(Artist Interviews, Video Works, Questionnaries, Boxes and Banners in Public Space, Exhibition) 2001
Judith Siegmund, Brigitte Franzen, Armin Hauer: SOZIALE GERÄUSCHE – SZUMY SPOŁECZNOŚCI – SOCIALNA ŠUMENJA
Edited by Forum Stadtpark Graz, Graz 2003, in collaboration with:Museum Junge Kunst Frankfurt (Oder), Kulturhaus SMOK Słubice (Słubicki Miejski Ośrodek Kultury). Sponsored by the European Commission, Political Development in the Cultural Sphere, in the framework of the programme "Culture 2000"
www.amazon.de/Soziale-Geräusche
Soziale Geräusche (Social Noises), a multi-lingual publication (in German, Polish, and Slovenian) by Judith Siegmund, presents material collected during the course of two art projects in two separate border zones: in 1999-2000, at the invitation of the Museum für Junge Kunst, Frankfurt (Oder), Judith Siegmund worked in the area surrounding the German-Polish border between Frankfurt (Oder) and Słubice. In 2001, she repeated the experience in Graz, Austria and Styria, Slovenia, this time with the support of the Forum Stadtpark, which is also the publisher of the book.
The sources of both art projects were formed by statements of the residents of both regions. In part, these were made through handwritten statements in anonymous questionnaires, and in part through spoken interviews which were subsequently transcribed. Through an artistic process this material (which in Frankfurt (Oder) also provided the exhibition concept – an interconnection of the artistic space with the urban space), was then complemented, extended, and processed through other media: videos, text-collages, textual installation, banners, photos.
While it is true that with the publication some of the multidimensionality of the project is lost, at the same time the artistic spectrum of the project becomes extended into a further medium of expression – that of the printed word of three languages. This multi-lingual presentation captures the idea of comparability, and it is thus only in this presentation that the holistic concept realized by Siegmund through artistic action first becomes readable: by letting people from two far-removed regions speak in their respective languages and in the terms of their respective oral histories.
The book is therefore much more than the mere documentation of the project. It is "neither a scientific nor a political publication, neither a pure art catalogue nor a collection of materials without commentary. So then, what is it? I want to describe it as a work of art (as opposed to an art catalogue), namely one that not only documents the process behind this project on borders, but continues to take it up and play upon it" – writes the author in her foreword.
At first glance, the selection of the two border zones as regions of comparison for two art projects may appear quite arbitrary. But this is not so. The regions on the Mur and on the Oder have, despite their considerable geographical distance, much in common. They are sections of the most important language-frontier of Europe, i.e, that dividing Germanic and Slavic languages, and in this sense are also parts of the historical-political frontier between east and west. Ten years after the collapse of the Soviet Union – and that was the precise point at which Siegmund executed her art project – the differences between east and west are more economic than political. The east is poorer, the west richer. Beyond this, both Poland and Slovenia are candidates to join the EU and – as is highly probable – in 2004, will become member-states of unified Europe.
The method of the artist – writes Dr. Brigitte Franzen of the Universitität Graz in her preface – "is inspired by documentarily informed artistic methods, such as those that have become known since the mid-1980�s through Group Material or Martha Rosler. The aesthetic of the informative has its roots in the conceptual art of the late 1960's and early 1970's of the 20th century. Since the last two Documenta exhibitions of 1997 and 2002, this new form of information-art, which spread long ago as an international method, has also become known to a broader audience. The attempt to connect or pursue "art with politics" ... lies behind these institutions and critical art market approaches. In it the borders between cultural-anthropological, literary, documentary and artistic forms of approach become blurred."
In collaboration with the residents of both regions, Judith Siegmund has traced biographical and social states-of-mind at a unique historical moment. Her primary interests throughout have been the fear of difference and everyday racism; the result that she presents is a deeply-probing, sometimes strikingly monotonous, series of pictures of moments of common life in an uncommon political and economic situation. And it is precisely in the unanimity of so many statements that the particular, extra-artistic value of this project consists.
Ewa Maria Slaska, Berlin, 2003
"Social Noises" Judith Siegmund's Art Project about Relations Across the EU Border
"People don't like the Turks," says an inhabitant of the Styria region in southern Austria, "but Ali who sells döner kebabs in his café on the street corner, people like him." The difference between liking and not liking in Styria hinges on the distance between the two agents involved. From afar, the representative of a foreign land appears strange and threatening, whereas in close proximity Ali the kebab seller is perceived to be friendly and is addressed by his first name.
