BEATRICE VON BISMARCK

Peggy Buth. Desire in Representation.

The Royal Museum for Central Africa (Musée royal de l’Afrique centrale) in Tervuren, Belgium, represented the point of origin for Peggy Buth’s three-year research that in 2008 culminated in the two-volume artist’s book Desire in Representation. By focusing on this cultural institution, established in 1907, the artist has devoted herself to an example of colonial cultural practice of paradigmatic character: originally conceived by Belgian King Leopold II with an aim to showcase the Free State of Congo (his private property at that time) at the 1897 World Exposition in Brussels, the King started off by having ethnographic objects, taxidermied animals, and the most important Congolese export products exhibited at the “Colonial Palace”, which he had had constructed on the royal estate in Tervuren near Brussels expressly for this purpose. Over the course of the twentieth century, the museum – initially carrying the title “Musée du Congo” – was increasingly transformed into an ethnographic and anthropological institution with a research department augmenting the exhibition collections, eventually adopting its current name in 1960.
The institution’s genesis and transfigurations exemplarily testify to the significant developmental stages involved in the processing of colonial history from the end of the nineteenth century into the present. Here a view of the African continent characterised by the perspective of European expansionist politics becomes apparent. Peggy Buth’s Desire in Representation confronts this representational convention with a complex set of reference systems and contiguities that succeeds in disrupting both the distinctly colonial hierarchal systems of perspectival exchange between the continents and the binary structures of early post-colonial critique. She thus juxtaposes a museum space – functioning from a European standpoint as “frontier”, as Mary Louise Pratt words this tradition – with a space that embodies the role of a “contact zone”. With the term “contact”, Pratt is emphasising the perspective of subjects being “constituted in and by their relations to each other” – relationships of historical and geographic “co-presence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, and often within radically asymmetrical relations of power”. Buth expands the medium “book” in the sense of multiply intervolved spaces where different forms of “contact zones” can evolve insofar as the networking structures of the material collections are conceptualised in the form of progressive historical, political, and moral exchange relationships.
Buth initially localises the main axis of exchange in the transfer between the Congo and Europe – and Belgium in particular – but at the same time intersects this with a second axis between Africa and the Arabian-dominated offshore island of Zanzibar. With photographs she has taken in the museum, with archival images and documents, along with excerpts from travelogues and adventure novels, Buth enmeshes, interweaves, and layers a range of different historically specific images, projections, and discourses on Sub-Saharan Africa, Arabia, and Europe.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 107/2009, pp. 11–22.

MAREN LÜBBKE-TIDOW

A conversation with Artur Żmijewski

Maren Lübbke-Tidow: Characteristic of your artistic practice up to now has been its experimental nature, a practice that has continued to foster controversial discourse: The first work that I recall included photographs of amputees that you presented in a Graz exhibition in 2001. For the 2005 Venice Biennale you staged a remake, “Repetition”, of Philip Zimbardo’s famous 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment. You have worked with deaf children and youth as well as with other disabled persons – in short, you have developed various forms of social experiments involving disadvantaged groups in society. For your new series of videos, you have chosen a form of radical documentarism: “Democracies” – a series of documentary films on political declarations of will in various European countries and the Middle East – juxtaposes opinions and forms of enactment, such as demonstrations and parades, re-enacted historical battles, the Football World Cup in Germany, and Jörg Haider’s funeral. What inspired you to pursue a new artistic strategy for this series? And why did you select the title “Democracies”?

Artur Żmijewski: Do you really want me to produce artworks about the same issue? For example about amputees? It would be much too boring for all of us – for me as a producer, and for you as a spectator. I am interested in different aspects of reality – and I follow these interests.
I chose the title “Democracies” because it’s a lie: These are not all democracies. Are the Autonomous Palestinian Territories a democratic country? I do not think so – they are occupied and fully dependent on Israel (are under its military control, in fact) and on the international community. Is Israel democratic? Maybe, but only if we add the term “colonial” – it’s a “colonial democracy”, or maybe a “military democracy”. Northern Ireland is still under British occupation. Of course it is a democracy, but on occupied territory. Maybe Poland is a democratic country? Sure it is, but in this democracy women do not share equal rights with men. One of the basic democratic rules is to observe the equality of citizens. That’s why I described these movies as “Democracies” – because of the lack of democracy in these countries.

