Re: [-empyre-] from 5th Avenue New York City
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Dear Renate and Tim — Thank you for your post. How strange the mixing of the writing address in my response. Apologies. But I feel, to my only excuse, we are all in this together, you, Tim and Johannes and all of us regardless of our geographic locations. Nevertheless please forgive the mix -up of names in my note. To all of you, the empyre list members who are protesting now in New York City and elsewhere - please stay safe and thank you, Monika On Dec 5, 2014, at 7:27 PM, Monika Weiss gnie...@monika-weiss.com wrote: Dear Johannes, It feels like it’s raining around the world recently, not only in New York City. The holiday music so disturbing anyway becomes almost apocalyptic when faced with beautiful austerity of hand written protest signs. ’I can’t breathe’ said the man who was choked and sat on, by a police officer, as he was being filmed… Seeing my city lie down like this, at Grand Central Station, I have a strange feeling as if my own work — the once relatively poetic and only gently-political projects, involving prostrate body, body lying down in public space, as a way to oppose the heroic verticality, works involving large groups of people lying down in historical sites—is now becoming more and more intertwined with real protests, assuming there is any difference left between ‘real’ and performed protest. Our collective postmemory is so fast now that it becomes concurrent with history. Postmemory unfolds as history happens. It is taking place now/towards and no longer ‘after’. If postmemory is a form of trauma that we inhabit even though we did not lived through it, current protests are a form of postmemory that leaks through time and space, through race especially, responding to ‘not being able to breathe' which we did not experience directly yet we are all part of. His death lives through us, inhabits our bodies and inhabits the architecture of the Grand Central Station. Protests in cities are symbolic, perhaps even poetic — and it is their symbolic/poetic and not military power that Saskia Sassen calls the “weak regime” — the kind that nevertheless causes dark, loud clouds of helicopters to appear over our city’s skies, with their surveying eye, the helicopters’ collective eye informed by the fear of the symbolic/poetic power of lying down. Monika On Dec 5, 2014, at 6:59 PM, Renate Ferro renatefe...@gmail.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- It is raining here in New York City. Tim Murray and I just joined hundreds of protestors who marched down 5th Avenue, one of the most tourist, commodified streets in the world. Past the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree decorated in lights galore hundreds of tourists stood in line to watch on one side the lit tree and the other side a light/video show on the facade of Saks Fifth Avenue. Loud speakers filled the block and adjacent streets with holiday music. Disrupting that scene hundreds of what I noted as young activists marched directly down the side walks of this holiday scene shouting Hands Up, Don't Shoot, I can't breathe, and other chants to stop shoppers in their tracks. Shoppers had two choices: to clear out of the way for protestors or to join. Right now in Macy's protestors move into the inside of the shopping season, lay down and conduct a die in. I find it stunning (has to be another word) that reflects the confusion of the junta-postion between a commodity driven season and a politically driven movement that collides head to head. How crazy is it that just moments before when I opened my email via the smart phone I was using to video the moment, the White House sent out this message: We've been watching the economy steadily improve for years, but today there's new reason to really zoom in on that progress. Consider this: Last month, American businesses created 314,000 jobs, extending the longest streak of job growth on record. That's 10.9 million jobs added over the last 57 straight months. Let's put that in perspective: With 2.6 million jobs created in the first 11 months of the year, we've already added more jobs in 2014 than in any entire year since the late 1990s. It's been a long road to recovery since the Great Recession. And while there's more work to do, America is outpacing much of the world in putting people back to work. Take a look at how far our economy has come since President Obama took office -- then share the facts with everyone who needs to know: HELLO? What about the thousands of young and dis-engranchised who for the past three nights around the US have been shouting out to be heard about the injustices that have manifested themselves over the past several weeks. World-wide ordinary people from Hong Kong to Mexico to the US are shouting out as well about other injustices. Can we take a moment to reflect
Re: [-empyre-] from 5th Avenue New York City
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Dear Johannes, It feels like it’s raining around the world recently, not only in New York City. The holiday music so disturbing anyway becomes almost apocalyptic when faced with beautiful austerity of hand written protest signs. ’I can’t breathe’ said the man who was choked and sat on, by a police officer, as he was being filmed… Seeing my city lie down like this, at Grand Central Station, I have a strange feeling as if my own work — the once relatively poetic and only gently-political projects, involving prostrate body, body lying down in public space, as a way to oppose the heroic verticality, works involving large groups of people lying down in historical sites—is now becoming more and more intertwined with real protests, assuming there is any difference left between ‘real’ and performed protest. Our collective postmemory is so fast now that it becomes concurrent with history. Postmemory unfolds as history happens. It is taking place now/towards and no longer ‘after’. If postmemory is a form of trauma that we inhabit even though we did not lived through it, current protests are a form of postmemory that leaks through time and space, through race especially, responding to ‘not being able to breathe' which we did not experience directly yet we are all part of. His death lives through us, inhabits our bodies and inhabits the architecture of the Grand Central Station. Protests in cities are symbolic, perhaps even poetic — and it is their symbolic/poetic and not military power that Saskia Sassen calls the “weak regime” — the kind that nevertheless causes dark, loud clouds of helicopters to appear over our city’s skies, with their surveying eye, the helicopters’ collective eye informed by the fear of the symbolic/poetic power of lying down. Monika On Dec 5, 2014, at 6:59 PM, Renate Ferro renatefe...@gmail.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- It is raining here in New York City. Tim Murray and I just joined hundreds of protestors who marched down 5th Avenue, one of the most tourist, commodified streets in the world. Past the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree decorated in lights galore hundreds of tourists stood in line to watch on one side the lit tree and the other side a light/video show on the facade of Saks Fifth Avenue. Loud speakers filled the block and adjacent streets with holiday music. Disrupting that scene hundreds of what I noted as young activists marched directly down the side walks of this holiday scene shouting Hands Up, Don't Shoot, I can't breathe, and other chants to stop shoppers in their tracks. Shoppers had two choices: to clear out of the way for protestors or to join. Right now in Macy's protestors move into the inside of the shopping season, lay down and conduct a die in. I find it stunning (has to be another word) that reflects the confusion of the junta-postion between a commodity driven season and a politically driven movement that collides head to head. How crazy is it that just moments before when I opened my email via the smart phone I was using to video the moment, the White House sent out this message: We've been watching the economy steadily improve for years, but today there's new reason to really zoom in on that progress. Consider this: Last month, American businesses created 314,000 jobs, extending the longest streak of job growth on record. That's 10.9 million jobs added over the last 57 straight months. Let's put that in perspective: With 2.6 million jobs created in the first 11 months of the year, we've already added more jobs in 2014 than in any entire year since the late 1990s. It's been a long road to recovery since the Great Recession. And while there's more work to do, America is outpacing much of the world in putting people back to work. Take a look at how far our economy has come since President Obama took office -- then share the facts with everyone who needs to know: HELLO? What about the thousands of young and dis-engranchised who for the past three nights around the US have been shouting out to be heard about the injustices that have manifested themselves over the past several weeks. World-wide ordinary people from Hong Kong to Mexico to the US are shouting out as well about other injustices. Can we take a moment to reflect on how these movements may be organically generating? How does social media, list serves, networked media enable movements such as these? What else may be inspiring these gestures of resistance. I am looking forward to speaking to all of you now but for now I have to run. Renate Ferro (and Tim Murray from NYC) ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Re: [-empyre-] introducing week 3
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Ana, When I was preparing the project in Santiago, Chile, one of the women who worked at the Museo told me she was very happy on that one particular day, because they found, she told me, a little finger bone that belonged to her husband’s hand. Now, she said with a smile, I can finally have a funeral for him, after all those years of searching. Her smile was something I will never forget. Monika On Nov 23, 2014, at 12:43 AM, Ana Valdes agora...@gmail.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- The Mothers of May started to walk round the plaza de Mayo, in Buenos Aires, silent, with huckles in their heads, carrying posters with the images of their missing children. It was in the 70:s. More than 3 people dissapeared in Argentina and Uruguay. Many were buried alive. Many were drugged and thrown from airplanes to río de la Plata. We are still finding old bones in hidden graves. Ana Enviado desde Samsung Mobile Mensaje original De: Murat Nemet-Nejat Fecha:23/11/2014 02:42 (GMT-03:00) A: christina.spie...@yale.edu,soft_skinned_space Asunto: Re: [-empyre-] introducing week 3 Perhaps the most powerful form of symbolic space is the plaza, from Tienanmen Square to Tahir Square to Maidan (which is a Turkish word) to Damascus to Taksim Square in Istanbul, to cite a few relatively recent examples, the symbolic action most feared by governments. I wrote a poem about thirty years ago Fatima's Winter exactly on the idea of the square (attached to a tool) as a potentially revolutionary space. Participants to our dialogue at Empyre may be interested in it. Though published, the poem is not on line. I don't know whether I can include it within the the post or attach is as a document. The poem is a few pages. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Vor dem Gesetz/Before the Law, hoveringly
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Dear all, I have been on an airplane and now I see so much has happened in our writing in the meantime. I will read/address those newer posts later tonight but in this post I would like to share what I wrote on the subject of voice of (for) others in response to Johannes Birringer’s question: _ The voice must be given but only to those who express the desire or need, those who agree to have it projected into space, to have it exist as their voice but also as our voice, shared as an inscription into the public sphere. Those who are here now, our contemporaries, and who live in the shadows of their private or public trauma or who are socially removed from power, including power of voicing. How can we not offer [as we are positioned in the realm of visibility, we work with visibility as our language] to be the conduit, to be the transmitter, the ‘amplifier'? Those who are no longer here, the forty students in Mexico, those disappeared whose relatives I met while working on the project in Chile, whose fragile remains, particles, bone fragments, are still being searched for in the sands, in the dirt surrounding Santiago. How can we refuse to offer to be their microphone? Their amplifier? their resonance box? Their archivist? Their instrument? Their lover/loving listener? Those who are no longer here, the 1,000 young women seamstresses who perished in one of the death marches, on their way out of Gruenberg camp ( “Shrouds”), the abandoned, now forgotten (and sold to a private developer) by the city. The square as actively not remembered, not seen, by the citizens. The women who perished there are in oblivion; the site today looks like a damp, full of debris, which serves as a field for the enacted practice of forgetting, our active forgetting. How could I refuse to give them our/their voice, the voice of now living young women that worked with me on that site, lamenting, and who wanted to speak through their presence (the young women living in this town today), in order to give the voice to that absence and erasure. A ribbon came out of the young women raped by a group of citizens on a bus. One of them recalled during the trial a certain feeling of surprise at the site of that red ribbon, which was her intestines taken out by a rod inserted violently into her already devastated and destroyed bleeding body, inserted by the youngest of the rapists. Her heroic attempts to stay alive without internal organs left inside, just for a little while, some days following the destruction, where her body was literally turned inside out, her RIBBON (something I am working with right now), and her dramatic whispered call. She addressed us to us to not to forget . Her voice and her ribbon waving at us, still today. How can I not give her the voice, the amplification. How can we not give the voice to the raped and murdered daily victims of the horrific uses of war and sexual violence understood as means to destroy, as means to kill, to penetrate with rods, with bottles, with weapons, harsh objects, those taking ribbons out, in horrific acts of violence against human beings. We all ought to see the ribbon. It needs to glow before us, in our memory, in our wake and in our sleep. I dream of a monument to her internal ribbon that should occupy a public sphere. Perhaps within the canopy in front of the India Gate. A monument abolishing rape and abolishing gender based prosecution. We ought to stand by, identify with, those who’re tortured, silenced, disappeared, raped, killed, wounded, beaten, forgotten, invisible, impoverished, deprived, removed. We as artists have at least a chance, a potential, a chance at visibility, through the artifacts that we sometimes make, the conditions of enunciation. Art making as the realm of the visible, always within public domain Art as pollution and as an accusation and as a trial. Cultural production as political production, including poetry. Activating and transformational, even if only nearing this potential of transformation. The artifact, the poetic entity, the place, the site of the encounter, bordelinkings (Bracha Ettinger) . Artifact as the amplifier, as the conduit, as the transmitter, as a fluid membrane, as a form of resonance, as the act of waving our silents and often forcibly silenced arms towards the volume of violence. Potentiality of the realm of the symbolic, what Kristeva calls the “thing”. The shortcut, the residue, voice, voice over, voicing, speaking up, voice as presence. —— Monika Weiss On Nov 20, 2014, at 3:57 PM, Johannes Birringer johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.uk wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- dear all So much to ponder, in your postings, that one doesn't know where to go, following Simon's dark pronouncement of our dilemma, and the fear projected onto us all? Is it possible to talk about
