Filed under: Beirut, bla bla on writing and language, konversationpieces, Kunst / Art, Lyd / Sound, notes on cph, texts, The Love Libration Movement
Texts, reading and writing came out to be the topic of October and November last year. First, in the workshop Verb Lists – Knowledge Done Again at the conference Mobilityshifts : International Future of Learning Summit at New School in New York and later, in a talk about Roles and Relations in Artistic Research at the ISCP International Studio & Curatorial Program, a talk which nevertheless morphed into a collective reading-writing session.
The workshop Verb Lists – Knowledge Done Again was developed from a symposium held in Copenhagen in June 2011 with the University of Copenhagen, Freïe Universität and Goldsmiths University of London, which I co-organized with Adam Drewes, Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld, Martin Glaz Serup and Trine Friis Sørensen. The symposium was called How to do things with academia and questioned traditional ways of organizing and performing academia. All participants submitted, instead of an abstract, a manual of how to do something differently with and in academia. Divided into 5 groups some 30 people worked intensively over a period of 3 days to create 5 collective manuals, which were printed and performed the last day.
In my group (consisting of Thorbjørn Becjman, Jürgen Bohm, Paola Crespi, Janis Jefferies, Trine Friis Sørensen and myself) we had DIY universities as our topic and somehow ended up creating a circular manual of “doing” as such inspired by Richard Serra’s Verb List from 1967-68. We literally read the verbs out loud, performed them, video recorded it and then asked others to interpret our movements thereby generating a new list of verbs. The new list of verbs was then performed, recorded, interpreted etc. creating a never ending manual translating verbs into action, actions into verbs and text into image, image into text.
The transformation of verbs to physical movements inspired Trine Friis Sørensen and I to translate the manual into the driving force of a workshop for the Mobilityshifts conference in October 2011 at the New School in New York. With a critical intention to question the discourse of the “educational turn”, which has influenced the European art scene the last decades, we decided to look at core texts from the discourse in terms of what verbs they use and thus what actions they ask us readers to perform. We were interested in asking if the sometimes abstract and idealistic theory, which we both are inspired of in our work, could be grounded and materialized in simply performing the verbs of the texts.
We chose to work with Jacques Ranciere’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, Irit Rogoff’s article “Turning”, Anton Vidokle’s “Exhibition as School: unitednationsplaza” and the text material from the Mobilityshifts conference itself. From these texts we chose central paragraphs and extracted the verbs into two verb lists. During the two hours we were scheduled to do the workshop we divided the participants into two groups, asked them to perform the verbs of one of the verb lists, recorded them doing it and swapped the videos for the other group to interpret their movements.
The reactions were many, some understood the concept without further questions and jumped easily into the exercise, others questioned everything. Roughly, some expected to learn a useful teaching method, others were happy staying with an open situation in which an experiment was being carried out and in which the means were more important than ends. Finally, we never really discussed the actual discourse of the “educational turn” (it was not clear how present this discourse was among the participants, we assumed that they were well informed as the conference material referred to initiatives considered part of it), but somehow we ended up performing it instead. To stay with the process and the means are key features of that discourse and this was what actually happened. One, who focused on the ends straight from the beginning and kept discussing what we were doing, was told by one of the others to “stop wanting to know everything beforehand”.
What we learnt from the workshop were two things. One, that on the one hand it takes something to make people go through a two hour session that is not focusing on results, but on the other hand that this situation carries a lot of potential. And two, that having had one more hour and having made the participants find the verbs themselves would have made the texts more present and the discussion of them potentially more open for realizations about the discourse.
One of the participants in the verb lists workshop was Mirene Arsanios, a friend and colleague who also participated in How to do things with academia and with whom I have been developing public reading and writing exercises during the past year. Being co-founder of 98weeks Project Space in Beirut she was invited by the ISCP to present 98weeks there during a one month residency. Mirene had asked me to do a talk with her and what we proposed was something about roles and relations in artistic research in relation to 98weeks. However, and more excited about trying out new ideas rather than cementing old ones, we decided to do an open and collective reading session to explore the mechanisms of reading desires and writing. Some 30 people gathered with the book they were reading at the moment and after a short introduction we sat reading in silence. Whenever one felt the urge to share some lines, one would go to the microphone and read out loud a paragraph. This was recorded and rules were simple. All the time one person had to be live archiving the event taking notes on a computer and one could swap books with another person, but then one had to go to two computers to take notes in a shared google document.
Unfortunately, we had to stop after an hour, because just at that moment the group found a rhythm, got hooked on writing and dived deep into the reading/writing experience. Afterward, while sharing the leftovers of the wine, we dreamt of doing this for hours on and on. With people coming and going, falling asleep, eating, smoking, drinking and sharing their often lonesome reading experience. There might be a chance we can do so in Copenhagen in March, if so, you are all invited.
