SEMI-DETACHED GER WITH A GARDEN

Experience of Self, Commuity and Environment in Urbanizing Mongolia

DA Dissertation, Pori School of Art and Media, University of Art and Design

Semi-detached Ger with a Garden: Experience of Self, Community and Environment through Urbanizing Mongolia

This dissertation has its background in an artist-initiative exhibition and travel project in which together with five other artists and one philosopher we travelled to Mongolia to make an exhibition with the aim of making contacts with local artists and to make ourselves face something radically different from the world and life we led at home. The project was motivated by a concern for personal and collective experience people have in relation to their surroundings: sensual, mental and social. In other words by asking how do different cultures, different economical systems, landscapes and historical backgrounds produce different conceptual, material and social structures and thus experiences of the world? These concerns have shifted and taken many forms during the past four years, but also remain at the heart of the project.

At the moment the aim of my dissertation is to reflect on in which ways and to what extent art exchange projects, that combine art, aesthetics and urbanism in Mongolia and Northern Europe, can create situations and contexts in which these varying experiences can come into contact with one another, affect one another and produce (self-) awareness and alternatives to what could be termed everyday life transparency. As a research hypothesis I have that artistic practice/research can create an ’affirmative space’ in which it is possible to bring forth and together issues and experiences otherwise difficult to combine or to grasp, verbalise and/or visualise and thus possibly mediate such awareness across social power structures and cultural breaks.

The research builds up from three interlacing fields of practice: 1) organisational work including curating and facilitating exhibitions, residency projects and editing publications for these, 2) own artistic practice in form of installation, video and photographic work and 3) conceptual reflection on the experience of self, community and environment as they emerge from the above mentioned projects.

Site of Research and Some Issues Arising There From
Mongolia and especially its capital Ulaanbaatar, where I have visited for a few months every year since 2005, have become the site of the research through which the experiences of both the Mongolians and the Western participants of the projects come into focus. The aim is not to study the city as an object in itself, but rather to use it as a culmination point, a point of view or a plane through which we can become aware of our varying evaluations, conceptualisations and practices.

Mongolia and the city of Ulaanbaatar combine in a unique way pastoral nomadism, still practiced in the country, Lamaist-Buddhist and shamanistic cosmologies, Soviet Modernism and recent change into market economy and the havoc this is wreaking on the urban structure as well as that of the social. In the city relations of ideologies and the physical environment become very tactile and visible. Everything being in a process of radical change people are forced to become aware of their fundamental relations to their environment, other people, other nations. When life becomes impossible to continue ‘as until now’ people are forced to actively, everyday, ask themselves what kind of a world do we live in or want to live in? And whose is the responsibility of how the world becomes?

Through the meeting of Western and Central Asian ideals and realities one point of focus has formed around the discrepancy of urban design / city planning discussions and practices between the 1st and the 3rd worlds. As most current urban design is concerned with enlivening environments and creating connections, the solutions proposed for the 3rd world living in non-modernised environments repeat much of what has generally been acknowledged as a failure in modernistic planning. Urban design/planning that singularly aims at efficient problem solving fails to grasp the heuristic knowledge existing in the societies/environments in question. Open-ended research/ art can function as a channel to reach this tacit knowledge of inhabitants and make it visible thus creating both self-consciousness in the inhabitants and understanding in the design and policy makers.

In trying to understand Mongolian and European sense for quality of life concepts such as dignity and elegance have arisen alongside those of ethic and economic considerations. These bring forth basic questions of what humanity is considered to mean and where humanity should be heading in its relation toward itself (its different “worlds”) and environment in local and global and universal scale. I am at the moment writing these thoughts into two articles titled On Mongolian Elegance – or how to Cope with Scarcity and Chaos with Grace and On Nomadic Urbanism and Other Oxymorons to Learn From. Both of these texts try to address the idea that the Modern (Enlightenment based) ideal of order and total control in all fields of life has left us with a certain rigidity that does not make life better; that in all its well-meaning that project has not been innocent in anyway. My intent is to reflect on some aspects of the Mongolian ways of dealing with the irrationality and uncontrollability of (natural and human) life as well as the nomadic relations to material things, the movement, storage and usage of them in contradiction to those of Western/Modernistic ones.

In the curatorial process working with or without institutions of varying kinds, facilitating and funding projects in cultures with fundamentally differing cultural infrastructures and economies have also created juxtapositions and insights of flexibility and rigidity in many ways. In trying to make things possible and meaningful both for funding bodies, exhibiting institutions and the participants questions arise as to i.e. how do you make these platforms possible and effective without making them into something with a permanent or rigid state? How do you use the support of an institution and still have space for production and circulation in an experimental and flexible way? On the other hand, how do you have a certain continuity without the support of an institution?

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