MISSION REPORTS
Artistic Practice in the Field - Ursula Biemann Video Works 1998-2008 | 2008
This substantial monograph, on and around Ursula Biemann’s practice, provides an opportunity to engage with more than a decade of her video art production and writing. Through a range of essays by cultural theorists, as well as texts by the artist herself and generous visual documentation, this book surveys the numerous artistic and visual research projects Biemann has conducted throughout the contested trans-national territories of the world. She has consistently developed a unique aesthetic language with which to explore her concerns with the concept of borders and the contemporary forms of migration that they produce. Her video essays offer a critique of the visual technologies being advanced for the acceleration, and control, of global mobility, confounding the prevailing representations to reveal a more complex human geography of collateral effects and unrecorded movements on the ground.
Conceptualising Artistic Fieldwork
Texts by Ursula Biemann
Making the Transnational Intelligible: Performing the Border
Turning Bodies into Codes: Writing Desire
Reorganizing Women on a Global Scale: Remote Sensing
Logging the Border: Europlex
Suspended in the Post-humanist Lapse: Contained Mobility
Embedded Fieldwork and Global Oil Circulation: Black Sea Files
Dispersing the Viewpoint: Sahara Chronicle
Articulating the Exception: X-Mission
The Video Essay and Real-World Politics
Essays by:
Angela Dimitrakaki Materialist Feminism for the Twenty-First Century: The Video Essays of Ursula Biemann, Wendy S. Hesford Global Sex Work and Video Advocacy: The Geopolitics of Rhetorical Identification, Uta Staiger Visualizing the citizenship gap: EU borders and migration in cultural productions, Brian Holmes Extradisciplinary Investigations. Towards a New Critique of Institutions, Jean-Pierre Rehm Political Typographies, Jörg Huber Getting to the Bottom of Vision: Theory of Images – Images of Theory, The Significance of Ursula Biemann’s Video Work for a Theory of Culture, T.J. Demos Sahara Chronicle: Video’s Migrant Geography.
Edited by Ursula Biemann, Jan-Erik Lundström with an introduction by Jan-Erik Lundström
Specs
208 pages, illustrated, color, English
complete biography and bibliography
Published with Bildmuseet Umea/Arnolfini Bristol 2008
Distributed by
Cornerhouse Publications
70 Oxford Road
Manchester M1 5NH, UK
Tel +44 (0) 161 200 1503 Fax +44 (0) 161 200 1504
www.cornerhouse.org/books
£ 23.50 / € 29.00
ISBN 978 0 907738 91 6
Introduction: Going to the Border
Going to the Border: an essayist project
Ursula Biemann
This publication of my videos and writings from the past ten years chronicles two parallel processes: first, the process of discerning a geographical and political area of interest for my art practice and, second, the process of tracing out a research field at the juncture of different forms of knowledge production where this practice could be situated. My simultaneous engagement with the geopolitical and social transformations being induced by globalization, and with the form in which these could be addressed in the expanded aesthetic field, are conceptually related. These two ongoing processes are connected and hinge, in my work, on the concept of the border.
By the late 1980s, discourse on art was already considerably “contaminated” by other theoretical currents – such as ethnography, cultural and media studies, post-colonial criticism and feminist theories – which did not only represent new content but also provided instruments for reformulating the domain of symbolic production. It had become evident that an art-immanent discourse would no longer be the sole frame of reference for an aesthetic practice which would now have to position itself in relation to other terrains of knowledge production. This important discursive expansion coincided with the vigorous onset of globalization processes and a turn, in the arts, towards content-oriented work, enabling precisely this connection of diverse strands of critical interpretation. It was a moment for calling the theoretical basis of my work into question as I sensed the necessity of developing an aesthetic practice that could respond to this complex and rather unique condition.
The initial purpose of my writing, particularly in connection with my video projects, was to elaborate on their socio-political content. I regarded such theoretical elaborations as a way of expanding on those issues I had not been able to address directly in the video pieces. But, very soon, I developed a need for writing about my work on a ‘meta’ level. Reflecting on my motivations and aesthetic strategies became particularly useful for the reception of my videos in the art context, since the prevailing art critical trends were somewhat unresponsive to my emerging concerns as an artist. This kind of self-reflexive writing has been generally helpful in situating my work within the intellectual and interpretative context in which I think it is best understood. Conversely, the condition of continuously being driven to writing on both these levels has no doubt had a strong impact on my essayist video making.
