Introductory
notes by Valerie Lamontagne and Pat Badani
Thread 1: Valérie Lamontagne
"The Wizard of Oz" concludes with Dorothy clicking her
ruby slippers and intoning: "There's no place like home",
which transports her back to the comforting, predictable environment
that is 'home'. Filmed in late 1930's America, the film reflects
notions of displacement and Otherness that were being questioned
through the transforming effects of mass-emigrations, world travel,
and early technology. Today, distance and difference have become
so blurred through the aegis of hyper-technology and global processes,
that the fixed identity of home - of being in and of a place - has
shifted to the point of collapse.
Samuel Weber notes that, "Ever since Aristotle's Physics, 'place'
has been defined in terms of immanence, stability and containment,
as 'the innermost motionless boundary of what contains'.
In the goings-on of modern technics, by contrast, this 'innermost
boundary' is forced, driven out of its motionless state. It begins
to move. To be sure, this was already true in ancient technics,
which was a way of unsecuring, of unsheltering, of displacing. In
its modern version, however, the principle of containment no longer
serves as a self-evident prerequisite of order. Instead, place as
container breaks up and in so doing discloses the problematic consequences
of an ordering that can no longer be taken for granted." This
unraveling of the boundaries of 'place' is at the heart of Dorothy's
adventure in Oz. The possibility of a better life, always located
elsewhere - somewhere over the rainbow - is endemic of modern living
where no place is contained and no home fixed. In displacement,
now a commonality of a global society, we collectively share a shifting
definition of placement, heritage and belonging. This new 'home',
located in a fluid zone extending cultures, geography and history,
is at once liberating and a cause for anxiety. Homi K. Bhabha reminds
us that: "It is in the emergence of the interstices - the overlap
and displacements of domains of difference - that the intersubjective
and collective experiences of nationness, community interest, or
cultural value are negotiated." These cultural interstices
permit us to dream of a better place and to embrace the Otherness
within and around ourselves as we redefine the essence of 'home'.
In her current exhibition at Ispace, Where Life is Better, Pat Badani
invites us to question "Where is life better?". Badani's
oeuvre has long explored notions of place and belonging. A citizen
of the world herself, her work is acutely involved in the process
of setting these questions at play within multimedia installations
that invite the public-at-large to experience and participate in
her knowledge-building form of art. In the exhibition Where life
is better, we discover mutable texts and audio/video archives rich
with first-person reflections. Comments on the notion of home made
by over 300 individuals, culled through her Hometransfer.org website,
are transcribed into an interactive book that invites visitors to
further add personal observations on a graffiti wall of notes. We
are also called upon to 'play' with dwelling-shaped objects, transforming
a series of wall-mounted sentences on the topic of a better life,
into a personalized and democratic narrative. Finally, a multimedia
installation work features candid testimonies culled from a series
of interviews filmed during the artist's research into her upcoming
project: Where are you from? In her present exhibition, Badani offers
us the opportunity to experience globally shifting notions of 'place',
'home' and Otherness in a transnational meditation on the question
of what a "better life" means today.
Thread 2: Pat Badani
Where Life is Better is the latest of 8 projects exploring material
and immaterial environments in which we live: the home, the city,
and virtual territories. These projects, produced since 1994, deal
with the anxiety of no place from various perspectives: lost place,
the place regained, the projected ideal place (or merely better)
and the search for it through displacement.
The multimedia installation at Ispace results from a recent experience.
In 2002-03, I set off to trace my personal geography through 6 cities:
Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Montreal, Toronto, Paris and Chicago.
I videotaped conversations about a "better-life" with
average individuals in each of these hybrid cities. The works at
Ispace include a selection of voices from the people I encountered
in this journey. These voices are juxtaposed to written testimonies
on "feeling at home" that I have collected since 2000
from global passersby on the www.
My works are a laboratory for me to filter personal experience,
and build knowledge and understanding. Because I think communication
is essential to knowledge, some of these projects also create discrete
communicational spaces that allow citizens-at-large to become actively
involved in the knowledge-building process through their participation.
Bakers, medical doctors, architects, the average passer-by in city
spaces and on the www, have become part of a collaborative process
in which the meaning of the work is expanded through their gestures,
texts and dialogue.
The exhibition Where Life is Better at I space, likewise creates
a discrete communicational space by means of several interrelated
elements that explore notions about a better way of life. Visitors
to the gallery interact with the works and participate in the production
of meaning by expressing choices and opinions.
Where Life is Better
Valérie Lamontagne interviews Pat Badani
VL: Where Life is Better involves cultural research, participatory
installation and documentary-based archives, which are situated
at the juncture of material and digital environments. Could you
further explain why you choose to combine these elements both in
your process and presentation?
PB: My work is at the juncture of a number of practices. My choices
are made during a process of discovery and analysis, and are contingent
upon the language that best embodies the requirements of each project.
As for research: my work is experiential, a way to understand where
I am (we are) in the present and explore some possibilities for
the future. This has led me to readings in several disciplines including
media and new media. I also sometimes form collaborations with individuals
in the social sciences to research issues related to space, place,
cities, communication, global processes and digital environments.
