Fotodok has recently welcomed the installation 'Alexander' by Polish photographer Michał Siarek. The installation is «a follow up to the group exhibition 'Joint Memory: Photographic Fragments' which reflects on the nature of collective memory of historical events as constructed by media and politics.» Alexander's work is played around the relationship between politics and history, and illustrates the controversial construction of a branding national myth in the Republic of Macedonia. Everything started in 2009 when the Macedonian Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski announced an architectural scheme titled Skopje 2014. The equestrian statue of Alexander the Great becomes the Trojan horse to penetrate the voters' home defenses. A rather anachronistic vision that however can stimulate more general considerations on the role of history.
The book 'Alexander' by Michał Siarek
The book 'Alexander' by Michał Siarek
The book 'Alexander' by Michał Siarek
No other era has had at its disposal a quantity of information and notions of history like the one we are experiencing. A deposit of sources, publications, critical essays and anything more you could wish for. We can draw from this well in various ways. Braudel wrote that history is nothing more than a set of questions addressed to the past in the name of problems, curiosities, anxieties of the present. In some ways, history is an answer given from the past to the present, or rather to the future as the now becomes past when it is thought of.
Therefore, we can say that there is no future without a past or without memory. This leads us to reflect on the contemporary era that is outlined through an eternal present, in the here and now syndrome that produces a frantic and paradoxical race of individuals to rush in the same place. An uncertain and worrying future that eliminates the need for memory. Or again that it can reduce the historical conscience to an aesthetic, commercial, utilitarian habit. Or, history is reduced to a functional "device" for the production of reliable truths or self-legitimating historical "factualities" in which the needs of power are masked.
© From the series 'Alexander: Forging Utopia' by Michał Siarek
© From the series 'Alexander: Forging Utopia' by Michał Siarek
© From the series 'Alexander: Forging Utopia' by Michał Siarek
In Michał Siarek's photographs, we observe a destructured look on a young nation's intent of building a future turned towards the past. Now leaving aside the most colorful and folkloristic aspects, the questionable historical claims, the nostalgic references to neoclassicism in architecture, a bitter aftertaste as a decadent fairy tale, what other useful considerations can be inferred in the attempt to self-define a national identity from past historical events. At the peak of the potential acceleration of history unleashed by the futurist utopia along the track of unlimited progress that has zeroed distances and geographies, we observe the raising of a regionalist aspiration in the old continent. We find traces manifested in different forms such as in Spanish Catalonia or in the Northeast of Italy, to name a few. Or, again, the awakening of Eastern European nationalism. These experiences jointly promise the battle against the cosmopolitan spirit although they regularly deny themselves when it comes to razing the sedimented memory of urban centers and making room for the liquid and post-modern anonymity of the smooth and reflective facades of skyscrapers. Faceless aircraft carrier from which the hawks of capitalism take off to launch their media bombs aimed at colonizing the younger minds, the consumers of tomorrow, and at breaking local resistance with franchise blows and Anglo-Saxon idioms.
© From the series 'Alexander: Forging Utopia' by Michał Siarek
© From the series 'Alexander: Forging Utopia' by Michał Siarek
© From the series 'Alexander: Forging Utopia' by Michał Siarek
Therefore there's no originality in what is witnessed in Macedonia, in this wave of "museification", in the semantics of the dominant retrospective, or to say it with Bauman in the taste of "retrotopy". An escape back that legitimizes power and isolates from others, and from the risks of the future. It not only produces cultural enclosures that reduce dialogue and prevent confrontation but feeds that conservative sentiment behind the stainless myth of Plato's cave. The possibility of a change is not contemplated in the anti-modern mythologization program of history, and the horizon thus resembles a dead end. This is the main pitfall behind what Svetlana Boym calls the global epidemic of nostalgia in which we tend to confuse "the ideal house" with "the imaginary house". It is like replacing critical thinking with emotional desire. We must, however, avoiding to hastily condemning this last human condition which translates the need for community, to retrace our steps even in an affective way.
© From the series 'Alexander: Forging Utopia' by Michał Siarek
© From the series 'Alexander: Forging Utopia' by Michał Siarek
© From the series 'Alexander: Forging Utopia' by Michał Siarek
Man is a land animal, which for instinctive deficiency needs to orient himself and for this reason produces signs and sounds to remember.
This material heritage constitutes a collective memory on which places and villages stand. Man is also an animal that is constituted through relationships with others with which he consolidates his "cultural" references, a sense of belonging that is equivalent to personal acceptance. These two needs are structural in man: the link with a topos (also understood as a space for memory) and the relationship with the other (understood as a cultural space). Now, it is undeniable that the nostalgic drift that is expressed in the reassuring illusion of restoration and conservation up to the "tyranny" of memory derives from existential precariousness, the liquefaction of human relationships, of world bewilderment, of sad passions as Spinoza described them, and of that endless scenario that forces postmodern Man to perpetual shortness of breath, to a continuous run-up.
© From the series 'Alexander: Forging Utopia' by Michał Siarek
© From the series 'Alexander: Forging Utopia' by Michał Siarek
© From the series 'Alexander: Forging Utopia' by Michał Siarek
However, it is necessary to pay as much attention to the fact that this nihilistic landscape, made of shadows rather than lights, favors the fatalistic and sometimes fanatical acceptance of historical absolutisms, the prevalence of conjectural historical instances detached from a more comprehensive and supportive perspective. As Karl Jasper has argued, a conception of history that wants to cover the totality and sense of human things must then include the future. So we come to the fate of the youngest, sometimes forced to protest not to feel "devitalized". Rumors that are often diminished, ridiculed if not violently quelled. Yet Man does not live by the past alone, he has to face tomorrow's challenge day after day. And in doing this he needs creative impulses, more universal divisions, to look further with his eyes, to experience his conscience, to "kill" his fathers.
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Michał Siarek personal website
Fotodok
Urbanautica The Netherlands
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