.

The ingenuity of underground

waterway and irrigation system in
dry lands spread all over Central
Asia. A reminder of deep connections and movements.

Transgression and
Syncretism

Photothe author

YOU MI

30
.
(
). , , ,
, .


, , ,
.


.

.
.

From the book An Atlas of Ancient Maps in China: Qing,

Cultural Relics Publishing House, Beijing, 1997

, ()

. , , ,
. , ,
,
.

.

?

,
.
, ,
. ,
,
.
,
.
.

().
(16361912)


.

.

Qing edition / Territorial

Map of Xinjiang: the Taklamakan
desert, the worlds second biggest
shifting sand desert had remained
elusive in this Qing period (1636
1912) depiction of Xinjiang. At the
time, however, rigorous cartography
had been carried out in most parts
of the world where the Western
powers had set foot on.

.
.
.
,

Some thirty years ago, I asked Toynbee what historical

period and place he would most like to have been born in.
He replied Xinjiang (now the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous
Region of China) soon after the start of the Common Era,
because Central Asia at that time was a meeting point for
Buddhist, Indian, Greek, Iranian, and Chinese cultures.
Daisaku Ikeda
The program Transgression and Syncretism takes the silk road
as a figuration of thinking and demystifying method, which
questions the constructed codes of culture and politics that
define borders today in terms of nation, ethnicity, ideology,
standard of development, and fixed in temporal scale. Inspired
by travelers on the silk road, historical and trans-historical, real
and fictive, we embark on a journey that transgresses such
gridded and coded structures that govern our thinking and
action today.
Silk road resounds for us not merely as a romantic image
for trade and mobility, indeed we may have been as impulsively
enthusiastic about the volume of historical land-route trade as
we are about the prospect of transnational super infrastructures today. Both have to be examined in context and in the
way they define movement, space and relation to the centers.
Archeological findings of tax records at a key entry point to
medieval China suggest the size of caravans and volumes of
trade were rather consistently small. This does not, however,
discount the flux of people, ideas, forms of communication and
styles of life, which results in the most syncretic visual, cultural,
linguistic, religious practices still to be seen today. The
historical routes connecting a great number of nodal points
through which goods and knowledge flow could be said to be
a decentralized network.
At the core of the quest for us is, what propels the nomad,
both literal and metaphorical, to be always on the move and
reaching beyond the horizon? For the nomads, space is not
distributed to man but man is distributed to space, hence
mobility is not the cause but the necessary symptom of
transgression. As so many historical records reveal, traveling in
the deserts and steppes negotiation with the exterior forces,
the stars, the wind, and relying on the instinct of ones animal
companion. I marveled at the rich collection of preserved
medieval paper scraps from the International Dunhuang
Project documenting divination practices, star atlas and
almanacpractices of astral negotiation. As I was dreaming of
applying these old techniques for instructing life today, a friend
said to me, deadpan, But, may we say, the stars they saw
back then are stars from even further back in history because
of the distance light has to travelsome of them might have
decayed. The stars we see today may actually be the stars
shining above the medieval men.

Navigation has different realities today. The opposite of the

nomad figuration is the self-assured person who parcelizes
spaces, nurtures land, builds cities, establishes laws, categorizes knowledge, draws borders, and so on and so forth
awhole history is to be written since the moment nature is
detached from man. A primary binarism, its long-reaching
effects still play out in todays geopolitics, society of control
and crisis of depletion. Artificially created borders make
tangible impact on livelihood and rewrite culture and history.
And while borders are the tangible forms to control the flow of
the less entitled, invisible networks of capitalistic global
governance seizes everyone through its machinery of knowledge production and desire modulation even before ones
cognitive registration. Late capitalism assumes the form of
centralized network par excellence. Though its outreach is
transnational, their architecture is structurally centralized and
programmed for consolidation of capitalization.
The aim is not to go back to any romanticized original state
but to ask, in what way can the nomadic spirit find contemporary incarnation? Ethical judgment aside, it is interesting to
observe that a genuine decentralized network today is dubbed
Dark Silk Road, be it historical camaraderie or ironical wit that
informs its name. In short, it is the dark net, or the overt
network of enciphered communication, which allows trading of
goods and services anonymously and which adopts bank-less
monetary transactions using the bitcoin. Attempts to seize it
and close down some of its hosts have not been successful; it
revives and thrives elsewhere in the matrix of Internet. Aparallel economy that escapes the capture of the corporate
capitalistic machine as it promises, its long-term efficacy will
still have to be seen.
Another instance of going against the grain. At the height
of scientific explorations of Central Asia in the second half of
19th century, when cartography serviced the military and
designs of roads railways met the interest of capitalists,
French anarchist geographer lise Reclus (18301905) saw
geology and geography being mined for geopolitical leverage.
His writing would resound today, when a new wave of highspeed railway projects is underway to connect Chinese and
European commercial centers via Central Asia. Reclus vision
could be interpreted as a slower silk road, indeed he saw the
silk road as a geohistorical marker not of maximized commodity ow but of humanitys collective self-awareness of forming
one body with the planet itself (Tamara Chin).
This return to the planet itself reminds us of the deep
history we tend to forget. Some fifty million years ago the
continent of India collided with the Eurasian landmass, causing
the Tibetan plateau to stretch east- and westward, creating
the largest mountain belt on Earth, a spiral galaxy of massive

Transgression and
Syncretism

Introduction

You Mi

, ,

, , , ,

, , .

) (prehend)

? ,

()

. ,

, , , .

( )
,
.
,
, .

.
. 19
,

,
(lise Reclus, 18301905)
.

,
.
,

( ).

. 5 ,

.

, 700
.
.
Or.8210/
S.3326 ( CC0 1.0).

Star chart from Dunhuang, probably

dating to c.700. This section shows
a circular chart of the North Polar
region. This is from the digitalized
catalogue of International Dunhuang
Project, catalogue entry: Or.8210/
S.3326 (licensed under CC0 1.0).

. ,


3D .

Screenshot of Apple Map 3D view

of Pamir highlands with glitch.

Transgression and
Syncretism

Photothe author

Introduction

peaks radiating clockwise into the Karakorum, Hindu Kush,

Pamir, Kunlun, and Himalayan mountain ranges.
The thrusting compulsion, after what is in the eyes of
geological time a short time span, continues to push the
Mount Everest to rise today. If this is the way earth prehends
to borrow a Whiteheadian term deriving from comprehend
for non-cognitive graspingand continues to prehend the
force, in what form does the human prehend it? In other words,
in what form is the geo-dynamism transformed into the human
realm, if only registered pre-personally? It must also survive,
Ispeculate, in a kind of cosmic identification and transcendental imagination, in the sustained human wish to transgress
boundaries, to see beyond its promised horizons, and to ride
on the force of nature.
The program follows the dramaturgical arch illustrated
above and is composed of a series of performatively interwoven lecture performances, screenings and performances. The
interwovenness and equal footing of the discursive and artistic
enactment aims to make sense of different forms of intelligence. Stretching into three dynamic afternoons and evenings,
and roaming in different spaces of Asian Cultural Center and
beyond, they lead the audience into the deep time-space of
Eurasia.

.
, ,

,
,

[ 1]

, 11, 2014 [ 2]

( - ).

. ,
, .

.
, ,

, ,

. 6

( ),

12

. ,

(
) .

. ,

192030

, ,

.
1978

,

(

5
,

.
,

).

,
(

.

,

.
(,
, )
,

).

(counter-image)
.

, , ,

.

.


,

.


.

(
)?

. (
)

.
( )
.

.
(: )

.



.



.

3 11

M. S. Bulatov, Geometricheskaia garmonizatsiia v arkhi

tekture Srednei Azii 915 vv. (Moscow: Nauka, 1978)

Puay-peng Ho
Experiencing the Silk Road
Lecture
The Silk Road linking East Asia with
Western Region conjures different
images for different people. While
there had been numerous studies
on the myriad aspects of life along
the Silk Road, it is near impossible
to re-create or re-present the historical Silk Road in its totality. This
talk will present vignettes of Silk
Road experience seen through people group as expressed in art and
surviving literature between 6th and
12th centuries. Art as a social construct in tradition period is a potent
medium for expressing human aspiration and emotion. Obviously, what
we call art may just be utilitarian
objects for contemporary people
making, using and symbolizing the
objects. They were instruments for
the projection of the meaning of life.
The talk will present several
instances where life along the Silk
Road was vividly presented in art
and literature serving as the basis to
have a totality of experience of living, traveling, worshipping, or governing within different local communities along the historical Silk Road.

Igor Demchenko
Architectural Heritage, Nation
Building, and the Cult of Science
in Soviet Central Asia
Lecture [fig. 1]
Architectural heritage is the most
visible representation of the past,
but we almost never encounter it in
its pristine form: it is censored,
edited, and reframed. It is hardly
surprising that the Soviet Union with
its high level of political centralization, expansionist ideology, and
planned economy was systematically reordering the past.
In Central Asia, the southern
periphery of the Soviet Union, atheist Bolsheviks saw no value in the
religious culture of Islamic cities
inherited from Russian imperial governorate of Turkestan, the emirate
of Bukhara and the khanate of Khiva
that they rearranged into five
national republics of Soviet Central
Asia in the 1920s and the 1930s.
One would expect little interest in
monumental Islamic architecture
(mosques, madrasahs, sufi mausoleums) on their behalfbut the reality was considerably more complex.
Regional architectural heritage,
albeit significantly reshaped by restoration and selective demolition,
was mobilized for the purposes of
building socialist nations and establishing the line of progressive historic development according to the
Marxist laws of history.
The quest for the progressive is
the central story of the lecture. In
Soviet ideological discourse the
progressive (as opposed to retrograde) was associated with the
rational and the scientific.
Architecture was progressive inasmuch as it reflected the historic
development of natural sciences
and mathematics in its structure
and design. I will specifically discuss
the ideological underpinnings of
obsessive search for geometric
harmonization and proportional
principles in Islamic architecture of
Central Asia that defined the Soviet
historiography. Finally I will use several restoration cases to unveil the
messages embodied by Soviet
architectural historians and restorers in Islamic monuments co-opted
for the purposes of trans-conceptual indoctrination.

Aslan Gaisumov
Prospect Pobedy
Video, 11 min, 2014 [fig. 2]
The main character of in the video
Prospect Pobedy is the city of
Grozny. The city has been almost
entirely rebuilt by Chechnyas
incumbent president Ramzan
Kadyrov. The video is a succession
of panoramic city views with grandiose theatre buildings and concert
halls, Grozny Citys high-rises, fountains with colourful illuminations,
new mosques, museums and monuments intermingled with government regalia: the presidents portraits, state slogans and the names
of state organizations. The combined effect reflects the governments policy of prosperity and
well-being. The video allures to
Soviet era documentaries. Indeed,
even the music featured in the project is the original score of the 1978
documentary USSR Cities. Grozny
suggesting the projects possible
ambition to rival soviet films and
their skillful editorial work of turning
imagery into propaganda.
However, beneath the masqueraded prosperity, like the reverse
side of a ceremonial portrait, gleams
a different image, that of Groznys
half-destroyed Cultural Centre,
where the video is being shown.
This contrast in the register of perception is a litmus test of the official
image of Grozny. It makes one think
of the past war and the price paid
for the demonstrative well-being.
Just like the city itself, Aslan
Gaisumovs project is an intersection of the present and the past,
proving once again that history is
always written in the present. (Text
by Elena Yaichnikova)

Transgression and
Syncretism

initially drawn based on the type of

economy in Soviet Central Asia,
Uzbekistansedentary agriculture
of the plains; Tajikistansedentary
agriculture of mountain valleys;
Kazakhstannomadic agriculture of
the steppes; Kyrgyzstannomadic
agriculture of the mountains; and
Turkmenistanagriculture of the
very dry steppes and the desert.
The program turns around the question of nationalism and rationalism
at play in heritage politics in Soviet
Central Asia (Demchenkos talk) and
construction of identity in post-
Chechen-war Grozny (Galsumovs
film). Border transgressing becomes
real in insurgency moments in the
instance of the Druze community
living in border zones between Syria
and Israel/Palestine, but it also happens with voice as medium and in
the conceptual realm of translation
(Abu Hamdans film). Further, the
politics of transliteration may be
traced in nation building and colonial projects, but may at the same
time harbor subversiveness and
sensuality (Slavs and Tatars lecture
performance). The immediate
counter-image to border regime is
no less dire: what is defter at disregarding border than transnational
capitalism (Revells lecture
performance)?
The day is concluded by traditional trance-inducing Sufi music
from Central Asia (concert produced by Mu with Memet).

