ANABASIS. RITUALS OF HOMECOMING
05.09 - 04.10.2009
Artists: Lida Abdul, Helena Almeida, Mieke Bal, Yael Bartana, Rita Sobral Campos, Jonas Dahlberg, Danilczyk & Krakowska, Edith Dekyndt, Elmgreen & Dragset, Famed, Jaroslaw Flicinski, Kasia Fudakowski, Tadeusz Kantor, Agnieszka Kurant, Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler, Lothar Hempel, Marine Hugonnier, Susanne Kriemann, Sharon Lockhart, Ernesto Neto, Adrian Paci, Mai-Thu Perret, Agnieszka Polska, Pedro Cabrita Reis, Mathilde Rosier, Esther Stocker, Andrey Tarkovsky
Venue:
Ludwik Grohman Villa, ul. Tylna 9/11
Book Art Museum, ul. Tymienieckiego 24
Lodz, Poland
Curator: Adam Budak
Coordination: Ola Knychalska
Opening: 5 September at 5.00 p.m. till 6:00 a.m.
Organizer: Festival of Dialogue of Four Cultures
"roads of the world, we follow you. authority over all the signs of the earth. O traveller in the yellow wind, lust of the soul!... and the seed (as you say) of the Indian cocculus possesses (if you mash it!) intoxicating properties. a great principle of violence dictated our fashions".
...with these words French poet, Saint-John Perse concludes his poem „Anabasis“ (1924), one of the most important works of his entire literary ouevre for which he received Nobel Prize in 1960. It is with this poem which depicts „the earth given over to explanations“ Saint-John Perse, according to French philosopher, Alain Badiou, perceived the century’s epic dimension. It is there where the notion of „anabasis“ receives its most profound – contemporary – meaning. Referring to a narrative by Greek soldier and writer, Xenophon entitled „Anabasis“ which reported an expedition of a troop of Greek mercenaries from a coastline up into the interior of a country, „anabasis“ is the name for the „homeward“ movement, the movement of lost men, out of place and outside the law and as such, according to Badiou, it may serve as a possible support for a meditation on the XXth century and beyond. The Greek word „to anabase“ which means both „to embark“ and „to return“ seems to aptly describe the century which ceaselessly had been oscillating between its own beginning and end. This century is marked by the urge for and a necessity of a movement – homecoming, search for roots, desperate need to construct a „new“ order, an experience of beginning. „anabasis“ indicates such a movement – the ceaseless journey, displacement, a principle of lostness and an unprecedented return from (eternal) wandering lie at the root of „anabasis“. Perse defines this notion in the most picturesque and sincere way, writing about childhood, about memory, about neverending travelling, about experience of exile and community, about love and about... wind... In his essay „Anabasis“, included in the anthology „The Century“, Badiou confronts Perse’s version of the anabasis with the one depicted in the poem by Paul Celan (1963). This version – already closer to our moment of time and life – complements Perse’s. For Celan, we are not at home, we haven’t succeeded neither to begin a journey according to previously recognized path and planned itinerary: "we are, in what constitutes an admirable nomination of the anabasis as well as of the entire century: 'far out / into the unnavigated'. And it is precisely here, at the point of unknowing and bewilderment, that the 'Upward and Back' must be undertaken; it is here that we stake our claim of one day being able to turn towards 'the heart-bright future'. it is here that the anabasis is invented" (Alain Badiou).
But in fact as it seems – the paradigm for the inventive dynamism of the anabasis can be found in the story of the Odyssey, a discourse on exodus, which, as Michel Serres explains, is not an encyclopedia of knowledge but it rather represents a scalenopeadia, unbalanced in parts, signifying lameness, describing an oblique, twisting, complicated path: “Ulysses takes scalene routes and thus discovers and invents, routes of Greekness, those of non-redundant cultures. Cultures with history. Non-recycled history, not recyclable into a balanced or preconceived model, into a model in the two senses of the word, both theoretical and optimal. The first words of history are an exodus. There are cultures in which that history forms a scenario rehearsing legislation or structures, self-evidently present, or buried and yet to be revealed, a characteristic scenario, a methodical journey. We are beginning to know how to construct them, these schemes are no longer unfamiliar to us. One or two cultures came along in which history freed itself from this equilibrium, and begun to fluctuate outside the cycles, to branch outside repetitive schemas, to abandon itself to scalene paths. Ulysses navigating without a care in the world leaves behind closed knowledge and histories constrained by structures, he invents inventive knowledge and open history, a new time” (Michel Serres).
