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text by Vassilios Oikonomopoulos / Nov
2011 /
The Biennalist in Athens – Emergencies in the midst of
unfulfilled promises.
INSTEAD OF A PROLOGUE
The Biennalist came to Athens for two reasons. On the one hand he
wanted to investigate the current condition of the city and the
evolution of social politics in the wake of the financial crisis. On
the other hand, and as part of his continuous project, he came to
Athens on the occasion of the 3rd Athens Biennale ‘Monodrome’.
This piece is conceived at the intersection of the two. The Biennalist
aimed at researching beneath the surface of facts, and uncover a
realistic image of the current situation in Athens. In this quest he
encountered and witnessed many aspects of Greek culture, beliefs and
ideals, rational and irrational phenomena, many opinions and layers of
visible activities, fantasies and imaginations, realities and hopes. It
was an experiment of sorts, where a city became the laboratory for
questioning experiences, interrogating the collective imaginary,
provoking thought and testing out ideas. This is an interpretation of
various episodes and degrees of interaction – at times coherent and at
other maybe inconsistent, it intends to explore an unformulated
territory, the territory of contemporary Athens in its process of
change.
CURRENT SITUATION OF CRISIS
Crisis is the new upgrade for Greek society. The biggest news so far
for the country, possibly the biggest news worldwide since 9.11, a
typology of data that threatens to destroy the foundations of Western
society. Everywhere in crisis-land, there are activists and political
orators, demonstrations, wooden boards, placards, slogans, violence,
police, people being arrested by the police, tear gas, fire, petrol
bombs and immense destruction. Us Greeks love to abhor the crisis and
the ways it functions as a financial, social, geopolitical and media
spectacle. We end up condemning ourselves to a long, voyeuristic and
passive immersion in its repeated imagery of insanity. A residue when
the drying up flow of cross-border capital disappears and a sign of its
multiple points of return, the idea and only of crisis brings shivers
down the spine of the middle classes. It makes them think of the
unthinkable. A changing future which brings the lack of financial
advantages, the end of security, the end of money and capital movement
and a future of fading, evaporating materialism expressed in
irrational inner-city warfare with signs of the urban struggle
appearing even in the outer suburbia. This type of transformation is
despised by many as the evolution of chaos and absurdity, an escalation
of suffering and the purgatory for productivity and continuous
development. It is the fear of the signs of a dark age that appear to
announce the destruction of existing society, the end of the world as
we possibly know it.
MONODROME aims to provoke debate around something that has broken down,
but also offer the possibility at a glimpse of something new to come.
MONODROME evolves around an unlikely encounter: The Little Prince meets
Walter Benjamin. This intentionally peculiar coupling of the two
figures acts as the ground onto which the ongoing worldwide
socio-political and financial upheaval will be examined, through a
narrative that will address humanity in a universal and poetic manner.
3rd Athens Biennale 2011
MONODROME
MONODROME
Within this environment of pronounced transformations in the social and
political landscape, the 3rd Athens Biennale is taking place in one of
the most under-developed areas of the city, in the premises of what
used to be a school for arts and crafts. In a climate characterised by
many as a constant mayhem, fuelled by demonstrations and strikes, an
uncertain political condition of a country in recession and a growing
number of people living on the verge of poverty facing an unstable
future, the directors and curators of the art Biennale are promising
the production of a new model for exhibitions. Seizing the opportunity
to bring the crisis factor into the art discourse, the Biennale’s
directors and curators propagate a unique combination of aesthetics and
politics, the creation of new forms of artistic subjectivities and the
constitution of radically new mechanisms for thinking and practising
that will unite the - creative - ambiance of the times, with the
revolutionary causes of change and transformation. This is a task
rather optimistic and ambitious, that if successful, it bears the
possibility of erecting new forms of culture, an alternative and
experimental condition, a contemporary avant-garde in the form of a
major art show and a new type of situation that will lead to unknown
and exciting results.
