Rozalinda Borcila, Excerpt, Vector Gallery, Iaøi (3rd–20th of June)

When concepts of identity and difference, as well as the related idea of contextual significance, no longer represent the elements of a discourse whose performative function is meant to disclocate habits of a specific self-representation, they obviously risk becoming, by means of an excessive repetition, nothing more but mere flatus vocis used in a process of describing states of affairs. In other words, one of the major dangers threatening the critical discourse is represented by using the concept of heterogenesis as a new kind of Hegelian unity. By exposing their supposed neutral value, the use of these concepts risk to leave unaffected altogether the reified habits of thinking and the virtues of image. Consequently, the use of such concepts rather legitimates the discursive capacity of generating habits of thinking, which allow images to promote and produce, politically and ethically, their ideological power.
In addition, when the artistic practice bears the responsibility of rescuing theoretical discourse from becoming commonplace (a task which faces the same risks as the theoretical ones, having no immunity in this respect, supposedly acquired either by tradition or by some decree), the danger of becoming commonplace and losing all critical power threatens the very use of images and their manner of acquiring autonomy. This also means that they separate from their critical function by attaining the “spectacular” representational function cautiously pointed out by Guy Debord some time ago.
In other words, when practices of subversion and détournement face the risk of becoming commonplace, when, in addition, the nomad condition of thinking taken as the ontological ground of social reality risk to transform the cultural grafting into a well-selled commercial product, the deleuzian concept of reteritorialization (a concept similar to the nomad act of camping in a foreign territory) is compelled to manifest its double critical task: re-describing a context redefines the usual attitudes that occur facing those ideological mechanisms that the image both reveals and conceals within the process of its social circulation.

Excerpt: Documenting a Project
The idea of an “excerpt” as a theoretical strategy that became both the subject and the technique of an artistic project can be regarded as such an example of discursive practice that re-describes an initial cultural space by means of recontextualization, intending to change the viewer’s attitude towards the images promoted.
Each excerpt from the whole of Rozalinda Borcila’s continuously developing work (one of the most interesting artists of transgression) already re-signifies her projects. Not only because her artistic development shapes its identity at the borderline between political interventionism and contextual analysis, but also because the main figure of this artistic trajectory is most probably represented by the comparison between two distinct regimes of image functioning and, simultaneously, by the analysis of the effects of this junction upon one of the terms of the relation explored. However, when the artist’s interest is explicitly focused on analyzing one of the terms of the relation in question, the effect of superimposition, not that of two images but that of two signifying contexts (the political and the artistic) which both serve at mediating images, regain the necessary force for dislocating the ideological mechanisms involved in the construction of an image and those involved in the construction of ideological patterns of thinking through the use of an image.
Relating the artistic and the political contexts within the same discursive practice separates the image from the context where it is commonly used (no matter if that context is the producer or simply the medium of the image) and reveals the signifying potential of the social context. It also reveals its mechanisms of framing the political significance of the image and the patterns of its ideological use. To conclude, it helps dislocating the reifying potential of the social context. Thus, the discourse about contextualism and cultural relativism (constructing identity through difference) regains its rhetorical power.
The presence of Rozalinda Borcila at the Vector Gallery in Iaøi on the occasion of her exhibition Excerpt can be regarded as such an example of using once more the relation between transgression and subversion, whose aim of emancipating the image from its “natural” regime further intends to comment the mechanisms of constructing the initial context. The opening of the show was followed, on June, the 4th, by a lecture on the relation between intervention and performance, lecture accompanied by a workshop that helped exemplifying the triadic model involved, in her opinion, in any social intervention. The workshop was, in fact, nothing but a lucid commentary on the function of the performance and on the development of the creative potential.
For the exhibition in question, the artist extracted three samples from her work. Though it might have seemed quite unbalanced at first sight, by intending to present under the same title three independent projects – Compositions in Black and White and Lessons of Geography together with the simultaneous presentation of the visual interactive archive Common_Places – the exhibition is worthy of attention precisely due to the remarkable internal unity of each of these projects, each of them based on the gesture of recontexualization, projects that comment always differently the relation between the context and the de-contextualized image.
Thus, the exhibition created its identity precisely due to the inner continuity of this conceptual strategy, its conceptual unity (a habit that will hardly disappear from the receptive expectations of the public) being guaranteed by doubling the typical artistic strategy for each project at the level of the whole. By informing the public about its artistic identity, Rozalinda Borcila actually exhibited a recurrent personal strategy, common to its peculiar way of analyzing the construction of visual identity: the excerpt, understood as an act of critical positioning performed by an image. A gesture of dislocating and re-marking the image that, on the one hand, generates attitudes (assuming a position towards that image) and, on the other hand, simultaneously states the artist’s attitude (or position) towards the significance of the images he uses, as well as the strategic functions (positions) the image plays within the cultural fields thus connected.
Organized during the show as an open space for informing, the Vector Gallery offered a public documentation of the two video projects, allowing in the same time that the public consults the archive of creation and contributes to its further development.
The choice of the first two projects is also unitary in its artistic technique – namely, subversion. Concerning the first one, Compositions in Black and White, the subversive act is represented by extracting an image from its political context and by its faked transfiguration into an artistic object, or, more precisely, by its re-framing within the rhetoric of the artistic discourse in order to be used as a signifier open to a new questioning of its significance. As for Lessons of Geography, subversion is present through the act of illegally recording images within the controlled spaces in airports.
Presenting in Iaøi the “on-going-archive” Common_Places and placing the local group on this artistic trajectory actually represented the concretion of a gesture similar to contextual analysis only on a meta-discursive level: creating an archive of artistic projects focused on collective creation that gathers together spaces and places as a testimony of transgression. Hosted in the gallery by means of a photo, video and catalogue documentation (more than fifty documents which hung on the walls, arranged according to their ephemerity, accompanied the presentation of this project), the archive also functioned as a metaphor of creative meeting. It offered the possibility of informing about projects alike to the artist and to other artistic groups connected through the common idea of questioning the concept of collectivity.

