I am working on a series of pieces based on the idea of myself as an artist prepper, a ‘survivalist’. I use my artistic work to forecast the potential dark future we are facing. What do I need as a person to survive? How can I use my present work to help out in different future scenarios and, at the same time show the obvious damage we all participate in?
As I was working on this subject, I realized that it would be really hard to stand the absence of art and that all good artworks that have been created this far will disappear when a large part of the planet goes underwater. What is interesting to keep for the future; what do we want to pass on to our kids and to the eventual survivors?
As an artist, I have always been into DIY and been engaged in different artistic organisations. This becomes very natural living and working in Gothenburg, which sometimes can be experienced almost like a city with an anarchistic art society. Gothenburg has a strong scene of artist run galleries and artists that have chosen to live here to get away from the hierarchical and elitist art world that exists in many other cities around the world.
From the series Apocalypse Insurance – Keep family breathing by Linda Tedsdotter
When I started the Apocalypse Insurance series I did it with a large amount of criticism to the whole idea of “just make sure you and your family is safe” – which is the model that the insurance industry is based on and an idea that the ‘preppers’ are into. This is not so different to the contemporary art scene, which is often a very ego and selfish driven system.
Apocalypse Insurance / Waterproof. A Selection of Art History is an attempt to map out a more horizontal view of the arts and to get an alternative picture of what the history of artists and their practices will be like in the future. I see this work as an ongoing piece, hoping that every time I will exhibit it that more artists will choose to be part of the future and create a new heritage. When the apocalypse happens and if somebody survives, this person will probably have more important things to think about than art as it is conceived today, but I like to think that the selection of artist books might serve as a starting point to face a new surviving situation.
I like to preserve artist books – not only the well known ones. I am planning to collect artist books and vacuum package them and pile them on a floatable ‘Pallet’.
I need your help to collect all these artist books. Do you want to be part of it? What is important to save for the future? What do you think the future Art History shall include? Are you willing to give away one of your own artist books? I would be delighted and so thankful if you will help me with this piece. The books will be presented so that the backs are visible to the audience. I would be more than happy if you can send it to me:
Not so long ago it was a challenge to get artistic practice recognized as ‘work’. Even today, art is sometimes treated as a kind of unwieldy force that just comes out of you, almost effortlessly, depending on if you have inspiration or talent. Artists could be seen as parasites or as idlers leading a bohemian lifestyle. In practice, however, today artists are rather precarious self-managers, multitasking with self-promotion and presentation, application writing, networking, and actual artistic production, often also having other ‘normal’ jobs to make a living. As most freelancers, they have neither stable income nor social benefits. In return for such a stressful and vulnerable life and working conditions, they are supposed to get their ‘artistic benefits’ – pleasure, fame, and etc., which in reality are rather substituted with nervous breakdowns, burn-outs, anxiety, and depression. At the same time there is an old idea that artists are meant to suffer – that’s how their artistic production happens. But in the modern world artists are expected to be not too crazy or depressed but just sane enough to keep it safe and convenient for management and networking; in other words artists should foster business relationships.
To cope with this situation there are several tools that normalize artistic production: the most common of which are artists’ unions or having a legal status as self-employed. The former in Eastern Europe nowadays unfortunately turned out to be mostly corrupt and has a conservative bureaucratic structure, while the latter does not eliminate all the struggles that go along with the precarity in the worker’s life mentioned above. If an artist becomes a worker, whom are they employed by: the state, society, curators, critics, or by themselves and other artists – aka within ‘the arts field’ itself?
So maybe we should move the opposite direction, or not move, but turn to the non-work in order to finally experience pleasure and joy as a political statement, practice radical idleness, and become unproductive and uncreative without any guilt, stress, or regret! The non-creative non-work of the artist. This idea is not so new but can be found within a political and artistic tradition. In 1883, Paul Lafargue wrote his The Right To Be Lazy where he claimed that the workers should not demand more work or improved working conditions but rather work less and demand the right to laziness and reap its pleasures.1 Marcel Duchamp stood for the refusal to work as a refusal to be an art producer or performer who has a social function and artistic identity.2 Given today’s obsession with self-performance and constant presence (this phenomena is well analyzed by Hito Steyerl in her lecture and essay “The Terror of Total Dasein”, 2015), this demand sounds particularly acute.3 Kazimir Malevich praised laziness and criticised both capitalism and communism for being labor-centered in his text “Laziness as the Truth of Mankind” (1921).4 Mladen Stilinović believed that “there is no art without laziness” and criticised the Western art tradition as a system of artistic production in his “In Praise of Laziness” (1993). He writes: “Artists in the West are not lazy and therefore not artists, but rather producers of something.”5 While artists in the East, he claimed, were deprived of that system and therefore “had time enough to concentrate on art and laziness. Even when they did produce art, they knew it was in vain, it was nothing.”6
Practicing laziness in our work-oriented society is however not so easy as it might seem. As Maurizio Lazzarato puts it:
Let us start with the socio-economic critique. Laziness is not simply a ‘non-action’ or a ‘minimal-action.’ It involves taking a position with respect to the conditions of existence under capitalism. First of all, it affirms a subjective refusal of (paid) work and of all the forms of conformist behavior capitalist society demands.7
Laziness, unproductivity, and non-work are not eccentric selfish deals, but collective political issues, which should be approached systematically and with complexity. Being lazy efficiently could become hard work in itself; it could be violent and painful. So a really important point is to keep the shared joy and pleasures of the non-work.
DZINA
Olia, great! Thank you a lot for starting the conversation!
I just wanted to comment briefly that in the contemporary context of St. Petersburg there is a network of horizontal laboratories, which stands for a world without labor – n i i c h e g o d e l a t (Scientific Research Institute for doing nothing). ‘Employees’ of SRI for doing nothing want to undermine labor and attend to social behavior through inaction. They write that doing nothing can be or become the possibility of inventing new ways to coexist and live in alternative times: “The development of new labor relations and total laziness are necessary tensions that create a field for uniting workers and non-workers.”8 They are into the themes of time (burn out – acceleration, decay – stopping), connectivity of spaces (intimate interfaces); exploring the body and its ability to slow down and accelerate; and the role of the social parasite, procrastinator, precariat, and slacker. They often refer to UNI (universal basic income) + social assistance (such as free healthcare, education, vocational training, social services). On the 1st of May, LABOR DAY, they went out to the annual demonstration for solidarity with the working people and parasites. Here are some of their slogans and catchwords →
n i i c h e g o d e l a t at the the annual demonstration for solidarity with the working people and parasites on 1 May, Labor Day in St. Petersburg. Screenshot from n i i c h e g o d e l a t video documentation.
n i i c h e g o d e l a t at the the annual demonstration for solidarity with the working people and parasites on 1 May, Labor Day in St. Petersburg. Screenshot from n i i c h e g o d e l a t video documentation.
n i i c h e g o d e l a t at the the annual demonstration for solidarity with the working people and parasites on 1 May, Labor Day in St. Petersburg. Screenshot from n i i c h e g o d e l a t video documentation.
n i i c h e g o d e l a t at the the annual demonstration for solidarity with the working people and parasites on 1 May, Labor Day in St. Petersburg. Screenshot from n i i c h e g o d e l a t video documentation.
n i i c h e g o d e l a t at the the annual demonstration for solidarity with the working people and parasites on 1 May, Labor Day in St. Petersburg. Screenshot from n i i c h e g o d e l a t video documentation.
n i i c h e g o d e l a t at the the annual demonstration for solidarity with the working people and parasites on 1 May, Labor Day in St. Petersburg. Screenshot from n i i c h e g o d e l a t video documentation.
KOLYA
Thank you, Olia and Dzina, for touching on the issue of practicing non-work from the collective perspective! I want to share an example of an activity of n i i c h e g o d e l a t (SRI for doing nothing).9 It is a moving/movement performance-report “Temporal liquidity in revolving doors of ‘Galereya’ shopping mall in St. Petersburg” made by Marina Shamova as part of Symposium of SRI for doing nothing in ‘Galereya’ shopping mall (2017). Here is the link to video documentation.
And here are some screenshots if you don’t want to work for social-media-corporations and create accounts in their social networks:
Marina Shamova. Performance-report in movement Temporal liquidity in revolving doors of ‘Galereya’ shopping mall in St. Petersburg. Screenshot taken from video documentation of the action.
Marina Shamova. Performance-report in movement Temporal liquidity in revolving doors of ‘Galereya’ shopping mall in St. Petersburg. Screenshot taken from video documentation of the action.
Marina Shamova. Performance-report in movement Temporal liquidity in revolving doors of ‘Galereya’ shopping mall in St. Petersburg. Screenshot taken from video documentation of the action.
Here are some theses on the reasons why I find the occupation of the revolving door important:
Transparent, anti spectacular activity.
Collective practice involving strangers.
It is an action of occupying already existing structures, cultural machines that produce division of modes of leisure/rest and work.
It is the production of a temporary zone without any claims to be sustainable (very problematic word that is co-opted by self-entrepreneur discourse).
OLIA
Thank you Dzina and Kolya for bringing the practice of n i i c h e g o d e l a t to the discussion! I am also captivated by their performance in the revolving doors. The revolving doors of the mall are the transit space between the space of consumption – which today is often almost equal to the space of leisure – and the mundane everyday space ‘of work’. The performers refuse to pass from one space to the other. There is also something particular about the very circular movement of walking in the door, the loop and repetition, the reference to khorovod or kolo dance and carousel, but the structure of the door is made of segments, separating the passers by into temporary and accidental groups.
NILS
Dear all, thank you for bringing in actions with a political dimension into our effort of collective writing. The performance in the carousel reminds me of an international anti-capitalist project named Buy Nothing Day (on the 25 of November). A group of Swedish artists organized processions of empty shopping wagons in malls. They were told to stop their action by guards. This art-activism practice used to be seen and understood as a protest against consumerism, but the global ecological crisis has changed everything. The big issue today is the climate-crisis. A lot of people are working hard to destroy the ecology of our planet. On a global scale, big capital is made on the destruction of the fundamentals of life. It seems that all the dystopies produced by Hollywood will be real. Stopping dystopias from being real! should be the first argument for the non-work line. The second argument is that it takes a lot of work to keep up the non-work line, as Olia mentioned. We should create a sphere of luxurious laziness that opens up the mind and invites to joys and pleasures.
It could work for a lot of people because nowadays the technological and production level of humankind could provide for us all.
Back to art. I think it is important to defend art from the ideas and system of creative industries. The concept of creativity is dangerous. We are better off with the concept of non-creativity. The point when art says no. No. A big no-no.
