bienfaiteurs

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Tony Oursler, Slip, 2003.

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Tsuneko Tanuichi, Micro-événement n°1 /Ato no matsuri / Trop tard, performance, Galerie chez Valentin, Paris, 1995.

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Viviane sassen, 2014.

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Teresa Murak, Sculpture for the Earth, 1974.

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Jacqueline Mesmaeker, Enkel Zicht Naar Zee, Naar West, 1978.

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“The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust.”

- Donna Haraway

By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. Ths cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation. In the traditions of ‘Western’ science and politics–the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other - the relation between organism and machine has been a border war. The stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination. This chapter is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction. It is also an effort to contribute to socialist-feminist culture and theory in a postmodernist, non- naturalist mode and in the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe also a world without end.

By the late twentieth century in United States scientific culture, the boundary between human and animal is thoroughly breached. The last beachheads of uniqueness have been polluted if not turned into amusement parks–language tool use, social behaviour, mental events, nothing really convincingly settles the separation of human and animal. And many people no longer feel the need for such a separation; indeed, many branches of feminist culture affirm the pleasure of connection of human and other living creatures. Movements for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness; they are a clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture. Biology and evolutionary theory over the last two centuries have simultaneously produced modern organisms as objects of knowledge and reduced the line between humans and animals to a faint trace re-etched in ideological struggle or professional disputes between life and social science. Within this framework, teaching modern Christian creationism should be fought as a form of child abuse.

The second leaky distinction is between animal-human (organism) and machine. Pre-cybernetic machines could be haunted; there was always the spectre of the ghost in the machine. This dualism structured the dialogue between materialism and idealism that was settled by a dialectical progeny, called spirit or history, according to taste. But basically machines were not self-moving, self-designing, autonomous. They could not achieve man’s dream, only mock it. They were not man, an author to himself, but only a caricature of that masculinist reproductive dream. To think they were otherwise was paranoid. Now we are not so sure. Late twentieth- century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and art)ficial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.

The third distinction is a subset of the second: the boundary between physical and non-physical is very imprecise for us. Pop physics books on the consequences of quantum theory and the indeterminacy principle are a kind of popular scientific equivalent to Harlequin romances* as a marker of radical change in American white heterosexuality: they get it wrong, but they are on the right subject. Modern machines are quintessentially microelectronic devices: they are everywhere and they are invisible. Modern machinery is an irreverent upstart god, mocking the Father’s ubiquity and spirituality. The silicon chip is a surface for writing; it is etched in molecular scales disturbed only by atomic noise, the ultimate interference for nuclear scores. Writing, power, and technology are old partners in Western stories of the origin of civilization, but miniaturization has changed our experience of mechanism. Miniaturization has turned out to be about power; small is not so much beautiful as pre-eminently dangerous, as in cruise missiles. Contrast the TV sets of the 1950s or the news cameras of the 1970s with the TV wrist bands or hand-sized video cameras now advertised. Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, and these machines are eminently portable, mobile – a matter of immense human pain in Detroit and Singapore. People are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque. Cyborgs are ether, quintessence.

Excerpt from: Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist- Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 1991, p.149-181.

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Sophie Calle, The Chromatic Diet, 1998.

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Estelle Chrétien, Opération terrestre, 2016.

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“Only the wisdom of hindsight sees the obvious, that nothing can remain immense if it can be measured, that every survey brings together distant parts and therefore establishes closeness where distance ruled before.”

- Hannah Arendt

As a matter of fact, the discovery of the earth, the mapping of her lands and the chartering of her waters, took many centuries and has only now begun to come to an end. Only now has man taken full possession of his mortal dwelling place and gathered the infinite horizons, which were temptingly and forbiddingly open to all previous ages, into a globe whose majestic outlines and detailed surface he knows as he knows the lines in the palm of his hand. Precisely when the immensity of available space on earth was discovered, the famous shrinkage of the globe began, until eventually in our world (which, though the result of the modern age, is by no means identical with the modern age’s world) each man is as much an inhabitant of the earth as he is an inhabitant of his country. Men now live in an earth-wide continuous whole where even the notion of distance, still inherent in the most perfectly unbroken contiguity of parts, has yielded before the onslaught of speed. Speed has conquered space; and though this conquering process finds its limit at the unconquerable boundary of the simultaneous presence of one body at two different places, it has made distance meaningless, for no significant part of a human life—years, months, or even weeks—is any longer necessary to reach any point on the earth.

