‘Not for us what can be dreamed or imagined, described or spoken of’: Alex Hartley’s Nowhereisland and the ‘Im-possible’ of the Olympics

Abstract

A piece of ‘uncharted land’, revealed under a glacier in the High Arctic, Nowhereisland was declared a nation in September 2011. During the Olympics, ‘this nation without borders’ traveled to the coast of South-West England, attracting over 20,000 citizens, before disappearing in September 2012. This article explores the ambivalent politics of staging and imagining belonging in Hartley’s utopian project. Nowhereisland appeared to contest nationhood but employed strategies that perpetuated the nation’s emotional legitimacy – hence, it staged a paradox. Following Tim Etchells’s suggestion (March 2012) to move beyond normalizing utopias that ‘can be imagined or spoken of’, I consider the politics of Nowhereisland in its attempt to extend the limits of belonging to the Derridean im-possible. I propose that there is an analogy between belonging to Nowhereisland and identification with the New Europe. In doing so, this article seeks to locate an instance of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad in the matrix of current European crises.

Notes

1. I am grateful to the colleagues who organized and those who attended the London Theatre Seminar in November 2012, where I presented work in progress for this article. Their generous feedback and rigorous comments as well as the reviewer’s insight were invaluable for completing the piece.

2. Tim Cresswell, ‘Migration and Hospitality – Lessons from Svalbard’, Nowhereisland, <http://nowhereisland.org/#!/resident-thinkers/4/> [accessed 28 November 2012].

3. Arts Council England website, <http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/funding/funded-projects/case-studies/artists-taking-lead-south-west/> [accessed 12 December 2012].

4. Ibid.

5. Claire Doherty, ‘Nowhereisland: An Introduction’, pamphlet for The Last Days of Nowhereisland, Symposium, Bristol, 8 September 2012.

6. Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 2.

7. Cresswell, ‘Migration and Hospitality’. Other terms employed in the artwork’s promotion included ‘displaced, migrant nation’ and ‘nation without borders’.

8. Jacques Derrida, ‘Hospitality’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 5.3 (December 2000), 3–18; Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, trans. by Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (London: Routledge, 2001). The terms ‘im-possible’/ ‘im-possibility’ imply Derrida’s negotiation of the ‘perhaps’ as a fundamental component of the ‘event’, as ‘the disarticulated joining of the possible and the impossible [..] of the possible as im-possible’ (Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine, Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005, p. 74).

9. Ghassan Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society (Melbourne: Pluto Press, 2003).

10. London 2012 Olympic Games Opening Ceremony: Media Guide (London: London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games, 2012), p. 11.

11. Isles of Wonder was the title of the Games’ opening ceremony.

12. Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995), pp. 82–83.

13. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd edn (London: Verso, 1991), p. 4.

14. Luisa Passerini, Memory and Utopia: The Primacy of Intersubjectivity (London: Equinox, 2007), p. 98.

15. Ibid.

16. Claire Doherty, ‘Relation to Citizen: Participation Beyond the “Event” of the Public Artwork’, unpublished article shared with the author in personal email correspondence, 9 December 2012. Potentially, Nowhereisland’s ‘Olympian’ quality, saluted by the Arts Council expert panel, can be traced in the ways that Hartley’s work was founded on and dialogued with this past, the explorers’ desire for ‘remote and unfamiliar landscapes’.

17. ‘Art’, Nowhereisland, <http://nowhereisland.org/embassy/art/> [accessed 28 November 2012].

18. ‘The Nowhereisland Declaration’, Nowhereisland,<http://Nowhereisland.org/about/#!/citizenship/declaration/> [accessed 28 November 2012].

19. Ibid.

20. Nonetheless, Nowhereisland could also be read as a performance of eco-tourism, because members of Hartley’s expedition arrived to Svalbard on airplanes, adding to the problem of global warming.

21. Bruce Robbins, ‘Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism’, in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, ed. by Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1998), pp. 1–20.

22. According to the project’s website, 19 per cent of citizens were below the age of 15, while another 18 per cent was aged between 15 and 24, attesting to the ways that Nowhereisland appealed to younger generations. See the project’s website <http://nowhereisland.org/citizenship/> [accessed 21 August 2013].

23. Over its year-long status as a nation, the island gathered over 23,000 citizens from ninety-one countries and 2700 propositions to its online constitution. See <http://nowhereisland.org/citizenship/> [accessed 21 August 2013].

24. Doherty, ‘Relation to Citizen’, n.p.

25. Jackson, Social Works, p. 26.

26. London 2012, <http://www.london2012.com/about-us/cultural-olympiad/> [accessed 15 December 2012].

27. Tim Etchells, ‘A Utopia of Dispute Might Be Better’, Nowhereisland, <http://nowhereisland.org/#!/resident-thinkers/27/> [accessed 15 December 2012].

28. Claire Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, October, 110 (Fall 2004), 51–79. Bishop’s influential analysis of participatory art practices is founded on Ernesto Laclau’s and Chantal Mouffe’s (1985) re-conceptualization of Left politics, whereby a focus on antagonism and hegemony aimed to challenge what were hitherto perceived as neutral relations of opposition. See also Jackson’s critique, Social Works, pp. 45–59.

