Review: Marina Abramovic at MoMA

click here to check out a review i wrote for the june/july issue of NYArts Magazine.

–persis

Marina Abramović, The Artist is Present, 2010. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art.

review: the storyteller

Review featured in White Hot, April 2010

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The Storyteller

Curated by Claire Gilman & Margaret Sundell

Organized by Independent Curators International

January 29 – April 9, 2010

Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Parsons The New School for Design

Featuring artists: Cao Fei, Jeremy Deller and Mike Figgis, Omer Fast, Mounir Fatmi, Ryan Gander, Lamia Joreige, Joachim Koester, Emanuel Licha, Missing Books (Maria Barnas, Maxine Kopsa, Germaine Kruip), Steve Mumford, Adrian Paci, Michael Rakowitz, Liisa Roberts, Hito Steyerl.

By Persis Singh

The act of storytelling is above all, an act of history. Through an engagement with memory––involving both recollection and improvisation––and the process of narrative translation, the figure of the storyteller has assumed an active role in the crafting of both personal and collective accounts of history. Over the past decade, we have seen a wave of widespread structural change––our global society has felt the onslaught of rapid urbanization, the violence of war and the ongoing displacement due to these varying forces, all of which have led to the silencing and negation of subjective accounts, frustrating our sense of collective memory.  In a continued exploration of the documentary mode, contemporary artists are responding to the threat of this marginalization and erasure, utilizing the narrative form to examine these transformations and highlight the varying perspectives and conditions that exist in contrast to other mediated historical accounts. The work of the fifteen artists presented in The Storyteller, an exhibition curated by Claire Gilman and Margaret Sundell and organized by Independent Curators International, addresses this trend within Contemporary art, one that consists of imaginative reinterpretation and reconstruction, blending both fact and fiction in order to challenge the very way we internalize, historicize and transmit these unfolding events.  As these artists’ practices affirm, storytelling is as much a form of testimony as it is agency––it allows us to position ourselves within the often contested narratives of history.

Joachim Koester, The Kant Walks, 2003, Seven Chromogenic Prints, two wall texts, Photographs: 18 ½ x 23 ½ in. each, Wall text: 11 x 8 ½ in. each, Courtesy of Greene Naftali, New York and the Martin Z. Margulies Collection, Miami.

Within the tranquil exhibition space at Parsons The New School for Design, The Storyteller offers a refreshingly thoughtful, politically-geared exhibition, spanning diverse mediums such as video, photography, drawing and sculptural installation, while simultaneously addressing ongoing socio-political issues and events from diverse geographic locales. Upon entering the gallery, we see Joachim Koester’s The Kant Walks (2003) consisting of seven photographs accompanied by a written text by the artist. Koester’s photo-essay documents the urban landscape of contemporary Kaliningrad through the artist’s own retracing of the paths that Immanuel Kant followed during his daily walks in the 18^th century. Through these peripatetic retracings, Koester chronicles the diverse architectural topography of what was then Königsberg, capturing abandoned industrial yards, somber medieval castles and bleak housing blocks, still bearing the haunting marks of destruction caused during WWII. Koester’s meditation on the city’s lost history blends both past and present, defying a Cartesian reading of time and space––the artist intermeshes imaginative speculations of Kant’s life with his own personal attempt at ‘reading’ Kaliningrad’s history through its palimpsestic traces.

Lamia Joreige, Objects of War No. 3, 2006, Single channel video with color and sound, 55 minutes, Courtesy of the artist.

Nestled within a corner space of the gallery, Lamia Joreige’s ongoing video project from 2006, Objects of War, confronts the traumatic impact of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) through documented testimonies. Within this work, a number of protagonists each relay their experiences through recollections surrounding a particular object, creating a stark tapestry of individual accounts, each reflecting, to varying degrees, the ethos of this period. These testimonies, differing from emotional and poignant, to casual and mundane, highlight the very tension between ‘memory,’ a process full of gaps and fissures, and ‘history,’ a continuum that reflects this very rupture. Through Joreige’s grainy, lo-res footage, the viewer is faced with a myriad of accounts, frustrating any single reading of an event and underlining the lacunas that exist within any narrative of history.

