06/07
Astrophysical Pier, Antonio Jose Guzman
People now are very sedentary in political ideas. So that’s the whole idea of the project, to imagine a new place, imagine a place for rest, a place where everyone can have a piece of the cake, not only the big guys.
SPREADING HOLL ANDITIS With piertopolis , Antonio Jose Guzman brings ®
back a utopian outlook Born and raised in Panama, with Afroindigenous as well Sephardic Jewish heri tage, Amsterdam-based artist Antonio Jose Guzman embodies the idea of the globally connected individual. Through the audio-visual, multidisciplinary work in Piertopolis, he explores his roots to find ways to discuss universal themes like DNA, migration, and utopian ideals. Using the symbol of a pier—a dreaming and gathering point as well as a launch pad for journeys and new opportunities— he aims to draw attention to links and connections all over the world. For his investigations, Guzman spent the last few
years making working trips to places related to his multifaceted ethnic back ground, such as Dakar, Murud, New York and Bodo. (You can view his online visual notebook at www.piertopolis.com) On these travels he traced his genetic past and found communities that came closer to meeting ideas of an ideal society. Inspired, amongst others, by utopian futurists of the past, such as theorist/architect Richard Buckminster Fuller and New Babylon creator Constant, Guzman also ruminated on concepts like optimal architectural forms and alter native mapping. The Piertopolis project
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Baifal, Antonio Jose Guzman (2x) < Ultra Kaolak Violet, Antonio Jose Guzman
shows art playing a significant and indis pensable role in the social and political process of envisioning an ideal global society for our age. Guzman’s Piertopolis research reaches its conclusion—for the time being—with the exhibition at GEMAK. His next step will be to turn his ideas into reality by creating an ideal city-model, Piertopia, on a Panamanian island—a modern-day utopia allowing art, artists and society to find new ways to relate positively. Guzman spoke about his ideas and inspirations the day before the GEMAK opening:
on a street where a lot of Jewish people used to live, and now there are a lot of people from the Middle East, and new migrants come to live there. I had found out through the DNA ancestry project that I had Jewish ancestry in Amsterdam. What I wanted to do with the pier is also related to why a pier ends in my street, and is that a coincidence? Is a pier some thing that we find normal? Is that some thing from everyday life? For you it is. For me it is. But for certain inhabitants of other countries a pier is not an easy thing, or is not something that is just there.
Why are piers of symbolic significance to you? I was searching the way in Google to an address in my neighbourhood, in Amster dam east, and I found out the next street ends in a pier. I walked there, following a GPS Google map, following my mobile telephone, because this whole project is about constructing, mapping—it’s a whole data visualization of my identity, life, and a mapping of the places where I’ve been. So I walked to the end of this place in the harsh winter of last year, and I asked myself, what now? This is the end of my street. This is where I live in Amsterdam,
How important can a pier be to a community? My grandpa, who was from the jungles of Panama and has Senegalese ancestry, he moved to Panama City in a time when it was like moving from Newfoundland to New York. So what happened was he went with his kayak, his little boat, to Panama, where he become a shoemaker and then a politician—a self-sufficient intellectual. Then he married my grandma and moved to this little town and became the mayor. Probably he was the only black person in the whole town; everyone was mixed, mestizo.
like to do is see new ways of organizing. How are we going to build new cities? Piertopia wants to create this activity of new reasoning, of new thinking for a new community, a new society.
Orbit Number Seven, Antonio Jose Guzman
10/11
So what Piertopia, the city, would
of the Spanish elite, so the social reforms after the coup in 1968 changed and reformed people. My grandpa, as a black person, could be mayor. My mother, as a black woman, could be a diplomat… didn’t leave Panama till 1999—the pier stayed. I never saw it, I just heard stories. There are no pictures. Apparently it sank soon afterwards. It was a very important period of time for the little community, when the pier was there, economically. I tell you this because we take it for granted. For the people in the village in Panama, probably the pier was a utopia. You’ve written that piers are connected to people’s hopes and dreams. Are you taking that to its logical conclusion with your desire to establish Piertopia? Yes. This project is called Piertopolis, because it is research. Piertopia is going to be a community inspired by that failed utopian project called Drop City. These were students of Buckminster Fuller, and they made these geodesic domes. They went to live somewhere in the middle of the United States, Nevada or Texas, a desert area.
