The Grass is Greener on the Other Side

Multi channel video installation, interactive food art performance, fondue, 2-tone tablecloth, 16 June,2012, 19h.

ITS-Z1, Ritopek, Belgrade

Participants: Lia Lapithi, Işın Önol,  Dimitrina Sevova and Dragan Ilić.

 

This project is a work that emerged under the general title Enemies in Collaboration, which began as a collaborative thinking process the artist Lia Lapithi Shukuroglou and the curator Isin Onol, from Cyprus and Turkey. Their successive countries of origin is reflected in the general title as per above.

 

The prerequisite was to make a project that did not touch directly onto the political Cyprus-Turkish issue, something that would be expected from the viewer, but to look outside the obvious. The result of this collaboration can be seen in two parts.

 

The first part is a multi-channel video installation of cows from varying countries; Cyprus, Israel, Croatia, Oman, Switzerland, Germany and Qatar. For each cow channel, its “country of origin” is determined either by background sound or by a characteristic landscape.

 

Among the cows, a Swiss lawyer, Rene, gives a historical account about “the Jura problem”, (an unexpected “problem” area, Switzerland, in which most people view it as a country whose “grass is always green/er”), and making the definition of the Swiss democracy. The viewer can hardly hear Rene among the cacophony created by the cow videos.

 

In front of the videos, a dinner table is set, with a two-tone green tablecloth and a small fondue pot that sits in the centre of the two green-shades that divide the table-cloth. The two “enemy friends” as well as another 2 guests, one from Serbia and another from Bulgaria, all sit together and eat in silence, dipping their forks in the same pot. They share this meal in front of an audience, while the videos of Rene and the cows at the background keep looping the same story, over and over again…

 

 

Text as seen on video installation: My name is Rene, I am a Swiss citizen living in the canton of Solutern???, French canton of Solaire, and I have the opportunity to talk about the problem of Switzerland, the political struggle of the people of the canton of Bern who wanted to fight for more independence…and will talk also about democracy in Switzerland and this in the context of Jura.

This struggle of the people of the Bernese Jura started in the middle of the last century and they were fighting for separation from their canton Bern to have their own canton Jura and ultimately to achieved their goal. To understand the background and significance you have to go back to history. You probably know that Switzerland is 900 years old and democracy as we practice it now is based on the constitution of 1848. Since then it’s more or less the same…

And these people in the canton of Bern, they were allocated to Bern, their region was allocated, it’s a North-West part of Switzerland, so they were allocated as a consequence of the congress of ????

This was not a democratic, not a wise decision therefore the problem. This people who wanted more autonomy over Catholics, relatively poor farmers and they were part of canton Bern, affluent society, German speaking and Protestant. This was the cause of the problem, the cause of the conflict.

Now they were part of Switzerland so what were they actually fighting for? To understand the significance of this problem of the people of the Jura you have also to understand the political system of Switzerland,  the way we practice democracy, and we have a long tradition, we have the strong belief that public affairs should be decided on the appropriate level, so we have decision making participation by the people on the level of the municipality, and the next level in the state. The state is in Switzerland the canton, it’s a membership state of the national-federal-state. Switzerland comprises of 26 canton states, and then there is the highest level, the federal state, the nation….and this is different to most European Countries who have young democracies which are less direct, and in a way less intensive…

…and this minority people in Bern they have had perfect democracy on the lower level, on the level of the town, the village, they could direct their vote to the government there, they had their own local  education, and they were perfect Swiss citizens with the same rights as everybody else on the national level. But in between, on the canton on this state level they didn’t feel well represented because they were minority with another culture, another language and other wishes. So they were fighting for democracy on this state level, and they were not hurt because the other people said what do they really want? I mean they have the same rights as we have in the other cantons.

So they started to draw their attention to their conflict, to their dilemma, by a kind of terrorism, arson, bombs were exploding and after some years, the Swiss heard them and said ok, it is a legitimate struggle and ultimately there was a vote in the canton of Bern about this separation from Bern and the purpose of forming an own state, a new canton which didn’t happen since 1848…

…and the Bernese people said Yes in the end and because it was changing the structure of Switzerland also a referendum was needed, the people of Switzerland had to vote too about this Question. And they voted YES and a new canton, a weak one, an economically weak one, Jura is a canton of agriculture, a little bit of cattle breeding, horse breeding and a little bit watch industry. So they achieved their goal and what does this mean? It means that by this fight they had reached a state of democracy in an appropriate way also on this middle level.

If you think of Europe and the democracy which is offered there, it is much less. You do not have an intense direct democracy on the level of municipality, member state and national state and this is actually why Switzerland has so much difficulty to join the European Community, because if the join the EC the super-national law will in a way over-rule all what is on the level of the legislation of the municipality, and in particular what is on the cantonal level. Not much will be left, because the European law will have to have priority.

 

 

 

In Growing up Amid the Historical Mysteries of Proximity

Pros & Cons of Being Neighbours

ITS-Z1, Ritopek, Belgrade

16 June - 21 July 2012. Opening on 16 June, 18h.

Curatorial Text

 

To speak of 'meaning' and of 'truth' in the middle of military agitation, geopolitical calculations, suffering, the grimaces of stupidity or else of lies is not 'idealistic': it is to get to the very nub of the thing.

