GUEST

CLOTHES FOR THE JOB

Today was 10^th day of my temporary job, though it feels like more time then that has passed. Maybe this sense of having been here longer is there because I have stretched it out to 3 days a week, and so this is my 4^th week. It has been an interesting process of being part-time away, as I still go back ‘home’ and have a chance to reflect on what has happened during the time at the University of Bath. These comings and goings have given me valuable spaces, so that I can emerge myself fully into the new environment and then pull back and re-group my thoughts, impressions…

I wear a specially made ‘workwear’ to my new job, which was sewn by my mother. I drew a quick sketch of how it would look then gave her the drawing, and from that she made a pattern and then the suit (in fact to my delight she made two identical ones). She runs a made-to-measure sewing business from her home in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and I have worked with her in the past on the projects Graduation Dresses http://www.margaretakern.com/projects/GraduationDr… and Radionica http://www.margaretakern.com/projects/radionica.htm.

The suit started off as a boiler worker suit, though my mother made it a lot more elegant, which has given it a more indeterminate look and I am pleased about that turn.

I have made my own logo and a label for the suit.

It is completely white, like a blank canvas.

In the morning, I put on my work suit, like it is a layer of me that I am pulling on.

The changes in me are subtle, I know that I am going to a particular place, and a specific actions will take place. I am going to work. I am going to be in public, seen and noticed more then I usually am. The whiteness of the suit in a strange sort of way makes it more noticeable.

I think of the ‘high vis’ jackets and how it in fact makes those workers even more invisible – remembering that wonderful project of Stephen Gill who photographed the workers http://www.stephengill.co.uk/portfolio/portfolio#id=album-30&num=content-674.

I go to lectures and sit in class with other students, who are dressed casually, though again even their clothes could be argued is uniformed on some level. We are all unformed from one point of view. But, some are more then others – and across the University those who are uniformed are: cleaners, caterers, security guards, lab technicians, builders, sports people and me (I might have missed some workers, so hope to expand my list!).

Whilst my new work uniform takes away the dilemma of what to wear in the morning, I am beginning to miss wearing colourful clothes (have noticed that in the time I am not at my ‘guest’ job, I tend to go all colours of the rainbow).

People look at me when I enter library, class rooms, coffee shops, I get looks which pretend not to be looks, quick glances, sideway glances, unable to locate me, curiosity about who I am, where did I just come from, what is my role here…

And in my new job I play many roles and in this performance I am highly visible, the environment observes me observing them. The looks are circular… and even placing each other into the categories is circular… In a way my blank sheet suit provides a more ambiguous space where it’s harder to pinpoint who I am, except that I am a GUEST.

My appearances in the suit though have been only one part of my performative action – I have spent a large amount of time speaking to people, engaging in interesting discussions, which I plan to include and reflect on here bit later on… It has been a rather complex intervention thus far, I am not entirely sure I can grasp all its meanings yet…

The suit, when not worn, hangs in the gallery space – when worn, the space where it hung casts a shadow with words stencilled in ‘the artist is at work’.

Introducing the GUEST (part 2)

These are just some thoughts behind the creation of a character, another persona, that of a GUEST for my temporary job as an ‘artist in residence’ with the University of Bath’s Institute of Contemporary Interdisciplinary Arts, and the department of Social and Policy Science.

The residency has been born out of a previous, and now on-going project, on the ‘guest workers’ in Berlin. Last year, 2009, I spent 2 months as an artist-in-residence in Berlin, where I researched and interviewed the ‘guest workers’ who came to Berlin in the late 1960s from the former Yugoslavia (and many other countries like Turkey, Italy, Portugal etc). I focused on the women ‘guest workers’ as I discovered that they formed the majority of workers on the large factory assembly lines of the West Berlin’s electronic and telecom companies such as AEG Telefunken, Osram, Siemens etc. This conflicted with the predominantly male image of the migrant worker in the national narratives and imagery, of both countries Germany and the former Yugoslav countries.

Whilst visiting the ‘guest worker’ women in their homes, for the first time, and as a total stranger (winning trust due to shared cultural background, and also desire on their part to tell their story, which up until I visited them has not been told, the reason for which are complex and to do with the marginalised position of these guest workers during socialism), issues of the ethics and the political positioning and commitment of the artist as ethnographer and historian, grew more important.

I reflected briefly on those in my presentation at the Tate Britain’s conference recently http://www.borderlineproject.org.uk/ and on my guest workers blog http://guestworkerberlin.blogspot.com/, but I also feel that I have only just scratched the surface. In a way my residency in Bath is on one level an attempt to address those questions, by embracing the residency as a mirror of that process – the ‘hyper visible’ GUEST, rather then assimilatory artist-ethnographer and an attempt to reflexively scrutinise processes of collaboration and participation.

Bit more background info on the residency can be found on ICIA’s page:
http://www.bath.ac.uk/icia/events/?page=event&art_…

Introducing the GUEST (part 1)

A trouble of not writing the blog from the first day of my job is that I have accumulated so many notes and thoughts that the very burden of them prevents me from starting to write. Paradox, hey!?

The inherent paradox of writing a Blog, on the other hand, (which I reflected on in my previous writings on the project Clothes for Death www.a-n.co.uk/p/384946), is that it is a public space for what usually are quite private and sensitive insights and how to negotiate these spaces in myself, inner-outer, private-public, what do I want to share and in what way?

I’ve been also pondering about the constructed nature of blogging, and its relationship to ‘documentary’ modes of images making – I see the parallel where both on the surface seem ‘naturalistic’ and spontaneous, but in fact, like everything else are edited, constructed and on one level fictional. It is the fictional that has been intriguing me more and more, in relation to my practice and to the practice of anthropologists/sociologists/ ethnographers (hope they don’t mind me bracketing them so closely). I recall a conversation with an anthropologist, who told me that when he is doing ‘fieldwork’ he almost becomes another person, more outgoing, listening intently to what others are saying.

I can relate to that space and the persona one adopts, as in some of my work I directly engage with people, either to photograph or interview them. This ‘guest’ space has allowed me to adopt an inner new position, and from this new space, listen more intently. It is as if I park my usual everyday self, with its insistence on self-referencing aside, in order to truly hear this person, for who and what they are, without ‘me’ in the way. Working for example with my mother and grandmother, on some of my previous project, this positioning created a space for listening them and allowing them to be who they are, in a way pausing the learnt reactions, accumulated from the past. Perhaps, it is a way of pausing time, the past, and letting the present in.

It may sound deceptively easy when written like this, but the boundary of the ‘ethnographer’ self, ‘artist’ self, and all the other ones, ‘daughter’, etc, are fluid, and in constant negotiation. It is these negotiations of power, (mis)understandings, language, translation, and ultimetly representation, that I am interested in.