Tense Present: Repurposing War Infrastructure
In Danis Tanović’s Oscar-winning film No Man’s Land (2001) there is a scene set in 1994 in the middle of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) war, featuring two Bosnian soldiers in a trench. Stuck on the frontline in close proximity to Bosnian Serbs, the two soldiers are quietly passing the time; one keeping a lookout, and the other reading a newspaper. All of a sudden, the soldier reading the paper exasperatedly exclaims: ‘Oh dear’, to which the other asks ‘what is it?’. Not lifting his head from the paper, the first soldier says, ‘You should see the shit that is going down in Rwanda!’ Laced with dark humor, the scene captures one of many ethical paradoxes from the war: the capacity to empathize with the suffering of others while dealing with your own. The soldiers’ sincere concern for Rwandans caught in a genocidal war in 1994 is paradoxical because he is reacting in disconnect with his own circumstances of (literally) living on the frontline of a genocidal war in BiH.
This scene resonated with events in October 2019 as the Vučjak migrant camp near Bihać came into the spotlight. Operating at over maximum capacity under appalling conditions, the camp was under threat of getting shot down. BiH once again found itself at the centre of a humanitarian crisis, only this time not as subject to a genocidal war, but as a country unable to accommodate large numbers of migrants moving across its borders on-route to the EU. Images of detention camps, violent pushbacks by the Croatian border police, and forced displacement of people raised the ugly specter of the war from two-and-a-half decades earlier. People of BiH were again challenged to empathize with the plight of ’others’ while dealing with their own dire circumstances, including being subjected to war-like conditions. Only this time, it was not a war for ethnically cleansed territories, but for maintaining the militarised borders of Europe.
The events in BiH present a powerful context within which to consider the way in which artists featured in the exhibition Tense Present repurpose military knowledge about space, bodies and border control, enabling displaced civilians to breach militarized state sovereignty and circumvent unjust and inhumane migration policies. In the age of endless ‘planetary civil war’, mass migration and forced indefinite detention, borders have become instruments of war: militarized infrastructure used to delay, detain and control people.1 Tense Present;includes works that create an educational material based on lived experience and designed to protect life against military destruction. Collaborative project Un-War2 documents war destruction by demilitarizing it: archiving how civilians caught in the Sarajevo siege by Bosnian Serb forces (1992-1996) collectively repurposed urban spaces ruined by military destruction into functioning spaces of survival. Un-War functions as ‘a didactic tool for anti-militarist urbanism’, creating the means to reconceptualise the passivity of civilians caught in conflict.3 Mladen Miljanović’s Didactic Wall is a ‘subversive educational installation’ that repurposes draconian EU migration laws to produce a manual for displaced people with information on how to navigate, avoid detection and seek shelter while travelling to EU via BiH.4 For thousands of people stuck in BiH camps, the manual becomes an educational tool of shared military knowledge.
Tense Present also includes works that intervene into the militarised border by creating a short-circuit in the infrastructures designed to control life. Zoran Todorović’s video work Integration documents the artist collecting urine from a refugee centre in Belgrade, Serbia and distilling it to make beer based on a Belgian recipe intended for export to ‘first-world’ countries. The video features footage of Todorović consuming the beer with the audience as part of a lecture performance in London. The work is a scathing critique of European border management by juxtaposing the mobility of the ‘processed’ migrant body (body waste literally processed into craft beer) against the limited mobility of the lived body. Brewing the guilty conscience of Europe, Todorović processes and rebrands the bodily waste of refugees to create craft beer that can move across borders to be consumed by western art loving liberals.
By drawing attention to the way in which civilian infrastructure is being used for military purposes, Tense Present alerts us to the way in which the very understanding of the notion of ‘civilian’ is changing. Recent decades have been marked by the pervasive use of military technology and ideology to control and manage movement across borders. This includes a shift in public discourse which criminalizes refugees and migrants – forcing distinctions between ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ – under the auspice of threats to state security. The more-or-less overt racism and islamophobia underpinning these distinctions is hidden behind the ideology of micro-policing; our collective need to ‘be aware’ and ‘learn’ about the possible threats.
The Militarised Border
The works in Tense Present repurpose military infrastructure to enable movement: in Un-War the collateral damage of destroyed urban infrastructure and architecture becomes the means to enable survival of civilians caught in war, and in The Didactic Wall military manuals become the means to safely cross borders and avoid detection. In creating sources of information for displaced peoples, these artists are effectively creating informal educational infrastructure.5
Militarization of the border refers to the transformation of borders from sites of law enforcement and policing activities designed to intercept people who violate immigration laws to sites for militarized security activities focused on preventing violent threats from entering the state’s territory.6 On the one hand, this includes the deployment of military troops (rather than civilian border patrols) along borders, the utilization of military ideology and terminology in management and protection of border sovereignty. On the other hand, this also includes the increased use of military technology in policing of the border, such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV’s or drones), surveillance systems, and military hardware. Forensic Architecture’s The Left-To-Die Boat repurposes the knowledge gathered through NATO surveillance of the coast of Libya into evidence of responsibility for the crime of non-assistance in May 2011. The work demonstrates how borders have become key parts of the militarization of infrastructure, where knowledge about the border leads to intentional non-action with deadly consequences.
