PAVILION

Notes:
1. The German word Handlung will be kept -
and its plural form Handlungen - in italic for the
whole text, thus highlighting its different layers
as well as its haziness. It is one of the most difficult
and yet easiest words to translate:
Action, activity, agency and participation, but
progression, act, plot or story would also be
perfect translations, but all of them are limited
to one - and only one - specific meaning and
therefore unable to recall the different layers
that cannot be blanked, because they are permanently
present. The significations of
Handlung that go more in the direction of
action and activity can be explained in separation
from a more passive and unintended
behaviour as something that is happening
active and deliberately and is focused on
organizing reality. Whereas the term agency
has an even heavier connotation of a thing or
a person to produce a particular result and
could be described as form of existence, which
expresses the terms political implication. On
the other hand side (plot, story, etc.), Handlung
has meanings close to fiction and narration;
respectively they appear as something happened
and something that is reported afterwards.
2. The definition of ‘thing’ is based on Bruno
Latour’s ideas in his essay “From Realpolitik to
Dingpolitik” (cf. 196), where he advocates for
an “object-oriented democracy”: “For too long,
objects have been portrayed as matters-offact.
This is unfair to them, unfair to science,
unfair to objectivity, unfair to experience. They
are much more interesting, variegated, uncertain,
complicated, far reaching, heterogeneous,
risky, historical, local, material and networky
than the pathetic version offered or too
long by philosophers. Rocks are not simply
there to kicked at, desks to thumped at. 'Facts
are facts are facts'? Yes, but they are also a lot
of other things in addition.“
3. For the German edition of The Human
Condition, Hannah Arendt translated „action“
as either Handeln or Handlung.
4. Hanna Arendt: The Human Condition,
Chicago 1958, p. 7.
5. Ibid., p. 7.
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6. Chantal Mouffe: On the Political, London
and New York 2005; The Return of the
Political, London 2006; The Democratic
Paradox, London 2000. See also her essay
Agonistic Democracy and Radical Politics in
this volume (cf. 248)
7. If I talk about “artistic projects” here, I understand
this in the broadest sense, which
includes all the other aspects and projects that
are taking place within this biennale and is
thus highlighting the interdisciplinary
approach.
8. It would go too far, if we would consider
Blumenberg’s thoughts in extenso, but his
short text “Prospect for a Theory of
Nonceptuality” (in: Hans Blumenberg:
Shipwreck with Spectator, Cambridge 1996.)
gives a good idea about how a feedback
between narrative structures and world good
function.
9. Speaking with Jacques Rancière, these are
the moments in which politics happens.
Rancière speaks about ‘la part de sans-part’,
which becomes visible in those acts of politics,
which are in fact a new “distribution of the sensible”,
a new order of different regimes. Cf.:
Jacques Rancière: La Mésentente. Politique et
Philosophie, Paris 1995; The Politics of
Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible,
London 2004. See also Maria Muhle’s essay
“Aesthetic realism, fictional documents and
subjectivation. Alexander Medwedkin. The
Medwedkin Groups. Chris Marker” in this volume
(cf. 151).
10. Cf.: Bruno Latour: Reassembling the
Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-
Theory, Oxford 2005.
11. Cf.: Hayden White: The Content of the
Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical
Representation, Baltimore 1987; Metahistory:
The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-
Century Europe, Baltimore 1973.
12. Hayden White: The Value of Narrativity in
the Representation of Reality, in: Critical
Inquiry, Vol. 7, No. 1, On Narrative, (Autumn,
1980), p. 5-27.
13. “Handlungsraum” is again a very powerful
German word to describe spatial conditions of
actions, because it is used as a vocabulary of
narrative theory and theatre as well as to
determine the political area in which action is
possible.
14. For a more detailed analysis of this relation
see Ludger Schwarte’s text Performative
Architecture: Setting a Stage for Political
Action in this volume (cf. 172)
15. Arendt, p. 200.
16. Boris Groys talks about a double erasure
in Eastern Europe: The first one with the
beginning of socialist and communist regimes
and more recently the introduction of the capitalist
economic/cultural system.
17. I do not want to spend much time with historical
facts and just highlight one of the major
differences to other European cities in the middle
ages, that is the absence of a city wall.
Leaving aside all military consequences here,
this uncommon structure has still some impact
into recent days. Through the nonexistence of
a city wall, it is impossible to constitute the borders
of the city and thus having a relatively diffuse
notion of its spatial existence.
18. It has to be mentioned that this conception
is anything but new. Its roots can be found in
modernity, if we think about Le Corbusiers
“unité d’habitation” and later on (but still earlier
than Ceaușescu) in projects of Team Ten
members.
19. Srdjan Jovanović Weiss describes those
structures and transformation as‚ turbo-architecture’,
according to the popular music genre
‚turbo-folk’, a very fast and eclectic mix of traditional
East European folk music, Western
pop music as well as techno and rock.
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