The beggars themselves already are and display facts on the ground, they are committing a political action, they speak through their silence; through (performative) body language. It is passive resistance; the beggars are expressing a kind of politics of waiting, a forced demonstration. A demonstration that is about and that expresses an ongoing passive unemployment activity. A demonstration of an exclusion that makes visible how a We have excluded a Them. Their begging is directed at all passers-by, regardless of position of power, skin tone, and gender. It demonstrates to us – who are working or have the option of finding work – and makes us complicit in a suppression, in a policy that has excluded certain people. On her radio show Sara Stridsberg says: “And for one single, vertiginous moment, an entire world order is thrown into question, a person’s outstretched hand is very common and negligible. It happens all the time, everywhere, you forget it, and you can’t forget it, the hand.”²³⁾Stridsberg, www.sverigesradio.se/sida/avsnitt/126264?programid=2071.

It’s almost as if this demonstration has created a “we”. One feels like one belongs to a different category, one that one might not have previously considered. But I am part of the European body politic, as is the begging person on the street. The begging person is excluded from belonging in various ways: From schooling, work, health care, and other things that should be part of, other things that usually belong in, a social community. Poverty is a political condition and that political condition affects us all. What happens in the streets makes visible the systemic failures of European policy. Inequalities between individual people are upheld by the tension between the system of the individual nation state and the EU.

I continue to paint, every now and then, for a few months. In the dark attic the canvas becomes my only window and also the surface I project on. I don’t paint more faces, instead I paint bodies that bow, pushing, pressing upward or down.

Louise Bourgeois writes that when she creates sculptures she isn’t seeking an image, nor is she seeking an idea, her work is about reliving the past and giving it physical shape. With her sculptures she articulates in the present what she couldn’t or wasn’t able to do in her past. She often talks about working through past fears. Her work is about exorcism rather than beauty. “Fear is a passive state, and the goal is to be active and take control, to be alive here and today. The move is from the passive to the active […] since the fears of the past are connected with the functions of the body, they re-appear through the body. For me, sculpture is the body. My body is my sculpture.”²⁵⁾Louise, Bourgeois, Deconstruction of the Father, Reconstruction of the Father, (London: Violette Editions, 1998), 357. Her words resonate with me. I am surprised by the paintings that emerge, even as I see myself in them, they express my body and my feelings.

The blind beggar, who “sees in a way that is all his own”²⁶⁾Arne Dahl, Blindbock, audiobook, (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag, 2013)., is one of the main characters in Arne Dahl’s crime novel Blindbock [blind-man’s-bluff]. He’s from Sarajevo, he is one of the Roma that have been purged, now he’s been bought by the director of the home to make money begging, he’s bought by human traffickers. In the novel there’s also a policeman who has a blind son. The blind son helps the father see. The blind person has developed an inner eye, a guiding eye. In a world bursting with the visual, people develop selective seeing, each person’s intuitive eye. We also see each other with that eye. The theologian and former archbishop K. G. Hammar tells me: “In some ways you can be even more aware of someone’s presence when you close your eyes. I can’t stand seeing… you may be far more aware of that person than of others.”²⁷⁾K. G. Hammar and I spoke about begging people in Lund November 21, 2013.

The question – What pushes the man (in the red jacket in the first photo) onto his knees on a cold street? – is directed at the social context, at the passers-by, as well as at the man himself. George, another one of the begging people gives me an answer. He periodically lives with eight other people in temporary shacks around Sweden. He tells Laura and me how he attempts to handle his existence:

G: We stay here in winter too, what can we do? In Romania we have a house, but we have no work, no social help, the minimum wage is 120 Euro I don’t think you can raise 3 kids, have a five-person family on 120 Euro a month. So yes, it is better here, we collect cans. We survive! If any of us has a problem back home, we collect money together, we all help out and we always send money home to our children, to our families.

L: So all your children are in Romania?

G: Of course! You cannot come here with kids and live in a hut. You struggle by yourself, you are a grownup, but why put children through this? And anyway, here the social workers will pick them up immediately. You cannot raise children under these conditions.

L: Did you try to get help?

G: I went to T-Centralen to ask, handed in my ID-card, all my papers, filled in the papers, and they told me to wait for their call. It’s been five months since then… I also applied at the Solna immigration center, to get an address and work, I went there together with a woman from the Skanstull center, she spoke for me in Swedish, filled in her address on the papers, and… nothing happened. No call. It’s difficult.³⁰⁾The audio recording is transcribed by interpreter Laura Chifiriuc and is partially reproduced here. The full transcript can be found in the archives.

