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FLIGHT INTO THE ABYSS.
A POLITICAL AND PSYCHOSOMATIC ANALYSIS
Paweł Leszkowicz
2024Poznań, Poland
The action was photographed and filmed in a rural space, in a field, near Brest, yet close to the Polish-Belarusian border. Brest is the city where Volha Maslouskaja and Raman Tratsiuk come from and where they founded the Bergamot Group in 1998. These basic biographical data are relevant here, which is why I am repeating them, as they are both Belarusian artists, although Raman Tratsiuk has been living in exile in Poland since 1999.
Action Flight, 2020
0,4 h, Zalessie, Belarus
The theme of the relationship between art, origin and national identity will be relevant to my interpretation. According to the artists themselves, the work was created in response to the violence of the security services loyal to President Lukashenko against protesters against his authoritarian regime. These protests, the largest in Belarus' history, began in August 2020, across the country, in response to the dictator's falsification of the presidential election results. During the pacification of the demonstrations, masked OMON officers and female officers in civilian clothes grabbed people from the crowd and violently carried them to police cars. They also recorded these arrests.
The Bergamot Group's performance recreates these dramatic historical events in a different space, outside the city, in the bosom of Belarusian nature. As part of the action, four people carry a fifth as other participants film with their phones. Gender does not matter, just as it did not during the arrests, when both men and women were taken away. Additionally, the artists gave the realization the title 'Flight', associating the act of being carried by others with flying.
However, we know that for those arrested in Belarus it was a flight to hell, where people are tortured and killed.
The question that needs to be delved into in order to reflect on this controversial performance is why has a radical act of violence and oppression been turned into a situation that can be associated with the summer entertainment of a group of young friends on a trip to the countryside? Such a reception of the film may also be reinforced by the presence of a dog, accompanying the carrying group.
The second edition of the action, which took place with the audience and Volha Maslouskaya during the Performensk festival at the Zair Azgur Museum in Minsk, on September 5, 2021. This version is presented in the artists' film from 2024. The flight took place in the spaces of the Azgur Museum, the most prominent Belarusian Soviet socialist realist sculptor, who created monuments to revolutionary leaders. The black-and-white film Flight (2024) was constructed in such a way that any associations with play disappear, and the act of carrying becomes a dramatic experience for the audience, just as it was for the people kidnapped by OMON.
Action Flight, 2021
0,24 h, Museum-Studio of Zaire Azgur, Minsk, Belarus
The entire experience has the character of a dark ritual; cell phone footage was chosen so that only the tortured faces of the participants and their convulsing bodies are visible. This traumatic effect is further amplified by deep, painful, labored breathing and a kind of mournful music. After walking around the courtyard, people are carried into the museum's main hall, where in the center stands a large white pedestal, which takes the form of an altar surrounded by white monumental figures of communist ideologists, leaders, and heroes by Azgur. In my imagination, they are being carried as sacrifices to these "gods" of Soviet totalitarianism, who have not disappeared at all, are not part of the past, but rule and murder again in the territories of the former Soviet empire. The ghosts of totalitarianism have been reborn.
This film vividly demonstrates how the geographical and political context gives this performance a completely different character and meaning. What in Poland, or anywhere west of Belarus's borders, might be perceived as entertainment or a group exercise, in the country of its origins, has the character of a dangerous, subversive act. Therefore, this performance could not be performed on Belarusian streets, for the safety of the participants, as it would be perceived as openly politically opposed. That's why the first Belarusian edition took place in the wilderness near the border forest, and the second in a safe museum space. However, this safety has now been lost.
