Agency (Can’t speak for/of myself or other) Multimedia project by Anja Krakowski
Moving soundtracks and given and appropriated images, 2008
http://hebdo.ahram.org.eg/arab/ahram/2009/1/7/arts4.htm
I find it very hard to speak of other, particularly of other women. May be my struggling derives from my own experience of being a stranger and the idea that any kind of image making or speaking on the other rather empowers it existence instead of erasing the distance between one and another.
That is reason why I have chosen to base my work on appropriated materials in order to let the others speak (for me). Here, as an author I am only an agent, producing an encounter of voices that have never crossed, pretending to built an overlapping and complex dialogical, traductological and performative hiper-text (as showing the aims of any transcultural practices) of converting and diverting thoughts. The texts I have chosen are of two different kinds.
The first kind (Track 1 and 4) reflects on the subject of woman as other speaking in general, by using early occidental and oriental feminism discourses, represented by the writings of Simon de Beauvoir and Huda Sharawi. Both experts stem from a close period of time, written in the 1940´s and show each woman’s specific worries on the distinctions and differences made by gender divisions, focusing one on a more philosophical and on more political discourse the other. Together, both speeches give an idea of historical and cultural specific background of each of them, as well as they confirm that cultural exchange of knowledge of women, crossing geographical boundaries, was a fact in the early feminism movements.
The second kind (Track 2 and 3) respond to two personal statements taken form the Internet. If have hosen those videos by chance, that is that the first Take of the Hijab, was the very first entrance to appear on www.youtube.com by searching the subject Muslim Women, while the second is the first video-answer to it.
In that sense both videos show a Muslim and Non-Muslim woman´s (distant) ‘dialogue’ on the relation of Hijab and freedom, producing stereotyped and homogeneous visions of each other´s cultural background, broadcasted through video making on youTube. The spoken and written texts are both (more or less) provocative and show the distance towards the cultural background of the one and other. Even though the videos are produced in direct relation to each other, they show that they are not meant to exchange knowledge and experience, but to confirm their position and fixed identity of the self in relation to the other.
The sound piece comes accompanied with an image sampling of a total of 30 images. 20 of the images stem from Internet research, showing the first 10 entrances you get when you search Muslim Women and Non-Muslim Women on Goole Images respectively.
Again, any of the images has been chosen to show or underline my personal ideas. I have selected them as they turned up by the chance operation of using a key word, and by doing so they give an idea how even ‘free media’ as the net often produce and reproduce the stereotyping borders of otherness rather than erasing cultural conditioned distances.
This is not meant to be a critique on the Internet itself, but on its use and abuse as a guaranteed source of knowledge. It is especially very troubling that it is the images of women (Muslim women) who circulate on those pages, set completely out of context, to illustrate discourses of often quite demagogical, if not racist nature.
I am showing these images together with family snapshots of ‘real’ women, which have kindly been send to me by friends form Cairo. These images stand for my idea that the only possible contact zone between cultures is that of ‘real’ knowledge and ‘real’ dialogue based on ‘real’ encounters and exchanges. Even than, the image hasn’t got the power to show what is underneath the surface and what is outside the frame. The image never captures reality in its heterogeneous manifest and therefore these images, even when they are much more suitable to represent what they stand for, are also slightly blurred. There is no possible image to be made that can stand for the self neither the other, but there is the possibility of mutual listening and understanding.
Moving soundtracks and given and appropriated images, 2008
http://hebdo.ahram.org.eg/arab/ahram/2009/1/7/arts4.htm
I find it very hard to speak of other, particularly of other women. May be my struggling derives from my own experience of being a stranger and the idea that any kind of image making or speaking on the other rather empowers it existence instead of erasing the distance between one and another.
That is reason why I have chosen to base my work on appropriated materials in order to let the others speak (for me). Here, as an author I am only an agent, producing an encounter of voices that have never crossed, pretending to built an overlapping and complex dialogical, traductological and performative hiper-text (as showing the aims of any transcultural practices) of converting and diverting thoughts. The texts I have chosen are of two different kinds.
The first kind (Track 1 and 4) reflects on the subject of woman as other speaking in general, by using early occidental and oriental feminism discourses, represented by the writings of Simon de Beauvoir and Huda Sharawi. Both experts stem from a close period of time, written in the 1940´s and show each woman’s specific worries on the distinctions and differences made by gender divisions, focusing one on a more philosophical and on more political discourse the other. Together, both speeches give an idea of historical and cultural specific background of each of them, as well as they confirm that cultural exchange of knowledge of women, crossing geographical boundaries, was a fact in the early feminism movements.The second kind (Track 2 and 3) respond to two personal statements taken form the Internet. If have hosen those videos by chance, that is that the first Take of the Hijab, was the very first entrance to appear on www.youtube.com by searching the subject Muslim Women, while the second is the first video-answer to it.
In that sense both videos show a Muslim and Non-Muslim woman´s (distant) ‘dialogue’ on the relation of Hijab and freedom, producing stereotyped and homogeneous visions of each other´s cultural background, broadcasted through video making on youTube. The spoken and written texts are both (more or less) provocative and show the distance towards the cultural background of the one and other. Even though the videos are produced in direct relation to each other, they show that they are not meant to exchange knowledge and experience, but to confirm their position and fixed identity of the self in relation to the other.The sound piece comes accompanied with an image sampling of a total of 30 images. 20 of the images stem from Internet research, showing the first 10 entrances you get when you search Muslim Women and Non-Muslim Women on Goole Images respectively.
Again, any of the images has been chosen to show or underline my personal ideas. I have selected them as they turned up by the chance operation of using a key word, and by doing so they give an idea how even ‘free media’ as the net often produce and reproduce the stereotyping borders of otherness rather than erasing cultural conditioned distances.
This is not meant to be a critique on the Internet itself, but on its use and abuse as a guaranteed source of knowledge. It is especially very troubling that it is the images of women (Muslim women) who circulate on those pages, set completely out of context, to illustrate discourses of often quite demagogical, if not racist nature.
I am showing these images together with family snapshots of ‘real’ women, which have kindly been send to me by friends form Cairo. These images stand for my idea that the only possible contact zone between cultures is that of ‘real’ knowledge and ‘real’ dialogue based on ‘real’ encounters and exchanges. Even than, the image hasn’t got the power to show what is underneath the surface and what is outside the frame. The image never captures reality in its heterogeneous manifest and therefore these images, even when they are much more suitable to represent what they stand for, are also slightly blurred. There is no possible image to be made that can stand for the self neither the other, but there is the possibility of mutual listening and understanding.