DZINA
Dear Nils,
I reread your thoughts in the doc. I was somehow caught by the slogan “Stopping dystopias from being real!” and as you also mentioned: luxurious laziness. That made me think about the utopian project that often refers to predictions about technology that can bring equality and freedom. Maybe even freedom of work as we see it in fully automated luxury communism that claims that new technologies will liberate us from work, providing the opportunity to build a society beyond both capitalism and scarcity. “Automation, rather than undermining an economy built on full employment, is instead the path to a world of liberty, luxury and happiness. For everyone.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmQ-BZ3eWxM
NILS
Hello again, I am trained as a practice based artistic researcher and received my Phd in 2017. The fundamentals of artistic research are radical because it gives the artist the right or duty to explain his/her work. It breaks up the division of labor between the artist as a producer and the curator, and the art critic /historian as the explainer. The concept of research also means that the artist/researcher has to work in a more open, non-mystical-way. Artistic research at its best creates a multi-disciplinary dialogue between different artistic and theoretical traditions and also acts as a bridge to other fields of research and innovation. The academic learning apparatus has severe problems to cope with it because the structure of higher education is not constructed to host practicing artists. We have the problem in Sweden to create an environment where art and research can thrive and bloom.
What we often get is an institutionalized art crippled by bureaucracy in sterile office like settings. (IKEA HELL)
For you people in Belarus this may sound like spoiled children complaining over nothing.
The publication is a collection of texts discussing ways to create an environment where art-research and education could meet and communicate.
Aaron Bastani explains Fully Automated Luxury Communism, a post-capitalist utopia. Screenshot taken from Novara Media youtube.
OLIA
Nils, thank you for your contribution. What you say about instrumentalizing and bureaucratizing art really resonates with me. Not only in reference to the marriage of art & research in the academia, but also more generally. I think I tried to say something related to the above when I mentioned that artists today are expected be comfortable to work with: they can’t have depression or be too crazy. I also have a feeling that maybe today the text or research accompanying the artwork sort of proves that the artist really worked, as the artwork itself often does not look like some effort of production. Of course it’s not always the case.
We should also keep in mind a certain difference between the Belarusian and Swedish situation, as we are obviously not talking about just local or vice versa just universal issues here, and even within our ‘home’ contexts some of us have different positions. Actually, sometime as an artist from Belarus, I may feel a kind of gap, trying to balance in-between the western and post-socialist systems of arts production.
DZINA
Yes, I also think that Swedish art context differs a lot from Belarusian context. As a rule, it’s not only impossible to live from one’s art in Minsk, but there are certain difficulties from the bureaucratic side. It is completely opposite to the Swedish situation. Here, I refer to the “law against social parasites” in Belarus that I am sure you are familiar with. This policy requires anyone who works for less than 183 days per year to pay 20 basic units (around 230 euro) for “lost taxes” to help fund welfare policies. Just so you know, it’s quite a lot – around a half-month’s wage. As the Ministry of Labor and Social Protection argues: it’s important to “stimulate” employment of the population.
As an artist, in order not to pay “tax” (actually the word “fine” works better here), you would need to show your art to the special commission that can give a professional certificate issued in accordance with the law (or they refuse to issue it if you do not have a classical education in the art sphere). So you know what it means for contemporary artists – almost no chance to get it.
The law was in use from April 2015 until very recently. On February 2017, there were series of street protests against the law and the economical situation in Belarus. The anti-parasite ‘tax’ and its reflection on the sphere of culture made the space between the market and the authoritarian control of the state evident.
On 1 December 2018, a database of the unemployed was compiled. We know already that the unemployed will have to pay “for the services determined by the Council of Ministers at prices and tariffs ensuring full recovery of the economically justified costs of providing them,” like medicine, education, a communal flat, public transport…
DZINA
Hey all again!
How are things with you?
Dear Olia,
Just wanted to point out the importance of your thoughts for me about artists that are expected today to “be comfortable to work with,” “they can’t have depression or be too crazy.” I found myself in this situation when I was invited, for example, to a residency where everybody was very helpful and nice, but expecting and ‘looking forward to’ something – which is also ok if this ‘forward’ is not expecting the production of a comfortable situation for the visitors. I am like: why are they inviting me? Don’t they know what I am doing? Or a lecture where you need to present your artistic method that is sometimes treated as radical and can also provoke inconveniences or discomfort for some people. However, this is needed as a provocation and as a method to unlearn what you were learning or to deskill – how to use a tool in another way than it was programmed for in order to break the convenient, cozy, and familiar user-experience scenario. I often spoke about this with my friends from Night Movement who often struggle with the organizers of different events for being too crazy.
Night Movement. Night Without Movement. Screenshot taken from the website.
Night Movement. Night of Sleep. Screenshot taken from the website.
Night Movement. Night of Sleep. Screenshot taken from the website.
Concerning ‘pauses’, ‘stops’, and ‘resting moments’, me and Kolya recently made an online-conference about the useless concept of the ‘Traffic Loop’ that is basically an infinite loop of data going round-and-round. During the conference, people who were hired to perform a script had a 7-minutes break.
eeefff. Screenshot taken from the script Traffic Loop.
eeefff. Screenshot of online-conference dedicated to the speculative phenomena Traffic Loop, an infinite loop of data.
We are talking a lot here about non-work, cultivating, and growing it in ourselves, but also in a series of SWS – simultaneous work sessions – Kolya and I invited our friends and colleagues to join a work activity for an hour span of time:
This is a digital union of non-material workers, the virtual space of multi-user processing – so try not to distract each other – you can watch someone doing her cognitive work.
The synchronized sessions are designed to unify participants into one working mode. Being united by one of the online-communication tools, we will simply work and listen to each other’s work. Being silently present in the imaginary space.
Rationalized time management of production processes is the contrast to joint silent sessions: when we unite not to produce something together but rather to help each other to overcome the accelerating communication and production processes reinforced by online tools. Using the same tools against their primarily functions, we are constructing together the union of non-material workers.
This gap that you are mentioning could be a cave or a cathedral. The position of art in Belarus gives artists, curators, and other cultural workers a position to create something that could be ……………… (outstanding, depressing, new, or special).
Belarus is still outside of the international system of contemporary art. For you, the white cube has just started with Ў gallery around 10 years ago. I get the impression that the artists, curators, and cultural workers from Belarus gathering around the Status project are representing a strong new generation. You speak English, travel, study, and have internships in the US, Norway, Finland, Sweden, etc.
I think we as artists and cultural workers can and should take all possible opportunities to collaborate on an international scale, but we should also be conscious of the fact that we are also played with (or can be played with) by others. I think that we, in our collaborative process, should make it a priority to create examples. Making art with limited resources and discovering a system for critical reflection in our own process/project where everybody in the project contributes.
OLIA
Olia Sosnovskaya Sunday, 25 nov., 19:30
to: Dzina, nicola, Nils.Claesson, tania.arcimovich, Nastya, maximsarychau
Hey dears!
I want to share with you today’s experience, which fits perfectly to our agenda. I was paid to do nothing for 2 hours (7.5 euro per hour) with four other art students. It was a performance by my friends, artist duo Martinka Bobrikova & Oscar de Carmen Non-logic Devices in Logic Processes. Though of course our ‘doing nothing’ had some protocols and instructions, which we had to follow: we were to either sit on the chairs holding a rope or stand by the tilted wall, and not communicate or make contact with anyone, including each other. That practice also felt a bit like meditation or hypnosis because at some point of immobility I could neither feel some parts of my body nor the time. I’ll attach the photo.
Olia Sosnovskaya performs in the Non-logic Devices in Logic Processes by Martinka Bobrikova & Oscar de Carmen. HotDock Project Space, Bratislava, November 2018. Photo by Aleksei Borisionok.
DZINA
Dears,
I’m so sorry for my late reply! As a ‘personal enterprise’ (I hope I’m kidding here) I am overwhelmed with the multiple tasks that I need to conduct. My everyday practice – the way I procrastinate in order not to write a completed text – is composed from words-findings and words-that-are-playful. So please let me invite you to my uncompleted never finished ‘procrastination machine’:
paradise politics
slow archipelagos
last resort
post-fast
hyperpassive
I am very much concerned about a less work-centered future. To put it more precisely, when I actually write ‘future’ I mean the present, following science-fiction that counts itself as “science-fiction of the present day,” imagining or speculating on the current state of society rather (or sometimes even if) writing about previously non-existing worlds at new planets hundreds of year from now. So read it as “a less work-centered present” that is imagined but not yet real. ↓↓↓signpost phrases↓↓↓signpost phrases↓↓↓signpost phrases (something like “From this I want to go deeper into the subjects identifying themselves as competitive” or posing a question might be good – “Is it possible to overcome the work ethic?” or smth).
efficient man
the figure of the enterprise
entrepreneurial subject
competitive man
personal enterprise
neo-liberal subject
the desiring being
investments in creativity
The apparatus of efficiency is a particular kind of subjective normalization from which the ‘efficient man’ was born. Viewing a human as an active subject who must participate fully, commit herself utterly, and engage completely in her professional activity. This is the subject of total self-involvement. And even more – this person is becoming the desiring being. As Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval in The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society put it:
The new techniques of ‘personal enterprise’ doubtless reach a peak of alienation in claiming to abolish any sense of alienation: following one’s desire and obeying the Other who speaks softly within the self are one and the same thing. In this sense, modern management is a ‘Lacanian government’: the desire of the subject is the desire of the Other.
↓↓↓ (something from my personal life – yesterday I was in the lecture of my friend Gleb Napreenko who was defining the Other as a constituent legitimation of one’s identity and what happens when you dismiss the Other…, or that sometimes a part of your own body can become the Other…) ↓↓↓ from this I can somehow go to the idea of parts of the body and their transformations that can break the logic of/transform the understanding of the Other ↓↓↓ or maybe that goes too far↓↓↓
sensibilities
sensoriums
extensions
sensors
augmentations
capabilities
sensing abilities
biotransformations
The word ‘cyborg’ comes from the words ‘cybernetic organism’ that is an organism that has bio-, or mechanical extensions in the body↓↓↓ Do we want to develop extensions at different levels?↓↓↓ A body works pharmacologically even when we are asleep↓↓↓ Maybe the word ‘work’ should be dissociated into thousands of meanings↓↓↓ How to raise new sensibilities within ourselves?↓↓↓
OLIA
I want to get back to the fully automated luxury communism for everyone, brought by Dzina. I think it is important to mention that laziness and refusal to work, even in its radical form, can be a privilege. Who can afford to be lazy? Is it only those who are relatively safe in terms of their basic needs, like was Duchamp? Laziness is also often linked to white privilege, particularly in terms of being lazy to educate oneself about racism, for example. On the other hand, migrants and persons of color are often portrayed as lazy, as parasites, or Eastern Europeans are stereotyped as cheaters, avoiding work and study. I would like to problematize the list of male theorists and practitioners of non-work and laziness, which I referenced in the very first comment when I spoke about the history of the issue. It is the same old question about representation and access to resources. To put it in a bit of an exaggerated way: while the male artist is already refusing to work, the female artist is still working hard to get noticed and be acknowledged as an artist. Or, while in the exploitation of the working class, men were conscious of this, and they were organised enough to demand their ‘right to be lazy’ – the exploitation of women was mostly invisible, and took place in the separated (‘private’) spaces of homes. Kathi Weeks in her book The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries explores those intersections.10 I agree with Dzina that perhaps the word ‘work’ should have many more meanings, like non-work should not be neutral but always be nuanced and have particular social, political, gender, and racial biases.
