FOTOD: Paula Roush


GARAGE: Manuela Ribadeneira + Paula Roush *SPACE PROTOCOL* (curated by Louise Garrett)

infiltrate>>estonia: SPACE PROTOCOL
TEXT: Louise Garrett
infiltrate began as an ongoing conversation about the ways in which contemporary artists and curators sought to investigate and reveal the networks, structures and spaces of the art 'world'. In particular, I was interested in the way that certain artists sought to translate, reload or negotiate the codes and conventions framed by the institutions and politics of art by creating their own networks or organisations, which allowed them to circumvent or infiltrate, to reactivate or occasionally corrupt or infect existing systems and operations. The networks or institutions artists and producers had created for themselves or operated within were more or less real or, in some cases, entirely fictional. They could be a conglomerate of individuals or an individual posing as a conglomerate. Some tended to be bound by a strongly branded identity where others sought to pursue anonymity. Certain organisations maintain an aggressively rigid structure while others act as a constantly mutating organism relying on an ever changing variety of hosts for their form. In fact, the very slipperiness of such organisations and modes of practice in terms of given definitions was often the source of their efficacy—often a constant interplay of fictionalised reality allowed an indeterminacy that connected to the very elusiveness of meaning itself. Within these types of organisations, artists were (are) able to adopt a variety of roles, as mediators, directors, service providers, activists, consultants, producers, researchers, collaborators, archivists—roles in fact often seen as the domain of the curator. So, alongside this recognition of the way particular artists were choosing to operate was another conversation regarding how curators and artists could pursue particular dialogues in an atmosphere in which their respective roles were becoming almost interchangeable.

How that particular conversation may play itself out is part of a wider frame for this current discussion in which I want to focus specifically on the process behind the project SPACE PROTOCOL at Rael Artel Gallery. Rather than illuminate the broader picture, I hope to dwell on the undulations and eddies that took place beneath the surface of this project to look at the specific terms of the collaboration and dialogue that took place in Estonia.

Before entering into the dynamics of that collaboration I will briefly sketch the first infiltrate exhibition at The Substation in Singapore (April-May 2004), which serves as a further backdrop to the current project. For that exhibition I invited seven artists from both northern and southern hemispheres to contribute either existing or new work that I hoped would sketch out a map of localised tendencies in this broader current of work that seeks to interrogate and problematise specified institutional and cultural morphologies. The artists — Heman Chong (Singapore/Berlin), Lucy Harvey (UK/Dusseldorf), International Necronautical Society (London), Christian Jankowski (Berlin), Dane Mitchell (Auckland), Manuela Ribadeneira – Artes No Decorativas S.A. (Ecuador/London), Peter Robinson (Auckland) — seemed to share a certain mock-serious tone as they attempted to straddle insider-outsider positions within various artistic and cultural terrains. The works in infiltrate often operated as fragments of much larger viral networks or ongoing archives. By nature institutionally bound by what the term 'art world' might imply, the artists in infiltrate had a tendency to underwrite their complicity with the institution by an urge to slip through the net of its boundedness. Through either ambiguous forms of empire building or the desire to adopt or elicit others to adopt roles, they conjured a micropolitics of (inter)action.

Where infiltrate (Singapore) relied upon a fairly obvious curator-led model, for infiltrate>>estonia I wanted to scale things down so that a more collaborative and responsive process could take place. To this end I brought together two London-based artists who were able to take part in a dialogue before and during the exhibition in Estonia. The two artists — Manuela Ribadeneira and Paula Roush — have certain affinities in terms of approach. Both artists work collaboratively under the auspices of a branded identity or company: Artes no Decorativas S.A. (Manuela Ribadeneira) and msdm (Paula Roush). Both of the organisations have a somewhat ambiguous or flexible function, but are broadly oriented towards providing some kind of 'service', and both of the artists generally work in a context-specific fashion. Prior to this collaboration, neither of the artists knew each other or were aware of each other's work. None of us had been to Estonia nor knew a great deal about the place beyond the basics, so there was an element of the 'exotic' about our destination, which we were entering as not much more than (that maligned category) 'tourists'. To start the process of stabilising our mission, we agreed on a set of protocol with which to process, generate and activate the, as yet unknown, conceptual space(s) we intended to invoke through our intervention in Estonia, thus:

SPACE PROTOCOL
A preliminary draft and record of a transaction

i SPACE is the premise
ii SPACE has not been defined as a space before
iii SPACE may be defined as ‘new’ by a new use given to it
iv SPACE manifests itself in the physical world
v SPACE can be territorial or geo-political as well as philosophical or purely perceptual
vi SPACE may be short-term, long-term, permanent, ephemeral, and its manifestation may be captured by means of documentation only
vii SPACE can be used in daily life
viii SPACE is accessible to every person
ix SPACE is generous

Whatever individual projects we intended to pursue were designed to fit within the framework of SPACE PROTOCOL, and that, then, became the title of the project as a whole.

Prior to leaving for Estonia, Manuela put forward her intention to work with part of an ongoing project called Imaginary Lines. This project has many manifestations, but a point of departure is the name of the artist's birthplace, Ecuador, which reflects one form of imaginary line—the equator. One particular line of enquiry the project led to was the need for artists (and others) to demarcate physical and mental space within which to operate, so she began devising a set of prototypes to be used for designating such space. Simple gadgets could be introduced and demonstrated to the local audience in Estonia as part of a public relations exercise to lead towards the eventual manufacture of such products. To give a few examples, different types of space markers might include stickers, labels, ropes, sticks, personalised smells or recorded voices, which the user mobilises to mark out and define space as well as the rules governing that space. The work is activated to create a mobile interface between personal and public space, such that an artist or user can produce a space or identifying structure for their own practice wherever they find themselves.

For her part, Paula began research on Pärnu itself and found that the local weather report was accompanied by online images of Pärnu's main shopping street via a webcam. After further delving she found that this webcam was part of a global network of surveillance cameras: the Axis 2100 Webcam (made in Sweden), which is a pre-programmable device with its own server sending images from weather stations, shopping malls, university libraries and nature resorts all over the world. This curious 'axis of information' provides a service that is by turns educational, banal, invasive and frankly baffling — does the diligent researcher in a Finnish library know she is being observed by an artist in Camberwell? Beyond local security services, who is the intended consumer of images of an entrance to a campus in Massachussetts? At any rate, this random network of spaces offered a nebulous line of connection from rainy Pärnu, 'The Summer Capital of Estonia! Town between the River and the Sea!' to an uncanny conglomerate of spaces elsewhere...

On arrival in Tallinn, and perhaps as a reaction against the tourists' directed identification with location symbols, Manuela proposed the Marguerite Duras quotation 'She asked for directions to get lost...' as a possible stepping off point for our initial investigations of the city. Proposing the city as an entry point to a kind of labyrinth by which unknown routes might throw up unforeseen clues to the question of space motivated us to debate what being lost or getting lost might mean to visitors of a new space. Was it a question of how, why or where to get lost? Could locals provide us with a key for getting lost? Could there be any possible instructions for getting lost? Could we ourselves provide a service to help other tourists to get lost? Was getting lost a matter of geography, or a stranger's inability to read the signs (of a space's identity, for example, its existential meaning)? Problem was we were running out of time and needed to head to Pärnu the following day to try to deal with an actual gallery space, so we had little time for anything but a minor diversion and were not sure if we were getting anywhere fast (but surely that was the point?) To cut a long story short, the following morning the artists conducted an hour-long research project which directed us on a bus-ride to Lasmanäe, a vast swathe of Plattenbauen deemed by vox pop to be a place to (potentially) get lost in ... While this project failed to manifest itself fully in the final project at the gallery, the idea of the labyrinth remained as a potent symbol for personal engagement with space, and an aide memoire in the form of a piece of embroidery made by a local craftswoman using the quotation "She asked for directions to get lost..." was commissioned by Manuela as part of her installation.

Some hours later, we'd arrived in Pärnu. It was raining. We tried to locate the webcam. We looked for the gallery (closed). We headed down to the beach. It was still raining and khaki-coloured water lapped onto the deserted shore. We looked for mud baths and found the rather grand neoclassical structure Pärnu Mudaravila built in 1926. It was closed. Difficult to get lost in the 'Town between the River and the Sea!' but easy to lose direction...

