metropolis m

‘Because Manifesta is a migratory biennial, the challenge is to affect a kind of change. There is an urgency to produce some social transformation. You don’t have the advantage of being able to build on past editions, or create a continuous relationship with an audience. Therefore one quite quickly needs to look at how to bridge into a specific debate or schism, and that is exactly what I am trying to do in Genk, namely intervene in a social schism between two attitudes around the legacy of an industrial past. Genk was built by the coal industry practically from scratch. By the time the coal industry closed down in the 1980s, it had become a complex conglomeration of people and cultures from all over Europe, with a very detailed urban infrastructure. The former mineworkers who stayed in Genk have since then been creating archives and museums of the region and its history, thereby demanding that this material is inscribed as an identity of the place. They have an intense wish to pass this legacy on to the next generations. They are incredibly proud of their working class culture and the social bonds that have come from it. On the other side, there a pursuit of a new future. The local politicians and a considerable sector of society are looking into the question of what comes next. However, it isn’t clear whether the questions of the past, the present and the future necessarily meet. That tension exists, and it’s an interesting one. What is the role of culture within a (post)industrial society? The intention of Manifesta 9 is to delve into this question.’ 

‘Many people do look at it with envy, as a measure of accomplishment and significance.’

‘I refuse to describe the way people feel addressed by their industrial past as necessarily “nostalgic”. Instead, I feel that many of our discourses have a certain fear for nostalgia that constantly conceives the past as dangerous, as some sort of ghost that we cannot stop staring at. The result is that we have a neurotic relationship with the past, and this is exactly the space I would like to address with Manifesta 9. What we are trying to do is produce a number of interventions or newly commissioned works that are anything but nostalgic. One of the sections of Manifesta 9 is about heritage-cultures, or as I like to call them, memory-cultures. A number of works will look at heritage as an active culture between the past and the present. This section mixes the exhibitions and objects of ex-miners with contemporary works by other cultural practitioners, from fashion designers to comic strip artists, which are similarly defined by the memory of coalmining. Eva Gronbach, for example, for her project German Jeans, produced new versions of historic miner’s jeans, which have been receive quite successfully.

What I hope would come of such a presentation is an account of our interactions with the past that would show them as intense, polemical, fetishistic, surprising, diverse, and that it is not a boring or a dead narrative. The goal in this is to build a platform so as to produce a dialogue. Our aim is to give space and momentum, so that all parties with a stake in the heritage of the region can meet and discuss how they could develop as a cultural sector or as a social force. We hope that by the end of the show in September there will be a practical moment of thinking and negotiation that doesn’t involve us, but that we have allowed for the conditions for that discussion.’