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M eg aevent Cities ART/AUDIENCES/AFTERMATHS
Edi t ed by PETER DICKINSON, KIRSTY JOHNSTON, and KEREN ZAIONTZ
CONTENTS
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INTRODuCTION MEGA-EVENT CITIES: ART/AuDIENCES/AFTERMATHS Peter Dickinson, Kirsty Johnston, and Keren Zaiontz
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MEDIA ARCHAEOLOGIES OF THE OLYMPIC CITY Angela Piccini
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INELASTIC OLYMPIC HOPEFULS: RHYTHMIC MIS-INTERPEllATION IN THREE AuDITIONS FOR THE lONDON 2012 CEREMONIES Keren Zaiontz
PART 1: VANCOuVER 2010 13
HOSTS AND GUESTS Lorna Brown
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THE ILLUSION OF INCLUSION: AgENDA 21 AND THE COMMODIFICATION OF INDIgENOuS CulTuRE IN OlYMPIC gAMES Janice Forsyth
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“YOU JUST CENSORED TWO NATIVE ARTISTS”: DISEASED lOgICS AND ANTI-OlYMPIC RESISTANCE Jennifer Adese
PART 2: lONDON 2012 49
OLYMPIAN PERFORMANCE: THE CulTuRAl ECONOMICS OF THE OPENINg CEREMONY OF lONDON 2012 Michael McKinnie
PART 3: REFlECTIONS ON ART AND ACTIVISM AFTER THE “BIg SHOw” 90
BATTLE FOR A BRAVE NEW WORLD Jenny Sealey
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PUBLIC ART AS COLLECTIVE PRACTICE: A CONVERSATION wITH NEVIllE gABIE Neville Gabie and Keren Zaiontz
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THE AESTHETICS OF AUSTERITY: A CONVERSATION wITH lIZ CROw Liz Crow and Keren Zaiontz
PART 4: SuSPENDINg FREEDOM, SuSTAININg SPECTAClE: MEgA-EVENT CITIES, PAST AND PRESENT
REVIEwS ExHIBITION REVIEwS 182
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CALGARY (1988): A CulTuRAl OlYMPIAD AVANT LA LETTRE Susan Bennett
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OLYMPIC HOMONATIONALISMS Heather Sykes
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ALL THAT GLITTERS: SPORT, BP, AND REPRESSION IN AZERBAIJAN (“THE gREAT COMINg OuT PARTY OF AZERBAIJAN” AND “wHAT THE MARRIAgE HAS CREATED”) Emma Hughes and James Marriott (Platform)
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STATES OF NO EXCEPTION: ExPO 2015 IN MIlANO Urban Subjects
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FIGURES (2015)—MASS SCULPTURAL DURATIONAL PERFORMANCE Liz Crow
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COLLECTIVE BREATH POSTER Neville Gabie
NICHOLA FELDMAN-KISS, WITNESS Noor Alé
BOOK REVIEwS 185
THE ART AND POLITICS OF ASGER JORN: THE AVANT-GARDE WON’T GIVE UP, KAREN KURCZYNSKI Pehr Englén
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A THEORY OF THE DRONE, GRÉGOIRE CHAMAYOU Genne Speers
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BREAKING AND ENTERING: THE CONTEMPORARY HOUSE CUT, SPLICED, AND HAUNTED, BRIDGET ELLIOTT, ED. Melanie Wilmink
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SURFACE: MATTERS OF AESTHETICS, MATERIALITY, AND MEDIA, GIULIANA BRUNO Nick White
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BIOgRAPHIES
Construction on the 2010 Athletes’ Village, South False Creek, Vancouver, September 2008. Photo: Peter Dickinson.
INTRODuCTION
MEgA-EVENT CITIES Art/Audiences/Aftermaths PETER DICKINSON, KIRSTY JOHNSTON, AND KEREN ZAIONTZ
Just over a year ago, as Toronto was gearing up for the 2015 Pan Am and Parapan Am Games, pundits were lamenting what appeared to be the overwhelming lack of enthusiasm, if not outright hostility, among local citizens toward the mega-event. Stories of anticipated traffic nightmares and delays besetting the new Union-Pearson Express dominated the news; the discovery of an underground tunnel near York University’s Rexall Centre, site of the tennis competitions, raised security alarms; ticket sales for sporting events were at a standstill; and everywhere people seemed to be asking why all this fuss for what was cast as a second-tier sporting showcase, a consolation prize awarded to the city as a result of previous unsuccessful Olympic and Paralympic Games bids. What a difference a few weeks make. By the end of July, with Canada having finished second to the United States in the medal standings, and after what seemed like a non-stop nightly party in Nathan Phillips Square, Mayor John Tory was openly mulling a civic bid for the 2024 Summer Olympics. In the end, however, the deadline came and went. How to explain this megaevent temporality: from doubtful and indifferent build-up, to heedless in-the-moment excitement, to sober aftermath? More specifically, what role does art play in soliciting audiences’ participation in the “eventness” of the mega-event and, as importantly, how can art’s precarity and ephemerality provide us with additional insights about post-evental revanchist development narratives in and of the city (the disappearance of all those live sites, the retrenchment of budgets following the flows of special event monies, etc.)? These and other questions form the basis of this special issue. In 2000, sociologist Maurice Roche coined the term “mega-events” to describe large-scale events like the Olympic Games, World Expo, and World Cup. Global mega-events, according to Roche, are organized by multiple levels of government, multinational corporations, and armslength national and international nongovernmental organizations that partner to stage events of “dramatic character” and “mass popular appeal.”1 While a diverse body of work analyzes the social impacts and legacies of Olympic Games and World Expos, strikingly little attention has been paid to how art and cultural programs articulate the agendas of urban mega-events. A notable exception is Monika Kin Gagnon and Janine Marchessault’s recent volume examining the film programming at Expo 67 in Montreal. As the contributors to Reimagining Cinema make clear, expanded, multi-screen, and immersive cinematic environments at Expo 67 were key to articulating the fair’s larger aesthetic, architectural, and philosophical ideas about integrated urban environments.2 They also prefigured in many important ways our current digital age, including, as Angela Piccini notes in her essay for this issue of PUBLIC, the now ubiquitous uses of screens and screen technologies at mega-events. Then, too, it is often at the site of opening and closing ceremonies, special cultural programming, and commissioned public art projects that
