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IN TRANSIT 2003: Customs - Nothing to declare
von Ong Keng Sen, Curator and Artistic Director
In Transit goes into its second year this summer. and with any second year, there are even more questions, often without any answers. i was asked many questions last year such as whether In Transit is a multiculti festival or whether it is a politically correct festival or whether cultural exchange equals art.
of course, this raises the question of "when does an expression from an 'ethnic' individual become art in europe"? when does it transcend its (god forbid!) folk cultural label to become of meaning to the european city host and the city it originated from?
in this day and age, does home and/or roots and/or domicile and/or site still make any sense? for this is, after all, the age of mobility.
but we have moved from ethnocentricity; to hybridicity and multiplicity; back to the joys of the local.
in the face of these relentless dizzying questions, i made a very simple journey, i went back to nyc. where i studied and where i was never a foreigner for we were all foreigners, perhaps. one of the few cities on this globe where being a foreigner is valued, where it is not strange; where the foreigner is embraced, where the artistic exile nests in - the city of migration.
a city which also wears its politics on its sleeve.
i have likened the complexity of this subject to a rubik's cube which reveals or conceals a different surface as you twist it. a political minefield which is transformed through play to become ever more eloquent, ever more pungent, ever more incisive.
embedded in these questions, is that of borders. what are the borders today? is it the obvious customs immigration borders that we pass through whenever we travel?
or are they borders which increasingly evaporate, only to condense when a surface threatens the atmosphere, when a disruption clarifies the invisible?
within us there are social customs which we carry. these customs which we run away from, which we resist, are also cloned within us. we are carriers, we are infected.
and in this infected state, we hurry through the passage "nothing to declare", to avoid the questions, to disguise ourselves.
i have nothing to declare.
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Notes from New York City
it is no coincidence that in the last two years, new york city and the us has been on everyone's lips. with all its inherent contradictions, new york city is the city of our dreams and yet the us is the center of our brewing cultural wars today.
new york city is not the united states of america. everybody in the us tells us that. and it is true that nyc is starkly different from the rest of the country. the visa office of the us embassy is notorious for abusing all prospective applicants seeking entry into the us but once you get into new york city, you melt into the landscape. everybody is an other here.
hence everybody develops a peculiar perspective, unique and open and ultimately informed by cultures that have been left behind. Coco Fusco with her visual arts/film background, growing up with the 'latina' label around her neck, did much of her early confrontational work with Guillermo Gomez Peña including 'The Couple in the Cage'. the museum was a golden cage with two natives (Pena and Fusco) exhibited for a well-meaning but privileged audience. today, Coco's work has moved well beyond this arena, she is politically involved with the border of the us and mexico, especially mexican women who are exploited as units of labor and who 'disappear'. continuing much of her personal exploration with the border of life and death, her new play is about an american man who makes a piece of art recording his sexual experience with a dead mexican woman. [Border Customs in "The Incredible Disappearing Woman", In Transit, 13 & 14 June 2003]
one of my students in new york university had been working with
Walid Raad as part of another dramaturgy class assignment for Andre
Lepecki. Walid, a member of the Atlas Group, fascinated me with
his imaginary archives, his imagined history of the beirut/israel
conflict in the seventies. performing "the curator" at the Whitney
Biennale, he showcased the Atlas Group archives through a powerpoint
lecture about its different slides and videos. subsequently i had
'Lunch with Walid' at Penang, a malaysian restaurant in soho. there
he revealed the imaginary audience that he had planted in the Whitney,
with the most immaculate questions that had stunned me that night!
we talked about his perspectives of beirut which had come from his
studies in nyc, his distance from home, his present life in nyc
and the journey that he makes between his two cities.[Imagined Customs in "Labcase: The loudest muttering is over", 13 June and "Labcase: Civilizationally, we do not dig holes to bury ourselves" 14 June 2003]
Ping Chong is who he is because of his history growing up in new york's chinatown. he has never been an overt spokesman for the asian american cause; his work extends far beyond that. his theatre is a deeply political commentary of the insular nature of the american psyche and in parallel, the paranoia in all of us of the other, of difference. in 1993, i saw an early draft of Undesirable Elements where he went to the roots of xenophobia by inviting 10 "foreigners" in nyc to share their memories, their histories, their cliches, their kitsch with the audience. unlike much of his highly aestheticised work such as the Asian Quartet that he has made about japan, china, vietnam and korea, he has distilled the Undesirable Elements into a basic austere storytelling moment. in the last decade, he has continued to make different versions of it in different cities, the last with children of war who now live in the us. [Secret Customs in "Undesirable Elements", In Transit, 6 - 11 June 2003]
Ralph Lemon has been charting his geography trilogy for the last
eight years. this epic journey has required him to travel to continents
of africa, asia and finally now within the united states of america.
