image from the 2008 installation of Chinese Whispers at Ellen deBruijne Projects in Amsterdam
became extremely interested in the work of Suchan Kinoshita again, well once over, not understanding the first time, as I realised in the search that we had seen her work before, at the skulptur projekte münster in 2007, when i got more interested to photograph the simple space than listen to the words… it was language that came between us (german) and with no translation in sight or sound, i used the set, or maybe it was weariness from the art-trekking… had not thought about it at the time, but the theatrical element was very strong —-the kind of box that you wanted to dance in—- and it turns out she has a background in experimental theatre as well… considerations for the direction of the audiences in space. She seems to like the between spaces. What about context as a between space, context surpassing even content? does language matter any more in a perforated box that you want to move in? And ashamed to admit it, but was looking for it in her cultural identity as well (half Dutch, half Japanese). Guilty of my own reductionist fears…
Today someone saw a copy of Wear and said, “Oh, it’s this kind of outsider’s perspective isn’t it?” And when his wife was flipping through it a while later and asked where I am from, she said “Oh, banana.”
Sigh, sigh sigh… I long for the Chinese whispers to happen a bit faster…
Between me and you is the “and” – it is spoken language that connects people to one other. And it is also words that separate them – if the “and,” for instance, were suddenly to disappear. “Chinese whispers,” known in German as “Stille Post” and in French as “téléphone arabe,” is a kindergarten game that illustrates our dependence on language more clearly than any linguistic theory. One person secretly whispers something into his neighbor’s ear, and he conveys what he has understood to the next person, and so on until – at the end of a long row of people – the last person hears something that, thanks to misunderstandings and misinterpretations, no longer resembles the original message. In her project for skulptur projekte münster 07, Suchan Kinoshita re-enacts this childhood game, selecting sentences from illustrated magazines or writings of various philosophers and language theorists as well as asking speakers commissioned by her to invent their own sentences. Other participants include so-called “disrupters,” who deliberately alter the phrases by translating them into other languages. With sensitive recording techniques, Kinoshita eavesdrops on these “Chinese whispers,” powerfully illustrating how the spoken word is subject to continuous change. In the Münster Chamber of Commerce, visitors can hear the resulting sound loop twenty-four hours a day without interruption. The large window in the showroom provides a full view of the street outside, which will almost automatically become the focus of the listener’s gaze. But standing in this open space, his ears entranced by “Chinese whispers,” he will have the chance to reflect on Wilhelm von Humboldt’s assertion that there is no escape from the circle drawn around us by our language.
–from the description of the project Chinese Whispers (Stille Post) [2007] available here, with Suchan Kinoshita’s interesting biography
Posted by e | reply »园子/haus
Mr. Tong’s family has had this property since about 1911, when his great-grandfather took it over and renovated the entire plot. The layout is quite different from a traditional siheyuan, with two rows of rooms that both face south, the southernmost one opening to a large open courtyard space, about 100+ square metres. There is a date tree, the timber framework for vine plants to be planted in the spring and a funny old tree with a spiralling trunk. There are no rooms facing inward from the west, east or north, and Mr. Tong says that particularities of this design were highly influenced by his great-grandfather’s time spent abroad, when he studied in Germany. Mr. Tong’s great-grandfather’s library was located in one of the center rooms on the south end, with stacks of Chinese and German books from floor to ceiling. These were all destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, but most everything else, though, has been kept in its original form. The natural-stained timber is unusual for Beijing architecture (not painted/decorated the usual lively colours), but this taste is also perhaps something more akin to southern Chinese styles, as their family was originally from the South, not Beijing. Mr. Tong defends his home, and he points out that this hybrid will actually be more “traditional” than you would find in many other seemingly traditional siheyuan houses, as many of the versions available now in Beijing are copies, renovated reduxes made popular from this revival of “traditional as style”. Most of the timber used in Mr. Tong’s house is still the original wood from when it was built, down to the hardwood floors and infrastructure, and they insist that everything should be kept as is; they have a respect for its own form of originality, and insist that no changes should be made to the rooms or layout. When a toilet was finally added to the house later on, they purposefully kept it separate from the rest of the rooms, on the western side in a relatively non-descript fashion off of a narrow corridor. The kitchen is next to that, and while relatively unfurnished with appliances, Mr. Tong and his wife suggest that you can have food brought and eat all together here, and then retire to your own rooms after.
