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Los Angeles

about being down and out Downtown
07.10.15
6 min
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Mit einen Kanister Wasser und meinem Pass fahre ich zur 5. Ecke San Pedro.Auf Zeitungen, Kartons, alten Matratzen oder mitten auf dem Trottoire liegen Menschen. Eine in ihrem Erbrochenen. Viele humpeln, trotten, schlurfen, magisch roboterhaft gesteuert, irren sie wie Zombies durch die fast leeren Straßen, ziehen Einkaufswägen voller prall gefüllter Plastiksäcke hinter sich her. Siejammern, brabbeln. Sie zucken oder heulen laut, sitzen katatonisch herum oder schreien sich gegenseitig über die Straße hinüber an. Ihre lumpige Kleidung ist verdreckt und steif von Blut und Urin und Essensresten und Straßendreck. Auch auf ihrer Haut, in ihrem Gesicht klebt brauner, schwarzer Rand, und die Haare baumeln einigen als dicke Zotten vom Kopf. Sie verdrehen ihre Augen, haben sie weit aufgerissen.

Ich denke, was wenn ich hier bleibe, wenn diese zwei Nächte und Tage, die ich unter diesen Menschen bleiben will, nur die ersten von hunderten und tausenden Nächten und Tagen unter Brücken, in nassen Betonritzen, unter dem über mich hinweg donnernden Verkehr sein würden, im Dreck der Straßen und Geschäftseingänge, die Schmerzen durch den Schlaf auf dem Beton, ausgesetzt der Helligkeit und Hitze, der Sonne, der Willkür von Polizei und dem Elend der Anderen, der Folter ewiger Müdigkeit, Langeweile und Hungers.

Ich gehe los, in diesen Tag hinein, vielleicht vier Stunden. Ich werde sehr bald sehr müde, ich suche was, wo ich etwas schlafen kann. Es ist brütend heiß, in kürzester Zeit bin ich ausgetrocknet, bald stoße ich auf einen kleinen Park, in dem schon einige andere liegen. Finde einen schattigen Platz unter einer Palme. Schlafe ein, wache schwitzend wieder auf, ich stinke nach Schweiss, ich laufe weiter. Ich setze mich auf eine Bank, sehe tausende Autos an mir vorbeifahren. Wenn ich sitze, fläze ich mich hin wie sie und ich atme leicht, und die riesige Straße ist ein Klang eingehüllt in Wüste und Staub.

Es wird dunkel, und ich bekomme Angst. Ich muss einen Schlafplatz finden, mich irgendwie geschützt fühlen, nicht frieren, nicht überfallen werden. Ich treffe auf immer mehr Obdachlose. Zuerst setze ich mich auf den Boden, an eine Wand gelehnt, werde beglotzt und angepöbelt. Ein Typ wankt auf mich zu, Hector aus Mexico, sagt er irgendwann, nachdem er mich anfaucht, was ich hier will. Er sagt mir, dass er hier seit 13 Jahren lebt, dass er aus einer Psychiatrie von einem auf den anderen Tag von Reagan oder Bush oder so entlassen wurde. Es ginge hier den meisten so. Er braucht lang, um das zu erzählen, weil er so ein gedrängtes, zerfahrenes Denken voller Wahneinfälle hat, so viel Unverständliches laut herunterbetet. Er stinkt schrecklich aus seinem Mund, und das Gefuchtel weht den Geruch fauliger Wunden zu mir. Er verzieht sich bald wieder in seinen Verhau aus Holzkisten und Müllsäcken. Ich bin sehr, sehr müde und will nur noch liegen, lasse mich langsam zur Seite fallen, ziehe meine Beine an, vergrabe meine Armen und meinen Kopf zwischen sie. Von unten, von der Seite sehe ich dass immer mehr Menschen wie Gespenster an mir vorbei ziehen, niemand bemerkt mich mehr, ich will nichts mehr mit ihnen zu tun haben und schlafe ein. Ich weiß nicht, wie viel später, ich wache auf, es ist dunkel, nur das fahle Licht einer gelblichen Laterne fällt auf die Straße, und ich friere. Direkt neben mir liegt wie eine Mumie eingewickelt ein Mensch, dessen Geschlecht und Alter ich nicht schätzen kann, weil er so heruntergekommen ist, eitrige Pusteln und Borsten hat er im Gesicht, alle Zähne fehlen ihm, so liegt er mit geöffnetem Mund gegen die geriffelte Stahl-Jalousien eines Lagern gedrückt. Ich warte und liege lange, und es wird hell. Mir ist übel, vor Hunger wahrscheinlich. Ich stehe auf und gehe, um nach etwas Essen zu suchen. Ich werde von der Polizei angehalten, der Beamte spricht mich grob und bestimmend aus seinem Wagen heraus an, beide Männer steigen aus, mit der Hand an ihrer Pistole, und fordern mich auf, meine Arme auf das Dach des Wagens zu legen, meine Beine zu spreizen, sie greifen mich ab und schauen verdutzt was dieser verdreckte Deutsche hier zu suchen hat. Um nicht verhaftet zu werden, kläre ich sie auf.

