Here as the Centre of the World

Most nations, irrespective of their location, tend to see themselves as the centre of the world. The city in turn sees itself as a centre within the nation, if not the centre in the case of Taipei, Beirut, Damascus and Khartoum. From outside the nation, appearances differ. Edward Said suggested in Orientalism that the widening of cultural horizons has had Europe firmly in the privileged centre- making all other cultures and cities a version of the already known. The title also hints at the existence of cultural hierarchies in any cultural gathering, suggesting that uneven cultural and economic exchange has taken place historically and contemporaneously between and within the nations and cities from which participating artists originate.

Using ‘here as the centre of the world’ as a starting point, the artist is asked to challenge his/her own vantage point of origin as the centre of their world. By providing an (or multiple) alternative point(s) of reference, temporary residency within a new cultural matrix calls for a refraction of the artists knowledge of the world at large through the prism of the ‘new’ city. The invited participants are encouraged to work directly in the streets and public spaces of the city in order to experience the various facets of that prism, beyond the seemingly familiar setting of the studio or art centres in those cities.

The existence of an international art world appears to provide the framework for communication and exchange in a project which brings together artists from diverse cultures. There are expectations about a certain ‘sameness’- shared ideas of what constitutes contemporary art, shared interest in certain kinds of visual language and media over others. There are also expectations of ‘difference’, based on our imaginings of the distant locations where the workshops will take place. When confronted with the confusion of the multi-layered realities they will experience, it will be tempting for everyone involved to ‘rescue a simple story out of a complex one’ (Stuart Hall) in order to come up with aesthetic and conceptual frameworks for making art. It will be tempting to encounter the new city as an aesthetic experience, rather than another version of everyday life, a complete social and political reality.
There is a danger of an exaggerated witnessing of ‘difference’ to the extent of exoticising the new environment, and a forgetting that encounter is a two-way process. When unexpected differences crop up in the ‘shared’ understanding of contemporary art, it will be tempting to force an unnatural ‘sameness’ within the visual language and choice of media of participants, in keeping with certain cultural hierarchies.

The project reminds us that difference is a fact of life and not an exotic choice or something which disappears in the face of internationalism. What is ‘same’ in one context is ‘different’ in another- whether we talk about cultures or peoples or attitudes towards art. The project title ‘Here as the Centre of the World’ recognizes that participants bring ethnic, religious, political and cultural identities with them which are viewed as ‘different’ in a new environment, while what they experience as ‘difference’ is seen as ‘same’ in their host country. This offers the potential for self-reflection as much as reflection on the new culture. Artists are thus invited to extend their working process beyond the city in which they are temporarily in residence to a renegotiation of their own city, based on the resulting heightened awareness of their culture of origin (which appears ‘different’ on return). In this way participants are encouraged to discover the outlines of their own identities and create a sense of their position in the world (in which there are many centres other than Here).

The project can be seen as an ‘invitation’ to gather together and generate new energy by the proximity of participants, while making space for each other’s artistic and cultural identities in the process of assembly. Collaborative projects will be welcomed, to create possibilities for exchange and sharing between artists whose work appears on first sight to have little or nothing in common. In Nikos Papastergiadis’s words: ‘This invitation must be made with an open hand, to allow the other to be as he or she is, acceptable and unexpectable, their identities never defined in advance, but always empty, waiting to be filled though exchange.’ Hence the answer to the difficult question of how to make the foreign familiar will not be answered by a filling-in of ready-made expectations, but through a willingness to briefly lose our sense of being in control, of knowing, of understanding and openness to things previously unthought of, individual encounters and friendships overcoming language and cultural barriers.

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