<\/p>\n
The woman who stamps my passport is called Mercy and she has no fixed abode. Born in Nigeria, she travelled via Libya to Italy, where she lives in the city of Padua in a state of legal limbo.<\/p>\n
The passport she stamps is issued not by the United Kingdom but by the Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK), a Slovenian art collective exhibiting at the 2017 Venice Biennale.<\/p>\n
The purpose of the installation is to explore the meaning of states and statelessness, in part by reversing the experiences of citizen and migrant.<\/p>\n
The 57th International Art Exhibition in Venice features 85 national pavilions, from Albania to Zimbabwe, with themes as diverse as the University of Disaster and the Theatre of Glowing Darkness. This year, faced with a rising tide of nationalism, many artists are keen to stress universal identities: there is a Pavilion of Humanity, and a Tunisian installation that issues visitors with a \u2018freesa\u2019 (a free visa), endorsing \u201cfreedom of movement without the need for arbitrary state-based sanction\u201d.<\/p>\n
The NSK proclaimed their \u2018state\u2019 in 1992, the year after Slovenia declared its independence, as new nations gained sovereignty at the end of the Cold War. \u201cArt is fanaticism that demands diplomacy,\u201d states the inset of my new passport, which declares the owner to be \u201ca participant in the first global state\u201d. NSK regards itself as a \u201cState in Time\u201d, without nation or territory: it \u201cdenies the principle of national borders, and it advocates the Transnational Law\u201d.<\/p>\n
Over the last century, passports have come to represent a fundamental aspect of our identity. When IS proclaimed its caliphate, they instructed fighters to tear up their passports, cutting ties with their \u2018colonial\u2019 inheritance and committing themselves to a new entity. No less ideological is the utopian World Passport conceived in 1954 by peace activist Garry Davis. Issued by a \u201cworld government of world citizens\u201d, it is said to be owned by 10,000 people, but not recognised diplomatically: in 2016, hip-hop artist Mos Def was detained in South Africa for trying to use the document to leave the country.<\/p>\n
Authenticity is an essential component of a passport, to the point that it is taken as proof of identity. In 2004, NSK\u2019s headquarters in Ljubljana was inundated by thousands of passport applications from Nigerians based in the southern city of Ibadan. Some correspondents wrote that they had heard NSK was a beautiful country and wished to travel there.<\/p>\n
State authority<\/p>\n
Visitors to NSK\u2019s pavilion are handed a copy of its newspaper, the front page of which prints an \u201cApology for Modernity\u201d. \u201cIt is cruel to refuse shelter to refugees\u201d, says the editorial. \u201cBut it is much more cruel to make people refugees\u201d. NSK regards \u201cthe perpetrators of their suffering and misery\u201d to be \u201cthe liberal Western world\u201d, the citizens of which \u201care all complicit in the crimes our elected and unelected leaders have committed. We have become stupid and ugly.\u201d<\/p>\n
This opinion is not rare in the art world (86% of the consulted NSK members endorsed the statement), unlike the group\u2019s dedication to a statist model, which is unfashionable among artists, who tend to be wary of overweening state power. \u201cThe state is the basic condition for individuals\u2019 moral and political life, for their freedom\u201d, declares the provocative Apology, which says it is the duty of artists to \u201creaffirm the majesty of the state both in time and space\u201d.<\/p>\n
This stance appeals to NSK\u2019s most famous ambassador, the charismatic and controversial philosopher Slavoj \u017di\u017eek. Shortly before he delivers a lecture to mark the opening of their pavilion, he tells me that \u201cthe uniqueness of NSK is this idea of the \u2018stateless state\u2019. It is not, as some leftists think, just a parody. They are not mocking the state, and this assumption reveals a typical liberal fear: what if some people take it seriously and are seduced? But they are to be taken seriously!\u201d<\/p>\n
A Leninist by inclination, \u017di\u017eek has written that the NSK collective should be committed to \u201ca state art in the service of a still non-existent country. It must abandon the celebration of islands of privacy, seemingly insulated from the machinery of authority, and must voluntarily become a small cog in this machinery\u201d. When I suggest that state art is at best banal, at worst coercive, he replies that \u201cNSK are state artists only of their own state!\u201d<\/p>\n
It could be said that \u017di\u017eek underestimates the arbitrary tyranny of bureaucracy \u2013 as testified by artists throughout the 20th Century. The curators of NSK\u2019s pavilion argue that its state is \u201cfree from the weight of the crimes of older states. It can breathe the air of statehood without choking\u201d. Yet the burden of states lies not only in their collective past, but in their essential bureaucratic structure, which tends to ever greater accumulation of information and influence over citizens.<\/p>\n
When I challenge \u017di\u017eek on this point, he recounts his experience of speaking to refugees travelling through Europe. \u201cPolice wanted to register them, and they said \u2018No, we are not cattle \u2013 we are humans\u2019. But they wanted to go to Norway \u2013 the most organised state you can imagine! Because that\u2019s how the welfare state functions\u201d.<\/p>\n
Having it both ways?<\/p>\n
The refugee experience is not uniform (some flee from tyrannous states, others from lawless statelessness) but \u017di\u017eek\u2019s statement reveals a tension at the heart of NSK\u2019s work. Their passport claims it is \u201ca document of a subversive nature\u201d but it replicates the same bureaucratic processes it purports to critique. The applicant is charged with listing personal particulars (such as blood type) that are stored in a state register.<\/p>\n
I suggest to \u017di\u017eek that more accountable and direct forms of democracy have been devised using local models \u2013 after all, we are speaking in Venice, once an independent republican city state, resistant to the authority of larger political and religious entities. But \u017di\u017eek argues that city democracy is nearly always run by an urban elite (much like Venice\u2019s Biennale). He points out that many of the problems we face today \u2013 from the environment to the migration crisis \u2013 require supra-national structures such as the EU.<\/p>\n
\u017di\u017eek\u2019s scepticism about local democracy derives in part from his understanding of the ethnic tensions that exploded in the Balkans in the 1990s. In the NSK newspaper, he writes that \u201cthere is nothing liberating about the breaking of state authority… utopian energy is no longer directed towards a stateless community, but towards a state without a nation, a state which would no longer be founded on an ethnic community and its territory\u201d. In this vein, \u017di\u017eek argues that \u201cit is today\u2019s anti-immigrant populists who are the true threat to the European Enlightenment\u201d. He tells me that our commitment to refugee rights should not be dependent on heart-rending stories of dispossession, but on civic principles: \u201cyou shouldn\u2019t like them because they have a nice story to tell \u2013 no, you like them irrespective of their story, because human rights are totally abstract rights. We will solve this crisis through geopolitics, not by asking \u2018how open will our heart be?\u2019\u201d.<\/p>\n
Within an hour of the opening of NSK\u2019s pavilion, there is a lengthy queue to view the main installation. It revolves around a daring and disorientating room slanted at an angle of 45 degrees. The gradation is acute enough to force the visitor to struggle to maintain balance, which is best achieved by adopting the pose of a surfer, or leaning on the display panels. The artist Ahmet \u00d6g\u00fct confirms that the effect is to ensure that visitors are intensely focused \u2013 this is not an exhibition for casual perusal. It may not be easy to throw off our inherited identities, but we can at least bring a degree of attention to the issues that confront us, and seek to navigate a solution.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The woman who stamps my passport is called Mercy and she has no fixed abode. Born in Nigeria, she travelled via Libya to Italy, where she lives in the city of Padua in a state of legal limbo. The passport she stamps is issued not by the United Kingdom but by the Neue Slowenische Kunst […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-392882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-business"],"yoast_head":"\n