The Zair Azgur Museum was the last space for free contemporary art in Belarus, which is why the Flight could take place there in 2021. However, as of February 1, 2023, its courageous director, Oksana Bogdanova, no longer works there. Like her, the remaining creative and academic staff, such as Vladimir Parfenka and Nikolai Pogranovsky, were forced to resign by the authorities. The last independent institutional space for art in Minsk has disappeared. The Ministry of Culture and the Minsk City Executive Committee have taken total control of the institution and are merging it with the Minsk History Museum. Oksana Bogdanova served as director of the Azgur Museum for 19 years. Under her leadership, the institution became not only a memorial to the famous Belarusian Soviet sculptor, but also a modern center for contemporary art. Exhibitions, concerts, and performance art festivals, both local and international, were held there. The former home and studio, now a museum, of the official Soviet sculptor was one of the few oases of independent art. However, Lukashenko's ministry deemed these artists destructive, and such art was defined as destructive. The Museum will therefore house the lonely yet eternally reigning fathers of communism.
Similarly provocative is the third edition of the action in which I participated on 28.06.2022 in Poznań, when it was presented, as part of the Malta festival "World in Embrace" in the form of a Flash mob. This time, the audience who arrived at the event beforehand was instructed on the following plan for the event. The willing participants had to divide themselves into groups, then within each group, exchanging roles, one person was to be carried by the other four, running on the green areas next to the Warta River in Poznań. The bearers and the carried took turns. The artists also asked that everyone document the running and carrying with their mobile phones and then send them the videos. Based on this documentation of the participants, another film work by the Bergamot Group was created.
Flashmob Flight 2022
1,30 h, Malta Festiwal, The bank of the Warta river, Poznań, Poland
In the Poznań Flight, the artists themselves also participated, joining various groups, The Action thus had the character of a collective action, where the division between audience and creators was blurred and everyone followed one instruction. My personal experience of the event is surprisingly revealing. Firstly, I experienced how hard work it is to carry another human being, even in several people and even lightly, especially if you have to move fast. A certain kind of frenzy was part of the performance. Secondly, it was a kind of group action, a game in which you can lose yourself and establish a completely different relationship with a stranger with whom/whom you suddenly have such close tactile (physical) contact. Moreover, the whole thing suddenly turned into a kind of race between groups, so a new kind of community, but also exercise, was created. Thirdly, the question of trust, towards others, the belief that one will not suddenly be let go, and the fear of falling, became extremely important. In such a position of suspension one is almost completely incapacitated and totally dependent. This fear brought me back to the Belarusian streets!
For there, the people caught and carried to the cars by their arms and legs were aware that this was being done to them by their absolute enemies who wanted to harm them, that this flight of terror would lead to an even worse situation of incapacitation and violence, to prisons where they would be subjected to the physical suffering that authoritarian terror always reaches for in order to maintain its power at all costs. So, by participating in the Bergamot Group's performance, in fear of falling, we get at least a fraction of the psycho-corporeal sensation that is the situation of enslavement and fear, on a basic physical level.
But how is it possible for artists to offer us this experience through a kind of group activity shared with them that can be seen as entertainment? Participation in Flight, however, is not as simple as it seems and involves for many a certain overstepping of boundaries. For one has to allow the close and trusting touch of a stranger, a state of one's own inertia and a certain surrender to others, as if in a situation of weightlessness. This is why the metaphor of flight is such an excellent symbolic device, on many levels.
Bergamot Group, seem to be referring here to a certain elementary psychotherapeutic strategy, particularly in group therapy, not for the first time appearing in performance art. There is no decisive proof of the effectiveness of this technique, which is brilliantly described by the English word 'trust fall', which consists of us voluntarily falling backwards knowing that there are people behind us to catch us. On a similar principle, we allow ourselves to be carried, trusting that we will not fall. This is a technique ostensibly to build trust with others, also to create community and solidarity. However, this cannot apply to the situation of people being kidnapped into police cars by brutal serving Lukashenko OMON officers?!
However, when we performatively recreate such an experience of incapacitation, we perform a minimal physical act of empathy, our identification with the victims of the regime becomes physically close, and this can only happen within the conventions of exercise or play or art, for no one would voluntarily submit to the oppressors and put themselves in such a real situation. Although of course this is not true - the Belarusian oppositionists, and there were hundreds of thousands of them, took such a risk, they knew they could be arrested and what awaited them in prisons. They performed the trust fall without security, so symbolically Lot gives them such security, with our hands.
