THE HORNSLETH VILLAGE PROJECT UGANDA

VILLAGE PROJECT UGANDA 2007

This book is dedicated to the wonderfull people of the village of Buteyongera, Mukono district, Uganda.

A special thanks goes to David Katerrega, Richard Mulondo and Birger Wulffeld, without whom this project never could have happened.

Kristian von Hornsleth

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VILLAGE PROJECT UGANDA We want to help you, but we want to own you

2007

Futilististic Society Publishing

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Published by: Futilististic Society Publishing © 2007 info@hornsleth.com www.hornsleth.com All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission of the copyright owners.

ISBN 87-986623-3-3 Number printed: 2000 Photo team: Kristian von Hornsleth Bjarke MacCarthy & Jon Norddahl | GAB Graphic Design & Prepress: Morten Ehrhorn | Rasteriet.dk Production: Esben Eriksen | Clausen Offset Print: Clausen Offset Bookbinding: Förlagshuset Nordens Grafiska AB Paper: 150 g/m2 Arctic Gloss Partners:

Förlagshuset Nordens Grafiska AB

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Content INTRO |

KRISTIAN von HORNSLETH

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WE WANT TO HELP YOU BUT WE WANT TO OWN YOU |

STAFFAN BOIJE AF GENNÄS

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ABOUT THE HORNSLETH VILLAGE PROJECT IN BUTEYONGERA [MUKONO DISTRICT] RICHARD MULONDO

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DEAR KRISTIAN von HORNSLETH KLAUS WEIBEL

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ART ON THE INSIDE JÖRG SCHELLER

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BURN YOUR PORSCHE, CUT YOUR HAIR AND FLEE THE COUNTRY SVANTE LINDEBURG

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WHY THIS IS CONTEMPORARY INTERVIEW WITH BORIS GROYS AND KRISTIAN von HORNSLETH

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IDENTITY CARDS |

PRESENTING THE ID CARDS

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THE HORNSLETH VILLAGE PROJECT UGANDA PORTRAIT SERIES KRISTIAN von HORNSLETH

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TITLES INDUVIDUAL TITLES AND SERIAL NUMBERS

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INTRO The Hornsleth Village project is an art work KRISTIAN VON HORNSLETH

10o people from a small village in Uganda made a free trade deal with Kristian von Hornsleth.

The deal was that the villagers all change thier name to ‘Hornsleth’ in exchange for household animals.

Each person went through the official legal name change process.

A national Uganda ID card was issued to each person to show their new ‘Hornsleth’ name.

Each person was photographed holding their new Hornsleth ID. The 100 photographed people are the 10o first to take the name ‘Hornsleth’ and they are representing the whole community.

The portraits are defined as an original art work.

The total art work is a series of 10o photos of 120 x 100 cm to be presented in selected international galleries and museums.

A professional documentary film crew is filming the process for Danish National TV DR2.

International art critics, philosophers and local project partners has contributed with texts for this book about the project.

A community based organization, a CBO, called ‘The Hornsleth Village Project’ was formed according to local legal practise, and according to agreement with the village opnion leaders.

A total of 300 animals, pigs and goats, were traded with 300 families.

A locally well known animal redistribution system was implemented.

When these animals breed, half of the outcome can be kept by the family, and half is redistributed to other families, Thousands of people will in five years have traded names for animals from this project if it runs as planned.

Stop donations, start free trade!

Don’t worry, this is art!

INTRO

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WE WANT TO HELP YOU BUT WE WANT TO OWN YOU A possible a neo-colonial adventure STAFFAN BOIJE AF GENNÄS

Scrambled Eggs, Coffee, and Bitching at the Jinja Nile Resort “I asked for scrambled eggs….”, an American woman is complaining to her husband, “and look what I got…this!”

And he replies, “No, those sure don’t look like any scrambled eggs”.

And I’m thinking: Why do all my clichés about Americans have to prove themselves right again and again and especially today?

It’s my second morning in Uganda, and I’m trying to see through the mist of all my African preconceptions… and in the company of my American breakfast neighbours, who, with each comment, is cementing my world view more and more thoroughly, it is not getting any easier.

It’s very early, I just finished my first cop of coffee, knowing that if the bus ride today will be as bumpy as the one the previous day, it will be very rough.

The husband to his wife “And the coffee!”

His wife “Tell me about it!”

And I can’t help wondering if there isn’t a bit of joy in the couple’s mockery of the eggs; if it’s not their thing to go on in this way, if it’s not what nourishes their relationship. An encounter with bad eggs, and their day is made! Not a bad choice of kicks and lifestyle!

Amusing but strange. But hey, it’s probably only the tip of the ice-berg in relation to what this day will carry in all its length.

Okay, unusual things happens quite often, so you shouldn’t be surprised that they sometime do.

How about this for strange: in some hours we will arrive in a distant village where the inhabitants have been asked to take part in an art project.

Yes, it might sound like an average day in the contemporary western art world. But, no, not the typical question for the villagers to wake up to that particular morning: “Say what!” “Well, an art project: If you add an extra middle name, Hornsleth, to your other ones, you’ll get pigs, sheep or goats, maybe two…as payment” “Huh?” “…and we’ll take a photo of you, too.” “Okay, photos, I see, you had me worried there for a while, thought you were kidding me or

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something… but this extra name how does that enter the picture? “That extra name. well, you see in western art… … …”

How’s that for strange? Strange for them, and rest my soul strange for me.

Thank God I’m only the biographer.

While thinking this, I see the sun rising over the Nile, the Ninja Nile Resort, the bungalows and the swimming pool. A waiter refills my coffee cup, and one of the crew’s photographers, Jon, passes by and says that the bus finally has arrived. I’m thinking that “finally” is a bad word, and that it’s too early in the morning to judge people on their taste in eggs–but I still do, and I can’t help smiling inside because I feel I’ve figured out their thing. And, yes, it makes me feel superior to the couple.

A security guard is passing by with an old rifle over his shoulder. Cool! Or maybe I should say that he looks cool. I’m smiling to him, hoping that it will make me appear less as an arrogant tourist and more as a friendly fellow, he smiles back at me. There is a lot of his kind, armed guards, around these somewhat exclusive establishments. Does he expect a bandit attack from the Nile or from the woodlands behind? Last night we had seen a group of monkeys attacking the resort in search for remains from the day’s human activities. Supposedly, they came up from the Nile side by swimming and jumping on rocks, the Nile is not a slim river. And then with full stomachs back across the river again, quite impressive!

If I have to get out of here, fast, I’ll use the same path.

The bitching couple are still going strong. Now, if I told this couple that I’d been paid by an artist to write about his project We Want To Help You But We Want To Own You or The Hornsleth Village Project, what would they say?

As republicans they would probably think the title was too honest, that it could do with some disguise. If democrats, they would look for an ironic angle in the title, but finally end up not laughing.

And me? Was this a fun gag, an ironic parody of contemporary art or a serious project with interesting political implications? Not being tuned as much as Hornsleth towards media spectacles I felt a bit worried. I was not sure what this would lead up to. I had noticed the same feeling of unease under the surface of my travelling companions; was this really something that we ought to have gotten into? In many ways this project was more serious than many of his previous, but had he, somewhere in the process stepped too hard on someone’s toes?

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Black Mambas and Community-based Art We had met up in Copenhagen Airport at 4.30 in the morning-all in all six grownups and two kids. It’s a time of the day when you’re not very interested in socialising.

The expedition’s producer, Peter, complained about not having had or having made time to eat. According to him“There is time!” But Hornsleth, the artist and director behind this adventure, held back. Maybe because he’d promised us to take care of us during the trip, food and all. But sandwiches for eight at Copenhagen airport are another ballgame than sandwiches in Uganda. And according to Hornsleth the trip wouldn’t start until the plane took off. There was irritation in the air.

Peter finally left to tend to himself. With him gone his son, Carl-Fredrik, got going.

“Are there lots of Black Mambas in Africa?”

“I think so.” The answer came from one of the two still-photographers, Jon, the youngest of us, and maybe because of that, not so touched by the early hour, and judging from his appearance a person friendly towards wildlife and the outdoors.

“I mean where we are going, are there Black Mambas there?”

“Well I don’t know. We have to ask someone when we get there, or Christian [Hornsleth’s first name] might know, he’s been there before.”

“Christian, is there…”

“Hell yes!”

“No, stop kidding, I’m serious, are they the most poisonous snakes in the world?” He was very excited, but at the same time serious, strange. And he somehow seemed to enjoy his frustration.

“Hell yes! Do you want to take one home to Denmark? I’m buying.”

Imagine that the words ‘Black Mamba’ can come as a relief and a welcome icebreaker. The two words soon pushed out all speculations about getting breakfast for free and what was really stipulated in our contracts. And it erased the thought of the threat of having to ask one another about life and careers.

Something that we ought to do at some point soon, as few of us had met before.

But now logistics started kicking in and we found common enemies in things like metal detectors and flexible gate numbers.

Besides Idi Amin and The Lord’s Resistance Army, the name of the airport we had landed in two days earlier, Entebbe, was one of few things that really had made its way into my Ugandan namedropping chart. Once, in the 1970s, PLO had forced a high-jacked plane to land here. As I remember it, filled with

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Israelis. The name, Entebbe, had existed in my memory since childhood, and only knowing that I‘d land there carried its own excitement.

I’d brought a book on Idi Amin and an issue of ARTFORUM, the May one.

The book on Idi Amin was by one of the few surviving ministers from his time in office, Henry Kyemba. It was my preferred choice of reading. I had hopes it would bring some hints about the high-jacking story. Instead it gave me some unexpected cultural insight; this thing with surnames, it turned out to be a recently new thing in Uganda, something that started up as a European inspired fashion, or maybe colonial heritage. And with this more relaxed relation to names… could that mean that adding Hornsleth to their present ones was not that big of a deal for the villagers? That is, compared to us who’d lived with this naming culture for quite some time?

And, I smiled while thinking this. Did this mean that Hornsleth and his art would lose its provoking edge when landing in Entebbe? More investigation into this issue was required.

“Does your hotel have a swimming pool?” I looked up from my book and memories. And there were two sisters, somewhere between six and eight, that had been raking the aisles of the airplane, making conversation with anyone at hand. “Well I certainly hope so. But I can’t remember if I can swim, it’s been a while since I tried it, can you?”

“She can swim!” The younger of them said, pointing proudly at her sister.

They told me that their parents were going to a conference on big monkeys, gorillas, somewhere in Uganda. But no, they didn’t find that exotic in any way.

“Do you like monkeys?”

“I am only allowed to swim when my mummy or daddy is with me. But it’s very warm in the water in the pool so I can play a very long time before I have to get up.”

What fascinated them was clearly having fun in luxurious environments, rather than nature. But the excitation from the thought of the pool finally burned them out; soon they dozed of, one after the other, some seats away, and I was left to my destiny, meaning having to engage in my art magazine. My trip–as apposed to the sisters-was, after all, not all about having fun. There was this article on Community Based Art in it: THE SOCIAL TURN: COLLABORATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS [178-183]. And, believe it or not, this Hornsleth project– despite the fact that he has been labelled, by some people, the guardian of political incorrect art-seemed to have some of the ingredients to qualify it under the heading THE SOCIAL TURN and the category of Community-based Art. I had already skimmed the article once, it was by a Claire Bishop, and quite well written. A highlighted quote in pink said: ‘The discursive criteria of socially engaged art are, at present, drawn from a tacit analogy between anticapitalism

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and the Christian “good soul.” In this schema, self-sacrifice is triumphant’ [p.

182, May, 2005].

No, Hornsleth was not aiming to claim that ‘good soul’ and certainly not the playing on anticapitalism. Indeed, it was more the structure of the communitybased artwork I was reading up on in relation to him; the kind of art where an artist together with a given community is running the project, collaborating on the actual outcome.

The article gave me some leads to go on in relation to characterising his work: In a way this artist, and critic of our everyday aid politics, is appropriating the structure of aid projects or the usual Community-based Art, just giving it an opposite political twist-that is neo-liberal-than the one we’re used to.

But apart from not claiming the good soul-in real life, at the village, he was actually doing the same thing: developing the project together with the locals, working together to…

“What are you trying to read?” I’m interrupted again, my travelling companion, Bjarke, seated next to me, is making conversation. It’s time to get acquainted.

The magazine has an oversized format, making it a little difficult to read, especially being squeezed down in an airplane seat. Like small talk about snakes, odd situations are also icebreakers.

“ARTFORUM” ”Art-what?” ”Just the usual shit about art. But in exclusive framing, just look at the nice print it has… important shit!”

I usually phrase my answers in a similar way when confronted with a question about my occupation; to avoid sounding pretentious when saying that I’m an art critic. By adding the word ‘shit’ in connection to art I usually manage to confuse people enough not to start lining up the usual kind of questions indicating that I think I know better then them. A pro-active strategy, as Bush would have put it.

“Aha, some shit. It seems to be hard to read.” He’s now explicitly referring to my fumbling with the magazine in the tight airplane seat.

My neighbour and fellow traveller had humour, and I might as well start loosening up.

“Very hard.”

Landing Entebbe, the airport, was pitch black when we arrived. It was of course lit up like any airport, but still somehow pitch black. Maybe because of not seeing anything I wasn’t disappointed, none of my expectations and memories from

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the high-jacking were refuted. And being there I realised that it probably was from here, the hostage freeing, that a whole generation had gotten their inspiration playing “commando soldier”. What year was it? I’ve must have been around ten? 1976? My older brother told me then that no one but the Israeli security forces could have done it in such a professional way, not the Soviets and not the CIA, and maybe he was right.

There, in the middle of my nostalgic moment, while queuing to get my passport stamped, it started again: “Are there lots of Black Mambas in Africa?”

“You’ve been asking that all day.” His father replied a bit stern and protective in relation to the rest of us in the crew.

“I’m asking again.” Carl-Fredrik, looked stern too.

