(DOC) Kader Attia - reappropriations (draft version)

Dr Amanda Crawley Jackson SOMLAL University of Sheffield Jessop West 1 Upper Hanover Street Sheffield S3 7RA Great Britain Email:

Telephone: +44 (0)114 222 2882 (Re-) appropriations: Architecture and Modernity in the Work of Kader Attia PLEASE DO NOT CITE FROM THIS DRAFT VERSION OF THE ARTICLE. IF YOU WISH TO CITE FROM THE ARTICLE, PLEASE CONSULT THE FINAL, PUBLISHED VERSION IN MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY FRANCE, vol. 19, no. 2 (May 2011), 163-177. Re-appropriations: Architecture and Modernity in the Work of Kader Attia http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108 0/09639489.2011.565163 2 Re-appropriations: Architecture and Modernity in the Work of Kader Attia ABSTRACT This paper explores recent work by the Franco-Algerian artist, Kader Attia (b. 1970), in which the artist uses the modernist architectures of France and Algeria in order to discuss the order of economic and cultural (post) modernity. I suggest that Attia sets up an antimony between the order of architecture and the critical, interrogative function of art, arguing that the latter is metaphorised by the voids which characterise so many of his works. I also explore the idea that the creative practice of architecture, its détournement and re-appropriation as a living object by users, opens up a creative hermeneutic space in which to reconfigure the prevailing order, spatialities and cognition that it represents. Finally, I will consider the installation format favoured by Attia as a means of breaking up the univocal, hegemonic narratives instituted by architecture, in favour of partial, embodied and situated narratives that foreground the presence and role of the spectator. Kader Attia was born in 1970 to Algerian parents in Dugny (France) and raised in Garges-lès-Gonesse, a canton of the northern Parisian suburb of Sarcelles. A graduate of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, his first exhibition was in 1996 in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where he lived and worked for three years. Since then he has exhibited extensively throughout the world, including Miami (Art Basel, 2004), Stockholm (Andréhn-Schiptjenko Gallery, 2006), Tel Aviv (Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, 2008), Seattle (Henry Art Gallery, 2008), London (Saatchi Gallery, 2009), Paris (La Force de l’art 02, 2009), Berlin (Galerie Christian Nagel, 2009) 3 Re-appropriations: Architecture and Modernity in the Work of Kader Attia and most recently in the Sydney Biennale (2010). Attia was shortlisted for the prestigious Prix Marcel Duchamp in 2005. In 2008, he was awarded the Prize of the Cairo Biennale and two years later, with the curator Laurie Ann Farrell, the Abraaj Capital Art Prize. He works in a variety of media (including drawing, photography, sculpture, video and installation) and tends increasingly towards time-based, ephemeral and experiential pieces that foreground the embodied presence of the spectator. His practice is politically engaged and explores the matters which shape and structure our contemporary reality: geographical and social displacement, political and economic disenfranchisement, the unevenly distributed privileges and wealth of the globalised world (an enduring legacy of colonial modernity), the vacuity of consumerism and the loss of meaning and identity in the globalised world. In this paper, I will concentrate on a number of recent works by Attia, in which the artist focuses his attention specifically on architecture: its purpose and power, its practice and its lived, temporal reality. He writes: Even if in earlier times an authority ordered art, most of the artists today create their art without specific orders. Architecture is totally different. Architecture has first to do with politics, with the political order. It is always a political or religious order or power that commissions an architect to build a monument. That is why I’m very fascinated by architecture, because generally when I say art asks questions and architecture gives answers it is more because, as an answer to an order, architecture has to do with the economic, political, and cultural issues of its time; but the more architecture exists through time, the freer it becomes and the more it becomes a marker of its time. Architecture is less interesting in its own contemporaneity. To appreciate architecture we need time. During its own time, a monument is not so strong. (Attia, cited in Farrell 2010b) I will examine the antinomy Attia sets up between art and architecture; between order, stability and reason and the critical, disruptive and interrogative function of artistic 4 Re-appropriations: Architecture and Modernity in the Work of Kader Attia practice. I will also explore the idea, however, that like art itself, the practice of architecture, its re-appropriation as a plastic object by users over the course of time, opens up multiple and conflicted interpretations of architectural reality, eroding its self-willed coherence and ideological autonomy. I will suggest that the disclosure of architecture’s radical contingency – which is often expressed in Attia’s work as a void – and the interpretive space this opens up provides the artist with a way of thinking more generally about the ways in which modernity, a performative, colonial ideology which continues to structure the reality of political and also artistic relations between the global North and South, can be re-appropriated and given new meanings through acts of translation and détournement. Finally, I will consider the installation format favoured by Attia as a means of breaking up the univocal, hegemonic narratives instituted by architecture, in favour of partial, embodied and situated narratives that foreground the presence and role of the spectator. As recent overview articles in the specialist art press have suggested, there has been an identifiable neo-modern turn in contemporary