2019 ~ Meditations#6 ~ Ayesha Hameed
DAI invited artist and researcher Ayesha Hameed to contribute to the following meditation, on the occasion of COOP SUMMIT 2019 on June 28 and 29, 2019, and Roaming Assembly#25 ~ RADIO MUTINY ~ convened by iLiana Fokianaki on Sunday June 30, 2019, in Cagliari, Italy.
The Island a Character, The City a Force of Resistance
“In this complicated dance of iterations and nimblenesses made for shifting terrain, the island becomes a character, and the city a force of resistance and yet with generous openings.”
This is the second year that the Dutch Art Institute (DAI) has been a “roaming institute,” where once a month DAI participants and tutors congregate in cities in Europe and beyond. I have been parachuted into the hothouse of DAI activity as a privileged scribe, learning through watching and participating by witnessing, from the former crematorium of Silent Green in Berlin during a rainy May to the cauldron of Cagliari, Sardinia amid a June heat-wave. Bringing an institution and its aspirations to other spaces creates a geopoetic intermingling of intention and materiality, history and ephemerality, gesture and gravity. In this complicated dance of iterations and nimblenesses made for shifting terrain, the island becomes a character, and the city a force of resistance and yet with generous openings. What does this look like? In June, the COOP Summit offered the final presentations and performances of the practice-based collaborative component of the DAI course. This was followed by the Roaming Assembly#25—a format entailing a public discursive event organized by a DAI tutor or a guest curator—titled “Radio Mutiny” and convened by ILiana Fokianaki.
COOP
Each annual COOP group is run by three tutors in collaboration with a partnering institution. Participants from both years join one COOP, following a careful application and pitching process that results in groups extremely committed to practising together. There were seven groups this year with presentations spaced across two days and located in different sites across the cities in which they took place. While the work done accumulates throughout the year, the final Summit was held on a second visit to Cagliari so that COOPs could build on previously made relations.
The first group who presented, Unmapping Eurasia led by Binna Choi and Mi You in collaboration with Casco Art Institute, held an event called Eurasia Underground Library: There Is No Eurasia Here Where Eurasia Is Now. The concept of a library outside the usual architectural parameters was mobilized by re-territorializing the concept at the scale of two continents—Europe and Asia—and their histories and their geologies. The proposition of Eurasia as not only a landmass but also a library gave a different charge to role of librarian, which participants and performers took up in presenting historical, geopolitical, and geological studies of Eurasia. The performances and/or study events animated deterritorialized knowledges: rural Sardinian throat singers who evoked the sound of animals; Eurasian migration histories told through numerology; historical battles performed as narratives; a tug of war involving the navel of Eurasia moulded within that of the body. A fermented Russian drink called Kavass was served at the summit of a hill overlooking the city where the performances gathered beneath a tree that spread its branches 30 metres wide, conjuring the quiet multidisciplinary study set up in Rabindranath Tagore’s Shantiniketan School in Bengal.
The second group, Peekaboo – Looking Askance at Issues of Childhood Connected to Nation, led by María Berríos, Tina Gverović, and Ruth Noack, was located at ExArt Cagliari. Their presentation took two forms looking into childhood in relation to nation-state development that was supported by workshops in Orani, Sardinia involving children and adults, alongside a pop-up cinema set-up by DAI participantss, in collaboration with partnering institution Museo Nivola. First, they showed a book of chain mail conversations among that year’s participants rehearsing ideas from seminars. Given the intense congregations and dispersals that characterize each month of the DAI calendar, these conversations were also filled with the time and space of other times and spaces—the geographies of participants’ “off” weeks on non-institutional time making sense of ideas at home. The messages span distances like skeins of a spider’s web, becoming thicker and more intricate as personal ideas are woven into those from the inextricable “stage” of learning. Second, there was an installation of folio-sized book works—interventions made by individual participants in the form of snippets of ideas. These ranged from speculative fiction on the origin of Switzerland and the redaction of the feminized non-Western “other” in the story to the corporatization of nature manifest in cycling competitions to the failure of a love letter encoded in the language and format of an immigration application form to using Foley sounds to reproduce elements of the weather.
