The VIDEO ATLAS invites members and collaborators of groups and collectives which explore non-academic or otherwise marginal fields of knowledge-production to talk about their common projects. These may include small try-outs, soft and delicate attempts, convincing and very professional strategies, all seeking to build up new methods and channels to challenge hegemonic world views.
The project provides a space for widely differing projects from all parts of the world: investigations of space, media, art, urbanity, food, seeds, identity, transnational constellations, flows, gender, digital and analog, discursive/non-discursive, non-linear approaches and so on.
The collection of video-contributions is open to be extended.

Berlin 1998, Dorothee Albrecht

The VIDEO ATLAS (2014)

Simple dividing lines and traditional balances of power are no longer tenable due to globalization and the transfer of information via the Internet. “It is a time that is characterized, among other things, by a deep crisis in the relationships between democracy, memory, and the idea of a future that humanity as a whole could share. This crisis has been exacerbated by the fusing together of capitalism and animism as well as the fact that all areas of our existence are currently being re-encoded in and through the language of economics and the neurosciences. This re-encoding questions the idea that we have formed on the human subject and the conditions of its emancipation since at least the 18th century.”[1] 

The protests in Istanbul’s Gezi Park or at Tahrir Square in Cairo, the Occupy movement originating in New York, and other revolutionary uprisings in recent years are attacking dominant power structures. At the same time, the tsunamis, earthquakes, and floods transported into the living rooms of this world via the media deliver further shocks to traditional perceptions of safety. Financial crises also underscore the need to rethink economic, political, and social relationships.

In the 1960s, the Situationists tried to revolutionize and rewrite modern consumer society. Techniques used included the “theoretical and practical fabrication of situations” and especially the “dérive”, exploring through aimless wandering, experimental research; in case of the Situationists, the “dérive” involved explorations of the city of Paris in particular—sometimes targeted and accelerated, then again diffuse, languid, and yet systematic. 

The group acted as a research cluster. The research area became ameboid because the individuals moved in different directions. The habitus deliberately differed from traditional research methods; new areas were explored in a playful and performative fashion. “The concept of the dérive is inextricably linked to the exploration of effects of a psychogeographical nature and the assertion of a constructive play behavior, which counterposes it in every respect with the traditional notions of the journey and the walk.”[2] Psychogeography is thus “the study of the precise laws and exact effects of the geographical environment, which, deliberately set up or not, directly acts on the emotional behavior of the individual.”[3] 

Today, the central psycho-geographical object of investigation is the global world. Since the nation-states related to modernity have begun to fade into the background as identity-establishing factors, the global world appears possible and yet phantasmal as a frame of reference. “The growing emphasis on networking and linkages in the process of globalization stands for the recognition that the emergence of the modern world can be interpreted as ‘common’ or ‘shared’ history, in which different cultures and societies shared a number of key experiences and created the modern world together through their interaction and interdependence.”[4] 

Édouard Glissant goes even further when he speaks of creolization and the “finally recognized ‘totality earth’”: “the term of creolization can be applied to the recent situation of the world, that is to say to a situation, in which a finally recognized ‘totality earth’ allows that in this totality (in which no ‘organic’ authority exists anymore, in which everything is archipelago) most distant and totally heterogeneous elements can be related to each other in a totally unsuspected way.”[5] 

The heterogeneous elements that are freed from traditional orders keep converging randomly at various places in the world, shake up structures, frighten many people, and provoke conservative reactions. The contemporary art space is one of the few areas in which the coming together of heterogeneous elements can be examined and dealt with productively, as a civilian space and a place for potentialities and experiments. 

The VIDEO ATLAS focuses on the art space as a space that can be redefined time and again—a space in which art is actually happening. Often, project rooms or producer galleries enable the experimental nature of art, as do institutions that can claim civilian spaces in the midst of conflict-ridden situations. 

The contemporary art space is the common denominator that can connect a wide variety of spaces and places. It is related to the new global contemporary art context, but because of its location it is defined by the specific local conditions. It can be understood as a layered heterotopic space in which traditional, local, specific layers interweave and overlap with modern, general, global layers.“... the challenge consists of simultaneously inhabiting several worlds and forms of intelligibility at the same time—not in the gesture of an unmotivated distance, but as a back and forth that allows the articulation of a thought of crossing and circulation. This kind of thinking bears enormous risks. However, these risks would be even graver if one becomes entrenched in the cult of difference.”[6] 

Ideally, collaboration at the global level takes place without hierarchies and as a matter of course—realistically, however, it is a constant practice of exchange and conflict, perhaps even of clashes; for Victor Segalen it is the “unforgettable shock of diversity.”[7] In Esthétique du divers. Un essai sur l’exotisme, he calls for a new understanding of the foreign and, derived from this, a new awareness and intensification of one’s own culture.[8] “In the difference of the other—which presents itself in the form of the other culture—man confronts himself with his open borders, the diverse, which only his own experience can create and intensify.”[9] 

The journeys taken from space to space create a relational structure that continuously registers and processes differences. The project develops both abstract-symbolic as well as concrete-physical connections. It is, as it were, a performance that exists only in the imagination. Observers cannot follow the multitude of movements. The practice of the VIDEO ATLAS could be described as systematized wandering. Although the process begins with research, it is not about expert knowledge but rather about agency. The actors seek advice from experts on the local scene and then act medially, as connecting links between art spaces and the public. 

