>> Dec 2013, Letter of withdrawal
Open Notes on our Withdrawal from the 2013 HK-SZ Bi-City Biennial of Urbanism & Architecture (UABB) [chinese version here]
This letter is hardly a boycott against the Hong Kong Biennial, as our singular action lacks the faith of a collective gesture (in the sense that a boycott implies a greater sense of solidarity), but perhaps it is exactly a feeling of ineptitude towards mobilisation that requires such an open statement. These notes serve therefore moreso as an exploration of a couple of nodes in the making of a decision, a fermata.
A fermata is the musical symbol of an indefinitely sustained ending, and it was also the title of a performative symposium project proposed to the UABB, the metaphor meant to find a rhythm for addressing a cluster of issues surrounding collaborative artist initiatives, and more specifically, those pertinent to the diverse group of participants we intended to gather from HomeShop (Beijing), the Institut für Raumexperimente (Berlin) and WooferTen (Hong Kong). Each of these spaces have or will in the near future, for various reasons, discontinue in their current forms, and for us, these endings are the beginning point for a reflection on the unstable nature of educational and artistic alternatives within the larger system of commodified and/or more traditional modes of artistic production.
Whatever suggestion of awareness stems from this was in this case unfortunately countered by the naïveté of having entered a long-distance discussion with UABB with an insufficient knowledge of the controversies surrounding the Biennial site in East Kowloon, managed by the government-run Energizing Kowloon East Office (EKEO). While we initially tried to find out more information regarding the ongoing urban developments, these concerns irresponsibly fell to the background the more we became invested in developing our ideas and negotiating details with invited participants and the UABB team. And here, even after hearing one of the curators chime the warning bell of a phrase like “doing it for exposure”, is where we have fallen too easily again into the systemic trap affecting art labourers everywhere. Because as artists, the fact of being engaged with and actually liking what we do somehow becomes a token traded in for fair working relations (e.g., getting paid). Granted, the UABB was clear from the beginning about their limited position within the larger machine of knowledge production. But even if we leave aside the fact that we have been invited to act as unpaid professionals in a large-scale event supported by public funds, we continue with the reciprocation of having no finalised agreement as to the site location of our project nor the financing, only two weeks before installation was set to begin (three weeks before the opening). What this undermines is any faith in a reliable working relationship with the bureaucratic organisation we would be dependent upon to realise and represent our work, and it also undermines, therefore, any possibility for creating our project in a respectable and timely manner with integrity towards the ideas and people involved.
Without the resources of some of our more local friends who will continue to participate in their own manner, we are not close enough, cost-effective enough (a great deal of our budget would have had to be spent on airfare and lodging), nor readymade enough to work around these obstacles. The “exposure” we are offered would thus be our implication in the usual creative industries strategy for top-down gentrification, whereby the UABB serves as a bedazzled playing card in the ten-year masterplan for turning Kowloon East into Hong Kong’s second Central Business District. And it is this aspect of the famed “Hong Kong Value” which prioritises not one, but two CBDs, over the current public space and low-rent industrial studio spaces occupied by many young artists and musicians.
This is the glamour of the international biennial circuit, Hong Kong style. From the perspective of HomeShop in Beijing, it’s ironically a similar path of development that factors into the very endings that this project originally set out to explore. And while we are aware that our non-participation may do little to change the planned course of privatised public space and accelerated market value in the area, we hope that this minor act of doing it for “exposure” can generate a productive discourse about and awareness of the implications of (in)dependent practitioners involved in large-scale events that turn out more often than not to consist simply of “land decoration” and up-marketisation.
We hope that a loud and resonant fermata can continue under more favourable circumstances elsewhere. Thank you to everyone who has been involved so far.
Humbly yours,
Elaine W. Ho and Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga
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For more information regarding recent protests of EKEO and the plan to revitalise East Kowloon, see:
http://www.inmediahk.net/8akt http://www.inmediahk.net/node/1018957 http://www.inmediahk.net/node/1015360 http://www.vjmedia.com.hk/articles/2013/10/30/53266 http://www.ekeo.gov.hk