Configurations of Time: Imagining Other Temporalities in the Artist Residency

This book offers an alternate lens to rethink how we process art—and life—inside residency time.

Looking beyond the conventional and managerial, Angela Serino sets out in search of what is put in motion by the experience of being “in residence” that is not instantly visible or quantifiable. In a culture where the pressure to produce tangible results is paramount, Configurations of Time holds space for an environment that values process in its own right, unlearning and research. Finding inspiration from a wide range of artists’ works and conceptualisations of time in science and cultural theory, such as Carlo Rovelli, Lisa Baraitser, and María Puig de la Bellacasa, Serino looks at how time is spent in residencies through the different and overlapping concepts of space time, care time, and soil time.

Through speculative storytelling and fostered by analytical hypotheses and first-hand experiences, this book offers an alternative reference guide. It creates a highly poetic space, providing insights into the ethics of the residency field in today’s accelerated and contested times.

Author: Angela Serino. Graphic design: Cleo Tsw. Copy editor: Olamiju Fajamisin. Editorial advisor: Freek Lomme. Published by Set Margins’. Artists: Sema Bekirovic, Louise Bourgeois, Every Ocean Hughes, Toril Johannessen, Tamara Kuselman, Katja Mater, Harriet Rose Morley, School of Temporalities (Annette Krauss, Maja Bekan), Saša Spačal, Laura Wiedijk. Thanks to Mondriaan Foundation.

Link to purchase the book on Set Margins’ here.

Photos of the book’s inside pages. All photos by Annette Behrens.

L'Utopia Presente – UNIDEE Residency Module

This booklet serves as a polyphonic account of the UNIDEE residency module L'Utopia presente (October 17–20, 2024), curated by Angela Serino. It consists of a series of posters and includes a text by Serino, alongside traces of the discussions held by participants during their intensive stay at Cittadellarte. These conversations centered around three key themes: rooting oneself in a territory, building alliances and economies, and transforming narratives and imaginaries. The text is in Italian.

L’Utopia presente at Latronico (PT), Meeting of STARE – Italian Association of artist residences, Cultural Association Vincenzo De Luca-APS, Nov 2024.

The Museum of Edible Earth by masharu

“mangiare la terra per nutrire l’anima e creare relazioni. The Museum of Edible Earth by masharu”. A conversation with masharu on awkwardness, communities, old and new traditions, and feeding one’s soul. Published in: Robida Magazine n.9 (2023), On Soils, pp.177-182.

Link to purchase the issue here.

More information about the artists here.

The Museum of Edible Earth by masharu (detail from the museum’s collection), in the exhibition “Our Living Soil”, Zone2Source, Amsterdam, 2022. Photo by Thomas Lenden. Courtesy of the artists and Zone2Source

Between the Standing and the Inclined, Kunstlicht Issue Vol.44, N.4, Editors' text

What is the inclined? Why support structures? And how can these help us speak about change—(because yes, we still want many things around us to be different)?

Support is generally intended as something that holds up or serves as a foundation, provides a basis for the existence or subsistence of someone or something, keeps from yielding, and gives comfort. Inspired by Adriana Cavarero’s words, this issue explores 'support' as all that sustains and shapes an art practice—what enables someone to stand as an artist or art professional today, whether in the absence of or despite certain systems, within the gaps of material constraints, transforming these limitations into opportunities for collective action and self-empowerment.

Guest-editors of this issue: Maja Bekan and Angela Serino, with contributions by Manuela Zammit and Alina Lupu, Patricia H. McMeans, Eleonore Pano-Zavaroni and Kathrin Wolkowicz, Multiple Choice, Irena Borić, Mari Kalabegashvili, Gunndís Ýr Finnbogadóttir, Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodriguez, toni kritzer.

Kunstlicht is a Dutch academic journal focusing on art, visual culture, and architecture. Three issues are published each year, each focusing on one specific theme. 

Kunstlicht. Maja Bekan and Angela Serino studio session. Ph.: M.Bekan

Mescolanza, a card collection to connect words, places and species

This text is a conversation between Angela Serino and Irina Shapiro about ‘Mescolanza (mixture)’, the project developed by Serino for the School for MultiSpecies Knowledges at Amstelpark (May-July, 2022).

The conversation took place on the 8th of July, in Shapiro’s garden in Rotterdam. It continued online and was edited in its final version in December 2022.

The School for MultiSpecies Knowledges is a multi-anual programme developed by Zone2Source (a platform for art, nature and technology) and Open Set (platform for art/design research & professional development), and curated by Alice Smits and Irina Shapiro. Together with participants and audiences, the School aims to ‘explores new learning environments to rethink our relationship with other organisms and its implications for how we live together’.

Photos by Balans LaB

‘What is Magical is Hidden too: an Exploration of Zone 00’ (with ARRC)

‘What is Magical is Hidden too: an Exploration of Zone 00’ by ARRC, Art Residency Research Collective

In Summer 2022, I was invited together with ARRC’s collective members to CAP, Curating Advanced Practice, seminar organized by Stiftung Künstlerdorf in Schöppingen, Germany.

Titled ‘Towards Permacultural Institutions: Exercises in Collective Thinking’, the seminar was curated by Aneta Rostkowska, Nada Rosa Schroer and Julia Haarmann and focused on permaculture principle and vegetal thinking as a way to rethink how we work in our residency and art organisations.

Inspired by the theme of this gathering, we held a group workshop on natural patterns as tools for self-reflection and inspiration for changes in our individual and collaborative work. You can read all the details here !

The text was published in: “Towards Permacultural Institutions: Exercises in Collective Thinking”, Editors: Julia Haarmann, Nada Rosa Schroer, Schöppingen, 2022, ISBN: 978-3-937828-38-1

“A shock can be many things. A shock can bring many things” for Station to Station #4

“A shock can be many things. A shock can bring many things” is a new article commissioned by DutchCulture | TransArtists for their online magazine ‘Station to Station’ edition n. #4, titled Gamechanger.

Station to Station is the online magazine of DutchCulture | TransArtists, focused on international collaboration in the field of artist-in-residencies and artistic practices. Each issue raises a current theme through guest contributions by a variety of people working in the cultural field, from residency organisers to curators, museum managers, biologists, philosophers as well as TransArtists team members.

Gamechanger is the theme of this edition: we believe that residencies can be powerful agents of change. We invited guest authors who are advocating for structural change and are all taking steps to create a more sustainable, inclusive and fair art world. They are working in and with artist-in-residencies from Argentina to Kenya, and they speak from their respective practices as researcher, artist, residency organizer, designer and curator. With Station to Station #4 they present a kaleidoscope of imaginative, thought-provoking practices.

