On 28 May 2008 a press conference was held at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin under the title 'Dubai Erweiterte Horizonte: Museen schaff en eine neue internationale Öff entlichkeit' ('Dubai Expanded Horizons: Museums Create a New International Public Sphere'). It brought together the directors of the three largest German museums, who referred to themselves during the press conference as the 'three generals';¹ they were 'flanked' by the Head of the Directorate- General for Culture and Communication of the Federal Foreign Office and by the Cultural Director of the Dubai Culture and Arts Authority (DCAA), representing the Dubai government.

The aim of the event was to make public the plans for a large scale collaboration project between the three German institutions (joined under the label 'United German Museums'), the German cultural diplomacy and the Emirate of Dubai. The wholly unironic project consisted of the development of a 'Universal museum' to be located in Dubai, continuing another 'very successful' as they put it international cooperation between the three institutions and the National Museum of China in Beijing (which, once the extension work is completed, will be 'the world's biggest museum').² This collaboration will eventually result in the exhibition 'The Art of the Enlightenment', taking place between September 2010 and February/March 2012 and which, through a selection of works and artefacts from the museum collections from Berlin, Dresden and Munich, will present the Enlightenment as a key chapter in the history of European thought and civilisation and, furthermore, will aim to 'redefine the Enlightenment and China as forming part of a universal "intellectual world-heritage site"'. After this first experiment, the 'United German Museums' will expand their horizons even further, exporting European culture and its key notions such as cosmopolitanism, civilisation, public sphere and universalisation to other former countries of the Second and Third World.

The plans by the three museums constitute a renewed colonising impulse, one in which the exhibition and historicisation of cultural goods renew the historic impulse to impose 'civilised' values on underdeveloped countries through state institutions which has always been characteristic of colonialism. Instead of critically analysing the history of European colonisation and, for instance, addressing the plundering of cultural goods from colonised countries, the presentation of these new cultural projects emphasises the dialogue between cultures as an example of an ideal speech situation, i.e. a state of undistorted communication, to use the words of a certain critical theory. For example, the conference's discussion of the Dubai of fifty years ago when it was mainly known for its pearls focused not on the working conditions of pearl fishers, but on the role of pearls in the European Baroque, thereby subsuming a relation of exploitation under the ideal of a 'universal art'. In times of post-colonialism, post-history and postmodernism, the arts and their institutions pretend to reflect on colonisation, history and modernism by reenacting their strategies under the shelter of a metareflective position: the missionaries and militaries of the past, who brought alphabetisation and Western values to the colonised countries, are replaced by the cultural 'generals' who bring the pale reflection of colonialism the archive of Enlightenment to the newly built 'universal' institution in Dubai in order to establish a flow of cultural goods in tandem with the system of financial exchange.

The interventionist and explicitly political re-enactments of Alice Creischer, made in collaboration with Andreas Siekmann and the composer Christian von Borries, unfold against the background of this cultural-political situation. Horizontalerweiterung (Horizontal Expansion, 2009), their latest re-enactment to date, addresses the colonial character of the institutional export of art and cultural goods taking place in the Chinese and Dubai museum projects by re-staging the 'United German Museums' press conference. By doing so, it deals with the relation between representation and historiography.³ Re-enactment is a traditional form of historiographic practice within popular culture, especially through 'accurate' and 'objective' re-staging of historical events aiming both at authenticity and immersion. In contrast, contemporary art destabilises these practices and, mostly looking for a political impact, includes them knowingly within visual, filmic or photographic representation through filmed tableaux vivants or re-enactments (as in Omer Fast's 2007 video The Casting or, in perhaps a less reflective manner, in Jeremy Deller's re-enactment of The Battle of Orgreave, filmed by Mike Figgis in 2001), or through the exhibition of historiographic 'instruments' such as archives or documents (as in the fictional image archives of the Atlas Group).

