“She is a trouble maker! And they have thousands of non-trouble-makers.”
Interview with Marina Gržinić, Emma Hedditch, and Klub Zwei/Jo Schmeiser
Do you mean that it’s important to move beyond discourse and start to change structures?
Marina Gržinić: No, this is not our invention; it is not an academic invention. It is coming out of direct and precise struggles that were conducted by positions that didn’t have a voice but actually understood very clearly that the only possibility is this struggle for agency and the struggle for the reconstitution of the social-political-epistemological space. And now, those positions are still not integrated, practically, while others already have developed new discourses, let’s say, the white paradigm, the regime of whiteness, and are actually capitalizing on this. And I thought that this warning that she quite recently formulated is something that has to be taken very seriously. And one interesting case is Operation Spring, because we are speaking in Austria, and Operation Spring was the biggest let’s say horrifying post-Nazi situation, when they were cleansing the specific immigrant Nigerian population here in Austria, when after this was over, after the fight and the engagement of the black community, what happened? They made a film and in the film we don’t have even one representative of this community speaking about what was going on; instead, they are only speaking because they were in prison. And the formulation of the fight, the struggle, the economic argument, the framework, is actually coming from white discourse.
[…] My point was simply to say that if we have this relationship, this means we have to completely rethink the place from where we are speaking. So that means rethinking the theses that happen when we’re talking about interventionist practices, it’s a part of art to rethink, […] that’s what I call a radical critical practice, what is it that we do? And not just as a rhetorical question.
Emma Hedditch: […] I do think this is something that happens in the teaching practice and in the field of curating; the question to learn is not to assume your own position in history as the only and central place to work from. This is all I can say about it. In terms of appropriation or talking about practices you see, are recognized as coming from a different history than your own […], but still, we have to be careful and think how we introduce that into the institutions that we are involved in […].
Klub Zwei/Jo Schmeiser: You [Marina] talked about this film Operation Spring and I understand what you mean because when you see the film it’s made by two white people and you can look at the film and you can criticize: Who is making this film? From which position, and is this position described in the film, is it shown, is it a topic or not? And I would say no, it’s not at all a topic in the film, the topic is Black people and the way they are treated in Austria, to sum it up in a nutshell. […] And I think for me, when I do something, now I really have this approach of positioning myself in relation to it and making this relationship a discussion. What does it mean when I go and make a movie about Operation Spring? From which position do I talk about the subject? […] So you really have to look in detail at the ways in which you are making a documentary film or other piece of work.
Marina Gržinić: This was my point. […] This is very important when someone reads it and thinks “oh another preaching of modernist art…” or if we think instead, and reflect on what we actually say and why we are saying it.
Marina Gržinić, Emma Hedditch, Klub Zwei, Laila Huber, Rosa Reitsamer, Elke Zobl ( 2014): “She is a trouble maker! And they have thousands of non-trouble-makers.”. Interview with Marina Gržinić, Emma Hedditch, and Klub Zwei/Jo Schmeiser. In: p/art/icipate – Kultur aktiv gestalten # 04 , https://www.p-art-icipate.net/she-is-a-trouble-maker-and-they-have-thousands-of-non-trouble-makers/
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