"

The epistemology of the other

For a cartography of memory and otherness
ENGLISH VERSION
ANNA MARIA GUASCH
UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA

In spite of the negative aspects of the processes of homogenization that it has
generated, globalization can be understood as a machine or a technology that helps
to broaden our horizons by providing routes which connect us to other societies, other
peoples, other ways of thought. It does so not only through the traditional or electronic
media but through what Appadurai calls mediated experiences, ranging from travel
and migration to experiences derived from dialogue, that is, dialogical experiences
1
.
Therefore, globalization ceases to be an external, abstract, distant process which is
always changing its coordinates and may even arouse fear, to become a vehicle
certainly with utopian elements that broadens and projects horizons, expectations and
local aspirations. It is then that we can speak of a production of locality, which is by
no means innocent, and which may cause violent confrontations between the two faces
of globalization mentioned above. The local ceases to be something inert acted on by
global forces to become something given which requires agency, purpose, vision,
design: in Appadurais words, this is, more than anything else, a process and a project
2
.
We can then understand the local not as a spatial structure, but as a structure of
feeling, as Appadurai proposes, following Raymond Williams
3
, a critic known

1
Arjun Appadurai,Minorities and the Production of Daily Peace. Interview with Arjun Appadurai, in
Joke Brouwer & Arjen Mulder (eds.), Feelings are Always Local, Rotterdam, NAI Publishers, 2004.

2
Arjun Appadurai, The Right to Participate in the Work of the Imagination, in TransUrbanism,
V2_Publishing/NAi Publishers, Rotterdam, 2002, p.33.

3
Raymond Williams uses this concept for the first time in The Long Revolution (Williams, Raymond. The
Long Revolution. London, Chatto and Windus, 1961), and returns to it in his later Marxism and Literature
(London and New York, Oxford University Press, 1977). Williams used this concept to characterize the
experience of quality of life in a specific space and time. And although it maintains a structural level, it
operates at the most delicate level of our activities. Williams describes the structures of feeling as
social experiences in solution. A structure of feeling corresponds to the Culture of a specific
#
especially for his contribution to the Marxism of subjectivity. The equivalent of this
subjectivity is, for Appadurai, the role granted to the imagination, which he describes as
something more than an individual faculty or a mere mechanism to escape the real.
Imagination would, therefore, be a collective instrument to transform the real, to
create multiple possible horizons. Hence the production of locality should be
considered as a work of imagination rather than as a social construction.
Of course locality has a spatial dimension, a scalar dimension, a material
dimension and a kind of embodied dimension, but I want to infuse them with the idea
that in the world in which we live the imagination can actually reach into multiple
scales and spaces and forms and possibilities. These then can become part of the toolkit
through which the structure of feeling can be produced locally. Locality, in the end, may
still have something to do with scale and place, and with the body (and without that it
loses all its meaning) but with the difference that the horizons of globalism, through
media and the work of the imagination and migration, can become part of the material
through which specific groups of actors can envision, project, design and produce
whatever kind of local feeling they wish to produce
4
.

It is from this perspective understanding the production of locality in a
liberating sense defying all restrictions and stressing the global as a broadening of the
horizon of the local, the locality of the new minorities that we understand the
relation between memory and otherness, an otherness which is not isolated or unique or
exotic because it is connected and, at the same time, is a part and a consequence of
global networks. We aim to apply a third view of otherness: not the Romantic view
inherited from the Enlightenment which stresses culture diversity and confers meaning
on it, though always through the figure of the savage, the exotic and the authenticity of
ones roots, nor the modern view that assumes that the other abandons his or her
otherness and becomes involved in a process of assimilating and copying the culture
of the West so as to be a part of universal modern culture.
Through this third view the West no longer requires the other to be exotic,
traditional and tribal, or to express a pure authenticity; it discovers itself, recognizes
itself in the Other on the basis of the idea of interactivity and cultural exchange. In

historical moment, avoiding idealist notions of the spirit of the time, and suggesting a set of perceptions
and values shared by a particular generation that is based on specific artistic forms and conventions.

