All My Passports (v.2)
From a true life story to a fairy tale and back again
In the autumn of 1994, while sipping with Jovan Šumkovski the best coffee we have ever had in a small coffee-shop in a São Paulo neighborhood, I was trying to figure out why is all this happening to us. Looking for a solution to the problem raised by the Greek artists and the promoters of the Biennial, we felt that we were not enjoying the coffee because of the paradox we found ourselves stuck into and the poor chances of getting out of that impasse. It was the moment when we had already decided to reject the change proposed by the promoters (under the heavy pressure of the Greek lobby and the artists from Greece) which included our presentation under the name of FYROM, instead of our exhibiting under the name Republic of Macedonia, which was already in use. At one instant, out of the blue (as much as my memory serves me), Jovan asked me: ‘Do you know why the abstract art is the most remarkable in Macedonia?’ I was slightly taken by surprise, yet as an art historian, I tried to answer the question with arguments. ‘No, no!’ he interrupted me, ‘Go no further! It is as simple as this: everything in Macedonia is entirely abstract, from the very notion, the history, the people, the borders, the name, all the way to the state ... or at least this is how others have determined.’ We laughed bitterly and ordered another round of coffee. I knew that he was referring to the temporary passports that the Brazilian Embassy in Belgrade had issued to us for this occasion.
A few days latter, after the passport control at the borderline crossing at the airport, when we realized that the officer intends to take our temporary passports, we asked if he could give them back to us so that we could keep them. He answered in rage that it was an official document and that it was highly impolite to even think of keeping it as a souvenir. I looked at Jovan and we smiled. It was more than clear that being treated as ‘abstract’ citizens of an ‘abstract’ state, our stay in this country also remains ‘abstract’.
I had my first passport in 1980; that ‘red’ one, the Yugoslavian. [Fig. 1]
(Although, as an irony, my first trip was to Crete, Greece.) These days I leafed through it and I was astonished by the fact that it had lasted for whole 14 years. Despite the numerous trips, it had only four visas in it (two for Greece and one for Syria and Jordan each) and a stamp proving my support to the UNESCO campaign in Egypt for saving the Nubian monuments. The new passport - the ‘blue’ one, the Macedonian one, I obtained in 1994. [Fig. 2] 
(In that time it was, and still is interesting for me why passports in ‘blue’ color replaced most of the former ‘red’ passports!?) Due to the numerous (all of them official and none of them private) trips, I filled it pretty quickly and I had to replace it with another new ‘blue’ passport, in 1998. [Fig. 3] 
Moreover, this latest passport was also filled soon। It would be normal for anyone living in the West to think that I went on traveling a lot after the independence of Macedonia, or that with the ‘blue’ passport I travel even more often than with the ‘red’ one. And, what’s more probable, the citizen of the West would conclude that it was the advantage of the independence, democracy, liberation from the chains of ‘communism’, freedom of choice, world globalization and fulfillment of my basic human rights for freedom to choose and, therefore, to change. But, unlike the citizen form the West, it was normal for me to predict how many trips would I be able to realize with this passport. It is as easy as this: I should only count the number of empty pages and I could easily calculate how many visas can I get (which equals the number of trips). Until I replace it with a new one - soon.And it happened! In 2008, before it expired, the second ‘red’ passport was filled. And again I had to obtain a new one - there were no empty pages for new visas any longer. Now I have my third passport in the independent Republic of Macedonia - third in fourteen years. [Fig. 4]
But, this time what encourages me is that it will last longer. Here is why: after the directions and instructions for the standards from European Union, my state had to produce new passports (and by that to replace the former) in accordance with a pile of forge security criteria and standards. Long lasted these negotiations with the Union, since, as they were promising - that is the only condition to fulfil to abolish the visa regime towards Republic of Macedonia. And that lasted for years. Finally, this year my state fulfil all of the ‘recommendations’ and I got a new passport with which I would not need any visa. That suppose to mean that in the next ten years (as long as the passport is valid) I will not have any need to obtain any new one, because the visa-stickers won’t fill entire pages in my passport again. The optimism was even additionally increased by the fact that the new design now was neither ‘red’ nor ‘blue’, but - ‘deep violet’. And that lasted very short. That optimism of mine disappeared quickly: the Union now poses a new set of conditions (they called them ‘recommendations’) for more liberal visa regime. That meant that the abolition of the visa regime will not happen earlier than 2009 due to...But, as a matter of some presentiment, since November 2000 onwards I have one more passport! [Fig. 5]
It is completely empty. And it will probably remain that way. This passport is neither ‘red’ nor ‘blue’, nor ‘deep violet’ - it is ‘dark green’. The choice to become a member or a ‘citizen’ of this ‘dark green’ community/state was not based upon a depressing Yugo-nostalgia for the ‘red’ passport or upon a failed expectations from the ‘blue’ one. I simply found a solution for the years long dilemma and riddle and search for an answer to the question - who am I. I became the citizen of a ‘NSK State in Time’ of the Slovenian Artists’ Collective ‘Neue Slowenische Kunst’, trough the IRWIN group. Since I have already been defined as an abstract citizen of an abstract state, I decided to become such thoroughly. What’s more, the abstractness of the whole situation was completed with an even greater abstraction: the administrators of ‘NSK State in Time’ appointed me a ‘state clerk’ of the ‘abstract’ ‘NSK State in Time’ - I am an owner of a diplomatic passport of the ‘NSK State in Time’.Following this act I definitely accepted and acknowledged my own ‘abstractness’. Yet, this time it was not others’ wish or determination, but my own decision.