Contributions by Pablo Caligaris, Zhenya Chaika, Fernando Garcia Dory, Geraldine Hepp, Poppy Spowage and Maïmouna Jallow, Doreen Toutikian, a.o.

Here the link to the issue (download).

Interview with the author by Irmeli Kokko (2021)

This interview follows the research gathering ‘Summer Well’ at the Saari Residency in Finland (August 2021).

In her research on residencies, curator Angela Serino examines what residencies mean to artists and explores different dimensions of time for artists while working at a residence and in terms of what happens afterwards. In her interview with Irmeli Kokko, Serino explains how the pandemic has affected artists’ work and how residencies have also had to re-evaluate the sustainability of their activities in a new way.

Read the full interview here.

The Body is the House (text on Tamuna Chabashvili) (2021)

Text accompanying Tamuna Chabashvili's solo show at Gallery Artbeat, Tbilisi, Georgia (14 Sept - 24 Oct 2021)

Tamuna Chabashvili, artist's archive (detail), 2021 Courtesy of the artist

“He inverts the concept of house and body. Now the body is the house. It is a community experience. (..) He is connected to the others in a common body. Corporal expression here has an essential importance. It is through it that the cells are built, for example by opening one’s arms, creating tunnels with one’s legs spread out through which people may pass through.”(1) These words by Lygia Clark describe the experience of her ‘propositions’, developed together with the students in Paris at the beginning of the ‘70s, where a series of found objects became catalysts for the experience of a collective body(2). 

This image of a reversed relationship between the house and the body has struck me for a long time. Being far from home myself, I found it empowering to think that via certain postures and gestures, the body – any body – can open up to, support and protect others. Such a body does not necessarily need a home (as a material construct made of roof and walls) because it can become one at any time. 

‘The body is the house’ has circled around in my thoughts again – first quietly and then with increasing persistence, when I looked at Tamuna Chabashvili's work during a studio visit in Amsterdam. 

Going through her projects, I saw the body and the idea of a house mingling and echoing each other in several ways and for different reasons, yet all centered around a common point of origin: growing up as a teenager during the collapse of the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet years, and the consequent disillusionment and depression caused by the political instability for a whole generation.

In “A Bundle” (2015), for instance, one of the first works developed in Tbilisi, the body is literally the tool that allowed the artist to measure and recreate the neighbourhood where she was born and grew up, and now radically changed due to the urban redevelopment(3). In “A Mantle” (2018), the ongoing research project started in residency in Berlin, the body is the measure as well as the carrier of a personal archive in progress in the shape of a mantel. 

In the first case, we see a body that carries material from a home, and a hometown, that is invisible to an external eye, yet that is still there and palpable under the skin, in the form of memories. In the second, the body becomes the place where to make visible anew – sewn together in an adult gesture – the memories and the culture that the artist has collected over the years also while far from home. Wearing this mantel-archive-disposable home(4) allows her to both show and shelter the intimate self, and to speak as a woman artist from a place of protection (like a house is). 

It would not be right to highlight only the personal, autobiographical dimension of her body in the work though. In the conscious process to continuously mold the space for her own voice ‘in-betweens’ (facts and memories, East and West, personal and collective history of trauma), Tamuna’s works call in action also other people’s bodies and with them stories of ‘broken’ homes and attempts to rebuild new ones often rearranging and recontextualizing objects, fragments taken from houses left to escape war or violence (“The Corridors of Conflict. Abkhazia 1989-1995”, “Supra of Her Own” are the ones that come to my mind here, as they show different ways to do that).

The new works presented on the occasion of this solo show continue this fertile intertwining between the body and a sense of home, as a place of grounding and protection especially when one is on the move. This time, the numerous layers of a personal and collective history of trauma and (forced) displacement take the form of minimal and deliberately simple signs, dense in their dryness. The works result from a process of removal and distillation, rather than accumulation of traces and documents: there is a search for essentiality.

Each blanket with its bright colors and geometric motifs hosts specific prints, intentionally abstract at first sight. The titles of the pieces help us to identify what we are looking at, while the signs of use on the blankets are clues to the existence of a layered history.

Layed on the gray and blue checkered fabric, we have an organic entangled set of lines and points: a map. We do not know the identity of this territory. Is it an existing landscape? What is its current name and was it the same before the war? Is it an earthly territory at all?

On the yellow and red blanket, it stands out a beautiful, sophisticated image made of lines and numbers. It is a set of instructions to make a portable home, a tent, and it comes from a manual, part of the ongoing research for ‘the Mantel’. This key-element of the artist’s archive is also present on a different multi-color blanket, as a clear cut, almost abstract design of an open mantel. Finally, the pink and green blanket hosts a series of very intriguing elements. This time it is the verse of a lullaby, whose words are, however, hard to grasp. The artist, indeed, has decided to highlight the space in between the letters in order to make visible “what is behind those words”. Differently than in “Supra of Her Own”, the intention is to move away from the words as carriers of meaning, and leave space to a (childhood) memory of a singing voice. The attention here is for a more intimate, visceral sense of being home, that calls for the presence of, and a bond with another person, another body. 

A map, a voice, (instructions for) a tent, a mantel. In this installation, I see a body who is fiercely committed to mimic a house, to recreate a sense of home. All the elements in the room are, indeed, somehow tools to position, ground, protect temporarily oneself: ways to create a home away from home, especially if in a new, unknown territory. Together they make a survival kit, which the artist confidently offers to everyone as a conceptual tool to ground or reground oneself wherever one is.

Taking the vulnerable position of the displaced person as the starting point, the artist’s work revolves more and more around the idea of a ‘safe space’ in the form of an emergency dwelling (like a portable home) that shelters her creative processes allowing her to gather experiences, process them and pass them on. 

What we see in the room is the tangible effect of such artistic development.

(Amsterdam, 4 September 2021)

Photocredit: Gallery Artbeat

Footnotes:
1. Lygia Clark, ‘The Body is the House: sexuality, invasion of individual territory’, in: Cornelia H.Butler, Luis Perez-Oramas (eds.), Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art 1948-1988, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2014, pp. 247-249.

2.Brazilian artist Lygia Clark taught at Sorbonne in Paris from 1972 to 1976, before returning to Brazil. In her classes gestural communication and sensory perception were the key to create a participatory experience that blurred the boundaries between artist, students and spectators.

3.“A Bundle” consists of a map embroidered on textile and a series of drawings. “The square piece of map is thought as a bundle, a piece of cloth used to wrap one’s belongings in the course of a journey. The numbers and the words embroidered on the textile map are based on V. Dolidze street and its surrounding area in the Saburtalo District in Tbilisi. Each drawing locates a story through retracing and linking the numbers to each other. Through the depiction of my body-mindscape I recreate the city, thus retracing my emotions, memories, and questions”. (From the artist’s portfolio).