Steve Mumford, From the series Iraq, 2003-05, Watercolor and ink on paper, 13 3/8 x 11 in., Courtesy of Postmasters Gallery, New York

In his series of ink and watercolor drawings depicting commonplace scenes during the Iraqi War, Steve Mumford’s Iraq (2003-2005), is a study of everyday life in Baghdad during the height of the U.S.-led war. Through lyrical drawings configured with loose lines and washes of somber color, Mumford’s drawings bear the composition and immediacy of photographs, yet hold a certain temporality that the latter do not. Unlike photojournalism, centered upon capturing that key ‘moment,’ the act of drawing implies a sense of lingering, contemplation and intimacy with a certain place or subject. In 2005, the artist released Baghdad Journal: An Artist in Occupied Iraq, which featured these drawings alongside his own vivid personal anecdotes providing context and detailing his experiences in Iraq. This project highlights Mumford’s subjective engagement­––his mode of gestural storytelling––that forms part of an intimate exploration of a city under siege, countering the reductive imagery of war and distorted news coverage disseminated by mass media outlets.

Cao Fei, Whose Utopia, 2006, Single-channel video with color and sound, 20 minutes, Courtesy of the artist and Lombard-Freid Projects, New York.

Other artists in the exhibition, such as Cao Fei and Ryan Gander confront the practice of storytelling through an engagement with fabulation. My first encounter with Cao Fei’s Whose Utopia (2006) was through the haunting music that reverberated throughout the gallery space, an original score composed for the work by a Chinese rock band. Fei’s video work is composed of three parts, or chapters, echoing standard literary form and providing a loose narrative structure to an otherwise abstract, non-linear piece. Whose Utopia chronicles the workers at a light bulb factory in the Guangdong province of China, at first depicting scenes of calculated post-industrial efficiency, of machines whirring, conveyer belts gliding and the partially obscured faces of workers industriously laboring. Each subsequent part portrays a number of workers reenacting a myriad of imagined personas––a young man slowly motions on an electric guitar and a woman gracefully dances ballet en pointe while donning a pair of angel wings. Within the final chapters of Fei’s work, the mechanized movements of the factory are replaced by a sense of fluidity and fantasy, reinforced by the solemn, at times unearthly music that accompanies the piece. In contrast, Ryan Gander’s work examines another facet of the modernist legacy, namely the ramifications of urban development and the potential for architecture to alienate and at times, dehumanize a community. Through his use of constructed fictions and by utilizing the stylistic format of a children’s book, The Boy Who Always Looked Up examines the legacy of failed utopian ideals via Erno Goldfinger’s contentious Trellick Tower––all told through the eyes of a young boy. Alongside a viewing copy of the book, Gander’s installation, As Time Elapsed (2005), floats high above, as if physically reifying the sense of distance and enchantment present within the artist’s tale.

Accompanying the exhibition is a series of film screenings, showcasing the work of Omer Fast, Jeremy Deller & Mike Figgis, and Liisa Roberts, which similarly confront issues of historical reconstruction and the rise of documentary ‘fiction.’ Within an exhibition that spans a diversity of viewpoints, geopolitical contexts and mediums, the show rightfully demands the viewer’s attention––I returned several times to linger with the video-based work, read through Gander and Mumford’s books and revisit Koester’s text. Much of the work successfully opened up an array of attendant issues and broader questions, and the multiplicity of perspectives directed me on my own search for a sense of grounding and personal understanding of the maelstrom of global events that envelop us on a daily basis. In The Storyteller, curators Claire Gilman and Margaret Sundell have highlighted a key phenomenon within contemporary artistic practices, one that exposes the lapses in the way we remember and the fictions that we often create, alluding to our own implication in the way we both perceive and construct history.

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The Storyteller is a traveling exhibition organized and circulated by iCI (Independent Curators International), New York. Guest curators for the exhibition are Claire Gilman and Margaret Sundell.  The exhibition, tour, and catalogue are made possible, in part, by a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation; iCI Benefactors Agnes Gund, Gerrit and Sydie Lansing, and Barbara and John Robinson; the iCI Partners and iCI Advocates.

installation photos

picks: chelsea

some highlights from chelsea, this past weekend:

(Wolfgang Tillmans, Installation View, Andrea Rosen Gallery, NY, ©Wolfgang Tillmans, Photo by Jeremy Lawson)

Wolfgang Tillmans, January 30–March 13, Andrea Rosen Gallery, 525 W. 24th St.