Courtesy Pinchuk Art Centre and Kromus + Zink, Berlin

March 11

The program kicks off with the past

lives of the silk road, or the routes of
connections across Eurasia and
beyond. Historical moments are
revisited when differences in culture, daily practices, and their linguistic and visual expressions are
negotiated and come to give rise to
syncretic forms (Hos talk). More
than a conceptual and scholarly
idea, syncretic moments are intimate and produce lived realities that
essentially challenge the founding
of what is the self and what is not.
The history of encounters and
syncretism is to be confronted with
regimes of nationalism and nationalism-based imperialism, which is
reflected in borders of the tangible
and ideological kind in recent history. For example, borders were

88.7,

The Tranny Tease

, 15, 2013 [ 3]

. , 2012

, 2009
[ 5]

[ 6]

[ 4]

2040 ,

( )

, ,

88.7,

.
,

,
10

24 ,

The Tranny Tease ,

,

88.7,

, ,

,

.

. The Tranny Tease

,
.

,
,

,

/
,

( ),
( ), (12

)

.

Khhhhhhh
, 2012/2016
2012
(Mousse/Moravian Gallery)
.
, [kh]
, ,
.
,
,
,

Courtesy the artist

Courtesy the artist

3 11

Tobias Revell
88.7, Stories from the First
Transnational Traders
Installation, presented as lecture
performance, 2012 [fig. 4]

Language Gulf in the Shouting Valley

is an audio essay and audiovisual
installation about the politics of
language and the conditions of
voice faced by the Druze community living between Palestine/Israel
and Syria. Recordings of the Druze
Soldiers working as interpreters in
the Israeli Military Court system in
the West Bank and Gaza are contrasted that with recordings from
the Shouting Valley, Golan Heights,
where the Druze population gather
on both sides of the Israeli/Syrian
Border and shout across the jurisdictions to family and friends on the
other-side. By inhabiting the border
between Syria and Israel and
Palestine the Druze complicate the
solid divide. If we listen closely to
the oral border produced by this
transnational community, in one
voice we can simultaneously hear
the collaborator and the traitor; the
translator and the transgressor.

In the early 2040s an ex-Soviet

Arktika class icebreaker was recommissioned to act as an experiment
in global finance at 88.7 degrees
latitudethe heart of the arctic sea.
Here it could circumnavigate the
world in twenty-four hours, allowing
it to stay in constant contact with
trading zones throughout the world.
The experiment was a phenomenal
success and proved that growth in
trade could be sustained beyond
the auspices of state regulation.
88.7, Stories From the First
Transnational Traders aptly threads
geopolitical and biopolitical events
after this transnational trading
experiment in a narrative including
the dissolution of the European
Union into a transnational business
entity, the rise of the uniquely North
Korean economic solution and the
regimes favoring homogeny than
individualism, as well as the
research of corporate geneticists
hoping to gain insight into the melding of biological man and market
through the transformation of transnational traders.

Situated on ancient trade routes

between the East and West, the
area of Xinjiang received Islam from
Central Asia in the tenth century,
after Shamanism, Buddhism,
Manichaeism, and Nestorianism, all
of which left their marks in the
region.
Sufism played an important role
in the Islamization of Xinjiang. One
of the reasons of Sufisms success
in the Uyghur region is its fusion
with local cultures, which bestows
the Uyghur people a unique and
localized way of practicing Islam.
Sufi Night will feature famous
Uyghur musician Ubulhesen Memet
and three of his students, who will
treat the audience to Sufi music
from the Xinjiang area of China.
With the introduction by ethnomusicologist Mu Qian, the musicians will
play dastan (musical epic), muqam
(classical suites), and hikmet (musical poetry attributed to the 12th
century saint Khoja Ahmad Yasawi),
and explain the meanings of music
in Islam among the Uyghur people.

Lenin believed that the revolution of

the east begins with the Latinization
(or Romanization) of the alphabets
of all Muslims of the USSR. The
march of alphabets has always
accompanied that of empires
Arabic with the rise of Islam, Latin
with that of Roman Catholicism, and
Cyrillic with the Orthodox Church
and subsequently Bolshevism.
Through the lens of phonetic,
semantic, and theological slippage,
The Tranny Tease explores the
potential for transliterationthe
conversion of scriptsas a strategy
equally of resistance and research
into notions such as identity politics,
colonialism, and faith. With a focus
on the Turkic languages, of the former Soviet Union, as well as the
eastern and western frontiers of the
Turkic sphere, namely Anatolia and
Xinjiang/Uighuristan, The Tranny
Tease attempts not to emancipate
peoples or nations but rather the
sounds rolling off our tongues.
Slavs and Tatars
Khhhhhhh
Poster, 2012/2016
An excerpt from Slavs and Tatars
2012 publication (Mousse/Moravian
Gallery), translated into
Korean.Areconsideration of pedagogy, progress, and the sacred role
of language via the perspective of a
single pesky phoneme, [kh], across
the Hebrew, Cyrillic and Arabic
alphabets,Khhhhhhhexplores the
thorny issues of knowledge versus
wisdom and the immediacy of the
oral versus the remoteness of the
written word thru a fireside chat
around sacred hospitality, Velimir
Khlebnikov, and numerology.
Courtesy the artist

Lawrence Abu Hamdan

Language Gulf in the
ShoutingValley
Installation, presented as screening,
15 min, 2013 [fig. 3]

Mu Qian, Ubulhesen Memet et al.

Sufi Night
Concert [fig. 6]

Transgression and
Syncretism

Slavs and Tatars

The Tranny Tease
Lecture performance,
2009ongoing [fig. 5]

Courtesy the artist

March 11

.
.

?
. ,

.
.

. ,

. ,

, 5 8

, ,

, , .

, ,

4 10

, 7 9

. 400

, ,
. ,

4 .

. ( A. ,

[Record of the Buddhistic Kingdoms], Shanghai:

Kelly and Walsh, 1899, 23)

, ,
.
, ?

10

2 .

, ,

Some Thoughts on Cultural Exchanges Along the Silk Road

The Silk Road conjures up a romantic image for many people possibly due to the exotic stories being told within the
context of the travellers filled with adventurous spirit trotting
the rugged landscape. However, the distance of time and
space should not diminish our understanding of the Silk Road.
Essentially the Silk Road is a network of routes between
Central China and Central Asia, which might be considered to
extend to Japan in the East, or southern Europe in the West.
Travel in ancient time was difficult and treacherous, thus they
would not be undertaken lightly. This is the reason why we
consider those who braved the journey to be courageous and
driven by greater forces. Monks and priests must have been
filled with religious fervor to spread the faith and teaching
across cultural borders. Traders might be driven by business
ventures and gains, embassies and soldiers sent by kings and
emperors might served with loyalty, and explorers filled with
asense of adventure. They were rewarded with witnessing different cultures, interacting with different races, while achieving
their purposes. The excitement of the Silk Road for the people
of the past and for today must be the fascination associated
with a rich tapestry of sights, sounds, and culture across the
vast territory and the transmission of goods, produces and
ideas through such exchanges. How can we understand the
full extent of cultural exchanges?
Needless to say, physical condition must have been harsh
traveling on the Silk Road during 4th10th centuries. Contrary
to the green rolling landscape with gorgeous flowering trees,
alarge section of the Silk Road was covered by the Gobi
desert from western China to Afghanistan. The crossing over
Taklamakan Desert was the most dangerous as suggested by
many travellers in the account of their journey. Famous
Chinese monk Faxian who travelled on the Silk Road from
Chinese capital Changan westward for India in 400CE
described part of his journey through the Taklamakan desert:
In this desert there are a great many evil spirits and hot
winds. Those who encounter them (the winds) perish to a
man. There are neither birds above or beasts below. Gazing
on all sides as far as the eye can reach in order to mark the
track, it would be impossible to succeed but for the rotting
bones of dead men which point the way. (Herbert A Giles,
Record of the Buddhistic Kingdoms, Shanghai: Kelly and
Walsh, 1899, pp. 23)
In the subsequent leg of the journey, Faxian and his companion monks crossed the Snow Mountain into the Pamir, and he
again described the dangerous conditions over the mountain

pass. During the crossing, sadly a member of Faxians group

died. And that was a common tragedy. The other danger
that is frequently mentioned in the travel accounts were the
bandits. Many wall paintings from the Buddhist cave temples
at Kizil or Dunhuang show how travellers were tied up and
possession or goods taken by armed bandits. Despite these
life-threatening mishaps, traders and monks still threaded the
Silk Road with fervor, what drove their zeal and what could
have been the result?
The answers could be simple: traders must have been
motivated by trading profits, and monks and priests by the
transmission of religious practices. During the process, cultural
exchanges must have resulted which is what we consider now
to be the greatest achievement of the ancient trade road.
However, such exchanges might have been direct consequences of trade or simply incidental occurrences. It should
not be taken for granted that we have a full understanding of
what happened with these exchanges. Take for example, the
enjoyment and consumption of the luxurious product of silk
might have spurred both the trade in silk, or even technology
transfer of silk production. And the story of how this technique
was well guarded by the Chinese, legends of how silkworms
must have been smuggled out of China by a princess, speculations of how silk was produced circulating in Roman Europe,
and the break through in its production in 5th century Khotan
and 8th century Persia. Other product such as glass was
brought into China evidenced by Roman and Persian glassware found in many early tombs in China. In addition to craft
products, there were also many fruits and edible products that
were also transmitted along the Silk Road, such as grapes,
pomegranate or spices. Why would such products receive
acceptance and liking by people of all places along the Silk
Road? How could taste be changed?
At another level, cultural practices had also been transmitted along the trade routes, such as music and dance which
were most notable during the 7th to 9th centuries. Historical
records in China suggest that music from Kucha region and
dance from the Western Regions were adored by the emperor
and aristocracy and received widespread enjoyment by
common people. Dresses and cloths, hair ornaments and facial
make up, and living patterns from Western Regions were also
accepted by the Chinese. The adaptation of sitting on
couches, known as foreign beds, must have started during the
4th century, evidenced in Dunhuang wall paintings and other
pictorial media. Was it accepted because lying on couches or
sitting on chairs were more comfortable than kneeling on mat?
Or were there other more symbolic reasons? New architectural types might have been introduced into China and adapted
within the cultural milieu too, such as the pagoda, for religious
purposes.

Transgression and
Syncretism

Motives and
Patterns

Puay-peng Ho

11


.
,

. .

.

.

.
,
,

.

. ,
,
.

12

217 .

Travellers depicted in the wall painting in Mogao Cave 217.