4
Arjun Appadurai, The Right to Participate in the Work of the Imagination, in TransUrbanism,
V2_Publishing/NAi Publishers, Rotterdam, 2002, p.34.

$
this process which overcomes all the binary oppositions (centre/periphery,
civilized/savage, learned/ignorant), cultures should be conceived as interacting,
transgressing, and transforming in a far more complex way than traditional binary
oppositions allow. Hybridization and linguistic multivocality are thus presented as the
most powerful tools for dismantling colonization processes and for favouring the
intercultural relation between the one and the other. This is how Jacques Derrida
conceptualised the issue in his text Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of
Origin (1998:40) in part philosophical essay and in part autobiographic memoir, in the
sense that he deals with his own relation to the French language where he interrelates
issues closer to linguistics with issues on cultural identity. I have but one language
yet that language is not mine: with this assertion Derrida explores, on the one hand, the
structural limits, the wishes inherent to the act by which each individual possesses his or
her language and, on the other, he bears witness to his acculturation as an Algerian Jew
in respect of language acquisition and the dynamics of political and cultural inclusion-
exclusion; finally, he reveals the complex interaction of psychological factors associated
to the wish of the subject of identity of recovering an original lost language and to the
ambition of adopting the language of the colonizer.
the monolingualism of the other (also means) that in any case we speak only
one language and that we do not own it. We only ever speak one language and, since
it returns to the other, it exists asymmetrically, always for the other, from the other,
kept by the other. Coming from the other, remaining with the other, and returning to the
other. (Derrida:40.)
To address these relations between memory and otherness inside what we will call
the post-colonial condition, which obliges us to speak of the politics of consciousness,
the politics of trust and responsibility (My home, my street, my life can change more
visibly what proletarian revolutions have been able to achieve), we provide an
epistemological framework for some of the issues surrounding globalization. We will
not be approaching them from an economic, a political or a strictly artistic point of
view, but from a geographical, geopolitical point of view. We include the cardinal issue
of identity, which can better explain these paradoxes and frictions between the I and
the other. This takes place within a process of interculturality ruled by the following
leitmotivs: we are all exotic in the others eyes, we are all universal or no one is, we
are all the one and the other.
%
This epistemological approach, within a paradigm shift in which the art of the
periphery and the erstwhile other have progressively taken the centre of the culture
scene, is based on a series of concepts that can explain the new centrality of the post-
colonial and the local, and establish differences vis--vis the identitary politics
associated with post-modern anti-universalism and its relativism.

CONCEPT 1 (THE CULTURE-WORLD)
We propose to work inside a kind of cartography in which places are occupied by
a series of concepts such as what Gilles Lipovetsky terms the culture-world, touching
on topics related to art, but also on culture and the economy understood as symptoms of
the new era: the culture of techno-capitalism which operates at planetary level and
invades all areas of society. As Lipovetsky holds, this is no longer the fixed cosmos of
unity, of an ultimate meaning, of hierarchical classifications, but a cosmos of networks,
of unlimited flows with no point of reference:
In hypermodern times, culture has become a world whose circumference
is everywhere and whose centre is nowhere
5
.
In this culture-world, the humanist universal makes way for the specific and
social universal and the economy-world conforms to a single model of regulations,
values, and aims: the techno-capitalist ethos and system. It is a culture-world that
addresses questions and issues of a global dimension such as ecology, the economic
crisis, immigration, poverty and terrorism, but also existential issues, such as identity,
beliefs and crises of meaning, and personality problems: a world, in short, which
becomes culture, and a culture which becomes world, as Lipovetsky holds. A culture-
world without territorial, economic or political borders, crossing the limits of the
cultures derived from classical humanism. A culture-world which is neither a mirror nor
a reflection of societies, but the principle that generates, constitutes and models them,
and causes them to evolve. Binary oppositions such as high/low culture,
anthropological/aesthetic culture, material/ideological culture are abandoned (or should

5
Gilles Lipovetsky & Jean Serroy, La Culture-monde. Rponse une socit dsoriente, Paris, Odile
Jacob, 2008, p. 8.

&
be abandoned), and the basic structures and the poles of the culture-world are freed.
These structures nurture everything from techno-scientific culture to media and network
culture and individual culture, and have generated or vice versa a new type of image
creator/recreator/manipulator/communicator which we continue to call, out of habit or
for lack of a better name, the artist.