The story of Ulysses (the meaning of his journey as the paradigm of the return home throughout western culture and the curvy “unnavigated” path of his wandering) hovers above the exhibition “Anabasis. Rituals of Homecoming” and, together with the “anabasis” as a guideline and itinerary, it is loosely being considered as a template (one of many in fact…) to map the phenomenon of delirious Lodz and its own history and knowledge, dispersed and distributed, not integrated into totality, always deviating.
As an integral part of the Festival the Dialogue of Four Cultures, which this year is programmed around the issues related to the notion of TERRITORY, the exhibition “Anabasis. Rituals of Homecoming” considers various dimensions of homecoming – between intimacy and public exposure, interiority and a monument, personal and collective mythologies – as templates to rethink our relationship towards the past, history and memory. Here, childhood, migration and exile, leaving aside your national belonging, coming back from a factory, ordinary returns that belong to the practice of everyday life and the cultural/political heritage are perceived as rites that negotiate passages of our life. Home as an archetypal place and its prototype, home as a mythological and a real place we come from, the primal shelter and the site of unmediated presence; a homecomer – the conceptual personae of the Socius – as an active agent in the formation of territories; and a homecoming as a primordial act we carry with ourselves through the entire life of ours: sentimental (‘will I be missed?’) but traumatic too and perceived as an experience of repression (‘home is the place you left’). This exhibition approaches an act of homecoming critically as a heterotopic experience and a crucial component of becoming but also as a phantasmagoria. Here, it is being associated with Derridian “spacing” and “tracing”, and it marks a specific attempt at “writing” or “story-telling”. Homecoming “writes” pages of life as a journey out of oblivion and one’s identity as an on-going act of wandering. It is a method and a reference, an essential component of Deleuzeian sensation: the vibration, the embrace or the clinch, or the withdrawal, division, distension.
Partly homage to a city of a wounded fabric, this exhibition is a reflection upon a situation that generated an impossibility of homecoming. As a stage for a mental quasi-reenactment of a mythical return, Lodz – a modern city of a future, another attempt of utopia, ‘promised land’ – appears as both a void of no integral identity and a receptacle of failed in-placements and constant displacements, a matrix of failure, indeed. Rootless and ungrounded, temporary and transitory, it brings in a definition of home, which oscillates between the parasitic and the appropriate. Rapid economic growth and industrial boom of the mid-19th century, as well as dramatic political upheavals of the last two centuries and the current lame development in the shadow of the capital – turned Lodz into an urban and cultural edifice of a porous identity, an intercultural zone of diversity, on the one hand, but on the other – of broken tides, unwanted belongings and instability. Here, the rhetoric of a house and a politics of place and homecoming are conducted upon the absence of the vernacular – in a network of lines of flight and deterritorializations (Deleuze) that generated a city as a place inhabited but unsettled. Historically and contemporary, Lodz apparently has always been a para-site: ‘never quite’ taking place as part of its performance, of its success as an event, of its taking place; being neither inside nor outside a house, that which is beyond, and yet essential to, the space. Thus Lodz – the ghost town and an uncanny site, where we are “not at home”, constantly alienated, detached and defamiliarized, an estranged place of ‘far away so close’ – functions as a machine to rethink and to disfigure the contemporary understanding of a home as an enclosure and shelter, a primary site of belonging and proximity, the proper (oikeios) place of Celan’s ‘We’.
“Anabasis. Rituals of Homecoming” has been choreographed as a set of tentative chapters: contemplation of a home, home as a process, belonging to a place, fate of place (a residue and a site of transformation), impossible homecoming and a trauma of displacement, performing nostalgia and longing, ruin and the architecture of memory, childhood rites and the ethics of labor, reenactments of personal memory… They operate as mirrors reflecting back the individual and the collective, the political and the private, overlapping singular biographies and pages of history, along the curved lines of the past and the present. All invited to this exhibition artists perform a tension that on the one hand alludes to the inner voyage of Andrey Tarkowski’s “Mirror” (a fetishisation of home and necessity of inner exile) and on the other, it echoes an ironic and decadent study of nostalgia and the subject’s deconstruction in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Le Mepris” with its ironic reenactment of Odyssey as yet another potentiality and symbolic of the archetypal theme of homecoming. As a collection of rituals, this exhibition is an exercise in distancing and proximity, on the way to delineate a psychological space of estrangement and familiarity.
