Nicoline van Harskamp
D+T Project, Brussels, Belgium
When Dutch anarchist Karl Max Kreuger died in 1999, he left behind an archive of thousands of letters from like-minded people all over the world. His international correspondence, now stored in the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam, offers an interesting insight into various strands of anarchist thinking. Dutch artist Nicoline van Harskamp – whose work has displayed her interest in the relation between politics and language – became fascinated by Kreuger’s archive. Because the material can’t be copied or borrowed from the Institute, she spent hours going through the thousands of letters and copying extracts by hand. Her selections form the basis of ‘Yours in Solidarity’, an ongoing project through which Van Harskamp investigates anarchism as an ideology and the idiosyncratic ways it is interpreted by its followers. Though the notion of ‘reanimating the archive’ is all too often a hollowed-out cliché in contemporary art, Van Harskamp manages to use this archival material to create a convincing portrait of anarchy’s proponents. She even studied the correspondents’ handwriting in order to gain insight into their psyches.
At D+T Project in Brussels, she presented the first chapter from this larger work-in-progress, focusing specifically on Belgian correspondents. (Other presentations will follow later in London, New York, Berlin, Zagreb and Amsterdam.) One of the gallery’s walls is covered with copied letters from the archive, offering a first encounter with the different protagonists, whose observations range from revolutionary theories to banal statements. While going through these notes, one stumbles upon certain phrases that recur in an accompanying video projection in which one can hear – and read – Van Harksamp discussing the letters with actors she asked to portray the various characters. In a joint process of interpretation and speculation, Van Harskamp asks the actors to imagine how these characters would have developed in our present society, posing questions like, ‘Do you think he had problems with the law?’ The result of this interpretative process is presented in a related two-channel video (Yours in Solidarity, Episode 1, 2010), in which one recognizes echoes of phrases from ‘Bojan’, who complained in his letters that his Marxist activities are restricted to organizing meetings. In the video, an actor portraying Bojan pronounces his revolutionary theories from behind the counter of an electrical shop. A certain ‘Robert’ is trying to fight the system while at the same time working for the government. He realizes this might sound contradictory, but it offers him the possibility to make real changes every now and then.
Deliberately operating through the bias of speculation and fiction, Van Harskamp does manage to convincingly resurrect the various anarchists, their political views and personal doubts. Though working with decades-old archival documents could potentially yield dry results, her project does not lack humour: Van Harskamp is not afraid to highlight the way lofty ideals and banal daily reality are closely intertwined. The previously mentioned Robert, for instance, concludes his report on a failed 1st of May action with the words: ‘But the food was good.’
Sam Steverlynck
Responses
There are no responses yet for this article.