– Jean-Luc Nancy 1

The exhibition project and live events focus on the contradictory aspects of the notion of being neighbours, in relation to varying forms of deterritorialisations, reterritorialisations and the selective enforcement of borders, identificatory models offered by overlapping, competing and contested historical narratives, as well as political, social and cultural interaction between territory and desires in a time of globalisation, flexibilisation, precarity, mobility, migration, and occupation and how they combine to produce conditions of inclusion and mechanisms of exclusion.

The existing, seemingly insurmountable incompatibilities in the formulation of borders, whether in the past or in the present time, find their ‘justification’ in the forming principles of the idea of territory and its borders growing out of the collective space, temporal fantasies and memory, manipulation of interests by political elites and economic formations confronted and delimited by their neighbouring formations. This leads us to relate these complex issues to a formal inquiry into the ways in which (self-)images of nation, race, gender, subjects are produced and naturalized, and the role of a hunger for belonging and for a smoothed and purified historical memory in this process, interacting on the one hand with space-time characteristics, and on the other with the discursive formation of knowledge-power relations – what Michel Foucault calls dispositive. Space is structured by giving it a meaning, by naming it and identifying it, through language and narrative and such rhetorical devices as metaphors, as well as verbal and visual constructions of a ‘homeland.’

Belonging and memory find their realization in the interweaving of landscape and identity expressed in a relation between ‘nature’ and ‘home’ in which the identity of a select group of people is seen as “rooted” in the soil. This then serves as a justification for naturalizing statements like that of the ‘organic connection’ between the identity of a region and the identity of its ‘original’ inhabitants and their home, village, town, country, land and everyday practices as well as their physical characteristics and traits of character.

In these models of identification the question is not what multi-layered histories of the space are telling in themselves. “We” belong to that territory and it belongs to “us,” determined and dominated as it is by “our” history and practices, and not by the histories and practices of the other. The selectiveness of narrative structure eliminates contested stories with the entire rhetoric and pathos inherent to such gestures with their claim to authenticity. From these interactions visions crystallize, and imagined communities are formulated: we/they, inside/outside, here/there, and our land/their land. How does this process reflect on the inhabitants of border regions under social and cultural conditions of ‘conflictual consensus’ who in their everyday practices encounter the other and frequently live beside each other, even sharing the same meadow? Then history gets shaped, playing on imagined and actual wrongs suffered by people identifying with each side, smoothing the narrative along different lines to divide and conquer. These narratives channel and transform subjective stories that are then transmitted from generation to generation. How can these histories be juxtaposed to wrinkle the smoothness of each? Where is the belonging that will match the hunger while overcoming the divisions, even as the respective governments continue to insist on their conflicting histories?

The ontology of the border lies in the relation between the environment and the ideology of the landscape. The demarcation lines sketch not only geographical territories and their division, determination and perpetuation, but they constitute the folds between competing images and forms. This is why borders between two regions mark not only the space as physical nature by fixing geographical locations and their socio-political differences, but they constitute a clash of conflicting representations with all their manipulation of desires, hidden in the production and marketing of these images and the apparatus behind them. Cartography is a discursive practice of vision, a textuality of borders, a modulation of thoughts. The performativity of linguistic structures perpetuates borders in a continuous repetition and reproduction, making them subservient to the interests of an economy that is based on the control of the traffic of imported and exported goods, and of the mobility of people as labour and capital through conventions, visa regimes, the police gaze, custom duties, taxes, regulations implemented according to management principles and clientelism. Visa regimes have not prevented, nor are they intended to prevent, migration on a scale never seen before. But they modulate the flows, the rights and the exploitability of migrants. There is no refuge but only temporary and transitory residence where those who do not fit the norms, the displaced, dislocated, rootless, stateless, travellers, ‘strangers,’ illegal/legal migrants, refugees are made to feel out of place.

The borders of a territory would seem to be socially constructed mindscapes and as such immaterial, but they are also the material embodiments of the economic and military elaboration of disciplining and control procedures, of a security regime. The enforcement of ‘b/order’ categories 2 is a political act, and ideologically commands notions of value and truth, even as its immaterial forces translate at times into hard barriers and walls of rock and concrete. But as Anssi Paasi puts it nicely, the existence of borders implies the possibility of crossing them – even if sometimes at the price of taking a substantial risk. Under what conditions can contemporary art practices in their globalised hybridity contribute to creating new possibilities for transgression, overcoming the demarcation of image regimes constitutive of borders and subverting the naturalisations at play?

Text by Işın Önol & Dimitrina Sevova

Notes

1 Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Confronted Community (For Maurice Blanchot),” in Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 6, No. 1, 2003, p. 24.

2Cf. Henk van Houtum, Olivier Kramsch and Wolfgang Zierhofer (eds.), B/ordering Space, Ashgate, Hants/Burlington, 2005, <http://ncbr.ruhosting.nl/henkvanhoutum/borderingspace.pdf> (accessed 2012-05-24).