Such insights are the product of "Social Noises," an ongoing art project by the Berlin artist Judith Siegmund. In anticipation of the expansion of the European Union on 1 May this year, the artist has distributed questionnaires, carried out interviews, built installations of giant banners in shopping centers displaying everyday sayings, and recorded people&s reactions on video. She explores with almost scientific detail the intimate thoughts, fears and hopes of citizens living in the border regions of the European Union. The first phase of the project was staged in Frankfurt (Oder) and Słubice, two (formerly one) adjoining towns situated on opposite banks of the river Oder on either side of the German-Polish border, where anonymous residents were invited to fill in questionnaires and drop them in specially designed letterboxes. The completed questionnaires were later exhibited, together with printed quotations extracted from interviews and video recordings, in an installation in the Museum for Junge Kunst in Frankfurt (Oder). The fragments of phrases and images collected in Frankfurt and in Styria have now been published in a trilingual volume called SOZIALE GERÄUSCHE – SZUMY SPOŁECZNOŚCI – SOCIALNA ŠUMENJA (Graz: Verlag Forum Stadtpark, 2003).
The borders between Germany and Poland and between Austria and Slovenia, which from May 2004 will be transformed into internal European borders, are characteristic of the often ignored areas of transit far from Brussels and central national governments. Siegmund&s project thus offers insight into the human consequences of the European unification process on the periphery. Although the daily prognoses of politicians permeate the verbal utterances and identities of the inhabitants of these border regions, there remains a gulf between the well-intentioned principles governing public EU-discourse on the one hand and the antagonistic historical memories and social perceptions of outsiders and fellow citizens on the other. Yet this artistic project also reveals how the numerous passers-by, respondents, readers, speakers and listeners who make up the ephemeral community of participants in the project are willing to question the ingrained assumptions underpinning the mental borderline between their own world and the imagined strangers on the other side, and to recognize and even keep in check the unconscious reflexes that govern everyday cross-border interactions in times of political change.
In defiance of routine political statements about the capacity of new member states to integrate economically and politically into the European Union, Siegmund gives a voice to the very people who are most directly affected by the opening of the European borders and perhaps the most sensitive witnesses of the changes that lie ahead by asking them what it means to be so close to yet so distant from strangers, and in turn to be considered strange by strangers? "How important is it to own a car?" "Can we belong to a culture if we were not born in the place where that culture exists?" "What do you understand by &culture&?" The diverging responses constitute a collective testimony to political self-understanding manifested in everyday life, and conditioned by age, place of residence, migration, language and different political systems (in this case, under the influence of former socialist regimes).
May 2004 will mark the opening not of one but of several dozen borders, as reflected in the different self-perceptions of people living in Frankfurt and Słubice and in Styria. The Austrian inhabitants of Styria frequently hark back to the Habsburg Empire when the Ottoman Empire still epitomized the collective popular image of the imagined "other." The inhabitants of Frankfurt (Oder) instead evoke the collective memory of a more recent past since 1945, when they defined themselves in opposition to Poland on the one hand and to West Germany on the other. Cohabitation on the borders of Europe is clearly characterized by diverse, deeply entrenched understandings of tradition.
An inhabitant of the Slovenian Styria expresses amazement at the effects of the border on her own political awareness. She can envisage harmony between Austrians and Slovenes on both sides of the border only on condition that "the people are able to free themselves from their thought patterns." Yet it remains unclear which people and which thought patterns she is referring to. Does she mean those of the Austrians or the Slovenes? And are her own thought patterns also part of the continuing disharmony? The analytical passages supplied by some of the interviewees betray not only contradictions but also self-deception. Indeed, analysis often serves as a means to extract oneself from society, as if one has no part in it.
Rarely has art come so close to writing "history from below" or a "history of mentalities" in the manner of the social sciences. Yet the relative openness of art conveys at close proximity and in lucid terms the ambiguities of values, hopes and fears in the border regions. Perhaps the most revealing expression of political identity is language. Ali the döner kebab seller is seen as a friendly familiar face, while those lumped together under the collective pronoun "Turks" are dismissed as unfriendly foreigners. This way of thinking, based on the rejection of things assumed to be unfamiliar, is possibly the structural core of the xenophobia inherent in all cross-border encounters.
The documentation gathered during the course of this artistic research project, including the personal accounts and mental associations, is not an end product but one stage in an enlightening transnational communication process. However scientific in character, this project nevertheless does not adhere to the methods of sociology or political science, but to a principle of publicly exposing raw and often intimate verbal material in the form in which it was expressed. By collecting and exhibiting a repertoire of inner mental reflexes induced by EU expansion, Siegmund forces us not only to recognize patterns of interaction, fear and self-delusion, but also how the some of the same patterns operate in each of us.
Faithful to the concept of artistic neutrality, the artist does not intervene in politics but instead stirs up the border between that which is considered to be part of Europe and that which is not, between the familiar and the strange. She does not fabricate the beautiful or arbitrate between mystical beauty and earthly imperfection, but acts as a catalyst of vibrant "social noises." By placing the inhabitants of peripheral regions in the center and giving them the opportunity to speak, it would seem that Europe is not only a geographical, historical, political, economic or even cultural entity, but one whose borders are, and must remain, open to permanent negotiation.
The book SOZIALE GERÄUSCHE (Graz: Verlag Forum Stadtpark, 2003), €29.80.
Peter Carrier, 2004
