Bettina Wind :: Subjective Cartography

ARCHIVE ONLY

2011-05-31T04:41:00.000-07:00

This blog serves as an archive for texts and works from 2004 to 2010.
Documentation of recent works can be found at windferreira

My Business Card

2010-10-05T12:57:00.000-07:00

Facing a new round of applications, I decided to upgrade my professional appearance in order to be able and surf on the rough waves of crisis and competition. If you feel like giving your own CV a kick to set off, just follow the reference in the bottom line and you will discover a whole new universe of self-presentation. Enjoy!

Business Card
Name: Wind
Target Group: Interested Colleagues
Region: Berlin / Paris / London Elsewhere
Business Division: Global Culture Sphere
Job Title: Self-Entrepreneur
In the business since: 2004

My role

I work for Global Creative Ressources (GCR) covering predominantly public clients on special situations and event-driven festival opportunities. My area of expertise is risk taking, art production, performances, texts and counter strategies.

When I came to Berlin, I was placed in a former DDR apartment with just one other translocal team member. Thanks to our efforts and lots of good workflow, we have built the desk into a #1 European Relative Value operation. We have relationships with over 100 colleagues in the art world. The revenues speak for themselves and our team in Berlin has grown temporarily from two to three persons. I personally manage some of the most valuable network relationships.

My background

Before completing my Master, I worked at Theatre festivals on their structured production desk. After having finished my Master program in Dramaturgy & Comparative Literature Studies at LMU Munich (LMU), I decided to gear my studies towards a career in the interdisciplinary field of art and culture, with the hope of changing my career, as nobody provided me with the opportunity to put into practice all that I had learned during my Master program.

The Master program was extremely useful to the extent that it gave me the opportunity to take some exotic courses and help me build up a network that unfortunately got lost in competition. Certainly, had it been for the master program and the limited recruitment opportunities, it would have been difficult for me to make the shift from what was essentially a career in dramaturgy to art and performance.

Day to day challenges

Finding viable creative ideas is the biggest challenge I face in my job. It requires a great deal of information, ingenuity, and insight. Tapping into research, and drawing upon multiple resources are the keys to success in my business. The writing of concepts and applications is the easy part. Getting the full project and seeing the big context is where the challenge lies. Managing time is the second biggest challenge.

Community & Work Environment

From senior artists to junior members of the community, every one is a competitive player. The network is extremely intelligent, creative, open minded and hierarchical. There is always a buzz on the biennials and openings, the energy is electrifying, the pressure is high, yet I can confidently say it is one of the few truly "fun" jobs I have had in my life.

Training Program

A four week theory training program, and several long-term artist-in-residency programs were an excellent refresher course in the various aspects of art, theory & politics. The off-site team-building activities for participants provided a great forum to make connections and build networks in improvised conditions. One of the most rewarding parts of the programs was the opportunity to get connected with the art & theory world in Amsterdam, Istanbul, Sydney, and Stockholm. This allowed me to build relationships with the various critical colleagues who make up the translocal art projects.

Language skills
English, German, French, Portuguese, Finnish, and other European Dialects.

Corporate Culture

To understand the art culture, I would suggest that you visit websites and face book communities where you will read that our identity is based on five core values: Work focus; Creativity; Innovation; Performance and Trust. When I first joined the art world I heard the buzzwords but they didn't mean much to me. But having worked here for almost seven years now, I can really see how true they are. Almost all my colleagues live by these values and not by a stable income. I am surrounded by a group of unassuming, yet highly motivated players, driven by a hunger for success. The entire network is focused on achieving market dominance while being convinced that they are maintaining integrity at all times. I have found that self-management fosters and encourages entrepreneurship at all levels of the organization. Come out with an intelligent idea, even if it is not very likely that you will be given the resources for implementation.

Application & Interview Processes

My first-round applications for potential projects were directed to London, Tel Aviv, Helsinki, Aomori and other places hosting art-in-residency programs. The negative reactions were fairly informal, but we did not discuss anything, neither my career aspirations nor prior work experience. I decided to continue applying, however, as the art world in general demonstrates to me how committed everybody is to his or her own career. I found that my temporary employers were not traditional or elitist. To the contrary, the team I met at museums and festivals was down-to-earth and focused on building a formidable franchise. The quality and professionalism of the translocal art world really was a major deciding factor for joining it. I am curious about what the future will bring.

Bettina Wind

This text is dedicated to my translocal colleagues struggling with applications and concepts at the moment; I also want to thank Mr. Kanak, whose generous gesture to publish his job description on the website of Deutsche Bank helped me to give my professional appearance a completely new tune.

Hey lady, you, lady

2010-03-27T12:53:00.000-07:00

Hey lady, you, lady, don’t just walk away, cause I have this need to tell you why I’m all alone today.

By that time you have already entered the castle with a mysterious woman dressed in white who walks in her sleep up the stairs and stares out of the window while telling you a story, her story. From the first listening it seems a line of memories, carrying her back to Georgia and California and anywhere she could run. But as soon as she speaks of the preacher man she made love with in the sun, you realize that there is something entirely different going on. The woman tries to calm you down with clichés about Greek yachts and nights in Monte Carlo, and the music does its part to make her voice and the whole scenario even more kitschy, but still it happens again: the woman confesses to you that she has seen some things that a woman ain’t supposed to see (in a cover version sung by a Korean female duo one of the singers fakes disapprobation at that part). She has seen something you ain’t supposed to see. Something she wants to tell you about because she can see so much of you living in her eyes. You have entered her fantasy by listening to her too long. Be careful with what it will do to you.

Charlene D’Angelo married twice. As a consequence, her name changed to Duncan and then to Oliver. Charlene Duncan tried to land a hit in the US in 1976 called “I’ve never been to me”. One line about “unborn children” was misunderstood as a feminist pro-abortion statement, which did not really help to make the song popular at that time. Some other singers tried after her to turn it into a success, such as Nancy Wilson and Randy Crawford, but it was Charlene Oliver, by then living in the UK, who made the song become a “one-hit wonder” in 1982. “I’ve never been to me” made it into the charts and Charlene into TV-shows. After that she continued her work in a sweets shop in Ilford, where she is supposed to work still now, if she has not retired yet.

So far, so sweet.

Or, as Charlene would put it: I took the sweet life, I never knew I'd be bitter from the sweet.

Be careful, this is another trap she prepares for you, because now comes a line that is usually cut out - for obvious reasons as you will see - of the Japanese cover version “Love is All” sung at marriage ceremonies. Here it goes:
I've spent my life exploring the subtle whoring that costs too much to be free.

We’re not listening to Charlene anymore (in fact, the original version was written for a male voice, as the front singer of the group “The Temptation”, who performed their version of the song in 1982, proves on You Tube).
We’re now listening to Priscilla, future queen of the desert, moving her lips accordingly to Charlene’s words, trying to defend her show against the drunken dangerous men molesting her on stage.

We’re not in the big castle anymore, following a little private guided tour: we’re on stage, exposed to the audience’s clutches and touches, trying to make it through the night without losing the line. Trying to move between spaces along this line, which is really a line of D and not of C, always and already in the middle – but of what?

We lost the point here, the origin, though the story I am telling you already raised some doubts about a point of origin: was it a crazy idea of a crazy composer? A male voice supposed to address a female audience? A Korean pop star raising an eyebrow in fake disapproval about her partner’s confession? Was it Priscilla’s fantasy that took hold of Charlene, drawing her deeply into exploring the subtle whoring, or was it Charlene in her sweets shop, who tries assure you that the sweet will make you bitter (but why selling sweets then)?

Forget about the truth. Forget about memory. Start fantasizing with me. Don’t believe my lies that you are the true woman holding that little baby. Try to misunderstand me when I sing of the man you fought with this morning. Do it like Valentina Hassan and think of the man you fucked with this morning and the one you will make love with tonight.

Follow me into the desert of a becoming, it starts just behind the castle.

Please lady.
Please. Lady.

Don’t just walk away. Listen to me again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrIqsFSjqso&feature=related

Familiar Stories (and other strange discoveries)

2010-03-27T12:46:00.000-07:00

Blank - 2

I don’t know where this photo was taken, but it is part of the story I will tell tonight. The main character is a young woman who is not interested in politics at all.

3

When her father asked her to pose in front of the monument together with her mother, she leaned against the fence in an elegant yet provocative manner and put on a questioning smile. Her mother, a non-smoked cigarette in her right hand, grasped the fence as if it could save her from falling or walking away. There is a kind of routine in the way both put their shoes and sandals on display. While we are still looking at their feet, a woman crosses the street in the back. She’s not part of the story, so we might forget about her quickly, when we move on to the next picture

4

which shows a typical day on the beach. She was about to dive into the water when being caught by the camera. A young boy is pointing at her from the distance. Her nephew. She’s missing to make the family arrangement complete.

