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Kenneth Tay, untitled photograph (Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei), 2015.

7. Uniform Connectedness

The Vampires of Poverty (1977)

The easiest way to begin describing this film is to consider it as a fictional film that follows a documentary crew who are trying to film and stage “poverty porn” in Colombia to be sold off to a German television. But even then, that doesn’t really cut it as the film relies first of all on a kind of division between black-and-white footages and color footages: we as audience are led to believe that the staged footages shot by this documentary crew are in color while the film about this documentary crew is in black-and-white. What is initially set up to look like a documentary expose (playfully reliant perhaps on the values we place on the aesthetics of black-and-white) on poverty porn production is revealed in the last scene to be itself a work of fiction. So much so that even at the end of the film, where the director and the crazed/wild actor are in conversation together we are left in doubt as to the whole veracity of the scene as well. In a way, we could describe this film as performing something quite similar to Christopher Nolan’s Inception where audience are left scrambling to find which layer in the film is the base reality from which to measure all else. The diegesis of the film therefore remains somewhat in suspension. All in all, the film seems to function both as a critique of the grotesque production of poverty porn in Colombia for European consumption, as well as a critique about the veracity of the photographic document.

Transmission

a checklist for the interim

BETWEEN THE LITERARY AND THE VISUAL ARTS there still is a lot of work to be done in terms of the two fields interlocking with one another. so far there seems to be little or no genuine contamination between the two fields; writers and visual artists from separate camps hardly meet or collaborate on anything significant. if we take the arts house’s “new word order” as a symptom, then it becomes clear that local literature is treated merely as a throw-away citation/reference for most part. well, it’s of course arguable that one should not simply impose of the other. but what we might end up with is the situation where the best thing we have to show out of all this is the “dawn ng” kind of work; and that says a lot (precisely because such works say nothing at all). what we need perhaps is an intermeshing of the two fields, something that would allow us to think about, say, the questions and conditions of reading within an exhibition space. or a kind of literary publication that would display an explicit concern about the architecture of its pages, a kind of exhibition-in-print perhaps. let’s hope the stuff with concrete island might be able to push out something in these directions.

AESTHETICISED RESEARCH, ANYONE? had a long discussion with an artist friend the other week, and he expressed concern over the present mode of curating that is sweeping across singapore, something that has now perhaps become a default mode of working without us noticing. that is, these days, there seems to be a spontaneous preference for curators to go after “larger” issues such as knowledge systems, infrastructures, research; basically, metaconcepts that would implicate art in the broader engines of our contemporary world. while this (for lack of better terms) “aestheticised research” is all well and good, something that he recognised as having gathered momentum first at nus museum (with the exhibition camping and tramping perhaps being the prime example), it does seem to bring about a “death of aesthetics”. art is losing its ability to create experiences and affective modes, preferring instead to dwell in the realm of pure ideas and concepts. here in singapore, it seems as though john berger’s famous maxim “seeing comes before speaking” has been perversely ignored for vogue ideas and currents that could be quickly and unequivocally circulated and disseminated for the market. and the prime example seems to be the revolting art stage format in recent years, with the inclusion of so-called “curated” segments and additions which are supposed to offer some critical weight and cultural ballast against the vulgar commercialism of the entire set-up. at present, we’re reaching a point that is fast resembling what walter benjamin saw in fascist regimes as the aestheticisation of politics. where do we go from here?

#singapore #art

coming soon in january 2016:

CONCRETE ISLAND

In J.G. Ballard’s novel Concrete Island (1974), the speeding protagonist finds himself ejected out of the London highways, and marooned onto a traffic island located somewhere between and beneath the highways. No one can stop to help him. No one can stop in the relentless traffic. In many ways, Ballard’s tale is an urban update of Robinson Crusoe, a tale of survival and atavism, though it comes to us with a crucial difference: Ballard’s tale is driven by an acceleration into delirium.

