PAPER
A Gathering in Three Parts & A conversation with Ofri Cnaani
Ofri Cnaani an artist and resarcher who works across perfromance and media.
images in this article courtesy of the artist
part of Lost Libraries, Burnt Archives, 2023
edited by Sindi-Leigh McBride & Julia Rensing (Basel University & UCT University)
Contributors: Danielle Bowler, Nicola Brandt, Sophie Cope, Dag Henrichsen, Duane Jethro, Atiyyah Khan, Bongani Kona, Lerato Maduna, Portia Malatjie, Sindi-Leigh McBride, Nisha Merit, Santu Mofokeng, Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja, Jade Nair, Masande Ntshanga, Koleka Putuma, Julia Rensing, Lorena Rizzo, Ruth Sacks, Niren Tolsi, Eugene van der Merwe, Laura Windvogel, Carine Zaayman
This is a story that begins with an error. In six short hours in September of 2018 a disastrous fire brought an end to two centuries’ worth of treasures held in Brazil’s national museum. Only a handful of artefacts of the 20 million items that were housed at the museum survived the fire. In the age of algorithmic reproduction, it feels almost unimaginable that so many valuable objects were simply wiped off the face of the earth without leaving any sort of digital trace. Among the digital remains there is a sporadic collection that was contributed by users via WikiCommons and includes photos of the collection as captured by visitors on their personal devices. The digital files are accompanied by a full virtual tour, a product of Google Arts & Culture, where one can easily visit the no-longer existing museum.
Cnaani traces the collection’s aftermath to show how the removal of the object leaves behind the multiplicity of its conditions. Her work proposes that although the museum’s objects no longer operate within their inherited institutional orders or colonial indexes, some of their constitutions, temperaments, and affordances are “dragged” with them from their original matter to the digital and information realm. Residues are never clean. They cannot be easily turned into data. They fail to complete a simple transfer from analogue to digital, or from material to immaterial form. The residues form an ecology of leftovers that habituate the space in-between eras and orders. Museums’ residues don’t have form, like objects. They are the surplus of affects, tools, and affordances that arrive with the objects. They are active formations.
Leaking Lands is a video installation that acts like a ‘digital séance’ in three parts. On one screen, Cnaani uses the virtual tour to wander around the spectral museum, guided by conversations with several of the institution’s caretakers who were looking after its collection and its publics. On the second screen, the artist uses the hybrid collection to look at ways data systems intermingled and refused the canonic institutional order and its indexing system, industry standards, and the forms of governing these orders represent. Finally, the third screen, brings to life a collaboration between the artist and dance-maker luciana achugar (Uruguay). achugar's 'pleasure practice' is a healing practice that decivillizes the body, a storage space of transgenerational trauma, through pleasure. Cnaani subjects 3D models of objects from the collection to a methodology of movement. Following a similar speculative methodology, objects can no longer be ‘known’ or ‘utilized’ to a specific set of indexing or ‘put to work for a specific ideology’.
Ofri and I have known each other for years, worked together and talked numerous times but never met outside the digital sphere. In a way we follow the premise of Leaking Lands and its methodology of the ‘digital séance’ as our engagements similar to the objects in her video occupy the realm of pixels and signals. Yet our bodies are anchored in the analogue world and while the digital offers us these remote exchanges, we ultimately translate them into the world we inhabit which is guided by physics and manifestations. Using Ofri’s work as a prompt to contemplate about my own practice leads me to the following three part gatherings - Contemplation towards a Gesamtkunstwerk, Conversation in which Cnanni's responds to my musings on the role of care in curation, art, the archive and the museum and Conclusion which suggests some playful ideas going forward.
