7.1 On the production of The Chorus of Begging and The Chorus of Giving

In the winter of 2012 Leif Eriksson called me – he is a teacher and researcher at The School of Global Studies at the University of Gothenburg and, I later realize, a key figure when it comes to those who beg in Gothenburg. He had heard me on the radio and we ended up talking about an economy that is becoming increasingly clear in the encounter with the people who are begging on the streets, an economy built on inequality, which we agree is not acceptable. We talked about exchange rather than to help. How might this work?

Two months later we meet in Gothenburg, he drives me around and tells me how he’s been spending his spare time the last six months.⁴⁾The conversation was recorded and transcribed. Leif Eriksson has read this text and it is published here with his permission. We get out of the car at Hjalmar Brantingsplatsen and he shows me a hole in the concrete under the bridge by Hjalmar Brantingsgatan. He says:

– I got angry. In November I taught an M.A. class on social exclusion in which we among other things looked at homelessness and the processes that are taking place in Gothenburg in relation to the global system. We had homeless people come to the class and tell their stories. One thing led to another and some time in late November when it got very cold I had enough. I’ve arranged a number of campers and parking permits for a group of EU mobile people who’ve come here. I work half time, so this is something I do in my spare time. They pay for the campers, I buy them and handle the paperwork here in Sweden.⁵⁾“Givandets och tiggandets kör”, Tendens kortdokumentärer, Sveriges Radio P1, August 19, 2014. Accessed April 13, 2016, www.sverigesradio.se/sida/avsnitt/417601?programid=3381. Recently Leif has also started an organization through which those who beg can find work.⁶⁾“Ej Tiggare”, Accessed April 13, 2016, www.ejtiggare.se.

Three months later and a few weeks before recruiting The Chorus of Begging (May 2014) I meet Leif again. I’ve asked to see him because I want his response and support. But before this I’ve described my idea to several others, Aaron Israelsson, editor-in-chief at Faktum, among them. Aaron tells me that they hire as many of the EU mobile people who beg as possible on the condition that they take a Swedish course, and that there’s a long wait list. Aaron listens to my idea and doesn’t protest, but I can’t tell how he feels about it. I hope I’m not on the wrong path I think, a bit nervous about what Leif is about to say. I am going to ask him to help me recruit singers for the chorus.

When we meet Leif is quiet for a long time, he just sits and listens. As I talk, his body language conveys skepticism. I say that art is another way of expressing the sensual and that the political is also based in the sensual, in people’s emotions and reactions. I give him my view of the interaction between those who beg and those who give or choose not to give. I tell him that I think that this kind of artwork can illuminate a dimension of the ongoing drama. The givers’ feelings are heard and noticed, only very few people who beg have been given space in the media and they haven’t expressed their feelings as strongly as the givers, nor have they done so in my interviews. The givers appear to be having a constant internal conflict, and in the cases where no deeper reflection happens, it’s just isolated incidents that lose meaning and the problem is shunted onto those who beg and onto their home countries. Why is there not more interest in finding out why the givers have such strong feelings? I say that I think the system has made its way into our bodies somehow, that people’s emotions constitute a playing field for the market of selling goods and services. That’s not news to be sure, that’s what a market researcher does for a living. But what happens if the givers’ feelings end up in the hands of strategic party platforms? Or what happens if the situation becomes “normalized”, becomes a part of a social body politic and accepted as the status quo. I notice my own basic understanding of equality losing touch with the reality on the street. A kind of violence is becoming commonplace.

– Leif, I understand that you’re outraged. You to want to try to see what the possible paths to action are between you as a giver and the person who begs. One can learn a lot from drama. The palpable and physically sensual experience in the encounters between the begging and the giving penetrates deeply into people’s logic, intuition, and political ideology.

In the end Leif Eriksson answers:

– Here’s what I think. For those of us who grow up never having to face acute problems of vulnerability, even if one has good intentions – as the people who want to ban giving have – one has to remind oneself that one doesn’t know what the fallout might be of this kind of art project. The key question is: What is their compensation for this kind of work?

