<Bound>

While globalization has ushered in an era of greater interconnectivity and freedom of circulation and exchange by virtue of an ever-expanding market and digital contraction of spatial distances, it has been achieved at a cost.

This cost has been the appearance of an environment that, under the banner of freedom, obscures the logic of an economy increasingly governing all forms of legibility that enables or disables what is visible. For while the notion of visibility has always been defended as a principle of equality and democratic right especially in regards to an otherwise unseen materiality of lives and hence the potential to forge new relations and conditions for social exchange, the technologies of visibility have continued to be developed as a principle means of greater surveillance and control over all aspects of modern life. However, what perhaps distinguishes the contemporary era is the degree to which what is made or given visibility is determined and shaped by a covert network that exists within the system. This economy has produced new spaces of invisibility that exist within the system tailored to regulate and monitor the movement or circulation of both people and material culture can occur without any manifest form or means of representation. With neither laws nor means of access these temporal zones have been occluded or so spatially compressed that the form of their containment fails to provide a signal sufficiently strong to register their location or character. In other words, this enables control and movement to occur without detection and outside the principles and laws of Western civil society defining rights of representation whether this is understood in terms of a legal system or visibility. Hence, just as the field of images that circulate through the media are in point of fact highly regulated and limited by the increasing control of the state over what is allowed to circulate, so equally we may apply this to the field of individuals and groups as defined by their ethnicity and religious affiliation.

The control over the regimes of the visible in which the body is both exposed and occluded produces a heightened condition of anxiety regarding what it is that we do not see more than what we do. In such terms, what is not seen becomes an invisible threat that justifies and demands the exercise of extreme measures and state violence authorized as a ‘state of exception.’ This has led to a demand for even greater control over the forms and networks of both movement and visibility able to function regardless of whether the legal system allows for it not.

Under the clarion call of a war on terror, the intensification in the forms of containment in both the means and channels of movement and circulation constitutes an era where the conditions of possibility defining civilian life are being increasing shaped once again under principles that formerly characterized military regimes. Most evident of this is the increasing incidence of circulation and forced detainment and detention of people into camps and centers, the deportation of refugees seeking asylum or secret rendition of people to foreign government torture facilities. In such cases, their visibility is withdrawn from the public sphere and lack of rights and representation means a virtual disappearance. Not only has this occurred under the jurisdiction of state legal systems whose suspension of the unconditional justice of human rights (The Geneva Convention) has been defended as necessary in the fight against terrorism but equally the establishment of covert and para-military operations operating outside the rule of law.

Likewise, there exists a complicit pact between the nation state and global capital in creating zones of forced displacement, dispossession and abandonment i.e. forced mobility of peoples who, having been dispossessed of rights to citizenship and statehood, live in disarticulated zones of refuge, defection or containment. This can be seen most starkly in the MV Tampa incident in 2001 when the Australian government turned back the boat TAMPA filled with political refugees from Afghanistan and Iraqis fleeing the war and regimes the government was seeking to overthrow.

The modern container: An invisible economy
It is no accident that the modern container itself was conceived was initially designed by the US army during the period of World War Two. Designed to protect military cargo from damage and pilfering, the container represented the realization of the most economic and secure means of transport supplies to and from far-flung theaters of war. This history of the container belongs, of course, to larger histories of transportation and shipping following the age of a mercantile economy in the period of imperial expansion and colonial conquest. And yet insofar, as these histories have been defined and regulated by international laws of property and exchange, they have been always shadowed by, if not produce, illicit economies of trade. In a manner not dissimilar to the epoch of privateers, this situation has spawned if not produced a parallel economy within civilian life. ( ) The container becomes an essential part of the covert history of war economies and the dark underbelly of capitalism. This is the other side of the law in which whether controlled by armies, warlords or criminal cartels, the container served as the invisible space of illicit mobility serving as a covert agent for the smuggling and trafficking of antiquities, arms, drugs and human cargo whether it be prostitution or labor.

Milica Tomic’s recent work The Container stands as an embodiment of this history. ( ) Produced and shown in 2007 both in the courtyard of Hyde Park Barracks in Sydney and as an alternate version in front of the Museum of the Revolution in Belgrade, the 20 foot container initially appears out of place as if dumped there without clear reason or regard. ( ) Further, there is nothing from the outside that appears to have been radically altered in its original form as a container. Its function appears neither to have been modified nor elaborated as a form of sculpture or monument but remains, in this regard, closer to the form of a ready-made. However, on closer inspection, what becomes evident is that the container is riddled with bullet holes and that, on looking in through its open door, is empty. There is neither cargo nor any sign of what it once contained. Nothing remains except a mere shell. As such, we can say, it contains nothing except in the form of absence and of an action taken, the subject of which is absent. Whatever was there has been removed and yet, given the presence of the bullet-holes, it signifies an action of violence.