It was Friday night, and we had till the opening on Tuesday evening to devise and realise some kind of response to this new space within the terms of SPACE PROTOCOL. As a collaboration, it was becoming clear that each artist would work side-by-side while working on her own direction — at some points the routes may intersect, often at unforeseen junctures or in unexpected forms. Paths that had seemed dead ends might be pursued later on, or from a different angle. The little spa town of Pärnu would act as a studio for the artists to activate a productive space.

Saturday morning and we've located the webcam in the window of the Information Centre. The real time online images from the camera have a primitive quality to them. Time lapse and frame frequency gives the tourist procession down Rüütli, Pärnu's main shopping street, a jerky, ghostlike aspect as faces and figures jump in and out of the frame. Our reading of such surveillance images was very much coloured by recent events in London involving four young men on a train from Bradford and their terrorist paraphernalia. Innocent backpacks, favoured accessories for terrorists and tourists alike, had taken on a sinister nature. That affinity would take on a certain import over the next few days in Paula's project.

There was one more local symbol that was beginning to draw Paula in, so while Manuela and I were down on the beach taking polaroids of instructional images on how to use Manuela's protoypes, Paula was on the trail of MUD. Having successfully infiltrated Pärnu Mudaravila, she shot a video of herself covering her face with mud in the pattern of a mask or veil designed to allude both to terrorist camouflage and the jihab. This action made an oblique reference to the relationship between tourism and surveillance and post 9/11 anti-terror legislation that makes it illegal to wear face covering such as masks and face paint in public space. Reference to the jihab reminds us of alternative legislations of identity outside western norms, and again refers to the interface between private and public representations. The artists' private performance inside one of the booths used for mud treatments was coupled with filmed images of the faces of waxworks housed in a museum in the same building as the mud baths. Ghostly simulacras of Stalin, Princess Diana, Arnold Schwarzenegger and others created an odd juxtaposition with the image of the artist deliberately obscuring her own identity with a mud mask. This image of the artist then became a label for a second element of Paula's installation — a jar containing Pärnu mud. This symbol of Pärnu's pulling power for a century's worth of leisure tourists wanting to take the treatment for a variety of ailments was appropriated by the artist as a "product" of the artist following the model of the Italian conceptualist Piero Manzoni's work Artist's Shit. This absurdist reduction of place to identity to product folds back into the way the meaning and image of places is constructed for visitors to particular places, and that this directly impacts on our experience of other spaces.

Something else had caught our eye that bore further investigation — dotted randomly along the beach were brightly-coloured changing cabins used on the outside as advertising hoardings with glossy images selling furniture, soft drinks, depilatory devices, mobile phones and all manner of other consumer items. The beach cabins were interesting temporary spaces that seemed to speak well to our project: private space, on the one hand, designed for modesty, but positioned among the public space of the beach. Their use as advertising hoardings also brazenly positions the body politic of post-Soviet Estonia as the realm of free market capitalism — during the Soviet era this Baltic spa town was one amongst many providing state-sponsored health treatments for workers, a system much vaunted in Soviet propaganda as an emblem of the high standard of living their citizenry (supposedly) enjoyed. Now the town has reverted to its status as a healthy retreat for foreign visitors.

The beach cabins also linked back to the idea of the labyrinth, as a solitary space of personal transformation to which an ambiguous and complex set of references could be attached, and as a found object that could act symbolically within the terms of SPACE PROTOCOL. An abandoned aqua-coloured beach cabin down the end of the beach, well away from its counterparts and denuded of advertising bills became the model of the replica cabin made for the project and eventually positioned in the car park outside Rael Artel Gallery. Inside the cabin, a poster of the SPACE PROTOCOL was attached and alongside a radio played a sound track transmitted from the gallery. The sound element came about from another episode when the artists and I, Rael and Karolina, a visiting Polish art critic, were down on the beach inspecting and measuring the cabins in preparation for construction. Paula, Karolina and myself idly began reading our own phonetic version of the words from an advertisement on the outside of one of the cabins. This meaningless performance of translation, from advertising slogan to gibberish, was recorded and gave voice to the loud glossy advertising imagery absent from the SPACE PROTOCOL replica. The funky transistor radio added a reference to the leisure time enjoyed by the sunbathers on the beach down the road. Finally, on the evening of the opening of SPACE PROTOCOL, the changing cabin was the scene for an "action" performed by Paula. She entered the cabin and undressed whilst vigorously flinging her clothes over the top of the cabin with saucy abandonment in the vein of the Ealing comedy "Carry On" films. This final interpretation activated the space for engagement.