art, within which modernist architectures feature predominantly. Brian Dillon (2010), writing in the British art magazine Frieze, provided a timely overview of ‘the variously thoroughgoing or superficial archaeology of architectural and artistic Modernism that has exercised so many artists in the last decade’, a trend which has been represented by some of the most influential exhibitions and biennales of recent years. For Roger Buergel, the artistic director of Documenta 12: Is Modernity Our Antiquity? (Kassel, 2007), this modern turn can be explained by 5 Re-appropriations: Architecture and Modernity in the Work of Kader Attia contemporary anxiety regarding the political, social and economic future of a world still marked by the structures of colonial modernity and yet desirous of bringing about fundamental change; paradoxically, then, an aspiration of the kind precisely associated with the modernist era: It is fairly obvious that modernity, or modernity’s fate, exerts a profound influence on contemporary artists. Part of that attraction may stem from the fact that no one really knows if modernity is dead or alive. It seems to be in ruins after the totalitarian catastrophes of the 20th century (the very same catastrophes to which it somehow gave rise). It seems utterly compromised by the brutally partial application of its universal demands (liberté, égalité, fraternité) or by the simple fact that modernity and coloniality went, and probably still go, hand in hand. Still, people’s imaginations are full of modernity’s visions and forms (and I mean not only Bauhaus but also arch- modernist mind-sets transformed into contemporary catchwords like ‘identity’ or ‘culture’). In short, it seems that we are both outside and inside modernity, both repelled by its deadly violence and seduced by its most immodest aspiration or potential: that there might, after all, be a common planetary horizon for all the living and the dead. (Buergel 2005) According to this logic, a solution to the current political, economic and ideological crisis can paradoxically be found in the very modernity that gave rise to it. Kader Attia’s perspective is, however, quite different. For him, as I will go on to show, only by derailing the inexorable march and instituted values of modernity and its contemporary avatars, through multiple and creative acts of mis-use, mis- interpretation and détournement can we begin to conceive of and build alternative futures. I will argue, then, that fundamentally Attia’s practice is about ‘la réappropriation du sens des choses’ (Attia & Luste Boulbina 2009, p. 165); or what Emma Cocker has described as this ‘subversive strategy for dismantling the logic of the dominant order – the logic of Empire – by reassembling its languages into counter- narratives or for resurrecting those histories and artefacts 6 Re-appropriations: Architecture and Modernity in the Work of Kader Attia that have been marginalised or repressed within its terms’ (Cocker 2010). In an interview with the curator Laurie Ann Farrell, Attia described the importance of architecture in the development of his practice: my way to make art is influenced by the fact that I was exposed to Western postmodernist architecture early on, where the notion of ‘order’ has been developed following the main desire of the father of modernist architecture, Le Corbusier, who used to say, ‘I’m making the link, the alliance between emotion and order’. Le Corbusier was fascinated by technique and aesthetic. But unfortunately, today, his successors have followed only the tough part: order. (Attia, cited in Farrell 2010a) Unashamedly stripped of the utopian ideals espoused by Le Corbusier, Tony Garnier et al, the housing estates built in France in mid-twentieth century were deeply compromised and impoverished translations of modernist architectural principles. Responding to the housing crisis prompted by a rapidly expanding urban population swelled by post-colonial immigration and the disorderly proliferation of shantytowns at the edges of major cities, French developers and architects sacrificed infrastructure, affect, community and urbanity to political expediency and the exigencies of potentially disruptive social crisis. Designed to contain and shelter a surplus population, in the same way that colonial Algeria was conceived as a dumping ground for the impoverished and unemployed of France (see Clancy-Smith 2009 and Nora 1961, p. 81), the suburban cités (re)produced a socio-spatial grammar of exclusion, predicated on the apotropaic modern division of self and other, here and there. In a conversation with Jean-Louis Pradel about the installation he made for the Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon in 2006, Attia described his own experience of these postcolonial 7 Re-appropriations: Architecture and Modernity in the Work of Kader Attia geographies of segregation and exclusion: ‘Si l’on n’a pas vécu dans une cité, on ne peut pas imaginer la difficulté psychologique et matérielle, de passer de la banlieue à Paris’ (Aupetitallot and Prat 2007, p. 62). In one of the Lyon gallery spaces, Attia installed 172 abandoned fridges (Fridges [2006]), upon which he drew black and grey windows and doors, reflecting the concrete fabric of the suburban housing estates in which he grew up. The fridges, like the blocks in Rochers carrés, were densely arranged and filled the room, creating a sense of claustrophobic imprisonment and disorientation. In another room, he made a wall painting that Tami Katz-Freiman describes as ‘the image of a city composed of a medley of black buildings, the contours of which line a labyrinth of desolate streets […] a dark suburb, a city without pity […] hopeless urban infernos’ (in Aupetitallot and Prat 2007, p. 24). Between the room filled with fridges and the adjacent gallery space, Attia installed an automatic sliding door of the kind one sees at airports, in which he embedded knives and large shards of broken glass. On the one hand, the door