4.“The Mantle embodies a process of patterning my own mantle as a possible wrap, a straightjacket, a portable home, a tent, a diary.” – the artist states about this work in her portfolio.

Cultivating Time, time and residencies (2018)

Kunstlicht is an academic journal for art, visual culture, and architecture based in Amsterdam. Each issue is dedicated to a specific theme. Issue Vol. 39, N. 2 (“Unpacking Residencies: situating the production of cultural relations”) focused on the role and value of artists’ in residencies. Guest- editors were anthropologist Herbert Ploegman and visual artist and Expodium co-director Nikos Doulos. I contributed with a new article on time and residencies.

‘Taking inspiration from Yield (2016) by artist Laura Wiedjik, the article proposes to rethink the dimension of time in relation to art residency programmes. By bringing together recent understandings of time from quantum physics and specific cases from current artists’ projects, the author proposes to ‘think through time’ as a way to acknowledge the existence of various degrees of visibility and of different timelines in a residency experience.’

Cultivating Time, pp 60-73 in: Kunstlicht, academic journal for art, visual culture, and architecture, Vol. 39, N. 2, 2018, '“Unpacking Residencies: situating the production of cultural relations”.

“Dare forma al tempo: tracce - tempo - residenze per artisti” (2017) (In Italian)

This article was published in: boîte #18 , art magazine (Summer 2017)

"Boîte” magazine is a magazine in the shape of a cardboard box in a limited edition of 250 copies bringing together unbound pages, images and words.
 
It was published from 2009 to 2019 by Boîte, a studio founded by Giulia Brivio and Federica Boragina devoted to research and production in the contest of the art publishing. Each issue dealt with one single topic from contemporary art, offering many different gazes from many different horizons.

"Boîte” #18 focused on the ‘non - documentation’. “Dare forma al tempo: tracce - tempo - residenze per artisti” is an article in Italian where I touched on issues of invisibility, artistic production and documentation of a residency’s period.
You can order a copy of the issue here: https://boiteonline.org/products/boite-18

Setting off on a Journey for "Sacred Repositories" (text on Rory Pilgrim) (2015) →

Text accompanying Rory Pilgrim's solo show at Galerie Andriesse-Eyck, Amsterdam  (14 February - 28 March 2015)  

“We no longer reveal totality within ourselves by lightning flashes. We approach it through the accumulation of sediments” (Édouard Glissant) 

"Sacred Repository N.1: Violently Speaking" is a work about geology and renewal, fluidity and excavation. As a starting point to the exhibition, Rory Pilgrim has selected a series of black and white photographs that are key to understanding the scope of the journey of his first film work. The starting photo shows two shirtless black men, their bodies curved into their work: they are miners chipping stone with clubs and picking a channel in a stone bed. This quarry in Portland, England, is in an area known among British builders for centuries because of the quality of its stone. Several governmental buildings have been built using this stone, one of which is the United Nations headquarters in New York. In one of the photographs of the series we see the official laying of the corner stone of UN permanent headquarters in 1949: a collective ceremony that "attests an act of faith,.. of unshakeable faith" to accomplish the goals of world peace and international cooperation by the then recently founded intergovernmental organization.  

The formal words spoken by US President Harry S.Truman at the ceremony in front of an enthusiastic, hopeful crowd draw a parallel between the purity and uniqueness of the cornerstone and people’s capacity to maintain such an ambitious project. The building's construction and the actions set to take place in it are bound together in this speech and a collective pact is set, sealed by the Portland stone as a cornerstone of peace. But is this relation enough to keep this promise of world peace over time? 

What happens when words are closed off in our throats because they no longer contain the strength to enter the world and change it? 

If “Words become broken / When history becomes open / And words no longer say what they mean”, where do we turn to keep our faith and nurture our spirits?

It is at this point of rupture, of broken promises and growing dissatisfaction with the state of things, where the journey of the film really starts. 

Despite the compelling images of the quarry, the frequent sounds of ships’ whistles, and sea waves lashing the Portland coast running through large part of the film, "Violently Speaking” is not a film about the journey of the Portland stones shipped from the coast of Dorset to the US, but rather what they stand for. It is indeed a film about the search for a new collective cornerstone: an element that is able to provide us with solidity and security and which can offer a shared ground from where a sense of togetherness with joy and hope can be built.

As an archeologist of the spirit, Pilgrim sets off on this journey to dig out and unearth sediments equally precious as the Portland stones. Instead of the dealing with only the physical stone, Pilgrim realizes a series of cultural excavations, making a cross-sectional cut through history and space. Going back and forth between the two continents, he draws lines of connections among natural sites (Portland Island, the Great Salt Lake in Utah), congressional buildings (some of which are institutional, like the UN General Assembly Room, but others which are not, such as the Quaker Meeting house in Utah and the activist office for Trans issues in New York), and groups of intergenerational women (the Quaker’s group, the Drag Queens and five British teenage girls invited to work with him). 

With this gesture, Pilgrim reveals that a 'repository' of promises, faith and new hope can be found in as diverse places as nature, a building, a word, a person’s silence or a dance movement. 

Almost as if following the regular rhythms of the waves governed by the moon, these different elements of nature, voices and women return cyclically in the film, highlighting a continuous transition from one material state to another, from one setting to another. 

As the film unfolds some of these repositories reveal their particular potential in generating the space for renewal, transformation and change that the artist is seeking. 

This is the case, for instance, of the 'voice' of the waves. 

“Oh I see waves /Waves that speak away/ As they crash into the shore / Violently Speaking”.       

In a carefully developed tension, the rhythmic sound of the waves lashing against the shore is present during most of the film. Sometimes they are calm sounds of gentle waves in the open sea, other times, we hear them hitting hard against the British cliffs. While following their movement we gain awareness of their potential. Water’s lightness and liquidity is no less powerful than the heavy materiality and solidity of the stones from the quarry of Portland’s island. On the contrary, the repetitive motion of waves can mold existing shapes or seep into existing structures and break them apart. The image of waves overlapping the round table and chairs in the UN assembly room seem to refer to just this possibility of disrupting existing orders while also acting as a metaphor for new forms of more fluid and inclusive belonging and identification.