The third COOP, Making Nothing Out of Something: Improvising Writing and Publishing in Relation to Practices of Resistance, was led by Jorinde Seijdel, Florian Göttke, and Werker Collective (Rogier Delfos and Marc Roig Blesa) in collaboration with Open! Platform for Art, Culture & the Public Domain. In Making Nothing out of Something, they looked at publishing as an expanded practice—banner making, artists’ books, collaged writing, citational practices, the creation of a lexicon, of two videos, sound—in Oreri Iniziativa Editoriale, which was then transitioning into a space for local artist and activist printing and publishing. Before arriving, we congregated in a nearby square where several banners were laid on the ground, silk-screened with slogans and images. COOP participants stood around simultaneously reading excerpts from their in-progress lexicon so that voices and meanings overlapped. We followed the performers and banners to the venue, where there was an installation of videos, banners, book works, and live works. Presentations on the space’s local publishing aspirations were followed by performative readings on the street outside, compiling and sublating texts that were also handed out. At the end the audience was offered strips of the banners and fragments of the texts printed on them as residues of the intervention. The idea of the relationship to language and public space as equally contested and contestable squattable spaces was evoked, and underscored by the presenters’ awareness that the space faced Antonio Gramsci’s primary school, and next to it, a Fascist party building.
The fourth project, Curating Positions: Logics of Montage. In Between the Cinematic Apparatus and the Exhibition, was led by Marwa Arsanios, Leon Filter, and Leire Vergara in collaboration with Bulegoa z/b. The proposition of thinking through montage and cinema without sight brought them to consider centralizing other senses like sound. The performances in the Ex Manifattura Tabacchi—a disused tobacco factory that also housed a cinema for its workers (and before its closure, an erotic cinema)—used the cinema at the entrance/exit as catalyst for a year-long investigation into the relationship between labour and cinema. Harun Farocki’s Workers Leaving the Factory (1995) was a key signpost, as well as a feminist attention to the politics of care within the space of the cinema. In the two visits to Cagliari, the group started conversations with the director and programmers of the film library Cineteca Sarda to explore archival videos and the past and future of the Sardinian cinematic tradition. Interestingly, many participants in this COOP were choreographers, so the issue of the cinematic became a phenomenological exploration of the bodily and movement. The four-act performance began with a congregation and recitation in the factory courtyard, followed by two performances in provisional cinematic spaces: the first a choreography of bodies and light and shadows; the second developed with Sardinian musicians playing Launeddas, an instrument found in Sardinia and migrating across Europe from prehistoric times, in a darkened space. Both presentations put the audience in the dark, increasing their awareness of sound, soft montage—a concept devised by Farocki—but here moved away from the cinematic and into the space of the choreographic. The final act returned to the courtyard with a dance performance involving all participants in the group.
The final three projects were presented the following day. Untitled (Orficially Yours), led by Sara Giannini, Geo Wyatt, and Arnisa Zeqo in partnership with If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to be Part of Your Revolution was inspired by the work of Italian theatre maker, writer, and actor Carmelo Bene. To Bene, “the act is a forgetfulness of a script, a role, or a dramaturgy.” Forgetfulness was a point of departure for the performance that sought to be a theatrical exploration of making contact with an absence, rather than reacting to a presence. A continuous, simultaneous, and fragmented performance considered voice and the relation between the oral and the anal, across two floors of the Sala delle Mostre Temporanee della Cittadella dei Musei, a wax museum adjoining the archaeological museum. An interactive choreography of voice and movement at the beginning laid out propositions and vignettes enacted in videos, writing performances, and spoken word. The installed and live elements jostled for attention filling the room and making it palpably alive and oversaturated: a surreal cooking show involved objects resembling those inserted into the collection; a disjointed detective looked for clues while on vacation; a distraught interlocutor paced through the space carrying a Louis Vuitton bag big enough to hold an adult. At the end, the group moving in tandem under a large anthropomorphic quilted tapestry full of holes and protrusions, and then to the choreography of humans as squirting, squelching moveable fountains.