Will it really be like this? The Biennalist is here to find out…
PLOT
The Biennalist arrives to Athens in the midst of events, and before the
opening of the Biennale in order to experience first-hand the
production of this new form of practice and explore the current
socio-political conditions. Excessively and obsessively studying all
forms of communication produced by the organiser’s and involved in a
relationship of wonder and mystery with the Athens Biennale, he has
devoted himself in critically interrogating the complexity of the
Biennale’s program, its functions and if the emergence of a remarkable
new experience will dominate the expressive output and manifest itself
as the reality of a new collective enunciation, as it has been
proclaimed. Tense and intense, in a state of oscillating rhythms of
loving and hating the Biennale, and open to learn from it, to be
affected, touched and struck by things, the Biennalist’s Athens project
begins, with a clear aporia. Will we be jolted out of our aesthetic
skins? Will that be the beginning of the new for art shows? These are
the questions, and these we are set to discover.
The way up is the way down
Heraclitus
Against a background of major developments, with one of the biggest
strikes in recent months taking place two days before the opening of
the Biennale, the Biennalist is determined to gather all information
and analyse the growth and development of revolutionary sentiments and
also the composition, limits, strengths and weaknesses that affect
those groups and movements that rapidly produce new organisational
forms within the urban terrain.
FIRST STAGE – EXTRACTING INFORMATION
Attracting and extracting is the first act of his focus. Staging the
beginning of a multiple, diverse and interconnected conceptual process
of movements/actions that will enable the deeper understanding of the
current social and cultural contexts and that will illuminate the cases
he is here to question, the Biennalist sets out to collect personal
information from people’s recording cameras. Without any hypotheses or
anticipations, this is pure exploration. What actually constitutes the
contemporary revolutionary cause as it is being expressed by the Greek
condition and what are the spaces where distinct new functions are
becoming able to produce an evolutionary form of dissent, are central
matters to this quest and determine a kind of loose focal points for
this investigation.
Parliament Square, central Athens. Walking through labyrinthine routes,
through bodies that either move or stand still. Most of the people are
protesters, there are some curious passers-by, and many photographers,
reporters and media presenters that attempt to report from the centre
of events. Circulation is difficult and improvisation is important, as
sometimes routes are being blocked by police, or extreme overcrowding
does not allow access. The situation is electric, with protesters
producing passionate moments of effect, in a sort of unified human
landscape, an irregular, overwhelming totality on a baroque urban
stage. The aim is to glide swiftly through this installed show in
search of active collaborators. The search is focusing on people that
will be happy to share their memory cards from their digital cameras,
in order to extract their views and memories, the data they have stored
and still they did not have the time to select, their raw material from
the demo but also from their personal lives, their mementos and
impressions of reality in a most direct and straightforward process of
accessing and collectivising the small moments of their lives. These
moments will then be thrown together with the rest of the ‘Extractor’
material in the disorderly, complicated and ultimately unified database
of sorts to be found anywhere in the world.
There is plenty of interest. As if people really want to open up, to
share their material, to offer their views, to show what they have
seen. There is a viable possibility for intervention and extraction,
with a phenomenal, even at times restrained, openness with which people
are participating in the extractor’s project. The Biennalist continues
through the crowd, pursuing to decompress more of the constructed views
of this loose social network of people, collecting and creating a kind
of an aesthetic synthesis, adding to a means of common knowledge,
fusing with little preserved moments of several past tenses the global
undercurrent of pictorial representation.
VIOLENCE
In the meantime, the demonstration is turning into a violent riot. It
erupts outside the Greek Parliament. All cameras focus. The whole world
focuses. International media, since early morning, have taken position
in the hotel balconies overlooking the Parliament Square. Video
snipers, are stationed in nearby rooftops and terraces waiting for
these moments to begin. They will not be disappointed. Cameras will
successfully record the intensification and escalation of violence as
police, political groups and individuals are clashing on the street.
THE AWFUL TRUTH
It is important to notice here that the participating groups and
individuals are not connected with the demonstrators, whose majority
has now become a passive viewer. The ones that partake in violence are
groups possibly related to anarchist/nihilist ideology. However, it is
common knowledge, although somewhat covered up, that these groups are
not entirely ideologically positioned in the anarchist domain, but they
are obscure entities that are using anarchy as a preface for
carrying-out a destructive course. Their existence and operational
tactics are covered by a suspicious connection with the police forces
and the main political parties. No one knows how this type of
nihilistic destruction continues unstoppable for such a long time in
Greece, and there has been many instances where their collaboration
with the police has been recorded in video. However, these groups still
function undisturbed. Their presence and action, realises and satisfies
a number of goals. From the creation of intrinsic fear to the rest of
the Greek population who is watching the news from their home, to the
exposure and over-analysis of the danger of Greek rebels on the
flickering screens of the global networks of instantly gratifying
infotainment, images from a burning Athens and the tear-gas cloud over
the Acropolis, remind to everyone what the catalytic consequences for
the Western civilised world might be if the if they detour from the
pre-described routes of capital obedience.