(Extract from script for "Familiar Stories")

slideshow performance in london in march

2010-02-26T03:10:00.001-08:00

Family photos draw a line between centre and margin. In the centre: an almost united family (only the photographer is missing). In the margin: some blurred landscape with a passer-by. Now let’s cross the line and see what happens…

Work Game

2009-09-14T11:02:00.000-07:00

Work game deals with work conditions in the field of contemporary art, and the ambivalent position of artists as entrepreneurs of their own life. A set of questions is used to develop an associative field of connections and contradictions in response to desires, self-technologies, and (precarious) work settings. Tokens and visual structures help to transpose isolated thoughts into multilayered temporary maps. Results enter the game’s account as well as a “work game diary”. Basic idea of the game is to generate an intuitive, intimate knowledge about dynamics and desires in the work process; to visualize structures of thought that cannot be expressed in a linear way, but nevertheless play an important role for our way of dealing with the work conditions we set up or respond to.

an unfinished publication - by windferreira

2009-08-21T11:04:00.001-07:00

My Business Card

2009-06-23T01:57:00.000-07:00

Facing a new round of applications, I decided to upgrade my professional appearance in order to be able and surf on the rough waves of crisis and competition. If you feel like giving your own CV a kick to set off, just follow the reference in the bottom line and you will discover a whole new universe of self-presentation. Enjoy!

Business Card
Name: Wind
Target Group: Interested Colleagues
Region: Berlin / Elsewhere
Business Division: Global Culture Sphere
Job Title: Self-Entrepreneur
In the business since: 2004

My role

I work for Global Creative Ressources (GCR) covering predominantly public clients on special situations and event-driven festival opportunities. My area of expertise is risk taking, art production, performances, texts and counter strategies.

When I came to Berlin, I was placed in a former DDR apartment with just one other translocal team member. Thanks to our efforts and lots of good workflow, we have built the desk into a #1 European Relative Value operation. We have relationships with over 100 colleagues in the art world. The revenues speak for themselves and our team in Berlin has grown temporarily from two to three people. I personally manage some of the most valuable network relationships.

My background

Before completing my Master, I worked at Theatre festivals on their structured production desk. After having finished my Master program in Dramaturgy & Comparative Literature Studies at LMU Munich (LMU), I decided to gear my studies towards a career in the interdisciplinary field of art and culture, with the hope of changing my career, as nobody provided me with the opportunity to put into practice all that I had learned during my Master program.

The Master program was extremely useful to the extent that it gave me the opportunity to take some exotic courses and help me build up a network that unfortunately got lost in competition. Certainly, had it been for the master program and the limited recruitment opportunities, it would have been difficult for me to make the shift from what was essentially a career in dramaturgy to art and performance.

Day to day challenges

Finding viable creative ideas is the biggest challenge I face in my job. It requires a great deal of information, ingenuity, and insight. Tapping into research, and drawing upon multiple resources are the keys to success in my business. The writing of concepts and applications is the easy part. Getting the full project and seeing the big context is where the challenge lies. Managing time is the second biggest challenge.

Community & Work Environment

From senior artists to junior members of the community, every one is a competitive player. The network is extremely intelligent, creative, open minded and hierarchical. There is always a buzz on the biennials and openings, the energy is electrifying, the pressure is high, yet I can confidently say it is one of the few truly "fun" jobs I have had in my life.
Training Program

A four week theory training program in Eindhoven in 2007 was an excellent refresher course in the various aspects of art, theory & politics. The off-site team-building activities for participants provided a great forum to make connections and build networks in precarious conditions. One of the most rewarding parts of the program was the opportunity to understand the various stars within the art & theory world in Amsterdam, London and Istanbul. This allowed me to build relationships with the various critical colleagues who make up the translocal art projects.

Language skills
English, German, French, Portuguese, Finnish, and other European Dialects.

Corporate Culture

To understand the art culture, I would suggest that you visit websites and face book communities where you will read that our identity is based on five core values: Work focus; Creativity; Innovation; Performance and Trust. When I first joined the art world I heard the buzzwords but they didn't mean much to me. But having worked here for almost five years now, I can really see how true they are. Almost all my colleagues live by these values and not by a stable income. I am surrounded by a group of unassuming, yet highly motivated players, driven by a hunger for success. The entire network is focused on achieving market dominance while being convinced that they are maintaining integrity at all times. I have found that self-management fosters and encourages entrepreneurship at all levels of the organization. Come out with an intelligent idea, even if it is not very likely that you will be given the resources for implementation.

Application & Interview Processes

My first-round applications for potential projects were directed to London, Tel Aviv, Helsinki, Aomori and other places hosting art-in-residency programs. The negative reactions were fairly informal, but we did not discuss anything, neither my career aspirations nor prior work experience. I decided to continue applying, however, as the art world in general demonstrates to me how committed everybody is to his or her own career. I found that my temporary employers were not traditional or elitist. To the contrary, the team I met at museums and festivals was down-to-earth and focused on building a formidable franchise. The quality and professionalism of the translocal art world really was a major deciding factor for joining it. I am curious about what the future will bring.

Berlin, 15.6.09, Bettina Wind

This text is dedicated to my translocal colleagues struggling with applications and concepts at the moment; I also want to thank Mr. Kanak, whose generous gesture to publish his job description on the website of Deutsche Bank helped me to give my professional appearance a completely new tune.

THE BALCONY SACRIFICE

2009-06-21T03:59:00.000-07:00

Last week I was witness to the so-called “Balcony Sacrifice”. I had heard of such occasions, yet it still took me by surprise. There were signs of it some months ago: an old man on his third floor balcony climbed onto a fruit box with a round set hammer in hand, in order to check if his neighbour’s balcony would serve for the next sacrifice. I was privy to this on my way to the studio in a backstreet of Wedding – a rather ordinary district of Berlin, where fake castles serve as courtyards, security men greet you when on your way shopping, coffee is served in electrical supply stores, older brothers beat up their younger brothers in the street, rush hour is at one (both over and underground), and a young Muslim in a wheelchair waits for passers-by to carry him upstairs. Like any other district in Berlin, Wedding is currently being “discovered” by artists. But as there are no picturesque canals and only a few run-down houses waiting to be renovated, the stimulation of an artistic avant-garde might not be the watertight solution to cheering up the atmosphere and boosting property prices…at least, as far as I was concerned. I had just been through a very strange month.

It had been a strange month and nothing indicated its end she thought / except her tiny pocket calendar and some houses / set on fire by an early summer or an all too late crowd of activists / let’s get out of it she thought / and rode her bicycle up north / following the former path of surveillance / that had crossed a dead-land territory once / a run-down supermarket / an African flea market (about to close) / some Soviets’ graves next to allotment gardens / the abandoned railway tracks ready for suburban Sunday promenades / that would lead her to the edge of town

My studio faces a short street, cut in half by the large factory building: a liminal space par excellence. I rarely see people in the opposite building, part of which is probably empty anyway. Its shabby grey-white surface serves as a screen for my imaginary projections.

It had been a strange month in total she thought / while remembering the stark tyranny of an everyday sun / that dried out soil and daydreams / and a “try harder” ethos / so she left for a left bookshop / consumed academic thoughts from bookshelves / over-heard the latest rumour about gallery assistants threaten post-doc students / in the quest for grant-based income // as the crisis will attack // and there won’t be any escaping into books she thought / so she bought one and she went on to the playground / children inside / vendors outside talking on their ear-plug-cell-phones / an old lady with her solid plastic picker that reaches out beneath the parked cars / picking up trash professionally sad

Wedding once had a strong identity, or at least a strong colour. Namely RED. It was in this district that workers had tried to demonstrate on May 1, 1929. 19 of them got shot by the police, in the so-called “Blood May of Wedding”. Over forty years later, the West-German Social Democrats moved their party’s headquarters here in order to show their affinity with the workers class. Today, Wedding is a workers’ district, where not only has work vanished (50% of industry closed down in Berlin after the Wall); even the district’s name disappeared when swept up by the central city district’s administrative machine. Its inhabitants did not go away though, they just started performing life outside beyond below without work and district distinction.

There we are John thought D. Jarman / made her wonder how far that we would reach / but her newly bought book told her to connect it all / the fenced playground and the vendor and the lady and the bookshop / and the social vulnerability / and the pseudo-open collaboration with a big subjectification machine / making work and non-work merge / in sweet self-exaggeration / exploitation / re-invention of a flexible biography / a nostalgic lack of continuity / and protection / and desire and submission / institutional co-option of her (oh) so dynamic work force / a power field disguised as game field / an experiment as commodity / while she’s dreaming of something else

If solidarity can only be organized in relation to systems of paid work, then my work in Wedding relates to a system without solidarity. I feel a certain distance, every time I walk out of the metro station. The pavement is broad enough to give way without forced encounters (sometimes objects are dropped from above, sometimes voices are snatched from interiors). Still, I register too many impressions during the five-minute walk and by the time I arrive at the studio I have already been elsewhere’s, losing some thoughts on the way. People here let you come too close; their traces and silences and gestures and angry conversations at the public telephone booth speak too clearly a language that enters my imagination and lingers there, unwilling to drop off and give way to what I brought with me from an early morning thought. I get contaminated with dull lives that make me dream of taking all these moods with me and simply escaping.

There she was on a hill top / right before her the last piece of territory / like a leisure park in a nutshell / like a national park without extension / but with an exploded view that would send out / shock waves of freedom // out there // children were chasing dogs in electric bobby cars / old couples were dancing to nostalgic melodies of forgotten bands / dogs, ducks, horses galloping across fields and fences / and some wannabe punks waiting for the last bus to take them back to their sullen sad skyscrapers / while the filled air of swamps and rotten tree trunks smelled like Finland / so she took a last breath of its infinity / and the local train back home

When I started copying this text to a postcard, I realized that on the balcony in front of my studio, a man was fixing a golden helmet to his head, while an old lady stared cautiously out of the apartment, wondering what will happen to the neighbour’s balcony. While we watched in silence, the man took out a rather large weapon and started attacking the ceiling in methodical pokes.

