a conversation between Kush Badhwar and Zody Burke

This is the second year that Paljassaare has been serving as a site of study for the Urbanisation Studio of the Urban Studies program and the first year for the Contemporary Arts program, as part of the subject Art and the Anthropocene. A student from each program, Zody from Contemporary Arts and Kush from Urban Studies come together to talk about their experiences of Paljassaare through these respective subjects. 

Kush: Even though we are studying different things - you, Contemporary Art, and me, Urban Studies, our academic paths crossed, and later diverged around Paljassaare. I thought this journey could be interesting to trace with you. In order to get into that, could you give some context to the subject you were studying that led to our encounter? What was the subject about and do you know what it's intentions were in relation to Paljassaare?

Zody: The anthropocene class I was in was based around some readings and lectures, mainly on climate change's changing face as depicted through art through the centuries and attempting to understand time on a geological scale. We explored different cultural imaginations surrounding climate, discussed food waste and dumpster diving, and talked a lot, too much I think, about the validity of the term 'anthropocene'. All of this was enmeshed in what became almost like a mantra of "this is all very overwhelming" which professors and cohort echoed back and forth at every available opportunity, which felt both didactic and ineffectual. Despite everyone's best efforts, I am left in doubt of whether it is possible to teach the anthropocene in the year 2021 without placing excessive emphasis on the role of the individual within these systems. Instead of having to hear everyone talk about how overwhelming the problems of a warming climate are, it might have been more effective to address the atomizing individuality we have all been reared in as artists under neoliberal capitalism which at this point has absolutely shown to be detrimental to collective action. Our interventions in Paljassaare were at the very least collaborative, so I think that is where we came closest to scratching that surface.

Kush: In mid-October, Contemporary Arts and Urban Studies came together to hold an event presenting our research and work to anthropologists who were partaking in EnviroAnt Network for Environment & Anthropology meeting  in Paljassaare. I have distinct memories of our coming together to discuss this event. When we entered the room, a kind-of "when two tribes go to war"¹ situation seemed to emerge between the two groups.

Our following meeting consisted of a few students from each program. In this meeting, I remember more care taken in how we came together. For example, all the regular urban studies tools - spreadsheets, charts, maps etc. were put away for the meeting, rather, we sat around the table to listen to each other's thoughts and ideas carefully. What are your memories or impressions of how Contemporary Art and Urban Studies came together, at the beginning, or thereafter?

Zody: That cataclysmic moment when our classes first converged... up until then I had been concerned about how simultaneously disorganized and urgent this Paljassaare project was shaping up to be. I remember the week before the intervention was to take place, Contemporary Art had barely even discussed it as a group, with emphasis being put on other subjects. It seemed like we were expected to do some simple land art style interventions - I believe it was suggested by one of our professors that we arrange leaves on the ground - which might be within the interests and framework of some of the artists' practices, but was not something that aligns with mine. There was a lot of confusion about timing and what was actually expected from us. This was when I personally began to question what was really expected of me as a fine art graduate student at EKA. I am very deliberate in my practice and I don't believe I stand to learn or gain much from creating work that could just exist as a half-conceptualized gesture, installed haphazardly on a windy peninsula a day or two before, without having had much time to generate work or formalize ideas.

The Paljassaare project we undertook was intended to be an accompaniment to a conference, but due to the organizational chaos, I don't think any of us really had the opportunity to invest ourselves fully in the event that we were working within and around. We were asked in a very open-ended way to create offsite artistic interventions on Paljassaare, which were expected to be informed by the anthropocene in some way. Paljassaare was presented as the most tangible evidence of anthropocentric systems we could get our hands on, and it is relatively clear why. Paljassaare is a void. The bird sanctuary is a space un-aestheticized. Michel Houellebecq refers to nature as "an abject and meaningless universe that has no message to convey to humans" in a poem I think about often. Nature is a blank canvas. The Soviet ruins are old enough to be understood as history, adding context but not dominating any given interpretation of the space. In Paljassaare, supplantion of aesthetic meaning awaits. Who will be the first to grant it... developers, artists? Urban studies students? I am interested in what happens when liminal spaces are newly aestheticized, the consequences seem dangerous.

Kush: Our event was called Peninsula Production presents: Paths of Desire, the title referring to how our work is ‘producing’ Paljassaare, or at least more versions of it.