What is especially interesting about the work of Creischer, Siekmann and von Borries is that they take re-enactment back to live performance to the stage, its 'original' venue and thus break with traditional documentary media, such as film or photography, and their 'political' claims. But this does not mean that Creischer et al. focus on re-enactment's illusionist or immersive effect. On the contrary, they displace the 'historicist' i.e. truthful and authentic strategy of re- enactment and the discussion about the truth value of the documentary image, and focus instead on the articulation of several paradigmatic elements in order to construct a 'series of series', to use Michel Foucault's words: the configuration of meaningful elements in order to produce or to highlight a meaningful context.⁴

On 14 September 2009, the 'Dubai Expanded Horizons' press conference was re-enacted at the Temporäre Kunsthalle, situated in the heart of cultural and historical Berlin. The site faces the void where the Palace of the Republic formerly stood and where the Stadtschloss, the City Castle, is to be reconstructed to house the 'Humboldt Forum' and the ethnological collection of the National Museums of Berlin.⁵ A press release under the header 'German United Museums' was circulated by a fictional press attaché, announcing a discussion on the occasion of the 'strategic partnership' between Dubai, Berlin, Munich and Dresden, and the signing of a cooperation agreement with the government of Dubai. A specially dedicated website also made available press information,⁶ which included the transcription of the original press conference, enriched with textual and visual commentary on the positions outlined by the 'three generals'. One such was a photograph of the Kham hom Orchestra from Bangkok, whose 1900 performance in the Zoological Garden in Berlin had been recorded by the German psychologist Carl Stumpf and was the founding sound document for the Phonogram Archive.⁷ Additional comment on German colonialism and its universalising discourse is made through several pictograms illustrations of the circulation of migrants and their labour, contrasted with illustrations of Western movements such as tourism, consumerism and export.

While the re-enactment at the Kunsthalle aimed to maintain some semblance of veracity by 'officially' inviting the press and making it look 'real', at least in its initial stages, a second performance was held a few days later at the Sophiensäle Theatre in Berlin, in which the re- enactment was now explicitly announced under the title of Horizontalerweiterung. The programme labelled it as a 'musical piece' that continued some motifs from the collaboration presented by Creischer, Siekmann and von Borries during documenta 12 (2007). If that piece, Aufeinmal & Gleichzeitig (Suddenly & Simultaneously), was staged in a commercial centre in Kassel to explore the conditions of production of commodities, this one focused 'on the value of culture in international import and export', as the theatre programme euphemistically put it.⁸ It did so by looking at German cultural politics at the crossroads of the recent discussions about a German Leitkultur,⁹ the reconstruction of historical Berlin as the heart of the New Republic and the fading importance of Germany, the former champion of world export, especially in comparison to new financial powers such as Dubai or China.

Even though the 'illusionist' aspect was absent in the second mise en scène, the staging of the press conference was similar on both occasions: the stage was divided in two parts, as if mimicking a split screen. The right side of the stage was the site for an average public event, with a table, five chairs and nametags; water and microphones; and a screen behind the table onto which the press conference's slogan ('Dubai - Expanded Horizons') was projected. The left side of the stage was occupied by another screen onto which the photograph of the Kham hom Orchestra was projected. Once the conference started, the first fifteen minutes were a faithful re- enactment of the original event: as in role-play, the characters read out the original parts of the script from the conference. Seemingly aware of the salaciousness of the museum project they were presenting, the 'three generals' also included their own self-defence, averring that the financial and cultural wealth of the Gulf region does not only consist of oil, but also of 'creativity and people' and 'morally neutral' enterprises such as 'construction, financial services, logistics and tourism'. They also assured the audience that even though most of the immigrant population of Dubai comes from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and 'a lot' of them work in construction, there are also wealthy businessmen from these countries living in Dubai. Thanks to this 'cosmopolitan furore', as the script puts it, Dubai fortunately does not need a discussion about a Leitkultur of the kind Germany had just gone through. But it does need a 'Universal Museum' that is able to show as many aspects as possible of the cultural and artistic history of the region the realisation of which needs to be handed over to European cultural institutions.

