Being Away - Yane Calovski

Afterimage, Jan, 2001 by Yane Calovski

In 1997, I started "The House and its Imperfections," a series of drawings referring to the structural and speculative logic of the home designed and built by my parents in Skopje, Macedonia. It was during this time that I first began to recognize the importance of my "original address," my own singular history. I've been away from Macedonia since 1991 and never thought that I would "return" home through my work. What fascinated me most at the time was the effort my parents were investing in the house amid all the uncertainties in Macedonia. It seemed to me that they were, in some way, adjusting the building to every social and political change, rebuilding and improving various corners of our four-bedroom home as a way to "stay" there.

The original architectural drawings of the house were lost over the years and all the consecutive alterations--an extension of the porch with a specially designed opening to accommodate the quickly growing cherry tree, or the inversion of one of the walls in the library to preserve an old bird's nest--were never documented. My drawings, rendered on long sheets of rice paper, articulated more than the objective architectural information. Employing a range of representational and narrative strategies, they also alluded to autobiographical incidents and conjectural possibilities that would resurface again in future projects.

The question about origin and the meaning of representation are often brought up by cultural critics and historians. In 1990/2000, an 11-month residency at the Center for Contemporary Art (CCA) in Kitakyuhsu, Japan, provided an opportunity to investigate these issues firsthand. It is an intense program where each year six foreign and 10 Japanese young artists are brought together to confront their work, each other and the dynamic of a very desolate industrial city. To find yourself in a small city in the south of Japan and in the company of visiting artists such as Lawrence Weiner, can be both disorienting and exciting. It was in Japan that I was able to confront insecurities and issues with my practice, my relationships to people, and to produce work that challenged my methods and means of production.

One of my projects at CCA was a collaboration with Gaku Tsutaya, an artist from Tokyo, titled "here, now." Conceived as a large scale exhibition experiment including the work of 51 artists involved with the research program and produced at the Fukuoka Art Museum, it included video and film projections, computer-based projects, and site specific interventions throughout the city of Fukuoka. In addition, we produced an artist's book/catalog (distributed in the U.S. by Printed Matter in New York City). The exhibition space resembled a large laboratory where opposing ideas, mediums and scales co-existed in a installation that ultimately worked as a portrait of a dialogue with a place we had all come to recognize as a cognizant "middle of nowhere."

At the end of my residency in Japan I received an invitation to participate in "Manifesta 3: Borderline Syndrome--Energies of Defense," the 2000 edition of the European Biennial of Contemporary Art. My collaborator, Nayia Frangouli, and I proposed a public sculpture/sound installation entitled "common denominator." The following excerpt from the text we wrote for the exhibition catalog pertains directly to our identities as "expatriates," where the desire to be "some" place collides with the fact that you are from somewhere predetermined:

We meet in Japan, in the spring of 1999. We came to attend an international research program designed to "cultivate" young artists whose first responsibility is to recognize their role in the international art context. Prior to that for the last eight years, we have studied, lived and worked in Western Europe and the United States, empowering ourselves with the influence of the west, becoming more "western'. Caught somewhere between our past and our future, we confront things known, expected, desired. We travel and move, we are multilingual, well educated, we remember our origins with fondness, we are critical of our respective cultures. Along the way, we may have lost our sense of belonging, and now feel as we belong everywhere and are becoming every man ... We try to move on but we are a bit stuck with our own insecurities.

The work was comprised of two independent, autonomous components. The first, a CD compilation of Macedonian and Greek music with distinct nationalistic and political overtones, was installed as a sound installation in the National Museum in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The second was a market stand located in the park in front of the National Museum presenting fresh fruit (Macedonian apples and Greek oranges) handed out for free to visitors during the exhibition. The fruits were labeled with an edible sticker printed with a sun-burst image recently employed as the emblem for the Macedonian national flag, but also recognized as a celebrated Greek symbol of the goddess Vergina. The ongoing political and cultural war between the two nations is fought over symbols such as this one. Rendered as a fruit sticker mimicking the assurance of "product quality" and origin, the image was resurrected and redefined as a positive graphic gesture, dissolving in a new cultural context and recognized only by its "taste."