Dreamers
In her artistic practice, Maja Hodošček regularly collaborates with high-school students, aiming to use micro interventions to infiltrate the barely permeable tissue of educational institutions. Proceeding from a perception of schools as one of the institutions defining the dominant knowledge, the artist primarily addresses the students since they are the ones expected to embrace this knowledge unconditionally. She is interested in the students as thinking subjects, which is why she moderates only the initial content and the framework captured by the camera, while the students are in charge of the process itself and the specific reactions. Through the students’ active participation and use of video, the artist seeks to increase the dynamism of the field of education, which is generally perceived as a rigid system defined by a multitude of rules.
The exhibition Dreamers presents the works that further develop the artist’s attempts to discover new ways of articulating the ideas and meaning arising from the dominant language.
The video What is Community? (2016) is a continuation of the work Dreaming Society initiated at the exhibition We Need a Title at Škuc Gallery.[1] The work consisted of a series of workshops in which the participants defined their own reflexions on predetermined concepts such as community, democracy, but also dreams.
The question “What is community?” forms the core of one of the visual experiments whose purpose was to reconsider the meaning of this rarely questioned concept. It was important for the artist to address that question to the members of a generation whose political voice is not taken seriously, while at the same time current political tendencies are shaping their future. For the purposes of the experiment, Hodošček presented several photographic documents which show the pioneer induction ceremony, the meeting of political representatives of the EU, media photos of refugees, and the OHO group in the village of Šempas where they had founded a commune. Despite being ideologically very different, these photographs function as a subtext for considering the idea of community, and the participants are asked to describe how they perceive the content of the exhibited images. Ultimately, their answers take the form of four drawings, and the process of drawing is recorded on camera. Even though all participants responded more or less equally to the content of the photographs, their understanding of community was vastly different. It is precisely this heterogeneity of understanding of a seemingly monolithic concept that interests Hodošček.
This is why the video What is Community? presents the perception and imagination of community in a heterogeneous manner.
Pointing to the fragility of this imaginary construct, the artist actualizes the issue of who is actually responsible for rendering its dominant definition.
The philosopher and educator Michael Apple also discusses the fragile foundations of community: “Everybody should participate in determining what community is. It needs to be constantly rebuilt.”[2] The reason for re-examining this construct is that its members are constantly culturally changing, which is why it is rarely that everyone participates; a homogenous community can never include everyone. That is why talking about everyone means negating the dominant culture that superficially presents itself as the culture to which everybody, regardless of their life patterns, must adapt. For today only the culture imposed by the majority holds any real power – the symbolic and the institutional one. It is indicative that only culture can be imposed institutionally, and, as Michael Apple claims, the school is one of those institutions that reproduce and deepen the inequalities resulting from the position of power and ability to access resources, which is why he sees it as a space where it is possible to achieve togetherness.[3]
The video Rushing to my dance class, can’t talk (2016) was inspired by a real event in which the school truly became a litmus test for inclusiveness – a recent attempt to accommodate refugees in the dormitory in Kranj.[4] The dormitory director’s suggestion to accommodate a group of Syrian minors was rejected by both parents and school employees, followed by a number of demonstrations.
From the work’s title, Rushing to my dance class, can’t talk, we can infer a failure of the usual verbal form of communication. In the video, the artist explores the means of communicating that which we do not understand through collaboration with young breakdancers from Celje, asking them to respond to the song Refugee to rap by the Syrian band Refugees of Rap. The translation of the lyrics is unavailable and the song becomes a rhythm that uses the form of the dominant hip-hop subculture even though it speaks in a different language. The dancers follow the rhythm and respond to it with movement, which is why translation is not a key element of understanding. Despite being influenced by the dominant subculture, neither Slovenian breakers nor Syrian rappers are reduced, that is, simplified in order to be understood. The French thinker Éduard Glissant wonders “how can one reconcile the hard line inherent in any politics and the questioning essential to any relation? Only by understanding that it is impossible to reduce anyone, no matter who, to a truth he would not have generated on hid own. That is, within the opacity of his time and place.”[5]
The opacity Glissant talks about can be used for imagining community based on knowledge and meaning produced communally, by everyone, respecting their heterogeneity as well as the right to produce their own truth. After all, regardless of whether there is understanding among members of specific cultures, the school as an institution participates in changing the world, and its ideological production of knowledge is never without consequences.
Irena Borić
[1] Maja Hodošček’s solo exhibition, Škuc Gallery, Ljubljana, 10 December 2015 – 15 January 2016.
[2] Košak, Klemen (2016), “Michael W. Apple. Interview with the philosopher and educator.” In: Mladina 23. Ljubljana., p. 30.[3] Ibid.
[4] Košir, Izak.(2016), “Šest otrok preveč” (“Six Kids Too Many”). Mladina. Source: http://www.mladina.si/172723/sest-otrok-prevec/, 14 August 2016.
[5] Glissant, Éduard (2005), Poetics of Relation. The University of Michigan Press: USA, p. 194.
http://www.hodoscek.com/
Exhibition supported by: City of Zagreb, Ministry of Culture of Republic of Croatia, City of Maribor
Exhibition is opened till the 24th of September.
