Mostar's Little Dragon - How Bruce Lee became a symbol of peace in the Balkans.

Contribution from Marija
In 2004, the Sarajevo Center for Contemporary Art launched the project "De/Construction of Monument. Within the project" "Urban Movement Mostar" came forward with an initiative to erect a monument to Bruce Lee in the city of Mostar. Inauguration of the Bruce Lee Monument, made by Croatian artist Ivan Fijolić, took place on Saturday, November 26, 2005 in Mostar, Bosnia.

The kung fu movie star Bruce Lee would have turned 65 in November, and a two-ring media circus descended on Mostar, Bosnia, for his birthday. It was then that the world's first public monument to Lee was unveiled. Building civil society never seemed so weird: Here was a life-sized bronze statue of a topless American immigrant paid for by the German government and christened by a Chinese diplomat, erected at the behest of a dysfunctional community of Croats, Serbs, and Muslims, in the city that saw intense warfare during the Bosnian war from 1992- 1995 that involved ethnic cleansing.

This initiative represents an attempt for the public spaces to regain their meaning, and at the same time to question the significance of monuments and symbols, old ones as well as new ones. By mixing up a "high" stylistic registry (monuments, grandeur, bronze) and a "low" one (mass-culture, kung fu, heroes of our childhood), a short circuit of reception is produced: the "high" stylistic registry is being deconstructed and the overwhelming mythomany is being ironized (Who are our heroes? Whom to and why do we build monuments?), but at the same time the "low" registry is being revalorized, for its power to evoke little ordinary things of everyday life that do not have anything to do with politics and ideologies, and that bring people and nations together instead of separating them. Bruce Lee was chosen by organisers as a symbol of the fight against ethnic divisions. Lee, who was an American of Chinese descent and famous martial arts actor, represented to the residents of Mostar a bridging of cultures. "One thing we all have in common is Bruce Lee.” In a city with a reputation for violence, the dynamic movie star was a symbol of "loyalty, skill, friendship and justice."

It may seem odd that a city trying to overcome its reputation for violence would choose as a symbol a man famous for artfully snapping vertebrae. But violence is relative, nowhere more so than Bosnia. Lee never used a weapon designed after the Han dynasty. His preference, famously, was the nunchaku, a weapon of wood and rope with origins in the tools of Asian subsistence agriculture. Nobody ever massacred a village with nunchucks.

As with a Lee roundhouse kick, the post-political point seems to have been made with grace and power; the Lee statue elicited only smiles and shrugs from locals on every side of Mostar's tense three-way divide. "I'm very happy about it," one Muslim resident told Agence France-Presse. "For a moment it did not matter who is Muslim and who is Croat."

If Lee is an unlikely symbol for unity in Bosnia, he is also, alas, not an entirely effective one: Just hours after the monument was unveiled, a group of rowdy teenagers defaced the statue and stole the nunchucks, leaving the site littered with wine bottles. According to Sky News, one citizen responded with the cry, "Once again we've shown what Balkan savageness is!"

A white South African in Nantes

Contemporary art using humor to break stereotypes

Contribution from Catherine

In 1997, six years after the end of the apartheid, a South-African artist, Wayne Barker, was invited in Nantes (France) with a group of South African musicians, artists, filmmakers and dancers to the exhibition "Fin de Siècle”. The festival was created as a platform for the exposure of South African culture in a post apartheid milieu.

The story told by the artist himself:

“But very many clichees like zulu dancers, shit actually, not contemporary South-African culture. So I was sitting in bar and it raises spontaneously. I was one of the guests, the artists. And there was this huge French black man, a bodyguard. And every night at the bar “zulu, zulu, zulu”. Plus a French artist says to me, why my work is political and I am not black? And then I thought “Fuck this, this is scheisse.” I had a girlfriend, and there were big balls of chocolate mousse for the guests and everybody. And I took off my shirt and she put the chocolate mousse on me and I went to the piano. It was completely unplanned, then I did it and when I started to play, the bodyguard came to arrest me, but it was in a cultural center. Then I said “No, I am one of the performing artists.” That’s how it started.»