“Well in Uganda, yes,” I pitched in, “but only the big kind. Not the small one that eats frogs and small creeps. The small kind lives further down south. They have the big species in Uganda, the kind that likes to eat monkeys and dogs.”

“No, no.” the boy laughed while getting high on this wriggling frustration.

“No, they can’t open their mouths that wide, can they? To eat a whole monkey?”

His Black Mamba, it slowly strikes me, is somehow my Entebbe, an unfathomable piece of Africa, his ‘Hart of Darkness’. Fascinating!

“Not the ones they have south of Uganda, no.” I might as well give him the whole enchilada since that’s what he’s looking for. “But the Ugandan ones… and they have teeth too, the type they can bite with, like hyenas, they can take a peace of your leg without blinking.” The moment is too true to life Freudian for me to stop adding fuel to his phantasm.

“How? No… But they are only in the jungle, right?”

“Yes, like in the jungle by the village where we are going.”

“No.” “Yes, but not in the hotels.” He’s almost boiling over from excitement over the unknown, still all the way through not quite believing a word that I’m saying.

“In the hotels they have special Black Mamba guards making sure that no one gets into the rooms.”

“No?” “No, you’re right, they still do! Get into the rooms!”

“No! “ Our collected gear and bags created a huge pile outside the entrance to the airport; a pile that we continually have to move around in order for it not to be in everyone’s way while occasionally trying to answer one of the questions that never stops. That is, everyone but Hornsleth’s son, Adrian, about fourteen,

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who is so concentrated on making tricks with his Yo-Yo that one of us has to follow behind him and redirect him to the new spot for our luggage pile in order not to lose him again: As his father expresses it: he has potential for becoming a professor.

Adrian wears his pants the way Hip-Hoppers do: so far down the ass that most of his underwear is showing. That is, his entire underwear. Moving fast with the Yo-Yo in one hand and the other securing his pants is impossible. And me being the slightly embarrassed type speculating about how the people in the Ugandan–MTV-unaffected –village would experience this fashion? All the time a loud Hornsleth is on the phone trying to locate the driver that was supposed to have come around with the bus to pick us up. Hornsleth never missing an opportunity to make friendly, but still mockery complaints, is giving the driver a mouthful.

“I’m standing here in the middle of Africa and my film crew are about to leave me and it’s all because of you!” “…” [the person he called on replies something] “Why! You’re asking me that! I’ll tell you why; they told me that they would fly down with me to Uganda if and only if we would make it in time to the hotel to see the second half of the game France–Togo. You know the world championship. And now it has already started and you are not here and it has already started, and they are very angry with me and it is all your fault!”

Hornsleth is winking at us, his way of telling us that the person he’s talking to knows his ways, and that there is a game on TV that some of us said that we really wanted do see, but that we now, overtaken by our first encounter with Uganda, has forgotten all about. “ …”

In Uganda, it seems, people are not embarrassed about looking straight at you when something sticks out, and we, with or without showing off our undergarments, did stick out. And hence the night was full of glowing white eyes trying to make sense of this strange spectacle. As the minutes passed the feeling of transformation from a sensible people of some kind into caricatures grew thicker and thicker.

“You’re stuck in traffic ha! Well, I have other information; I have heard that you are watching football yourself. If they leave me you have to film everything for me. Can you do that?” “…”

“You say you’ll be here in about five minutes? Five minutes? Ugandan time?

Well I tell you what: if you are not here in 30 minutes you have to… … …”

And in the midst of this turmoil Henrik, the hired documentary filmmaker, is following all our moves.

It was probably not because of the spectacle we were putting on, but the at-

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traction of the light from the airport, that so many mosquitoes had started to fly around us. Not shockingly many, but when one of us suddenly remembered that these animal are the number one killer of humans in the world, we all at once started to dig around in the pile of bags for malaria pills and mosquito sprays. And now we didn’t care how we looked. We had one aim and that was creating a giant cloud of mosquito repellent that we could feel safe inside.

Danish doctors had told us that it was okay to take this new kind of malaria pill just one day before entering into an effected area–this would later prove to be wrong and mis-informative to the point that it could very well have lead to an abrupt ending of this Ugandan adventure.

Finally the bus pulled up. And three Ugandans that seemed to have taken Hornsleth’s threats very lightly jumped out. I suddenly came to the realisation that his mockery kind of jokes were right in line with his art, and if I could dissect them I could probably come up with a fairly good explanation of his work.

Still waiting for the bus Here comes the other still photographer, Bjarke. He’s now trying to bypass my table, also telling me that the bus has finally arrived. But a rapidly assembled experience has taught me that it will be at lest 30 minutes before take off after the call.

Down there, by the shores of the Nile, small things are sticking out of the water. Every one of them could be an eye of a crocodile. But they’re probably not. According to the hotel employee I spoke with the water is too turbulent down here below the resort. If I wanted to see them I should go upstream to the power plant. But one usually doesn’t see much more of them than something sticking up from the surface, anyway.

But I won’t have time for that today. No, we’re off to the jungle and the village.

I like the sound of that word, ’jungle’… jungle, who doesn’t?

It’s the same bus that finally picked us up in Entebbe that arrived at the Jinja Nile Resort. Not good! It’s completely without suspension.

Hornsleth is on the phone. I can spot some trouble, he’s still making gags but he’s a bit shaken. It’s the passports that the Ugandan lawyer had promised to have in order by now, the ones proving that a hundred Ugandans have added the name Hornsleth as one of their middle names. They have not come through yet.

No, he really shouldn’t worry, he still has ID cards though, and they look much better than any passport anyway, having an exotic African look. So, for-

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get about these passports, let the photographers shoot the pictures with the IDs instead and let that be that.

I’m right behind him heading for the bus. His smile is knowingly forced; it tells me that he’s talking to some one that is trying to pull something on him, giving him an excuse that he’s not buying. About ten seconds longer into the phone conversation I’m hearing a lot of bad words, he’s hanging up, and is letting off his steam in my direction. I’m telling him to “Relax, this is an adventure, things are supposed to go bad… at least in the beginning!” All the while he keeps on cursing–but in his own never actually real way. And then he says: “And if things continue to go bad… then it’s a tragedy. Tomorrow I’m going to the Kigali to see someone in charge of fucking me over, whatever minister.

This was supposed to have been taken care of long ago. That lawyer… and now, suddenly, he tells me that we are not getting any…

You, no we, might as well stay at the pool all week until the airplane will take us home again. If I don’t get any photos with the villagers holding the passport I’ll have no art to sell… meaning that I will not get any money back from any of my investments, meaning that I’ll go broke!

Turn around and go get your bathing suits and meet me at the pool in fifteen minutes.”

As he is saying that we are continuing down to the bus. The sun in Uganda is extremely pleasant; it’s the high altitude that makes the climate here so lovable. I’m starting to enjoy my morning.

But okay, a as soon as the bus has pulled out of the smooth Nile Resort parking lot the bumps in the road will start making us jump up and down. Okay, I’ll have some minutes of pleasure before the bus starts This bus driver likes to step on it, like all Ugandan drivers, and instead of slowing down when traffic gets bad he’ll just lean on the horn, hoping that the bus will scare off all approaching drivers to the side of the road.

The bus has now passed the local airport, no longer in use, the marketplace, and the hospital. The horn has started to do its job, the road is full of pedestrians, animals, cyclists, mopeds, and two-wheeled bicycle taxis.

But this is nothing, at night, going back, there will be just as many people on the road but it will be pitch black. This will only mean that the chauffeur will use the horn twice as much. Then, at night, we can’t see him smiling when we tell him to slow down.

Coming to think of it, up to this point I haven’t really heard the artist explain any details of the work. I could always push for some. But if I’d ask him about it he would probably say that that’s my job and that is what I’m paid to do: explain it. He would say it with a sincere look in his eyes, which you can’t really tell is for real or not. It’s probably a bit of both. Then he’d add a phrase like “It’s your job to make me famous and my work intelligent! Now do it!”

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And me, adjusting my tone of voice and temper to the situation, would respond, “I’ll find and bring out something–even in your work–that no one can deny sounds interesting or at least partly acceptable!”

Well, well.

Going to the Village We’re getting closer to the village of Buteyongera in Kasawo sub-county. It’s exiting.

Vegetation is getting thicker but there are still a lot of houses around. I never thought there was a thing like a densely populated jungle.

Anyway, everything will feel a bit strange for a while coming there, for the villagers and us. I know it from experience, but until “normality” arrives by itself one should not do a thing about it. If you start saying that a lot of miscommunication is going on and so on you only run the risk of having the “background oddness” taking the square root of it all and making things very, very awkward.

“Even if you don’t recognise the omelette, swallow!” It’s my new motto.

Welcome to the Hornsleth Village Project, the sign is hanging on pillars painted in the Ugandan colours: black, yellow and read. Hornsleth’s name and signature, itself, of course being the most visible and having bigger lettering than the other words. This man and his name… what can I say?

Still, we all seem surprised seeing the sign.

“This seems to go beyond even your megalomaniac expectations?” I had to ask him.

“Yes, this is crazy. It looks good ha?” The artist jumps out of the bus, and the other passengers follow. I don’t know all of them, we picked them up on the way over here. But from conversation I’d overheard two or three of them were journalists from Ugandan newspapers.

“How did this come about?” Peter, the producer, is as uninformed as I. “I hired a local artist, a friend of David.” Hornsleth replies.

David is one of Hornsleth’s employees in the Village Project. He‘s also working for a Dane, Birger, who owns a bar in Jinja. David has some university degree, and is a born-again Christian with his mind set on priesthood. And more importantly he grew up in this village, his grandma lives here and she is one of the project participants.

People are gathering around, and again the cameras begin shooting and filming. And again Hornsleth is cracking jokes and talking to people from the crowd. The bus takes off, we are passing small huts and people, many of them wave-are we expected?-and we wave back.

After having waved and smiled for about 20 minutes my expression starts

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to feel glued on. But I keep it up, I feel partly as an intruder in this remote place, so if someone waves and smiles at me I will surely be waving back.

But why did they do it–look so friendly? Does any bus coming down this road create as much attention?

The “background oddness” is giving itself the square root without my involvement. One should always remember that paranoid questions are nothing to be ashamed of; according to Freud they are your best defence when you end up in complicated situations.

In the clearings we pass small clay huts one after the other. Kids, in groups of five or ten, usually dressed in some school uniform or some very worn-out t-shirt with enough holes in them to fit several extra arms, greet us with the highest energy, jumping and waving, some of them following the bus as long as they can keep up.

This mix between the extreme poverty that most people seem to be living here and this, and yes, cheerful mode, is very bewildering. What wouldn’t it take to get people going in this welcoming way in Copenhagen?

To say it frankly: I didn’t understand shit of what was going on out there.

I’m almost wishing for another round of questions from Carl-Fredrik about the Black Mambas, it would have a calming effect on me.

The analogy, connecting this trip to The Heart of Darkness or in Apocalypse Now, had been knocking on my door for some time now. I couldn’t resist it in any longer. The boat ride in the film, getting close to the camp… no, we were greeted with smiles, not spears. And I don’t expect any spears either, but all this waving, I hadn’t expected that either. Am I heading for some kind of imploded space, as in the fiction, in the riff between two cultures?

What promises had Hornsleth given them? Was I part of a scam, had the artist promised them heaven for the right to become a part of their middle names, or was I just part of the circus coming to town? When the bus stops, will I see a throne that the local artist built?

At the Village The bus has stopped and we are getting out. The crowds, mostly kids, two to ten, gather around until we are cornered from all directions. If anyone or anything had become a “tourist attraction” in this part of the country, it’s certainly not the crocodiles by the power plat in Jinja, it’s us.

Children pouring in from all directions manage to dislocate the row of chairs that had been put out for our meeting with the village elders, scheduled for now.

We have no choice but to remain standing, each of us, as islands sticking out of an ocean. They’re all looking straight at us with something that I can

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only decode as a sincere interest, but I’m not certain. Many of them trying to get eye contact. And us, or at least me, have no way of turning down that kind of direct friendly invitation. But keeping this contact with more than one at a time… no, it does not work. Still I try, is it considered culturally rude to look away? But do they just look at me as a funny character?

Some of the smaller ones seem very interested in the hairs on my legs. It hasn’t struck me, until now, that hairy legs is basically a Caucasian thing, or?

The turmoil continues, I’m starting to relax, but the photographers seem to be in distress.

Then there is suddenly some movement. Carl-Fredrik and Adrian have placed themselves in the door of the bus and has started up a show of some kind.

A peek-a-boo one; doing strange faces, appearing and disappearing with a new look each time; and it’s gradually evolving and becoming more and more advanced. And yes, I don’t have to worry anymore, as a stroke of good luck Adrian’s pants and his hip-hop way of exposing his undies melts right in somehow.

Now they’re doing break-dances to Danish evergreens. It brings down howls of laughter. Most of the children forget about us not so entertaining elders; and in the backdrop of the show the elders in our crew and the village elders can finally sneak away to put up the dislocated rows of chairs in line again. With only a smaller section of the kid crowds still remaining around us our meeting gets going and Hornsleth can go through the courtesies, with Robert as translator, and then they agree to the schedule of the photo shoot.

But it’s a brief moment of peace. The funny faces slowly get competitions from the cameras, computers and all the other equipment that the photographers are installing. And as the photo shoot-of the 100 villagers holding their ID cards–has started, the children have taken over again and all attempts to keep them out of the picture are useless. They are everywhere; and each of us has again an uncountable crowd around us-even me not holding any camera.

This time it’s Peter and Jon who’s figured out a counter strike tactic; with a Polaroid camera each they are slowly dissolving the crowd handing out the photos as they are working their way out of the centre. The small gifts create their own turmoil, but it’s a turmoil that pulls attention away from Bjarke and his hundred models.

And after six hours of this, the sun has gone down, the motor of the bus has started and we’re getting in and are carried away from the sea of children.

Another hell ride in the bus is in action, but it’s easier to take this time. It’s leading back to something relatively familiar: to the pool, the bungalows and the bar at the Jinja Nile Resort.

