Our Failure to Disagree

In 2004, shortly following the opening of Manifesta 5 in Donostia-San Sebastián, the International Manifesta Foundation circulated a call for proposals inviting 40 individuals to put together a team to oversee the conceptualisation and implementation of the next European Biennial, Manifesta 6, in 2006. This gesture alone raised everyone’s hopes. Past Manifesta’s relied on curatorial teams formed by the foundation itself, who chose two or more individuals to work together. For an exhibition with the solitary (if flawed) promise to show the best in contemporary European art, it was generally felt that Manifesta’s forced curatorial partnerships was limiting the depth of the show’s discourse, leading to uneven and incoherent gatherings in a rota of 'contested’ locales. The new strategy seemed to rethink the compelling problematic of resituating the event every two years, by actually inviting a team to address context from the outset. The context, in this case was Nicosia, and the team was Mai Abu ElDahab, Florian Waldvogel and Anton Vidokle.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Nicosia, (also known as Lefkosia), became the only divided capital city in the world—a condition that dates back to ethnic troubles in 1963 and the arrival of UN peace keepers. Ever since, a demilitarized zone called the Green Line, has divided the city. In 1974, responding to a military coup attempt by Greek militants, the Turkish army invaded and remained in the North of the island. In 1983, the Turkish Cypriot community proclaimed a separate state - the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, recognized solely by Turkey.

Soon after IMF announced the team for Manifesta 6, the curators announced their intention to develop a temporary art school in various locations throughout the city, comprised of three departments revolving around a number of cultural issues and debates, where participants could engage for period of three months in a different structural model for art education. This experiment, inspired by such examples as Black Mountain College and the Bauhaus, offered Nicosia as a coordinate, a meeting place where cultural producers could use the biennial structure as a platform for discussion and production. Whether the Manifesta School would supplement or subvert the usual output of a biennial exhibition remains unanswerable; certainly it changed the behaviour of Manifesta’s audience, which was a start.

The decision to invite Anton Vidokle to be curatorial editor of Issue 6 of Printed Project arose out of events that took place in June 2006, when the city of Nicosia cancelled Manifesta 6 and terminated the curators’ contracts, a move that is virtually unheard of on this level. In July, during a heat wave in Dublin, in the casual banter that precedes this type of meeting, Printed Project’s editorial panel shared our disbelief, relaying to one another various sources of speculation. The idea arose to use the next issue of Printed Project to document the controversy, in hopes that this would allow some public entry into the decision. However, this approach would contradict our editorial mission: to support guest curators through an open platform in the form of a printed publication with no prescribed theme. We decided that an appropriate response to Manifesta’s cancellation would be to invite one of the curators to do anything they wanted. In effect, to offer a curatorial platform where one had been stripped away.

Anton invited Tirdad Zolghadr to co-curate the issue. It is important to mention that many of the contributions here are based on various events which took place at unitednationsplaza, Berlin in the autumn of 2006, the month that Manifesta 6 was intended to open. When I met Tirdad in London in the weeks leading up to the plaza, we found ourselves amidst the brutal consensus that is the artworld today—like so many others formed in an array of market-oriented principles, despite us, despite our politics.

I wonder what Manifesta 6 will teach us.

(Sarah Pierce, "Our Failure to Disagree", introduction to "I Can't Work Like This," Printed Project Issue 6, eds. Anton Vidokle and Tirdad Zolghadr. Published by VAI:Dublin 2006.)