CONCEPT 2 BARE LIFE
Artists who adopt this culture-world define themselves as inhabitants of the global
world and participants in this microworld: artists interested in the social discourse not
a class discourse, but a territorial discourse not so much image creators as image
researchers, who gather, create, question, narrate and present iconic or other information
on universal topics, as individually or socially local, in a format that Western society, or
our society, has classified and confirmed as art. An artist who uses this information
not as the sole object of analysis but as one tool among many, though privileged by its
status as art, to unmask, reveal, denounce, analyse... censored, humiliated, or abused
aspects of the modern world: democracy, justice, otherness, migration, rootlessness,
diaspora... Topics which bear little or no relation to ways-of-life, but to a sacrificeable
life banished from the world, reduced to survival, the bare life that Giorgio Agamben
proposes in his theory of marginalization
6
, life driven out to the margins of the social,
to which the political, legal and biological show no mercy; a life that alienates, if not
disposes of, citizens, deprives them of their legitimate rights, leaves them stuck in the
mire of corrupt legal systems, and turns the human being, in Agambens words, into the
homo sacer, a deportee with no status in society, given over to nonexistent gods,
soiling society by his mere presence.
This homo sacer and his bare life, with no gods to invoke, has paradoxically taken
the spotlight (if not the leading role) away from gods, emperors, nobles, the bourgeois
or revolutionaries who over the centuries have successively been the major figures of
art
7
, as we can see in this proposal/exhibition. Rather than using art as protest,

6
Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer. El poder soberano y la vida nuda, Valencia, Pre-Textos, 1998.

7
See Anthony Downey, Zones of Indistinction. Giorgio Agambens Bare Life and the Politics of
Aesthetics, Third Text, vol. 23, n 2, March 209, p. 110.
'
propaganda or agitprop, the works presented here are created with an ethical and
political dimension that reveals how limited human rights are and how vast is the area
of exclusion, oblivion, and repression, the mire of the bare life and the undefined areas
where power turns into control or terror: all this, however, without giving up the
aesthetic (it would be unfair to do so, as this would mean vilifying what had already
been soiled). This approach is close both to political aesthetics of Agamben and the
aesthetics of Jacques Rancire, and it expresses the configuration of the sensitive within
the area of the new relations between politics and aesthetics. Since it is on aesthetic
grounds understanding by aesthetic not art theory in general as rooted in a Hegelian
perspective but a certain regime of thought that combines doing and being and the
forms of visibility, as Rancire holds that the battle can be fought today. A battle
which once focused on promises of emancipation and the dreams and disappointments
of history, and which now reaches beyond the debates on the autonomy of art and its
political submission, eliminating the control over what is seen and what can be seen and
the distance between those with the ability to see and the status to speak, and those to
whom these rights are not granted
8
.

CONCEPT 3. MOBILE IMAGE
The artist represents or presents these undefined areas through the technologies of
the mobile image, which allows him to work in the interstices that exist in the areas of
documentation and art, as Boris Groys proposes in his work Art as Documentation
9
.
Groys proposes documentation as a method for contemporary art which is not limited to
the seemingly objective methods of the documentary but which unashamedly adopts the
formats of interpretation in making explicit the role of the artist in selection,
manipulation, synthesis and encoding of information so as to bring forth an author that
is unrelated to the autobiographical subject: a subject who, dissatisfied with the public
or corporate manipulation of information, uses the power of the images of the global
world (some his own, others foreign or appropriated from television, cinema or Internet)


8
Jacques Rancire, La divisin de lo sensible. Esttica y poltica (2000), Salamanca, Centro de Arte de
Salamanca, 2002, p. 28.

