ART&RESEARCH

Subsequently, we got invited to propose a work in Turin, for the Biennial in 2002. The context in Italy at that time was quite interesting. Berlusconi was in power in a coalition with some far right elements, presiding over one of Europe’s most extensive and porous borders while a relatively new wave of immigration - some legal and some illegal for economic reasons or some seeking political asylum - coming from outside the prosperous EU countries was taking place, resulting in the very noticeable presence of immigrants from outside of Italy. Despite the now integrated settlers from the south having been discriminated against when they arrived to the north in the 50s and 60s, there was quite a lot of quite openly racist sentiment against this new wave of immigrants. So we decided to do a project that would address this situation in the city. First of all, through a variety of contacts that we made at health centres and services, shelters, social centres or political groups that provided assistance to immigrants, we made contact with around 30 recent immigrants from a variety of countries. On a page with the central train station, Porta Nuova - which is the most common arrival point for a lot of immigrants into Turin - in the centre, we began by asking each participant to sketch their ideas of what features constitute the city for them. Participants were asked in to indicate particular places on their maps such as: where they go to eat, sleep, where they’d had a good experience or a bad experience, places that that remind them of their home country, where they go to meet friends and relax. They were then given a camera and asked them to photograph each of the places they’d marked on their maps and afterwards, when we’d printed the images we recorded and transcribed their comments. Most of the resulting photographs were of urban landscapes – trees, cars, streets, buildings, and buses – not really people, because taking pictures of people who may have entered the country illegally would cause problems. As with the ‘Inside Out’ project, the pictures didn’t necessarily have to be beautiful – though a lot of them were – and each image was given a context by the corresponding comment. There’s not really time to read them here, but there’s a website with all this documented.[1] Each person’s individual map was synthesised into a composite map which only included the parts of Turin that were mentioned by the participants, and an installation was made with that map overhead and pictures and comments hanging below, corresponding to the area of the city in which they were taken.

At that point, we were working under our own names, but when we got invited to some more exhibitions, we decided to start working under a group name, Big Hope, partly because we felt we were collaborating with other people and it didn’t feel quite right foregrounding our names in projects that had many participants.

This was in a building in Zagreb where we worked with logos of local companies - small scale local companies that were slowly going out of business and dying out as they became consumed in the inexorable process of economic globalisation. We used these letters that were part of logos to write the slightly banal statement, ‘Where do we end and they begin?’ around the outside of the building in Croatian. In 2002 this related to George Bush’s ‘with us or against us’ statements, but also to the slow dying out of these smaller businesses as the bigger global companies move in. In a similar vein, back in Hungary again, in 2003, we worked on a project in a new town called Dunaújváros, which was originally called Stalin Town when it was built around a new iron works as a kind of socialist utopian new town in the 50s. People that lived there found it a good place to live but now, but with Hungary now having entered the European Union, the iron works is no longer economically competitive and a lot of people in the town are losing their jobs. We were interested in trying to start some conversations about economics with a variety of workers in the town. We met and recorded interviews with ten people working in jobs ranging from traditional production jobs to academic and service sector jobs, for example a mechanic, school teacher, waiter, EU advisor. We asked for their opinions on the role of economics in society and their idea of what constituted a good and a bad economy. Some comments we got back were quite banal and some quite astute, but most were critical of economic globalisation and how it’s affecting them. We took an image of each of the work places – this is obviously a mechanic in the factory workplace, and presented the work in the gallery with that image alongside a corresponding selection of the interview text. There was also a video, which you can see in the corner there, on which we presented more in depth comments from each person, and also made a printed newspaper that could be taken away from the gallery for further reading. The idea of that was to have different levels of engagement with the work, that there could be this quite surface level where you just read a couple of comments, maybe stay half an hour and watch the video, if you wanted to read more you could take the paper away. Part of the thinking about that was the problem of excessive documentation that can be found in galleries with these kinds of projects, and the unrealistic amount of time people are expected to stay and read up on something. Although we could agree with the many comments that were quite critical of economic globalisation, we felt that the outcome was something that could come across as quite negative, and so we began a subsequent project that we called Commonopoly, in which we tried to highlight some of the ideas of possible economic alternatives.

Commonopoly, is obviously a play on the game Monopoly, but again with this question about documentation, rather than present a lot of information about our research into alternative economies, we decided to make a more playful game like format, where through engaging in a series of activities that represented a kind of synthesis of the fundamental concepts of some alternative economies, players could gain some very general understanding of existing concepts to be expanded upon and related to their everyday experience and environment. It takes the appearance of a game, but there’s no winner, so it’s more like a series of activities. You roll this coloured dice, land on one of the boxes, flip up the coloured flap and read the instruction of what you should do with the object or the book or the photograph in the corresponding box – sometimes you have to collaborate with another player in the game to exchange something or to add or to offer something. Some of the ideas were based on research of practical activities and initiatives that exist in Berlin. Like there’s a free shop where people give things they don’t need, and anyone can go and take some things that they need without paying. There are exchange rings, where people have formed a non-cash currency of hours exchanged providing and receiving services. There are also various cooperative kitchens where you can get very cheap food, and there are groups that are working on the ideas of commons, such as campaigning for free entry to swimming baths, park areas and public transport. So these were some of the concepts that we tried to include in the game. It’s been shown in about four places, and three of the places were exhibitions with a theme of economics that also included Oliver. I think they complimented each other quite well, because Oliver’s work contains a deeper explication of different, alternative economies – whereas Commonopoly includes a brief but more hands on and playful engagement with some of those same ideas.

This next project was something in Graz, in Austria that we were invited to do. It’s called the Protest Songbook. We sent emails out to people we knew asking them to contribute an idea of a protest song that resonated with them somehow, or had some impact, and to write a little bit about why and what way they found it was successful as a song. The reason for that came from my own strong interest in playing and also in the listening to music, and thinking about how different that is from my approach visual art. Usually I appreciate art that deals with political themes much more, whereas with music, that’s not really a criteria for my enjoyment of it – it’s more of an emotional expression, and certain protest songs if attached to a particular issue can become outdated. So this work started from an interest in exploring the differences between those mediums. Miklós and myself performed some of these songs in the gallery and also on the streets of Graz. (Laughing) We took the installation out onto the streets. There was also a radio programme part to it – in one of the corners of the exhibition space you could listen to interviews that we did with Ross Birrell, Martha Rosler, the artist in New York, and Elio Gilardi, who’s part of the creative group within the Turin Disobbedienti activist group. The way that they started using samba music at their demonstrations was very interesting, so he talked about that. So we asked different questions about the relationship between music and art and politics.

The last one, just to mention briefly was called The Threepenny Video and was, again, dealing with economics. We were invited to an exhibition in Budapest on a theme of Brecht - it was the anniversary of Brecht’s birth and we decided to work with The Threepenny Opera, which contained some caricaturing of polarised figures within Capitalism - the bad business guy, the poor beggars and also someone who’s exploiting the beggars by making a business out of them. We did two workshops – one with a group of homeless people, and one with a group of business people, where we presented certain scenes from the film, using those as provocations in order to document some responses. For example, in the film there’s a part where the beggars organise a demonstration, and we asked the participants in the homeless workshop if they could imagine organising a demonstration? What would they put on the placards and where would they march? Also with the business people, we used Brecht’s provocations against the criminality of business to see how they responded. So in a sense, it was a way of making our own role sort of neutral, because we could use Brecht as the person making accusations and gather responses from contemporary representatives of those characters. We made two videos with streaming text as the translation, which in this case was German and the original language was Hungarian.