In the 1970s there were a lot of social reforms around the world, and in Latin America there was this communist call of social reforms, agrarian reforms. So he established a co-operative for the little town, for the fishermen to become more sustainable, to have their own political and social rights. So this community still exists today, and everybody regards my
grandfather as a sort of—I don’t know— Che Guevara. These people never really did have a pier, but when the Americans invaded Panama in 1989, the Americans went to many harbours in Panama, including this little harbour in Aguadulce. They built a floata ble pier because they needed it for their army. When the Americans left—they
Planisphere print, Antonio Jose Guzman Fuller Panama, Antonio Jose Guzman
Piertopia is a community that I want to build in Panama. It’s not just an abstract thing, it’s an artist’s residence: artists coming there, agriculture, a school for children, sustainable food. These bio products will be used in Piertopia, the commune, and will be sold to the hotels in Panama. Not only that, we will rent the space also for communication networks. So that makes the project sustainable. It means you have an artistic project but still you use capitalism to pay your bills.
I started with the idea of the pier, and then I came up with the idea of constructing Piertopia. The realization of wanting to create this island community in Panama, that just happened in December, when I was in Africa. I wanted to make something concrete of the whole thing. Something that I can do.
What kind of nearly ideal communities did you came across in your travels while researching Piertopolis? Norway was very important, because it was a place where I found some peace, and because there are not so many people there, the society works better. There is enough economical situation for everyone. The towns are built in proper ways. They are not so huge as Mumbai, or Mexico City or Sao Paulo, or Panama City. Those don’t work anymore, completely. The only place next to Mumbai where you can work is Murud. Murud was an island, a fortress, where there used to be black sailors. These people were slaves and then became the high ranks, and they built this island. There are a lot of fortresses in India, but Murud was never defeated by the English and the Portuguese. This community was an Islamic community, and anyone who lived there knows that they have African heritage. The way the commune was built is just amazing, with the lakes and the mosque and the fortress.
Medina in Dakar is a very important area for me to live. They built these buildings at times when the whole world was looking at social reform. So the buildings How do other artists, such as were built in futuristic styles, and they Buckminster Fuller and Constant, were made for the people to be inter inspire you? The thing with Piertopia, and Piertopolis, connected. Medina is the old part of is that Constant was also inspired by map Dakar, were the real worker people live, ping. There was a group of French people the working class. And some people still after the war called the Situationists. And use the villas in that sustainable way of intercommunicating with each other. there was a movement to try to identify the images of the city where people are in Some people don’t. But there was a transit, and where people congregate. So meaning in buildings like that; there was this was a project created by Guy Debord, an intellectual idea beforehand. a French anarcho-socialist. He created psycho-maps. They were a contribution to You wrote that a new utopia is needed a new way of looking at mapping, ways of for our times. Why is that? Because young people have forgotten all moving through the city. So what about that. Only those of us who were Piertopia, the city, would like to do is see born in the 1970s have a big backpack on new ways of organizing. How are we going to build new cities? Piertopia wants our backs. We need to re-establish to create this activity of new reasoning, of utopian ideas. It’s not about me being an new thinking for a new community, a new artist, for my ego, making a project. It’s about me trying to make a statement society. that ideas of social reform are important. Constant is very important, because he The whole French commune started in wanted to create a new city, which was a the 1800s, when they wrote the “Inter New Babylon with a homo ludens mix— the creative person who is free from nationale.” These things incubated until society. The playing person. That’s why 1969, up into the 1970s, when everything there are pictures in this exhibition of a collapsed in the disco time.
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We’d had 16 years of dictatorship
religious group in Senegal. The clothes were amazing—very geometrical, they look like the Fuller map. And they look like some forms of Drop City. I see them as playful homo ludens. So that’s why there are architectonic pictures in this space, and there are pictures of this group, the Baifal.
The exhibition PIERTOPOLIS ran at GEMAK from January 21st till February 26th 2012
the pier was a utopia.