The process of its viewing forces us to mirror the process of its making, and hence we may properly define the work at the level of the performative. This occurs from two perspectives. On entering the container, we find ourselves surrounded by the gaping holes left by the bullet-holes that have torn through the metal walls, forcing us to recognize that the walls do not shield that which is inside. Standing there the viewer is forced to experience the condition of vulnerability to being inside: the claustrophobic closeness of the surrounding metal walls, the sharp perforations only through which daylight or night can be glimpsed or the stultifying dryness of the heat or dampness of the rain. It is no longer protects that which it contains from the outside. In that instant we recognize it is us who are contained and yet vulnerable to an outside of which we are no longer certain. We are subject to the uncontrollable force of an unknown outside. Through this experience of immersion and the surrounding bullet-holes, we may imagine the moment of being fired upon, the experience of being caught of and the violation of the space which may have appeared a form of protection from the outside.

On leaving the container, our perception of the container from outside changes. For now on viewing the container from the outside, we are placed in the position of detachment, an onlooker or amongst those who fired the shots into the container. The significance of the work of this is that the ‘Container’ becomes neither purely historical nor about another place and people. While Tomic’s art work may provoke a reading or inquiry into the context of local histories and the site in which it is placed, the artist does not specify these histories. Rather, the work produces an experience that could happen anywhere, anytime. It is a work of enactment that is played out by the audience itself. As such the container functions as an indexical present whereby the audience is confronted with their own condition and level of understanding.

Through both the process of its production and its viewing the work functions within the immediate local time and place of its reception. For while, as a ready-made, its use is already inscribed, the operation performed upon the container and its re-location reinscribes its meaning in order to expose a set of covert histories that belong to the present, histories of the present. That is, the making of the work itself exposes the local legal structures put in place in order to govern the use of such weaponry.

In constructing the container in Belgrade, Tomic writes of how “everything that we used to reconstruct this crime (buying a container, hiring professional police units to riddle it with bullets, connection police/military, sporting shooting-ground sport club members, weapon and bullets itself, where they had been produced etc.) These tools established a connection with police and military operations in our country when it turned out that the only bullets strong enough to put holes in metal containers were made in ex-Yugoslavia in 1988. They were used in Kosovo all the way till 1999, the year of the transport of the bodies of Albanian civilians in the containers inside a freezer truck which was later dumped in the Danube River. In Serbia it was so direct and obvious. I made a video interviewing the participants in the war and reconstruction. When the work was exhibited the container was more presented as a metaphorical object than a product of the reconstruction which reveals all these connections, that is a local network of violence.”

While in Australia, there appeared to be no immediate historical links that were uncovered in the process of the container’s reconstruction, locating AK47’s proved to be substantial difficult, either by its pure association to recent histories or when connected to the Balkans and specifically Serbia by reference to the artist’s background. Alternatively, finding private land to avoid having to enter a legal process of obtaining a license and then request use of an AK47, was equally difficult, first in proximity to the ultimate location of the container and away from the public eye and ear. Having secured a place at least two hours away from Sydney, an AK-47 could not be obtained but the use of bullets that would create the same effect was secured. These same bullets were used by the Australian army in fighting the US led war in Iraq. ( )

It is then, in this manner, that through the process of its production and reception Tomic’s work reenacts a crime that belongs to larger network of power over the movement of people and the systems of invisibility operating outside of the law That is, the work exposes in its process of its own local production a local network to which it belongs more so than its reference to the Balkans or Afghanistan ( ) More than that, Tomic’s work stands for what has been described as the toxic model of modernity. As the artist has suggested, the ‘container is not used for storage/transport of goods, but as a depot…in which people are hidden, people who have become a surplus in some transaction.” ( ) The container becomes a metaphor of containment and contamination, a metaphor which belongs to the notion of naked life (as Agamben refers to it) but, more radically so, as an object that requires quarantine, containing potentially threatening properties to the health of the nation which it threatens. Off -shore or at the edges of the hegemonic topographies of the nation state, it belongs to an economy that has redrawn the boundaries and its methods and forms of exclusion, destitution and disappearance. In such an era, these bodies assume a spectral identity whose existence and fate exists as the necessary condition of a global order. Bound, invisible, the container becomes the secret kernel of modern life occluded within the highways of digital time and relays of information and capital, haunting the regime of the visible in an era of diminishing democracies.

FOOTNOTES:

• An earlier version of this was published in Broadsheet No 1, (Belgrade, 2006).