Wandering towards a Project

Welcome to theory of clouds. This is our first post and I want to use the opportunity to thank Tomoko Sugiyama and Nobuhisa Shimoda, President and Director respectively of Studio Q2, C.A.P House, Kobe for supporting our efforts to document the life of Kobe’s arts community. I also want to thank Merel Matic, Ali Watson and the Team at Mediamatic for supporting our proposal to join the Mediamatic Travel network.

This year, theory of clouds will launch three major programs. The first is the Kobe Artists Video Archive. This archive will contain studio visits and interviews with Kobe and Kansai based artists. The goal for 2009 is to create records of 40 artists. Our first interviews will be conducted in the week of March 9th, 2009. In the future, these records will be available for viewing on the web, and this project presents the local face of our organization.

Our global face appears in our relationship with Mediamatic Travel. This year theory of clouds will host travelers from the Mediamatic network here in Kobe. Mediamatic Travel was launched by Mediamatic Foundation, in collaboration with Partizan Publik to facilitate trips to contemporary cultural scenes worldwide and connect local operators in the arts to professional visitors and peers from abroad . The goal is to enhance the visibility of artists around the world and promote collaboration.

Finally, this year, theory of clouds will begin production of the video series Practice and the City. These conversations with artists, architects, scholars, and hobbyists from the Kansai explore the subject’s relationships with their practices of collecting as these practices bring them to engage the cities in which they work. The questions that drive these interviews occur from two readings, Walter Benjamin’s Unpacking My Library and Alice Kaplan’s Working in the Archives. What follows here is a very brief summary of the origin of those questions and I hope a clarification that may serve as an introduction to how theory of clouds likes to think.

Perhaps, you have read this essay by Walter Benjamin, the one that begins:

“I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order. I cannot march up and down their ranks to pass them in review before a friendly audience. You need not fear any of that. Instead, I must ask you to join me in the disorder of crates that have been wrenched open, the air saturated with the dust of wood, the floor covered with torn paper, to join me among piles of volumes that are seeing daylight again after two years of darkness, so that you may be ready to share with me a bit of the mood…”

I have revisited such moments several times recently, and while my books had not been crated for years, certainly they had been gone from my sight long enough. Long enough for me to feel that without them, I was loosing a sense of my personal history. Then there was the uncomfortable feeling of living without the benefit of reference and even worse, without the gift of provocation.

So I should say right away that I experienced a simple delight while rereading this essay. It opens as a “little essay”; something simple, yet it holds a particular sort of complexity. It’s dangerous in the way that slowly becoming lost in a city is dangerous. Rewarding in the way that returning to one’s hobby room, studio, or kitchen arouses the most earnest comfort.

By calling our attention to the “precariousness” of our relations to collections, Benjamin reminds us of a passionate relationship filled with episodes of wandering, uncertainty, fear, recovery, and most strikingly of how the search for books leads us to revel in a city. To hold on to those deeply personal places we find in cities, even when they are also very public places.

Benjamin turns his reader away from the boring tidiness of the display and toward the chaotic, passionate longing that brings life to the collection. So even as he writes about the responsibility of ownership and the collection’s transmissibility, he is forced to consider a still larger geography.

“Other thoughts fill me than the ones I am talking about- not thoughts but images, memories. Memories of cities in which I found so many things: Riga, Naples, Munich, Danzig….”

The collection is haunted by what lies beyond the walls of Benjamin’s apartment. A litany of cities and walks, searches and maneuvers, returns and second-guesses. The life of collecting is outside the collection.

Benjamin’s references to collections are largely personal and singular (his own). Alice Kaplan, however, writes about the large private or public archive. And for her, “an archive can be anyplace, but for an archive to be, there must be too much of it, too many papers to sift through. And there must also be pieces missing, something left to find.” In addition to defining the archive in this open fashion, her essay Working in the Archives raises the value of “private storytelling” as it relates to research and the development of evidence. To enable the story that both Benjamin and Kaplan tell, the collection seems a necessary façade. It is a place to begin, an entrance.

Working in the Archives introduces us to a task Kaplan undertook to identify sources for material in Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s anti-Semitic pamphlets. Her essay points directly to the role of imagination in the archival enterprise.

“I needed my imagination of Celine as a “neighborhood guy” to reject the pamphlet factory in the 17th arrondissement as the final source, and to locate the pamphlet factory that was within walking distance of Celine’s apartment on the rue Lepic. I needed to imagine the walk from Montmartre to Clichy in order to recognize that the pamphlets produced on the rue Cardinal Mercier were worth studying.”

She and her friends walked those streets to test her imagination and those walks changed the outcome of her research.

“So it is not the case that these wanderings through Paris, this note book, make my archival research relative to some personal experience or autobiographical quest. They were necessary ingredients in the research, they changed the results of the research, and they made the discoveries possible.”

For both Benjamin and Kaplan, collecting and working in collections lead them out of the collection and into the city. The city and the collection address each other. They are, in these works, in dialogue.

These essays speak to a rich area of inquiry. How do the practices of building collections and investigation within archives contribute to our personal understanding of our cities and the formation of the idea of a city’s story? What do these practices contribute to the very private enterprise of “making place”?

We will be posting a partial list of interviews in April. The videos will be posted at links here and at mediamatic.net