Rozalinda Borcila, University Of South Florida, Tampa

Citizen/Foreigner in Recent Installation and Performance Art

In the museum, multiple large-scale images, texts and sounds are spacially juxtaposed. Their physicality pushes them out into your three-dimensional space, surrounding you on all sides. Reading each one separately is impossible, as is finding a place from which you can perceive the space "from the outside", as a whole. Rather, you must move from one source to the next. Images and sounds are found and lost again, texts appear, change and move with the physicality of bodies. You negotiate the room as a non-totalizable frame, the experiencing of which is guided by your position and movements. The images, sounds and texts cross-contaminate, and as fragments begin to guide a narrative, your "dance" from one space to the next, you become the body through which the space narrates itself. You are encountered in the act of speaking, of performing, of producing yourself through the space, and producing the space through your body.

Such performative strategies characterize the work of many contemporary artists, and inform my own installations and performances. It is difficult to contain such work in narrative form, to move the embodied and experiential into the discorsive. I will attempt to translate and adapt some of the above strategies into a "performative presentation". The text you are reading is yet another (impossible) translation, which can hopefully serve as an introduction and reference, but is not intended as a substitute or equivalent.

This is the fiction that interpellates me and allows me to enter into a dialogue on unequal terms. The fiction of "Eastern Europe" is, it would seem, a necessary fiction. Yet, I am very much aware that I never really go home to "Eastern Europe, " and I am never closer and further away from "Eastern Europe" than I am here as a television viewer. ....." Andaluna Borcila, How I Found Eastern Europe
Growing up in Romania, my friends and I were not familiar with Eastern Europe. I encountered it upon my arrival in the US in 1992, when I found myself identified as Eastern European. And since then, my friends in Romania have been watching CNN via their home-made parabolic antennas, watching themselves being watched as Eastern Europeans. Weather here or there, we have all had to encounter ourselves as other. In order to speak at all, we have learned to speak of ourselves as other.	subREAL, News from Dracula The metal stakes around the gymnastic horse refer to Vlad the Impaler, the character at the origin of the Dracula myth. The Romanian artist collective subREAL uses western tropes of Romania - Dracula, poverty and gymnasts. The absent body of the gymnast is violated by the stakes, grouped in a defesive/aggresive formation around a CNN news report.
floor - single channel video Woman's voice "I was afraid of going there", a slow-motion journey through an Eastern European-looking town, interrupted by images of gymnasts and orphans.	My work, by necessity, began interrogating the construct of Eastern Europe - the other Europe - and its production in American culture, mapping its journey from west to east and back.
In western ethnographic and televisual sites, in documentaries, news and docudramas, Eastern Europe is produced around the recurring tropes of violence, poverty, and the twin children: the gymnast and the orphan.	"Naming is a part of the human rituals of incorporation, and the unnamed remains less human (...) The threatening Otherness must, therefore, be transformed into figures that belong to a definite image-repertoire". Trinh T Minh-Ha, Woman, Native, Other
For the production of some of his characters, Guillermo Gómez-Peña conducted a web-survey of "desires and fears for the Mexican Other". His performances symbolically interpret the results of these polls, producing "ethno-cyborg-Frankensteins". Gómez-Peña, Temple of Confessions: The artist performs a "curio-shop shaman for spiritual tourists", created as a generic Benetton primitive. In his plexiglass enclosure are live crickets, taxidermied animals, tribal musical instruments, a table filled with witchcraft- looking artifacts and a ghetto-blaster. Viewers are invited to confess their inter-racial desires and fears into the microphone, and are recorded. Their responses help shape future performances.	The glorified drama of the heroic gymnast-child as victor and the tragic image of the destitute orphan-child as victim alternate, at times contaminating each other. The syrupy, conspicuous and overly dramatic language of the TV narratives spills awkwardly into my own videos, while in performances I produce my own identity as a hybrid gymnast/orphan. I began to embrace the twins and my new hybrid as reflections of western desire and fear, as images through which I could explore the eroticised and paranoiac relationship between American subjectivity and its other. In recent projects, my interests have shifted from the discorsive to the embodied. I began considering the body of the other as it moves through and interacts with regulated spaces, producing and being produced by them, with performance experiments became the main strategy of investigation.

