(Un)sitings.
Kristin Wenzel’s monumental care.
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Anne Faucheret
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An Essay about the artist's project Die Vorstellung des Buchstabens Y: Eine psychogeographische Untersuchung/ The Presentation of the Letter Y: A Psychogeographic Investigation • Friedrichswerth Castle • 2023
Memory stays with traces, in order to “preserve” them, but traces of a past that has never been present, traces which themselves occupy the form of presence and always remain, as it were, to come—come from the future, from the to come.
– Jacques Derrida, The art of memories, in Mémoires: For Paul de Man, 1986
[S]he who has been, from then on cannot not have been: henceforth this mysterious and profoundly obscure fact of having been is h[er] viaticum for all eternity.
– Vladimir Jankélévitch as quoted by Paul Ricoeur in Memory, History, Forgetting, 2000. Female gendering added by the author.
The acceleration of history: let us try to gauge the significance, beyond metaphor, of this phrase. An increasingly rapid slippage of the present into a historical past that is gone for good, a general perception that anything and everything may disappear – these indicate a rupture of equilibrium. The remnants of experience still lived in the warmth of tradition, in the silence of custom, in the repetition of the ancestral, have been displaced under the pressure of a fundamentally historical sensibility. Self-consciousness emerges under the sign of that which has already happened, as the fulfillment of something always already begun. We speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left.
Our interest in lieux de mémoire where memory crystallizes and secretes itself has occurred at a particular historical moment, a turning point where consciousness of a break with the past is bound up with the sense that memory has been torn—but torn in such a way as to pose the problem of the embodiment of memory in certain sites where a sense of historical continuity persists. There are lieux de mémoire, sites of memory, because there are no longer milieux de mémoire, real environment of memory.
– Pierre Nora, Les lieux de mémoire, in Representations 26, Spring 1989
[T]he increasingly fast slippage of the present also amounts to an exponential gaining of weight of the past, under which our epoch so agonizes. Acceleration leaves behind a growing mountain of ‘stuff’, results in a windfall of information and an ever-increasing sense of disappearance and obsolescence. This in turn results in an intensifying desire to capture things before they are lost for good, a general nostalgia for the past, and a self-conscious interest in, or indeed obsession with, memory both individual and collective.
– Uriel Orlow, Latent Archives, Roving Lens, 2006
The public representation and social role of collective (official) memory in Europe seems to have taken on unprecedented proportions since the fall of the Berlin Wall: the proliferation of remembrance celebrations, the multiplication of monument erections and the desire to preserve existing monuments at all costs (without necessarily taking care of them), all contribute to the “commemorative obsession” already diagnosed in 1989 by historian Pierre Nora, who noted that memory work could not be carried out in such conditions, where it is instrumentalized for strategic political purposes of pacification and homogenization, and where memorial saturation is such that there is no longer any room for listening to and representing forgotten voices, bodies, stories and practices. The inscription of multi-perspectivist memories (in opposition to the official neo-liberal collective memory) in the public space and in the imaginaries is made more difficult by this paradox produced by the excesses of memorialization on one hand, and by the tendency towards oblivion, on the other. Both physically and symbolically, the public space sorts out the stories to tell, the events to forget, the layers to keep, instead of making room for the tangle of memories. Quite a few artistic practices tackle the hierarchies presiding upon memory work, working with archives, monuments and lieux de mémoire, and try to design, collectively, a new order of memories, new criteria for telling stories and linking past(s) and future(s), beyond linearity.
Kristin Wenzel is interested in the constitution, negotiation and transmission of memory in its complex interplay with space, history, political agendas, the collective unconscious and individual experiences. In the project Die Vorstellung des Buchstabens Y: Eine psychogeographische Untersuchung, (The Presentation of the Letter Y: A Psychogeographic Investigation) her attention was drawn by built cultural heritage. The artist embraces the multifarious dimension of ruins and monuments as traces, vessels but also agents in the complex processes of historicization and memorialization. She creates works that set the conditions for a singular collective experience, which makes this complexity literally tangible, graspable and transmissible. How can people relate to spaces of memory? How can we talk about and recount a past that has not been lived through, nor experienced? How can we develop alternative forms of knowledge, or a deeply felt commitment through narratives that undo simplifying dualities? How can we excavate memories that have been concealed or erased? How do spaces of memory trigger relevant processes of identification, socialization, dealing with the past and living together?
The collective exploration of Friedrichswerth Castle and its surroundings proposed by the artist through Die Vorstellung des Buchstabens Y: Eine psychogeographische Untersuchung raised all these questions. The multi-layered monument provided a perfect site. Planned by the master builder Jeremias Tütleb, the castle was completed in 1689 and used by Duke Frederick I of Gotha and the ducal family as a summer residence in the countryside. During the Seven Years’ War, the castle was largely cleared out for fear of looting and fell into oblivion. In 1855, the state of Thuringia took over the castle, which became the seat of the Wangenheim district court until 1924. After 1924 various uses followed, including as living quarters. In the last year of World War II, the Gotha State Theater’s collection, library holdings and other art objects were stored there. After the war, the castle—then located in the German Democratic Republic (GDR)—was used as a juvenile detention center from 1947 to 1990. In the first 10 years, over 1200 girls and boys lived in the monument. The castle stood empty for the last 20 years and was inaccessible to the public, until the artist decided to open its doors with her project. Two periods seem to have left the most marks on the building: the period right after its construction during the baroque era, in which the castle served as a remote place for aristocratic leisure and pleasure, and the 40-year period when it was used as a juvenile detention center in the GDR. The recurrent modification of the building’s functions and the corresponding transformations of its aspect and inner configuration following pragmatic needs materialized historical layers in space and matter.