the first part was entitled Geography - an exploration which was
primarily with dancers from the ivory coast, guinea as well as american
dancers. Tree, the second part of his trilogy, was about his travels
through china, japan, india and his realizations; many of his encounters
in china crystallized into comic dramatic scenes. rewriting travel
as a 'black' man in terrains which are often the purview of the
'white' elite traveler in the historicized annals of europe. the
initial explorations of his third part called House is about belonging,
about home and the american-african experience, from slavery to
democracy, with the specifics of blues music and lynching in the
us. [Custom-made in "Labcase:
Searching for Home", In Transit, 3 & 4 June 2003]
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Tales of Travellers
i went to ouidah in January 2001 to see Koffi Kokko in his capacity as voodoo priest. Koffi tries to go to benin every year in january to maintain and support the rituals in his temple. ouidah is one of the original ports from west africa which supplied slaves to the americas and europe. in between the voodoo rituals and the contemporary africa dance festival that Koffi was organizing, i also researched the travelers who were forced to make this final journey through the gate of no return. in the early 1990s, unesco had commemorated the road from the town of ouidah to the beach where the would-be slaves boarded the ships which took them away to new lands to new homes which created future identities for their descendants. the local kings were in collaboration with the european slave traders and captured lower tribes from the inlands to sell as slaves.
one of the most significant rituals that these slaves were made to conduct was to walk around the tree of amnesia, nine times for a man and seven times for a woman. in this way, the individual would forget his past, his roots; for a individual with no memory would make the best slave. with his identity erased, he could start on a clean slate, to absorb new identities, to declare new loyalties. i was extremely struck by the thinking of these local kings who seemed infinitely wise in their cruelty. for days, i was intrigued by this story of enforced departures from home to go to the americas. to forge new cultures, black brazil, haiti, african americans. holding onto fragments of identity, of spirituality in new homes; future generations reinventing and tracing the past. africa, the united states of america, brazil.
after much thought, In Transit decided to commission Koffi to abstract his spirituality and his people's customs into a new dance expression rather than to contextualize the voodoo rituals for berlin which was our original proposal. as in "The Buddha Project", this new commission relates to contemporary artists processing ancient spiritualities into poetic tales of travelers. [Customs in "Les feuilles qui résistent au vent", In Transit, 30 & 31 May, 1 June 2003]
when Gautama Buddha was a young man, his father tried to protect him by from the pains of the mortal world. the king was told that his son should not see an old body (an elderly man), a diseased body (a sick man), a dead body (a corpse) and a wasted body (a hermit). Gautama could not be kept within the confines of the palace as he was a curious individual with a conscience. when he saw these bodies, he became alienated and strove to understand the spirit, the soul beyond the body. he flagellated his body by starving himself to a point where his backbone could touch his sternum, where his hair fell in patches whenever he touched them. he realized that he needed a strong body to gravitate towards the spirit. sitting under the bodhi tree, he traveled the world in the depths of his imagination. perhaps he was the first global soul; perhaps when we travel, when we search for home in our restless world today, sometimes we can touch him.
a tale of contemporary travelers (Charlotte Engelkes, Sophiatou) in urban landscapes pursuing connection, contact. citizens of jetlag city, symptomatic of our contemporary mobility, swimming in a soundscape of Toru Yamanaka from Dumb Type. airports - sites of expectancies, of potentialities - transit spaces which can explode into emotion maelstroms. global currencies, us, artistic capital, representative identities coveted by political systems, ancient cultural treasures, are mixed together into this trip with no return ticket. who am I? where am I? his last breath...a journey into the heart of darkness. conceived and directed by In Transit curator and artistic director, Ong Keng Sen. [Global Customs in "The Global Soul - The Buddha Project", In Transit, 30, 31 May & 1 June 2003]
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The Exotic Menagerie: I am what I am
i was introduced to socially accepted third sex of samoa, the fa'afafines, at columbia university, nyc by Lisa Taouma. in a scitillating lecture, she juxtaposed Gauguin and the dusky maiden. fresh as frangipanis, the polynesian goddesses of the south seas. the fasciniating beautiful child-native who peers at you seductively. ultimately christianised by their colonisers who continue to photograph them in different modes of undress.
