-Escribir La Ciudad Letrada: El Padre Mío y Zona De Dolor, o Las Performances Urbanas De Diamela Eltit”, http://www.iiligeorge town2010.com/2/pdf/Wittern.pdf. Accessed 15 November 2013. 41 Diamela Eltit, Lumperica (Havana: Casa de las Américas, 2008). 42 See Leonidas Morales T. Conversaciones con Diamela Eltit. (Santiago of Chile: Editorial Cuarto Propio, 1998). 43 See “Diamela Eltit”, Proyecto Patrimonio. http://www.letras.s5.com/diamela 240701.htm. Accessed 25 January 2014. 44 See Diana Taylor, “Hacia una definición de Performance”. http://www.crim.unam.mx/cultura/ponencias/PONPERFORMANCE/Taylor.html. Accessed 5 December 2013. 45 See “Resistencia Creativa,” Jesusa Rodríguez. http://resistenciacreativa.org.mx/ index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=19&Itemid=33. Accessed 29 January 2014. 46 See “El Maíz (Corn)”, Jesusa Rodríguez. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v =nnfHd89Oubs. Accessed 5 December 2013. 47 See Lynda Avendaño, ed., Silencio y política: Aproximaciones desde el arte, la filosofía, el psicoanálisis y el procomún (Madrid: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid; Art, Globalization and Interculturality (AGI); Universitat de Barcelona, 2014), http://artglobalizationinterculturality.com/wpcontent/uploads/2014/02/SI LENCIO-Y-POLITICA-Lynda-Avendano-Santana-version-digital.pdf. Accessed 31 March 2014. 48 See “Dominicanish last performance-2m.mov”, Josefina Báez. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzmrhGtHk0k. Accessed 3 December 2013. 49 See “Ay Ombe Theatre/Josefina Baez”, Josefina Baez. http://ayombe.webs. com/retreat.htm. Accessed 20 January 2014. 50 See “Espacios confluyentes: El Caribe en clave de género in Casa de América of Madrid”, Josefina Báez. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFETOVQrZcc. Accessed 5 December 2014. 51 See “Marga Gómez Long Island Iced Latina”, Marga Gómez. http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=RbClv7YLn_Q. Accessed 2 December 2013. 52 Henri Bergson. La risa: Ensayo sobre la significación de lo cómico (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2008), 144. 53 Emmanuel Lévinas, Entre nosotros. Ensayos para pensar en Otro (Valencia: Pre-Textos, 2001), 239. 54 See “El principio de la hospitalidad”, interview with Jacques Derrida by Darius Yancán, http://reconstruyendoelpensamiento.blogspot.com/2007/09/elprincipiode-

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hospitalidad Accessed 7 February 2014); Mark W. Westmoreland, “Interruptions: Derrida and Hospitality”, Kritique No. 2, Vol. 1 (2008): 1-10, http://www.kritike. org/journal/issue_3/westmoreland_june2008.pdf. Accessed 18 February 2014. 55 Anaïs Nin, Diario (Barcelona: Plaza & Janes Editores S. A., 1993), 361. 56 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2000).

CHAPTER THIRTEEN TOWARDS A SOCIO-POLITICAL ETHICS OF ART AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE ERA OF GLOBALIZATION: FIGHTING GENDER VIOLENCE IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE MAU MONLEÓN PRADAS

1. Introduction To address the issue of gender violence from an ethical dimension and from a socio-political perspective that promotes clarity on the development and achievement of equality between women and men, we must establish a contextualization that frames the globalization process and the development of new technologies. In order to achieve this, we will start from an understanding of our culture as the expression of a complex network of cultural relations which has promoted the gender binary and the consequent roles assigned to women, which are still to be overcome. It is through this gender binary that the need to visualize alternative feminist positions has emerged in confrontation with the decadence that the crisis of capitalist patriarchy reveals. From this perspective, the process of globalization can be seen as a sexist biopolitical generator, that could simultaneously contribute the use of technology 1 to the progress and overcoming of this discriminatory situation that manifests itself in gender violence. We will start with the definitions by María Elena Rodríguez Simón in her book titled Hijas de la igualdad, herederas de injusticias2 [Daughters of Equality, Heirs to Injustice], where she helps us map out the current violence exerted on women: a violence that is structural, symbolic and direct.

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Direct gender violence refers to beatings, wounds, lesions, mutilations, rape, sexual abuse, torture, abduction, humiliation, and mental illness, and, at its maximum expression, feminicide. The Mexican professor Marcela Lagarde y de los Ríos transformed the term “femicide”3 to “feminicide” because the former can be construed simply as murder, i.e. as a concept that merely specifies the sex of the victim. Changing “femicide” to “feminicide” implies the need to clarify that we are not simply describing murderers who commit crimes against children or women, but also the social construction of these hate crimes, the culmination of gender violence against women, and the impunity this social framework grants the perpetrators. Direct violence may be the most visible in the more extreme cases; however, gender violence also includes psychological abuse, which is all the more devastating because it destroys a woman’s self-esteem. What is more, it is usually a type of invisible violence, forged from small machista traps and tricks, or what Luis Bonino calls “micromachismos”4 that occur daily within a male-female relationship. Following the ideas of Marion Young, Simón Rodríguez affirms that “any woman can be exposed to and be at risk for machista violence”, 5 making reference to the signs of oppression, generally found repeatedly in all individuals belonging to an oppressed group of people (exploitation, marginalization, cultural colonization, powerlessness, violence, etc.). Structural violence is manifested in all pillars of society, where there is still a clear resistance against women participating in the economic, religious, and military power structure. For its part: symbolic violence affects the set of beliefs, attitudes, and knowledge regarding the supposed superiority of the male, bolstered by all sorts of media and cultural narratives found in television, literature, and art. Many women have thus devoted themselves to the unravelling, and deconstruction of macho roles, established and made “real” through cultural myths.6

If we were to examine all the types of direct, symbolic, and structural violence practiced worldwide, there would not be room enough in this text to outline all its various forms and spheres; nevertheless, we can highlight domestic violence or violence within the family, as it is called in the mass media. This moniker creates confusion, as it leads to the conclusion that this is a private type of violence. In this context, the feminist Celia Amorós,7 using the term coined by Michael P. Johnson in 1995, prefers to talk of domestic terrorism and calls for the need to resignify the language by clearly referring to patriarchal terrorism by name.

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Statistics through October 2011 give us a clear picture when comparing types of aggression: violence perpetrated by the Basque terrorist group ETA produced 829 victims in 43 years, which amounts to 19 deaths per year, while machista violence has killed 488 women in just 6 years, or 81 deaths per year.8 The treatment afforded the victims of ETA by politicians and the media compared to that given to the victims of gender violence is paradoxical. From our point of view, the term domestic terrorism is frighteningly accurate in that gender violence not only claims many more victims than political “terrorism” in Spain, but it also is, in effect, a way of “terrorizing” and sowing fear among women, who consequently suffer the aforementioned marks of oppression. In this essay I will briefly discuss some of my work and personal motivations as an artist, theorist, researcher, and curator relating to the projects of other artists that give us cause for further reading on the subject at hand: the fight against gender violence in the era of globalization and the ethical use of art and technology. In regards to these personal projects and to the main subject of my essay, I’ll mainly review structural and direct violence, including feminicide. Both the concepts of structural violence and direct gender violence, related here, are directly reflected in theory and artistic praxis of my personal work in the last decade. Therefore, in this essay I have selected, under a qualitative criterion, three of my main contributions in this line of artistic praxis: the Maternidades globalizadas [Globalized Maternities] project (2006), the Contrageografías humanas [Human Countergeographies] project (2008), and the ACVG project (started in 2009), the latter built as a Platform for Combating Gender Violence through Art and Technology, which I am directing, and which is especially dedicated to the context of Spain and Latin America. In the first section of the text, I will exemplify gender violence within the field of politics, work and power to show that structural gender violence is manifested in a new form of slave-labour that is related to female precarity. I refer, therefore, to the care crisis and its inevitable relation to gender violence in the postcolonial era.9 In this context, I will discuss the mentioned personal projects, that can be situated between art and political activism, which question the role of surrogate mothers of migrant women in Spain, as well as offering tools for the visibilization and reporting of this demeaning situation through an awareness Campaign Against the Roles Assigned to Migrant Women in Spain. The second part of this paper will focus on the ACVG Platform Against Gender Violence (www.artecontraviolenciadegenero.org) as a

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technological tool of resistance and insurgency, addressed to the empowerment of women, mainly in Spain and Latin America. As director of this platform, I will set out its main goals and its principle priorities. To do this, I will select examples of artists represented in the Platform, which have focused their work on the complaint and visibility of direct gender violence, especially in feminicide. In the context of this essay, it is important to highlight feminicide as a form of brutal and extreme violence which, although it constitues only the tip of a hidden iceberg, in most cases is closely related to the global economy, labour, and politics. In this regard, we will consider the wave of feminicide occurring in Mexico as fundamental example, directly related to the denigrating work that women do in the maquilas in Ciudad Juarez thanks to NAFTA, the Free Trade Agreement between the U.S., Mexico and Canada. We will expose this crime through the vision of Latin American artists such as Lorena Wolffer, and we will also turn to examples of Spanish artists, such as activist Nuria Verges in her project entitled Feminicidios en Área [Feminicides in Area], who are represented in the Platform ACVG. Therefore, our discussion will focus mainly on two aspects of gender violence: structural gender violence related to the care crisis, and direct gender violence, exemplified in systemic crime involving feminicide. To combat and overcome these forms of gender violence is the challenge we must address from the conclusions arising from this and other texts, as well as from positive actions to achieve equality.

2. The Care Crisis and Its Inevitable Relation to Structural Gender Violence in the Postcolonial Era 2.1. Free and/or Precarious Emotional Work We start with the definition of “care crisis” theorized by Arlie Hochshield, 10 according to whom the women of the South (East) are leading new migratory flows; they insert themselves into the labour niches of the host countries as domestic workers to alleviate the incorporation of women of the North (West) into the labour market, and for this reason they “de-care” from their duties in the reproductive sphere. As a result, we are witness to the emergence of a form of global maternity,11 which refers to the affections exchanged between migrant women and their dependents (children, the elderly and the sick) in the host countries, in exchange for a very low wage ratio.

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In this way, migrant women represent a new form of postcolonial12 slavery that can be encrypted not only in the job insecurity that they face, but especially in the perpetuation of the role of the maid-servant of the colonial era. This is reaffirmed because most of the women who migrate to Spain belong to former colonies and embody a new “emotional imperialism” 13 which refers to the exploitation, not of raw materials or natural resources, but of other resources that are more personal, such as love and feelings. This emotional work is being handed from one continent to another, producing no measurable revenues in economic terms. Moving onto studies on the transnationalization of the care crisis and the global supply chains of affection or emotional work, we find a strong relationship with feminist theory and activism of the ‘60s and ‘70s in North America. According to these ideas, all the structural lines and the fundamentals of these terms come into question when relating them to the housework held by the vast majority of women, and how it still remains invisible in the global labour market. At the time of First Wave feminism, women urgently demanded that housework should be shared, and they also stressed the need for subsidies for childcare. In addition, feminist Marxist critique denounced the precept that housework was inherently related to women, in a role defined and appropriated from the Fordist model of the family as belonging to a capitalist-patriarchal system. According to this model of the sexual division of labour, the man becomes the only economic sustenance and householder. Feminist studies14 have revealed how the visibility of productive work is the tip of the iceberg of the world economy, while the invisibility of reproductive work is immersed in the very base of this iceberg, although, in reality, it is the great support of the tip. From the outset, the importance of reproductive work for the world economy has been stressed, given the abovementioned reason that the economic system is kept afloat by the working lives of many women. But the current situation has proven to be completely different, and the battle has not been won.

2.2. Migrant Women in Domestic Service: A New Post-Colonial Slavery In the Spanish context, migrant women working in domestic service (care) come from the waves of migration from former colonies: Latin America, Northern Morocco, Equatorial Guinea and the Philippines. In the middle of the 90’s a large number of women from the Dominican Republic and Morocco (and also from Guinea and from the Philippines in a smaller proportion), settled in Madrid and Barcelona. We call them the

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first case studies: women who suffered the worst discriminatory treatment (skin colour and/or religion) due to the total invisibility of domestic work and to the neglect of any adequate social and labour laws to protect them.15 In addition to the impossibility of access to other more respectable work positions, this also re-established the eternal Lady-housekeeper relationship from rural Spain (or, similarly, from the Franquist era), now reformulated as “internal service”. This relationship was still in use in the second wave of South American female migrants from Ecuador and Colombia mainly, and in a minor proportion from Peru, Bolivia, Brazil and Argentina; it has resulted in the emergence of important social movements by NGOs and trade unions (CCOO - UGT). Equally, we can observe that the latest batch of female migrants has arrived from Eastern Europe throughout 2006 to 2010. The care crisis and its inevitable relation to structural gender violence relates precisely to these new migration flows linked, in most of the cases, to the former Spanish colonies. We can affirm that these new forms of slavery, exemplified in domestic service, promote new forms of structural gender violence, in relation to the increasing feminization of poverty.

2.3. Raise Awareness and Fight against the Roles Assigned to Migrant Women in Spain My project Maternidades globalizadas (2006-2007, figs. 13.1 and 13.2)16 was consolidated in a collective exhibition entitled Geografías del desorden. Migración, alteridad y nueva esfera social [Geographies of Disorder. Migration, Alterity and the New Social Sphere] (curated by Jose Luís Pérez Pont in 2006, in the NAU, University of Valencia, Spain). This art project was conducted in two different contexts: it was presented as a video installation within the Museum gallery, and then developed in the Col-legi Major Rector Peset de Valéncia, Spain, as a series of debate sessions entitled First Debate Sessions “New Women Protagonists of Migration Flows”17 (organized by the Institut Universitari d' Estudis de la Dona and directed by me). This approach responded to the main objective of our research, where we associated not only theory and praxis from the outset, but also emphasized the dissemination and visibility of our work in different contexts in order to reach different audiences and interests. Moreover, this approach favoured the visibilization of the transfer of affections that occurs in care work, and especially the discrimination suffered by migrant women in Spain.

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Figures 13.1 and 13.2. Mau Monleón, Maternidades globalizadas, 2006-2007. Videoinstallation, video 29 minutes, telephone audio 28 minutes. Project for the exhibition Geografías del desordre. Migració, alteritat I nova esfera social, LA NAU, Sala Estudi General. In collaboration with Asociación de Mujeres Inmigrantes de Valencia and Taller Audiovisual de la Universidad de Valencia. Courtesy of the artist.

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Maternidades globalizadas is a video installation which, through direct and interactive interviews, documents the voices of South American migrant women belonging to the second wave of immigrants (mainly from Ecuador and Colombia, but also Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, and Argentina), along with the more recent migrants from the Eastern European wave (Romania, Bulgaria, etc.), many of whom were hired as domestic help to alleviate the so-called care crisis. The whole project takes the form of a “locutory”18 to host the voices and declarations of these invisible women, who have decided to work in Spain, mostly leaving their own families in order to save enough money to help them send remittances back home. The grid of the project has evolved from the already mentioned theories and theses related to care crisis, as well as from an approach necessary to the Immigrant Women’s Association19 of Valencia. The first contacts with the women interviewed emerged from here, constituting a total of twelve testimonies of women of different nationalities and conditions (mainly Ecuador and Colombia, which are supposed to be the worst-affected migrant women, as well as Eastern Europe). All of these women have been taking care of children and/or elderly, and some of them are still doing this kind of domestic work in Spain. For this project, I have been influenced by feminist theorist Gayatri Spivak,20 who in recent decades has become an indispensable reference within the postcolonial framework, as she highlights the limits of representation of women as “subordinate” figures due to their double marginalization as women and as colonial subjects. Instead of asking myself if it is possible or not to let migrant women speak in our society of exclusion, these women have placed themselves in front of the videocamera to analyze and evaluate their own experiences. Through the project, I have established a dialogue with these women about the emotional grief of uprooting, and the feelings and contradictions that are generated because of family division. And we have also discussed the situation of slavery that they have to suffer because of their “subordinate” position in our discriminatory society, given that many of them possess qualifications and higher education, for which they receive no recognition. In this context, we I am deeply interested in the project carried out by the Valencian artist Ana Navarrete in 2007 entitled N340 Globalfem.21 The piece focuses on migrations that are exclusively female, the lack of protection women face—both socially and in the workplace—and the new sexual and domestic order. The project analyses the concepts of gender, sex, race, and class, as well as the alarming effects of globalization on equality and distributive justice.

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Figures 13.3 and 13.4. Mau Monleón, Contrageografías humanas, 2008. Interdisciplinary Project. Campaign to promote awareness of the roles assigned to migrant women in Spain. Advertising posters on bus 7 of the Valencia EMT. Funded by Promedios. Serigraphy and vinyl on glass. Courtesy of the artist.

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My project, Human Countergeographies, 22 is an “Awareness Campaign against the Roles Assigned to Migrant Women in Spain” (figs. 13.3 and 13.4). This is a project that stems from the proposed collective exhibition entitled “Mapping Valencia”. In our case, we conducted part of the exhibition within the Museum—there was essentially a video installation about the proposed urban intervention in the context of the city, together with photographs and visiting cards designed for the campaign. The video document, entitled “Internal or External” (fig. 13.5, 10’23” mins. duration), collects images of city places “mapped” through a series of creative posters that I found on the streets of Valencia; they are small, modest posters in which migrant women announced themselves precariously in order to offer their work as carers. Simultaneously, there was an intervention on bus 7 outside the museum, on the route that passes by the Museum of History of Valencia where the video installation was housed. The bus involved was present both within the museum (shown in the video document “Internal or External), as well as en route outside, in everyday city life. The intervention consisted of three vinyl transfers placed on the rear and sides of the bus. These transfers reproduced three small posters by migrant women on a magnified scale. In addition to this, and especially designed for the campaign, the intervention included a logo denouncing the assignation of roles to migrant women in Spain. The three posters photographically represent several job posts found throughout the development of the project. Each of them function as an advert, while the bus creates a moving map with each round, establishing a temporal and ephemeral counter-geography that is offered as an alternative to consumption, as a space for reflection and participation that allows for meditation and discussion. The bus route map is not only an objective map here, but also a subjective map of each of the people who take the bus or simply see it on the street. It is the map of the “visibility” and transmission of information, the map of the creation of networks and interconnectedness with each other through contact between people, the exchange, the comings and goings, comments and participation in the campaign. In this project, art and technology has transformed a precarious message into a sort of institutional advertising which emphasizes the urgency of reorienting the history of the city through these new informal economies of mobility across borders. For this, the active contribution of citizens against this new form of gender violence that enslaves women is fundamental.

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Figure 13.5. Mau Monleón, Contrageografías humanas, 2008. Interdisciplinary Project. Frames from the video Interna o Externa, Mini DVD, color. 10’23” mins. Courtesy of the artist.

3. Overcoming Feminicide as a Socio-Political Crime and Fighting the Different Forms of Gender Violence through Art and Technology 3.1. The Globalization of Technology: A Double-Edged Sword We can argue that the globalization of technology has motivated new forms of gender violence. We refer specifically to the “technological circuits” that are used today from the patriarchy to build, redesign and cascade structural, symbolic, and direct gender violence. The equation Capitalism = Patriarchate is shown to us clearly and directly when we realize that capital is interested in gender violence. This constitutes not only a business for the exploitation of women, but also a tool to control through fear, as evidenced by the mass media. The television itself is an instrument of the invisibility of exploitation, and of the inequality of women through the process of selection and censorship of information. As we have just been discussing in relation to the new forms of postcolonial slavery, another example of the lucrative exploitation of women is constituted by the United States’ imperialism, exercised from the implementation of NAFTA (the Free Trade Agreement signed by the U.S., Canada and Mexico in 1994) which is clearly related to business and associated to feminicide as an extreme form of gender violence. In Ciudad Juarez, prostitution is associated with work in the maquilas, and rates of feminicide have grown. The situation is similar in Tijuana, another Mexican border city which houses hundreds of global assembly plants, and where a prostitute is considered even morally superior to the women workers in these plants. These “border circuits”, as Saskia Sassen23 terms them, where female labour supports multinational imperialism, confirm that gender violence is global, transnational and shifting into forms of discrimination related to

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the “new serfdom and slavery” derived from the requirements of new capital. Therefore, we can consider feminicide as a socio-political crime, in a public sphere beyond the scope of the domestic. Globalization, and its necessary alliance to technological fact, is not the cause of gender violence, but the indiscriminate use of technology for the enrichment of a few men has increased inequality between men and women and worsened the gap between North and South, making the women more vulnerable in this process. On the one hand, the number of women entering the global workforce has never been as high as today, and yet, women have to cope with higher unemployment rates and lower wages. Woman represent as much as 70 percent of the world’s absolute poor.24 From 2002 to 2007, the gender gap in unemployment was constant, with the female unemployment rate higher at 5.8 per cent, compared to male unemployment at 5.3 per cent (with 72 million women unemployed). The crisis raised this gender gap to 0.7 percentage points for 2012 (destroying 13 million jobs for women), with projections showing no significant reduction in unemployment expected by 2017.25 On the other hand, half of the migrants worldwide are women, numbering around 95 million women and girls according to a report of 2006 by the United Nations, and their needs are not satisfied to the same extent as boys’ needs are. Women suffer marginalization because of the fact of being women and migrants; additionally, they are more prone to violence. In Spain, gender violence is rampant, and it is also indisputable that a pandemic of violence against women is tearing across Latin America. The artist Lorena Wolffer masterfully exemplifies this idea in her performance, video and photographs for the piece entitled Si ella es México, ¿quién la golpeó? [If She is Mexico, Who Has Hit Her?] (1998, fig. 13.6). Through a visual metaphor of the convergence between the body of a beaten woman and Mexico, the artist raises awareness on gender and national violence. In addition, acting as a model in her performances, photographs and videos, the artist shows us her body remade by the fashion industry in a job that stigmatizes female, sentencing it to the limits of the standards of beauty. Despite the conviction emitted by the Cotton Field Court26 (rendered in Ciudad Juárez in 2001 after finding the bodies of three teenagers along with five other unidentified women), since 2010 there have been 309 new cases of disappearances and deaths of women in this city. 75 % of crimes in this country are not reported, and a judge prosecutes only 1.6 out of every 100 crimes.27

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Figure 13.6. Lorena Wolffer, Si ella es México, ¿quién la golpeó?, 1998. Performance, Video/DVD/fotografía, 8’18” mins. Photograph by Eugenio Castro. Courtesy of the artist.

