http://newborn.krcf.org/

This intervention examines how multiple, translocal networks constitute themselves in the common local space of Zurich and how they develop specific forms of visibility and invisibility within the public space. The truck with the NEWBORN sign serves as focal point triggering responses which will render these presences visible to all.

The original meaning of the NEWBORN sign will be evident primarily to migrants from the Balkans. Many of them were either present in person, or via the media, when an almost identical sculpture was unveiled at the Mother Theresa Square in Pristina when the independence of the Kosovo was declared (02.17.2008). For the Kosovo-Albanians, that sculpture symbolizes a new phase of their self-constitution. Not just in the Kosovo, but also in Zurich. Since the establishment of the state, the Kosovo-Albanian community in Switzerland is beginning to (re)present itself in the public sphere on their own terms. Kosovo-Albanians will also understand the rapper whose lyrics are partly in Albanian and how he interprets the NEWBORN sign from his individual perspective.

The issue of a ?new beginning? is also present in the Swiss political public, not the least through recurring debates over and votes on the conditions under which foreigners can become Swiss citizens. At the same time, a discourse on ?shifting identities? seems to offer ? if not a new beginning ? then at least an alternative conception of ?post-national? political identity.

The third layer which circulation of the NEWBORN through the city of Zrich investigates in the capturing of the public space through commercial actors and their interest. The EURO2008, which starts while the intervention is taking place, pushes this development to new dimensions. Across the city highly controlled areas of intensive advertisement (fan zones) are being erected. For those who do not behave according to protocol special temporary detention facilities are being erected so that they can be removed swiftly from the public space. The degree to which the public and imaginary space as already been captured by commercialism will lead most people who see the NEWBORN circulating through the streets to interpret it as just another advertisement signage to be set up somewhere in the city.

The Project NEWBORN ? Undeliverable? conducts research into the constitution and interaction of multiple, parallel publics within the local space of Zurich shaped by the dynamics of translocal migration, national identity and globalized commercialism. Such a research endeavor needs to take place in the public space itself. Only by intervening directly the latent, often invisible dynamics can be brought to the surface. Activating existing and triggering new dynamics is an essential part of the approach. The interventions are being documented and material will be made available online and offline.

NEWBORN ? Undeliverable? will take place June 5-7 in Zurich. The precise locations of the interventions will not be announced in advance. Stay tuned.

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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

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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

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http://translocality.blogspot.com/

with ah text in german: http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/forum/type=artikel&id=632

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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.

watch video

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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.

Quelle/ Exhibition GfZK

Project’s Website

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«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

>> VIEW: Video-Trailer

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«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

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Read the article «Translocal Expeditions» on the Artists Unite Issue

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Border Cities - The Baltic Sea Region

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.

Themes and Locations:

• Kaliningrad: an exclave or an EU-land of expectations
• Malmö: an in-between city without borders
• Tallinn: new European passage

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