Wir liegen, sitzen, lungern verstreut am Strassenrand, vielleicht 60 Männer und Frauen. Manche bei ihren aus Plastikplanen zusammengeschnürten Zelten. Um die Ecke werden es noch viele mehr, Hunderte leben hier so auf der Straße in Downtown. Auf Los Angeles verteilt sind es einige Tausend.Ein großer, stark buckeliger, tief schwarzer, vollbärtiger Mann mit rot unterlaufenen Augen und sabberndem Mund kommt auf mich zu, er krächzt, stöhnt einen Schwall schizoider Verschwörung und Halluzination hervor, wendet sich wieder ab, geht ein paar Meter weiter, zieht sich die Hose runter und scheißt wie ein Hund auf die Straße. Es stinkt wahnsinnig. Ich kann hier nicht bleiben, raffe mich auf und suche mir eine neue Straße, einen neuen Liegeplatz. Ich drücke mich an eine Hauswand. Es ist ziemlich dunkel geworden, keine Strassenbeleuchtung, irgendwelche Papierfetzen, Zigaretten Stümmel, ich schlafe irgendwie ein, meine Arme und Beine, meine Hüfte tut weh, ich fühle mich fiebrig, dämmere, schrecke auf, jemand schreit und weint nicht weit entfernt, einer, der den Stimmen in seinem Kopf antwortet, vielleicht.

Ich habe über 20 Stunden nichts gegessen, ich frage mich durch, wo es etwas zu essen gibt, nicht weit gibt es eine Ausgabestelle. Ich gehe dort hin, niemand da. Ich warte und sitze dort vielleicht zwei Stunden, ich bin so schwach geworden, Leute trudeln ein, es gibt kleine, weiße Sandwiches mit Schinken und Käse. Ich esse, so viele ich kann, vielleicht vier, nehme mir zwei mit und laufe los. Ich will reden und setze mich zu zwei Männern und hebel mich mit einem kleinen, vorsichtigen Zug aus der Crackpfeife, die sie mir anbieten, aus meiner Dumpfheit. Glück flutet meinen Körper. Ich liege herum mit geöffneten Augen und träume das süßeste Zeug, während die beiden akribisch irgendetwas in ihre Taschen sortieren und sich volllabern. Ich dämmere weg, wache mit riesigen Kopfschmerzen auf, ich gehe nach Hause und schlafe.

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Moments Like These

Agostina Rufolo about making a literary selfie
02.10.15
1 min
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I, with great difficulty due to a hurt thumb, rolled a joint and headed outside with a box of matches because I hate that smell inside the house and because I wanted to look at the rain. Several matches got turned off by the wind, some accomplished their mission while I watched a little spider coming out of a spiderweb on a corner. So I started walking towards the garden by the trees and thought: “I live for moments like these.” I looked at the sky sensing a lightning coming soon. And in a few seconds it did. So I ran towards the house with a thunder as soundtrack. Inside, Donovan coming out of the computer, thanks for Youtube’s Autoplay. I danced for a little while infront of the mirror and then started writing this. With a break and a chocolate cereal bowl in the middle, switching to Rolling Stones. Is writing something just right after it happened like taking a literary selfie?

Arthouse Pop

Georg Diez about the smart beauty of Malakoff Kowalski
30.09.15
4 min
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It was a hotel on the edge of Tiergarten. Till Harter had invited me and as he had not shown up for the 60showcase event at Weissensee I decided I would go to his event instead. It would be about Jazz, this is what I had understood. The hotel was grand, imposing, expensive, a lot of heavy stone, the way the old Berlin was and the new Berlin wants to be like, but imitation is a boring game.

I went there also because Aram was going to perform a few of his songs. He had had very positive reviews in major newspapers in recent days, he was at the event in Weissensee and stayed until Igor Levit had played Beethoven and everybody was crying inside. He does not perform very often. And I like him. A lot of reasons to go there.