Transgression and
Syncretism

Motives and
Patterns

Finally, the most crucial exchange must have been the

exchange of ideas, religions and the metaphysics. Were the
acceptance of Buddhism in Western Regions and China due to
wide acceptance by the ruling class, or by common people?
Can the official history be trustworthy? It is commonly
accepted that the emperors were the first to have accepted
Buddhism in China in 2nd century CE, but there are carved
evidence of Buddhist images around the time in vernacular
context too. It was also said that transmission of Buddhism
came through the Silk Road from Central Asia to China, but
there were early evidence of Buddhist imageries along the
Eastern coast of China which might suggest a sea transmission route. There must have been multiple transmission paths
and different acceptance patterns. However, one cannot deny
the difficulties in the acceptance of a foreign religion in
traditional societies. So perhaps the best explanation might be
that wide-spread practice of Buddhism was encouraged by
the ruling class in north China who were not ethnic Chinese in
the early period of transmission of the faith. And during this
time, the Buddha might have been seen as a protector deity
and the monks from Western Regions propagated the belief
with magic and supernatural acts. In parallel, we could also
question why Nestorian Christianity, Zoroastrianism,
Manichaeism did not received similar following in China, or why
there were no evidence of the transmission of Confucianism or
Daoism in the West? Much of the pattern of cultural transmission might have been effected incidentally, through idiosyncratic actions of individuals or small communities, rather than
following a grand narrative of transmission. It is thus necessary
to consider each cultural encounter, each form of transmission, each communities along the Silk Road with the detailed
consideration and careful study they deserved.

13

?
,
?
( )
?
, ,
.
,

.
-
, .

.
.
,
.
1940 1980

. 1920 1930
, .

,
.
(Kunst
wollen)
,

.
, (
) .
, . ,
.
.
,
.
1920

14

.

, 1970 .
.

Bibi-Khanym Mosque before the

restoration. Postcard published by
the Central Committee of
Uzbekistan Communist Party,
Moscow, 1970. Authors private
collection.

. .

 M. S.
.

M. S. Bulatovs proportional analysis

and the reconstruction of BibiKhanym Mosque.

Bibi-Khanym Mosque after the

restoration.

How is history structured? Is it a compendium of roughly

independent events, which historians retrospectively integrate
into causal chains occasionally interrupted by spontaneous
fluctuations of natures ferocity and human will? Or is it a
homogenous system organized by certain rulesor even
lawsfrom the dawn of human history and well into the future.
The former position is common to early modern and postmodern historiography, while the latter one is characteristic of
Soviet modernism. It underlay the approach to architectural
heritage in Soviet Central Asia. To Marxist historicist mind, the
ability to understand and generalize the causal logic of the
past stabilizes our position in the present, and allows to
predict the future with a high degree of probability. If, quoting
from the French historian of philosophy Jean-Marie Schaeffer
historicism implicitly acknowledges the existence of a
transparent past, architectural restoration makes this
acknowledgement explicit.
It is important to distinguish between educational and
entertainment purposes of restoration. In the postmodern era
the goal of entertainment predominates: with middle-class
leisure tourism in mind, contemporary specialists in historic
preservation are prone to amuse through staging interpretational ambiguity calling it conservation. Yet in the Soviet
Union the principle attitude was different and the goal of public
education and enlightenment was central to the work of
restorers. The statements that restorers made were straightforward and monosemantic, and the guiding implication of
those statements was the fundamental comprehensibility of
the past.
Between the late 1940s and until the late 1980s, a massive
campaign of restoring medieval Islamic monuments was
unfolded in Soviet Central Asia, with few large-scale but
isolated restoration projects predating this campaign in the
mid-1920s and the late 1930s. Those restorations were
conceptually embedded in the Soviet discipline of architectural
history that prioritized the search for progressive historic
evolution of the quantifiable transhistoric aesthetic values.
Alois Riegl once noticed that the specific nature of the
perception of a monument makes for a distinction between the
modern Kunstwollen and those of earliest times; we may best
call it relative art-value as it is not objective and lasting but
undergoes constant change. The Soviet historians of architecture had exactly opposite take on this issue: they believed
that the architectures aesthetic value (or in other words
art-value) is not relative but absolute; it is located in monuments proportion and harmonic order and therefore is
quantifiable; it generally accumulates with a progress of
society from one stage of development to the other, although
every stage has its pinnacles and declines; and finally the

Transgression and
Syncretism

From M. S. Bulatov, Geometricheskaia garmonizatsiia v arkhitekture

Srednei Azii 915 vv. (Moscow: Nauka, 1978), p.161.

Science of HistoryGeometry of Beauty

Photo: Igor Demchenko, 2012

Science of History

Igor Demchenko

15

) ,

. ,

, , .

. (, )

1930 . 1950

. ,

14

. 7080
.

,
.

( ,

, ,

) .

, ,

, ( ) ,

(1978 )

. .

,
.

, ,
.
.
2 ,
,
. (
,
)
.

.

. (

16

republics of Central Asia. (Besides, the logic of state-run

planned economy prioritized work-intensive highly interventionist restorations, since they produced higher and more
stable net output.) This resonated with the theories of Bulatov
and his fellow proportionalists, which allowed Soviet restorers
to penetrate into the minds of medieval builders and reconstruct ruined structures; the science of chemistry provided the
original recipes of glazes used in tiles for the reconstruction
of buildings surfaces. There is a long chain of restorations
based on this scientific methodology (in fact the adjective
scientific was systematically applied to the noun restoration
in Soviet publications and bureaucratic papers), but let us
focus on the most spectacular one: that of Bibi-Khanym
mosque in Samarkand restored under the supervision of the
pupils and followers of Bulatov. A highly fragmented structure,
or simply a ruin, was reconstructed in a series of mathematical
moves: a module was establisheda different one from that
proposed by Ratiia or even Bulatov himselfand the lost forms
were generated through applying the rules of proportioning
and harmonization. The resulting structure, which tourists now
see in Samarkand, is by and large a product of Soviet industry
and historicist optimism.
In the case of Soviet Central Asia, it was indeed the
complete lack of sentimental national sensibilitypeculiar to
simultaneously totalitarian and colonial environment in which
local intelligentsia was physically exterminated and replaced
by imported European specialist and the test-tube grown
socialist national cadresthat allowed for the unconditional
triumph of scientism in restoration methodology. But the
restoration projects like that of Bibi-Khanym mosque in
Samarkand also materialized the Soviet reinterpretation of
Central Asian history, which moved away from the colonialist
ideas of Oriental decline to the historicist narrative that
distinguished between Central Asian antiquity, dark ages, high
medieval period, renaissance (exemplified by Bibi-Khanym
mosque), and Central Asian abortive transition to modernity
revitalized by Russian conquest and the Bolshevik Revolution.
This historic progression, generated by Marxist laws of
societal evolution and now embodied in architectural monuments, professed the dawn of the next Communist stage of
human developmentthe inevitable future that will never
come.

Transgression and
Syncretism

Science of History

aesthetic value is fully objective and therefore can be comprehended and restored when damaged in the course of time.
Already in the 1920s, early-Soviet intellectuals were
obsessed with the systematic search for the objective content
of art and architectural beauty. On the opposite poles of
Soviet architectural scene, the avant-garde Rationalists led by
Nikolai Ladovsky, as well as a small but highly influential group
of Soviet neo-classicists circled around Ivan Zholtovsky were
occupied by this problem. During Stalins dictatorship their
solutions melted and merged into a single theory that saw the
essence of architectural beauty in proportion, harmony and
rhythm, expressedor even originally conceivedin geometrical and algebraic terms.
In Central Asia the first experiments in applying proportional and harmonization analysis to medieval monuments
came in the mid-1930s. In 1950, Shalva Ratiia was the first to
propose the reconstruction of the late-14th century Timurs
Bibi-Khanym mosque in Samarkand based on the analysis of
its proportions measured in whole numbers and simple
fractions of a module that, according to Ratiia, equaled the
diameter of its minaret. Ratiias calculations significantly
influenced the actual restoration of the mosque later in the
1970s and the 1980s. Central Asian scholars (including Mitkhat
Bulatov, Konstantin Kriukov, Pulat Zakhidov, and Vladimir
Filimonov among many others) who published their proportional analyses of medieval Islamic buildings sincerely believed
in their schemes and calculations. After all, architectural and
aesthetic discourse in Stalinist and post-Stalinist Soviet Union
was framed in a way that applying proportional theory to the
analysis of medieval buildings could seem only natural or even
self-evident.
Mitkhat Bulatov, the author of the most authoritative Soviet
book on pre-modern Central Asian architectural aesthetics
(first published in 1978), was certain that he was able to
reconstruct the forgotten methods of geometric harmonization
as a part of medieval Central Asian architectural theory. Yet
he was never able to find documental evidences in support of
his conviction: they simply dont exist. Medieval Islamic
architects had not left any theoretical treatises prescribing a
system of rules or aesthetic guidelines in the style of Vitruvius,
who remained completely unknown in Islamic world; Islamic
mathematicians occasionally produced books, in which they
strived to enlighten builders about the rules of geometrybut
those ones never deal with the questions of beauty, proportion
or harmony; Islamic philosophers did write about harmony and
proportion, but never mentioned architecture in this context.
After World War II, the Soviet Union continuously expanded
its investment in conservation and restoration of architectural
monuments, being particularly generous to the developing

17

( ),

Contra Diction:

. 2

, 2013 [ 1]

[ 2]

, 2014 [ 3]

Contra Diction:

()

. 3

(taqiyya) .

? ( )

.
,

).

,
.

.
,

(

)

/ .

,

, ,
,

()
,

( ).

( ).
2

18

Courtesy the artist

Courtesy the artist

3 12

Diane Rabreau
Becoming a Satellite Explorer
Workshop and presentation, 2013
ongoing [fig. 1]

Mohammad Salemy
Blockchain and Decentralized
Networks
Lecture [fig. 2]

Lawrence Abu Hamdan

Contra Diction:
Speech Against Itself
Lecture, 2014ongoing [fig. 3]

Diane goes for you is a free exploration service, online. If there is any
spot on Google Maps that seems
strange to you or that inspires you
any question, send to Diane the
geographic coordinates and she will
try to go there one day and tell you
what she saw and experienced.
Since three years, Diane Rabreau
has been travelling the World to
explore geographic coordinates.
After investigation, she has found
some answers. The tree isnt floating but lying in the sand. The house
is a closed sauna. At the Romanian
border, there is a radio antenna
overmatched by the Ukrainian army.
The island under construction is
going to be a floating casino.
In Gwangju, Diane Rabreau will
host a workshop with the local community to find destinations in
Gwangju area to explore.

Our cybernetic age whose prehistory can be traced back to the natural philosophy of John Locke and
the political thought of Thomas
Hobbs sees the world as a closed
system of statistical feedback
loops. The seeds of our technologyfuelled and statistically oriented
society were sown centuries ago,
through Hobbes fiction of the organicity of monarchical rule and the
sovereigns role in the domestication
of the natural worlds chaos, to
which neoliberalism has somewhat
successfully returned the sociopolitical order. Like the Leviathan, this
system secures the place of the
king and his knights, or in todays
terms the owners and managerial /
professional class within the chaos
of social order. By mimicking the
unfair hierarchies embedded in
nature, not only how in general it
places those with expertise or political and economic power, in command of nature, animals, labourers
and machines but also how it geopolitically makes them the master of
states or peoples too small or weak
to vie for their own.

In Contra Diction: Speech Against

Itself the artist seeks to explore the
ways in which our right to silence
can be preserved in todays all-hearing and all-speaking society. In his
reappraisal of silence and its politics
Abu Hamdan will look into the linguistics of taqiyya, an old piece of
Islamic jurisprudence practiced only
by esoteric minorities that allows a
believing individual to deny his faith
or commit otherwise illegal acts
while they are at risk of persecution
or in a condition of statelessness.
By looking into stories of alleged
mass conversions of the Druze
minority in northern Syria, Abu
Hamdan indicates how such minor
speech acts can help us re-appraise
the precision of speaking, the multiple ways of remaining silent and the
inherently unfaithful nature of ones
voice.