Performing the border is my first video essay. While it dates from 1999, I had been thinking about the US-Mexico border since I graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1986. It was my first self-assigned research project as an independent artist. The border was to be explored as a zone of north-south labor division established during the peak of the corporate wave of going multinational, a division which also happens to run along the line of gender difference.
My trip to the border town of Ciudad Juárez in 1988 was the coming of age of an artist who would henceforth be ready to go to any unappealing place in the world if her research focus required it. This trip prepared the ground for an investigative art practice involving extensive fieldwork, cooperation with grassroots organizations, assembly of library- and archive-based information and theoretical reading. Art became a medium through which to get to know the world – not in the sense of discovering the unknown but rather with a view to organizing a wealth of existing knowledge into a complex aesthetic product from which new meaning could emerge.
Much of my effort in those early years went into condensing the complexity of my source material into conceptual art works involving photography, text and wall graphics. Yet, this reductive working method proved, on many levels, to be unsuitable for tackling such complex reflections. Social transformation processes and their theoretical articulations should not be reduced to icons. It is only when I started to experiment with video, ten years later, that I found a medium which would foster an adequate form for speaking about globalization. The layering of images and text, the temporal movement through video time, the narrative quality of image sequences and the sonic dimensions of voices, music, environmental sounds, come together in a sensual compression, but not in a reductive sense.
Video is predestined to work simultaneously on multiple levels of expression, leading to a certain fluidity when moving from one type of enunciation to another. As a consumer medium, video easily connects with circuits of distribution beyond the art world. Working with video did not hinder or reduce the scope of my project; on the contrary, it made me constantly think about the role of image-making in forming discourses about the world beyond the narrow confines of art.
In many respects, the border project encapsulates my ongoing interest in conducting territorial research on the geopolitics of human displacement from a gendered perspective. On the US-Mexico border, I witnessed the emergence of a gigantic transnational space effectively produced by female migration and labor. The scenario made apparent what is ultimately meant by the regime of globalization: capital-intensive operations in the north, labor-intensive operations in the south. The magnitude of exploitation is impressive. In the following years, camera in hand, I visited other pertinent sites: free trade zones, entertainment cities catering to military camps, resorts for sex tourists, more border areas, refugee reception camps, transit migration hubs. All of these places are trans-local in practice, many of them extraterritorial de jure.
There are a number of reasons why visual representation is difficult in this arena. To begin with, these places profit from a special status in the juridical, and often moral, framework of the country. They are widely inaccessible; entry is restricted and under official, corporate or private control. The industrial parks are gated, borders are monitored, assembly plants are off-limits, clubs and bars are full of pimps and vigilant guards; this would involve image-making on prohibited terrain. Yet, refraining from making a film about assembly plants simply because they won't allow you on the factory floor with a camera cannot be the solution. Despite the strict image regime of corporations, we have to find ways of representing the situation – by finding information on the web, interviewing workers, copying and commenting on news material, grasping images in passing and constructing a complex whole.
There is another reason why the significance of these sites cannot be rendered fully by documenting the material facts on the ground. Migration networks, as well as global corporate players, use information and communication technologies for their procedures, allowing them to engage in the process from remote places; this means image-making in digital, immaterial, virtual spaces. This gives rise to a third, immaterial, dimension for an image maker to consider. The forceful intervention in local cultures and in the psychic identitary structures of people who are implicated in the globalizing process has consequences beyond visible economic exploitation which would require image-making of psychic dynamics. Any attempt to represent the gendered spatial relations of the emerging global order would have to include a reading of these intangible dimensions.
Much of my research goes into representing this new relational space, and the biopolitical body that constitutes it, by complying with, resisting or reinventing the emerging conditions. Video facilitates my experiments in assembling diverse discursive and visual languages, to tell the story of places that are alienated from local cultures but connected across continents, be it through corporate structures or improvised migratory systems, places of desire and violence, conceived by a vision of difference but ultimately performed by gender, mobility, and labor – relentless hard labor.
