• Tuesday 16 April 2013 - 19:30
  Erotic Capital: Lecture and interview Catherine Hakim

• From Friday 26 April 2013 until Sunday 2 June 2013
  citybooks exhibition in Amsterdam

• Sunday 28 April 2013 - 17:00
  The New Sermon #4: lecture by Jules Evans, author of the bestseller Philosophy for life

Discover our English activities! written by deBuren in: News

The right to laziness, once claimed by Paul Lafargue in Le Droit à la Paresse (1880), is perhaps more topical than ever. We live a time and age when competitiveness is the categorical imperative in the name of which businesses, towns, regions, countries and continents are set against each other. A time and age when business people are proclaimed guardian angels because of jobs to be created or to be saved. In such a time and age to claim the right to laziness seems like a betrayal, an appeal to apathy, almost blasphemy!

Lafargue associated the right to laziness with a general reduction of working hours. That we take up this theme again is only logical and in fact also necessary, as we are told that if we do not change our production methods, the future of humankind will be jeopardized. It is no longer possible, as we used to believe, to talk about the current unfavourable balance of power and to predict that change will come in a hundred years, or to play with Kondratiev waves-this miracle of economic pseudoscience-which offer a grandiose perspective of regularity that has been fabricated from data inferred from just a few of the most "explosive" decades of human history, in the course of which the entire inheritance of our planetary history-first coal, then petrol-has gone up in smoke. Yet, we rather hear about the urgent obligation to extend the so-called active live of people. Logic and the menaces that hang over the future, clash with this terrible objection: "that will decrease even more the competitiveness of our industry." Today, the reduction of working hours constitutes no longer a "reformist" claim-it is an almost revolutionary viewpoint. It also confronts us with the question of a transition period.

This situates the particularly minimalist version of the "right to laziness" I will offer here: the resumption of a struggle which selects its own terrain, a terrain where those who govern us, those who present themselves as "responsible", acting upon inevitabilities ("unfair but necessary") which we childishly seek to escape, still have a few miserable degrees of freedom-as the rest of them have been surrendered to the "laws of the market" and their European and international spokespersons. These degrees of freedom concern the installment of an "active policy for employment" meant to ward off the "great threat" of unemployed and other people receiving some form of allowance, who all get up late and live from hand to mouth, being caught in the trap of laziness..

I could speak here as a philosopher, because laziness-which in the case of the unemployed may be referred to as the trap of laziness, the trap of unemployment, social isolation, etc-is then called leisure, and has from its very start been defined by philosophers as a prerequisite for philosophy. Philosophers should not worry about making a living, according to the Ancients: if one is to reflect on life, one should not waste time to earn a living. However, I have no intention whatsoever to claim that those unemployed who are hunted down today as "bad unemployed", are amongst those who think and who are actively engaged in inventing new ways to live. I do not want to open the black box of the "laziness" for which they are blamed and put ideas into the head of the inspectors who would then evaluate who "deserves" to be lazy. That one? Oh, well, he's a philosopher, sorry for having asked. This one? But no, he lives off a private income, an annuity-we don't want to talk about the trap of living of a private income, do we? But if the person is simply unemployed, we have to protect him against himself and demand that he prove that he "deserves" to be lazy. Thus I will not indulge here in a eulogy of those who, being lazy according to administrative criteria, bustle about, dedicate themselves to thinking, and maybe even contribute to the creation of a future that is worth living. There are of course people like that, but not everyone is so fortunate. Some people are simply fed up, that's all. Today all of these people, "deserving" or not, can be penalized indiscriminately, and it is precisely this element of indiscrimination I want to retain.

In doing so, I am relating to an event that greatly impressed me and that radically called into question the judgment of experts who are in a position to decide that some people need to be protected despite themselves, namely drug addicts. When in the early 1990s I got interested in this problem, not only therapists described drug consumption as a form of "social suicide", justifying that consumers be protected against themselves-but also a number of reformed drug users spoke in defense of the laws that had forced them back to the straight and narrow path, without which they would have been dead. And I still remember the profound joy I felt at a symposium that addressed the problem of a repressive policy with regard to drugs. As was often the case, the meeting was invaded by the interested parties, yet this time it were not reformed users that accused us of being irresponsible, but members of a new sort of organization: we saw the birth of a self-help movement of non-reformed drug users. The intrusion of these non-reformed drug users made all the difference, perhaps not from a legal point of view, but in any case from the point of view of the social workers and therapists. Of course, those engaged in this struggle constituted a tiny minority, yet they have changed the way we look at the others. One of the (meager) results of their intrusion was the start of policy of "reducing risks".

The similarity is almost perfect between on the one hand the discourse of the traditional drug experts and on the other hand that of the "responsible" people, who "know" that it is necessary to protect the unemployed against themselves, against the inactivity in which they revel and that turns them into demotivated human wrecks. The organizations of non-reformed drug users succeeded in making traditional drug experts sound ridiculous as they pointed out that the ban on drugs itself had pernicious effects that are more dangerous than the drugs consumed. And what if we were to say that unemployment indeed exposes to certain risks, yet that the current regulations do not reduce them, but actually increase them. And if we were to say that the fact that the unemployed are forbidden to do anything at all except look for a job-i.e. they are forbidden to join forces, work together, organise themselves in order to live their lives and not merely survive (except if they do so clandestinely)-in fact increases the "risks of unemployment". Of course we should not stop helping those who claim they need help-but stop singing the great sad song of the drama of "the isolation of the unemployed", which is in fact imposed on them.

When I hear those who talk compassionately and with academic zeal about the pitfalls of unemployment, I hear the old-fashioned shrinks specialized in drug addiction, or respectable ladies of days gone by engaged in charitable work that will improve the morals of the poor working class.

Actually, the unemployed are not the only people whose fate experts seek to improve despite themselves. Today, even at universities, which are supposed to be places where a selected group of people enjoy time to think and understand what questions need to be asked instead of accepting ready-made questions, it turns out that we have to understand how irresponsible we have been, that we have to be competitive, that we to have find a niche, that we have to wake up and be prepared to be evaluated according to criteria that will define our degree of "excellence". And we are told that "the party is over." I am not sure what party is being referred to, but on the other hand I do remember this imaginative decade, some thirty years ago, that has been smothered to death. In the 1970s, that which we call neoliberalism was simply inconceivable. Sociologists seriously asked questions about "the leisure society" that was to come. In 1977 the Adrets collective estimated that working hours could be reduced to two hours a day or one week a month, or one year in four: that would be the necessary working time "linked" to the functioning of a society which-that went without saying-had banned waste and overconsumption, i.e. a society that would reinvent itself without capitalism. Something was moving and the idea of a "more democratic" university belongs to that epoch. A democratic university would open up to those who are nowadays considered as a burden, as the prevailing view is that competition takes place at the level of the "winners"-ambitious students from the entire world are invited to study at the Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management, not at the Institute for Labour Sciences! What was simmering in the 70s and had to do with the right to laziness has been eradicated. We may well wonder if the neoliberal offensive could not be considered a true sorcery attack, wickedly, obstinately, blindly undertaking to kill the sense of the possible that was then starting to sprout.

I have just reread the famous pamphlet Rosa Luxemburg published in 1915 under the pseudonym Junius, with the famous reference to Engels' saying about the choice between "socialism or barbarism". She lent the words a new dramatic intensity, as she wrote during the First World War, precisely at a moment when novel shades of barbarism imposed themselves on humankind. I was struck by the topicality of the passages in which she denounces the great betrayal: the social democrats' acceptance of the war. If in these passages we replace "war", meaning blood, trenches and grenades, by "economic war", meaning desperation, humiliation and people being laid off, we can doubtlessly speak of a great betrayal, of a war that all those who govern us, including the social democrats, have accepted as the only possible future. And when we read that "millions of proletarians fall on the field of shame, fratricide and self-mutilation, with on their lips a slave song", we no longer hear machine guns, but the gentle advice of gentle social workers that want to encourage integration and "empowerment". Competitiveness is indeed the sweet consensual euphemism for a war that destroys all solidarity, the possibility to think and imagine. The slave song we are so familiar with, is intended to urge people to continually recycle themselves, to urge them to preserve the capital that constitutes their appeal or to reap its fruits, to urge them to send the right signal, i.e. a cry for a "job"-no matter what kind of job. And of course, like in every war, we also hear the cry "down with the deserters": the "bad" unemployed, those who do not "really" try to find a job.

When in the 1990s, I heard trade union officials protest that the unemployed were not lazy, that they were "really" looking for a job, I understood what Rosa Luxemburg meant with "field of shame" and it made me decide to become politically involved to fight the poison spreading through our lives. We knew that underemployment was henceforth part of the employers' strategy-there were these slim-downs and rationalizations at the time-but we accepted the legitimacy of the accusation about "bad" unemployed" who "took advantage of the system". And thus we also accepted that the unemployed were a category of people who had to be put under surveillance: they were suspects, people who were potentially guilty. We should not feel pity for the black sheep! It is this blatant, almost schizophrenic lack of coherence between the systematic creation of underemployment and the categorical imperative that the unemployed "should do everything" to find a job-with warnings of measures that will be taken against the idle, and increasing persecutions that are today going onward and upward-that has made me think that Rosa Luxemburg was actually referring to our time and age. And it is not merely to expose this that I bring up this link, but rather to learn how to address it, i.e. how can we resist not only the enemy, but also the poison of mobilization that is instilled in us.

For it is indeed a complete and full mobilization that the unemployed are subjected to, as they have to compete for jobs that are increasingly hypothetic. Actually, those who have a job and those who don't have, are mobilised in much the same way: the former for the sacred cause of competitiveness, the latter under the surveillance of an army of "minions", as they are required to prove their motivation to sell themselves at whatever price, turn themselves in a sought-after commodity, be prepared to seduce. In short: they have to prostitute themselves, not in exchange for a steady job-there are a thousand well-motivated candidates for ten jobs-but just to show incessantly that they remain mobilized.

It is therefore little surprising that some people seek to avoid this sort of empty servitude, and perhaps the director of the public employment agency receives letters of this kind: "Mister Director, I am writing you this letter that maybe you will read, if you find the time..." (Le déserteur, a famous Boris Vian's song) Of course he won't have time. But my question is not addressed at the director of the public employment agency-it is addressed at all those who have not given up the fight: is it really utopian to think that those who have a job may be willing to defend not only the rights of those who don't have one and who are looking for one, i.e. the rights of those of the so-called good unemployed, but also the rights of the job dodgers, the deserters, those who avoid to work, those who object to work, including degrowth activists of course, but also all those who passively, lazily resist this mobilization.

In my view, if the answer to this question is that it would indeed be utopian to think so, because, let us be realistic, the workers are not prepared to support those who laze about-"we are the ones who get up early to go to work-then the poison of resentment has done its work. Those who consider themselves realistic may well believe that they still think in terms of a struggle, but they have long renounced that which was the very power of this struggle. The enemy has won, because the answer is simply this: the resentment has prevailed over the imagination, over the power to think, the power to create. To fight against the conflict between the good and the bad unemployed means to fight against the all-pervading force of the resentment that overwhelms us and infects us if we don't take care. We need to find a way to protect us against this resentment, for otherwise we are forced on the defensive and we will fight with our back against the wall. We will be nothing but a crowd of meek workmen, always ready to break into a slave song as soon as our masters announce that "jobs are threatened"-save our jobs, please, even if it should kill the planet.