Aram calls himself Malakoff Kowalski when performing. I have forgotten why, and my Iphone refuses to remember that name, it is always Aram, there is a stubborn side to technology. At the hotel, there were maybe fifty people standing on the balcony overlooking Tiergarten, Aram said “Georg” and Till said “Georg” and then I had white wine and Aram and his girlriend had Schorle or Spritz for which they kind of apologized. Then Aram, as always dressed in a white shirt and tight black pants and his imperial black cap, had a glass of water and showed me the bag he had traded the other night with Helene Hegemann who in the last couple of weeks has been shooting her film “Axolotl Roadkill” at all the places everyone goes to all the time and with all the people involved who go to these places. It is the bubble of the bubble, chamapgne bubbles.

Aram is part of this bubble and is not. He is always polite and respectful and surrounds himself with a playful distance, almost detachment. He seems like a character from a movie that looks like it was an arthouse hit in the seventies but really is from 2013. There is a very contemporary feeling of timelessness about him which implies time having passed.

What is so special about Aram’s music is that it seems like a thought prolonged into sound. It works on a musical level and on a literary or maybe even visual level. About the musical side I cannot say a lot, I am pretty illiterate when it comes to that. But as for the images he evokes, the moods he imitates, the streets he draws and the women he paints, there is a lot to be said. As he puts it himself, he wanted to make an album that is like a kiss, like a long embrace, a tenderness, a warmth that may or may not have to anything to do with the digital world, just because everything by definition is related to the Internet today as we live in the digital age.

Suffice to say, I am not convinced that it tells you anything about the beauty, the sadness, the longing of Aram’s music if you relate it to 1 and 0. When he played at the Stue hotel that night, he had an accoustic guitar with a lot of echo which brought to my mind the dark and winding roads on a typical night in the hills above Los Angeles, headlights searching, cars cruising, people on the move, no direction home, a metaphysical loss that is being clouded by the way things always appear smaller when you look in the rear mirror. The memories that Aram plays with might or might not be real, the night sky above Los Angeles is real. The smell of the trees, the touch of a dress, the sound of a car driving by. This is as real as it gets.

But where does that leave love? Aram does not pretend to be an expert, to the contrary, the appeal of his approach is that he talks about loving like an amateur would; and this is not just a nod to this very concept of unplugged emotions, of make-shift relationships, of moment to moment immediacy. Aram reflects in his words, in his music the way that love is constructed without tearing apart the secret that surrounds it. He leaves intact the mystery, he even creates a new form of mystery by referencing the accoustic version of life. His guitar as much as his voice lead us astray, they turn us on, they make us long to be someone else and ourselves at the same time, because they dream up a life that never was – which is maybe the closest one comes to fulfillment.

Death in the Theater

Georg Diez about the meaning of Maxim Biller and his play "Kühltransport"
24.09.15
3 min
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Salon | 60showcase

German theater, like a lot of things in Germany, is supposed to be the best in the world, this is at least what Germans like to think. I am not so sure. I was a theater critic for a while, and just the other day, in the drunken hours after the 60showcase, Mavie Hörbiger again tried to convince me that I was any good. Whatever. These times are over, the theater lost me, or I lost the theater, we grew disenchanted, this much I can say. 
But back in the day when the theater was still young for me, my friend Maxim Biller had the idea of writing a play. He had never been particularily interested in this art form, as far as I know. He might have been inspired by Thomas Ostermeier who had just been named director of the once famous Berliner Schaubühne at a very young age. There was a certain cultural pull in this direction for a while. This has turned out to be an illusion in a couple of ways.

But Maxim wrote this play, “Kühltransport”, he dedicated it to Thomas Ostermeier, in 2002 there was a really good reading at the restaurant of the Schaubühne with its Bauhaus influenced large glass windows – and then the play somehow disappeared. It was performed once or twice in smaller theaters, but it has never had the influence or relevance it could have had.

It is true, this play and the others he wrote after that are different from almost all other plays that are written in produced in Germany, they try to find a way to talk about the world we live in in a language people might actually use. They are political, they are straight forward, they apply art as a means of understanding, not of showing off. And, so it happens, they are rarely performed, if at all.

Which is strange. Really strange, considering how few good plays are out there. But what is the meaning of this? The theaters and the theater directors seem a bit shy to tackle his plays that deal with jewish life in Germany – and, in the case of “Kühltransport”, his first play, the tragedy of the 58 Chinese who in 2000 died in a container, suffocated to death. Biller reconstructs the last hours of these people, he goes back to China and moves across to London and Rotterdam to understand how this could happen and what the reasons, motivs, consequences are.
15 years later it is not any longer Chinese who are coming, who are dying, it is Syrians. The play is still not performed. This is why 60pages published it, in German. This is why we had a reading of parts of it, at the 60showcase on September 20 in Berlin Weißensee. Thank you Pedro Martins Beja, Sergej Lubic, Tom Radisch, Aram Tafreshian, Max Urlacher!

