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André Lepecki's daily reports on
the IN TRANSIT lab
Report #10. Thoughts to be continued...
(June, 14th 2003)
Leaving thought, acts, and things open to radical inconclusiveness
is to allow their movement to be continued. In the case of In Transit,
of the Berlin Lab, I am curious in thinking on how the many movements,
ideas, and formulations that passed through the House in the past
two weeks will keep unfolding while allying themselves with a trans-cultural
critical thought. These unfoldings are unpredictable. I will share
with you what has interested me in my scholarship and artistic work,
and what has interested me the most in what I saw, experienced,
and discussed with the artists present here throughout the festival.
I am interested in both analyzing and proposing artistic/academic
practices that while crossing cultures, borders, cities, disciplines,
genres, identities, bodies, modes of subjectivity, modes of writing
and modes of being yet refuse to take the pre-determined, pre-destined
path. Which means I am interested in how to establish new relationships
with the terrain in our moment of insidious cartography - of when,
where and how one might journey without navigational tools. Roaming
without the grip of the ever more present GPS, moving not on a plane
of coordinates but on a cracked, dusty, rough terrain, meandering
underneath, above, beside, and in between the grid of fixed coordinates.
If the condition of modernity implements navigational technologies
and pre-determined pathways in order to better manage and control
circuits of capital, commodities, and bodies one can say that this
project implements a specific understanding of what is ground and
what is movement. Modernity's understanding and management of movement
invents choreography as a structure of command - a structure
that births a body that can act efficiently only on a domesticated
surface. Moreover, the pre-written movement demands this body to
be the host of a subjectivity that submits itself to - and enacts
without delay - the already pre-formed.
So, how does one remain in transit, while navigating the ever more
insidious structures of command typical of global capitalism in
the age of the multi-cultural? This is a call for rethinking, revisiting,
and reinventing the possibilities of resistance embedded (and how
can we still use this word after Operation Iraki Freedom??) in anti-navigational
practices that have been proposed by artists, philosophers and cultures
since the colonial contact.
Dérives with the Situationists, the Derridean paranomasia,
the Deleuzian Body without Organs with its nomadic/rhizomatic becoming
-- but also Ralph Lemon's invisible anti-memorials, Tanja Ostojic's
subversion of the proper channels of border crossings, Walid Ra'ad's
insistence on the need to expand our notion of "present moment"
from the temporally instantaneous and think it rather as an open
ground rich with otherwise unsuspected para-events. I am limiting
myself here to describe the work of those participating in the Berlin
Lab. But we could also include a plethora of quotidian performative
acts that invent and implement unexpected ways of relating with
and subvert the various structures of command that stifle the possibility
of a being-in-transit. I am thinking here on cultural formations
of un-representable cartographies, capital-ineffective pathways,
microscopic cultural mobilization, and strategies and performances
of inefficiency, ineffectiveness, and inefficacy.
I am thinking of thought-practices that meander, get lazy and get
lost; of a navigating without compass; of a road that cannot be
mapped. I am thinking here of the formation of a culture where being
is a constant state.
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Report #9. From the headlines. (June,
13th 2003)
Today's report will be short. I want to introduce two quotes just
to clarify a bit some aspects of Report #7, which discussed the
notion of telepresence and the implementation of the digital body
as a mode of control being in-transit in a transglobal landscape.
On the digital body in transit:
The Associated Press informed yesterday that a British company will
start testing an "intelligent seat" for commercial air flights.
The intelligent seat is designed to monitor passenger behavior in
order to determine whether he or she is prone to violence, is a
terrorist or not, or may be a candidate for blood clots and other
cardiovascular accidents during flight. The seat will monitor the
passenger's skin conductivity, skin moisture, his or her body temperature
and frequency of mobility as well as other variables and will relay
this information to a central computer on board. The computer will
process the information according to certain programmed profiles
and will alert the crew if it believes a passenger may cause danger.
The AP did not clarify what would be done to a passenger in case
his or her body would be digitally read as a threat.
On the necro-citizen and its reproduction:
The necro-citizen is the human being to whom full access to vitality,
to life, has been denied - including the capacity to act politically.