THE TECHNOLOGY OF VIOLENCE
Therefore, functioning more as a symbolic process of demystification of
violence in contemporary urban environments and as a progress whose
possibility can entail a destructive function if its territoriality
expands in other systems, violence and riot is turned into a complex
technology for the production of fear and control. A worldwide effect
made possible via the forceful events of violence, and the possible
disaster that is threatening to consume the global future.
Tear gas, masks, helmet, cameras. The Biennalist is inside the event,
coexisting in order to absorb and decode functions, objects, people,
symbolisms, in the stage of the here and now, in the theatre where
politics and aesthetics is played out.
He is intentionally allowed to be dragged into a peculiar artistic and
urban project of deciphering the ritual of violence and destruction. As
he is following people, he is creating a route of detournement,
unidentifiable and limitless, outlined by makeshift borders, flaming
objects and rising smoke. Somehow contained within a pattern, movement
becomes an exploration and a measuring of possibilities. Every step is
a laboratory of the contemporary, more current and more real than any
artistic representation, a great leap that can not be substituted for
any hopeless product.
DESTRUCTION AND ITS RITUALS
The desire is to continue but also to keep a safe distance from burning
bins, cars, shops and tear gas grenades. It is a full blown assault,
rude, rough and inescapable. Stuff flies in the air almost magically,
petrol bombs touch the ground and leave a trace of fire, tear gas
produces a spectacle of smoke, in a continuous antigravitational
flow. The perpetual mode of attack creates a transitory space of
urban rubble. An urban installation, an experience of momentary
exhilaration and panic, an almost primitive sense of fear. Wooden
sticks, shattered glass, disfigured metal structures, a sea of broken
marble and stone with melted bins, chairs and other furniture, and also
people busied in running, some of them involved in destroying and
others in documenting, make for a challenging experience. At times
navigation is only by instinct, trying to avoid getting caught in the
middle. There is competition to be always around. Documenting this
processual experience in a chaotic manifestation of a city out of
control, questions arise fast. How much of this happens with the
desire to change? How strong is the desire to creatively produce
alternatives to the forces of systematic suppression? What are the
alternatives and how can this energy be used productively to produce
new forms of subjectivities?
The existing experience resembles more of a dramatic New Babylon, a
city trapped in a nihilistic becoming. An urban installation, where
signs, symbols, logos and materials are piling up on top of each other,
defaced and decontextualised, in a kind of junk-chic aesthetic and the
apotheosis of an ephemeral new whole, the revolutionized carcass of
what used to be a city. As the fire rises and the smoke clogs up the
tiny streets of the historical centre, it creates a phenomenon of raw
action, discharged energy on an infantile political ground. The city
turns into the politics of spectacle. A charged atmosphere and a sacred
totem overpowering and realising the mythology of an immoral festivity.
This is political battleground, but is it a revolutionary possibility?
More often than not, it seems to be pure reduction, the abandonment of
any ambition and the subdivision of people’s needs and desires to a
simple survival. Contemporary political action in Athens is just a
distorted notion of collective behaviour and a face to face fight
destined for media consumption. It is thus dominated by abstract
gestures, empty movements and the disorienting ruination of a city in a
downward transition.
CULTURE
The lack of political program and the evident disappearance of a
productive revolutionary cause describes the course of destruction. Is
this the rise of a new form of totalitarianism? Is this a
totalitarianism controlled and manipulated by mainstream politics, by
corrupt governments and corrupt politicians? Is this experience but a
living monument to their perverse agenda? When the notions of people
and citizenship have evaporated, when democratic processes are being
silenced by vandalism and when the obsession with destruction becomes a
real threat, then we are within a system that no longer serves anything
productive but launches a blow to any potential change, to optimism and
the production of new systems of radical thought. As the revolution
turns into the ugly monster of destruction, it becomes a leap towards
pure spectacle, an attraction more popular than anything else. Change
seems to be one more piece of territory lost in the battle that devours
the streets of Athens.
