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2008

"I am reminded of the work of Iwai Shigeaki for Ginburart (1993), organized by
Masato Nakamura. Iwai used coin lockers in Ginza subway station to place small sound
works which one could listen to by pressing one's ear up against the locker doors. (...)"
Roger McDonald on tactical museum, April 27, 2006.



Off the record #2 - propositions overview

Off the record is a punctual underground underway experimental art platform that takes place at various venues and subway stations in Tokyo. It hijacks the recently installed X-CUBE^© locker system. Those lockers allow multiple users to exchange packages by using a touch screen and their cell phone numbers as digital-keys. The tactically curated Off the record exhibit simply substitutes the package with an artwork or installation.
Existing entirely in transitional public spaces, the show nevertheless remains hidden and visible solely within a private network: a person who has gained access to the work can only invite someone else to view it whose cell phone number they already have.

A chain reaction guest list:
The curator or the artist places the artwork, then invites the first person to the show by registering his cell phone number with the X-CUBE^©, and calling him to confirm. In the following hours, the invited viewer arrives at the station, uses his cell phone to unlock the gallery space (the locker), and pays ¥100 to view the work. He then invites the next person by registering a new cell phone number and calling to confirm, and so on...
Think of a "Chinese whisper," a children's game in which a sentence is passed on from one player to the next, often with its meaning altered in transit.
Want to see a work? You need to find someone who's invited, and get him to invite you or go with him together to see it. There is no other way. This is a mean hi-tech mega-city: if you're rich, pop-up when you want...but if you're poor, be fast! It costs ¥100 every 3 hours.

Invited curators included Clémentine Deliss (Metronome Press/Future Academy), Marjolijn Dijkman (Enough Room for Space), Pier Luigi Tazzi, Ouahiba Adjali (Arts en Liberté gallery), Svetlana Racanović, ICPA and Roger McDonald ([AIT] Arts Initiative Tokyo).

- For a list of the artists, click here.
- Visit this link for an article about the project in Tokyo Art Beat: PDF version

"We have been enjoying your atomic sunshine"
General Courtney Whitney of GHQ, February 13th, 1946.
"Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order,
the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation
and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.
In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and
air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right
of belligerency of the state will not be recognized."
Article 9 - Japan peace consitution.

The Constitution of Japan was essentially written by US army officials from General Headquarters (GHQ) in 1947. Parts of "Article 9," known as the Peace Constitution, renounce war and the maintaining of potentially belligerent forces as the sovereign right of the nation. This unique provision in the peace clause of the Constitution, unlike any seen elsewhere before or since, reflects the idealism of American New Dealers. The new Constitution was well received by the Japanese people, who had experienced the bitterness of war; and it has not been altered for 60 years. But now, faced with political instability in Asia and an upsurge of nationalism, its very existence is being questioned.
In a climate in which the Constitution is faced with the possibility of being revised, the art exhibition "Into the Atomic Sunshine - Post-War Art under Japanese Peace Constitution Article 9" attempts to highlight issues and raise awareness of the influence of the Peace Constitution, which played such an important role in shaping post-war Japan and has had such an enormous impact on the Japanese people, and the reaction of post-war Japanese art to it.
Article 9 played a large role in allowing Japan to recover from war and helped reshape the country. Japan has avoided direct confrontation with other countries for more than 60 years. Although Article 9 has kept Japan from direct involvement in wars, its indirect involvement in wars has meant that Article 9 has helped maintain a twisted status quo. This unique situation has given artists the opportunity to discover a theme to tackle and express in their works. Numerous artists tried to deal with difficulties such as post-war problems and identity issues; these works are also related to the connection between Article 9 and world peace.
Despite the uniqueness of Article 9, its very existence is, surprisingly, not well known in other countries. Through this exhibition, not only will post-war Japanese and non-Japanese art be introduced, but Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution will also be made more familiar to audiences outside Japan.
Named after the "Atomic Sunshine" Conference between the U.S. occupation administration and Japan representatives which created the Constitution of Japan, this exhibition will investigate the historic significance of Article 9 and the importance of its development, and the fact that there has been no Japanese blood shed as a result of direct military confrontation for 60 years after the end of World War II.
-- Shinya Watanabe, curator.

Artists: Yukinori Yanagi, Yuken Teruya, Motoyuki Shitamichi, Yoko Ono,
Nobuyuki Ohura, Yasumasa Morimura, Yutaka Matsuzawa, Eric van Hove,
Kota Ezawa, Allora & Calzadilla, Vanessa Albury.

The contribution consisted of an earth worm autodafé: namely, feeding these simple ancient invertebrates photocopies of the Japanese Constitution, written after the war by US lawyers in the occupation authority (omitting Article 9). The sound of the worms' digestion of the disputable pages (which oddly resembled the popping sound of a fire) was recorded and broadcasted live on local radio frequencies using a basic PC transmitter, not unlike the way Hirohito's spectral voice emerged from radios across Japan on August 15, 1945.

On that occasion, some individuals are said to have written down their thoughts related to the event and thrown them to the worms, adding a cathartic dimension to the action. In fact, Japanese Shinto priests perform on different occasions a kind of autodafé which is called お焚き上げ (otakiage), literally "offering to the fire".

The history of such burnings is rich. In ancient Greece the books of the sophist Protagoras were burned in the marketplace of Athens, Roman emperors were fond of autodafés, as well as Pope Gregory IX, who in 1242 threw a full wagon-load of volumes of the Jewish Talmud into the fire in Paris. In the 14th century European penance preachers organized the Bonfires of the Vanities in which immoral literature was destroyed (Sandro Botticelli placed some of his paintings in the bonfire himself), not to mention the conflagrations frequently arranged by the Nazi regime. The best known autodafé in the East seems to be the 焚書坑儒 (where Chinese classics were burned and Confucian scholars buried alive) ordered by the First Emperor of China, Qin Shi Huan (�E#31206;始皇 / Shin-no-Shikoutei in Japanese) in 213-212 BC.

