The initiative for the project came from the Slovenian IRWIN/NSK artistic collective (its conceptual framework and current fields of research will be presented in a booklet available at the time of the journey). It is closely connected with their experiences in a previous artistic event -- the APT ART (Apartment Art) project, which took place in May and June of 1992 in Moscow. This project was organized by a group of Russian artists, curators, and intellectuals in order to reflect and re-evaluate the social model of their artistic practices -- which in the time of Soviet ideological repression were hidden behind the walls of private apartments but which, with the beginning of perestroika, gained international recognition and large public attention overnight. The IRWIN/NSK collective participated in this project with an event called the NSK EMBASSY MOSCOW, which took place in a private apartment. Some of the content and results of their one-month of living, exhibiting, performing, and organizaing lectures and discussions in Moscow are documented in the NSK EMBASSY MOSCOW edition subtitled How the East sees the East. The most important results of this project, however, are the continuity of personal relations, artistic interactions and the continuing mutual support in developing specific individual/collective social models of art production and a system of values in the context of changing Eastern societies.
A wider aim of TRANSNATIONALA is therefore to research the potential models of interaction among different artistic communities by travelling with some American artists and visiting various American art communities.
Of course, one cannot avoid the simple macropolitical contextualisation and interpretation of the TRANSNATIONALA project as a meeting and confrontation of the two myths (the USA and Russia) of our recent history, in which Slovenia plays the role of a minor, hardly known actor in the westernmost part of the Eastern territory on the planetary geostrategic map. Such a superficial view conceals many difficulties of communication among individuals from different and distant cultural and political spheres. As our perceptions of distant worlds are marked by many culturally and politically produced presumptions and limitations, the objectives of the TRANSNATIONALA project should be developed and analyzed step by step. A very practical aspect of communication difficulties is that, regardless of an individual’s efforts to surpass national contexts and notions in his or her artistic or humanistic practice, he or she will still have to use national notions and signs to inform others from different national or cultural spheres who he/she is, where he/she is coming from and which cultural and political reality has defined his/her work through his/her corporal existence in a certain territory on the earth. Inside national borders we act as individuals or groups with individual character. We are in a critical, analytical if not subversive, relation to society and state politics -- we represent and defend our individual borders. When we represent our works abroad, however, we automatically identify ourselves in universally understandable categories -- we represent our national and state borders. This gap in decontextualisation which annihilates the corporeality of social experiences as a real background of any universal art or intellectual work is highly abused today by the structure of the existing art and intellectual systems and markets as well as by the institutional distribution of universal values.
One of the reasons for the journey across the United States is also liked with the need to analyze and demysticize our culturally-produced preconceptions of America. From the Eastern (or perhaps any other) point of view American culture represents the center of the world power structure and the dominant culture of Western civilisation, which has been and still is the crucial identification point for the East. Living with the myth of the West, we in the East probably have many distorted perceptions of the real rhythms, colors and qualities of life in the “center”. For us, this journey therefore represents an opportunity to gain a more subjective experience of American culture. And finally, America is a large urban territory with great intersocial complexity corresponding to the universal complexity of the world as a whole. And this is perhaps our main reason for meeting and confronting American art communities: to learn about their own reflections and experiences of their inner complexity and to exchange views on the particular and global complexities of today’s world -- from the point of view of defined artistic and intellectual positions, of course.
We believe that a journey with one-month direct, intimate communication among individuals and groups from three different cultural spheres -- without any central intermediation of state institutions (galleries, museums, festivals, universities) -- is a convenient model for researching and analyzing the common symptoms that define the experience of critical individual and group positions (however different they might look when observing concrete artefacts or discourses) in relation to their particular societies and society as a whole.
Eda Cufer
The TRANSNATIONALA project will take place in the form of a journey. A group of artists from the United States of America, Russia and Slovenia will spend a month travelling together across the USA, making stops at five American cities (Atlanta, Richmond, Chicago, San Francisco and Seattle) in which various artistic events (artistic actions, lectures, discussions, presentations) will be organized in collaboration with the artistic communities of each city.