In one of his short stories, Melville tells us about Bartleby, a true hero of the right to laziness, who refuses the tasks proposed to him. Bartleby works as a clerk at a lawyer's office. To every request by his boss, he reacts politely but firmly, "I would prefer not to." What fascinates me in this story, is that the lawyer, who is at first merely intrigued, then obsessed, is finally ready to do anything, even give him his place as lawyer, if only he were to step back into line. The story ends with the lawyer's final villainy, preferring to move his office and leaving Batleby as a gift for the new occupants. Bartleby ends up in prison, where he "prefers not to eat." The story makes me wonder what they live through, those who are supposed to "help" the unemployed to find a job, those who are asked to spot the "bad unemployed" and punish them, who have to "make the numbers", who have to exclude people, their hearts grieving, until they have no feeling left in their hearts to grieve. The common element with Melville's story is that at a certain moment, Bartleby's employer is ready to let him live as he wants, but his clients, who are met with the same polite refusal as the lawyer, are outraged by the clerk's behaviour and put pressure on his employer to sack him. Perhaps that pressure has nothing to do with the pressure experienced by those who have to supervise the unemployed. Yet in both cases the point is not a matter of good will or good intentions. Protection against resentment as expressed in the exclamation "let him work like anyone else" needs practical imagination, the invention of ways that make it possible to resist pressure collectively. The collective indifference to the fate of the unemployed who do not succeed in proving that they are not "bad", isolates those workers who are officially in charge of "helping" them to find a job, and have to choose between anaesthesia and the threat to their own work. It exposes them to finally side with the torturers. That, at least, should make worker organizations think!

Gilles Deleuze claimed that the difference between right and left-to the extent that it is not just a matter of the position of the cursor on the screen-is this: the right is perfectly content if people obey, whatever they obey to; for the left, however, it is vital, really vital, that people think, i.e. that people are capable of actively eluding the ready-made problems that present themselves to them and that they are able to create problems in their own way. It is in this context that we should view the right to laziness, the right to dodge work, the right not to subject oneself to blind mobilization, to the demand to become active. These rights follow the tradition of a struggle that in the past has resulted in the invention of our world and that in the future will be essential if this future makes its crucial to address the problem of work and production.

It is thus not a matter of singing the praise of laziness as an individual choice, i.e. it is not about supporting for example a "good solution" such as a universal allowance that would allow the lazy or those who have been defeated by life itself to live a life of misery on the fringe of our "active" society-"and they shouldn't complain for that matter, after all it's the life they've chosen." Vae victis. The neoliberal model of the individual choice has nothing to do with the sort of fight that invents things, that activates the imagination, that creates a bond between people, instead of resulting in the dream of the enemy: competition and rivalry. Rights are not granted to people-they are invented and conquered, and the conquest of the right to dodge mobilization for work does not involve that one resigns to a two-speed society, as some used to claim. If this right is achieved by struggle, it may result in the creation of new bonds between those who have work and those who have not.

And though it is really a minor objective with respect to that which awaits us, it is above all the feasible resumption of the impulse of invention that constitutes the legitimate proud of the labour movement-it is about the creation of rights that are not meant to benefit in first instance those who fight for them, rights that embody solidarity; it is about the creation of a world in which solidarity is no idle word, a world that is not ruled by the idea of every man for himself, which is the world the enemy seeks to create. And let no one say that is merely about reforms, that we should accept that we must renounce the righteous fight for full employment, with a general reduction of working time. The refusal to hunt down the "bad" unemployed, the "lazy", would instead translate into a reclaiming of the history of a solidary inventiveness, into a rejection of the submission the enemy has been preaching for the last thirty years. It will, finally, translate into challenging the operation of eradication of the sense of the possible that was intended to separate us from this history.

To fight against the holy duty to find a job, no matter what kind of job, or rather, against the necessity to pretend that those "who really want" actually can find a job if they try hard enough has nothing to do with accepting organized unemployment. Such a fight creates collective imagination, including even those who really and desperately look for a job. It is a fight that like all non-reformist fights, tests our links with the established order.

Kind-hearted people will point out that there is no right without duty; others will refer to the threat of moonlighting and of the collapse of the social security system it involves; still others will say that work is a central value in our society and that unemployment involves the threat of exclusion. As if the "lazy" unemployed have to be sacrificed to prevent the collapse of "our" world, to avoid that our world disintegrates or ends up in chaos. As if there are no good reasons to refuse being forced to integrate in this world. As if it were possible to assess the "value" of work in a world in which those who are not pensioned, those who do not live off some annuity, are all condemned "to do nothing that could benefit them in any way, be it financial or material." As to the realists, they will say, "that won't do, because the workers will never accept that people are paid for doing nothing, and what's more, for not even having to try to do something." The realists will thus confirm that the history of the working-class invention has come to an end, and that from now on we have to accept this one thing that condemns every invention: the resentment of those who have been humiliated, who are under pressure, who are afraid to lose that which is essentially their life-a resentment that is directed against those who try to live a different life. Both the kind-hearted people and the realists will tell us that capitalism has won. That implies that what is awaiting us, given the dire prospects for the next decades is a future of social ravages and still unheard of barbarism. It would also mean that we have lost the imagination to fight, the imagination to create, which would enable us to escape that sort of future.

Today, to fight for the right to laziness, means to regain the strength not to make common cause with the enemy, not to give in to the resentment that is instilled into us, not to accept the slave songs we are required to sing. It means to (re)claim the initiative in a situation where barbarism seems to have won.

Note on the title of this article: translation by XXXXXX of « Le droit à la paresse, une revendication urgente », in Le droit à la paresse, nécessaire, urgent ?!, ed. Michel Majoros, Université Libre de Bruxelles, on line http://mmc.ulb.ac.be/publications.php. 

Isabelle Stengers is a philosopher and works at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. In her early books, written with Ilya Prigogine, she addressed the role played by physics with regard to both the world view physics has inspired and the model of science it represents. She then extended her reflections to the production of knowledge and the role of scientific authority in our society. That lead her to become politically involved, with a focus on the necessity to reclaim the problems of the present and future by those concerned (La sorcellerie capitaliste, with Philippe Pignarre, 2005, translated as Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell, 2011; Au temps des catastrophes, 2009, Une autre science est possible !, 2013).

The right to laziness, an urgent claim written by Isabelle Stengers in: Blog

Tags: isabelle stengers, petra van brabandt

'Le vrai travail, pour cela, on ne l'a pas encore trouvé' 
(Ernst Bloch, Traces)


At the heart of contemporary capitalism, with its knowledge economy and creative industries, there are images and knowledge. In late capitalism, even the most critical words and images are welcomed with open arms. What matters is not what you send into the world – you can send whatever words and images you want into this world; what is important is that you send words and images into the world; words and images that succeed other words and images in an endlessly accelerating carousel of words and images.

It is precisely this fast succession of words and images that disarms any critical potential. The time for a critical interpretation process to unfold is pulled from under your feet. The maker’s body gets disciplined to the hellish rhythm of producing words and images – an animal laborans; the receivers’ bodies are conditioned to an endless succession of shots – consumers. Neither words nor images get the time and space needed to make a difference.  Nor does the receiver get time or space to keep the pairing of addiction and indifference at a distance.

Next to the neutralisation of potentially critical words and images by their densification in space and time, there is also the specific work ethics that is the paradigm of labour organisation of today’s capitalism: contemporary capitalism is craving for flexible, creative, innovative, and temporary workers who make no distinction between life and work, between self and work, between day and night. Today’s capitalism, we could say, is craving for the artist work ethics. For the artist, work is not a means to an end; to make art is to be an artist, or to work is to be.

This work ethics is a very profitable strategy: if you can make people believe in this mantra, they will beg for work, compete for work, and fight for work. They will show their endless willingness to find work, whatever work, at whatever price, even if there is no work, even if there is what Isabelle Stengers calls an open politics of non-emploi; the constant endeavour to cut jobs away, everywhere, in the public and the private sector, and as many as possible. Nevertheless, to work is to be. To be lazy is not to be. And we keep on believing it.

I could give here examples of how this neo-liberal spirit is working its way into education, healthcare, we all know about how it has colonized academia, but since we are in a cultural institutional setting, let us consider some aspects of its impact in the cultural world.

With the arrival of cultural festivals in the city, the supermarket is everywhere. You look at their programs in the same way as you look at the colourful shelves. You get dizzy, nervous, and anxious. There is no way of choosing, because every article is competing as hard as the other for your attention. Every event is seducing you and promising you an unforgettable experience. An experience you need so badly, they tell you, to lead a fulfilling, interesting, and critical life. You try to pack two days full of cultural experiences, yet you will still be a cultural loser and miss out on 24 other society changing experiences. The city cultural festival repeats the neo-liberal organisation of consumption, and continues its hold on our bodies as consuming desire machines.  It collaborates with the neo-liberal city’s marketing and entertainment objectives and foregoes any critical dimension it pretends to embody. 

The cultural festival also copies, and by this affirms, the neo-liberal organisation of production. It tends to work with quasi volunteers. The festival wants to produce as many cultural experiences as possible to establish its cultural prestige (or we can also call it status, or profit).  So what does a festival do when it wants to maximise profit? It engages cheap labour. Cheap labour that is eager to be exploited by the festival, because, remember, to work (for the cultural festival) is to be (part of culture).

The same holds for cultural institutions; let’s take a look at the new public library as we see it popping up in every city. The public library should be the fort of cultural resistance. With the arrival of the manager in the public library however, the walls are turned into glass, the doors are broken open to the market, and we read together on the rhythm of the city fanfare. Now it is difficult for the reader to forget the time whilst sitting reading in a dark, quiet and lonely corner. In the library there are no longer dark, quiet, and lonely corners.

The manager ignores that the books were the first to burn. It was the city that burned the books. A library should be a memorial for the burnt books and carry this menace with dignity into the future. A library should remember the prophecy: it will be the city that will burn the books. A library should be a stranger to the city.

A living memory for books to be burnt is not made of glass and open doors. A living memory has the architecture of protection. The door falls heavily in its lock after your entrance; to protect the books in which the dangerous seeds shelter from exposure, and to protect you, visitor, against the noise and clocks of the market, and the zeal of the perpetrator. The walls of the library should be thick and keep the light out. The owl of Minerva, Hegel said, takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.

Yet the busy manager carries the books out of the library and puts them in broad daylight on the market stalls. She hastily collaborates with the city and in all her haste the precious seeds fall through her hands; those books on the market stalls will never burn. The public library has to honour the tragic mission of taking care of books that in the near or far future will burn, and as a good caretaker knows, fragile seeds need to be handled by careful fingers, not by plentiful busy hands; books that will burn need the slow, secret, consoling caresses of the lazy librarian.

In the cultural institutions we happen to think that we are protected from the neo-liberal system and that we are the last resort of refuge and criticism. But the neo-liberal city is at the heart of our organisations, and they collaborate in the disciplining of people’s bodies as workers and consumers. Not surprisingly, these disciplined bodies are working themselves towards the depths of resentment.

Capitalism has not the objective of creating work; it is a system that aims at profit. By means of the technological revolution, this aim is reached with less labour than ever before. The knowledge and service economy is progress; it diminishes the costs of labour. To keep the little labour that capitalism still needs as cheap and accessible as possible, the neo-liberal system came up with a solution: make people crave for work.
One achieves this by putting work forward not only as a means to consumption, but also as the sole road to self-esteem. This self-esteem through work is dually structured: in relation to others it is defined by social status and in relation to oneself by self-mastery and endurance. My self-esteem is based on my worth that is firstly defined by the professional position I occupy in relation to others (social status). And secondly, even more importantly, it is defined by my endurance to find a job, to keep a job, to work harder, and better, and more than I did yesterday.

