Customs: Borders and Traditions
Ong Keng Sen talks about IN TRANSIT 2003

In which ways does "IN TRANSIT II - Customs: Nothing to declare" continue the work of "IN TRANSIT I", the first festival of its type? What's definitely different, what's similar?

First of all we continue to extend the limits of performance. Again, "documentary performances" will play a major role in the festival - the combination of life and art, biographical data, social history and political developments from a very personal point of view. Ralph Lemon, an African American from New York City and a participant in the laboratory, is presenting his dance project "Searching for Home", in which he explores the roots of the African American freedom fight. He traces them from the slave trade to the lynching that continued until the 1950s and 60s, from the civil rights movement to the blues music of the South.

Last year we started this idea of "documentary performance" with my Cambodian production "Continuum: Beyond the Killing Fields", the Middle-Eastern production "Three Posters" from Beirut and the South African production "He left quietly".

All these commissioned pieces were of actors or dancers exploring their personal identity, almost performing their own selves. In the same way we now have Ralph Lemon exploring the origins of his people in America and in New York City, black creativity and the Black Atlantic drift from Africa to the New World, and to New York City in particular.

Another "documentary performance" is called "Undesirable Elements" and will deal with foreigners who live in Berlin. This production is directed by Ping Chong, an Asian American from New York City. With his ongoing oral history project he has already explored the roots and biographies of migrants and asylum seekers in 15 different cities beyond his home New York. In Berlin he's going to audition and cast about ten individuals who are non-actors, non-artists and who come from everyday life. These people will work out a documentary about themselves, the countries they come from, their traditions and their daily living conditions in Berlin.

For the first time the focus shifts to New York City as a city of migration. That's definitely different from the first edition of IN TRANSIT and unexpected of the House of World Cultures, which traditionally concentrates on countries and continents like South Africa, South America and Asia. Now, for the first time, we are working with artists from the city of New York - a very global city, a city of migration, a cosmopolitan city. Usually, when the House of World Cultures does a project - as recently on Mexico -, it's about otherness as regards a whole country. Here we are saying: Let's look at New York City and see whether we find otherness within that city.

Some of the artists involved in the first edition of IN TRANSIT appear again. Are there artists you prefer to work with, artists who represent your ideas and philosophy of transitory art work?

I think that the idea of IN TRANSIT was to try to create a performance festival which would have some continuity. It's very dangerous for a such a festival to constantly showcase what is new, what is fashionable. I believe arts festivals and venues and arts centres should try to support and nurture artists. In that sense, there is a group of artists who embody this idea of transition, this transitory quality that IN TRANSIT is all about.

Now to the title or catch-phrase: "Customs: Nothing to declare". The acts in the main programme are classified as global customs, gender customs, secret customs, birth customs and border customs. What does this mean? What is it that puts all of these performances under one umbrella?

I'm playing with the dual meaning of customs. Of course, customs means immigration on one level in the English language, but it also means people's habits. A lot of the artists I cooperate with work with very special contexts and with their own special kind of customs. Also, unlike the confrontational attitude of earlier artists, contemporary artists are very playful in talking politics. Like Walid Raad, whose work was shown at the recent "Documenta". He originated the "Atlas Group", an imaginary archive with notebooks, videos and anonymous documents of the Civil War in Lebanon.

Most of us are outsiders to the mainstream of Europe, the European Union. Like Tanja Ostojic from Belgrade, for example, who is participating in the laboratory with an installation. One of her earlier works bears the ironic title: "Looking for a husband with EU-passport".

Being someone who travels a lot through airports, I'm always trying to avoid the "Goods to declare" sign. Everyone tries to avoid it. We all try to move quickly through the green passage: "Customs: Nothing to declare". I think this is very ironic, because in a way, even when we are saying "Nothing to declare", we in fact have so much to declare. We have so much to talk about: what is periphery opposed to the mainstream, what is marginal opposed to the establishment.

I think artists all over the world - even artists in Berlin - are always positioning themselves in some kind of tension with the mainstream. Playing with the dual meaning of customs is almost like a Rubik's cube. As you turn this Rubik's cube, it has all these different colours, and as you try to turn it, turn it, turn it, everything becomes one colour. For me this is exactly what the word customs means: The colours are melting, they are transforming. With one turn we talk about gender customs in Samoa. With another turn we watch "custom-made" productions for IN TRANSIT like Ralph Lemon's. With yet another turn of the cube, the subject changes to birth customs and women giving birth in China under the superstitions and the pressure to have male children, even today in contemporary Chinese society.