This was followed by Reading Evaporated Tears, led by Nick Aikens, James Bridle, and Navine G. Khan-Dossos in partnership with the Van Abbemuseum, which explored ecological issues, the carbon footprint, and the climate crisis. On a twenty-minute bus ride an audio essay narrated the histories of what we were passing by, including a statue of St Francis and flamingos in salt lagoons, situating us as audience, participants, teachers in considering DAI’s own carbon footprint, symptomatic of other travellers in the art world, other means of transportation, the accumulation of distances measured by different kinds of footfalls and footprints. The tour bus ended up at the Parco Naturale Regionale Molentargius, a natural reserve, where everyone was handed a pack of cards. After a short walk, we came to a site where a banner was erected. Following a few presentations, we moved again to a second site where the significance of the cards was explained and performed. The tarot deck had been reworked by the group—from the iconography of each card’s imagery to the index sheet that explains their significance, each one reconsidering climate change from a different epistemology of speculation and chance based on readings and work throughout the year. Before demonstrating how these would be read, the group explained the failure of logical systems and data sets to make sense of climate change and alternatives. The tarot is a logical/illogical tactical rethinking of epistemological tools to enable some kind of action. Tasked to consider the environment, we were given our own decks and encouraged to formulate a question on new speculative terms. And at the end the banner was cut into pieces and distributed to everyone to create a wrap for each deck.
The final COOP, “Banquet X,” led Bassam El Baroni, Aslak Aamot Kjærulff, and Bjarke Hvass Kure in partnership with Diakron, also considered climate change, but from an expanded notion of the culinary through sound, text, taste, and movement. The sound works, video projections, and small gestural performances in the Orto Botanico dell'Università di Cagliari were rather seamlessly arranged in the strongly present environment of botanical museum with its heat and swarming mosquitoes flourishing in the ecological diversity. Upon entering a sound piece played as each visitor was handed a map of the garden and interventions. Two guides sprayed the visitor with mosquito repellent and gave them a small disc resembling a petri dish. Walking through the garden was somewhat like working through a labyrinth, looking for the DAI interventions but in the process, at the garden itself. There were many moments of contemplation produced by several installed audio essays and sound works. A film was projected onto the face of a rocky cliff with cinema seats clustered around. A performance ritual took place in the depths of a cave entered through a series of other caves. The smell of damp hovered in the air. On a guided walking tour of an extremely steep set of stairs we heard an account of an ecological catastrophe called The Flaneurs of Stupidity. Finally, a small walking circuit recapitulated the movements of a swarm of locusts.
Roaming Assembly
The following (third) day comprised the Roaming Assembly titled Radio Mutiny, convened by ILiana Fokianaki in collaboration with its participants, a product of a shorter course taught at the DAI called the Planetary Campus. They engaged with a Mediterranean perspective on Cagliari, connecting the site of the Mediterranean to the complicity of Europe, and Italy especially, with respect to the EU border regime and the lives and deaths of migrants who try to cross it. A live and precisely timed radio broadcast saw participants compose jingles, sound works, musical interludes, and critical weather reports. After introductions and short pieces by Fokianaki and the participants, Deep Down Tidal (2017) by South African director Tabita Rezaire was shown. The net.art-style video essay contrasts the ephemeral imagery of the “cloud” with the material reality of the seafloor, revealing communication’s dependence on these cables that follow old colonial routes, read through in African presences and spiritual counter-narratives. A weather report was then read live by participants in a recording booth at the back of the room as a conversation, discussing the weather as out of control, as disappeared; it recalled Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016) discussion of how the weather’s imbrication in histories of slavery reverberates in contemporary experiences of racialised violence.
The second presentation was by Forensic Architecture member Stefanos Levidis, who presented a report made by Forensic Oceanography, an associated group. Forensic Architecture and Forensic Oceanography share methodological approaches—both are multidisciplinary, rely on multiple testimonial forms including the idea that objects and media provide their own kind of witnessing. The case presented, Mare Clausum, followed the capsizing of a boat full of migrants on the Libyan coast and documents blow by blow the inaction by the Libyan coast guard in response. This event is reconstructed through a forensic analysis of media—video and sound—on the boat, that shows the coastguards’ inaction, their late arrival, the violence unleashed on the migrant men eventually let on to the boat. Levidis contextualized the event in terms of the outsourcing of border control to countries of the South to keep unwanted migrants from the EU—“‘refoulment by proxy,” an externalization of the border regime. The next presentation by lawyer Giorgia Linardi from Seawatch could not take place due to the arrest of her client Carola Rackete for docking a ship full of migrants in Lampedusa without authorization the previous day.
The next intervention was a sound work by participants on silence.
Heba Amin then presented her project Operation Sunken Sea, in which nineteenth-century plans to drain the Mediterranean Sea into the Sahara basin to amalgamate the continents of Europe and Africa is a point of departure. Amin contrasted this hubristic scheme narrated by Jules Verne, designed by Herman Sorgel and dubbed Atlantrope, and advocated by Mussolini, with the route that migrants take across the Sahara and West Coast of Africa to get to the Mediterranean. She narrated her own reconstruction of that journey and the very long histories of gendering the Mediterranean landscape. Her intervention into the Atlantrope project was an effort to reconstruct what she describes as very masculine forms of posturing and propaganda—to re-perform Mussolini’s speech in praise of the draining project, to set up a mock bureau to initiate investigations into implementing the dam. She also pointed to the complex distribution of power between North and South in the propagation of these dictatorial schemes, looking at Muammar Gaddafi’s implementation of a canal system in Libya to access water fossilized during the ice age. It was finished in 2011 just before NATO’s intervention into Libya and was immediately bombed and destroyed by NATO forces, thus destroying a clean water source widely used by the public.
The artist and activist Daniela Ortiz spoke following this presentation. Rather than screen her film Empire of the Law, she chose to discuss the role of natural forces in the promulgation of border controls, which shedescribed as the militarization of nature by the EU. She argued that this extends the extractive practice of imposing violence on the land and its inhabitants by countries of the North, to using nature as a tool for death, noting that David Cameron’s description of migrants in Calais as “swarms” and “the natural advantage of our sea border” allows nature to do its job of border control. From this perspective it is winter, not conditions of living in detention centres that kills migrants. She also spoke with granular detail about migrant justice organizing in her home of Barcelona and the hypocrisy of campaigns advocated by the city government. But more importantly she tore into the liberal image of migrants as being passive and without agency—as being victims to be rescued by European actors. What about migrant self-organizing? Why are migrants reduced to representations as victims or criminals?
Following this was a series of interventions by members of the Planetary Campus in the form of jokes, and traditional Sardinian poetry battles (carefully translated into English and made into a booklet). The ’90s Detroit-based electronic duo Drexciya made an appearance in the form of one of their tracks Andrean Sand Dunes, refracting the band’s imaginary of a Black Atlantis formed of slaves thrown overboard and adapting to form a city under the sea.
The final presenter, Ana Dević from For What, How & for Whom (WHW) a collective of curators from Zagreb, detailed the trajectory of their curatorial practice since the early 2000 under the prism of partisanship and the artists whose work they have curated. Her interest was in expanding the notion of partisanship from beyond the Second World War into other political and historical situations. She described a series of images of Nada Dimić, a Yugoslavian communist who died in the Second World War and other female nationalists from that era and the erosion of their legacy in the expansion of neoliberal development. Other exhibitions they curated that she shared with us considered women’s work in relation to craft, the design of Black Panther Party newspapers by Emory Douglas, and explorations of the Greek poet, actor, and writer Katerina Gogou. In observing the original meaning of partisan as guerrilla, a protagonist who has devoted themselves to a cause, Dević saw curating as a practice of advocacy, creating new social ground on the cultural front.
Coda
These three days could have been three weeks. In the intensity of study that began under a tree and ended with the sea, a complex, shifting, and necessarily partial image of the city was created. To use the term landscape is always unsatisfying, unless its evocation points to its limits, and the ideologies that furnish the fantasy of a totalizing image. What is perhaps brought to the forefront with these limits in mind is the privileging of acts of engagement in a shifting, complex, historical yet teeming space. If a skewed deployment of the idea of landscape privileges interventions that openly question notions of totalizing knowledges in the service of the political, what is created is a map that is necessarily partial, embodied, partisan, affective, and at whose limits make possible spaces of contemplation, subjectivity, and collective study.
London, July 2019.
Read more about COOP SUMMIT 2019
Read the program Roaming Assembly #25