Núria Güell

Action | Video-installation
Sketch of the master plan on a wall, screen displaying the conferences (miniDV, PAL, 16:9, color, stereo, 2:00:50 h) and manual.
Spain, 2010-2011

In Displaced Legal Application #1: Fractional Reserve, Núria Güell defines a master plan which proposes to apply the Fractional Reserve system to banks, the same law that banks apply to their clients and which allows them to create money out of nothing, generating it as debt and enslaving the population.
In order to do this, she created various means to inform and educate the public on how to expropriate money from banks. The first phase was to carry out an educational meeting entitled “How to ex­propriate money from the bank” with expropriators Lucio Urtubia and Enric Duran, and economist Qmunty, where they explained diffe­rent strategies of expropriation as well as the actual strategy banks currently use to create money. The second phase was the crea­tion and publication of a manual containing various expropria­tion strategies, legal consultation and analytical texts.

EXPROPRIATING MONEY
Núria Güell

Too big to fail: a peculiar justification given by the government to take away public resources and hand them over to banks. The more perverse and corrupt they were, the more rewards they obtained. It all started with the Fractional Reserve System, which is the legal privilege that the States ceded to financial institutions to create money from nothing, thus allowing them to loan its customers’ deposit money to make a credit expansion and achieve exponential growth in earnings. And it seemed they were going to fall, but were rescued. Placing on our backs an extraordinary debt that does not belong to us and that we are required to return through budget cuts and by decrees, we have been condemned to impoverishment, family instability, the dismantling of public services, in order to fatten the odious mass grave in the Strait of Gibraltar, the consumption of tranquilizers, and the loss of a future.
Lucio Urtubia counterfeited $20 million dollars in Citibank checks in order to contribute them to the antifascist struggle during the Spanish dictatorship. Human betrayal put him behind bars, although only for six months. “Anarchists are the kings of the arts”, Lucio always says. Citibank wanted the impeccable printing plates that made them lose capital and legitimacy. His wits won the day: “First of all, get me out of jail so I can hand over the plates in exchange for the millions I ask, and I promise the counterfeit checks will stop circulating.”
Enric Duran, a Catalan activist, expropriated €500,000 from banks to allocate them to anticapitalist initiatives. He made this public, assuming the risk and consequences. Enric chose not to legitimize the judicial system, and preferred to go underground.
I called Enric and Lucio. I needed their involvement to conduct a Displaced Legal Application to the Fractional Reserve System, as I had defined a master plan that sought to apply to the banks the same law they applied to their clients. They were surprised when I told them we could use the autonomy of art as an “umbrella” to use certain illegalities as a significant resource, the financial and human resources of art institutions as a means and as a framework to make the imagined possible and to leverage media exposure in order to expand the audiences and those addressed.
So Enric and Lucio went from being expropriation militants to being teachers, participating in various delivery platforms and training citizens on strategies to expropriate money from banking entities. After the completion of the pedagogical encounter entitled “How can we expropriate money from the banks?,”, I published a manual with different expropriation strategies, legal and economic analyses, and reflective texts for free distribution in public space and on the web.
The methodology is simple: it consists of applying for several loans at different banks in parallel so that they do not know you are applying for many loans simultaneously. The documentation requested in order to obtain the credit can be forged. As banks are private companies, at least in Spain, they cannot check your personal information. You pay the first instalments and when you have already applied for all the credits you want, you declare insolvency and stop paying the fees, getting to keep all the money. The banks will think you are one of the thousands of customers that due to the crisis cannot repay their debts. In order to avoid any legal entrapments, it is imperative to state that the intention from the outset was to repay the loans and that, despite the counterfeiting of documents, there was no premeditation to not repay them.
Sharing strategies, fears, and above all desires, empowers us and gives us the feeling of a togetherness that is more powerful than the power itself. The project was appropriated by others, creating small groups and organizing clandestine meetings to create future strategies and set up future actions. And then came the moment I had to position myself: direct action or art?

Originally published in Truth is Concrete. A Handbook for Artistic Strategies in Real Politics. Ed. by Steirischer Herbst and Florian Malzacher. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014.

The Turkish artist Gülsen Karamustafa (guest professor at Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna) used the Hanak/Thorak monument for her own art work, presented in the Viennese exhibition “The Monument and the child” at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 2010, where she wrote about an “unfortunate language of monumentality” in relation to formal similarities to the visual language of fascism in Europe.

“Atatürk – Interface” could be understood as a contemporary connection to the the large Austrian oeuvre of monuments in Turkey during the 1920s and 1930s. Just this time not with hammer and chisel, rather than CAM = Computer Aided Manufacturing.

As opposed to classical feedback loop this one is Hyperspacial, since it has multiple recording points which trigger randomly on random parts of the tape. The resulting recording on the magnetic tape would be used as documentation and as a source material for further exploration. Spatial recording of the space and the interactions with the space and the constant rewriting of the loop would serve like a spatial amplifier, accenting the characteristics of the particular space of the performance and removing the articulated sounds, abstracting it until the only thing left is the sound of that space and how it resonates.

Intro
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk is the most prominent political figure in the younger Turkish history. The founder of the Turkish Republic (1923) the person ofAtatürk enjoys far after his death (1938) until today the status of a hero with strong personal devotion. Over more than 7 decades artists and sculptures from Turkey and abroad did numerous sculptures, busts and monuments, representing “Atatürk” the “Father of the Turks” as a leader. Representing the same person, every form, bust, body and face differs slightly from each other by using material, technique and aesthetics. As a personal artwork of the artist, they are results of imagination of every single person. Especially the emblematic well known and same face is always an artwork and in a way unique.

