Atlas critique

Exhibition

Le Parc Saint Leger, Centre d’Art Contemporain, invites le peuple qui manque.

Francis Alÿs, Erick Beltrán, Berger & Berger, Border Art Workshop, Mark Boulos, Lewis Carroll / Henry Holiday, Chto delat?, Fernand Deligny, Michael Druks, Claire Fontaine, Internacional Errorista, Pedro Lasch, Vincent Meessen, Nástio Mosquito, Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza, Lia Perjovschi, Radek Community + Dmitri Gutov, Philippe Rekacewicz, R.E.P. Group, Allan Sekula & Noël Burch, Société Réaliste, Stalker, Endre Tót, David Wojnarowicz /James Wentzy / AIDS Community Television.

Curators : Aliocha Imhoff et Kantuta Quirós

Opening : Vendredi 16 mars 2012 à 18h30

Dates: March 16, 2012 – May 27, 2012

Parc Saint Léger, Centre d’art contemporain
Avenue Conti 58320 Pougues-les-Eaux / France

www.parcsaintleger.fr

“The ‘new critical thoughts’ are an unknown continent, in the process of formation, since the historical defeat of Marxism as a thought and as a movement has ushered in a new era – in which Marxism is present, but in a different mode than before – whose coordinates are still unknown to us. Hence the importance of multiplying and confronting maps.” (Razmig Keucheyan, 2010)¹

At a time when critical thought and contemporary politics are mutating and redeploying themselves, the need has arisen to establish new cartographies of this theoretical continent in formation. Atlas, cartography and diagram, by spatializing forms and modes of thought and critical intellectual work, offer us an optimal visuality. The atlas, as a visual form of knowledge presentation, is said by art historian Georges Didi-Huberman to be designed to capture the fragmentation of the world and “reassemble the world “2. By dismantling and reassembling old categories, by establishing invisible connections and links that had hitherto remained unintelligible, the atlas proves to be the ideal operating model for establishing and proposing synoptic tableaux that would link conceptual archipelagos, world images and political constellations. The diagrammatic thinking of Erick Beltran (Mexico), Lia Perjovschi (Romania) and Vincent Meessen (Belgium) is part of this archaeology of knowledge, while offering forward-looking models of the geography of contemporary critical theories. Their conceptual landscapes, with their strong interweaving of the subjective and the systemic, constitute imaginative encyclopedias, machines of transformation.

All that is solid melts into air

But even more than this, at a time when for many contemporary theorists, geographers and political philosophers (Edward Soja, Fredric Jameson or David Harvey), space dominates time, many geographical concepts, such as cartography, scale, frontier, distance or territory, are proliferating in the field of art, and a resurgence of interest in thinking about space has occurred recently, well beyond geography, architecture or urban planning. Critical theory and the social sciences now appeal with renewed insistence to spatialities to read social phenomena. Capitalism, itself long considered without territory or frontiers, is now thought of as a phenomenon that engages in spatial planning when it invests a territory. For geographer David Harvey3, capitalist crises are physically embodied in the spaces they produce. In his striking diptych All that is solid melts into the air4 (2008), artist Mark Boulos plays with proximity and distance in a dialectical montage. By pitting rebels from the Niger Delta against traders from the Chicago Energy Exchange, on the first day of the subprime crisis, Boulos reveals the causal spatialities between financial speculation and the dispossession of Nigerian workers, through the global circulation of a material that has become immaterial value: oil. “Money does not yet exist, the commodity does not yet exist, the whole symbolizes the ‘metaphysics of capitalism’. With The Forgotten Space (2010), the latest film by artist Allan Sekula and filmmaker and film theorist Noël Burch, these two experimenters in the documentary genre consider the sea as the forgotten space of these globalized times, a place of exchanges and all circulations within the globalized economy.

B/orderlands 5

Theorists of postcolonial thought have also produced spatial analyses of the ideological construction of notions of border and distance. “People who live on a few acres will draw a border between their land and its immediate surroundings and the territory beyond, which they call ‘the land of the barbarians’. (…) Every era and every society recreates its own Others “6 , wrote the Palestinian intellectual Edward Saïd, who described this phenomenon as a “dramatization of distance”. The extent to which toponymy, the geographical naming of territories (in the Americas, for example) or of “near” and “far” (us and the others, the center and the periphery, the national space and the rest of the world, or the Near/Middle East) correspond to epistemic categories, underpinned by the question of who has the power and authority to name and subsume Others within identity categories. Postmodern anthropologists (James Clifford, Johannes Fabian) and radical geographers (Derek Gregory), nourished by postcolonial theory, have also shown that the distancing of “the Others” is the result of imaginary geographical constructions that extend – far beyond the physical and symbolic borders that structure continents, countries and cities – right down to the disciplines of knowledge7. These hegemonic systems of spatial and geographical meaning are now being rewritten by contemporary artistic practices. Thus, while we know how deeply cartography, as a discipline, was involved in the performative production of the narratives of modernity, rationality and positivism, but also of the history of colonialism and national narratives, today it has become the privileged site for the invention of counter-practices and counter-mapographies by artists, which open up lines of escape.

