kagablog

this article first published by one small seed

Africa Remix was an international success. The Johannesburg Art Fair is becoming a fixture in the international art circuit. Major academic interventions such as Sarah Nuttall’s Beautiful/Ugly are redefining the boundaries of African aesthetics. William Kentridge, Penny Siopis and countless individual African artists are making a name of their own in the world market. A silent revolution in contemporary art is in the making. Its ramifications extend to other domains such as literature, fashion, music, architecture and design. As jazz and cubism in the 20th century, it is to a large extent engineered by African forms.

Yet the terms of recognition of African contemporary art and cultural creativity are still contested. The latest controversy is about the role of Western cultural funding agencies in Africa and whether the support for arts and culture should be justified by the latter’s contribution to “development”. What, then, is the agenda of donors when supporting the arts in Africa? Is there a role for the arts in “poverty reduction” or in “conflict resolution”? Is “cultural cooperation” a two-way process or a surreptitious way by which donors impose their agendas on Africa? What do terms such as “cultural diplomacy” mean?

In this interview, Achille Mbembe research professor in history and politics at the university of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg, South Africa) responds to Vivian Paulissen, an expert and consultant in cultural funding policy based in Amsterdam.

Is there a space for respectful/mutual negotiation in the traditional donor-recipient relationship in which cultural funding agencies today operate?

I am not saying that it is a zero-sum game. Indeed there are very rare exceptions. The Prince Claus Fund is one of these. But overall such a space hardly exists. And considering the little amount of money involved, the damage is disproportionate.

In fact, relationships between Western cultural funding agencies and local “recipients” (individual artists and organizations) have never been so bad.
Over the last decade Western European financial contribution to the development of arts and culture in Africa has been steadily declining. The paradox is that as they put less and less money on the table, European agencies increased the severity of the conditions of accessing their meager subsidies. Instead of creating art, many artists in the Continent must spend a disproportionate amount of time, energy and resources filling useless application forms or desperately trying to respond to ever-changing fads and policies when they are not constantly checking the mood of ever-touchy and capricious Western consulates’ “cultural attachés” they hope to get support from.

Instead of spaces of mutuality, recognition and respect, donor agencies have established throughout the Continent countless networks of patrons-clients relationships. These relationships are not one-dimensional. They are characterized by deep levels of collusion and complicity, unequal transactions, at times mistrust, and in any case reciprocal instrumentalization. We can keep dressing up the unlimited power of the donors and the myriad forms of humiliation and indignity visited upon their “recipients” in the fancy language of “partnership”, “empowerment” or even “international friendship”. These words won’t mask the brutality of the encounter between those who have money and resources but hardly any good or useful idea and those who have some good ideas but hardly any money.

The situation is made worse by five major local and global trends.

First, the neo-liberal drive to further marketize and privatize all forms of art and life has resulted in the endless commodification of culture as spectacle and entertainment. This is a very significant development. It comes at a time when global capitalism itself is moving into a phase in which the cultural forms of its outputs are critical elements of productive strategies. The capacity of art and culture to engage critically with the velocities of capital can no longer be taken for granted.

Second is the relentless pressure from African governments to consider art and culture as a kind of “social service” whose function is to cure the ailments of poverty and underdevelopment. Third is the hyper-technological enframing of the life-world and the growing implication of art and culture in global systems of militarization of consciousness – which raises deep concerns over the limits of freedom in the militarized landscape of our times. Fourth is the “humanitarian” impulse of most Western donor agencies – the vicious ideology that promotes a view of Africa as a tabula rasa, a doomed and hopeless Continent waiting to be rescued and “saved” by the new army of Western good Samaritans.

And finally is the conflation of African art, culture and aesthetics with ethnicity or community or communalism. The dominant but false idea – shared by many Africans and many donors – is that the act of creativity is necessarily a collective act; that African artistic forms are not aesthetic objects per se but ciphers of a deeper level of the “real” that is fundamentally ethnographic and expressive of Africa’s ontological cultural difference or “authenticity”. It is this African “difference” and this African “authenticity” donors are keen to find, support and, if necessary, manufacture.