Re: [-empyre-] creative powerlessness, expressive violence, performance
or two different movies. The film may or may not be Kandahar (perhaps someone can help me with this). In one, a big shot Taliban official (wearing the usual turban, etc.) around fifty culls a young girl in of around twelve among a group of young girls of the same age to make her one of his wives. There is a grotesque scene where he is taking a bath and the little girl is suspended by a rope and dipped into a vat of water for cleaning before the consummation of the marriage. (in that horrifying dipping scene violence and ritual unite, perpetuating the violence since in the eyes of the mullah his action is legitimate because preceded by a purifying act. In around 1995, I wrote an essay Is Poetry a Job, Is a Poem a Product? in which I discuss the class structure of the American poem [and poet] by the light of Marxist analysis (http://home.jps.net/~nada/murat1.htm). Here is a quote from it: Failure — or its vertiginous potential — is an aura in the American poem. The way the nouveau riche flaunt their wealth, the poem's addiction strives towards failures by creating gaps between public — that is, communicative — usage of words and itself. The American poet has a unique relation to language in the culture. He or she fetishizes language in excess of its use as a means of exchange, beyond what the culture wants of it; he or she sexualizes it into uselessness. This economically — capitalistically — perverse relation gives the poem its consumptive aura. What American the poem does in its uselessness (powerlessness) is akin to Panahi's spinning of an unfilmable scenario (This is Not a Film) in his film: I play [italics my own] at Riches — to appease/ The Clamoring for Gold — Emily Dickinson. Ciao, Murat On Tue, Nov 18, 2014 at 9:12 AM, Monika Weiss gnie...@monika-weiss.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear Reinhold and all, 'To bear witness, it is therefore not enough to bring language to its own non-sense, to the pure undesirability of letters… It is necessary that this senseless sound be, in turn, the voice of something or someone that, for entirely other reasons, cannot bear witness. It is thus necessary that the impossibility of bearing witness, the ‘lacuna’ that constitutes human language, collapses, giving way to a different impossibility of bearing witness—that which does not have language […] The particular structure of law has its foundation in this presuppositional structure of human language. It expresses the bond of inclusive exclusion to which a thing is subject because of the fact of being in language, of being named. To speak [dire] is, in this sense, always to ‘speak the law,’ ius dicere.’( Agamben) In the third edition of Modernity and Holocaust, Zygmunt Bauman added an afterward titled 'The Duty to Remember—But What?’ in which he discusses Agamben’s homo sacer and ancient Roman law’s concept of homo sacer defined as a human being who could be killed without punishment, but at the same time—‘being absolutely Other, alien, indeed inhuman’—could not be used in a religious ritual or to be sacrificed. The homo sacer was thus an unprotected being that could be a target for every murderer, but also a recommended target 'for everyone seeking to conform and exercise their civic duty.’ It’s worth remembering that the origin of the Nazi Lager is in Schutzhaft (protective custody) was a Prussian juridical institution invented in 1851 as a state of emergency, which Nazi jurors later used and classified as an example of a preventive measure. Of course the first camps were not of the Nazis’ design but rather those of the Social Democratic governments, which interned thousands of communist militants as well as Eastern European refugees. Article 48 of the Weimar constitution guaranteed the president of the Reich the power to suspend constitutional rights in case of emergency, including the suspension of personal liberty, the freedom of expression and assembly, the inviolability of the home and of postal/telephone privacy. These were indeed suspended under several Weimar governments and later were implemented indefinitely by the Nazis. Their 'decree for the protection of the people and State,’ issued in February 1933, included one important novelty—the word Ausnahmezustand (state of exception) was no longer used. The state of exception became simply the rule itself, ‘opening the space of the camp’ . In Hannah Arendt’s observation the camp is a place where 'everything is possible’ simply because there is no more distinction between law and fact. Pure life within the camp, stripped of any rights or political status, denationalized (Nuremberg laws) becomes an absolute biopolitical space, its ‘ areness' confronted with nonmediated, absolute power. Hence, the right question is not how these atrocities were possible against human beings
Re: [-empyre-] creative powerlessness, expressive violence, performance
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Dear Reinhold and all, 'To bear witness, it is therefore not enough to bring language to its own non-sense, to the pure undesirability of letters… It is necessary that this senseless sound be, in turn, the voice of something or someone that, for entirely other reasons, cannot bear witness. It is thus necessary that the impossibility of bearing witness, the ‘lacuna’ that constitutes human language, collapses, giving way to a different impossibility of bearing witness—that which does not have language […] The particular structure of law has its foundation in this presuppositional structure of human language. It expresses the bond of inclusive exclusion to which a thing is subject because of the fact of being in language, of being named. To speak [dire] is, in this sense, always to ‘speak the law,’ ius dicere.’( Agamben) In the third edition of Modernity and Holocaust, Zygmunt Bauman added an afterward titled 'The Duty to Remember—But What?’ in which he discusses Agamben’s homo sacer and ancient Roman law’s concept of homo sacer defined as a human being who could be killed without punishment, but at the same time—‘being absolutely Other, alien, indeed inhuman’—could not be used in a religious ritual or to be sacrificed. The homo sacer was thus an unprotected being that could be a target for every murderer, but also a recommended target 'for everyone seeking to conform and exercise their civic duty.’ It’s worth remembering that the origin of the Nazi Lager is in Schutzhaft (protective custody) was a Prussian juridical institution invented in 1851 as a state of emergency, which Nazi jurors later used and classified as an example of a preventive measure. Of course the first camps were not of the Nazis’ design but rather those of the Social Democratic governments, which interned thousands of communist militants as well as Eastern European refugees. Article 48 of the Weimar constitution guaranteed the president of the Reich the power to suspend constitutional rights in case of emergency, including the suspension of personal liberty, the freedom of expression and assembly, the inviolability of the home and of postal/telephone privacy. These were indeed suspended under several Weimar governments and later were implemented indefinitely by the Nazis. Their 'decree for the protection of the people and State,’ issued in February 1933, included one important novelty—the word Ausnahmezustand (state of exception) was no longer used. The state of exception became simply the rule itself, ‘opening the space of the camp’ . In Hannah Arendt’s observation the camp is a place where 'everything is possible’ simply because there is no more distinction between law and fact. Pure life within the camp, stripped of any rights or political status, denationalized (Nuremberg laws) becomes an absolute biopolitical space, its ‘ areness' confronted with nonmediated, absolute power. Hence, the right question is not how these atrocities were possible against human beings or against humanity, but rather, what juridical procedures and operations of power were in place by which human beings could be so completely deprived of their rights and by which the acts against them could appear not as crimes. If nation states act as designers or gardeners (to use Bauman’s metaphor), we live in a “garden” situation that is dangerously unchanged. Our current status is being in a place that has been forever altered and is now still inhabited by the camp. In many languages the word ‘people’ contains an inherent contradiction and fracture within itself, between the ‘sovereign People’ and the le peuple, les malheureux (Robespierre). Modern ‘ people’ (modern as understood by us means Western or Western-like) claim to have constructed an environment that forbids and prevents violence and assumes the sanctity of the human body. Violence is thus displaced and hidden, especially institutional violence and especially in the most developed countries. Violence is in general most cost-effective when the means are instrumental and rational, organized institutionally, dissociated from any moral evaluation of the results. Violence and archive interact and merge, as power exercises itself at the level of everyday life.Language/causality as the governing law. Law as language. Law that perpetuates violence. Benjamin wanted to break the dialectic of the two forms of violence, the one that makes law and the one that preserves it in time but ISIS enacts violence as the ultimate language and as the ultimate law. We are all homo sacer. Terror functions as an ultimate suspension of individual rights and as a perpetuated/perpetual exception from any rules except its own, those of terror. Heads falling during French Revolution. The idea that there are ‘higher reasons’ for the sovereign power to act upon and thus we need to surrender human rights. In the case of
Re: [-empyre-] creative powerlessness, expressive violence, performance
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Healing, placing shrouds over the wounded body of the world… In my native language “shroud’ relates etymologically to a ‘kiss’ as much as it also is about burial. Washing (lava me). Covering, lying down (keimai), enshrouding, touching, marking, and keeping together, silently (sustenazo). But I often wonder if we should try to also keep the wound partially open. An open wound ‘kept’ and maintained as a form of re-enactment. This is postmemory but not only in the way Marianne Hirsh defines it as a memory inhabited by next generations (relating to intra-familial historical trauma especially children of Holocaust victims). Not only the generations AFTER. I think of memory as also happening TOWARDS (Adorno’s statement could be translated both ways as ‘away from/after/post-’ but also as ‘towards’). Our memory of things past and of things arriving, barely visible, merging, at the horizon of history, au delà (Derrrida’s ‘la borde’). Across not only generations but also geographies, genders, systems… how to heal but not seal/not to close, not to forget (Renais’ “I am forgetting you already”). There needs to be an opening left, a way for the archive to leak through TOWARDS, for the lament to flow through the archive, for the past to pollute the present, just enough to wake up from our collective amnesia and to counteract the practice of forgetting. We need to hear the voices of those forgotten, tortured, killed, disappeared, raped and abused by various systems of oppression. Over the years I have gradually moved towards working with others, towards creating openings and holes within the work to allow the flow of contingency of others. Squares, cities, volunteers, passersby, participants, inhabiting. The site as the public space or as the space of film and of sound recording . Participants told me how they felt a kind of profound transformation, just being there, inside the space of lamentation. Later, after being recoded, recomposed, voice by voice, presence by presence, it was all becoming a film, a record, a choral testimony, an image. After and towards, incantation, the refrain which seem to move both directions at once, towards and away from. Lament as a form of direct dialogue with loss, a choral dialogue, contingent, echoing and return (even if only possible for the brief moment of our ascending/descending). Lament as dangerous because of its transformative and shared membrane. Lament as political, because of its ability to pollute the public space. Yes, perhaps it is all perlocutionary as Simon writes. But the problem that I am experiencing now is the overwhelming volume of sound of violence that seems to increase every day. I feel flooded, drowning in the deafening sound of violence and terror. The unheard yet equally loud voices of the victims surround me. I think of Wojnarowicz tonight and how he was feeling too much volume as he was trying to wave his silent arms. Monika p.s. Reading these days Martin Shuster’s Autonomy After Auschwitz and Concentratory Cinema, edited by Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman On Nov 18, 2014, at 4:21 AM, Fereshteh Vaziri fervaz...@yahoo.de wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- I always think about the question raised by Alan, How can art heal? I don't know if it can, but it can surely hinder us from going completely down. By expressing our fears and anxiety in our works, by performing them on the stage, by portraying them in our poetry and in our stories, we can reduce our inner pressure. Simultaneously, we can tell other people who suffer from the same fears that they are not alone in the world; there are many people who suffer. I tried to express it in my play, Homeland was no Portable Violet. The protagonist, who has experienced a trauma in her islamic homeland and doubts the effectivness of pychotherapy in a world full of violence, war and joblessness, tries to heal herself by writing a play. Many of the spectators told me that they could very well identify with the protagonist. Fereshteh Johannes Birringer johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.uk schrieb am 21:28 Montag, 17.November 2014: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- [encryption tests 2] A question was raised, by Alan Sondheim [Saturday, November 15, 2014] :: How can art, art performance, performance, heal, help one make it through the day, inspire one, against this background of continuous performance [of violence], where everything, lives, cultures, languages, are at stake? :: Why not make a concerted effort and look into this question over the next few days. Yoko had sent us a link to the description of OCCUPIED [ I attempt to perform “occupation”.] http://ishiguroyoko.info/iroiro/OCCUPIED.html and Fereshteh's new play was just premiered last weekend at the Iranian Theatre Festival