Mapping boundaries and zones of belonging/access, these projects have led me to focus on the Eastern European specifically as the foreigner, and her crucial function in the production of American national identity. This has implied, for instance, a change in my relationship to the twins and my hybrid. I am now looking not so much for the gymnast and orphan, but rather for the American male subject whose fears, desires and humanitarian fantasies are played out on their pre-pubescent bodies. It is in this space of the citizen/foreigner dynamic that my work seeks to function as simultaneously experiment, re-enactment and performance.

"The body is (..) the material vehicle through which individuals become subjects of the law"

Lauren Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy

"·naming is part of the human ritual of incorporation and the unnamed remains less human·"

Trinh T Minh-Ha, Woman, Native, Other

"I am concerned with the rhetorical power of the fiction of "Eastern Europe" and with the way in which it positions subjects--viewers, readers, potential tourists--in unequal discursive configurations·"

Andaluna Borcila, How I Found Eastern Europe

"On a certain day in Lucerne,
I entered a 5-star
hotel and told the person at the front desk that I
was in room 69 and I needed to make a long-
distance call. She believed me. She even handed
me a martini. My mother answered in tears:
"mama, I love you
I just performed my best piece ever
in a 5-star hotel ·
[interference]"'

Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Performance Phone Call

My sources come from sites in which I find the relationship of citizen and foreigner is articulated most clearly and most explicitly: immigration law, travel guides, military technology, TV coverage of American military operations and Olympic TV coverage.In these sites, the citizen/American national subject is produced around a certain way of watching the other.This always presupposes a way of accessing, recognizing and naming the other, all of which are acts of privilege and power. My strategies have been to experiment with this process of recognition, the process of identification as a performative act -- taking on not only the identity of the foreigner, but also of the citizen.

I deploy these strategies in the gallery and also in what are often called private performances, what I term simply every day experiments. I have begun the process of applying for US residency, placing myself in the contexts that most strongly situate me as other. At the same time, by eliminating all recognizable markers of an other/foreign identity, (mode of dress, accent etc) I have been experimenting with "passing as a citizen" . In these experiments, I again deliberately place myself in contexts where the citizen - foreigner line is clearly drawn, but this time produce myself in such a way as to be mis-recognized. I have engaged in illegal border crossings, unauthorizes employment and other activities, not by claiming to be a citizen, but by allowing others to mis-recognise me as one. Most recently, I have obtained US Department of Defense clearance to conduct research on attack helicopters and stealth technology at two military bases.

Rozalinda Borcila, Alien id #: 076-973-254
Expiration date: 12/2000

Form I 693 (Rev. 09/01/87) N:
Medical Examination of Aliens Seeking Adjustment of Status
"A medical examination is necessary as part of your application for adjustment of status. The examination must be performed according to the US Public Health service "Guidelines for Medical Examination of Aliens in the United States". The doctor will examine you for certain physical and mental health conditions.
You will have to take off your clothes"

Illegal Border Crossings:
March 1996
February 1998
March 1999

Unauthorized Employment:
Mounmouth, IL
Lafayette, IN
E. Lansing, MI
1992-1998

"Dear Friend,
I am black. I am sure you did not realize this when you made/laughed at/agreed with that racist remark. In the past, I have attempted to alert white people of my racial identity in advance. Unfortunately, this invariably causes them to react to me as pushy, manipulative or socially inappropriate. Therefore, my policy is to assume that white people do not make these remarks, even when they believe there are no black people present, and to distribute this card when they do. I regret any discomfort my presence is causing you, just as I am sure you regret the discomfort your racism is causing me.

