“The Ones With No Name, A Desire For Anomaly” is a tribute to those who always fail, by choice or exclusion, to fit a name, starting with the question of utterance as a performative act that cannot be reproduced or be enclosed in an identity, a political system, a language, and that is doomed to disappearance.
In his book How To Do Things With Words (1962), the philosopher of language J. L. Austin observes that a speech is made of a constative element but also, simultaneously, of a performative one: to say something is to do something at the same time. Once it is said it is done, once it is done it is said. And we immediately lose the control of this act/statement. This unique quality of enacting the speech was used during the 70s and the 80s by different semiologists, art historians and artists (body art, conceptual art, process art, feminist art, cultural activism, institutional critique etc.)
Today, in the shifts of global order, the collapse of ideological systems, the unknown of a post-pandemic context, it seems relevant for us to revisit such reference and to raise fascinating questions related to:
– How language and body can be thrown out of themselves instead of being used to signify, to tell, to narrate, to identify oneself or the other?
– How gap, discrepancy, misidentification, misunderstanding, silence – but also sometimes rough and blunt speech act – can be a precious practice to develop in different social, cultural and political contexts where things and people can be assigned to a place, a country, a culture, a nation, a language. Or simply monitored, silenced, censored and disciplined?
– How the performative speech act can be considered as a unique practice of displacement?
– How the practice of naming is a rich and complex one, holding in itself different layers of name dropping, un-naming, de-naming, re-naming, especially when it refers to a private or collective history, colonization, adoption, deportation, concentration etc.?
“The Ones With No Name, A Desire For Anomaly” originates as a performative, processual and research project.
“The Ones With No Name, A Desire For Anomaly” reflects our very intimate feelings during the pandemic, the (self or imposed) quarantine period, new arbitrary legislation and regulation that generate a mix of profound isolation, separation, solitude, vertigo, as well as of intense focus on extremely detailed and essential physical percepts, affects and artistic creation. Thus, the challenge of this project is to translate and to rearticulate these percepts and affects in a critical, constructive, generous, individual and collective experience.
The performative dimension of The Ones With No Name, A Desire For Anomaly is also related to the concept and practice of the precious One Moment in Time (Whitney Houston) for each single individual and for the humanity in this post pandemic context. One moment in time that can never be reproduced, recorded but only be experienced, remembered once in a lifetime by each individual and as a group of individuals contributing to this performance.
Each performative occurrence of The Ones With No Name, A Desire For Anomaly is unique and so will be (re)invented according to the specificity of each context.
Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance. To the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology. Performance’s being, like the ontology of subjectivity proposed here, becomes itself through disappearance. Peggy Phelan, “The Ontology of Performance: Representation Without Reproduction”, in Unmarked , p.146.
The Ones With No Name is more deeply engaged in the question of the formation of language and genders, repeating but also observing that the mere fact of identifying and condemning an oppressor-speaker is necessary, helpful, efficient, but in the same time no longer enough. The point, now, is to invent new ways of acting through different forms of language and actions that transform the power of insult, indifference and oppression. There are still grounds for infiltrating the new order of discourses, reacting to them from within, creating counter-representations in the form of new modalities for the re-signification of discourse, and for the legitimation of emergent forms.
“Understanding performativity as a renewable action without origin or clear purpose suggests that discourse is not, in the end, constrained either by a determinate speaker or a context of origin. Discourse is not defined only by a social context, but also by its ability to break with such contexts. Performativity has its own social temporality, in which it is rendered possible precisely by the contexts with which it breaks. (…) The political possibility of reworking instances of discourse so as to bring them into play against the force of insult consists of reappropriating the power of discourse by deflecting it from its previous contexts.”
Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, London: Routledge, 1997.
“The Ones With No Name, A Desire For Anomaly”embraces the « mise en abyme » of the image as a pure artefact of artefact. Thus the importance of what can happen on the surface of a screen, a fabric, a sound, a curtain, an interstice, a distance or connection between two bodies, a word and a sound, a sound and a picture, a picture and a combination of sound/text/image.
