ZUSAMMENFASSUNG LIFE ON EARTH 2009 (PDF - DEUTSCH)

Dear Dr. R,

Thank you very much for your candid email.  You have addressed important issues and initiated an exciting and important discussion in which we would love to take part.  Namely : what is art? why is what CABULA6 does considered art? what is the relationship between what is real and what is fictional? how does art fit within broader social issues directly affecting the communities where the art is produced and consumed?  And finally, what is the role of the audience in contemporary art?  Is it as a “consumer” or as an active member of a community partaking in a communal event - the show?

Here is the email you sent us:

“Sehr geehrte Frau Heu!

Sorry - kochen ist so wirklich nicht meins und angesprochen wurden da halt auch primär Personen, die sowieso kein Problem mit Fremden haben. Wo bleibt  die Kunst? Hätte auch gerne mehr über die Dame aus Tschetschenien erfahren, aber die war leider  nicht sehr gesprächig.  Ich habe auch nicht so Gefühl gehabt, dass sie Leute aus Macondo so glücklich über diese Bewirtung waren, ich glaube umgekehrt wäre es ihnen lieber gewesen.

Mir auch; ich bin gespannt ob ich doch mal nach Macondo komme und wie es dort jetzt weitergeht.

Liebe Grüße

AR”

(Sorry - cooking is not really my thing and those who were addressed there are primarily people who don’t have a problem with foreigners anyway. So where’s the art? I also would have like to have found out more about the lady from Chechneya, but unfortunately she wasn’t very talkative.  I also didn’t have the feeling that the people from Macondo were so happy about the hospitality.  I think they would have preferred it the other way around. Me too:  i am curious to come out to macondo and see how things continue there.  best.  AR)

The central question you ask, “where is the art”  is one with which we have been very involved over the past nine months of working on this project.  It presupposes another even more fundamental question - “what is art?”  And that’s a good question.

In March we wrote a text for the Vienna Curators placing the overall project, Life on Earth, within the contemporary performing arts context of “dialogical art” or “conversational art” as described in Grant Kester’s book “Conversation Pieces” (http://cabula6.com/macondo/?p=492) and Nicolas Bourriaud’s seminal text “Relational Aesthetics.”  (http://cabula6.com/macondo/?p=599).  Kester explains that these artworks are works that exist in public space, which

“challenge the identity and stability of both the artist and the viewer through long-term collaborative engagements with specific sites and constituencies that often exist beyond the normative assumptions of the art world and art institutions…These works draw on improvisational, non-professional forms of creativity, community formation, and problem solving exemplifying…’immersive’ practices…. The actual experiences of the participants…is equally if not more significant than the final ‘product.’

“Life on Earth” should be read within this context - a durational art project which  creates objects of common contemplation around which dialogues emerge and new complex forms of community recognition can surface.  We created a container/sculpture/garden-space which numerous people in the community helped to both build, partially destroy and rebuild, a bus stop and living map culled from the imaginations and memories of members of the community, a series of film gatherings, music events, dance, theater and new media workshops, short films, dinners in our apartment, and finally a sophisticated performance project consisting of a tour moving backwards in time, and the simultaneous transmission of narrative through a cooking and language choreography/improvisation, a formally framed encounter between disparate groups and the reconstitution of those groups into a single entity through a ritualized dinner and storytelling event.  In each of these cases, the “objects” (container, performance, workshops, film gatherings etc) functioned as traditional art presentations in their own rights, but more importantly provided a central social object around which disparate groups with asymmetrical power statuses were able to gather, communicate, disagree and engage on more or less the same level based simply on the fact of being in the same place at the same time - by simply being part of the same community.

The underlying presumption of this approach is that traditional power structures inherent in the typical relationships between performer, audience, artistic subject and art work (or product) can be complicated and called in to question, forcing each member of those gathered around the object to become self-aware in order to re-orient themselves in this new and complicated set of exchanges.  Our ultimate aim is for the focus to move away from the product or object (performance, painting, sculpture, piece of music, etc) and to be refocussed on the group of people who are gathering around the object; that is, for the focus of the work to return people to their own lived experiences, to their own lives.  The framed, fictional gathering should deliver all of us back to an enriched “real” life full of possibilities that have been achieved by seeing who we are in the first place, perhaps simply with new eyes.

