Artist Talk: Cristiano Berti and Can Sungu:
Tvornica snova: Negdje daleko… nalazim se Ja /
Factory of Dreams: Somewhere Faraway… There is Me /
part of Black Disguises
27.2.2018
MMSU / Krešimirova 26c, 51000 Rijeka

Factory of Dreams: Somewhere Faraway… There is Me

Interview with Cristiano Berti and Can Sungu 
Conversation was led by: Helena Kariko

What attracted you to this story of migrants and what was the starting point that motivated you to deal with this topic? For example, was there any personal experience or inspirational story of deterritorialised experiences of people living on the margins of society?

Berti: The work exhibited in Rijeka originates from a fruitful discovery of vhs tapes and other material originally part of a Nigerian video library in Turin, closed around 2007. Work and life have repeatedly brought me into contact with the world of Nigerian immigration in Italy, which I would call proudly marginal, in the sense that I have often perceived a certain indifference to the cultural context in which this community has established itself. Marginality therefore seems to be a condition that this community has probably been subjected to, but also laid claim to.

Sungu: I immigrated from Turkey to Germany almost ten years ago. Although I had priviliged conditions compared to the majority of migrants coming from global south, I also had to go through the complicated bureaucracy and experience institutional discrimination. My personal experiences flew into may artistic work, as well. In my previous works I dealt with different aspects of migration between Turkey and Germany, also with the Turkish video market in Germany. This lead me to work together with Cristiano on Highlife. I tried to reflect and recontextualise my previous experiences and knowledge on Nigerian community based in Turin. I don’t think that they are people living on the margins of society. I reject this sort of simplifications.

You have tried to illustrate social integration of migrants and returning to the past with connotations of limited labour market to connect this art installation with the home of cardboard walls that bring the dreamlike reality emerging from the need for places that will give the deterritorialised migrants a new authentic experience. Since you were dealing with painting and sculpture in the early stages of your creation, do you believe that the “death” of old media have occurred and that you can do much more today with new multimedia production formats that engage video, sound and picture than you can express that in painting? Why did you make a move away from painting?

Berti: The cardboard structure was, at the same time, the result of a functional (to create a sheltered, low-cost environment) and formal need (to make this environment warm and attractive). We did not choose cardboard to allude to poverty, just as we did not create a closed environment to make it a metaphor for discrimination or marginality. It is a shelter, a structure that we generally build entirely ourselves, repeating the construction process, and the effort, which is found in one of the two videos that make up the installation, the amateur film shot in Africa where we witness the slow construction of a large villa.

As for my past relationship as a painter and sculptor, there is certainly a trace of this previous activity in my work of the last fifteen years. It’s a complex argument, but said in a nutshell, my choice to work with other media besides traditional ones depends on the desire to break away, to look further afield, in a colder way.

From your works, therefore, present is the inherent critique of contemporary society through the prism of the past and the revival of marginal topics such as dislocated places and the way we connect reality and what is actually visible in all of this. That is, it is a symptom, a space of imagination more than reality where we can consistently manage our lives. Do you think art today should be more politically and socially engaged and deal with migration issues?

 Sungu: Since migrations are an issue that is present in different levels of our urban realities I think the artists can’t ignore it. But the question where we position ourselves as artists is crucial. Maybe a good start is to see migrations as a normal state and not as an «emergency» or a phenomenon which merely belongs to some «marginal» groups in the society. We had to stop talking permenantly about «others» (or «us» and «them») but rather try to deal with the concepts of living together in a post-migrant and transcultural society. At the same time we need a conciuosness about our privileges and whiteness. And a good portion of honesty, fairness and empathy.

With regard to Angela Merkel’s migration policy, do you think that a refugee inflow in Europe has stimulated more positive or negative consequences for society?

Berti: Although it has finally proved to be quite contradictory, German policy on international protection remains about the best in Europe. From the point of view of a low-birth country, and subject to flows that mix international protection with economic migration (assuming that the two components can really be divided), as it is Italy, the short-term consequences are problematic, with social tensions and forms of rejection which can sometimes be flagrant, while those in the medium to long term will certainly be positive. But politics struggles to look ahead, and so the political question of immigration tends to be flattened everywhere.