The images and sounds of “The Ones With No Name, A Desire For Anomaly”do not pretend to speak about, around or besides a (hi)story, a locality, a people, a subjectivity. It just utters/happens with paradoxical materials.
The friction, the collusion, the repetition, the distance between images, texts, sounds, silences, languages create the rest… as a re-presentation, a trauma, an affect, a dream, a critical question, a vibration.
I don’t care, I just do it (…) Whenwe shoot with a Bolex, weholdit to a place, not exactlyat the level of the brain, a little bit lower, and not exactlyat the level of the heart, slightlyhigher… And whenwewind up the spring of the Bolex, wegive to the camera an artificial life… We live continuouslyinside the situation, in a temporal continuum, but we shoot only by bits of squirting, as much as the springcanallowit… Wenever stop to cut the reality of whatwe are shooting… Wetakeit back again and again. Jonas Mekas, « The Film-Diary (about Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania) » in The Avant-Garde Film – A Reader of Theory and Criticism, P. Adams Sitney, New York: New York University Press, Anthology Film Archives, 1978.
Jonas Mekas’ statement is extremely precious for us today. Not to refer to such practice as a nostalgic way of making image but, on the contrary, to question its validity (or not) today: it is an evidence that the Bolex is now replaced by digital bank of existing, polished images and by cell phone camera. So the challenge is to dig into such radical changes and practices of making, editing the image (but also sound and text), re-appropriating a so-called reality with such spirit of cutting, squirting, editing, uttering.
“The Ones With No Name, A Desire For Anomaly”
(re-en)act the act the activity the action the activism
We openly claim our affiliation to a decisive moment of cultural activism in the 80s when anti-AIDS activists radically reinvented the economy of making and consuming images in the age of capitalism and neo-liberalism. Many of them were artists, writers, curators, musicians, art historians and they decided to quit their own individual position in favor of collective actions, often ephemeral and anonymous, or to contaminate their own field of practices with unexpected sounds, images, texts, out of the framework of the institution. During the 80s and still today, this revolutionary moment was very much neglected, despised or too lately acknowledged by the (left) academia, the artistic institution and the art communities. Such practices were considered as being not enough subtle, elegant, meaningful, complex, beautiful and being too much straightforward, provocative, radical, blunt, reductive etc. But it is just a fact that they were at that time tremendously efficient into revealing the exclusion of minorities in dominant media, giving and accelerating the access to health care and treatment, negotiating the compromise of governmental inactions with greedy pharmaceutical industries.
Working on the artificiality and the mirroring effect of the image, we are also very much inspired by a « camp attitude » that still exist today and had different variations in the past, that consist of duplicating, repeating, exaggerating the image in such a way that the narrative and the form enclosed in the « legitimated », « commodified » image, often perceived as « natural », suddenly appears as a codified and entirely constructed one because of social norms, intellectual references, artistic (exclusive) disciplines, gender identification.
That is also why we are quite suspicious of academic and curatorial concepts of horizontality, equality, solidarity, ecology. Not because we do not believe in this (on the contrary) but because these concepts are often used by artists, curators, museums as mere concepts inside their own intellectual comfort zone and standards, instead of acting them as a critical practice in/outside their institutions, social status or directly in the daily life of public or private spaces. Means taking the risk of making these concepts simply a practice that is able to reflect, to act and to question differences, rather than levelling every people into a scheme, a system, an identity, a name. From a fundamental and necessary legal framework of equality (human rights, democratic participation etc.) to the on going practice of the differences between us, that is for us the real meaning of equality.
But of course, claiming such affiliation to cultural activism for us is also to recognize the limits and even the impossibility of re-enacting activism today. Just because of: – a dramatic change in the geopolitics – the raise of new forms of authoritarianism – the ongoing repetition of already existing institutional formats of curating, exhibiting, thinking. – the ingestion of arbitrary regulation, surveillance, censorship by and in in people’s mind and body – the overall control and manipulation of people’s movements, speech acts on social media
That is also why we feel so close to Lee Kit’s blunt statement that overtly addresses the silent compromise with such apparatuses of control as a person, an institution, a country:
In fact, lately I find you repulsive.