Documentary and installation as work process and presentation have
been part of my work for a while. In the mid 90's I explored photographic
travelogues and included these productions within installations.
Towards the end of the 90's, I started to favour performative projects
as an extension to previous explorations. The new projects functioned
as a forum for dialogue where photography and video became a way
to document the time-based situations. At this time, I also began
investigating the www as a way to include global, delocalised participants
in projects that involved the public sphere and participation.
In Where Life is Better at "Ispace", there are 2 object-based
installations that invite participation, a video projection and
a Web-work (www.hometransfer.org/betterlife.html) with audio documents
I have collected since 2002. The gallery visitor reconstructs these
multiple channels of information that unfold in time and interrelate
in space. I am interested in the potential for engagement with others
offered by these diversified practices and presentation strategies.
VL: The home is a reoccurring theme in your work. Gaston Bachelard
notes how "He [the individual] experiences the house in its
reality and in its virtuality, by means of thoughts and dreams."
Where Life is Better addresses the notion of telematic "belonging"
wherein home is also both a construct and a reality. Is home a "what"
or a "where" or both?
PB: The word home often brings up images of a physical structure
like a house, but the word's accepted meaning usually refers to
the social and psychological shelter created in the domestic environment,
the affective and relational support that one might receive there,
including family. Home can also refer to location, such as the homeland
and its associated concept of nationhood.
For many of us today, ideas of home have become an unstable, anxiety
ridden territory. This may be due to the perpetual changing nature
of contemporary living conditions, with relocation and mass migration
contributing to a sense of no place. Those who are displaced often
need to count upon some reliable place, one that may oscillate between
the past -a place to go back to, and the future -a place to go towards,
like a better place.
But home can also refer to a state of being, a condition of connectedness
where notions about selfhood and belonging can be re-created, a
state where one is in place and @ home. This space in the mind is
a virtual one, a notion that might re-orient definitions of "what"
or "where" attached to definitions of home.
"Telematics" , computer mediated communication like the
Internet, provides instantaneous links between geographically dispersed
individuals. Because it transcends the body's placement in a physical
structure or location, "telematics" has opened new horizons
in the process of negotiating relationships between people and places,
offering alternative structures for the creation of knowledge and
of being at a distance , potentially enhancing the condition I mention
above. But, the question of "telematic belonging" which
had a seductive utopian note when cyberspace was presented as a
pure no place where human interaction could occur in a democratic
and cerebral way is now relativized.
VL: William J. Mitchell notes how the "worldwide computer network
- the electronic agora - subverts, displaces, and radically redefines
our notions of gathering, place, community, and urban life."
Are you, with the projects Where Life is Better and Where Are You
From?, aiming to bridge the gap between networked and non-networked
communities who do not have access to self-expression on the www?
And if so, what are your strategies for diversified community participation?
PB: With these projects my focus is to explore notions of belonging
articulated through mobility as well as the relationship between
global processes and local environments, more so than networked
and non-networked communities.
As for general strategies: a number of my projects happen outside
the studio and in non-cultural/art-venues. These projects are interventions
that establish a spatial and temporal order in public space in carefully
chosen urban settings and, more recently, on the www, which I use
as an extension of the urban. I organise activities that incorporate
direct lived experience to reveal a certain morphology of everyday
life through encounter and dialogue. These works are participatory,
in that part of the production results from people's active involvement
in the project.
My aim is to establish contact and exchange with ordinary individuals,
representing diverse constituencies (economic, cultural, linguistic).
With regards to interviewing the public in city spaces; I develop
a number of specific strategies in order to engage a diversified
community. These strategies include international travel; communication
in several languages; the skill to relate to different cultural
codes in combination to the ability to strike conversations with
strangers; familiarity with urban spaces in several countries and
their use by the public; trandisciplinary research and team work.
Regarding strategies to engage participation on the www; I set up
simple systems in Web-works that include: interactivity through
dynamic graphics, streaming audio and video, and participation through
available Web-based communication technology. The www is an inclusive
platform, a vehicle for production, distribution and participation
in which I can also access broadcast time in a way that I cannot
through other systems (i.e. television). In addition, reaching a
diversified global community is potentially greater on the www.
With works like Where are you from? (currently in its pre-production
stage) I aim to explore everyday encounters in more than one local
space. My intention is to engage the public sphere simultaneously
on the www and in city spaces, integrating the displacement favoured
by global networks.
VL: Where Life is Better, is a parallel project to Where Are You
From? which aims to map cyber/analog space as well as private /
public space. And yet, it could be argued that the virtual/analog
space dichotomy has become increasingly blurred. "As such,
interactions within cyberspace, whether it involves altering records,
conducting business or monitoring the city, have consequences on
people in real space." Do you believe that technology affords
greater agency to impact changes within real space? And if so, what
becomes of real space?
PB: My work has explored spatial mapping for a decade in city spaces,
natural spaces, workspaces, and living spaces. Since 1999 I have
also been interested in mapping social space in electronic environments,
specifically on the www. I see one space as a continuum of the other,
differentiated yet complementary. I am interested in developing
processes that bridge virtual/analog as well as private/public spaces,
and blur boundaries between a number of habitually distinct categories.
