FREEDOM IN MOTION - OMAR MUÑOZ CREMERS
Freedom in Motion - Omar Muñoz CremersWhen you think of the images of the future we are exposed to from a young age, you might assume that it is a sterile world that awaits us: glistening surfaces, an overabundance of plastic and yet-to-be-discovered metals, white clothes, food concocted in laboratories – and offspring too, if at all possible, so that sex, with all those horrible bodily byproducts, becomes redundant. Cities of light: orderly, rational and humorless. That is the dominant vision of the future. And while it may not have been fully realized yet, here in the early 21st century (the century of the future, almost as if the future will become abolished or forgotten after this), there are plenty of areas in society where elements of this sterility have reached a fairly advanced stage.
Since the imagination is anything but one-dimensional, there is also another vision of the future that emerges alongside this one when skeptics, pessimists and paranoids shine their gritty light on the topic. The most extreme version of this involves a world devastated by nuclear war, though fortunately, there are also some less fatal scenarios in this vein of what you might call honest science fiction. The writer Philip K. Dick could be considered a figurehead of this latter strain, with his fictional accounts full of relationship problems and ordinary men put through the wringer by unwieldy bureaucratic structures in a grimy world bursting with aggressive advertising, agitated powers of authority and, perhaps most important, a sense that reality itself is patently in need of change.
What prompted this introduction? The fact that Paul Segers’ stations, with their sometimes vague agricultural functions, appear to have materialized out of a Dick novel. These aren’t the glistening spaceships led by daring captains that we saw depicted on the illustrated covers of sci-fi paperbacks. We are being presented with practical technology for survival, the lessor adventure of a settler, a farmer making planets inhabitable, which is a rotten job – boring, lowly and dangerous. The easy way out is to think, “That is Mars. It has nothing to do with me.” A more nuanced thinker might see this sci-fi scenario as a metaphor. But what Segers is doing actually goes a step further: he is bringing science fiction into the here and now. And this produces a powerful effect, one magnified by the fact that the setting tends to be the Netherlands, that most engineered of countries, lacking in dreams, where people prefer not to think about the future. (Is it because they know, deep down, that there will be no future in the end?) In terms of the immediate future, it is indeed difficult to imagine that a shopping street in Apeldoorn is going to look substantially different one hundred years from now: what awaits is the sea.
Segers makes us aware of this confrontation and even fictionalizes it as early as his first solo show, Dromen voor de Nuchtere Jongens (Dreams for the Sober Boys):
“After all the huge setbacks they had suffered in their own country, Dutch farmers decided that things had to change. They made plans to go in search of new land. The first models of mobile farms were an instant success and hundreds more followed. The farmers set out in every direction in small columns of three or four farm tanks, plus several auxiliary vehicles. A massive communication network formed between the enclaves of new farms. The invasion was totally unexpected. Finally, there were dreams to be had for the sober boys.”
The result is the rollout of these machines. The fundamental tension between dream and pragmatism (soberness) is palpable. What are these dreams, then? Dreams, after all, can overpower even the most rational mind – dreams of machines and dreams of freedom and mobility, of course. And here we find ourselves increasingly in very Dutch territory, where freedom and mobility – that which is so infinite in the dream state – are at risk of becoming scarcities.
What is a farmer, when you think of it? Or, better yet, what remains of the farming tradition in the 21st century? Farmers have ostensibly become neglected outsiders in the Western world. They barely survived the Industrial Revolution; their numbers have been drastically reduced by technological advancements; and now that another revolution – radical digitization, to the point of possibly overtaking humankind itself – is affecting humanity, they would appear doomed to an existence as a necessary relic until the problem of food production is solved (i.e., entirely automated). The farmer stands alone, looking off into the ever-more-brightly glowing lights on the horizon, watching the stream of people moving toward that urban light, only sporadically interrupted by oddballs going in the opposite direction in search of simplicity, tranquility and a different kind of community.
