Allora and Calzadilla are a collaborative duo of visual artists who live and work in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Jennifer Allora (b. 1974, Philadelphia, USA) and Guillermo Calzadilla (b. 1971, Havana, Cuba) Since the beginning of their collaborative career in 1995, Allora & Calzadilla have worked in a variety of media to produce a body of work spanning sculpture, photography, performance art, sound and video. Allora and Calzadilla are known for their interactive art pieces in public, often addressing social and political issues and engaging questions of history, geopolitics, and culture.
Chalk (1998) is an ongoing art project in which the artists place human-size sticks of chalk – each piece measuring 64 inches in length – in public spaces for passers-by to use as they choose.
Chalk is not a completed project. It has been presented in many cities globally, including Zapopan-Mexico, Boston, Paris, Sydney and New York. This ongoing project was also installed in the central government square in Lima, Peru, to stand as a part of the 2002 Biennial Iberoamericana. With each iteration, the character of the work shifts in response to the locals, social, and political factors
I wanted to share this to broaden the vision of the formats that a collective demonstration can have. I find it interesting to think about the complaint beyond institutional formats. I would like to highlight the simplicity of this piece as a potential for the use of public space as a huge blackboard, an extended canvas on which one can write, sue or complain.
Although the piece is not a specific call to express complaints, on the multiple occasions in which the “agents, executors, pedestrians or participants” have performed, they use the opportunity to express general discontent, complaints with the government, emotional manifestations or political positions. .
I also wanted to show this in relation to the book Complaintivism!, to see explorations of how the complaint can be thought from art, how from the idea of “installation, performance or drawing” the public space can be rethought to share the private issues.
Remarkable the game with the scale. It seems accurate to me, how a device as simple as chalk, with that school connotation that it has, by making it giant, takes on a sculptural dimension that empowers the potential writer. Removing the chalk out of class and placing it into art spaces or streets stands as a chance for the public to share their ideas and enlighten their foils.
“To file a complaint can also mean to become alienated from the history that led you to complain, an intimate alienation that you feel in your own bodily being” (Ahmad, pg. 42)
How reclaims and complaints interferes in our own bodies? Mind and body relation have been a topic that has overcome day and day more important, as studies showing their strong interconnection. Lately I read an article in an online magazine called Mental Health America which says that the intestine coating functions “a second brain”. Both intestine and brain are connected physically by the vague nerve, and chemically by hormons and neutroansmitters. Therefore they are interconnected back and forth. Consequently, the intestine is the main psychosomatic organ. A good mind influences a good intestine functioning and a good intestine functioning conducts to a healthy mind. When I swallow my complaint my body “resiente” Spanish word that means literally re-feels. Metaphorically meant that it reacts with pain. As a matter of fact I have a condition called “inflame intestine” a psychosomatic reaction in the gastrointestinal apparat. It started when I was 20 years old and comes and goes depending on the season. It was triggered by a family crisis, which in that moment was difficult to elaborate through words, with text. So, my body took the work of materializing into a feeling, an uncomfortable body feeling. Ahmad says our body can be converted into an archive, as a document. Our whole existence is involved in the process of letting a reclaim out. In my case, I have learned that when I don´t speak out the situations that bother me, if I don´t “file my complaint” my body resents and reminds me that is important to elaborate this discomfort through speech. Since my first intestine crisis I started a psychotherapy process, for many years in a row. That helped enormously. That safe space with an objective ear that heard unprejudiced became an effective way to file and convert those life complaints into a document that possible to be analyzed, letting it out of my body as a knit, out from my guts. The possibility to elaborate the difficulties of experience through text. Although the psychotherapy space is a different institonalized space, and it is not conducive to bringing grievances to any formal process, It helped at that moment to organized the ideas in order to lead them in the future to other spaces of pleading. And certainly to learn how to manage my guts.
After sharing my personal experience with complaining and having F too close at the same time, I let anger directly bleed on paper.
First outburst to leave doesn’t feel good, doesn’t feel right. Another layer should calm down outspoken words, should offer time to reflect on them.
However complaint need time, it will not erase. To cover complaint, to drown it doesnt quite work. The complaint is there no matter how much you put on it.
It gets calmer through times YES, but it still wants to achieve. It is motivated, it is alive, it wants to succeed and it will come out again…
… different this time: slower, with caution based on the history of complaint.