[-empyre-] Vor dem Gesetz/Before the Law, hoveringly
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Leila Sadat, a scholar of international crime and law, with whom I collaborated two years ago, has invited me to perform a new project, silent lamentation shared with dozens of participants in my Sustenazo series, and with choral sound composition. It opened the 10th anniversary of ICC, held at the Whitney Harris International Law Institute which she directs. She told me that none of her many important books, in which she collected data, and which contain highly reliable information, including numbers, facts and testimonies as well as other documents of genocides and atrocities committed by entire nations—none of this can ever replace, she said, a kind of ‘shortcut’, an emotional and affective immediacy that she perceived in the work that I do. Only recently there were first trials in Rwanda. In general, only some of the perpetrators are ever tried, or, as Rustom writes, in some/many other places none of them are ever tried at all. Leila would travel around the globe, she would see and meet the communities, the individuals, the whole generations and nations affected, mourning, in suspension of trauma, but not fully mourning. What voice do they have, she asked me. Where does it live, the voice… http://www.artisttalk.eu/monika-weiss-us/ When we met for the second time, I gave her “Frames of War”, the importance of asking over and over, after J. Butler, the question ‘who is worthy of mourning’. I feel there is a need for both grass-root organizing (as Rustom writes) and activism but also the actions or enactments within public space that are artifacts (at artifacts as the connecting tissue) — which provide the “shortcut” or the immediacy through the symbolic language or site, or through transferring/imprinting—giving voice. The two types of engaging of public space are sometimes overlapping (activism and artifact). What Krzysztof (Wodiczko) did with his projection of veterans and their voices onto Lincoln monument. What I hope to do in Delihi, around India Gate. The practice we are engaged in comes with response-ability and this goes for philosophers and artists alike, I believe. The public nature or public (polis) potential of our activities should not be relegated into simply the space of flowerings, the ‘roses’ that have no place during the burning times of wars. Baczyński saved several identical manuscripts of his poems, burred deep under the ground, under the floors of his home’s cellar, under layers of later collapsed buildings of Warsaw (exploded and burned one by one), as he knew there was no way of survival. But why saving poetry? Why Avanza under Pinochet? Baczyński’s poem ‘Rains’ saved so many lives under the harsh grip of communist regime, years after his death. It in—formed my life. Yes, this is a defense of poetry, writing in the hour of terror and of horror, the defense of the ponos and the poinoi, both are hidden and exposed, shared and painfully solitary. Why burning of books (including music sheets), what danger can arise from words, notes and images? The powerlessness of poetry is not so powerless (as in John Berger’s Hour of Poetry). p.s. On the subject of ecstatic cinema and its violence (frame) and Butler’s framing of war — the question is how we frame, what and how, for whom, towards whom, towards what. The possibility of political community of another order, that of our own shared reframing. Monika ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
[-empyre-] Monika Weiss Post
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Following the October 2012 debate on Pain, Suffering, and Death in the Virtual I am now re-joining the debate on ISIS, Absolute Terror, Performance. Thanks to Alan and Renate and everyone for having me back as a quest. Alan writes in his introductory text that an ‘absolute terror, the performative of beheadings, genocides, and crucifixions, signs the performative of the end-time itself. It is not a question of the inerrancy of the text leading the torturers on; it's the errancy of any text in the face of decapitation; every world is ultimately unutterable.’ I have been working with collapsing systems of language and meaning through lament. Lament is the moment when we face history. History, the way I learned it as a child, was always a stream of masses of killed and tortured bodies disguised as battlegrounds, when at their best, or morphed into camps, when at their worst. Facing ‘history” language disintegrates into non-meaning. This is the moment of lament and the moment of music—but if music is the ultimate lament, it also becomes non-music, non-sound. There is a void, a silence, a giant absence that the horror creates out of the masses of killed and tortured bodies. When I think of ISIS, I think of Agamben’s notion of the camp. The state of the camp is when law decides about itself as law. If we think after Aristotle that language is a form of law, there is a kind of iteration that cannot be denied: I kill therefore I am, what I say (who I kill) is what I am. Enonces, statements, in form of words, images, torturing and killings, cannot be denied. We are facing them now, facing history as it happens now. It feels to me like the world has finally speeded up so much so that we are looking at our own postmemory. We re gazing back at our death, we are speechless like Eurydice. No more gaps or voids of time, no generational differences or delays. We are looking at our own past and our future as they are collapsing and colliding, the true end of times as Alan writes. One of the projects I am working towards right now --and yes, I am also under the avalanche of “production” deadlines but at least I am not physically in Dresden this week- is a public project in Delhi next year. The project is, in brief, proposing pollution of the public sphere through Lament. Silent gestures of lamentation on the Victory Square. Inhabiting the area around India Gate and the nearby empty canopy with the monument of the body of the king George removed and no other monument or body replacing it until now. Project Two Laments (title in progress) will be a film and a sound composition, it proposes to collide two kinds of trauma and two kind of body: first is the lingering aftermath of war and second will evoke the current and often-repressed and newly urgent subject of sexual violence against women on the Indian subcontinent and around the world, [including especially ISIS]. Lament functions here as the voice polluting public sphere (both ponos and ponoi). But what one does, how one responds, to echo Alan’s question? I only know one must ‘go on’. I recall looking down from my Warsaw window when I was a girl, only to see tanks on the streets, in 1980, the year of Marshall law in Poland. The size of the tanks seemed so much bigger then I imagined based in history books. The absurdity of the possibility that if I went outside, they would destroy my body, if only because of the “law”. The absurdity of violence. … To be continued as I am still reading, only now, through the earlier posts. The pairings of violence versus stillness, pain/torture and ego, war and representation, re-enactment with empathy, and expression as violence, and violence as expression—among others, are those that caught my attention and that I intend to address as much as I hope to gradually move this week into a new chapter of our discussion . Monika Weiss ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Practice in Research odd methods, rude mechanics
dear All, I have only now began to read through some of the posts on this highly contested/defended today subject (art and research, art as research) and this quote came across as something I wanted to write towards and perhaps oppose it a little: art is non instrumental because it does not have to refer to anything outside of itself, if it desires, its use value is to itself only. I think when Carolee talks about process as opposed to practice (thank you JB for that artforum quote by the way), and the way I understand the process as well --- it leads us, pulls us, away from [and towards] strangely familiar and unfamiliar places, both at the same time. Both familiarity and recognition as well as strangeness and unknown territories, create a productive place for the work and its reception. Thus I disagree profoundly with the idea of complete independence of art from life (as referent) which the above sentence implies, I think. There is always some type of a connecting tissue, a link with real event, which is why a dialogue is even possible. Of course the question arises how to defend that inner and connecting-with-outer tissue. Critics and historians are practicing answers to this question in what Edward Shanken I believe calls MCA (main stream contemporary art) -- this defense (or de-fence) is practiced by dealers, critics and historians on our behalf, while in the NMA (new media art) we are more often writing or exposing our thinking directly as theory and making it visible first hand. This apparent conflict between art and research has many faces -- again something even Shanken agrees in one of his recent posts on Rhizome -- that a lot of new media work is not great (if we assume that new media means it is work that comes automatically with theory and research and writing etc.) but he also states that a lot of MCA is equally not interesting or equally not relevant (also true). Thus, if we take the power of the work itself aside for a moment, I want to ask whether a profound research done by an artist along side the work of art that stands on its own takes anything away from the 'art? -- or, perhaps, it becomes part of it , at least in the best case scenario... I recently had a conversation [following a screening of my work] with an important artist from the MCA world whom I mutually adore. However his complaint was that I spoke as part of my screening, especially that I spoke of the issues or histories and places that I researched and that it took away some of the magic or mystery. He said - let THEM do it. This, this strange division between us and them seems to be as relevant in the conversations about research and art or practice as is the context of academia. The sometimes still lingering bourgeois notion of an artist as always a priori other and as an outcast, comes to mind. The non-intellectual, the mute genius, hidden in HIS studio (and then sold by Gaugosian). And, as we all well know, it was the first wave feminist artists and writers that, among others, brought to the fore the notion that ideology, politics, social issues, economy, the body and the biography, all can be explicitly discussed in and alongside the work itself. Of course since then, we have grown both into commercialization of the ideology (and even/especially of the process itself--enough to just take a walk through Basel etc.) which is now commodified (again thanks to MCA machine) but we have also developed systems of questioning values such as this assumption about the non instrumental art -- and, in a bright utopian universe, PhD for artists could offer that place of questioning. [here, I need to also state that only in places like Australia, where the government pays for PHDs, not in the US and nor in Europe where it is an adventure reserved for the riches] - Is our production defensible? By THEM? By us? Who has a right to stand by it in language, in theory, in public forum and how, why? [Interestingly, Schneemann is a very good writer - I recommend especially her conversation with Thomas McEvilley in the book accompanying her tremendous retrospective in the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto from few years back.] -- So, there are just my few thoughts before I dig deeper into the past posts in this conversation--- regards, Monika Weiss On Jan 20, 2013, at 12:18 AM, Johannes Birringer wrote: dear all the small post I sent a few days ago was meant to interrupt the conversation, and I am sorry for that. The messages that appeared before here were quite illuminating, in many respects, and also deeply, very deeply saddening, when I felt I read about the experiences described, artists becoming academics, teaching, defending their Phds, embroiled in bureaucracy of management, pedagogy, teaching studio? teaching academic practice theory? preparation for teaching, administering, writing essays and theses, and all this, yes. And all
Re: [-empyre-] election algorithms
