2030: War Zone Amsterdam

‘There is no audience, there are only participants.’

‘I can’t tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that art has often judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past has suffered, so that it has never been forgotten.

‘I know too that the powerful fear art, whatever its form, when it does this, and that amongst the people such art sometimes runs like a rumour and a legend because it makes sense of what life’s brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us, for it is inseparable from a justice at last. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts and honour.’

It was May of 2002 when I received a phone call while on vacation in France: Pim Fortuyn, the populist politician and Holland’s most famous ‘camp’ gay, had just been killed, nine days before he was expected to win the parliamentary elections. In a leading article in Le Monde a few days later, a journalist wrote of a furious crowd marching to parliament in The Hague, suggesting that the Netherlands was on the brink of civil war. What a joke, I thought at the time. Granted, the first political murder since 1672 had turned the country upside down, but civil war in our chilly little country driven by consensus and compromise? Impossible! Just a month before the murder, however, the recently deceased cultural critic Michaël Zeeman had expressed his premonition of an approaching catastrophe: ‘I do not believe in the spectre of an Islamist threat any more than I do in that of the Fortuynists as a xenophobic rabble. But it would seem to me that the idea of Dutch society being historically disinclined to instability is in need of revision. For by the look of it, there now is a nasty fissure running through society, a fissure that is only getting bigger.’2

2030: War Zone Amsterdam3 is an exercise in imagining the unimaginable: civil war in your own city in the year 2030. A cease-fire has just been announced, and a group of international artists, theatre makers, filmmakers, journalists and intellectuals go out into the city to investigate what the war has done to Amsterdam and its inhabitants. 2030: War Zone Amsterdam names no enemies, provides no answers, but fires questions at a possible future. The participants occupy public space, infiltrate exhibitions, festivals and publications, or seek cover in underground spaces. 2030: War Zone Amsterdam makes the concept of war, so abstract for the Dutch, specific and palpable by projecting the artists as well as the public onto a war situation in Amsterdam.

The enemy is unknown – for history has shown time and again that a former enemy can become a best friend. The war is deliberately situated in the city and not throughout the entire country. The character of war has changed; it no longer takes place between nation-states but between ethnic, religious or economically motivated factions that are not bound by the confines of arbitrary national borders. But what is war like in 2030? Since 9/11, a few airplanes are all it takes to plunge countries into war. Will democratic governments adapt their military strategies and, as the American journalist Robert Kaplan claims, undertake preventive actions with small groups of warriors? What tactics will people be using in urban warfare by that time? Today’s and future generations are growing up with Second Life, playing virtual games and doing all sorts of virtual training. What kind of soldiers is this creating? Do they experience the reality of war in the same way that soldiers who grew up in a mechanical age did? If everybody is continuously monitored, how can the population evade virtual and physical surveillance? Through what channels do people communicate? How and where does one survive all of the violence, what is everyday life like? Is there a public domain, and what is that like? Is art still being made, and if so, how do artists reach their public? The artists participating in 2030: War Zone Amsterdam will not answer these questions literally, but take them as a departure point for discussion of the possibilities and impossibilities of war and of the role of art.

So, in order to simulate discussion and get people thinking about their astonishingly laconic acceptance of the curtailment of their civil rights in the name of safety in the War on Terror, to get them thinking about the use of fear as a political element and about the direction in which we citizens want to develop our own society, this event is predicated upon a war in a conceivable future. Not because I might be war hungry or want to stir up feelings of fear. On the contrary. But indeed to stick a pin in the balloon of ease with which people in this country assume that the Netherlands will never, ever know war again because we are too reasonable and civilized for that, to debunk the assumption that war is a thing of the distant past or happens in a distant country. And to open people’s eyes to a war that, according to some, has been rampant in Western society for a long time, not immediately visible and recognizable, but proliferating beneath the surface like an insidious growth, popping up at unexpected places and unexpected moments.9

What significance the arts can still have in the portrayal of war, in the portrayal of reality, is a question that has occupied me as a curator for years. How do we restore the power of the image in an era in which the creation of images long since has ceased to be reserved for professionals? How do you reach a public that either passively turns away from, or actively immerses itself in, the oversupply of spectacle, emotion and entertainment? Can we break through the appearance of things and replace the casual glance by Sehen, as Rilke understood it – the lengthy and penetrating observation of everyday reality that gains form in art?

For we are not only media creatures; not all of our experiences, thoughts and emotions are determined by the media. 2030: War Zone Amsterdam is a revolt against intellectual laziness and indifference, an intense attempt to understand our present-day era and society. As an art historian and curator, I do this with the means that I have – the arts. Paul Virilio presented a plan in 2002 for a ‘Museum of Accidents’ as a response to the avalanche of natural and man-made accidents, mishaps and disasters that we are witnessing today. Although the uniformity of the selected works of art, many of which were literal and familiar images of disasters, made the exhibition less convincing than the accompanying publication, the intention behind it appealed to me greatly. Virilio did not stoically wait until a disaster occurred in his vicinity, he nefariously turned the situation around. Instead of being exposed to accidents, he exposes the accidents in a new kind of museum-science and museography.13

My exhibition ‘Soft Target. War as a Daily, First-Hand Reality’ in 2005, with 14 hours of film and video material, installations and paintings, was a protest against the ‘shock and awe’ spectacle of war in the media. With ‘Soft Target’, I attempted to avoid putting on a classical exhibition in the white cube of the Basis Actuele Kunst (BAK) institute in Utrecht by using a number of spaces in the Hoog Catharijne shopping mall in addition to those of BAK, with the goal of having a more open relation with the outside world. With 2030: War Zone Amsterdam, I operate entirely outside the walls of art institutes, in an attempt to go a step further than the symbolic representation of reality in the – oh, so familiar and oh, so safe – environment of museums and art institutes.

All of the 30 participating artists and artist collectives, whom I have met during my travels to the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Canada and within Western Europe over the past one and a half years, have already done projects in public space and know the obstacles of working outside the white cube. Many of these artists, especially those from non-Western countries, are also curators and have organizational experience. In addition to seeking variety in the themes, disciplines and work of the artists, I have also sought to create a fruitful composition of the group as a whole, inviting warmongers as well as peacekeepers, worrywarts as well as optimists. Some of the artists live and work in war zones or former war zones; with their personal experience of war and expertise as artists, they will look at this fictitious assignment differently than will artists who are at home in the Dutch or Western situation. During a week of workshops and explorations when the artists collectively go round the city, a good deal of time will be reserved for discussions with the artists and the project team about the basic assumptions of the event.14

The conditions of war will be taken into consideration for all communications. What is available after all of the familiar media fall away – no Internet, no television, no cell phones? The group will discuss how underground activities can be communicated in such a way that they are difficult to trace and yet reach a large and varied public. For starters, we will look at low-tech examples from art history such as mail art and contemporary sub-cultural expressions like graffiti, but high-tech means of communication will also be investigated. The great mobility of people in the cultural world will be used for making international contacts and spreading news. A number of representatives from the general press will be invited to participate in the event as embedded journalists.

The results of the event are extremely uncertain. Will it remain a theoretical Spielerei for the few, or will it truly hold up a mirror to a broad public and get them thinking about their own position in a country that, according to some, is on the verge of civil war, and according to others, has already been in a state of war for some time? As far as I’m concerned, one thing is certain: there are no spectators, everyone is a participant.