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You
Are Here But Why? A Free Festival of Mapping
worked in collaboration with TRAMA
at the exhibition Again
For Tomorrow
at the Royal College of Art.
1:1 MAPPING March 16th 2006
1:1:1:11:1:11:1:1:1:1:1
In
the end, it was the weaving
that
we liked >>>
'Only by assuming the political responsibility of creating collectively shall
we earn the opportunity
to think of ourselves as free'
Claudia
Fontes, TRAMA(1)
Finding...
Early
in 2006, Claudia Fontes (TRAMA) approached YOU ARE HERE BUT WHY? about participating
in the 'Again For Tomorrow' show
at the Royal College of Art as an activation
of a 'temporary node of Trama's network in London'. Trama is a network
of artist / organisers primarily centered in Latin America that seeks to extend
the autonomy and self-empowerment of all those involved through a programme
of 'cooperation and confrontation'.
For several years, TRAMA has been collecting a series of maps spontaneously
drawn by var ious audiences in differing circumstances. This Trama Atlas is
'an attempt to question the assumptions set in motion by the international
art establishment whenever it organises its discourse about the globalisation
process and the dynamic of local inclusion into the exhibiting strategies or
strategies for international artistic exchange'.
It is one of the intention of this collaborative mapping project to discuss
basic issues - 'What does globalisation mean to different people? Who has
the power to access which culture? Which currency enables us to join a globalized
cultural game?'. At 'Again For Tomorrow', the Atlas was to be 'activated'
through a number of events in both London and Argentina'.
'Trama' in Spanish (as we understand it!) means 'to weave' or 'to
plot'. Claudia came to 56a Infoshop to find map people and luckily we were
in. During the chat, we began to see quite quickly that we all had much in common,
in ways of working and also in our approach to, and our desires, for the world.
In this simple way, the weaving began.
Responding to an initial TRAMA proposal to the RCA, we were excited by the focus
on 'the archive' as a major thread to the exhibition (2). Trama pointed up three
main working themes based in archival and/or recovery of archive work that would
concentrate upon:
· Archives as grassroots for the formation of communities
· Archives as producers of evidence
· Archives as spaces of creation of a common imaginary
We wrote to Claudia:
'...Without detailing too much more of what we have (in our archive), it seems
better to focus on the three themes you propose to the RCA. Part of the intention
of the Map Festival was to increase the number of self-made maps we archive
at 'The Map Room (is open...)'. With this in mind, we came away with a bigger
and for ourselves, wildly increased sense of what self-made mapping can be.
Here, the Festival was a two-way process, an exchange of an idea that encouraged
self-mapping but also the 'formation of community', as you say, as people who
came to the Festival became attached to the micro-community that built during
the month long Festival. It was quite an emotional experience to connect and
play, map, walk and talk with those who felt drawn to the Festival. This feeling
may be familiar to you from your work with Atlas Trama and that marvellous possibility
in the spontaneous communal creation of hand drawn maps. In Trama's work with
Atlas, there also seems to be a resonance with our Map Festival's initial question
'You Are Here But Why?'. Self mapping, communal mapping are simple creative
processes that delve very deepy into the puzzles of our existence and individual
and collective subjectivity. Like you say, the map is an 'excuse'. We did not
seek to recreate personal information as a 2D plan, as something 'artistic',
or as something expert, but to make connections through the mapping. In a wider
sense, the Infoshop often functions as merely an 'excuse' to continue meeting
people. If we only existed to sell radical books and CD's, I think the project
would not have lasted more than a few years. Primarily we are a social centre.
Our continued presence and the archive are our 'evidence' of self-directed building
and construction of our collective Infoshop history - fantasy, politic, culture?'
After another meeting in a cafe at London Bridge, Claudia showed us the final
RCA plan. The main activities would be - 'an invitation for audiences to
make their own contribution to a collective mural drawing depicting a map of
the world. Resorting to various institutional and organisational means in keeping
with Trama's stance, the action will be repeated in three diverse scenarios:
in the exhibition rooms at the RCA, in London's streets, and in Argentina'.