Sincerely yours,

Adrian Margaret Smith Piper"

Like Adrian Piper and Rasheded Areen, I am exploring what happens when the markers of identity are placed beyond the recognition thershold of the people I interact with - who constitute, for these projects, my audience. This is analogous to Areen's strategic courting of mis-recognition as a way to de-stabilize the space of the audience - allowing for infiltration, substitution and a reversal of power.

Rasheed Areen: Green Painting I. The painting is deliberately constructed to "read" according to established conventions of Western hard-edge abstraction. However, the sources of the images and the meaning of the text are beyond the recognition-threshold of most western viewers (Urdu newspaper headlines of Richard Nixon's visit to Pakistan, for instance). The painting works to defeat a single, complete reading .

The Onion Plan - installation
A video of me marching and silently singing at the top of my lungs is projected upon a screen of 120 lbs of onions, most of which are cut in half. Almost immediately, the viewers begin to sob uncontrollably. Onion is a specific Romanian political pun, making reference to tragic instances of political violence. The irony of the work rests in the tearful response of the American audience in front of the comical image of the marching girl, as a fake or "missed" empathy.

These experiments are in integral part of my gallery art work, though the relationship between them is not always immediately aparent. Document (Buni Series) is an installation and performance that plays looped videotapes on 4 monitors and 2 video projectors. It is impossible to remain "outside" of the work, as the viewer is always surrounded by images and sounds. Due to the placement of the projectors, in all areas of the space the viewer becomes both a part of the projected image and an obstruction in its way. In a very real sense, the interaction of images, sounds, objects and the limits of the space (walls, floor etc) becomes modified by the viewer's movements; the viewer thus performs the work.

For each individual viewer, this performance of identification with "the voice" of the space (assuming the position from within which the installation "speaks") is accompanied by a simultaneous viewership, or a certain way of watching the characters in the images and the other viewer/performers.

Have you ever

knowingly committed any crime of moral turpitude or a drug-related offense for which you have not been arrested?

Yes No

Documented daily rituals (bathing, cooking etc)of my Romanian Grandmother (Buni), and intimate conversations revealing a family history of abuse and violence. Buni responds to ethnographic desire, and is established effortlessly as a certain type of "object of scrutiny".

NBC coverage of Olympic gymnasts: "Look into her eyes, they are the eyes of her nation·" "Romanian children all seem to play gymnast·" Gymnast on beam, combination tumble forward, looped in reverse slow motion, repeated. Little orphan girls behind fence. Orphan girls is the field, cartwheeling.

Close-up images of performer rehearsing the different characters; "failed" rehearsals of the same 4 lines over a period of 6 months are included.

For the performance component of the piece, the videotapes are synched to play a pre-determined sequence. I take on the characters of a cartwheeling gymnast, a traditional storyteller, an anthropologist, and a character who talks to my granny via the TV - the rehearsals of whch are icluded in the installation.The performance re-interprets the content of the video images - for instance, the myth told by the storyteller reveals that some of my granny's stories may or may not have been auobiographical

Performer steps behind projection screen -only her shadow profile remains visible to the audience. From behind the screen, she imagines her features in detail, reciting a visual description. A video camera records a close-up of her face and projects it in the front of the space, visible to the audience but not visible to her. The audience can note the inaccuracy of her blind self-description.

Storyteller is interrupted. Anthropologist picks up a video camera, turns the camera and a bright light upon the audience. She selects a male"subject", and recites a detailed, systematic visual description of his face in close-up, as seen through the camera. The images recorded are projected in the front of the space - audience member replaces Buni as object of scrutiny.

Roberto Sifuentes, El Mexterminator Project
The artist performs "El Pre-Colombian-Vato", a holy gang member, who incarnates the fears and desires Americans feel toward youth of color living dangerously. Sifuentes' character , a hi-tech aztec gang member, is part of a "living diorama" of previously "undocumented specimens" brought into the museum. Viewers are invited to feed, smell and touch him. His interactions with them and his computer keyboard are hyper-sexual and aggressive.