What is one of the inescapable impressions city people have when they visit the countryside? Their purview certainly becomes less chaotic, that’s one thing. But what invariably fascinates, surprises and perhaps even scares them are the smells: boundless odors that permeate their sense of smell all the more powerfully because of the crisp air. These are smells that people would be happy to forget (and which Segers forces unexpectedly upon them in his installation De Hollandse Nacht 2 [The Dutch Night 2]). The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman contends that modernity has declared a war on smells. Smells symbolize the exact opposite of everything modernism represents: order, predictability, control and self-control. Smells are emblematic of animality and savagery. The problem is that smells travel freely and can never be definitively vanquished, despite a massive disciplining campaign. In any case, this “civilizing” anxiety has engendered a situation whereby social inferiority (which is a flexible concept and can therefore be applied to any number of groups – workers, immigrants, the homeless) stinks. Only the most impertinent fan of perfume – a capricious modern invention, which itself is often questioned by overly strict disciplining agents – would allow himself to be tempted by the deliberate deployment of animal odors.
Modernity stinks, it’s true, but in most cases, the most offensive producers are sequestered off on the outer perimeters of industrial parks – just as urbanites will occasionally neglect their personal odor management during that inversion of social convention known as the festival: events that are located beyond city borders whenever possible. Farmers, of course, exist even further out on the periphery. More important than their physical positioning, however, is the fact that they operate on the margins in terms of the production of meaning, as well. This exclusion is associated with processes of forgetting, invisibility and silencing. And while it is a real danger, it is not an inescapable fate. For those who are perceptive, the visionaries, it can actually be a gift, providing them with a position from which to construct a reimagined flow of meaning that creates new connections if people just ask the right questions. And there is one question today from which all others follow: the question of technology.
Segers calls himself a sculptor and that is a legitimate qualification within a given art discourse, but I would describe him instead as an engineer or technician, whereby I would hesitate to add “of dream states or fantasies,” since this might label him as too much of a conceptualist, without properly acknowledging the physicality and craftsmanship of his method. Whatever you call him, what he does is build, and the objects he builds unquestionably introduce fantasy into everyday reality. The farmer/rural countryside is not some lifeless sociological concept or social problem, it is a means of accessing technological themes mixed with myths and dreams, fantasies, impossible ideas.
Much of his oeuvre consists of mobile farms or machines and obliquely related buildings. Why all those farms? First of all, because on the most simplistic level, they are idealized objects and these sculptures are the proof that they could actually exist: they appear ready for production. Practical and inventive, without a doubt, but there are also two essential aspects to these works that instill them with greater meaning, in terms of the two questions they compel us to ask time and again: “What does it do?” and “What is going on here?” No matter what kind of practical agricultural purposes they might possibly serve, they invariably cultivate imaginative ideas, drawing lines to the future, with attendant associations.
This effect becomes amplified and even stranger when the farms are physically placed in a real-life situation in the Netherlands. That placement itself creates an effect. For one thing, it instantly reframes our perspective on the everyday environment by breaking through the urban and rural space, planned down to every tree and paver, and the stultifying absence of any surprises or fantasy, especially in and around the two predominant landscapes in the Netherlands: new developments and motorways. The fact that this invasion of the everyday sometimes provokes feelings of aversion and aggression has primarily to do with the psychological makeup of the Dutch national psyche (widely written about), which tolerates very few intrusions into personal life, no matter how innocent these may seem. Since the appearance of J.G. Ballard’s Crash in 1971, futuristic technologies contain a sinister undercurrent, harboring the potential to unleash our darkest desires and channel them in new and unexpected ways. It could be that people unconsciously recognize the military design Segers is fond of using, but these tractors, stations and farms would seem to radiate an inherent goodness, the instruments of well-behaved workers laboring industriously.
A second point is that the recurrence of the term “mobile” is hardly arbitrary. Mobility is being put forth as an answer to the real problems faced by farmers in the Netherlands (see Dromen voor de nuchtere jongens), who are constrained by regulations and saddled with the stigma of being obsolete outsiders. In the social fantasy of mobile enclaves, their political issues and social status actually become irrelevant: “The migration of new farmers had already long been overtaken by reality. The real exodus to Canada, the U.S. and the Eastern Bloc at that time already signified the approaching demise of the Netherlands as a producing country.”