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(Superflex, FloodedMcDonald’s, 2009, Film (RED 16:9) 21 minutes, loop, sound, Courtesy of Peter Blum Chelsea)

Superflex: Flooded McDonald’s, January 22–March 20, Peter Blum, 526 W. 29th St.

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(Jeffrey Vallance, Coral in the Shape of Connie Chung, 2006, mixed media, 13.25×11.5×5.25 inches, Courtesy of Tanya Bonakdar)

Jeffrey Vallance: Relics and Reliquaries, January 9–February 6, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, 521 W. 21st St., 1st fl.

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(Mark Dion, Travels of William Bartram–Reconsidered (cabinet), 2008, Wood cabinet, glass jars, cotton batting, found objects, Courtesy of Tanya Bonakdar Gallery)

Mark Dion: Travels of William Bartram–Reconsidered, January 6–February 6, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, 521 W. 21st St., 2nd fl.

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(Marlo Pascual, Installation view at Casey Kaplan, 2009, Courtesy of Casey Kaplan)

Marlo Pascual, January 7–February 13, Casey Kaplan, 525 W. 21st St.

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Markus Shinwald, Margot, 2009, oil on canvas, 17.91 x 13.39 in, Courtesy of Yvon Lambert

Markus Shinwald, January 14–Feb 20, Yvon Lambert NY, 550 W. 21st St.

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(Gavin Turk, Mappa Del Mundo, 2008, Wool, silk tapestry and metallic thread tapestry, 3.13 x 2m)

Demons, Yarns and Tales: Tapestries by Contemporary Artists, January 8–February 13, James Cohan Gallery, 533 W. 26th St.

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(Nadia Khawaja, Installation view at Thomas Erben Gallery, 2009, Courtesy of Thomas Erben Gallery)

New Art from Pakistan, January 7–February 20, Thomas Erben, 526 W. 26th St.

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Also, there is a really great show at the Sheila Johnson Design Center at Parsons, The Storyteller… plan to spend a bit of time with this exhibition, it’s documentation and video heavy… January 29–April 9.

–Persis Singh

the opening

Last Friday was the opening of our inaugural exhibition, LIMINAL SPACE. We just wanted to thank those of you who stopped by (so many of you!) and if you haven’t had a chance to see the show, THE LAY-UP is open to the public every Sunday, 1–5pm and by appointment.

Photos by Garrett Lubertine

review of ‘the double club’

A peer of mine in London sent over this review of Carsten Holler’s ‘The Double Club,’ originally written for the art journal OBJECT, which is published by the History of Art department at the University College London. She writes about the work’s contentious and divisive depiction of cultures and the more general staging of non-Western cultural stereotypes that many Euro-American cultural institutions have adopted and reaffirmed within exhibition practices. From my own experience, I remember a chilly winter night in London last year, when I tried to get a glimpse of Holler’s ‘installation’ and was denied entry at the door, perhaps for lack of being 5’11, waify and blonde. It’s an interesting when one tries to experience supposed art installation/project, yet in the process, is faced with the oftentimes humiliating door politics of a nightclub. Perhaps this was Holler’s intention.  –Persis

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The Double Club’, A Carsten Höller Project by Fondazione Prada

London, November 2008 – July 2009

By Juliette Desorgues

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The growing urge in our post-modern age to embrace the multicultural takes on a complex dimension within the context of cultural productions. Contemporary Belgian artist Carsten Höller’s latest London-based project The Double Club, realised in collaboration with the Fondazione Prada, can be seen as an example of this. Similarly to the Quai Branly Museum, inaugurated in Paris in 2006, attempts at an unbiased post-colonial aesthetics of display were here problematically debased and old colonial stereotypes of the primitive Other seemed to be deployed.

Höller’s project was intended as a place where both ‘the Congo meets the West’ and ‘the West meets the Congo’, and to celebrate a new and harmonious relationship between the two. [1] It consisted of a restaurant, bar and nightclub situated in an old Victorian warehouse behind Angel tube station, divided both functionally and decoratively between so-called ‘Western’ and Congolese cultures. The music played in the nightclub alternated between both cultures, and the menus in the bar and restaurant offered a range of both European and Congolese specialities. The general décor of the space also functioned according to this pattern: works of art by Western and Congolese artists adorned the walls and sophisticated Western furnishings were juxtaposed to (stereotypical) Congolese plastic chairs, tables and a shack-like bar.