Sea waves are not the only ‘voices’ that, violently at times, speak in the film. As in the artist’s other works, there is a privileged attention, care and interest to bring forth the voices of specific social groups, who in different manners fight for self-expression, social justice and equality or practice active forms of spirituality undermining principles of authority and hierarchy. Women and teenagers are still the most valuable ‘voices’ to hear. However, in the film there is not only attention for who speaks and what is said: there is as much attention towards words of self-empowerment and hope as there is to silence. Silent pauses alternate with singular words (‘compassion’, ‘mystery’, ‘understanding’, ‘acceptance’), the powerfully liberating voice of the Queer singer, the joyful lyrics of the teenagers’ group, and the sound of the sea waves. All the sounds of the film – connected as much to the human presence as to natural elements – are purified by silence. Silence creates a protective zone. And it is in such a condition, according to poet Caroline Bergvall, that “the catalepsy of experience will start releasing new vocabulary”. The silence that balances words appears as another possible repository.

The result of this first movement in search of “Secret Repositories” is an intimate work that asks for a similarly intimate focus from the viewer. As in Pilgrim’s previous works, we are still in front of a poignant exploration of life’s fragilities and of the fundamental contradictions we are all composed of – spirit/matter, belief/skepticism, resistance/resignation. The questions on the hand- embroidered banner unveiled on the occasion of the Stedelijk Museum re-opening are still pressing: 

“Where do we find hope that builds from the past? Where do we find hope in a future to come?” (“Open”, 2012)

Note: all the pictures are stills from the film "Sacred Repository N.1: Violently Speaking"(2014) by R.Pilgrim. Courtesy: the artist. Read more about Rory’s work on the artist's website here.

Role Exchange (then and now)

An Interview with Marina Abramovic by Angela Serino (September 2009).

---

Angela Serino: I have been aware of your performance Role Exchange since the start of the Red Light Art Amsterdam project in January 2009. I did some research in the archive of de Appel and found out that, according to their press release, your performance took place in July 1976. In some other on-line sources and printed articles, the work is quoted as having happened in 1975. Can you tell me when you did this performance?

Marina Abramovic: I think it was 1975, because it was before I started the collaboration with Ulay, which I started in 1976. Are you aware that the son of the prostitute contacted de Appel recently? This is interesting because de Appel’s director just wrote me yesterday, I haven’t had time to answer yet. This guy actually has contacted de Appel to let them know that his mother is dead. He wanted to know what kind of work she took part in and whether she did it for the money or for a real interest in art. And he wanted to tell me about her life and explain why she became a prostitute.
So this recent new attention in this work of mine is so interesting: after all these years now your questioning and that the son has come out of nowhere…

Angela: How did you develop this performance, how did you come up with the idea of exchanging your space with a prostitute? Why did you choose to go into a brothel?

Marina: I came to Amsterdam in 1975 to participate in a television program about body art. I was invited by de Appel and by a television program at that time. De Appel also invited me to develop a project inside the gallery, which was one of the only performance galleries in Europe at that time.
That was the first time that I had seen the red-light district. Coming from a communist country, this was rather shocking for me. I had never seen such thing before in my life. Plus I had had a very strict education, quite military, from my parents and the whole idea of being a prostitute was that it is the lowest job you can get – to sell your own body. So I saw it as a highly shameful position for a woman.
For me it was very interesting to see how I could explore that position and see what it was really about. So I proposed to de Appel to exchange place with a prostitute. At that time I had been a professional artist for ten years and I was looking for somebody who had been a prostitute for the same amount of time, so that we could exchange professions. It took me a very long time to find somebody. I quickly found the streets where the prostitutes were working but they were controlled by the pimps. None of the prostitutes wanted to collaborate and the pimps were only very rude to me. Until Ulay, whom I met in that time though we didn’t start working together then, helped me out. He actually knew somebody who knew a pimp who owned three streets of prostitutes. So we had a meeting with him and he proposed that he could join the project with his own wife. So we went to meet her.

Angela: His wife was a prostitute?

Marina: Yes. So we met her. It was the most amazing experience in my life for quite a long time. She had children in the countryside, not in Amsterdam. She had a business with her husband who had other prostitutes. She only worked in the morning, not in the afternoon. Then he would wait for her in the early afternoon and they would go for tea or for dinner. She said they had a wonderful marriage and everything was fine. She told me that she saw this as a business and that her body was completely divided emotionally from it. I remember when we finished working on this project that I kept seeing her. She said: “Oh just pass by and we can have coffee together.” In the mornings, if you see the curtain closed that means that she was working so I would come maybe later than 11 o’clock and see if the curtain was still closed. I would knock on the window and she would just open the window and say: “Oh just give me five minutes, it’s only a blowjob.” When she had finished with her customer she would open the door and we would go for a coffee. It was quite incredible to see how she could separate the emotional and the physical.
When I proposed the deal I wanted to make she accepted, but I proposed six hours work and the fee I had at that time was like 50 guilders. She told me that she liked the project and she liked me but she was not Mother Theresa of Calcutta and that she could earn much more money for those six hours of work. She agreed to take part in the project only for three hours. So basically she did me a really big favour. I gave her half of the money, half of the fee.
Before starting she explained a few rules to me. The most important one was that I could not go down on her price, because I would ruin her business.
It was amazing, I was dressed and sitting in the window. She was dressed as for her work, but going to de Appel art gallery. And we both had the camera filming this.

Angela: Were you dressed in a normal outfit or were you dressed up differently because of the new, special place you had to go to?

Marina: I was dressed as if I was going to the opening of my show. I was elegant with a black dress. She was dressed more explicitly and sexual. Then we filmed, in my case with a secret camera and with a normal TV camera in her case. And it was really interesting. When we put our films together she looked at my recording and said that I would starve to death, because I would never make it as a prostitute; I was not talented at all.
It was really interesting, you know, people were telling me that when she first came to the gallery the public asked her how she felt. And she said “I feel very warm” and she started to take her clothes off. Then they asked her: “Do you like art? What do you know about art?” She said she didn’t know anything about art but she knew “all about fucking”. In my case, I was sitting there and I was really stressed and worried because psychologically it was an extremely difficult piece. I felt like I was nobody in that position.
I didn’t want to change the regular flow of the costumers of the Red Light district. So the gallery added the concept and the plan of the performance without actually giving the address of where I was working. So if anybody wanted to find me he or she had to search through the whole district. I did not want to create some kind of exhibition scene around the window.

Angela: What happened when you were there?

Marina: While I was sitting there two costumers came. One came and asked for her and left. The other one was really drunk and wanted to know the price, and it was too high for him. I could not lower the price – that was basically the only rule I had to respect. So he left.
After she saw the film, I asked her: “Why do you think I am so bad?” She told me it was very simple. If you sit in the window you can always see any costumer coming from the left and coming from the right before they see you. She said: “If you see a small man with a kind of scary worried look, you have to make a really motherly face so he is not scared to come in.” But I was sitting there in a position of performing, just looking in one direction, so I had scared everybody away.
After that I continued my relationship with her. I took her to exhibitions and openings and she almost always came with friends, other prostitutes. She brought them because she was very proud of this art connection. After a while I lost contact with her and I didn’t know she had died. Only yesterday I received the letter from her son and I find this a very strange coincidence.