The zero meridian

In the course of the 19th century, the acceleration of colonial ventures by European countries – which had already taken off in the 15th century with the gradual mastery of sea routes and the colonization of the American continent – led to a territorial expansion which, right into the interior of continents and in the extreme regions of the globe, reduced the blank spaces on maps while refining their precision even further. Cartography became not only an instrument for territorial and military appropriation, but also an imperialist ideological matrix. Thus, the homogenization of temporal measurements, through the promulgation of the Greenwich meridian in 1884 as the universal tuning fork of time, imposed an implicitly Eurocentric universalism. With the choice of the zero meridian, this manufacture of universal time was a function of spatial warfare8. It was against this backdrop that Lewis Carroll and illustrator Henry Holiday’s blank, hollowed-out map of the ocean appeared in the short story The Hunt for the Snark, published in 1876. This ideal map of the ocean, stripped of terrestrial conventions and landmarks, could be described by literary theorist Bertrand Westphal as a “paradoxical map, (…) from which a space of freedom might emerge “9 , conjuring up an imaginary of conquest, yet tinged with a nostalgia linked to the end of virgin spaces10.

Upside Down – América Invertida

In 1943, Upside Down / América Invertida, the famous drawing of a map of South America “upside down” by Uruguayan artist Joaquìn Torres Garcìa – representative of the “School of the South” pictorial movement – inverted the representation of the Northern and Southern hemispheres and political, cultural and geo-epistemic hierarchies. Today, a young generation of artists sees Ecuador, the sign of North/South partitions, as a place for rewriting. Ecuadorian artist Estefania Peñafiel Loaiza and Brazilian artist Adriana Varejão present it as a contingent line that arbitrarily truncates postcolonial bodies and subjects. And cartographer and geographer Philippe Rekacewicz (FR), artist/videographer/performer Nástio Mosquito (Angola), collectives Société réaliste (FR), Claire Fontaine (FR), Stalker (Italy), who are interested in displacements, mobilities and migrations, and other nomadic geopoetics, question, more broadly, through disruptive spatialities, North/South epistemologies and hegemonies, the constructivism of borders and national fictions. A new physics of the map is born.

Places-real-and-imagined

“A border is a vague, indeterminate place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. The border between the United States and Mexico is an open wound where the Third World rubs shoulders with the First and bleeds. Open wound 1950 miles long / dividing a pueblo, a culture, running the length of my body, planting fence posts in my flesh / cuts me in two in two / cracks me up cracks me up.” Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands – La Frontera – The New Mestiza (1987) 11

Chicano theorists, writers and conceptual artists (Border Art Workshop, Pedro Lasch, Gloria Anzaldúa) have challenged the naturalness of the Mexican-American border, seeing it simultaneously as wall and passage, suture and break, boundary and threshold between worlds, site of oppositional culture and political struggle. With his major and internationally acclaimed book, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), Gloria Anzaldúa, Chicana poet and theorist of post-colonial and post-feminist studies, envisioned borderlands as liminal spaces at the origin of a new geography of self and knowledge, inaugurating a theory of knowledge based on radical disidentification, loss of control, a space of in-betweenness, where the writer becomes a visionary cultural worker, moving between often conflicting worlds. Anzaldúa’s multilingual methodology embodies what Walter Mignolo calls “frontier thinking”, a double consciousness employing multi-language to offer a new epistemology. Following in the footsteps of the Chicano Art Movement, which emerged in the United States in the 1970s, the Border Art Workshop (BAW) / Taller de Arte Fronterizo (TAF) collective has been working on the political, cultural and imaginary topos of the border since 1985, through site-specific actions on the Mexican-American border. While the Chicano Art movement had already asserted the notion of border culture, and posited Spanglish as a poetics of cultural hybridization, the emergence of BAW / TAF coincided with the enactment of new migration laws in the United States and an industrial intensification of the border.