Tan Pin Pin’s film 80km/h (first done in 2003) records the journey along the Pan Island Expressway (PIE). Beginning from Changi Airport to Tuas Checkpoint, the film accelerates quickly to the speed of 80km/h - what was then the speed limit on the PIE. The entire film runs for about 40 minutes in total, approximately the time taken to travel across the entire horizon of Singapore at the imposed speed limit. End to end stuff.

CONCRETE ISLAND draws from both Ballard and Tan’s works as points of departure. It proposes to think of the city not just as a built environment, but as a condition of movement. The project disperses into several movements all at once: a prep-room exhibition at the NUS Museum; a publication reader of speculative “passwords”; an experimental reading programme based on Ballard’s novel (“This land is our lab”); a mobile cinema programme (“Drive”); and a bus tour along the PIE. Contributors to the project include: Tan Pin Pin; Luca Lum; Tse Hao Guang; Jason Wee; Geraldine Kang; Fiona Tan; Ho Rui An; Anca Rujoiu; Amanda Lee Koe; Kathleen Ditzig; Liao Jiekai; Kent Chan; Vanessa Ban; Lai Chee Kien.

(image credits: Geraldine Kang)

#concrete island #nus museum

To read a text in a literary mode is to recognize a material sustainability that is destructive of any constituted sense; to repress or resist the literary is to posit a sense that sustains itself through time, beyond inscription. To read in a counter-literary manner would be to insist on the truth or sense of a text such as the Bible, the constitution or the Magna Carta, regardless of the language or rhetoric of its incarnation. To read in a literary mode is to focus on materiality rather than ‘phenomenalization,’ on the inscription rather than what the inscription intends.

Claire Colebrook, “Twilight of the Anthropocene”

#anthropocene #literature

The future of the anthropocene

The anthropocene imagines a future beyond our human existence, where the future archaeologist would discover in the strata of the Earth an entire collection of our technological culture. It is, of course, guided by the resignation that we are now entering into the age of human extinction. Somehow, it seems that the agreement about our extinction as a human race did not meant the disappearance of a future. But rather, it seems to have generated speculations, further thought experiments about the aftermath of our existence that extrapolate beyond human exceptionalism. In other words, the real future.

#anthropocene

Assume no readership

In a video titled “Assume No Readership”, Kenneth Goldsmith begins by reading an article in the papers, but does so by breaking and pausing into a rhythmic metre. Suddenly, an innocuous article reporting the winning of a Nobel by a French writer is turned into a poem. What would have been typically read as the most prosaic of some time-sensitive words had turned out to be a poetry reading by Goldsmith.

I am bowled over by the gesture. For its simplicity as much as its audacity. Yet, what intrigued me was how much it revealed that the problem has been less that with writing than it is with reading. Is it something about the paper material of the newspaper (thin, cheap, disposable looking ...) that tells us how to read it? Or is it by virtue and assumption of the author/writer? What is it about our everyday assumptions that allows us to read articles in a newspaper as articles in a newspaper? Have we become habituated readers? I hesitate to use the term “lazy” of course. But there are, quite simply, more genres of reading than we’ve often cared to realise.

Even before Goldsmith, Roland Barthes was already on to the case of our reading habits. A lot has been said about Barthes’s distinction in S/Z between what he called the “readerly” and the “writerly” text. Often, these readings of Barthes’s argument typically assert that the “readerly” text is one that assumes and demands a passive reader, in which there is almost always merely one singular line of interpretation and consumption of the text. And on the other side of things, there is the “writerly” text where the reader is no longer that of a mere recipient but that of an active creator of the text. The attribution of the “writerly” to this reader stresses, to that end, a sort of co-production between the reader and the author. The “writerly” text therefore does not seek to impose a certain interpretation but allows and even facilitates the reader to go on a derive with the text.

