Category Archives: collage

Vertical multiculturalism

You have to be the most humourless disco sceptic not to like this Turkish gem:

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Clã – Competência Para Amar:

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Against horizontal multiculturalism – by which we intend a socio-cultural activity oriented towards minorities, or a decorative employment of mainly non-European expressive cultures (Brook, Barba, Mnouchkine), a moussaka which tries to convince us, with a bit of Indian make-up, majestic Japanese costumes and roars of two to three dark-skinned actors, that it is engaging with the rest of the world. But the methods of composition and employment of these piled up sensations/sensationalisms are still intact in their Westernness. In contrast to this – let’s say it calmly – colonial approach, artists of the so-called vertical multiculturalism, working on the transects of different cultures, struggling to break through the simultaneity of different cultural identities with a sort of schizoanalytical approach, are building a unique, innovative art. Such an actor manages to hold, within his mental habitus, multiple different archaic combinations and ways of being while his body emanates the gestic essence of modern theatre, which gives a vertiginous dimension to the internal, ritual element. The same can be said for the above-described directorial interventions.

–Gordana Vnuk, Pogled iznutra

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Bookmark: Marianne Van Kerkhoven

The image of the Berlin Wall comes from Dream of Harlequin, where is appears uncredited.

If we define idealism as “acting on the basis of an unshakeable belief
in the possibility of a better life”, then we were the bearers of a
fervent idealism and great optimism. In its philosophical meaning,
idealism is a theory that holds first of all that reality is a product of
one’s consciousness, the ideas one has in one’s mind. But that was
not the theoretical foundation on which the movement of ’68 rested.
We drew support from the materialist philosophy of Marxism which
holds that the social being, the materiality of existence, in the final
analysis shapes man’s thoughts, emotions, mental processes. We
knew that people living in huts would inevitably think differently,
and see society differently, than people living in palaces. We were
aware that there were classes in society who had different needs and
concerns, and that this would inevitably lead to the emergence of
social struggles.

The achievements of the Enlightenment were not yet being questioned
at that time.We believed in the power of reason, in the power
of the word. We also believed in the power of progress, in hope, in
the possibility of improving the world. We were convinced that the
true nature of life in society was being hidden from view by an
ideological veil.We wanted to do what we could to remove that veil
from in front of others and ourselves, so that another perception of
the world could clear the way for another activity.

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And yet, despite our efforts and enthusiasm, the great revolution
did not occur; the world seemed amore difficult place to change than
we had anticipated. Our perception of the world started to sway, or
was it the world itself which was swaying?

In “Between Two Colmars”, an essay from his volume About Looking,
John Berger, the English author and art critic who resides in France,
describes two successive visits he made to the small French town of
Colmar (in Alsace) to see Grünewald’s famous Isenheim altarpiece:
first, in 1963, and then again ten years later, in 1973. In the space of
those ten years, the lives of many thousands of people would be
radically altered. In his essay, written in 1973, Berger observes that
for him, too, the years before 1968 were “a time of expectant hopes”
and that “hope” was “a marvellous focusing lens”. He attempts to
compare with great precision the impressions Grünewald’s altarpiecemade
on him at those two different moments. “I do not want to
suggest that I saw more in 1973 than in 1963,” he writes. “I saw
differently. That is all. The ten years do not necessarily mark a
progress; in many ways they represent defeat.” The difference in his
consecutive observations lies in the difference in his frame of mind
at the time of observing: hopeful in 1963, doubtful in 1973. “Hope”,
he wrote, ”attracts, radiates as a point, towhich one wants to be near,
from which one wants to measure. Doubt has no centre and is
ubiquitous.” I quote further: “It is a commonplace that the significance
of a work of art changes as it survives. Usually however, this
knowledge is used to distinguish between ‘them’ (in the past) and
‘us’ (now). There is a tendency to picture them and their reactions
to art as being embedded in history, and at the same time to credit
ourselves with an over-view, looking across from what we treat as
the summit of history. The surviving work of art then seems to confirm
our superior position. The aim of its survival was us. This is
illusion. There is no exemption from history. The first time I saw
Grünewald I was anxious to place it historically. In terms of
medieval religion, the plague,medicine, the Lazar house.Now I have
been forced to place myself historically. In the period of revolutionary
expectation, I saw a work of art which had survived as
evidence of the past’s despair; in a period which has to be endured,
I see the same work miraculously offering a narrow pass across
despair.”