Our approach in CABULA6 is to look for different ways of framing reality.  By understanding lived life as a malleable work of art which can be affected and molded by fantasy and play, we enter into systems and attempt to corral, coax or cajole living forces into a particular direction the way one might have to deal with a wild horse, or perhaps navigate a ship through a storm.  We enter into situations which are ultimately out of our control and attempt to harness or in some cases simply ride the powers we confront and are confronted with.  In order to do this, we sometimes have to put our own bodies and lives in the way of harm.  We risk losing control.  And we have to humble the force of our own will in the face of powers greater than us, learning instead to recognize the tell tale signs of power in order to frame the moments we are looking to frame.  Nicolas Bourriaud describes this as “catching the world on the move”:

“the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realties, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever the scale chosen by the artist. Althusser said that one always catches the world’s train on the move; Deleuze, that “grass grows from the middle” and not from the bottom or the top. The artist dwells in the circumstances the present offers him, so as to turn the setting of his life (his links with the physical and conceptual world) into a lasting world. He catches the world on the move”

He then goes on to frame the very concept of art away from objects and artifacts towards a concrete relational exchange,  by claiming that

“Art is a state of encounter.”

The entire dramaturgy of the evening, “Crash Course,” which you took part in, Dr. Ruis,  was designed around the moment of encounter between the two groups, two audiences - the one at “home” in the theater/kitchens, and the guests which arrived from far away.  The act of cooking and language acquisition that we encouraged in your group was a preparation for that eventual encounter.  It was a way of encouraging the intimate knowledge of another person, another reality through the body and activities of that person and world as opposed to through language.   Roland - the person who taught you how to cook the soup - spent part of his life meeting Salpa, the woman from Chechneya whose food you learned to cook, and Roland became your intermediary;  an imperfect guide, if you will, from your reality to the reality of Salpa.  You cooked in a fragment of her actual kitchen.  You cooked her recipe and ate her food.  Roland encouraged you to understand the efficiency with which she cooks.  The silence with which she cooked when he was with her.  You then sat at her table and just like her children, had the opportunity to drink tea and eat seeds and wait.  And finally you were given the opportunity to talk directly with her, to initiate communication to know more about her or let her know more about you.

You state in your email that “angesprochen wurden…Primär personen, die sowieso keinen problem mit Fremden haben.”  But in no way was our attempt to problematize the relationship between two groups which view one another as foreign.  This statement perhaps lays bare your own view of this woman and the world you were encouraged to engage with in a playful manner as “foreign.”  The fact is, she’s not a foreigner.  She’s an Austrian.  The issue then becomes not about whether or not someone is OK or not with a foreigner, but rather, “how do we all belong to the same community.”  It was never Salpa’s job to be any more “gesprächig” than you were.  We just asked her to be there.  Whatever then happened around the dinner table is a personal story between you and her as equals with equal responsibility to communicate or not - whatever you felt was appropriate.

The truth is, we had (at least) three different audiences in that room.  Your role, as everyone in the room, was multiple to the degree you were willing to accept it or not.  If your question “Wo bleibt die Kunst?” refers primarily to formal theatrical concerns let us address them, beginning here - with the audiences - and the ways in which they were formally constituted, dissolved and reconstituted.

Formally speaking, we framed three basic audiences.  Your audience was in costume and on a formal theatrical set.  From the perspective of the group arriving from Macondo, you were actors in a traditional play - a kitchen drama, so to speak.  From your perspective, the people who you had heard about for half an hour were framed in a small black box with an enormous white clock above their heads.  They were performers in a typical “contemporary performance setting”  - they were real time performers, while your group were  temporally indistinct “theatrical” performers - on a set, in costume, playing out a fiction which, from your perspective was real and from the perspective of your audience was a show.  The truth be told, the group that entered with us were no more “from Macondo” than you and your fellow audience members were “from TQW.”   But both groups were staged as such in this moment of encounter as a formal gesture.  The encounter was with one another but also an encounter with people’s own assumptions about the other group, about the “foreignness” of the other and the in/appropriateness of staging this.

