‘A person’s identity is not a patchwork, but a drawing on a tightly-stretched skin: only one part has to be touched for the whole person to vibrate with it.’

Amin Maalouf

1.
Faced with a turbulent world where a huge number of extremely serious problems are crying out for resolution, many of today’s artists are looking for ways of expressing their concern for and their sense of responsibility towards the world. They wonder how they can make a social commitment without giving up their artistic independence – the freedom essential for creating art. They want to play a part in society’s debate; a part that does not presuppose ‘putting themselves at the service’ of politics, but rather ‘appropriating’ this politics. Charles Esche, director of the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven, came up with the term ‘committed independence’ to describe this (see Erwin Jans in Etcetera, no. 119). In 1924, to describe this process of ‘appropriating the world’, the Swiss painter Paul Klee took a metaphor from nature. In his lecture Über die moderne Kunst he described the artist as the trunk of a tree. Through his network of roots spread out below ground he sucks in the world, letting all these impressions flow through himself like a filter or a conductor and then enabling this to develop into a complex of branches and a canopy of leaves: a uniting crown, that we call a work of art. The political element is worked, moulded and filtered until it has changed into an artistic building block, until it transforms into an essential, vital part of the dramaturgy of the artistic project itself.

2.
‘Multiculturalism is an exceptionally powerful presence in countries with a colonial history, where the post-colonial intelligentsia felt guilty as soon as they had anything to do with the non-Western world’. On a world scale, this sense of guilt, as described by Ian Buruma (in Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents) is one of the flywheels that keep the mechanism of development aid turning and it certainly applies to our relations with the former Belgian colony, the Congo. This feeling of guilt and the money paid in the hope of one day being delivered from it, make it very difficult or even impossible for Western and non-Western and/or ex-colonial partners to enter into ‘normal relations’. In the project Blue Key Identity – Part1 – Common Ground, the theatre-maker and film-maker Ernst Maréchal sought a way of getting out of this problem: ‘I was looking for more responsibility, for reciprocity’. The background to Blue Key Identity lies in the Table Kitchen by Globe Aroma (originating in 2008) and the Made in Belgium performance (2009), two projects that Ernst Maréchal developed in the last few years with residents of the ‘Klein Kasteeltje’. Through the Table Kitchen he got to know the Congolese Bhelly Bompolonga and the Syrian Daïf Preshini, two political refugees who arrived in Belgium in 2008 and 2009 respectively and are now both officially recognised as refugees. Bhelly currently lives in Sint Gillis and is a singer-songwriter. Daïf settled in Ghent, is a graphic artist and cartoonist and was recently accepted as a student by the KASK. Ernst’s friendship with Bhelly and Daïf, which has grown closer over the years, became the driving force behind and the motivation for the production of Blue Key Identity. Since, as political refugees, Bhelly and Daïf can no longer return to their native countries (they would immediately be arrested), Ernst offered to visit their families and to convey messages from their ‘lost’ son, brother, nephew, friend… When he returned to Belgium he was then able to cheer up his friends with a series of messages from their home countries. As he himself put it: ‘In this way I was able to make use of my privileged position as a Western tourist. After all, I am able to go and to be where I want.’ So Ernst became a courier, a go-between, the bearer of messages: the goods he carried were largely invisible, but very precious.

