Eric Souêtre


The Suez Canal Project
1999

TOURNESOL : TURN TOWARDS THE SUN.

Once a year, my family and I visit a local festival at Little Venice in west London. Little Venice, is a small enclave that is built around the Great Western canal as it cuts across London. Once this canal, alongside the many other disused canals in Britain, existed as an important route for the transport of goods and people, but, today it is much reduced as a waterway and functions as a tourist trap of old London, a slice of English history. Like so many such inventions within the capitals of Europe, the old routes and old ways are no longer important but are treated as leisurely and regenerated leisure sites for tourism, the twentieth century cashcrop industry. The canal festival provides yet another use for dysfunctional arenas of trade in one of the foremost expansionist countries in Europe.
Everywhere one turns regeneration seems to be afoot, old docks turned into music arenas, old depots into museums, waterfronts into yachting bays, the list is endless.

In opposition to this decline and celebratory rejuvenation of the past there remains an incongruous steep growth of other canals.
The dependence of such important shipping lanes as the Suez canal or the Panama canal is increasingly surpassing their original and ambitious desires. Such places are no longer economically viable in the late twentieth cen-tury; their current use has far superseded their original designs. They all face long overdue expansionist programmes that are vehemently supported by major trading empires and multinationals. The future is big, with a capital B. Plans are afoot to create deeper, wider, stronger and ultimately grander schemes for the majority of overused waterways and airways. The Suez canal is ultimately part of this super officious scheme.

Its relatively short life in existence has proved to be invaluable in global economics and trade. The Suez is worth its weight in gold, albeit the black gold. Black gold, or oil as it is commonly known, is 'forced' through the canal at a phenomenal rate. The figures remain as abstract mathematics to the lay-men, but without it Jack and Jill would ultimately be unable to function let alone be able to leave their immediate neighbourhood.

The importance of transportation is ultimately one of the most generally ignored. Relaxed views are only shaken by the ridiculousness of the situation in times of war or suppression of their needs at times of crisis. People always remember the Gulf war for the sheer carnage to oil fields as fortunes were spilled in the wake of the withdrawal of the Iraqi troops from Kuwait or for the spillage that endangered millions of local birds and fishes in nearby shores. News items on national television channels always began their reportage with the continuous and relentless burning gas as well as the darkened fields of pipelines gushing out precious oil. The source to fire boilers, run cars and exist in normality for the world as we know it, was bleeding. Yet, today about a decade later, we feel secure in the knowledge that everything has been taken care of, the various dictatorial muscle flexing has been played out; control has been reasserted in the region, the canals, the pipelines and the precious black oil is secured- in an economic and political agreement on our behalf, for our well being and our security.

Yet, little is investigated or reported on the importance of the region as a life source or its history as a centre. In comparison a great deal is known by the other great economic power wielder- silicon valley or its current king, Bill Gates. Maybe it is sexier to be associated with new technology, or is it the sheer fact of the geopolitical position from which this centre is crea-ted. The Suez region unfortunately for Europe / America is on the wrong side of the Mediterranean, it is too near Africa and close to Asia. The Suez allows but can also disallow. This is a worrying situation, a situation that enabled its early inception but also one which can create a bottleneck. The need to control and subjugate the region and ultimate access to the world outside of Europe has been fraught. The mystery of the region is further exacerbated by the alliance of fighting nations, their subversive activities creating a suppressive metaregion. The Suez, after all, forms a natural extension of a boundary between warring countries, but these have fought the shortest wars in the history of war and created the strongest agreements in the history of geographical and economic agreements.

Yet, with all of these conditions very little is known of its "ins" and "outs”.








Key moments of how all this has come about is as allusive as the secrets of ancient Egyptian history. An empire without a history is surely an invaluable area of research for an inquiring mind such as Eric Souêtre. Souêtre, a trained clinical psychiatrist and practising artist has brought it on himself to reveal through the process of research and fact finding the events and position of this key place and space in human civilisation. His inquiry, unlike most artists, is not entirely based on visual encounters with the subject. The visual reconfiguration plays a vital part in his disser-tation, but the bulk of his discourse lies in the research process. This process can be viewed is to have an educative function, but that in itself could be viewed as a simple argu-ment; what Souêtre provides is a partial contextualisation of the matters and facts that he has unearthed. The problem with his methodology within a fine art discourse, remains with the fact that such ruminations are viewed scep-tically by the audience. The presentation of such a wide variety of documentation and research that treads far a field as the historical to the engineering feats accompanied by the visual re-interpretation of this material in the form of image manipulation creates a blockage. A plethora that begs for the simple recantation of the obvious or the reinstatement of the material in contemporary cultural bites.

