The other neighbourhood

‘Imagine that you wake up one morning and your country has disappeared. Your bed and the house are the same and your neighbourhood is, almost, the same, but your neighbours seem to have changed and the city is changing even as you get out of bed. On the news a man that you do not recognize is making an inaugural presidential speech, introducing a flag and national anthem you do not recognize and he is speaking about a country, yours, that you do not know. Very soon you will begin to change as well, for with this shift everything from your religion to your education, your understanding of your family and basically your entire value system will be influenced by the changes outside and effect you in ways you could not even begin to imagine last night. In less than a decade, you will notice yourself speaking in a different accent and addressing the world in a different manner than your mother taught you and soon you will not even recognize yourself and the transformation will be complete.’*

Is it going to happen like this? An ambiguous transitional period – and you are a member of a new, although not yet familiar society. Your neighbourhood is yours and your neighbours gradually shift from the border familiar/alien towards the familiar. And then a new, another neighbour arrives… Nobody lives in exile, but at home. Something is always brought along, until memory becomes ornamental. Is the transformation complete?
Recent history stubbornly proves the opposite.

Exile/in exile – words chosen as key words of the 13th Tallinn Print Triennial, cover a lot of ground, meaning both leaving and staying, homeland and being without homeland, openness and closure. In the consciousness of many 20th century Europeans the word exile generally denotes unplanned and unwelcome changes, which were impossible to leave behind once in a new society – identity crises, alienation, religious and cultural conflicts, aggressive sub-cultures, emerging ghettos.
Exile means different things to different peoples – there are countries that you leave, and countries where to go; there are people who know exile as nothing but expulsion, and people for whom it is political exile. Ireland and France speak about exile in different tongues. For Estonians, with their experience of being chased out of their homes and the Stalinist deportation in train carriages meant for cattle to places thousands of kilometres away, exile means something quite different than it does to Spaniards who transferred their home to the New World.
History had drawn state borders without considering peoples, languages or religion; people do not always identify with the state and the state does not necessarily denote nationality. The borders of the Holy Roman empire or Austria-Hungary meant nothing but a political agreement, and the rapid changes of power in Italian city-states between the French, the emperor or papal armies, had always caused much headache for the students of history. Every state does not suit its citizens, and ever since ancient times the meaning of political exile was widely known.
The last huge wave of political exile occurred after the Second World War, from the countries that remained within the socialist sphere. The enforced exodus from east to west has added its own, negative meaning to exile.

Today’s Europe has changed considerably. Political reorganisation within Europe has enabled an almost limitless movement in at least half of the continent. The European Union will expand in the future as new potential members have been already earmarked. In principle, people can choose where to live in practically any corner of the world, according to his wishes, interests and career opportunities. The idea of free movement from one home to another, no longer living together as a nation but rather as a community with similar interests (Silicon Valley) is part of the contemporary model of civilisation.
Living as a commune with similar interests one should not talk about exile, or perhaps only on an abstract, theoretical level where we can regard a certain loneliness within the community as mental exile.
Today’s postmodernist world favours blending, unfinished developments, rhizome models of culture. From here has emerged the positive treatment of multiculturalism, loss of hierarchies between different types of culture, emphasising cultural migration as a phenomenon that enriches the nations.
Questions about exile make the organisers face the fact that during the last fifteen years people have been seriously dealing with the mixing and blending of traditional cultures, and also with results accompanying such large-scale movements. The last example here was XI Kassel Documenta in 2002, curated by Okwui Envezor. It might therefore seem that we are late with our exhibition and pointlessly repeat the especially hot and played-out theme of the late 20th century.
If, however, we still organise an art exhibition and ask questions about exile, we must admit that we have, firstly, a priori not trusted the positive social model presented to us, where exile as a forced migration no longer exists. We have not trusted it because we read the papers and watch the TV news about countries that due to the post-war massive immigration are home to people from many nationalities. Instead of the synergic meeting of cultures, however, cultural clashes occur, and more and more marginal groups emerge on the basis of religion, nationality or language. In big cities ghettos are formed where the inhabitants only recognise the customs and language of their homeland, and communication with their new chosen country does not really function. They are just as distant from the white suburbs as Moon from Earth. Such voluntarily closed communities live for generations and refuse to let the neighbours’ values interfere with their style of life. New cultures emerge that have hardly anything to do with cultures of the former homelands.
Secondly, art reveals increasing signs of a wish to tie one’s identity with the peculiarity of a place, giving through that much deeper or new meanings to worn truths. We are not talking about countries and borders here, but about places and cultures that people retain in their memory and, if at all possible, restore in their new homes. These may create beautiful poetic images, but may equally cause conflicts when they cumulate, create the phenomenon of the Other Neighbour.
Could we deduce from this that the ideology of multiculturalism of the 1990s was nothing but an invention of some intellectuals, a characteristic manner of communication of the so-called interest communities, which ignored real migration processes?
In case this is true, the title of the exhibition acquires quite a new value, it no longer has the context that later analysed the past decade’s search for a new identity. It is instead a belief in the possibility (an idea that has failed several times in history!) to use the experience, skills and power of analysis of the interest group or community (artists) as a bridge between two different understandings. Between politically correct multiculturalism and actual identity crises, inability to adapt and misunderstandings. Or between the community and an individual. Adapting to new values that may be a far cry from ‘what mother taught them’ can be most traumatic. Thus an artist speaks to us in two different languages (Daniča Dakic) and another establishes his presence in a new environment through a weird shaman’s dance (Călin Dan).

Juri Korchagin, a simple Russian worker who got a camera for his 70th birthday began filming his surroundings, his street, beach and factory. He was one of the first to receive the Estonian passport and is a loyal citizen. At home he paints white birches, a tree turned into a peculiar symbol of homeland by the artists in north-western Russian.
This simple and natural example could well confirm the positive ideology of multiculturalism. But it proves once again that memory and identity are far too complicated to be ignored in the light of new models of civilisation.
It is quite clear by the start of the 21st century that great migrations of peoples are still to come also in this century. Some leave, some construe new similar places, just like mother used to teach who codes and decodes memory. Exile will probably never be a forgotten word.

*Kendell Geers. The work of Art in the State of Exile. – Milica Tomić. National Pavillion. Serbia and Montenegro. Catalogue for the 50th Venice Biennial, 2003, pp 1 –23)

Sirje Helme