3.
The story of Ernst’s two trips (to Kinshasa in June and July 2010 and to Aleppo in August 2010), the filmed messages, the conversations on Skype and other virtual media between Kinshasa, Aleppo, Brussels and Ghent, the story of the two men’s flight and Daïf’s cartoons, Bhelly’s lyrics, music and singing, the festivities for the 50th anniversary of independence in Kinshasa and the 21st July celebrations in Brussels, the political discourse on the issues of refugees, multiculturalism, and the relationship between two sons and their mothers, with Ernst as a ‘surrogate son’ in between: all this and a lot more are touched upon in Blue Key Identity. Together with Ernst, the two artists, Bhelly and Daïf, have to been able to continue developing their talent by working on this production. From the very start it was clear to Ernst Maréchal that he wanted to use ‘Blue Key’ in this project. This is a film technique whereby an object or figure is filmed against a blue background. In the second stage, the blue background is made transparent using computer software so that another background can be put in its place. Using this technique Ernst literally transports Bhelly and Daïf into the pictures he filmed in Kinshasa and Aleppo and he also literally lets them hold a conversation with their friends and family who are actually so far away. In this way the ‘lost sons’ can ‘come home’ for a while. These confrontations, repeated over and over again in the rehearsals, generated a great deal of emotion. The fact that Bhelly and Daïf allow us, the audience, to witness these intimate moments with their loved ones is only possible because of the trust they have in Ernst, thanks to the feelings of friendship they have for him. We the audience can only accept this gift with great diffidence and abundant respect. The technique produces such convincing results that during the rehearsals Daïf received complaints from his family that he ‘phoned them less often than in the past’. The reason for this was that in rehearsal he spent several hours in their presence every day, albeit in a virtual sense.

4.
Although Ernst is the messenger, a character, a man who reports on what he has seen and heard, he nevertheless remains invisible. He acts in the first place as a ‘medium’, a transmitter. It’s true that it was he who shot the film in the Congo and Syria, but he did so more as a ‘disembodied eye’: ‘I am an eye. A mechanical eye. I, the machine, am showing you the world. (Dziga Vertov). His subjectivity is not only affected and distorted by the camera, but is also directed by Daïf and Bhelly. The routes that Ernst took in Kinshasa and Aleppo were drawn out and prepared in advance with Bhelly and Daïf in Brussels and Ghent. Ernst is the eye, but the camera is in part directed by two pairs of remote, invisible hands.

5.
The issue of the migrant and the multicultural society is again a hot topic. In recent statements the German chancellor Angela Merkel declared that the project to build a multicultural society had failed. Our provisional prime minister, Yves Leterme, was quick to endorse this observation. This project was doomed to failure because it is based on premises that do not correspond with reality. A choice was made, based on the desire to avoid discrimination, to go to the opposite extreme: integration. On this point, Edward Said wrote: I think that the real problem today is that there’s no mediation between these two extremes. Either there’s homogenization or there is xenophobia, but not the ‘sense of exchange’. Attempts to develop a multicultural society will continue to fail as long as we:
- continue to opt for a form of ‘purity’ and against this ‘sense of exchange’.
- do not understand that a migrant leads a double life: the old and the new. This double identity is his everyday reality, the destiny he cannot escape. It is precisely this reality that the far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders denies and considers ‘unacceptable’ when he expresses his opposition to ‘double nationality’.
- here, do not understand that the arrival of all these foreigners in our cities also inevitably changes our own lives and makes them more complex. It is more difficult to grasp this world. Analysing it and making it manageable requires a greater effort, more time, and greater patience.

There are lots of people of good will, among both the indigenous people and the immigrants, but ‘good will’ alone is not enough. An attitude based on ‘the difference’ and which then asks the question ‘what do we have in common?’ has a greater chance of success than the idealistic premise of ‘all people are equal’. People are equal but are very different. This is the reality. In the lives of ‘the others’, such as Bhelly and Daïf, we will recognise certain things but will not understand others at all. Take for example the sorrow of the mothers who miss their sons: this would seem to be something common to all cultures, but it is certainly not expressed in the same way everywhere. The question ‘what do we have in common?’ becomes even more difficult and complex when we leave the realm of personal and family relationships and enter that of morality, identity, language, religion, politics and so on. And yet this question does have to be asked at every level: in the microcosm and the macrocosm, at the level of the individual identity and that of the social, ethnic, religious and political community and collectivity. Because we are always, simultaneously, both alone and together: ‘just as the strings of a lute are alone, even though the same music vibrates in them all.’ (Khalil Gibran)