But what’s this? The journalists, three in all-that in a bored way have been hanging out all day seemingly just waiting for the bus to take them backare getting out. With one foot still in the bus they stop. They want money before

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they remove the other foot. And quite a lot, some kind of we-came-along-fee.

It’s apparently standard procedures.

And then after the number of drinks it takes to grind down all of the day’s experiences some kind of firm ground re-emerge, and sleep can finally take charge.

Short-circuits Oooyes, it is the Minister of Interior that we’re going to see today. That’ll be interesting. When I heard about it I just took it as one of Hornsleth’s over the top jokes, but no, we’re apparently going, all of us, except Bjarke and Jon. And the two look like they know what they have coming; another day at the sea of kids, demobilized by their charm and interest, while trying to take photos, and without us around to divert the attention.

“You can’t do it!” Hornsleth to Bjarke, and he continues, “David will come along, he knows some good tricks, I’ve seen them, they will keep the kids amused for hours” “Yeah, yeah, as if…!”

We are all off to the city centre of the little town of Jinja, “Just to pick up someone”– another “just” another hour.

The buildings in town are Indian/Colonial British style. It’s quite charming.

Indians, besides the British, were the core of Ugandan economy and business before they were kicked out or killed. Idi Amin’s feast lasted for about as long as their confiscated fortunes covered his expenses.

From Jinja Jon and Bjarke will drive a rented car to the village, a car will hopefully be waiting for them here. Only the thought of steering through the unknown traffic, the orchestra of car horns and the no lane system, makes Jon’s already pale face even paler. An unfamiliar bacteria has started to do its job. It’s not only his stomach that has gone bad, it’s the majority of ours.

The bus is now stopping in front of SILVER TOUCH, the partly Danish owned bar.

Hornsleth has left the bus to see if the lawyer has arrived, Henrik is following him with his video camera, Peter is telling everyone to “Stay in the bus!” saying “Hornsleth has gone to talk to the lawyer, he’ll just be a while.”

Yeah right! Bjarke and Jon are getting out to shoot some pictures. Their rental car has arrived, but strangely enough not the keys for it. Adrian and CarlFredrik leave the bus to go buy some stuff in a store, and Bobi, the non-helping helper that’s supposed to stay in the bus when no one else is in it, leaves to see what they are up to.

And I’m left in the bus with the driver, because Peter has now also gone with Robert to find out why the lawyer hasn’t arrived. And as I leave the bus

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the chauffeur takes off in it. He probably knows that if he’s back in an hour we will still be waiting for something.

“I need a beer now if I’m going to make it through the day,” a pale Bjarke says when I’m catching up with him, and I decide that the same goes for me. By now we have given up our search for Fernet Branca in Uganda. It’s supposed to do wonders for you if you have a stomach condition.

Something is finally happening, there’s movement again, the lawyer and the keys have arrived.

The comparison of a short-circuit, that I’ve heard Hornsleth make in relation to his works, becomes more and more to the point for every bus ride, telephone conversation, meeting, that I see him involved in. He say’s that he likes to create short-circuits, and that that actually is what his art is about.

And yes, from the moment of landing in this county everything has been in line with his analogy; if something is going smoothly he’ll decide to add another circuit that will corrupt the previously harmonious ones.

But what’s his strategy?

When things at the village are going okay, a good part of the hundred will probably have been photographed by the end of the day. Richard has signed contracts for buying the piglets, and the small goats and sheep. If he just left it at shooting the ID cards and just dropped those passports, he’d be doing just fine. But no, when involving journalists and politicians… what does he expect.

Knowingly or not he’s looking for some scandal; people in general are not used to projects of this kind and not used to seeing something in a more reflective light when it’s produced under the epithet art. And in Uganda where this kind of art is unheard of…

But trouble means publicity and publicity means fame and fame leads too high prices. If he creates a scandal in Uganda it will not go unheard of in Copenhagen.

Why does the minister of interior want to see him? He probably wants to find out how this live disturbance, calling himself an artist, functions. He might expect that there could be military use for this talent.

“Mr Hornsleth, how do you do it?”

“Dear Minister, well, you see. You just have to create a mismatch between two harmonious points. Just take the title of this project; it consists of to statements, We Want To Help You and We Want To Own You. Connected they’ll boost the strength of one another, you know the synergy effect. And from this original mismatch, this short-circuit will spread, and with such a speed that after just a few days it will hit government level!

Almost seeing the minister As we drive off, street kids, about six to eight years old, have gathered round

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our bus. They have come down to Jinja from the war up north, the Ugandan government versus The Lord’s Resistance Army.

Carl-Fredrik gave them money yesterday and in ten seconds flat they were back in front of the bar with lighters sniffing the gas. A small aid project that went bad. It’s easy to say, “We want to help you”, but as it turns out not easy to do it. This little episode made Carl-Fredrik feel really bad. Birger told him to go buy some fruit and bread to give them instead. It helped; both giver and taker seemed satisfied.

The bus has stopped outside the ministerial area in Kigali. There is a map of it in my Idi Amin book. Amin has somehow become my Black Mamba. His few years in office supposedly set back the county’s economy around twenty years.

We’re all starting to get effected by the harsh reality that this Uganda not all together has rid itself from.

I can remember how the TV-news during the 1970s reported that human remains had been found in the dictator’s refrigerator after he was forced off the throne. On the trip over here I read that Amin often fired ministers by throwing them out from helicopters over the Nile, yes, by Jinja. In the medical reports it was called drowning. Here you can really talk about the Heart of Darkness.

Maybe I should stop reading this book; it leaves me in some kind of strange hyped Discovery Channel mood. Things I read come out more as interesting curiosities than terrible events.

The traffic on the street where we have parked is massive, we are approached by street salesmen, dealing everything from fruit to lawnmowers. Hornsleth, the lawyer, Henrik and his camera have left to go see who will greet us and where. Adrian is out on the street showing the salesmen tricks with his Yo-Yo. But Carl-Fredrik is not doing so good. He has been lying in the back of the bus not saying a word during the entire trip. We suspect, a bad stomach, but he does not show any other signs of it than paleness and fever. An hour goes by, then another, and then Henrik picks us up. No, it’s not the minister that has agreed to see us, but we have been asked to present the case to one of his secretaries. And Peter has to be there, as producer, and he can’t leave Carl-Fredrik, so we end up all going.

Having expected ending up in this kind of meetings I brought an old, but not to beat up Hugo Boss suit. Once in Mongolia I ended up in a position not too different from this, and wearing a suit then, looking respectable, very likely ended up saving my ass. But what will I get for keeping the dress code? Probably nothing, the others are dragging me down, dressed in shorts and sandals.

A guard is leading us through the row of metal detectors and indoor roadblocks. We must make out a strange parade; clothes wise one would guess we were heading for the beach, having taken a very wrong turn somewhere; jud-

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ging by our sheet white faces as griever’s looking for the funeral. And to top it off Peter is now carrying Carl-Fredrik.

We finally reach this big office-a big table, chairs and two pictures of someone on the wall.

Carl-Fredrik is placed on the floor.

The secretary calmly receives this odd spectacle that we must represent.

I’m quite amazed that he has no problem with Henrik filming it all. He asks about the project, and seems to agree with the aid part of it, that animals has been bought locally, that they’re going to be handed out to people in a very poor area, and he likes the idea of how part of the offspring will be redistributed to new owners.

Now, the passport issue; the lawyer goes through the legal part, telling the secretary that now, when all requirements have been fulfilled-fees paid, a hundred notices placed in newspapers stating that each of the hundred villages has added Hornsleth as an extra name– according to Ugandan law is illegal to not give these people their passports.

The secretary says that of course they were a bit surprised receiving name change and passport applications from a hundred persons all wanting to be called Hornsleth.

“It sounds very much like we could be dealing with a religious cult of some kind. I guess,” he looks us over for some time “you’re not.”

But who could really blame him for worrying; with the likes of The Lord’s Resistance Army around, who “in God’s name” had their ways, I guess careful is the least you could be. It’s not all that easy to de-code his small comments.

He has humour, but which kind of bottom the jokes are anchored in is a riddle.

He tells us that he will look into it. Hornsleth says he needs answers now!

“I’ll give you a call in a while to tell you what is possible.” It’s his reply.

And we’re off to the bus waiting for the next phase of bureaucracy to kick in.

Carl-Fredrik’s fever starts peaking, he’s not complaining about feeling sick any more, instead it’s the view outside the bus that bugs him. “The palm trees, I don’t want to look at the palm trees. Why are they standing there?” The fever is making him hallucinate.

We have to find a doctor fast.

The doctor thinks it’s malaria, and the tests seem to indicate it. But actually it couldn’t be possible after only three days in an infected area; it should take about ten days to get it. He asks if he could have gotten it in Denmark. But Peter says that we very much doubt that. And in the doctor’s car they’re off to the children’s hospital in Jinja, it’s supposed to be good.

The rest of us return to the Nile Resort for dinner. That is the remains that

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are still standing, 50% of the ones who left from Copenhagen. Malaria and bad stomachs, what’s next?

From were I’m seated at the dinner table I think I can spot the route where the monkeys are making their crossing over the Nile. If the bacteria won’t get me, neither will any one else!

At the village everyone seemed happy with the project. They used to grow coffee, but after some decease took their plants things appeared to be going downwards for them. This village project, at least according to some of the elders I spoke to, gave them new sense of a future, it was at lest something to believe in. But there were people that did not agree with it, of course I had realised that some people would. But everything around us had become much more fragile after Carl-Fredrik had ended up in the hospital. Humorous intents had stiffened, art was not only art, the way the secretary had pronounced the title of the project especially the part “we want to own you” now echoed in my head. The others round the table do not look too well off.

“You know in Mexico, the stomach decease that the tourists gets is called Montezuma’s revenge. Do you think that the one we have gotten here is some revenge for being too humoristic under not so funny circumstances?”

It was partly said as a joke, even though my fever gave more and more reality to my any speculation. I don’t know if I expected a “Hell yes!” from Hornsleth, but no, he does not look too well.

Nurses and Kings We had to go into town and buy a kind of white robe. And those of us not having any black shoes and dark long pants had to buy some it at once. It’s easy to say, but in Jinja not easily done. After having had trouble all morning getting proper, of course, it came to nothing. The white robes covered the pants and the better part of the shoes.

Hornsleth being his own unrivalled spin-doctor had somehow, during the evening or this morning gotten us invited to the local King. One of six in Uganda. According to this spin getting a picture of him and a royalty in the papers would make the ministers Kigali more friendly towards us. The tribal kings are supposedly quite popular. Not a bad plan.

Any other day this visit would have felt quite adventures. But Carl-Fredrik was still in the hospital and with him there courtship is just not the same. If any peace of mind would return we had to go see him.

The nurse that showed us around in the hospital opens up the refrigerator door. The interior is, except for one blood bag, empty.

“We don’t get anyone to give us blood anymore, no one dares to. No one wants to know if they’ve gotten infected by aids, by now the rate is between 10 to 20% of the population. There is no way of telling.”

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Carl-Fredrik had his own room, in rooms as big as his in this part of the hospital there were ten patients accompanied by as many relatives. He was doing okay again. Fever was dropping and he had started eating. One could even trigger a smile by telling him about our upcoming visit to the King.

Peter had donated a quite considerable amount to the hospital. To show her gratefulness she is really giving us the grand tour, taking us from room to room, Introducing us to staff and patients. Seeing all this, what could one say or do…? Bjarke and Jon grab their cameras and start to shoot away as if every kick from their camera is a “Hail Marry” that can clean out sins and make the sight of it all easier to carry. Me not having any camera just have to stand there and look.

This is no place to go if you already feel quite crappy, that much is certain.

And finally we’re running to the doctor. We’re getting some good news. In a day they think that Carl-Fredrik can come home, the malaria medicine and what else he’s getting from that drop in his arm is doing its job. It’s at lest something.

Were late, Birger is calling someone to tell the King we might not make it in time. He has brought gifts from his bar, food and drinks, it’s for the customary exchange of curtseys. Seeing him arranging this one wonders if this royal visit isn’t his thing. If he hasn’t arranged our visit in order to go there himself.

It’s with some envy Jon and Bjarke again climb into the rented car to go back to shoot the final pictures.

Still, things are about to be finished out in the village, they are seeing the end of the line of the hundred. It’s their new guerrilla tactic that’s paying off.

They start off by taking walks in the outskirts of the village, just making rapid visits to the location of the photo shoot. It works, it’s giving them the space they need. And yes, maybe they are not all that exotic to the kids anymore–if you’ve seen one pale person with hairy legs, you have more or less seen them all.

And as if in a dream, that is, in an actual fever dream we’re off to the king.

Our average condition is getting worse. As Carl-Fredrik is getting better, Adrian is going down, he has stopped throwing his Yo-Yo around; it’s a bad sign.

We still arrive at the Kings place within respectable time. The gates are opened and we are greeted by servants and asked to take our seats in the garden.

Everything is minutely arranged: servants, journalists, us and the royalty, all getting a seat in relation to status.

The King appears in his ceremonial clothing, something that he doesn’t usually do. It’s quite stylish, both African and Western at the same time. The press are probably more interested in a picture of him and his clothing than us.

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A master of ceremony takes over, leading us through the motions.

And as rapidly as it begun it’s all over “After a short photo opportunity the royal family and his foreign guests will go into the house for private conversation.”

Hornsleth is not far behind the king as he moves to the spot for the photo session. And after some time he is asked to join the king on the stairs for photos, and yes Birger is also invited, mission accomplished!

Adrian is, however, about to go down, but he bites his lips and comes along.

Inside the mansion it’s nice and pleasant, placenta to the point of us forgetting about our health during the stay. Or is it our vanity and hype over getting invited in that’s doing the job?

The King and four of his sons are there, showing us relics and old family photos and some with other European royalties, we’re having a good time.

But as we are leaving the royal castle, the old fever returns and intensifies.

We’re stopping the bus on our way home, Adrian is getting sick and his father doesn’t look like he’s doing much better.