9
Boris Groys, Art and Documentation, in Documenta 11_Platform 5: Exhibition, op. cit. p. 62.

(
to collect, process, interpret and disseminate information to the community
10
. And it is
here that the use of film and video as creative tools and means becomes meaningful: a
use which, though widespread in the 1980s and 1990s, is now a new instrument that
reveals a subjective dimension deriving from the artists individual and empirical
encounters with geography as a social and identitary space and from the processes of
displacement inside an unstable world. This empirical factor, understanding experience
as a direct encounter which makes possible a history from behind, an oral history
or an everyday history, feeds on the ethnographic, and not on an abstract perception
deriving from grand episodes and figures, a history which, as Irit Rogoff and Martin Jay
propose
11
, ensures the authenticity of knowledge deriving from the proximity to the
real.
Together with film and video, considered as fiction, life interaction, performance
or tableaux vivants, there are other ways of working with mobile images and,
specifically, images conceived as memory flashes synchronic and spatial rather than
diachronic and temporal or as an index of an interest for the domestic and the family
space that highlights problems of difference, identity, race, and ethnicity. We should
bear in mind, though, that this use of video as subjective documentation, where the
always fragmented I of the artist-researcher-essayist appears in the first person in his
dialogue with the other, does not imply a renewed cult of the Romantic-style ego.
On the contrary: it is an active commitment to the world and to history conceived as a
horizontal archive where a multitude of nuances coexist without hierarchies, projected
on local narratives within the framework of multiple geographies of capital. And they
do so in permanent negotiation with aesthetic criteria in the form of political strategies,
without avoiding symbolic relations.

CONCEPT 4. THE MEMORY EFFECT: MEMORY, HISTORY,
ETHNOGRAPHY

10
Angela Dimitrakaki, All that is solid melts into air but I cant change anything. On the identity of the
Artist in the Networks of Global Capital, in Jonathan Harris (ed.), Identity Theft. The Cultural
Colonization of Contemporary Art, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, Tate Liverpool, p. 2008,
p.231.

11
Irit Rogoff, De-Regulation: With the work of Kutlug Ataman, Third Text, vol. 23, n 2, 2009, pp.
175-176. See also Martin Jay, Songs of Experience, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2005.

)
To approach the topic of memory, or the memory effect
12
, we should consider
the ways in which in present-day art memory has become both a historical concern and
an artistic and theoretical issue, and this has led to an obsession with memory, both
instinctive memory (mnem or anamnesis) and memory as an act of consigning or
storage (hypmnema), both of individual memory and of collective or cultural memory.
As Pierre Nora and Andreas Huyssen hold, works of art can be considered to be
repositories or areas of memory, taking for granted that the memories and stories that
appear in them, either explicitly or implicitly, belong to different contexts and latitudes,
to a specific time and place, to a site specificity.
We can include under the Memory Effect a large number of contemporary artists,
such as Ursula Biemann, Hannah Collins, Francesco Jodice, Rogelio Lpez Cuenca,
Dennis Adams, Jordi Colomer, Antoni Muntadas and Krzysztof Wodiczko, Kutlug
Ataman, Francys Alys, Adrian Paci, Alfredo Jaar, Yael Bratrana, Olaf Breuning, Renzo
Martens and Harun Facochi. Through fractured narratives they collect, recollect and
present images and information about a world perceived as a cross-disciplinary
database. To an extent these artists take up the methodological legacy of Aby Warburg,
who in his project Atlas Mnemosyne (1927-1929) showed how the memory effect
underlies the temporal and spatial spirit of Western and non-Western art history on the
basis of an eclectic, diverse and irregular collection or archive of visual fragments in
which each image is a fixed interval and the final reading can only be understood
through the montage of these intervals.
This cross-disciplinary approach to memory has meant that ethnography, the
cult of the present and interest in the spatial (which at one point were interpreted as the
only claims of postmodernity) can today stand outside this question of time and
memory. In other words, what used to be the exclusive interest of anthropology the
study of inhabited spaces through categories such as geography, borders, trade routes,
migration, transportation and diaspora associates itself with a universalist historical
analysis and temporal continuities interested in the reconstruction of the past/present.

