spaces In between
July 31 - August 6, 2011
ConcentArt, Kreuzbergstr. 28, Berlin
Curated by Simon Donovan
Organized by Jayne Holsinger and Karen Marshall
spaces In between
An International Exhibition from Transart Collective
Liminality from the Latin word limen, meaning “a threshold” or “in between”, characterized by indeterminacy, openness and ambiguity; perhaps mobility, transition, dissolution or disorientation.
Communitas is a Latin noun referring to an unstructured community in which people are equal. Communitas is an acute point of community. It takes community to the next level and allows the whole of the community to share a common experience, usually through a rite of passage. Communitas is characteristic of people experiencing liminality together.
Trans is a Latin noun or prefix, meaning “across”, “beyond” or “on the opposite side”.
The Transart Collective is, as implied by name, a coterie of artists “from other places.” In this exhibition, several of the collective’s individual members share their perception of the spaces in between those places. Such spaces may be physical, psychological, spiritual, sociological, political, or simply a demarcation point or stage in a process. Thus, the Transart Collective represents varied cultures, ages, and nationalities as well as an assortment of personal interpretive perspectives. The collective will exhibit its investigations of “in between” and spend the week in “communitas,” in order to exist in a space of transition, they will examine “rites of passage,” with the hope of gaining new perspectives beyond normal limits of thought and actions and out of in between. Recognizing, of course, that people, places, or things may not complete a transition, or a transition between two states may not be fully possible or tenable.
For inquiries, please contact: Simon DONOVAN at simondonovan@msn.com
NOTHING TO DECLARE
October 25 – November 25, 2011
Manila, Philippines
Curated by Faudette May V. Datuin
Organized by Josephine Turalba
NOTHING TO DECLARE
Flaudette May V. Datuin
Overview
Nothing to Declare is a Contemporary Art Exhibition aiming to exhibit artworks by international artists, who are enjoined to collaborate and interact, not only with each other but also with their host communities. The pedagogic / educational aspect of the project is an integral component that aims to conduct art educators’ training workshops, essay writing contests and artist talks for children / adolescents in high school and college levels.
The tentative target date is 25 October to 25 November 2011, in several venues in Manila, Philippines, with a possibility for the exhibition to travel to some of the participating artists’ countries in 2012 to 2013.
Project Objective
Nothing to Declare is a project that aims to explore the creative process of visuals artists who come to Manila with their cultural specificities and span of professional experience that is varied and diversified.
The project is designed to allow selected international artists to mingle with selected local Filipino artists and share their artistic practices and know-how as regards concept and craft.
This exchange among artists provides the starting point for pedagogical, art-critical and art-education activities.
Nothing to Declare’s exhibition and workshop is expected to be documented in a full color book/catalogue that will comprise critical texts, academic essays, artists’ statements, photo-documentation of the workshop, and community activities as well as of the round-table discussions.
Themes and Discourse
Through the selected works of international and Filipino artists, Nothing to Declare will explore issues of identity, gender, migration —broadly defined as movement not just across waters, land, and air, but also across immediate, virtual and hyper realities—and shifting societies. The title pays particular attention to the role of migration in shaping those social changes by continuous movement, a movement characterized by breaks, dislocations, absences, and silences of those who have nothing to declare.
In an uneven global system where people’s ways of sensing and feeling are de-synchronized and fractured, irreducibly plural, discontinuous and non-homogenous, Nothing to Declare plans to address such phenomena in workshops and round table discussions.
Such disjointed perceptions —which become concretely apparent in states of trance, possession, daydreams, jokes, manic and epileptic seizures— can be understood under the thematic of “picnolepsy”, a category we borrow from Paul Virilio to explain experiences that exist as a series of vacancies and absences, configured in shifting and provisional arrangements, rather than coherent unities, ordered and logical thought.[i]
Nothing to Declare is thus interested in those picnoleptic vacancies and absences, the un-saids in human perception and the gaps in human experience, particularly of those at the fringes who fall between the cracks of the “real,” the rational and the visible in a global culture of unequal access amidst material excess, of want and poverty amidst waste and plenty.
The project’s first stopover and point of entry for engaging with and making sense of these gaps and disappearances is Manila, the capital city of what is referred to as “a nation of nannies,” of exported overseas workers, whose remittances to those they leave behind supposedly keep the economy afloat.
Project Location
As pilot site for Nothing to Declare, Manila is place as well as metaphor for understanding a particularly nomadic, migratory sensibility characterized by displacements, of absences, and of slippages, that are lived in very real, concrete, at times painful terms in the everyday. “Livedness” and “lived realities” for these families do not only refer to the immediate, the concrete. In life until death, the bodies of these so-called citizens of the world present concrete examples of contradictions, of absent people who are made present through money coming through the wires, a lifeblood circulating —from birth to death— through impersonal, electronic banking and financial circuits of exchange.
For example, there is now a funerary service advertised as “Cyber-Burol” (cyber-wake), where the webcam and the computer can relay images of the bereaved and the dead, a situation where grief and feelings of loss, and pain are played out virtually.
Such virtual realities become very real and pervasive, especially in political circuses, such as elections, which for the first time have become “automated” in 2010 —a development that gives rise to the possibility of failures in elections, a danger that WJT Mitchell[ii] characterized no longer of “things falling apart” —of wars and mass destruction or mass malfunctioning of machines— but of things coming alive: the creation of new, ever-vital, virulent images and life forms: of computer viruses, terrorist sleeper cells, of warlord cells, of smart bombs, and in the case of Philippine elections, of automated Garcis (short for Garcillano, the election commissioner linked to the vote rigging in the presidential elections that in 2004).
Similar circus elections and migration of labor phenomena are found in the homeland of some of the selected artists, from Egypt as a sample of Middle East countries to several Latin American and African nations. Nothing to Declare takes careful note of these movements across realities: movements where copies and objects that, despite or maybe because of having nothing to declare, nonetheless have realities and lives of their own.
As site of political and cultural power, Manila is the seat of the nation-state, one that is constantly challenged by political, cultural and social forces within and without. As source of exported labor and goods, Manila exists in the margins of global politics and economy as well as in relative geographic isolation from the rest of mainland Southeast Asia’s capital cities. However, as port of entry to the rest of the Philippine Islands, Manila is also the junction towards the rest of Asia. As the first destination for Nothing to Declare, Manila thus becomes a meeting place where people from various points of origin can work together, listen and tell stories of loss and leavings, as well as gains and triumphs.
Nothing to Declare is thus a contribution to contemporary discussion on migration, not only of people across borders, but of forms and realities across time and space, with the dysfunctional city of Manila as initial site. But instead of the subaltern who cannot speak[iii], the project focuses on those who have nothing to declare –those whose marginality is source of intervention and strength, of subterfuge and resistance, of constraint as well as change.
Footnotes
[i] Paul Virilio. The Aesthetics of Disappearance. USA: MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. And London, 2009.
[ii] WJT Mitchell. “The Work of Art in the Age of Biocybernetic Revolution,” What Do Pictures Want? Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005.
[iii] Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg, eds. Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1988.
