TOWARD THE PRODUCTION OF AN AESTHETICS OF RELATION

IN PLACE OF AN INTRODUCTION

The text below is a concise form of chapter 3 of my PhD thesis ‘Performing

a Practice-led Research on the Gastarbeiter Legacy: Toward the Production of

an Aesthetics of Relation’.

In chapter three of my phd thesis I borrow Édouard Glissant’s (2006) notion

of Relation and introduce it into the field of contemporary art production in an

attempt to scrutinize existing discourses on relational art. While Glissant sees

Relation as an inexorable product of social intercourse, I argue that in

relational art Relation is not a given: it needs to be performed and it is the

relational artist’s responsibility to engender its performing. Relation then

foregrounds the differences – sociopolitical, cultural and other – between those

individuals that come together with the desire to work collectively.

Nevertheless, their differences will be catalytic for the process of art making

and will lead to disagreements. Only if a group manages to navigate through

such difficulties and arrive at a work that reveals the conflicts that were

formative for the group and/or the work, one can speak of a genuine attempt

at producing an aesthetics of relation proper.

Having mapped relational approaches in the works of a number of

contemporary artists, I go on to reveal Relation at work in my own practice-

led research, which culminated in a site related, narrative audio-walk on

Gastarbeiter histories in Munich. I also introduce the idea of haunting as 1

History  Remix  is  available  for  free,  online,  on  www.historyremix.de.  The  feature  length  audio  narration  guides  1

an  audio-­‐walker  through  the  city  of  Munich,  unpacking  histories  of  Gastarbeiter  migrants,  by  projecting  archival  research,  oral  history  material  and  elements  fiction  onto  the  fabric  of  the  city.

ethico-political event (Derrida, 2006) into the practice of audio-walking and

discuss various techniques I have used to produce a distinct aesthetics on

silencing and haunting in and through the city of Munich, the site through

which my audio-walk guides its audience.

DISPUTED CONCEPTS: “COMMUNITY” AND “COLLABORATIVE ART”

When speaking of the former Gastarbeiter the usage of the term “community”

needs some clarification: in reality the name Gastarbeiter – itself heavily

disputed – refers to more than ten different, extensive minority groups that

stem from an equal number of countries of origin. We could thus speak of

“ethnic” communities that arrived with the Arbeitsmigration and, since then,

live in Germany – each community having its own language and distinct

history. Even then, the assumption that there is one Turkish, one Italian, one

Spanish community etc., is a simplified one, since the members of these

communities feel close affiliations for specific subgroups within the larger,

ethnic contexts. These affiliations are based on common origin in a village,

town or region, on social practices, political beliefs, or on religious

orientations. They establish much stronger bonds than those of the common

national identity (Bade and Oltmer, 2005; Appadurai, 1996).

During my practice-led research, rapport or even collaboration with groups of

former Gastarbeiter was desirable – and yet, intricate. Desirable, since – apart

from legitimizing the research as such – contact was a source of joy and

knowledge, and a tactic to establish a network in the city. Intricate, since –

on top of the considerable logistical problems it caused – establishing a

relation with communities came hand in hand with issues of authority and

artistic license. In the field of contemporary relational art, communities are

mainly examined in relation to projects in which artists work with groups of

non-artists to produce works of art. Complexities arise at exactly that point,

where the artist is accused of “misusing” a community, or group, in this

context. Typically, such arguments present communities ‘as having little or no

agency’ (Kwon, 2004, p. 144) reducing them to passivity and uniform identity.

But communities never act as one: they are dynamic and diversified. Kwon

(2004) argues that rigid notions of community overlook differences between the

individuals that make them up, and underestimate the role of plurality as a

constitutive element for processes of subject formation.

Clearly, most artists’ work with communities is purpose-driven and thus always

at risk of becoming exploitative. ‘Vigilant reflexivity on part of the artist is

[therefore] essential’ (Kwon, 2004, p. 139). Despite their plausibility, concerns

about communities being ‘lured [into] collaboration’ (Foster, 1996, p. 76) by

abusive researchers who intend to exploit them for their own needs, reveal a

good degree of arrogance, since they presume a de facto empowered researcher

working with a disempowered community. In many instances during my

creative practice research, it was me who was the weakest link. Being a

newcomer and visitor of sorts I only had a general, often wrong,

understanding of networks and relations between individuals, or of the diverse

micro-political affiliations at work behind the scenes in the city. Although

uncertainty and doubts might initially have affected my research negatively, in

retrospect I argue that the dense web of local micro-politics that I gradually

learned to navigate, strengthened my research. As Édouard Glissant (2006, p.

137) put it,

‘Passivity plays no part in Relation. Every time an individual or

community attempts to define its place in it […] it helps blow the

usual way of thinking off course’.

Glissant sees Relation as necessarily affecting all parties coming into contact. 2

Each group, or individual, has its own cultural and personal backgrounds

which it carries into Relation. These are expressed as desires and aspirations

regarding the encounter as such and the potential gains that it could bring

with it. During my practice-led research, Relation manifested in the will or the

unwillingness of diverse parties to co-shape the research trajectory and its

outcomes. Initiative and indifference, desire and resistance, commitment and

concealed agendas, were all part of the relations established and constantly

renegotiated. Revealing how stakeholders positioned themselves to the project

will allow me to reflect on what is increasingly gaining significance for

contemporary art practices: an Aesthetics of Relation.