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The art of the contemporary 3

Marie-France Rafael about the commodification of the present
24.09.15
4 min
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  1. Gallery – Day

The show has been set up. The front window of the gallery is filled with snails. Inside a camera team from the local TV station is filming. Along the walls of the gallery 2000 science fiction books have been pilled up in alphabetical order, a work by Post Brothers. Other works like a pink c-print on canvas showing to horses are leaning against the wall on the floor. In the back room of the gallery the curator Chris Fitzpatrick is giving one interview after the other. He, the gallery assistant (A) and an art historian (M) have set down for a little chat.

M

(to Chris Fitzpatrick)

Chris, tell me, what is contemporary art for you?

Chris Fitzpatrick

I think contemporary art is more and more indiscernible.

It is less and less essentialized in any kind of given space.

So it is happening that the artists are interested more and more in applied things, leaving art context altogether.

I was telling someone about Post Brothers collection of science fiction books, a collection of 2000 titles. In all of them you have a somehow antiquated idea of the future that already passed – a kind of space aged idea of the future from 1987 and now we are in 2015. It puts a graveyard of great ides that didn’t get realized…

The camera team steps in. They finished their work and are leaving.

Chris Fitzpatrick (CONT’D)

(to the camera team)

Oh, buy and thank you.

(to M)

And so to me the conflation of all the different people, voices and subjectivities that lead to the collection being there and how it is arranged in this sort of absurd alphabetical topography is very much like contemporary art. It’s what that does by doing that. That’s the picture, the picture now is well beyond its frame. To me the information is embedded in that.

A

(to Chris Fitzpatrick)

I think there is an another interview scheduled, maybe we should take a little break if that’s ok?

M

(to both of them)

Yeah, sure, I can come back in a few minutes.

Chris Fitzpatrick is joining his other interview partner and Marie-France Rafael steps out for a few minutes. We see her entering a bakery around the corner and eating her sandwich while walking back to the gallery.

All the three of them are sitting again in the backroom of the gallery.

M

(to Chris Fitzpatrick)

Let’s pick up the conversation where we left it, talking about the picture.

Chris Fitzpatrick

The picture is not necessarily inside a frame. There are things that are invisible, but implicitly they are there. You can’t see those things, but you can see the effect they have on other things.

M

(to A)

And what is contemporary art to you?

A

It could be different things.

Someone is entering the room. A is saying “Hi” but is still continuing talking.

A (CONT’D)

For me as someone who is selling art it is also an exchangeable good. We consume it, but we don’t really need it. But it gives you something.

The complexity of contemporary art is how you deal with it, literally in the double meaning of “to deal”. The snails are a good example, once you put them in the gallery they become art.

Chris Fitzpatrick

For me art isn’t a commodity at all.

If her job is to sell, my job is to spend money.

I only think of art as a kind of pursuit that makes life livable. Without artists the world would be completely uninhabitable. And the fundamental thing about contemporary art is that it is not very contemporary but futurological.

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Fear and Trembling in Buenos Aires

Agostina Rufolo about how a spider can make me feel the luckiest girl.
21.09.15
4 min
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In the midst of zapping I found the film “XXY” with Valeria Bertuccelli, Ricardo Darín, Martín Piroyanski, and Inés Efrón as its main actors on an Argentinan Cable TV channel called “Volver” something like “Return”, so, basically, they broadcast old Argentinian TV shows and movies, this one’s not that old, so it surprised me to see it already there, or was surprised by the constant and rapid passage of time. 

It was nice to catch this film on the telly because I had a weird week and I was tired after my dance class that evening. So my body was tired but my mind was spinning around and this movie is set in Uruguay, where my mum is from and it relaxed me to observe the isolated beach and the calm and steady Uruguay lifestyle. Early on the week I went to my dance class, then left at 11PM to a friend’s for 2 days because his parents were out of town. The second day my battery went off and I didn’t have a charger with me, and since I’m not really fond of cell phones, I’m usually happy when that happens, I was online anyway. But my dad freaked out and reported me as a missing person because my phone was off. They never talked to me on FB, a friend did, which is how I found out I was apparently missing, talked to my mum on Facebook, and she was online, which made everything really weird. Then later that day, as I got to school at 8PM, they were evacuating it because the Earthquake in Chile was felt in Buenos Aires as well, which never happens. Buses here usually vibrate so much I didn’t feel a thing. I got inside passing through the security guy telling me not to, while other students were taking pics and filming the event, because that is how good we Argentinians are at evacuating a place, we just think nothing will happen to us, I guess, Buenos Aires having little climatic and geographical trouble in that sense. My professor was still inside the class saying he was too concentrated talking about “Fear and Trembling” by Søren Kierkegaard that he didn’t feel a thing, but he liked the FX added to his class. I went home feeling like I didn’t belong, feeling as if I were really missing and I wasn’t supposed to be living my life normally or feeling like in another dimension I was really missing, who knows in what kind of situation. Or maybe I was in this other dimension, where I was living my life normally but the real me was missing. And I survived an earthquake(?)