The project was intended as both a proposition on how space is constructed and activated by its users and how space is engaged with according to a particular set of rules. While this premise recognised the public space of the gallery and the conventions it is framed by, it also sought to link the different economies and frameworks of, say, the space of literature, leisure, media, the Internet, architecture, the city, memory, and so on. The project was interested in how the process of responding to space might translate into the gallery, and as such provided tools and scenarios through which a 'way out' might be facilitated. SPACE PROTOCOL performed an interrogative space rather than a conclusive one, and thus, like any journey, was a space of departure.

Excerpts from A-Z of space: Words, concepts, philosophies

A
AIRPORTS: ‘Desire is always infinitely deferred, and meaning is elsewhere and otherwise’.
Martha Rosler, Martha Rosler: Positions in the Life World
> AUGE, Marc

B
BATAILLE, Georges: ‘I want to speak as a philosopher and without reserve. This means that I commit myself: (1) not to limit the object of my discourse; (2) to empty of meaning or to relate to a meaning that I will give to everything philosophers have said before me or will say after me’.
‘Aphorisms for the “System”’
> GALLERY AS PHARMACY
>> MUSEUM (2)

C
COLLECTION: ‘The collection relies on the box, the cabinet, the cupboard, the seriality of shelves. It is determined by these boundaries, just as the self is invited to expand within the confines of bourgeois domestic space’.
Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection
> GALLERY
>> WHITE CUBE
>>> MONAD

D
DESTABILISATION: ‘Precisely because cities are sites of “meetings”, they are also places which are saturated with possibilities for the destabilisation of imperial arrangements. This may manifest through stark anticolonial activities, but also through the negotiations of identity and place which arise through diasporic settlements and hybrid cultural forms’.
Jane M. Jacobs, Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City
> MEETING, The

E
EFFECT: ‘So what then, where is the work located? Perhaps that is the wrong question, perhaps a “where” intimates a fixed and known location where we might conceivably go and look for the work and actually find it. Perhaps better is the notion of how does the work function and what does it produce. Of what effect it has in the world rather than of what existing meanings it uncovers’.
Irit Rogoff, ‘Art as interlocutor - The flight lines of address’
> ELSEWHERE

F
FICTION: ‘A concentration of relationships; levels of engagement and shifts of focus; a different model, developed so that subject/object has shifted, or maybe the relation between subject and subjected has changed. The reality is no longer at the centre. Parallel positions may be at the centre of the activity. It is possible that there is more space for things to happen within this exchange, because it is never “really real” but another fiction.’
Liam Gillick and Rirkrit Tiravanija, ‘Forget about the ball and get on with the game’
> CONTEXT

G
GESTURE: What characterises gesture is that in it nothing is being produced or acted, but rather something is being endured and supported. The gesture, in other words, opens the sphere of ethos as the more proper sphere of that which is human’.
Giorgio Agamben, ‘Notes on gesture’
> EFFECT

H
HETEROTOPIA (1): ‘The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites, that are in themselves incompatible...’
Michel Foucault, ‘Of other spaces’ (1967)
> HETEROTOPIA (2)
>> GESTURE

I
INTENTION: An intention is embedded in its situation, in human customs and institutions. If the technique of the game of chess did not exist, I could not intend to play a game of chess. In so far as I do intend the construction of a sentence in advance, that is made possible by the fact that I can speak the language in question’.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
> DINNER

K
KIERKEGARDE: ‘I stick my finger into existence - it smells of nothing. Where am I? What is this thing called the world? Who is it that has lured me into this thing, and now leaves me here?’
Kierkegarde, ‘Philosophical fragments’

L
LEFEBVRE: ‘(Social) space is a (social) product.’
Henri Lefebvre, The production of space
> GEOGRAPHY



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