After the fact 'all conversations, discussions and secondary actions spontaneously
arising during the actions will be documented and published in an interactive
website...providing the opportunity to see and compare local outcomes from every
chosen location as well as to participate in a debate about general conclusions....the
action itself is only a tool meant to induce spontaneous ways of organisation
in temporary territory of belonging which, hopefully, may inspire and nuture
collaborations, discussions and exchanges of viewpoints...'.(3)
We agreed to work with the project and to consider a London location for a repeat
mapping of the world outside of the institution. It was also during this meeting
that Claudia brought to our attention difficulties she was experiencing with
the organisers at the RCA. A text meant for the exhibition catalogue had been
censored and various obstacles were being placed in the way of the map-making
Losing...
YOU ARE HERE BUT WHY? is a small network of people engaged in a
wide range of activities from creative mapmaking, writing radical history, putting
on themed events, opposition to national borders, encouraging international
activity, making craft-based work, taking photographs and archive making. We
do not describe ourselves as 'artists' and come from active backgrounds that
remain critical of both the role of the artist and of culture itself in our
society.
This was the first time that YOU ARE HERE BUT WHY? had been approached to work
with an art institution. Although initial meetings were with one network member,
the proposal was circulated among the network for comment and fleshing out possibilites.
Some people wanted nothing to do with the RCA on principle that there was nothing
to be gained or produced from collaboration. Others agreed to support the world
map-making on it's opening night. You could call this a loose process of 'dissensus'
that enabled some in the network to be involved and others to ignore it and
continue working on their own projects.
On the opening night of the show, various YOU ARE HERE BUT WHY? people contributed
chalk scrawlings to the large blackboard wall. In observation, it didn't seem
that much could be made from the more graffiti-style marks that people added
to the board, as the world as we know it was fleshed out. Participants mainly
drew in the countries they were born in or had visited. Overtime, the world
map dis/appeared under territories, nationalities, borders or regional identities,
and then under plain graffiti of a showing-off style.
In the end, we are not sure what can be made of this, insisting on neither a
strict political engagement with what was created nor a utopian fancy for other
worlds to be created and marked up. It was intended as a open map-making project
but we felt not much could later be said about what had been put up by those
who participated. The privileges of those owning the space or attending the
opening night were on show anyway, as at any other prestigious event like this,
either in London, New York, possibly Mumbai or Buenos Aires: social networking,
being seen and being entertained, consumption of 'culture', notions and displays
of civilisation. It would have been good to map this instead of merely observing
it.
Lost along the way, probably due to time lost by the obstructions of the RCA
(but maybe other reasons too), the other map-making projects in the streets
of London and somewhere in Argentina did not happen. This was a shame. Something
similar to what we had done in the Map Festival could have been attempted by
taking self map-making and the production of biography into areas we live and
work in. This might have been resulted in something freer and more connective
than what had happened inside the gallery and been a good contrast to the work
in the institution.
Searching...
'Do
we produce from the parameters laid down by power or from the recovery of a
space of our own, from individual proposals closely related to our history and
experience?'
Graciela Carnevale (4)
Happily, during preparation and the map-making itself, the weaving process itself
became the main energy and inspiration for us, quickly pushing the involvement
with the RCA and, to some extent, the map-making activity, into the background.
TRAMA had invited Graciela Carnevale to be part of their space within the exhibition.
Graciela had been involved with an emerging avant-garde movement in Rosario,
Argentina in the 1960's. By 1968, social and political questions could not help
but impact on the practice of the group. Graciela writes 'The streets turned
into a field of action: artists took part in demonstrations and joined the proposals
issued by the progressive political groups, which abandoned the cultural apparatus,renounced
art galleries and awards and contacted worker's organisations. "Tucumán
arde" emerged as the climax of the process, making use of one of the claims
for which the CGT de los Argentinas (General Confederation of Argentine Workers)
was struggling in order to create a collective work denouncing the anguishing
situation of workers in Tucumán
as a consequence of a sugar mills shutdown..."Tucumán arde"
intedned to start as a counter-information circuit with the purpose of bringing
to the public eye the real state of affairs that the administration was concealing
from the people...In early November 1968, the exhibition-cum-denunciation opened
in Rosario's CGTA headquarters under the name of 'Primal Bienal de Arte de Vanguardia'
(First Avant-Garde Art Biennial). It ended up as a political act with massive
attendance'.(4)
Following this event, tensions and contradictions erupted within the group around
the question of political involvement and commitment. For some, the practice
of art was abandoned either temporarily or forever. For others, political work
led to either exile or death.