The statement also condemned the state of Mexico for failing to properly investigate, and it was sentenced to investigate the offenders through a gender-perspective. The authorities that contributed to the corruption and impunity of the case were asked for a public apology to the families of the victims and the public; they also imposed the construction of a memorial; financial reparation to victims; several legal amendments, and the creation of a missing persons’ data base. It was the first time a state was condemned as responsible for feminicide.28 In terms of progress in other Latin-American countries, on March 9, 2013, the president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, enacted and passed a law that punishes feminicide for up to 30 years in prison. It is the highest sanction in Bolivian law, and it was passed in response to the feminicide committed between January and February 2013. In Latin America, despite the dictatorial legacy of many of the countries with the highest rates of gender violence in the world, the silenced violence has also resulted in a tradition aligned with feminism, and it is generating active responses to these problems. As we have

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already discussed through the work of artist Lorena Wolffer, art is really struggling against gender violence. Las Muertes Chiquitas [The Small Deaths] is an interdisciplinary project featuring interviews with over thirty women from different areas of Mexico. Their life stories reveal events related to the feminicides in Ciudad Juárez, while providing a glimpse of the lives of prostitutes from marginalized neighbourhoods, university professors, European war refugees, women with AIDS, homosexuals and transsexuals, ex-guerillas from the 70s, bourgeois and indigenous peoples, students, mothers, grandmothers, daughters, in short: women. With this project, the Catalonian audiovisual artist Mireia Sallarés has, like Lorena Wolffer, delved deeper into the socio-economic aspects of feminicide.

3.2. ACVG. A Platform for Empowerment against Gender-Based Violence through Art and Technology While the school drop-out rate of girls in the Spanish state is 10 points lower than that of boys, and the number of women graduates is 40% higher than men, female participation rate is still 13 points below men, and women are mostly paid less and belong to less socially valued labour sectors. This is an obvious form of structural gender violence. In Spain, gender violence deaths represent only the tip of an iceberg hidden under invisibility. While in 2012, 52 women have been victims of feminicide according to the Ministry of Health, Social Services and Equality, (according to Redfeminista the number is 76). In the first quarter of 2012, 30.895 complaints were registered, representing 339 complaints daily. Created in 2009, the ACVG Platform www.artecontraviolenciadegenero.org (figs. 13.7 and 13.8) aims to offer an active network to assess and confront the current social scourge of gender violence by applying methodologies of documentation, cataloguing and visualization of artistic practices conducted in the Spanish and Latin American contexts mainly. The site provides tools through which new technologies help to overcome this discriminatory situation. The main objective of the platform is to create an accessible and updated document source for researchers and teachers in the field of history, art history, fine arts, gender studies, and new technologies that make visible and confront gender violence from different perspectives, aiming at overcoming and reporting beyond victimization, and participating in the development of critical knowledge.

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Figures 13.7 and 13.8. ACVG: Arte Contra Violencia de Género, www.artecontra violenciadegenero.org. Director: Mau Monleón. Design: Alberto García and Elena Mir. Courtesy of the artist.

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The platform has been complemented by the realization of the exhibition In-Out House: Circuitos de género y violencia en la era tecnológica that opened its doors until the 19th December 2012 in the spaces of the Polytechnic University of Valencia; it was also open until the 30th April, 2013, in Room X, Pontevedra. Since the University plays a key role in education of values for gender equality, we believe that this initiative can become a point of reference on discussions about the contribution of the University and of art in the eradication of gender violence and feminicide. Therefore, the exhibition In-Out House and the platform ACVG are creating an educational and transversal space that offers documentation on projects, catalogs and literature on this topic, whose main goal is to put the accent on the prevention of gender violence. The coordination model for In-Out House has aimed to be crossborder, and cross-disciplinary. We have worked with groups such as the Colombian Caribbean Redhada and the Continent Group of Argentina. And we have had the pleasure of collaborating with female and male international artists29 who have vastly contributed to the platform and to the exhibition in a truly committed way. Most, if not all, of the women represented in the In-Out House project, condemn the assaults on our own flesh or identify ourselves with the violence directed against other women. This is a way of politicizing our common experience.

3.3. Key References in the Fight against Gender Violence through Art and Technology Of essential reference for our ACVG Platform is the Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing in September 1995. The report for this event considered that women should have equal access to economic resources, including land, credit, science and technology. This is because of the fact that technology has the capability to promote equality between men and women, representing them without stereotypes and respecting their dignity and value as individuals. The feminist term “empowerment” (English term), which refers to the need for the increased participation of women in decision-making processes and access to power, was central to this discussion. Two Spanish pioneer platforms are Mujeres en Red, created by journalist and feminist Montserrat Boix in 1996, and Red feminista de organizaciones contra la violencia de género, active since 2002. Currently MAV, Mujeres en las artes visuales, a partnership originally headed by Rocío de la Villa in 2009 and today led by Marián López Fernández Cao,

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aims to analyze and report objective data on the status of professionals in the sector of the visual arts in Spain. It also works to implement egalitarian policies in the field of visual arts. That is why this last platform is a reference in the fight against structural gender violence regarding the arts sector in our country. Since 1995, the artist Margot Lovejoy has developed the work Parthenia,30 which has become a point of reference to extend the idea of a virtual network of complaints of specific cases of gender violence through the Internet. This project was completed the same year as the Fourth World Conference on Women, in which it was established for the first time that violence against women was considered a violation of human rights which prevents the achievement of the objectives of equality, development and peace. Parthenia is a monument of political protest, a demonstration of the subversive potential of the Internet to make public, by the victims of gender violence around the world, what has been reviled as private and invisible. Parthenia gives voice to women victims of violence by men in order to give them the opportunity to break the silence, by writing, if they wish, how they were attacked, where and by whom. Thus, Parthenia acts as a way of witnessing this situation of violence, often suffered in silence; and it provides the ability, through the anonymity of de-privatizing the stories of the victims, to claim them as victims in a global conflict that does goes beyond cultures, ages or economies. While patriarchal society has erected monuments to fallen soldiers and has built them cemeteries of white crosses, women have barely raised monuments to victims of gender violence, although such violence constitutes a declared war against women both in times of peace as in times of war. Regarding the progress that the use of new technologies to denounce gender violence represents for women, we have to highlight the Leonardo International Society for Arts, Science and Technology (ISAST), which has been dedicated to publishing avant-garde articles by women in this field. We also note the recent publication Women, Art and Technology, edited by Judy Malloy, which witnesses the work being carried out by women in the field of art and new technology, and covers an important volume of the work in the field of gender violence. Moreover it is also important to highlight the paradigmatic exhibition curated online by Remedios Zafra entitled “Violence without Bodies” on the occasion of the exhibition Cárcel de Amor [Prison of Love], performed in 2005 at the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía de Madrid. 31 The art exhibition Feminist Genealogies in Spanish Art: 1960-2010 was recently conceived and curated by Juan Vicente Aliaga and Patricia Mayayo. It presents a collection of the works

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involved in the fight against gender violence as one of the main agendas of feminism in the Spanish territory. In matters of technological and cultural gender studies, Toronto’s University web platforms, Canadian Women’s Studies On-Line, the University of Chicago’s Centre for Gender Studies, and the platform of the University of Virginia, Women’s Studies are obligatory reference. These platforms aim to accommodate the voice of groups of women and to visibilize discrimination problems, interacting extensively with the world of sound and visual culture in order to create cultural products such as independent radio or monograph art shows about gender violence. On the other hand, we also want to highlight Spanish activist platforms which denounce cases of domestic violence and feminicide such as Feminicidio.net and Feminicide in Area (2000-2010). The platform Feminicidio.net has been visible on the web since the 25th November 2010. One of its main objectives has been to afford visibility to the issue through advertising campaigns related to feminicide committed in Latin America, where the exact number of women murdered each year is still unknown. In this way, Feminicidio.net was born in order to document the global barbarism normalized by the patriarchy, with the intention that through the web we could document ourselves and nourish virtual network connections between the civil society, academia and institutions. Currently Feminicidio.net is a portal of information and data journalism with a gender perspective that feeds interviews, articles, special investigations and reports on feminicides and violence against women in 21 countries in Latin America and Spain. The Spanish project Feminicidios en Área (2000-2010), 32 by Núria Verges Bosch and Jaume Nualart Vilaplana, is an activist research platform on violence against women that aims to show that feminicide persists in the Spanish state because, according to the conclusions emitted by the project: the murdered women had in common that they were women and the fact that a man, emotionally close to them, believed he had the right to decide about their bodies and their lives to the point of killing them through extreme, brutal, and bloody violence.33

3.4. Defining and Rounding Up “Gender Violence” in the Struggle for Equality On our ACVG web platform, male and female users can find all the above mentioned references and projects, as well as definitions of gender violence, such as the already named domestic terrorism proposed by the

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feminist philosopher Celia Amorós, misogynist terrorism proposed by Drs. Psychology Esperanza and Victoria Ferrer Bosch, and sexual terrorism given by feminist theorist Diana Russell. Also, our users may find definitions of types of feminicide, from the intimate, non-intimate, child, family member, stigmatized occupations, for connection, for prostitution, for trafficking, transphobic, lesbophobic, racist, for female genital mutilation, as an international crime, or systemic sexual feminicide. The media unfortunately does not appoint all these types of feminicide; even the word feminicide is not in frequent use either. Also, on our Platform we can find the analysis and exemplification of so-called “symbolic” gender violence, which maintains a direct relation to the construction of our collective imaginary forms, on which the present text cannot elaborate. Other kinds of definitions that we can find in the mentioned web are around activist art, press coverage of gender violence, theoretical texts, links to specialized documentation, news, as well as a discussion forum on the topic. From the platform, we work to provide a tool of support to visibilize a problem that is ignored in the institutional agenda. We note that, increasingly, the dominant ideologies in our country undermine the attention given to gender violence and take advantage of the economic crisis to cut budgets assigned to this issue. In Spain, after the disappearance of the Ministry of Equality in 1998, the population has suffered budget cuts and, as of the Royal Decree of January 2012, the Ministry has been based in the Health, Social Services and Equality sector. This has had important implications in the fight for equality, which are not only of an economic nature, but also political. Ana Maria Pérez del Campo of the Federation of Separated and Divorced Women, a long-time activist against women abuse, asks: “How can the budget in the field of equality and gender violence be reduced and a general amnesty be given to tax evaders?” She continues: “They have been abusive. The funds were already below the needs. It is an ideological cut that shows that the Government has no intention to solve these problems”.34 In equality policies, the Institute for Women, an autonomous organisation dedicated to encouraging women, has suffered a reduction of 9.3% to approximately 18.7 million in 2012. The Equality Ministry budget has been reduced by 18 % to 24.9 million. At a time when the Spanish state takes advantage of crisis to cut 70% of the budget for advertising campaigns against gender violence, we need more than ever to warn the public that male violence is a matter of human rights, and that such areas of the budget cannot or should not be “cut”.

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Especially when feminist politics has been institutionalized and controlled by the mass media, and these resources are depleted for visibility. With the web platform ACVG, we stand against all kinds of gender violence and against these and other policies of violence’s perpetuation.

4. Conclusions Summarizing, the mentioned projects can be situated at the boundaries between art, education, politics, poetry, social activism, and feminist militancy in order to help us achieve the purpose of the Platform Against Gender Violence ACVG: to create new spaces for communities to express their demands and experiences, to support the struggle for equality through the denunciation of gender violence to which women are currently subjected to in Spain and around the world. All of the projects discussed above have been able to insert themselves into patriarchal contexts, taking a step forward in the fight for equality and the empowerment of women. And all of them have the goal and the good will to make an impact on people, thus avoiding the weakening of women’s rights that is produced by the male chauvinism and dictatorial policies. Through its manifestations, in which the personal has become political and vice versa, male and female artists have challenged patriarchy by raising awareness and, in some cases, mobilizing an important part of the population. Regarding the care crisis and its structural relationship with new gender violence, we have been able to discuss capitalism’s interest in the exploitation of women. Therefore, patriarchal society has repositioned the role of women in the spotlight, developing a form of new postcolonial slavery which stigmatizes women workers in domestic service (and other typified roles). In this regard, the creation of campaigns denouncing the invisibility of precarious work that most migrant women do, and its widespread dissemination through technology, has become necessary today. The title of our essay “Towards a Socio-Political Ethics of Art and Technology in the Era of Globalization. Fighting Gender Violence in the Public Sphere”, has to do with this necessity to pay attention to social injustice in the public sphere, because the invisibility of women and the precariousness in labour are symptoms of structural gender violence. Similarly, thanks to the creation of platforms for the cooperation between various actors in governmental and non-governmental areas— such as the American artist Suzanne Lacy, among other pioneers35—it has been possible to analyse how gender violence is discussed in Spain, frequently inscribed in political and informative speech saturated with

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demographics of fatalities. However, these platforms attempt to explain the stories of countless women silenced every day in situations of abuse by expressing and recognizing the needs, demands and experiences for the real empowerment of all of us. By maintaining an awareness that education not only consists of “reasons” but also of emotions, our task is to reach the youngest and to teach them the values of equality and improvement. Therefore, it is essential to consider all these projects in the organization of feminist networks because, in addition to the visibility of the work done by men against women and domestic violence, all these platforms attempt to explain the stories of many women who bear abusive situations every day. To empower ourselves through these platforms means to recognize the needs, demands and experiences that allow us to make connections between universities, social networks and specialists in the field. Finally, the ACVG platform, acting from a standpoint of feminist militancy and social and political activism, has taken positions against all forms of gender violence and feminicide, and against the policies of perpetuation of violence within the patriarchal framework, both in Spain and in the globalized world. In this sense, we believe that it has been an act of resistance against patriarchal policies that not only control the bodies of women, but also the network. For this reason the ACVG platform and all the feminist activists platforms constitute acts of resistance against patriarchy. Thank you to the PhD in Art History, Dr. Irene Ballester Buigues, for her valuable contributions to this text.

Notes 1

VNS Matrix—a group of artists that emerged in South Australia in 1991—is a pioneer in the use of the concept cyberfeminism with its Bitch Mutant Manifest consolidated during the Dokumenta X in Kassel. Even today, many female and male artists continue to seek equality against discriminatory violence, and have proposed the use of new technologies as an effective way to improve on the creation of networks, associations and cyberfeminist groups. On this subject see the fundamental text of Montserrat Boix, “Hackeando el patriarcado en la lucha contra la violencia hacia las mujeres. Filosofía y práctica de mujeres en red desde el ciberfeminismo social”, Labrys, études féministes (June-December 2006) http://vsites.unb.br/ih/his/gefem/labrys10/espanha/boix.htm 2 See Mª Elena Simón Rodríguez, Hijas de la igualdad, herederas de injusticias (Madrid: Narcea 2009). 3 Marcela Lagarde, “Del femicidio al feminicidio”, in Desde el jardín de Freud.

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Revista de Psicoanálisis, No. 6, Universidad Nacional de Colombia (2006): 9. Feminicide is also the term endorsed by feminist authors in: Diane Russell and Jill Radford, eds., Femicide. The Politics of Woman Killing (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992). 4 See Luis Bonino, “Los micromachismos en la vida conyugal”, in Violencia masculina en la pareja, J. Corsi, ed. (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 1995). 5 Mª Elena Simón Rodríguez, Hijas de la igualdad, 169. 6 Ibid., 170. 7 The definition of domestic violence is qualified by feminist Cèlia Amorós as “conceptual fudge”, who prefers to advocate the need to speak clearly. For further information on the coincidence between Cèlia Amorós and Michael P. Johnson; see Hope Bosch and Victoria A.Ferrer, La voz de las invisibles. Las víctimas de un mal amor que mata (Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, Universitat de València, Instituto de la Mujer, 2002), 35. 8 The statistics are analyzed in the article published by Jesús Gómez, “La violencia de ETA, la violencia machista y la paradoja del valor (196 veces),” 18 November 2011. http://queopinamos.com/?p=1164. Accessed 15 April 2014. 9 For further information on the relationship between care crisis and new postcolonial slavery, see my essay: “Hacia una visibilización de la crisis de los cuidados. Arte social frente a nueva esclavitud poscolonial”, Revista API, Miradas Poscoloniales. Latinoamérica, Vol. 2, (December 2010): 22-44. 10 See Arlie Hochschild, “Las cadenas mundiales de afecto y asistencia y la plusvalía emocional”, in En el límite. La vida en el capitalismo global, Anthony Giddens and Will Hutton, eds. (Barcelona: Tusquets, 2001), 187-208. 11 Hochschild, “Las cadenas mundiales de afecto”. Arlie Hochschild has defined the concept of “globalized maternity” in the context of the care crisis. On this concept, see especially: Rachael Parrenas Salazar, The Global Servants: Migrant Filipina Domestic Workers (Los Angeles and Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), cited in Giddens and Hutton eds., En el límite, 187. See also Sònia Parella Rubio, Mujer, inmigrante y trabajadora: La triple discriminación (Barcelona: Anthropos, 2003). 12 Feminism and postcolonialism are allies. To abound on this topic see Reina Lewis and Sara Mills Editors, Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, (New York: Routledge, 2003). 13 See this idea in the report by Cristina Vega Solís, Subjetividades en tránsito en los servicios de atención y cuidado (Barcelona: Ayudas a la investigación francesa Bonnemaison, 2006). See also in this respect: Hogares, cuidados y fronteras. Derechos de las mujeres inmigrantes y conciliación (Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños, 2004). 14 I want to highlight two important feminist studies on industrial changes in the Spanish context that have contributed to the studies on the care crisis. See, in this regard, M.J. Miranda, “El paso de la sociedad fábrica a la metrópoli”, in Laboratorio Feminista, Transformaciones del trabajo desde una perspectiva feminista. Producción, reproducción, deseo, consumo (Madrid: Tierradenadie,

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2006); and Lidia Falcón, La razón feminista. La mujer como clase social y económica, el modo de producción doméstica (Barcelona: Fontanella, 1981). 15 Many women suffered the worst discriminatory treatment due to the total invisibility of domestic work and the neglect of an inadequate social and labor law: the obsolete Spanish law RD 1424 19854. We refer to an outdated law governing the Special Scheme for Domestic Workers in Social Security, from the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, 1985. This law placed domestic employment outside the normal system of Social Security, hampering the right of workers to access it. 16 On this project see the dissertation by Alexa Cuesta and Mau Monleón,“Hacia una visibilización del transvase de afectos en una economía globalizada. Ser mujer, ser madre, ser líder, ser cabeza de familia, ser productiva, ser migrante o... ¡todo en una!”, in Javier de Lucas Martín et al., Geografías del desorden. Migración, alteridad y nueva esfera social (Valencia: La Nau-Universidad de Valencia, 2006), 161-175. 17 The conference “Women Protagonists of the New Migration Flows” (“Mujeres Protagonistas de los Nuevos Flujos Migratorios”) have embraced the internationally acclaimed theoretician Sonia Parella Rubio, together with migrant women with work experience in the domestic sector, such as Rosario Lampín. 18 In Spain, locutories are small businesses that provide internet access and longdistance telephone services for immigrants. 19 The Immigrant Women’s Association of Valencia (Asociación de Mujeres Inmigrantes de Valencia ) was founded on October 25, 1999, and has been offering social and legal advice for years. Besides offering a free psychological support programme, it also offers a wide range of other activities. 20 Gayatri C. Spivak, ¿Pueden hablar los subalternos? (Barcelona: MACBA, 2009.) 21 N340 Globalfem is a project carried out for the exhibition “CyberFem” produced by Espai d’Art Contemporani de Castelló-EACC. The concept is by Ana Navarrete, developed with Verónica Perales, Fred Adam, and Sylvia Molina, with the collaboration of Pere Gallego, Carmen Navarrete, Daniel Palacios, and Pedro Pestana. 22 About this project see the article by Mau Monleón, “Contrageografías humanas. Circuitos de género, economías informales y roles adquiridos”, in Mapping Valencia, eds. Javier Marroquí y David Arlandis (Valencia: Ayuntamiento de Valencia, 2008), 69-80. 23 Saskia Sassen, Contrageografías de la globalización. Género y ciudadanía en los circuitos transfronterizos (Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños, 2003). 24 According to a UNESCO report, entitled “Education for Sustainable Development Brief” referring to the decade between 2005 and 2014. See http:// portal.unesco.org/education/en/file_download.php/c087fbc95b175f1776b7480363 52e65fbrief+on+ESD.pdf. Accessed 3 April 2014. 25 Data estimated by the ILO, International Labour Organization, in “Summary of the Global Employment Trends for Women 2012”. See http://ilo.org/global/ research/global-reports/global-employment-trends/WCMS_195449/lang--en/index. htm. Accessed 2 November 2014.

