THE
ART OF
SURVIVAL
artistic views on
the social / APAP VI
APAP Advancing Performing Arts Project
Editors: Corpus / TRANSFORMA
CONTENTS
2
4
FOREWORD
6
PRESENTERS’ STATEMENTS
8
INTRODUCTION
by Bertie Ambach and Michael Stolhofer
Tanzfabrik Berlin
The Student Centre, Zagreb
Workspace Brussels
by Helmut Ploebst
12
Migration Cookbook
18
The Angola Project
24
Ethnography of a European City
30
m et moi
38
Look_4_Faces
44
Sound of Migration
52
Domini Públic
58
Quoi aprés Babel, Alain Platel et Jérôme Bel?
62
Animals
68
The Art of Dying
72
About Falling
81
production credits
82
ARTISTS’ BIOGRAPHIES
84
AUTHORS’ BIOGRAPHIES
85
APAP NETWORK PARTNERS
87
CREDITS
OLIVER FRLJIC
CABULA6
IFFAT FATIMA
MEKHITAR GARABEDIAN
ANNA PIOTROWSKA
JULIUS DEUTSCHBAUER & GERHARD SPRING
ROGER BERNAT
BEN BENAOUISSE
JUHA MARSALO & ANTONIO PIZZICATO
LINA SANEH
DIEGO GIL & IGOR DOBRICIC
FOREWORD
APAP VI: The art of survival – artistic views on the social
by Bertie Ambach and Michael Stolhofer
The advancing performing arts project (apap) 2007/08 carries the
number VI. The apap is now ten years old. It began with 5 partners, at
the moment it is 8, and from 2009 it will be 14 european organisations.
The network is developing and changing. What was founded for the joint
support of young artists has increasingly developed into a platform
for designing and implementing artistic projects which could only
emerge within this network and, in addition, also into a forum for a
theoretical examination of function, production and distribution of the
contemporary performing arts in Europe. Further along its way, apap will
advance the preoccupation with important social and art themes on a
theoretical level and in artistic productions. All these activities, which
are spread out across Europe, are brought together in annual themes in
a meeting of artists, experts and curators, starting in 2009.
A peculiarity of apap is diversity and difference. Partners with differing
specialisations add up to a stronger whole. The work on thematic
priorities with various artistic means and approaches provides a
broad and continuative perspective. apap VI brings together different
perspectives and forms of representation regarding the theme of “The
art of survival – artistic views on the social“ in presentations in Berlin,
Brussels and Zagreb.
THE FESTIVALS
Tanzfabrik Berlin
Berlin, October 29 – November 2
[www.tanzfabrik-berlin.de]
The works in seven European institutions, each also handling the
curation of the artists, were the result. The presentation form of the
works was developed together.
Workspace Brussels
Brussels, November 10 – 15
[www.workspacebrussels.be]
The Student Centre
Zagreb, December 11 – 14
[www.sczg.hr]
4
APAP VI: The art of survival – artistic views on the social / FOREWORD 5
PRESENTERS’
STATEMENTS
APAP VI PRESENTATIONS 2008
Tanzfabrik Berlin
With the title “Monologische Dialoge (Monological Dialogues),” Tanzfabrik Berlin presents the
productions of the 6th edition of the Advancing Performing Arts Project in Berlin. The title is
programmatic in many respects. It refers to the attempt of a dialogue between the invited artists,
between the participating European institutions and towards the public. Tanzfabrik Berlin pursues
a dialogical direction, serving as a production and work place for many Berliners as well as for
international dance and performance artists. At the same time, the artistic process is also always a
monological act which, prior to its openness to dialogue, has to constitute itself through itself. The
much coveted dialogue, especially desired and requested by cultural productions in international
networks, is a fragile construct reliant on certain conditions. The artistic presentations, lectures and
lecture-performances are dedicated to dialogical forms with versatile, aesthetic approaches and
show extracts from the social realities of a pluralistic European community. With this programme,
the transdisciplinary character of the Tanzfabrik Berlin is presented on a contentual as well as on an
artistically formal level in an extended form.
WorkSpace Brussels
One of the core principles of the mission of WorkSpaceBrussels consists of an attempt to create
a context in which innovating artists are allowed and stimulated to find new forms and formats to
do artistic research, production and presentation. As a workshop structure, we are not focusing
on presentation as such, but try to organise – once in a while, at different moments in different
venues – a project in the form of a festival formula, in order to present the results of the artistic work
that happened in the workshop. Our festival in November will consist of different projects that have
been created within and with the support of WorkSpaceBrussels. Next to this, the other part of the
festival will consist of the different projects realised within the frame of apap. Apart from presenting
interesting artists and exciting projects and ideas, we hope that by this a different, open and
stimulating exchange will happen between artists, audiences, projects, ideas, etcetera.
The Student Centre, Zagreb
This December marks the first events joining Szene Salzburg and Zagreb’s Student Centre (SC) in
a collaborative platform. The performances which will take place between December 11 and 14
showcase the diversity of the apap network as well as the emerging artists of Croatia and abroad. The
festival reinforces apap’s commitment to nurturing creative and innovative forms of presentation,
and it also expands the scope of the network to embrace more of Eastern Europe. Over a four day
period, apap artists will present projects supported by its “art of survival” theme, and artists selected
by the Student Centre will offer insights into their own points of view. While the SC gained cult status
almost 50 years ago, during the 1960s and 1970s when it was the focal point for Zagreb’s alternative
and experimental scene, there was a long period of cultural stagnation in the 1990s. Recently the
SC has become, once again, a hub for contemporary performers and ideas. The apap network is
particularly happy to welcome its newest partner, the Student Centre, and invites all to see the
results of our collaboration in the centre’s multifaceted venues.
6
APAP VI: The art of survival – artistic views on the social presenters’ statement 7
INTRODUCTION
The art of survival – artistic views on the social
by Helmut Ploebst
range from spectacular conversation to critical manifestation, from cultural fuzzy
logic to calculated irritation of conventions, from affirmation and deconstruction
to clear opposition concerning administrative regulations and to piracy against
purpose logics, borrowed from the cult of the genius.
A few years ago, when adventure sports started booming, all kinds of survival
training came into fashion. White-water rafting, canyoning and adventure trail
lead into a world which still upholds the law of the survival of the fittest and allows
for a type of hero romanticism far from the desk-bastions behind the mirror
fronts of manager and administration strongholds. How nerve-wrackingly are
average desktop-soldiers supposed to survive their weekend, how will they survive
a catastrophe made in Hollywood? The training also serves another purpose. It is
supposed to improve performance back at the stronghold, claiming: “I can survive
everything.”
Outside the revolving glass doors of these castles lies the administered and
managed world where all things wanted, requested and tolerated by administrators
and economists take place. This world also holds numerous structures which
organise the survival of the community and the individual. Art is, put plainly,
the product of its enabling by the desktop-heroes behind glass fronts. Art is the
money which artists and art presenters have to apply for. And this money is called
“Subvention” (subsidy), derived from financial aid for weak economic branches
provided by the public authorities. The subvention, in general, is an expression of
the appreciation of structures which could not survive without support.
Art is a constant applicant, a constant asylum seeker. And it appears as if
everyone involved has come to terms with this definition. Before juries and
committees, art always has to fight for its survival, and this situation finally
codetermines what kinds of art productions can be presented to the people. When
speaking of an “art of survival” in connection with dance and performance at the
apap VI, this does not refer to the examination of the art field of artists.
But the view on the social, which is sharpened in this project, cannot be
fully grasped without taking the dynamics of the arts within administrative
systems into account. Because many countries’ administrative bodies consider
contemporary art, in its constitutive phenomena, to be a part of the ethic
component in the social consciousness.
In doing so, it still serves the representation of elites or nations, to a certain
extent, but, in terms of its required effects, it has become more complex. These
8
And still, art constitutes – even if the according discourse has become dubious –
an indicator of political states and conditions within certain political confines.
Much more important, however, is the preparation of communication spaces and
thought categories, which contemporary art creates as “Swarm Intelligence”
between a utopia and heterotopia and which contains guidelines which political
practice is lacking in all respects.
In a text featured in this catalogue, the Croatian artist Oliver Frljic writes: “Instead
of seeking for more representative and spectacular forms for questioning and
addressing immigration legislative of EU, it [his project, ed.] stays in interspaces
between private and public, political action and an escapist journey into new
Europe. It replaces the global dystopian image of Europe with a utopian belief in
the essential goodness, kindness and hospitality findable on EU’s different micro
levels.” The artists involved in the apap VI project “The art of survival – artistic
views on the social” reflect on the current state of the political and artistic climate
with a great variety of different approaches.
Since these are strongly influenced by the new communication rituals of the
Internet, the Belgian Ben Benaouisse and Roger Bernat from Spain also take these
into consideration. Sevie Tsampalla explains: “Benaouisse has incorporated the
fragmented language of the web not only in terms of form, but also in his working
methods. Keeping a balance between the fragmentary and the structural is a
constant effort. Departing from his personal space, trying to establish a relation
with a specific person through the internet, while at the same time remaining
visible to a broader community, is another effort of balancing between the
personal and the public.” And Bernat’s work, which translates into “Public Domain”
refers to, as Judith Helmer points out, the changed relationship between providers
and those who accept in art: “‘Domini Públic’ is the start of a research process
into the figure of the audience. Without exposing the individual, Bernat is using
narrative possibilities inherent in the audience as a group. Since the beginning
of the age of videogames (...) something developed that Bernat calls ‘the player
paradigm.’ The spectator no longer wishes to be entertained while he is in a
passive mode, but rather to be involved in the action. Theories about interactivity
and participation currently rule many business sectors. For example, newspapers
try to involve their readers and the success of pages like Wikipedia is linked to
their basic structure of participation.” The examination of artistic and media
public spheres becomes a process which contains many analogies. The artist duo
Julius Deutschbauer and Gerhard Spring also refer to the mechanisms of the mass
media with their interview machine, underlining their authoritarian nature and
APAP VI: The art of survival – artistic views on the social INTRODUCTION 9
using the connective ties between highbrow-culture and boulevard-journalism for
embarrassing interrogations of the visitors at the noble Salzburger Festspiele.
One of the important questions results from the obvious inability of many
administrative bodies to come to grips with the task of an ethically respectable,
constructive migration policy.
Apart from Oliver Frljic, the group Cabula6 (Austria/US) also responds to that. The
group’s founder Jeremy Xido says: “Some of my concerns, some of the things
that make sense to me, are the things about immigration, about what it means
to travel, what it means to leave home (which is the history of my family), what it
means to not belong to a place, what means to be white – to have white skin and,
for instance, a black nervous system.”
In her project “Ethnography of a European City: Conversations in an Indian
restaurant in Salzburg,” the Indian Iffat Fatima examines what the integration into
a new, or already familiar, but constantly changing environment in the Austrian
town of Salzburg can look like in practice. Kate Mattingly says: “She describes the
project as a whole as an ‘impressionist ethnography,’ a phrase that taps into the
play between private and public, the individual and the group, even its choice of
words. ‘Impressionist’ suggests an individual, spontaneous view; ‘ethnography’
is the branch of anthropology that deals with scientific description of specific
human cultures. Essentially the project is about people, interaction and survival.”
The Lebanese artist Lina Saneh responds to the apap VI project “The art of
survival” with a determined reversal. Because even the dead are tools in the
survivors’ struggle: “The different Lebanese (and Arab and Middle-Eastern)
communities cultivate their dead only in order to better invest them in their
fights for hegemony.” The Polish choreographer Anna Piotrowska also deals with
prevailing cultural themes from her home country, with questions concerning
national identity and worth, a pre-Christian history of culture and the role of
religiousness today.
The son of a Syrian father and a Lebanese mother, Mekhitar Garabedian deals with
a family history which resulted from Turkey’s genocide of the Armenians, ending
up in present-day Belgium. From a point of view that has outgrown all national
restrictions he says in an interview: “I am very interested in the position of the
foreigner-translator. As a foreigner you are constantly forced to translate. You
find yourself in a position in which you can no longer speak of a mother tongue;
neither Armenian nor Dutch suffices as you are in fact constantly translating.
The position of the foreigner-translator interests me in a poetical, literary sense
but I am also drawn to its socio-political aspect. An immigrant is supposed to
assimilate both in his home and in a broader social context. He should abandon his
own language, but I see this as having an added value. The foreigner’s accent is his
10
strength; it is precisely this that distinguishes him, not just his appearance but
his melody.” In a volte, in which being displaced into a translated life is considered
a socio-political advantage, Garabedian distances himself from these victim
discourses that critics of various political grievances often restrict themselves to.
Juha Pekka Marsalo and Antonio Pizzicato, on the other hand, direct their attention
not so much to mediality and migration, but to the basic principles of these
two phenomena. Martina Ruhsam comments on that: “If capitalism is the global
usurpation of belonging, the social is permanently and complexly intertwined with
economic requests and related dependences – in some cases to the existential
necessity for material conditions to ensure surviving, and in other cases, to
the increase of status symbols, luxury and power.” Diego Gil and Igor Dobricic
work with the concept of failure, of falling and the significance of hope therein.
In a conversation among the two artists about their work together, Dobricic
remarks: “Compassion and consequently care is the only solution to a failure. It
is a paradoxical solution as it is not resolving anything else but the loneliness of
our failing. To realize that we are not failing alone but together with every human
being who ever lived, is making failure as a negative value judgement irrelevant.
You need to embody universal failure in a pure state that reaches another person
as his own failure, but in such an aesthetically superior manner that instead of
fear, inspire generosity, instead of pity, compassion. This transformation of fear
into generosity is analogue to the transformation of existential fall into soaring
and it is the real meaning of alchemical procedure that changes lead into gold.
This transformation is the magical reversal which constitutes miracle.”
This is the point where a philosophical thought connects with Garabedian’s
remarks which consider the “displaced life” regarding the migration discourse as
potentially a strong, positive element in the system of foreigners. The idea that
the transformation of fear into generosity serves as the basis for the miracle is the
unresolved issue, if you will, that lies at the core of the ethic-aesthetic discourse
network of the apap VI project ”The art of survival – artistic views on the social“.
This perspective can also be regarded as the basis of the curatorial cooperation
of the organising network apap which initiated this project. Here it becomes
apparent that political art still is possible and important. It will not change the
offices in glass palaces anytime soon, but, at least, it retains a political space for
reflection that institutionalised interested parties perceive as irritation.
The catalogue at hand contains texts and images that arose from the
collaboration between corpus, as publisher solely reliable for the contents, the
artists, the curators and the authors with regard to joint performances in Berlin,
Brussels and Zagreb. This material was sent on to Transforma in Portuguese
Torres Vedras where it was graphically converted.
Translated from German by
Harald Weiler
APAP VI: The art of survival – artistic views on the social INTRODUCTION 11
MIGRATION COOKBOOK
O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!
Sondern laßt uns angenehmere anstimmen und freudenvollere.
(Oh friends! not these sounds!
But let us strike up more pleasant sounds and more joyful!)
19th February
Conceived as 30 days long journey, during which I spend every day in a different
city staying with different hosts; this project is a kind of intersection between a
tourist travelling/vacation, a durational performance, a series of micro-political
actions, a sketch for an alternative economy, a one-time encounter, video diary,
political debate.
20th February
How does it function? In the first phase I constantly travel for one month from one
city to another and from one host to another. At first sight it could be a tourist
travelling with some restrictions made in advance. One of them is the fact that
each day I am in a different city with a different host. I meet my host and explain to
her/him the way the project works and what it should be about. All this is recorded.
I also talk to my hosts about the project’s political, legal and artistic dimensions.
Besides this, I try to get to know as much as possible about my host in this limited
period of time. At the end of the day, I edit the materials recorded during the day
and post them to my video diary. The day after, I leave and travel to another city
and to another host.
24th February
Time and time restrictions seem to be of decisive importance in this project. The
artificiality of the situation and the deficiency of time would probably force me to
operate on the level of representation dominated by cultural stereotypes. There
would not be time for production of depth and anchoring an ontology of any kind.
Everything stays on the surface. The host’s hospitality and my appreciation for it
would be willing reduction of possibilities and directions in which our relationship
could be developed in a longer period of time, in favour of friction to be avoided.
And avoidance of friction in relationship with the host finds its reflection in the
way that the project’s immanent politics become visible. Instead of seeking for
more representative and spectacular forms for questioning and addressing the
immigration legislative of the EU, it stays in interspaces between private and
public, political action and escapist journey into new Europe. It replaces a global
dystopian image of Europe with utopian belief in the essential goodness, kindness
and hospitality findable on EU’s different micro levels.
Different Try Outs to Explain to Myself What This Is About by Oliver Frljic
OLIVER FRLJIC
26th February
The exhaustion which would probably occur in this project is a kind of recurrence
of promises and politics of radical performance art of the 1960’s and 1970’s but
also to their bankruptcy. Now the exhaustion happens in a radically changed
context and with a radically different performative potential. Instead of belief in
the performer’s self as a last territory which could temporarily suspend dominant
political economy and interrupt its distribution of power, in this case exhaustion
comes as a result of speeding up the strategies which seem to be emptied from
any potential for activation of political invention. I am talking here about the
12
olIver Frljic MIGRATION COOKBOOK 13
project’s partial form of a tourist travelling. Putting oneself in the situation
which could be described as an exaggeration of a tourist travelling, with 30
different destinations in 30 days, would undoubtedly cause her, or in this case, his
exhaustion. But exhaustion in this case doesn’t promise anything. If it invents or
wants to believe that it invents new formats of political resistance, at the same
time it is aware that these formats don’t have any or have very little effective
political strength.
