[spectre] 'The Rest of Now' at Manifesta 7

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

Dear All,

(Apologies for cross posting to readers at Nettime, Spectre, 
Fibreculture, Crumb, Kafila and the Sarai Reader List)

This is to share with you news of 'The Rest of Now' an exhibition 
curated by us, the Raqs Media Collective (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica 
Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta), at the ex-Alumix factory in 
Bolzano / Bozen, for the seventh edition of Manifesta: The European 
Biennale of Contemporary Art, which opened in the Trentino-South 
Tyrol region of Italy on the 19th of July. The exhibition will stay 
open till the 2nd of November, 2008.

Manifesta is an itinerant biennial that changes location every two 
years. The  artistic strategies of Manifesta 7 take the landscape, 
history, industrial heritage and socio-cultural environment of the 
Trentino-South Tyrol region as their points of departure. The five 
different venues: - the fortress in Fortezza / Franzensfeste, the 
Manifattura Tabacchi in Rovereto; the Ex-Peterlini  factory and the 
railway station in Rovereto, the Ex-Alumix factory in Bolzano / Bozen 
and the former Central Post Office in Trento - will all be open to 
the public for the first time in their new incarnations as spaces for 
the exhibition of contemporary art.

The artistic content of each Manifesta is conceived and developed by 
a new team of international curators. This edition of Manifesta is 
curated by Adam Budak (Graz / Krakow), Anselm Franke (Berlin / 
Antwerp) / Hila Peleg (Berlin / Tel Aviv) and Raqs Media Collective 
(New Delhi). Adam Budak curates an exhibition titled 'Principle: 
Hope' in Rovereto,  Anselm Franke & Hila Peleg curate an exhbition 
titled 'The Soul' in Trento and the Raqs Media Collective curate 'The 
Rest of Now' in Bolzano / Bozen. The three curatorial teams 
collaborate to curate 'Scenarios' at Fortezza / Franzensfeste.

The curators of Manifesta 7 have invited more than 180 participants 
from many different parts of the world, with a strong focus on 
today's diverse Europe, to present their work in Trentino-South 
Tyrol. The curators have invited the artists to respond to the key 
curatorial concepts of Manifesta 7, which are inspired by the 
region's intricate web of history, modernity and contemporaneity.

To find out more about Manifesta 7, see - http://www.manifesta7.it/

To find out more about the different exhibitions, locations and 
artists lists,  see - http://www.manifesta7.it/locations/show/

To find out more about the curators, see - 
http://www.manifesta7.it/pages/657763594

We enclose below, our curatorial essay for The Rest of Now. We look 
forward to responses, to the essay, and for those of you who have 
been, or are planning to travel to Manifesta 7, to the exhibition 
itself. This essay has been published in 'The Index' to Manifesta 7, 
by Silvana Editoriale, Milan, 2008

regards

Shuddhabrata, Monica and Jeebesh

(Raqs Media Collective)


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The Rest of Now

Raqs Media Collective


1.

A hundred years ago, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, artist, poet and high 
priest of a muscular industrial aesthetic, was seriously injured in 
an automobile accident on the outskirts of Milan.  During his 
convalescence, he wrote a passionate paean to speed, the very force 
that had so recently threatened his life. His words, clad in the 
brash cadence of the first Futurist Manifesto, ring out as a fanfare 
to the velocity of the twentieth century.