This means a diminution of his or her capacity to participate in
decision-making processes that may influence or impact the surrounding
social context. Unicef and Plan have just announced the disturbing
figure: this year 40% of newborns will not have their births registered.
This figure jumps to 70% in sub-saharan Africa. A whole mass of
human beings is thus already deprived of their right to exist politically
and legally. This allows for all sorts of trafficking, abductions,
deaths, and exploitations. For the question of traveling cultures,
the necro-citizen is the human being quivering at the limit of the
living and of the political.
I am sure Walid Ra'ad's presentation this evening and Coco Fusco's
piece will allow us to push these ideas further within the context
of the festival. Continued here >>
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Report #8. Parallel thoughts. Haunting.
(June, 12th 2003)
... to be haunted is to be tied to social and historical effects.
Avery Gordon
A bunch of thoughts on ghosts and history. Thoughts running parallel
to the events of the festival and which have no ambition to touch
them directly. Thoughts energized and mobilized by Ralph Lemon's
and Ismael Ivo's proposals - two very different choreographic projects
that do share a common ground: both directly address the ghostly.
It is not that recent critical theory has not been paying attention
to the spectral: from the concept of the disappearing body in performance
(tied to performance's ephemerality -- see Peggy Phelan), to the
mobilization of the Freudian concept of melancholia in order to
understand the formation of the racialized subject as always colonized
(see Anne Anlin Cheng).
According to Freud, the melancholic is the one who will not relinquish
the lost love-object to the facticity of the loss. Thus, the melancholic
remains haunted by the presence of the specter of what is no longer
there. But, rather than to think of melancholia as the pathology
of those-who-will-not-let-go (of the loved object), recent critical
and performance theory has emphasized the ethical importance of
the profound link the melancholic establishes between the community
of the living and the community of the disappeared (see José Muñoz).
This haunted subjectivity is what allows for a vivid perceptual
and ethical capacity of carefully attending to the surrounding environment
and to perceive in it the persistence of the past.
To repeat: "to be haunted is to be tied to social and historical
effects."
In the case of Ralph Lemon, his research process has taken him
to revisit trajectories and charged places in the recent history
of African-American oppression and freedom. That such history still
places its calling, waking up our consciousness in the middle of
the night, making us sweat, panic, hear noises are just signs that
the ghostly has its own theatrics of revenge.
Again, the question for the subject who must constantly negotiate
his or her body's agency and identity under the haunting blows of
past colonialist history and the invisible mannerisms of current
post-colonialist racisms, is of how to mobilize his or her blundered
body in a contemporaneity where such issues are deemed "overcomed"
and properly "buried."
In this sense, to listen to the calling of the improperly buried
dead is to understand history not as that which has already passed,
but as that which will not stop surrounding us, and against which
we must constantly negotiate our steps, gestures, actions and perceptions
in order to avoid its traps. This negotiation with the invisible
is precisely the project of proposing a practice of the improperly
choreographic. Continued here >>
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Report #7. Necro-citizens and haunting
histories. (June, 11th 2003)
The Talkshow last night with Coco Fusco and Ricardo Dominguez brought
up the issue of borders as vividly as ever. How can we create transiting
cultures in our era of border consolidation? And how do we create
a different relation to being "in transit" through the invention
of what Coco and Ricardo called telematic culture?
In telematic culture, the body endures radical linguistic displacements
while enduring identity re-mappings where absence becomes a new
mode for performing presence. Questions probed by Coco and Ricardo:
how does a telematic culture of resistance remain active, alert
and intelligently creative under the surveillance of that other
form of telematic culture performed by electronic state vigilance
and warfare? How does one escape the necrophiliac calling of the
Nation State, as it recasts its citizenry into what Coco Fusco referred
to as necro-citizenry?
Here, global politics and contemporary intercultural performance
imbricate to re-arrange notions of the proper, of property, of the
appropriate, of territory, of limits, of belonging, dissent, resistance,
allegiance, mobility and action. The artist must navigate this faulty,
surveilled, terrain, with ever more careful tactical canniness.