Some of the artists conceived projects that directly respond to the city of Lodz, the location and the exhibition’s theme. “Anabasis” will feature amongst others, the premiere of three new works by Pedro Cabrita Reis (a light mural, a reenactment of Kobro’s “Composition in Space” in the Park of Kilinski, a limited edition of a poster developed in a collaboration with the Museum of Art Book), new interventions by Esther Stocker and Jaroslaw Flicinski, a new sculpture by Rita Sobral Campos, inspired by a relief, depicting Hercules, found in the villa of the Museum of Art Book, new photographs of Susanne Kriemann from her on-going series “Untitled (Alphabet)”, new film “Courtyards of Lodz” by Sharon Lockhart, a new project by Agnieszka Kurant (a new rendering of Godard’s “La Chinoise”), new video installation of Edith Dekyndt (“Here/There”), new site-specific sound installation by Ernesto Neto, new sculpture “Styx” by Lothar Hempel, new versions of works by Yael Bartana (“Summer Camp”, accompanied by a new series of photographs) and Mai-Thu Perret (“Evening of the Book”) as well as works by FAMED (including a neon work “Will I Be Missed?”, installed on the façade of Grohmann Villa), Adrian Paci (including his sculpture “Home to Go” and film “Per Speculum”), Marine Huggonier (and her trilogy “Territory”), Hubbard&Birchler (with their uncanny film “House with Pool”), Agnieszka Polska (with her film “Calendar”), Kasia Fudakowski (a selection of her recent sculptures), a selection of installations and poetic sculptures by Mathilde Rosier, a monumental video installation by Mieke Bal (“Nothing Is Missing”), a unique embroidery by Elmgreen&Dragset (“Home Is the Place You Left”), two films by Jonas Dahlberg (including his recent “View Through the Park”), films by Lida Adbul (and especially her “What They Saw Upon Awakening, depicting the ruins of her hometown, Kabul), impressive photographs by Helena Almeida from her “Experience of Space” series and – last but not least – two very recent works by Tadeusz Kantor (including a painting “Ma Maison”). The exhibition’s highlight will consist of a unique and profound study of identity and homecoming – a set of 80 polaroids of Andrey Tarkowski.
“Anabasis. Rituals of Homecoming” takes place in charming interiors of the late 19th century villa of German industrialist, Ludwig Grohmann, one of Lodz’s first luxury residencies that proved a high economic prosperity of a town around the turn of the centuries. Designed in 1889 by Hilary Majewski, its architecture alludes to Italian renaissance. A special part of the exhibition, including a unique set of Andrey Tarkowski’s polaroids (“Instant Light”) has been staged in located nearby villa of Henryk Grohmann (built in 1892), with eclectic interiors, referring, amongst others, to Viennese Secession, partly and most likely designed by Otto Wagner, now becoming a home of Museum of Art Book, with an exceptional collection of art books, owned by Jadwiga and Janusz Tryznowie and a unique atelier with old printing machines.
The extended vernissage (September 5/6) includes performances (Mathilde Rosier, Danilczyk/Krakowska, Kriemann/Roelstraete), late-night screenings (Lockhart, Tarkowski, Godard, Kantor), and talks (roundtable with the artists as well as the conversation with the son of Andriej Tarkowski, Andriej A. Tarkowski).
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with a rich visual material (including exhibition’s installation shots) and essays by Suzanna Milevska, Mieke Bal, Dieter Roelstraete, Krystian Woznicki, Alain Badiou, Doreen Massey, Adam Budak, Kaja Pawelek, Agnieszka Kurant, Tomasz Majewski, Jaroslaw Lubiak.
Text courtesy of Adam Budak, curator. Images courtesy of Weronika Dobrowolska, Festival of Dialogues of Four Cultures and Monika Branicka.