If people relate to work accordingly, capitalism realises the perfect internalisation of its aims. People want to work, at whatever price or sacrifice, because it gives them not only access to consumption and social status, but it also demonstrates their self-mastery. Our new worker is the addict, the competitor, and above all, the top-athlete.

This system is also very profitable in a second, related way. The one who does not work, ridicules with his idleness my dressage and sacrifices. This is why the non-worker has to prove that he wants to work and master himself, and be responsible for finding work. He has to prove that my self-mastery is the sole source of my worth; and that it is not a question of sheer luck. If my work is my merit, then his laziness should be his fault.

It is clear that this attitude is advantageous to the capitalist system: in our demand for proof we end up pushing the non-worker out of the welfare system and into work at any price. Cheap labour, precarious labour, flexible labour, stupid labour, labour that destroys man and nature, we couldn’t care less, as long as the other is not lazy and proves his worth by merit, like we do. Our self-esteem as constituted by hard working is at stake; and this is why we resent the lazy, those who resist joining in the apology of work. Those who are just sitting there.

Sitting there, just being there, and being welcome, we forgot about this option some time ago. That ‘just being there’ justifies your ‘being’ can probably only be revealed to us by a vertical transcendence; call it the word of God, the whispering of the face of the other, or the caress of the angel of history. Yet it is the ultimate law of hospitality, by which we keep the barbarian in ourselves at distance, and it should thus never be overridden, overturned or put between brackets by our economic arrangements.

Derrida wrote:

Let us say yes to who or what turns up, before any determination, before any anticipation, before any identification, whether or not it has to do with a foreigner,
an immigrant, an invited guest, or an unexpected visitor, whether or not the new arrival is the citizen of another country, a human, animal, or divine creature, a living or dead thing, male or female.  (Derrida, Of Hospitality, 2000, p. 77) 

It is time for us to become lazy in our adherence to economic models, arrangements, and policies. It is time to sit down again, take our time again to acquaint us with the barbarian within, and rediscover the first moral law of caring for human and non-human beings and non-beings, just because they are there. It is time to become lazy in our barbaric resentment.

By working like crazy we become resentful, and reproach the other for not working. There is a direct relation between the laziness we refuse to undertake and the laziness we reproach in the other. In the same way there is a direct relation between the laziness we should practice and the resentment we should deconstruct. We should become lazy and change our relation to the other. We should become lazy and reconstruct our social justice criticism. We should restate the other’s intrinsic value simply because he is around, and our economic arrangements should follow.

And we should restate our own preciousness. Laziness is also beneficial in relation to ourselves. The lazy woman stays in bed. It is in bed that her senses awake and that she meets herself as a desirous body. In Dutch we have a beautiful word for that: ontmoeting; this is ont-moeting. The obligations are being undone. Upon meeting herself she is stripping herself of all dressage and discipline. She honours herself for what she is, an awakening of the senses, a desirous body.

Consumer society makes us believe that satisfaction should and can be reached somewhere in the always near future, and thus it chains us to this endless quest for satisfaction. Yet consumption will never bring satisfaction, simply because we are not in need of satisfaction. This is the truth we discover in our lazy beds; our pleasure precisely resides in sensing ourselves as desiring bodies, and not in the satisfaction of these desires, which would mean our annihilation.
 
It is in the lazy bed that we discover that sexuality is more about sensing the bodily desires than about orgasm, not surprisingly called little death, the point where desires are silenced for a brief moment. In our lazy, voluptuous encounter with others and ourselves, it is not the orgasm we are after, but the simple pleasure of sensing and honouring others and ourselves as desirous, sensual creatures. What we need is a bed to laze around in, to sense and host and caress our desires. All the rest is ballast. It is in the lazy bed that we discover that we don’t need much.

In laziness we also stand face to face with the world. When Calvino’s Palomar looks at the waves of the sea he slowly but surely becomes the sea. Or the sea becomes Palomar. In our slow and aimless encounter with the world, we become part of the world, part of what is, just because it is there. It is in this mode that we realise how subtle the difference is between being there and not yet being there or not being there any more.

It is not in hectic activity, living as if we were sentenced to death, but in laziness that we come to share with the world the simple mode of being there. Maybe we don’t need any vertical transcendence after all; we only need laziness to reveal to us that just by the fact of being there beings and non-beings have intrinsic value. Like the child thrown in the world and seeking asylum with us has intrinsic value just by the subtle fact of being there.

Lecture on laziness written by Petra Van Brabandt in: Blog

Tags: petra van brabandt

Gertjan Boulet, on behalf of the CPDP programming committee
Research Group on Law, Science, Technology & Society (LSTS)
Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) - Faculty of Law and Criminology
www.cpdpconferences.org
www.europeanprivacyday.org

A landscape of snow under a beautiful sun written by Gertjan Boulet in: Blog

VIDEO | Norman Davies talks with Luuk van Middelaar written by deBuren in: News

Tags: luuk van middelaar, norman davies

Thanks to the publication of citybooks in De Morgen and on the website of De Groene Amsterdammer, more and more people are discovering these unique city portraits. And our download figures confirm that a half-hour citybook audio book is the ideal holiday literature: in August alone the podcasts were downloaded more than 26,000 times!

TOP 5 (July and August 2012)

1. Arnon Grunberg (Lublin): A Reported Offence
2. Thomas Gunzig (Charleroi): The Reservation
3. Onno Kosters (Graz): Gravity and Counterweight
4. Abdelkader Benali (Sheffield and Skopje): Down and Dirty in Sheffield and Warrior on a Horse
5. Lasha Bugadze (Tbilisi): A Song for Tbilisi

TOP 5 (January 2012 until now)

1. Abdelkader Benali (Sheffield and Skopje): Down and Dirty in Sheffield and Warrior on a Horse
2. Bernard Dewulf (Ostend): Snippets from Ostend
3. Simone Lenaerts (Graz): A Scrap of Time
4. Saskia de Coster (Skopje): One-Hundred-and-Forty Kilos of Love
5. Toast Coetzer (Grahamstown): I am Sitting in the Sea

• Here you can find an overview of all the citybooks that have appeared in De Morgen.

• Subscribe to the mailing list and we'll keep you up to date with the publication of new citybooks on our website, as well as all other citybooks activities, both online and offline.

citybooks downloaded 45,000 times in July & August written by deBuren in: Blog

Tags: city books

Jef Van Eyck, coordinator of Turnhout 2012, will open the exhibition on the 17th of August at 20:00, with the artist in attendance. After the opening, you will be able to pay the exhibition a visit for free until the 26th of August.

Creative Factory
Druivenstraat 20, 3rd Floor,
2300 Turnhout
Entrance via the car park of the Museum van de Speelkaart
info@creative-factory.be

Opening hours :
- 17.08 : 20:00: vernissage
- 18.08 : 10:00 - 18:00
- 19.08 : 10:00 - 18:00
- 24.08 : 18:00 - 21:00
- 25.08 : 10:00 - 18:00
- 26.08 : 10:00 - 18:00
Free entry

Kakha Kakhiani exhibits in Turnhout written by deBuren in: Blog

Tags: kakha kakhiani

The event takes place on Friday, 31st of August 2012, at 17.30,the Romanian Spiritual and Cultural Center, Rue de la Charite 41, Brussel.

Asociata Heritage is the local citybooks partner in Bucharest. Discover the citybooks about this city by Anna Luyten, Răzvan Rădulescu, Ester Naomi Perquin, Adrian Schiop and Jaap Faber in English, French Dutch and Romanian here. You can also listen to these stories. The Dutch and Romanian podcasts of Ester Naomi Perquin and Jaap Faber are already online, the rest will follow soon!

Download the program (pdf).

Romanian Heritage Day in Brussels written by deBuren in: Blog

Tags: citybooks

Chronological index

July 1
July 2
July 17
July 21 (1)
July 21 (2)
July 23
July 25 and 26
August 14

July 21, 2012 (1)

I decide to seek out Ryan Gander’s Orangerie work, which I understand to be a man sitting on the terrace, writing alone. I begin by cheating, asking the owner of the café where he is. I am denied: the café won’t – can’t - give away the identity of Gander’s subject. I loiter around the tables, watching for the subject. Nothing but families eating pizzas. Then I notice a young bespectacled man in the corner by the bar, a black notebook beside him. I approach.

‘Are you Ryan Gander’s work?’
‘Who is Ryan Gander?’
‘He’s - an English artist’ I say, ‘he’s asked someone to sit and write every day in this café and I figured it was you, because you are alone and – with a notebook’. I'm nervous, embarrassed maybe. He peers back at me, and I squint back at him, trying to gauge if what is going on is what is supposed to be going on is actually going on. I back away apologetically but linger in the vicinity.

The bartender gestures for me to come speak with him, wiggling his forefinger. He directs me to a lounge seat at the far end of the terrace, where a woman sits writing. She is ignoring two other women who are sitting at the table with her, consulting a map. When these two leave, I make my move.

‘Are you Ryan Gander’s work?’ (this time I gesture toward the numbered map of the Karlslaue)
‘No.’
She doesn't look confused by my question. She goes back to staring at her thick notebook.

I feel deceived and walk back to the bar, a failure. ‘Of course the writer will always deny that it is he or she you are searching for’, says the bartender, pouring a beer.

BK

July 2, 2012

Behind the Hessenland Hotel lies Huguenot House, which in recent years has fallen into disrepair. Then Theaster Gates came with an arsenal of people and material – men, women, children, architects, designers, artists, students, and a lot of salvage from an abandoned building in Chicago that Theaster is also restoring – and the house began to be transformed. As dOCUMENTA opened, stories emerged. One woman early on told Theaster that she had lived in the building during her childhood, and that she had to hide in the basement during the war. Another explained to the inhabitants of the house that he had made exhibitions there in the 1970’s. Alex, the New York-raised Kassel-based personal fitness trainer who mans the door here explains that almost daily, someone comes in with their own claim to the building. 'Oh yeah,' he says, 'people write down their stories in the guestbook over there and we compile them, we’ve got dozens of them.'

I join the tour of the house which has just begun with Norman, a Theaster Gates worker and inhabitant of Huguenot House. Explanations of the heavy presence of music are given, and Norman walks us past a woman and small child making a bean salad in the kitchen. Later we peer into bedrooms of the inhabitants – beds are hastily made, personal items are stored just out of view – and Norman evades a question from a tour-member asking which is his bedroom.

The tour ends in a room with two carpeted steps that resemble the front porch, a place to gather and to greet your neighbors. Norman sits us down for a question and answer period. 'What will happen to this installation after dOCUMENTA?' questions a beaming American dad. His daughter is perched under Norman, red sneakers and homemade necklaces with eyes jutting right and left. 'Theaster has proposed to buy the place, turn it into an artist’s residency and let others use the space the way they want.' Norman’s voice is even and mild. The American daughter pipes up, her eyes the size of light-bulbs, 'and we could raise sheep in one of the rooms!' Norman gives us a smile: 'yeah!' even and inviting as usual. The American daughter is reeling. She turns back to her father who looks back admiringly.

Downstairs I pass through the dark corridor to Tino Sehgal’s work. They are humming and whooping, I enter the dark and wait for my eyes to adjust. A scene in black and white gradually appears, and I count the performers as they break into an acapella version of Timbaland’s 'The Way I Are', all choreographed gyration.  I wonder what the performers’ life in colour must be like. I make a note to meet them and ask.