Rustom Barucha, in The Politics of Cultural Practice explained
these dynamics well:
'Not every cultural exchange, I would acknowledge, needs to subscribe
to the global agenda determined by the market economy, the satellite
media culture, the McDonaldization of commodities, among other phenomena
of global capitalism. There are artists in the world who seek each
other out at personal and creative levels, through the harshest
of economic circumstances, with no particular hope of recognition
even within the framework of their respective national cultures.
The work of these relatively unknown artists is not likely to be
commodified by the agencies of corporate culture. On the other hand,
there can be established artists whose narratives can work against
the demands of the market that they are in position to negotiate.
Still others can opt out of the market altogether, pursuing a different
set of cultural interventions that bring together a wide spectrum
of activists, drop-outs and dissidents, representing the non-conformist,
if not subversive elements of any society. Interculturalism ...
embraces all these possibilities of dissent...'
I am over-extending my word limit today, but I think the point
is important for our discussion of what may constitute cultural
exchange in the moment of telepresence and necro-politics. Just
one word before the end of the page (I will continue tomorrow on
Ralph Lemon's proposals -- sorry for the delay Ralph, Okwe, David
and DjéDjé): telematic culture initiates the possibility for a politics
of haunting, as articulated by Avery Gordon, which I think is what
Ralph Lemon is attempting to mobilize with his new project. This
mobilization of the spectral in performance recasts the role of
remembering and of historicity in their intimate relations with
the choreographic. I'll try to go over these points tomorrow (and
I suspect Ismael Ivo's piece will give us hints on this haunted
history as well). Continued here >>
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Report #6. Frames. (June, 10th 2003)
A couple of days of pause in these reports allow for a deeper reflection
on the past ten days of the festival, the lab, the many conversations
with the participants, formal and informal. Also, it gives me a
couple more days to reflect on the work of Wen Hui and Wu Wenguang.
I am interested in particular on how Report on Giving Birth renegotiates
issues of place and belonging by spatializing memory.
To spatialize memory is to spread out time and history onto the
surfaces of the world. Through this spreading surfaces gain face.
We can start relating to them. And they can talk back to us, the
things of the world talking back to us thanks to the weight of splayed-out
memories they receive. This "gaining face" of the world is one of
the basic conditions for political inter/action. At least, this
is how I understand Giorgio Aganbem's thoughts on the politics of
the face.
So what?
So that the issue of place, formulated in the question "Where
does one present or represent cultures?" has been a constant theme
of debate in the informal, non-public conversations between lab
and festival participants. This question probes the role of architecture
in the perception of non-western and non-conventional performances,
of what Ong Keng Sen has called in one of the Talkshows "unqualifiable
performances." The thing is that the unqualifiable performance always
defies its placement within the architecture of the dominant gaze.
It's like a face we find familiar, but cannot recognize. It remains
nameless, homeless. I have asked this before but I'll repeat it
again here: where and under which conditions do we house the unfamiliar?
In the context of performance, this question demands discussing
the appropriateness of the proscenium stage to still operate as
optical-apparatus for contemporary, non-western, unqualifiable,
politically engaged performances. The question becomes: how can
the architecture of theatre gain a new face? How can it receive
on its surface the imprint of new, unexpected, defiant memories?
How can architecture and theatre face the cultural in transit?
So. Thinking about Report on Giving Birth. Here, the proposal
is to break down the architectural boundaries of the theatrical
gaze. A platform enters right into the audience. In the beginning,
members of the audience walk back and forth between "set" and seats.
Later, the live-fed camera reveals corridors off stage, where action
also takes place. Different projections also reveal parts of the
building either through fields of light or through still images
moving about. On the "proper" screen (but of cotton) live and recorded
memories are offered. And then, there are the bodies on stage, splaying
out memories and intensities.
During the post-show talks, it has been asked more than once of
the pertinence of the theatrical space for receiving performance
today. Perhaps it is not a question of getting rid of the stage,
but of making it a face, "the only location of community"
(Aganbem), so that its architecture can relate and house differently
-- without commanding. Continued here >>
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Report #5. Two questions and two quotes
a propos Talkshow with Ong Keng Sen, Ping Chong's Undesirable
Elements: Berlin, and Tanja Ostojic's Looking for a Husband
with EU-Passport. (June, 7th 2003)
Two questions:
1. Is it possible to talk about world cultures without addressing
head-on the issue of racism?
