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The fragility of human sense and communicating context lies at the heart of Ivana Keser's work, whether it is of metaphysical, political, social, or poetic reflection. She contributes a distinct form of performance interaction through the appropriation of the newspaper form. Where others might be tempted towards subverting the medium Keser bypasses this rather obvious game by engaging with the recycling nature of the media - stories, news, incidents – to deftly and playfully reaffirm our place in the cyclical rhythm of existence.
Producing newspapers as art works moves activity beyond the currency of object-hood and imbues the reader/audience with a very private and meditative communion with the artist. She also employs locally produced newspapers in Installations.

Along with Tomislav Gotovac she was a participant in Aleksandar Ilic's 10-year performance project 'Weekend Art: Hallelujah the Hill'. Keser and Ilic organise the Zagreb-based open project 'Community Art': a permament process of examining through a range of activities different phenomena of existence /co-existence / resistance / educations.

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Ivana Keser, Local-Global newspapers, Rotterdam, 1996

LOCAL - GLOBAL

The future is doubtless the most expensive luxury. The thought of it gives rise to the group therapy of gathering, selecting and promulgating global values. In the veritable epidemic of life, with a population of five billion people on Earth, more people are living on the margins than in the centre. What all maps have in common is featurelessness. They show neither margins nor centres, because a map is not a territory. If there is a group of several thousand to several million people speaking a specific language, recalling the same figures from the past, the same names which they still use, and if they call one another barbarians, boors or yokels, and if they use the calendar backwards, and if they feel safe only when they are constantly expanding, then we are certainly dealing with a nation. Life follows the same patterns everywhere; the centre is where one is standing, and the margins are all around it. News readers do not spare their listeners and announce the "local" on all sides. Looking at it from this viewpoint, one cannot imagine any other dimension of reading the Earth. Issues are explicitly divided into local and global ones, but in reality there are only local issues, and the global is simply a consequence. Here is an obvious example: was it not the case that in one of the larger industrial margins, in the pathless expanses of Arizona, someone was solving his local problem by creating a new space to live in? Since then all the inhabitants of the Earth, even those on the opposite side of the globe, have been protagonists of the global; they are dealing with "somebody else's" local problem. Similar examples, with a different story, are those sailing the ocean on the way to China, as yet unconquered, in the shape of a ship loaded with parts of obsolete, but still workable parts of nuclear technological equipment. This kind of trade in local problems, operating on the principle of sell or fob off on someone, is part of the long-term interests which the inhabitants of the developed and underdeveloped countries are, for the first time, encountering together. This new phenomenon is called the local problem market. This market, along with all other institutions, signals a slow and sure mutation of the system. When a system is too big, it becomes ineffective, as in the example of the garbage collecting system. The global, divided community, which is becoming ever more homogenous with respect to garbage, will certainly be transformed into a new civilization of trash. This is what the present stage of the late twentieth century looks like.

A contribution to the civilization of trash

Since we have mentioned garbage, we must say what we mean by that term. True, the concept is very broad and has so far eluded definition, apart from saying that it refers to discarded or dilapidated objects which no longer serve their original purpose. Garbage, which becomes garbage when it loses its context, includes ideological and pornographic garbage, household waste, and so on. All together, this makes up the garbage of a civilization. The garbage we put into bags and leave on the doorstep is far less trashy than the garbage indiscriminately broadcast or published in the media, transmitted one-way from an individual to the public. The things and concepts that have escaped being labelled garbage and that have thus survived are called values. The hardest thing, of course, is to tell where garbage begins and where it ends. Values are generally accepted and may be inherited. Even those that are local in nature can become global when they prevail due to the support of the majority. This category includes all the talk of a one-sided respect for interculturality, which means taking everything that can be incorporated into the dominant local culture.

All estimates are based on a local perception. Having some form of the news in front of us does not mean having the truth, but having an interpretation. The truth is interpretation. The meridian decides on what is the truth, and ambiguity is part of the nature of the media.

An activist or an atavist

Most viewers or listeners cannot distinguish between an activist and an atavist. One can be both at the same time. As when armies of mobilized voyeurs sit in the grandstand rooting for their team. Voyeurs are omnipresent. There are always more onlookers than players. Enjoying another's activity is like sitting in a restaurant watching people eating, without eating yourself. In that case a game or a match is the voyeur's version of a fight, and he is a passive activist. The ultimate violent game is war. It resembles soccer, although no-one protests against soccer. There are fans and the war theatre. War as a genre is a 24-hour screening of a horror film free of charge, and is based on a permanent feeling of persecution. War can easily be reduced to a micro phenomenon. It can easily be localized. Because of its global - macro extent, literary voyeurism is somewhat more uncouth. How can one describe a crime without committing a crime, either in thought, or by reconstructing the possible, or by retelling what exists. The Bible, too, is full of crimes, and imbues the writer of classical pieces with the power to deal with crimes in books. The only defence for the mental staging and projecting of violence is an explanation of the context. In that case, violence is justified only if it serves an educational purpose. However, in practice it looks like this: the death penalty is a warning to others. Although the most widely read news are always stage-managed stories about violence, they are there to point out drastic examples. No-one sees events in the same order, and the natural selection arising from the recording of saints and criminals is conducive to today's civilization of garbage. After the historical screening, only the best and the worst remain. Everyday life has been swept away. History does not create on purpose. There is a formula according to which dates and places change, but the same events keep repeating themselves. Movement seems to be everything, and the goal is nothing. But there is the intuition according to which the main protagonists decide on the day of their appearance. Every tyrant, as well as every righteous person, has always known when it was time for a lottery, and when for Russian roulette. And it seems that nature has taken care to arrange today's course of events. They say nature protects species and sacrifices individuals. But nature does not take care of anything. There is only need. Neither does the species, especially the human species, take care of itself. It is only the individual who takes care of him or herself. Thus history is reduced to the sum of local stories. These differ in their precepts in nations and countries with 3.10 or 200 million inhabitants. Nations differ in the extent to which they are imperilled. While some have a nationality, others have a psychosis. All local issues may be classified into those concerning race, class and sexuality. That is what art deals with today: the planetary dimension with regional consequences: the sum of local frustrations. This social dimension is not something new; it has simply prevailed over the visual, together with which it made up the art of preceding centuries. Since the stage of abstraction was adopted in the early 20th century, what is now required of the individual is that he or she should not be passive, that he should not repeat to others, "You are the potter, I am the clay," but that he or she should take part in raising, understanding, and solving local issues, since, as has already been mentioned, there are always and only local issues, and global issues are the product of local ones.

An excuse for the future

The 20th century is the century of the impatient and the hyperactive. People tried everything in a seemingly short period of time: flying and walking on the moon. Leaders fell, nations grew and empires collapsed. In periods in which destruction was always more effective than construction, an Edison or a Tesla would spring up from time to time, discovering a thread to give light to the dark decades. Due to the dense population of the Earth, even local problems came together. Progress as a whole still looks uncertain. The inventor, who has a humane goal, is usually exposed to misuse, so that his name may be ingloriously and naively crowned with the laurel wreath of the "Winner in the race of fools". He will be the last to control his idea. The average person, the heir to the inventor's idea, yoked to ideas, will climb the stairs of progress, which lead to the abyss. Before falling in, the same person will not know whether the idea was there for his sake or whether he was there for the sake of the idea.