Filed under: Beirut, bla bla on writing and language, konversationpieces, Kunst / Art, notes on cph, texts, The Love Libration Movement
A while ago it was a Saturday afternoon. We wanted to go reading in a café. It got late, like 6 or 7, and we ordered some food and beers. We were three people, J, M and I. J was commenting a paper and writing in the margin. M was reading a book she had gotten from another M. I was reading Nelly Richard, a masterpiece; Margenes e Instituciones. As the local families left the café the younger generation of cph hipsters started entering. M and I invented a reading/writing exercise where we took notes of each our books in the same notebook mixing minds and sudden reflections. As the night came closer and the café turned into a going out place I felt increasingly uncomfortable. As if reading, writing and thinking were not appreciated in this party-collective-social-happy setting. I told M, who got a bit offended and claimed that it was because I was not absorbed enough in what I was doing and that first of all she would not operate with a distinction between the intellectual and society. That was what I had done, I had questioned the role of the intellectual in public space. Because the feeling of not being wanted there resonated with the lack of intellectuals in public opinion, the lack of time to listen to reflections and the lack of people reading books in public space in Denmark. Experts investigating specialized areas are not that hot.
A couple of days later we met again and something had happened, she gave me some texts about the role of the intellectual and we continued the discussion. Somehow we decided to think more about it. Do readings in different places and reflect about the text, the place it was being read out loud and the relation between them.
We didn’t have the time to carry out the experiment. But some weeks later we met up in Beirut and wanted to do yet another project, a summer exorcism, a ghost dance on a platform in a wasteland in-between highways, rubbish and houses. We didn’t have the time to that either, but had nevertheless decided to do something there the following Saturday at twilight. It ended up being a reading/sleeping interaction, just for us and the passersby. M tried to fall asleep and I tried to make her do so while reading a sort of random collage of fragments of texts. We sat there for and hour and a bit more. She never really fell asleep, it was full of nature, mosquitos, bats and bushes. Only guys passed by us, I could hear their steps as they climbed the stairs, crossed the platform and walked down. They didn’t approach us or gave us comments. Not until afterwards, when we had finished and were leaving through a nearby street. A guy whose steps we recognized made the classic coquette noises and interpellated us into heterosexual women in the street. Apparently, before that we had been something else and had had a situation that was not to be entered. Both our Saturday night intellectual-interventions were in that sense exclusive, which I cannot clearly identify as a problem, a consequence or just a mere fact that does not mean that the intervention did not resonate with its surrounding.
Filed under: Beirut, bla bla on writing and language, konversationpieces, Kunst / Art
How it all started:
konversationpieces is a series of performative conversations developed in response to Home Works V, in Beirut April 2010. Every day, nearly, meeting points will be announced and scheduled in specific locations across the city as spaces of conversation where to debate Home Works’ program. konversationpieces wants to tackle conversations’ potential to initiate critical debate within the contingency of a specific moment, space, and crowd.
To participate you need just to be, there. For exact information, please email your Lebanese cell phone number to nelund@gmail.com or mirenearsanios@gmail.com and you will receive information about meeting points and time from day to day.
The above is taken from konversationpieces.wordpress.com and responded to a desire we (Mirene Arsanios, Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld and Sidsel Nelund) have felt during previous Home Works’ and other intellectual events or conferences: a desire to discuss in informal settings and also with people who do not necessarily raise their voice in Q&As. After several engendering conversations during Home Works 5 in April 2010 we still desire to continue our conversation and aim at creating enigmatic capsules for experiment and thought-provocation in the future.
Filed under: Beirut
(the following was written on the last day of the Lebanese election. I happened to write in Danish and have decided to keep the original version. Apologies to non-Danish speaking readers)
23/11/07, kl. 12-13.00
I dag er sidste dag af valgperioden i Libanon. Jeg sidder i solen på min balkon i centrum af Beirut og har lyden af nabomoskeens minaret og larmen fra de syriske bygningsarbejdere i ørene. Mænd og unge drenge kommer gående fra alle hjørner for at samles til fredagsbøn på terrassen af moskeen. Der er ikke mange kvinder i gadebilledet. Jeg har også valgt at blive inden døre. Mit ophold i Beirut er helliget research i libanesisk samtidskunst og det center jeg dagligt arbejder i ligger meget tæt på Downtown Beirut, hvor valget i dag skal foregå. Faktisk ligger centeret omkring 200 meter fra Hotel Phoenicia, hvor mere end 40 parlamentsmedlemmer har opholdt sig under skarp bevogtning den sidste måned af frygt for at blive assasineret op til valget. Der er nu 12 timer til parlamentsmedlemmerne skal have fundet en ny præsident og oppositionen har meldt, at de ikke vil møde op til forhandlingerne i dag. Ekstra knuder bindes på en temmelig uløselige situation, som ingen kan spå konsekvenserne af.
Asfalten foran moskéen belægges nu med grønne og hvide tæpper, terrassen er fyldt af mænd. Så mange mennesker plejer der ikke at møde op. Der holder et gult og et blåt folkevognsrugbrød ved siden af. De tilhører moskéen. Normalt associerer jeg folkevognsrugbrød med skandinaviske hippiefamilier på køreferie i Østeuropa. De er forbløffende langt væk nu og jeg griner lidt af kulturclashet. På sin vis er det rart.