Justice, equality and freedom are things in life we might all want. But how to deal in a system where this is only valid for one? To change the system, to break down borders, to achieve a respectful communication demand work and patience. It means to understand, to explain, to react, to reflect, to act, to react, to reflect, to understand, to explain again -> for justice, equality and freedom. For love and communication, to stay connected and not alone.
However you want to stay connected: Getting to close involves risk for damage. Its a game, a steady negotiation of distance and participation. There is tension to eat each other, to destroy, to fall apart again…
Reading Sara Ahmed’s Book Complaint! let me think of my personal experience with complaining in an institution:family. Ahmed describes how hard it is to get a complaint through within an institution and so I do.
There is no future, but at least there is coffee. Not the kind of coffee they sell in fancy places. Not the kind my mother used to make. There is no future, but at least there are shoes. Not those comfortable shoes. Not even uncomfortable ones, but sexy ones. There is no future, but at least there is music. The kind that makes me dance, makes me sweat, makes me stink. There is no future but there is saliva. Of the slippery kind that makes me retch and the dry kind when there are no more words. There is no future but at least the printer works. After ten tries and even though the cartridges were full.
Incredible violence is happening where people are being displaced and places destroied forever. Despite of a climate catastrophy that is already happening the german governments still allows corporations to enlarge open coal mines like the one called “Garzweiler” close to cologne that is one of the largest in Europe. Twelve villages had to be demolished for it in the past, homes, protected monuments, fertile soil, insects and other creatures, roman excavation sites the whole complexity of a peace of Earth taken out by a huge digger. What remains is a incredibly large and deep whole that seems to be empty but that is actually full of complaints and suffer, of ignored voices of protest. There is a fracture on GoogleEarth were the view of 2009 and 2020 meet each other. On the satellite picture we see the village of Borschemich that stopped existing in 2017 and we see at the same time, more that 100 meters below, the ground of the new coal mine. The next village that should fall is Lützerath were only one farmer was able to stay but that is accompanied now by hundreds of squatters that moved into the abandoned houses and selfmade treehouses. They try to amplify not only the complaining voices of those who are affected locally by displacement but also those who are and will suffer from the massive CO2-Emissions of the coal. Lützerath became a fertile space of complaining, of resistance and of the creation of an alternative sphere in opposition to capitalisms extractivism.
Squatted house in the village of Lützerath that is currently under threat of destruction due to enlargement of the coal mine Garzweiler.
The village of Borschenich (satellite image from 2009) that disappeared 2017 and the open coal mine Garzweiler (satellite image from 2020) in Germany near Cologne. Fracture found on GoogleEarth.
The summary was urging to be done and therefore, we are coming back to the roots: the place where the complaints were planted, watered, and let out by the complainer-creator, to the#0.
I do wonder sometimes why I have started voicing the itchiness I encountered. The following question would be why I do art. Then again, after rereading the displeasures once in a while I always bump into the satisfying answer. Moreover, I love my army of complaints. The question would pop up: how is it possible to have an emotional connection to the displeasure? I might not be able to explain it well, but assume that for me it comes from the joy of complaining, the power of reflecting, something very personal, one-man therapy, the empathy with the protagonists of my story, and most importantly, being able to be vulnerable somewhere, more than anywhere else. The topics that I touched through my displeasures are a good base to realize what are the itchy places and triggers, more precisely the base for future complaints and that is, my complainers, what I was looking for a while. I might be my own feminist ear.
What a lovely way to burn!
STICKY DATA: Complaints framed as self-damage
Is it, now when I opened these very personal, but very public questions and realized how sticky they are? Now, when I am aware of the damage that has been made? It can not be more of destruction than actually taking the words and bringing them into action. I and my displeasures are already here, which is, as I experienced, definitely not enough. Otherwise, Ahmed would call it a fatalist process (opened and started just in order to be initiated). But I would say that if my voices are burning now, there must be the next stage. Therefore, let me complete this action until it gets visible.
Fatal procedures, poster
WHAT A LOVELY WAY TO BURN
After voicing displeasure #The Code of Visibility, I could finally cry my life off, after months of holding it back. The wonderful moment of being able to tell him how hurt I was is not the pathetic story about my father, as I always thought. It is the voice of all the girls in the world that were abandoned, living with the thought that they made a mistake. It is the voice of the anger, the spit of the tension that pierced my belly for years. Thinking about the children that are very present in my everyday life, I pictured the visibility that their complaints are creating: the contrast of being taken too seriously, or not at all. I have been observing both their creation of visibility and complaining in front of the authorities and I actually found something useful to apply in my own practice.
