There is a danger concerning the artistic work of Alexander Vaindorf, the danger of critical implification. This especially applies to his video installation Detour. One Particular Sunday from 2006. The film deals with the fate of migrant workers, mostly women from the former Soviet Union living in Italy. Vaindorf meets them in Parco di Resistenza in Rome, where they gather together every Sunday, their only day off; we find that they spend the rest of the week mostly locked up in the houses of Italian families where they work as housekeepers. They tell the artist their personal stories and their reflections on life, work and migration.
If we approach Vaindorf’s project from the perspective of genre, focusing on the abstract theme of migrant labour rather than on its visual and discursive content, the task of interpretation becomes very easy. In short, we will get a sort of “identity drama”. Far away from home, or to use a more sophisticated vocabulary, displaced from the culture to which they originally belong, themigrants fromthe former Soviet Union create an enclave of their own diasporic culture in Rome, amidst another, foreign society; and within this particular cultural space they reclaim their lost identity. On this level of interpretation, the people appear as victims of a twofold alienation: from their original culture and from the culture they currently live in. In fact, the migration itself is in this case understood as a form of cultural and social alienation, which necessarily implies that there must be an original, authentic culture and society where all people including thesemigrants “naturally” belong. Consequently their gathering in the Parco di Resistenza in Rome comes aross as the building of an ersatz-community, a social and cultural compensation for an alleged authentic belonging that they have lost. Of course, this loss deeply affects the identity of the migrants, which is supposed to be deeply divided and ambivalent—in short, alienated.
However, following recent developments in cultural theory, we may offer another interpretation that goes beyond themotif of alienation. It focuses on a positivemoment in Vaindorf’s story. The cultural space the migrants create, the one that belongs neither to the culture they have left behind nor to the one theymust now adapt to, is in fact the so-called “third space”, the space of cultural in-betweeness or cultural hybridity, which cannot be perceived in terms of homogenous national cultures, and precisely for due to this lack of origin cannot be understood as an alienated form.
Vaindorf makes a survey of this space, explicitly from the minority perspective, giving us a clear picture of the existential condition of the cultural and social displacement and disjunction. But what the migrants really articulate and what defines the narrative of the entire event that he depicts, is a cultural difference. It is only in the process of articulating cultural difference that they manage to produce—or better yet, reproduce—their subjectivity. And this is what is at stake every Sunday in the Park of Resistance in Rome. People who are believed to be pure objects, puppets of a global historical transformation—regardless of whether we call it the collapse of communism or the downfall of industrial modernism—now become subjects of a new social formation, of a new form of social belonging. Far from being an alienated form of an ‘original’ national community, the diasporic community built in Rome by the migrants presents the emergence of a new type of transnational subjectivity beyond the “classical” multiculturalist pattern that is, as is generally known, based on the idea of essential identities. This simply means that the subjects of Vaindorf’s video installation are not defined primarily by what they were (socially or culturally), but rather by their future, by what they are creating now. As migrants, they are not alienated from authenticity as an essence; authenticity is what they—precisely as migrants—always recreate and is thereby something they can never be alienated from.
Here then, is the positivemoment in Vaindorf ’s film. Not one of the women and men that the artist talks to presents her- or himself as a victim. Although they explicitly define their social position as a form of slavery—tracing the origins of their current social condition to the history of a “Rome that was built by slaves”, rather than to the societies they came from—although they openly talk about their exclusion, their illegal status in Italy, about the economic, moral and emotional exploitation that they are exposed to on daily basis, about horrible experiences they have with trafficking, about living in city parks and disused train cargo wagons, etc., there are no signs of self-pity in their stories. Actually, the people do not even complain about the conditions in which they live. Instead, they think of it quite realistically, and are in the first place preoccupied with the struggle for survival. Generally their attitude towards life and their future is rather a positive one.
Vaindorf’s work only confirms the impossibility of grasping the situation his video describes in terms of simple antagonism between authenticity and alienation, allowing for an alternate ideological characterization of his work. He is in line with those artists who critically question today’s still hegemonic multiculturalist vision of the world and search for new forms of cultural and social articulation focusing on the phenomenon ofmigration. We may call it the quest for a new internationalism that emerges beyond the obsolete concept of sovereignty.
But, is that all? Is this really the ultimate level for interpretation of Vaindorf’s work, one that finally abandons the discourse of authenticity and alienation? Anyone who knows his recent projects well must have noticed a peculiar recurring motif. In his film Kids (Group D) (2003), Vaindorf approaches reality from the perspective of children, the so-called ‘Chernobyl kids’ who were born in the areas around the Nuclear Power Plant right before of after the explosion in 1987. Although they do not have any conscious personal experience of this event, they are nevertheless able to reflect on the impact it has had on the reality they live in—using “second hand” information from their families, media and school. And yet precisely this artificially constructed experience seems to be more authentic. Is it because of the children who articulate it?