reproduced for the spectator something of the dangers and difficulties faced by those who do not belong to globalisation’s kinetic elite (I borrow the term from Zygmunt Bauman) as they attempt to pass through the many borders which structure and govern our contemporary world. On the other, it represented a defensive barrier against the incursion of what was precariously contained beyond, for on the other side of the door, Attia had placed dozens of umbrella frames, which squatted on the floor and appeared to run down the black walls like monstrous arachnids from a science fiction fantasy. The spider-filled room, representing the anxiogenic space that lies beyond the boundaries which both contain and protect us, speaks to the fears and emotions that beset us in our relations with (sub)urban others. In the same room as the 8 Re-appropriations: Architecture and Modernity in the Work of Kader Attia umbrella skeletons, Attia installed Moucharabieh (2006) – two window-like pieces, again in the form of an Islamic arch, their traditional lattice work replaced with a trellis of handcuffs. Kept at bay by this thin but efficient defence, the ghostly subjects who live behind the windows are invisible, yet their hidden gaze, concealed by the handcuffs and the light, is a disruptive and unsettling presence in the room, both imagined and sensed by the spectator. A number of Attia’s works deal explicitly with the affective experience of those who, behind the screens and gates erected to contain them, inhabit the alienating, quadrangular architectures of (post-) modernity. Untitled (Concrete Blocks) (2008) is an installation of identical, grey concrete blocks, reminiscent of the tower blocks of the grands ensembles, cut at oblique angles and set in a dense and rigidly patterned circular formation on the gallery floor. There is no space between the blocks, which overlay and overshadow each other, cancelling out individual identities in favour of a geometric abstraction that shows little regard for the temporal human realm. Spectators can only circumvent the edges of the installation and observe it from above (as Le Corbusier surveyed the cities of the Algerian Sahara from his aeroplane), thereby reproducing the disembodied, demiurgic and ultimately voyeuristic gaze of (post-) modern planners. Rochers carrés (2008), a much larger installation of towering, slanted blocks made of wood and plasterboard invites the spectator into a gallery space that has been transformed into a suffocating, modernist labyrinth. The angle at which the blocks are set, their oppressive uniformity and shadowy proximity to each other, have the effect of disorienting and overwhelming the spectator who walks between them, producing an awkwardly embodied, affective and 9 Re-appropriations: Architecture and Modernity in the Work of Kader Attia psychological experience of containment, exclusion and spatial uncertainty. Untitled (Fridges) (2007) is another large, densely packed installation comprising one hundred and forty discarded fridges of various sizes, painted black and covered in mirror mosaics that resemble impenetrable windows. A cold cityscape of modernist tower blocks, the fridges reproduce themselves endlessly in a myriad of abyssal and shattered reflections, thereby compounding the spatial disorientation of the emplaced spectator. Sleeping From Memory, a work made by Attia in situ at the Boston ICA in 2007, comprises a number of closely-packed beds topped with cheap foam for mattresses bearing the roughly hewn traces of the fragile and evanescent bodies of absent sleepers. Again arranged in lines, with little space between them, these beds evoke the anonymous dormitories for migrant workers and the overcrowded bedrooms and apartments of the banlieue. The post-modern architectures described in these works have a base level of functionality; they are machines not so much for living as existing, barely. Human presence is refracted or effaced, leaving only the slightest trace upon its hard, flinty surfaces. The colonial histories which haunt the French suburbs and which constitute both their genealogy and contemporaneity are the subject of works such as Rochers carrés (2008-2009), a photographic series shown as part of the Rochers carrés installation described above. The photographs depict the huge, concrete wave breakers that circumscribe the beaches of Algiers. Amidst them, we see potential harragas (the young men who attempt to make the perilous, clandestine journey across the Mediterranean towards Europe) as they stare out to sea, their bodies dwarfed by the concrete masses that contain them. The arrangement of the wave breakers, 10 Re-appropriations: Architecture and Modernity in the Work of Kader Attia carefully tessellated in places and in others collapsed in chaotic piles, is suggestive of the still performative ruins of colonial modernity, a poignant commentary on the segregative geographies and economic iniquities that structure relations between post-Schengen Europe and its former colonies in Africa. Also, however, the concrete blocks evoke the parallelepipedic tours and barres of the French banlieues, suggesting that the reality of the French banlieues which constitute the dream-horizon of the harragas differs little, in fact, from their lives in Algeria. In this way also Attia draws our attention to the proliferating, internal border zones (or internal colonies) of globalised postmodernity (see Balibar 2001), in which non-European migrants are contained and which spatialise and multiply the borderlines that circumscribed nation states as these were conceived and mapped in the modern era. If the contemporary border zones described by Balibar constitute the toxic afterlife of modernity’s circumscribed nation states, so the genealogy of post-colonial suburban architectures in France can be traced back to the disciplinary colonial urbanism practised by the French regime in Algeria. This is illustrated in Attia’s 2009 photograph of the cité Pouillon in Algiers, a housing estate designed by the modernist architect Fernand Pouillon in the 1950s as part of the programme launched by the then Mayor of Algiers, Jacques Chevallier, with the financial and strategic support of the metropolitan French government, to tackle the acute housing crisis (Bennoune 2002, p. 66) that threatened the stability of the colonial order. The necessity of finding a solution, described as ‘un enjeu de la paix’ (Dufaux and Fourcaut 2004, p. 184), allowed for experiments in urban planning that would have been inconceivable in the metropole. 