katalog-overlapping voices - Ritesinstitute

…do the right thing
it’s the hottest day of the summer.
you can do nothing, you can do something, or you can …
karin schneider, friedemann Derschmidt
the point of spike lee’s pun, of course, is the fact
that it would indeed be good to do the right thing
in a labyrinthine situation. But unfortunately, no
one tells you what that is. and the suspicion quikkly
arises that the right thing is already something
else at the moment when you do it.
From here
Being from austria, we were interested in israel always
with a clear reference to our own history. it
was coming from the latter, and it had always been
that way, that we spoke; it was coming from the
latter that we went to israel and not to chile or tibet
or Beirut – equally good places for difficult projects
– nor, initially, to Ramallah.
we always spoke of the close entanglement
between viennese and israeli history, by which we
meant the history of viennese anti-semitism and,
not only but ultimately also, the history of the
shoah – of the annihilation and expulsion of the
austrian and european Jewry. and we were thinking
of the figure of theodor herzl, the successful
prophet and creator of a state, of the history of political
Zionism associated with him and tied in with
his anti-semitic viennese milieu; Zionism, the answer
or one of the possible answers to this
anti-semitism.
Simple complexities, quickly told
half a year ago, we could still couch our intention
in the simple terms we used again and again in our
project descriptions: we wanted to present a more
complex picture of what is here perceived simply
as the “conflict in the middle east” and subsumed
under this title.
in this country, middle east experts who often do
not even live there explain this conflict. at the beginning
of the project, our mission was clearly to
render at least this one simplification less clear. it
was and still is our wish to call for greater respect
for the complexity and intricacy of the situation. all
12 OVERLAPPING VOICES
our efforts were based on the idea that we would,
as far as possible, let all voices speak for themselves,
even when or precisely when their message
does not conform to the mainstream or is hard to
understand in our context. this presupposes the
ability to bear contradictions. this desire is also
reflected by some of the contributions to the
catalogue.
Yet there is one voice we almost entirely silenced
in this confusion once we engaged in dialogue with
our israeli and Palestinian partners: our own voice;
the voice of the european, the austrian position,
one that is of no small importance in this configuration.
even though we may not identify with this
our history and society (as our partners frequently
do not identify with theirs either), we are a part and
product of the place from which we speak or, over
the course of the project, more and more often remained
silent.
to keep silent about one’s own interests and
desires, however, becomes problematic as we request
that others express theirs. the temptation is
only too great to deduce from this silence a status
of objectivity, and hence a sense of (european-colonialist)
superiority. it is very comfortable, after all,
to be obliged primarily to listen and not to “show
one’s colours”.
Language found again
every time we returned, our luggage and heads full
with new stories, new knowledge, and new experiences,
to austria and its only too familiar loquacity,
the silence we had practiced in israel seemed
to us to be exactly the right thing. we had learned
from our partners simply to listen to them without
wanting to know better.
we came to understand a previously unfamiliar radical
respect for a great variety of taboos, limitations,
and vulnerabilities on the part of those we
encountered. and this experience gave us the certainty
that we had become wiser. at home, we tur-
ned experts ourselves and began to tell of that
foreign land.
at issue, then, is here the familiar question of who
takes the word in which context and in which name,
and who will in fact also be heard.
this question arises as a matter of principle; but of
course it arises with special urgency with respect to
a region that is time and again made to serve as a
foil for acts of political positioning within europe.
we want to write here also about how quickly and
naïvely even those who don’t want to walk into the
colonialist pitfall of “expertise” – simply because
it flatters them (and us!).
we would be incapable of understanding the structures
of colonization if we overlooked how neat and
pleasant it feels to privileged white europeans to
talk smartly about others while we pass over ourselves
and our history in silence as though we were
a blank slate.
one way or another, we didn’t do the right thing. it
might well be that there is no right thing within the
wrong thing. we won’t escape the post-colonialist
pitfalls.
Processes of transformation
if education is the mission, then it ought to be to
educate one’s own society about its own affairs.
we probably liked some of the artists we met
through tal adler so well because they presented
to us projects that do exactly this, and to the fullest
degree, with respect to their own society. the
visitors to the present exhibition and the readers
of this catalogue are similarly invited to engage in
a dialogue not specifically about israel or about Palestine
but about the ways in which artists and authors,
using their own means, interrogate themselves
and their society. and this one important
difference lies precisely here: whether they speak
about their own society, and hence about themselves,
and wish to change both, or whether we
speak about the society of others in the unfoun