Angela: How was the brothel?

Marina: There was a very simple bed, condoms, a towel and a sink. It was really a very military kind of set up, very functional.

Angela: Were you interested in exploring the position of a prostitute, or was your work pointing to what art could or should be, not just a display of objects to be sold but a place where something disturbing like prostitution went on?
Did you think about the economic aspect?

Marina: I think it was both. First of all, the inner experience was incredibly important for me. To be in that kind of mental and emotional state in which I actually was stepping out of the protection of being an artist into the completely unprotected area of being a prostitute. I was interested to know how that really felt. Which is really an incredible experience because if the costumers come and would pay the full price I would really have done it. It just happened that I followed the rules and it did not happen. But just this possibility was so scary, it was another world, which was not connected to Art, but I wanted to know that other world. And I also wanted to see how her world worked in the gallery.
And whether these two worlds could really be connected or in communication with each other.
In a way the communication happened, in the form of our continuing friendship. But still neither of us understood each other. So it didn’t really work.
And another thing was really interesting. Later on there were a few feminist books coming out and one of these authors wanted to interview her about her being a prostitute. She was extremely angry about this feminist approach and she told them: “I don’t feel like a prostitute, I’m a social worker, I do social work because any man can come all morning to talk to me, most don’t even come to be fucked or to have a blowjob. They come to talk about the problems at home.” So she saw her function in a social context. Her attitude was very interesting. But I think that is something very difficult to explain.

Angela: Did this work change your opinion of prostitution and your ideas of prostitutes?

Marina: Definitely, I saw them in such a new way. I stayed for a long time in Amsterdam and every time when my friend would visit me from abroad we would go to the red light district. I used to live very close to the district so we would make tours. After this work my entire position on prostitution changed. I see it now as from their point of view, as a real a job, a job of selling the body without emotional attachment.
But what happens in the process is that human emotions get fucked up. You can’t sustain this profession for long because a lot of problems come up in the end with this work, like drug use.
Then the profession takes over, which is much the same thing that happens with artists. It’s a very interesting thing if you think about it. Many artists these days die from an overdose, because of the intensity of being an artist and the demand of society on them is so high that actually on the end both prostitutes and artists often come to the same end.

Angela: Did you try to draw a comparison between Art and prostitution? Art could be seen as a beautiful object on display, like prostitutes are, but it should be something different?

Marina: It could be a long discourse and a very interesting one. But for me, I can say, it’s all about contexts. I have an example. If you have the baker in the bakery making the bread, he is the baker. But if you have the artist making bread in the gallery it’s an art piece. So it is the same thing, if the artist comes to the brothel and makes a work of art, that space is transformed. But if a prostitute is there this is not art, you know, so it’s all about contexts, seeing things in perspective. I think her being in de Appel was really an art piece. Me being in her context is more of a personal experience than achieving anything like creating an art space. It was not an art space when I sat there in her window.

Angela: Was there an exchange of public? Did anybody from the gallery find you in this performance?

Marina: Yes, but not too many. Even though at the same time, you were one of the many passers-by and possible clients of the red light district. However, anybody else who would pass there didn’t see that I was an artist, they saw me as a prostitute like all the others, though probably not with an enticing expression, but that is all. They didn’t see any kind of change so I didn’t make any impact in changing that space into any kind of artistic activity. It’s just an exchange of roles. And I didn’t want to change that. I was interested in exchanging the role and taking that role, and that’s it. It is a different thing when you invite people to come to that kind of space. But I didn’t do that; it was just a normal crowd of people who passed by. There were a few people from the art world who passed, but that didn’t change anything. The work had a lot of influence in the art world because people talked about it for a long time after. But it didn’t change anything in the red light district.

Angela: In the case of Redlight Art Amsterdam the situation is very different. We were invited to temporarily occupy the vacant brothels by the Municipality and De Key. You were looking for a context by yourself, you chose with whom you wanted to do this exchange in order to explore the role of a prostitute and to question the art context. In this case the artist is invited to react to the space of the brothel, to relate to a context, which has already been framed by someone else.

Marina: This is very similar to an exhibition project I did in Melbourne where the artist had to react to the space of a disused women’s prison. You could come and make this prison a space for an exhibition. I went there to see the prison. It was really interesting, people were placing their objects and photographs. For me this was displaced. If you wanted to enter my space in the women’s prison, you had to sign an agreement that you were willing to be emotionless for 25 minutes, that is not much. So you have security guards in uniforms bringing you to this space and you are going to be tied up with the headphones which completely isolate you from the cells. You are restricted to really feeling what it means to be a public exhibit. People went into total panic with a claustrophobic reaction, but my reaction was, OK, you want to work with the prison, then do something with the prison. Don’t just play with it. It was the same for me with the red light role change. I wanted to exchange roles to see what it was about. I’m always very confrontational in my actions.

Angela: How did the art public react, what were their comments? Were they curious about this lady or were they just rethinking their relation with prostitution? What were the comments you got from the lady?

Marina: You know, it was so long ago, in 1975. I remember there was a lot written about this piece. First I didn’t go to the opening so I didn’t hear direct comments. But it was a very large opening and many people came out of curiosity to see her. Where I was there was hardly anybody. I know it was a very curious project for Amsterdam, and until that time nobody had done anything with the red light district so it was referred to as an original project but I don’t remember the comments exactly.

Angela: Do you know anything about the changes that Amsterdam in undergoing now, with the prostitution?

Marina: Actually I don’t have any relation with Amsterdam at the moment. I’ve been living for nine years in New York.

Angela: I have already asked you about the economic aspect of your piece. Was there a judgement on what art is or should be?

Marina: We are talking about the 1970’s, it was so different then. For me it was amazing to come from Belgrade and Yugoslavia, where everything was forbidden, to the place where there were free sex and the free drugs. I was completely overwhelmed by this freedom, the Provos and the movements of the seventies. For me it was freedom, everything was free.
I really do believe prostitution is the oldest profession in the world. Every society had prostitutes from the beginning of civilisation. And every society denies the existence of it. Amsterdam was the only one that said ‘Yes, we have prostitutes and we give them social security and health care.’ This was really positive at that time. I don’t know what happened later because I haven’t been there for nine years. I don’t know what’s going on in Amsterdam at present.

Angela: The municipality has decided to close most of the brothels and coffee shops in the red light district. It’s part of a bigger plan of changing the public image of the city. So while it was once known for sex and drugs they now want to replace those things with creative industries like fashion designers. Artists, as creative people, are included in this new category that will have extra space and more opportunities in place of prostitution. It’s a complete switch.

