The List is an on-going project that records the thousands of refugees,
asylum seekers and undocumented migrants who have died while seeking refuge
in Europe since 1993. Turkish artist Banu Cennetoğlu has helped European
NGO network UNITED for Intercultural Action distribute the list, which has
been reproduced and installed in public sites across the world including a
bus stop in Basel, billboards in Amsterdam, a wall in Los Angeles,
advertising columns in Berlin, and a public screen on top of Istanbul’s
Marmara Pera hotel.
In July 2018, The List was installed in Liverpool city centre, as part of
the Liverpool Biennial programme of commissions and public realm projects.
A few weeks later, on 1 August, it was torn down and speculation ensued
about the perpetrators. Many people presumed it was a xenophobic and racist
attack; a more benign suggestion was that a council employee had mistaken
the work for illegal flyposting (it was very neatly removed). Later, the
idea was floated that this was the work of a disgruntled flyposting company
who felt their patch was under threat. The Biennial reinstalled the work
and released a statement firmly locating the destruction of the list within
the heated current debate about the global refugee crisis:
*It is timely and important to make The List public during a global refugee
crisis. We were dismayed to see it had been removed on Saturday night and
would like to know why. The List has been met with critical acclaim and we
are doing everything we can to reinstate it.*1
Banu Cennetoğlu + UNITED for Intercultural Action, The List, 2018.
Liverpool, UK. Photo: Banu Cennetoglu.
When it was destroyed for a second time on 16 August (in a more haphazard,
vicious way), Biennial staff announced that the work would not be
re-installed:
*Due to repeated damage and removal since The List was installed, Banu
Cennetoğlu and Liverpool Biennial have decided to leave it in its current
state as a manifestation and reminder of systematic violence exercised
against people.*2
Debate ensued about whether this was the right decision; many people took
the view that the work should be reinstated each time it was destroyed, in
order to make a defiant statement that fascism, intolerance and bigotry was
not welcome in the city.
*Both the artist and the Liverpool Biennial should stand up against whoever
is pulling it down by printing again and again. Why just give up and let em
win??*3Banu Cennetoğlu + UNITED for Intercultural Action, The List, 2018.
Liverpool, UK. Photo: Joe Anderson.
A section of the work was later covered in the more definitively hateful
INVADERS NOT REFUGEES. The List has been displayed in many cities across
the world over the past decade. This was the first time it was destroyed.
Many took it as a reflection of the febrile atmosphere in the UK caused by
Brexit and the atmosphere of fear, hatred and intolerance it created.
NOTES
-
Liverpool Biennial statement, 1 August 2018
-
Liverpool Biennial statement, 16 August 2018
-
The White Pube, Instagram post, 21 August 2018
RELATED ARTWORKS
Garth Evans, Untitled Sculpture, 1972
https://archiveofdestruction.com/artwork/untitled/
Josephine Meckseper, Untitled (Flag 2), 2018
https://archiveofdestruction.com/artwork/untitled-flag-2/
+++++
BLACK TAPE TO MOURN
Horacio Zabala300 Meters of Black Tape to Mourn a Public SquareBuenos
Aires, Argentina1972
Back to Artworks https://archiveofdestruction.com/
Horacio Zabala, 300 Meters of Black Tape to Mourn a Public Square, 1972,
Buenos Aires, Argentina (detail). Collection of the Institute for Studies
on Latin American Art (ISLAA), copyright Horacio Zabala. Courtesy the
artist and Herlitzka + Faria. Photo: Arturo Sánchez.
*300 metros de cinta negra para enlutar una plaza pública (300 Meters of
Black Tape to Mourn a Public Square)* opened on 23 September 1972 at 4pm.