BK

July 17, 2012

Download an e-mail from Daniel Miller to Kai Althoff here (pdf).

July 23, 2012

Brussels, 23 July 2012

Dear Marta,

how are you doing?

We didn't really get the chance to talk in Kassel but Dirk took care that you were in my mind for some time. When I bumped into him at the Fridericianum asking if he saw and knew of those tapestries, he answered, ‘that's Marta's [choice], a Norwegian or Danish artist or something.’

I am not only writing to thank you for this great contribution, but also to say how struck I was by reading your essay on the works of Hannah Ryggen and learning that, beside the fact that she exhibited Etiopia, a response to Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia at the 1937 Paris Expo next to Picasso's Guernica, she later  ‘hung her tapestries on a clothesline outside her house in Oslo in full sight of Nazi soldiers!’

It is not only by the act, but also by the coincidence that a certain Léon Degrelle, leader of the Belgian fascist party REX, could have been one of these Nazi soldiers, as he escaped to Oslo when he was sentenced to death in absentia in Brussels on the 29th of December 1944.

Moreover, on the night of 9th of May 1945, when Western Europe was celebrating its liberation, he had the genius idea to board the airplane of a certain Albert Speer and fly South at a low height over the North Sea, the Netherlands, Belgium and France. He finally reached the Spanish border, where he, having no fuel left over, made a final crossing over Mount Urgull and let his airplane slide into the Bay of La Concha, San Sebastián, Donostia.

With a broken arm and several fractured ribs he found refuge in Franco's Spain, where – despite the demand for extradition by the Belgium government and several attempts of abduction – he lived for the rest of his life and died at age of 87 in 1994.

Hitler himself hung the SS-Ritterskreuz around Degrelle’s neck for being one of the few who survived the battle of Tcherkassy. ‘If I would have had a son, I would have liked him to be like you,’ would have been the words of the Führer. Mystifying the rest of his life on these words, he became an inspiration and his house a haven to many fascists around the world.

I don't know if you remember the time we met with Dirk in a restaurant near Avenue Louise in Brussels. I realize now that the former Brussels headquarters of the SS (where in its caves Jews and resistance fighters where tortured) is just around the corner from there. I am not sure if the restaurant existed during the war, but the cobblestones of those streets were definitely walked by Rexists, if not by Degrelle himself, who, by the way, held his mass meetings of the Légion Wallonie at the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles! I don't know why, but I'm suddenly imagining a show by you on the rise of Fascism in Europe. The airplane of Speer was a Heinkel He 111, in case you want this on the roof of the Beaux-Arts... Guernica was already exhibited at the Beaux-Arts in 1955; I know this because I recently found a photo of Patrice Lumumba in front of the painting when he made his first trip to Belgium.

By the way, yesterday was the anniversary of the Breivik massacre, were you in Oslo?

Looking forward,

Sven

July 21, 2012 (2)

Michael Portnoy’s 27 Gnosis

There are probably one hundred and fifty people milling about the mud mound that Michael Portnoy (in collaboration with architect Christian Wassmann) has built in this vast Hauptbanhof room. The lighting is dim, and a recording of a previous 27 Gnosis (maybe the first one, maybe yesterday’s) can be heard over the din. A woman asks where she should wait if she wants to participate; she looks at her watch expectantly. Others make their way up the wide steps single-file to catch a glimpse into the mound. The crowd rustles and look to each other for answers.

The pre-recording dies down, and an omniscient voice begins to tell us what we are about to behold. A suited young man appears with several painted mother-of-pearl spoons. He hands them to onlookers: ‘you have been chosen to participate in 27 Gnosis...’. He passes me by once, twice, and then I am handed a stick. I make my way to a semi-circle of other chosen onlookers holding sticks around the mound. Another young man arranges the position of my posture. A young woman to my left gives me a look; she is incredulous, I give her an empathetic shrug. The man who arranged my hand minutes ago then re-appears, takes my stick away, and places my hand on top of the older man to my right. I’m not sure if we’ve done something wrong – I blame the woman to my left.

‘Hurry now’, ‘quickly now’, we hear over the loudspeaker.

The selection process is complete, and we the chosen participants make our way into the mound, up one flight of stairs and down another into the sloping purple arena. We climb to our positions along the circumference of the circle. The space is steep – chosen participants are slipping and grasping at each other for their places, canvas bags are used as ballasts – and there’s a brandy glass waiting to be drunk (or maybe left behind) on the shelf along with twenty-seven knobby black objects which that like they’d be nice to hold.

Michael Portnoy and Ieva Misevičiūtė appear wearing black suits (tailored by threeASFOUR) with gapes and slashes up their legs and down their backs. They gyrate and extend their limbs nimbly, activating the space. They test the limits of their diaphragms as they breath deeply into their handless microphones. The game begins.

Two groups of three people are selected, I am chosen for one of them. Portnoy looks us each in the eye, already dripping sweat, and wafts his perfumed body past us as he explains the game and its rules. A gnosis is placed in front of us (‘do not touch the gnosis’): it is a tool for attaining experiential knowledge, a thing that forms knowledge and resides in knowledge. I really want to touch the gnosis. Portnoy’s hand hovers briefly over it as he speaks with precision, annunciating so violently that I notice a woman wince, blocking spit from her eye. As he speaks, Ieva repeats his words and choreographs her movements to them. My god she moves beautifully.

We are given the heuristic task of devising three irreducible categories that locate some sort of essence of some sort of situation, in two minutes. Things are moving impossibly fast for me. I look to my teammates who are, I’m relieved to see, equally panicked. We say nothing at first, but time is ticking and Ieva swoops in: ‘what do you have so far?’ she asks. We sheepishly mumble a response but it is turned down, ‘too much flesh!’, she says. We begin to understand that we must turn off our ‘psychic censors’*; we all have to forget what this impressive ambiance with its spectacular diversions is turning us into, and simply say something. So we do. We win the first round. I cannot remember past our first category (‘founding’) – the game show has drowned out any recollection of this proud moment. The second round commences; I go into a trance for about five minutes.

The third round approaches and my teammates and I are called back to the stage from our sardined spots along the wall. At this stage, we all seem to be immersed in a state of dazed and ecstatic readiness – there is nodding and there are hand signals. Another proposition is given (again, I cannot for the life of me recall what it was, almost as if this simple question, or maybe Portnoy himself, were D.B. Cooper), and we begin to deliberate. Portnoy approaches, he looks me in the eyes with trust and whispers (into his microphone) to us, ‘it’s very simple, just follow this and you’ll be fine …’ and shows me a page from his book. Is he letting us cheat? It wouldn’t matter anyway, none of us retain the information he drenches us with. An ‘expert’ then appears – who the hell is he? Alarmingly, he reaches for the pendant around my neck, ‘what is this, describe this space between this rock here on your necklace, and you will have the answer’… two minutes must be almost up. I implore my teammates to leave it to me, ‘I’ll deal with it’ – what a fool I am. Portnoy turns to me, ‘WHO WILL SPEAK FOR YOUR TEAM?’. I mumble something about a void, about energy flowing through something. He cross-examines me, I answer with an experience – something to do with growing my hair long, but I know we’re through. Portnoy’s disappointment is palpable. He moves on to the other team. The winner’s are declared – GROUP TWO (we are group one). Hands are shook; tight-lipped losers’ expressions are exchanged between us. We exit the mound, breathing deeply as we ascend the inner steps into the known world. I get the sense that nothing matters.

Shortly thereafter, while I am speaking to Michael and Ieva, a visitor places his foot on the mound, as if this will help him to gauge what it is made of. Portnoy stops short in mid-sentence – ‘what is he doing? Is he stepping on the mound? What the fuck…Sir! What are you doing?’ {Tense mumbling, foot stamping, and hand gestures, Portnoy points to the exit, and the visitor hurries away holding his hands over his head}.

I want to note that throughout all this, I can recall a woozy, slightly menacing music being played – something with the edge of a science fiction soundtrack and a repetitive new age glow. I can’t be sure, though.

BK

* The ‘psychic censor’ is a term used in Chaos Magick to describe the mental power averse to producing magic, typically the conscious mind. When Chaos Magick practitioners enter a ‘gnostic state’ (which for them is an altered state in which to produce knowledge or magic), any thought or experience must circumvent the ‘psychic censor’ in order for them to reach a subconscious state which encourages the magical manipulation of reality.

July 1, 2012

The Plank, 2012, an economically/aesthetically performative bow tie composed of chance encounters, material recycled from the Hugenottenhaus in Kassel and fabric from a skirt originally belonging to a Tino Sehgal interpreter, commercial website (www.plank22b.com) modified photograph, descriptive caption. Held in TSCOO Collection, Fogo Island, Newfoundland.

July 25 and 26, 2012

An Occupier came to listen to Jasper Kettner read The Concerns of a Repentant Galtonian by Critical Art Ensemble on the steps of the Fridericianum. He shook his open right palm in praiseful affirmation, nodding. Then he got up and walked toward the iced cream stand to our left. He gave a high-five to a woman ordering a bowl of extra-dark chocolate (good choice), then feigned waiting in line again before ambling back to where he’d come from, hands permanently fixed in a thumbs-up position. A sign reading “FREE HUGS” was to his left as he entered the camp.

The next day I returned under the hot sun to speak with a member of the Occupy dOCUMENTA movement, hoping to encounter this guy again. I was greeted instead by man who identified himself as a Frankfurt-based social worker on his summer vacation - he would go back to work in September.  For the purposes of this article, we will call him Our Man. Our Man does not live at the camp but has rented an apartment in Kassel and arrives during the day to help organize the camp and to act as a liaison to passersby. He never stays there into the night; the inhabitants of the camp get too drunk or fucked up on drugs, he said.

“Is the dOCUMENTA 13 wooden sign something they gave you,” I began, “or did you make it yourselves?” Earlier that week, I had heard rumors that the Occupiers installed the sign as an intervention of sorts, perhaps as a dedicatory portrait to dOCUMENTA 13. No, Our Man answered, the sign was provided to them, and states that there camp is ‘non-commissioned’.

dOCCUPY (as they have come to be called) is encouraged by dOCUMENTA 13 to make art – painting, for example – which they do prolifically. Photocopied literature, signs that read “we are the people” and “Capitalism Kills” as well as announcements of events such as “Kinder Dag” are layered one over the other. There is also their accumulation of objects – plates, photographs, and ballpoint pens- on display, inviting potential exchange with visitors. Cumulatively the objects resemble a nesting ritual, as in placing trinkets on a windowsill for passersby to observe from the street, but they also begin to form a sort of shrine: visitors leave offerings of cigarettes and crackers and flowers, but do not take the plate, photograph, or flower.

Then again, dOCCUPY are discouraged from actually building anything. No infrastructure, nothing that might guarantee a permanent position on the lawn of the Fridericianum. While dOCUMENTA 13 provides electricity to the camp, they also (and apparently often do) propose changes, and express their satisfaction or disapproval with the camp’s evolution on a case-by-case basis.

Occupiers here are from all over Germany: they are itinerant punks and anarchists, one is a Central American artist (a crazy and great guy, I was told). Our Man touted himself as perhaps the sole politically active member of the group; everyone else, he told me, really don’t do much, “they don’t even know Marx”. He was sweating disappointment.

