Blog L’Internationale: #1

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http://www.internationaleonline.org/

Kaja Kraner, Tjaša Pogačar, Izidor Barši in Andrej Škufca pišejo blog na spletni platformi L’Internationale. L’Internationale je projekt večih evropskih muzejev (več o tem tu: http://internacionala.mg-lj.si/ ), pri katerem sodeluje tudi MG+MSUM. Njihov blog najdete pod rubriko OPINIONS: http://internationaleonline.tumblr.com/

To je njihov prvi blog:


 

#1

Our starting position for writing this blog is that our starting position is not neutral, yet not defined in advance. How can this be? We obviously speak something, from somewhere and to somebody, yet at the same time, the “what, where and to whom” of our speech is not exactly known to us. It could be something entirely different.

It would be easy to simply inhabit and then write from one of the pre-constructed positions that meet the “Eastern European young artist/theoretician” identity (including its attributed traumas, issues, topics and questions). The one that supposedly belongs to us (or we belong to it). But we won’t. Because we are not sure that it truly does (does any?).

This blog is a process of figuring out where we are; or rather, figuring out this “where” and, at the same time, this “we”, that is not something fixed or stable.

We start this blog as a conversation, but not as a consensual one. Rather than searching for an agreement and unification (a consensual “we”), we are interested in various misunderstandings, ruptures and conflicts, that might appear in the process of making it.

Young visual artists /1/

We, young visual artists, theoreticians of art, or those who defected into theory and/or art criticism (and are now slowly returning?), born in the 80s, we the young, who are said to be from the former east, are supposed to be the descendants of our local “artistic mothers and fathers”.

They were said to have struggled and still struggle to historicize and reflect the specificity of their situation. The one from the 80s in the 90s. They are still doing it. For us as well. And so much more for them as they had the need to contemplate, when the situation supposedly vanished, where are those who should have vanished with it. They keep convincing us that this history of theirs is to be ours as well.

Anyway.

They had the (mis)fortune of their borders being defined by the “repressive totalitarian state apparatus”.

There is nothing similar that would give a crap about us (as Tibor concludes in one of his columns).

We do not know to whom, what and from where we speak.

(To be more precise: we do not speak, but make so-called artistic gestures with arbitrary tools and media.)

We are the nodes/locations of a speech (especially because we like to co-work and read together).

But they have nonetheless left us some heritage.

Strategies of parasitizing, building autonomous value/art systems, total installations, and similar.

That is why we are (our own) artists, theoreticians and curators.

Workers, managers and investors.

We meet in the basement of the Moderna galerija and Rog (usually on Wednesdays).

Barši from the Academy occasionally joins in.

Over the past few days, we’ve been sending each other emails with links about the young literary scene (in Ljubljana).

This here is a relational artwork, not a poem.

Make no mistake.

____

/1/ A part of this relational artwork, that adopts the medium of a poem, was created as an intervention‑commentary for the web portal of LUD Literatura, a literary artistic association, at the time when the association posted a poem by Nejc Rožman Ivančič entitled Mladi slovenski pesniki (Young Slovene Poets) on its Facebook profile. A commentary under the pseudonym ‘young Slovene visual artist’ appeared – on the one hand, it was a dialogic exchange between the “young poetry scene” and the “young visual art scene”, or rather an attempt to get such a dialogue under way; on the other hand, it was an attempt to intervene in the logic of the “voice of a generation”, that the “young Slovene male and female poets” consistently adopt or wear in the Slovene cultural‑artistic context for one reason or another.