Contemplations towards a Gesamtkunstwerk
A former boss once declared “Nisha gets things done!” after being asked to define my position within the institution. At the time I thought, what a great position to be in! But now, looking back at the construct of the institution from an independent position, which is largely undefined other than in conjunction to the cultural and institutional landscape, I see the need to define the parameters of collaboration and positioning. On the one hand we have the confrontation with freedom and the possibilities lurking around the corner and on the other the inherent insecurity of freelance work. As much as the institution apparatus had confined me, it also legitimised me, defined what I do and offered both monetary and idealistic value to my work. In a professional environment that still largely works within a system of validation through an institutional body, my self-declaration of being a ‘one person curatorial para-space’ is a hard sell. In this context, the Greek prefix para describes a state that is neither against the institution nor fully defined by it - an ambiguous periphery that is not consumed nor defined by the centre or the institution, but a rhizomatic interchange, I like to imagine.
Returning to “Nisha gets things done!”: this statement defined a product-driven idea, something finished, polished and packaged. No question, its productional completeness feels great and is the ultimate institutional gratification, but the process, the nuance - the tools of the para - are also consumed during its making. While independence is lacking institutional legitimation, I have traded it for a vast playground to explore my space and my process. And when it comes to process, Care is the modality I use within the intersection of curatorial and artistic practices, creating interstitial spaces of knowledges and processes to be articulated and shared. A process that is intrinsically collaborative, practising Care invites a multitude of voices into the context - the artists, the space and the audience. Conversations become here the connecting membrane and form part of the curatorial concept through exchange, interviews and sharing of ideas. Care holds space that is inquisitive and inclusive that tends to disrupt and invite. It is a practice that British curator Renée Mussai explains as: “both praxis, and process, this remedial curatorial care work I describe entails a deep commitment to diversity, and within that our curatorial responsibility – or response-ability, to borrow Toni Morrison’s phrase – is to continuously support new and different voices – to act and activate our power(s) to create inclusive spaces for solidarity and multiple occupancies: it means a long-term promise to work towards cultural and structural change and social justice – towards a counter hegemonic ‘otherwise’, if you will.”
Extending these contemplations to the idea of the curator, which by now feels almost limiting, I want to use the unique quality of the German language - constructing compound nouns. The ability to build new words from existing words and by that creating almost infinite new meanings. Here is an example and a personal favourite: Gesamtkunstwerk, something like: all-encompassing-art-work. Within the premise of inclusivity that this word speaks to, a lexicon is developing and with that a multitude of practices arises. So many creative practitioners around the world are contributing to this lexicon, a lexicon that by its very nature has no originator, sharing an understanding by re-defining and questioning the status quo and defining different cultural (para) spaces into being.
Conversation
In order to think beyond the abstract theory of this growing lexicon, to go beyond the psychology of my own work and apply these thoughts to artistic practice, I spoke with Cnaani about Leaking Lands, a video installation investigating the glitch, the residue and the algorithmic reproduction of the museum's archive. As mentioned, Ofri and I have never met in real life, or Away From the Keyboard (AFK), a term which counterposes the notion of “digital dualism,” that life online is less authentic than life offline. And yet, we share time, space and ideas through these flat surfaces that connect us despite the distance; talking about her practice, the idea of the archive and the concept of para - navigating between the inside and outside.
Nisha Merit
Let's start at the beginning or rather, with the process. I am establishing definitions for myself, my work and the methodologies that guide my engagements especially in conjunction with others. I follow the idea of Care, which emphasises process but also tries to establish an extended connotation of the curator, especially using para as one of its super powers. How do you define your practice?
Ofri Cnaani
My practice is usually driven by a question. Never by a form, which is something I find rather confusing. My practice takes many forms. The initial question is often situated within a historical case or a quote, event or a locale, but it's always driven by an inquiry. My practice is discursive and as time goes by it overlaps with my writing, where the more theoretical work and the practice are becoming similar in a way. I don't work so much towards a product, of course it might become a performance or a video, but I almost always work within clusters or constellations. The same set of inquiries can become a lecture performance or a series of photos, an article or a video installation. It's really time-based in the deepest way, by that I mean, almost every project is also a culture for the next project. It’s not packaged with a beginning and end.
