Fictioning

Goda Palekaite, Agency, Charlotte Vanhoubroeck, Laura Vandewynckel

In addressing the role fictions have in our everyday lives, [these artists] show how fictions can be used as means of revealing the hidden workings of a state of affairs, and even of establishing a certain agency within it. Far from being an escape from the world, then, here fiction takes us to its symbolic center, and might allow us to establish some leverage within the tangled contingencies and hidden conventions that lie there.

— David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan, Fictioning: The Myth-functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy (2019)

5 DREAMS WITH IMPLICATIONS: On Private Methodologies of Artistic Research

Goda Palekaitė

When I first began to see myself as an artistic researcher, sometime in the spring of 2017, I remember my primary concern was the mysterious extinction of the medieval Khazar culture, which had once existed between the Caspian and the Black Seas. Living by the laws of ethnic and religious diversity and the wisdom encoded in dreams, Khazaria is sometimes considered the most tolerant empire of all time. Dreamhunting – an advanced religious practice – was cultivated by a sect of the most talented and respected priests. The art of dreamhunting enables one to enter other people’s dreams and have agency there. The Khazars have been reported to keep snakes around their waists, sleep with their heads turned south, wash their feet without taking off their shoes, and carry birds inside their shirts to keep warm. They believed that rivers followed one course at sunrise and another at sunset, and that contracts did not apply in the same way before and after a victory. They used to say that after an earthquake, even plants grow in a new and different way.

The Khazar king, or khagan, lived in the capital Itil at the mouth of the Volga River, where the Russian village of Samosdelka is now located. The controversial discovery of the ruins of Itil was made in 2003, when a history teacher at the Samosdelka high school found his pupils throwing stones at some ancient pots aligned by the school fence. The khagan also had a marble summer palace called Sarkel, which stood facing north, close to what is now Volgograd. Michail Artamonov, who is credited as the founding father of contemporary Khazar studies, excavated it in the 1930s. In 1952, Stalin decided to flood the most fascinating archaeological discovery of the century in order to create the largest industrial body of water in the USSR, the Tsimlyansk Reservoir. Today the fully submerged Khazar remains provide power to the Tsimlyansk hydroelectric station and an irrigation system for crop fields, including wheat, rice, cotton, maize, grapes, and vegetables.

The fatal event in Khazar history, which caused the collapse of the empire, occurred sometime in the ninth century, and is commonly referred to as the Khazar Polemic. All began with the khagan’s dream, in which God told him: “I am not pleased by your deeds, but by your intentions.” The sovereign summoned the most prominent dreamhunters and asked them to explain what God had meant. They said: “You must choose one of three biggest religions in the region, Christianity, Islam, or Judaism, and convert your whole nation to it.” The khagan then invited the most prominent scholars of each religion to lead a debate and convince him which religion to choose. The debate lasted an eternity and was followed by the extinction of the whole empire. Curiously, not enough historical sources survive to prove which religion the Khazars ended up adopting. Nor do we know how the collapse of the empire occurred or what happened to the Khazar people.

This story, neither fully invented nor really found in history sources, contained everything relevant for the formation of my personal and professional self. The idea that an entire empire went extinct as a consequence of a dream, helped me to unlock the practice of discursive reasoning, to reimagine the concept of truth, and invited me to explore new working methods. I could relate to it on both a personal and cultural level. I was born in the USSR, a state whose extinction was caused by a form of cancer, as its dystopian regime ate itself from within. I was raised as a part of the Lithuanian “ethnos”, the nation that built its identity on historical detective stories, pagan sentiments and ancient glory; imagination and inconsistency served as fundamental discursive principals. Intuition and dreams, and here I mean dreams in the English sense of the word – both night journeys and daydreams –, proved to be the only reliable guidelines.¹ I grew up into a troubled artist, amateur writer, and a nonacademic anthropologist. But I was eagerly searching for a discourse and a methodology that could combine all these elements without asking me to compromise or lose what these fields could offer independently. It was then that the term artistic research unfolded its opportunities and complexities in front of me. In this text, I attempt to describe five of my privately developed (and often collectively exercised) methodologies of what I see as artistic research, or in other words, five dreams with implications.²

1: DREAM ON THE ARTEFACT: travel, dream, imagination

I developed interest in the Khazars after reading a novel by the Serbian writer Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars (1984). There, he describes three versions of the Khazar history talking from three different perspectives (Christian, Jewish and Muslim), masterfully merging extensive historiographic and archeological research with poetic writing.

The research that began with a book of fiction led me to a variety of academic sources and, finally, to two research trips: the first one to the Caucasus region, nowadays Russia and Georgia (2017), and the second to Israel (2018). I came back with 24 archeological artefacts taken from the Khazar capital Itil – they were waiting there for the Volga River to rise and wash them away to the bottom of the Caspian Sea. On the field visit to the archaeological site of Itil, professor Dmitry Vasiliev, who has been excavating the site for the past 24 years, whispered to me that they might be 1000 years old.

I was familiar with the methodology of ethnographic fieldwork from six years of social and cultural anthropology studies, which led me to conducting research trips in several countries. But this one, guided both by fiction and intuition, was not exactly ethnographic fieldwork. I found myself observing and photographing landscapes, recording songs and stories told by local people (who had hardly heard about the extinct Khazars), and collecting my own “Khazarian” experiences. I wished I could hear the stories encoded in the material objects I carried back home, and read the dreams that these artefacts carry.³ Yet my own effort could not be sufficient to connect to the dreams of the extinct society. Thus, I shared the Khazar story with 12 other artists giving them one artefact each accompanied by the following instructions:

1) put the artefact under your pillow before going to sleep 2) dream of something that could cause legal implications 3) record your dream when you wake up 4) share it with me⁴

Some of the outcomes of the Dream on the Artefact method were later transported to Israel and contributed to my solo exhibition Legal Implications of a Dream, which took place at the RawArt Gallery in Tel Aviv and Art Cube Artists’ Studios in Jerusalem.⁵ The exhibition included my texts, sculptures, the archaeological artefacts, a film, sound pieces, and a performance. Working in (and about) the context of modern Israel, a state which is today to a large extent defined by its catastrophic implications, I addressed the political agency of dreams and the role of collective imagination in the formation of state ideology.

2: PUT WORDS IN MY MOUTH: conversation, incantation, overcoming the author

Besides the displaced artifacts, there are other “unreliable” historical materials that can unlock new methodologies within artistic research. I call them historical leftovers. These contain all things that do not fit formal historiographic criteria and have therefore been neglected by the grand historical narratives. Accounts that reach us as somebody’s dreams, visions, opinions or rumours have commonly been disqualified from the discourses of “truth” and censured as unreliable. It was perhaps Michel Foucault who first taught us how to draw ahistorical connections within history, how to use history as a material itself. This is the beginning of his Lives of Infamous Men:

“This is not a book of history. The selection found here was guided by nothing more substantial than my taste, my pleasure, an emotion, laughter, surprise, a certain dread, or some other feeling whose intensity I might have trouble justifying, now that the first moment of discovery has passed. It’s an anthology of existences.”⁶