perhaps the german colonials who photographed much of its colony's samoan beauties, thinking that they were the epitome of the innocent child-native in paradise, had photographed fa'afafines - men who live their lives as women (fa'afafines - literally 'like a woman' in samoan language).
complicate this further, by the samoan migration to new zealand where they have become an ethnic minority, the pacific islanders. much like the african american culture in nyc, pacific islanders provide the main energy of hybridicity and creativity in new zealand today.
cut and paste contemporary transgender artists who appropriate the fafafine identity today as an artistic and political position from which to make work.
copy inscriptions of identity onto the flesh. body adornment or traditional samoan tattoo tapped into the skin by a pig's tooth.
finally roll it into the tutti fruitt fashion pageant where the most beautiful 'women' parade and strutt their stuff in the most outrageous kitsch clothes of the century and you have the fafafine extravaganza cabaret Diva Sivas. cliches, parodies, icons galore. to cite so as to transform.
come to their talk show hosted by Lisa Taouma, where you will see the entire continuum of transgender individuals from drags part time to urban political artist-activists to traditionally brought up island girls from samoa! [Gender Customs in "Diva Siva", In Transit, 30, 31 May & 1 June 2003]
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Transfer to Beijing, transit Hong Kong
Wen Hui and Wu Wenguang. Living Dance Studio. well known documentary film maker Wu who has screened his films all over europe, the us and asia teams up with his partner Wen Hui to present a contemporary portrait of china today. their work often examines the rapid economic growth in china today where people will and do sell themselves to get ahead. Wen Hui was one of the collaborators of Ralph Lemon in Geography 2: Tree. i first met them in 1995/96 and have since collaborated with them in a variety of different ways. one of our earliest collaborations was to look at the chinese laborer/foreign worker in singapore. today they have expanded this into one of their most startling projects with countryside farmers who are now in beijing to make a living as construction workers. paying them equivalent wages to come to play in the arts center rather than to go to the construction site. the new exotic in the city of beijing.
redefining dance in china, informed by the documentary and through the language of the everyday. this year, they will tour the us as well as present their work in festival d'automne paris after berlin. for their production in berlin, they traveled china interviewing women who have given birth in a variety of different environments or contexts. rural, urban, professionals, housewives. a landscape of china today with its one child policy but its age-old pressures on women to perpetuate the family line with a boy child.
I am....I was born on...at... [Birth Customs in "Report of Giving Birth", In Transit, 7 & 8 June 2003]
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Remapping Berlin
who are the faces of berlin today? who lives here and calls berlin home? splintering berlin into niches and locales which are bound to surprise us will be Ping's new version of Undesirable Elements: berlin. like scherazade who kept her caliph captive for 1000 nights with her arabian tales; these foreigners, aliens, others in berlin will reveal the secret histories in berlin. through a specific process of mining these individuals, these stories; Ping and his collaborators, people off the streets of berlin, will keep us spellbound. specifically working with non-actors and by peeling their stories progressively, a meditation of journeys will unfold. like the elusive hana (flower/blossom) which japanese aesthetics seeks, Ping endeavors this with his storytellers from berlin. speaking in german, they share with us their joys and nightmares of a new life in a city of their choice. [Secret Customs in "Undesirable Elements", In Transit, 6 - 11 June 2003]
this year we approached DJ Ipek (resident of the famous oriental Gay Hane clubnight) to bring together a new club for In Transit. a club which would respond to a notion of berlin being in transit, beyond the physical. the reverberations after the physical transitions stay with us much longer. perhaps there is no better site to explore this than the club culture of berlin. who are the constituencies of these clubs? how do they redraw borders in their carnivals of the night? who are these imagined communities, secret communities, local communities dawning in berlin? and do they redraw borders with the first light? [Clubbing Customs, In Transit, 30 & 31 May, 6 - 8 June, 13 & 14 June 2003]
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