Transgression and
Syncretism

communications and transactions of

goods and services (see Salemys
talk)a proposition that perhaps
approximates the spontaneity and
decentrality of the silk road networks in old times. In the context of
East Asia, it is little discussed that
the success model of what would
be the East Asian answer to capitalistic system was foreseen by the
Japanese politician Nobusuke Kishi
already during WWII, whose syncretic economic philosophy is characterized by refashioning German
style technical specialization,
American style Taylorist assembly
lines and Soviet Style central planning. Linking his story narrated as a
vampire story to today, shifts and
displacement in the capitalist network are to emerge (see Ngs lecture performance). On a conceptual
level, language is also invested in a
coded, representational, binary
structure. An interpretation of the
practice of taqiyyah of the Druze
Islamic community highlights the
paradoxical structure of language
and language in its pre-semantic
instance, hence pushing the boundaries of politics of speech and listening (see Abu Hamdans lecture).
A dedicated attention exercise
brings everything into focus again
(see ESTAR(SER)s lecture performance and exercise).
To dislodge the codedness and
structuredness, the program continues in a Buddhist temple in the
Mudang mountain with a sound
experience that traces the breathing of the mountains and connects
them to the geo-cultural history of
Korean peninsular (see Parks
performance).

Courtesy the artist

March 12

Having traced what kind of Eurasian

connections and disconnections
there have been, the program goes
into a meta-historical level to investigate centralized structures and
decentralized networks, as well as
the stagnation and creative disruption of them.
When space has fallen under the
omniscient eyes of Google Earth,
and the algorithmic mediation of it
co-shapes our experience of space
and time, what does it mean to find
ones (digital) bearings? What narrative can possibly come out of its
cracks (see Rabreaus workshop
presentation)? Aside from the ubiquitous networks and technologies
that capture and analyze our lives,
there is the dark net, the overt network that facilitates enciphered

19

ESTAR(SER)

:,

, 2016 [ 4]

3
.

[ 5]

, 2014 [ 6]

, ,

- (erotic

grotesque nonsense)

. , ,
,

(18891966) 3

3335 .

20

1939

193539

20

:,

()
.

(, , )

, ,

.
49,

.
,
.

.
.

( ), (),
-, ,
.

30 80

(),
2 3 18
.

.


.

100m
15

Courtesy the artist

3 12

New evidence strongly suggests

that the Francophone Transylvanian
philologist-explorer Marton Bialek
(18891966) was an associate of
the Order of the Third Bird, and that
his work with syncretistic central-
Asian trance texts known as the
Rlek Scrolls drew on, and contributed to, his preoccupations with the
Order. Scholars with an interest in
these matters will present a brief
biography and reveal Bialeks fascinating Exercise of the Trochilus, a
formal protocol for sustained attention to a work of art. Guided collective experimentation will be encouraged. All are welcome, regardless of
their knowledge of Bird practices.

Soyoung Park
Su:um, Dari
Performance, 2014ongoing [fig. 6]
Using Baekdu mountain range and
Map of the Korean Peninsula Shaped
like a Ferocious Tiger (
), Su:um, Dari is a 33 to 35-plate
story of score and choreography
where human organs and plates of
different senses are located. Baekdu
mountain range stands for the main
artery and takes the shape of
branches, roots or a snake.
This pieces overall story was composed based on the information of
underground movements(location,
direction, intensity) gathered for 15
days by the seismic triggers installed
100 m underground in Jeongseon,
Gangwon-do Province. It consists of
49-minute interdisciplinary performance, sound (including manpasik
jeok flute), dance (salpuri), score and
choreography-drawing, set design
and design for two costumes. The
underground information was collected by the seismic trigger when
winter turns to spring (thawing season): from February 3 to 18. Lee
Junki, professor in seismology at
Seoul National University provided
assistance for this information.

Courtesy the artist

ESTAR(SER)
The Trochilus Exercise: Marton
Bialek and the Ecstasy of the
Rlek Scrolls
Lecture performance and workshop
[fig. 5]

Transgression and
Syncretism

This performance will narrate the

life of Japanese bureaucrat, colonial
administrator, economic planner,
war criminal and prime minster
Nobusuke Kishi as a vampire story.
Kishis long life, sexual corruption,
greed and disregard for human suffering make him the perfect amoral
protagonist for a phantasmagorical
retelling of 20th century East Asian
political economy. In the Japanese
puppet state of Manchukuo in
Northeast China between 1935 and
1939, Kishi created a model of syncretic economic philosophies, combining German industrial cartels
with Taylorist assembly lines and
Soviet Style central planning
enforced by an authoritarian military
government. Manchukuo was Kishis
failed, experimental state, a testing
ground which provided the model
for the post-colonial Asian state.
Between his time in Manchukuo in
the 1930s to his death in the

mid-1980s, Kishi would live to see

the South East Asian tiger economies like South Korea under Park
Chung-Hee adopt the state authoritarian capitalist development
model which was first brutally realized by Kishi in the cold expanses of
Manchuria.
The work will take the form of a
three-channel animation that borrows the erotic graphic vocabulary
of Japanese shunga prints and the
decadent ero-guro nanesensu
images which formed the subversive cultural parallel to the violence
inflicted at pre-war Japans colonial
periphery. The video installation will
be live narrated by the artist as a
lecture performance, dressed in a
1939 propaganda kimono, summoning the ghost of Kishi that continues to haunt modern Asia.

Courtesy the artist

March 12

Royce Ng
Kishi the Vampire
Lecture performance, 2016 [fig. 4]

21

/ .

, ,

, ,

,
. 2008

. P2P ,

. .

, ,

.
.

, ,

. ,

, .

, ,

. ,

22

,
,

Our cybernetic age whose prehistory can be traced back to

the natural philosophy of John Locke and the political thought
of Thomas Hobbs sees the world as a closed system of
statistical feedback loops. The seeds of our technology-
fuelled and statistically oriented society were sown centuries
ago, through Hobbes fiction of the organicity of monarchical
rule and the sovereigns role in the domestication of the natural
worlds chaos, to which neoliberalism has somewhat successfully returned the sociopolitical order. Like the Leviathan, this
system secures the place of the king and his knights, or in
todays terms the owners and managerial/professional class
within the chaos of social order. By mimicking the unfair
hierarchies embedded in nature, not only how in general it
places those with expertise or political and economic power, in
command of nature, animals, labourers and machines but also
how it geopolitically makes them the master of states or
peoples too small or weak to vie for their own.
We have come to an age of technological advancement
where machine-aided owner and managerial/professional
class establishes its domain through the mediating power of
our main regulatory technologies of media state and capital.
The control of the flow of information in various techno-social
feedback loops allows this particular class to constantly
deprive the networks by extracting tolls and accumulating
different forms of power out of them. It is important to remember how the incorporation of powerful computers and 24/7
network connectivity have only made this perversely magical
system more robust and cheaper to stage manage compared
to the old colonial/imperialist modes of geopolitical operations.
If the institutions of modernity, under pressure by both the
existing left and the right, have been on decline, if democracy,
rule of law and equality cannot even be maintained on paper
let alone in actual social relations, and given the wider definition of technology which consider our social and political
machinery as part of the cybernetic order, can we even call
our planetary technosphere an advancement?
If we combine the contradictions between the quantity and
quality of humanity as the subject of history and the gap
between the being and function of what we categorize as
technology, we will get to the picture of a widening socio-
technological evolution, and if necessary a revolution, not
unlike that of the terminators Skynetof course visible only if
the film is remade from the point of view of the machines and
not humans. If this story doesnt make sense it is because in
order to do so we must abandon our human point of view and
look at the situation from the point of view of the machines.
From the machines point of view our societies will either
have to shed the skoumorphic skin of the enlightenment era
humanism which has been camouflaging the despotic nature

of our cybernetic age and accept the brutal and top to bottom
imposed leviathan of the powerful, or instead work with
humans, help them to repair their damaged psyche, and
together topple the system.
A new kind of technopolitics demands the we dismantle the
third party regulators which mediate exchanges and replace
them with processes that are less prone to foster inequality,
laws that prevent a minority to use their advantaged position
within our techno-social system in order to hack it for their
benefit. This new politics demands the establishment of
general protocols for direct and discreet forms of exchange
via computation and accounting which circumvent or make all
together redundant entities like the state, banks and the
media.
Bitcoin is a digital measure of computational labour as well
as social value and exchange invented by Satoshi Nakamoto
who published his invention in 2008 and released it as an
open-source software in 2009. The system is essentially
peer-to-peer; meaning users can transact directly without
needing an intermediary. Transactions are verified by network
nodes and recorded in a public distributed ledger called the
block chain. The ledger uses its own unit of account, also
called bitcoin. The system works without a central repository
or single administrator. Bitcoin is described as the first
decentralized digital currency. It is the largest of its kind in
terms of total market value. Bitcoins are created as a reward
for processing work in which users offer their computing
power to verify and record bitcoin payments into a public
ledger. This activity is called mining and the miners are
rewarded with transaction fees and newly created bitcoins.
The block chain is a public ledger that records bitcoin
transactions. A novel solution accomplishes this without any
trusted central authority: maintenance of the block chain is
performed by a network of communicating nodes running
bitcoin software. Transactions of the payer sending bitcoins to
payee are publicly broadcast to this network using readily
available software applications. Network nodes can validate
transactions, add them to their copy of the ledger, and then
broadcast these ledger additions to other nodes. The block
chain is a distributed database; in order to independently verify
the chain of ownership of any and every bitcoin, each network
node stores its own copy of the block chain. Approximately six
times per hour, a new group of accepted transactions, a block,
is created, added to the block chain, and quickly published to
all nodes. This allows bitcoin software to determine when a
particular bitcoin amount has been spent, which is necessary
in order to prevent double-spending in an environment without
central oversight.
Understood in this context, the invention of blockchain by

Transgression and
Syncretism

Blockchain and
Decentralized Networks

Mohammad Salemy

23

. ,

.
.
,
.



.
,
.
.
 , ,

.

, ,
.
, , ,
.
,
.
.


.

.
. ,


.

24

 Copyright and notarization or any other kind of time-

stamping services that tie a particular event or object to
aparticular time and broadcast it publicly can also be
replaced by a blockchain.

Domain name system (DNS) registries, both national and
international, that record web addresses can also be
replaced by a blockchain to create a truly global decentralized registry of domain name ownership.
Next target are the privatized, centralized and profitable databases of the social media like Facebook, Twitter Instagram
and the rest. This is precisely what Ethereum is working
towards, utilizing the concept and practice of blockchain to
record simple transaction of information on a decentralized
ledger. Ethereums ambitious goal is to create a decentralized
computational engine. This is a system for running programs,
or executing contracts, on a blockchain held in play via a distributed network of computers rather than Mark Zuckerbergs
data centers.
We also must not get carried away with euphoria of techno
optimism and the false idea that we are able to invent technological solutions for all of our problems, and blockchain is no
exception. We ought to remember that without emancipatory
intervention in a timely manner meaning before it is too late,

the idea and practice of blockchain, rather than creating a

stateless world, will be utilized to impose a more cunning order
that in the name of offering freedom and protection reestablishes the power of the already powerful humans. Also conceiving the blockchain as an idealized and libertarian outside
to the existing hierarchical cybernetic system can only push
this new technology towards a darker and deeper leviathan,
one that would essentially put fewer, but never the less more
powerful humans in charge. Like others technologies before it,
blockchain can continue its emancipatory function when it is
truly in hands and service of human-inhuman constellations
who aware of the stake and are willing to maintain its operations primarily as a form of political function and not a business venture.

Transgression and
Syncretism

Blockchain and
Decentralized Networks

Satoshi Nakamoto ought to be seen as something far larger

than a technological innovation and perhaps as a potential
liberating force, the building of a master key not unlike the
emergence of alphabet.
According to Nitzan and Bichler, alphabet was invented by
the turquoise miners of Sainai peninsula as a way of keeping a
separate record of their labour from that of their Egyptian
masters who used their knowledge of hieroglyphs to short
change the miners. The popular alphabetic languages which
eventually replaced more complex and highly representational
models of communication were more simple, showing that
progress doesnt always come with complexity. These simple
phonetic symbols circumvented third party regulators of the
written text, managing to democratize language and bring its
immense power to a far larger number of humans. This is why
perhaps the two similar implications of block chain technology,
the proof of work and the elimination of third party authority,
can have reverberations not only in political economy via
monetary policy and credit but also in ways power and value
are exchanged between humans and machines from the
standpoint of sciences and humanities.
However block chain does not only have the potential to
disrupt banking and finance but all forms of information and
power intermediaries. Here are some examples:

25

:,

II

. , ,
,

, .

