A truck is circulating through Zurich. Seven extra-large letters stand on its open holding area. They form the word NEWBORN. At different locations, the trucks pulls up. A rapper, EKI NOX, performs. But the truck has to leave again after a very short time. Will its cargo remain undeliverable?
Employing a whole mix of attitudes, viewpoints and forms, the artists in Territorial Phantom respond to occupying and possessing space. In today’s culture, based around claiming and possession, organizations, businesses and countries appropriate ever more space, by privatizing public space or bringing ‘democracy’ to countries, and where necessary eliminating opponents.
Exhibition text Territorial Phantom
Specific zones such as a city, a mountain range, or simply a piece of paper are central to the artworks in this exhibition. Territorial Phantom is about not only physical, but also virtual and symbolic spaces. Spaces can be shaped and changed in character by political, cultural or personal interventions. In addition, places are often linked to personal and collective memory. They involve boundaries, or perhaps to put it better, thresholds, which extend beyond physical barriers or time. Territorial Phantom examines the ways in which the significance of a place changes through acts, emotions, dreams and memories. Or is it perhaps only our perspective which shifts? How do we ourselves deal with space, with occupying space, and how do we define our own position in a country and in regard to various territories?
AES+F Group (RU), Yael Bartana (IL/NL), Cao Fei (CN), Yolande Harris (UK), Marine Hugonnier (F), Karen Lancel (NL), Lucas Lenglet (NL), Raqs Media Collective (IN), State of Sabotage (SoS), Artur Zmijewski (PL)
Netherlands Media Art Institute
In collaboration with The Globalised Crystal Ball this is the fifth issue of Visual Foreign Correspondents. VFC is an independent platform in which 11 distinguished artists from around the world are invited each month to give their personal visual commentary on events and situations from their locally situated perspective. Their works especially created for urban screens and online platforms. This project will give people in the streets of Amsterdam a brief window into other regions, peoples and other kinds of imagination.
Living in Bishkek, originally one of the Caravan stops of the Silk Road, in the central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan, the artists Gulnanara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Dzhumaliev make works that combine the immediacy of video with the reflective detachment of ethnographic observation. Their approach embodies what theorists George Marcus and Michael Fisher term ‘anthropology as cultural critique an approach which involves regarding one’s own culture as would a stranger from outside.
www.visualcorrespondents.com
This blog is meant as a platform for research and debate about the field of TRANSLOCALITY. In a performative act at the 12th of October 2006 Bettina Wind and Alexandra Ferreira proclaimed the STATE OF TRANSLOCALITY and distributed first visa for free. The STATE OF TRANSLOCALITY is a state of mind as well as a geographic territory, neglecting borders, having roots on both sides while navigating mentally as well as physically through the space in between.
http://translocality.blogspot.com/
with ah text in german: http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/forum/type=artikel&id=632
The representation of geography and the intricacies of global relations influence Alfredo Jaar’s work as an artist. In the Project „A Logo for America“ this led to critical investigations of cartography. „A Logo for America“ was an explicit demonstration of the significanca of the images and language of geography – its representation and articulation.
The Artist, born in Santiago de Chile, lives and works in New York, was one of thirty artists invited in 1987 to produce a 45sec. Computer animation/intervention on the Spectacolor lightboard in the heart of Times Square. For a month, his designed animation was featured every six minutes surrounded by private advertising and promotional campaigns for the city. Jaar’s animation began with a solid image of the United States of America. In the next frame it was transformed into spare outline. Next, „THIS IS NOT AMERICA“ was inscribed across the silhouette of the 48 states. Replaced by a red, white and blue flag of the USA. Finally the flag was drained of color and imprinted with „THIS IS NOT AMERICA’S FLAG“. Then, a brightly illuminated „AMERICA“ stood alone. The center letter (R) slowly tranformed to a hemispheric image of Canada, the USA, Central America, and South America. As letters dissolved and reappeared, a complete – and accurate – represantation of the American continent coalesced. In a wild conclusion, the image was doubled, twisted, upended, and superimposed over the word „AMERICA“.
Alfredo Jaar used this prominant site to deliver a clear message about identity and language. Using a selective taxonomy of communicative systems – maps, flags, and words – he reminded viewers of the propaganda that perpetuates power. Amidst the gaudy glitz of Times Square, Jaar seized the corporate world of promotion to introduce another reality.
LIMINAL SPACES is a project by the Palestinian Association of Contemporary Arts (PACA), Ramallah, The Israeli Centre for Digital Art, Holon, and the University of the Arts, Berlin. The project was launched with a conference in March 2006, in the area of the Qalandiya checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah and continued with individual residencies, which gave artists the opportunity to research tactics and artistic strategies for addressing the physiognomy of specific sites and their everyday operations while adhering to exposing Israeli spatial and contextual politics.
