Exhibition text Territorial Phantom

29-03-2008 - 12-05-2008

Text as PDF

Edward Said: 'Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography.' 1)

The title 'Territorial Phantom' comes from State of Sabotage. This state, established by artists, is everywhere, or can be everywhere: a territorial phantom, a state without delimited territory. With a paper passport, during the opening and the day after you can become a resident of the cultural phantom state, State of Sabotage. Residents of the State of Sabotage are thus nomadic individuals. Wherever the State of Sabotage manifests itself, from Australia to Austria, it undermines existing systems by rejecting state controlled possession of land and borders. A curious comparison can be made with the term 'radar ghost' – which has in itself the word 'ghost', or phantom – which was created as a military term to describe the false signals that are picked up by the radar of a ship.

Marine Hugonnier, one of the artists participating in the exhibition, wrote in her book A Film Trilogy that perspective is an invention, not a discovery. Just as America was not discovered because it already existed as a continent, perspective is a random system of representation, and therefore an invention. Geography organizes space in order to comprehend it. For the sake of comprehension, men draw lines and a grid is laid over a geographic area. In the same way that space is measured and recorded on maps, optical rules were invented in order to render space and time in paintings. This rationalization of space and time is the fundamental invention of perspective. It imposed the dominance of the Western gaze in images for centuries. As Marine Hugonnier cites the French art historian Daniel Arasse, 'perspective is thus a political operation towards the representation of power'. 2)

Even the ancient Greek maps were more a system of relations than an enumeration of locations. The maps of the world by Eratosthenes from the third century BCE were a means of indicating the importance of a particular place as an element within a system of relations. Eratosthenes was then already more interested in the structure of a map than in an inventorization. He therefore provides no systematic grid, but geometric relations between places that had no geometric connection with each other. As a result, new relationships and travels through the inhabited world in an abstract and geometric manner became possible. 3)

From the above it will be clear that comprehension, rationalization, mapping and with it a certain claim to space, domination and power are all close to one another. For artists it once again would seem to have become a timely subject for reflection.

Wars are breaking out almost daily everywhere in the world. 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, the endless conflict between Palestine and Israel, Darfur and Kenya are only a few instances that spring to mind. These battle zones arise because of complex and contradictory conflicts and struggles over different geopolitical, economic, cultural, ethnic and religious interests. Superpowers use their armies to impose their liberal, capitalist economic systems and related values. Most wars and clashes take place in developing countries. Some of these wars can be seen as an advancing form of colonialism. These military interventions are a part of the complex problems that developing countries have to deal with; the developing nation-states don't appear to have much to say about the matter. More than once the world has had to look on passively as the challenging transition from decolonization and independence to modernization and globalization was forced by a foreign power. 4)

Today it is evidently still a matter of power, of the possession of space, of a form of colonization, whatever interests or reasons may serve as a background for it. We could say that places are political, and even that keeping a place vacant in a natural manner is a political act. People fight to maintain a division or to eliminate it, while others try to slip through between them unnoticed. Every place is in fact an accumulation of different places, that is to say the place at different moments in history. In addition, places are often linked with personal and collective memories. These involve boundaries, or to put it better, thresholds, which that reach further than physical barriers or time.

Parallel to all this, there are ongoing developments such as expanding commercialization and privatization that lead to ever more public space becoming private. In the last twenty years, spaces that were once regarded as public are increasingly coming into private hands. Moreover, over the past five years Western governments in particular have been seeking to extend control in urban space, hardening it and expanding surveillance there. 5) Are we fixated on property claims, the possibility of shutting ourselves off and finding our identity in our surroundings?

Along with the influence of war, privatization and increasing governmental interference, the rise of digital networks and wireless technologies has also changed our relation to places. Portable electronic gadgets help us to navigate through a city or country, thereby more and more shaping our medial orientation. Soon it will no longer be static points such as a church tower that will form our frame of reference, but communication, being hooked up, that will do so: on, off, lost or localized.

The artists in 'Territorial Phantom' explore dominant ideas about concepts such as borders, territory, possession and occupying space. They are responding to grids, or are laying these over territorial areas. As artists, they seek to claim space, and employ different artistic strategies to do this. The exhibition presents mental, social or political phenomena regarding the occupation of the space mapped.

1) Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, 1993, p.7.
2) Marine Hugonnier, A Film Trilogy, 2007, p. 107.
3) Christian Jacob, 'Mapping the Mind', in Mappings, 1999, pp. 40-41.
4) For this see also the catalog of the Istanbul Biennial, Not Only Possible, But Also Necessary: Optimism in the Age of Global War, 2007, in which reference is made to Empire, a book by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt.
5) For this see Saskia Sassen in 'Hybrid Space', in Open, nr. 11, p. 21. We are here dealing with publicly accessible space, not to be confused with public space, which will be the subject of the following exhibition, dealing with the shifting concepts of what is involved in private and public space.

The virtual world is growing exponentially. The familiar boundaries are being crossed to new zones, causing the word to change into a completely new phenomenon. In this new world wars look like games – as in www.americasarmy.com, a war game made by the American government, based on real war experiences. The 'paradise' that AES F is showing, titled 'Last Riot', is a mutated world in which time stands still and the past is close to the future. The inhabitants have become sexless, angelic beings. This is a world where the violent, vague or erotic illusion comes across naturally in its artificial, unstable 3D perspective. The heroes of this new era have only one identity, that of participants in the final struggle. Everyone fights for himself and the other; it is no longer possible to tell the difference between victim and attacker, man or woman. Everyone fights, but why, and for what? This world celebrates the end of ideology, history and ethics.

In the middle of the day Slawomir Sierakowski, a young Polish radical leftist, gives a speech in the stadium at Warsaw. During the years of the Polish Republic (1921-1939) this stadium was one of the favorite places for political rallies and street festivals. The speech reflects the aesthetic of nationalist propaganda films, but its content runs counter not only to the style, but to everything on which that style is based. The speaker wrestles with the form, revealing how greatly we are still hampered by nationalistic codes. He speaks before an almost empty stadium, where only a few young people listen to his words. Sierakowski describes the cultural and linguistic consequences of the departure of the Jews after the Second World War to Israel, and calls on the Polish Jews to return to Poland. By citing the style of old nationalistic propaganda films Bartana stresses the similarities between the ideological and visual in this film, in which the speech functions as a form of resistance. Ultimately Bartana is interested in the possibilities (and impossibilities) of the content of the speech and the anti-Semitic and racist questions that a film like this raises.

The architect China Tracy, the digital alter-ego of Cao Fei, is going to build a city named 'RMB City' in Second Life. China's current obsession with intensive land-development projects is being expanded into Second Life. 'RMB City' is a condensed incarnation of present-day Chinese cities, with many of their characteristic elements; it is a series of new Chinese fantasy images that are highly contradictory. The image of the future that Cao Fei creates is charged with irony and mistrust, and is entertaining as well as political. As a crude hybrid of communism, socialism and capitalism, RMB City is realized in a globalized digital environment where exuberant symbols of Chinese reality are combined with fleeting images of the future of that land. From the air we look down on the water, and see various icons, new and old: a huge Ferris wheel going round and round on the tip of the Monument to the People's Heroes, small rockets constantly being fired into the sky, and a statue of Mao Zedong floating in the ocean.

Sun Run Sun: Dead Reckoning, 2008
6 channel sound installation
live data processing from a static GPS receiver

'Sun Run Sun' charts a path between environmental awareness and technological development, using sound as the medium to enhance both. The project investigates the split between the embodied experience of location and the calculated data of position, exploring the individual experience of current location technologies through a personal experience of sound. It seeks to (re)establish a sense of connectedness to one's environment, and to (re)negotiate this through an investigation into old, new, future and animal navigation using sound.

This project, recently completed as Artist in Residence at NIMk, consists of two different parts, a sound installation and a series of portable instruments to take on a walk through the city. In the installation 'Dead Reckoning' Yolande Harris reveals the patterns of orbiting satellites coming in and out of range and inconsistencies in how GPS technology locates the self in a longitude/latitude grid. The mobile 'Satellite Sounders' transform the live satellite data directly into a sonic composition listened to on headphones as one walks through the city. Live signals from satellites in orbit, together with the performer's coordinates on earth, generate a continuously transforming electronic soundscape. Yolande Harris's soundscape questions what is inside and what is outside, what it means to be located and what it means to be lost.