As Our Man spoke, I reminisced about friends who had been active participants during the early weeks and months of Occupy - voting in assemblies, discussing ideas, making placards and holding them, shouting songs and chants, making lunch – and what happened when they eventually went back to their jobs, apartments, and lives outside of this world. As the movement’s piercing public and media popularity wades into the haze of far bloodier revolutions, its remaining dedicated members find themselves in a position of having to ask how the movement can continue in a relevant sense, and whether this can be done through a continuous presence in public spaces (all the while avoiding the kinds of extremists and tag-along crazies which haunt them). In his entry for dOCUMENTA’s video glossary, W.J.T. Mitchell reminds us that Occupy, once a mere verb, has also become a proper noun, capitalized “as if it was a trade mark, or a brand name”. Its name becomes its body: while Occupy movements such as ‘dOCCUPY’ figure out their position and what they want to do about it, their namesake, the ghost of Occupy’s past events, silently hovers above them.

In her letter welcoming the ‘dOCCUPY’ movement, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev wrote, “I also want to affirm the abilities of the people involved to care for the square, and to take responsibility for the space that they have the right to occupy, to consider the City of Kassel and the other visitors of dOCUMENTA in a worldly spirit of germination and flourishing.” Are dOCCUPY devoted caretakers of this semi-public domain, or, as many a witness to the Occupy movement at large has pointed out, essentially a band of Bartleby’s with no objective but occupation? When dOCUMENTA moves out for another five years in mid September, will dOCCUPY pack up and go, or will the city of Kassel call dOCUMENTA before their police throw them in The Tombs? Do they need an audience? As Jonathan D. Greenberg, who has spent some time exploring this comparison, pointed out, “The unclarity of Bartleby's aims -- What does he actually want? What are his demands? -- invites our attention but defeats our reading.”

I asked Our Man how this camp differs from others he has been active in, notably Occupy Frankfurt (stationed outside the European Central Bank), which is currently being threatened by police eviction. Frankfurt has already fallen, he notes gloomily: their camp has been over-run by Romanians, who have usurped power through a leaky General Assembly voting process (according to the most recent reports, there are fifteen ‘activists’, over sixty ‘homeless Romanians’, and a lot of rats – no word on if they are actually mice). I asked if it is problematic for homeless Romanians to live there, and he told me, “It’s not that I have a problem with them, they’re fine in small groups. But it’s a bit like if I as a white man were to go to South Central L.A. and tell the people there ‘hey, don’t sell crack’, I mean, it’s not going to work”. He was referring, I can only imagine, to the Romanian settler’s ‘anti-Occupy’ spirit, which according to Our Man includes rife stealing and harassment. Occupy Frankfurt initially welcomed Romanian families on an ideological but also symbolic premise: there was a desire to make public a group of people who are, for all intents and purposes, invisible.

The dOCCUPY General Assembly was to be held that night, and Our Man dutifully explained its procedure. Simple: a movement is proposed and voted on by inhabitants of the camp and anyone who wishes to be present. If there is a majority in favor of a motion, it is passed. Now, I was either misinformed by this account of their voting system or there has been a rather grievous error in communication to dOCCUPY from the higher Occupy powers. Generally, the Occupy movement has a clearly delineated veto system (physicalised by the famous crossed arms held to the sky), which protects from the loophole-pricked procedure the Kassel movement ostensibly has in place. Nevertheless, Our Man suggested that I gather a group of twenty friends and put forth a motion, while also encouraging me to come so that I could back the three ideologies he wished to propose.

Carolyn Christov Bakargiev cited Joseph Beuys as a potential spiritual guide to the dOCCUPY camp in her open letter to welcome them. She suggested that his social sculpture methodologies would lend themselves to Occupy’s desire to crystallize frustration against Western rapaciousness and corruption. In speaking of 7000 Oaks, Beuys said, “My point with these seven thousand trees was that each would be a monument, consisting of a living part, the live tree, changing all the time, and a crystalline mass, maintaining its shape, size, and weight. This stone can be transformed only by taking from it, when a piece splinters off, say, never by growing. By placing these two objects side by side, the proportionality of the monument’s two parts will never be the same.”

Later, at lunch with Julia, we made a list:

POSSIBLE MOTIONS TO PUT FORWARD AT THE
FORTHCOMING dOCCUPY GENERAL ASSEMBLY:

i.    Attach weather balloons to all the camp’s tents so that they hover just centimeters off the ground until someone climbs inside of one.

ii.    Protest Maria Loboda’s cypress trees by night, at their most ambulant and therefore most vulnerable.


Or,

iii.    Consider whether the cypress trees are friend of foe and act accordingly.

iv.    Paint a life-sized impression of the Fridericianum and place it in front of dOCCUPY’s camp entrance.

v.    Pick a direction and elect one person from the camp to walk there until (s)he can do so no longer.

Prologue:

Two weeks later and I am walking past the Friedrichsplatz once more. Something has changed: the dOCCUPY camp has grown exponentially. Their production of banners and their presentation of knick-knacks and photocopied literature are all the more abundant, but there are also four or five new tents, slightly separate from the rest of the camp. Later in the day, I find out that these new additions to the camp are not necessarily here for Occupy. No, they are visitors to dOCUMENTA - tourists.

August 14, 2012

I had passed by but never stopped. The mixing of esoteric and futuristic sounds was not much to my liking. Besides, I saw a guy solemnly standing at the visible entrance to the mud mountain and I thought the piece was really a trap, a place you could not abandon any time you wanted to. So I did not go in.
Then I met Michael Portnoy at a dinner party and he was certainly a very suave person, softly spoken and very cultivated, interested, as I personally am since years, in the work of the intensely Italian artist Carmelo Bene.
I had to admit I had not see his piece – and he told me with no resentment at all that I could do so the next day and to be "chosen" I just had to make patently clear that I wanted to go in. So I did. I was picked up almost instantly by a young assistant who gave me a mother pearl token half-painted in blue, very pretty, but looking an awful lot like the tokens you get to go into bumper cars. Only people with that token could enter the mud mountain. After a while there were more people wanting to go in than mother pearl tokens so I had to share mine with an Indian looking and very pleasant young man. We were told that the performance would be in "sophisticated English" – to which the Indian young man, coming from New Delhi, retorted that he was not sure that was the English he was familiar with. We chuckled. We were told to stop laughing and hold our token high, held by both our right hands.
We marched in, led by one of the solemn assistants. We came into a sort of circular futuristic contest room, curved everywhere so that you could not stand your ground safely anywhere – you were permanently unstable.
In the middle of the room Michael Portnoy and a young lady I recognized as his wife were wearing elegant but bizarre suits – their backs were naked – and making signs around their noses, esoteric and futuristic sounds as a constant background.
I tried to keep myself very low profile, to no avail! I was of course picked up as a contester in the contest of the 27 Gnosis (it sounds like 'noses') – we were two groups of three, I recognized my other two companions as students working at dOCUMENTA, and one of them, I thought, had told me he worked for Michael Portnoy. He came in handy; we were soon urged to answer totally incomprehensible questions, and he seemed to have some experience.
The questions were not the problem, it as the vocabulary that did not make any sense, even if the grammar was American English (Is this sophisticated English? I wondered – but my early companion was now far away and I could not share the joke).
I could not understand anything we were talking about, and yet it sounded like reasonable English. The clothes of Michael Portnoy and his wife and their earnestness when stalking us with extremely urgent questions made me think of this TV series I used to watch with my son: "My parents are aliens", where two aliens adopt the form of an adult woman and an adult man and adopt three orphan children. They adopt as well all possible human behaviour and habits, and yet, nothing they say or do make sense to the horrified children.
What was really interesting in the performance of Michael Portnoy was that you felt compelled to make sense of a gibberish that did not make any sense to the reasonable part of you.
Why we were the winners of the contest I cannot tell you. As a price, I was honoured to give a name to a yet nameless Gnose. I said "Arbaces", the evil character of the movie "The Last Days of Pompeii". And my alien parents were happy with it.

Dora Garcia

dOCUMENTA 13: 23 Skidoo written by A Prior in: News

Tags: bitsy knox, daniel miller, documenta, els roelandt, kai althoff

Postcards from the Future

Epilogue - Postcards from the Future written by deBuren in: Blog

“What do cities like Bucharest, Charleroi, Chartres, Graz, Lublin, Sheffield, Skopje, Tbilisi, Ostend and Utrecht have in common?” asked deBuren’s director Dorian van der Brempt at the preview of the citybooks exhibition at de Markten. “Nothing,” he filled in, almost immediately. Just that they’re places off the beaten track around which to build an art project. They may not have the allure of Paris or London, but, all the same, deBuren considered these ‘United Cities of Europe’ more than suitable locations for the multimedia programme citybooks.

For citybooks, an ever-expanding group of international artists make portraits of different cities in the form of poems, essays, photos, videos and short stories. For each edition, five writers and a photographer take on individual residencies in a particular city. Afterwards, the work they produce in reflection is published on the citybooks website, and made available entirely for free. There’s already a whole series of short stories at www.city-books.eu, and they’re available for reading and listening as e-books, web texts and audio books in Dutch, English, French and the host city’s local tongue. Thomas Gunzig, Anna Luyten, Stefan Hertmans, Pascal Verbeken, Caroline Lamarche, Saskia de Coster... all set off on their individual trips and returned with a vibrant, diverse collection of work. In a deeply sensory account of the Georgian Tbilisi, Hertmans searches in vain for an old, Abkhazian Knife-maker, Verbeken extracts stories from the washing machine drums of Charleroi’s Eurowash 2000 launderette, while Saskia de Coster deems Skopje a fitting place for a slice of exuberant crime fantasy.

© Kakha Kahkiani (Tbilisi), David Bocking (Sheffield)

The extents to which the stories really get to the hearts of the host cities vary. Some show the nervous effects of airport flightiness and hurried meetings, like Joost Zwagerman’s citybook about Sheffield. Sometimes weird and wonderful things happen too, as during the visit Davide Longo pays to Utrecht. His research on the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) was bizarrely illuminated by the recent death in the city of an Italian with almost exactly the same name as an Italian diplomat who, three centuries earlier, was involved in the city’s historic negotiations.

In each city, a professional photographer produces a collection of 24 photos. Of course, these aren’t just tourists’ snaps. Frosina Stojkovska’s work comes closest to an album of travel memories, though, mourning the loss of her beloved, old Skopje, fixing the little that hasn’t already made way for giant apartment and office blocks in deep pinks and oranges. Sheffield’s David Bocking also endeavours to present his city in its best light, leaving its post-industrial greys for another assignment. Elsewhere, the photographic realism is less rose-tinted. In the Polish city of Lublin, Maciej Rukasz’s photos show glimpses of empty benches, markets, stables and shopping trolleys through a thick blanket of mist. Filip Berte turns to the periphery of Tbilisi, capturing its tower blocks and the interiors of old Soviet hotels now occupied by refugees from Abkhazia and south Ossetia. And while Georgian native Kakha Kakhiani does photograph the city in colour, he too seeks out its shadows and transitional spaces. In Bucharest, colour comes courtesy of the omnipresent advertising billboards that Christian Binder encounters there. Sander Buyck’s Charleroi is significantly more cheerful, provided you can stomach his humour for social contrast: the stately Palais de Beaux-Arts, for example, depicted alongside the bawdy Palace Bar.