From reality to Utopia, and vice versa
The question of state and statehood of the newly formed countries (or newly-fenced / newly-bordered territories), as a consequence of the dissolution of one of the great narrations of the 20th century, belongs to the kind of questions that draw the map of the present, not only as a new geo-political actuality (which proved to be of less importance), but as a new global reality. The globalization of the actuality, together with the instruments for imposing the global reality, is on its way to redefine the modernist concepts of power and capital. (In this sense, it is already obsolete to describe the Western societies as capitalistic.) But, the idea (or the new project) that the world should be defined by and through this global reality is also on its way to destroy itself. The basic definition of this reality is the one that Baudrillard saw as becoming hyper-reality. The tendencies to define things as more real that the real [hyper-reality = more real than the real] turn the reality into non-reality, into a virtual object (subject), ending with an abstract. Thus, the actuality to which this reality refers turns into a virtuality and from there on it becomes abstractness. The paradoxicality of this situation (the oxymoron ‘abstract actuality’) is even greater when it comes to the level of state, especially to the aspects of its statehood. Therefore, it seems useful to reexamine once again the conditions and the qualificatives of the newly formed countries. It is even more important considering the fact that this question is essential not only for these countries, but, above all, for the ones ‘from the other side’, for the ‘already formed’, more precisely, the countries that define themselves as real.
In this aspect, the project ‘NSK State in Time’ by the group Irwin seems to have postulated most appropriately the aspects of the global reality and its reflection (or consequences) on the realities of the actualities that it tends to include. The project is organized following the principles and the organization of a state (post with post stamps, army, guard, flag, coat of arms, passports, liaison offices, embassies), yet it is all absolutely non-functional, it is not meant to function the way if would function in a particular state. Nevertheless, the fulfillment of all these aspects of statehood with a devoted perseverance (presence of real soldiers, sealing real post stamps, issuing real passports, hoisting a real flag, having a real stamp) (Arns, 1998) presents the project ‘NSK State in Time’ of the group Irwin with so much reality that it overcomes the expected measure within an artistic action which appeared to be more real than the real. It became obvious during the ‘performance’ (if it is still what it means) ‘NSK Passport Office’; the usual question of the interested ‘buyers’ of citizenship were: ‘where can I travel with this passport?’, or: ‘for which countries is it valid?’ In this switch of realities and in the context of the two mentioned questions one can recognize the post-colonial condition of the subaltern for whom having a passport means an exit, a way out of his/her country, a condition of stepping into the unachievable-desired. The situation becomes complex when that very same passport is recognized by the Other as an instrument of protection from the mentioned stepping into the unachievable-desired, as Sarkanjac concludes. (Sarkanjac, 2000: 31-40) The fall of the demand for passports with the ‘Westerners’ means the rise of the demand for passports in the rest of the world. On one hand, the Western societies are convincing their subjects that the globality is a pan-state condition (and for them, the subjects, it is so), personified, for example, at the border crossings or parts of them with the notion ‘For EU Citizens Only’, while on the other hand, they force the rest with a request for a passport, that is, they force them to confirm and verify (meaning: define your suitability) their belonging to a state, personified in the exponent of this dual and hypocritical game - the ‘visa’.
