Travel Picture Works
2006/2008, 2012

Travel Pictures [Tschaikowskistrasse 17 in multiple exposures* (LAXFRATHF/TXLCPHSEALAX) March 27–April 3, 2006]
*Contax G-2, L-3 Communications eXaminer 3DX 6000, and InVision Technologies CTX 5000
2006/2008

The photographs comprising the series Travel Pictures, were made on the site of the Iraqi embassy building at Tschaikowskistrasse 17 (one of four former diplomatic missions located in an office park at Tschaikowskistrasse 51 in the Pankow district of Berlin). The film used to make the photographs was exposed to X-rays during the customary checked baggage security procedures during air travel. The resulting photographs display views of the interior of the embassy overlaid with the fogging, striations, and haze caused by the exposure of the photographic film to the high powered X-ray emitters used in baggage scanners.

Diplomatic Missions and Sovereignty:

The Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of 1961 established and standardized the broad legal protections allotted to official diplomatic missions and foreign delegations. The provisions specific to mission buildings and property are outlined in Article 22, which reads:

1. The premises of the mission shall be inviolable. The agents of the receiving State may not enter them, except with the consent of the head of the mission.
2. The receiving State is under a special duty to take all appropriate steps to protect the premises of the mission against any intrusion or damage and to prevent any disturbance of the peace of the mission or impairment of its dignity.
3. The premises of the mission, their furnishings and other property thereon and the means of transport of the mission shall be immune from search,
requisition, attachment or execution.

This article guarantees the inviolability of the diplomatic mission and its premises, barring the intervention of law enforcement of the host nation on embassy grounds, and making the willful violation of those grounds comparable to a violation of sovereign territory, a violation that is tantamount to an act of war. Furthermore, it places the onus on the host nation to protect the mission from threat of intrusion, both natural and man-made. Regardless of the nature of threats to the embassy, approval of the head of the mission must be obtained before any intervention on the embassy grounds can take place. In short, it exempts the grounds of the mission from the jurisdiction of the host/receiving nation, creating a satellite locus of foreign sovereignty within the host nation.

Iraq and the GDR:

Shortly after the establishment of the Second Ba’athist Republic of Iraq in 1968, the Ba’ath Party Congress officially acknowledged the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1969, becoming the first non-Eastern Bloc country to do so, and prompting the opening of direct diplomatic relations and the establishment of mutual diplomatic missions. In reciprocation, the GDR gave the use of a parcel of land in Berlin and the ownership of the future building on its premises in perpetuity in exchange for a one-time payment (an arrangement that the GDR had not extended to any other diplomatic missions before or since). Notably, during the dedication in the presence of then President of Iraq, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, Wilhelm Stoph (then Prime Minister of the GDR) referred to the revolutionary republic of Iraq as a “bruderstaat” (brother state), a term that would be used frequently by officials of both states to describe the relationship between the states through the 1980s.

The Iraqi diplomatic mission to the GDR located at Tschaikowskistrasse 17 in the Pankow district of former East Berlin, was formally opened in 1973, coincident with the GDR’s entry into the United Nations. This special arrangement regarding the Embassy and its lands was acknowledged even after German reunification and the subsequent mutual adoption of the Unification Treaty of August 1990 by both the East German Volkskammer and West German Bundestag, which resulted in the absorption of the GDR into the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). The ratification accompanied the complex revision of key provisions of the constitution of the newly expanded FRG that included special diplomatic provisions for former GDR allies. Reunification coincided with the first Gulf War, during which Iraqi delegations were officially recalled, yet the special status and rights of use given to the Iraqi government persisted even through the second Gulf War, and the 2003 dissolution of the Ba’athist government and installment of the Coalition Provisional Authority, a US-led, United Nations-sanctioned occupational force. During the period from 2003–2007, official diplomatic relations for the Iraqi Republic were suspended and the new constitution only provisionally ratified, leaving the forgotten and abandoned embassy—still technically the sovereign territory of the Ba’athist Republic—in geopolitical limbo as a sovereignty-free zone, neither part of Germany that surrounds it nor the new Iraqi government, controlled instead by the now defunct state it was donated in perpetuity to. This curious effect of international law set the mission and its premises into a limbo which continues to persist. To this day, the Iraqi government retains ownership over the building, and unfettered rights of use of its premises, although the diplomatic protections have been relinquished.

Abstraction and Material:

While the innocuous building located at Tschaikowskistrasse 17 appears no different than the other former missions that surround it, it is technically subject to a wholly separate set of international laws, making it discontinuous with the city that surrounds it, despite there being no material or perceivable trace of this distinction. Here, in extreme form, the collision between the concrete material world and the abstract system of political relations (codified in international law) produce a bizarre effect. Ostensibly a contemporary terra incognita, the mission was a tangible site for a state of sovereign exception, both in the sense of its exemption from the laws of the land it is located within, and its being a territory that is protected as sovereign but lacks a sovereign authority to commandeer it.