In Fallrise from 2002/2006, Vaindorf investigates the ephemerality of collective memory, its manipulative character and its political misuse of historical events. His example is the monument “Eternal Fire” that was built in Belgrade in 2000 to commemorate 1999 NATO bombing of what was at that time Yugoslavia. Only a few years after its inauguration, themonument has been completely forgotten and devastated. Its infrastructure has been robbed, the bronze letters of the inscription (conceived by Mirjana Markovic, the wife of Slobodan Milosevic) have been ripped off, it is fully covered by graffiti, etc. Vaindorf began the project by video recording an interview with the architect who constructed the monument, a young man in his late twenties, the only one among Serbian artists willing to realize the project. Again engaging young people, he showed the architect’s story, a “truthful version” of his own role in the building of the monument, to teenagers and invites them to write their personal response to it, in the form of letters to the architect. He includes their letters as well as drawings made while watching the video in the book Left Commas, which is a part of the project.
Let us repeat the question: why teenagers? Why do these young people have to verify a testimony of another person directly involved in the event? Do they present the ultimate instance of a really truthful experience?
Teenagers are also involved in yet another project by Vaindorf—his Useless/Open Letter to the Government #2 (Will You Be Profitable, Little Friend?) from 2006. This work is entirely dedicated to the question of the purpose of today’s education. Its point of departure is Peter Tillberg’s realistic painting Will You Be Profitable, Little Friend? from 1972, as it is often stressed, one of the most famous and perhaps best-loved post-1968 art works in Sweden. Thirty-four years after its completion, Vaindorf shows this
painting to the students of a graduating class at a senior highschool in Stockholm. He asks each of them to put together his or her thoughts on this painting in a personal letter to the Government. Later, he includes these essay-formletters into the curriculum. The students read each other’s letters and discuss them—Vaindorf has gathered them in a similar situation like that seen in the Tillberg’s painting. Finally, the video of this discussion was also sent to the Government.
Children, teenagers, students…why does social experience need their authentication in Vaindorf’s artistic work? Are we not again caught up in the well-known opposition between authenticity and alienation?
Vaindorf explicitly stresses that, besides its reference to Dziga Vertov’s The Man with a Camera (1929), his Detour. One Particular Sunday also contains a reference to Ettore Scola’s Una giornata particolare from 1977, a film about two people—a housewife (Sophia Loren) and a man who has lost his job and is about to be deported because of his homosexuality and animosity towards fascism (Marcello Mastroianni). While everyone goes to the streets to follow Hitler’s visit to Mussolini in Rome, they meet in an empty house and begin a love affair. The Parco di Resistenza where the migrants from the former Soviet Union meet is in fact near the train station Ostience, which was build by Mussolini specifically for Hitler’s arrival.
But what does this reference actually want to tell us? First, that in the case of Vaindorf’s Detour we have to deal with two scenes: the one of the gathering of migrants in the park; and another, which is not clearly visible, but must necessarily be presupposed, namely the scene from which the migrants and the event of their cultural and social articulation in Parco di Resistenza are radically excluded. This is the scene of today’s democratic politics, of citizenship, of rights, of order, of democratic public, in short, of a society generated in the formof the (national) state. In contrast to this invisible scene, the ‘third space’ in which Vaindorf’s migrants gather is completely bereft of these conventional political elements—not unlike the house in Ettore Scola’s film where Loren and Mastroianni meet. Moreover, it is essentially defined by its displacement and dislocation, or, to go a step further, by its alienation from the “proper” society. However, this does not make this scene less social or less political. It doesn’t even make it less authentic either. Just as in Scola’s Una giornata particolare, it is precisely its radical alienation from the fascist event that makes the event of love between Loren and Mastroianni really authentic, giving it both social and political character.
Let us sum up. The motives of authenticity and alienation in Vaindorf’s work never occur as simple opposites that necessarily exclude each other. In fact, they are rather mutually determined. Why? Alexander Vaindorf is fully aware of the intrinsic impossibility of an authentically totalising social experience. In his work, civic experience always appears as broken, fragmented, displaced, culturally divided, politically hegemonized, alienated, etc. In other words, if there is such thing as an ‘authentic’ social experience, it can emerge only in the process of social and cultural displacement and disjunction. It is authentic not because it keeps society together, but rather because it bears witness to its dissolution and its groundlessness. This is the reason why Vaindorf repeatedly asks kids to tell us the truth of our society. Because by telling us this truth they create themselves, not our society. Crucially, kids always exist in society in statu nascendi —migrants as well.