THE BRAND ESTHÉTIQUE RÉLATIONNELLE

The term esthétique rélationnelle (relational aesthetics), was coined by Nicolas

Bourriaud in 1998. In a collection of essays Bourriaud uses esthétique

rélationnelle to describe the art-practices of contemporary artists, who seek to

establish intersubjective encounters that allow a ‘collective elaboration of

meaning’ (Bourriaud, 2002, p. 15) to manifest through their artworks. These

artists strive to achieve modest, unpredictable connections among different

members of their audience, by means of ushering direct experience into

galleries and museums: spaces with a tradition in staging the spectacular

(Bourriaud, 2002).

The role relational artists assign to themselves is not that of envisioning the

utopian, but of offering ‘ways of living and models of action within the

existing real’, explains Bourriaud (2002, p. 13), who sees relational works as

 Wherever  the  term  Relation  is  used  in  Glissant’s  sense  I  will  be  writing  it  with  capital  “R”,  as  Glissant  2

himself  does  in  his  work.  The  use  of  italics  is  by  myself.

ephemeral outcomes of an ongoing social experiment, played out in the field

of contemporary art. Accordingly, the so-called “relational” artist or curator

offers modes for ‘learning to inhabit the world in a better way’ (Bishop, 2004,

p. 54). Typically, relational art works take the form of installation

performances, resembling studios or sets designed to accommodate direct

human encounter, for esthétique rélationnelle comes as an antidepressant to the

‘countless forms of melancholy’ (Bourriaud, 2002, p. 12) provoked by the

failed concepts of modern emancipation.

Hal Foster (2004b) is sympathetic to relational artists’ efforts to turn ‘passive

viewers into a temporary community of active interlocutors’ (Foster, 2004b, p.

192), but opposes Bourriaud’s claim that esthétique rélationnelle has the

potential to restore impoverished social bonds and warns of the risk of making

oversimplified analogies ‘between open work and inclusive society’ (Foster,

2004b, p. 193). Undoubtedly, works presented in an institutional context are

always already inscribed by that institution’s authority. Therefore, the types of

relations established in and through relational aesthetics need to be carefully

examined and any rhetoric that conceals ‘art as a nexus of power and

unspoken exclusivity’ (Charnley, 2011, p. 39) be revealed. 3

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN ESTHÉTIQUE RÉLATIONNELLE AND NEW

GENRE PUBLIC ART

 Interesting  in  this  context  is  Grant  Kester’s  critique  of  an  installation  of  Rirkrit  Tiravanija.  He  writes  3

(Kester,  2004,  p.105):  ‘In  the  winter  of  1996,  as  Tiravanija  was  reconstructing  his  New  York  apartment  in  the  Kölnischer  Kunstverein  as  an  “open  space”  for  cooking,  eating,  and  “communal  celebration”,  the  Cologne   police   were   in   the   process   of   breaking   up   and   driving   out   a   settlement   of   homeless  people   near   the   gallery   […]   concerned   about   the   threat   the   homeless  would   pose   to   tourism   and  gentrification  in  the  area.  While  Cologne’s  liberal  press  lauded  the  show  as  a  model  of  “intercultural  exchange”,   a   number   of   local   artists   and   activists   found   the   juxtaposition   of   Tiravanija’s  magnanimous   spatial   gesture   (albeit   one   in   which   admission   was   carefully   monitored   by   a   stern  Hausmeister)  and  the  brutality  of  police  attacks  on  the  homeless,  deeply  problematic.

In One Place After Another, Miwon Kwon (2004) examines the relational

potential of new genre public art in detail. The term, coined by Suzanne Lacy

in 1991, stands for art projects that introduced challenging ideas about

collaboration between artists and communities. Kwon closely examines the roles

of sponsoring institutions and curators in early stages of research and

production of new genre public art projects. She asks (Kwon, 2004, pp.

116-117),

‘In actual practice, how does a group of people become identified as

a community in an exhibition program, as a potential partner in a

collaborative art project? Who identifies them as such? And who

decides what social issue(s) will be addressed or represented […]?’

Kwon suggests that curators, organizers and commissioning institutions have a

much more significant power over collaborative art projects than is generally

assumed. At the same time, her stunning examination engages with a

deconstruction of any presumptions over the rigidity of power relations in

processes that produce collaborative artworks. She proceeds to a detailed

examination of proposals, work processes and finished artworks by a number

of artists that developed collaborative projects for the 1993 Culture in Action

exhibition of public art, programmed by Mary Jane Jacob and Sculpture

Chicago. Kwon focuses on conflicts that grew out of attempts to negotiate

forms of shared action among participants, organizers and artists in processes

that were announced to produce artworks in such ways that each party

involved could see part of their intentions reflected in the outcome. Kwon

reveals how a constantly shifting economy of interest, a dense network of

power relations and significant differences in each artist’s specific approach to

‘processes of interaction’ (Kwon, 2004, p. 104) led to a number of successful

collaborations, but also to major conflicts and to decisions to discontinue

projects or disengage artists.

Instead of following a similar path of detailed examinations Nicolas Bourriaud

solely focuses on the way esthétique rélationnelle presents itself to a receiving

audience. It is uncertain to what degree Bourriaud’s ideas and intentions might

have influenced the artists’ practices he branded under the title of esthétique

rélationnelle. It is arguable though that as director of the renowned Palais de

Tokyo, Bourriaud would mainly promote art that could be shown in such type

of institution. Despite the work-in-progress character of these works and the

artists’ liking in collaborating with one another, Bourriaud’s “relational” artists

are predominantly concerned with formal innovations within the tradition of

installation art produced for museums and galleries. Their works have been 4

neither drastically informed, nor radically transformed by audiences. Thus, in

reality, the ‘platforms’, ‘stations’ and ‘laboratories’ offered by these artists

‘sidestep the difficult narratives of transformative politics’ (Charnley, 2011, p.