– One hundred kronor an hour, which is what I’m paid after taxes.

– It wasn’t obvious to me that you were going to pay them. Then that’s an entirely different matter to me, you’re giving something immediate in return. This will take time, which is in short supply for many of them since they need to beg in various ways in order to make money during the daytime. They have very little spare time and in the time they have they might need to for instance take a course in Swedish for immigrants. ☞

Leif and I decided to meet the next evening on Götaplatsen and drive to the three campers on Hisingen. Those who beg work long days and don’t get home until eight or nine. The first time I met them – also with Leif and with Carmen Condruz as interpreter – they asked why I didn’t want to come to their homes and film their lives and living conditions, or why I don’t create a forum where they can talk to Swedes. I told them that I’d been to Romania to meet others as well and that I’d done an interview film with other people who beg on the street and that the type of forum I’d like to create is a space in which giving and begging people can have a task in common and create together.

Jenny Roos and Pär Hagström were choir directors, they planned the exercises and led the training. We wanted to leave room for dissonance – the non-euphonic, cacophonous – and for the participants to be able to use their voice for expressions that don’t usually count as song.¹⁰⁾Martin Rössel, musician and producer, who has put the song of the choruses on Spotify describes it as: “They aren’t singing straight-forward tones, but atonal clusters. This breaks up the sense of a tonality to a unified sound.” Danish choir director and pianist Torben Eskildsen writes “This reminds me and has me associating to Gerlesborg, where I in the early ’80s participated in a number of vocal improvisations, where we did ‘types of noises’/‘noise collages’ with composer Svend-David Sandström. We used cluster chords, harmonies of closely spaced tones, whose tonal value is determined by among other things the density and location. On keyboard instruments clusters were carried out by striking a specific section of keys with the palm of a hand, forearm or the like.” In the introductory letter I wrote: “We work with one mood at a time and will voice variations on feelings. The choir director aligns us. To free our voice and explore our voice potential we do physical exercises together. The goal is to sing our feelings – feelings that exist or that could exist in the encounter with the person who begs and the person who gives – together with others.” All chorus participants had been prepared for the task to voice – sing – feelings in their own chorus, which in turn sings in dialogue with the other chorus. They understood that training would be needed, but not how it would work.

One of the voice exercises used concrete situations as a prompt: stories of longing for one’s children in Romania, of being spat on, of a loved one dying. Jenny and Pär then guided the participants in finding a sound, a tone, and a short melody, a call or another way of expressing their emotion and repeating this word mechanically. At 12:20 minutes into the film, “mechanical voice improvisation”, Jenny explains: “I will give you a theme based on a feeling – that we’ll talk a bit about first – then one finds a sound that one repeats and together that becomes a song. It’s important that you keep it mechanical. It shouldn’t be a song that you create yourself, but a small sound, a part of a larger whole.” Jenny continues using an example in which they begin singing their sound to a certain rhythm.

When each person one-by-one – led by a rhythm – repeated their sounds mechanically it became a choir. A choir of individual sounds that originated in a personal association to the same feeling, they were expressing a mood.

Another exercise was “call and response” where Jenny or Pär made a sound, a call, and the participants answered. That was to practice jamming with the other chorus. The production film also shows focus exercises to relax the entire body and feel how the body is a “resonance box” for the voice.

Then in the choir lineup they got to connect their own experiences with the mood that was given to the entire chorus. Jenny and Pär drew the participants’ attention to silence as a choice that might help one listen better, focus on what one is doing is transmitted through the gaze, one can close one’s eyes or notice someone in the other chorus.

The Chorus of Begging and The Chorus of Giving underwent the same training. They were even filmed during the exercises, which prevented the situation from becoming too therapeutic. They had a constant listener – “the viewer” was present. After each exercise there was a choir lineup in which the individual feelings would be expressed as a collective chorus on the podiums. The choir lineup contrasted markedly with the more physically active exercises.