Taken altogether, the combined effects of these processes on the relations between “donors” and “recipients” and on African cultural creativity and autonomy have been devastating. Without a new ethics of recognition, solidarity and mutuality, the way most Western cultural funding (or for that matter development funding) agencies operate will become ever more destructive of the Continent’s capacity to culturally and artistically account for itself in the world.

keep reading this interview on chimurenga online

www.cleonpeterson.com

How do we sense?
How do we measure?
How do we identify?
How do we organize?
How do we relate to ourselves?
How do we assess a situation and how do we act?
How about the aesthetic dimension at the functionality of place?
How about the impact of peripheral and underlying information?
What about the area between the assignable and the indeterminable?
How do we handle diffuse conditions?
How to navigate noise?
Is this dust or dark energy?
Is it noise or did we catch a signal?
Are we gathering data or glimpses while we are developing models and strategies to process and
shape a housing for reality?
Are we able to comprehend more by gathering more and more information?
Are we able to process the information?
Is it pure construction?
How to identify all this human projections?
What about our longing for stability?
Is it this curiosity to dig and detect that is essential and fullfilling?
It is essential to be aware of limitations. To ask ourselves how we are handling borders. To be aware
of our mechanisms to structure our surroundings. To be aware of our urgent need to control. To be
aware that we are casting a net of boundaries upon the world, on which we fix our findings. This
knowledge becomes the net´s architecture itself. A system of established theories and interpretations
which needs to be touched, cut and reformed for it doesn´t become a cage.
“Being aware of” is not a constant state of mind, it is unstable. It is a beautiful challenge as it enables
us to transgress the boundaries, to develop and change things. And it is a disquieting anticipation as
it is biting the hand that feeds us.
Can experimental artistic practice function as some kind of laboratory to explore the raw material of
perception, consciousness and subconsciousness?
I believe in the need for these associative experiments. In the need to engage in a long-term research
in the sensory and mental relationship of man and place. In the need for installations as test
arrangements, pseudo-scientific constellations, constellations that produce and question borders of
one´s own perception, constellations that take the observer on a journey through the subtle layers of
one´s own production of reality.
Let us trigger disquietude.
Let us travel in between sharpness and blurring.
Let us explore what isn´t easy to identify.
Let us sharpen our senses.
Let us give ourselfs over to this border motion, take different pathways, sensuous pathways and keep
up the useless focus not blinded by efficiency and functionality.
How do we sense?
How do we measure?
How do we identify?
How do we organize?
How do we relate to ourselves?
How do we assess a situation and how do we act?
How about the aesthetic dimension at the functionality of place?
How about the impact of peripheral and underlying information?
What about the area between the assignable and the indeterminable?
How do we handle diffuse conditions?
How to navigate noise?
Is this dust or dark energy?
Is it noise or did we catch a signal?
Are we gathering data or glimpses while we are developing models and strategies to process and
shape a housing for reality?
Are we able to comprehend more by gathering more and more information?
Are we able to process the information?
Is it pure construction?
How to identify all this human projections?
What about our longing for stability?
Is it this curiosity to dig and detect that is essential and fullfilling?

first published on the blog of netfilmmakers.dk

Time has come, the new edition of Netfilmmakers is upon us! On October 18th, South-African artist Aryan Kaganof will unveil the 18th edition, curated by him, aptly named “Noisewomb”, at the new and improved Netfilmmakers’ space, at Brorsonsgade 1, Vesterbro. Contributing artists Kerstin Ergenzinger, Isabelle Schiltz, and Catherine Henegan, will be present and discuss their works.

Curator Kaganof describes his idea of Noisewomb:

Intention of the theme (After Adorno).

If the aesthetic realm originally emerged as an autonomous sphere from the magic taboo, which distinguished the sacred from the everyday, seeking to keep the former pure, the profane now takes its revenge on the descendant of magic, on art. Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane, which finally took over the taboo. Nothing may exist which is not like the world as it is. Noise is the false liquidation of art. Instead of utopia becoming a reality it disappears from the picture. NOISEWOMB is a net-based staging of the reappearance, on the scene of the absent sign, of the previously silent utopia.

I think it is useful to return to Rainer Maria Rilke’s fabulous essay “Primal Sound” from 1919, where he describes the following:

“The coronal suture of the skull a certain similarity to the closely wavy line which the needle of a phonograph engraves on the receiving, rotating cylinder of the apparatus. What if one changed the needle and directed it on its return journey along a tracing which was not derived from the graphic translation of a sound, but existed of itself naturally–well: to put it plainly, along the coronal suture, for example. What would happen?
A sound would necessarily result, a series of sounds, music … Feelings–which? Incredulity, timidity, fear, awe–which of all the feelings here possible prevents me from suggesting a name for the primal sound which would then make its appearance in the world … Leaving that side for the moment: what variety of lines then, occurring anywhere, could one not put under the needle and try out? Is there any contour that one could not, in a sense, complete in this way and then experience it, as it makes itself felt, thus transformed, in another field of sense?”

