Indecisiveness as a Mode of Being: A Conversation with Pages.
Charles Esche: As artists and cultural producers based in the Netherlands you initiated the project Pages. I think it would be good at the start to talk simply about what Pages is, and more specifically about Pages magazine, which you publish in Farsi and English. What do you think its position is – in Iran and in Europe and who is your readership? What was the impetus behind it and what are your hopes for the project?
Pages: We started our activities as Pages in 2004, when we published the first issue of the magazine. Later we initiated other kinds of collaborative projects to be able to focus on particular subjects and issues. Coming from Iran and maintaining an active connection to the country, a great part of Pages’ activities start precisely from there. Yet, the specificity of the Iranian situation has triggered discussions of a broader context. Addressing issues with regard to their locally specific conditions brings one closer to the reality of the issues, problematizing their common notions and triggering their re-articulation.
If we would try to shortly describe what we hope to do with Pages, it is to circulate critical notions of artistic and cultural practices, on a scale from the personal micro-level to the larger context. That said, with each issue of the magazine or new project, we articulate the objectives anew, not on the level of rhetoric but also based on our encounters with the participatory practices in which we are interested.
In sync with this mode of working, the Pages magazine is published irregularly. This is because of many factors, mostly due to practical reasons like the financial and working conditions connected to each issue. The process of editing, publishing and distributing has changed constantly since we started publication. Our aim has never been to be a regular art and culture magazine. On the other hand we see that we’ve been constantly busy with Pages as an ongoing research project. In that sense it’s as if we just started with the first issue every time. This structure defines the kind of readership or the public for Pages, which is never vast but specific.
CE: As editors of Pages, you are dealing all the time with the question of the translation of contexts and languages. How do you understand the responsibilities of translation and the limitations it has? What do the two languages each permit and disallow?
Pages: Translation is something that starts with the magazine and is passed onto the reader – so there is a shared responsibility between us as editors and those who engage in reading and interpreting it. The bilingualism of the magazine was a clear choice for us. The question is if and in what ways the space of translation is a social and political space. Or is it a space where these traits are suspended for the sake of a ‘responsible’ translation? For us it is clearly a space of conflict, negotiations and re-articulations. Since the very beginning, we always tried to search for ways of expanding the space of translation into the content of the magazine and to the readership. In short, the responsibility of translation is actually taken on only once the circumstances of a discourse within a language are also passed on. Through this process, various points of identification within each of the linguistic spaces and its different readerships are put into question.
In general most of the modern terminology in art and criticism is western and many of these have not gained a proper equivalence in the Farsi language, or have not yet completely integrated into the language. This is a challenge for us and for everyone working in these fields. There are sometimes different translations for a single term and also words referring to different terms. Often to transfer a text fully one has to include the English origin of the terms in front of its translation in brackets. Many Farsi writers already do this in their own texts, in fact, to indicate clearly which term they mean exactly. The interesting part of the challenge is when one has to translate these terms ‘back’ into English.
Translation truly becomes an issue when it starts to involve complexities beyond language – when you have to translate a term that has gained a lot of weight beyond its initial meaning. To give an example, the term ‘conceptual art’ started to resonate more in the art context in Iran after an exhibition called The First Iranian Conceptual Art Exhibition at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art in 2001. But the context and the language of these works are different from what we know of conceptual art in the West. In fact, there is little in common between the two. When this term is simply translated ‘back’ into English it does not at all reflect the true nature of the works to which it refers. In other words, one sometimes has to ‘de-translate’ as it were in order to convey the real connotations of terms or words within different contexts.
Besides the fact that translation tries to bring one closer to a particular meaning, it also introduces a kind of ‘interval’ in terms of the ambiguity of relationships. You could say that translation is the interval. As such it necessitates ambivalence in order to maintain within it the possibility of meaning. In this sense, it is not about maintaining distance, but about provoking a space of participation beyond fixed subjectivities. However, what we see happening is the filling up of this prolonged vacuum of meaning with predefined words, because we tend to see this vacuum as a threat to our being in relation to the ‘other’. We tend to explain the other through agendas irrelevant to the reality. So translation, in its political meaning, can be seen as an interval that is introduced into the circulation of these preconceived agendas.
CE: How do you see this understanding of translation playing out in the Netherlands, where it seems that demands for pragmatic solutions and effectiveness limit space for reflection? And in relation to that, could you describe why you decided to work here and what the social and cultural structures this country offers that you would not find elsewhere?