NM
You are an artist and educator - how does one discipline influence the other? I am thinking of the prevailing knowledge system that tends to be limiting and self-serving. But also about how the idea of the institution and the idea of the archive are both contested and complex and yet instrumental for knowledge transfer. And yet these are often simultaneously inaccessible, and even sacred spaces?
OC
In The Parasite, French philosopher Michel Serres describes how “every parasite that is a bit gifted, at the table of a somewhat sumptuous host, soon transforms the table into a theatre.” It's a good place to start and to think about the performative potential of what Serres calls ‘the table’, what we may also call ‘the institution.’
I sometimes say that the museum is my medium, because in the past ten years, most of my work looked at different conventions of the institution. The world of museum mediation and the space between objects and subjects is often traditionally unified. This space inbetween, which is highly controlled and mediated although it has shifted quite a bit within the digital world. I am interested in what happens there, who the experts are or how objects are being staged. In that respect, I am looking at the conventions of things like guided tours, information signage, IT networks, orientation maps and other museum apparatuses that embody the institution's thinking, all methods that are largely accepted. And when I say ‘museum is my medium’, it's also about the question of how museum conventions of mediation can be used otherwise because all these performances you cannot look at, there's nothing to see, it is rather a staged conversation.
If the table is the institution, it turns it into theatre or a performative potential, but in a folded way. Many of my performances think about the para in that way of taking care of this fold between education and performance or art making. So the art is not turning into education but taking the art of mediation or the space of mediation, which is often approached as a pedagogical space, and radicalising it by revisiting it. To quote Andrea Fraser who was pursuing this kind of institutional critique back in 2005 already: “it is because the institution is inside of us, and we can’t get outside of ourselves.”
NM
Leaking Lands deals with the impermanence of the physical archive, using the case of the fire at the National Museum in Brazil in 2018. In the work, we see the museum’s artefacts manifested in the digital, where pixels turn into the only evidence of what was lost - a cartography of moments in time and space so to speak. What was the process for you? Can you explain that transient space of the physical to the digital?
OC
I entered this story – of the National Museum of Brazil burning down – remotely. I'm not from Brazil and I was not working with this case from the perspective of either geographical or cultural proximity to Brazil. Instead, I was thinking about how in recent years quite a few museums and archives have been damaged or destroyed, similar to the fire at the Jagger Library at the University of Cape Town in 2021. In these cases, there is a very tangible way of thinking about the end of the archive or the end of the collection. But in this case, it’s not simply a metaphor – the fire in Brazil is actually a meeting point between processes of privatisation and financialization, often through hyper national leadership that uses the neglect of the museum as a device of governance, which is reflected in a systematic state of austerity. A second entry to this story was the fact that, in our current time, we are confronted with an oversaturation of images and we often need to fight for the right to be digitally forgotten. And yet, in the case of the National Museum of Brazil, almost nothing survived in the digital realm. This brings to mind issues related to the inequality of media representation and algorithmic biases as a growing phenomenon when it comes to collections of art and archives.
So when I started with this case, it was from my interest in Algorithmic and Media Studies, looking at what I call the residues - what survives. While the museum is interested in what survived in a very technical, literal way in terms of the physical objects, I look at the residues of this fire in an all-encompassing, but abstract, way to propose that what survived exists in matter whether that matter is ash, heated steel, or meteorite. I propose that this exists through the flesh – burns, or lungs damaged by smoke and other bio forms – as well as through social orders, memories, oral histories, places of gathering, employee routines. And it also exists in the media and data that have been circulating as copies through the internet and other surviving metadata. The museum can be thought about in terms of separating rights: you take an object away from its originating environment and reorient it under the order of the museum, which is centred around the index. But the residues are scattered, they're in the ultimate state of incompleteness. They all remain unclaimed by the museum because the museum is interested in what survived physically but not in their employee's lungs, which cannot be quantified and captured in the same way. But what survives are affordances, so the objects are removed, but the conditions remain. And these conditions are kind of dragged with the objects and exactly this movement of dragging, which is also a movement of the cursor, is the movement that comes from performance theory of the drag - the drag queens. This term originates from Shakespeare’s plays where men played the women as well, performing in big fancy dresses and dragging them across the stage. So it is about the movement that also always picks up the dust through dragging.
