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Very Very Important Salvation

2023; The MIT Press; Volume: 45; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/pajj_a_00673

1537-9477

Johannes Birringer,

Geographies of human-animal interactions

Very Very Important Fish, a video by Irwan Ahmett and Tita Salinas, Territories of Waste: On the Return of the Repressed, exhibition, Museum Tinguely, Basel, Switzerland, September 14, 2022–January 8, 2023; The Ghosts Are Returning, a performance by Group50:50, Schaubühne Lindenfels, euro-scene Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany, November 9–10, 2022.Staying alive, for every species, requires livable collaborations.—Anna Lowenhaupt TsingA spiritual journey may require proper preparation and a particular mindset, for example, a belief in transcendence or reincarnation. Or in the first place, a belief in a path for survival, a method of illumination, thus a performative challenge facing the pathfinder. What if there is no more spiritual recovery, with all the maladies lingering on in the killing fields and contaminated, damaged environments? Some time ago, when I was preparing a theatre piece for a Houston gallery, I remember stopping on the road to take a closer look at a creature that had been run over. I never would have done so, but a photographer friend had alerted me to a series of portraits he had made of roadkill. We decided to use enlarged projections of these images in the performance. It did occur to me that unlike in previous ages, death is largely taboo in Western culture, and dead humans, just as smashed or condemned carcasses of animals, are largely hidden, removed from view.The memento mori of human funerary sculpture, such as skulls or scythes, were exhortations to the living, to live and die well, whereas the medieval danse macabre played a more energetic role, generating mania at times (especially during the Plague) and gradually associating such choreomania with decadent and morbid, rather than religious and spiritual, motifs. On a political level, the choreomania epidemics of the Low Countries, France, and the Rhineland confused church authorities, challenging the limits of legitimate dance yet inspiring modern filmmakers like Eisenstein, who captured the exuberant calaveras of the Day of the Dead processions for his ¡Que viva México!.A danse macabre, owed to the Black Death, did not erupt during our current pandemic, although I would have deemed it a pertinent expression or ritual effort for self-transcendence to probe the realm of the unknown, among our pressing and traumatizing uncertainties caused by Covid-19, climate catastrophe, war, and the energy crisis. Western and Eastern societies practiced lockdown, and in the current mood of cancel culture a newly pervasive sense of disappropriation has taken hold. Stolen icons and artifacts travel home and change hands. Artists apologize for the inappropriate, so do ministers of health. Theatres have to issue warnings that the content of their performances might offend.If by the sixteenth century the religious tenor of the dance of death movement had begun to erode, and the secularization of courtly ballet and theatre in the Western world progressed, we now observe the Last Generation activists gluing their hands to the streets or the frames of van Gogh, Monet, and Klimt paintings. At the same time we watch—if we are fortunate—some vulnerable unorthodox metaphysical live art—such as the works shown at the 2023 Out-FRONT! Fest, or Daina Ashbee's J'ai pleuré avec les chiens (Time, Creation, Destruction) at Gibney Dance in New York—that transports us into realms of reincarnation and salvage, replete with twisted Baconesque bodies and contorted torsos. These can also be considered activist transports, spiritual collaborations on the edge, with uncertain metamorphic outcomes.Here I evoke two brief salvational scenes to question pathways where obstacles arise and obtain symbolic significance. Perhaps a lack of spirituality in a nihilist age contributes to the obstacles, and I claim no intimate knowledge of the sacred, nor of ritual healing. But my theme is salvage as a form of reconstitution or resurrection, in the context of ecological and cultural devastation, as I feel quite disconsolate by the despair experienced when the region where I live was hit by storms and disastrous floods in July 2021. Houses were swept away, whole villages drowned in water, roads and train tracks seemed to have vanished. I could not believe my eyes, and still wonder why the idea of remedy or reconstruction seemed futile then, an empty gesture and frantic language distracting from intractable bleak reality.In the exhibition Territories of Waste at the Museum Tinguely in Basel, the Indonesian artists Irwan Ahmett and Tita Salinas displayed their video Very Very Important Fish as a daring intervention into damaging pollution and waste disposal, the littering in public space here shown in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta. This also appears as a bleak reality: with more than ten million inhabitants, Jakarta is the biggest city in South-East Asia and for years has been struggling with deficits in public infrastructure and people's lack of access to clean drinking water. Many in the population are dependent on buying water in plastic bottles, or drawing it from makeshift wells. But in the video a young man discovers a tiny tilapia fish in a polystyrene container in a river full of rubbish. He