M. L.-T.: How did you come to decide on which places and events, on which demonstrations and parades, to visit with your camera in the different countries?

A. Ż.: I knew, for example, about the anniversary of the Nakba, and I went to Israel to film this event. Usually I had no plan – I was reading newspapers and waiting for information about ongoing events. I was also checking posters on the streets and asking people for information – there is nothing mysterious and difficult about it – this is information that is available to everybody. This was also my intention – to be one of the masses, similar to the others, with reduced political possibilities. And I was simply open to each kind of so-called “political event”.

M. L.-T.: As far as the selection of locale went, did you focus on particular aspects? Were there specific phenomena in the type of events that you strove to highlight in particular?

A. Ż.: Yes, these phenomena can be named: political drive and radical democracy, participation in conflict, and so on.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 107/2009, pp. 23–35.

THILO KOENIG

Atlante Italiano. A State-commissioned Project on the Trail of DATAR

Despite a high level of sophistication and Luigi Ghirri’s photo-politics, contemporary Italian topographical photography is still widely unknown in other countries. Retrospectives such as “Trans Emilia” in Winterthur and Cologne, that focuses on the long-running regional photography project “Linea di confine” in Emilia Romagna (Camera Austria 79/2002, p. 29–34), are perhaps starting to change this to some degree. To mark the adoption of the European Landscape Convention in Florence in 2000, “Linea di confine” – like the Nederlands Foto Instituut before it – had showcased European commissioned projects, including Milan Province’s “Archivio dello spazio” (1987 – 97) (Camera Austria 85/2004, p. 43–48) and Venice’s “Osservatorio Venezia-Marghera” (1996). While such campaigns had previously stemmed from regional or municipal initiatives, the Italian unitary state established what was probably the first longer-term national commissioned photography project in the form of its “atlante italiano” project, that began in 2003. (…)
More so than in other countries, the image of Italy is fraught with persistent clichés that go back to the “Grand tour” and the subsequent pressure of tourism on the Italian landscape and, in view of real developments, have long since become obsolete; Ghirri opposed this with his “Viaggio in Italia” as early as 1984. The “atlante 007” exhibition began with statistics on the unprecedented current construction boom and its economy and on the problem of illegal “Abusivismo” and its ruthless destruction of the landscape. Francesca Fabiani, director of the photography collection of MAXXI Architettura: “Italy is, unfortunately, one step behind other European countries. I am not even talking about the institutions, but rather civil awareness. That is just something that does not exist in Italy. Italians do not see the landscape as a thing in its own right – the usual problem of lacking respect that always allows small-time private crime to prevail over the common good. And I think that a museum’s prime task can be to create a public awareness for this problem.”
The aim of the project is a systematic survey of the current condition of Italy so as to permit new interpretations: “Author-photographers already familiar with landscape and architecture were commissioned to observe the change in the Italian landscape. Now that people have long come to realise that the landscape is not just a picture-postcard landscape, the aim was to take stock of the situation: in order better to recognise actual developments, above all in the intermediate zones, the ›non-places‹, where public life really takes place.”

Text feature in Camera Austria International 107/2009, pp. 36–41.

ALICE CREISCHER, ANDREAS SIEKMANN

Outstanding Questions. On the Relationship of Image Production, Hegemony and Violence IV

Having come to the end of our column, we have by no means written everything that we had set out to write. Reflection on the conditions of artistic production in the new metropolises of the globalised world has taken a back seat to examples that give us some leads to the historical continuity of current hegemonies. The last example also spotlighted a boundary of how we understand images, a boundary that is drawn by our personal experience of history and that runs counter to the ideal of global cultural understanding upheld by the biennials and major shows. This ideal would seem to inhere in rather than relativise a hegemony that we will address here in the form of two questions.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 107/2009, pp. 58–59.