*this is the courtyard recommended by Anouchka (yes, they said you are cute!)…
Posted by e | reply »聋哑 EATING sketch 1
What do we recognise of one another, as we are taking in, ingesting,
ingesting as sharing
i/o, he says
eating Chinese
busy
What do we miss
not hearing this
not to be identified
(a small notion)
Posted by e | more »何颖雅 sketches winter 09: 聋哑的
questions:
If we start without oral language, where does culture take us?
What forms of access can be granted by sharing a meal together?
Among strangers, what routes does “the natural” take?
What is Chinese food?
[will post an "audio" element tomorrow... also can send larger-resolution images by e-mail for your meeting]
Posted by e | more »clear distinction between private and common space: “one bright and two dark; one primary one two secondary.”
hierarchy of access at different scales
1600 pages overseas
* fotini stumbled upon and passed along…
The Chinese Overseas: Routledge Library of Modern China
By Hong Liu
Published by Taylor & Francis, 2006
ISBN 041533859X, 9780415338592
1600 pages
This collection gathers some of the most important, and previously disparate, publications in English on various dimensions of the Chinese Diaspora. While it includes sections on the historical evolution of the Chinese communities overseas, the focus of the selection is on the last half of the twentieth century. The last 25 years are a particular focus, since the launch of the reform policy in China, and against a backdrop of the accelerating pace of globalization.
With a population of more than 30 million, the Chinese living outside of the Mainland, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan (called collectively the “Chinese Overseas” or the “Chinese Diaspora”) constitute an important force in the socio-economic transformation of modern China as well as in the countries they reside. They have also played a significant role in the interactions between China and these residing nations. Viewed from the perspective of international migration, the Chinese Overseas are one of the most dynamic immigrant groups in theworld, contributing to globalization and multi-culturalism.
Of certain interest include section 3.2: Problematizing Chineseness and its essay by Rey Chow called “On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem”, as well as Nonini & Ong’s “Chinese Transnationalism as an Alternative Modernity”.
layout of siheyuan
how many room shall the ‘overseas’ siheyuan have? what should the siheyuan look like? how big are the rooms? questions…questions…
海外的鬼
Chinatown, Hello Kitty, 5 Dollah Riff-Raff
Hello Kitty by Agathe Snow* Simone, I just saw this piece and had to think of you… reading more about her work (see below), it seems she does a very good job at facing the stereotypes head-on. Curious to see the piece described as “expatriates filmed while she asks them them questions regarding their national identity”, which may not be so different from what we did in Beijing, but wondering if it’s the fact that she is coming from outside the Chinese identity and probably dealing with this for multiple expats, multiple cultures (the Benetton question?), that takes the subject matter away from national identity to exactly all the fluff and contrived-ness that it is…
below: copied from a text about Snow’s work at the Art Berlin Contemporary 2008
Agathe Snow
“Chinatown: Every Square has its Round”
Mixed Media Installation, Film - DVD, ca. 1:45 Std./hr.
Größe variabel/Dimensions variable
Ed.: 3 + 3 AP
Courtesy of Peres Projects, Berlin/Los Angeles
In order to realize her latest video, CHINATOWN: Every Square Has its Round, Agathe Snow visited numerous Chinatowns in large U.S. cities, where she went to soup kitchens, purchased fireworks and walked straight into the temptations and stereotypes these parts of town offer. For her project, the artist did not restrict herself to the use of her camera. She develops diverse methods to create her highly narrative work and its many investigative elements. Snow favors overpopulated installations that absorb anything she gets hold of, and she knows very well that she sometimes transgresses the fine line of kitsch and repulsiveness.