All this is standard literary theory, summarised and rehashed in extensive volumes after volumes. Sometimes packaged as “cultural theory”, sometimes “critical theory”; but what remains consistent in each case, regardless of the label, is the unwillingness to return to the question of reading. Or to be more precise, the genres of reading. Barthes obviously favoured the potentials of the “writerly” text; he himself could be said to be a master of such a text (my personal favourite example of this is Barthes’s Empire of Signs). But more importantly, there have been so many occasions where reading commentaries on Barthes, I find the distinction between the “readerly” and “writerly” used to stress on the French notion of “ecriture” (this has allowed of course Barthes to be seen, amongst others, in similar light with what his fellow Frenchmen Jacques Derrida wrote about writing itself). Worse, Barthes is sometimes read as suggesting a way to categorise the nature of texts around us: readerly/writerly; prosaic/poetic.

In other words, what I mean to point out is that Barthes was merely alerting us to the problem of reading itself. The “readerly” and the “writerly” then are less intrinsic qualities of texts but are instead broad genres of reading.

Some weeks ago, I did an interview with T.K. Sabapathy. Recorded in the exhibition space of OPEN EXCESS, we had a conversation that aimed to traverse the terrains of his essay “Road to Nowhere”, using the essay itself as a guide for our conversation. Along the way, we happen to stop by the issue of reading; and I remember dearly Sabapathy saying: “Yes, yes, writing is begotten by reading.” I think we’ve stayed on the course of writing for too long. I’ve heard countless writers and theorists go on and on about the experience of writing, writing as a troubling supplement, writing as death; the list goes on. But perhaps it’s time we went on a drift instead, reading signs along the way.

Further up ahead in the new year, I hope to organise an experimental literature class, where we will all read (all ten or so of us) J.G. Ballard’s Concrete Island (1974), but do so on a weekly basis and each time reading only a chapter’s worth. We would not be concerned even to finish all 24 chapters but select merely 7 chapters to do so. And rather than all of us reading our reading(s), each in our own private time before class, I would propose that we read in the company of others. Reading therefore is not to be enacted in an enforced solitude, but in a setting that is fundamentally distracting and dispersive. Towards the end of the class, we might even publish something that aims to rewrite Ballard’s novel through a different form/medium. Maybe something along the lines of a Powerpoint book? Who knows!

#reading #overreading #kenneth goldsmith #roland barthes

Readers, in fact, never confront abstract, idealized texts detached from any materiality. They hold in their hands or perceive objects and forms whose structures and modalities govern their reading or hearing, and consequently the possible comprehension of the text read or heard. In contrast to a purely semantic definition of the text, which characterizes not only structuralist criticism in all its variants but also literary theories concerned with reconstructing the modes of reception of works, it is necessary to maintain that forms produce meaning, and that even a fixed text is invested with new meaning and being when the physical form through which it is presented for interpretation changes.

Roger Chartier, "Laborers and Voyagers: From the Text to the Reader"

#reading #theory

Not Yet: Of Desires and Futures

Perhaps one of the greatest insights of psychoanalysis is the assertion that the fulfilment of desire would be the death of desire. It sounds simple enough; yet its implications are far reaching. For one, it intimates that our desires are never meant to be fulfilled, and that we secretly involve ourselves in a ceaseless production and repetition of desiring objects. Chain after chains of them. From one angle, this seems to be a linear displacement between one object of desire to another, a progression of our time on earth as desiring subjects. But seen from another perspective, this is but a cyclical event, the central void being the obscure object of desire around which we spend our lives constantly circling around and about, looking for an always inadequate substitute/surrogate. The objet petit a: the gravity of our lives.

While it’s easy to see this almost as a perverse variation of the Sisyphean myth, it needs to be said that such a ‘torturous’ circuit of desire produces, in secret, an enjoyment in us, precisely because we are enjoying the pure pleasures of ourselves as desiring subjects. To put it differently, what we are enjoying as hinted by psychoanalysis is also this question of the future itself. After all, embedded in all desires is the future: an imagined time where the object of desire will be attained, rejected or given up for something else altogether. But more importantly, this future is also seen from the perspective that desires reproduces itself constantly through a failure to adequately satiate itself, by repeatedly insisting on a ‘not yet’ to the production and repetition of desire. It’s also in this regard that psychoanalysis reveals ourselves and our lives to be constantly becoming. Life is not a linear path towards the fulfilment of all our desires, but rather finds itself in an asymptotic career.

