Part of the
Documents, Constellations, Prospects program.
Boris Buden,
Helmut Draxler,
Maria Hlavajova,
Marion von Osten, and
Joanna Warsza, moderated by
Simon Sheikh Taking the editorial meeting as its model, this roundtable discussion on the methods and topics of the final
FORMER WEST
publication inaugurates a two-year period of public, collective
deliberations situating the possibilities of a formerizing of the West
in specific international contexts. This first editorial meeting’s point
of departure is Berlin, a locus for a “former West” par excellence. The
previously divided city is the primary symbolic site of 1989 and can
today be seen as tripartitioned into a West Berlin, a “former East”
Berlin, and an East Berlin, but never in terms of a former West
Berlin—which could perhaps be the premise for a politics that advocates a
former West. Moreover, the meeting takes place at HKW, opened in West
Berlin in 1989 as one of the last cultural projects of what is former
West Germany. Looking at the three delineations of documents,
constellations, and prospects that form the basis of this iteration of
the project in Berlin, this meeting opens up for discussion how each of
these notions might be made productive, destructive, or instructive for a
publication about the possible becoming former of the West after 1989.
If the events of 1989 lead, however gradually, however abruptly, to the
concept of a former East, it is also crucial for any politico-aesthetic
project today to try and imagine or construct a notion of a “former
West,” asking: What has become of the West after the supposed end to the
East-West division of the world? Without this bifurcation, how must we
think of the division of geopolitical (dis)ordering of the North and the
South, or, in other words, how must we collude the post-communist
condition with the advent of the post-colony? Which documents must we
look at, and how can they be re-presented and re-activated through
artworks, discourse, and publications? Can these documents form the
constitutive parts of a constellation of ideas and actions, whether we
think of constellation in terms of sociological-analytical methodology,
or, following philosopher Walter Benjamin’s famous use of the term, as
counterpoint to the notion of linear history? Finally, what prospects
can we find from documents and what constellations enfold them, and can,
in turn, unfold for the idea of becoming former—or, rather, the will to
formerize (as opposed to formalize) “the West” as concept and political
unit?