Hidden behind her sometimes drastic titles and similarly extreme installations are examinations of intercultural patterns and anomalies. This is also true for CHINATOWN: Every Square Has its Round; where Snow depicts expatriates filmed while she asks them them questions regarding their national identity. While the artist does not take the role of a commentator offering moral or political viewpoints, her rhetorical support takes the form of occasional exaggerations. The work’s radius is intentionally complex and cannot not be completely understood upon first visual inspection. The life patterns and realities depicted in Snow’s video sequences – derived from the daily routine in the age of virtual realities – are too divergent to be totally comprehended. Whereas her non-didactic pieces sometimes lead to seemingly absurd contents, ultimately they are in no way different from life itself: simply complicated. (text by Daniel Kletke)
Born in Corsica in 1976, Agathe Snow lives in New York City, where she participated in the 2008 Whitney Biennale. Future endeavors include her upcoming solo show in Paris’s Jeu de Paume.
Posted by e | reply »overseas in paris
happy holidays from overseas! we are now (not) in paris doing a four-day session of coming together, planning and brainstorming for overseas 2009-2010… more soon!
Posted by admin | more »while our discussion quiets, there is lots around
no short breath when it comes to discussion on china, asia, or asian-ness… winter time to catch up on reading?
Posted by e | reply »The Hour We knew Nothing of Each Other
The theaterworkshop with the Overseas Chinese is finished and we had last week a little showing and I presented parts of the making of the theaterworkshop as well. The participants were very happy about what they have achieved and I was really happy to share that with them. I’ve been talking to Liliana (the theater pedagogy teacher) about continuing our work together. She told me about the piece The Hour We knew Nothing of Each Other. It sounds interesting. I didn’t know the piece, I just knew that Peter Handke wrote the filmscript with Wim Wenders for “Himmel über Berlin” (Wings of Desire) which is Thom’s favorite movie. Do you know it? Read what Peter Handke has to say about this play:
Peter Handke on The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other
From an interview with Sigrid Löffler for Profil, May 1992
Posted by mon | more »Your new play is totally silent and its protagonist seems to be a square across which people walk. The play is called The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other. What’s behind this strange title?
The trigger for the play was an afternoon several years ago. I’d spent the entire day on a little square in Muggia near Trieste. I sat on the terrace of a café and watched life pass by. I got into a state of real observation, perhaps this was helped along a bit by the wine. Every little thing became significant (without being symbolic). The tiniest procedures seemed significant of the world. After three or four hours a hearse drew up in front of a house, men entered and came out with a coffin, onlookers assembled and then dispersed, the hearse drove away. After that the hustle and bustle continued - the milling of tourists, natives and workers. Those who came after this occurrence didn’t know what had gone on before. But for me, who had seen it, everything that happened after the incident with the hearse seemed somewhat coloured by it. None of the people milling on the square knew anything of each other - hence the title. But we, the onlookers see them as sculptures who sculpt each other through what goes on before and after. Only through what comes after does that which has gone on before gain contours; and what went on before sculpts what is to come.
