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Beirut – Taipei – Damascus – Khartoum – Diyarbakir – Enschede

‘I keep asking myself if there aren’t hidden places everywhere,’ sighs Chris Meighan on his web log, as he discovers a hidden level between the first and second storeys of the hotel where he and his fellow students are staying. His question could be a motto for the Here as the Centre of the World project, initiated by the Dutch Art Institute (DAI), the two-year masters program of the ArtEZ academy in Enschede.Meighan is a student at the DAI, and as I write, he is just back from Diyarbakir, in southeastern Turkey (an area claimed as part of Kurdistan). Together with Taipei (Taiwan), Damascus (Syria), Beirut (Lebanon), Khartoum (Sudan) and the Dutch Art Institute’s hometown of Enschede, in the east of the Netherlands, Diyarbakir is one of the six cities where the DAI has been organizing a series of workshops and lectures between May of 2006 and May 2007. In the project, curators Lucy Cotter, Gabriëlle Schleijpen and Alite Thijsen bring into discussion the facility with which people fall back on their own familiar frameworks. Their cultural horizon is generally a limited one. Restrictive thinking is characteristic of both the individual artist, who is all too quick to hide away in the familiar setting of his studio, and the institutions, which are inevitably still focused on the West. The Dutch Art Institute’s own peripheral location − Enschede has become a shared metropolis with Germany’s Gronau, just across the border − has forced the school to reflect on its ‘on-the-fence’ situation. The principle behind Here as the Centre of the World is this prevailing dichotomy: here versus there, self versus the other, inside versus outside. In his pioneering book, Orientalism (1978), Edward Said (1935-2003), literature theorist and one of the founding fathers of postcolonial philosophy, referred to the extremely Eurocentric thinking in the cultural field outside Europe. Said’s writings are a cornerstone in the theoretical principles on which Lucy Cotter has based the project. Knowledge and power are closely bound to one another, as Cotter reminds us with a quotation from Said. The ‘power to narrate’ implies that ‘other’ stories are being ignored, even repressed. In the West, this has been standard practice for all too long. Here as the Centre of the World wants to do something about it and break through prevailing structures.

Streets

The first contacts for the series of workshops were made two years ago, when Alite Thijsen travelled to Syria on the invitation of the suryoye, the Assyrian community in Enschede. In almost self-evident fashion, the wider network of participating cities evolved as a result. According to the curators, although it all sounds very arbitrary, this is characteristic of the kind of continuity to which Here as the Centre of the World aspires. The discourse is taken up at all imaginable levels, spontaneously, without premeditation. Dialogue is sought between participants and students, between supervisors and the local art world, and between the familiar and the foreign, sometimes alienating environment. The terrain on which the investigation takes place is public space. In each of the cities where the DAI has been a ‘guest’, a prominent street is selected, wherever possible in collaboration with an art institute in the respective country. In Beirut, the focus was Hamra Street, a market street where the confrontation between old and new sections of town gives expression to ‘both the static and the dynamic character of the city’. In Damascus, the choice fell on Basha Street, a partly covered, partly ‘open’ street situated between Islamic, Christian and Jewish neighbourhoods. The streets are not only cultural melting pots, but according to the curators, they also function as a prism opening out to the world. Streets are symbols for our view onto the outside world. But the question is whether this is not too idyllic an approach. Wouldn’t any randomly chosen spot in whatever city you like always be under the influence of economic, political and cultural interests? As a huge melting pot, isn’t the city more a simulated concept than real?[1] In Damascus, a text by Cotter, hung up by the group for a single day in a shop rented for the purpose, was censored by invisible hands. In Khartoum, the DAI’s Julien Grossmann photographed ‘unspoken truths’. Although Sudan has a strong oral tradition, Grossmann explains, people seem to understand each other without words. Inspired by the ‘different’ ways of communicating, he gave his computer-manipulated photographs back to the local people, asking them if they would tell a story based on what they were looking at, a story that did not exist in reality. The Storyteller completely overturned the framework of ideas with which one looks at reality. But who is it about here? Whose story is being told?