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A pioneering judgment convicted the Mexican state of violating the right to life, integrity and personal freedom, among other crimes, for the case of three young women killed in Ciudad Juárez in 2001. This judgment was called “Cotton Field” on 10 December 2009, and marked a before and after in Latin America, as it was handed down by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the highest body of justice in Latin America, whose faults are final. 27 Data collected by Ana Lorite in El País, 18 February 2011. http://sociedad. elpais.com/sociedad/2011/02/18/actualidad/1297983603_850215.html. Accessed 2 November 2014. 28 Data collected by Lorite, El País. 29 To see a report of the exhibition and the catalogue, go to the platform ACVG, where you can download further information. 30 The project was archived as part of adaweb.com and has been part of two exhibitions at the Museo Reina Sofía de Madrid and the Museo del Castillo, España, among others. View http://www.parthenia.com. Accessed 6 April 2013. 31 See the website http://www.carceldeamor.net/vsc, accessed 6 April 2013, constructed as a net.art exhibition in which various lectures about gender violence are confronted in the network. It included the participation of artists such as Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Tina La Porta, Cindy Gabriela Flores, AnneMarie Schleiner, Faith Wilding and Hyla Willis, Sonya Rapoport and Marie-Jose Sat, Prema Murthy, Harvey and Michael Samyn Auriea, Retail, Margot Lovejoy Natalie Bookchin, Francesca da Rimini, Agricola de Cologne, Robert Nideffer, Melinda Rackham, Cristina Buendía, or the Guerrilla Girls. 32 See http://nualart.com/area. Accessed 6 April 2013. 33 Núria Vergés Bosch, in “Feminicidios en Área: Visualizaciones interactivas de los feminicidios en el estado español”, http://nualart.com/area. Accessed 6 April 2013. 34 Ana María Pérez quoted by Charo Nogueira and María R. Sahuquillo, “Adiós a las campañas ‘a bombo y platillo’ contra la violencia machista. Igualdad recorta en un 70% los fondos para alertar contra el maltrato”, El País, 5 April 2012, http://sociedad.elpais.com/sociedad/2012/04/05/actualidad/1333638624_808957.ht ml. Accessed 6 April 2013. 35 The American activist and artist Suzanne Lacy has dedicated her entire work to combatting gender violence, from her ground-breaking book Rape Is (1972) that compares different definitions of the word rape without resorting to any image; to her famous performance Three Weeks in May (1977) held in various locations in the city of Los Angeles. Recently, the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, National Museum of Art (MNCARS), presented the project The Tattooed Skeleton (2010), curated by Berta Sichel, head of the Audiovisual Department, consisting of a set of interventions and works created specifically to match the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. The Tattooed Skeleton is a platform for cooperation between different agents of governmental and non-governmental fields—artists, youth, activists and abused women—to analyze how gender violence has been discussed in Spain. The project consists of a round table with representatives of social and cultural organizations, evidence of abuse, academia

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and the media, as well as a workshop on the prevention of gender-based violence with young students in a school, who write on a white masks testimonies of victims of abuse previously collected by Suzanne Lacy (an action that was broadcast live on the web streaming of the museum). Finally, all the work collected in the meeting and workshop was integrated into a performance by the artist. Watch the video http://blip.tv/play/gpEygeirZQI. Accessed 6 April 2013. Video Source: Reina Sofia Museum through blip.tv

PART IV ART AND THE POST-NATURAL CONDITION

CHAPTER FOURTEEN GARDENS BEYOND EDEN: BIO-AESTHETICS, ECO-FUTURISM, AND DYSTOPIA AT DOCUMENTA (13) AND BEYOND T.J. DEMOS

According to Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, director of dOCUMENTA (13), “we live in a state of permanent crisis, a state of emergency and thus of exception”.1 As such, it may seem surprising that she chose to respond to that state of crisis with numerous gardens in what is undoubtedly the most ambitious of mega-exhibitions. Nonetheless, the show was overgrown with experimental planters and creatively landscaped areas, relating variously to agriculture, farming, and natural life forms, which made the 2012 iteration of Documenta that occurs every five years in central Germany the most “eco” yet. The garden-as-art included: Kristina Buch’s The Lover, an open-air butterfly micro-habitat installed in front of Kassel’s Staatstheater, comprised of plants ideal for indigenous varieties of the insect, some of which emerged from their chrysalises during the length of the show; Christian Philipp Müller’s Swiss Chard Ferry, a group of barges floating on one of the canals in the Karlsaue Park, filled with different edible varieties, realized in cooperation with the Department of Organic Agricultural Sciences at the University of Kassel in Witzenhausen; and Song Dong’s Doing Nothing Garden, a six-meter-high accumulation of rubble and organic refuse, sprouting grass and flowers and sporting neon signs reading “Doing” and “Nothing” in Chinese, found on the Karlswiese lawn in front of the Orangerie. Gardens may seem irrelevant to our world of ecological crises and emergencies (the specific circumstances of which Christov-Bakargiev neglected to identify). But in fact they concern the most urgent of global conflicts—including the corporate financialization of nature, realized by

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the patenting of genetically modified seeds by agriculture and pharmaceutical corporations; the production of greenhouse gas emissions, via a monoculture- and export-based agribusiness reliant on the fossil-fuelled transportation industry and the use of chemical fertilizers; and the destruction of unions and small-scale farmers, displaced by the mechanization and monopoly ownership of the means of production. About these various pressing emergencies the curators (including the director’s “core agent” Chus Martinez) had little to say,2 and as such the various biotic artworks risked becoming mere green embellishments to an already organically adorned Baroque environment, especially given the Karlsaue Park’s eighteenth-century redesign as a landscape garden. Claire Pentacost’s vertical gardens, for instance, adorned the Ottoneum’s front grounds, rendering her 8-foot high dirt-and-plant towers extensions of the natural history museum’s landscaped grounds, and suggesting an organic approach to sculptural decoration. Yet far from evident was the radical nature of her proposals, meant as prototypes for self-sufficient food production in land-poor urban areas, unless one dutifully read the exhibition’s Guidebook or was already familiar with the artist’s politicoecological activities. Described as an exhibition without a concept by the director in the runup to the show—in order to de-instrumentalize and singularize the inclusions—dOCUMENTA (13) largely outsourced the definition of the show’s conceptualization to its impossibly multiple and sometimes internally conflicted “100 notebook” publications. 3 While that overwhelming panoply provided little immediate service to visitors at the exhibition, the publications do open up fertile territory for considerations of certain pressing environmental matters (when one has the time to read them). The series assembles short essays by a range of artists and theorists, including some of the ecological, such as Donna Haraway, which suggest numerous productive, if competing, ways to approach the exhibition’s gardens, and more broadly, its approach to the environment. Let’s start with Haraway’s Documenta “notebook”, SF: Speculative Fabulation and String Figures, which rehearses the terms of an aesthetic of techno-organic hybridity, familiar in her well-known work on cyborgs, which finds a creative political inspiration in the science of gene research and bioengineering. “SF”, for Haraway, extends to such meanings as “speculative fabulation, speculative feminism, science fiction, science fact, [and] science fantasy”,4 each exemplifying the joining of otherwise conventional oppositions that her cyborg also signifies as “a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction”, one modelling and thus stimulating a world beyond the oppressive binaries of Western modernity (male-female,

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culture-nature, technology-biology, etc.).5 Haraway’s conceptual presence was discernable in the exhibition’s spatial dispersion—with its dozens of offsite locations comprising a rhizomatic display geography—and in its conceptual diffusion—where a hundred approaches eclipsed any single reigning theme. It was also perceptible in the “natureculture” and “intraactional” aspects of the “becoming-with”-ontology of the gardens, suggesting environments that play a role in both organizing, and providing socio-aesthetic support systems for, human life. Yet mobilizing Haraway as a model for eco-aesthetics is tricky, especially when placed in relation to the many political garden practices at dOCUMENTA (13), such as that of Ayreen Anastas, Rene Gabri and their collective And And And, which embraced an “anti-capitalist”, organic, and localist character, and whose garden kiosks sold regional food and produce on the exhibition grounds. The artist-run initiative, And And And, which formed part of dOCUMENTA (13), investigated the notions of the common(s), and non-capitalist life in gatherings and seminars across the world—from the US Social Forum in Detroit, Michigan, to workshops in Tunis, Yerevan, and Buenos Aires—during the two-year period preceding the exhibition. The group also organized events over the show’s hundred days,6 such as event 13, when the group, in alliance with The Compass of the Midwest Radical Culture Corridor, placed the Monsanto corporation on trial for ecological and economic crimes in Carbondale and Chicago, IL, and Iowa City, on January 28, 2012.7 The political ecology implied here is perhaps best articulated by Indian eco-activist Vandana Shiva—another of the exhibition’s “notebook” authors—known for her struggle against the patenting of indigenous knowledge of seeds and plant life by multinational pharmaceutical and agribusiness corporations. 8 While Haraway too explicitly opposes the patenting of life-forms, her postmodern aesthetic of eco-feminist sciencefiction ultimately crosses Shiva’s anti-corporate globalization climatejustice activism, leading to a conflict of global ecological visions. For Shiva, writing a Notebook much less playful than Haraway’s, entitled The Corporate Control of Life, “living organisms, unlike machines, organize themselves” and “cannot be treated as simply ‘biotechnological inventions,’ ‘gene constructs,’ or ‘products of the mind’.” 9 Against corporate “biopiracy”, Shiva places her emphasis on the fight to protect the legal sovereignty of non-commercialized knowledge systems and the free and universal access to the life processes that comprise humanity’s shared heritage.10 Haraway’s cyborg, conversely, “does not dream of community on the model of the organic family”, and “would not recognize the Garden of

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Eden”, as s/he is “wary of holism, but needy for connection”.11 For her, the “lively area of transgenic research worldwide”—giving rise to such hybrids as “the tomato with a gene from the cold-sea-bottom-living flounder, which codes for a protein that slows freezing, and the potato with a gene from the giant silk moth, which increases disease resistance” 12 —inspires visions of new forms of emancipation beyond essentialist identities and cultural-ontological purities. Haraway, moreover, acknowledges being suspicious of activist positions that oppose corporate science with the values of the local and organic: “I cannot help but hear in the biotechnology debates the unintended tones of fear of the alien and suspicion of the mixed. In the appeal to intrinsic natures, I hear mystification of kind and purity akin to the doctrines of white racial hegemony and U.S. national integrity and purpose”.13 Yet, with Shiva’s politics in mind, one cannot help but hear in Haraway’s enthusiasm for GMOs a questionable aesthetico-political imagination that unintentionally corresponds with corporate practices like Monsanto’s, with its global threat to the livelihood of farmers, indigenous eco-knowledge, and human health itself.14 There was thus a profound divergence within dOCUMENTA (13)’s discursive positioning of its gardens—between Haraway’s postmodern constructivist approach to biotechnological hybridity as a model of creative liberation, on the one hand, and Shiva’s postcolonial commitment to an ecological justice opposed to corporate property claims on organic resources pilfered from the Third World, on the other. 15 While dOCUMENTA (13) productively raised this very conundrum by its inclusion of these voices, the clash of positions—which concerns pressing global conflicts over food production, capitalism, and the status of the natural world—was never explicitly engaged in the exhibition’s framework (only by individual authors and artists). As a result ChristovBakargiev’s project risked a (non)position of uncommitted pluralism, a tendency familiar in the liberal milieu of contemporary art, happy to allude to crises and emergencies but take no clear stand in relation to them.16 To take a position would demand a critique of the contradictions in scifi aesthetics (of the kind Haraway supports), and to position them in relation to their political ecologies (of the kind Shiva points out). In terms ot he critique of sci-fi aesthetics, Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future offers a useful model, which looks at sci-fi utopian literature and analyzes its political conditions, although he doesn’t touch on ecology, despite dealing with books (such as Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy of the 1990s—that we could hold accountable for their positive, even utopian take on GM biotechnology, used in relation to the terraforming of Mars in

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the imagined near future). 17 How do futurist imaginings of corporate biotech experimentation correlate with current day political conflicts over land use, energy resources, and GM technology? What is the political unconscious implied in the aesthetics of genetic hybridity?18 In fact dOCUMENTA (13) also included numerous artistic visions of potential dystopian futures, such as News from Nowhere (2012), by South Korean artists Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho, should alternatives not save us from the current course of corporate globalization’s environmental auto-destruction. An example of sci-fi aesthetics, the multi-media project comprises a film, installation, and a publication, and builds on a scientistic iconography of genetic engineering and biotechnology that resonates with Haraway’s cyborg-poetic eco-futurism. In this regard, it reveals further ways to consider the relations between science, nature, and advanced capitalism in contemporary art. Inspired by the eponymous 1890 story of a future agrarian worker society by socialist artist William Morris,19 Moon and Jeon’s presentation visualizes a post-apocalyptic time to come when humanity, owing to a series of catastrophic “major climate changes”, is reduced to an endangered species, and survivors are left to reconsider their philosophies of life that now lie in ruins. Referencing utopian socialism and science fiction, the film, El Fin del Mundo (The End of the World), portrays a latetwenty-first century earth permeated with radioactivity and hazardous waste, where raised sea levels necessitate floating settlements and the corporate giant Tempers rules over all. Those seeking citizenship, including the film’s male and female protagonists, volunteer to collect samples in the surrounding toxic environment, without realizing their real mission is to serve as living research specimens exposed to atmospheric contamination. The accompanying archival installation, Voice of Metanoia (2011-12), assembles an array of futuristic products such as clothes and tools that, created collaboratively with other artists, designers, and architects, are presented as if they come from the film’s fictional corporation. As such, the project makes apparent a further risk of Haraway’s model—in this case, a sci-fi poetics that aestheticizes crisis but establishes no political traction. Much like the “speculative fabulation” of popcultural variants like Star Trek or Avatar, the piece sidesteps critical knowledge about the present, opting more for visual gratifications of our desire for futurist fantasy. Indeed, it pays mere lip-service to the failures of the present, without identifying the causes of—or better, providing alternatives to—the “major climate changes” that serve as its fiction’s generic foundation. Seduced by futuristic style, a corporate-scientist social

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order, technological redemption, and the imagery of a transfigured posthuman cyborg-body, the film and installation construct a problematic utopian imaginary within our otherwise catastrophic circumstances.20 A counter-model is offered by the Otolith Group’s The Radiant (2012), which exchanges Moon and Jeon’s dystopian futurism for a focus on the real existing corporate-science complex and its disastrous failure that is itself worthy of fiction. 21 The approximately one-hour long film takes March 11, 2011 as its point of departure, when the Great Tohoku Earthquake occurred off the pacific coast of Japan, triggering a tsunami that left more than fifteen thousand people dead, and caused a catastrophic nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, which continues to contaminate land, air, and maritime environments to this day. Mixing appropriated historical media reports and live footage of interviews with scientists, activists, and locals, the film joins the erstwhile promise of nuclear energy expressed during the plant’s post-war construction to the coming threat of a radiation-ruined environment, forming an explosive equation that opens critical rifts in the forsaken present. Resonating with the premise of El Fin del Mundo, The Radiant’s evacuated Japanese villages and untouchable plant life within the contamination zone serve as an experimental laboratory in which elderly volunteers—called “abandoned people” by activists—expose themselves to what the Otolith Group terms “the necropolitics of radiation”, a governmentality of death administered by TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company), Japan’s political network, and more broadly the global nuclear regime for scientific research, promoted by the International Atomic Energy Agency. In the video, the abandoned landscape, filled with toxic flowers, is one populated by the walking dead, rendered ghosts in life before their time. Suffused with the creepy sounds of birds and insects heard in playgrounds and shopping streets normally filled with human activity, the imagery includes the representation of electric light, as if radiation normally invisible to human perception is made apparent, thanks to the infrared camera employed in the black and white segments of the video. Photography, of course, constitutes a technique of observation that displaces the anthropocentrism of other modes of picture-making, such as drawing and painting, owing to the camera’s de-hierarchizing of visuality, a result of its radical equalizing of the visual field of its focus, where sundry environmental objects can receive the same detail as a human face (despite the compensatory urges of photographers). The toxic zone of radiation pushes this de-anthropocentrism into the anti-human, captured imperfectly—but all the more truthfully—by our surrogate camera eye. As such, the post-human environment joins with video’s supra-human

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visuality in The Radiant to confront the post-anthropocentric realizations of speculative-realist philosopher Ray Brassier—especially where he writes of a “mind-independent reality, which, despite the presumptions of human narcissism, is indifferent to our existence and oblivious to the ‘values’ and ‘meanings’ which we would drape over it in order to make it more hospitable”—or in this case less so.22 Brassier’s Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (2007) attempts to comprehend the logical consequences of the Enlightenment’s disenchantment of the world through reason, and refuses to defend against the threat of nihilism by safeguarding the experience of meaning. Rather than positioning nihilism as the heroic conquering of metaphysical thought, or as an act of empty negativity that represents a “calamitous diminishment” of the world’s significance deprived of human values, Brassier turns it into a “speculative opportunity.” 23 As such, Brassier’s text, and the Otolith Group’s film, broach the paradoxical implications of the so-called anthropocene era—where human beings may come to be the central drivers of geological change as well as the agents of their own extinction. While primarily a philosophical text without ecological reference, it can be no coincidence that Nihil Unbound comes to us in the context of the sixth mass species extinction event we’re living through now. Owing to a combination of climate change, environmental destruction, and the spread of humans worldwide, we could see the die-off of roughly half the world’s plants, animals, and birds in the next seventy years. Such an eventuality poses questions such as what a world would be like without its vibrant biodiversity, and ultimately, if that biodiversity is life-sustaining for humans, a world without us.24 In addition to the Otolith Group’s film, we have further glimpses of post-human environments in contemporary art, where photography and video—thanks to their time-travelling capacity—cross and blur temporalities, uncovering hidden pockets of futurity in the present. As such, they seize that speculative opportunity of which Brassier speaks. I’m thinking particularly of the image-complex surrounding post-nuclear disaster zones, such as Chernobyl and Fukushima (to say nothing of the World War II bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Marshall Islands, where residents were studied by the US military for the effects of radioactive fallout from nuclear tests between 1946 and 1958). Diana Thater’s video installation, Chernobyl, 2010, for instance, shows haunting images of Prypiat, a city built in the early 1970s for workers at the reactor in northwest Ukraine, now lying abandoned after that plant’s meltdown in 1986. It presents contemporary ruins and an architecture of sudden

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abandonment, the aftermath of disaster, where nature and animals— genetically altered in unknown ways by radiation exposure—reclaim formerly human spaces. Thater’s arena of video projection, a virtual theatre of technological sensation, allegorizes a denaturalized nature emptied of human life. Or take Jane and Louise Wilson’s The Toxic Camera, 2012, a video that investigates Soviet filmmaker Vladimir Shevchenko’s recordings of Chernobyl in the days after the accident, for which he produced footage marked by static interference from radiation rendered “visible” via the visual obfuscations in his imagery (his camera was so contaminated it had to be buried on the outskirts of Kiev). The work relates the uninhabitable space of nuclear contamination to the failure of technologies of perception, a forlorn context which nonetheless can’t suppress attempts at its visualization, even if that means tempting a contemporary death drive to know what the aftermath of human life looks like. The Radiant, in my view, goes still further, insofar as it entangles the future enchanted gardens of the post-human in the political conflicts of the present. As such, the film exemplifies what Fredric Jameson calls “negative utopianism”, one that “transform[s] our own present into the determinate past of something yet to come”. 25 Rather than giving itself over to the sci-fi seductions of some future bio-technology, this work finds the future immanent in specific conditions of our present. The result is that this future projected by The Radiant works like a mechanism to make the present different than it appears, sparking a political energy to resist what is already occurring. In fact, the video shows protesters contesting Japan’s irresponsible and media-spun response to the disaster—especially the government’s decision (in cahoots with TEPCO) to distribute irradiated soil throughout the country to shield itself against future liability lawsuits by destroying control groups of forensic samples, and valuing corporate profits over people by repeatedly raising the accepted risk levels of radiation exposure. 26 The Otolith Group thereby seizes “the speculative opportunity” of a post-extinction environment to contest such a necropolitical regime, and to provide witness to a world—haunting in its calm and peacefulness—without us. As we’ve seen, dOCUMENTA (13)’s concept-less exhibition tended more toward a dispersive bio-aesthetics of sci-fi, and even toward a neosurrealist futurism (given its inclusion of a group of paintings by Salvador Dali). As such it missed the opportunity to engage the philosophical and political controversies surrounding the status of life today, let alone position itself within them.27 Still, it remains significant in that it opened paths for artists to explore the biopolitics of nature, the mixed economies

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of food production and experimental gardens, and the contested modes of environmental governance, present and future. These questions lie at the heart of contemporary debates over what kind of world we want to live in, how it will be organized, and what role art might play in its creative imagination, representation, and realization. With each passing day, the stakes of those debates only continue to grow more momentous.28

Notes 1

As Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev wrote in Letter to a Friend, dated 25 October, 2010, which set out her ideas for Documenta 13. The letter is published as one of the “notebooks” in Documenta 13: The Book of Books (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2012). 2 See Martinez’s tellingly titled publication, Unexpress the Expressible in Documenta 13: The Book of Books. 3 The number 100 plays off the exhibition’s traditional hundred-day run. On Christov-Bakargiev’s lack of a concept, see Martin Conrads, “Of Dogs and Humans: Documenta 13 in Kassel,” http://www.goethe.de/kue/bku/kpa/en9556 034.htm. Accessed 15 April 2014. A recent e-flux announcement for the closure of dOCUMENTA (13) added this “clarification”: the “exhibition could be thought of as a pre-reflexive consciousness, a qualitative duration of consciousness without itself” (September 8, 2012). 4 Donna Haraway, “SF: Speculative Fabulation and String Figures”, in Documenta 13: The Book of Books, 4. Haraway also served on the exhibition’s “honorary advisory committee.” 5 “A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important critical constructions, a world-changing fiction […] Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs—creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted. Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs”. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association, 1991), 149-50. 6 However, unless one was physically present, the meetings’ proceedings have been largely inaccessible, relayed via short online descriptions, with few archival transcripts and little video documentation. 7 See http://andandand.org/ and www.midwestradicalculturecorridor.net. 8 See Shiva’s notebook entitled “The Corporate Control of Life” in Documenta 13: The Book of Books. 9 Ibid., 7. 10 Ibid., 8 and 12. For further discussion, see T.J. Demos, “The Post-Natural Condition: Art after Nature,” Artforum (April 2012), 191-97. 11 Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women, 151. 12 Donna Haraway, ModestΖWitness@SecondΖMillennium.FemaleManΖMeetsΖ OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 1997), 88.

