In the fall of 2020, as the first exhibition after the lockdown, we took over the FUTUROMA exhibition curated by Daniel Baker, which was part of the supporting program of the Venice Biennale the year before. In an interview we made, you used a notion almost identical as the Grotowski Theater in Pontedera does: art as a vehicle. You related this notion as a common link of all works in your show to the birth of the autonomy of art in Florence and said: „these objects remain instruments of the power of the state and the church. Here the public are persuaded of the transcendental nature of art, its beauty and skill used to promote ideas and narratives that point away from daily life toward the profoundly spiritual and the intellectual. This model of separation is how the modern museum is still understood and from my perspective there seems to be little appetite for approaching things in different ways.“ Andrea, you are an artist, who always refuses to position yourself in the art world. Judith and Heide, you are both also working with and on so called hand-crafts … Can we talk about how to subvert the logic of power and create other practices, places and cooperations through and with art? Giovanni, you succeed in completely undermining the dominant and violent gazes on excluded persons through your visual narrations in your films ….
First let me say that it is a great pleasure to be part of this conversation. I think it would be useful for me to enlarge a little upon the context of the quote above for clarification: As Angelika mentions, the email exchange that is referred to took place during the run of FutuRoma at Villa Romana. The key point that I was making here centres upon the idea that museums (their operations, programming and collection practices) have historically acted to separate art from daily life / lived experience / social engagement by reinforcing and focusing on the transcendental nature of art. This proposition has been initially established through religious contextualisation as can be seen to great effect in the churches and museums of Florence, which as Angelika reminds us, is the birthplace of the idea of the autonomy of art through the renaissance onward.
The objects that I am referring to in the quote are artworks held in museums that form part of state and private collections and which are used as markers of nationhood and power – often severing links with the people that they are acquired from and in the name of.
These are I think the underlying issues on which this conversation was based. I have pasted a link to the full text on the VR website which gives a broader view of some my ideas around art practice as an integral factor of daily life and tool of social engagement.
To enlarge upon this slightly, I can say that these thoughts are inspired by my interest in the circumstances through which much of the art practice within Roma communities has evolved. I continue to explore these phenomena, and increase my understanding, through my encounters with Roma material culture using my own studio and curatorial practice to examine the meanings transmitted via Roma aesthetics and Gypsy visuality. It is through this lens that I have glimpsed the significance of Roma art practices as they relate to the everyday lives of Roma and the implications that they might have for re-thinking the way that art functions today.
Such an approach to the integration of art within the social realm exemplifies for me an alternative to the growing divergence between artistic practice and the practice of living that seems to be encouraged by Western methods of art appreciation; methods which reflect a set of values that are invariably framed within market interests and hierarchies of knowledge. In contrast to this there seems to me to be little distinction between Roma artistry and Roma acts of living. This is clearly evident within the Roma aesthetic where the collective qualities embedded within the objects and performances that originate from, or circulate within, Roma communities can be seen to both reflect and inform Roma daily life. This kind of approach is something that perhaps we can all benefit from, not just in terms of the reclamation of art from the privileged arena of the museum and the market, where emphasis is placed on the demarcation of intellectual and financial property, but also in terms of the enrichment of the each of our lives.
I look forward to continuing the conversation.
https://www.villaromana.org/front_content.php?idcat=99&idart=1473&lang=2
The beginning of the 21st Century saw the birth of a number of high profile modern art museums across the globe, each acting as powerful mechanisms for the reification of nationhood through artistic might. Tate Modern, in my home town of London, is a prime example. Since its establishment in 2000 it has achieved phenomenal success in attracting vast numbers of visitors, both domestic and international. And in the light of an increasing secular West it has also reinvigorated the notion of the modern art museum as a site of pilgrimage, a domain previously occupied by faith based institutions and their associated reliquaries. The emergence of the mega modern art museum phenomenon—along with the coincidental proliferation of contemporary art biennales around the world, has at times been described as the new religion, its institutions acting as cathedrals to the cause.
In a recent TV documentary about the Metropolitan Museum in New York, filmed before and during the current Coronavirus pandemic, the museum, along with its contents, were described by visitors in terms of their capacity to offer rescue from the ravages that were now being enacted upon the lives of New Yorkers; a kind of sanctuary where painful and difficult thoughts and feelings could be placed in perspective through communing with art. This idea is not new and has long been a recognised as a core function of artistic practice, both in making and in engagement, and along with many others I find myself drawn to the idea of art as sanctuary, an escape, a way out of the difficulties in which we find ourselves. But I am also minded to resist the allure of such a seductive proposition that is some ways can rob us of our own capacity to resist and to act. In such environments, as awe inspiring as they are intended to be, we can be left wondering how our own agency connects to these monolithic structures and where within them a sense of ourselves might reside.