Never mentioned before that I have always been disguised and repelled by the way my family structure is described in the official documents. It gave many people the right to comment and construct their own perceptions of the two members of my nuclear family. I hated the way they victimized my mom seeing her as a tortured, poor woman, the single parent left alone. Once, in the report of a school psychologist, she wrote:the child’s lack of motivation due to the consequences of her broken family. Whatever would change in my behavior, that was considered weird, it was always attributed to the crack I was born in.
Once, I cried in front of a 5 years old girl I babysat because her toy/doll family construction matched mine very well. Instead of stopping the professional cry, I started the professional complaint in front of her and the game was successful. The feminist ear has no gender and no age.
voicing the burning
#The Professional Cry is a fusion that gravitates and connects displeasures written before and after it. It is, indeed very much connected to the first displeasure #Feminine Masculinity. Both empowered my female/male voice and helped me understand the NO complaint. I was not respecting my own body, and my own little girl cried inside me every time I gave it to them. I was sexually harassed, taken advantage of. I experienced verbal abuse not knowing that what has been happening is wrong. I never told that to anyone, because they would immediately give credit to the broken family situation: seeking love more than others, daddy issues, loneliness, not having a man figure to look after, etc. I am not saying that traces of the crack are not present, but how dare you? Developing masculine femininity is a process and I prefer saying that my deep voice is therefore a social construct.
The fatal calculation, poster
This must be a professional crying class, voicing up and healing the cracks.
#The Crying Honk was, on the other hand, at the beginning very general, global, touching something outside of my body. I started writing it after the second day of my trip to Egypt thinking about the reflection on the way. After a while, it became strongly personal and I noticed that this was the task of mine, the one this life urges me to have: I am the voice of the children. I always felt this whisper more than others and whatever is the context, I ended up working with kids. At least I know whom I inherited this complaining skill from. Therefore, the more honest and radical I was, the more visible I became. This might also be called radical softness because my words are written faster than my brain can check them. I am simply unloading and emptying my cabinets within each letter.
NOWHERE TO GO, BUT READY TO BURN
So, how to treat these empty pieces of furniture that are piling up? How to fold all these tears and screams-soaked napkins? Where to store them? The collection of the voices, cabinets of displeasure, university of ears, feminist laboratory, collective hug, complaining choir – (some)where to go?
I have a trillion questions while burning on my own and some of them are adding oil on fire, while some are swallowing me even more into the topic. I am asking:
What is the difference between psychotherapy (type of a feminist ear), official complaint (including administrative process e.g), and art practice here, for me? What am I proposing and voicing?What wouldhappen when the voices are heard and the cabinet is exposed, becoming visible? Will my writings hug the people, motivate them? What do the complainers need? Is it more of the introspection and individual complaining experiences or the instruction of how to make an act?
Will anything voiced drastically change anything existing?
Until all of them are answered, until it all burns.
The sound of collective praying made me tremble. I heard the voice coming from the top of Ibn Tulun mosque communicating with the other voices, the choir of Al-Qāhirah. The collective vibration transmitted through the architecture gave birth to a sobbing city I had a chance to encounter.
Why are you crying? ارجوك لا تبكي.
All the best from the West
Scared for my white skin, I walk through the dusty bubble and pray for my white skin not to get dirty. For my white skin not to get raped. For my white skin not to experience poverty. My privileged, white body prays for the kids from this street, for the mango traders of Bazar, and the mothers feeding their newborns on the pedestrian zones, beyond the legs of passengers. The white privilege that I have not chosen but was given to me. With the whiteness and ability to wash my face after a long day on the streets, I dare to ask: how can we be part of the same planet? Me and this little girl in front of me, being alone on the street? We, small humans spreading inequality. We, mute humans, do not hear the cry.
On day 4, I slowly accepted these scenes as a part of the landscape and got used to poverty.
Honk for the existence
Being loud or visible has many purposes: from the simple joy of having attention to the emergency blankets, danger alert, and simple, everyday fear. I find the ambivalence of the honking orchestra here being disturbing and meditative simultaneously. The sound of confirming the presence on the road.Another form of crying, right? Traffic tears, polluted breath, screaming brakes.
Somehow, this typical Egyptian honking practice sounds very much like my own cry – hysteria, anger, the language of the unique emotions. Imagine honking as the only voice you can use. The honking makes you want to explode in your own anxiety and drown in your own tears. Or in mine, if you wish.
