Communities in Process/Processes in Community

 

The three curatorships that are presented in the second edition of the Electronic Arts and Video Festival Transitio_mx 02 have a common interest: the ongoing question around the community. Beyond utopian and ideological considerations about its condition, reflection and analysis over the concept of community started from its problematization: the community is a zone of conflict which, previously and subsequently to the social contract, is nourished from the pact of the tribe with itself, from the encounter of the tribe with other tribes, and from the symbolic and technical production with which these pacts and encounters are carried out: war, civilization... and its contradiction.

 

Far from reflecting on the community as a mere identity, as a statement of property, as the point of origin that for once and for all roots and defines us, the community is impossible because its pact is a secret. It is impossible because it is explained by a complex relation between affection, the same and the other, by the area where bodies and tools inhabit in the equivocality of their use. The body and its agencements are at the same time a tool and a weapon, a border of the affectivity from which the relation of the same with the other is inscribed and banished. In this area where bodies, desires and affections play in the site previous to the political, the community simply happens in the space in-common. It is this in-common what is explored in the curatorships: the in-common of the public space, the in-common of the non-prescribed exchanges in the social relation, but mainly, the in-common of the frontier that lies between the need to inhabit the same space and the interference that, from the beginning, the other is to that space. The limit between hospitality and intrusion is explored; the threshold/hinge* between welcoming and hostility is investigated.

 

The relation between affection and community is developed through three aesthetic registries: continuum, action/interruption and friction. Thus, the Free Synthesis curatorship aims to build a memory of the immediate from the dialectic between action and registry, conceived in the area between the performance and public space intervention practices and its documentation in the Memory Lab. This project proposes the casting of a multiple, cumulative and dissolvent memory that accounts for the interaction between artistic practice and social multitude; a sort of ephemeral and multiple construction of memory starting from the vital field of action.

 

In turn, the curatorial project Im-polis looks to give rise to the in-between of the political space. The political is the common or shared space in-between men; the threshold/hinge is activated, in the curatorial proposal, through the opposition between action and interruption. Thought of as a game between what is happening and what is interfered, this project re-inscribes technology to the in-between of the social space in order to establish aesthetic tonalities that try to activate the relation between the machine and the in-common space of the experience as a restitution of the political to life.

 

(dis)COMmunities, the third curatorial project, explores discomfort. Starting from a place defined by its construction but undefined by its location, this liminal space is a pure threshold where the limit between hospitality and hostility operates. A border zone that works with the affective edge of the friction between what must be respected and the intrusion of the other in the common space. From minimum artistic actions in social and political spaces, which are public in principle, this project interferes with the spaces by the presence of others that produce friction on the established, and with it, they set the social contract, on which the supposedly public space is rooted, into crisis. This minimum displacement of the space through friction tries to show the fallacy over which the myth of the political is built in modernity.

 

All three curatorships that conform the exhibition program of the Festival are the result of a reflection and discussion seminar on the concept of community held with the curators for three months. A result in which the relations between art and technology are inscribed in a wider aesthetic and social space: the place of the public, but also in an extended time: that which emphasizes the relations between art and life, that of the performative practices in art.

 

Undoubtedly, in the context of the discussion over globalization, the community becomes both a limit and a problem, which beyond its reduction to the differences or pertaining of a certain nationality, creed, race or gender, and even beyond the romantic visions on nomadism, it should be thought in the intermediate place, in the border: not the limit line drawn between the one and the other, but that place a bit anybody’s a bit everybody’s, that affective site of wait and fear, where what matters is the in of the common, which regarding borders is its pure inappropriateness.

 

José Luis Barrios June 2007

 

* Trans. Note The original word in Spanish is “quicio”, which has a double sense as a jointure mechanism (hinge) and the place for entering and exiting that is neither inside nor outside (threshold).