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PART 1 VANCOUVER 2010
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HOSTS AND guESTS LORNA BROWN
The sheer scale of the Games changes a body’s (and thus a practice’s or an idea’s) ability to speak or have impact, and bringing work into this arena requires massive creative adjustments. Perhaps central to this discussion, which on the surface is about funding levels and Olympic legacies, is the question of how a mega-event radically shifts the nature of public life, and thus its relationship to the creation of public art.1 –Vanessa Kwan Other Sights For Artists’ Projects Association is a collective of artists, curators, architects, and producers working collaboratively to present artworks, publications, events, and programs that consider the aesthetic, economic, and regulatory conditions of public places and public life.2 We work primarily in Vancouver, which is sited on unceded Coast Salish territory: the traditional lands of the Musqueam, Skwxwú7mesh, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. The development of all art in public spaces is overseen by the city government’s Public Art Program: civic projects at city buildings, greenways, parks, and other public spaces are funded through capital budgets while private sector projects are funded as public amenities in the re-zoning process, as a percentage of buildable square footage. In the lead-up to the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, the Public Art Program supported artist-initiated projects, through which artists themselves proposed sites that they considered relevant or fruitful contexts for permanent or temporary works of art.
FIGS. 1 and 2. Monument to Mysterious Fires, 2015. Photos: Marko Simcic.
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THE IlluSION OF INCluSION Agenda 21 and the Commodification of Indigenous Culture in Olympic games JANICE FORSYTH
One of our greatest challenges is that Indigenous participation is relatively new to the Olympic Movement—there is no template we can follow—no clear indicators for how we measure our success. Indigenous participation in past Games, such as Calgary and Salt Lake City, has focused primarily on ceremonies and cultural programs. We plan to go beyond that, to set the bar higher, with the hope that future Organizing Committees can be inspired and learn from our experience.1 –Gary Youngman, Consulting Director for Aboriginal Participation, VANOC 2010
Four Host First Nations Logo. Regulated by Fair Use. Courtesy of http://fourhostfirstnations.myshopify.com/.
Introduction In November 2009, several months before the opening of the Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games in Canada, a podcast I submitted to “Intellectual Muscle: University Dialogues for the Vancouver 2010 Games” was released amid some wrangling among organizers about its content. The program, co-sponsored by VANOC, the University of British Columbia, and The Globe and Mail, was made available free to the public through a digital forum, suggesting that Olympic officials welcomed critical insights on all matters concerning the Games. As for my contribution, the program leaders thought it was oppositional and shone an unfavourable light on the events in Vancouver. I was advised to adjust the content or it would be rejected. The institution where I worked at the time, the University of Alberta, argued for my right to free speech, pointing to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms for support. That line of argument worked nicely. Shortly after, the original podcast, titled “The Illusion of Inclusion,” was made available online.2 What was it about my talk that generated this concern? I proposed that what we were witnessing in Vancouver was the further entrenchment of unequal power relations that would intensify the expropriation of Indigenous lands and the commodification of their cultures for Olympic tourism first, and then broader commercial purposes later on. I pointed specifically to the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) Agenda 21: Sport for Sustainable Development as an example of how these unequal relations become institutionalized. While I agreed that Agenda 21 marked an important turning point in the history of Indigenous-Olympic relations for the way it focused attention on the need for more meaningful engagement with Indigenous people within the Olympic movement, I insisted that Agenda 21 was, more importantly, something to question and monitor because of the way it linked global sporting interests with the exploitation of Indigenous lands and cultures. In short, I argued that Agenda 21 and the precedent being set in Vancouver was a new mode of regulating the relationship between Indigenous people and Olympic organizers, and that this new arrangement prioritized commercial interests that did not necessarily align with or benefit Indigenous interests. The quote by Gary Youngman that was used to open this paper—about there being “no template” to follow and “no clear indicators” for measuring success—was misguided, if not disingenuous, since there are clear historical patterns suggesting things were not to be much better for Aboriginal people hoping to benefit