• Exhibition
• Participants

Exclusions and censorships

Carlos Jiménez

One could think that this exhibition works as a whole, the way one of its pieces or fractals do: the video Canto VI , opposing images of patera boats and their shipwrecked persons to images taken from the dazzling world of a tourist summer at both the Atlantic and the Mediterranean coasts. This is not so much due to the fact that the remaining pieces included in this exhibition share the same concept, or even the same "montage" strategy, which is so characteristic in Canto VI. It is rather that this peculiar hymn to what we really are belongs to the same strategy as the works exhibited in Le partage, Rogelio López Cuenca's solo show in Madrid last January/February at Galeria Juana de Aizpuru, whose title was taken from the book Le partage du sensible by Jacques Rancière1. López Cuenca suggested then, through this appropriation, that the most general purpose of the works he is now undertaking is to show the partage du sensible (the sharing out of the sensitive) –the very core of the political to the above mentioned French thinker– which only takes place when subverting the kind of sharing out of the sensible which decides at any time what can be seen, heard, perceived, named... It is on this so a sensitive territory where politics definitely do stake their destiny –rather than, as it is usually thought, on the ground of parliaments, parties, programmes, opinion polls or elections2. I have written ‘what can be seen, heard, etc,' as indeed does Rancière, but the attention can be drawn to the specific fact that what can be seen really consist in what is permitted to be seen. I mean that in the very structure of constructing reality operates a power which conforms and even discriminates such forms, let us say a priori, of the sensitive, that Rancière analyses with so much care3. The difference between what is possible and what is permissible may seem to us entirely ‘infra-slight' –like to Marcel Duchamp seemed the step between the possible and its effective realization4– but its effective consistency is symptomatically shown through the fact that censure seems to have completely disappeared from the Western political scene, whereas in fact what has happened is that it has become more surreptitious and therefore more efficient than ever before. In the overwhelming visual regime we live in, subject to the unusual fusion of a panoptic's scopophilia and the society of the spectacle , control and exhibition being equally universal, the matter is not that censure deprives us by law or by censure of this or that piece of news; it is not so. What power decides, in an invisible way of course, is what is visible and what remains relegated to an invisible area and thus, absolutely excluded. So much excluded that we cannot even perceive the existence of the exclusion. Not even the exclusion itself. Martin Heidegger –within another discourse, with a different purpose– anticipated a formulation of this crucial question in his well-known essay on Hölderlin and Rilke5, where, aiming at clarifying the desolated question of Hölderlin: "Why poets in times of shortage?" he concluded that shortage in our time is a most extreme one, because it does not give an account of itself as shortage. In other words, perhaps closer words, it is a matter of poverty not being conscious of being poverty.

But let us go back to Canto VI, a work that could well be qualified as a "notebook"' –as in the press release that Galeria Juana de Aizpuru put into circulation to inform about the López Cuenca exhibition already mentioned6. A book of images rather than a notebook, its logic not being the logic of an album or an archive, but rather the one of an Arbeitsjournal, or even Brecht's Kriegsfibel. That is, a device which is means as well as product of a strategy trying to ‘read' images in a period where their absolute prevalence saturates so much our consciousness and makes unconsciousness so permeable that it prevents from thinking about them7. Nonetheless, the reading of images Brecht tries to carry out in his Work diary and in his War alphabet does not follow a discursive and therefore sequential and connected logic. On the contrary, it is the breaking and clashing logic of montage. Didi Huberman presents it as follows, in one of the passages of the book analysing the German poet and play righter relationship to images: "... this formal working of language –reframing, interruption, displacement, delay– is what makes Brecht's poetry, according to Benjamin, a real dialectic work with the image, a work accomplished from the very core of the documented gesture, enabling a photographic montage or an epic sequence to deliver its surprise'8. According to Brecht, this surprise allows for the establishment of a distance from the immediate and/or the familiar, giving rise to the thinking activity. I believe Canto VI is inscribed within a similar strategy, because the images the artist has selected and put aside from the uninterrupted flux of images –where, as in Heraclitus river we cannot immerse twice- remain trapped in an incongruent logic of contrasts, similar to the one Brecht used to put in motion when inviting an actor not to identify himself with his character nor to disappear from his position as interpreter, lying on ‘the fact that he is not really Julius Caesar, but a man from the 20 th century, a professional actor, who is interpreting on a Berliner stage during the cold war period'9. The opposed images coupled, or better, assembled by López Cuenca in Canto VI give form to a discourse where very solvent tourists enjoy a very desirable holiday in a world whose atrocity, represented by the Africans embarked on the patera boats out of desperation, is, to say the least, a scandal to which they feel entirely alien.