Thank you Johannes for these - I have been hurried in work and meanwhile the world is falling apart, once again. Will especially look at the Turkish article with Zygmunt Bauman references, although the New York Times and LeMonde articles are by themselves alerting enough. Monika Sent from my iPad On Nov 19, 2012, at 10:59 AM, Johannes Birringer johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.uk wrote: the golden dawn? As an update to my comments on political risks in Europe, see this important article from the Nov. 18 edition of The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/opinion/sunday/europes-new-fascists.html?hp [William schreibt] here below a few boomerang comments, from other sides of the water... http://elpais.com/elpais/2012/05/31/inenglish/1338465404_424332.html NO HAY CRISIS ECONOMICA LO QUE HAY ES UN EXCESO DE ELECCIONES POLITICAS | http://lacomunidad.elpais.com/blagusadas/2012/4/11/europa-espana-va-directa-hacia-primera-revolucion-social-del http://www.presseurop.eu/it/content/article/2333541-ranghi-serrati-dietro-la-cancelliera http://economia.panorama.it/euro/pil-disoccupazione-austerity-Europa http://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2012/07/24/l-europe-politique-et-la-transition-ecologique-solutions-a-la-crise-globale_1737078_3232.html http://www.fr-online.de/schuldenkrise/euro-krise-warten-auf-den-griechenland-gau,1471908,16929622.html http://www.fr-online.de/schuldenkrise/euro-krise-das-maerchen-von-den-griechen,1471908,17172592.html http://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2012/09/03/la-bce-doit-changer-ses-objectifs-d-inflation_1754770_3234.html http://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/apr2012/east-a07.shtml http://www.turkishweekly.net/news/140115/europe-39-s-political-crisis.html (this last one from Turkey makes an interesting reference to Zygmunt Bauman's writings on the political future of 'europe', and the europeans' loss of the luxary not to learn from mistakes:: “Power is the ability to afford not to learn from mistakes, presumably this particular reference is made with the waning US empire in mind, and one only has to recall the last debate between the election candidates for the casa bianca on global politics to feel rather worried about dawns, naturally, and dusks, and the birds that fly at dusk time. with regards Johannes Birringer ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Pain, Suffering, and Death in the Virtual
My thanks to the - e m p y r e moderators for the invitation and to all of you who responded to my initial meditations/manifestos with very important remarks and questions. It's been a pleasure. I will continue on the receiving and reacting end now Looking forward to the next chapter! Monika Weiss On Oct 8, 2012, at 7:07 PM, Charles Baldwin wrote: The second week of October's -empyre- discussion will start tomorrow, continuing with the topic of Pain, Suffering, and Death in the Virtual. The guests will be Yael Gilks aka Fau Ferdinand and Jon Marshall. Their biographical information is below. We expect the discussion will continue around the topics raised so far, but moving more towards avatars and the virtual - though let's see! I look forward to it. Sandy Baldwin :: Week 2: Fau Ferdinand (UK) and Jon Marshall (AU) Yael Gilks aka Fau Ferdinand is a performance and visual artist. She is a member of Second Front - a performance art group using Second Life as a platform. She co-directed Odyssey, a contemporary art and performance simulator in Second Life, with Liz Solo. Jon Marshall is a failed playwrite, avante-rock musician, and novelist. He is also an anthropologist, interested in the history of science and the occult, and since 1994 studying online interaction and the social usages of computers. His work includes writing an ethnography of the internet mailing list cybermind _Living on Cybermind: Categories, Communication and Control_ (Peter Lang 2007) and editing the Cybermind Gender Project for the online journal _Transforming cultures_ (http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/TfC/issue/view/40). More recently he has vered into editing a book on the disruptive psychology of climate change, _Depth Psychology, Disorder and Climate Change_ (JungDownunder Books 2009) and is currently co-authoring a book called _Disorder and the Disinformation Society: The Social Dynamics of Networks and Software_ (forthcoming Routledge). ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] On (severe) Pain Part 3 (dialog between Sandy Baldwin and Alan Sondheim)
These are very beautiful summaries of your meditations--reinscriptions, thank you Alan and Sandy. Pain as socially visible and already historical from the point of view of others, yet unnamable and meaningless within ourselves. Loss of the ability to signify, to mean, is a shared attribute of pain and mourning. Pain as embodied union of mind and body, in their indiscernible embrace (when it hurts it hurts throughout) --- and mourning as an act, a response to the loss of meaning, to the loss of, breaking of, falling of a part of one self, the entire self breaking, so that it no longer is capable to comprehend itself. Could you expand on the pain's relationship to the body as cosmology to the universe Monika Weiss On Oct 6, 2012, at 11:12 PM, Charles Baldwin wrote: Here's the final part of the dialog (in fact, the notes below are largely by Alan). Again, these emerge from the kernel/core/chora of the discussion of mourning and grief. 110812_004: Pain as separating inscription/history from the inertness of the body; what's read as history from the outside (and thereby entering the social), from the inside is unread/unreadable. The inside is pure substance. 110812_005: Inscription carries, until burial, carries a specific relationship to the body until burial. Burial is a form of reinscription. A line on the body - how is this interpreted during life? during death? 110812_012: Inscription = embodiment and maintenance; maintenance = retardation: what makes for example virtual particles last as long as they do? Retardation - slowing things down, copying, duplicating, a poetics of dispersion, holding-back. See the phenomenology of numbers: data-base, interpretation, intentionality, an immersive situation, memory. In doing mathematics, always dealing with temporal processes. In pain: everything drops away, definable and immersive situations cease to exist. 110812_014: Splintering, splintered nails, leveraging of particles, striations, applicable to notions of binding, constriction, discomfort. 110816_002: Pain of the signifiera: signifier as incision, disturbance, splits between the Pale and beyond the Pale. Pain beyond the Pale? The pain of death: horizon foreclosing its origin and the subject as well. 110816_003: The work I do as obdurate, not grid or mapping, but flows that are not channelized, flows that are mute - relation to pain. The phenomenology of the embodiment of the signifier is also mute. What I do is planless, expands into available technology on a practical level, produces and reproduces that way. 110816_006: My Textbook of Thinking: components of inscription: linkage, syntactical structure, inscription is an ordering of difference, impulse, representation-structure, legitimation structure, maintenance, stabilization mechanisms, positive/negative feedback, field of abjection. Excessive related to corrosion. Difference between fissure and inscription. Relationship of corrosion and scarcity to pain. 110816_007: Phenomenology of eccentric space, Sarduy, de-centering the subject, tied to abjection. 110816_008: Difference between fissure and inscription; pain tends towards fissure; if fissure is same and same, there's no geography, no topography, no topology; the result is the crack / wound, everywhere and nowhere. 110818_001: Pain relates to the body as cosmology to the universe. (?) 110819_001: Pain in relation to virtual worlds: in circumlocution of the subject who may remain impervious, the degree zero of phenomenology. 110821_001: What happens when users exchange their avatars? Our histories, inventories, are no longer our own. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] regarding grief and mourning
Yes Ana, Jaar is an important artist and I have always admired his Rwanda Project. Museo de la Memoria y Los Derechos Humanos where my Sustenazo (Lament II) is opening later this year began their contemporary art programming in 2010 with his very interesting permanent installationGeometry of Consciousness. There was a question earlier in a post, I think from Johannes, which is an important one and has many implications. The problem of the projected and cinematic environments' capability to induce any emotions or intellectual epiphanies worthy of the space of the polis, especially in the case of my work's preoccupation with public ritual of lamentation. Along those lines, I think you Johannes asked to what extend (if at all) installation work with live presence has any impact outside of the internal feasts that happen inside the museums and for the museums' trustees (as in case of the gradually more and more devaluated and also openly married to financial establishment practice of Ambramovic). This is possibly a question that should trouble many or all of us, and it definitely troubles me to a great extent. One of the ways that my work has been overcoming this predicament is for example in my series of open drawing landscapes -- where passersby would be invited to inhabit the territory of the work for any period of time, often by lying down in its space, and experiencing sound as well as interacting with the landscape by leaving marks of their presence. The process would be filmed by an overhead camera and the contingencies that would result would be later visible in the film, for example in my Drawing Lethe project at the World Financial Center Winter Garden etc. With less interactive pieces or with those made for and inside art institutions, I would often receive a lot of unexpected feedback, at times (actually it happens a lot) the people who either attended a performance or viewed the projections, would proceed to cry. They would tell the guard or the curator that they felt happiness as they were crying Or they would talk to me directly about the experience. This is not to say it's a given or a guarantee that someone would be moved to tears and I never set this as my goal... This seems to just happen. As I am using these words, tears or emotions or happiness I realize that they have been forbidden for a while now The Duchamp's expulsion of emotion from contemporary art took place for a good reason originally, when it felt as a bourgeois method, as a misleading trope, that has nothing to do with the more desired analytical skepticism . And yet, today, as Adriana Valdes spoke in Berlin last summer in her talk titled When Irony Is Not Enough -- skepticism, irony and their deconstructive skills are not enough indeed. The relationship is/needs to be dialectical and dialogical -- between the spectacle and the interactivity, the emitted/porous emotion/affect and the analytical agency, the gesture and the response-ability, from merely institutional, towards public and dispersed among many. Monika Weiss On Oct 6, 2012, at 12:16 PM, Ana Valdés wrote: I am friend to Alfredo Jaar, the Chilean born artist living in New York since many years. I love his work, the Rwanda Project. 1994-2000 He wrote this text in the Imaginary Museum, “These posters, scattered around the streets and squares of Malmo, reduced the rhetoric of advertising to a cry of grief. But they also served notice on a complacent public: ‘You—in your tidy parks, on your bicycles, walking your dogs—look at this name, listen to this name, at least hear it, now: Rwanda, Rwanda, Rwanda...’ The posters were a raw gesture, produced out of frustration and anger. If all of the images of slaughter and piled corpses, and all of the reportage did so little, perhaps a simple sign, in the form of an insistent cry, would get their attention.” - Alfredo Jaar, imaginarymuseum.org Regarding Deenas interesting linking together, I think it's of course right and fair to try to be a part of a collective catharsis with our writings with our images with our tears with our cries. Ana -- http://writings-escrituras.tumblr.com/ http://maraya.tumblr.com/ http://www.twitter.com/caravia158 http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/ http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia http://www.scoop.it/t/gender-issues/ http://www.scoop.it/t/literary-exiles/ http://www.scoop.it/t/museums-and-ethics/ http://www.scoop.it/t/urbanism-3-0 http://www.scoop.it/t/postcolonial-mind/ cell Sweden +4670-3213370 cell Uruguay +598-99470758 When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to return. — Leonardo da Vinci ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum
[-empyre-] Fwd: regarding grief and mourning
p.s. I re-read last sentence that I wrote and realized that the very end is not what I meant the direction cannot be from institution towards public domain, but it has to be somehow reversed. I strive towards that, not without many failures. I think one of the artists who works and writes in this direction is Krzysztof Wodiczko with his public work's focus on casting light towards those of us who are the most dis-priviledged and muted. Ethics as new esthetics as he said in the early 1990s -- this motto resonates deeply today. Amongst his writing I recall a statement about the fact that as artists we hold a privileged position, not in terms of financial power (except a few) but because we are invited to make critical and poetic statements and to create critical images, and because sometimes some people pay attention and listen to what we do, and sometimes some even respond. If you don't know one of his most recent works - a monument at Nantes, France, that celebrates the abolition of slavery, please see it here: http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/#/news/memorial-by-krzysztof-wodiczko-and-julian-bonder-mdess-96-to.html Monika Weiss Begin forwarded message: From: Monika Weiss gnie...@monika-weiss.com Date: October 6, 2012 3:32:04 PM EDT To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Cc: Monika Weiss gnie...