42) that Kwon reveals being at work in new genre public art. In Bourriaud’s

esthétique rélationnelle, Relation is far more imagined than embodied.

TOWARD AN AESTHETICS OF RELATION

PROJECTS, NIKKI S. LEE

Nikki S. Lee’s series of snapshot works entitled projects are often described as

ethnographic studies from the standpoint of an artist (Kwon, n.d.). Lee appears

in an astonishing number of subcultural guises in her photos and poses among

“authentic” members of diverse subcultural groups. She thus seems to conduct

a form of ongoing, short-term participant observation study. The artist has

produced an astonishing number of projects following this method: she

 An  exception  are  Thomas  Hirschhorn’s  early  installations  in  public  spaces.4

introduces herself as an artist and asks local groups to “adopt” her until she

adapts to their codes to such an extent that she is visually not distinguishable

from the “authentic” members. If her proposition is accepted, Lee meets up

with the group for about two weeks. During the meetings snapshots are being

taken by a friend of the artist, or by members of the group she engages with.

These snapshot photos casual, unpretentious, and therefore seemingly the

documents of lived experience, are the only evidence that remains from the

encounters and the final outcome of Lee’s cultural adaptation work.

Undisputedly, Lee’s projects bear traces of relational intentions, regardless of

whether it is in her intention to produce such reading of her oeuvre. In her

essay Traces of ethnography in the works of Lan Tuazon and Nikki S. Lee,

Miwon Kwon (n.d.) notices that Lee’s photos ‘function to falsely signify

intimacy, a quality of extended engagement, normally based on deep

knowledge, rapport and trust’ (Kwon, n.d., p.86). Lee contacts the groups she

intends to adapt to, having a precise idea about the product that she wants to

gain out of each encounter: a photograph. She also has a method of arriving

at each photograph, a method that is far less adaptable to given circumstances

than her guises are. The limited time that she gives herself to engage with a

group or subculture, forces her to be highly “efficient” in her approach to her

subjects: knowing that she will show photographs as a result of her

engagements, Lee naturally attempts to produce situations that lend themselves

to photography. Lee’s “efficiency”, her desire to quickly arrive at a “good

shot”, is what makes her practice superficial in relational terms. The artist

continually reproduces the same type of imagery, in which she foregrounds

herself, through her guise and her well-performed mise en scene. Although the

artist possesses the talent in evoking an interest in her hosts, who, I assume,

have a good time performing their identity for the camera, she fails to

question her medium: what remains undocumented is the relational heart of

Lee’s projects. How exactly does the she manage to approach and “infiltrate”

the diverse groups? How much of her accurately observed and well-performed

mise en scene can be considered a joint working process, in which the

“authentic” members of each subculture teach her how to dress and behave?

Lee’s photos reveal little about this. What is instead being revealed in her

works is a formula of representation that turns her hosts into her hostages.

BATTLE OF ORGREAVE, JEREMY DELLER

On June 18, 1984, a mass picket at the Orgreave coking plant, South

Yorkshire, was taken forcefully down by mounted police. The breaking of this

picket marked the end of months of strikes against dubious privatization and

economic efficiency strategies in UK’s coal and steel industries that were

planned and implemented by Margaret Thatcher’s government. The events at

Orgreave, during which 93 pickets were arrested – all later acquitted due to

unreliable police evidence – had traumatic consequences for miners and their

families, which were deeply bound up with the coal industry. The breaking

of the strike at Orgreave paved the way for significant social and political

shifts in the entire country. As Stuart Hall (2012) put it, Orgreave came as an

accurately planned government attempt to defeat unions, considered to be ‘the

principal forces blocking […] the reconstruction of Britain as a neoliberal

“market society”’ (Hall, 2012, p. 83).

Seventeen years later, on June 17, 2001, artist Jeremy Deller and the arts

organization Artangel, hundreds of local volunteers and historical reconstructor

Howard Giles as director of over twenty historical societies, staged Battle of

Orgreave as a massive, live reenactment of the events that took place on June

18, 1984. Around eight hundred (800) participants were involved in the

reenactment, two hundred and eighty (280) of which were locals that had

taken part in the 1984 events. Research for the project had started one year

before the reenactment day, the intention of Deller and the production team

being to re-stage the clashes as accurately as possible. Interviews with men

and women involved in the pickets, archival research in public, newspaper, and

police archives and searches in relevant literature were the principal methods

used to learn about the histories of those entangled in the events, as well as

the economic and sociopolitical backgrounds that led to the clashes.

Deller envisioned the reenactment as a form of ‘living history’ (Deller, 2002,

p.7) and therefore insisted on the physical participation of locals who had been

involved in the 1984 events and of reenactment societies. Thus in November

2000 Howard Giles and EventPlan were invited by Artangel to produce a

feasibility study on a massive reenactment in the area of Orgreave coking

plant and were subsequently assigned with scripting, organizing and directing

the event in the summer of 2001 (Historical Film Services, 2008). At the

same time Artangel introduced a further partner into the project: Channel 4

and renowned documentary film director Mike Figgis. It remains unclear

whether this was initially only thought of as a way to cover the project’s

considerable costs and produce a quality documentation of a live performance,

or if Deller and the Artangel team could foretell to what degree the synergy

with Figgis would change their initial plan. With hindsight, one can argue that

Battle of Orgreave has become a milestone in the field of political,

collaborative art due to its medialization through Figgis. The filmmaker took

advantage of his early involvement in the project: during the research and

preproduction periods of the reenactment he focused on revealing events behind

the front line of the 1984 pickets. Thus lengthy interviews with the families of

picketing miners foregrounded the pivotal role of an entire community in

supporting the strikes, accrediting it its actual significance. Whereas Deller

focused on the “battleground” and thus on “front line heroes” of the pickets,

Figgis managed to also reveal the inner workings of a community in crisis.

