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The Forum Artists-in-Residence Programme (F.A.R), inaugurated in 2005, resulted from the co-operation between two cultural organisations, Action Field Kodra, which has undertaken the implementation of the programme, and Forum European Cultural Exchanges, that has undertaken the planning and curating. more
A Museum of Forgetting?
Dear Andreas, Burak and Ines!
We are coming together within a framework which sets us some tasks, operates with some restrictions and allows for some freedoms. As a curator for the artist’s residency, it is my task to elaborate upon this framework in order to enable all of us, as individuals and as a group, to decide how we want to engage with it. My description of the field within which we will be moving will in no way be complete and it might not even touch upon any subject that you choose to find helpful in your individual endeavours. But it will give you a picture of what I am about and thus will hopefully permit you to make use of me as a conduit to your work during your stay in Kodra –Kalamaria– Thessaloniki. Kodra –Kalamaria– Thessaloniki: Burak has expressed an interest in the social struggles in Thessaloniki’s public realm, possibly working with recent migrant communities. Ines wants to connect with old women from Kalamaria, dealing with the topic of the displacement of the Pontic people and the influx of refugees in the 1920s. Andreas and I have yet to start our communication and until we do, I am taking recourse in the strong visual image his previous work has left upon my mind. In his case, I am imagining sculpture in Kodra. Thessaloniki –Kalamaria– Kodra. When I first learned of Kodra, I thought it my duty to understand its secrets. A former military camp. The home of thousands of refugees. What scenes of violence have happened here? Are there moments of joy to be remembered? But the place did not speak much to me, stories did not pour out of the people I met, and the traces of life still to be found there were hardly significant. Kodra was breathing a benign atmosphere and the Festival’s organising team was emanating good will and enthusiasm. Turned into a cultural site in the 1990s, there nevertheless remains a fence around Kodra. Which border is the fence delineating, if for all practical purposes is not for keeping in/keeping out people? „Some day soon“, somebody says, as we are walking the territory in the scorching midday heat, „it will be turned into a mall“. And thus we come to understand that the fence is symbolic, a marker of property, a reminder of the Janus face of contemporary modernity, where public sphere is interchangable with private space, though this exchange seems to be working only in one direction. So far, though, there are the old buildings, a hospital, an administrative tract, barracks, all crumbling, roofs caving in. The site has been declared a monument, and thus they are not to be restored – we cannot make use of most of the buildings, they are a hazard to the public. I sympathise with Pier Luigi Tazzi, the curator of the 2006 residency, who made a break for the outside, choosing to relegate the buildings themselves to the realm of the picturesque. Any attempt to turn these edifices into proper spaces for exhibition must surely fail – never has the "White Cube“ been more of a (modernist) phantasm. No, what interests me is something else: here, in this city of history, these recent ruins seem to mock the archaeological sites which we have come to associate with European antiquity. I was (and am still) looking forward to visiting the Roman, Greek and especially Byzantine remains. However, upon setting foot into the city, my intention collided with the evidence of what is gone, what has been made to vanish: the material traces of what must have been a truly fascinating multicultural urban life, which had its high point during the Ottoman reign. Whereas I had naively imagined antiquity always to be present, readily accessible to a cultured tourist, Mark Mazower’s history of Salonica, in particular the section on "Making the City Greek“, helped me understand, that antiquity had been manufactured, had been made to appear for particular purposes. While these purposes surely are manifold and not all sinister, „recovering the memory of one past meant forgetting and even destroying another".(1) Gone are the 36 Synagogues, gone are the many Minaretts. Is it enough to attempt to remember what is being banished from our present? Will the act of remembering save us? As the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips writes, "memory is only ever as virtuous as its users."(2) And thus we must keep asking, to what use (or abuse) memory is put by individuals and by society. To understand (the secrets of) Kodra –Kalamaria– Thessaloniki, we will have to start thinking about what it might mean to forget. "What“, in Adam Phillips's words, "a Museum of Forgetting could be a museum of?" I understand this kind of forgetting as a form of opposition to suppression. And thus I find comfort in the ways the buildings at the former camp Kodra, this strange take on an open air museum, are being left to crumble. But even in this state of dissolution, Kodra is not out of sight. In fact, Action Field Kodra has put it on the map again. With a slightly sly grin on their faces, its buildings appear as symptoms of all that is being purposely remembered and haphazardly forgotten – or haphazardly remembered and purposely forgotten. But what are symptoms, if not another language for those kind of thoughts that sustain no words? And what are symptoms for, if not for testing one’s environment, one’s relationships, one’s own borders?(3) We might want to think of them as disobedient, willful forms of communication and in that sense, I liken them to works of art. Ruth Noack Curator, Documenta 12 (1) Mark Mazower, Salonica. City of Ghosts, London, 2005, p. 467. (2) Adam Phillips, „The Forgetting Museum“, in Side Effects, London, 2006, p. 129-134. (3) Adam Phillips, „Symptoms“, in: Terrors and Experts, Cambridge/Mass, 1995, p. 33-45. Burak DelierInes DoujakAndreas SavvaGENERO-CITY-PARK
The dividing or bordering lines, the demilitarized zones and the permeable boundaries comprise again this year the theme of the artists-in-residency of the Action Field Kodra.