from Vancouver 2010. The attempted censorship of my podcast is not that surprising given the pivotal role that Aboriginal people played in securing the 2010 Games, a fact that Olympic organizers readily and repeatedly acknowledged. On the one hand were the economic benefits of Aboriginal involvement for the host society. In 2007, news agencies were already referring to the Games as “brand Aboriginal,” with Jack Poole, Chairman of the Board for Vancouver 2010, stating that VANOC intended to make Canada’s First Nations as much a part of the Games as they could, “Not just because we should, but because it’s going to make our games more lively, more interesting, and more memorable.”3 On the other hand were the political benefits. Again, Poole’s words are instructive: “If it hadn’t been for the full support of the Four Host First Nations in our bid,” he said in 2009, “we likely wouldn’t be talking about Vancouver 2010 today.”4 Poole was certainly correct in pointing out the centrality of the Four Host First Nations (FHFN) to Vancouver winning the rights to host. The 2010 Games took place on unceded
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“YOu JuST CENSORED TwO NATIVE ARTISTS” Diseased logics and Anti-Olympic Resistance JENNIFER ADESE
Emblazoned on buildings, spray-painted onto banners, printed onto posters and pamphlets, and spread across activist websites—the thunderbird image created by Kwakwakwa’kw artist and activist Gord Hill and TsuuT’ina/Nak’azdli artist and activist Riel Manywounds is, in many ways, an iconic image. This thunderbird was born from and reflective of resistance to the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympic Games. Karen-Marie Elah Perry and Helen Hyunji Kang argue that the thunderbird was a counter-discursive logo that sat in opposition to images produced from within the Games via the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Winter Games (VANOC).1 Yet the thunderbird also, and perhaps more importantly, exists as a counter-discursive image in relation to the Four Host First Nations (FHFN). Hill and Manywounds’s thunderbird is a visual critique of FHFN’s official logo—a logo intended to signal Indigenous participation and partnership within the formal structures of the Vancouver 2010 Olympics. The thunderbird does more than counter other images; it does more than serve as a mark of Indigenous opposition to the Olympics; and it does more than signal a contrast to Indigenous collusion with the Games. The thunderbird works to draw attention to the way that the Olympics, and all forms of collusion with it, are underpinned by diseased logics, by ways of being in the world that are emblematic of what Powhatan-Renapé and Lenape scholar Jack Forbes terms “wétiko psychosis.” This article begins by connecting Forbes’s argument to the Olympics, viewing the Games through the lens of wétiko psychosis. In doing so it also draws on the work of Jules Boykoff who argues that the Olympics are reflective of a distinct form of “celebration capitalism.” To demonstrate how celebration capitalism is a diseased logic that seeps into Indigenous communities, this article focuses on formal relations between the primary body of Olympic stakeholders and what came to be known throughout the 2010 Olympic process as the FHFN. Following this analysis of relations, I then turn to consider those who stand outside of these agreements and partnerships. In particular, I focus on the organization No2010: No Olympics on Stolen Native Land, whose founder Gord Hill is, as was previously mentioned, one of the people principally responsible for the thunderbird image’s creation and its circulation. Through a contextualization of the thunderbird’s meaning to anti-Olympic resistance more widely, I argue that, in many ways, the thunderbird is a potent inoculation against, and treatment for, infection with wétiko psychosis. Rather than existing as a simple “brand” created to mark anti-Olympic resistance, the thunderbird exists above and beyond the Games, as both vaccine and antidote to capitalism, and specifically the form of celebration capitalism visited on Indigenous peoples by the Olympics.
Diseased logics, celebration capitalism, and the Vancouver Olympics In Columbus and Other Cannibals, Jack Forbes argues that while they have changed over time, forms of exploitation such as colonization and imperialism persist. They are entangled in such a
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FIG. 3. No2010. “Anti-Olympic Convergence” (2010). Courtesy of the Vancouver City Archives, Vancouver, BC. Photo: Jennifer Adese
PART 2 LONDON 2012
OlYMPIAN PERFORMANCE The Cultural Economics of the Opening Ceremony of london 2012 MICHAEL MCKINNIE
Introduction The 2012 Olympic Games commenced in London in spectacular fashion, with a three-and-a-half hour opening ceremony staged by Danny Boyle, the theatre and cinema director best known for his Academy Award-winning film, Slumdog Millionaire. The ceremony’s set-piece show, Isles of Wonder, was performed by a professional and community cast of over 7,500 in the newly-built, 80,000 seat Olympic Stadium in the city’s East End.1 Budgeted at a cost of approximately £27 million and lasting about 90 minutes, the show offered a succession of extravagantly staged scenes depicting different moments in British history, densely packed with references to British historical events and cultural figures (from the Industrial Revolution to the founding of the National Health Service to the creation of the World Wide Web, and from William Shakespeare to Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling to Mr. Bean, among others). As a performance event alone, Isles of Wonder was a hugely impressive undertaking, not only in terms of the inventiveness and scale of