In this way the staging of the choral arrangement is based on real events and the personal voice of each participant in relation to the act of giving and begging.¹¹⁾Merete Mazzarella writes: “Phenomenologist Sara Ahmed wants to view emotions as movement – in space, between individuals, groups, and objects – definitely not as something that is, that exists inside people, but rather as something that’s done and becomes actions, in interaction with and dependent on other people.”
——Merete Mazzarella, “Emotioner kan väcka heta känslor”, Svenska Dagbladet, October 17, 2011. Accessed April 22, 2016, www.svd.se/kultur/understrecket/emotioner-kan-vacka-heta-kanslor_6559059.svd. ☞

At one point in the production film I tell Jenny that I’ve promised the participants they’ll understand each other. – “Wow, that’s no small promise,” she answers.

I want to clarify what I mean by that assertion. Understanding is a key concept in this work; I’ve often had the experience of thinking that I understand, but it isn’t until I understand that I don’t understand that I really start to listen and pick up on things I didn’t know before. When the frame of reference ends, when I don’t have mental images – because there are none – I listen more attentively to the person whose experience is different in order to learn something I don’t know.

Understanding can be a form of empathy; I can see myself in you and understand your feeling – your sorrow for instance – but I understand your feeling in terms of my own experience of sorrow. In the recording space the attitude was palpably empathetic. In the exercises we asked the participants to refer to their own experiences tied to various feelings or moods, sorrow among others. When someone relates sorrow to the fact that she misses her three children in Romania, I relate it to my mother dying a year ago. We both feel sorrow but our images are different.

When I said that they would understand each other I was talking about the dimension of understanding in which a tone emanates from one’s own feeling to the body of another, then resonates with this person’s feeling. I don’t think it’s possible to completely understand another person’s entirely different life conditions. I can’t truly understand someone who has to beg. But I can connect my feeling to another person’s feeling despite our different narratives. It isn’t so much about understanding What, it’s more about How.

That’s why we asked participants to draw on their own life experiences connected to their own emotions. It’s still a construction of sorts but it gets at – as Jenny puts it in the film – a more “real or true feeling” than asking them to imagine their sorrow in general. These are the memories of individual people.

To be sure there was a certain understanding in the Jacobsson Theatre during these three days. An intimacy built over time. In the more social contexts, when we ate, took breaks, drank coffee, and danced, there was a desire to make contact, a search for communication, a curiosity and a sort of attraction – a curious interest. Three interpreters were at the lunch so that everyone would be able to understand what we said to each other. A sense of community emerged between the participants in the chorus.

Pär Hagström and I decided which takes and parts of takes to use and we chose by listening – without images – to the soundtracks from the takes. Pär is a musician and served both as choir director and sound technician for this project. One take stood out from the other eight. We added parts of three other takes to it. It ended up being 7:30 minutes long. Pär edited the soundtrack and Kristina Meiton and I edited the images. When we edited the two films in the installation we did it keeping in mind that a viewer would be standing between them – at the same angle that the camera had been shooting – and not be able to see both at once.

From August 20 to September 14, 2015 six shipping containers were set up by Röda Sten in Gothenburg. The choir dialogue was shown in two of these (see image below). The containers are positioned at an angle corresponding to the positions of the choruses when they were filmed. At times the participants in the two choruses make eye contact with each other.

