Digestion: The Making of the New Silk Roads

Seph Rodney, PhD candidate at University of London-Birkbeck College, writes a reflective essay on his experience at the Making of the New Silk Roads summit, hosted and organized by Arthub in Bangkok.

It was later that I realised I had to look at the road in the title as a conduit for knowledge. The original road was also such a conduit, though the story of its conduit of goods, that is, its commercial interchange, has had greater historical emphasis. Initially, we were traversing a few familiar passages in Bangkok. Then, later, when we found our legs, we may have fashioned fresh routes, some viable ways for artistic inquiry into these cultural contents. Now, I look back the way we came at what these roads indicate for the future.

The politics of making within this context came to the forefront right away: we didn’t fully appreciate that the rules imposed were only there to be broken. I recall a conversation with a few of the participants—this must have been on Friday. After we had already experienced a day of mostly rigorous, but trusty slide-talk-slide presentations, at our little school desks facing the front of the room, benches uncomfortably rigid against our animate, curling spines, we said ‘Do we really need to do this?’ Through the conversation we concluded that the scholastic overlay didn’t work very well: the next day we would come in, change all the desks around, make a circle or square, seminar format. We decided to make our own space. It never happened. That idea died the way many political ideals have died without our even hearing about them: inaction, indifference, fear, or forgetfulness.

In talking with Davide later on he reminded me he had both written and said repeatedly that freedom of action within the space was completely up to the participants. He and Defne would allow whatever performative actions people thought up to challenge and remake the space. At the end of the first day, he said, he too was hoping for more provocative actions, and thought that as everyone settled into a sense of knowing the layout and became more comfortable, they would feel more able to act freely. Thus politics, knowledge production, and the performative gesture were interrelated from the beginning.

We witnessed the drama of political ideals enacted when Nika (Nikoloz Chkhaidze) pushed himself against the barrage of a directed firehose. We saw the beauty in the individual, ineffectual gesture against control. Given how much seemed to be at risk (Nika’s body), we might have been satisfied with that, but then the stakes increased. When Onno Dirker—playing the part of the repressive state apparatus—lost control of the vehicle of repression (the hose) we saw that power spray everywhere. No inroads were created in that moment, not even a mapping. But there was a registering of power (and knowledge) being everywhere and all at once. This gave us an inkling of what lay ahead for us in the time still to come, in the proliferation of voices and strategies and practices from across continents. It gives us now a hint of what can (and did) happen as we push through the didactic measures we have inherited, against the propulsive, unidirectional flow of knowledge, and plunge into work that is performative, documentary, risk-taking.

That work, against the administrative conformity of the chairs and desks and seating maps defined an outer edge of the symposium—performatively. It also gave us a strategic plan. Our new roads would be created through this kind of collaboration: a representing of political determination, acting from the place of local knowledge, but mediated by a historically informed self-awareness.
Such a diverse and deep cultural field as offered by our roster of artists and researchers was baffling, but it began to resolve itself for me into questions of approaches. The academic presentations defined some boundaries as did the administrative and performative. The analytical prowess of Kyong Park and Jiang Jun gave us all a sense that questions of connecting East to West, of location within that paradigmatic division were less significant than internal divisions that now exist within the East. Park delineated the complexity of current culture across Asia, with its blossoming economic and legal institutions, and social and spatial ways of organizing themselves—showing that mapping as an attempt to configure what is happening can utterly fail. Jiang Jun demonstrated that following the trail of insignia, signs, and emblems with a particular rubric in mind could construct meaningful distinctions, and thus reveal separations between the cultures of Mongolia and China that are historical, but also, by his claims, structural. His work shows the determinative power of definition—though with unknown consequences.

Both artists presented work which was analytical, rather than performative, but no less political for that. Both of their presentations presume that the logic for dealing with cultural questions may be produced by the same culture. This idea has had significant effect in the West for some time, until the Silk Road (among other connections to the non-Western Other) brought knowledge from the outside and with that, terrible self-knowledge. Still, this notion persists. I have never been able to simply say this is mistaken, but I have my doubts about it. Despite this, I came to see through more of the later work that this assumption has truly important uses.

At the very start of the symposium Agung Koerniawan took the stage with a packaged version of his work, about with how people who live in a particular city come to recognize it, and I would suggest, their place in it. It included documentary footage of night-time activity of the particular group, with recordings of their own voices, depictions of the music—the socially significant parameters of their lives. The urgency in his work for inclusion resonated. We saw much more of this approach over the span of the symposium. This grassroots ethic meant the inclusion of the worker, the shop owner, the farmer and student—which specifically repudiated that part of colonial history which privileged only the view of the privileged. This was demonstrated performatively as well, through Agung Hujatnikajennong’s video of a dancer/performer sweeping through a factory and blessing the machines in his path. The functionality of that ritual connects cultural behaviour and economic necessities, revealing how indigenous practices are tied to self-preservation for those who work in local factories.

Howard Chan’s work placed cultural preservation of everyday ritual in the contexts of both community self-awareness and curatorial strategy, thus relaying why the knowledge produced from within needs to be preserved. This knowledge allows day-to-day life to have the dignity and poise it is rarely given. His museum of the streets allows those who visit to recognize themselves in the images, usually made for easy consumption, that proliferate everywhere. Through specific programmes such as the Refrigerator Project, Chan takes the image back to the simple quotidian usefulness of the refrigerator in the family home to talk about generational differences, social mobility, class, but crucially, not for foreign export as a commodity. Part of the legacy of the Silk Road is that much of the West has learned to comprehend itself through consumption, and to imagine other cultures as there to provide more delectable goods, goods even more interesting to consume. Other cultures have learned this as well.

It was a worthwhile moment of friction and awareness when Felix Mandrazo and Max Zolkwer of Supersudaca reminded us of what images as exotic mental and material souvenirs look like. The superficial depiction of rapturous abandon in a childlike bliss of effervescent things, was shown as just that, and the results were ludicrous. Much of the room laughed at this way of representing their experience of foreign travel. Agung Koerniwan objected and walked out—a useful reminder of what you stand to lose on this inherited road, if it is not met with analysis, interrogation, or at least suspicion. It was a useful reminder of what happens when the joke doesn’t land. As Agung later said, humour is difficult to pull off and can be subversive when it is powerfully employed, but it risks failing and becoming a bad joke. In the ensuing discussion we began to place ourselves in relation to those hard and fast partitions of East and West, performance and pedagogy, inheritance and the shock of the new, interrogation and acceptance. Until this point, those difficult divisions had been largely been played down.

In parts of Alexander Ugay’s documentary work, Shaarbek Amankul’s videos of Shamans, Mu Qian’s examination of the Pentatonic Workshop, or Zoe Butt and the Long March Project, small, rarely seen pathways of culture were made visible. There was, in these performances, a sober celebration that certain ritual practices have not died out, that they are constituent of a present we across the global span enjoy.

These works, mostly represented in a documentary style, often with a camera that succeeds in ordering the perceived practices for our view, and yet renders them flat and diminished, seem most concerned with making a record, and, thus, had an anthropological character. Certainly, part of the function of anthropological documentation is to remind those outside a culture that a people and their ways of dwelling in the world still exist—but it is also to generate local knowledge, to keep an inheritance circulating in the family, to make memory a live endeavour. Thus, remembering can make a case for the necessity of remembering.

Then, performance took these questions of local knowledge and raised them to the level of interrogation. It showed, even when it failed, how the necessary contextualizing power of clear identification and distinction could ground these questions.

Community based political activism, in social advocacy groups, and art circles often gets waved about as restorative. Arahmaiani’s work was illustrative of this assumption, with its hybrid flag of no clear provenance and no specific agenda. Her performative work suggests activism without bureaucracy, without preamble, but not necessarily with clarity. We can say yes for political action, like saying yes for typical political slogans like moving forward into the future, but this trite formulation hardly tells us where precisely to place our energies, what the cost will be, or even what is at stake. This is to say that what it demands to be artistically compelling and politically useful is the rigorous research that places the constructed object or practice within the scheme of a history, an anthropological comprehension, or a methodology for reading visual culture.

Wisely, another political tact: hybridity, the making and realizing something else out of the raw materials of our cultural histories was a fact of our coming together and not a stated theme. In reconsidering the original road, we met with distinct ontologies, ethnicities, practices, and commingling—in this post-modern moment one of the few things that can surprise. Gary Pastrana’s work, deck chairs sawed and hacked to pieces and recreated Frankestein style into glue-sutured, contorted bodies of sculptural vehemence were another boundary: the other side of the hybrid strategy.

Sometimes the new combination only yields evidence of combination, a representation of difference, a question of its potential uses. While in Stefan Rusu’s work the built space examined hybridity and also became a platform for it. The Flat Space existed by using local knowledge collaboratively, permitting what did not figure in its construction to inform the meaning it took. And this meaning changed again and again over the course of the three days. As performances took place on it, action again pushed against the stream of history.

Hakan Topal brought many of these strands together—to then spread them apart. He actively attacked the idea of built structures, shown to be precisely subject to the consumptive impulse. With a photograph installation of tourists taking pictures of themselves in various tourist spaces in the background and with Veronica Sekules sitting and reading out loud, he raised a shovel and split open a bag of Portland cement. He snapped me back into presence immediately with the sound of that striking shovel. Using the base material that is used to construct monuments and cities, his action sought to unbuild, to refute construction. As Veronica read out a text concerned with political trauma, the nature of its historical struggle, Hakan took the cement bags apart and energetically shoveled the grey, dusty material over Veronica’s feet, and around the space. He scattered the substance of modernity, recanting its knowledge, disavowing its claims. In the process, our locale, the Bangkok University Gallery, was recontextualized in terms of its relation to its history—that of modernity, which is fashioned to both wall in and wall out.

This examination was more intense when the local knowledge was placed in a contradictory relationship with the speaker. David Cotterell presented films of soldiers wounded in Afghanistan. He identified himself as a pacifist, yet put himself in the speartip of contemporary war to complicate his response to local knowledge. He asks the question truly worth asking: ‘How do we look at our sacred, meaningful practices?’, imagining that this precedes how we see them. How do these perspectives inform our world view? The knowledge he gains locally then challenges the convictions and prejudices brought with the observer to his films. Facile slogans such as sacrifice, bravery, and loss start to take on clearer significance. In his work the bodies of soldiers, blasted and battered, take on a dramatic presence in the operating theatre. Warring bodies made vulnerable by injury become bodies over which the fight for preservation is waged, and it becomes far more difficult for the pacifist viewer to reject these bodies and the things they carry with them.

In Lina Saneh’s presentation of a narrative about her own body, those very same terms come at this conduit from the other direction. Lena has the personal conviction that her own body is hers. She insists on this though local customs refuses to regard the body as belonging only to the individual. The set of political issues brought to the foreground are many. One consequence is that the body retains its significance as a primary place where local knowledge is enacted and tested, and thus the place where politics and political understanding begin. Where it goes might be towards the recognition that Lena evidenced in her work: a self-awareness of what the pressures of commodification, religious dogma, and mysticism produce on the body and how that circuit may be circumvented and questioned by placing her body everywhere and nowhere at once. Her escape was through absurdity, moving towards a position where she may be able to slip past the guards.

At the last, which was also at the very beginning, the positioning of Ho Tzu Nyen was contradictory—both with us and not with us. He allowed himself to be represented for most of the symposium by a stand-in who went on to ask the kinds of questions only an outsider asks, naively and candidly. Why? And then what happens? How do you see this commenting on art in general? These questions, could have, with a bit more context, pushed us to look at the art practices presented from the perspective of a spectator who can take little for granted. Perhaps this was the enacted embodiment (through an act of sleight of hand) of the trans-cultural situation: to be in it, but not of it, to stand slightly outside, looking and recording and mapping long enough to be clear on where one can reposition oneself. This new position, as yet to be, will constitute another boundary for the symposium: Tzu Nyen is to produce a film or video of what he observed throughout from the vantage of being there/not there. As Els Silvrants later said, it is crucial to step out of borders, ideologies, markets. I wonder whether it is just as crucial to step back in.

I concluded, once back in London, with my feet planted on western soil, the art and practices that have flourished along the Silk Road and ones which are burgeoning are sufficient to themselves. They do not require outside critique or critical regard. However it will be very useful to have it. Its art and practices devolve from historical meanings rich and full, but still, upon reflection, require cognizance of its contradictions. These contradictions should not be erased, but—and this is one of the harsh lessons of Western history—they should be lived with and even lived in. Accepted at face value, contradictions might have the appearance of limiting the power of local knowledge, of taking its children away from the community, of ameliorating its authenticity. However, cultural meaning exists in passage, in flow, and preservation should not mean consecration. How we tend to local knowledge might be done in tandem with the questioning outsider. And how you tend to it has much to do with how it will grow. So writes Marco Polo—one mote in the flux.