At the hotel, Hornsleth’s again on the phone with the lawyer, but there’s no longer any stamina behind his mocking attacks. Still, there’s a new plan in action; in hoping that the photo shoot with the king went well and that some of the newspaper will bring them, the political climate might turn in our favour.

It’s hard to say if he quite believes it “Maybe it’s a good Idea to leave it at that for now.” The plan is to be happy with the photos with the ID cards for now, and then work on the passport problems, through the lawyer, from Denmark.

And when everything’s in order come back to Uganda and do a re-shoot with the villagers.

And from being in the midst of a war with time, with elements, the kids and our fever, everything has suddenly come to an end, we’re all finished.

Everyone sits quietly, it’s strange shifting gears in this way. Well, I haven’t done anything other than hanging around taking occasional notes, but still.

The job is done for now, the name change is official, the animals are bought and on their way to the village and the photographers’ job is reduced to being finished.

The villagers have arranged a fest for us in two days, that’s it, and after the party we’re going back to Copenhagen.

The party Everyone but Hornsleth is now doing fine. Before the party we’re making one stop at a place to pick up about a hundred piglets. To carry one you grab them by their hind legs and just lift them up. And no matter how much they scream and kick you can’t let go, because then you’ll never se the pig again. The road

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to the house is too narrow for the truck to drive on. It’s more than fifty meters between the house and the car. I hardly ever walked a longer fifty meters, and after the first walk with a pig, another will be waiting for you.

The artist himself is not helping out. He hasn’t said a word all morning; he just sits in the bus staring at nothing. When the final pig have been caught and carried and we’re about to take off, his time has come. David is finding a taxi for him, he’s going back to Jinja and a doctor.

This time, three or four times the amount of people to our previous visits have shown up. The news of the village party has apparently spread. The big difference is that today there are as many grownups as kids.

I’m asking around, and this project, at least for now, seems to be quite popular with the village. Still, it’s hard to say what this liking consists of. Something is happening anyway, something you can attach hope to. The schoolteacher says that it’s created a new sense of community. When asked about the name issue, one of the elders, and a newly re-baptised Hornsleth, just says, “Anything that fights poverty is god, anything.” It’s somewhere here around this “anything” where good and bad meets up in this project. Is the relatively forced choice–due to the poverty–of selling a spot among your names something that is, all in all, up to the villagers to take? Is it something that we as outsiders should make judgments about, can’t we trust in their judgments of their wellbeing? Does “We Want To Own You” also include the right of knowing better than the ones involved what’s good for them?

Hornsleth has certainly come up with a short-circuit this time.

Peter will come around with Adrian and Carl-Fredrik later, Hornsleth is not recovering, the ones of us in the village are doing our best trying to stall things until they arrive. We’re visiting huts, talking to the elders, and taking pictures of beautiful sights. But, there are a thousand people waiting for us, probably more.

A bull has been slaughtered and we’ve brought soft drinks for-hopefullyall.

Just to check on the situation we’re approaching the place were the party is waiting for us. Instead of stopping it we’re starting it. As we approache the music starts and after that it’s all in motion, we’re sitting down in sofas facing the better part of the villagers, and there’s music and dancing and food, and it goes on and on. In the midst of it all Peter and the boys finally arrive. There’s a good atmosphere between them and us. Richard’s brother, David, a politician and Ugandan pop-star, is handling the translations of the speeches we as guests are all expected to do. At certain points during the translation people are laughing so hard that they have problems standing-Richard’s translations are obviously a lot better then our speeches.

And then, before any official ceremony of handing out the animals have had

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time to start, the sun’s going down. And when the sun has gone down it’s all over. Henrik, Bjark and Jon are trying to make pictures involving handing over a goat and a pig to two of the new Hornsleths, but in this darkness and with the massive gathering of people it’s not any use.

We’re off.

Copenhagen versus Kigali Directly after coming home to Copenhagen Hornsleth is hospitalised with an “undefined tropical disease.” It takes days before they release him.

At first there’s no reaction in Uganda. In Copenhagen, however, the papers, radio and TV are reporting. Apparently Hornsleth has hired the right press people. No journalist is really trying to nail him with tricky questions, he’s getting of the hook very easily. And he’s the artist that a lot of papers usually love to hate, strange.

In Kigali however, after initial peace, things slowly start to pick up, becoming a media affair. Political points can probably be won by picking on an outsider, and for this Hornsleth is a wonderful target. The papers aren’t denying that the project seems popular in the village, a few hundred have signed up to join.

It’s instead a defence against a latent humiliation some think he is causing Ugandans in general; has the villagers’ “souls been sold for a goat?”. Is he not “ridiculing poor people?” And with references to the dirty words you can find on his home page and Hornslet’s paintings, his character is being questioned, what kind of person has Uganda opened the doors for? I’m calling him to see how he’s doing. “It will blow over soon, if you had listened to the radio you would hear nicer things about me, in Uganda the radio is more important than the papers, and I have made friends with the radio people.”

Staffan Boije af Gennäs, writher and critic based in Copenhagen.

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OPEN LETTER TO PEOPLE IN DOUBT ABOUT THE HORNSLETH VILLAGE PROJECT

MR. DAVID KATEREGGA, UGANDA

This is David Kateregga. I am a Ugandan and a member of the village where the Hornsleth project is taking place. I am part and parcel of the project.

I respect your brotherly concern, but allow me to explain just a few lines, so that you may have an understanding of the issue. And hopefully an explanation will allow you to approve of the project instead of feeling anger towards it.

1. Sub Saharan African people are actually dying. Uganda in particular with a life expectancy of 46 years. Not because we Ugandans want to die that early, but simply because our people do not have a single coin to buy medicine and the basic necessities to keep living.

2. One of the ideas of the art project is for people around the world to understand that aid is given to poor countries with one hand and demands are given with the other hand. In other words: the aid is conditional, it is pure business and not really something that will benefit the poor countries in the long run.

3. The people of my village are participating in the Hornsleth Village Project of their own free will. Absolutely none are forced into doing something that they do not want to do. They fully understand the aim of the project, and they are participating – not only to get a goat or a pig – but also because they approve of the aim of the project.

4. And what is the aim of the project? The project has many facets, so it takes more than a few lines to explain. However; it is pro the African people and certainly not against… Furthermore it demands questions and answers, making people think of the fairness of the Western world aiding Africans and at the same time setting limits of international open trade markets.

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5. So forget your immediate anger for a moment and try to see the project with the right eyes. Somebody here (Mr. Hornsleth) is bringing out the reality and absolutely not “having fun” embarrassing people from any poor country.

He has an idea to open the eyes of the rich world, and his aim is to focus on a more fair world in terms of resources and rights to the wealth of the earth.

6. When I read your lines I ask myself: what about the corrupt African leaders who place the money sent for aid in their own pockets? I am sure that if things were OK in your own country, you would not be in Denmark. Think of your relatives and the conditions you left at home: do your people have many pigs or goats? Are they living in a democratic society with conditions to develop themselves and their surroundings?

I hope that this remains a brotherly discussion for you to realize the importance of the project in my village. Who would have known my village and my people anyway, if it wasn’t for the project?

Think of it.

Think of those you left at home.

Think about Africa.

We badly need a voice, and who will speak, if the Africans around the world are not speaking?

I believe that this project is part of our voice. We are a small voice in the bush, where roads are impassable and we drink water from the pond.

We can still discuss the project further. I do not mind at all. In an African spirit.

Best regards, David Kateregga Engineer, musician and certainly part of the Hornsleth Village Project in Uganda.

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ABOUT THE HORNSLETH VILLAGE PROJECT IN BUTEYONGERA [MUKONO DISTRICT] - where p’ple have added a name of Hornsleth to their names RICHARD MULONDO

It all started when Mr. Kristian made his first visit to Uganda. I came to know Kristian through my brother DAVID who works for MR. BIRGER, a Danish investor here, who is Kristian’s friend and mine, too. When we met David, Birger, Michael[Germany] and me, Mr. Kristian shared with us his vision of what he wanted to do for his art project. In the beginning, to me it sounded weird for the entire village to add his name to theirs. It was really going to be impossible in my sense. But Mr. Kristian went ahead to explain that it was trade between the villagers and him. They give him something by taking up his name and in return, he gives them something[money or animals]. There were also other benefits of taking up HORNSLETH’sNAME. These included – villagers will be able to trade with the outside world under the HORNSLETH name.

– villagers were passports bearing Hornsleth name to theirs for free.

– the name given to the villagers was to bring us together under one family regardless of your tribal, religious, political background and ideologies.

– villagers were to get money in form of animals to boost their income and many other benefits.

The task was left to explain it to the villagers, and David and I organised a village meeting for Kristian to meet the villagers. Kristian himself explained to the villagers about his art project and what he requires of them and what they get from him. They agreed to trade with him by taking up his name. Later that day, he talked to the opinion leaders and all agreed on what was to be done with the money Kristian was giving, that they should have them in form of pigs, goats and sheep. And each villager will take one of his choice.

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Before Kristian went back to Denmark, a month was set for the grand opening of the project and we got a lawyer by the name of Shaban Muziransoga based in Jinja. Kristian talked to him and he was supposed to help in the legalising of the project, drafting of the constitution, taking oath of affidavit and securing passports for the villagers.

David and I were meant to do the ground work cos we are from this village.

Kristian went back, but we kept communicating and him sending the money for the processing legal documents and the setting up of the project.

We started with the process of getting the villagers to fill the forms and taking the vows of affidavit. I got the forms from the lawyers office and took them down to the village. Villagers were waiting cos we kept notifying them through the project co-ordinator Henry and mobilizer Sarah. The local council chairman 1[Giduno]also helped in the sensitisation of the p’ple with the other village leaders. The p’ple willing started filling the passport forms and taking the oath with the added name Hornsleth to theirs. Every bit of the entire process could be video recorded cos by this time, Kristian had sent a camera trough DHL. Mr. Edwin Twino does the video coverage to this day.

In the process, p’ple were so excited about the project and what was promised to them from adding HORNSLETH to their name, this caused other neighbouring villages to feel envious and coming to us asking to be included in the project, but we kept telling them that their turn would come also.

Almost forgetting, according to Kristian, he needecd 110 participants in his photographing, but the villagers were more than 400 so we had to tell the p’ple that the selected 110 were the ones going to represent the entire village, but everyone would benefit from the project.

The village leaders helped us in selecting out the 110 p’ple. It wasn’t a simple task cos other p’ple thought that they will be left out. But we had to convince them that more than 400 p’ple are to benefit cos our target was 10,000 p’ple in the coming 5 years to be reached.

Runours started spreading, discouraging the villagers from adding the Hornsleth name to their names like; – its not good to take on a foreign name.

– Kristian’s promises of giving money in return was not real.

– maybe we were registering rebels.

– the p’ple were going to be used and in the end get nothing. And many others.

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The p’ple disagreed with the rumours one by one, especially the issue of taking on a foreign name. They remembered that when Kristian first visited, they too gave him a name BIRUNGI,KIRABO[Birger], MUKISA[Michael].About stealing them, they saw that we asked no single coin from the p’ple not even registration, yet other organisations here ask for registration fee. The villagers agreed that we should register the project as a C B O with the help of the chairman local council 3,KAFUMBE, from Kasawo parish and chairman local council 1,Giduno,signed the letter that was taken to the district[mukono] with the constitution. Everything was verified and later given a certificate. The project was registered in the name of HORNSLETH VILLAGE. After being registered, the project had to find a place to set up its office. Before we were doing all the work in a church building. Having looked here and there for a cheaper land to put up project offices which Kristian was willing to pay for and not finding it, one of the village members willingly offered to rent us her house and the land on which it’s located.

Kristian sent down the for rent and setting up of the office, like fencing the land, painting of the place in national colours of BLACK YELLOW and RED. On the construction of the place, we hired the villagers for labour and paid them according to their labour.

In one of the meetings with the villagers ,one by the name of HENRY Kayondo suggested that it’s time to change the name of the village from BUTEYONGERA to HORNSLETH cos literally buteyongera means things do not progress.

The camera man, Julie, the vet doctor and me started visiting different farms in search for pigs, goats and sheep, at the same time making bookings. Meanwhile Kristian came back to Uganda, he started sending down money to buy the animals. We started the buying and shipping in the animals to the farm which by this time was through with construction.

We also had other help in the process from Henry Kayondo as co-ordinator,Sarah Nakalemaas secretary, Mawanda as mobilizer, Godfrey as helper, Ssengendo Francis as watchman. These p’ple are still working with the project up to today.

Kristian came with a group of photographers from Denmark and the p’ple from the village had been waiting and prepared the village. They also practised songs, excitedly waiting for him and the grand opening. By the time Kristian came, the passports we had applied for hadn’t yet been issued, but we

ABOUT THE HORNSLETH VILLAGE PROJECT IN BUTEYONGERA [MUKONO DISTRICT]

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had made the village cards with their new name. the L C 1 chairman signed the I D cards bearing Hornsleth in them.

Kristian and the group came to the village and the p’ple were many waiting for them. The first three days, they used it to photograph every person among the 110 participants who were representing the entire village in this art project as agreed upon with them.

The opening day came and there were very many p’ple in thousands, some from neighbouring villages who had come to witness this new idea of art of all villagers to take on ONE name. We had two members of parliament, L C 3 chairman kasawo, religious leaders, local leaders, news reporters and Others.

Now the time every one was waiting for anxiously for a long time came to give out what was promised. THE ANIMALS. Kristians’ son ADRIAN, who was representing his father, gave out the first animal to a very old man by the name of ABI in his 70’s and it was a pig. This marked the beginning of giving out animals and about 307 beneficiaries got animals[pigs, goats and sheep].

The project is moving on smoothly though there has been many a challenge we’ve faced. Challenges like: the planning to close down the project by politicians giving reasons like we are recruiting rebels.

Villagers loosing their animals to sickness and bad care.

Visitation of police to the site.

Having to move many miles a day to sensitise the villagers about how to take great care of the animals. And many more.