Marina: OK, this is fine but what help is provided for people who don’t have any profession other than being a prostitute. What is happening to them?

Angela: They are very angry because the only money that has been invested by the government is for associations which work with prostitutes to find them other jobs. For some ladies it works but others just want to have their places back. They just want to have a place where they can work. The other reason the municipality is closing these houses down is they have evidence that the owners of the brothels or the pimps are involved in criminal activity. For this reason they are able to take possession of the houses from the brothel owners.  The former owner is paid by the municipality but the prostitutes, who worked for him, get nothing and don’t have a place to work anymore.  So that’s the main problem.

Marina: It’s similar elsewhere. In Brazil or New Zealand, for instance, where the clearfelling of the rainforest is bad for global warming, you can forbid the cutting of timber but then you have to deal with the hundreds of thousands of people who live from that work. These people don’t have anything to eat. You have to find them other jobs. You just can’t stop one thing and create another problem.

---

[A version of this interview translated into Italian is published in: Juliet Art magazine n.160, 2010, pp.101-103. The English interview is available on-line on the project’s website and at de Appel’s library archive, de Appel art center, Amsterdam]

How to Lift the Body and Fly

Angela Serino in conversation with Shana Moulton on her project “Decalcifying our pineal glands” at Kunsthuis SYB (September 2013)

---

Angela Serino: The hectic rhythms of modern life often put lots of pressure on our bodies and minds, a pressure that we try to release and to compensate in several ways, playing sports or being closer to nature being among the most common.

About that, one of the most fascinating things I've seen in Beijing (where I am presently writing from) in recent weeks is how Chinese people actively use the parks and the green areas of the city. In a lake close to where I'm staying, young and elderly people gather from the early hours of the morning to practice various physical activities: swimming, fishing, walking, Tai Chi, playing table tennis or just simply using the sports equipment available in the park. What struck me is that they participate next to each other in an almost nonchalant way, without being touched or disturbed by the others nearby. In contrast, when I walk in a park in Amsterdam, I feel that I, and the other people, are very aware of each other’s movements, what we wear, how much we sweat, etc. Perhaps this is another way in which different ideologies manifest themselves (Chinese communism versus Western individualism). Or perhaps there is more that I will untangle over the coming months.
Can you speak a little about what your ideas are on how people care about their body, for example by participating in sports in the open air, in parks or in nature, and how this is important for you (and Cynthia)?
Do you find differences in attitude between the US and Europe?

Shana Moulton: I think that in the US adults don't use outdoor space for recreation. It seems like outdoor recreation is confined to children, walking the dog, jogging and a few group sports like basketball, baseball and tennis. It’s very rare to see someone exercising outdoors in an unselfconscious way on their own but near other people, practicing martial arts or yoga or whatever. I know that I would feel uncomfortable doing so, but one goal I've always had in life was to learn Tai Chi, so that when I'm older I could go practice in parks and be the lone woman doing Tai Chi. For myself and Cynthia, what I'd really like to do outdoors is leave my body behind and fly over the landscape. But I also think this difference is related to how comfortable people are with their own bodies and physical abilities. In the US you would only practice sports in public if you are very athletic. But it seems in China everyone practices physical activities in public regardless of their ability. I didn't notice a huge difference between the US and Europe regarding this, besides there being even less group sports practiced in public, and rarely any solo sports.

Angela: ‘Decalcifying Our Pineal Glands’ is the title of your project at SYB. It suggests an attempt to crack open the rigidity with which we think. We know from neurosciences that over time, the connections between our neuronal cells tend to diminish if not properly stimulated. When this happens, we become less open to changes and start ‘ageing’, at least at a cerebral level.
Can you tell me more about the 'techniques' that you experimented with at SYB to defy this (risk of) rigidity of thought and also expand a little on the relationship between thought and body, thinking processes and physical movements that its title suggests?

Shana: The idea that our pineal glands become calcified as we age and less able to perform their natural functions is terrifying to me, and I wonder if it’s related to losing the sense of wonder and creativity we have as children. The pineal gland has been thought of as the third eye in some cultures, while Descartes regarded it as the seat of the soul. We know it produces melatonin but some scientists believe that it also contains DMT, a powerful hallucinogen, which is released into our brains when we die.
Several websites recommend the following things for decalcifying the pineal gland:

Avoiding all things fluoride
Garlic
Citric acid (LOTS of lemons will work)
Raw apple cider vinegar
Sungazing
Crystals
Regular Meditation and Chanting
Natural Entheogens
General Healthy living

We taught ourselves some of the basics of Tai Chi, we performed musical chanting, we cooked and ate only healthy vegetarian food, emphasising garlic and lemons (with the exception of some chocolate and stroopwafels), we did the scientific seven-minute cardio workout, we gazed at the sun with our mouths open, aiming the sunlight at the roof of our mouths, and we used fluoride-free toothpaste. Another recommendation for decalcifying the pineal gland is imbibing natural entheogens (not for everyone): Ayahuasca, Psilocybin Mushrooms, peyote, changa, cannabis, salvia, DMT and more. Read more here

Rather than taking DMT we found a great documentary called The Spirit Molecule, which is about a Medical Study from the ’90s where participants took DMT. The participants were interviewed in the documentary and just hearing about their experiences was enough to help decalcify my pineal gland. Quotes from some of those interviews have gone straight into my work. However, we did partake in the cannabis entheogen for pineal decalcification. I'm not sure whether or not these practices were actually working on my pineal gland or not, but for me it was also important to work on building healthy rituals into my daily life/artistic practice, and SYB Kunsthuis seemed like a perfect place to start to do that.

Angela: In your films you usually work alone, but at SYB you decided to spend the six weeks with several of your friends and colleagues, such as Noa Giniger, Lucy Stein, Andrew Kerton and Nick Hallett. How did this collaboration go? How hard or exciting is letting someone else enter Cynthia's universe?

Shana: All of the collaborations were very different. With Nick it’s more clear cut because although we work on the story together, he makes the music and I make the visuals. Lucy already had a script in mind, so I mainly helped her execute that script, making my mark with the cinematography, editing and effects. Andrew and I were more loose, organic and experimental together, as were Noa and I. It’s difficult for me to collaborate on projects that feature Cynthia, as she is so autobiographical and personal, so I usually don't, besides musically with Nick. A lot of the collaboration involves how our attitudes towards art and life intersect. Sometimes it was even difficult to come to an agreement on what to eat, where to sleep, how clean things should be or where to bike, but for the most part those things were pretty smooth.[4]

Angela: You have collaborated with Noa Giniger a few times in the past. On the occasion of Noa’s ‘Zimmer for FAB’ at SYB (2011), for instance, you realised the video ‘The Frisian LandEscape’, and now ‘Trusting Your Company’, where you ‘play a private conversation to black cows later to be eaten by humans who would then contain our secrets’.

