NSK State in Time 2

Inke Arns:
Continued Mobile States (NSK)

The 'immaterial state' NSK Drzava v casu performs this movement by materializing in different time intervals under the form of an 'embassy' or a 'consulate' in various places (17). This means that the members of the different NSK groups, as performed for the first time in 1992 during the "NSK Embassy Moscow" (18) in Russia, travel to a certain place together (in Moscow, a private appartment), and then through lectures of NSK members and participants from Slovenia or ex-Yugoslavia as well as local theoreticians and artists, and discussions with the audience, stimulate an exchange of experiences. For the duration of the 'embassy' or the 'consulate' the place of the event is declared to be state territory of the NSK Drzava v casu. The central element of this exchange of experiences is accompagnied by exhibitions ('Irwin', 'Neuer Kollektivismus' [= 'New Collectivism'; the graphic department of NSK], concerts ('Laibach') or performances ('Kozmokineticni Kabinet Noordung'). As of today, the NSK Drzava v casu has been installed temporarily, as well as permanently, in Moscow, Gent, Venice, Suhl, Berlin, Florence, Amsterdam and Umag.
One would suspect that the transition from the 80s to the 90s brought about a fundamental change in NSK's working method. With the loss of the clearly defined contextual reference system which NSK's 'overidentifying' strategies were addressing in the 1980s, we can now question the viability of continuing these strategies within the context of today's globalization tendencies and the gradual vanishing of clearly localizable (power) centers in the 90s. NSK's disorientation since the early 1990s, triggered by the cessation of reference systems, becomes clear in the visual metaphors used in the 1992 'Laibach' music video "Kapital": In the hermetically sealed-off cockpit of a space ship whose walls are decorated with suprematist black and white crosses, the 'Laibach' crew flies into deep, dark space. The visual material that has been accumulated by NSK in the 80s doesn't find reference points anymore in the as yet unknown and unsurveyed ("black") space of the 1990s.
More promising seems the direction under formulation since 1991 - with the creation of the "NSK State in Time" - mainly by 'Irwin' and Eda Cufer (member of NSK): The concept of the "NSK State in Time" leads away from the hermetic entity which NSK defined itself as in the 80s; away from NSK as a declarative setting (Setzung) using totalitarian emblematics meant to confront the single individual with his or her (own) fantasized partaking of, or participation in power.
On the contrary, in the 1990s the concept of the "NSK State in Time" puts the emphasis on the moment of communication, of open interaction, of exchange of experiences. The temporarily materializing 'embassies' of the "NSK State" are not only about a self-referential re-working of the own history. Rather, the aim can be described as the wish to communicate the specific experiences made in a certain place in the 80s to another 'different' place, and thus to make these experiences productive. Which differences can be perceived; what are the possible similarities or homologies? How can the specific experiences made in the "East" be communicated to the "West"; how far can these experiences be adapted or actualized and made productive for the 1990s? To what extent can the contemporary - potentially totalitarian - projective discourse formations be met by using strategies developed by the NSK in the 80s? Can the deconstructive procedures by which NSK was revealing and pointing to the affective functioning of ideologies within mass societies be transferred to the more subtle - and thus much more perfidious - working of 'Leitbild' formations within the mass individual societies of the 1990s?
During the one month journey of the "NSK State" through the United States of America in July 1996 ("Transnacionala. A Journey from the East to the West"; see http://www.heck.com/trans.html) these issues, among others, were also addressed. These are question that NSK has to ask themselves critically, but questions directed to the audience as well.
More NSK

top