SITE
However, the Biennale is the main concern here. Is it possible for an
art show to react upon developments moving so fast, upon ideas and
practices of such an intensity and speed? Is the notion of the
contemporary in art a mere symbolism, a dysfunctional representation
and an iconic structure that distorts and succumbs any effort for
addressing the emerging potentialities that are at stake?
At the site of the Biennale, a literal 10-minute walk from the
spectacle of destruction, time moves in a different pace. It is less
than two days before the opening night and the Biennalist is intrigued
to find out about the area in the immediate proximity of the Biennale.
People mention that this is a dangerous territory, especially at night.
As soon as the sun sets, the area around the former school becomes
frequented with African prostitutes, junkies and drug dealers. An
underground population emerges in the streets of the forgotten quarter.
Pedestrians rather than vehicles occupy the roads. There is the
occasional trading from small shops that sell Chinese and Asian
products, and where other commercial exchange takes place over
transitory stalls and makeshift shop windows. There is a huge contrast
with the area we were just before, where the battle still continues. A
huge monitor in one of the shops shows the burning storefronts just a
few minutes away. A paradoxical image in this trajectory of
questioning… However, there are no chic boutiques here or monolithic
department stores to burn, neither it is a beautiful village. Its
background would not satisfy the news consumers. This is a rough
territory, part wasteland, part slum, a compound constructed by
immigration, rejects, overcrowding and inadequate sanitation.
Miraculously though, on the run-up to the Biennale, images of
degeneration have disappeared. Prostitutes and junkies have been
removed, possible by a police operation, the so-called ‘Broom
Operations’. Policemen are ‘sweeping’ the streets of the area clean of
the unwanted, the marginalised, the ‘dangerous’ elements that frequent
it. Continuing his detective work, the Biennalist is looking for
evidence of this operation, asking what has happened to the junkies and
the prostitutes. It is true that the area seems strangely empty, a
naked city, at the process of a cosmetic operation. People are
reluctant to talk about it, however, it is apparent that junkies and
prostitutes have been pushed to a different area, a few streets below
in an effort to present a clean city to the visitors of the Biennale.
This is another forceful construction, to satisfy the insatiable thirst
of the art crowd, fuelled by the persistent drive to rationalize,
homogenize and regulate with the controllable power of police, what
used to be a diverse, fluid space. As the official institutionalised
qualities of art are progressing to taking up this space, the
evacuation of a local population is deemed necessary. Another spectacle
is progressing here, the new social and aesthetic structure that
competes for the site, with the promises for offering the possibility
for a new society, a new form of experience and a new power
construction where the old will be eliminated.
TEMPORARY MONUMENT
Second day for the Biennalist in Athens. More action this time. Heavily
armed with recording cameras, masks, helmets, a tent and spray paint,
the Biennalist will not remain passive but in a more provocative way,
he will further question the events and conditions that unfold. There
is another demo, the second in two days, and the background is the
same. Until the moment of destruction arrives, all participants are
inspecting the territory, passively waiting to enjoy some action. In a
moment of waiting and anticipation, right outside the Parliament, the
Biennalist is setting up his tent. A green, two-people tent pops up in
between the crowd, that opens up in surprise. An action of
unpredictability, that breaks down the regularity of a natural course
of events, the Biennalist’s tent becomes a moment of attention. The
introduction of this element – the tent – within the
protesting/standing crowd creates a kind of synthetic intimacy. Many
support and recognising the strict temporal boundaries – things might
start getting nasty at any possible point - the assist with the
task. People take up the opportunity to help, and soon after the tent
is mounted. Looking like an ephemeral monument and a gesture
signifying the construction of a new space within the larger
whole of the demonstration, it certainly exploits its vulnerability and
immediacy. A sign of collective praxis, the tent opens up to a moment
of participation. Ann attractor and a metaphor, it bears the vision of
fragile resistance that overwhelms for an instance the presence of
armed police on the streets. Its effect is almost utopic, a momentary
monument that radicalizes behaviours and an eventful surface
articulating the time and space of its realization. A modular reality
and a manifesto that changes the way for experimentation, through a
playful, anarchic game.