A catalogue was published: Into the Atomic Sunshine - Post-War Art under Japanese Peace Constitution Article 9 (68 pages, A4 Size, full color).
Curator's statement: The Breakaway from the Century of War - Article 9 as the Overcoming of European Modernism.
Exhibition sponsored by The Kao Foundation for Arts and Sciences, Asahi Newspaper Cultural Foundation and the Puffin Foundation. Supported by Daneyal Mahmood Gallery.
Support specific to the Worm Autodafé installation provided by Wanakio, where the work was initially commissioned.

"Là où ça parle, ça jouit, et ça sait rien."
Jacques Lacan, Encore, Éd. du Seuil, Paris, 1975, page 133.

Thus this calligraphic intervention related to the Anthropometries of Yves Klein, the Logograms of Christian Dotremont and the Dactylograms of Piero Manzoni, which I have labelled a Metragram and that consists of inscribing on the hypogastrium (womb) of a woman with monochromic black ink -- tabula rasa, pinakis agraphos. A Metragram is a symbolic (perhaps cathartic) inking of the origin of the world.

For a glimpse at other images from the Metragram series, visit this webpage.

"About this room, which was plunged in utter darkness,
I knew everything, I had entered into it, I bore it within me,
I made it live, with a life that is not life, but which is stronger
than life, and which no force in the world vanquish."
Maurice Blanchot, L'arrêt de mort, Gallimard, Coll. L'Imaginaire, 1948, page 124.

Thus this calligraphic intervention related to the Anthropometries of Yves Klein, the Logograms of Christian Dotremont and the Dactylograms of Piero Manzoni, which I have labelled a Metragram and that consists of inscribing on the hypogastrium (womb) of a woman with monochromic black ink -- tabula rasa, pinakis agraphos. A Metragram is a symbolic (perhaps cathartic) inking of the origin of the world.

Thank you to Kensy Sambola & Mariano Marin.
For a glimpse at other images from the Metragram series, visit this webpage.

"How many daydreams we should have to analyze under the simple heading
of Doors! For the door is an entire cosmos of the Half-open. In fact, it is one of its
primal images, the very origin of a daydream that accumulates desires and temptations:
the temptation to open up the ultimate depths of being, and the desire to conquer all reticent
beings. The door shematizes two strong possibilities, which sharply classify two types of
daydream. At times, it is closed, botled, padlocked. At others, it is open, that is to say, wide open.
But then come the hours of greater imagining sensibility. On May nights, when so many doors
are closed, there is one that is just barely ajar. We have only to give it a very slight push! The hinges
have been well oiled. And our fate becomes visible. And how many doors were doors of hesitation!."
Gaston Bachelard, the dialectics of outside and inside, in The poetics of space, Beacon Press, Boston, 1969, page 223.

Thus this calligraphic intervention related to the Anthropometries of Yves Klein, the Logograms of Christian Dotremont and the Dactylograms of Piero Manzoni, which I have labelled a Metragram and that consists of inscribing on the hypogastrium (womb) of a woman with monochromic black ink -- tabula rasa, pinakis agraphos. A Metragram is a symbolic (perhaps cathartic) inking of the origin of the world.

Thank you to Fabio Robelo.
For a glimpse at other images from the Metragram series, visit this webpage.

This artist talk is part of a larger series of discussions which should be considered storytelling objects. It used a number of earlier works and interventions -some unfinished or never even shown- as the base for a display of ideas and ruminations believed to be more meaningfully conveyed through stories. Maybe here the traveling contemporary artist is in some way similar to the Kamishibai of Japan who, between the two world wars, was telling from the back of his bike different stories based on a number of picture cards. We can also think of the bakhshi or Ashug of central Asia or the itinerant storytellers of africa (mikilist of the Congos, Griots of Mali, bards, ashiks, jyrau,...) who go from one village to the next, unfolding a story.

Starting from concrete examples (i.e. "Abreaction" intervention / Shanghai-2004, "A nos morts" intervention / Senegal-2005, or "Off the record" curating project / Tokyo-2006...) the talk attempted to show how the use of the "broader public space" -meaning the foreign public space- for artistic interventions pondering such ideas as statelessness or diasporism, can offer an appropriate catalyst for engaging with issues of today.

Talk invited by Dieter Stadler (La Casa de los tres Mundos). Thank you to Ernesto Salmerón and Mariano Marin.

"Under free trade the trader is the master and the producer the slave. Protection
is but the law of nature, the law of self-preservation, of self-development, of securing
the highest and best destiny of the race of man. (...) We cannot take a step in the
pathway of progress without benefiting mankind everywhere. Well, they say, "Buy where
you can buy the cheapest". Of course, that applies to labour as to everything else.
Let me give you a maxim that is a thousand times better than that, and it is the protection
maxim: "Buy where you can pay the easiest." And that spot of earth is where labour wins its highest rewards"
Republican US President William McKinley speech on Free Trade, Oct. 4, 1892 in Boston, MA William McKinley Papers (Library of Congress).


Free Trade Concrete Mixer Kaleidoscope (concrete mixer, various Chinese imported goods, mirrors and lamps - 4m x 2m x 2m)

"The theoretical value of the Kaleidoscope must be understood in the face of the Benjaminian conception of the historian as a scavenger (Lumpensammler): "create history with the very detritus of history" (...) Not only does "the god [of history] is to be found in details", as used to say Aby Warburg, but it seems to bask in rubbish, in dust. (...) The magic of the kaleidoscope holds in this: that the shut and symmetric perfection of the visible forms owe its inexhaustible richness to the open and erratic imperfection of a dust of rubbles. Hence, this phenomenology of the kaleidoscope express not only the structure of the image - its dialectic, its double regime -, but also the condition itself - condition also dialectic, double regime - of knowledge on image and on art in general."
Georges Didi-Huberman, "Connaissance par le kaléidoscope. Morale du joujou et dialectique de l'image selon Walter Benjamin", Études Photographiques - CNRS, No7, Paris, May 2000. [My translation]

