Letter to BVdP

You arrived in Belfast at the close of a long, hard season. A city with a split-personality, two sides of a coin, commingled and inseparable. Socialism, nationalism, victimhood, narcissism. The Belfast Complex. At the crux of the agreement is a political proposition: a future, memorialised and inert.

When nobody shows up people shrug and excuse the absent for “voting with their feet”, but as Liesbeth said, apathy is not a position. The greatest divides lead to the greatest dependencies. How do we understand the nature of certain oppressions, violent precisely because they are difficult to loose? Police on the Belfast train now arrest asylum seekers for collecting benefits in the North and the South; everyone else talks about how open the border is.

In Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon develops a utopian desire to be free of the past, which requires total revolution, “absolute violence”. Utter amnesia, like a blow to the head. What if we distil this position, not through political imagery, but through a notion of identity that fails to reconcile with place. Imagined experimental identities surface, unnamed by points elsewhere. A transposition of representation through detours, accidents of circumstance that bring about serendipitous doublings, in this case, people with multiple pasts.

An artist whose company I’ve shared on three occasions, in Stockholm, London, and Dublin, has on each occasion told me the same joke. The first time I laughed, the second time I laughed politely, the third time I smiled and excused myself. Men in our generation, say younger than your father (because he is always the exception and the rule) who tell jokes are usually asses. Funny thing is, I can’t remember the joke. Something about Lenin. Perhaps you’ve heard it?

I told you, I liked your radios in Moscow. The little liars. Mute. Leaden. By way of reappropriation, propaganda returns as art. It’s a good joke. I hear Russia is full of them. Til soon, S.

(Sarah Pierce, "Letter to BvDP" in The Lost Moment, eds. L. Bik, J.N. van der Pol, and F. Ustek, Bik Van der Pol:Rotterdam 2007.)