1. How important is it to appeal to the Communist roots of globalization today?

It seems crucial to understand these, and it will be unavoidable, since they remain to be as a potentiality. They may lead to a critical awareness, a possibility to think the future.
What seems important to me too is the roots of the communist roots, the strands of thinking it comes forth from, so that it doesn’t become an isolated image but multiplicity.

 

2. Which chances do you see for the ongoing democratization of art? Is it possible to break out of the framework of market hierarchy and global representation?

We now have an exhibition titled ‘All under heaven’, which seems to be a poetic title but is actually the base of the Chinese image f the world, an inclusive image.

The MuHKA tries to articulate its position not only within art but also within social acting. In order to do this we rethink basic words that have been discarded. We now work around ‘reflexivity’, ‘joy’, ‘conversation’ and ‘morality’. We also asked Rudi Laermans to write an operational text starting from the polyphony idea of Bakhtin.
We want to make our position knowable. This may be a base. We want to relate this to our activities, so that we can be approached on these grounds.

Besides we do theoretical research on the articulation of not-economically validated formats of art (that which may be found in other databases of the museum besides the collection).

 

3.How important is it today to stop the conveyors of big events, opting instead for internationalist work on location? 

I feel events to be one of the main possibilities of these times. Most often they are horribly empty, but they may be full, like Paulo Herkenhoff’s Sao Paulo Biennial or the last Kwangu biennial. Those were the richest moments I encountered the last years. I feel they should not be opposed but entered, reassessed and critically validated as a possibility of intensity and transformation.

 

4. In how far is the experience of new local communities that draw their linguistic legitimacy from global pop-culture?In how far do they influence the development of contemporary art?

How horrible that we don’t have an alternative to the ‘glocal’ word. Now, I am. I am connected, in the choices of my mind, with you, with my local environment, with Paulo Herkenhoff in Rio as well. These connections make me specific. These make activity, being expressed. Aren’t we on the wrong track in our negotiation?

 

5.Is international style the only relevant possibility for addressing the local problematique? Is there any room left for creative misunderstandings, lost in translation, experiences that are both subjective and local? Which experiences have you made in highlighting the uniqueness of a local cultural context as something of general relevance?

Is style relevant as a concept? Is there an What do we address? Do we address the local problematique or our problematique which has local as well as international as well as bodily, past and future, human and accidental dimensions? Isn’t it more intresting to think in terms of contingencies rather than in creative misunderstandings? Creative misunderstandings postulate the possibility of absolute understanding. Isn’t it more intresting to have an ambition of relative understanding?
Any of my experiences did so, experience is always also localised.