Actually, the idea of a visa (or visa regime) includes the disproportion between the agreed and the fulfilled global reality and the existing and particularly local actuality. (Even the locality is dual.) The points where these two spheres meet now are not the border crossings but the embassies. It is not even the embassies, but the visa gummed over the entire page of the passport! ‘The Borderline Syndrome’ (the title of the ‘Manifesta 3’) (2000) is transferred from physical to virtual coordinates: waiting at the border crossing is of no importance now since nobody is checked there - you have already been ‘checked’ when you were allowed to obtain a visa, or, nobody comes to the border crossing without a visa, or, only with a visa you go to the border crossing. This is how the physical space becomes unimportant and if the visa is the exponent of the global reality by being at the same time the exponent of both the virtual and the local actuality, then what else defines a state and its statehood? The deconstruction of this dual coexistence in the ‘NSK State in Time’ project is more than obvious. It goes even further, because the doubling produced by issuing of my (which implicitly means - subaltern and local) ‘diplomatic’ passport makes the visa or the visa regime hyper-real: the state in time, whose official representative I am, is the reality within the Arthur Danto’s and George Dickie’s world of art, and, what’s more, the passport issued by such a state is diplomatic - so, with such a passport I don’t need to verify my subaltern position and my locality, that is, in it or with it I would not need visas, which is a reality within the global world. Yet, I remain subaltern and local within my local actuality and reality.
From the conditions and possibilities and further
This is the viewpoint from which Wood refers to the subjects or citizens of the Fourth World (Wood, 2000) and, probably inattentively, he makes a parallel in the title of his text ‘Hawaiians in Cyberspace’ with the episode ‘Pigs in Space’ form the famous Muppet sequel (if we compare the metaphor with Sarkanjac’s analysis of Bonito Oliva’s ‘look of the swine’). The Fourth World, the world of the unrecognized and the ones scattered over all the continents is constantly reexamining and confronting the question of their own, state, social and cultural entity and identity. The Fourth World, it is the world of the Other, of the one additionally defined by the One, without whom the One would not be able to define itself today, or at least it should be so, as Gržinić says. (2000) The One, the center, necessarily accepts the Other, so far still led by the interests of the global market of values and wealth, selling the idea of the global reality, even ‘feeding’ the Other - in small doses. The lucid idea of Gržinić to turn the title ‘The Beauty and the Beast’ into ‘The Beauty and the East’ with a small game of letters, actually defines the relation as: the One, Europe or the First World across the Other, the East or the Fourth World. The actuality that comes out of this new defining replaces the former relation center-periphery with the relation the One - the Other; yet, in this new defining we don’t have the relation superior-subordinate, but it is a relation of equally worth poles of a unique dichotomy. This replacement also leads to a change of attitude towards the reality, where the centristic historic thought, personified in the syntagm ‘the winners are writing the history’ is replaced with the post-historical, or some other thought personified in the syntagm ‘the Other is adding to the history’. If a moment comes when ‘everybody is writing the history’, the history alone will disappear and the reality would define the a-historic thought. (Vilić, 2000: 68) So, the question of reality (as a denominate of the concrete and the abstract) becomes a complete abstract, not referential to the actuality, and, therefore, not interesting.
In this kind of establishing the reality, having a ‘red’ or a ‘blue’ or a ‘deep violet’ passport makes no sense. It seems that the ‘dark green’ color of the ‘NSK State in Time’ passport is most appropriately drawing the actuality, pointing to an other reality. The fact that this last passport of mine, the ‘dark green’, is remaining empty and without visas is maybe the best answer to the question: why the abstract art is the most remarkable in Macedonia?
References:
Arns, Inke (1998) ‘Mobile States/Shifting Borders/Moving Entities. The Slovenian Artists’ Collective Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK)’, pp. 68-79 in IRWIN. Three Projects. Warsaw: Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle.
Gržinić, Marina (2000) ‘The Spectralization of Europe’, pp. 13-36 in Fiction Reconstructed. Eastern Europe, Post-socialism & The Retro-Avantgarde. Vienna: Selene.
Sarkanjac, Branislav (2000) ‘The State, States to Be, Passports and Borders’, pp. 31-40 in Nebojša Vilić (ed.) State-Irwin. Skopje: 359°.
Vilić, Nebojša (2000) ‘Post-History or A-History’, pp. 65-8 in Jelena Lužina Contributions to the History of Macedonian Theatre. Prilep: MTF. (In Macedonian)
Wood, Houston (2000) ‘Hawaiians in Cyberspace’, pp. 41-68 in Nebojša Vilić (ed.) State-Irwin. Skopje: 359°. [Also on http://www.fas.nus.edu.sg/staff/conf/poco/paper2.html (downloaded March 2000)].
(2000) Borderline Syndrome. Energies of Defence. (Manifesta 3 publication) Ljubljana: Cankarjev dom.
* The first, shorter, version of this text was firstly published as ‘All My Passports’, pp. 9-19 in Nebojša Vilić (ed) State-Irwin। Skopje: 359°. This version is going to be published in the book "Borderline" edited by Ileana Pintilie Teleagă, on behalf of the symposium that has to be held in Temisvar, Romania in March 2009.