From your creativity and social engagement is a visible link to feminism and gender theme. For example, in the works published in your book Vertigo of Reality, as well as in the installation of Highlife, you bring marginal and forgotten stories to the surface, revealing the absurdity of a system that is largely neglected in such cases. Within one of the photographic series are shown the places where the bodies of murdered sex workers were found. Do you think that media content nowadays is more affected by female subordination and perpetuating the patriarchy of the social system in relation to the past?

Berti: Bringing to light stories and neglected situations is an operation that is particularly congenial to me, it’s true. Often this has regarded stories of migrant women, because in my work and life experience I have come into contact with these stories and situations: in the past I worked in the field, especially as a social worker in health risk reduction units for STDs, and many interesting inspirations came from there. But as far as my work as an artist is concerned, it is a general attitude to look further ahead, elsewhere, moved by curiosity.

The media reflect the fact that our culture is permeated with ancient legacies, which change very slowly, but as for the perpetuation of models of female subordination by the media, it’s sufficient to look back a little just to see how far we’ve gone.

In the context of this art installation, what other lines have you discovered in the process of your research, which knowledge have you acquired about these smaller migration communities?

Berti: As far as I am concerned, Highlife didn’t lead to great new discoveries: it is almost thirty years that I interact with Nigerian people. I can say that writing the subtitles for the amateur video has been a very interesting job. In my opinion, what we have made of this videotape represents, better than any other component of the installation, our overall approach: very little tampering of materials, high consideration for their content, regardless of their original nature: the video of the construction of the villa was subtitled with extreme care, as if it were a sacred text. And for Highlife, it is.

Sungu: For me it was very interesting to dive into the world of Nollywood films and also gain insights about the Nigerian community living in Torino. In my former works I dealt with the media consumption within the Turkish communtiy based in Germany. Especially in the 80s hundreds of video rental shops  used to be active all around in Germany, even in small villages. So the people rented videotapes in those shops and organised a sort of video evenings at home including neighbours and family. Watching videos was accepted as a pleasant and family-friendly alternative for going out and getting attached to German-dominated cultural life. Our research for Highlife showed me that there are a lot of simililarities regarding the ways of production and consumption of home video within these migrant communities. Regardless of which cultural background the migrant communities have, they watch those films not just for having fun but also to refresh some cultural codes, values or manners, remember their countries of origin or just to hear their native language.

In which direction you would like to continue your further research. What are the directions you want to extend and / or future plans and projects?

Berti: At the moment I am involved in a series of works that combine historical and artistic research, and which also have in common the fact of moving along a geographical axis that extends from Italy to the Caribbean, Cuba in particular. These are completely unknown stories, or unknown aspects of facts that have already been studied. If the first work, recently concluded, revealed the (tenuous) relationship between a high mountain marble quarry, in Piedmont, and a neoclassical fountain located in Havana, the second focuses on the immaterial legacy of one of the two commercial intermediaries in the commission of the fountain. In fact, there are dozens of people in Cuba bearing the surname of this ancient emigrant, without any apparent evidence of direct descent, but certainly thanks to him: Antonio Boggiano, who died in Trinidad, Cuba on April 22, 1860.

Sungu: I am involved in several projects. In May I’ll be showing two new works: Since the beginning of last year me and my team are working on a new project focusing on the left-behind children of working migration and looking into different family stories in Germany, Turkey and Romania in the past and present. This multi-channel sound and object based installation will firstly be showed as a solo exhibition at DEPO in Istanbul and later on in Berlin. The other new work is commisioned by a prominent museum in Dresden, Germany. I’ll focus on the representations of «the other» and the visual concepts of orientalism/ exotism in German adventure films mostly from 1920s to 1970s and make a video which brings together several cuts from those films and reinterprets them in a new context.

More on:
https://riskchangeproject.wordpress.com/2018/02/27/factory-of-dreams-somewhere-faraway-there-is-me/