George testifies to structural violence. How can I hear George? I have no personal experience of what he’s gone through. What binds us as social bodies? Michael Azar, professor of intellectual history, writes about the risks of domesticating the potentially unknown by subsuming it into an existing discursive order. “For instance, in a discourse built on strict dichotomies – sense or sensibility, good or evil, civilized or barbarian, freedom fighter or terrorist etc. – every occurrence will be singled out as being one or the other. No third alternative is given.”³¹⁾Michael Azar, Vittnet, (Gothenburg: Glänta, 2008), 46. The third is “something inter-subjective that inserts itself between the subject and the being”, this third is the discourse that is the foundation for whether we can see and understand things the same way. “We don’t have an experience and then understand the meaning of it, they happen at the same time.”³²⁾Ibid., 45. Michael Azar claims: “That is where the experience lacks a name – that it becomes mute, it mutes her and makes her search for words.”³³⁾Ibid., 43. The quote is preceded by: “[…] how can the witness know what an intelligible testimony regarding a certain experience is if she doesn’t already know how ‘one’ should interpret the experience? Rather perhaps we must […] imagine how the names are already more or less given to her and that these are what designate the shaping of the experience.” I can’t stand it! Vinterhed exclaims, groping for a frame of reference – that doesn’t exist – in the common language.³⁴⁾Azar, 43. “It’s not the subject on one hand and the object on the other: Rather it is the discourse that designates how the relationship between the two will be experienced and lived.” p. 43. How does one testify to that for which there is no words? Sara Ahmed wants to show how actions are reactions, in the sense that what we do is shaped by our contact with one another.³⁵⁾Ahmed, 6. Ahmed builds her theory on French sociologist and philosopher Émile Durkheim among others. For Durkheim emotions do not emanate from the individual body, rather they are what keeps together, or binds, social bodies.³⁶⁾Ahmed, 9. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion Sara Ahmed joins the sociologists and anthropologists who claim that emotions – rather than being seen as psychological states – can be seen as social and cultural practices. She describes Durkheim’s reasoning on how individual ideas and tendencies come to us “from without”. Durkheim argues that sociology is about “recognizing constraint”. “Most of our ideas and our tendencies are not developed by ourselves but come to us from without.” (The Rules of Sociological Method, (New York: Free Press, 1966), 4.) He presents a theory on emotion as a social form and presents the example of large gatherings of people generating emotions that don’t tie in to individual “self-expression” (compare to swarm theories). Emotions are also created by something, are oriented around something, involve a stance “on the world” or a way of grasping “the world”.³⁷⁾Ibid., 7. “Emotions are intentional in the sense that they are ‘about’ something: they involve a direction or orientation towards an object (Parkinson 1995: 8). The ‘aboutness’ of emotions means they involve a stance on the world, or a way of apprehending the world.” Ahmed describes emotions as movements in which bodies orient toward each other, as well as away from each other. Emotions could be described as a power, or a tension between social bodies in community life. An increasing number of testimonies are given in this tension. George’s story is also a story about pain. A testimony of pain that we must take personally. But not even those closest to us can feel our pain. If I break my leg and you hear my pain, but you’ve never experienced a broken leg first hand, you can’t know what it feels like. You can listen to what I say, or perhaps rather to how I express myself. Because emotions are created in the presence of another, they shape us and also shape that which we are in the presence of.³⁸⁾Ibid., 7. A testimony can be understood by another person the same way the impossible can be understood. Sara Ahmed expresses it thus: “Our task is instead to learn how to hear what is impossible.”³⁹⁾Ibid., 35.

I experience a distance, almost a gulf, between me and those who beg. Overall, it feels like the atmosphere on the street has changed in recent years; something has happened to the social climate that feels substantial, difficult to pin down. Is it solidarity, the ability to be touched? The project aims to make tangible and give shape to a question that is as common as it is impossible to answer: “How does it feel?”

Body on Street began in January 2013, and has been staged in various places and contexts across Sweden. A workshop is held with local people in conjunction to the exhibition, the photos generated in the workshop then become part of the exhibition. Participants are invited via email or notices in newspapers. Participation is free.

In the workshop participants think and associate in images and gestures, on the distance between those who beg and those who give on the streets; political realities that are made visible daily in the Europe of free movement and migration. After the workshop, the photo is published on a project website.⁴⁰⁾The photo demonstration began in November 2013. The photos have been mediated through a special website and tied in to previous and future improvisations with a growing number of participants, Body on Street is still ongoing as we write. You can find photos as well as a short text about the idea here: “Body on Street”. Accessed April 27, 2016, www.ceciliaparsberg.tumblr.com.

The street is a political arena. The effects of the prevailing policy become visible on the street, but street life also affects policy. My physical actions affect the choreography of the street. Mentally I become my body when I perform the position but in the position I am not just my physical body, I am also the one making my body perform the position, I act and I will be seen a certain way.