We have so far lived up to the expectations of the villagers and Hornsleth and the project is growing strong day by day. We have been cleared by the police that there are no illegal activities taking place. We have been replacing the animals that died and giving back to the villagers whose animals died with others.

We have a vet who goes around the village treating all animals and we provide medical care to each and every person who benefited.

As I am talking now, the project is stable and moving on well. In conclusion, we on behalf of the Hornsleth village p’ple are most grateful to MR KRISTIAN for what he has done to uplift the everyday living standards of the villagers.

THANX A LOT. YOURS RICHARD MULONDO.

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DEAR KRISTIAN von HORNSLETH

KLAUS WEIBEL

“It is easy for him who keeps his foot free from harm to counsel and admonish him who is in misery” Aeschylus “We only become moral when we are unhappy” Marcel Proust

Dear Kristian von Hornsleth, I hope Africa leaves you alone. I never really wanted to go back after my two trips to Kenia and Mali. You know the old joke you hear in the airport-lounges where you stay hours and hours if not days, because the plane is late and no one cares about it. Standard answer: we have our problems, you have yours, but you always have been part of ours. If you cannot stand it, go back to Europe and leave us alone! Good old Europe, thank you Mr. Rumsfield, for reminding us of the difference.

No, I always hated Africa. I remember the conversation with Graham Green at the Bar of the Ritz in Paris, when he was already the old gentleman, Sir Graham Green. He was not too keen on Africa either. He preferred Asia after all, and so do I. I did an interview for the Spectator in 1988 and had to ask him after his memories of Hotel Bars. I remember Green was talking about the Majestic Hotel in former “Saigon”.

Built in 1928, the Majestic Hotel offered opulence much closer to the life Graham enjoyed as a wealthy and famous novelist. Perhaps he liked the Majestic because here he was somewhat insulated from the dangers of the street. In the cosy central courtyard, lounging around the pool, he could easily have imagined being in Nice or St. Tropez. He was a born again Frenchman.

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Years later I visited The Majestic and its roof bar with its fine view both up and down the river where you can contemplate the strange flavours of Vietnam’s cultural melange from a safe height. After dark, above the dark tangle of bamboo scaffolding and corrugated iron shanties on the opposite bank, giant neon billboards advertising Carlsberg, Phillips and AIWA seem to hang suspended.

Icons of the re-instated corporate pantheon. Even more incongruous is the mariachi band on the Majestics’ open roof-deck, wearing sombreros and black suits and playing Mexican swing. I remember buying a bottle of Scotch and spending the evening talking on the phone to Chantal. She always calls me ”Petit”. ”That’s him playing, the dandy, journalist, informer, man about town.

People know him as a regular at the bars and, where he could be counted on to make an appearance each night at cocktail hour, with cane in hand, dressed in a dark-blue jacket and open-necked white shirt.” She doesn’t like to be lost in translation, as much as I do. Ah, yes the joke: Africa is a huge country, many airports and no lions.

On a plane between Shanghai and Dubai I saw the movie ”Hotel Rwanda”. A slam to the West’s discreet non-involvement in the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Hotel Rwanda, as Xan Brooks writes in his critic for the Guardian rumbles in with a two-pronged agenda: to slam the West’s discreet non-involvement in the 1994 Rwandan genocide and to salute one man who stood up and made a difference: Paul Rusesabagina. In reality he was a Kigali hotel manager who turned his Belgian-owned resort into a sanctuary for about 1 200 Tutsis and moderate Hutus and saved their lives through his actions.

Mr. Hornsleth are you the brave white Paul Rusesabagina? Do you hide a few hundred poor soles under the warming coat of western decadence and take advantage of public relation effects? That does not stand for the western discreet non-involvement!

Smart Ass Hornsleth, you sleep well in the happiest country of Europe, Denmark. ”An internationally successful working artist is using all possibilities of personal freedom of speech, of developing his markets and his international reception. He generates his economic wealth through fun and fame. ”Fun, Fame, Fortune!” He is subjectively pushing his artistic value system and acting in his world, which is the international world of art. The individual and his individual wishes are his driving force. His fame becomes a key tool to improve peoples living conditions!” That is how we can read it on your website. So as I know from the press mirror you have sent me, you are really very famous in the Republic of Denmark. 30 Million ”Media contacts” in not even two month with one project: Respect!

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This works out, but how does this affect the life of people from your village?

Your website sketches their situation very realistic: The perception of a human being from a village in the countryside of Uganda: They try to survive as a farmer or as a peasant. They live without electricity without any kind of security system and without any ambition to work on anything else than surviving the existentially and socially very difficult situation. The world ends in the capital of Uganda to get medicine against malaria. The world consists of this life condition and this social surrounding. The surviving of the family is the main goal, everything else is not essential!” This serious description of the social situation is convincing, but how does this relate to the famous contemporary artist in the West?

As I read you went to the village in Uganda in order to convince them to use your name and gain through this a new and enduring tool to improve their living condition. What you ask for is to buy the second given name on their identity cards.

What they get are animals to enrich their personal life. You are offering an economic deal to people who never would be able to do any economic deal of this kind without your offer. You point out that they as individuals own something, not essential to them, which has an economic value. Until now 380 people chose this way to improve their situation on short, medium and long terms.

You just want a photo of them showing their identity card with their second given name ”Hornsleth”. These photos are your artworks, no personal rights of the photo remain with the person photographed.

I am not sure if this is cynical or idealistic, inhumane or humane and a real way to help. The difference is that these people take ”Hornsleth” as their second given name in order to improve their lives. This alone is your and their decision.

And the marketing and public relation of this act as contemporary art is very efficient as we see, and you even give the leader of the village the possibility to speak about the situation of his people in the media. But why do we still think you are not like Paul Rusesabagina? Because he did it because he did it, you did it to become famous and you took something of their identity away.

Rusesabagina is a hero! Are you a hero, too or are you a fool? I did not find any reference neither in cultural history nor in the history of economics related to Africa. Except the slaves exported from Africa had to take the name of their new owner. Obviously you are not owning them and they are not working for you. Do you really want to help them or just get famous on their behalf?

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Prometheus – to mention one example – was a great benefactor of mankind in Greek mythology. Prometheus stole fire from the gods, gave it to man, and taught him many useful arts and sciences. This sympathy with mankind roused the anger of Zeus, who then plagued man with Pandora and her box of evils and chained Prometheus to a mountain peak in the Caucasus. Prometheus tricked Zeus. In his anger over the trick Zeus took fire away from man.

However, Prometheus brought it back again to man. Zeus was enraged that man again had fire. He decided to inflict a terrible punishment on both man and Prometheus. Mr. Hornsleth are you tricking us, are you tricking the people in your village, are you tricking yourself, the political power in Uganda or are you not tricking anyone? The beautiful Pandora was sent by Zeus to mankind.

Eventually, Pandora’s curiosity about the jar she was forbidden to open became to great. She opened the jar and out flew all manor of evils, sorrows, plagues, and misfortunes. However, the bottom of the jar held one good thing - hope. So is there any beautiful Pandora and what about the hope of these people?

And there is the other story which comes to my mind: Phaeton, the son of the sun-god Helios. When Phaeton (”the shining one”) finally learned who his father was, he went east to meet him. He induced his father to allow him to drive the chariot of the sun across the heavens for one day. The horses, feeling their reins held by a weaker hand, ran wildly out of their course and came close to the earth, threatening to burn it. Zeus noticed the danger and with a thunderbolt he destroyed Phaeton. He fell down into the legendary river Eridanus where he was found by the river nymphs who mourned him and buried him.

The tears of these nymphs turned into amber. For the Ethiopians, however, it was already too late: they were scorched by the heat and their skins had turned black.

Phaeton wanted to show he was a son of a god, he wanted to show, look, I am important.

No matter whether we think of Prometheus or Phaeton, both had to face the result of their actions, no matter whether they did it from a humanistic or egocentric point of view. You are border-lining between the two aspects and I guess you have to move on the razor’s edge like a snail. You have to please both expectations, the humanists and the egoists, the idealists and the cynics.

This is a very tough demand and a very high price you pay to be famous.

You show through your photos individuals with an individual voice and an individual perception of the world as such and they chose you to communicate their existence to the world. Mr. Hornsleth, you are their ambassador and

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the person who explains who they are, where and how they live. Even if they naturally do not care about contemporary western art, they accept this artist offers a solution tool to improve their live situation. Hornsleth is a voice for them to communicate their own individuality beyond their own horizon.” You go to Africa and convince people to take your name as a given name and then you make them look as if this was their own free decision to take you as their personal ambassador. You want to tell us that someone who does not travel and does not care about any outside country chooses you as an ambassador to the world? Therefore your public relation is part of campaigning their wish to speak to a world they do not even have been interested in? You are saying this wish aroused through your artistic intervention?

So this work is a testimony of responsible creativity as suggested by Mary Shelley in Frankenstein. Mary Shelley writes in her Preface to Frankenstein, that her aim was ”the exhibition of the amiableness of domestic affection”.

The novel shows the results that a lack of domestic affection can have on art, results which allow Mary Shelley to call her novel ”my hideous progeny”. It argues that by focusing on the issues of paternal negligence and the need for responsible creativity, Shelley’s novel deconstructs the story of Prometheus as a masculinist narrative of patriarchal authority. And now you, the Viking, give us an example of what she ideally meant with your way of letting the people ask you to represent their interests, by an artwork representing the very person?

Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein is widely understood as an allegory on art and art production. Victor creates the monster like an artist creates an artwork, while the process of production of this very art-piece, neglects humanistic, emotional or social as well as ethical values. Victor dangerously ignores the human affection that arises from the domestic sphere. In setting up a common parallel, that between the artist as creator and God as Creator, Shelley suggests that the artist must take moral responsibility for his fictive creations. Mr. Hornsleth you go one step further, you are dealing with really existing people of a number of over 300, how much more must be your moral responsibility, which you have to take over through your artistic intervention into their lives. Victor Frankenstein, as a pseudo-artist, creates a monstrosity and you create what?

Your website puts it like this ”Where does the art start and what makes it a great art project? The art starts with the decision to realize this projects, to go to Africa, to understand the situation, to dialogue with the people from the village, to find a solution with the village leaders and to think of an economic deal which is good for both sides. The art is a process and an experience; a new experience for the people from the village and for the artist himself. The

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art is a process of generating this idea and dealing with different cultures, different continents and all kind of barriers. The art is the result: The living situation improved. The consciousness of the people in the village as well as the artists’ changed. The result is art which perhaps changes the opinion of the visitor of shows of this work and perhaps make many people aware that they can do something to improve people’s living conditions not only in Africa, but in general.”

The question remains why do you expose yourself and your work so macho then? Why do you not just say I want to help people in order to do something responsible with my creative energy. I still do not believe. Until now I think you write ”Fuck you art-lovers” over Pamela Andersons chest, or engrave kill the bitch on a jewellery collier or all the other pseudo-decadent cliché kitsch. This is exactly the type of artists Mary Shelly’s criticizes. This Hornsleth we know seems to be closer to Shelly’s good friend George Gordon Byron (1788-1824), better known as Lord Byron who featured extravagant living, numerous love affairs, debts, separation, and allegations of incest and sodomy; he was described as ”mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” Byron served as a regional leader of Italy’s revolutionary organization the Carbonari in its struggle against Austria, and later travelled to fight against the Turks in the Greek War of Independence, for which the Greeks consider him a national hero. From what we read in the Danish media we might see a new Lord Byron in you: Kristian von Hornsleth.

Let us change our perspective for a second, we are getting to sentimental here.

Let us try to understand why we all like it so much if you give pigs and goats to the poor people of a desperate village in the middle of Uganda?

If we look into the official websites of the Uganda Government or the information material sent to me by the Embassy of Uganda, the state has always been a land of rich soils and good climate. These have supported a trebling of the population in the last 30 years to approximately 26 million people. Most Ugandans still live on the land and more of Uganda’s wealth comes from agriculture (42%) than from either industry or services (38% and 20% respectively). But Uganda is also a landlocked country wrapped around the shores of Lake Victoria. The official wording of Ugandas government is: ”Many people today think of Uganda as a great success story – and they are right in many ways. Since 1987, we have enjoyed a sustained period of economic growth.

Liberalization and privatisation have created new opportunities and a growing middle class; new businesses have opened; urbanization has created new suburbs for the new middle class who enjoys better infrastructure and services, indeed a better standard of life...” What the government does not tell us is the

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social conditions on the countryside. People living in small villages on nothing or nearly nothing and try to survive on nearly nothing. Most often no school education, no medical infrastructure and no electricity and no social net at all, as we know it from Denmark, Germany, France or other countries of the European Community.

Mr Hornsleth, you show us the opposite and your own solution to management of this social situation of a big part of African contemporary society, you are not showing us the new middle class of Uganda, you are showing us the poor who cheer up because their personal life situation improves through your action. Through the whole operation you created a win-win situation for you and your people, but you tricked the governing elites in Uganda. So what are they going to do? Whatever they do, it will do good for you. Congratulations for this.

And we hope that you are not like ”The Interpreter,” promoting the idea that African elites are generally bad and it needs the help of the good white.

Why do we love this action so much? Do we love the Danish Robin Hood in the forests of Uganda, taking the money from the white capitalists in Copenhagen and giving it to the poor African people or do we see tricks and virtuously covered ideas of self promotion and public relation on behalf of the poorest of the poor?

I think we love it as we appreciate movies like ”Hotel Rwanda”, because they are grounded in ”the undefined but persistent feelings of guilt that we, the West feel about contemporary Africa.” We are not Prometheus like you, we are no hero or saint, we are nervous about getting involved since it’s not ’our’ place. The movies celebrate Africans who tried to do something about their lives and political situation and now you are showing us your subjective vision of dealing with the situation.