Video also allows me to integrate theoretical reflection, not towards a line of argumentation, but in a loose assemblage, alongside knowledge produced in interviews with local experts and personal interpretations of the material space. The video essay, the essayist form, is what eventually emerged from this cocktail. My video essays are explicitly subjective in their approach – so, for example, in my first four video essays only women speak – they are highly theoretical and move back and forth between various discursive levels of lived experience, researched information, personal associations and theoretical speculations. On many occasions, just when you thought you were seeing a straightforward document, you realize that the narration is not congruent with the image.
I am not in search of reality – a notion that has proven to be a fiction in and of itself – but I am interested in generating an artificial construct. Most of my video footage is used without its original sound – no Mexican music, no diesel traffic. The border zone is a synthetic area, and this has been made perceptible through the manipulation and layering of images and an electronic soundscape. Ultimately, these drastic means are used as critical tools with which to sever the image from its signified and to shift the mode from documentary transparency to critical reflection.
The video essay is the most suitable genre for an aesthetic project that involves a subjective position and the organization of an amazing diversity of knowledge. The subject need not to be presented as a coherent phenomenon explained via a linear narration. The authorial voice in the video essay has a different role – practicing a sort of dislocation by tying disparate places and concepts together in a trans-local fashion, as it were, not unlike transnationalism itself.
It is hardly surprising that video essayist work consists mainly in the complex process of montage. In practical terms, this means that, for two weeks of research and recording in the field, I spend one year in the editing suite. This procedure explains why my research does not set out with a clearly defined thesis and a plan of action; it is most effective in an open process of knowledge production.
In the sequence of videos that followed Performing the Border, I developed different aesthetic strategies for mapping the condition of the emerging transnational subject. In their own way, each of these projects invests in specific forms of the domestication and mobilization of space and resources, and is informed by an awareness that mobility itself is one of the most powerful resources available today. Each of the video works represents a distinct structural configuration, calling for an equally distinct strategy of aesthetic analysis. The writing of the political matrix of a transnational corridor (Black Sea Files) clearly requires a different mode of visualization and intervention than the multidirectional network of the global trafficking of women (Remote Sensing), the economic circuits circumscribing a border checkpoint to the Spanish enclaves in Morocco (Europlex), the loose arrangement of traffic nodes in the Saharan migration system (Sahara Chronicle) or the interconnected enclaves of the Palestinian refugee camps dispersed throughout the Middle East (Mission Report).
What these sites have in common is that they are thoroughly and profoundly gendered. By now, we are certainly aware that the majority of free trade zones, set up in countries from Jamaica to China, are mainly staffed by women, who are preferred, especially in technological manufacturing, over their male counterparts. Yet, in discussions of global labor, gender often seems to drop out of the equation. Unfortunately, if we dismiss gender as a determining factor, this gives us an incomplete, but also quite a distorted, picture. Gender is not a special interest area one can turn to once the overall logic of global capitalism is understood; rather, gender is a major constitutive force in forming the new global condition. That is why, in my video essays, I try not to reduce the female body to representations of Woman and her living conditions. Wherever possible, I record these mobile bodies in the process of doing other things: performing borders, activating networks, tracing geographies, constructing transnational principles.
Since the overwhelming majority of gender-related art and video production has placed the body and identity center stage, I should clarify here that my primary focus has always been on gendered systems of world migration and the movement of large numbers of women across the globe. My work investigates global structural concerns, not those of subjectivity formation. Although we see the existence of a significant body of academic literature on women and space, geography, migration, and globalization, this theoretical shift from identity to geography has not been counterbalanced by a significant shift in the domain of aesthetic production. This is a field of investigation in which a great deal of visual experimentation has yet to occur. The transformations to be examined reach beyond the concerns of the economy of female sexuality and productivity within a changed world order. They encompass a certain discursive shift in the way female dislocation and migration can be conceptualized and talked about today. The diasporic identity as a subject with a history – a concept developed in valuable intellectual and artistic work during the last decade – is not an appropriate description of this new subject. A theoretical platform that articulates gender, subject, mobility and space and a visual language which can represent a hyper-mobile, capitalized, gendered body – not only with a history but also with a geography – must be invented. Bodies with a travel schedule. Geographic bodies.