Prophesy now involves a geographical rather than historical projection; it is space, not time, that hides consequences from us.
In physical geography, proper names are used to denote a place or territory – mountains, rivers and lands – based on their physical features. In political geography, territories and their borders, though often painfully real, have a much more contingent origin. They are the result of migrations, centuries of war, expansion and unification, as well as disintegration. Today, Europe, which until recently seemed to be a territory as stable as it was open, is experiencing a moment in which these borders are once again clearly visible. On the one hand, we are strengthening our external borders in order to more effectively separate ourselves from those who are seeking a better, dignified (sometimes bare) life in Europe. On the other hand, we are seeing increasingly strong centrifugal movements—communities and societies that, in the face of the challenges of today’s globalized world, are “rediscovering” their distinctiveness, seeking a sense of security in their roots in tradition and old cultural forms. These movements often lead to new forms of exclusion and reactionary attitudes.
Ola Skowrońska’s Heda sketches a completely different geography of the old (sub)continent. Heda is the name of the artist’s close Chechen friend living in Moscow, whom she has known since her teenage years, but whom she has never met away from the keyboard. The meeting was first prevented by the pandemic, then by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Heda can be read as an attempt to meet despite these limitations. In the project, which consists of extended portraits of Hedas living in the European Union, we see places from the perspective of the protagonists, and the protagonists become them precisely in relation to places: Heda from Moscow, where it all began, then Heda from Brno, Heda from Warsaw, Heda from Bingen. What connects them is a strong bond with Chechen culture, but also the fact that they have been shaped by European culture, whose values and imaginary are in many ways difficult to reconcile with what they have learned from their family homes. With each of the Hedas, we encounter specific, localized attempts to negotiate identity and living space in the entanglement of these two worlds. Most of Skowrońska’s protagonists have had difficult experiences related to migration and assimilation. But what if we treated these stories not so much as examples of the fates of migrants and their attempts to find their place in their destination (although they are that, too), but as a model of contemporary European identity?
From this perspective, we cease to view Europe as a collection of separate territories to which we assign distinct essences, whose integrity must be defended (against foreigners, cheap labor, imported products, overly strong—whatever that means—cultural influences, etc.). Europe is becoming more of a network of non-exclusive, overlapping relationships with many names. This is how we interpret Skowrońska’s video work, in which Heda from Brno tags successive places, while a female voice in the soundtrack reads out Chechen women’s names: Heda, Dagmara, Milana, Luiza, Iman, Amina, Marina, Fatima… Heda is one of many names, and each of them evokes a new network that crosses the borders of existing territories, a kind of psychogeography of what we are used to call Europe.
In this context, the attitude of feminist cultural geographer Doreen Massey seems particularly pertinent. She critiqued political imaginaries that romanticize a bounded, authentic local in opposition to an abstract, threatening global. According to her, such attitudes reinforce a “Russian-doll geography of ethics,” where responsibility decreases with distance. In this understanding, our family is “closest,” with “strangers” at the other end of the spectrum, especially migrants and post-migrants, even if they are our neighbors. It is precisely this understanding of proximity and distance that must be dismantled if we want to create an understanding of space and, consequently, of politics which “acknowledges the openness of the future.” In other words, if we want to have a future (if we want it not to unfold according to a long-ago written script), we must recognize that space is not something that is given, but something that is constantly being created and negotiated.
"If we take seriously the relational construction of identity (of ourselves, of the everyday, of places),” Massey asks, “then what is the potential geography of our politics towards those relations?"
Massey advocated for spatialized subjectivity, an “outwardlookingness” that recognizes our own relational constitution through our engagement with a world of others. This is not a subjectivity that comes into being by withdrawing into an interior, temporal flow, but one that becomes itself by opening out to the multiplicity of the world. In a globalized world, our “daily lives” are constituted by relations that stretch across the planet, and that is why the author of For Space called for a “politics of implication,” which means recognizing our responsibility for the distant relations that constitute our “here and now.” Our life with others is increasingly characterized by what Massey calls “throwntogetherness”—the fact that, especially in cities, we live in rather random constellations of races and cultures (unfortunately, less and less often of classes). This is a challenge, but also an opportunity for a politics of connectivity, of making and contesting time-spaces, grounded in the radical contemporaneity of a world of multiple, interconnected becomings.
In light of what is currently happening in the world, such thoughts may seem irresponsible, fantastical musings, but we insist that this is precisely the power of art: to imagine a world other than the one that is currently coming into being. To realize that the trajectory we find ourselves on is not the only one possible. It seems that in a world rushing towards catastrophe, joint efforts to practice this openness to the outside world in specific implications allows for a sense of agency that so many so often lack.
authors: Witek Orski, Krzysztof Pijarski