Istishara.
Por KEITH SANBORN
Catalogo de Nam June Paik Award. 2006
"Not everyone wants to enter a cave; you never know what might be inside."
-Mohamed Chukri in Toni Serra's Perro Corazón
"Istishara"
in Arabic means to seek advice. In Toni Serra's Istishara, people
recount their dreams to understand, to confront the dead, to gain access
to the deeper reality of the imaginary city below the streets of their
city. Borgesian labyrinths appear, but instead of surveying the literary
dimensions of a disabused orientalist prison, we cross real, numberless
boundaries to enter a fearful, tender space. Divisions dissolve:
East:West, dream:reality, self:other, life:death, human:divine. Ideas,
impressions, insights migrate across languages and cultures. In Plato's
cave, contrived mysteries reveal the logic of power to a ruling elite;
in Serra's, we traverse obscure interiors, full of dangers from madness
to death, on a path to apprehending, as a Sufi might, the many and the
One. We learn to read the signs and their flickering transformations for
ourselves; our guide offers clues: sounds and images echoing
from other worlds.
Serra's work appears to divide in two: the personal "documentaries" in Morocco-such as
Istishara-and
the vast, collaborative Archives of Babylon, tracking the Universal
Technological American State. In the latter, each dream and conscious
imagining is devoted to electronics and warfare: video games to
television, corporate advertising to military propaganda. In the
information age, the artist has become an archivist, and vice versa. But
to grasp Serra's larger project, we must surpass Borgesian catalogic
ironies, approach the rigorous personal sociology of Benjamin's
Passagenwerk and inhabit he implacable, blasted logic of Debord's final
interventions where deft citation suffices to disclose spectacular
mechanisms of control.
Debord
tells us that the spectacle is not a collection of images, but a
relationship among people, mediated by images. Serra's work explores
that relationship through images the Empire would impose and those
rising up in dreams, in response to that attempted colonization. Serra's
project is anti-colonialist, but from the position of a subject neither
subaltern nor master, but a constant traveler between worlds, a
stateless shape-shifter, at home in the dark with as many names as
identities: Toni Serra, Abu Ali, Pierre Gambarotta, OVNI sister. Each is
a heteronymn of
the others; each creates new situations; each rings new dikhrs: remembrances which are and invoke the light.
Keith Sanborn