Is it either this feeling of guilt or is it the fascination about the idea of Africa through books like Kiplings ”The Jungle Book” and the imagination of a huge Arcadia which is in reality a paradise with wild animals, amazing landscapes, great light and a lot of poor Africans as ethnic or tribal performers? Rudyard Kipling wrote about the jungle in India, but had accrued much knowledge through listening to others and using research. The tales in ”The Jungle Book” are fables, using animals in an anthromorphic manner to give moral lessons.

The verses of The Law of the Jungle, for example, lay down rules for the safety of individuals, families and communities. Here we are: animals indicate ethics and moral habits and transform the way of thought of people in the village and stimulate our western imagination of help organization.

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Our guilt focuses on the authentic. Lynn Smith in her article in the Los Angeles Times about the German drama ”Nowhere in Africa,” which won the Oscar for best foreign-language film in 2003 testifies the productions reach for the authentic.

Does authenticity mean to take poor people to play poor, or rich people play poor for the western wish for authenticity and then drive back to their new middle class bungalows in the suburbs of Nairobi? The director probably meant be aware of the clichés we have in the west and try to avoid them, but what does that mean, African romanticism or how romantic it is to be poor, without energy and water? Despite the physical hardship, it was important to shoot in Kenya to make the film as authentic as possible, says Peter Herrmann, who travelled with the crew. As an ethnographer who had spent several years in Africa, he says he knew how to get things done with little money. I think the term little money sounds authentic to western expectations. Little money sounds also familiar in the way Hornsleth works.

After shooting the film team formed a foundation and held special screenings in Germany to raise funds to support Mukutani, the village where they filmed and whose inhabitants appeared as Swahili-speaking extras. Herrmann returned to Mukutani.

Using a generator, he screened the film outdoors at night for the community. ”The whole crowd was laughing,” he says. ”They were very excited to see themselves and people they know.” Even without knowing specific words, he says, they understood the universal language of relationships in the movie. So what do the people who see themselves showing their modified identity card think when they see the show. First of all they never see them because they have no passports, second they never know how to finance a trip like this, if they would know where to book the tickets.

All the press writing on the project trust your descriptions, photos and filmmaterial if they would go there and see the reality, they would not talk so much about you Mr. Hornsleth, but the situation of people in a country which regards itself as well doing with a growing middle class. If that is the reason for this project and not self promotion I think you have developed and executed an excellent idea. If it is just because you want to be famous then congratulations, you made it, but wait Prometheus had to pay with his lifetime for his attitude.

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Graham Green wrote in 1960 “A Burnt-Out Case” which was set in the African nation of Kongo. The protagonist is a world-famous architect, who is the victim of a terrible attack of indifference, he no longer finds meaning in art or pleasure in life.

Arriving anonymously at a little village, he is diagnosed as the mental equivalent of a ‘burnt-out-case’. However, he loses himself in working for the people of the village, his disease of mind slowly approaches a cure. So if this is your way and you are starting to work for these people and help them to improve their live condition in an ongoing way I congratulate you and I am the first to say this is really serious contribution to contemporary art and responsibility of creativity.

The one thing which was left in Pandoras’ jar was hope. If hope is the one result I think the whole project deserves respect and recognition.

Sincerely Yours Klaus Weibel Villa St. Michele, Fiesole the 20th, September 2006

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ART ON THE INSIDE Why the Hornsleth Uganda Village Project threatens what it affirms JÖRG SCHELLER

If it is possible to state something about the development of western art since 1945 in general, then it might be the thesis that art has moved from an – alleged – outside to the inside. Typical of the era which we call classical modernity was a drive towards the utopian, the esoteric. It sought power on the inside just because it claimed to be the “other”, the outside, the great difference, the healer, the messiah. Franz Marc or the Futurists dreamt of warlike art and artlike war, of destruction as a great hygiene for the collective spirit, the ever symbolist futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti dreamt of chaos re-entering the sphere of crusted human existence, a technologized version of chaos, however. Malewitsch promised the entry to a superior suprematist sphere behind the canvas of his “Black Square”, the Surrealist movement reclaimed the wild, untamed spirits of the unconscious, attempting to free the “Es” from the domesticating hands of the “Ich”; even in the early Romantic period of the nineteenth century the Nazarenes (“the first moderns”, as Beat Wyss states in the catalogue to the exhibition “Religion Macht Kunst – Die Nazarener” in Frankfurt, 2005) demanded the renewal of life – political, religious, social sphere included – through religious art. They literally moved to the outside, namely to the monastery San Isidoro near Rome, but continued to influence the inside, staying in contact with and working for King Ludwig I. Generally speaking, classical modern art defined itself as the outside healing the inside. Chaos instead of order, religion spiritualizing the materialistic dead, transcendence as a viagra for immanence, otherness lending its helping hand to the carnal profane. Artists proclaimed their work autonomous, transcendent and different, only to offer its difference to the realm of the inside. The relationship between immanence and transcendence was reciprocal yet the transcendent aspect was evidently favoured.

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After 1945, at the latest with the rise of Pop-Art, this era ends. In his book will to art, of the genesis of nominalist modernity. Although even modernist, Greenberg-acclaimed artists like Barnett Newman once again sought transcendence and mystical experience through art, the great vector from ‘45 to our present days is that of art giving up its claim to otherness, of art moving to the centre, of art entering the age of affirmation. Media turning into messages, artists employed in companies as a desirable creative disturbance, art adapting its cultural techniques to those of the société du spectacle, art as psychiatric therapy, art as investment, art as a materialist status symbol, art as a tourist attraction, the world changing into its own museum (as claimed by Boris Groys or Jean Baudrillard)... all news. However, it is naive to believe that at any given previous period art in fact had played any other role. It was not art itself but the approach to art, the rethorics about art, its self-assessment, hopes projected, dreams materialized, healers sought after, in short: the real artwork always has been the discourse about art. Art as the genuine otherness, art as the outside is a myth of discourse – which does not imply that it was ineffective or “untrue”. On the contrary. Myth has always been the most effective way to create truth. Myths are not true. But they become true anyway.

Money and metaphysics Now what has all that do with Kristian von Hornsleth’s Uganda Village Project?

First of all, there is a historic link. Although nowadays most artists attempt to valorize their oeuvre by claiming its unique innovativeness, its a-historic subjectivity, its ironic position towards tradition; although the current posthistoric ideology – still – despises the “old” turning its face towards compliant dreams of future, the evidence is clear: The Hornsleth Uganda Village Project is simultaneously located at both sides of the permeable historic border – at that of classical modernity, intertwining life, art and politics, and at that of nominalist modernity, giving birth to worldly coolness, affirmation and immanence, rejecting the idea of redemption of the inside by the outside. It applies basic methods and techniques of economy and principles of free trade without restraint just because it no longer believes in the genuine transcendent otherness of art. The relation to classical modernity is no longer based on belief, hope, tradition. It is a playful relation, an intertextual approach, a paradoxical means to integrate history separated from its historic nature.

The third side that the Hornsleth Uganda Village Project occupies and also redefines is that of the realm of postmodernism. Leslie Fiedler’s dictum “Cross the Border - Close The Gap” is reanalyzed not in terms of closing the gap between “high” and “low” but in terms of overtly, self-evidently closing the gap

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between the exchange of commodities and the sphere of art. Art moves to inside. If the global crystal palace proves to be large enough to shelter the entire cosmos, including money & metaphysics, is yet to be resolved.

The traces haven been laid. Ignoring them does not prove their non-existence.

Derrida’s and the poststructuralists’ most salient legacy is the understanding that every text written is not written by a single author but also of all authors having preceeded him. No author is a genuine subject sailing its own territorial waters all alone. There’s always pirates setting sails, too. Every author is an author of authors. Branding is one of the best examples of the authorship of authorship. Concerning the Hornsleth Uganda Village Project, on the one hand we might thus track the traces of a Beuysianian soziale plastik or of a Vostellianian declaration of life as art, both late (even too late) representatives of classical modernity rather than of nominalist modernity. On the other hand we might think of a postmodern act of de-centering and of provocation, of a melting pot of diverging entities, of a renaissance of “anything goes” – branding people, branding countries, branding life, branding art, Erweiterter Kunstbegriff until discourse crumbles, bursts, explodes. Kant’s Interesseloses Wohlgefallen seems to disappear behind a cloud of culminating culture, the demand for a fundamental difference between art and economy in the tradition of the philosophy of German Idealism seems to vanish finally.

Capital vs. Capital But there is more and there is contradiction laying in wait. We might also detect a position inspired by the age of enlightenment: art as the helping hand, art as a bridge between cultures, art as a means of contact and communication, art as a common denominator of the human race as such, art as an aesthetic of existence, life itself as a slumbering artwork, which the freemasons symbolized as the “rough stone” to be hewn by the artist. Proceeding on this assumption, the Uganda Village Project would quasi-automatically imply a critique of the mechanisms of capitalism and capitalist power. By re-contextualizing and thus distancing and contrasting these mechanisms in the sphere of art, one could argue, it reveals their true effects, it unmasks false rethorics of capitalist ideology. Most prominently it thus would expose the effect of turning existence into a commodity. The critique of popes and kings turns into a critique of the present capitalist aristocracy which is attempting to abandon profane, carnal life to rise to the crystalline, abstract sphere of capital. However, it should not be forgotten that it actually was the age of enlightenment which gave birth to capitalism, to the age of the inside. And never was the link between art and capital factually broken. For instance, even at the time of the Lebensreform

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around 1900, when European artists, philosophers, authors, vegetarians, nudists, feminists, musicians, anarchists sought the “third way” between capitalism and communism, capital was needed to create islands in capitalism. In 1900, the Belgian industrialist Henri Oedenkoven founded together with feminist Ida Hofmann und the brothers Karl and Arthur Gräser a cooperative of vegetarians, nudists and freethinkers in Ascona, Switzerland, called the “Monte Verita”. Of course the area, an entire hill, had to be purchased first - an investor had to invest capital to abolish capital. And of course also Guy Debord’s radical thinking was financed by a wealthy publisher, a man of capital. Now it is Hornsleth cooperating with investors in the sphere of art – yet overtly and unashamedly.

However, this essay advocates the thesis that there is one major difference between the Hornsleth Uganda Village Project and the critique of the abuse of power as coined by the age of enlightenment, one major difference between the age of enlightenment and the age of affirmation which shelters Hornsleth’s work: The critical methods of unmasking and exposing, as developed by the age of enlightenment, today are no more effective, no more valid, no more useful. Peter Sloterdijk has portrayed and outlined eight of these methods in his “Critique of cynical reason”: the critique of revelation, of religious illusion, of metaphysical mock, of idealistic superstructure, of moral mock, of transparency, of natural appearances, of private appearances. So the most effective critical method of the age of enlightenment was to tear down the masks. To reveal that pigs dwell under robes, that hypocrites sit on the thrown. The age of enlightenment provokes established powers by attempting to prove their inner illogic, their bigoted mentality, the incoherence of semantics and rethorics. For instance, Kant’s groundbreaking approach to philosophy was to outline that neither metaphysics nor sheer positivism are able to define or prove a proper basis of their thought systems. Kant’s proposal was that although we cannot prove the existence of God, we nevertheless may and even must believe in him. And if there is no such thing as an ontological “good” to be found neither in heaven nor on earth, the solution is that all human beings should behave in a way that benefits all other human beings. He too could have invented the Nike-slogan: “Just do it.”

This is the great difference. Hornsleth is not interested in unmasking anything.

He collects and plays with masks already thrown onto the floor. The age of enlightenment and its critique could only succeed as long as there were less representatives of the cynical version of reason as there are today. Nowadays almost everybody, at least those in leading positions, secretly or overtly believes in the constructivist, mask-like nature of truth, reason, morals, mankind,

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and in the cold, neutral power of markets. The globe sways to “every cop is a criminal”, the Rolling Stones’ early jam on Hegel’s dialectics. Everything is true, as Baudrillard pointed out. War results in peace and peace is the earliest phase of war. Peace is unendurable. Postmodern theory – and ideology - postulate that truth itself is a construction and although there are strong signs that we are re-entering an era of essentialism (both economical, cultural and religious), we cannot hide from the postmodern insight that throughout history it factually was possible to perpetually construct and re-construct truth.

Even essentialism now is of constructivist nature. So it is no longer shocking that pigs grunt under robes, that presidents lie, that the real turns out to be the mask of the real, exchangeable, polymorph, adaptable; that the nature of art and the nature of money overlap, that the roles we play indeed are roles, that the distinction between actor and character is no longer valid, that history is a product of mankind and mankind a product of history, a closed circuit – “there’s only man to do it right” says a line of the British pop-group Faithless, but who is man and what is right? And who are Faithless anyway?

The Light Is Everywhere Humanism and enlightenment – just like democracy in Derrida’s opinion – at least in some respects are auto-immunizing, self-destructive. Our culture, may it vaporize or not, has aligned chaos and science (as Norbert Bolz outlines in “Die Welt als Chaos und Simulation”), art and culture, money and art, Es and Ich, God and mankind, outside and inside, everything pulled into the bare light. Metaphysics is on the rise again but only as one competing power among others, providing instruments for structure and order, for all times having lost its numinous qualities (which of course does not account for the individual “mystic” believer). Where is the darkness to flee from? Where is the liar to accuse? Where is that good old devil to seduce us? Is Hornsleth a devil? Is he the seducer? Waiting at the crossroads of art and trade, promising riches for sold souls? If Hornsleth is the devil, then the devil has always been human. The only thing that frightens us is that there are no more things left to frighten us but ourselves, no more lies to pillory. No we create new devils via mass media to keep the fire burning, to keep us in motion. The fear of the outside, of otherness, of the foreign has changed into a fear of the total inside – even terrorists wear Nike-sneakers, study at universities, write emails. They are not the outside – they are the inside. The terrorists have become what they terrorize. The light is everywhere.

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Is the Hornsleth Uganda Village Project scandalous? An attempt to provoke the goodly-hearted? Jean Baudrillard has pointed out that even scandal and the denunciation of scandal are no longer possible in a system of simulacra, simulation and self-referentiality because it only serves as a pretext to pretend that morals still is valid and strong within the sphere of capitalism (which it is not). Watergate was no scandal and it today is no scandal that member of US-congress Mark Foley writes indiscrete emails to young male employees – it is just one thing a man can do among other things a man can do, no more, no less. This is the darker side of Pico della Mirandolas speech “on the dignity of man” in which the author claims that everybody is the sculptor of one’s self.

