Lexicon for the Provisional Future(s)

Graffiti Monument

khadija_zc — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 20:23:18 +0000

Image / excerpt from the Graffiti Monument. Svetlana Boym: “Intervention of the living graffiti amateur”, Galena Hashhozeva: “or living Mo(nu)ment? and this residual ‘nu’ squeezed in between the two limbs of the past/future moment isn’t meaningless either: it is Swedish /”Dutch”/ for ‘now’”, Anonymous visitor to Skuc (perhaps Wietzke Maas) ”but in a sense what weighs on us is not so much the past itself as the prospect of its return and so even this is future oriented”, Svetlana Boym: ”two severed heads of forgotten authors”. Transcript by Khadija Z Carroll of a ‘Graffiti Monument’, from Track Changes + Living Monuments, 2007.

See original text in separate Lexicon entry titled Living Monuments, authored with Azra Aksamija.

Authors who participated included: Stephen Zachs, Peter Lang, Ellen Smith, Kate Palmer Albers…

The non-heroic intervention of anonymous authors venting their views on Bruce Lee’s body (see Kung Fu Mostar entries), together with my project ‘Track Changes’ produced for the Lost Highway Exhibition in Skuc, Ljubljana in 2007, gave rise to a new concept for future monuments, the genre of ‘the Graffiti Monument’. By subtracting the statue, the graffiti provisionally became the monument. The graffiti monument speeds up contingence of identities that change over time to reflect our altering memories. It is a response to the failure of historic monuments to activate the interrelation of future and memory. Spread over many meters, the graffiti monument mapped peoples desires and frustrations with the Mickey Mouse versions of history. As a surface the graffiti monument is perpetually metamorphic and ephemeral.

A graffiti monument was tested by having no heroic bulging golden body, but a process of accumulation, as follows:

During the Lost Highway Expedition I asked the travelers to respond to a seemingly simple question about what they imagined would be a perfect future for ‘the Balkan’ they were experiencing. This collaborative writing experiment stemmed from the ELF website onto a separate site that invited people to edit the text that had evolved using the ‘track changes’ editing function to map their contributions.

This second virtual and papery conversation was then installed in Skuc gallery for those beyond the network of people who made up the 300 artists who participated in the LHE to reflect on the propositions of a future living monument. Lounging around in the Slovenian institution, reflecting on the experience of the place, another layer of multi-lingual intertext was added by the public. This was the life of the piece titled ‘Living Monuments + Track Changes’, linking Ljubljana to other voices. The result was multilingual admixture of living wall text, artist’s manifesto, and a graffiti wall.

Rotated History

khadija_zc — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 16:34:08 +0000

This is part two of the Kung Fu Mostar story Azra and I wrote in dialogue — please read her entry (included in the lexicon) and then continue here.

Image: Ban Jelacic rotated, photograph by Khadija Z Carroll.

The artist Milica Tomic said of the new wave of Bruce Lee, Rocky Balboa, and Samantha Fox statues that they are “a dangerous joke in which history is being erased and replaced by Mickey Mouse.” Perhaps, for this reason Bruce Lee suffered damaging blows in the badlands of the Mostar community park after both Bosniaks and Croats, claimed that the fighter was an unworthy representative because of his militant pose. His golden body was heavily vandalized with graffiti. Unknown writers expressed their aggression towards the monument. So the statue was rotated into a neutral direction, but the graffiti continued until Bruce had to be taken away from Mostar.

This was not the first time that a Balkan monument was covered, disappeared, and reappeared rotated. The heroic monumental statue of Ban Jelačić that was erected in 1866, facing east in the central ‘Jelačić square’ of Zagreb to celebrate his defense of the city against the Ottomans, was suddenly covered up in 1945. It disappeared from under the covers and in 1947 on top of the cover, as on a giant plinth, a communist star was displayed. Ban Jelačić’s statue was exiled from its plinth until 1990 when it returned to the center of Zagreb. Since then Jelačić’s figure looks in the other direction: now he faces West!

Statuette of Liberty

ivan_k — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 15:37:26 +0000

On the famous painting by De La Croix celebrating French Revolution, liberation is figured as a strong, hypersexual women surrounded by poets, workers and outlaws. This reminiscence of the fruitful Goddess with her brothers in arms has been established and carried out through centuries. Generations were raised to equalize the liberating act to sexual experience. Indeed, time of revolution was a time of sexual freedom, so different from the ordinary lifetime with its organized social boundaries. Providing fundamental human reasons, the ideal of liberation has been giving dignity to all revolutionary bloodsheds. As soon as revolution fulfilled its local goal and life came back to its regulated routine, the ideal of liberation, being impossible to control and unpractical while organizing society, has been repressed by the very liberators themselves. Packed back into thr subconscious, as any sexual desire, this ideal has become the constant trigger for new uprisings. Such a trigger-mechanism is used to promote spectacles for the society of competitors, where the Goddess of Liberation is downsized to no more than a commercial statuette. The ideal of liberation is simplified for ideological purposes, assigned for media communication, misused in political fights and proliferated in massive consumption.