12. .

- ,

. ,

, ,

. ,

. ?

: .

:(su:um) (atem) ,
, , .

. (dari) , , , ,

.

,
,

III

()
, , ( )

. , ,

, .

. ,

(, )

, .

. =

, , .

. ,

. -

().

, , .
. ,
, .

() ().

() , ()
. ()

. ,

100m

, .

, , .

.
.

IV
1953
.
. :,
,

26

:,

I
.

()

(Map of the

Korean Peninsula shaped like

aferocious tiger)

I
Baekdudaegan, consisting of massive rocky ridges, is the
spine of the Korean Peninsula. Its 12 veins rise high as if trying
to reach the sky and stretch down far as if having a rendezvous with the sea. Its ridges run into various directions before
abruptly stopping at a certain height and distance as if being
bewitched. There, more histories and myths unknown to us are
su:um-ing (breathing). As if to communicate with continents,
oceans, and air, and then to transmit their stories to a certain
star in the distant universe. Who is the transmitter of the
stories? The historical su:um hidden inside Baekdudaegan,
Iguess.
For me, su:um refers to the breath of a living organism, but
it also connotes being hidden, secluding oneself, and hiding. In
other words, it shows that su:um has a diverse stage of
motions and temporality. Dari means linkage, continuity,
meeting, connection, and a multitude of relations made
through organs in a huge body underground.
Baekdudaegan, a word meaning a magnificent stream
stretching down from Mt. Baekdu, is a mountain range that
forms the backbone of the Korean peninsula. This spine was
used as a boundary between regions, as the border during the
Three Kingdoms Period, and as an administrative boundary
during the Joseon dynasty. The bottom line is that the range
connotes two conflicting concepts: connecting and dividing.
That is because the word stream connotes connection, which
is not static but ever flowing.
The minds of all the invisible souls that hide inside the huge
mountain range (joy, anger, sorrow, and pleasure, and the
fundamental essence of life) are breathing along with us. To
put it differently, the soul=heart of nature moves along the
stream of the mountains. The range connects the mountains
of Baekdu, Duryu (the Gaema Plateau), Geumgang, Seorak,
Taebaek, and Jiri. It is also connected to Manchuria, Mongolia,
and Siberia. Moreover, this region bears multitudes of stories
that have yet been told. The world is interactional in a wider
and deeper way than this, both directly and indirectly. The
sincere heart of an artist may be delivered to the heart of
nature, felt and flown, and then finally as a response, a certain
shudder that is conveyed 100 meters below the earths surface
at Jeongseon, Gangwon-do Province, legible as seismological
data.
The movements and communication of certain organs
inside a flowing earth and the relation between the spirit and
the behavior of people may be the nutrients for certain living
things. In other words, our behavior, traces, and stories are
having an enormous impact on the next worldeven if the
world has to start all over again after everything perishes.
Inside the beginning is absorbed the impact of the past,
because history becomes the present and the future, not the
past.

Transgression and
Syncretism

Some Starting Points of Su:um, Dari

Su:um, Dari

Park Soyoung

27

 . .

3757'21"N 12640'14"E

, ,

Bridge of No Return at 3757'21"N

12640'14"E

,
.
, .

. :, ,

28

:,

. .

III
Inspired by the Map of the Korean Peninsula Shaped like a
Ferocious Tiger, the mountain scenery diagram charting
Baekdudaegan, Daedongyeojido (The Great Map of the East
Land) and the Korean mountain magazine Mountains and Life,
I see the mountain range of the Korean peninsula as a living
being. This opens up diverse opportunities to think about
spaces, which are connected into a tangled web of relations
throughout the galaxy.
Baekdudaegan is like a bamboo stem, or the ancient flute
instrument made of reed, manpasikjeok. Manpasikjeok are
dragons, wind, and sound, all characterized by motion. A
certain consciousness awakens and is put to sleep by opening
and closing one hole on the instrument. It becomes a sort of
sound-rain, which softly infiltrates our world.
The Chinese character for dance mu () originated from
mu () which means shamans. According to Joseonmusokgo
(thesis on Koreas shamanism written by the Koreanology
scholar Lee Neung-hwa), mu () is a person that serves a god
by dancing, with gong () at the center, meaning connecting
the sky and earth, and in () on both sides, meaning dancing
persons. Here, connecting the sky and earth can translate into
connecting gods and humans, and thus shamans are those
who connect humans to gods through the process of being
possessed by a spirit. That is, salpuri dance is sacred and
draws out deep, restrained breath as well as inner pleasure.
The dance shows how to stay detached, free, and calm in life.

IV
After the Korean Armistice Agreement was signed in 1953,
prisoners of war were repatriated across this bridge. The
name of the bridge originated from the fact that once prisoners of war crossed the bridge, they could never return. If the
work Su:um, Dari is performed there, it will make the bridge a
beautiful boundary and at the same time a place where the
door of connection opens. The sight may be beauty itself. The
Sacheon River that flows below the bridge as well as the
bridge over the river will serve as a venue for profound
contemplation over diverse subjects, such as the sky of the
four seasons, the four heavenly guardians of Buddhism, and
the river of death. Over the Sacheon River that connotes these
meanings opens the door to the bridge of no return, a place
where sacred hearts are exchanged. The river should be able
to open the doors of each others hearts to various worlds and
continuously flow. Su:um, Dari depicts the wings of the wind
blowing carefully and gently. This is a stage that can be in
harmony even with a mere weed.

Transgression and
Syncretism

Su:um, Dari

II
In Buddhism, dari (bridge) means not only a border dividing this
world and nirvana, but also su:um (breath) that travels between
the two worlds. It connotes mutual inter-communication
between the three universal dimensions of earthly paradise,
heaven and the world of mortals, which translates into the
possibility of transition from potential to morphologic, from
death to life. I my work, I explore death as a return to the form
of non-existence and being that was exiled to nothingness. It
is an act of performance to approach su:um from a certain
consciousness, and to deliver an exchange of hearts (minds),
more valuable than any other material exchange, a bridge
where impressions and hearts (minds) are exchanged.
Departure from the body is not death, but rather the first
voyage.
A coffin cannot be the last ship.
It is the first ship.
Death is not the last journey.
But the first journey.

29

SYNSMASKINEN:

, ,

[ 1]

, 20 51, 2011/12 [ 2]

,
BURST

, 2015 [ 3]

(SYNSMASKINEN ).

, ,

, ,

. , ,

, , , ,

2015 9,

, /, /

,
,

).

. -

.
.

).

,
.

(

) (

UFO
.

.
- 1603

. BURST

),


(

( )
,

.

) .

.

.

3 13

(ESTAR(SER)

Courtesy the author

30

( ).

Agnes Meyer-Brandis, VG-Bild Kunst 2016

Agnes Meyer-Brandis
The Moon Goose Colony
Video, 20 min 51 sec, 2011/12 [fig. 2]

Xinjiang, or the Chinese part of

Central Asia is a land imbued with
spirits. From archeological findings,
historical records as well as recent
witness accounts, we have found
many phenomena pertaining to the
supernatural, roughly in the triangular region between Karamay,
Qinghe/Fuyun, Burqin/Kaba River.
Icall this region the Mystical
Triangle. Each of the three places
displays distinct features.
Apart from its grotesque geological formation nicknamed Devils
Town, much dinosaur fossils were
found in Karamay, as well as numerous accounts of beasty beings
were reported. This is also the place
where the most UFO reports were
filed in China. Qinghe, deep in the
Altai mountains, boasts a great
number of giant-rock circles in the
shape of crop circles, deer stones
of curious shapes, and cave paintings with single-eyed man. One
cave in Fuyun raises our attention to
a sizable cosmological illustration. In
Kaba River region cave paintings of
ancient flying machines are found.

Agnes Meyer-Brandiss poetic-

scientific investigations weave fact,
imagination, storytelling and myth,
past, present and future. Here she
develops an ongoing narrative
based on The Man in the Moone, by
bishop Francis Godwin, in which the
protagonist flies to the Moon in a
chariot towed by moon geese.
Meyer-Brandis has actualised this
concept by raising eleven moon
geese, giving them astronauts
names, imprinting them on herself
as goose-mother, training them to
fly and taking them on expeditions
and housing them in a remote Moon
analogue habitat.
Meyer-Brandis develops the contested history of Godwins original
fictionposthumously and pseudonymously published in 1603 as if
the genuine account of the travels
of Domingo Gonsales. She weaves
a narrative that explores the observers understanding of the fictitious
and the factual, with a nod to
notions of the believably absurd.
The Moon Goose Analogue: Lunar
Migration Bird Facility is commissioned by the Arts Catalyst and
FACT Liverpool, in coproduction
with Z33 and in partnership with
Pollinaria. Moon Goose Colony, P1 is
a Pollinaria Project by Agnes MeyerBrandis, 2011

SYNSMASKINEN:
Frans Jacobi, Ferdinand Ahm Krag,
Theis rntoft and Frederik Jacobi
BURST
Film, 2015 [fig. 3]
In september 2015 visual artists
Ferdinand Ahm Krag and Frans
Jacobi, poet Theis rntoft and filmmaker Frederik Jacobi travelled to
the furthest Siberia, the Yamal
Peninsula, to investigate and film
some deep craters, that has been
found in the tundra during the last
year. Scientists suggest that the
deep holes are created by severe
explosions of methane gasas a
consequence of increasing temperatures caused by global
warming.
BURST is an attempt to use the
images of the methane-gas-holes
as metaphors for the potential passage through the limits of the sky
and the waters that is now suggested by an international scientific
community as a possible consequence of capitalist cultures all-
encompassing influence on the
globe.
BURST is produced within in the
context of the artistic-researchproject SYNSMASKINEN.

Transgression and
Syncretism

Zhang Hui
Mystical Findings in Xinjiang
Lecture [fig. 1]

Courtesy of the artist

March 13
Agnes Meyer-Brandis, VG-Bild Kunst 2016

With a leap into the future

enfolded with deep history, the program offers a speculative take on
what has been a driving force in
Eurasia and where it might lead us.
A practice of heightened attention is
due, to dissociate the permanence
of ones body, here, from a world in
which things happen, there, and to
discern the primary order of things
which grumbles beneath or is
imbued in nature.
The gaze turns as well inward as
outward. Central Asia is cast in the
light of extraterrestrial beings, as
pieces of messages yet to be deciphered suggest such contacts and
encounters (see Zhangs lecture);
the Yamal sink holes in the nomadic
land far north reveals at once a disconcerting action of the planet
earth, and opens to a poetic theory
interweaving earth, force and
nomadic cosmology (see the film of
SYNSMASKINEN). One may also
adapt to and invent tools to approximate utopian scenarios, such as
following the narrative of Godwins
The Man in the Moone to nurture
moon goose (see Brandis film).
Through a walking workshop, the
senses awaken for the geological
composition we find ourselves in,
which exerts its influence in ways
yet invisible (see Tumas workhsop).
After multiple ascends and time
travel, the whole journey ends with a
transformative act of The
Pancosmic Whirling Dervishes
where man turns into vegetation
and colors (see Sepahvands reading) and a choreography commission that takes us out of the comfort
zone and makes us fully aware of
our bodily presence in time and
space, again (see Jeongs
performance).

31

#2:

[ 4]

, 2016 [ 5]

2008 2010

. .

.
(:

.
(2014) 3500

)
,
.

.
.
,

.

.
, ,

,
, ,

3.

(
) .