12
Charles Green, The Memory Effect. Anachronism, Time and Motion, Third Text, vol. 22, n 6,
November 2008, pp. 681-697.

*
The synchronic (a horizontal approach) and the diachronic (a vertical approach)
are no longer perceived as separate, or even opposed, categories; from the interstitial
area of memory, acting both on history and the present, they occur in parallax. In
Tristes Tropiques (1955), Lvi Strauss already talked of the close relationship between
ethnography, a product of fieldwork mapping, of participatory observation, of
journalistic inventory-chronicles, of confession books and memory and
forgetfulness, between trace or ruin and recollection. Years later this standpoint
was endorsed by David Harvey in The condition of Postmodernity (1989), and by
Andreas Huyssen, who, in Present Pasts. Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of
Memory (2003) claimed that the growth in memory discourses was not only related to
the debate on the Holocaust and its concept of territorialized memory which had
begun in the 1980s, but to the shift towards the memory of the other, in which
cartographical (typical of synchronic thought) and the memorialistic (typical of
diachronic thought) meet.
Marc Aug goes one step further and describes an ethnological-social situation in
respect of what he calls pure time, a dateless time absent from our world of images,
simulation, reconstitutions and history. Once the non-places in hypermodernity are
defined a postmodernity which accelerates history, retracts space and individualizes
destinies that is, the non-anthropological places which cannot be conceived as
relational or historical identity spaces, it is time to specify the places of memory
inhabited by ruins, unorganized strata of rubble and monuments of the past, the places
of a pure and lost time, places not corrupted by the falsification of reality that seeks to
turn place into a consumer good, the places of truth and life which for Aug are the
jurisdiction of art.
As opposed to traditional anthropologists who, faced with the quarry of reality
before them, attempted to construct an inventory of lost objects from which to build
their interpretative theories, historical sequences, and mythical episodes, new
anthropologists do not work with ruins as inanimate objects or skeletons from the past.
For them and for the artists involved in this problem, considering and working with the
ruins of reality does not mean embarking on a trip through history, but experiencing
pure time which is present time since it is not past: In its past aspects, history is too
rich, multiple and profound to be reduced to the stone sign that has escaped from it, a
lost object like the ones that archaeologists recover in their spatial and temporal
"+
sections. In the present aspects of time, emotion is aesthetic, but the spectacle of nature
combines with the spectacle of the remains
13
. Thus, artists not only work, analyse and
communicate what lies before their eyes: towns, trampled fields, the colonizers and the
colonized, potentates, the starving, natives, immigrants, men, women, as for them
making the inventory of the dilapidated remains of reality is not an end in itself, not
even an end; what matters is reinventing, reconstructing reality: Humanity is not in
ruins. It is a construction site, states Aug. It still belongs to history. Often tragic,
always unequal, but irreparably common history
14
. We need to feel time again to be
conscious of history:
At a time when everything conspires to make us believe that history is at
an end and that the world is a spectacle in which this end is staged, we have to
refind the time to believe in history. This, today, would be the educational
vocation of ruins.
15


CONCEPT 5. TRANSLATION
Negotiation between the synchronic and the diachronic, between the
anthropological and the historical, is only possible through a further basic element,
translation, understood as a tool that creates areas of cross-disciplinary understanding,
and as a paradoxical concept, making understanding possible while at the same time
pointing to the possibility of the untranslatable. This form of translation should not be
understood as a means of fulfilling a linguistic function (as in the linguistic and
ethnographical texts of the 1930s and 1940s) but as a cultural and political instrument,
an instrument that not only makes the hegemonic incorporation of the other possible,
but shows the potentiality of resistance in the process of translating in itself.
If, during the colonial process, translation was a source of interest especially
because of its ability to build bridges across cultures, being perceived basically as an act
of communication, nowadays the focus is on the context of translation. Understood as