scoops up the tiny creature to rescue it, holding it in his cupped hands embarking on a mad journey on the back of a moped across the heavy traffic of Jakarta. Every time they stop, he asks the driver to give the fish in his hands a little water from a plastic bottle, like a priest preparing the Eucharist. This salvage operation is also an urban intervention. The two men on the moped are accompanied by a horn-honking retinue of motorcyclists waving yellow flags to stop the traffic and clear their way. Waving yellow flags is a traditional practice for funeral processions: the flags symbolize death in Jakarta. The origin, Irwan Ahmet tells us, lies in the yellow quarantine flags employed under Dutch colonial rule. The Covid pandemic shifts the ecological crisis addressed in the video to a poignant question: there will be more waste and more death. The funeral convoy becomes a ritual spectacle for the inevitable, yet it is also an urban intervention into the traffic. It stops traffic, elevating a concern for the very small living creature to a heightened level of spiritual abstraction.My second example is drawn from a performance at the euro-scene Festival 2022 in Leipzig, a co-production by the artist collective Group50:50 from the Republic of Congo, Switzerland, and Germany. Directed by Christiana Tabaro and Michael Disanka from Kinshasa and the Swiss Elia Rediger and Eva-Maria Bertschy, their “post-documentary music theatre” piece The Ghosts Are Returning takes as its starting point a fieldtrip to the Congo Basin. A Swiss doctor once dug up the skeletons of seven “pygmies” there in 1952 and brought them to Geneva. His research must now be considered racist and part of colonialist anthropology; the skeletons are still at the University of Geneva, though unlike other African skeletons and skulls, preserved by the thousands in European museum archives, the names, dates and causes of death as well as the approximate origin of the seven skeletons are known. The doctor's estate wishes the bones to be returned, a process that was initiated but faced legal obstacles.This disconcerting story from the past, and the endangered situation of the nomadic Mbuti living today in the Congo Basin, prompted the collective to search for the descendants in the forests of the Congo and present their performance not only as a commemoration of the extracted remains of the dead, but also as an anthem for their musical negotiations between European and African traditions. As a multi-media music theatre work addressing spiritual and material restitution, The Ghosts Are Returning is extraordinary in its kinetic and sonic force, a vibrant dynamics between dancers, narrators, singers, and musicians who act out their versatile handling of multiple genres in front of a triptych of video projections. In those we see images from the Mbuti land and hear the indigenous chorus and musicians interacting with performers on stage. The astonishing voice of Rediger, with viola playing of Ruth Kemna, Huguette Tolinga on percussions, Merveil Mukadi on bass, Kojack Kossakamvwe on guitar, Franck Moka on electronic instruments, and singer/narrator Tabaro transport the audience into a ritualized shamanic dimension, a kind of séance channeling the atonement and gratification of the spirits of the dead and salvation of the forests and their indigenous inhabitants. Fascinating dramaturgical questions emerge from this intercourse with the revenants and are explored in the narration: for example, whether the descendants actually wanted to recover the skeletons, whether traumatic wounds can be healed, and how, with restitution of masks, skulls and skeletons, the spirits that colonizers removed and locked away during the colonial era are coming back.During this powerful performance of a jointly found, sung, and acted story, I associate an intergenerational cross-cultural dialogue (only modestly reminiscent of work by theatre director Milo Rau or Rimini Protokoll's real-life stories performed by non-professional actors) with a sense of long-durational longing for an overcoming of racialized violence, an attunement and deep listening to the need for a peaceful honoring of nature and co-existence with others and other species. The ensemble performance of The Ghosts Are Returning is both electrifying and perplexing, in its animated mixing of funeral laments from both classical and traditional Congolese music with polyphonic songs and rhythms of the Mbuti who had celebrated their dead with complex choirs long before polyphonic requiems were composed in Europe.1 The anthem that I felt was born is a scenographic musical death ceremony for skeleton spirits, and the Mbuti choir from afar vividly interfaces in a video call-and-response with the musician-performers on stage. Digital technology, as streaming transmission and remediation, thus also enters into a dialogue with ritual practices and ritual sources. Thus the multi-media musical theatre piece provides uncanny hope for something—like the tiny fish in Jakarta's fresh river—to be saved, something to be healed and carried over, and for the disposability of bare life to be recognized before it is too late. Group50:50’s performance, with its more than fifty participants in the production, premiered in Germany and Switzerland before “returning” to Congo in 2023. Works like Very Very Important Fish and The Ghosts Are Returning are our contemporary happenings, possessed, raw and yet highly refined in their resilient fungibility.