11 Re-appropriations: Architecture and Modernity in the Work of Kader Attia On the occasion of the opening of the Diar el-Mahçoul (‘Land of Plenty’) complex, Chevallier spoke of ‘the triumph of human dignity, of French liberties, and of the future of French-Muslim civilization’. ‘France’, he declared, had ‘to build in Algeria, day and night, as much as possible, so that she would not have to worry any more about the political problem’ (cited in Çelik 1997, p. 143). Following the announcement in October 1957 of De Gaulle’s ‘Plan de Constantine’, which promised 210 000 new housing units over a five-year period (Çelik 1997, p. 120), Paul Delouvrier, who would later oversee the Schéma directeur d'aménagement et d'urbanisme (1965) in Paris and the creation of France’s ‘villes nouvelles’, was appointed Délégué general du gouvernement en Algérie, with the task of managing the vast construction project. While the new estates were to accommodate both working-class European and indigenous populations, the two communities were segregated from each other and the apartments built for the indigenous population were smaller and of an inferior standard, often lacking basic amenities. Jacques Deluz insists, rightly, that in the 1950s, in terms of its desire to resolve the housing shortage, ‘[l]a France prend conscience, non pas tellement de l’injustice coloniale, mais des conséquences politiques et sociales d’un excès d’inégalité’ (Deluz 2007, p. 1). The product of emergency strategies, then, of pacification and containment, rather than a uniquely social gesture or policy, they are in many ways the ideological precursors of post- colonial urbanism in the metropole. What Delouvrier learned in Algeria would be put into practice in France a decade later. What is striking about the cité Pouillon in Attia’s photograph is its formal resemblance not only to the architectures of the French banlieues (which, as I have suggested, were largely inspired by the typologies tested and developed in Algeria), 12 Re-appropriations: Architecture and Modernity in the Work of Kader Attia but also to vernacular architectures. For example, the triangular composition, emphasised by the contre-plongée angle of the camera’s lens, of a tiered construction, with flat roof terraces rising in steppes towards a citadel-like construction at the summit, clearly evokes the famous view of the Ottoman Casbah as it descends the hill towards the bay of Algiers. The architect Roland Simounet, a member of the CIAM-Alger group, describes thus the influence of Algerian vernacular architectures on modernist design: Je fais depuis quelques temps cette constatation: dans l’Algérois où je suis né, et d’une manière générale dans le Maghreb, se trouvent les éléments fondamentaux du Mouvement Moderne en architecture: la terrasse, le lait de chaux, la rue intérieure, le coté vernaculaire des choses, avec cette géométrie simple que l’on retrouve dans la casbah ottomane d’Alger et qui a séduit beaucoup d’architectes. (Simounet & Dollé 1989, p. 95) In 1931, Le Corbusier travelled to Algiers to deliver two public talks about modern techniques for the construction of mass housing (Boesiger 2006 [1934], p. 174). He visited the Casbah and also flew south across the Algerian Sahara into the M’zab valley, where he was able to see for himself Ghardaïa and Béni Isguen, the eleventh-century Ibadite ksour (fortified towns) which had inspired Marcel Mercier to write his 1922 book, Le M’zab, une leçon d’architecture. What Le Corbusier found there and in the Casbah influenced him profoundly. The roof terraces, pilotis and free façades of the ksour provided him with many of the design principles that are outlined in his influential Charte d’Athènes (1933). Simone de Beauvoir, when she visited Ghardaïa in 1954, was struck by its apparently anachronistic resemblance to the modernist aesthetic: Cette fois – c’était ma troisième tentative – j’arrivai sans encombre d’Alger à Ghardaïa ; la ville méritait ma persévérance ; c’était un tableau cubiste magnifiquement construit : des rectangles blancs et ocres, bleutés par la lumière, s’étageaient en pyramide ; à la pointe de la colline était fichée de guingois une terre cuite jaune qu’on aurait 13 Re-appropriations: Architecture and Modernity in the Work of Kader Attia cru sortie, géante et extravagante, des mains de Picasso : la mosquée. (Beauvoir 1963, p. 283) Many modernist architects working in Algeria believed that the adoption of the vernacular aesthetic represented a means of adapting progressive Western forms and technologies to the needs of indigenous populations. For example, François Bienvenu, the architect who designed an early modernist complex, Climat de France (1933), a ‘cité indigène’ at the edge of the Casbah, claimed to ‘rationalise’ the vernacular architecture of the medina, combining ‘the “traditional” with the European’ and presenting a ‘new housing type that responded to the customs of the Muslim residents while giving them the amenities of modern habitation’.1 Critics, however, have argued that the modernist appropriation of vernacular aesthetic forms failed both to recognise and respect the deeper structures of kinship and sociality, which they originally reflected. What emerges clearly from the historical account of modernist architecture in Algeria is that the mass construction of social housing in Algeria was an attempt by the French regime to shore up and stabilise colonial order and that the appropriation of vernacular architectural forms largely served this same agenda, constituting a means both of pacifying the colonised people of Algeria and reinvigorating the declining power of the colonial authorities. Le Corbusier’s radical (and rejected) Plan Obus (1933) for the city of Algiers shows quite clearly that the deep structures of Western modernism remained largely unaffected by the incorporation of non-Western forms. What he proposed was a ‘modernist megastructure’ (Ackley, undated), dominated by a huge aerial freeway and structured both by the separation of residential quarters from zones of industry and commerce, and the strict 1 Çelik (1997), p. 134. 