[spectre] follow-up from Riga Syndicate encounter

[sally jane norman]

Kia ora friends, colleagues

For the Deep Europe Symposium Andreas and Rasa Smite organised in the
context of the "Splintered Realities" conference held in Riga last June, I
contributed a text which seemed, for me, to be the only way to contribute
to this reflection on a community that means/ meant much for so many of us.
In multiple ways.  Following the conference online - scattershot, given
time zone differences - for me was heartening, memorable, and eminently
humanising. It was great to re-encounter thoughts and friends from long
ago, long missed, but still clearly driven by the values we shared 25 years
ago. Andreas asked if I would share my text, which is below. There's an
irony here - I seem to have unsubscribed from Spectre a few months ago,
because I was finding it hard to relate to a list essentially publishing
announcements of faraway events.  Yet the "Deep Europe Symposium"
re-awakened the sense of closeness founding and longstanding Spectre
members always represented for me. So hopefully this will make it to the
list, without being too out of kilter as an Antipodean's reflections on
Deep Europe.  I'm prefacing the text with comments I sent when forwarding
this to Andreas after the conference/ symposium.

warm wishes to all, stay strong, kia kaha

Sally Jane

*It's awkward for me to place so much emphasis on Indigenous culture here
as I haven't been able to devote enough time to respectfully do so - then
again, so much that I'm learning feels immensely important. And often
conveys values not unrelated to those I felt we shared from Syndicate
times. **The attached text feels inadequate in many ways - I'd written
screeds that required serious cutting down, and was/ am acutely aware of
burning politics and neighbouring warfare for Riga and East Europe-based
friends. As during 90s Kosovo events that impacted our community, input not
directly related to urgent conflict matters felt/  feels both blithe and
oddly necessary.*



Syndicate goals and contexts then and now: spatial and temporal links and
gaps

How to reflect on Deep Europe in a rear-view mirror? A mirror’s reflections
depend on where you’re placed: your position determines what you can see.
Our interdependency with these reflections is even more complex with
rear-view mirrors, used in situations where we are mobile, and where what
we see depends on our position in a moving vehicle, and it depends on the
environment the vehicle is moving through. Rear-view mirrors let us safely
move forwards, as well as backwards: knowing what’s behind us, or what
we’re leaving behind as we travel ahead, helps us negotiate our path. In te
reo, the indigenous Māori language of Aotearoa New Zealand, the place I’m
speaking from, this is encapsulated by concepts of time encountered
throughout Polynesian cultures: kei muri, designating the future, crudely
translates as ‘behind’, while reference to the past: ‘i-ngā-rā-o-mua’
translates as ‘the days in front’. We move forward towards our ancestors –
human and more-than-human - recognising our genealogy, our origins.
Indebtedness to the past underpins our duty to the future, so it drives
current actions.

Earlier discussions about this «Syndicate Session» compared today’s
uncertainty about our planet, politics, and futures, with the sense of
shared values, goals, and horizons of possibility that brought us together
in 1996. It was suggested that we may have to start from scratch in
conversations about Deep Europe, about art and media. But starting from
scratch means discarding events that shaped us, including those that
brought us together over 25 years ago. It means doing away with “the
rear-view mirror of history” that helps us move forwards, knowing what
we’ve traversed. I can’t do this, but am interested in leveraging our
shared history to renew the drive to open things up that characterised
Syndicate: how to reflect on cultural encounters in the widest sense of the
term, to collectively build new horizons of possibility in this radically
transformed context.

It's odd participating from the Antipodes as a Kiwi and “deep European”,
committed to the diversity Deep Europe represents. But I’m grateful for
recognition of this group as «a messy formation that should be cherished
and cultivated – in Europe, and elsewhere».  Particularly given the fraught
geopolitics dominating Eastern Europe, cascading across and beyond the
continent. Distance doesn’t diminish the sense of connectedness: sometimes
bigger gaps generate a stronger sense of links. Despite advantages and
relative safety of being so far away, this isn’t a “comfortable” country or
situation in many ways. As Luchezar has said, there are problems everywhere
(there’s racism and terrorism, socio-economic disparities). So please bear
with my subjective account of Syndicate goals and contexts, across gaps and
links of twenty thousand kilometers and twenty five years. My first
Syndicate encounter at the Dutch Electronic Arts Festival in Rotterdam in
1996 – it was moving to see Alex Adriaansens earlier in Miklos’s images -
spawned introductions to countless online and physical networks. I’d been
member of a Paris media artists’ cooperative, working as a freelance
translator without institutional affiliations (about to change) roaming on
the edges of groups that interested me, excited by the European adventure
and liberated by Internet’s growth in France after its slow initial uptake
there.

