[Reader-list] [Announcements] Invitation to the Wherehouse

[jeebesh at sarai.net]

This is to invite you to an opening of our work, The Wherehouse, in
Brussels at the Palais de Beaux Art, and to share with you some of the
thoughts that we have been engaging in the process of our work on this
project.

The Wherehouse opens on the 6th of May, as part of the programme of
'Revolution/Restoration' curated by Barbara Vanderlinden and Dirk
Snauwert, and we would be very happy if you could find the time to come
and be with us for the opening, on Thursday, the 6th of May at 18:00 hrs
(if you are in or near Brussels), or take time out to visit the
installation during its stay at the Palais de Beaux Arts (7.05. 2004 >
06.06.2004).

The address of the venue is -

PALAIS DES BEAUX-ARTS BRUXELLES
(CENTRE FOR FINE ARTS, BRUSSELS)
rue Ravenstein 23, 1000 Bruxelles
info: 02 507.84.44
(nearest metro stop : Central Station/Gare Centrale/Centraal Station)

To see the online rescension of the project, visit
www.the-wherehouse.net

For more information on the show, see

http://www.bozar.be/fr/wherehouse.html (in French)
http://www.bozar.be/nl/wherehouse.html (in Dutch)

Below is a brief note by us about the Wherehouse.

Looking forward to seeing you, and to hearing from you

best,
Raqs Media Collective
raqs at sarai.net
---------------------------------------------------------

THE WHEREHOUSE
Raqs Media Collective

The Wherehouse is a constellation of images, objects and annotational
possibilities designed to posit a speculative archaeology of/for the
present moment. It constitutes an assemblage of reflections on time,
memory, movement, stasis and location in a world where some people  are
forced to abandon home, and others can be seen as being imprisoned by
their assumptions of stability about their present location. The
constellation intends to raise questions about our moorings in the
materiality of the world we inhabit, and our certitudes about our
destinies.

The work emerges from Raqs’s ongoing concerns with multiple forms of
legality and illegality in the contemporary world, and a period of
engagement in the course of conversations with residents of detention
centres for illegal aliens in Brussels, ex-illegal aliens, and recent
refugees in Frankfurt am Main and Hanau, as well as by a drive to collect
material objects from the inhabitants, and streets, of Brussels.

The first phase of the project took place in March in Frankfurt during a
Raqs residency in Frankfurt at Das TAT, at the invitation of its artistic
director Louise Neri, and involved engagements with refugees, ex aliens
and migrants as well as activists working with them, and culminated in a
'reading performance for a listening room' at the TAT in collaboration
with AndCompany&Co, a Frankfurt based association of independent theatre
practitioners, performance artists, musicians and writers.

***********

Refugees, exiles, asylum seekers, or any people who cross borders
illegally (without papers), leaving behind situations of deprivation and
hardship, often find themselves incarcerated in detention centres where
they await assimilation or deportation. They have no way of knowing
whether or not their application for asylum and residence in the country
they have come to will be accepted. They are imprisoned by the clock and
exiled from the calendar. They have no way of knowing whether tomorrow, or
next week, or next year, they will be put on a plane that flies them back
to the war or the fear or the hunger that they sought to escape in the
first place. When they leave home, they are often compelled to leave
behind them most of what constitutes the material reality of their lives,
carrying with them only that which is most essential, urgent or especially
precious.

The cities that such people (refugees, asylum seekers, exiles, border
crossers) come to are regarded by their legal inhabitants as stable spaces
where nothing is going to change drastically. This notion of stability
forecloses the possibility of seeing any space as vulnerable to the
seismic upheavals of contemporary history. It assumes that the upheaval
endemic to Kabul will never touch Brussels.

The engagements that we make with the residents of detention centres focus
on a body of images of material objects created and collected by us. These
object-images may be suggestive, and are open to be read as provocations
for memories or thoughts of the abandoned material universe.

The 'illegals'/migrants, or ex-illegals and residents of the detention
centres are requested to annotate a book of photographs made by us
containing images of quotidian objects of general use. These annotations
are registered on to the website of the project in the form of a database
of narratives linked to images. These registrations can also be made by
anyone who wants to inscribe their thoughts on to the website, and be a
part of this narrative database. The annotated notebooks and web pages
constitute one node of the work.

Simultaneously, the project envisages inviting people from the city of
Brussels located between the Petit Chateau and the Palais des Beaux Arts.

People were asked to gift a single object that they no longer use, or are
willing to discard, to the project. The process also involved collecting
objects abandoned on the streets of Brussles. These objects, which range
from furniture to notebooks to matchboxes, to implements, are arrayed in a
grid with tags speculating as to their provenance (their previous
custodian) as if in an archaeological site following a dig.

The two sets of objects (and the annotations accompanying them), with
their two trajectories of provenance, intersect in the work and are offset
by projections and layers of imagery taken from the outer walls of the
'Petit Chateau', a detention centre in Brussels.

The Wherehouse seeks to engender a reflection on the circumstances in
which time thickens to an eternal present, and space is folded inside out.
Where the outer wall of a detention centre is the inner wall of a city and
when due to circumstances beyond their control, those who ventured out
(crossing borders) are cloistered and the plans that they made for the
future rendered futile by the casual and catastrophic perambulations of
our times. A time for instance, when an entity called Europe, expands it
borders even as it raises its walls, contracts, closes in on itself.

By locating itself within Brussels, a city at the epicentre of these
upheavals, and within the discourse generating apparatus of contemporary
art, The Wherehouse seeks to provoke an encounter between abandoned
materials and abandoned memories with a view to the asking of questions,
to the telling of (and listening to) stories, to the sharing of histories
and to the necessary labours of memory and reflection - on realities that
are often wished away.

Credits
A project by Raqs Media Collective
Print and Website Design: Mrityunjay Chatterjee
Website Coding: T. Meyarivan
Sound/Music: Sascha Sulimma (AndCompany&Co)

Acknowledgments:
Barbara Vanderlinden, Dirk Snauwert, Louise Neri, AndCompany&Co, Abbasin
Sher, Hagen Kopp, Rana Dasgupta
Fedasil, Brussels
Das TAT, Frankfurt
Migrants, Refugees, Asylum Seekers and People without Papers in
Frankfur, Hanau and Brussels who participated in the project, and many of
whom would not like to be named.
The residents of Brussels


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