1st March
The awareness of having only a couple of hours and no idea in which direction the
relationship between my host and me as a guest should be developed, leaves us in
front of a very general task to fill in the given time with something. What could be
thematised within this frame? It could be this very situation in which I travel and
stay at my host’s home discussing with her or him this very project. It could be my
legal status as somebody who travels from one city to another and doesn’t check
in at the police and my host’s co-responsibility for this violation of law. It could
be new formats of solidarity. It could also be the immigration politics of my host’s
country. It could be Pop Music. It could be Sponge Bob’s square pants. It could be
Heath Ledger’s death. It could be “everybody wants to do documentary theatre
these days.”
3rd March
The project’s seemingly looseness and leisureliness is underlined with the pursuit
for and invention of new models for political existence of non-EU-ans in EU. What
does it mean for me as a non-EU-an to stay in this grey legal area between artistic
project and tourist trip? What are the political implications and effects of it? And
what about its elusive character, its constant shifting between a harmless tourist
trip and something else?
4th March
Instead of more representative models, I purposely chose an exclusive
performative form most of the time including only my host and me. It becomes
available and visible for a third party through video diary, although its purpose is
not to register the content of these encounters, but to create a community of
viewers, to stimulate creative thinking and invention of new forms for questioning
well-ordered society and its inner microphysics of power. This community and its
role are something to be thought about.
6th March
Realizing this project in 30 days in 30 different cities with 30 different persons
or families requires certain performative strategies to be developed and applied.
First of all, entering somebody’s private space and colonising it as a space for the
artistic project for a limited period of time which is less then one day means that
a very specific micro-performative situation should be set. My performative role
14
would be to conceptualize this staying, to surpass its pure functionality and to
reflect its broader political context. Supposedly, this micro-performative situation
would also include a specific mode of affective production which is dominant
in service industry and Postfordistic society. It means that during my stay a
short-term relationship with my host will be established and developed. Its shorttermness seems to be here of decisive importance because today’s prevailing
mode of affective accumulation in public space would be reproduced through it
but in significantly different economy. The difference of this economy lies in the
possibility to temporarily turn a private space into a public one, while keeping the
process of turning reversible. Making this reversibility visible and showing the way
it reproduces or suspends the macroeconomic processes would be the criteria for
the effectiveness of this micro-performative situation. It would also include the
way that the border line between private and public appears and disappears as well
as an act of identification of performativity which enables movement from public
to private.
11th March
One of the interests in this project is immigration politics of the EU. Besides
directly addressing this issue, it would also be approached from a different
angle. For a non-EU citizen to stay 30 days within EU and do an artistic project
most certainly requires a specific legal procedure to get residence and work
permit. But, embedding this project in the vague area between private and public,
where it never attains the amount of public visibility that would set in motion
corresponding legal sanctions, makes it a performative tool kit for staying in the
EU beyond valid immigration legislative. The condition for this is the project’s
own ambiguity. It is an artistic project while at the same time it could also be a
vacation. It is set in the private sphere, but at the same time, by the nature of its
performative mechanisms, it recreates this private sphere as a public one.
15th March
Colonising private space for a specific performative purpose raises the question
for whom this performance is intended. It erases the thin line between those
who perform and those for whom it is performed. That is because my coming to
somebody’s home, staying for one night or even less, discussing with him EU’s
immigration politics, explaining my own project and the way it reflects broader
political contexts and so on stands against offered hospitality, somebody’s
decision to host me etc. and thus blurs the clear division of performative roles.
Instead of performing low-level resistive and subversive potential of tourist
travelling, my host would probably perform hospitality.
17th March
Although it stresses as its goal the preservation of ambiguity between something
emptied from explicit political content as a tourist travelling and something over
politicized, such as the private sphere, the project at the same time becomes
olIver Frljic MIGRATION COOKBOOK 15
a test field for new politics of performance and explicit critique of the present
EU’s (immigration) politics while preserving its right not to promise or prophesy
anything else but short-termness and lack of determinable political objectives.
Most of the time it works to create the terms for speeding up, additional mobility
and development of their diverse potentials. It is, just like this text, an effort for
understanding its own praxis at the same time as the praxis happens. Even though
it works to destabilize a certain distribution of power and its belonging structures,
it is aware of the art market’s logic which already includes this destabilizing
potential, as well as its economic insufficiency and loss.
18th March
The 30 day long journey represents the first phase of the project and it would be
followed with a documentary film and an exhibition. Materials collected during
the journey would be used as a source for this. The idea behind the making of
the documentary film and setting the exhibition is making more visible and
conceptually coherent the specific intersection between the artistic privatization
of somebody’s intimate space, a call for invention of new short-term political
communities and the escapism of a travelling tourist.
/
16
olIver Frljic MIGRATION COOKBOOK 17
THE ANGOLA PROJECT
Renata Catambas: In a first talk we had, you already had this
1
project about the Benguela Railway1 a little bit sketched. What
The Benguela Railway project:
was the first thing that led you to investigate and work on this
www.cabula6.com/angolaINDEX.htm
issue of the reconstruction of this important Angolan railway?
Jeremy Xido: The project began with Transforma saying they
were doing another apap project and that the theme, as far as I
understood, had something to do with immigration. They asked
me to propose a project, and my proposal was related to what I
would be interested in doing: filmmaking as performance.
The couple of times that I visited Lisbon I was struck by the
enormous number of Africans who I passed while riding the
subway. Much more than in Germany, London, Spain, Austria...
So I thought that, if there is something about immigration
that interests me, and that is related to my life, it is African
immigration. Not just immigration of Africans to Portugal, but
the travel back and forth: the 500-year legacy that we received
from both sides — slavery and colonization — and how this is
transforming completely the face of Europe, the face of the world.
Catambas: How did you get to your project?
Xido: Basically, I see issues of refugees, issues of massmigration as absolutely fascinating. So, I suggested a project
focused on immigration that would be about what it means
to travel between here and there — whatever the here and
there are: that between space, where people travel both
imaginatively and also physically, back and forth. So, it wasn’t
originally that I wanted to do the “Benguela Railway,” but I really
wanted to start developing a script for a feature film: I thought
of writing a film script that I could then use to shoot a film. I
had a very rough idea of a trajectory for a film script: somebody
who was born in Lisbon, but came from an Angolan family, and
ended up having to go to Angola for some reason (to go back to
a place where she never had been before). In order to do this, I
realized I didn’t know anything about Angola, I have never been
to Africa, even though I grew up in a place where everybody in
my neighbourhood talked about Africa all the time, but nobody
had a clue where Africa was on the map. I realized that the
way for me to do my research and my writing was to come to
Lisbon and meet people to see, actually, what the reality was
between ideas I had in my head and what I read in books. I had
to get to Africa, which is actually my big goal. It had nothing to
18
Excerpts of a conversation with Jeremy Xido. May - Lisbon, Portugal. by Renata Catambas
CABULA 6
cabula 6 THE ANGOLA PROJECT 19
do with art, it had nothing to do with being something socially
important, I just wanted to go and see for myself, unlike
anybody else in my neighbourhood where I grew up.
whatever. People who ended up going to Africa realized that
they weren’t Africans: they were Americans. They thought
“What the hell am I doing here? Take me back!”
Catambas: You were saying that in your neighbourhood almost
all the people were black. Are there any specific reasons for you
living on a particular neighbourhood like that one?
Catambas: This curiosity about Africa happens in Portugal too.
The children of people who came from Africa, but were already
born Portuguese, have this enormous will to go back to Africa.
They have a very strong African legacy from their families, but
it seems as if they don’t fit into the Portuguese social context.
Xido: I moved to Detroit, which is probably 85 percent black,
when I was little and I grew up there (from 4 to 17 years old).
My family was the only white family in my area. Everyone else
was black, and my experience was very different from the
experience of a lot of people in the USA. The reason why we
were in this neighbourhood was because my dad was working
for the UAW (United Auto Workers), a big union. They went with
a political agenda from California to Detroit. Three years before
we moved, there were a whole series of riots that took place
all over the US, in Newark, Los Angeles. Detroit was one of the
biggest ones: The National Guard came in, with tanks. They were
basically race riots, and afterwards, a lot of the white people
ended up leaving. They moved to the suburbs, and we moved
there as kind of a counter-current. We had a very inexpensive
house, very big and beautiful, in a neighbourhood where half
of my neighbours were Baptists, like my grandfather, and the
other half were Nation of Islam — NOI — a kind of Islam that
believes that white people are literally devils. This influenced, a
lot, my experience with people.
Catambas: It’s interesting that your family moved to Detroit as
part of a counter-current attitude.
Xido: Where I grew up, there are very few African-Africans. Most
of the people were African-Americans. Everyone is an American.
Everyone had come from “slave families.” Nobody knew where
their ancestors where from. Even though there were musical
traditions, social customs, that clearly, if you started searching
back, you would find from Africa, but they could have been
from west Africa, from southern Africa, even from Angola.
But I always wondered what it would be like to be in a place,
like some neighbourhoods in New York where you find only
Liberians, for example. They are Liberians, they are Africans,
they are not African-Americans. They bring with them a certain
kind of cultural identity that is from another place. Where I
grew up, they are Americans: for good, for bad, for hating it, for
20
Xido: Just one more thing about the Benguela Railway that
I wanted to say: the whole project for apap is like a trip to an
unknown place. It’s almost as if you spin around a globe and
you point to a certain spot, and you think, “Ok! I’m going to go
here!”, but you don’t know how to get there. That’s a little bit
what it’s like. And the “here” it is not just a metaphor; the “here”
is the making of a film. I know that at some point, if I have
to take a boat, a donkey, or dig a hole through a wall, I have
to figure out what to do in order to make that film. My main
purpose is to go to a place I haven’t been before: the “strange”
will of going back to Africa and also the fact that I have been
2
playing capoeira2, probably influence the direction of this
Capoeira – A kind of dance / fight of the
project. Some of my concerns, some of the things that make
Brazilian popular culture. Developed
sense to me, are the things about immigration, about what
by African slaves brought to Brazil
it means to travel, what it means to leave home (which is the
during the 16th century.
history of my family), what it means to not belong to a place,
what means to be white — to have white skin and, for instance,
a black nervous system.
Catambas: Migrations and other kinds of fluxes are now
happening on a global scale. Most of the people need to travel,
need to go from one place to another. Can you imagine the
repercussions of all these fluxes in a thousand years?
3
Xido: I was talking with SP & WILSON3 and they are interesting
SP & Wilson – Hip Hop musicians.
because of how different they are. SP grew up in London. He
Currently living in Lisbon and London.
speaks with a little bit of British accent. His girlfriend is from
http://profile.myspace.com/
Virginia, and he spends time in New York. Wilson’s family is from
index.cfm?fuseaction=user.
Luanda. His mom sent him to Portugal when he was five years
viewprofile&friendID=65886317
old. I think SP has some family in Angola, but most of them
seem to be in London. I guess his mom is Portuguese and his
dad is African (his mom was a doctor in M.P.L.A.). He has cousins
who have never been to Angola. They are born and raised as
British citizens, but they say that they are Angolans, although
cabula 6 THE ANGOLA PROJECT 21
they never went to Angola. He once said to me that — and whether this
is true or not, I have no idea — “all Angolans want to die in Angola.” And it
hit me because the Jews — my dad’s side of the family is Jewish — have
this holiday called Passover and you have a big dinner and retell the story
of the Jews in Egypt 3.000 years ago when they were slaves who got
away. What is really weird is that people have been having this dinner and
saying this piece of food means this, and that means that, to somehow
keep this part of history alive. At the end of the meal you are always
supposed to say “Next year in Jerusalem.”
Catambas: What is meant with Jerusalem?
Postscript
to the interview
4
longing.
Xido:
One of the things I have been
thinking about that we didn’t
talk much about when we
met is the “narrative theory.”
That is, “How do people tell
stories?” And not only this, but
how do we use other people as
“material” to tell our stories?
Or how do other people use us?
And where and how do conflicts
arise when our own story-lines
about who we are conflict with
how others see us as part of
their stories? One of the ideas
that keeps going around in my
head is this — I came here to
research a screenplay I want to
write; a fiction film script. And
the question that I am faced
with is: “How do I turn people’s
lives into a story which may
or may not have anything to
do with the stories they tell
themselves or construct in
order to live their lives with
dignity and purpose?” What
if the way I want to use them
in a story causes them pain
or aggravates past traumas?
How do I give different voices
and perspectives the chance
to make their claims on reality,
while accepting that none of
them have a monopoly on that
reality? And to accept that the
way that I see things is also
valid — if not necessarily true?
...It is a slippery terrain.
22
Xido: “Jerusalem” is never a place, but it’s this idea of saudades4, a
longing. I relate it to what SP said: that people want to die in Angola even
though they haven’t been there once. For them, it is a place that means
something. I was just thinking that the Jews, wherever they are now,
still say the same thing, they still want to be in that place. Especially
considering that the Jews have been travelling for 3.000 years.
Saudades – word in Portuguese for
In a certain way, all diasporas hold on to an idea of a place, no matter
where they are in the world, but they still have a sort of mental
connection to some other sense of longing. And it has nothing to do with
physical realities. I had an image today while I was talking with António
5
Escudeiro5. He asked me why I was doing this project and I told him
António Escudeiro (1933 - ): Angolan film
basically that immigration and travel issues interest me a lot, and that I
director. Currently living in Portugal.
already had developed another project close to this called OnEarth6. He
6
thinks it is a very interesting issue, but also a very, very difficult one. And
OnEarth project:
it is true, because it is all shifting sand — it is always in motion and there
www.cabula6.com/ONEARTHindex.htm
is no fixed point of reference. It is extremely floating, and exhausting.
/
cabula 6 THE ANGOLA PROJECT 23
ethnography OF
A EUROPEAN CITY:
conversations in an Indian
restaurant in Salzburg
The title of apap VI “The art of survival – artistic views on the social”
embraces recurring subjects in the work of Iffat Fatima. An independent
documentary filmmaker, Fatima is currently based in Delhi, but was
born and raised in Kashmir. Her works have explored themes of survival,
artistic views and social reality through various frames.
She describes her documentary film “Lanka – the other side of war and
peace” as “an act of recalling and remembering the last 55 years of
violence in Sri Lanka. By bringing the warring communities face to face
with their own practice of violence, the intent of the film was to facilitate
a conversation in the public arena, within and between communities that
have been separated by geographic, linguistic and ethnic difference, as
well as to stimulate dialogue with and between parties to the conflict.”
Ethnography of a European city by Kate Mattingly
IFFAT FATIMA
Very different in subject matter, but suggesting some similarities
in approach, Fatima’s project for apap VI is called “Ethnography of a
European city: Conversations in an Indian restaurant in Salzburg.”
Inspiration for the project came a year ago, in 2007, when Fatima
visited Salzburg during the sommerszene festival performances of the
Chandralekha Group. Fatima remembers her first glimpse of the town:
“my mind juggles with many impressions: a surreal carnival, a frozen
archive, a fairy tale, a picture post card, cathedrals and castles, market
and establishment, wealth and indigence, high poetry and trash art,
Mozart and Sound of Music.”
In her concept for the apap project, she proposes a multiple narrative
tour of the city through images and conversations. Taking individuals
from different social and economic groups (a tourist, an artist, a South
Asian running an Indian restaurant), Fatima plans to “unravel and
delve into the social survival strategies and skills of a cross section of
communities and people living in Salzburg.”
She describes the project as a whole as an “impressionist ethnography,”
a phrase that taps into the play between private and public, the
individual and the group, even its choice of words. “Impressionist”
suggests an individual, spontaneous view; “ethnography” is the branch
of anthropology that deals with scientific description of specific human
cultures. Essentially the project is about people, interaction and survival.
As Edward Said writes in “Orientalism,” “…human history is made by
human beings. Since the struggle for control over territory is part of the
history, so too is the struggle over historical and social meaning. The
task for the critical scholar is not to separate one struggle from another,
24
IFFAT FATIMA ETHNOGRAPHY OF A EUROPEAN CITY: CONVERSATIONS IN AN INDIAN RESTAURANT IN SALZBURG 25
but to connect them, despite the contrast between the overpowering
materiality of the former and the apparent otherworldly refinements of
the latter. My way of doing this has been to show that the development
and maintenance of every culture requires the existence of another…”
In “Ethnography of a European city,” Fatima, a non-European, sets her
focus on Salzburg, a city that has become a destination for those seeking
a traditional European venue. A potentially rich interaction between a
non-european perspective and a notoriously conservative European
town is set in motion.
Fatima herself noticed during her first visit to Salzburg: “it is a city
constantly photographed and ‘museumized.’ It is a city efficiently
regulated, socially, culturally and linguistically tidy and homogenous
(unimaginable in India). An overwhelmingly white city it reflects a
pan-European identity, however, it has a distinct localized personality
and character.”
