THE OTHER SIDE SAIT DIARY

Social Actors in Transformation : ROTTERDAM 2003 – An invitation by the curators of the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art for WHY Rotterdam to interfect the SAIT project by CHOROS International Projects. Through inter-disciplinary, inter-sector and inter-regional comparative research, the project seeks to articulate and intervene within the “cultural ecosystem” of three cities (Rotterdam, Minneapolis, Belgrad) in an attempt to bridge the gap between critical theory and contemporary cultural / aesthetic practices.

WHY Rotterdam by Innbetween is a project that searches for the “true Rotterdam” that “lies innbetween factual history and consensus reality and it's hidden legends or imagined utopias”

READ PROPOSED CONCEPT “Secret Agents Innbetween”

Images SAIT page @ WORM STATION

Entries from WHY sketchbooks reflecting on our invitation to participate as Artists in the Social Actors in Transformation Project at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam. All Social Actors are purely faktional and this has nothing to do with Art.

(FROM THE MOST RECENT ENTRY)

• STROMBOLI: Final Entry. After the month experience in the SAIT “laboratory”, with great distance innbetween the initial proposal and the end “taste-in-the-mouth”, we had a chance to reflect on the experience in the five-evening "Stromboli" festival at The Player April 30 to May 4. Within the evening theme “The Resurrection of the Visual Arts”, this eight minute movie traces an individual’s schizophrenic search for the “Stromboli” in the insular forum of the art-world to his just revelation. The story sets in with a Dionysian goat-masked character, Igor Kempinski, surrounded by computers in his laboratory which all repeat his objective on the screens: “Stromboli?”. He promptly receives information that the “Stromboli is the Center for Contemporary Art”. SEE STROMBOLI

• PARASAIT: Appreciating the parasitic, viral effects that the project produced. Once again it was proven how important the mere existence of a gathering space, how white and non-smoking it might be, is for exchange. I mean, it needed a link from the WdW website that a Lukas from WORM first experienced our website–no correspondance, no signature, no numerous unpaid collaborations made that happen so far! Even his (Lukas) complaints about being a “showcase organisation” were nicely and rarely so outspoken: “we are guinea-pigs in the laboratory, but no one wants to make experiment with us” or “when we are ourselves, WORM, people running around, telephone, chaos...it makes the organisers feeling uncomfortable”, “This has nothing to do with art” ...which is funny because (see other entries) it brings you back to wonder and question what this ART could should would mean. Often a reflection starts with a negative formulation (this is not... i am not... you/we/they are not...)

• Why did WdW need an impetus from the “outside” to even put the word “Rotterdam” in their vocabulary? Already longer, they expressed the need for this discourse, an evolving question of the position of this center for contemporary art within THIS urban network. But obviously it needed a certain “language” to open that door wider. Was it the articulation they imagined? Is the theme “checked” now, that was it, Rotterdam, we are going back to Cairo? Maybe the “virtual SAIT” on their website is a start, collecting links, research, images etc. Hopefully they soon run out of space on their server and it becomes something by itself, affiliated with the center, so that artists & co. can profit from the connection/namedropping. It could grow in a collection missing in the city like the WHY Rotterdam magazine.

• I like how it started for us. We were encouraged to interpret the title “Social Actors In Transformation” : “...spare yourself the trouble of asking us how to interpret it and make a proposal in which your reaction to the content makes sense to you...”, and you don’t wanna know what can grow in our minds when we fantasize! Since it has never been our way of working to create an “Innbetween product”, we liked the notion of mutual contamination between theory, serious dialogue and art-practice and surreality. Hey, we read and use sociology/politic/philosophy writing, too! Actors are for us interpreters, performers of reality. They don’t tell you the truth, well maybe they do, but through a story or a certain dramaturgy. Acting is one of the artistic practices, even for art-councils. If you see it that way, then SAIT was a bad director (regisseur, zeremonienmeister). We would tolerate the fact that there was no desire/“design” composing a spatial experience (for the visitors and participants) or behaving like a good host (no, i don't mean the catering), if there was a certain unspoken agreement/openness/chemical message to be wanting to be used and adapted. Occasionally I saw actually (non-participating) artists–and other persons having something to add to this—sneaking around where I wished they would/could openly express their part of the story (of Rotterdam?) they are carrying around with them. Also the “invited” often proclaimed their versions (their knowledge) into the ashtray outside the non-smoking area. And those were often the pieces that would have made the laboratory original and multi-facetted. Let alone those “actors” who make (based on legitimate or illegitimate prejudice) a big circle around the WdW anyway. Don’t think that that would have ended in total chaos–come on, we are in Holland! Too much can always get less. (see director, zeremonienmeister).

• New York Foundation for the Arts sponsors CHOROS, the organizers of the Social Actors in Transformation project in the Witte de With. CHOROS, in the manner we have experienced them, is an unfamiliar association / usage with the realm of “ART”. If CHOROS applies as an ART organisation and gets funded, the understanding and definitions of ART must once again be discussed. Which is essentially a good thing. More often, we have detected that the language and tools of sociology and political science are sufficiently “reasonable” to satisfy the art council’s definitions of artistic practice. I mean how weird is that? More questions: What did the “Center for Contemporary Art” identify as the artistic practice with in this project? What “artists” is the SAIT staging? What is the role of the artist in this project where for example DUENDE, as invited artists, participate essentially as discussion forum organizers?

• Recommend continuing the Parallel Practice round tables in the third phase. The strategy to reveal overlaps or contrast practices should be kept but without the 3 cities approach. The success of this approach should be applied to the case study city, especially Rotterdam, because these discussions are not happening here. Thereby this project might actually have some relevance to being stationed in Rotterdam.

• Why is this project so well-behaved?

WELL-BEHAVED OBEDIENT REINFORCING THE CLICHÉ APARTHEID DUTCH ORDER

• But what happened since Phase 1? Think what was criticized / protested in the January discussions and then compare it do what is happening now. The current popular model of the artist as social worker instrumentalized by the government to gentrify neighbourhoods. The artist as a socio-cultural harmonizer. The absence of any perceptible artistic reflection on the political changes in the last year in the public sphere. The art “CUBE” ivory tower. apARTheid. Like then, we are still suspicious of a Bik van der Pol.

Are we doing this Phase 2 the “Dutch way”?

In fact, the methods by which the SAIT negotiates with the Witte De With employs/exploits the Dutchness we criticized. The current “laboratory” manifestation of the SAIT project mirrors the repressive tolerance of the Dutch mentality where we, also as invited (foreign yet) Rotterdam artists, must negotiate our own creative input with a strict categorical and analytical style of documenting the cities to the point of neutralisation. There is no space to be a Social Actor in our view. Our approach, our “acting”, which inevitably has to do with why we are involved in this project is suffocated by the prescribed structures it claims to be criticizing. We believe that we are the only artists within this project which are “acting” as artists. Even WORM's expression of their art is prescribed. Even Tanja and Freya asked “where is Innbetween?” WHY is a door. But maybe we have to be more extreme. Again forced into extremism, symptomatic of Dutch Order. We can behave. We don’t need or want to be extreme for the sake of being extreme. but we do not want to contribute to Dutch consensus reality. You have to understand us? You have to understand us. We live in a case study cover-up of democracy and we have to say something about it. This project is not radical or experimental. This project does not want to change anything in Rotterdam. Where is the potential of “irritation” as a source of innovation? Are they all really so comfortable in their situation? Forget Artist. Try being a Transdimensional Tourist in Rotterdam.