The exhibit partly revolved around an ongoing debate around Free Trade in Costa Rica at the time of the exhibition, even though of course it isn't only a Costa Rican reality. The population was divided by a vote for or against Costa Rica's participation in the U.S. Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), that would authorize large foreign companies (mainly from the US and China) to dominate the market. Despite the fact that this would obviously be damageable for domestic and family-owned businesses and be more favourable to rich citizens, the country wide referendum finally approved the free trade agreement with the United States. The symbol of a heart in which appear the Costa Rican flag was found in both the YES and the NO graffitis and stickers that soon appeared everywhere to influence voters.
The Shark Fin Piñata piece reflect on another largely controversial topic in Costa Rica: after the government accepted to allow Taiwan to fish freely in its waters in exchange for the construction of a much needed bridge, Taiwanese companies soon started the finning of living sharks on an industrial scale, as witnessed and photographed within the protected marine area of Costa Rica's Cocos Island National Park. Shark fin soup is a Cantonese cuisine delicacy commonly served as part of a Chinese feast.

Work exhibited:

• 1 - Free Trade Concrete Mixer Kaleidoscope - 2008 (concrete mixer, various Chinese imported goods, mirrors and lamps).
  
  
  
  
• 2 - Shark Fin Piñata + TLC cake - 2008 (coloured papers, cardboards and various Chinese imported goods).
  
  
  
  
• 3 - Untitled - 2008 (10 petrified chameleons from Niger, 10 living "owl" butterflies (Caligo idomeneus), cocoons, plastic and fluorescent light).
  
  
  
  
• 4 - Metragram 2007/2008 (c-prints mounted on wood, 40x50cm)
  
  
  
  Exhibition invited and hosted by Frederico Herrero (::.: ..: ::.: :. : . .:).

This artist talk is part of a larger series of discussions which should be considered storytelling objects. It used a number of earlier works and interventions -some unfinished or never even shown- as the base for a display of ideas and ruminations believed to be more meaningfully conveyed through stories. Maybe here the traveling contemporary artist is in some way similar to the Kamishibai of Japan who, between the two world wars, was telling from the back of his bike different stories based on a number of picture cards. We can also think of the bakhshi or Ashug of central Asia or the itinerant storytellers of africa (mikilist of the Congos, Griots of Mali, bards, ashiks, jyrau,...) who go from one village to the next, unfolding a story.

Starting from concrete examples (i.e. "Abreaction" intervention / Shanghai-2004, "A nos morts" intervention / Senegal-2005, or "Off the record" curating project / Tokyo-2006...) the talk attempted to show how the use of the "broader public space" -meaning the foreign public space- for artistic interventions pondering such ideas as statelessness or diasporism, can offer an appropriate catalyst for engaging with issues of today.

Talk invited by Frederico Herrero (::.: ..: ::.: :. : . .:).

The ClubMed hotel of Moorea was one of the finest resorts in Polynesia, and was abandoned after 50 years of use in December 2001, partly as a result of September 11, since American tourists stopped coming. Tina Tetumu, who appear in this image, worked at the hotel for 22 years until it closed. I was thinking about these theatrical sceneries and wash paintings that William Hodges brought back as the accompanying artist of James Cook's second expedition to the Pacific, as with this painting titled "Tahiti revisited" (1776). Art critics of his time seem to have complained that his use of light and color contrasts gave his paintings a rough and unfinished tone, which was exactly the feeling one had walking the collapsed remains of this former paradise.

As Walter Benjamin remarked, it is by bearing the mark of the implication of art in the world that ruins become "the building forces of humanity."
If Gérard Wacjman proposed the ruin as a true 21st century object (l'Objet du Siècle, Verdier ed.) and called it "présence picturale de l'absence" (the pictorial presence of absence), I think I touch this absence in her presence, flanked by the crumbling pillars of tourism (if "belly" in English is the "womb", as an idiom it also means to fail, to crumble: "to belly up"). As those ruins decaying in natural settings which symbolized beauty and transience for Caspar David Friedrich, this is a sort of post-modern tropical version of the romantic landscape.

If the ink used for calligraphy in Japan is made from the soot of the burning of seeds and bones from small animals, the ink used for the tribal tattoos in Polynesia were made from the burning of the seed of the Tau (tree), the Poro 'ati (litt. the perfectly round ball). This seed had curing properties, but could also poison it's user if badly prepared.
Thus this calligraphic intervention related to the Anthropometries of Yves Klein, the Logograms of Christian Dotremont and the Dactylograms of Piero Manzoni, which I have labelled a Metragram and that consists of inscribing on the hypogastrium (womb) of a woman with monochromic black ink -- tabula rasa, pinakis agraphos. A Metragram is a symbolic (perhaps cathartic) inking of the origin of the world.

Thank you to Teva Pater.
For a glimpse at other images from the Metragram series, visit this webpage.

"To represent someone or even something has now become an endeavour as
complex and as problematic as an asymptote, with consequences for certainty and
decidability as fraught with difficulties as can be imagined".
Edward Said, Representing the colonised: Anthropology's Interlocutors', Critical Inquiry, Winter 1989, v.15, no. 2, page 206.


The Metragram Series originates in my interest in the history of European visual representation of Non-Europeans, ranging from ethnological images to art works, which in fact often tend to mingle into one single and puzzling result, between legitimate inspiration and ostensible materialism. My recurrent appearance in the image with the "subject" of the work is aimed at inscribing what is European in me within the context of the representation of the other, here epitomized as a woman, and her womb in particular. It is obviously a subjective representation. If formal and iconographic conventions in European art inevitably affected how non-European were pictured, this series foster backward this history, going from the seemingly realistic to the more fanciful or idealised, even transparently unrealistic but always non-fictious. I do not forget that any representation of the Other is an underlying attempted control (especially in regard to colonial and imperialist image making history).

