Collect the (un)connected and (re)connect the uncollected 

Script for the performance lecture held by Paula Urbano at Queens Museum July 2019

curated by Susanne Ewerlöf and Carmen Ferreyra

CPR 2019: NAVIGATING THE (ART)WORLD

IMAGE: Paula Urbano HEAD

6:30 min

-Hi, how are you? What’s your name? Where do you come from? 

-Fine, Paula, Sweden.

-I mean where do you really come from? Where do you originally come from? 

-Im born in Sweden but my parents are from Chile. I have been there but I have never lived there.

In this question is a categorisation hidden, under a label of curiosity. You are not ”us” you belong to ”them”.

The line between ”us” and ”them” has always existed through history, what has changed is what defines”us" and "them". I believe there has been a movement of recognition through history that is difficult to register or collect. The movement of recognition as seen in the Hegel Master-slave dialectic.
Hegel places the origin of history in what he in the book The Phenomenology of Spirit called the master/slave dialectic: The origin of history starts in the human relations, it starts with two self consiousnesses that each desires to be recognised as self conscious by the other. The essence of the dialectics is the movement of recognition. This movement is made in a tense space, it is a disruption or when taken at its extreme, takes the form of a quote struggle to the death unquote in which one masters the other only to find that such lordship makes the very recognition he had sought impossible, since the bondsman, in this state, is not free to offer it. Hegel never mentions who he refers to as master nor slave and that leaves it to the reader to interpret. Karl Marx saw the relation between the social classes, Simone de Beauvoir the gender perspective and Frantz Fanon the relation between the coloniser and the colonized. 

The need to define the self and the other is essential in human relations and to define you need to delimit. Can I as artist contribute with a critical approach to these definitions, or even extend it?  The myth of origin is a very suitable agent to create a group identity wether it is a small group or in the building of the nations “we”. The myth makes the present comprehendable by explaining the relation to the past. The mythic elements in an ethnic identity should not be cleared off as unhistorical, but I believe it is necessary to critically scrutinize or challenge the Myth of Origin and the main aim in this project is to take on this mission. 

Collect the (un)connected and (re)connect the uncollected is a critical view on the fine but yet distinct line between the Swedish ”us” and ”them”. Who is included in the nations ”we”? What defines Swedishness? What does the relation between nationality and identity look like? How is the relation between history and identity, genealogy and identity? What role does the national museum institutions have in the narration of the nation? Is this definition negotiable? Or extendable? How? In which way does the archeological artefacts in the History Museum really tell us about who “we” are? 

What happens when there is a discrepancy between perception and representation of identity or nationality. Can artistic research contribute with a critical perspective on history? Can art and art practices tell something about history that history can’t? What would be the difference, if there is any between the artist and the historian presenting the same material? These are the questions I’ve been working with.

Aristotle writes ”poetry is more scientific and serious than history because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”

In order to go to the bottom with this enquire about my origin. I turn firstly to history to archeology. 

I started my research at the Swedish History Museum. Can I among their 10 million artefacts find my origin? Find traces of my origin, traces of me? 

Then I turn to Genealogy and order 2 DNA tests from different companies to be able to compare the results.

I turn to philosophy and read Heidegger’s The Origin of the Work of Art. I find interest for his formulations about origin, the relation between artist, art work, art, the essence of art and the truth in relation to all this.

Heidegger writes: The origin is the source of the nature in which the being of an entity is present. The artist is the origin of the work. The work is the origin of the artist. Neither is without the other. Nevertheless, neither is the sole support of the other. In themselves and in their interrelations artist and work are each of them by virtue of a third thing which is the first -through Art. So, the origin of the Artists and the Art work is Art. 

Truth’s drawnness to Art is because it needs the work to establish itself within that which is in order to occur as being in the midst of things.

So, in this study Collect the (un)connected & (re)connect the uncollected will I as an Artist through this Art work let the happening of truth occur as being in the midst of things.

