...POLITICAL RUMOUR /CULTURAL LANDSCAPE /PRESENT IMPERFECT /RUINS IN REVERSE /ZONES OF CONTINGENCY / UNDER CONSTRUCTION /SPIRITUAL NOISES /PROJECT AND ACCUSATION / LANDSCAPE MANUAL /ENCOUNTER WITH AMBIGUITY /CITY FOLDED OVER ONTO ITSELF /TWO WAY MIRROR /DOUBLE EXPOSURE /BIPOLAR CITY /POWER OF IDENTITY /POTEMKIN VILLAGE /STAGED MATRIX /TRICKLAND /SILENT FACTORY /... TO BE CONTINUED

Manifesta 5 as curated by the team of Marta Kuzma and Massimiliano Gioni opens on June 11th, 2004 to include over fifty artists from throughout Europe. The project in Donostia – San Sebastian is organised by the Amsterdam based International Manifesta Foundation together with the Basque Government, the Territorial Council of Gipuzkoa and the Donostia-San Sebastian City Council.

Departing from the notion of the city as a territory, the curators refer to Manifesta 5 as an instrument of investigation into Donostia-San Sebastian as a privileged social site and catalytic trigger to launch the formulation of their project. Deferring from the spectacle of the political and bypassing contemporary art’s recent obsession with global geographies, the works within Manifesta 5 illustrate how the cryptic and opaque may reveal the subtlety of the polemical and the potential of its transgression.

Manifesta 5 attempts to explore cultural landscapes as they get refracted through hieroglyphic languages. The projects developed in Manifesta 5 concentrate on the formulation of intricate and idiosyncratic structures that translate reality into enigmatic forms, corresponding to a more stratified understanding of the complexity of one’s relationship to the world. Such complexity reveals contradictions and simultaneity - between the demand for order and the will for formlessness, between the rational and irrational, construction and expression, the performative and static, and between symmetry and chaos, violence and rupture.

In approaching Donostia-San Sebastian and its broader Basque territory as a zone of contingency, Manifesta 5 and the artists involved in the project turn to time and space as malleable, locating their works within a temporal gap that houses at once the past, the present and the future.

The articulation of the exhibition endeavors to reflect those tensions endemic to the territory and the spectral doubling of place by occupying both the historic centre of Donostia-San Sebastian and its industrial, peripheral counterpart – the port town of Pasaia. Extending beyond the symmetry, order, homogeneity, and leisure of Donostia-San Sebastian into the polemics of its neighbouring Pasaia, Manifesta 5 aims at revealing the essence of something that is simultaneously economic, political, historical and aesthetic.

In looking for clues within the physical space of its inception, the curators initiated the Office of Alternative Urban Planning in September 2003 with the Berlage Institute, a Rotterdam based post-graduate laboratory of architecture and urban research, directed by the architect Alejandro Zaera Polo. Together with a designated team of architects led by Sebastian Khourian, the curatorial team explored how Manifesta 5, as a cultural project, might enable the reinvigoration of Pasaia as one of the most impoverished areas in the Gipuzkoa territory located outside Donostia-San Sebastian’s city center.

The Collaboration with the Berlage Institute (Office of Alternative Urban Planning)

The collaboration with The Office of Alternative Urban Planning (OAUP) was not merely focused on the essence of its findings, rather on its possible effects of research. This method of investigation proved one way to abstract from the built environment and from the irregularities relating to the traditional flow of city, region, territory and state, implicit of the Basque territory to find new articulations of political, cultural, and social formations.

The involvement of the OAUP was also crucial in overcoming the bottlenecks associated with the complicated layers of public administration to facilitate the role of curators, artists and cultural producers as negotiators. As a laboratory of ideas, OAUP provided scenarios that extended Manifesta 5’s role into a feasibility study as to how cultural agents and artists may provide alternative solutions in reviving areas such as the port city of Pasaia. Since the programme’s inception, Pasaia has been designated as a priority within the region whereby Manifesta 5 serves as the catalyst in diversifying an area formerly cut off from its community.

