A State of Uncertainty
A State of Uncertainty
In Conversation with Aernout Mik
Aernout Mik (b. Groningen, 1962) is returning to Venice to represent the Netherlands for the second time at the world’s most important biennial for the visual arts. He is showing three new video works at the Gerrit Rietveld Pavilion, which he is using shipping containers to remodel into something reminiscent of disintegrating detention centre.‘I am pleased to be able to do it a second time,’ says Aernout Mik in his studio on Amsterdam’s KNSM Island. [1] His exhibition in Venice is one of the three cornerstones of the presentation organized by curator Maria Hlavajova, director of the BAK, Basis voor Actuele Kunst (base for new trends in art) in Utrecht. Together with a lecture series and a critical reader compiled by Hlavajova, Rosi Braidotti and Charles Esche, the exhibition is intended to clarify ‘… how security, in tandem with the turmoil and fear that, paradoxically enough, form the basis of and are generated by that security, has become a determining factor for today’s world’. The Dutch exhibition investigates ‘… mechanisms of power and violence that are inherent in the continuing and open confrontation between the privileged and the underprivileged, and which since the rise of social democracy have become most clearly prevalent in attitudes regarding immigrants and refugees’. [2] It may sound somewhat generalized, but the political tenor is unmistakable.Aernout Mik explains that his video work, Training Ground (2006), exhibited in London, served as a starting point for the development of the presentation for Venice. [3] The video initially seems like a registration of a border police training exercise on the Dutch-German border. A team of agents has to arrest a group of people. Whether they are refugees or student workers is not very clear, as one would expect in Mik’s work. ‘The practice exercise as a ritualized form of simulation is an important factor in my work,’ explains Mik. ‘The video describes a cramped and recurring pattern that reaches a boiling point and finally implodes. Segments of the groups, both the refugees and the border patrol, begin raving and fall into a kind of trance. Suddenly the roles are reversed and the refugees are arresting the agents. There is a moment of transgression that becomes a quantum leap, shooting out past the normal exercise into another level, where it finds a new balance.’Although they are staged and are consequently a form of theatre, Aernout Mik’s rituals have a certain degree of reality. The processes that take place before the eye of the camera do not follow a clear-cut script. The actors do not each play a role of their own but let themselves be carried along by the dynamics of the group. The mixing of reality and fiction is reminiscent of Les Maîtres-Fous (1954), a documentary by Jean Rouch about a ceremony of a religious sect somewhere outside Accra, on Ghana’s Gold Coast. During the ritual, the participants become possessed by spirits identified with the Western colonial powers: the governor, the doctor’s wife, the cruel overseer. The images show the men foaming at the mouth. As Mik explains, ‘You see them in trance, or an imitation of a trance; whether it is real remains unclear. They act out a kind of theatre that is a bastardized version of colonial rituals, a kind of reliving of the oppression. It is a film I find very interesting because it is about a ritual simulation taking place within a closed group. As in my own work, what you see is certainly not all fake.’ Rouch moreover emphasized that for the members of the sect, the possession was not theatre, but reality. The most intriguing thing about the ceremony is undoubtedly the complex psychological framework of the oppressed group, who for the duration of the ritual crept into the bodies of their oppressors. In terms of content, Training Ground identifies an intrinsic area in which Aernout Mik’s two new works can be situated. One of these works is a video projected on four screens. ‘It describes a fictional situation taking place in what might be a detention centre, built from shipping containers that serve as cells or holding rooms. One of the subjects that interests me is the untenability, the permeability of borders. I also use the containers in the pavilion in order to make the relationships between interior and exterior ambiguous. They both reinforce and drill through the boundaries of the pavilion.’ The film was made at the Marnehuizen military training grounds in Groningen, where the Dutch Ministry of Defence built something of a copy of one of Holland’s post-1993 planned neighbourhoods. ‘It looks like a neighbourhood under construction. Everything is there, including glass recycling containers and telephone booths, but at the same time, it is unfinished. There are ruins in between the new buildings. The location straddles something that is yet to be there and something that used to be there. I find it interesting to bring that typical, recent Dutch architecture into the Rietveld Pavilion. There is an uneasy bond between the two. Both strive to achieve an orderly, tidy clarity. The Rietveld Pavilion represents a modernist, self-contained architecture, and I want to bring in something in opposition to that.’