Towards the end of his work as the seminal psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud was to make a startling turn in his project. He was to make a critical revision to what built his career with the publication of Beyond the Pleasure Principle as a u-turn to his earlier writings. The death drive, as proposed by Freud, describes our inner compulsion to repeat, and to return to a (former) state of inanimate equilibrium. While this seems to explain, on the surface, certain self-destructive tendencies in our society, the death drive is also a way of addressing the nature of desire itself - this drive towards the fulfilment and therefore, also correspondingly, death of desire. You could say that Freud’s introduction of the death drive into his repertoire of writings is itself a performance of the death drive, since it marks a return to as well as a turning of his pre-established idea of the pleasure principle. In other words, there’s a sense in which Freud’s latter revisions and introduction of the death drive seems to be an enactment of a desire to further the psychoanalytic project, to insist on its becoming and an uncertain future. It is in this that we should continue, as Jacques Lacan did and even consequently Slavoj Zizek among others, that there is a psychoanalysis that is still to come. Like the analyst, we need to listen...

#psychoanalysis #future #desire

Up to No Good: notes on the politics of psychoanalysis

Some thoughts from Todd McGowan’s Enjoying what we don’t have: the political project of psychoanalysis (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2013). An interim stock-taking.

1) The political import of psychoanalysis comes, ironically, from its non-alignment to any political movement or commitment. It describes movements in history as a repeated resistance and reluctance to move. In other words, psychoanalysis describes a revolt culture, but it is one that never gathers into the momentum of a (successful) revolution. In short, an inertia and a death drive.

2) The notion of a “good” society doesn’t square with psychoanalysis. Instead, the psychoanalytic project is one that constantly insists that there is no Sovereign Good. Rather, it is the prohibition of good that allows us to project or to imagine this virtual goodness. Good does not or cannot exist independently on its own. Such that as we move closer to the ideal of a good society, we also find ourselves approaching simultaneously the emptiness concealed within the ideal and therefore also correspondingly further away from achieving any good. So instead of proposing any utopian way forward, psychoanalysis interprets the long march of our human history as one constant repetition of the inevitable failure of achieving any good. Not because we are a race destined necessarily for failure or doom; but that the ideal of good itself is fundamentally unsustainable since it glosses over the intrinsic antagonism and incommensurability of the social order. Put differently, we might say that psychoanalysis recognises the impossible exchange.

#psychoanalysis #good #politics #theory

Southeast Asia does not really exist. Rather, it is a slippery, historical fiction born of the mid-century military exigencies of Western colonial powers. It makes little sense in geographical, cultural, religious or linguistic terms. The 40 years of self-conscious regional association through ASEAN -- no less a child of the Cold War -- has brought little if any cohesion. Global capital tends to make these nations competitors, rather than a unified bloc.

David Teh, “The Video Agenda in Southeast Asia, or, ‘Digital, not so Digital’” (2011)

#southeastasia

The moving image moves. But where does its movement come from? For a certain approach in art history, an image is a discrete, whole entity. To move from one image to anotheris already an immense wrench: even the analysis of a diptych is wildly complex. What then is it to speak of 'a' moving image, constructed from thousands of constituent images? In what sense is it an image? Cinematic movement is a fundamental challenge to the concept of wholeness and integrity, its becoming a test of the primacy of existence. In particular, it raises the question of temporality: when is the object of cinema? When, indeed, is the moving image?

Sean Cubitt, The Cinema Effect (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004), p.5

#cinema

Jump Cut: Singapore's film historiography

In Singapore, where well-organized exhibition circuits linked to Malaysia were in existence before 1945, production was around twenty features a year (some Malay, but mostly Chinese) by the mid-1950s but declined to nothing in the 1970s. Singapore is thus the only country in East or Southeast Asia without a local film industry — perhaps a reflection of the relative weakness of indigenous capital in Singapore’s economic development. - Roy Armes, Third World Film Making and the West