On this prompt, the second screen was removed and an orchestra came into view. The 1900 recording of the Kham hom Orchestra was played through the speakers while the orchestra remained silent, its sound making the voices of the speakers inaudible. Subsequently, the orchestra began to re-play the recorded piece re-enacting not the concert as an 'event' but its recording by imitating even its sizzling noises, and highlighting the difference between the record as an instrument for storing data and the live (impossible to reproduce) performance. The music was then disrupted by a paradigmatic theatrical artifice: a woman stepped out of the orchestra and contextualised the music, explaining that the recordings were made by Stumpf in 1900, and are part of the Phonogram Archive in Berlin. The Phonogram Archive's aim, she went on, was to produce as complete a collection as possible of fragments of all the music in the world. This first sound fragment, as the initial step towards a universal music, reflected the one-sidedness and paradoxical nature of the dialogue between East and West implicit in universalisation: the idea of 'world music', re-enacted by the musical score by mixing Western 'exoticist' music with this quotation from the universal sound archive, represents the institutionalised sublation and dissolution of non-Western music into a classifiable system.¹⁰

This relationship between the non-European voice or music and the enlightened collector, scientist or artist was brutally reversed on the stage by the intervention of a Brechtian character: in the second half of the play, the actress who had stepped out of the orchestra explicitly intervened in the press-conference scenario, with the speakers seemingly unable to notice her, as she enacted her spoken commentary. In order to illustrate the process of recording, she took the head of the actor playing the Director of the National Museums of Berlin in her hands and directed his mouth towards an imaginary recording device, thus reversing the relation between those recording (the European scientists and directors of cultural and ethnological institutions that operate in the Humboldtian spirit) and those recorded (the musicians from Bangkok in 1900, the voices of the natives recorded during the colonial expeditions or in the prisoner camps in the German Reich, which also form part of the Phonogram Archive). Her spoken words turned into a moritat, a street ballad recounting horrible events and unspeakable crimes. Her subsequent discussion of recording practices as colonial instruments at the turn of the last century was then contrasted with an account of the contemporary construction of the largest museum of the world. Standing in front of the illustrations and hammering on a motorcycle helmet, the actress explained the real living conditions of workers in Dubai - their miserable pay, the camps in the desert where they live - before she tied the hands of one 'museum director' to his back, put the motorcycle helmet over another's head and placed a blue, red and white striped plastic hold-all bag - the paradigmatic accessory of global migration - in front of them. Then she disappeared behind a white partition panel, onto which documentary images of workers leaving a construction site in Dubai were projected.

This parallel montage allowed for a reformulated discourse on universality, the Enlightenment, the public sphere and globalisation, with the right side of the stage deconstructing the left side through the denunciation of a 'new' and double-layered colonialism: the European exportation of cultural goods to a country whose development itself is based on colonial strategies, including the exploitation of - for all intents and purposes - slave-like immigrant labour and that, at the same time, presents itself as the new paradise of financial freedom and the blossoming alternative to the decaying Western world. The 'split stage' thus constructs two images of history, or more specifically, two modes of writing history: on the one hand, the enlightened historicist vision of the progress of mankind carried by one of its most precious goods culture and, on the other, rephrasing Walter Benjamin, the story told by those who built the skyscrapers of Dubai, its opera house, universal museum, universities and other cultural institutions.

Besides highlighting the concrete absurdity of the statements and self-image of the representatives of German culture, and their attempt to sell the trademark of 'United German Culture' from a 'Re-United German Nation', the central concern of Horizontalerweiterung is historiography itself, the institutions that administer history historical, ethnological and natural science museums; art collections and cultural archives and the documents that these institutions produce and safeguard.

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In the introduction to the Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), Michel Foucault relates the ambiguous status of the document to two strategies the historical and the archaeological within historiography. On the one hand, traditional history tends to reconstitute the past based on the interrogation of documents, of their authenticity or truth, by reading their fragile but still decipherable traces:

… history, in its traditional form, undertook to 'memorise' the monuments of the past, transform them into documents, and lend speech to those traces which, in themselves, are often not verbal, or which say in silence something other than what they actually say.¹¹

On the other hand, the archaeological history transforms documents into monuments:

[It] deploys a mass of elements that have to be grouped, made relevant, placed in relation to one another to form sets or complexes [and thus] aspires to the condition of archaeology, to the intrinsic description of the monument.¹²

