The Children (2009) is a video based on the painting entitled Fëmijët (1966) by Albanian socialist realist painter Spiro Kristo (b.1936). His street scene with children, painted in the propaganda style of Socialist Realism. For the shooting, the outdoor street scene depicted in the painting was staged as a tableau vivant inside the Hotel Dajti (designed by one of the Italian colonial architects during the fascist occupation), in one of its former ground- floor salons in particular. It is a short and mostly silent pictorial meditation or gesture (looped), a melancholic greeting to Brecht’s Street Scene. The only piece of text is spoken in voice off by one of the girls. It is the Albanian translation of “The image should stand out from the frame”. That advice was given by the elderly Francisco Pacheco – official censor of Seville's Inquisition & author of Arte de la pintura: su antiquedad y grandeza – to his pupil (and son-in-law) Diego Velázquez. Foucault quoted it in his famous Las Meninas essay, which was to become the first chapter of Les mots et les choses (in 1966). [Press release, solo show at Sala Rekalde, Bilbao 2010, cur. by Leire Vergara]

Besides the animal, childhood is a central theme in Peter Friedl’s works. It would take a separate essay to do full justice to the richness with which he has approached this topic. In the context of the present text, however, I want to conclude by briefly looking at one work that sheds further light on the issues addressed above: the video entitled The Children (2009). Once again, this “filmic gesture” – as Friedl defines his videos – reads as a radical act of neutralization. Only two minutes and twelve seconds long, The Children re-enacts a socialist realist painting from 1966 by the Albanian artist Spiro Kristo, entitled Fëmijet - meaning ‘children’ in Albanian. This painting, which is part of the permanent collection of the Tirana National Gallery of Art, depicts seven children, among whom five are looking down at a chalk drawing of a rifle. One girl, in a white dress, stands up with her back turned to the viewer. The toy rifle (one may presume) that she has hanging over her left shoulder, is prominently mirroring the street drawing right down, next to her. Another boy, who is facing her, also has a weapon hanging over his shoulder. Further in the background, more children are playing nearby what appears a construction site of a large building. The abbreviation of the then ruling Albanian Workers’ Party (‘PPSh’) can be clearly spotted on it. Similar typically socialist realist buildings are situated next to it; a young tree prominently positioned in the foreground, and surrounded by a toy bucket and a spade, completes the peaceful picture. In the now totally looted and abandoned but formerly luxurious Dajti hotel – built during the time of the Italian colonization – Peter Friedl stages seven children, looking down at the same drawing, and wearing the same clothes and accessories. As in a true tableau vivant, nothing is said – certainly quite a strain for children of that age – except for one short sentence, pronounced at the very beginning by one of the girls while the six other children are entering the stage. It states (in Albanian): “The image should stand out from the frame.” It is taken from Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things, who cites it as an advice given to Diego Velázquez by his teacher, Francisco Pacheco.ii In retrospect, this phrase comes out as a motto to Friedl’s own work: to create reflexive images that not only stand out from, but also are released by the frame (the picture) as its material carrier. Children in Peter Friedl’s view are the real anarchists of this world, the true subalterns.iii As childhood is often misrepresented, it provides him optimal material for his methodological investigation. Especially the representation of children in art under socialist realism allows him to circle like a detective around the question of the power of images: one of the young girls, in a pink dress, prominently holding a copy of the illustrated communist children’s magazine Fatos on her lap (as in the original painting) is an ideal trigger for starting to think about how children become indoctrinated by visual and textual materials from a very young age onwards. The Children subtly subverts the logic of militarization that underlies the Kristo painting, and with that, its emphasis on a socialist realist artistic style. The seemingly harmonious though rather odd scene in a mythically prosperous street in Communist Albania, as painted by Kristo, was completely idealized. By restaging the scene inside of an existing, real building now turned into ruin, Friedl instead makes the scene radically real. Realism is thus transformed into an investigative method: it allows him to engage in reflection on what social realism in art can mean after the demise of socialist realism.iv The irony contained in this act is a generous one: one hears the sound of cars driving on the street. As the artist says, this is to emphasize that daily life in Albania, despite all odds, continues.v In Infancy and History, Giorgio Agamben reflects on infancy as a philosophical idea that, in linguistic terms, is always present in adult life. He reminds us that it should be possible for us to remember that we once had an experience that was prior to language and subjectivity, and marked by muteness or wordlessness. The viewing of Friedl’s radically neutral, mute images of infancy stimulates our memory of the speechlessness that came with it. To Agamben, it is within silence that an understanding of historicity can arise. “It is infancy,” he writes, “which first opens the space of history.”vi Foucault’s book has not yet been translated to Albanian. Only this one sentence now leads its own life in that language, via Friedl’s work. It shows the artist’s profound respect for the diversity of language and the inevitable speechlessness that comes with it. It is as if a fundamental truth about reality arises in the aesthetic experience of the images of these children, the truth that we all long for: to experience absolute and unconditional love for someone. Unconditional love for one’s children goes hand in hand with an unavoidable vulnerability and immaturity, as it is not necessarily reciprocal. But the openness towards the other encountered in this deliberate immaturity is perhaps what we need most when we want to find a constructive force for forging new collective identities and building knowledge about where to go in the future while learning from the past.

1 Metaforische substituten, 74. 1 Cf. M. Foucault, The Order of Things. An Archeology of the Human Sciences (1966), Oxon, New York: Routledge, 9. 1 Cf. Secret Modernity, 205; and Everything is in everything, 58.

1 Again, his method aligns with that of Allan Sekula. Cf. my ‘’Social Realism’ Then and Now. Constantin Meunier and Allan Sekula,’ in H. Van Gelder (ed.), Constantin Meunier. A dialogue with Allan Sekula (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2005), 71-91; and J. Baetens and H. Van Gelder (eds.), Critical Realism in Contemporary Art. Around Allan Sekula's Photography (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2006). 1 Cf. Metaforische substituten, 72. 1 G. Agamben, Infancy and history: on the destruction of experience (1978). (London: Verso, 1993), 60.

[Hilde Van Gelder, “Intermediality, for the Sake of Radical Neutrality, in Peter Friedl’s Work,” in Raphaël Pirenne and Alexander Streitberger (eds.), Heterogeneous Objects: Intermedia and Photography after Modernism, Leuven University Press: Leuven 2013, pp. 169–71]