The damage was done by you alone, but the trouble you caused harms everyone.
You are a hypocrite in a sincere world.
In your heart, you are convinced that no one understands you.
But to tell the truth, it doesn’t matter much anyway.
You are still just as disgusting.
Slowly, you begin to think of hypocrisy as sincerity. Slowly, hypocrisy becomes sincerity.
When the neck grows weary and aches for a massage, he misses his head.
He feels as though the bright lights in the city where he grew up gradually transformed into a kind of sound.
It is like the sound of bowing your head.
When you look down, every place seems the same.
“AS YOU GO… roads under your feet, towards the new future”, conceived and initiated by Biljana Ciric, unfolded from 2019 to 2022 as a long term research curatorial inquiry that found great potential in its collaborative practice and situated topics.
Originating from organic research cells[1]varying from independent art practitioners (artists, researchers, writers, curators) to small-scaled organizations or state/private museums, we learned from each other on a long term process through regular meetings, intensive workshops and seminars. We attempted to generate alternative modes of working together that debunks the hierarchy of the artistic institution, encouraging creative interplays amidst the large scope of cultural production and interdisciplinary research.
[1] . Zdenka Badovinac (curator and writer, director of the Museum of Modern Art/ Moderna galerija in Ljubljana until 2021 and currently director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb)
. Nikita Yingqian Cai (Deputy director and chief curator of Guangdong Times Museum, Guangzhou)
. Biljana Ciric (interdependent curator and founder of What Could/Should Curating Do)
. Sinkneh Eshetu (writer and landscape architect, founder of Fruitycity Children’s World, Addis Ababa)
. Larys Frogier (founder with Alfie Chua of the duo artist studio Ocean & Wavz – OW based in Paris, art historian and artistic director, head of the Rockbund Art Museum Shanghai until 2022)
. Aigerim Kapar, (curator, initiator of the Artcom Platform and Art Collider school, Almaty)
. Dragan Stojmenovic, ethnologist and librarian at Public Library, Bor
. Robel Temesgen (artist, Addis Ababa, PhD. fellow at the Oslo National Academy of the Art, Oslo).
From 2019 to 2022,we initiated two encounters one in Addis Ababa in 2020 and one in Borin 2022. Along with the AS YOU GO… online journal, we organized a meaningful symposiumin 2021, issuing a seminal publicationin 2023. We also provided substantial support to numerous artists, collectives and researchers (sociologists, scientists, philosophers…) in order to achieve research and art projects through new commissions and residency programs, artwork production funds, curated exhibitions, lectures and papers, performances and events…) [1].
. The Fault Zone curatorial collective, Greater China
. Wu Yeiji, artist, Shanghai/London
. Jasphy Zheng, artist, Shanghai
. Anastasia Albokrinova, curator and artist, Samara
. Robert Bobnic and Kaja Kraner, researchers, Ljubljana
We developed such network, programs and activities in order to raise unheard voices of shared struggles within different contexts intensified by pandemic and new geopolitical divisions, from China to Central Europe, from Ethiopia to Central Asia. Through building collective and critical learning, the organic research cells have formed a sense of intimacy that challenged the usual definition of curatorial practice and academic research, trying to foresee new forms of collaboration and modes of relationality.
Our practice aims to avoid interpreting “international” as “the opposite of national”, or limiting such quality to the predominant local, national forces, regimes, industries and institutions. We continue to believe in the importance of the small entities, the overlooked routes, but also symbiosis of big and small and their interdependence through subtle yet meaningful interconnections crucial for our survival first as humans, and then cultural workers.
