[spectre] Announcement: Encounters in Relational Geography - Dust, Ashes, Residua

[Gulsen Bal]

*° Encounters in Relational Geography - Dust, Ashes, Residua | 2 June - 2
July, 2010*

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*Opening*

*1 June, 19.00 – 21.30*

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*Project curator: Richard Appignanesi*

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*Participant artists:*

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*Ranko Bon *

*Dumitru Budrala *

*Marina Grzinic and Aina Šmid*

*Isa Rosenberger *

*Saso Sedlacek *

*Vlad Nanca  *

*Zbynek Baladran *

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*The awkward question: is East Europe really accounted as European ‘added
value’?  Or is our currently ‘extended Europe’ fatally schizothymic. Do the
East European newcomers to the Union remain disavowed migrants at the
banquet edge of Western Europe?  Where does the threshold of Fortress Europe
actually begin, once again?*

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*Seven East European artists have been convened as diagnosticians and
researchers to explore these questions in the art exhibition, ‘Encounters in
Relational Geography - Dust, Ashes, Residua’.  Each artist, of acknowledged
status, will address new multi-media work to the urgencies of a ‘space for
life’ in the neoliberal capitalist reconstruction and reterritorialization
of East Europe. Vienna, the former imperial lynchpin of trans-territorial
peoples, is the ideal ‘in-between’ site for this exhibition.*

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*The broom is our humble emblem, the symbol of everyday domestic contest
that serves as cultural text for these artists in their meditations on waste
and relational geography.  Literally, too, the broom is the anthropological
artefact linking together images of the folk collection of brooms at the
Museum of Arna Jharna in Rajasthan, India, and the documentary film on
present day broom-makers, the Baesi Roma group in the uplands of Romania.  It
is our aim to gather fresh birch twigs for our ‘sweepings of dust, ashes and
residua’ at the Open Space.*

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*The highlight of this exhibition is exemplified research, but of a type
that has another resonance in East Europe, just as their contemporary art,
for all of its apparent resemblance to Western tactical intermediality, has
a different aesthetic texture. The artworks featured at the Open Space are
also justifiably resistant to prejudice and assimilation. Our objective is
not to exoticize East European artists as Europe’s ‘others’ but to
comprehend how they play on an unfamiliar scale of visual assonances and on
which the past and present are inflected in a phantasmic way, because the
modernist utopia of Communist socialism suddenly went dead and a prefab
‘machine for living’ was left vacant, with everything stranded in uncanny
residua – the architecture, the monuments in public spaces, even
territoriality itself had become homeless.*

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*A bridge of concern to ‘Encounters in Relational Geography - Dust, Ashes,
Residua’ is now being built across the trauma of seismic change.  But is
this the prelude to a further dire transformation from ‘biopolitics to
necropolitics’?  The situation is critical but not hopeless, for surely
these artists are themselves evidence of the trenchant and humoristic
resilience of East Europe.*

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*Artist info:*

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*Ranko Bon *

*Residua (1976 – 2010)*

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*This collection of notes, essays, epistles, stories, aperçus, diary
entries, tales, epigrams, vignettes, parables, poems, quips, fables,
snippets of conversation, maxims, slogans, quotes, jokes, and aphorisms, as
well as the addenda that extend all of the above, was begun in 1976, and now
contains about two million words that can be searched. At first, the
writings were collected at the end of the year into yearbooks and shared
with friends and acquaintances around the world. Collections of writings
extending over all years appeared in print on several occasions, and many of
these writings were published since 1976, most often as selections on a
particular theme. *

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*Residua is about a journey of discovery and shaping of the author’s own
self. The author is inviting others to partake in his journey, as well as to
consider their own journeys of discovery and shaping of their own selves.
According to the author, this is art’s ultimate aim.*

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*Marina Grzinic** and Aina Šmid in collaboration with Zvonka Simzcic*

*Naked Freedom, video, 2010*

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*This video work, connecting Ljubljana, Belgrade and Durham USA, presents a
conceptual political space of engagement that allows for rethinking what
local community is. It conceptualizes the possibility of social change under
the conditions of finance capitalism and its financialization processes that
permeate art, the social, political and critical discourse. The collective
process of making the video “Naked Freedom” is about the enactment of
social, political and collective performative practices for the screen that
resonates with the performers’ own off-screen lives. *

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*In Ljubljana seven young activists, musicians, poets and youth workers,
members of the Youth Center Medvode, a village near Ljubljana, discuss
capitalism, colonialism, education and the power of art as a possibility for
politics. They also rethink the possibility for a radicalization of a proper
life. The work is not only recognition of local youth power but as well an
initiation, through the making of the video work, to social relations that
will make visible those agencies seeking new possibilities.  *

