(continued from here)
At the conclusion of the residency, we held an open air live art event with a picnic. We set up several installations, and a large army tent on a grassy verge in the town centre surrounded by trees, where we presented video animations and digital photo-slide shows made during our sojourn. Outside we set up a mini “pirate radio” station with dozens of small radios (sourced from markets and junk shops) embedded in the ground and hung in the trees, all tuned to the same FM station, broadcasting audio-mixes via a very low-frequency signal. As the site was in public space by the canal path, it was open to all to take part.
We were initially afraid that it might be difficult to make contact with the life of the community, especially as, aside from our two interventions, there was never any attempt to bring contemporary art there before. The organisation that hosted us unfortunately disapproved of the idea that so-called “simple people” would be involved and invited to the project. However, when we presented our work to them, the locals came, and found it interesting. They appreciated the fact that we showed them an outsider’s view of the place, and invited them to see their familiar environment in a new way.
3 – Permanence and Transience: site specificity and site research
The period of our residence in Kronstadt was one of impermanence
and transience. Likewise, the work that we produced in the form of audio recordings,
video and photography is mutable, reproducible and transferable into different
media. What we have done in Kronstadt and in other similar projects 1, is
create something which is site-responsive rather than narrowly site-specific.
The act of responding to and creating out of, situations and environments
that are themselves fluid and mutable is different from “making work”
which is specific to a particular physical space – implying permanence
and immutability.
The nomadic principle is at work here, and in similar projects bringing artists
together across national and cultural boundaries. The great changes of the
modern world - since 1989 for example - have caused artists as well as everyone
else to react to the ease of movement of people and cultural products around
the globe. Whether this is a new freedom, or simply a reaction to change,
is impossible to determine.
Working in such a unique place highlights many issues around art and site-response. Is site-response as art practice a temporary reaction to specific social, political and economic situations and discourses? Or is it a new direction or movement in art, marked by close interaction with specific realities and hybrid media? Perhaps it is far too early in the history of this fragile and tentative movement to make any conclusions.
The peculiar subtle difference of site-response as opposed to site-specific, which involves an insistence on the actual dialectic between artist and all aspects of the space, not only the physical, means that there may be less chance for any characteristic mode of operation to occur. There is great potential for site-responsive art to develop this dialectic, to constantly create fresh interventions into “everyday life” while at the same time universalising through art the concerns that are, at their base, bound in human time and space.
Hence, the opening of the site to art is a brief, interventionist moment, not a permanent condition. A consciousness not only of time but of change or flux is at the very foundation of this type of work. Different experiences of time and change intersect: historical time (the lived experience of the site); material time (the materials used); experiential time (the actual period of the intervention). The particular experience of being Kronstadt on its tercentennial anniversary, made us conscious of the three hundred years of time and change to consider. Our task became the act of transcribing the specific and particular moment of our intervention, into the shared or non-specific language of art.
4 - What we brought and what we left behind
Our Kronstadt work has been exhibited in Berlin and Montreal, and is available on a DVD and online where it can reach innumerable audiences. This is one example of the “particular to the universal” that site-responsive work is empowered to do. We hope that exhibiting this project will both stimulate an interest in Kronstadt itself, and to show how site-responsive art can begin a dialogue to help communities reappraise and re-value their locality. At the same time, our experience of Kronstadt awakened us to some very real and specific aspects of live in the post-Soviet system.
While we were there, the anniversary of the beginning of
the Second World War was marked on Kronstadt. For Russia, the nation which
suffered the most in the war, this will always be a sad and sober occasion.
But in Kronstadt as we watched bus and boatloads of retired admirals and captains
pour into the little town, in threadbare uniforms, from places as far flung
as Murmansk, Solchi and Vladivostok, we could sense their sadness, not at
the passing of time and change, but at the sacrifice and disinheritance of
these people. Several kilometres away, the city of St.. Petersburg, which
Kronstadt spent 300 years defending, shone with its newly-painted facades
and glittering shops, as insubstantial as air to the sombre-faced old sailors
strolling by the harbour.
For the people of Kronstadt, who have seen their historic town fall into decline,
there are issues of pride, isolation, opportunities and the impact of globalisation
at stake. And so Kronstadt is not only a small island town off the cost of
St. Petersburg, but is a microcosm of the world in its state of 21st century
flux and uncertainty, where wealth and poverty exist side by side but rarely
touching, where a sense of the past and one’s place in it is continually
challenged by feelings of insecurity and the ever-quickening rush of time.
We hope that exhibiting this project will both stimulate an interest in Kronstadt itself, and to show how site-responsive art can begin a dialogue to help communities reappraise and re-value their locality.
Gillian McIver is a member of the Luna Nera group, and curated the Kronstadt
project. Contributing artists were Julian Ronnefeldt (lead artist); Valentina
Floris and Ben Foot, Hilary Powell, Agnes Domke, Dirizhable Group (Eugene
Strelkov, Olga Khan, Andrey Suzdalev, Mikhail Pogarsky) and assistant curator
Oleg Ikona.
(Endnotes)
1 Luna Nera has made site-responsive projects in Berlin, Zurich, London and
Nizhny Novgorod (with Dirizhable). You can view more of their work at http://luna-nera.org).