@monika-weiss.com Subject: Re:regarding grief and mourning Yes Ana, Jaar is an important artist and I have always admired his Rwanda Project. Museo de la Memoria y Los Derechos Humanos where my Sustenazo (Lament II) is opening later this year began their contemporary art programming in 2010 with his very interesting permanent installationGeometry of Consciousness. There was a question earlier in a post, I think from Johannes, which is an important one and has many implications. The problem of the projected and cinematic environments' capability to induce any emotions or intellectual epiphanies worthy of the space of the polis, especially in the case of my work's preoccupation with public ritual of lamentation. Along those lines, I think you Johannes asked to what extend (if at all) installation work with live presence has any impact outside of the internal feasts that happen inside the museums and for the museums' trustees (as in case of the gradually more and more devaluated and also openly married to financial establishment practice of Ambramovic). This is possibly a question that should trouble many or all of us, and it definitely troubles me to a great extent. One of the ways that my work has been overcoming this predicament is for example in my series of open drawing landscapes -- where passersby would be invited to inhabit the territory of the work for any period of time, often by lying down in its space, and experiencing sound as well as interacting with the landscape by leaving marks of their presence. The process would be filmed by an overhead camera and the contingencies that would result would be later visible in the film, for example in my Drawing Lethe project at the World Financial Center Winter Garden etc. With less interactive pieces or with those made for and inside art institutions, I would often receive a lot of unexpected feedback, at times (actually it happens a lot) the people who either attended a performance or viewed the projections, would proceed to cry. They would tell the guard or the curator that they felt happiness as they were crying Or they would talk to me directly about the experience. This is not to say it's a given or a guarantee that someone would be moved to tears and I never set this as my goal... This seems to just happen. As I am using these words, tears or emotions or happiness I realize that they have been forbidden for a while now The Duchamp's expulsion of emotion from contemporary art took place for a good reason originally, when it felt as a bourgeois method, as a misleading trope, that has nothing to do with the more desired analytical skepticism . And yet, today, as Adriana Valdes spoke in Berlin last summer in her talk titled When Irony Is Not Enough -- skepticism, irony and their deconstructive skills are not enough indeed. The relationship is/needs to be dialectical and dialogical -- between the spectacle and the interactivity, the emitted/porous emotion/affect and the analytical agency, the gesture and the response-ability, from merely institutional, towards public and dispersed among many. Monika Weiss On Oct 6, 2012, at 12:16 PM, Ana Valdés wrote: I am friend to Alfredo Jaar, the Chilean born artist living in New York since many years. I love his work, the Rwanda Project. 1994-2000 He wrote this text in the Imaginary Museum, “These posters, scattered around the streets and squares of Malmo, reduced the rhetoric of advertising to a cry of grief. But they also served notice on a complacent public: ‘You—in your tidy
[-empyre-] Monika Weiss -- Shrouds, 2012-2013 (as addendum to Lamentation)
Today is the real estate and the commerce and the corporate world--- memory of a city does not constitute a value, unless it's a negative value, because it becomes a threat to the powers. Nationalism of any kind does not interest me. Instead, is the redefinition of otherness as sameness. I grew up seeing an empty square of ground located centrally in my own city of Warsaw, which used to be a royal castle. After 1945 Soviets prevented Poland from rebuilding the castle, so that there was no national monument to speak of. But in the seventies, when the entire city was up and rebuild from zero to its simulacrum (as you know Germans reduced entire Warsaw to an ocean of rubble by systematically exploding and burning all buildings and bridges while Soviets watched this spectacle from the other side of a a very narrow river of Vistula, during Warsaw Uprising in August 1944) -- When I was growing up in seventies the rubble, gray like our grand zero in 2001, created a stark contrast to the rest of the city, a reverse monument, a whole, a living wound. On Oct 5, 2012, at 7:41 AM, Ana Valdés wrote: Beautiful text, Monika! When I was a child (I was a very precocius reader :) and read history of Rome and Greece. My favorite was the history of Carthage and I was shocked how the city was erased and the Romans threw salt in it to avoid the Carthagineses should build it again. These horrible fate of a city was a nightmare for me and I asked my grandfather if our city could have the same fate and my grandfather tranquilized me, it happened in the old times, nothing similar could happen now. But he was wrong and he wanted spare me the grief, of course. I visited the city of Guernica in Spain some years ago and I tried to imagine the eerie atmosphere of the city when the fascist bombs fell over the city. It was these atmosphere the thing Picasso tried to paint in his painture. I searched the city of Guernica trying to evoke the day when the city's heart was ravaged. And what about the mourning today? It was a planted tree and a post telling the day and the time of the attack. Nothing more. Ana On Fri, Oct 5, 2012 at 1:24 AM, Monika Weiss gnie...@monika-weiss.com wrote: From a text I wrote about my current ongoing this year project Shrouds. Do cities remember? Maps of cities are flat, yet their histories contain vertical strata of events. Where in the topography and consciousness of a city can we locate its memory? Maps of the Polish city Zielona Góra depict an empty unmarked rectangular area located on Wrocławska Street, across from the Focus Park shopping mall. Located centrally within the city this area looks abandoned, being composed mostly of broken masonry and wood debris. Inquiries to citizens of Zielona Góra indicate that many of them do not know the history of this abandoned area, including those who grew up near the site. Invited by a local museum to propose a project, I arrived to Zielona Góra (Gruenberg) knowing of the past history of the unmarked yet centrally located ruined site. On June 9th this year I flew on a small airplane to film this territory and its surroundings. The flight marked the beginning of my new project that will eventually develop into a film and a multi-layered dialogue with the citizens of Zielona Góra. During the Second World War the site was a forced labor camp, which later became a concentration camp designated primarily for Jewish women. The camp was developed on the site of the German wool factory, Deutsche Wollenwaren Manufaktur AG, which supplied the German war machine with military clothing. (It has since been converted to a shopping mall.) During the war about 1,000 young women worked there as seamstresses and eventually became prisoners of the concentration camp complex governed by KZ Groß-Rosen. Towards the very end of the war the prisoners were sent on one of the most tragic of the forced Death Marches where many of them died. Looking down from the airplane we see well-kept buildings surrounding the ruins of the former camp, as though it were an open yet forgotten wound in the body of the center of the city. During the performative phase of the project, I invited a group of young women from Zielona Góra to spend some time in silence on the site of the camp, wearing black scarfs which later were taken off and left behind amongst the ruins. Their presence evoked the absence of the prisoners. In the dual video projection installation at the BWA, (an exhibition that initiated the project in June), the faces of these young women look towards us in silence. In another part of the projection we observe a torso of a woman wrapping bandages onto her naked chest in a slow, fragile gesture of defense, or perhaps caress. Her body stands for our common body, anonymous as if it were a membrane between the self and the external world. Awareness of our marginality becomes elevated into the realm
Re: [-empyre-] Monika Weiss -- Shrouds, 2012-2013 (as addendum to Lamentation)
I would love to get in touch with them, if you think possible. This has been and continues to be my main project (in other cities as well) since last year and it would be interesting to consider a collaboration with them, should they be interested. I feel a deep connection to your writing Ana by the way. Monika On Oct 5, 2012, at 8:53 AM, Ana Valdés wrote: A group of friends of mine, the architect group Hackitectura, www.hackitectura.net work with maps and try to make a cartography of the memory (or the lack of it) mapping social relations, inmaterial networks, political issues. One of their main pillars is the work with communities wanting to recover the hidden stories of the cities, the place where the real estate or the market converge with the lives of the people living there. Your remarks about the real state and the commerce and corporate world reminds me about the debate on gentrification and it's consequences. With gentrification the stories of the people are erased, shiny new white surfaces substitute the cracks of the fabric, the holes in the walls, the peeled tiles, the age, the wrinkles of the skin. Ana On Fri, Oct 5, 2012 at 9:52 AM, Monika Weiss gnie...@monika-weiss.com wrote: Today is the real estate and the commerce and the corporate world--- memory of a city does not constitute a value, unless it's a negative value, because it becomes a threat to the powers. Nationalism of any kind does not interest me. Instead, is the redefinition of otherness as sameness. I grew up seeing an empty square of ground located centrally in my own city of Warsaw, which used to be a royal castle. After 1945 Soviets prevented Poland from rebuilding the castle, so that there was no national monument to speak of. But in the seventies, when the entire city was up and rebuild from zero to its simulacrum (as you know Germans reduced entire Warsaw to an ocean of rubble by systematically exploding and burning all buildings and bridges while Soviets watched this spectacle from the other side of a a very narrow river of Vistula, during Warsaw Uprising in August 1944) -- When I was growing up in seventies the rubble, gray like our grand zero in 2001, created a stark contrast to the rest of the city, a reverse monument, a whole, a living wound. On Oct 5, 2012, at 7:41 AM, Ana Valdés wrote: Beautiful text, Monika! When I was a child (I was a very precocius reader :) and read history of Rome and Greece. My favorite was the history of Carthage and I was shocked how the city was erased and the Romans threw salt in it to avoid the Carthagineses should build it again. These horrible fate of a city was a nightmare for me and I asked my grandfather if our city could have the same fate and my grandfather tranquilized me, it happened in the old times, nothing similar could happen now. But he was wrong and he wanted spare me the grief, of course. I visited the city of Guernica in Spain some years ago and I tried to imagine the eerie atmosphere of the city when the fascist bombs fell over the city. It was these atmosphere the thing Picasso tried to paint in his painture. I searched the city of Guernica trying to evoke the day when the city's heart was ravaged. And what about the mourning today? It was a planted tree and a post telling the day and the time of the attack. Nothing more. Ana On Fri, Oct 5, 2012 at 1:24 AM, Monika Weiss gnie...@monika-weiss.com wrote: From a text I wrote about my current ongoing this year project Shrouds. Do cities remember? Maps of cities are flat, yet their histories contain vertical strata of events. Where in the topography and consciousness of a city can we locate its memory? Maps of the Polish city Zielona Góra depict an empty unmarked rectangular area located on Wrocławska Street, across from the Focus Park shopping mall. Located centrally within the city this area looks abandoned, being composed mostly of broken masonry and wood debris. Inquiries to citizens of Zielona Góra indicate that many of them do not know the history of this abandoned area, including those who grew up near the site. Invited by a local museum to propose a project, I arrived to Zielona Góra (Gruenberg) knowing of the past history of the unmarked yet centrally located ruined site. On June 9th this year I flew on a small airplane to film this territory and its surroundings. The flight marked the beginning of my new project that will eventually develop into a film and a multi-layered dialogue with the citizens of Zielona Góra. During the Second World War the site was a forced labor camp, which later became a concentration camp designated primarily for Jewish women. The camp was developed on the site of the German wool factory, Deutsche Wollenwaren Manufaktur AG, which supplied the German war machine with military clothing. (It has since been converted to a shopping mall.) During the war
Re: [-empyre-] public lament and gardening
