BERGAMOT GROUP


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PUBLIC RITUALS.  ART / VIDEOS FROM POLAND


Rainer Fuchs

2003


Museum of Modern Art MUMOK, Vienna, Autria
...Bergamot (Volha Maslouskaya and Raman Tratsiuk) use some of their performances for body focused actions that extend through to physically violent exchanges to attack each other, thereby acting out the mechanisms of power and control mat latently pervade our day-to-day lives. Their particular works are conceived as aspects of a larger complex of works and share with it the title Organic Life. The term "organic life" can therefore be applied to both the organic connection between ostensibly disparate aspects of real life, such as the private sphere and public sphere, as well as to the thus emergent meaning and role of the physical body. 

Bergamots aggressively provocative behavior usually addresses subtle and subliminal mechanisms. Being against apologists for an impassive "we", who disguise their hunger for power with a feigned need for harmony in order to be more effective, Bergamot resort to blatant public displays of conflict to make the efficiency of this veiled power visible and attackable. This is exemplified in a performance in which the artists slapped each other publicly while eating in a well-known, state-subsidized milk bar. The performance that was staged as an interpersonal conflict in public-not recognizable for the others as an art performance - through the inclusion and provocation of a real public, aimed at showing the interpenetration of individual  and collective, private and public power, and violence. When displayed to the eyes of the public, violence which usually takes place in seclusion and in private, normally tolerated as inevitable - as long as it remains concealed and suppressed-provoked immense indignation on being openly displayed. Involuntarily, the protesting restaurant clientele and the threatening waiter became the constabulary of a power that felt observed and put on the spot by this eruption of visible aggression. The attempt to use all means to make this visible violence vanish from sight also became recognizable as a rescue operation for suppression, and thus as the actual threat.


Action Organic Life 2000

Pod Arkadami milk bar, Poznań, Poland
The fact and the extent to which the private is also political and the fact that power is not exerted by the state apparatus and institutions alone but also by micro levels of society, was already postulated  by Foucault in his analysis of power: "Power relations run between every point of a social body, between a man and a woman, in a family ... and they are not just simple projections of a great and supreme power over individuals; they are, rather, the movable and concrete ground in which power has taken root, they are the conditions of its prospect of functioning. ... So that the state can function and for the way it functions there must be very specific power relations between man and woman, between adult and child, that have their own configuration and follow their relative autonomies." 

Although this questions the linear causality of power from top downward as a simplification, the relations of the different milieus of power remain unquestioned. The very display of private conflict also refers to its links to institutional and state power. Foucault found that in making the effects of this power unbearable in the everyday, lay the means for obstructing the state's apparatus of control.

Bergamot`s mise en scene conflict between man and woman and their visual depictions 
of the interconnection between private and public affairs allows for extensive interpretations within the Foucauldian analysis of power: through the violence done to each other and in the alternating exchange of blows, each of the two adversaries proves to be both victim and culprit. Each reflex of power is therefore also one of resistance. This, too, shows a turn away from extremely contradictory and schematized images of power and powerlessness or those of culprit and victim. Instead, an insight into the dialectics of power enters which also includes the productive aspects and effects of power: "One must cease from describing  the effects of power negatively. ... In reality, power is productive; and it produces genuine things. It produces realms of objects and rituals of truth: the individual and his knowledge are the result of this production.

In yet another performance, this time for an art audience in Mińsk in 1999 (repeated in 2012 at MANIFESTA 9, Hasselt, Belgium) , Maslouskaya and Tratsiuk hindered each other from entering and leaving a room. In the doorway, at the threshold between indoor and outdoor space, they carried out a struggle for territory in a kind of deadlock. They acted out a struggle of genders in which each attacks the other but at the same time robs him or herself of all agency. But this struggle could also be seen as an endless duel or as a call for constant resistance against violence and the attempt to appropriate. In this case, doing violent harm to each other also means resisting the violence from the other and risking continuous conflict rather than resigning passively. In this work, Bergamot make it explicitly clear how much the establishment of power also has to do with drawing limits and that these are therefore precisely the limits that it is necessary to exceed again and again.



Performance Organic Life 2012

MANIFESTA 9, Hasselt, Belgium

Hotel De Immigrantes - Cosmopolitan Stranger.
©  2003. Rainer Fuchs. PUBLIC RITUALS. ART / VIDEO FROM POLAND. Museum of Modern Art MUMOK, Vienna, Austria