NOWISWERE is the word sourced from the sentence ‘now Cover commissioned by

is were’ which stands for the ‘now’ that is currently being Young-In Hong © 2008
marked in ‘singular present tense’ as ‘plural past tense’. That
is to say, whenever you say ‘now’ that ‘now’ belongs to a
certain past which becomes plural through references and
associations to and with other experiences.

NOWISWERE is open for submissions.

Impressum:

Editors: Veronika Hauer, Fatos Ustek

Contributors: Jurga Daubaraite, Mara Ferreri, Veronika Hau-
er, Jan Lemitz, Marianne Mulvey, Mandla Reuter, Hildegard
Spielhofer, Fatos Ustek, and Jonas Zukauskas.
Thanks: Adeena Mey and Marianne Mulvey
Layout: Luca Hauer

Contact: nowiswere@gmail.com
www.nowiswere.blogspot.com
 TH Prologue..........................................................................4
Veronika Hauer

EF Return upon Return....................................................7

Fatos Ustek

TH Pictures.......................................................................10
Mandla Reuter

AS Is there sincerity in hollow speech?..................16

Marianne Mulvey

CC Suh Yong........................................................................22
Jan Lemitz

EF Emptiness in the Post-Communist Condition.........24

Jurga Daubaraite

TH Ni Espoir Ni Peur.....................................................26
Hildergard Spielhofer

CC Legacy and désaffécte spaces.................................31

Mara Ferreri

TH Boer war soldier........................................................34

Jonas Zukauskas

THematics: hosting texts up to 1000 words or image mate-

rial of four pages, focusing on a single theme.

EF Expecting Future: Is a sub section of THematics, hosting

texts pointing out possibilities of future and positioning the
potentials of the to-come-true. As expecting future requires
awareness of present, the section will be the gathering of the
today’s variety of practices, attitutes, tendencies...

AS Artist Specials: hosting evaluations on or interviews with

artists.

CC Critics’ Corner: hosting reviews on current exhibitions,

performances, events, happenings...
 Image Source: www.jab.de

TH + 4
 Veronika Hauer

Prologue
Once my housemate could barely escape from one of the
neighbours vandalising in the streets with a golf club outra-
ged by a domestic argument. From my window seat I tend to
think I know where these aggressions origin: little space for
the individual to remain individual.
‘We went to an opening yesterday night.’
December 11th, 2008.The European headquarter of Bloom-
berg appears glamorously before the walker wandering
down City Road from Old Street tube station. Red, yellow,
green lights mark the invisible edges of the building. Ente-
ring the reception area, we are blocked by security guards
directing us towards the receptionist. After our invitation
is checked, our name (well, actually the friend’s name who
was truly invited by the company and had passed on his in-
vitation to us) is double-checked with the paper list and the
computer until in the end a tasteful blue neon wristband
supports our presence in this estate. We neglect the pho-
tographs hung in the chilly reception area and immediately
trespass the hall to enter the interior of the building. Inside,
looking up, the representational exterior facade is mirrored
to the architecture’s interior: green lighting accentuates the
numerous floors and footbridges that cut into the immense
void at the heart of the building.
The centre is entirely empty: a luxurious gesture given that
London is significantly expensive when it comes to own and
rent space. Touched speechless we lean against the glass ba-
nister, thoroughly regarded by security’s eyes in a more sini-
ster than warm atmosphere. Gazing down from the gallery
to the ground floor, we spot waitresses circulating among
the guests. ‘Food is the only thing I can think of now.’ But to
eat, we must take the lift downstairs for stairs are not acces-
sible. Even inside the lift we are not alone, but accompanied
by another verbal advise: ‘After you have had a drink you
might wish to come back up again!’ With a glass of wine I
nervously scan the crowd for a waitress to approximate us
close enough to grab food from her ambrosial wooden tray.
My efforts remain unsuccessful.
‘A dissatisfying strategy needs to be adapted to changing cir-
cumstances.’ You come up with the idea to search for the
‘source’ of nutrition than to wait to be found by it. You im-
mediately determine where they come from and we posi-
tion ourselves close enough to the opening in the wall and
wait. One by one they trickled out. One at a time.
The source sits in the fold of the bar. Flagged down by our
demanding eyes, the waitresses stop, smile in sympathy and
feed us. I feel shame in light of this perfect catering: Shame
for my hunger and anger about my shame. The sudden re-
cognition of being poor does not derive from the bystanders
being richer, wealthier than myself, as everyone seems a bit
needy in this atmosphere. More so, it derives from the rea-
lisation that I am being fed by a too obviously decent and
hence depressingly present hand.
From the dent, kept in a warm elegantly sober greyish stone,
I look up again. The offices are lit, as they normally alight the
city of London, even after the last employee has left the buil-
ding. Behind the wardrobe, screens and a white dashboard
are being cleaned from pen marks, assumptions and calcu-
lations about today’s developments on the stock market.
Three massive screens fill the meeting room behind the bar.
It is an impressive picture that opens up before my tipsy
eyes. With the spicy taste of a grilled squid unfolding its aro-
ma in my mouth and a lamb chop in my other hand, a glass
of red wine on the table, I watch pale, white haired men
commenting on the world’s financial crisis. I watch lips and
tongues move, and words being articulated that never reach
my comprehension. I am sure the volume to be turned off
anyways. Or maybe it isn’t?
Between this source of economic information and myself
unfold 6 meters of empty space, a glass front, a dark haired
waiter, a bar and 300 empty wineglasses. Ideologically there
lay matters of abstraction, engagement and capital between
us. In my mouth I squeeze another squid against my front
teeth. What does my presence yield for them, I wonder?
I watch closely what these lips try to tell me: In te gri ty
you whis per.

Gorgonzola and pear on cracker

Lamb chops with basil pesto topping
Squid wrapped in bacon, roasted on a spit
Courgette-paste on toast, sausage topping
Crab pesto and scones
Grilled scampi

TH + 5

Return upon Return*
And then coming back was the worst thing you
ever did
We are living in a new world: A new world that has never
existed before. History can no longer repeat itself in
grand narratives. It is no longer an activation of social and
individual past experiences. We are writing new stories and
new histories, establishing brand new grand narratives. The
decay is over: the decay that has been announced within
post-modernist trend.
We are living in a new world made of new realities. Is it
overly exciting or utterly thrilling? Does it provide the new
grounds for optimism and hope or does it cause fear and
anxiety?
We are living in a new world of new relations, associations,
claims, resistances, territories and assumptions. It is a new
world, and how brave is it? Did the two major figures of
dystopia (Huxley and Orwell) come together in real?
In this new world, what is the formulation of
the ‘real’?
The real that has been engraved with the admiration of
simulation and simulacra in the 90s, has come back. The
tricotomy of its disappearance, its return and its presence
came through a sequence of destruction: The Gulf War, 9/11,
Iraq War.
The Gulf War, as the first one screened on televisions,
broadcasted in colour, has formed the ground of the ‘as
if’. The patriot missiles meeting rockets upon the sky of
darkened cities has been broadcasted all over the news. The
audience, who was not living in those regions of conflict
and tension, has received these images as if it was watching
a computer game: as if someone was playing a basic game
on a machine, but not in real. The fact that lives were
lost, a civilisation was destroyed, places were demolished,
became mere abstraction. As if nothing was actually taking
place. As if we were all listening to a sci-fi story from our
future descendants. Baudrillard wrote a trilogy of essays to
Libération and The Guardian, before, during and after the war.
He said: “The Gulf War will not; is not; did not take place”
in three steps.** The essays were not denials of the violence
that was taking place, nor rejections of losses; they pointed
out another form of reality: a masquerade of the real. A war,
for the first time in human civilisation, was being maintained
through maps and information gathered from satellites or
neighbouring countries. The destructive occupation did
not only take over the land but also occupied the social
domain. “Life” has been mapped, charted, theorized. What
the rockets destroyed were no longer lives but power
structures. The actions taken during the war were akin to
EF + 7
Fatos Ustek
Image Source: blog.analogmedium.com
acts taken whilst playing a cardboard game. Furthermore, the
information broadcasted through the media was highly re-
edited and manipulated. Loads of informations were received
but they failed to produce knowledge about what was really
happening. The distanciation of what was really taking place
and what was visually experienced had a relieving effect. The
audience of destruction did no longer need to feel, try to
understand and learn the reality of things. As Baudrillard
points out, the society of production has become an admirer
of simulation and seduction of images transmitted through
the media. There remains no responsibility of being a social
being and caring for the other.
For longer than a decade the praising of simulation and
simulacra gave birth to several technological innovations,
which defined virtual reality.The theories of fiction simulated,
grasped, and anticipated what was happening and what has
happened and what else could take place. On the peak of
flirting with Tamagotchis and connecting through wires,
consuming through mechanical spatialisations, the two
planes came crashing into the castles of power in the US.
The event that took place on September 11th in New York
has revolted the ongoing fantasy of the simulation.What was
broadcasted on media channels was not the announcement
of Spielberg’s latest sci-fi action movie.
Slavoj Zizek’s series of essays, published in the aftermath
of the event analysed what actually happened on 9/11
and welcomed its readers to the desert of the real. Zizek
conceptualised what took place in the aesthetics of
the political and social domain in the last ten years and
reformulated what a plane crash could mean in 9/11’s recent
future. Zizek’s reading focuses on several factualities, one of
among is: ‘virtual is real.’ Zizek supports his argument on
‘virtual being real’ by the example of Tamagotchis.The virtual
pets almost every child owned in the late 90s and looked
after not only through feeding them virtually but also through
giving love and affection via pressing several buttons. The
domain of abstraction has increased its volume by involving
sensations rather than only facts and actions. The feeling of
the real has shifted through associations of the subject to
the object. Hence the materiality of relations became prior
to the emotionality of subjectivities. With 9/11 the common
mourning for the real started. Not only Zizek but also many
other writers, theoreticians, artists, activists began to ask for
‘the real’ to come back. Hal Foster announced its return to
the domain of arts by his renowned book The Return of the
Real, where he analysed and conceptualised repetition as an
enactment of questing the real. He refers to simulation and
simulacrum in a discreet basis of questioning the potential of
repeating the trauma of the real. He projects his arguments
on the domain of arts, art practice and the artist as the
creator of imagery. Today, we are experiencing a density
of documentaries in exhibitions. The return of the real to
arts came with the return of documentary practice in art
making.The documentaries I mention here, are not of simple
information domains but they screen the atrocities of many
kinds, of what is really happening in some geography. The
return of the documentary shall be related with the position
of trauma:The trauma that springs from not being capable to
see the whole picture, to get to know what is really happening
at the same time the trauma of not taking an active enrolment
in the construction of the real. Rather than the fictionalisation
of issues, it became/or it is momentarily preferred to receive
one-to-one corresponding documentation. This can be the
result of craving for information, which can be related to the
real, interpreted as the real. 9/11 has not only brought back
the mourning for the real but also the trauma of being in
the real, which implies an urgency of security and control in
Western societies. The regulative mode of laws and policies
has been upgraded by authoritarian orders. Restrictions
on movement and exchange have started to be received
positively rather than as limitations of freedom. A priori
acceptances start to cover the skies of civilisations on how
to live and what to believe in.
The prejudices and presumptions against the absolute other
on the other being an enemy to existing structures have
supported another destructive event, the third one in the
trilogy: The Iraq War. Besides the main reasons of oil and
power, the war is actually a war started off against the cliché
Other. Against the unknown and unwanted opponent of
Western thought. It is an ongoing war, different to the former
two examples. It is a war human kind has not witnessed
before: A war on the everyday. A war that does not end. Will
not end.
I feel a strong connection between our relation to the real
today and a fiction novel by Stephen King. Pet Sematary, also
adapted to screens by Mary Lambert, takes place in a small
town, with a small cemetery near by. The cemetery is not
like any other, but a mysterious one. The soil can revive
the dead. It is mostly used for pets, the beloved animals
of the household. The story starts with the loss of a cat.
The common wish of bringing her back to life leads the
protagonist to go and bury her in that special cemetery. And
the cat comes back, for real. A loss is always a loss, small or
big. The wonder of the cat coming back convinces a young
couple to revive their young son, who had been killed by a
EF + 8
truck. The ones once alive but gone dead come back to life
again. But it is here, where the tension starts. Since the ones
that come back have slightly changed, and become more
aggressive and violent.They have been bewildered.They look
the same, but no longer behave the same.
What is real ‘real’? How can we recognize it? It is not at the
level of the fact that now you are real and holding this text
and reading these words. It is at the level of understanding
and reflecting upon what is taking place, right now, in the
past and in the future, in the social domain. According to
Lacan, the real is a complex set of constructions and the
individual positioning does not correspond to but can
intersect with it. It is through the processes of perception
and evaluation in relation to subjective experiences. But
what if the experiences are preset and predefined? How
can we then talk about a duality of individuality and society?
What if the ‘everyday’ is mapped and charted? What if
everything we see and experience is already pre-defined?
What if we are only living through a set of traumas and we
name them real? It is no longer romanticism of a sovereign
or evil genius it is the human kind over human kind. The real
is here with its objecthood, with its territories of divided
societies, movements and relations. Material real has been
always here and will always be. What is not like it was
before? The way people have related to the society they
live in is being defined within the restrictions of ideologies
and fanaticisms. We produce subjective truths that fit in the
commonality of our living spheres. Our relations to truths
have become fetishised. We are heading towards societies
with fanatic ideologies. Let this be expressed by the new
right in Europe or the rise of conservatism in the Middle East.
Both are fundamentalist ideologies with different objectives.
A togetherness of these two is unimaginable.
The real, which has been engraved in the 90’s is out of where
it was, is back in the ‘everyday’. And something is in the air:
the real is not how it was before. Something has happened.
Something is happening. We believe that it must be the real
that has left, and returned. The worst is that we are more in
need of believing in its return rather than to look at how it
returned. Something is changing, from the image of the real
to the real itself. Something is on the move, let this be the
introduction of new concepts to civilisation such as virtuality
or let this be the imbalance of sources, for whichever is the
case, there is a need of looking at what we produce and
what it all means.***
 Image Source: www.best-horror-movies.com

*For this piece, I am borrowing the title from Jean Francois Lyotard,
although the content of this piece has no correlation with Lyotard’s
text. I have allowed myself to interpret the title as a prologue to
‘real’.

**Baudrillard was referring to the play by Jean Giraudoux on Trojan

War.

***For this piece, I have chosen the three destructive events

because of their relation to the imagery produced in each of theirs
aftermath.Visuality has changed significantly in relation to the three
events I example.

EF + 9
 Mandla Reuter

Pictures

TH + 10

Is there sincerity in hollow speech?
Feeling the cliché in contemporary
performance.
“Do others go through their lives feeling like a stand-in
who hasn’t read the script?”
She asked, standing there in her candy pink prom dress, fum-
bling with the microphone. I didn’t know it then, but she
was quoting someone else. We sat there hushed, expectant,
waiting for something funny. But as the speech went on it
became horrid, tragic and distinctly awkward due to the pal-
pable nerves at making her voice heard.
In the summer of 2007 I attended the screening of All My Life,
2007 and dance performance The Time of My Life by artist
Oriana Fox at the Hatcham Social Club in South London. I
have only hazy approximations of the actual event, flashes of
funny feelings I experienced. During the film Fox and friends
appeared on screen in various outrageous costumes and
wigs, performing different retro dances from iconic Ameri-
can movies moving through 60s formation to 80s disco. As
she acted out fantasy roles of dancing and being danced
with, a smooth American voiceover mused on the nuanced
experience of relationships. “What does it mean to always
choose and never feel chosen, or visa versa?” she asked as
Fox, dazzling in a red bee-hive wig, picked a dance partner
from the “ladies’ choice” line up of schmaltzy men vying for
her attention. (i)
Later in the film Fox and partner performed the scene from
Dirty Dancing, where Baby learns how to dance to the tune
of Hungry Eyes. Wearing t-shirt tucked tight into bra, minis-
cule pants and white pumps Fox as Baby struggles to get the
moves right until Johnny brushes his hand sensuously down
her out-stretched arm to her tiny waist and, after a series
of flinches and giggles, she finally begins to feel it. Watch-
ing these formulaic replays with wistful enjoyment, I didn’t
recognise each reference, but they resonated with some-
thing so cemented in my pop cultural imaginary that I knew
every last cliché. Embarrassingly enough, I too had wanted
to be that girl, making those moves, saying those lines with
that cute American accent. Sharing a strange accord with
the performer, here were our teenage fantasies resurfacing
resplendent and poignant as they had been ten years ago.
When the film screening and live dancing stopped she began
reading a monologue, her own voice breathy from exertion
and nerves. Moving from the insipid beginning previously
quoted, the artist described the agony of growing up feel-
ing surplus to requirements with rhetorical questions and
gruesome metaphor: “Where did I get the notion that being
me was so horrible?... And when did those abortions and
miscarriages begin? Those self-inflicted knitting needles and
AS + 16
Marianne Mulvey
coat hangers... by six I was a nervous wreck and by nine I
was no longer me and I had already perfected the technique
of artful recreation.”(ii) Taking an unexpected turn from
the sickly sweet to the darkly sentimental, I was shocked
at Fox’s seeming confession; yet it seemed somehow to fit
my perception of her, and this display of “artful recreation”
before me. Ending with Baby’s last line from Dirty Dancing,
“But tonight I’m going to do my kind of dancing with a great
partner”, The Time of My Life tune kicked in. Dance part-
ner Sven re-emerged to whirl her once more around the
ballroom floor, signifying now a corny acceptance of self, of
finding one’s way through the dance of life. In a collective
celebration of self-expression the evening ended with ev-
eryone joining in: I too self-consciously shuffled to Madonna
remembering the burning embarrassment of school discos
and half-empty dance floors…
Curiosities
At the time I recognised the event as an elaborate cliché
from beginning to end, a comical riff on American high-
school fantasies of overwrought teenage emotion, yearning
for acceptance and love, finally finding the wholeness within
to “receive love, and give love.” (iii) The on-screen voiceover,
live monologue and dances presented signs of growing pains,
signs of burgeoning sexuality, signs of first love.And yet there
was a seriousness with which the artist concentrated hard
on practiced dance moves, a real vulnerability in her voice as
she read to the hushed ballroom. Embarrassing as it seems to
imagine oneself tickled by Patrick Swayze and falling in love,
the question of whether this was an ironic performance or
sincerely meant began to trouble me.
Can the act of spoken and material quotation can be im-
bibed with a sincerity that retains a pleasurable ambiva-
lence? Caught between laughing and being uniquely touched
by Fox’s work, I analyse the clichés she employs to image
her life in video and performance, looking for the potential
sincerity in her self-representation and the kind of affective
engagement produced. After J.L. Austin’s work on performa-
tive utterances and dismissal of theatrical language as devoid
of meaning, how might Oriana Fox be queering a traditional
notion of sincerity and authenticity, engaging in a flirtatious
exchange with her audience that allows possible futures to
open up?
Hollow speech
Occasionally I slip into a hybrid Californian teen/assertive
New Yorker mid-conversation. Most of the time I’d joking,
but sometimes I’m able to admit something otherwise dif-
ficult to say, couched in a fake American sincerity. Such ev-
eryday performances might be termed hollow – but could
they offer something else?
The notion of hollow speech I am borrowing from J.L. Aus-
tin’s theory of performative and constative utterances. A
performative speech act accomplishes an action in the ar-
ticulation of words, whereas a constative utterance merely
states a description of facts as they are.(iv) For Austin the
intentions of the speaker uttering a performative must be
present and appropriate to the language and context for the
performative to take effect: they must be sincere.(v) Austin
excludes theatrical language from his doctrine, where words
are said but not really meant: “a performative utterance will,
for example, be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by
an actor on stage, or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in
a soliloquy”.(vi)
It is the peculiarity of hollow speech and gesture, and its al-
ways uncertain interpretation, that I investigate here. De-
spite Austin’s claim that hollow speech acts cannot be taken
seriously, I will assume that there is always the possibility of
investing a belief in them, both as performer and audience.
How might performing someone else’s words a monologue
enact a different kind of sincerity? Can a clichéd gesture be
cited with feeling?
Hollowing out sincerity
In his book Sincerity and Authenticity Lionel Trilling tracked
the history of sincerity through its usage in literature, and
significance for the socio-political sphere. Adapted from the
Latin meaning “clean, or sound, or pure”, it came to describe
persons as virtuous, honest and without pretence.(vii) To
re-cite the famous lines that the character Polonius advises
Laertes in Shakespeare’s Hamlet:
This above all: to thine own self be true
And it doth follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Being true to oneself is a virtue in itself, but sincerity is also
a moral societal good.(viii) We are compelled to behave in
a believably honest way, but cannot calculate whether our
performance of sincerity will have its desired effect. Sincerity
is thus inextricably linked to theatricality: “we play the role
of being ourselves, we sincerely act the part of the sincere
person, with the result that a judgement may be passed upon
our sincerity that it is not authentic.”(ix) Though sincerity
“refers primarily to a congruence between avowal and ac-
tual feeling,”(x) it has become a “hollow sound, and seems
almost to negate its meaning,”(xi) denigrated further by an
unfortunate relation to theatricality. (xii) Is sincerity itself an
over-used sign devoid of any meaning or real intent?
The difficulty in traversing the gap between feeling and
avowal can result in an exaggerated and unbelievable rendi-
tion of sincerity, in popular culture, high and low art. In art as
in literature, the more outrageous the subject of authorial
discussion, the more theatrical and spectacular the result:
consider Tracey Emin’s My Bed, 1998 and the ruckus sur-
rounding the exhibition of the artist’s unmade bed with its
scattered paraphernalia: used condoms and discarded tights.
(xiii) Michel Foucault writes in the History of Sexuality,Volume
AS + 17
1: “Western man has become a confessing animal. Whence
a metamorphosis in literature… ordered according to the
infinite task of extracting from the depths of oneself, in be-
tween words, a truth which the very form of confession holds
out like a shimmering image.”(xiv) Foucault’s writing on the
confession, a reciprocal event of questioning, divulging and
consuming resonates with contemporary replications of the
scenario where talk-shows and intimate documentaries bar-
ing the televised subject’s soul for our nightly entertainment,
are so ubiquitous they become banal. It is my hunch that Fox
might be performing a version of sincerity that riffs on the
banality of confessional culture and hollow sentiment prolif-
erating in the mass media. Mediating her self-representation
through clichés and her own a retro-nostalgic lens, Fox’s
work turns such banality on its head. If the performance of
originality and authenticity are crucial to confessional cul-
ture, then replaying a scene from a classic movie denies af-
firmative biographical access to the “shimmering truth” of
another, but opens up a different point of entry to possible
truths, arguably more intriguing in their ambiguity.
Narrating an autobiography differently –
voicing cliché
The disembodied voice narrating visual action plays a central
role in Fox’s films. I had assumed it belonged to the artist, but
her narrators range from friends, audio borrowed from film
and television, and a professional voiceover artist for Play
Girl TV. Listening to their oh-so-familiar timbre, I could not
help but wonder, were the corny questions and commentary
expressing genuine sentiments about the artist’s life? Or did
they just epitomise the irony with which we viewers should
be watching the films?
Filmed in Marseille where the artist was in residence in
2007, Excess Baggage begins with a voiceover pondering the
difficulty of decision-making as Fox devours a box of soft-
centre chocolates and deliberates what to wear. Complete
with the goofy music of a low-budget sitcom, the film pres-
ents a predictable image of a young woman in a quandary.
(xv) Eventually donning her entire wardrobe, she climbs an
endless stretch of stone steps carrying yet more baggage
as the voiceover describes a woman weighed down by a
man in a relationship. Shedding her clothes layer by layer on
reaching the top, free of all her literal and metaphorical bag-
gage, she runs down to the sea sparkling gold and blue in the
setting sun. In a climactic moment of pure kitsch Fox bursts
out of the water with a beautiful tanned young man whom
she resuscitates, while the voiceover shares his vulnerability,
signified by the emblematic rescue. Despite all this cliché and
thoughtful musing, there is a profound beauty in the moment
their sandy faces embrace in the orange light that I remem-
ber vividly. When I asked was there something believable, or
even universally true in her depiction of relationships, she
laughed: “Do I really believe I could run into the Ocean and
pull out a guy?”
Embarrassing moments –
performance and denial
A little ashamed at my gullibility, I still wondered if the film
had anything to do with actuality? “I [never] make anything
that was my fantasy, it’s always a quotation… there’s some-
thing about removing myself that makes me able to deal
with difficult things. It saves me the potential humiliation
of revealing my own life story,” she replied.(xvi) However
the patchwork of movie scenes, dances, costumes, music
and voices that Oriana Fox brings together do not conceal
her life-story, rather they reveal her own deep-seated fan-
tasies and desires. Recognising that the narratives we like
to tell about ourselves are accumulative, eclectic and always
rendered differently, her collage of clichés offers a different
reading than the regular autobiography. Speaking of Excess
Baggage the artist exclaimed, “When people watch it they
see something funny in it, like its hammy or sentimental – but
I actually feel that way!” Paradoxically claiming to really feel
the kitschy sentiment of the beach scene but having already
denied making anything that is her own fantasy, she enacts
the dichotomy of confessing feelings and the simultaneous
compulsion to deny them. Far from eradicating “potential
humiliation” Fox embraces it by placing her own body in
a crisis of embarrassment: acting out her deepest desires,
albeit as an imaginary character. Highlighting the inherent
vulnerability of sincere speech – the potential to have one’s
deeper feelings ridiculed – embodying theatrical speech and
quoting clichés is perhaps a way of performing the paradox
of confession and denial, keeping embarrassment always only
at one remove.
Vulnerable speech
Not knowing what to make of The Time of My Life, I became
aware of my own vulnerability as uncomfortable witness to
it. Fox’s agonising reading of the monologue by feminist per-
formance artist Rachel Rosenthal, likening life to an uncom-
fortable and painful act,(xvii) presented, as I thought, truth
testimony as self-conscious performance. The poignancy of
hearing her actual voice lent a painful authenticity to the
hollow speech, rendering the entire performance queerly
believable.
Uncertain whether I was mocking or being mocked, I was
strangely caught up in the whole event. Stephen Cohan’s de-
scription of Camp is useful here: “Camp, as [Esther] Newton
puts it, provides for ‘an engaged irony which… allows one
a strong feeling of involvement with a situation or object
while simultaneously providing one with a comic apprecia-
tion of its contradictions.’”(xviii) Camp appreciation is an
ironic position of engagement, “‘the formation of a queer
affect; of taking queer pleasure in perceiving if not causing
category dissonance.’”(xix) The inability to reconcile these
competing feelings of pathos and bathos have recently been
theorised in Gavin Butt’s essay How I Died for Kiki and Herb
as “quathos”.(xx). Butt describes how watching Camp caba-
ret duo Kiki and Herb perform their infamous repertoire
AS + 20
of kitsch ballads and darkly comic routine, he found himself
quite unexpectedly in tears. After relating the story of her
daughter Coco’s death by drowning after falling from a yacht,
Kiki began “what I can only describe as a heartfelt rendition
of the Stevie Nicks song… casting her eyes over the inky ex-
panse of the darkened Thames, the mood turned elegiac, and
I felt myself curiously moved.”(xxi) The fleeting juxtaposi-
tion of time, place and perception of real feeling underneath
melodramatic expression tips the viewer into a space where
a tragic story and its poetic remembrance in kitsch song
surfaces into a possible reality, and he cries.
Either we reject these queer professions of sincerity as only
ridiculous or ironic, or we allow ourselves to become af-
fected, however fleeting and unpredictable this might be, and
see where it might lead…
Uncertain conclusions – flirtation
I want to end on a flirtatious note and show how all these
mixed feelings might be experienced other than an unset-
tling, destabilising response to performances of sincerity.
Flirting produces pleasurable and nervous excitement pre-
cisely due to the uncertainty of exchange: a tentative offer
is made and provisionally accepted, with the possibility of
rejection or retraction always hanging in the balance. Unfor-
tunately our normative reliance on predictability and stabil-
ity often figures flirting pejoratively. As Adam Phillips writes,
“flirtation has always been the saboteur of a cherished vo-
cabulary of commitment… it is inevitable that flirtation –
the (consciously or unconsciously) calculated production of
uncertainty – will be experienced at best as superficial and
at worst cruel.”(xxii) Writing circa 1910 sociologist Georg
Simmel also described the forms and affects of flirtation,
providing some interesting similarities with the uncertain
sincerity of Oriana Fox:
“the assertion of something that is not really meant, the par-
adox whose authenticity remains doubtful, the threat that is
not seriously intended… the subject of… flirtation leaves
tangible reality and enters a vacillating and fluctuating cat-
egory in which his real being can be included but not clearly
grasped.”(xxiii)
To enter into flirtation is to enter a state of flux: partners
dance on unstable ground where each avowal of feeling is
already prefigured on its potential denial. The experience of
flirtation is always and only fluctuating, but it touches on
another reality, indeed proposes all sorts of potential re-
alities: “flirtation keeps the consequences going. By keep-
ing the future open, it acknowledges something about the
future.”(xxiv) Phillips doesn’t elaborate on what this “some-
thing” might be, coquettishly allowing it to remain alluring
and ungraspable.
The witty re-enactment of the clichéd scene in Dirty Dancing
where Baby finally begins to feel the dance, sets in motion
an indiscernible oscillation between outward movement and
inward feeling, flirting outrageously with an audience not
knowing what to make of it all. I felt exactly as Simmel de-
scribes, “A scale of graduated phenomena [that] leads from
the assertion that is really made in complete seriousness,
in which only a touch of self-irony is barely perceptible…
that leaves us in doubt as to whether the speaker is making
a fool of himself or us.”(xxv) Affirmation of feeling is always
in close proximity to potential humiliation, leaving us in end-
less doubt. With one cliché the artist mocks herself, with
another she mocks us for lingering on the question of its
genuine sentiment, with yet another she appears to express
some deep desire.This state of not knowing as a pleasurable
and awkward experience is produced by both the flirt and
her audience for as long as the performance lasts, and may
continue indefinitely.There is something vital about flirtation
– it is both life affirming and essential to it – that needs to
be kept going. Not being able to explain precisely what was
going on, even after asking the artist herself, I can’t conclude
this episode with a neat summary. What I have tried to do
is to prolong my Campy enjoyment of the queer sincerity in
citations of cliché and hollow speech for as long as possible;
and now I think I’ll to leave it there, open-ended and in flux.

i Oriana Fox, All My Life, 2007 view at www.orianafox.com/video and removal with a story of fair-well party when she was eleven,
ii Speech by Rachel Rosenthal appears in full on www.orianafox.com/ where her father interviewed her guests: “He asked me: ‘what do
performance, and in Rachel Rosenthal, edited by Moira Roth, The you wanna say to your friends?’ I guess I felt nervous in front of the
John Hopkins University Press, Blatimore and London, 1997 camera so I got out my year-book and quoted someone. I have this
iii Oriana Fox, All My Life, 2007 great ability to memorise, so if I’m feeling uncomfortable I’ll just
iv J.L. Austin, How To Do Things with Words, second edition, edited by come out with something someone else said.”
J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà Oxford University Press, 1976, p.5. xvii The speech begins “Do others go through life feeling like a
v Austin, 1976, p. 15-16. Being insincere, saying “I promise” when we stand-in that hasn’t read the script?”, adapting the suitably hack-
have no intention of keeping it is an “abuse of procedure” neyed motif of theatrum mundi, the world as stage.
vi Austin, 1976, p. 22. xviii Stephan Cohan, cited in Gavin Butt’s essay How I Died for Kiki
vii Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, Harvard University Press, and Herb in The Art of Queering Art, ed. Henry Rogers, Article Press,
USA, 1971, p. 12-13 2007, p.92
viii Trilling, 1971, p. 3 xix Butt, Article Press, 2007, p. 92
ix Trilling, 1971, p. 10 xx Butt, Article Press, 2007, p. 93
x Trilling, 1971, p. 2 xxi Butt, Article Press, 2007, p. 86
xi Trilling, 1971, p. 9 xxii Adam Phillips, On Flirtation, Faber & Faber, 1994, p. xvii
xii Jonas Barish’s Antitheatrical Prejudice University of California xxiii Georg Simmel, Georg Simmel: On Women, Sexuality, And Love,
Press, 1981 sets out a detailed account of theatre’s fallen condi- translated by Guy Oakes,Yale University Press, 1984, p. 138
tion. xxiv Phillips, 1994, p. xxiii
xiii “Tracey Emin shows us her own bed, in all its embarrassing xxv Simmel, 1984, p. 138
glory. Empty booze bottles, fag butts, stained sheets, worn panties:
the bloody aftermath of a nervous breakdown. By presenting her
bed as art, Tracey Emin shares her most personal space, revealing
she’s as insecure and imperfect as the rest of the world.”
www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/artpages/tracey_emin_my_bed.
htm
xiv Michel Foucault, The Will to Knowledge, The History of Sexuality
Volume 1, translated by Robert Hurley, Penguin, 1998, quoted in
Rosenbaum, 2007, p1
xv Oriana mentioned that the opening sequence of Excess Bag-
gage has paralleled for some American viewers the TV show Jack
Handy Deep Thoughts: “this really cheese-ball but funny show. He
has clichéd thoughts, but he thinks of them as really deep…” www.
deepthoughtsbyjackhandey.com
xvi Oriana illustrated how quotation allows self-representation

AS + 21

SUH YONG
Dunhuang Paintings
Lee C Gallery, Seoul
May 2008
The Samcheong-Dong neighbourhood is situated in the his-
torical centre of Seoul.The area is limited by the palace wall
to the east and its network of small, small alleyways contains
the largest density of ancient Korean houses in Seoul. The
mixture of culture and commerce attracts large crowds on
weekends and it has a modern, somewhat cosmopolitan ap-
pearance.
Exhibited in immediate proximity to the bustling urban
sprawl outside, Suh Yong’s pictures seem to reflect issues that
evolve from an apparent loss of history. His re-enactments
of traditional, spatial structures on canvas seem antithetical
to the constant processes of uprooting that propel cities
across Asia from a horizontal past into a vertical future.
These days Suh Yong is a traveller in space and time, bridging
the gap between the rich findings of the past and his own
contemporary practice. About to launch into a promising
career upon graduation from a Beijing university in oriental
painting, Yong took an entirely different turn after visiting
Dunhuang, a once significant intersection on the northern
silk-road in the Chinese part of the Gobi desert. Dunhuang’s
economic significance helped its emergence as one of the
most important religious sites in the region. Buddhist pil-
grims and monks created mural paintings in hundreds of
caves over a period of 1200 years. Until today Dunhuang is a
site for research, worship and spiritual practice.
CC + 22
Jan Lemitz
Yong stayed there for seven years, studying and reproducing
mural paintings, transferring them into a personal language
full of originality. Uncompromised reproductions of an ar-
chitecture of spirituality, rich in detail, colourful and inex-
haustible in the playfulness of their structures. The fine line
between replica and original, in other words, the timeline, is
the leitmotif of his work.
For Yong, reproduction becomes a way to construct spatial
and temporal coherences and successions previously inex-
istent; its stylistic device recalls natural processes of deterio-
ration. Yong’s means of reproduction remain authentic, for
instance he uses original clay from Dunhuang to paint on, a
process displaying the porosity of real age. The structures
disappear underneath layers of dissolving colours. His own
handwriting is preserved from traceless disappearance and
complete extinction and connects elements from different
eras of the past, resulting in the sustained continuity of the
notorious timeline into the presence. The Dunhuang paint-
ings are about vivid continuity, about indispensable knowl-
edge and relatedness with past and tradition. Suh Yong brings
back tangible memories and creates material artefacts of a
real place that is fictitious in the same time, a place in full
blossom and colour in the middle of the desert.
CC + 23

EMPTINESS IN THE
POST-COMMUNIST
CONDITION*
“We live in the ruins of culture”(i)
Where are you from? Where is your accent coming from? And
then, what could possible outcomes of my answer be? What does
one relate my answer to? How am I recognised and how am I
not?
Me, London, 2008, have been living here for five years already.
Started with an illegal worker status (in the restaurants),
managed to enter the United Kingdom as an art critic, with
a press card to be shown at the border, as if I was coming
for a few days (with an open date return ticket) to see new
shows in the most prominent contemporary art galleries
and then go back to return my reviews on the western art
scene (I always had a list of current shows there, not having
a clue of what they might be; names from the contemporary
art scene seemed to be a floating gap in my field of knowl-
edge, I just had to remember them to perform profession-
ally when entering the passport control zone for non-EU
citizens, or others). As an eastern European I know what it
means standing in the line at the airport and repeating pre-
pared explanation - why do I come to this country. But since
the European Union decided to expand its borders in 2004,
I have a great feeling of relief and sensation every time when
crossing these newly dismantled divisions.
Such a personal geographical leap is needed to recognise the
political implications that rest upon the terms and condi-
tions of state for someone brought up in a post-communist
country, one that lies on the other side of the perceptional
border. Local context here is an important departure point
for recognising the current national and cultural (re)-identi-
fication processes and new trends. European Union context
is nevertheless useful for articulation of recent relations be-
ing built within it. Having lived and experienced both sides of
the real and imagined European map divisions, I tend to see
and name some disturbing processes that mark European-
ization from my personal perspective.
‘Kids, go West’- I encountered my father saying in account
for the future. The mode of a runaway, escape, reach, dis-
covery, is related with a dominating feeling in the East of
fear and uncertainty of one’s own current state of being,
doubled by a relation to the unknown. And here, the West
is most commonly used as a point for motivation and ref-
erencing. Since the spectacular collapse of the Soviet Union
those newly formed and reshaped nation-states are lingering
on the certain plan to be followed, which includes popula-
rising of the national identity, and ‘going West’ at the same
time. It is a decade of bridging East with West in a political
representational realm and as well as promoting of the idea
that now we can come back to Europe, where our home is.
EF + 24
Jurga Daubaraite
Arriving at the EU border became a challenging moment of
self-questioning. Where am I from? Are the eastern Europe-
ans - Europeans? If so, where are we integrating then?
These are not abstract questions. To demarcate the changes
in the map visible processes becomes important first of all
because of the certain lack of point of reference from the
perspective of the eastern Europeans. After 50 years of be-
ing divided from the cultural, social, political course of devel-
opment taking place in western countries, and being isolated
as an unknown part of the map(ii), draws its own conclu-
sions on how is then a post-communist condition lived?
Back then, in my school days, there were still two kinds of
history books. One published in the early 80’s and one in the
mid 90’s, both were still used as teaching tools and rarely ap-
proached critically. It was simply rather complicated within a
period of few years since Lithuania became independent to
separate ‘grain from chaff’ as a Lithuanian saying goes. Later
the Soviet perspective of history had to be withdrawn as
rather a fictional view on certain processes and the new
one, a rush-rewritten history reader that was taken for real.
(iii) What is then the current language of replacing the past?
A concern with the past and with memory has primarily
touched upon self-perception and cultural heritage. Just as
the alienation of certain history elements started with the
destruction of its cultural artefacts (soviet monuments, lit-
erature, art), a whole discussion on the relation society has
with its history could be traced in its attitudes towards rep-
resentation.
The soviet mechanisms of erasing the past used in the oc-
cupied territories of the Soviet Union undermined any re-
mains of independence, freedom, democracy and democrat-
ic movements in the history of all those countries included
into the new state of the USSR since 1941.Therefore, it gen-
erously created a persistent gap in the self-perception of the
post-communist subject. What should replace the voided
parts of history, tradition and culture? From what source of
legitimacy is the new history reader written? The first years
of Lithuanian independence were marked by confusion, col-
lapse of old values and obscurity of the new ones.The West-
ern example’s promise of democracy marked the inescapable
processes of the transformation in post-communist society
suffering from the self-prevented discursive thinking about
soviet past as ours, and acceptance of its consequences. A
radical decline of previous two ‘lost’ generations (as sociolo-
gists count during 50 years of occupation) played a signifi-
cant role in constructing a new identity that was imported
and imitated. Therefore arrival to the period of transition
now could be characterised by a series of imbalances. Wel-
comed to the European family imitating Europeanism the
post soviet subject constantly has to revisit its state of being
because of a lack of appropriate categories in the new valid
system of meanings. No doubt, this old-new identity con-
struction is fuelled by euphoria of integration into the Euro-
pean Union. How does lost in integration look? Legitimacy
and recognition of eastern European as ‘not’ being eastern i Political figure’s Vytautas Landzbergis phrase describing the con-
European has the language of mimicking and of silencing its cerns and hopes of Lithuania after gaining the independence.
authenticity. The urge to become European is also seen in ii Minister of Foreign Affairs of Island on Lithuanian TV interview
the favour to drop mildly differentiating geopolitical prefix (2008) said: “We did not know of the existence of Baltic states in
the Soviet Union, as they were so tiny.” (The population of Lithu-
“eastern” in order to become a more equal member of the
ania is 3.5 million, similarly in Latvia and Estonia)
community overnight(iv). It deals with issues of memory and iii I personally remember about four different history lesson read-
forgetting and where that authenticity is. Seeking to establish ers appearing each year from around 1992.
a recognisable identity one articulates itself as something to iv Edit Andras (2005).“Blind Spot of the New Critical Theory,Notes
be filled with newness, therefore asserting being the same on the Theory of Self Colonization”, European Influenza.
(meaning European) but not quite the same, at the same v Rasa Balockaite (2008). “Lithuania in Europe. Europe in Lithuania”.
time. And a reconsidering of the historical processes does Eurozine
not provide the new member of the EU with one answer for vi Throughout the text I will include not necessary relevant, in a
the question- where its home is straightforward sense, parts from Dan Perjovschi work Key Words
in the New Europe (2005), due to its matter of subject - keywords as
ironic illustrations, definitions. Published in The New Europe. Culture
Although official political circumstances are rapidly chang- of Mixing and Politics of Representation.
ing, the obscurity and uncertainty that preoccupied the
* Jurga Daubaraite’s text consists of three parts. Part two and
minds of citizens during the first years of independence in
three will be published in issue 4 and 5.
the new eastern European states still marks todays struggles
of the post-communist subject. Soviet modes of relating to
the state, law, society or other citizens are persistent and
point to a certain lack of reason and disbelieve in changes. If
communism as a time of erasure and oppression of national
culture is now cut off and declared as radical negativity, how
does a subject of such historical narrative “rise from ruin,
emerge from non-existence”?(v) A regime that was based
on utopian ideology produced a subject, commonly named
homo (post)-sovieticus: fearful, conformist, unconfident disbe-
liever that inhabited and later inherited such pejorative at-
tributes. Therefore, the Western democracy promise flown
in together with the plan to join the European Union came
over as a lid preventing real (or radical) changes in a mental-
ity of the post-communist subject. The very need to get rid
of communism, hence the future orientation and promises,
the guarantees for true future pertaining the ambiguous ‘af-
ter’ characterises a post-communist present.The concept of
democracy then is perceived as another rule and accommo-
dated parallel to soviet habits. It is important to pay atten-
tion here to the creation of the void: in a way one changes
trajectory of reference due to a new destiny, forcefully void-
ing still present significants of the past.

“Post-communism
If I had to select a metaphor for Romania today, then I would
choose that great hole in the center of Bucharest. It has been
there for months, as wide as the sidewalk and forcing people into
dangerous maneuvers.This hole is right in front of a shop window
with a tie that costs two average monthly salaries. No one knows
who dug the hole, or why and when, nor who will fill it in again
and who will be made responsible for it. Nobody complains. We
all just look at the ground and watch our step, taking care not to
break our necks. It doesn’t matter, the tie is not very cool anyway.”
Dan Perjovschi (vi)

EF + 25
 Hildegard Spielhofer

NI ESPOIR NI PEUR

NI ESPOIR NI PEUR
“N’espoir ne peur” is the original phrase in old french,
stitched on a tapestry called “Trois Couronnements” (three
coronations) located in the cathedral of St. Etienne in Sens,
France. The tapestry was a present of Charles de Bourbon,
archbishop of Lyon, in the 15th century.

NEITHER HOPE NOR FEAR

Hope and fear is neither a duality nor a polarity. Hope
doesn’t suspend fear and hope doesn’t complement fear.
Hope is an illusion, because hope aims at the future. Fear
paralyzes the viability (Lebensfähigkeit), for example the fear
of death. Living without hope and fear is living right now.

TH + 26

Legacy and désaffecté spaces: on docu-
menting and acting in contexts of con-
flictive urban
developments
Reflections on Legacy in the Dust and Save Our Heritage by
Winstan Whitter
The notions of cultural legacy and heritage usually denote a
transmission of tangible or intangible cultural objects(i) along
a chronological line from one generation to another. In this
view the value of such “legacy” follows an accretive model,
resulting from the accumulation of histories read as consti-
tutive of a present cultural identity. This commonly shared
understanding can easily offer an interpretative framework
for two recent documentaries by filmmaker Winstan Whit-
ter on the famous music venue “The Four Aces Club” in
Dalston: Legacy in the Dust and Save Our Heritage (2008)(ii),
recently presented, respectively, at the British Film Institute
and at This is Not a Gateway Festival.(iii)
The first, shot over a period of more than eight years, fol-
lowed and documented the many histories of “The Four
Aces Club” and of Dalston as an area at large during the
so-called Windrush Era, the first large migratory wave of
West Indians to Britain. During the research for the Legacy,
Whitter’s interests in the space brought him to encounter
the lawyer Bill Parry-Davies and Open Dalston(iv), and their
campaign to save the building from Hackney Council’s de-
velopment plans. Their decision to join forces has become
the subject of the second documentary, a sequel to the first,
although with the remarkably different urge of documenting
a struggle in the making.
Opening a brief historical parenthesis, “The Four Aces Club”
used to occupy part of a large building conceived at the end
of the 19th Century as a circus, the “Dalston Coliseum”.
The place was later to become a Victorian variety theatre, a
cinema in the 1920s, subsequently undergoing an incredible
variety of functional metamorphoses, hosting several live
music venues and clubs, even a car park and a restaurant. In
1966, “The Four Aces Club” was founded by Newton Dun-
bar and was to remain active, under different guises, until the
1990s.Whitter’s personal involvement with the club brought
him to privilege the Four Aces narrative thread, leading him
to unravel, visually and aurally, over three decades of activity
in the venue.
The film is set to document the importance of the club as
an incubator for live West Indian music, soul, reggae and ska,
and for dub sound system culture as a vehicle for under-
ground evaluation and transmission of new records coming
from abroad, at that time ignored by mainstream radio. The
variety of the venue’s musical scene is evoked throughout
the film by a choral arrangement of interviews, which at
times come to consist solely of rhythmical flow of names of
bands, lyrics and live musicians, who attended, performing or
were simply loosely connected to it.
From the names of famous reggae singers, such as Desmond
CC + 31
Mara Ferreri
Dekker, to the first generation of British-born West-Indians,
the choir of voices reveals a complex combination of music
and identity struggles, drawing from the symbols and con-
tents of the Rastafari movement and, later, subjected to the
need to come up with its second-generation, “British” ver-
sion. At the same time, there were also the late 1960s and
1970s marches, the strikes, politics taken to the streets, the
struggle for equal rights for black citizens, the problem of
housing, and the lyrics would reflect and refract all of this,
as stressed by many interviewees in what was perceived as
a momentous melding of music and political awareness. And
here is where the idea of a legacy begins to appear like the
superimposition of a fixed identity over something much
more fluid and complex.
Although Whitter’s visual and aural editing might be read
as an attempt to compose a seamless collective entity, af-
ter watching both films one is left with a strong impres-
sion of complex heterogeneity and with a suspicion towards
the idea of a coherent cultural legacy constituted by such
a disparate assemblage. Asked to describe “The Four Aces
Club”, one would probably be driven to recall the incongru-
ous list of trajectories and elements that populated it: live
music, fried chicken, sound systems, dub sound, out-of-place
decaying 1920s decorations, musical waves, political demon-
strations, migratory recursives, the Rastafari movement in
London, struggles for identity and an emancipation from it;
a workers’ neighbourhood, dancing music, and, of course,
people: walking in, talking, dancing, singing, drinking, listening,
meeting up, fleeing from the police’s raids... a 30-year-long in-
tensity, with various peaks, intensifications and declines, until
it became abandoned.
Trying to make sense of this impression to a francophone
friend, I was told that to describe an abandoned space in
French, one could employ the adjective dèsaffectè. And in
truth these places can be said to become “dis-affected”,
turning into spaces of disaffection, as dissatisfaction and
withdrawal of support, but also, with a twist, as spaces where
affect plays only a negative role, as a force of detachment and
of subsidence of intensity. With the decay of “The Four Aces
Club”, the function of the building and its importance reced-
ed, slowly, until a lawyer and a growing number of concerned
inhabitants gathered and projected new desires upon it.
Moving away from the idea of cultural identities and cul-
tural legacy, it could be useful to think about spaces and
subjects in terms of what Nigel Thrift calls “geographies of
concern”: territories fleetingly defined by lines of movement
that carry the interest of “vast numbers of bodies and last
for years” or for a few days, passing “in to and out of exis-
tence in very short timescales in large or very restricted
spaces”(v). Focusing on intensities and concerns, it would
become crucial to reverse the common understanding of
legacy as something handed down from the past and to con-
centrate, instead, on the idea of heritage and on the process
of inheriting.While a legacy is “left” to the present, a heritage
has its origin in the movement of those who inherit – that is,

Image Source: http://opendalston.blogpress.com
retroactively, from the present toward an allegedly identifi-
able and bounded “past”.
To return to Save Our Heritage, the wish to preserve the
“Dalston Coliseum” became central to the inhabitants’ cam-
paign for better urban developments in Dalston. The pos-
sibility to save the building from destruction was turned into
the focus of a series of actions against ruthless development
plans, proposed by Hackney Council under the push of the
construction of new transport infrastructures between the
centre of the city and the 2012 Olympic site. (vi) It therefore
becomes apparent how the club and the building were, once
again, invested with affectivity. Open Dalston and several inde-
pendent attempts to action, which included squatting part of
the building, belong to what could be seen as a new wave of
intensification in the relation between local inhabitants and
spaces.
Open Dalston is clearly not about preserving a legacy, but
about building according to the needs of the inhabitants. As
it is clearly stated in its mission:
“OPEN’s objects are to promote excellence in the quality of
the built environment, the provision of transportation and
the provision of amenities, and to ensure that changes to
these have proper regard to the needs of residents and busi-
nesses and the maintenance of a sustainable residential and
business community.”(vii)
CC + 32
And here it can be argued that the affective trajectory of the
old theatre and the club has fully shown its incompatibility
with a static notion of legacy as the generational transmis-
sion of a cultural identity.
The alleged value of this particular space in Dalston can-
not be flattened to a vague nostalgia for a black and white
photo of a club, nor appealing to a cultural identity. Any at-
tempt to define such a legacy would incur in the limitations
of drawing a line of exclusion that cannot represent complex
movements of concentration and dispersal of concerns and
desires. Beyond the notion of space as a material container
of bodies, spaces are not only socially produced, but them-
selves produce subjectivities, which can be thought of as
“lines or fields of concernful[sic] and affective interaction
taking place in time”.(viii)
Appealing to the preservation of a historic site, a territory
of belonging is delineated around it, on the basis of a default
assimilation of current inhabitants and present “cultural in-
heritors”. An affective approach to spaces as geographies of
concern, on the contrary, could present a more accurate
depiction of the processes at work around collectively pro-
duced spaces, without the need to individuate a “cultural
identity” to be preserved.
In this sense, both Legacy in the Dust and Save Our Heritage,
without attempting to reconstruct a coherent and linear
past, succeed in actively engaging with the affective produc-
tion of subjects and spaces simultaneously. As in the pas-
sage from “legacy” to “heritage”, it can be argued that the
parabola of the two films taken together eventually comes
to acknowledge the contingent and fluid nature of such a
production. From the standpoint of an affective theory of
subjects and spaces, there should be no need to seek a gene-
alogical legitimisation for the desires of present inhabitants.
The actions and affective intensities stirred by a grass-root
movement such as Open Dalston already constitute an event
of relational intensification: the only force that should really
matter in any attempt to regenerate already existing urban
spaces.
i For the UNESCO’s Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible
Cultural Heritage (2003) see http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/in-
dex.php?pg=00002
ii See http://thefouracesclub.com/
iii Presented at the British Film Institute on Friday 28th November
2008, see http://www.bfi.org.uk/whatson/legacy_in_the_dust_ja-
net_kay_and_freetown_live and at This is Not A Gateway Festival
on the 25th October 2008, see http://thisisnotagateway.square-
space.com/
iv See http://opendalston.blogspot.com/
v Thrift, Nigel, “I Just Don’t Know What Got Into Me: Where is The
Subject?”, Subjectivity, 22, 2008, p. 85.
vi See http://opendalston.blogspot.com/
vii Ibid.
vii Thrift, ibid.
Image Source: http://opendalston.blogpress.com

CC + 33
 Jonas Zukauskas

Boer war soldier

TH + 34
The Illustrated London News, 10 November 1900, Illustration showing Colonel (later General) Sir Redvers Henry Buller (1839-1908) (centre, on
horse) rescuing Captain D’Arcy during a skirmish with Zulu warriors on Inhlobane Mountain, 1879.

Original Boer war memorial statue, depicting an infantryman in the British Army uniform
used in the war between 1899 and 1902 holding a rifle in the advance position, was
unveiled by General Sir Redvers Henry Buller in 1905. Statue was stolen November 2006.
In August 2007 Nuneaton and Bedworth borough council announced sculpture commission,
to replace it with accurate replica, and announced £50,000 public appeal to fund replace-
ment.
I responded to call for submission by remaking sculpture in smaller scale sketch following
the photographs provided by council. Unfortunately I was refused opportunity to undertake
the commission; sculptor’s Alan B Herriot’s work was chosen, and was unveiled October
2008, back on original plinth.
My plot was, if given opportunity to undertake this commission, was to research and
document conditions under which is possible to remake this monument a hundred years
after it was erected. Why local people see it as manifestation of their patriotism, is there
any critique towards such reconstruction, is there any change in Nuneaton public opinion
towards atrocities of Boer wars.
Emily Hobhouse visited Boer war British concentration camps in 1901, that were unprec-
edented in history, she discovered that third of camps Boer and African inmates died of
starvation and disease mostly women and children.
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