OF REGRET AND O THER BA CK P A GES

Transcription

OF REGRET
AND OTHER
BACK PAGES
#16
1
2
1
Editorial
P. 5
SPECULATION
Khaled Fahmy
The Essence of Alexandria
(Part II)
P. 22
When the Body Politic
Ceases To Be an Idea
P. 28
The Image and the Survivor
The Form of Remains
P. 63
PROJECTION
I Travel Because I Have To,
I Come Back Because I Love You
Georges Didi-Huberman
PROJECTION
MATERIALS
P. 116
Mnemosyne 42
P. 107
P. 18
CONVERSATION
A Dialogue Between Ann Cvetkovich
and Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz
Toxic Feelings
P. 34
Gal Kirn and Robert Burghardt
Yugoslavian Partisan Memorials: Between Memorial Genre, Revolutionary Aesthetics
and Ideological Recuperation
ETUDE
P. 61
SPECULATION
P. 66
ETUDE
Karim Aïnouz
and Marcelo Gomes
Cosmin Costinaş
The Slave at the Louvre
The Sound Evidence of Sonic Warfare: Notes from the
Aural Contract Audio Archive
CONVERSATION
P. 76
P. 12
PROJECTION
Françoise Vergès
Lawrence Abu Hamdan
Hito Steyerl
and Maja Petrović-Šteger
MATERIALS
Thoughts and Notes after rites,
thoughts, notes, sparks,
swings and strikes
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The Shuhada of the Past Fifty Years
P. 84
We Will Win Survey,
Selections
SPECULATION
Mustapha Benfodil
Of Dreamers,
Ezzeddine Qalaq and
Palestine’s Revolutionary Posters
Burak Delier
P. 8
P. 46
The Portrait of a Lover
Rasha Salti
Dear Rustam Khalfin
SPECULATION
Marc Nichanian
EXHIBITION
ROOM
Ariella Azoulay
Adnan Yıldız
MATERIALS
Leeza Ahmady
P. 80
EXHIBITION
ROOM
P. 98
Bojana Kunst
Cuauhtémoc Medina
ETUDE
Chinese Labels
P. 104
SPECULATION
The Project Horizon:
On the Temporality of Making
P. 112
Valentina Desideri
GAME
Contributors
Colophon
Political Therapy
P. 130
P. 133
P. 135
OF REGRET
AND OTHER
BACK PAGES
Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez,
Virginie Bobin and Rasha Salti
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Editorial
Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez,
Virginie Bobin and Rasha Salti
Of Regret and Other Back Pages
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This third and final installment of Manifesta Journal, guest-edited in
collaboration with Rasha Salti, concludes the red thread on “the politics
of time”. Woven around the theme of “regret” and its many semantic and
lexical connotations—remorse, redemption, bereavement, cooptation,
subjective versus institutional memorialization(s) and nostalgia, to name
a few—the issue takes up and further develops some of the pivotal
themes that have been touched upon in the previous two issues.
Regret raises powerful questions as regards the relationship to time
and contingency; the retrospective gaze at and the evaluation of past
experience; the ambivalence of hesitation and the burden of shame.
Yet—regret is fickle. It has a perniciously double life. For one, the formulaic
“we regret to inform you…” is (sadly) all too familiar to anyone who has
applied for a job, grant or award. It is also a familiar motif in the unguarded
conversations between amiable curators with enough trust and affinity
to disclose “insider” stories or lament their disappointing experiences.
However, regret rarely, if ever, seems to appear in public and formal realms,
let alone in the framework of intellectual, critical or theoretical meditations
on the profession. Obviously, self-critique is central to curatorial and artistic
practice, but because the system in which practitioners operate and in
which their labor is commoditized is so cruel, restless and flimsy, selfcritique is precariously private, marginalized and under-valued. Is it almost
as understated and pervasive as a… taboo?
The public life of a curator (as well as that of an artist) can easily be
described as being intensely “social”, in a myriad of ways. It involves
a high degree of interactivity with all sorts of practitioners from very
different fields—people who produce ideas and knowledge, and, on a
more superficial level, people who attend a significant number of social
events. What is not as obvious, however, is how, paradoxically, the life
of an arts practitioner can actually be profoundly solitary. For example:
independent curators journey from one project to the next, or juggle
several at once; they travel from one city to the next, switching from one
culture, language, set of codes, social mores, and dynamics to another.
The situation is hardly less complicated for institutional curators. Pushing
the argument further, the pace at which curators are generally expected
to produce exhibitions, and the material and immaterial paradigms
by which their labor is evaluated (or “valued”), are embedded in a
merciless logic of cognitive capitalist production. Moreover, the virtue
of the curator’s position as mediator between the institution(s), groups
of artists, artworks, audience members, critics, wider socio-economic
contexts and political stakes, only deepens this sense of solitariness.
Regret, or at least our approach to the notion in Manifesta Journal #16,
comes from that space of solitary reflection, sensibility and feeling.
Just recall a few quotidian moments: the silent, meditative, “empty” time
whilst waiting to board a plane or ride a train; or better yet, whilst waiting
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after being interrogated by an immigration officer (who vigilantly guards the
borders of a G8 country on high alert because its unemployed youth are
protesting new economic austerity measures), and explaining to no avail
what it means to be a curator… These are by no means moments of truth,
they are not pregnant with epiphanies; they are simply unguarded moments
when the sordidness of life unravels in one’s mind and weaves unpredictable
narrative threads. In these moments, regret often creeps in, sometimes
like a taunting demon, and sometimes like a wise, but melancholic and
retrospective reckoning. Regret is not remorse because it does not bear the
cross of responsibility, but it certainly dwells in the same neighborhood.
Neither is it entirely about redemption, nor is it entirely about nostalgia; it is
not exactly melancholic, not quite a kind of mourning, and not altogether
memorializing. It travels between these notions. It is our hope that this issue
of Manifesta Journal will inspire a vivid discussion of the richly evocative
significations of regret that weave themselves in and around curatorial
practices.
We inaugurate this issue with eloquent mourning and hauntings: Leeza
Ahmady’s compelling eulogy to the late artist Rustam Khalfim preempts
the guileless gesture of the art establishment’s self-congratulating and
posthumous “discovery” of artists kept away from visibility during their
lifetime. We conjure up ghosts of pasts yet unsettled with Françoise Vergès’s
The Slave at the Louvre that unveils the (mis)representations of slavery
in the very bosom of the renowned museum as well as the constitution
of Europe’s modernity; Khaled Fahmy’s The Essence of Alexandria, the
conclusion to his masterful deconstruction of nostalgia for the city’s colonial
cosmopolitanism (whose first part featured in Manifesta Journal #141); and
Mustapha Benfodil’s gut-wrenching The Shuhada of the Past Fifty Years, a
scathing reconsideration of Algeria’s fifty years of independence.
With Mnemosyne 42, Georges Didi-Huberman revisits Aby Warburg’s
notion of art history as a “ghost story for adults”, by curating an
iconographic montage of classical and contemporary representations
of lament from the wide repository of art and cinema. Mnemosyne
42 enacts an open-ended writing of history that reclaims the political
agency of grief and grievance. Meanwhile, Ariella Azoulay’s generously
annotated photo album, When the Body Politic Ceases to Be an Idea is a
passionate call to reconsider the (regretfully) oft-ignored experientialist
knowledge of insurgent bodies. In turn, politics of listening are likewise
investigated by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, whose Aural Contract Audio
Archive displays the distorted embodiment of law through transformed
voices taken from famous recordings of trial hearings.
Remains of what can never be again: in Maja Petrović-Šteger and
Hito Steyerl’s exchange over The Form of Remains, which drafts—and
incarnates—a meditation, at once poetic and penetrating, on the stories
contained in the remains of “posthumous” bodies, especially those of
victims of war, and how we apprehend them; Marc Nichanian’s The
Image and the Survivor boldly explores what remains after the death
of the witness and how artists have represented survivors; and Gal
Kirn and Robert Burghardt’s Yugoslavian Partisan Memorials parses an
unlikely, captivating (hi)story of Yugoslavia from the trail of World War
1www.manifestajournal.org/issues/souvenirs-souvenirs#page-issuessouvenirssouvenirssmell
alexandriaarchivingrevolution0
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II memorials that snake their way through the posthumous territory of
the once-federal republic. In collaboration with Robert Burghardt, Kirn
reveals the mechanisms of the co-optation of these monuments that
arises in parallel to the disintegration process and its new nationalistic
moments. In her study of the posters from late Ezzedine Qalaq’s
collection (PLO representative in Paris in the 1970s), Rasha Salti explores
how artists and illustrators articulated subjectivity and a sense of bearing
witness for Palestinians and their struggle for nationhood in the 1970s.
Cinders of loves lost: Adnan Yıldız’s The Portrait of a Lover visits the
museum that Nobel-laureate Orhan Pamuk curated after his own bestselling novel The Museum of Innocence, where he showcases everyday
objects, traces of a love story that were gently, and obsessively collected
by the novel’s bereft protagonist. Karim Aïnouz and Marcelo Gomes’s
“Etude” of I Travel Because I Have to, I Come Back Because I Love You,
the feature film they co-directed, shares glimpses of their protagonist’s
car journey through the desolate, arid landscape in the northeast of
Brazil, soliloquizing as he comes to terms with the loss of love.
Returning to examine the predicates that regiment the conditions of
our labor and creative production, Bojana Kunst’s The Project Horizon:
On the Temporality of Making, delivers an incisive and lucid critique of the
centrality of the notion of “project”; Cuauhtémoc Medina’s Chinese Labels
contemplates the implications of a curious curatorial wall text carved into
marble, while Cosmin Costinaş’s Thoughts and Notes after rites, thoughts,
notes, sparks, swings and strikes, reflects provocatively on the strategic
recourse to alternative and unconventional modes of engagement in order
to circumvent cooptation. On the other hand, we have culled selections
from Burak Delier’s We Will Win Survey, which evaluates, in a caustic sleightof-hand, the “marketable” skills of artists and perceptions of the effectiveness
of artistic production in Turkey.
Of regret and shame: in their conversation, Ann Cvetkovich, Pauline
Boudry and Renate Lorenz examine the so-called negative effects of regret
and/or shame as regards activism, chronopolitics and queer theory. They
attempt—much as Boudry and Lorenz’s works Normal Work, No Future / No
Past or Toxic do—to foreground their counter-productive potential as a site
of resistance to the normalizing power of neoliberal capitalism. And last but
not least, in Political Therapy, which is conceived similarly to a journal, with
the mission to “develop alternative languages and imagine other possibilities
to deal with politics”, Valentina Desideri proposes a practical tool to engage
with social and political questions that can sometimes be overwhelming.
It seems paradoxical to conclude a triptych with “regret”, a theme that
ails from lack of “closure”. In the two previous issues, we have thoroughly
enjoyed indulging ourselves in the irreverent gesture of searching through
the vast jukebox of pop and rhythm and blues tunes. With “regret”, however,
song titles containing the word were remarkably fewer, and the most
infamous one, Edith Piaf’s “Je ne regrette rien”, has already once been
appropriated by the French Legion battalions that served in the Algerian War.
We thus did not want to shoulder the burden of that reference. Instead, we
have settled for “Regret” adjoined to “Back Pages”, in reference to Bob Dylan’s
My Back Pages, released in 1964 on his album of folkish protest songs,
Another Side of Bob Dylan, with the infamous lyric: “Ah, but I was so much
older then / I’m younger than that now”.
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Rustam Khalfin, 1949–2008
All images have been provided
courtesy of AhmadyArts
Leeza Ahmady
Dear Rustam Khalfin
Please note that all the image
captions are based on notes
that were made by the author
during her visit with the artist in
the summer of 2008. Though
they were cross-checked with
secondary sources, not all captions
are complete or fully accurate
due to the current unavailability /
accessibility to an archive of the
artist’s works.
MATERIALS
Pulota (Hand), The Space of Minimal Distances, 1999–2000. Photo
documentation of installation as part of Zero Level. Clay Project.
Installation lasted one year, and took over two stories of an empty building.
Supported by Soros Centre for Contemporary Art, Almaty, Kazakhstan
Untitled photographs, 1990-2000
Untitled photographs, 1990–2000
Sunday, September 9th, 2012.
Dear Rustam Khalfin,
I have been irritable about your having left recently
without any utterance anywhere of your passing. How
can you, the proclaimed founding father, protagonist,
leader, teacher, and prophet of contemporary art, just
die, with only the skipping of a few dozen-heart beats
that knew and loved you?
Photo documentation of performance installation. Untitled, date
unknown. Almaty, Kazakhstan
8
Untitled photographs, 1990–2000
You were neither mentioned in the papers, nor in
the Sunday columns, nor even amidst the massive
abyss of the World Wide Web! I imagined paying for an
e-flux ad to announce your death, but I was broke and
the idea seemed disproportionate to the kind of loss
that I felt your passing was to your community and
to generations of artists. Many months later, I found
only an old, recycled article about your life and work in
Universes in Universe, which made me even sadder.
Please know that art history is profoundly limited
and ludicrously slow to awaken. For sure you will be
auction material someday, perhaps just as soon as
clever dealers organize luxurious tours for collectors
to traverse the region where you once lived. For now
though, you have many spiritual brothers whose
limelight you might share. At least that is not a shame.
Your twin brother Beuys, for example, might have
already met up with you by now.
I wanted to write you because when we first met
I did not speak Russian. Refusing to learn it, I was
unwilling to sacrifice my already rusty half-dozen
tongues that I had picked up along my traversal of
immigration routes to America. By the 1880s my TajikUzbek grandparents had probably forgotten to speak
Kazakh. You seemed to have never learned Dari from
yours. This is perhaps because you were not Uzbek,
though you were born in Tashkent. I remember how
we sat at the base of a tree in front of Soros Center for
Contemporary Art (SCCAA) in Almaty. I was thrilled
to be on the grounds of what was in the 1990s a
sacred site for contemporary artists. Unfortunately,
SCCAA died even before you did. Shut down for
lack of funds—or was it poor luck with leadership?
Anyway, during that meeting you opted not to speak.
You simply made gestures and stared at me in English.
So I came to know your work by listening to others
discuss its novelty.
During my last visit to your two-room studio
apartment your health had taken a turn for the
worse. Your art works were scattered in museum
storage rooms and defunct galleries, already the
fodder for vicious friend and family disputes. So we
spoke through images. With my newly purchased
digital camera, I photographed the mostly crumbling
remains of your old printed matter. Invitations,
documentations of performances, installations and
other paraphernalia; translating analog photographs
of scenes I had missed by only a decade, my mind
conscious of captivated audiences. Their presence
still resonated through your messy albums. We
drank tea. You shrugged your shoulders, and humbly
smiled with glee. I decided you might perhaps be
the greatest Sufi-Fluxus wonderer on earth. I plan
to explain this sometime, but not just yet; I am still
coming to terms with your being elsewhere.
The Space of Minimal Distances, 1999–2000. Photo documentation of
installation as part of Zero Level. Clay Project. Almaty, Kazakhstan
The Space of Minimal Distances, 1999–2000. Photo documentation of a
performance as part of Zero Level. Clay Project. Almaty, Kazakhstan
In Rider’s Honour, 1997. Photo documentation of performance,
Unknown location (Almaty, Kazakhstan or Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan)
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Above and beyond regrets and claims, I have
wanted to share some of the images stored in my
hard drive, in commemoration not unlike other
memorials to unforgettable artists. In the process, I
hope that others may also have the opportunity to
decipher the significance of these titillating moments
in art and performance, in yet another corner of the
world, in an altogether different timeline in history.
Rustam Khalfin was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan in 1949 and passed
away in Almaty, Kazakhstan in 2008. In 1972 he graduated from the
Architectural Institute in Moscow, after which he settled in Almaty
where he spent the rest of his career. During that time he became
a follower of Vladimir Sterligov, the last survivor of the Russian
historical avant-garde. Soon after, he started an artist group with his
wife Lida Blinova and other like-minded artists who began organizing
underground shows in apartments and basements in Almaty. Khalfin
Towards Realization of Boundaries. Large
is now considered to be the father of contemporary art in Kazakhstan,
Glass, 1995. Photo documentation of
having played an integral role in training young artists and intellectuals.
performance, location unknown (Almaty,
A prolific painter, Khalfin’s practice progressed through media to
Kazakhstan or Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan)
encompass sculpture, installation, performance, photography, and
Yours truly,
Leeza Ahmady.
video. Khalfin’s work has been widely exhibited throughout the
countries of the former USSR in addition to many cities in Europe of
late, including the Venice Biennale 2005.
Zero Level. Clay Project. (My Ruins). 1999–2000. Photo documentation
of the installation that took over two stories of an empty building.
Installation lasted one year, and was supported by Soros Centre for
Autumnal Gestures of Wrath, 1996. Photo
Contemporary Art, Almaty, Kazakhstan
documentation of Khalfin’s first performance
art work, Almaty, Kazakhstan
Untitled (fragment), 1990–2000. Photo documentation
Flying White, 1997. Photo documentation installation / Performance,
location unknown (Almaty, Kazakhstan or Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan)
Zero Level. Clay Project. (My Ruins). 1999–2000. Photo documentation
Please note that all the image captions are based on notes that were
made by the author during her visit with the artist in the summer of
2008. Though they were cross-checked with secondary sources,
not all captions are complete or fully accurate due to the current
unavailability / accessibility to an archive of the artist’s works.
of performance during Clay Project, Almaty, Kazakhstan
10
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SPECULATION
Marc Nichanian
The Image and the Survivor
I.
From November 2010 to January 2011, the Pratt
Museum in New York hosted Blind Dates: New
Encounters from the Edges of a Former Empire. The
curators of the exhibit were Defne Ayas and Neery
Melkonian, who described their project in the following
terms: “The Blind Dates Project departs from the
premise that the Empire’s abrupt rupture and its violent
reformulation into nation-states have their linger
ing effects on life to this day.” At stake, it seems, was
an exploration of “what remains” in the aftermath of
a traumatic event; understood here as a breakup that
leaves behind nothing but dispersed and ill-fitting
fragments. The modus operandi of this exploration
consisted in the construction of “pairs,” to initiate or
provoke improbable encounters, and to inscribe the
“remains” by way of collective work. All this involved
a considerable risk, namely, to see the expectations of
the project reinterpreted by the couples thus formed,
each pulling hither and thither, with ultimately no
unity visible; no decipherable image for an informed
audience. That is in fact what happened. We live in
the time of nations after all. And the time of nations is
the philological time of cultures, the worth of which
is measured exclusively from within, according to the
claims of an always fantasmatic and immemorial past.
It is the time of the aftermath, with no “beforehand”
available in the form of a memory. Any reconstruction of
a “before” is aleatory or requires a work of interpretation.
Was the Empire claimed by the exhibit’s title a unique
and unitary space of civilization? Was it transformed
with the advent of the new time; the time of autarkic
cultures, or the time of civilization’s decline? This is what
seems to have been presupposed by at least one of
the contributions to the Blind Dates encounters, which
produced and exposed a text in the (dead) language of
the Empire, as if it were alive, translated from an original
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written in English. A superb but ambiguous idea. One
suspects it of having overturned a Spenglerian paradigm,
which had obsessed the conservative right of Germany
and of Europe (and some high-flying Armenian
intellectuals as well) for a large part of the twentieth
century. Today, national cultures embody the decline of
the great civilization (the civilization of Empire). And if it
is not the decline of the West, it will be that of the East. If
we have long suffered from the colonizer’s melancholia,
today we shall experience a different melancholia—one
appropriate to those who identify with the fallen Empire.
Yet, to translate into a dead language as if it were alive:
that was a very beautiful idea.
II.
In order to avoid these ambiguities and these
approximations (and the usual trickery that risk
motivating or accompanying them), we need a
phenomenology of the survivor. We must invent a
new language for it, which would be the opposite of
the grammar of public exposition that contemporary
art is. “What remains,” therefore, is what we will be told
by those who returned as ghosts [les “revenants”], and
by them only, these living-dead that are sometimes
called survivors, outside of a Spenglerian paradigm
and with no reconciliation in the offing. Such a
“phenomenology of the survivor” is a very paradoxical
affair, and this for a number of reasons. First of all, there
is no phenomenology but of a subject. The survivor
is, of course, the reverse of a subject. (The modern
subject was invented in the eighteenth century. A
fabulous invention. The subject is always and again
the one who obeys, as the word subject indicates. One
knows, however, that what he henceforth obeys is
the law that he himself instituted. What is less known
is that the modern subject is also he who produces
himself as an image, who produces the truth in image.
At the core of the subject is now the imagination.
This first revolution, the revolution of the subject,
belongs to the modern era and it is at the origin of the
time of nations, our time, which has yet to exhaust
all its resources. It brought about the next, secondary
revolutions, the political revolutions, when the good
news spread that the subject had turned sovereign, and
when the nations learned to provide themselves a past
fantasized and imagined for them by philology. The
subject, whether individual or national, thus became
the witness par excellence, his own witness, before the
law and by means of the image.) Why is the survivor
the reverse of any subject? Because he denies himself
as a survivor. More simply: because the survivor is
nothing but the dead witness; she whose life is no more
“than the return,” as Maurice Blanchot would say, she
who has returned dead. The second reason for the
extraordinary paradox that is the phenomenology of the
survivor is that it has in fact already been formulated.
It took the form of a novel in the narratives written by
Blanchot in the late 1940s, not least Death Sentence
(1948) and this narrative entitled “Un récit ?” from
1949, published as a book by Blanchot in 1973, with a
changed title, now The Madness of the Day. Derrida
once proposed a remarkable reading of these narratives,
in one of his early great texts translated into English
(in Deconstruction and Criticism [1979]). The French
title of the essay that Derrida devotes to Blanchot was
“Survivre.” The English title: “Living On.” One must read
with caution the English translations of Derrida’s essays
and books. Here, for instance, the translator never
renders “survivre” with “survival,” and forbids himself
the thought that the survival in question could have
anything to do with the figure of the post-catastrophe
survivor. One shall therefore never read, from Derrida’s
English pen, this simple sentence: Survival is denial.
To my knowledge, Derrida himself did not intervene
in the decisions of his translators. He abandoned his
texts to their discretion. He himself theorized this in the
lower section of “Living On,” in the form of a challenge
to the translator. Finally, there is a third reason; equally
crucial. A phenomenology of survival truly requires
a phenomenology of the image, which never fails
to present itself under the form of an analysis of the
“mortuary resemblance,” the resemblance of cadavers.
Mortuary resemblance, then. We shall see what
it is about immediately. I believe it was analyzed
for the very first time in the extraordinary pages
Maurice Blanchot devoted to “two versions of the
imaginary;” two versions of the image, therefore,
at the end of The Space of Literature in 1955. It was
not exactly unknown beforehand, though. The
matter was exploited over the course of centuries in
Western Christianity, in the unexpected form of the
acheiropoietic image. The exploitation was equivalent
to a denial. The survivor was already denying himself
in the image, all the way to his terrible and majestic
entry onto the horizon of our own gaze, in the
aftermath of the holocaustic events of the twentieth
century. On the other hand, in a much more modest
manner, albeit equally surprising and no less
decisive, the radical phenomenon of the “mortuary
resemblance” was inscribed—and served therefore
as the object of an implicit experimentation—in
the work of photographers and artists, our very
contemporaries, of which I shall give two examples.
Aram Jibilian is the first, who contributed to the Blind
Dates project in 2010; Carol Fékété is the second. That
same year, she published in France a magnificent
book of photographs, with a preface by PhilippeAlain Michaud, entitled Ce qui reste (“What Remains”
(published by éditions Biffures).
III.
Aram Jibilan was interested in the ghost of Arshile
Gorky. Back in 2003, he had read an article in the New
York Times, “which revolves around Gorky’s history at
the Glass House, his home in Sherman, Connecticut…
The current owner and resident of the home, Martha
Clarke, discussed how the ghost of Gorky continues
to live with her.” Gorky took his own life close to this
house on July 21, 1948. Here is what Jibilian had to
say about it: “When I, my collaborator, Aaron Mattocks,
and the curators of this project met Ms. Clarke, she
again recounted numerous stories of when she and
[her] guests were visited by his ghost. These stories
serve as the point of departure for my proposed series
of photographs for Blind Dates. Playing with the idea
of Gorky having lived his life in an in-between state of
exile, I seek to capture what his current in-between
state might be.” Jibilian thus made use of a self-portrait
of Gorky as a teenager (itself painted from an old
photograph that the artist had kept). He made a mask
and staged Gorky or his ghost. What I draw from this
is that a ghost cannot come to inscribe itself directly
onto a photographic plate. It cannot print or impress
itself chemically. Why not? Why is it that the ghost can
circulate freely in every corner of the house, make noise
in the bedrooms, even appear to the eyes of some, but
cannot be photographed? I draw something else from
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on the canvas, upon which the Son had called him
closer, asked for a cloth and wiped his face with it. His
face was impressed upon the cloth. This is the famous
kandilyon, the Byzantine version of the Veronica, the
true icon, the Image par excellence. In his preface to
Carole Fékété’s book, Philippe-Alain Michaud recounts
the tale in the version attributed to Constantine
Porphyrogenitus. The image was hidden in a niche in
Edessa, with a lit lamp in front of it. It was discovered
again a few centuries later. The lamp was still burning
and, an effect of the light, the figure was carried
over onto the brick that closed the niche. This new
rendering of the image made without human hand,
the Byzantine called the keramion. In it, Michaud finds
the conceptual origin of photography.
As to Maurice Blanchot’s reflections on the image,
they appear first at the opening of The Space of
Literature in the following passage:
Aram Jibilian, Gorky and the Glass House, 2010, Installation view of
the exhibition v, Pratt Manhattan Gallery, New York City, Photograph
courtesy of the artist
this as well: thanks to the artist, the ghost can now show
itself in image. Without mask, no image. It is as if the
ontological status of the ghost were the same as that
of the mask. No more, nor less. A presence-absence
suspended between two worlds, covering no more than
the absence of what is supposed to be covered.
We are lost. We are now incapable of distinguishing
between the ghost, the mask, and the image. Our
astonishment knows however no bounds when we
perceive that this figure, this self-portrait painted
by Gorky on the basis of his own photographic
image, was in fact a death mask. Aram Jibilian has
done nothing else, therefore, than to render this fact
obvious to whomever wishes to see. The self-portrait
was a death mask. Which also signifies that Gorky
gifted posterity (and himself too) his own death mask
while he was still alive. Or perhaps he was already
dead? Was he dead already? That is the question. But
if “dead”, then as what? As a subject? As a man? As
an exile? A survivor? An artist? A witness? And if as a
witness, then in what sense? Was it as someone who
had lived through atrocities and who fervently wished
for the world to know? Or was it as someone to testify
of his own death as witness? Can a dead witness
testify of his own death as witness?
14
IV.
I shall say only one word about the acheiropoietic
image. This is the image “made without human hand”
theorized by Byzantine theologians at the time of the
civil war between the partisans of the image and its
adversaries. The story was used of the envoy of King
Abgar, who was also a painter, so goes the rumor (but
perhaps he was already a photographer). This envoy
brought to Edessa a portrait of Christ, according to the
most ancient tradition found in Syriac narratives taken
up very early by Armenian translators (who seized the
opportunity to make Abgar into an Armenian!). The
Byzantine made the story into a philosophical tale.
