Apolonija Sustersic is currently a PhD student at University of Lund, Malmö Art Academy, Sweden; she has her own art / architecture studio practice in Amsterdam, the Netherlnads and in Ljubljana, Slovenia. As a former professor at Royal University College of Fine Arts she established a Department of Permanent Transformation; a mobile unit; a parasite that could be plugged into any institution that performs an educational function.
She participated in a number of internationally published and exhibited projects and exhibitions within and beyond the international contemporary art institutions around the word, like Moderna Museet Stockholm, Berlin Bienale, Luxembourg City of Culture, Moderna Galerija Ljubljana, Marian Goodman, Paris, De Appel, Amsterdam, Generali Foundation, Vienna, Art Museum, University of Memphis, USA, Tirana Biennale 3, Tirana, Muhka, Antwerp, Edinburgh International Festival, Edinburgh among others.
Apolonija Sustersic’s practice is imbedded within interdisciplinary discourse and usually includes collaborations with other professionals such as architects, urban planners, curators, sociologists etc. Together with architect and researcher, Meike Schalk she formed an operative unit which occasionally produces research, projects, actions and discussions.Taking care of public space
by Meike Schalk & Apolonija Sustersic
By the example of the public art project Garden Service, in this text we will explore possibilities and obstacles of practices of agency. The project was commissioned by the art institution The Common Guild in Edinburgh, for the exhibition Jardins Publics, which took place in relationship to the Edinburgh International Festival, in summer 2007. It was based on the participation of a community, and the communication – including solving conflicts as well as the building of partnerships – between different actors, from institutions, associations, to individual local residents.
For Garden Service we built a temporary garden on a public lot located within a courtyard, together with inhabitants of a council house, and members of a housing association. Point of departure was our research into a given urban situation in the centre of Edinburgh. The collecting of information and a critical analysis of the particular spatial situation, its social, economical and political dynamics, and practices of everyday life were constitutive parts of our project. How, what, and from whom information was provided formed the base of a participation process, which resulted not only in an analytical criticism, but produced before all a proposal for change. We suggest that practices of agency start beyond an intellectual anticipation. They are rooted in actions. In these actions the artist, the planner, the activist, and everyone else engaged are involved and connected professionally as well as they act as citizens.
We worked with Garden Service for approximately half a year, where we returned frequently to Edinburgh for collecting information, and making contacts. Very early we decided to address the peculiar situation of mixed public and private areas in the closes adjacent to the Royal Mile. The Royal Mile is one of Edinburgh’s greatest tourist destinations, leading from the castle to the newly built parliament by Enric Miralles and Benedetta Tagliabue. The closes are accessible through small entrances from the main road. This spatial situation creates a sort of backstage, where actors prepare themselves for their main act on the front stage/ street. Spaces such as Chessels Court, which became our project location, are secluded from but also connected to the Royal Mile. They are frequented not only by residents but also by locals and tourists, taking a rest or having lunch off the main track. This situation of multiple uses by different groups, insiders as well as outsiders, gives rise to various conflicts around issues of left garbage and noise disturbance.
Within Chessels Court, some buildings belong to a housing association where inhabitants own their flats, and other buildings contain council flats held by tenants. Some years ago the housing association bought a public part of Chessels Court, an alley adjacent to one of their buildings, fenced it in, and transformed it into a garden, thus withdrawing it from the public sphere. The tenants of the council flats do not have the means of buying public parts of the court; however, it was a resident of a council house who, nevertheless, had started, very shyly and illegally, with gardening on a public spot, when we decided to work with Chessels Court. In terms of gardening, he received advice from a lady of the housing association, who had been involved in the making of the first garden, which belongs now to the housing association. Despite existing class differences between the various groups in Chessels Court, which would become very obvious during later discussions, here was already an established partnership across the two housing groups, and the strong desire to take things into own hands, and to create a difference.
With Garden Service we moved into an already ongoing activity. We invited the neighbourhood to a public hearing in the nearby community hall to see if there were more residents who wanted to engage in the transformation of the public spaces within their courts. We learned about conflicts between different groups such as their opposing views on design and safety issues. Together with the residents we opened up a discussion of private care of public spaces. Addressing the issue of the legal-illegal situation of gardening on public land to the authorities we asked for a permission to build a garden in Chessels Court. After an initial refusal, and several negotiations we achieved only the permission for a temporary garden for the time of the exhibition. During the following planning and installation phase, we understood our role as intermediaries in a process of self-organization. Our own agenda was to support and study the transformation of the place, and the overwriting of its identity in respect to the different layers of social and legal relations, which we will discuss here in terms of participation, agonistic plurality, the appropriation of space, and performance and performativity, using terms and concepts of Patrick Geddes, Chantal Mouffe, Henri Lefebvre, and Judith Butler.