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Ibid., 61. On the dangers of GM foods, see Jeffrey M. Smith, Seeds of Deception: Exposing Corporate and Government Lies about the Safety of Genetically Engineered Food (Totnes: Green, 2004); Marie-Monique Robin, The World According to Monsanto: Pollution, Corruption, and the Control of the World's Food Supply (New York: New Press, 2010); and Robin’s 2008 film of the same name. For more analysis of the relation between Shiva and Haraway, see Alicia H. Puleo, “From Cyborgs to Organic Model and Back: Old and New Paradoxes of Gender and Hybridigy”, Comparative Critical Studies Vol. 9 No. 3 (2012): 349364. 15 Of course there are still more positions to consider, such as Pentacost’s “Notes from Underground” in Documenta 13: The Book of Books, but I highlight these two particularly dominant voices to focus my argument here. 16 Similarly unengaged is the relation between the exhibition’s ecological sensibility (I hesitate to use the word “commitment”), and its globalist attempts to place different geopolitical contexts in relation, including Kassel, Kabul, Cairo and Banff, both in the exhibition, and via its program of preparatory seminars. 17 Another text that presents more the negative dystopian consequences of bioengineering is Margaret Atwater’s Oryx and Crake (2003). 18 As Jameson describes the critical and interpretive task of The Politics Unconscious: “to restructure the problematics of ideology, of the unconscious and of desire, of representation, of history, and of cultural production, around the allinforming process of narrative, which I take to be...the central function or instance of the human mind” (13). 19 Morris’s story News from Nowhere is told by the fictional narrator William Guest, who, after falling asleep upon returning home from a meeting of the Socialist League, wakes up in a future world where society is organized around the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production. The agrarian culture has no system of authority, money, legal courts, prisons, or class system—only the shared pleasure in work and nature. 20 Also see their book, Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho, eds., News from Nowhere - a Platform for the Future & Introspection of the Present (Seoul: Workroom Press, 2012). 21 On the corporate-science complex, see Alan Rudy, Dawn Coppin and Jason Konefal, Universities in the Age of Corporate Science: The UC Berkeley-Novartis Controversy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007), which reviews the growing collaboration between industry and academe, using US Berkeley’s Plant and Microbial Biology Department’s multi-million dollar ties to Novartis, the international pharmaceutical and agribusiness conglomerate, as a case study. 22 Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), xi. 23 Ibid. 24 See Alan Weisman, The World Without Us (London: Virgin, 2008). 25 Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), 288. 14

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See Satoko Oka Norimatsu, “Fukushima and Okinawa: The ‘Abandoned People’ and Civic Empowerment”, http://www.truth-out.org. Accessed 28 November 2011. 27 On September 10 and 15, 2012, dOCUMENTA (13) held “On Seeds and Multispecies Intra-action: Disowning Life,” “a two-day public conference that takes as its starting point dOCUMENTA (13)’s ecological perspective, building on a global alliance between different forms of research and knowledges that is actively being developed in a variety of fields”. The event included Vandana Shiva, and a video presentation by Donna Haraway, yet did not address the relations or conflicts between the two theorists’ work. 28 For further consideration of these issues, see the issue of Third Text, no 120 (January 2013), which I guest-edited on the subject of “Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN GLOBAL LATIN AMERICAN ART: AN EYE ON EARTH ANDREA DIAZ MATTEI

I “Perhaps universal history is the history of a few metaphors”1 writes Jorge Luis Borges at the opening of his essay “Pascal’s Sphere” (1951). In these scarce five pages, Borges takes us on an itinerary of the metaphor of the sphere and its centre through the history of the Western thought and its various interpretations, along with its metonymic shifts (God, Universe, Nature, etc.). He reflects on this metaphor in particular, that he considers essential, since it has been used by various philosophers and intellectuals throughout history. This intelligible sphere, so perfect and final, associated to the figure of the arjé2 (or arché), God, the Universe or the Nature, becomes a visual metaphor that structures our thinking from the pre-Socratic philosophers’ age up to—we could say without risk of error—the present. Spheres, globes, circumferences, these forms have been chosen since ancient times to refer to the universe, to the human world and to divine creation. In fact, the nuance that J. L. Borges stresses in the quoted text is on the displacement of focus, which ultimately determines the type of epochal interpretation. As described by the Argentinean writer, men are lost in time and space in “Pascal’s abyss” of the infinite universe, hated precisely due to its infinitude, where God is no longer tangible. Pascal writes in his manuscript that nature is an infinite/dreadful3 sphere (he rectifies: infinite, rather than dreadful) whose centre is located everywhere and its circumference is nowhere.4 Therefore, he culminates his reflection with his initial hypothesis slightly modified: “Perhaps universal History is the History of the different intonations of some metaphors”.5

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In truth, this metaphor of the most perfect geometric shape, the sphere, persists in many contemporary thinkers. Peter Sloterdijk 6 addresses the topic of spheres and global systems by emphasizing the link between the balloon shape and globalisation, resulting mainly from the expansion of the European world by means of the naval circumventions—as well as the Copernican rupture/revolution—up to the globalization of telecommunications. Moreover, he builds his thought from a historic-anthropological and subjective perspective, and no longer from a universalist one. Cartography flattens the forms of three-dimensional geometry as a science of world representation. However, reflecting on the design of a cartography of current globality, we cannot avoid considering the images provided by that Eye on Earth (Google Earth, etc.), an omnipresent eye which observes everything and particularly combines technological and scientific information, as well as civic information—in continuous interaction—displayed on the internet. The issue arises from the question of whether this current representation of the immediate and spatial world informs us about the contextual and identitary reality of the different territories represented in it. In fact, this abstract order for depicting the world seems to deprive us of the humanity and the expanded senses to which the latest manifestations of contemporary art and, why not, of many theoretical reflections, had us accustomed to. Despite this, it seems that aesthetic forces bid for a site beyond the inevitable stereotypes of an impersonal and global vision. In fact, the Earth—simplified by such global mapping—is much richer and more complex: as a land it connects territories with displacements, as well as time and space or memory and history, drawing a symbolic plural construction process full of identity traits. If we look at the images that offer us both the technology of satellite images and poetic geography, they seem to challenge political, institutional and hegemonic geography (similarly to what the current and popular game called scratch map does). They even challenge the printed Form in our imaginary. Both satellite imagery and geopoetry seem to design a world that is moving away from the metaphor of that closed, inscrutable and perfect sphere, deconstructing in this way an image that has been installed in our psyche for centuries. The image of the world offered by satellites gets and delves into the terrestrial bowels by means of the zooms and progresses of technology, mis(con)figuring conceptions, boundaries, and political frontiers.

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II In another sense, geopoetry does much of the same. Looking carefully at the 8th Mercosul Biennial—held in Porto Alegre (Brazil) during the last quarter of year 2011—under the title Geopoetic Essays, it offers us a very specific theme. While questioning and investigating them, this macro exhibition brings us closer to the natural, territorial and symbolic forms promoted from the curatorial strategy, from the artists’ dynamics, from the activation of the public, and from the territory. The curatorial strategy is aimed to involve and directly activate the local territory, its people and its cities, as well as the critical redefinition of the concept of map and territory from an artistic point of view. Rio Grande do Sul (and its surroundings) becomes a stage of experimentation on, and consideration of, geographies, maps, national symbols, nations and identities. As a result, we obtain a new cartographic and visual-poetic creation, done by artists who are not only from Mercosul or Latin America but also from different parts of the planet. If we start with the Biennial’s Graphic or Carto/graphic Project, we see that the world’s representation through bi-dimensionality also carries its own conflicts and possible solutions. The artists Angela Detanico (Caxias do Sul, Brazil, 1974) and Rafael Lain (Caxias do Sul, Brazil, 1973) break down the solid dodecahedron known as Geodesic Dome (patented as Dymaxion Map) created by the American inventor, architect and visionary Richard Buckminster Fuller.7 In this way, they misconfigure Fuller’s “world map to be assembled”8 into its basic geometric components (triangles and squares) and recompose it by proposing an “8”, which corresponds to the 8th Mercosul biennial. They develop a typography called Polygonal that is applied to all graphic materials of the 8th Biennial, through the deconstruction of the planisphere and using the same combinatorial principle. Its curator, the Colombian José Roca, writes on the subject: In this logo, territory fragments are proposing a new and changeable map that matches, perhaps more accurately, the current situation, in which the notion of Nation-States has been replaced—at least in terms of political autonomy—by supranational and transnational organizations, usually driven by economical conveniences. The logo isn’t just one: the public will be able to see several settings on the many graphical applications that correspond to several other geopolitical moments, referring to a territory in constant reconfiguration.9

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Figures 15.1 and 15.2. Detanico & Lain graphic project for 8ª Mercosul Biennial, 2011. Courtesy of Acervo da Fundação Bienal de Artes Visuais do Mercosul/NDP.

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Figure 15.3. 8ª Mercosul Biennial catalogue, 2011. Courtesy of Acervo da Fundação Bienal de Artes Visuais do Mercosul/NDP.

But not only do these two artists focus their themes on territory and its particular reconfiguration from geographical, cultural and political perspectives through art. The extensive organization of the Biennial shows in its structure some of this complexity. In fact, the Biennial is formed by a group of Exhibition Strategies (Exhibitions: Geopoetics, Beyond Frontiers, and Eugenio Dittborn), a group of Activating Strategies (Unseen City, Continents, and Casa M) and, finally, an innovative and highly relevant Education Programme (Mediation Programme, Programme to the Public, Programme with Teachers, School Programme, Biennial Online, Documentation and Evaluation, and Publications). At the centre of the intersection we can find the Travel Notebooks. In these diverse and broad ways, the Biennial tries to encompass the labyrinth of the current configuration of the globe, not limiting itself to a visual issue, but penetrating into imaginaries, experiences and subjectivities. The work-in-progress of these concepts, with its ambiguity, its partiality and its direct questioning of lived experience, is one of the main objectives of the exhibition, “in a world of imagery and media where

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topography tends to be cancelled out by the flattened vision of maps and satellites, where visual appearance is exploited to exhaustion, to the point of almost anaesthetizing the eyes”.10 In the main Biennial’s exhibition strategy, Geopoetics, the exhibited works and artists—instead of being organised in national pavilions—are guided by tacit questions about the experiences of nation, territory and mapping. Concurrently, we can define this one as a Biennial that does not deny the national, the local, and identity while it does not need to limit itself to generate another closed and antithetical reconfiguration. The national symbols present in the event, both de-constructed and re-built, provide a good account of this. The Unseen City action, on the other hand, intervenes the public spaces of Porto Alegre where the artists’ work the territory “on the ground”. Unseen City proposes artistic experiences beyond the scope of pure visibility, involving other senses, interfering with the daily relationship between transient and public space and thus resizing the spaces, outlining in its path an emotional and shared cartography. Due to its direct relationship with the land, I will specifically focus in this paper on the activating strategy of the Travel Notebooks. Mobility and Art practices in Contemporary Art: The Artist as a Container of Experience. Travel Notebooks is a project where nine artists (out of the hundred and four who participated in the Biennial) went over the regions of Rio Grande do Sul and its border areas during the months of April and July 2011, culminating their pathway with an exhibition inside the visited area. Artists who often work with the action of traveling developed the action and subsequent exhibition, Travel Notebooks, in the Gaúcha region. They investigate the territory, question it, intervene it by walking it, browsing it, visiting indigenous villages, acting on the native nature with help of the local community people: Rather than the artist planning the work and going out into the territory to develop it, the results were determined by the specific nature of the place and the artist’s experience on the journey. At the end of the period each artist held an exhibition in a space at their destination, displaying the results of the art processes followed during the journey and introducing their work and experience of the place to the local community. Having completed the journey and returned to their studios, the artists then developed the works to be shown on the Cais [Docks] do Porto.11

Artists’ travel notebooks went into the territory and, under a close look

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Figure 15.4. 8ª Mercosul Biennial catalogue, 2011. Courtesy of Acervo da Fundação Bienal de Artes Visuais do Mercosul/NDP.

that oscillates between the ethnography, anthropology and the curious visitor, carried out several works. In particular, for their final work three of these artists video recorded the daily life of different communities which, through their differences, teach us a form of community life understood as attachment and respect for their place. They moved from an indigenous village in the jungle to an industrial South Brazil city or a Finnish conventional city. What immediately comes to our imaginary is what in Latin America is traditionally called Madre-Tierra, the Pachamama,12 mother of the Earth, the world and the cosmos. It is the regenerating core for the belief systems and the ecologic-social actions among peoples. It is about journeys and tours to the borderlands, not only to those of the Mercosul but also to cultural, linguistic and traditional boundaries. Those tours seem to be guided by a metaphysics related to native populations that dialogue with the place—whichever it may be—and with what emerges from it. The Chilean artist of Mapuche origins, Bernardo Oyarzún (Los Muermos, Chile, 1963), travelled to the border region of the Jesuit missions where he lived with a Guaraní tribe in the village of Koenju (from the Mbya-Guaraní ethnic minority) during three weeks approximately. He shared with them their non-spherical cosmos, their

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Figure 15.5. Bernardo Oyarzún, Chivi, Xi’y, Chinguere, Kaguare, 2011. Acrylic resin, 30 x 50 x 50 cm. 8ª Mercosul Biennial catalogue, 2011. Photograph by Alexia Tala. Courtesy of Acervo da Fundação Bienal de Artes Visuais do Mercosul/NDP.

Figure 15.6. Bernardo Oyarzún, Koenyú [Dawn], 2011. HD video. 8ª Mercosul Biennial catalogue, 2011. Courtesy of Acervo da Fundação Bienal de Artes Visuais do Mercosul/NDP.

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enhanced his reflections on identity and belonging. Shy at first and, at the same time, respectful of the environment, he made a video in which he examines, from an aesthetic, identity and ecological perspective, a reality close to his own biography. The video is a portrait in the foreground of the face of a young Guarani who tells the myth of the jaguar and the anteater. It is a tale of relationships, history and identity that, with feline force, refuses to disappear. The artist also made an installation with letters made of adobe,13 which symbolizes the partiality of the phonematic representation of native American languages14 in European texts. Bernardo Oyarzún evidences with his interventions the naturalness of the contact between the Earth and these populations, as well as between the earth and metaphysics. The artist explains in an interview: I developed two projects related to myths and the imagery, which hold the memory and wisdom of these people. It felt strange to tell them that I had the idea of making three-dimensional soil letters, but the Guarani accepted this quite naturally and trustingly.15

Similarly, by way of respecting cultural roots and the environment, the experience of Beatriz Santiago Muñoz (San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1972) in the city of Caxias do Sul shows the result of an observation aligned with visual anthropology. She looks at a specific situation to conclude her work with a video installation that runs along the borderline between documentary and fiction. The artist went deeper in the local community to make a series of videos during her stay, highlighting the interactions and the social and political problems of an industrial city. In the same sense, but at the geographic antipode of Mercosul, the Finnish couple Kochta & Kalleinen (Helsinki, 2003) developed a project in collaboration with the community of Teutonia, Finland. The work consisted of a performance that brought together different people from a city with a rich choral tradition; they developed together a “complaints choir” in which the inhabitants of the place raised their discomforts with the current life of the city and the local peculiarities of everyday life. Finally, we need to mention the site-specific work (although close to land art) by the Colombian artist María Elvira Escallón (London, England, 1954), who also travelled to the Misiones region. She produced an intervention by extracting twigs, sap and leaves from the trees and making carvings directly on them, as a result of her research experience with native plants in the area, and in collaboration with a cabinetmaker and local restaurateur, highlighting the importance of native flora and its relationship with medicine and consumption.

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Figure 15.7. María Elvira Escallón, Nuevas floras del sur [New Southern Flora], 2011. Carving on Timbaúva tree (digital print). 8ª Mercosul Biennial catalogue, 2011. Courtesy of Acervo da Fundação Bienal de Artes Visuais do Mercosul/NDP.

As we can see from the above, the participating artists of Travel Notebooks, far from their ateliers, showed part of their experiences in the region, unknown for many of them. Similarly, they also matured a reflection on the parameters that usually govern the practices dislocated from the place where the artist thinks and produces his work. In this way, they found a geopoetry contextualized in the specific field of play.

III At the same time, some exhibitions in Spain still seem to question the existence of a Latin American art and its borders, as for example the itinerant exhibition Sinergias. Arte Latinoamericano actual en España [Synergies. Current Latin American Art in Spain], 2010, Badajoz,16 which groups artists with a Latin American background who are living and working in Spain. In its catalogue we read:

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Figures 15.8 and 15.9. María Elvira Escallón, Nuevas floras [New Floras], 2003/2007. Landscape intervention. 8ª Mercosul Biennial catalogue, 2011. Courtesy of Acervo da Fundação Bienal de Artes Visuais do Mercosul/NDP.

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In contrast, the Geopoetics works and images—unlike the example above and the previous editions of the Mercosul Biennial—do not limit themselves to the area of Rio Grande do Sul, nor Mercosul, nor Latin America as a region. They do not repeat a path of institutionalized relationships that force the identity unification of/with the territory. Rather, they recreate a multiplicity of poetics, relations and formats that bring us closer to the earth. In contrast with Sinergias (which subtly insists on looking at Latin America as an other), Geopoetics adopts a different position: it places its eye on the earth, zooming in on it and producing from its inside. Ultimately, these artists work, engage, and position themselves on the outside of a discourse of otherness. Without intending to be oppositional, but rather positioning themselves from outside that speech, artists and curators are willing to build an artistic language and imagery based on questions, on lived experience, on transit and circulation. However, this is not a newly emergent speech; Ivo Mesquita had already advanced it in the catalogue of the exhibition Cartographies, carried out in 1993: It is important to promote the possibility that art produced in those places ceases to be the other about which it is spoken, to guarantee the full exercise of languages and preserving the specificity and autonomy of the poetics.18

Actually, this re-configuring and decentralizing movement has its precedent in the factual discovery of the roundness of the Earth.With it, a series of new spatial configurations emerged, with all the imaginaries and geopolitical and psychological implications that this entails. Aldolfo Vásquez Rocca elaborates on it in an article titled “Sloterdijk and the Imaginary of Globalization: Philosophical Origins of the ‘GlobeMotif’”: The “globe” informs modern human beings about their relative location in the world, better than any other image, kicking off an incipient process of anthropological off-centring and the overcoming European ethnocentrism through the observation that in the circled 'round space’ all points are equal.19

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As we have tried to develop, it is in this sense that the millennial imagery of a closed, apprehensible and perfectible world becomes unravelled. And this is, indeed, what led Pascal to the choleric abyss mentioned by Borges in the essay that introduced this work. A being equidistant from a relative centre, not fixed anymore, was, for Pascal, unbearable. According to Borges, [Pascal] deplored that the firmament didn’t speak, compared our life to the one of people shipwrecked on a deserted island. He felt the relentless weight of the physical world, he felt dizziness, fear, and loneliness.20

Despite Pascal’s unease, modern men knew how to accommodate themselves to the situation, maintaining the illusion that they were at the centre point of the sphere (their home, their homeland, their universe), from where they watched the otherness of the unknown other. Then, as neighbours of being, 21 modern men displaced the centre even from themselves! Thus, the monopoly shared with large maps and planispheres as a technology for visualising the Earth’s surface has only been broken in the last quarter of the 20th century by satellite photographs with a suprahuman point of view, demonstrating the de-centring of the human being with regard to the universe. While that EYE of the satellite lens, with its technological image, embeds itself further and further into our earth, many artists walk the land, pass it, manipulate it and mingle with it. The metaphors of the sphere and globe become dehumanized, diverting the egocentric look of the inhabitants of today’s world, which is giving way to the porous and the disintegration of the universe. Paraphrasing Borges and his quotation from “Pascal’s Sphere”, perhaps universal history needs to review and create new metaphors for mitigating Pascal’s renewed cosmic horror.

Notes 1

Jorge Luis Borges, Nueva antología personal (Barcelona: Editorial Bruguera, 1980), 197. 2 The term arjé is a Greek term (also transliterated as “arkhé” and “arché”) meaning etymologically “principle, foundation, start, and which was used by the first philosophers to refer to the primordial element from which it is made or from which derives all material reality”. Glossary of philosophy, http://www. webdianoia.com/glosario/display.php?action=view & id = 34 & from = action % 3 Dsearch Accessed 15 April 2013.

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The strikethrough in the term dreadful is explicitly introduced by the cited writer in the text mentioned. 4 See Borges, Nueva antología personal, 201. 5 Ibid. 6 See Peter Sloterdijk, Esferas 1. Burbujas: microsferología (Madrid: Siruela, 2003); Esferas 2. Globos: macrosferología (Madrid: Siruela, 2004); 3. Espumas: esferología plural (Madrid: Siruela, 2006). 7 “A map of the world registered a cuboctahedron, allowing to break with the idea of North/South, up/down that characterized Western cartographic convention (as if the universe is infinite and the Earth is round, why we are down?)” 8th Mercosul Biennial, Geopoetics Essays (Porto Alegre: Fundação Bienal do Mercosul, 2011), 26. 8 Fuller takes the map of the continents in their true magnitude and inscribes it in a polyhedron that can be constructed in a three-dimensional way. 9 th 8 Mercosul Biennial, Geopoetics Essays, 28. 10 Ibid., 362. 11 Ibid., 297. 12 The term Pachamama is formed by the word Pasha that in Quechua means universe, world, time, place, and mama, translated as mother. See Diccionario de mitos y legendas, compiled by NAyA network team http://www.cuco.com.ar/ pachamama.htm Accessed 23 April 2013. 13 Adobe is a mixture of soil, water and straw, with which houses are built even today in many parts of Latin America. 14 Guarani, the language spoken by this tribe (and by many inhabitants of what is today known as Mercosul), did not have writing until the arrival of the Spanish Jesuit missionaries, who provided them with the Latin alphabet. 15 th 8 Mercosul Biennial, Geopoetics Essays, 313. 16 Transformed in “Sinergias (Artistas latinoamericanos en una cartografía global)” for the Museo de Arte Moderno de Santo Domingo, República Dominicana (2012) 17 Enrique V. Iglesias, in Carlos Jiménez, Carlos Delgado, Fernando Castro, Elizabeth Flores, Martin Hernández, Synergies: Current Latin American Art in Spain, Ex. Cat. (Badajoz: CEXECI, MACUF, 2010), 5. 18 Ivo Mesquita, Paulo Herkenoff, Justo Pastor Mellado, Cartographies. (Winnipeg Art Gallery - Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango - Museo de Artes Visuales Alejandro Otero - National Gallery of Canada - The Bronx Museum of the Arts, 1993), 46. 19 Adolfo Vásquez Rocca, “Sloterdijk y el imaginario de la globalización: origen filosófico del ‘motivo-globo’”, Nómadas. Revista Crítica de Ciencias Sociales y Jurídicas, Vol. 24, Nº4 (2009). http://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/NOMA/article/ view/NOMA0909440301A Accessed 23 April 2013. 20 Jorge Luis Borges, Nueva antología personal, 201. 21 Peter Sloterdijk, Normas para el parque humano. Una respuesta a la carta sobre el humanismo de Heidegger (Madrid: Ediciones Siruela, 2008), 49-50.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN MECHANICAL MONSTERS OF THE CYBER-TECHNOLOGICAL IMAGINARIUM: TECHNOLOGICAL DYSFUNCTIONS IN CONTEMPORARY ART JULIANA GONTIJO

The forms that vary more greatly from their species’ standard, with no chance of classification or assimilation, have been stigmatized as monstrosities at several points of human history. Monstrosity, related to the concept of anomaly, implies the idea of a discordant alterity that overcomes the limits of humanity and evokes what reason has always tried to conceal below its geometric regularity: hybridity and irregularities in nature. The monster always breaks the laws of uniformity and normalcy; it is, as described by John Canguilhem, “a living being of negative value”.1 These are beings that combine different spheres (human, animal and machine) in a paradoxical duality which, in the words of George Bataille, constitutes the true essence of nature2. The contradiction of such bodies, condemned by the public institutions, incarnates what society judges as abject. However, they generate a simultaneous repulsion and deep seduction in the public, and are the proof of nature’s ability to self-develop unnatural shapes. Through the link between machine and human nature, and the resulting post-human condition, I am interested in the analysis of how some meetings of art and technology become a reflection of the cyber-collective imagination, where such products are embedded. The making of a technological-mechanical bestiary from an artistic point of view shows some socio-cultural anomalies and becomes a target for criticism against the human beings’ rational techniques. In the same line of thought, some current art works re-elaborate machines and recycle low-tech devices in a technical-fantasy arrangement that defies classifications. With the initial

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loss of machine usefulness, these innovative designs present a “technological anomaly” and also suggest that certain human attributes are transferred to the machine. Works by Brazilian artist Mariana Manhães and the Argentinean collective Oligatega are good examples of this type of production. Their proposals mark a symbolic ambiguity between the human and the machine, organic and inorganic, the imaginary and experienced reality. In addition, they follow a low-tech policy and an aesthetics of improvisation, derangement or technological impairment; a strategy in which they not only display the materials and the means of artistic re-elaboration, but they also claim a different organization to the one planned by human gesture, a new configuration built up on the chaos of postindustrial parts.