I’d also remained enthralled by my earlier academic research on twentieth
century Central and Eastern European art – and vividly remember a Paris
café terrace with Inke, discovering our shared passion for Malevich et
al’s Victory
over the Sun; it got cold when the sun went down but the discussion kept us
warm for hours!  Remembering Malevich, V2_East, and the exchange with Inke
is today all the more moving given Malevich’s Kiev birthplace and
attachments. In any case, for all these reasons, V2_East felt strangely at
home, as did Syndicate’s geographically and politically scattered,
dislocated, yet ethically welded community.

Syndicate goals and contexts involved listening to and trying to deeply
dialogue with others, in the search for a more richly interconnected,
creatively, often disturbingly and disruptively critical, culturally
diverse Europe. The English language as key medium for “deep Europeans” is
something I still find awkward – now a burning question in Aotearoa, a
bilingual country where the indigenous language conveys very different ways
of thinking and living. This reminds me of questions raised at the
“Understanding the Balkans” meeting organized by Melentie Pandilovski in
Skopje, in 2002 (post-Syndicate Spectre), where few participants spoke
fluent English and all the others used a shared Slavic idiom for casual
conservation, switching to English for the conference. Concerned that we
were inhibiting exchange, we questioned the others who said that conversing
in “foreign” English offered a neutrality they couldn’t get in their
respective languages once discussion moved onto formal, often controversial
terrain. This situation of course didn’t diminish the importance of the
other languages that were overridden, but it heightened general attunedness
to the politics of language and communications. Something perhaps obvious
for others that, for me, had to be directly experienced and assimilated.
Like lessons learned at a Faces meeting with Kathy Rae Huffman and others
in Linz, where it was very clear that fluency with English language and
style does not necessarily improve exchanges amongst people attentive to
silence, hesitation, apparent clumsiness. Again a lesson that resonates
with Aotearoa encounters, where what Europeans call silence, can be read by
Pasifika people as powerfully contributing to exchange.

These Syndicate experiences imprinted on my rear-view mirror, informing
current travel, epitomize the value of openness to trying to learn from
different perspectives. Not by pseudo-consensus or ironing out differences
but by respecting the dynamics of possibly conflicting, irreconcilable
viewpoints. Splintered realities. So how to make what Haraway called
“situated knowledges” speak to each other? This aligns with decolonisation
discussions: to play with Australian philosopher-artist Paul Carter’s
words:  If a decolonising (diversified deep Europe?) approach articulates
local knowledges as situated, contingent, multi-sited, dispersed, and
intricately connected to place, person and identity formation, then how
will they relate to one another?  Valuing the multiplicity of local
knowledges… may produce postcolonial disintegration rather than radical
anticolonial integration.

Situatedness in the nineties motivated collective efforts to build media
resources vital for our work and our very differently enabled communities –
a focus on bandwidth featured in the European Cultural Backbone manifesto
for the Austrian European Parliament;  lobbying for support to facilitate
exchanges and widen circulation of critical creative work independent from
tech market forces was also a key driver. Local perspectives informed group
thinking and raised awareness of differences in needs.

Today’s different needs and splintered local perspectives are geared
towards global issues impacting our survival as a species and a planet.
Interrelated military conflict, climate change, pandemics, and oppressive
regimes fuel competition for energy and agricultural resources, for
inhabitable land and air, urgently posing questions that were just starting
to hit public awareness a quarter century ago but that today impact all
media, artistic, and cultural engagement. In my part of the world, this
includes thinking about the precarious futures of Pacific Island nations
that will cease to exist over the next few decades; Tuvalu, Kiribati,
Rotuma, Tokelau, Wallis and Futuna, Marshall Islands are all atoll-based
countries whose peoples each day are undertaking a painful exodus from
their homes, to survive as climate refugees. This week’s Pacific
celebrations of Tuvalu language week discussed how to create a virtual home
for a Tuvaluan population without Tuvalu.

Limits the pandemic has imposed on mobility, combined with efforts to lower
carbon-guzzling travel, has set questions of relocation, attachments and
community, in a new light. I’ve been engaged with the “Vā Moana” Global
Talanoa Network – talanoa is a word used across the Pacific to signify a
discourse of openness, trust and inclusivity – where we’ve searched for
ways to translate senses of protocol and encounter into virtual online
modes. Sound played a key part in last year’s Talanoa conference : there
were recurrent surges of distinctive Pasifika drumming, and a background
sound of waves breaking on the shore that was a very poignant presence, as
many of the talanoa participants reside on islands being submerged. The
Global Talanoa Network exemplifies ethnomusicologist Steven Feld’s concept
of acoustemology, which means engagement with environmental listening,
tuning to the creative backdrops against which sonic knowledge can emerge.

More generally, and to wind up this antipodean splinter contribution, my
work tries to align with what Feld defines as an ethics, as well as an
aesthetics, of expansive listening. This is where I feel indebted to
Syndicate’s legacy and ethos.
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