How are you going to do that?
‘The pavilion is a problematic space, and in my opinion not Rietveld’s best work, although it is typical of Rietveld that it has a ramshackle quality about it − which is perhaps its charm. The entrance, for example, is awkward in comparison to the space behind it. The high back wall is dominant and disrupts the circulation. Another problem is that the floor is so light. The incoming light is reflected from so many surfaces that there seems to be no bottom to the space. Because of the way the light is filtered, the boundaries of the space are very hard to see. All that is exciting, but very difficult for an exhibition. I am making some major adaptations. I am putting in a darker floor, and because I work with video, the level of light has to be drastically reduced, so I am going to black out all the windows, up to two and a half meters high, to focus the attention downwards, to the floor, where most of the video screens are. The containers face from inside to outside, so that the boundaries of the pavilion will be outside Rietveld’s floor plan. Things are brought together, at different levels. You see the containers again on the set of the Marnehuizen video, and some video screens are installed in the container sections. I may put plastic-coated mattresses down on the floor for the audience, the way they do in detention centres.’
Aernout Mik’s exhibition also refers to what is for the Netherlands the relatively new phenomenon of antiterrorist training. The fear of what might possibly happen and how people are preparing themselves for it can be felt everywhere. The question is what it actually is that they are in fact preparing. In the new, post-apocalyptic reality after the attack, existing systems will have been destroyed and new relationships created that can release unexpected powers, as well as illuminating hidden shortcomings. Mik sees a parallel between the enacted reality of relief workers practicing a disaster scenario and his own video work. ‘Most of my videos take place in an artificial situation, in which it is suggested that something has happened or is going to happen, albeit unclear what, where and when.’Aernout Mik’s exhibition also refers to what is for the Netherlands the relatively new phenomenon of antiterrorist training. The fear of what might possibly happen and how people are preparing themselves for it can be felt everywhere. The question is what it actually is that they are in fact preparing. In the new, post-apocalyptic reality after the attack, existing systems will have been destroyed and new relationships created that can release unexpected powers, as well as illuminating hidden shortcomings. Mik sees a parallel between the enacted reality of relief workers practicing a disaster scenario and his own video work. ‘Most of my videos take place in an artificial situation, in which it is suggested that something has happened or is going to happen, albeit unclear what, where and when.’
Do your new works allude to the hysteria about the Islamic Hofstad Group [responsible for the murder of Theo van Gogh] and the arrests in the Laakkwartier, the Berlage neighbourhood in the Hague?
‘There is a relation to current events, but at the same time, my work is outside all that. If the work generates flashes of associations with, for example, the fire at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport, that is good, but I don’t make reconstructions of such events. The problems of the situation in which we find ourselves are exceptional for the Netherlands, but they are not limited to the Netherlands. It is about phenomena that are taking place in the whole western world. The critical reader goes into the Dutch situation as an example of a broader development. My contribution is a more general one. In many of my works, you see the uncertainty and the doubts that go hand in hand with loss of identity and the uncomfortable tension in people’s attempts to hang on to that identity. You can very physically see that in Training Ground – which is of course also a metaphor for what is going on now in the Netherlands, with the passport debate.’
In many of your video works, including Training Ground, it is difficult to distinguish between the perpetrators and the victims. Why do you relativize that difference?