I. Technological Anomalies Each period in history produces its own representational system, and with it, its homogeneous patterns that are the base for any productive society. By homogeneity I mean, following Bataille, “the commensurability of elements and the awareness of this commensurability”. 3 A homogeneous and productive society is a useful society, where all useless elements are automatically excluded. Thus, the heterogeneous supposes elements impossible to assimilate by production processes, since it involves unconscious delirium, excesses and violence; all factors that disturb the homogenous aspect of society. When faced with social constructs that only allow production and conservation of both the species and goods, Bataille poses a new economy principle based on loss and opposed to the principle of constancy. According to his definition, art would be a heterogeneous element of society, related to non-productive expenditure since it has an end in itself. In light of such an analysis of productive society, the concept of “technological anomaly” that I put forward relates to the fact that machines, having lost their original usefulness or having displayed dysfunctions, now distance themselves from the homogeneous regularity of the means of production. They then become a sort of parasite, which would find itself and by itself, socially condemned. From a potential dysfunctional use of these elements, new artists emerge, starting a process of machines resignification, embarking in a true anthropological analysis of social structures in industrial metropolis, as well as instantly reflecting the post-industrial social imagination.

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With the previous analysis as foundation, the works of Mariana Manhães make up a digital-analogical system of such haziness, randomness and unreliability that may result in unpredicted machinery reactions. Her installationsʊmost of them site-specificʊuse electronic circuits, electric motors, PVC pipes, light sensors, among other materials; constituting a body attached to the interaction among its own constitutive elements and its placement. The autonomous functioning of each part, variations in movement speed of the electromechanical pieces, even the oxidation of metal parts may, in time, provoke unexpected alterations in the functioning of the whole installation. In a way, this subjection between the different mechanisms and the environment provides the installation with an organic dimension, since it implies the concept of evolution of machines through time, independently of the human factor. This is why the artist refers to her pieces as “organic machines”. In Thesethose (2011, fig. 16.1), an installation designed for The Mattress Factory Art Museum (Pittsburgh, USA), Manhães aimed to establish an architectonical parallelism among the elements in her everyday life and the exhibition space, so as to start a dialogue between the windows of her atelier and the exhibition room. In the two screens that make up the installation, every movement shown by the video image (in this case, the opening and closing of windows in her atelier) is read by the sensors located above the screen and turned into a series of electronic impulses that trigger a mechanical reaction throughout the rest of the installation. The electronic movement of the image is, then, a code of visual language responsible for boosting the rest of the installation. In addition, Manhães uses for her work electronic components taken from everyday machinery. In Thesethose, two garage-door motors interact with each other: they come closer to each other and, when they are about to make contact, the on-screen videos switch. The machine commands its own body. However, such perception of machine autonomy and of its unrestricted behavior generates a bit of initial estrangement in the spectator; almost as if he or she was an intrusive body in an unknown biosphere. All attempts to interact with the piece fail, given the lack of response from the machine organism, whose life is independent from human involvement. To the noise caused by the operation of the machinery itself, the artist adds the sound of a recorded and digitally altered voice, which is incorporated to the video and echoes the ghostly presence of live beings. Air, the main player in this installation, becomes a part of the process through plastic bags, which fill with air and deflate at irregular intervals.

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Figure 16.1. Mariana Manhães, Thesethose, 2011. 2 LCD screens; DVD Players; electronic circuits; electric motors; PVC pipes; electric blowers; plastic bags and other materials. Installation view at The Mattress Factory. Pittsburgh, USA. Photo: Mariana Manhães. Courtesy of the artist.

Thanks to the reproduction of breathing within the working of the piece, the organic factor becomes more evident: the machine symbolically incorporates the specific traits of living beings and symbolically blurs the borders dividing the organic and the inorganic. The concept of human/machine symbiosis, like that of “organic machine”, was first conceived by the French doctor Julien Offray La Mettrie. In his essay L’Homme-Machine (1784), he refers to human being as a mechanical system comprising not only a body, but also a soul. Descartes’ doctrine of animal-machines4 extends to human beings, who, according to the doctor’s monist approach,5 are basically part of the same substance that makes up inanimate beings. La Mettrie argues, rather categorically, that “man is a machine, and that in the whole universe there is but a single substance differently modified”.6 Human existence, reduced to its mechanical materiality is an extremely disturbing concept, since equating human and machine nature subverts the idea of an autonomous conscience and questions the spiritual aspects of existence.7 Spirit would thus be no more than the sophisticated organization of matter within the human brain.

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Incorporating chance, irregularities, eventual failure and decay, Jean Tinguely’s machinery, early as it was, already rejected the usual precision and perfection of technological products. Back then, he introduced the concept of intentional randomness and a destruction of shapes (underlined by the ephemeral features of his self-destructive machines) in the art sphere. These works still maintained the appearance of a large machine with engines and gears. Hommage à New York was the work that started it all, exhibited for the first time in the gardens of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1960. It worked for 27 minutes until the fire brigade interrupted its movement once it became partially dysfunctional. The parts of Hommage à New York followed no rational engineering logic aimed at group working, but rather, they had been pieced together in a supposedly chaotic manner so that they would deliberately self-destruct. In this way, in their opposition to any productive intent, they were “anti-machines”. The reclaiming of irrational machinery and inaccurate featuresʊas developed by Tinguely and, I believe, as can be found in my analysis of Manhães’ workʊmeans, according to Pontus Hulten,8 an insight into the human unconscious. From this point of view, it could all be related to a hybridization process, which would neutralize dichotomist divisions between organic and inorganic, human and machine. Classical philosophical and scientific conceptions, which separated the subject’s consciousness from his or her machinery system of bodily functions, are now displaced, since new ways of machinery subjectivities arise. As Guattari argues, machines “are nothing other than hyperdeveloped and hyperconcentrated forms of certain aspects of human subjectivity”.9 The author thus points to the emergence of a new hybrid subjectivity, with a unique temporality, memory, artificial intelligence and manufactured materiality. Thinking a machinery subjectivity and organization, as we have already argued, opens a series of questions that subvert the idea of the modern subject centered on an autonomous body, with a conscience and a system of organs. Post-humanist theories of this post-industrial era mark the onset of a hybrid life form, capable of dramatically changing the conceptions of body and subject. The human being seems like a hybrid body caught between the organic, the machine, and the cybernetic; a symbiosis that can trigger an expansion of its own perception and symbolic conditions. According to Roy Ascott, we would now be entering a “moist” era in which the wet human systemics would intertwine with the dry silicon.10 The development of nanotechnology, hand by hand with advances in virtual reality, global communication, neural nets, genetic manipulation, and artificial life; is a step towards such moisture. Therefore, post-humanism brings about the need to re-think the category

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of the human being in the bodily, social, philosophical, anthropological and psychic dimensions. When dissecting the relationship between machine and human nature, and the post-human condition it entails, I believe it may be valuable to also reflect on the concept of nature, and to re-think the binary notions designating what is natural and artificial, organic and inorganic. Donna Haraway remarks on the condition of “constructed artificiality” inherent to nature. This is no physical place; nature is a topos, a construction that represents a commonplace that structures our discourse: “nature is the place to rebuild public culture”.11 The author sets on, then, to understand nature as something constructed, at once fiction and true event. On the one hand, natural organisms would be the result of a techno-scientific manufacture; and on the other, technology would equally be the generator of a particular nature. This idea opposes to the well-known unnatural characterization of technology, since it presents machines as “active constructors of natural scientific objects”.12 When seen from this view, it is all about reconsidering the alterity relations among beings, and among human beings and machines; and ruling out the current hierarchical dominations and traditional dualist oppositions. In Haraway’s opinion, nature is still made up in a highly articulated manner, and bodies (human or otherwise) are the result of that articulation and of collage techniques: elements taken from different spheres may be reunited, just as similar elements may be torn apart. In short, an organic machine would belie a mechanicist nature that would comprise a true interaction between its mechanical parts, with the addition of potential adversities in its behavior. The mechanicist nature of the Manhães organic machines works with no apparent usefulness and shows a constant evolution, independent of spectator interaction. The constitution of their bodies is the outcome of articulating disparate elements of diverse origins. The acquisition of a unique language and an inherent sense, a feature of organic beings, reveals an encounter whose monstrosity lies in theʊconceptual or actualʊtransgression of borders.

II. Cybernetic Monsters With the advances in cyber-technological society, the imaginary of a new conception of subjectivity has visibly emerged in literature and the arts; it is a subject threatened by the self-questioning of identity, his or her ephemeral environment, and the perpetual movement of industrial machinery. New monstrous figures rise after the fusion of human beings and technological wonders, space exploration and genetic experiments.

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Such an imaginary may be associated with unconscious fears and anxieties, which according to Freud’s diagnostics,13 would originate in the troubled disassociation between human and in-human, or between the organic and the inorganic; releasing ghosts like the Gollum or Frankenstein outside of the unconscious realm. Some contemporary art pieces give way to this potential of revitalizing mechanical artifacts, and suggest human automatism through their fragmentation and hybridization with machines. They bring to the surface monstrous shapes that signal, in turn, the manufactured horrors at the core of our own societies, the fragility of social order, and the immediacy of utter disaster. The monstrous is defined by Michel Foucault as a combination between the impossible and the forbidden.14 He locates the term within the frame of the law, that is, the monstrous being (half human, half machine) exists in a double violation: it disturbs the shape of the species (natural law) and creates legal irregularities (human law). Cyborgs can be then understood as the monsters of post-modern imagination: “A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction”. 15 The condition of the cyborg subject is the outcome of a combination that interrupts, interpellates and re-invents, dangerously and monstrously, the landscapes of techno-scientific society. In the same line of thought, which links human beings to machines in the cyber-technological imagination and is framed by an ever-growing technological society, lies the work of Argentinean artist collective Oligatega. Created in 1999 by Alfo Demestre, Maximiliano Bellmann, Mariano Giraud y Mateo Amaral, the group works on installation art, videos exhibitions, texts, drawings, sculptures, musical pieces, and performances; operating on varied resources and materials so as to build a collective, unstable, irregular and chaotic imaginarium, materialized in a fifth group member named Mobo6. Their installation/performance El enorme (2008-2009, fig. 16.2) was a closed room full of smoke, which could only be seen from the outside by looking through two small windows: At the centre of the room there was a sculpture, illuminated from behind by two flashbulbs, which created a backlight effect and gave shape to the silhouette. At floor level there were objects much smaller than the central sculpture: a home-made smoke machine (a heater and a container with glycerine soap), branches, a backpack, transparent plastic, wires, cloths, pliers, small boxes, foil, a tap, wires. All these things were hidden behind a smoke curtain.16

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The feeling of a fuzzy presence triggered by that smoky atmosphere provoked several questions as to the true content of the room and its realities. Access to it was doubly impaired to the visitor, firstly by the tiny openings in the walls (the only visual access to the room), and secondly by the smoke curtain. The narrative content revealed a being, a place or a state beyond narration, an abundance of indistinguishable materials which would suggest an unembraceable and incomprehensible trans-reality: “a cyberpunk fantasy without stylisation. There emerged the smoke, the name, the installation. An unembraceable space-being, unattainable and hidden in a soap cloud, a steamed mirror”.17 El enorme interpellates us on the level of a monstrous, hybrid, and undescriptive, shapeless nature in perpetual transformation. Within the many conceptions on human nature, science fiction literature mixes with a blurry theurgic conception.18 On the one hand, invoking supernatural or extraterrestrial entities and powers suspends human rationality by relying on rather obscure symbols, languages and gestures (such as “Oligatega”, the invented name of the group). Absurdity, indefinition and instability linger around installation works, performances and drawings. On the other hand, their foreseeingsʊmost of the times violent and apocalypticʊsuggest dystopian and ironical thinking. The tendency to represent disastrous events relates, according to the collective itself, to the fact that when they began their meetings, Argentina was struggling against a deep political and economic crisis. The collective feeds on science fiction literature to build their own apocalyptic mythology, functioning at the same time as a trigger for a change of perspective on the present time, and as an opening to an alternative future. The works of Philip K. Dick, J. G. Ballard, Isaac Asimov and Kurt Vonnegut, precursors of the 1980’s cyberpunk aesthetics, have beenʊaccording to the artistsʊa great influence. Such a narrative displays a scene in which the technological advances and the development of cybernetic nets detonate the most assorted speculations, potential human mutations, nuclear disasters or extraterrestrial invasions. Neuromancer, a classic cyberpunk novel by William Gibson published on 1984, adds certain innovative ideas for his time, such as advanced artificial intelligences, and the concept of cyberspace. This dystopian imaginarium may be seen as an invitation to a change of perspective on the present reality, and a new openness to alternative futures. Once it operates at the margins of the law and rebels itself against the State and corporations, cyberpunk language poses a political stance in its off-centered application of science and technology. It also entails:

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Figure 16.2. Oligatega, El enorme (escena 7), 2009. View from the installation at the show “Fantasmas”, at Universidad Di Tella, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Courtesy of the artists. [...] a deep philosophical question concerning the nature of reality, subjectivity, and the human in a hightech world: what is authentically human as the lines are being blurred between humans and technology? What is human identity if it is programmable? What is left of authenticity and identity notions in a programmed implosion between technology and the human? What is “reality” if it is capable of such vast simulation? How is “reality” under erosion today and what are the consequences?19

Machines, in a cyberpunk context, are “personified” by the adding of human features. Human beings, in turn, lose his or her original organic specificity and transform into “cyber” creatures with implants, surgeries, drugs and genetic alterations; thus slightly resembling artificial intelligence beings, such as cyborgs and androids. The greatest clash is the one between the preservation of human subjectivity and the technological dominance of socio-economic activity. Oligatega’s aesthetics and actions are difficult to conceptualize, given the mixture of heterogeneous elements and the random and defiant usage of resources. In the creation of their atmospheres, the sound aid pairs with the

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visual aid in performances highlighting the raw materiality of elements, and the experimentation with available technology. However, the transcendent imaginarium revealed in their works breaks the limits of the known and the unexpected, creating undefinable beings and post-human monsters who inhabit hypothetical worlds ruled by techno-science.

III. Techno-Aesthetic Subversions Far from sublimating technology, and from the principle of technocratic precision and accuracy, the artistic practices referred to in the present essay resort to the poetic re-elaboration of materials through a critical stance on the utilitarian definition of objects, the concept of technical advances, and the obsolescence of devices. The recovery of technological objects, their functional displacement and the re-valorization of low-tech realize a new way of thinking the dominion of technique. Art can thus be seen as a political and cultural agent of transformation in current cyber-technological consumer society. Beyond Manhães and Oligatega, artists such as Milton Marques, Gambiologia, Leonello Zambón, Jorge Crowe, Leo Nuñez, among many others, resort to the improvisation of materials, exploring unpredictable functioning, cyberpunk aesthetics, technological trash, unusefulness, degeneration and the obsolescence of machines as cultural strategies to face an increasingly technocratic society. The appropriation of extra-artistic objects, those readily available in the market, has been general knowledge since Duchamp’s ready-mades. Ironically, ready-mades bring art into the capitalist production process, and the work of art becomes a displacement of a product from one sphere to the other. Thus, the distinctions between creating and choosing, producing and consuming, fade into thin air. The work of art, like any other cultural object, becomes merely a temporary end within a net of interconnected elements through which previous narrations can be reinterpreted. Outside the industrial chain, those objects assume a patch-work shape in which the constitutive elements emerge as an assemblage, subverting any hierarchization of materials and technologies, as manifested by Manhães’s “Thesethose” and Oligatega’s “Enorme”. In this sense, the patchwork arises as an artistic practice in touch with a broader cultural arena. Known in Brazil under the name of “gambiarra”, it implies the alternative and money-saving resolution of everyday problems by assigning new functions to available objects. In the artistic field, and heightened by digital and electronic techniques, this kind of patchwork

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turns into a political tactic, as well as an aesthetic option. As suggested by Michel de Certeau, this action tactics intrudes firstly on the industrial field, so as to later alter its rules.20 In the displacements performed by Manhães and Oligatega, the artistic object destabilizes the industrial product technocracy. Microwave gears, LED lamps, computer fans, and a neverending list of objects found at popular markets are purchased or restored so as to be rejoined with several other objects, and re-inserted in a field of symbolic meanings. Improvisation and the retrieval of hand-made production, implicit in those practices, break the limits between industry and craftsmanship, in the same manner as it subverts the boundaries between the artist, the inventor and the craftsperson. Thus, the retrieval of low-tech and obsolete objects reverses the usage logic of technological devices since it can be accompanied by a devaluation, or relativization, of high-tech. It reveals dystopian patterns and a cyber-technological imaginarium which struggles against technoscientific sublimation, and sets up a diversity of cultural usages, in turn subverting the logic of production: “what is called ‘popularization’ or ‘degradation’ of a culture is from this point of view a partial and caricatural aspect of the revenge that utilizing tactics take on the power that dominates production”.21 However, technology is not dismissed, since displacing tactics operate at the heart of a given system and, mostly, they will not reproduce technophobic ideas when they modify techno-industrial objects. Manhães and Oligatega’s practices operate, besides, in the opening of what philosopher Vilém Flusser has named the “black box”, a technological device whose internal workings are unknown. 22 With the opening of this artifact, its constitutive parts are exposed and become attainable, manageable, and apt for the re-elaboration of their functioning. What was once designed for fulfilling one given function within utilitarian pragmatism in contemporary society may now change into a resignification of objects that allows for machinery’s latent potentials, obscured by conventional usage, to be creatively exploited. Such practices refer, in general, to an ontological search for the essence of objects so as to make use of their hidden potentials, thus subverting the anxiety for technological novelty and re-utilizing what industrial consumer society rejects as trash. In the mixture between the analogical and digital, the art of technological improvisation claims an encounter of production feasibility, aesthetics, and political activism. In short, a sort of antropofagia23 of a culture of objects which are given to us, that devours and rejects both old and new, low and hi, tradition and innovation.

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Conclusion Following Antonin Artaud, “no one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell”.24 The artistic works herein described are linked to monstrosity in that they claim the irrationality of machines, and allow us to question the so-called organic and stable value of human beings. They also help us to bring to light the internal contradictions in the rationalist system, whose obsessions and fears underlie social behavior. This is what we can actually see in the accidental and organic dysfunction of Manhães’s work and in the insatiable and unconscious cybernetic imaginarium of Oligatega’s collective. Through them, art may contribute to the elaboration of a machine bestiary, androids, cyborgs and aliens who populate the sociotechnological imagination with monsters. In face of the technological impulse of our time, I think we must, now more than ever, recover the stance of critical discomfort for the technologized artistic field. This position is able to create its own discourse and effectively contributing to culture. As Arlindo Machado argues, since technical discourse has substituted aesthetic debates, we need an urgent inquiry into which are the places where that technological intromission provokes actual qualitative differences in shapes, content, or artistic expressions.25 It is the responsibility of art to identify the potential in, and the changes caused by, technology, disarm them, and subvert them, for in the words of Friedrich Hölderlin, “but where danger threatens / that which saves from it also grows”.26

Notes 1

Georges Canguilhem, “La monstruosidad y lo monstruoso”, Diógenes, Vol. IX, No. 40, (October-December 1962): 34. 2 Georges Bataille. “Les écarts de la nature”, in Documents, nº 2, 79 - 83, 1930. 3 Georges Bataille, La conjuración sagrada (Ensayos 1929-1939). (Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo Editora, 2003), 138. 4 In The Discourse on the Method (1637), René Descartes writes that animals, since they do not possess reason, and therefore a soul, would not be more than well engineered machines. 5 Philosophy defines Monism as a theory, which emphasizes the unity of reality as a whole, or the identity between mind and body, in opposition with Dualism or Pluralism. 6 Julien Offray La Mettrie, L’Homme-Machine (Paris: Ed. Frédéric Henry, 1865), 159.

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Claudia Giannetti, “Metaperformance - El sujeto-proyecto”, in Luces, cámara, acción (...) ¡Corten! Videoacción: el cuerpo y sus fronteras. (Valencia: IVAM Centre Julio Gonzalez, 1997). 8 Pontus Hulten, Tinguely (Paris: Éditions Centre George Pompidou, 1988). 9 Félix Guattari, “Da produção de subjetividade”, in Imagem-máquina: a era das tecnologias do virtual, André Parente, org. (Rio de Janeiro: Ed. 34, 1993), 177. 10 Roy Ascott, Telematic Embrace. Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 11 Donna Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others”, in Cultural Studies, Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, Paula A. Treichler, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1992), 296. 12 Ibid., 297. 13 Mentioned in José Miguel G. Cortés, Orden y Caos, un estudio cultural sobre lo monstruoso en el arte (Barcelona: Anagrama, 1997). 14 Michel Foucault, Los anormales (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2000). 15 Donna Haraway, “Manifesto ciborgue: ciência, tecnologia e feminismo-socialista no final do século XX”, in Antropologia do ciborgue: as vertigens do pós-humano, Tomaz Tadeu, org. (Belo Horizonte: Autêntica Editora, 2009), 36. 16 Full interview with Oligatega Numeric available at http://boladenieve.org.ar/en/ artista/166/oligatega-numeric Accessed 30 June 2013. 17 Interview with Oligatega Numeric. 18 Theurgy is the invocation of extraterrestrial, angels or god powers through rituals. To attract the desired supernatural energy, the symbols and formulae used are not directly clear or rationally conceivable. 19 Douglas Kellner, “Mapping the Present from the Future: From Baudrillard to Cyberpunk”, in Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics between the Modern and the Postmodern (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 315. 20 Michel de. Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 21 Ibid., 32. 22 Vilém Flusser, Filosofia da caixa preta (São Paulo: Hucitec, 1985). 23 I am referring to the process of metaphorical ingestion and vomiting of the other as described by Oswald de Andrade in his Manifiesto Antropofágo (Revista Antropofagica No. 1, May, 1928), which lies at the core of Brazilian identity. 24 Antonin Artaud, Van Gogh, el suicidado por la sociedad (Barcelona: Argonauta, 1981), 96-97. 25 Arlindo Machado, “Tecnologia e arte contemporânea: como politizar o debate”, Revista de Estudios Sociales, No. 22 (September / December 2005). http://www.scielo.org.co/scielo.php?pid=S0123885X2005000300006&script=sci_ arttext Accessed 30 June 2013. 26 Friedrich Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 463. Also quoted by Martin Heidegger in the text “The Question Concerning Technology” (1954).