As seemingly disparate as her projects appear, Fatima is consistently
engaged in views on cultural difference and survival. These interests can
be traced to her first years in Kashmir, which she refers to as “perhaps
one of the most beautiful places in the world but is unfortunately
today the epicentre of a major conflict. Its strategic location and
beautiful environs has attracted from time to time traders, religious
missionaries and military invasions impacting and influencing the
course of its political, social and cultural formation. Kashmir has
gracefully amalgamated these influences and developed a distinct
identity: simultaneously Buddhist, Islamic and Hindu. However, the
present turmoil and political uncertainty, a legacy of the partition
of India and Pakistan, is completely undermining this way of life and
tearing apart its social and cultural fabric. Having very closely seen and
observed this process I have been sensitised to the various nuances of
conflict, violence and reconciliation. I do not see conflict as essentially
problematic; it can create space for dialogue, redress, and reconciliation.
However, very often through political and cultural manipulation this
space is claimed by violence. With anguish and despair, I have witnessed
in Kashmir the complete breakdown of this dialogue process leading
to hatred and violence since 1989. To combat my own despair and
reclaim this space for dialogue has been a continuous creative quest.
It led me to Ladakh, a remote Himalayan region where I spent many
years, as a filmmaker documenting the age old tradition of storytelling.
Simultaneously narrating and creating, the storyteller with fluidity and
ease has over years resolved and integrated divergent and conflicting
points of view, and in the process revitalised and kept the art form alive.
26
Being exposed to this tradition of story telling was a liberating and a
learning experience for me.”
In 1990 she completed her masters degree in Mass Communication from
Delhi (India) and started working as an independent documentary film
maker on a wide range of subjects: environment, sociology, arts, women’s
issues, violence and conflict. She lived in Sri Lanka from 2002 to 2004,
during a peace process to resolve a two decade old conflict through a
negotiated settlement. “Although the parameters of conflict and violence
in Sri Lanka are different, I can draw many parallels with the situation in
Kashmir,” she recalls. “Intransigence, insularity, bigotry and fanaticism are
common markers, which are necessary corollaries of protracted violence.”
She further developed this research in the United States through a
fellowship at Brandeis University in Boston. The fellowship was entitled
“Recasting Reconciliation through Culture and the Arts.” Her most recent
endeavours encompass issues of Enforced Involuntary Disappearance
in Kashmir. She explains: “in association with the family members of the
disappeared person I am working on a media advocacy and campaign
programme. Eventually I hope to do a film.”
Her apap project is reflective of her engagement with simultaneous
multiplicity and intercultural dialogue: “However what interests me
primarily about the apap project is the possibility it offers for a shift in
perspective... the turning of the ethnographic eye on a western society...
questioning some of the assumptions in the east west polarity / dichotomy.”
She lists some of the starting points of her research as questions: “In a
cosmopolitan European city how do different social categories represent
and interpret each other and the city? What are their networks, forms
of conversation? How are the differences and hierarchies between them
accommodated and negotiated? What are the spaces they inhabit?
Are the spaces overlapping or isolated from each other? How are these
spaces regulated and organized? What is the role of the state policies in
restricting and regulating transnational and international movement of
people / products / technologies and communication in a globalizing era?”
Her questions trigger thoughts about different communities and politics,
as well as our views of these entities. In the essay “Corpus,” Jean-Luc
Nancy writes about the irreconcilability of a sign and its sense in literature
and philosophy. He adds: “In its turn, politics represents the same thing,
the same endless explication of the mystery. Either one has to designate
the community, the city as a body, or else the social, civil body, given as
such, must engender its own sense of community and of city. As a body of
IFFAT FATIMA ETHNOGRAPHY OF A EUROPEAN CITY: CONVERSATIONS IN AN INDIAN RESTAURANT IN SALZBURG 27
forces, as a body of love, as a sovereign body, it is both sense and the sign
of its own sense, but as soon as it’s the one, it loses the other.”
For another writer, Vikram Seth, the historical compromise of different
cultures, takes a more personal form. In “Two Lives,” the true story of
Seth’s great uncle, a soldier for England during World War II who was born
in India, there is the retelling of a conversation between an English wing
commander and Seth, a captain: “‘Well Seth, you must say we did a lot for
them out of, well, goodness… We educated them, we trained them…’ So I
said, ‘Look here, why did you do that? What have we in common? Are we
related? Is our language the same? Is our religion? Nothing. So if you say
we went into that country because they were stupid and we wanted to
subdue them and rule over them, I’ll believe you. If you claim goodness
of heart, I don’t accept it; it makes no sense. As for educating us, Indian
culture is far older than British culture. In Roman times, people in the
army were sent to Britain as a punishment. It was the most uncivilized
country at the time…”
works cited:
Said, Edward W., Orientalism,
Random House, Inc., New York, 1979.
Survival, artistic views and social reality: three elements which transcend
historic, geographic and national borders.
/
Nancy, Jean-Luc, The Birth to Presence,
Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 1993.
Seth, Vikram, Two Lives,
Little, Brown, Great Britain, 2005.
28
IFFAT FATIMA ETHNOGRAPHY OF A EUROPEAN CITY: CONVERSATIONS IN AN INDIAN RESTAURANT IN SALZBURG 29
m et moi
ELLE
...Écoute-moi.
Comme toi, je connais l’oubli.
LUI
Non, tu ne connais pas l’oubli.
ELLE
Comme toi, je suis douée de mémoire. Je connais l’oubli.
LUI
Non, tu n’es pas douée de mémoire.
(Marguerite Duras: Hiroshima Mon Amour, Éditions Gallimard 1960, pp.31/32)
Kurt Vanbelleghem: Several of your works are based on highly personal
references in which your position as an immigrant clearly plays a central
role. How did you actually land up in Belgium?
Mekhitar Garabedian: My father was born in Haleb in Syria and my mother
in Beirut, in Lebanon. They grew up in the Armenian communities of
Haleb and Beirut. The suburb of Bourj Hammoud in Beirut is also known
as Little Armenia. My (great) grandparents ended up in both countries
respectively in 1915, when they fled the Turkish atrocities. Throughout
the Middle East you see Armenian communities living with their language
and their religion in the midst of various Muslim communities. Because
of the civil war in Lebanon and the resulting instability in the Middle East,
my parents finally emigrated to Europe and they found themselves in
Belgium more by chance than anything else.
Vanbelleghem: Armenian history and culture still have a huge impact on
your lives even though you are separated from it by two generations.
Garabedian: I was brought up according to the Armenian orthodox
tradition of my parents. Armenians, and you see this all over the world,
are very conscious of the possibility of the disappearance of their own
people, their history, language, culture, etc. This feeling is strengthened
further by the fact that the world seems to have forgotten our history.
Armenians instil this as it were in their children. ‘You must not forget
this. This is what happened. This is your language. This is our history.’
Vanbelleghem: Of course in Belgium you encounter quite a different
system, with other customs and a language not your own. You went to
school here. What impact did these two worlds have on your education
and your personality?
30
Make no mistake, you said stay so we stayed.¹ a conversation between Mekhitar Garabedian and Kurt Vanbelleghem
MEKHITAR
GARABEDIAN
¹
“Make no mistake, you said stay so
we stayed” is also the title of a video
installation by Mekhitar Garabedian
from 2006.
MEKHITAR GARABEDIAN M ET MOI 31
Garabedian: Well, it already starts with your name; it is pronounced
differently in the two worlds. In (his book) Distracted Jalal Toufic writes:
“A stranger’s exile: spelling one’s name.”
Vanbelleghem: This duality also plays a central role in your artistic
activities.
Garabedian: You find the most direct translation of this back and forth
movement in the work entitled “MG”. I stand in front of a mirror and
pronounce my name alternately in Armenian and Dutch. I look at myself and
constantly move from one context to the other. A name acts as a signifier,
it contains who you are for other people, and it represents your identity.
Vanbelleghem: You base your own interpretation of the concept of
identity on a highly personal situation. You refer to your own family
history and you also use this explicitly.
Garabedian: In the “M. Verdoncklaan” video I show someone looking at
family photos, but these family photos function on a more abstract level.
Everyone has a pile of these family photos lying somewhere at home. It
is about what is missing when you watch how someone looks through
a pack of photos like these. These photos show a history, our history,
but if you look at the images you see nothing of the history we have
experienced. You don’t see the ruins of buildings in Beirut even though
they are there and we lived there. What interests me is precisely what
has disappeared and how you show that something is disappearing.
When watching this video one is constantly wondering what we can find
out about this family, but in fact...
Vanbelleghem: The “Beirut 1963” video has a similar starting point.
Garabedian: In this video I literally show the disappearing. The image, a
very traditional family portrait which appears in its original, crumpled
state and becomes an image in perfect condition, which is technically
speaking contemporary. I then show what cannot be seen, what can no
longer be seen. What also interests me in this process is how memory
works, the way memory grows analytically, but its deterioration occurs
erratically and does not appear to be subject to any rules.
Vanbelleghem: Several of the works you have made so far are
self-referential, though one is not immediately aware of this, as in the
series of photographs entitled “Happy when it rains.” Do these photos
reflect your own position?
Garabedian: They act as self-portraits. They are about a feeling of not
belonging anywhere, or of being somewhere in between, between different
positions. Being unable to take root, to flourish. Even though you learn to
speak the new language perfectly and you master it, even though you do
not hear a single melody to remind you of your origins, you are constantly
reminded that you are different. Every time I introduce myself, “I am
Mekhitar Garabedian”, I also continue to belong to this other world.
Consequently, my — Armenian — origins will certainly continue to be a
starting point, but not just defined by a context of migration. It is also
about realising that you too – as a second or in fact as a third generation
migrant, if you look at it from an Armenian perspective – can be held
responsible for the disappearance of a history, a culture and a language.
How does one deal with this fact? This is something I often translate into
my work. I feel like a vampire looking in a mirror, and there is no reflection,
you see nothing, and yet you are there, you are looking into the mirror.
The video work entitled “Learning Piece” shows this double attitude
inherent in my own position. On the one hand it is a retake of an earlier
performance by the American artist Vito Acconci. It is a work from 1970
in which Acconci actually teaches himself a song on stage. Using a tape
recorder he repeats a couple of stanzas over and over. He keeps on doing
this until he has managed to learn the whole song perfectly. In a certain
sense I have appropriated that work. On the other hand, “Learning Piece”
also expresses my responsibility with regard to Armenian history. In
the remake of Acconci’s performance I am on stage with another man,
an older Armenian who is passionately teaching me an old Armenian
revolutionary song. It is about being separated from the homeland, it’s also
about the genocide; and it is the old man’s sacred task not only to teach
me this song but to also make me aware of this history. He demands that I
become engrossed in it, in the absolute belief that in this way we will keep
these facts alive and that we will survive. One could almost describe his
motive as fear; “look, we have a young Armenian of whatever generation
who does not know this song, who does not embrace his own history.” What
particularly interests me in this learning process is what both Augustine
and Wittgenstein refer to, namely that learning a language is not a form of
instruction but of training, a conditioning.
Vanbelleghem: Another important element in your work as a whole is the
concept of language. It almost seems as if you are conducting some kind
of research into the position of language in migration. Language includes
and excludes, language is a home and a hostile environment.
Garabedian: This definitely has to do with the experience of growing up
32
MEKHITAR GARABEDIAN M ET MOI 33
in two languages, Armenian and Dutch. In addition to this my parents
used a third, Arabic, as a secret language. When we, the children, weren’t
supposed to hear something they would switch to Arabic. Of course this
immediately creates an awareness of inclusion and exclusion. If you wish
to stigmatise someone as a stranger then you simply have to speak a
language he does not understand in his presence and you heighten the
feeling that he is undesirable to an incredible degree.
Vanbelleghem: In this sense the sound installation “Pararan (Dictionary)”
has an alienating effect. You are engulfed in a torrent of words from 38
loudspeakers, but it feels very unpleasant to walk in a space filled with
language you don’t understand at all and where there is nothing you can
get a hold on.
Garabedian: I am very interested in the position of the foreigner-translator.
As a foreigner you are constantly forced to translate. You find yourself in
a position in which you can no longer speak of a mother tongue; neither
Armenian nor Dutch suffices as you are in fact constantly translating. The
position of the foreigner-translator interests me in a poetical, literary
sense but I am also drawn to its socio-political aspect. An immigrant is
supposed to assimilate both in his home and in a broader social context. He
should abandon his own language, but I see this as having an added value.
The foreigner’s accent is his strength; it is precisely this that distinguishes
him, not just his appearance but his melody. In “Pararan (Dictionary)” you
get an inverse process. Here the non-ethnic person feels like an alien,
he experiences the same as a migrant who ends up in a totally alien
language structure and has to orientate himself in it. This appears to be a
difficult and nerve-wracking experience. When meeting and receiving the
foreigner, his discourse, and his strange language the non-ethnic person
feels very uncomfortable. Personally, I find listening to a language I do
not understand a special, enriching experience.
It is the fate of the foreigner to experience a break. He has left
something behind him permanently. He does not choose the break; it is
the result of an action that is often forced upon him and he must adapt
accordingly. Through the process of migration there is inevitably a break
with the traditions of your original environment, with your language and
with your history. This gives rise to a great many questions: forgetting,
losing, shifting, betraying, and evaporation, erosion – of identity,
language, family, culture and history. The extinguishing of tradition. The
disappearance of an image. Exile reduces the old body, the old language,
to a corpse. What is language, what is speech, when the language and
the voices that feed it are being extinguished? What is the image that
remains of the country that has been left behind after living an entire
34
life in a new country? Then there is a new context, a new history; what
effect does this have? Is this a new history? What happens to the old? I
find dealing with the break and translating it highly intriguing. It is about
living in sounds and associations that have no ties with what the body
remembers at night.
I speak Dutch to my brother. Here I do not address my brother in my
mother tongue, but in a foreign language. The absence of a language; I
speak Dutch out of habit. Switching languages is the same as the losing
or a betrayal... of the language of the country, the language of the group,
the mother tongue. On the basis of this fracture, the old and the new,
the original family and the new community appear to be as attractive
as they are problematic: there is no end to the questions and the unrest
cannot be quelled.
The “Pararan (Dictionary)” sound installation is partly a translation of
something my mother used to say: “To hear our language is a joy for us.”
The linguistic nature of man is that he names things. Naming things
and events (speaking) in Armenian is a joy. Like Elstir, a character in
Proust who recreates things by taking away their name and giving them
a new name, Armenian recreates reality. Dutch does not have the lexical
ambivalence or the multiple, often indeterminable meanings of the
Armenian idiom, which is insufficiently familiar with Cartesian notions
and in which the prayer of the heart vibrates together with the darkness
of the senses. Visually, Armenian also means a different representation
of reality (through language); it has its own alphabet with thirty-eight
letters. This is not me. This is my mother memory, that warm corpse that
still speaks; a body within my body.
Vanbelleghem: Through your work you often place yourself in a position
that could be described as a non-location; the place in which you find
yourself can only be defined on the basis of an external questioning. Is
this also how you approach the presentation of your work?
Garabedian: I often present my work in ensembles. In a previous
exhibition I presented the “Agheg” sound installation and the “Beirut
1963” video as the two central works, and two other works, the series
of photos entitled “Happy when it rains (Self-portrait)” and the video
“M. Verdoncklaan” acted as a sort of commentary. One work questions
the other. The choice I make here depends on the type of presentation.
There are times when these choices are reversed. The works refer to
each other – not only visually but also intellectually.
Vanbelleghem: This non-location, the absence of a clear starting point,
MEKHITAR GARABEDIAN M ET MOI 35
also makes up the substance of the video work “L’Étranger,” in which you
place a person in a completely nihilistic situation in which he does not wish
to retain a single reference.
Garabedian: Man sometimes asks the animal: “Why don’t you tell me
about your happiness; why do you just stare at me?” The animal wants
to answer and says: “It is because I always immediately forget what I
wanted to say.” — But then it forgot this answer too and was silent: and
this surprised man. However he was surprised at himself: that he could
not learn to forget and consequently always remained attached to the
past, no matter how far or how fast he walks, he always carries the chain
with him. It is a miracle: the moment, which appears in a flash and passes
in a flash, and before which there is nothing and after which there is
nothing, nevertheless returns like a ghost and upsets the tranquillity of
another moment. A sheet from the scroll of time constantly detaches
itself and flutters away – and then suddenly flutters back into man’s lap.
Then man says “I remember” and envies the animal who immediately
forgets and actually sees each moment die, disappearing into mist and
darkness and being extinguished for ever.
This interview was first published in Happy
when it rains, Mekhitar Garabedian, editor:
Kurt Vanbelleghem, graphic art:
Céline Butaye, Toohcsmi Uitgevers,
Publishers, 2006
In this text by Baudelaire a man admits to no longer having any ties, no
memory, no desires, but it is impossible to grasp this state of being. What
is past is never past, but a ghost; it continues to return and disturb the
fullness and peace of the present. Consequently, man is not just what he
is, but is marked by what he no longer is. What typifies human life is that
it turns back on itself; it must come back because man is pursued by his
“having been.”
/
Translation from Dutch by Gregory Ball
and Mekhitar Garabedian
Photos
Title:
Intimacy is being angry and it doesn’t
relate to anything or anyone because no
one is inside of you with your language to
understand.