The consequences of this archaeological notion of history are multiple, one being that the possibility of a global history relating to a traditional historicism based on the notions of Enlightenment, progress and necessity, giving way to 'what is called metaphorically the "face" of a period'¹³ - vanishes and gives place to a general history whose central question is: to determine what form of relation may be legitimately described between these different series; what vertical system they are capable of forming; what interplay of correlation and dominance exists between them; what may be the effect of shifts, different temporalities and various re- handlings; in what distinct sets certain elements may figure simultaneously; in short, not only what series, but also what 'series of series' - or, in other words, what 'tables' [tableaux] it is possible to draw up. A total description draws all phenomena around a single centre - a principle, a meaning, a spirit, a world-view, an overall shape; a general history, on the contrary, would deploy the space of a dispersion.¹⁴

This opposition between global and general histories intersects with Horizontalerweiterung on two levels. The piece itself displays what Foucault calls a dispersion, i.e. it constructs a tableau or a constellation of meaningful elements that are collocated by ways of series or, to use Deleuze's term, in a rhizomatic network and it thus deconstructs the hegemonic claim for totality that has ruled the traditional understanding of (global) history and its colonising practices. But this deconstruction happens on a second level, paradoxically reflected through re-enactment, a method that claims to provide the most accurate documentation of reality. While documentary representation of reality has traditionally been the task of photographic or filmic media - whose ontological status has often been discussed both in terms of its alleged objectivity (on the basis of its mechanical nature) and from the perspective of radical doubt about the possibility of objective and truthful representations historical re-enactments resume this faith in the truthfulness of the representation by re-enacting in the most accurate way historical battles or armed conflicts. This relates to a history based on the notion of authenticity: the possibility to capture 'the "face" of a period'. As Sven Lütticken has put it, historical re-enactments are 'historicism-in-action', that is cultural historicism understood as 'the re-use of various old or "exotic" styles and models in nineteenth-century art and culture' and shaped by the nineteenth-century philosophy of history.¹⁵ The historicist re-enactment is therefore one that reconstructs a global history based on a causal, logical and linear continuum between past, present and future. What Creischer, Siekmann and von Borries do, therefore, is to reflect on the historicism of re-enactment as a paradigmatic form of representation of ideological historicism: a global history that includes, for instance, a global or universal music and a global or universal museum, through re-enactment itself. In order to do so, they focus on and deconstruct the immersive or illusionist dimension of classical re-enactment. The key conceptual distinction to consider would be the opposition between a re-enactment that targets illusionism or immersion and the epic of Bertolt Brecht's 'Street Scene', what we could call, following Brecht, an 'epic re-enactment'.¹⁶ While immersion has a stabilising function - by proposing a synaesthetic (or harmonious) continuum between the senses, it creates a universe where the difference between reality and fiction becomes insignificant, insofar as the goal of fiction is to be sensed 'as if' it were reality - epic re-enactment, as performed by Creischer, Siekmann and von Borries, does away with this continuum and gives the representation a meaning for reality or as reality. This form of epic re-enactment does not pose history as an ephemeral 'event' (as does re-enactment in performance art), nor as the 'truth' of a society or a state (as does historicist re-enactment). Instead, it stages an archaeological movement in the Foucauldian sense: not as an institution of history but as constitution of a tableau, the creation of inter-medial, and therefore contextualised, networks of meaning.

The re-enactment organised by Creischer, Siekmann and von Borries is therefore not the 'more real reality', nor the 'truer reality' or perfection of representation: it is potential reality insofar as it reflects on the conditions of appearance of something as 'something real'. And it therefore presents another meaning of Enlightenment, one that Foucault calls in an enigmatic text 'the critical ontology of ourselves':

it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.¹⁷

Horizontalerweiterung thus has to be understood literally as a series of horizontal connections of meanings and media (music, text, images) that expand beyond the theatrical stage. It performs the opposite to re-enactment: not duplication and illusionism, but a lapse and derailment of representation; not repetition of the real accompanied by an illusive faith on the possibility of political effects, but interventionist practice; not immersion, but a 'critical attitude'.