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN TOWARDS AN ECOLOGICAL HERMENEUTICS OF THE EXHIBITION SPACE: THE CASE OF ALBERTO CARNEIRO’S ENVOLVIMENTOS AND ECOLOGICAL ART IN THE 1960S AND 1970S MARIELLA FRANZONI

1. Since the 1960s, the connection between art and ecology has taken increasingly diverse forms. This is due to the fact that both the concept of ecology and the ways of viewing nature which it implies have been redeveloped and reinterpreted in many ways, not only from the perspective of aesthetics, but also from the social, political and cognitive sciences. T.J. Demos casts light on the ways this diversity of approaches is apparent in Eco Art exhibitions since the well-known 1969 Earth Art exhibition (Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York). He emphasizes that the dominant tendency has been to use an apparently anti-capitalist ecological ethics to perpetuate an image of nature as a pure biological realm in need of protection from the damage industry causes. 1 This image presupposes a fundamentally depoliticized conception of ecology, an ecology detached from social, political and economic dimensions. 2 More specifically, for Demos, although firstgeneration ecological artists—such as Hans Haacke, Joseph Beuys and Alan Sonfist—rehabilitated damaged habitats and degraded ecosystems, they reified nature and perpetuated the problematic structure of “objectification” of the biological-natural realm, originating precisely in industrial capitalism. 3 Similarly, Amanda Boetzkes 4 argues that art that physically and conceptually incorporates nature and the earth is always underpinned by an ethical concern for the natural world, and that this common thread links artists like Robert Smithson, Ana Mendieta, James

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Turrell, Jackie Brookner, Olafur Eliasson, Basia Irland and Ichi Ikeda. However, in this essay we defend the idea that what the “ecological” character of this kind of art expresses is less of a reifying, ethical or nostalgic attitude than a way of applying the aesthetics of nature to the modern museum or gallery model of exhibition. Seen in this way, 1960s and 1970s Ecological Art renewed the language of exhibitions and, therefore, of the hermeneutics of art as well, in a way we could describe as “ecological”: ecology in the sense of an epistemological foundation, a definition developed in the social and cognitive sciences in the following years.

2. Many of the artists of the period used “nature” as a powerful conceptual medium, one which permitted them to rethink the relationship between art and the social and political dimensions of existence. During these years, artistic discourse appropriated the term “ecology” to express a view of the earth as a dynamic, interactive system. This led to very different “attitudes” towards nature that Kastner and Wallis define as colonialist, nostalgic (or emotional) and spiritual. 5 Both in Arte Povera and Process Art, as well as in the Land and Earth Art movements, artistic intervention adopts “nature” as an aesthetic category. This is reflected, in the case of the former, in the use of natural and raw materials such as stones, sand, grass and wood; and in the case of the latter, in the dialectic between artistic and natural spaces. It is true that the image of the artist who romantically flees cultural spaces—museums and studios—to carry out her work in a natural environment provides a glimpse at the paradigmatic opposition between the ideas of nature and culture: the former appears as a virgin world, outside and prior to the development of culture, while the latter is presented as decadence from a natural state, a corruption of the harmonious relationship between humanity and the environment. A feeling of loss of a balanced, ecological relationship with the environment does indeed underlie the work of many of the first-generation ecological artists. However, “what is natural” finds its way into their work not only at a formal or thematic level, but also in their language of exhibition, which questions the concept of the work of art as an object with intrinsic value, as well as the way it is interpreted in the exhibition space. Between the 1960s and 1970s, the transfiguration of communicative and signifying relations between work, space and spectator had profound political and social consequences.

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Beyond the idea of a nostalgic escape from civilization or a romantic return to nature, we ask ourselves: “What does the concept of ‘nature’ mean in these forms of artistic expression? What role does it play in challenging the way art is presented and in formulating new languages of exhibition? In what ways does it affect the relationship between the work of art, the audience and the construction of the work’s meaning? What “ecological” position underlies these artistic languages?” We hypothesize that, beyond the ethical implications of these artistic movements, using an aesthetics of nature leads to hermeneutical and epistemological questions, resulting in languages of exhibition which are non-conventional in comparison with the modern tradition. This type of art, in challenging the epistemological power of the modern exhibition space, suggests an ecological hermeneutics of the work. That is, it offers the spectator of the exhibit a modality of interpretation intended to overcome the paradigmatic opposition between nature and culture, thus bringing together and integrating art and life. This hypothesis challenges the idea that first-generation Ecological Art perpetuates the divide between art and nature, and suggests that we should view ecology as an epistemological postulate to which the art revolution of the 1960s and 1970s can be considered a precursor.

3. In order to test this hypothesis, we will consider the case of the Portuguese sculptor Alberto Carneiro’s Ecological Art (Coronado, 1937).6 The conceptual phase of his work was developed from 1968 to 1976. For Carneiro, the term “ecological” is not equivalent to the ethical and environmental concern influential in the work of other European artists of the same period. Rather, it corresponds to a particular artistic attitude towards nature which we can describe as symbolic or emotional. The relationship between the artist and the natural environment is mediated through bodily action, as in A. Mendieta and C. Simonds’s work,7 and has a ritual quality that dramatizes the relations between humans and nature. As Santiago B. Olmo suggests, Ecological Art claims for itself a demiurgic, phenomenological condition that unites nature with humanity.8 However, we are interested in exploring not only the ways in which Carneiro conceived nature in his art, but also how this conception affected his exhibition languages, as well as the aesthetic and interpretative experience of the spectator. Here is where the artist undertakes to go beyond the paradigmatic opposition between natural and artistic space: that is, between nature and culture.

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Alberto Carneiro was born in the rural north of Portugal during the dictatorship of the Estado Novo. 9 He trained primarily as an abstract sculptor in the Academy of Fine Arts in Oporto. The development of his conceptual work, culminating in the years following the establishment of democracy (1974), was favored by a period of postgraduate study at St. Martin’s School, in London, from 1968 to 1970, 10 in the same environment where artists such as Richard Long and Hamish Fulton were training. This is why critics such as Javier Maderuelo group his art with English Land Art, with Italian Arte Povera, and Process Art of the period in general. However, Carneiro’s adoption of an aesthetics of nature does not stem from the typically urban nostalgic desire for contact with primordial elements; rather, it is rooted in lived experience. In Carneiro’s work, the concept of nature is not at all exotic, but autobiographical in character.11 In keeping with contemporary European conceptual and process investigation, the conceptualization of Carneiro’s work uses the medium of projects. Consisting of drawings with texts collected in O Caderno Preto (“The Black Notebook”, 1968-1971), the projects represent a “program of actions”, carried out as documented performances (through drawings, texts, black-and-white photographs and maps) or installations composed of natural and raw materials. In both instances, the emphasis is on the dialectic between the exhibit as event and the landscape in which the performance was carried out, or from which the natural elements came. As is known, these artistic languages belong to the conceptualization and dematerialization stage in art, described by Lucy Lippard, 12 which Rosalind Krauss defines as the process of expanding sculpture both inside the exhibition space, as well as outside it, to the countryside and the natural environment.13 In particular, it is through the exhibition medium of the installation that this type of art deeply challenges what Brian O’Doherty would later call the “White Cube”.14 The White Cube can be defined as the aesthetic ideology of the modern museum, and corresponds to a hermeneutical modality of the work based on contemplation of the aesthetic object. This contemplation only involves sight and the intellect; the body is not involved in the process. In a modern art museum, a good observer brings a distant, disinterested gaze that apprehends the aesthetic value of the object through silent contemplation. 15 According to O’Doherty, the White Cube filters aesthetic experience by sublimating it to human higher faculties, and amputating the embodied aspect. The installation, however, (with roots in certain kinds of art from the first half of the twentieth century) appeared in the 1960’s as the artistic language that reinstated the capacity for the spectator to physically relate to the

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context of an exhibition in its totality: as a visible and perceptible space.16 For the purpose of our analysis of the series of projects belonging to Alberto Carneiro’s ecological art, we will examine those projects which are implemented as installations, which the artist called “Envolvimentos” (“envelopments”, environments or total installations made with raw materials). They are ephemeral, site-specific environments built from materials taken from the natural environment such as hay, tree stumps and heads of wheat. The Envolvimentos are designed to form a whole with the surrounding space, spreading out horizontally and vertically as they envelop the spectator, who can experience the work through all the senses, involving tactile, olfactory and visual qualities. The Envolvimentos convert space into an environment which asks to be inhabited, physically and conceptually. Thus they are closer to arte povera and process art environments than to Robert Smithson’s non-sites,17 because the natural materials brought into the museum do not mark the physical absence or conceptual presence of a work/landscape created in the natural environment; rather they constitute the phenomenological presence of nature in the realm of culture. We shall now analyze three Envolvimentos. “O Canavial: memória-metamorfose de um corpo ausente” (“The cane field: memory-metamorphosis of an absent body”) is Carneiro’s first conceptual work, and it stems from a project from the London years (1968). It is characterized by the placement of canes marked with small colored strips, tied with raffia fiber and arranged in an order that appears to be random, but is actually subject to a combinatorial code. The following sentence appears inside the installation: “We are a body in the cane field or the cane field is our body”, which suggests a passing from the sensory experience of the cane field to identifying with it.18 Presented for the first time in 1971, in the Buchholz Gallery in Lisbon, “Uma floresta para os teus sonhos” (“A forest for your dreams”) is composed of tree trunks cut into sections of variable length. Stripped of roots, crown and branches, these trunks allude to the transformation of trees into wood through human manipulation. Due to their dense arrangement and their vertical and horizontal length, they trace paths for the spectator to follow and come to resemble woodland, visually and perceptually.19 The installation “Um campo depois de colheita para deleite estético do nosso corpo” (“A field after the harvest for our body’s esthetic delight”) from a 1973 project, was first set up in 1976 in the National Museum Soares dos Reis in Oporto; it is composed of wheat stalks, sprouts and ears arranged in sheaves, which are placed vertically to prevent, metaphorically, spoiling

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due to moisture from dew or summer showers. Just as in the field they come from, the sheaves are arranged in the exhibition space so that people can walk among them: the spectator can experience the same sensations (visual, perceptual and olfactory) as a farmer, though, obviously, they are charged with aesthetic and conceptual meaning.20 These three installations are presented as indoor landscapes: they depict situations typical in a rural landscape, such as a wheat harvest, reproduced in the artificial space of the museum. The artist superimposes and blends natural and artistic spaces, revealing them to be cultural conventions or constructs. His objective, as we will see, is to overcome reified, distant conceptions of nature and culture, which conceive of these elements reciprocally opposed in dialectic tension.

4. In light of the above, our question becomes: in what way do Carneiro’s Envolvimentos require an “ecological” type of hermeneutics? In the exhibition language of the installation, the meaning of the work is not determined a priori, as modern exhibition rhetoric would have it, but rather as something that unfolds in relation with the spectator. Once the concept of the work-as-object, centered in itself and essentially independent from the context of the exhibition, is overcome, the Arte Povera and Process Art movements situate art in real space and within the realm of experience, where knowledge of things and phenomena arises through a set of empirical relationships, sensory contact, and direct experiences.21 This interpretive model, which can be defined as “phenomenological”,22 emphasizes knowledge of the object on the basis of its physical presence, its relationship with the surrounding space and its perceptual characteristics. The phenomenological perspective, developed in the minimalist sculpture of Robert Morris and emphasized in postminimalism, breaks with the idea of meaning as intrinsically contained in the artistic object, invariable in time and autonomous in the context of the exhibition. The spectator of an installation, who experiences the work physically and conceptually, becomes the author of its meaning: an active, conscious interpreter. Thus, Carneiro’s Envolvimentos transform the aseptic, sterile space of the museum into a space for producing meaning, a place for “creation” rather than contemplation. Furthermore, in “Das notas para um diario” (“Notes for a diary”) (1970), 23 Alberto Carneiro defines aesthetic experience in terms of “poietic imagination”, taking inspiration from the thought of Gaston

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Bachelard.24 Imagination, according to Bachelard, has a poietic, creative function corresponding both to the ability to create multiple possible worlds (poiesis of imaginary worlds) and the ability to renew the real world, i.e., our conditions of habitability in the world (following the idea that there are many subjective ways to inhabit the world through the imagination). 25 In the same way, Carneiro conceives of aesthetic experience as a poietic or creative exercise based on the phenomenological experience of matter. Therefore, poietic imagination belongs both to the artist, in creating the work, and to the spectator, in interpreting and recreating its meaning. Both effect a metamorphosis: they transform items from nature (a tree, a flower, a Stone) into a work of art—objects endowed with meaning. The transformation of nature into art is not merely an aesthetic act; it possesses a cognitive dimension. In the context of exhibitions, imaginary consciousness guarantees the meaning potential of the work of art and prevents a stable, one-way meaning from crystallising. The indeterminacy of meaning corresponds to the infinite signifying possibilities the work can trigger in its encounter with the spectator. Thus, the act of interpreting the Envolvimentos—a poietic and phenomenological experience—involves the inseparable whole of mind, body and environment in creating new meanings; it is this aspect which suggests an ecological hermeneutics. To define this term, we refer specifically to the concept of ecology developed by the English anthropologist Tim Ingold. 26 Using Gregory Bateson’s ecological philosophy27 and Pierre Bourdieu’s practice theory, Ingold claims that the relationship between humanity and the environment is characterized by a permanent reciprocal engagement corresponding to the ability to “dwell”. In this sense, “dwell” means not only occupying a space, but weaving a series of physical and meaning relationships which generate poietic processes from the immanence of practice. In fact, Carneiro’s Envolvimentos break with the idea of the work of art as an object of contemplation, as they break with the idea of the natural world as an objective, exterior, distant thing suited for contemplation. They present an environment that demands to be “inhabited” as the real world. The perceptive act of the spectator of the installation is an active, exploratory process, 28 and it generates a sort of practical knowledge, a consciousness of what an environment offers the perceiving subject, who is involved in it through individual interests and prior intentions. Phenomenological interpretation stimulates infinite meanings for the work by conceptualizing the interpretative act as a mode of human existence and in terms of corporeality and practice, following the meaning of “practice”

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developed by Pierre Bourdieu.29 Knowledge, according to Bourdieu, is not a thing which the mind transfers to contexts of experience, but rather is generated within them, in intersubjective engagement and in the carrying out of ordinary, day-to-day tasks. In this way, our analysis finds the Envolvimentos to be a metaphor for the epistemological paradigm which sees the human modality of existence as the place where nature and culture, mind and environment come together. As Ingold claims, humanity is related to the environment through a continuous process of signifying. Meaning is not a thing which the mind transfers, content-like, to natural objects, but rather something which develops within the context of practice: knowledge is simultaneously “embodiment” and “enmindment”, in the sense that it is immanent to life. 30 Through this ecological perspective, culture—as an interpretative activity and a construction of meaning—represents the manner in which humans inhabit the world. In other words, culture is human nature, the modus operandi of humans in their surroundings. Thus is dissolved the paradigmatic opposition between nature and culture which, according to Timothy Morton,31 characterizes the modern tradition of ecological thought, and which T.J. Demos attributes to Eco Art of the 1960s and 1970s. The hermeneutical model of the Envolvimentos, on the other hand, advocates for an ecology as an epistemological paradigm of knowledge, based on what Morton defines as a “mesh”: a network of socio-political and phenomenal interrelations.

5. It is clear that the aesthetics of nature present in the art of the 1960s and 1970s raises epistemological and hermeneutical questions by reformulating the relations between the spectator and the work of art, and on a deeper level, between the individual and the world. In this sense, Carneiro’s ecology of art aims to use an aesthetics of nature and rurality to purge the modern exhibition space of its characteristic artificiality, and convert it into an allegory of culture, which continuously generates ways of experiencing the world. In the Envolvimentos, the absence of interpretative schema and paths determined a priori creates a type of knowledge/awareness which is not predetermined but rather values the creative contribution of the spectator in interpreting the work. Therefore, this hermeneutical modality of art (in the same way as culture according to Ingold’s definition) is an unscripted experience essentially based on “improvisation”.32 Furthermore, it never represents a private or solipsistic act, because it is in a socially connoted

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space (like the exhibition space) where the subject is not in complete control of meaning and meanings can be renewed. Ingold emphasizes that the ability to create and innovate is not held by lone individuals against the conventions of culture and society, but is rather an attitude intrinsic in the processes of social and cultural life. Creativity, then, does not belong only to the maker of artistic objects, but to every individual involved in the activity of developing meanings in real life, like the spectator called to interpret the work of art. Thus, the social and political dimensions of ecological art of the 1960s and 1970s—apparently less politicized—manifest themselves in its language of exhibition. This is the case of Carneiro, who never takes up political or social themes, despite living in Portugal during a crucial historical moment. In fact, artistic installation was born when artists began to question the architectural and ideological framework of the modern museum, which is anti-dialectical, reproduces the power structure that privileges aesthetic sensitivity to the eternal beauty of the masterpiece, and avoids the multiplicity of meanings of the work of art.33 Modern exhibition spaces present themselves as apparently mute and passive, and works of art speak for themselves: their meaning unfolds under visual contemplation and the text appears redundant.34 Thus, the artists of the 1960s and 1970s, fully aware that this spatial frame determines the value and meaning of the object on display, 35 reconceptualised the physico-architectural definition of the term “space”, associating it with political and social meanings.36 “Environmental interventions” (which, according to Germano Celant,37 invite a reciprocal relationship in which art creates an environmental space, to the extent that the environment creates art) represent an artistic practice which defines itself based on its critical relation with space. In Portugal, the exhibition which marked the definitive institutional adoption of conceptual artistic languages was Alternativa Zero, 38 commissioned by Ernesto de Sousa in 1977, three years after the end of the dictatorship. Alberto Carneiro participated on the front line with one of his most conceptual installations, “Uma Floresta para teus sonhos”, which set him apart as one of the artists most emblematic of the freedom which Portuguese art had attained. Obviously, the exhibition had a very deep political and social significance. The freedom expressed in new artistic and exhibition languages was a metaphor for the freedom attained in the whole sphere of public life. Although not all the works displayed dealt directly with political and social topics, the new freedom in the use of the exhibition space symbolized the conquest of public and institutional space.

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6. Our analysis invites reflection on the ecological character of the first Environmental Art, while considering the complexity of the concept of ecology. In particular, it values the epistemological positions which authors like Gregory Bateson were already suggesting at the beginning of the 1970s, and which were later developed in the cognitive sciences (for example, by Félix Guattari) and the social sciences (by Roy Rapport and J.J. Gibson, among others), culminating in contemporary theories by anthropologists such as Tim Ingold, Philipe Descola y Gìsli Palsson. The investigations in Ecological Art of the 60s and 70s, which developed an aesthetics of nature and used nature as a raw material, intervention space or conceptual medium, have profound epistemological consequences and seem to anticipate non-dualist ecological postulates now prominent in the renewal of the scientific and social disciplines.39 Based on these considerations, we can reconsider Timothy Morton’s concept of an “ecology without nature”, which he defined as the need to correct the rhetorical tendency typical of ecological thought, which sees nature as a container in which humans operate as autonomous beings, a space that exists outside the walls of society. Although we cannot claim that Ecological Art of the 1960s and 1970s was aware of these limits to modern ecology, through our analysis we reveal the germ of a paradigm change. Furthermore, we can affirm that the “post-natural” awareness of contemporary artists such as Henrik Hakansson, Tue Greenfort o Nils Norman, which T.J. Demos speaks of, 40 represents the current artistic strategy for revising the same paradigms of ecological thought. As Demos explains, these neo-conceptual artists bring an ironic view of the concept of “sustainability” in contemporary ecological policy, and propose an artificially recreated concept of post-nature while inviting us to think in terms of an ecology of culture and technique.

Notes 1

In T.J. Demos, “Art After Nature: The Post-Natural Condition”, Artforum (April 2012): 194; see also “The Politics of Sustainability: Art and Ecology”, Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for Changing Planet 1969-2009 (London: Barbican Art Gallery, 2009), 17-30. 2 Demos, “Politics of Sustainability”, 20. 3 Ibid., 19. 4 See Amanda Boetzkes, The Ethic of the Earth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 5 In Jeffrey Kastner and Brian Wallis, eds., Land and Environmental Art (London:

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Phaidon, 2005), 17. 6 The artist presents arguments about his ecological art in the document “Um manifiesto da Arte Ecologica” (1971), published in the majority of his exhibition catalogues. 7 Carneiro's performative actions in the natural environment can be compared to Mendieta's camouflages and silhouettes or Simonds's mud performances, due to the way they present the connection between the nude body and material from the earth as one of identity and promiscuity; see Javier Hernando, “Visiones de la Naturaleza: el arte y la sensibilidad ecológica”, in Tendencias del arte y arte de tendencia a principios del siglo XXI, eds. Juan Antonio Ramírez and Jesús Carrillo (Madrid: Cátedra, 2004), 69-70. 8 See Santiago B. Olmo et al., Alberto Carneiro, Ex. Cat. (Santiago de Compostela: Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporáneo, 2001). 9 The Portuguese dictatorship included the military dictatorship (1926 to 1933) and the Estado Novo (1933 to 1974). 10 St. Martin’s School, under the direction of Anthony Caro at the time, promoted process art and performative language involving the environment. The professional courses in advanced research in sculpture that Carneiro attended focused on project mediums as a technique to develop artistic concepts and a way to discover personal media of expression, combining creative action with constant reflexive questioning; in Caterina Rosendo, Os primeiros anos 1968-1975 (Lisboa: Colibrí, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2007), 120. 11 In Isabel Carlos, A escultura é um pensamento (Lisboa: Caminho, 2007), 14. 12 See Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object (New York: Praeger, 1973). 13 See Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”, October Vol. 8, (1979): 30-44. 14 Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space [1976] (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1986). 15 For Eilean Hooper Greenhill, the modern concept of the museum is associated with positivist thought, based on objectivity and rationality; in Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture (London, New York: Routledge, 2000), 130. 16 See Julie H. Reiss, From Margin to Center. The Space of Installation Art (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999). 17 In the documentary type of Land and Earth Art, where the video or the photograph is both record and work proper, the experience of nature offered to the spectator is merely conceptual, founded in the dialectic between site and non-site. Both terms are used by Robert Smithson to indicate, respectively, the perceptible specificity of the natural space where the intervention was carried out and the conceptual abstraction of the item displayed in the museum. The terms simultaneously mark an absence and a presence: on the one hand, non-sites (maps, photographs) represent the absence of the site; on the other hand, sites are marked by the absence of the material taken away. The site is the physical element, stark reality, the grounds intervened on. The non-site of the gallery and of the work displayed (maps, photographs, materials taken away) points to the register of