Txomin Badiola's piece LM&SP (The efficient intelligence) does not act directly on a given flux of images, on their immediate evidence –as López Cuenca does. Badiola prefers to take a distance from such evidence by means of staging it, generating an unusual theatrical scene played by characters that in reality are the personification of certain recurrent visual media stereotypes. The most shocking one is a naked man, sitting on the floor with his head covered by a hood. We have seen such an image, or better, its stereotype, thousands of times on the TV news, proving that to tie or to hood prisoners, or to make them kneel and sit on the floor is an humiliating normal practice of the occupying troops in Iraq or Palestine having unfortunately more and more supporters. What is surprising here is the contrast between the defenceless necked hooded character and a partial image of a common man who, sitting in front of him, reads quietly a book. And the result of such surprise are possible questions about the motives or the reasons why the hooded character –in opposition to what is usual practice in media images of the Middle East wars– is not standing on a battlefield: he is in a domestic environment so ordinary and regular as any other domestic setting. Or is it that our most intimate surrounding is also a battlefield, a battlefield were the endless war against terrorism takes place? And the indifference or the passivity of the reader before the necked prisoner, lacking so much of violence, is not perhaps the staging of a tacit complicity with violence whose victims are the prisoners of the battlefields in the Middle East?

And as for the interior surrounding: could it be the addressee of one of the Airmail pieces by E. Dittborn such as Have you seen this man? also included in this exhibition pretending, as the other pieces in this series, to involve unknown people in the destiny of other unknown people? Unknowns but, in spite of each being singular, they belong to the very wide and heterogenic category of the systematically forgotten or suppressed by the prevalent stories. Dittborn explains the general sense of the Airmail series in these terms: "Power in our country (he refers to Chile) has constructed a social, political and cultural space characterized by its monstrous capacity for excluding any possibility of memory. This is the reason why I circulate little models of a possible memory"10.

The photographs by Emily Jacir on the reserve corps that Israel left in the location of Surela to control the entry of Palestine workers to the zones where their contracting firms are located, belong to the wide and heterogenic set of excluded images, images that the media presently refuse to give us. And thus they break or split the univocal integrity of our gaze into what we see and what we are permitted to see. We do not see what we want or we are able to see; we see what we are permitted to see. At the limit, what we do not see now we will never see, as seems to demonstrate the piece by Dennis Adams consisting of facsimile reproductions of official American documents classified initially as Secret or Top Secret and declassified by legal order 25 years after. Adams intervention shows how those who are compelled to follow the mandate in fact deceive it, by putting at the public's disposal declassified documents with so many erasures that it is almost impossible to read them and even less to grasp their real meaning.

The walls constructed by Israel to shut in the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank unfortunately are not the only ones build up with similar purposes worldwide. In fact the American parliament approved a few months ago a law allowing the prolonging of the actual wall separating San Diego from Tijuana, along 1500 kilometres of border between Mexico and the United States of America. Furthermore, a double circle of wire surrounds Ceuta and Melilla with the purpose, according to the authorities, of stopping the entry into those cities of illegal immigrants most of them sub-Saharans. Those walls, however, are not made only of reinforced concrete and barbed wire; among the construction materials perhaps the most important one is the fear suffered by the people who build them up or ask for or approve their construction. And that fear, or rather those fears are the theme of the two most revealing works by Antoni Muntadas in the frame of his long-term project entitled On translation . The title of the first one is Fear / Miedo and the second one is called Miedo / Jauf both consisting of videos where we see people who answer questions on what does fear mean to them. What is revealing is that in the first work, the interviewed people live in San Diego and Tijuana, two cities separated/unified by the border between the United States and Mexico, while in the second work the people interviewed come from Algeciras and Tangier. Both pieces refer to the therapeutic properties of oral expression, capable of exorcising what is named. In this case, a fear that can be defeated by means of listening to those who dare say they suffer from it.