(Balcony Sacrifice: Yearly ritual performed without public announcement in a district of Berlin, believed to ward off misfortune in the future. Description: A balcony is partly destroyed by a performer carrying a halberd while wearing a golden helmet > reference to Saint Florian, whom believers address in their prayer as follows: “Saint Florian Dearest / From Fire and Damage protect my Home / Let others’ Homes drown in Extinguisher’s Foam.” The (usually dead-beat) balcony symbolizes an insecure future and inherent risks when stepping out the safety of home and tradition; its sacrifice is a substitution for the real sacrifices that might await those who take a step beyond and expose themselves to unknown forces that, through the ritual, are then wrought upon a lifeless object. Note: Popular sources relate the use of a balcony to Karl Liebknecht’s declaration of the Republic from the Berlin Castle’s balcony in 1918, as well as to his violent death shortly afterwards.)

Critics say that the “Balcony Sacrifice” is just a way to establish societal order, keeping transgressions temporary, under control. The real aim is to neutralize the potential of resistance against forces – neo liberal ones, they add - that threaten not only balconies, but the base of work and life as a whole.

Still, I enjoyed the ritual’s destructive beauty. Aesthetics are what artists aim at, in the end.

GALLERY DISCUSSION BERLIN

2009-06-21T03:46:00.000-07:00

Pamphlet intervention on May 1st 2009 by Alexandra Ferreira and Bettina Wind

strange forms of life - slideshow

2009-05-03T06:29:00.001-07:00

strange forms of life - extract

2009-05-03T06:01:00.000-07:00

(...)
At about the same time another man runs for his life. His bare feet almost do not touch the icy ground as he tries to move faster than the huge ship behind him that is breaking the ice he had crossed just a moment before into big white islands. He is running towards us but he cannot come closer. We are out of reach.

(slide)

To be more precise, we are sitting in a dark room that is illuminated by one source of light pointing at a blank canvas. There are no other sources of light although we know that out there in this district of the city, lights are directed onto streets and shops and billboards and museums, but this is of no interest for us at the moment, as we are forming our own district by means of a source of light and some folded lines. In our district there are borderlines forming landscapes of extension and intension, enclosing points, expanding and limiting zones between us and our neighbours. Just like in the following image:

(slide)

Every fold produces a double-fold of interior and exterior, a folded landscape that blurs the boundaries of inside and outside vision. Does it matter if these images correspond with a materialized outside? Or do they rather describe an inside, an introspective, a projected ground upon which each single imagination draws its own district?

(blank)

In the inner district of imagination linger images that might have been taken in the outside, at a specific time of the year, in a specific light; still, if we look at them now, the outside is out of reach – we might as well take them as images of a dream about strange forms of life.

Slideshow in Berlin, April 2

2009-04-03T02:00:00.000-07:00

PASS THIS ON

2009-04-03T01:53:00.000-07:00

THIS TEXT OFFERS A PACT. Not the kind of pact that is made in the opera “Der Freischütz” (The Marksman) and that leads inevitably to death and destruction. More a kind of pact that keeps the audience watching the opera till the end, with the feeling that there is no escape from the cruel German legend, but that there is pleasure in assisting to it.

THIS IS A PACT ABOUT PLEASURE. What else could it be? There is no money or fame involved. Even a proofreader is missing to edit these words, written during a rainy evening in a Berlin apartment. There is just Word’s auto-correction program and I. And a strange voice in my head, telling me to

PASS THIS ON

MEMORIES OF A STORYTELLER

I don’t know if I passed on this link to you already:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VLnLs_-Ez4

Don’t worry; it is not a virus, though it might become contagious. Let me explain to you: When I watched this video colleagues had passed on to me some time ago I felt a certain danger, a growing tension between the singer and the audience. I have been to Finland a couple of times and have experienced community centres in countryside that offer cultural divertissement at isolated places. I have seen a drag queen performing in a back street of Tampere, and I also got into trouble in another back street, when walking along with an Argentinean colleague who was wearing his hair long and black. The video’s constellation did not seem to predict a lucky ending at all. Even when the first man starts to dance, it looks more like a kind of provocation. “Is he willing? Will he play?” asks the singer, and then suddenly the scene takes off to another place, to an old fairy tale that goes like this: Two brothers follow the spell of a strange woman, and lead the whole village to her place in the forest, where young and old lose their caution when listening to the woman’s seductive songs. They follow her invitation and start to dance; they lose themselves in their movements and in their dreams. They become somebody else. The only one, who does not enter the dance, but watches from the margin, is the brothers’ sister, who gave her voice to the woman in exchange for the promise of fame and fortune for her family. Silently, unable to speak, for her tongue belongs to somebody else now, with her eyes wide open, she keeps watching.

MEMORIES OF A SORCERER

It is the fascination of a multiplicity inside us that draws us to the edge of a forest to witness the pack (of wolves, of witches, of witnesses of a ritual) and its shepherd, its leader or singer or sorcerer. Unnatural participation, as Deleuze and Guattari call it, a propagation by epidemic, by contagion. There is always someone on the edge inviting you to make and alliance, to enter a pact. Someone defined by the liminal position of being inside and outside the pack, of slipping into it (slipping into a tune, a costume, a voice, a gender) or standing outside as the exceptional individual, the “Outsider”. It is a dynamic position, a movement marking the borderline of the pack, into which the human passes or inn which his or her becoming takes place, by contagion (Deleuze&Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 1730). In this sense, the singer does not only invite the brother to play or to dance, but also to bring along the human group he has a second alliance with, the audience watching the two dance, as the singer watched the two brothers dance before (Oh, what a dance), and along with it the next human group, the fascinated Self, the You Tube audience watching a dance that comes as a surprise; that involves a group most unlikely to spend time together in a community centre up north. What are they doing there? How did they come together, if not secretly and always on the fringe?

You can say that we are just watching a summer hit of Club music, produced by Karin and Olof Dreijer aka The Knife, who appear in the video as the dancing men and the young woman in the last shot. That Rickard Engfors who performs the playback version of the song “Pass this on”, simply marks the making of his/her drag performance by putting on the music and taking the fake microphone. A drag show, a fake song, a music video.

I say we are watching a becoming, and by watching it, we get invited to a pact, we might even get infected by an affinity to politics that are neither those of the family nor of religion nor of the State.

This video might be contagious.

PASS IT ON

40 Jahre Mousonturm // Eine Retrospektive

2009-03-05T04:55:00.000-08:00

The exhibition proposed different ways of telling (hi)stories of the interdisciplinary centre for performance and arts Mousonturm: moments of past and potential future were "stored" in boxes, ready to be explored by the visitors. The exhibition opened on February 5th 2009 and changed every week till the final intervention by Oliver Augst and Stefan Beck on February 28th who performed "Sprecheinsatz: Alle Künstler" at the last evening.

40 Jahre Mousonturm // Eine Retrospektive

2009-03-05T04:50:00.000-08:00

Exhibition with Alexandra Ferreira, in collaboration with Pedro Lagoa, for Künstlerhaus Mousonturm in Frankfurt am Main

drawing a line

2009-01-01T05:14:00.001-08:00

Slideshow in Oporto, November 8

2008-11-10T12:10:00.001-08:00

DES HOMMES QU'ON APPELLE SAUVAGE

2008-11-06T05:37:00.000-08:00

"Did the mask belong to Jean in the same way it belonged to the dancers in their village who received the sprits when turning around to the rhythmic sounds?

(SLIDE)

Jean used it during the day when he was close to the others, it was as if he needed their presence become another, to enter the ritual of his totem, his spirit. But which kind of spirit was it that Jean received when he put on his black mask that would cover half of his face while his lips were pressed onto each other in eager suspension?"
(Extract of Slideshow for Oporto, November 7)

Invitation to a Slideshow in Oporto

2008-11-06T05:35:00.000-08:00

machine of desire for caldeira 213

2008-10-25T08:01:00.000-07:00

A machine of desire dedicated to the collective project Caldeira 213 in Oporto, as part of a publication

Imaginary Snapshots meet "Wunschmaschine"

2008-10-25T07:43:00.000-07:00

The slideshow about places and encounters in European "culturescape" turns into a (self-)experiment: What kind of "Wunschmaschine" (machine of desire) is needed to measure the optimal "cognitive distance" between image and memory, performer and public? How can I turn an ephemeral slideshow into the ultimate "knowledge spill-over"?

(Performed at Salonmarathon, Ballhaus Ost Berlin, on October 23, 2008)

Mountains are for Masochists

2008-10-25T07:31:00.000-07:00

(Page of booklet that accompanies Alexandra Ferreira's exhibition)

Extract of my text:
No point of return. Every passage looks different when going backwards: the impossibility to take back going backwards in the mountains the dead end

that makes you lean back against the mountain and feel about death when you look at the scale: a dimension that was not obvious, step by step breath by breath only focussing the stones and path and little area of attention incapable to perceive the whole, the ensemble without you without humans. just two meters too high enough to break down into the ice when falling. To be caught in the inside of a glacier a rock a river to be cut off what is still a valley a landscape. Where is the invisible border between down here and up there, between the mountains on their own and the assemblage created by animals, humans and cottages?