Concept
The project Atatürk-interface tries to explore the more than 70 years old Atatürk monuments in a more detailed way, than we see it daily in the public space. It selects 10 important sculptures and monuments done by different artists across Turkey and scan them into a digital computer model. The focus of the 3D scans will be on the face of the sculptures. The face is the characteristic and emblematic element that became like a logo/symbol of the Turkish nation (also money coins etc.) By using CNC technology each digital model will be transferred into a physical model. In a final exhibition the 10 models will be placed next to each other and present a collection (like a meeting of the sculptures that can not move in real world) The direct comparison of the individual models will generate a a following intersection off all faces – the “interface” – a new perspective on Atatürk appears. Its not about creating one more Atatürk, its more like a mapping of all of them together.< br />
Austria, Turkey & sculpture
The first and artistically most important Atatürk monuments in Turkey were created by the Austrian sculptor Heinrich Krippel and later also the Italian sculptor Pietro Canonica. Atatürk himself invited them in the mid 1920ies to start the network of representation by political monuments all around Turkey. The professional artits should bring in the skills from their countries, which were dominated by fashism/regimes (Austria, Italy). At October 3, 1926 Heinrich Krippel created the very first “Sarayburnu Atatürk Monument” close to the golden Horn in Istanbul. The art historian Aylin Tekiner (author of the book “Atatürk Heykeleri”/Atatürk sculptures) registered two more Austrians in the Turkish sculpture history, Anton Hanak, Josef Thorak, who did the Güvenlik (Zabıta) Monument in Ankara 1934-1935.

The Turkish artist Gülsen Karamustafa (guest professor at Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna) used the Hanak/Thorak monument for her own art work, presented in the Viennese exhibition “The Monument and the child” at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 2010, where she wrote about an “unfortunate language of monumentality” in relation to formal similarities to the visual language of fascism in Europe.

“Atatürk – Interface” could be understood as a contemporary connection to the the large Austrian oeuvre of monuments in Turkey during the 1920s and 1930s. Just this time not with hammer and chisel, rather than CAM = Computer Aided Manufacturing.

“We don’t want to fight but by Jingo if we do …We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too!”

(Macdermott’s War Song lyrics)

It was 1878 when in the United States Edison patented the phonograph that later was developed into gramophone and remained the most common device for playing recorded sound until the 1980s. In the same year across the ocean the music-hall singer G. H. Macdermott (aka “the Great Macdermott”) introduced in London Pavilion his War Song.
This is one of the very first examples of combining propaganda and popular music. Macdermott was commissioned to make the song with the aim to influence the public opinion in Britain in the middle of the political crisis between the British Empire and Russia, after the surrender of Plevna during the Russo-Turkish War, by which the road to Constantinople was open. The crisis ended with a diplomatic triumph of Britain’s Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli at Berlin Congress and after the song a politician from the oppositionist Laborist Party invented the term jingoism that now is used for describing ‘extreme chauvinism or nationalism marked especially by a belligerent foreign policy.

It is amazing how political life changed forever since audiovisual mass media and propaganda charged popular culture were invented and eventually became an intrinsic part of the public life.

To remind for all these events Petko Dourmana will setup a temporary Jingo Karaoke Pavilion at public spaces in Istanbul (former Constantinople) with a karaoke set that uses a toy Edison-style cup phonograph. In the military tent everybody who want to sing Macdermott’s war song Jingo is invited.
In the plastic cups used as recording media visitors will earn a free beer after singing.

Financial crises, rising unemployment, increasing wealth divides and redistribution from the bottom to the top, as well as the resurgence of nationalism and xenophobia, are all part of the new realism that has replaced utopia for the time being. At this point, it is virtually impossible for news outlets to talk about Europe without drawing a link it to some kind of raging crisis.

Reversing is an act that produces a countermovement, a different position, direction or order. It means turning around, taking an opposite stance, changing one’s opinion or judgement. For the driver of a vehicle, the act of reversing brings with it certain impediments to control over vision and movement, which increases the risk of collisions. Due to low speeds however, accidents that ensue in the process often verge more on the comic rather than the tragic.

Reversing into something is driving in reverse right at this thing. Correspondingly, reversing into utopia could be seen as an attempt to use a device (in this case a poetic device rather than a mechanical one) in the opposite direction that it was originally intended to, and use it as a projectile aimed directly at the surface of a particular utopia.

The project Reverse into Utopia consists of a series of visits to different European capitals. In each city a group of singers or a brass band are brought together. They study a song of symbolic significance, most likely the European anthem, Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’, or perhaps the country’s national anthem.

Instead of a usual recital, however, the song will be performed in reverse, in public. The reversal will be based on an actual recording of the song, so should a recording of the eventual performance be reversed again, it will recognisably resemble the original version.

Reverse into Utopia is an intervention in public space that – quite literally – performs a reversal of conventional symbols of unity and identity. This mode of action carries with it an unfamiliarity of operation, which has the potential to engender accidental outcomes, as well as to put a dent intoexisting hierarchies of identity production. Ultimately the project aims to destabilise conceptions of collective identities, of utopias, and to question the power of symbols relating to these.

The performance will be documented and the collected video will exist as material that can be played back in either direction, forward or backward.

In my presentation I will outline transitoriness as a time-frame of the transforming societies in relation to political-economic power distributions in the Central and Eastern European transitional countries. Through this approach I will focus on the institutional changes interrelated with the transitional period, and also I will present a possibility for research and presentation of transitory art and artistic research materials through the idea of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas.The relevance of the question of institutional transformations is emphasized by the necessity of the reflection to the continuous Eastern European transformations, the current political changes in the EU region, and especially by the politically indicated transformation of the cultural sector. The recent figures are intensifying the call for a thorough understanding and analysis of the role and direction of art institutes.