2010-12-29
Speak, Memory!
Carla Bianpoen

celine condoreli, The series of Departure

Concerns for hidden, forgotten or near-lost  cultural past are emerging in one or the other way in many parts of the world, but perhaps the most passionate were revealed in the Middle East, of which the Cairo based Townhouse Gallery organized  Symposium Speak, Memory, was the most recent. Held from 28-30 October, it brought together an eclectic group of artists, curators, and researchers, many of whom  had met in earlier conferences on the issue of archiving.

Borrowing the title from Vladimir Nabokov's classic authobiography, Laura Cardarera the symposium's curator explained that Speak memory seeks to instigate an informed debate on the challenges and strategies for the presrvatin of modern and contempoary art histories, focusing on those that have been scarcely documented or are under represented in dominantn art historical narravives. 

Presentations revealed a pletoria of private initiatives, mostly focusing on Middle East related issues. With all the activism speaking through several projects, one  can't help the notion of 'independent' archiving becoming a new trend amidst rising commercial interests in the art world.  While the significance of certain initiatives cannot be denied in the face of huge gaps in official archives, the surge of so-called 'independent' initiatives in many instances evoke doubts how independent these 'independent' archivists are or will be in reality as  issues of financing and  sponsorships  trap them  into the same  kind of  'mainstream' and 'commercialism' they critisize. A clear example is offered by the Sandara project, a new initiative questioning official narratives and fearing the rise of artefacts in the market, in the wake of  planned gentrification operations in downtown Cairo. Ironically, the project is sponosred by a real estate company.

A different kind of activism was illuminted by award winning photographer and keynote speaker Susan Meiselas, whose actions emanate her concern for human existence. Based in new York, she has covered the insurrection in Nicaragua and documented human rights issues in Latin America. her photographs have been published worldwide in the pages of Time, The New York Times, and Paris Match and Life. Susan Meiselas in her presentationa focused on the story of Kurds who were destroying photographs in fear of persecution, and her efforts communicating with those holding the past which she tried to bring back to the future. She said she was interssted in the feeling of time when gathering oral memories, or images (each image tells a story, ,who is in the photograph, who took the picture, etc) of the scattered Kurds. Her work encompassing the collection of pictures that she scanned and found artefacts, which  eventually brought back the Kurds into existence and culminated with the book Kurdistan in the Shadow of History. She had also set up the web akaKurdistan, a virtual archive that allowed the dispersed Kurds  a home for  cultural exchange. But in a discussion later in the day, Susan was wondering whether her publications might have had an unwanted impact.

A similar fear has led Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh of the Arab Image Foundation to stop her research and refrain from public exposure of the photographs in her posession.  With a background of history, photography and visual anthropology which she studied  in Paris , Yasmine  moved in 2006 to Burj al-Dhamali, a refugee camp established in 1956 located South of the port city of Tyre, where she carried out a photograpic projct with young Palesianian refugees. Here Hasnaa, a refugee who had developed close relationship with her,  entrusted her with an extensive collection of personal images. Images of Hasnaa  as a young unveiled woman were interesting as they showded a quite different reality from the social and cultural life represented in the mass media.  The huge collection is still with her, but Hasnaa has passed away leaving Yasmine with a heavy burden of the dilemma as issues of ownership and legality prevent her from taking any action with the photographs. In the case of the pictures she received from another resident of the camp, who actually wanted her to publish the pictures of his wife before and after the Israeli attack with napalm gas in 1992, political sensitivity constrains a public display.

The Arab Image Foundation as explained by Negar Azimi who studied politics at Stanford and Harvard and is pursuing her PhD at Columbia University, is a non- profit organization  dedicated to the collection, presrvation and study of photography and other related visual material from the Middle-East, NorthAfrica and the Arab Diaspora. It was founded in 1996 I Beirut by three artists now evolving to be an institution with an archive of 300.000 photos. Negar is also the Senior Editor of Bedoun Magazine, and one of the organizers of the traveling Bidoun Library consisting of books and other publications.

From Peru, writer, artist, researcher Miguel A. Lopez' spirited presentation about the Red Conceptualismos del Sur (Southern conceptualismus Network) informed about the Network which was founded in 2007 by a group of researchers aimed to create renewed conditions for the preservation of artists archives and/or documentation of political events dismissed by hegemonic readings and recent historiographic accounts of so-called Latin American art. A self proclaimed autonomous entitiy of about 55 researchers---- artists, curators, psychoanlalysts, art historianssociologists and activists from Mexico, Peru Ecuador, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Colombia and Spain---- the Network has held an experimental curatorial, published a book, and texts in several magazines, participated in various international symposiums and set up an editorial platform. Interestingly, the Network opens a different path of alternative initiative, by cooperating with museums. For its project on Cartographies, which proposes other ways of understanding the contemporary, which has to date been carried out in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay and Peru, the first phase was supported by MACBA (the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art), while the second phase is assisted by SEACEX (State Corporation for Spanish Cultural Action Abroad) and the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid. 

As in the case of Susan Meielas and Yasmine Eid Sabbagh, though of a diferent nature, Miguel Lopez too made mention of the risks of naming certain groups of documents 'archives', including the their status and economic value. The Network is undertaking steps for protection. Their second project, to convert the archive  the Archive of Clemente Padin into a public Center of Documentaion in Montevideo city, Uruguay, grew out of the artist's concern at private collectors' desire and offers to acquire his personal archive of experimental poetry, publications and magazines from the 60s and 80s consisting of editorial initiatives that constructed networks for interchange during years of hars political repression.