2008, 9 photographs
(2x) 101 cm x 67,5 cm
(7x) 90 cm x 67,5 cm
lambda on diasec
36
MEKHITAR GARABEDIAN M ET MOI 37
look _4_faces
21.03.2008, Cracow - Warsaw
Our project will deal with the issues of faith, origins and European identity.
We will ask questions about roots, community feelings and about history.
Are we still divided into East Europe, Middle Europe, Middle-East Europe?
Besides our planned intervention in the invited participants’ private lives and the
contribution of a Polish folk sculptor and a photographer, our project also aimed at
putting forward our European identity through a stage performance.
Anna Piotrowska will present her dance solo.
Anna Piotrowska: How can “she” fit into “him.” Furthermore I do not know, I wonder,
sitting on a throne, in a crown with the horn of plenty on my male chest, waiting for
decoration. Waiting for an order for perfection and plentitude of the deserts of my face.
My feet sink into the earth of abundance, it is me who feeds all nations, it is me
who gives them faith and hope.
The most important is to eat to the full and not feel anything anymore.
To look at my divine face of four facades.
In the Middle of One Continent by Agnieszka Mazur
ANNA
PIOTROWSKA
12.04.2008, Warsaw
We look for a bond. The easiest connotation is our common Slavic origin. We go back
in time and try to dig deeper, we draw connections Slavic people = pagan people.
Is there anything left in us from those times?
As Poles – Slavic tribes – we inhabited a vast part of Europe. Most of the territory
east of the Laba river, except for the land occupied by the Hungarians and the
nomads, was our home. Curiously, not a single coherent record describing our
beliefs has been left. During the course of the last ten thousand years, the Slavic
tribes ceased to be a single nation and divided themselves into several smaller
units. In the beginning, there were three of those: one in the west, one in the east
and the last in the south. Therefore, nowadays we still divide the Slavic nations
into these three groups. Poles, Czechs and Slovaks belong to the western group.
The eastern Slavs are Russians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians and the Lemks. The
southern ones are Slovenians, Croats, Bosnians, Serbs, inhabitants of Montenegro,
Macedonians and Bulgarians.
Borders seem to be only an artificial partition, as a matter of fact ethnic
membership can create real diversity (social patchwork).
Nevertheless what is still our major interest is the ancient spirituality of our
common ancestors…
Who was praised back then? What was the object of the cult?
The beliefs of those days drew from the great Indo-European polytheistic religions.
Those, as suggests the term, implied the existence of several, often equally important
gods, or the presence of one main god with many personifications (henotheism).
The Unique God of the Slav tribes was Swietowit (“svet” means strong, powerful),
the divine being with four faces, god of war and abundance, to whom the believers
consecrated the harvest festival.
All pagans worship their gods around “pales”. A “pale” was a special place situated
38
ANNA PIOTROWSKA LOOK_4_FACES 39
in the middle constituting the central point of each community.
We can assume in days gone by, there were specific chains, something like a
Europe of small communities.
Anna Piotrowska: The power of Swietowit is fascinating. It derives from his ability
to look at the four sides of the world simultaneously, it allows him to travel far into
space without moving… He is able to join, to cement different points of view.
4 faces 4 hearts 1 thought
4 faces 1 heart 4 thoughts
4 faces 8 eyes 8 ears
4 noses 8 eyebrows 4 mouths
4 foreheads 4 chins
4 hats
1 head
Is the heart divided into 2,4,6?
Meetings of many faces
Face to face
Back to face. To feel one’s breath.
To breathe a couple times, in different tempos.
To decide about one’s being, about one’s helplessness, an infinite number of times
I am the face: first, second, third, fourth.
From one, rose others
18.04.2008, Warsaw
We want to touch deeper our European identity. On the one hand there is cultural
heritage (Greek-Roman antiquity, Jewish-Christian traditions) and universality,
but on the other we have present values: democracy, freedom, human rights,
multiculturalism-metaphor. These values in our project are the 4 faces of Swietowit.
To look closer into common origins, examine our roots; we come across a folk
sculptor (Kazimierz Kostka), who agrees to create for us a figurine of Swietowit.
The figure of Swietowit that the sculptor will make for us will be a transitive one —
a challenge figurine. We want Swietowit to wander, to travel around people, places
— it’s going to be a symbol of openness, an identity of variety.
We hope to open up a discourse about identity and spiritual aspects of our lives in
order to explore disappearing traditions, community feeling — especially here, in
this running metropolis.
We simply want to ask if people are conscious of their origins, their provenance.
Do they carry with them a basic, at least, consciousness of their origins? Do they
feel they are Slavs, Europeans? Whose descendants are they?
40
Swietowit is like a guardian angel — supposed to wake up consciousness and ask
questions about the existence of a “right” path to follow, a right place to be...
23.04.2008, Warsaw
The contemporary world and our lives are often molded by contradictory trends of
globalization and strong national identity. It is an overwhelming, impetuous process.
Is there anything similar to one global consciousness that reaches above all
national and cultural differences?
From a geographic point of view the situation looks simple: the Ural chain on the
east, the Atlantic Ocean on the west, Gibraltar on the southwest, the Greek Islands
mark the southern end and Spitzbergen in the north.
Are we conscious that in defining, characterizing a place a crucial role is played
not by its geographic location, but by people’s representation/image of that
specific place?
2.05.2008, Warszawa
In the beginning there was chaos... then appeared borders.
Human beings are afraid of border situations; they do not feel comfortable within
them. Nevertheless they keep surrounding themselves with them. One just needs
to take a look at the world atlas: only lines, divisions, continents, countries, cities,
districts. Borders of climate zones, places of occurrence of natural resources or
the limits of cultivated grounds marked with different colours.
Borders traverse our heads as well. Separated paths in our brain determine
our abilities, predispositions, allow memories to occur. The border between the
left and the right hemispheres influences the facility with which we learn new
languages or our ability in abstract thinking.
Is it possible to create borders in Europe which are not division lines but rather
platforms for thoughts and experiences to exchange — something more like
“doorsteps” for openness and tolerance which allow us to overcome stereotypes,
to offer common perspectives which defy the challenges of this century.
Such diversity (of European nations) creates a base for European identity,
simplifies one dialogue and eliminates sources of conflicts.
Does this imply that what is most wanted, most desired is a total BOUNDLESSNESS?
And coming back to us, would we like the still existing frontiers to disappear from
the maps?
So far we are, we live. We have continents, countries, capitals, divisions, set ways
of behaviour more or less typical for different nations.
There is an open question of “what is European identity?” and “what elements
make it one entity?”
The process of regroupment still lasts.
To be continued...
/
ANNA PIOTROWSKA LOOK_4_FACES 41
42
ANNA PIOTROWSKA LOOK_4_FACES 43
Sound of Migration
A Participation Film
The stories told in our film are, above all, true, moving and touching
refugee stories which speak to many people. In addition, you also have
the wonderful scenery with the beautiful city of Salzburg as the setting
and the excellent refugees, facilitators and immigration police officers
who take part in this film.
The protagonists – art tourists and culture tourists, locals and day
tourists – spread such charm, such a tremendous joy of life, which
makes any flight, as dramatic as it may have been, almost forgotten.
You could go on watching and listening to them forever as our interview
machine assails the art and culture tourists at the Salzburger Festspiele
with questions such as “How do you grant refugees a second chance,
perhaps as a sylph, like Antonín Dvoæák’s Aquarius (Vodnik)?” or “Isn’t
the fort Europe turning more and more into Duke Bluebeard’s Castle?”.
With questions then, which have, on the one hand, been derived from
the programme of the Salzburger Festspiele 2008 as well as from the
relevant migration literature.
DUKE BLUEBEARD’S CASTLE by Julius Deutschbauer
JULIUS
DEUTSCHBAUER
& GERHARD
SPRING
It is the aim of this film to stage different ideas, fantasies and facts
concerning this theme, to stage the “Sound of Migration” in front of
the backdrop of the Salzburger Festspiele so to speak, and all that
with breathtaking images, a camera that seems to be in love with the
Austrian landscape, complete with the probably best songs from the
history of migration, ranging from the title song “My Favourite Barriers”
to “Climb Every Barbed Wire”. Carried by these songs, everyone receives
the opportunity to come true as a refugee, an immigration police officer,
a facilitator, a benefactor or as whatever they want. The role reversal
takes place in the interview with the reporters Deutschbauer / Spring. All
festival locations are film locations, preferably at premieres, private views
and more or less public receptions. The actors are made recognisable
as such through an accessory. In the course of this, they are filmed and
confronted with questions coming from a belly-loudspeaker.
/
44
jULIUS DEUTSCHBAUER & GERHARD SPRING SOUND OF MIGRATION 45
The machine that reads out the questions, and which Julius
Deutschbauer has since been fastening to his belly, was only the first
step. Some improvements have since been made, e.g. the time for each
answer, which runs out after 8 seconds with the sound of a ring tone,
the fixed maximum of 5 questions per interview, and, in terms of the
recorded image, the static change of perspective from the machine
to the interviewee and back again. Due to the machine, a little bit of
belly gets into the frame, but this seems as abstract as a shirt pattern.
After Copenhagen, it was also Antwerp (deSingel) that same year, where
the interview machine stood the test in Flemish and French, then in
2006 at the art fair (arco) in Madrid in Spanish. Shortly after, near
Karlsruhe (Blickle-Stiftung), that time even in German, which almost
is the language of the machinists, and then finally in Vienna, where
hundreds of questions were being asked and answered under the title
of “Flirtmaschine Don Juan” (Albertina) all through the summer. The
machine does not always ask the same questions, but rather responds
to stimuli. Sometimes individual words are replaced if necessary, when,
for example, “Flirt” is exchanged for “Flucht” (“Flight”), on the occasion
of the “Flüchtlingsdrama vom Lunzer See”. Under the title of “The Sound
of Migration”, the attraction of the mountain lake is exchanged for the
Salzburger Festspiele, the refugee as day tourist for the refugee as
culture tourist. An estimated two thousand interviews have already been
conducted with this machine.
/
46
Are refugees popular figures?
How do you distinguish refugees from, say, natives?
How do you grant refugees a second chance, perhaps as a sylph, like
Antonín Dvoæák’s Aquarius (Vodnik)?
Aren’t refugees and facilitators – like for example Eros and Thanatos,
love and death – intrinsically tied to each other?
Isn’t the relationship between refugee and establishment much like the
one between Othello and Cassio?
Is the Orpheus myth not the prototypical allegory of escape and
renouncement?
Doesn’t the refugee feel the same way about his home country as did
Orpheus about Eurydice, who he wasn’t allowed to turn back to and look at?
What’s your name? – Is this your birth name? What is your birth name?
What’s the weather like where you come from at the moment?
Where are you from?
How was the journey?
Please make a gesture that is typical of a refugee!
What kind of work were you doing at home?
Are you happy to be here?
Everything OK?
We heard you’re in trouble?
What are you planning to do now?
How did you make yourself suspicious?
Do you know a song from your home country? We want to hear your
voice! The highs and lows of your voice!
Do you see yourself as a descendant of the nomads?
How many of your comrades have reached EU territory?
Did you have enough drinking water, food and fuel on board during your
flight?
What was the weather like during your crossing?
How long were you on the ship for?
Have you already been interrogated?
How often have you been caught yet?
How long did you have to save in order to have enough money for the
journey into the uncertain?
In an emergency, would you have been able to turn around?
How big was the ship?
What would have awaited you at home in case of your return?
Why are you shivering?
How do you compensate for the loss of fluids?
Do you have any complaints – sickness, cough, any type of muscular
complaints?
Due to which political activity did you have to flee?
Were you incarcerated? Tied up? How you did you manage to free yourself?
THE QUESTIONS (A SELECTION) by Julius Deutschbauer & Gerhard Spring
THE INTERVIEW MACHINE by Gerhard Spring
The “Interview Machine“ was first used in 2005 in Copenhagen (Nicolaj
Plads). The newly minted machinists (Deutschbauer / Spring) conducted
a number of interviews in a language they could neither speak nor
understand. Their interviewing technique was “mechanical” already prior
to this, since they were reading their questions off tiny sheets without
considering the interviewees’ answers and follow-up questions. While
the interviewees were still formulating their answers, the interviewers
were already shuffling their cards again, like a card game. They asked
their questions blindly, regardless of what was being said or not said.
Only their cameras and microphones seemed to be interested in the
interview, as well as some bystanders who were served the results. It
didn’t matter whether the interviews meant anything to the interviewers
or not. After all, they merely disappeared into the background with all
their questions while only the interviewees took centre stage. Even if
they just irritatedly stared into the camera or tried to tell a joke in order
to escape this uncomfortable situation, the answers were good portraits
of the interviews.
jULIUS DEUTSCHBAUER & GERHARD SPRING SOUND OF MIGRATION 47
Are you worried about being incarcerated here, at the end of your journey?
Are you afraid of being deported?
Have you ever been deported?
What if you fail?
What did you imagine your life in Europe to be like?
Is it worth risking your life?
Who did you leave behind?
What do you know about Europe? – about Austria?
Do you ever want to return to your home country?
Do you feel welcome in Austria?
What have you been vaccinated against?
What were you able to take along on your flight?
How much did you pay for the flight?
Do you have any children? Where are they? What are their names?
Can a flight also be a tourist experience?
How long were you at sea for?
And if you were deported to your home country again, what would that
mean to you?
Which kind of society are you expecting to find here in Lunz?
Are there also people among them who are friendly to foreigners?
Can you prove that you’re a refugee? What do you have to prove it?
Could you sketch a portrait of your home country?
Do you know the basic facts about Austria?
Do you want to become an Austrian citizen? How?
Do you know which requirements you have to fulfil in order to become an
Austrian citizen?
Are you a disappointment to your home country?
Is Austria a disappointment to you?
How much of your left-behind home country is still in you?
What don’t you like about your home country?
What don’t you like about Europe?
Can you tell us the name of an Austrian beer?
Do you know any beers from your home country?
What is Austria referred to among refugees?
With what characteristics has Austria come to be engrained in your mind?
Can you think of any means by which the traumatic experiences of your
escape could be erased from your memory?
Or isn’t it actually just the wealth that brings you to Europe?
Is your home country a place of crime? A holiday resort?
Questions for immigration police officers:
What is your job?
Please make a gesture that is typical of an immigration police officer!
How do you make refugees turn back home?
48
How do you go about persuading refugees to return home?
Have you ever thought what it would be like to be a refugee?
Are there any special instructions for dealing with refugees?
Have you ever managed to save a refugee? How did you do it?
How do you practice saving someone out of the water?
Have you ever looked at Austria from the outside?
Have you ever looked at Austria through the eyes of a refugee?
Does the ideal refugee exits? – What does he/she look like?
Describe the sequence of feelings when you’re looking at a refugee!
What are you thinking about?
Are refugees a nuisance to you? – Are we a nuisance to you?
When did you have the last argument about refugees?
Do you treat a refugee like a friend or like an enemy?
Isn’t every refugee a potential hero? A potential enemy?
What would you do to put refugees who have been shaken by depression
and anxiety in a joyful mood?
Do you carry responsibility for the fate of refugees?
Would you not rather shift this responsibility on the country and the
economy?
What personal statement about it could you make?
Which image would you draw up for this purpose?
With which statement would you portray yourself?
Questions for facilitators:
Please make a gesture that is typical of a facilitator!
How much money did you take per refugee?
Why did you abandon the refugees?
How long have you been working as a facilitator?
How did you become a facilitator?
Were you once a refugee?
Are you rich?
Do you feel like a travel agent?
Which swear words for refugees can you think of?
How are you planning to get rid of us again?
Or is it all totally different?
What are you looking at with such interest, rather than into our eyes?
What’s the appropriate attire for a facilitator?
For a refugee?
What can facilitators be useful for?
Are you bored?
And what makes a facilitator happy or unhappy?
/
Translated from German by Harald Weiler
jULIUS DEUTSCHBAUER & GERHARD SPRING SOUND OF MIGRATION 49
50
jULIUS DEUTSCHBAUER & GERHARD SPRING SOUND OF MIGRATION 51
Domini Públic
A public space in front of the theatre, headphones, some simple
rules and most of all the audience – these are the most important
components of “Domini Públic,” an interactive performance by the
Spanish director Roger Bernat. You won’t find any actors in his play,
although what he is going to produce is a kind of fiction. To lead the
audience Bernat establishes a certain game-structure, a guided tour:
the members of the audience will be asked questions, transmitted via
radiofrequency to their headphones. The way to answer the questions
is to do a movement as the voice is telling you: go left or go right or go
to the centre of the square. Little by little the game becomes a kind of
fiction, teams will form and they will interact, always guided by the voice.
“Domini Públic” is a political work, going into the research on interactions
between people and their experiences when they become shifted out
of an environment in which they trust. As always in Roger Bernat’s work,
the research on reality is present. His theatre often has a documentary
attitude like in “Amnesia de fuga,” where ten Hindus and Pakistani,
refugees in Spain, tell their private stories. In “Rimuski,” a recent work,
he has local cab drivers refering to their views on the city in which the
performance takes place to make up a utopia on the perfect city as such.
In his video work as well, there is the strong presence of the real which
puts the observer in an uncomfortable situation, somewhere between
fascination and embarrassment. In “Vero,” for instance, Bernat showed a
transsexual woman in the moment of awakening, with the reference to a
classical roman sculpture.