Power and Invisibility:

Even though we physically undergo no tangible physical change when it takes place, the movement through international borders transforms our relation to the state, from citizen subject to foreigner, and our supposedly inalienable rights become subject to revision. Yet this change of status is in operation in a multitude of more banal circumstances, such as in the travel through the airport, where our rights to privacy, free speech, and probablecause protections from unreasonable search and seizure, are momentarily suspended.

These microcosms of state exception (or exception to the rights of citizen subjects) have increasingly become the norm. In each instance of these intrusions of the state, material traces can be found. Just as the apparatus of metal detectors, X-ray scanners, and various other forms of supposedly un-invasive expressions of state power are manifest in large machinery, electromagnetic radiation, and bureaucratic management. While the physical intrusions of this surveillance machinery are largely invisible to the naked eye, operating at the microscopic level, various sensitive materials are irrevocably altered. Electromagnetically responsive materials, such as microphones and photographic emulsion, register these confrontations with the state, providing us with an alternate representation of material effects of state sovereignty’s ability to amend and suspend the rights it grants.

In every instance, the state’s ability to grant rights to its citizens is evident in negative form in the ability to revoke them. This momentary revocation is represented in the “noise” or “interference” produced by these surveillance techniques. We might use a catchall term such as “noise” to describe these effects on representational media, since they seem to operate to obscure conventional results produced by that media, but “noise” is simply a term for information (in this case, a depiction) produced by an unrecognized or marginalized entity. In this instance, the “noise” or traces can be understood as a direct impression of the state apparatus on representational technology, a making visible of what, by design, is kept obscured or remote. This invisibility lends spectral authority to these systems, making them seem ubiquitous and impermeable, unavoidable and untraceable.

Material Conditions and Production:

Titling Convention:

The works are titled with the name of the color present in the image according to the standard color centroid model of the NBS-ICC System and Nomenclature for Commercial Synthetic Dye Application (Fern, Fog, Granite, Marshes, Meadow, Mist, Rose, Sunset, and Violet reflect the names of the colors assigned to synthetic dyes used by commercial industries in products from furniture to industrial enamels) followed by the embassy address and a notation of multiple exposures to the film, the airport codes traveled through, and the dates traveled, along with the camera brand and type, and the airport baggage scanner brand and types which exposed the film. The date attributed to the work is the year of its first exhibition. A final description of the work, for example one that would appear on a wall didactic in an exhibition space, might read:

Travel Picture Rose [Tschaikowski- strasse 17 in multiple exposures* (LAXFRATHF/TXLCPHSEALAX) March 27–April 3, 2006]
*Contax G-2, L-3 Communications eXaminer 3DX 6000, and InVision Technologies CTX 5000
2006/2008
Chromogenic print
51 1/2 x 90 3/8 inches

Here annotated:
Travel Picture Rose [Tschaikowskistrasse 17 in multiple exposures* [address of embassy site and notation of film exposure] (LAXFRATHF/TXLCPHSEALAX [airports traveled through]), March 27–April 3, 2006 [dates traveled]]
*Contax G-2, L-3 Communications eXaminer 3DX 6000, and InVision Technologies CTX 5000 [camera and airport baggage scanners used to expose film]
2006/2008 [date(s) of first exhibition]
Chromogenic print [media]
51 1/2 x 90 3/8 inches [framed dimensions]

Travel Pictures [Tschaikowskistrasse 17 in multiple exposures* (LAXFRATHF/TXLCPHSEALAX) March 27–April 3, 2006],
*Contax G-2, L-3 Communications eXaminer 3DX 6000, and InVision Technologies CTX 5000
2012

Once the complete edition of the Travel Pictures was produced, the original negatives of these works were hole-punched, a method traditionally used to artificially limit the edition size of multiples by canceling originals so no further prints could be produced. These hole-punched negatives were then used to produce a new edition titled Travel Pictures, which are printed at the same size and scale of the original works as an extension of the previous series.

The canceled Travel Picture work titles note the cancelation of the original negative with a strikethrough of the original title, for example:

Travel Picture Rose [Tschaikowskistrasse 17 in multiple exposures* (LAXFRATHF/TXLCPHSEALAX) March 27–April 3, 2006]
*Contax G-2, L-3 Communications eXaminer 3DX 6000, and InVision Technologies CTX 5000
2012
Chromogenic print
51 1/2 x 90 3/8 inches