on “being singular plural”
Going back to beginnings, I am trying to think again about the reasons for the nagging feeling of “cheesiness” related to this overseas question, why making any kind of work trying to self-represent a particular social group comes with this discomfort. We talked a lot about the ‘I’ and the ‘We’ as the building blocks of identity, and today coming across some texts on Jean Luc Nancy’s “Being Singular Plural”, I realised that it is exactly that kind of identification that makes me uncomfortable from the very beginning. Because just as identification can be a form of creating that ‘we’, it is a manner of ‘with’ that separates and segregates, in its heightened forms, into a identity politics that reveals humanity at its worst. He reminds us of
“the places, groups, or authorities (…Bosnian Serbs, Tutsis, Hutus, Tamil Tigers, Casamnce, ETA Militia, Roma of Slovenia…) that constitute the theatre of bloody conflicts among identities as well as what is at stake in these conflicts. …This is the ‘earth’ we are supposed to ‘inhabit’ today, the earth for which Sarajevo will become the martyr-name, the testimonial name: this is us, we who are supposed to say we as if we know what we are saying and who we are talking about. … This earth is anything but a sharing of humanity… What I am talking about here is compassion, but not compassion as pity that feels sorry for itself and feeds on itself. Com-passion is the contagion, the contact of being with one another in this turmoil.” (pp. xii-xiii)
Nancy asks the question of how ‘we’ can find another sort of meaning beyond a statement of identity: “We do not ‘have’ meaning any more, because we ourselves are meaning - entirely, without reserve, infinitely, with no more meaning other than ‘us’ (p. 1) …Being itself is given to us as meaning, being does not have meaning. ‘Being itself’, the phenomenon of ‘being’ is meaning that is in turn its own circulation - and we are this circulation. (p. 3) …There is no meaning then if meaning is not shared, and not because there would be an ultimate or first signification that all beings have in common, but because meaning is itself the sharing of being.” (p. 2)
Is there a way, thus, that we can find a way of acknowledging being in and of itself, relating to one and another, without identifying? Can we speak about an overseas identity but move beyond it, to relatedness itself?
I am tired of all this talk of identity, as much as i wind myself up in it everyday. Each time someone says, “You don’t understand”, it becomes an accusation of Chinese-ness, of Western-ness, of Foreign-ness, of placement. I want to say, “No, you don’t understand”, but I never do. Instead, can we think about what circulates, what mixes and what blurs? How do these concepts give us relation to our pasts as much as to the person next to us?
[quotes and thoughts reflected from Irit Rogoff's "We - Collectivities, Mutualities, Participations"]
Posted by e | more »context, placelessness, lozano-hemmer
[from "ALIEN RELATIONSHIPS FROM PUBLIC SPACE: A winding dialog with Rafael Lozano-Hemmer" by Alex Adriaansens and Joke Brouwer, published in the book Transurbanism, 2002]
My work is best situated somewhere between architecture and the performing arts. For me it is a priority to create social experiences rather than to generate collectible objects. The making of a piece itself is closer to developing a performance or a play than a visual artwork. For the most part, I work with my long-standing collaborator Will Bauer, but also with photographers, programmers, architects, linguists, writers, composers, actors or other staff that may be needed depending on the project.
Most of our work has been developed in media arts contexts, and within this I prefer collective experiences rather than using individual interfaces for solitary participation. In 1989 I interviewed Robert Lepage, the Canadian theatre director, about the impact of technology on the arts. He said, “computers can communicate very efficiently; but they can’t engage in communion”. I think he used the word communion not in its religious connotations but more as the acknowledgement of the human complicity that can’t be shared with computers. I find this idea very interesting, not because it sounds like an apology for humanism, which is in a well-deserved crisis, but because I think communication as a concept in Art is overrated and corporate. What’s more attractive is people meeting and sharing an experience, —a simple pleasure that composer Frederic Rzewski calls “coming together”. This concept, at least when referring to coming together in the flesh, is becoming more radical as people do it less and less thanks to telecommunications, urban design, increasing work load demands, and work schedule flexibility, to name a few factors.
I named the series of interventions “relational” in large part because I wanted to avoid using the term “interactive”. This word has become too vague, like “postmodern”, “virtual”, “deconstruction” or other terms that mean too many things and is exhausted. Duchamp said “the look makes the picture” and when we say that every artwork is interactive, the word is not that interesting anymore. Also it sounds too much like a top-down 1-bit trigger button —you push and something happens— which is too predatorial and simple. Of course “relational” is not my term, I read about it in Maturana and Varela’s neurological studies and also the word has been used since the 60s to describe cross-referencing databases. The great Brazilian artists Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica also used the term in the 60s to refer to their user-activated objects and installations. “Relational” has a more horizontal quality, it’s more collective: events happen in fields of activity that may have resonances in several places in the network.