Then there was the third audience.  The moment of encounter was dissolved and everyone in the room was engaged in the activity of setting setting the tables, eating the food and eventually listening to the stories from the “film scripts”.  This was a new communal act.  Formally speaking, this act of eating together and listening to the story of how everyone sitting at that table came to be there was essentially a reenactment of a Passover Seder.  A Spring gathering of Jews to re-tell the story of becoming refugees - exiled and wandering through the wilderness, sticking together to survive and telling the story.  In a passover seder, the food that people eat is emblematic of moments of this story.  The narrative is ingested.  In our version, each dish that was eaten, was emblematic of the stories of flight from war - Afghanistani Bolani, Chechnyan Tchorba, Chilean Palta and food from Jews who fled from Vienna in 1938 symbolized by Toyashoshnokedli - a food which is simultaneously Austro-Hungarian and Jewish.  The final movement of the piece was to make us all part of a single audience, combined by mutual experience, activity and similar history.

Perhaps you didn’t read the final film texts in full.  They were handed out after the dinner for those who wanted to know more (it was a conscious decision to provide the texts as literature as opposed to performance in order not to inadvertently re-traumatize people for whom the history being told is still very present).  If didn’t have the opportunity to read them,  we would like to provide a copy in German to you.  As they are written, they provide historical and political contexts to the dinner scenes which we read as “radio plays.”  They are the unspoken worlds surrounding the events of a dinner.   They are not brought up at the dinner table.  They are lived by all of those sitting together.  In our experience, eating and cooking is NEVER only about eating and cooking.  It is about community.  And for us community is largely about the unspoken shared experience of being in the same place at the same time and experiencing the world and events from slightly different perspectives.

For us, part of the challenge of the evening was to answer the question, “how do you create community out of two groups that don’t see the world from the same perspective?”    What we did by framing two disparate groups in which neither one had the sole answer to the meaning of the evening, who are then brought together to reciprocally fill in the missing information while engaging in a communal activity was to create a symbolic choreographic gesture to address this question.  How do we live together?  Is it by cooking together?  By cooking for one another?  Is it by learning each other’s language?  Is it by setting a table together?  Is it by sitting silently with one another?  Is it by passing soup to one another? Is it by telling stories or by breaking bread?  Shouldn’t the story of 1938 live next to Salpa’s story from 2002?  Should she be expected to communicate any more in German - a language she doesn’t master - any more than others should be expected to communicate in Chechnyan? A language you perhaps don’t master?  And yet you are sitting at the same table, eating together, sharing knowledge and this life on earth.

These are the questions we ask and which lie at the heart of our Art Work:  How do we all personally act and behave under the most imperfect of conditions?  How do we acknowledge our lives on Earth as shared experience with others?  How do we play with the fact that none of us have all the answers but still have to engage with one another?  How do we learn to respect one another and accept the fact that maybe we actually don’t respect others?  Would respecting others mean we would have to relinquish some of our power?  The truth is, whether we think we have a problem with foreigners or not,  all people come from different perspectives, have different sets of knowledge and experience, interpolate one another differently and cause - often in spite of our best efforts - damage to those around us.  How do we address this?  How can we change the way we live to be more present and alive and aware?  How can we reduce harm?

To strategically address these questions, CABULA6 looks for what Nicolas Bourriaud refers to as “the interstice” - a small intermediary place which offers the possibility of functioning differently than in pervasive macro systems of power and order.  These are tiny bubbles in which the labels we commonly use to name and understand the world, which we are comfortable with,  don’t quite function.  A place where we are forced to redefine the world.  The set of encounters we staged were an attempt to form an interstice.  An in between place where things can function differently.  Where we are confronted with inequality, sets of inadequate assumptions and beliefs and simultaneously asked to sit together and figure it out.  If you ask us where the art is, it is in the attempt to address this dilemma in the theater - a place of communal gathering.   For us, this is the only art worth pursuing.

Dr. Ruis, thank you for beginning this discussion.  It means a tremendous amount to us.  We feel this is an essential discussion which isn’t really taking place in Vienna at this moment.  Perhaps with your email, we can begin a broad and much needed conversation about the nature of performing arts and community in Europe in the 21st century.