This way of thinking is informed by my encounters with, and comprehension of, the role of art within Roma communities. As a Romani Gypsy and an artist, the relationship between Roma life and Roma artistic practice has long held fascination for me and it is through this lens that I have glimpsed the complex significance of the Roma experience as an example for rethinking strategies of existence.
A hard-won understanding of the precarity of life on the edge of society has informed the Roma way of life resulting in a worldview which has often positioned Roma communities at odds with society and the nation state. This kind of dynamic facilitates an ideal of moving away from the routine political organisation of life to offer the potential to forge new ways of being and alternative models of existence. As the original Bohemians Roma and have been admired for personifying an outsider’s creative approach to living and thinking; qualities that greatly influenced the artists and thinkers of the avant-garde to position Bohemianism as the founding model of the cultural vanguard of the past. It is this legacy upon which the archetype of today’s contemporary artist is built; symbolising multiple sites of action and agency and further illustrating the ways in which the mechanisms and values of Roma existence can allow a new political model to be imagined.
Roma communities continue to exist outside of societies that they are, at the time, surrounded by. The ongoing simultaneity of dislocation and attachment that Roma experience has precipitated an underlying sense of contingency implicit within the Roma sensibility—an existential state within which Roma people both embody and signify a threshold positioning. Assigned to the margins of society, a state of contingency continues to underpin the collective Roma experience and has resulted in strategies of survival that carry with them the transgressive potential to challenge and reshape the boundaries of convention—a potential that also lies at the root of a universal mistrust of Roma—equally founded in the perception of Roma as outsiders, unfixed, un-rooted, and ultimately unaccountable. Yet, those same characteristics of flexibility and spontaneity can also lead to new ways of understanding ourselves and our lives together; an approach which positions Roma life as a locus of creative resistance rather than a threat to the status quo. A deeper understanding of such phenomena can offer new ways of thinking connections across communities, territories, generations, and activities as evident for example in the conflation of work, living, and play space within the Roma encampment, where the drawing together of diverse elements dissolves the borders between things to facilitate closer connectivity.
These fundamentals of Roma existence bring more keenly into focus the potential value of the connectivity that unites the practices of art and daily life for Roma. This expansive approach to the material world and the diverse social agencies through which it is manifest points towards new possibilities for co-existence. By re-sensitizing us to the underlying inter-connectedness of human endeavour we are encouraged to recognise opportunities for creative thinking and actions—a space where art is effectively woven from and integrated within the social realm. Through such pragmatic moves towards unification, Roma communities are effectively dismantling the politics of separation.
Coffee and cigarettes –
one disappears in the air while the other runs through your veins.
An analog photo-camera consists of two parts: a body and its lens. When I walk with my camera, we are like some double-body, one that can have a coffee run through and the other who has a film running through itself. To run through and capture – my hand decides that.
The Nobel prize in 2021 for physiology was just given to scientists who had researched the sensatory of our hands. The committee writes to this that “Our ability to sense heat, cold and touch is essential for survival and underpins our interaction with the world around us. In our daily lives we take these sensations for granted, but how are nerve impulses initiated so that temperature and pressure can be perceived?”
The interaction with the world is registered on the films of my camera by pressing with my finger the button of the shutter release. With the pressure of my finger the shutter opens and the world enters the film via light. And almost the same thing happens in my body to do so. This year laureates had found an unknown mechanosensitive ion channel which they called Piezo1, after the Greek word for pressure (í; píesi). Once there is a mechanical force entering our surface those ion channels open up and tell our brain that we are touched – a major aspect of how we sense the world.
Doublebodies.
My camera captures, everything and everywhere when I press the shutter and let the information enter the film. Depending on the shutter speed I can decide in what form this touch enters the film. It can vary from blurry to fine sharp and crystal clear. It’s just a question of shutter and speed. By this it creates a new narration, an independent one from its origin. One can call this art or documentary or even proof of reality but basically, it’s an impression which is primarily a memory of pressure.
Some light which was captured at a certain time of something I opposed. It’s a proof of time which passed while capturing it.
Angelika has once said to me that the only thing that shows a career is if there is a book about your work in the end or not.
When she said so, I immediately saw the library of Villa Romana in front of my eyes. Where all those artists books reside beside other books. I had once found there a big compendium about Aby Warburg which had been newly published. While flipping through it and reading bits here and there, I understood almost nothing. But I liked it how he had researched and made up his own fantastic interpretation of art history and how he had created a new cosmology of his own.