The envoy did not succeed in fixing the traits of Christ
In literature, doesn’t language itself become entirely
image, the image of language... or an imaginary
language, a language that no one speaks—that is to
say, spoken from its own absence—in the same way
that the image appears on the absence of the thing,
a language that is also addressed to the shadow of
events... ?1
Thus, in this tongue that “no one speaks,” language
is its own image. It is spoken on the ground of
absence, and located beyond its use value. It survives
itself, in short, as a living language, or as already
dead. As “its own image,” language, in literature, is a
survivor. From the beginning, therefore, and without
firing a shot, Blanchot establishes
a faultless relation between image
and survival, between the image
and the survivor, the image and
translation in a living language as
if it were dead (which constitutes
therefore the exact opposite of
the example we encountered
earlier). Yet something is obviously
missing here for this relation to be
fully comprehensible. That is why
Blanchot returns to this question at
the end of his book, in an Appendix
where he immediately proposes
the following parallel between the
image and the “cadaver” (or “the
remains”). “At first sight, the image
does not resemble a cadaver, but
it could be that the strangeness of a cadaver is also
the strangeness of the image…” (419). And why is this
the case? The explanation comes slowly. When the
remains is withdrawn from us, Blanchot says, “at this
moment, when the presence of the cadaver before
us is the presence of the unknown, it is also now
that the lamented dead begins to resemble himself”
(420). There, that is the mortuary resemblance, which
Blanchot calls here “the resemblance of cadavers.”
Further on, one can also read these extraordinary lines
with regard to the remains. “If we look at him again,
this splendid being who radiates beauty: he is, I can
see, perfectly like himself; he resembles himself. The
cadaver is its own image” (421).
In actuality, Blanchot transposes, in the form of
a phenomenological description, a reality that he
had explored a few years earlier in his novel Death
Sentence. This novel presents itself as a double
narrative. The first narrative tells the story of a woman
who wakes up from death only to die again. She
thus finds herself for a few hours in the uncertain
and undefined space between life and death, neither
dead nor alive. She is a survivor. In the same part of
the tale, the narrator, at the office of the doctor who
must pronounce death, sees a photograph in which
two faces are superimposed, that of Christ and that of
a young woman, whom we suppose is, to Blanchot’s
1
The English version cited here is from the Station Hill Blanchot
Reader, with translations by Paul Auster, Lydia Davis, and Robert
Lamberton, who must be granted, I think, collective credit (M.
Blanchot, The Station Hill Blanchot Reader: Fiction and Literary Essays
[Barrytown: Station Hill Press, 1999], 415).
15
(136–137). The interpreters have
never known what to make of
this superimposition between the
Veronica and the death mask. It in
fact offers a very simple equation:
the acheiropoietic image and the
death mask are fused to the point
of constituting one and the same
thing. The divine image of the face
is just another form of the mask.
It is the dead face, already, that
impressed itself on the cloth or on
the shroud, during the life of the
Son on this earth. Christ produced
his own death mask.
This idea of the dead face from
which a cast is made while the
person is alive appears again at
the end of the second narrative.
In order to remind the narrator of
the contract sealing their union
beyond death; to remind him
that he bound himself to her as a
survivor, as someone “with no life
but the return”; to remind him that
their marriage contract was written
in a living language as if it were a
dead language, and to punish him,
after a fashion, for breaking the
contract—Natalie arranges for a
cast to be made of her own face.
She has her death mask made for
her. When he understands what
has transpired, the narrator finds
himself beyond fright. He himself
had described the procedure, “a
Aram Jibilian, Gorky and the Glass House, detail, 2010, Installation view of the exhibition Blind
process which is strange when
Dates: New Encounters from the Edges of a Former Empire, Pratt Manhattan Gallery, New York
it is carried out on living people,
City, Photograph courtesy of the artist
sometimes dangerous, surprising,
a process which… ” (183). The
sentence interrupts itself, however.
eyes, “the unknown woman of the Seine,” the young
Evil was done. She represented and she has seen her
woman who had thrown herself into the Seine and
own dead face. Dead while living. It was the face of
whose death mask had been preserved. “On the
the survivor.
wall of his office there was an excellent photograph
of the Turin Sudario, a photograph in which he
saw two images superimposed on one another:
one of Christ and one of Veronica; and as a matter
of fact I distinctly saw, behind the figure of Christ,
the features of a woman’s face extremely beautiful,
even magnificent in its strangely proud expression”
16
Christ, 1992–2000, triptych (after Philippe de Champaigne, Christ, 1654, Louvre), © Carole Fékété
V.
Then there is Carole Fékété’s book of photographs,
What Remains. The work of this artist is remarkable in
that it is resolutely opposed to the image-testimony
to which we are accustomed. She produces stagings.
She exposes series. She does away with any allegedly
natural frame. She revisits and parodies the origins of
photography. She devotes herself to an archaeology
of testimony through the image. This is so when she
looks backward into the stream of time. But when
looking forward, she also speaks of what remains
after death, I mean, after the death of the witness.
There is a qualitative leap here. On one side, the
visual critique (a kind of deconstruction by way of
the image) of the image-testimony. While on the
other side: the death of the witness. What remains
after the death of the witness is the survivor. Each
time, in these images, a scene, a stage, a ground, a
background, a wall, an envelope, a perfectly artificial
intervention. Each time, the context is absent. No
more circumference, no more environment, no more
place, no more world. This is how the images of this
photographer are so powerfully different from what
our eyes are habituated to. They are different from all
the photographic works that arrest the instant, show
the world, tell a story in a tableau, and offer up faces.
If there is no contextual dimension at all, no world,
no hint of testimony, then there is no time either.
No chronicle. The images of this artist do not bring
the human landscape onto the scene. Furthermore,
when there are human bodies in the shape of statues,
she proceeds to cover them, to hide them. She
shows their absence, their becoming-absent, their
removal. Here are images without context, without
frame, without margin, without world, without
human presence; images that strive to erase the third
dimension instead of producing an illusion of it, to the
point of confusing the surface of the image and the
surface of the object.
One must admit that this is already quite
impressive. But even before the series presented
in this book, one of the early works of Fékété was
a series of faces of Christ, based on Philippe de
Champaigne’s famous Deposition and enlarged many
times thereafter. I will conclude with this. The artist
goes back to the Baroque era, so obsessed with the
cadaver in the form of relics, mummies, skulls and
bones of all sorts. By choosing to photographically
reiterate a fragment of the cadaver, she magnifies it
and signals toward its image character. The cadaver
is its own image. Through photography, she aims
at the resemblance of cadavers. She keeps only the
face of the cadaver, as if on a cloth, between the
acheiropoietic image and the death mask, with no
possibility henceforth of distinguishing one from the
other. With this superimposition, she secretly signals
the Christian, and therefore Western, exploitation of
the mortuary resemblance, as Blanchot did in his
time. This exploitation is also the negation of the
survivor, of “what remains” after the death of the
witness. It is proper to the West, and at the very root
of its Orientalism.
Mummy (after Roman legionary, third century), 2007, © Carole Fékété
17
Françoise Vergès
The Slave at the Louvre
PROJECTION
“Slavery here is a ghost, both the past and a living presence;
and the problem of historical representation is how to represent
that ghost, something that is and yet is not”, wrote the Haitian
postcolonial thinker Michel-Ralph Trouillot.1 What can be said
for the pictorial representation of this spectre? How did French
artists from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries represent
the slave? In particular, how were they represented between
the trade’s beginnings up to the definitive abolition of slavery
in the French colonies in 1848? These questions were already
at the heart of the proposition made by the Committee for the
Memory of Slavery (of which I am a member, www.comphe.fr)
in 20042 to the museums of France: to make an inventory of the
figure of the slave in painting and decorative arts. This inventory
has yet to be finalized but the question of the representation of
the figure of the slave has remained, for me, a recurrent one.
At a meeting with Okwui Enwezor, curator of the 2012
Triennial exhibition3 in Paris, I suggested organizing a
programme of guided tours in the Louvre museum entitled,
“The Slave at the Louvre”. The aim was to revisit the collections
in the Louvre in search of the figure of the slave. The main
focus of the visits was to review the collections of the
Louvre, a museum opened in 1793 by the Revolution, and
whose collections end at 1848 (with later works having been
transferred to the Musée d’Orsay). The germinal work by Fred
Wilson entitled Mining the Museum (1992), in which he revisited
the Baltimore Historical Society’s collection in light of the
history of slavery in that city was an important reference. The
Louvre agreed to and actively supported the program.
Filling in an absence or imposing the presence of the slave was
not my intention, even though a great part of the riches of Europe
and America were built upon its work; riches that have even been
1 Michel-Ralph Trouillot, Silencing the Past. Power and the Production of History (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1995): 147.
2 This committee of twelve people was set up according to Article Four of the Taubira Law of
21 May 2001, recognizing the slave trade to be a “crime against humanity”. www.cpmhe.fr
3 La Triennale, Intense Proximity, 20 April–26 August 2012, Palais de Tokyo and other venues,
Paris. www.latriennale.org
18
partly displayed in the Louvre. The goal was not
to seek this kind of reparation but rather to come
to an understanding of the necessary absence
of this figure, or to identify why the figure could
be expressed in a distorted way. It was less about
pointing out that something was missing than it
was about examining what had permitted a lack
or a marginalisation of such a central figure in the
emergence of European modernity.
The role of slavery in human history and of
Marie-Guillemine Benoist, Portrait d’une négresse, 1800, Paris, Musée
colonial slavery in the making of the modern
du Louvre, © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre) / Gérard Blot’s
world, and its recurrence despite technological and
Portrait d’une négresse was commented on by Shuck One, artist.
humanitarian progress should already concern
us. The figure of the slave remains so deeply evocative that it is
often invoked to describe any situation in which the dignity and the
integrity of a person are violated. All this draws out a cartography of
an economic, cultural and socially predatory system.
Critical and analytical work on the representation of the slave
during the French colonial period has yet to be done. Nothing
yet in France measures up to Marcus Wood’s innovative study,
who in 2000 opened up a critical field with Blind Memory: Visual
Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780–1865,
and then took it further in Slavery, Empathy and Pornography
(2003), and The Horrible Gift of Freedom: Atlantic Slavery and the
Representations of Slavery (2010). For Wood, the most pertinent
artistic representation of the slave and of slavery is that which
explores the catastrophe without closing its history, and which
reminds us of the difficulty or impossibility of seeing what the
living experience of the slave truly is. For him, the paintings by
Turner have come the closest to this goal. Blind Memory is not a
“blind” memory, but a memory “blinded” by the light projected
by slavery on the society that practices it, by its pornography, its
violence, and its will and capacity to mask such violence.
In France, the shift between analysis of representations of the
“Black Man” and the “Slave” tends to repeat what colonial slavery
has constructed: an equivalence between the two figures—yet
two figures between which I believe it is important to mark
19
a distinction. When did the slave become “black”? When did
freedom become “white” and servitude “black”? Otherwise, this
absence of analysis allows, without any critical distance, the
endless reproduction of paintings such as François Auguste
Biard’s Abolition of Slavery, 27 April 1848. The sentimentality and
its prefiguration of the civilizing mission do not appear to cause
any problems even among postcolonial critics, for whom they
have become iconic. Yet, the painting transforms abolition into
a gift; it masks the bitterness of the slaves’s struggles, and the
difficult and long battle that the abolitionists underwent. It shows
a “white” man carrying a French flag, bringing freedom to the
black slaves. A black woman on her knees kisses the feet of two
white women, and two black men embrace
each other, brandishing their broken chains.
The entire iconography of the colonial doctrine
of abolitionism is there, obliterating any radical
dimension. Why, at the very moment of its
accomplishment, was the slaves’s freedom so
often represented by a “white” man or a “white”
woman? What inspired the iconographic use
of the image of the tied-up and kneeling slave
during the abolitionist period—on both sides of
the Atlantic? Why was freedom always shown
as having been a gift given to the “Blacks” by the
“Whites”?
Sought in the aforementioned visits was
not literally the figure of the slave. One could
Frans Post, Le Char à boeufs, paysage brésilien, 1650, Paris, Musée du
thus stop in front of the painting, Six Shells
Louvre, © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre) / René-Gabriel Ojéda.
Post’s painting was commented on by Carpanin Marimoutou, professor on a Shelf4 to signal the presence of a cowrie
shell, which was emblematic of the slave trade
of literature and poet.
on the African coasts where it was used as
currency for exchange (millions of cowries were transported from
the Indian Ocean across the continent to West Africa). Indeed,
looking at paintings of coffee cups, of tables, of teapots, and sugar
bowls would likely achieve similar ends. The arts of living and of
household consumption were profoundly affected by the arrival of
sugar, coffee, tobacco, and chocolate in Europe in the eighteenth
century. Though their conditions of production had to remain
invisible, the figure of the “Negro” was prevalent in the decorative
arts (visible on crockery, snuffboxes, tables, vases, and the like).
Colonial slavery lasted several centuries in the long history of
French colonisation. The closed-chaptered approach (for which
generalizing labels such as “Antiquity”, “The Middle Ages”, “Royalty”,
“The Revolution”) masks a cartography that extended far beyond
European borders and brought new tastes, new manners and nonEuropean people to France. The narrow cartography of French
history (the “Hexagon” or the binary couple “France / Colony”)
heavily obscures the ways in which French identity, the Nation, the
economy and the State were affected by colonization. The shifts,
4 Adriaen S. Coorte, 1696, Hollande, Richelieu wing, Second floor, Section 33 bis,
15cm/22cm.
20
the echoes, the displacements, and the accidents of history are all
marginalized therein.
Colonial slavery was a matrix for experimenting disciplinary
and punitive techniques, states of exception, laws that were not
those of mainland France, and the principle of universality, all of
which led to the construction of anti-Black racism. The figure of
the slave haunts the figure of the free and the citizen. Servitude
and revolt, the denial of equality and its affirmation, are brought
together there. The history of modern colonisation is thereby
enlightened in a way that does not allow apologetic discourses.
If colonial memories are often fragmented, however, their
history is sometimes shared. Thus, must we be reminded that
the colonisation of Algeria started eighteen years before the
abolition of slavery, and that in 1848 the same government that
later abolished slavery declared that Algeria was to be divided
into the French departments?
Revisiting the complex artistic terrain of fragmented memories
and crossed histories opens up new debates on representation,
absence and presence.
The Visits
The idea behind the guided
visits was as follows: An
inventory of the paintings
or objects exhibited in the
galleries and that made
reference to slavery was sent
to people that I had invited:
Shuck One, the graphic
artist; Leonora Miano, the
writer; Carpanin Marimoutou,
the poet and professor of
literature; Isaac Julien, the
visual artist; and Maryse
Condé, the writer. Each person
chose one of the inventoried
objects. On the day of the tour,
Théodore Géricault, Le radeau de la Méduse, 1818, Paris, Musée du Louvre, © RMN-Grand Palais
the visitors were welcomed
(Musée du Louvre) / Michel Urtado. Le radeau de la Méduse was commented on by Isaac Julien,
by three people: Laurella
artist, and Maryse Condé, writer.
Rinçon, a Conservateur du
patrimoine; by one of my guests; and by me. I introduced the
visit, first explaining the role and the place of colonial slavery in
the culture and history of European society and the importance
of its heritage for the contemporary world, Laurella Rinçon
presented the artists, and the invited guest was given carte
blanche to speak either about the work or the place of slavery
in his or her own work, or about anything that the painting or
the object brought up in his or her mind.5
5 Following its success, the program will continue in 2013. For the dates and times of the
special guided visits, feel free to visit the Louvre’s website: www.louvre.fr
21
Jews… [Furthermore, the] ambiguity of social life
in cosmopolitan Alexandria lay in the coexistence
of openness in economic life and [at the same
time] closed boundaries elsewhere… Hence the
need to tread cautiously, and the impression that
social life was a lazy, pleasant but careful dance.
The impression was created—and people came to
believe—that ‘we are happy together’. [… But] the
golden rule was never to talk seriously about the
things that mattered most: differences in values, or
in religious or political perspectives.2
Note from the Editors: We are proud to present you here the second
half of the essay of the same name, which appeared in the January
2012 issue of Manifesta Journal #14: http://www.manifestajournal.org/
issues/souvenirs-souvenirs#page-issuessouvenirssouvenirssmellalexan
driaarchivingrevolution0
Alexandria:
A Cosmopolitan City?
Recently published critical studies have highlighted
the serious fault lines in the discourse on Alexandria’s
cosmopolitanism. Robert Mabro, for example, has
closely studied the different Egyptian censuses from
the late 1840s to the 1960s, in order to come up with
a precise composition of Alexandrian society in its
cosmopolitan age. Finding that even though the
foreign community in Alexandria was sometimes
very large, he stresses that it never exceeded a
quarter of the population, and that “the Egyptian
population constituted a significant majority, with a
ratio of at least three Egyptians to one foreigner.”1 He
raises considerable doubt about the degree to which
Alexandrian society was truly open and cosmopolitan:
Alexandria was a fragmented society, and not
only along the Egyptian/foreigner boundary. The
foreigners did not form a homogenous group.
Those who had a clear national identity held to
it: it was the hard core of their inner being. Those
who generated the Alexandrian cosmopolitan
identity mixed together in cultural events and
could talk to each other about certain intellectual
issues. But the Shawam* remained Shawam, the
Italians remained Italians, and the Jews remained
1 Robert Mabro, “Alexandria 1860–1960: The Cosmopolitan Identity,”
in Alexandria: Real and Imagined, ed. Anthony Hirst and Michael Silk
(London: Ashgate, 2004), 247–262; quotation from 247–248.
*
Note from the Editors: “Shawam” is Arabic for Levantines (Syrians,
Lebanese and Palestinians).
22
Khaled Fahmy
The Essence of Alexandria
(Part Two)
SPECULATION
In addition, Mabro’s critical work on what he calls
nostalgic literature on Alexandria stressed, among
other things, the curious absence of Shawām, i.e.
Muslim and Greek orthodox Levantines, from this
literature of nostalgia,3 (after all they speak Arabic,
and were therefore “Arabs”). The degree to which
ideas and intellectual trends were exchanged and/or
created in cosmopolitan Alexandria is something that
Sami Zubaida also doubted in his rightly celebrated
essay on Middle Eastern cosmopolitanism, where he
remarks that the “cultural mix and excitement [of Cairo
in the 1920s and 1930s] was cosmopolitan in a much
more profound sense than the celebrated EuropeanLevantine milieu of Alexandria.”4
In an earlier study and in a similar attempt to
revisit the notion of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism, I
pointed out the necessarily elitist and exclusionary
components assumed in that discourse. Using police
records of the city, a source hitherto rarely used, I
attempted to draw a picture of quotidian life in late
nineteenth century Alexandria, and argued that the
2
Robert Mabro, “Alexandria 1860–1960”, 260–261.
3 Robert Mabro, “Nostalgic Literature on Alexandria,” in Historians
in Cairo: Essays in Honor of George Scanlon, ed. Jill Edwards (Cairo:
American University in Cairo Press, 2002), 237–265.
4 Sami Zubaida, “Cosmopolitanism and the Middle East,” in
Cosmopolitanism, Identity and Authenticity in the Middle East, ed. Roel
Meijer (Richmond: Curzon, 1999), 27.
impressive details of daily life that this archival source
provides can go a long way towards providing a
historically accurate account of what it meant to live
in such a multilingual, multicultural milieu.5
One of the most original contributions to the
critique of the discourse of cosmopolitan Alexandria
is that which Halim provides in her study, “The
Alexandria Archive”.6 In response to Forster’s
categorical claims about the spiritual decline
during the thousand year-long “Arab period” Halim
takes stock of two theological areas that had been
overlooked by Forster, namely, Islam’s encounter with
Classical and Hellenistic philosophy, especially NeoPlatonism and Sufism. She argues that Alexandrian
Neo-Platonism was something that Muslim
philosophers were eager to engage with and that
this engagement partly took place by translators,
commentators and philosophers who had either
lived in Alexandria or who had been educated there.
“Forster’s categorical statements on the subject,”
she remarks, “indicate that he was unaware of, and
did not pause to investigate, the possibility of an
Alexandria-to-Baghdad intellectual transference and
assimilation.”7 With respect to Sufism, Halim similarly
argues that Forster was oblivious of the significant
Alexandrian contribution to medieval Islamic
mysticism.
5 Khaled Fahmy, “For Cavafy, With Love and Squalor: Some critical
notes on the history and historiography of modern Alexandria,” in
Alexandria, Real and Imagined, ed. Anthony Hirst and Michael Silk
(London: Ashgate, 2004), 263–280; and “Towards a Social History of
Modern Alexandria,” in ibid., 281–306.
6 Hala Youssef Halim Youssef, “The Alexandria Archive: An
Archaeology of Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism”, PhD Diss. (Los Angeles:
University of California, 2004).
7
Halim, “The Alexandria Archive” ibid., 163.
An Olfactory Tale of an “Arab” City
In what follows, I would like to attempt to capture
the smells of the lost Arab Alexandria and raise the
possibility that these smells may be a sign both of a
more inclusive Alexandrian cosmopolitanism than
that which we are now familiar with and also of
that which is usually left out from the idyllic picture
of the city. If by sniffing around the discourse of
cosmopolitan Alexandria one is able to detect both
the limitations of this discourse and its questionable
politics (especially given its undertones of
Eurocentrism and its celebration of the Hellenism of
the city as the only source of its vitality and creativity),
is it possible for the olfactory sense to provide us with
other maps? Are they different itineraries, perhaps,
to the Alexandria that has been erased by this
discourse; ones of an Alexandria in which another
cosmopolitanism might be detected, one less tainted
by Eurocentrism?
The Smell of Gunpowder
One of the smells that may have struck one’s nose
during a key moment in the history of the modern
city is that of gunpowder and smoke. On July 11,
1882, the British fleet started pounding Alexandria.
Not only was the port under attack, but also the
downtown area, and specifically, the Place des
Consuls, which was the showpiece of the modern
city that was meant to exhibit the multiethnic nature
of the city. Fires broke out everywhere, and in spite of
Forster’s insistence that it was mostly looting that led
to the destruction of the city’s main square and the
surrounding areas,8 there is little doubt that the smoke
bellowing out of the city that day was the result of ten
8 Forster, Alexandria: A History and a Guide, 101–103; quoted in
Halim, “The Alexandria Archive”, 179; This opinion is shared by Michael
Haag, Alexandria: City of Memory (Cairo: The American University of
Cairo Press, 2004), 10.
23
hours of bombardment by the British Mediterranean
fleet under the command of Sir Frederick Beauchamp
Paget Seymour.9
The bombardment of Alexandria by the British fleet
and the subsequent landing of British troops a couple
of months later led to a seventy-year long occupation
during which Egypt was firmly incorporated in the
British Empire (although never as an official British
colony). The smell of smoke that day is a poignant
reminder of the colonial context of the muchcelebrated Alexandrian cosmopolitanism, and of the
oblique complicity with that colonial context by many
of cosmopolitanism’s key figures (most notably Forster
and Durrell).10
The smell of smoke hovered over Alexandria during
another crucial moment of Egypt’s history. This time
it was in 1954, during a hot July, and was specifically
before the 6:30 p.m. screening of Cinema Rio when
pedestrians in Shāri‘ Fu’ād saw a young Europeanlooking man running out of the movie theatre in fireladen clothes. The man was Philip Natanson, who as
it turned out was part of a Jewish Egyptian espionage
network that the Israeli intelligence had formed three
years earlier with the intention of launching a sabotage
campaign (what would currently be called terrorism if
conducted by Muslims or Arabs, as Beinin rightly points
out). The campaign, called “Operation Susannah”, aimed
to attack several targets in Cairo and Alexandria—the
main Alexandria post office, the Cairo train station, the
United States Information Service library in Cairo, and
several movie theatres in Cairo and Alexandria. The
intention was to show Egypt to be an unstable, radical
country and to thereby convince the British, who had
been engaged with the new revolutionary regime in
9 On the bombardment, see R. Robinson and J. Gallagher, Africa
and the Victorians: The Climax of Imperialism in the Dark Continent
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1961), 110–113, and C.L. Seymour, “The
Bombardment of Alexandria: A Note”, The English Historical Review,
Vol. 87, No. 345 (Oct., 1972), 790–794.
10 See Halim, “The Alexandria Archive”, chapters two and three.
24
Egypt, not to withdraw their troops from the Suez Canal
region. The campaign failed miserably, however, and
Natanson’s attempt to blow up Cinema Rio ended in
disaster (both for him and for his fellow terrorists) when
the explosive device he had planned to leave in the
Cinema caught fire in his pocket.11 Again, the smell of
smoke reminds us of the imperial context that shaped
life in modern Alexandria, a context that is presently
missing from much of the scholarship on the city’s
tradition of cosmopolitanism.
The Smell of a Quotidian Cosmopolitanism
In contrast to the highly sanitized way in which the
materiality of the city is marginalized in the discourse
of cosmopolitan Alexandria, Edwar al-Kharrat’s texts
embraces and celebrates this materiality in refreshing
ways. The Alexandria that comes across in the texts
of this Egyptian novelist, translator and literary critic,
furthermore, is a city whose cosmopolitanism has
a place for the Arab, the Muslim and the Egyptian
components that have hitherto been denied
recognition in the “Alexandria that we have lost”.
In his Alexandrian texts (Rama and the Dragon and
his autobiographical novels The Way of the Eagle, City
of Saffron and Girls of Alexandria) al-Kharrat does not
provide a coherent guide to the city of his childhood
and youth. Given al-Kharrat’s “morbid flinching from
nostalgia’s indiscretions”,12 the smells in his œuvre are
never employed in a Proustian manner to refer to the
essence of a lost city. Instead, they constantly draw
our attention to streets, pavements, and alleyways of
the material city. In contrast, to Durrell’s oft-quoted
11 Khaled, “The big street”, 22. Natanson was eventually caught,
tried and received a fifteen-year prison sentence; for an account
of “Operation Susannah, a.k.a. Lavon Affair”, see Joel Beinin, The
Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of
a Modern Diaspora (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2005),
19–20, 110–116.
12 Edwar al-Kharrat, “My City, Sacred and Untamed”, trans. Hala
Halim, in Alexandria, 1860–1960, 179.
scene which ends with the famous words, “Alexandria:
The Capital of Memory,” and which is followed by
a section where we retrace the footsteps of the
protagonist down the narrow streets that are “soft
now of rain but not wet”, and that were lined with
brothels whose prostitutes “like the true inhabitants
of Alexandria, were offering the deep forgetfulness
of parturition”, passing through his room where he
“listen[ed] to the heavy tone of [Justine’s] scent,”
and ending in his desperate attempt to remember
the name of Justine’s perfume,13 al-Kharrat’s mix of
smells, memories and loss ring less judgmental, more
generous. Indeed:
I boarded the Mex tram, the one open on both
sides. The agony of love, of jealousy, of humiliation
gnawed at me. It had the pungent, putrid smell
of the tanneries that was suffocating me. I was
not sure she would come. By now I was almost
sure she would not come. I stood under the old
grey stone wall of the fort, not knowing precisely
what was happening to me. The wall rose high to
my left, buttressing against an always imminent
collapse. It was almost as though I could not
see the vendors and fishermen squatting behind
baskets and hampers laden with sardines and
mullet and blue-fish and prawns and crabs. I
threaded my way, careful not to step on the
meager bodies of discarded fish, flattened, bloody
protrusions marking the heads and bellies.