14 Re-appropriations: Architecture and Modernity in the Work of Kader Attia segregation of European and Muslim communities. There is nothing in this plan to suggest that Le Corbusier had engaged with the socio-spatial practices that structure the vernacular architectures whose forms he had plundered. Brian Ackley’s critique is corrosive: the Plan Obus represents nothing more than ‘an encounter with difference in the search for new forms – yet another Western drama played out with appropriated images of the other’; ‘a collision of the idealized dwelling, mythic feminine and romantic landscape offset by modern technology in the service of colonial needs’ (Ackley, undated). A similar dynamic can be seen in the official Neo-Moorish style adopted by the colonial regime in the early decades of the twentieth century, which Nadira Laggoune argues represented little more than the ‘construction of a glorified image of a metropolis that claimed to protect and to respect the identity of the indigenous’ (Laggoune 2010). The pastiche and appropriation of generic ‘Arab’ forms did little, in effect, to influence or alter the ways in which the dominant European forms of sociality, consumption, representation and mobility continued to structure urban planning and organisational policy. Far from producing new meanings or new values, they underscored the capacity of the colonial regime to plunder and attribute meaning to cultural forms as they saw fit, achieving little other than decorative or ornamental effect. Similarly, we must interrogate more critically the ostensible break with Corbusian tradition by the CIAM-Alger group (of which Simounet was a member) at the 9th Congrès International d’architecture moderne (Aix-en-Provence, 1953), when they proposed a design for mass social housing inspired by the Mahiéddine bidonville in Algiers. In fact, their presentation grille represented a fairly typical CIAM structure (and one in which the inhabitants of the bidonville had little or 15 Re-appropriations: Architecture and Modernity in the Work of Kader Attia no investment in terms of its design [see Richard Klein in Attia 2009b]), which overlaid the topography of the bidonville and suggested again that the Western view of architecture remained largely unaffected by its encounter with, or consumption of, vernacular architectural forms. Attia is keenly aware of the ways in which Western modernity consumed non-Western forms, while remaining unaffected by their meanings. For example, he describes how ‘le vivre ensemble’ that structures vernacular urbanism produced an adverse design effect in the Modernist architects who appropriated the forms to which it had given rise: Cette proximité est devenue, à cause du dédain qu’elle inspirait aux architectes et aux pouvoirs coloniaux de l’époque une ‘promiscuité’. Pourquoi la pensée occidentale du moment, qui se voulait moderne, et malgré des tentatives comme la cité Radieuse de Le Corbusier, qu’il avait coutume de comparer avec Beni Isguen, version verticale, n’a-t-elle pas su s’approprier ce type de détail évident, comme une nouvelle voie possible vers la vie communautaire moderne? (Attia & Boulbina 2009, p. 161) Attia’s Untitled (Ghardaïa) (2009) plays out the modernist appropriation of Algerian vernacular forms in dramatic form. On a table measuring 2m2, he makes a model in couscous of an Ibadite ksour, upon which Le Corbusier and Fernand Pouillon, whose photographic portraits he hangs on the gallery wall, hungrily gaze. Mirroring, perhaps, the decaying fabric of both the Casbah and the ksour, Attia’s model gradually collapses and crumbles into an amorphous pile, beneath the architects’ unchanging eyes. In the photographs Attia made of Ghardaïa, however, a rather different dynamic emerges. What he foregrounds are the ways in which its inhabitants are reclaiming its ancient architecture, making repairs to the urban fabric and adapting its functions to suit life in the twenty-first century. He writes: 16 Re-appropriations: Architecture and Modernity in the Work of Kader Attia [Ghardaïa] is today an amazing laboratory for ‘signs of cultural re-appropriation’. The aesthetics of its minimal and thousands years old [sic] architecture, made of lime and gypsum, is, for a short time, re-appropriated by its inhabitants to realize local contemporary street furniture, like public toilets. This act, on the opposite [sic] of importing Western contemporary street furniture, is, in its spatial and temporal context, the sign of a change. Is it the one of a post-modernity that escapes the Occident? An innovation […] that continues the thousand years old evolution of a vernacular architecture, by and for Ghardaïa’s inhabitants. (Attia 2009a) It could be argued that in the photograph of the cité Pouillon a similar process of transformative place-making can be observed. The satellite dishes and the multi-coloured laundry, which hangs from washing lines stretched from window to window and across the terrace roofs, obscure the blank façades, providing a kind of decoration and busyness that were anathema to modernist designers such as Le Corbusier and Adolf Loos. And yet there are no people to be seen in this image, only the anthropomorphic satellite dishes whose heads are all turned towards the same invisible fixed point in