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abstraction: the transformation of a physical process into a mental one, the passage from the concrete to the ideal; in Tonia Raquejo, Land Art (Hondarribia, Guipúzcoa: Nerea, 1998), 78-79. Therefore, the work/document demands a speculative attitude on the part of the spectator, since interpreting it involves an intellectual or conceptual (non-phenomenological) process. 18 In Carlos, Alberto Carneiro, 9. 19 In Rosendo, Os primeiros anos, 157. 20 In Carlos, Alberto Carneiro, 13. 21 Francesco Poli, Arte Contemporanea. Le ricerche internazionali dalla fine degli anni ’50 ad oggi (Milano: Mondadori, 2005), 146. 22 In particular, I am referring to Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception, whose key concepts (like “body schema” and “perceptual field”) permeated British and North American artistic and critical discourse starting in the 60s, when Phenoménologie de la perception (1945) and Le visible et l'invisible (1959) were translated into English. Phenomenology became the answer to ethical questions posed regarding the paradigms of subjectivity and interpretation, whose dynamics were claimed to reproduce visual systems of power based on gender, race and libidinal desire; in Amanda Boetzkes, “Phenomenology and Interpretation Beyond the Flesh”, in Art History: Contemporary Perspectives on Method, Dana Arnold ed. (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 690. 23 In Caterina Rosendo coord., Alberto Carneiro. Das notas para um diario e outros textos. Antologia (Oporto: Assirio &Alvim, 2007), 20. 24 Gaston Bachelard presented his theory of material imagination in such works as Psicoanálisis del fuego [1938] (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1966); El agua y los sueños: ensayo sobre la imaginación de la materia [1941] (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2005); La poética del espacio [1957] (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1991). 25 Luis Puelles Romero, La estética de Gastón Bachelard. Una filosofía de la imaginación creadora (Madrid: Verbum, 2002), 132. 26 The ecological focus of Tim Ingold’s anthropology comes from the dialogue between developmental biology, ecological psychology and phenomenology. His theory aims to eliminate distinctions between body, mind and culture, and sees the latter as the modus operandi of humanity in its environment. The key concept of skill defines practical knowldge of the world and is the necessary condition for it to be habitable by humans. See Ecologia della cultura (Roma: Maltemi, 2004); and The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge, 2005). 27 Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind [1972] (Chicago: University Press, 2000); and Mind and Nature: A necessary Unity [1979] (New York: Hampton Press, 2002). 28 For a theory of perception as exploratory action, see Cristina Grasseni and Francesco Ronzon, Pratica e cognizione. Note di ecologia della cultura (Roma: Maltemi, 2004). 29 See Pierre Bourdieu, Esquisse d’une Théorie de la Pratique, [1972] (Paris: Seuil, 2000); and Le Sens pratique (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1980). Bourdieu

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refers to both Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment and Husserl’s concept of time. Based on the idea of “habitus”, practice theory “breaks with dualist schematicism to which Western social science has traditionally subscribed, and puts forth a theory of action which rejects both objectivist and subjectivist postulates”; in Carolina Ferrante, “Corporalidad y temporalidad: fundamentos fenomenológicos de la teoría práctica de Pierre Bourdieu”, Nómades. Revista Critica de Ciencias Sociales y Jurídicas, No. 20 (2008):1. Bourdieu understands practice as “know-how” incorporated into and developed from continual performances of specific postures and gestures (body hexis) in order to carry out an activity: for Bourdieu, the way people walk, use facial expresions, sit and use utensils orient them in the world; in Tim Ingold, Ecologia della cultura, 70-71. 30 Ingold, Ecologia della cultura, 70. 31 Timothy Morton takes issue with the idea of nature as a surrounding medium, separate from society and prior to its cultural development, an idea implicit the rhetoric of all modern ecological thought; see Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007). 32 The concept of “improvisation” characteristic of culture, defined by Ingold as being generative, relational and temporal, is very appropriate for defining the signifying relation between the work and the spectator in the Envolvimentos; see Tim Ingold y Elizabeth Hallam, Creativity and Cultural Improvisation (Oxford: Berg, 2007). 33 In Christopher Whitehead, Interpreting Art in Museum and Gallery (London: Routledge, 2011), 91. 34 Julia Noordegraf, Strategies of Display, Museum Presentation in Nineteenthand Twentieth-Century Visual Culture, (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 2004), 198. 35 Daniel Buren, “Function of Architecture. Notes on Work in Connection with the Place Where it is Installed Taken Between 1967 and 1975, Some of Which Are Specially Summarized Here”, in Thinking about Exhibitions, eds. Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson and Sandy Nairne (London, New York: Routledge, 1996), 224. 36 Although the word “space” was initially associated primarily with physicality proper in architecture and geography, from the second half of the twentieth century its meaning was broadened and the term started to be used in different disciplinary contexts, such as social theory, culture, politics, media studies and technology; see Julie Ault, Alternative Art New York: 1968-1985 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 250. 37 Germano Celant, Ambiente/Arte, dal futurismo alla body art (Milano: Electra, 1976), 5. 38 João Fernandez, “Prospettiva: Alternativa Zero. Vent’anni dopo”, in Alternativa Zero. Tendenze polemiche dell’arte portoghese della democrazia, exhibition catalog (Palermo: Galleria Bianca, 1998), 23-45. 39 See Michael R. Redclift and Graham Woodgat eds., The International Handbook of Environmental Sociology (Cheltehnam: Elgar Publisher, 2010). 40 Demos, “Politics of Sustainability”, 26-28.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN TRANSFORMING WAYS OF LOOKING BY USING TECHNOLOGY, AND ITS APPLICATION IN CONTEMPORARY ART PRACTICE SALIM MALLA GUTIÉRREZ

1. Introduction The piece Correspondencias (fig. 18.1) takes its name from the numbers printed on the bus shelters that inform passengers about the possible connections of the bus route. In this project, these numbers are used in combination with the geographical coordinates of the bus shelters to obtain a new set of coordinates referring to an unknown place that is then searched for on Google Earth. Correspondencias is an installation composed of two elements, a geometric shape on the floor and a wall painting (fig. 18.2). The shape is composed of 62 digitally printed PVC tiles, which take the form of a flat, unconstructed rhombicosidodecahedron1. The wall painting shows the data collection and the pseudo-topographic algorithm of the transformation of the coordinates, which is used to both obtain and pair the images captured on Google Earth. Therefore, each tile shows an image that is the result of two superimposed images. On the other hand, the tiles have multiple combinations, which can be placed interchangeably, as long as they do not compromise the final geometric shape. This emphasizes the connectionist characteristic of the digital network, as well as the transportation network. In the completed floor piece the spectator can observe a map configured as the result of a journey carried out in real space, superimposed in turn onto images from a virtual journey on Google Earth. It takes as its point of departure the initial consideration that public transport networks and the Internet have similar structural configurations, given that both are connectionist systems. However, a basic difference is

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Figure 18.1. Salim Malla Gutiérrez, Correspondencias, 2012. Multimedia display. The piece on display. Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 18.2. Salim Malla Gutiérrez, Correspondencias wall painting, 2012. Courtesy of the artist.

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postulated here, being that each one is found in different environments. The first one, public transport networks, are linked to the real environment that possesses “recintual”2 or Cartesian characteristics, and the second, the Internet network, belongs to the virtual environment and possesses netlike or nodal characteristics. Thus, bus stops and bus shelters, places of transit in which passengers are immobile and waiting for their connection, function as dual nodes where both worlds, the real and the electronic, are connected. This splitting of the node occurs when somebody situated in one of those nonplaces uses their mobile device in order to escape from the tedium of waiting, and in this way they set off on another journey, a virtual one this time, which connects two systems and therefore two environments. Following a long process of registering, processing and materializing the data, the final outcome consists of a series of landscapes resulting from the superimposition of aerial images. They include the origin and destination of a journey, which starts in the real environment and finishes in the virtual. Therefore, each landscape responds to a correspondence of images that speaks about two worlds, one of them traversed and physically positioned in the first environment, and the other travelled through thanks to an interface, which guides the user through the electronic environment. The landscapes obtained in this piece via the accumulation of data are registers of one activity, of one movement in space and time that is frozen in the superimposed images. This superimposition allows the spectator’s unequivocal perception to be distorted, due to the fact that the decomposition of the original images results in the configuration of an unknown third space, a hybrid of the physical and virtual spaces. Therefore, the resulting landscapes celebrate the beauty of the poetics of the journey itself, placing the spectator in a reality in which spatiotemporal perception is compressed into one level, into a postcard, which reveals neither the starting point nor the end of the journey, but rather leading to another space. The piece reinforces the concept of the aerial view, a stance that has already been accepted and assimilated by the spectator, questioning in turn the naturalness with which this position, in terms of reality, already forms an indisputable part of our manner of thinking, our collective imagination and our way of perceiving the world. Through the superimposition of the images of both environments, the fragmentation of a world decomposed into images is recorded, images that interact and interweave forming a whole which is spatially compressed and temporally anachronic. These fragments can be understood as places that are physically separated but virtually contiguous. They form concrete connections that come from the

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randomness of searching, of discovering, and of reconfiguring diverse worlds; of beginning with the dichotomy between one’s own and the other, the concrete and the random, the close and the distant.

2. Technology as a Motor for the Evolution of Environments Before entering into the urban and electronic environments, we will define what is understood by “technology”. We can find two opposing definitions for this word. Firstly, “technology” can be understood as the coming together of technical knowledges, ordered scientifically, that allow the design and creation of goods and services which make it easier for human beings to adapt to their environment and satisfy not only their essential needs but also their desires, as well as the whole range of artificial means used to persuade and dominate over third parties.3 According to the previous definition, the subject adapts to the medium thanks to technology. However, the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset defends a different thesis. In his book La meditación de la técnica, the author says with regards to this adaptation that “man, at the mercy of his technical ambitions, has created an artificial environment in order to adapt nature to his needs”.4 The technique is therefore not one of adapting the subject to fit the medium, but rather adapting the medium to fit the subject. This adaptation of the medium to the subject means that the natural environment is modified gradually, creating new environments in which the human being learns to get by. Therefore, if the environment is indeed modified by creating other new ones, we must define what those environments are. To do this, we will accept the classification suggested by the author Javier Echeverría in the book Los señores del aire: Telépolis y el Tercer Entorno. 5 That is, currently and according to his theses, these artificial environments are the urban environment and the electronic environment. Both environments take the previous one as their starting point, and share common characteristics, to a greater or lesser degree. The first, or natural environment, is considered the initial environment, and the second, or urban environment, is created from that one, and they share certain properties. In this case some of the analogies that we find among them, and that are used to defend our thesis, are mainly that both are proximal, “recintual” and presential. In other words, in order to produce the interaction of the human being in this environment, the dual, physical presence of the agents involved is essential.

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On the other hand, the third or electronic environment, whose canonical form is the Internet, differs considerably from the previous environments. In this case, and according to Echeverría, unlike the three characteristics shared by the first and second environments, the third is characterised by its “distality 6 ”, its netlike structure and its representationality. In this sense, and regarding one of the opposing characteristics that differentiates the second from the third environment—netlike versus recintual—this point needs to be explained in further detail, essential for understanding the meaning of the aforementioned piece Correspondencias. Although Echeverría takes into account the transport networks as modifiers of the landscape, he does not relate the logic of these networks with the Internet. This is where the theses of this project diverge from those of Echeverría, in defending the similarity of the mathematical characteristics of the transport networks placed in the second environment with the connectionist logic of the third environment. This characteristic allows these two environments to fit together in the aforementioned dual nodes.

3. Recognising the Terrain: Aerial Images Since ancient times, knowing the surrounding territory in depth and having a good perspective thereof has been a crucial element in mounting a strong defence against enemies. Locating towns and cities in strategic enclaves in order to get panoramic views of the environment, and thus being able to anticipate attacks, is not a new phenomenon. However, perhaps less obvious is the fact that in the first abstractions of territory the aerial view is dominant in maps, and although they present their differences symbolically depending on the context in which they are inserted, generally these maps use a bird’s-eye view and simple geometric forms for their configuration. It is worth considering here one of the first representations of the world, an item conserved in the British Museum. I refer to a Babylonian map (fig. 18.3) that represents the idea of its surrounding environment on a clay tablet. The drawings and inscriptions are displayed using an aerial perspective, in which the Babylonians’ view of their world can be appreciated, as well as the media and forms they had at their disposal for representing it.

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Figure. 18.3. Clay Tablet; Map of the World of the Babylonians, from approximately the 5th Century BC, and a diagram showing the inscriptions. Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum.

The text on the outer edge of both sides of the tablet shows that the Babylonian map is an attempt to represent and take in the world in its entirety. This is why both the physical space and the imagined space are united in their representation in this map, a map that is the result of the symbiosis of the microcosmic and the macrocosmic. The world therefore is reduced to one plane, the plane reduced to a fragment of territory, and the territory to a detail. The map, as a way of looking “from above”, is an excluding, dominating system, which reveals via abstraction a form of territory that is not actually known, using it as a tool of dominance over the land and over the individuals that inhabit it. This Babylonian map shows how the aerial view has been linked with human beings ever since they inhabited their first environment: both the mental and physical maps that were made even from very early times had the characteristic of representing the environment from an elevated point of view. This kind of representation responded to the need to get to know not only the immediate surrounding area but also that of the neighbouring towns. As well as this, the aerial view has also been associated with the socalled zero environment, an environment in which a superior entity without the sensorial limitations of the human being would look down

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Figure 18.4. Hieronymus Bosch, Table of the Mortal Sins, late 15th Century, oil on panel, 120 cm x 150 cm. Madrid. Courtesy of Museo Nacional del Prado.

from above. The act of looking “from above” assumes a position of advantage over those who are on the ground, which allows their actions to be watched and strategic decisions to be made, decisions which are necessary to achieve domination. This surveillance could be real or symbolic, but always effective, due to the impossibility on the part of those being watched in verifying the true existence of this superior entity. There are numerous similar examples that can be found throughout the history of art, representations with panoramic, zenith-like qualities that allude to one eye that sees everything, also known as the divine eye. Hieronymus Bosch is one of the painters that most certainly used this symbology, as can be seen in one of his panel paintings called Table of the Mortal Sins (fig. 18.4) that can be found in the deposit of the national heritage in the Prado Museum. In the central circle of this painting that looks like an eye, Christ as the “Man of Sorrows” can be seen in the pupil along with the phrase “Careful, careful, the Lord is watching”.

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Figure 18.5. The Presidio Modelo prison on the la Isla De La Juventud, Cuba, built using Bentham’s designs. Image under Creative Commons licence. Attribution: I. Friman.

4. The Panoramic View as an Act of Control In the same way, the first construction designed for surveillance over a group of people from a privileged position can be found in the design for the Panopticon by Jeremy Bentham. In this case, surveillance is not carried out from above looking downwards, but rather from a central point situated in practically the same plane as those being watched. This way, the privileged nature of the panoramic viewpoint is maintained. The concept on which the building is based (fig. 18.5), the panoptic way of looking, was also conceived as an instrument applicable to any social area, a tool for the governing powers in control of the population. Foucault, in his work Discipline and Punish, 7 and referring to this construction, offers a sociological hypothesis that a disciplinary and prison regime similar to Bentham's panoptic has been established in civil society over the past three centuries. He argues that it encourages a state of permanent visibility that guarantees that the power mechanisms function, which allows an analysis of individuals' behaviour, considering the possibility of guiding or directing their behaviour.

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This system has the advantage of avoiding confrontation with the sphere of power, given that self-surveillance works as a repressive tool. In that respect and as the author notes, current society is immersed in a system in which technological media act like a tool to generate Bentham's panoptic, in which the individual observes and is observed at the same time.

5. Correspondencias: The Process Technological advances, which since the Industrial Revolution have cut long-distance travelling times considerably, as well as the daily journeys of the civil society in the contemporary city, caused a rupture in the way of relating with space. Associated with these movements in flow societies—as Manuel Castells calls them in his book The Network Society—we find information societies.8 They are a space of connections and nodes in which the logic of interconnection is completely different to the lineal, temporal and spatial logic of real life, generating a sensation of closeness that alters the notions of space and distance that people had grown accustomed to. That is, a change in the space-time conception of the environment is brought about by the individual that causes the restructuring of his or her mental mechanisms. Now that I have arrived at the end of the third point, the piece that I present below is entitled Correspondencias. This piece came from the detailed analysis of one of the public transport networks in the city of Madrid, specifically the CI circular bus line. This journey around the circular line, on board the public bus, was embarked upon with the objective of finding varied data, which in the following phase would be filtered, selected and ordered. The data extracted was mainly numerical, but it also took into account the attitudes of the passengers. Thus, among the data collected on the bus items such as the temperature, the time, or the number of passengers, were included. Regarding the references collected on foot, we focused on those relating to the correspondences with other lines that appear at the top of the bus shelters, and for which this piece is named. In these shelters the individuals waiting for the bus were also observed, a fact which became key when it came to the conceptualization of the project. Finally, via geolocational tools, the geographical coordinates of every bus stop were obtained.

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Figure 18.6. The original data cloud, taken from my notes. Courtesy of the artist.

Once I had this data cloud (fig. 18.6) I started to combine the information to find a common logic. I initially considered creating a digital image using Processing to assign each group of numerical values certain graphical properties of size and tone, in order to give shape to the image that would represent the journey. But the tests carried out were not satisfactory, not so much for the aesthetic result but mainly because I was not entirely convinced about assigning random characteristics to each group of numerical values. I was interested in randomness, but I was also interested in a more precise approach, and so I decided to afford a greater weight to some data over others, eliminating in the process those, which I considered superfluous. In the end, the selected data with which I set about working were the geographical coordinates of each stop and the number assigned to them by the EMT (the Madrid local transport authority); the numbers and letters in the bus shelters that indicate connections with other bus lines; and the final chosen element, crucial for understanding this piece, were the attitudes of the people waiting at the bus stops. In bus shelters, these places of transit and short stays where the passengers are immobilised while waiting for their connection, the behaviours of the passengers were repeated throughout my journey around the line by most of the individuals. These attitudes have become more and

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Figure 18.7. General transformation algorithm of coordinates, and its application to bus stop 58. Courtesy of the artist.

more common during the waiting times produced on the transport networks, mainly because the advance and reduction in price of technology has permitted smart mobile devices to be affordable for the average citizen, giving him or her access a large quantity of information, “multichronically”,9 and not dependent on distance. Let us bear in mind that time and space, the here and now, were characteristics belonging to the interrelation of the first and second environments. Thus, these people who are physically immobilised are capable of continuing with their journeys virtually, using another network with the same structural logic of nodes and connections—that is, the Internet. Once these parallels had been established, it was necessary to settle on the criteria by which the local reality with its “recintual” structure could be linked with the netlike-structured global reality. In this regard creating a new world was considered, one in which these two realities could co-exist. The way of achieving this was to establish a single, unambiguous criterion, a transformation of coordinates (fig. 18.7), applicable to each one of the bus stops through which, and starting with the collected data,

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new coordinates were obtained leading to points on the planet not physically contiguous but mathematically connected. Once the two coordinates for each bus stop were obtained, the official one and that which I calculated, I used Google Earth to take a screen grab of the satellite image (fig. 18.8) of each one of them, including as a requisite the same scale for each image. From here, they were brought together in pairs to obtain 57 landscapes, corresponding with the 57 bus stops of the C1 circular line. These heterogeneous landscapes could represent how Foucault referred to the space in which we live, the place where our lives, our time and our history is eroded. Just as in Borges’ attempt to describe the Aleph through language,10 the images here are not shown in succession but rather through superimposition and transparency, that is, another tactic to be able to show something vast. They are landscapes that comprise a mix of places of transit, and places safe from the network of the masses, heterotopical11 places that generate a kind of estrangement from a world that is ours; familiar, but at the same time unknown. Finally, and with the intention of keeping the flat quality of the obtained images, a particular polyhedron is chosen, the rhombicosidodecahedron (fig.18.9), due to its characteristic of fitting into a sphere at 94.33 per cent and being composed of 62 flat sides. This figure allows us to build an element that may not concentrate everything into one single point, but is capable of including in a quasi-sphere all of the obtained landscapes without losing its shape. We must bear in mind that a sphere seen from far enough could be regarded as a single point. To finish, it needs to be clarified that the chosen figure, the rhombicosidodecahedron, composed of 62 flat sides as mentioned above, has five more units than the obtained landscapes. Therefore, these remaining sides, that can be considered the closing points of the figure, show the node that lies beneath each one of the landscapes, a central node that is dual. It brings together that which is crossed physically and that which is crossed virtually, and the connecting lines that, when cut perpendicularly with each side of the geometric figures obtained, allow multiple combinations of the elements that comprise the final mosaic. As we discussed above, what comes first in connectionist logic is not the distance that separates but rather the existence of a node that allows us to make the connection.

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Figure 18.8. Example of a correspondence of coordinates; the number 35, and the method of superimposition. Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 18.9. Rhombicosidodecahedron and its development. Courtesy of the artist.

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6. Conclusion The work presented here is not an emphatic, standardising solution to a given problem, but undoubtedly it did result from a proposal in which a particular result was being searched for, and that in the process of creation, mathematical procedures related with topography have played a part. But it is no less true that even the exact sciences are, by definition, subject to continuous self-criticism that ought to lead to ever more precise adjustments to the models by those who make them. Therefore, the piece Correspondencias emphasises this process, and the result obtained is only one of the multiple possibilities that could be obtained. In some way, the process by which this work has been built reflects the logic of the networks on which data circulates in the so-called information society, the result of any Internet search being a combination of data based on a predetermined algorithm. As has already been noted, it is true that the new terrain-recognising technologies, and their accessibility to the people, have caused a change in citizens’ perception processes in the environment that surrounds them. A similar process was produced when grounded motor vehicles and later aeroplanes gradually started to reduce travelling times and relegated the physical distances between two points to a second plane. However, in the case of new technologies, this evolution has been radically faster, speeding up the change of model in a mere two decades. The speed with which these systems inundate all areas of our lives needs, therefore, immediate responses, a kind of race in which human beings are put to the test. Who knows if the same system will end up being absorbed by itself, surpassing even its own ambitious expectations.

Notes 1

In geometry, the rhombicosidodecahedron is an Archimedean solid. It has 20 regular triangular faces, 30 square faces and 12 regular pentagonal faces. 2 Concept developed by Javier Echeverría related to the Cartesian characteristics of physical space, where relations between things and people, depend on their real position in space. 3 “Tecnología”, http://www.youblisher.com/p/579856-TECNOLOGIA/ Accessed 20 December 2012. 4 José Ortega y Gasset, Meditación de la técnica (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1965), 23. 5 Javier Echeverría, Los Señores del aire: Telépolis y el Tercer Entorno (Barcelona: Ediciones Destino, 1999), 27-146.

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Javier Echeverría, in Los Señores del aire: Telépolis y el Tercer Entorno, defines distality as the opposing concept to proximality. It means that distance is not a necessary characteristic to connect two people in the third enviroment. 7 Michel Foucault, Vigilar y castigar: Nacimiento de la prisión, Trad. Aurelio Garzón del Camino (Argentina: S.XXI, 2002), 180-210. 8 Manuel Castells, La Sociedad Red vol. I. (Madrid: Alianza, 2000). 9 Javier Echeverría, in Los Señores del aire: Telépolis y el Tercer Entorno, defines “multichronic” as the opposite concept to synchronous. It means that temporal coincidence is not necessary to connect two people in the third environment. 10 In the short story The Aleph by Jorge Luis Borges, the author tries to describe the “Aleph”, a small point where absolutely everything that happens in the world can be seen simultaneously. However, when trying to write about the experience, his language forces him to order his words in a successive manner. 11 Heterotopia is a concept in human geography elaborated by the philosopher Michel Foucault to describe places and spaces that function in non-hegemonic conditions. These are spaces of otherness, which are neither here nor there, that are simultaneously physical and mental, such as the space of a phone call or the moment when you see yourself in the mirror.