Cairo, Egypt
Who takes the pictures of the otherness and who is the otherness?
“The relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony.”
Said, Edward W. 2003. Orientalism
The postcolonial studies introduced us to the Westerns depicting the Orient as an irrational, strange, weak, feminized “Other”, contrasted with the rational, familiar, strong, masculine West. I would gladly comment on something that opposestheotherness, the one belonging to Orient (from the previous view), and reflect on my own, Occident otherness experience in Egypt. It is very important to underline my position here: I am not a scientific researcher on the topic, nor competent to discuss postcolonialism on any deeper level. The fact that these were my first steps out of Europe and the ways I used to experience each of them urged this reflection and made it very personal.
As I have already voiced in one of my displeasures, it feels that my everyday purpose is to be visible wherever I am and no matter what I do, say, or behave, my visibility was never so present (I dare to say even successful visibility in my case) like here. It is not me, Nadja, being exotic otherness in Egyptians eyes, but us, Nadjas that came to enjoy the heritage of their country and leave a few pounds more, possibly. And here I was even more white and prestigious, being considered a German within the group of German students I came with. What fascinates me among many things here is the way of communication that consists (besides the honking) of a couple of questions as where are you from; what is your name; and multiple versions of welcome to Egypt. These questions are never meant to actually be responded to, but to deepen the conversation, lead to the possible trade, and give them ”the promise”. Each word answering their conversation starter is a permission to enter the platonic friendship where you are the one promising to buy, to sit there and, necessary, come again. Such intensity in everything happenings. Welcome, to Cairo, they said.
What is your name?
My name is Nađa, that, according to Russians comes from Nadezhda (Надя) meaning hope. According to Arabs comes from Arabic Nadia (Nadiya) meaning moist; tender; delicate. One of the sellers from Bazar told me that the meaning is a short, but very fast river. I wanted to run aweay, that's true. So, you are Egyptian? I was asked.
The first time in this symbolic 25 years I exist in this world, somebody took the picture of me because I was different than everybody else there. I was the exotic, fascinating alien among the ordinary, everyday man on this continent. Instead of giving the superiority that attention usually does, I felt the opposite. I felt small and different in front of the whole world that I had no idea about. I felt the heaviness of the cloak of otherness that was worn by the people of color in Europe, Muslims praying on the street of the Orthodox country I came from, the women with hijabs, etc. Their unusual, extraordinary behavior or look was taking the attention of ”normal” white people and now, it is was me: an alluring, foreign subject.
I would revive the Serbian saying ”Šta je, jel igra bela mečka?‘ (eng. Is the white bear dancing or what?), the term we use for an event that evokes the curiosity of random passers-by. Apropo this saying, I wonder, who is the white bear and who is the spectator, actually? It might be that the white bear is the observer and he does not need to be tamed.
Gold-coated, crying city
Not goldening it more than it is, it is the fact that Egypt has been visited for its archeological heritage as a golden civilization that left magnificent traces dating back from the world we have no idea about. This golden coat kicked me after I left Cairo and woke up the following morning on the night train in Luxor. There I understood the massive tourism of the Serbs used to go to Hurgada every year, as well as other people visiting Egypt and seeing just Lux(or). Nobody enjoys truly the 67 layers of dust on their faces while being trapped in the traffic sandwich between the cars, buses, auto-rickshaws, and running pedestrians in Cairo. Rarely who want to live in these conditions. I do not. Yes, we are contributing through tourism and we should keep doing it. No, Egypt is not just a sandy kingdom and Giza. That is all I wanted to comment on.
Again, how to be sure that this is not one more reflection fabricated by a western explorer?
Now, poetry for the poor. (ref. Architecture for Poor, Hasan Fathy)
Granite poverty, she, however, bravely smiles. Sculptured, structured valleys and these little brown eyes.
I dare to feel, feel quickly and escape. Never in your skin. Never in this shape.
My apologizes for just being, and existing as I am. I must create a blanket so I can protect them! All of them.
Scared and aware, of the white nightmare my foot in dirth, completely bare. My skin somehow shines. And they stare.
Nevertheless, I am the other My eyes are bigger then my own hunger.
They are the one, one of the same. Non-existing trone, just a pile of chairs.
The voices are raised, the voices that dare. They exist so much, one can feel it in the air.
I have never seen the crying city before.
West Bank Poetry, chalk on the wall New Gourna Village, Luxor, Egypt