the sky. As Fiona Duffy suggests, the cité Pouillon is ‘a large collection of households simply existing side by side. The satellites result in a group of viewers who become detached from the place in which they live. While watching, they play a diminished part in their own community, whereas at the same time they are unable to form part of the communities of the global North that they see on screen’ (Duffy 2010, p. 18). Attia’s photograph attests to the deleterious effects upon local communities of the valorisation and passive consumption of Western cultural artefacts, brands and values. The cité Pouillon passes, unresistingly, from one form and era of modernity to another. In the images of Ghardaïa, however, we see that the inhabitants re-appropriate the vernacular architectures of 17 Re-appropriations: Architecture and Modernity in the Work of Kader Attia which they were dispossessed by the consuming modernist gaze. They use and adapt their cultural legacy, suggesting that far from being a frozen, historical artefact, a curio in the history of Western modernism to be conserved and quietly contemplated, for them Ghardaïa is a living object, to be adapted and manipulated. Their practices chime with the urban détournements advocated by Debord: le complexe architectural – que nous concevons comme la construction d'un milieu ambiant dynamique en liaison avec des styles de comportement – utilisera vraisemblablement le détournement des formes architecturales connues, et en tout cas tirera parti, plastiquement et émotionnellement, de toutes sortes d'objets détournés: des grues ou des échafaudages métalliques savamment disposés prenant avantageusement la relève d'une tradition sculpturale défunte. Ceci n'est choquant que pour les pires fanatiques du jardin à la française. (Debord 1956, p. 228) They constitute a means of resisting – through non- participation in its markets and logic – the cultural homohegemony of the globalised neoliberal economy: les enjeux de notre futur ne sont pas les progrès technologiques qui accompagnent l’idéologie du développement durable à la mode écolo, mais de retrouver notre liberté de pouvoir tirer des choses que nous produisons autre chose que ce pourquoi nous les concevons. (Attia & Luste Boulbina 2009, p. 165) Attia explains that in his work, ‘L’autre chose que je souhaite évoquer […] c’est en quoi la globalisation de l’économie et la disparition de tout caractère identitaire sont liés aujourd’hui’ [in Durand 2008, p. 167]). These practices of re-appropriation can therefore also be understood as a means of subjectivisation or décolonisation (which Seloua Luste Boulbina suggests are synonymous [in Attia 2009b]). They rupture the historical continuity of global (post-) modernism, recovering from the footnotes of the Western historical archive that which had been expropriated and using it as a means of developing and imagining futures that are not bound to the 18 Re-appropriations: Architecture and Modernity in the Work of Kader Attia prevailing neoliberal discourses of global solutions, Western charitable aid, ‘development’ and technological progress. Evidence of a similar ethic of re-appropriation can be seen in Attia’s much earlier work, Piste d’atterrissage (1997-1999), a photographic series, which depicts the transsexual Algerian prostitutes who work on the Boulevard Ney in Paris and who, according to Attia, inspired his reflections on architectural détournement: Dans cette globalité culturelle qui est la nôtre aujourd’hui, où on ne voit plus vraiment […] la différence entre une ville comme Barcelone et Paris, ces personnes exilées [de l’Algérie] à l’époque pour des raisons de survie […] ont espéré trouver en France, et particulièrement à Paris, cette idée qui a été pendant très longtemps [transmise] à travers cette hégémonie de la pensée française et particulièrement eurocentriste, l’idée de liberté et de droits de l’homme… Elles ont espéré retrouver cette liberté, mais en fait elles ont été totalement rejetées de cette communauté. Ce qui m’a vraiment intéressé dans ce travail, c’est de voir à quel point elles ont continué à développer, tout en vivant à Paris, les cultures de leurs pays d’origine, les cultures ancestrales. On reconnaît à travers les broderies et le culte… particulièrement les broderies et notamment certaines images des chandeliers enveloppés dans du velours et de la broderie, une très, très forte influence ottomane. (Attia 2009b) The karakou (traditional dresses) worn by the Algerian transsexuals, which are individually embroidered, by hand, in silk, gold and silver thread, set in train a complex series of meanings that cannot be reduced to a nationalistic or parochial return to essential (or folkloric) identity. A traditional feminine accoutrement, they are poached from the Algerian culture that marginalises them and brought into a new context as an act of affirmation of both identity and community. Furthermore, it could be said of course that transvestism and transsexualism in themselves constitute the re-appropriations of a body disciplined, produced and expropriated by dominant discourse. The clothes and bodies of 19 Re-appropriations: Architecture and Modernity in the Work of Kader Attia the transsexuals indicate that re-appropriation is a process and a form of re-working, rather than the appropriation of a bounded object or commodity. It is a way of accenting the universalising culture of globalisation, using strategies of suture, collage and repair. Attia’s work in Ghardaïa prompted him to pose the following questions: Does it mean that this history is shared by the two parts, but built in the shadow of Western thought’s hegemony? Or vice versa? It might be neither one nor the other: the influence that exists between two cultures is never one way, but always two ways. […] Instinct for the native production of a modernity – which goes through digesting what you learn from the other, then sublimating it – cannot exist and be read from a single geographical and