‘Thinking Documenta, Doing Documenta’: mulling Documenta11, Platforms 1–5 (2002)

The thrust of today’s migrations seems largely ‘Northward’ – even in the Antipodes where they are clearly headed towards the opposite pole. The ‘South’ has tended to signal ‘underdevelopment and crisis ’. It has also flagged up notions of ‘other possibilities, alternative perspectives’, other ‘designs for living’. The ‘exodus from the South for the North’ is at odds with the idea of ‘Global South’ as a privileged vantage point from which to critique the world-system. We have rather anomalies and crossovers that affirm and straddle, unpick and unravel in one go received N/S dividing lines. How to map this topsy-turvy global space, how to take its sound?

On the one hand, with today’s migrations the classic, cardinal points and domains – ‘East/West/ North/South’ – are constantly fixed, even vehemently asserted. On the other, migratory drives surge and spill over such distinctions blurring and undoing them—throwing up fresh contact and interaction. Do these emerging spaces mirror strands of the ‘primordial, pristine’ space into which our ancestors, stone age homo sapiens, wandered ‘out of Africa’ to roam and rove what were the ‘proto-continents’? An ‘unnamed’ space prior to demarcations and orientations – a pre-cardinal space – should we say? Does it echo the rising ‘post-cardinal’ spatial mentality and experience thrown up, against the odds, by today’s migrations? With this streaming movement do we have the glimmerings of a ‘contemporary paleolithic non-cardinality’?

The start-up for our project is a ‘reconstruction’ of the Art History Room (Durban, South Africa) of the Apartheid years. The AH Room was at the University of South Africa, University College, Durban for Blacks of Indian origin. This is in the province of Natal with the great Drakensberg mountain range – Ukhahlamba – with one of the world’s most extensive sites of prehistoric rock art and cave paintings. The ‘reconstruction or recreation’ at Malmo, Sweden can be in any mode – art installation, film, diagrammatic or performative statement, walks, discursive picnics, critical rambles etc.

The AAH Room put on show an ‘evolutionary ladder’ of artefacts, artworks and cultures from across the world. Its effect, if not explicit objective, was to underline a Eurocentric vision of things – not uncommon in art studies of the time. Some took it to imply that the spectrum of world cultures and art forms existed in separate, segregated compartments, almost in ‘parallel universes’. To their eyes the display embodied ‘apartness’ – sometimes touted as a ‘multicultural’ rainbow (in which, needless to say, some cultures were more equal than others)

But did the display also open up – perhaps quite unwittingly – counter-views and alternative readings? A glance across the room inescapably brought into play notions of mix, exchange, and swap – the sense of brisk translation between diverse artistic and cultural idioms, styles, and modes of thinking. What light could this throw on today’s world of the migratory swirl of peoples and cultural elements – on prickly issues of ‘multiculturalism, its limits and shortcomings’, on questions of living with ‘diversity, difference and multiplicity’, on much-thumbed notions of ‘hospitality and tolerance’, on ceaseless everyday cultural translation and cosmopolitanising forces – all in a setting of apparent ‘racisme sans race’?

Alongside to mull: The AH Room had come into being in Apartheid’s segregating, ethnicising logic: at the time, opposition to this was summed in the slogan: ’Knowledge is Colour Blind’. What to make of this in the face of today’s search for a ‘decolonialisation of knowledge’ – for ‘tonal modes of knowing’ – not least, in the 3 thick of an all-encompassing knowledge society, the drives towards a pansophic world? What mileage for art practice, creativity and art research not simply as hard-nosed ‘knowledge production’ but perhaps its opposite – as modes of ‘knowledgeable ignorance’, as ‘Ignorantitis Sapiens’?

SCM
November 2016
London. Lund

Malmö Art Academy 31.1 – 6.6 2017

Lecturers:
Professor Sarat Maharaj: After the Apartheid State, Beyond Cardinality: Neither North/south nor East/West. the Paleolithic and the Contemporary Today’s Migrations (Inauguration lecture 31.1)
The Drakensberg Prehistoric Cave Paintings and the Retinal (March 20)
Acoustemics and the Decolonialising of Knowledge (Closing lecture June 6)