Normally the institution is the one that holds things together but in this case, the conventions of the institution are no longer available; not the display, not the mediation, not the collections. The archive is very similar in that way, everything we know and need or love and hate about the archival, is no longer available. But what stays are all those conditions and affordances that have been dragged from the museum into another realm, which is the realm of the residues, which I believe, present a different epistemological model of knowledge production, one that is more about alliances and kinship, one that is not human centric. It doesn't really have a beginning and end, it's really based on movement. So it's not a para-institution as an alternative to the institution, but it is para, because of its thinking with the conditions.
NM
I am thinking about your practice, which as you say, is not working with the form as such but rather with the movement. The museum’s objects are largely manifested in form but now they have been translated into non-form. So you come in once they have lost their form and turned into information. That’s why I think it's quite instrumental for the work that you didn’t physically go to the site of the object residues but the digital site of information residues.
OC
That was very clear to me because I work only with what survives digitally, which was basically only a virtual tour by Google. On the same night [of the fire], local students started a campaign through Wiki media, asking people to upload any photos they took - selfies, photos of objects and the museum space, photos of their kids in the museum, etc. There is no institutional digital collection but instead we have this amazing relational, ghostly and completely subjective user generated collection, a re-collection. Next to that we have the most corporate remain, which is a virtual tour by Google Art and Culture. So one can actually visit the no-longer existing Museum, but at the same time, it's a product by Google, with the same camera that documents your street, developed through military technology that was then adopted by Google. It sits on Google’s Cloud somewhere else, it actually has nothing to do with Brazil or with the museum, but it's the main remnant. And then you have a set of rather limited 3D models that I worked with. So I decided very early on that Leaking Lands is all about those digital remains, turning them into sites of interventions. I also had many meetings with museum stakeholders from the director of the museum to the maintenance staff, and educators and I met them in virtual tours where I asked them to lead me in a conversational walkthrough, which is a very frustrating experience. But nevertheless, it was to habituate those impossible spaces and share them with others.
NM
The performance by Brooklyn based Uruguay dance-maker luciana achugar that accompanies Leaking Lands as one of the three screen installations is very interesting, it brings to mind how the temporality and physicality of performance rests against the backdrop of the ashes of material history and the digital afterlife. Fire points to a certain urgency, that there is something to fix. Something is broken and if the object is hole, situated in a museum space, we think it's fine, but yet it often carries a lot of trauma. These kinds of intangible moments cannot easily be spoken about, but may be powerfully performed. It also brings to mind the fragility of the singular entity, trusting something seemingly powerful and safe like a museum.
OC
Taking performance away from its final form and instead conceiving of it as a way of engaging with the world and as a way of thinking led me to the presentation for this video work as a method of research. luciana achugar has developed a practice that she calls ‘pleasure practice’. She both choreographs and teaches through this method where she calls on the participant to get into a body state of pre-knowing of what things are, an infant place of things. And for that she considers the body from the inside, because she speaks about growing a new body, a utopian body as a way of healing from the transgenerational trauma of colonialism. When the body is in a state of pleasure, not is a sexual sense but rather like a newborn the body cannot be captured, because you cannot say what it is and therefore it cannot be used or abused.