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What impact does it have on us if, as Peter Sloterdijk put it, we have
to come to terms with the most important mental shift in Western
civilisation in the twentieth century; namely, the shift from the
primacy of the past to the primacy of the future. We draw up little
lists of important things that we want to take with us from that past;
we discuss the canon, cultural heritage, repertories, the final attainment
levels; we elect the most important Belgian or Fleming etc.
of all time. But none of this yields a real solution to the issue of how
to deal with the past. If you were taught in the seventies about the
importance of historical conscience as the means par excellence
with which to read the contemporary world, this is a development
that is very difficult to grasp.

The Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran defined utopia as
“the grotesque en rose”. “A monstrous fairyland” will replace the
image of the future, “a vision of irrevocable happiness, of a planned
paradise in which there is no room for chance and where the least
fancy comes across as heresy or provocation”. But Cioran added:
“You can repress everything in people except their need for an absolute”.
And he concluded: “No paradise is possible, except in the
innermost of our being and, as itwere, in the I of the I; and even then
it is necessary, in order to find it there, to have observed all paradises,
the bygone and the potential, to have hated or loved them with
the awkwardness of fanaticism, and then to have explored them and
rejected them with the skill of disappointment”.

The holistic vision of the world that, in the seventies already, we
nourished in theory, namely, the sense that everything was interconnected,
today seems to have become a reality. A single system
spans the entire world. Like time, space too seems to be compressed.
The internet, other real-time media, and tourism have made our
world smaller. We can, as it were, communicate with anyone around
the world as if they were our neighbours. The world is flowing into
our lives and our homes. When a tsunami hit a number of countries
around the Indian Ocean in late 2004 causing 300,000 victims, not
only was this event brought close to us through real-time footage,
but it also became clear how many Europeans spent their holidays
there, as if it were a destination in the south of France.

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Today, communication seems to occur more often through images,
without having recourse to words. Language, that old and slow
symbolic medium, has seen its status affected in both social and
theatrical communication. William Forsythe has devoted a
performance to this topic, Heterotopia, in which language acquires
a spatial dimension. Language has become an image, a square
peopled with characters, a Tower of Babel that has been flattened,
made horizontal. And all these characters, including the audience,
are following the inscription (but simultaneously the injunction)
that Peter Handke wrote at the beginning of his wordless play Die
Stunde dawir nichts von einanderwußten
(The Hour We Knew Nothing
of Each Other
): “Do not betray what you have seen. Remain in
the picture.” All letters of the alphabet are literally on stage, but no
matter what the performers do, these letters refuse to form words, to
create meaning. And yet, there is a constant communication on the
stage: with bodies, actions, movements, sounds, images. In Romeo
Castellucci’s Purgatorio, “the reading of text” is turned into an
image; this also occurs in Hooman Sharifi’s God Exists, the Mother
Is Present, But They No Longer Care
, in which, during the representation,
time is set aside for the audience to read the projected text.
In Castellucci’s play, the projected text includes descriptions of actions
that will occur on stage, or not. He is playing with time,
keeping us alert. The projected words make us pay attention.
What, in fact, is the relation between words and images?

