Counter-Conference
Posted by: Fats in: Wika at Hirap > Mga Pulong atbpCounter-Conference
Contré-Conference (or Counter-Conference) is a dual-session forum/workshop to take place in Paris in March and May of this year. Two themes are proposed to be explored: “Infomarkets” and “Art, Media, Identities.” Overall, the forum/workshops intend to provide a venue for reflection on the relationships between art, media, globalization and identities. Expected to participate in the project are “artists, students, teachers, mediactivists, researchers and cultural actors, who maintain a forum of discussion and a networked interface.” It seems that at Conference, institutional affiliations are not primary requirements or criteria for participation, although the project itself has an (semi-)institutional base. This is an interesting symbiosis which I also noticed at the Read_Me Software Art and Cultures conference in Aarhus, Denmark.
Commendable of the experienced organizers of Contré-Conference is the requisite idea of “discussion and a networked interface” for its participants. This means a series of pre-Contré-Conference sessions to take place through the Internet (Such as the Conference discussion group) and perhaps other means of communications, including possibly small physical group meetings. Logged in the Contré-Conference website are discussions mostly in French, and a few in English and Spanish. Despite the language differences, communications continue on with adjustments undertaken as necessary - for example, a brief summary in English for a French text if not a full translation. In my own website, key concepts that are in Filipino have summaries in English (it seems that abstract concepts can only be translated more effectively into foreign languages through a series of summaries rather than simple and direct translations).
For multi-cultural projects, I would really recommend (after consulting with the participants) acquiring the services of a very good and sympathetic translator rather than requiring a single language as official medium of communication. Two conferences I attended in Taichung and Chungli in Taiwan had excellent translators so that participants can still speak freely in their native languages. Sometimes, even without translations, insofar as the spirit of the speech (for example as it is used in a ritual ceremony) is clarified to the listener, a different level of understanding takes place. This was my experience at Cultural Futures in New Zealand, which excellently demonstrated the power of language as a sensory-cognitive medium.
The detail of language could be what is crucial to Contré-Conference’s proposition that “social and artistic media usages” could introduce breaks in the media-market saturated environment. Of course, when I say language I do not only mean translation - after all, what transformative difference does it make to dub Korean telenovelas into Filipino for the Philippine market? By the detail of language I mean the capacity for linguistic conscientisation, that is, the capacity to challenge linguistic norms including that of silence. I think that this is possible when we understand what it means when concepts are internalized and externalized through language. So, the power in “social and artistic media usages” depends on the diversity of languages (and language-concepts) employed in such practices.
Within the theme of “Infomarkets”, Contré-Conference proposes the city as a kind of micro-satellite of the global market phenomena. Cities, since Homer’s day (a citadel upon a hill to which confederated families living in the country round about it resorted in times of actual or threatened invasion), essentially refer to inhabited places (thus somewhat making “living in cities” a rather redundant statement), with historical meanings attached to the term as civilizations come and go (i.e. the direction of refuge - whether towards or down from a mountain or hill - changes throughout history). Currently, cities as informational landscapes are emerging again as material and structure of critical representations and discourse. In Filipino (from the Sibuhanon language), “city” is “lungsod”, a term close to Bahasa Indonesian “lungsur” and Bahasa Melayu “longsor”which means “to slide down.” “Lungsod” (as does the term “city”) perhaps pertains to those inhabited places found as one slides down the mountains (which already implies differentiation between living in the mountains and living in the plains), or those settlements found in the plains, as in “cities in plains”, chief of which for example, interestingly enough, are Sodom and Gomorrah.
Lecturing about “Multiple City”, a well-known curator (based in New York and Havana and how that is possible?) coming to the Philippines this month says in a press release about his lecture that the “connection between art and city has not evolved very far yet, but will probably indicate a main course of action for artistic practice in the near future. Multiple dynamics of fragmentation, hybridization, and contrast have given the city its peculiar character.” The German theorist Adorno said that the culture industry commodifies and standardizes all art, then fools you into thinking that it is new and original in order to sell it. This makes the contemporary art curator a neo-fascist. Here, the difference between mainstream contemporary art and the artistic position at Contré-Conference is that (if I am not mistaken) Contré-Conference recognizes the possibility of being informed by the artist whereas mainstream contemporary art fascistically “informs” the artist what to do to become “famous.” Trevor recalls when a curator (of contemporary art) went to an artist’s studio, looking at the artist’s charcoal drawings on the wall and declared “it’s too bad you’re not doing much work anymore,” to which the artist retorts “but those are my work!” And the curator explains, “but these are not video!”
The complexities within art, mass culture and globalisation are proposed for investigation in the second theme of “Art, Media, Identities.” Here, Contré-Conference challenges center-periphery readings of art and society, as well as a myriad of other mainstream readings of the processes of globalisation. With researches and theoretical discussions pursued within the context of production (in all its ethnic specificities and hopefully without degenerating into postmodern anxiety), perhaps Contré-Conference could provide the space for more and the often marginalized vistas on art, media and identity.
