Names dropping in the Pacific is a life project gathering different materials: images, poems, short essays, sounds, archives… weaving critical thoughts, fantasies, performances, theories, emotions, research… From these materials, we aim to produce a movie and a publication, along with installations and workshops.
Names dropping in the Pacific is dedicated to the Maori people of the Pacific I am tied to, but also to the American, Chinese, French, Japanese, and all mixed communities who are the children of (post)colonization histories, developing their lives in these areas and having a true attachment to this vast ocean.
It is fascinating to research how names, and of course how each individual/collective life, area and context related to them, could open complex streams and unexpected threads to better understand how the Pacific, going along with its history and contemporary development, is constantly reframed by geopolitical strategies of naming due to the re-de-mapping of the sea according to colonization histories and current economical appropriations of the ocean.
Moreover, naming, renaming, de-naming is also an impressive private and collective cultural “thesaurus” of the Pacific generated by people themselves, individuals, families, societies and identities living or/and migrating in the Pacific.
As the ocean, the process of naming is a boundlessness area crossing:
– The (still unknown) origins of the Maoris: some Maoris have been struggling to keep their indigenous names while others were “renamed” after colonization and mixed filiations. It appears also that people have western family name but Maori first name, or vice-versa. Then, the resurgence of Maori cultures are leading young generations of renaming themselves with Maori names.
– The inter connections of the people from the Pacific with America, Asia and Europe as continents: as an example, some European families transformed their names when they migrated to the United States and before arriving in the Pacific archipelagos. Asian communities in China and Japan who migrated by choice and opportunities of job offered by western colonizers saw their names changed or more precisely “distorted” since their names were written (means recreated) phonetically by French or US administrations. Other Asian communities like the Hakka people in French Polynesia tried to preserve their names and cultures, openly or discreetly.
– Illegitimate relations and recreation of mixed families: the Pacific, from the colonization to now, was not only made of an official history of political, administrative and legal administration and governance. So many individuals had illegal love relations (French with indegnous, Chinese with indigenous, indigenous from one locality (New Zealand) with another indigenous locality (Tahiti). So in the Pacific you can meet people who have a name that is not their real name, but a name coming from another family who adopted the child to hide the illegitimate relation.
– Some of the people in the Pacific have simply… no name
Names dropping… What is in a name? How sounds a name? De-naming? Re-naming? Integrating a name? Alienated by a name? Claiming a name? Original naming? No naming? All these questions relate to multiple and complex representations of the Pacific, inside or on the margins of official history. That is the challenge of such research project.
Of course names dropping in the Pacific is neither about the construction of a (sub) history nor an obsession for finding some true origins. It is an on-going practice of archiving, experiencing, performing, practicing and engaging the Pacific, combining different layers of sounds, texts and images (re)creation, of course connecting with other cultural backgrounds from Asia to Europe, from the Americas to this sea of islands that is the Pacific.
This project is not (only) a theoretical academic project but it is more an in-between artistic, historical, anthropological, poetical, sonic, visual, theoretical, private/public statements. In the following texts and images selection, the reader might cross some passages related to my personal story and experience (Larys Frogier aka Ocean) as a mixed Polynesian and displaced person from my childhood to now, having different life journeys from Polynesia to Europe to Asia. Thank you to take such process, not as an “exhibition” of a self-centered story-telling, but more as one voice among multiple other voices and contributors who could/will engage the project.
Names dropping in the Pacific is a salty ‘clin d’oeil’ to the real bombs dropping in and looming from the ocean related to the past and contemporary colonial histories, conflicts, reunifications that happened for geopolitical and ideological strategies, exploiting people, building walls of exotic representations, occupying remote, invisible places to make happen the worse of humanity like nuclear explosions (French Polynesia, Marshall islands etc.), war bombings (Hawaii Pearl Harbor, Tahiti). But this project does not limit itself to (post)colonization history. It aims to look (back and forth) to much more complex ancient and current practices of migration from multiple communities. It also observes and questions the contemporary capitalist and communist strategies of economical invasion of territories, destruction of environment and cultures in the Pacific.