My largest doubt of the day lay in being unsure what the event was for. We’d heard there was this conference for anthropologists, and our event would serve as a break from the conference, in addition to offering a way in for guests from various places to know more about Tallinn and Paljassaare where their conference was taking place. But until I knew more about the conference and met the people partaking there was this lingering doubt about where and for what purpose one’s labour is being utilised. At least that’s how it felt to me. Though public performance can be a valuable experience, simultaneously, in performing for strangers, the stakes also become a question - are we getting the chance to learn that may also include the chance to fail?

Zody: I felt like we were in the dark about whether our artistic endeavors were destined to aid and abet the agenda of an event we didn't fully understand. I was skeptical; as someone who was born and raised in New York I have had to bear witness over and over to the aestheticization of developable land with "eccentric" characteristics like Paljassaare, and the often dire consequences for its inhabitants, both human and otherwise. At this point in my life I have become painfully aware that art is often used to clean hands with communities' blood on them, and that artists are very often the ones who lay the first stones on the path to neoliberalization and gentrification. It's a paradoxical position because gentrification and development are obviously the enemies of culture. Lots of artists seem to be in varying degrees of denial about their roles in this process, especially when it's happening right in front of them. The line is arbitrary; we could have been participating in something like this. Maybe these concerns were addressed in the conference, I don't know. I still don't have the complete picture on what the conference was about. If I had gone to it I wouldn't have been able to complete my work.

Kush: How was your experience and what were your impressions of the day?

Zody: I met the day with extreme trepidation due to the circumstances leading up to it. No one in the group of art students I was working with expected anything other than a high-strung and exhausting disaster. Some of the anxieties we expressed as a group involved being left behind by Urban Studies in the case that they decided not to allow enough time for guests to explore our work. I think the amount of stress I was feeling about both my role and the greater project eventually plateaued and coalesced into some kind of embrace-the-chaos mentality, and I felt resignation and acceptance in letting whatever was to happen, happen. I was kind of blown away when everything seemed to go off without a hitch. The Urban Studies students shepherded us all on our bikes in a timely and synchronized manner through Paljassaare, and we enjoyed some satirical performances from them. It was quite fortuitous that the majority of the artist interventions were placed within a short walk from one another so that we were able to fold them all into one excursion and thus not take too much time from the larger experience. I really enjoyed the satirical condo presentation by the water. All in all, I think the excursion of that day was very successful, and exceeded my doubtful expectations by a mile.

Kush: That there were only a small number of anthropologists, greatly outnumbered by all of us, also helped I think.

As the semester proceeded, we continued to work in and about Paljassaare, and intermittently we would hear Contemporary Arts is too. I recall the odd corridor conversation with a Contemporary Arts student about the possibility of collaborating on our next Paljassaare work in the near future. Later in the semester, Urban Studies proceeded towards producing and presenting more work in Paljassaare in December. Contemporary Art was, at one point, going to make and present more work in Paljassaare at around the same time, but in the end opted not to.

Zody: There were some ideas thrown back and forth (before the event) about planning our own excursion at the end of the semester. I think some of our professors expected us to go along with this idea because we had thought it possibly necessary at one point. But no, that was not to be. Despite all of the unease leading up to the project and my own personal concerns of which I have just listed many, I think we all did great work that day. It just seemed absurd to go back after that. Why beat a dying horse?

The thing that really started to pry at me was this urge, this immediacy of needing to plumb every square inch of meaning out of a space that may cease to exist at any given moment; or may perhaps continue to exist for years. The threat of developer interests transforming Paljassaare into condos or a casino is also the threat of aesthetic pollution, resulting in barrenness in the eyes of art students. When a space ceases to hold conceptual value for artists as a playground or canvas, that's when your Telliskivi happens, or your Williamsburg. I think the importance that was placed by the EKA groups in assuming a vanguard position, in being able to aestheticize Paljassaare before the developers could get to it, was kind of harmful for this reason, despite good intentions. Or maybe just short-sighted and participatory in a degree of denial like which I mentioned. I read somewhere that one of the proposed titles for the Urban Studies project was "Leave Paljassaare Alone", I absolutely love that. In the grand scheme of things it's hard to tell what would have made me feel less trepidation about the Paljassaare project but the fact that Urban Studies kept it ongoing was definitely confusing to me. I am curious about what the goal was, if there was one. For us, I felt like we did what we could, and what made sense, and then we walked away.