As an anthropologist, I engage in an exercise in observation with myself, learning to define myself as other via a camera that projects my image, replacing the granny and the gymnasts - later, the anthropologist turns their attention to the audience, transforming them into the new object of scrutiny. An important component of the performance is the videotaping of audience members, who become the new subjects of narratives and documentation (the other). Images of the audience and documentation of each performance event become part of the next installation.

The current developing project is a more direct exploration of the audience as performers of identity, and of the relationship between "life and art". These next installations include images of military technologies, particularly stealth fighters and attack helicopters, some of which will be cast out of sugar and eaten - my way of producing the citizen through bodily incorporation. Performance tableaus stage interactions between body and various objects and images. Some text fragments from immigration law will be narrated in multiple voices, while others will be silently projected, requiring that the viewer provide the "voice" for them. In these texts, the you/I positions are at times ambiguous, confronting the viewer in the political act of assuming an I. Images recorded in the gallery space will situate the viewer "inside" the monitors, and performance elements will bring the characters on the video tapes "outside" into the space.

Recite:

"How do I become naturalized?"

"How do I become naturalized?"

"How do I become natural-ized?"

"I'm black. Now let's deal with this social fact and the fact of my stating it altogether. (..) If you feel that my letting you know I'm not white is making an unnecessary fuss, you must feel that the right and proper course of action for me to take is to pass for white. Now this kind of thinking presupposes a belief that it's better to be identified as white". Adrian Piper, Cornered	The viewers can purchase the candy planes, photographs, sculptures made of felt and wax, and can have their picture taken with the foreigner. At the purchase, the viewer receives a fee bonus: a handmade, signed confessional of my illegal activities, coated in sugar. This insertion of "real life experiments" into the gallery makes the viewer party to, and sponsor of, the frightening infiltration of the foreigner/alien, My smiling wedding photos become, in the context of this exhibition, problematic and dangerous, hinting at potential deceit. Next to these photos, video images of myself rehearsing my residency interview as well as performing fake television special effects again problematize the relationship between "truth" and performance, and suggest that identity is constructed as a rehearsed performance legally and publicly negotiated. Documentation of this work will be used as proof of employment and professional activity in my US Immigration application for permanent residency scheduled to begin in December 2000.
"performance was always my salvation what I didn't do as a citizen I did in the name of art & no one seemed to mind I broke a zillion laws in the reams of politics, identity and language & everytime I broke a rule I had a conversation with Death in each of these conversations she told me to be more careful next time Tonight I proceed with absolute caution" Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Confession to an Imaginary Priest	By building a space out of the very relationship between viewer, text, image and performer, I confront you in the act of viewing.
	Play/recite images of Buni and rehearsals of INS interview

Neither I nor You are fixed; what we risk is the making and unmaking of you/I/i. To enter can be dangerous -- your body may collapse into the text, and back. Look for me behind the stains on your screen, in the mirror, in the back of your mouth with no visa #.

Hasan Elahi, NAFTA Project
The relationship between the geographic and political North and South is confounded if you leave the US from Detroit - "going south" from Detroit, you arrive into Canada, not Mexico. Elahi's on-going project involves travelling to Canada to eat Mexican food, and looking for Canadian food in Mexico. He is also planning the smuggling of Canadian poutine into Mexico. As a US citizen, Elahi is attempting to become an illegal alien worker in Mexico, and to have himself deported to the US. His body, as a material vehicle, functions towards equalizing the transaction of goods and privilege across geo-political lines.

"There is a Border Patrol agent in the audience

can he please identify himself?

can you please identify yourself?"

Border Brujo

Recite:
"How do I become naturalized?
How long will it take to become naturalized?
If I am naturalized, will my natural children be born naturalized, or do they have to become naturalized? Can my adopted children be naturalized?
Once I am naturalized, can I be de-naturalized?
Should I be afraid of losing my naturalization?"

Repeat questions until time runs out.

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