cultural context, but rather from both. Nevertheless, the West- centred reading of Modernity’s History always remains on this side of Western borders, even when the Occident has been inspired by unknown ways of thinking. (Attia 2009a) Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie asserts that the ‘appropriation and domestication of a foreign visual language’ (Ogbechie 2008, p. 181), which was performed ‘without knowledge or understanding of its conceptual meanings’ (Ogbechie 2008, p. 179), was arrogated as a right only to Western artists. Similar appropriations of Western forms by African artists were, and continue to be, largely denigrated or ignored, instituting, as John C. Welchman has shown, ‘uneven flows of citation and taking […] between Western and non-Western cultures’ (Welchman 2001, p. 1), a (neo-) colonial asymmetry reproduced and sustained by dominant cultural historiography. Recent scholarship has attempted to redress this iniquity. Rachida Triki, for example, explores the Algerian artists who, following Algerian independence in 1962, continued to work in the historically European genre of painting (Triki 2007, p. 109). However, it is not so much the genre that is important, she argues, but ‘[la] nouvelle 20 Re-appropriations: Architecture and Modernity in the Work of Kader Attia sensibilité que se traduit le mode local de représentation’ (ibid.). The creative détournement of the genre by the use of vernacular craft and miniature techniques produced, she contends, ‘une autre visibilité’, ‘une autre forme de présence’ (ibid.). If ‘[t]he ideology of Modernism depended on this strict distinction between the European self that dominates and appropriates non-Western culture while dismissing the reality of non-Western interpretations of cultural practice’ (Ogbechie 2008, p. 169), then the practices of re-appropriation described by Triki and Attia bring together, or perhaps fold upon each other, the cultural spaces separated by modernity’s dividing lines. Holy Land, an installation made by Attia on a beach for the 1st Biennale of the Canary Islands in 2006, comprises dozens of large mirrors, made in the form of a pointed Islamic arch to resemble the traditional tombstones of North Africa. The work is a poignant elegy to the vast number of harragas who do not survive the Mediterranean crossing, and whose bodies are washed up almost daily, in the glare of media attention, on the shores of the islands of southern Europe. The mirrors, which denote the ephemeral traces of migrant bodies in European sands, reflect both the sea and each other, having the effect of fragmenting and recomposing the landscape, bending and folding the horizon, at once disjointing and conjoining the continents of Europe and Africa. If, as Rochers carrés and the effect of these mirrors suggest, the holy land of Europe multiplies and spatialises its borders, producing an abyssal, encompassing volume where there was once a line, it must also be said that the disorienting spatial complexity of the work also evokes the deeply ambivalent relationship between France and Algeria, their separation and propinquity, metaphorised by the metaxu of the Mediterranean, across 21 Re-appropriations: Architecture and Modernity in the Work of Kader Attia which are performed multiple and diffuse networks of crossings, returns and correspondences. If modernity is predicated on the setting out of rigid spatial geometries and one-way modalities of relation (Aimé Césaire observed the tendency of Europe to soliloquise, noting ‘elle parle à sens unique’ [cited in Attia and Luste Boulbina 2009, p. 159]), then the practices of re-appropriation, in which objects and ideas travel across cultures and are given new (yet always provisional) meanings in this act of translation and transposition, serve to produce more dialogical relations. In effect, as Steven Flusty has persuasively argued, ‘Plutocratic globality’s material emplacement, enactment and embodiment in transit is precisely what renders it vulnerable to a host of countervailing practices’ (Flusty 2004, p. 172). Attia’s anecdote regarding the use, for example, of industrial pink gingham to repair traditional Congolese raffia loincloths (Attia 2009a) is an example of how the products of globalised industry are recuperated and creatively re-used in non- programmed and unforeseeable ways by those who inhabit its margins. Kasbah, which Attia made in Tours in 2008-2009 and again at the Sydney Biennale in 2010, is an installation comprising locally recuperated materials (including corrugated iron sheets, rocks, tyres, wooden doors, road signs, satellite dishes, pallets and television aerials) -modernity, which are assembled on the gallery floor to resemble the rooftops of the shantytowns – themselves accented and site-specific responses to global urbanism – that proliferate in the cities and towns of the global South. Re- appropriated according to a logic of use, rather than property; brought into new contexts, constellated in novel ways and used in a manner that was not intended, the waste materials and objects in Kasbah, like the fridges used in other 22 Re-appropriations: Architecture and Modernity in the Work of Kader Attia installations, are given new meanings and value outside the neoliberal global and art economy from which they emerged. This idea is explored further in Attia’s untitled 2009 work (which he describes, in fact, not as a work but as ‘un geste’ [Attia & Luste Boulbina 2009, p. 166], shown in La Force de l’art at the Grand Palais in Paris and which comprised number of empty carrier bags placed, like sculptures, on the gallery floor. He explains: Comme les pigeons, [les sacs en plastique] prolifèrent, polluent et sont partout. Comme eux, ils représentent une dégénérescence de notre monde capitaliste post-utopique, et ironisent un peu plus sur la Modernité. Et en plus… il n’y a rien à faire: ils sont toujours là. (Attia & Luste Boulbina 2009, p. 165) This iconic and highly nomadic symbol of the