The project invited artists, architects, academics and art practitioners to examine the condition of everyday space, borders, physical segregation and cultural territories and challenge the possibilities of art as a catalyst for political and social change. The focus of the project is the radically divided and fragmented urban region of Jerusalem/Ramallah, which has become a laboratory for an urbanism of radical ethnic segregation. Artists investigated the perception of the frontiers and challenged their accessibility, permeability and potential as contact and communication zones. Artists employed new forms of creative practice adopting and subverting contemporary technology and systems of media communication, underlining the central role played by technology in the shaping of the physical and mental borders.
The exhibition LIMINAL SPACES/grenzräume at GfZK Leipzig presented the results of this artistic research process to the public for the very first time. As representing a single stage in a longer process, it was therefore decided to combine the exhibition with an international workshop.
«Airports can be understood as compressors of space and time, they act as a conduit from one physical location in the world to another. But at the same time the extraterritorial zones of airports become an important threshold controlling the flow of people in a free market economy. This space in-between is in fact an abstract space created by a bureaucratic system of inclusion and exclusion within trans-nation states rather than a transition space. Transit zones at airports emerge because of a complex set of factors: border crossing as well as today’s security and safety regulations. The innumerable thresholds to the transit zones are points of congestion that are governed by an imperfect system of identification. Different mobility patterns of varying relevance circulate in the airport’s structure, and they are distributed within airport architecture according to the typology of various levels of comfort and aesthetics.»
Monika Ewa Wisniewska / Bettina Boknecht, 2006
«For Slought Foundation, Territorial Agency (Ann-Sofi Rönnskog & John Palmesino) has proposed a project entitled North, as an occasion to think about how water is rapidly becoming the central issue in the management of inhabited territories. The changing conditions related to its ownership, protection from shortages and excesses, disputes on sovereignty, as well as underwater oil and mineral resources exploitation are modifying our perception of the geography of large parts of the Northern European regions, of the Artic Sea and Northern America. The research project addresses these themes through investigation of a number of case studies, from the oil resources off the coasts of Norway, to the disputed continental shelf under the North Pole, to the waterways accesses of Russia on the Baltic. By shifting our understanding of ‘location’ away from nation states and towards geographical regions and the interplay of different fields, North explores the dynamic relations between contemporary politics and their spaces of operation.»
«One of the principles underlying the work of Territorial Agency as well as John Palmesino’s founding role in the Milan-based research network multiplicity is that research is itself a practice and a form of production. By evading clear distinctions between artist, architect, critic, and curator, their work challenges us to reconsider the politics of exhibition display and prevailing curatorial approaches.»
«Throughout the 2007-2008 academic year, students in the course will collaboratively undertake research in conjunction with Territorial Agency architects John Palmesino and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog, collecting and constructing a series of archives and materials representative of the various forces and fields of influence currently operating in the conflict-ridden northern territories. In the process, the students will engage in research spanning disciplines such as literature, geo-political studies, visual culture, architecture, and urbanism, as well as science and technology. The students will collaborate and dialogue with Territorial Agency through a variety of modes of communication ranging from personal interaction to video conferencing. The result will be a display in the vault galleries at Slought Foundation and a public event featuring the collaborative research undertaken by the firm and the seminar students.»
More and Audio Interview with John Palmesino
Starting from the question «is New York City as translocal as ever?» Katherine Carl states that it is a shift in perception, feasible due to the distance from the 20th century, coming translocal practices into focus. Thereby she also sums up the Translocal Practices Workshop from June in Zurich very elaborated.
Read the article «Translocal Expeditions» on the Artists Unite Issue
http://www.eu-urbanism-bordercities.de
Bauhaus Kolleg IX: EU-Urbanism
The Bauhaus Kolleg IX will investigate border cities in the Baltic Sea Region as locations at which a new Europe is taking shape. The Baltic Sea Region numbers amongst the most dynamic laboratories in which, since the end of the Cold War period, Europe has again been put under the microscope. The Baltic Sea Region, singular, in fact includes a huge variety of contradictory regions, characterized by disparities, discontinuities and conflict, as well as by intensive exchange and international cooperation and migration. Openness and partition, dynamic economic growth and industrial decline, radical experiments in free trade and state-controlled isolationism, new wealth and poverty, transnational identities and new nationalism are here all part of the mix.The contradictory mechanisms of European integration are demonstrated in a quite particular manner on the northern margins of Europe. The border cities of the Baltic Sea Region insofar constitute a test-run for the project of ‘Europeanization’. How are constant processes of exchange and mass migration affecting the region’s respective cities? To what extent are new models of European urbanism taking shape there? The Bauhaus Kolleg IX will pursue these questions in the light of developments in three border cities in the Baltic Sea Region, which are confronted in different ways with the reality of a border.