Antonio Jose Guzman on the road after Piertopolis in GEMAK DUSTY & THE ELECTRIC DUB –D.A.T.E.D. (A.J. GuZMAN & AURORA ADAMS)
It was a very important period of time for the little community, when the pier was there, econo mically. I tell you this because we
The main idea of social reforms is that you should have as a goal to try to change things. It should be established in the minds of people that there are better ways to live than the ways we live now. People now are very sedentary in political ideas. So that’s the whole idea of the project, to imagine a new place, imagine a place for rest, a place where everyone can have a piece of the cake, not only the big guys. When you first came to Europe, did you think of it as a kind of utopia? I came here for the ideal. I thought every one here is painting, and going to the opera, everyone reading. But it’s not like that. In Panama, we used to live in com munes, and go to Hare Krishna temples, and I was a sort of Deadhead. But when I went to Holland that commune, hippie thing didn’t exist—there was the rave. It was so much alive, and it was the same, but it was all trance music, electronic
music. I came here as a photographer, and I would get assignments from the magazines to go to raves. For me that was like I lived in the 1960s. And all these thousands of people with colours and piercings and lights and people waiting for the millennium, thinking that UFOs were going to come, like now in December 2012. It was a very beautiful time, so that’s why I stayed here. Then came the 2000s, and everything that existed in the 1990s became commercialized.
Op 15 januari en 19 februari 2012 gaf het multimedia duo D.A.T.E.D in club Dimanche Rouge in Parijs een live performance. Antonio Jose Guzman monteerde live zijn films The Day We Surrender to The Air en The Legend of Billy Maclean, met zang en gesproken woord van Aurora Adams. Guzman liet zich voor dit nieuwe experi ment inspireren door een literair hoogte punt uit de Spaanstalige literatuur, de roman Rayuela (Hinkelspel) van de Argentijn Julio Cortázar (1914-1984). What else is in your personal “backpack” Rayuela gaat over de Argentijnse intellec tueel Horacio Oliveira die na jarenlange that motivates you? I come from the 1970s, from Panama, from ballingschap terugkeert naar Buenos the land of Omar Torrijos, who was one of Aires en hier met een vriend een krank zinnigeninstituut start. De roman kan the most important leaders of Panama. The demonstrations were a huge big deal: letterlijk op vele manieren gelezen worden, 100,000 to 200,000 people in a land of want de volgorde van de hoofdstukken not even a million. It was amazing. ligt niet vast. Political demonstrations—but not against the government, for the government. Check: http://electricdub.tumblr.com/
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in the village in Panama, probably
Skymaps decode, Antonio Jose Guzman
(Foto’s: Dana LaMonda)
take it for granted. For the people
We’d had 16 years of dictatorship of the Spanish elite, so the social reforms after the coup in 1968 changed and reformed people. My grandpa, as a black person, could be mayor. My mother, as a black woman, could be a diplomat. Here in the Netherlands, since Afghanistan, since Iraq, there’s not so many people going to demonstrations. I stopped going to demonstrations myself. I should be going. So I guess with my project, probably I’m trying to put in my little granito de arena—little grain of sand. I always thought, well, people here don’t care that much. There were demon strations back in the 1960s, I know, there was a squat movement here. There were a lot of things happening, but it didn’t go to my brain too much. Then I bought an anthology from City Lights in San Francisco, with an intro duction by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. It included a Dutch poet, Simon Vinkenoog, who died in 2009. He was a very important pacifist, writer, activist, when everything was happening here in the 1960s. He wrote a poem about the 1980s, and it’s called “Hollanditis.” I found out Hollanditis was a movement of demonstrations. They were so contagious that the whole world started to demonstrate. Can you imagine? So Hollanditis emphasized that there was a time here when a lot of demonstrations existed, and there’s apathy now.
piertopolis
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terug naar het utopisme Interview by Gudrun Will hielden zij zich bezig met vernieuwende cartografische en logistieke methoden in relatie tot de stad en verstedelijking. “Met Piertopia, de stad, wil ik nieuwe organisatievormen ontdekken. Hoe kunnen we in de toekomst nieuwe steden bouwen? Piertopia wil nieuwe vormen van redeneren en denken creëren, voor een nieuwe gemeenschap, een nieuwe samenleving.” “Tegenwoordig zijn mensen erg ‘sedentair’ in hun politieke denkbeelden. Eigenlijk is dat dus het centrale idee achter het project; het kunnen verbeelden van een nieuwe plaats, een plaats waar kalmte heerst, een plaats waar iedereen mee mag doen, niet alleen de grote jongens.”
