[-empyre-] activism and networks

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all

the recent posting by David McIntosh touched a few chords with me;
and thanks for your critique of the new term that was initially proposed here (the value of which is indeed questionable);
I also found your reference to Buenos Aires contexts (and graffiti and stencil art works at two different moments in history) and then the late 1980s AIDS crisis and the wider activisms it generated very helpful
and insightful, both in terms of the necessary political mobilization and the public strategies (Crimp's writing you mentioned, and Patrick added the reference to Avram Finkelstein and the design of Silence=Death poster
or, in extension, the "public" works of Gran Fury and many others (later also involving the Quilt), but also in regard to the discussion here on what constitutes documentation or why documentation of actions might also be actions
or whether it is necessary and unavoidable and proactive.

Zach introduced a good way of looking at forward documentary performance, when saying that "in the installation context, images are more about utopic desires, exceeding their specificity, 
rather than documentation of a past performance", but this also tends to treat "documentation" perhaps to reductively as images (film/photography) in an installation or a similar platform, even wider
networks if you will, but different from, if I remember now, what was brought forward here in the beginning of the month (by Selmin and Samara) when public protests were addressed  –  I would much like to hear more about your experience and understanding of the Gezi Park protests and other moments of occupations (in New York or elsewhere, perhaps the Occupy movement is now no longer fresh in mind or remembered as failure of all the claims of
dissemination?). 

When I look at the expressive performances during the Istanbul protests, there are numerous ones to be mentioned, and Hayriye Koç Başara, a visual artist from Istanbul,  recently showed some examples during a workshop she gave at our Performance Research Seminar Series at Brunel , e.g. she selected photographs she had taken, and also videos on YouTube she had gathered (some by anonymous editors who only mentioned their blood group in the credits,  A+,  A-, 0...), pointing to a young man who played the guitar, while the police with their water cannons lined up, there was the young extravagant dancer who danced/adopted a Sufi whirling dance that went on for a long while and increasingly involved and incorporated more people and bystanders from the crowd, including a flower vendor, women and young teenagers out en masse to be present/public/demonstrative in the way they dress, behave, sing, dance (and laugh into the many cameras and cell phones), there were hackers who tapped into electrical lines to have power, there were people providing food,  there was the Standing Man who began his protest silently and perhaps not readably (thus disaligned from the protest, his simply standing there illegible until secret police arrived to inspect his backpack and question him - his silent standing then became readable, and soon, apparently, generated solidarity actions and not only in Istanbul...), and so on, a huge diverse range of activities, everyday spatial and living practices, specific articulations, and also strengths of sustaining such protest in the face of governmental or police/military repression, and yes, the old Gran Fury poster comes back to mind, but that equation Silence=Death was not an artwork and not just advertising of course, and here it becomes difficult for me to discuss the "aesthetics" or performance character of resistance, it is not so interesting to worry about the artistic dimension, is it, unless you argue that strong protest movements (and effective ones) are always creative and use any and all methods (by any means necessary), and as Hayriye suggested, even the boy with the guitar, useless and futile playing of songs, in face of terror, is not without utopian energy. Romantics remember the flowers put into the tank machine guns in Prague 68;   the man with his two plastic bags stepping in between the line of tanks on Tiananmen Square. 


Here a workshop announcement that just came to me this morning from BADCo (Zagreb), another one of their very provocative meeting points -  not too long ago I mentioned here their gathering/encampment at the river - "ecological camping at Jakusevac" they called it, to carry out a program of performances, exhibit work and open discussion on ecology and the city, waste and its management ( *Nature needs to be constructed*, September 2013). The new one, with choreographer Christine Gagg,  is titled
>>
"Frame by Frame" / *Kadar po kadar*
06.12.2013.  @ net.culture club mama, Preradoviceva 18, Zagreb
::
In "DeSacre!" (2013), a docu-performance that brings together quotes of Stravinsky’s and Nijinsky’s "Le Sacre du Printemps" of 1913 and the artistic action of Pussy Riot in Moscow’s Cathedral Christ the Saviour 2012, Christine Gaigg uses methods of re-enactment and film-analysis. A close reading of this piece is at the heart of the workshop. As another example of deriving choreography from film- and video-analysis she will use samples of her work to offer insight into a method which over the last ten years Gaigg has developed together with composer Bernhard Lang. Their loop-grammar intertwines music and dance on the grounds of difference and repetition and is derived at great length from experimental film and video. Examples of this body of work are the "TRIKE-Series" (2004-2012) and "Maschinenhalle#1" (2010), with the conceptual integration of technology. The guideline of the workshop is the analytical eye: tracing movement with visual media and using this knowledge for dance and choreography.
>>


As their methodology seems quite a fascinating assemblage of strategies discussed here (however emphasizing the performance dimension more than 'documentary'), it may give us more food for thought to trace the politics of movement.

regards

Johannes Birringer
DAP-Lab, London
http://www.brunel.ac.uk/dap

PS.    This year's Performance Research Seminar Series is listed here:  http://people.brunel.ac.uk/dap/boiler14.html