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| The deep of the modern Elīna Dūce, Visual Arts Theorist Manifesta 9 | |
| The roving European Biennial of Contemporary Art Manifesta 9 is taking place from 2 June to 30 September in Genk, in the Belgian region of Limburg. The Manifesta events this year will be held, contrary to any previous time, at one single venue – in the former industrial complex known as the Waterschei, which used to be one of the major coal mining sites in 20th century Europe. At the busiest time of working – the beginning of the installation of the Manifesta exposition, we invited the curator of the exhibition The Deep of the Modern, Cuauhtémoc Medina, to an epistolary conversation. | |
 Former coal mine of Waterschei. Genk, Belgium. 2011 Photo: Kristof Vrancken | |
| Studija: Manifesta is well known as a contemporary art biennial. You are the first curator of the event who is focussing on the past, not only due to The Age of Coal exhibition artworks that date from the 19th century, but historical evidence as well, as in the exposition 17 Tons, where visitors will be able to get acquainted with an exploration of cultural production derived from collective memory. What prompted you to build the event as this kind of cross section, in this manner? Cuauhtémoc Medina: The way I see the project is as an intersection between contemporary art, art history and the contemporary culture of legacy. In that sense, the project is not so much focused on the past, but on the tension between different eras of the history of production, and the way they define, in turn, cultural production. Such a combination derives from both critical and strategic reasons. We want to make a project where contemporary artworks interact with a wider cultural context and relate to issues that have been pertinent to artistic production in a long-term perspective. The Age of Coal, the historical section, which I am curating with Dawn Ades, is an essay in a material perspective on the history of art that, we believe, covers relatively unknown ground and suggests a direct relationship between contemporary art and possible changes in our ways of thinking about the art of the past. We want to believe that the issues we cover in the historical section will enter into direct dialogue with the contemporary works we have selected, and encourage the audience to take the contemporary art works together with their full social and historical implications. By the same token, we want to transfer some of the cultural capital that contemporary art operators take for granted in our field to the participants of the 17 Tonnes heritage section, suggesting the significance that their activities have around the transmission between the past and the future. My co-curator of the contemporary section Katerina Gregos and I agree in feeling that the recent mega-exhibitions of contemporary artists were running the risk of lacking distinction and sabotaging the correct appreciation of contemporary artworks because of the emphasis on numbers; given that the pursuit of inclusion of new artists is not so much on the agenda of exhibitions, given the significant number of institutions and biennales that have grown around the world, we thought we could focus on creating a more demanding exhibition within a complex set of cultural arguments. Studija: Speaking about the concept of Manifesta 9, you often refer to collective memory. In what meaning do you use it? C.M.: I think the concept we most use is the “energy of memory”, which relates to the enormous impulse and investment that the inheritors of the coal mining industry, ex-miners and their descendants, have in calling attention to the significance of their past, and the need of a certain exchange of experiences between generations. However, it is clear to me that the effects of the changes of industrial systems, and in general the formative process of the world involved in the history of production, creates a social memory which does not only relate to the representations and stories people carry in their heads and transmit themselves from one generation to the other, but that which is inscribed in geographies, artworks, documents and materials. The exhibits and cultural practices in the section titled 17 Tonnes are all involved in a certain wayto the question of memory, either in terms of artifacts, mythologies, documents, or artworks: from the dust colouring the fabric of Eva Gronbach’s fashion designs, made with clothing recycled from miner’s uniforms, to the police documents relating to the clashes between police and mineworkers in Zwartberg in 1966, to the plants preserved in a wasteland in Genk in a work by Lara Almarcegui, to the legend of a mine witch evoked by an issue of a comic strip; all of those are instances where we have inscribed a relationship with the past, encoded or sedimented in many different ways, either in objects or ideas or people. | |
 Former coal mine of Waterschei. Genk, Belgium. 2011 Photo: Kristof Vrancken | |
| Studija: In the Art Salon discussion that was held within the framework of Art Basel Miami last December, you said that one of the effects of capitalism was that we didn’t have any clarity as regards what history is for and what to do with that structure, and substantiated that an excess of artworks related to history was an indication that history wasn’t working. Businessmen mostly live with the idea of the future. Why do you think we need to, and that it’s time to look back to the past? C.M.: I think my observation is, above all, a description of an extended cultural condition: capitalism remains a teleology based on the constant claim of a promised future that appears entirely immune to critique. I do not need to argue for a need of the past to note that the power of capital is one of the first power formations that does not need any traditional authority, neither an argument of origins, nor of a notion of legacy, and in that sense it is logical. Marx’s remarks on how the bourgeoisie is the most revolutionary class in history is related to a totalitarianism of modernization, which, despite our academic and cultural postmodern arguments, appears as a naive conviction both of the propaganda of the future of the social system and the unconscious of production. In that sense, by underlining the ways contemporary art and culture are also a form of dissent against this permanent futurology, I am not trying to subsume those interests under a project: our task as curators lies in mobilizing forces appearing within artworks and other forms of culture that, in relation to this topic, point towards a constant questioning of the ways in which social memory reclaims a different social space, and in works that question the transience of the present. The urgency of such an operation lies in the desires and questions posed by the works themselves. How to put that to use, beyond the claim those cultural forms make on us, is something which depends on a transformation of our public and social mores, and which I do not believe it is my task as curator