‘I don’t relativize it. I focus attention on to the mechanisms of violence itself. Violence follows a reciprocal pattern in which the roles of perpetrator and victim can change. I am interested in the origins and the disintegration of these processes, in the turning point where something switches into its opposite. It is not about concrete facts or specific cases. It is not up to me to expose a scapegoat, but to create a platform from which we can think about these issues. That is also what is deceptive about the title, Scapegoats, because there is ultimately no scapegoat to be seen in that video. I do like the tension between the title and the work.’
Scapegoats (2006) is one of the works that Mik presented last year at BAK, in Utrecht, together with Raw Footage (2006). [4] Scapegoats shows a staged situation that vaguely recollects a civil war, while Raw Footage is comprised of film sequences from the war in the former Yugoslavia. We see images of men dragging bodies off the streets, livestock stumbling along the roadsides and bored soldiers trying to unwind. It is irrelevant whether it is about Croats, Serbians or Bosnians.Scapegoats (2006) is one of the works that Mik presented last year at BAK, in Utrecht, together with Raw Footage (2006). [4] Scapegoats shows a staged situation that vaguely recollects a civil war, while Raw Footage is comprised of film sequences from the war in the former Yugoslavia. We see images of men dragging bodies off the streets, livestock stumbling along the roadsides and bored soldiers trying to unwind. It is irrelevant whether it is about Croats, Serbians or Bosnians.
‘It was my intention to investigate war as a phenomenon in itself,’ says Mik, ‘but also as a reflection of the conditions in which we now live. In what used to be Yugoslavia, it was a civil war. In civil wars, relationships between population groups are disrupted and suspicion dominates everything. In civil wars, fiction and reality are extremely difficult to differentiate. On the one hand, there is the ordinary character of everyday affairs. On the other, everything has become unstable, something you cannot put your finger on. In my opinion, something similar is evolving in our own society. What I realized at a given moment was that in the world that I grew up in, a civil war was utterly unthinkable. Now it is no longer so unthinkable. I am not trying to say that it is realistic to think that a civil war could break out here, but the reassuring awareness that we couldn’t even imagine such a thing has disappeared. Something fundamental has changed. My exhibition at BAK was about that growing sense of insecurity. This society is no longer the same and people no longer really understand what it actually is. All this panic about multiculturalism has something to do with it.’
Raw Footage is made up of material from press archives, including ITN/ Reuters, most of which was never broadcast because it was not dramatic enough or was not found suitable, for whatever reason. For Venice, you are putting together a new work from archival footage. Can you tell us something about the film footage you have been looking for?
‘I wouldn’t exactly say “looking for”. It is not as easy as that. It is an enormous, time-consuming job, and I was assisted by Danila Cahen. What I try to do is bring together raw material that concerns the way refugees are dealt with – a theme that is related to Training Ground. I am going to combine that with material about, for example, antiterrorist training and the special police squads in the French banlieues. The war in the former Yugoslavia produced a treasure trove of excess material that may not have had news value, but said a great deal about the situation. It is harder with a subject like refugees. To begin with, it is in any case far more difficult to find raw material. People used to save footage on videotape. Today, the big news agencies store everything digitally and make those archives accessible to the public, including the Internet. In fact, a very rough selection is made, and a lot of material is immediately destroyed. Paradoxically enough, making information more accessible to the public has meant that this same information is more closed off. Secondly, the refugees theme brings with it a lot of clichéd images, and I do not want to tell a pitiful story. I find stereotyped images of Africans trying to reach the Spanish coast in rickety boats hard to use because they’ve already been so corrupted by the media. I am looking for other kinds of images.’
What kind of images? Can you give an example?
‘One that I find very interesting was made in the French town of Sangatte, near Calais and the Channel Tunnel, where a few years ago, scores of refugees tried to get across to England. It pictured an exposed situation, with a large group of refugees brought together. You see a small group of agents trying to arrest them, but they don’t succeed because there are too few of them. The agents could not use force because there were too many journalists around. They made hopeless attempts to communicate with the refugees. There is a beautiful relationship between the alternating collapse and regaining of control. It also shows that in a way, the two groups are equal, that refugees are not pathetic or pitiful, but can be a force that cannot be simply be contained by a few officials. What I am interested in is making physically tangible what in fact is taking place and what the archetypal patterns are – the ritual game of imposing order and upholding structures that become rigid and structures that dissolve, of hygienic protection and control, unceasing contact and never-ending relocations. If a system behaves too rigidly and starts to fossilize, it will eventually collapse. It is this untenability that I am investigating.’