Nothing, to be sure, could have been more alien to the purpose of the explorers and circumnavigators of the early modern age than this closing-in process; they went to enlarge the earth, not shrink her into a ball, and when they submitted to the call of the distant, they had no intention of abolishing distance. Only the wisdom of hindsight sees the obvious, that nothing can remain immense if it can be measured, that every survey brings together distant parts and therefore establishes closeness where distance ruled before. Thus the maps and navigation charts of the early stages of the modern age anticipated the technical inventions through which all earthly space has become small and close at hand. Prior to the shrinkage of space and the abolition of distance through railroads, steamships, and airplanes, there is the infinitely greater and more effective shrinkage which comes about through the surveying capacity of the human mind, whose use of numbers, symbols, and models can condense and scale earthly physical distance down to the size of the human body’s natural sense and understanding. Before we knew how to circle the earth, how to circumscribe the sphere of human habitation in days and hours, we had brought the globe into our living rooms to be touched by our hands and swirled before our eyes. There is another aspect of this matter which, as we shall see, will be of greater importance in our context. It is in the nature of the human surveying capacity that it can function only if man disentangles himself from all involvement in and concern with the close at hand and withdraws himself to a distance from everything near him. The greater the distance between himself and his surroundings, world or earth, the more he will be able to survey and to measure and the less will worldly, earth-bound space be left to him. The fact that the decisive shrinkage of the earth was the consequence of the invention of the airplane, that is, of leaving the surface of the earth altogether, is like a symbol for the general phenomenon that any decrease of terrestrial distance can be won only at the price of putting a decisive distance between man and earth, of alienating man from his immediate earthly surroundings.

Excerpt from: Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 1958.

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Minne Kersten, Leak, 2020.

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Cecilia Bjartmar Hylta, Airbags, 2020.

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Júlia Esqué, Paper woven prints, 2021.

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Elspeth Diederix, The Studio Garden.

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Louise Bourgeois, Ode à la Bièvre, 2007.

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“Though they are highly visible in the environment and exist in an open zone, they go unquestioned and unnoticed, unless specific questions are asked.”

- Sukanya Krishnamurthy

As stated by Alois Reigl (1998), physical monuments in our environments are created as a human reaction to keep alive certain memories/events for future generations. The transformation to the causes of memory (and forgetting) are introduced not just by the rebuilt bridge as an exact replica and intentional monument, but also by the stones that graze the floor of the rebuilt bridge that have the potential to behave as counter- monuments.

On the shores of the river Neretva, at the foot of the towering bridge, lies the “Old-Old Bridge”, not in complete form but as stone blocks that have been dredged out of the river. Quiet and unseen, the stones bear material witness to the new bridge.

If these ruins can be seen as challenging the traditional role of the monument, they can be represented as “un-intentional counter memorials”. Laid out on the banks of the river, they appear to blend in with the landscape rather than call attention to themselves. Questioning the paradox that is the reconstruction, it is a narrative space caught between a state of survival and a state of not being fully alive (as they are not given the same prominence). They exist in an open zone and not in an artificially created museum. Open not only to the forces of nature, but also to human nature (to memory and to forgetting), the stones present a narrative state that brings together what Jarzombek (2004: 71) states as questions on memory and public space. For Jarzombek the process of retrieval and representation happen in open public spaces.

Though they are highly visible in the environment and exist in an open zone, they go unquestioned and unnoticed, unless specific questions are asked. The presence of these stones is not to force them on to the memory-industry, but to be used as a space (/platform) for contemplation on the issues of memory and forgetting through built form, and in this specific case an unintentional memorial. Through their presence and representation, these stones have an inherent value for understanding the temporality of memory, either in or through material form.

Uit: Sukanya Krishnamurthy, “Memory and Form: an Exploration of the Stari Most in Mostar”, Journal on Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe 4, 2012, p. 81-102.

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Ana Mendieta, Silueta Series, 1978.