Journalisms -- Susan and Steven -- 16 Things to be done (Part 2: #9-16) September 26, 2003 ------------------------------------------------------ "Journalisms:" or "Our Correspondent:" or "?" The title and mission of this collective project is a work in progress. But the general...

(Note: the second block (9-16) will be sent on September 19th, 2003.

16 Things to be Done works with the current archive of the What is to be Done? project by Susan Kelly and Stephen Morton, which was presented in the Spring of 2003 at the Lenin Museum in Tampere, Finland. What is to be Done? is an ongoing archive of responses to Lenin’s original question, re-posed 100 years after Lenin’s original book. It continues on the Lenin Museum web-site and will travel and accumulate at the Krasnoyarsk Museum Biennale in Siberia (September 2003), and other future locations to be confirmed.

A selection of 16 archived responses from Susan Kelly and Stephen Morton’s project "What is to be Done?" will be sent out as a pair of emails, eight responses each, and starting two weeks before our First International Lunchtime Summit - through the 16Beaver Journalisms e-mail list in New York, and the list of international lunch participants. The responses will also be available in print during the exhibitions "Get Rid of Yourself" at ACC Gallery, Weimar/Leipzig (July-October, 2003) and "24/7" at the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, Lithuania (September-October, 2003). In addition, response cards will be left in each space for further answers, thoughts and ideas to be added to the archive.

Diary of Vilnius: Day 1.

Airport

I arrive at the airport via Helsinki and outside of being one of the closest airports to the center of a city, there is not much to comment on. But it is day one, and I am excited to write, so I will try.

Raimundas (Malasauskas + Kestutis Kuizinas = curators of the 24/7 exhibition) picks me up, we enter a cab that is deeply reminiscent of Yerevan. I would like to say that it is the make of the cars, but most of the cars are newish european cars. So no Soveit style Ladas in sight yet, our’s is a refreshingly old Audi. So my guess is that this link to Armenia is largely by smell, something about the way the cigarette smoke enters the seams of car seats maybe, or just the volume of cigarettes smoked.

And quite possibly the link I am making is beyond smell, maybe it is in the seams, or wrinkles, in understanding, in passing, in time, our driver seems hardened by them, his hair a greasy graying blonde, this is not his time, his system, it matters little what I say or think, we drive, blip blip, but history has its way with us, as we with it, with time, with wrinkles.

A glance left and right, we are in the center of town, we are at the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius.

Thursday, August 22, 02

I struggled to concentrate during the brief Beirut meeting with Lamia, because I was preoccupied with how I would enter Syria. Did I need a visa or not? Would the Syrian border official find out that I had actually come from Jerusalem? What would happen if he did? How could I possibly cross the borders without arousing suspicion?

I asked friends in Beirut their opinion of how risky it would be to just take a taxi to Damascus. Most of them discouraged me unequivocally, some warning me of the consequences should I get caught. Eventually it occurred to me: I am an American citizen after all; why not call the U.S. embassy in Beirut and get official information as to the realities of, and rumors about, travel to Syria. I was told that I did indeed need a visa to Syria, but that there was no way for me to obtain one in Beirut. Why? because there is no Syrian embassy in Lebanon (there would appear to be no need for one). This meant I had to fly to a nearby neutral country such as Cyprus, and apply for a Syrian visa from there. But going to Limasol and waiting for a visa to be issued there was a risk I could not afford, especially since there was no guarantee that this would ever actually happen.