  "We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a 
new beauty: the beauty of speed... We are on the extreme promontory 
of the centuries! What is the use of looking behind at the moment 
when we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible? Time and 
Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we 
have already created eternal, omnipresent speed..."
  A hundred years later, standing inside the disused Alumix factory in 
Bolzano/Bozen, which for five decades had been dedicated to the 
production of Marinetti's beloved aluminium, hindsight suggests that 
we consider a different rhythm. Not the speeding regularity of 
architettura razionale, but the soft, syncopation of desuetude.  Let 
us rest for now, between an odd and an even beat, and consider what 
remains from a century devoted to the breathless pursuit of 
tomorrow's promised riches.
  An empty factory, which once produced aluminium - the substance of 
bombs, aeroplanes and coffee percolators, the metal of speed, death 
and light - is the stage and provocation for us to invoke that which 
is left behind when value is extracted from life, time and labour.
Aluminium, which as tinfoil and scaffolding is used for the cladding 
of everything from sandwiches to building sites, is also what is 
thrown away the moment the sandwich is eaten and the building 
finished.  Mountains are flattened to mine bauxite, the main 
aluminium ore.  Mountains of aluminium waste may eventually take 
their place.  The Alumix factory, like its counterparts all over the 
world, is a monument to its own residue.
  Turbines, transformers, motors, smelters, furnaces, production 
targets and megawatts of electrical power have long since vacated 
this building.  Marinetti's "great agitation of work" has departed to 
other continents, making room for dust, fungi, and the anticipation 
of resurrection.  Manifesta 7 enters the building in this moment of 
pause, stealing in between the downtime of industrial abandonment in 
the core of Europe and the overture of global capital's next move.
  The "rest of now" is the residue that lies at the heart of 
contemporaneity. It is what persists from moments of transformation, 
and what falls through the cracks of time.  It is history's obstinate 
remainder, haunting each addition and subtraction with arithmetic 
persistence, endlessly carrying over what cannot be accounted for.
The rest of now is the excess, which pushes us towards respite, 
memory and slowing things down.
  Remembering what has departed, recognizing what is left behind and 
preparing for what is yet to arrive means making sense of the 
relationship between living and having lived.  It means reading the 
things that almost happened, or didn't quite happen, or that were 
simply desired, against the grain of that which is occurring or has 
taken place.  Residue is a space of open, uncharted, alterity.  The 
residual and the imminent share a paradoxical working solidarity.
  In "Lance," a short story about time and space travel, Vladimir 
Nabokov wrote, "the future is but the obsolete in reverse," 
suggesting that even the impulse to hurtle into futurity is always, 
already, shadowed by its own imminent obsolescence.  The Alumix 
factory, like so much of the twentieth century's heroic and tragic 
dalliance with the future is now a repository of the residual.  What 
better place can there be for the rest of now?
2.

  An exhibition is a design in space.  "The Rest of Now" is also a 
figure in time.  In Bolzano/Bozen, the ex-Alumix factory sits nestled 
between the elevations of the Dolomite mountains, whose every fold is 
a reminder of the fact that industrial time is only a faint ripple on 
the surface of geological time.
To draw a figure in time is to inscribe a mark on a difficult and 
slippery surface.  As time passes, the reasons to remember grow 
stronger, but the ability to recall is weakened.  Memory straddles 
this paradox.  We could say that the ethics of memory have something 
to do with the urgent negotiation between having to remember (which 
sometimes includes the obligation to mourn), and the requirement to 
move on (which sometimes includes the necessity to forget).  Both are 
necessary, and each is notionally contingent on the abdication of the 
other, but life is not led to the easy rhythm of regularly 
alternating episodes of memory and forgetting that cancel each other 
out in a neat equation that resolves to zero.

Residue is the fulcrum on which the delicate negotiation between 
memory and forgetting is undertaken, because it is the unresolved, 
lingering aftertaste of an event that triggers the task of retrieving 
and dealing with  the difficult of its recollection.  The question of 
what is to be done with residue - should it be burned, buried, 
frozen, embalmed, mourned, celebrated, commemorated, carried over, 
forgotten or remembered - haunts us all the time.  It haunts us in 
our personal lives as much as it haunts the larger histories we 
participate in and draw from.  To draw a figure in time is 
necessarily to encounter and reflect on the difficulty of the 
residual.  There are no easy answers to the questions posed by 
residue.

Images are not always the most reliable allies against forgetfulness; 
words play tricks with memory. Oblivion is easily accomplished, 
especially with the aid of what is usually called restoration, which 
makes it possible to ignore or cosmetically invert the action of time 
on a physical surface.  Monuments, contrary to the stated intentions 
of their construction, abet forgetfulness.  Sometimes the work of art 
can be a matter of ensuring that the time it takes to think and 
recall difficult questions be given its due; that instead of 
purchasing the processed and instant sense of time mined from a 
monument we explore the option of accessing the potential of even a 
modest memento to destabilize the certitude of the present.