Professor Matts Leiderstam: The Gift of Tears (February 2)
Professor Franco Farinelli: On the Nature of Mapping ( February 3)
Senior lecturer Jan Apel: The Scandinavian Pioneer Settlements (February 6)
Ndikhumbule Ngqinambi: Artist talk ( February 10)
Junior lecturer Margot Edström: The Activists , SAFRAN group and Skåne archives of anti-apartheid groups, (full day seminar February 15)
Professor Paul Gilroy: A Proper Name for Fascism: Torture , Humanism and the Challenge of Translating Inimba ( February 20)
Professor Emily Wardill: Screening and presentation of Fulll Firearms (February 20)
Professor Thomas Higham: Migration, Extinction and Colonisation in the Palaeolithic Neanderthals, Denisovans, and Modern Humans (February 27)
Jürgen Bock: Tout-Monde, Négritude and Maison Tropicale (3-day seminar March 1–3)
Hans Carlsson, Runo Lagomarsino,Julia Willén, Jakob Jakobsen, Patricia Lorenzini: Unsettling White Temporalities, lectures and seminars (March 9-10)
Dr D G Govinden: The World Turned Upside Down – A view from the South ( April 4–6)
Angela Ferreira: Artist talk (April 4)
Professor Arathi Sriprakash: Decolonising Minds? The Global Politics of Knowledge (fullday seminars and lectures, April 20–21)
Professor Gertrud Sandqvist: The Daughter of Cosmos, on artist and theosophist Rukmani Devi (April 27)
Manuela Ribeiro Sanches: Disorienting Europe: Reading Cesaire and Fanon on the Twenty-First Century ( full-day seminars May 2–4)

by Gertud Sandqvist

The point of departure of this big project was a reconstruction of the room in which Professor Sarat Maharaj learned art history during the Apartheid era at University College of South Africa for Blacks of Indian Origin at Salisbury Island, Durban. A slightly blurred photocopy of a photograph of the AAH Room was a study in ambivalence. The references to art in this room during the Apartheid regime in South Africa were much more global than a class in art history in the UK would be at the time. On the other hand – the peak of achievement was still “obvious” . It was the white plaster copy of a classical Greek sculpture.
The room was reconstructed at the Malmö Art Academy by a group of students during Autummn 2016. The very impossibility to make an exact reconstruction from a rather blurry photo i b/w shows important insights in how human communication is operating. It was interesting to follow the decisions made by the students when they reconstructed in particular the sculptures in the photograph. In the end they looked as remnants from a late, degenerated style of – something. The supposed sharp difference between the different time periods and areas where the objects were made was blurred – indeed it is impossible to trace the origins. But the students didn’t want to make a point out of this. It was a consequence of how the different layers of reproduction corresponded with how recognition works: if we don’t understand, we guess.
The reconstruction of the rest of the room followed similar lines. The students found furniture that resembled the ones in the photograph, given the distance between Salisbury Island in the 1960:ies in Durban and the flea-markets in Malmö fifty years later. Sometimes the students managed to find a relatively accurate copy: the carpet seen at the photograph was actually commissioned of a Swedish Mission Station in the area, and the students managed to trace it back to Sweden.

The room hosted a number of lectures, seminars, workshops and screenings with the point of departure in the project description given by scholars, artists, activists around the themes of migration, present and 50 000 years ago, colonialism, womens’(pushed aside) role when it come to the writing of South African Anti Apartheid history, and a decolonizing of knowledge production.
For Malmö Art Academy this is by far the largest project we have done, this far. Professor Maharaj being a most valued member of the faculty made this endeavor possible. Through the project some 50 students got a glimpse of an insight in a time and a situation different from theirs- and yet not. Sweden had both through missionaries in the 1950:ies and through a number of anti-apartheid groups with a more socialist background in the 1960:ies- 70:ies an almost first-hand experience of the brutal Apartheid system. Many of the ANC leaders visited Sweden for longer or shorter periods, and the boycott of goods from the South African Apartheid economy was a source of national pride. It turned out that many of the activists of the time were still around. It was our pleasure to invite them for seminars where they met with a new generation of activists, exchanging experiences, differences – and similarities.
Through the collaboration with our longstanding partner Maumaus in Lisbon the project also opened up towards the complicated relations between different kinds of colonialization, and the precarious role the Portuguese from Moçambique had in apartheid South Africa. Artist Angela Ferreira was one of those. Through Maumaus and its director Jürgen Bock and his collaborator Manuela Ribeiro Sanches the students in the project got valuable insights in the Portuguese/French experience and understanding of colonialism.
But of course the mind-blowing experience of the participating students was mainly a result of the very wide lines of thoughts suggested by professor Maharaj, the initiator of the project. Anchored in the old photograph, he used detail after detail in it to depict new connections between cultures and civilizations. The world opened up. And closed down. As a young student he experienced the hard way that some places were forbidden for him under the Apartheid regime. Durban is in the province of Natal where are the famous Drakensberg caves, with their paleolithic paintings made by the San people. He could not join the study trip with Professor Walter Battiss as travel and accommodation facilities were for Whites only. Without the right kind of government documents the caves would remain forbidden to him though it was an essential part of his coursework. This small comment made in one of professor Maharaj’s lectures got suddenly the students to understand what apartheid actually means. Since the students came from different backgrounds they could start to discuss, and compare, and despair, and discuss again.