One such historical existence relevant to my practice was the Russian anarchist thinker and presumed founding father of political anarchism, Michail Bakunin (1814-1876). Bakunin exercised political critique through his own existence: he left Russia to study philosophy in Germany but never came back as a free person. He traveled through most European countries giving speeches and initiating revolts. Every state he came to prosecuted him. He was given two life sentences in prison and sent to jail in Russia where he spent five years and lost all his teeth from scurvy. Nevertheless, he managed to escape through Siberian rivers to Japan and the USA, and he finally came back to Europe to continue his underground activities. My fascination with this specific historical figure arose from the fact that political anarchism has developed in the act of public speaking, i.e., in performance (in contrast to bookish Marxism, for instance). As Bakunin never published a coherent theoretical work and spent most of his life undercover, there are very few “reliable” sources. As Paul Avrich notes in his introduction to Bakunin’s most famous work God and the State: “he was forever starting new works which, owing to his turbulent existence, were broken off in mid-course and never completed.”⁷ As part of my research, I travelled to Bologna and Turin to conduct interviews with the contemporary Italian anarchist community. Yet, in order to write the script for my performance Bakunin, I sensed that the traditional ethnographic methodology is not sufficient to respond to the unruly nature of my research subject – I needed an experimental component. The method described below as Put Words in My Mouth contributed largely to the performance which premiered at The Venice Biennial for Architecture 2018 at the Lithuanian pavilion.⁸

For Put Words in My Mouth, I again invited a group of artistic researchers to develop dialogues based on a certain score or script. The people were divided into couples (preferably two people who did not know each other well would form a couple), and each given a sheet with 103 phrases divided into questions, answers and reactions. They were asked to construct and directly record a dialogue speaking out phrases spontaneously in any chosen order or repetition. Here are some examples of each:

QUESTIONS: Who are you? Where do you come from? What is your problem? How shall we live? What is destruction? … ANSWERS: A citizen of all history. My life itself is a fragment. What is real is rational and what is rational is real. I am a fanatical lover of truth and freedom. … REACTIONS: Hypocrite! Are you certain? Stop… Stop… [Ask the other to repeat] [Uncomfortable silence] [Uncontrollable laughter]

The simple phrases, influenced by the 19th-century anarchist discourse and aesthetics of language, enabled the conversation to evolve here and now, collectively, intuitively and without imposing the authority of an author (an anarchist gesture in itself). Later, the transcriptions of these private conversations formed an essential part of the performance script. Moreover, the audience members were asked to participate in a similar “blind” dialogue during the performance. One might also notice a Dadaist influence, where poetry readings occasionally consisted of placing cut-out words from newspaper articles in a bag, shaking it and then constructing poems while picking the words in arbitrary order. Or think of another element of the Bakunin performance: at certain moment, the performer Stefano Moretti would “read” a poem by Velimir Khlebnikov, a Russian constructivist poet, called Incantation by Laughter, which barely contains any meaningful words and instead consists of strange sounds reminiscent of somebody trying to contain their laughter. The performer would thus succeed to make the audience laugh without clowning or joking but through the power of incantation.⁹

In these explorations, the confrontational and provocative aspects of the methodology were no less relevant than its corporal performativity. By naming them Put Words in My Mouth and Incantation, I did attempt to comment on performativity as possibly a forceful political tool, as suggested by Bakunin’s anarchism. An underground agent who relied heavily on his performative abilities, such as improvised public speaking and provocative actions, Bakunin can be seen not only as a founder of a political movement, but also of the whole political performance methodology, and he can be compared with contemporary artist-activists. As Christophe Meierhans, a former theatre director and now one of the leaders of the Extinction Rebellion movement in Belgium, describes his work: it aims at “designing and realizing actions of civil disobedience.”¹⁰

3: VODKA SALT: partial truths, fictioning, intoxication

With the performance Vodka Salt, I intended to thematically integrate my two previous fields of research: the imaginary landscape of Khazaria and the speculative history of anarchism. This required a new methodological gesture again. The performance took shape as a personal encounter between a visitor, a historical character and myself. Each member of the audience was invited, individually, to spend time behind a huge curtain – on the backstage of a group show of performances entitled Unsettled Study and presented at the KANAL Centre Pompidou in Brussels as part of the Performatik festival 2019.¹¹ A 20 meters long curtain was installed there to create a backstage for historical and political narratives and identities, in which the agency of the imagination is mobilized in processes of truth-making. Here, my methods were conversation, partial truth, fictioning, and intoxication. The performance would start with instructions for one visitor at a time:

1) Find an artist in a red military jacket 2) Tell her the keyword you chose to activate the performance: vodka or salt.

Hence, by choosing one of the two keywords, each visitor had a chance to encounter one half of the performance. It is perhaps no surprise that the vast majority chose vodka. Once the person would find me wearing a red military jacket and tell me the keyword, I would lead them on a journey behind the curtain, beyond geography and chronology. I would be speaking as one the two chosen historical characters: Essad Bey, whom I speculatively related to the Khazars and who was represented by a pile of salt; and Michail Bakunin, whom I chose to stereotypically represent by vodka.¹² Mixing my biography with theirs, raising the questions of anarchism, orientalism, and their legacy in the contemporary world, sharing vodka and salt all night, in the closest possible proximity to my audience, I explored the intimacy with history that could have not been explored in another way. The space behind the curtain became a hideout from the busy public gaze of the festival goers, and unexpected drunk encounters took place.

The fact that nobody besides myself knew the full truth of the performance (full script, full concept) might remind us of the seminal essay by the anthropologist James Clifford, Partial Truths (1986), in which he insists that ethnographic research (and other kinds of research as well) is an interplay of voices and positioned utterances; it is closest to fiction and the ethnographer is closest to a “maker of texts”.¹³ Clifford suggests that we approach research as a constellation of partial truths. Thus, the partial truths of Vodka Salt did enable my visitors and myself to summon history, privately, personally, intimately. One might ask whether it was still history that was summoned as I confused the facts, made up the narrative, merged the biographies, writings and speeches of historical figures with my own.

In fact, the differentiation between “fact” and “fiction” can itself be seen as a historical confusion. As Lennard J. Davis shows in his article “A Social History of Fact and Fiction”, in the development of literary genres, fictionality or factuality were not crucial factors in defining the genre of a piece of writing until the 18th century.¹⁴ In 16th- and 17th-century English literature, the term novel was used to talk about both real and fictional, both everyday-life and supernatural events. The term covered both the Decameron and journalistic articles, and was used fairly interchangeably with the word news. Moreover, authors of English novels of the time usually began their texts claiming that this was not at all a fiction but somebody’s actual life, compulsively repeating phrases such as “as far as I can remember”. These techniques showed that the writer was merely documenting the true course of events, whether those of the physical or the discursive reality, which both stood on equal grounds. “Journalism” did not appear to be classified far from fiction either. News reporters of the early modern times were often accused of being liars (their accounts were based on a sworn statement of truth) while most of the successful writers were also reporters. In this light, our contemporary age of “post-truth”, “fake news” and “alternative facts” does not seem either novel or sensational.

4: THE STRONGEST MUSCLE: translating, editing, outsourcing

My favourite figure in 17th-century England, in this curious time before the brutal separation between fact and fiction, is Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673). Having had no formal education (on account of her gender), she yet enjoyed a privileged status in society by being married to a wealthy duke. Their house was a meeting place for thinkers, writers, scientists, and other intellectuals of the time. Being domestically involved in these circles, Cavendish educated herself – by listening to the discussions, opinions, gossip –, and started to write. My solo exhibition The Strongest Muscle in the Human Body is the Tongue was presented at the Editorial Project Space in Vilnius and at Kunsthal Gent in Ghent.¹⁵ There, among other things, I worked with Cavendish’s novel The Blazing World (1666), which is often considered the first written work of science fiction. In this rather hard-to-read novel, Cavendish wildly connects natural philosophy, sciences, speculative reasoning and fantasy, without complying with any rules, not even grammatical ones. With her excessive language she addresses issues that were not generally addressed in her days; we can hear her intuition for feminist and post-humanist ideas. Her radical descriptions of the body as a fluid and ever transitional entity with abilities to move back and forward in time, were particularly interesting to me:

I consider my contribution to Margaret’s piece as an editor and translator as part of a methodology in artistic research. I was concerned with how to find a new, spatial shape for a historical, perhaps hardly accessible, text. How to edit or draw it, how to write in space in a way a contemporary audience would be able and willing to read? How to rescue it from an exclusively academic (and within academia, also very niche) circle? Half of The Blazing World’s fragments in my exhibition were excerpts from the English original and half of them were my translations to Lithuanian, deliberately attempting to imitate Margaret’s style. The graphic design, created by Jonė Miškinytė, attempts to materialize this wildly moving all-directional text.

In their book Fictioning: The Myth-functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy (2019), David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan discuss fiction not as a genre but as a method applied in contemporary art, music and philosophy, and suggest that fictioning in art is employed with visionary purposes.¹⁷ In their words, it intends to describe the reality to come. And, thus, I suggest that Margaret Cavendish was a visionary interdisciplinary artist employing the scientific research of the time along the method of fictioning, merging facts and imagination in order to create new worlds or new possibilities to think about the world she lived in and to define the reality to come.

5. ENCOUNTER THE PREDICAMENT: liminality, intimacy, transference

Since I have just described the artist-editor’s approach of outsourcing and repositioning (in contrast to the approach of an artist-God creating ex nihilo), I should mention at least one precursor, Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), the German playwright, theatre director, theorist and poet known for revolutionising theatre and performance. Brecht, in his work, borrowed freely from many sources, adopting plagiarism in support of parody. Up to this day, many critics disagree about the ethical implications of this aspect of his work, without denying Brecht’s genius. Yet, it was Brecht himself, and not the subjects of his plagiarism, who took the political consequences of his explicitly Marxist art in Nazi Germany – his books were publicly burned in 1933 and he himself had to spend 15 years in exile before returning to spend the last years of his life in East Berlin.¹⁸

In performance theory, Brecht made his undeniable mark for developing the Verfremdung technique, which is translated to English as alienation. This artistic device requires an artist to distance the artwork from the viewer through confrontation and realisation, through an awkward gesture of disconnection (in Brecht’s case, the performer would disrupt the theatrical illusion by suddenly demonstrating that he/she is playing a role).¹⁹ In the political context of WW2, this has to be seen as a technique for raising political awareness and educating the audiences to detect propaganda by deconstructing the social meanings they encounter through art.²⁰

What I wish to obtain today, however, might be seen as the opposite side of the Verfremdung coin. The terms of intimacy, affinity and transference (as used in psychoanalysis) are useful here. I do see my practice in Brecht’s lineage, working against artistic illusion and naturalism, standing for awareness-raising and society-questioning forms of art, and expecting intelligent engagement from my viewer. Still, I am interested in radically opposite techniques than the ones Brecht used – those that do not distance you from the artwork but confront you with its disturbing proximity, which, I believe, another form of alienation.

With the project Liminal Minds, I continued my investigation of the implications of dreams found in historical records and invited the viewers to closely encounter the predicament of two visionaries. The first one was the underestimated Swedish futurist Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772): philosopher, theologian, geologist, mineralogist, anatomist, astronomer, engineer – a man of many talents. At the age of 56, he started having intense dreams and visions in which he encountered Jesus and regularly visited heaven and hell, which made him turn away from science towards mysticism. After this transformative period, he devoted the rest of his life to theological writings, mostly regarding the afterlife, including descriptions of the architecture of heaven with an engineer’s precision. He claimed to be as objective in his mystical practices as in his scientific ones.

The second figure I presented was Michel Leiris (1901-1990), French anthropologist and surrealist writer. From 1931 to 1933 he participated in the Dakar-Djibouti Mission, which, sponsored by the French government, collected artifacts and documented and described cultural practices and peoples from East to West Africa. Early on in the expedition Leiris realised that the mission employed endless questionable, unethical and violent methods in taking ownership of peoples’ religious artifacts and artwork. Feeling trapped and frustrated, Leiris found himself unable to assume his role as secretary-archivist and to objectively document the mission. Instead, he began writing an enormous number of personal notes in free association. After his return to France, Leiris decided to publish them. L’Afrique fantôme was a 533-page surrealist constellation of dreams, fieldnotes, unstructured diary, self-analysis, descriptions of anxieties, and erotic fantasies.²¹ The publication was, for decades, refused by the academic community, but it immediately became a seminal work for surrealist literature.

The concept of liminality was first introduced by Arnold van Gennep in Rites de Passage in 1909.²² He observed the rites of passage or transformative rituals of social life (such as weddings, funerals, initiation rites, etc.) and described liminality as the psychic and emotional state in between one social status and another – the state of ambiguity, disorientation and loss of fixed identity. In three of my exhibitions related to the Liminal Minds project, I invited the audience to enter into the liminal minds of these characters, and to perceive them as critical thinkers who operated ahead of their times.²³ While Swedenborg performed a radical critique of Western science and Christianity, Leiris’ account was central for the shift from a colonial to a postcolonial mindset. My light, sculptural and video installations in dark rooms served as bedrooms for an intimate encounter with the nightmares and desires (or, if you will, the madness) of my characters. Hence, in my research, I adopt the concept of liminality not in the classical anthropological sense but rather in a personal and creative sense. Personal journeys, often secret transitions and transgressions, usually accompanied by dreams and visions placing persons outside of society, alienating and excluding them, become my material.

Supposedly, dreams and imagination had a prominent role in the Khazar empire. And, again supposedly, the empire’s legal and administrative system codified the reality of dream, intuition and imagination. I wonder what the world would be today if it had taken the Khazar path. However, the historical and archeological sources that remain are limited, contradictory and used for different ideological purposes. Imagination is the only tool that does not fail in helping to understand not only where we are but also where we could be.

After the conversion, the wisest Khazar poet – princess Ateh – was condemned to forget her language and all her poems. She even forgot the name of her lover. But before all this had happened, princess Ateh, sensing the danger, requested a large number of parrots that could imitate human speech. Each of them was taught a poem in the Khazar language. The birds flew away into the forests, where they taught the poems to other parrots, and these taught them to others, until Khazarian was only known to parrots. This story is to remind ourselves that language may know more about us than we know about it. Ateh’s practice may be seen as an archaic methodology of artistic research itself. It is in those displaced methodologies that I notice an opportunity to reframe the hierarchy of epistemological structures of truth and objectivity. By exploring and constructing an alternative, more intuitive, poetic discourse and intertwining public and personal memory, we might be able to counter-write official, stubborn, one-sided historical narratives. I suggest that the transdisciplinary and unsettled field of artistic research is a key environment to work with speculative and creative methodologies. As a final remark, I feel a need to note that I believe the methodology of artistic research is private. It is driven by the impossibility to apply proven methods while exploring the most urgent inner questions. It cannot be taught, repeated or generalized because it is invented every time anew. Yet I believe that even private methodologies can and should be shared and that sharing methodology may be more relevant than sharing the results. In order to learn from you, I need to watch your process.

Notes

• ¹ In contrast, in my native Lithuanian, which still usually serves as the language of my dreams, there are two distinct terms for dream as nightdream (lt. sapnas) and dream as daydream (lt. svajonė
• ² A predecessor of this text was presented on the occasion of completing my participation in the post-master program in a.pass, a platform for artistic research in Brussels. Its rigorous and interdisciplinary context played an irreplicable role in the development of my methodology. Recently facing financial threats imposed by the Flemish government, the institute itself might soon become a dream.
• ³ Artifacts collected at Samosdelka, Russia. Image by Goda Palekaitė, 2017.

• ⁴This and some of the other group experiments described below took place in the context of a.pass
• ⁵ More about the exhibition Legal Implications of a Dream at RawArt Gallery and Art Cube Artists‘ Studios (2018-2019), curated by Leah Abir.
• ⁶ Foucault, Michel, “Lives of Infamous Men”, in: James D. Faubion, Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, vol. 3, New York: The New Press, 2001, p. 157-175.
• ⁷ Avrich, Paul, “Introduction to the Dover Edition”, in: Michael Bakunin, God and the State, New York: Dover Publications, 2015, p. v-xii.
• ⁸ Bakunin was further performed at the Laboratorio Artistico Pietra in Turin, and Vilnius International Theatre Festival Sirenos. The video trailer of the performance Bakunin filmed at Laboratorio Artistico Pietra in September 2018.
• ⁹ The audio recording of performer Stefano Moretti reading the translation of V. Khlebnikov’s poem Incantation by Laughter in the performance Bakunin, directed by Goda Palekaitė, sound-edited by Adomas Palekas (2018).
• ¹⁰ Without having a chance to expand on artist-activism here, I would like to refer to several contemporary examples, such as the contribution of Christophe Meierhans to Extinction Rebellion, Russian feminist activist band Pussy Riot, and Russian interdisciplinary activist collective Chto Delat.
• ¹¹ Curated by Vladimir Miller and a.pass, Unsettled Study was a 3-day event in which numerous performances were simultaneously activated in a huge space at the KANAL Centre Pompidou in Brussels (2019).
• ¹² Essad Bey (1905-1942) was a pseudonym of a Jewish writer and journalist from Baku, Azerbaijan, who spent most of his life in Germany, where he had converted to Islam. In the 1930s his books were praised by Nazis leading to international success, until his Jewish origin was revealed; as a result his books were burned and Bey died young in exile and prosecution. Today Essad Bey is perceived as an orientalist and often criticised for exotising and misrepresenting his home region and its peoples as primitive and barbarous.

• ¹³ Clifford, James, “Introduction: Partial Truths”, in James Clifford and George Marcus (eds.), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1986, pp. 1-26.
• ¹⁴ Davis, Lennard, “A Social History of Fact and Fiction: Authorial Disavowal in the Early English Novel”, in Edward W. Said (ed.), Literature and Society, English Institute, 1986, pp. 120-148.
• ¹⁵ The exhibition The Strongest Muscle in the Human Body is the Tongue at Kunsthal Gent was produced in collaboration with The Institute of Things to Come and curated by Valerio Del Baglivo.
• ¹⁶ Vinyl print for the exhibition The Strongest Muscle in the Human Body is the Tongue (2021): a quote from The Blazing World, edited by me and marked as […], graphic design by Jonė Miškinytė. My full piece The Blazing World exhibited at Editorial project space in Vilnius contained five excerpts from the book and their translations:

• ¹⁷ Burrows, David and O’Sullivan, Simon. Fictioning: The Myth-functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy. Edinburgh University Press, 2019.
• ¹⁸ Freeman, John. New Performance / New Writing. Palgrave, London, 2016.
• ¹⁹ We could also consult Viktor Shklovsky’s notion of ostranenie or defamiliarization, which, even before Brecht, in the Russian formalist context, was referring to the crucial distinction of poetical and practical language. Defamiliarization was proposed as the fundamental artistic principle.
• ²⁰ Freeman, John. New Performance / New Writing. Palgrave, London, 2016.
• ²¹ Leiris, Michel. Phantom Africa. Seagull Books, Calcutta, 2017 (1934).
• ²² Van Gennep, Arnold. Les rites de passage. Émile Nourry, Paris, 1909.
• ²³ Exhibition view: Liminal Minds at Konstepidemin art gallery in Gothenburg, 2019

boundary thing 000923 (Scared Straight!)

Agency

boundary thing 000923 (Scared Straight!)

In 1976, Richard Rowe, an inmate at Rahway State Prison, who started the Lifers Group, developed The Juvenile Awareness Program. The program was meant to deter participants from future crimes by providing first-hand observations of prison life and interaction with inmates. The program consisted of a confrontational talking session conducted by inmates serving life sentences and attended by juveniles who had begun experiencing difficulties with the law. During the course of each session the inmates exposed these juveniles to prison life by depicting the harshness and brutality of their incarceration. Each session differed from the other, depending on the reactions of the attendees. Although the actual sessions themselves were unscripted, Rowe instructed the inmates both on the contents of their talks and the methods to convey their thoughts. Rehearsals were also held. The goal of the program was that the juveniles would be “scared straight”. Rowe never recorded the program in any way.

In 1978, Arnold Shapiro made a documentary about The Juvenile Awareness Program at Rahway prison after reading an article on the program in the magazine, Reader’s Digest. He filmed seventeen juveniles before, during and after a three-hour visit to Rahway prison which predominantly consisted of a confrontational session with life-term inmates. In the documentary a group of inmates scare the juveniles by screaming and shouting brutally at them. In March 1979, the documentary Scared Straight! produced by Golden West Television Productions was first broadcasted on television. In December 1979, CBS entered into an agreement with Golden West to produce a new television film inspired by the documentary. In November 1980, the television film Scared Straight - Another Story, a drama with actors also produced by Shapiro, was broadcasted.

On March 13, 1980 Rowe filed a complaint against Golden West Television Productions, Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) and Arnold Shapiro for infringement of The Juvenile Awareness Program. During Rowe v. Golden West Television Productions at the Superior Court of Middlesex County the judge held that:

The fluid, free-flowing educational “scared straight” program, where no script existed and audience reaction and inmate participation changed with each presentation, was not a concrete expression of an idea of [Rowe]’s that rose to the level of a tangible product deserving of a common law copyright.

The court concluded that there was no copyright protection. Rowe appealed the decision. He asserted that the sessions themselves were the tangible expressions of his conceptualization deserving copyright protection. On March 22, 1982 during Rowe v. Golden West Television Productions at the Superior Court of New Jersey, Judge Matthews held that:

Whether the session in question here was, as [Rowe] contends, a dramatization of prison life created by him, or, as [Golden West] assert, merely a real life exchange incapable of being copyrighted, we conclude that [Rowe]’s claim must fail. As we have noted, New Jersey law does not protect literary property which is not in a tangible form. And even if [Rowe] is to be credited with the dramatization of the sessions so that the sessions themselves are considered to be the concrete expression of his work product, we find that his claim nonetheless must fail as a result of federal preemption. Though the Copyright Act of 1909 preserved state law copyrights with respect to unpublished works, the [U.S.] Copyright Act of 1976 has now preempted this area. [...] Applied to [Rowe]’s claim for copyright infringement we find it clear that that action has been preempted by federal law. [...] [Rowe] makes no statutory copyright claim. Nor could such a claim be maintained in light of his failure to comply with the registration requirement.

The court decided that The Juvenile Awareness Program could potentially fall under the subject of copyright protection, but the claim of copyright infringement was preempted by the lack of registration.

Confabulation as Artistic Method
Reactivating the Sentimental Jewellery of Louise-Marie d’Orléans

Charlotte Vanhoubroeck

In 1832, Louise-Marie d’Orléans was welcomed in Belgium. The twenty-year-old French princess, an outspoken and sharp-witted woman, was to unwillingly marry the first king of the Belgians – who was twice her age – and become queen herself. As a wedding present, she received his miniature portrait, surrounded by diamonds and incorporated into a bracelet. An honourable act of love? Or a somewhat awkward formality? Presumably the latter. Transitions such as the 19th-century royal wedding, which rarely involved love, were frightening. These fears were anticipated, for instance, with jewellery. The sumptuous rituals of the bridal attire served to distract the bride from her impending marriage duties and the departure from her familiar home.¹ This marriage was a turning point for Louise. The princess, who had been born into a large, warm nest and enjoyed herself with her brothers and sisters at the French court, could suddenly no longer be her witty self. Despair and melancholy steadily transformed the queen into a faint shadow of her former self. “When setting off for another place (…), hopes and imaginaries become reminiscences of lives lived before (…). When stuck in a place (…) we tend to dwell on memories of our former ways of life.”² For Louise, it became tempting to muse. To visit bygone places in her mind, places that colour the day. “Mnemonic practices help to make sense of our lives,”³ and Louise developed the urge to cherish memories of loved ones and meaningful moments, memories that gave Louise’s life a new bloom. This she did by exchanging so-called sentimental jewellery pieces with the people she cared about. These small bodily treasures, which were very fashionable at the time, were known to encapsulate little mementos like miniature portraits, locks of human hair, engraved names, dates, messages, and so on. As small secular sanctuaries they gave a home to Louise’s inner world of feelings. They helped her celebrate sentiments of love and friendship, but also mourn and commemorate her departed loved ones.

Memories reside in the material world around us. They are recalled in dialogues – dialogues between people, but also between people and objects. Objects themselves may have no memory, but they certainly can contain and (re)produce memories.⁴ Memories can be evoked via the sensory touch, sometimes unintentionally.⁵ Objects that almost seem to be in need of this touch are jewellery pieces, as they are designed to be close to the body. It should not come as a surprise, then, that jewellery has been serving as a memory carrier for centuries. They proclaim not only status, splendour, but also, and sometimes above all, sentiment.

It’s fascinating to see how people can cling to the latter. To that sentiment. Louise lived during the heyday of Romanticism, a movement of emotion and melancholy that emerged during the drastic political, social and economic transformations of the late 18th century and early 19th century.⁶ The industrial society slowly became a harsh reality, and romanticism sought to bring salvation by creating an illusory, ethereal hideaway. Romantic moods were to move the minds, so sentiment and delirium took over from reason and nostalgic escapism was intensely encouraged.⁷ These ideals had also taken root in the mind of Louise, who wasn’t really interested in regal status displays and shimmering splendour. As a child of the sober French July monarchy, which did not want to indulge in decadent aristocratic behaviour out of fear of new rebellions, Louise valued simplicity and modesty and mostly cared about the matters of the heart. Her Estate Inventory, a document drawn up a year after her death in 1851, gives an insight into her belongings, including her jewellery. The voluminous book lists and values all movable property – from the simplest handkerchief to the finest court dress – that Louise owned at the time of her death.⁸ The chapter on jewellery describes no less than 293 pieces, of which more than a hundred are sentimental jewellery pieces. Throughout the descriptions, these pieces showcase a landscape of sentiments, and all together act as a miniature museum of Louise’s emotional mind. Regretfully, almost all of Louise’s jewellery got lost in the course of the inheritances.⁹

The loss of this heritage might displease the art historian. Nothing remains to be touched, there is nothing left but language. The artist, however, is intrigued. For the artist there is no need to accept that some information is lost forever. After all, the visual voids create space for imagination and ‘retelling’. I thus want to discover and work with what these descriptions reveal, or rather, what these descriptions don’t reveal. Intimate information such as Louise’s love for Leopold, the happiness she felt at joyful celebrations, the grief she struggled with after her firstborn died, etc., was once made touchable and wearable for a reason in many jewellery pieces; fragments of Louise’s sentimental mind were suddenly made tangible. What can this surviving information – with all its gaps – mean today, both from an art theoretical and artistic point of view?

This train of thought can be redirected to the question: how can the myth of Louise-Marie d’Orléans be retold through the sentimental jewellery pieces described in her Estate Inventory? Louise’s identity as a queen is a consciously constructed identity. Mainly for political reasons, she was presented as a pious woman who devoted herself to her children, charity, religious activities, and who refrained from political comments. This idealized image, as Regina Schulte pointed out, emerged in times in which the middle-class prevailed and new family values allowed for reimagining queenships. In an attempt to distance themselves from the late 18th-century European courts, which were characterised by the abuse of power, decadence and intrigue, the 19th-century royal houses designated themselves as middle-class, where “marriage and family were among the cornerstones of [the] conception of society, or more precisely were [the] natural preconditions.”¹⁰ The motherly ideal of the queen was already carried out by Louise’s mother, Queen Marie-Amélie, whose husband Louis-Philippe, duc d’Orléans, rose to the French throne following the July Revolution. Louis-Philippe was known as the ‘Bourgeois King’, or the ‘Citizen King’, and Marie-Amélie assumed the role of ‘an ideal Bourgeois Queen’. In fact “her apolitical public image was a conscious construction, designed to emphasise that the role of a queen was simply to be the king’s spouse.”¹¹ Eventually, it would also be the reign of the English queen Victoria “that cemented an image of the monarchy as a fully politically domesticated institution”.¹² Louise, being very close to her mother Marie-Amélie, and being a good friend of Victoria, almost had no other choice but to fit the narrative from the moment she became queen, and to become a national myth as well. My way of deconstructing the representation of Louise-Marie d’Orléans aims at presenting a new narrative of this first queen of the Belgians. Via (lost) objects of memory I’ll add a new layer of reality to the story. Of course, I will never pretend to uncover the absolute truth. However, both as an art historian as a maker, I will add a yet unseen perspective onto this fixed, artificial reality, which I call the Myth of Louise-Marie d’Orléans.

To create this new layer of reality, I allow myself to be intrigued by these aforementioned voids in the descriptions written down in Louise’s Estate Inventory. The gaps that emerge amidst the language are doors to a new reality, one that can be constructed in the here and now. Therefore, based on the descriptions, I’m reactivating the sentimental jewellery of Louise-Marie d’Orléans from a contemporary point of view. By appealing to the imagination, by “aiming at the imaginary”, I hope to go “beyond what one can cognitively know”.¹³ As such, I use experimental artistic methods that revise seemingly fixed truths through alternative narratives. In recent years, methods such as fictioning and speculative thinking have gained prominence and have been presented and employed as both academically and artistically valid work strategies.

At first sight, fiction as method may seem rather unscientific. Yet, in essence, it does not differ much from what the historian does.¹⁴ In the 1980s, Hayden White pointed out how historians can never represent historical reality in a neutral way, since their writing is inescapably influenced by the narrative conventions of their time. This is a turning point in history and in literary studies which White called the ‘Narrative Turn’.¹⁵ The historian is in fact also a writer of fiction: “Written history is (...) also ‘an act of the imagination’, filtered and tinted by the values, interests and assumptions of the historian. However, as readers and viewers we tend to be less aware of this.”¹⁶ In the arts, fiction and reality can be deliberately confronted, making the audience suddenly realise how relative each perspective on reality is.¹⁷ This was emphasised by Jon Shaw and Theo Reeves-Evison, who advocated the importance of fiction.¹⁸ Equally, David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan explored fictioning techniques of numerous contemporary artists and philosophers and mapped out the three so-called ‘Myth-Functions’. The first function, ‘Mythopoesis’, is proposed as productive of worlds, people and communities to come, often drawing upon residual and emergent cultures. ‘Myth science’ functions by producing alternate perspectives and models, revealing habits of thought concerning physical, historical and social realities as yet more myth. Finally, ‘mythotechnesis’ concerns the ways in which technology enters into discourse and life, through projections of the existing and future influence of machines. Fictioning is seen as a ‘mode of operation’ and these myth-functions fiction reality in different ways.¹⁹ In the world of fashion (history) – which includes the world of jewellery –, Caroline Evans and Alessandra Vaccari expressed the need to examine the timelines of fashion: the ‘industrial’ time’, the ‘antilinear time’ and the ‘uchronic time’. Interesting is the latter, the ‘uchronic time’, since ‘uchronia’ means an impossible or fictional timeline. It allows the invention of possible futures, and the rewriting of the past. This means that uchronic time has the capacity to provide alternative histories of fashion: one can create utopian heritages, trend-forecasting predictions, forward-looking fantasies set in an imagined future, and activism motivated by a real sense of urgency and political engagement.²⁰ Narratives like these eventually encourage innovative, experimental and even revolutionary thinking.

In the same way, I am adding a new layer of reality to Louise’s story. I am regenerating the sentimental jewellery described in Louise’s Estate Inventory by using the so-called confabulation method. This method starts from tangible, historical information, which is inevitably incomplete. Precisely these voids constitute the space in which I move, the space to which I ultimately give a personal interpretation. The confabulation of Louise’s sentimental jewellery is a process that unfolds in two phases, namely the linguistic confabulation and the material confabulation. The first makes me explore the tangible, historical information, which is, in this case, the Estate Inventory. I scrutinise the descriptions in this document in depth until certain words, phrases and sentence combinations generate associative streams of thought. These musings mingle with other known information about the described piece or about its context, and trigger first, fragmented ideas. The second phase – the material confabulation – is initiated as soon as the thinking takes on visual proportions and starts bringing forth specific material and technical solutions. From then on, I can move on to the making process and regenerate a new jewellery piece of Louise-Marie d’Orléans.

As an illustration, I’ll demonstrate a brief outline of my creation process of jewellery piece N° 16, the sixteenth piece described in the Estate Inventory.

Original description:

« N° 16: (S. A. R. La princesse Charlotte) Une broche en or, forme de nœud, ayant pour pendant un cœur en or, enrichi de pierres précieuses; ce cœur qui s’ouvre contient l’œil du Roi peint en miniature, prisée deux cents francs. »

English translation:

« N° 16: (H. R. H. Princess Charlotte) A gold brooch in the form of a knot, having a gold heart for a pendant, enriched with precious stones; this heart, which can be opened, contains the King’s eye painted in miniature, valued at two hundred francs. »

N° 16 concerns a piece of jewellery that Charlotte, Louise’s daughter, is said to have inherited. At the time of her mother’s death, Charlotte was ten years old and was given this gold brooch in the form of a heart-shaped medallion enclosing an eye miniature of king Leopold, hanging from a bow. Each fragment of this description makes me ponder. The linguistic information provokes words, sentences and questions; even wordplays or puns come to mind. All kinds of associations arise while reading and rereading this description, associations that continue to transform into new thoughts and ideas and eventually lead to visual thinking.

The associations that emerge from these streams of thought eventually substantiate into visual images, images that stimulate the maker to collect materials and sort out technical details. This is where the material confabulation comes in. Reflection and creation go hand in hand; both can only take place in constant interaction with each other. The mind moves the hands – and vice versa – until I obtain a new N° 16. This new piece has been stripped of its wealth and can no longer show off royal status. The shimmering of the gold and precious stones just blind the eye too much. The childlike heart invites to play. It gives the young Princess Charlotte comfort, distracts her from her grief. Inside the heart, the invitation ‘Place I Here’ reveals itself. An ‘I’, like in ‘Eye’, referring to the eye miniature? Or to leopold I? To louise maybe? Or to I, myself, the maker, who might also want to play along? Once closed, the heart is eventually ‘tied’ to the clothing. An abstracted bow-’tie’ presents itself as both a decorative element and a functional brooch mechanism.

Jewellery piece N° 16 was once a lover’s gem given by Leopold to Louise. Princess Charlotte cherished the piece after Louise’s death, until it finally disappeared. While confabulating, a fragment of Louise’s love for both Leopold and Charlotte is reactivated. A new jewellery piece emerged that renews a past reality. A reality that tells of Louise-Marie d’Orléans, first queen of the Belgians.

Notes

Moved by the object

Laura Vandewynckel

L’appèl

“We’re overwhelmed, suffering from bad news fatigue.” We have seen uncountable faces of people fleeing their country in search for shelter. They’ve blurred into an anonymous black hole, unfathomable for a simple mortal. We are occupied with closer-to-bed concerns, begging for a time-out of “hardships which are not our business.” During our oblivious nap, however, a million faces appeal for recognition. They have shimmering eyes, soft smiles and hairs whirling in the wind. They remain unseen, unheard.

From September to November 2020 Amal travels Europe. She’s tall for her age, 3,5 meters to be exact, gentle, and a bit stiff. Her eyes shimmer, her smile is disarmingly soft. Wherever she passes, crowds flock together to marvel at this young girl travelling 8000 km in search of her mother. Amal is an automated giant, created by the Handspring Puppet Company. She is on a cultural odyssey transcending borders, politics and language, to remind us of the millions of displaced children like her, in search of shelter, separated from their families. Amal has become the talk of the town.

It takes a puppet to raise a child

The creative team of Good Chance and the Handspring Puppet Company have created a strong community-building interaction ritual. The heart of that ritual is a young girl’s effigy, which, through her lifelike gestures and charm, becomes – in the words of her creators – “a communicator and empathizer¹” and wakes us out of our slumber. Built out of canes and wires, collectively brought to live by her puppeteers and her audiences, Amal has the power to brush up our minds, to make us wonder about the situation of real children resembling Amal, whom we have forgotten.

Amal’s walk reveals the impact of the automaton on audiences. What can an automaton achieve that a human cannot? How can a bunch of canes and screws so strongly affect us? The investigation of ‘thing-power’ is one of the scopes of my research on thaumata automata as triggers for social change. / τῶν θαυμάτων ταὐτόματα / is a term borrowed from Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Thauma means wonder, automaton means self-moving. Aristotle refers to automatic wonders that inspire metaphysical curiosity:² the same way we are puzzled by and inquiry about these automats, we wonder and learn why all things are as they are.

Assuming that automata indeed have a power to make us wonder, can they be used to confront us with and teach us about social injustices and our responsibility for these? And if staged in public space, as a part of a collective interaction ritual, do they have a community-building potential? To find out I started ‘invading’ public space with automata: puppets, robots and kinetic sculptures. The encounter with them is always sudden and ephemeral. The hope is to bewilder the spectator, to encourage interaction and reflection and to offer a moment of togetherness.

First of all, there are the scapegoat projects, presented under the names Pharmakos, the Sin-eater, Cat Consolation, which I discuss below. Another long-running project is the participative choreography Stick Together. It has been performed on several public squares in Brussels in 2020 and 2021, and is made by and for Brussels citizens or visitors. It departs from international stick games, dances and fights. The attempt to play a stick game together is a metaphor for the social game we try to play daily in a community that is increasingly diverse and competitive. We want to collaborate, but never lose. We have to deal with cocks of the walk, hacks, nit-pickers, tacticians, cheaters, know-it-all’s, winners, losers, bad losers. How do you play that game? Which game?

Finally, there is The Unheard, a project initiated by K.A.K. and CREW and to which I contributed. K.A.K. is a Brussels group of 17 multidisciplinary theatre makers and “tinkerers”. CREW is a Brussels experimental theatre company that aims to visualize how technology is changing us. The Unheard was created during the Brussels lockdown in 2020 and was an attempt to answer two fundamental needs that emerged during the lockdown: how could we create intimacy remotely? And how could we represent the voices hushed by the public noise during the crisis? Five automated horn robots were presented in public space as the megaphones of unheard voices. The voice of the introvert, for whom the lockdown was a blessing, of the elderly, whose fate in corona times was discussed by many, except, it seemed by the elderly themselves, the voice of the youngsters who were banned from the suburban squares, of artists bereft of a platform, the voice of all mouths figuratively and literally masked. The robots drove through streets connecting people through talks and songs, mediating a public conversation.

The scapegoat mechanism sublimized through myths and rituals

Pharmakos, The Sin-eater, Cat Consolation and Let the sea take away all the evil make up the different scapegoat projects. They are aimed at the dissection of a very specific psychological mechanism, ingrained in the human psyche and cultural history. The scapegoat mechanism refers to a tremendously fascinating trait which is more familiar to us than we are willing to admit. This (in)humane mechanism saved individuals, groups, or large communities from internal conflict in the short term, but made countless people suffer both in the short and the long term. Every day we unwittingly shift the blame of our misfortune to innocent others, sparing us from the toughest question: Am I to blame? Am I responsible?

Since the beginning of time, this subconscious mechanism has been reflected and sublimized in myths and rituals, which serve to channel our frustrations and strengthen the bonds threatened by crisis. They have become less violent over the course of time. The ancient pharmakos ritual for example, in which real people were sacrificed, has morphed into the still widely practiced ‘non-violent’ judas burnings, in which a puppet-like embodiment of a community’s persona non grata is collectively beaten and burnt. A seemingly innocent scourging-by-gossip might be considered its contemporary equivalent. But are these evolved rituals and myths really devoid of direct violence—are they really less harmful? How innocent has been the ritual burning by the Croatians of two kissing gay puppets?³ How harmless is the myth of Great Replacement or the complot theories rampant around covid-19 vaccination? Cultural anthropologist René Girard (1923-2015) has investigated dozens of ancient and contemporary rituals and myths and distinguished in them the stereotypes of persecution. As the myths are always told from the perspective of the persecutor, the scapegoat mechanism is neatly tucked away in self-legitimation and lies, cunningly proving the scapegoat is guilty and the violence against them justified.⁴

The awareness that there is no escape from this inherently violent mechanism and the harmful myth- and ritual-making that comes with it should not keep us from searching for less harmful alternatives. Girard states that if we want to put an end to the violence, we need to deconstruct the scapegoat myths, expose their lies (stereotypes of persecution), and retell them from a different perspective.

Pharmakos – Sifnos

In 2016 I was invited to create a short film on the Greek island Sifnos. I had never heard of René Girard. At that time, my mind was troubled, and I was desperate for consolation. Being an atheist, I envied those who find comfort in religious rituals. Researching the project, I chanced upon an ancient ritual which apparently took place around the 6th century BC in Athens and other towns in the Mediterranean region called Pharmakos. Pharmakoi means ‘medicine’ in Old-Greek but also ‘poison.’ Every year, before the first harvest, during the Thargelia festival, or in case of war, pestilence or famine, the Greek citizens chose two men “of low origin and useless” and “common and maltreated by nature”, onto whom they transferred the bad luck that had hit or might hit the town.⁵ During an extensive ritual ceremony these men, burdened with the sorrows of the people as a whole, were bombarded with stones and burnt. Thanks to their ritual but all too real removal, the citizens felt appeased.

I decided to bring the ancient Pharmakos victims back to life in the shape of two human-like objects and crafted two life-size mechanic puppets. Packed with limbs and heads I flew to Sifnos. There, the Pharmakoi meticulously reenacted the archaic ritual as described by the historians. They collected stones and handed them out to the people of Sifnos, who were invited to inscribe them with whatever they wished to get out of their mind: fears, sorrows, angers or the names of whomever had caused them. In the meanwhile, the pharmakoi chopped wood for their fire and dragged the poles onto which they would be hung. On the night of the ritual, right outside the walls of the village, they were beaten up, stoned, and burnt.

The Sifnos experience had a big impact on me and, more than I had anticipated, on the people of Sifnos. My companion Nienke Deutz and I had been parading these pharmakoi around the island, initially much to the hilarity of its inhabitants. The puppets were quiet listeners during the many interviews with passers-by and participants. Unconsciously, we had started to like these clumsy puppets. When the moment of the ritual had come, and we invited the participants to throw their burdened stone onto them, it left us all with mixed feelings. For sure, it was a relief to hit these objects hard with the stone that carried our burden, but the result of our actions rebounded in our minds. The foam head of the puppets became the faces of those whom we had ranted against in our stories. There were dangling on their poles, staring at us.

The scapegoat projects

The Sifnos experience marked the beginning of a series of scapegoat projects. Each time, such projects depart from an ancient or contemporary scapegoat myth and ritual, which is then de- and reconstructed by social artistic means. The ambition, naïve as it might be, is to turn existing scapegoat myths and rituals into new ones that would put a spell on us and at the same time unravel their own lies—that delude and confront us, that blatantly show our responsibility, but at the same time sooth and relieve us from carrying that responsibility.

The approach is based on two artistic elements. First, non-human automata would mount the stage. These animated inanimate objects are deployed as a method to externalize the mechanism, to lift it from the subconscious realm, to visualize it and make it debatable. They exhibit three characteristics which distinguish them from human actors and make them, in my view, more apt for the task.

(a) You could tell they are negligible, mere assemblies of wood, screws and ropes, lacking a soul, blessed with the gift of feeling no pain, no emotion, impervious of the violence we inflict on them. At the same time, however, they are very much alive, affectionate and “like us”, and if we take a closer look, we’d swear we have seen tears in their eyes.

(b) In scapegoat myths the scapegoats are said to have deliberately chosen their roles. To problematize this idea of voluntariness, I choose to underline the active-passive paradox of the animated dead object. Automata seem to act on their own, but at the same time we are aware they are manipulated and bereft of agency.

(c) Scapegoat myths are ideologically and politically charged. It does not need explaining that their narrators would be offended by hearing their truth be called a myth. A lifeless thing, on the contrary, is neutral—or at least, neutral at the start. It is a carte blanche, an Every-Body which can be invested with whatever identity or conviction.

Second, as the interventions happen in public space, the spontaneous interactions with the passers-by as audiences and participants are another essential element. The automata do not actively address people, as they have their own occupation, they are out there in the streets to fulfil their own tasks. However, when addressed by passers-by the interaction slowly builds up. The spontaneous encounters trigger stories and testimonies. In the summer of 2020 and 2021, for instance, we ventured out with a cat. This automaton was inspired by the cat-throwing ritual that has been held for centuries in the Belgian city of Ypres. On the annual fair, a number of living cats would be thrown from the 70 meters high belfry. (Nowadays the real cats are replaced by toy cats.) Up till today, the official explanation for the ritual is that cats were simply too numerous . During our interventions we brought one of those damned cats back to life. The animal searches for the real roots of this bizarre habit in the streets and living rooms of contemporary Brussels, Poperinge and Ypres. People stoop down to caress and to cuddle it, it is invited inside family houses, it snores on the lap of elderly ladies at the care center. The video Cat Consolation can be watched here.

In the future, the collective approach will be expanded and even the handling of the puppets and the scripting of their actions will be lent to whomever feels like participating. By collective playing and voicing, the automata will come to represent the polyphony of visions and turn into containers of meaning.

Human-non-human hybrids

The creatures staged in the scapegoat projects are never fully non-human; they are, instead, assemblies of human, animal, plant and object elements. They recall the Latourian concept of hybrids or mixtures of nature and culture⁶consisting of human and nonhuman components that exchange properties, mutually translate one another, shift their capacities.⁷ The human and non-human object co-exist horizontally and symmetrically. This flat ontological conception of reality is contrary to a long philosophical tradition, which draws a clear line between a superior human subject and an inferior non-human world of animals and objects. The non-human world only matters to the extent that we, humans, perceive it, and is only valuable if we humans can control it and make use of it. In the past we bridled horses, water, and forests, reined and exploited objects and animals for our (mental) comfort and survival. In a drastically changing natural environment and with technology penetrating our daily lives, we increasingly touch upon the borders of our capacity for control. We can no longer view ourselves as the puppeteers of the object world. In fact, we are no more puppeteer than puppet, played by the non-human forces around us. Forest fires, excessive waste, invasive animals, viruses, artificial intelligence, … have an effect on us as much as we influence them. What’s even more, we can no longer see ourselves as separate from these entities. We are entangled with them in complex networks of meaning … and responsibilities.

Pharmakoi, let the sea take away all the evil

In 2018 I travelled to Brazil, to the island Itaparica, for an artist’s residency. This island is located 40 minutes by boat from the metropolis of Salvador in the Baia de Todos os Santos de Bahia. From the outside, Itaparica is a tropical paradise with a very rich cultural history, exuberantly celebrated during the many colourful festas. In reality, the island faces serious challenges: there is constant drug violence, police violence, high unemployment, a healthcare system collapsed by COVID-19. Itaparica is decaying and sees its last factories closing. Anti-establishment sentiments run high.

Already upon arrival I was amazed by a peculiar phenomenon. In the middle of the overgrown streets, hardly visible in the shade of streetlights, horses would emerge. They stood still and stared. On the 7th of January I attended the speech by the mayor of Itaparica on Itaparica’s Independence Day. She was rightly proud of her accomplishments and fully aware of the big challenges she and her team face in Itaparica. After an enumeration of problems-still-to-be-tackled, she said: “We have a lot of problems, but what really makes our throats tick is those horses in the street. I’m not afraid to talk about it!” I had marveled at these beautiful fairytale-like horses, so for me as an outsider it was hard to understand why these horses were a problem. I asked around and heard they were a true nuisance: they invade houses, leave the streets filthy, they cause car accidents and when they die, their corpses often linger there for a long time. It felt strange to hear the horses being mentioned in the same breath with public health issues, drugs violence, and poverty. I was wondering whether the horses maybe were the only of these problems that could readily be tackled: eliminating horses is way easier than tackling persistent poverty and violence. I assumed their removal would mean a lot to the people of Itaparica, who told me they were fed up with the inertia of the Brazilian government and the lack of prospects. I decided to explore this assumption further.

Back home we recreated the horse in the shape of a hybrid automaton. Our hope was to travel back to Brazil with it. However, before undertaking such an ambitious journey, we wanted to test the mechanism and find out if the automaton would in some way affect the passers-by when released in public space. We roamed the streets of Jette for three days. We invited people to saddle the creature with their burdens. In the following video (password: zondebok) you can watch the result.

After two years of postponement due to the covid crisis, the documentary film project in Brazil has finally taken a new start. The film’s treatment is currently being written in dialogue with Brazilian filmmaker Camila Grégorio. Also the street horse is well accompanied now. It will take up the protagonist’s role together with two other damned non-human entities, which mark the Itaparican landscape and offer considerable food for debate. Like the horse, the bridge and the paredão got caught up as scapegoats in a web of political, social and economic tensions.

In Itaparica, there are two possible stances: you are either for or against the bridge. For twelve years now, the governments of Itaparica and Salvador have been thinking about building a bridge to connect their territories, and for just as long this bridge has divided the island. The conviction that the bridge will economically revitalise the island through the influx of businessmen and tourists clashes with fears that the bridge will pose security problems due to the ‘dangerous invasion’ of people from the mainland and of the Chinese. After all, people think, with this construction project, investor China will hold the region in its grip for 35 years. The project for ‘the longest bridge in Brazil’ costs billions and also comes with a major ecological cost. Hundreds of acres of nature reserve will make way for the construction of the bridge and the building of fenced communities. Will the bridge jeopardise the unique cultural identity of the island, or will it revitalize the island? One resident states: “With a bridge, an island ceases to be an island.”

The third character recalls the former project The Unheard and can be considered as their Brazilian brother. Local authorities hunt down paredão every week. These deafening mobile speakers play a symbolic role for the young people of the slums, who gather around them, twerk and drink. They live hidden in the trunks of cars, bear names like Tough John and Hot Tracey, pop up clandestinely and shout it out: decibels of funk and pagoda-style tunes full of raw, politically charged frustration and pornographic escapism reverberate through the night. The speakers are despised by the evangelical church and the middle-class community. The police have a full-time job confiscating and publicly executing these indecent troublemakers.

For each of these three main characters, we write a fictional microscript based on the fates of their real-life counterparts. The horse is looking for a home (but is not welcome anywhere), the speaker wants to be heard (but is silenced), and the bridge wants to connect (but does nothing but divide). Their stories are performed in public space, by and for the people of the island. These automata are the instruments with which a multitude of ‘islanders’, i.e. insiders and outsiders, creative participants and casual passers-by, representatives of different communities and individuals, experts and local administrators, give their account of the facts. The script of the automata is constantly being rewritten by the people who play them, voice them or interact with them. The automata-scapegoats become passive marionets and mouthpieces at the service of their players. However, their active and living presence and their recognizable desires remind us of ourselves. Man and automaton melt together. The line between scapegoat and perpetrator, between man, animal and thing becomes blurred.

Conclusion

My artistic research is aimed at understanding if and how animated lifelike objects move us in an emotional and intellectual way. How can they activate us in order to reflect upon our behaviour? Through the series of projects I described, I experienced how the automata, however shabby they look, can strike a sensitive chord with casual onlookers. They make people stand still, they are caressed and spoken to in whispered “thank you”, they make passers-by open up to talk in natural ways. People speak about their sorrows, about the people they love or miss or about whatever the automata reminds them of. The interventions are heartwarming, emotionally soothing and socially inviting. This reconfirms the findings of researchers in AI and robotics investigating the potential of automata as social companions.

Still, we may wonder whether the interventions with automata are more than pleasant entertainment? The appearance and actions of the automata (who, in the eyes of the passer-by are just walking by without a clear goal) do not spontaneously trigger any in-depth reflections nor discussions amongst the public. People would ask what the intervention was about, and we would explain, as if providing the manual accompanying an abstract painting. People would understand and confirm. One could suggest that the intervention is too short and ephemeral to invite people to engage in a reflective way, let alone to genuinely participate in them. In any case, the interventions up till now habe had many shortcomings. The automata were probably too idle, and in their actions they distracted onlookers from their myths, so people could hardly link them to these myths. In Pharmakos and Cat Consolation, moreover, the selected myths were historical. On first sight, the myths are no longer relevant, they are obsolete relics of a folkloric past, which people no longer feel any affinity with. Everybody agrees it is outrageous to throw cats from towers. So even if we reenacted the cat-throwing with an automated puppet, we would be appalled by the cruelty of the act, but never question the reasons why our ancestors did this. Nor will we ever associate those practices with our current scapegoating practices. No one would wonder who the present-day cats or pharmakoi are.

Therefore, for the Brazil project, which is the cornerstone of my research, it has been a conscious decision to tackle topical myths, revolving around urgent and much-debated issues. The myths are so much part of the general public discourse that we would never call them myths. Precisely this makes them extremely valuable for a Girardian deconstruction. By a repetitive reenactment of these myths, from the most diverse perspectives, we assure that they lose their obviousness. The themes associated with the horse (poverty and governmental inertia), the bridge (economic progress versus incapsulation and preservation, cultural decline, natural sacrifice) and the paredão (the silencing of vulnerable groups) are highly relevant. They are not only relevant for the local island community, but for all figurative island communities we create on the back of the scapegoat on a daily basis around the globe.

The challenge for the next stage of the research is thus to deploy the automata as fora for debate. It would be unrealistic to expect that interventions will trigger discussions on the spot. It is the task of filmmaking to assemble many voices and interpretations and juxtapose them in a polyphonic film. The resulting bigger picture, unravelling the complex web of responsibilities, should serve as a catalyst for discussion. Finally, we will strengthen the participatory dimension and make even the construction, performing and storytelling into a collective process. The non-hierarchical co-creation and collective experience can transform the interventions into real interaction rituals that confront, connect, and sooth.

Notes