‘That which changes our way of seeing the street is more important than
that which changes our way of seeing a painting’
Guy Debord
A SELFISH REVOLUTION?
Setting up the tent activates the street and mobilises the people. The
street becomes a privileged site that unites the everyday with the
festive, and in extension with change. The Biennalist graffities the
outer walls of the tent with a question, sprayed with red paint.
‘Is the revolution selfish?’
This question bears a most crucial and poignant message. For a minute,
everyone stops to consider it. A question that remains largely
unanswered, whose meaning seems to resonate inside most of the crowd.
For the Biennalist this is a highly pressing need, as he
witnesses the rise of the personal and a manifestation of a selfish
model of behaviour within the realms of an aspiring revolutionary
course.
This action aims at presenting the dilemma in the psychological frame
of mind of protesters. By asking them if the revolution that they form
part of is selfish, is blatantly asking them what they are fighting
for. It also provoking them to consider the wider process of events
which goes beyond their own existence and occupies a different plane, a
plane of total rethinking of society. In reality some people find it
funny that this question is being asked. For many this is a fight for
their rights, and the personal and the collective mingle to overcome
the common enemy. We film while the Biennalist is asking these
questions to the people. Others get seriously upset and almost violent
with the possibility of questioning their struggle. They support
whole-heartedly the revolution and they attack the Biennalist, who, as
a Northern European represents the comfortably-living individual who is
unable to understand any of this. However, what is apparent is that the
revolution involves mainly the safeguarding of the establishment for
middle-class individuals that experience a dramatic change in the
privileges they used to hold until now. The reasons to revolt, it
becomes clear, are focused on holding on to things rather than changing
things. The spectre and oeuvre of the revolution seems
fatalistically narrow, produced and contained within a bourgeois
objective and a pitiful materialistic ideological enslavement. A device
that annihilates collective energy and ambition and transforms a whole
society into a spectacular anticlimactic fantasy.
IMMIGRANTS
In the streets around the Biennale, a number of immigrants are
interested in talking to the Biennalist. They want to express their
fear and uncertainty, the insecurity they are faced with on an everyday
basis. Most of them are literally trapped in Greece. Crossing the
borders months ago, their final destination would have been a northern
European country, where they would have more opportunities to work.
However, without any money and without any work they are stuck in
Greece, most of them without legal papers, without existing, phantom
images in an absurd background that certainly offers very limited
possibilities. They are based on the edge of existence, mostly by
scavenging and selling metal pieces they find in rubbish. Although some
are educated and used to have a job back in their home, they are now
penniless and hungry, searching for food in the bins. When asked about
their experience with the police, they mention how scared they are of
them, how violent they have been against them in the past, and how
unfairly and inhumanely they have been treated. They are aware of the
operations for cleaning up the area, and they believe something similar
has also happened now. At the same time, they have absolutely no idea
about the Biennale that is beginning in the area tomorrow. This is not
part of their life. For the Biennale, they are unwanted. This is not
good material for neither for press nor for potential visitors. In the
global circuit of art mobility, the army of curators and international
artists does not interact with the wilderness of real life. Instead it
superimposes its own hue on the image, reconstructing it by eliminating
any anomalies. This magical landscape, this other city of aesthetic
beauty, fiery political scintillations, new conceptual instruments and
illusionary fulfilments, bypasses the contemporary misery, opting for a
cardboard reality.
The Biennalist, presenting himself as both a cultural colonialist and a
naïve interrogator, is increasingly agitated by the great formula
of manipulating reality and mythologizing ambitions, that are
constantly being practised by Biennales internationally and their
curators. Continuing in the same mode of questioning and researching,
his multiple formats will appear both in social events and the
Biennale. The Biennalist continues his living critique of the 3rd
Athens Biennale, fuelled by the tensions on the social, political and
urban terrain.
GERMAN COLONIALIST, NAÏVE PEACEKEEPER AND FACEBOOK RITUALS
In an effort to understand the complexities of the area, the emerging
complexities in the wider picture that represents what Athens is at
present, and the aims and ambitions of the Biennale, the Biennalist
transforms himself into multiple personas.