I am hoping that the three artists involved will work with this idea of a primal noise, an Ur-noise, a noise from the womb. I do not however, want to influence their interpretation of these ideas in any way.

aryan kaganof

Bewildered and fascinated by Aryan´s theme and notion Noisewomb and his link to Rilke’s contemplation about his first experience with an experimental setup of a phonograph I rediscovered Rilke’s Ur-Geräusch via the English translation. As point of departure I asked myself how does something look like in difference to how it sounds? An acoustic action and its representations (visual, tactile etc.) are intrinsically tied to each other by their nature. But their meanings reveal to be independent, blueprints for our associations and mental constructions. One question gave birth to the next and for me making a piece for the Noisewomb edition of Netfilmmakers became a constant back-and-forth between questioning, framing a rule, taking an action, cutting and re-cutting.

Some questions

Where does noise come from? How does a certain act sound? How does it look like? How does it feel? What traces are to be observed and will we be able to reconstruct the incident from what is remaining?

Is this noise or a signal, a sign or nothing?
If we are only able to interpret in relation to something else, does everything depend on our constructions?

Is a netfilm a film in the net, a film about the net? Just moving images, a piece of online art or an online piece of art? May this mean it is something the observer is generally facing on the screen of his or her personal computer? Then how does it feel like to watch a piece of art online? Is it an intimate experience? Is it intimate even if available for anybody 24h a day, depending on server and online access?

What does it mean to sit in front of a screen, watching, reading, listening, typing, editing, programming, designing? What does opposing a screen make with us? Bodily? Mentally? How is this screen like? What kind of surface is it? Is it flat, is it really flat? Is there something beneath it? Is it a surface above an inside? If yes what would this be? Is it the machine? Is it the information? Is it the code, the algorithm or its representation? Is it what we want it to be? Our counterpart? Is it a layer upon a layer upon a layer?… At least for this fly in the dark my TFT screen is cozy, warm and bright, in the moment definitely the best whereabouts.

Some rules

Setup: a digital SLR face to face with white paper above black paper above a cut mat. On the cut map fix a piezoelectric microphone, under the cut map place a table with a cut-out, beneath the…

Task: destroy the paper starting by cutting a) vertically, b) horizontally, c) diagonally, to thin the paper use rubber, to take away the crumbs use your hand and your spit, take as many pictures as possible and record the sound of all actions with a contact microphone.

One aim is nothing shall remain, but the cut mat and I wanted to peep through it as well.

Allow yourself:
to follow the unfolding phenomena
to break the rules
to vary and experiment

Analyze and organize the imagery and sound independently. Find a way to reconnect and spread it out on the screen and the built-in speakers of a personal computer.

The result:

Inner Cuts is an animation
Inner Cuts is about the surface. It is about choosing an action and a direction to delete one surface to reach the next.
Inner Cuts are tactile gestures and their acoustic traces meant to be sensed digitized by crawling back into the personal computers, those engines they have been fed in and cut a second time. Their mouth are the speakers, the screen is their face.

Kerstin Ergenzinger October 2009

first published on http://www.netfilmmakers.dk/netblog/

The heartbeat is the formative bass rhythm which shapes our instinctive ability to feel music and dance. The joyful bliss of play that we experience as children, is gradually unlearned and forgotten as we become adults. Rhythm and dance offers a passage through which we can return to utopia, a consciousness of unconsciousness and joyful community. Samples of female figures from 8 mm family footage shot in the 1960’s digitized to create a video poem. Sisters, cousins, aunts, mother and grandmother gazes and gestures interwoven in a pixel tapestry of memories of the womb time before noise erased our oneness with the vibration of life itself.

TOOLS / Ingredients:
Human heartbeat recorded in the womb. Chimes and a rainstick. 8 mm family footage. Final Cut Pro.

Technical Specs:
VIDEO LOOPS
Actual Pixels 960 X 540
PLACED center screen with no tool bars or timeline visible (preferably you only see the film loop with a black background)