images | text

Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck & Media Farzin
Born in 1972 in Caracas, Venezuela; born in 1979 in San Diego, USA  / Lives in Berlin, Germany;  lives in New York, USA

Adriano Pedrosa: Tell me about your ongoing series Cultural Diplomacy: An Art We Neglect.

Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck & Media Farzin: “Cultural diplomacy” is a foreign policy term. It is also known as “cultural exchange” or simply “propaganda.” The historian Joseph Nye has called it a prime example of soft power—that is, persuasion through culture and ideas, as opposed to hard power, which uses more visible means such as military force. Our series looks at relationships between politics and art history through what we call entanglements. We use quotations, objects, and images to make these relationships more visible, to present art history in a more complex  way. 

AP: Tell me about your interest in Middle Eastern politics.

ABY & MF: It may be more useful for us to speak about our interest in United States foreign policy. Middle Eastern oil has been on the minds of American politicians for some time now. Take this statement by the U.S. Deputy Coordinator of Petroleum Administration for War, Ralph Davies, in 1941: “The United States must face the prospect of acquiring and holding sufficient additional reserves to supply our military and civilian needs in the years ahead, irrespective of whether such reserves are within the borders of the United States.”

AP: Which works of yours relate to the topic?

ABY: I began to focus on U.S. culture and foreign policy in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. Coming from an oil-producing country such as Venezuela, the baseless 2003 invasion of Iraq felt like a direct act of terror on the part of the U.S. I was looking at a map of Iraqi oil fields, and their organic shapes reminded me of Alexander Calder’s work. So I began researching the history of both Iraq and Calder’s creative process, and I found chronological coincidences and suggestive metaphors. I produced the installation UNstabile-Mobile (2006), which recreates Calder’s formal language and narrates the parallel stories of the “creation” of Iraq and the “invention” of the mobile by Calder and Marcel Duchamp. 

AP: Tell me about your collaborative methods. How do you work together?

ABY: In 2007 Media saw the UNstabile-Mobile installation, and we spoke about it. Hearing
her comments, I realized that we could develop these ideas collaboratively. We each have different skills and areas of expertise, but we develop the works together, from conceptualization to execution. The series Cultural Diplomacy: An Art We Neglect is the result of our fears and our understanding of history and current events in our countries.

AP: What is Chronoscope, the new video you are producing for the Istanbul Biennial?

ABY & MF: Chronoscope is a video project that uses footage from Longines Chronoscope, an American television program that aired from 1951 to 1955 on CBS. It was an early form of infotainment, and it functioned as a sounding board for Cold War discourse. The program’s branding and packaging of ideas has many paradoxical resonances with today’s events. Time becomes a palpable subject in itself, superseding the immediate political discussion.