Throughout Knut Asdam’s
work, we find a continuous investigation into urbanity and how the structures
of the contemporary urban environment, buildings, streets and parks structure
the formation of "personal" viewpoints. Here, the production of space
leads to the production of (certain) possibilities and impossibilities. This
is, in effect, what he has described as his interest in ‘contemporary
subjectivity’: how architecture shapes and responds to our modes of behavior,
not least our use and understanding of language, sexuality and gender. Howee is
also concerned with how we counter these structures through spatial practices
in everyday life.
This is evident in the
video Cluster Praxis, which features shots of the city, and focuses on possible and
imaginable practices within the buildings: a nocturnal club. Life inside the
buildings is invisible and private, and thus Cluster Praxis
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’> is attempting to show the
non-visible, to map the unmappable activities rather than the structures. The
video is all jumbled cuts, broken soundtrack and music, moving bodies without
faces, intensities rather than identities. The subjectivities produced in this
club setting are in a flux, not going anywhere in particular, but casting off
everyday behavourisms and languages. They are lost in the music but not to
themselves.
Correlations between
architecture and language also seem to lie at the heart of Filter City
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>, where the protagonists negotiate
their surroundings, themselves and each other through language and buildings;
but here we are only outside buildings, never inside them. Life between
buildings, as it were, is a constant negotiation of a double language, spoken
through the buildings and the body. Neither seems to run smoothly. There are
impasses, intersections, redirections, residues, surpluses, misunderstandings,
etc. — and the protagonists are in a constant struggle to mediate and
understand their (urban) condition. Alongside the territorialization of the
streets and blocks, there is also always the deterritorialization of the
subjects. Through and against, back and forth.
In Filter City
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>, Asdam’s first foray into film
(rather than video), we principally follow two female protagonists inhabiting
public places — as noted, we never see them in private places — of a specific
but unspecified city over a likewise unspecified period of time. Their relation
to each other is unclear, as is their social status. We first meet them in a
long establishing shot that places them on a street corner, but what this shot
actually establishes in terms of story and subjectivities is unclear — Filter
City quickly
discards filmic conventions of narration and continuity. Where the establishing
shot usually establishes the characters in a narrative structure and explains
just enough to grasp their life position, this shot only establishes the
ambiguous relations and positions themselves. We see that they are hanging out
on a street corner in a modern cityscape, but as we get closer the characters
seem more out of place than in their place. They are obviously not teenagers
and neither do they affirm any other preconceived notion of street persons;
they are young women and not easily categorizable as a gang or bums, they are
unexplainably there. But they seem to belong ; we trace not uneasiness on their
part, but familiarity, a strange sense of belonging. Perhaps we might, then,
categorize them as ‘familiarly strange’.
Not only their appearance
is a fluctuating signifier. Their speech also shifts from narrative, from
vernacular dialogue to an erosive language of theory-poetry. Through the course
of their dialogues and monologues, we understand that these characters have
some sort of bond, although we never find out the nature of this bond. Are they
friends or lovers, or both, are they in the present or past tense? We also
learn, through their later conversation/ territorialization in a playground —
crucially, a (deserted) public space not designed for such intimate encounters
— that the connection between them clearly is broken, not so much by any
particular action taking place between them, but rather by the space between
them. Rather than being protagonists in a story with parts to play, they are
situated — or established, if you will — in a space.
The two main protagonists
in Filter City,
S and O, are immersed in this space, and their agencies and subjectivities
cannot be separated clearly from it. Their relationship to the city space may
be antagonistic at points, but is always contingent. S is constantly trying to
find new ways of interacting and engaging with the city and its subjects, while
O falls seamlessly into a depressed speech and alienated state that merges with
the greyness of the city space around her. S walks around in the city and
narrating it like a private eye or a everyday resistance fighter. One recalls
Michel de Certeau’s famous notion of the walker: an urban practice of everyday
life where the individual not only experiences control and inaccessibility, but
also joys and freedoms in resisting the technologies of structurization and
control by refusing to be reduced to them. S follows an unknown woman first
through some familiar streets, and then through the aisles of a supermarket,
musing on her own interest in this person as well as to the identity of this
person. She finds almost nothing, only one crucial thing, that she recognizes
this woman, not from somewhere, but from everywhere, and that she is similar to
the other by way of location.
In this regard the
properties of Asdam’s films are similar to Gordon Matta-Clark’s strategies of
‘anarchitecture’ — an amalgam of anarchy and architecture — as seen
in the site-specific work Conical
Intersect, made in
Paris in 1975. Conical Intersect
consisted of making a hole
through a block of houses about to be demolished.
What Matta-Clark’s
traversal of these private spaces made public was not
difference or
individuality, but structural similarity, a sameness: that all the
apartments were similar,
not only in their lay-out, but also in their furnishings and arrangements.
Matta-Clark showed how privacy didn’t produce
individuality, only
isolation: everyone lived similar lives in similar apartments, but unseen by
each other. The implications of visualizing similarity and isolation are
profoundly political, and a movement from practice to critique to revolution of
everyday life becomes
apparent. Asdam’s work places itself as part of this trajectory, but he is also
with everyday resistances, with potentialities.
Even though the desires of S presumably are not met,
neither by meeting O in the playground or following/stalking the woman, she is
at least trying to (inter)act, to make sense, to formulate: a line of least
resistance. O, on the other hand, fails to connect and talks of a split, not
just between her and her surroundings, but also inside herself, as if she has
internalized the compartmentalization of modern cityscapes. She is lost in
language and lost in space, and this, in Asdam’s work, often amounts to the
very same thing. Thus, when he employs the language of art into cinema and
theory into poetry, he is suggesting the beginning of thought-as-action.
Simon Sheikh is a critic
and curator. He is Assistant Professor of Art Theory and coordinator of the
Critical Studies Programme, Malm� Art Academy, Sweden. Sheikh is also a Curator
at NIFCA, Helsinki, and General Editor of the OE series of critical readers in
visual cultures, published by b_books, Berlin. He lives in Berlin and
Copenhagen. |