DZINA
Olia, thanks for commenting! Your comments are great!!!
The gendered aspect of the conceptions of ‘work’ should be a key part into building post-work imaginaries. Social reproduction and care – such as raising of children and domestic issues – still require a lot of the female dominated ‘private’ work.
As Silvia Federici puts it
while production has been restructured through a technological leap in key areas of the world economy, no technological leap has occurred in the sphere of domestic work significantly reducing the labour socially necessary for the reproduction of the workforce.11
Jozi Stolet and Polina Shilkinite (St.Petersburg / Moscow) in their project world of work / world without work face invisible work of activists, artists, mothers, volunteers, and possible solutions in cooperation with machines: http://workhardplay.pw/en/2017/projects/shilkinite-stolet.html#
Jozi Stolet and Polina Shilkinite. Screenshot of the video world of work / world without work.
Jozi Stolet and Polina Shilkinite. Documentation of the project world of work / world without work held during Work Hard! Play Hard! in 2017 in Minsk. Photo by Dzina Zhuk.
Today I was also thinking about a collaboration between Uliana Bychenkova & Zhanna Dolgova Welcome To The Doll House! (Kyiv / St.-Petersburg) and the notion of play and procrastination that they find important in order to reclaim language and voice. They write:
Finally, our desire is to play. This wish connected to the lack of our meaning in the hegemonic discourses, to the blockage of non-normative types of pleasure of the weak – female, childish, any pleasure of the other. Playing, we can produce ludic commonality – in an attempt to install, to foster new ties (friendly, affective, sensible, somatic, ontological). We put search and affirmation of the most intimate and at the same time shared wishes and hopes into the form of play – commonality, which can be political.
NILS
Dear Dzina, thank you for introducing or reminding us of the institution of play. Play is a radical force that unites not only humans but also animals into non-productive, non-work activity. (In a collection of old fairy tales and myths from the Sami people one story is how the sami-children made a truce with the bear-mother to play with bear-cubs. I think this story goes from Scandinavia along the white sea all the way to Siberia).
Even a cat knows when it is time for play and not.
Takao Mumiyama. Calligraphy. From private archive of Nils.
This is a calligraphy made by Takao Mumiyama in summer 2018. I asked him write the term karoshi. It means death by overworking. Around 200 persons die that way every year in Japan. The signs have the same meaning in Chinese and Korean.
KOLYA
Date:
Tue, 25 Dec 2018 17:05:11 +0300
From:
nicola spesivcev
To:
Dzina Zhuk, Olia Sosnovskaya, Nils Claesson, tania.arcimovich, Nastya Ranko, maximsarychau
Hey all!
Thank you Dzina and Olia for shattering our two pole system where only ‘work’ and ‘non-work’ exist. I think that nuancing neutral term of ‘non-work’ and elaboration on the notion of play and procrastination have a big potential to make our analysis more accurate. Your ideas pushed me to speculate about the situation that unfolds even before the division between ‘work’ and ‘non-work’. In desire to do so, I found myself in thoughts spinning around the notion of ‘activity’ and something similar to the word ‘activism’.
Last week I was in the discussion “Past and Present of Activist Art: Dialogue of Generations” (speakers: Oksana Vasyakina, Artem Loskutov, Pavlo Mitenko, Natalia Nikulenkova, Ekaterina Nenasheva, Make, Dasha) that was in frame of “Marathon of Activist Art”. A large part of the conversation was about different methods of juxtaposing art, actionism, and activism.
The term of activism was formulated there as _activity_ with political aims and _activity_ that goes beyond any forms of alienation.
Pavlo Mitenko during the discussion – and in his text “How to Act in the Public View (Moscow Actionism and the Community Politics)” (available here in Russian: http://magazines.russ.ru/nlo/2013/124/20m.html) – proposed some ideas that can be useful for our purposes as well.
Here I’d like to re-formulate several of his theses:
– because it’s a-sociality and socially dysfunctional, an action cannot be evaluated through the grid of institutional forms of art and politics.
– an action is an act/leap-of-faith. Therefore it’s a phenomenon that does not belong to divided spheres of labor, but to the tissue of unformalized relations, to immediate relations in other words.
Based on this, I want to bring to our discussion this very notion of the attempt to deal with relations before establishing any alienating forms of institualization, relations that belong to the activity understood as intensity of life.12
Maybe the marxist theory of establishing human subjectivity elaborated in late Soviet times by Evald Ilyenkov, for example, could be useful to unpack the relation between activity and various social and political grounded forms of work and non-work. But give me a bit more time to think about that.
At the end, I would like to share a bunch of issues of “Pervasive Labour Union Zine,” which I think is firmly connected with themes we’re discussing here. Here is the link: http://ilu.servus.at/
And a small excerpt from an introduction to the issue #11 the entreprecariat:
The strategic colonization and commodification of relationships with
others and with the self is one of the predominant features of the
‘entreprecariat’ , which is the focus of this issue. The term emerged
from the realization that, while an array of diverse forms of precarity
(financial, professional, and even existential) is becoming the norm for
a growing number of people, so it is the necessity to tackle them
entrepreneurially. As witnessed by the emergence of terms like
‘entrepreneurism’, individuals as well as institutions are increasingly
urged to think of themselves as brands, companies or startups. Against a
backdrop characterized by relentless destabilization, entrepreneurship,
the practice of starting and managing a business through risk, turns
into entrepreneurialism, a universal doctrine with its own dogmas,
martyrs and plans of salvation.
xxx
P. Lafargue, 1907. The Right to be Lazy and Other Studies, Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company.. ↩
M. Lazzarato, 2014. Marcel Duchamp and The Refusal of Work, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).↩
Steyerl, Hito, “The Terror of Total Dasein” Lecture, Public Editorial Meeting Former West, Art and Labor after the End of Work, Museum of Modern Art, 9 and 10 October, 2015, Warsaw, PL, [online video], https://vimeo.com/147260974, Accessed 31 December, 2018.↩
Malevich, Kazimir (1921). “Laziness as the Truth of Mankind”.↩
This catalogue is work in progress, where we propose to discuss the cases connected with the topic of Heritagization. Heritagization – heritage-making, the creation and re-creation of cultural, historical meaning, and identity – is done by different actors and at different levels, from institutions, museums, their visitors, to common people, and artists.
In our collective project, we focus on different forms of heritagization that emerge parallel and/or are in conflict with official and authorized forms of heritage making. In particular, we are interested in highlighting, enacting and performing alternative processes of heritage-making collectively, through art practice and activism in urban public spaces. The project is composed of different parts that dialogue and build on one another to explore how art and activism can make or reflect on heritage. We also plan to analyse the situation in Belarus and Sweden and will try to search for any similarities, patterns, or differences in our future work.
Belarusian Cases
Prepared by Alina Dzeravianka
Having worked for the last five years with heritage and contemporary art in Belarus, I proposed a number of cases that I think are relevant to the topic of heritage making or Heritagization. For me, it is a process when an artist, group of artists, or activists start to work on a certain topic connected to the past. Somehow their works can be connected with material or intangible heritage, and sometimes it is not yet perceived as heritage by the wider society. In such cases, the artist or a group becomes an occasional researcher or historian who works with heritage. In some cases, as in Brest stories guide projects or Artur Klinau’s City of the Sun, the artists emphasise the importance of historical memory or the value of monuments. In others, such as the work of VEHA project or artist Andrei Liankevich’s work Pagan,, artists focus on the tradition, personal stories, and local identity connected with the past. In Ruslan Vashkevich interventions in the museum, he questions what gets perceived as museum heritage nowadays, and who decides what it is.
Brest stories guide (audio guide-performance)
Brest Stories Guide, Photographs by Roman Chmel.
Brest Stories Guide, Photographs by Roman Chmel.
Brest Stories Guide, Photographs by Roman Chmel.
Brest Stories Guide, Photographs by Roman Chmel.
Brest Stories Guide, Photographs by Roman Chmel.
In 2016, the independent theatre group Kryly Khalopa began the project Brest Stories Guide. It is a series of documentary audio performances in the city space of Brest that one can download on a mobile app. The project is an audio guide – a tour around a ‘nonexistent’ Brest – and is based on materials from the archives, books, photos, and interviews with witnesses of the events related to the rise of anti-Semitism since 1937 and the Brest ghetto and the obliteration of the Jewish community in 1941-1942. In addition to the memories of surviving Jews and Brest citizens, they also used the unpublished reports of German officers from the archives. The play becomes a kind of investigation based on the sonic memory of witnesses to anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in Brest in the 1930s and 1940s. Now Brest has a history told not by the authors of textbooks and the creators of heroic narratives but by its inhabitants.1 For a long time it was almost impossible to see any remains or signs of the Jewish population in Brest, which used to make up 60% of the city in the 19th century; however, due to the Soviet ideology and Post-Soviet neglect of politics, this history is buried.
The mobile application consists of the audio guide and a city map, which allows the user to navigate freely on the map with key sites of Jewish heritage and historical events in Brest. Streets, buildings, and yards become a stage on which the voices from the past sound The Kryly Khalopa theatre offers the visitors to plunge into the history, and also see the outlines of a disappeared, old Brest appearing through the facade of today’s city2.
Brest Stories Guide is a project at the intersection of art, tourism, and cultural heritage preservation. It is the result of the co-work of about twenty people, including historians, experts from Jewish organizations, as well as the best actors of Brest theaters3. Brest Stories Guide is one of the heritagization processes in Belarus done by an independent theatre group who helps promote the untold, sometimes neglected history, but also promote the heritage of the city.
Horse in a coat exhibition by Ruslan Vashkevich
Horse in a coat exhibition by Ruslan Vashkevich, Brest, 2016. Photographs by Roman Chmel.
Horse in a coat exhibition by Ruslan Vashkevich, Brest, 2016. Photographs by Roman Chmel.
Horse in a coat exhibition by Ruslan Vashkevich, Brest, 2016. Photographs by Roman Chmel.
Horse in a coat exhibition by Ruslan Vashkevich, Brest, 2016. Photographs by Roman Chmel.
Horse in a coat exhibition by Ruslan Vashkevich, Brest, 2016. Photographs by Roman Chmel.
Horse in a coat is a unique project on borders and smuggling, which was created specifically for Brest by Belarusian contemporary artist Ruslan Vashkevich in October 2016.
The exhibition discussed how objects that were seized at the border, some of which were seen as smuggled objects, get framed as Art within the museum. The artist muses how these ‘Modern Art’ objects colonize the space of the local museum. The objects created by artist were supposed to mix their perception with their function in the museum. It was first planned to be exhibited in the Museum of Saved Values (Музей спасенных ценностей), but after museum professionals saw the objects, they refused to show it. So the artist has to find a new place in one day. Finally he found a place in the shopping center; so in the end, it was quite provocative and interesting at the same time.