It was this supposedly equal distribution of distinct marks of cultural identity that set  up the intended dialogue. Such an endeavour to render Congolese culture visible, by attempting to create a space of equal exchange within the largely white middle-class area of Angel, could be considered commendable. Similarly to Höller’s earlier works such as Test Site (2006), which involved large slides for public use in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, the project took on an experimental quality, unsurprising for an artist with a background in science. This gave a real-life character to the dialogue, one in which the artist’s control remained open-ended.

However, the fact that the project was developed by two Europeans – Höller and Italian fashion designer Miuccia Prada, co-founder of the Fondazione Prada – and not, for instance, in collaboration with Congolese scholars, sets up a primary imbalance and risks the actual effectiveness of the dialogue. Could the latter be considered successful as a whole, in its display of non-European, previously colonised cultures, if its very conception is dominated and sponsored by European entities – including an exclusive fashion brand? Perhaps it could, if a degree of precaution was adopted. Yet it is in the problematic staging of the DRC that the conceptual difficulties lie. Other forms of structural imbalances seemed to follow. As previously mentioned, the venue was located in a highly fashionable white middle-class area. There was no Congolese head chef present and most of the management team was European. Furthermore, if the Western sections of the venue were designed exclusively by Europeans (Clemens Weisshaar, Reed Kram and Höller), the creation of the Congolese décor also involved the artist.

In the face of such imbalances, the Congolese décor strikes one as problematically backward looking. It seems here that old, primitivist-oriented stereotypes of Africanness, which have plagued European and North American cultural fields, remain operative. The project can thus be read as consisting of two largely tokenist homogenous binaries. These derive in turn from the problematic conflation of race and geography inherent to colonial discourse. As theorised by post-colonial thinker Edward Said, such a West/East binary corresponds to an imaginary opposition between the modern, sophisticated centre and the primitive, exotic Other. [2] By presenting such stereotypes within the sphere of entertainment, Congolese culture is turned into an object of mere spectacle, participating in a commodified form of multiculturalism, which finds resonances in other non-artistic venues – like the nearby Favela Chic club – or in fashion world settings to construct a consumable exoticism or ‘primitive chic’. The essential acknowledgement of the current political upheavals that the DRC is undergoing is, in contrast, omitted. Whilst Höller’s commitment to Congolese culture may be at a certain level unquestionable (half of the profits go to UNICEF to help women in the DRC), this does not translate to the level of representational politics: the project’s set-up remains a largely idealised and stereotyped cultural construction by two Europeans.

This somewhat thwarted effort towards a more open dialogue between cultures is not however unique to The Double Club. With the motto ‘là où dialoguent les cultures’ [where cultures come to interact], The Quai Branly Museum attempts to map out a new curatorial direction for the collections of the Musée de l’Homme and the Musée des Arts Africains et Océaniens, rejecting centuries of ethnocentric French museology. Similarly to The Double Club, the museum seems to fall back into the very colonial discourse it sought to avoid. Designed by French architect Jean Nouvel, the general setting of the museum, which dissolves into the landscape under the growing vines, activates a sense of the primitive which become associated with the objects on display and their respective cultures. A meandering path leads visitors through a garden of bamboo and other indigenous plants towards the earth-coloured museum. Inside, visitors embark on a ‘voyage of discovery’ following a  dimly-lit trail, shrouded in mystique, towards various (grossly generalised) geographical areas where the objects are displayed.

The reasons for the problematic staging of these objects could perhaps be found, just as in the case of The Double Club, in the very development of the museum which was largely dominated by the then President Jacques Chirac, a keen amateur collector of ethnographic objects. Seen as another ‘grand project’, a seemingly presidential tradition in French politics, the museum, which sits in a fashionable, desirable tourist area of the city, was created without the inclusion of contemporary artists or scholars in the field.

If a growing concern with promoting unbiased dialogues with non-European and non-North American cultures is evident in both projects, they both also reveal a continuing tendency to collapse into the very discourse they sought to overcome. Both seem to fall into the traps of sponsorship and Eurocentric advocacy, becoming prey to the complex politics of display. Yet, in contrast to the Quai Branly Museum, and despite its problematic set-up, it must be said that the real-life quality of The Double Club allowed for some unpredictable and enriching cultural encounters to develop.

[1] See accompanying booklet to The Double Club.

[2] Edward Said, Orientalism, London, 2003.