Following the colonization of the Pacific in the XVIth-XVIIth centuries and since the middle of the XIXth century to now, the Pacific has been the very first and most strategic “crossroad” for experimenting the system of what we call today ‘globalization’ based on profit, commodification, planning, exploitation, creating stereotypes of indigenous people (especially women) to better submit people to Western and Asian continental standards of society, economy and “development”. The invisibility of such tiny archipelagos was and is still very convenient for continental nations to occupy, hide, destroy atolls with nuclear bombings, to deport and to impact people with radioactivity and other diseases, to crush coral reefs and islands, killing life environment for the future decades and centuries.
Needless to say that Globalization is not only a Western practice but nowadays it is also an Asian infiltration with authoritarian systems promising trade, education (well you know what I mean…), financial help (well you know what I mean…), drowning these islands and independent governances into indebtment and ideological submission.
I am the fruit of colonialism means I do not belong to any “pure, unique and exclusive” origin. Made of very unbalanced mixtures of Tahitian, European (Danish, German, French, American) and Chinese roots, I am claiming such family history made of displacements and life experiences because it radically changed my understanding of the official history of colonization.
Of course I am and will forever be traumatized with official administrative, religious, economical colonization acts and atrocities. However, I feel also committed into more constructive ways of (re)considering the alternatives impacts of colonization. Indeed, many people and individuals living in the Pacific have reinvented invisible but powerful alternatives of localities based on unexpected combinations: for example forbidden love stories between Polynesian, French, Chinese, American etc. have made possible the emergence of new generations who are very much engaged in more unexpected, opened acts of life, cultural cooperation, artistic creation, bringing with them their own challenges, ideas and creativity. And this is just as precious as the limitative dichotomies about the “colonizer” versus the “colonized”.
The origins of the Maoris and Polynesians are very much unknown with many theories still opened to questions. So this add another deep layer in feeling constantly rooted and de-rooted in the same time. For the best… because we are always standing far away from and out of any enclosure of nationalism, localism, regionalism, territorialism, separation between “us” and “them”: I believe into this on going process of change, displacement, re-adaptation. Never integration… Since we are already des-integrated, while keeping safe cultural heritage and preservation of environment and quality of life.
In other words, the ocean is our horizon not our land as a property, a nation or a continent. We are not only coming from small islands or archipelagos in the sea but fundamentally from the ocean. Instead of using the Western invented name of the “Pacific”, the anthropologist and poet Epeli Hau o’Faa prefers wording OCEANIA as multiple peoples, movements of the sea, on-going and changing interconnections between (is)lands and seas, non-human elements of the ocean, dense layers of histories and cultural practices. Such position is also quite different from Edouard Glissant’s concept of the archipelagic that is still tied to (is)lands, territories and anthropo centered areas, as well as dependent on or extending from the history of colonization.
Continental men (…) on entering the Pacific after crossing huge expanses of ocean, introduced the view of “islands in a far sea.” (…) I have just the term “ocean peoples” because our ancestors, who had lived in the Pacific for over two thousand years, viewed their world as “a sea of islands” rather than “islands in the sea.(…)
An identity that is grounded in something as vast as the sea should exercise our minds and rekindle in us the spirit that sent our ancestors to explore the oceanic unknown and make it their home, our home. I would like to make it clear at the outset that I am not in any way suggesting cultural homogeneity for our region. Such thing is neither possible nor desirable. Besides, our diversity is necessary for the struggle against the homonegising forces of the global juggernaut. Epeli Hau’Ofa, We Are the Ocean, 2008, University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu, p.32, 42.
Photograph taken in 1883 from Caroline atoll, Kiribati, during the total eclipse of the sun.
SAVAGE was the name of the boat on which my Danish ancestor named Samuel Brothersen (1825-1915) embarked from the United Kingdom to the United States of America. Once in San Francisco, he changed his name to an American name as Brothers, and he developed with a business partner and friend Joseph Browne a trading company, navigating from North to South, East to West through the Pacific Ocean. He got married with Mary Browne (1845-1934), renaming the schooner MARIA.
