All quotes by Hannah Hurtzig are from a conversation that took place in March 2006 in Berlin. _– _– _– 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 w<strong>ith</strong> 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 w<strong>ith</strong> 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 w<strong>ith</strong> 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 w<strong>ith</strong> 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 clan<strong>des</strong>tine 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 w<strong>ith</strong> 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 w<strong>ith</strong> 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 w<strong>ith</strong> 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. )
Pictures © Thomas Aurin 31 — # 08/09 (Dezember 2006) Das Magazin <strong>des</strong> <strong>Institut</strong>s <strong>für</strong> <strong>Theorie</strong> der Gestaltung und Kunst Zürich (<strong>ith</strong>)