YAEL DAVIDS
Invited by Virtual Museum Zuidas.
Interested in portraying language and the human dimension of spaces.
Plan: to make a quiet protest in the form of a subtle literary collage.
‘Normally my work relates to a specific place, but I find the Zuidas, and especially the area around the Amsterdam Zuid station, to be a hermetic, artificial and much too planned-out environment. In contrast with my artist-in-residence experience in Istanbul, for example, a sensual and seductive city, it is difficult to feel any attachment with the Zuidas. The buildings are primarily designed to please the eye, not to protect you and make you feel at home. I’m also surprised at the lack of respect for the past, so that part of a building complex like the former Sint Nicolaas Monastery can be preserved for reasons of efficiency and part of it can be demolished. My contribution should be seen as a sign of protest.’
I prefer not to.
Assume that it is important to ‘have a voice’ (where ‘voice’ is a metaphor and mode of inclusion/ exclusion similar to ‘visibility’), and that some people mistrust this goal, thinking it better to remain invisible: to find power in the undetectable, flying below the radar, refusing to engage with the language or visual scheme used by a given regime to structure our spaces and interactions. From this perspective I would say that one shouldn’t worry about such schemes – you’re not invisible to yourself, to your family or community, and you can strengthen these spheres, organize and live your life, all without waiting for other people who ‘don’t see you’ to give you permission.1 In Bartelby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street, Herman Melville recounts the tale of the humble copyist Bartelby and his employer, a lawyer whose name we never learn. Initially, Bartelby performs remarkably, ‘working day and night… as if long famished for something to copy.’ But his productivity stops suddenly. He does not refuse to work; he does not leave; to every one of the lawyer’s requests, he simply and without malice responds: ‘I prefer not to.’ Bartelby is a protagonist on strike. He embodies the paradoxical power of strategies like passive resistance, procrastination, refusal and boycott. Although contemporary discourse defines freedom as the ability to choose
from an array of circumscribed options, Bartelby illustrates an altogether different kind of freedom– the freedom to refrain.2
1 Ashely Hunt, On Knowledge Production: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art, published by BAk, basis voor actuele kunst, 2008, p. 163
2 Dimitri Siegel, ‘Unworking Bartelby the Scrivener’, from Dot Dot Dot 4, published by Dexter Sinister, New York, p. 5
