Unsere Frau in Minsk: - Gfzk.de

What is real life here?
“What a useful thing a map really is,” I remarked.
“That is another thing,” my Lord said, “that we learned from your country – the making of maps. But
we have taken the art to still greater heights. What do you think is the largest scale map that could
really be any use?”
“Something like two centimetres to the kilometre, perhaps.”
“Only two centimetres!” exclaimed my Lord. “We starting using a scale of ten centimetres to the
kilometre at a very early stage. Then we tried it with a metre. And then we got the best idea of all: we
actually succeeded in making a map of the country on a scale of one to one!”
“Was it used a lot?” I asked.
“It hasn’t been spread out yet, so far,” my Lord replied. “The farmers were against it. They said the
map would cover the whole country and cut off the sun. So we are now using the country itself as its
own map, and I do assure you, it works almost just as well.” 1
It was in the winter of 2003 that Antje Schiffers and I were sitting in my kitchen, trying to formulate
the plan for a trip. We knew approximately what goal of it was to be, but not what means were to be
used. My kitchen table lends itself very well to the planning of trips like this, because it carries on its
surface a wipeable map of Europe which I stuck on it because maps are visually attractive and
communicative, and can be a refreshing stimulus to mental travels. What is more, this physical map
testifies to a youth spent in West Germany, where geography lessons were characterised by this
particular type of map and from which base we could float off in thought into distant lands. The East,
however, was hardly ever a factor here. Somehow it all just stayed grey, like an unknown and sleeping
giant behind its Iron Curtain – it remained a graphic presence, in the atlas and in the media.
When in 2003 we – the curators of the Leipzig Museum for Contemporary Art – set off on our first
trips to the Cultural Territories, 2 the goals we aimed at were such places as Warsaw, Vilnius, Riga,
Tallinn, Budapest, Prague, Brno, Zagreb, Bratislava, Ljubljana, Sofia and Minsk. Most of the places
represented for me only images relayed through the media and points on the physical map mentioned
above, but I had never actually visited them. On my map Ljubljana was called Laibach, Zagreb was
called Agram, and Bratislava, Pressburg. We travelled to some of these cities. Hardly had we arrived
there when the imaginary pictures disappeared, to be replaced in part by completely new realities (or
partial realities).
On this trip the wish was expressed for an ambassadress and correspondent who would travel as a
mediator between us and the countries involved in the Cultural Territories project: someone who
would render a report in foreign countries to the east about the realities of our existence (what exactly
this meant was still a subject for investigation), so as to provide a counterbalance to images formed
through the media. At the same time – turning it the other way about – the correspondent’s task was to
be that of reporting back to us, after such a trip, about the countries visited and the people encountered
there. As “our woman in Minsk” the artist Antje Schiffers combined the roles of correspondent,
diplomat, ethnologist and topographer. She was already familiar with the challenges posed by terra
incognita, whether as a painter of flowers in Mexico 3 or as a wandering artist in Kazakhstan 4 – so she
was the ideal person for the role: inquisitive, persistent, communicative, a gifted linguist, a versatile
author and observer, an all­round artist who would be able to find her way into the most varied range
of situations.
1
Lewis Carroll, ‘Sylvie and Bruno Concluded’. This quotation was included in the exhibition “Our Woman in
Minsk” at the Museum for Contemporary Art.
2
Kulturelle Territorien [Cultural Territories] is a project initiative launched by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes
[Federal Cultural Foundation] in collaboration with the GfZK 2003/2004 [Museum for Contemporary Art
2003/2004] foundation. A series of thematically based exhibitions and conferences took place, focussed on
transformative processes in the formerly socialist countries of Eastern Europe. Here we worked hand in hand
with institutions, curators and artists of the partner countries.
3
Antje Schiffers “Da wo ich war” [“Where I was”], 1998­2000.
4
Antje Schiffers “bin in der Steppe” [“am in the steppes”], Revolver Verlag [Revolver Publishing House] 2003.

The map developed into a route planner and a game plan at once 5 . “Our woman in Minsk” grew into a
project which in retrospect looks like a performance extending over a whole year. Antje Schiffers
undertook three quite extensive trips to Bulgaria and Macedonia, Romania and Moldavia, and Belarus,
Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. “How would you like your country to be represented?” became a
centrally important question for our correspondent Ms. Schiffers. “And how would your average
person understand this question? Is your country just the locus of your daily experience of its
buildings, means of transport, workplaces and food? Or is your country itself at the root of what
distinguishes these buildings and means of transport from those in other countries? Does a country
consist of its history or of its achievements? Do the people to whom I put the question think a personal
or a political answer is more appropriate?” 6 Did she want to fulfil the expectations that the people on
the other side in each country may have had?