In that regard, the archives of the National Museum of New Zealand holds over a million of colonial images, ranging from ethnological postcards or stereotyped portraits (often presenting a "type" or a "specimen"). A good portion of these focuses on the Māori woman through a plethora of evocative names: maiden, belle, girl, beauty, etc as was the custom at the time, from the Indian girls of Tilly Kettle and William Daniell to the Egyptian belles of John Lewis. The expression in their eyes oscillates between melancholy, curiosity, sadness and detached amusement. This abundance can partly be explained by the fact that while daguerreotype were culminating in 1839, the negative image was invented by William Talbot in 1840, which corresponds to the foundation of the first organized European settlements in New Zealand.
These photos are often contextualized after the famous Māori Arawa legend of Hinemoa, as shown in the work of numerous artists of the time as Gottfried Lindauer, Robert Atkinson, Wilhelm Dittmer, or Arthur Îles. In this Metragram image, we sits in the remains of a canoe, overgrown by coastal plants. Hinemoa is shown in a canoe in a famous, but otherwise abstracted, oil painting by Nicholas Chevalier; "(...) a crutial episode of which involved a long swim by Hinemoa across a lake to reach Tutanekai (her lover), the canoes of her tribe having been hauled on to land to prevent the lovers meeting". Leonard Bell, Colonial Constructs, European images of Maori 1840-1914, Auckland University Press, 1992, page 142.
This image can also be seen as frustrating one of the most popular sub-category of the nude painting in nineteenth to early twentieth-century art, the Bather: "a single nude female located in the foreground plane, occupying about a third to a half of the picture space, close to water amidst foliage". E. N. van Liere, Solutions and Dissolutions: the Bather in Nineteenth-Century French Painting, Arts Magazine, May 1980, page 104.

As was also explained to me in Tahiti, in Polynesian traditions, following the birth of a baby the placenta was buried on the future land of the newborn in the roots of a fruit tree, which in turn was thought to die along with him. This image was taken close to the tree in which roots the placenta of Arawhetu Berdinner -the woman with whom I work (her iwi is Te Arawa, her sub tribes(Hapu) = Ngāti Pikiao and Ngāti Whakaue)- is entangle, closeby to her family house.

Thus this calligraphic intervention related to the Anthropometries of Yves Klein, the Logograms of Christian Dotremont and the Dactylograms of Piero Manzoni, which I have labelled a Metragram and that consists of inscribing on the hypogastrium (womb) of a woman with monochromic black ink -- tabula rasa, pinakis agraphos. A Metragram is a symbolic (perhaps cathartic) inking of the origin of the world.

Thank you to John Di Stefano and Sheba Williams.
For a glimpse at other images from the Metragram series, visit this webpage.

This artist talk is part of a larger series of discussions which should be considered storytelling objects. It used a number of earlier works and interventions -some unfinished or never even shown- as the base for a display of ideas and ruminations believed to be more meaningfully conveyed through stories. Maybe here the traveling contemporary artist is in some way similar to the Kamishibai of Japan who, between the two world wars, was telling from the back of his bike different stories based on a number of picture cards. We can also think of the bakhshi or Ashug of central Asia or the itinerant storytellers of africa (mikilist of the Congos, Griots of Mali, bards, ashiks, jyrau,...) who go from one village to the next, unfolding a story.

Starting from concrete examples (i.e. "Abreaction" intervention / Shanghai-2004, "A nos morts" intervention / Senegal-2005, or "Off the record" curating project / Tokyo-2006...) the talk attempted to show how the use of the "broader public space" -meaning the foreign public space- for artistic interventions pondering such ideas as statelessness or diasporism, can offer an appropriate catalyst for engaging with issues of today.

Talk invited by John Di Stefano (Massey - Director post-graduate program).

This artist talk is part of a larger series of discussions which should be considered storytelling objects. It used a number of earlier works and interventions -some unfinished or never even shown- as the base for a display of ideas and ruminations believed to be more meaningfully conveyed through stories. Maybe here the traveling contemporary artist is in some way similar to the Kamishibai of Japan who, between the two world wars, was telling from the back of his bike different stories based on a number of picture cards. We can also think of the bakhshi or Ashug of central Asia or the itinerant storytellers of africa (mikilist of the Congos, Griots of Mali, bards, ashiks, jyrau,...) who go from one village to the next, unfolding a story.

Starting from concrete examples (i.e. "Abreaction" intervention / Shanghai-2004, "A nos morts" intervention / Senegal-2005, or "Off the record" curating project / Tokyo-2006...) the talk attempted to show how the use of the "broader public space" -meaning the foreign public space- for artistic interventions pondering such ideas as statelessness or diasporism, can offer an appropriate catalyst for engaging with issues of today.

Talk invited by Sau Bin Yap & Wing Kok Yoong Lim (RAP).

The origin of the word Malaysia, "Malaya", is also the name of the National Forest or sacred garden, comparable to the Garden of Eden, in the Shambhala tradition.
Elis Faizah is of Malay and Punjabi descent. Her mother died some month only before this image was taken, and the work is intended as homage to her. She appears on the right, in an old photography, opposite the only existing image of her grand mother.

Thus this calligraphic intervention related to the Anthropometries of Yves Klein, the Logograms of Christian Dotremont and the Dactylograms of Piero Manzoni, which I have labelled a Metragram and that consists of inscribing on the hypogastrium (womb) of a woman with monochromic black ink -- tabula rasa, pinakis agraphos. A Metragram is a symbolic (perhaps cathartic) inking of the origin of the world.

For a glimpse at other images from the Metragram series, visit this webpage.

Kitanomaru Park connects the Imperial Palace and Yasukuni Shrine, that is dedicated to the spirits of soldiers and others who died fighting on behalf of the Emperor of Japan. As of October 2004, its Book of Souls listed the names of 2,466,532 men and women whose lives were dedicated to the service of Imperial Japan, particularly to those killed in wartime. The shrine is a source of considerable controversy.
Cherry blossoms are an enduring metaphor for the ephemeral nature of life, which is embodied in the concept of mono no aware (lit. "the pathos of things"), a Japanese term used to describe the transience of things and a bittersweet sadness at their passing.