  How can images and objects be brought together in a manner that 
helps etch a lingering doubt onto the heart of amnesia?  How can 
concepts and experiences that sustain an attitude of vigilance 
against the impulse of erasure be expressed as tools to think and 
feel with, to work with in the present? How can we remember and 
reconsider the world without getting lost in reverie? How can a 
meditation on history avoid the stupor of nostalgia? What work must 
memory be put to, in order to ensure that we erect, not memorials 
that close the roads to further inquiry, but signposts that ask for 
more journeys to be undertaken?
  "The Rest of Now" is an occasion for the asking of these questions. 
It offers both the building blocks of an argument and a disposition 
to be alert to the material, cognitive and emotional consequences of 
temporal processes.  Underlying the argument and the disposition is a 
hunch that the after-image of residue may be a critique and an 
antidote to the narrative conceit of progress.  We can move on only 
if we understand that the debts we owe to the past are a long way 
from being settled, and that we are required to carry them with us 
into the future.  We can move on only if we understand that the 
future is constituted by the debts we incur in the present. Residue 
is an unlikely, but effective, engine.
The artists we have invited to "The Rest of Now" have responded in a 
variety of ways to our proposition.  Coded within their responses are 
entire archives of forgotten, retrieved and imagined worlds, 
exemplars of practices of persistence and refusal, instances of play, 
investigation, questioning and speculation.  Looking out with them, 
out of the factory, towards the mountains, this exhibition layers, 
leaches, and addles time.  It arrests and thickens time, sows time's 
seeds in a garden, bores time's holes in masonry, scrapes time's dust 
off a wall, build's time's bridge to nowhere, measures time in terms 
of detritus, tells stories about the stubborn persistence of things, 
people and ways of life that refuse to admit that either their time 
is over or that it hasn't yet come.  This exhibition takes time, and 
lays it across a long table, makes it climb a high tower, skip a 
heartbeat in a tap dance, rise like mist and fall like sunlight, run 
like an engine and dance like a worker, sleep like a hill and wake 
like a factory, shine, escape and elude capture like the enigmatic 
memory of a dead grandmother.

3.

[The extraction of value from any material, place, thing or person, 
involves a process of refinement. During this process, the object in 
question will undergo a change in state, separating into at least two 
substances: an extract and a residue. With respect to residue: it may 
be said it is that which never finds its way into the manifest 
narrative of how something (an object, a person, a state, or a state 
of being) is produced, or comes into existence. It is the 
accumulation of all that is left behind, when value is 
extracted...There are no histories of residue, no atlases of 
abandonment, no memoirs of what a person was but could not be.]

 
 
 
				 "With Respect to Residue," Raqs 
Media Collective, 2005

  When faced with any apparently "abandoned" situation, it quickly 
becomes clear that a lot remains.  Even the walls of a shut-down 
factory teem with life forms, only some of which are visible to the 
eye.  To recognize this is to encounter the fecundity of residue.
  In 1855, the English botanist Richard Deacon published a botanical 
study of the ruins of the Flavian amphitheatre in Rome, "The Flora of 
the Colosseum."  His meticulous and monumental account catalogues the 
420 species of vegetation growing in the six acres of the ruined 
edifice.  These included several species so rare in Europe at that 
time that Deacon speculated that they must have been transported as 
seeds in the guts of the animals and slaves imported into Rome from 
Africa and Asia for the staging of gladiatorial spectacles.  Deacon 
speaks of these rare plants with affection and awe, saying that they 
"form a link in the memory, and teach us hopeful and soothing 
lessons, amid the sadness of bygone ages: and cold indeed must be the 
heart that does not respond to their silent appeal; for though 
without speech, they tell us of the regenerating power which animates 
the dust of mouldering greatness."  By 1870, the Colosseum in Rome 
had experienced the first of several modern attempts at 
"restoration," and the ancient cosmopolitan exuberance of vegetation 
that had been the botanist's consolation had begun to give way to 
naked stone.
The vocabulary of contests and gladiatorials has not changed much in 
the last two millennia.  Speed and prowess matter as much as they did 
when prisoners, slaves and beasts fought it out in the Colosseum's 
arena.  If anything, the Olympic virtues, "citius, altius, fortius" 
(faster, higher, stronger) have become the governing maxims of the 
contemporary world - the pace of life and labour gets faster, profits 
and prices rise higher and armies get stronger.  Our societies are 
Colosseums reborn.  We are spectators, gladiators and beasts.
  The late Alexander Langer, autonomist activist, thinker, maverick 
European Green politician, and native of South Tyrol, with his 
interest in the residual and his ecological emphasis on slowness, 
provides us with an interesting late twentieth century counterpoint 
to Marinetti's cult of speed and the gladiatorial imperative. He 
proposed a challenge to the "citius, altius, fortius" maxim with a 
call to consider an alternative trinity of virtues - "lentius, 
suavius, profundius" (slower, softer, deeper).
For quite some time now, the Olympic virtues have been defended with 
armed police pickets all over the world. It becomes necessary, at 
times like this to consider a few good reasons and methods to slow 
things down, to reclaim the stone with wild seeds.
--------------------

Shuddhabrata Sengupta
The Sarai Programme at CSDS
Raqs Media Collective
shuddha at sarai.net
www.sarai.net
www.raqsmediacollective.net