its staging but also in terms of the sheer amount of organizational skill involved in bringing it off. In the United Kingdom, media commentators almost universally applauded Isles of Wonder, regardless of their own political leanings or those of the outlets in which their work appeared.2 They generally agreed that it was entirely apt to lead the piece with a major scene entitled “Green and Pleasant Land,” accompanied by the familiar music to which Sir Hubert Parry set Blake’s poem, “Jerusalem.” Although the poem (and the longer, separate work that goes by the same name) is a significant example of English radical romanticism, Parry’s popular musical adaptation has historically been associated with very different types of political projects and institutions in Britain: the poem was originally set to music during World War I in the hope of boosting national morale; it was adopted by the suffragist movement; it is the anthem of the Women’s Institute; Clement Atlee used its final verse as a campaign slogan during Labour’s successful election campaign in 1945 and it is still sung regularly at Labour Party conferences (but it has also been sung at Conservative Party conferences); every year it concludes the 49
MEDIA ARCHAEOlOgIES OF THE OlYMPIC CITY ANGELA PICCINI
Introduction To paraphrase the title of John David Rhodes and Elena Gorfinkel’s edited collection, Olympic moving images and their associated large and small screen manifestations in the city take place.1 They present, are generated within, are distributed across, and viewed from specific places. Yet, how is this taking and making of place through screen media and their technical assemblages of screen and urban infrastructures understood in the interdisciplinary Olympic studies literature? Histories of the Olympic Games have discussed the mega-event as an urban and global growth engine,2 and as a hotbed of cultural3 and technological innovation.4 Still, from the earliest television broadcasts in 1936 to the first use of full stadium floor projection mapping at Vancouver 2010, the cities themselves, as media and mediating technologies, are often obscured by grand narratives of progress and/or ideology.5 Moreover, as media scholar Erkki Huhtamo suggests, there has been surprisingly little attention paid to the urban landscapes of both private and public screens, and camera technologies as visual culture.6 This paper therefore asks: how might the myriad screens that produce the Olympic Games be approached in ways that generate new understandings of the Olympic city? Why might newer methods for engaging with Olympic screen assemblages be necessary, and how might these methods have an impact more broadly on the study of screen media? How have media forms appeared in literature on the Olympic Games? The scholarship spans representationalist approaches that understand media narratives and technologies as signifying the coercive control of the state and corporate interests through increasingly hyperbolic spectacles and surveillance,7 and Foucaultian considerations of the ways that media iteratively mark and perform bodies (human and non-human), which seemingly sediment “innocent” matter with systems of knowledge.8 Important attempts to understand the complexities of the Olympic event emerge from the broad field of performance studies. Arne Martin Klausen’s edited collection9 is an early consideration of the Olympic Games as cultural performance that includes screen media. In his contribution to the volume, Odd Are Berkaak argued that the Games could be thought of as “mega-drama.” In this mega-drama, in the wake of the Olympic event, national identity becomes not a genealogy or a destiny, but a project whose prime capacity is adaptability, rather than continuity or authenticity.10 Sociologist Maurice Roche’s groundbreaking work on the Olympics as mega-event11 focused specifically on the narrative structure and theatricality of the Games. In more recent scholarship, theatre and performance researchers Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo,12 art historian Anna Dell’Aria,13 and dance scholar Kate Elswit14 have explored the potent entanglements of the Olympic Games’s cultural performances, questions of place, and media infrastructures as they produce the Olympic event and, in turn, the different sets of cultural
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MEGA-EVENT CITIES PICCINI
Bromley-by-Bow tube station. Creative Commons license. Photo: Kake (Flickr handle): https://flic.kr/p/2X41Sf.
INElASTIC OlYMPIC HOPEFulS Rhythmic Mis-Interpellation in Three Auditions for the london 2012 Ceremonies KEREN ZAIONTZ
Everything in the Olympic and Paralympic Games begins and ends with the fact of the body. The most visible body is the athlete, who, depending on the competition, must demonstrate her physical singularity through contests that measure speed, flexibility, and strength. What the body of the athlete communicates is technical mastery since not every body can conform to the highoctane demands of Olympic and Paralympic competition. It is this extraordinary physical difference between the pole vaulter or track and field star and ourselves that binds the athlete to her nation. We may be lumpish and physically inhospitable flag wavers, but the body who sprints past the finish line—the body to whom we have aligned ourselves through unabashed cheering and war paint—is temporarily in our hold. Her movements are taken to be signs of our national greatness. Or, if the doping tests prove positive, our national shame. Whatever the outcome of the competition, the body of the athlete does not belong to her alone; her physical demonstration organizes the nation. Just as the body of the athlete is not private territory, so too are the dancing bodies in the