Everything seemed hostile and yet very intimate…
The scent of the sea and of fresh raw fish
permeated the slightly muddy alleys. The puddles
of rainwater from yesterday’s storm still sparkled
and skidded with the impact of salt-licked gusts of
wind, and settled on the basalt pavements.14
What is remarkable about this and other passages
in al-Kharrat’s texts is the manner in which the odors
of the city, even if they are putrid and suffocating,
even if they are of discarded fish and puddles of
rainwater, conjure a celebration of the city, rather than
a feeling of disgust, amazement or disillusionment. In
fact, his constant references to smells express not only
a celebration of the city and its exuberant vibrancy
but a joyful embrace of life itself, and a childlike
wonder at its mysteries and secrets.
The smells wafting out of al-Kharrat’s Alexandria
are full of life and fertility, evocative of pleasure
and desire, suggestive of dampness and the sea. In
contrast to the smells encountered by Keeley which
were “cut only sporadically by a pinch of sea-salt,
[and which were] of a refuse not ripe enough to pass
for garbage and a urine a bit too spotty for official
concern,”15 in City of Saffron16 al-Kharrat constantly
refers to “the breeze warm and cool by turns on my
face, bringing the salt smell of the sea” (42); to the
“damp smell from the salt-marsh [and how it] still
comes from over the railway-line wall” (15); to the
“smell of charcoal and flotsam, faint and slightly dry
[coming] from the direction of the harbor, borne
by the moisture of the air.” (24) And in contrast
to Haag, who describes Alexandria on the eve of
Durrell’s second visit as “spiritless, its harbor a mere
cemetery” and whose “palatial villas overgrown with
bougainvillaea…, abandoned or confiscated or left to
rot by their impoverished owner, their rusting gates
opening into wild and unkempt gardens,” al-Kharrat
describes houses that were “like palaces, their iron
fences overhung with the thick branches of trees. The
penetrating scent of native Jessamine, and the smell
of moist earth, wafted to me.” (20)
15 Keeley, Cavafy’s Alexandria, 4.
13 Durrell, Justine, Alexandria Quartet, 152–155.
14 al-Kharrat, “My City, Sacred and Untamed”, 185–186.
16 Edwar al-Kharrat, City of Saffron, trans. Frances Liardet (London:
Quartet Books, 1989).
25
Above all, it is the scenes and smells of communal
life and of an inter-ethnic mix that is most remarkable
in al-Kharrat’s œuvre. In City of Saffron he describes
how his Coptic mother and her Muslim neighbor, Sitt
Wahiba, shared the task of washing the stairs of the
building they shared:
life: ‘In the name of the father, the Son and the
Holy Ghost! Come in, my girl, come in! [...] Our
Lord has commanded the protection of women
from shame. May he so protect the women of this
house.’ (10–11)
On the day when the stairs were washed my
mother filled the pail at the bathroom tap, carried
it out to the landing and poured it out. The water
cascaded down the steps, making a magnificent
slapping, echoing noise. Then she squatted on
her haunches and wiped each stair with a piece
of sacking, step by step, until she reached Sitt
Wahiba’s door. The latter would be waiting: ‘Watch
out of me, Sitt Umm Mikhail!’ she would laugh.
‘Steady on a bit—may no evil eye of mine harm
you!’ And she would bend down and lift the hem
of her house-galabiya to reveal her plump dark
thighs, looking at me bashfully as she did so—
which I found strange—and finish wiping down to
the bottom step. (8)
This tolerance and amicable co-existence that
al-Kharrat describes in the city of his youth were not
restricted to relations between Egyptian Copts and
Muslims, but included relations between Egyptians
and foreigners. In City of Saffron, al-Kharrat relates
many episodes in which foreigners and Egyptians
interacted amicably in Alexandria and the few
European characters that are introduced in the novel
appear in very positive light. Even Allied soldiers who
found themselves in the city during WWII are not
criticized by the narrator for their drunken, rowdy
behavior; rather, he sympathizes with their ordeal
describing their orgies as being the result of “despair,
defeat and death.” (25)
What we see in al-Kharrat’s texts are signs of
a different cosmopolitanism, one which is not
confined to members of the elite, or to Westerneducated classes. Rather, his is a more quotidian
cosmopolitanism that is inspired by local, popular
practices of tolerance and openness to others. In this
open tolerant city, religious feasts become occasions
for communal celebration and mutual exchange of
pastries among neighbors and friends across the
religious divide. Al-Kharrat describes in some detail
the preparations that his narrator’s mother undertook
for the feast of the Archangel Mikhail and the rituals
associated with it. These started with the purchase of
special oil from the neighboring oil press: where he
“was overwhelmed by the sticky penetrating smell of
pressed oil with its slightly sweet, sugary overtones.”
(17) Then there is a lengthy description of the rituals
associated with his mother’s preparation of the
pastries for the feast:
Difference in religion did not prevent neighbors
from getting together and helping each other out
in their time of need. When Hosniya, their neighbor,
heard the horses’s hooves coming along the white
graveled road, and when she realized that the police
were on their way to arrest her as a result of Sitt
Wahiba reporting on her and on her flat to which cabdrivers and others had been seen going night after
night, the smell of hashish lingering in the stairwell
until morning, she could turn to no one but to Uncle
Qaldas, the narrator’s father. ‘The police, Uncle Qaldas,
they’re coming’, she implored.
I beg you, Sidi, help me, please help me—may God
spare a woman of your house such shame—hide
me in your house, I beg you on your honor—I
kiss your feet.’ I heard my father’s voice, husky
from sleep. He sounded very gentle and kind,
with his Sa‘idi accent that he had retained all his
26
came out hot from the oven, crackling, round and
spreading slightly. Their surfaces were cracked
and golden brown, shining with sesame oil. They
had words printed on them in Coptic, and foliate
Coptic cross. Every year my mother arranged the
pastries [… and] sent some of these pastries, on
big, flat white-china plates decorated with blue
flowers, to all her neighbors and beloved women
friends—Umm Mahmud and Umm Hasan and
Umm Toto, and my maternal uncle Hanna and
my maternal aunt Labiba. The Muslims among her
neighbors and bosom-friends would return the
compliment at Ashura with special Ashura dishes;
and at Ramadan, they sent round jugs of khushaf.
We exchanged plates of ka‘k and biscuits and
ghurrayiba and crisp milk crackers, at the feasts
of Easter and Adha and Christmas and Fitr: plates
covered with ironed tea-towels, checked or white.
(86–87)
Throughout al-Kharrat’s œuvre, we witness—and
smell—a cosmopolitanism that is more inclusive
and more tolerant than that of an elite, Westernized
class which has been celebrated by scholars of
cosmopolitan Alexandria. Throughout there is the
extended invitation to experience another Alexandria,
an Alexandria
… which is a smooth boulder in the [heart of the
deluge], where the valley slides slope down, green
with lily-of-the-valley and elderflower; where the
land is saffron, fertile and living; and where on
high a black dove flutters, its wings spread out to
infinity, beating in my heart for ever. (106)
At the first glimpse of morning the pastry rounds
27
The Blood of the Martyrs Will Not Stop
“A million and a half million martyrs”. Ever since I was
a child, that’s what I have heard. It is a figure of myths
and legends. For a long time it was lodged in my
mind and in the minds of thirty-six million Algerians.
It refers, of course, to the death toll of the War of
Independence (1954–1962). It is one of our founding
myths, us Algerians. It follows us everywhere we go.
When I travel to any other Arab country, as soon as
I say that I am Algerian, someone is always there
to remark, “Ah! al-Djazaïr, balad al milioune chahid.”
(Ah, Algeria, the land of a million martyrs!) It is a
sort of brand we cannot shake, not even fifty years
after independence. I admit I was astonished when
I learned that this total was based more on legend
than on fact and that historians (Benjamin Stora and
Mohammed Harbi, to name two), actually estimate
the toll to be around 400,000 deaths—most of them
civilian. I admit that I was a little sad. It was as if you
had discovered, at age forty, that your father was not
really your father. I learned late in life, very late, that
this story of a million and a half martyrs was rooted
in of one of President Ahmed Ben Bella’s impassioned
speeches. Addressing a highly charged crowd during
the summer of 1962, he threw out this number on the
fly. One of the key phrases in our national story was
thus etched into marble.
Beyond these guesses and exaggerations about the
death toll are the so-called laurels of post-colonial
martyrdom, which in hindsight are striking. This
bloodshed continued to torment the majority of the
country even after the ceasefire,1 as if my people
needed to offer up every one of the supposed one
and a half million bodies to some vicious deity in
order to reach nirvana.
1 A ceasefire between France and the FLN was established on March
19, 1962, the day after the Evian Accords were signed.
28
Mustapha Benfodil
The Shuhada
of the Past Fifty Years
All images courtesy of Mustapha Benfodil
SPECULATION
Algerians, rise up!
In this account, I want to trace, in broad strokes,
the story of the river of blood that will not let. The
post-1962 martyrs, the shuhada,2 were just so many
offerings to this cannibalistic monster, an Algerivore
that is never sated. A demon-god that I imagine takes
the physical form of the Maqam Eshahid; literally,
“the shrine of the martyrs,” a giant concrete beast
looming over Algiers. This beast devours a hundred
men for lunch and as many for dinner. It wolfs
down thousands of legs, hearts, kidneys, and other
throbbing organs before puking them all up again into
the Bay of Algiers.
Portrait of Ramdhane Mekhaznia, a twenty-two year old biologist who immolated himself on August 16, 2011. He was
the only member of his family to have earned a diploma. He lived in El Ouenza, a small Algerian mining town that
borders Tunisia.
“Seven Years is Enough!”
Emerging at last from colonial domination, this
parched earth, hacked and furrowed by the claws
of conquerors, called out to be watered with fresh
blood. Not watered gently, as one would a garden, but
violently; brutally. The liberators had hardly put down
their guns before the country plunged into civil war.
It was the crisis of the summer of 1962, as the news
referred to the fierce rivalries among the factions of
the FLN.3 Indeed, a muffled war was about to break
out between the political and the military wings of
the ruling party. It would pit the followers of Colonel
Boumediène,4 operating out of Morocco, against
the Provisional Government (GPRA), based in Tunis.
Ben Bella, hoisted onto Boumediène’s tanks, entered
Algiers triumphantly on August 3, 1962, leaving
behind him a trail thick with the blood of 3,000
bodies. People filled the roads chanting, “Sabâa snine
2
Shuhada, plural of shahid, Arabic for “martyr.”
3 Front de Libération Nationale (National Liberation Front), the
legendary revolutionary party that led the battle against colonialism.
4 A nickname for Mohamed Boukharouba. He was the chief of staff
and figurehead of the so-called Border Army (Armées des Frontières).
Ramdhane Mekhaznia’s father and sister, with his portrait.
29
barakat!”, or “Seven years is enough!”
Hocine Aït Ahmed, one of the leaders of the
original section of the FLN, shut down the constituent
assembly and, in September 1963, created in its wake
the Socialist Forces Front (FFS), which came to be
known as the oldest opposition party. While dissidents
suffered under repression, he took refuge at his
stronghold in Kabylia and along with Colonel Oulhadj
established an armed guerilla resistance. The death
toll: 400 combatants from Kabylia.
More deaths. Algerians, rise up again! Among
the casualties were luminaries and leaders. Their
celebrated names fill history books and mark the main
streets of Algiers. Yet there remains a sharp contrast
between their status as icons and heroes, and their
tragic fate. They were not brought down by the
obvious enemy, the French, but by their own brothers
in arms. The most emblematic case was that of Abane
Ramdane, the brains of the FLN and architect of the
Revolution.5 His motto, “politics over militarism,”
cost him dearly.6 Some consider the assassination
of Abane, occurring years before Algeria achieved
national sovereignty, to mark the first coup in the
country’s history.
After independence, the number of political
assassinations escalated. On January 4, 1967,
Mohamed Khider, another historic figure and cofounder of the FLN, was killed in Madrid. The Algerian
Special Forces were most likely behind the job.
Khider’s mistake? He had denounced Boumediène,
who on June 19, 1965 had ousted Ben Bella. And
then on October 18, 1970, Krim Belkacem, the very
man who had signed the Evian Accords that marked
the end of French colonial rule, on behalf of Algeria,
was strangled with his own tie in his hotel room in
Frankfurt.
The deputy Noureddine Aït Hamouda, son of Colonel
Amirouche, openly accused the head of the FLN’s
secret service, Abdelhafidh Boussouf (yes, him again)
of having betrayed his father. The most tragic part of
this affair is that Amirouche Aït Hamouda never even
had the right to a burial. As soon as the country was
liberated, Amirouche’s remains were thrown into the
basement at the headquarters of the national police
force in the hills above Algiers. It was a way of erasing
all trace of him; razing his legacy. His remains were
not dug up until 1984. He had to wait twenty years to
claim the right to a monument in Martyrs Square, the
renowned cemetery of revolutionary heroes. This is
precisely our relationship to our martyrs; we honor
them selectively, and this praise is always strongly
dependent on power struggles within the nationalist
movement.
For civilians, the violence did not stop in 1962—far
from it. The protests of October 1988 left 500 dead.
Activists called the victims “martyrs of democracy.”
Then came the war in the 1990s, bringing funeral after
funeral to the streets of the country. The first martyr
of the new Algerian war was President Mohamed
Boudiaf. He was considered to be the father of
the FLN, a revolutionary from the start, and his
assassination was seen as a sort of patricide. Barely
six months after his inauguration, Boudiaf was shot
on June 29, 1992 while giving a speech at a cultural
center in Annaba. The event was broadcast live on
television. This dramatic end ushered in a new war,
and its own harvest of casualties. The numbers are
shocking. Some say there were between 100,000 and
200,000 deaths. No one has the list. No one has the
names. And no government agency has ever been
made to turn over an official report on the casualties.
Ramdhane Mekhaznia’s family. The photograph was taken in their neighborhood, a slum at the foot of the mine called
Hai Edhalma, which literally means the “City of Darkness”.
Remembrance is forbidden
Heroes without a grave
Some heads of the Revolution proved themselves
to be troublesome even in death. This was notably
the case with Colonel Amirouche, nicknamed the
“Lion of Djurdjura”, who was killed near Boussaâda by
French paratroopers on March 29, 1959. Of course, it
wasn’t just the French whom the valiant Amirouche
troubled—he clearly worried his brothers in arms, too.
5 In Algeria, this term is used in reference to the War of
Independence (1954–1962).
6 At a farm in Tetouan on December 26, 1957, he was strangled
in cold blood by Abdelhafidh Boussouf, the head of the FLN’s secret
service, the precursor organization to the political police.
30
April 15, 1999: Abdelaziz Bouteflika was “elected”
president, roadmap in hand: an amnesty project to
be carried out immediately. September 28, 1999:
a referendum is held regarding the Civil Concord
and the fate of the Islamic Salvation Army7 the
military branch of the Islamic Salvation Front.8
This act pardoned the minor offenses of Islamist
prisoners. September 29, 2005: the Charter for Peace
and National Reconciliation was also adopted via
referendum. This meant total amnesty for the worst
7 Armée Islamique du Salut (AIS).
8 Front Islamique du Salut (FIS).
A child in the Hai Edhalma neighborhood, who totes the Algerian flag on his jacket. What does the future hold?
31
killers among Allah’s guerilla fighters. The problem:
both these projects were top-down measures. There
was no debate on the pardons. There were only
wounds torn open in the hearts of the victims of
terrorism and the families of the disappeared. There
was only death. According to a report from the
Algerian League for the Defense of Human Rights,9
some 18,000 people abducted by “agents of the
state” remain missing to this day. Every Wednesday,
the mothers of these victims camp in front of
the headquarters of the National Observatory for
Human Rights, portraits of their children held tight
to their chests, demanding the truth. Inevitably, they
remind me of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo
in Argentina. These families do not even have the
luxury of mourning their children, of kneeling at their
graves. Worse, they do not have the right to demand
accountability from the state since the security
services responsible for the abductions were granted
amnesty outright. A presidential decree issued on
February 28, 2006 expressly prohibited any inquests
into “the national tragedy.” An excerpt:
Anyone who writes, speaks, or otherwise acts to
use or exploit the wounds of the national tragedy
to undermine the institutions of the People’s
Democratic Republic of Algeria, to weaken the
state, to damage the agents who have served with
dignity, or to tarnish the image of Algeria on the
world stage will be punished with three to five
years in prison and a fine of 250,000 to 500,000
dinars.10
It was not just the families of the disappeared who
were outraged by this text. The families of the dead
also considered that this total absolution of crimes
attributed to Islamist activists constituted an attack
on the memory of their loved ones. To top it all off,
the leaders never descended from the djebel (or
mountain) not once, to express even a sliver of regret
for their actions. For them, the initial violence had
been a justified jihad, after which the Islamic Front for
Salvation had been robbed of their rightful electoral
victory. Some people requested that a reconciliation
process based on the South African model, under
the aegis of Nelson Mandela, be implemented,
including a committee on truth and justice, where
the main players—that is, the Islamists and agents of
the state—would admit to their crimes, allowing for
a cathartic processing of trauma. The regime wanted
to move quickly and bury the dead without delay,
however. They stitched up the wounds carelessly.
This did not go over well with the population. In the
cities and towns where the so-called penitents had
reintegrated into civil society, life became agonizing,
especially for the families of the dead. Penitent
(repentant): another word that was in vogue. A new
class of citizens who were going to invest in the
public sphere, improve their communities. A perfect
example of this situation was the case of Mohamed
Gharbi, a former mujahid11 from the eastern Algerian
village of Souk Ahras who picked up a gun in order
to defend himself and his family after repeated
threats and taunts from Ali Merad, a repentant former
Islamist leader. One day, Gharbi refused to endure
the affronts any longer and shot him point blank. He
was sentenced to death in February 2001 for killing
the penitent. His case—which brings into sharp focus
all the absurdities and the folly of the amnesty law,
the official decree for total absolution—sparked a
substantial popular rally.
Our very own Boutef12 shouldered the mantel
of savior by promising to put an end to Islamist
guerilla warfare and to expel the guerilla fighters.
Unfortunately an insurrection broke out in Kabylia
when a police officer shot and killed a high school
student, Guermah Massinissa, at police headquarters
in Beni Douala (Upper Kabylia). It was April 18, 2001.
This new cycle of violence lasted three months. Death
toll: 126. They were the martyrs of the Black Spring.
Still more deaths.
Algerians, rise up again!
The War of Monuments
When speaking of the current Arab insurrections,
everybody asks me, “And you? When will your
revolution come?” I regret that when the October
1988 uprising broke out, over twenty years before the
ones in Tunisia and Egypt, there was no al-Jazeera
and there was no Facebook to give it the attention
and support it deserved. It is worthwhile to emphasize
that at the moment when Mohamed Bouazizi set
himself on fire and the people of Tunisia rose up,
9 Ligue algérienne de défense des droits de l’homme (LADDH).
10 Presidential decree regarding the implementation of the Charter
for Peace and National Reconciliation, article 46.
32
11 An FLN guerilla fighter during the War of Independence.
12 Boutef is a nickname for sitting president Abdelaziz Bouteflika.
a series of unprecedented riots erupted across
Algeria. Numerous protests followed, demanding
change hic et nunc (here and now). I participated in
many of these demonstrations, and despite a strong
mobilization of elites and supporters of democracy,
the movement never quite caught on at the popular
level. People told us they were sick of the violence.
“Barkana dem!” they said. (“Enough blood already!”)
Yet, the fact remains that Algerians continue to
die, disgracefully sacrificed at the altar of oppression
and injustice. Every day brings new offerings to the
Maqam Eshahid (Monument of the Martyrs). Every
day, groups of harragas (“burners”, or undocumented
immigrants to Europe) throw themselves into the
sea, illegal migrants trying to reach Europe on
makeshift boats. Kamel Belabed, father of a harraga
whom he hasn’t heard anything from since 2007,
declared to me in words full of truth: “The harragas
are neither harebrained nor suicidal. They are a
political movement.” Another growing phenomenon
that has emerged as a form of citizen resistance by
contradiction is self-immolation. Not a day passes in
which a citizen, a man or a woman, does not drench
herself in gasoline and set herself on fire. Sometimes,
she sets fire to her children, too. A full fifty years after
independence, and the number of self-immolations
is soaring. This is a scathing critique of Bouteflika and
his cronies.
How many times have I heard this phrase—how
many times from former guerilla fighters themselves?
“Mazal maddinache l’istiqlal.” (or, “We have not yet
gained independence.”) Where does the blood run
from now? As the death toll escalates, Algerians just
don’t know where to stop. Martyrs supplant martyrs.
Walking around Algiers, I am often struck by the
succession of monuments to the dead. Each new
war produces its own set of martyrs. I note with a
certain shudder, however, that at a certain point, the
Algerians stopped erecting new commemorative
monuments. I was simply astonished to see that
the massacres of Bentalha, Rais, and Had Echkalla,
which claimed fifty victims, are not marked by any
monument, not even a cardboard sign. Nothing. It is
as if only a pack of wild dogs had been killed there.
I do not know what could stop the bleeding and
heal our hearts. I do not know how to hasten the
clotting of the blood of history. Yet I am just dim
enough to believe that mourning can begin when the
terms of the autopsy are agreed upon. The language
of the autopsy, the autopsy that reveals the true cause
of death and that allows us to move on to other
things. I know that the right words carry a sacred
healing power. We must begin to tell the truth. We
must put an end to the legends and the exaggerated
tales; put an end to the falsely cathartic lies. We must
relieve the corpses of their festering truths and let
the graves blossom in full. Only words can heal; free
speech. It is no longer possible, after Ben Ali, after
Moubarak, Qadhafi, Assad, and the whole group
of outworn dictators, that the heirs and heiresses
of Djamila Bouhired, Abane Ramdane, Louizette
Ighilahriz, Frantz Fanon, Mohamed Boudiaf, and Larbi
Ben M’hidi can keep their heads down.
Algerians, rise up again! Finish the job.
Strike one more time and seize
this damn independence !
Mustapha Benfodil, author, artist, and journalist
All images courtesy of Mustapha Benfodil
33
Toxic Feelings
CONVERSATION
A Dialogue Between
Ann Cvetkovich
and Pauline Boudry /
Renate Lorenz
In the exchange that follows, artists Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz along with queer
theorist Ann Cvetkovich reflect on the intersections between their recent projects. They have
taken feeling and politics as a point of departure, in addition to the relation between past and
present, and the productive value of negative affects. Here, they reflect on the category of regret
(the focus of this Manifesta Journal special issue), and its implications for their work on toxicity,
feeling bad, the politics of passivity, and feelings of ambivalence.
Regret
(Ann Cvetkovich)
In my collaborative work with Public Feelings groups, we often start
with what seem like minor key words or feelings, such as depression (the
subject of my new book), respite, or impasse, in order to explore their
genealogies, social meanings, and affective resonances.1 Sometimes the
work is associative, and even tangential or impressionistic connections
can be productive.
Although I haven’t done much thinking about it, “regret” is a suggestive
category for this kind of investigation, especially since it is another form
of “feeling bad”, the colloquial term I have used for negative affects.
One of the first things that comes to mind is the question of whether
militant women activists from the 1960s and 1970s, such as Weather
Underground members Kathy Boudin and Judith Clark “regret” their
involvement in violent actions such as the 1981 Brinks Robbery that led
to the death of a Brinks driver and two policemen.2 (Boudin was also
involved in the 1970 Greenwich Village townhouse explosion that killed
three of her comrades.) I am intrigued by the ambivalent status of radical
left militancy and by the feelings that accompany the turn to violence
to make a better world. In so many examples, perpetrators (itself a
loaded term)—Nazis, sex offenders, slave owners, imperialists, murderers,
terrorists—are represented as unsympathetic, and it is easy to project
homogenizing and alienating concepts of evil onto them. Because of
that, their cases don’t manage to provide much traction on the complex
and ambivalent feelings that can accompany acts of violence. The minor
archive of radical activists admitting their mistakes, feeling regrets, or
figuring out ways to make amends is thus useful.
As a specifically political feeling, regret resembles the forms of
disappointment and despair about the failures of activism that I and others have
1
See Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).
2 See Tom Robbins, “Judith Clark’s Radical Transformation,” New York Times Magazine,
Jan 12, 2012. Other examples include Katherine Ann Power (who was involved in robberies
in Massachusetts that led to the death of a police officer. She went underground and then
surrendered in Oregon in 1993), Patty Hearst (the subject of performance work by Sharon
Hayes), Bernadette Dohrn, and the Baader-Meinhof Gang.
34
explored under the rubric of political depression. But whereas political despair
can be the product of doing what you think are all the right things and still
not getting what you want, regret captures the circumstances of having tried
something that you now recognize to have been wrong and even harmful to
others. The case of the Weather Underground, and more generally the pursuit
of militant action for a good cause—such as armed struggle in revolutionary
contexts like South Africa, Ireland, and Palestine—is a source of intrigue for
radical activists committed to non-violent protest. What happens when you
intend to do violence, or when violence that wasn’t supposed to result in the
loss of life doesn’t turn out the way you had expected? These difficult cases of
the relation between feeling and action make for morally ambiguous stories
of uncertain agency that are infrequently told in the popular media.3 We have
very few models for what it means to discuss acts of violence or to be a political
leader who acknowledges mistakes, because doing so means displaying
disparaged forms of public vulnerability. (Gender, sexuality, and conceptions
of masculinity are central here, in addition to my interest in whether or not
women and lesbians who have committed acts of violence are more inclined
to acknowledge feelings of regret.) If we had a better sense of how one might
acknowledge a mistake and still move forward, and of how one were able to
create a different relation between past feelings and actions and the future,
what would concepts such as reparation, apology, atonement, or making
amends look like? Kathy Boudin and Judith Clark were, for example, cofounders of AIDS Counseling and Education (ACE) at Bedford Hills prison, and
Clark has taught parenting classes, participated in writing programs, and trained
service dogs.
The proposal for this special issue of Manifesta Journal places regret
alongside nostalgia and shame, both categories that have been of
interest for queer affect studies, particularly as the focus of efforts to depathologize negative affects and to consider their productive potential.
If queer theory de-pathologizes shame, for example, might it also
de-pathologize regret?4 Does “de-pathologizing regret” mean that we
refuse to regret or that we embrace it? Or perhaps that we can do both
simultaneously as a measure of the contradictory nature of emotional
life? (I think, for example, of the ambivalent force of Edith Piaf’s “Je ne
regrette rien” in which the world-weary diva articulates a tough refusal of
feeling (one that can underwrite forms of historical amnesia) while at the
same time indulges in feeling through its refusal, particularly through the
mournfulness of vocal sound itself.)