In his 1987 survey of the third world and its film industries, Roy Armes notes then of the absence of a film industry in Singapore. Considering the period of his publication, such a statement seems true enough. Scanning through the pages of recent publications on Singapore’s film history, from Jan Uhde and Yvonne Ng Uhde’s Latent Images: Film in Singapore (2000) to Raphael Millet’s Singapore Cinema (2005) or to World Film Locations: Singapore (2014) edited by Lorenzo Cordelli, one is struck by a similar observation made throughout these accounts: that the 1980s represented a lacuna in Singapore’s film history. Cordelli’s edited publication sees just such a jump cut in its filmography, moving from the controversial Saint Jack (1979) to The Last Blood (1990) without losing any pages in between.

But as Millet writes, this is somewhat curious, if not even surprising, given that tickets sales in the 1980s was at its highest; yet the offshoot of this was a hiatus from the local industry for about a decade or so. One could speculate, as the Uhdes did in their account, that Singapore became increasingly anxious about potential misrepresentations of the city-state since Saint Jack (1979)was made in. Alternatively, I wonder too, given the ascendancy of Singapore’s economy in the 1980s and the general industrial shift away from manufacturing, if this caused a corresponding increase in the appetite of Singaporeans as reflected by the consumption of foreign imported films (especially those from Hollywood cinema).

Yet, as useful as these accounts of Singapore’s film history may be, they stem fundamentally from an interest only in examining feature film productions in Singapore. There are several options and alternatives of course, one of which is to change the focus on film production (much less that of feature films) to that of a general film culture, shifting the sole emphasis on production towards that of reception as well. Perhaps it is by taking cue from reception that we may find how Singapore has digested such foreign film imports. Somewhat similar to what May Adadol Ingawanij has done by looking at “versioning” of Thai cinema in the twentieth century, I wonder too what a comparative study of movie posters in 1980s Singapore might lead us to discover.

Essentially, film history in Singapore needs to be broaden up to look beyond just feature film productions or even narrative films in general. The existing literature, due to such a historiography, tends therefore to position 1991 as the year Singapore embarked on a renaissance of its film industry. In other words, the study of Singapore’s film history exhibits a tendency to marginalise efforts outside both the state and the identifiable industry in general. The digitization of the late Ivan Polunin's collection of moving images would be a great start, though the bulk of Polunin’s materials were shot primarily between the 1950s and 1960s. What we need urgently perhaps is an archive of both films and its (paratextual) paraphernalia in order to reframe Singapore’s film history.

Works cited

Roy Armes, Third World Film Making and the West (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987) Lorenzo Cordelli (ed.), World Film Locations: Singapore (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2014) May Adadol Ingawanij, siam16mm: fragments of obsolete cinema. http://siam16mm.wordpress.com Raphael Millet, Singapore Cinema (Singapore: Editions Didier Millet, 2005) Jan Uhde and Yvonne Ng Uhde, Latent Images: Films in Singapore (Singapore: NUS Press, 2009)

#singapore film history #cinema

Centred around the notion of the bibliographical, OPEN EXCESS is an ongoing prep-room project that...

As a means to contextualise the anticipated changes to the project OPEN EXCESS, this site will mark and record through fragments such as notes, images, quotations and conversations that revolve around the materials in the room. It's also, I suppose, a first of my own attempts at long-term exhibitionary projects (approximately two years). But these are not meant merely to incubate in a given space (since such a metaphor seems a little inadequate); rather, they would also calibrate themselves according to their immediate settings over time (i.e. other exhibitions in proximity). In any case, the exhibition will feature materials donated to the NUS Museum by art historian T.K. Sabapathy and also an ongoing "curatorial essay" situated on site.