IMAGE: MYDNA.tif

This is the result of my DNA test 

It shows that I am: one percent Saami, two percent from Middle East, ten percent from China, thirty one percent Native American, and fifty seven percent from South Spain.

To be able to see my paternal lineage I ordered DNA tests on my grandfather and to double check my maternal I ordered a DNA test on my son.

IMAGE: GENEALOGY

My paternal lineage migrated from Africa more than 100,000 years ago through the Arabian Peninsula on upwards and ends in the southern Mediterranean for 4000 years ago. 

While my maternal line migrated a bit later, around 67 000 years ago, the same way through the Arabian Peninsula, but took on eastward throughout Asia over the Bering land bridge, which then were covered by ice and allowed passage over to the Americas where the tracks ends with Haplo group C1b in the southern part of South America around 18 000 years ago.

IMAGE: COAT OF ARMS

This is the coat of arms on my paternal side. Since the family was Hidalgo – noblemen –  they were sent as officials from the Spanish port city of Seville, to settle in the new country after La Conquista, the colonisation,1492. My father’s mother was the last who wore the name.

IMAGE: ARCHAEOLOGICAL FINDS

Among the 10 million artefacts at the Swedish History Museum, I have dwelt upon these objects from the fourth period of the Bronze Age. They were found in Grava parish in Värmland. An archaeologist named Johan Ling led a study in which they tested these objects among about 40 others and they could tell exactly where the copper was broken. In these objects the copper was broken in southern Spain.

IMAGE: HJÄRPETAN MOUNTAIN

This is the site for the so called Hjärpetan-find. It was a hewer that found it in the 1920s, in one of those houses lives the hewer’s grandchild. Today it is situated alongside the Klarälven, but earlier it was a narrow bay out of the lake Vänern. One can imagine that the people who placed the items in the mountain really made an effort to hide them. 

IMAGE: FORNVÄNNEN

Taking a closer look at the mountain you would only see big rocks, but it actually was in between the rocks that the objects were carefully hidden. Probably they came by boat and disembarked here because it is easy to recognise the location. The Hjärpetan-mountain stands up as a landmark and if you aren't familiar with the area it was probably good to have a clear landmark to be able to retrieve the objects.

IMAGE: FORNVÄNNEN SCRAP HOARD

It is a so called scrap hoard. They brought a number of broken items that were already broken in the Bronze Age, apparently with the aim to recast them. They are dated to the fourth and fifth period of the Bronze Age, 1100-900 BC and 900-700 BC. There were pieces of lead-tin found that is used together with the copper to make bronze. 

IMAGE 7A, B C COPPER MINE EUROPE

When Johan Ling’s study Moving Metals II was published in 2013, the Lead isotope analyses showed that the copper in the items was broken in a mine in south of Spain.

IMAGE: BRONZE AGE MAP

The shoreline at the time was a part of Vänern and it went up to a place called Ekenäs in Kil’s municipality. From there it’s very close to Fryken. Along Fryken was one of the central districts of the Bronze Age. There are very many signs of the Bronze Age culture, particularly graves. 

The particularity with Fryken is that most of the graves are located on the east side of the lake. But there is a contemporary item with Hjärpetan, namely a small razor, that was found at a site that differs from all the other graves in the bay of Fryken. It was found at a place called Skinnargården located around 2 km west from Fryken. 

IMAGE:  RAZOR KNIFE

That’s a bit odd because reportedly, it was found in a mound. The odd thing is that there are no mounds from the Bronze Age in Värmland that we know of today. So the very existence of a mound and that it was placed at the west side of Lake Fryken, 2 km from the lake, allows the archeologists to suspect that the ones who were buried there, where not buried in the same manner as those who lived there.

That allows us to wonder: Why did they hide so many artefacts in the mountain? Why where goods left there? Why did no one pick them up? Who was the owner of the small razor? Was he murdered? Could it have been a crime of passion?

My hypothesis is that my Spanish paternal ancestors were in Sweden in the Bronze age

Therefore I can state I come originally from Scandinavia.