I was still over-thinking while watching “XXY” and I felt a presence. Really near me. I kept watching the TV, ignoring the feeling. Eyes lost on the screen while a thousand thoughts ran through my head. A few centimeters from my eyes I see a little spider coming down from the wooden ceiling. I observed it, happy to had such a lovely visitor. It went down, slowly, all the way to my right leg and instantly started going back up, passing by a few centimeters from my eyes once again, till I lost sight of it, once it camouflaged itself with the wood. 

It reminded me of when I was little and I would keep spiders in jars, only to find them dead in 2 days because I didn’t know how to feed them, till I thought it was better to see them around the house or in the garden, being themselves and alive.

It’s funny how a presence, even if it’s just a tiny spider can make you go back to yourself, to make you care about what matters and to just enjoy that (in)significant moment, which is the only true and existing thing. The rest is just noise.

60showcase

17.09.15
2 min
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Salon

If electricity cut off the internet – how many horses would you need to get it on track again? 
We don’t know that neither – but in the meantime we’ll try some stuff. Internet unplugged for instance, and the maximum depth of the digital. 
The best of both worlds. 
This is 60showcase, an event produced by 60pages – the international network of authors, artists, thinkers based in Berlin. 
There will be texts, what ever that means. 
There will be music, very beautiful one. 
There will be moving images, because that clicks. 
There will be food and drinks from Gordon, because he’s so Tiki. 
From 4 pm till 10 pm. 
For all of those who need some fresh air after the Berlin Art Week.

This is how we line up:

16.30 downstairs: Georg Diez / Jagoda Marinic – Thomas Jeppe

17.00 upstairs: Hadley and Maxwell

17.30 downstairs: Sandra Bartoli, Murat Suner, Mariam Zaree

17.30 upstairs: Andrea Hanna Hünniger

18.00 upstairs: “Kühltransport” by Maxim Biller, Reading, featuring Sergej Lubic, Tom Radisch, Aram Tafreshian, Max Urlacher, under the direction of Pedro Martins Beja

18.30 downstairs: Hanno Hauenstein – Gabriel Loebell-Herberstein

18.30 upstairs: Mark Wachholz – Katti Jisuk Seo

19.00 downstairs: Igor Levit

19.30 downstairs: Fabian Wolff – Pippin Wigglesworth

19.30 upstairs: Emily Dische-Becker – Ali Hussein al-Adawy

20.00 downstairs: Armen Avanessian – Christopher Roth – Sam Chermayeff

20.00 upstairs: Sarah Harrison, Angela Richter

20.30 downstairs: Igor Levit

21.00 downstairs: Anne Philippi – Ralph Martin – Mavie Hörbiger

21.00 upstairs: Noaz Deshe (pending)

21.30 Igor Levit

60showcase 

Sunday, September 20th, 2015, 4 pm – 10 pm, Lehderstraße 34, Weissensee, Berlin, 

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60showcase

Murat Suner about Igor Levit
16.09.15
1 min
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Salon | 60showcase

What’s a revolution and how does it sound? 
What is a song and what can it do?
You will find out, with our dear friend Igor Levit playing compositions of his dear friend Frederic Rzewski – for you and all our dear friends. Plus, maybe, some Beethoven.