Samuel and Mary Brothers made several voyages from Tahiti to San Francisco trading import/export of copra from coconut plantations, orange, lime, vanilla, fish, guano fertilizer, pearl shell. During one of their trip, their very young son died of dysentery. Mary was distraught since she had already lost her daughter two years before, committing her body to the sea. So they decided to make a stop on Caroline Atoll part of the Kiribati archipelago, and there they buried the Willy son’s body. A small islet of the Caroline Atoll bore now the name of “Brothers islet”. Captain Samuel and Mary Brothers had eleven children, five of them survived.
Following troubles about import/export pearl shell with the young queen of Bora-Bora island – French Polynesia (where was shot the movie TABU by Murnau in 1930), they settled in Fiji in 1875. But during one their trip the boat was sabotaged and sank into deep waters nearby Tahiti. The family lost all and get semi-retirement on Raiatea island French Polynesia, working for the Société Commerciale de l’Océanie (Commercial Society of Oceania). Samuel died in 1915, aged 90 years old, Mary died in 1934; aged 89 years old, both bodies are buried in Papeete-Tahiti French Polynesia.
Video recording of TARAVA TAHITI REO PAPARA, 2017, who won the first prize for the “Himene Tarava” during the famous yearly HEIVA festival in Tahiti.
“Himene Tarava” (quirky song) is a traditional way of singing from Polynesia.
The style is started by one person singing a stanza. Other singers gradually join in and rhyme with the person. The men sing in a deep voice for punctuation, while the women sing in a light voice.
One of the earliest forms of Himene Tarava originated in 1844 in Tubuai island in the far Austral area of French Polynesia where my Brothers traveled and settled in the Tubuai island.
There are different forms of the music in each region.
– In the Windward Islands of Tahiti and Mo’orea, there are five vocal parts of the song.
– The islands of Rimatara and Rurutu use between 10 and 12 vocal parts.
Which sonic flames for setting fire to my desires?
The sliding of our bodies soaked in sweat A furtive gesture suspended into the unfathomable The wet tongue of a dog licking my bleeding skin Words dripping from your lips That will never be said or heard The breeze whispering on my blowing hole over the grass The friction of my hands on your words to milk my rage Vibrations of the celestial
Silence The media of the social Endless on line talks Exposure of knowledge and arrogance Making me speechless Narcissistic images Lectures of power Deafening anthems of the human Screens of the obscene
My music is a vibration of the unsaid Pulsating from the deep drums of my ancestors Who had no text, no book But contained growling inside their chests Spreading over the burning waves of the ocean Louder than the radioactive bombings Resonating beyond assassinated souls
Silence Is this your house of knowledge? Putrid rotten concepts Quoted until nausea and revulsion Confiscated to comfort an academic position A non curatorial statement Followers of the haunting dominant choir Left is left
My books are made of Coral branches Blowing multicolored bubbles of air Thick and heavy algae Swinging in deep dark waters Swishing ferns Dancing under the armpits of rolling cascades
Silence Your obsession with horizontality is highly suspicious to me Why should there be only verticality or horizontality in this world? Between us, there is no hurt to fly high, very high Getting lost in many upside down Not directions But energies Biased, tilted, rounded, melted, stretched, scratched, deepened, cut Your theories about social equality Built up the violence of our administrations and bureaucracies Another tyranny Undermining the beauty of the politics in dream And the power of democracy in practice
Can you hear Crawling insects Millions of fluttering bats Flying out of millions souls Echoing our ignominies Touching the invisible image Vibrating the inaudible tear?