#openexcess #nusmuseum #sabapathy

A Quiet Manifesto

in the event of future stock-taking, here are some key principles:

1) Never stop researching on possible 'intertexts' however tentative these texts may be in terms of historical contiguity

2) Therefore no work is ever independent or self-sufficient on its own but porous

3) Paratext of an exhibition is just as important as the main show (peritext: title, wall text, research binders; epitext: exhibition catalogue, programmes)

4) Publications for exhibition should not seek to 'resolve' the exhibition but rather form another point of dispersal; they can function as documents of exhibitions without needing to fix an image of the exhibition; essays in publications can be further theoretical fictions

5) Given the transient nature of the exhibitionary medium, exhibitions can be a productive site to incubate potential overreadings -- which means that one should show just enough without being too transparent and the exhibition must force the viewer to push to make some sense of it

6) An exhibition is never a one-off; therefore do not stress over the fact that you did not get it 'right' but allow the exhibition perhaps to grow; in other words move over the anxiety of failure

7) Never ever reduce your curatorial role to that of a mere administrator and producer for an artist

8) Do not ever use the excuse of a 'difficult space'; a curator must develop the premise of an exhibition alongside the space rather than to superimpose a certain curatorial concept onto it

#curating

Where the horizon lies: a review of ICOM UMAC & CECA 2014

“Please ask the speaker to slow down.”

The line repeats itself several times over the course of a Mexican presenter’s talk. There is an unmistakable urgency in her tone while she discusses the important role of contemporary art in Mexico, a country marked by violence and inequality. But the interpreter is struggling to keep up with the pace of information bursting in Spanish. What was at first a chirpy American-accented English soon turned into one of exasperation. Most members of the audience, however, seem contented to look on with a mix of amusement and embarrassment.

Yet, this inability to comprehend is not just an isolated event; but rather, as I would like to think, symptomatic of the entire proceedings of ICOM CECA & UMAC 2014. Nor is it a sheer coincidence that topics such as “University Museums as translators of research” or “Researchers, Curators, and Educators as Mediators” surfaced in the conference. Comprehension, we’re often told, remains a key element in any pedagogical approach. But to comprehend something isn’t simply to understand it, or to translate its otherness into something digestible. Rather, as the word “comprehensive” implies, there is a tendency to be all-inclusive, sometimes even to the degree of being exhaustive.

In light of the conference’s programme, this was probably true as discussions ranged from issues such as museum “in-reach” for museums in Germany, to the state of antiquities museums in Egypt today, and to gender (mis)representation in a maritime museum in Finland. While I would readily admit that the significance of the conference’s title (Squaring the Circle? Research, Museum, Public)remains somewhat lost on me, its choice of venue was not: The Bibliotheca Alexandrina is a twentieth century reconstruction and re-imagination of the great Library of Alexandria, famed for its extensive collection of books and manuscripts from around the world. Situated close to where the old library was believed to have been, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina sits between the University of Alexandria and the Mediterranean Sea. It sits looking out to the horizon of the sea, looking out to the vastness of the world beyond the city of Alexandria. For if the sea has always informed the fortunes of this city, it has also trawled in for the city its fair share of knowledge and information from elsewhere. Not surprisingly then, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina is expansive in its ambition to be thecity’s cultural centre. It boasts of an enormous library able to house eight million books, several gallery spaces for temporary exhibitions, four working museums showcasing a breadth of Egyptian material culture, a planetarium designed mainly for kids in mind, a state-of-the-art cinematheque with a panoramic screen made up of nine large screens in total, and a magnificent granite facade inscribed with characters from over 120 languages. Even the centre’s architecture, as I was told, was a collaborative effort between architects coming from all over the world. To put it simply, there is no shortage of signs in the Bibliotheca that does not refer back to the centre’s ambitions to be expansive.

But in the effort to be as inclusive as possible, the conference suffered from several issues. The most serious of which is delay. On several occasions, time was wasted waiting for the scheduled presenter who may not have turned up for the conference in the first place despite submitting an accepted paper. And delays also meant that the moderators of each session tended then to push comments and responses towards the end of each session. By that time most members in the audience would have forgotten their initial reactions or questions to the particular presentations. Furthermore, the urge to be as inclusive as much as possible meant also that presentations were clustered together in the same session even when they seem only to be remotely connected to each other despite the best efforts of the organisers. More importantly perhaps, delays also prevented moderators from having sufficient time to review their respective session adequately, and to tease out for the benefit of the audience some common threads between disparate presentations. What was left at the end of each conference day was a general sense of incomprehensibility, saved only by that one or two presentations that stood out from the rest.