Following these three years of research and collaboration, we believe that the vitality of contemporary creativity involves the constant cultivation of dynamics that encompasses tension, transformation, friction and the invention of cultural and artistic inquiries. We cultivate vulnerability, continue to learn about multiplicity as a passage towards different modes of relationality that would enable healing.
Looking to enable vital practices to continue playing a crucial role in the humanities and the contemporary arts, after three years of working together, AS YOU GO…, is entering from 2023 onwards into a new phase of development, transitioning from a long term based project to:
AS YOU GO… as a sustainable autonomous, transnational and multiplatform organization.
Our transition will take sufficient time and care to implement the following guidelines:
– AS YOU GO… will connect and relate with localities on the margins with the future intention to expand its network to like-minded individuals and institutions in areas in Africa, the Arab world, Asia, Europe, Latin America, Pacific and other regions.
– AS YOU GO… will continue to use opacity and visibility as active choices.
– AS YOU GO…will nurture art and research as political and solidary practices within the organization members and beyond.
We are thrilled and honored to announce that AS YOU GO… transnational organization funding partners cells is now legally registered in Paris as a non-profit organization and its founding members are as follow:
. Biljana Ciric, What Could Should Curating Do, Belgrade
. Larys Frogier, Ocean & Wavz – OW, Paris
. Jelica Jovanovic, Belgrade/Vienna
. Sinkneh Eshetu, Addis Ababa
Partners remain opened and proactive to:
. Conceive and lead art and research programs
. Engage into art and research cooperation projects
. Develop initiatives supporting art practitioners and researchers
. Welcome fruitful exchanges with individuals, collectives, organizations,
institutions, sharing similar values and methodologies of working
. Meet the artistic, cultural, democratic and environmental challenges that are
shaking our contemporary worlds and will determine our common future.
ByLarys Frogier, Director Of La Criée Centre for Contemporary Art
Art… Cooperation… Transmission…
Democ(k)racy
Project
With the support of the Culture Program of the European Union
In many European countries, there are signs of withdrawal into separatist identities – alarming evidence of a crisis of democracy.
Europe is now reaching the limits of an economic model which is resulting in
brutal social fragmentation and deepening inequalities between individuals and countries.
The conditions required for the exercise of democracy
are now being suffocated by obsolescent administrative,
legislative and communication structures.
The critical, educational and creative dimensions of art, meanwhile, are fundamental to the development and exercise of democracy.
In an era of globalization,
we believe that difference, discontinuity and contradiction should constantly be cultivated through inter-relating the commonplace and the singular:
these underpin our representations of reality.
In view of all this, we, the partners in the A.C.T Democ(k)racy project:
. Altart Foundation, Cluj-Napoca – Romania
. École européenne supérieure d’arts de Bretagne – France
. Onomatopee research centre, Eindhoven – Netherlands
. University of arts and design, Cluj-Napoca – Romania
uphold the following convictions:
In the face of withdrawal into separatist identities, we believe that the ongoing progress of European democracies in the era of globalisation depends on our ability to cultivate a continuous, inter-penetrable, porous dynamic with respect to otherness
In the face of critical, educational and creative challenges, we believe that art has the capacity to bring historic, cultural and social elements into relationship with each other in order to generate unpredictable representations, unexpected encounters and innovative creations
Amid a Culture which is over-administrated and decreasingly inventive, we believe that the vitality of contemporary creativity involves constantly tending a dynamic encompassing tension, transformation and the invention of cultural and artistic projects.
Together, the partners have designed the A.C.T Democ(k)racy project to encourage theoretical research and artistic creativity as tools of critical analysis and inventiveness with regard to new ways of engaging in democracy.
The A.C.T. Democ(k)racy project calls for a permanent commitment in favor of powerful experiments which can contribute to the practice of democracy in both art and thought, particularly by devising constructive attitudes with regard to new cultural challenges, as well as encouraging diversity in aesthetics, thought and culture.
The A.C.T. Democ(k)racy project is passionately in favor of movement, interchange and openness as the prime conditions for the free circulation of ideas and works.