One summer I saw a shepherd (he told me that during winter he worked at a ski resort or as butcher in his home town in South Tyrol) jumping alongside the line of sheep that forms a white chain against the carved lines on the mountainside. He was running next to the sheep, jumping, leaving the tricky ground aside while using his stick as reliable leg. He also told me about the water places on top of the plateau, a spot the cows would find in their rhythm and way. No manipulation. Becoming-cow in learning about speed and slowness and herd: the whole system of paths and smells and triggers and hints to climb, settle, rest, move, find, drink, eat, digest and keep up a sane system of energy that would sustain also the unborn calf travelling with you.

Why monkeys do not make good pets

2008-10-25T07:27:00.000-07:00

(Video Still, part of the exhibition by Mariana Viega)

Scroll down for English version...

"Landschaft ist Konstruktion. Sollte sie nicht künstlich angelegt sein (was hier natürlich der Fall ist), dann wird sie doch in unserem Blick entworfen, festgehalten und eingerahmt. Wir folgen einem sichtbaren oder unsichtbaren Horizont und halten die Reflektionsflächen, auf die das Sonnenlicht trifft, für echte Farben: den blauen See, die grauen Steine, den grünen Wald.

So zumindest wird Natur uns in der Fotografie präsentiert, die – ihrer eigenen imaginären Ideallandschaft auf der Spur – immer neue Variationen einer scheinbar ursprünglichen Umgebung produziert. Wir wissen ja, dass das Original nicht existiert, dass wir in jedem Bild, das wir aufnehmen oder betrachten, eine Vorstellung durch die nächste ersetzen und trotzdem in der Mitte eine Leerstelle zurückbleibt, die uns anzieht, uns antreibt zu weiteren Versuchen: Kopien, die ihre eigenen Irritationen und Inkommensurabeln hervorbringen. Was würde geschehen, wenn wir tatsächlich das Originalbild fänden, wenn wir uns in einer Umgebung befänden, die uns einschließt, uns umfasst und festhält? Eine Umgebung, in der wir weder Horizont noch Außen, weder Verweis noch Geschichte erkennen können, weil uns der distanzierte Blick nicht gelingen will, kurz: was würde passieren, wenn wir vor das zurückgehen könnten, was die Fotografie in unserem Blick entlarvt hat?

Säulen-Bäume öffnen die Vertikale, ohne das Blattwerk erreichen zu lassen. Schattenspender vielleicht, Finger-Stein-Einkerbungen, die ein Hochschwingen des Körpers ermöglichen, einen Sprung, ohne auf dem staubigen Boden aufzutreffen, ein Zusammenkauern hinter der trockenen, aufgerauten runden Fläche, die ein Loch in das grelle Tageslicht bohrt.

Tiergärten haben als Reste eines kolonialistischen Exotismus längst ihr Verfallsdatum erreicht, ohne dass man sie schließen könnte: die Affenhäuser wollen gefüllt werden. Endloser Kreislauf, Stillstand der Zeit.

Im ersten Moment scheint das Bild angehalten zu sein, doch dann ein verschobener Augenblick, eine schnelle Bewegung, ein Sprung gegen die Zeit…

Nur eine Katastrophe vermag die Zoomaschine zu unterbrechen: Bei einem Bombenangriff auf Sarajewo wurde ein Teil des Zauns beschädigt, so dass erschrockene Tiere durch die Stadt galoppierten, bevor es gelang, sie zu erschießen.

Nach der Bombadierung Berlins im 2. Weltkrieg warb man in allen Sektoren Arbeiter wie Freiwilligenverbände zur Beseitigung der Trümmer an. Eine der größten Trümmerdeponien lag auf dem Gebiet des 1954 neueröffneten Tierparks in Lichterfelde. Freiwillige des “Nationalen Aufbauwerks” halfen bei der Gestaltung des größten Landschaftstierpark Europas und integrierten wohl auch Teile der Ruinen Berlins, einer zerstörten Stadt, die sich jedoch bereits dem Wettstreit um das Sinnbild der modernen zweigeteilten Welt verschrieben hatte. Während das repräsentative Berlin im Osten und Westen vorausblickte, machte der Tierpark einen Doppelschritt zurück: über die Ruinen, einer romantisch verklärten Kopie hin zum imaginären Original der klassischen Antike, der sogenannten “Wiege der Kultur”.

Ein Vorausblick: Als das Bündnis griechischer Kleinstaaten nach dem Sieg über das persische Reich die regionale Vorherrschaft übernahm, verkörperte Aischylos in der ersten überlieferten Tragödie “Die Perser” den Anderen (ein erstes “becoming-other”). Aus Sicht der Besiegten schrieb er:.“Rettet alles, oder alles ist dahin”. Er wusste noch nicht, dass einige Affen später einen Sprung gegen die Zeit wagen würden…"

Oktober 2008, Bettina Wind

(Dieser Text ist für eine Ausstellung von Mariana Viegas in Berlin entstanden und Teil ihrer Installation)

Landscape is construction. If not artificially laid out (as is naturally the case here), then it is designed, retained, and framed within our gaze. We pursue a visible or invisible horizon and consider the reflective surfaces, upon which the sunlight strikes, to be true colours: a blue lake, grey stones, green forest.

This, at least, is the way nature is presented to us in photography, which – pursuing its own imaginary ideal landscape – produces ever new variations of a seemingly primordial environment. Although we realize the original we replace with an idea in every image that we record or observe does not exist, we are nonetheless still attracted by the fact that something central is still missing, driving us to further experiments: copies that produce their own irritations and moments of incommensurability. What would happen if we actually found the original image; if we found ourselves in an environment that enclosed us, enveloped us, and held us tight? What if we found ourselves in surroundings where we could make out no horizon or exterior, no reference or history, because we could not succeed in taking a distanced view? In short: what would happen if we could return to whatever existed before the view the photograph reveals to our sight?

Pillar trees open the vertical without reaching foliage. Shade providers perhaps, finger-stone indentations that allow one to swing one’ body upwards, to leap without landing on the dusty ground, to huddle behind the dry, roughened round surface that drills a hole in the glaring daylight.

As remnants of colonial exoticism, zoos have long since reached their ‘best before’ date, but no one has been able to close them: the monkey houses must be filled. An endless flow; time stands still.

In the first moment the image seems frozen, but then a moment’s hesitation, a quick movement, a leap out of time…

Only a catastrophe could interrupt the zoo machine. During a bombing raid on Sarajevo part of the fence was damaged, so that frightened animals galloped through the city until people managed to shoot them.

After the bombing of Berlin during the Second World War, workers and bands of volunteers were enlisted in all sectors to clear away the rubble. One of the largest repositories of rubble was on the grounds of the zoo in Lichterfelde, newly opened in 1954. Volunteers of the “Nationalen Aufbauwerk” (National Reconstruction Project) helped construct the largest landscaped zoo in Europe, thus also integrating parts of the ruins of Berlin, a destroyed city that itself was already devoted to the rivalry surrounding this epitome of the modern bipartite world. While representational Berlin looked forward in the East and West, the zoo took two steps backwards: across the ruins of a romantically exalted copy towards the imaginary original of classical antiquity, the so-called “cradle of culture”.

A look ahead: As the alliance of Greek city states assumed regional dominance after the victory over the Persian empire, Aeschylus, in the first surviving tragedy “The Persians”, personified the others (a first “becoming-other”). From the point of view of the vanquished he wrote: “Save everything, or all is lost”. He did not yet know that some apes would later venture a leap out of time…

October 2008, Bettina Wind
Translation by Sean Gallagher

Slideshow in Berlin, October 23

2008-10-21T10:44:00.000-07:00

Upcoming performance on Oktober 23 in Ballhaus Ost Berlin, only three days to go...

That's what I am writing on right now:

Hier sind wir im Hafengebiet Antwerpens, das eigentlich nicht bewohnbar ist, wegen der chemischen Belastung. Trotzdem ist im Obergeschoss des großen Backsteinhauses Licht. Hier hat früher der Schleusenwärter gewohnt. Nun wird die Schleuse, über die im Bild eine Brücke führt, automatisch betrieben und so konnte das Haus in eine Künstlerresidency umgewandelt werden, denn Künstler sind ja mobil und dadurch temporär mit Giftstoffen belastbar. Eine Künstlerin, die im oberen Stockwerk wohnt, zeigt gerade, über welche Hindernisse sie geklettert ist, um eine gerade Linie zu beschreiben.
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Dieses Studio gehört derselben Künstlerin, allerdings nur temporär, den sie nimmt an einem zweijährigen Programm der JanvanEyckakademie in Maastricht teil. An diesem Bild sind nicht so sehr die verstreuten Bücher auf dem Boden oder das rote Schlafsofa interessant, das den halben Raum einnimmt, als vielmehr die merkwürdigen Geräusche, die durch die rechte Seitenwand dringen. Es handelt sich, wie ich später erfahre, um Proben für einen Auftritt des Gemüseorchesters.
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Hier sieht man die vier Performer des Gemüseorchesters, mit einer angeschlossenen Kartoffel und einigen Mischpulten und Verstärkern. Auf dem langgezogenen Balkon im Hintergrund befinden sich Umkleidekabinen des ehemaligen Schwimmbads, in dem das Konzert stattfindet, die Kacheln hinter den Musikern gehören zum Schwimmbecken, die Atemwölkchen zeigen die ungefähre Temparatur des Innenraumes an einem Brüsseler Novemberabend an.