The research, conducted from different sides with different methods and

particular interests, must have had an enormous impact on Deller. He

continued engaging with the issue and a year after the successful staging of

the reenactment, he initiated the publication of The English Civil War Part II

(2002), a book that focuses on information unearthed during research for the

reenactment, such as police documents, speeches in parliament reprinted in

papers and on interviews that Deller conducted with individuals involved in

both, the events of 1984 and the reenactment of 2001. These show that Battle

of Orgreave was not perceived as an art project among locals, but as an

opportunity to ‘reopen old wounds and the chance to reiterate historic slurs

and injustices’ (Morris, 2002, p. 123). Channel 4 involvement in the

reenactment had provided the community visibility during a process of retelling

the history of a “lost cause” and coming to terms with its consequences in

public.

Essentially Deller’s reenactment had allowed those smashed during 1984 and

silenced in the years that followed to re-examine their histories “in the open

field”, rather than in the solitude of their homes: in and through a public,

collective undertaking that lent them dignity, while at the same time allowing

for critical engagement with the roles of all parties involved. In his Aesthetics

and its Discontents, Jacques Ranciére (2011) argues that the configuration of

specific spaces and the framing of particular experiences are deeply political

actions that can empower subjects and designate discourses (Ranciére, 2011).

Political, in this respect, is the act of re-appropriation of time and space and

of the sovereignty to think and live this time and space differently. Battle of

Orgreave, art project, community project, research project, historical

reenactment, documentary film and publication, all at once, has achieved

exactly that: not to represent, but to institute collectivity; to re-appropriate a

space and a time, even if only for a short while; to instigate a reinterpretation

of the past, through a process of thinking, acting and experiencing together, a

specific historical event, from different sides and with different perspectives.

COLLECTIVE ARTISTIC PRACTICE AND THE PERFORMING OF

RELATION

Miwon Kwon (2004) proposes the term collective artistic practice for art

projects that engender a projective rather than a descriptive approach to

collaboration. Rather than affirming the notion of a coherent, immanent,

community that expresses itself through producing art about itself, collective

artistic practice, instigated by an artist, brings together a provisional group,

that performs (Kwon, 2004, p. 154),

‘its own coming together and coming apart as a necessary

incomplete […] working-out of a collective social process.’

Kwon directs our attention toward collaborative practices based on groups that

neither necessarily need to produce art that represents them as a group, nor

necessarily need to take part in the actual making of the artwork as such.

Rather, what Kwon foregrounds, I argue, is the performing of Relation. Her

collective artistic practice is based on establishing and nurturing a collective-

divergent will to form: collective in as much as no party, or individual

stakeholder can meet their interests without the other; and divergent because

each has an interest to shape the process and its outcomes differently.

An Aesthetics of Relation, I thus argue, engenders the desire of participants

and stakeholders to shape a work of art collectively, each party or individual

imprinting part of their projections, desires, intentions and their histories and

backgrounds onto it. In opposition to Grant Kester (2004), who sees the

collective act of making art as pivotal for such type of relational projects, I

argue that the hands-on process of making is less significant than the

collective performing of Relation for the production of an Aesthetics of

Relation. What needs to be focused on is thus the coming together and

influencing a proposed project by means of projecting a will and a desire on

to its production processes and its possible outcomes. The key for evaluating

what kind of Aesthetics of Relation has been produced should therefore lie in

revealing what means of expression and what kinds of approaches toward

producing art have been employed to best institute the performing of Relation.

How exactly Relation is sought to be established; which parties, groups, or

individuals will be involved at which stages of research or production of a

work; what timeframes are provided; what works will result and who these

works will address: these are all issues to be worked-through during the very

process that produces an Aesthetics of Relation. With these questions in mind I

will examine different types of synergies established during research and

production for the audio-walk History Remix: between artist-researcher and

migrant communities; between artist-researcher and the Munich workgroup; and

between the artist-researcher and his supervisory team. 5

A COLLECTIVE-DIVERGENT WILL TO FORM [part I]: ATTEMPTS TO

WORK WITH MUNICH’S MIGRANTS

To  meet  the  50.  000  character  limit  of  the  call,  I  have  left  the  third  section,  synergies  with  the  5

supervisory  team  out  in  this  version  of  the  chapter.

I became aware of Relation and thus of entering the realm of an Aesthetics of

Relation the moment I started conducting interviews with Gastarbeiter migrants

in Munich. My intention at the time was to conduct quality recordings of oral

history sessions, so as to have good enough material to work with when it

later came to using the original interviews in artworks. Naturally, the desired

quality required an investment of time and effort – also on behalf of the

migrants. In turn, this obliged me to provide the participating interviewees

with some kind of assurance that their stories would play a role in the

resulting work. Nevertheless, how could I assure an inclusion of their stories 6

regardless of the content the migrants delivered, or the feeling their stories

transported? The inclusion of original audio recorded material from interviews

in artworks is much dependent on the interviewees’ talent for telling a story:

ease of expression, humor, pace, idioms and accents, all play a significant role.

In the case of the Gastarbeiter, language posed an additional challenge since

many among the first generation speak only poor German. How can a story be

told in a language one is not at ease with?