Spatial negotiations
Garden Service was inspired by the work of the biologist and town planner Patrick Geddes (1854 – 1932), a former resident of the Royal Mile. Geddes planned a network of seventy-five gardens, of which several got installed in various closes along the Royal Mile around the turn of the last century. Geddes was a firm advocate of the value of gardens as social places, and gardening as time spent towards common good.
He was also an anarchist, and befriended with the anarcho-geographers Peter Kropotkin and Elisée Reclus whose ideas of a society based on the natural principles of evolution he shared. Instead of progress through competition, as in the views of social darwinists, and liberal economists’ at the time, the world of nature and that of society would develop only through cooperation. Although putting forward town planning as a subject for all citizens in cooperation based on radical democratic principles, and participation, Geddes rejected the system of a representative democracy as he feared that with different political parties, society would fall apart in various rivaling groups. What is strangely absent from Geddes’ societal concept is the political, meaning the possibility of a ‘dimension of antagonism that is inherent of human relations’ speaking in terms of the political theorist Chantal Mouffe. Mouffe distinguishes the ‘political’ from ‘politics’, which ‘indicates the ensemble of practices, discourses and institutions which seek to establish a certain order and organize human coexistence in conditions that are always potentially conflictual because they are affected by the dimension of “the political”’.
Negating conflict, Geddes’ politics take place in form of the unifying practices of gardening, and in theory – because he never really had the chance to test it – town planning. Gardening and town planning express, and are conducted in direct actions of entire neighbourhoods, and in common aesthetic experiences of nature and art, delivered through walks, exhibitions, and the staging of masks or performances. Although Geddes’ conceptions of a good society are based on collective cultural experiences, processes through which a society connects emotionally, and represents itself that largely happen in public space, there is no thought of, or space for (class) struggle, conflict, or antagonism, as one would expect. There are radical thoughts in Geddes’ societal constructions such as his emphasis on common practices, and collective agency, which could be described as a form of empowered, responsible and engaged, even passionate form of citizenship. Problematic is that he never developed them beyond a mere idealistic narrative, and chose to neglect the tensions that might emerge within processes of collective agency in the public sphere. For the anarchist Geddes’ public space is conflict free, there are no legal borders, rules or regulations to obey, space is only shaped and determined by natural boundaries and everyday culture. We took up this undeveloped thread. The project Garden Service reveals possibilities and problems with self generated activities. On the one hand, it shows openings, and on the other it also points to the limitations, when a body of legal regulations originally built in order to protect public space, is challenged.
In The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre points to the paradoxical situation that in order to protect public space, and the individuals in public space, a space is dominated by rules and regulations. A situation created for preventing violation is always immanently built upon a power that restricts the use of that space. Against this abstraction of space, Lefebvre puts the activity that shapes social spaces, the appropriation of spaces. In practice this means that there is always a spatial conflict between domination and appropriation, as in the case of illegal, or guerrilla gardening. On the one hand, the state and its laws can never fully control public space from appropriation, on the other hand this space is always threatened of experiencing repressions. But important for Lefebvre is that social space, meaning appropriated space poses the possibility of a counter-culture or counter-space as it can provide an alternative to an existing situation. This is not so far from Geddes’ suggestions for collective agency, although Geddes sees space and place not produced by political struggle or the opposition of public/ private as Lefebvre does, but as formed and determined by natural features, which educe cultural conventions naturally. Against any such essentialism, Lefebvre sees conflicts under marxist terms, as a quality and not as a problem. Society bears a utopian potential that can only be described in terms of contradictions between the possible and the impossible.
For the project Garden Service, we asked the authorities for the permission to build a garden on a piece of public land that was already under transformation. The so-called ‘observation platform’, once an institutional green of veronica bushes that had been covered with concrete in the 1980s, ought to become re-enacted as a garden now. At first our request was refused with the remark that the platform might suffer structural problems through the construction of a garden. After proving that there had been a garden once, and several debates, we received a temporary permission for the time of the exhibition Jardins Publics.
