HOW LATITUDES BECOME FORMS : Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla

Chalk (Lima) Installation at Pasaje Santa Rosa, Lima, Peru, 2002
Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla
Courtesy Lombard-Freid Fine Arts, New York, and Carmen Rita Pérez / Arte Actual, Santa Domingo, Dominican Republic

Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla

Jennifer Allora b.1974 (United States)
lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and San Juan, Puerto Rico
Guillermo Calzadilla b.1971 (Cuba)
lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and San Juan, Puerto Rico

launch interview with Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla

Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla have been working in collaboration since 1995, frequently mining the spaces between sculpture, performance, architecture, and social or public intervention. In their work they try to provide avenues for reflecting on the complex intersection of global politics and personal identity. Often interactive, their work uses the underutilized (quotes of secret desires placed on flat building rooftops for viewing by airplane passengers), the unexpected (a tennis video-game board painted onto the floor of a real tennis court), and the physical (office window blinds that open and shut according to the movement of outside passersby, thus reorienting who controls the power of observation). Through works infused with a generous democratic impulse, they address issues of public engagement and expression. For the ongoing Chalk Project, the artists place huge pieces of chalk in public spaces such as city plazas and invite people to leave their marks, which range from political protests to whimsical drawings, each a poignant yet ephemeral expression of a specific time, place, and individual within the collective.

For How Latitudes Become Forms, Allora and Calzadilla present Charcoal Dance Floor, a highly detailed floor drawing of animated club-goers in Puerto Rico shown from an aerial perspective. Because the drawing is made with unfixed charcoal adhered to wooden panels, it is a work continually in process, decomposing before our eyes and under our feet. As visitors' footsteps gradually erase the drawing, the exquisite and individualized detail of each figure becomes a blur of gray, hinting at the dangers of conformity and homogeneity in our increasingly globalized world. The construction of identity can be a challenging process for the individual but also a beneficial one for the group when each person's awareness of the other is increased. In making that process visible and physical through their group performances--wherein dancing and erasure symbolize losing one's individual identity for the good of the whole--Allora and Calzadilla aim to increase a community's sense of responsibility by pointing to the consequences and the effects of individual actions. Here, politics and ethics intersect on the dance floor.

Allora and Calzadilla have been featured in solo exhibitions at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut (2002), and the Institute of Visual Arts at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee (2002). They have participated in several group exhibitions, including Zoning at The Project in Harlem, New York (2001); the VII Bienal de La Habana, Havana, Cuba (2000); 1999 at P.S. 1, New York, New York; and the XXIV Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (1998).

--Olukemi Ilesanmi

Globalization from the Rear: "Would You Care to Dance, Mr. Malevich?"
Philippe Vergne

ask if this language is the "language to be transformed" that Hall describes. The key idea of Szeemann's exhibition was without a doubt liberation. Indeed, the exhibition and the artists designed forms that in a nondidactic, nonillustrative way were echoing the liberation movements that emerged across the world at the end of the 1960s. The methods and the results were in many ways exceptional, though one may regret that the protagonists were exclusively European or American.[21]

The current exhibition acknowledges the importance of this predecessor, but at the same time points out that the model it represented is not an exclusive one. If our history is one of "permanent changes," looking back at a tradition started in 1969 allows us to free ourselves from it and to project ourselves in a different direction. This idea parallels the definition that Paulo Herkenhoff provides for the relationship between Brazilian culture and modernity: "Modernism in Brazil reconstitutes the past as a possibility of projecting itself in the future ... Brazilian culture reformulated rather than refused the relationship with tradition and past."[22]

Are we, today, facing comparable shifts in terms of politics, history, and aesthetics? Do those shifts define what could be called the global age? Our research for How Latitudes Become Forms took us once again to Brazil, and to a text by Hélio Oiticica, who was not in the Szeemann exhibition but might be seen as a point of departure for many of the practices we have encountered in our travels.[23] In 1966, in an essay in which he articulated what seems to be the nucleus of his activities, Oiticica wrote:

I intend to extend the practice of appropriation to things of the world which I come across in the streets, vacant lots, fields, the ambient world, things which would not be transportable, but which I would invite the public to participate in. This would be a fatal blow to the concept of the museum, art gallery, etc., and to the very concept of "exhibition." Either we change it, or we remain as we are. Museum is the world: daily experience.[24] This short excerpt contains within it many of the elements that are feeding our reflection today: the notion of proximity and locality; the idea of in-betweenness symbolized by wasteland; the outline of an aesthetic of the slightest gesture; the performativity of audiences and artists across disciplines, which is a possible lead toward multidisciplinarity; the critique of museum authority; the increasing importance of the everyday; and the subversive potential of art. These different concepts might serve as the constitutive elements of a specific aesthetic of "thirdness." The term "third" here does not designate an aesthetic geographically located in the so-called Third World. Rather, its meaning derives from the Third Cinema, a body of film theory that explore show cultural practices driven by political and cultural emancipation can equally commit to aesthetic strategies.[25] Because the aesthetic of Third Cinema does not limit itself to a geographical meaning, it can be extended across disciplines and applied to other disciplines, such as performing arts and visual arts.

The works of Japanese artist Tabaimo--anime films that are bittersweet and seductive, yet repulsive--belong to such an aesthetic (pp. 241-243). Colorful, naive, clumsy, and fragile at first sight, these narrative and poetic playlets achieve a sharp deconstruction of Japanese social systems. Her critique relies on a manipulation of Japanese stereotypes (images of the "salary man," the "Japanese woman," public baths, sumo fighters, and commuter trains) using the form of yet another Japanese stereotype: the underground anime aesthetic. The critique that results from the problematization of these stereotypes focuses on nationalism and its relationship to economic achievement or failure, reflecting a period of deep crisis of values (work, patriarchy) that alters the hierarchical construct of Japanese society. As a result, gender politics (in Japan as elsewhere) come under the gun in Tabaimo's work, though it may appear cute and girlish on a superficial viewing. The complexity of her work is that it reconciles the terms of political struggle with an attention to form and to aesthetic strategies.

21 One exception was Philippine artist David Medalla.

22 Paulo Herkenhoff, introduction to Núcleo histórico: antropofagia e histórias de canibalismos, exh. cat. (São Paulo: XXIV Bienal de São Paulo, 1998), p. 42.

23 "We" includes the Walker Art Center curators who joined me in organizing this exhibition: Douglas Fogle, for Brazil and India, and Olukemi Ilesanmi for South Africa.

24 Hélio Oiticica, "Position and Program," in Hélio Oiticica, exh. cat. (Rotterdam: Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art; Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1992), pp. 103-104.

25 See Michael Wayne, "The Critical Practice and Dialectics of Third Cinema," Third Text, no. 52 (summer 2000). In this article Wayne uses Gillo Pontecorvo's 1966 film The Battle of Algiers as a primary case study for his reflections on the aesthetics of the Third Cinema.

Translocations
Jeebesh Bagchi, Steve Dietz, Gunalan Nadarajan, Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Yukiko Shikata

In the near future, it will become important to seek the new possibility as much as possible and to produce the human space following the model of the collective. … Here, works are not "created" by a single author, but "produced" by collaborations regarded as the production of the space … and the space could be said to be a "public space"… This space can be realized by taking the way of the "public domain" or the "commons." Where do those "commons" exist?[21]

We might think of this as a new kind of translocal entity, which is an agent or agency to connect with us and others, and also to connect us with each other (this is also done, for example, by Knowbotic Research's IO_dencies project).

* * * * *

From: Steve Dietz <steve.dietz@walkerart.org>
Date: Wed Mar 13, 2002 9:31am
Subject: Re: translocations

Yukiko,

Thanks. I think the movement you make from translocal to information commons is important. There is a certain parallelism between global/local, nomadic/fixed, public/private, which is very interesting.

* * * * *

From: Raqs Media Collective <raqs@sarai.net>
Date: Wed Mar 13, 2002 8:28am
Subject: nomadism and routes

Dear Steve, Yukiko, and Guna,

It is great to see the list really warming up and all of our postings substantiating one another.

Guna has raised a very important point about the "limits of nomadic strategies" because, as he says, "there is a tendency for such strategies not to have a life after their initial interventions and effects."

While this is a very necessary caveat to keep in mind, it also presumes that nomadism is seen as being inherently contingent on impermanence.

We think, however, that nomadism is not a one-off singular movement from one location to another. It requires regularities, and returns. This is the difference between the nomad and the migrant. The nomad walks the same paths between places; the migrant leaves one place for another.