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Every day in my work as a dramaturge, I observe how the naming of
things leads to a readjustment of the perception of those things, and
vice versa. In order to talk about new realities, a new vocabulary has
to be developed. To name, to try to describe reality seems to me to
be the first task that we have to take on in the face of the confusing
reality that surrounds us. In order to decipher the world, to be able
to narrate the world, we must indeed believe that it can be described.
Maybe that offers one possibility, an initial boost. In order to
understand something, we must be able to imagine it. For understanding
to be possible,word, image, thought and imagination must
come together.

-Marianne Van Kerkhoven, The Ongoing Moment. Reflections on image and society. Hosted on Sarma.be.

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Review: Africa

“There are four big problems that emerge from aid. One is the obvious one: the corruption, the fact that you’re giving somebody something for free, no strings attached. The second problem is aid dependency, which is the whole notion that you create a society heavily burdened and laden with bureaucracy, which is very inefficient and essentially kills off the entrepreneurial culture. The third problem has to do with this economic term called ‘Dutch disease’, although they usually call it the oil curse. It actually applies to aid as well, where you have these large inflows of capital which really kill off the export sector. Then finally, disenfranchising the middle class; governments become beholden or responsible to report to donors and they don’t have any obligation to report to the domestic citizenry.
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-Dambisa Moyo in The Africa Report

“In addition it was clear how little say not only the citizens have, but the governments have. You hardly ever saw participation from domestic policymakers in designing and discussing what was, essentially, our future – Africa’s future. I mean, there are so many classic examples of people’s lives essentially being shaped and designed by policy that’s not domestically constructed.” She cites the donor who refused to give any aid unless an entirely new town be built in Zambia, despite the government’s protests that they would be left holding the baby, as indeed happened; or George Bush’s requirement that two-thirds of the $15bn he was giving to fight Aids had to go to pro-abstinence programmes, and none could go to any establishment that provided abortions. ”
The Guardian interviews Dambisa Moyo

Partly, of course, it’s about power, and purse-strings; partly, she believes, it’s a PR issue, “there are many well-spoken, smart African leaders who should be on the global stage”; very largely, given that so far not many are, it’s a case of who gets to do the talking, and increasingly, it is people like Bob Geldof and Bono, the most visible representatives of what she calls, in a thrillingly withering manner, “glamour aid”. “There are African policymakers who are charged with the responsibility of creating policy, and implementing policy. That’s their job. Long, long lines of people have stood in the sun to vote for a president who is effectively impotent because of donors or because glamour aid has decided to speak on behalf of a continent. How would British people feel if tomorrow Michael Jackson started telling them how they should get out of the housing crisis? Or if Amy Winehouse started to give the US government advice about the credit crunch? And was listened to? I think they would be perturbed, and worried. I mean, they’ve completely disenfranchised the very people we’ve actually elected!”
The Guardian interviews Dambisa Moyo

The Insularity of English

“At a time when everyone is asking why English-language fiction has stalled, why fewer readers buy novels, part of the answer must lie in the decline of translation. Alert readers of Spanish, French, German, Italian and Portuguese, among other languages, participate in an international aesthetic conversation; readers and writers of English, condemned to silence by insular fantasies of global artistic relevance, are missing out on the next wave of literature.” – Stephen Henighan, The Insularity of English

3xQuestion (rather less rhetorical than they may seem)

1. 1994

The New York Times had an article on the front page asking: why isn’t there class conflict, why aren’t all these people recognizing they have class interests that are being betrayed, lethally betrayed, by Big Business, and why now do people blame government instead of blaming business, and why is the boss never really seen as being the enemy and is rather being seen as a fellow victim? The article laid out in political and sociological terms how much the Right has won and how much the elimination, not even so much of the Soviet system as an alternative – because it never really has been an alternative for us – but of an ideological space marked “alternative”, how the elimination of that has absolutely forced people into simply accepting as a given all the things that are contrary to their own self-interest. You won’t blame the boss because blaming the boss means developing a critique of capitalism as a system and, of course, we all know now that capitalism is the only conceivable system. Look at the destruction of the trade unions, the idea that everybody is downscaling and everybody is being put out of work. No one is getting angry at these corporations anymore because it is simply assumed they will maximize profits at the expense of human beings, and that this is the way that it has to be.
– Tony Kushner interviewed by Carl Weber

2. 2006

How did we get [to the war on terror]? The best place to look for the answer is not in the days after the attacks, but in the years before. Examining the cultural mood of the late ’90s allows us to separate the natural reaction to a national trauma from any underlying predispositions. During that period, the country was in the grip of a strange, prolonged obsession with World War II and the generation that had fought it.