So there is a lot of pun in the meaning of the word "customs" and also in the phrase "Nothing to declare", because we all choose this passage to avoid trouble. But actually we have so much to talk about, so much to declare - about our differences, about our individuality, about art in relation to society.

Let's talk a bit about New York. Your journey back to the city and to New York University, where you studied in the early 1990s and later taught, was kind of a trigger for the second edition of IN TRANSIT. In New York City civilisations from all over the world "clash". Yet people there tend to live in almost perfect harmony, unlike anywhere else. Block by block they celebrate the different cultures of their origin. Otherwise "undesirable elements" gather in New York City. Many residents, especially artists, have more than two identities - for IN TRANSIT, these are represented by Walid Raad's "Atlas Group", Ping Chong's Chinatown-based project with foreigners, which now will become part of "Remapping Berlin", or Ralf Lemon's search for his African-American heritage. Have you been part of this circle of transformation yourself?

Going to New York to study in the early 1990s was very exhilarating for me, even though the city has changed a lot from the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Suddenly it was alright to be different! Suddenly you were given a passport to be yourself. You didn't have to hide who you were. When foreigners say: "Oh, I'm not from America, I'm from Berlin" - or from Beirut, or Bangkok or Singapore - they become the talk of the town, natives are interested in them. This kind of curiosity is encouraging. Foreignness is celebrated in New York City! It's kosher to be from a foreign land. It's a place where all of us can find new roots: We have to find ourselves in this city, but at the same time we are all equal, there is no original race, there is nobody who has a natural position of power. Hybridism is celebrated. You bring the source culture of your origin and then you kind of fuse it, clash it, oppose it - debate this original source culture with the cultures of New York.

Cities can be very inhibiting, they prevent you from becoming yourself, give you the feeling that you have to play a role. Or cities can be very open. New York is an example of a very open city. This is one of the reasons I've chosen it for this second IN TRANSIT festival, as a symbol for a contemporary open urban city, where you can at the same time be yourself, trace your original root culture and yet find a new space.

Other main topics are "Tales of Travellers" and "Transit Spaces". For example, avant-garde dancer Koffi Kôkô relates contemporary dance to the age-old rituals of his home Benin, the voodoo cult, etc. In your performance "The Global Soul - The Buddha Project" you follow the migration of Buddha as a spiritual journey.

As a curator and an artist who works in many different countries and cultures, I am intrigued by both the dangers of travel and also the enlightenment of travel. Travel allows you to come into contact with emotions, with intellectual discourse, which would never happen if you stayed in your own city or country or culture. I worship travel and yet at the same time I'm apprehensive of the dangers of travel.

All of us are constantly travelling in the sense that we are very often moving away from where we come from. By that, I mean that we might still stay in our city, but we move away from our parent's world or the traditions of our family, and try to find our own space and time. These personal journeys already equal travelling.

Koffi Kôkô, for example, has travelled away from Benin to Paris to find his own position in the dance world there. Yet he tries to hold on to his roots as well. And this tension, which always happens to a traveller, is very interesting to me: Do you fall in love with where you are or do you hold certain loyalties to your past?

The background for my own Buddha production is today's globalization process with its positive and negative aspects and the commodifications it brings about. There is a commodification of religion as opposed to spirituality today. At the same time there is a commodification of art: If you are part of the international arts circuit - be it the Biennale or other festivals - you're constantly circulating, permanently travelling. So you have to admit that you are part of this circulation-consumer process in many ways. You cannot run away from it, even though you might reject certain parts or refuse to buy certain products. But overall, there is so much circulation happening beyond physical travel - with telephone, internet and e-mail - that the whole of our contemporary existence really revolves around it. For me sometimes it's existential.

That's what's interesting about the story of Buddha: As he sat under the Bodhi tree and as he came to Nirvana, it was not about physical travel, but his mind, his imagination was on a trip.

Kofi Kôkô's "Les feuilles qui resistent au vent" and my "The Global Soul" are both productions about how artists are processing spirituality and maybe trying to find some contemporary meaning. Kofi's approach is going to be much more metaphorical, more symbolic. He is not going to play out a religious ritual on stage and I know definitely that my whole reason for doing the Buddha work is to understand the human being in an age of spiritual failure. It's not so much to make a performance about the life of Buddha, not to create something spiritual that we cannot reach, but to actually look at who is the traveller today. Why do we travel? What are we in search of?