The link between regret and nostalgia is also suggestive because
recent theories of melancholy and queer temporalities struggle with
the problem of whether to critique nostalgia or claim it.5 When queer
theorists and artists seek versions of holding on to the past that retain the
negative—ones that don’t abandon the present or the future in favor of
3 See Kathryn Bond Stockton’s discussion of the film Heavenly Creatures, in which she argues
for the complexity of the affective conditions for murder, which cannot simply be explained in
terms of “premeditation” or conscious “motives”. See The Queer Child, Or Growing Sideways in
the Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).
4 See, most notably, Eve Sedgwick in Touching Feeling (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003),
as well as David M. Halperin and Valerie Traub, eds. Gay Shame (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2009).
5 See Elizabeth Freeman, ed. “Queer Temporalities” Special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian
and Gay Studies 13 (2007): 2–3.
35
an idealized past but instead seize the negativity of the past as a resource
for the future—they often try to reject bad versions of nostalgia that,
like the sentimental, erase negative affect or whitewash the past. But I
am wary of the dismissal of some versions of feeling as being truly bad
instead of being useful, productive, or good versions of bad feelings and I
thus want to retain nostalgia as a category.
With this prelude in mind, I am curious to know how the term “regret”
resonates alongside your work, since for you, as for me, it doesn’t
necessarily seem to be a primary category but rather one that is potentially
present in the interstices of shame and nostalgia. I understand that these are
significant categories for you, including their relation to the category of the
“toxic”, whose ambivalent meanings you have been exploring of late.
6 Renate Lorenz, Queer Art. A Freak Theory (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2012).
or that sports and health should have been more of a priority. This kind
of ongoing negotiation is one part of a deployment of labor that we call
“sexual labor”,10 a term that combines concepts of a performative, repeated
production of gender, race and sexuality with post-Marxist and sociological
concepts of work and precariousness. Regret and shame both seem to
be indications of precarious (and thus of vulnerable) bodies. However,
their inner workings are unpredictable since they are both motivated by
contradictions. This flexibility and unpredictability opens up the concepts
to resistance and de-normalization. Our film, “Normal Work”,11 refers to the
photographs and documents of the Victorian housemaid Hannah Cullwick.
Her leftovers from the late nineteenth century are a good early example of
those contradictions: Having felt ashamed to have opened her employer’s
door to visitors in a completely dirty and dripping dress, she writes that at
the same time, she loved dirt as a sign of achieved labor, and obviously as a
sign of her masculinity. The permanent crossing of social positions is a very
productive deployment but, as Hannah Cullwick’s photographic work shows
and as we wanted to highlight in our film, it might also lead to the complete
de-normalization of such practices.
We agree that just rejecting the feeling of “regret” full-stop might
not work. Maybe not rejecting but multiplying the possible future of
regret would be an interesting response. The American performer and
artist Bob Flanagan wrote the great poem, “Why?”, which seemed to
answer the unspoken question, “Why you are such a pervert and invest
your energy in S&M practices?”. In so doing, he seemed to produce a
collection of everything in the past that might have influenced his future
in a way that could have been regret but… well… it could also have been
something else. A short excerpt: “… Because there was so much sickness;
because I say FUCK THE SICKNESS; because I like the attention; because
I was alone a lot; because I was different; because kids beat me up on
the way to school; because I was humiliated by nuns; because of Christ
and the Crucifixion; because of Porky Pig in bondage”.*12
If we think of regret as something that feels bad because we cannot
change the past that unavoidably influences our future, I think our art
works might intervene into this complex since they invest a lot into
chronopolitics; the politics of temporality.* Our films, such as “No Future
/ No Past” particularly reference the politics of Punk, but actually all
of our works, look for forgotten queer moments in the past and then
rework them in order to create an archive of de-normalizing practices
for a livable future. Our recent work, “Toxic”, refers to the violent history
of photography as an instrument of the police and of racist colonial
practices. It seems important not to refer to these practices by simply
quoting them but at the same time to look for deterritorializing moments
where the racist and homophobic impulses weren’t successful, in
addition to intervening in the past in a way that may improve the
prospects for the future.
7 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Shame, Theatricality, and Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The
Art of the Novel,” In: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, (Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2003).
10 See Renate Lorenz / Brigitta Kuster, Sexuelle Arbeit (in German) (Berlin: b_books 2006),
Renate Lorenz, “Long Working Hours of Normal Love,” In Normal Love, exhibition catalogue
(Berlin: b_books, 2007).
8 Elspeth Probyn, Outside Belongings (New York and London: Routledge Press, 1996).
11 See Pauline Boudry, Renate Lorenz, Temporal Drag (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2011).
9 See Ann Cvetkovich, “Public Feelings,” In South Atlantic Quarterly 106: 3 (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2007) 460, 463.
* Note from the Editors: The plural and variegated resonances of chronopolitics are further
investigated in Manifesta Journal 14 and 15. See www.manifestajournal.org .
(Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz):
As you have aptly pointed out, we have worked more on “shame”, which
somehow seems to be “part of the family” of regret, since we might regret to
have done something which in turn forces us to blush. Therefore regret may
be directed not only to dramatic events but also to really small and everyday
practices, such as having uttered a wrong sentence or having forgotten to
do something. Renate worked on shame in her recent book, Queer Art,6 but
has developed the subject more extensively in Auwändige Durchquerungen,
in the context of a queer perspective on labor, which has been an important
subject in our common work since we met almost fifteen years ago. Shame
indicates that the gaze of others reveals us to be something that we don’t
want to be, while we have already experienced or phantasized otherwise.
(See also Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s7 and Elspeth Probyn’s8 work on shame).
Shame can also indicate that we have become someone we want to be
on the one hand, but on the other hand that we do not want to be like
that by any means. Thus the concept of shame is an effective tool in the
field of neoliberal labor, since it is particularly produced by the meeting of
contradictory or incongruous demands.
It also seems as if regret is particularly activated under current working
conditions. This is another interesting aspect that you characterized in
your reports on the “Public Feelings Groups”: That the groups themselves
started as a questioning or protest against “professional norms that demand
success, productivity, and a seamless public persona”9 and that many
participants described a “sense of divided attention” between professional
demands and political urgencies. If a person feels responsible for his or her
own well-being, happiness or prosperous future, he or she might fear to
regret something in the future which is or is not presently being taken care
of. One might fear to regret having refused a task, such as working long
hours, or giving a certain lecture. Yet at the same time one might also fear
having wasted one’s entire life working and not having been lazy enough—
that political urgencies or disasters should have been left to the wayside,
36
37
No Future / No Past
Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz
Installation with two Super 16mm films / HD, 15 min and 15 min, 2011
Performance: Ginger Brooks Takahashi, Fruity Franky, Werner Hirsch,
Olivia Anna Livki, G. Rizo
No Future / No Past is a film installation and part of a series of two films
that both work on punk archives from the period between 1976 and
2031 investigating the radical negativity, the self-destructiveness and
the dystopia of this past moment.
This work takes another look – anachronistically – at the punk policy
of aggressively slating and rejecting the present without ever proposing
its own movement as the guarantor of future social justice. Instead of
demanding social change, the five performers – four musicians (Ginger
Brooks Takahashi/”Men”; Fruity Franky/”Lesbians on Ecstasy”; G. Rizo;
Olivia Anna Livki), and a choreographer (Werner Hirsch)–stage and
practice outmoded acts and sentiments of the past that have been
deemed useless. The musician-performers provisionally take over the
positions of four musicians from the punk movement: Darby Crash,
Poly Styrene, Alice Bag, and Joey Ramone.
38
39
Toxic and “Feeling Bad”
We are currently very interested in the term “toxic”. Not only to address
the historic and present discourses around toxicity and to introduce
the term as a critical instrument, but also to highlight its ambivalence—
somehow we use it as an equivalent to “queer”—as a term which is as
much bound to violence as it is to pleasure; to a different beat in life and
to the de-normalization of certain practices. Let us briefly describe our
last film, entitled Toxic.
The film starts without human performers, although it is located in
a theatre space, indicated by colorful curtains and a projection screen.
Instead of performers, on stage are many huge and small plants,
including toxic ones such as winter roses and rhododendrons. The floor
is covered with a dirty mixture of old glitter, cigarette butts and pills. The
two performers, Werner Hirsch and Ginger Brooks Takahashi, enter first
as simple on-screen projections. They are seen in a series of “mug shots”
(photographs taken both frontally and in profile at once; a style that was
invented to photograph criminals, sex workers, homosexuals and people
from the colonies, and was used by the police or in anthropology from
the late nineteenth century onwards).
The people photographed are of unclear gender and origin. They
wear masks and strange costumes and show off assemblages, referring
not only to early ethnographic imagery, but also to queer underground
subculture and to street protests. Sometimes the people in the
photographs don’t even look human. Though there are references,
there is also a certain level of imperceptibility. When the two performers
finally enter the stage they seem not to care about the slide show in the
background. Werner Hirsch inhales smoke from his cigarette and coughs
a cloud of glitter out of his mouth, whilst Ginger Brooks Takahashi takes
up a microphone and begins listing off a number of toxic substances,
thereby obscuring the categories of environmental catastrophes (the
Great Pacific Plastic Patch; radioactive compounds that cross national
borders); treatments that supposedly heal (chemotherapy, Xanax);
narcotics (cocaine, heroin); and soft drugs (alcohol, cigarettes). The
usage of the word “toxic” seems not only to tolerate ambivalences but
to produce and enhance them. It refers to bodies, which are permeable,
extending beyond the layer of skin that contains them, as Donna
Haraway has said, or even better, to “body-substance-assemblages”.13 The
doses of the substances are important, but you never know what dose
might produce which effect.
Our work on toxicity was initially inspired by a text by Mel Y. Chen,
“Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections“.14 Chen introduces her topic
by showing how the discourses around toxicity currently install racist
hierarchies (toxic toys are produced in China, but instead of protesting
the toxic working conditions the discourse is more about China’s
propensity to poison white children in the West). She further complicates
40
her critique of the discourse by explaining her own condition, (Multiple
Chemical Sensitivity), which forces her to live her life within the confines
of this very discourse of toxic danger. In the end, “toxic” seems to be
more about practices and relations, ones between humans but also ones
between humans and “animist” furniture for instance. While working on
the film installation we came to the assumption that it could be useful
to see not only substances—chemicals or parts of plants, among other
things—as toxic but the photographic / filmic apparatus as well: its
history since the nineteenth century, the technologies, matters, practices,
discourses and social effects that are implied therein, in addition to
the way we continue to work both in and through them. Yet even if
the cinematic apparatus tries to allow for unmediated objectivity and
knowledge it might also produce ec/static bodies and queer connections
as dirty and uncanny by-products, if you will.
13 For a further discussion of such a concept see Lorenz, Queer Art, 2012.
(Ann Cvetkovich):
Although I have not used it directly in my own work, I, too, have
been intrigued by Mel Chen’s discussion of “toxic animacies” and was
excited to see your use of it in Toxic. Chen’s examples of small children
licking toys and the intimacy between her fatigued body and a couch
render vivid new theories of affect that underscore how the object/thing
world is just as “animated” or alive as human beings are. The porous
boundaries between people, objects, and environments make for queer
and unpredictable forms of embodiment and intersubjectivity. Although
this vulnerability opens up the body to toxic forms of contamination, it is
also an enabling condition towards being affected by the world, for forms
of “chemical” (or biological) sensitivity are also about being attuned
to people, objects, and environments. The “transmission of affect”, to
borrow a term from Teresa Brennan, takes place at a sensory level that is
not necessarily conscious or cognitive, and it thus necessitates the new
accounts of sensory experience provided by recent theories of affect.15
This conception of intersubjective and sensory embodiment is
present in my thinking about depression, which I describe as the result
of being so overwhelmed or flooded by sensations from the outside
world that one is unable to sustain a self. Critiquing the medicalization
of depression and pharmacological solutions—the idea that a pill can
“cure all”—is important to me. Anti-depressants and their marketing feed
the desire to find a drug and ingest it in order to alter the biochemical
substrate of felt experience. The list of drugs in Toxic reveals the range of
ways in which we seek the assistance of chemical substances, and your
work makes me wonder whether “toxicity” necessarily entails notions of
the pharmacological. I am interested in new ways of working with the
integrated relation between inside and outside, and between body and
mind.
As in the case of “regret”, practices of re-description are also central,
which are manifested both in writing and in art practices that re-imagine
the medical, the political, and the therapeutic in everyday and lived
contexts. (Renate and Pauline’s work would be an exemplary case here.)
I have, for example, favored the term “feeling bad” over “depression”,
14 Mel Y. Chen, “Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections.” In GLQ 17: 2–3 (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2011).
15 See Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).
41
Toxic
Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz
Installation with Super 16mm film / HD, 13 min and archive, 2012
Performance: Ginger Brooks Takahashi, Werner Hirsch
The film Toxic shows two protagonists in an undated time, a
punk figure in glitter (Ginger Brooks Takahashi) and a drag queen
(Werner Hirsch), both of unclear gender and origin. They linger in
an environment of glossy remains, of toxic plants and transformed
ethnographic and police photography. While the punk gives a speech
on toxicity and a performance referencing early feminist art works,
the drag queen reenacts an interview of Jean Genet from the ‘80s and
blames the filmmakers for exposing her to the police-like scenario of
being filmed.As the camera turns and depicts the space-off, the space
outside the frame, a question is raised: what happens if the film and
photographic apparatus is focused from a perspective of toxicity?
42
43
because I wanted a term that was open-ended and that wasn’t freighted
with the medical connotations that so often foreclose more nuanced
stories. This strategy served as a point of departure for The Alphabet
of Feeling Bad, my recent film/performance collaboration with Karin
Michalski, which seeks to generate multiple vocabularies for feeling bad,
including ordinary words such as numbness, dread, and hopelessness.16
The Politics of Passivity
(Ann Cvetkovich)
We have both expressed interest in the “politics of passivity”, a concept
that comes up in the conclusion of Heather Love’s Feeling Backward, which
is inspired by the same “Public Feelings Discussions” on political depression
that also catalyzed my book.17 As I understand it, the “politics of passivity” is
a way of describing conceptions of politics that don’t turn on heroic action
or revolution, that make space for quieter, less melodramatic, more ordinary
forms of activity or even for states of being that do not look like action. A
useful resource for the concept is Anne-Lise François’s theory of recessive
action that was laid out in her book, Open Secrets.18 Focusing on Romantic
and nineteenth century texts that do not reflect Enlightenment notions of
progress and productivity, François identifies scenes of non-action that are
emotionally sufficient even when “nothing happens.”
I realize that having started with an image of 1960s revolutionary
activism was no accident—it is actually a constant provocation for my
efforts to imagine activism in new ways. Neither do I want to play into
critiques of revolutionary activism as a regrettable mistake nor do I want
to neglect exploring them. They possibly fit under the rubric of regret,
and enable new ways of thinking about activism that can include what
otherwise looks like passivity, inaction, and mixed feelings.
Perhaps your interest in the non-melodramatic moment in Toxic that
appears in the midst of what looks like a theatrical staging of dramatic
performance and affect might follow along these lines: the moments that
come before or after the performance, or that happen alongside it, or the
moments that are articulated in a flat or affectless register. These connect
with my own interest in ordinary affects (as articulated by Kathleen Stewart)
and especially in questions of how to represent them.19 In Depression: A
Public Feeling I turned to memoir because I wanted to explore different
ways of writing the non-dramatic moment—the forms of non-activity, such
as sleeping in, shopping, going to the dentist, or swimming repetitive laps in
a pool, where it seems like nothing important is happening or where things
do not add up to anything in particular. As I tell the story, those moments
can contain resources for later insight or action, but in ways that are unable
to be anticipated and thus do not necessarily have implications for how the
moment could be lived differently.
16 Karin Michalski, “The Alphabet of Feeling Bad,” Film/installation in A Burnt-Out Case, NGBK,
Berlin, September 2012. (http://www.karinmichalski.de/).
Regret may thus be resisted here, as well as shame or nostalgia—there
is no point in thinking about how it might have been different; it simply
was. My interest in depression stems in part from wanting to sidestep
the relentless demand for productivity under capitalism. As you also
suggest above, “regret” takes specific forms under capitalism—sometimes
people regret not doing more (not working harder, not getting better
results), and sometimes they regret not doing less (for example, working
less in order to leave more time for family and for leisure). Either way
the condition that produces these forms of regret is the demand
for productive results. If we relinquish this demand, what affective
experiences and what conceptions of politics might be possible?
Furthermore, what forms of documentation or representation could help
us to imagine other ways of thinking and feeling?
Referring to your question how to work on conceptions and
representations that reject the demand for productivity under capitalism,
we would like to come back to our common interest in “ambivalence”.
We think that there is a connection between the politics of ambivalence
and queer passivity. You mentioned the moments of “flat” actions in
Toxic, for instance. The fact that you have privileged “feeling bad” as
an element of concern with the everyday affect and the seemingly
less-important distress instead of “trauma” seems to go in the same
direction. These kind of actions seem to nourish the different types
of ambivalences (for instance between the anti-capitalist moments
of substance use and the toxicity and possible normalizing effect of
medication against depression) instead of trying to straighten them
or to produce a clear position (which often appears to be the most
important precondition of leftist politics). We also like Heather Love’s
work on “queer passivity” in Feeling Backward, especially her argument
that leftist politics produce their own norms, which further render certain
politics and abilities invisible or useless and that it might be important to
produce an archive of political gestures which are not based on those
norms. Our research on the Punk movement (No Future / No Past)20 was
particularly concerned with the question of why it might still be useful
to aggressively reject the world as it is, choosing to long to destroy it
without providing a better alternative. Finally, in your text, Public Feelings,
you also mention that negative affect should be seen as a resource
for politics rather than as its antithesis. Here, we like Avital Ronell’s
neologism “pathivity”, which addresses a way of being passive whilst
still moving.21 This matches the idea that agency and passivity are not
mutually exclusive.
We suppose that a certain passivity of action also produces a rhythm
or pulse that might be an important part of an alternative and anticapitalist “worlding”; a way to invest in imperceptible politics or politics
of opaqueness.
17 Heather Love, Feeling Backward (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).
18 Anne-Lise François, Open Secrets (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).
19 Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). On dedramatized and flat affect, see also Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2011).
44
20 See http://www.boudry-lorenz.de/
21 Avital Ronell, Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania (Lincoln and London: University of
Nebraska Press,1992).
45
Civil awakening at this time / sheds a new light
on the great revolutions of the eighteenth century /
exposes the fact that they are the revolutions of ruling
powers / which, on behalf of the nation’s right to selfdetermination / expel entire populations / And in the
name of the capital they covet / recruit all who are
allowed to remain or enter / as the nation’s sentries.
For every horror / that today might seem a novelty
/ a precedent is found in regimes that rose, inspired
by those great revolutions / revolutions that created /
an ongoing regime-made disaster / A disaster for the
mere fact that based / on religion, nationality, gender
or race / not all governed are recognized as citizens /
A regime-made disaster in which / the body politic is
abstracted from all who are governed / and becomes
an idea / A product of a ruling power / that by brute
force decrees: these—yes, those—no.
Those who were distanced from the body politic
/ created in the great revolutions of the eighteenth
century / women, blacks, the poor, and children / are
the ones whose civil awakening moved revolution
/ But the civil revolution was immediately replaced
by governmental power revolution / and instead of
partnership among members of the body politic /
they became ruled.
Since then, when sometimes against all chances /
Opportunity appears on the horizon / Citizens have
not given up / The possibility of imagining another life /
Once in a while they re-emerge and declare: / Without
us there is no body politic; only an idea on paper.
Here they are in the pictures / sweating, shouting,
putting up tents / surrounding policemen, holding
fishing rods as well as pots and pans / with ropes
and in underwear, sharing the space and claiming
a re-partitioning / Determined to be, and not to be
evicted / They transform time and again / Turn civil
language into a spoken one / A language learnt in
the body / and written in pictures / spoken in the
46
Ariella Azoulay
When the Body Politic
Ceases To Be an Idea
EXHIBITION
ROOM
plural / together with others / Anyone who speaks it is
present as a living reminder / of the fact that she is not
a resource / neither she nor the world in which she
lives / That rule is merely a temporary deposit / and
when it does not enable being-together / it must be
re-constituted.
To reconstruct a civil link among sense data, what
people do and experience and the system of words
and notions that serves them as they exist and act /
To deconstruct ruling language and its Justifications
which will appear as acts of violence towards all those
governed / To deepen civil syntax / While the various
expressions of this language / serving citizens the
world over / appear in one sequence / Revolution is
revealed as a civil language / a form of partnership
that renews itself / no one can claim to be its sole
author / and deny it to others / and no ruling power is
entitled or capable of killing it / Out of civil revolution
one can begin to imagine a being together that is not
subject to the sovereign power of capital and nation.
A huge number of civil language speakers in places
far and wide / are learning and using it nowadays,
simultaneously / The revival of civil language on a
global scale / is a golden opportunity to reconstruct /
rich repertoires of past civil actions / and to re-weave
all its performances / that have been consistently
oppressed by sovereign national regimes.
For the first time in history / civil awakening has
managed to break through the shackles of the nationstate / Today in Bahrain, tomorrow in Montréal /
yesterday in Ramallah / next week in Tel Aviv / in June
in Seoul / and in October in San’ah.
The hour of Palestine has come / the time to revive
Palestine / as a beacon for all nations—state in which /
Palestinians and Jews will live together as citizens.
Civil language is not new / It is being revived today
/ because all over the world / simultaneously / more
and more women and men speak to each other in
civil language / The broad expansion of this language
creates an opportunity to rethink Palestine / To
suspend, ad hoc, solutions proposed by oppressive
politics / of which nationality, capital and war are its
syntactic foundations / To reconstruct possibilities
of being-together in which Jews and Arabs refuse to
be enemies / To recognize refugees as an ongoing
“occupy” movement / to claim a civil state to which
refugees return and shape their destiny as full citizens
for all purposes / To realize the potential of the
world’s political map, showing that / of all places,
Palestine, whose people were expelled and oppressed
for decades / has been spared the “award” entitled
“nation-state” and the lie of self-determination / To
contest the conformist idea that a nation needs selfdetermination and a nation-state / No state better
demonstrates how the nation-state oppresses than
the State of Israel / All those who do not belong to
its people / Fortification of borders / Refusal of refuge
to those who seek it within its area / and Use of the
force vested in it by its citizens to intimidate them /
and in the name of their security / Expel those marked
as its enemies.
Information with which to complete the list of photographers is welcome.
London, Trafalgar Square, January 23, 2010
Photographers strike in protest of a new regulation that allows policemen to arrest photographers as terror suspects when caught pointing a
camera towards a photographic object that is not typically aesthetic or touristic.
© Photograph Oli Scarff / Getty Images
47
Seoul, South Korea, June 29, 2008
Fifteen thousand demonstrators filled the streets in protest of lifting the ban on American beef importation. They reached public space equipped
Bil’in, July 12, 2012
with ropes and pipes fearing that the police would prevent their protest. Demonstrators surrounded by policemen are a common sight. When it
In this act, too, Palestinians are the ones who will be arrested. This time, however, they force the Israeli soldiers to chase them as if they were
reverses and the policemen are surrounded, one may begin to ask poignant questions about the right to public space. One might also ask if the
chasing (Jewish) prisoners under the Nazi regime. The soldiers can insist that these are only Palestinians, but the photographic act preserves the
answer for the question of why the policemen turn their backs to the mass of protesters that circle them cannot be found in this image of one
meaning with which Palestinians wanted to imbue the situation.
particular protestor whom they have surrounded.
© Photograph Haitham Khatib / Haitham Khatib Photography
All rights reserved. Source: www.chinadaily.com.cn
London, July 27, 2012
One hundred policemen surround a small encampment that has remained in the square after a night of “settlement” in protest of pension
Bil’in, February 12, 2012
payment reforms. Some of the protesters wore masks and sunglasses to protect themselves against policemen whose helmets imply that their
Palestinians, Israelis and internationals in Nabi tribe costume fight imperialism, turning the film “Avatar” into an allegory of Palestinian existence.
setup in public space is ominous.
Whoever does not support their struggle against the regime that subjugates them is assigned a rather dubitable role in the plot.
Photographer: Pete Hendrick. © Photograph Pete Hendrick
48
© Photograph Oren Ziv / Activestills.org
49
Tel Aviv, Rabin Square, June 30, 2012
Madrid, July 18, 2012
An armored vehicle installed with state-of-the-art combat equipment—“Raccoon” (“Stalker”) intelligence-gathering system. The “Raccoon”, which
As a sign of their support of the demonstrators, policemen remove the riot helmets they wear when suppressing protest. The Spanish firefighters
has so far been used against Palestinians in the West Bank, has begun to roam Tel Aviv-Jaffa freely, illegally gathering information on citizens and
went a step further and initiated their own protests, expressing their participation in the civil struggle, crying: “We save people, not banks!”
their political views.
All rights reserved
© Photograph Ariella Azoulay
Cairo, January 28, 2011
The presence of a military armored vehicle
in the city center is nearly as outrageous as
the statue of a tyrant. The lack of reaction
by the policemen in its turret to a garbage
bag thrown at its windshield is another omen
of the turnabout in the position policemen
would adopt shortly after, in the civil
awakening of Cairo.
© Photograph Goran Tomasevic / Reuters
Tel Aviv, August 2011
The bank is secured and an armed guard stands in front of it. Facing him, along the sidewalk, are members of Public Movement. Wearing white
uniforms, and with their fists clenched, they stand as guards of their own accord, as reminder or warning that the public has a part in the capital
invested in the bank, and that keeping the public distant from the bank’s management and profit-making is the outcome of free-marked violence
that should be challenged.
© Photograph Oz Mualem / Public Movement
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London, November 18, 1910
In response to violence exerted against them (including sexual violence) for having contested the parliamentary illegality of excluding rightful
citizens from elections, the Suffragettes smashed several shop windows. They claimed that the government was more concerned about
protecting private property than about protecting the lives of women.
Napels, June 30, 2012
Demonstrators use their bodies to depict the common expression of their impoverishment—“We were left with barely our underwear”—and
demand the return of economic and banking discussions from the abstract sphere in which they have traditionally taken place. This, through the
concrete manifestation of the violence they inflict upon the body (politic).
© Photograph Zero 81. All rights reserved
Montréal, May 1, 2012
Policemen patrolling the sidewalk, equipped as though they anticipated violent combat, are received by a line of demonstrators with “warning
Anata, July 12, 2012
rods” against the donut temptations offered to cops for free in various eateries, and making them forget that they have no fewer reasons than the
Palestinian and international volunteers rebuild the home of Selim and Arabiya Shawamrah without permission of the authorities. In doing so,
demonstrators for getting out on the street and claiming their share.
however, they risk its repeated demolition by the Israeli regime.
© Photograph Dario Ayala / The Montréal Gazette
© Photograph Ryan Rodrick Beiler / www.activestills.org
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New York, September 30, 2012
The human microphone is a simple and effective mode of action. It enables people to bypass bans on citizens’s use of megaphones in public
space and serves as a way to learn the syntax of a new—civil—language. The speaker calls out, “Mic: Check” and waits for the echo of listeners,
invited to express their position with gestures while speaking.