From my point of view, Ruslan Vashkevich tried to reflect on how a museum object gets framed in the museum. The Museum of Saved Values is the only museum in Belarus where works of art and antiques are exhibited after being confiscated by Brest customs officers in an attempt to save them from being smuggled abroad. But the question is: how is the collection formed? What is the value of the smuggled objects? Why do they became museum objects?
I think that through Vashkevich’s objects created for the exhibition, he was able to reflect and critique the museum display and its collection. We see that most of the works he created turned out to be similar objects as the ones that are in the museum but with some added artistic value. From this point of view, it is questionable what has more heritage value: the confiscated objects or the objects created by artist Ruslan Vashkevich? He also had a number of interventions in the museum collections: the exhibition Go and See at Rumyantsev-Paskevich Palace, Gomel, Belarus and the exhibition Museum in 2011 at the National Art Museum.
Minsk. City of the Sun concept and book by Artur Klinau
From the album Minsk. City of the Sun by Artur Klinau.
From the album Minsk. City of the Sun by Artur Klinau.
From the album Minsk. City of the Sun by Artur Klinau.
Artur Klinau is a Belarusian writer, artist, and architect, based in Minsk. In 2000, he continued to work on the topic of Minsk’s Stalinist style architecture that he started already as a student. As a result he created a photo album City of the Sun (2005) and later on a novel Minsk. City of the Sun (2006).
In 2009 he initiated a public program City of the Sun-2 which aimed at Minsk’s transformation into a major tourist and cultural center of Europe and later the group of UNESCO experts were invited to study and collect a portfolio; the discussion on the inclusion of some parts of the central Minsk into UNESCO heritage (such as its Stalinist architecture is still ongoing.
Minsk. City of the Sun is an attempt at describing one of the main urban planning projects of the Stalin era. The text, with photographs of the author, combines historical and architectural analysis of the great Soviet utopia. The book was written in Belarusian in 2005, and then it was translated into German, Polish, Swedish, and Hungarian, and published in Russian for the first time in 2013.
Klinau studied and described in his book the political and social history of Minsk architecture. He analyzed how a Soviet utopia was realized in the architectural form that the Independence avenue and six main squares, created in 1950s, takes. All the elements, including parks and squares, had a special meaning and concept for the people.
Since the early 2000s, Artur Klinau has meditated on the significance of Stalinist architecture in Minsk. He created a new understanding of heritage and the value of Soviet utopia. Through the artists eyes, we saw a new meaning created for the objects, streets, squares, parks, and so on. I think the book and the public program have influenced a public opinion and contributed to the re-evaluation of historical value of the Stalinist architecture of Minsk.
The best side photo project by VEHA group
The Nailepshy Bok / The Best Side by VEHA.
The Nailepshy Bok / The Best Side by VEHA.
The Nailepshy Bok / The Best Side by VEHA.
The Nailepshy Bok / The Best Side by VEHA.
The Nailepshy Bok / The Best Side by VEHA.
The Nailepshy Bok / The Best Side by VEHA.
VEHA is the project dedicated to the preservation of archival photos of Belarus and the formation of family photo archives. In 2017, the group started a project The Nailepshy Bok / The Best Side and started to collect photos of Belarusians that would be placed on homemade, woven carpets from small villages and places. The collection The Nailepshy Bok / The Best Side shows the theme of photography as a social ritual. Woven carpets are a peculiar phenomenon in family, festive, and everyday photography of Belarusians and represent the best side of life to others, which means that a holistic impression of life can be made.4 The project was shown to a wider public during the Minsk Month of Photography in 2017 for the first time.
The result of the project was the publication of a book The Nailepshy Bok / The Best Side with images of the collection supplemented by expert articles in the field of ethnography and visual research.
The project is also related to the construction of family heritage because during Soviet and Post-Soviet times it was not that popular to collect family historical narration. Now the group is trying to renew and analyze this specific tradition. I would say it was even risky to know the history of the family, especially after Stalinist repressions: parents and grandparents didn’t talk much about their life or relatives, so somehow we lost the tradition and connection to our previous generation. I chose this project because it is about understanding the value of personal/family history. The projects pays attention to the personal archives, photos, family history, and tradition. It helps to create a family history and to get a better understanding of one’s identity, roots, and prehistory. I think it is quite important to stress the value of family history and to help people to learn how to work with it, how to find out the story, and how to create a story.
Paganstva/Pagan, photo project & book by Andrei Liankevich
From the photo book Paganstva / Pagan by Andrei Liankevich.
From the photo book Paganstva / Pagan by Andrei Liankevich.
From the photo book Paganstva / Pagan by Andrei Liankevich.
From the photo book Paganstva / Pagan by Andrei Liankevich.
Andrei Liankevich is a Belarusian photographer who was born 1981 in Grodno and is based in Minsk. In his book Pagan, he shows the pagan traditions and customs that still exist in Belarus. Most traditions disappear or have already disappeared in the 1960-70s. In some villages, only one, the oldest inhabitant, still remembers them. Liankevich traveled through the villages and talked with people to collect legends. Today we are living in the Christian tradition, and we do not always understand that it appeared after thousands of years of Pagan beliefs and taboos. And if you compare the age of Pagan beliefs and Christianity, the latter influenced civilization for only two thousand years. Paganism is present in the life of modern Belarusian society because, after all, who does not look in the mirror when one comes back for forgotten things or who does not think a few times if is it worth it to continue the journey after meeting a black cat? In the villages, this is more common, and still a lot of people follow superstitions.
This project is about questioning our current and past traditions; what is left, and what can be preserved as a heritage. I would say that this project is not giving answers but asks more questions.
Andrey says in one of the interview about the book Pagan
Many people who have seen the book and photos ask the question, what is paganism for me. Many people have an understanding of it: here is a cow, cut off the head, lay it down and dance, preferably at night under the moon. But for me it became clear that paganism is a huge world view, which Belarusians still live with. To the quiet Christians we are just slowly coming closer to Christianity…It is clear that this is a long process of transition. Now many of our holidays have a direct connection with paganism. I have village roots, and all these unforgettable summers, which I hated when I was a child, now turn into these photos….I have answered the questions of who the Belarusians are, what, why and how, who I am, who we are5
Swedish Cases
Prepared by Elina Vidarsson and Chiara Valli
Shoreline memorial
The Shoreline memorial
The Shoreline memorial
The Shoreline memorial
The Shoreline memorial is a raised stone with a plaque engraved with “Play Shoreline” (in swedish “Spela Shoreline”). The monument was put up in a large park (Slottsskogen) in Gothenburg, Sweden by two anonymous artists in 2014. The monument is dedicated to the memory of the Swedish alternative rock band, Broder Daniel and placed on the site where the band had its final concert in 2008.
However, the city’s Park and Nature Administration wanted it removed because it was put up without official approval. But this got a huge social media response. Both the public and famous Swedes objected to its removal and argued for the value of the monument. A Facebook campaign was created to convince the city’s Park and Nature Administration that the public wanted the monument to stay. After two days, the campaign was joined by 5,000 people. And finally, the political board of the city’s Park and Nature Administration made a formal decision to let the monument stay in the park.
In the fall of 2018, the monument was part of an exhibition called Public Luxury at the museum ArkDes (Sweden’s National Centre for Architecture and Design) in Stockholm.
This case is very interesting because it is made by two artists that highlights the importance and relevance for the public. An anonymous creator writes:
It is not a dusty sword bearer or sad bust of any Czech poet who no one read. It is contemporary history and speaks to the souls of Gothenburg’s people6
The monument is also a memory of the Swedish youth subculture Popare which is inspired by Brit-pop and pop art. Some also call (or rather called) themselves BD popare where BD stands for Broder Daniel, one of the most popular bands of the subculture. So, it is interesting that a subculture that more or less died with the breakup of the band is in a way materialized through this monument. It is also interesting that this monument has done a ‘class journey’. It came from the bottom, was challenged by the decision makers and was approved from the top. And later it became part of an exhibition in one of the finest museums in Sweden.
Fascinate
Fascinate. Photograph by Jacob Kimvall, 1999.
Fascinate. Photograph by Jacob Kimvall, 1999.
Fascinate. Photograph by Jacob Kimvall, 1999.
Fascinate is a graffiti painting created on the outside wall of an industrial building in Bromsten, Stockholm. The painting was made 1989 by the two artists, Circle and Weird (Tariq Saleh), with consent from the property owner and was then the largest graffiti painting in northern Europe.
Its preservation was under discussion for many years (in the mid 90s Stockholm city introduced a Zero Tolerance policy against graffiti inspired by New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani), but in 2015, it became the first officially protected graffiti work in Sweden with much thanks to the researcher Jacob Kimvall and author Tobias Barenthin Lindblad.
In 2007, Jacob Kimvall and Tobias Barenthin Lindblad sent an application to the county administration board of Stockholm with a request that four graffiti paintings in Stockholm should become officially protected. They argued for the importance of the art form and the need of protecting it for the future. And they described their worry for the loss of cultural values and loss of cultural heritage due to the city’s Zero Tolerance policy.
This case is interesting because there has been and still is low tolerance against this art form. Still many find it’s hard to see the difference between art and vandalism and most of the graffiti is removed within 48 hours. So there is rarely any time to fight for protection. However, Kimvall and Barenthin Lindblad have as activists worked for protection and succeeded. According to Jacob Kimvall, Fascinate is one of the world’s oldest protected graffiti paintings. And its preservation value is not only that it is old, but part of the identity of Bromsten and that it represents a subculture (in contrast to elite culture).7
The Library of Unborrowed Books
The Library of Unborrowed Books, Photograph by Jean-Baptiste Béranger.
The Library of Unborrowed Books, Photograph by Jean-Baptiste Béranger.
The Library of Unborrowed Books, Photograph by Jean-Baptiste Béranger.
The Library of Unborrowed Books, Photograph by Jean-Baptiste Béranger.
In 2012, the Stockholm-based artist Meriç Algün Ringborg had an exhibition in Stockholm Public Library called The Library of Unborrowed Books. This first section consisted of 600 books that had never been borrowed at Stockholm Public Library. The second section was presented in Art in General in New York the following year and consisted of 1001 books that had never been borrowed at Center for Fiction in New York.
Meriç Algün Ringborg writes,
There is a selection made of what books accompany us into the future. Within education, for instance, the establishment of a canon is clear – it is the venue for the particular echo that determines what books persevere, those that are to be kept in the loop and read again by the next generation. This comes natural, a selection is necessary, and it’s made in different instances either conscious or unconscious. Nevertheless, the books that are left behind — those deemed useless or for unknown reasons are abandoned — still exist in physical form, organized and systematized within the one institution representative of knowledge in all its forms, the library.