However, if this interpretation goes too far, it is probably closer to understanding the second psychotherapeutic idea that performance evokes and provokes. The reflection on the obsessive repetition of trauma, originates already from Sigmund Freud, in whose conception a traumatic experience from the past is obsessively reproduced in the vortex of the unconscious and the death drive. In the therapy of post-traumatic stress disorder suffering, the trauma must somehow escape to a conscious level, even become embodied, in order for the healing process to begin. Let us try to transfer these psychoanalytic concepts to the experience of society as a whole; to make psychotherapy a utopian policy leading to democracy.
Arguably, for that part of Belarusian society which is thirsty for freedom and ready to fight for it, the defeat of the 2020-2021 protests must be an unimaginably traumatic experience, brutally pressing into the darkness of depression. I am not thinking here only of the people who experienced humiliation, torture, beatings and imprisonment after the arrests, because they are the direct victims of the violence, but also of those who were observers, accomplices, co-witnesses of OMON brutality, who completely lost their illusions and realised the horror of the system in which they are prisoners. A horror so great that it annihilated, once again dampened the joy of the revolution and the hope of freedom.
In this perspective, then, is the Bergamot Group's Flight, merely a symbol, or perhaps something more, a performative psycho-physical therapy, a recreation of trauma in the sphere of safety provided by art, an escape from the cities enslaved by the uniformed towards nature, a transformation of nightmare into play in order to psychologically survive it.
Performance as psychotherapy
Let us remember that Lot was first performed in Belarus, at a time when violent demonstrations and arrests were ongoing. At that time, several artists collaborating with Maslouska and Tratsyuk, first re-enacted the scenes of violence that were taking place in the streets. Turning acts of brutalisation into acts of caring, helping, but also of an oppositional alternative community at a time when it had failed in the political realm.
The action of 'Flight' is so deeply immersed in the Belarusian context that it is difficult to look at the action and the film in any other way. And yet one can - to see only the physical movement action. Without an explanatory text and an awareness of where the artists come from, the name -Bergamot Group- sounds neutral, the performance can become another product of contemporary art as capitalist entertainment.
The work therefore also poses the problematic of two levels of art; that which is 'national', identified with a certain country and its situation, and that which is timeless and universal, extracted from a specific crisis context. Very often, after all, art from Western countries is shown this way, as art about universal global or existential phenomena, without even posing the problem of the origin of the creators. Meanwhile, art from our part of Europe can often find its way into global circulation only if it becomes national, i.e. an illustration of a regional crisis. Lot also problematises this dimension of the Western-centric exhibition complex, where a renewed interest in art generally from Eastern Europe blossomed when perestroika finally turned into total 'catastroika'.
Flashmob Flight 2022
1,20 h, Malta Festiwal, Collegiate Square, Poznań, Poland
The Bergamot group is separated by a murderous border, which also puts their work and everything they do in a completely different perspective now.
This border is also present in the first Lot action, as it took place in Belarus, but near the Polish border, so one can read this run as a flight towards freedom, i.e. beyond the borders of a totalitarian state. As a metaphor for emigration, a common experience for thousands of young people and oppositionists from Belarus. Only that this border has now also changed its face, is a zone of darkness, one of the centres of a global nightmare of refugees from various parts of the world. The responsibility for this lies with the Polish government and our uniformed forces. Significantly, our participation in the Bergamot performance also puts us in the role of these people, the hidden torturers behind the uniform, who drag the victims along. The fundamental question is, after all, who are they?
This flight, which we experience from different positions, is thus a flight into the abyss into which Eastern Europe is plunging once again.
And therein lies the power of performance art, it allows us to think again and differently, personally, about the great Eastern European narratives of terror and escape in which we are all trapped. My reflections are only the beginning. Let us be ready to fly, for we never know when it will become necessary.
© 2024. Paweł Leszkowicz, A FLIGHT INTO ABYSS. A POLITICAL AND PSYCHOSOMATIC ANALYSIS