Silence Eco-system The word of the world today Turning any murmur, motion and accident of life Into a flattened system to be designed, managed, controlled Eco-dictatorship
Poetry A practice of life Not a text A breath Laughing Making Singing Opening up Cooking Pulsating A word A letter An interstice As a fish Slipping out in a millisecond From the iron collar of man’s mind
Sand slides in my flesh A velvet smoke is infiltrating my fluids At the extreme opposite of rationality Are rumbling the deep bass Of the anima
Un-mapping the Pacific
Stick seafarers map named Rebbelib from Marshall islands, mapping of the ocean and islands made with wooden sticks and shells.
Rebbelib is a chart system specific to Marshall islands in Micronesia (more than one thousands islands and islets spread across several hundred miles) used by seafarers to navigate with their canoes between the islands. Vertical and horizontal sticks are used as supports while diagonals and curved sticks indicate swells movements and waves. Shells are locating the islands. The charts were memorized and would not be carried on voyages.
Te Aurere Waka, reconstructed ancient Polynesian canoe, 2015. Copyrights Te Taka Keegan.
Beyond the Rebbelib from the Marshall islands, some studies have been made in the past years to understand how Maori people were traveling without any map. In 1995, Dr. Te Taka Keegan from the University of Waikato, New Zealand, rebuilt with teams of people traditional canoes and travelled from Hawaii to Rarotonga (2,700 miles) using traditional Polynesian techniques of navigation. According to Dr. Te Taka there are three main attributes to Polynesian navigation:
To read the waves: most ocean waves (swells) are formed by the wind so always changing accordingly and, for a professional maori navigator, they are key indicators to constantly pay attention to. Some other ocean waves are main (stable) swells such as the main westerly swell. Interferences of waves and their own patterns are also important since they indicate directions but also tell if the canoe is far from or close to an island.
To deduce position, speed and direction: stars rising up from the horizon are indicators of position and direction. Speed is measured by evaluating the swells with time taken by the (right or wrong position) of the canoe to cover a distance.
To keep the canoe driven during all the journey, means seafarers do not sleep or have alternate from one to another in order to keep going on the observation of the wind, the waves patterns, the swells, the stars and the position/speed of the canoe.
Map or no map? There is no way to privilege neither to oppose here traditionalist, historicist or scientific cartographic approaches. The question is more about different cultural practices and historical backgrounds that contributed to the lives of people on the sea and their interconnection through voyages and migrations.
Diogo Ribero, “Padrón Real”, 1529, the Vatican Library, Roma, Italy.
“Cartography”, from the ancient Greek etymology “paper” and “to write”, is the study of making and using maps, combining observation, memories, science, fantasies, aesthetics, techniques, practices… The origins and the methods of mapping are not only a “Western” tradition and science but they can be traced in different areas and times like the wall paintings from the 7th millennium in Anatolia or the rock cravings in France from the 4th millennium or the engraved maps found in Babylon from 14th-12th centuries BCE, or the Polynesian ways of mapping and navigating before the western colonization, or the maps found in China from the 5th century BCE and developing from the Han and the Song Dynasties.
The map shown above was made in 1529 by the Portuguese Diogo Ribero who served the Spanish kingdom as an explorer and cartographer, while he also invented some navigation instruments like astrolabs and quadrants. His major work “Padrón Real”is known as the first representation on paper of the Pacific Ocean. But the word “Pacific” was not yet “there”… While the western edge of the ocean was explored since 1513 by the Portuguese followed by the Spanish, it was in 1520 that the explorer Ferdinand Magellan (Portuguese serving under the Spanish monarchy) used for the first time the name “Pacifico” (Peaceful) Ocean to express his feelings of a “calm” sea after going through the stormy and risky Cape Horn that connects the Atlantic to the Pacific.
From the western colonization to the cold war era and to the contemporary Asian geopolitics infiltration of seas and oceans as new forms of colonization, the Pacific has been subsumed remapped, renamed and dissected into different zones that could satisfy the economical and military interests coming from different continental or regional structures of power. Of course this brought a lot of confusion and, most importantly, always excluded or slotted the people who are living in this ocean of islands into areas that do not reflect the complexity, the interaction and the migrations of Pacific islanders. Here are some examples of naming and mapping the Pacific:
“The South Seas” was the name generally used during the colonial era to identify this far area from the Western and Eastern representations of the Pacific. It helped to build different stereotypes of the Exotic like the uneducated but “Good Savage”, the “beautiful female Polynesian women (Vahines)”, the “wild” cannibalism from different archipelagos like the Marquesas islands etc.