“Reality is an exceptionally question­begging term for strict market reformers. This is because anyone
who appeals to reality is laying claim to the indisputable facts, to incontrovertible empiricism, to the
absolute truth indeed. Even if a person is a modest realist, but still the other – who is unprepared to see
reality in all quarters – you are living in relation to this person in a world of repressions and illusions.
Reality has something imperative about it; it demands submission and recognition, rather than
discussion and comment. Reality demands that people accommodate themselves to its demands; its
inner logic must be followed without compromise. It sets forth the facts of the matter, offers no
alternative and so claims to be perfectly rational, insisting on compulsory acknowledgement. ... And
yet reality is, as we know, a highly ambivalent matter. The reality of one person does not necessarily
bear any correspondence with the reality of another person...“ 7
Here we see the reflection of another significant aspect, which was destined to become symptomatic
for the entire project of “Our woman in Minsk”: namely the question, What, here, is the real life?
What is representative? Which aspect is the important one? What does anyone want to show about his
or her country – and who are they? 8 In a project of this kind, what is the role of a correspondent? How
many people would she have to meet if she really wanted to convey a picture of these countries that
would be as representative as possible? 9 Antje Schiffers took her own reality with her and found ways
of engaging with other realities, which she encountered over the course of this year. The fact that these
realities were ambivalent is an intrinsic aspect of the whole campaign, and of the new maps that
Schiffers was able to make because she had been there herself – and because it was an artistic, not an
ethnographic project, that she had been involved with. 10
5
See inner flaps of the book.
6
For Antje Schiffers, see www.korrespondentin.antjeschiffers.de.
7
Franz Walter, “Geteilte deutsche Wirklichkeit” [“The Divided German Reality”], TAZ [Tageszeitung: Daily
News], 27.9.05. The article was sent to me by Antje Schiffers just recently.
8 The idea of representing a country through objects and assembled cultural artefacts is not a new one. In
ethnological museums and museums of municipal history we find objects that are intended to show the history of
a country in compressed form. The artist herself points this out in her website for the project
(www.korrespondentin.antjeschiffers.de) in the chapter Über das Auswählen [About Selecting]: “At the world
exhibitions of the 19 th century the German Reich was represented by a block of cast steel made by the Krupp
company, which grew larger with each exhibition. ... At Expo 2000 in Hanover, the Germans put on view a
Viking ship, the Gutenberg Bible and the first Benz car. Buthan showed monasteries, Nicaragua the talent of its
inhabitants for improvisation and joie de vivre. Gabon, Ghana and Guyana showed objects drawn from Nature.
In New York in 1939, the Westinghouse company buried a time capsule that was to be opened in the year 6939
in order to show the state of humanity in the year in which it was buried. It contained examples of consumer
goods, samples of textiles and metals, cement, plastic, asbestos... microfilms and a microscope. The spaceships
Pioneer 10 and Voyager 1 likewise carry contemporary data on board, for the inspection of later generations or
an encounter with extraterrestrials. So how does a country represent itself?
9
Just take a look at the long list of things that were contributed in this book!
10
Here the observation of such artistic methods as cite science is subject to the danger that they will also be read
in this light, as the means that would enable them to be seen in an artistic perspective have not been fully formed
and so cannot be taken for granted. Artists such as Marc Dion, Marion Porten have had similar experiences.

“Our woman in Minsk” was the soubriquet for a correspondent who under this title travelled into a
total of eight different countries. For this purpose, Antje Schiffers first of all developed a script: before
her first trip, with the help of employees of the Museum, the class of a Hanover school and her
parents, stories and objects that were to stand for Germany. (see Part ???, German articles in this
book). She published articles in her own journal, she set up a website, 11 she gave others a chance to
make their own contributions, she visited art galleries, community centres, domestic living rooms,
beer gardens, Pushkin museums and Goethe Institute offices. She found a large audience of people
who shared her interests, and now she leave us with a major collection of objects and stories that
deliver a report of at least two realities. On the one hand they provide an answer to the questions
which the correspondent put to those who participated in the project. On the other, they give us an
account of the entire peregrination of “our woman in Minsk”. Antje Schiffers herself says: “The whole
project of Our woman in Minsk was also quite absurd and overdone – was a performance lasting a
whole year, if that is what you want to call it. At the same time it is all real and true – while still a role
or an act – so you can’t tell at any point what is real life here.” 12
The idea for this project was one that we worked out on my kitchen table, using the map of Europe as
a game board. We had pictured to ourselves what it would be like for Antje to be travelling to Sofia on
the train, carrying stuff in her suitcase that could hardly be more absurd: wine, coal briquette, poems,
lebkuchen, a song and an ambassadorial flag (an embroidered representation of the buildings of the
Museum for Contemporary Art). As soon as Antje’s trips had been completed and the journals were
ready, the physical map of each country that had been installed on the project website as a placeholder
yielded place to the journal itself, which frequently consisted of just such a variegated mixture as the
contents of the “German” suitcase had added up to. So Antje Schiffers has ended up by replacing the
map of the country with the map of her own experiences.