Wunschmaschinen - first adaptation

2008-09-04T09:06:00.001-07:00

Wunschmaschinen - series in progress

2008-09-03T11:24:00.001-07:00

Voice-Over: Re-Translating Harun Farocki

2008-06-13T04:08:00.000-07:00

The classical set of questions:
How much do you lose when translating a text, and how much do you win?
How much does a voice and its intonation change when another person speaks in another language?
How can you imagine an author if you are only able to hear his or her double?
How can he or she speak for him/herself if actually it is you speaking for them?

Translation as Voice-Over: Harun Farocki uses his own voice to speak “over” images; his critical analysis adds layers of contextual information to the selected images and movements, covers their edge with sub- and meta-titles. Or, putting it the other way around (not as addition, but as subtraction): “The uncovering of images from the many layers of their encoding”, says the translator, “Die Bilder von den Ablagerungen ihrer Kodierung zu befreien”, say the editors of Harun Farocki’s texts, “To liberate the images from sediments of their encoding”, say I, maybe not in correct English, but in admiration of the image the editors have chosen to describe Harun Farocki’s “archaeolo-analytical” device.

“Re-Translating Harun Farocki” is a simple operation (I will re-translate the English translation of some of his texts into German) but has rather complex implications: Farocki synchronizes moving images with his line of thought, rewinds them, holds them, comments them, synchronizes his voice with the movement of the images. “Winding back and forth” (“beim Hinundherfahren”) a third element emerges out of text/voice and image/movement. Edited in a book, the texts still hold a certain performative quality of synchronization; their translator needs to move “back and forth”, using his or her own voice to perceive the presence inherent in the printed words, like in a drama. But again: the imagination of images that move(d) along with these words is still present, like a visual echo that provoked itself a voice (the performative quality of Echo’s words, forcing Narcissus to react and to set into motion another series of echos…).

How to translate a visual echo that lingers in your memory in disguise?
If the way we remember images differs so much from how we saw them from how they are recorded from how they were revisited, then a translation (that loses of what is thought of what is written down of what is remembered) can only win if marking this embodied difference, this mental subtraction Deleuze praised as “minotarian memory”.

Let’s start with what an editing room is (“Was ein Schneideraum ist”, Harun Farocki, 1980).

Constructions of Home

2008-06-13T03:54:00.000-07:00

Extract of a text written for "O Fascinio de Ulisses", Galeria Luís Serpa, Lisbon

(...)

First site: Praça Onze, Rio de Janeiro, around 1915. Entering Tia Ciata’s house in the evening, you might get immediately stuck in the ballroom, where musicians, politicians, neighbours and visionaries meet and listen to improvised songs. If you follow the long dark corridor, you will reach the kitchen, dinner hall, pantry, heart of conversations, rumours and specialities from Bahia. But wait: there is still the garden in the backyard, a fertile ground for jamming and dancing, for Samba and Candomblé, its ritual objects hidden in a small wooden shed in the very last corner of the territory .. The front side and back side, the entrance hall and garden lot – they belong to the same festivity, yet different events. Not that these aspects of concert, conversation, dance, dinner and ritual could be separated completely. Visitors might mix them up, if they knew how to read the house. Its architectural body serves more as a kind of bond for moving centres and rhythmic sound. Permissive membranes between different territories fold one into the other: the representative, the cultural, the ritual, the convivial, the excessive… Though none of them is directly attached to the house itself, they can only come into being (can only be territorialized) in the intense gatherings, the crowded corridor, the hidden garden.
House (1): construction site for a temporary present home based on a collective act and attitude.
House (2): architectural body transformed by certain rhythms and circles of sound.

Second site: Rue Fleurus, Paris, around the same time. First, some friends came to dinner at Gertrude Stein’s and Alice B. Toklas’s apartment. They looked at paintings by Matisse, Cezanne, Picasso, they looked at walls covered with frames and messages and they brought more friends who brought more friends who drank a lot of tea and listened to Gertrude and Alice. A Saturday evening tea party, an intellectual jam session divided in two: (gay) men and (unmarried) women around Gertrude, (married) women around Alice.
“Her apartment was the most fascinating place in all Paris because everybody went there” said Janet Flanner , she was also from the Left Bank and she went there and Picasso and Fernande, they all went there and Sylvia Beach and Natalie Barney and Pavel Tchelitchew and Allan Tanner and all the other writers and composers and painters and undiscovered talents who went there - their motive: the paintings; their real motive: the presence of thoughts evoked and articulated by its majestic centre Gertrude Stein, marked and objectified by the framed painting in all their abundance. If Gertrude and Alice gave the motive, the internal impulse, then the walls built the melodic landscape, the external circumstances, the counterpoint that attracts the listener even before the leading (and often laughing) voice can be heard.
Home (1): marking of inside and outside, intimately strange in the presence of thoughts.
Home (2): a counterpoint/melodic landscape that gives impulse to motives, attracts and turns one territorial assemblage into another.

Last Site: West 21st Street, New York, around seventy years later. A crowded ballroom with an improvised stage in the centre. The house of Extravaganza walks . To perform the real woman, the real soldier, the real beauty, the real drag. To belong to a “house” means to get a new name, a new mother, a new gang that walks with you in the streets half dancing, half cheating, half vogueing. Your house is a performance, an expression of proper qualities, of colours, gestures, steps that might cause you trouble in the straight white world but bring fame in the ballroom, the only home zone left after you leave your first family as teenager. “How very important it is, when chaos threatens, to draw an inflatable, portable territory. If need be, I’ll put my territory on my own body, I’ll territorialise myself”
House (3): a physical and mental performance of lived belonging
Home (3): a transcoding passage between different milieus, a deterritorialisation of your body by putting your territory on your body

And now? The sites might have had the potential to create a territory (by singing, thinking, vogueing), a home beyond individual landmarks. But how can we set up another route of deterritorialisation if we try it again on our own? We need one for the road, a refrain to be hummed (we don’t need another hero). Some cover version or fake translation, that’s what we need right now.

Bettina Wind, March 2008
(Written in the train from Vienna to Berlin, the Swiss café, at home in Berlin)

On Mountains

2008-02-26T04:45:00.001-08:00

Twelve steps cuts, images, imaginations, carving out the rhizomes that are inherent in the mountains’ structure to reach a rhizome of the female techno body and the scattered surface of the rock, zigzagging through it, jumping, letting fall, using the sticks and bricks and metal picks like teeth and finger nails, using teeth and nails and fingers to dig into holes, to feel the bodies weight against the rock’s sediments, will they hold, will they turn into body mass or will they crush the body into stone mass? It is a question of speed and slowness, just the right ingredients for a becoming, a becoming stone goat bird machine, the endorphin danger fear oxygen drug exhilarating the speed till it becomes part of another sphere just like performing a musical piece without controlling the fingers’ movements anymore performing the whole act of climbing a performance that cannot be taken back no return point every passage looks different when going backwards the impossibility to take back going backwards in the mountains the dead end that makes you lean back against the mountain and feel about death when you look at the scale a dimension that was not obvious step by step breath by breath only focussing the stones and path and little area of attention incapable to perceive the whole, the ensemble without you without humans just two meters too high enough to break down into the ice when falling to be caught in the inside of a glacier a rock a river to be cut off what is still counted as valley as landscape as humanised. Where is the invisible border between up there and among others between the mountains on their own and the assemblage created with animals, humans, cottages?

(Extract from a text on recent works of Alexandra Ferreira)

a little act of sabotage

2008-02-18T11:06:00.000-08:00

When I lined up the little acts of sabotage I had committed during the last year, it soon got clear that they had been quite a failure: they had never attacked the heart of a project I had been invited to but then felt the urge to criticize. Instead, my little acts of sabotage appear as post scriptum, as last remark that goes against the grain, a gesture of final relief from a system or a rule I could not entirely identify with but got money from.
Did my acts have a destabilizing effect? And on whom: the system or myself? Will I continue this year without committing little acts of sabotage, and does this mean that I won’t earn money with projects I don’t agree with? Am I going to found a movement in order to perform collectively big acts of sabotage in a system or will we stay away from it anyway? And will you join us?

Sculpture under working conditions

2008-02-07T03:56:00.000-08:00

A pistol of grey marble is lying on a wooden pallet that composes a rough, yet symmetrical background. A clear image, it seems at the first glance: Figure on Background. But as soon as we regard how the material has been used, a paradoxical twist starts to turn the image around: How to connect the heavy weight of the pistol’s material with its (imaginary) use? How to understand the rough materiality with the clean surface in mind that constitutes sublime sculptures of marble? How to decipher the hidden narrative every pistol is pointing to – a trace of the deed – when the traces of work on the pistol itself remain so dominant?

Maybe a look on the second photo can lead us further:
We see the pistol with books, the classical arrangement of a romantic writer’s desk. This time, the background tells more about the setting: a working place of sculptors, a blurred image of other works and pallets that are used to carry stones and sculptures. The photo focuses on the works but does not leave the working frame, the working chain apart. Read from that background the arrangement of book and pistol tells about a transformation: the material that still carries the traces of its process of making is taken out of its frame, is transformed into a small narrative, a metaphoric scenery that does not longer belong to the space of work, but the sphere of art. Just as a writer might have left his notes and lines inside the books, the sculptor has left traces on the hard but smooth looking surface carved of the books; an own texture, an own style realized on a writer’s book, the old symbol for creative expression. The objects still show traces of the industrial act of machines carving the stone, but also of the intimate choreography, the movement of hands forming the stones by holding the machine like a pencil. The sculptor as writer, the writer as worker. In that sense, the sculptures can be read as a double portrait of their maker, exposing their hard materiality that needs to be worked on and the soft line of thought immerging in the act of transformation.

