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All quotes by Hannah Hurtzig are from a
conversation that took place in March 2006
in Berlin.
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14
Trickstering, Hallucinating
and Exhausting Production
There are projects that inaugurate or respond to a curated
topic, serving and being regarded as the curatorial markers
of a period, such as, for instance, the upcoming «Documenta»
or the cancelled «Manifesta» exhibitions. And then there
are projects that develop an autonomous practice over a
longer period of time, and although they are not conceived
in reaction to or anticipation of a trend, their appearance
seems to be amplified at times by a current curatorial interest.
Such is the case with the Blackmarket of Useful Knowledge
and Non-knowledge that has emerged from a series
of projects which Hannah Hurtzig has created since 1995 in
order to experiment with the forms of knowledge production
and transfer in constructed public spaces. For a brief
account of the history of the Blackmarket one should mention
the «Mobile Academies» (Bochum 1999, Berlin 2001
and 2004, Warsaw 2006). Even though they are now lumped
together with other summer schools and academies
burgeoning everywhere, they were the first to hybridize (in-)
disciplined workshops and lectures, cultural fieldwork and
political activism in an event that creates its own imaginary
community. The first official Blackmarket for Useful Knowledge
and Non-knowledge, called «The Hallucinated Community
College of the Mobile Academy with 100 experts
from Berlin», emerged from the «Fakelore» Academy that
took place in Berlin in 2004. This attempt at an encyclopaedic
systematization of «terms and topics that played an
important part in the past Mobile Academies» was a wild
taxonomy of cultural, artistic, scientific, jargon, practical,
common-sense based, disciplinary and non-disciplinary,
acknowledged and clandestine areas of knowledge — fortytwo
topics ranging from A for ‹Aeronautics› to U for ‹Urbanism›
in Arabic, Bangla, Chinese, German, English, French,
Greek, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Dutch, Low German, Portuguese,
Russian, Swedish, Urdu, and Viennese languages
(or dialects). Already the first edition established three elements
— one-to-one talk between an expert and a client for
one Euro, a duration of thirty minutes, an audience that
would listen in on headphones — from which a model
emerged that could be the object of discussion on several
agendas. I want to talk about the Blackmarket in order to
analyze the specifics of its format and its effects vis-à-vis
new forms of knowledge production and their politics as
well as the role theory has taken on in an age of theory
performance. I will observe element by element the particularities
that produced the Blackmarket as a new autonomous
model.
Machinizing a public space
What distinguishes Blackmarket from the artistic
interventions that critique public spaces as being closed,
controlled and dominated by marketplace consumerism is
its proactive approach: not to discover, display or import the
ready-made structure of a museum, theatre or academy but
to construct in the city a public space that is not authorized
for the production of knowledge. Hurtzig explains that her
resources were «archives and reading rooms in libraries,
the stock-market, and rooms with a special function in non-
European countries, such as, for example, in Zimbabwe the
places where illiterate people come to speak to a scribe in
order to have their story or knowledge written down — the
purpose could be a letter, an advert, any written information
to be stored.» The type of public space the Blackmarket
is aiming for is an user-oriented space («Benutzerraum»).
What it has in common with theatre is the reference to the
public forum of classical antiquity as well as a mixture of
performance and event. It is a performance in the sense that
each expert takes the position of a knower (= performer),
self-authorized by the speech-act, and deploys all techniques
of performing, by which I mean not so much acting
techniques but rather the linguistic craft of giving, fulfilling
or betraying a promise of knowledge. Blackmarket is less a
performance than an event in as much as it does not present
itself in confrontation with an audience that seeks a consensus
in reception. There are no spectators to observe and
receive a performance, but all participants — the experts,
their clients, and those who just listen — are users involved
in shaping the event to varying degrees. The intimacy of the
encounter at each table-unit requires a low volume — whispering
and maybe even stuttering — so that the view from
above onto the hundred tables in the room indicates very
little representation in the sense of resembling or standing
in for or speaking in the name of something/someone else.
Hence the Blackmarket is an installation only in a technical
sense, in terms of its set-up rather than its genre of display.
It is more like a self-sufficient machine that operates a space
in an open, uncontrolled, uncontainable production, dissemination
and infiltration of knowledge. For now I speak of
‹knowledge› for want of a better term, and I will further
elaborate the specific difference in this notion.
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