I wish I was there to witness it... I think collective catharsis could be the very foundation of the political community of citizens. On Oct 4, 2012, at 1:51 PM, Ana Valdés wrote: For me the lament is a kind of collective catharsis, as the mourning itself. I has been in Palestine several times and see and listened to the collective mourning of the women when some of their relatives or friends are killed or buried, a kind of powerful roaring, not the claiming not the whinning but the power of a repressed cry or shouting. Ana On Thu, Oct 4, 2012 at 3:14 PM, Johannes Birringer johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.uk wrote: which Lamentations are you refering to? (not Martha Graham's Lamentation?) The lament of nation-building I'd be interested in this idea of the critique of the ritual and the community self-restitution, and also in a review how lament becomes a gesture (in performance and film/filmed performance/then in stilled photograph) of witnessing and what Monika describes as witnessing and enunciation sequenced to non-linear time[with] compose[d] sound from testimonies, recitations, laments, the environment... I was interested in the staging of lament, Monika, and how it loses all aura (in Benjamin's writing on something that may have been originary or original) thereby, or retains some?, and how people today, perhaps, are divesting themselves of having to witness ageing, decrepitude, decay, catatonia, living absence, death. Not sure, i know many folks, in the old village, who are care takers and who are witnessing the disappearance of loved ones, the sliding away, in pain or tranced, stilled pain (medicated), but Yoko Ishiguro, a Japanese performance artist who studied at my school, recently staged her symbolic passing outside the library, had herself placed and buried in a coffin and transmitted all that action through the network to test whether the net would be a kind or tomb archive for later generations to look back to Yoko's death at the foot of the library and how would the data be preserved? Yoko told me she was reacting to the crass commodification of death she observed, with funeral trade shows and, for example, the Japanese cyber-burial companies which invite the dead to be buried on the website so that you can visit there online.She saw this commodification in the Benjamin sense of raising questions about work: (art) in the era of technical reproducibility. So my question (this is before Alan and Sandy's dense textdialiogue about the signifier of pain arrived, which i have not been able to translate) was still to Monika to try to describe how she sees her work function, and what effect is produced, and how the audience is drawn into the long circle or not. And can there ever be audience in lamentation/mourning? (PS. i personally have no problems with weeds (as weeds), i love them in my garden and tend to them, and they are migrants too, some weeds have travel from far but i didn't know there were weeds, some one has to point out. that must be the signifier. I had never thought of them in the sense of homo sacer. This astonished me, Monika, that you mention Agamben, after Nowoczesność i Zaglada. thank you for responding to my query, and in think Alan's answer is not quite responding to Bauman's critical analysis of the garden society, and what the writing may also have to tell us about politics of integration or assimilation of impairment, otherness. respectfully Johannes Birringer Alan schreibt: public lament and gardening On Thu, 4 Oct 2012, Maria Damon wrote: Is there then (I'm sort of assuming the answer is yes, but asking anyway in order to make it part of the fabric of the conversation) a way in which lamentation is also critique as well as community self-constitution, as in Lamentations? Maria, I wonder what sort of critique would be possible? Lamentations seems to bridge the political and the obdurate. When pain becomes overwhelming, silence is at the core and the signifier dissolves; I think this is also the core of anguish. One is left speechless. On the other hand, how much clarity is necessary for political or 'rational' thought? In an odd way this also brings up mathematical thinking - which, from an outsider point-of-view, seems based on the manipulation of symbols, but from within is much more of clouded movements with indeterminate focus (see Jacques Hadamard). Thinking itself, in other words, may well have less content than its representations, and certainly its representations in virtual worlds, where everything, one way or another, is determinate and rationalized on a pixel-by-pixel level. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- http://writings-escrituras.tumblr.com/ http://maraya.tumblr.com/
Re: [-empyre-] public lament and gardening
While aware of some of the lamentations explored by artists such as Martha Graham (who is not my favorite although I have a great respect for her) -- what I am working towards is a connection with the older, before now, before any specific time, lamentation. My dancer actually took me to Wender's film about Pina Baush last Spring, and while aware of her name I never really knew of this work until quite recently (maybe even Alan mentioned her to me a long time ago) but it took a person whose body literally inhabited my work 'Sustenazo (Lament II)' to discover this work and a feeling of connection. Monika On Oct 4, 2012, at 4:05 PM, Alan Sondheim wrote: which Lamentations are you refering to? (not Martha Graham's Lamentation?) Book of Lamentations in English All Sandy and I are/were on about, I think, is the silence and the obdurate that occurs in relaton to severe pain; I'm thinking for example of my mother shortly before her death, when she had been anesthetized to alleviate her suffering in the hospice. The silence is also the silence at the heart of the signifier; the signifier is both suture and broken suture, covering and dis/covering pain, naming it for those who are suffering, who can no longer hear the name, who are no longer with us, coffin or not - when my father died, there were issues at the cemetary about the burial of ashes. - Alan Alan schreibt: public lament and gardening On Thu, 4 Oct 2012, Maria Damon wrote: Is there then (I'm sort of assuming the answer is yes, but asking anyway in order to make it part of the fabric of the conversation) a way in which lamentation is also critique as well as community self-constitution, as in Lamentations? Maria, I wonder what sort of critique would be possible? Lamentations seems to bridge the political and the obdurate. When pain becomes overwhelming, silence is at the core and the signifier dissolves; I think this is also the core of anguish. One is left speechless. On the other hand, how much clarity is necessary for political or 'rational' thought? In an odd way this also brings up mathematical thinking - which, from an outsider point-of-view, seems based on the manipulation of symbols, but from within is much more of clouded movements with indeterminate focus (see Jacques Hadamard). Thinking itself, in other words, may well have less content than its representations, and certainly its representations in virtual worlds, where everything, one way or another, is determinate and rationalized on a pixel-by-pixel level. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre M o n i k a W e i s s S t u d i o 456 Broome Street, 4 New York, NY 10013 Phone: 212-226-6736 Mobile: 646-660-2809 www.monika-weiss.com gnie...@monika-weiss.com M o n i k a W e i s s Assistant Professor Graduate School of Art Hybrid Media Sam Fox School of Design Visual Arts Washington University in St. Louis Campus Box 1031 One Brookings Drive St. Louis, MO 63130 mwe...@samfox.wustl.edu http://samfoxschool.wustl.edu/portfolios/faculty/monika_weiss ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] public lament and gardening
yes, if I understood you correctly Maria, you say that I am not trying to work with grief over ones own complicity or remorse. I am more invested in the notion and symbolic power as well as real experience of communal grief -- this is what oppressive systems fear most -- the symbolic power of the connecting tissue of our emotions but not those on individual level alone On Oct 4, 2012, at 6:41 PM, Maria Damon wrote: Yes, when I mentioned Lamentations, I meant the Hebrew Bible. Old. Grieving for ones city, ones polis, ones people. Also, it seems that this is *not* where you were going, Monika, a sense of grief over ones own possible complicity, real or imagined... remorse. On 10/4/12 5:55 PM, Monika Weiss wrote: While aware of some of the lamentations explored by artists such as Martha Graham (who is not my favorite although I have a great respect for her) -- what I am working towards is a connection with the older, before now, before any specific time, lamentation. My dancer actually took me to Wender's film about Pina Baush last Spring, and while aware of her name I never really knew of this work until quite recently (maybe even Alan mentioned her to me a long time ago) but it took a person whose body literally inhabited my work 'Sustenazo (Lament II)' to discover this work and a feeling of connection. Monika On Oct 4, 2012, at 4:05 PM, Alan Sondheim wrote: which Lamentations are you refering to? (not Martha Graham's Lamentation?) Book of Lamentations in English All Sandy and I are/were on about, I think, is the silence and the obdurate that occurs in relaton to severe pain; I'm thinking for example of my mother shortly before her death, when she had been anesthetized to alleviate her suffering in the hospice. The silence is also the silence at the heart of the signifier; the signifier is both suture and broken suture, covering and dis/covering pain, naming it for those who are suffering, who can no longer hear the name, who are no longer with us, coffin or not - when my father died, there were issues at the cemetary about the burial of ashes. - Alan Alan schreibt: public lament and gardening On Thu, 4 Oct 2012, Maria Damon wrote: Is there then (I'm sort of assuming the answer is yes, but asking anyway in order to make it part of the fabric of the conversation) a way in which lamentation is also critique as well as community self-constitution, as in Lamentations? Maria, I wonder what sort of critique would be possible? Lamentations seems to bridge the political and the obdurate. When pain becomes overwhelming, silence is at the core and the signifier dissolves; I think this is also the core of anguish. One is left speechless. On the other hand, how much clarity is necessary for political or 'rational' thought? In an odd way this also brings up mathematical thinking - which, from an outsider point-of-view, seems based on the manipulation of symbols, but from within is much more of clouded movements with indeterminate focus (see Jacques Hadamard). Thinking itself, in other words, may well have less content than its representations, and certainly its representations in virtual worlds, where everything, one way or another, is determinate and rationalized on a pixel-by-pixel level. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre M o n i k a W e i s s S t u d i o 456 Broome Street, 4 New York, NY 10013 Phone: 212-226-6736 Mobile: 646-660-2809 www.monika-weiss.com gnie...@monika-weiss.com M o n i k a W e i s s Assistant Professor Graduate School of Art Hybrid Media Sam Fox School of Design Visual Arts Washington University in St. Louis Campus Box 1031 One Brookings Drive St. Louis, MO 63130 mwe...@samfox.wustl.edu http://samfoxschool.wustl.edu/portfolios/faculty/monika_weiss ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre M o n i k a W e i s s S t u d i o 456 Broome Street, 4 New York, NY 10013 Phone: 212-226-6736 Mobile: 646-660-2809 www.monika-weiss.com gnie...@monika-weiss.com M o n i k a W e i s s Assistant Professor Graduate School of Art Hybrid Media Sam Fox School of Design Visual Arts Washington University in St. Louis Campus Box 1031 One Brookings Drive St. Louis, MO 63130 mwe...@samfox.wustl.edu http://samfoxschool.wustl.edu/portfolios/faculty/monika_weiss ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] Monika Weiss -- Shrouds, 2012-2013 (as addendum to Lamentation)
From a text I wrote about my current ongoing this year project Shrouds. Do cities remember? Maps of cities are flat, yet their histories contain vertical strata of events. Where in the topography and consciousness of a city can we locate its memory? Maps of the Polish city Zielona Góra depict an empty unmarked rectangular area located on Wrocławska Street, across from the Focus Park shopping mall. Located centrally within the city this area looks abandoned, being composed mostly of broken masonry and wood debris. Inquiries to citizens of Zielona Góra indicate that many of them do not know the history of this abandoned area, including those who grew up near the site. Invited by a local museum to propose a project, I arrived to Zielona Góra (Gruenberg) knowing of the past history of the unmarked yet centrally located ruined site. On June 9th this year I flew on a small airplane to film this territory and its surroundings. The flight marked the beginning of my new project that will eventually develop into a film and a multi-layered dialogue with the citizens of Zielona Góra. During the Second World War the site was a forced labor camp, which later became a concentration camp designated primarily for Jewish women. The camp was developed on the site of the German wool factory, Deutsche Wollenwaren Manufaktur AG, which supplied the German war machine with military clothing. (It has since been converted to a shopping mall.) During the war about 1,000 young women worked there as seamstresses and eventually became prisoners of the concentration camp complex governed by KZ Groß-Rosen. Towards the very end of the war the prisoners were sent on one of the most tragic of the forced Death Marches where many of them died. Looking down from the airplane we see well-kept buildings surrounding the ruins of the former camp, as though it were an open yet forgotten wound in the body of the center of the city. During the performative phase of the project, I invited a group of young women from Zielona Góra to spend some time in silence on the site of the camp, wearing black scarfs which later were taken off and left behind amongst the ruins. Their presence evoked the absence of the prisoners. In the dual video projection installation at the BWA, (an exhibition that initiated the project in June), the faces of these young women look towards us in silence. In another part of the projection we observe a torso of a woman wrapping bandages onto her naked chest in a slow, fragile gesture of defense, or perhaps caress. Her body stands for our common body, anonymous as if it were a membrane between the self and the external world. Awareness of our marginality becomes elevated into the realm of meaning through our brief encounter with memory and history. “Shrouds” considers aspects of public memory and amnesia in the construction of the space of a city and its urban planning. As part of this project, citizens of Zielona Góra are invited to propose how we choose to remember, (or not) the women prisoners who perished there, and how this fulfilled the goals of a systematic destruction of an entire population. Over the course of this year citizens of Zielona Gora are also invited to respond to a questionnaire in order to propose their own ideas for the development of the area, whether as a site of commemoration, or through other forms of dialogue. Earlier this year, after over 50 years of gradual decay and abandonment, the site has been sold by the city's officials to an undisclosed developer. Yet the larger debate in Zielona Gora, a dialogue about the site of the former camp and about the city's memory and amnesia, as well as about the meaning of citizenship and response-ability shall continue, to some extend, thanks to Shrouds. http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1015094644656.448736.179396834655type=3 http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1015095089656set=a.1015094644656.448736.179396834655type=3theater http://bwazg.pl/index.php?option=com_contenttask=viewid=1455Itemid=46___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Sustenazo: related URLs