Why is it important for young artists to encounter such a widespread and non-linear thinking? Maybe because it shows that not only artists are thinking in a non-linear way. That would mean that they gain confidence in their own way of thinking. The experience of four months of intense meetings with highly sophisticated knowledge along an adventurous set of connections makes them respect knowledge other than their own. The blend of personal recollections and theoretical speculations makes them understand the entangledness of knowledge, politics, the personal and the beauty of the detail.
Is it important that they “understand”? Maybe not. Like all knowledge it fuels their thinking. It burns and disappears. Maybe something rests as ground for new thinking. As a pedagogue you don’t know. Maybe it was the surviving bumble-bee on the windowsill that really meant something.

by Jürgen Bock

A black and white photograph, showing the office of Professor X – on Salisbury Island, Durban, South Africa, in the 1960s – is the visual point of departure. The academic title, era and place suggest a university at the time of apartheid. It is indeed an Art History room and the picture is presented to us by Professor Sarat Maharaj, who studied in this room at the University College Durban for ‘Blacks of Indian origin’.

In the rationalised northern world, there is the idea that the South has tended to signal ‘underdevelopment and crisis’.¹ Some years ago, Portugal’s location in Europe, on the southern edge, was synonymous with the European financial crisis and its inherent migration of Portuguese labour to the centre and North of Europe. The AAH room migrated from the past to the present and from the South to the North, and then back again, from Malmö to Lisbon – a place on the threshold between Africa and Europe.

The reconstruction of the Durban Art History room in Sweden was installed in a seminar room at the Malmö Art Academy at Lund University. A group of students took on the challenge of deciphering the image mentioned above, which announces its own pastness so clearly. It was difficult to identify all the items that Professor X had gathered in the room, creating a specific atmosphere for the students attending. The larger items, such as a desk, some chairs and a large blackboard with a poem written on it, were the easier parts. We can also recognise a framed artwork on the wall, a reprint of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Peasant Wedding of 1567, combined with artworks of African origin. Bruegel was a printmaker himself and painted Peasant Wedding 79 years after the Portuguese rounded the Cape of Good Hope, called Devil’s Cape by sailors and which Manuel I, the then king of Portugal considered too negative.

In the 1960s Art History room, all kinds of artworks or references to art from all over the world were juxtaposed side by side outside the museum space – undermining any attempt at classification of ‘western European high art’ and ‘African or Asian low art’, or artisanal objects normally classified in an ethnographically reductive way. In its ‘private’ appearance, the room undermined what the ‘public’ concept of ‘race’ then stood for. The students experienced the co-existence, a ‘mutual becoming’ of things through an apparently ‘accidental’ juxtaposing of objects, which, because of the normative structures in place at the time, would normally not have been seen that way. Bearing in mind a possible eloquence through the specific placing of objects, it might be worth paying attention to how seminar rooms look in the context of art education and what kind of teaching could take place through the ambiance of a space, through the equipment of a space, through a ‘different’ notion of infrastructure. What kind of ideas could be provoked and engendered, independent from those provided through direct teaching, in such places of dwelling and encounter with theory?²

I taught at the AAH Room in Malmö. I felt uncomfortable about taking my place at Professor X’s desk. The chair wasn’t comfortable, but those who had reconstructed the room weren’t offended at me changing it for a more comfortable one. A rather large group was facing me from sofas, while my position up on a chair looking down at my listeners suggested a hierarchy, which I usually question in my seminars regarding authority in the context of the study of art and the art world as system.³ At the same time, it also felt like a play, a symbolic representation, in which I had to take on my role and in which my vanity at sitting on such an important chair, having the rather daunting role of bringing to life the AAH room in Malmö together with a group of students, in a teaching environment that appears a ‘simulacrum’ of teaching, was strangely appealing. I felt that I couldn’t move as usual, exactly because there was a role to be played. There always is, but here it was more specific, because I had to be even more careful not to emphasise my comments with bodily gestures, because of all the amorphous clay artworks around me, which represented the rather diffuse, undecipherable objects in the picture of the Art History room on Salisbury Island.⁴ And it was not ‘my’ room, I was a visiting lecturer dragged into an invoked past of a country far away, a time of apartheid and Professor’s X choices of objects of interests.