2. How do we give voice within the confines of the theatrical?
Or, to reformulate (while also reiterating) Spivak's expression:
how can the subaltern speak within the aesthetic frame?
Two quotes:
1. From the dinner discussion during Tanja's presentation: There
is a place in Berlin where all sort of "immigration illegals" are
kept, locked up eight people per cell, without legal representation,
with only one hour/day of walking outside of their cells, with no
right to visitations, and where inmates are charged 60 Euros/day
for their imprisonment. Some are incarcerated for the most absurd
reasons. A French citizen was arrested under the accusation of not
being French, and of holding a fake passport. The passport was actually
fine. But apparently the man had the misfortune of "looking Turkish"
to the eyes of German police officers... whatever that "look" means.
The man was realeased after 24hours, but nor after strong pressures
from the French Embassy. Some other stories are far more tragic.
We were told of the "deportation class" in Lufthansa flights, and
that when deported, some "illegals" have died due to suffocation.
The police procedure on how to handle the deported person in the
aircraft is to force the deported person's head against a pillow
so he or she cannot protest and thus be removed from the aircraft.
To make sure no sound comes out, the police presses the deported
person's head against this pillow quite strongly. Sometimes people
die while fighting for air.
2. From Undesirable Elements: Berlin "SLADJA: Authors I
talked to stress that not only political forces move people around
throughout the world. A real person moves through the world too,
at the same time. But history has forced them into a corset, made
them smaller, forced them to fight for air. Finding ones own position
is a balancing act on a tight rope."
PS - Quick afterthought: What is the role of documentation, of
the archive fever buzzing around some of the performances? What
is the role of documentation when it becomes itself an event in
the framing of the event? Perhaps a word that could enter into our
collective reflection in the next few days (a word also coming from
the colonialist project, a word which is a powerful accomplice to
the logic of capitalism, a word teeming with orientalisms and "exotic"
desire, a word that performs culture as commodity) is: fetish.
Continued here >>
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Report #4. Privilege, power, isolation,
choice... (June, 6th 2003)
One word bridges the three interventions of yesterday: capital.
In the Talkshow with Wen Hui and Wu Wenguang, co-founders
of Living Dance Studio, a short video was shown, documenting their
work in 2001 with farmer workers in Beijing. This piece prompted
many questions about notions of culture, of the traveling of traditions,
of body techniques, of aesthetic affiliations and their genealogies.
To see migrant Chinese workers performing contact-improvisation
exercises, or exercises developed by Yvonne Rainer in the 1960s,
is to witness the dissemination of aesthetic and political concerns
specific to the New York avant-garde scene from the 1960s and 1970s
into different geographies and political contexts. Importantly,
the practices proposed by the New York post-moderns were tied to
notions of radical democracy -- in dance and in society. Wen Hui
and Wu Wenguang's work operates politically as it presses for a
detachment of the notion of culture from its facile associations
with ideas of nation and ethnicity. Culture becomes that which travels
in the unfolding of living, allowing for unexpected and creative
actions within the present, interfering with the present, messing
up narratives, remaking and reinventing social conditions and its
corporealities, while sustaining the possibility of communicability,
remembering, and identity.
In the video, an amazing moment is the negotiation (not easy, not
without tensions, misunderstandings, and conflicts) between artists
and workers. The economy of art making is bluntly exposed, illustrating
vividly how the conditions of possibility of art are inextricably
bound to the dynamics and forces of capital.
The imbrications between art, capital, and global mobility were
also demonstrated in Tanja Ostojic's performance-installation "The
Venice Diaries" -- part of her project Strategies for Success.
In choosing to work with curators as material, Ostojic demonstrates
how artists are always already navigating networks of power, where
gender, visibility, mobility, politics, fashion, and money are insidiously
present. Listening to Ostojic reading from her Venice Bienalle diary,
where she escorted for 4 days Harald Szeeman, the Bienalle's chief
curator, one could not but think on the discrepancy between capital's
ability to flow globally and freely in contrast to the human being
forever trapped within legal, political and economic barriers.