Soon I realized I had a second significant issue to work against: my research

found only moderate response among the larger groups of migrants. The year

2010 marked sixty years since the official start of the Arbeitsmigration and

2011 marked fifty years of Turkish immigration to Germany. During both of

these years, celebrations would take place in many big German cities, radio

and television programs would foreground Gastarbeiter histories and symposia

would celebrate their contribution to German culture and society. Thus, in

preparation of these celebrations, many former Gastarbeiter of Munich

experienced a steep increase in exposure to the media. In contrast my

proposed collaboration only promised moderate gains to participating

It  is  difficult  to  win  people  for  interviews  that  will  never  be  published.6

individuals: at the time I only had a vague idea of what the research could

culminate in.

Initially, I felt that the enormous attention the Arbeitsmigration was getting

was a drawback for my work with communities. Nevertheless, upon witnessing

the sudden stardom of some of the former Gastarbeiter just before the 2010

celebrations in Munich, I started rethinking my tactic for producing

collaborative work on migration for the public space in the city. Was the

sudden, brief attention that some of the former Gastarbeiter were receiving

doing justice to a collective history? Should my research attempt to compete

with existing media projects and public celebrations that were producing “stars”

and were staging the spectacular? Producing low profile, critical work seemed

a good response to the existing agendas and when the idea of producing an

audio-walk eventually emerged, it was exactly this critical distance that led to

the decision not to use excerpts of authentic audio recordings, which would

foreground “talented” interviewees and “eventful” biographies over other.

Instead I would cast amateurs to impersonate a script stitched together from

fragments of material of various strands of my research, among which

interviews were only one: History Remix would neither star Gastarbeiter, nor

stage the authentic by using Gastarbeiter voices as document. Rather, it would

become a meta-narrative on the Arbeitsmigration, revealing an attempt to relate

to former Gastarbeiter, their stories, desires and projections. At the same time

the audio work would introduce elements of critical theory, elaborate narrative

techniques, and a site specific approach to the city that would clearly

distinguish History Remix from any existing work on Gastarbeiter memories,

histories and narratives distributed through the media at the time.

Interestingly, critical distance allowed me to amplify issues that migrants in

Munich had mentioned in interviews, but had not expanded on, possibly

because they did not feel that these issues were of importance for my

research. Not surprisingly, I often felt that exactly these issues, although not 7

always being at the core of my initial interests, were significant and needed to

be revisited. One such issue became a key element of the audio-walk History

Remix: the desire to see a monument for the Arbeitsmigration erected in

Germany. Many of the first generation Gastarbeiter in Munich have had the

hope to see such monument being presented to them, since they feel that their

contribution, social, cultural and economic, is still being silenced in Germany

today. Research in the Archiv DOMiD, in Cologne, showed that this desire is

widespread among the former Gastarbeiter in Germany: between 1998 and

2005 the board members of Archiv DOMiD had earnestly struggled to lay the

foundations for a public monument in form of a museum of migration.

Despite my own reservations regarding both a contemporary monument of

migration and the idea of an all encompassing museum of migration, as

envisioned by the founding members of the Archiv DOMiD, I feel utmost

respect for the commitment and the sincerity with which they tried to realize

this idea. I thus revisited this desire in my audio-walk. Taking Glissant’s

concept of Relation seriously, I treated the entire audio-walk History Remix as

a spectral monument in honor of the Arbeitsmigration. Spectral, for it takes no

visible form and yet is a most powerful demand for readdressing silenced

issues relating to the Arbeitsmigration; and monumental because, the feature

length, narrative audio-walk appropriates significant sites in Munich inscribing

itself into the fabric of the entire city.

In fairness, often the importance of such issues appeared to me later in my research. Thus issues 7

discussed in interviews during 2008 and early 2009, might have become more relevant to me in 2010.

A COLLECTIVE-DIVERGENT WILL TO FORM [part II]: WORKING

WITH THE MUNICH WORKGROUP

The name Munich workgroup refers to a loose group of individuals, working

in different cultural organizations in Munich that joined my research at various

stages. Initial contact was established with Patricia Müller, who runs the

program Urban Cultures in Munich’s City Art Council, the Kulturreferat. I had

met Müller during an artist residency in 2007 and contacted her in early 2009

to inquire about financial support from the Kulturreferat. Upon sending in a

portfolio of works, Müller informed me of a major research-and-exhibition

project on migration that the Kulturreferat was producing in partnership with

Munich’s Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU). Crossing Munich paired

academic researchers with visual artists and would lead to an extensive

exhibition. Although the participating artists had already been selected, Müller

argued that some of my work might still find its place in the exhibition.

However, she did not manage to get the video work included.

To my great surprise Müller seemed dedicated to find another opportunity to

present my work. I thus frequently informed her of the development of my

research. In June 2009, Müller introduced my work to Fuad Hamdan, the

director of the Dritte Welt Zentrum (Third World Centre) of Munich. Hamdan 8

is the organizer of the Integrationstage (Integration Days), an annual program

focusing on migration and the integration of migrant minorities in to Munich.

With hindsight, I believe that Müller – who knew of my oral history sessions

with Munich’s Gastarbeiter – introduced me to Hamdan in an attempt to

promote my research as a community art project. I cannot find another

explanation for her “tactical maneuver” that underplayed my outspoken

 The  Dritte  Welt  Zentrum  has  assigned  itself  with  the  task  of  providing  alternative  news  and  media  8

coverage   from   the   second   and   third   world   to   Munich.   It   operates   under   the   aegis   of   the  EineWeltHaus,  an  umbrella  organization  hosting  alternative  social  and  cultural  projects  in  Munich.

dedication at the time to show any work in an “art” rather than a “community

art” context.