Sunday Game

Brittani Sonnenberg about going back in time with soccer
14.09.15
3 min
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I played in a soccer game yesterday for the first time in about fifteen years. In high school, during the “fall” season (a misleading term in tropical Singapore, where the temperature always hovers around 30 degrees Celsius, with a fierce deluge in the early afternoon), I laced up my cleats on a daily basis. I was never very skilled in dribbling or fancy footwork; all I had going for me was a doggish desire to do well and a lack of concern for personal injury: I considered bruises to be bodily trophies.
Yesterday, stepping out into a baking Texan heat, sporting shin guards and high white socks, those high school games felt eerily close, even if my sixteen-year-old stamina felt very far away. There are so many selves that we inhabit and shed, which lie dormant for years. Yesterday, suddenly, I was a soccer player again, playing stopper, keeping my eye on the talented center-midfielder on the opposing side, scanning the field for open players when the ball came to me.
I realized how much I had missed the easy, laughing camaraderie of female teammates. Hungry to win, running hard, shouting warnings and encouragement. It’s all less urgent now: no one’s crying after a loss; in the middle of the game yesterday, one teammate yelled “sorry” after kicking the ball out of bounds, and then reflected, as the other team ran to retrieve the ball, that apologizing constantly wasn’t very feminist, there was a book she had just begun reading that said that women—but then the player with the ball was back, and throwing it in, and my teammate had to pause her book review to play defense again.
Shortly after the second half began, the ref blew the whistle, and shouted that there was a player down at another field, and asked if there were any doctors present. The other team’s goalie, apparently a physician, took off to help. My body went cold, as I saw the circle of players around a body at the field above us. My sister had collapsed on a soccer field, when I was fifteen, and never risen again, and as the ambulances came, to pick up this woman, I heard them coming to pick up Blair again, and felt nauseous. That self is always there too, next to the soccer player, or grown woman: the teenage older sister awash in fear and panic, the game paused, the circle of players, life ending, on a blithely sunny field in Singapore.
The woman had dislocated her knee; it popped back into place when she was placed on a stretcher. The game resumed, and the final score was a tie, 2-2. Exhausted and sweaty, I slapped hands with my teammates and made small talk as we changed out of our cleats, discussed the high points of the game. Then I got back into my car, which I never did in high school, because you couldn’t drive in Singapore until you were eighteen. I turned on the radio to a local station that I like and got a little lost trying to find the highway that would take me home.

On Ambiguity

Beny Wagner about sexual fantasies, border controls and Donald Trump
13.09.15
14 min
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Last winter Samara and I went to Turkey on vacation. We spent a lot of time recording video footage and talking to different people we met. One of the first men we talked to was very friendly and accomodating. He let us film him in his store, told us to come back and said he would show us some bars and clubs. To his surprise, we came back a couple days later. He expected our exchange to be like those he had with most other tourists; we would all pretend to stay in touch but never see each other again. In retrospect, our return must have seemed full of ambiguity. We clearly didn’t want to buy anything from him and we already had the footage we needed. We didn’t exhibit signs of any other ulterior motives.

He welcomed us back and waited for the right moment to start talking about the German couples he claimed had come to him wanting to have threesomes, or one couple where the man wanted to watch while he fucked his wife. He talked about his penis implant in graphic detail. When we asked what that was, he used his jeans to demonstrate how his foreskin had been pulled up and incised to make room for the small pellet. Initially he had had a ceramic bead inserted but once when he was in the sauna it got so hot he thought his penis would burn off. So he had it replaced with plexiglas and now it was fine. He could make a girl orgasm in five minutes.

We thanked him, and this time did what most tourists would have done the first time. We said we’d be in touch and disappeared. For several weeks, long after we had left Turkey, he kept sending Samara Whatsapp messages.

A couple of months later we flew to Canada from Berlin. Arriving after the long flight, I was tired from not having slept at all. We had to separate in customs, Samara a Canadian national, myself a foreigner. The line for foreigners was much longer and it took ages for me to reach the officer. When I arrived, the officer started asking me routine questions: How long was I staying? What was the purpose of my visit? If my girlfriend was Canadian what was to prevent me from staying? How much money did I have with me? Did I really think that was enough for three weeks? Did I have access to more money when that small amount inevitably ran out? He then asked me what I did. I said I was an artist. He asked what kind of art. I said I made videos and wrote, the fog of the sleepless flight plunging me into an existential space not appropriate for this type of interaction. He asked what kind of videos. I said I didn’t exactly know how to explain. Like art videos. He said: What kind of genre? Pronouncing it: Jean. I couldn’t hold back a little laugh at the pronunciation and responded: It’s like art. He ­said sharply: Porn? I said no. This came as a complete surprise, but immediately I realized that he had been thinking this all along, that all his questions had been leading up to that presumption. All my hesitations and uncertainties had seemed to him like incriminating evidence. He let me go through.

These two interactions became deeply intertwined in my thoughts. They happened on different continents, in completely different conditions with two men who have radically different functions in different societies. The one man sells counterfeit clothes in a cheap bazaar in a tourist trap in Turkey. His entire demeanor seemed to say: I’m down for whatever. I know how to do things underneath the gaze of the law. I can show you how it’s done. Wink​. The other was the official

law enforcing face of national security. He represents the law. His demeanor said: I will find out every secret you might be hiding. I will obey and enforce the most rigid of legal codes. Your wink​will be held against you as evidence. And yet both these figures, in separate but equally surprising twists in the course of interactions chose to understand me as covertly offering or harboring porn. It’s hard for me to understand the reason for this being something I embody, something that singles me out among countless others. I can only understand the leap in their projection and expression to be a result of my having shown ambiguity in the way I represented myself.