From a constructivist perspective, law always points towards measurements that limit the complexity of life. This enables decisions that are orientated towards general rules, under a totalising discourse. Thus, on the one hand law fails to take into account the complexity of social realities – inclusively the right to difference and heterogeneity. However this right is not ignored, but also made available for courts (institutions), as well as citizens, although there exists a power difference between legal and individual statements. Judith Butler, in Excitable Speech criticises the productive potential of state law as repressive. She focuses hereby less on the normative order, on the existence of laws themselves, as Lefebvre did, but on the implementation or the interpretation of laws. Extending from her suggestion of performative repetition as a means of establishing norms as well as of transforming them, law is not simply given but negotiable. A constructivist perspective, like Butler’s, must also recognize the possibilities to create another discourse of law. A discourse that can liberate, shift meanings, and break through existing orders, and which is open ended. There is a chance that a conflict can become a forum for change, when norms are not only repetitiously and performatively re-enacted and re-experienced, but also overwritten, and changed.
Together with the residents of Chessels Court we chose to insert some simple urban elements designed to make spaces available to be used, not only for the neighbourhood living in the court without a private garden or outdoor space, but also for other locals, as well as strangers. By installing stairs to a green level and providing a set of picnic blankets we supported activities that were already present. In a workshop under the professional leadership of a gardener, in participation with residents of both houses, owners and tenants of Chessels Court, we installed a temporary garden with eatable plants in movable containers. The platform became equipped with custom-made large tables and benches. The garden was opened with the re-enactment of a garden party according to the instructions of an elderly lady who used to organize these kinds of fêtes every summer with support by most of the residents, until she felt too old for taking the responsibility. Connected to the garden after its opening, was a series of Sunday tea talks in the garden, advertised on a tree, with garden lovers and experts.
Art practice as a practice of agency
Garden Service has been a participatory art project, which consisted in the process of negotiation with participants and authorities, and not in the garden as an object itself. What does this mean for a practice of agency? According to the art historian and critic Grant H. Kester, socially engaged and critical art practices during the 1960s and 1970s “often focused on an internal critique of the work of art, [which they expanded] into a set of positive practices directed towards the world beyond the gallery walls, linking new forms of intersubjective experience with social or political activism.” Since then, there have been various other practices that employ concepts seeking to grasp an art production in which an art piece in the sense of a physical object was not necessarily central, replaced by an activity that invited the participation of an imaginary community. Attempts to frame socially engaged art practices have been Suzy Gablik’s ‘connective aesthetics’, Susan Lacy’s ‘new genre public art’, Nicolas Bourriaud’s ‘relational aesthetics’, Grant Kester’s ‘dialogical art’, and the so-called ‘context art’, and ‘community based art’. Art projects that were based on social process rather than on aesthetic objects, and that required the participation of an audience challenged the frame of traditional exhibitions. With it came a wave of institutional critique.
What do we understand under all these terms? The common denominator for these more recent tendencies can be seen in a care for the participants’ and places’ specific socio-political identities. Several contemporary art practices have developed a critical examination of spatial problematics. They have been conceptualizing their projects mainly based on various forms of action research and public participation to question the usual passivity, non-activity or strictly regulated behaviour within planning processes. Their collaborative, consultative approach has deep and complex roots in the history of community art and cultural activism. The practices are mostly interdisciplinary. They call in for collaboration or they are already composed from professionals with various knowledge and experiences, practitioners and theoreticians. They would often be addressed as spatial practices, which describe both a critical analysis of spatial relations, and various forms of interventionist strategies that are being devised by professionals and non-professionals. They address questions of community and act as an agency.
As already mentioned ‘participation’ has become a key word and a strategy for operation for different spatial practices. We could describe many modes of operation, and variations of social interaction related to the notion of participation
from involving the public into a discussion via traditional exhibitions, or other forms of publishing to inviting them directly into collaborative, creative processes, which provide a dialog. In Garden Service we addressed participation already within the process of research. The dialogical encounter with the residents living in Chessels Court and others related to our project created a specific situation where knowledge and information was exchanged through non-pedagogical, meaning non-hierarchical processes, mainly through conversation, meetings, and one to one interviews.