His travel to the Hopi Indians touched me that much that it made me move on the same trip just several months after I had sat there in the library.
What I found in New Mexico more than 100 years after Aby Warburg’s travel, was striking. Although having my camera close by my side I couldn’t press the shutter at the places which were narrating the story of our past century in one picture: a total destruction of culture, environment and its inhabitants sitting in the middle of it. It was like the story of our past 500 years frozen in one image, into one Nano frame. It was too crisp and too clear to press the shutter but it burned its picture inside my brain: an oppressed body within a demolished surrounding what should have been a shelter, a house, a place of imagination, a home.
On my way back to Albuquerque I had to travel through Navajo land. I stopped by at a second-hand bookstore and bought a copy of the book “Navajo and photography”, a book which addresses a critical history of the representation of the Navajo tribe.
It felt like an answer why I wasn’t able to press the shutter when being at this spot described before.
That a surface might never be able to tell the story as such. It’s like an emblem, a metaphor, which can be turned easily into something which can be used for abuse as well.
Eight years later I found the book Sandpaintings of the Navajo Shooting Chant by the American Anthropologists Franc Newcomb and Gladys Reichard. It was printed in the late 1930s at Augustin Press which was located close to Hamburg. One of their apprentices at that time who took care of the production of this exact book edition was Jimmy Ernst, the son of the Surrealist Painter Max Ernst. He was sent there by his Jewish mother Lou who had exiled to Paris some years before to be later deported and murdered in Auschwitz and who had told him, for leaving Germany and for his survival he’ll need a proper work education – his school education of Old-Greek and Latin won’t help him in his future abroad.
The same Newcomb and Reichard signed guarantees for the young Ernst which made his escape from Nazi-Europe possible. After his arrival to the US they took him on a trip to New Mexico to show him the “real” or what was left of the native America, the roots, to make him understand the country he wanted himself make emigrate to. What he described in his memoires was similar to my observations some decades later when I travelled the same place.
Sandpaintings/ Pre-Graffities: From the Navajos to Graffities.
Leaving traces. As the field of Anthropology started to develop which was about the same time that Warburg had visited the Hopis, their field of interest was always a tribe, a certain group of people who had developed certain things as a group.
Can a house like the Villa Romana be seen as the head/ the locus of a wide spread tribe as well? Are we, who had all been connected to it can be seen as members of that particular tribe, with Angelika as our big Kahuna, our chief of tribe? A rhizomatic tribe which has rarely seen each other in real, but left traces there of all different kinds. Who became part of the place, part of the traces and absorbing them as well.
When I visited the Hopis I sat down in the house of Harold Polingyumptewa, a divorced weaver who had to give everything he had owned to his separated wife. He offered me a cigarette of the brand Seneca. He explained that to smoke with each other means to make peace.
I took a picture of him, sitting there in his comfortable chair, one of the very few things that still remained to him. I later read in the book about Navajo and Photography that the photographs shot by non-Navajo says more about the photographer than about the Navajos itself.
If I keep on the thought for my work there or what I shot in Florence, what does that mean?
Does this thesis also touch all the buildings and places I had captured on film?
The Archives of the KHI, the store of the rug seller Boralevi, the collection of Bardini, the photobooks by the former director of Villa Romana Burmeister, the statues of the Boboli garden?
Books, photographic copies, rugs and marble stones. What does that say about myself, a possible member of that imaginary tribe which was hosted up on the hill at a road leading to Siena?
Is the material I was shooting more than the simple expression of I was here?
To me it seems that it also says something about me what I didn’t shoot. Where myself resisted the pressure, the capture, to only be in that moment, as a body, doing nothing, but sensing and being human, a body, in which blood runs through it veins and whose thoughts disappear in the air.
I watch a bio topic about the artist Dash Snow. He had taken hundreds of Polaroids of his graffities that he and his friends had done in New York around 2000 and who had become a gallery artist with G. Deitch and B. Brunet the years after that. The moment he started to commercially exploit his traced and photo-archived roots of a free-spirited behavior of illegal urban actions, seemed to be a moment when he sold his own spirit of escape and revolt against the system he actually was against. His rigorous denial of social conformity in his youth was possible by heavy drug use. So in the end to have been able of acting like an “independent” in the streets of New York, were made possible by a substantial dependency and ended with a golden shot in a Boutique Hotel in Manhattan.
Was Dash Snow also art as a vehicle? In capturing the street life of a city with his body till its absolute decline? In turning himself into a metaphor about the dialectics of freedom and financial success? And was it a coincidence that he moved his look closer and closer to Jesus?
Is this art as a vehicle if you sacrifice your body for a message, a warning or a remembrance?
