Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz. Cruising Utopia
Through their video installations and carefully staged, choreographed environments, Berlin-based duo Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz explore notions of otherness and queer identity, aiming at challenging stereotypes and easy categorizations. In conversation with Elise Lammer, the artists discuss the ideas behind “Moving Backwards,” the brand-new project conceived for the Swiss Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale.
“PAULINE BOUDRY & RENATE LORENZ: MOVING BACKWARDS,” SWISS PAVILION, 58TH VENICE BIENNALE. MAY 11 – NOVEMBER 24.
At the 58th Venice Biennale, the Berlinbased duo of artists Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz are representing Switzerland under the curatorship of Charlotte Laubard. On this occasion they are transforming the Swiss pavilion into a vast immersive project reminiscent of a nightclub. Under the title “Moving Backwards,” the project explores alternative practices of resistance in a time of widespread backlash, by means of an installation that includes a new film and a performance developed in collaboration with Julie Cunningham, Werner Hirsch, Latifa Laâbissi, Marbles Jumbo Radio and Nach. The concept of back-and-forth movements will be complemented by a free journal, which gathers statements written by authors invested in queer and postcolonial theories.
Since the beginning of their collaboration in 2007, the artists have explored how narratives of “otherness” are central in defining queer persons, while trying to deconstruct categorization and undo the gender binary that imposes a reduced vision of identity. In filmed actions taking place in carefully staged and choreographed environments, they look at how gender and sexuality can be performatively subverted, while attempting to challenge stereotypes that not only affect queer persons but also society as a whole.
Importantly, “queer” is proposed in “Moving Backwards” as a political concept and a tool for activism that goes beyond sexualities. Wrongly simplified into a term for homosexuals and other sexually non-normative individuals since and after the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, the artists (backed up by a community of thinkers, philosophers, performers and activists) are pushing the significance of the term to a much larger scheme, including as queer any alternative identity providing a basis for a community. In their Venetian installation, queer thus becomes an umbrella, an open and nondiscriminatory space that by means of direct experience encourages political action. Rather than trying to establish common elements between the uses of queer, the artists introduce queer as a new, manifold model for mobilization.
More than ever, it feels urgent to address questions of gender and sexual identity. The interaction of sex, gender, and sexuality with global neoliberal economics is producing and justifying a whole new set of inequalities. However, activism and the politics of the body seem to be undergoing a crisis, as they’re being increasingly instrumentalized by the same neoliberal policies they’re attempting to fight against. As a result, going frontal can distract the attention from what is actually at stake: challenging the distribution of power in contemporary societies. Your work has often followed the concept of “speaking backwards,” something I understand as an alternative to downright activism. Can you explain this concept and how it will be carried out in the Swiss Pavilion?
PAULINE BOUDRY / RENATE LORENZ: Going frontal can be important as well. For us, the art context with its formal and aesthetic means allows for the intervention of a clear perpetrator-victim and friend-enemy distinction, and to work on ambivalences. This seems important now, with the reestablishment of old and creation of new enemies in Europe and the US, the building of fences and walls, the legitimation of hate speech and the installation of more prohibition. It comes without any nuances. On the other hand, a patronizing victimization and “speaking for...” doesn’t help either. Both perspectives leave, as you said, the distribution of power extremely uneven. We are looking for something else without claiming to know the right way to achieve this. For us, “Moving Backwards” is a reaction to the feeling of being pushed backwards in a political struggle. The project will also experiment with interventions into the linearity of time. Instead of believing in the easy distinction of progress and backwardness, we learn from a strategy of the Kurdish women’s resistance, where the guerrilla fighters wore their shoes in reverse when walking in the snowy mountains. This made it seem as if they were walking backwards, but actually they were walking forwards – or the other way around. We like to use the possibilities of re-embodying and thus re-opening current, but also seemingly past, events and strategies, connecting this to ways of “cruising utopia” (term used by José Esteban Muñoz). For us it is about cruising your desires instead of finding solutions or installing new norms; searching for and leaving traces of utopia – like those promising tracks of the steps of Kurdish women who are fighting for a space for experiments. We like their urge to live with more gender equality, through sharing labor and political power as well as resources, land, housing, and food.
In many ways “Moving Backwards” mirrors a nightclub, with an environment designed to allow the audience to go through a whole physical and sensory experience. It also invites the viewer to reflect on the history of the pavilions of the Giardini della Biennale, whose past is rooted in pre-war nationalism. In contrast, a nightclub can be a safe space, where social, sexual and political categorizations don’t apply. Rather than providing a clear statement, it seems you suggest political criticism through direct experience.
The Swiss Pavilion with its three-meter high walls can easily be seen as a reference to a nationalist idea of not only belonging to a group but also safeguarding it against all others. What we call an “abstract club” is not meant as a safe and ideal counter-space against this notion – since the nightclub has its own norms, which can be violent as well – and also not as a space of experience in contrast to reflection. The “abstract club” is a construction with a rather open meaning: it might be a space that allows desires and experiments. It might give agency to elements and objects such as lights, sounds and performances, and thus challenge the status and positionality of the visitor. Instead of being a space where categories do not apply, it might challenge the ability to apply them. It might also connect to histories of underground and drag performances that were, and still are, an important part of a political struggle. For us it is also a concrete place for collaboration. All the performers in our film have their own important work in the fields of art, performance, and dance. We bring this work together, connect and share it in this space for the time of the video shooting but also for the prolonged time of the screening. It is our method of working: to create a possibility for these connections and to suggest a way of choreographing them.
The space you devise in Venice is as much a mental as a physical setting. Going back to José Esteban Muñoz and the literary tradition of utopia, I understand your use of queer aesthetics as a tool to produce an environment that is neither mainstream nor truly alternative. It escapes categorization from both the ends of the giver and the receiver, and in that sense it is “experimental” in its purest sense. It’s a moment in which the outcome can be imagined and yet is unforeseeable. In terms of activism, how would/could this imaginary environment have an impact in reality?
That’s a very interesting question. Maybe these queer figures of ambivalence and the paradox (neither/nor) are aesthetic and political figures at the same time. For example, they challenge our ways of dealing with difference. If one enters an (exhibition) space, and finds easy ways of applying norms and categories foreclosed on many levels, one has to be creative and to act in a political way. Difference cannot be handled in relation to the dominant order. If you find yourself in such an environment, you can embrace an experience beyond categorization or even protest against it, i.e. you do nothing, you are not interested, you hate it, you walk away... All these possibilities are part of a political practice. In terms of activism, you might see this kind of queer aesthetics as an intervention into the ways in which processes of integration are handled in a society. Difference beyond categorization might shatter the established norms, instead of just integrating into them seamlessly.
Elise Lammer is curator at SALTS, Birsfelden, Switzerland. She is based in Basel and Berlin.