Thus this calligraphic intervention related to the Anthropometries of Yves Klein, the Logograms of Christian Dotremont and the Dactylograms of Piero Manzoni, which I have labelled a Metragram and that consists of inscribing on the hypogastrium (womb) of a woman with monochromic black ink -- tabula rasa, pinakis agraphos. A Metragram is a symbolic (perhaps cathartic) inking of the origin of the world.

For a glimpse at other images from the Metragram series, visit this webpage.

"Today, one sees the beginnings of a society in which one proposes to apply to every
citizen the devices that had only been destined for delinquents. According to a project that is
already on the road to realization, the normal relationship of the State to what Rousseau called
the "members of the sovereign" will be biometric, that is to say, generalized suspicion. (...)"
Giorgio Agamben, No to Biometrics, Le Monde, December 5th 2005.


"The spatial behaviours that underpin present day life are subject to a broad pattern of structural change, a silent revolution often referred to as the information society, portrayed as a new, knowledge-based and borderless world, commonly associated with a collapse of time and space. As a result, spatial planning at a variety of scales is dealing with a new economic geography, electronic-based transactions, increased mobility and accessibility, and fundamental changes in the valorisation of spatial resources and assets. This information society has implications for future patterns of spatial development, creating a need for different and sometimes radical imaginations of spatial futures. (...)"
Gordon Dabinett, Planning and spatial justice in an information society, in Localism and the information society, Edited and compiled by Richard Berry & Dave McLaughlin, UK, 2007.

Amongst the works I presented:
- Ecumenopolis (Worldwide, 2004-2008)
An MJPG nonlinear digital film experimenting with cinema as an apparatus of memory, a video still life of a sort. Using over 1500 short videos filmed in 60 cities, the aim of the piece is to represent the idea that in the future urban areas and megalopolises would eventually fuse and there would be a single continuous world-wide city as a progression from the current urbanization and population growth trends. As Brans Stassen, the man behind the planning of Almere said himself; such a dynamic is already occurring on a regional level in Flevoland.
- Filipino emigration series (The Philippines, 2008)
60 ID pictures in a specially designed cabinet (250x26x90cm)
- Bush's names in Chinese (China, 2004)
Shanghaiese manufactured copper sheets (120x200cm)

Artists: Richard Wentworth, Marjolijn Dijkman, Enough Room for Space, Savage, Eric Van Hove, Melle Smets, Frank Koolen, Sara Kolster, Derek Holzer, Marc Boon, Kristin Posehn, SoundTransit, Maarten Vanden Eynde and Julie Peeters.
Curator/organizer: Macha Roesink & Annick Kleizen + Marjolijn Dijkman.

One of Galicia most antique monastery and one of its first hermit settlement, San Pedro de Rocas is directly excavated on the natural rock, and finds it origin when a group of seven ascetic men settle themselves here in retirement, according to the foundation memorial stone which you can hit upon at the Ourense Provincial Archaeological Museum. It is situated in the valley of the Ribeira Sacra.
In a tradition that existed throughout all of the Middle Ages, the floor in and outside the building is craved with human shaped sepulchres.
It is in one of them that I sit in this image. She is Cristina Pato.

Thus this calligraphic intervention related to the Anthropometries of Yves Klein, the Logograms of Christian Dotremont and the Dactylograms of Piero Manzoni, which I have labelled a Metragram and that consists of inscribing on the hypogastrium (womb) of a woman with monochromic black ink -- tabula rasa, pinakis agraphos. A Metragram is a symbolic (perhaps cathartic) inking of the origin of the world.
For a glimpse at other images from the Metragram series, visit this webpage.

This artist talk is part of a larger series of discussions which should be considered storytelling objects. It used a number of earlier works and interventions -some unfinished or never even shown- as the base for a display of ideas and ruminations believed to be more meaningfully conveyed through stories. Maybe here the traveling contemporary artist is in some way similar to the Kamishibai of Japan who, between the two world wars, was telling from the back of his bike different stories based on a number of picture cards. We can also think of the bakhshi or Ashug of central Asia or the itinerant storytellers of africa (mikilist of the Congos, Griots of Mali, bards, ashiks, jyrau,...) who go from one village to the next, unfolding a story.

Starting from concrete examples (i.e. "Abreaction" intervention / Shanghai-2004, "A nos morts" intervention / Senegal-2005, or "Off the record" curating project / Tokyo-2006...) the talk attempted to show how the use of the "broader public space" -meaning the foreign public space- for artistic interventions pondering such ideas as statelessness or diasporism, can offer an appropriate catalyst for engaging with issues of today.

Talk invited by Mok Chiu Yu (Centre for Community Cultural Development).

Thus this calligraphic intervention related to the Anthropometries of Yves Klein, the Logograms of Christian Dotremont and the Dactylograms of Piero Manzoni, which I have labelled a Metragram and that consists of inscribing on the hypogastrium (womb) of a woman with monochromic black ink -- tabula rasa, pinakis agraphos. A Metragram is a symbolic (perhaps cathartic) inking of the origin of the world.
For a glimpse at other images from the Metragram series, visit this webpage.

"道 (dào, or Tao) in Chinese philosophy, is a fundamental concept signifying "the correct way," or "Heaven's way."
In the Confucian tradition, tao signifies a morally correct path of human conduct and is thus limited to behaviour.
But in the rival school of Taoism (Dàojiāo 道教), the concept takes on a metaphysical sense transcending the human realm.
The 道德经 (Tao Te Ching - Dàodéjīng), a Taoist classic of contested authorship and date (sometime between the 8th and 3rd
century bc), opens with these words: "The tao that can be spoken about is not the Absolute Tao." The Absolute Tao thus defies
verbal definition, but language can make suggestions that may lead to an intuitive or mystical understanding of this fundamental reality."
Britannica Encyclopedia on the concept of tao (Chinese philosophy).