So in these cases, ambiguity ­ any hesitation towards precisely classifying myself and my intentions ­ meant porn. When I think about the framework for these projections it seems like this way of thinking is a product of the internet. Maybe it comes from a gradual development of pre­internet media and information, but in these particular details it comes across as the unmistakable product of this saturated form of networked information. The beginning presumption on the part of both these men is that they know everything. Of course they are aware that they don’t know every single thing but they have the arrogant confidence of someone who, despite not having the world’s information stored in their minds, has access to any piece of information at any time. It is the abstract notion of that access that builds the confidence, or rather, projection of knowing, however flimsy.

The legibility of surfaces of strangers encountered at face value gradually mirrors a google search with the filters on. People present themselves as presentable, as morally upright, law abiding, not perverted. Those moral boundaries are often pushed playfully, and even with the filters on, we find little winks that allude to some borderline mischief personalities may be prone to given the right circumstances. Most of us recognize that wink. Many of us, like the Turkish man, take pride in our literacy of subtle codes, often over­eager in presuming the person standing in front of us is fully legible. But that legibility, more often than not, is desire projecting itself on to the un/knowing other. Was the customs officer, bored in his little booth, day dreaming? Would assuming that I was a porn director spark his fantasies for that brief moment? Does he see his job as an impossible tedium, each minute a minute lost masturbating?

The average person recognizes filters and preempts their illusory surface. That person is well trained in detecting the human/search engine filters of etiquette and assumes to see past the social codes they believe must hide some form of perversion. Everyone has at some point heard some statistic about how much porn occupies the internet. But the issue is not so much the quantities of data. The issue is rather how this collected information, both filtered and unfiltered, realigns collective perception and reconstructs its ability to comprehend and map an environment together with the characters that perform within it. Here is an accumulated moral code without source or author, more absolute than Catholicism. Everyone is a sinner. Everyone lives a duplicitous life, hidden by a thin shell of penance. But here, the average person is both priest (the confessional is public and accessible to all) and sinner (recognizes the sodomy hanging thick in the wireless airwaves). Ambiguity is squeezed out of that consciousness as something code can’t handle. What’s left is a space of confusion somewhere between the

arrogance of presumptions and the misfired projections of stifled desires.

I was once interrogated by Israeli customs officers on my way to Tel­Aviv via Zürich. It felt extreme that they were stationed in Zürich, but then it wasn’t that surprising. They pressed me with all kinds of very personal questions. Their manner and tone made it feel like they already knew everything there could possibly be to know about me. During the interrogation I kept reminding myself that there was no way they could ever know as much as they made it seem. But still, their theatrics were effective. I chose every word carefully. I exposed myself so as not to come across as suspicious. I felt like I had already broken laws I had never considered before. I turned possibilities into factual statements, creating half­truths to replace the truth of ambiguity.

The symbolic presence of the police is synced with the civilian recognition, developed at the same speed as consciousness, that articulation, whether verbal or in physical gesture must drop any sense of ambiguity. The forcefulness of that demand creates narratives in the mind that then become hard to distinguish from the truly fragmented plot, full of inconsistencies, that the new narrative replaces. A lie told over and over can convince its creator as much as the recipient. Subjecting oneself to that process of translation into factual half­truths gradually creates the demand that the same subjugation be enforced on the rest of the environment.

This type of mentality, formerly reserved for trained representatives of the law, seems to have lodged itself permanently into the collective code of conduct. Maybe as the internet and digital media have progressively deskilled the majority of labour practices, it has done the same with law enforcement. Whereas the police once represented the moral, psychological, and physical laws of a social system, they might increasingly only be there to enforce the actions of physical bodies in space. If most people, both those representing the law as well as those representing its evasion, gradually develop towards understanding ambiguity as perversion, the theoretical enforcement of the law becomes becomes the guiding principle of social interaction.

I remember the early stages of my interactions with social media, when I had just created my first email account and chatted with strangers and friends on icq and msn messenger. Even at that young age it was understood among the friends I communicated with, that this mode of interaction created difficulties in determining the tone someone was using. The ambiguities expressed in person, or even on the phone, the facial and tonal nuances that both add to and soothe the uncertainties of interaction were often lost in a line of text. Friction and misunderstanding arose much quicker because of not being able to determine whether certain messages had angry or sarcastic undertones. The ubiquity of this mode of communication, together with emoticons and hi res images used to add affect have gradually shifted the focus away from the conversation over that loss of ambiguity. It seems that most people accept that either the half­truth of factual statements broadcast at high volume correspond to reality, or are resigned to their voice, with all its nuances, remaining unheard.