Body on Street is performed and presented in three types of spaces: On the streets, in art venues, and social media. Under each photograph is the name of the participant, their title, institution and city, in order to announce the identity of the person performing, and what he or she represents in the community.⁴¹⁾A selection of the photographs from Body on Street – about 25 of them – have been shown as a series in several exhibitions 2014–16. See “Documentation”. Accessed April 27, 2016, www.ceciliaparsberg.se/how-do-you-become-a-successful-beggar-in-sweden.

Every Body on Street workshop is unique, but they all have in common that we investigate together at what point the gestures of the body start to signify that which isn’t said, and social body in relation to body politic.

The participants are asked to share a story about an experience, an encounter or a shortcoming, an exchange, or perhaps the opposite, with a begging person. The following is an example of mine:

I ask them to describe how giving feels to them, mentally, what gesture they made and how that can be expressed. Next I ask them to show their conversation partner how they moved in relation to the begging person and to develop a special gesture they made, did they position themselves, take a certain stance? Then I ask each person to hold a feeling, a gesture, and a posture that they’ve found and not try to correct it or free themselves of it. We do a focus exercise that I call social presence, it’s about feeling connected to a social group – while still holding onto that frame of mind or feeling. The purpose of the exercise is to relate to one’s surroundings on the street – in a physical and sensory way. The individual feeling is connected to a social body in the urban landscape that in turn is part of a body politic.⁴²⁾The exercise is done standing, in a circle. I improvise the exercise, it goes something like this:
Take a few deep breaths and feel your body. If you perform this exercise with your eyes closed, or half closed, you will find it easier to focus. (15 seconds)
—Feel your feeling, your experience of your interaction with a begging person in the experience you just told us about. Can you picture how you moved in relation to one another? Your body remembers the movement. (10 seconds)
—Physical posture is influenced by intention. Feel your intention. (10 seconds)
—Hold the course of events, feelings, and intention for the entire exercise, even if they are vague, try to stay with them. (10 seconds)
—Stay where you are and sketch – by visualizing – a movement and a position for yourself. (20 seconds)
—Feel the presence of your neighbors to your left and to your right. Make light contact with them, touch each other. (15 seconds) Your body is a social body.
—Feel your surroundings, the environment you’re in and feel the social body. We are a part of community life, an ongoing life in society, with our own feeling, our social physicality that can make contact with others. Take a few deep breaths at your own pace and feel all these physical and mental dimensions at once. If you’re feeling stiff you can shake your body out. (10 seconds)
—Open your eyes, tell your neighbor what you felt, what thoughts you have. (10 minutes)
—Change partners and tell someone else. (5 minutes)
—Change partners again and tell each other without words. Hold your hands up in front of you, put your fingers against the other person’s and narrate with movement.
—Choose a place on the street to perform your gesture or position, alone, in couples, or more. Together in our social group we won’t censor anything, but we relate to what’s going and to others on the street.

Their performative acts are then staged in the public space and documented. The improvisations on the street are quick, the whole thing requires maintaining a certain pace and I try to see to it that we do. I don’t want the participants to spend too much time discussing what they’re doing, if one thinks and talks too much about the gesture one is about to perform, the physical presence is easily lost and one risks self-censoring – I can’t do this, can I… But if a conversation emerges about how to develop the improvisation I’ll slow the pace down, I’ll listen to what is happening within the group and lead it. At one point I noticed that the entire group wanted to act together and then I directed them in performing this position.

In Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of Brecht, the philosopher seems to imply that the position situated in a flow of behaviors – were it to be isolated – can be identified as an element of a real condition, that it can surprise the viewer precisely because it is a familiar position, but also distance itself from the flow. “The interrupting of action is one of the principal concerns of epic theatre.”⁴⁷⁾Walter Benjamin, “What is Epic Theatre?”, Understanding Brecht, transl. Anna Bostock, (New York: Verso 1998), 19.

The invitation reads: “When I perform a gesture I’m not just my physical body, I’m also a cerebral body. My actions and how I take shape affects patterns in the choreographies of the street.” The staged act becomes a new experience in the urban landscape, breaking with one’s own behavior can bring insight into one’s own position, insight into who one is in a social context, to unframe the framed.

“The supreme task of an epic production is to give expression to the relationship between the action being staged and everything that is involved in the act of staging per se.⁴⁸⁾Ibid. 11. This is according to Walter Benjamin. The position expressed by the participants in Body on Street lasts for a few short minutes. It might be reminiscent of Brecht’s way of freezing a movement into another in order to give the viewer the opportunity to consider how we behave to each other – whether one behaves against or with the other, the movement happens in relation to. The room is framed by the photo.