In a third container the production film was presented along with this text. There was also a newly written essay on giving and begging in a larger European context, “Giving in Free Movement Europe”.¹²⁾The essay had been published in Glänta No. 1 (2014) the previous week. It can now also be found at the online journal www.eurozine.com (in Swedish as well as in English). Eurozine described the text as follows in Eurozine Review: “The informal politics of distribution on the streets – begging, giving – makes visible the faults inherent to the European welfare system, writes Cecilia Parsberg. Free movement is intended to open up national borders, but when poor EU citizens make use of this freedom to travel and do what they can to make money within the framework of the law, they are met by rules and statutes that aim to prevent them from enjoying this possibility.” Cecilia Parsberg, “Giving in Free Movement Europe”, Eurozine, August 6, 2014. Accessed August 3, 2016, http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2014-08-06-parsberg-en.html. It had been reviewed by Judith Kiros “… in free movement Europe we are struggling to manage the system we’ve implemented. As Cecilia Parsberg points out in her investigation of giving and begging in Sweden and Europe – states do their utmost not to attract the ‘wrong’ intra-European migrants. The poor.”¹³⁾Judith Kiros, “Rasismen kommer uppifrån”, Dagens Nyheter, August 7, 2014. Accessed March 22, 2016, www.dn.se/kultur-noje/kulturdebatt/rasismen-kommer-uppifran.

I asked all participants for their thoughts afterward, some of them answered.

Leila: “I thought the three days went really well. The actual work was the hard part, I was exhausted. I had preconceived notions about the Givers and heard comments such as ‘Oh, now we’re going to meet the other group, how will that go?’ I thought it sounded like they thought it was difficult, but it turned out great. There was a nice warm atmosphere between the two groups; hugs, everyone cared. It has felt good afterward. Florino and I sometimes work as extras in films and have experience of other productions.”

Florino: “There atmosphere within the group was good, everyone did their best. And it was good for everyone to get paid.”

Marin tells Swedish TV program Kulturnytt: “To create some emotion was wonderful and to meet the people in this group and to meet also the Swedish people – now, we are friends – is very important for us.”¹⁴⁾Segment on the Swedish TV program Kulturnyheterna. Kulturnyheterna, SVT, August 22, 2014. Also available at: https://vimeo.com/108839080.

Maja writes: “I felt that the three days of shooting were very rewarding but also very demanding. It was galling and complex and difficult and beautiful. I still think it’s very difficult to relate to begging as a phenomenon, and to the begging people I meet on the city streets. I sense that I vacillate between recognition and shutdown when I continue to avert my eyes because I don’t have the emotional energy to engage. I don’t give often, but sometimes (here I have the impulse to justify/explain this, to write ‘I have very little money’). I’ve also spent time thinking about what responsibility I have to ‘see’ people, I don’t feel that I have a responsibility to see, meet, and take in every person I encounter, even if that’s desirable, something to aspire to, so why would I need to do that to a larger extent with the people who beg? I do think that it’s very unfortunate if I meet/take in those people less than others and there’s a risk of that. Generally I have more of a tendency to block out people who want something from me, that’s true of everyone, the people who are recruiting for Doctors Without Borders, peddlers and those who beg. I’d like to think that my view is more nuanced now, that I think more about it, question my own behavior more, my ability to be present and open in relation to this.”

Frej writes: “I’m glad I was part of it, but it was a bit embarrassing, a bit uncomfortable, awkward. I felt that you cared, so that’s not it. I wasn’t used to navigating that kind of situation. There are images and fantasies and prejudices about people who beg and when I encountered their stories I felt ashamed, in part for my own stories and my environment and in part for my stories about them. I saw them. It turned into a meeting of subjects. In the day-to-day there was a distance, I can choose if I want to give five kronor or leave, but here we were encountering one another in an ethical situation. We shared a responsibility.

They were paid and I wasn’t, but I wasn’t there to get paid. Because of that we weren’t colleagues either. We givers were middle and upper class and donated our time to an interesting project. We weren’t meeting as equals. Now I became the giver but in relation to a recipient and not to the beggar.