Further on in the process a form of ‘direct participation’ such as in workshops would involve residents into a production, where there was space for individual creativity and community dialog. Such form of participation gave everyone involved a feeling of power, to change something that seemed to be difficult, or even impossible to change, and to manifest that change. The relationship described as participation could create a condition for a constructive democratic development in city planning, as in, what Chantal Mouffe describes as, ‘agonistic plurality’. Mouffe means hereby a form of struggle, which does not take on the form of ‘antagonism’ as in a struggle between enemies but of ‘agonism’, as in a struggle between adversaries. In this case, every party involved, activist group and institution, has to move up to the same power level of speech. The agonistic model recognizes passions, and probably also desires, although not in Mouffe’s vocabulary, as a mobilizing force towards democratic ends by creating collective forms of identification around democratic objectives.
The form of an art exhibition because of its temporality seems to us especially useful as testside for community projects, which when successful have usually been taken over and continued by an organization, a group, or an individual. The project Garden Service provided a platform for different, sometimes even oppositional thinking where a dialog, among different participatory groups, city authorities, and media, was possible. Conflicts occurred especially around the issue of building or not building a gate around the new garden to keep out homeless people. Also the staging of a fête was met with resistance by a few residents who where afraid of too many strangers invading “their” court. In the end the fête took place with an overwhelming support.
The garden is a public expression of private care and shared benefit – a public green space created and looked after by private garden lovers. The example raises questions about the provision and the use of communal spaces in the very centre of the city. We believe the city of Edinburgh and especially its historic centre is very well suited for the tourists invading the city – looking for attractions and entertainment – but it offers little to residents living in the historic centre, keeping the city alive and vibrant at all times of the year.
The temporary garden that was supposed to disappear after the time of the exhibition has developed. It has entered a new phase. The residents of Chessels Court have further pursued the project and a permanent permission was granted. They have removed the pots and most of the concrete slabs, and inserted the plants into proper flowerbeds. The garden we installed all together presents an old/ new prototype, and is a reminder of Geddes’ values of gardening. With its shared facilities it offers places to stay; it serves as a meeting place for insiders and outsiders, which became animated by specific programs during the time of the exhibition and the festival. Today, Chessels Court is part of the Greenyonder Tours programme exploring ‘Hidden Gardens of the Royal Mile’.
Literature
Susanne Baer ‘Inexcitable Speech. Zum Rechtsverständnis postmoderner feministischer Positionen in Judith Butler’s “Excitable Speech”’, in Kritische Differenzen – geteilte Perspektiven. Zum Verhältnis von Feminismus und postmoderne ed. by Antje Hornscheidt, Gabriele Jähnert, Annette Schlichter, (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1998), pp. 229-250).
Claire Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, in October 110, Fall 2004, pp. 51-79.
Peter Blundell Jones, Doina Petrescu, Jeremy Till (eds.), Architecture and Participation (Place: Spon Press, 2005).
Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon-Quetigny: les presses du réel, 2004), translated by Simon Pleasance, Fronza Woods, Mathieu Copeland from Esthétique Rélationnelle, 1996.
Judith Butler, Excitable Speech. A Politics of the Performative (London: Routledge, 1997).
Grant H. Kester, Conversation Pieces. Community + Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford/ Cambridge : Blackwell, 1991), translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith from La production de l’espace, 1974.
Sofia Leonard, ‘Patrick Geddes and the network of gardens in the Old Town of Edinburgh’, conversations under a tree at Chessels Court for Jardins Publics, Edinburgh International Festival (2007). <http://www.patrickgeddestrust.co.uk/articlespapers.htm> [accessed 12 January 2009].
Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object, (New York: Praeger, 1973).
Lucy Lippard, ‘Trojan Horses: Activist Art and Power’ in Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (New York: The Museum of Contemporary Art The New / David R, Godine, Publishers, 1984).
Chantal Mouffe, ‘Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism’, in Political Science Series 72, edited by Christine Neuhold and Gertrud Hafner (Vienna: Institute for Advanced Studies, 2000), pp. 1-17.
Chantal Mouffe, ‘Politics and Passions. The stakes of democracy’ in CDS Perspectives (London: Centre for the Studies of Democracy, 2002), pp. 1-16.
Nya relation-aliteter – ett seminarium om kruxen med relationell och interaktiv konst, program description for a seminar 25 February 2006, IASPIS Stockholm.