The Office of Alternative Urban Planning and the integration of artists who have also been in direct negotiation with the city and regional administration pressed for a type of activation of a former dead zone within the industrial port of Pasaia – within a disgarded warehouse referred to as Casa Ciriza and a former ship building plant, Ondartxo: both venues will not only function as sites for the duration of Manifesta 5, but they will remain as pilot projects for cultural production beyond the closing date of the exhibition. In this way, the curatorial team has attempted to broaden the category of Manifesta 5 as an art event and to focus on its performativity. This approach extends the decision not to entitle Manifesta 5 with one title or unique theme, but with numerous concepts that relate both to the complexities of the region housing the project, and the open diversity of today’s art and reality.

Working List of Artists and Participants

Bas Jan Ader - Victor Alimpiev and Sergey Vishnevsky - Huseyin Alptekin - Micol Assaël - Sven Augustijnen - Zbyněk Baladrán - John Bock Michaël Borremans - Sergey Bratkov - Carlos Bunga - Duncan Campbell - Cengis Çekil- Iliya Chichkan and Kyrill Protsenko - D.A.E. (Peio Aguirre and Leire Vergara) - Jan de Cock - Angela de la Cruz - Jeremy Deller - Andrea Faciu - Iñaki Garmendia - Geert Goiris - Kim Hiorthøy - Laura Horelli - Külli Kaats - Johannes Kahrs - Leopold Kessler - Mark Leckey - Maria Lusitano - Mark Manders - Asier Mendizabal- Boris Mikhailov - Oksana Pasaiko - Anu Pennanen - Garrett Phelan - Kirsten Pieroth - Paola Pivi - Office of Alternative Urban Planning (Verónica Arcos, José Arnaud, Sannah Belzer, Sebastián Khourian, Claudia Strahl, Mónica Villate, Constanze Zehi) - Marc Quer - Daniel Roth - Michael Sailstorfer - Silke Schatz - Markus Schinwald - Conrad Shawcross - Eyal Sivan and Michel Khleifi - Hito Steyerl - Misha Stroj - Patrick Tuttofuoco - Vangelis Vlahos - Amelie von Wulffen - Gillian Wearing - Cathy Wilkes - Yevgeniy Yufit - Olivier Zabat - David Zink Yi - Darius Ziura

Arteleku houses the OAUP. Partipating artist projects located throughout Donostia-San Sebastian -in the cultural center of Koldo Mitxelena, Kubo KutxaKursaal within Rafael Moneo’s Kursaal, Museo San Telmo, the Aquarium and Soto of the Aquarium, a former storage house for boats in the historic port of Donostia-San Sebastian. In complement to the projects in Donostia-San Sebastian, artists projects will also be located in Pasaia– in the former fish warehouse of Casa Ciriza and the former boat building space of Ondartxo.

The Catalogue

A full catalogue will include artists’ representation and contributions, the Manual produced by the OAUP, and introductory essays by each of the curators, Andrew Benjamin, Alexander Garcia Duttmann, Dan Graham, and Peter Osborne. Additional essays in relation to OAUP by Alejandro Zaera Polo and Sebastian Khourian.

Programming

An additional academic program related to the issues explored by Berlage and within the exhibition will be held at the time of Manifesta 5.

Opening dates:

Organizers:

Basque Government, Territorial Council of Gipuzkoa, Donostia-San Sebastian City Council. Additional Sponsors. Culture 2000, Kutxa Obra SocialAllianz Kultrustiftung, El Diario Vasco. Collaborator: Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte of Spain. Other sponsors and partners. Association Française d’Action Artistìque (France), Association Tranzit (Czech Republic) Berlage Institute (The Netherlands), British Council (United Kingdom), Center for Contemporary Art (Estonia), Critical Voices (Ireland),Department for Land Development and Promotion of the Territorial Council of Gipuzkoa, European Cultural Foundation (The Netherlands), Federal Office of Culture (Switzerland), Fundaçáo Caloustre Gulbenkian Servigio de Belas-Artes (Portugal), FRAME Finnish Fund for Art Exchange (Finland), International Renaissance Foundation (Ukraine), Ministry of Culture and Tourism (Turkey), Ministerie van de Vlaamse Gemeenschap (Belgium), Office for Contemporary Art (Norway), Port of Pasajes, Port Authority of Pasajes, (Spain), Scottish Arts Council (United Kingdom), The Mondriaan Foundation (The Netherlands), Untitled Art Consulting (Spain)