Ivan Kucina

Skip the Neighbors

ivan_k — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 15:34:47 +0000

The history of the Balkans, as well as the history of all other places, suggests a mistrust of the neighbours. Keep the fence in-between so that everyone respects the boundaries, especially if the fence has to be crossed for trespassing. History teaches that that the neighbours of your neighbours are becoming your best friends. That is probably because the neighbours of the neighbours are not sharing the same fence but the common neighbouring thereat. A common fence makes opponents and a common threat makes friends. Finding friends, as history teaches, mean skipping the neighbours.
Ivan Kucina

Self-destructing Hedonism

ivan_k — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 15:32:30 +0000

The European continent has been described as incapable to establish its own consistency, with no consensus on key values, with no energy to resolve the main problems and short of sense that anyone could possibly threaten it. Europe is becoming the realm of relativism characterized by an erosion of community, uncontrolled movements of people, economic non-efficiency, political corruption, media obsession and expensive maintenance. A European society that is oriented toward having more free time, has in fact less capacity to fulfil the high demands.
The European exchange of vitality for hedonism is reviving memories to Yugoslavia that has gone (down) for the same reasons. However, self-destructive hedonism did not disappear together with the old state, perhaps because it was its main constituency. It has been approved today as a common attitude of the individual all over the Western Balkans. We all agree that it‘s better to live for the moment of absolute satisfaction than spend our lives in building up the conditions to maintain a certainty of comfort. For self-destructive hedonists only death is certain, but no one can predict the doom day that may come before death, which in turn means that all of it does not depend on anyone’s undertakings. Whatever you do to make yourself satisfied will not affect doom’s unexpected arrival. For that reason, to reach the absolute momentum of satisfaction, anyone is to take more than he or she can handle.
Ivan Kucina

Multitasking Loop Trap

ivan_k — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 15:29:18 +0000

During a period of crises people get used to take on any job offer. When times get better their long-term habit creates multitasking work process. Multitasking is composed of jumps from one concurrent flow to another without knowing where they all go but with the ability to adapt to sudden changes of direction. It is very close to schizophrenic behavior with the exception that all the memory remains possible to rewind. Storing memories is enlarging capacity for more jumps, which means that the number of concurrent flows can grow over time, which again brings more memory to enlarge this capacity. The danger of such process is that it could really become schizophrenic when the memory gets too large to be stored. To avoid this danger the memory has to be shared, but sharing memory introduces another concurrent flow which means again more jumps in the process. It seems that this loop can never stop once it has been started.
Ivan Kucina

Minimal Commons

ivan_k — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 15:26:23 +0000

Minimal commons is a possibility that is not often practiced, mainly because it is not bringing too much promises and overall projections in advance. It is a simple stadium of coexistence in which taking out any particle (or statement) means breaking the decision making process, which would in turn acknowledge the incapacity to undertake anything collectively. In such moment, the individual resistance to the paralysis of the system creates a capacity to establish minimal commons – which is a bit of time and space where there’s nothing left to lose but a lot to add.
Ivan Kucina

Losts and Founds

ivan_k — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 15:22:57 +0000

The foundations of universal humanity – liberty, brotherhood and equality have been imprinted into the constitutions of each modern state, including former Yugoslavia. However, their interpretations were simplified for ideological purposes and proliferated for media communication. Their meanings were misused in political fights and finally lost in massive consumption. Any attempt to revitalize the true power of their statement would lead toward another cycles of appropriation and degradation. Looking into the provisional future of the Western Balkans through (re)questioning the very foundations that were constituting Yugoslavia, new ‘founds’ have appeared to alternate for the ‘lost’ ones – lost liberty found exclusive moments of everyday practice, lost brotherhood found self organizing movement, lost equality found network diversification.
Ivan Kucina

Exit War

ivan_k — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 15:20:10 +0000

Both socialist and neoliberal minds have demonstrated a significant capacity in diagnosing the recent collapse of the economic system. At the same time they have demonstrated a significant incapacity in creating concepts to find a way out of the collapse. Even if they would have had alternative visions, the political system is already so corrupted that it would not have been able to realize them. Even if political elite would have been innocent, media is already so manipulated that it would not have had the capacity to forward the message straight on. And even if the communication devices would have been justified, society is already so diversified that it would not have constituted the critical mass for the new beginning.
The scaring fact learned from the big crises in history, is that the only way out that intellectual minds, political elites, global media and diversified humanities could successfully undertake at this stadium of civilization is creating a war machine. War designers know, although they deny it, that the spectacle of war is the most effective exit strategy for leaving problems unsolved and that it is the strongest trigger for ’’dead end’’ societies to enter into another cycle of growth. Warlords have no obstacles in creating an enemy to set up the agreement for launching the fire.
Ivan Kucina

Institutional Abstraction/Popular Figuration

ivan_k — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 15:12:42 +0000

Modern institutions representing the most progressive image of a society heading toward a bright future, often have been taking abstraction as their field of expression. Abstract values signified the presence of an unfamiliar wellness that would be achieved if society followed the rules established by its institutions. Similar rules addressed individuals more directly through a basic figuration that was accepted by everyone. This classic strategy of dual signification created a spatial dichotomy between modern public institutions and traditional private spaces. Being too classical to be accepted by everyone, this dichotomy did not have the capacity to generate order, but rather created chaos instead.
Ivan Kucina