Roger Bernat - the friendly provocateur by Judith Helmer
ROGER BERNAT
Bernat is interested in the anthropological question of the phenomenon of
collaboration. “Human beings want to collaborate, everybody wants that.
We want to react adequately to the situations we find ourselves in. That
is a sociological master-pattern,” he describes. “So, if we ask the people
questions, they will answer, they try to collaborate. Even though they don’t
know the person whose voice they are listening to via the headphones.”
“Domini Públic” is the start of a research process into the figure of the
audience. Without exposing the individual, Bernat is using narrative
possibilities inherent in the audience as a group.
The visitor becomes a participant
Since the beginning of the age of videogames (which started in 1972
with “Pong,” a black screen with two vertical lines that hit a ball to each
other) something developed that Bernat calls “the player paradigm.”
The spectator no longer wishes to be entertained while he is in a
passive mode, but rather to be involved in the action. Theories about
interactivity and participation currently rule many business sectors.
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ROGER BERNAT DOMINI PÚBLIC 53
For example, newspapers try to involve their readers and the success
of pages like Wikipedia is linked to their basic structure of participation.
This change is mirrored in quite a lot contemporary theatre
performances where the spectator becomes a player, a participant.
“We experienced in the last years that the difference between public
and private has faded. Maybe this difference does not even make sense
any more,” Bernat states. “Domini Públic” is playing with this thesis on
different levels. “We got used to playing with our own identity by faking it.
We use different nicknames in the internet, we put real or fake pictures
to our profiles, etc. And it’s not just in the internet. We are characters,
(re)acting according to certain situations and expectations. In the game
‘Domini Públic’ sets up, the people will decide whether they answer
correctly or lie. Some questions are personal, and some touch areas we
usually do not speak about, like our income. And in the end even the true
answers are in a way always constructions.”
Furthermore there will be the participants in the game who are not even
aware of their participation: the public space is not reserved for the show
but used by the “normal” public at the same time. Maybe a skater will
cross or some kids will play their own games. Bernat likes this idea: “Two
parallel universes that will not touch, but take notice of each other.”
Answers have consequences
By answering simple, private, funny or even irritating questions, the group
will form different teams. If the answer is “yes,” one has to go to a specific
point, a place which is different from those who answer “no.” The spectators
will watch each other, and be watched. “You give answers and they take
you into a strange situation,” says Bernat. For him, the performance will
point out what is true, but not only for the time of the show: “You have to
make decisions all the time, small ones and big ones, and they all have
consequences, even if no one can foresee the complete results.”
to follow instructions without questioning them. And on another level, not
in announcements but in a much more subtle way, something has power
on our actions. As Bernat explains: “We live in a very easy going society,
the real power is never flaunted. The hierarchy in society is getting
hidden, that’s how I see it. In my performance you have a hidden power,
the voice, you never get to know but who directs you and you follow.”
In the world of theatre, Bernat has, through his work without actors,
touching people in a very direct way, and involving them to a high degree,
been labelled as the “born provocateur.” But this is a denotation he does
not feel comfortable with. “For bringing the audience to a kind of catharsisexperience, I do not have to play the big provocateur. It’s enough to get
people on a square with headphones on their ears, directing them. That’s
not provocative I think, since I always take good care of my audience. I
don’t want to shock the audience but to play a game with them.”
Bernat studied stage direction and dramaturgy in Barcelona, and has the
background of a classical director, but his work is different. Instead of
actors, he puts young people, refugees or cab drivers on his stage. And
now even the audience itself. “Theatre at the end is only a game. As a
classical director I work with a text, and the text is used as a form of very
concrete rules with no space for chaos or the unexpected. In my work I
want to build other rules for the theatrical game, not so tight ones, but
certainly rules.”
/
Some of the questions and how the group answers will have an effect on
people’s self-perception. “At the moment when everybody is answering
the same way, you get aware of not being as individual as you may have
thought or wished to be. And in the next situation someone beside you
might be not answering according to your expectations and you might
see that your appreciation of someone was wrong.”
“Domini Públic” not only makes it obvious who has the power in terms
of what’s going on — the guiding voice — but also the invisibility of this
power, this person. It is one of those disembodied figures we have gotten
used to when we are put on hold or riding public transport. We are trained
54
ROGER BERNAT DOMINI PÚBLIC 55
56
ROGER BERNAT DOMINI PÚBLIC 57
Fragmentation of the Spectacle by Sevie Tsampalla
BEN
BENAOUISSE
Quoi aprés Babel, Alain
Platel et Jerôme Bel?
The title of his project, “Quoi aprés Babel, Alain Platel et Jerôme Bel?,”
already ending with a question mark, it comes as no surprise that Ben
Benaouisse tries to address certain questions through his research, in
the framework of his participation in apap. For example: “How can one
exit the dead-ends within the contemporary scene of performing arts,
by looking at the same time back at the history of it?,” or: “Is it possible
to bring out to the public the result of one’s efforts in a (preferably the
most) sincere way?” Questions that have already been raised, at the
point that they have become well-known clichés. But for someone who
is occupied not only with the “what” but also with the “how” something
can happen on stage, they still remain essential. As the title suggests,
the questions are being “filtered” through Ben Benaouisse’s personal
parcours as performer and choreographer.
Benaouisse seeks out the possibilities of founding a new company of
performing arts that can integrate at the core of its existence the logic
of a laboratory. Experimenting with form and “testing” the results are
integral stages in this process. Experimentation evolves in this case
around the idea of the “fragmentation of the spectacle,” in the sense
that one encounters on the internet’s YouTube. Borrowing elements
from the “home made” visual vocabulary of YouTube films and the like,
Benaouisse has started filming, in the interior of his own apartment,
situations that, although staged, are seemingly haphazard. The same
principle is used when it comes to finding a structure for the filmed
material. Although having defined seven distinct parts (Prologue, Réel,
Passé, Voyage, Futur, Mythe, Epilogue) the idea is to let the images
succeed one another in a loose structure, where montage is kept to a
58
BEN BENAOUISSE QUOI APRÉS BABEL, ALAIN PLATEL ET JERÔME BEL? 59
minimum. A further step will be to open up an on-line dialogue with a
specific person, on the basis of uploaded footage on YouTube. These
sequences are addressed to Michaela Leslie-Rule, a dancer working
between the USA and Switzerland, who shares with Benaouisse the same
interest in issues such as displacement, ethnicity and migrant memory.
Going through these steps it becomes apparent that various aspects
overlap one another. Benaouisse has incorporated the fragmented
language of the web not only in terms of form, but also in his working
methods. Keeping a balance between the fragmentary and the
structural is a constant effort. Departing from his personal space, trying
to establish a relation with a specific person through the internet,
while at the same time remaining visible to a broader community, is
another effort of balancing between the personal and the public. The
internet is used along the way as a platform for testing the outcome
of those distinct but overlapping efforts. Benaouisse is conscious that,
in doing so, he places himself within the context of an ever increasing
mediacratic culture. The quest and the final step are to find ways of
transcribing this fragmented language on stage. Although the result is
yet to be defined, the idea of the scene as a screen (and vice versa) is
already there.
/
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BEN BENAOUISSE QUOI APRÉS BABEL, ALAIN PLATEL ET JERÔME BEL? 61
MARSALO
& ANTONIO
PIZZICATO
animals
On the way to Castiglioncello, a small village on the west coast of Italy, where
people just have decided to put their trust once again in Silvio Berlusconi and his
political and social plans for the Italians, I am thinking about dance, choreography
and their relation to the social.
Let’s approach it from different perspectives. As a strictly solipsistic individual
is as much a fiction as a person totally determined by society and culture, the
social actually remains the inevitable and always already existing condition of our
living and working. The social dimension of a choreographic project starts with the
chain of encounters leading to a residency or an invitation of an organiser, the
negotiations with collaborating persons and the discussion of a concept. Thereby
the social aspect cannot be denied as a productive element in the process that
has its own dynamics and traps, yet it is often underestimated in institutional
discourse - focusing on the concept, the author and the product.
You Only Live TwicE by Martina Ruhsam
JUHA
Choreographing and dancing are embedded in concrete social structures and
encounters. As soon as we work WITH (and strictly spoken we always do that,
even if we work alone), the situation is already socially configurated, that means
beyond the control and intentionality of one subject — what also signifies a
performance-event as such. (Permanently mutating) relationships sometimes
act as an especially constructive and enabling potency in artistic processes, but
at the same time every collaboration is always a potential cause of friction and
conflict, especially if the involved people have different cultural, social and artistic
backgrounds. How to deal with heterogeneous approaches?
Silvia Bovenschen writes in her book “Becoming Older” that the desire for
appreciation is probably connected with a wish for total synchronisation, with
the desire to commit everybody to one — namely their own — perspective. If more
people are involved in a project, their own perspectives are constantly twisted and
questioned: in the best case, it becomes a realm of negotiations.
Juha Pekka Marsalo is a choreographer and ex-Ultima Vez dancer from Finland
now based in Paris. He was invited by Angela Fumarola (dance-curator of Armunia)
to develop a piece in collaboration with an Italian director. After declaring his
wish to work with a composer or musician, Antonio Pizzicato, singer and Italian
music and theatre-director, became part of the project. Both authors realized
fundamental differences in their approach towards the project. After two
heterogeneous understandings of how to work had collided, they decided to work
on the development of elements for the project separately from each other for
the duration of one week. That’s when a fourth person was involved: Marco Menini,
an Italian dramaturge who was subsequently asked to help in connecting the
individually developed material. Frederic Moreau observed the ongoing work in
order to develop the light design for the performance “ANIMAL/You only live twice.”
62
jUHA MARSALO & ANTONIO PIZZICATO ANIMALS 63
Snap shot
When I come to the huge theatre-tent in Castello Pasquini, which is located on a
romantic hill in a prosperous village facing the seaside, I observe how Juha Pekka
Marsalo and Antonio Pizzicato are teaching specific skills to each other. How to
floor somebody, how to pronounce an English text correctly, how to find the right
tone to start with a chanted phrase, how to find a common rhythm. An exchange of
embodied knowledge literally takes place.
And there is a question floating in the space: How to end the piece?
While singing into the microphone an old chant that reminds me of Claudio
Monteverdi´s madrigals (titled “Songs of Love and War”), Pizzicato is making
nervous gestures on his own body, as if he would engrave a chaotic pattern on his
own skin. Both artists are confronting an imaginary audience — not present yet —
with the verbal and vocal evocation of pain and violence. Sitting on one of the 600
empty chairs and listening to the sounds that are approaching me from the stage,
the picture of a machine gun shooting an empty field appears in my mind. Juha
Pekka Marsalo is “cutting” the space with words.
Do you know how it sounds when your head hits the stone floor?
Do you know how it sounds if your foot twists?
Do you know how it sounds if you cut your finger with a kitchen knife?
Do you know how it sounds if you bite your tongue?
Do you know how it sounds if your arm slips out of your shoulder?
Do you know how it sounds if you walk on broken glass?
Do you know how it sounds if there is a spike in your eye?
Do you know how it sounds if you lose a tooth?
Do you know how it sounds if the knee bends the wrong way?
Do you know how it sounds if a bone comes out through the skin?
“Are violence and brutality (in movement) interesting issues for his work?,” I
am asking Juha Pekka Marsalo later. “No”, he answers. But the apap title “The
art of survival - artistic views on the social,” would not allow a light and fluffy
performance. That would not be a choice.
The topics that Antonio Pizzicato and Juha Pekka Marsalo are addressing spare
every kind of illusion: pain, disease, resignation, violence, although form-wise,
their performance is quite entertaining: they sing, they dance, they scream, they
fall, they go into the audience, they are physically and emotionally involved.
The attempt to categorize what is rehearsed here in order to become a part of
the performance can only fail. Too compound are the styles of this, let’s call it,
promiscuous working-method that is constantly blurring the borders between
singing, declaiming, dancing and screaming in pop-, rock-, madrigal- and other
styles. And exactly this intermixture is the unique benefit of the collaboration of
64
Juha Pekka Marsalo and Antonio Pizzicato. The two artists decided not to use any
scenography, objects or recorded music. Everything that happens (besides the
light design), is developed and done in real time by the two men on stage — “gifted
with their bodies and voices.”
Their performance reaches a climax in screaming a kind of mantra. In trying to
produce a reality by repeatedly screaming for it, the over-and-over-iteration of
the sentence “I WILL NEVER DIE” – sung in two voices – in the style of a rock song,
seems like an uncompromising test of the performative capability of language.
Let’s never die!
Repeat these words 10.000 times a day and it will work!
I will never die
I will never die
I will never die
I will never die
...
Juha Pekka Marsalo:
“The survival is the fact that you cannot imagine your end.
We are here because we have an instinct to survive. What does that mean? It
means that we cannot understand our end. If I understand my end, maybe I won´t
survive. So it has to be marked somewhere in me: I will live forever. It is marked in
me. It´s somewhere. I can say: I will die, I know. But at the same time, what is in me,
tells me: You will not die, never.”
The atmosphere is cooking
Whereas the social is easily perceived as a distinctive quality and capability of
human beings, Pizzicato and Marsalo assume an animalistic dimension in the social
behaviour and come to the conclusion that survival produces our own destruction.
It’s burned in my bones
It’s graved in my heart
It’s marked in my mind
I will never die
It’s written in me
My grandfather didn’t die
My grandgrandfathers didn’t die
They are all alive
I’m not gonna die Never
Let’s live forever
A discussion about the apap title turns out to be a debate about climate change
and the abundance of energy that human beings are dissipating, unable to
change their behaviour and without showing any commitment to seriously look for
alternatives. They are we. And we are enthusiastically and unaltered approaching
a probable catastrophe.
jUHA MARSALO & ANTONIO PIZZICATO ANIMALS 65
And the next sandwich is waiting
On the highway between Bologna and Firenze, on the way back from
Castiglioncello, I look at all the cars on the motorway and wonder about the social
life that takes place within them. Stopping at one Autogrill-motorway-service,
besides petrol stations the social junctions of street systems, I have a similar
feeling as in airports and train stations. People from all kinds of social and cultural
contexts meet in one space for the duration of a sandwich, check-in time or train
arrival. They consume the same products and continue on the same tracks in
order to disperse again into diverse “private,” cultural and social surroundings.
I remember how Juha Pekka Marsalo was talking about a Chinese family he saw in
one Italian Autogrill-roadhouse, stopping their huge Mercedes convertible for a
moment. He was recalling the image of a big Chinese kid sitting on the front seat
of the huge Mercedes.
If capitalism is the global usurpation of belonging, the social is permanently
and complexly intertwined with economic requests and related dependences
— in some cases to the existential necessity for material conditions to ensure
surviving, and in other cases, to the increase of status symbols, luxury and power.
Juha Pekka Marsalo:
“If you watch TV and you watch the commercials once, you are part of ten millions.
So the impact of art is…nothing in a way.”
Antonio Pizzicato:
“For me, the fact about how many people will come to the performance is not
important in what I do. I decide that I want to talk about something. Then it depends
on how I talk about this. How I create something about this. And then 5 persons will
come or 500. I don´t know. But I don´t take care about how many persons will come.”
Juha Pekka Marsalo:
“I don´t dream that there will be a big impact on anything in this world whatever I
do. Is it gonna change something? That´s not the question to ask. You just do it.”
Don´t turn back, look forward,
Don´t listen, move forward
Don’t turn back, erase your steps
Don’t look to the ground behind your back
All the text-fragments on
the right side in this text are
quotations of the performance
ANIMAL / You only live twice
and are written by Antonio
Pizzicato, Juha Pekka Marsalo
and Marco Menini
66
The art of surviving is connected with the art of forgetting.
And, with keeping to go on.
/
jUHA MARSALO & ANTONIO PIZZICATO ANIMALS 67
THE ART OF DYING by Lina Saneh
LINA SANEH
THE ART OF DYING
Unfortunately I do not remember who said that art doesn’t have to clean up the
mess produced by politics and society. I pretty much agree with that. Similarly it isn’t
up to art to assure our staying the course, that we continue for better for worse, this
means things are not as serious as they seem.
I always had a hidden penchant for the works seeking death rather than
life, rupture rather than link, today rather than yesterday and tomorrow,
incomprehension rather than communication, divergences rather than
common ground, solitude rather than contact, absence rather than presence,
disappearance rather than construction. I find them infinitely political and poetic.
The Lebanese should learn to die, said Jalal Toufic. And (only?) art could achieve
this, he continues1.
1
Today my reflection on certain topics
Two paradoxes, not at all provocative and extremely precise.
and subjects which I intend to work
out for the apap project, inspired
by the propositions of the various
Although it is legitimate to ask: how can one teach dying to people who in this part
participating artists, will be based on
of the world, which is the Lebanon and the Middle East, die incessantly, wage war
the ideas and concepts which are, in
and count their dead in hundreds each day?
essence, proposed by Jalal Toufic in his
article « Ruins » in : Vampires, An Uneasy
But when you “count” your dead in hundreds, is this really counting?
Essay on the Undead in Film, éd. The
To count your dead only to better glorify this anonymous mass of bloodshed for
Post-Apollo Press, California, 2003.
the cause (be it pseudo-secular or frankly religious), is this still counting the dead?
Is this knowing what it means to die?