The pining for the glory days of the Good War has now been largely forgotten, but to sift through the cultural detritus of that era is to discover a deep longing for the kind of epic struggle the War on Terror would later provide. The standard view of 9/11 is that it “changed everything.” But in its rhetoric and symbolism, the WWII nostalgia laid the conceptual groundwork for what was to come—the strange brew of nationalism, militarism and maudlin sentimentality that constitutes post-9/11 culture.
– Christopher Hayes, The Good War on Terror: How the Greatest Generation helped pave the road to Baghdad

3. yesterday

Nick Dave’s new book The Death of Bunny Munro, about a man who sits in a hotel room and masturbates fantasizing about vaginas (what elese?, you sort of wonder), is due for release in Australia in August. This is the cover. If I knew whether I think it’s problematic or not, it would mean I have found answers to many questions troubling me these days. I haven’t, so I don’t.

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Shut Up and Give Us Art (notes in progress)

Always Choose the Worst Option;

the strategy of over-identification
• Artists/Art are not legitimate political players.
• Artists should stick to what they know.
• Art is expected/demanded to experiment and criticize – just don’t go too far, don’t be radical.
Constructive Criticism
• Artists cannot just criticize, they must provide solution
• No solution? Then shut up.
• This is the way the existing order/authorities to neutralize criticism
Equally so, the existing order creates illusion that the system is receptive
• Door horizontality and transparency
• By assuming the same position as the critic
• Yes, we know all that already, what’s new?
Consequence:
• Art’s role shifted into the socially conscious art / socio-artistic projects / creative consultancy
• → NGO’s, Artist without Borders
• Here art regains its credibility: concrete artistic interventions that provide solutions / relief
• P.25 Pierre Bourdieu – the 2 pronged system: one creates the social wasteland, the other is asked to patch it up and to appease the victims.

(NOTE: Bourdieu text not cited in the original)

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Quick note to David: listen to the crackle

Ali Fathollah-Nejad: You just mentioned your article in Die Zeit. I’d like to move on to the situation in the media. There was all the fuss about the Rütli School.[6] I think you’ve contributed a great deal to the debate through your publications, but I still have the feeling that in the media in general there’s a certain atmosphere of inertia. I get the feeling that not a lot is changing. What’s your view?