I guess the beauty that Dash Snow inherited was his exposure of a cultural destroyed body.
Like so many native Americans went through as well.
To not shy away from the pain that our time creates, the distortions of our cultural aliveness, the attacks by capitalist powers of pushing the materialism into the state of totalitarianism in our societies is something that doesn’t need a particular answer – but like the streets we need places of expression and shelter.
Angelika has created a place for a tribe like this. A house which is fixed on a hill but has become a place of transition. People’s thoughts, ideas, imaginations, fantasies, worries have floated the air for more than a decade like smoke, like liquid, like sound, like light and smell.
Accompanied by bread and wine, like an ongoing political, artistic, ethical communion embedded in the ancient renaissance spirits.
When I resided in the Villa in 2012, two posters were greeting me every day in the staircase.
One was showing a photo of a middle-aged man lying under blankets, looking somehow very emaciated and underfed. Next to the picture was a poster with one of the most appealing texts I’ve ever read. It was the praise of laziness by the Croatian artist Mladen Stilinovic.
Here is an extract of it:
As an artist, I learned from both East (socialism) and West (capitalism). Of course, now that the borders and political systems have changed, this type of experience will be no longer possible. But what I have learned from that dialogue stays with me. My observation and knowledge of Western art has recently led me to the conclusion that art cannot exist in the West anymore. This is not to say that there is not any. Why can art not exist anymore in the West? The answer is simple. Artists in the West are not lazy. Artists from the East are lazy; whether they will stay lazy now that they are no longer Eastern artists remains to be seen.
Laziness is the absence of movement and thought, dumb time—total amnesia. It is also indifference, staring at nothing, non-activity, impotence. It is sheer stupidity, a time of pain, of futile concentration. Those virtues of laziness are important factors in art. Knowing about laziness is not enough, it must be practiced and perfected.
Artists in the West are not lazy and therefore not artists, but rather producers of something. Their involvement with matters of no importance, such as production, promotion, the gallery system, the museum system, the competition system (who is first), their preoccupation with objects—all that drives them away from laziness, from art. Just as money is but paper, a gallery is but a room.
…
Finally, to be lazy and conclude: there is no art without laziness.
Maybe this was also a reason why Dash Snow was an addict. Maybe in Western World people even have to take drugs as a form of action, of doing something because they are unable to just do “nothing” and be lazy. The Western rules stick to consume and produce. So instead of being able to be actively lazy, you choose the highly professionalized state of getting stoned by something.
Having a monthly stipend is the best form of being able to do nothing and while Mladen was laying in his bed on a picture in the hallway, I was laying a lot in my bed next door.
But like smoke in the air, what happens while doing so, is, that you simply think, you are moving thoughts, you are doing reflective work which is an ephemeral stream of high creativity of no physical borders. And the act of presenting a lazy body can be also be seen as an anarchistic act in our capitalistic world which is something no-one usually talks or rarely brings to debate.
During my time at the Villa I learned that I am a pyjama artist. That this was the great gift, to be able to lie in bed and being in my train of thoughts and once the muse kissed me with an idea, I just had to walk a view steps to my studio and to fix it there and/or add some material to it. The architecture and the stipend offered the chance of being an artist who was not excluded from intimacy.
I’m sure that this is an aspect of this particular tribe there as well. That the place itself has always given protection. And I do think it makes a difference in atmosphere that there are parts in a house, which are open to the public, where someone plays contemporary music in a concert, while one floor above someone brushes her or his teeth and goes to sleep.
In a setting of intimacy people can talk and act differently and this shelter for intimacy was always provided and given by its architecture and hosts.
When we walk in public space we are fragile. We are in need for certain rules and manners and we are happy once we meet friendliness and warmth. We can’t be lazy in public space. We have to absorb, react and understand. We are touched by millions of information’s, viruses and spirits. It’s no aseptic space, so isn’t the Villa.
The format which has developed by Angelika has brought all those aspects of the public and civil realm to a sheltered space, where people could rest and exchange for a spatial time their thoughts, forms and positions.
And the brains of all those people who had moved through that place are somehow like the films that have moved through my camera. The exchange and the emotions of all those encounters are captured in the people’s brains as memories in all kind of forms: fragmented, blurry, black and white or colored. Maybe erased, over- or underexposed.
So, a house can certainly also act as a vehicle for the creation of forms and thoughts. It can be art in resembling something not known or ever experienced before. It can be used as a tool,
where its participants act as colors and brushes moving themselves on a time-based canvas being
an inspiration or disgust for each other. And as we learned by the Nobel price committee, to touch means to survive.