#000000 (Installation view - 100 Xuanzhi calligraphy paper sheets, cotton, wood, polished steel, intravenous drip and ink - 4m x 3m x 3m)

This piece is intended as a take on the Taoist concept of 道 (Dào): while the Absolute Dào "defies verbal definition", how about a contemporary calligraphic attempt, since calligraphy is about the formal aspect rather than the meaning of words? The calligraphy papers used for this installation are the most absorbent of all Xuanzhi (宣紙). 100 sheets are folded together on a carpet of white cotton. Above, suspended in the air thank to thin steel wires, a large bottle of black ink hangs up side down, connected to an intravenous drip, which let a drop of ink fall every height minutes.
Slowly, accompanied by the rhythmic ticking sound of the drops, the paper gets inundated, and over the duration of the exhibit the whole bunch of papers will eventually turn tremendously black. Even though I know that earlier this year researchers from Rice University and Rensselaer Polytech created the blackest material known to science using carbon nanotubes, which seems to absorbs light perfectly at all angles and over all wavelength, I haven't yet for myself seen anything as completely black as a Xuanzhi paper completely soaked in ink.
The characters on the wall, made of polished steel, compose an old Chinese Idiom: An Xia Hu Lu Fu Qi Piao (literally: Hardly has one gourd been pushed under water when another bobs up), meaning "solve one problem only to find another cropping up". The font used is this the Chinese government use for their official declarations: 宋体 (Song Ti).The piece is named after the six-digit hexadecimal number used in HTML, CSS, SVG, and other computing applications, to represent Black.

Curated by Pan Xinglei, Koan Jeff Baysa, Li Shi.
Support: Wallonia-Brussels International (CGRI).

"We have been enjoying your atomic sunshine"
General Courtney Whitney of GHQ, February 13th, 1946.
"Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order,
the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation
and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.
In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and
air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right
of belligerency of the state will not be recognized."
Article 9 - Japan peace constitution.


Japanese Constitution Worm Autodafé (Exhibition Model, scale 1:1 - Aluminum, pine wood, steel - 2m x 130cm x 50cm)

The Constitution of Japan was essentially written by US army officials from General Headquarters (GHQ) in 1947. Parts of "Article 9," known as the Peace Constitution, renounce war and the maintaining of potentially belligerent forces as the sovereign right of the nation. This unique provision in the peace clause of the Constitution, unlike any seen elsewhere before or since, reflects the idealism of American New Dealers. The new Constitution was well received by the Japanese people, who had experienced the bitterness of war; and it has not been altered for 60 years. But now, faced with political instability in Asia and an upsurge of nationalism, its very existence is being questioned.
In a climate in which the Constitution is faced with the possibility of being revised, the art exhibition "Into the Atomic Sunshine - Post-War Art under Japanese Peace Constitution Article 9" attempts to highlight issues and raise awareness of the influence of the Peace Constitution, which played such an important role in shaping post-war Japan and has had such an enormous impact on the Japanese people, and the reaction of post-war Japanese art to it.
Article 9 played a large role in allowing Japan to recover from war and helped reshape the country. Japan has avoided direct confrontation with other countries for more than 60 years. Although Article 9 has kept Japan from direct involvement in wars, its indirect involvement in wars has meant that Article 9 has helped maintain a twisted status quo. This unique situation has given artists the opportunity to discover a theme to tackle and express in their works. Numerous artists tried to deal with difficulties such as post-war problems and identity issues; these works are also related to the connection between Article 9 and world peace.
Despite the uniqueness of Article 9, its very existence is, surprisingly, not well known in other countries. Through this exhibition, not only will post-war Japanese and non-Japanese art be introduced, but Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution will also be made more familiar to audiences outside Japan.
Named after the "Atomic Sunshine" Conference between the U.S. occupation administration and Japan representatives which created the Constitution of Japan, this exhibition will investigate the historic significance of Article 9 and the importance of its development, and the fact that there has been no Japanese blood shed as a result of direct military confrontation for 60 years after the end of World War II.
-- Shinya Watanabe, curator.

Artists: Yukinori Yanagi, Yuken Teruya, Motoyuki Shitamichi, Yoko Ono,
Nobuyuki Ohura, Yasumasa Morimura, Yutaka Matsuzawa, Eric van Hove,
Kota Ezawa, Allora & Calzadilla, Vanessa Albury.

The contribution consisted of an earth worm autodafé: namely, feeding these simple ancient invertebrates photocopies of the Japanese Constitution, written after the war by US lawyers in the occupation authority (omitting Article 9). The sound of the worms' digestion of the disputable pages (which oddly resembled the popping sound of a fire) was recorded and broadcasted live on local radio frequencies using a basic PC transmitter, not unlike the way Hirohito's spectral voice emerged from radios across Japan on August 15, 1945.

On that occasion, some individuals are said to have written down their thoughts related to the event and thrown them to the worms, adding a cathartic dimension to the action. In fact, Japanese Shinto priests perform on different occasions a kind of autodafé which is called お焚き上げ (otakiage), literally "offering to the fire".

The history of such burnings is rich. In ancient Greece the books of the sophist Protagoras were burned in the marketplace of Athens, Roman emperors were fond of autodafés, as well as Pope Gregory IX, who in 1242 threw a full wagon-load of volumes of the Jewish Talmud into the fire in Paris. In the 14th century European penance preachers organized the Bonfires of the Vanities in which immoral literature was destroyed (Sandro Botticelli placed some of his paintings in the bonfire himself), not to mention the conflagrations frequently arranged by the Nazi regime. The best known autodafé in the East seems to be the 焚書坑儒 (where Chinese classics were burned and Confucian scholars buried alive) ordered by the First Emperor of China, Qin Shi Huan (秦始皇 / Shin-no-Shikoutei in Japanese) in 213-212 BC.

Further details about this piece are explained in an interview with the Japanese Art magazine Shift in Tokyo. It is accessible in English and Japanese here:
English = http://www.shift.jp.org/en/archives/2008/07/eric_van_hove.html
Japanese = http://www.shift.jp.org/ja/archives/2008/07/eric_van_hove.html

A catalogue was published: Into the Atomic Sunshine - Post-War Art under Japanese Peace Constitution Article 9 (68 pages, A4 Size, full color).
Curator's statement: The Breakaway from the Century of War - Article 9 as the Overcoming of European Modernism.
Support specific to the Worm Autodafé piece provided by: the Belgian ambassador to Japan Mr. Johan Maricou, Wallonia-Brussels International (CGRI), the Flanders Center and Trainspot KK. I extend my gratitude to Wanakio, by whom the work was initially commissioned.