The Spiral of Silence is a term coined in the 1970s by political scientist Elisabeth

Noelle­Neumann. It is meant to describe the tendency in people to remain silent when they sense that their views in relation to a particular topic are not shared by the majority. The term has gained attention and significance regarding communication through social media. It has been used to describe an array of reactions to social issues ranging from racism to gay marriage rights, from war and climate change. An image emerges in which one of the greatest effects of the freedom of speech enabled by social media is an infinite and, outside of the broad use of a sociological term, undocumentable layer of silence lurking beneath the surface of the acceptable terms of communication. But I would argue that the term itself also adds to the issue it attempts to understand and perhaps reconcile. The application of this term suggests that opinions are solid and fully formed, whether articulated or not. It denies the uncertainties of forming an opinion regarding something as complex as climate change or the role of religion in political and social systems. In short, the term gains traction and relevance at a moment in which space for the acceptance and understanding of ambiguity has already been eradicated. Might it be possible that the silence spiral is not the deliberate hiding of an unpopular opinion, but simply the resistance towards translating uncertainty into factual half­truths?

Over the last weeks I have been captivated by the growing presence of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. My attention was probably activated the moment he self­authored what, by most standards of communication existing on the surface, would have been a public relations death­blow ­ when he referred to Mexicans as rapists and murderers. The momentum he has gained since, a seeming inversion of free speech values, has not been altogether surprising. Trump’s persona, almost consciously satirical, collapses the distinctions that divide social standing and political affiliations. He is an implosion of high and low, belonging to the 0.001% while using a rhetoric of ignorant dismissal by calling people stupid, deflecting incriminating charges as “nonsense”, and appealing to the no­bullshit type of expression seemingly prefered by the average American in times of severe political alienation.

The perversity of the legal code allows him to play all sides. A recent CNN debate hosted a Cuban American woman who won the first season on his show “The Apprentice”. She denied suggestions that she might be on the losing side of his political motivations and implicit racism by making it clear that her parents, while Cuban, had immigrated ​legally.​Trump can deny his racist inclinations by claiming that he does love Mexico and Mexicans and “their spirit”, because of their entrepreneurial cunning. He admires the fact that they can steal from America, which is simultaneously the precise problem he wants to solve for Americans. He enjoys selling them condos in the Trump Towers, which shows exactly what’s wrong politically ­ Mexicans shouldn’t be rich enough to afford that kind of real­estate. The same woman who had won “The Apprentice” defended him as a bastion of free speech. His delivery may be unpolished, but he says what’s on his mind. That his brand of free speech links so well to the minds of a large section of the American public shows exactly how much is omitted from a poorly applied notion of free, democratic expression.

To return to the loss of ambiguity, Trump is both the Turkish man in the bazaar, and the Canadian customs officer. Trump can use the ​wink​as an invitation to use the law as cunning

deviation and simultaneously use it as incriminating evidence. He appeals to the person who knows better than to trust the surfaces of expression because he articulates both sides of the search engine, the glossy, morally upright, and the perverse, but more seductive and entertaining side everyone knows to be there at all times. Trump conjures up the silence spiral from its hiding place and embodies a caricature of the voices lost in the space between opinionated half­truths, keyboard and screen, for those who silently watch social media but do not feel their voices represented in it.

But Trump’s popularity (and equally its fierce opposition) is a testament to the collective absence of ambiguity in the formation of opinions and their reflection in the world. He implodes what seem to be contradictory binaries in his own person. He takes what appears to be hypocritical in the mediation of information and reconfigures it into a single whole. Rather than following one side of the law, he enacts the contradictions between racism and law enforcement, corruption and entrepreneurial spirit. His brand of free speech might not be as ludicrous as it may come across at first glance. In a system that denies the possibility for any individual to act according to her or his own conviction, in which every individual expression or gesture is absorbed as commodity, Trump is big enough to represent that system in his own self. He is one of a handful of individuals in a vast minority who can thrive under the current system. His mode of free speech exists in combining the hypocrisies of half­true opinions into a solid mass.

Free speech cannot exist in a system in which modes of expression are reduced either to the surfaces of a thin, implausible morality or the sinkholes of hatred and violence. Free speech requires the freedom to describe the contours of ambiguities with a level of awe towards the unknown both within oneself and in the environment one inhabits and observes. Free speech would allow me to say I’m not quite sure what it is I do without that being understood as perversion, where a ​wink ​could be the invitation to enter the unknown.

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