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*Isa Rosenberger *

*DANCE OF DEATH. A Rehearsal*

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*The domination of Austrian banks in Eastern European countries, as one
example of the so-called transitional processes in post-socialistic
countries, is the starting point of Isa Rosenberger’s artistic research.
While searching for images which could represent the abstract and immaterial
economic-political interlocking and the negative spirals, in her work DANCE
OF DEATH. A Rehearsal Rosenberger adopts the motive of the Dance of Death,
as a kind of morbid waltz, an image of destructive flows, turns and
intertwining: a dark motive that is intermitted with the aesthetic dimension
of the dance.*

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*The work DANCE OF DEATH. A Rehearsal should be interpreted as homage to the
ballet of the German choreographer Kurt Jooss. In this expressionistic piece
conceived as a dance macabre, Jooss translated the classical motive of late
medieval art linked to motives that reflect the times of the Weimar
Republic, the first Fascistic tendencies, the economic crisis, etc. Isa
Rosenberger translates this first political ballet into contemporariness,
but also into a proper genre, and she interweaves it with her own
experiences and perspectives on the actual political and economic
conditions.*

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*Saso Sedlacek*

*AcDcWc (Merda d’Artista), floor inslattion*

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*The project’s prototypes are nicely summarized with the upgraded work of
Piero Manzoni’s work from 1961 Merda d’Artista where the artist filled cans
with his excrement. The work is part of AcDcWc project which presents
different prototypes of portable and stationary toilets which can one day
generate electricity in the western world by recycling our own excrement.  *

*The design of individual types of AcDcWc toilet is based on Indian
technology called Deenbandhu, meaning "helpful for the poor", which was
developed recently by Indian technologists for the poorer classes of Indian
society, who can thereby produce electricity and gas for cooking. Sedlacek's
upgraded version of this technology was mostly driven by the need to adapt
and use it in the so-called developed world, and it resulted in the various
types of toilets. *

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*Vlad Nanca*

*Birch broom, floor instillation*

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*The birch broom is more traditional than the commonly seen besom broom. It
is normally used in autumn to sweep leaves and usually found in poorer
areas. The plan is to make such a broom in early spring with the assistance
of broom- makers from the villages outside Bucharest and gather the
necessary branches from the trees at a time when they are about to blossom.
As soon as the broom is made, it will be placed in a jar of water and
allowed to grow roots and of course little leaves. It is a natural process.
>From there on the broom can be planted in different gardens and grow new
birch trees. This would be a different use of the broom, a slightly less
direct way of cleaning, but with a more direct impact on the environment.
The broom here is just a pretext.*

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*Dumitru Budrala*

*Curse of the Hedgehog, video (Running time: 100 minutes)*

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*Dumitru Budrala’s film Curse of the Hedgehog is a central reference point
for the ‘Encounters in Relational Geography – Dust, Ashes, Residua’
exhibition because of its unusual and poignant depiction of broom-making
among the Baesi Roma people. This particular project makes a specific link
between Baesi, so-called “gypsy“, broom-makers of Romania and the Arna
Jharna Museum in Rajasthan, India, where the material culture of this desert
area is being represented by a long-term project of collecting brooms. We
come to appreciate the wit, the good humour and tenacity of these Baesi
people who live on the edge of disaster.  There is also interestingly a
relational geographic link of ethnic descent which joins the Roma people
dispersed across Europe to their origins in Rajasthan.   *

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*Zbynek Baladran*

*Bookcase, video essay, 5’ 05”*

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*This short video essay is based on a description of a family bookcase seen
through the eyes of child. From this point of view everything looks very
enigmatic and the interpretation of one basic authoritarian ‘Socialistic
Architecture’ book shifts the result of the child’s perception to a new
consequence. *

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*supported by**:*

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*BM:UKK *

*ERSTE Foundation*

*Stadt Wien - Kulturabteilung MA 7*

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*° About us:*

*Open Friday, Saturday 13.00 - 18.00 and open for the rest of the week days
by appointment only. *

*Admission free *

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*Open Space*

*Zentrum fuer Kunstprojekte*

*Lassingleithnerplatz 2*

*A - 1020 Vienna*

*Austria*

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*(+43) 699 115 286 32*

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*for more info: office at openspace-zkp.org *

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*http://www.openspace-zkp.org*

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*Open Space - Zentrum fuer Kunstprojekte aims to create the most vital
facilities for art concerned with contributing a model strategy for
cross-border and interregional projects on the basis of improving new
approach.***
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