Den sidste uge har været meget anspændt. Alle frarådede folk at tage til Beirut og hvis de gjorde, så skulle man ikke “cirkulere”, som de sagde. I søndags indtog 30.000 politi og militærfolk byen og tanks og checkpoints blev hverdag. Jeg tror ikke, at jeg nogensinde har set en kampvogn før, men nu, kun 6 dage senere, er de allerede en del af gadebilledet, som jeg ikke mere lægger mærke til. Der er 3 kampvogne i gaden lige foran vores hus. Og der politimænd på gaden, afspærringer og en hel masse venten. De står der, dag ud og dag ind. Parat til at blokere for ind- og udkørsel af byen, hvis ‘det’ skulle ske. ‘Det’ som alle venter på og som ingen ved hvad er. Borgerkrig, bilbomber, optøjer. Der angst under overfladen. Den kommer frem i meningsløse diskussioner i trafikken og øget salg af anti-depressiver.
Fredags-talen er netop slut. Den virkede roligere end den plejer. Der er stille nu, for der knæles og bedes. Flere folk kommer stadig til og må sidde på asfalten. Tæpperne er nu også fyldt.
Min bofælle er lige kommet hjem. Hun fulgte vores anden bofælle ned til Downtown. Han er pressefotograf og har fået adgang til parlamentet. Der var fudstændig øde i Downtown, sagde hun. Alle butikker er lukkede, køretøjer har ingen adgang og der var militær på hvert et hjørne. Hun har aldrig set så mange maskingeværer på et sted før! Hun er tysk aktivist og har boet i Palæstina i flere år, også i perioder med udgangsforbud. Jeg er spændt på, hvilke billeder han kommer hjem med i aften.
Vi tænder for BBC. Bomber i Nord-Indien, bomber i Baghdad. Og nu, Beirut, der er små chancer for at løse landets krise, siger korrespondenten. Konflikten er den værste siden borgerkrigen endte i 1990. Der er kun få timer til at finde en løsning, men vi følger sagen som den udvikler sig løbet af dagen, siger nyhedsværten med britisk accent; ”And the dollar is now…” Videre til næste nyhed og vi lytter ikke længere efter. Fokus er forbløffende meget rettet indad mod Libanons navle, Beirut.
Der er noget som jeg beundrer ved Beirut. Folk har en utømmelig vilje til at fortsætte livet. Byen har en karisma, som folk udefra også støtter op om. På trods af dommedagstrusler har der de sidste to uger været fulde huse ved byens to kulturfestivaler. Hver aften har der været dans, performance, filmscreeningerne og teater. Kompagnier fra Tokyo, Belgien, Tunesien og Rio. Det er imponerende, at contemporary dance kan samle næsten 500 mennesker i en krise-by som Beirut, når Dansescenen i København mange aftener besøges af måske 50 mennesker. Er det eskapisme, flygter folk fra en hverdag de ikke kan holde ud? En hverdag tynget af en situation, som de ikke kan påvirke, men som deres liv og drømme er afhængig af. Måske derfor er der et kulturelt drive blandt folk, en vilje til at gennemføre og ikke aflyse planlagte festivaler, blot fordi de falder sammen med et udskudt og umuligt valg. Som en af organisatorerne sagde, “Hvis vi skulle udskyde hver gang, situationen var ustabil, ville vi jo aldrig kunne gennemføre noget. Vi fortsætter, så længe de udenlandske performer tør komme til landet. Det er meget modigt af dem.” I morgen ankommer Anne Teresa de Keersmakers dansetrup fra Belgien. De skal performe på søndag. De har hele tiden været mit håb. Hvis Anne Teresa de Keersmaker kommer til Beirut for at performe, så tør jeg også være her.
Så er bønnen ovre, folk rejser sig og spredes til alle sider. Der er roligt i gaderne. Er det stilhed før storm? Eller skal vi endnu engang igennem en udstrakt og slidende venten? Tror jeg vil gå ud i byen, man bliver sindssyg af den her form for påført lammelse. Det er en angst, som man ikke ved er berettiget eller ej. Min mor har lige haft ringet. Aldrig har hun fortalt mig så mange gange før, at hun elsker mig. I dag begyndte hun også at græde. Det skal nok gå, sagde jeg, jeg passer på. Vi har et netværk af folk, der sms’er, hvis der er steder man ikke skal bevæge sig. Men der er intet at være bekymret for, der sker ingenting. Sådan prøver vi i hvert fald at overbevise hinanden her. For ingen ved noget som helst. Og hvorfor så vente i ukonstruktiv angst?
20.40
Mirene kom lige forbi for at sige farvel. Matthew fik en besked, der er skyderier ved Cola bus station. Vi tænder for Al Jazeera. State of Emergency, siger de rullende tekster i bunden af skærmen. Det er kun en trussel. Præsidenten har givet militæret magten. Mirene og hendes ven skynder sig ud ad døren. Vi når at omfavne hinanden, længe, tårer er på kinderne. Hun rejser i morgen tidlig kl 5.00, hvem ved hvornår vi ser hinanden. Hvis hun kan forlade landet. Vi får se. Fra nu er der kun venten.