During the military dictatorship, Graciela writes 'many people were impelled
to get rid of their books and emptied their libraries, buried documents or burned
papers...we felt a paralysing fear as the search closed in. We were anxious
about not compromising or exposing others, even at a moment when the group no
longer existed and, under certain circumstances, that situation forced me to
adopt different criteria of perservation to protect people even if this meant
destroying documents' (5)
It was only in the recent past that Graciela has been trying to put back together
an archive of the disappeared work of the Grupo de Arte de Vanguardia and "Tucaman
arde", this archival project being, we imagine, both a practical and deeply
emotional struggle
As part of the TRAMA space at the RCA exhibition, Graciela placed numerous photos
from the "Tucuman arde" process on a large table as a random pile
of images to be sifted, looked over, considered and for selections to be made
if desired. Photos could then be pinned up along a series of wires making an
ever-changing non-curated exhibition (expose?) of what had been done nearly
forty years ago.
She has written:
'By making visible that which is not here any more, the archive reminds
us that artistic practice is still an ethical act. I see the archive as an entity
provoking a memory with almost no images and interrogating a past that for a
long time people tried to deny'. (5)
Three accompanying texts were
also available 'A
Small History' and 'When
Silence Falls' by Graciela and 'RE:
Trama's last paragraphs' by Claudia,
all three reframing the night's activities for us, away from the processes
and conventions of the institution and towards an affirmation. The chalk map-making
did not really point out much other than the distances, there and then, between
most people in attendence. In the setting of an opening night, it was hard to
make connections between the institution, the artists, the curators, the fellow
travellers, the chalkers and oneself. (6)
Finding
Again...
Through
TRAMA's work on 'the archive', we can see that archive-making is a type of conversation
about the past, present and the future. It is a conversation about power. In
our experience, people will find each other and what they have in common just
from simple acts of talking and questioning. It must also be said, that this
activity can only happen by people seemingly engaged in the process of searching
for something that connects us as human beings. We are aware that this search
involves not only good connection but the possibility for periods of melancholic
lack of connection. During both the Free Festival of Mapping and the experience
of working with TRAMA, the fairly spontaneous joys of finding, creating and
exploring were pushed to the front of what was in the process of being organised
and made happen. In a generous act, TRAMA donated a complete copy of their Atlas
to our archive, The Map Room (is open...). The coming togther of TRAMA and YOU
ARE HERE BUT WHY? now speaks less of institutions and difficulty, less of specifics
and outcomes but more of possibilities, or at least, of what we now know. We
know of 'Tucumán
arde', of Graciela Carnevale, of Claudia and her work as organiser of the TRAMA
network, of TRAMA itself.
For ourselves, we know that we have nothing to prove in the institution of the
RCA, or the wider culture game. We know that we do not stand for 'policy' in
our network but favour doing what we like when we like as part of our practice
of critique. We neither stay-away nor sign oursleves up. We never 'intervene'.
These three strategies are viewed by us with suspicion. Being against notions
of conclusion, we can say that nothing further may need to happen between TRAMA
and ourselves other than what we now know of each other. This is not final but
infinite. On that basis, we weave together...we know...
In the end, it was the weaving that we liked. Yes, it was the weaving that we
liked.
(1) RE: Trama's last paragraphs, Claudia Fontes, March 2006
(2) Other stuff of interest (amongst much else) were Liv Perjovschi's mobile
archive 'CCA' that collects the hidden or previously inaccesible work produced
during the Ceausescu regime in Romania; MIssing Books project on the last twenty
minutes of the life of Rodolfo Walsh, an Argentinian journalist and guerilla
fighter with Montoneros who 'disappeared' in 1977; Joachim Koester's uncovering
and photographs from Aleister Crowley's Thelema Abbey in Cefalu, Sicily, now
a ruin and site of pilgrimage/curiousity.
(3) The 1:1 Maps: A proposal to activate a temporary node of Trama's network
in London, Claudia Fontes, February 2006
(4) When Silence Talks, Graciela Carnevale, May 1999
(5) A Small History, Graciela Carnevale, No Date
(6) A more interesting interaction had occured earlier in the setting-up time
with a bunch of Albanian men who had come to lay carpet for the exhibition and
been treated rather shabbily by the organisers.
Women
weavers on the stairs of the Bauhaus, 1927
October 2006