3 13

?
?
.
/

32

Courtesy of the artist

The Volkskrper trilogy involves in

articulations around an expanded
understanding concerning the
notions of both Volk and body. The
second part choreography of tectonics deals with the production of
a sensitivity towards forces of tectonics via a series of walks and the
production of text. The walks take
place at the intersection of geological knowledge and the development
of perception technologies to
engage with tectonic movement as
something that can be traced by
scientific data yet escapes my
capacity of everyday experience.
The text production and the book
tell the history of a region through
the events rooted in operations of
tectonics and the self organization
of matter. The book Choreography
of Tectonics (2014) tells the history
of the region of Switzerland through
the event of the alpine folding that
took place long before humans
entered the picture 35 million years
ago. For Transgression and
Syncretism, Tuma proposes a continuation of the research around
what a choreography of tectonics
could be in respect to another
region of the world based upon the
same principles of text production
and walking together. Tuma presents a walk that opens the theater
space to geological time. Her starting point is her recent trilogy,
Volkskrper, which examines the
history of Swiss national history
through the lens of the Alps
formation.

Over the course of 20082010

Iwas working on a novel set in a
post-disaster Baghdad where a
contemporary art biennial is scheduled to take place. A group of mystical scientists calling themselves the
Pancosmic Whirling Dervishes
enact a performance during the
opening that goes terribly awry.
Amassive explosion shakes through
the museum and all that is left is
alush forest of trees, bushes, and
flowers. The act is decried as terrorism. The Dervishes, however,
argue that this intervention was a
practical demonstration of a technique they had mastered over the
years: catastrophic transubstantiation, a method elaborated upon in
their Manifesto on an art of the
future. This is not only theory, but
ascientific art. I never finished the
novel because I felt that aspects of
my fiction were becoming real in
everyday life, as if my imagination
had invoked magic. Today, this
extends to the great urgency of
thinking through the future creatively. Indeed, artists, thinkers, and
makers increasingly find themselves
implicated (and made obsolete) by
hyper-accelerated capital flows,
asymmetrical economic collapse,
irreversible climate change, and
global civil war. Can the catastrophe
be tapped into and transformed?
Can art destroy in order to create?
The Manifesto will be presented for
the first time in public, a reading that
aims to speculate on the role of the
imagination in composing the future
as a total work of art.

Geumhyung Jeong
Fire Drill Scenario
Performance, 2016 [fig. 5]
In a new commission, Geumhyung
Jeong re-introduces contingency
situations that challenge the safety
zone of art and life. A theater has
various considerable risks as many
people gather together in a confined space. If an accident occurs
during a performance, and if people
fail to follow appropriate actions in
the emergency at the theatre, it may
lead to grave consequences.
Geumhyung Jeong will choreograph
the safety instructions to familiarize
the audience with the safety manual
and evacuation routes in the event
of an emergency in the theater
space.

Transgression and
Syncretism

Ashkan Sapahvand
The Pancosmic Manifesto
Towards an Art of the Future
Reading

Courtesy of the artist

March 13
Courtesy of the artist

Lucie Tuma
Volkskrper #2: Choreography
ofTectonics
Performance and walk [fig. 4]

33

34

()

. .

, .

[ 6, 7].

.
III

1300 1400 ( )
[ 1, 2, 3].

, 1020
. 25

II

19.5, 11.5, 11.8 .

[ 8, 9].

. ,

. 10,000

[ 10, 11].

, .

1, 4, 6 , , ,

[ 4, 5].

. UFO

UFO

. .

? 300

I
In the Bulqin steppe in the Altai region there have been many
stone figures found. Some of them are eroded to leave only
bare slabs, some are broken into parts. They were transported
from different regions to the Bulqin region for protection
reason so they have already the original context. I have found,
on one of the stone slabs, three curious figures aligned in line,
which appear like helmet-shaped machines with antenna on
the head and a diagonal mark across each body. The periodization of the stone figure is not clear; I estimate it as a Tujue
(later Turkic) stone figure from circa. 1300 or 1400 years ago
[figs. 1, 2 and 3].

The Ramayana, a Sanskrit epic written no later than 300 BCE,

further describes vimana as a double-deck, circular (cylindrical) aircraft with portholes and a dome. It flew with the speed
of the wind, and gave forth a melodious sound. It is reported
that the pilots have to go through rigorous training, and there
are operations, such as standing still in midair, that only
specialized designed machines of our time could fulfill. From
high above the clouds, there are accounts from the pilot that
the sea seems like a small pond [figs. 6 and 7].
III
In the Koktokay area of the Altai mountains, there are the
Tangbaletas caves tucked in a rocky area 1020m above sea
level. Hovering 25m above the flat rocks, it is a natural, southward oriented formation measuring 19.5m in length, 11.5m in
height and 11.8m in depth. The slope leading to the sublime
cave opening is coated with green. The composition of
landscape makes it a perfect ritual place in ancient times
[figs.8 and 9].
The interior of the cave is filled with red ochre paintings,
creating a mystic ambience [figs. 10 and 11]. On the right side
of the cave are two faces of man upside down, both with a
pointy hat. The face is composed of three eyes and delineated
by short, parallel lines. The other feature that stands out in the
cave paintings is a series of four oval circles with concentric
lines inside, highlighted with thick strikes. The oval circles give
the impression of the sequence of a UFO descending; the
inner and outer circle patterns seem to suggest that the
painter wanted to convey that the UFOs were swirling. On the
left side a torch figure is to be seen. Above it, a set of bow and
arrows.

II
The Kaba region on the circumventing route around the
otherworldly Kanas Lake is populated by the Tuva people and
dotted with sand mountains. Ancient nomadic people have
clearly settled in this pleasant area, the traces of which are left
in the so-called Duogate cave paintings. The Duogate caves
are a series of caves of various sizes tucked in curiously-shaped hills. The larger ones are of the size of a hall room,
the smaller ones the size of a niche. Seven of these caves
contain red ochre paintings from the late Paleolithic time,
around 10,000 years before our time. Most interestingly, in the
caves numbered 1, 4 and 6, depictions resembling planes,
rockets and wagons as well as strange figures of persons are
to be seen. It seems to suggest that in the ancient time there
had been flying machines [figs. 4 and 5].
One of the oldest books of the world, the Mahabharata,
speaks of a vimana as an aerial chariot with the sides of iron
and clad with wings. What is a vimana, then, if not a plane?

10

11

Transgression and
Syncretism

Mystical Findings
in Xinjiang

Zhang Hui

35

. .

- 1950

, , , , , , ,

()

, ,

. .

. ,

, .

. , ,

. .

, ,

?
?

?
,

. ,

: , ,

(): ,

, ,
.

. . .

: . , ,

( )

, .

. , , -, ,

. ,

36

, .

: , ,

. ,

, 26 ,

, ,

, , ,

, .

We are mystic scientists.

.
() K . 89.
. 17.211.2 cm.
III 6368.

Leaf from a Manichaean Book.

Gaochang (Kocho), Temple K, Tarim
Basin, China. 8th9th century AD.
Painting on paper. 17.211.2 cm.
Museum for Indische Kunst (Berlin),
III 6368.

A question resounds underneath the cacophony of the

present now-time. It rumbles below the stream of images,
news bites and sound clips that pollute the audio-visual
terrain of the everyday. It reverberates between fragments of
text and the unceasing difference of opinions cluttering the
world with distraction. It pleads from within the rank piles of
refuse, the spoils of civilization, the accumulation of material
waste. Aquestion calls out from the dark, the blind visitor in
the nightshadow, specter, illusion, a dream amidst the all-
encompassing mirage of global information networks, invisible
credit transactions, subaltern waves of human migration and
the death pangs of empire. It is a simple question, positing
a tomorrow when today seems never-ending: what ever
happened to the future?

Transgression and
Syncretism

What follows are excerpts taken from The Pancosmic

Manifesto, also known as Towards an Art of the Future. The
manifesto is not a solitary text: it exists as an arcane series
of mytho-poetic, collectively-authored documents circulating
in multiple recension forms between various radical networks
of mystics, activists, poets, scientists, fuck-ups, visionaries,
losers, romantics, and futurists positioned along geopolitical
nodes of the so-called Silk Road since the 1950s up to today.
Some have speculated that the manifesto is an intertextual
time-machine, written in the future and transmitted back in
fragments to select populations occupying critical moments
in history, specifically times of great, impending catastrophe.
No surprise, then, that it resurfaces today, for our transitory
present bears the mark of a great civilizational collapse that
has been going on for some time and only now begins to show
its all-encompassing imminence. Others view it as a syncretic
cosmogrammatical blueprint, a text-based world-picture that
mirrors the unactivated potentialities stewing underneath the
global logic of techno-scientific capital. Could we read its musings as an ethnographic account of our current civilizational
unconscious, an epic cosmology of Kapital, its Figures and
its Forces? Would such a reading allow us to re-enchant our
mundane work-and-play realities? What transformative magic
does a theory of limitless energetics make possible? If, indeed,
this document is merely a time-slip and an anachronous folly
echoing from an archaic futurity, it should draw our attention to
the task of composing what is to-come as a collective labor of
the human. In other words, to dedicate the practice of living-on
to whom life is as an experience to be carried as far as possi
ble. It is not that we have seen nothing yet, it is rather that we
have not lived as finally as we possibly can live.

Pancosmic Manifesto

Ashkan Sepahvand

37

.
.

.

, .

, , , , .

. .

,
. -

. .

. ,

, , .

.
. .

.
.

. .

, .

,
.

, ,
.

, .
, , .

,

. , . ,

, - ,

, , .

.
. -
. ,
. -

38

We are anticipating a science fiction of a primitive-to-

be(come), the time when we will be surrounded by real, living
and different beings the inverse of our alienation beings that
multiply into innumerable others just as alive as the first.
Things must be pushed to the limit, where quite naturally they
collapse and are inverted. This is why the only strategy is
catastrophic.

The art of the future is based on action.

Actions take four historical trajectories:
POLITICAL AESTHETICS: action for a cause; vanishing
under the threat of monolithic thought; disappearing in the
face of monotheism; dancing in front of those who threaten
with what they wrongly assume is feared: death.
CATASTROPHIC TRANSUBSTANTIATION: tapping into the
energy inside and around; uniting the body with the environment; rearranging the atomic properties of all material; not
defining absence or unwanted matter. We are there by not
being there. Implosion, stronger than any development in
nuclear technology.
THE ERADICATION OF DEATH: resurrection as reversal of
transubstantiation; the destruction of all Things, all Selves, all
Souls for the perfect integrationthe reversal of differentiationinto a more perfect creation. The music of the cosmos;
the end of time; the now-eternity; Omega Point; the singularity
of rhythm.
POTENTIALIZING MATTER: the immanent economy; like
water within water; complete and omnipresent cosmic self-
realization and self-awareness; the unbundling of the twentysix dimensional surfaces; the vibrational harmony of strings;
the prolonged moment, a flash of Gnosis, re-normalization of
gravitational force; pancosmic love and its double.
To understand action towards the future, we must imagine the
beginning of the end.

In the beginning, there was nothing solid, stable or substantial, only forms that moved as moments, lusciously keeping
the beat. The rhythm was durationless. Everything was
evanescent.
The art of the future starts with music, for the universe came
into being through rhythm, not time.
The artist of the future is the poet. The poet uses words like
the primordial, rhythmic atomic strings in order to reveal the
dynamism of Thought: that which was one and now is distributed across all existence: the imagination, the animated atom,
radiant mankind and the coming community.
The art of the future is able to capture reality by embodying
forces that before were not considered fully or properly real.
Imagination is a being capable of holding together earlier
moments of time beside the present.

