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Johanna Billing (for Moscow Biennale Catalogue) by Jan Verwoert 2004 Can we still imagine ourselves as part of a collective? Who is this "we" anyway? These questions are a port of entry into the work of Johanna Billing. In her videos and group performances she stages scenarios that portray the constitution of social collectives as both possible and impossible, real and imaginary. The video Missing Out (2001) shows a group of young people lying on the floor in a vast space. They try to perform an exercise taught in Swedish primary schools in the 1970s: By breathing in unison children were supposed to develop a sense of social cohesion. The performance no doubt taps into the collective memory of the participants. Still they cannot make it work any more. Uneasily they shift and twitch. Finally, someone gets up and leaves, visibly unnerved by the climate of forced harmony. Project for a Revolution (2000) restages a scene from Antonioni's Zabriskie Point (1970). Students wait for a political rally to start. Someone prints out pamphlets. But they are blank. Everybody here is a non-conformist, ready to revolt. Yet, a common cause is missing. So nothing happens. Both videos are marked by the distinct absence of nostalgia or moralism. Billing records the loss of a common ground, but also the general disbelief in rituals for community building. She thus portrays a sceptical generation that would want to believe in something, but is smart enough not to trust anything. For her ongoing project You don't love me yet (since 2003) Billing asks bands from different places to perform the song You don't love me yet (1984) by singer/songwriter Roky Erickson at concerts she organizes. Parallel to this Billing produced a CD and video with the same title. For the video friends and members of different bands got together in a studio to record Erickson's song, a melancholy ballad that gradually builds up to a forceful coda in which a strong choir reiterates the mantra: "You don't love me yet". It's impossible to tell whether the video images are ironic or for real. The scenario of staged solidarity immediately evokes memories of the notorious Band Aid tearjerker Do They know it's Christmas (1984). Still, the intensity of the group performance is genuine and the music sounds great. Ironically, the chorus of the song throws into relief that the one thing all artists have in common is precisely what makes them competitive egotists: the desire to be loved. Yet, the video actually makes you love that group. It presents this harmonious collective of individualists as a contradiction in terms and as a viable reality, as both impossible and possible. You know this is too good to be true. Yet you wish it was real. And then again it is. After all the record rocks. Jan Verwoert <<<