© Photograph Lucas Jackson / Reuters
Tel Aviv Jaffa, January 2, 2009
Demonstrators wear overalls recalling those of fighter pilots. The blood shed by pilots at the touch of a button in the cockpit is foregrounded here
by large red stains and signs that leave no doubt—“The blood of children is on your hands”. The demonstrators are on their way to block the entry
gate of the air-field from which lethal assaults on Gaza took off.
© Photograph Oren Ziv / www.activestills.org
Madrid, July 10, 2012
The miners’s march on Madrid received the support of a million citizens throughout Spain. In numerous localities, supporters wore helmets
and lanterns, not merely in an effort to say, “We are all miners!” but in an effort to signal their actual presence to the mainstream media that so
frequently ignored them—even when the police exerted violence against them.
All rights reserved
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55
Bethlehem, September 2012
For decades, the Israeli regime has nurtured the “national conflict”, causing the governed—both Jews and Arabs—to perceive their lives only through
its perspective. Without any symmetry in the two populations, enslavement to “the conflict” took over life in both: the Jews entrusted their life to the
“security forces” that dominate every aspect of their civil life, while the Palestinians devoted their life to the struggle against occupation, integrated with
national longing for liberation and self-determination. The Palestinian civil uprising—beginning towards the end of this summer and directed against the
Palestinian Authority and its failing economic policy as protection for the Israeli regime—was a further step towards liberation from the burden of “the
conflict”, as that which the regime can exploit its subjects in its name, denying them the means for a reasonable life. The photo shows the protest of taxi
Jerusalem, September 28, 2000
drivers who shaped the word “STRIKE” as an image to be seen only from above, as if wishing to make the global protest movement recognize the civil
In the existing world of political categories, this photograph symbolizes the outbreak of the Second Intifada. Palestinians protest against Ariel
nature of their own protest and their demands to be extricated from the national deal that the international community has been backing.
Sharon’s visit at Temple Mount. If it reads within the continuum of ongoing Palestinian protest, it is actually a part of the “Occupy” movement
© Photograph Ahmed Masoud. All rights reserved
that has operated for decades now without being recognized as such. When they are not being cruelly suppressed as “terrorists”, it is far more
convenient to depict them as the subjects of a nonexistent authority that is expected to represent them one day with a territorial agreement,
thereby denying their having been subjugated by the Israeli regime for decades and having a variety of claims that cannot be reduced and
certainly cannot be solved solely by national self-determination. However, the Palestinians, as all other governed peoples the world over, do not
only protest in the terms accorded to them by the regime to which they are subjugated. Israeli citizens are subjugated to the same regime. The
separation of these two groups contributes to the naturalization of enmity between them, preventing their possible recognition that they are
actually struggling against the same regime. Splitting their struggles is an oppressive technique for the preservation of power.
All rights reserved. Source: www.aljazeera.com
Nabi Saleh, Summer 2011
The tent in which Israel has forced Palestinians to dwell ever since 1948 (every time their homes were demolished or expropriated) finally became
a symbol of civil awakening in summer 2011. State citizens—Arabs and Jews—put up tents in cities, and in the West Bank, Palestinians carried
them, covered with “social justice” slogans as a major cry in demonstrations.
© Photograph Oren Ziv / www.activestills.org
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July 15, 2011
Map of the world prepared by the UN which presents the spread of the nation-state concept to every corner of the globe. One persistent red stain
stands out in the map: a small territory called Palestine. The state by which it is ruled—Israel—has both prevented the inhabitants from founding a
nation-state and has refused to naturalize them as its own citizens. Thus this little stain has become nearly the only place in the world where aside from
the obvious possibility of another nation-state being founded with all its disabilities, the reciprocal possibility of becoming a state-of-all-its-citizens is
also open to consideration. Perhaps from here, as a beacon to all nations, the idea would spread throughout the world and civil language might turn
things about.
All rights reserved
Calcutta, National Library, 1947
The partition plans promoted by the UN in the late 1940s, which led to the partitioning of Pakistan and India, created not only states with
differential body politics, but also an ideology that enabled the existence of long-standing differential political bodies. The argument was that
since they had each belonged to a separate history, history could be partitioned. The librarian in the photograph is required to separate the
knowledge accordingly: one part to these peoples, and another to those.
© Photograph David Douglas Duncan. Harry Ransom Center. Source: Life Magazine, August 18, 1947
Maroun al-Ras, Northern border of Israel, May 15, 2010
Palestinians expelled from their land over sixty years ago in a non-violent procession on Nakba Day. They insistently refuse to let nation-state
logic obliterate their civil claims, and they non-violently advocate the obvious—their wish to return to and live in the places from which they were
expelled, thereby participating in shaping their own political future.
All rights reserved. Source: www.uprootedpalestinians.blogspot.nl
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The Sound Evidence of Sonic Warfare : Notes from the Aural Contract
Audio Archive
Jerusalem, Mamila Street, November 1947
The UN’s newly unveiled partition plan
Listen to the sound file on www.manifestajournal.org
is contrary to the wishes of most of the
country’s inhabitants. Palestinians took
to the streets in protest. This was the last
Part 1: Colin Powell’s Sound Evidence
time Palestinian protest was perceived as a
Part 2: Sonic War-Farce civil movement. Since then they have been
Part 3: The Chipmunk in the Court of Saddam
doomed to expulsion and have been viewed
as mere assailants from without.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan
Courtesy of Central Zionist Archive
Tel Aviv Jaffa, June 30, 2012
The necessary condition for the persistence and expansion of the new civil awakening movement in Israel lies in its possibility to recognize itself
as a fraction of a civil movement that preceded it for several decades and was led by Palestinians. No civil movement can exist on the basis of
ethnic or national differentiation, especially under a political regime that uses the separation of populations as a self- preservation weapon of its
older apartheid regime. The signs in the picture, which are carried by both Jews and Palestinians, re-draw the territorial continuity between the
Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River as a space whose definition the regime must change. The condition for this is to do away with military
Aural Contract is a project that is constituted by a series of events,
publications, exhibitions, compositions and workshops that examine
the contemporary politics of listening through a focus on the role
of the voice in law. Throughout the project I have built up a sound
archive, containing audio extracts of my works together with specific
moments of juridical listening and speaking gathered from a wide range
of sources such as the trials of Saddam Hussein and Judas Priest, UK
police evidence tapes, films such as Decoder and readings from texts
including Italo Calvino’s “A King Listens”. The components of this archive
are then mixed together, generating audio documentaries and narrative
compositions that immerse its audience in the heart of a discussion
about the relationship of listening to politics, borders, human rights,
testimony, truth and international law.
For Manifesta Journal, I have put together a selection of tracks from the
Aural Contract Audio Archive to provide an audio analysis of the vocal
manipulations and distortions that occur in the two political-juridical
forums that buttress the war in Iraq. Here, both Colin Powell’s 2003
“Speech at the UN” and the “Trial of Saddam Hussein”, are examples of
the contemporary role of audio as a weapon of war.
In March 2003, whilst he was secretary of state, Colin Powell gave a
notorious speech at the United Nations Security Council in which he
made the case for war in Iraq. The two heavily distorted audio recordings
he played to kick start his warmongering torrent of “evidence” speak
clearly about the speech as a whole. The contrast of Powell’s amplified
address through the audio infrastructure of the UN security council, with
the raw crackles of an intercepted walkie-talkie exchange readily reveals
who dictates the right to speak and who controls the capacity to hear in
such forums. It is in his hybrid role of secretary of state and voice-over
artist that Powell is able to both legitimise and initiate the war.
occupation: Un-occupy Palestine.
© Photograph Oren Ziv / Active Stills
60
In October 2005, Saddam Hussein’s trial began. Pitch shifting and other
voice effects were used throught the trial to disguise the witnesses
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These two examples complicate the conventions of sonic warfare:
from sound canons and Metallica songs to that of complex audio
manipulation and vocal destruction in sites where speech acts. Hence
this audio composition gathers together and processes a set of archival
materials that testify to the role of listening and voice in both the
destruction of nations and the reconstruction of political realities.
The Form of Remains
CONVERSATION
August, 2012
HS – Mr. Slepoy, it’s extremely important for me to talk to you because I think you are one of the few people in the world who
Ljubljana—Frankfurt
know the answer to my question.
JG – Dice que es muy importante para ella hablar contigo porque piensa que eres una de las pocas personas en el mundo que
Dear Hito,
I've recently watched your Journal No. 1—An Artist’s Impression (2007)
CS – Bueno, dile que está equivocada.
again, the documentary in which you recreate some of the personal and
HS – So, my friend disappeared in Kurdistan thirteen years ago. She was, well, you know, she joined the Kurdish insurgent
collective memories people have of the 1990s Bosnian wars through
movement PKK and she was killed in a summary execution during a firefight. Could you please translate, Jenny?
footage about and belonging to the ex-Yugoslav film studio, “Sutjeska”.
JG – Su amiga desapareció hace 13 años, sí en Kurdistán, se aliñó con el PKK.
More than anything else, the archive, with its burnt racks and missing
CS – ¿El Kurdistán Turco?
films, evoked for me the various local and internationally-run DNA and
HS – Yes, sí, sí.
re-association labs that store human remains from the more than 40,000
JG – Y fue asesinada en una ejecución sumaria.
unaccounted-for at the end of the Yugoslav wars, all ready for testing.
HS – After being taken prisoner in a firefight.
In place of films, the racks hold parts of commingled and sometimes
JG – Después de haber sido tomada prisionera después de una batalla.
decomposing body parts. During the war, material objects sometimes
HS – So she was and is still missing.
shared the same destiny as people—dented by shell splinters, pocked,
CS – ¿Y apareció el cuerpo de ella?
scored, burnt, hidden, exchanged, left to rot. Nowadays, these people or
JG – Está desaparecida.
these parts play a crucial role in post-conflict attempts to make sense
CS – Está desaparecido. ¿Y se conoce cuándo fue ejecutada, en qué circunstancias?
of what happened. Human remains stand above all as evidence of war
HS – There are witnesses who have seen it.
crimes and atrocities.
JG – Hay testigos que lo han visto.
Yet what does it mean to make sense of the war? What constitutes
HS – But until now the location of, you know, this horror scene, was unknown.
proof of a war crime? Moreover, what are bodies and what are remains?
JG – Pero hasta ahora la localización de todo este escenario era desconocido.
Some authors suggest that unlike in academia, where “the body” is
HS – So none of the testimonies could be verified.
generally treated as a text or a trope, in society at large and in the global
JG – Así que los testimonios no podían ser verificados.
economy, “the body” must always be understood as a tangible, palpable,
HS – A few weeks ago, the grave site, or the site of this massacre, which involves many more people—about forty people were
undeniably “real” material object; one that, furthermore, is sometimes
killed in this massacre, to be exact—was found.
a “commodity” that can be bartered or sold.1 Others think that the dead
JG – Hace unas semanas se encontró el lugar donde están las fosas comunes, donde están los restos de esta gente.
body has been dematerialized in certain representations to the point
CS – ¿Y el cuerpo de ella fue exhumado? ¿Identificado?
where it is no longer intelligible as a former social being—and that
HS – No, no, no. It’s not. Exhuming the people or identifying them is impossible because there is no investigation into the case.
these representations of bodies do not help people to understand what
The people are simply said not to have existed. The whole case is said to be inexistent and nobody will touch it, or press any
it means to be a victim of a human catastrophe.2 Yet over the course
charges.
of my work, I’ve found distinctions between (on the one hand) a “real”
JG – El problema es que no hay exhumaciones ni hay posibilidad de hacerlas porque es un caso inexistente y no hay nadie
body, and (on the other) a conjectural or metaphorical one—or between
para presentar cargos.
ordinary and “spectacular” bodies—a distinction that is increasingly
CS – ¿Y la fosa, cómo fue descubierta, por quién, en qué circunstancias?
difficult to police, or to use to understand the experiences of those who
JG – He’s asking how the mass grave was discovered: under which circumstances and by whom?
had lost family members in conflict.
HS – So, one of the witnesses came forward. He was with the perpetrators—the people who executed the prisoners.
As you know, over the past decade, I’ve been examining a range of
JG – Uno de los testigos, que ha salido ahora a la luz, estaba con los criminales.
material practices and rhetorical strategies engaging the dead body
HS – With the perpetrators, not the criminals.
in post-conflict Serbia and Tasmania. Considering various cases of
JG – Sí, con los autores de la ejecución.
political burials, mass exhumations, re-interments and claims for bodily
tendrá una respuesta a su pregunta.
Hito Steyerl and Maja Petrovic-Steger
who testified in defense of Hussein. By aurally zooming into the use
of voice manipulation, a set of political intentions can be discerned.
Standardized for a long time now by the BBC in addition to other media
channels is the voice-disguise technique that pitches down voices in an
effort to preserve their anonymity. In Saddam Hussein’s trial, the voices
are pitched up to the level of “chipmunk”, an effect that infantilises its
witnesses. These absurd and puerile voices allow the court to perform
the ascendency of the nation into its “democratic” adulthood while at the
same time ordering the death of its father.
CS – Pero fue identificado el lugar de la fosa? O la fosa fue abierta?
JG – Fue identificado el lugar de la fosa.
CS – Pero no fue abierta la fosa?
1 Scheper-Hugh Nancy. “The Ends of the Body: Commodity Fetishism and the Global Traffic in
the Organs”. In SAIS Review: A Journal of International Affairs 22 (1), (2002). 61–80.
2 Klinenberg Eric. “Bodies that Don’t Matter: Death and Deriliction in Chicago”. In
Commodifying Bodies. Edited by Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Loïc Wacquant. (London: Sage,
2002).
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retrieval and repatriation, my research attended to the ways in which
HS – No, no. It’s very high up in the mountains, in a very remote region. So only two external or independent groups have seen
people imagine and enact relations between the deceased and their
the site until now.
corpses. I sought to document and understand the value and meaning
JG – Está muy alejado en las montañas y solo dos grupos independientes, totalmente externos han podido ir hasta el lugar
of the body and of human remains in the twenty-first century, from
donde las fosas.
an anthropological point of view. Human remains, nowadays, are
HS – It’s also very difficult to investigate there, because, in fact, neither the army nor the Turkish state has control over the
intersected by a set of highly charged contemporary discourses of
territory.
scientific rationality and legitimacy, property and human rights. In the
JG – Y es muy difícil llegar ahí porque de hecho, ni la armada ni el estado turco tiene control sobre esta zona.
different ethnographic cases of Serbia and Tasmania, diverse parties have
HS – But now, about one hundred mass graves have been discovered in Kurdistan.
identified the recovery and identification of bodily remains, and their
JG – Hay cientos de fosas comunes que se están descubriendo ahora en Kurdistán.
subsequent return to bereaved families, as part of a healing or restorative
HS – Sometimes they are even in the middle of the city.
process. Yet the forms in which body parts circulated in these situations—
JG – A veces están en el medio de una ciudad.
as a means for reconciliation, as commodities, as private mementos,
HS – Yet there still hasn’t been an investigation. Nor an exhumation, nor identification of the bodies because all the people are
and as a form of DNA-coded information—were always more various
said to never have existed.
than the official narratives of attribution and assignment suggested.
JG – Y no hay investigación ni exhumación porque toda esta gente es inexistente para las autoridades.
My research sought to illuminate and contextualize the realities of the
CS – Ahora esto de que se están encontrando muchas fosas, hay grupos que están trabajando en esto? Cómo es que se están
diplomatic, spiritual, scientific and legal resources that shape and enable
identificando? Si mal no entiendo ninguna de estas fosas fue abierta, no? ¿Cómo es que se han identificado estas fosas? ¿Quién
the movement of the dead or dismembered body. Needless to say, what
las ha identificado? ¿Qué tipo de acciones se están llevando a cabo? ¿Por grupos civiles, de derechos humanos?
interested me most was the creativity with which people deal with their
JG – He is asking why the mass graves are being identified, by whom, and why haven’t any exhumations and investigations
troubled pasts and imagined futures.
been performed?
My work did not presume a straightforward equation of bodies
HS – Well, the reason is that everybody always knew where the mass graves were but only now are people saying it openly in
with social beings, but rather inquired into how representations—and
public. They were too afraid before. It’s mostly the relatives of the people who are buried there who have been coming forward
the experience—of dead bodies enact persons. That the dead body is
and trying to press, you know, for exhumation.
necessarily the site of a physical individual is a wrongful assumption.
JG – Mayoritariamente son familiares que ahora están empezando a hablar porque hasta ahora tenían demasiado miedo y
Societies conceive death, personhood, and interpersonal attachment in
están empezando a sacar a la luz pública los testimonios.
a variety of ways. Resisting the urge to ontologise the body, or bodily
HS – Relatives have known where their loved ones are buried but they have been too afraid to talk about it until now.
remains, by presupposing a specific physical reality, I came instead to
JG – Siempre han sabido donde estaban enterrados sus familiares pero hasta ahora tenían demasiado miedo.
the view that different phenomena make up the “field of the body” in
CS –
En todo caso quiero confirmar de que ninguna de estas fosas ha sido abierta. ¿Es así?
post-conflict societies. Whilst the “dead body” throughout my research
JG – None of these graves has been opened?
was often an undeniably material object, it also named a conceptual
HS – In some cases the graves have been opened. One case that became very well-known was one in which a person knew
tool for understanding the past and projecting a future, even as it offered
where his brother was buried, and he decided to go on a hunger strike for sixty-four days.
a site of knowledge production, moral dispute and the representation
He refused to stop until the grave was opened.
of victimhood. The dead body could also be a synecdoche for
JG – En algunos casos se han abierto algunas fosas, familiares que han ido a buscar a los suyos. El caso más conocido es el de
reconciliation, or a placeholder for scientific value. When people related
un hombre que se puso en huelga de hambre durante 64 días hasta que le dejaron exhumar el cuerpo de su hermano.
to, evoked, or claimed dead bodies, they meant something more
HS – But, in the cases where bodies have been exhumed, the police have come with excavators and just dug up the bones to
inclusive and less securely categorized than the bare physicality of the
destroy all the evidence.
body. Bodies included, and emotionally meant, the clothes of the warJG – En el caso en el que hay exhumaciones, la policía viene con excavadoras y básicamente destruyen todo tipo de evidencia
missing, the scars left by aesthetic interventions, the red blood cells of
cuando cavan las fosas, destruyen todas las pruebas.
sick bodies, the genetic or DNA profiles of corpses, and the peace of the
CS – Bueno, no sé si queda algo de específico en todo esto. En todo caso, ¿si se ha intentado o si hay en curso alguna acción
souls of the bodies that might accompany repatriation to an “ancestral”
judicial dentro de Turquía en relación con esto?
home. Phenomena of different orders—biological, discursive, material
JG – Have any legal investigations been done?
and conceptual—were all drawn into a coherent field marked by the term
HS – Yes, one in Turkey and one in Germany. Yet both were cancelled because there was no, I mean, it was said that there was
“the body”. Bodies were no less physical when they became frameworks
no information. And that no information could be found.
through which people negotiated their relation to ideas of modernity,
JG – Hubo un intento en Turquía y uno en Alemania que fueron anulados. Se pararon porque parece ser no había suficiente información.
democracy, and accountability.
CS – Falta de pruebas. ¿Y piensa ella que ahora hay más que las que había entonces?
In one of your letters, you said that in the “Kiss” installation, like in your
JG – Do you think that there is more evidence now than there was then?
other works, you try to avoid showing bones or dealing with human
HS – Well, there have been different testimonies of the, let’s say, “assumed crime”. There is a sort of investigation, which I
remains visually. In your email on March 21, 2012, you wrote that “They
myself have seen going on at the site. It is consistent with what the witness is saying and we have to assume that my friend’s
make terrible / impossible aesthetic objects. Somehow I feel one should
remains are there.
show them as little as possible but rather investigate the conditions and
JG – Hay testimonios y varios testimonies del presunto crimen, luego Hito ha estado ahí y hay bastantes pruebas insitu de lo
technologies that make them over/under-visible”.
que están contando los testimonios y luego está el caso en el que ella asume que los restos de su amiga están ahí enterrados.
I too have always avoided showing human remains. After my talks, the
CS – ¿Y luego?
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audience always asks for photographs. They want to know what mass-grave
sites and exhumations look like; they want to look into the faces of those
CS – Si, pero la pregunta que yo hacía era si, bueno, en relación con esto último, además de la presunción se podría aportar
searching for the remains of their missing relatives or those of the forensic
algún elemento de prueba, algún indicio lo suficientemente importante como para abrir una causa. Eso en relación con el caso
archaeologists or lawyers taking care of repatriation claims. For a number
específico de su amiga. Y después, en relación con estas iniciativas judiciales que fueron archivadas por falta de pruebas, si a
of still-not-completely articulated reasons, I have always felt disgusted at
partir de entonces se han juntado más elementos de prueba? Son dos cosas, no, entonces.
the idea of passing around the photos. Not because the images would be
HS – Yes, there’s a new witness.
disturbing, but rather that in the process of exhibiting them, they would
[…]
become mere objects, eliciting easily moral, perhaps learned emotions
HS – An idea that has come up very often in the context of the issues you are working with, and which I’m really interested in,
(shock, despair, horror, solidarity, compassion). Pictures of remains are
is the idea that disappeared people are not dead but still alive.
supposed to be palpable, moving, and emotion-triggering. But what does it
JG – Una idea que le interesa mucho en tu trabajo, y a través de los diferentes casos en los que has estado involucrado, es el
mean to be moved by the predicaments of others? What kind of emotions
principio de que una persona mientras está desaparecida no está muerta.
can be aroused by the sight of bare bones? Moreover, in my experience,
HS – And that if the person is alive but has just legally disappeared, then he or she has technically been kidnapped. Kidnapping
rather than opening up listeners’s minds, this economy of representation—
is an ongoing crime, which means that we are able to press charges at any point in time.
only showing the bones—has always tended to lock people into their
JG – Si esta persona sigue desaparecida podría estar viva por lo tanto, en una situación en la que se tendría que seguir
presumptions of what dead bodies and remains signify.
buscándola y…
In various reconstructions of Andrea Wolf’s story, you relate her life
CS – Sí, sí, eso está claro, pero lo que te preguntaba es si esta persona, que identificaría el lugar en donde hay una fosa donde
through pictures of her as a strong and beautiful feminist; a modern
estaría además su amiga, que entiendo que es la persona esta que está oculta, ¿no? ¿si identifica además a represores
Amazon. Andrea left Germany to join the Kurdish liberation movement,
victimarios?
assuming the name Sehît Rohanî. Eventually she was taken prisoner
JG – Would this testimony also be able to identify the perpetrators?
and executed by the Turkish security forces. In “November” (2004), you
HS – Yes.
say that her body was never found and has never been returned. What
CS – Pero, ¿tiene nombres de los que produjeron el asesinato?
came back instead was a poster of a smiling freedom fighter adorning an
HS – Yes.
insurgent banner. Andrea became a revered martyr for the Kurdish cause.
CS – Bueno, pero también ha de quedar claro, ¿esta persona entonces declararía eventualmente delante de un tribunal
The poster declared, “Martyr Sehît Rohanî taken prisoner and murdered
español?
by Turkish security forces as a fighter in the free women’s army of
JG – Would the person declare it in front of a Spanish court?
Kurdistan.” You saw the poster in a cinema next to posters for erotic films.
HS – I don’t know; I will ask. But if the person were available, would it be possible to open an investigation?
The link between martyrs and pin-ups comes up again in the 2007 film
JG – Dice que no lo sabe, que lo preguntará, pero si esta persona estuviera disponible, sería posible abrir una investigación?
“Lovely Andrea”. That documentary reconstructs the search for a series of
[…]
photographs of a roped SBM model (yourself), who used the pseudonym
CS – Bueno, entonces vamos a ver ahí, la posibilidad de investigación. Para ir aclarando cuestiones, en cuanto esto que
“Andrea” and featured in Japanese bondage magazines.
hablaba de la desaparición. Efectivamente se entiende que mientras la persona está desaparecida, el delito no se termina de
Your work—your stills, excerpts, fragments, facts, artifacts and
consumarse, sigue consumando, está vivo en este momento el delito y por tanto no puede comenzar el cómputo de la
recollections—give the audience the chance to read, participate in,
prescripción, o sea, no hay un problema de prescripción. Se puede perseguir mientras no aparezca esa persona viva o muerta o
and construct Andrea’s (hi)story. Just as bodies are both materially and
se dé cuenta del lugar donde se encuentra. Por ejemplo, si efectivamente se hiciera levantamiento de la fosa, se exhumara el
conceptually capable of different constructions, so too are stories. When
cuerpo y se comprobara de que esa persona es la persona que se está buscando, en ese momento, esa persona estaría muerta
bodies become remains, they are perhaps the text of a story. As objects
a partir de ese momento, ¿no?
for emotional identification and cathexis, and as physical remnants,
JG – Un momento, por favor. As long is the person is disappeared, the crime does not expire. So yes, you can go on with the
human remains tend to be conceptualized as being fractured. They
investigation. But if there’s an exhumation, and if the body is found…
almost always stand for parts. Furthermore, this fragmentation of the
CS – Y no antes, y no antes, se tendría que determinar cuando fue asesinada eventualmente y a partir del momento que se
body goes hand in hand with the notion of the fragmentary nature of
determinara cuando fue asesinada empezaría el cómputo de la prescripción. De cualquier manera no es un problema que se
the truth(s) people attribute to remains. The shattered form invokes a
nos plantee ahora, este. Está claro que desde el punto de vista de que es una desaparición forzada el delito es perseguible, es
kind of constitutive disproportionality, revealing the excessiveness, and
perseguible por cualquier tribunal del mundo.
the necessity of investment, in the processes by which body parts are
JG – It’s an enforced disappearance. So the crime does not expire. The crime is still in operation and should be brought to trial.
“pressed” into sense.
JG – Hito asume que los restos de su amiga están también ahí enterrados.
The color of Hito Steyerl’s text, which is lying inbetween the lines above, will change to black once she has found
experts—anthropological archaeologists or forensics, lab analysts for chemical weapons, forensic chemists or otherwise,
who help her secure more evidence as well as test the evidence she has already collected from the remote mountain
site where her friend Andrea Wolf was supposedly extrajudicially executed as a member of the PKK. She has been missing
since 1998. Should the letters suddenly become legible here online, it means that someone has answered her repeated
and as-yet unsuccessful pleas for assistance with an issue that is so politically inconvenient that even blatant evidence of
human rights violations remains invisible, inaudible and impossible. So long as the text is white, it means that not only this
issue but also those of hundreds of other mass graves in the region have been left unsettled and unaddressed.
65
Gal Kirn
and Robert Burghardt
Yugoslavian Partisan Memorials: Between Memorial Genre,
Revolutionary Aesthetics
and Ideological Recuperation
SPECULATION
Introduction
More than any other art form, memorial sites are
invested with ideology relating to the national past,
to grand events and historical victories, or to what
after World War II related to massive sufferings and
the collective remembrance of terror and violence.
In the territory of former Yugoslavia, which is now
shattered into seven different new nation-states,
one finds an impressive and scattered collection of
socialist modernist memorials with peculiar aesthetic
qualities, testifying to their commonly shared past.
