Talk-Show: Der geteilte Himmel / The Re-unified Territory
a project for Introducing Site II, GFZK, Leipzig and Leipzig TV
talk show with Tanja Ostojic and Anne Koenig and 30 participants
Curator: Suzana Milevska
The issue of integration of Europe, the re-unification of East and West Germany, as well the integration of the emigrants that enormously proliferated after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the USSR and Yugoslavia, were the first associations that came to my mind when I received the concept of the larger framework of the project Cultural Territories.
The remapping of Europe and the other geo-political transformations that rapidly took place and converted the seemingly stable structure into territorial rhizomes and multiplicities (what Irit Rogoff formulated as ‘terra infirma’) opened inevitably the question of integration of the newly developed units, either geographical and societal, or individual. Deterritorializations that according to Deleuze and Guattari necessarily inflicts complementary reterritorializations, take place both on macropolitical and micropolitical level, and usually derive from conflicts and contradistinctions of these both levels. Since the macropolitical level, the politics and ideology of the re-unification of both German states and the constitution of the European Union are very complex issues that need extrapolation in more appropriate political context in order to be discussed properly, in the project Der geteilte Himmel/Re-unified Territory I chose to take on the micropolitical level that nevertheless is interwoven and always reflects the issues decided on macropolitical level.
Therefore the title that obviously refers to Krista Wolf’s novel Divided Sky from 1963, a very straight forward narrative that discusses the love story of the woman torn between the man and the system that she feels for. Actually the novel was my first encounter with the problem of divided sky in Germany back in late seventies (it was translated in Macedonian). After realizing that the writer herself got involved in some debates about the re-unification that came later I felt it reflects the best the ambiguity of the integration process.
The exhibition Introducing Sites II provided me with a very appropriate context for the idea that I had already: to ‘curate’, or better to direct a talk show for a local TV station. This concept cropped up as a kind of attempt to break the vicious circle of many projects addressing social and cultural issues that usually have no impact on the absent subjects that some of those projects were supposedly aimed and created for at first place. The talk show seemed to be a very appropriate medium for discussing integration, taking into account the assumption of the enormous heterogeneity of the TV audience in contrast to the fact that the galleries and the museums are not visited frequently enough by the audiences that do not belong to culturally and artistically informed middle class communities (Alan Read’s statement ‘You cannot address the absence’, uttered recently when he discussed the partial failure of his theatre project, formulates the best this paradox).
To address the issue of integration through a talk show, presumably one of the most populist television genres, that was to be shown both on local Leipzig TV, and in the Gallery for Contemporary Arts, also aimed to mutually and reciprocically introduce the three different sites to each other: the gallery, the TV channel and the private homes of the TV viewers.
The artists Tanja Ostojic and Anne Koenig were invited to discuss the delicate topic of integration throughout a recorded conversation held in the presence of an audience of about thirty people. Instead of asking the artists to create works for the exhibition they were invited to activate their memory, to reveal as much information as possible about the way that the integration affected their professional and private lives, and also to try not to influence the opinion of the audience with already convincingly packed theoretical context, or with aesthetically created objects.
The issue of integration is with me for quite a long time. The country of my origin, Macedonia, one of the ex-Yugoslav republics and the only one that was forced to keep the historic reference to now non-existing country is not and it is not going to be a part of the European Community in near future: once deterritorialized and still not reterritorialized. However the conditions under which it can be integrated are already being discussed and prescribed during each single meeting between the local politicians and the European authorities. The issues that bother all of us non-members of EU are mostly dealing with the privileges and advantages of being integrated in order to estimate if it is worth the trouble to meet the required conditions and to sacrifice the previously established cultural, economic and social routines in order to enter the European Union. Obviously to discuss culturally different territories and local sites is difficult without touching on the political differences.
However, instead to dwell and cling on the discourse of inclusion and exclusion, unequal exchange, globalisation and other general political issues I chose to discuss the issue of integration with the invited artists from their different subjective positions that are also reflected within their art practices.
Anne Koenig, an artist from Leipzig who experienced the re-unification of East and West Germany while in her twenties, and thus was ‘integrated’ in another cultural and political constellation without making any substantial geographical and territorial movements, works on sound based projects. She has developed a very specific procedure of ‘aural cartography’. Her archival project that turned into an urban sound map of Leipzig can be also treated as a kind of machinery device for memory retrieval. Her answer to the question ‘what did she lack the most about the period before the re-unification’ was ‘the silence’. To retrieve the very specific silence of the past suddenly revealed as so important.
Tanja Ostojic’s life was directly affected by the integration process from the position of a foreigner who came to live in Düsseldorf as a wife of the artist Klemens Golf whom she married in 2002 trough her interactive internet project ‘Looking for a Husband with EU passport’. With miming the procedures used by some ‘personal contacts agencies’ on internet her project simultaneously became a critique of the cyber prostitution with East European women. In order to acquire ‘the obscure object of desire’: the EU passport, as a citizen of Yugoslavia, she had to go through many different social, cultural and legal procedures that entailed the other side of the integration process. The most important reason for her participation at the talk show was her recently developed ‘Integration Project’, consisting of series workshops, dinners and other social activities.
Both artists are obviously not creators of object based art so that it was easy to negotiate this unusual format of co-operation. The assumption that there must be some similarities between the positions of a foreigner who faces the new cultural context of the ‘host’ country, and the position of a ‘becoming foreigner’ - when you are caught in a situation when your country changes overnight, proved to be relevant but also problematic. The questions and answers about the language, law, money, work, etc., revealed a very complex ‘map’ of delicate terrains, and the doubt in the success of the integration project expressed by both guests was probably the only obvious similarity that at the end of the conversation made the comparison plausible and translatable.
The message that was emitted through our conversation was full of ‘noise’, to use the language of information theory, simply because there is no one univocal message in regard to the problem of integration. To grasp and define its complexity was impossible task to be completed in only forty minutes. I am also aware that we did not make the problem any clearer, that we did not offer any recipes for ‘easy integration’, and, finally, that we were not amusing, sensational or anything else that rates as a successful TV programme.
Still, the fact that four times during prime TV time the local viewers had the possibility to recall (either them being foreigners or native citizens of Leipzig) their own experience of the process of integration, and also the several profound questions that came from the audience in the improvised studio, when recording the talk show, were prove of the awareness for the urgency of such discussions.