–Juliette Desorgues

(Photo: Attilio Maranzano, Courtesy of Fondazione Prada, Milan, from DOMUS)

For more information: www.thedoubleclub.co.uk/

to see: latifa echakhch at the swiss institute

Latifa Echakhch, ‘Movement and Complication’ at The Swiss Institute
December 1–February 13 2010

Latifa Echakhch, Globus (b), 2007. Courtesy the artist and Kamel Mennour, Paris.

Latifa Echakhch, Frames, 2000-2008. Courtesy of the artist and Galleria Francesca Kaufmann, Milan.

Latifa Echakhch’s, Erratum, 2004, Installation at The Studio Museum in Harlem

–Persis Singh

le groupe amos + huit facettes

I recently did a presentation on collective-based practices within Contemporary art– my explorations led me to a myriad of practices outside of Western (commercial) art circuits and into practices emerging from locales as diverse as New Delhi, Istanbul, Kinshasa and Dakar. The prominence of artist collectives within history is nothing new… collectives have always formed during times of social or political upheaval, as a focal point of shared ideologies, aesthetic and political views, and a site to rally around central resources. What has changed is the way in which we conceive of these politicized practices as veritable art forms in themselves. While many collectives may produce art objects designed for circulation and exchange within neoliberal/capitalist markets of the global art world, the practices of Le Groupe Amos (based in Kinshasa, DRC) and Huit Facettes (based in Dakar, Senegal) are part of a larger movement in Contemporary art that is founded upon a postmodern critique of the autonomy of the artist and supremacy of the art object. Following the rise of conceptual practices of the 1960s and post-structuralism’s discourse on the ‘death of the author’ (a la Roland Barthes), the movement from modernism to postmodernism has coincided with the denigration of the sovereignty of the art object– leading to a certain heterogeneity in terms of mediums and perceptive orders and amounting to a continued emphasis of process over product, means over ends.

Nicholas Bourriaud has written extensively on the shift away from the art object and towards practices whose aesthetic value is centered upon the social/inter-human relationships that are generated from the work itself. He attaches the rise in Relational Aesthetics to artists such as Rirkrit Tiravanija, Philippe Parreno, Liam Gillick and Carsten Holler, all artists whose work’s relational capacities are limited to the  bourgeois/elitist circles of white-wall spaces. However, I am much more interested in a further subset of artists that exist under the umbrella of socially-engaged/relational art and who operate in a definitively more democratic sense within the public sphere. So, I turn to Le Groupe Amos and Huit Facettes.

Coincidentally enough, in light of Stephanie’s previous post on violence in the Congo, it was interesting to look at what certain alternative groups within the DRC are doing on a grassroots level. Le Groupe Amos, founded in 1989, is a group of social and political activists working in Kinshasa, who do not necessarily label themselves as ‘artists,’ and who work to target the formal institutions and governmental entities that repress the subjectivity of the Congolese people. Through the use of pedagogical tools such as essays, pamphlets, cartoons, theatrical productions and radio broadcasts, Le Groupe Amos educates and increases awareness of violence against women, democratic election processes, local histories and culture, and helps quell violence between warring factions. What is key is that their work is geared specifically towards illiterate communities and is transmitted via vernacular languages such as Lingala, Kikongo, Swahili and Tshiluba. It’s quite difficult to find information regarding their work online, and my main point of contact was through information on Documenta XI, as documentation of their work was included in the exhibition by curator, Okwui Enwezor. For more information on Le Groupe Amos, click here.

Alternatively, Huit Facettes, founded in 1995 and based in Dakar, Senegal, is an artistic and cultural project conducted by a group of Contemporary Senegalese artists. Founding member, Amadou Kane-Sy, describes their practice as aiming “to free itself of the more haphazard and vulgar aspects of artistic means of expression as they are defined from the traditional western perspective” and delving “into possible ‘other’ forms of expression for artistic urges, including an exploration of interrelationships with other social fields, in particular with regard to everyday activities in urban settings.” Their principle project has been Les ateliers d’Hamdallaye, in which they work with a village community 500 km south of Dakar and 2 km from the Gambian border. These ateliers/workshops were set up with the aim of working with village dwellers to transform basic craft skills into professional skills– from “dyeing, glass painting, embroidery, sewing, sculpture, traditional design, the manufacture and conversion of soap, as well as pokerwork.” As Amadou Kane-Sy also explains, this project united and fostered interaction between various spheres that are otherwise alienated from each other: a rural village community + a group of urban artists + a NGO. Yet, the importance of the work lies in the group’s intentions: to engage with the most elemental aspects of artistic creation and transformation, based upon the restorative benefits of creativity and inventiveness for the dignity of all human life. In a way, their aim subverts the goals of many development-oriented NGOs, which often act in good faith yet are completely blind to the realities and desires of the actual contingencies they work with. By allowing each village member to decide which craft or art form they want to learn, Huit Facettes subtly inverts the hierarchical missions of many NGOs through their commitment to each participant’s autonomy via this type of dialogic practice. As with Le Groupe Amos, information regarding their practices is rather limited online, so for more information regarding their practice, click here.