In a place with specific geographic coordinates, where historians and archaelogists place the existence of ancient Therme, long before the foundation of the city of Thessaloniki*, three young visual artists, Zeren Goktan (Turkey), Mark Raidpere (Estonia), and Nikos Varitimiadis (Greece), of different origin and aesthetic identity, encounter one another, each focusing on the production of one work, examining their relationship with the landscape, experimenting in media or ways of personal narrative. The old camp - a historically, socially and politically charged area - now a demilitarized zone, an intermixture of ruins and depository of memory, is offered to them as pretext, a departure point of a personal course, in which the work is not but a “chance” milestone, indicative however of the moment, of their encounter with the aura and the vibrations of the wider environment in which this is created. What is desired is nothing more than the enhancement of this moment, possibly also the description of an explosion. The art that will be produced might have an ephemeral or monumental character, to be literal or to converse with the viewer in an allegorical/poetic idiolect, to exist as an action or as a document recorded in texts, photographs or video, to be ephemerally alive through happenings or performances. In the case of the Residency of the former camp, the artists end up functioning also like guardians. Only that, while the place is burdened, almost buried under consecutive layers of historical-social-political stages, a sound box, I would say of muzzled sounds, might (due primarily to their creative nature) act also as excavator of their truth. On the hill where the landscape of the city is climatically elevated, on the ridge but also in its deepest core, the space of memory seems to be scattered and it is the inspiration of their art that will bring to light the fruits of this memory. Action Field Kodra, like a challenge, comes to function with the poetic dynamics of an environment that produces meaning or more precisely derives the meaning (and the sense) of its past in order to disperse it in the present and from here to the future is fertilizer for new conundra. It is about taking a risk of stimulating the imagination, discovering the elements of codes, the secret combination of an alarm that awakens the landscape like the setting of an inner condition. The geography - the “borderline” - does not constitute but a grid that the artist is asked (it is the nature of art that asks him) to rupture, a membrane into which he continuously collides in order to return to his starting point and to be ejected with a new impulse towards the future. From this perspective – and for the sake of this view, the view of the future – the artist and the surroundings dance the steps of the same choreography: flowing, distancing from the security of the local or other determinations, vibrating and performing acrobatics, they are led to the opposite side: to the amorphous city that stretches across an open sea, framed by a mountain once inhabited by gods. Ancient Therme with question mark, Thessaloniki with suspension points, Balkan peninsula with no period, Mediterranean with exclamation mark!!!, Europe with colon. Punctuation that changes depending on the light. Shortly before nightfall and until midnight and for 15 days your works Zeren, Mark and Nikos, will be revealed like bright beams, vivid signs to some horizon. Thalea Stefanidou Art critic, Curator * It is believed that the area was inhabited before the foundation of Thessaloniki, from the Bronze Age, the Mycenaean era and first years of history. This area began to be known through the excavations of French archaelogists during the First World War, where the mechanisms of cultural change emerged, from the level, large neolithic settlements in the shrunken tombs of the Bronze Age and in the birth of “cities” in the beginning of the Archaic period. Zeren GoktanMark RaidpereNikos VaritimiadisWorkshop by Roger BuergelThings magically appear. They are not always there, among us, and they tend to disappear after a while. I am not primarily referring to objects here in their dumb materiality (some shell on the beach). Nor am I talking solely of human subjects and their strange capacity to make whatever object meaningful (the same shell on my night table). The "thing" is a particular category – dreamed up by psychoanalysis. Like a benign shadow, or the snow at the end of Joyce's novel "The Dead", it may fall upon subjects and objects alike. Desire and unconscious memories form the thing's core matter.
In dealing with artworks, we learn to face their particular magic. In art magic shows itself to us. This magic is bound up with affect; the thing makes its presence felt. Unfortunately, but for some very good reasons, magic has become tied to Capital. The art market has become the dominant paradigm for the appearance of art. Capital even manages to define the canon of contemporary art. This workshop is dedicated to the situation as described above. It aims for an understanding of what is going on in art production and reception now. Roger Buergel Artistic Director, Documenta 12 |
Artist-in-Residency program: |