13
Marc Aug, El tiempo en ruinas, Barcelona, Gedisa, 2003, pp. 18 y 45-46.

14
Marc Aug, op. cit., p. 19.

15
Marc Aug, op. cit., p. 53.

""
the process of incorporating the voice of difference, translation is based, according to
Walter Benjamins 1923 essay The Task of the Translator (Die Aufgabe des
bersetzers) on the impossibility of creating a mirror-image of the original, and
should be understood, as Derrida later claimed in his essay La diffrance (1968), as a
flow, a transitory movement that produces a supplement through its two poles. The
function of this supplement is to deconstruct the cultural assumptions on which
translation is based; and it would only be intelligible through the creation of a third
term, different from the original and the translated. It is not a plus nor a minus; nor is it
something external or the complement of the internal, an accident or an essence; and in
all cases it provides a space for the dichotomy of a cultural model hinting at
transgression within the framework of a broad encounter between different language
interfaces, ways of speaking or understanding the world
16
.

CONCEPT 6. PARRHESIA
Another common topic complementary to translation is the action of making the
other speak on the basis of the concept of public speaking or testimony. As
Wodizcko noted in an interview with Patricia Philips
17
, democracy would not exist
without the public speaker, or the fearless speaker (an idea introduced by Michel
Foucault in his lectures at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1983 from the
Greek concept of parrhesia). The artist becomes this public-speaker with a
clarification: while participating in the agora of contemporary public space he or she
give a voice to others, to enable them to add their voices to this agora. History is not
only the official history of the winners.
In this regard, moving ahead from his mute projections on public monuments,
what Wodizcko does is allow histories (or rather microhistories) silenced by some
specific trauma, to be represented and reinserted in the public space. Only thus,
according to the artist, can both people and monuments overcome traumatic impacts and
become operational in the public space. This is an artistic project, but also a political

16
Jacques Derrida, La diffrance (1968), essay in Marges de la philosophie, Pars, ditions de Minuit,
1972.

17
Patricia Philips, Art Journal, 2003, 62,4, ns 32-47
"#
and ethical one, and a psychoanalytical and sociological one, also closely related to
concepts of trauma therapy.

CONCEPT 7. EXPERIENCE
In an article dedicated to Kutlug Ataman
18
, Irit Rogoff proposes a vindication of
experience to reveal a subjective dimension derived from the individual and
experiential encounters of each artist with the multiple issues arising from inhabiting
the global world.
Rogoff understands experience as a direct encounter between artists and their
works that makes possible a history from behind, an oral history or an everyday
history beyond all abstract perception of great events and figures, the documents
legitimized by archive structures and official voices. This is the context in which the
narratives of experience proposed by Rogoff to explain the work of Kutlug Ataman
come into their own. And this is where mediated experience
19
acquires its full
meaning, ensuring the authenticity of knowledge deriving from the proximity to the
real.
Hence, many of the images used by contemporary artists move between two
poles: they are immediate, brief and transitory typical of ethnographical methodology
and symbolical and interpretative, with specific characters becoming part of an
inventory of myths which is the source of interpretative theories: fear almost
becomes a myth.
This would account in many cases for the approximation of the camera to the
different characters (treated with a certain formal and aesthetic preciousness) and close-
ups that focus more on expression (looks, voices, asides) rather than on message
content (related to immigration, drug trafficking, exile, rootlessness). Memories are
activated by a present that acknowledges them at each moment (a time-image that


18
Irit Rogoff, De-Regulation, Third Text, p.176)

19
Irit Rogoff, De-Regulation: With the work of Kutlug Ataman, Third Text, vol. 23, n 2, 2009, pp.
175-176. See also Martin Jay, Songs of Experience, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2005.