[Link: http://sybdecalcifying.tumblr.com/]

Even though at first glance your works seem very different – I would say you work with the ‘addition’ of elements while Noa is clearly for ‘subtraction’ – there are areas in which your interests overlap. You have mentioned a common interest in the ‘objects’ once. Can you expand on this a little bit? Could you give us an example of how this collaboration with Noa has brought something else or new to the realisation?

Shana: I think that is a really good way to characterize how our work is different, addition vs subtraction. A discovery I made while working with Noa was realizing that one thing that connects our work is its personal and emotional nature. That may be more obvious in my work, but I think both of our practices are very much about analyzing our own feelings, hopes and desires –feelings that often include sentimentality and magic. And I think for both of us, objects serve as vehicles that stand in for or express those feelings. We both have very emotional responses to objects in general. In Beetsterzwaag for instance we went on a lot of missions to collect objects, and for both of us this is the starting point in the creation of work.

Angela: Via this link you can watch ‘Quin Quag’ (2001-2002), a very compelling video work by the artist Michael Smith, where he plays the role of a real state entrepreneur who purchases a piece of land previously occupied by an artists' colony. I love the ironic and witty way in which he weaves together all these narratives, from the idealised vision of an artist colony of the past to the actual life of the artists there, to the rebranding of the place for wealthy managers and business people in need of a temporary retreat to recover from the stress and anxiety of their life and regain a better balance with their inner selves. Some of these situations resonate somehow with Cynthia's stories, or at least their premises.
Can you comment on this idea of a temporary retreat in remote places as a possible way out; a temporary break from an unsatisfactory life? How does this work for Cynthia?
And how does a residency like SYB work for you, Shana, as an artist?

Shana: That is funny. I'd never seen this video! I know Mike Smith and Joshua White – in fact, Nick introduced me to Joshua White, as they work together on the Joshua Lightshow. Mike Smith's videos have been a huge influence on me since I was a student. I really love his work. But one thing I've realised since I've met him is that I think he approaches these kind of subjects with total irony. For instance, he made a video at Burning Man, another type of ‘artist colony’ or experimental community, and his character in the video has a cathartic or transcendent experience there. But after speaking to him about it I realised he has a very critical and ironic attitude towards Burning Man. I went to Burning Man three times in the ’90s and loved it! I had amazing experiences there – and even though I can make fun of Burning Man, I also have a sincere appreciation and reverence for it. In fact, I wrote about this before, coming more from the carnivalesque angle, but I think this also applies to the idea of the artist retreat:

The line these events walk between Carnivalesque resistance and capitalist complicity is what most interests me about them and this tension was raised in a recent exhibition by Mike Kelley and Michael Smith at the Sculpture Center in New York City. There they presented an installation which included video of Michael Smith's Baby Ikki persona, an adult-baby alter-ego he originally developed over 30 years ago, gallivanting around Burning Man and interacting with the other revellers. In a New York Times review of the show Roberta Smith thought that the artists were portraying the festival as "naïve and disingenuously complicit with capitalist consumerism. She claimed that their installation portrayed the desert festival as "a symbol of what Herbert Marcuse called ‘repressive desublimation’, which reroutes unruly and rebellious instinctual energies into politically harmless sybaritic indulgence, escapist entertainment and spiritual delusion." [12] However, Alan Licht, in an Artforum review of the show, observed that "Burning Man, with its policy of ‘radical inclusion’ and admonition of ‘no spectators’, could be appreciated as Beuy's theory of social sculpture made manifest, a mini-society as a work of art to which each member contributes and, indeed, is expected to participate in rather than observe."[13] I wasn't able to discern which interpretation was closest to the artist's intentions in this show, and my personal experience of events like Burning Man and renaissance fairs is always conflicted. I usually find myself striving for the Carnivalesque but reverting to lethargic consumption or spectatorship.

Angela: Cynthia's stories have developed over the years as videos in the series ‘Whispering Pines’, but more recently also as live performances.
Can you tell me a little more about how you experience these two different ways of working?

Shana: I started making live performances before I learned to make videos. I stopped for a while because they'd become more and more elaborate and it was too much work for something that just happened once. But when I realised I could make a performance set out of a video projection I started to make them again with my newfound videos skills. For me, one big difference between making the performances and videos is that I feel more at liberty to be abstract or use montage in the performances, whereas in the videos I feel the need to construct a solid narrative. I think those approaches are based on what I enjoy the most as a viewer of performance or video. Because the performance is always tied to a video that is playing straight through, there isn't very much room for chance or the unplanned, besides things going wrong. Throughout the performance I'm concentrating on what I have to do next and timing, so there is less room in my brain to concentrate on acting. It’s as if I were a puppet controlled by the video I've made, and most of the rehearsal takes place in my head as I edit the video on my computer. While making the videos I do have the luxury of making six versions of a shot and getting the right expression on my face and the perfect angle and timing, so there is more control. Performing is more like forcing myself to create a scene in one shot with no errors. The audience is important too. If they are laughing it’s much more fun and a lot easier!

---

Links:

Kunsthuis SYB, Shana Moulton residency

Shana Moulton

Rhoon Traffic Management Center 51º52'02" N 4°26'18" E

Text in the exhibition catalogue “Jodi” (Rotterdam, 2005).

---

"The use of a GPS to navigate a car turns out to be far richer in implications than generally recognized. In particular, it requires an identification with a moving cursor on a screen generated by a computer that tells the driver what to do. (...) the subtext of the new digital maps of control and drift is the existence of an individual who can lend concreteness to the points and lines flickering on the screen, and play with the layers of software and databanks to create effects stamped with an utterly new materiality "

Antoine Picon, "On digital cartography" GNS Catalogue Palais de Tokyo 2003

Maps and geographical charts, that have for centuries fascinated artists and cartographers alike, now come alive. Lines indicating rivers and geographical borders drawn on paper, and surfaces covered in cities and nations have now become navigable spaces to discover: images through which we can move with a mouse, with our sight, with our mind. With the simple click of a mouse we can switch from the urban area in which we live to a complete view of the globe as a whole. We can choose which features of the Earth to examine (pollution, atmospheric currents, population density and transportation networks). We can locate and follow airplanes, cellular phones, ships and individuals. The application of modern digital technology to geography (GIS) and the transformation of military objectives into civilian objectives brought about by military satellite technology in the early 1990's (GPS) have further expanded the visual domain as we know it. It isn't only a matter of having new uses, functions and devices at hand, but rather the challenge of new mental models and spaces that develop with this overload of imagery. If by techniques and economy one speaks of using existent instruments and information that guarantee understanding and user friendliness; then by artists one speaks of the development of new processes of appropriation of this larger space, of creating new ways to enliven the relationship between micro and macro, between near and far, physical and digital and making sense of it all.
This greater visibility doesn't necessarily mean greater clarity and truth, nor is it a guarantee of greater comprehension and knowledge. The new images at hand are organized according to criteria and precise 'rules of transformation' and are based upon necessary needs and functions (as old maps once were). The "window", both that of Leon Battista Alberti on the real world as well as that of digital culture today (GUI), has never been a transparent frame but rather a material device that shapes the experience of the observer, expressing simultaneously a unique point of view, the singular and partial view of the author.
This publication -Jodi's artistic project for the Rhoon Traffic Management Center- brings to light the "thickness" of this mediation, and it reveals the subjectivity and purpose existing under the apparent neutrality with which information, and therefore the new images of the Earth, are organized.