The Library of Unborrowed Books bases itself on the concept of the library as an institution manifesting language and knowledge, of the passing of awareness and the openness to all types of people and literature. This work, however, comprises all the books from a selected library that have never been borrowed. The framework in this instance hints at what has been disregarded, knowledge essentially unconsumed, and puts on display what has eluded us.
Why these books aren’t ‘chosen,’ why they are overlooked, will never be clear but whatever each book contains, en masse they become representative of the gaps and cracks of history, or the bureaucratic cataloging of the world, the ambivalent relationship between absence and presence. In this library their existence is validated simply by being borrowed, underlining their being as well as their content and form by putting them on display in an autonomous library dedicated to the books yet to have been revealed.8
The Daddy come home project
Kopparmärra, Photograph by Ruben Östlund and Kalle Boman.
Kopparmärra, Photograph by Elina Vidarsson
Around 2014 the Swedish professor and film producer Kalle Boman started to work with the film director Ruben Östlund on a project called the Square. The idea was to create a sanctuary in the form of a white marked box, a zone which represents trust and equality. As a first step, they designed an exhibition at the art and design museum Vandalarum in Värnamo, Sweden. The municipality of Värnamo immediately got interested in the project and installed a permanent Square in the marketplace Flanaden that was finished for the opening of the exhibition.
As part of the art project, Boman and Östlund also started the project Daddy come home”(in Swedish “Pappa kom hem”) in 2015. The idea was and still is that they want the equestrian statue (known as “Kopparmärra”) of the Swedish King Charles IX on a horse, located in a central square in Gothenburg, to be moved. And they want it moved to another square a few hundred meters away, where a statue of the son of Charles IX, King Gustav II Adolf stands. The idea is that both kings should be taken down from their pedestals and that the wife of Charles IX, Christina of Holstein-Gottorp, also should have a statue next to her husband and son. The place where Charles IX now stands should later be replaced by their Square.9
The city of Gothenburg will celebrate 400 years in 2021 and Boman and Östlund argue that the city should revalue its landmarks and show that it’s a progressive city. According to Ruben Östlund, the removal of the kings is connected to the bigger question of “what should the public room be – and for whom?”10
Guerrilla-knitting
Yarn bombing, Lidköping, Sweden.
A form of ‘craftivism’, Guerrilla-knitting “takes that most matronly craft (knitting) and that most maternal of gestures (wrapping something cold in a warm blanket) and transfers it to the concrete and steel wilds of the urban streetscape.”11 Guerrilla-knitters have a feminist orientation and distance themselves from consumerism while giving new light to the hand-made, labor-intensive production.
Although this is an international movement (in the Global North, at least), it is widespread in Sweden also because of the zero-tolerance policy towards graffiti and street art.
This is as an example of alternative heritage making because it seeks to reinterpret the traditional handicrafts of knitting that has traditionally been performed by women in the private space of their homes and bring them out to the streets. It also represents a soft and warm feminist critique to the heritage of the male-domination in the graffiti art subculture. In Sweden it is particularly interesting because it also represents a way to get around the zero-tolerance policy against graffiti art. The guerrilla-knitting group Masquerade based in Stockholm states: “We often have political messages, but sometimes we don’t. Once, we decided to celebrate Sweden’s few female statues by dressing up four of them as super heroines.”12 This is a form of criticizing the male-dominated authorized heritage in Sweden through arts and crafts.
Haga
Haga Photograph by Harri Blomberg.
Haga Photograph by Harri Blomberg.
Haga Photograph by Harri Blomberg.
Haga was planned to be demolished in the 1970s. Through protests that saw a large involvement of artists and cultural workers (in the late 1970s-1980s it was the core of the punk music scene in Gothenburg), it became acknowledged as heritage and saved from demolition. Now it is one of the most gentrified areas in Gothenburg
This is as an example of how well-intentioned processes of heritagization in urban spaces often become co-opted and become instruments for gentrification. There are several examples of course, but this is a striking one on the ambivalence and risks of heritagization.
This is an artistic-contribution to the project STATUS, which is about the artist’s role in changing society, an exchange between Belarus and Sweden. At the meeting in Brest in September 2018, I became fond of the idea of looking at myself as a research-rabbit. I proposed to our little study group to come up with questions about what artists are useful (a utility) for. I had the idea that the research group could program me to act out in that way. When telling this to my colleague Nils Claesson he commented: so you want to be a rabbit? One can read this angle of mine as a response to the parasite-tax that the Belarusian government has proposed. The proposed tax forbids artists to not be useful for society, whereas an artist group Flying Cooperation proposed to be a religious sect that they named EKZOKOID to avoid this tax.1
In our study group in Brest, we argued that the ‘art-audience’ and ‘public’ should come up with ideas on how art and activism could contribute to society. In that discussion, we came up with our group’s name ‘Heritagization’ since we all agreed that art and activism contributes to society and that art is a part of a process of ‘the making of heritage’. So after that we constructed questions (see questionnaire by Heritagization group), and since I am a little bit scared of working with small children, I began by asking small children. My idea was to use the answers – and form/shape/modulate them to become an artistic-activity and maybe act out the answers (making proposals for heritagization and how art and activism can contribute to heritage) in a performance in Minsk in spring 2019 – preferably a collective performance. But, after having done the research with children on the 1st of November in Stockholm, I am reconsidering my idea and feel that I really need to add a cockroach to this project.
A rabbit is a used and useful animal – a utility that can contribute to society or to a ‘master’ of some kind. A cockroach, rather, is a parasite – the cockroach is not useful and does not contribute to society except to themself and maybe a small circle of friends and family.2
How could the cockroach ask questions to society?
I plan to ask the questions above in a negative manner in Gothenburg in March. Asking them like: 1) What do you hate doing most of all? Name an activity you hate would be in the future?…. 2) Is there any object that you really hate and wish that the future would know about it?….and so forth 3) a place you wish would disappear?
After reading the Swedish magazine Hjärnstorm (released in November 2018) BELARUS/SWEDEN I understood the Belarusian artistic point of view more than on my journey to Brest in August-September. Maybe it was good to come ‘pure’ without much pre-understanding and to be open-minded and just listen. Anyhow, the idea of the rabbit came from wondering a lot about my own contribution and challenge in the project. I saw the journey to Brest as a research trip without knowing what to research…more than looking for the artist’s role in a changing society, I took a bit of reality from my life and my fellow artist colleagues. Well I felt like a rabbit, and I also felt a bit used to be honest. When reading a bit more about the Belarusian government’s proposal about the parasite-tax, I wondered if I should not try out another more-parasitic type of being? A cockroach – inspired by Kafka – would fit well into my artistic research perhaps. As an artist, I spend my time doing something for no reason, but there is somehow a natural continuity for artists always anyway…well I am a junky for new challenges and circumstances – so here I am! Working again and making a complex meta-perspective on who is leeching off of whom and for what and what for? For me it comes down to an altered Shakespearean question – to do or not to do? And what does art do anyway?
My artistic challenge is how I could transfer all the ‘public’ answers to a collective performance in Minsk. I should if possible have time to ask the same questions in Minsk that I will ask in Gothenburg in March 2019 and maybe before that see what answers the other people in the “‘Heritagization-group’” come up with.
Right now, today on December 27, 2018, I also like the difference between the center and the periphery a lot – and I am tempted to add a comment on that in a performance around making queues. Maybe a queue of cockroaches standing in a line to post letters in a post box. The letters could be about ideas of the future: what to leave behind for the future or not leave behind?
The future now is behind us, as is argued by Zygmunt Bauman in his final book Retrotopia,3 and he means that we love to look at the time that has passed. So this year…2018 (well soon over) is the year of “Cultural Heritage in the EU” – I am asking what we can do in order to keep this ‘making’ as heritage and keep some space and hope about the future? Can we re-future our situation? MAKE RE-FUTURISM MAYBE…..how to re-future our space? And to do that as an anomaly, to go against this idea of ‘building’ identity through history…..how can we do that? I love to ask these question as an artist.
So for me now it could be an idea – to make some new questions for Gothenburg in March 2019 before coming to Minsk… to go against what the people want the rabbit to do and instead be the cockroach – the uninvited, the not wanted – as a refusing to be useful as an artist – and after that let’s see what sort of performance it will be in Minsk in June 2019.
A screen print from Elina Vidarsson from a skype meeting in October 2018 between the study group and Rabbit Ingrid.
The first use of the questionnaire
On 1st of November 2018 I walk over the central square Sergels Torg in Stockholm city. It is cold and windy, but there is warm latin music with salsa rhythms coming from speakers outside on the square as well as in the ‘room for children’ where I am heading. It is an open studio space in a public library in Kulturhuset (Stockholm city cultural center and City theater). They have several open studios for different ages: 0-13, 10-13, and 14-25. Beside that there is an ordinary open library and other places for exhibitions, cinemas, concerts, and seminars.
First, one enters the library for children and then one enters the room ‘Bildverkstaden’ (Imagery workshop). There is a small fee for using materials and there are three pedagogues taking care of the children and the ones who accompany them.
When I enter, there are several groups working with cut papers to make figures for shadow-games. The pedagogues have prepared trays with working materials, and now the children and their parents, grandmothers, or caretakers are sitting next to them while the children are working on their figures.
I have talked to the staff, and they have read my questions; we have agreed that I should ask some of the most common/steady guests. They know that I want to use myself as an ‘research-rabbit’ and ask the children about what they think heritagization could be and what art and activism can contribute to. This is a good place to sit and talk because children and the ones accompanying them have time to sit down, and the Latin music in the speakers is not too loud, so conversation is possible. There are people coming to Kulturhuset from all over the town and from all socio-economic groups, so the mix is good.
Looking over the room, I think the children are from about 4 years until about 13 years. All gender among children and company is mixed.
A photo taken by Rabbit Ingrid on November 1, 2018 att Rum för barn, Kulturhuset Stockholm.
A photo taken by Rabbit Ingrid on November 1, 2018 att Rum för barn, Kulturhuset Stockholm.
The questions are about activities, objects, places:
1)
What do you like doing most of all? Some activity? Something you do in company or would do if you had some others to join you?
Is there anything you think you want to tell the children of the future about?
Why? What is special about ‘doing’ ‘making’ ‘saying’ or ‘action/activity’?
2)
Is there something (object) – a tool or a toy – that you are particular fond of?
Is there an object you want to tell the children of the future about? Why?
3)
Is there a place – around here – or somewhere else – that you are particularly fond of? Is that space or place or building important to save for the children of the future? Why?
4)
What do you think heritagization can do? What is your proposal for a heritagization-process?
5)
Do you have any idea what artists do today?
What do you think artists should/could do today?
I had conversation with
1) Tea (7 years) and her grandmother,
2) Milton (8) with his mother and sister Loella (13)
3) Zainda (10) with her caretaker and her brother Benjamin (7)
So all in all I have asked five (5) children how they look at heritagization and art. It is important to consider that the answers have been produced through conversations and are made in a culturally sensitive place where children’s handicrafts are in focus. Below I group the answers under the questions:
Some activity
– I love handicraft (ghosts and bats, make pearl-work, carpentry and such). I have made a post box with flowers, a post box that one could enter as if it was also a house.