How to teach dying to a society that some consider to still be a consumer society,
a society of sacrifice, of rivalry gift and of potlatch2?
2.
I do not reject this interpretation,
but I would express it in a more subtle
Nevertheless, actually in spite of ten thousand if not a hundred
and cautious way. But that lies beyond
thousand deaths since the civil war until today, the Lebanese still have not learnt
the scope of this modest text.
to die.
The posters of the “martyrs” of the different belligerent camps – or even of
people who died of natural causes or in accidents – continue to invade the walls
of the city for years, renewed after each new battle and at each commemoration,
sometimes accompanied by a “Happy (third) anniversary in paradise”... Some –
very rare – smile at us pleasantly, to attract us towards them as it were; others –
much more frequent and much more austere – seem to dare us not to forget them
or to stray from the path they blazed and for which they paid dearly with their
lives: this means to continue the fight until the last drop of blood and until victory.
Who makes the posters? Who picks the one that is good to develop from among
the different portraits of the deceased? Who decides on their expression and on
the retouching necessary for this purpose? Who plays games with their looks?
68
LINA SANEH THE ART OF DYING 69
“Remember me,” father Hamlet’s ghost threatens son Hamlet; and he got what
he wanted to the last drop of blood including the “re”instatement of Fortinbras
the Norwegian in his “rights” over Denmark which for a long time already had been
emitting the stench of its dead.
So we see our dead continue to talk big to us in their new old speeches every day
on the television and to harangue us on every occasion; we also see them on the
posters standing behind or at the side of living persons, whispering advice and
recommendations into their ear; or again we see these same dead in dialogue
with each other, still on the posters, meeting and organising meetings and still
changing the course of the things of the world of living beings (although in their
lifetime they would never have met, either due to hostility or to chronological
impossibility... But it is true that the space-time of death is labyrinthine and
therefore anything can happen there. But it is also true that if the world of death
can appear to us in a flash, in the ruins or in the return of the ghosts, it is indeed
the other world that may continue to interfere with ours); and finally we see
and hear the martyrs in their pre-recorded video-testaments announcing their
death to us, in our presence, while they promise us and reassure us that they will
continue to live among us...
And the people living in Lebanon readily comply with the call of the dead and
promise to keep them alive forever in their hearts, to preserve their image and
their presence among us, to follow the path they showed us and above all to
safeguard their “due” in the distribution of power.
The different Lebanese (and Arab and Middle-Eastern) communities cultivate their
dead only in order to better invest them in their fights for hegemony.
The history of the individual differs enormously from the history of the
community, of the group. And the history of the city differs enormously from the
history of the nation and of the homeland.
The history of the nation/homeland is stable, fixed, immobile, a whole, faithful
to its myths, purified of any doubt. While the history of the city seethes with
lonely and solitary individuals coming from all parts to settle there as guests,
temporarily, discreetly and without ever losing the feeling of the provisional
nature of their stay. In the hybrid and ephemeral, changing city without thickness
there is no place for roots.
The history of the individual does not enter on the heritage of any other individual.
It stays its own until one day oblivion buries them both. It gives no example to
follow, no model to imitate. At most it remains a private personal experience
at which one could have a quick look in order to take from it some ideas or
questions concerning our present. A present detached from its past, finished and
70
irreproducible and turned towards a future open to all possibilities.
The history we inherited from our ancestors, heavy burden which rests both on
our shoulders and on our heart, demands from us, mercilessly, submission and
faithfulness, perseverance and persistence, continuation and upkeep of old
dreams and old reasons for which they fought and they died. Doubt and weakness
are not permitted; because this is the fault line along which the enemy may
penetrate and in this way, one would risk becoming a traitor and an enemy agent.
Will the Lebanese ever learn to forget? To bury their dead, forget about them,
turn around and continue their life? Will they ever learn to count their dead one
by one? To spell their names and first names as though unfamiliar? To recognize
the details of their unique faces with no past except their own, secret and
private, inaccessible, interrupted forever, without family tree, without parents
or descendants and even without horizontal or communitarian extension, nor
fraternal or geographical one, nor any at all? And with that, will they learn to be
horrified by the extent of the catastrophe instead of cheering each new massacre
they suffer as a victory? Yes, they cheer each new massacre as a victory because
each tear, each scream of pain and each insult brought forward against the
enemy is in their mouth a victory shout! Victory, they think that by being able to
prove (once again! – because all the other times do not seem to be sufficient proof
for them!) how monstrous the enemy we fight (and who fights us) is, we therefore
are right to continue to fight to the last drop of blood to take revenge for the
bloodshed and so on… without end. Will the Lebanese never learn to acknowledge
their defeat in order to be finally able to build their life, their present and from
there on their future without wasting their time looking at the past?
Perpetuating the life of our dead and fighting the enemy to the last drop of
blood, doesn’t that mean refusing to recognize our death as well as that of the
so-called “enemy”? Isn’t that a perverse effect? Or, still more perverse, if it were
a strategy knowingly planned and carried out? Because, as J. Toufic explains, the
dead don’t have an identity of their own, they are nobody and consequently they
are everybody and all the dead are me, and “all the names in history are me.” This
means, among other things, that since all are already undead, one is inhabited
by the others. Therefore one could think that racism, rejection of the other, of
the others, mainly becomes equivalent to limiting beings to living beings instead
of recognizing them: undead. Because if one recognizes that we are undead, and
therefore we are anyone and everyone, racism becomes ridiculous. This is the
reason for the insistence on limiting beings to living beings in order to be able to
practice racism.
/
Translated from French by
Werner Rappl
LINA SANEH THE ART OF DYING 71
ABOUT FALLING
The texts and images presented here are small selection from an ongoing working
exchange between Diego Gil and Igor Dobricic. They are chosen and organized
intuitively and according to their associative resonance rather than logic. In their
content and form and in a way they are ordered, the offered materials are trying
to stay faithful to the kaleidoscopic, personal nature of communication between
two artists. The overall working process that will lead to a performance “About
Falling” is documented in the form of a blog on www.aboutfalling.wordpress.com
1. Igor, 15/03/08 — Strange Position
It is not our responsibility (as artists) to offer a critique of society, also
not to preach (meta)physical truths to the “common people,” also not
to provide the comfort of a complete, aesthetically satisfactory image
of the world…etc. Our responsibility is to use critical consciousness,
(meta)physical knowledge, aesthetic ability to navigate ourselves away
from a position of being a passive and unconcerned object of public
contemplation and recover shared experience of “getting together”
with those who are separated from us - the audience. Observers need
to be included in the work. They need to be navigated into the midst
of it. THEY should be with US. Not only through mediation of symbols
or in technical terms, but concretely, through an immediate affective
experience. Control of attention is one obvious strategy that can in an
affective and kinetic way make the passive observer dance with us. But
that’s not enough. Apart from plotting a diagram of external attentionlocations in time/space, we need to identify the proper internal position
from which we are directing our own attention and engaging with each
other and the audience. It is a strange position that we need to occupy.
A position in between acting for ourselves and acting for others. It
seems that this is a real meaning of intuition. Our instinct makes us act
(move) for ourselves. Intelligence is making us act (move) for the OTHER.
The practice of intuition makes it possible for a performer to stay at
an equal distance from both instinct and intelligence, arrogance and
opportunism, isolation and prostitution. What a strange place this is.
Neither far nor close to the others, neither beautiful nor didactic, neither
public nor private. Slightly absentminded. Available. If we do not find this
place from which we move, talk, exist for ourselves and for the others in a
same time, we will, whatever we do, miss the point.
ABOUT FALLING by Diego Gil & Igor Dobricic
DIEGO GIL
& IGOR
DOBRICIC
2. Diego, 03/11/07 — Action
Am I ready to go to my past?
(Whatever action that could be)
Am I ready to go to my past?
(Any action should be…bla bla…)
Do I have that drive?
Do I care to be afraid?
Am I scared of having to cry?
Do I want to embrace loneliness like a King?
Do I want?
How I want?
Going back to the past.
Falling down the stairs.
Falling back.
Getting rid of what doesn´t make me fall…(bla bla)
72
DIEGO GIL & IGOR DOBRICIC ABOUT FALLING 73
Falling down the stairs
It is dark
You will be blind
Be blind
Feel back
Don’t look back
Feel and cry
It is not okay It is okay
It hurts
My back hurt when I was a child
I cry
Felt
3. Igor, 16/03/08 — Love
We do not have to love everybody, we should love those who, at every
particular moment in life, happen to be with us… we should love them
OR leave them and go somewhere else where love is possible. So, if we
choose to end up in theatre with a bunch of “strangers” looking at us, then
we have to take the consequences of our choice. We are not with these
people to fulfill our exhibitionism or their voyeurism but to be together.
That’s love. It does not matter that in an hour or two we will part and
probably never meet again. WHAT MATTERS IS THE PRESENT MOMENT in
which we willingly coexist with each other. Otherwise we should go away, be
somewhere else. It is like going to a party. The only real reason for a party
is a moment of love for those with whom we are at the party. Not for the
few “we like” or know or consider our friends, as long as this implies that
there are others around, those who are not our friends. Or we should party
only with our friends. Party IS the moment of love between those who are
participating in it. There are no strangers in a party. As much as there are
no strangers in theatre. Otherwise there is no party and no theatre.
EVERYBODY exists only as those few who are surrounding us NOW. They
are, from moment to moment, our only experience of humanity. To
love them is to love EVERYBODY. The immediacy of an encounter is what
makes love real and universal at the same time.
4. Diego, 18/02/08 — Here And Now
When thinking about the possibility to add “content” to the movement
material, I reflected upon my personal history of sickness as a child. (Not
trying to represent images of my memory, but using them as inspirations
to articulate actions with the physical movement). Nevertheless, I find
that pointless. The performance should be an event happening in the
“here and now.” Which means that I have to look at the elements that
we have now. Because they are the elements that audience will perceive
74
in the now of the performative event. The attention should be directed
towards the action we three performers will perform: one at a time we will
fall backwards and forwards, externalizing and internalizing movements.
Rehearsals in the studio should be about understanding the dynamics of
that action. I see it as a diagram of forces. I see it. It is like a graphic. This
action is the generator that will attract and repulse the issues that we
have been collecting since we started working.
5. Igor 02/11/07 — To Dance to A Music of the Fall (Funerary Rights)
To dance to a music of the fall is to tell ABOUT the fall. But what is
the “music of the fall” and how do you dance to it? That’s where the
existential structure of experience comes into play. It is not us who
are falling. It is rather that, due to the awareness of our mortality, in
relation to the world, we are constituted by the fall itself. Under certain
conditions of existence (sickness, depression, failure, death) the fall
emerges as the essential structure of existence and WE ARE, under those
conditions, the music of the fall. To dance to it means to remember its
structure, re-actualize it, while keeping the minimal distance from it.
Because, and this is, in my opinion, key for understanding the whole
performance, FALL ALREADY HAPPENED. That’s why we can repeat it again
and again. This is an act of remembrance through which we are hoping to
recover its meaning and get free from it. Move on.
6. Diego, 21/03/08 — Explaining Actions
The message to communicate is that we are paying attention to the
activity of ourselves. We are self conscious of what is going on in our
existence, and luckily, to the event created with the audience in front
of us. We pay attention critically (and this type of attention gives an
“electric” quality to our actions) and we pay attention sensorially (and
this gives a “warmth” quality to our actions). The electric quality is
connected with reaching out. The warmth quality is connected with
hiding in. Reach out: this gesture presents ourselves to the audience,
and at the same time, in lesser degree, hides us from them. It is to bring
attention to the real space of the theatre. The action performs our will to
connect. It is a posture that has suspension. I like the idea of suspension
as a metaphor for delaying audience’s expectation. Suspension is also a
reference to the imagery of floating or soaring. Reach in: it is a gesture
closer to hiding us from the audience, and the real space that we are
sharing with them. It is more intimate. I see it as a break from the direct
communication. It is a moment to sense ourselves, to be affected by
what we are doing on stage. It is a different way to touch with our skin,
with our attention, with our hands and feet, the space of theatre. A
moment to feel versus a moment to think critically. The gesture takes
DIEGO GIL & IGOR DOBRICIC ABOUT FALLING 75
the danger to get totally isolated from the event we are sharing with
the audience. It proposes to feel (a bit) different: to be more intuitive.
View point: we can call it perspective. The spatial perspective, the spot
in the space of the theatre where we choose to stand and perform
our movements of reach out and in. It is also the attitude towards the
subject matter of the piece. It is related with the becoming singular
of the specific. Even when we perform one message, we do it in three
singular ways. This means that when one performer comes to replace
and continue the action that the other was just doing, he does it
similar to the other but allowing his own style to emerge. Lastly, it is
detachment. If we seriously become messengers of a message, we need
to empty our ego. In this sense the “activity” itself happening in our body
is transmitted, but not just the intention to communicate that activity.
Communication needs to emerge, because it is already happening in
the activity of our body (in our individual-singular existence). Our true
existence on stage is to disappear and become communication. Outside
the theatre our existence is something else…. more egotistic.
7. Igor, 24/02/08 — Origami As A Diagram
After looking at the diagram, I am getting fascinated by the origami. Not
only that the diagram in itself is amazingly accurate representation of
the logic and meaning of “About Falling” but, while making my first paper
crane, completely immersing myself in a physical process of folding
the material, I got additional realization about the importance of the
concrete space/time action that actualize the potential encoded in the
diagram itself. I would like to note some observations both in relation to
the representational character of the diagram and the practical process
of its realization. The diagram itself, in logical terms, plots the timespace
of the action. It’s the narrative line that starts from a simple form/
content (square shaped piece of paper) and in a number of concrete
steps, through the repeated act of (un)folding — forward and backward,
inside and outside, it leads us to the emergence of meaning (the figure
of the crane) as the final transformation of the substance into sign.
What was, in its primordial state, just an open field of possibilities (the
paper) through the application of the diagrammatic scheme of unfolding
movements is emerging as a sign. Process of fall(d)ing (in and out,
backward and forward) results in a miracle — soaring three-dimensional
image of a bird that is suddenly appearing from the falling nothingness of
paper. Hope, that you were talking about in one of your previous entries,
is in the belief that action through which we are trying to (un)fall(d)
material/substance will lead to an emergence (soaring) of meaning. From
the side of the material, this emergence can be understood as a form of
speech — substance giving itself a name by becoming that name (the
bird). From the side of the maker, external observer, the emergence of
76
meaning is perceived as a moment in which recognition of new content
breaks through abstract and repetitive transformations of form.
8. Diego, 20/02/08 — Hope
I found an inspiring conversation between interviewer Mary Zournazi and
philosopher Brian Massumi that touches on issues such as “falling” and
“hope.” It is called “Navigating Movements.” Interviewer Mary Zournazi
begins the conversation talking about falling. “When you walk, each
step is the body´s movement against falling — each movement is felt
in our potential for freedom as we move with the earth´s gravitational
pull. When we navigate our way through the world, there are different
pulls, constraints and freedoms that move us forward and propel us
into life. But in the changing face of capitalism, media information and
technologies — which circulate the globe in more virtual and less obvious
ways — how do the constraints on freedom involve our affective and
embodied dimensions of experience?” Then Zournazi asks Massumi what
are his thoughts on the potential of hope during these times. I will jump
straight to the explanation of “hope.” I can connect it with the (poetic)
idea of “miracle” that started “About falling.” Miracle as a term extracted
from its religious meaning and investigated on its pragmatic function.
“In my own work I use the concept of ‘affect’ as a way of talking about
that margin of manoeuvrability, the ‘where we might be able to go and
what we might be able to do’ in every present situation... It´s not exactly
going for more, either. It´s more like being right where you are — more
intensely.” Then, the fall that we are working is the movement between
“freedom” and “constraint” focused on the negative aspect that disconnects us from others (isolation) and from the present time (towards
the past). Connection with the other is hope and open possibility “in” the
present for more to come (the future). I know that we already talked and
wrote about this a lot! But as a new input I wanted to stress the necessity
of bringing hope into the first part of the performance. As we wrote in the
subsidy application, the encounter-connection with the other is already
there in our (be) longing for it. Blossomy possibilities need to be perceived
even in the first desperate and isolated landscape. This wish is connected
with changes that happened in my private life since we started the
work. I am almost not interested anymore in desperation, “and then” its
solution, but in its interconnection. I guess I want to stand for hope.
9. Igor, 02/08/07 — Fear Into Generosity, Fall Into Soaring
An attempt to tell something (anything) without a pretension that
there is more to be done but an honest, difficult, almost impossible
attempt toward communication, is in my opinion the most important
thing to be (re)presented in art today. That’s why the attempt IS the
message. This is not a matter of useful but empty rhetoric that is
DIEGO GIL & IGOR DOBRICIC ABOUT FALLING 77
trying to give undeserved dignity of achievement to a failed attempt,
because if it were a trick, it would be connected to self-pity and shame,
and those emotions, being a result of self-reflection, are making us
hopelessly sophisticated neurotics. On the other hand, to a degree to
which innocence is free from self-pity and shame, an attempt toward
communication, toward final solution to an unsolvable problem (of
community, immortality, etc.) is shameless and unreflective even when
it leads to an utter failure. Who fails (falls) in front of our eyes with the
courage and pure enthusiasm of a child who honestly believes he can
succeed, will make us recognize ourself in him. It will, in other words,
make us compassionate. Impossibility of the solution will be received
as a solution in the form of unconditional compassion. Compassion and
consequently CARE are the only solutions to a failure. It is a paradoxical
solution as it is not resolving anything else but the loneliness of our
failing. To realise that we are not failing alone but together with every
human being who ever lived, is making failure as a negative value
judgment irrelevant. You need to embody universal failure in a pure
state that reaches another person as his own failure, but in such an
aesthetically superior manner that instead of fear, inspire generosity,
instead of pity, compassion. This transformation of fear into generosity,
is analogue to the transformation of existential fall into soaring and it is
the real meaning of alchemical procedure that changes lead into gold.