All the best

Jeremy Xido and Claudia Heu

CABULA6

P.S. we are including several texts for your benefit which might help to understand whatever aspects of our letter which might have been unclear.  First is a - as of yet unpublished text by Elke Krasny about the project “Life on Earth” scheduled to come out in “die Presse,” secondly a short article in “der Standard” by Margarete Affenzeller and finally a dramaturgical document by our dramaturge, Igor Dobricic, which can help understand the underlying structural elements of the performance piece.   And in the letter itself we have provided links to texts by Grant Kester and Nicolas Bourriaud which can be found on the Macondo blog http://cabula6.com/macondo/ under the Category of “Theory”

Aktuelle Situation:

Macondo/Zinnergasse befindet sich in seiner 50 jährigen Geschichte in einer sehr kritischen Situation.  Die Ursachen sind zwei einschneidende Änderungen:

• Das Integrationshaus wird im September 2009 geschlossen. Das bedeutet den Wegfall  von Deutschkursen, Koordinationsfunktionen, Betreuungsfunktionen, Sicherheit und Stabilitätsfunktionen für ca. 3000 Leute 
• Die 40 jährige Gartenkultur, die der Boden für ein gutes nachbarschaftliches Verhältnis zwischen den einzelnen Communities und eine weiche, soziale Kontrolle für den ganzen Ort war, kollapiert aufgrund von neu auferlegten Mieten für die Gärten.

Die Folgen sind  zwei soziale Leerstellen, die sehr wesentlich sind. Wenn die Leerstellen nicht gefüllt werden, kann die Nachtbarschaft zu einem kriminellem Ghetto werden.  Das heisst, verstärktes Bandenwesen,  Anstieg der Kleinkriminalität, Konflikte zwischen Nationalitätengruppen und Isolation von der Aussenwelt.

Oder

Aufgrund der speziellen Geschichte des Ortes und dem vorhandenen Potential in der Nachbarschaft, kann Macondo, falls die Leerstellen gefüllt werden, zu einem spannenden Vorzeigemodell Europas werden.

Unser Konzept  soll den bevorstehenden gefährlichen Veränderungen entgegenwirken.  Das 3 Punkte Nachbarschaftsmodell nennen wir “Modellprojekt Macondo”.  

Modellprojekt Macondo Proposal (Deutsch):

Projekt Teil 1

Projekt Teil 2

Projekt Teil 3

ORF THEMA 22 Juni, 2009

ORF THEMA 22 Juni, 2009

(eine Auswahl)

• 7 Mai 2009 : STANDARD  “Hundert Jahre Einsamkeit am Stadtrand Wien” von Margarete Affenzeller
• 29 Mai, 2009 : STANDARD : “Am Rande der Stadt” von Mia Eidlhuber
• 13 Juni, 2009 : DIE PRESSE / SPECTRUM “Hinter der Blechwand: die Welt” von Elke Krasny
• 8 Juni 2009: STANDARD “Aus der Fremde ins Ungewisse” von Martina Stemmer
• 6 Juli, 2009 : KRONEN ZEITUNG : “Hinter der Blechwand” von Doris Vettermann
• 22 Juni, 2009 : ORF THEMA “Macondo” (Video)  von David Krutzler
• 9 Juli, 2009 : JUNGLE WORLD : “Fünfzig Jahre am Rande der Stadt” von Philipp Brugner
• 15 April 2009 : FALTER “Die Stadt, die es nicht gibt” von Florian Niederndorfer
• 13 Mai, 2009 : ORF/OE1 :”Die Gärten von Macondo” von Natasa Konopitzky
• 19 Mai, 2009 : RADIO ORANGE : “Life on Earth” von Helga Neumayer
• 7 April 2009 : GEWISTA URBAN MEDIA “Out of Home with Macondo“
• 19 Mai 2009 : FUNKSOUP “Cabula6 Show was a Wonderful Twist” von Josephine Dorado
• 28 April 2009: DIE PRESSE “Macondo Kino : Filmabende in der Flüchtlingsstadt“
• 5 April 2009 : PUBLIC ART DIRECTORY “Busstop 73a“
• 19 April 2009 : HORIZONT “Macondo in der Simmeringer Haide“
• Juni 2009: A-N MAGAZINE “Stop the Bus”

RADIO SENDUNG

The competition/show will take place on May 2nd, 2009 at 4pm at the Container.

for more information, please call: 01/ 7699138  or  01/ 762063

for directions, click here

Subject: update 4 macondo

Date: April 12, 2009 11:03:32 PM GMT+02:00

herr champascha (tschetschenische “alte”),wollte heute eine gartenparty machen, habe einige zeit auf seinen anruf gewartet, aber es ist nichts gekommen….

January 30, 2009

11. April, 2009

Mamadou Diabate