terra incognita et cetera
| Presented as a party game, Terra incognita, et cetera (2009, interactive performance and wall installation) is an exercise in collective painting and, simultaneously, a play of collaboration and territorial marking. |
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| The interactive performance is an art exhibition opening party game where audience members can participate in cutting up a blank map of the world into bordered territories. |
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| Prior to the opening, I painted a blank dymaxion world map with watercolour onto the wall. |
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| During the opening a numbered grid is projected onto the mural. Two attendants, Daniel Wolfson and Kim Grondowski, walked around amongst the audience, serving trays of cocktail toothpick flags of five different colours and a bowl of glue. From these trays, audience members could choose a flag to stick on the mural within the grid reference that they specified, thus claiming the area, writing what they claimed as their last names with pencil to mark the area. |
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| I then coloured the chosen territory in accordance to the flags, repainted the names in watercolour. I continued making up new rules as the interactive performance proceeded, in response to questions from audience members. When the party was over, I marked all unclaimed areas of the map as Terra nullius, and the finished mural — with the freshly marked borders, flags, and territorial names — remained as an artwork for the duration of the exhibition. |
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| Indonesian curator Farah Wardani, after her speech that opened the exhibition, gleefully came to claim the area legally known as Malaysia. She didn’t tell me the reasons behind her choice, but from her triumphant grin it was obvious to me that she meant to refer to all the recurring territorial and cultural ownership disputes between Indonesia and Malaysia. |
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| We also had a Jordan amongst the audience members. I don’t think she claimed the area of the geographical map legally known as Jordan, however. |
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| Some people refused to mark a territory because they were “not into land ownership.” Some answered “I’m not that greedy,” in response to my stating the regulation that they could have as much as three boxes in the grid. Someone claimed three areas as his, Zipling, in green. |
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| The project took territorial marking to new heights: upon a visit to the gallery’s toilet, I found a small toilet graffiti which writing (style and content) resembles one of the audience members’ (“Free Free Palestine” – “Franchez” – “bastien of Free Palestine”). |
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| And as often found in toilet graffiti, someone actually hearts Georgie. |
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| Almost everyone had a reason to choose a specific area. Islands were mostly on demands. Many marked their home countries or some other places they fell in love with. Others based their choice on some popular political or strategic views. Scoglio said she wanted to as much as possible minimise the possibility of maritime invasion. |
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| We started with around 150 flags, and almost every one of them was taken. Some audience members glued their flags onto the wall without approaching me, so they didn’t know the rules of the game and didn’t inscribe their names next to their flags. I pulled out these illegitimate flags to allow newer, legitimate ones. |
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| The piece was as ephemeral as the world’s geopolitical boundaries: when the exhibition closes, following art galleries’ tradition — as I had done with the interactive performance at the opening of the exhibition — I had to repaint the whole wall back to white.
(Terra incognita, et cetera was part of Kompilasi group exhibition, curated by Kristi Monfries, Georgia Sedgwick and Tim O’Donoghue in Bus Gallery, Melbourne, 24 Feb – 13 Mar 2009.) |
| Photos courtesy of the artist and Lindsay Cox.
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