Hi, good morning, as per Alan's suggestion, here are a few of URL sites: http://search.wn.com/?results_type=videoslanguage_id=1search_type=expressionsearch_string=category+1944+compositionssort_type=-pub-datetimetemplate=cheetah-search-adv%2Findex.txtaction=searchcorpus=current http://www.streamingmuseum.org/content/monika-weiss/ http://www.museodelamemoria.cl/expos/monika-weiss-sustenazo-lament-ii/ http://www.lehman.edu/vpadvance/artgallery/gallery/WeissbyGuyBrett.HTM http://www.artslant.com/global/artists/show/163868-monika-weiss?tab=ARTWORKS http://www.quasha.com/writing-2/on-art/on-monika-weiss On Oct 2, 2012, at 8:07 PM, Monika Weiss wrote: Monika Weiss--Sustenazo (Part III) In Sustenazo the timeless gesture of lamentation is confronted with the archive of a specific historical event—the forced overnight evacuation of the Ujazdowski Hospital’s eighteen hundred patients and staff on August 6, 1944. In Part I of the video, the woman appears as two persons moving in opposite directions—simultaneously presented in real time and reverse motion, thanks to video and film editing technologies. Her body is present, although it exists outside of specific time. I choreographed and directed the performer’s movements. Her slow-moving gestures of lamentation or mourning are at once theatrical and minimal. They do not tell a historical narrative: the viewer does not know the reasons for her mourning. Lament—performative and communal—becomes a shared emotional experience. I decided not to perform in Sustenazo (or in my other recent works) to avoid autobiographical interpretations. Sustenazo is not solely about Poland or Polish history or European history. It is more broadly about the loss of lives inflicted by war and by other political and organized acts of violence and oppression. For me, war is not only devastating: it is unacceptable. Note: I employ the ternary form of Lament in the video and sound composition of Sustenazo. In Part I, German speakers read several passages from Goethe’s Faust II and from Paul Celan’s Schneepart. In Sustenazo, Celan, whose poetry was burned by German Nazis, represents the opposite symbolism to that of Goethe. During my artist residency in Berlin (2009), I invited a group of Germans to slowly recite passages from Faust II. Later that year, during my residency at the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, I recorded the voice of a survivor of the Ujazdowski Hospital’s expulsion, who at the time of the Uprising was a teenage nurse. Her elderly and fragile voice is heard in Part I of the video, as it overlaps with the young and well-defined female voice reciting in German fragments from Goethe. The Polish voice represents a “sonic stain,” a trace that cannot be erased. For Part II of the video, I recorded a countertenor whom I asked to sing short fragments of laments—formal compositions that exist in classical music—however without any accompaniment. Later, I digitally cut single notes and words, even syllables, and moved them around, creating a sense of language and melody that disintegrates into indecipherable sound, becoming lament.[i] [i] Etymologically, the word lament derives from Greek leros – “nonsense.” Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (C. G. Merriam Company: Springfield, Mass., 1977), p. 645. M o n i k a W e i s s S t u d i o 456 Broome Street, 4 New York, NY 10013 Phone: 212-226-6736 Mobile: 646-660-2809 www.monika-weiss.com gnie...@monika-weiss.com M o n i k a W e i s s Assistant Professor Graduate School of Art Hybrid Media Sam Fox School of Design Visual Arts Washington University in St. Louis Campus Box 1031 One Brookings Drive St. Louis, MO 63130 mwe...@samfox.wustl.edu http://samfoxschool.wustl.edu/portfolios/faculty/monika_weiss ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Sustenazo - Part II
Hi, After posting some visual materials I think my initial introduction to the work is done. I am happy to take it on from there and to form a dialogue Interesting question below from Alan about the nature of video as a catalyst for memory, pain and lament and later I would like to expand that part of our discussion towards the performative and the circular in terms of the relationships between cinematic mirroring and lament as well as pain. Just briefly for now -- about torture. I am more preoccupied with torture inflicted by governments, institutions and systems that often hide their violence -- as you know only recently in my city of origins, Warsaw, a CIA compound was found in which suspected terrorists were kept for a number of years and tortured by US forces, without any real knowledge amongst the civil part of the Polish government. There are thousands of examples of course. Massive, systematic pain and torture systems, the ones that are pre-designed by others, enlightened, designed by those who are in power or who represent structures of power and hegemony not because of hate, anger or any other emotion but because of fulfilling some abstracted and pragmatic goal, akin to Zygmunt Baumann's idea of gardening . Finally, I look forward to the post about Pain and other related posts expected this week and will hold off with posting major things for now (such as the City's memory and pain) until maybe later in the week. Looking forward to our discussion Monika M o n i k a W e i s s S t u d i o 456 Broome Street, 4 New York, NY 10013 Phone: 212-226-6736 Mobile: 646-660-2809 www.monika-weiss.com gnie...@monika-weiss.com M o n i k a W e i s s Assistant Professor Graduate School of Art Hybrid Media Sam Fox School of Design Visual Arts Washington University in St. Louis Campus Box 1031 One Brookings Drive St. Louis, MO 63130 mwe...@samfox.wustl.edu http://samfoxschool.wustl.edu/portfolios/faculty/monika_weiss On Oct 2, 2012, at 9:35 PM, Alan Sondheim wrote: Hi - some questions occasioned by what I've been reading here, and also thinking about torture, living through torture. Lamentation seems to imply an other, often disappeared or disappearing, that one mourns for, after, or almost within; torture applies to the self to the depths that there is no other. They are related by suffering, by anguish, and they both seem elsewhere than new or other media - they seem unmediated, even though lamentation may and often does, follow traditional cultural forms. They also seem to involve a pouring out or into; the self is dissolved. Lamentation seems to imply, as well, the second (still living or just alive) dissolving into the third (the dead), in an uncanny way paralleling the second person, 'you,' dissolving into the third, 'he' or 'she' or 'it' as the body might be. So how is all this manifest - or is it - through media? Is, for example, a video then a catalyst - of affect, memory, mourning? I ask myself these questions in the work I do in Second Life or 3d printing as well - Thanks, Alan, and please everyone, join in - == blog: http://nikuko.blogspot.com/ (main blog) email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/ web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 347-383-8552 music: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/ current text http://www.alansondheim.org/rp.txt == ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Sustenazo - Part II - links as requested by Alan
http://www.artslant.com/global/artists/show/163868-monika-weiss http://www.streamingmuseum.org/content/monika-weiss/ http://www.lehman.edu/vpadvance/artgallery/gallery/WeissbyGuyBrett.HTM http://artnews.org/artist.php?i=5752 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7GB_n-rzhA http://www.museodelamemoria.cl/expos/monika-weiss-sustenazo-lament-ii/ http://www.quasha.com/writing-2/on-art/on-monika-weiss http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Contributor,a=W/view-Contact-Page,id=15634/___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] public lament and gardening
Hi Ana, I had the same feeling and wrote about it to Alan By the way, can't wait to hear more from you as part of this discussion. Monika Sent from my iPad On Oct 3, 2012, at 2:13 PM, Ana Valdés agora...@gmail.com wrote: Dear Johannes, as I wrote in my answer to Alan, I am sad I don't have a clue how to avoid these ads in my text, I guess this is the prize to pay for a free digital hosting :( I am now poor as a mouse :) moved back from the First World with all it's glamour to the non glamorous and poor Third World. It means I can't afford to pay any fee for a more fancy add free hosting :( But as I said Amazon still sell back copies of the book where the text is included, the Garden of the Alphabet, published by Serpent's Tail in London and New York. Best regards to all of you Ana On Wed, Oct 3, 2012 at 3:39 PM, Johannes Birringer johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.uk wrote: Dear all thank you Monika for your text/introduction to your understanding of the system of lament, and public lament as performative and political act in public domain -- this is richly evocative and will have to go back to your writing after looking at some of your work (the slides, and the films or film excerpts you include on http://www.streamingmuseum.org/content/monika-weiss/ I am listening to the sound now, of two of your videos. I was struck, entering the site, to also find your reference to Cage's silence. on first viewing/listening, your visual-sonic work has quite a mesmerizing quality. I am just responding now, without thinking, to my listening, and also watching the face(s) of the women in your films. (this listening is now private, at a screen, in the dark of my room). so no public lament this. But you stage these works in public galleries or spaces, and they are visited by the public. how then does such work function in an art context? can it become a ritualizing space? but i shall look forward to reading more concisely (see below) your position, also in regard to the questions already brought up by Alan, when in his last post he speaks of the overwhelming suffering of the world, stating that he does not know how to accommodate all of this. This followed the conversation about pain, torture, memory begun by Ana. This accommodation will concern us, in the coming days, i am sure. Monika, could you expand a little on your reference to Zygmunt Baumann's idea of gardening . What idea is this? And Ana, I began to delve into your longer text on the migration from torture. It is a very complex and fascinating text, and i agree with Alan that the clickable words are a rather amazing intrusion function of the website. I clicked perfume We did not find any results for perfume. Search tips: Ensure words are spelled correctly. Try rephrasing keywords or using synonyms. Try less specific keywords. Make your queries as concise as possible. with regards Johannes Birringer dap-lab Monika schreibt: Interesting question below from Alan about the nature of video as a catalyst for memory, pain and lament and later I would like to expand that part of our discussion towards the performative and the circular in terms of the relationships between cinematic mirroring and lament as well as pain. Just briefly for now -- about torture. I am more preoccupied with torture inflicted by governments, institutions and systems that often hide their violence -- as you know only recently in my city of origins, Warsaw, a CIA compound was found in which suspected terrorists were kept for a number of years and tortured by US forces, without any real knowledge amongst the civil part of the Polish government. There are thousands of examples of course. Massive, systematic pain and torture systems, the ones that are pre-designed by others, enlightened, designed by those who are in power or who represent structures of power and hegemony not because of hate, anger or any other emotion but becau se of fulfilling some abstracted and pragmatic goal, akin to Zygmunt Baumann's idea of gardening . ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- http://writings-escrituras.tumblr.com/ http://maraya.tumblr.com/ http://www.twitter.com/caravia158 http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/ http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia http://www.scoop.it/t/gender-issues/ http://www.scoop.it/t/literary-exiles/ http://www.scoop.it/t/museums-and-ethics/ http://www.scoop.it/t/urbanism-3-0 http://www.scoop.it/t/postcolonial-mind/ cell Sweden +4670-3213370 cell Uruguay +598-99470758 When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to return. — Leonardo da Vinci
Re: [-empyre-] public lament and gardening
Dear Johannes and all, Zygmunt Bauman's concept of garden is mentioned by him in his Modernity and Holocaust - which actually reads better in Polish, Nowoczesność i Zaglada. I often talk about it in my own writings because it feels still very important today. The idea is that we are like gardeners, we make decisions such as mass-scale industrialized genocides as based on the desire for progress and of creating a beautiful design. He talks about getting rid of weeds not because we might hate them but because we believe they are useless of or the design we are planning, design of the world. More importantly he extends Arendt' assumptions about the danger of contemporary divorcing function and goal - the notion that others make decisions for us and we are basically only responsible for the immediate act or process that is our job. His claim is to return to some nine of, new but nevertheless morality which rests on our ability to think independently... My take on this that it basically calls for our citizenship and active response-ability ann to Levinas. I will continue this thought tonight - unfortunately now have to go back to meetings with my grads. More later and thank you Johannes for your notes, Monika Sent from my iPad On Oct 3, 2012, at 1:39 PM, Johannes Birringer johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.uk wrote: Dear all thank you Monika for your text/introduction to your understanding of the system of lament, and public lament as performative and political act in public domain -- this is richly evocative and will have to go back to your writing after looking at some of your work (the slides, and the films or film excerpts you include on http://www.streamingmuseum.org/content/monika-weiss/ I am listening to the sound now, of two of your videos. I was struck, entering the site, to also find your reference to Cage's silence. on first viewing/listening, your visual-sonic work has quite a mesmerizing quality. I am just responding now, without thinking, to my listening, and also watching the face(s) of the women in your films. (this listening is now private, at a screen, in the dark of my room). so no public lament this. But you stage these works in public galleries or spaces, and they are visited by the public. how then does such work function in an art context? can it become a ritualizing space? but i shall look forward to reading more concisely (see below) your position, also in regard to the questions already brought up by Alan, when in his last post he speaks of the overwhelming suffering of the world, stating that he does not know how to accommodate all of this. This followed the conversation about pain, torture, memory begun by Ana. This accommodation will concern us, in the coming days, i am sure. Monika, could you expand a little on your reference to Zygmunt Baumann's idea of gardening . What idea is this? And Ana, I began to delve into your longer text on the migration from torture. It is a very complex and fascinating text, and i agree with Alan that the clickable words are a rather amazing intrusion function of the website. I clicked perfume We did not find any results for perfume. Search tips: Ensure words are spelled correctly. Try rephrasing keywords or using synonyms. Try less specific keywords. Make your queries as concise as possible. with regards Johannes Birringer dap-lab Monika schreibt: Interesting question below from Alan about the nature of video as a catalyst for memory, pain and lament and later I would like to expand that part of our discussion towards the performative and the circular in terms of the relationships between cinematic mirroring and lament as well as pain. Just briefly for now -- about torture. I am more preoccupied with torture inflicted by governments, institutions and systems that often hide their violence -- as you know only recently in my city of origins, Warsaw, a CIA compound was found in which suspected terrorists were kept for a number of years and tortured by US forces, without any real knowledge amongst the civil part of the Polish government. There are thousands of examples of course. Massive, systematic pain and torture systems, the ones that are pre-designed by others, enlightened, designed by those who are in power or who represent structures of power and hegemony not because of hate, anger or any other emotion but becau se of fulfilling some abstracted and pragmatic goal, akin to Zygmunt Baumann's idea of gardening . ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] public lament and gardening