It was a situation that took a lot out of me. Not that you used us, that’s not how I felt, but I needed to process it afterward. I felt shame the entire time and afterward too. I still do now when I meet them on the street. Once one has looked each other in the eyes there’s a mutual responsibility. I lost a certain naiveté, an innocence. A door opened and it can’t be closed.” ☞

Catharina goes on to say: “The older woman in black, I didn’t catch her name, we were drawn to each other during one of the first breaks. We’ve identified one another as being the two oldest women here. I like that. Now we greet each other, nod and smile. She’s shy. But we take each other’s hands, hold them, and touch, and look into each other’s eyes. Hers are almost black. I ask how she likes being here at Artisten with us. “Bene,” she says, and I understand that it means the same in Romanian as it does in Italian: good. I call the interpreter so that we can talk more. The interpreter repeats my question. The woman says, haltingly: It’s so… beautiful! And I understand. It is beautiful, us being together like this. The artistic work and its framing makes this possible.”

7.2 On Symmetry and Asymmetry in The Chorus of Begging and the Chorus of Giving

Begging is a call to social interaction. Regardless of whether the giver interacts socially with the (visitor) begging on the street, the giver is implicated in the asymmetrical value system of the EU. These transactions and interactions take place between, and in opposition to, one another, which is why I have arranged the Chorus of Begging and the Chorus of Giving identically – in a symmetrical structure. The two choirs stood about five meters from each other when we shot the film and they are shown the same way – as projections opposite one another approximately five meters apart. This configuration does not become three-dimensional until the viewer steps into the space in between. The scale is calibrated so that a viewer and a member of the choir are about the same size when full body shots of the choir are shown on the screen.¹⁶⁾If conditions allow, as they did at Skövde Konsthall, Reflektera Konsthall in Väven, Umeå, at Varbergs Konsthall, and at Norrbottens Museum. When it was shown in containers there were other criteria. At street-screenings it is shown as a split-screen and the sound is the element that first reaches passers-by, after that they stop and see the projection on the wall, if they want to know more I talk to them.

The first reason for the symmetrical choral arrangement is the intention that the chorus of song would be created through interaction. “Co-presence” is a key word. On the streets, in our cities, we move in co-presence, people’s movements are an essential part of how cities function. But co-presence doesn’t necessarily mean that we interact: “Co-presence is not social in itself. In contrast, it makes up the foundation of social interaction (if we by social interaction refer to interactions in physical space – not over the phone or the Internet). And it is with social interaction that the social ‘begins’”, writes cultural geographer Sara Westin.¹⁷⁾Sara Westin, The Paradoxes of Planning, A Psycho-Analytical Perspective (Ph.D. thesis at Uppsala University 2014), (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2014), 187.

We began with such a “co-presence” and moved on to the interaction between the two choruses – choral singing is a creative endeavor between people which demands presence and togetherness from all participants, it could be said to demand exactly that from its participants which the prevailing political structure does not.

The second reason for the symmetrical arrangement is that I don’t want to depict what’s happening, I don’t want to replicate the physical gestures that play out on the street. The participants, whose bodies and gestures were shaped by the situation on the street, were guarded at the beginning, not so much when it came to singing as when it came to relating to each other. They needed training to unlearn instrumental roles and representations: to unlearn the images they had of each other. This process of unlearning also necessitated de-representation of clothes as well as positions.¹⁸⁾For more on this training see chapter 7.1 “On the Production of The Chorus of Begging and The Chorus of Giving”. (My reasoning here was the same as for my decision not to photograph those who beg, just the places where they beg – I don’t want the depiction, but the image itself.¹⁹⁾See “Places I” (chapter 3) and “Places II” (chapter 8). ) I wanted to try to make a new image emerge. My question was and remains: Is there a way for me to wriggle past the rhetoric that so easily traps me in the framework of expectation, to a place in which we do a third thing together. Is this how new images can be generated?

For the viewer of the video installation there are no clues to indicate which chorus is which. The viewers have only been told that one chorus is made up of people who usually beg on the streets and the other of people who usually give to those who beg (the participants are not asked for their ethnicity, citizenship and the like, they’re only asked about this particular activity and this action). Both choruses are arranged in the same formation.