Finally, Zoran Eric gave us an overview of the art scene in Belgrade,
showing how the shifting political grounds of a country that has
had three different names and three different constitutions in the
space of a decade inform art production. From what he called a "pathological
art" tied to early 1990s xenophobia and ethno-nationalism,
to very recent work already being influenced by international inflows
of capital (through, for instance, the Soros foundation) Eric proposed
how public and national space seep into artistic practices and objects.
Continued here >>
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Report #3. What I meant was... (June,
5th 2003)
A quote from my first parallel-lecture last night:
"We owe to Walter Benjamin the notion that the condition of modern
capitalism and fast-paced industrialization generates our experience
of reality as constant 'state of emergency.' (This expression was
formulated in his well-known "Theses on the Philosophy of History"
and has been influential for critical and political thinking from
Michael Taussig to Giorgio Agamben).
Now, in the realm of performance, of dramaturgy, and of the arts
in general, what I am proposing here for probing are the following
questions: what kind of physical body is created under this permanent
state of emergency? What are this body's capacities for movement?
How do this body's movements re-negotiate our understanding of the
location of culture (to use Homi Bhabha's expression)?"
A quote from my second parallel-lecture last night:
"Ordinarily, common-sensically, the rule of the catastrophe would
be to question the possibility of dramaturgy, to challenge the fable
of dramaturgy. Yet, there it is, inconspicuously unannounced, as
quiet threat and partner to the fabulous. The insertion of catastrophe,
of the disaster, in the dramaturgical realm, is what allows for
the intrusion of a powerful opening, a breaking up of every action,
of every story, fable, narrative, and unities. By the fire, becoming
one with the ashes, we find ourselves squarely within the question
of dramaturgy: defining art, making guns."
Quote from Giorgio Agamben quoted in my first parallel-lecture
last night, and which I find essential for an understanding of performance
outside the parameters of "alarmed subjectivity," and that I think
may help us understand the performance of identity of Diva Siva
and the Samoan fa'afafines:
"A life that cannot be separated from its form is a life for which
what is at stake in its way of living is living itself. What does
this formulation mean? It defines a life - human life - in which
the single ways, acts, and processes of living are never simply
facts but always and above all possibilities of life, always and
above all power. Each behavior and each form of human living is
never prescribed by a specific biological vocation, nor is it assigned
by whatever necessity; instead, no matter how customary, repeated,
and socially compulsory, it always retains the character of possibility;
that is, it always puts at stake living itself."
And my apologies to Kofi Kôkô for missing his talk...!
Continued here >>
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Report #2. The fantastical signifier
(June, 4th 2003)
So, I went home last night and thought
about this: what are the relationships between race, racism, and
movement? How is it that one goes about in the world as the world
fills itself up with many forces of many racisms? Remember how Franz
Fanon, fresh out of medical school, arrives in France from Martinique,
right after the war, with hopes to help reconstruct the nation?
Remember how he felt exhilarated to be finally in the Metropole,
a young doctor arriving from the colonial, colored, poor, far, and
exotic elsewhere eager to offer his knowledge and skills? Remember
how he thought of himself as perfect flâneur, gliding on
the European city, just another bourgeois man enjoying a careless
stroll down a main artery in Lyon? And remember what happened then,
during the stroll, when he crashed for the first time against the
fact of his blackness? "Look a Negro!" a boy yelled from
across the street, pointing at Fanon. "Mama, a Negro. I am scared!"
repeated the boy. Remember what Fanon writes, describing what he
experienced then?
"I stumbled."
"My body melted."
What kind of dance was that, if any? This falling and melting
and loosing of body, this forced clothing within abject identity
performed by the force of the speech act? And what had exactly happened
to the ground under Fanon's feet? A private-earthquake? The tectonics
of racialization force the question: how can one dance on a treacherous
ground?
Questions Ralph Lemon and his collaborators as well as Kofi Kôkô
and his dancers and musicians have been answering with their art.
As one of the most fundamental constructions of the colonialist
project, race is nevertheless a fantastical fantasy which, as Franz
Fanon has shown, has occupied the place of a most powerful, transcendental
signifier, re-organizing, for the past two centuries, our collective
understanding of identity, subjectivity, power, desire, labor, commodity,
perception, pain, flesh, body, aesthetics, humanness, and otherness.