waste of neoliberal economies reveals how objects and materials can be endlessly re-shaped and re-used, made into something and then rolled up again and put in one’s pocket for further and perhaps quite different use at a later time. As the context of this work suggests, what we have here, in this practice of re- appropriation and re-use, is the very act of art itself. At the heart of the carrier bags is a void, a hermeneutic openness that also characterises the practice and reception of art, distinguishing it from the ostensible and authoritative fullness of the architectural edifice (itself a metaphor, as I have argued in this paper, of the prevailing [post-] modern order). The architect Jeremy Till has argued that ‘The architectural image of stability disguises an inherent weakness in metaphysics, which in fact is built not on terra firma but on an abyss’ (Till 2009, p. 43). Attia makes a similar point, suggesting that ‘cette autorité a une vulnérabilité que l’art peut mettre en évidence’ (cited in Durand 2008, p. 171). This vulnerability or contingency of architecture, which Till attributes to the radical temporality that is occluded by 23 Re-appropriations: Architecture and Modernity in the Work of Kader Attia architecture’s claims to the absolute, is expressed by Attia as a literal and hermeneutic void in his works. Tawaf (2008) comprises hundreds of empty beer cans arranged in a dense circle around an empty square. The cans, which are all bent at an identical angle, resembling heads bowed in prayer, appear to move in an anti-clockwise direction around the void, evoking the pilgrims who make the journey to Mecca in order to complete the ritual of tawaf – the circumambulation of the ka’aba, the cube-shaped building that is the holiest site in Islam. The beer cans suggest that this work, at one level, is about the ways in which neglected and disaffected youth of Algeria and the French banlieues, their lives blighted by poverty, unemployment, drugs and alcohol, find structure and meaning in the rituals and dogma of religion. At a broader level, the work points the ways in which the fundamental void of our existence induces architectonic thought and the construction of apotropaic order. History of a Myth : The Small Dome of the Rock (2010), consists of a tiny sculpture made of a brass nut and a silver bolt, which is filmed in real time and projected in magnified dimensions on the gallery wall. As its name suggests, it evokes the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, which stands on a deeply contested holy site to which both Judaism and Islam lay claim. The stark incongruity between the tiny dimensions of the sculptural object and its aggrandised projection speaks to the ways in which an ideological carapace is constructed around the ultimately empty icon, but also of the fundamental contingency disclosed by the coevalness of the antinomous discourses which lay claim to it. In this sense, Attia shows how the architectural object can become a site of agonistic, dialogical practice. The installation format used by Attia stands as a counterpoint to the architectural edifice. It brings together in the same 24 Re-appropriations: Architecture and Modernity in the Work of Kader Attia space different media (for example, videos, photography and sculpture) and therefore different temporalities, requiring that spectators move between the works, which can never be seen together at any one time and which, furthermore, he also tends to re-constellate in new ways with each different exhibition. The heterogeneity of the works and objects displayed; the multi-sensorial experience of the sounds, smells and textures of the installation and the abyssal, interpretive space in which the spectator is literally required to move, all serve to fracture epistemological and ideological stability. The installation can be seen, then, as an anti-architectural gesture in that it foregrounds the negative spaces in between, where meanings are provisionally made and unmade by the embodied spectator for whom an Archimedean perspective of the whole is impossible. Attia’s black squares remind us of those described by Foucault that disrupted the classificatory, taxonomic grids used by the early natural historians, in which knowledge and classification, ‘[le] déroulement linéaire du langage’ (Foucault 1966, p. 148) failed. I would like to conclude by suggesting that in the installation, Attia finds a means of re-writing (post-) modernity in a manner that does not repeat it (a task which François Lyotard [1988] defined as crucial in our resistance to it). The re-appropriated spaces and objects of Attia’s installations do not lend themselves to cognition (the defining commodity of neoliberal cognitive capitalism) and contemplation. Instead, he rescues them ‘from a process of commodification, where they are enabled to perform again once more’ (Cocker 2010, p. 98). According to the logic of Aimé Césaire, this déchosification is comparable to a décolonisation [Césaire 2004 (1955), p. 23]). The installation escapes the linearity of language, constituting itself rather as a dialogical image (in the Benjaminian sense), 25 Re-appropriations: Architecture and Modernity in the Work of Kader Attia which as Tom Conley (1992, p. 42) explains, gives ‘something other to mean than what it is giving to see’. (Kader Attia frequently insists that in art, the rules of WYSIWYG [what you see is what you get] do not apply). Unlike the dead objects, closed signs, appropriated forms and commodities whose unilateral consumption structures and shores up the operations of (post-) modernity, Attia’s voids are the unruly ghosts that threaten the very foundations of prevailing order. 26 Re-appropriations: Architecture and Modernity in the Work of Kader Attia BIBLIOGRAPHY Ackley, Brian. Undated. Blocking the Casbah: Le Corbusier’s Algerian Fantasy. Bidoun: Art and Culture from the Middle East, no. 6. Envy [internet]. 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