Yet regardless of the trends and staving off current forces operating as fine art paradigms, Souêtre has continued with his research and produced a concrete if not extensive series of works. The works exist in a number of accessible sources that include a web site with a virtual gallery/background information site; a series of large photographic prints from original photographs from his field trip (treated and manipulated on computer programmes to resemble paintings) and finally this publication.

Is this duplication? Or outputs that would be generated by the weight of such intense research ! I would like to think it is a mixture of the three, in as much that the variety of possible ways for artists or researchers to share their finding has incorporated the world wide web as an essential source to disseminate their findings.

The normative and traditional exhibition format is a hard if not difficult method to negate if one is to function as an artist, and possibly helps this work to functions within the hierarchy of how art is viewed and accepted even at the dawn of the millennium. The last output- the publication can be viewed as celebration or longevity of any research; the book/ publication states the importance and worthiness of a methodological result. The three assets or aspects of the project form a whole; the various formats are necessary products of such enduring and insatiable fin-dings- this worthiness is partly constructed by the belief of the author but ultimately the test of this research lies with the audience.

How is the audience to react to the work?

The use of text in fine art can be argued to be comparable to the use of drawing as a nota-tion, a mapping of the subject. Drawing, traditionally formed the skein from which paintings were attempted, drawings provided the visual skeleton from which paint provided form and depth. In many early cartoons by the Renaissance artists such as Michaelangelo, one finds traces of text or text incorporated within the cartoons as informative, instructive tags. Within the history of contemporary art one can gauge a move towards the use of text as drawing or conceptually as the subject itself. Art and Language a British artists group used text as matter, Lawrence Wiener and On Kawara constructed paintings purely by the use of graphic/ text on monochrome surfaces.

Similarly Cy Twombly and Jean Michel Basquiat incorporated elements of their lifestyles and environments as key passages in their work; Jo Spence and Tracey Emin create a symbiotic relationship between their experiences, backgrounds and philosophy as a collage of ideas. But for Souêtre the Suez project is "linked to work by Willie Doherty (commenting on Northern Ireland), Krzysztof Wodiszko (on homelessness) and to some extent to Alan Sekula (fish story)." 

The interlinked series of information, text, manipulated imagery and the catalogue of history can be negotiated as inter supportive elements in subverting the political and the purely economic interests of Souêtre's initial research. It forms a model or a basis to view the intensity of regional communities, the monopoly of coloniality. But interestingly, Souêtre presents this through a toughened distance; from all this trawled information added to the personal experiences as a seaman in the region one can expect a polarised if not a didactic intervention. But his cool evocation of the power games, the separation into distinct outputs (catalogue, internet site and visual images) as well the sheer maintenance of a position similar to the anthropologist involved in field research can prevent this work commanding the warm support of its audience.

But more importantly, the work can operate as a "social and economic amplification of the power of western civilisation" not a "personal aggrandisement" of seeking the truth in ontological puzzle solving. In many ways the grand design of this work implores audiences rather then an audience. Its target audience might be enlivened by the use of pathological research methods, the geek surfer or academician or finally the art goers who encounters spectres of the work in the gallery. This is part of the battle fought in postmodernism, of ruthless representation and a persistent gaze to exhaust and consume the subject. It can function as an important trigger to access unknown places and spaces, of histories in consistently war torn territories but vice versa it can also provide a coherent plan to further subdue and manage the orient. Of another "western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority of the orient". The fact that the work so far has not heeded Michel Foucaults concept on discourse "the linguistic apparatus through which the articulation of knowledge becomes an expression of power" creates a abundant of problems. On the other hand one has to allow this contra* dictory and complex cultural production to emerge, for artists to make history, to present critical spaces and records, for the audience to encounter multiple dialogues and locations that embodies the producer as an active agent and the spectator as a cosmopolitan negotiator.





Souêtre's restless interrogation of breached boundaries, super tankers, deserted shore-lines, piled containers, culture moments in Egyptian history, like the History channel on cable TV speaks of the "use of a narrative dis-course" it "is also consistent with his strong interest in the scientific approach of history and of his analysis of painters addressing historical perspectives (David, Courbet) as well as socio-political issues (Monory)." 

It will be interesting as the project and its components emerge into the public domain which of the audiences will be the most enthusiastic. If history is about looking at the development of the economy, the superiority of infrastructures and production, then Souêtre is presenting us with an important picture by blocking the traditional views of North Africa and Egypt as pre industrial static regions. Here we see the full blown effects of industrial, developed mobile eco-nomy, busy with growth and betterment. This redescription and methodological cultural resistance provides an invaluable frame, providing values and axioms of a civilisation that remains enduringly relevant and challenging all of received and museumified assumptions. As Romesh Gunseskera writes "I was learning that human history is always a story of somebody's diaspora : a struggle between those who expel, repel or curtail-possess, divide and rule- and those who keep the flame alive from night to night, mouth to mouth, enlarging the world with each flick of the tongue."