Müller’s intervention had significant impact on my research and the resulting

audio-walk. It is exemplary for engendering what I have called a collective-

divergent will to form. Her proposition forced me to rethink the course of my

research. On the one hand a shift from the field of “fine art” to that of

“community art” would change the way in which the research and its

outcomes would be perceived. I feared a degradation of my work in this. On

the other hand a cooperation with the Dritte Welt Zentrum, a space with a

clear focus on sociopolitical issues, was certainly a step away from a

spectacularization of the Arbeitsmigration. Despite my hesitations, on June, 5th,

2009, I presented the core elements of my research to an also hesitant

Hamdan. Not surprisingly, the organization is not much concerned with

presenting contemporary art. Hamdan was himself only looking for an artist

who would provide straightforward photographic representations of migrants’

success stories, as he told me. My searches in the archive and my intention to

produce a significant work of art on the Arbeitsmigration were far off his

scope and interests at the time, but Hamdan had not managed to find a

suitable artist for producing his 2010 Integrationstage and my presentation

must have convinced him that I could take on the role.

We eventually agreed to work together if Müller – who we both considered a

guarantor –would co-manage the project. We decided to make monthly

meetings to discuss the project’s progress. During these meetings the Munich

workgroup gradually came together: Petra König, financial director of

EineWeltHaus, joined with the wish to assist the project in financial terms;

Anna Regina Mackiowack joined upon hearing that we intended to organize

walks through the city, as she wanted to contribute to this aspect of the

program; and Najereh Shirzadian joined the group as project assistant, after I

announced that I would need support on location. In December 2010 Isabella

Fehle, director of the Münchner Stadtmuseum (City Museum, Munich), joined

the group as its last member. To work with the Munich workgroup was

enjoyable, despite, or possibly because of, the differences we had in our

approach to issues regarding migration and its representation, or the production

of a collaborative art project. Knowing that the interdependencies we had

endorsed would best lead to results if we allowed objections to be expressed

and counterproposals to be seriously thought through, we developed a rather

open attitude toward each other’s ideas.

During autumn 2009 I presented my first concrete proposal for a public

intervention in Munich: a large, site-specific video installation, based on a

series of slide shows, presented in silent mode, at night, in public spaces. The

group was enthusiastic, but the choice of site became an overwhelmingly

complex issue, due to the City Council’s health and safety regulations. We

dropped the idea. My second proposal, a series of outdoor screenings without

license, was received with less enthusiasm. For a while we discussed a further

idea: that of organizing outdoor screenings in the EineWeltHaus. The

organization has a spacious terrace with a large, white wall that we could use

as projection screen. Nevertheless, relocating the project to the EineWeltHaus

meant that we were addressing an audience that was either directly stemming

from, or already well informed about, the Arbeitsmigration. If our intention

was to reveal the silencing of a specific history in Munich, we should be

addressing a broader public, I argued.

I kept developing ideas for a suitable approach to audiences in Munich.

Eventually my original idea of presenting video installations changed. In the

group’s next meeting I suggested to produce an audio-walk. There were many

reasons for which I thought that the shift from video projections to audio-walk

was only for the best. The format could lead to a long lasting, sustainable

project and thus be accessible to a broader and more diversified audience; and

it lend itself to diegesis, a much more engaging and informative approach to

the Arbeitsmigration. The drawback was that I would not be able to meet the

set deadline, I argued. To my surprise the group reacted with great flexibility

regarding the deadline and with absolute trust in my skills as author, director

and producer of the envisioned “radio drama”. It was soon decided that the 9

Integrationstage 2010 would not take place at all and that for Integrationstage

2011, the workgroup would solely present my proposed audio-walk. This shift

created the basis on which the extensive, site related History Remix was

produced. It allowed for a timeframe that made a bilingual audio-walk with

high production values possible and allowed for time to establish new

partnerships and seek additional funding.

URBAN AUDIO-WALKING [part I]: THE HAUNTED CITY

Audio-walking appealed to me for it allowed, more than any other medium, a

sense of haunting to emerge. In contrast to the popular notion of haunting as

a form of scary spectral activity, Jacques Derrida (2006) argues for haunting

as suppressed ethico-political event: it originates in a silenced act of injustice,

passed on from generation to generation. The act of haunting is thus always

also a demand to depose the powers that brought injustice in to emergence. In

Specters of Marx (2006) Derrida introduces the idea of haunting as a form of

projected fear: it emerges where evoked. What haunts is ‘what one imagines,

what one thinks one sees and which one projects’ (Derrida, 2006, p. 125). The

 The  German  term  “Hörspiel”,  acoustic  theatre-­‐play,  is  much  more  accurate  than  the  English  “radio  9

drama”,  I  believe.  In  the  case  of  the  audio-­‐walk  History  Remix,  we  have  a  site-­‐related  “Hörspiel”.

spectre manifests as an apparition, as disembodied voice. The act of haunting

is therefore a topo-situational event, the suppressing of an act of injustice that

the haunted know of or suspect and therefore cannot help projecting on to

their familiar, everyday surroundings. The spectre draws its powers from the

biographies of those befallen by it. It demands that responsibility for specific

events in these biographies is taken on and that justice is performed (Derrida,

2006).

Derrida’s ideas on spectrality were an inspiration for my research from early

on. With History Remix I developed a work of art that evokes a spectre,

which rises above Munich to haunt it. The voices of the audio-walk,

omnipresent and disembodied, exercise a subtle power on their audience: they

demand that their story be listened to. The voices will gradually break the

silence that rules in the archive and speak of places and relations of power: of

systems of organization and representation; of memories evoked in specific

places of the city; and of the unsettling opacity of historical documents. In

contrast to existing audio-walks, such as those of Janet Cardiff and George

Bures Miller, which are based on a sense of suspense, History Remix

empowers the emancipated subject that performs the audio-walk. The audience

walks and listens because it wants to think the issues at stake through.