Some photographers take an entirely different approach. In Utrecht, Lisa Van Damme doesn’t so much present us the city as she does a part of her nervous system, by spending a fortnight trailing employees of the local public transport bus company. In this way, Van Damme’s work gains a special narrative quality. Lea Titz also goes the extra mile in her two series from Graz and Chartres. In her Austrian images, she shades in different sections to accentuate particular reliefs, buildings and perspectives. In Chartres, Titz plays a game with the omnipresent cathedral; rather than straining to avoid it, she makes it the subject of a series of picture puzzles. By the end, you can recognise its two towers even in a shabby silhouette spotted on a litterbin, its outline traced by the tacky residue of a half-removed sticker.

Brussels, Thursday 7th June 2012
Michaël Bellon © Brussel Deze Week

Photo © Lea Titz

City Tripping at a Mouse Click written by Michaël Bellon © Brussel Deze Week in: Blog

Tags: citybooks

The brief is simple: just tell us why you in particular want to visit your chosen citybook city so especially. Send a text of maximum 500 words with a short biography to info@deburen.eu between Thursday 24th of May and Wednesday 20th of June 2012. Let us know why you’re the perfect candidate to visit one of the great citybook cities and win the prize!

For inspiration, visit www.city-books.eu and hear how writers like Bernard Dewulf, Joost Zwagerman, Goce Smilevski, Ester Naomi Perquin, Milena Michiko Flasar, Abdelkader Benali, Arnon Grunberg, Helen Mort, Ronelda S. Kamfer and Stefan Hertmans were inspired by the various participating cities. Alternatively, visit the group exhibition of citybooks photographers in Brussels, and see the many different ways in which they have managed to fix their host cities on film. The exhibition runs from the 25th of May 2012 until the 11th of July 2012 in De Markten, as part of the Summer of Photography.

Terms and Conditions:

• Submissions after Tuesday 19th of June 2012 at 23:59 will be considered invalid
• The brief: write a text of no more than 500 words explaining why you in particular want to visit your chosen citybook city especially
• The participating citybook cities are Bucharest, Charleroi, Chartres, Grahamstown, Graz, Lublin, Ostend, Sheffield, Skopje, Turnhout, Tibilisi, Utrecht, Venice, and Yerevan
• Include, as part of your text, your first and last name, telephone number, email address and a short biography
• The prize consists of a travel budget of 1,000 Euros. The winning participant may declare and reclaim travel expenses of up to 1,000 Euros. Supporting documents for these claims are proof of travel (plain tickets & boarding cards, train or taxi tickets, car hire receipts etc), proof of residency (hotel bills, apartment rental contract etc.) The size of the journeying party itself is relatively flexible: you could, for example, fly to Grahamstown alone or travel with a school class to Utrecht in a bus (the maximum reclaimable amount remains 1,000 Euros)
• The journey must take place between 1st of July 2012 and 31st December 2012
• The winner provides deBuren with a travel report. This report may take the form of text, photo, video or other reflective documentation. deBuren reserves the right to use this document in all of its online- and offline citybooks communication and publicity materials. More detailed agreements regarding this issue will be made personally with the winner
• The winner will be chose by deBuren, and deBuren will announce the winner on the 25th of June
• All competition participants will be notified of the competition results by email, on the 25th of June
• Further correspondence will be held only between deBuren and the winner
• Employees of deBuren and family members of employees of deBuren are not eligible to participate

Win a citybooks city trip! written by deBuren in: Blog

Tags: camiel van winkel, contest

Are you an expat? We would like to know what you think of Brussels. Complete the survey of the Brussels-Europe Liaison Office. www.blbe.be/survey. It only takes 15 minutes.

The survey asks for your personal experiences of Brussels: What do you find positive or negative about living in Brussels? How were you welcomed to the city? What do you do in your spare time? Do you know many Belgians?

The results will be published in June 2012 and will be used to write a report with recommendations from the international community to the Brussels Region.

All the European institutions are supporting this survey, which will be repeated every 3 years.

The survey will be online from 2 May to 2 June 2012. It is completely anonymous and will take about 15 minutes to fill in.

Are you an expat? written by deBuren in: Blog

Tags: europa

The Dutch Embassy in Tbilisi will distribute the books amongst those without Internet connections at home, so that they too will be able to become acquainted with the project and the work of the participating authors and photographers.

Dorian van der Brempt, director of the Flemish-Dutch House deBuren and driving force behind citybooks, will be on hand to elucidate the project, and the authors Ana Kordzaia-Samadashvili and Shota Iatashvili will recite from their citybooks. As well as this, the presentation will feature citybooks photos by both Kakha Kakhiani and Filip Berte.

Besides Kordzaia-Samadashvili en Iatashvili, Stefan Hertmans, Frank Westerman and Lasha Bugadze also wrote citybooks about Tbilisi. Read, listen to and download all of these stories for free as webtext, e-book and podcast in Dutch, English, French and Georgian at www.city-books.eu. This summer, Bugadze will be a guest at citybooks Turnhout. More information on this to follow!

Competition question: Win a copy of the citybooks book Tbilisi/ თბილისი.
deBuren is giving away 5 copies of this bilingual English-Georgian publication. To be in with a chance, answer the following question: what did 922 like in the citybook by Frank Westerman? Send your answer, before the 15th of May, to info@deburen.eu.

citybooks Tbilisi was realized in collaboration with Dutch Embassy in Tbilisi, the city council of Tbilisi, Europe House, the George Leonidze State Literary Museum of Georgia, Radio Muza, Gosselin Moving and the National Parliamentary Library of Georgia.

citybooks book presentation Tbilisi + competition written by deBuren in: Blog

Tags: ana kordzaia-samadashvili, filip berte, frank westerman, kakha kakhiani, lasha bugadze, shota iatashvili, stefan hertmans

citybooks

After Charleroi and Ostend, Turnhout is the third Belgian city in which citybooks will set up shop. This time, Peter Terrin, Chika Unigwe, Walter van den Broeck, Marjolijn Februari and the Georgian author Lasha Bughadze will be amongst the writers participating. The latter has already taken part in citybooks Tbilisi, for which he wrote A Song for Tbilisi. Now he’ll journey to the Low Countries, via the network set up between participating cities, to write a second citybook. This edition of citybooks will see collaboration with Turnhout 2012.

Venice is the first Italian city to take part in the citybooks project. The preparations are well underway, and we can already let a few names out of the bag: Atte Jongstra, Rebekka de Wit en Andrea Galiazzo (photographer). Venice is home to our local partner-organisation Fondazione Giorgio Cini. The resulting stories will appear not only as webtexts, e-books and audio book in Dutch, English and French, but also in Italian, as a special ‘courtesy translation’.

Can’t wait to listen to an Italian-language citybook? You don’t have to! The Italian author Davide Longo has written citybooks about Utrecht and Charleroi, both of which are now available to read and download in the original Italian. The story about Utrecht is also available for listening, while an audio version of the work from Charleroi will follow shortly.

Yerevan, after Tbilisi, is the second Asian city to feature on the citybooks map. At this moment, Serge van Duijnhoven is a guest in the brand new World Book Capital in Armenia. More information on this to follow!

Via www.city-books.eu, facebook and twitter we will keep you up-to-date with the latest citybooks news from all participating cities.

New citybooks cities announced: Turnhout, Venice and Yerevan written by deBuren in: Blog

Tags: andrea galiazzo, atte jongstra, chika unigwe, lasha bughadze, marjolijn februari, peter terrin, rebekka de wit, serge van duijnhoven, walter van den broeck

What’s more, there is a whole range of newly translated citybooks available to read and download, including texts by Simone Lenaerts, Thomas Gunzig, Caroline Lamarche, Goce Smilevski, Werner Schandor and Jeroen van Rooij.

Translations
Belgian author Simone Lenaerts wrote a text about Graz, in which she came face-to-face with ghosts of the past. This citybook is now online in the vernacular Austrian German, titled Wie ein Wimpernschlag. The series of poems by Onno Kosters about Graz are also available in German, and free for download as Schwerkraft und Gegengewicht. In the meantime, English translations of citybooks by Austrian writers Werner Schandor (Freedom of the Heart), Andrea Stift (I do not live here) and Milena Michiko Flašar (Farewell), also arrived at www.city-books.eu, fresh from Graz.

In other news, Howard Curtis brilliantly translated the black humour of Thomas Gunzig’s citybook about Charleroi into English in The Reservation. The English versions of the citybook by Caroline Lamarche about her days in ‘the Black Country’ of Charleroi and Jeroen van Rooij’s text about Chartres, Labyrinths, are now both online, too.

And, while you could already discover Nikola Madzirov’s poems and the texts of Goce Smilevski and the young writer Irena Cvetkovic in Macedonian and Albanian, these citybooks about Skopje are now also available in English. The translations into Dutch and French are well underway.

Finally, a tip for music lovers: Adrian Schiop has written a citybook about Bucharest, Travesti, and although this text is currently only available in the original Romanian, there is a world of Romanian music to be discovered through the links in the webtext!

Photo: Joost Zwagerman © Peter Boer

Listen to Joost Zwagerman audiobook for citybooks Sheffield written by deBuren in: News

Tags: adrian schiop, andrea stift, caroline lamarche, citybooks, goce smilevski, jeroen van rooij, joost zwagerman, milena michiko flašar, simone lenaerts, thomas gunzig, werner schandor

Good news? written by Paul Lewis in: News

Tags: paul lewis

Now that we can see and feel the sun again in all its glory, everyone at deBuren wants to go outside and sit at pavement cafés – wonderfully relaxed while people watching… and overhearing? This month ILAH illustrates the suffering that sometimes accompanies this relaxing pastime…

(Click on the image to enlarge)

Text in image (from left to right): ‘Talking Jiberish’

“What shall we eat, ladies? A glass of wine, everyone?”

“Yes, a chardonnay for me, please.”

“From a moral point of view I don’t eat ‘foie gras’, because of what I’ve seen on television.”

“Exactly, I rather prefer a couple of ‘cuisses de de grenouille’.”

© ILAH | www.ilahcordelia.com

Inge Liesbeth Alfonsina Heremans are the names that belong to ILAH, the slave and master of the Flemish comic. She studied Applied Graphics at Sint-Lucas in Brussels and Philosophy in Leuven. Since 1996, she draws the short comic ‘Cordelia’ for De Morgen. In the meantime Oogachtend published nine Cordelia albums (2001-2008). ILAH also draws ‘Mira’ for Flair (since 2007) and two Mira albums appeared as a result of that. Heremans created posters for the Boekenbeurs and De Lijn and she was nominated for the Bronzen Adhemar/Vlaamse Cultuurprijs voor de strip 2009.

Graphic column: 'Talking Jiberish' written by deBuren in: Graphic column

Tags: ilah

How did you spend your Valentine’s day? Red roses? Moonlight? This week ILAH painted a more realistic picture of love.

© ILAH | www.ilahcordelia.com

Inge Liesbeth Alfonsina Heremans are the names that belong to ILAH, the slave and master of the Flemish comic. She studied Applied Graphics at Sint-Lucas in Brussels and Philosophy in Leuven. Since 1996, she draws the short comic ‘Cordelia’ for De Morgen. In the meantime Oogachtend published nine Cordelia albums (2001-2008). ILAH also draws ‘Mira’ for Flair (since 2007) and two Mira albums appeared as a result of that. Heremans created posters for the Boekenbeurs and De Lijn and she was nominated for the Bronzen Adhemar/Vlaamse Cultuurprijs voor de strip 2009.