In an ironic and critical attempt, he is visiting the area of the
Biennale as a German colonialist and he explores the city of Athens as
a UN Peacekeeper. An explicit remark and a reflection on cultural
colonialism, and the forces that shape the global contemporary terrain
of artistic production, his fictive characters become hybrids and
testing grounds for their ability to attract attention, intensify and
suspend oppositions and conventionalities. His symbols of global
recognition, peace and understanding between people, become subverted
as instead of complementing and reinforcing a set of standard ideals,
they interrogate and question the existence and the validity of what
they aim at representing – a global purpose.
In the virtual realm, his many Facebook personalities are firing the
Biennale page and the Biennale’s site with the specific questions. Why
is the use of the Little Prince? Are they more in the past or in the
present? How can they claim the here and now? Where is now?
In multiple but interconnected gestures, the Biennalist aims at
questioning the whole structure that maintains and reinforces an empty
discourse around social political and cultural subjects. It invites
with a seemingly naivety but exceptional accuracy in program, the
descent below the surface of things, under the skin of the phenomena,
where the blurring of boundaries creates and generates strong
understandings about current and future conditions.
Art produces a type of effects which are helpful. Art is a
person-to-person situation… The strength of art is to be able to modify
your perception of reality…
Nicolas Bourriaud
PRESS CONFERENCE
Athens Biennale Press Conference. At the former School of Arts and
Crafts, where the exhibition is taking place. The Biennalist attends
the press conference. The curators XY (Xenia Kalpaktsoglou, Poka-Yio)
and the guest curator Nicolas Bourriaud are taking positions in the
room, surrounded by city officials, and a committee of affiliated
sponsors and directors. After the short introductory talks, the
curators, in a somewhat honest effort, they express the difficulties
they faced when organising the show, due to limited budget.
Furthermore, the express their deep interest to the events that were
unfolding in the city and in the whole of Greece and that have changed
the way of life dramatically. They consider ‘Monodrome’ as the only way
they could take. Do the exhibition and explore its political aspects.
The only way they could think of producing a show, was to incorporate
the events that result from the crisis. Their efforts would focus to
‘transform the biennale into a sit-in and a gathering of collectives,
political organisations and citizens involved in the transformation of
society, an invitation to create a political moment rather than stage a
political spectacle’.
However, it seems already from the press conference that the results
are not as wished. Poka-Yio makes an apologetic plea, for the purposes
of the Biennale have not been fulfilled. Nicolas Bourriaud focuses his
talk on the film, which will follow the end of the Biennale and will
present a collection of moments from Athens and the Biennale to a
global audience.
A series of questions resonate after the press conference. Poka-Yio is
taking up the task of guiding press through the rooms of the
exhibition. He is in position to answer more questions as they arise.
GUIDING TOUR
It is a big surprise that no collectives or sit-ins are to be seen.
Political groups and activists are nowhere to be found either. The
experience is a collection of two-dimensional and three-dimensional
works, from international or Greek artists and a collection of
historical material that represents the ‘good, old days’ when Greece
was great. Although some material is interesting, the disappointment is
clear. There are no intentions for exploring the current political and
social situation. The show, although sympathetic, cannot be considered
a breakthrough. It has certainly failed in grasping the situation, and
it has failed in showing and expressing the current and contemporary
moment which Athens experiences. This is another art show. Its agenda
for new forms of collectivities and new conceptual frameworks from
those that are involved in transforming the society, are non-existent.
An early attempt from the Biennalist to penetrate an artist’s space,
was blocked by the artist himself. Therefore, how can we continue
talking about new possibilities and new ideas when we are still
striving to maintain our old ideologies and dated conceptions? Is the
program of the Biennale doomed in the similar way that the revolution
in the streets is stuck between destructive nihilism and fetishization
of totalizing forces? Maybe this is true…. Maybe both revolution and
Biennale follow the same route of extra-big claims without achieving
anything. Is this the ultimate fate of Greece’s dramatic nostalgia? And
is there a way out of that?
It seems not. It seems that the Biennale has failed to address the
issues that were at stake. It has failed to change the perception of
reality, but instead it reinforces an already past set of realities, a
kind of historical example, without offering tools and technologies for
the future, for potential actions rather than pessimistic inactions. In
the exhibition there are no efforts to present new modes of existing,
new perceptions and emerging realities. They have failed to engage
productively the figures of the Little Prince and Walter Benjamin.