“This festival was portraying South Africa as a country a few centuries behind the main stream of art and music practice. It was geared toward the ethnic representation of S.A, seeming to forget the fact that as a nation we were, and still are, dealing with a huge amount of issues from the recently dismantled apartheid system, which comes with its own baggage. (…) And there it was, my action: to be covered in French chocolate mousse while playing a piano composition I had composed, “The African Basket” and then licked clean by a French woman. I saw this as a protest against how South Africa, how Africa in fact, was being represented and has been since the conquerors landed on the shores to enforce their gods and ways of seeing onto those savages. My being a White South African, meant to them that I was part of that charade and being no longer with them, as easily cast aside as a shipwrecked European; an extra in the peepshow of contemporary African art.”

“The piece dealt with how people are stereotyped and cast into identities. The music compositions are manifestations of loss. The idea of the sweetness of chocolate, the body painting and the licking, represents how we would like to see Africa. For me it was a cathartic initiation to humiliate myself by exposing my nakedness; the coating of this cute substance on my body a fantasy of colour. And then! to have the chocolate licked off, to the point of nausea, and there! back again to that same human being, without color or prejudice.“

To see a naked guy recovered with chocolate mousse licked by a woman while it is even not in the program of the event must have been a disquieting situation for the audience. Many people must have found it very shocking; some others hopefully may have understood immediately the message of the artist, others also must have found in it some food for thought. It’s the situation which makes this performance humoristic, the idea he had suddenly to take the bowl of chocolate mousse to paint his body and the whole meaning of this action in this particular place.

What is sure is that it has provoked new thought, changed the look of the French audience about South Africa.

Sources

About Wayne barker:

http://www.the-loop.com/smarthearts/html/wayne/websitecont.html

http://www.wayne-barker.com/

http://ntama.uni-mainz.de/content/view/194/29/1/11/

Hi girls:
I am sending quite in retard my contribution of a spanish experience and I am preparing the introduction and sum up of the contributions, i have by now, as soon as I have all I send to you.
Best wishes

Interculturality, Humor and Immigration: university research meets public services and society through humor

Considering the use of humour as an instrument of communication and mediation, that could contribute to the intercultural dialogue. I would like to point up the work of the Carmen Valero Garces team at the Deparment of Modern Philology in the University of Alcala de Henares that have a Humour cathedra, it organizes the I Conference Interculturality, humor and immigration and the exhibition Graphic humors, humor and tolerance and also coordinates the Programme Traduction and interpretation in the Public Services (Valero 2004)[i]. This group is also member of the International Society for Humor Studies. (http://www.uni-duesseldorf.de/WWW/MathNat/Ruch/SecretaryPage.html). Holding in Alcalá de Henares in 2008 the last Conference o the ISHS. The words of the famous Spanish humorist Forges that participated in the Interculturality Conference could be also a particular definition of humour:

“Humour in reality, as in the Greek theater, and as the northern oriental humors, is in reality the group of attitudes that the spirit has or the way the heart of the soul has to beat. Because humour can make smile, make laugh, make think, can make to be tender, sing, can make to be excited, can make to be sad, and all of this is humors. And many times we think that it is the referred to the smile what visionaries!” (24)

The objectives of this Conference were two: firstly, to create a forum of discussion and Exchange for the professional and academic community who work with the different areas of interculturality, the translation, the humor and the immigration and secondly to attract the public attention in general who is interested in the multilingual and multicultural reality from a different perspective. During that two days conference there was an opportunity to talk about the humor form different countries and cultures, to exchange “views”, and to laugh with others, to debate about questions related to humor and to analyze communication and the culturally specific of humor.

The 2008 Conference Humor between cultures: with a smile tastes better… III conference about Intercultural communication, translation and interpretation in the Public Services was held the 20th june 2008 in the University of Alcalá de Henares. The conference counts with the participation of the humorist Pepe Garamendy with his show “inmigrandes”[ii]


The idea shared by this research team is that in their daily work with translation and interpretation especially with the public services humor is a need to continue. Considering the perspective of a five years trajectory, 2003-2008, they have perceived that crises is coming, that people frowns, the pessimism grows, but as there has been more time living together, knowing each other better, they have leaned on optimism, humor and a “take it easy” way.

This team uses humor in a productive, positive and creative way, as a part of their research and in their conferences. As they say humor is one more opportunity to debate about the bridges between languages and cultures and how to reduce the language, cultural, ideological and social barriers that prevent integration… with a smile.

[i] Valero Garcés, C. (2004) Interculturalidad. Traducción, humor e inmigración. Alcalá de Henares. Fundación Universidad de Alcalá de Henares. [CD, text]
[ii] “Inmigrandes” its a pun that mixes two words “inmigrantes” immigrants and “grandes” bigs.