Graphic column: 'Love' by ILAH written by deBuren in: Graphic column

Tags: ilah

In 2010 several Flemish and Dutch artists made beautiful graphic columns for deBuren. You can view these visual pearls by Barbara Stok, Steve Michiels, Michiel van de Pol, Maaike Hartjes, Matei Branea, Brecht Evens and Daniel Ginelli on our website. This year we continue the graphic columns in a slightly different way. One artist will make a topical visual commentary for every month of the year. A new permanent, yet familiar face will join us: Ilah.

© ILAH | www.ilahcordelia.com

Inge Liesbeth Alfonsina Heremans are the names that belong to ILAH, the slave and master of the Flemish comic. She studied Applied Graphics at Sint-Lucas in Brussels and Philosophy in Leuven. Since 1996, she draws the short comic ‘Cordelia’ for De Morgen. In the meantime Oogachtend published nine Cordelia albums (2001-2008). ILAH also draws ‘Mira’ for Flair (since 2007) and two Mira albums appeared as a result of that. Heremans created posters for the Boekenbeurs and De Lijn and she was nominated for the Bronzen Adhemar/Vlaamse Cultuurprijs voor de strip 2009.

Graphic column: Little Night Pony written by deBuren in: Graphic column

Tags: ilah

There’s nothing wrong with knowing your art historical classics, in a time as visual as ours. What (or whom) pops up in your mind when you look at the second graphic column by Brecht Evens, winner of the first Willy Vandersteenprijs (2010)? We immediately came up with a couple of renowned names from the history of painting. How about you?

© Brecht Evens | brechtnieuws.blogspot.com

Brecht Evens (º1986, Hasselt) is a Belgian cartoonist. He studied illustration at the Hogeschool Sint-Lucas in Ghent and won in 2010 the 'Willy Vandersteenprijs' with his graduation album Ergens waar je niet wil zijn (A place where you don’t want to be). The 'Willy Vandersteenprijs' is a prize that is given to the best original Dutch graphic album published in the last two years. Work by Evens is printed in comic magazines such as Hic Sunt Leones and Parcifal.

Graphic column (2): 'Breakfast' by Brecht Evens written by deBuren in: Graphic column

Tags: brecht evens

The multicultural society is not only a hot potato in Flanders and The Netherlands, but also in other European countries. In his graphic column the artist Daniel Ginelli comments on the statement made by Angela Merkel last week.

© Daniel Ginelli

Graphic column (1): 'MultiMerkel' by Daniel Ginelli written by deBuren in: Graphic column

Tags: daniel ginelli

Now that fall has come to stay, it seemed appropriate to cheer you up with some visual pearls. The first graphic column of this fall will take you to a luscious location. Brecht Evens, winner of the first ‘Willy Vandersteenprijs’ (2010), sent us this beautiful drawing. Will you dream along with us?

© Brecht Evens | brechtnieuws.blogspot.com

Brecht Evens (º1986, Hasselt) is a Belgian cartoonist. He studied illustration at the Hogeschool Sint-Lucas in Ghent and won in 2010 the 'Willy Vandersteenprijs' with his graduation album Ergens waar je niet wil zijn (A place where you don’t want to be). The 'Willy Vandersteenprijs' is a prize that is given to the best original Dutch graphic album published in the last two years. Work by Evens is printed in comic magazines such as Hic Sunt Leones and Parcifal.

Graphic column (1): 'Residence' by Brecht Evens written by deBuren in: Graphic column

Tags: brecht evens

citybooks

Travel without moving! written by deBuren in: News

Tags: city books

This year, deBuren also looked across the border and took Elsschot to Heerlen, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Jakarta... and as of this weekend: California!

Peter Laurence is a young American who taught himself Dutch by reading De eeuw van mijn vader by Geert Mak. He wrote about his progress on his amusing blog ‘Learning Dutch with Geert Mak’.

Touched by his enthusiasm for the Dutch language and culture and his longing to promote this in the United States, deBuren sent him the graphic adaptation of Elsschot’s Kaas by Dick Matena. The original drawings are in possession of deBuren and travelled around the world in the last couple of years, but they are always available as a virtual exhibition on our site.

Now, Peter Laurence initiated a new project. He will read the graphic novel of Kaas and write about it on his new blog: ‘A Slice of Kaas’. At the same time he is trying to promote Belgium in the US. He has already written a hilarious script for a commercial titled ‘Belgium. Come for the weather.’...

deBuren wishes Peter the best of luck, we will follow his progress up close and offer him two suggestions to promote the Low Countries: Radiobooks and citybooks!

A Slice of Kaas written by deBuren in: News

Tags: dick matena, kaas, peter laurence

Life is somewhere and sometime else

In 2009 I spent more than four months in Berlin and one month in London.  I went to Berlin without knowing anyone and having any  purpose except that of being out of my hometown.  But Bucharest came to me through of friends, relatives, former girlfriends.

Each of them discovered the city which for me was no longer a foreigner. Being there for the third time, I wasn’t turned on anymore by the Panorama, the Mauer Park or the Brandeburg Tor, although I’ve been so happy on the first day that I could have danced in the streets that was no longer in Romania. I became a guide for my visitors, showing them, inevitably, mostly the same places: those which appear in In Your Pocket guide or on tourist websites. Places that everyone arriving in a city wants to see and capture, thus proving their friends that they’ve been there.

Whenever I had a guest I had to go to Oranien Strasse, to the monument of the Holocaust or to the Sony Center, I started observing the tourists deluging public spaces, the density of cameras per square foot, the never ending clicking and rising arms anticipating the exposure; the physical and behavioral changes people suffered in order to push a button; the conversations interrupted unexpectedly when a sight or situation worthy to be captured turned up;  the present process which in the future would become memory.

I became, as Kafka would say, an observer of the observers. I started frequenting again the areas which aroused the flashes of cameras. Though I was living in the most populated places in Berlin or London, Alexander Platz or Trafalgar Square, I felt like being the only man alive among zombies hungry for images. A clicking person is extremely fragile. I often approached them to the limit of indiscretion. Taking a photo is an act of isolation in a public space; it’s like listening to music on headphones. With a camera in front of the eye one sees without watching. At that moment you never question reality. You produce directly for the memory. Here and Now become Then and There.

Time Travel: Life is somewhere and sometime else written by Jean-Lorin Sterian in: News

Tags: time is a book: bucharest

TIME IS A BOOK is a project founded by artists Dirk Braeckman and Els Dietvorst. Time Travel spread over 300 books internationally. deBuren went to Bucharest and posed these questions to four young artists. Can art be engaged? Can you, as an artist, still be radical? Today, anarchistic cartoonist Matei Branea responds under the title ‘Time is a chair'.

© Matei Branea | www.branea.ro

Graphic column: 'Time is a Chair' written by Matei Branea in: Graphic column

Tags: time is a book: bucharest, time travel: bucharest

deBuren asked young Romanian artists to respond to the book, first during an evening debate in Bucharest, followed by an artistic reply. Last week we published the manifesto of director David Schwartz and this week we publish an essay on literature, commitment and feminism by Ana Chirițoiu. Next week, cartoonist Matei Branea will take his turn and the final participant is photographer Jean-Lorin Sterian who portrays the artist as the ‘observer of observers’.

These contributions will eventually be made available on www.timetravel.be, where everyone can upload their own contributions.

Time Travel: Bucharest written by deBuren in: News

1

It was the autumn of 2009, but it looked more like late summer in Venice. I was invited there to talk about contemporary young Romanian writers on behalf of the literary magazine I was working for, Noua literatură. I had brought along a selection of eight short stories that I thought to be representative for the new writing: one of them tackled being a writer between the East and the West, two other ones referred to travelling (I have to admit that my reading was more in the sense of touristic consumption), one was about the cyber control the state manifests over its citizens, one about the impossibility of being a writer or a translator for a living, one was simply funny and in the others one would have had to look far in order to identify social concerns, but they were nonetheless well written and entertaining. I distributed them among the public – Venetian students of the Romanian section –, read them aloud, talked about them and asked for comments.

Most of the comments I have forgotten, despite the very engaging dialogue, except for the one of a student who introduced herself as studying sociology and having taken part in a program of social assistance in several Romanian towns and villages. She was curious to know whether there are books written on such themes as work migration, abandoned children, poverty, rural life, gender relations and so on, which she encountered there and thought could make interesting themes for literature. Much to my own discontent, I could not come up with numerous examples.

I also find such themes as the ones the Venetian student enquired about artistically bounteous, and yet in a dossier on this subject hosted by the magazine I worked for, most of the writers invited to have their say did not share this opinion: some thought there needs to be drawn a line between the writer and the citizen, others that writing is an individual occupation and, especially when it is uninvolved, it saves one from the fallacy of stupidity, others said there are already plenty of writers who gained their glory mainly by being preoccupied with the fate of kangaroos, Amazonian forests, blacks, women, ring-plovers and the like, or that the only possible engagement for a writer is the artistic one. They would probably be offended (some actually were) by a sociological reading of their books, which do in fact support one, even though it is not explicitly invited by the actual content.

By and large, the conclusion of the dossier would be that ideology and social commitment, be it overtly expressed or not, are to be avoided in literature or at least not praised for themselves. I tend to agree to the latter opinion, but I can’t help adding a necessarily complementary question: can art be praised for itself in lack of an ideology? One of the authors invited in the debate opportunely said no. There are instances of books that have successfully embodied both extremes – either complete ivoryness, or total commitment – and even more examples of equally successful books situated at any point inbetween. But there are few instances of contemporary Romanian writers who show interest for current social realities, be it in the form of extra-literary involvement / action, or in that of fictional representations of social problems. The first case of disinterest can be accounted for mostly by sociological remarks: the social status (or symbolic capital) of artists is virtually non-existent, in a country where surveys have shown that a person buys one book per year, rendering literature as a niche form of entertainment or information. The second case requires a more elaborate explanation.

2

It is well known and widely accepted that it does not necessarily take a dictatorship for one to be a (genuinely) socially committed author. Nevertheless, it is generally alleged that one of the major causes for the lack of interest, if not overt refusal, of most Romanian authors to address social and political themes in their books is what was known as the intensely required (and equally intensely fabricated) social engagement of authors during the communist years. This is to say it was mostly the request that political successes be rendered by means of careful documentation which set the Eastern artistic mind frame to conclude, louder and louder, especially after 1989, that the only morality in art is that it be sufficient to itself, that is, aesthetically purified from political interventions, and that concepts as ‘ideology’, ‘commitment’, ‘documentation’ and so on are to be rendered irrelevant – if not directly disqualifying – when discussing an author’s work, and even more so when conceiving it.

Moreover, the autonomy of aestheticism has served a more twisted purpose than that of alienating artists from society: in the aftermath of the 1989 revolution, several cultural policy-makers made use of it so as to perpetuate the glory of the writers who had served the official politics in the former époque by means of their oeuvre, which was argued to be beyond their human deeds and, moreover, beyond the themes it had been set to illustrate (and often succeeded in doing so).

Formally, the exploration of socially engaged art has a history almost equally long on both sides of The Iron Curtain, but it took very different shapes in the different spaces: while socio-political critique was an important trend with several Western artists, often to the degree that the local establishment felt incommoded by it, with Eastern artists it was a direct request from the Party for artists to turn to society in order to describe the accomplishments of socialism. It can be argued that in the latter case the request stood as an invitation to merely produce fiction, which is indeed the way several artists (especially writers) have tackled it, but this argument is usually overlooked when blaming the horrid sonority of such phrases as ‘social involvement’ on past uses and abuses of the term. It is now enough to mention that documentation was the duty of art under dictatorship in order to compromise the idea of fieldwork; since the prerequisite of checks and balances with what was then called reality was abolished, together with the regime, it has apparently become superfluous to impose such a prerequisite upon ourselves.