– Build lego
– Play and go to school
– Make handicraft, and ‘klappramsor’ the rhythms and songs when one clap one’s hands together
– Drive cars and make pizzas
Some object
– A box with tools for handicrafts…pens and cups and such
– A thing built with lego, I want to show my children what I built as a child
– Cards, images about today
– Images from pets. I want to show how pumps for insulin looked like before and old music
– Trains and radio-cars
Some place
– An island, my summer island, my mother’s childhood summer house, an old house, I want to keep that old house, it is not stuck to the ground
– My living-room, the most important stuff is the TV – where you watch films and a big soft carpet
– The school, it has a big school-yard and with the rooms one can stay at when it is break, you educate yourself there and have plenty of friends
– France, except for the snails that people eat
– Tour de Eiffel
Heritagization
– Memory – heritage should be memory
– I want to tell about insulin-pumps, they used to be really big – now I have a small one (shows her stomach)
Artist contribution
– I have to think…build houses
– Build houses like this one – full of candy
– They should not take material that is artificial or waste natural resources we don’t have much of
– They could paint, and they could make cars that are run by garbage – or water – as long as the garbage does not smell too bad
Reflections on the interviews
Tea is commenting on her post box and her island that she wants to save – people are so close here so we do not need a post box on the island.
Asking children is in many ways asking their parents certain things. Small children want to do ‘right’ and answer correctly and want to understand why I, the rabbit, am asking these questions. So in that sense the children reproduce their parent’s (or their influencer’s) point of view – that is very clear in some of the answers, and also in some of the answers that there is a certain need to reflect the parents’ or brothers or sisters’ point of view.
From a conversation at Konstfack (Art college) about my STATUS-project and about activities for children – I learned there is a big difference in the countryside and suburbs compared to the city. In the city, one needs to stand in a queue (line) for hours, whereas in the country there are no lines or queues.
Article: RITENS MASKERAD in Hjärnstorm 132, by EKZOKOID, December 2018, p. 62↩
An application called TaskRabbit uses the animal to signify utility. The app pairs normal people as ‘taskers’, and they can contract to do bullshit jobs for other people who create short, temporary jobs or tasks to be fulfilled. It is a deskilling and making oneself useful for small pay, freelance tasks. ↩
Zygmunt Bauman, 2017. Retrotopia. Cambridge: Polity Press.↩
With Anna Chistoserdova (Ў gallery, Minsk, BY), Nils Claesson (Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm, SE), Linda Tedsdotter (Konstepidemin, Gothenburg, SE), and Oksana Haiko (KX, Brest, BY).
Brest, Belarus, September 30, 2018
Aliaxey Talstou: Hello everyone, my name is Aliaxey Talstou. Many of you may already know me since I worked with KX on several exhibitions. In the past days, we have been here with a team of artists and researchers from Belarus and Sweden to launch a project which will describe the role of art and actors within the art field in the transformation of society and talk about what we have common in our lives. Our project is called Status: the Role of Artists in the Transformation of Society. We decided that today we will hold an open panel discussion in order to meet the audience since being closed in our small groups is not our intention.
I will introduce our panelists: Anna Chistoserdova, art-manager and art-director of a Contemporary Art gallery Ў in Minsk; Linda Tedsdotter, artist and independent curator from Gothenburg; Nils Claesson, artist and researcher in the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm; and Oksana Haiko, director of KX theatre and KX space, director and actress. My name is Aliaxey Talstou, I am a curator and artist from Minsk.
Today we will discuss what is art now and how today’s art is perceived by the public and society; we will discuss its role in society and the role of the authors who produce it. Also, we will view art from the position of authors themselves since there are three artists and an art manager with us at the panel. We will discuss transformations and changes: Contemporary Art seems to be something new for us, and thus it’s of importance to talk about how the changes brought by art impact our society and transform it. Also, we will touch upon the topic of institutions and spaces where art can be found: for example, now we’re in one of those, and thanks to KX for having us here today. And we will briefly talk about the potential of art, which is socially and politically engaged, and other topics such as financing art, self-organization of artists, and consolidation of effort to make change happen. First, I address several questions to our guests, and then we will invite the audience to join.
The first question is a rather broad one, and I will address it to Anna, who co-founded a Contemporary Art gallery and has been working there for so many years. I suggest starting with the audience: who is the audience of Contemporary Art practices now, and how are these practices perceived in our society? After Anna replies I suggest other panelists follow.
Anna Chistoserdova: First of all, thank you for inviting me to participate in this discussion. My colleague Valentina Kiseleva and I started to work in the field of Contemporary Art fifteen years ago, so probably the audience – the audience of Contemporary Art, in particular – has influenced our professional development. The first gallery called ‘Podzemka’ was founded in 2004 on the almost scorched earth of Contemporary Art. Actually, I think that there were quite some Contemporary Art initiatives in Belarus in the 80s, but, unfortunately, the political fluxes caused changes in the art field as well, so our gallery gave an opportunity to artists who weren’t welcome in the official art spaces to present their works . From the other side, it is possible to work with any audience, and thus from the very first days, we found education and public discussions of great importance for us. And still, as a representative of the institution, I can say that if we realize our projects only according to the audience needs, expectations, and background, you will never see the art we bring to Belarus. Probably it is necessary to have these fifteen years over with in order to have the audience ready for the product you present. Though only yesterday we were told to go to church and confess our sins because of the content we show in our gallery. Thus I am thinking that, in working with the audience, there is double work to be done within the institution since the institution has to educate the audience. And the last thing I want to finish with: I wish that the perception of art as something that sows good, the eternal, and the beautiful, and serves as entertainment will be abandoned – especially in regards to the official position of governmental actors in the field of art.
A.T.: Thank you, Anna. Linda is working in Konstepidemin, our partner in this project. It is a big structure and a big community of artists which is comprised of 130 studios and situated in Gothenburg. Linda, please tell us about your audience in Gothenburg.
Linda Tedsdotter: Konstepidemin is a studio complex, and it was from the beginning squatted. It was an epidemic hospital, and when it was closed, some artists started to squat the space. And during the years, more artists have been moving in. It’s all different kinds of artists: fine artists, ceramicists, theater actors, filmmakers, photographers, and musicians. And we have about 130 artists. During the years, artists have started to do public events: we are centrally situated in a very attractive area in the city so at least many of us find it very important to keep working very intensely with publics to secure our position in the city especially because there’s a lot of economic interest in this area. So we have both… there’s a lot of interest in meeting the audience, but also there’s pressure, and a lot of us feel pressured to show the reason we exist. Of course, there are 130 artists, and we have a lot of opinions, of course also a lot of different kinds of wills, and a lot of individualistic people because we are artists. But we have some organized groups, and we have a gallery group: one gallery which is a typical, traditional white cube. And we have two other more experimental scenes. This gallery group is choosing artists to be shown at the gallery, and they are mostly working in the group and showing just what they think is good and not much about the audience. They are mostly thinking about the artists that they are showing and to give them an opportunity to show, to have a platform. It’s really hard to answer how we work with the public because first of all there are so many individuals.
A.T.: The last year I was invited to stay in a residency during the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, and I saw the audience which visited your events and also I remember about BRA 10 – a big party which is held in Gothenburg every month. It is possible to meet many different people there, so who are they, who is the audience?
L.T.: If you are talking about BRA 10 – because there are so many different scenes in Konstepidemin – it was an initiative from a group of artists in Konstepidemin. We really felt that we were missing something: we were missing a space, a meeting spot, so we created it. We wanted to have a place to go to at the end of the month when we are broke and to be able to meet people, to meet other ‘culture’ people from the city. So BRA 10 consists of people who work with art in Gothenburg or in the areas around. It’s a big range of ages – people from preparatory school around 18 up to 80 – but it’s all artists.
A.T.: Therefore I think that the art here deals with the audience, which is itself related to art. It is probably a paradox, but quite a characteristic one of when artists are the main audience at vernissages and art-related events. But let’s move to the local situation. Oksana, please tell us about the way and how KX works, and who is visiting you? I see familiar faces here today, but nevertheless – whom are you working for? Also, I wanted to ask why are you doing this? As I understand, you are the theater, and KX is its continuation. How did you set your goals when you started this new activity?
Oksana Haiko: You made this question so complicated! The theater is turning eighteen soon, and the space has been existing for almost four years. So I don’t even know how to start since I planned to talk about a slightly different topic. I think the most distinctive thing is that we are situated in the province. I will use this word though I am persuaded that there is no center and periphery. Because I saw what people do in the most godforsaken spots, as we may perceive them, and how these villages or small towns became huge cultural centers. Nevertheless, I will use this word now because in Belarus the province is in our minds. Though when I am talking with people from Minsk who are involved in similar activities, they say that similar problems with the audience are frequent in Minsk as well. Nevertheless, a couple of words about the theater: it has started and has been operating for a very long time as an activist project. People were working without any money and rarely received fees – and mostly only then from the festivals. Everything we did was dictated by the idea that we have to do art which had to influence the world somehow, change the world and reflect our critical perception of what was around us, and we continue to follow the same principles. Only lately we started to organize as many events as possible. There was a feeling of the lack of cultural events in general: lectures, meetings, people coming up with new ideas and who show, examples of new ways of living, or various creative practices, and so forth. We understood that if we didn’t do that then nobody would; so we started. We didn’t have the space that we have at that moment so we utilized various venues across the city. Beyond that, we had an unrealized need to organize everything and anything because, as a theater, we stayed for thirteen years in cultural centers owned by the city administration where we couldn’t organize all the things we wanted because of censorship, committee revisions, and prohibitions. Probably for those years, we learned how to organize anything: festivals – since we held some – and so forth.
A.T.: So who are the visitors?
O.H.: I should say that depending on what we do the audience is different. Talking about this space, since it is operating as a gallery, the audience is quite narrow. Therefore I will come back to the word ‘province’ because we discuss it a lot when we gather together as a team. We discuss how difficult it is to perceive the art which we want to show here in Brest. From the very beginning, we set the bar, aiming to exhibit art which critically views contemporaneity. For example, we would like to work with artists from Brest, but we don’t exhibit them there because in our opinion there’s no art to exhibit which would fit our standards. People who visit exhibitions here are part of a particular community. We are always trying to find new ways of attracting new people, for example, students. Anna is absolutely right that there’s work to be done with the audience, but sometimes we get too depressed. From the other side, there’s an example of the last theater project realized here. It was last year in June and a final performance of an acting studio which worked in our theater. We made this performance about the very acute events which took place in Brest that year: the construction of an accumulator plant and protests around that. It was a rather loud business. So the people who came here were not part of the usual audience which normally visits our exhibitions. All this space was filled by people, and they were sitting on the chairs, on the floor – everywhere. There were activists from the protest and those whom apparently these activists invited here. We’ve never had this amount of visitors before. It demonstrates that if – with our art – we touch the truly painful points for our community, it attracts people and many of them are the people who were not necessarily assimilated to the arts discourse.