"A year ago I escorted her home in the evening. There was
no one else who could be asked to do it. In the company of
several others, I walked happily along at her side. And yet it
seemed to me that I was almost happier in my hiding place;
to come so close to actuality, yet without actually being closer,
results in distancing, whereas the distance of concealment draws
the object to oneself. What if the whole thing were an illusion?
Impossible. Why, then, do I feel happier in the distance of possibility?"
Quidam in Søren Kierkegaard's Stages on Life's Way, 1845, page 205.


"Only in freedom is there love, only in freedom
are there diversion and everlasting amusement (...)"
Johannes in Søren Kierkegaard's Either/Or, 1843, page 360.

When Han Chinese Confucian hegemonic customs of betrothal were brought to the Naxi people of Western China around 1723, strict sexual repression curtailing the process of courtship took over local traditions, and soon strong reactions of intolerance against arranged marriage emerged. Young Naxi lovers couldn't accept for their whole lives to be coupled without possibility of free love relations.

Soon, inspired by the legend of a young woman 开美久命金 (K’â mâ’ gyù mí gkyî), who committed suicide rather than being forced into arranged marriage, ritual love suicide (yù-vû or "Yuwoo") became rampant, and remained so for more than two hundred years. Lovers would escape to the high slopes of the highest peak in the southern area of the Yangtze River, 玉龙雪山 (Yùlóngxuě Shān - Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, formerly known as Mt Satsetso) looking for scenic spot where "they could see as far as possible". There, thinking they would rather "be a shattered vessel of jade rather than an unbroken piece of pottery" (宁为玉碎,不为瓦全) they would look for the Cao Wu "Yuwoo" flower (which means "suicide" in Naxi language), build a shelter and play the mouth harp (k’á-kwuô kwuò). Named 草乌 in Mandarin Chinese, I identified the Yuwoo as being a variety of Aconite known as the Kusnezoff Monkshood which grows at an altitude of about 3300 meters. The Greeks hailed the Black Aconite as "the Queen of Poisons", created from the saliva of three-headed Cerberus, mythical guardian of the underworld. Used in countless societies, it is alternatively named monkshood, wolfsbane, leopard's bane, women's bane, Devil's helmet or blue rocket, and was the deadliest toxin known to mankind until the 20th century. In James Joyce's Ulysses, Rudolph Bloom, the father of Leopold Bloom, used monkshood to commit suicide, and it was with an aconite poisoned wine cup that Medea tried to poison Theseus.

He Limin, a professor of Naxi culture, explained to me that the Naxi traditionally had two paradises resting one on each side of the easternmost 7000 m peak in the world known today as 貢嘎山 (Gònggá shān). The main one was made of the five original villages and mirrored the normal social structures in mortal life, and was accessed via natural death, but there was another, a sort of Metaparadise which was "better" as it was a place of freedom from those very social constraints that the love-suiciders were dying to escape. This paradise could only be accessed for sure through love suicide. While Dtô-mbà (Naxi shaman) tradition identifies unnatural death, those who had died by their own hand without the benefit of a coin and rice in the mouth to open the gates of the Celestial Mansion, as the cause of transformation of the spirits of the dead into demons, love suicide turns them into "Wind Demons" (yù-ts’ù, "wind" means "to flirt" in Naxi). Those demons, earthbound spirits haunting the Third World of Yùlóngxuě Shān, a sort of dystopian utopia on the upper part of the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, could then tempt other young couples into yù-vû as long as they had not been appeased and sent off to Gònggá shān. To do that, the Dtô-mbà had to perform the largest-scale propitiation ceremony known: the five day long Hâr lâ llù’ k’ò’ ceremony to "propitiate the wind demons of suicide". (References: Naxi and Moso ethnography: Kin, Rites, Pictographs, Volkerkundemuseum Zurich, 1998, page 139. Edited by Michael Oppitz and Elisabeth Hsu.)

Following the indications of 李士昆 (Li Shikun), a Naxi herbal doctor from 玉湖村 (Yuhu village), formerly known as 雪嵩村 (Xuesong village) when it was home to Austrian-born American botanist and linguist Joseph Rock from 1922-1949, early September being their flowering season, I hiked above 3400 meters on the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, west of 玉湖 (the jade lake) up to 毒谷 (the poison gorge) past 天泉 (the heaven spring), and collected 草乌 "yuwoo" flowers. Then, I went up north into Sichuan Province and climbed on Gònggá shān, the mountain that He Limin asserts to be the location or inspiration for the aforementioned Naxi paradises. There I collected water from the glacier. Using that which had made its way down for hundreds of years from the supposed location of Naxi paradise near the summit and an improvised steam distiller I extracted the aromatic compounds from the purple Yuwoo petals. I then dried the deadly roots, and gathered the whole folded into two white Buddhist scarves into a black lacquered wooden receptacle carrying a passage from John Keats' Ode on Melancholy on its lid. A USB stick is included in the box containing various documentations including recordings from several conversations about Naxi love suicide with:


• Mr 李士昆 (Li Shikun), a Naxi herbal doctor from Yuhu village, about the 草乌 "yuwoo" flower.
• Mr 和力民 (He Limin), professor of Naxi culture at the Dtô-mbà Cultural Research Institute in Lijiang, about the tradition of Love Suicide in the Naxi culture and an accurate description of its mythology.
• Mr 和奇龙 (He Qi Long), Buddhist and Dtô-mbà researcher at the Five Pheonix Pavilion, Lijiang.
• Mrs 和淑芬 (He Shufen), a Naxi farmer from Lashihai Lake, about her sister who committed love suicide by hanging about 40 years ago at the age of 22.
  