Certainly, a deeper research into Benjamin’s work and a better use of
the Little Prince’s childish naivety, could have produced something
more interesting. It is clear that their use has only been employed to
fulfil publicity purposes.
And what about the local communities? The people that live and work in
the area, Mostly from different backgrounds and not related to art,
they are however people that live and breathe a few streets from the
Biennale. Is the exhibition addressed to them? Poka-Yio objected, that
they Biennale does not have any intention of being politically correct.
However, does it have an intention of being socially exclusive? How
much of that is in their program? Where is the change they hope for
comes for?
FIRST TIME EVER
Thinking of the immigrant communities that live in the proximity of the
Biennale, the Biennalist addresses the issues of social inclusion and
political program by inviting a local resident from Pakistan to visit
the exhibition with him. In a remarkably honest response, the
Biennalist’s new friend is amazed by the art and the show, and
exhilaratingly telephones his friend to announce them the event. Is
that a mini-revolution? And why did the organiser’s never included the
local communities? Certainly they are not the typical glossy art
magazines, neither do they follow or like sublime but empty
manifestations online. However, they are the phantom worlds of this
city, and although art can be interested in their representation, they
are not really fascinated by their reality, their presence and their
situation. In this stage, the dreamland of art, politics and life, they
are the counterpart of history, since they offer not an empty speech
but a living critique fuelled by direct experience, and the tensions of
social and political terrains the dominant society has never imagined.
This is another type of monument, a monument to the constant
annihilation of pseudo-dialectics.
ARTISTS AS VACUUM CLEANERS
So many questions still resonate, amplified even further. Is the
contemporary art circuit as it is presented here a process of
regeneration and sanitization? A process of eliminating and radically
transforming the demographics of a certain area, infesting it with
investment possibilities? Is this the political scope of the Biennale?
Are the artists a new methods of the gentrifying forces for uprooting
population and radically transforming lived areas? During the
exhibition excessive control over an area that runs its own course, is
being manifested. The dilapidated reality is artificially being
made-up, cosmetically injected with means of territorial control in
order to resemble a safer, private cultural landscape. As soon as its
contents are removed and refused, organisers, municipality, and real
estate interests follow a strategy of explicit ambition, of
transforming the area at all costs, even if that means the devaluation
of human life and dignity. Therefore, to a certain extent contemporary
art is intriguingly connected with a dominant philosophy and a perverse
project, which demands the further marginalisation of the most
vulnerable subjects. As a strict zoning is being implemented for the
mass of art lovers to inhabit, a sad methodological vacuum is being
created, a space of harsh exclusion, planned, orchestrated and
activated in the name of the artists.
ON A MODE OF CONTINUOUS PRODUCTION
The final outcome of the Biennalist project in Athens, is the rapidity
of the event and the simultaneity with which events, almost in real
time, are uploaded on the world wide web circuit. Immediacy against
delay. Hyperspeed against the histrionic stagnation of historicity, to
speed up things, to amplify capacities and replace repetition with
direct involvement and action. Against any notion of the contemporary,
since it is too delayed to capture the movement of process, and
managing to overcome the restraints of its hypnotizing domination,
fragments of motion become the hyperlocation and hyperdestination,
where everything happens at once, where everything is experienced,
uploaded, disseminated and informed, communicated simultaneously, with
the urgency of the immediate. The material that has been collected,
including interviews, images, people’s opinions and behaviours, fears,
hopes and responses are the ultimate expression of the emergency
situation, an emergency encountered throughout the last few days he has
been to Athens. The Biennalist’s material, always in the process and
always conveying the most pressing messages, present in a
straightforward aspect the ranking emergencies of a city on the brink
of collapse but also of a place in the edge of dissolution and
disillusionment. Raw, real and immediate, his shorter or longer
recordings of sounds, voices and images, investigate and present these
few days of action in Greece. It is a means for accessing the stages of
activity in the city, and a way for generating the significance of
temporary, emerging and escalating events. The urban, the social, the
cultural and the political unfold as the Biennalist follows the
developments in all planes of activity, as he is asking the questions
and as he is trying not to get killed. Experimenting with the
possibilities for intervention and set to scrutinise the boundaries
between events, art, politics and society, his critical explorations
will surface from the saturation of the mediums and the amount of
information collected about this place and its emerging condition.