Shibboleth is the piece with which Doris Salcedo gave an allegoric dimension and even a theological one to the problem of the growing gap between the First and the Third World. A gap translated into walls but also into legal and police measures as well as ‘sanitary cordons' that everyday give to the western world, and in particular to western Europe, the look of an inexpugnable fortress. Inexpugnable and bombed by anonymous crowds of starving people fleeing from the misery and ignominy in their own countries. If we can say those countries are actually theirs. The series of photographs included in this exhibition are a document of Doris Salcedo's intervention in the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in London in 2007, certainly the most giant and daring exhibition space in the Western world. Its colossal dimensions entail an extraordinary challenge for the artists invited to intervene there, where the shows last for six months. Besides, these artists receive practically unlimited funds for their projects thanks to the patronage of the multinational Uniliver. Under such conditions Doris Salcedo solved her assignment by means of breaking the very hard cement floor of the room with a zigzagging crack one hundred and seventy seven metres long, and variable width and depth. So much so, that some sections of the crack were just a fissure while others looked like a real ditch. The artist herself explained the sense of her work as a representation of the insurmountable gap the present borders between the first and the third world have become. She underlined that she had chosen the world shibboleth as a title because that was the world chosen by the ancient Jewish to test who did or did not belong to their people. Strangers were asked to say it and if their pronunciation was not correct, they were either expelled or killed11.

The publication in 1981 of the book by Jean Baudrillard Simulacres et simulation (Simulacra and Simulation) could be taken as a symptom or, as the author would say, as a sign overflowing what it signifies. That year, or rather that decade was the so call Reaganomic one, with the emergence and the apparently definitive triumph of an economic politics that offers to the international financial capital the total control of the American economy at first and then the economy worldwide, by means of a systematic application of the Shock and Awe tactic, in a process rebuilt up by Naomi Klein in a her well known book12. The vast social, political and cultural transformation promoted by such politics gave an excluding priority to the financial capital, the most abstract, plastic and expansive of capitals, and the most auto-referential one, if you wish, to put it into semiological terms. If in the classical political economy the economic activity kept to the circuit M-C-M where commodity (C) was a means and a reference of money (M); in an economy totally dominated by the financial capital the circuit leaves out the C and works in terms of the exclusive circulation of money: M-M-M13. Such suppression means that the real economy, the economy assumed as the total production of goods and services demanded by the market, disappears, replaced by its signs (M) in a similar way the real disappears in its simulacra in the hyperreality announced and -at the limit- promoted by Baudrillard14. And together with the real economy also comes out of scene the labour force making it work which, at least in the Western world, has long had a large social visibility through the trade unions, socialist and communists parties and a net of associations for self assistance of all kinds, including traditions, ways of life and thinking, as told in Great Britain by E.P. Thompson15 and in France by Rancière16. To this exclusion, to this foreclosing Santiago Sierra responds with a series of impressive works where the characters are temporary workers engaged by him to carry out in exhibiting spaces belonging to the world of art the most apparently or actually foolish tasks. In one of his works the artist they just crowd completely one of the exhibition rooms, thus preventing the public invited to the opening from coming in. In another room this people must stay hidden inside cardboard boxes. And in a third one, they must keep holding in shifts an inclined wall... With this sort of incorporation of workers to his pieces, and therefore to the privileged scene of art, Sierra draws the attention to the fact that, in spite of what is written or said, the labour force does still exist, but in an increasing state of vulnerability also due to their increasing invisibility. However, the piece in this exhibition puts a nuance to this strategy because of the paradox and irony in it. The black and white photos serve as a document to the intervention Sierra made in the ancient Palace of the People in Bucharest, probably the largest public building in Europe and a symbol of Ceausescu's megalomania when he was the ruler of socialist Rumania. Sierra asked to 300 women from that country to spread out along the endless corridors of the palace and stand as if begging for money to those invited by the artist to the event. It was ironic and indeed pathetic to see hundreds of liberated women from the socialist dictatorship just begging in a huge palace built up by workers, in the name of workers, as an answer to grandiose plans of design where, however, such workers had very little or null participation.