The two-fold project consisted of three, consecutive two-day workshops, conceived of by the artist as an accompanied diving into the story and space of the castle, according to a precise dramaturgy. The first day took place at the castle and garden. The second day took place at ACC Galerie Weimar. The group of registered participants were picked up in Weimar with a bus and brought to the site. During the bus ride, an introduction was given to the location and its history, to the artistic project and the workshop, and to the notion of psychogeography and the dérive. Upon arriving, people were invited to stroll around and explore the site freely, paying particular attention to their feelings and emotions. Finally, the artist handed each participant a piece of clay and invited them to make an impression of a fragment of the building, which could be anything: a section of wall, a corner, a window frame, a relief on the front of the building... Afterwards, the clay impressions were cast in plaster. All 120 casts were then displayed in an exhibition at the ACC Galerie. The hanging of the fragments and their respective position on the walls roughly corresponded to their original location in the actual building.
By making the ruined and abandoned castle accessible, the artist works against oblivion and toward the acknowledgement of a multi-layered history. By organizing a collective experience, she raises a shared concern for the past as commons. By introducing fragmentation and multiplicity in the casting workshop—which functions as a form of documentation—as well as displacement and re-configuration in the exhibition, Kristin Wenzel sets the conditions for a polyphonic transmission. She combines methods and approaches that morph into each other: casting is reproducing is documenting; experiencing is communing is caring; dispersing is interpreting is translating. The site is investigated both as actual and material site, full of traces and signs, but also as sets of immaterial semiotic constructions. It is activated through the tension between the material and the semiotic, but also between the personal and the social, the emotional and the cognitive, between what’s imagined and what’s learned. The artist orchestrates the coexistence of a plurality of meanings and experiences. Emphasizing the multiple ways of the presence of the past and its relational dimension to present and future, she transforms the site into a milieu of memory, where memory is not only represented but lived, not already constituted but always in negotiation.
The participatory dispositive reconfigures the traditional aesthetic relationship between artist, work and public, through a perspective of intervention and insinuation into reality. Kristin Wenzel instigates a situation, escapes any long-lasting spatial inscription, and embraces the openness of co-creative agencies. The public is no longer a viewer, but a co-producer. Participation not only dissolves the classical situation of reception, it also corrodes structural aesthetic categories (autonomy, disinterestedness, artistic distance). The participatory form is an attempt to reinvent new forms of the commons and community as a community of singularities, which emerges within the process of collaboration between artist and participants and does not precede it, and which is not based on the usual criteria of identity or cultural belonging, but rather on forms of taking into account singularities, situations and chance.
The invocation of psychogeography is crucial here. Between the late 1950s and the 1970s, the Situationists developed a philosophy and practice based on a Marxist analysis of social (and cultural) alienation directed against mid-20th-century capitalism and its “spectacular-market” society. The Situationist project sought to emancipate itself from the society of the spectacle by creating “situations”. A situation is a series of internally coherent micro-events, a set of gestures, behaviors and encounters that take place at a precise moment. A situation corresponds to a desire of experiencing events that wouldn’t be experienced in everyday life, with a peculiar poetic quality and emotional landscape. A situation is a way of intensifying life, but it is also a project of civic construction: ideally, situations would give back to the “spectators” their lost agency. Psychogeography is a means of triggering these situations and is linked to the notion of the dérive, or “drifting”—a singular, coded way of apprehending and surveying urban space—which is its principal tool. Drifting is a detour, an alternative way of wandering through the city that leads to the discovery of a web of lived experiences in the refusal of daily repetition, implying unprecedented vibration and emotion and enabling one to perceive the city differently. Drifting authorizes a counter-use of the city and its circuits, allowing the re-composition of a new one through ambiences, feelings, sensations and affects and not through a phenomenological and analytical apprehension of space.
How do we inhabit and produce space beyond passivity and dispossession? This is one of the questions running through the project too, and the fundamental inquiry of Marxist and existentialist sociologist Henri Lefebvre, as part of his analysis of the urbanization of society and the alienation of contemporary lifestyles. According to him, the abstraction, fragmentation (division of space into marketable parts) and homogenization of space under capitalism (exchange value dominating the use value of space, levelling it out), contribute to the transformation of everyday life, which has become the social locus of carefully monitored exploitation and passivity, causing it to lose its power to produce space. Lefebvre proposes to reform “spatial practices” and “representations of space” through alternative “spaces of representation”, where artistic activities and practices freed from dominant orders and discourses challenge existing social relations and imagine relational space differently. Spaces of representation are those of the imaginary, speculation, memory and perceptual manipulation. They appear as a line of escape, beyond the existing capitalist space.