This transformation is the magical reversal which constitutes miracle.
10. Diego, 30/06/07 — Care, Political Understanding of the Soul
Yesterday I met my old friend Lucía. She had a book of mine: Foucault’s
“Histoire de la sexualité 3.” “La souci de soi.” This morning I started
to read it again. (I already did four years ago, fully.) It mentions an
aspect of what you just wrote: the care of the self is a constant work
of consciousness, a work upon oneself, that traces a line between
“philosophy” and “healing.” It is not a practice of adding more knowledge,
but to understand our thoughts, sensations, representations and
imaginations. And it is not about “loneliness,” or to close oneself, but to
understand oneself in relation with the world. A political understanding
of the soul. When in our last meeting I talked about movement as “selfdetermination,” I guess I meant it in this way: self constitution of the
soul through a deeper understanding. My actual interest is the one of
“attitude.” I guess understanding is one state of being and attitude is the
tension/intention through which you connect with this state. It is the
way of tuning. And perhaps connected with what you call “the place from
where you act.” The tone of your action.
/
78
DIEGO GIL & IGOR DOBRICIC ABOUT FALLING 79
PRODUCTION
CREDITS
BEN BENAOUISSE
Title / working title: Quoi aprés Babel, Alain Platel et Jérôme Bel?
Choreographer / director: Ben Benaouisse
Performer/s: differing from city to city
Organiser/s: Buda Arts Centre and Workspace Brussels
Photo credits: Invasif vzw
OLIVER FRLJIC
Title / working title: Migration Cookbook
Author of the concept: Oliver Frljic
Performer: Oliver Frljic
Organiser: Studentski centar Zagreb, Teatar &td, Kultura promjene
Photo credits: Oliver Frljic
ROGER BERNAT
Title / working title: Domini Públic (Public Domain)
Choreographer / director: Roger Bernat
Performer/s: the audience
Organiser: La Mekanica
Photo credits: Cristina Fontsaré
Website: www.rogerbernat.com
MEKHITAR GARABEDIAN
Title / working title: m et moi
Directors: Mekhitar Garabedian and Céline Butaye
Performers: Mekhitar Garabedian and Céline Butaye
Organiser: Buda Arts Centre and Workspace Brussels
Photo credits: Mekhitar Garabedian and Céline Butaye
Website: www.garabedian77.be
CABULA6
Title / working title: The Angola Project
Choreographer / director: Jeremy Xido
Performer/s: Jeremy Xido, guests and acquaintances
Organiser: Transforma
Photo credits: Jeremy Xido
Website: www.cabula6.com / http://c6angola.wordpress.com/
JUHA MARSALO & ANTONIO PIZZICATO
Title / working title: ANIMALS
Choreographer / director: Antonio Pizzicato, Juha Marsalo
Performer/s: Antonio Pizzicato, Juha Marsalo
Dramaturge: Marco Menini
Lightdesign: Frédéric Moreau
Organiser: Armunia
Photo credits: Martina Ruhsam
JULIUS DEUTSCHBAUER & GERHARD SPRING
Title / working title: Sound of Migration. Ein Mitspielfilm
Choreographer / director: Julius Deutschbauer / Gerhard Spring
Performer/s: Audience of the Salzburg Festival as well as people
from Salzburg and other tourists
Organiser: Szene Salzburg
Second unit: Margarita Kirchner
Photos: Marlene Ropac, Margarita Kirchner
Copyright: Deutschbauer / Spring
ANNA PIOTROWSKA
Title / working title: look_4_faces
Choreographer/director: Anna Piotrowska
Performer: Anna Piotrowska
Concept Cooperation: Agnieszka Mazur
Visualisation: Marcin Morawicki, Karolina Płuska
Organiser: Silesian Dance Theatre
Photo credits: Marcin Morawicki, Tomasz Dyczewski
Website: www.eferte.pl
DIEGO GIL & IGOR DOBRICIC
Title / working title: About Falling
Choreographer / director: Diego Gil and Igor Dobricic
Performer/s: Norberto Llopis Segarra, Felix Marchand and Diego Gil
Organiser: Hetveem theatre and Tanzfabrik Berlin
Photo credits: Igor Dobricic
Website: www.aboutfalling.wordpress.com
IFFAT FATIMA
Title / working title: Ethnography of a European City:
conversations in an Indian restaurant in Salzburg
Director: Iffat Fatima
Organiser: Szene Salzburg
Second unit: Margarita Kirchner
Photo credits: Iffat Fatima; Photos with the banners: Association
of Parents of Disappeared Persons in Kashmir
80
PRODUCTION CREDITS 81
ARTISTS’
BIOGRAPHIES
BEN BENAOUISSE (Algeria)
Born in 1971, Ben Benaouisse is a second generation immigrant
whose family is from Algeria, and who has been working as an
actor and dancer with Victoria, Les Ballets C. de la B. and Latrinité.
During recent years, Benaouisse has been directing his own
performances and visual installations, within his own structure
Invasif and within “De Bank” (the bench) of Victoria.
films include Flüchtlingsdrama am Lunzer See. Ein Mitspielfilm,
2007 (presentation at Diagonale 2008). Their work is included in
books such as 6 Künstler-Künstler-Reden, edition selene, Wien
2003; Politisch für Künstler, Triton, Wien 2003; Zwialoge, Czernin
Verlag, Wien 2006; Figur ohne Grund, Passagen-Verlag, Wien 2008.
Since 1997, Julius Deutschbauer has organized the Bibliothek
ungelesener Bücher.
ROGER BERNAT (Spain)
Born in Barcelona in 1968, Roger Bernat studied Theatre Direction
and Dramaturgy at Institut del Teatre de Barcelona, where he
graduated with the prize “Premio Extraordinario 1996.” Between
1997 and 2001 he was one of the founding members and directors
of General Elèctrica, together with Tomàs Aragay, a Creation Centre
for Dance and Theatre, based in Barcelona. In addition to being an
author, he has directed the following pieces: 10.000 Kg (Special Prize
of the Critic 96/97); Álbum; Trilogia 70; Bona Gent; LA LA LA LA LA;
Amnèsia de Fuga, Tot és perfecte or Das Paradies Experiment. He has
also been developing video and installation works: Polar, La Tribu (3
contes patriòtics), Vero or El que sap tothom i ningú no gosa dir. His
recent projects are Rimuski, a project with taxi drivers from different
cities of the world, which was presented in Vienna and in Barcelona in
2008, and Public Domain, a new creation for apap VI.
IGOR DOBRICIC (Serbia)
Born in 1966 in Belgrade, Serbia, Igor Dobricic lives and works in
Amsterdam. He studied dramaturgy at the Academy of Dramatic
Arts in Belgrade, (former) Yugoslavia, left his home country at the
beginning of the Balkan wars and lived/worked for three years
in Australia before returning to work as the dramaturge for the
Belgrade International Theatre festival (BITEF). In 1995 he embarked
on an experimental performance work with the group of teenagers,
creating together with them and in a period of four years, a
small body of work. During 1998 he got involved, as a grantee, in
an art project funded by the European Cultural Foundation. In
1999 he became a coordinator of the Arts programme of ECF and
moved to Holland. In Amsterdam, Dobricic was admitted to the
postgraduate course at the De Amsterdamse School / Advanced
Research in Theatre and Dance Studies (DasArts), where he created
installations and solo performances mostly experimenting with
the parameters of the performer/audience presence inside a
specific space/time context. In 2004, Dobricic established the
TIME foundation, together with a group of artists, as a platform for
international interdisciplinary artistic collaboration.
Cabula6: JEREMY XIDO (USA)
& CLAUDIA HEU (Austria)
Cabula6 was founded by Jeremy Xido in 2000 and is currently
co-directed by Xido and Claudia Heu.
Originally from Detroit, Jeremy Xido was trained as an actor and
dancer in New York and plays Capoeira Angola with Mestre João
Grande in New York and Mestre Morães in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil.
He has worked extensively as a performer in the United States and
Europe in theatre, dance, film and television. He has written and
directed a number of theatre pieces and short films. With Cabula6
he has performed all over Europe and the United States.
Claudia Heu lives in Vienna and works as a director, performer
and teacher in the field of dance, experimental theatre and
performance. She is the founder of ONNO theatre, and, since 2003
has worked together with Jeremy Xido as co-director of Cabula6.
In addition to her work in the theatre, she has dedicated years of
her life to community service: she spent a year and a half working
in a Favela on the outskirts of São Paulo, Brazil, and has also
worked in refugee camps and prisons in Austria.
JULIUS DEUTSCHBAUER
& GERHARD SPRING (Austria)
Julius Deutschbauer, born in 1961 in Klagenfurt, and Gerhard
Spring, born in 1962 in Scheibbs, are currently based in Vienna,
Austria. From 2000 to 2007 they have presented creations as
“Deutschbauer / Spring.” Their exhibitions have been seen at
Kunsthalle Wien, Shedhalle Zürich, Galeria Zachenta Warschau;
their performances and theatre pieces have been presented
by Tanzquartier Wien, Thalia Theatre in Hamburg, and Politik im
Freien Theatre in Berlin. Their last collaborative exhibition Nur 100
Plakate was on view at the Museum Angewandter Kunst, Wien. Their
82
OLIVER FRLJIC (Croatia)
Oliver Frljic, a director, writer and performer, is a member of
the Centre for Drama Arts in Zagreb as well as a member of the
editorial board of the performing arts magazine Frakcija. He
studied Philosophy, Theatre Directing and Theology from 1994 to
2000. In 2002 he worked on the production of Luigi Pirandello’s
We are improvising tonight at Zagreb’s Croatian National Theatre
as a performer and assistant director. In 2003 he directed
productions at KUFER Zagreb (Fernando Pessoa’s Sailor) and at
the Istrian National Theatre Pula (Tatjana Suput’s Don’t bite your
nails, Lidija). In 2004 he directed Sarah Kane’s Phedra’s Love, and
Georges Feydeau’s Madam’s Mother has died! at the Academy of
Drama Arts Zagreb. He also co-authored and performed in Roland
Barthes’ Lover’s Discourse. In 2005 he directed and performed
in The Importance of having a Concept at the Centre for Drama
Arts, Grandmothering at the Academy of Drama Arts, and Georg
Büchner’s Death of Danton for Banana Guerilla. In 2006 he
directed The Seven Against Thebes, and The Misses Rice, Long
Before Geopolitics There Was Music. He is currently the author
of the concept and director for the Thomas Mann / Henry Purcell
production Death in Venice / Dido and Aeneas at theatre &TD well
as performing in Albert Camus’ The Plague at theatre &TD.
IFFAT FATIMA (India)
Iffat Fatima is an independent documentary filmmaker based
in Delhi. She was born and raised in Kashmir and received her
masters degree in Mass Communication from Delhi. At present,
she is working in Kashmir, involved in advocacy, and campaigning
against Enforced Disappearances. Amongst her films are The
Kesar Saga which explores the art of story telling in the Himalayan
region of Ladakh, Boojh Sakey to Boojh, on the contemporary
understanding of Amir Khusro, the 13th century Sufi poet and
scholar from Delhi, In the Realm of the Visual, on one of India’s
most prolific and versatile artist and designer Dashrath Patel.
In 2001, she was awarded the Asia Fellowship to live and work in
Sri Lanka on Intercommunal Relations and Education. In 2005,
she completed her documentary film Lanka - the other side of
war and peace, which focuses on issues of memory and violence
in Sri Lanka. In 2004, she completed the Brandeis International
Fellowship Program (2003-2004): Recasting Reconciliation
through Culture and Arts, at Brandeis University, Boston, USA.
MEKHITAR GARABEDIAN (Armenia)
Born in 1977, Mekhitar Garabedian is a second generation immigrant
whose family is from Armenia, and who is currently working as a
visual artist in Ghent, Belgium. In 2005, he was artist-in-residence
at Buda Arts Centre where he was able to develop his artistic
research and creation.
DIEGO GIL (Argentina)
Born in Buenos Aires in 1975, Diego Gil studied Philosophy at the
University of Buenos Aires and then continued his education at
the School for New Dance Development (SNDO) in Amsterdam,
graduating in 2003. He made the dance productions Trabajo
en Práctica Social (2004), Emotional Architecture of Movement
(2005-6) and Creating Sense (2007), and has also collaborated
with artists such as Hooman Sharifi/Impure Company, David
Weber Krebs, Andrea Bozic, Ji Hyun, Keren Levi and Angela Shubot/
Two Fish. He is interested in discovering alternatives ways of
perceiving human relationships and creating situations where the
body reveals extreme emotional states. In the future he will start
a collaborative group with dramaturge Igor Dobricic.
JUHA MARSALO (Finland)
Born in 1971, Juha Pekka Marsalo is a Finnish dancer and
choreographer who received his diploma from the CNDC L’Esquisse
d’Angers in 1996. He has performed with companies in France
and Belgium and was a member of the company of Carolyn
Carlson, based in Paris, from 1997 to 1999. Later, he joined the
compnay of choreographer Wim Vandekeybus and performed with
the Brussels-based Ultima Vez from 1999 to 2000. In 2001, he
established his own company for which he has made the trilogy
Isä, a duet with Esa “Robin” Simonen, a Finnish singer; Oiva, a duet
with Hugo Laruffa, an Argentinian painter, and Shocking, a solo,
which was presented during the festival of June Events in 2004
in Paris. In 2005, he created Prologue d’une scène d’amour for
his company, and staged Scène d’amour for the Choreographic
Centre National Roubaix Nord-Pas de Calais. Scène d’amour had its
premiere at the Théâtre de Béthune in December 2005.
ANNA PIOTROWSKA (Poland)
Anna Piotrowska, choreographer, director, dance teacher and
performer, is the founder and president of Dance Development
Foundation in Warsaw. She is also the founder and director
of _Mufmi teatr taœca, based in Warsaw, which since 1995
has presented 40 productions. She has led and directed local
and international projects including the Polish edition of the
International Dance Festival: SoloDuo Dance Festival / Budapest,
jam sessions bosa.stopa_jam party, space attack, British 4
Polish Dance.direction.London_Warsaw, direction. Budapest_
Warsaw.dance, direction.(0-22).Warsaw, eferte_laboratory of
choreography - choreographic workshops, summer workshops
- close to nature, film workshops and Warsaw Film Spring, the film
festival for students of film academies eferte_film.
ANTONIO PIZZICATO (Italy)
Born in Naples in 1974, Antonio Pizzicato is an author, director
and performer who graduated with a degree in Theatre Direction
from Scuola d’Arte Drammatica Paolo Grassi di Milano. After
several collaborations with established Italian directors, Pizzicato
began working on his own direction and interpretation of texts
encompassing music and theatre. During this time, he developed
a unique fusion of speech and song. In collaboration with the
poet and author Cristian Ceresoli, Antonio Pizzicato presented
the vocal poems entitled Voce Sola, the short poem Crashingcash
for the National Theatre of Poland and Canzoni D´Amori Feroci,
appunti per un pop concert for the festival Primavera dei Teatri
di Castrovillari. He has directed three different versions of
Sophocles’ Oedipus rex and the performances Acqua Porca, storia
dell´ACNA di Cengio, Caio Giulio Cesare and Vulcano. He has taught
narration and singing at Parma’s University and the Universities of
Bologna and Siena, among other institutions.
LINA SANEH (Lebanon)
Born in 1966 in Beirut, Lina Saneh is a theatre-maker who
has acted, written and directed several plays, among them
Les Chaises, 1996; Ovrira, 1997; Extrait d’Etat Civil, 2000; and
Biokhraphia, 2002. In her earlier works, Saneh focused on the
physical theatre in an attempt to produce a body imprinted
by the war. She questioned the socio-political conflicts and
contradictions in the middle-east region and the traces that they
marked on our bodies. Today, Saneh spotlights over the nature and
role of acts on stage, asking about the role which might be carried
out by body language in a virtual world marked by the idealization
of the physical body. From this point, her interests in the multimedia artworks, performing arts and video works that interrogate
our citizenship status and our position in public spaces, and that
might create a new political parole. Currently, she is an assistant
professor at the Institut d’Etudes Scéniques et Audio-Visuelles
at the Saint-Joseph University in Beirut and at the Saint-Esprit
University in Kaslic.