“Australasia” (Concise Oxford Dictionary) is another division of the Pacific taking Australia and Asia, means the Southwest Pacific, as the main dominant areas supposed to develop a “region” and to guard the Pacific against intrusions from “behind”.
“South Pacific” appeared after the Second World War II from military Western Alliances terminology, and spread over popular global industries and cultures (music, tourism) as a new stereotyped image of the exotic Pacific. This name was used to include a larger area than the “South”, including the far North Pacific (Mariana islands), the West Pacific with New Zealand and the South Pacific archipelagos inside the Polynesian triangle (Hawaii, New Zealand, Tahiti).
“Pacific islands” is a general term used after the Cold War to claim regionalism especially after the creation in 1950 “South Pacific Conference”, taking distance with the Western geopolitics strategy. But the “Pacific islands” name was then subsumed under the umbrella of the “South Pacific” generic name and then excluded the far Pacific islanders and created more distinction and separation between “us” and “them”.
“Asia Pacific” was and is still a name used by different political agencies like the United Nations, as well as by many cultural and artistic communities. Such name is supposed to reposition economical and cultural development of the Pacific from Asian “perspectives” (like the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation APEC founded in 1989 by Australia). But such “Asia Pacific” name reflects also the emergence of the “Pacific Rim” as the leading dominant structures of power and control (mainly Australia, South East Asia and New Zealand) and completely excluding the rest of the whole Pacific islands.
“Indo Pacific” is another academic name that was created in 1920 in Germany by western geopolitics, but was then progressively transferred to Japan to develop marine biology researches on species that do not exist in the Atlantic. Since the 2000s to now, “Indo Pacific” has been used for important global geopolitics coming from the West and the East continental and national systems of power. Indeed the significant resources of the Pacific, the strategic circulation of goods, the conflicts happening in the South China Sea between China-South East Asian countries-US, the strategic maritime routes between China and India leading to Africa and Europe, are positioning again the Pacific as a key area to remap, rename and of course, exploit and justify conflicts, occupations, obliteration of the Pacific islanders. From the building of fake islands in the Philippines to the so called “New Silk Road”, here we are… tossed around and alienated floating souls…
As a Pacific islander it is still with a spiced smile and rage to observe how such “Empty”, “Invisible” and “Exotic” oceanic space can be until today filled in with new names, commodities, polluted products, reeducation and wealth development plans, layers of maps, research programs, laws, destruction of coral reefs and fake islands, illegal exploitation of fishes and fishermen on the sea, nuclear bombs and tourists coming in to “taste” and “test” their own limits of knowledge and representation of Oceania.
Chantal Spitz: writer, 2012 Filmaker: Arnaud Hudelot Mururoa Radio, Voice of the Islands “Memories of the period from the Center for Experimentation in the Pacific (CEP)” Delegation in charge of the nuclear tests consequences, 2012.
English translation & subtitles: Ocean & Wavz Copyrights: Mémoires et images
Ocean & Wavz, "The Ones With No Name, A Desire for Anomaly", 2021. Installation view of "Curtain" exhibition, 2021, Para Site, Hong Kong. Courtesy of Para Site, Hong Kong, 2021. Photo: Samson Cheung Choi Sang.
The Ones With No Name, A Desire For Anomaly
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.
The Ones With No Name, A Desire For anomaly is 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
originate 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
(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.
Techno.
Lee Kit, Taipei, 2019
Ocean & Wavz, The Ones With No Name, A Desire for Anomaly, 2021. Installation view of Curtain exhibition, 2021, Para Site, Hong Kong. Courtesy of Para Site, Hong Kong, 2021. Photo: Samson Cheung Choi Sang.
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.