On the bus trip between Minsk and Vilnius, a fellow traveller of Antje’s tells how he imagines a
travelling artist should look: “The artist opens her eyes very wide, remembers everything and then
paints a great picture from memory.” At the exhibition at the Leipzig Museum for Contemporary Art 13
in November 2004, the first major image resulting from Antje’s travels was presented. The itinerary
from last year suddenly became evident as a very tactile collection of objects, which spread out rather
like a large­scale, walk­through map on every floor of the Museum for Contemporary Art 14 ,
reproducing various realities and wholly individual insights which reflected the artistic project and the
real life of “our woman in Minsk”. Bulgaria was followed by Macedonia, Belarus was followed by the
Baltic countries, Romania by Moldavia. Each country, reflected in the consciousness of the artist,
presented itself in a different light, a different colour, which – selected on the basis of pure subjectivity
– stood for her recollection of the country in question.
Reactions to the exhibition showed that to some extent the project was regarded as a one to one
representation of real life. The way it was set up made it possible to engage with the matter
immediately, as the exhibition involved displays of the kind that is common in museums that feature
the natural sciences, and also because some of the themes were extremely private and direct. Visitors
did not keep at distance, not did they show any misgivings about the art, which on closer examination
of what was involved here is rather surprising. After all, Schiffers was juxtaposing everyday jars of
ajvar [a pepper spread] with plastic bottles filled up with wine, shabby wooden clogs 15 and so on. How
much of this is art and how much is reality? At this point a further major vista opens up – namely, the
11
At this point I would like to express my very warmest thanks to Thomas Sprenger for his indispensable work
and help in the publication of the reports. He has been responsible for the realisation and design of the website
for “Our woman in Minsk”.
12 Antje Schiffers in a letter to Julia Schäfer.
13
The exhibition was also shown at the Kunstverein Hannover [Hanover Art Society], Goethe Institut New York
and the Window on Art of the BDI [Federation of German Industry], Berlin.
14
c. 400 square metres.
15
“In our exhibition it was plain that on the one hand we were dealing on such a large scale that it was as if we
could represent the world itself, and prove it by the love we showed for all these shabby details, and on the other
hand the absurdity of this attempt was equally apparent.” A.S. in a letter to J.S.

question at what point an ordinary object undergoes the transformation or passes through the gates that
transform it into art. In the work of “Our woman in Minsk”, objects receive an added value in artistic
terms at the moment when they are handed over to our correspondent. Not because Antje Schiffers
blesses them or because she is a saint. But in her script for “Our woman in Minsk” she has constructed
an artistic framework – and all these things belong, as protagonists, in the overall picture of the map
she has made. 16
“It may be said of a map that it is a duplicate with the help of which we can find our way around in a
given reality, but as Lewis Carroll has demonstrated, a map cannot be a duplicate of the country,
otherwise we could as easily get lost in the one as in the other. The idea here, incidentally, is that life
itself should be something like a map for art, as it is precisely through relating to life that we find our
way through that which is presented here as an imitation of real life.” 17
Julia Schäfer, Curator of the Leipzig Museum for Contemporary Art
16
Some people who gave objects and stories to Schiffers knew that they were to form part of a scenario, and this
can actually be seen in some of the contributions to the collection – as when, for example, real life is supposed to
be represented by the contribution of Oliver Musovik, in a photo of the artist. Here we see “our woman in
Minsk” both smoking and doing the washing – a picture that for Musovik is designed to represent a typical
Macedonian woman.
17
Arthur C. Danto “Die Verklärung des Gewöhnlichen” [“The Illumination of the Ordinary”], p. 52, Suhrkamp
Verlag [Suhrkamp Publishing House], Frankfurt am Main 1996.