Mapping, Political Ecologies & The Global South

[mappingcologiesglobalsouth]

Memes are the new Clement Greenberg

[mappingcologiesglobalsouth]

what has publishing become? where is it going?

The evolution of contemporary art magazines is markedly entwined with ongoing developments in digital publishing. The way in which audiences consume art media today is an intricate activity that concerns a number of issues including the junction of text and images, copyright, accessibility and the human eye-brain system. Indeed, it feels assuredly natural for contemporary art magazines to publish online as a means of responding to technological advancements and possibilities - such as Web 2.0 - while disseminating their content with breadth and conviction.

Questions surrounding the nature and future of art magazines are as painfully cliched as they are important; and it is clear that digital publishing demands constant reconfiguration. Orin Gat discusses the manner in which IOS and other handheld devices allow for images to be embedded in “a variety of formats: slideshows, moving images, animated GIFS” and so on and so forth. It would appear that utilizing the vertical (or horizontal) scroll while maintaining the history and dignity of print, is symbolic of the greater balancing act of art publishing; one that requires constant editorial and cultural recalibration. According to East of Borneo editor Thomas Lawson, art magazines have, “a purposefully old-school attitude to the idea of the art journal as something deliberately out of time”. East of Borneo, along with other publications such as Mousse, South as a State of Mind, Flash Art and Flaneur (to name a few), strive to embrace the benefits of online media while incorporating certain strengths of traditional print publishing.

Slowness and temporality are, for example, two associated traits of traditional arts publishing that warrant consideration as digital publishing moves forward. However, through embracing user and reader contributions - on top of their own editorial line and agenda - publications such as East of Borneo etc are able to “develop depth over time as material accrues”, allowing them to work towards “becoming substantial repositories of information and interpretation”. As beautiful as this strategy sounds, such notions are probably excessively idealistic and egalitarian at this point in time, as they glaze over some of the key complexities of art publishing today. As an interested party, however, I find the serial tension and confusion that engulfs contemporary art publishing to be richly attractive.

[mappingcologiesglobalsouth]

[mappingcologiesglobalsouth]

Global North Global South Global Ruptures Global Structures

As the director of public programs at documenta 14, notions of geography, displacement, location and the malleability of national borders are critical to Paul B. Preciado. The dislocation and possible rupture of documenta from its spiritual home of Kassel to Athens can be interpreted literally and conceptually as a move towards the South, towards the South of Europe and possibly even the Global South. The complicated and fervently contested notion of a political and geographic Global South is challenged and dissected in Documenta 14, with a multitude of alternative histories and geopolitical narratives presented across the exhibition. “Location”, argues Preciado, “far from being evident, reveals historical strife and critical controversy”.

Documenta 14 responds to a pressing geopolitical climate characterized by great uncertainty and profound divisions including including Brexit, the GFC, climate change and the current migrant crisis. For example, the internal political hierarchies and economic distinctions of the European Union are highlighted within documenta 15, with the work of many artists exposing the fragility of Europe and its economic community in recent history. Preciado outlines how “the 2007 financial crisis sharpened these distinctions and constructed again a “new” south of Europe where the so called “PIGS” (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain) were located”, reinforcing binaries and toxic division. Indeed, disrupting the geographical history of Documenta by translating it to Athens can be understood as a radical gesture, successful or not.

[mappingcologiesglobalsouth]

Naeem Mohaiemen, ‘Two Meetings and a Funeral, 2017. Documenta 14

Naeem Mohaimemen’s work is a multi-channelled video installation that presents alternative global narratives and geopolitical systems of power throughout the twentieth-century in the form a meta-archive. Mohaiemen’s project explores the intersecting regional histories of South Asia and its leftist uprisings, particularly the Bangladesh Liberation War, and the role of misrecognition within global solidarity. 

[mappingcologiesglobalsouth]

Nationhood & National Pavilions

Declarations of nationhood might have made sense at the inception of the Biennale di Venezia, but many critics argue that these distinctions have become irrelevant. indeed, ordering global art surveys according to nationality can be understood as an antiquated means of exhibiting and understanding contemporary art. The Venice Biennale is one of the oldest and most prestigious cultural institutions in the world and continues to champion such traditional means of exhibiting art via national pavilions. As an event based and founded upon ‘national pride’, it is curious to consider the manner in which The Venice Biennale has responded to changing national boundaries and the effects of globalization since it was first held in 1895.

The system of national pavilions is significant to both the history and identity of The Venice Biennale; despite reinforcing soft nationalism and perpetuating geopolitical dislocation, hierarchies and national competition within an otherwise highly globalized art world. Curator and art critic G. Roger Denson describes national pavilions “as ratifying an anachronistic system of ethnocentrism and nationalism that thrusts enforced identity onto artists who are ideologically removed from or opposed to such geopolitical categorizations of art”. Denson’s statement denounces the system of national pavilions as having become obsolete in light of the progress, reflexivity and heightened political awareness of contemporary art and artists. It is this system that stands removed from the majority of contemporary artists; many of whom do consider themselves ‘global citizens’ who would sooner reject pavilions and the myriad nationalistic connotations that they evoke than support their legacy.

