Diasporic intimacy

Diasporic intimacy: strategies of finding a feeling to substitute for "home"; diasporic intimacy that is not opposed to uprootedness and defamiliarisation but contituted by it.

Diasporic intimacy does not promise an unmediated emotional fusion, but only a precarious affection - no less deep, while aware if its transience."

"New intimacies don't need to rely on a common origin. People come into intimate understanding of displacement/emplacement or a shared effective investment in the future of the a common dwelling place."(reference to be added shortly)

Distance vs. Proximity

Distance --> causes forms to appear stable;

Proximity --> reveals the elements of danger

There is a tension between "distance" and "proximity", which permits the viewer to make the leap from a perceptual experience to its applicability as a metaphor for cultural relations within a broader social framework.


Full text: BEHIND THE SCENES: An Interview with Mona Hatoum (downloadable from http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2003/mona_hatoum_interv.html)

Multiculturalism vs. Diaspora

There is a difference between coming to belong in a place and having the place belong to you. (reference to be added shortly)

• Coming to belong in a place --> easily done through forming social networks and routines;

vs:

• having the place belong to you

i.e. the distinction between a multicultural and a diasporic city.

Multiculturalism vs. diaspora:

• Multiculturalism: virtually programmed to miss the dynamism of cultural hybridisation in cities; or through cultural funding programs, it reinforces the culture (i.e. the ancestral origin);

• Diaspora (or diasporic): evokes dynamic characteristics rather than a fixed object such as a group defined by way of its common territorial origin. -->

"Diasporisation, therefore, suggests a process that is open-ended and transformative. This changing social field affects all city residents, not only those who identify as transmigrants or displaced. ... "...the diasporisation process is simply the ethnification of transnational connectiones, so that communication, social relations and economics become organised and even institutionalised across boundaries rather than immigrant groups becoming transformed into separate minorities. Diasporisation is simply the ethnification of the immigration prcess." (references to be added)

The self vs. the other

[T]he ineluctable experience of the other is the founding of selfhood... My ability to think, act, and resist [is] literally from and for the other.

Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces...

Dialogical artists's artistic identity

[Dialogical artist's] sense of artistic identity is sufficiently coherent to speak as well as to listen, but it remains contingent upon the insights to be derived from their interaction with others and with otherness. They define themselves as artists through their ability to catalyse understanding, to mediate exchange, and to sustain an ongoing process if empathetic identification and critical analysis...

Grant H. Kester, Conversation Pieces...

Imagining the other's position

We can never fully inhabit the other's subject position, but we can imagine it, and this imagination, this approximation, can radically alter our sense of who we are. --> It can become the basis for communication and understanding across differences of race, sexuality, ethnicity, ...

Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces...

Connected knowledge

"... A connected knowledge is grounded in our capacity to identfy with other people."

Thus, connected knowledge leads to redefining "self": "to both know and feel our connectedness with others."

Grant Kester, in Conversation Pieces...

Grant Kester quotes Bersani and Dutoit

If art is to "communicate" anything, it is the failure of communication itself, or perhaps the identity of the artist as the ibe best qualified to diagnose this failure...

From, Conversation Pieces... (Grant. H. Kester)

Grant Kester quotes Walter Benjamine

"... the experience of 'shock' becomes the catalytic agent for a 'heightened presence of mind'..."

Grant H. Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern art, p. 84