A.T.: You described the situation very well. I was listening to you and thinking that I know what is going on and how to work around that. But I think that, in the case of KX or Ў Gallery, there is the intent to make changes and a will to make a difference. We were discussing how to change our audience and work with the people. One way or another, I see that both art workers who operate either as organizers or art-managers, or artists themselves, have a will to declare their agenda. I think that of course there is a difference between how art oriented towards entertainment vs. art oriented towards change, operates. Therefore I think that the work of artists itself has some different aims: it is not always to get a wage, or nor only, but also to have some kind of social influence. Nils, you are researching the artist working conditions. What is the situation in Sweden? Or maybe you have any examples from other countries?
Nils Claesson: If we are discussing these questions about the artist’s role in changing society, then we must ask ourselves what is changing society? And I would say that you have two things that really change society: one is information technology, and that’s an international thing. It’s not national because we all have mobiles, we all have computers, and we all go on the Internet. And another thing that affects and changes society is global warming and the global ecological crisis. And that’s also something that cannot be solved on the national level. So how should art respond to those changes of society? Maybe the artists should be – you know it’s an old saying that you hear the truth from crazy people and children. So art plays the role of crazy people or children. Or maybe art plays the role of a mushroom. Because you need to know something about mushrooms to pick them and eat them. Because some mushrooms are really tasty and they will make things tastier. And some mushrooms will give you hallucinations. And some mushrooms will kill you. So it’s a complicated thing with mushrooms. Sometimes you think that people have been eating mushrooms for thousands of years, but how did they accumulate all this knowledge about mushrooms? What happened to all the mistakes? So if you have an art audience, you have to educate them about mushrooms. And now we have information technology that’s really affecting people’s private lives because when you are on Facebook, Facebook is a commercial company, and it’s not really for free. They get a lot of information about you. So you are basically working for free for Facebook. Art can be an alternative to that kind of information flow. And questions to art… So art as a totality can question the monopoly of tradition and new media to interpret reality.
A.T.: So it means that if artists are mushrooms, some of them can be poisonous?
N.K.: Artists are not automatically good people. Artists are not a collective, and they feel as individuals. And in history you could buy artists for money, and they will sell themselves. But I am still an artist.
L.T.: Can I just add about the mushroom? Mushroom is also a good example because most of its life is underground: its whole system is under the ground.
A.T.: I think we can move further and focus our attention on Nils’s remark about artists being sold: that there are many who can pay artists and buy them, hire them.
A.Ch.: On the other hand, there is a certain amount of artists who can buy whatever they like.
A.T.: When we are stepping upon the uncertain path that leads to change, we need to tackle the issue of information technology or ecology, as Nils puts it. There are actors who are buying artists’ labor, time, and commission certain work. But who are the actors of change? We gathered here to discuss what the change could be like: what are the conditions of our work, and what do we want to change? But it’s quite obvious that there are certain organizations and institutions, which offer us jobs. Hence I think that for many in the artistic community, a community of like-minded artists, this is a question of the concurrence of individual interests and interests of a commissioner. Do they speak the same language? I would like to address this topic. After all, we are working with changes, and we probably have certain cultural and artistic projects which advocate these changes. Anna, I know you have to face it oftentimes.
A.CH.: We face it every day. Currently, with the participation of artists, we are working on a project which hopefully improves or changes the situation on Oktyabrskaya street. It is a project initiated by the gallery, and it is focusing on the promotion of a non-discriminatory approach to work among the various institutions that are based on Oktyabrskaya. We only recently realized ourselves how different discrimination could happen and that it has many shapes we luckily don’t think of. We are accustomed to seeing visible, which is, for example, discrimination or social exclusion of people with various forms of disabilities; but there is also ageism, sexism and various types of discrimination of the representatives of smaller communities. For us, this project would become first of all a challenge since we don’t know how many of our colleagues will support our idea. In fact, there are a lot of such questions. Probably the first challenge that became a certain catalyst for a change was the choice of the Belarusian language as the official language of the gallery’s communication nine years ago. And nine years ago it was very often considered to be a political gesture, to which we did not agree: it can be a gesture with regards to cultural policy, but in no way can this political statement be attached to the gallery. Therefore, I think that this kind of change, transformation, is a joint work in which completely different groups of participants are included: the gallery workers, artists, and society as a whole. I hope that starting with some small steps and examples, these practices will be adopted by others in the future. In my opinion, it is not the easiest or fastest, but possible ways of transforming society or discussing and solving some social issues that seems to me the most possible in our country.
A.T.: And my following question is: does the city or governmental institutions somehow participate in this initiative? Do you work with them?
A.Ch.: We assume that one of the results of this project will be a research: a specific mapping of the street, which we want to present to the city authorities as a good example of how to make the city friendly. On the other hand, the first exhibition which opened a new gallery space was called Without Exceptions. In it, together with artists, we explored various types of exclusion from life and society. And one of the issues that we discussed was the friendliness of cultural institutions to people with various disabilities, at least at the level of infrastructure. It turned out that out of eight governmental institutions that we visited in Minsk, only two were ready to accommodate at least a person in a wheelchair or with visual impairment. After that, we conducted a series of trainings on the topic of mediation with representatives of these institutions and, roughly speaking, on inclusion in its various forms. As I see it now, there are already some changes in the approach to their work. In our practice, this is one of the examples of the ways of changing. And I myself believe in evolution rather than in revolution.
A.T.: Thank you. Linda, I found really interesting the ways in which Konstepidemin works with the city and different types of funding: governmental and non-governmental. I know that you have a lot of projects in Gothenburg as well as collaborative projects abroad in various countries, for example, in Senegal in Africa. How do artists who form a community react to that; how do they cooperate?
L.T.: There are so many questions!
N.K.: Select one.
L.T.: First of all, we get funding from the city and the region. Then, we are applying for money for different kinds of projects. And for that we can apply for different fundings: governmental funding and so on. But that’s mostly the public work. For the studios, we are paying rent. Before it was so much easier because we organized activities for children, now it’s more like everyone’s studio. But that group is working pedagogically mostly for young people. And that group has since a year ago started a satellite in one of the suburbs. Because we have a huge problem in Gothenburg with segregation. So before we had a studio to which parents could take their kids, and they work with art, with pedagogues. But that’s like privileged kids because they live in the city center. so that group that works with the children pedagogy applied for money to do that satellite. They have different kinds of satellites, but they have one space that they actually rent.
A.T.: What was the intention of this group?
L.T.: I guess it was also to change society. I’m not so much into these groups. It’s been going on for so many years, and I guess the intention at the beginning is different from the intention now. Because it’s individual studies, working voluntarily in these groups, so it is changing depending on who is in the group. That’s one way to work with the city and the region. But then we are also trying to work for the artists in the city and the region. For example we are bringing people to the residency program, for the first time for the people who are coming, but also to bring in knowledge and other people to the city to make it more attractive for the people who live there. And we are also trying to get people and artists in the city, in the region to go out and spread their wings outside, in Senegal for example. I don’t know if it was the answer to your question.
A.T.: I would specify: what is the mission of artists who go to Senegal? Is it, perhaps, some type of an exchange?
L.T.: I mean all projects at Konstepidemin are so different from each other, because it is individual. For example, with Senegal: there was one artist from Dakar who came to Konstepidemin and wanted to do a collaboration with Konstepidemin. They have a Biennial in Dakar, and we have a Biennial in Gothenburg, and Konstepidemin is working with an off-program with an extended program of a Biennial. And this artistfrom Dakar, Mor Faye, he is working with the off-program in Dakar at their Biennial. So the initiative came from Dakar. And we were a group of people from Konstepidemin who were very interested because we don’t have any collaboration within the continent of Africa at all, and especially not West Africa. So it’s that simple. And then we see where it goes.
A.T.: I think these are very good examples. I think it would be interesting for us to collaborate with someone from Asia or Africa too. We are slowly crossing the one hour mark, and I am reaching the end of my questions. But before turning over to the public to ask their questions, I would finish with the following one. I think it will be a question to all the participants, and you can answer it quite briefly without reflecting too much since it can be too difficult. What do you think us, as actors in the art field, can and want to change in our societies and our local context, not only on the world scale? Oksana, let’s start with you. You finely described us your activities in Brest and talked about what led you there. Hence briefly, could you tell us what do you want and what could you change?
O.H.: If briefly, I would like people to develop critical thinking. Non-criticality and passivity are the biggest problems. And I think that everything we do is trying to change it.
А.Т.: Nils, what do you think?
N.K.: I would agree. That’s the role of art. And then I can raise the political questions: global warming, the crisis for ecology. I think an artist must be engaged in one way or another in that issue because it’s the question of survival if you want the future. And then in Sweden, we have a quite aggressive ultra-right racist party, so we started a network using Facebook called Cultural Workers Against Fascism, and now we have a network of 4,000 artists and cultural workers. So now we have to see if they can do something. We don’t know, we will see if clicking on Facebook translates to a political action.
O.H.: And for example, some people from Brest are commenting on my Facebook page that there is no nationalism in Belarus.
А.Т.: Linda, what about you?
L.T.: I actually agree; I always say that art’s mission is to make people think. For the rest of the society everyone wants people to think like ‘me’: if I am having a company of course I want to make everyone think like me, so they can buy from me. And I mean everyone is sort of trying to force their own opinions on people, but I think the most important thing is to make people think themselves. And doing very simple math: I mean everything you do will make a difference. And I do agree with Nils: I think we have a huge problem with the environment, and it’s not something that we can run away from. But then when it comes to art, and we can’t put too much responsibility on it… I mean it’s up to us as human beings, and then we can use whatever we do. If I am an artist I can use that, and the person who’s doing something else can use what they are doing to get some kind of result, to create something. Or we just all keep doing it, and then we are all gonna die and then the problem is solved. Because we are the main problem.
A.Ch.: I agree with all the previous speakers. But besides critical thinking, which is unfortunately not taught here and its development is not encouraged, I would really like people to start forming their personal opinions in regards to what is happening to them and to their environment: because civil society, which is rather nonexistent here, is a group of people who have their personal opinions. And it’s not enough to only form it; it is necessary to learn how to defend it.
Question from the audience: Oksana, I would like to ask you about the art from people in Brest. You mentioned that you would like to see more local artists in the gallery, but it is problematic on different levels. But what exactly would you like to exhibit here?
O.H.: For the last two years we formulated the mission of the gallery more precisely because before it was a bit more blurred. We used to recognize them before, but only now we formulated them directly as follows: we support and are happy to see in the gallery socially engaged and critical art. So considering the artists from Brest… We don’t want to exhibit just lovely images with beautiful female bodies, still life painting, or landscapes, as it usually happens here. Though we were thinking, what if we exhibit Yuri Stylski? Just to put a canvas on one wall, a canvas on another, and there will be a crowd and all fans of Stylski will come. In other words, we exhibit art which raises questions about the problems we have in our society. We exhibited and supported here several exhibitions of deviant art – art made by people who live in closed psychoneurological dispensaries. They are really great artists, and they need to be exhibited in order to let the audience know about them. These are the people who cannot exhibit themselves or buy a spot in a gallery. So we would like to work with this kind of projects. Did I answer your question?
