“Damascus: A First Draft” is a publication produced within the context of our project “Reloading Images: Damascus / Work in Progress 2008″. It contains research ideas, projects and projections, blog entries, essays and pictures collected during a 6 month online exchange period between artists from Damascus and beyond.
180 pages, b/w, 182×120mm, published by Qadmus Publishers Damascus/Beirut 2008
[Click on the image to enlarge]
Introduction/Editorial:
To write an introduction supposes that I am leading you, the reader, inside my words, towards a familiarity with what you are about to read in this publication as well as the who, what, when, where, why, and how of our project „Reloading Images Work-in-Progress Damascus 2008“.
To write an introduction, however, presupposes a voice that has the ability to bring an outsider in, a voice that I only share in part. Not possessing the oversight to write an introduction alone, as well as faced with the intermediate status of this publication – this is, after all, a work-in-progress, whatever I introduce today will no longer be the same tomorrow – I am summoning the spirit of the multiple authors who have been and continue to shape this project from the beginning onwards. Their voices are many but we are all participants, the who of this project: Nine Syrian participants and nine participants from abroad, along with the Reloading Images organizers, documentary team, official and unofficial partners, friends, and guests, working in (but not limited to) theater, dance, performance, photography, installation, action, architecture, curation, research, and writing. Over the past five months both sides have been challenged to connect on a virtual level – at times flourishing, at times struggling (technical problems notwithstanding) – and to talk and reflect about their work and interests in a way that keeps Damascus as its primary context. What does this project demand? In the open space of conducting artistic research, each voice is responsible for its own self, collaborates only willingly, speaks its mind about what it wants, needs, what it doesn’t approve of, and sometimes, when busy with other things, becomes silent for awhile – only to come back later.
For one month in October, when everyone may feel as though the face-to-face encounter is a whole new beginning for the project, both sides will meet for a workshop that ends the virtual exchanges and propels artistic collaborations into motion within the city. No longer, then, will Damascus exist as an imaginary virtual space, but as the real place itself (of course, such reality is questionable). To introduce this project at this stage, right before the workshop starts, is to reflect on the imagined city of Damascus through the research done by all participants in the past months, contributions from guests, challenges faced with authorities, as well as all of our lived, dreamed, and fantasized experiences of Damascus. Our where is undoubtedly Damascus, but where is Damascus? To locate a beginning is a personal task, a task for now, a gate into the city walls.
Everything starts and ends with the city of Damascus. Imagining a city is the first step – buying the guide book, looking up pictures, applying for a visa, booking a hotel, all these expectations, challenges, and unknowns. Factually, Damascus is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. Now, it is home to rich diversity and undergoing rapid change with regard to its inhabitants’ different lifestyles, circumstances, and backgrounds, The tension between the imagined and real cities of Damascus lies in the contradictions of such densely packed and intermingled diversity: Oriental spices, Ottoman arcades, Socialist avenues, futuristic mosques, women wearing headscarves, women not wearing headscarves, international coffee-shop chains, water-pipes, language students dancing debka, Friday markets selling Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle T-shirts and Air France magazines from 1993, cars blaring Russian techno, hamams, East German military jackets…
Of course, this has something to do with art, because every artist lives a life that is structured by its present circumstances, some of which are built from within the local context, others which are provided, suggested, or imposed from outside. Damascus, as a site that conjures images from here and there, as a complicated place, lies on the periphery. Saying this is not to disengage Damascus and its inhabitants from the world, nor to insist on an otherness, an exotic element, or an opposition. It is not to be underestimated that each place is complicated. That a place is complicated requires approaching neither the imagined city nor its real counterpart as polarized dualities (such as center versus periphery). That a space like Damascus is complicated, the why behind our project, supposes a simultaneity of modernities, for the “real” Damascus exists in the same space and time known as the present – how more modern can one be than to simply exist now and here, to struggle with recognizing the present under the pressure of a nostalgia of imagination or a fantasy of the past? The urban context becomes a platform to examine these elements: the Old City of Damascus alongside the New; tourism (language study, pilgrimage, or holiday); cultural marketing taken to the extreme of self-exoticization; the bazaar economy of barter, favor, and exchange competing with shopping malls, credit cards, and luxury items.
Work-in-progress is a method of not only engaging in artistic research, in which the complexity of place and circumstance deepens, but also a continual process of attempting to visualize the complicated systems encountered. A method that disregards logic not for illogic, rather one that embraces alogic, a crazy knowledge, an artistic episteme that sees everyday objects, interactions, situations as a set of curving coordinates charting out a map. Such a map is set against the background of life and the foreground of the place itself, a map of the mind as well as a map of the city. This map’s goal is not how to get from point A to point B, or where street-so-and-so is located. It is a map of desires and frustrations, always contradictory, since knowing what you want is never definite, always in flux. The why leads to the how: visualizing complexity through an open system which allows all voices in this map to guide its reader through the process of experiencing Damascus, both the imaginary and the real.
Is this publication a moment in which the project visualizes itself? Certainly, the publication can be seen as well as read. It is, in this sense, the map of which I have spoken. A certain doubt exists in this map. Its contents probe personal expectations, anxieties about the future of the project once the workshop begins, individual and collective preparations, and the wealth of questions asked in the context of work-in-progress. For many, this project takes place at a critical moment in which personal practices are being reformulated – making the move from the studio to the library, from the museum into the city, or the image to the text. What new language do we have to communicate unclear definitions? Is there a glossary to reference the terms that come up, each subtly shifting context, in the space of the project’s questions?
For example:
- SPACE – (n.) How do spaces invariably include and exclude? Where is the center in the periphery, the periphery in the center, the grey pages of in-between transitions from here to there and back?
- IDENTITY – (n.) Are we foreigners to ourselves? What does it mean to be from the East, to be from the West? How can we interact? Nice to meet you!
- CITY – (n.) How do I experience a city – do I rely on memory, on the performance of identity in varying situations, on maps, on the conflicting sensations that my body experiences? In the future, buildings will talk to one another.
- PRODUCTION – (n.) What is the difference between product and production? Which is more artistic? What is the result of a work-in-progress?
- NETWORK – (n.) Who will remain and who will venture away after the workshop is over? How do we create a sustainable collaboration for the future?
- COMMUNITY – (n.) What has the project encountered so far in attempting to create a community of friends and colleagues virtually? Get me out of this virtual space – I’m dying!
The following pages provide a set of perceptive situations in which the city of Damascus, the coming community of the Reloading Images workshop in October, and the personal circumstances of each individual in this project intersect. As with any perceptive system, the vantage points belong to a subjective eye. In subjecting ourselves to many eyes, the concern remains as to how we wish to represent ourselves and whether or not this conflicts with how we are represented. Visualizing what has happened so far, then, requires a healthy portion of imagination – yours, mine, and ours combined.
[Ashkan Sepahvand]
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