mass spectacles that bookend the Games. These volunteer performers also experience a shift from being a body to “the body” through choreographic maneuvers in mass cast scenes broadcast to millions of viewers.1 Registering as a sign of Olympic spectacle is part of a larger history of politically potent displays of national unity. The 1936 Berlin Olympics remains a testament to how “the body” was expressly used to articulate a mass celebration of totalitarian power through the repetition (spontaneous and staged) of the Nazi Heil in the Olympiastadion.2 But even beyond totalitarian regimes, people are drawn in the thousands to make massively scaled synchronous performances without ever being explicitly compelled to by the state. Seizing upon that desire to move together, the Olympic movement and its host nations regularly submit volunteer participants to the choreographic ambitions of official narratives. It was at the site of the 2012 London Olympic and Paralympic Games that I experienced these maneuvers firsthand. This was a Games where top-down policies of the body were enacted by athletes, artists, and cultural policy-makers in a range of highly visible scenarios. In large-scale legacy projects such as Big Dance, in volunteer programs such as Games Makers, and in mass spectacles such as the staging of the opening and closing ceremonies, UK subjects gave visible, bodily form to the nation. In a statement that frames this visibility as transparency, Prime Minister David Cameron, in his 2012 New Year address to the nation, proclaimed: “This will be the year that Britain sees the world and the world sees Britain.”3 In this article, I recount how I attempted to realize Cameron’s aim to see and be seen. Between November 2011 and March 2012, I participated in three auditions for the Olympic and Paralympic opening and closing ceremonies in east London.4 Each time I journeyed on the
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MEGA-EVENT CITIES AUTHOR
PART 3 REFLECTIONS ON ART AND ACTIVISM AFTER THE “BIG SHOW” 89
BATTlE FOR A BRAVE NEw wORlD JENNY SEALEY
Since 1997, I have been CEO/Artistic Director of Graeae Theatre, UK’s flagship disabled-led professional theatre company. I was also the Co-Artistic Director of the London 2012 Paralympic Opening Ceremony with Bradley Hemmings. This was the first time in history that a Deaf woman and a disabled man have been artistic leaders of such a prestigious event. The whole process from start to finish was an extraordinary rollercoaster fuelled with passion to create the most accessible and diverse ceremony ever. It was also fuelled by fear that we would fuck up. It was only when I was asked to speak at the Life and Death of the Arts in Cities After Mega Events conference in Vancouver at Simon Fraser University a whole year later, that the magnitude of what we had been through and what we had achieved hit me. The week after the 2012 ceremony, I went to a Disability Arts conference in Washington, D.C.. When I came home, my son left for film school, my partner became very ill, and then his ill father moved into our very tiny flat for seven months. It was also time to get back to business at Graeae. I struggled to find my place within the company as the general attitude was “we managed for the last five months without you.” So, I had to earn my stripes once again. I now realize that I had no time to ride the wave of euphoria, or to reflect on or evaluate the success of the ceremony, nor did I have time to sleep. Real life took over. I held onto that tiredness for almost a whole year, right until after the Vancouver conference. I stayed in the city for an extra week. On that first night, I cried for 14 hours and then slept for the other ten hours and then, only then, did I start to have perspective on the journey we had all taken. I was a jobbing actor for ten years and being a director had never been on my agenda. Becoming the Co-Artistic Director of a ceremony was so far off my radar that I am still staggered by how I fought to get this gig. I fought because I was incensed that a non-disabled organization was initially appointed. For me, it was crucial that the Paralympic Opening Ceremony was led by disabled people to marry sport and arts through the shared experience and aesthetics of being disabled. Further, the UK is a world leader in Disability Arts, and not to recognize this felt patronizing and dismissive. I was a woman on a mission to correct this omission. The original team pulled out. After a series of intensive interviews, on 24 June, my son became 17 years old, and it was publicly announced that Bradley and I would be Co-Artistic Directors of the London 2012 Paralympic Opening Ceremony! Our 2012 office was a breezeblock room at Three Mills, Bow in East London. On our first day we were surrounded by white walls, save for a sheet of paper with the words “Oh Brave New World, that has such beauteous creatures in it” (a quote from Miranda in The Tempest) typed on it. It was this quote—Miranda meeting new people and not judging—which clinched the job. This was not only because, by sheer fluke, Danny Boyle (Opening Ceremony) and Kim Gavin (both Closing Ceremonies) had also quoted The Tempest in their interviews, but also because it confirmed our approach to present a theatrical narrative placing Deaf and disabled people at the helm, and challenging the world’s perception of disability. First, however, we had to ensure that
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MEGA-EVENT CITIES SEALEY
The Limbless Knight— a Tale of Rights Reignited Left: Performers Lyndsay Watterson, Sophie Partridge, Ailsa Ilott, Chisato Minamimura, Cassandra Harris. Right: Performers Jeni Draper and Pat Povis (ground), Sean Gittens and Jez Scarratt (poles). Photo: Keren Zaiontz.