The true motivation behind the agrarian façade is a desire for freedom and mobility, the least abstract form of freedom; the hands-on experience that is the antithesis of the contemplation of freedom from a political or philosophy of law standpoint. Freedom in mobility is a crucial concept because it deals with problems and ideas that impact us in all sorts of ways. Mobility has become a cosmopolitan ethos. The world has forever opened up for those of us in the West. We look down upon people who don’t move around; anyone who doesn’t travel is certain to be accused of being uninterested (and uninteresting).
That freedom is, to some extent, quite real. On one level, the European Union has proven to be a successful freedom-of-movement machine, but there are two important reservations to be made in this regard. The first is that the freedom of cosmopolites is not unlimited. The more inhospitable an area is, the thinner the stream of visitors. There are innumerable no-go areas where access is restricted by local leaders or that are too dangerous, or simply too boring, to visit. The second, more important, reservation concerns those who are excluded from this freedom of movement. The image that emerges is that of a massive fortification of territory not seen since the days of the Roman border politics of Emperor Augustus, in which a host of barriers is erected, both of a physical nature and also in terms of identity, to exclude and preferably make invisible certain population groups, stigmatized according to strategic self-interest. In this context, airports are loaded with meaning, as points where all these social forces and trends come together, tunnels in the wall that facilitate mobility but at the same time impede it: serving simultaneously as both timeless shopping mall and prison.
The work, thus, has its share of inescapable shadow paths, the dark alleys of both the mind and technology. In one sense, this is a direct consequence of the longing for freedom, the downside to freedom that one inescapably encounters when one moves about. Walls are no longer made only of stone, but also of an assembly of technologies that see, categorize and, when necessary, direct the body: the wall of surveillance that poisons the mind of the vulnerable freedom seeker with a negative freedom that we generally classify as paranoia, hence the title for the show Paranoia op het platteland (Paranoia in Farm Country). Fortunately, though, there is an immediate move toward counter-surveillance in the observation post Station 03 and, particularly, ZFU-05, an installation that enters into a symbiotic relationship with the gated community, one of the clearest expressions of our paranoid culture.
What is the meaning behind the title Station to Station? The original David Bowie album, a classic from 1976 (the year Segers was born), presented a nearly ecstatic yet aristocratic vision of European freedom through mobility, which has since actually become reality, along with Trans Europa Express, Kraftwerk’s answer to it that appeared a year later. The mobile farms conclusively democratize this movement (to the extent that had not already been accomplished through tourism). But more importantly, they form a model, a model of heterotopia. It has become abundantly clear that creating a utopia is impossible for a variety of reasons. Briefly stated, that is because it represents an eternal social balance that is unrealistic and because history has shown that utopias try to forge themselves by forcibly eradicating undesirable elements. The heterotopia is the all but logical alternative to the shattered utopia, since humankind simply cannot escape the utopian desire. Heterotopias are, in essence, genuine small utopias, contrarian spaces, the first colonies being a positive example. Other examples are prisons and nursing homes, where deviations from the norm are placed. Michel Foucault called a ship the ultimate heterotopia, however: a floating space, a locale without a fixed place, moving, sealed off, but searching. “In civilizations without boats,” he wrote, “dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure and the police take the place of pirates.”
The mobile farms – along with the enclaves and stations – exude a desire for a heterotopia. In the moment of presence, they already function as one: an anti-place within the landscape, its structures and expectations. But they also function as one in the arts landscape, as so clearly demonstrated by the installation Bruggenhoofd Chabot, the amusing invasion of the Chabot Museum in Rotterdam by a landing vehicle. The language of science fiction used here does not detract from the fact that this is about more than a concrete intervention in the here and now; that the true heterotopias lie ahead of us, beyond the Earth, in what should, in truth, be the most essential issue of the next few decades, because it deals with the question of humankind’s very survival and how this can be engineered pragmatically, the dreams that flourish when the new ships leave their ports.