Pages: The situation in Holland is quite complicated. On the one hand there is this pragmatism with a slight lean towards hard-to-define nationalist sentiments, and on the other hand an interest in what is different. The latter is increasingly the case, and is the result of a wider trend in western European countries to know the other. This attempt is not necessarily one of understanding other contexts and conditions in different parts of the world. What has happened is that the complexities and conflicts often associated with non-western countries now seem to find themselves in the heart of the western world. So in the end, the will to understand the other outside is a pragmatic attempt to understand the other within. But this is a mistake, we are afraid, because of the disparate circumstances in which these phenomena appear. One is almost tempted to say that associating the stranger inside with an exterior context is an (unconscious) attempt to dissociate them from or deny them access to the community here. In any case there remains a misinterpretation, if not misrepresentation on both levels.
There are also sometimes unexpected coincidences that bring the two situations in very different cultural climates quite close to one another. For instance, the first issue of Pages was about the experience of public and private spaces in Iran. There is a common notion that in a religious society, or a religiously defined system of governance like that of Iran, the division of public and private is heavily defined by unchallengeable codes and regulations. Even when the private space is depicted in a film, its protagonists have to follow the codes that pertain in the public space, since the film is being shown in public. At this moment of obsessive protectiveness against the infiltration of privacy into the public, the boundaries between the two start to blur. You can only define one within the domain of the other, and this is what we explored in the issue. But doesn’t this tell us something about recent features of public space in the Netherlands, too? Recently a brochure was distributed on our street in Rotterdam encouraging us to keep the neighbourhood clean. On the last two pages, there was a series of signs indicating things that are not allowed – amongst which was a satellite dish. On that same page there were various snapshots of our street, including one in particular ‘casually’ depicting the satellite dish of our neighbour attached on the inside of their balcony. Another image next to this was of a sign hanging on our street since last year. It read: ‘Je hebt rust, zolang als je buren het je gunnen – Nederland’ (You can only have peace if your neighbours allow it – Netherlands).
Yet it is also hard to say if Holland is fundamentally different than other western European countries. Artists often manoeuvre through different cultural structures, especially when one is active in more than one context and always has a foot somewhere else, with different social and cultural anatomies. What we mean to say is that you try to let these differences overlap and somehow affect one another, at least within the boundaries of your own practice as an artist. It is as such that you try to create a space of reflection for yourself that is not geographically bound. In this sense the Netherlands does offer the possibility of defining one’s own space of practice to some degree; there is a certain flexibility here that is missing in a great part of the world.
CE: In what sense, if any, do you think you could be understood as Dutch artists? Do national designations hold any cultural meaning for you?
Pages: To answer this question one should first define what it means to be a Dutch artist and what Dutch art is. If we look at our work with Pages, it is undeniable that there has been a significant effect on the project from living in Holland for many years, and therefore having to deal with both where we come from and where we are. We can never know how we would have worked if we had never left Iran but it would surely have been different.
The flow of émigré artists to European countries has greatly influenced the art context of these countries. Art is no longer defined purely by the works of artists born in a particular place. The art context in many of these countries has itself been expanded with different notions and codes coming from elsewhere – codes that require different readings. It is the same in a broader social context. Immigrants living in Holland from all over the world each introduce a different series of codes into the social fabric. What kind of definition of ‘Dutchness’ would we then get if we were to put all these different subjectivities together?
We know an Iranian woman who had moved to Holland some years ago. Until recently we knew her by a name that we found out only recently was not her real name, the one she was called back in Iran. When we asked her why she had hidden her true name, her reply was quite interesting. She said from the moment she entered Holland that became her name.
To examine one’s true identity is to experiment with the boundaries that define it, and most probably at the moment of this experimentation, definitions of identity become quite irrelevant, because there, at the excess of this experimentation, you may find relationships you never expected to encounter. We could say national designation gains a cultural significance exactly at the moment of this experimentation, when notions of identity and nationhood are constantly put into question.
CE: So does your multiple identity allow you to stay outside these designations, a neither/nor position? If so, what do you observe of the rest of the Dutch art scene? Do you think there are characteristics that define Dutch art?
Pages: It’s hard to say something really concrete about Dutch art, unlike what you would be able to say about Iranian art. In Iran there is a struggle with identity and the imagery of self-representation. Artists are caught in the predicament of cultural and political conditions and deal with that. This is not at all the case here in the Netherlands. There is a lack of a collective concern among artists here; they are more involved in their individual urgencies, something that also applies to many of the art institutions. This is why here in the Netherlands there are only moments and occasions that one might find interesting or to which one can relate closely. Moments like a particular exhibition, a specific work of an artist or period in the history of an art institution.
CE: Have there been changes in your engagement with the Netherlands over time? How do you read the recent changes in the political landscape here, and have they affected your work in any way?