29. Etchells, ‘A Utopia of Dispute Might Be Better’.

30. Boyle, in his artistic director’s note for the ceremony’s Media Guide, suggests that there is a ‘golden thread of purpose’ linking the performance’s elements, ‘the idea of Jerusalem’, which he equates to an aspiration of a better world. However, his final emotional exclamation that ‘We can build Jerusalem. And it will be for everyone’ clearly indicates his argument’s populist and banal nationalist character, where the ‘we’ is the British people. Boyle quoted in London 2012 Olympic Games Opening Ceremony: Media Guide, p. 11.

31. Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (London: Verso, 1979), p. 173.

32. Etchells, ‘A Utopia of Dispute Might Be Better’.

33. The project’s website and pages on social media list examples of communities welcoming the island: communities’ celebrations across Cornwall, a radio station dedicated to the project in Plymouth and the silent goodbye to the island in Bristol. These events can be compared to the hospitality and ‘game-making’, performed and celebrated in the Olympic Park and across London during the Games. The most obvious example is that Nowhereisland’s arrival at Weymouth coincided with ambassadors and Weymouth’s citizens gathering on Furzy Cliff and participating in the ‘All the Bells’ project, led by artist Martin Creed. The project asked everyone in the country to ring a bell for three minutes from 8.12 on the morning of the Olympics’ first day. In this way, Nowhereisland’s first appearance was clearly linked to events happening in the host city.

34. Unpublished paper by Richard Noble, delivered in The Last Days of Nowhereisland symposium, Viridor Theatre, Bristol, 8 September 2012 [author’s notes].

35. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), p. xiii.

36. Ibid., p. 15.

37. Certainly, this sharpness could be read as corresponding to structures sustaining sovereign nation-states in Fortress Europe. The closure of the sculpture’s surface also staged, consciously or unconsciously, a comment on the security measures implemented in London 2012. The Games’ security protocols attracted major media coverage. See, indicatively, Stephen Graham, ‘Welcome to Fortress London’, Guardian, 13 March 2012, section G2, pp. 6–9.

38. During the Bristol symposium, the project’s ambassadors explained that when the island approached a new location many people asked first about the island’s mechanics of floating, before engaging in a conversation about its other significations and debate that it sparked. Clearly, people did not want to engage with something that was fabricated – they did not want to feel ‘cheated’ – although the experience of nationhood is based on an almost theatrical suspension of disbelief, an ‘as if’ that produces the national imagined community beyond time.

39. Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 6.

40. Passerini, Memory and Utopia, p. 98.

41. See Passerini, Memory and Utopia, pp. 103–14, and ‘Dimensions of the Symbolic in the Construction of Europeanness’, in Figures d’Europe: Images and Myths of Europe, ed. by Passerini (Oxford: Peter Lang: 2003), pp. 21–32.

42. Passerini, Memory and Utopia, p. 108 has emphasized Eastern Europeans’ desire to be recognized as Europeans after 1989. In the 2013 context, though, the figure of the displaced Other – economic migrants, refugees from war-torn contexts or dispossessed subjectivities due to the financial crisis – demands similar treatment.

43. Susan Stewart, On Longing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), p. 135.

44. A distinction between the object-souvenir that evokes the nation and the cenotaph-monument that commemorates and reproduces nationhood, occasionally offering solace to national subjects, particularly in moments of national crisis, might be necessary. The cenotaph and other places of memory that stand in for and substitute the dead and the departed functioning through ‘surrogation’ – to borrow Joseph Roach’s term in Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 2 – contribute to narratives of authenticity and myths of origin. The feelings generated through encounter with such places or monuments are communal and enforce belonging through culture. The Nowhereisland souvenir I am referring to here operates in a different way. Although it is conceived to stand in for the departed and disappeared island-nation, it is defunct as an object that can be consumed only individually and implies fragmentation and incompletion. In this way, I argue, it does not contribute to the perpetuation of the myth of the island nation.

45. Stewart, On Longing, p. 135.

46. Brian Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 8.

47. Ibid., p. 11.

48. Suzanne Shanahan, ‘Currency and Community: European Identity and the Euro’, in Figures d’Europe, ed. by Passerini, pp. 159–79 (p. 160).

49. Doherty, ‘Relation to Citizen’.

50. Jean-Luc Nancy in Rodolphe Gasché, Europe: The Infinite Task (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 12. Gasché reads Europe as a term signifying movement, both in space and in vision. In ‘Dimensions of the Symbolic’ Passerini has also argued that movement has been crucial for the European imaginary, for example in the experience of the Wandering Jew narrative. In another intersection of Europe, movement and travels, Georges Perec’s W ou Le Souvenir d’enfance (1975) [W or The Memory of Childhood, trans. by David Bellos (London: Vintage, 2011)] brings together the story of the author’s childhood and a story about travelling to the mysterious W Island, the author’s acknowledged ‘Olympic fantasy’ (p. 7), to evoke some of the traumas and memories of early and mid-twentieth-century Europe.

51. The Zuccotti Park occupation in New York was the first instance of the Occupy movement that spread to both sides of the Atlantic in the last months of 2011; on 15 October 2011, Occupy LSX was staged outside St Paul’s cathedral in the City of London.

52. Nadine Holdsworth, Theatre & Nation (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), p. 71.

53. Etchells, ‘A Utopia of Dispute Might Be Better’.