AFTERWORD GLOBAL INTERCULTURALITY FOR A CRITICAL CARTOGRAPHY OF ART AND VISUALITY ANNA MARIA GUASCH FERRER AND NASHELI JIMÉNEZ DEL VAL

During the symposium The Marco Polo Syndrome. Problems of Intercultural Communication in Art Theory and Curatorial Practice (April 1995, House der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin), Cuban art critic Gerardo Mosquera maintained that, while Marco Polo can currently be thought of as a pioneer in the experience of understanding “the other”, it has taken several centuries for us to realize that we continue under the spell of the “Marco Polo syndrome”: What is monstrous about this syndrome is that it perceives any difference as the carrier of viruses that threaten life, instead of seeing difference as a nutritional element. And while this doesn’t frighten us as much as other symptoms might, it infuses a high dose of death into culture regardless.1

In this sense, we cannot think of globalization as a transterritorial orbit that establishes contacts in all directions. Nor is it the effective interconnection of the whole planet as mediated by a network of communications and exchanges. More accurately, globalization is composed of an extended radial structure that spans across established centres of power through to their multiple and diverse economic zones. To date, globalization has achieved limited incursions into the peripheries of the world system given that globalization “globalizes” from and for the centres. Yet such a structure implies the existence of vast zones of silence, disconnected from each other or only connecting via the the central metropolises. Concurrently, a radial world map converging at the centres of power, leaving isolated areas on the peripheries, results in an intensive pursuit of connection; the global orbit structurally produces diaspora. The inherent contradictions within this system are reproduced in the global centres, for

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instance, with regards to immigration control: immigrants are feared as much as they are needed. In the midst of these complex tensions, the concept of “global South” takes on an added dimension that is more attuned to a geography of power than to physical geography as such. While this concept may be mobilized as a kind of geopolitical ghetto—a call for multicultural quotas and cultural correctness, or even a space for a new exoticism—it can also engender new forms of solidarity among the excluded in a united critique of power. And while it is obvious that an “art of the South” does not constitute a cultural identity as such, one might speak of a “mosaic”: The unfortunate result is that Third World countries and cultures have barely been able to articulate their points of conjunction through a mosaic based on what might unite them beyond their multiple differences.2

For Mosquera, the “Marco Polo syndrome” is so firmly entrenched in culture that it dominates all postmodern manifestations. While the newfound attraction that the centres feel towards alterity has allowed for an increased circulation and legitimation of the peripheries, the art that explicitly references difference has been subject to value claims or, rather, to its categorization as “other” in the scheme of a “postmodern neoexoticism”. The “Frido-mania” that took hold of the United States, for instance, is a clear example of an attitude that feeds into a sort of “selfostracism” by the peripheries. This conscious or unconscious form of “self-exoticization” has resulted in a new wave of exoticism that, rather than universalize its paradigms, feeds into a form of cultural production from the periphery that structures Western patterns of cultural consumption. In other words, the “Marco Polo syndrome” is a complex disease that likes to hide its symptoms, Mosquera argues. Current struggles against eurocentrism must not burden art with myths of authenticity that paradoxically contribute to the discrimination that persists towards Third World visual arts in the international circuits. It would be more plausible to analyse the current art of a country or region according to the aesthetic, social and cultural needs of the communities that produce them. Hence, there is a palpable need to vindicate new intercultural relations that would go beyond simply accepting “the other” in order to better understand her or to enrich one’s own cultural diversity. Rather, intercultural relations should be based on the reciprocity that they imply: This means in turn that the “other” does the same to me, [she] problematizes my self-consciousness. The cure for the “Marco Polo

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syndrome” requires us to go beyond centrism towards the recognition of a myriad of different sources of light.3

In this sense, the present volume has aimed to bring together a myriad of different sources of light that focus on the panoply of expressions of art and visuality in the global age. The response to the call for this book has been overwhelmingly varied, both in terms of the geographical provenance of the authors and the situatedness of their objects of analysis, as well as regarding the theoretical and practical approaches deployed to address the contemporary condition of art in globalization. The chapters included here address topics ranging from postcolonial approaches to border-crossings in Northern Africa; decolonial viewpoints on feminist theory in a Latin American context; the analysis of the archival turn in countries such as Italy, Spain and Greece; new cartographies of art in regions currently relegated to the margins of contemporary art circuits (i.e. Central America); art’s practice-based questioning of globalization and its capacity to establish links between the local and the global; the feminization of labour in Hungary and megalopolises worldwide; the avenues that globalization offers for resistance on a global scale, from the occupation of the Sol plaza in Madrid to the occupation of digital networks in order to fight against gender violence in the public sphere; and so on. Moreover, the essays collected here have successfully broken through established disciplinary boundaries by facilitating an enriching dialogue between art theorists and art practitioners. The inclusion of texts by artists, such as: “WeltKarten. Panorama” by Laura Gibellini, “Towards a SocioPolitical Ethics of Art and Technology in the Global Era” by Mau Monleón Pradas, and “The Transformation of the Gaze through Technology and Its Application in Contemporary Art Practice” by Salim Malla Gutiérrez; has opened up a conversation between artists and theoreticians whereby shared subject matter and theoretical approaches are potentialized through the variegated transdisciplinary exchange that has taken place in the pages of this book. In short, this volume situates itself at the site of passage from a “World Art History” to a “Global Art History”. The transition from “world” to “global” art history has meant that the end of universal and national art historical narratives has become entrenched in the artistic context. Former territorial boundaries, maintained by old parameters of eurocentrism based on Western dominance, and the project of modernity characterized by universalism, instrumental reason and autonomous individualism, have now come under scrutiny. Consequently, global art cannot be considered, under any circumstance, to be synonymous with modern art. By definition, global art is contemporary—not only from a chronological point of view,

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but also on symbolic and ideological terms. Art on a global scale does not imply, following Belting, an intrinsic aesthetic quality. 4 Beyond representing a new context, global art would signal the loss of a context or centre, thus including its own contradictions in the counter-movements of regionalism and tribalization. Consequently, there is an urgent need to elaborate and adopt a new working methodology called “Global Studies” (somewhere between Visual Studies and Cultural Studies) that, beyond being considered an independent discipline, should be understood as an auxiliary discipline that mediates between art history, ethnography and regional studies. We hope this collection of essays has contributed to this discussion and to the methodological considerations that need to be mobilized in the emerging interdiscipline of “Global Studies”.

Notes 1

Gerardo Mosquera, “The Marco Polo Syndrome”, in The Third Text Reader. On Art, Culture and Theory (London: Continuum, 2002), 267. 2 Ibid. 3 Gerardo Mosquera, “The Marco Polo Syndrome: Some Problems around Art and Eurocentrism”, Third Text 21 (Winter 1992): 34. 4 Hans Belting, “Contemporary Art as Global Art. A Critical Estimate”, in The Global Art World. Audiences, Markets and Museums (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2009), 39.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Lynda Avendaño Santana. Art Theorist and Historian of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Chile (UCH) and the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM). Ph.D. (c) University of Barcelona (UB). She has been a visiting researcher in the Department of Performance Studies at NorthWestern University (Chicago-USA) and in the Dipartimento di Storia dell’Arte e Spettacolo of the Scuola Dottorale in Scienze Dell’interpretazione e Della Produzione Culturale of the Sapienza Università di Roma. In 2002, the Spanish Ministry of Culture awarded her a grant for an internship in the Audiovisual Department at the Center of Arts of the National Museum Reina Sofia (MNCARS) in Madrid, where she worked on the organization of audiovisual works circles. Since 1991, her work experience has been related to university teaching, mainly in the Faculty of Arts at the UCH. As a college professor for over 15 years, she has lectured in undergraduate and postgraduate programs in the field of history of art, specializing in Latin American art and museum collections and documentation. T.J. Demos is a critic and Reader in the Department of Art History, University College London. He writes on contemporary art and politics, and is the author, most recently, of The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis (Duke University Press, 2013), and Return to the Postcolony: Spectres of Colonialism in Contemporary Art (Sternberg, 2013). He also recently guest edited a special issue of Third Text (no. 120, 2013) on the subject of “Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology,” and is currently at work on a book on the same theme for Sternberg Press. Andrea Díaz Mattei. Psychologist formed at the University of Buenos Aires and the Autonomous University of Barcelona, MSc in Art History, Theory and Criticism at the University of Barcelona. She has been a Research Fellow at the Department of Visual Culture Studies at the University of Westminster (UK), and taught during 7 years at IED, a design high school in Barcelona. Her doctoral thesis focuses on visuality through video installations in the context of the global South. She has published a number of articles in books, magazines and catalogues, as well

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Contributors

as presented her work in several conferences and symposia on contemporary art and thinking. Her latest publications include: Second Life. Kutlug Ataman y las Memorias de vidas pasadas (2013); Memoria feminista en Argentina y España. Un mar en continuo movimiento (2013); and São Paulo 2014, la bienal del sur global (2013). Angela Dimitrakaki is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Art History and Theory and Programme Director of MSc Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Edinburgh. Her research in contemporary art draws on Marxism and feminism. Her recent books include Gender, ArtWork and the Global Imperative: A Materialist Feminist Critique (Manchester UP 2013), Art and Globalisation: From the Postmodern Sign to the Biopolitical Arena (Hestia, 2013; in Greek), and, co-edited with Lara Perry, Politics in a Glass Case: Feminism, Exhibition Cultures and Curatorial Transgressions (Liverpool UP 2013). ECONOMY: Art, Production and the Subject in the 21st Century, co-edited with Kirsten Lloyd, is forthcoming from Liverpool UP in 2014. Angela is Corresponding Editor of Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory, published in London. Mariella Franzoni is a PhD student at the Department of Humanities of the University Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona (supervisors Dr. Isabel Valverde Zaragoza, UPF, and Joaquin Barriendos, Columbia University). She started her academic career with a BA in Cultural Anthropology and Ethnography (2009, Alma Mater Studiorum, Bologna University) and, subsequently, she was awarded an MA in Management of Cultural Tourism (2009, Bocconi University, Milan), as well as an MA in Comparative Studies in Art and Thought (2012, Pompeu Fabra University). Since 2009 she has lived in Barcelona where, in addition to her studies, she works on the conceptualization and organization of contemporary art exhibition as a member of curatorial collectives, as well as for cultural management companies. She has participated in several seminars and conferences, and has published a number of her articles in academic journals and publications. Laura F. Gibellini is a visual artist who holds a doctorate in contemporary art theory (Complutense University, Madrid). Gibellini’s work grapples with the notion of “place” and what it means to inhabit the world. She is especially concerned with the emergence of specific places in the interstice between ideal and factual gestures, in the gap between conceptualization and practice. Gibellini’s art practice involves substantial

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research in a variety of disciplines and extends to the field of writing. Gibellini is a faculty member of the MFA in Art Practice at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Her most current art projects include a permanent public art installation in three subway stations in New York City (commissioned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority— MTA) and a solo show at Slowtrack, Madrid. Recent exhibitions, performative lectures and projects include: Constructing a Place, ICI, New York; Muestras de Archivo, Matadero Madrid; Variations on a Landscape, asm28, Madrid; Salon, ISCP, New York; YANS & RETO, Anthology Film Archives, New York; Night of Festivals 2012, Nottingham; Video Guerrilha, Urban Space Projections, Sao Paolo, Brasil. Her first book, Construyendo un lugar / Constructing a Place was published by Complutense University of Madrid in January 2012. Juliana Gontijo is a researcher, teacher and curator in contemporary art. Currently, she is finishing her PhD in Art Theory at the University of Buenos Aires. She has a Masters degree in Combined Artistic Languages at the National University Institute of Arts (Buenos Aires, Argentina), and has graduated in Film Studies at the University Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris, France), and in Art History at the University Le Mirail (Toulouse, France). In 2012 she worked as coordinator of art exhibitions at Fundación Proa (Buenos Aires, 2012), and managed the cultural department at Fundación Centro de Estudos Brasileiros (Buenos Aires, Argentina) during the years of 2008-2009. She also coordinated the artistic residence Art in loco (Buenos Aires-Rio de Janeiro), prize winner of the 2009 Rede Nacional Funarte. Juliana Gontijo is the author of Distopias Tecnológicas, awarded the Funarte prize Estímulo à Produção em Artes Visuais. She also curated the exhibition Instabilidade estável, winner of Paço das Artes’ Temporada de Projetos 2014 (São Paulo, Brazil). Anna Maria Guasch Ferrer is Professor of Theory and Contemporary Art at the Department of Art History, University of Barcelona. Over the last fifteen years, Guasch has focused on the study of international art from the second half of the 20th Century. Her most recent research looks at the intersection between the artistic scenes of the 20th and 21st centuries, a theme developed in the book The Last Art of the 20th Century: From Postminimalism to Multiculturalism: 1968-1995 (Alianza Forma, Madrid, 2000). Her research on the archive, memory and contemporary art has been published as a monograph entitled Art and Archive: Genealogies, Typologies, and Discontinuities 1920-2010 (Madrid, Akal/Arte Contemporáneo, 2011). Guasch directs and coordinates Global Art Archive

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(www.globalartarchive.com), a research group that studies archives and their role as a liaison between collective memory and individual development. In addition, she is part of the London-based international study group Visual Culture Studies in Europe, the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA), and Zahia Rahmani’s Art et mondialisation research group in Paris (INHA). She is also the project leader for the Art, Globalization, Interculturality research group at the University of Barcelona (www.artglobalizationinterculturality.com). She is currently finishing her book entitled The Global Effect: Mobility, Translation and Memory in the Global Era, 1989-2014 (forthcoming, 2015). Jonathan Harris is Professor in Global Art & Design Studies at Winchester School of Art University of Southampton. He has published twenty books, including The New Art History: A Critical Introduction (Routledge 2001), Writing Back to Modern Art: After Greenberg, Fried and Clark (Routledge 2005), The Utopian Globalists: Artists of Worldwide Revolution (Wiley-Blackwell 2013) and, most recently, Picasso and the Politic of Representation: War and Peace in the Era of the Cold War and Since (Liverpool University Press 2013). Harris has lectured widely around the world, recently at Hong Kong Art Fair Art Basel, The Loop Alternative Space Gallery, Seoul, Aarhus Museum, Denmark and The Royal College of Art, London. Forthcoming books include Contemporary Art in a Globalized World (Wiley-Blackwell) and The Myth of the Art Market: Neoliberalism and the Social Order of Contemporary Art. Celeste Ianniciello. PhD in Anglophone Cultural and Postcolonial Studies, Department of Human and Social Sciences, University of Naples “L’Orientale”. Her doctoral thesis is entitled “Gli sconfinamenti del sé. Teorie e tecniche dell’(auto)biografia postcoloniale” [“Border-crossings of the Self. Theories and Techniques of Postcolonial (Auto)biographies”]. More broadly, her research focuses on the visual (auto)biography of female artists from Mediterranean countries (Mona Hatoum, Zineb Sedira, Lara Baladi and Emily Jacir) as a contrapuntal example set against the epistemology of geographical, cultural and sexual borders. She is interested in public art practices coming from the experience of migrations as “living archives” of postcoloniality. She is Appointed Researcher for the European project MeLa* (European Museums in the Age of Migrations), focused on the rethinking of the museums and archives in the light of the contemporary processes of migration. She has co-edited the

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book, The Postcolonial Museum. The Arts of Memory and the Pressures of History (Farnham, Ashgate, 2014). El Colectivo is a multidisciplinary collective comprised of 16 researchers: Ana Emilia Felker Centeno, Mauricio Patrón Rivera, Sofía Lemos, Claudia Lorenzo, Carolin Maxime Ackermann, Daniel Medina Orland, Anyely Marín Cisneros, Aimar Pérez Gali, Paloma Gutiérrez, Andrea Silva, Javiera Silva Ahuyón, Magdalena Pérez Balbi, Renato Fumero, Rebecca Close, Ana Fernanda Cadena y Blanca Pujals. All the members of El Colectivo are part of the Independent Study Program (PEI) at the Contemporary Art Museum in Barcelona (MACBA). They all come from diverse origins such as Catalonia, La Rioja, Mexico, Germany, United Kingdom, Bolivia, Venezuela, Chile, Argentina and Portugal. Nasheli Jiménez del Val is Beatriu de Pinós Postdoctoral Fellow (AGAUR, 2012-2014) at the University of Barcelona, where she is developing a research project on visual representations of power in colonial Mexico. She holds a PhD in Cultural Studies (Cardiff University, 2009), an MA in Political and Social Studies (UNAM, 2005), and a BA in Graphic Communication (UNAM, 2002). She has collaborated with several international research institutions, such as the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas as postdoctoral fellow (UNAM, 2011-2012); the Art et globalisation research strand at l’Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art through a Getty-Latin America Visiting Researcher fellowship (J. Paul Getty Trust, 2003-2004); and the Museo Nacional de Arte research team for the exhibition “Los pinceles de la historia. La arqueología del regimen, 1910-1955” (MUNAL, 2003). Additionally, she was Lecturer in Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Stirling throughout 2010. She has published several texts on Mexican visual culture and its relation to politics in various academic journals and anthologies. Elpida Karaba is an art theorist and independent curator. Her latest book (co-edited P. Kouros) ArchivePublic: Performing Archives in Public Art: Topical Interventions was published in the Spring of 2012. She is the coeditor for the annual journal of AICA Hellas 2013. She collaborates as a research-curator with ISET, and is the curator in chief of the series ArchiveRights. Her research interests and publication record focus on art and political theory, discourse analysis, and on documentary, activist and performative art practices. She is a member of AICA International and IKT.

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Elke Krasny is Senior Lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. She is also a cultural theorist and curator. She is currently working on a PhD in practice on feminist curating at the Research Platform in Curating, University of Reading. Her recent curatorial work includes How to Identify with Difference? Art in the Public Realm, symposium Vienna 2013; Hands-On Urbanism 1850-2012. The Right to Green, Architecture Centre Vienna 2012 and Venice Biennale 2012; Mapping the Everyday. Neighbourhood Claims for the Future, with the Downtown Eastside Women Centre and the Audain Gallery Vancouver 2011; Hongkong City Telling with the Hongkong Community Museum Project 201; and 2 or 3 Things We’ve Learned. Intersections of Art, Pedagogy and Protest, with Eva Egermann at the IG Bildende Kunst Vienna 2010. Salim Malla Gutiérrez is currently reading for a PhD in Fine Arts (Complutense University, Madrid), where he researches the conceptual art practices related to the measurement of units. In 2012 he received a MFA in Fine Arts from Complutense University. Previously, during his BA Fine Art studies he enjoyed a residency and scholarship at Sheffield Hallam University. He also holds a BA in Topography. Currently, he combines his PhD studies with artistic practice. He is part of the Rampa studio, a place for contemporary art events located in Madrid. He is also collaborator for the online art magazine larayaverde.com. He has exhibited his artworks internationally in solo shows in Sheffield, Thiene and Madrid. His lastest exhibition, Medir el metro, focused on his interest in the decimal metric system and its inconsistences, through a practice that mixes scientific metodologies and artistic mediums such as photography, sculpture and engraving. Mau Monleón Pradas holds a PhD, and is a professor, in Fine Arts (UPV). She has published several texts, the most noteworthy being La experiencia de los límites. Híbridos entre escultura y fotografía en la década de los ochenta (1999). She is co-author of the book Nosotr@s hablamos. Superando discriminaciones y violencias en la adolescencia (2011). She has also curated the exhibition In-Out House. Circuitos de género y violencia en la era tecnológica, having published a book with the same title (2012). More recently, she has published an edited book entitled Los últimos años del arte valenciano contemporáneo III (ed. Román de la Calle, 2013). She has exhibited in several galleries and art fairs, including: Galería Punto y Tomás March de Valencia, Juana de Aizpuru de Madrid; North Gallery de Copenhague; Ferias ARCo de Madrid y ART BASEL de Suiza; Museo IVAM, Sala la Gallera, reales atarazanas y la CAM de

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Valencia; Museo Pablo Gargallo de Zaragoza; Sala Alameda de Málaga; Central de Vapor de Berna en Suiza; City art Gallery Southampton en Inglaterra; Centre de la Vieille Charite de Marseille, Francia; MagasinCentre National d’art Contemporain de Grenoble en Francia; Uisi Kipinä Gallery de lathi, Finlandia, Akademie der Bildenden Künste de Muchich, Alemania, and MUSAC, Spain. Julia Ramírez Blanco graduated from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid with a BA in Art History. Later, she received a Master’s degree in “Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture” from the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid in collaboration with the Reina Sofía Museum of Contemporary Art (2008-2009), and adquired a Diploma from the “Seminaire International de Muséologie” directed by Claire MerleauPonty at the Ecole du Louvre in Paris (2009). She has taught at Tufts University and Skidmore College in Madrid. She is author of the book Utopías artísticas de revuelta (Cátedra, 2014); and her work has appeared in a variety of magazines such as Arquitectura Viva, Lars, Third Text and Boletín de Arte, as well as the newspapers El Mundo and The Nation. She is also part of the International Editorial Board of the European Academic Research Journal. Currently, Julia is working on her PhD thesis on “Contemporary Artistic Utopias” under the supervision of Delfín Rodríguez Ruiz (Universidad Complutense de Madrid). Her doctoral research is supported by a scholarship from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (“Formación de Personal Universitario” programme). Erzsébet Tatai is an art historian. She has been senior researcher at the Institute for Art History of Research Center of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences since 2003. She was the chief curator of MĦcsarnok (Kunstahalle) Budapest (2001-2002), and director of the Bartók 32 Gallery (Budapest, 1993-1999). She has curated over 70 exhibitions. She was also editor at Enciklopédia Publishing House (Budapest, 2000-2001) and Fine Art Publishing House (Budapest, 1986-1988). She has been senior lecturer of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts since 2008, and was lecturer at the Academy of Applied Arts (Budapest, 1988–1993), Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest, 2001, 2012), Moholy-Nagy University of Art & Design Budapest (2006–2009). She published several books, with her most recent publication being an artist’s monograph on Endre Koronczi (Mondd, hogy szeretsz… Koronczi EndrérĘl, Budapest, 2014). She has published numerous essays and studies on Feminist Visual Culture, Iconography and Contemporary Art.

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Sergio Villena Fiengo. PhD in Studies of Society and Culture. Professor at the School of Sociology, the Central American Graduate Program in Sociology, and the PhD Program in Studies of Society and Culture, at the University of Costa Rica. Author of El perro está más vivo que nunca. Arte, infamia y contracultura (2011), and Gol-balización. Siete ensayos heréticos sobre fútbol, identidad y cultura (2006), as well as several articles on Central American art and culture, published in books, journals and exhibition catalogs.