Nicoline van Harskamp - DeLVe | Institute for Duration, Location and ...

singular plural, in which “I” does not exist without that “with”, without the other, in
which it is always “we, you, they” simultaneously, the co-appearance, the co-essence,
and it is actually this tension and the indeterminable border between singularity and
plurality, it is precisely that “with” (which does not yet have status and use) that is set as
the essence of community. 10 This kind of conception of community is radically different
from the illusion of the single collectivity of bodies assembled and merged by a single
essential identity, and by immanence that is confirmed and promised only in the death of
its “members”. 11 Called upon in 1993 to write an “eulogy of the mélange” (mixture), Jean-
Luc Nancy starts his text with the words: “Sarajevo has become the expression par excellence
of a complete system for the reduction to identity.” 12 It, then, exists exclusively as
identity that is for the other a target for destruction, for which the assumed purity of
identity is at the same time precondition and also result. Mixing and “bastardry” are impermissible
and threaten the very heart of the idea of the immanence of some community.
This is not the only time that Nancy has mentioned Sarajevo and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
In the foreword of Being Singular Plural there is a reference to the time in which the essay
of the same name came into being, along with a lengthy list of the scenes of wartime
conflicts in the world at the time, together with their protagonists, their “identities”.
Precisely in this time, Nancy recognises the necessity to start thinking the community
again, to start once again thinking how to say “we”.
The work of Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafson, done in the form of intervention in public
space in Banja Luka, is a part of their continued project in the form of a campaign,
started in 2003, in which, making use of a broad range of strategies of media advertising,
in totally different social contexts and different countries, they write out, always in
the official language of the country, the same sentence: “Your country does not exist”.
Depending on the context, this sentence in the form of a proclamation takes on always
new and modified meanings that can be read differently. In the context of Bosnia-
Herzegovina the reading necessarily draws attention to the fact of the lack of consensus
about the fundamental system of the state and the perpetuation of waiting and instability.
The work was carried out using Latin and Cyrillic scripts, the two official scripts in
Bosnia-Herzegovina, thus evoking the laws concerning traffic signs, according to which
both scripts have to appear in the Republika Srpska and in the Federation BH, which resulted
in passers-by intervening on the Cyrillic/latin inscriptions on the signs, one more
symptom of the impossibility of an effective solution for coexistence, and the fact that in
Bosnia-Herzegovina for many of its inhabitants, this country “does not exist”. The work,
however, does not concern itself with Bosnia-Herzegovina; it should primarily be read
as agitation, an intervention through which non-adherence to any given framework and
identity is promoted, and as a calling into question of the ideological mechanisms that
define the forms of belonging.
Testing the community, a work by of Nicoline van Harskamp, presents a simple intervention
of the artist into a number of “found” questionnaires via which the respondents can
test out their own views about politics, morality and their own personality. The artist
reorganised existing questionnaires into groups with special chapters, focusing on topics
such as habits and patterns of behaviour with respect to other people and to everyday
obligations, the attitude to power and the manner in which individuals adapt to the role
GDJE SE SVE TEK TREBA DOGODITI / WHERE EVERYTHING IS YET TO HAPPEN