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CIMAM 2005 Annual Conference
Museums: Intersections in a Global Scene | |
Short report: | In his talk at the annual CIMAM conference, 2005, Maurizio Lazzarato spoke about the collaborative video editing project Timescapes and argued in favour of the development of micro-media as a territory for the construction of subjectivation processes. The Italian philosopher and social scientist based in France, co-editor of the important quarterly magazine on politics, art and culture Multitudes and author of the book Immaterial Labour (published in Brazil by DP&A), started by highlighting the work of Jacques Rancière and Félix Guattari in understanding the contemporary shift in the status of cultural production worldwide and its political implications.
While Rancière works within the boundaries of art history, taking the emancipatory project that resulted from the development of modern art as a paradigm and seeing the separation between art and life as the guarantee that art will not be submitted to the logic of the commodity and that of the division of labour, Guattari proposes a new aesthetic paradigm based on social production. By working with this new paradigm, Félix Guattari recovers another tradition, one which begins with Duchamp and Beuys. Duchamps critique of fine arts mechanisms opens up a territory for the discourse around the production of subjectivity.
Material and technical resources must be freed from the art context and become part of a proposition where creation is a possibility for all, stated Lazzarato. According to him, Guattari offers some clues on how to think about the production of subjectivity by re-employing artistic resources, that is, he allows us to see the meaning of the aesthetic paradigm in works that are not necessarily related to art, or that do not depart from art. The Timescapes project, by Angela Melitopoulos, is one example of that.
Lazzarato maintained that an art project could help us think about why the EU Constitution project has failed. Timescapes is a work developed by five collaborators who are based along the old European axis stretching from Berlin to Istanbul, a territory the group designates as B-zone. Europe is not explored here as a set of solid nation-states Timescapes reveals a continent on the move, it investigates the geopolitical evolution of this territory and its populations from the viewpoint of the dynamics of migration and Diaspora, proposing a way of questioning the concept of politics of migration as a continuation of colonial politics, he affirmed.
Timescapes is a video project that seeks to look at, and to make visible, what is happening in South Eastern Europe. To look at and to make visible that which politicians and the media do not see and do not make visible, actualising one of the potentialities that cinema never managed to realise: instead of looking at stories and making them visible, to look at History and to make it visible. Angela Melitopoulos took as a starting point for the project the trips she and her family as well as many other immigrant families - used to make between Germany and Greece. But she had to decide on whether to make a work about or with, that is, to make videos about that context in a documentary tradition or to work in collaboration with other video artists in that region.
The difference between making a work about or with is, according to Lazzarato, that on the first case the other is always seen from the outside, in front of the camera, whereas on the second it is possible to negotiate, to work in collaboration.
Each type of work requires a different methodology. Angela Melitopoulos has opted to involve other artists in the project a video artist from Belgrade who works with the post-war context in Serbia, a filmmaker from Athens who develops his work in a space that serves as a meeting point for migrants who have recently arrived in the city, and a group of video artists based in Ankara who organise film sessions about the forced internal immigration of Kurdish and Turkish people. Therefore, she had to find the right methodology. In order to question micro-political dynamics it is necessary to develop micro-media techniques, said Lazzarato.
Timescapes is an electronic platform, a micro-network that contains a database that can be used by anybody who wishes to build new meanings and communication tools; it is a platform for building relationships and unfinished cultural products. Here, technical agency is part of the processes of subjectivation, unlike in conventional media processes. The reading of that which was selected and put together by the other shows different takes on a given reality.
Because of its polyphonic, contingent and not-totalising character, Timescapes makes visible the intersection between aesthetics and politics, given that looking at the movement of small groups (migrants and other minorities) through the gaps in geopolitical space can ensure a realist apprehension of current historical dynamics.
(by Juliana Monachesi)
Translation: hí-fen translation solutions
Proofreading: Dan Fone
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