"$
links up with the ideas of Walter Benjamin on memory and history and the methods he
used in his chronicle of his native city, Berlin, in A Berlin Chronicle). The
conversations, the dialogues we see in all these videos work as a process that feeds and
encourages memory, an inventory of multiple voices through which the private becomes
collective, the individual social, and fears are finally exorcized and become
universal.
Hence the interest of many artists in privileging knowledge or data that have been
retrieved subjectively, rejecting official versions of history. As Gibbons holds,
Benjamin conceives this retrieval in terms of archaeology, in which the archaeologist-
historians role is to retrieve or redeem the common space, the poetics of the
everyday, and the unremarkable.
20


CONCEPT 8. AESTHETICS
So this is not a strictly documentation project, nor openly political, nor yet another
version of a CNN documentary. Rather than using art as protest, as propaganda or
agitprop, the works selected tend towards the ethical and political, without renouncing
the aesthetic, in a sense close both to Agambens and Badious political aesthetics and
to the aesthetic of Jacques Rancire when he talks about the shaping of the sensitive
within the framework of the new relations between politics and aesthetics.
It is in the aesthetic arena understanding by aesthetic not art theory in general as
rooted in the Hegelian perspective but a certain regime of thought that shapes the ways
of doing and being and the forms of visibility, as Rancire claims where the battle is
fought today. This battle once referred to promises of emancipation and the hopes and
disappointments of history, and goes beyond debates on the autonomy of art and the
subordination of art to politics, eliminating the control of what we see and what can be
seen, and the gap between those with the ability to see and the status to speak and those
who are not granted this right
21
.

20
(Gibbons:102).

21
Jacques Rancire, La divisin de lo sensible. Esttica y poltica (2000), Salamanca, Centro de Arte de
Salamanca, 2002, p. 28.
"%



CONCLUSION: INTERCULTURALITY

The issue of translation as a means for capturing the traces of the other (a
common practice among artists in The Memory of the Other, such as Jodice, Muntadas
or Wodiczko) in oneself when working around the confines of the context of such
traces and working through the tension between difference and identity, respecting the
individuality and originality of the presence of the other voice, leads us to another key
issue in present-day art and in our proposal/exhibition: the dialogical situation. Some of
the works presented here (Biemann, Collins and Lpez Cuenca) show how some of the
concepts usually used in the field of social and culture stratifications are no longer valid.
The paradigm of postcolonial culture, especially Western postcolonial culture, which
examines the culture of the others using terms concepts such as second and
third world is no longer valid; nor is the Western paradigm on identity formation in
the Western environment. These are unidirectional paradigms which should be
interpreted (and this is how art interpreted and practised them) as bilateral processes
affecting to use these words paradoxically both colonizers and colonized.
Within the context of this fundamental bilateralism, a dialogue between cultures
that expresses a relation of the kind me-you/you/me, in which each part recognizes in
the other a person, that is, an end in itself and not a means to achieve something,
acquires its full meaning. This dialogue would make it possible to go beyond the
multiculturalism stage thanks to the political philosophy of interculturalism, that is,
cultural exchange through inter-national processes, achieving a new critical
reappropriation of the national. We should, therefore, move ahead towards the
intercultural that overcomes the old dichotomy between identity and difference
dichotomy, towards dialogues between the different national contexts that stress
subjectivities, that is, the particular realities of each human being beyond the concept of


"&
the ethnic an intense and productive dialogue between the universal and the local,
understanding the local more in a relational and contextual rather than in a scalar or
spatial sense.
As opposed to the multiculturalist, who distances himself from the other via a
privileged universalism, the interculturalist blurs distinctions in the name of a shared
universalism: We are all universal or nobody is; We are all exotic or nobody is. In
the empty space of intercultural encounters, the ethnic disappears and universal human
identity emerges with its creativities and potentialities.
As the Iranian philosopher and writer Ramin Jahanbegloo claims, every culture
discovers itself in the others, and vice versa, by perceiving likenesses and differences
simultaneously. The dialogue with the other, as we have presented it in this
proposal/exhibition, is a dialogue with oneself. And this is how each culture sees the
other: as an event, an open door. The presence of a different culture is essential to
create and guarantee new possibilities
22
.


22
Ramin Jahanbegloo, Celebrating Diversity, http://www.india-
seminar.com/2007/569/569_ramin_jahanbegloo.htm.