Feridun Zaimoglu: I’ve given hundreds of readings in schools, mostly in Hauptschulen and in youth clubs. So these experiences are the basis for my views. One thing is that the three-tier school system is also subdivided according to ethnicity. There are the failures – who aren’t failures at all; dammit, I very nearly ended up in a special school. It’s true – I was that close to landing up there! Your typical Turk is generally seen as a PISA [7] failure and a playground yobbo. That stereotype exists. There’s a male problem going on, a problem with boys. This crap about male honour. If what that amounts to is some nasty coward who goes and shoots his sister, what do we do with him? There’s no straightforward answer to that. It’s different from case to case. You’ve got to look at it carefully, talk to people. I’m not surprised – the notion of a dominant German culture, a Leitkultur, the cartoon controversy, then Necla Kelek,[8] Seyran Ates,[9] and now there’s open season on all male, Muslim, immigrant adolescents. That’s why I say to people “Wakey wakey!” Did they think the class society no longer exists, or what? It still exists, and will continue to exist. And the ethnic factor is how the ruling class wants to look at it. It’s as simple as that. And anyone who comes along with their neoliberal crap, who stops thinking politically and starts looking at things ethnically, is behaving just like the ruling classes – and that includes the media and its movers and shakers. They talk about school and then they lay into the teachers. Yes – but if you thought politically, you would look at what is being done in schools. What funding has been slashed? What’s left in the pot? What’s happening on a day-to-day basis? That’s one thing. But the other thing is then also to say: “You know, guys, your honour, you can stick it up your immigrant arses. Your fucking male honour!” What is that? That is a crime. Those people are criminals. That’s how it needs to be discussed. The rightwingers always step in and say “Hey, they come from a different cultural background.” True, we mustn’t trivialize things that come from this different cultural sphere either. That would be idiotic. But nor should people play the white man by coming along as a feminist activist and to a certain extent shooting down these kids, then talking about religion and making their ethnic background the topic of discussion. These people are the white man’s little women. And these little women come and go and come and go. Here you might see the label “feminism”, there it’s “a particularly self-assured Green”, or whatever all these opportunists are called. You look at all that, but you must never stop looking at it politically. The political viewpoint rocks!

AF-N: But politics is only possible through participation. Yet in our society there aren’t that many people with a non-German background who take part in public discourse.

FZ: That’s changing.

AF-N: But it can only be changed through education?

FZ: It can be changed above all by means of the German language. For the sake of the children’s future we shouldn’t moan about German being compulsory. That’s yet another piece of ethno-nonsense. And then all these Turkish spokesmen come along, and these lefty liberals, all these jokers, and they tell us “Oh, but we can’t ask that of the children.” You twits! How much do you earn in a month? You’ve got it made. What is participation? Involvement starts from early childhood. When my parents couldn’t go through my homework with me at primary school, what are we supposed to say about that? That’s a built-in disadvantage right from the off. Yeah, so what? Did I cry? Did I hell! I fell for Petra at school and wanted to impress her. I wanted to stand out a bit by using classy German. You can’t say “Oi, mate!” to a woman! So what sources of motivation do people have? Politics is all well and good, but when the political class ignores the human situation, it gets detached and loses touch with reality. You’ve always got to look at what’s going on at the bottom!

  • [6] The Rütli School is a Hauptschule (secondary modern) in Neukölln, Berlin. In 2006, the school’s headteacher, unable to control the violence in her school, made an appeal for help to the Berlin Senate. This led to a debate about the school system in Germany, violence in schools and the integration of the children of immigrants.
  • [7] Programme for International Student Assessment
  • [8] Germany’s foremost critic of the treatment of women in Islam, also present at the Islam conference.
  • [9] A Turkish lawyer and women’s rights activist, she gave up practising in 2006 following threats from legal opponents.

from You’ve got to swing your hips! A conversation with Feridun Zaimoglu

Jamaica Kincaid on travellers

The thing you have always suspected about yourself the minute you become a tourist is true: A tourist is an ugly human being. You are not an ugly person all the time; you are not an ugly person ordinarily; you are not an ugly person day to day. From day to day, you are a nice person. From day to day, all the people who are supposed to love you on the whole do. From day to day, as you walk down a busy street in the large and modern and prosperous city in which you work and live, dismayed, puzzled (a cliche, but only a cliche can explain you) at how alone you feel in this crowd, how awful it is to go unnoticed, how awful it is to go unloved, even as you are surrounded by more people than you could possibly get to know in a lifetime that lasted for millenia, and then out of the corner of your eye you see someone looking at you and absolute pleasure is written all over that person’s face, and then you realise that you are not as revolting a presence as you think you are (for that look just told you so). And so, ordinarily, you are a nice person, an attractive person, a person capable of drawing to yourself the affection of other people (people just like you), a person at home in your own skin (sort of; I mean, in a way; I mean, your dismay and puzzlement are natural to you, because people like you just seem to be like that, and so many of the things people like you find admirable about yourselves – the things you think about, the things you think really define you – seem rooted in these feelings): a person at home in your own house (and all its nice house things), with its nice back watd (and its nice back-yard things), at home on your street, your church, in community activities, your job, at home with your family, your relatives, your friends – you are a whole person. But one day, when you are sitting somewhere, alone in that crowd, and that awful feeling of displacedness comes over you, and really, as an ordinary person you are not well equipped to look too far inward and set yourself aright, because being ordinary is already so taxing, and being ordinary takes all you have out of you, and though the words “I must get away” do not actually pass across your lips, you make a leap from being that nice blob just sitting like a boob in your amniotic sac of the modern experience to being a person visiting heaps of death and ruin and feeling alive and inspired at the sight of it; to being a person lying on some faraway beach, your stilled body stinking and glistening in the sand, looking like something first forgotten, then remembered, then not important enough to go back for; to being a person marvelling at the harmony (ordinarily, what you would say is the backwardness) and the union these other people (and they are other people) have with nature.