Let’s come back to the pistol: By exposing its materiality in a clear, yet paradoxical way, the pistol lying on a pallet questions its own classical, yet hidden discourse of stone and crime. By being part of the work arrangement pistol and books leave their classical frame and get closer to the sculptor herself, charmingly, ironically pointing out how sculpture is made “under working conditions”.

Let’s see what image will follow next.

(Text about sculptures and photos made by Alexandra Ferreira)

The Waves

2008-02-07T03:54:00.000-08:00

Map on the psychological and dramaturgical development of the characters in Virginia Woolf's novel "The Waves"

Construction of the Other

2008-02-07T03:52:00.000-08:00

Map of the Essay "Who sings the Nation State", part of Judith Butler

Mechanosphere II

2008-01-28T10:35:00.000-08:00

Map on "a thousand plateaux" by Deleuze/Guattari

Border Performance (duration 90 min.)

2008-01-28T09:55:00.001-08:00

1. Enter a train compartment for six persons and ask for a free seat beside the window.
2. Start to put your full plastic bags on top of the shelves and next to the seats of other passengers.
3. Ask them if they could declare the plastic bags as theirs. Reassure them that it is allowed to cross the border with up to ten boxes.
4. Reassure them that there won’t be any problems at all.
5. Try to hide boxes behind sleeping passengers and wake them up right before crossing the border to ask if they may help you.
6. Distribute sugar from small paper packets of cafés on the ground (will bring luck).
7. When the train stops ask everybody to tell his amount to the custom officers (they will pick only on a few vicitms as alibi).
8. Handle out your passport and ask the others in the cabin to stay calm, covering your body with theirs.
9. As soon as the train continues, start your central choreography:

Lie down on the floor and hide plastic bags behind the right seats (old German trains provide space between seats and division). Get up to get more plastic bags. Lie down again to hide the rest behind the left seats. Take off your (prepared) jacket and belt, take out the packets and put them behind the seats as well. As soon as you have completed this choreography ask the other passengers to come in.

10. Now police and custom officers will start their performance, too. The first will just have a look inside from the corridor and pass by. The second will open the door to ask for the amount. (You tell about a tenth of the amount you have with you). Then three officiers will check the luggage of every passenger. They won’t check the seats.
11. As soon as they leave, distribute sugar again and throw a coin to see if you will succeed this time with your performance.
12. After some minutes the first police officer will come back to give you a sign to leave the compartment.
13. You pay his share (1 Euro each box, be careful not to cheat too obviously)
14. As soon as your passport has been taken, stamped and returned, your performance turned out to be successful.
15. Start to pack again and at the next stop, hand over the boxes of cigarettes to the waiting cars.

Feminism Now

2008-01-28T09:53:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was the day of women so I went to the market in order to catch a photographer who could help me with a computer problem. She was taking photos of women fighting for ecology (www.genanet.org) and I started to wonder what could be the effect of gendering ecological activism. The friend who joined us could apparently not take part in the photo session, male as he was, but managed to be shot for another project by the same photographer. I stayed in email contact with her, still hoping to fix my problem.

The day passed without being aware of its official significance. Even when I visited an exhibition about the “room of one’s own” inspired by my hero thinker V.Woolf it did not come across my mind. At bed time, X. told me about a friend who chatted with her in the messenger, congratulating for “her day”. She asked back when would be “his” day and he anwered: “every day”. I guess that I what feels uncomfortable about “women’s day”, it feels like carneval where once in a year you have the power to act as you want before slipping into your niche again.

In the early morning I dreamt I ran away with a princess I had an affair with at court. It was meant to be a dream in the setting of 17th century but soon turned out to be very contemporary: us, fleeing with a dark big cabriolet stopping at a supermarket, trying to avoid the street control that was looking for two “shabby girls”; a constant hide and seek till we finally reached a city where a so-called uncle tried to protect us against suspicion in the camera spot.
One scene before I took part in a slalom contest at court (like in good old times where I was still a black male sportsman and lover of both, the king and the queen); of course I won, of course the ski fell down from the balcony in the next scene and my father asked me to fetch it. Downstairs a romantic encounter with my beloved one, observed by the king who then was doubting my sexual identity. I turned myself into a “onnabe” a woman-man, a really beautiful one with brown skin and Indian touch and stood beyond doubt.

Reading the “Frieze’s” essays about “Feminism” afterwards did not inspire me much but I enjoyed the short description of surrealist films given by Runa Islam. So far for this year.

On Nomadism

2008-01-28T09:50:00.000-08:00

Compilation of Attitudes and Theories towards Nomadism

On Steven Shaviro

2008-01-28T09:48:00.000-08:00

Cinema als sensual experience, Map on an essay by Steven Shaviro

Translocal Map of Mertola

2008-01-28T09:46:00.000-08:00

Historical layers of perception and social life in a small town close to the Spanish border, part of the Archive of Translocality

Translocal Map of Brussels

2008-01-28T09:43:00.000-08:00

Part of the Archive of Translocality

map station #1 structure

2008-01-28T09:37:00.001-08:00

Map by Alexandra Ferreira
As answer to reactions of visitors of the festival "plateaux" in Mousonturm, Frankfurt, who used different elements of map station in a playful way we included basic game structures and particular games like e.g. ping-pong as single events to open an additional sensual channel of communication. Within this structure visitors had the possibility to position themselves on the festival’s map and to start a dialogue apart from the classical format of one-to-one-conversation. A camera-mirror- installation was recording the central area from above, providing an overview accessible for all and including persons into a general image of the map itself.

map station #1 mousonturm

2008-01-28T09:36:00.001-08:00

The first step of map station at Plateaux Festival worked via extension and concentration in space and references to geography as symbolic language to reflect on and play with the context and conditions of festivals. Designed as participatory space with planned and spontaneous comments and interventions not only by the artists, but also visitors of the festival and the theatre’s staff, map station became, during the eight-days period of Plateaux, a multilayered, multilingual and heterogeneous space where all agents of a festival, visitors as participants, as well as the festival’s and cities “discourse” had an impact on a text, visual and hap tic level. Different sessions by artists of the festival marked steps in the development of the site that shifted between installation and communicative space.

map station #1

2008-01-28T09:33:00.001-08:00

has been developed as tool of research and communication. In dialogue with participants of the same event or network, common topics are mapped; a common ground is created in relation to site and context. On this ground we do not only present the results of our research, but also turn them into a visual, sensual, textual proposal that is open to feedback and can be used and restructured by others.

Live Mapping

2008-01-28T09:27:00.000-08:00

In the performative situation of "structure multifonction", organised by the collective LISA for Klapstuk in Leuven 2005, I asked audience members I had a conversation with during the performance to point out lines of connections and networks they see in the space. As result, a temporary map showed how much performers and public shared a common social and discursive space.

Mapping and Movement

2008-01-28T07:53:00.000-08:00

Maps are abstractions of space and thought, mapping a way of organizing in spatial order what is in and around us. Mapping produces relational movements of thought and body. If we call these movements cartography they will be perceived in the invisible frame of a prototype of map that may be linked to the childhood memory of travelling through the carpet’s cluster or imagining your own place on the panoramic map of the alps….
Ground becomes metaphorical when being mapped – the journey in Chinese opera takes seven days in seven steps – children invent same symbolic ways of travelling through the world when crossing the living room. Another layer of meaning is added to the stage as common ground of performers and audience. To movement in space: a journey. To words: coordinates. Cartography can widen a creative process into two directions: stretching and interweaving the organisation of thoughts in research and “metaphorising” space and ground via movement.