  The title of the piece in Chinese is 殉情 (xùnqíng) "committing suicide together in the name of love" and 心中 (shinjū) in Japanese: the "double suicide" of two lovers whose ninjo, "personal feelings" are at odds with giri, the "social conventions" or familial obligations. In Japanese puppet theatre (bunraku and/or joruri theatre), the tragic denouement is usually known from the audience and is preceded by a 道行 (michiyuki), a small poetical journey, where lovers evoke the happier moments of their lives and their attempts at loving each other.
  
  Without being in any way educated on the matter, most of what I heard and saw about the Love Suicide of the Naxi people in Western China leads me to Søren Kierkegaard's existentialist philosophy. Going from the "dizziness of freedom" in The Concept of Dread, as experienced by a man standing on the edge of a cliff because of his complete freedom to choose whether or not to throw himself off, to the concept of "First Love" as a pinnacle for the aestheticist in Either/Or, speaking of the opposition between the aesthetic and the ethical as reason for the contradictions inherent to love, reconciled for Kierkegaard in the aesthetic validity of marriage. It seems to me that Naxi "love suicide" might go beyond marriage's aesthetic validity in reconciling the aesthetic and the ethical. Juxtaposed under the title Either/Or, it seems as if there can be no continuity, no dialogue, between the two notions for Kierkegaard, but only an exclusive choice. Naxi love suicide seems to bring the aesthetic and the ethical into conversation, bridging Eros and Agape.
  
  Commissionned and funded by Lijiang Studio. Realized thanks to the support of Wallonia-Brussels International (CGRI).
  
  
  

"(...)Then he was born of a cow, which is nicer, then of a giant lizard
from New Guinea, big as a donkey, then he was born for the second
time of a woman, and in the course of that was mindful of the future,
it was women after all whom he knew the best and with whom he
would be most at ease later, and now he was already looking at
that breast so soft and full, while making the little comparative
judgments which his already considerable experience permitted."
Henri Michaux, Selected Writings, New Directions Pubishing, New York, 1968, page 73. [translation Richard Ellmann]

Thus this calligraphic intervention related to the Anthropometries of Yves Klein, the Logograms of Christian Dotremont and the Dactylograms of Piero Manzoni, which I have labelled a Metragram and that consists of inscribing on the hypogastrium (womb) of a woman with monochromic black ink -- tabula rasa, pinakis agraphos. A Metragram is a symbolic (perhaps cathartic) inking of the origin of the world.
For a glimpse at other images from the Metragram series, visit this webpage.

"There is a boom of construction in almost all big cities of Central Asia (and the former USSR), in spite of general complaints about bad life. Huge amounts of money are invested, fantastic dividends are collected, great human and material resources are involved. But it is obvious, that there is a lack of systematic approach to the problems of cities, lack of professional specialists, deficit of ideas and just a thoughtful attitude to each concrete situation. Gradually it is shaped dehumanized environment, a kind of aggressive hyper-text amidst which we have to live. An individual or a separate person cannot influence this process or present a worthy antithesis."
(Ulan Djaparov, curator).

Exhibition date: 23 September / 7 October 2008
Venues: Kyrgyz National Museum of Fine Arts, other venues in open sites
Curators: Ulan Djaparov, Muratbek Djumaliev, Gulnara Kasmalieva.

I shown my "Ecumenopolis" non-linear mjpeg experimental digital documentary film. Click here for a description of the project in Russian language.
I made a presentation at ArtEast followed by discussions, as part of a workshop organized by Ruben Arevshatian, (Yerevan).

Thus this calligraphic intervention related to the Anthropometries of Yves Klein, the Logograms of Christian Dotremont and the Dactylograms of Piero Manzoni, which I have labelled a Metragram and that consists of inscribing on the hypogastrium (womb) of a woman with monochromic black ink -- tabula rasa, pinakis agraphos. A Metragram is a symbolic (perhaps cathartic) inking of the origin of the world.
For a glimpse at other images from the Metragram series, visit this webpage.

Chen Tong's Libreria Borges is a gallery cum bookshop, while the Libreria Borges Institute for Contemporary Art is an non-profit art center and publishing house. In addition to his role as critic and curator, Chen publishes the magazine Vision 21 and edits art theory books.

Thus this calligraphic intervention related to the Anthropometries of Yves Klein, the Logograms of Christian Dotremont and the Dactylograms of Piero Manzoni, which I have labelled a Metragram and that consists of inscribing on the hypogastrium (womb) of a woman with monochromic black ink -- tabula rasa, pinakis agraphos. A Metragram is a symbolic (perhaps cathartic) inking of the origin of the world.
For a glimpse at other images from the Metragram series, visit this webpage.

Thank you to Ruijun Shen, Zoe Jiang, Wu Hai-yan & Faye Mok.

Michiyuki - a dual video channel projection talk and reading.
Invited by (établissement d'en face projects).

日本から来ました。
日本に行ったことがありません。
上記のどちらでもありません。
I came from Japan.
I have not been to Japan.
I am neither of the above.

Curator's statement:
"I came from Japan. I have not been to Japan. I am neither of the above. brings together contemporary artworks from six international artists that display differing relationships with Japan; however, this exhibition makes no singular statement about Japan, or implies that there might even be a cohesive Japan that the artists could speak about. One might state that the connections between Japan and this exhibition border on incidental - hence the title, which simply describes the varying levels of association between the artists and the country. Consider the works in this show as part of a larger exploration into finding a balance between the poles of stating and describing something overtly and leaving something implied, or unsaid.
For example, a Scottish computer engineer working for the Toyota company explained to me in a doctor's waiting room in Tokyo that communication between the East and the West is not unlike an iceberg, where what is discernible, what is above water, only represents a small portion of the iceberg's actual structure."

Artists: 有川滋男 Shigeo Arikawa, 康雅筑 Ya-chu Kang, 西村明也 Akinali Nishimula, 志甫和美 Kazumi Shiho, Eric Van Hove, and Ben Washington.

The work on display was the Metragram on a Japanese American woman, Kitanomaru Park, Tōkyō Imperial Palace, Tōkyō (Japan/2008) picture
Curated by Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock.