Manifesta 5, the fifth edition of the European Biennial
of Contemporary Art, which opens on 11 June 2004, brings together
more than 50 artists from all over Europe at a variety of venues
and sites in Donostia-San Sebastian and the surrounding area.
The curators of the project, Marta Kuzma and Massimiliano Gioni,
offer visitors a variety of paths through the exhibition, with
the aid of an expandable list of key concepts and titles, beginning
with ‘…POLITICAL RUMOUR / CULTURAL LANDSCAPE /
PRESENT IMPERFECT …’ (and so on).
The curators formulated a conceptual framework for Manifesta
5 on the basis of a careful investigation of Donostia-San Sebastian
and its surroundings. This led them to their decision to interpret
the area as a zone of contingency that lends to more complex
interpretations of Europe. Thus, they have come to view the
city, not only as a seaside resort dominated by tourism and
the leisure industry, but as a much more stratified territory
that forms a backdrop to the Basque Country where a prolonged
and tumultuous movement toward autonomy is a source of pride,
dissonance, and tension. One means of highlighting the visual
contrasts between the different areas of the city consists
in locating artists’ projects both near the idyllic seafront
in the city area and in the industrial setting of the neighbouring
port of Pasaia, a mere five kilometres away.
Abandoning the spectacle of the political and bypassing a
recent obsession in contemporary art with global geographies,
the artists in Manifesta 5 make subtle use of veiled and cryptic
allusions to create the potential for polemics and transgression.The
works in the exhibition illustrate how intricate and idiosyncratic
structures may be used to translate reality into enigmatic
forms, owing less to rhetoric than to a carefully differentiated
understanding of people’s relationship to the world.
This complexity and the combination of order and chaos, form
and formlessness, and static and performative elements, has
generated work which is resolutely dissonant and reveals many
hidden layers of meaning.
Through a creative investment in the open-ended, the hieroglyphic
and even the incongruous, the artists in the exhibition investigate
the generative and performative nature of art that extends
beyond the materiality of the object. Fragments and forms unfold
within an atemporal continuum, while fictitious universes and
personal identities are shaped in the twilit world of the imagination.
Manifesta 5 breaks with the earlier tradition of concentrating
mainly on the work of emergent artists, by placing an additional
focus on the subjective aspects of important and overlooked
works by artists from the 1970s and 1980s, who were actively
engaged both in Europe itself and beyond. The curators attempted
to reaffirm the binding relationship between the viewer and
the object, by presenting works that operate on a visceral
level, without the need for complicated exegesis. The exhibition
also questions the arbitrary distinction that is often made
between the ‘established’ and the ‘emergent.’ Thus,
Manifesta 5 is grounded in a constant dialogue between elements
of the past and future possibilities, and seeks its justification
in a synthesis of the two.
The exhibition is articulated in a way that reflects these
breaks and juxtapositions. Each of the four main venues serves
as a constellation of economic, political, historical and aesthetic
considerations:
In Donostia-San Sebastian, Koldo Mitxelena houses works that
relate to a rupture in the chronological sense of time, leading
to fragmentation, disruption and aphasia. The ethnographic
museum in the former monastery of San Telmo contains work that
delves into the past and examines issues of national psyche
and subjective identity through a mixture and cross-contamination
of folkloric, pagan and mystical elements. The works in Rafael
Moneo’s orthogonal Kursaal draw from architecture’s
implicit relationship to time and space, lodged somewhere in
the future. These projects use techniques of environmental
critique and architectonic displacement as means of challenging
accepted practices and relocating the sublime. The project
in Soto, a former boat storage facility in the historic port,
illustrates systems of belief based upon linguistics.
The work displayed in the decaying port area of Pasaia reflects
the antithetical nature of this part of the urban environment.
On entering Pasaia on the local train, the first thing the
visitor will encounter is a modified entrance to the precarious
urban passageway that commuters must use to enter or exit the
neighbourhood. The nearby Casa Ciriza, with its succession
of projects and installations, evokes the surrounding cultural
landscape of the port area. A former fish warehouse procured
with the assistance of the Office of Alternative Urban Planning,
Casa Ciriza functions as an industrial readymade, whose parts
are occasionally patched up and mended, but never restored.
In its cavernous spaces, static structures are turned into
moving parts, archives re-assembled, memories re-animated,
and former innovations put to new use. The physical dimensions
of Manifesta 5 are further extended to Ondartxo, where the
whole of a derelict boat-building and workshop has been transformed
into a semi-permanent installation, looking at the parallels
between various forms of construction and expression.
By interweaving its presence into the fabric of the contrastingurban
centres of Donostia-San Sebastian and Pasaia,Manifesta 5 has
attempted to explore ways of using a cultural project to diversify
the everyday experience of both communities, at the same time
as reinvigorating one of the most impoverished areas in the Basque
region. With this in view – and in an attempt to overcome
the prescriptive nature of many contemporary exhibitions – the
curators of Manifesta 5 also took the step of founding of the
Office of Alternative Urban Planning (TOOAUP) in September 2003,
in conjunction with the Berlage Institute, in Rotterdam, post-graduate
laboratory of architecture and urban research, directed by the
architect Alejandro Zaera Polo.Together with a specially designated
team of architects, led by Sebastian Khourian, the curatorial
team embarked on a collaboration that focused, not merely on
the essence of its findings, but rather on the possible effects
of its research. This method of investigation proved to be one
way of gaining critical detachment from the built environment
itself, and from the anomalies inherent in the traditional dynamics
governing the relationship between city, province, region and
state.As a laboratory of ideas, TOOAUP enabled Manifesta 5 to
extend its role into carrying out a feasibility study into how
artists and cultural agents might be called on to propose solutions
to the problem of integrating the impenetrable space of the port,
controlled by the Port Authority, with the inhabited areas of
Pasaia, which come under the local authority. |