On Nomadic Structures

2008-01-28T07:40:00.000-08:00

Notes on Nomadic Structures

2008-01-28T07:34:00.001-08:00

I. If we understand nomadism as de-contextualisation from space and structure as (re)contextualisation in space, we can draw a time line from one term to the other: starting with mobility, a concept that integrates nomadism as constant movement, then slowing down to locality, the perception of space by mapping its structure and finally the reflection of its context.
The operation of creating a (thematic and chronological) distance between both terms opens a territory that might expand its central spots (mobility, locality, mapping, context) to connected regions. There are (at least) two binoculars to look onto these regions: using the concept of agency (the act of creating structures) or structure/disposition (the state of being structured by space)
At the first glance nomads enter a kind of “terrain vague” as soon as they step on new ground. As locality cannot be fixed but seems to be as transitory and imaginary on the surface as translocality, it offers new experiences – a “space of flows” - when being crossed for the first time(s). If the nomad maps the new terrain by walking, (s)he can be drawn into urban dynamics easily: a visual series of buildings, streets and squares creating expectations, the imagination of another scene beyond sight, the contrasts of elements and impressions… in short: space as experience, as stimulus for a “rite de passage” that strengthens the individual powers by disturbing them temporarily. The “geographical imagination” (Harvey) that arises with linking local details in our memory provides us with a sensual knowledge of space and place linked to our biography. As the nomad’s biography follows the line of movement, the act of entering a “terrain vague” might be crucial for re-constructing and reaffirming his/her identity. At the same time nomads know that the new terrain they arrives at will be only of temporary use. To use the space efficiently as resource it is important to analyse local elements along a horizontal line (visual and functional elements) as well as vertically (historical and social layers of meaning, the “depth structure”) – interpreting the local just like interpreting a written text in a structuralist way.
Edward W. Soja calls this immediately perceived and analyzed space the “firstspace” in contrast to the mental “secondspace” that refers to images and representations ( Edward W. Soja: Thirdspace. Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, Oxford/Cambridge 1996. Quoted from sculpture projects muenster 07.) If nomads have access to the first and the second, are they also able to enter the “thirdspace”, the lived space, stage of political praxis? Regardless nomadic movements like the alterglobalist that transform space into a stage of political and symbolic battle for a short period of time, nomads often enter a system as newcomers without being involved in local dynamics, without knowing too well local power structures and alternative networks. Is it possible to link experiences gained elsewhere with observations and interactions “in situ” in order to create a new embedded and at the same time translocal knowledge? Does this knowledge have the power to lead to an action, a transformation of ground, even if it is neither the own nor the only one? What kind of impact do nomads want to achieve on the ground they temporarily use, and how big is their radius of action if this ground is already taken literarily and politically by the residents themselves?
II.
This first desillusion (of the structure around being taken by local forces) is followed by a second, third, fourth one if we change our perspective from agency to structure: the kinetic self (after Sloterdijk) that followed the drive of progress in modern times soon entered the vicious circle of constituting itself only via movement, in other, again Sloterdijk’s words: the modern active became (second illusion) a postmodern passive, trapped in the necessity to continue its nomadic life; even if it feels like leaving a system when leaving a local context there are, third, no exit signs for leaving the own professional system (as an artist or cultural agent), that means: the way values, nods and positions in a network are created does not change with changes the place, even worse: nomadic movements have a direct impact on the “transnational capital” (Christine Nippe) of an artist. Fourth: Contemporary nomads are not really following nomadic structures. What?
III.
Nomads (in the classical as well as in the contemporary, symbolic sense) challenge the project of state sovereignty by neglecting borders and by creating an alternative system of power and hierarchies based on relations in their community. They are often described as symbol of freedom and subversion. Yet, their way of life strongly depends on economic exchange with the settled population. They are half in, half out. They are always inside their community (“tribe”), based on mobility in-group by definition. The contemporary character of “the nomad” is nourished by stories of travellers and migrants, by the individual liberating itself from the social corset whereas nomads in the classical sense can only exist within common rules. Their deep knowledge of a specific region is crucial for the a system based on subsistence and natural cycles whereas nomads in a symbolic sense do not need to get in touch with the ground as deeply. On the other hand, their physical effort and sensation of movement and adjustment might even be bigger as there are no common tracks and experiences; it might even exceed their mental effort to create a biographical line, a translocal belonging. Becoming a nomad means to make a constant effort to move, hide, reappear, restructure, remember, react, translate, transfer the material base into a symbolic one (even if nomads own objects, these objects will be transferred into symbols of daily need and belonging when carried from one place to another). Nomads in the traditional sense are carried by cycles that have been opened, closed and re-opened in the past. Their twisted steps follow a pragmatic pattern, structured by a sustainable vision of exit and return.

Comparing two types of nomadism it seems that the perception of traditional nomadic life that led to the symbolic key figure of the contemporary nomad is focussed on mobility and opposition to state control, that means: taking the outer image as the new core of identity, claiming the consequence of action as its condition. Nomads in a symbolic and a literary way seem to be “false friends”, like words in neighbour languages that finally have a completely different meaning. Should these false friends separate or become real friends again?

The original disposition of nomadic life based on a micro system of community, cycles, sustainability, (trans)local knowledge and exchange might serve as blueprint for a new kind of contemporary nomadism. Incorporating freedom and subversion of the individual as basic structure of identity, but creating a new sense of belonging and responding to local contexts by reflecting one’s movements on shifting grounds. If we were able to read the lines of our movements, we could discover crossing points with the lines of others, stabilising circles, effects on the surroundings, a structure, an alphabet of lines and signs that are understood elsewhere; leaving traces of lived experiences in the space before moving on.

Why Nomadology should become a discipline

2008-01-28T07:32:00.000-08:00

Obviously Nomadology has not become an academic discipline during the past because it basically deals with social groups that have been marginalised as they did not fit into the State’s striation project: Circus groups, Gypsies, Mongolian shepards and warriors, Arabian Beduins, African merchants, Refugees, Sami hunters…
These classical images of nomads are images of the “other”, the “outcast”, so it is very easy for people travelling in culture scene to relate to them as the images affirm a transitory, risky, but also flexible and alternative identity. To describe nomadism as mental state rather than a physical one is an attempt to shift the traditional images into a contemporary sphere. Physical nomads do not cede to exist (you can find them at parking lots, sleeping in railway stations, renting guest rooms in big cities, keeping their herd together etc.) but mental nomadity seems to become a dominant preposition of nowadays way of life. But what does it mean exactly? If we just take “nomadism” as flexibility, movement, mobility we can attach the term to almost every phenomenom we like to attach it to. More than that: we feel attracted to do so as “nomadism” may describe also our state of mind and thought and move. Nourished by traditional patterns we create new images of “Nomadism” within ourselves. But does it help to catch the term? Do we need to catch the term in order to use it, to translate and transform it and to feed it into our own work? Nomadism is not a field, it is a world. And Nomadic Structures are patterns that fit on so many different layers that it is worth creating a whole discipline around it and not just a discussion. If we start to map that discipline we get an atlas with unlimited pages and if we start to study nomadism we may become aware that the term itself will cease to exist – we just used it as a key to open a new passage. Let’s see where it can lead us to.

Mapping Session on "Nomadic Structures"

2008-01-28T07:29:00.000-08:00

Brainstorming about "Nomadic Structures", the main theme of a residency programme at Bains::Connective, Brussels 2007

Booklet for an Ideal Libary

2008-01-28T07:25:00.000-08:00

Edition of undedited texts by choreographers, curators and dancers about their perception of body and imagination for studium:bühne Burghausen 2006. The booklet accompanied books adn video material that was sent to the small public library of Burghausen which opened an own section about performance.

Mapping Session "Prinz of Homburg"

2008-01-28T07:23:00.000-08:00

Techniques of mind mapping served as common tool for research and debate about central topics of a play that should be staged in a Romanian theatre: power, communication, hierarchies and networks. Together with Romanian theatre actors we explored the dimensions of text and work conditions surrounding the project.

Incorrect Map of Europe

2008-01-28T07:18:00.000-08:00

Compilation of incorrect maps for the New Media Festival Jonctions/Verbindiging in Brussels 2005

Incorrect Map of Finland and the Baltics

2008-01-28T07:15:00.000-08:00

Leaving the symbolic vocabulary of old maps the touching circles between artistic initiatives of Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania suggest transregional exchanges that start from local centres and spread over the region, geographic or language divisions left aside.

Lecture Performance

2008-01-28T07:13:00.000-08:00

“As the description of your own body cannot be distinguished from your bodiliy sensation, notes of a journey are automatically body notes with landscapes being absorbed into your body and finally turned into the body of a map. Maps could not come into being without physical movement and time, though in the end they do not depict neither movement nor time. Actually they are hiding much more than what they are showing…”
On Incorrect Maps and Imaginative Snapshots, held in Nextart, project space in Lisbon, Spring 2005

Imaginary Snapshots - New Shots

2008-01-28T07:05:00.000-08:00

“I decided to leave behind my camera and only take imaginative snapshots. Later on friends called me crazy when hearing that I had traveled to all these places, Brussels, Gent, Maastricht, Lisbon, Porto, Barcelona, Madrid, Paris, Helsinki, Riga, Tallinn, Vilnius, Prague, and also places they had never heard of like Palanga, Montemor-o-Novo, Inari, Pärnu, Kaunas, Liepaja, Pyhäjärvi, without taking any photos. I mentioned a rather practical reasen. Imaginative Snapshots are easier to carry. In fact I believe in slides without image or spoken words without recording more than in what is visible and proofable – because of their moment of appearance – their presence, in the centre always a blind spot, as presence itself cannot be grasped – and the search for traces afterwards, on the blank screen, in the auditorium. Let’s have a look…”

Incorrect Map of Portugal (Part Two)

2008-01-28T06:58:00.000-08:00

Coming back to Lisbon one year later new dynamics were going on - project spaces had opened, transnational connection had been created. But only the future would tell about shifts and transformations in the cultural landscape. So I decided to foretell the future by placing projects and persons close to each other that already had an affinity but did not collaborate yet.

Incorrect Map of Portugal (Part One)

2008-01-28T06:56:00.001-08:00

Countries themselves can take the shape of islands, like Portugal, maybe still remembering its glorious past as sailing nation, still looking towards its cities and the sea rather than towards Europe. Some artists and project spaces might be located close to a harbour to be able to leave for other shores….

Incorrect Map of Brussels and Surroundings

2008-01-28T06:54:00.000-08:00

Using landscape metaphors to situate networks in relation to and competition with others. Small rivers turn into bigger movements and get canalized by cultural policies, boats of visiting researchers are arriving at islands that could be placed anywhere in the European sea of artistic activities...