In the case of Die Vorstellung des Buchstabens Y: Eine psychogeographische Untersuchung, the artist’s call for participation, affects and disorientation is a way to escape socially-inscribed structures, to approach space and time and to challenge dominant politics of memory between hyper-visibilization and oblivion, between reconfiguration and abandonment. Instead, Kristin Wenzel triggers new forms of noticing the past. Room is left for emotions to surface, like nostalgia, grief, indignation or possibly resentment. Emotion and imagination remain inseparable. Physical and bodily experience, through walking and casting, is key. This all defies the conception of spaces of memory as a static stack of documents or as a series of already established and closed narratives or as a fixed set of unchangeable symbols. Spaces of memory are spaces of belonging, of constant negotiations, of conflicts, of frustrations, of acknowledgments. They are like archives, always partial, always biased, always haunted and haunting.
The open gesture of the artist, curating interactions, is embedded in a tradition of engaged in-situ practices working on context and content transformation, in order to articulate a critique of strategies of representation, address power relationships, propose exercises of resistance and take ethical and political responsibilities. Kristin Wenzels’ artistic intervention and co-creation become a gesture of care toward a community, toward a site, creating access and a shared concern for the past as commons, and linking the past into the future. Far from giving in to a nostalgic vision of the past, she seeks to establish a constructive relationship with it, in which the past can guide the present and the future, and in which polyphonic memories and multi-perspective commemoration can be articulated.
Museums, memorials and monuments are battlefields for competing visions of the past and of politics of memory, especially when it comes to those memories of so-called “difficult heritage” or “traumatic heritage”. In Kristin Wenzel’s work, memory is envisaged as an active force field of antagonist discourses within which individual and collective acts of remembrance are constantly re-negotiated, re-elaborated and recounted in often conflictual and contested narratives. It is a conception of memory not as an irrevocably deposited and defined notion but as an active and transformative force that reshapes the past as much as the future, while operating in the present. In the constant tension between remembering and forgetting, between an excess of memory and an excess of oblivion, between the unmemorable and the indescribable, Kristin Wenzel takes a stand to re-establish a direct involvement and an intimate contact with the social, political and cultural dimension of any politics of memory and its spaces as spaces of transgenerational and transcultural transmission and convergences, embracing art’s ethical role.
A politics of the common, then, can involve practices that make people feel part of something, and feel like they have collective stakes. This involves thinking about the material ways in which the common is produced that organises bodies so that a sense of shared life is enabled and fostered. (…) The “commoning” that I outline here stems from practices that look beyond our immediate worlds, and an ethos that considers the effects of our actions in these terms. If we feel like we inhabit common worlds—that we have shared stakes that extend beyond the immediate—then we can foster an ethos of collective responsibility and care towards the world. We can produce the social, and make common worlds, interrupting the story that society is made up of individuals and families and governments, with nothing in between. (…) [W]e can look at how the feeling of being in common is produced in different spaces and through different practices. These practices might include overtly political attempts to redefine the ‘commons’, or to reclaim particular spaces as held in common (for example the occupy movement), as well as those practices that also contribute to a sense of shared experience—that produce conviviality (common life)—like eating together, undergoing trauma, or parenthood. Political messages have weight when they are felt bodily, when they resonate with lived experience.
– Leila Dawney, Commoning: the production of common worlds, in Lo Squaderno 30. Explorations in Space and Society, 2013
What we can learn here is that a monument spatializes a connection to history in the present, whether that history takes the form of historical myth, argument, oral tradition or, rarely enough, fact. In doing so, it connects present concerns both with the past it mediates and an indeterminate future that will witness this particular materialization at a particular site. History in the present is politics, and the discourse in which history is constructed takes part in the creation of the public sphere. Dislocation, destruction, rebranding and reuse do not need to be met with cries of ‘cancel culture’ or fears of the erasure of history. Such responses are intrinsic to the history of monuments, and always have been. History persists, and the question is rather which forms it will take or keep. (…) The life cycle of monuments is not exhausted in their erection, removal, modification, or survival. Without care, objects and sites can disappear, and without care for commemoration and for public discourse, the past will not help us fight for a better future. “Care” is literal, and figurative at the same time: we care for the things we care about. If monuments function at all, they do so by materializing history in ways that connect to people, places, times and monuments: and not just by recalling memories tied to one privileged site of past events, any more than by evoking feelings or attitudes connected to one physical material. As we will see, history materialized in this way requires not just sites and their active use by people, but modes of mediation, technical as well as aesthetic (…)
– Mechtild Widrich, Monumental Cares. Site of History and Contemporary Art, 2023
Can we imagine reconstructing our lives around a communing of our relations with others, including animals, waters, plants, and mountains—which the large-scale construction of robots will certainly destroy? This is the horizon that the discourse and the politics of the commons opens for us today, not the promise of an impossible return to the past by the possibility of recovering the power of collectively deciding our fate on this earth. This is what I call re-enchanting the world.
– Silvia Federici, Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, 2019
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Link to the artist's website
https://www.kristinwenzel.com/artist-frontpage