I believe that technology has always offered humanity new possibilities
and greater agency. This is also true in cyberspace. Seen as a computer
mediated space that extends social interaction, it structures daily
living with a constant flow of information and exchange. The re-structuring
of "real" space, or physical space (which is in constant
flux due to numerous forces), have included a re-evaluation of notions
of place and presence. Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai argues that
electronic mediation offers "new resources and disciplines
for the construction of imagined selves and worlds".
VL: "As a recording witness of events and fictions, video has
become our individual and collective memory." Video and audio
documents stand in for the voices of the people you interview in
Where Life is Better and is an integral source in the development
of the work. In regards to video as a repository for "memories"
how do you perceive your role of author/filter/editor/facilitator
for these recorded public discussions? What are your goals when
interviewing the public and how do you reconcile your precarious
role as a post-modern "author"?
PB: My role when collecting video and audio documents from everyday
individuals, who follow no script but rather respond to my prompting,
is to favor communication within a topic of discussion framed by
a system I have developed ahead of time. My approach is informed
by recording considerations in documentary film and journalism,
and by culture-centered interviewing techniques used by counselors,
which I integrate to performative situations that place the participant
at the center of the stage. The value of interviewing the public
resides in that I can present multifocal viewpoints to a subject,
and deflect a single or Manichaean perspective. With the upcoming
Live Webcast project Where are you from?, my role as facilitator
during the course of interviewing the public is emphasized over
my role of author/editor, because the captured reality will be broadcast
live. This approach questions who is actually producing and controlling
the meaning of the work (me, the participant, the audience?) and
accentuates my tenuous position as "author". Editing has
the virtue of selectivity, and I rely on it to process and present
very specific material that I have archived, as in the case of video-clips
in my web-work http://www.hometransfer.org/where/stories.html, as
well as with the audio documents presented in this exhibition. With
this approach, I sort out what I think is the most meaningful information,
based on critical analysis and cultural understanding. When I integrate
this material from the everyday into the texture of an art-piece
that is not about purely documenting reality, a certain degree of
subjectivity and artifice inevitably comes into play; considerations
which I need to negotiate as author.
VL: "Otherness" has become an ever-present axiom through
which we can define the ebb and flow of cultures, identity and place.
Julia Kristeva notes how "The strange happiness of the foreigner
consists in maintaining that fleeing eternity or that perpetual
transience." The notion of perpetual "otherness"
in Where Life is Better seems a fitting investigation. Does this
reflect some of the autobiographical aspects of your work, for example,
your nomadism and trans-cultural identity?
PB: Kristeva's book "Strangers to Ourselves", reveals
pertinent questions/answers about my own wandering biography marked
by repeated self-exile. Driven perhaps by the desire to escape the
notion of origin and by curiosity about a promised land elsewhere,
I have felt at home in that in between space that Kristeva labels
"perpetual transience". My projects reflect the various
stages of enacting a nomadic process inhabiting this liminal space.
Where life is better certainly reflects these concerns, and incorporates
autobiographical identity markers (like the house-like shapes that
derive from fragments of a puzzle from France, where I lived in
the 90's; or the location of the projected sky that I filmed two
months ago in Buenos Aires, the city where I was born; or the narrative
elements included in the multimedia audio, captured recently in
Montreal). These sometimes-cryptic personal markers are part of
the work's topology. But the work transcends the personal scope,
by incorporating and interweaving the voices of multiple Others.
The sum of the two creates a far greater and more generative texture.
Bibliography
-Samuel
Weber, "Mass Mediauras: form technics media". Stanford
University Press: Stanford, California,1996. p.70.
-Homi K. Bhabha, "The Location of Culture". Routledge:
London and New York, 1994. p.2.
-Gaston Bachelard. "The Poetics of Space". Translated
from the French by Maria Jolas. Beacon Press: Boston,1964. p.5.
-"Telematics"- A term coined in 1978 by Simon Nora and
Alain Minc.
-Edward A. Shanken, "Tele-Agency: Telematics, Telerobotics,
and the Art of Meaning". Art Journal 59:2 (Sum 2000): 64-77.
-Lisa Nakamura, "Cybertypes - Race, Ethnicity, and Identity
on the Internet". Routledge: NY & London, 2002. P. 87.
-William J. Mitchell, "City of Bits: Space, Place, and the
Infobahn". MIT Press: Massachusetts, 1996. p.8.
-Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin, "Mapping Cyberspace". Routledge:
London, 2001. p.189.
-Arjun Appadurai, "Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions
of Globalization". University of Minnesota Press. Minneapolis,
1996. p.3.
-Louise Poissant, "Video: Writing History" in Peggy Gale
and Lisa Steele, Editors. Video re/View. Art Metropole and V Tape:
Toronto, 1996. p.190.
-Julia Kristeva, "Strangers to Ourselves". Columbia University
Press: New York, 1994. p.4.
Valérie
Lamontagne is an artist, freelance art critic and curator based
in Montréal, Canada. She regularly writes about new media
and performance art in international publications, and is co-founder
of MobileGaze.com, a net.art site featuring art and interviews with
artists and digital media producers.
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