Storms, Lies, and Silence: Notes towards a Non-Dialogic Mode of Intercultural Contact

Abstract

Sitting on the floor of a Phnom Penh studio, the conversation stumbling in a no-mans-land between English and Khmer, Punisa and I both trying to “make ourselves understood,” and enthusiastically claiming to understand the other. So caught up in this urge to communicate that we did not recognize that our attempts at understanding were creating a barrier. Failing to understand that there was something of value here beyond understanding.

The observations contained within this paper emerge from my own experience as the director of Incidental, an interdisciplinary organization that has spent the last seven years working on cultural projects that combine aspects of experimental sound, new media, community activism, and participatory artwork. Although diverse in format, these projects share a commitment to explore forms of creativity that are either ignored or sidelined within more traditional gallery-based art exhibitions, installations, and performances. This work has taken place in a range of geographies and contexts—including documentary sound projects in Manila City (Philippines) and Manchester’s Moss Side (UK), artistic interventions within deprived community housing projects in Phnom Pehn and participatory new media work in the South Wales valleys and the Lower East Side of Manhattan (USA).

This paper is not written by an academic theorist or researcher, but by a practitioner with more than a passing interest in both direct experience of and theoretical approaches to participation and collaboration. Accordingly the chapter does not seek to develop a finished conceptual model or framework, but rather to document the process of my own thinking as it has evolved in response to the experience of particular projects. In particular, it focuses upon my own experiences of the frictions within and resistances to dialogue-based models of intercultural projects. To begin, I seek to consider in some detail the assumptions contained within the phrase “intercultural dialogue,” and to question the extent to which intercultural contact must be conceived as a process of dialogue. I then go on to explore how the complex assumptions within this phrase are manifested within the arts, before exploring how we might conceptualize forms of intercultural creative experience that resist conventional models of communicative exchange.