Poetic document making

Niels Van Tomme interviews Andrea Geyer for Foreign Policy in Focus:

Investigating concepts such as national identity, gender, and class, German-born artist Andrea Geyer uses both fiction and documentary elements in her image and text-based works. Her multifaceted projects include Queen of the Artists' Studios, The Story of Audrey Munson, an exploration of the continuous struggle of women through the life of one of New York's most famous artist's models. 9 Scripts from a Nation at War, her much-discussed collaboration with Sharon Hayes, Ashley Hunt, Katya Sander, and David Thorne, is a room-sized, 10-channel video installation. Through this complex presentation, the artists reflect on the war in Iraq and how it constructs specific positions for individuals to fill, enact, speak from, or resist.

Focusing on the ongoing readjustment of cultural meanings and social memories in current politics, Geyer has constituted a revolutionary as well as poetic body of work. Living and working in New York, she has exhibited at numerous prestigious institutions worldwide, including the Secession in Vienna, the Whitney Museum in New York, TATE Modern in London, and Documenta 12 in Kassel.

NIELS VAN TOMME: Your latest project, Solemnly Proclaimed, is a collaboration with a group of 10 Canadian Inuit activists around the UN Declaration for the Rights for Indigenous Peoples. What was the starting point for this project?

ANDREA GEYER: I must say as a disclaimer to start off with that Solemnly Proclaimed is on hold right now, because there is absolutely no funding for it. The idea came out of two projects I've worked on since about 2003. 9 Scripts from a Nation at War deals with the situation of individuals in relation to the war that is happening in Iraq. The other project is Spiral Lands, a sequence of works that address land rights and questions of identity and identity claims in North America, taking the Southwest as an example.

In both of these projects, the role of law and questions of justice became very prominent. Spiral Lands contains passages on how the court system was used to deconstruct Native sovereignty and land rights in the 19th century (see Cherokee Cases, Chief Justice John Marshall). And then, of course, there is the part in 9 Scripts From A Nation At War that addresses the detainees in Guantanamo Bay and the role of the Enemy Combatant Status Review Tribunals. Now, with the Obama administration, we'll see how the detainees will be tried.

The project Solemnly Proclaimed looks at the Declaration for the Rights for Indigenous Peoples (DRIPS) that the UN passed in September 2007 After 30 years of trying to get it passed, activists finally built a consensus to ensure indigenous rights worldwide. The reason why there needs to be a special declaration is due to the history of colonialism and the fact that indigenous communities need a particular kind of protection, being colonized and living mostly within postcolonial conditions. There were four states that voted against DRIPS: Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand (although Australia has signed it since). All were, interestingly enough, British settler states. They could not ratify the declaration, mostly because of questions of land rights and entitlement of Indigenous people to their land, their history, and their culture.

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