And the Hornsleth Uganda Village Project is no scandal either. Provocation or scandal only make sense in a system built on essentialist thought, on a sytem based on a center, a system not capable of adapting to critique. Capitalism also could be interpreted as an essentialist system – but its essence and its dogma are inclusice, not exclusive. This is of major significance. It incorporates its enemies. It is like a vampire – perfectly undead, immortal, not killing the victim but turning it into a vampire, too. Capitalism does not simply exploit or destroy – it transforms, plays with and feeds on what it haunts. In one respect Guy Debord was right: In the newer société du spectacle there is no centre any more. No emperor left to poison, no Bastille left to storm. We are living under the condition of an “integrated spectacle”. The vampires no longer draw back in their graves or gloomy towers, they no longer fear the light.

The Hornsleth Village Project is deeply rooted in the age of affirmation, not in the tradition of enlightenment. As outlined in the first paragraphs of this essay, it applies the gestures of the age of enlightenment as well as those of classical modernity (which could be considered as the evil twin of the age of enlightenment) on the one hand, but just as structural, playful elements feebly reminding of their semantic tradition. On the other hand, its dominant aspects are nominalist and affirmative – in some respects reminding of the methods of the banker Muhammad Yunus who recently received the Nobel Peace Price for his successful attempt to improve the living conditions of the poor inside the capitalist system, inside its logic, inside the realm of its rules and codes.

As the German art historian Wolfgang Ullrich outlines in his book “Mit dem Rücken zur Kunst”, it even could be argued that modern art just because of its affirmative character is now more powerful than ever – it finally has arrived in the banks, the offices, the villas; it is customarily used as the background for official photographs of politicians and entrepreneurs. It has become a powerful player on the inside. And yet this is what makes it threatening to what it affirms.

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The new spirit of destruction Why? Why should this affirmative play with expectations, with tradition, with history, with economy, with art and culture turn out to be threatening to the established order? Why is the Hornsleth Uganda Village Project a menace to the global village with its market square and its ever busy traders? Luc Boltanski’s and Ève Chiapello’s brilliant sociological study “The new spirit of capitalism” provides an answer. The authors argue that in fact it was the ambitious critique of capitalism and the critique of the dominance of economy that served as the motor for capitalism. Because of its ever critical counterparts, the bourgeoisie had to re-invent capitalism and its justifications again and again. Without touching the nature of capitalism, its spirit was perpetually being justified and redefined - the face of capitalism changed from family-like enterprises which offered protection to groups based on the ideology of pure performance and competence to global groups worshipping the idea of total efficiency (McDonaldization). The nature of capital and –ism remained the same. Capitalism integrated critique as a sort of supervisory board, as a seismograph for collective mood, it changed not only its masks and its ideologies, as Boltanski and Chiapello stress, but also allowed critique to produce some real and factual effects, for instance on the conditions at workplaces. Thus adapting without changing, it managed to survive its lack of morals by admitting changes in its structure to a certain degree. The most prominent critic of capitalism and the bourgeoisie was art - the self-proclaimed outside, the otherness. But what happens when critique falls silent or when it becomes playful? What happens when everything moves to the inside? When affirmation takes over? Systems based on dynamics and innovation that ossify, that lose their outside, tend to implode (Baudrillard). The Hornsleth Uganda Village Project, just because of its affirmative approach, connotes a new level of critique - the absence of critique, which paradoxically is most dangerous for capitalism. The new spirit of this critique is silent, secret, clandestine, it is a silver tongued devil, a snake, a charmer, it nods its head and shakes its soul. What we experience right now is not necessarily the triumph of culture, capitalism and economy over art, the triumph of the total inside. What we experience might as well be the countdown to the implosion of the inside. The Hornsleth Village People, without knowing it, have put their fingers on the red button.

Jörg Scheller (born 1979), art historian and journalist, Stuttgart, Germany

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BURN YOUR PORSCHE, CUT YOUR HAIR AND FLEE THE COUNTRY SVANTE LINDEBURG

[Early on in the process Kristian Hornsleth hires a leading Scandinavian PRagency to create as much media attention around his Uganda project as possible. Hornsleth expects nothing less than a media crisis. And that is what he gets. Massive coverage by everyone from DR (Danish Broadcasting Corporation) to the BBC, to the Sunday Vision in Uganda. Top stories on the news, on the radio, in national newspapers, in lifestyle magazines, art magazines, in the tabloids, letters to the Editor from around the world – and not to mention PRvalue for millions of Danish Kroner.

Here PR-representative, Svante Lindeburg describes meeting Kristian Hornsleth for the first time.]

My mobile rings, it’s Sunday afternoon and I am at home. “Lindeburg speaking”, I say and hear a pleasant but clearly excited voice….

“Kristian Hornsleth here – I am an Artist. Hope you don’t mind me calling.

I have heard that you know a lot about art and PR and that you have excellent connections within CNN. When can we meet? I need your help. I have an idea.”

I knew all about Hornsleth’s idea. I had heard about it only two days earlier.

And what an idea! Ingenious, devilish – the sort of idea that you want to tell your friends about just to see the reaction on their faces. The sort of idea that you’re afraid to tell to your mother because you know that she won’t approve – but also the kind of idea that is almost begging to get out into the media. It is sensational, it is controversial, it is personal and at the same time it is art – in other words it’s great news.

Two hours later, Hornsleth arrives at my apartment with a massive black art book engraved with his characteristic name brand HORNSLETH in his arms.

“Thought you might like to read about my art, so that you can get to know me

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better.” Fair enough. I skim through it and stumble upon a couple of naked women with ‘Fuck you art lovers’ written on their bare skin.

Kristian strikes me as taller than I had imagined and even though there are a few paint stains on his pants, he doesn’t look like your average starving artist.

On the contrary, Kristian is very well dressed - in a shirt and jacket, his face looks healthy and tanned like he’s just been out sailing, his eyes are alive and there is a certain spark in his personality that makes you want to listen to him.

Perfect for TV, I think to myself. Intriguing, charismatic – almost seductive.

“It is very simple. I want to get as much media attention as possible. I want to see my face on national TV, I want to see my name in the leading Danish newspapers, I want BBC to call me; get me on CNN and throw in Sweden, Norway, Germany as well while we’re at it. Tell me to burn my Porsche and I will do it, tell me to cut my hair and it’s off – I will even flee the country if you tell me to.

In other words I am all yours. When do we start?”

This project was highly unusual compared to other organisations and companies that I had worked for. Now I had to put everything I knew about crisis management into reverse. Instead of getting a company out of a media crisis, I now had to get Hornsleth into one. Instead of avoiding the crisis – I had to create it. And at the same time I had to make sure that Hornsleth came out alive and stronger than before the campaign.

“For me, the media is part of my art. I therefore need a strong brush to write on the media with – and I want you to be that brush.”

As I saw it, the biggest challenge was how to tackle Kristian Hornsleth himself.

His eagerness to tell people about the project could possibly kill the story before it ever reached the headlines. Trying too hard to get into the media is a definite turn off for most journalists – so that was a real threat. Also, it was important to show that Kristian Hornsleth was not doing this just to provoke.

If the story should live more than a single day, we needed an argument with real depth.

“I believe in free trade. As I see it there should be no boundaries for free trade.”

Another key element in a true media crisis is that the debate should be larger than the person who starts it. It would therefore be necessary to identify people who could argue in favour of Hornsleth’s project, but it was also equally

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important to pinpoint some key voices that would be against it. It would be ideal if we could encourage debate in the media and slowly pull Hornsleth into the background.

“I leave for Uganda in a week, why don’t you come with me?”

And then there were all the ethical issues. On one shoulder I had Jeremy Bentham representing utilitarianism shouting “Yes, yes – this will give poor people in Africa something they didn’t have before” – and on the other shoulder I had Kant mumbling “No – no one can treat a person as a mere means to an end”.

Then I had the entire art world with Duchamp as lead vocal saying, “Hey - it’s just art” but also Shakespeare reminding me exactly how much is in a name.

After Kristian Hornsleth leaves my apartment, I sit down and look through my notes that I had been scribbling down while Kristian’s been talking. Then I look through his art book again and make a few phone calls.

Finally, I decide to call Kristian.

“Hi again. I have decided to be your media brush. The first thing your brush tells you, is not to burn your Porsche, not to cut your hair and not to flee the country. We lay low for the next two months and don’t give interviews to anyone. We have one chance to make this big, so let’s do it right.”

Next time I call Kristian Hornsleth, I get his voicemail: “Kristian von Hornsleth here. Please leave a message after the tone. Regarding Uganda, please call Mr. Lindeburg on 33959697.”

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WHY THIS IS CONTEMPORARY

INTERVIEW WITH BORIS GROYS WITH KRISTIAN VON HORNSLETH

(Moderation: Jörg Scheller) Hochschule für Gestaltung, Karlsruhe, October 2006.

Jörg Scheller: Mr. Groys, in your opinion: Is there a provocative aspect to Hornsleth’s artwork? And is it still possible to provoke with art projects?

Boris Groys: Well, probably it is. It is always interesting for me to look at the general background of an artwork. I do not know a lot about Danish art, but I was reminded of the last two films by Lars von Trier, especially “Dogville”, where a young lady tries to be the benefactor of a village, and “Mandalay”.

These films are very different from your project, on the other hand, they are somehow connected to it because here we also have a Danish artist interested in the European attitude to the Non-European. So both are dealing with the same problematic in a provocative way that is not subjected to the rules of of political correctness as it is established. I am not informed much about Danish culture but it is interesting for me that since one decade or on and a half we have this intervention from Denmark, a country without colonial background...

Kristian von Hornsleth: With very little. We had the Virgin Islands but we sold them. The king sold them in a game of cards. And we have Greenland.

Boris Groys: Yes, you have Greenland. And you also have this the politicalanti-political correctness thing with “Miss Smillas feeling for snow” and Peter Hoeg, who is now anti-jewish, who wants to destroy Israel and the Jews in Israel. And actually you had an empire but it was an empire with the same race in all areas, the “nordic” race. So I am just interested why Danish artists and intellectuals get involved in these intellectual discussions. They do not have this experience of the feeling of accumulated guilt that almost all other nations have, also the Dutch.

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Kristian von Hornsleth: Now there is a different guilt. We are so well off that we are ashamed when looking at other cultures. Everything is charity now in Denmark. Everything is being promoted via radio and television, the Red Cross, the Doctors without borders...

Boris Groys: I ask myself: What is the deeper reason for that? Maybe it is exactly the way to compensate the lack of imperial past – to develop a new imperial present. As I saw your project, my immediate reaction was: This is a project of somebody coming out of a culture without a big family, without a lot of relatives. If you go to Mexico, if you go to China, you are confronted with towns and villages of 300 people who are all relatives, all having the same name...

Kristian von Hornsleth: My father pointed out that now there are more Hornsleths in Africa than there are in Denmark!

Boris Groys: Isn’t it the case that the Danish are somehow looking for more relatives? They have too small families. It is a general nordic problem. If you look at Swedish cinema, it is always about tiny families, families being too small. At the beginning of the Dogma-movies, they were also about these tiny families and all the tensions inside these families. So isn’t this a belated imperial extension in the form of helping the others? Driven by the desire to expand the family? To have more relatives? More public? A small country that needs more public, more people interested in it? I don’t know if you read the last novel by Michel Houellebecq, “The possibility of an island”....

Kristian von Hornsleth: Yes, I have.

Boris Groys: What was interesting for me, as someone who is writing, is that the protagonist actually wants to produce a public because his clones are produced under the obligation to read his texts. So the idea is: We have no public, we have no relatives, we are producing texts and art but what is lacking is a public. So we have to invest in public. Because everything else is ok.

Kristian von Hornsleth: That makes sense. There are so many lonely destinies in that nordic area.

Jörg Scheller: Would you agree, that the only possibility left for provocation is affirmation? Affirmation of buying, selling, free trade, markets, economy, and then also admitting what one is factually doing, not pretending that one produces “high art” any more.

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Boris Groys: In this context, probably. In general we know about this status of affirmation. Almost all my acquaintances in the art field know that and they are all making some sort of communal projects, producing some kind of artistic communities, investing in some kind of collaborative projects. So there is a general trend of unwillingness to be an individualist. It is very obvious everywhere. Everybody wants to collaborate with somebody else. It is absolutely everywhere in the art world, from Sao Paulo to Berlin. There is a desperate attempt to somehow organize a community of co-workers, and spectators, and relatives, and public, all kinds of people involved in what one is doing.

Kristian von Hornsleth: Some big companies actually speculate in creating markets for new products that we do not need yet. Now there’s is a new telething for kids, so they create a market for them. What’s the problem? Just create the market!

Boris Groys: Yes, just create the market and pay the people so they are interested. You are paying them for being interested in your work. And I think this is very contemporary because the problem is not that you can not produce works or texts, the problem is that you do not have readers. You have to organize your readers.

Kristian von Hornsleth: Some say we are exploiting the people in Uganda. Do you agree with that?

Boris Groys: I would rather raise the question: Would it be possible not to do that? Is it possible not to exploit people? And if we do not do that – is it good for them or bad? To exploit people actually means to use people. It seems to be not a good thing, but on the other hand, if people are not usable, they are left alone and they are frustrated. So I think the human nature is that on the one hand, people want to be used because if they are not used, their life has no meaning, and on the other hand, they don’t want to be used because they have their sovereignty and their self-esteem. So the human beings are contradicting - whatever you do, you always hurt them. If you use them, you hurt them, if you don’t use them, you hurt them, too.

Kristian von Hornsleth: I read about your ideas of freedom. And that there is no freedom.

Boris Groys: There isn’t.

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Kristian von Hornsleth: And you were also talking about heroes, who are doing their own stuff...