551.35 – Geometry of time by Lana Čmajčanin engages with the temporality of the militarised border. The work is a large-scale lightbox featuring 35 maps which defined the borders of BiH during the last 551 years: since the incorporation of the Kingdom of Bosnia into the Ottoman Empire (1463), through its annexation to the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, incorporation of its territory into the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, to its final deconstruction as a result of the Dayton Agreement (1996). Čmajčanin creates a portrait of BiH as a war-state-in-time, where the end result registers the absence of state: the fading away of BiH due to conflict and re-carving of borders in line with larger geopolitical interests. Čmajčanin approaches war as the infrastructure for understanding and narrating the historical experience of BiH, in reference to the fact that for over two decades, BiH has been seen as a readymade post-conflict society plagued by rampant nationalism, political nepotism and corruption, social decay, and mass migration out of the country. Čmajčanin’s work refers to the way in which this infrastructure is reproduced through educational structures: how maps are used as means of learning and instruction, of indoctrinating division through learning.
Learning through Art
AA number of works in Tense Present operate through what can be described as an ‘educative form'7; art as form of sharing and teaching of survival skills. This is particularly evident in the collective project Un-War, as well as works by Miljanović and Čmajčanin. Each of these has an educative aspect, through relaying information or dealing with education as a system of normalization of borders. But importantly, learning here operates through a critical performance that dislocates the authoritative position of the artist as the educator and the knowledge that is being transferred.
The traditional model of teaching mirrors the colonial and authoritarian mindset, where the student remains in the position of the colonized receiving the knowledge. The teacher is part of history and works for its progress, while the student remains excluded from that temporality or perpetually belated in relation to it.8 However, even though the starting point for these works is the intention to share information, these artists strip away the aura of teacher authority. These works exist because the artists learned from experience of people before them and pass this knowledge on. Through this openness and self-critical relation to the process of teaching through art, the didactic premise of the works is transformed into an external object for the audience – in the form of a large map or monumental marble panels – enabling a critical dialogue about the relationship of art and knowledge production.
Another important factor is the method for transferring of knowledge. In the case of Miljanović’s Didactic Wall, the didacticism is based on an act of subversive misunderstanding of the administrative procedure and military ideology.9 Miljanović creates the work by taking literally the dedication in a book gifted to him by his superior officer at the completion of his military service. Reproduced in the exhibition as wall text, the dedication was included in a book gifted to Miljanović by his commanding officer, instructing him to ‘successfully apply’ his military knowledge in peace and in ‘eventual war’. Rather than treating the dedication as an empty ceremonial gesture that accompanies institutional rites of passage – such as graduations or completions of military service – Miljanović takes the command seriously and follows it through to its conclusion. This is an act of over-identification, where the official language is taken more seriously than it takes itself, causing a short-circuit in the ideological apparatus.
Tense Present captures the geo-political paradoxes of the present by overlaying the infrastructures of Europe according to the different national and international bodies that define it: the nation-states, the Council of Europe, NATO, the Schengen Zone, the transportation corridors. The works in Tense Present intentionally echo the militaristic language that permeates the public discourse on cross-border exchanges to recall the conquest, control and production of knowledge about space as a way of controlling and regulating movement. Yet, this is offset against non-hierarchical and non-linear forms of collectively shared knowledge and experiences. This gesture stands in opposition to the increased reduction of availability of information, especially to vulnerable and displaced peoples. Rather than approach migrants and refugees as passive and helpless subjects, Tense Present empowers them by drawing on their experience and amplifying it. This emphasis on the lived experience juxtaposes locality against the globalised strategic militarized knowledge about the domination of that territory. Living in an age of data mining and micro-surveillance, there is a sense in which these works refer to forms of knowledge outside of the digital tracking and satellite surveillance. Thus, Tense Present pits lived experience against visible and invisible structures and the hierarchies that police access to the EU. In these works, the opposition between stasis and movement is shown to be a historical and geopolitical construct, yet one whose direction and rhythms of movement have very real consequences in people’s lives. Despite being subject to larger forces (often beyond their control), we learn that people use those forces to propel their lives in unexpected directions.
1 On planetary civil war see, Hito Steyerl Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, Verso, London, 2017. On border as an administrative tool of delay, see Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labour, Duke, Durham, 2013.
2 Un-War Un-war is a collaborative work with contributions from architects and researchers Arminal Pilav, Ana Dana Beroš, Rafaela Dražić, Miodrag Gladović, Matija Kralj and Mauro Sirotnjak.
3Sonja Leboš ‘Un-learn, de-grow, un-war: Armina Pilav: Un-war Space, Greta Gallery, Zagreb’ Život Umjetnosti 104, 2019, pp. 182-190, 189.
4 Irfan Hošić ‘The Didactic Wall’, Gradska Galerija Bihać 2019.
5 Infrastructure should be understood not only in terms of logistical systems and structures but also as visible and invisible processes which manage the flow of global production (and destruction) and condition our everyday reality. See, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello The New Spirit of Capitalism, Translated by Gregory Elliott, Verso, London, 2007.
6 Reece Jones and Corey Johnson ‘Border militarisation and the re-articulation of sovereignty’ Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Vol 41, No 2, 2016, pp. 187-200.
7 Sven Spieker “Unoriginal Pedagogies: ‘Didactic’ Art as Edification (Robert Morris, Walter Benjamin, Ilya Kabakov). In: R. Niccolosi and T. Zimmermann (eds.), Ethos und Pathos. Mediale Wirkungsästhetik im 20. Jahrhundert in Ost und West Munich: Böhlau Verlag, 2017, pp. 413-423.
8 Ibid.
9 Slavoj Žižek originally deploys the term overidentification to describe the political provocations of Slovenian industrial band Laibach (affiliated with NSK), which adopted the stylistic and aesthetic expression of fascism within Yugoslav socialism. See Slavoj Žižek, ‘Why are Laibach and NSK not Fascists?’, reproduced in Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s, ed. Laura Hoptman and Tomas Pospiszyl (The Museum of Modern Art, 2002), 285–8, 287.