calendario eventi  :: 

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14/9/2011

Two exhibitions

CAN - Centre d'Art Neuchatel, Neuchatel

DAAR [Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency]
COMMON assembly: DETERRITORIALIZING the palestinian parliament

The Palestinian Legislative Council building – known as the Palestinian Parliament – is simulta- neously a construction site and a ruin. It collapsed not by the military violence that saturates our region but by the failure of a form of politics now challenged throughout the Middle East. The building is only one of the several Palestinian Parliaments scattered within historical Palestine and in the diaspora. Other “fragments” of Parliaments (Ramallah, Gaza, Jordan) and the traces of the erosion of Palestinian representation are present in many areas in which the political struggle wandered in the last decades. But that under discussion is probably one of the most representa- tive remains able to trigger the rearticulation of a new and shared political imagination.

Construction began in 1996, during the euphoria produced by the Oslo process. Its location is the product of political maneuvering. Some prominent members of the Palestinian leadership wanted to push the building as close as possible to the Al Aqsa mosque—a stepping stone towards the ultimate establishment of East Jerusalem as the capital of the Palestinian State —while Israeli lea- dership, military and settlers were simultaneously pushing the Parliament outside their unilaterally declared border of Jerusalem. Consequently, the Parliament wound up in Abu Dis, a peripheral Jerusalem neighborhood. In 2003, after the collapse of the Oslo Process, the eruption of the Se- cond Intifada, and the construction of the Wall just a few meters from the building, construction on the Parliament was halted and the building was left empty: a massive relic and a testimony to the failure of political negotiations.

Our project began with the discovery that – mistakenly or intentionally – the building was not built beside the border, but rather, that the border runs right through the building. Following DAAR’s methodology, which attempts to exploit opportunities found within colonial separations, our pro- ject seeks both to de-territorialize and re-activate this legal anomaly.

Upon discovering that the Israeli imposed Jerusalem border passes through the Parliament, it became clear that the building is sitting, paradoxically, within three different spaces: part within Israeli territory, part within Palestinian controlled territory, and a small strip, no larger than the line’s thickness, exists in a legal and sovereign limbo— potentially an extra-territorial zone. Thus we seek to reimagine the building, and its politically and legally suspended status, as an assem- bly that is able to represent all Palestinians: those living in Israel, under its occupation, and in exile.The activation of an assembly in a legal and political void constitutes a way of thinking and rethinking a space of relationality, horizontality and shared liberation, while colonial reason and the expropriators of the common have built their fortunes on these voids
The public, the private and the common

I
Common space differs from both public and private space. Public and private spaces entail institutionalized relations between people and things, regulated by the state: public property is maintained by the state and private property is guaranteed by it. Both public and private spaces are territorial mechanisms used to govern over people. Sometimes this form of government ope- rates by maintaining the distinction between public and private spaces, and sometimes by blur- ring them. The endless privatization of public space, mirrored by the incessant intrusion of public agents into the private domain, is a technique of government control.

II
In Palestine, the idea of public space is particularly toxic. Prior to Israeli colonization, various communities (such as agricultural, religious, nomadic, etc.) regulated a multiplicity of collective lands and collective land uses. After occupying the land and excluding its people, the Israeli state flattened all collective lands into one category, “state land,” and exercised sovereign control over it. State land became “public” space only for the public considered legitimate—the Jewish Israe- lis. The public land’s contours laid out the blueprint for colonization. Many parcels of state land have been transformed into settlements, aided by various legal procedures.

III
The common differs in this situation from public and private because it is constituted by a set of relations between people and things organized by principles of equality; it is not necessarily mediated by the state, and in order to exist needs to be activated/invented by a community The common is an instrument for rethinking the binary public/private forms of planning exchanged within official political discourses, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, in particular, provides unpa- ralleled opportunities to reflect on this dichotomy. Thinking about the common can breathe new life into the stale debate in which different parties appear to be trapped.

For the exhibition in Neuchatel, we will produce a coherent body of work using various explo- ratory mediums including architectural drawings, models, photography, videography, and text, making explicit both the historical understanding of the common in Palestine and our proposals for its collective re-envisioning.

This exhibition is a starting point to present architectural proposals—both realistic and imaginary. The CAN will act as a platform to provide the museum’s public with a unique, architecturally oriented perspective on the conflict. It will also coincide with the United Nations vote on Palesti- nian statehood at the end of September 2011.

