künstler

The Museum of European Normality

by Maria Thereza Alves, Jimmie Durham and Michael Taussig

TRIENT

In der Regel wollen Museen das Außergewöhnliche ausstellen – doch das Museum of European Normality (Museum der Europäischen Normalität) zeigt das alltägliche Leben an den (dichten) Oberflächen des europäischen Charakters. Das kollaborative Projekt von Maria Thereza Alves, Jimmie Durham und Michael Taussig konzentriert sich auf das „postkoloniale Zeitalter“ seit dem Zweiten Weltkrieg. Taussig befragt die Mysterien von Mimesis und Alterität, sowie, mit Friedrich Nietzsche, das Verhältnis von Tiefe und Oberfläche. Das Museum of European Normality ist jedoch keinesfalls auf der Suche nach einer Essenz oder der Tiefe des Seins in Europa; es fahndet nach seinen Gewohnheiten und Tricks. Alves erforscht die europäische Gepflogenheit, dem Gegenüber während eines Gesprächs in die Augen zu starren, sowie das Bedürfnis des europäischen Mannes nach Bestätigung, indem er in öffentlichen Ritualen das berührt, was andere Kulturen als das private Selbst bezeichnen. Sie ermöglicht den Besucherinnen und Besuchern auch, aktiv an einem Austauschprogramm zur Neudefinierung kultureller Strategien teilzunehmen. Durham bezieht sein Beweismaterial aus Wirtschaft, Volksweisheiten und den permanenten Verstärkungseffekten der Werbung.
Maria Thereza Alves ist eine brasilianische Künstlerin, die sich in ihrer Arbeit mit gesellschaftlichen Wissensstrukturen beschäftigt. Jimmie Durham war Dichter und politischer Aktivist und ist heute ein in Europa ansässiger Künstler. Der Anthropologe Michael Taussig lehrt an der Columbia-Universität und hat viele erfolgreiche Bücher veröffentlicht, darunter The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America und Mimesis and Alterity (Mimesis und Alterität).

Location

TRIENT

ANSELM FRANKE/HILA PELEG: "THE SOUL (or, Much Trouble in the Transportation of Souls)"

PALAZZO DELLE POSTE, VIA S.S. TRINITA’ 27, I-38100 TRIENT, ITALIEN

mehr

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This project proposes to examine today’s Europe not as an expanding geopolitical entity but in regard to the engineering of its psyche or soul. Trento, the city of the historic Council of Trent and of this part of Manifesta 7, provides the immediate background for the project.
As an archeology of reversals between inside and outside, self and other, individual and collective, The Soul follows the historical turning-inwards of the expansionist boundaries of European modernity and suggests that the production, mobilization, and representation of the inner self is a final frontier, a last outside.
Here the soul is not understood or treated as fact but as a cultural object, an allegory for social relations shaped by ideas and techniques of power. Much like the “discovery” of a continent, these techniques have produced and invented an entity they declared to map objectively. And yet this entity, the psyche—if only as the difference between material and immaterial, body and mind, object and subject—has never been entirely contained by positivist science. Its properties (emotion, memory, imagination, fantasy, self-consciousness) remain haunted by its own otherness, a minefield of displacements.
It was in Trento that the catholic doctrine of the relation between the soul and representation was articulated some five hundred years ago. And it was here that the rules for Christian confession were expanded to include purely projective, imaginary deeds and thoughts, thus marking an important step in the construction of the modern European self: the policing and self-policing of the interior.
This history unfolds in the exhibition as a set of miniature museums, which sketch possible, alternative, or incomplete histories of the psyche and the soul. These are study displays that investigate the embodiment of power in its affective and cognitive dimensions, experiment with the tradition of the museum, and bring into focus the paradoxes of a “European normality”, the relation between soul and image, nonphonetic pedagogy, structures of feelings, the logic of desires, psychological personality tests, and the history of antipsychiatry.
Next to this series of speculative museums, The Soul brings together recent and specially commissioned works by over thirty artists working in Europe and elsewhere. Some contributions engage with the site of the exhibition and its regional, political, and historical context. Others take the form of “deep” historical research, confronting the mythical contents of European history with the technologies of power and the power of cultural technologies. The entire exhibition is a search for languages capable of identifying and articulating new forms of exclusion and possibilities for reversing forms of social control.
Anselm Franke/Hila Peleg
THE SOUL
(or, Much Trouble in the Transportation of Souls)
CONTRIBUTORS
Nader Ahriman, Maria Thereza Alves / Jimmie Durham / Michael Taussig, Tamy Ben-Tor, Attila Bruni, Beth Campbell, Fabio Campolongo, Marcus Coates, Peter Coffin, Keren Cytter, Jos De Gruyter / Harald Thys, Massimiliano & Gianluca De Serio, Brigid Doherty, Omer Fast, Peter Friedl, Stefano Graziani, Tom Holert / Claudia Honecker, Karl Holmqvist, Hannah Hurtzig, Joachim Koester, Andree Korpys / Markus Löffler, Kuehn Malvezzi, Daria Martin, Angela Melitopoulos, Xisco Mensua, Valérie Mréjen, Rabih Mroué, Andreas Müller, Sina Najafi / Christopher Turner, Rosalind Nashashibi, Luigi Ontani, Ria Pacquée, Bernd Ribbeck, Pietro Roccasalva, Roee Rosen, Christoph Ruckhäberle, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Florian Schneider, Eyal Sivan, Josef Strau, Javier Tellez, Althea Thauberger, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, Barbara Visser, Klaus Weber,
Eyal Weizman
Texts in Pubblication:
Franco Berardi, Brigid Doherty, Tom Holert, Maurizio Lazzarato, Eva Meyer, Avi Pitchon, Renata Salecl, Michael Taussig, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, Eyal Weizman, et al.