In that way of thinking with performance, I asked luciana if she can channel her practice without a body, only via voice. Because when I work with the digital remains, there is no body, even the virtual tours with the museum staff are movements without a body. When objects are scanned into 3D, they're always scanned from the outside but through her instructions I let my cursor or my digital movement travel inside those objects and the images that are exposed are like caves, like inner spaces. These are not, and this is very important, not scanned spaces but speculative spaces, machine made spaces. luciana speaks about a state of healing from the trauma, and I wanted to take her feminist, embodied methodology where the subject of the body and the object and this critical space between them collapse. Those objects, you cannot look at them anymore, and they are not doing their job according to the museum apparatus, they cannot be used or put to work for a specific ideology, they melt into a space that is utopian, releasing them from their colonial past.
And fire is another level of trauma. In Brazil, indigenous activists spoke about how the loss of this museum is a second genocide, because the museum contained a huge archive and housed many documents and indigenous material culture. But the space after the fire also holds the possibility of thinking about an after the museum or after the archive. The many worlds, or relations that are more based on kinship or a network of alliances, between different entities that emerge and the residues that are in an active form protocols for relations. Thinking with the provocations offered by Ariella Azoulay in Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism; this is an invitation for us to try and think about the potential of other histories through the perspective of shared rights.
Conclusion
Conclusion is a big word. It tends to point towards a resolution or some sort of finite. And linguistically it is, as one would hardly start with the conclusion. I do like to think of the possibility of a rhizomatic one, a conclusion that leads to the yet unwritten chapter and thus is rather a temporary placeholder for the potential to come.
That said, looking back at the pages, three things are specifically poignant - definition comes through process, the periphery is a moving utopia and the digital is real. Language is a difficult tool and defining something also means setting boundaries. It is as Homi K Bhaba writes: “to exist is to be called into being in relation to an otherness, its look or locus. It is a demand that reaches outward to an external object and as Jacqueline Rose writes, ‘It is the relation of this demand to the place of the object it claims that becomes the basis for identification.” As much as I agree with Mister Bhabha, I also wonder what happens if the definition is not a static binary but a development as the one formed from the limitations of Male & Female into the spectrum of LGBTIQ+, if the one and the other keep moving and thus are consciously and actively redefining as we go along? Would that not translate into an inclusive act of morphing and adapting like a non-human but a microbial culture way of a soft surface boundary?
The introduced concept of the ‘para’ or the periphery as a moving utopia looks at the independent curation that often happens in the in-between spaces or the temporary spaces that we carve out. They are incredibly fluid and defy a linear definition. These spaces are the ones that are magical and playful yet largely underrated because they tend not to fit into an institutional way of measuring and approval. To find a method of sustaining these spaces without absorbing them into the center would be a dream come true and yet it seems to stay an oxymoron.
And lastly the digital being real, yes I do believe in the autonomy of the digital as the potential sustainable in-between space and I am currently investigating how it might work and how we can connect the tangible and the pixels through art. The rising AR in art (Augmented Reality) seems to be a good start. With South African artists such as Magolide Collective or Aluta Null who concern themselves with the performative nature between the digital and the physical. It is an exciting space of which Ofri Cnaani’s Leaking Lands is a precursor and a phantastic example between material culture and the world of the digital and in her words: “this is an invitation for us to try and think about the potential of other histories through the perspective of shared rights.”
- Ofri Cnaani, Leaking Lands, 2021 https://ofricnaani.com/Leaking-Lands
- Nora Sternfeld, Das radikaldemokratische Museum, published by De Gruyter, Edition Angewandte, 2018, p. 64.
- 1000 Words, Curator Conversations, #15 Renée Mussai, https://www.1000wordsmag.com/renee-mussai/ (14 September 2022)
- AFK or Away From Keyboard counterposes the notion of “digital dualism,” that life online is less authentic than life offline, described in: Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, published by Verso Books, 2020.
- Michel Serres, The Parasite, published by Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982
- Andrea Fraser, From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique, Artforum, New York: September 2005. Vol. 44, Iss. 1; pg. 278.
- Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, London, Verso Books, 2019
- Bhabba, H. (1994) The Location of Culture. Psychology Press. Chapter 2, Part 1.