The third reason for the symmetry is what the anthropologist Camilla Ravnbœl writes about a ten-month field study of those who beg on the streets of Copenhagen: “They see themselves as being EU-citizens […] as part of the system”.²⁰⁾“Den nya utsattheten – om EU-migranter och tiggeri”, Socialmedicinsk tidskrift, Vol. 92, No. 3, (2015), Camilla Ravnbœl, 328 and 331. Accessed May 6, 2016, http://socialmedicinsktidskrift.se/index.php/smt/issue/view/105. In the same vein Mujo Halilovic, a Ph.D. candidate at Malmö University writes that they themselves want to be seen as citizens like any other and no longer as “the others”.²¹⁾“Den nya utsattheten – om EU-migranter och tiggeri”, Socialmedicinsk tidskrift, Vol. 92, No. 3, (2015), Mujo Halilovic, 361. Accessed May 6, 2016, http://socialmedicinsktidskrift.se/index.php/smt/issue/view/105. The symmetry of the choral arrangement attempts to highlight the deficiency that is experienced on the street. The viewer is given the opportunity to confront this deficiency when they stand between the two choruses. Judith Butler claims that “a critical practice of thinking […] refuses to take for granted that framework of identitarian struggle which assumes that subjects already exist, that they occupy a common public space, and that their differences might be reconciled if only we hade the right tools for bringing them together.”²²⁾Judith Butler, “Non-Thinking in the Name of the Normative”, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable, (New York: Verso, 2009), 150. The configuration intends to suggest such tools. ☞

The viewer is invited into the space that separates them. The seemingly empty space is transformed – in front of the viewer – from glances exchanged in silence, to singing together with the other chorus. This action violates normative understandings of identity, ethnicity, nationality and subject. It’s an immaterial space. Sensuality is mediated here. A potentially sensual space lies between giving and begging.

The fifth reason is that the symmetry stages a framing. Within social frameworks norms are created for the inter-human, among others those that have to do with who deserves recognition and representation.²⁴⁾Since the designation the Roma who beg and the begging Roma are at play in the public discourse and I have personally experienced viewers using these to speak of The Chorus of Begging, I want to further emphasize that the division is not about ethnicity. For instance there are Roma participants in both The Chorus of Begging as well as The Chorus of Giving. (See further discussion in the Introduction, “Designations” as well as Chapter 5.2) To some degree giving and begging designate their respective representation and the installation with the two videos opposite each other with the viewer in the middle exemplifies this performative act.

According to the social framework in which the choral arrangement was developed, the question arose if and how I – who in this case inhabit a knowledge-producing position of power – can learn something new from the people I engage. Butler writes further:” “If certain lives are deemed worth living, protecting, and grieving and others not, then this way of differentiating lives cannot be understood as a problem of identity or even of the subject.”²⁵⁾Butler, p. 150 One way of putting it would be that both the members of the choruses as well as the viewer are invited to negotiate exchange and possible synergy with me as director. Another way of seeing it would be that a film director has simply hired them as chorus singers. Opening up that discussion is one reason why we include a screening of the production video. Author and film curator Tobias Hering writes “The viewer stands in-between. For Cecilia Parsberg ‘as a practitioner’, the concern for the in-between is a double concern: The installation The Chorus of Begging and The Chorus of Giving explores the social space around the mutually related gestures of begging and giving, while it also explores the physical space of its own agency as an installation: the sensual (sound and vision) space created for the viewer, the witness, to step in and partake in the exchange. An installation as a social space, as a way of doing things that affects the way of doing things: an ethical space.”²⁶⁾Tobias Hering, November 2014, in response to Cecilia Parsberg’s reflections in a doctoral seminar.

The symmetry makes visible the gap between the choruses and the asymmetry links them: the symmetrical and the asymmetrical make space for agency.

There is a dialogue between the Chorus of Begging and the Chorus of Giving, or a lack of dialogue between voices, facial expressions and bodies. Here the viewer stands in a liminal space between different EU-citizens, with different conditions but similar needs, with different experiences, and interests but similar feelings, with different clothes but in a similar position, with different educations but similar voice resources.

Chapter 7: Voices
Notes