The purpose of this work is exchange not change. While many will wonder how the actions of such collectives such as Huit Facettes and Le Groupe Amos differ from the activities of other forms of community activism and how they can be delineated as aesthetic forms, we must reassess what we consider the value of art as practice. With artists and collectives whose value lies in the ephemerality of the human relationships prompted by their artistic efforts, how can we critically assess the ‘quality’ or ‘efficacy’ of their work?  Should we even measure the importance of these practices by the agonistic/democratic/dialogic public sphere that is engendered or rather by the value of the work’s conceptual significance?

*(For more information, please see Okwui Enwezor’s essay, “The Production of Social Space in Artwork: Protocols of Community in the work of Le Groupe Amos and Huit Facettes” in Collectivism after Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945, eds. Blake Stimson & Gregory Sholette, University of Minnesota, 2007.)

**(Image: Installation view of documentation of the work of Huit Facettes, Documenta XI, Kassel, 2002)

–Persis Singh

Violence in the Congo

In recent weeks, the situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has gotten much worse.  The country’s East is going through another of its convulsions of violence, and civilians are being systematically attacked on an appalling  scale. A recent dispute over fishing and farming rights in the Equateur province has forced approximately 218,000 people, 70 percent of which are women and children, to flee to the neighboring Republic of the Congo. The conflict in the DRC has been ongoing since 1996 and has displaced around 3.4 million people.  It has gotten so terrible that the UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Gutteres compared  it to the 2004 Asian Tsunami, and, after visiting the refugee camps, stated that conflict in the Congo is taking more human lives than the Tsunami every six months.

The First Congo War began in 1996, catalyzed by the Great Lakes Refugee Crisis.  After the Rwandan Patriotic Front look over in 1994, 2 million Hutu refugees fled from Rwanda into Zaire. Among the refugees were members of the militia groups linked to the genocide who continued to target and kill Tutsis (both Rwandans and Zairian).  Then-President Mobutu Seko support of the Hutu extremists enraged the local population and saw the creation of the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Zaire (AFDL) led by Laurent-Desire Kabila. The AFDL received the support of the leaders of African Great Lakes states, particularly Paul Kigame of Rwanda (part of the new Rwandan regime) and Yoweri Museveni of Uganda.  Kabila’s control of the country and ascension to power happened quickly thereafter.  Opposition to Kabila’s government began almost immediately and, despite attempts to quell rebel factions, the (smaller) conflict escalated into a conventional war shortly thereafter.  The Second Congo War continued until 2003, when a peace agreement was signed. The peace agreement, signed in 2003 by the national government, the domestic political opposition, representatives of civil society and the Mai Mai, as well as Rwandan/Ugandan/Congolese militias, described a plan for a transitional government and an end to violence.

Despite the unanimous agreement of a cease-fire, little has changed in many areas of the Congo; the transitional government has rendered the state itself a liminal entity, where questions of whose state it is, and how the population is defined, are open.  Additionally, the liminality of the (governmental) state affects the collective and individual subjectivities within the Congo.  Guattari explains that factors, within both historical and present cultural and social contexts, effect the production of subjectivity, and that the contribution of factors (which in this case include the constant state of chaos, absence of rule of law and constant war-time mentality) that appear to be detrimental, can steer both individual and collective subjectivity down destructive paths.  Thus, unless the (governmental) state emerges from its liminal state and the factors that cause this violent, abusive and detrimental subjectivity are eliminated, violence will continue and the human rights abuses will endure.

