IsayUsaySsay

Name   : Patrice Riemens
Time   : 20.00-23.00 hours (V2, Rotterdam)
Subject: Presentation by Ingo Guenter
Date   : saturday 19 january 1996

Ingo Guenther's Refugee Republic project was presented and discussed yesterday evening at the Unie Cafe hall in Rotterdam. Its basic idea is that refugees, now numbering 1% of the world population, should be considered, by virtue of their transient, nomadic, and eminently post-modern condition, as the socio-political and politico-ideological avant-garde of the millenium. Hence, the project consists of a supra-territorial state, provisionnaly situated, yet permanently located on the Internet, which is multi-everything you can think of. Since Ingo Guenther has also registered this project as a corporation in the US State of Nevada, this is a commercial venture, which might well pay out dividend to its 50 million shareholders (equivalent to the number of refugees world-wide). Indeed, the projects take an extremely positive view of the refugee situation, taking displaced persons as an asset, an untapped resource that would promise rich return for those smart enough to exploit it - and this would be, preferably, refugees themselves, that is their representatives of the Refugee Republic, whose symbol is appropriately the same -RR- as the famous car-make from Coventry. Guenther has already gone quite a long way in providing this supra-national and for the moment virtual set-up with all the paraphernalia of a (quasi-) sovereign state, including passport and currency design, landmaps, connections, etc. Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, the audience did not take with a lot of enthusiam to this utopian project. While moderator Kathy Rae Huffman did her best to project the initiative from an 'art' point of view, while trying at the same time to maneuver through the (harsh) 'practical critique', referent Rob van Essen from the Rijnmond Refugee Platform put forward a large number of very practical questions about the viability of the concept in the real world, most of which being subsumable under the the near total non-homogeinity of refugee populations, even in the case they hail from the same country or region. The refugees in the audience (whose status entitled them to a free ticket) were even less pleased with this project, and put forward a lot of objections, not all of them positive in their approach. In fact, we witnessed a fairly exemplary clash of cultures and of values, not so much between refugees and do-gooders, but between the more upbeat, business-oriented trans-atlantic culture and the more pessimist approach of the "old countries". To me, it was clear that the RR-project is so attractive as to make one choose for the refugee status would it come into being. This is on the other hand the surest guarantee that it will be rejected by an - overwhelming? - majority of the people whom it is supposed to address. I think on should view the RR project much more as a contemporary utopia, in the line of eg the bolo'bolo concept (Ingo Guenther's RR has uncanny ressemblances with PM's "Amberland, BTW), than as a concrete solution to the plight of the real existing refugees. It may be appropriate, since the commercialisation of the Internet threatens to make many of its current and activist denizens net-refugees. Rendez-vous in the Refugee Republic then? (check it out on the n5m website!) The RR has been given "country" status by the organizers of the Internet World Fair. Ingo Guenther comes to Amsterdam on Sunday, Paradiso Hall, 15:00-17:00 ("new impulses for a translocal culture")

Patrice Riemens (patrice@xs4all.nl)