Where facts and fictions, past and present, argument and anecdote are thrown

together, the audio-walker cannot remain passive. S/he has to activate an inner,

critical voice: is the heard in accordance with the seen? Is the narrated in

accordance with one’s own knowledge and experiences? Does the city, the

audio-walker is walking through while listening, mirror the accusations the

voices whisper? Through an act of walking and listening, emotionally and

critically engaging with the city and its history, the audio-walker performs

what Ranciére (2011, p. 24) pointed out as being the essence of the political:

‘the configuration of a specific space, the framing of a particular

sphere of experience, of objects posited as common and as

pertaining to a common decision, [and] of subjects recognized as

capable of […] putting forward arguments about them’.

The audio-walk is an invitation to re-appropriate Munich physically: walking,

observing, listening and rethinking. Neither work nor audience leave visible

marks in the fabric of the city. Any shifts or transformations will remain

invisible, spectral: they will take place in the audio-walker’s conscience.

CAST VOICES: THE MAIN PLOT

The main plot in History Remix revolves around the lead figure, VOICE A.

The part of VOICE A is written in the first person. The main character is a

visiting artist on residency in Munich, commissioned to produce a work of art

on the Arbeitsmigration. Searching for material that will help him put this

work together, he comes across an intriguing photo-document printed in a

book: the photograph depicts joyful Gastarbeiter migrants arriving in Munich.

The photo, which is apparently kept in the city’s public archive evokes

questions regarding its authenticity. Was this shot staged, and if yes, what end

did its staging serve? Seeking more information about that particular

photograph, the main character negotiates his way through Munich, with the

audience walking in his footsteps. As concerns regarding history, memory and

the archive become more complex, plot-driven narration fades to the

background. VOICE A thus gradually changes from the “voice of action” to

that of a contemplative, engaged commentator.

VOICE A engages with the histories of Gastarbeiter through the prism of

photography. It weaves together reflections on the history of the

Arbeitsmigration with questions on photography as a means of documentation

(Sontag, 1979) and questions strategies of photographic representation (Sontag,

1979; Tagg, 1998) and principles of organization of archives (Derrida, 1998).

The intention in these parts of the script is to move away from an audience’s

possible expectation to be served “facts” on the history of the Gastarbeiter.

Instead, I attempt to reveal some of the complex technico-ideological processes

inherent in photographic representations (Sontag, 1979; Gunning, n.d.) and to

confront audiences with the inner workings of mechanisms that constitute

material remnants of historical events as documents and in extension as the

“truth” about these events (Derrida, 1998; Foucault, 2008). What were the

limits of the mechanical and chemical processes of capturing and documenting

“facts”? How were “facts” either consciously or unconsciously being

manipulated by the aesthetics employed to document them? And how are

“facts” reprocessed, translated, or re-encoded in order to be preserved by the

invisible mechanisms inherent in systems of representation, such as archives?

(Appendix 4, section 03):

‘VOICE A:

Photos appear in peoples’ lives like bolts of lightning. The time

it takes to shoot an image has lapsed within a millisecond and

life resumes its normal rhythm. The time-period recorded on

film is barely experienced: it is so short that it can hardly be

perceived. The photograph however, is considered as proof of

that moment– as its confirmation […] often, it will be just one

such photograph that remains as a document of an entire era.’

While writing the part of VOICE A I tried to avoid making the text overtly

abstract or theoretical. Nevertheless, the text is an attempt at drawing

audiences into discourses that deconstruct prevalent notions about the

Arbeitsmigration, not by providing new “facts”, but by revealing to what

extent the existing “facts” were the products of acts of consignation and thus

also the products of a specific politics of representation.

URBAN AUDIO-WALKING [part II]: CO-SOUNDING OF PLACES

Audio-walking is an exercise in multitasking. An audio-walker needs to master

the tasks of listening to and making sense of a narrative and a discourse,

while at the same time navigating through busy streets, walking through train

stations, plazas and empty buildings. While walking s/he has to bring the seen

in correspondence with the narrated, the narrative with the own thoughts and

these with the surrounding city. Since earplugs never entirely block out the

sound of a city, the audio-walker is constantly moving between overlapping

sonic realities: a real-time sonic ambience – the sound of the city as it is the

moment s/he experiences it – and a pre-recorded ambience that the audio-walk

provides through the headphones. If consciously employed, this layering of

sound mixes in and out of the arguments introduced by the cast voices, at

times emotionally underlining them; at times providing information that

deconstructs them; and at times being a means to work against the voiceover

arguments. Introducing a sense of co-sounding of places and times, I aim to

confuse the audio-walker’s spatiotemporal certainties and evoke other time-

places.

While sitting in the S-Bahn, the overground train from Marienplatz to the

Central Station, for example, the audio-walker who listens to track 3 of

History Remix is gradually becoming aware of a second train-sound, fusing

with the actual sound of the S-Bahn: the sound of a long distance train, of a

type not in use any more. In the meantime, while VOICE A recounts the

length and difficulties of travel from Istanbul, through the Balkans to Munich,

VOICE B, the navigation voice, announces that the audience should now step

out: they have arrived at Central Station. Walking upwards through

underground corridors and stairs, always followed by the repetitive re-sounding

of that long distance train, the audio-walker finally emerges on the platforms

of the long distance trains, where the anachronistic sound meets its

contemporary double in the exact place where masses of Gastarbeiter once

arrived: at platform 11 of Munich’s central station. As recording and reality

co-sound, the audience of History Remix feels that the irritating ambience

forces them to contemplate at the same time the “here” and the “there”, the

“now” and the “then” of histories, people and places. The audio-narrative

supports this contemplative moment (Appendix 4, section 03):

‘You stand exactly where they stood when they

arrived in Munich in the late 1950s. You, a visitor,

spending time in this wealthy, German city. They,

labour migrants from villages of Spain, Italy,

Portugal, Greece and Turkey, from North Africa, or

former Yugoslavia; people that had never left their

village before coming to Munich to work.