[mappingcologiesglobalsouth]

National Pavilion of Venezuela, designed by Carlo Scarpa in 1954

[mappingcologiesglobalsouth]

The national pavilion of Switzerland, designed by Bruno Giacometti in 1952

[mappingcologiesglobalsouth]

The national pavilion of Russian, designed by Alexei Shchusev in 1914

[mappingcologiesglobalsouth]

The national pavilion of Finland, designed by Alvar Aalto in 1956

[mappingcologiesglobalsouth]

[mappingcologiesglobalsouth]

The idea that European society will be destroyed and colonized by the immigrants is nonsense, a fake idea. I'm for totally open boundaries and frontiers. I am for the end of Europe as a fortress. Fully. Open doors. Windows, boundaries, borders. Open Sea, Sky

Paul. B. Peciado

[mappingcologiesglobalsouth]

Paul B. Precaido, Curator of Public Programs at documenta 14 (Kassel/Athens)

[mappingcologiesglobalsouth]

Khvay Sammang’s Preah Konlong (The Way of the Spirit)’ commission for documenta 14

Cambodian artist Khvay Sammang’s work ‘Preah Konlong’ is comprised of an immersive projection (located in Kassel) as well as a sculptural component (located in Athens). Sammang’s work came about through a lengthy period of collaboration with the Chong people who are indigenous to a particular region within the Cambodian rainforest. ‘Preah Konlong’ is a process driven and multilayered work and the issue of mapping and cartography rests at its very center. Sammang’s work explores the traditional modes in which the Chong people have mapped and navigated their land via ancestral and oral histories. The symbiosis between land and people which are crucial to the Chong’s culture can be seen to clash with historical forms of western cartography; forms that can be understood as a colonial act. For example, geological maps are vital for the mapping, logging and general extraction of the forests that the Chong people have inhabited for thousands of years. Sammang’s work is an aesthetic triumph, and despite the problematic curatorial decision of placing his work within Kassel’s natural history museum, the gravity and scope of the work succeed in translating the vastness of the Chong’s land and the symbiotic relationship between people and environment.

Sammang’s work speaks to broader themes within docuemnta 14 such as alternative narratives, dispossession and the privileging of indigenous and minority voices. Moreover, the theme of the global south is as the very center of this Sammang’s work, in the sense that from a geographical perspective, the global south was invented entirely by colonial cartography, which has fully unfolded through industrial capitalism. Colonial cartography is arguably the blueprint for a great deal of global power hierarchies and structural economic disparity.

[mappingcologiesglobalsouth]

Khvay Sammang, ‘Preah Konlog (The Way of the Spirit) commission for documenta 14

[mappingcologiesglobalsouth]

Interview between Documenta curator Candice Hopkins & Sami artist Joar Nango

CH: Often the far north - the Arctic and sub-arctic - is framed from the perspective of the south. It’s a place that has been mythologized; many people consider it to be a periphery. Do you consider your work peripheric in any way?

JN: It’s a complex and relative question. Ultimately I like the idea of periphery as a place where there is a lot of room and space for experiments. And “periphery” is, of course, dependent on a defined center. The center in my case is a very subjective one. My background is both Sámi and Norwegian, and I have spent many years living and researching in the far north, but I am also familiar with the metropolises of Europe. I have lived in Berlin for three years and spent a lot of time in Canada as well. That has shaped and formed me.

JN: In the Sámi areas the concept of periphery is actually quite different than if you’re taking a more southern or more urban viewpoint. The Sámi parliament is deliberately designing a decentralized political, institutional, and cultural apparatus. They are consciously placing cultural institutions in many small places all over the Sámi areas, avoiding the big, urban centers. In this case, the idea of remoteness is being activated as a strategy for our cultural survival.

[mappingcologiesglobalsouth]

Our European Union is falling apart, Europe is not falling apart; Europe will remain on this continent, and it's built of so many more complex sizes, categories, cultures, and materials than the nation-state puzzle explains. I think the cultural potentials that lie in the peripheral, dark, shadow zones of Europe can exemplify new ways of solving problems or thinking about future economies and post-capitalist communities. The Roma people, for example, are probably the most European of all cultures inhabiting this continent. I've been asking myself what lies in the shadowy or invisible parts of Europe. I want to make new intercultural connections. I am thinking about the future. What happens when a new Indigenous feminist union established itself. How will such a thing look, and what can it possibly offer us

Joan Nango, Mousse Contemporary Art Magazine, Issue #58, April-May 2017