Along Cildo Meireles's working life there is a period dominated by an activism framed in what Simón Marchán Fiz has called "the inversion of conceptualism"' as an effort to characterize the artistic practise last century's 70s and 80s, which forcing the limits of conceptualism as defined by Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner and others, tried to put it at the service of social critic and politics17 To this period belong Meireles's pieces where he deviated the normal functions of some banknotes and turned them into holders of subversive message... or rather a clarifying one.

Itziar Okariz turns her head and fixes her attention on the western workers, particularly on those who in the 1980s led the resistance struggle against the breaking with the Fordian model of production and against the dismantling of the welfare-state.

The photographs Okariz shows on this occasion record her performance not long ago in what are now residential areas laid out with gardens around the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which before were occupied by the Euskalduna shipyard. The workers in them carried out a bloody strike at the end of the 1980s against the plans for the closing of it, from which there are no traces at all today. Nevertheless, the artist wanted to remember them by walking along a red line previously traced by herself through the area currently urbanized, following the perimeter of the disappeared shipyard. But Okariz pretended to dedicate not only such an ephemeral and melancholic recital to a struggle of dockworkers summarized today as a short footnote of the huge and loaded 20 th century. No. She wanted to do more and brought to our amnesic present the question the strikers painted on the docks terrace: Where are you, justice? This question is crueler and more pregnant than the very workers who painted it could ever imagine. And it was, or rather, it continues to be a crucial question of our times, even if the powers of the earth insist in hiding or crossing it out and mixing up more and more frequently justice and rights, two different terms from the times of the ancient Greeks, amongst whom the laws of the city could never be mistaken with Ananké or Diké, two classical Greek terms normally translated into our language as ‘destiny' although their original meaning is ‘a given sharing out' of the world19. Mortals, gods, things existed because they had a place and they were in it, the same way as the motifs and designs were in the fabrics of the weavers. The Moirai –the spinner women of ancient Greece who were given the exceptional role of marking the place of everyone at their moment of birth- appear as Parcae and at the same time as witches in Shakespeare's Macbeth on the threshold of these times of ours, when the anticipation of our destiny is no longer considered as an announcement of an objectless prophecy, but a hateful malediction. And I quote Shakespeare –the author who, according to Borges was "the dream not dreamed by someone"– because he offers to Jacques Darrida the starting point for his Espectros de Marx20, the book with which the Franco Algerian philosopher tried to reply to the question: Where is justice?, now when our times and together with them our world –Derrida's one even more than Shakespeare's– are out of joint. Yes, let us repeat with Okariz her question: where is justice, in our deranged world where nothing fits, not even ourselves. When the powers try to solve or at least channel again such distortion by means of multiplying, expanding and reinforcing their controls to improbable limits, apparently unconscious of the fact that they themselves are out of joint, unfitted, lawless. Power itself appears as the most extreme manifestation of the out of joint with each new attempt of gauging what cannot be gauged.

Montserrat ends up her way this exhibition with two photographs of her series Invernaderos (Greenhouses), aimed at documenting the greenhouses in Almeria. They do not show the slightest trace of the immigrants who normally work there. We just learn something about them when the TV journals bring us images of one of those xenophobe aggressions they suffer from time to time. The rest of the time they remain invisible.

(*) Carlos Jiménez. Historian and art critic. Professor at the University