Kush: I find this fork in the road between the two courses interesting to think about - why has one produced and the other not? It's something I've been thinking about, particularly in relation to how our program seems to be unfolding overall - the workload is intense and the emphasis seems to be on relentless production and presentation. I've tried to get perspective on this, which can be difficult when one is inundated with deadlines. I wonder if it's a difference of approach between disciplines? Are architecture and urban studies departments closer to a capitalist mode of constant production than, say, contemporary art departments?

I don't know if you ever caught them, but a couple of months ago in one of EKA’s 3rd floor A-wing bathrooms there were a number of memes about studying architecture stuck all over the walls, the themes that ran throughout the memes were all about working oneself to the bone, never sleeping etc. Around the architecture department, I've been finding some really enticing hidden bed setups. Ironically, the conversation we are having now, which gives us an opportunity to chat about work and overwork, also makes up a part of a pile of work assigned to us over our end of year ‘break’. While each bit of assigned work is potentially interesting, on the whole the incessant approach affects our outlook and approach to the urban - it gives little breathing space and chance to experience and partake in the urban fabric outside of the academy - socialising, playing, working, surviving, loitering, dreaming… which, as a result, doesn’t allow Urban Studies to be as broad and interdisciplinary as we are told it is.

I wonder if non-production could be considered a possible way forward for the world we live in, or at very least a potentially interesting and fertile area to think about, perhaps in the tradition of Paul Lafargue's The Right to be Lazy or Mladen Stilinović's In Praise of Laziness? Do you have any thoughts about this - perhaps in relation to you and your class being a close-to-home living example of non-production; regarding the differing approaches across disciplines; or how students might respond to overwork...

Zody: It is interesting, the sort of murky dichotomy between visual arts versus urban studies, the latter existing more in the Cartesian space of architecture. It seems like art doesn't exist on a plottable axis to the extent that architecture does. I feel inclined to think of art practices more as mutable, emotion & intuition-informed endeavors, which contrasts more regimented ways of thinking directly addressing the needs and desires of communities in tangible ways. But from an outsider perspective it also seems like your field, urban studies, is kind of trying to break down the line between the two, being rooted in theory and more metaphysical approaches to understanding space and the way humans behave within it. I read Rem Koolhaas' Exodus and Delirious New York some years ago which introduced me to a more conceptual, theoretical, and even poetic side of architecture. The Urban Studies interventions at Paljassaare kind of reminded me of Delirious New York, which was kind of a magical realism-esque approach to describing a space, its potentials and its drawbacks from many sides.

My understanding of architecture as a study discipline is intrinsically linked to the knowledge that a couple people in my life have gone through architecture school, also working very hard and sleeping very little, only to emerge out the other end and realize that they could never really get a job in their field because of the unspoken rule that future architects have to put in several years of unpaid internship to be able to move upwards at all. It goes without saying that many Americans can't afford to live that way, especially while managing crippling college debt. I imagine it probably works differently elsewhere, but yeah, seeing those memes on the 3rd floor bathroom walls definitely made me think of those people I know and wonder how anyone manages to get through it without generational wealth. But that's really just part of it.

The choice to withdraw from Paljassaare part two just seemed obvious from our perspective. It's a tenet in our understanding, which has been drilled into us, that creativity cannot be commanded or rushed. The university is a practice stage where we hone our skills; it exists to facilitate valuable experimentation for its constituents. Why then, would we go back out there in the snow, during assessment period, weeks after our first success, and throw together what would be tantamount to a bunch of bullshit? Bullshit that it was guaranteed no one would care about or remember, including ourselves? Our hearts weren't in it. It seemed like a waste of time for everyone involved. But yes.. this puritanical impulse towards constant production equaling value - I'm tired of it, it is an illusion, why, as a group of people in a program that is intended to question modes of production, would we pretend this is a viable way to make work? As a working artist I understand that on some occasions you will have to follow through with projects that don't stoke the fires of your inspiration. But if the faculty of any arts department is truly concerned with helping their students adjust to a 'real-life' capitalist system of overworking ourselves and churning out products even when the muses don't come marching in... maybe they should be teaching a class in grant writing and residency applications instead. We will have plenty of time to make bad, half-baked art in the meantime.

I am glad our professors were receptive to our concerns and I am thankful that we have created the sort of permeable and encouraging environment that allowed such a negation of the prescribed course of events to take place without conflict. The fact that the faculty and students of contemporary art were able to communicate in a way that our thoughts were considered and validated was very encouraging. Maybe it's cliche or obvious but I believe in the power of students and professors learning from one another.



<sup>References

1. A reference to a lyric from the Frankie Goes to Hollywood song Two Tribes, ZTT, 1984.</sup>