One of such presentations was London-based artist and anthropologist Daniel A. Baker’s brief introduction of his project The Exhibition Laboratory. Working with several museums in the United Kingdom including the British Museum, Baker uses The Exhibition Laboratory as a nomadic project to turn the entire museums themselves into exhibitions for visitors. Through a series of interventions, Baker encouraged the visitors to start paying closer attention to wall texts and captions as if these were exhibition objects themselves; visitors started asking why a particular free-standing wall was positioned or fabricated this way. In this way, Baker’s project allowed visitors to become more deeply involved with how the museum facilitates their understanding and interaction with certain objects at large, rather than remain merely consumers of an exhibition’s content. For me, this was a different articulation of the term “museum education” that is often discussed and presented in conferences such as this by museum professionals. So rather than a pool of numbers after numbers based on research conducted on visitors and their reception of a given exhibition’s content, Baker’s presentation of The Exhibition Laboratory was a much-needed breath of fresh air. But what it also did simultaneously, and perhaps unintentionally, was to problematise just what is meant by the term “museum education” in the first place. Something I found to be deeply lacking in the many presentations on researching museum education for the public.

Closer towards the urgencies of the hosting city, Emad Khalil, Associate Professor of Maritime Archaeology at the University of Alexandria, delivered a fascinating insight into what museum education means for Egyptians today. Professor Khalil explained that terrorist groups in Egypt have been funding their campaigns by way of looting antiquities out of Egypt, selling them to foreign museums through several layers of dealings and exchanges, and thus obscuring the links back to them. For him then, there is an added value of “counter-terrorism” to museum education in the context of Egypt today. But more importantly, he hopes that this would encourage the Egyptian government to recognise the urgency of the situation. Not only are more and more precious materials being shipped out of the country illegally, but Egyptians youths today are themselves at the risk of becoming increasingly detached from their own history and cultural heritage since there has been no centralised effort to educate the young in this regard. Museums in Egypt continue to be built to serve tourists primarily. Entrance fees remain relatively expensive for the locals, and the high traffic of tourists throughout the year has also slowed down efforts to conduct further archaeological and conservation work.

In my tour of the historical sites around the city of Alexandria, it was clear that these sites remain used or visited mainly by tourists, local historians and archaeologists. It also does not help that these sites are often barricaded. Not surprisingly then, I hardly met any local visitor to these sites save for archaeology students from the city’s universities. What I found instead was a steady stream of litter around the gated perimeters of these sites, which is telling of the overall situation: there is a clear disconnect at large and the significance of these historical places remains largely “wasted” on the local Alexandrians.

By the end of the conference, there were however some good news. It was announced that the Egyptian government has approved and agreed to support the initiation of a museum studies programme in the University of Alexandria in light of the many discussions from this conference. This is, of course, an important first step. But amidst the noise of the hearty cheers and applause, I found myself asking if museum studies, as largely understood and propagated by members of the conference, is really what is needed at the moment for the situation in Egypt. For one, I found it rather ironic that this news was announced without so much as the announcer looking down at where her feet were planted. For if she had done so, she would have noticed that the Bibliotheca Alexandrina has so much more potential to offer in this regard to the people of Egypt at large than a mere venue for this international conference. Spaces in the cultural centre remain more or less disconnected from one another: the exhibition spaces and museum floors do not speak to the library’s collection, and neither does the planetarium or the cinematheque have a common programme together. They remain, in the process, largely unprogrammed venues for the most part. The result of which is a large cultural centre that has little relevance to the lives of the local people. So instead of looking out to international perspectives and visitors and holding on to the city’s history of being a cosmopolitan place, it seems to me that Alexandria could focus more on what it already has at the moment. To return to a term that was introduced in the conference, we might begin by looking closer at the value of “in-reach”.

#umac 2014 #alexandria #museum

"The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution."

Hito Steyerl, "In defense of the poor image"

#hito steyerl

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