-Stephanie Lotshaw

‘whatever being’

When thinking about liminality in socio-political terms, we often identify this concept with the  various marginalized communities that exist on the fringes of society. The large-scale inequity that has pervaded global society, resulting from the unrelenting forces of globalization, has rendered many individuals and communities into stateless entities existing outside of the ‘protective’ nation/citizen bind. Whether consisting of migrant workers, refugees, prisoners of war, and those displaced by famine or conflict, these beings have been reduced to what Giorgio Agamben has termed ‘bare life’… in other words, a life stripped of its political inscription–life reduced to an ‘organic’ state separated from its form. While Agamben’s notion may be most aptly applied to the statelessness of refugees in the context of our post-national globalized world, this condition may be extended to those who have been rendered non-citizens by the exclusionary forces of the nation-state, leaving them with no true political voice or representation, whose liminal status on the peripheries of civil society has made them nearly bereft of political subjectivity. Within an urban context, the condition of ‘bare life’ experienced by many migrant workers/translocal laborers is engendered through the exclusionary forces of city planning and urban development, leading to mass displacement and exile of the poor from their homes, as well as in their overall ‘invisibility,’ their non-representation within the city, as well as nation-state’s economic framework.

Now on a slightly tangential note, this past weekend I had the opportunity to attend a number of sessions at the 3-day Digital Labor conference at the New School entitled The Internet as Playground and Factory. The first session that I attended, ‘Virtual Worlds, Civil Rights and Slaughter’ was super-interesting––topics spanned Chinese gold-farming, whether virtual labor needed a ‘civil rights movement,’ and the politics of visibility in relation to virtual exploitation. Yet, it was in the lecture given by Jodi Dean, a professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at Erasmus University, that I started thinking about the type of liminality that is created by Agamben’s notion of ‘whatever being,’ which was discussed in the context of social media and our current anemic state of democracy.

According to Agamben in The Coming Community, ‘whatever being’ was conceived as a way of conceptualizing the post-national/post-sovereign subject––thinking along these lines, this community of ‘whatever beings’ does not agglomerate based on commonalities such as citizenship, religion, belief system, common language or ethnicity (or “being Red, being Italian, being Communist”); they share no common properties or characteristics. As Agamben writes, “whatever being is a being whose community is mediated not by conditions of belonging… nor by the simple absence of conditions…but by belonging itself.”

It seems that these new notions of ‘belonging’ and community are most clearly manifest in the virtual realm, via online networks and interfaces, which in many ways have shaped new modes of sociality in contemporary society. Surely most of us have a Facebook, Twitter, Bebo or MySpace account. We’ve all watched videos on YouTube and perused photos on Flickr. What is most apparent about these online social networks is that ‘belonging’ is predicated on nothing, except belonging to the network itself. While many would argue that social networking sites are important political platforms for diffusing information and rallying popular support, what does joining groups or becoming fans really accomplish long-term?

As Jodi Dean simply stated, ‘Clicking does that make collectivity.’ Thus, as ‘whatever beings’ in the virtual world, we are thoroughly apolitical. Agamben would say that ‘whatever singularities’ cannot form viable social movements, as they “do not have any identity to vindicate, or any bond of belonging to seek recognition.” As such, ’whatever beings’ neither respond nor resist, they are neither inside nor outside; they merely circulate continuously through these virtual circuits of cyberspace. I found this interesting in contrast to thinking of liminality in terms of ‘bare life,’ in its relationship to the involuntary marginalization of various groups and their overall invisibility within the political order. It seems that these new virtual modes of socialization and online networking that inundate our lives and mediate social encounters, have drastically transformed our political existence. We exist liminally through our own choices, guided by the technology and developments that inform our actions, we are rendered ‘in-between’ through our lack of identification with one grouping or the other. By participating in a ‘collective’ network purely based on the idea of collectivity itself, our interactions and identifications become abstracted and solidarity is not engendered, rather mimicked.

I am not denying the importance of social media and the potential that exists in terms of disseminating information. Yet I agree with Dean that these platforms based on collectivity purely for the sake of ‘collectivity’ do not have the ability to mobilize or sustain true social movements, and if anything, they merely engender a superficial sense of solidarity based on convenience and vanity (being a ‘fan’ of Michelle Obama and joining the group ‘Free Palestine’ outwardly depicts how liberal, hip and socially progressive one is and is a very ‘convenient’ way of engaging politically).

–Persis Singh