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Indepth Arts News:
"Platform4_Documenta11 -- Under Siege: Four African Cities, Freetown, Johannesburg, Kinshasa, Lagos"
2002-03-15 until 2002-04-20
Documenta11
Kassel, ,
DE Germany
Rather than a generalized and diffuse discussion on cities all over the
world, this conference will focus on the specific example of four African
cities: Freetown, Johannesburg, Kinshasa, and Lagos. The aim of the conference
is to examine the vital place of these cities in the political, social,
and cultural economy of the region and to focus on the nature of their
social destabilization whether from war, crime, urban decay, AIDS, and
population explosion. But more than serving as testament for further
deracination of the African continent, the conference will also be concerned
with the analyses of how to reinvent the urban imaginaries of
these cities as places that still hold great potential for human vitality,
creativity, and inventiveness.
The Micro-Politics of Cities as Locations of Global Citizenship
What then constitutes civil societyNULL And what is citizenshipNULL What binds
the production of these highly incommensurable denominations to the
creative intercourse of cultural and artistic praxisNULL We would like to believe
that, while the notion of nation states remains the conceptual axis around
which such questions revolve, it would be necessary to tease out its evolve-ment
through the study of the micropolitics of cities, as primary locations
where they are fused.
The question of the city has served as one of the fundamental vectors for
the range of experiences we attribute to modern life. The consequence
of this has meant that for quite some time agglomerations of people,
histories, languages, identities, religions, commodities, cultures, etc. in
cities have brought about increasing tensions and demands for a better
and more efficient management of the spatial dynamics of our cities. It is
from these that a set of initiatives (some based on the notion of sustain-able
development, others more obedient to the pragmatic economic de-mands
of global capitalism), that a critical interrogation of urbanism and
urban expansion have risen. New theories of this rise in urbanism and
the pressure points of expanding populations we have witnessed in the
last half century have seen many cities transformed, their social fabric
recut to fit the changes that make urban spaces dynamic and volatile at
the same time. This tension will continue to be one of the challenging
features of metropolitan life in the foreseeable future.
Under Siege: Four African Cities, Freetown, Johannesburg, Kinshasa, Lagos
is a conference in a series of public dialogues in six cities in Europe, the
Caribbean, Asia, and Africa, being planned as part of the core of Docu-menta11,
which opens in Kassel, Germany on June 8, 2002. The conference
also represents the fourth platform within five distinct, thematic
areas of Documenta11 which proposes to engage in dialogue and to
examine intellectual and historical processes that are implicated in differ-ing
strategies of cultural production. By inaugurating this process of exchange
between the exhibition based in Kassel and other locations outside
Europe, it is our intention and commitment to embark on an extensive
relocation of discourses of globalism and culture to the specificity of
sites within which particular questions and issues are inscribed. By operating
first on the local level (Vienna, Berlin, New Delhi, St. Lucia, and
Lagos) and by allowing these public dialogues and critical exchanges to
precede the exhibition more than a year before the official unveiling of
the Documenta11 in Kassel, our hope is to dramatize and demonstrate
on an immediate level the interdependence of the global paradigm, by
revealing how local specificities create new orientations in the global discourse.
Additionally, Documenta11's proposition is to expand on the notion of
the mutuality which binds artistic praxis, the mega exhibition model, and
contemporary art as vehicles of a globalized discourse that requires new
interpretative agents. This conference, thus, represents one agent in the
complex dynamics of a changing global orientation. Our hope is to bring
art and artists into a productive relationship with cultural and intellectual
activities that often are seen to be outside the necessity of exhibition
practice. In so doing, Documenta11 wishes to also highlight another ele-ment
in its primary conception, which has to do with the relationship
between subjectivity and agency, between artistic practice and intellec-tual
discourse, and between institutions and social spaces, all of which
are intimately connected to the ways we conceive of notions such as civil
society and citizenship.
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