Lichtenberg Diary December 2019 & January 2020
Explorations and readings of social-ist amnesia
Thursday 30 January 2020 19.00hrs
Siraj Izhar (artist in residence)
I came to Lichtenberg to continue work on themes began at funkhaus, the monumental former GDR broadcasting building, a relic from the heroic socialist realism times now in private hands. In the so-called „peaceful revolution“ of the German unification or Die Wende, the transfer, whether it’s of Peoples Palaces or vast housing complexes or even political parties from one system to system, has selective processes of de- and re-memorialisation.
Against these transfers (of resources
and heritage) within instituted memorialisation, the subject of my
project is social-ist amnesia.
The word socialist is split because
I am trying to say both social and socialist at the same time.
The gap, break is filled by the word Ideology. But that word brings
negative connotations because of the scale of suffering it (Ideology)
is accused of inflicting. That, for instance, the legacy of the last
century left us all as „victims of ideology“. So as part of
de- and re-memorialisation, Ideological symbols become emptied of
Ideology, to be ceremonial, or diluted or neutralised; whilst some
symbols are exorcised or become social taboos.
But to re-think
Ideology as symbol, it is worth remembering that Marx also read
Ideology through the negative – as the false consciousness that
sustains the contradictions of our existing political order. Ideology
by its inversion is the sedative that puts political consciousness to
sleep. The word amnesia refers to the collective sedation. It runs
parallel to what Walter Benjamin wrote in his Passagenwerk or the
Arcades project that we in modernity exist in a dream state from
which we have yet to awaken.
social-ist amnesia is an exploration of
that terrain of amnesia or dream state below the surface of
instituted memory and its processes. The exploration is not of the
space of official memorials and ceremonies but something else
scattered in the corners of the everyday, in the gaps between the
visible and invisible. What we see but do not see. A political
unconscious that connects social, historial and cultural memory in
fluid ways outside any narrative of the Wende.
Using only the
project’s tools, the exploration of social-ist amnesia has been
broken up into multiple parts, or Acts (as each requires an
interventionist act). Each Act brings into play its conflicts and
partitions. The images obtained through the two Acts completed are
not about any aesthetic merit or political value or revolutionary
potential. They are in the ganzfeld of our shared lives. Only from
there, as Benjamin suggested in the way he saw the world of images,
will we awaken from the dream state to find that all images, the seen
and the unseen, are equal and that without exception each has its
salvation. In the political unconscious the dust doesn’t settle by
the laws of gravity.
Project tools:
1. Vinyl Red Star 10mm radius.
2. Digital Cameras Lumix GF2, Sony Experia 10 cellphone
Act 1 The Real
Sites: Berlin public transport S-bahn S75, S5, S7, Tram M17, M4, Bus 256, 197 covering Lichtenberg and adjoining areas of Weißensee, Marzahn and Hellersdorf.
Act 2 The Real and the Imaginary
Sites: housing complexes in Hohenschönhausen, Wartenberg, Falkenberg, Ahrensfelde and adjoining areas.
All works left on sites of exploration.
Documentation and Submissions: 2×24 Digital stills 4000x3000px
Interregnum (Dornröschen)
Rosa
& Karl Gedenkveranstaltung (Memorial service) January 12th 2020
at the Gedenkstätte der Sozialisten (Socialist memorial),
Gudrunstraße Lichtenberg Berlin
Unsubmitted work:
Act 3 The Imaginary and the
Symbolic
(work in progress)
Act 4 The Symbolic
(not
undertaken)
Postscript