"Driving a Car/ Drawing a Car 1:1"(Jodi)

Faced with the current high tech instruments of the survey and visualization of information relative to automobile traffic Jodi adopts a material belonging to an opposite world: the analogue one of paper and drawing. "Driving a car becomes drawing a car on the road-network". The car designed in this way transforms itself into the origin and the unit of measure of a new universe of roadways that, like Jodi's previous manipulations of browser, software, web pages and computer games, it is shaped through a collage of images both real and virtual.
"The car" -and the road circuit that it represents- are subject to continuous manipulations through software and 3D rendering applications for the Earth's surface and popular Route calculators. The result is a car-route with instructions on How-to-drive-it-yourself and projections of the same route in circuit-drawings of computer car games.

The viewer is "displaced" by what he sees. "Chaotic aesthetic", "random behaviour" (Florian Cramer), "confused geography" (Ian Campbell) -characteristics of the artwork of Jodi- all change the function of the GPS Road navigator. The roadmap is progressively deprived of its function to instruct, providing certainty and security; its function to measure, calculated and precise, is slowly lost, and the accurate road instructions given by a confident voice ("At the end of the road, turn left, then turn right", "Turn right 200 meters ahead", "You are here", "At the roundabout, take the second exit"), in the end, reveal themselves useless.

The deconstruction and the multiplication of the interface and the graphics of the Road navigator are the means for a critical, conceptual discourse on high technology. To the navigator's preciseness and functionality, Jodi, in fact, proposes a "childish" universe. (The car, appearing crumpled, seems as if it's right out of a comic strip, or from a sketchbook of a child.) They create a playful atmosphere and procedure which contrast with the sensations and atmosphere of control and threat that derives from the interface design of GPS Road navigators. The 3D bird's-eye view (the model of navigable space created by some of the first flight simulators for Boeing in the U.S.A in the early 60's which then developed into a visual style often associated with monitoring and surveillance) is "dismantled" and "mixed up". It is transformed by the generation of lines in a stylized cluster of roads around and within the car-route, that conceal more forms and words to be discovered ("now here", "draw", "on the road").

Transported by the little car in this sequence of jodian images and maps, we continually bounce between the concrete and illusional representations, between real and virtual worlds where it is difficult to distinguish one universe from the other.
If the path from a to b is the place in which the identity of the driver is created and formed, then the little blue car that moves along the red line at sea level could be potentially our "real" car. Thus "the real navigator/user" could be the same driver who crashes the car in the race game of 'V-Rally 2' or that discovers medieval villages in 'Trackmania'. On the map-drawings their paths are the same.
But are we actually talking about the real driver? The roadway featured in a Road Navigator program doesn't necessarily imply that the voyage happened in reality. Just insert the spatial coordinates (in the form of mailing address, or latitude and longitude) and one can actually navigate while sitting comfortably in the living room of his home. The real driver thus resembles very much the virtual driver of a computer game.
This short circuit of identity, this continuous exchange between real and virtual renders any indication, any sign, or any system of coordinates or roadways completely relative.
New orientations and reference points are formed along the trajectories delineated by Jodi and the car. These reference points "break" the rigidity of standard screen-interface and render relative the suggestions of the common car navigation system. We no longer see one road, but we see -and drive along- many others.

Angela Serino

NOT ME!

Text about Mounira Al Solh’s work, published in the catalogue “Catalyst” (2006)

Still from the video ‘Rawane’s Song’ (2006) by Mounira Al Solh

“Rawane's Song” fascinates. It captures our attention by freshly and intelligently investigating concepts in contemporary discourse through analyzing and questioning the artist's own cultural reference points. Mounira compels viewers with two effective techniques. She uses the intimate form of a story told in the first person, diary-like. And for the entirety of the video, she pursues a seductive visual motive: two pointy red shoes, objects of conventional femininity with connotations of frivolity. These red shoes, which may be interpreted as the artist's alter ego, provide the critical distance necessary to be able to articulate issues of personal identity, in unrestricted and experimental ways. In its primary stage, this identity manifests itself as a negation. But contextualized within Mounira's own cultural background and all its accompanying beliefs and customs, it may actually be understood as an act of self-realization. As text from Rawane's Song reads: “I have nothing to say about the war; don't feel that I'm typical Lebanese; nor typical Arab; have nothing to do with the Palestinian cause; know almost nothing about politics”. The whole narrative, which is an attempt to designate new relations between the artist's aspirations and personal wishes within her provenance, as well as the predominant values of her culture, is delivered with a pungent sense of irony.

Overall, it also shows Mounira's strong capacity for self-reflexivity and refined investigative abilities. Such qualities manifest themselves in extraordinary, original ways throughout the development of the narration, sparking a push-pull dynamic between the video and the viewer. This pushing and pulling is what makes Mounira so captivating. She speaks to the public's presence of mind, referring in her text to urgent current issues such as war, culture clashes and religious diversities. And yet, she simultaneously comments on the very predictability of the public's expectations through describing her many failed attempts to make an art piece about the local war. Her point is well taken, for example, when she lures viewers to believe her fabricated war documentary's success in the international film festival circuit. In describing these awkwardly executed projects to perform as a typical Lebanese artist, Mounira is pointing to us, the public, as testimony to her failure to live up to such an expectation. The artist implicates our own socialized thoughts and behaviors, while provoking in us the urge to distance ourselves from convention and habit. (We are almost inclined to utter aloud, "Not me! I don't think like that.") Still Mounira's critical commentary takes the form of a soft, seemingly inadvertent oscillation. It constantly goes back and forth, between the private and the public, between the specific and the universal, between models of reading and viewing, between Mounira, herself, and us. It is here, in the in-between, where the greater value of “Rawane's Song” lies.

Angela Serino

Still from the video ‘Rawane’s Song’ (2006) by Mounira Al Solh