Nowadays, after the bloody destruction of Yugoslavia,
when partisan victory has turned into a defeat, this
new historical constellation renders the monumental
sculptures into very ambiguous objects: beautiful, sad,
powerful, strange, weak, bold and almost invisible.
Many were destroyed by nationalist forces in the early
nineties. Others still were vandalized, or were “at best”
abandoned and rendered invisible. Nevertheless, for
those who encounter them, the sculptures remain
highly evocative: they could be ambassadors from
far-away stars, witnesses of an unrealized future, or
specters that continue to haunt the present.
In the Yugoslav context, the categories and
oppositions shaped by the cold-war block
confrontation have been blurred. In its hybrid inbetween position, Yugoslavia produced a genuinely
specific memorial typology that linked the memory of
WWII to the promise of the future brought forward by
the socialist revolution. Instead of formally addressing
suffering, modernist memorial sites were intended
to catalyze universal gestures of reconciliation,
resistance, and modern progress. Examining Yugoslav
monuments to the revolution is thus a manner of
addressing certain moments, ones that neither fit
easily into the expected monumental narrative nor
into the aesthetic memorial genre.
66
The political dimension of memory is evident.
Whose stories are being told, and by whom, is
crucial for the determination of present and future.
Indeed, Walter Benjamin’s intervention in the history
of philosophy resurfaces in its purest form here. If
dominant narratives in history are necessarily those
of the victors, and if emancipatory politics always aim
to address the history of the oppressed, shouldn’t the
particular lines of memorial development attempt to
clearly show how disputes, or radical disagreements,
about the legacies are being outplayed, even if
we have condemned them to being completely
forgotten?
Some argue that memory must address specific
stories of places, people and events that are long
gone, and that have been buried in history. However,
only through the materialization of the charged
objects can we save these stories from complete
oblivion. Yugoslavia is a country that nowadays
exists only in memory. Perhaps it is on these
commemorative sites, and through the legacy of the
exceptional monuments they contain, that historical
drama is again laid bare. This legacy points toward
a past that had inscribed emancipation onto its
future—far more than it tends to do today. Even if we
are critical of a “simplistic” and nostalgic perspective,
it must be said that socialist Yugoslavia pursued in
many respects a more progressive politics than its
successor states did, and that most post-Yugoslav
societies did indeed miss out on emancipatory
perspectives for the future. Twenty years after the
bloody dismemberment, and while a neoliberal
capitalist recuperation is in full swing, the promise of
joining the European market does not have enough
integrative force to make up for Yugoslavia’s loss
of its previously diverse, multi-ethnic and socialist
perspectives.
Image of Jasenovac (concentration camp), designed by Bogdan Bogdanovic (1971). Photo © Robert Burghardt
The Typology of Yugoslav Partisan Memorial
Sites: The Beginnings of Socialist Modernism
Between 1945 and 1990, several thousand
monuments to the revolution were erected. Many
had already been built in the 1940s and 1950s, often
as simple memorial plaques on which the names
of local villagers were listed. This first phase of
memorialization was based on a mixture of popular
forms of sculpture, and had a realist undertone.
Noteworthy here is that monuments to the partisan
struggle do not resemble the many examples of
massive socialist realist monuments that are more
typical of either the Eastern European countries or
the Soviet Union. Then in the second phase, from the
1960s to 1980s, a sweeping movement of memorial
building [or memorialization] emerged under the label
of “socialist modernism”. The monuments were not
only modernist, but they contained their own peculiar
typologies: monumental, symbolic (fists, stars,
hands, wings, flowers, and rocks), bold (sometimes
structurally daring), otherworldly and fantastic.
A large majority of the Yugoslav monuments to
the revolution were henceforth erected on historic
sites of the partisan struggle, and as a consequence
are nearly always located outside villages or towns
amidst open landscapes. They form an invisible
network of symbolic sites that still generate a
consciously constructed Yugoslav space. However,
they do not occupy the more classic and highlyvisible sites of representation such as the central
streets and squares of big cities. Many of these
memorials were placed in parks, showcased by
leisure-time destinations with picnic facilities, cafés,
restaurants, or even hotels. In yet other memorial
parks, museums or amphitheaters served as open-air
classrooms. In addition to their double function as
sites of mourning and celebration, memorial parks
were conceived of as hybrid complexes, merging
leisure with education, architecture with sculpture,
objects with the surrounding landscape. Sometimes
museum and sculpture merged; sometimes sculpture
67
Kozara monument, designed by Dušan Djamonja (1972). Photo © Robert Burghardt
68
is was actually integral to the amphitheater. The
mission of the amphitheater seemed to be important:
it was regularly integrated into the sculpture, while
sometimes the monument itself unfolded into a
stage set. As classical modernist works of art, they
stand as objects in the landscape, and the landscape
surrounding them is transformed into a park that in
turn stages the monument.
In the ideological systems developed after WWII,
the opposing models of socialist realism versus
abstract modernism were respectively identified
with the socialist versus the capitalist world. After
the break with the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia began to
aesthetically distance itself from socialist realism. In
1952, at the Yugoslav Writer’s Congress in Ljubljana,
Croatian writer Miroslav Krleža renounced socialist
realism in a remarkable text that was also endorsed
by party officials, and the path towards socialist
modernism was advanced. It not only prevailed in
architecture, but especially prevailed in sculpture
and later on in other arts (theater, cinema, and
performance art, to name a few).
In the debates on the artistic heritage of socialist
Yugoslavia, the role of modernist art has been
interpreted differently. Artists have either been
considered heroes, who fought for artistic autonomy
or freedom under the dominance of the socialist
system, or mere vassals of the authoritarian state,
serving it with the proud production of a modern
image. The relationship, however, between the
state and artists cannot be understood through
the simple iconology of the “state artist” versus the
“dissident.” Excepting for the early post-war period,
the Yugoslav state never proscribed a certain style.
Instead, it adopted and appropriated new tendencies
and positions in its own cultural policies. The state
preferred more formal and decorative types of art—in
other words, art that didn’t cause a stir. This formalist
tendency within Yugoslav modernism earned it the
title of “Modernist Aestheticism”, and yet we would
argue that at the time, formalism was no less of a
phenomenon in the Western modern art system.
Artists such as the sculptor Vojin Bakić or the
architect Bogdan Bogdanović worked for the state
institutions most of their lives, and insisted on
never giving up their own positions. Bakić entered
into dialogues with the avant-garde art group,
Nove Tendencije (New Tendencies), consequently
following his path into abstraction, which aimed
to question traditional patterns of reception /
expression. Bogdanović, who considered himself an
agnostic, took a critical stance toward the Yugoslav
socialist system, all the while fully supporting the
partisan struggle. He developed an abstract-surrealist
language, which strove toward being universal, yet
was simultaneously grotesque and fantastic.
Between Abstract Form
and Revolutionary Politics
Immanent motives of the monuments include
various attempts at universality on a formal and
artistic level, in addition to the universality inferred
by their politics. There is a certain fascination for
the very sweeping character of the monuments; a
formal strength that outlives its own time, and that,
simultaneously, is the result of very specific historical
circumstances. “Untimely timeliness” generates a
multi-layered space and opens up a dialogue between
the history of art and specific historical experience.
The idea of the communist revolution contains
many all-embracing claims such as the equality of
men and women, but even more than that, it aims
to integrate the perspective of a worldwide or even
69
Kosmaj monument, designed by Dušan Djamonja (1967). Photo © Robert Burghardt
70
cosmic planetary community. In the specific case of
the Yugoslav communist revolution, its application
took the form of the abolition of private property and
a more just distribution of surplus value, in addition to
the projects of modernization, education, antifascism
and the construction of a common, multi-ethnic
space. The major task of these monuments to the
revolution was to consider how their universal claims
were addressed, and then later formalized into an
aesthetic language.
We are faced with a logical contradiction at the
heart of the very idea of constructing a monument to
the revolution. Revolutions are generally associated
with government overthrow and a destruction of
certain (oppressive) heritages, operating primarily
through the destruction of institutions themselves
instead of the destruction of memory and its
institutionalization in the form of monuments.
Simultaneously, if we consider history as both an
open process and a revolutionary practice—as a
practice to keep the place of transformation open for
further change—then a monument should intervene
in this practice without presupposing a simple
“passive” position of the subject, which would only
follow from an official reading of the past. The idea
of “making history”, however, indicates that social
change generates new stories and memories that
people want to keep and experiences that people
want to preserve. It is not only the grandiose form
that can preserve revolutionary form for eternity,
but people’s everyday interventions. Perhaps
revolutionary history strives for the opening up of
history itself. In terms of transformation, one must
assume the indeterminate character of any “real”
movement.
The Yugoslav monuments operate by
institutionalizing collective memory of WWII events.
They then evoke formal gestures of opening towards
the future. It is clear that the most obvious strategy
of representing universalism is abstraction. In the
abstract formal language of the Yugoslav revolution,
memorials instigate a certain sense of openness
that allows for personal associations. They remain
receptive to multiple interpretations, and they awaken
fantasies. Their abstract vocabulary allows for an
appropriation of meaning that bypasses official
narrations, allowing access to the monuments even
for people who disagree with their official politic.
The monuments in question play much more into
the realm of modernist art. Narratives of progress
and modernization are apparent in the time structure
that many of them embody. In their linear and
progressive formulations of time, revolution is rather
idealistic, and masks the often painful, difficult and
complicated processes of social transformation. How
can a monument to the revolution, which celebrates
the social power that leads to change, relate to the
realities of social practice? How can the trap of a
program of prescribed and formalized memory be
avoided, thereby creating space for people to develop
their own memorial practices, which would then
relate back to this change?
Current Ideological Investments:
The National Reconciliation
and Re-appropriation of Memorial Sites
The abstract monuments stand on symbolic sites,
where many people have died and/or experienced
the horrors of WWII. The memorial sites represent
partisan universalism, the only social force that really
rejected the logic of nationalism and consequently
the logic of ethnic cleansing that was imposed by
fascist forces. Abstraction in this regard has mainly
71
however (apart from the 1946 documentary film,
Jasenovac, which is actually one of the first Yugoslav
films) the idea of broaching the subject of trauma
just after the war had ended in a country that needed
all the support for reconstruction it could muster
was a problematic issue to say the least. Yet socialist
Yugoslavia was actually more stable “right after the
war” than it would be later on, which makes the
topic one of the most significant blind spots of the
communist leadership.
The Fate of Modernist Monuments:
Destruction, Decay and Decontextualization
Bubanj monument (fists), designed by Ivan Sabolić (1963). Photo © Robert Burghardt
provoked opposition by nationalist ideologues who
have criticized the monuments for neglecting to show
what actually happened on the sites. The gestures
found in the monuments have been perceived
as expressing particular national interests whilst
conveniently suppressing others. Furthermore, the
form of abstraction they engender denies the logic of
a “national” form, as well as a certain kind of politics
of victimization, which especially in the Yugoslav
context became a very problematic logic in light of
the civil war in the nineties.
Indeed, the memory politics of the Yugoslav
Communist Party aimed at a conciliatory universalism
that rested on a positive and inclusive idea of socialist
Yugoslavism. During the socio-economically insecure
1980s, extreme forms of nationalism surfaced in
various places, and the Yugoslav politics of memory
in addition to the centrality of the antifascist ideology
was undermined. In the eighties, a bitter dispute over
the number of victims in the Jasenovac concentration
72
and extermination camp was unleashed, in which
the number of victims were either drastically overor under-reported by the opposing sides. Similarly,
the post-WWII extrajudicial killings (some of which
were motivated by revenge, others by politics) by
communists and partisans were for the first time broadly
addressed, opening many wounds of the civil war that
had taken place during WWII. New memorial sites
were re-imagined and re-appropriated for the national
cause, with the intent of rehabilitating local fascists and
demonizing communists / partisans. Unfortunately, the
attention mobilized in the process of memorialization
was less motivated by the idea of bringing historical
truth to surface than by its exploitation for the coming
battles in the 1990s civil war.
Reconciliation thus became a part of the general
nationalist politics that prepared the ideological
grounds of the bloody breakup. There, communist
leadership would perhaps have been better off
openly addressing these issues before the breakup,
If we partly agree with the statement that the
new historical context re-appropriated monuments
for the nationalist cause, then we disagree with
the thesis that their abstract form allowed an easy
re-adjustment. On the contrary, it was precisely
because of their antifascist and communist legacy,
which symbolizes the other space (Yugoslavia), that
many modernist partisan monuments have been
destroyed and/or left to decay (as Bogdan Žižić’s
film, Damnatio Memoriae aptly documents). They
had to be destroyed, because they were a sign of
a different future that embodied the universalist
claim of the partisan figure. It seems that this specter
haunted some, inciting them to undertake a rigorous
“monument cleansing” by means of dynamite.
Nowadays, the partisan memory is increasingly
condemned to oblivion. Monuments have been
partly forgotten by most people, and due to their
distant locations have become less and less visited (if
at all then only by a few surviving partisans and art
historians). Certain sites have even been removed or
destroyed in the instances where their narrative has
directly countered nationalist interests, such as the
anti-fascist sites in Croatia. In states such as Slovenia,
Serbia or Macedonia, the narrative of self-liberation
and partisan struggle has more easily integrated
into the new nationalistic narratives and has been
reconciled with those of other patriotic groups
such as the Chetniks and Home Guards, who have
received their own memorial sites. Within Macedonia,
the historical revisionism is dramatically visible. If
in the ethnic Albanian parts, the monuments are in
utter neglect (case in point, Struga), in the ethnic
Macedonian parts, the monuments have been well
kept (Prilep, for example).
With most museums around memorial sites closed
and very few regularly organized field trips, these
sites have been completely decontextualized. Yet
the very recent fashionable academic turn toward
“archaeologies of modernism” includes a renewed
interest for these monuments. They attract attention
as peculiar design objects posted on many design
blogs, triggering both enthusiasm and discussion.
The monuments still capture people’s imaginations.
It could be argued that this interest is instrumentally
helpful in saving some of the sites from total
demolition, in that it insists on their high artistic
value (the tactic of claiming that the monuments
are not political but instead, works of “pure art”).
Nevertheless, this tactic is still problematic, because
it follows from a formalist understanding of art as an
autonomous space. It is this formalism that denies
the social function of objects and the complex role
they play in a political discourse, one that could be
described as being part and parcel with the process of
abandonment.
What seems contradictory at first glance
might therefore best be described by the term,
“musealization”. Things that we find in museums tend
to have fallen out of use. Our knowledge of the past
73
becomes but a sediment, and its role in the present
thus nullified. It is only when these objects connect to
a social practice that they are again imbued with true
meaning. Returning to these monuments is thus not
simply about saving them, but about the possibility
of retrieving the emancipatory and antifascist
politics that they embody. It is not only about the
consideration of “resources of hope”,1 as Raymond
Williams has aptly put it, but about the possibility
of their re-enactment and mobilization for present
struggles.
Last but not least, the formalism of the “pure
art” approach is embedded in the contemporary
post-communist time-structure, which is primarily
characterized by two discourses: 1) the discourse
of totalitarianism, and 2) the discourse of nostalgia.
Both lack the intention to open the present towards
the future. Totalitarianism dismisses everything that
challenges the present order as a threat to freedom,
while nostalgia dwells in the construction of an
idealized past. In the logic of this time structure,
objects that challenge its order have to be either
utterly revised or erased. Intervening in this context
with the aesthetic ideology of the artistic autonomy
of the object does not help us “rehabilitate” or
mobilize the emancipatory potential for the future,
but rather freezes it in a stand still, and in so doing
stripping memory of its references to both the
past and future references. The memorial art work
becomes “eternal”, in a way, and in this respect it is
complicit with dominant post-communist manners of
dealings with the past.
1 Raymond Williams wrote an impressive book Resources of Hope
(London: Verso, 1989).
74
Conclusion
Although the real future of the modernist
memorials already lies in the past, the promise of
a better future remains crystallized in the formal
power of their material existence as sculptures. As
physical witnesses, the monuments are not only
witnesses to WWII and the partisan struggle, but
they have become monuments to Yugoslavia itself;
to its irreverently progressive anti-nationalist and
anti-fascist perspective. They maintain an invisible
network throughout the territory of former Yugoslavia
and make apparent the disruption and segmentation
of a formerly common space. Where the political
investments of official power seem yet again to have
been stripped of their ideological content—whether
through past reductionism to Yugoslavian nationbuilding, or through the nation-building processes
of the present—they fail to address their radical core,
which is embodied in the monuments themselves:
the call for a different future.
Petrova Gora monument, designed by Vojin Bakic (1981). Photo © Tomislav Medak
POUR ANNE
75
MATERIALS
Adnan Yıldız
The Portrait of a Lover
The Turkish word “Kar” is used for snow, and is also
the title of an Orhan Pamuk novel, set in the eastern
Turkish city of Kars. Appearing throughout his work
are civilians, the army, politicians and the idea of
modernity. Crime and morality are also some of the
social dilemmas that create individual tragedies at the
sites where both the public and private are violated.
My earliest memory of Orhan Pamuk is of a public
library in Karaman, my hometown. Karaman is a small
city in Anatolia, not even as big as Kars. The same
political climate existed in both Kars and Karaman.
The two are not far from each other, connected in
much the same way as Anatolia and Istanbul are. Upon encountering my first Orhan Pamuk novel, I
remember that the public library had been moved
from its old building into a newly renovated one. All
the things that one would miss about the old library—
its smell, its particular light, and the old, scratched
up wooden shelves—had been replaced by new
elements of design. No distinguishable features from
the previous space had been kept. Everything looked
like an airport, a hotel or a contemporary art museum.
Sleek and clean, with a hardly-bearable lightness, the
library uncannily contained the same combination of
glass, steel, and 1990s-style polished shelves. It felt like
nowhere.
Füsun was from Istanbul, and lived with her family
throughout her whole life. At the very end of Orhan
Pamuk’s latest novel, The Museum of Innocence (first
published in 2008), she died in a car accident. It was
the first time she had left them. Füsun is the muse
of the main character, Kemal. Throughout the novel,
Pamuk talks about Kemal’s strong form of obsession
for Füsun: his memories of having spent his childhood
and youth with her, as well as the eight long years of
having stalked her, later on. After having lost Füsun in
the car accident, just before their honeymoon, Kemal
relinquishes all hope for life and his last wish is to
establish a museum full of Füsun—a portrait of a lover.
76
While he was hopelessly in love with Füsun, Kemal
(fictively) collected many of the items and objects that
they had shared. Used cinema tickets, her earrings,
newspapers, postcards, everyday objects and all kinds
of ephemera—pictures of celebrities, logos of popular
brands of their time. All the way down to the remains
of the cigarettes that he had smoked (or supposedly
smoked) while he was thinking of her. He inscribed
everything with a date.
Orhan Pamuk worked for several years on the
project. At first, the novel included the map of Kemal’s
museum on the last page, in addition to the news for
those fanatic readers who would go looking for the
museum in Istanbul, and would be disappointed to
find the building closed. Pamuk’s name later surfaced
with the launch of the 2010 Istanbul European
Cultural Capital program, which was a political failure
for the Turkish supporters of the European Union
membership campaign. After speculations about
corruption at the organizational level, Pamuk took
a step back. He eventually brought his project to
fruition as an independent institution and a not-forprofit foundation. The museum was inaugurated in
2012. Eleven thousand people visited it in its first three
months of being open to the public.
The Museum of Innocence,
Istanbul, 2012. Photo © Adnan Yıldız
The Museum of Innocence,
Istanbul, 2012. Photo © Adnan Yıldız
77
The Museum of Innocence, Istanbul, 2012. Photo © Kristina Kramer
In several of his interviews, Pamuk has mentioned
the absence of a city museum or an institution that
held the records of the modern urbanization of
Istanbul. Having reconsidered this question whilst
visiting the museum earlier this summer, I have
decided that it has lost its relevance for the locale. The
museum space is dominated by wooden boxes filled
with ephemera, and objects including projections and
small installations. Its staged atmosphere attempts
to reflect the silence and pain of the character,
Kemal, who dies after his agreement with the author.
Nevertheless, one of the many concerns about this
experiment is the artistic approach to the translation
between two realms of imagination: namely from
text-based imagination (the bulk of the material) into
image-based imagination (the remainder).
Orhan Pamuk produced his museum project as
an artist, a curator and the author of the story. In
so doing, he created a place for the imaginings of
Kemal and Füsun, and he made them real for his
readers. His design taste was not as refined as his
writing skills were, however. The representation of
Kemal (especially on the top floor) is very theatrical.
Far removed from being a conceptual approach, it
fails to communicate with the viewer and does not
suggest that it was left behind by the character. In
general, the museum resembles the public library that
I used to borrow Pamuk novels from. Not only does
its architecture seem not to have made use of the
potential offered by the relationship with its location,
it lacks a sense of sensitivity towards its context. In
the neighborhood surrounding it are so many antique
shops selling items similar to those found on display
in the exhibition. Pamuk’s museum is frozen in its own
conceptual time and spatial thinking, and does not
respond to any clear intellectual or political position.
What happened to Kemal’s Istanbul, Füsun’s view, and
their city?
78
Istanbul now has a museum of
literature that has been the fodder
for long discussions over many
years. It would be interesting to see
what would happen if Pamuk acted
differently, and worked in a more
performative and collaborative
way at a moment when Istanbulbased contemporary artistic and
critical practices have particularly
been flourishing. Surprisingly
indeed, Istanbul still lacks a city
museum, or an equivalent, to
memorialize the history of its city
life. Yet Pamuk’s museum seems
too modest an intervention in
this regard, and due to the lack of
investment, it cannot purport itself
as such. Rest assured, however,
one can still visit the Orhan Pamuk
Shop at the end of the tour in order
to buy all kinds of Pamuk literature.
79
I Travel Because I Have To,
I Come Back Because I Love You
ETUDE
This “Etude” is an excerpt from the film I Travel Because I Have To, I Come Back Because I
Love You (Viajo Porque Preciso, Volto Porque te Amo), directed by Karim Aïnouz and Marcelo
Marcelo Gomes
& Karim Aïnouz
Gomes, released in 2009.
Straddling between fiction and documentary, I Travel Because I Have To, I Come Back
Because I Love You is formally a road movie, but in content, it is a long elegy on love, the loss
of love, loneliness, regeneration, search for self, and the loss of one’s sense of self in the search.
A geologist is dispatched on an official mission to Sertão, a far-flung region in the north east
of Brazil, to survey water sources and study the proposed map for water canalizations. The
opening sequence of filming the road ahead, at night, recurs throughout the film and sets a
cadence to this physical, geographical as well as interior journey. Through letters to his former
wife, the viewer is intimated to the chronicle of the protagonist’s emotional journey, and soon
Film still from I Travel Because I Have To, I Come Back Because I Love
after, the attributes of the natural environment begin to allegorically resonate with his interior
You (2009) directed by Karim Aïnouz and Marcelo Gomes
state. The overwhelming longing, the pangs of estrangement, and the sense of loneliness are
compounded by the aridity of the landscape around him. The various characters he comes
across seem to embody different forms of solitude and abandonment. Some are pensive
and quiet, others are sad, and others still are sex workers, poor farmers, or truck drivers. The
prospect of bringing water to a semi-deserted area is itself a potent metaphor in the geologist’s
life. He waivers between painful memories of marital warmth and the desire to rekindle a love
lost on the one hand, and the awareness of its impossibility on the other. The scientific findings
he collects along the journey thus become poetic measures of loneliness.
The Editors
80
Day 02.
Geological study of tectonic structures for the construction of a canal
connecting the Xexéu region with the Souls’ River. Duration of the field
trip: thirty days. Fuck it! Thirty days...
I am on the BR 432, Kilometer forty-five. Altitude 450 meters.
The climate is arid, the terrain tertiary. Cambrian limestone clay,
composed of arenites, siltites and reddish-brown ferruginous
conglomerates.
The region is called Little Meadow—though there is not a meadow
anywhere in sight.
It is twelve o’ clock.
I take advantage of the mapping work to make contact with the few
locals whose lands will have to be requisitioned in order to cut the canal.
Nino and Perpétua will be the first to be resettled.
They have been married for over fifty years. They have never lived
anywhere else, have never had a fight, have never spent one night away
from each other.
Nino went out to turn off the radio, but I called him back in. I didn’t want
to film them apart.
81
Day 18.
Blondie, Good Morning!
Good morning, my love.
It is October 28, Civil Servants’ Day. No one is working at the department
back in Fortaleza, and here I am, slogging away in the dry dirt.
Seventeen days and twelve hours to go. It seems like an eternity. Hardly a
soul on the road since leaving Fortaleza.
Stopped at a gas station today and saw something kind of hippie painted
across the wall. I didn’t heed any attention to it at first, but when I drove
off it dawned on me what had been written there: I TRAVEL BECAUSE I
HAVE TO; I COME BACK BECAUSE I LOVE YOU.
I keep the radio on, thinking of you the whole time. And that is all. I wear
myself out thinking about you so much.
Driving along this road, with a romantic sunset. I remember our last
sunset together, there on Praia do Futuro, in Fortaleza.
I cannot stand the thought of being alone.
This trip is taking me back; back to the day you left me.
I think about going back the whole time, but there isn’t anywhere to go
back to.
Unbearable! I let on that we were still together, that we had never broken
up. I started writing you letters and replying to others you never sent.
I keep the radio on, thinking of you the whole time. And that is all. I
wear myself out thinking about you so much. I took this trip to try to
forget that you dumped me but it has just made it worse. Just makes me
remember. Endlessly.
Film still from I Travel Because I Have To, I Come Back Because I Love
You (2009) directed by Karim Aïnouz and Marcelo Gomes
When you said never again
Don’t call again; it’s better that way
That wasn’t exactly
What I wanted to hear you say.
and you said, sharp as a knife,
I want you out of my life,
that it was all insane
all so absurd...
Then out of the blue you call me up
a few days later, you look me up,
your voice all soft, almost formal
and you say you’ve had second thoughts
that it doesn’t have to be the end
of something so right and so casual,
and suddenly everything
is sent into a spin
and the one who lost can now even win.
82
Day 29
I feel bursts of love and hate for you.
I travel because I have to.
I won’t go back, because I still love you.
83
MATERIALS
Rasha Salti
Of Dreamers,
Ezzeddine Qalaq and
Palestine’s Revolutionary Posters
A Virtual Exhibition in the Making
1
Ezzeddine Qalaq was born in 1936, in a village near
Jaffa. With the Nakba, his family was displaced to a
refugee camp in Syria, near Damascus. He studied
chemistry at the University of Damascus, joined the
Communist Party and was jailed briefly for subversive
activities. He traveled to Saudi Arabia and worked
for nearly two years as a teacher. He left in order to
pursue a doctoral degree in letters, his true passion,
at the University of Poitiers, in France. Whilst there,
he joined the local branch of the General Union of
Palestinian Students there, and shone, a natural born
leader. Yasser Arafat appointed him as the PLO’s
representative in France after he graduated, and he
moved to Paris in 1973. On August 3, 1978, Qalaq was
killed with his colleague, Adnan Hammad, when a
bomb exploded in their office in Paris. This, in brief, is
his “wiki-style” biography.