PuBlIC ART AS COllECTIVE PRACTICE A Conversation with Neville gabie NEVILLE GABIE AND KEREN ZAIONTZ
Neville Gabie is standing at the western most edge of Europe in his Sunday best. The skies are predictably gray in County Galway, Ireland, the site of the Mace Head Atmospheric Research Station. While the facilities are home to aerosol, gas, and meteorological equipment, Gabie has opted to bring his own instrument to the research station. As one of the key global centres that collect data on climate change, Mace Head could be mistaken for two holiday cottages dotting the shore were it not for the 10 metre high meteorological tower straddled between them. The laboratories at Mace Head are literally measuring our planetary crisis by recording the alarmingly high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But even as they record the massive concentration of gases and aerosols trapping everything from plants to people in human generated heat, there are no alarms issuing from Mace Head. Measuring crisis is not the same as declaring an emergency. Perhaps that is what makes Gabie’s project, Collective Breath (2014), so compelling. Part readymade, part unclassifiable wind instrument, the sculptural dimension of Collective Breath took the form of a pressurized tank that Gabie attached to a wooden instrument with a long neck and conical bore rivaling a sousaphone. Gabie’s self-fashioned instrument was not on permanent or even temporary display, but transported to Mace Head where he installed it beside the station in order to release—or, more accurately, play—the gases stored in the tank. As the selected site and the scene of the sonic event, Mace Head is “one of the most important stations globally for monitoring long-term trends in climate and air quality indicators and products.”1 Gabie’s Dr. Seuss-like instrument was not so much an addition to Mace Head’s facility as it was a dedicated site for listening that would not go unnoticed, since the gases (now transduced into sound) would be measured along with the insupportable amounts of carbon currently being pumped into the atmosphere. In the interview printed here, Gabie describes the sound of Collective Breath as a “warning note” released into the skies over the Atlantic ocean. The oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide sounded urgent—the sonic equivalent to the reports issued by the United Nations intergovernmental panel on climate change—like a foghorn warning us of the dangers ahead. Composed of the breath of 1,111 people, all of whom were asked to suggest “release” locations, Collective Breath is indicative of Gabie’s ongoing commitment to archiving collective experiences and responses. Gathered at the 2014 WOMAD World Music Festival in the UK, the collective breath of the festivalgoers was one part of Gabie’s commission for WOMAD entitled, Experiments in Black and White.2 It was festival goer and breath contributor, Anita, who suggested Mace Head. The full slate of proposed locations are recorded in a poster included in this issue of PUBLIC and constitute one piece of the Collective Breath archive. The other archival piece had a much shorter shelf life as a sound work and lasted under one hour, or the length it took to “voice” the collective breath. Gabie used this short window of time to reflect on the multiplicity
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THE AESTHETICS OF AuSTERITY A Conversation with liz Crow LIZ CROW AND KEREN ZAIONTZ
Anti-Atos armband: Atos Kills (2012). Photo: Molly Crow/Roaring Girl Productions.
Keren Zaiontz: Let’s start with the moment of the London Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2012. You visited the Olympic Park in east London wearing a homemade anti-Atos armband and then circulated an image of yourself wearing the armband online. Atos was the French IT firm initially contracted by the Tory-led coalition government (to the tune of £112.4m) to slash disability benefits that included claimants diagnosed with terminal illnesses. Atos’s morally suspect assessments and tribunals have resulted in serious distress and even death for thousands of claimants in the UK. Your simple gesture of (covert) protest in the Park was particularly important given that Atos was an official sponsor of the Paralympic Games.
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MEGA-EVENT CITIES CROW + ZAIONTZ
Liz Crow: The armband was the product of my overlapping personal and political roles. I'm an artist-activist that works in public spaces. I do that work (and was also present in the Park) as a visibly disabled person, and an ill person, and as somebody receiving benefits. Knowing that the Games were probably a once-in-a-lifetime experience, I wanted to take my daughter. I booked the tickets with all the qualms connected to the branding of the Games, but only then did the Atos involvement come to light. I had this push and pull between honouring the commitment to my child, and honouring myself, and my commitment to activism. I think there was a kind of unspoken assumption that anybody who went to the Games enjoyed themselves, and cheered on the athletes, agreed wholeheartedly with what was going on. There weren’t many ways to both join in and object. In the end, I realized one way to square my ambivalence was to challenge Atos within the Park. That’s how I came to the idea of the armband as a political statement, but also to resolving the ethics of my being at a Games sponsored by Atos. I confess, I didn’t wear it the whole time. I was juggling the fact that it wasn’t just me there. I was with my child and I had to respect what she could cope with too. But it enabled me to know that I had made some kind of statement, that I had taken some kind of opposition to what was happening. What I did in the Park was low-key, but my daughter's photograph captured the armband with the Olympic stadium in the background. Once posted online, the action came into its own, helping to subvert the tide of pro-Paralympic rhetoric within and beyond the Olympic Park. KZ: The armband proved to be one of many actions in which you attempted to intervene in powerful images circulating in the print and online media that cast people with disabilities as either “scroungers” or “superhumans.” LC: At the time, what I was seeing was a collision of different images and ideas in the press. While the Paralympic Games network Channel 4 promoted the athletes as “superhumans” on billboards and other advertisements, other disabled people were being publicly castigated as scroungers and skivers. If we were, by definition, the opposite of the high-performance Para “superhuman,” then that made us subhuman. Disabled people receiving state support were experiencing an onslaught of propaganda against them. The superhumans campaign exaggerated that division because it showed claimants, by contrast, to be even more lacking, even more of a drain on society. An incredible pressure on an already vulnerable group now became greater, and the response from the public, from insults to hate crimes, escalated as a result. I was getting accosted in the streets by people who didn’t like the fact that I had a motor on my chair; who perceived me as being lazy in comparison to the athletes, telling me I should take a leaf out of their book. I think the propaganda made me and other people very much public property, being accosted in the street, inviting this open judgment. I’m talking about the athletes and people receiving assistance as two separate groups but there is, of course, a big overlap between the two. The majority of Para athletes also receive some sort of benefit, but that was written out of the narrative. There were these falsely separated communities: the good guys and the unspeakable other. The people needing some form of social support were automatically stamped as failures, whereas the other group, the superhumans, were also being set up to fail because they simply couldn’t meet those kinds of pedestal criteria. They