Pages: Unfortunately the recent political climate in the Netherlands has forced most debates into a deadlock of overt self-indulgence, often disguised as good old-fashioned self-criticism in the most banal form. A good example of this is the endless variety of TV programmes dedicated to issues of national identity and foreignness. What hold this deadlock in place is not only a political indifference towards the other, but most of all a kind of disinterestedness to specify a clear stand in regard to positions outside of recognizable (socially and culturally pre-defined) boundaries.
Inevitably these characteristics have found their way into the art world as well. Whether you want to or not, you become a part of these debates, especially as foreign artists. The question is on what level you would want to engage in them. When we started Pages in 2004, we were aware of the kind of connotations it may have in relation to the current political climate. By focusing on different social and political circumstances, we search to consider the relevance of these debates on a wider scope than the national. It is the very specificity of the things encountered that force one to take a stand beyond generalizations. In this sense you could say that the peculiarity of the political climate in the Netherlands has given us an awareness of a possible place we can have within it.
CE: Besides editing Pages you are also artists working independently. How do you think the activities of editor and artist feed each other? It often seems to me that immigrants in general have an easier time maintaining multiple identities than people educated within the Dutch pragmatic tradition. Do you recognize this, or do you find that people in the Netherlands or Western Europe are wary of an artist who is also something else?
Pages: Maintaining multiple identities still requires you to clearly define what each of these identities are, which for us has never been an issue. One important effect that our activities as editors and artists have had on our practice in general is a certain open-endedness. It is increasingly becoming a trend among artists to be active in different fields at the same time. Educational systems in art hardly teach you ways of working in multiple fields. It is something that you learn as you go along. It is what comes from the necessity one feels as an artist. Therefore it is not so much a question of identity (multiple or singular) but rather of a willingness to participate in something that is not predefined in its social and political form; something that requires intimacy in the face of constant indecisiveness. The issue of translation we spoke of earlier is in fact a part of this. Finally, if being an artist is also being something else, the ‘else’ is something that you repeatedly become as a result of such involvement.
CE: The notion of ‘indecisiveness’ that you just mentioned is something that you have dealt with. You wrote about the notion of ‘indecisive discourse’ to describe what cultural practitioners have at our disposal to undermine the discourses of power. How does this play out in your work?
Pages: Indecisiveness, as explained more extensively in our text Practice of Indecisiveness, refers to conditions – like those in Iran – where life is lived in the discrepancy between true realities of social life and their totalizing political representation. Discourses of power try to hide this discrepancy because it threatens their validity. Yet indecisiveness as a mode of being can have agency and a voice, because it constantly refers to this gap and the irresoluteness of political identification. In the case of Iran for example, rumours circulate critical often-revealing stories while remaining free of inhibitions and control due to their very indecisiveness.
The crucial question for us was how cultural practice may channel such agency and voice to undermine discourses of power. How can indecisiveness become a mode of practice, opening spaces for negotiation and re-articulation. Indecisiveness for us was not something we approached on a theoretical level. It was first of all something that we were truly affected by during our early engagements working with Iran. It required us to encounter situations through long processes of involvement, and thus offered us the possibility to address them within their complexities.
CE: Yet such indecisivness seems at least superficially absent from the secure Netherlands. Do you find it in your adopted homeland or only in situations like Iran at this moment?
Pages: If we see indecisiveness as something conditioned by a gap between the reality of life and its political articulation, then we do see it here in the Netherlands too. This is especially the issue regarding religion, immigration, integration etc. Having both lived here now for about twenty years, we have never experienced life being so defined by terms and signs as in the last few years. What is sought for is not an understanding of the reality itself but rather the absolute meaning of terms that are thought to define reality. The notion of tolerance, for example, forces the tolerating subjects to define their relation to the other only under such definition. The result is that they are either tolerant or racist; there remains no option in between. In reality one is suspended in the gap between one’s real desire and its articulation by these terms. You become foreign to your own desires. The same goes for the notion of security. The neighbourhood articulated under such a term is never a place in which one is actually living day by day. Again it is defined as either secure or unsafe and, in the end, this definition turns the given neighbourhood itself into somewhere that is unrecognizable for everyone, whether the definition applied is secure or unsafe.
1-This conversation first appeared in the critical reader Citizens and Subjects: The Netherlands, for example, part of the three-part project Citizens and Subjects, the Dutch contribution to the 52nd International Art Exhibition – La Biennale die Venezia. The critical reader was co-edited by Rosi Braidotti, Charles Esche and Maria Hlavajova (BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht and JRP|Ringier, Zurich, ISBN: 978-3-905770-73-5).
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