to dictate. Studija: You were the curator of Teresa Margolle’s project What Else Could We Speak About? (2009) for Mexico’s pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale. During its implementation, you faced political obstacles caused by the sensitive issue of drug trafficking. Manifesta also has experienced trouble because of complaints in political circles (I’m talking about M6 (2006) that was closed down). Working on the M9 theme, don’t you have impression that it is politically advantageous to hush up history? C.M.: The political tension surrounding Teresa Margolles’s project was not so much related to drug dealing per se as what, in retrospect, has proven to be one of the most misguided policies of the Mexican government in the recent years: the failure and disgrace of trying to combat drug dealing by force, aligning with the hypocritical policies of the USA. On the part of the curator, such intervention involved putting into question the rationale of the pavilion as an official cultural representation of the country, and a contribution to the political debate and the process of mourning that involved us as citizens of a particular nation state. Margolles’s project involved, then, both an oppositional stance towards the fake consensus around Mexican president Calderon´s so-called war on drugs, and a poetic and irreducible intervention in relation to the invisible forces that Margolles mobilizes through her low materialist aesthetics and the use of death as subject matter in the making of very subtle artistic interventions. The politics of M9 are not framed in the same way: we are trying to address sensible and polemical issues of the locality where the exhibition will take place, Genk in Belgian Limburg, the question of the heritage of coalmining, but hoping to show the complexity of the subject without assuming an oppositional role. Manifesta includes an attempt to highlight the role of the organizations and institutions of the ex-miners, granting them a space of visibility in the exhibition, and helping in creating a congress-symposium next September where questions of cultural policy related to industrial heritage will be discussed. The show is intervening in the space of opinion and influences surrounding the relations between contemporary culture, memory and the experience of industrialization, and at the same time starts off a local quest for defining a complex cultural politics. This is a different setting, where as a curator I am very grateful of being allowed a role into a specific social predicament which, despite the fact that it has analogies with questions that affect me, is not entirely mine. | |
 Former coal mine of Waterschei. Genk, Belgium. 2011 Photo: Kristof Vrancken | |
| Studija: With the Manifesta 9 team you had explored ways of contemporary art reflections on the changes in manufacturing. What are your observations, your conclusions? C.M.: Although Katerina Gregos and I worked with the aim of looking for works that would have a complex poetical structure, I am astonished by the variety of reflective and allegorical ways in which some of the works we selected address the experience of social and economic change, and the possible underlying connections between the poetics of works that are geographically and historically unrelated. There are several works that connect detritus with long term social and natural processes, in something that has to do with the enormous significance that waste and leftovers have in the industrial system, from Maarten Vanden Eynden’s gathering of plastic waste in the seas, to the processing of the remains and memories of the utopias of nuclear energy by Rossella Biscotti, Lina Selander or Claire Fontaine, and the performative meditation on office work refuse by Ante Timmermans. Several works, such as Jota Izquierdo’s Yellow Capitalism, Ni Haifeng’s Paraproduction factory and Paolo Woods are exploring extremely distant social processes that truly connect, in global scale spaces of production, consumption and representation. I am very excited with the works that bring together the rethinking of the different genealogies of workers’ movements, from Magdalena Jitrik’s paintings concerned with the rift between Victor Serge and Trotsky, to Nicoline van Harskamp’s exploration of the letter exchanges in anarchism to Nemanja Cvijanovic’s work with the ghosts of internationalism, or Bea Schlingelhoff’s homage to Simone Weil. I am very impressed with the way artists refuse the colonized epistemology of the documentary, to suggest forms of knowledge and experience that keep on relating history within their artworks. I wonder, however, if I should call these routes “conclusions” as pointers to modalities of thinking that are interesting in refusing a means-end logic of knowledge. Studija: You have concealed the names of participating artists in the M9 until now. What kind of art projects can we expect in the contemporary part – the exhibition Poetics of Restructuring? C.M.: By now, as you know, the list is out: we tried to make a selection of works of significant diversity that nonetheless takes into account the task of making a proper exhibition space out of a ruin of a mine, with a certain concern for the relationship of works in space, and in relation to the ruin. Studija: Manifesta has a reputation of being the discoverer of emerging artists. Will M9 bring to the forefront any new names? C.M.: Certainly, and not only in the contemporary section, but in the heritage and the historical sections as well. I do not think that artists such as Michael Matthys, Tomaz Furlan, Marge Monko, Goldin+Senneby or Ben Cain, to name a few, have been represented properly in other exhibitions. But by showing Aglaia Konrad, Ana Torfs or Carlos Amorales or Kendell Geers the way we are presenting them, we are not confirming common places. Showing designer Irma Boom as a relevant artist for the relationship between industry and art, or including collaboration between Raoul Vaneigem and Nicolas Kozakis, involves unexpected views on contemporary culture. But one decision involved in this exhibition is indeed not to indulge in age, gender or disciplinary divisions, as central for the criteria of a show that is based on a concept, rather than on a strategy of representation. | |
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| Studija: You have visited approximately 250 artists’ studios for the selection of participants for the contemporary art exhibition. Have you included artists from the Baltic States in your research? C.M.: Marge Monko and Visible Solutions are from Estonia. Studija: What would you wish to visitors of Manifesta 9? C.M.: I would like them to enjoy and profit from the heterogeneous object we have created, and at the same time, to become a heterogeneous audience as well, where local and international forces find themselves equally addressed. I hope that they can share some of the intellectual, political and aesthetic passions we have tried to respond to during this project. | |
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