Posted by e | reply »“Placelessness” and “multiplace” are terms concerning the condition of the artwork, but also of ourselves, and of architecture. The feeling that you belong to nowhere, and that you belong to many places at the same time. These two things are the same phenomenon. Personally, I live between Madrid, Montreal and Mexico City and yet I feel like a foreigner in all three cities. I now talk about “going back homes”, in plural. The sense of continuity and complicity is created through the persistence of connectivity and dialog with these places. Locality, like Identity, is a performance.
Every city is many cities in one, all of them overlapping and coexisting. I think coexistence is a very important concept. Two years ago I heard Edward Said speak about how he does not believe that the separation of Israel and Palestine, a reterritorialization on the basis of identity, will work. He called this approach “Identitarian”, that is the authoritarianism that comes from identity and the definition of who’s in and who’s out. There have been centuries of coexistence of different religions in the Middle East, and Said stresses that these models of coexistence should be reactivated and somehow be made more heroic. I find that very interesting, this possibility that you have in the same time and place intensely different planes of experience. The planes may be very different, but sometimes a small connection is being made, either locally or temporarily or post-geographically. There’s always seepage between the different levels. We all live in relational space, and time. For me the emphasis is not on the fetish of the structure, on what is top and what is down, it’s more in the interconnection, the relationship between two things, the relationship between our experience and the outside world of constructed, consensual, sensory experience, if it exists at all. For me what’s important is where these worlds meet.
thinking about dance-related
[some thinking about dance from other angles, and ways of using video and dance... looking at the moving body (and what if this movement moves across generations, we may ask?) ...thought it might be of interest for us. below, from the press release of the exhibition "Trances"]
Mathias Poledna
Version, 2004.
16mm black and white film, 10:40 min (16mm frame enlargement)
Courtesy Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne; Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles; Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna.
Trances
Four dance-related works from the permanent collections
Rineke Dijkstra, Douglas Gordon, Joachim Koester, Mathias Poledna.
11th of october- 15th of december
Musée départemental d’art contemporain de Rochechouart
Place du Château
87600 Rochechouart, France
“Why have moving images of bodies taken the place of statues? Because the world has been set in motion, firstly as a planet, then as a poetic universe,” wrote Jean Louis Schefer in the introduction to his On the World and Moving Images. Rochechouart Museum of Contemporary Art’s new exhibition “Trances” explores this theme of the moving body and world through four key works from its collection, evoking aspects of dance, performance as well as experimental, ethnographic or science films.
Rineke Dijkstra’s The Buzzclub, Liverpool, UK/Mysteryworld, Zaadam (1996-1997), records the behaviour of adolescents at a night club as they dance in front of a white backdrop, isolated from the crowd. They are filmed directly facing the camera but rapidly forget its presence as the techno beat takes over. Douglas Gordon, in Hysterical (1995), appropriates an old science film, projecting it in slow motion and partly reversed to obtain a mirror effect on two tilted screens, this double screen projection creating a three-dimensional space that spectators can move through and walk around. The film itself is an early 20th century documentary on hysteria, the study of which provided foundations for the beginnings of modern psychoanalysis. Mathias Poledna’s short film Version shows a group of dancers silently floating in darkness. Their lack of any identifiable location heightens the sense of mystery and increases the dancers’ photogenic impact. Poledna also playfully evokes the feeling of an historical setting without ever pinpointing a specific moment in time. Like a haunted doppelgänger of this film, Joachim Koester’s Tarantism shows actors imitating the trance-like states witnessed in primitive dance rituals, faking convulsions not unlike those seen in Douglas Gordon’s Hysterical. The title Tarantism refers to the folk dance from Southern Italy thought to have its origins in the spasms caused by the tarantula spider’s bite. In a predominently Catholic country, the dance survives, some claim, as a remnant of ancient Dionysian practices.
Posted by e | reply »