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Zwischenraume - Interespacios
Interstices - Images and texts by Women in Foreign Places
A community project in Zurich, 1992/1993

At the end of 1991, I initiated a project that forged ties with an institution that defined cultural work more broadly than a studio-based art practice, and engaged in activities linking social, cultural and political concerns. Following on from my previous work with Mexican women, I was interested in working with Latin-American in Zurich. Femia, a local centre for culture and education for migrant women became the partner with whom this project was finally conceived and realised. Interstices was my first collaborative community project and was motivated by not wanting to speak about women from the 'Third World' in my work, but rather working with them. Also, I felt I was able to do so, as I could look back on my own personal migration experience because of my move to Mexico and New York in 1983 and the return to Zurich in 1991 - both of which stirred up my cultural self-definition. The project offered a field of practice substantiated by my theoretical knowledge on the representation of 'Third World' women, acquired through reading postcolonial criticism and combining it with a feminist reading of representation, particularly media images.

This community project was concerned with the psychological and social aspects of identity as a result of cultural displacement. In Europe, like elsewhere, the situation of physical and cultural dislocation characterises the daily lives of many. Exile, and the split sense of self it engenders, are the experienced by millions. Where does one start to address the experience of marginalisation in a culture which denies representation of anything that exceeds an identification with the national entity?

The title of the project suggests a plurality of spaces that can be inhabited and occupied rather than a gap to get stuck in, it implies a cultural interstice, i.e. the space that opens up between two cultures which brought about by cultural displacement or migration.

The project started off as a visual communications seminar for Latin American women attempting to reflect on their position as women and migrants, and to articulate it in the visual-verbal language of photography and text. The women involved in this project were Lyana Amaya, poet and language teacher from Columbia; Santusa Herbas, psychologist from Bolivia; Jacqueline Isler dos Santos, tourist guide form Brazil; Monica Senn Zegarra, Peruvian painter from Argentina; Pierrette Malatesta who studied communication and PR in Peru participated in the seminar; and Carmen Real, Argentinian writer and performer wrote an introduction in the book.

I understood my role as a visual artist conducting an art project, rather than a social worker who set out to help people find solutions to their social problems. This art-driven idea turned into a turbulent one-year project, that challenged all personalities, brought about an identity crisis and triggered tough negotiations in a cultural struggle that was larger than our project. What was larger than ourselves could be vaguely described as the power relation between the two continents: Europe and South America. The project consists mainly of the events which occurred during those 12 months and it materialised as a photo-text book.

Everyone came up with a topic they were free to treat in a socially critical, poetic or psycho-analytical manner. Despite the cultural or social significance of the topics, they turned out sooner rather than later to have deep personal roots. With some, it was obvious and conscious from the beginning, that in a profound way, they were really producing work about themselves. While with others, the work took several weeks or months to emerge. This work finally became manifest after an intimate personal connection was made and accepted.

Here are three examples of this convergence and investment:
Santusa Herbas from Bolivia had a background as a psychologist who had a rich professional and social curriculum before she left her country to look for new horizons. Now she works as a cleaning lady at the hospital in Zurich. Without hesitating, Santusa decided to write about the discrepancy between the education and skills she acquired in her home country and the lack of professional opportunities available to her in Europe. An experience, as she describes, that brought about an identity crisis, feelings of inferiority and depression. Through attempting to formulate her ideas, Santusa found tremendous strength in her roots and visualised this in the portrait for Mama Juana, a Bolivian friend and role model of hers. Her involvement in this visual communications seminar gave her the self-confidence to approach another psychologist at the University in Zurich with whom to share her ideas.
Angela Ceballos, a very young woman from Columbia literally threw herself into research on Latin-American women who are lured to Europe by agencies who promise them a glamorous life as models only to channel them directly into the networks of topless bars. I greatly admired her fervour in writing about their predicament and often accompanied her to go-go bars and to streetwalkers to take undercover photographs. 'One day,' I said, 'I will surely learn why this is so fascinating to you.' A week later, she suddenly remembered the traumatising story of her cousin form Cartagena who had gone through this nightmare herself; risking her life when she escaped a Dutch brothel, being rejected by her family and never returned to her home country. Oh, I had completely forgotten about her, Angela said. We decided to include this personal story into her critical documentation and to mark the segments with a visual sign.