DAAR
Sandi Hilal, Alessandro Petti, Eyal Weizman
Directed by Alessandro Petti
“Common Assembly: Deterritorializing the Palestinian Parliament”
A project by Sandi Hilal, Alessandro Petti, Eyal Weizman, Nicola Perugini
with Nishat Awan, Ghassan Bannoura, Benoit Burquel, Suzy Harris-Brandts, Runa Johannssen, Zografia Karekou, Cressida Kocienski, Lejla Odobasic, Carina Ottino, Elizabeth Paden, Sameena Sitabkhan, Amy Zion.
“Common Assembly: Deterritorializing the Palestinian Parliament” is the second collaborative partnership between DAAR, the Al-Quds Bard Honors College and the Forensic Architecture project, at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London. It is supported by Foundation for Arts Initiatives and the Municipality of Beit Sahour. The International Summer Research and Internship Program took place during the summer of 2011 in Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem. It involved students, architects, NGO staff and village officials. The residency in colla- boration with Delfina Foundation included 15 international architects and artists, 15 students from the Al-Quds Bard Honors College as well as local and internationals experts invited to present lectures and participate in seminars.

www.decolonizing.ps

DAAR [Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency]
DAAR is an art and architecture collective and a residency programme based in Beit Sahour, Palestine. DAAR’s work combines discourse, spatial intervention, education, collective learning, public meetings and legal challenges. DAAR’s practice is centred on one of the most difficult dilemmas of political practice: how to act both propositionally and critically within an environment in which the political force field is so dramatically distorted. It proposes the subversion, reuse, profanation and recycling of the existing infrastructure of a colonial occupation. DAAR projects have been shown showed in various biennales and museums, among them Venice Biennale, the Bozar in Brussels, NGBK in Berlin, the Istanbul Biennial, The Architecture Biennale Rotterdam, Home Works in Beirut, Architekturforum Tirol in Innsbruk, the Tate in London, the Oslo Triennial, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and many other places. DAAR’s members have taught lectured and published internationally. In 2010 DAAR was awarded the Price Claus Prize for Architecture, received Art initiative Grant, and shortlisted for the Chrnikov Prize.

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Jérôme Leuba
BATTLEFIELD #82 ; BATTLEFIED #77 /STONES

In his films, photography, installations, objects and living sculptures, Geneva-based artist Jé- rôme Leuba creates situations that seem somehow familiar – e.g. through the media – but which elude any specific interpretation or conclusion. Often entitled „battlefields“, they describe zones of tension, or conflict, by employing certain codes of representation, just to challenge the definite meaning these images might bear. Leuba’s battlefields do not only address zones of global power struggles, but also and foremost the very personal and individual struggles one might feel when confronted with the subtle uneasiness that these scenarios imply.

battlefield #19 / if you see something say something (2005) takes form of a simple intervention in public space, in this case an art institution. A piece of luggage left inconspicuously in a corner is per se nothing dangerous. But latest since 9/11, the object has lost its innocence. First installed at the Swiss Art Awards on the fairgrounds of Basel Messe, the unlabelled suitcase or sport bag made visitors call the authorities to examine and remove the subject of suspicion. The collective projection through our conditioned reflexes – reflexes conditioned by the media and society, as exemplified in battlefield #19 – is juxtaposed by the idea of a singular space of projection in batt- lefield #27 / unlimited (2007), a slow tracking shot through a sparely lit space. It is not clear imme- diately, if it’s an interior or outside space. It implies a nightly ride through an empty ghost town, with buildings without windows, and an unsettling soundtrack. One is reminded to Jacques Tati’s iconic movie “Playtime,” in which the camera glides along anonymous modernist glass facades, or to a 3-D computer game, where an unknown enemy could jump around the corner at any second. Apparently, there is an exit sign visible, which confuses the impression (implied through the sound) that we are in an open urban landscape. It’s not a film set either. The film was shot in Art Basel’s Art Unlimited hall, just before the artworks moved in. White cubes and black boxes are rarely distinguishable, and the floors are still covered with plastic foil. The title “unlimited” suggests openness, but after each corner waits another frontal wall, unlimited view is nowhere in sight. In this piece, Leuba transports the meaning of battlefield quite elegantly to the art market, by capturing the ultimate playground of the art world’s power game in a state of emptiness that at the same time unveils its spatial limitations. It is a game without players, and, as such, without winners. But at the same time, the piece slyly reverses its implied critique: with its sheer esthetics and site-specify, it is in fact likely to enter these holy halls one day under other circumstances.

Leuba’s „battlefields“ transport their meaning beyond the ground of military operations, as exem- plified in battlefield #4 /verdun (2003) – a historical battlefield, turned into a gulf course. These ambiguous images describe clashes of different visual information systems and communication codes. On one side, there is the battlefield as territory. On the other, there is the clash of visibility vs. invisibility – between the visible, factual information, and the invisible, ungraspable connota- tion that these images bear and create. In his work, Leuba consciously prevents us from seeing or understanding everything. He rather suggests that it’s exactly the space between the visible and the invisible, where images become meaningful – where the mediated, society produced reception is separated from the individual.

Eva Scharrer in “shifting identities” (Kunsthaus Zurich), cat., ed jrp, 2008

As Leuba’s work always sparks an unforseeable concern and surprise in the public, we decided avoid describing and analyzing the two pieces shown in the exhibition.

Image: Carina Ottino, Parlement palestinien à Abu Dis, 2011

press contact :Marie Villemin
mv@can.ch
+41 (0)78 739 30 22

Press conference: thursday 15 september at 11 am with the presence of the artists and curators

Opening : friday 16 september at 6:30 pm

Guided tours : Sunday 25 September at 4 pm, Sunday 16 October at 4pm

Centre d’art Neuchâtel
37, Rue des Moulins - 2000 Neuchâtel
Openings: wed-sun: 2-6 pm, thurs:2-8pm

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