In the future, time will no longer exist. In its place will be a

combination and configuration of spatial images as movement
and force. The artist of the future lives in a duration in which
he or she is immanent to the whole of the universe, bound to
the continual elaboration of mobile reality.
This is an alchemy of relations, in which the body acts as a
guiding thread. The visual, tactile and aural formulate a future
physics of the world. The world, as a circular movement that
has already repeated itself infinitely, opens and plays until eternity, the body dancing along the historical trajectories drawn
by plucked atomic strings. Truth can only take place within life,
in the middle of life. Repetition, rhythm, poetrya labyrinthine
mirror reflection of a mirror, a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose

The art of the future posits a possible world in which there

are no objects at allat least no concrete objects. As the
anthropic world sheet is torn, other possibilities seep into
this lonely world. There must be one moment in the future in
which our possible world will solely consist of abstract objects:
neither material nor existent in space-time, abstract objects
are types, forms, ideas, concepts, images, etc. The artist of the
future self-generates creative acts. All abstract objects will be
comrades of and tools for the immanent community.

Transgression and
Syncretism

Pancosmic Manifesto

Without attempting a social history or consulting a fiction, we

can well imagine revolts and social movements demanding the
right to immortality for all. Humankind, the only unviable right
granted to it being the right to die, rises up to imagine the
future: immortality for all.

39

.
.

. ,

, ,

.
.

. ,
.
- . -

.
.
.

. ,
, - ,

. ,

.

, .
.

40

. .

precisely, the consideration of what may occur at the extreme

of life.

The art of the future wishes to reveal that all matter generates
itself from itself. This self-consciousness occurs on the plane
of imagination.

Life can only be lived in the after-lifenot a paradisiacal virtual

reality awarded to the righteous after they die, but the Life that
is to-come after the Body ceases to regulate it.

Imagination is the will to be real, to project into reality.

It is living and ceasing to live which are imaginary solutions.

Existence is elsewhere.

The art of the future is able to capture reality by embodying

forces that before were not considered fully or properly real.
As self-thought passes into, out of and between bodies,
it thinks through images. Imagination is what causes selfthought to pass from the realm of images to the abstraction of
the Real.

The art of the future is the double to symbolic accumulation

and aestheticized, phantasmagoric capital. The economy that
the art of the future proposes is an imaginative re-appropriation, a fluctuating reversibility to the teleological infinity of
capitalism and the fragmentary, finite disintegration of communism. Death is exchanged for potentialized matterit is not
staved off through endless accumulation and self-destructive
rituals of anamnesis; death-space is mediated to rearrange
atomic bundles and restructure the world sheet; objects are
destroyed in order to make room for the abstract image which
makes the concrete possible; and subject-object distinctions
implode so that the ideal environment for auto-creative acts
may exist.
The art of the future challenges the art of the past, as a fantasy-value and desire-product of economic transactions and
projections towards accumulation within societies, with the
imaginative possibility of seeing its accumulation as possibly
total, and thus, eternal: the time of accumulation is the time of
death itself. Life itself must leave the law of value and achieve
a successful exchange against death. It remains then, that the
art of the future can be nothing other than death, or, more

The disaster takes care of everything.

The art of the future is political, for it is concerned with the

reorganization of life, the substance of living.

The art of the future is the first step towards the creation of
a radiant humanity: through the mastery of energetics, movement exploration, psycho-nautical techniques of imagination-projection, and an economy of instinct and luxury, human
civilization will be able to produce new resources by transmutating and transubstantiating all matter. By doing so, mind
and body, animate and inanimate, will be united into a dynamic,
compacted bundle of dimensional vibrations.

We want to sing the love of oblivion, the habit of energy and

catastrophe. The poet must aim to imagine the enthusiastic
fervor of the primordial atomic strings.

We live in an epoch when it is crucial to adapt to and manage the immense amount of knowledge we have generated.
The art of the future unleashes a creative, vital force whose
ultimate goal is the total culmination of dimensional vibrations able to produce a final singularity of consciousness, the
moment in which self-thought collapses into itself, an orgasmic
transparency of never-ending depth and force.

Transgression and
Syncretism

Pancosmic Manifesto

Laws of nature do not exist in the art of the future. What

appears to be rational and fixed is related to the force of
self-thought. Self-thought produces events in a sequence in a
complex process of atomic interaction and unconscious activity, appearing to immediate waking-consciousness as predictable or interrelated: a law. This is simply false awarenessthe
workings of self-thoughts will at a given moment may repeat
itself indefinitely, however, this will and can change at anytime.
There is no permanence. There is only movement.

The art of the future implodes.

The art of the future unifies.
The art of the future is radiant.
The art of the future is pancosmic.

41

, /
?

( ) , , ,

. 1930

. 120 ,

10 30 .

(deep-time)

.
,

, ,

.
.
.
.
.

,
.
,
.

. /
,
.
, , ,
.
,
,
/
.
,
.
8
. 1

42

/
,

If Along the Silk Road a Traveler: Research Game

If Along the Silk Road a Traveler sets out to explore questions
of deep history of Eurasia, and takes history writing as speculative archeology.
Central to the project is a growing/evolving game and
archive of possible historyies about the silk road, which allows
chance-regulated (yet for some, firmly destined) becoming of
a series of characters, relations, events and moments.
The player throws dice to determine who and where he/she
is. There are over 120 possibilities in the present edition, with
more than 30 characters at a dozen of geographical locations.
Upon departing, the player becomes a historical figure in a
particular spot, and can then reach out to a folder in the
archive containing corresponding materials, including texts
and imagesthey are historical records, travelogues and some
are stories of fictive charactersbut historically documented.
The player is encouraged to deliberate on the material, raise
questions, draw personal associations, make up missing
stories, speculate on hidden dimensions of the story and
contribute in any form. The player may also enter conversation
with other players and establish connections between themselves. After this, the player may proceed with dice throwing
again, and receive instruction as to who he/she becomes and
where to go next. In this way the game continues.
The design of the initial rules is untrivial. There is a possibility that the player always travels onward with the same
character on a historically accurate route with certain dice
combination. Or he/she will become someone else with
intrinsic connections. And there is a possibility that the player
goes into a meta-archive containing sheer historiography and
research material, where one could learn about certain
aspects of the silk road, and propose changes in the game or
sketch up new characters, which serves as self-evolving
mechanism of the game and questions its own conditions. So
far, the game/archive covers roughly the eastern half of the
silk road, from central-western China to the Pamir highlands.
Many players have contributed speculations, drawings,
questions and personal histories. For instance, surviving
medieval documents about astrology was questioned by a
player in that the stars in the sky are images of real stars from
the past, by this token the stars from medieval documents are
stars from further back in history, and the stars we see today
could be from the medieval time we are reading about in the
game/archive. In one instance, it was questioned how fortune
telling based on this time lapse could generate alternative
pastsa swirl of histories. In another instance, a player
identified the hat of a figure found in desert oasis Turfan,
dated around 8th century AD, which resembles hat of an

Etruscan warrior figure. More than a thousand years and

thousands of miles apart, how could such migration of images/
forms have been? Another player questioned what form of
feminism there might be in the past, and filled in a story of
prophet Muhammad getting proposed by and marrying with a
widowas an instance for womens status in society. Adocument about a wall painting depicting a theater scene is
supplied with translations of the ancient Buddhist theater
script Maitrisimit, and deliberations were made on its possible
staging. Some players have shared Sven Hedins joyful vision in
the 1930s for a trans-Asian road that connects eastern China
all the way to Istanbul, and pondered on the growing gap
between dream and reality back then and now.
This ongoing, deep-time, deep-space exploration of the silk
road allows for possible histories to emerge. This potential is
the very essence of the silk road, which is constituted by great
cultural forces in virtuality, full of curiosity and openness, only
awaiting to come to intimate stasis in particular timespace
constellations.

Transgression and
Syncretism

Ongoing Research

You Mi

43

, .

.
MHKA, +,

, ,

(),
() .

e-, ,

. ,

, ,

()

,
.

() .

2014

. ,

, , , ,

&

, ,

. 2015 MIT

IMPAKT, ,

,
.

. , , , ,
, , , , , ,

,
.
SOAS

. 2012
2014

, ,
,

. , , ,

.

()
.

(Anthropocene)
Textures
of the Anthropocene: Grain, Vapor,
Ray(MIT Press, 2015) .

,


.

. -
FFUR /
.

.

.
, UCLA, ,
,
, ,

13, ,
, ,
X, - ,
, ,
.

2007
,
.

.
2014
7

,

.

,
, , ,
. ,

DLR

. 2011

, ,


.
,

.
, , , ,

.
, ,
.

,
. :,

()

.
Mirrors for Princes
(JRP-Ringier / NYU Abu Dhabi,
2015), Not Moscow Not Mecca

.
(
)

.
()

44

(Revolver/Secession, 2012),

Molla Nasreddin: the
magazine that wouldve, couldve,
shouldve (JRP-Ringier, 2011)

Igor Demchenko is a postdoctoral

fellow at the Kunsthistorisches
Institut in Florenz. He received a
PhD in architectural history from
Massachusetts Institute of
Technology in 2015. His doctoral
dissertation explores the politics of
heritage preservation and the restoration of medieval Islamic monuments in Soviet Central Asia. His
research was supported by the
Swiss Government Excellence
Scholarship, Canadian Center for
Architecture, Aga Khan Program for
Islamic architecture, and Dumbarton
Oaks Research Library. He presented at numerous conferences in
the US, Europe, the Middle East,
and Central Asia. His publications
and presentations explore the questions of non-Western architectural
expertise and the problems of historic preservations in the Islamic
world.

ESTAR(SER)The Esthetical
Society for Transcendental and
Applied Realization (now incorporating the Society of Esthetic
Realizers)is an established body
of private, independent scholars
who work collectively to recover,
scrutinize, and (where relevant)
draw attention to the historicity of
the Order of the Third Bird. (www.
estarser.net)
About the Order of the Third Bird:
There remains some confusion
about the history and practices of
the body known as the Order of the
Third Bird, but evidence points to its
having been for some time a loose
network of cell-like groups that
engage in ritualized forms of sustained attention to works of art. The
canons of secrecy around these
activitiestheir structure and purposeshave traditionally been sufficiently restrictive as to leave some
doubt as to whether any individual
professing knowledge of the Order
could in fact be genuinely associated therewith.
The Trochilus/Rlek Working
Group includes D. Graham Burnett,
Carla Nappi, Sal Randolph, Bruce
Rusk, and Catherine Hansen.
Aslan Galsumov was born in
Grozny, Chechen Republic, Russia,
where he lives and works. He has
had his solo shows in M HKA in
Antwerp, Kromus+Zink in Berlin,
Winzavod Center of Contemporary
Art Moscow. He has participated in
Manifesta, Moscow Biennale of
Contemporary Art, in exhibitions at
Garage in Moscow, Ullens Center
for Contemporary Art in Beijing and
Art Dubai. His works have been
collected by the State Hermitage
Museum in Saint-Petersburg and
the National Centre for Contem
porary Arts, Moscow.

Puay-peng Ho is professor of architecture at the Chinese University of

Hong Kong. He received architectural training at the University of
Edinburgh and practiced in the
United Kingdom and Singapore.
Prof. Ho subsequently obtained a
Ph.D. degree in art and architectural
history from the School of Oriental
and African Studies at the Univer
sity of London. His research interests and publication are in Chinese
architectural history, Chinese art
history, Dunhuang studies and architectural conservation. He has published widely in art and architectural
history and also been involved in
many conservation and adaptive
reuse projects in Hong Kong.
Geumhyung Jeong is a choreographer and performer. In her work, she
constantly negotiates the relationship between the human body and
the things surrounding it. Jeong
studied acting (BA) at Hoseo
University in Asan, dance and performance (MA) at the Korean
National University of Arts in Seoul,
and Animation Film at the Korean
Academy of Film Arts in Seoul. Her
works has been presented by New
Museum Triennial 2015 (New York),
Museum of Contemporary Art of
Barcelona, Spring Festival 2015
(Utrecht), Tanz Im August Festival
2015 (Berlin), ImpulsTanz Festival
2014 (Vienna), Zrcher Theater
Spektakel 2014 (Zurich) and many
others.
Ubulhesen Memet is one of the
most famous performers of dastan,
a form of musical epic popular
among the Uyghur people. Born in
Hotan in southern Xinjiang,
Ubulhesen began to study dastan
since childhood. Today, a national-level bearer of Intangible Cultural
Heritage, he still busks in the markets and saints tombs, following the
tradition of dastan singers.
Ubulhesen has more than twenty
students, and often plays in groups
formed with two or three of his students. They play such instruments
as rawap, dutar, tanbur, dap, sapaya,
and tash. Apart from dastan, they
also perform folk songs and
muqam, and participate in the Sufi
zikr ritual.