In Bauman's writing the weeds are what Agamben, and to some extend Zizek, call Homo Sacer (such as G. Agamben Remnats of Holocaust and Zizek's Violence). The idea of silencing is very important to me, which is also related to disappearing, to making disappear. Lament, which otherwise we could call the communal citizenry, the true citizenship, this is response to the language of silencing power. Lament, lying down (refusing to march like soldiers) are present in my work to somehow direct or connect with this inter-connective tissue that firms itself when we are following our ability to respond, response-ability [The silencing (milczenie) is like book burning -- you can burn Celan, but his work will never burn completely, just like silencing of the voices of those killed and tortured will always leave a stains, like stains on texts of Goethe, like stains of tortured in Guantanamo, shining on our hands as we speak here and now] On Oct 3, 2012, at 9:34 PM, Alan Sondheim wrote: Re - weeds - terms like 'weeds' and 'pests' and 'vermin' are very problematic - they reflect only the speaker, not the spoken-for who often is placed in the position of a Lyotardian differend, unable to speak, blotted out. Whenever I hear them, I cringe... == blog: http://nikuko.blogspot.com/ (main blog) email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/ web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 347-383-8552 music: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/ current text http://www.alansondheim.org/rp.txt == ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] public lament and gardening
Thank you Ana for those words. I would love to know more about the Antigona Oriental. p.s. Yes, we have lived through torture since time immemorial but with the Declaration of Human Rights and other international institutions, we had hopes for progress in that area. So, I don't subscribe to the idea that what was there once, is therefore explained today. the problem with the law and its ability to constitute law, and therefore, to go outside of itself, such as was the case with the concentration camps, and such as is the case today thanks to patriot act etc. otherwise under the umbrella of emergency. But there is a deeper underlying notion of right that certain powers have, like during Feudalism, the self-assigned right to inflict law upon others, including pain and torture, for the sake of higher goals or security. On Oct 3, 2012, at 6:35 PM, Ana Valdés wrote: HI Monika I checked the links you post and they were stunning beautiful, as the cry of the mourners in the Greek tragedies. By the way a group of Uruguayan former political prisoners, many of them my former comrades, put together a beatiful piece called Antigona Oriental. It was a contrast between their texts and the text of the Greek tragedy and it worked perfect. The old crimes and the new shapes, but as Allan said probably Humanity has lived with torture and mayhem since Man (and Woman) were born. I think we deal different with pain and each one of us choose it's own strategy and have his own array of tools to do that. For me is writing for others is painting, for others dancing, etc. Ana On Wed, Oct 3, 2012 at 8:17 PM, Monika Weiss gnie...@monika-weiss.com wrote: Hi Ana, I had the same feeling and wrote about it to Alan By the way, can't wait to hear more from you as part of this discussion. Monika Sent from my iPad On Oct 3, 2012, at 2:13 PM, Ana Valdés agora...@gmail.com wrote: Dear Johannes, as I wrote in my answer to Alan, I am sad I don't have a clue how to avoid these ads in my text, I guess this is the prize to pay for a free digital hosting :( I am now poor as a mouse :) moved back from the First World with all it's glamour to the non glamorous and poor Third World. It means I can't afford to pay any fee for a more fancy add free hosting :( But as I said Amazon still sell back copies of the book where the text is included, the Garden of the Alphabet, published by Serpent's Tail in London and New York. Best regards to all of you Ana On Wed, Oct 3, 2012 at 3:39 PM, Johannes Birringer johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.uk wrote: Dear all thank you Monika for your text/introduction to your understanding of the system of lament, and public lament as performative and political act in public domain -- this is richly evocative and will have to go back to your writing after looking at some of your work (the slides, and the films or film excerpts you include on http://www.streamingmuseum.org/content/monika-weiss/ I am listening to the sound now, of two of your videos. I was struck, entering the site, to also find your reference to Cage's silence. on first viewing/listening, your visual-sonic work has quite a mesmerizing quality. I am just responding now, without thinking, to my listening, and also watching the face(s) of the women in your films. (this listening is now private, at a screen, in the dark of my room). so no public lament this. But you stage these works in public galleries or spaces, and they are visited by the public. how then does such work function in an art context? can it become a ritualizing space? but i shall look forward to reading more concisely (see below) your position, also in regard to the questions already brought up by Alan, when in his last post he speaks of the overwhelming suffering of the world, stating that he does not know how to accommodate all of this. This followed the conversation about pain, torture, memory begun by Ana. This accommodation will concern us, in the coming days, i am sure. Monika, could you expand a little on your reference to Zygmunt Baumann's idea of gardening . What idea is this? And Ana, I began to delve into your longer text on the migration from torture. It is a very complex and fascinating text, and i agree with Alan that the clickable words are a rather amazing intrusion function of the website. I clicked perfume We did not find any results for perfume. Search tips: Ensure words are spelled correctly. Try rephrasing keywords or using synonyms. Try less specific keywords. Make your queries as concise as possible. with regards Johannes Birringer dap-lab Monika schreibt: Interesting question below from Alan about the nature of video as a catalyst for memory, pain and lament and later I would like to expand that part of our discussion towards the performative and the circular in terms of the relationships between
[-empyre-] Sustenazo - Part 1
Hi dear All, I have been invited by the moderates to begin by writing about my work, which is closely related to the overall theme of this week's discussion. In the first part of this introduction I will address my work that evokes public Lament as performative and political act in public domain. I will continue by discussing recent work that has to do with memory and amnesia as related the construction of a physical and political space of a city. By enacting ancient gestures of lamentation, my recent work Sustenazo considers contemporary contexts of apathy, indifference, invisibility, and historical amnesia within the public forum. Lament is extreme expression in the face of loss. Ultimately, as Judith Butler wrote, “grief furnishes a sense of political community of a complex order, and it does this first of all by bringing to the fore the relational ties that have implications for theorizing fundamental dependency and ethical responsibility.”[i] Group mourning is an act of political force, and not only a response to individual grief. We should ask then, after Butler, whose life is or is not worthy of grief? In the context of war, loss is often about the loss of the Other, but in reality the Other is also a part of oneself. Empathy and collective mourning, including mourning the loss of others who are supposed to be our enemies, can become a powerful political tool, in opposition to heroic, masculine fantasies of conquest and power. T o b e c o n t i n u e d l a t e r t o n i g h t . . . Monika Weiss [i] Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London/New York: Verso, 2004), p. 22.___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] Sustenazo - Part II
Monika Weiss--Sustenazo: Part II Antiphonal Structures Language is a sovereign system that signifies and coincides with denotation. It maintains itself in relation to what it describes but at the same time withdraws from it into “pure” language. In my work lament questions language. An expression that arises from speech, lament represents the moment of breaking of the speech and of facing the loss of meaning. A recording of phenomenological experience, the archive appears in my work not as an evolution in time or as a depository of gradual accession and accretion, but rather as a flat, non-linear, layered surface, composed of multiple narratives, which offer the potential to overcome the structures of power. Fragmentary and non-hierarchical, the database of the archive is traversed in search for meaning. Lament assumes a form of expression, which is excluded or expelled from language—the latter understood as a system or design of meaning in relation to event. As a loss of language (leros,) lament traverses the flat surface of the archive. In the oldest examples of Lament, the intercourse between the world of living and the world of the dead is performed as a dialogue either between two beings, one present here and one absent, on the other side, or between two antiphonal groups of mourners. The mirror structure of the Hebrew psalms makes it probable that the antiphonal method was also employed among others by ancient Israelites. The surviving copies of the thirteen century B.C.E. texts from Hittite civilization, describe taptara-women who are specialized wailers, forming a chorus that sustains a kind of performance of wailing for possibly long periods of time, as a response to the initial lament/address (kalkalinai). In modern moirologia there are still traces of the ancient tradition of this dialogue, where laments are considered to be uttered either by the dead person or by their tomb. The imagined dialogue between a traveller and a tomb was full of austere brevity characteristic of the archaic style, which later developed into a refrain, the choral ephymnia, incantation, repetition, and echoing. In the traditions of Lament, the address (an opening) would be followed by an appeal (intervening narrative/recollection of past events) and finally the reiteration of the initial address. This three-part form was cultivated in threnos, but was also shared by the hymnos, enkomion, and epitaphios. The origins of this ternary form, in which the prayer is first stated, then enacted as thought fulfilled, and finally repeated, are to be sought in primitive ritual and “the form was developed in all kinds of ritual poetry”.[i] In contrast to hymnos, enkomion and epitaphos, the development of three-part form did not in threnos lead to the disappearance of the refrain. The lament was always in some sense collective, and never exclusively a solo performance. There seems to be no example in Greek antiquity of a lament, which has lost all traces of refrain. The word epode means “after-song” but also “after-someone,” a magic incantation, designed to bring that someone back, if only in imagination, if only in the moment of incantation, the moment of enunciation. The strong tendency for women to be agents of lamentation is seen by the anthropologist Maurice Bloch as part of a more general association of women with death by early tribal societies, who tended to perceive death as analogous to birth, both fundamental biological processes, and both seemingly controlled by women, who by the act of giving birth, were already “contaminated” or anointed by the “other side” while men, whose position in society was to be more public, “were thus left comparatively free of death pollution”.[ii] [i] Ian Rutherford When You Go to the Meadow…The Lament of the Taptara-Women in the Hittite Sallis Wastais Ritual in “Lament: Studies in the Ancient Mediterranean and Beyond”, ed. Ann Suter, Oxford University Press, 2008 [ii] Margaret Alexiou, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, Rowman Littlefield Publishers, Lanham, Boulder, New York, Oxford, 2002 antiphon (Greek ἀντίφωνον, ἀντί opposite + φωνή voice Sustenazo (Greek), “lament with, groan together.” ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] Notes to Sustenazo, Part I, II, and III
p.s. The posted tonight reflections are fragments from my recent writings and interviews, but also function here to hopefully instigate a conversation... Perhaps this is enough reading for one evening. Tomorrow I will begin with the City and its memory as well as its amnesia, and with very recent reflections in relation to that series of projects. It will be wonderful to hear from -empyre list. Depending where everyone is located, I wish you a good night or good morning-- Monika ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