Monica Zegarra really tried hard. But five months into the project, Monica had not come up with any text, photograph or an idea that she felt could be useful. She knew that if she didn't produce anything soon, she couldn't be in the book. I was anxious about the deadline and she was desperate. On the day before I presented the project to the publishers, she came to the group radiating. She had written a number of stories she called 'Just another flop'. They go like this: A Latina falls in love with a Swiss man, preferably blond, who is vacationing on tropical beaches. Eventually this man convinces her to come to the New World of opportunities with the promise to marry her. Once she is here, however, her dependency gets on his nerves, he loses interest and abandons her. Monica wrote subtle variations of this quotidian drama in a monotonous narration and complemented it with the isolating bareness of her photographs. Of all the pieces, I think hers is one of the more successful ones. She carried the stories inside her over the five months and was only willing to reveal them under considerable pressure.
Making the courageous step of moving from one continent to another often requires a radical separation from the past and, by the same token, becoming disconnected from oneีs social and psychological roots. In some way, these women were floating in a cultural limbo. By opening up a space of critical reflection between their cultural heritage and the strange new Swiss context, the project offered them a first opportunity to reconnect the past with the present, and in doing so, lay a firmer foundation for their future trajectory. Very soon, our workshop came to represent this interstice that we set out to fill with names and cultural signs a space where their route and motivation, their history and identity-building past was welcome. For several women in the group, engaging in this work initiated a disturbing process of re-orientation which they were simply not exposed to when staying comfortably embedded in their self-confirming culture of origin.

Besides the individual struggle over re-defining one's identity, all the projects contributed to the articulation of a legitimate cultural position, that of vacillating between fixed identities associated with a singular national concept. In the realm of symbolic representation, our art production located itself in the new spaces opening up in the cracks of nations. A 'Third Place' challenges the monolithic concept of nations. The homogenous nation-state has become a highly contested terrain; on the one hand for being populated by an ever increasing diversity of people and on the other, for being forced to yield power and influence to global formations. Where does one reorient oneself in relation to these major cultural shifts? Merely celebrating free-floating identities was clearly not the strategy of this project. Rather the articulations attempted to recreate and legitimatize the cultural interstice in its own right and this can never be an apolitical gesture.

In terms of a critique of representation, it is not sufficient to simply state that Latinas are invariably represented by ingrained stereotypes even though the prevailing situation is dismal. The present images of Latin American women in Switzerland are either dominated by Christian funding agencies who are active in Latin America or by the tourist industry which promotes sensual or adventurous vacations. Given this predicament it is crucial to intervene in the symbolic production from a perspective of a self-defined position. But it is equally important to understand how these misrepresentations work within the field of forces that constitute the domain of cultural struggle. Starting from personal situations, the texts in Interstices draw these connections into a wider context; framing the experience of the subaltern by revealing the precise conditions of illegalisaton and isolation for greater exploitation, patriarchal attitudes and legal regulations which can be equated with pimping on a State level.

In the course of a few months, the deep involvement with issues of colonial oppression, relations of dependency both as colonised beings and as women, triggered outrage and revolutionary feelings within the group. The participants went through an extraordinary process of liberating themselves ideologically and emotionally, and the closest subject at hand was the group's figure of authority. I was called to account for controlling the process of production and appropriating the project for my own art career. And its presence in this volume confirms them to be right. On the other had we had to admit that everyone in the group had participated in the project to reap the benefits both personal and professional; whether it was to achieve social recognition, publish poetry or exhibit photographs for the first time. After this debate, the product and its distribution was more firmly in the women's hands.

If the prime purpose of this project had been to emancipate the participants, I feel that the project was a success. But I have to recognise that, as a group, we did not manage to transcend all the conflicts raised by power relations which we addressed in the book. However, the collaborative project provided a space for negotiating a relationship, which has a long and painful history that affects our lives. It set into motion, for all of us, a more prosaic process of political and psychological awareness - a trying and challenging experience - that is in progress today.

©Ursula Biemann, 1994

Edited version of a paper presented at 'Citizenship, Identity, Community: Feminists (re)Present the Political', a conference hosted by the Women's Caucus of York University's Graduate Program in Political Science, March 19/20th 1994, York University.