The betweenness of the first movement and the finality of the second departure enclose between them a world of a difference. In fact, this difference may be what we are struggling to define as the distinction between translo-cality and the hegemonic form of globalization. This is not to say that translocality is antithetical to all forms of the global imaginary, but of that, more later.

The paths on which nomads walk need to be maintained over time and across generations. While settlements have witnessed ebbs and flows, cities have been depopulated and repopulated, and so have trade routes. The entire history of Central Asia, and the languages that many of us speak, from Turkey to Bangladesh, bear witness to the obstinate persistence of nomadism across generations. This permanence requires that there be stable institutions of hospitality for practices of nomadism. Hence, sarais. Hence, the settlements that grew with sarais as their nuclei. Nomadism and location have in this instance at least a symbiotic relationship. And the decline of many cities and seemingly permanent settlements in our geographies has to do with the inability

21 See Henri Lefebvre, La Production de l'espace (Paris: Éditions Anthropos, 1974); author's translation from the Japanese ed. (Tokyo: Aoki-Shoten Publishers, 2000).

"Le Cinema est un Language Universel"
Cis Bierinckx, Philippe Vergne

Cis Bierinckx and Philippe Vergne in conversation at the Walker Art Center, August 29, 2002.[1]

Philippe Vergne: As a film and video curator you've been programming across disciplinary boundaries for a long time now. Why do you think it's important for your practice to break through these boundaries?

Cis Bierinckx: For me, it's always a question of looking farther than your own nose. Breaking boundaries is very important in our world because the world is conditioned primarily by broadcasting and manipulated images. It's clear that in certain (even highly developed) countries the televised image fulfills nothing more than a conditioning task. Pictures are framed. You can select what you want to show and what you want to crop out. For us in the film/video field, it's important to give the screen to the voiceless, to subjects that are not covered by television, journals, mass media. Most of the television networks are connected to all sorts of national politics, to commerce, to industry, or to ideological groups ranging from the left to the extreme right. Cinema can provide a platform for other perspectives and voices. It is remarkable that even in the early history of film there was a very specific sense of "globalism" in place . . . first by anthropological films, later by festivals. In the early days of Cannes, which is one of the oldest film festivals in the world, one could discover the films of Indian master Satyajit Ray, which confronted the viewer with an Indian culture quite unfamiliar to Western audiences.

I can't explain why it has always been easy to cross borders in cinema, whereas it has taken a long time for the visual arts to develop an equally global interest. Although there were always visual artists who were crossing borders, even going back to the nineteenth-century French painters who were fascinated with Japan or chinoiserie. They reflected this fascination with the exotic in their paintings. Traditionally, however, curators either didn't show any real interest in non-Western work or organized exotic shows that did show African or Chinese art but avoided any global reflection. Times were different and colonialism was still strong then; today the global is active in the visual arts in a very different way and functions as a means of challenging a century of orthodoxy.

Film has always had a different attitude. Certainly in Europe, festivals were always looking to the "other," were open to the "other" and to those voices. Maybe it was simply because cinema was easier to transport than paintings. Film has long been viewed as entertainment and not as art. Movies never played in special buildings--art temples that could be entered only by climbing up the stairs of the sacred. The movie house was always a public, popular space rather than a holy dome for spiritual enlightenment.

PV: You've talked to me before about Cinema Novo in Brazil. What was the importance of that movement?

CB: Cinema Novo of the 1960s was the cinema of the poor. An unofficial history I've heard concerns an obscure Brazilian filmmaker, José Marins, who made horror pictures with almost no money. The shoestring budget

1 Cis Bierinckx is curator of film and video at the Walker Art Center; Philippe Vergne is curator in the visual arts department and curator of How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age.

Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla

"I intend to extend the practice of appropriation to things of the world which I come across in the streets, vacant lots, fields, the ambient world, things which would not be transportable, but which I would invite the public to participate in. This would be a fatal blow to the concept of the museum, art gallery, etc., and to the very concept of "exhibition." Either we change it, or we remain as we are. Museum is the world: daily experience."

There is a certain parallelism between global/local, nomadic/fixed, public/private . . .

The movie house was always a public, popular space rather than a holy dome for spiritual enlightenment.