How important is spirituality for "Customs: Nothing to Declare"?

We are searching for a new spirituality that is not necessarily linked to an organized religion. This spirituality can be found by living in New York City. It's not about going to the Synagogue or going to a church but about some kind of life energy, life force that sustains you and brings you some kind of salvation. Salvation is a celebration of life. It's a celebration of existence. I'm not thinking of spirituality in the sense of finding an afterlife. It's about finding the contemporary meaning of spirituality. Organized spirituality, organized religion of today is actually something that is very negative for me.

This fundamentalism all over the world - not just with the Muslim religion - does actually exist, because we are afraid of finding new spirituality. We are trying to hold on to the past and become very dogmatic about it.

As in the first IN TRANSIT festival, you focus on the transgender aspect in a project with the marginalized third sex of Samoa, the Fa'afafine. They present a cabaret production dubbed "Divas Siva". Why is the transgender aspect so important in your philosophy and art work?

The transgender issue represents a border. It's like talking about "Lear", where this blind man walks to the edge of a cliff and is about to fall... All these slippery borders are really like mirrors in which we can encounter our new society, where nothing is stable anymore, where we have to leave behind our beliefs and to accept and be open to new thoughts, new ideas. What I found particularly interesting with the Fa'afafine is that traditional Samoan culture was actually very enlightened toward sexuality, accepting a male and a female and a third sex. Sometimes I believe that traditional practices in societies are much more open and enlightened and even quite sophisticated in the way they deal with social problems. I'm interested in this transgression, this kind of duality, where something is political and also playful. The Fa'afafine represent that for me because they have this certain kind of naivety. They play on the sense of the native, the Polynesian, the stereotype of the brown girl in the ring. But at the same time, they make us rethink our politics and rethink our stereotypes. And this is sometimes much more powerful than a very direct overt challenge of power. We need to almost laugh at power, mock power and undress power in a way. The playfulness of the Fa'afafine and the traditional way of understanding their sexuality in Samoan society is only a role rather than a fixed-term position. It's really enlightening.

Again there will be labs for future collaborations of the participating artists and a newly designed "Club". What are they about?

This is related to the idea of "Remapping Berlin". We very often have a fixed notion of a city or of a people, in this case of Berlin or of the Germans. Sometimes we take our cities for granted. And when we look at "Remapping Berlin", either through the "Undesirable Elements" project or through the oriental DJs, a different image starts to emerge. It's about re-understanding our city.

Concerning the Club we got in touch with DJ Ipek, resident DJ of the SO 36 in Kreuzberg and creator of the "Gayhane HomOriental Dancefloor". The DJs as well as the personalities she chose are partly transsexuals, and are also non-white Berliners who have chosen to live in the city. We focus on this act of choice - moving into a city and staying there - as a celebration of autonomy. They decided which life they want to lead, which place they want to call home. The whole oriental DJ scene reflects and reviews new and different images of Berlin.

IN TRANSIT is taking place at a very special point in history, when the turntables of the world are being spun around. There is a war in Iraq, in defiance of the majority of world opinion. What does this mean for art at the cutting edge of contemporary life, art in between cultures, art that has nothing to declare but itself?

This is exactly it: We have to continue to do what we believe in the face of any kind of tyranny - tyranny of a singular decision - we have to celebrate individuality and celebrate art for what it is. It's vital for us to dare to say what we want to say, to declare what we want to declare. And even though this individuality may be destroyed and even though this optimism may be destroyed, the continued fight for this utopia is something which I would like to believe is the power of the artist. Of course, there are many artists today who are extremely commercial or who don't want to engage with politics, don't want to engage with message, trying to do their own thing in the pursuit of aesthetics. But it's really important that we dare to stand up for what we want to say and not be browbeaten into accepting tyranny.

Is that the stance you will take during "Customs: Nothing to Declare"?

The continuing existence of IN TRANSIT means that what we fought for in the first year and what we continue to fight for is here to stay. Many people asked me the first year: "Oh, are you making art or are you just doing multiculti?" The answer is: Art is not defined by the tyranny of a standard in either Asia or Europe or America. Art is really a personal pursuit for expression. It becomes even more vital in times like these. With IN TRANSIT or similar projects we need to give a strong foundation to choice - choice in life, choice in art.

Interview: Ute Buesing

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