Jamaica Kincaid: A Small Place

Contemplating Hell

Contemplating Hell by Bertolt Brecht
Contemplating Hell, as I once heard it,
My brother Shelley found it to be a place
Much like the city of London. I,
Who do not live in London, but in Los Angeles,
Find, contemplating Hell, that is
Must be even more like Los Angeles.

Also in Hell,
I do not doubt it, there exist these opulent gardens
With flowers as large as trees, wilting, of course,
Very quickly, if they are not watered with very expensive water. And fruit markets
With great leaps of fruit, which nonetheless

Possess neither scent nor taste. And endless trains of autos,
Lighter than their own shadows, swifter than
Foolish thoughts, shimmering vehicles, in which
Rosy people, coming from nowhere, go nowhere.
And houses, designed for happiness, standing empty,
Even when inhabited.

Even the houses in Hell are not all ugly.
But concern about being thrown into the street
Consumes the inhabitants of the villas no less
Than the inhabitants of the barracks.

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In other people’s words

1. Confronted with a world configured by the colonizer, the colonized subject is always presumed guilty. The colonized does not accept his guilt, but rather considers it a kind of curse, a sword of Damocles.”

Wounder and Wounded, James Wood

2. “All that my freedom has brought me is the knowledge that I have a face and have a body, that I must feed this body and clothe this body for a certain number of years. Then it will be over.”

One out of Many, V. S. Naipaul

3. They were in some ways well matched. Like him, she was from modest circumstances—her father was a clerk in a lawyer’s office, and the family lived in a two-bedroom flat in a suburb of Birmingham. She was the only girl at her school to win a state scholarship to Oxford. They were both twenty-two when they married, and neither family was notified. But, whereas Naipaul careered from confidence to anxiety (a year after meeting Pat, he told her that “from a purely selfish point of view you are the ideal wife for a future G.O.M.”—Grand Old Man—“of letters”), Pat was stable, supportive, a willing helpmeet. Years later, in one of this biography’s many devastating moments, Naipaul reread his early correspondence with Pat and made notes. He had got too quickly involved with Pat, he wrote; he had been in too deep and could not get out. It would have been better if he had married someone else. Pat “did not attract me sexually at all.” He decided that the relationship, on his side, “was more than half a lie. Based really on need. The letters are shallow & disingenuous.”

Her presence in this biography is a hush around Vidia’s noise; her job is merely to hold the big drum of his ego in the right position, the better for him to strike the vital life rhythm. Naipaul’s sympathy for the political and emotional fragility of his characters did not extend to his wife. Pat’s diaries make for painful reading: “I felt assaulted but I could not defend myself.” “He has been increasingly frenzied and sadly, from my point of view, hating and abusing me.” Pat died of breast cancer in 1996. “It could be said that I had killed her,” Naipaul tells French. “It could be said. I feel a little bit that way.”

Wounder and Wounded, James Wood

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