2
2 Commemoration of the twelfth year of the Palestinian revolution,
by Ismail Shammout, 1977. Produced by the Unified Information Office
of the PLO, Berlin. From the Ezzeddin Qalaq collection.
84
Ezzeddin Qalaq in France, image courtesy of Claude Lazar.
4
5
3
1
On May 14, 1948, the British colonial mandate
was officially ended and the last of its administration
staff and army corps evacuated, but war between
armed Zionist groups, factions, militias and armed
Palestinians resistance fighters, seconded by Arab
armies, had broken out much earlier. An armistice was
brokered in 1949, defining the boundaries of the state
of Israel and territories in the West Bank and Gaza
Strip, which was administered by the Jordanian and
Egyptian armies respectively. During the war of 1948,
an estimated 800,000 Palestinians were expelled from
their homes, villages and cities located in the territory
of what would become internationally recognized as
Israel. These refugees were settled in camps within
the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but also in neighboring
Arab countries, namely Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.
While Nakba refers to the shock and horror of
military defeat and loss of homeland in 1948, it also
marks the protracted lived experience of humiliation,
dispossession and hardship in the decade that
followed. In 1952, the General Union of Palestine
Students (GUPS) was established, and spread very
quickly across university campuses in the Arab
world, Europe and the United States. Shattered and
disenfranchised political representation, dispersal and
destitution, the right for Palestine to exist, the ability
for Palestinians to return home, the entitlement to
self-determination and sovereignty were each indeed
at the risk of being absented, eluded and silenced. The
GUPS was actively invested in defending these basic
rights in any and all of the public spheres to which
they had access.
3 Palestinian Cinema, An Essential Front in our Struggle, artist
unknown. Produced by the Unified Information Office of the PLO,
Beirut. From the Ezzeddin Qalaq collection.
4 Fat’h. The Revolution Continues, by artist Kemal Boullata.
Produced by Fat’h. Ezzeddin Qalaq collection. Kemal Boullata is very
well established Palestinian artist and intellectual. This poster was
conceived on the occasion of the twelfth anniversary of the revolution.
It is remarkable because it conjugates calligraphy, an art considered
traditional, within a modernist style of expression.
5 Abu Ammar (Arafat) at the UN: War starts in Palestine and Peace
Is Born in Palestine. Produced by the Unified Information Office of the
PLO. From the Ezzeddin Qalaq collection. The poster marks the first
speech Yasser Arafat gave at the UN General Assembly in 1974, and the
formal recognition of the PLO by the world community as the official
and legitimate representing Palestinians.
85
included Folk Dance, Theater and Popular Arts. The
Plastic Arts Section provided Palestinian artists with
stipends and supplies, and organized exhibitions
in Beirut, Arab cities and the rest of the world: The
Exhibition of Palestinian Posters 1967–1979 in Beirut
Palestinian Artists exhibition in Oslo, Norway, 1980, as
well as the Art Exhibition of the Palestinian Resistance
at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, 1980.
And last but not least, The International Art Exhibition
in Solidarity with Palestine, in Beirut in 1978.
7
By 1964, at the Arab League meeting in Cairo, the
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was formed
and mandated to liberate Palestine through armed
struggle. It was premised on the existence of Palestine
and the rights of Palestinians for self-determination.
Endowed with a charter, it encompassed all of the
political movements that had emerged until then in the
West Bank, Gaza and in the diaspora, as well as some
leaders or figures that prevailed before the Nakba. A
decade later, the PLO’s chairman, Yasser Arafat (whose
chairmanship lasted from 1969 until 2004) was hosted
at the UN General Assembly, thus recognizing the
organization as the official political body representing
Palestinians worldwide.
The overall outcome of the 1967 war between Arab
states and Israel was a defeat that Arab populations
experienced as a humiliation that eventually
mitigated into a long-lasting, deep and widespread
disenchantment. The PLO could not afford to bear
that load, however. From the middle of the 1960s, it
set up military training camps in Jordan and launched
commando operations in Israel. By 1969, conflicts
between the Jordanian monarchy and the PLO
command escalated to full-scale armed clashes that
resulted in the PLO’s relocation of its headquarters
to Lebanon, the country host to the second largest
refugee population and sharing borders with Israel.
A few influential cadres among the PLO’s intelligentsia
had understood early on that the political struggle
was as much a military as it was a discursive one.
Qalaq was one of the most eloquent and inspiring of
such high-ranking militants. The PLO was structured
to operate like a government in exile, replete with
executive and legislative bodies, a constitutional
text, a higher command, as well as both military and
civilian leadership. In lieu of ministries, it instituted
departments. The principal challenge was to represent
and communicate with its own constituency, which was
scattered across territories in refugee camps, in cities
and under Israeli occupation. The second challenge was
to communicate with the world the legitimacy of their
narrative and mobilize support.
In 1965, the department of Arts and National
Culture was both established and headed by Ismael
Shammout, a Palestinian artist who had studied art
in Cairo and Rome, and who had moved to Beirut in
1965. In addition to his position in the PLO, he was
elected the first president of the Union of Palestinian
Artists (1969) and of the Union of Arab Artists (1971).
Shammout’s wife, Tamam al-Akhal, also an artist,
headed the Arts and Heritage Section that organized
an exhibition of traditional Palestinian clothing and
crafts, which toured in seventeen cities in Europe
in the late 1970s. Throughout the 1970s, Shammout
and al-Akhhal organized different exhibitions in
the Al-Karama Gallery, a space supported by the
PLO to exhibit art. In addition, the Department of
Unified Information and Culture was remarkably
active in the production and support of cultural and
artistic activities. Its Graphic Arts section instigated
the production of posters; the Palestinian Cinema
Institute produced documentary films; other arts
6 No Peace without the Palestinians by artist Claude Lazar, circa
1975. From the Ezzeddin Qalaq collection.
7 Revolution until Victory, artist unidentified. Produced by Fat’h.
Ezzeddin Qalaq collection.
6
86
through the liberationist revolutionary fervor that
swept the region (Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, etc.) and the
rest of the world (Cuba, Chile, Vietnam). From the
middle of the 1960s until about the early 1980s, the
question of Palestine and the struggle for liberation
were enounced as revolutionary projects that
intended to defeat the settler-colonial Israeli state, and
to upheave comprador Arab regimes complacent to
the prevailing order. Thus the Palestinian revolution
was perceived and experienced as a profoundly
transformative project that sought to restore justice,
dignity, equality and sovereignty in the Arab world.
In other words, Palestine became a metaphor that
crystallized the aspirations for a life with dignity for
young militants in the Arab world.
8
9
The new political class as well as intelligentsia that
emerged within the PLO was culled from refugees
and the diaspora. Both its political universe and its
aspirations were as much informed through their
lived experience of humiliation as they were informed
8 The two posters are described as “mural newspapers for young
adults”, titled al-Fata al-Arabi or “the Young Arab”. They are the work
of Muhieddine el-Labbad, a pioneering Egyptian graphic designer,
illustrator, and a foundational figure in revolutionizing graphic arts as
well as pedagogy with regards to graphic novels, comics, children’s
books and literature for young adults in the Arab world. The first mural
newspaper features two very short stories The Most Beautiful Place
in the World (by celebrated Syrian author Zakariyya Tamer) and The
Fisherman’s Fingers, as well as an article titled Our Arab Oil. The second
mural newspaper features the lyrics of The Camel’s Song, and a funny
educational game titled “What are the Similarities between the Life of
Ibn Khaldun and a Day in the Life of Oussama?”. From the Ezzeddin
Qalaq collection.
Soon, the PLO would attract a nebula of dissident,
gifted and innovative artists and intellectuals to Beirut.
Artists and poets contributed to the production of
posters (the roster is impressive and comprises some
of the most well-known names of modern artists and
poets of the time). In their turn, artists discovered the
institutional realm as well as the resources to innovate
and experiment. The “red lines” were remarkably loose
(to the contrary of several other revolutions) and there
was a world / mass audience to conquer. The array of
experimentation, diversity and creativity of Palestinian
posters is bewildering. It has remained unprecedented in
the Arab world, and remarkable on a worldwide scale.
9 Vietnam. Palestine. Rhodesia. South Africa. Latin America, artist
unidentified. Produced by the GUPS. From the Ezzeddin Qalaq
collection.
87
Qalaq’s genial feat is to have regarded
representation and agency as cornerstones of political
and artistic practice at once. He mobilized artists and
intellectuals to shape a representation and narrative
of Palestinians that crystallized their aspirations and
image of themselves. He also inspired European artists
to see in Palestine a mirror of the world’s injustice. He
had realized that the most effective means to counter
the traumatic dispersal of Palestinians in safeguarding
their sense of peoplehood was also through culture
and the arts. If homes were lost, the poetic record
of having had a home would remain alive; if the
land was too far removed from sight, its visual
imagining would remain visible and in myriad forms;
if citizenship were denied, then being-in-the-world as
Palestinian would thrive.
10
11
“Without him, this collective would have never
seen the light of day; he helped us with obtaining
accreditations, [he] encouraged our initiatives,
facilitated events and actions and provided us
with whatever we needed. He advised us, while
respecting each one’s personal research. He did
not hesitate to criticize stereotypical and banal
imagery and was strict on the political significance
11 Poster for the Moroccan association in support of the Palestinian
people’s struggle, artist unidentified.
88
15
to produce a poster on the theme “Zionism is
a form of racism and discrimination”, and I had
rendered the star of David from barbed wire; he
explained to me that using these elements could
lead to misinterpretation, [as] he was against the
use of religious symbols to refer to Zionism.”
Qalaq was also one of the most active PLO cadres
in the production, dissemination and circulation of
posters. If the body of Palestinian poster art is regarded
as a political movement’s propaganda machine, its most
astonishing feature is the extent to which its production
was unshackled from dogma and its articulations close
to the everyday lived experience of refugees as well
as to collective memory. One of the reasons for this
was that artists and propagandists were themselves
children of refugee camps and not an elite intelligentsia
socially disconnected from the “people”. Posters were an
interpellative platform for the revolution’s constituency.
They were produced in an era when television broadcast
was the exclusive purview of nation-states and was
not beyond the means of the PLO’s extra-territorial
framework. Posters were lightweight, cost-efficient, easy to
disseminate and fantastically communicative.
In 1973, Qalaq accompanied Guy Champouillet
and Serge Lepéron, filmmakers from the Cahiers du
Cinéma, as they traveled to Lebanon and Syria for
their film L’Olivier. In 1975, he met the French painter
Claude Lazar, who, involved with several anti-fascist
artistic events, was the then general secretary of
the Jeune Peinture Salon. A deep friendship was
forged almost instantly. Together they established a
collective of “artists for Palestine” within the Jeune
Peinture group. In a brochure titled Figuration
Critique, published by the Musée du Luxembourg in
1978, Lazar recalled Qalaq’s contribution:
10 Artist unidentified, circa 1974. From the Ezzeddin Qalaq collection.
This poster was made to promote the film, L’Olivier. Qui sont les
palestiniens? (The Olive Tree. Who Are the Palestinians?), directed by a
group of filmmakers from the Cahiers du Cinéma in France.
14
of our work. For example, he had once asked me
13
First was the imperative to provide generations
of refugees dispersed across countries that could
not physically see Palestine with images of their
homeland. Second, was the imperative to debunk
the prevailing Zionist claim that Palestine was “a land
without a people for a people without a land”, put
forth by Golda Meir (who was Prime Minister of Israel
from 1969 to 1974). That statement or “representation”
denied Palestinians the right to be. The Israeli state
systematically referred to Palestinians as the “Arab”
population of Palestine, with the explicit purpose of
“normalizing” the melting of Palestinian refugees into
host Arab societies, undercutting discourse and action
of rights of return and reclaiming homeland. Posters
explicitly depicted the people of Palestine and the
myriad ways in which they belonged to the land. So
for instance, Jaffa oranges branded worldwide as an
“Israeli” product were reclaimed as a native symbol
of Palestine; so were the Galilee’s olive groves. The
Palestinian traditional folk dress was reproduced in
its plural versions as a national symbol hallmark of
Palestinian identity.
16
17
Revolutions invent the world as well as its people
anew. Palestinians transformed from peasants to
revolutionaries, from helpless victims to fearless men
and women who were shaping their own destiny
against the insuperable odds stacked against them.
14 Jerusalem in our Hearts, by artist Hilmi al-Touni. Produced by the
Unified Information Office, PLO. Ezzeddin Qalaq collection. El-Touni
is considered a pivotal figure in children’s book illustration in the Arab
world. His style bridged the legacy of folk drawing and modern artistic
expression using a vibrant palette and reproducing symbols that
children identified and memorized easily. His calligraphic style was
inspired by popular genres used for film posters, insignas and signage.
This poster iterates some of the canonical elements that would
become minted as visual symbols of Palestine: Jaffa oranges, the alAqsa mosque, the traditional folk dress, and Palestine embodied as a
woman.
15 Poster commemorating the seventh anniversary of the founding
of the DFLP, in which tribute is paid to women more generally and to
their commitment to the revolution more specifically, by artist Hilmi alTouni. Produced by the DFLP. Ezzeddin Qalaq collection. In this poster,
al-Touni represents a woman—who also “embodies” Palestine—,
carrying Jaffa oranges and donning the traditional folk dress; behind
her is a rainbow in the colors of the Palestinian flag and in the corner
of the poster the Dome of the Rock. All are visual codes that iconicize
Palestine.
16 We Will Return, artist unknown. Ezzeddin Qalaq collection.
12
12 Jerusalem, by artist Jumana al-Husseini. Produced by The June
5th Collective. Ezzeddin Qalaq collection.
13 Struggle is the Only Path to Jerusalem, artist unknown. Produced
by the Unified Information Office, PLO. Ezzeddin Qalaq collection.
17 The Land Belongs to those who Liberate It, by artist Abdel-Rahman
al-Muzayyen. Produced by Fat’h (Palestine Liberation Movement, or
PLM). Ezzeddin Qalaq collection.
89
of their catastrophe and attempted to reverse the
burdensome defeatist sense of loss and humiliation.
24
18
27
19
22
20
26
21
Posters were instrumental in disseminating
Palestine’s national history, countering the Zionist
claim that it had never existed, or that it was
“stillborn” in 1948. At the same time, the posters
recorded orally-transmitted collective memory
and minted important events as milestones that
refugees had lived first-hand. May 15th, the day that
Israel celebrates its independence, was christened
alternately as the “Day of the Martyr” and the “Day of
the Palestinian Struggle”, a gesture that celebrated
the courage and steadfastness of Palestinians in spite
Another noteworthy date was marked on March 30,
1976, when Palestinians living in Israel were protesting
confiscation of their land in Sakhnin, in the Galilee,
and were shot at by the Israeli army. Six were killed
and others severely injured. News spread and sparked
more protests among Palestinians worldwide. The
PLO coined March 30th as “Land Day” and produced
posters at every commemoration.
23
One of the notable landmarks of the Palestinian
revolution is an armed confrontation between a
Palestinian commando and the Israeli army in the
village of al-Karama in the occupied West Bank, in
1968. While the Palestinians fought to the last man
and suffered losses, the battle was noteworthy
because the Israeli army battalion had also lost a great
deal and had in turn retreated, leaving a battlefield
with charred tanks and dead soldiers. The morning
after, newspapers published images that ignited
shockwaves across the Arab world: for the first time
since the humiliating defeat of 1967, hope and dignity
was restored to the Palestinian revolution. Thousands
were galvanized to volunteer and fight alongside
Palestinians. Furthermore, by a strange twist of fate,
in Arabic, al-karama means “dignity”: the battle and
its double signification in fact became a foundational
myth in the Palestinian revolution. A large number
of posters were produced for years thereafter,
commemorating the al-Karama battle.
25
28
18 Poster for the film Victory in their Eyes by Samir Nasr. Produced by
the Palestinian Cinema Institute. Ezzeddin Qalaq collection.
19 Ten Years on the Palestinian Revolution. 1965–1975, by artist Hilmi
al-Touni. Produced by the Unified Information Office, PLO. Ezzeddin
Qalaq collection.
20 Women’s Struggle Constitutes one of the Essential Pillars of the
Struggle for Freedom, artist unidentified. Produced by Fat’h. Ezzeddin
Qalaq collection.
21 Palestinian Women Fight for Liberation, by artist Burhan Karkoutly.
Produced by Fat’h. Ezzeddin Qalaq collection. Karkoutly was a Syrian
artist exiled in Germany whose style was distinctive. He attempted to
weave together traditional folk graphics and a modernist expression.
The poster illustrates the transformation of Palestinians from peasants
to revolutionaries, and obviously celebrates gender equality.
90
26 Hommage to the al-Karama Battle, artist unidentified. Produced by
the June 5th Collective. Ezzeddin Qalaq collection.
22 May 15th. The Day of Palestinian Struggle. Glory to our Martyrs, by
an unidentified artist. Produced by the PFLP. Ezzeddin Qalaq collection.
The poster illustrates literally how from the ashen squalor of refugee
camps, fighters—fidayyeen—rise, almost “larger than life”.
27 Al-Karama by artist Samir Salameh. Produced by the Unified
Information Office, PLO. Ezzeddin Qalaq collection.
24 The al-Karama Generation, artist unidentified, 1977. Produced by
the Unified Information Office, PLO. Ezzeddin Qalaq collection.
23 Unity is the Objective, by an unidentified artist. Produced by the
PFLP-General Command. Ezzeddin Qalaq collection.
25 Al-Karama Battle commemoration, artist unidentified, 1971.
Produced by the GUPS, Paris. Ezzeddin Qalaq collection.
28 Land Day. Our Roots, by artist Suleiman Mansour, with a poem
by Munib Makhoul. Produced by the Unified Information Office, PLO.
Suleiman Mansur is a leading Palestinian painter who now lives and
works in the West Bank. Ezzeddin Qalaq collection.
91
Posters were also used to denounce massacres,
attacks and war crimes that had been perpetrated
against Palestinians from the beginning of their
struggle against the Jewish colonization of Palestine
under British colonial rule. To inscribe acts of violence
into a serial record, and to publicly identify them
as crimes, was a remarkable counter to the media’s
indifference towards the Palestinian’s plight as well as
a manifestation of the reclaiming of agency.
rarely idolized. Martyr posters very quickly became a
genre in itself, evolving from a straightforward photo
portrait of the martyr, with name, date of death and
political slogan, to complex visual expressionist or
abstract compositions with a poetic verse replacing
the slogan.
33
29
34
31
37
Every revolution has heroes. The Palestinian
revolution identified fallen fighters, assassinated
intellectuals and leaders as its heroes-martyrs; they
were integrated in popular history, iconicized, but
33 Abdel-Qader el-Husseini, Martyr or the al-Qastal Battle, 1948, artist
unidentified. Ezzeddin Qalaq collection.
31 Deir Yassin massacre commemoration, artist unidentified. Ezzeddin
Qalaq collection.
35 We Write our Revolution with our Blood. Assassinated Palestinian
Intellectuals, artist unidentified. Produced by the Union of Palestinian
Writers. Ezzeddin Qalaq collection.
The Palestinian freedom fighter was known in
Arabic as “fida’i” (plural fida’iyyin or fidayyin). He traded
his life for the defense of his people and land, for the
recovery from the humiliation of passive victimhood,
for the overturn of the historic injustice he was
subjected to. Semiologically, the word was originally
attributed to Christ, the quintessential martyr. The
modern use of the term to designate Palestinian
insurgents was consecrated in a poem published
during the Great Revolt of 1936, the popular uprising
against British colonial mandate rule. The Palestinian
revolution was also a people’s war, and the fedayyin
were everyday folk. Intrepid and steadfast, the fida’i
was at once anonymous and epic. He covered his
head with a kuffiyyah to infiltrate enemy lines without
revealing his individual identity. Posters celebrating
the fidayyin were intended to debunk negative
representations of fighters as terrorists, and to
mobilize generations to the call of battlefield.
36 Poster commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the
assassination of Count Bernadotte at the hands of Zionist militias, by
Dhia al-Azzawi. Produced by the June 5th Collective. Ezzeddin Qalaq
collection. Dhia al-Azzawi is a leading Iraqi artist who was exiled from
Iraq in the 1970s, lived in Beirut before settling in London.
37 Because the storm promised me… (a verse from poet Mahmud
Darwish), artist unidentified. Produced by the Unified Information
Office, PLO. Ezzeddin Qalaq collection.
35
36
32
30
29 Land Day. 30 March 1976, by artist Claude Lazar. Produced by the
Unified Information Office, PLO. Ezzeddin Qalaq collection.
30 Land Day by Galilee’s School Children, artist unidentified. Produced
by the Unified Information Office, PLO. Ezzeddin Qalaq collection.
92
32 Look… They Are Three Thousand. They Were Killed in Tall el-Zaatar,
by artist V. Domenici. Ezzeddin Qalaq collection. The poster was
produced to denounce one of the most cruel and violent massacres
in refugee camps in Lebanon, namely, Tall el-Zaatar, located in the
eastern suburbs of Beirut, it was one of the most important camps. The
death toll amounted to 3,000 deaths.
34 January 7th, the Day of the Palestinian Martyr. You Will Not Be
Forgotten, artist unidentified. Produced by the Unified Information
Office, PLO. Ezzeddin Qalaq collection.
93
The Palestinian revolution captivated the hearts and
minds of the progressive and militant intelligentsia in
the Arab world, and Palestine became a metaphor for
a just, democratic, free and sovereign Arab world. As
regimes across the region became more and more
autocratic and intolerant of dissent and critique,
artists and intellectuals found a friendly haven in their
engagement with the Palestinian revolution. Cultural
production was prolific: exhibitions, film screenings,
publications, and concerts abounded.
38
Palestinian political organizations were also faced
with the tremendous challenge of the changing
perception of their revolution in the West. In
mainstream media, Palestinians were at best helpless
refugees and at worst, unrepentant terrorists. The
Palestinian cause found a friendly terrain of solidarity
among anti-colonial, anti-imperialist liberation
movements. Generally, they articulated two motifs:
denunciation of Israeli crimes committed against
Palestinians (military occupation, arbitrary expulsions,
detentions, assassinations, massacres, bombardment,
et cetera) and the righteousness of the revolution.
39
41
44
45
42
40
43
38 Twelve Years on the Palestinian Revolution. 1965–1977, by artist
Ismail Shammout. Produced by the Unified Information Office, PLO.
94
39 This poster was actually the result of a competition, the artist is
Jumana al-Husseini. Produced by the Unified Information Office in
The Netherlands. Ezzeddin Qalaq collection. Jumana al-Husseini is a
leading Palestinian artist who lives in Paris.
40 Artist unidentified. Produced by the Unified Information Office in
Spain. Ezzeddin Qalaq collection.
41 Artist unidentified. Produced by the Unified Information Office in
The Netherlands. Ezzeddin Qalaq collection.
42 Revolution until Victory, artist unidentified. Produced by the
Unified Information Office in Paris. Ezzeddin Qalaq collection.
43 Artist unidentified. Produced by the Unified Information Office.
44 The International Exhibition in Solidarity with Palestine, 1978, by
Dhia al-Azzawi. Produced by the Unified Information Office, Beirut.
Ezzeddin Qalaq collection. The International Art Exhibition in Solidarity
with Palestine was inaugurated on March 21st, 1978, in Beirut and
open to the public until April 5th of that year. It included approximately
200 works by 197 international artists from approximately twentynine countries. The initiative was inspired from the Salvador Allende
Resistance Museum in Exile, which was undertaken by Chilean artists
in Paris in 1973 after the Pinochet coup. The works were donated with
the aim of constituting a seed collection for a museum of international
modern art in solidarity with Palestine, in exile.
45 The International Exhibition in Solidarity with Palestine, 1978, by
Mohammad el-Mellihi. Produced by the Unified Information Office,
Beirut. Ezzeddin Qalaq collection. Mohammad el-Mellihi is a leading
Moroccan artist who saught exile in Beirut during the 1970s.
95
48
46
One of the tragedies of statelessness is the
impossibility of establishing and administering proper
archives. Qalaq had the visionary foresight to collect
posters produced in Beirut, Damascus and Europe.
His collection represents a unique and vibrant record
of how Palestinians once saw themselves: dignified,
sovereign and beautiful; men and women in color
and in verse defying a world that denied the simplest
fact of their existence. Who could believe that from
the pallid squalor of mud-drenched, tin-roofed
refugee camps that so much radiance, lyricism, valor
and inventiveness could rise to reverse the course of
history?
This virtual projection was inspired by an
exhibition I was invited to curate the exhibition in
2008, titled Posters of the Palestinian Revolution.
The Ezzeddin Kalak Collection. It was part of
MASARAT Palestine, an artistic and cultural
season in the French Community of WallonieBruxelles, an initiative of the Commissariat
général aux Relations internationales and the
Palestinian General Delegation at the European
Union, Belgium and Luxembourg, under the
high patronage of the International Relations
Ministry in the French Community, Mahmoud
Darwich, and with support of the Ministry of
Culture. Conception and Execution: Les Halles de
Schaerbeek, Brussels. Posters of the Palestinian
Revolution. The Ezzeddin Kalak Collection
was hosted at The Mundaneum, an archive
center and exhibition space in Mons, Belgium
(www.mundaneum.be), from November 7 until
December 21, 2008. The exhibition sponsored
by the Commissariat Général aux Relations
Internationales (CGRI) and the Palestinian
General Delegation at the European Union,
Belgium and Luxembourg.
------
47
46 Poster for a Palestinian film week in Rabat, Morocco, artist
unidentified, 1978. Ezzeddin Qalaq collection.
47 Poster for a Palestinian film week in Valence, France, artist
unidentified, 1978. Ezzeddin Qalaq collection.
96
48 Poster for screening of a Palestinian film followed by a debate
on the Black September massacre, artist unidentified, 1971. Ezzeddin
Qalaq collection. The photograph in this poster was taken in a training
camp, the emphasis of the revolution’s emancipation of women was
noteworthy. The young woman’s disposition is endearing. She smiles:
serene, self-assured and reassuring. Her gun is visible, but it rests
against the wall, unthreatening. There is no celebration of violence;
the composition of the poster is all about the young fida’iyyeh’s
attractiveness.
97
EXHIBITION
ROOM
Mnemosyne 42 is the experimental answer to Alain
Fleischer’s April 2012 proposition to create a work on
images in the context of Le Fresnoy Studio national
des arts contemporains. The rules of this proposition
were at once very open and very strict. Very open,
because like everything that counts in Alain Fleischer’s
eyes, it concerned a game of invention, with those
very “serious” things that haunt us in history and
in images: the general title that was eventually
chosen for the game actually took up Aby Warburg’s
phrase for defining his own object of study in the
Mnemosyne atlas, or the history of images, as a “ghost
story for adults”.1
It was nevertheless strict in that Alain Fleischer had
directly set out the limits of space and visibility: first, it
was a question of “doing something” with the space of
the grand nave of Le Fresnoy Studio national des arts
contemporains (approximately one thousand square
metres). Second, Alain wanted everything on view
to be seen exclusively from the gangway of the first
floor where, moreover, we were to install Atlas, suite,
a series of images by Arno Gisinger created from
the Atlas exhibition2 (in its ultimate version, as it was
exhibited in Hamburg at the Sammlung Falckenberg).