Inside the Show: Transgression and Documentation
Though, at first sight, the mere opportunity for a one-man-show, the exhibition that took place in Iaøi is open to commentaries (be it a briefly sketched one) concerning a project which is, in my opinion, artistically remarkable precisely in its obstinacy in turning art as documentation of reality against its present-day methods of exploring society. And which is also remarkable in its manner of using the already much too used practice of détournement. By documenting her own projects, Rozalinda Borcila questions the documentary function of art, and often uses her artistic projects as an analysis of the documentary value of image.
Locating the habits of constructing and receiving images represents one of the successful effects of this nomad project, that helps the artist document her own artistic transgression of the simultaneously legal and geographic borders framing identity.
In this respect, what is remarkable about Geography Lessons (a title whose bitter irony I would warmly stress) is precisely its manner of recording the use of technology and of image both as a control device and as a mechanism of locating and distributing individual identity between the indistinct identity of the masses and the identity appropriated by means of subjectivation. A use which is obviously subjected to a power regime, but which also represents the very manner of revealing the shape and the limits of power, deconstructing its functioning in its essential a-topos: the border. By personally risking within the surveillance legal system of the airports, the artists thus documents the very mechanisms that help constructing the national political identity – namely, the quasi-paranoid American security and surveillance system that marked the airport spaces after September 11.
The same play of the negative continues within Compositions in Black and White project, from its corpus the artist having selected for the present exhibition only four images. By surreptitiously extracting from the US Army Archive infrared photos taken by the “cameras” found on the aircrafts during the war in former Yugoslavia (“cameras” which obviously function, in fact, as tracking devices), the artist transfigurates into an artistic object the documentary function of the photograph, and uses the habits of interpreting (photographic) art precisely in order to question what otherwise remains invisible in the politic and judicial use of the image: the significance of transforming into an image a physical act (the annihilation of a territory) whose violence is often masked by the technological abstraction. What really matters in this project is the very process of re-signifying the image, once separated from its initial use, by faking the transposition into an artistic image of a political event photographically recorded. Its placement within the aesthetic regime of the artistic field serves as a device for analyzing the initial documentary significance of the image.
Though manifesting a cynical use of document and documentation, eventually, the exhibited photographs are not artistic objects at all, and they do not even function as such, despite their outstanding aesthetic value. Their apparent aesthetic function is meant to underline the double transfiguration of the material object into abstraction (first, the creation on camera of the image of the explosion – the trace of a transformation undergone on a physical level – second, the abstraction which occurs when acquiring certain significance). Thus, it ironically and lucidly comments the “euphoric” attitude of political violence.

Endnotes Written at the Artistic Terminal
Hastily sketching a panoramic survey on the artistic projects developed the last several years, one can easily notice a growing tendency to use artistic interventionism in the very areas of control of the social mechanism that delineate as many spaces of censorship and of the consequent loss of identity. Waiting for a history of subversive artistic practices which is still to be written and whose continuous development and re-writing naturally forbids any general diagnosis, I can only hope, taking the present exhibition as a starting point, that the creative terminal opened by Rozalinda Borcila in Iaøi would be lucidly accessed and used. This means nothing more than continuing to promote art as politics, by keeping the practice of détournement away from its aesthetisation, and the political intervention away from its reified form of commonplace interventionism. A task that Rozalinda Borcila’s exhibition succeeded to accomplish by surreptitiously keeping the public away from the fascination created by the use of an image.