In Southeast Asia,  the Asia Art Archive---founded and headed by Claire Hsu , who has an MA in the histor of art from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London--- has grown into one of the most important public resources for contemporary Asian Art, which through its various projects instigate critical thinking and dialogs. In its 10^th year of existence,  AAA library and archive collection has 32,000 items of material. With research posts in china, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan and India, AAA is forging networks in the region and has been actively participating in various key initiatives, such as the Symposium on the Museum in HK

Another art archive in the SE Asian region of note is the Indonesian Art Archive, which is headed by Farah Wardani since 2007. Grown out of the Cemeti Art Foundtion led by established in 1995 by Nindityo Adipurnomo and Mella Jaarsma amids suppresson of the freedom of creative expression by estensive political contorl and commercialisation ----and an outgrowth of their Cemeti gallery, IVAA 's database contains thousands of data references and archives related to Indonesian and international visual arts. Farah Since 2008, IVAA has an online network, the only one in the country. Farah Wardani has an MA in 20^th Century Art History from the Department of Historical & Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths collge, London. She has been active as a  lecturer, writer and art organizer since 2002 and a curator collaborating with various art spaces in the country. IVAA is a digital information center with online library, online archive and oline map of art venues in Jogjakarta.

Creative thought was revealed in the presentation by Barnaby Drabble who works as a freelance curator,  critic, researcher and teacher based in zuich. H holeds an MA in curating contemporary Art from Goldsmiths collge in London and holds a PhD for his thesis entitled Stop Making Sense : the ends of curating and the beginnings of the exhibition. He has established the Postgraduate Program in curating at the ZhdKunst in Zurich. Together with curator and academic dorothee Richter, he initiated the Curating Degree Zero Archive, a platform for lacting, deating and documenting critical and experimental approaches to curatin contemporary art. He said that he had received an overflow of curatorials, and decided to make it a traveling documentary, leaving the manner of exhibiting to the host.  The   cardboard sculptures by Gvin Wade at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, into which the viewer had to 'climb' may be unusual but it's a unique manner to attract attention to otherwise (maybe) boring docuements.

Among the most intriguing presentations in the Symposium, was that by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, who offered a strangely seductive take, bordering on the absurd on documentry photography. Neither artist has a had conventional training in photography – Broomberg holds a degree in Sociology and the History of Art and Chanarin one in Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence. Invited to respond to the Belfast Exposed, a Photography and Art Center that had for 30 years conduted workshops for amateur photographers they noticed that quite a few frames had been obscured, scratched out or removed. As it had been open to the public, many a researcher had made use of it, leaving their marks like scrtaches, dots, scribbles or colored markers, Through 'manipulations' such as deleting the iamges around the dots or constructing a  'mask' using it in the dark room under the enlarger and laid over the photographic paper allowing only a cercular area of the image to be exposed. 'thus' the surrounding image that has always been seen by the public) is automatically removed'.  A lot of our work is not about making images but finding things that ar normally not archived but thrown away. A leaf found on the pavement in Tel Aviv hours after  a young palestinian bomber detonated himself  November 4, 2004, was actually the result of the explosion which propels the leaves from the branches of nearby trees. A row of images of figures over whose heads and shoulders appeared as if marked by 'post-it' signs. In fact these were photographs of ID photographs in Rwanda where ID photographs used to be stamped over with on'es ethnicity before the genocide, and their heads and shoulders clipped off thereafter. Thus Adam and Oliver in fact make one feel the invisible, making the sinister even more stirring than if they had been showing realistic images.

Such stirring were also felt in Celine Condorelli's poetic presentation titled Il n'y a Plus Rien (There is Nothing Left). Merging fact with imagination,  text with dramatic images on screen,

Celine's moving account of the cotton production starting in Alexandria in the first half of the century and ending at the now-shut cotton mills of Lancashire, England; and the people that once inhabited this second largest city of Egypt at the meditarranean, and had left in a massive departure some decades later, there is nothing left, though the city continues another life with other people, addressing the construction of a city in time. Celine Condorelli is a guest professor at the Nuremberg Art Academy, and one of the founding directors of Eastside Projects, an artist run exhibition space in Birmingham. She is a PhD candidate in Research Architecture, Goldsmith London, working with art and architeture, combining a number of approaches. Il n'y a Plus de Rien has been developed for Manifesta 8, 2010 and ACAF, Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum (ACAF) , an  independent non-commercial organization whose primary function is to operate an alternative venue for the presentation and research of contemporary visual culture and art practices in Alexandria , Egypt.

Other speakers included Beatrice von Bismarck, Heba Farid- CultNat, Vasif Kortun-

Platform Garanti,  Jesus Carrillo - Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS)
Sebastian Lütgert, Jan Gerber, Sanjay Bhangar, Namita Malhotra, Ashok Sukumaran and Zinnia Ambapardiwala – PAD.MA, and Sean Dockray - Aaaarg.org and The Public School.

While issues of  copyright, legality of exposing personal memories to the public, ownrship, and questions of conservation, the technology of archiving, research methodologies,
advocacy strategies to encourage access to national archives, or the recording of oral histories were points of discussion, less reflection was evident on the need of creative, innovative and artistic ways of archiving through contemporary interpretation of the very art forms supposedly the subject of alternative archiving strategies.