With the help of films by the Mali born cultural theorist Manthia Diawara, I introduced Édouard Glissant’s philosophy of a permanent becoming through engaging with others,⁶ which I linked to Brackette Williams’s notion of a contact zone as the place from which all culture emerged.⁷ A further discussion focused on ‘counter nation-state building’ through culture by Léopold Sédar Senghor’s concept of ‘Negritude’, with its ‘asymmetrical parallelism’, which seeks to combine the culture of the coloniser with the culture of the colonised, the latter seeking to overcome the former by merging with it in order to deliver itself in a new independent state. In the film Negritude – a Dialogue between Soyinka and Senghor (2012), Diawara relates a dialogue between the Nigerian Literature Nobel Prize laureate Wole Soyinka and Senegal’s first elected president Léopold Sédar Senghor British and French colonialism through a filmic re-enactment to problematise the by colonial regimes imposed – with different intensities – and from Brackette Williams’ perspective mistaken, idea of an absolute pure culture onto the colonised, which resulted consequently in just other, also specific, contact zones.

On the last seminar day, an art project was presented against the backdrop of the AAH room: in 2007 I curated Ângela Ferreira’s Maison Tropicale installation for the Portuguese pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennial. I introduced the project as follows:

The sites hosting the AAH room in Lisbon and Malmö were rather different. It seemed that, after having had the opportunity to somehow ‘rehearse’ in and with the AAH room in Sweden, the project in Lisbon would be positioned ‘on a different stage’: an art gallery, with opening hours, a preview, press release, e-flyer and printed invitations. To a certain extent, the AAH room in Malmö engaged with such protocols – the room could also there be visited – but in Lisbon the AAH room was integrated into an ongoing schedule of exhibitions: before Sarat Maharaj’s project, Peter Friedl’s ‘Teatro Popular’ exhibition took place, and subsequently a group exhibition of five artists dedicated to the ethno-poetry of the German beatnik writer Hubert Fichte was to open. There was no hierarchy between Malmö and Lisbon, but the circumstances were different: a setting had to be created, which would function as a seminar room as well as an exhibition.

The way the space was produced was also different; the re-enactment in Malmö turned out to have been a prototype, from which one could learn and to which the Lisbon AAH room somehow responded, engaged with and, at the same time, distinguish itself from it. In Lisbon, available artworks were the starting point, together with purchased artefacts especially chosen for the exhibition. In addition, a table and a bookcase were needed, where the table in Lisbon indeed symbolised Professor X’s desk on Salisbury Island – a table the professor sits behind talking to the group of students gathered on the other side – but took precisely the shape a of larger table allowing a group of students to sit at ‘eye level’ with the teacher around the ‘desk’. The interpretations of Professor X’s office/seminar room on Salisbury Island developed through the symbolic staging in Malmö leading to a somewhat changed iteration in Lisbon.

For me, working as a curator with Professor Sarat Maharaj was rather different from all my previous work with artists. Instead of indicating this or that, this design and that item, this object and that artwork, when it came to rendering the blurred photograph back into life temporally in a space, Sarat Maharaj was rather subtle, commented carefully, mostly listening and encouraging to choose and arrange the objects in a way I understood to be the most appropriate. I realised how wonderfully easy it is to ‘obey’ artists’ demands, however difficult they may be. Responding to a rather open articulated context and a subtle given input, I became in a way a ‘medium’, myself being confronted with the creative act of going from intention to realisation through a chain of sometimes uncomfortable subjective decisions. Marcel Duchamp’s statement came to mind: ‘[The] struggle towards the realization is a series of efforts, pains, satisfactions, refusals, decisions, which also cannot and must not be fully self-conscious.’⁹

The core of the exhibition in Lisbon was constituted by two artworks by Heimo Zobernig, an artist whose practice engages with art’s infrastructures, turning equipment and objects for art’s display into art itself, blurring in a subtle way the thresholds between art and non-art objects. Often Zobernig’s artworks suggest a function, claiming at the same time the nonfunction of the art object, of an art for art’s sake. The sculptures created by him reference minimalism – Zobernig’s works are impeccable in their finishing, with a rigour not dissimilar to that of American minimal school, ironically contrasting the use of often raw industrial poor materials, such as particle board, of which Zobernig’s works at the AAH room were made.

The AHH room in Lisbon persisted as a re-enactment, where notions of the 25-year history of the Maumaus School merged with an interpretation of Professor X’s seminar room from the Salesbury Island 70 years ago. Because of a conceptual gap instigated by Sarat Maharaj, both were able to amalgamate in the exhibition space of Lumiar Cité.

Emil Westman Hertz studied at the Maumaus Independent Study Programme in 2006 and had spent some time on the African continent as an adolescent. During his last days in Lisbon, he entered the director’s office with a print of a kind of Heart of Darkness stereotypical landscape. Figures with testicles resembling pairs of cherries appear as a pattern in a jungle. Emil offered Maumaus the print as a goodbye present with a broken frame he had found on the streets of Lisbon, which was repaired before displaying it for the first time in the AAH room.