Twenty-four hours later it had been dismantled by government officials. In
the words of the artist, Horacio Zabala, it was ‘destroyed by the
institutional vandalism of that era…not a single material vestige of the
show remained, only references to it: the catalogue, the press
releases…newspaper articles and a few photographic records’.1
Horacio Zabala, drawings for *300 Meters of Black Tape to Mourn a Public
Square*, 1972. Collection of the Institute for Studies on Latin American
Art (ISLAA), © Horacio Zabala. Courtesy the artist and Herlitzka + Faria.
The work was part of an outdoor sculpture exhibition staged in Plaza
Roberto Arlt, a very public location in the centre of Buenos Aires. By
staging the exhibition in the public realm, the curator’s aim was to ‘take
art to the streets and encourage new forms of collective reception and
appropriation of art’.2 Zabala tied a black sash – replete with bows –
around the outer walls of a large building, encircling the site in a sombre
expression of public mourning. 300 meters… was a public memorial to a
group of sixteen dissidents who had been brutally executed by Argentina’s
military dictatorship a month before, in what became known as the Masacre
de Trelew (Trelew Massacre).
In an era when overt displays of public dissent were punishable by
imprisonment or even death, the work of artists, musicians, writers and
poets became a crucial outlet. The subtle, often oblique ways in which the
dictatorship was critiqued through art was a life-line for those in search
of some kind of public expression of rage and sadness – and a determination
that such violent acts would not remain unchallenged or unmarked.
Zabala’s work wasn’t the only installation that was destroyed that day; all
the other works in the exhibition were also violently removed by police
after the opening. The authorities initiated a court case against the
curator Jorge Glusberg; a local, national and international outcry ensued,
with many supporters of the exhibition, the artists and the curator,
decrying the censorship.
Zabala set out his position on the social function of art in his *Diecisiete
interrogantes acerca del arte (Seventeen Questions about Art)*. In this
manifesto of sorts, he made a passionate case for the potential of art to
form disruptive interventions in the public realm and in so doing, become a
catalyst for revolutionary action. One of the seventeen questions is
directly applicable to 300 metros…: *Can [art] offer a maximum of
possibilities with a minimum of resources?* A cheap, utilitarian, ‘non-art’
material (industrial plastic) is employed to make a poetic, radical
statement about state-sanctioned violence and the importance of public
resistance.
Horacio Zabala, 300 Meters of Black Tape to Mourn a Public Square, 1972
(Reconstruction, 2012). © Horacio Zabala. Courtesy the artist and Herlitzka
In 2012, Zabala carried out a re-enactment of 300 meters…, on the same
building, giving the work the same title. The forty years that passed
between ‘the original’ work and the ‘copy’ constitute, the artist says, a
‘temporal distance’:
*The first instance of mourning can be considered a historical document
that reflects a symptom of the violence prevalent during that era. The
second expression of violence can be considered as the renovation of a past
experience carried out in the present which entails contemporary values. As
such, this work is or could be a mental reconstruction based on memory and
imagination.*3
NOTES
-
Arte e Ideología. CAYC al aire libre (Art and Ideology, Libre Outdoors),
was a group show organised by the Centro de Arte y Communicación (CAYC),
1972.
-
Horacio Zabala, *300 metros de cinta negra para enlutar una plaza
pública, 1972–2012*, Legislatura Porteña, Otra Cosa, 2012
-
Ibid.
FURTHER RESEARCH
Horacio Zabala in conversation with Iria Candela
https://islaa.org/updates/horacio-zabala-in-conversation-with-iria-candela/
ISLAA exhibition talk, January 2021
https://islaa.org/updates/horacio-zabala-in-conversation-with-iria-candela/
English transcription of Horacio Zabala in conversation with Iria Candela
ISLAA exhibition talk, January 2021
RELATED ARTWORKS
3Nós3, Ensacamento (Covering), 1979
https://archiveofdestruction.com/artwork/ensacamento-covering/
Yu Wen-Fu, Outside the Wall, 2009
https://archiveofdestruction.com/artwork/outside-the-wall/
https://archiveofdestruction.com/artwork/300-meters-of-black-tape-to-mourn-a-public-square/