Boris Groys: ...making their own wine...

Kristian von Hornsleth: Yes, I almost felt embarrassed when I read it because I financed the Uganda project myself, I went there, I took the photographs, I fought the bureaucrats – am I a hero?

Boris Groys: Yes, of course, you are a hero. There is one quotation of Hegel.

He says that speaking of heroes and the impossibility of heroes in modernity, we should ask ourselves what the heroes were drinking. And the heroes were drinking wine that they produced themselves and their families, and it is not possible, he says, that somebody who drinks coffee or tea could be a hero. But to follow a certain way of thinking one step further: Of course for the present civilization, the fate of the church is a kind of paradigm. Every kind of activity in the West somehow reproduces it. So if we ask ourselves how the church developed, then it developed from an institution to save your soul, from institutional salvation, to an institution of caring activities. This shift happened after the French Revolution. So after people realized that they have no souls, there is no need to save them. The problem was: how to install church nevertheless, and give some meaning to the church. The answer was to help the biopolitics to care for the bodies. So I ask myself: Isn’t art going the same way? Because at least modern art emerged with the claim to save your soul, to create images that are images of ecstasy. And now, as it’s over, art repeats the development that the church went through one and a half centuries ago.

Kristian von Hornsleth: I feel the same way. When I saw the collection of the ZKM in Karlsruhe, it was like a temple. And I felt as if I was looking at old epitaphs and old pieces that used to help people a long time ago. But some of them still help me. That still works. They still speak to me.

Boris Groys: To you, but not to the next generation, for example.

Jörg Scheller: But do you think that art still provides something like an outside, some mystical or metaphysical outside? Because now, as we are talking, it seems as if everything has moved to the centre, to earth, to the physical sphere. So is there still otherness to art, is there still an outside?

Boris Groys: I think there is almost only the outside. Because the illusions that there is no outside appears from the use of the word “we” – “we have no out-

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side. Of course “we” have no outside. But there is no “we” any more. We have only me and you – and you are the outside. That’s it. We can mot speak about humanity any more. Humanity is the outside. So if earlier God was the outside or Nature was the outside, now humanity and human nature are the outside. If I have problems with my stomach, that connects me with humanity. I go to the doctor, I go to the hospital, I do not care about that, because it’s just something that startled me, it’s something outside, to be healed by what – no idea. I have no idea why that should help me and in what respect. It’s precisely as if I would go to the church, like in the middle ages. Mankind and politics are getting more and more foreign to the individual, more and more outside. The colonialization of mankind that von Hornsleth practices actually, already shows that he has nothing to do with these people. The starting point for the project is that there is nothing that unites them. So if you want to deal with them, you have to create some visible, tangible, economical, political ties between you and the others because these ties don’t exist as such. And that means that we have nothing else but the outside. We have to establish the ties. And it’s like early religion: I am born and initially I have no connection with God, it must be advertised and incorporated, then I get one. Or we have to be integrated by schools, politics.

That’s why sexuality became such a problem – because we are fundamentally, originally disconnected.

Jörg Scheller: Is this what Baudrillard meant when he said that there is no “real” anymore? Is this when simulation sets in, when we ourselves perpetually have to generate or simulate the ties and links between everything? And anyway, what is the difference between politics and art then – politics also attempts to create those links and ties.

Boris Groys: Less and less, I think. There was a relatively long time when art was more like economy with an art market. But I don’t believe that the art market plays such a big role. What we have now actually is the expansion of art projects and exhibitions, and so on. And at the same time, politics is aestheticized up to a degree that is really extreme. So I think what he have in the end is a kind of creation of a political art and political aesthetics space which is fundamentally minded, like in old cultures, the cultures of the middle ages, we can not separate between aesthetics and politics or aesthetics or religion and I think we are going in that direction. One curator asked me to write a text about art in the German Bundestag. So he showed me all the works that are inside the Bundestag space and they were kind of average artworks. But then he showed me the space of Bundestag itself. It was an incredible artistic installation. It was the only artwork in this space I was really impressed by. If you go to this space, you have three entrances. On the entrance left, there is the word

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“Nein” (no), on the right “Ja” (yes), and in the centre “Null” (zero). They all go through these gates and they are checked and halted. And this alone is more art than anything else at this space.

Kristian von Hornsleth: It makes it contemporary.

Boris Groys: Extremely! I took photographs and asked the curator: Can I write about this? He said: Oh, no, no, no!

Jörg Scheller: I’d like to come back to the aspect of colonialization once again.

I remember that when I first talked to Boris Groys about the project, he said that it is often forgotten that even colonialization was based on humanist motives and humanist thinking. In your opinion, is a project like the Uganda project still based on humanist thinking?

Boris Groys: Absolutely. It is. But a different kind of humanist thinking. In the first wave of colonialization the idea was that mankind was as a unity and that that unity had to be brought to a political unity, too. But at that time, that really was the ideal of fundamental unity. And that fundamental unity also meant that people ought to have a name. And now with this neo-colonialization we have a completely different presupposition. A different presupposition of otherness. We have the presupposition that us and other people have nothing in common. Because we are living after the multicultural, we are living after the end of universal ideas like communism, and so on. In this situation we say that other people are just others, we have nothing to do with them. And on this presupposition, we start to organize ties with them as with others. Not with brothers. Now it is on the level of exchange and treaties. What is interesting in Hornsleth’s case is that he tries, maybe I am wrong, to make Danish culture interesting for the world. With relatives, public...

Kristian von Hornsleth: ...marketing...

Boris Groys: But in marketing you paradoxically have to create the public for the marketing. It is not a marketing for a already existing consumer, you have to create this consumer because this consumer can not be presupposed. And that precisely is the end of the mass culture. There was this traditional concept of the artist, beginning with Baudelaire, described by Benjamin as someone who is creating art for the masses, for the anonymous spectator and for the anonymous reader. And then we keep us a conclusion: this anonymous reader does not exist. And if he exists, he does not read my works. So I have to create

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the audience. You have to provoke scandal, make something that seems to be important, create a theme, and after that, you write something.

Kristian von Hornsleth: Ok, we created this public. But what do you think about the other side, about the “African problem”, about this great, beautiful continent, where they are fighting all the time and dying of Aids? Even though the Uganda project might appear cynical or purely capitalistic, there is clearly a side to it, that is about art that really can help somebody out there.

Boris Groys: We are living in an interesting time where a guy gets a nobel price for finding a possibility to involve all these people into a capitalistic market.

That is quite a turn. Ideologically and politically it is quite a new development.

But I must confess that I am not interested in Africa somehow, personally, so I have no relationship to it. I somehow don’t have this romantic dream, you know, at the heart of darkness, that’s a cliché for me. Somehow I don’t have any attitude. Concerning your art project, I am much more interested in the causes: What are the causes to go there? That must be some kind of worry, some kind of uncertainty in your own country.

Kristian von Hornsleth: Boredom?

Boris Groys: Yes, but boredom is not enough. I think you have to get nervous at a certain point.

Kristian von Hornsleth: I am nervous.

Boris Groys: So is Lars von Trier.

Kristian von Hornsleth: Yes, he can’t even take an airplane.

Jörg Scheller: His hands are shaking, he’s trembling all the time.

Boris Groys: So why this breed of nervous nordic artists? Think of Kiergekgaard...

Kristian von Hornsleth: Oh yes, he was nervous!

Boris Groys: Absolutely nervous.

Kristian von Hornsleth: Ingmar Bergman?

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Boris Groys: He was not so nervous. He pretended. But Hansen was.

Kristian von Hornsleth: Strindberg?

Boris Groys: Partially. He was more crazy than nervous. So you have to be really nervous and you have to have this kind of anguish. But it seems to me that after you made this trip you will live more quietly.

Jörg Scheller: That’s what most people tell you after they return from Africa.

They go to this wild continent and they stay there for some time and when they come back, they are really calm. They think it is a big cure. Maybe it is.

I have one last question: Do you think that there is a new notion of satanism in capitalism? The focus on the ego, the believe that it is most important to benefit your own ego?

Boris Groys: No, it is not about the pleasure principle. The satanic and the demonic is a very hedonistic attitude. You feel pleasure when hurting people, it is sadistic. In capitalism you just practise your own profit, you find your own happiness, and that is good for everybody because the world is a sum of individual effort. So if you make more individual effort the sum will be greater.

So it is rather a positivistic and utilitarian attitude. It is not hedonism. It is not demonic.

Boris Groys (born 1947), professor of philosophy and art sciece at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe, Germany

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| INTERVIEW WITH BORIS GROYS AND KRISTIAN von HORNSLETH

WHY THIS IS COMTEMPORARY

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LIST OF WORKS

The Hornsleth Village Project Uganda Portrait Series (2006)

100 COLOUR PHOTOS ON ALUMINIUM DIBOND PLATE, 120 X 100 CM. EDITION OF 3.

Titles of individual works: 001.100 002.100 003.100 004.100 005.100 006.100 007.100 008.100 009.100 010.100 011.100 012.100 013.100 014.100 015.100 016.100 017.100 018.100 019.100 020.100 021.100 022.100 023.100 024.100 025.100 026.100 027.100 028.100 029.100 030.100 031.100 032.100 033.100 034.100 035.100 036.100 037.100 038.100 039.100 040.100 041.100 042.100 043.100 044.100

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HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH

| LIST OF WORKS

JANET NAMONO BENICTO OCHANYI RODA GALANDA FRANCO GIDUUNO MARGRET NADUNGA FRASCO SENGENDO PHILIP GIMUGU JOYCE NAKABUGO CHARLES JUUKO TWAYIBU SSEMPEBWA SIPESIYOZA NAKATE KATALINA NAMATOVU TWAHA KAKOOZA MARIAM BAMAYERO RICHARD MULONDO LOVINSA NAKAMYA EIRIAB MASAABA SAMUEL KIZITO SARAH NEGESA ANNET NAKIWU NATHAN MANJJALI ROBERT NAKWASI RUTH NANSAMB HENRY KAYONDO SARAH NAKALEMA FLORENCE KAYINZA JESCA KAYINZA SAINA NANFUKA FREDRICK MUBIRU ELIZEPHAN KYANDA GODFREY MASANGA GRACE SSELA SERA LEYA FLORENCE KWAGALA MUHAMED LOBOWA NORA NABUDUWA ROSEMARY NANFUMA ELIFERET DUMBA GODFREY MAWANDA JESCA NASAAZI JUMA NSUBUGA SAFINA NAKAFERO LAMEKA MADABA ROSEMARY ACHOLA

045.100 046.100 047.100 048.100 049.100 050.100 051.100 052.100 053.100 054.100 055.100 056.100 057.100 058.100 059.100 060.100 061.100 062.100 063.100 064.100 065.100 066.100 067.100 068.100 069.100 070.100 071.100 072.100 073.100 074.100 075.100 076.100 077.100 078.100 079.100 080.100 081.100 082.100 083.100 084.100 085.100 086.100 087.100 088.100 089.100 090.100 091.100 092.100 093.100 094.100 095.100 096.100 097.100 098.100 099.100 100.100

HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH HORNSLETH

PATRICK SEWANYANA BIRABWA NANTEGE CHRISTINE NABUDUWA APPOLO GAMBWA CHRIZESTOM SSEMUGENYI NASITANZIYA LWASA WILSON KAYITA STEPHEN KATIYA ANNET SEERA ROBERT SSENQAGIRE SAFINA NANKABILWA CHRISTOPHER BUKENYA REGINA NAKAYENZE ESTHER BUKENYA JUSTINE NAZIWA KEVIN MUSANYA ROSE NYADOYI MARGREAT NANJEBE SYLIVIA NAKYEJWE ZAYINA NAMULWASILA JOYCE SEBADU GEORGE SABADU ISAAC MUTESASIRA SESIRIYA MUZAKI ERIASAPH KIZZA ROBERT MUSISI MOSES KAFUMBILWANGO LOZIYO SEWANYANA SUSAN GIMEYE AHMED KABENGE LUNRUSE NDAGIRE BETY KEDEN VICENT LUBEGA MATIYA BEYANGA MARGREAT NAMUBIRU FLORENCE NANDEKYE AGUSTINE GIDUDU EFRANCE NALWANGA PROSCOVIA NAKAZIBWE ROBINAH NAMBOZO JOSHUA MATOVU ANNET NAKYANZI YOKANA MUKONO EDITH BABIRYE ERUNASAN NKUUNA RICHARD SENOGA EMANUEL MAGUYA REBECCA NAMUTOSI ZIYADA NAMULI SARAH MUGIDE VINCENT BUZIRE ZAITUNI NAMPUNGU RESTY NASIMBWA STEPHAN HABI ROSE NABULYA ESAWO GIMANGA

”THE HORNSLETH VILLAGE PROJECT UGANDA PORTRAIT SERIES (2006)” |

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The Hornsleth Village project is an art work 100 people from a small village in Uganda made a free trade deal with Kristian von Hornsleth.

The deal was that the villagers all change their name to ‘Hornsleth’ in exchange for household animals.

Each person went through the official legal name change process.

A national Uganda ID card was issued to each person to show their new ‘Hornsleth’ name.

Each person was photographed holding their new Hornsleth ID. The 100 photographed people are the 100 first to take the name ‘Hornsleth’ and they are representing the whole community.

The portraits are defined as an original art work.

The total art work is a series of 100 photos of 120 x 100 cm to be presented in selected international galleries and museums.

A professional documentary film crew is filming the process for Danish National TV DR2.

International art critics, philosophers and local project partners has contributed with texts for this book about the project.

A community based organization, a CBO, called ‘The Hornsleth Village Project’ was formed according to local legal practise, and according to agreement with the village opnion leaders.

A total of 300 animals, pigs and goats, were traded with 300 families.

A locally well known animal redistribution system was implemented.

When these animals breed, half of the outcome can be kept by the family, and half is redistributed to other families, Thousands of people will in five years have traded names for animals from this project if it runs as planned.

Stop donations, start free trade!

Don’t worry, this is art!