This film by Marine Hugonnier takes as its starting point the rules that to an increasing extent regulate our access to and perception of nature. The background for 'The Last Tour' is the end of the Age of Spectacle, at the moment that most tourist attractions are being closed for the public. In this fictional story, a final balloon flight over the iconic Matterhorn in the Swiss Alps is going to be undertaken. Everyone who visits the mountain finds themselves already 'in' an image that people have of this mountain. The mountain area that will be closed in the near future, where one will not be allowed to take photos any more, will perhaps become a blank spot on the map and escape from surveillance, time management, geographic codes and space, as if it had never been discovered. 'The Last Tour' is about closing off and fencing in. The core of Hugonnier's work consists of human subjectivity that has adapted the environment to the images that it has created – otherwise what could be called 'the politics of vision'.

On March 18, 2002, the artists Marjorieke Glaudemans and Karen Lancel established a new country on the internet. By physically registering ten square meters on the border between the provinces of Groningen and Drenthe, a symbolic piece of land has gone on record as no-mans-land. 'nomansland' is a meeting place, a hybrid platform for exchange and debate, a conceptual space with a base on the web. 'nomansland' initiates social interventions on the public domain, inviting the audience to meet in online chats, to join offline discussions and performances. In the public space of the Internet, 'nomansland' actively invites participants to report on personal experiences, psychological and collective connotations and political systems that touch on the ideas around borders. A border can exclude, but it can also serve as an orientation and transitional space; a space in between.
'nomansland' stimulates an awareness of systems and mechanisms that form identity within a globalizing society.

www.nomansland.nu functions as a platform and as a growing collective memory of 'nomansland'. Website hosted by driebit.nl.

Lucas Lenglet's recent work increasingly shows signs of reflection on the other side of violence and aggression. Security, or the search for it, establishes the self-evident presence of violence and its inescapability. As the title indicates, 'Panzersperren' is comprised of cross-shaped obstacles that are used to surround an area to prevent tanks from entering it. In this installation the barriers – the originals of which are much bigger – still refer to security, but through their fragile arrangement they themselves form a danger. Lenglet's sculptures are perhaps too elegant, too stylized to be destructive, to inspire fear. But Lenglet knows that in our society of the spectacle violence can not be separated from its aesthetic component, from theatrical effect. The unnatural lighting turns the frightful crosses into a minimalistic, 'innocent' structure and evokes the ambiance of a theatre or film set. 'Panzersperren' functions as a synthesis of our anxieties, a disturbed condition that is the result of current concerns such as protection, isolation and paranoia. Lenglet makes objects/instruments/architecture that simultaneously embrace contradictory qualities like attack, defense and protection.

The photographs by Raqs Media Collective are images of sections of flaking plaster on a stone wall that remind one of maps. Each section of plaster evokes a characteristic geographic element – an isthmus here and a peninsula there, a continent or an island somewhere else. Together the images seem to indicate the possibility of discovering a map of the whole world if you look at disintegrating walls closely enough. The images contain cryptic hints and texts that tell about four sets of characters: about illegal aliens who navigate through the water, squatters who construct a shelter of tarred canvas, digital pirates who burn cd's, and workers who protect machines in an occupied factory. Raqs Media Collective describe it as: 'a whimsical but carefully constructed navigation aid for the contemporary world.'

State of Sabotage, 2003-06
DVD

'State of Sabotage', abbreviated SoS, was founded on August 30, 2003, by the Austrian artist Robert Jelinek. It is a real state, the first sovereign cultural state according to international law. But it is a state that is or can be everywhere: a territorial phantom, a state without a circumscribed territory. SoS citizens are therefore nomadic groups. Wherever SoS manifests itself – from Australia to Austria – it undermines the existing systems by rejecting state controlled possession of land and borders. For instance, in various countries SoS manhole covers – designed by Robert Jelinek – have been placed in the ground, which do not cover sewers or utilities, but virtual transnational tunnels. SoS is everywhere. An SoS manhole cover can function as a new form of national boundary, a displacement of national borders.

Artur Zmijewski is among the most prominent figures in the art scene in Poland today. Unusual and surprising situations, generally provocatively introduced by the artist himself, are the starting point for an oeuvre that blurs the boundaries between normal and abnormal, ordered and disordered. Zmijewski's work, in which the ill and aged, religious fanatics or naked soldiers take a prominent place, turns the familiar inside out. In his film 'Them', which was also shown at the latest Documenta, Zmijewski sharpens the discussion about how far art can and may go, by showing how it can take on destructive forms. He arranges a workshop where Polish Christians, Jews, Young Socialists and Nationalists are confronted with each other's ideas. Creative space loses its innocence.

curator exhibition / text: Petra Heck
translation: Don Mader