Agnes Meyer-Brandis studied mineralogy and moved to sculpture and

new media art. Her work, exhibited
worldwide and awarded, is at the
experimental edge of art and science, exploring the zone between
fact and fiction. Meyer-Brandis is
the founder of the Forschungsfloss
FFUR / Research Raft for
Subterranean Reefology, a small
institute whose chief aim is to
explore and confirm subterranean
phenomena and unknown lifeforms.
Since 2007 her focus of investigation moved into higher altitude with
their connected realities. She realized an artistic experiment in
weightlessness in cooperation with
the German Space Agency DLR. In
2011 she started to breed Moon
Geese in Italy.
MU Qian is a performing arts curator, ethnomusicologist, and writer.
He is currently a PhD candidate in
ethnomusicology at SOAS,
University of London. Mu has served
as Music Director of World Music
Shanghai and Post Mountain MusicArt Festival (Beijing), two major
world music festivals in China. As an
ethnomusicologist, he has a special
interest in the music of Muslims. He
has presented papers at various
conferences, and given lectures at
UCLA, University of Michigan,
University of Wisconsin-Madison,
University of Maryland, and Royal
Holloway, University of London. In
2014, as an Asian Cultural Council
fellow, Mu conducted research for
seven months on world music and
arts administration practices in
Washington D.C. and New York.
Royce Ng is an artist currently
based in Hong Kong. Using performance, animation and ceramics, his
work deals with the intersection of
economics and aesthetics. He often
works with the anthropologist Daisy
Bisenieks in the collective Zheng
Mahler and is currently engaged in
aproject on the economic relationship between Asia and Africa for
the Johann Jacobs Museum in
Zurich. Most recently, their performance New York post et pre-
figuratif was presented at Performa
15: New Visual Art Performance
Biennale in New York City.

Transgression and
Syncretism

Participants

Lawrence Abu Hamdan lives in

Beirut, Lebanon. In 2013 Abu
Hamdans audio documentary The
Freedom of Speech Itself was submitted as evidence at the UK asylum
tribunal where the artist himself was
called to testify as an expert witness. He continues to make sonic
analyses for legal investigations and
advocacy. His previous solo exhibitions include ( taqiyya) at
Kunsthalle St Gallen, Tape Echo at
Beirut in Cairo and Van Abbe
museum, The Freedom of Speech
Itself at Showroom, London, The
Whole Truth at Casco, Utrecht.
Additionally his works have been
exhibited and performed at venues
such as New Museum Triennial, the
Shanghai Biennial, the Whitechapel
Gallery London, MACBA Barcelona,
Tate Modern London, M HKA
Antwerp, the Beirut Art Center and
the Taipei Biennial.

45

ESTAR(SER) Esthetical Society

for Transcendental and Applied

. ,

Realization,

. 2015 2017

(Society of Esthetic

(Zheng Mahler)

, -

Realizers) . 3

SYNSMASKINEN
,

()

. (www.estarser.net)

. New York

3 : 3

post et pre-figuratif

, prima materia

, ,

15 .

. 5

. 2013

, ,

. 2008

The Freedom of Speech

Itself( )

( , )
,

. , ,

40
.
,

.
(taquiyya),

.
2

.

,
.

Tape Echo,
The Freedom of
Speech Itself,
The Whole Truth
.

/ D.
, , ,
,
.

, ,
,
MACBA, ,
M HKA,

.

.

. SOAS
.
,

,
.

.
7 (2009),
(2011),

, ,
.
,

,
, ,

(2013), (2015)
(2011),
(2011) .

.
/

(2007),
(2011, 2012),

2015
,
2015(),
()
. 2014

(2012),
(2013) .
,
,

(),

.

.
,
,
.

46

, ,

SYNSMASKINEN
.

Diane Rabreau is a modern-times

adventurer. She explores the world
from all perspectives, virtually and
physically, gathering answers, new
questions, anecdotes, mysteries
and theories. She produces books,
films, performances, and other
media, and is continually interrogating possibilities to discover about
the world, about everyones perspectives and experience of it. Her
main research tool is the Internet,
which she supplements with physical actions.
Slavs and Tatars is a faction of
polemics and intimacies devoted to
an area east of the former Berlin
Wall and west of the Great Wall of
China known as Eurasia. The collectives practice is based on three
activities: exhibitions, books and
lecture-performances. They have
exhibited at leading institutions and
lectured widely at universities
across the globe. Their publications
include Mirrors for Princes (JRPRingier / NYU Abu Dhabi, 2015), Not
Moscow Not Mecca (Revolver/
Secession, 2012), as well as their
translation of the legendary Azeri
satire Molla Nasreddin: the maga
zine that wouldve, couldve,
shouldve (JRP-Ringier, 2011).

SYNSMASKINEN is an artist-group
and an inquiry into contemporary
political crises. The project consists
of a series of art projects, each
exploring a certain aspect or manifestation of contemporary crisis.
Together these visions are attempts
to unfolding a contemporary political cosmology. SYNSMASKINEN is
an artist-group in the sense that
each production is made by new
groups of artists and thinkers. In this
version SYNSMASKINEN consists
of: Ferdinand Ahm Krag, Frederik
Jacobi, Theis rntoft and Frans
Jacobi.
Tobias Revell is an artist and critical
designer. Spanning different media
and genres, his work addresses
failed utopias, rogue actors, unexplained phenomena, and the idea of
technology as territory. Tobias is
Course Director for the London
College of Communications BA
(Hons) programme in Information
and Interface Design and tutor of
BA (Hons.) Interaction Design Arts.
He is a co-founder of research consultancy Strange Telemetry and
one-half of research project
Haunted Machines. He lectures and
exhibits internationally, and has
recently appeared at Improving
Reality, FutureEverything, IMPAKT
Utrecht, Web Directions Sydney,
Transmediale Berline and Lift
Geneva.
Mohammad Salemy is an independent New York-based artist, critic,
and curator. He has shown his
works in Ashkal Alwan (Beirut) and
Witte de With (Rotterdam). His writings have been published in e-flux,
Flash Art, Third Rail, and Brooklyn
Rail. He has curated exhibitions at
the Morris and Helen Belkin Art
Gallery, Access Gallery, and Satellite
Gallery in Vancouver. In 2014, he
organized the Incredible Machines
conference. Salemy holds an MA in
critical curatorial studies from the
University of British Columbia and is
one of the organizers of The New
Centre for Research & Practice.

Ashkan Sepahvand is a writer,

translator, and researcher. His practice traces associations from within
the histories of the body, the sensory, sexuality, imagination, celebration, transformation, futurity, queerness, collectivity, ritual, and the self.
From 2012 until 2014, he was a
research fellow for the
Anthropocene Project at Haus der
Kulturen der Welt, where he co-
edited the publication Textures of
the Anthropocene: Grain, Vapor, Ray
(MIT Press, 2015). His work and
writings have been presented at
Documenta 13, Ashkal Alwan,
Institute for Contemporary Arts
London, Former West, Sharjah
Biennial X, Al-Mamal Foundation,
the Barber Shop, Kunstwerke, and
Kunsthaus Bregenz. He lives and
works in Berlin, where he organizes
the technosexual reading circle.
Lucie Tuma is an artist based in
Zurich working with choreography
and dance. During 20152017, she
has been assigned Young
Associated Artist by ProHelvetia
and in that context, has engaged
with questions around the development of modes of collaboration and
structures that bring forth non-
identitarian artistic production,
mainly via a series of invitations to
related artisst and their common
activities titled prima materia. Over
the last five years, her work has
been fed by a thorough engagement with current philosophies and
their propositions of rearticulations
on matters of materialism, realism
and the figure of thought of speculation. In 2008, together with Cecilie
Ullerup Schmidt, she founded the
Duo Chuck Morris: a long term
working relationship for the next 40
years and an attempt to dissolve
individual artistic identity. The works
are mainly co-produced and shown
at theatre venues and festivals in
Switzerland, Germany and
Scandinavia.

YOU Mi travels physically and metaphorically on the silk road between

East Asian and Europe. She is a
curator, researcher and academic
staff at Academy of Media Arts
Cologne, where she lectures on
global arts with a social-political,
transhistorical and transcultural
perspective. Her curatorial projects
on artistic and urban research were
shown in Shenzhen/Hong Kong
Bi-City Biennial of Architecture and
Urbanism (2007), Beijing Design
Week (2011, 2012), Istanbul Design
Biennale (2012), Lisbon Triennale
and Athens Biennale (2013). She
writes about philosophy of immanence, performance and technology, and is developing a concept of
digital Confucianism. Her recent
writings appear on Performance
Research, Kaleidoscope, Sharjah Art
Foundation publication, among
others.
Zhang Hui is staff member of
Xinjiang Province Museum. He specializes in museum exhibition curation, the history and art of Xinjiang,
history of technology in western
regions (of or to China) and mystic
culture. He has published monographs on the history of Xinjiang,
the steppes, Bortala region, and has
served in the editorial team of
Xinjiang Antiquity Chronicles. He
has discovered a circular stoneware
that prolongs the prehistory of
rmqi city for two thousand years.

Transgression and
Syncretism

Participants

PARK Soyoung (SoYoung) studied

western painting, after which she
majored in media arts at Academy
of Media Arts Cologne. She has
been researching and creating
works on connecting the changes in
nature with the stories related to
society, history, Taoism, Buddhism
and shamanism, which is then translated into the senses of the soul.
The state-of-the-art sensors and
scientific technology used in the
work Su:um, Dari felt the pulse of
heaven-human consonance. During
this process, observation and
research in varied aspects in an
infinite space of all directions led to
the mapping with artistic expressions. This suggests an acute
insight of the process leading to
metaphorical advent.

47

:
:

-
, ,
, ,

SYNSMASKINEN

ESTAR(SER)

-
Khhhhhhh
:

:


-

Asia Culture Center Theater

Transgression andSyncretism

Artistic director:
Seonghee Kim
Dramaturg:
Max-Philip Aschenbrenner
Producer:
Sungho Park
Publication:
Max-philip Aschenbrenner
Boyon Kim
Graphic design:
Sulki and Min
Translators:
Kathy Kyunghoo Lee
Shinu Kim

Curator and editor:

You Mi
Executive producer and
program advisor:
Els Silvrants-Barclay
Production manager:
Sarah Parolin
Technical director:
Michele Piazzi

Commissioned and produced by:

Asia Culture Center Theater

Participating artists and speakers:

Lawrence Abu Hamdan
Igor Demchenko
ESTAR(SER)
Aslan Gaisumov
HO Puay-peng
JEONG Geumhyung
Agnes Meyer-Brandis
MU Qian, Ubulhesen Memet,
Ghulammemet Sithamut,
Mettursun Sidiq, Muhemet
Yasin
Royce Ng
PARK Soyoung
Diane Rabreau
Tobias Revell
Mohammad Salemy
Ashkan Sepahvand
Slavs and Tatars
SYNSMASKINEN
Lucie Tuma
ZHANG Hui
Translations and graphic design
assistance for Khhhhhhh:
Hyungju Woo
Jina Kim
Thanks to:
GAO Yueyi
Kevser Gler
Renan Laru-An
Anca Rujoiu
SUN Siwei
Davide Quadrio
ZHANG Yuan.