Édouard Glissant “makes a world view a guiding concept that replaces the negative tendencies of globalization with a positive chaos model. This model in turn creates non-hierarchical relationships between the elements of the diverse—a continual process rather than a rigid network. An initial experience of the Tout-Monde is the variety of communication and languages now freed from the odium of the negative.”[10] 

The VIDEO ATLAS gathers contributions about art spaces and research spaces, which are described in different languages and manners of speaking. They are recorded on video; the scenery is designed jointly by the protagonists or the acting group. After an introductory long shot, which usually shows the art space in question, the stationary camera focuses on the speaker(s). The deliberately unostentatious and restrained staging leaves the room to the speaker; the video machine is reduced to a conversational situation. 

The questions, for example regarding the origins of the art space, the concept of art and the art program, local placement, and the supraregional or global network, visitors and conveyance and dreams that point to the future, form a loose framework; priorities are defined according to the needs of the speaker(s). The video material recorded is hardly edited at all and the narrative flow is respected. 

Narrations about the creation of art spaces are interesting if one inquires about the human subject and the conditions of its emancipation. How is it that individuals join together with others in order to open and define a space; a space of potentiality, which is designed with other actors, artists, theorists, and mediators and further expanded through participation of the audience; a space that can be re-established with each project, which over time develops its own historicity, inscribes itself in artistic, social, and political discourses, and receives weight and power; a space that, thanks to the participants, can enter into an exchange with other spaces, groups, and networks in other parts of the world? 

While in the 1990s we spoke about institutional critique, today, it is all about the construction of spaces, institutions and networks, about construction after deconstruction. The VIDEO ATLAS functions in this construction space, in which it continuously creates possible connections.

The idea of the text that the VIDEO ATLAS writes, is partly dependent on the interpretation of the recipients, and remains ambiguous as a productively questioning interspace. The individual descriptions of the art spaces, however, can be heard in very concrete terms on the project website.[11] The text uses examples, since the limited project funds can only allow a small and dwindling number of stories about art spaces to be presented. 

In 2010, the VIDEO ATLAS – Art Spaces in Times of Global Crisis – Starting from Dakar, Starting from Ramallah and Tel Aviv and Starting from São Paulo evolved as a contribution tot he 29th São Paulo Biennial. 

The writing of correlative relationships will be continued. 

Berlin 2014, Dorothee Albrecht

[1] Mbembe, Achille/Fargeau, Arlette, Interview with Achille Mbembe to mark the release of Critique de la raison nègre, News, 10/2013, http://eipcp.net (visited on September 3, 2014).

[2] Situationistische Internationale, magazine, self-publishing 2/1958, http://www.randomat.org/spektakel/wege_aus_dem_spektakel_72.pdf, p. 10(visited on January 19, 2015).

[3] Debord, Guy, Rapport sur la construction des situations et sur les conditions de l ́organistaion et de l ́action de la tendance situationniste internationale, self-publishing, 1957, p. 37.

[4] Randeria, Shalini, Vom Imperialismus zum Empire, Nicht-westliche Perspektiven auf Globalisierung, edition suhrkamp: Frankfurt 2009, p.11.

[5] Glissant, Édouard, Kultur und Identität – Ansätze zu einer Poetik der Vielheit. Verlag Das Wunderhorn: Heidelberg 2005, p. 14.

[6] See footnote [1].

[7] Segalen, Victor, Die Ästhetik des Diversen. Versuch über den Exotismus, Fischer: Frankfurt/Main 1994, p. 101.

[8] Segalen, Victor, Esthétique du divers. Un essai sur l’exotisme, Edition Le Livre de Poche: Paris, p. 51.

[9] Ralph Ludwig, Dorothee Röseberg (eds.), Tout-Monde: Interkulturalität, Hybridisierung, Kreolisierung, Peter Lang Verlag: Frankfurt am Main, 2010, p. 53.

[10] Ibid., p. 9f.

[11] www.videoatlas.info

Ongoing since 1998.

Many thanks for the contributions!