Essay Maria Lind
tions, increasingly attempts to avoid political concepts. Instead of citizenship, one speaks of humanity, while morals and ethics are allowed to replace rights. Although Hannah Arendt was of course right in saying that human rights remain an abstraction unless they are grounded in citizenship. One person who knows how tricky the discussion about “the people” versus the “population” can be, even after the fall of the Third Reich, is the artist Hans Haacke, who was born in Germany but has been living in the U.S. for over 40 years. When in 1998 he was invited to create a new work for the German parliament, newly relocated back to the former capital Berlin, he opened a can of worms. At the same time he created one of the most fascinating, genuinely interventionist artworks that I know of. As a riposte to the 1916 inscription “To the German People” (Dem deutschen Volke) on the west façade of the Reichstag building, he laid out the text “To the population” (Der Bevölkerung) in three-dimensions on the ground in one of the Reichstag’s courtyards. The font is the same as that of the older inscription – created by Peter Behrens – and the letters are surrounded by a bed of plants, which the Reichstag members were encouraged to provide from their constituencies. The ground around the letters is not to be weeded and the growth of the plants can today be followed via a webcam on the project’s homepage. Der Bevölkerung prompted a debate about when, where and how one can use the terms “people” and “population”. It raged not just in the German press, but also among the members of parliament. At Germany’s own “ground zero”, the very home of the electorate’s representatives in the reunified country, the sparks began to fly : can one avoid the legacy of ethnic attitudes in the term
“people” ? Is it possible to open up to pluralism, for example, by including those who are not citizens, by using the term “population” ? Or would this risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater and of abandoning oneself to abstractions? It is in discussions about Haacke’s work, among other contexts, that Mouffe has made her point concerning “the people” as a necessary political term. One of her interlocutors, Tom Keenan, nevertheless invokes the example of former Yugoslavia and the way its own variant of “people”, namely “narod”, was vigorously invested with an ethnic dimension by the region’s nationalists in the 1990s. It became the very core of belligerent rhetoric. In Bosnia “narod” was challenged by the new concept of multi-ethnicity. A neologism which, in Keenan’s view, proved fruitful in the attempt to escape from the ethnic trap of “the people”. Although I am a Swedish citizen and can vote in Sweden, I have to admit that I often feel uneasy when introduced as a “Swedish curator”. What is it that defines Swedishness, in this particular context ? On the other hand, I am perfectly confident of being “a curator from Sweden”. We should not underestimate such small, seemingly symbolic differences. Even though we realize that the introduction of the term “cleaning consultant” in the 1970s did little to alter working conditions or the social standing of cleaning staff. The decision by the curators of Manifesta 1 in Rotterdam in 1996 to specify artists’ places of residence rather than their home countries in all exhibition information was an important gesture which subsequently stood out as a clear step forward in a gathering storm of “reluctance to represent”. The idea was that international exchange should happen on the terms of art and the artists themselves. Art should distance itself from diplomacy and “politics”, in the