Cultural Differences

In the concrete, collaborative exchanges between the various art institutions, such as the DAI and the NIASD in Damascus, the Zico House in Beirut, and the National Taipei University of Education, the investigation of the ‘different’ and the ‘other’ is further debated. In addition, smaller groups of students from Enschede and the host cities collaborated closely during their ten-day stays at each location. The objective was to come up with a collective project, centred on the issue of whether an equal and equally-valued exchange between cultures is in fact possible in the light of little-changed cultural and economic hierarchies.Artist Hester Oerlemans, who served as artistic leader for the project in Khartoum, thinks that this question set its sights too high. In fact, working in public space was completely new for all the students, regardless of their backgrounds, as she explained over the telephone. ‘Social doubts about this ‘strange’ working domain brought all of them together.’ In Khartoum, the results of the weeklong workshop took the form of a projection onto the central wall overlooking the market. ‘That evening was something of a happening’, in part thanks to the Donkey Days project, for which decorated donkeys paraded through the streets, and students and local people got to know each other better.[2] Dagmar Kriegesmann, a student who participated in both the Taipei and the Khartoum projects, emphasized the bonding character of the workshops, which bridged cultural differences and eventual hierarchies. In Khartoum, she transformed one of the common, low-set stools that Sudanese tea sellers use in the streets into a musical instrument. The project resulted in a concert with the instrument maker and musician who had taught her his techniques. Lebanese student Rana Hamadeh found herself primarily confronted by differences between the cultures. Hamadeh first came into contact with the DAI in Damascus. She participated in the project in her own city, Beirut, and later became a student in Enschede. In February, she went to Khartoum. In Basha Street in Damascus, Hamadeh had discovered how different people react to the camera, and how history, with all its complexities, lies ingrained in the structures of a city. As a result, she asked herself how we actually deal with history. How do you make a profoundly laden past recognizable and understandable to someone who has not shared the experience? Hamadeh travelled to Syria with two cases of archives, which she installed in a shop hired for the project. The project focused on the problem of representing a culture, in either image or text. Can any image or text really record collective experience and emotion? There is a danger underlying the assumption that contemporary art has a universal, shared language, as Cotter explains. The project is about living with differences. The ‘other’ culture is not some exotic island. People do not choose the differences, nor do those differences disappear, even in an age characterized by the enrichments of internationalization and globalization.

Admirable Initiative

Cotter and Thijsen find that their projects, unlike the big biennial exhibitions, truly change something in the urban fabric.[3] Hirschhorn’s Bataille Monument, for example, shown at documenta 11, never got beyond its good intentions, and did not really make contact with the local population. According to Thijsen, Here as the Centre of the World is not just a symbolic gesture. The people who work and live in these streets and are directly involved in the initiative are their public. Take the Sudanese artist, Duha, who, with the help of the local inhabitants, adorned Khartoum’s chicken-wire trash containers with found objects and fabric. Another example is the project centred on an abandoned patch of ground in Damascus. Students asked the children hanging out there what they would like to do with that property. They were given paper and coloured pencils in order to put their secret fantasies down on paper. The children’s drawings were later projected onto the barrier surrounding the site, together with vocal recordings of interviews with neighbourhood adults. As a result of their project, the Syrian authorities decided to turn the space into a public park. Here as the Centre of the World is an admirable initiative, and it generates a lot of sympathy. But that was not their intention. What is wanted is debate. In order to make heterogeneity visible, the discourse needs to be honed, as it were, on the sharpest edge of the blade. In Between Worlds, writer Edward Said strove to put his ‘divided halves’, Arabian and American, into thinking and writing in counterpoint: the ‘Arabian’ and the ‘American’ must work with, but also radically against one another.[4] His attempt resulted in writing characterized by a discerning acuity in which raw divisions and restlessness, dislocation and disorientation, are intentionally kept alive. As a result of a somewhat superficial approach, the contrasts underlying Here as the Centre of the World tend to get snowed under. The problems that the project wishes to discuss are comprehensive and large, perhaps a bit too much so. As a result, much is left unmentioned, including the complex, highly problematic recent history of a country such as Sudan. For Oerlemans and Grossmann, it seems to be curiosity about ‘the other’ that was the primary attraction. Finding answers or solutions was not the objective. There is no reconciling synthesis. Why would you want to crawl into in-between floor spaces and other ‘hidden places’? It is necessary to make the divisions and disunity comprehensible: only a diversity of questions can lead to a compelling and convincing analysis. Can we please bring those questions out of the shadows, out of the periphery and into the light? The project will soon be concluded in the form of a book, not an exhibition. Schleijpen, Cotter and Thijsen emphasize that ‘an exhibition would put too much of a stamp of finality on the project. The element of surprise, so inherent to the workshops, would be quickly forgotten or negated in an exhibition.’ It proves to be no simple task. How, for example, do you represent a concert of ventilators on paper? Dagmar Kriegesmann is still pulling her hair out over it. How will Grossmann put those Sudanese ‘unspoken truths’ into words? Isn’t the book also a traditional form that primarily relies on Western conventions, from which any investigation ‘into the foreign’ manages to escape?The final workshop in the Here as the Centre of the World series takes place in Enschede in June. The catalogue will be published in the autumn.www.dutchartinstitute.nlNotes[1] A. Simone, ‘Globalizing Urban Economies’, in Documenta 11_Platform 5: Exhibition: Kassel, June 8–September 15, 2002. Catalogue, p. 115.[2] from the exhibition, Allan Kaprow. Kunst als leven, Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven, 10 February-22 April, 2007. ‘Het [de Happening] is kunst, maar het lijkt dichter bij het leven te staan.’ (It [the happening] is art, but it seems to be closer to life.)[3] ‘Thus the entire scope of the project inverts the logic that the exhibition’s centrality is what defines the proper meaning of the artistic and intellectual possibilities of its procedures.’ Enwezor, O., ‘The Black Box’, in Documenta 11_Platform 5: Exhibition: Kassel, June 8–September 15, 2002. Catalogue, p. 42.[4] E. Said, ‘Between Worlds’, in London Review of Books, Vol. 20, No. 9, 7 May, 1998.

Ilse van Rijn

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