The Passage
by
Kinga Santus (1)
The Passage – which is the process involving the removal of visual
comments of yesterday and the installation of artistic statements
created today – takes place on the white scene punctually at 12.10 pm.
The very word itself: passage, and those actual events which are
connected herby, plays an important role for the concept of Emergency
Room and shapes the ground for those activities that take place inside
its frame. The passage indicates a poetical moment, a time of
transition where the politically motivated art entangles itself in the
world in order too unfold new perspectives on the current situation.
The passage is a revolutionary event, emptied of any utopian vision. It
is a vigorous and powerful actual event: a perpetual coming into being
of action, of thought and of significance: a process which for Thierry
Colonel implies the potential of organizing cultural change. The
Passage is a capacious form, in the sense that its immediate transient
and dynamic character simultaneously involves the necessity of a strong
and decisive moment of precision, which is implemented by the fact that
the passage takes place at a certain time. The term precision reflects
discipline, in theory as well as in its actual performance, and it is
in this sense closely connected to the term topicality, which
emphasizes the basic demand of the project Emergency Room, being to
urge the exhibiting artists to react spontaneously on current subjects
and debates and on daily basis. The moment of precision functions in
practice, first and foremost as a space of change. A change that
anybody can witness at the space of time lasting from 12 to 12.20 pm.
The three terms passage, precision and topicality are all a part of the
exhibiting process in Emergency Room and these constitute all together
an artistic energy that differs from the rest of society, by precisely
intervening in it in order to make visible and draw attention on
destructive tendencies.
The Passage vitalizes the recognition that discipline makes a
difference: it is a poetical moment, which creates a breathing space
for nuanced reflections in the midst of the rapid circulation of
pictures and information in the mass media. It is a transient, but
constantly returning explosion of artistic energy, which penetrates
society in order to point out different aspects of the mechanisms and
strategies of entertainment in the dissemination of news as performed
by the mass media.
The Passage is a peephole, which cuts itself through the surface of
that mirror, which has been staged between man and the world by the
society of spectacle. A mirror which obliterates differences of great
value by means of its seductive and dazzling reflection. It is this
reflection of identical perspectives on contemporary life reproducing
eternally and playfully, that the passage disconnects in order to
restore the difference between fiction and reality and simultaneously
to point out the mutual influence; the dynamic flow between fiction and
reality in the production of identity, culture and politics. A dynamic
flow which is revealed in the experience that reality itself contains
an obvious element of mise-en-scéne in our visual culture today.
In other words, a process of change is performed by the passage, in
order to mark that boundary between entertainment and responsible
mediation of information, which has been blurred by the flood of news
in the mass media and at the same time in on order to nourish new
meanings, new significance. The passage from today to the future is a
space of possibility, of coming into being without any incentive to
nostalgic looking back.
(1) The text is written in light of
my involvement with Emergency Room at Nikolaj, Copenhagen Contemporary
Art Center from April to June 2006, and in light of conversations with
Thierry Colonel. It expresses my interpretation of Colonels concepts:
retard, passage and topicality, and can be viewed as an attempt to
create an initial theory for Emergence Room, all though a theory which
is rudimentary and open for modifications as Emergency Room is a
process in continuing development.September 2006