–
I hope that this book will preserve this imaginative tribe of smoke and mirrors which has been curated and therefor created over the past years by the great Kahuna – Angelika and her wonderful companions and assistants plus the huge amount of money made possible by the capitalistic world. Thank you for being able to be lazy there and walk around with my camera capturing nothing important just things I liked but which always carry the possibility to inspire someone or no-one.
Nine Budde
Berlin, December 2021
Another formation of smoke and another bed.
Most likely I had read the Wikipedia entry on Ingeborg Bachmann and it was one of her friend’s description that stayed with me, in which he recalled how cigarettes that Bachmann had smoked left stains and scars on her body as it had been numbed by the overconsumption of painkillers and other medication. Finally, cigarette ash would ignite her duvet and leave her with wounds she wouldn’t be able to recover from. This was in 1973 in Rome.
A body, which was so numbed that it was unable to detect destructive forces and no longer alarmed by life-threatening danger.
The image of a woman’s body marked by burning particles, that the oxygen of her own breath had produced, caught my attention.
A first result of this encounter was a series of papier-mâché objects made from old copies of Corriere della Sera and the foreign edition of Süddeutsche Zeitung both present at Villa Romana in 2013. Fragments that abstractly resembled parts of the body’s limbs. I pressed and turned my index finger into the slowly drying material regularly over several days.
Later that year I received some wood pulp of South American origin through the port of Livorno. This was the only time I worked with pure cellulose. This time I made much-magnified finger shapes, which many saw as termite hills and into which I again pressed my fingers. Did that virgin matter feel any different between the fingers because it had no embossed letters nor ink? I can’t tell, but yes sure, it was less sticky.
We desire to be able to smoke not alone but to share an ever-changing amorphous cloud. The fascination of the image of a cloud at the sky or in the formation of smoke that someone had before exhaled is the awareness of its temporality, its constant change and certain disappearance. Is this the opposite of what an institution hopes for? Is an institution more than an ambition to maintain and conserve the art works in its holdings, to keep them from decay and other life-disturbances, and to establish a story, that underlines its interests and power on material and symbolic level.
Antwerp, where I am teaching at the moment, is a city that shares with Florence strong self-identification with the glory of its past, the celebration of that past to exclusion of more problematic aspects of its trade and wealth. In Florence that could be the darker side of Renaissance as Walter D. Mignolo called it, or the passage of Belgian colonial business through the port of Antwerp.
Vijai Patchineelam, a fellow researcher at the Academy in Antwerp and I made a tour with a group of students by Waterbus and bikes through the expansive territory of Antwerp’s port. Our objective was the ghost village of Doel, that was emptied decades ago and remains unoccupied until the port’s next expansion, another deep sea dock. This village features in Allan Sekula and Noël Bruch’s film The Forgotten Space—A Film Essay Seeking to Understand the Contemporary Maritime World in Relation to the Symbolic Legacy of the Sea (2010). Vijai had watched The Forgotten Space with the students as an example of an all-knowing narrator in a series of essay films. In my memory it was the most crisp and clear day that this November had offered. The size of the harbour cranes, container ships and connected industries stood out against the deep winter sun and contrasted with the comfort, cosiness and nostalgia that the medieval city centre provides.
On the dyke at Doel the group collectively started to read the second chapter ‘The Ship’ from Christina Sharpe’s book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. In this chapter Christina Sharpe points to what Sekula and Bruch miss out in their attempt to address the forgotten spaces of globalization. She asks how it is possible that the Middle Passage—the slave trade between the African continent and the Americas— can be eradicated again and again from historical narratives. The only speaking Afro American person in The Forgotten Space is the so-called former mother. Earlier in the book she refers to the vivid public memorialization of the Holocaust and points to the work that needs to be done to allow the development of languages that recognize the losses, pain and suffering of the Middle Passage; the crimes and injustices that were executed, endured; and their reiteration through the altered trajectories for Black people in contemporary society, and through public silence about this past.
With Sharpe’s words in our minds, the ‘forgotten’ space of ‘the ship’ grew too large in our vision of the harbor’s structure to remain unnamed. Our perspectives got shaken, taken-for-granted assumptions didn’t feel right and comfort was for the moment uncomfortable. There was no cloud in the sky, instead we could see our breath condensate leaving nose and mouth. For a moment neither our physical presence in Doel or its symbolic resonance had priority over the other.
The constellation was unplanned, Vijai had watched the film with the students, Paul Müller, a student had suggested that we visit the site of Doel, and lying ill in bed in that spring I had read Christina Sharpe’s text and proposed that element. No-one person had created this moment, it grew through all who agreed to travel along.
If we make space for more languages, fewer bodies need to be numbed.
Heide Hinrichs