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PART 4 SUSPENDING FREEDOM, SUSTAINING SPECTACLE: MEGA-EVENT CITIES, PAST AND PRESENT
CAlgARY (1988) A Cultural Olympiad avant la lettre SUSAN BENNETT
Scholarly interrogations of large-scale events such as Olympic Games and World Expositions have tended to focus on both intrinsic and instrumental attributes of event programming as well as their immediate impacts on audiences, places, representational trajectories, and local and national policy. Fewer studies have assessed the aftermath of these large-scale and ambitious occasions beyond the financial outcomes. As Matthew Zimbalist points out, “perennial claims that hosting the Olympics or the World Cup is an engine of economic development find little corroboration in independent studies.”1 Famously, the Olympic Stadium built for the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal was only fully paid for 30 years and $1.5 billion later. Yet, it is typical— perhaps obligatory—for those involved in the planning of a mega-event to speak enthusiastically about an event’s potential to generate a “legacy.” Indeed, mega-event rhetoric has come to promise a dizzying array of significant impacts for host cities. But whether or not those impacts are achieved, the ever-accelerating calendar of mega-events continues to direct attention—be it public, corporate, media, governmental, or international—towards the next big thing. Brazil had barely waved off the thousands of soccer fans for the World Cup before the Olympics arrived on its horizon. 2015 was the year of a major World Exposition in Milan, which was uniquely twinned with the long-standing mega-event of the Venice Biennale. The next World Exposition in Dubai 2020 is already heavily advertised across the United Arab Emirates. 2016 is the year of the next Summer Games and of “Shakespeare 400” (celebrations to mark the quadricentennial of the playwright’s death) with major cultural events not restricted to the obvious venues of London and Stratford but planned worldwide, and on it goes. So, to turn my attention back to the XVth Winter Games in 1988 in Calgary is something akin to time travel—to remember an event before the “mega” prefix had become normative, before a rhetoric of legacy was commonplace, and before the Olympic rings were (as Stephen Wenn, Robert Barney, and Scott Martyn have so trenchantly put it) “tarnished”2 by the Salt Lake City scandal and by the increasing and extraordinary personal fortunes amassed by individual members of the International Olympic Committee. This essay retrieves the history of an ambitious arts festival, made possible by the platform of the Games, so as to examine both the experience of that event and its importance for Calgary. I address the artistic, cultural, and political concerns that shaped and promoted the aspirations of a modestly sized prairie city to grow into a more significant place with the status and benefits of global recognition. At the same time, as I will illustrate, events at the festival revealed the city’s roots in European settler colonization, a history that violently subjugated First Nations peoples and converted Indigenous cultural traditions and practices into collectible objects directed towards a colonialist gaze. From an account of the general scope of the Olympic Arts Festival and its implications for local artists as well as the general Calgary population, I move, then, to a particular
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OlYMPIC HOMONATIONAlISMS HEATHER SYKES
Introduction At the end of the nineteenth century, European colonial governments and military empires developed the modern Olympics to create a sense of national belonging, strengthen militarized bodies, and to facilitate the exploitation of colonized people and lands. This underlying colonial logic continues in today’s highly corporatized sport mega-events, under the guise of neoliberalism, privatization, and securitization. Sport mega-events have grave social and economic consequences for local populations. In addition, because these mega-events take place in different host cities across the world, they are a unique form of “roving colonization.” Indigenous and anti-colonial activists protest how sport mega-events serve the interests of colonial and postcolonial elites. These protests are place-based, responding to harmful local impacts of sporting mega-events in a city or region. They are also part of more longstanding anti-colonial resistance by Indigenous people throughout modernity to maintain their sovereignties and territories, and to enact stewardship of the environment. During the twenty-first century, gay and lesbian social movements have increasingly advocated to be included as athletes and welcomed as spectators at the Olympics. Gay and lesbian inclusion in the Olympics offers a form of queer belonging to a momentous urban, civic event. Including (rather than excluding) sexual minorities from the Olympics is often taken to be a current indicator of a nation’s human rights. Sport mega-events also offer moments of spectacular pleasure, pride, and identification with the nation. Yet, being included in a highly corporatized, nationalist sport mega-event is only one type of inclusion, only one type of sexual politics within sport. It requires gay and lesbian sport groups to align themselves with neoliberal interests of both the nation-state and transnational corporations. This is the politics of “homonationalism.”1 This photo essay explores this tension between Indigenous anti-colonial protests and homonational politics in four Olympic cities: Vancouver, London, Sochi, and Rio de Janeiro. In Vancouver in 2010, there were massive protests against hosting an Olympics on First Nations territories that had never been ceded to the British Crown. In contrast, the gay winter sport groups operating in the ski resorts played a central role in forming the first LGBT “Pride Houses” at an Olympic games. This Canadian form of sporting homonationalism was based on white, settler colonial narratives about owning land and winter sports. In London in 2012, due to the bombing of the public transit system the day after London won the bid to host the games, national enthusiasm for the Olympics went hand in hand with increased anti-terrorism securitization and militarization of East London. Inclusion in the London Olympics meant capitulating to the militarization of the city—which was based on both populist and state-sanctioned Islamophobia. This, in turn, went hand in hand with neoliberalism. Exemployees of the investment bank Goldman Sachs were hired to manage LGBT diversity for the
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MEGA-EVENT CITIES SYKES
Drilling Rigs off Sixov Beach, south of Baku. Photo: Jahangir Yusif.