Do you see your work as a form of media criticism?
‘I prefer to see it as a correction to the media, or working through the profusion of the media. Images from that war are always presented in a certain manner, and it remains odd that what you see on television actually has very little effect. I am curious whether that material can make you feel differently about what was actually happening there. The strange thing about the war in Yugoslavia is of course that it was such a short time ago and so close by. We have managed to hold it at a distance. Raw Footage lets you feel the closeness and the ordinariness of the war.’
Almost all of your films from the last decade show dozens of people involved in group processes. What have you learned about group dynamics?
‘The group exercises an unbelievable power of attraction. It is astounding that as soon as a number of total strangers are put together on a film set, within half an hour, a dynamic of its own develops and the group follows its own plan. It happens over and over. In my video footage, that process has significant direction, but this only happens because the group allows it. The force of the mass has a tremendous influence; people are first and foremost social creatures. Ritual is an artificial form, a mutual contract that gives free rein to the power of the group. There are hidden rituals that influence the entire society. The paranoia about our security, for example, has resulted in all of us carrying our toothpaste around the airport in plastic bags. It is unbelievable theatre. It hardly even gets through to us that we simply let it happen.’
Your most recent works deal with themes like power and repression. I am thinking of Vacuum Room (2005) – a chaotic situation following a revolution or a coup d’état, during a court hearing or a meeting, or whatever. Is power a subject?
‘As soon as you bring several people together, there is a power relationship. It is unavoidable. I let these power relationships evolve, but I also let them get derailed, like a subversive act. Spinning out of orbit like this is a way of creating space. You see everything fall apart, but at the same time you feel increasing opportunity for change. New possibilities are created.’
Maria Hlavajova has put your exhibition in the context of a discussion about fear, immigration and the changed political climate in the Netherlands. She writes, ‘We see contemporary art as the terrain in which important networks of cultural, political and social discourse intersect one another, and in so doing, offer new possibilities, a place where there is once again room for imagining ideals that cannot possibly offer an opposing force to the development of repression in the public domain.’ What do you think of that context?
‘It is good, for various reasons. Firstly, because that theme focuses on the peculiar, somewhat archaic form of national representation in Venice, which because of the strong resurgence of nationalism is perhaps no longer so archaic. Secondly, I think that from her position as a creator of exhibitions in the Netherlands, it is logical that she does not merely want to create the obligatory catalogue, but also wants to provide structure for theoretical discourse. The exhibition and the reader can feed and influence one another. I am also pleased that it is these aspects of my work that she is looking at, because my work is not political in any obligatory fashion.’
Has the socio-political dimension of your work increased in the last ten years?
‘Of course, but you can also approach it differently. As an artist, can you generate space for political discussion with and through your work? How can you use images to create an opening for thinking? People are afraid that politicizing immediately turns art into an instrument. That fear is understandable, but it is no reason to avoid the connection to theory and politics. I want to put art back into society. What is essential is that art is not theory or politics, but that it is art.’
2 Mondriaan Foundation press release, 30 November, 2006.2 Mondriaan Foundation press release, 30 November, 2006.
3 Aernout Mik: Shifting Shifting, Camden Arts Centre, London, 16 February-15 April, 2007.3 Aernout Mik: Shifting Shifting, Camden Arts Centre, London, 16 February-15 April, 2007.
4 Aernout Mik: Raw Footage/Scapegoats, BAK, Utrecht, 1 November-24 December, 2006.
Dominic van den Boogerd