Question from the audience: Yes, thank you. I will ask another one: is art able to change the world not only in terms of culture but also socially and politically?
N.K.: Yes! Art can work, you know… Usually, art wakes people up. It can be like a fire alarm. That can be the function of art.
O.H.: When I was preparing for today’s event I remembered a case from 2004 when I was invited to the city administration office and had a very difficult conversation there. I was threatened by KGB and similarly was told that my art was a threat itself.
A.Ch.: A threat to national security?
O.H.: No, that it is sometimes worse than direct actions. I was astonished because the theater was only a few years old. In other words, our art was recognized as dangerous, as possessing some potential to change the situation. I was told that I’d better raise my own children than changing the world.
L.T.: I agree with what was said. I mean that the ‘bad parts’ of politics want to change what art shows, so I guess it has some impact on the society. It is really hard for me to see that but I assume it is some kind of a threat. I mostly think it has to do with free will because it’s easier to control people if they don’t think so much.
O.H.: Can I ask a question? It’s a question to you, Anna: these political graffiti which appear in Minsk and is painted over the next day, what is that? Obviously, the paranoia of authorities gets involved, but is it for a reason? Do these graffiti have any effect?
A.Ch.: Well, at least the Shchetkina wall is worth something! But anyway, they are painting over absolutely everything, not necessarily political statements because nobody canceled ‘fundamental suprematism’. You know, from one side we live in a country where any expression of creative freedom and opinion gets painted over too fast, censored, negated. From the other side, you ask a good question, and Linda also addressed that: sometimes it is very interesting to think about the other side when art becomes a servant for current authorities. So to think about the ways, oh, how this instrument works, this instrument of propaganda, this instrument of promotion of the great ideas which state leaders promulgate – this is interesting, and this is worth reflecting upon, especially since nowadays the world experiences the reinforcement of alarming processes, for example, the rise of nationalism. In view of this, I suggest you to watch the movie about North Korea, Under the Sun, and it will become clear that there is a country in this world which exists according to the laws of the theater: North Korea is a global immense political theater with stunning scenography. And it is a film about the creation of the film. Art can do a lot, it’s important to not forget about it.
A.T.: It could have been a good ending, but I guess we have more questions.
Question from the audience: How difficult is it to deliver ideas or problems to a viewer through art, and how does society react to that? How to make people understand an idea or a problem and respond to it?
O.H.: It all very much depends on the quality of art. If art is good, it is possible to deliver the ideas; and even if the best ideas are realized on an unsatisfactory level it can become useless in the end. But it’s just my first thought.
Question from the audience: And how do people in Brest react to problems of this kind?
O.H.: Do you mean reacting to problems themselves or art which illustrates these problems?
Question from the audience: I mean problems illustrated in art, of course.
N.K.: But art should not be an illustration of a problem. Art has its own dynamics. And sometimes the dynamic of art can address social or political issues, but not always. But you have a tradition of some kind of performance of art. That was also big in Soviet times, and in Poland, in Czechoslovakia – socialist countries. Artists developed the strategy of making actions which could influence people, but it was just an action that created some kind of a myth or a story. And nowadays media is the society. If we talk about today, I have one example. It was one artist in Sweden called Anna Odell, and she made a performance when she pretended to be crazy and wanted to commit suicide by standing on a bridge in the middle of the night. And she was arrested by the police, and they took her to a mental hospital. She had to spend a couple of days in a clinic. And then when she revealed herself as an artist it became a huge scandal in the whole of society. And then Anna Odell could address why people do get crazy in a society, how mental patients are treated by society. That’s how a little performance led to a long debate. She even had to pay a fine, but people helped to pay it. So sometimes art can really wake up people. I think if you go to Wikipedia you can find an article in English about her.
Question from the audience: Can only Contemporary Art change society, or are there examples from Art History of the XIX, XVIII or XV century when artists influenced society in a certain way? Is it an aim of Contemporary Art only to interact with society and solve certain problems?
L.T.: You mean the art that was contemporary at the time it influenced, or you mean that it’s only Contemporary Art today that influences?
Question from the audience: What is called Contemporary Art nowadays – the second half of the XX century.
N.K.: I would say there are a lot of examples, and we need to have a long lecture now! One of the most known pieces – Goya’s The Disaster of War, but that’s old. I didn’t live in those days, I don’t know how people were reacting.
O.H.: Let’s not forget what Anna was saying: we are talking about a somewhat positive impact of art on society, but there is also art which serves the regime in establishing a system, and I think there are enough examples of that in history.
A.Ch.: In the Middle Ages, it was the church.
O.H.: Art is influential yet even if it influences the other way round.
N.C.: But sometimes… There is an artist in Sweden called Britta Marakatt-Labba; she is coming from Sami minority, and she makes textile art. Sami people are a minority, and they live in the North and quite maltreated by the Swedish state because the Swedish state basically took a lot of their land because the land was rich. She’s been active in Sweden and Norway for many years but nobody really cared about her. But then it was the curators of Documenta, a big European exhibition, and they got interested in Marakatt-Labba’s work and showed it on Documenta. And then they made a big exhibition on Documenta with her work about the history of Sami people made in textile, and then afterwards Swedish art curators and institutions started to get interested – that’s how it works.
A.T.: I think we stop here. Thank you very much for your participation and for being here today; thank you KX for hosting us.
It is very important to ask questions, and it is nonetheless important to repeat them over and over again, no matter how trite they seem. Answers may alter with time. They may be and, most likely, will be different depending on the context, cultural, and social environment, as well as individual mood, age, gender, or character of the respondent. Even a quantitative analysis of the answers can hardly provide any satisfactory result. The answers allow one to determine the range of diverse interests and points of view, and not to find out who is right or wrong, who knows more, or “who knows how to.” Such an understanding of the very essence of asking questions frees participants from having to adjust the answers to the expectations of the questioner and allows them to be sincere and effective in identifying and solving problems.
Any question posed commands a promise of an answer. The promise lies at the heart of this wondrous language construct and guarantees its implementation. In this regard, an unanswered question is no less interesting, since, similar to an unfulfilled promise, such a question can have a lasting effect. It is necessary to ask questions, even if it is ‘futile’.
Questions are also fraught with position and content. A few years ago I gave a lecture on the art of performance for students of the School of Dance and Circus in Stockholm. The lecture consisted entirely of questions, without a single affirmative sentence. As then, in an attempt to explain such a fluid and free phenomenon in art as performance, it seemed more correct to formulate the problematics of the STATUS project by the means of questions.
The question cards presented here are the result of a three-day meeting in Gothenburg in November 2017, at which Belarusian and Swedish colleagues developed the STATUS project. Notes of discussions, suggestions, and issues raised, were reworked into a card set of questions which we subsequently used as a warm-up game at a seminar in Brest in September 2018. Drawings on these cards are partly the documentation of the Gothenburg meeting, partly the collages of motives from my photos.
There are no strict rules in this card game so you can create them yourselves.
Chiara Valli is a postdoc researcher at the department of Conservation at Göteborg University, Sweden. Her research interests include critical urban studies, urban and social geography, political theory, and critical heritage studies. Her current postdoctoral research investigates issues of cultural heritage, urban change, neoliberal urbanism, gentrification, marginalization, and resistance, with a focus on Göteborg, Sweden. She received her PhD degree in Social and Economic Geographyfrom Uppsala Universityin 2017 with a thesis titled “Pushing borders. Cultural workers in the restructuring of post-industrial cities.” Her doctoral research critically explored the agency and positioning of cultural workers in the restructuring of contemporary cities, in relation to processes of gentrification, precariousness, and political resistance by studying New York City and Milan as empirical cases.
Selected publications: Valli, C. (2017). “Pushing borders: Cultural workers in the restructuring of post-industrial cities.” PhD Dissertation, Uppsala University. Valli, C.(2016). “A sense of displacement: Long-time residents’ feelings of displacement in gentrifying Bushwick, New York.”International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 39(6): 1191-1208, Wiley. Valli, C. (2015). “When cultural workers become an urban social movement. Political subjectification and alternative cultural production in the Macao movement, in Milan.” Environment and planning in SAGE Journal: A, 47(3): 643-659
Denis Romanovski is an artist and organiser based in Göteborg. As an organiser, he has been running and producing numerous international and local art events, festivals, and exchange projects such as: Net Art Meetings (Minsk, 2001), RAM7 (2005), international performance festival Navinki (Minsk, 1999-2008), PALS – Performance Art Links festival in Stockholm. His artistic practice ranges from performance art to interactive and technology based art, artistic investigations, and other similar tactics. His performances often focus on dynamic relations between the members of the audience, creating situations for individual expressions and experience of collective awareness. Denis Romanovski is actively involved in several artist runorganisations: Gallery54, Konstepidemin, Fylkingen, and other.
The main focus of the group’s research is the hidden or private lives of artists whose life is mostly unknown and invisible both to the public and artistic community. What about other social roles of artists – being a son/ a daughter, a wife/ a husband, a mother/ a father etc.? What is the conditions of their everyday life? The aim of the group is to deconstruct the stereotypical overview that the Belarusian society has about being an artist and to present a non-public image of the cultural worker. The poor economical situation in the art field will be reflected through analysis of the work the artist performs that is not related to art but which generates the main income for artists and creates the opportunity to make art in the first place. That activity mostly is hidden and not presented in artistic CVs and bios because the forces of the art market could consider this as a ‘shameful’ part of their biographies that undermines the sparkling figure of ‘real’ artist. The group Hidden Life will also touch on concepts of work and labor in Post-Soviet and Capitalist societies. The work of the group includes research, text-based, and visual contributions.
Heritage making – the creation and recreation of cultural and historical meaning and identity – is done by different actors and at different levels, from institutions, museums, their visitors, to common people. In the collective project Heritagization, the group focuses on different forms of heritagization that emerge parallel and/or in conflict with official and authorized forms of heritage making. In particular, the group is interested in highlighting, enacting and performing alternative processes of heritage-making in individual and collective ways, through art practice and activism in urban public spaces.
The project is composed of different parts that dialogue and build on one another to explore how art and activism can make heritage in Belarus and Sweden. The work of the group is based on academic research, artistic-based research and performative methodologies.
This site uses functional cookies and external scripts to improve your experience. Which cookies and scripts are used and how they impact your visit is specified on the left. You may change your settings at any time. Your choices will not impact your visit.
NOTE: These settings will only apply to the browser and device you are currently using.
This site uses functional cookies and external scripts to improve your experience.
This site uses functional cookies and external scripts to improve your experience. Which cookies and scripts are used and how they impact your visit is specified on the left. You may change your settings at any time. Your choices will not impact your visit.