“THE gREAT COMINg-OuT PARTY OF AZERBAIJAN” EMMA HUGHES AND JAMES MARRIOTT (PLATFORM)
From: All that Glitters: Sport, BP and Repression in Azerbaijan (London: Platform, 2015).
On the evening of 12th June 2015, the Games begin. Fireworks explode out of the National Stadium of Baku, crackling into the city sky. The roar of 68,000 spectators and music from the athletics ground is heard across the hot metropolis and far out over the Caspian Sea. Across Europe and beyond, the opening ceremony of the Baku 2015 European Games is followed on TVs and laptops. The dancers and music, light shows and pyrotechnics, produced by the company that created the opening of the 2012 London Olympics, is viewed around the world. Fifty nations are taking part over the coming two weeks, with 6,000 athletes competing at the stadium and 17 other venues in Baku. Simon Clegg CBE, chief operating officer of Baku 2015, and former manager of Team GB, has declared: “This is the great coming-out party of Azerbaijan.” With the wind from the west, the sound of the explosions penetrates the white walls and wire of Kurdexani prison, on the edge of the city. One of those incarcerated there is Rasul Jafarov, sentenced to six and a half years on charges that are ludicrously flawed. His real crime has been to stand up for freedom of speech and democracy. In another cell is Intigam Aliyev, a human rights lawyer who has spent years defending political prisoners in Azerbaijan, and is now one himself. In another is Khadija Ismayilova, a journalist who investigated the corruption in the Azeri elite and has been in Kurdexani for seven months, still awaiting her trial. There are more than 100 prisoners of conscience in Azerbaijan. The exact number is unknown, as the state clampdown means that effective monitoring is no longer possible. They include lawyers, journalists, filmmakers, bloggers and many members of Azerbaijan’s Muslim community. Indeed, so many prominent intellectuals and youth leaders have been imprisoned in Kurdexani that some Azeris refer to it as “Kur De Khani University.”1 The last time the world’s media focused on Azerbaijan was during the Eurovision Song Contest in 2012. There were demonstrations for democracy in Baku at which the participants were attacked by police with batons. There will be no such protests during the European Games, for all forms of dissent have been silenced. The clamour of the Games will last 16 days. They follow the design and regulations of the European Olympic Committee. This committee has long dreamed of creating a continental competition that would become a stepping-stone to the four-yearly global games. Such competitions already exist in the Americas, Asia, Africa and the Pacific. This, the first European Games, completes the set. Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev, who also heads the country’s National Olympic Committee, has been determined to hold a full Olympic Games in the Azeri capital. Under his
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STATES OF NO ExCEPTION Expo 2015 in Milano URBAN SUBJECTS
Expos, Olympics, World Cups, and other mega-events float around the globe as ghosts of modernist visions of a world system in which a gathering of nations meant more than a meeting at Davos.1 Pulled down from those global flows that we were told would level the uneven global geography of capital, mega-events are now distinctly urban even as they fly national flags. The heads of the town (as the poet Jack Spicer designated them)2 leverage mega-events to transfigure a city or particular neighbourhood and to open more space for surplus global capital to alight. Expos, in particular, are now less geared as glinting spectacles of the capitalist future to come than they are humming and whirling urban accelerators. The global temporality of mega-events—look, brave world, here is the future capital will bring!—is now a more immediate mega-moment of urban creative destruction. Dispossession, displacement, banalization, and standardization ensue, as if this is the natural course for cities. Use values and rhythms of life shaped over time are overturned by the urgency of exchange value. The surplus created in one city often jumps back up into the global flow only to land elsewhere. Jamie Peck describes the checkered urban development strategy of mega-events in this way: “And the hollow promise of mega-event strategies has been exposed for all to see, given the sorry legacies of white-elephant infrastructure projects and fiscal hangover effects.”3 Yet this bad history of mega-events, which is too easily repeated, dialectically sparks Right to the City movements and intensifies antigentrification actions, or even sets longer-term justice movements in place. Cities can be launching pads for urban politics, as Andy Merrifield reminds us, as well as the landing pads of nervous surplus.4 Mega-events have been around long enough—since the initial fair in London in 1851—to be a historical force in the shaping of cities from modernism to neoliberalism. The history of Expos is also a remarkable urban history. The Milan 2015 Expo is no exception to the trajectory Peck highlights. This city known for design, fashion, and industry hosted Expo to showcase both the city and a post-Berlusconi Italy, and the spatial scales of urban-global transformation that Expos initiate started to unfurl. The Expo grounds, 15 kilometres outside the city centre and at the end of a new subway line, occupy a site that previously hosted light to wispy industries, along with some apologetic agriculture that knew its days were numbered. But the transformation of these industrial spaces, fields, and infill reached out and rippled to the city itself—and intensified existing processes. Gentrification has been a persistent urban process in Milan since the 1960s and, from the 1980s forward, there has been a respatialization of the small-medium industrial sector that has resulted in, as Enrico Gualini puts it, “a high turn-over in land-use, but also increased rates of urbanization.”5
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Construction of the Olympic Park, east London, 2011. Photo: Keren Zaiontz.