MS : Instead of talking about the project and enhance the togetherness of the administrator and the artists, maybe we could ask ourselves : what is the battle we are fighting here ?

VM : There are a lot of layers in the project and as you said you have to choose your battle, but sometimes there are different fronts.

MS : There is always one enemy.

VM : That is really too easy, like east-west…

RH : I think choosing our battle in the end may well define PE as a project. Since we have no common ground from which to operate, this process of selecting our battle seems to me very constituent of what we call Potential Estate.

MS : We should talk about the film you will develop from your presence here (*). I’m wondering what it means in this context of production, in which it is usually the object of selling. Traditionally a gallery exhibition occasions the selling objects… Yet PE chose not to have an exhibition, but a series of events. Are the production of discourse and of values, and the production of marketable objects being offered a new way of dealing with the current political situation in Belgium ?

KV : The marketable object has at the same time changed as well. We are still discussing if we want to sell the film and what’s more important in what way. One possibility is not selling it, but offering it for free through the sales of publicity space in the film.

MS : So it would generate money ?

KV : It is not just about making a product and then simply selling it.

MS : But that is part of the logic of this whole system that you live right now. And it is a necessity that you have to deal with. It is not just part of a project, it is part of the bigger picture in which we are all participating.

VD : Part of the believe…

PH : This speculative dimension was there from the start. Even the name Potential Estate… We even discussed buying real estate, actually buying Belgique, a ghost town along the Missouri river. I even talked to some lawyers calling themselves ‘architectes de patrimoine’. They deal with real estate stuff, they buy art, discuss speculation. When they bought a piece of Wim Delvoye they realized that his practice was actually not so very remote from theirs…

RH : It is like in the Wally Hope story we sold : there is no real opposition between culture and commerce, just a merger waiting to happen…

IS : That already happened several centuries ago.

VM : Interesting is the position of the artist and his cognitive capital. The artist is like the ‘poisson pilote’, the initiator, an ideal for the business elite. You can see the whole business and neo-capitalist system looking at the artist no longer as an unproductive element, as a parasite of society, but rather as a projection of what might be creative capitalism. Much of the time I feel we are trapped in a contradiction…

VD : The issue is ‘value’.

MS : The number of battles you fight and your position as artists, is a matter of translation. The situation we have here with the administrator and the artistic collective on the one hand and on the other hand the use of another language that allows for an artist to be incorporated in an institution or in a bigger system of powers etc…. In answering the question where the administrator stands, you clarify your own position within the art system. To me it is like a Mobius strip, you cannot get out of it at all. Or like in Hitchcock’s Rear Window, who is watching whom ? There are of course many battles, but if you want to position yourself, take a clear position with regard to what you want. Then there will be only one battle and one enemy.

VM : It is clear for me, since we are so different as artists, that there is a kind of balancing out when we work together. It’s not about aesthetics. We can resolve conflicts that arise between us and in the end have focus.

MS : We are also more than artists I hope ? This is about qualities that do not apply to the artistic field alone. First of all you are a citizen, just like me. It is about citizenship and how citizens are administered and monitored into control, also beyond the level of the nation state. We have to avoid a kind of fetishism of the artistic status. It is important but you will accomplish nothing if you continue in that direction. Inequality exists on many different levels. People need to be brought in and the discourse needs to go beyond the artistic fields of interest.

KR : It is also a matter of choice. For me so far it is not clear if this project really wants to step out of the circle of the art world.

MS : The audience is participating in the process of making and deciding. There is no outside there is only the Mobius strip.

VD : The question of outside or inside is just a reinsuring representation, which is not real. It is a bit terrifying.

MS : Brutal but truthful.

VD : It is brutal because we are all becoming shareholders instead of citizens. The dynamic of the project suggests just this. If there is a crisis in the political representation, a crisis of the individual, the citizen, and the artist is one of the purest examples, if we are in a crisis of representation like this, then Belgium is no longer able to support identities.

VM : There is an obsession with identity. We all have mixed ancestors in this country. What is interesting about Belgium, Wisconsin as a trigger, is that it invites us to look at things from a different angle. Over there we too were once migrants, and yet what happened to all these utopian communities in the US. They produced a model. The great social utopias of 19th century found a destiny in the US. Together they became the American utopia. It is a weird duplication of Europe that could not exist elsewhere, as if they simply decided to remake the world. Our view on America is full of clichés. PE is playing with these notions, but at the same time we also take a closer look at them and the village of Belgium offers us just that : a case study, so we can see ourselves as migrants.

MS : When you were talking about the 19th century utopia in the States, to whom did you refer ?

VM : Fourier, the French utopist. They sent French families to create Icaria. For Wisconsin also the German Lutheran separatist George Rapp… The French revolution took place when they were there. Yet after it they did not return to Europe because they had created their new world across the Atlantic. Many of the early communities were created on this utopian basis. We need to look into this history more closely. Like we did with migrant figures for Cabinet Reclus and Jacotot. Both are connected with theories and utopias from the 19th Century.

MS : PE could touch upon a wider field of references, as I see things broader than the artistic field and the status of artists. I don’t know if you want to follow this line, but for me it is the only utopian and at the same time realizable line… Starting from this PE could become a platform to question things, a space for discussion about artistic and political issues today that are relevant toward real conditions and contexts one wants to address. I can see the potential of these kinds of events. Then you could do something not in a gallery, but in a place that has to do with real decision- making processes…

The discussion ends with some concrete feedback on the four candidates that applied to become the administrator of Potential Estate.

(*) The Crying of Potential Estate (2008)