But if race was first invented as a pseudo-scientific form of social
taxonomy for the sake of colonial subjugation, it has endured a
radical transformation since the anti-colonial movements of the
first half of the past century, the négritude movement of
Senghor, and the civil rights and black power movements in the US.
From oppressive ideological device, race has been claimed and re-invented,
precisely by those whom had felt on their flesh and lives race's
most horrid forms of subjection. Race can be understood now as a
force of cultural, social, and historical resistance.
I would add, after seeing the dances, videos, small happenings,
and after listening to the stories, the histories, and the songs
presented by Lemon and his collaborators, that race has also fundamentally
impacted on our understanding of movement. Not only on our understanding
of what movement is, but importantly of what can be achieved through
movement. Lemon and his collaborators have made clear that it is
impossible to dissociate the history of modern and contemporary
dance and visual arts from the overall societal forces of racialization.
Continued here >>
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Report #1.
Housing cultures (June, 3rd 2003)
On the stages, on the foyer, by the bar, at the
restaurant, on the hallways, in the off-public areas of the building:
the event spreads out, filling up the House. From across the globe,
from across the Atlantic, from across the border, or simply from
across Berlin, artists, curators, creators, performers, stream in,
claiming their transitory new space of presentation as a time for
experimenting and creating. I arrived with some of them a week ago
at "The House of World Cultures". How is it possible to
create a homely space that harbors such diversity, such a radical
diversity? Remember the historical-political weight of those two
terms: house and culture. The term culture is a relatively recent
European invention in its current anthropological sense. It allowed
for the colonial project as the exercising of brutal taxonomies
in order to divide, within artificial boundaries, the ethos and
the morphologies of non-European peoples, all in the name of economic
expansion and racial domination. No question about it - in recent
European colonialism, the use of the word culture as we understand
it (i.e., as series of aesthetic, behavior, linguistic and morphological
traits that are deemed to typify and to distinguish a human
population) posited social differencing as unquestionable fact,
and cast this fact in such a way that any possibility of contact
across cultures had always to be mediated by the language of the
master. The master's job, by the way, in the colony, was always
to be at home ruling, at home ruling even while being away...
How to house world cultures then, without putting them under house-arrest?
What could be the rules of this housing? What of its economy?
Remember how economy contains already the notion of the well-kept,
tightly ruled house: oikos (home) + nomos (law).
Question upon arrival: What could be the laws
of this particular House in Berlin filled with unruly cultures that
moreover, perform?
Answer: Liquify architecture. And flow.
In the
past few days, the House has been unruly, subverting architecture
and economy. The House becoming an improbable studio for multiple
exchanges: of ideas, of gestures, of movements, of body techniques,
of rhythms, of sounds, of concepts, of stories, of histories, and
of dances. With the performances by the ensembles directed by Ong
Keng Sen, and by Koffi Kôkô, and the shows by Diva Siva, what became
transparently clear in the past weekend was how performance, when
properly housed within intelligence and freedom, has the potential
to liquify even the heaviest of hegemonic burdens. These first performances
in transit re-claimed the word culture from its colonial economy
and turned it around. Culture has been shown to be a becoming of
intensities and potentialities spreading in the fluidity of the
liquid house. After the shows on Friday and Saturday, DJs and VJs
exercised their art throughout the night mobilizing the house's
audience and artists directly into action. As we danced, the walls
of the House seemed at times to be made out of sound. Vibrating
just like our bodies...
In the past few days, during the hours preceding the arrival of
the audience, the house has been transversed by yet another set
of performances: conversations and experimentations unfolding in
studios and around tables. This is a political-dialogical project
in shared thinking anthropologist Nadia Seremetakis calls "reflective
commensality". I can think of no better way to house cultures
than in this open exchange of flows. Continued here
>>
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The Lab participants:
- Ralph Lemon, New York >>
- André Lepecki >>
- Tanja Ostojic, Belgrade/Düsseldorf >>
- Zoran Eric, Belgrade >>
- The Atlas Group / Walid Raad >>
- Junko Wada, Berlin >>
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