By means of time and politics, the generation that had endured communism soon became the cultural mainstream and perpetuated its purist beliefs to the point where it would cause serious clashes with younger generations, the priorities of which were perhaps others. Social and political concerns in art have been discouraged – not only in reviews, but also in the preferential granting of access to publications, stages and galleries. This time the censorship was merely symbolic, but how’s a defender of aestheticism to say that symbolic deeds weigh less than practical ones, especially in a country where, for lack of actual dissidence, the aesthetic concern was much-praised as a means of symbolic opposition to the former regime?

3

My bitter remarks could go on and on, but the discussion is fairly uninformed and highly idiosyncratic. I’m not aware of surveys being made as to what the proportion of writers who swear on pure aestheticism and their reasons to do so is, and this subject hardly ever enjoys any discussions. Participation in debates regarding public and social subjects tends to occur in what I’d call extravert societies. Ours is not such; it has often been said that communism has failed in perhaps its greatest scope: creating a public sphere. And so far the transition to democracy did not manage to change much in this respect either, not even when shutting the windows could not help the noise of the street or that of the public sphere from entering one’s solitary study room.

What the transition to democracy, often described as ‘catching up with the West’, did manage, however, was to create a sense of cultural sufficiency, which renders themes as social commitment as passé, due to a two-fold self-indulgent logic. It is said either that, once we’ve read books, watched performances or seen exhibitions containing the results of (Western) socially engaged art, we can have a say in it and not need to practice it any further; or that so numerous artists have formerly exercised socially engaged art that the present may be exempt of its presupposed benefits. But it is only honest to admit that neither of these rationales can stand for an actual experience of political art; the former is artificial, the latter is counterfeit.

Social engagement no longer appears to be the Golden Fleece in Western literatures either; when it is still practiced, it simply conveys personal choices and a personal ideology, and there are probably cultural circles where it is even regarded as naïveté or indeed as a desertion from aesthetic value / incumbent artistic subjectivity / honesty / individuality. Even though they ceased to be major intellectual conquests, there are nonetheless books of fiction being written on such themes as human rights* or feminism – a species that would have to wait before it appears in Romania, if it ever will, despite the necessity that it does. A necessity reclaimed in the name of a reality that calls for a representation, and furthermore, in the name of morality and – were it not such a censurable word – didacticism. But the obviousness of such representations is made void by the sufficiency described above, perverse enough to make many be amused by political correctness without ever having practiced it.

4

Take, for instance, feminism. ‘Feminism is so passé’, I hear prominent local artists say, while statistics show that in Romania a woman is being abused every 2 minutes and that, throughout 5 years, more than 700 of these cases ended in death**. Even though local statistics don’t fall short from global ones, they may be relatively far from those in Western Europe, towards which we aspire without taking notice of the gap between the aspirations of intellectuals and the realities of the field. In fact, such figures may be more similar to those of countries like Somalia, of which we are otherwise appalled to read in the news. There are no surveys to show to what extent public Romanian intellectuals are aware of such data as they serenely preach disinvolvement from social issues in art, frequently rendering it a gratuitous leftist caprice which has failed to change the world anyway, but which poses a serious threat to change art. Thus, feminism does not even resound here in academic circles – there is no feminist criticism, no feminist studies, and the few translations from feminist authors remain largely unnoticed.

I browse The Guardian and find an article in which several feminist authors talk about the books that influenced them; I wonder how long it will take before an important daily newspaper in Romania approaches the subject and also how much it takes before it finds five local feminist authors. The most frequent objection such intellectuals formulate against feminist literature – and any other form of engaged literature – is that such writers have sacrificed their art for the sake of the direct purpose. Did Jeanette Winterson do so? Did Doris Lessing? Did Emily Dickinson? Did Sappho? Who’s to judge art beyond its ideas? Is there a sacrifice involved at all? Who’s to defend the idea that such writers are writers before they’re feminists? And why would anyone?

5

It’s early summer in Bucharest, 2009. The yearly book fair Bookfest takes place in a huge building inherited from the former regime. One has the chance to meet here writers in flesh and blood. A young male writer grabs my arm and takes me to a bookstand to have me look at a poetry album he says he’s crazy about. The album consists of images of young women’s naked bodies on which poets write poems. It is printed on quality paper, in bright, full colours. It costs a lot, too. The poets in the pictures look pleased. So does my friend. A post on a feminist blog I often read, which would easily be considered radical here, comes to mind; it states that the history of art merely reproduces the history of women’s humiliation. I can’t quote that to my young male friend without expecting to be ridiculed. But I can’t think of anything else while I try to make out from the looks on the girls’ faces what other than a deep, undisputed sense of patriarchy has prompted them to offer their bodies (benevolently, as far as I remember) for writers to use them in such an uninspired manner. And also what the chances would be of an equally luxurious album of poems and photos about the abuses on women to be financed and appreciated by such sophisticated young writers as my friend. Is women’s nudity (in such obsolete, hippie forms) the only way to make poetry appealing to the audience?

Poet Adrian Mitchell is frequently quoted to have said, ‘Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people’. Most self-sufficient intellectuals would not admit that exploring reality and positioning oneself in relation to it is not only a perfectly legitimate artistic act, but also a desirable one. The gap between them and their possible audience is therefore larger than life. The social reality in which a woman is abused every two minutes seems to occur in a country far away from the one where artists pronounce themselves against ideology in art while they consume albums in which poetry (supposedly aesthetic and abstract) is written on the body, as if such artistic gestures were ideology-free.

The debut poetry volume of Adrienne Rich is entitled A Change of World. It appeared in 1951. I recap the words which changed my world: falogocentrism, le deuxième sexe, queer, écriture feminine, inequality, performativity, woman-eunuch, borderlands, king kong theory, power discourse, transsexual, gender. And I wonder if it’s not time they changed other people’s world too, and thus make the gap between a room of one’s own and the facts and figures and people living outside of it less blatant. Most insist on calling the allusion to this gap an undesired remnant of the former regime. I’d simply call it fieldwork.

* Freedom: Short Stories celebrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a collection of short stories issued in August 2009 by Amnesty International and Mainstream Publishing, gathering texts by such authors as David Mitchell, Ariel Dorfman, Xiaolu Guo, Paulo Coelho, Henning Mankell and several others.
** Survey done by the National Agency for The Protection of The Family, quoted by Unica magazine.

Time Travel: They Called It "Dictatorship". I'd Call It "Fieldwork" written by Ana Chiritoiu in: Column

INSTANT-ART MANIFESTO

Obedient televisions. Controlled newspapers. Obeyed art. Official art. Non-reactive art. Absent art. Lack of activism through art. Lack of engaged art. Lack of radical art. Lack of art. Lack of political involvement. Lack of civil rights activism. Lack of sense of justice. Lack of justice. Lack of minority rights. Lack of minorities' public representation. Lack of minorities' right to express themselves and to be represented. Lack of freedom of speech. Lack of spontaneous mass protest. Lack of riot. Lack of community spirit. Lack of community gathering. Lack of community. Lack of gatherings. Lack of social action. Lack of political action. Lack of radical action. Lack of action. Lack of immediate, instant, collective reaction/action.
Refusal of the instant art.
Refusal of the debate.
Refusal of the community.
Refusal of the minority.
Refusal of the representation.

FIGHT BACK! REACT!

The Romanian Orthodox Church is spending one billion dollars on building the biggest cathedral of South-Eastern Europe. REACT!
The government is shortening the retirement payments by fifteen percent. REACT!
The extreme religious right members are throwing stones at the Gay Parade. REACT!
The president is calling a journalist a “stinking gypsy”. REACT!
The ministry of foreign affairs states that “the Roma people should be sent to a camp in Africa”. REACT!
An American marine officer kills a man in a car accident and is protected by diplomatic immunity. REACT!

Right here. Right now. Watch / Observe / Document / Debate / Protest / Perform. React!
Every week.
1.    Instant reaction: act/re-act instantly and respond to present day political issues and immediate events.
2.    Public reaction: perform your statements in public crowded places.
3.    Represent the unrepresented: perform the absent, the invisible, the unpopular.

Immediate response to social and political issues. Perform the political present. Shake the “reality construction”. Fight the passive. Fight the inert. Fight the delay. Act fast and furious.

For three months, every week, a cross-disciplinary team of artists, sociologists, activists will build up performance reactions on major outrageous topics. The subject, the scenario, the set, the rehearsals will be concentrated in one week. Every seven days, a new show will be performed in a public space.

This is a call for instant gathering. For instant reaction. Act here and now. Debate the present. Perform the result. Gather / work together / document / react instantly and furiously / represent the unrepresented / tell the untold. In-your-face.

ART IN PRESENT-DAY ROMANIA

Can art still be radical? In present-day Romania art should necessarily be radical. And therefore it is not. Since the foundation of Romania, in the 19th century, art was, with some exceptions, either totally unengaged or, more often, art obeyed to the political regime. The same with historical and social sciences. As for more than fifty years of the 20th century, Romania has been run by dictatorial regimes (either monarchial dictatorship, fascism or communist totalitarianism), art has rarely been, if ever, allowed the luxury to be provocative, infamous or/and openly against the political leadership. History was changed, forged and mystified, social sciences were adapted to serve the regime and the artists often watched this with silent disapproval or rewarded obedience. On the other hand, the abundance of obedient art called political art and perceived as political art (especially in the communist era) has led to despise and exclusion of any form of political art in the 90s and 2000s. These habits are very difficult to change or shake in present-day Romania. And therefore any engaged form of art, that stands against the political regime, against the religious values, against the common prejudices and beliefs, can be seen as radical.

In this context the Instant-Art Manifesto tries to cover three big issues.

First, the lack of immediate reaction to major scandalous events – so far the artists usually react with 10, 20 or more years later even to big bloody social episodes (the pogroms, the labour camps for Jewish and Roma people in the fascist era; the evictions, deportations and tortures in the 50s; the Coup-d’etat called revolution in 1989; the fights between Romanians and Hungarians in Targu-Mures in March 1990; the repression against intellectuals and Roma people called Mineriad in 1990). These bloody events are always hidden, never discussed and debated in public, absent from history schoolbooks. The lack of immediate reaction is many times followed by no reaction at all. The lack of reaction leads to oblivion.

The second issue is the lack of the custom of gathering, of the community spirit and of the organized collective protest. In recent years Romanians only gathered together in extreme moments of their history. And even in those moments they were often manipulated and forged to react.

The third issue is the lack of representation of ethnic, religious, sexual minorities in Romanian culture, doubled by a refuse to represent the oppressed, the low class, the disadvantaged. Even though 6.6% of the Romanian citizens are Hungarian, very few theater performances and almost no Romanian film pictures Hungarians. With the Roma community, things are more radical, not even the official census offers a credible number of the Roma people among the Romanian citizens. The people with disabilities, the old people, the people affected by poverty, the people in the countryside, have virtually no access to culture and no possibility of representation and of exercising their right to express their beliefs.

In my opinion, art can still be radical in present day Romania, if it aims to shake the lethargy of the spectators, of the street-walkers, of the big cities inhabitants. If it screams in their face what they don’t want to hear, what they are afraid to see, to admit, to think about. If it stands consistently and critically against the political regime. If it promotes and allows to be heard the voices of the unpopular. Of course, the big problem of such an art programme will be the lack of any financial support, private or state-owned.

Time Travel: INSTANT-ART MANIFESTO written by David Schwartz in: News