ARTISTS’ BIOGRAPHIES 83
AUTHORS’
BIOGRAPHIES
APAP
NETWORK
PARTNERS
RENATA CATAMBAS
Currently finishing the Painting course at the Fine Arts College
- Lisbon, PT. Member of the editorial board of Marte (publication
directed by students from Fine Arts College - Lisbon, PT), now
designing the 3rd edition where the subject “performance” has
been discussed. Curating and production of the cycle of lectures
PERFORMANCE: studies, Culturgest - Lisbon, 2006. Performances:
exercise, with Lúcia Prancha, Alkantara – International Festival
of Performative Arts, 2006; trio mutiplicado, from Tiago Guedes
(interpretation) - como eu e tu cycle, Teatro Camões, 2006;
3times, with Yann Gibert and Ana Monteiro, project Inter.faces07
– NEC, 2007; Paris, 22 de Outubro 1797 - Parque Monceau / Porto, 7
de Junho 2008 - Parque Serralves, with Lúcia Prancha, Serralves
em Festa, 2008.
In Germany his articles have appeared in ”Ballettanz”/Berlin,
”tanzjournal”/Berlin, and ”Frankfurter Rundschau,” as well as in
Switzerland and Belgium. He has served as a freelance dance
curator and has lectured on topics related to research, theory
and criticism in different laboratories. Since 2004, Ploebst has
been teaching Performance Theory at the Institute for Dance Arts
of Anton Bruckner Privatuniversität, Linz. He is also the founder
and spokesperson of the website CORPUS - internet magazin für
tanz, choreografie, performance/Vienna (www.corpusweb.net).
His publications include NO WIND NO WORD. Choreography in the
Society of the Spectacle, Klaus Kieser Ed., Munich 2001; HIGHWAY
101/The Journal #1: SWAMP, Damaged Goods, Brüssel/Wien 2000,
and KÖRPERWITZ. Groteske und Ironie in der Tanzperformance,
Turia + Kant, Wien 1999.
JUDITH HELMER
Born in 1978 in Hildesheim/Germany. From 1998 to 2002 she
studied Dramatics and Musicology in Vienna concluding with a
study residency in London. Together with Florian Malzacher she
published the book Not Even A Game Anymore (Alexander Verlag)
about the british performance group Forced Entertainment.
Judith Helmer gained her journalistic experience in the cultural
field in the arts department of the APA (Austria Press Agency) as
a freelance author. Since 2006 Judith Helmer is spokesperson of
the Konzerthaus in Vienna. She is a member of the editorial board
of CORPUS - internet magazin für tanz, choreografie, performance/
Vienna (www.corpusweb.net).
MARTINA RUHSAM
Studied Movement Studies & Performance
(Anton-Bruckner-Privatuniversität) in Linz. Since 2005 she is
working as a free-lance artist in Vienna and Ljubljana, mainly as a
choreographer and performer. Currently completing her Theatre-,
Film- and Media-Studies at the University in Vienna. In 2007 she
presented the piece ONE DOLLAR ONE DOLLAR in dietheatre in
Vienna and H STORY in the City Museum in Ljubljana (both projects
together with Vlado Gotvan Repnik).
She received a DanceWeb-Scholarship from ImPulsTanz/Vienna
last year and she is a member of the editorial board of CORPUS
- internet magazin für tanz, choreografie, performance/Vienna
(www.corpusweb.net) which has published several of her articles.
KATE MATTINGLY
Graduated from Princeton University magna cum laude with a
degree in Architecture: History and Theory and completed her
Masters of Fine Arts at the TISCH School of New York University.
Between 1996 and 2006 her writing about dance was published in
“The New York Times,” “The Village Voice,” and other publications.
2000 to 2002 she was a member of the Nominating Committee
for the New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Awards. In
2005 she was invited by the National Endowment for the Arts to
serve on the Dance Panel determining funding for U.S. companies,
choreographers, and schools. In 2008 she was the festival
dramaturge for sommerszene in Salzburg.
AGNIESZKA MAZUR
Agnieszka Mazur is a psychologist who has been collaborating for
many years with Anna Piotrowska’s Dance Theatre _Mufmi teatr
taœca. She dedicates her free time to the study of Art History.
HELMUT PLOEBST
Born in 1961, Helmut Ploebst received his PhD in Communications
and Art History at the University of Vienna/Austria. Since 1986, his
writing about dance, performance, literature, film, photography
and cultural politics has been published around the world and he
works for several periodicals in the capacity of editor and critic.
As a freelance writer with a major focus on dance/performance
since 1996, he has been published mainly in Austria, most
notably as the dance critic for the daily paper ”Der Standard”.
84
SEVIE TSAMPALLA
Sevie Tsampalla has an undergraduate degree in Archaeology
and a masters in Art History from the National and Kapodistrian
University of Athens. She has been working as a researcher
and editor for art editions (among them: Greek painting in the
Collection of the Bank of Greece, Harris Kondosphyris: AthensBeijing, Sao Paulo Biennial, The sculptor Yannoulis Halepas,
tragedy and myth) and she has contributed articles to magazines.
As a founding member of the artists collective Reconstruction
Community, she was involved in the organising of actions in the
city of Athens. As a participant of Existentie (Ghent), she was cocurator of the exhibition Extra Muros in Oostende. Since September
2006 she lives and works as a freelance journalist and art critic in
Brussels.
KURT VANBELLEGEHEM
Kurt Vanbelleghem (1968) was editor at Imschoot Uitgevers
(Publishers); and is now freelance curator.
SZENE SALZBURG began in the late 1960s as a platform for local
artists interested in the contemporary performing arts and
music. In Salzburg, famous for its traditional culture and art
forms, szene grew to be the contemporary counterweight to
this historical reputation. szene functions as an international
producer for new forms of dance, theatre, and special music
events, and offers residencies to international artists. An integral
player in promoting collaboration on an international scale, szene
established the European network known as apap (advancing
performing arts project) to support young performing artists.
Throughout the year, szene oversees a 600-seat theatre in the
centre of Salzburg which is home to contemporary productions
and experimental art forms. A significant aspect of szene’s
programming is nurturing and encouraging local creators. During
the months of June and July, the annual contemporary dance
and theatre-festival called SommerSzene takes place under
the auspices of Szene. It has been referred to as “Austria’s only
festival with curatorial competence” (Frankfurter Rundschau).
ARMUNIA, an association of 8 municipalities fostering cultural life
in the region of western Tuscany, was established in 1996. It offers
several studios, theatres and rehearsal spaces as well as training
facilities in Castello Pasquini. Armunia’s main activities include coproduction, residencies and various workshops for young artists,
as well as the organization of exhibitions and meetings. Signature
characteristics of Armunia include its location: a castle built in the
last century (Castello Pasquini) situated by the sea, with an
infrastructure that includes a scenography laboratory, lighting
equipment, and technical staff. Armunia has four theatres; one
tent theatre in Castiglioncello, one theatre in Rosignano Solvay,
one theatre built in the 19th century, in Guardistallo, one in
Castagneto Carducci. Since 1982, during the summer period,
Castiglioncello organizes an international dance festival in the
Pasquini Castle, now one of the most well-attended and
well-received festivals in Italy. Since 1998, Armunia has organized
INEQUILIBRIO, one of the most important festivals of dance and
theatre in Italy.
KUNSTEN CENTRUM BUDA is a fusion of the festival for visual arts
Beeldenstorm, arts centre Limelight and dance workshop Dans in
Kortrijk and has been subsidized by the Flemish Ministry of Culture
since 2006. Between 40 and 50 artists a year are welcomed to
work in residency on artistic research or creation: discipline,
experience and nationality are not the issue. The results of these
residencies are presented during different festivals in Kortrijk:
3 fresh-weekends (during spring), focussing on first showings,
experiments and work-in-progress; Kortrijk Congé, a summernight
city festival; the international artsfestival NEXT (autumn),
focussing on international creations and Belgian premières.
BUDA arts centre has access to five studios and two theatres
for technical residencies and public presentations during the
festivals and also presents alternative author cinema in three
cinemas. All studios, venues and offices are located on the
Buda-island, a small geographic island on the River Leie that has
been relocated as an “artists’ island.” Dans in Kortrijk, one of the
founding organisations for BUDA arts centre, has been part of the
apap network since the very first start. www.budakortrijk.be
LA MEKANICA is a non-profit cultural organization based in
Barcelona whose mission is to develop contemporary performing
arts in Spain within an international context. La Mekanica
facilitates a variety of activities that provide artists and cultural
workers supportive resources for the development of their own
work. These activities include the organization of an artistin-residence program, projects of international collaboration
with partner organizations in and outside of Europe, and the
organization of FESTIVAL COMPLICITATS, a biannual international
dance event that is dedicated to the presentation of “new”
approaches, values and works in the field of international
contemporary dance. La Mekanica recently opened a new working
space and meeting place for artists and cultural workers in a 1500
square-meter country house in the outskirts of Barcelona. The
aim of this new centre, which contains six studios plus a seminar/
conference room, is to create a meeting place for different
artistic practices and cultural networks, welcoming a spectrum of
professional performing artists, researchers and cultural workers.
La Mekanica has been a part of the apap network since 2006.
SILESIAN DANCE THEATRE, Poland’s first professional contemporary
dance company, was established in 1991 in the city of Bytom by
director and choreographer Jacek Łuminski. Since its inception,
the Silesian Dance Theatre (SDT) has organized monthly
national and international workshops and seminars open to
dancers, choreographers and administrators. It established the
Foundation for Contemporary Dance in Poland which promotes
and presents young Polish choreographers and formed the
Silesian Dance Theatre Foundation which supports initiatives
APAP NETWORK PARTNERS 85
CREDITS
in education and community outreach. SDT is committed to
nurturing independent artists and dance companies in Poland and
initiated the first contemporary dance program in Poland with an
original curriculum. SDT is currently developing a five year dance
education program which culminates in a masters degree, and
offers programs in dance performance and teaching, cultural
administration, plus dance criticism and theory. SDT has been a
part of the apap network since 2005.
TANZFABRIK BERLIN – Centre for Contemporary Dance – combines
both artistic and educational work under one roof. Four studios
and an incorporated studio stage, offer space for rehearsals,
production, research, workshops, and training. The aim is the
development and presentation of contemporary dance in
its diversity of choreographic and performative approaches,
the promotion of young artists, the connection of theory and
practice and international exchange. The studio stage focuses
on the visualisation of artistic processes and the presentation
of regular events. In addition, the Tanzfabrik initiates extended
training projects for young choreographers and the biannual
TANZNACHT BERLIN. Since 2005 Tanzfabrik Berlin is partner of the
apap network. Tanzfabrik Berlin is also part of the Berlin network
“TanzRaumBerlin” and the same named association to develop a
new expertise centre on contemporary dance.
THE ART OF SURVIVAL – Artistic Views On The Social / APAP VI
TRANSFORMA facilitates theoretical and practical research and
documentation for contemporary culture, for and with the individual
and the collective in an educational and artistic context, by
providing and creating physical, relational and material conditions.
Transforma believes that the promotion of an autonomous and
inventive capacity to transform our perspectives is possible for
every individual.
Research is developed focusing the connection of artistic
activities and the social environment in which they operate.
Attention is given to the analysis of specificity and how
localization affects concepts, both at the artistic and creative
level, as well as at the production and programming level.
Several categories promote this Research and ongoing Dialogue
and turn it into a Laboratory for Contemporary Artistic Practices:
Creative Research Residencies, Shows and Performances,
Contemporary Art Exhibitions, Forums and transdisciplinary
Events, ARTINSITE: Contemporary Art and Culture Publishing,
International Meetings, Workshops and Training.
Transforma is based in Torres Vedras, Portugal, where it runs a
gallery and several other non conventional spaces throughout
the city.
This publication documents and reflects on the artistic work
carried out between October 2007 and December 2008 in the
context of the APAP Advancing Performing Arts Project* network
in eight European cities located in Austria, Belgium, Croatia,
Germany, Italy, Poland, Portugal and Spain, and presented
between October and December 2008 in three of these cities:
Berlin (DE) / Tanzfabrik Berlin, Brussels (BE) / Workspace Brussels
and Zagreb (HR) / The Student Centre.
* APAP is an European network (SZENE, Salzburg - Austria | BUDA
ARTS CENTRE, Kortrijk - Belgium | WORKSPACEBRUSSELS, Brussels
– Belgium | THE STUDENT CENTRE, Zagreb - Croatia | TANZFABRIK
BERLIN, Berlin - Germany | ARMUNIA, Castiglioncello - Italy | SILESIAN
DANCE THEATRE, Bytom - Poland | TRANSFORMA, Torres Vedras Portugal / LA MEKANICA, Barcelona - Spain) that aims to support
emerging international artists in developing their artistic projects
and identities, by providing different forms of collaboration.
First Published in September 2008 by ArtinSite**.
www.apapnetwork.net
© 2008
Editor / Content: corpus – internet magazine for dance •
choreography • performance / HELMUT PLOEBST & MARGIT MOISL.
Editor / Volume Publishing and Design: TRANSFORMA / LUÍS FIRMO.
Texts: by courtesy of the authors.
Images: see Production Credits, reserved, under responsibility of
the contributors.
Contributors: AGNIESZKA MAZUR, ANNA PIOTROWSKA, ANTONIO
PIZZICATO, BEN BENAOUISSE, BERTIE AMBACH, CABULA6 (JEREMY
XIDO + CLAUDIA HEU), DIEGO GIL, GABRIELA DAEDELOW, GERHARD
SPRING, HELMUT PLOEBST, IFFAT FATIMA, IGOR DOBRICIC, JUDITH
HELMER, JUHA MARSALO, JULIUS DEUTSCHBAUER, KATE MATTINGLY,
KURT VANBELLEGHEM, LINA SANEH, MARTINA RUHSAM, MEKHITAR
GARABEDIAN, MICHAEL STOLHOFER, OLIVER FRLJIC, RENATA
CATAMBAS, ROGER BERNAT, SEVIE TSAMPALLA.
General Manager: MICHAEL STOLHOFER
Organisation and Communication: BERTIE AMBACH
Editing and Organisation of Website contents APAP VI: KATE MATTINGLY
THE ART OF SURVIVAL – Artistic Views On The Social / APAP VI is a
project that has been funded with support from the European
Commission. This publication reflects only the views of the
contributors, and the European Commission cannot be held
responsible for any use which may be made of the information
contained therein.
** ArtinSite is an editorial label of:
THE STUDENT CENTRE in Zagreb is a multifunctional space filled
with students, cultural workers and people from varied areas of
interest. Founded within the University Student Association of
Yugoslavia in 1957, the Centre became the central organization
responsible for student needs. As a result of its cultural activities,
the SC gained cult status. During the 60’s and 70’s, it was the
focal point for Zagreb’s alternative and experimental scene, but
there was a long period of cultural stagnation in the 90’s due to
war. In September 2004, a new cultural program was developed,
titled Culture of Change, and from this concept, the SC of today
emerged. With its music, visual arts, theatre, film, radio and
educational programs, the Culture of Change creates a variety
of projects, workshops, concerts and festivals which visitors can
enjoy on a daily basis throughout the premises of the Student
Centre Complex: SC Gallery, PU Gallery, Theatre &TD, SEK, SC
Cinema, SC Club, Multimedia Centre, The French Pavilion, SKUC,
PAUK, Zagreb 10m2 Gallery, Happy House and Visual Arts Atelier.
The Culture of Change is dedicated to supporting interesting
initiatives and conceptions of programs, particularly those of
younger authors and students. The Student Centre joined the
apap network in 2008.
86
WORKSPACE BRUSSELS is a new Brussels-based organization that
aims at supporting young artists in research, creation, production
and presesntaion of their projects. Workspace Brussels (WSB)
accomplishes this by providing these artists with a working space,
basic equipment, advice and a platform for communication
and presentation. WSB is supported by Kaaitheatre and Rosas
and is embedded in a wide international network of affiliated
organizations.
Managing and Production: TIAGO MIRANDA
Translation: WERNER RAPPL, AGNIESZKA RYSZKIEWICZ, HARALD WEILER
Proof-reading: KATE MATTINGLY
Editorial Assistance: SANDRA COSTA
Design and Art Direction by: VIVÓEUSÉBIO – www.vivoeusebio.com
Printed and bound by: ROLO & FILHOS II, S. A.
Paper: PRESTO SILK PAPER 115 g/m2 and 250 g/m2
Fonts: TIMES NEW ROMAN, VAN CONDENSED LIGHT
Reproductions: 25 full-coloured, 40 blue, 40 red
Nr pages: 88
Copies: 2500
ISBN: 978-989-95397-4-7
Legal Depot Nr.
TRANSFORMA
Praça do Município, 8
2560-289 Torres Vedras, Portugal
T. +351 261336320 | F. +351 261336322
E. info@transforma.mail.pt
W. www.transforma-ac.com
www.transforma-b.blogspot.com
www.desvios-transformaac.blogspot.com
www.transformathinktank.blogspot.com
www.artinsiteeditions.wordpress.com
Transforma is supported by:
Cataloguing: THE ART OF SURVIVAL – Artistic Views On The Social,
APAP Advancing Performing Arts Project / Editors: corpus /
TRANSFORMA
Keywords: Community. Dance. Dialogue. Film. Immigration.
Integration. Intercultural. Performance. Performing Arts.
Photography. Site-Specificity. Social. Space. Survival.
Distributed simultaneously in Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Germany,
Italy, Poland, Portugal and Spain.
Printed in Portugal
_____________
© All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced
or utilized in any form electronic, mechanical or other without
permission in writing from Transforma.
CREDITS 87
88