VOICE A […] Their skin smells of cities, the names of which

are hardly pronounceable. “Munich” means nothing to them.

They have no idea of what this city is like and they lack the

foundation on which this understanding can be built. Having

arrived in a foreign place, they would now need to define their

new environment through memories of home. Memories they

eventually impressed upon the city. And now, on a dewy spring

morning in Munich, they could smell the aroma of Palermo’s

central vegetable market, or, on a humid summer day in

Westend, the wafting flavor of sea-salt and watermelons,

reminiscent of the Galata Saray promenade in Istanbul.’

The tactic of taking apart an audience’s certainties through a dense layering of

sound indebted to Bill Fontana’s co-soundings. Fontana, who began his career

as a composer in the 1960s, soon focused on recordings of ambient sound,

which he considered ‘an act in mental intensity equal to writing

music’ (Fontana, n.d., p. 1). Over time Fontana developed a sculptural practice

in sound, for which he produced multi-channel recordings conducted in a

specific location and transferred them “live” to another location where they

were made audible to audiences. For playing the recordings back, Fontana used

as many loudspeakers as he had used microphones for their recording and he

installed the loudspeakers in the exhibition space in the same configuration as

he set up the microphones during his field recordings. Thus, in Fontana’s sonic

environments more than sound is relocated: Fontana describes the works as

transferring the specific and exact sense of spatiality inherent to each chosen

place from which sound is relocated.

Similarly, in History Remix I introduce the sense of spatiality caught in a

recording and make it coincide with the real-time sound of the place through

which the audio-walker is moving, producing a sonic spatiotemporal syn-

topias. These co-soundings, are among the practices I developed in my 10

attempt at evoking specters in Munich. How would an audience feel, if

standing in Munich’s central station it was confronted with the sound of

Gastarbeiter trains arriving from their journey through the Balkans? What

impact would recordings of migrants, spilling out of overfilled trains, have on

an audience that at the same time was witnessing these Gastarbeiters’

daughters and sons following their daily routines in the same station their

mothers and fathers had arrived in, some fifty years ago?Voiceover narrative

fades in to the background during the co-soundings in History Remix. When

it comes back the audio-walker will feel a warm appreciation for VOICE A,

for it also brings one back into the diegesis. The voice is knowledgable, but

never distanced and does not usher in solutions. It unearths fragments of

stories or documents and memories in the hope of striking paths between the

audio-walker and the ideas, visions and wishes of other.

IN PLACE OF A CONCLUSION

In chapter 3 I focus on the production of an Aesthetics of Relation. I

introduce and use Édouard Glissant’s notion of Relation to reveal that

esthétique rélationnelle essentially refers to artists that avoid sincere

engagement with others and that conversely those experiments in collaborative

practices conducted under the name new genre public art are much more

 Whereas  Michel  Foucault  (1967)  described  heterotopias  as  real  places  that  can  evoke  several  other  10

sites,  one  after  the  other  (i.e.:  watching  a  film  in  a  cinema  one  experiences  a  skyscraper  in  New  York  and  the  next  minute  a  field  in  Yorkshire),  with  the  term  syn-­‐topias  I  aim  to  describe  constructed,  sonic  environments   that   allow   distinct   places   to   fuse   and   coexist   by   means   of   sound.  Other   than   with  Foucault’s  heterotopias,  where  each  “topos”  is  independent  but  linked  to  the  other  (i.e.:  the  interior  of  a  moving  train  and   its   surrounding   landscape),   relocated  sound,  as  used  by  Fontana,   is  based  on  a  conflict  between  “topoi”   that   fuse   in   such  a  way   that  each  “topos”  exists  parallel   to  and  within   the  other,   different   but   not   separated   from   one   another   (i.e.:   recordings   of   the   sound   that   a   river  produces  over  the  surface  and    under  water  played  back  at  the  same  time  so  that  the  recordings  fuse  into   a   new   sonic   environment).  Ambient   sound,   it   seems   to  me,   has   an   integrating-­‐fusing   quality,  moving  image,  on  the  contrary,  has  a  disjoining-­‐juxtaposing  one.  Thus,  the  first  offers  the  potential  to   construct   sonic   syn-­‐topias,   whereas   the   second   allows   for   the   production   of   (audio)visual  heterotopias.

interesting in relational terms. A work born out of Relation ought to carry

marks of the diversions, shifts, collisions and reconfigurations that formed it. In

this light, I coin the term collective-divergent will to form to inscribe Relation

into a contemporary discourse on aesthetics. I argue that an Aesthetics of

Relation proper is being produced wherever Relation engenders a collective-

divergent will to form in and through relational arts practices.

Having examined these issues in theory and in relation with the works and

practices of a number of contemporary artists, I go on to reveal how they

have affected my own practice-led research in Munich. Central to my decision

to produce an audio-walk on the Arbeitsmigration in Munich was the intention

to inscribe a work – itself inscribed by Relation – into the fabric of the city

of Munich. Using a cast of voices to introduce elements of narrative and

critical diegesis into a feature length audio-walk that guides audiences through

Munich, allowed me to embed many of the different perspectives and

approaches to the (hi)stories and the legacies of the Gastarbeiter into History

Remix. Revealing developments in my practice-led research, I have shown that

the production of an Aesthetics of Relation is possible, even under

controversial situations, and that the practice-led doctorate study is a good

format for such undertaking.