Incorrect Maps and Imaginary Snapshots

2008-01-28T06:48:00.000-08:00

started in November 2003 as part of my research dealing with transdisciplinary projects in the area of arts, politics and public space in Europe. While traveling through different areas of Europe, capital cities as well as “peripheries”, visiting projects, spaces, interviewing artists and producers, the research got focused on dynamics in developing projects and communicating between different artistic and cultural fields in an informal network, that surpasses national and institutional borders.

This network does not exist as static structure but rather as a way of interaction and communication between different agents in cultural field, which is marked by flexible exchange, alliance and support in (co)production. In a combination of face-to-face encounter and communication via internet shifting “points communes” on a map of culturescape are created, mingling positions and processes that were formerly divided (like artist/publisher/sociologist, actor/choreograph/researcher).

Not only in geographical respect but also in terms of roles and positions Europe’s map is reshaped, borders between areas are blurred and new systems of inclusion and exclusion come into being, depending on the radius of background, experience and facility.

The facts that more and more artists/agents are getting access to, participating in and navigating through Europe’s network-based culturescape has a strong impact on the role and fields of activities of artists as well as on structure and aesthetics of projects that are reflecting a transnational and transdisciplinar way of working and living in Europe. “Artists-in-residency”, co-productions in festivals and organizations, virtual offices that offer supporting structure for projects in different countries, the fusion of virtual and public space in architecture and urban movements are pointing towards a tendency of translocality. On the other hand a strong focus on community and local situation leads into a “grounded” vision of arts and culture.

Different from former movements towards “neighborhoods and streets” or (perfomative and other) experiments of the 60s and 70s this vision has its sources not in a (political) countermovement, not (only) in critic of institutions, but in an reflective process of questioning situations of work and living in different (artistic, urban, political) circuits and creating answers within these circuits.

My answer is also navigating between different circuits, the academic, artistic, sociological and geographical one, as I am using different formats to deal with the subject (the thesis, texts for magazines and presentations, lecture performances, hand drawn maps as visualization and informal guides), following the dynamics of encounters and spontaneous collaborations in the networks I am doing research about.

Rather than objectifying results I try to work with intuitive yet reflective answers to the situations I find during my stay in different countries. In this respect I am part of the research itself - and of the map that has to be incorrect, because it may change its focus and range with every interaction and distribution; of snapshots that have to be imaginary as they consists of “points specials” and “points communes” which have too many layers for being put into a two-dimensional format; of encyclopedias that have to be incomplete because they are dealing with an endless amount of ways how to enter cultural regions and use the dynamics of “grounded” projects within a translocal frame of action.

Aspects of Cartography

2008-01-28T06:47:00.001-08:00

Qualities of Mapping

2008-01-28T06:45:00.000-08:00

Sketch for Library

2008-01-28T06:43:00.000-08:00

About an Ideal Library

2008-01-28T06:39:00.000-08:00

The dream of an ideal library – a space that contains all information, inspiration and atmosphere you need for your own creation – must be a common one for many artists. Rather than offering just books the ideal library provides space for thoughts, comfort, visual and sensual attractions… like the ideal residency space it inspires you immediately to gather knowledge and concentrate on work, to reflect on what you have done so far and to contextualize your own creation within a broader framework. It turns your social and professional communication into hardware (books, visual material), your personal studio into a shared space (cabins for work, floor, tables) and your creation process into an architectonical metaphor. If you move through the ideal library and pass various sections your body is already performing the search for knowledge about itself, about its relationship to space and the others, to the world of arts and its common ground. From above e.g. from a gallery on the second floor you can see bodies moving through the ideal library which perform a delicate choreography of thought with intervals or stills: bent over a book, quiet in the sofa, in front of the window to the outside world that does not share the same rhythm. No need to say that the library’s order is not an alphabetic or thematic one but corresponding with your needs and movements. The library itself can move, change its order and appearance, share your thoughts, lead them further, give you the feeling that you are on the right way with what you are doing, that there are colleagues, writers, thinkers, performers who share your direction.
Your work, of course would have its own place in the library and being stored in a shelf with title and registration number on the cover it looks more consistent and continuous than you ever thought it to be. So far to the dream of an ideal library. Which – as many artists might know – does not (yet) exist. There are quite some attempts to set up archives, database, collections of books and visual material deriving from praxis and theory at accessible points both for artists and audience. These open archives might be small and rather hidden, yet they become more and more crucial for image and attraction of culture and art centres. “You should visit Tanzquartier! They have a marvellous library for dance in there!” Creation ex nihilo is a myth, the ideal library is meant as a counter image showing the artist in community and communication, and well aware of the (theoretical/historical) ground (s) he is moving on in search for new steps.

The first step leading towards the idea of an ideal library is to map the common ground it could be built onto. For contemporary performance arts that ground is multi-layered reaching the deeper levels of politics and philosophy while underlying the soft, slippery surface of “corporeality”. Neither a geological, biological nor and architectonical map would do to grasp the complex dimensions of work with living bodies. Though renaissance dreams of maps that cover every section of the world and human being within are tentative they would not be helpful for the investigation of a common ground for contemporary arts: after all, this ground will always be instable, shifting, relying a lot on self-perception and expression of individual artists and thinkers. Collages, notes, sketches for future maps must do meanwhile, covering the interspace between movement, body and thought as invisible border marks.

When Virginia Woolf’s alter ego was walking through London and Cambridge in search for Shakespeare’s sister and a Room of One’s Own her thoughts were taking the same way too, over passing (gender) obstacles, getting stuck, lost, crawling deeper into the damp insides/insights of body knowledge. By moving through her (re-imagined) every days world she was getting closer to a future dream manifested in a space open for both sexes and even a third one: a space of creation you can only enter by reflection and by risky jumps over the barriers of gendered society rules. It was by no way a fled towards “Innerlichkeit” , an inner utopia the writer was projecting herself into in literary dreams. It was her, who was not only her anymore, fighting for a common ground of arts one could mentally and physically enter after having left the gendered mantle at the entrance. There would be no section for “Women and Household” or “Women and Africa”. If V.W.s Room of One’s One would contain a library it would be for sure an ideal one with (body and other) knowledge open to be shared. The dream of an ideal library is dedicated to her room.

On Incorrect Maps

2008-01-28T05:59:00.000-08:00

[...] A friend once asked me where I was in my maps.Would be easy to say: I stay outside, it is only my subjective gaze on European networks and connections. But by following physically the nonlinear logic of these hints, from one billboard, one town to another, getting new numbers on the phone, returning again, you cannot be sure is it you creating this map by travelling and drawing or are you simply the dot of ink leaving traces while moving through it.

As the description of your own body cannot be distinguished from your bodily sensation, notes of the journey are automatically body notes with landscapes being absorbed into your body and finally turned into the body of a map. Maps couldn’t come into being without physical movement and time, though in the end they do not depict neither movement nor time. Actually they are hiding much more than what they are showing.

Also this map does not depict borderlines, only distances, though I was constantly crossing borders – one time at the Swiss border I had to get out all the stuff of my rucksack to produce it to the officer who was, after two hours of going through nuns‘ underwear and childrens‘ teddy bears, already too tired to realize that I was the bad guy in the bus, smuggling handdrawn maps that deleted completely the well-controlled borderlines of his home country. After this two hour check I was quite dissapointed: My maps seemed not to have any revolutionary potential at all.

I came to understand this map as a correction: All names of people, projects, culture centres, festivals have the same size, there are no hierarchies between centre and peripherics, though it was necessary for drawing it to start with an invisible centre from where the first paths could start and in consequence others would follow. At the end the map was covered by invisible yet influencial centres, the radius of paths starting from there is marking different regions in a multiple perspective.
Still the map does not say how often and in which way these paths are used. Some artists might even use even ships amd river passages to be more flexible in where they what to enter new regions - a way of transport that wouldn’t work so easy in real geographics of Europe.
[...]
If people are travelling through Europe with their work they are not necessarily leaving their ground. To touch the ground, you do not have to be grounded, you do not have to touch the pavement even, if your surroundings supply enough floor, artistic or artificial one. Andre Lepecki explains the term „grounded“ by describing an artist crawling up the avenue in superman’s costume, touching the pavement literally with every move. He himself is standing on a wooden stage in a theatre in Gent, in front of an audience of dance and theatre people, students and choreographers.

If you want to be grounded I guess you have to step out of this theatre, not only expand your range of action in culturescape because in the world this „map“ depicts there is no „real outside“.
„Outside and real“ – again these dangerous words, describing the nonexisting yet influencial centre from which the photographic image starts and where it points to. A blind spot so to say. The spot where my snapshots lead to, in addition to the map that has no geographical sites or out-sides. But as you are not able to see a blind spot – it is exactly the area taken out of the radius of perception – there would be no use in showing „real“ snapshots. So what to do?

At this point (between Madrid and the border of Portugal geographically spoken) I decided to leave behind my camera and only take imaginative snapshots. Later on friends called me crazy when hearing that I had travelled to all these places, Lisbon, Porto, Madrid, Barcelone, Paris, Geneva, Vilnius, Riga, Talinn, Helsinki and also places they have never heard of as Palanga, Montemor-o-Novo, Inari, Pärnu, Kaunas, Liepaja, Pyhäjärvi without taking any photos. I mentioned a rather practical reason: Imaginative snapshots are easier to carry. In fact I believe in slides without image or spoken words without recording more than in what is visible and proofable, because of their moment of appearence – their presence, in the centre always a blind spot, as presence itself cannot be grasped - and the search for traces afterwards, on the blank screen and in the auditorium.

Let’s take a look (turn)