Torrijos
Polarcircle Theory, Antonio Jose Guzman
De in Panama geboren en getogen, in Amsterdam gevestigde kunstenaar Antonio Jose Guzman is met zijn Panamees-inheemse, Afrikaanse en Sefardisch-Joodse achtergrond het schoolvoorbeeld van een wereldburger. Het audiovisuele, multidisciplinaire werk in de tentoonstelling Piertopolis, is een onderzoek naar zijn eigen wortels en een poging om door te dringen tot universele thema’s als DNA, migratie en utopistische idealen. De pier – als plaats om te dromen, bij elkaar te komen, maar ook als vertrek punt voor reizen en mogelijkheden – staat in het project symbool voor mon diale verbanden en connecties. Voor zijn onderzoek heeft Guzman de afgelopen jaren werkbezoeken gebracht aan plaat sen die te maken hebben met zijn veel zijdige etnische achtergrond, zoals Dakar, Murud, New York en Bodo (zie voor meer informatie zijn visuele notitieboek op www.piertopolis.com). Tijdens deze reizen bracht Guzman zijn genetische geschiedenis in kaart en ontdekte hij gemeenschappen die dicht in de buurt kwamen bij heersende denkbeelden over de ideale samenleving. Onder invloed van, onder meer, utopistische futuristen uit het verleden, zoals de theoreticus/ architect Richard Buckminster Fuller en Constant, de schepper van New Babylon, onderzocht Guzman ook concepten als optimale architecturale vormen en alter natieve cartografie.
In het Piertopolis project speelt kunst een belangrijke en onontkoombare rol in het sociale en politieke verbeeldingsproces van een moderne ideale mondiale samen leving. Tijdens de tentoonstelling in GEMAK bereikte Guzman’s Piertopolisonderzoek een voorlopige conclusie. Hierna wil hij zijn ideeën gaan verwezen lijken door een ideaal stadsmodel, Piertopia, te creëren op een Panamees eiland; een hedendaags Utopia dat nieuwe mogelijkheden biedt voor posi tieve interactie tussen kunst, kunstenaars en samenleving.
Een andere bron van inspiratie, uit Guzman’s persoonlijke ‘rugzak’, waren de massale, pro-regeringsdemonstraties ten tijde van de Panamese regeringsleider Omar Torrijos (1968-1981). “Na 16 jaar dictatuur van de Spaanse elite zorgden de sociale hervormingen na de coup van 1968 voor enorme verande ringen onder de Panamese bevolking. Als zwarte man kon mijn grootvader burgemeester worden en mijn moeder kon als zwarte vrouw diplomaat worden.”
Hollanditis
Totdat Guzman in een bundel het gedicht ‘Hollanditis’ van de in 2009 overleden Simon Vinkenoog tegenkwam, was hij in Een dag voor de opening in GEMAK sprak Gudrun Will met Guzman over zijn ideeën de veronderstelling geweest dat Neder landers niet politiek geëngageerd waren. en inspiratiebronnen. Hij kwam erachter dat Hollanditis, met De Pier zijn massale anti-kruisraketten Tijdens de Amerikaanse invasie van demonstraties, in de jaren tachtig van de Panama (1989-1999) kreeg de kleine haven vorige eeuw een beweging was die zich van het dorp Aguadulce een drijvende als een virus had verspreid over de hele pier die ergens in de jaren ’90 weer zonk. wereld. Een scherp contrast met de “Het was in economisch opzicht een erg tegenwoordig heersende apathie. “Zelf doe ik ook niet meer mee aan belangrijke periode voor deze kleine demonstraties. Maar ik zou het wel gemeenschap toen de pier er was. Wij vinden een pier misschien vanzelfsprekend, moeten doen. Dus ik denk dat ik met dit project mijn kleine granito de arena maar voor de mensen in dit dorp was (zandkorreltje) wil bijdragen.” deze pier waarschijnlijk een utopie.”
Futuristische utopisten
De tentoonstelling PIERTOPOLIS was te Guzman vindt inspiratie in het werk van zien in GEMAK van 21 januari t/m 26 Buckminster Fuller, Constant en de Franse februari 2012. situationisten, waaronder de anarchosocialist Guy Debord. Net als Guzman zelf
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Antonio Jose Guzman keert met
(Foto’s: Dana LaMonda)
DE VERSPREIDING VAN HOLL ANDITIS