The actor in Body on Street performs their gesture for the group and is also aware that this is about performing a gesture for the camera – they are seen. The camera is the public eye that is an otherwise constant presence on the street, the eye of the public. Brecht’s actors weren’t supposed to “lose [themselves] in the character but rather demonstrate the characters as a function of particular socio-historical relations, a conduit of particular choices”.⁴⁹⁾Elin Diamond, Unmaking, Mimesis, (New York: Routledge, 1997). When the performed act in Body on Street, the photographed gesture, is shown together with a number of other people’s gestures, the behavioral break appears more markedly as a common movement – a counter movement – as a demonstration. That is why I call Body on Street a “photo demonstration”.

In 1928 Brecht staged the musical The Threepenny Opera, a politically confrontational, documentary theatre that challenges conventional morals.⁵⁰⁾In 1934 he published the Marxist, anti-Capitalist short story. It has been translated into 18 languages and staged more than 10,000 times on stages across Europe. It’s not just an opera about beggars it is also “the beggar’s opera”. This epic theatre continues to be influential, but in order for it to be a contemporary political act it must continuously be rephrased.⁵¹⁾One is example is the Spanish artist Dora García staging The Beggar’s Opera in Munster in 2007, a performance she calls a “Theatrical production in real time and in public space with no clear beginning or end” http://thebeggarsopera.org. If a human is only the sum of their social conditions, if the private is incorporated into a social body and set up in relation to a body politic, they risk becoming instrumental for the purposes of the body politic. Or as Brecht put it, they become material.

Author and playwright Sara Stridsberg describes her experience: “If you don’t give anything you are saying that you accept the prevailing order, the boundary between rich and poor, between the person who seeks help (let us call her the stranger) and yourself. If you choose to give a penny, it always has a larger value than the financial transaction. Regardless. You go on your way through the city with questions like dark claws in your chest […].”⁵²⁾“Sara Stridsberg”, Sommar i P1, Sveriges Radio, July 21, 2011. Accessed April 27, 2016, www.sverigesradio.se/sida/avsnitt/126264?programid=2071. I’ve had the quote mailed to me by her and am using it with her permission.

When the participants assume a position on the street in front of the rest of the group and my camera it is similar to the way of acting that Brecht terms gestus. The term gestus is relevant in Body on Street as the person physically performing their gesture at the same time expresses an attitude that relates to the social position of those who beg. The actors assume a position on the street that they never would if they weren’t being photographed by me. They give me both their image and their permission – their confidence that I can administer said image. When they give me their image in this manner they destabilize their position. This is about what I previously described in my method and intent as a way of destroying the own image of the image; the imagined image (a prevailing, normative image, a cultural image).⁵³⁾The process of staging Body on Street follows my methodological intent described in greater detail in the Introduction.

Each person’s motivations, commitment, and actions express a stance, a haltung (disposition). By this Brecht didn’t just mean mental attitude, but also the concrete physical posture. In his thesis, researcher Kent Sjöström discusses how physical and mental attitude affect each other: “In order to complete a task the body must adjust to the prevailing conditions. If the actions describe what a person does, the adaptation to the task also describes how the action is performed.⁵⁴⁾Kent Sjöström, Skådespelaren i handling, (Stockholm: Carlsson, 2007), 119, 236. The pleading stance of the beggar and the downward dip of the giver are both socially conditioned actions. They constitute (physical) stances that carry meanings.

The distance between the begging and the giving can be seen and felt on the street, the way givers and beggars relate is often expressed through distancing gestures. It isn’t merely a transaction – I look at you, perhaps approach you, change my position in terms of distance and height, negotiate the physical space with you, our space – between us.

In Body on Street the distancing doesn’t make visible a dialectical relationship, but a new social space – evident since around 2011 due to the begging people who traveled here – in which various emotions are set into motion, where the relationship needs to be re-negotiated. The space can be seen as a liminal one, where images I already have prevent me from seeing and where I must find other ways of relating in order to create new images. The physical act in Body on Street is a way to think through and with the body – to “exercise” the images. Body on Street portrays a sort of verfremdungseffekt that intends to hold a space for the viewer to interpret and think over how the urban landscape feels.⁵⁵⁾In the journal Konstperspektiv Bo Borg writes of Body on Street: “One of the image series, Body on Street stands out from the rest. It depicts staged arrangements done together with giving people. People lie on the street in a manner that would be extreme even among the begging. They become social sculptures that highlight the indifference of the passers-by and the fact that the urban landscape has changed. This type of photo has been taken in different places and will also be staged in Skövde.” Bo Borg, “Cecilia Parsberg’s utställning i Skövde Konsthall 7/3–22/5”, Konstperspektiv No. 2 (2015).