Third, therefore, the “exhibition” to be invented had to
be directly engaged with the discussion developed
in Atlas and in Atlas, suite, namely, that the montages
of images were specific forms of knowledge of the
world and of its history. Fourth, everything had to be
conceived of and created in just four or five months
with relatively limited resources (Le Fresnoy being
very different from a museum or a kunsthalle).
1 “Vom Einfluss der Antike. Diese Geschichte ist märchenhaft—to
[= zu] verstellen. Gespenstergeschichte f[ür] ganz Erwachsene.” (“On
the influence of the ancient world. This history is magical—to be
dissembled. A ghost story for adults.”). A. Warburg, Mnemosyne.
Grundbegriffe, II (2 July 1929) (London: Warburg Institute Archive,
III.102.3–4), 3. Cf. G. Didi-Huberman, L’Image survivante. Histoire de
l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg (Paris: Les Éditions de
Minuit, 2002). Id., Atlas ¿Cómo llevar el mundo a cuestas?, trans. M. D.
Aguilera (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2010). —
Atlas. How to Carry the World on One’s Back?, trans. S. B. Lillis (Madrid:
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2010). Atlas ou le gai savoir
inquiet. L’œil de l’histoire, (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2011), 3.
2 G. Didi-Huberman and A. Gisinger, Atlas, suite (Zürich, Paris:
JRP|Ringier, 2013).
98
Georges Didi-Huberman
Mnemosyne 42
So what was to be done? What
was to be shown? Were we to bring
together a new ensemble of works
by different artists who created
atlases of images? There was
neither enough time for that, nor
was there the means; and besides,
what was the pertinent choice after the 140 or so
artists presented in Atlas? Choosing a single work?
But why only one, however complex or monumental
it might be? (It is true that for an instant I thought
of Franz Erhard Walther.) Then the most interesting
aspect—but also the most restrictive—of the initial
proposition came into play: that everything would be
visible from above, viewable only from the gangway
in the Fresnoy. I initially thought of using large tables
(a memory of Gabriel Orozco perhaps, and perhaps
because I would have liked to have included him in
the initial presentation of Atlas in Madrid)—large tables
upon which images would be placed, arranged like
tarot cards during a visit to a circus clairvoyant (albeit
on an enormous table). Then, in a flash, the idea of
a projection came to light (a recollection perhaps
of the very first exhibition at Le Fresnoy which was
indeed titled Projections). It was coherent with the
aim of the work as was envisioned together with Arno
Gisinger: an exhibition without any “original” works,
an exhibition that would be light and easily adaptable
anywhere; all in all, a part of a portable atlas, part of a
one thousand square-meter “exhibition in the age of
its mechanical reproduction”.
The idea was quite simple: to project onto the
ground, vertically from the ceiling of the nave, a
gigantic plate from an atlas; to take up—because I
have frequently come back to this in my works-inprogress over the last few years—the forty-second
Mnemosyne plate that Aby Warburg devoted to the
Pietà motif and to the lamentations that the living
murmur, utter, shout or sing before their dead;3 and to
pay new homage to this plate,4 not only by projecting
it in dimensions that Warburg would never have
imagined, but by accompanying it, by commenting
on it, by prolonging it, and by making it come out of
itself, in order to create around it a whole constellation
of new images. The images are in black and white (as
in Warburg’s work), but also in colour. Still images (as
in Warburg’s work), but moving as well. Silent images
(again as in Warburg’s work), and ones with sound.
Images that I know, that I have before me, in that part
of my computer, which for a long time now, I have
come to refer to as my atlas.
It would have been enough to choose, to arrange,
and to make a montage of all these images or
sequences of images. It would have been enough
to experiment: to see what this might create, to play
with the relationships between images, rhythms,
scales, dimensions, or colours. Perhaps as Warburg
had done with his black hessian screens and his
little pincers with which he endlessly arranged and
rearranged his great figurative puzzle of the “tragedy
of Western culture” as he called it. And to the vertigo
already aroused by the photographic montage of Plate
42 must be added, in vast proportions, the vertigo of
other images whose coexistence, I imagine—since
I write these lines before having seen or concluded
anything whatsoever—could well produce something
like a great kaleidoscope of the motions of the
soul, from the perspective of, or according to, the
cornerstone of mourning and lamentation. It would
be worthwhile, one day, to attempt the same thing
with joy.
*
Aby Warburg, Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (plate 42) 1929
©The Warburg Institute
3 A. Warburg, Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (1927–1929), Gesammelte
Schriften, II–1, ed. M. Warnke and C. Brink (Berlin: Akademie Verlag,
2000), 76–77.
4 I had previously attempted something like this, but in the space
of a catalogue rather than an exhibition, in “Esquisse d’atlas”, Pascal
Convert : Lamento, 1998–2005 (Luxembourg: Musée d’art moderne
Grand-Duc Jean, 2007), 199–261.
99
Film still from Terra em transe (1967)
Directed by Glauber Rocha. All rights
reserved.
Bertolt Brecht, Kriegsfibel, 1955
Courtesy Eulenspiegel Verlag.
Film still from Cimetières dans la falaise
(1951) Directed by Jean Rouch.
© Jean Rouch
Francisco de Goya, Los Desástres De La
Guerra (Material Gráfico) 18th plate (out
of series 50), 1863
Courtesy Biblioteca Nacional De España
100
The images of Mnemosyne 42 arise to a certain
extent from the memory—and even the citation
which is central to the arrangement—of the
Warburgian plate. As though by strata (for still images)
or by successive waves (for moving images): archaic
figures and ancient sarcophagi, medieval frescoes and
Italian altarpieces (Duccio, Giotto, Lorenzetti, Boticelli,
Bellini, Crivelli), reliefs by Donatello or Bertoldo di
Giovanni, the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and intensely
sculpted groups by Guido Mazzoni or Niccolò
dell’Arca, to name a few. Soon enough, however,
the great moderns: first of all Goya, whose Disasters
of War, unknown to Warburg, decline (to the point
of nausea and infamy on the one hand and total
dereliction on the other) the various gestures adopted
by the survivors before the dead; and then of course
Picasso, who prepared and prolonged Guernica
through a whole series of studies on the cry, tears
and pain in the face of history. Perhaps even Bertolt
Brecht, who documented and collected in a montage
several Pietà situations in his work journal and his War
Primer.
One must then introduce movement, which is
a more delicate operation to the extent that I did
not seek a kaleidoscopic abyme or abyss effect,
nor any chaotic confusion whatsoever, but instead
the possibility for the spectator to compare certain
images in movement and to take advantage of
space—through intervals, the scales of figures,
hazardous desynchronization, and the configuration
of the ensemble—which this comparison beckons.
First of all, there will be certain “monuments” of
cinema in which scenes of lamentation intervene
by way of narrative “hooks”, or crucial moments:
Eisenstein’s Potemkin, Vangelo, Medea or Rabbia by
Pier Paolo Pasolini, as well as, for example, Terra em
transe by Glauber Rocha. The archival images will
be collected in a montage by Artavazd Pelechian
in Nous; the cinematographic documents of the
public funerals of Buenaventura Durruti in 1936;
Yasser Arafat in 2004; or Kim Jong-Il in 2011. Two
extracts from Zhao Liang’s film Petition, The Court
of Complaints will also be on view, in addition to
ethnographic documents such as those collected by
Ernesto De Martino in Italy in the 1950s, or by Filippo
Bonini Baraldi who in 2004 filmed a lamentation of
Rumanian Gypsies. Also part of the exhibition is a
martinete funeral of a cante jondo sung by Manuel
Agujetas near a photograph of Carmen Armaya on
her deathbed. All of this unravels as but an indication,
101
since the “Lamentations” folder of my own atlas
of images, which contains some two thousand six
hundred audio and visual documents, is far from
closed.
*
Mnemosyne 42 is thus presented like an immense
carpet of images projected onto the floor of the nave of
Le Fresnoy. It is therefore an installation, as is commonly
said. The question, however, is: Are the philosopher
and the art historian—even the exhibition curator—not
assuming the role of artists? Of course they aren’t.
The question should not be articulated in such terms.
Mnemosyne 42 is not a work of art for the very trivial
reasons that it will not be for sale, and it will not live on.
Rather, it will give rise to other equally impermanent
forms (except perhaps the book, which remains the
fundamental element of my work). More profoundly,
it is not a “work” per se, concluded, or “operated” (opus
operatum); but a visual modus operandi that is at once
historical and argumentative. It is intended to remain
a site; the site of the construction of a “laborious”
labour (opus operosum). I simply consider the nave
at Le Fresnoy to be like the exhibition space inherent
to that space of experimentation and work that the
Studio national des arts contemporains is. A place for
exhibition: it is not a place for saying “I-me” or “I-methe-artist”. Nor is it a place for the self-fulfilling “there is
the work”, as though the working were completed in a
work, and the work endowed with value. In this context,
a place for exhibition is merely somewhere to lay out
visual and reflective configurations, just as someone
who seeks to arouse another’s reflection lays out an
argument.
The fact that Le Fresnoy is a place of research
had considerable impact on my choice. The
first dimension of Mnemosyne 42 is its heuristic
dimension: what will be seen in the thousand
horizontal square metres of the nave is, on the
whole, just a particular extension of the organisation
of images—the open organization—by which I do
my historical and philosophical research every day.
It is a projection of what happens on the thirtythree centimetres of my laptop computer screen.
Albeit magnified, it is a working tool that is open to
modification along the way, as opposed to being an
aesthetic result. The spectacular “exhibition” of this
tool is not necessarily something pinned to its own
axioms (for otherwise its heuristic and experimental
content would disappear) or on its visual choices.
102
On the other hand, the fact that Le Fresnoy is
also a school engages the pedagogical dimension
of Mnemosyne 42. Here too, it is simply a matter of
the disproportioning of a visual arrangement that
I develop—and modify—in my weekly lectures at
the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. I
have, however, learned from Warburg, as I have from
Bertolt Brecht or Walter Benjamin, that pedagogy (the
transmission of knowledge, not in the least of “the
gay science”) is such a crucial question that it cannot
be separated from a poetic dimension. There is no
production of knowledge without problematization;
that is, without questions posed at a new expense. Yet
there are no new questions, not even new contents
of knowledge, without an invention of forms; without
a “form-making” that can draw our attention to the
questions themselves. As such, Mnemosyne 42 comes
under what we could quite modestly call a visual
essay. This is why, once again, the “installation” is
not to be seen as a work of art, but rather as a mere
arrangement that instigates questions.
It is worth remembering how Theodor Adorno
characterised what is at the same time the theoretical
and poetical form of the essay: it is a form for
“coordinating elements rather than subordinating
them” to a causal explanation; a form for “constructing
juxtapositions” outside of any hierarchical method; a
form for producing arguments without renouncing
their “affinity to the visual image”; a form for seeking
“a greater intensity than discursive thought can
offer”; a form for not fearing “discontinuity” and for
seeing in it, on the contrary, a sort of dialectic at a
standstill, a “conflict brought to a standstill”; a form for
refusing to conclude and, yet, for “letting the totality
light up in one of its chosen or haphazard features”.
It is a form which, consequently, always proceeds
in an experimental way, essentially working on a
“presentation”, which reveals a certain relation to the
work of art, even though its aim is clearly non-artistic.
It is an “open form”—neither teleologically closed, nor
strictly inductive, nor strictly deductive—that agrees
to present a contingent and fragmentary material in
which what is lost in precision is gained in legibility. It
is a form that is both “realistic” and “dream-like”, able
to “suspend the traditional concept of method” by
seeking its truth content in the transitions.5 All in all,
it is a question of re-actualising this form of montage
that inherited the paradoxical “method” assumed by
Walter Benjamin in his Arcades Project: “Method of
this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything.
Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate
no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse—
these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way
possible, to come into their own: by making use of
them.”6
The choice and arrangement of images in
Mnemosyne 42 at last seeks to give clarity to the
political dimension inherent in the way that the theme
of lamentations is treated therein. First, through the
de-prioritised coexistence of “documents” and of
“works of art”, where an old Romany woman filmed by
an ethnomusicologist can rightfully appear alongside
the Virgin Mary of Giotto’s Pietà; and then, through
the practice of citation—but not appropriation—with
the aim of giving images back to everyone rather than
“taking them” for oneself when “one” fancies oneself
to be the author of everything. Finally, it is a question
of making sensitive the dialectic established between
lamentation (the emotion, the non-power, the pathos)
and political demands. We will see here how peoples
in tears eventually become peoples armed, or at least,
people who are not satisfied with pitying themselves
in the face of death, but who demand justice and
who make a complaint against a certain state of the
historical world.
5 T. W. Adorno, “The Essay as Form”, in The Adorno Reader, trans.
Brian O’Connor (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 99, 104, 109.
6 W. Benjamin, The Arcades Project (N1a,8), trans. Howard Eiland and
Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2002), 460.
(3 July 2012).
Georges Didi-Huberman, temporary
draft for Mnemosyne 42, July 2012.
103
ETUDE
Chinese Labels
Cuauhtémoc Medina
Shanghai Museum: Label of the Sculpture Gallery, 2009. Photo © Cuauhtémoc Medina 104
Museum texts are probably amongst the most neurotic literary genres
that exist. Rare are the voices that point out that reading is, in fact, one of
the most prevalent activities of the audience in a museum, for it drives
the visitor to “consider the logic and wholeness of something that cannot
be present, but is represented by something that is perpetually present
in the object or the specimen.”1 Curatorial doxa still agrees with French
museologist Georges Henri Rivière who hopes to see “the museum
epigraphy” brought down to a minimum, and hopes that the right
staging, lighting and dramatization will allow artworks and objects to
babble, because “an exhibition is not a book and the objects themselves
ought to speak”.2 The use of videos and interactive guides beamed down
to handeld devices, in addition to the ever-present hypnosis-inducing
audioguide, ventriloquize an infinity of artifacts. Yet however animated
the objects become, they unfortunately remain dumb to the fact that
the audience members (a.k.a. wandering visitor-cum-zombies) have
already got tired of the same old boring texts. On the other hand is the
late modernist ideal of visual hygiene that identifies any interference with
the purity of the contemplation of works of art as a loitering of its aura
by academic graffiti. Even experimenting with LCD-editable labels that
are continually updated from a distance,3 institutions seem to consent
to making texts as fleeting and immaterial as possible. Traces vanish in
the river of the information overload. Curators know that their ideas are
never destined to be written in stone.
All those rules fell into dust in November 2009, when I walked in
amazement into the Sculpture Gallery at the Shanghai Museum located
in the People’s Square. Right in front of the doorway, I was struck by a
one-and-a-half meter tall black stone, which appeared to be made of
granite and was marked with an inscription. To my disbelief, this was
not one of the exhibits of the collection: I had in fact stumbled upon
the most daring of curatorial gestures, a room label written for posterity,
which would surely outlive any of the objects shown in the room. Its
placement seemed to have been thoroughly thought out. Whereas the
Chinese text stood proud as a stele displaying its golden ideograms
under the spotlight, the other half, written in English for foreigners, had
toppled onto the floor. Sic transit gloria mundi.
Having just visited a Prada showroom fifty meters away that not only
1 David Carr, A Place not a Place. Reflection and Possibility in Museums and Libraries (Oxford:
Altamira Press, 2006), 57.
2 Georges Henri Rivière, La museología. Curso de museología/Textos y testimonios, Trad.
Antón Rodríguez Casal (Madrid: Akal, 1993), 474.
3 For an experience of ephemeral labels, see: Ross Parry, Mayra Oertiz-Williams and Andrew
Sawyer, “How Shall We Label Our Exhibit Today? Applying the Principles of On-Line Publishing
to an On-Site Exhibition” Museums and the Web, 2007. The International Conference for Culture
and Heritage Online, in: http://www.museumsandtheweb.com/mw2007/papers/parry/parry.
html
105
We see in the tapestries
the resurrection and the death
of the doomed white unicorn
because the time of this place
does not obey an order.
The laurels I touch will flower
when Leif Eriksson sights the sands of America.
I feel a touch of vertigo,
I am not used to eternity.4
Like Borges, I also felt the structure of time crumbling under my
feet, but what is a museum if not a place whose time “does not obey
an order”? I realized that the curators of the Shanghai Museum had
effectively produced the Rosetta Stone of the future.
Thanks to this bilingual label, the philologists of 3000 C.E. will be
able to start bringing the works of Shakespeare back to life, rescuing
them from the midst of primitive western alphabetic writing. They will
probably conclude that De Quincey was an imitator or disciple of Borges;
with some luck, they will be able to decipher the name of Champollion.
Because alas, the credit line for the curator who wrote the Shanghai
stone was only recorded on administrative reports printed on acid paper.
Thoughts and Notes after
rites, thoughts, notes, sparks,
swings and strikes
Nothing is more daunting for a curator than critical analysis of
projects past. Aside from the common professional difficulty of revisiting
one’s accomplishments—something not restricted to curators—our
profession’s parameters and vocabulary are crafted in such a way that
innumerable specters are embedded at the onset of every proposition.
This open-endedness and the neurotic ambitions that accompany it set
the bar high enough to make almost every retrospective assessment
disappointing. At best, it is an exercise in melancholy. Such is the case,
for instance, with the second project that Venus Lau and I brought to
fruition in April 2012 at Para/Site, entitled rites, thoughts, notes, sparks,
swings, strikes. a hong kong spring. It was intended to be a pause in
the institutional unfolding of discernible programming, and a space for
reflection on what we are doing. What weight and implications do the
things we do have in the institutional context of Para/Site (moreover,
what exactly is this context?), in the city of Hong Kong, and in the
grander scheme of the world?
Rites, thoughts, notes, sparks, swings, strikes. a hong kong spring,
installation view, Courtesy Para/Site.
4 Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems, Vol. 2, ed. by Alexander Coleman (London: Penguin
Books, 2000), 435.
106
Cosmin Costinaş
sold overpriced garments, but whole silk sofa sets and bedrooms to
the burgeoning new Chinese elite, I had to accept that the label as yet
another omen of the impending demotion of Western hegemony. A few
weeks later, the words of a Jorge Luis Borges poem were thick in my
mind. Partly for their content, and partly for their historical context (as
the author wrote them just after visiting The Cloisters in New York City,
which is yet another museological marker of the transfer of geopolitical
power). They went:
Rites, thoughts, notes, sparks,
swings, strikes. a hong kong spring
was defined as a one-month long
restless exhibition, predicated on
the association of items of different
physical quality and temporality.
Artworks and poems were installed
at Para/Site, and were combined
with talks, performances,
screenings and curatorial
episodes by artists. They were
presented in different sessions,
held in different venues in Hong
Kong, throughout the duration
of the project. Contributors
included professionals from all
different fields, disciplines, and
geographies. The nature of their
involvement was heterogeneous,
within a deliberately provocative
framework: a “Hong Kong
Spring”. We were acutely aware of
the radical political specter that
107
the word once again resurrected
(complicated as it was by the
unity and univocality of spring as
a semantic and physical object,
coming back every year with
commencement and promise).
The surrounding streams of
tension in both Hong Kong and
mainland China (which only
intensified in the months after
the event) entertained a sense
of unease and unspoken hope.
We filtered these moods through
a reading of Ackbar Abbas’s
analysis in Hong Kong: Culture
and the Politics of Disappearance,
in which he describes the Hong
Kong phenomenon of mourning
for the loss of things that still
Handwritten fragment of Alfian bin Sa’at’s poem, “Singapore you are
exist; a summoning of the ghost
not my country” Photograph courtesy of Para/Site.
of collective history in the midst
of its own miscarriage. In his
opinion, mourning the ghosts of a spectral history—a history yet to
come—is a defining state in Hong Kong. We tried to play this up, both in
order to look at the art system in the city, and in order to interrogate the
possibilities it offers for our own work.
Looking at the project retrospectively, I will leave aside the forensic
comparison of our original intent and its outcomes, so as to develop
upon a few questions sparked at the intersection of our initial ideas, and
some lingering thoughts. First and foremost, do we hold a fetishistic attitude toward the forms
of our practice, and more precisely, does our work manifest a constant
desire to dismiss existing forms? Indeed, our project followed neither the
established structure of an exhibition, nor the conventions of delivering
art works and discursive items to audiences. In this organism of unstable
form, the participant’s involvement and nomenclature were also not
in line with the usual roles expected of our practice. Nevertheless, this
de-structuring was not the result of an a priori disengagement with
such forms, but rather, a method of confronting every object that is
constitutional to our profession, and the relations at work between them.
Looking at contemporary curatorial practices (and I am afraid that
our project did more to feed into this logic than to effectively critique
it), reveals a self-righteous disbelief in both the specific means and
language of art and exhibition-making. Added to this is a fetishistic
approach to theory and politics, which are rather sterile developments
in these times when the intellectual and the political relevance of art
108
Handwritten fragment of Alfian bin Sa’at’s poem, “Singapore you are
not my country” Photograph courtesy of Para/Site.
is most under question. From
large scale exhibitions based on
nihilistic mantras that deny the
very possibility of the art system to
others that decompose exhibitions
by staging them according to the
logic of strolls in a park, curators
have become uncertain of every
tool at their disposal, starting with
the very name of their profession,
renaming themselves with various
questionable synonyms. This
looming sense of crisis in the
vocabulary specific to exhibitionmaking feeds into the logic of
the wider system—a system that
constantly proclaims a crisis. In
the same way, the elusiveness,
disembodiment and ungraspable
nature of many current curatorial
projects (a critique that does not
exclude our own) seem to be
better serving the system’s need for
flexibility and unaccountability.
In spite of being a central issue in the thinking about art today, the
curator’s need to constitute his or her own autonomous space of
production, away from the principles of production in the capitalist
system, operates as if the very economic system that one opposes would
still be organized along Fordist lines of production, and would not have
employed disembodiment and flexibility as its main ethos.
Secondly, when questioning the nature of our global encounters, what
roles, hierarchies and translation issues are still at play? The most visible and
perhaps the most successful component of rites, thoughts, notes, sparks,
swings, strikes. a hong kong spring was the staging of encounters between
a number of practitioners of our field, people who each came from various
contexts with different experiences of participation in the contemporary
art system. In order to fully approach this question, however, I would like
to go back to the beginnings of Para/Site and to another time in the history
of contemporary art. Para/Site was founded as an artist-run space in early
1996. It emerged in circumstances specific to Hong Kong, such as the lack
of contemporary art institutions in the city at the time (a fact that was made
even more obvious by the earlier opening of the Hong Kong Museum of Art,
a museum that lacked satisfactory contemporary art programming) and, in a
more diffused but perhaps more catalyzing way, the impending handover of
Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China, on July 1st, 1997. In that time of
great uncertainty, a sense of heightened political awareness and a need for
self-organization emerged in the city’s public sphere.
109
Historical specificity aside, however, the institution was in many
ways also a symptom of a global phenomenon specific to the era. The
middle of the nineties witnessed an accelerated expansion of the system
of contemporary art throughout the world. Following the great trade
routes of the globalized era, contemporary art set shop throughout the
emerging world, reproducing institutions, practices and vocabularies.
The lack of contemporary art institutions started to be recognized and
named for the first time as such, in many different parts of the world, not
just by the founders of Para/Site in Hong Kong. This happened as the
places began to be regarded as part of the same realms as the regions
in which the contemporary art system first emerged; bundled together
by great economic forces. This “resetting of the clocks” in the art scenes
around the world and the abrupt synchronicity that the highly unified
system and common language of contemporary art had brought about
in the early nineties has nonetheless been imperfect, leaving some
strains only partially connected and some narratives still un-translated in
the different genealogies and the vastly different realities of production
that were amalgamated. The methods of implementing the system
relied on different agents—from biennials to residency programs, from
newly established magazines to artists-turned-curators (and often, later,
curators-turned-gatekeepers). Yet perhaps the most available format, the
one that required minimal resources and better fit the pioneering ethos
of the times, was the artist-run-space.
It is important to note that the geography of expansion towards the
margins did not only follow the old colonial routes of expansion, as
margins within the central realms have been important pieces of this
process. What occurred in Hong Kong and Singapore was analogous
with what occurred in Glasgow and Scandinavia. During that phase
of expansion, the anchor institutions performed an enthusiastic
ambassadorial function, promoting the system within their contexts, and
projecting production from their surroundings in the international field,
often directly towards the centers, which still acted as filters of what was
to be circulated further within the system. Fast forward to 2012: a very different landscape emerges. The
expansion has been remarkably successful. Following the fluctuations
of the economy more directly than ever in the history of art, the global
animal of contemporary art has indeed managed to impose a unified
voice: common tools, mutually recognizable institutions, and this in
spite of the remaining (and mutating) differences. The above analysis
was our premise, which we accepted both as a critical description of
our realities and as an aspirational project. We chose to extract ourselves
from the logic of furthering the global institutional construct but also
from questioning the adequacy of contemporary art as a space for
approaching our reality, assuming that this internationalized field still
has untapped potential for creating new forms of solidarity in addition to
diving into the specificities and the un-translated blind spots that persist
alongside the contemporary art nuclei in various parts of the world.
110
Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor, Rite of Spring, 2011, Photograph courtesy of Para/Site and the artists.
Whether or not this premise was naively ambitious (as many other
previous attempts to create vehicles of internationalism were), or a
strategic mistake altogether, taking us toward a dead end with yet more
mistranslations and false assumptions along the way, is still a burning
question for us.
Third, and finally, is our more melancholic question. Following the
growing sparks and strikes that have been occurring in Hong Kong
over the past months—ones that have primarily been set off by a young
generation which has started to craft a new understanding of politics and
self-organization that nobody would have been able to predict even at
the beginning of the year—and following the language and use of spaces
that are beyond the reach of art and its institutions, I cannot help but ask
the question that has been in many ways our greatest fear in the past
decades: is the true nature of curating a metaphorical one?
111
The Project Horizon:
On the Temporality of Making
The present text is a shorter version of the longer essay that was first
published in the issue No. 149–150, vol. XXVII (Autumn 2012) of Maska,
Performing Arts Journal.
I
In recent decades, probably one of the most
commonly used words among artists, producers and
other cultural workers is the word “project”. Artists,
scientists, politicians, producers and all others who
work in the so-called creative sector all are united
through the one word with which they / we often use
to name what they / we do: “projects”. This word seems
to be not only endlessly extensible (it can describe
anything and everything), but also overwhelmingly
pervasive: everyone is involved in projects; probably
several of them at the same time, and in different
places. All of us are finishing off old projects and
starting up new ones; continuously taking part in the
relentless projective movement of production (and
creation).
However, as Foucault once said, the sheer frequency
of the use of a particular notion or word can also be
a reason for anxiety: the anxiety that springs precisely
from the (sometimes unbearable) lightness with which
the word “project” takes over the denomination of
different activities and occupations.1 Of course, the
plain banality and everydayness of the use of the
term “project” speaks to the fact that the term is often
used as an empty signifier; a concept that neglects to
imply anything in particular, denominating nothing,
and adding nothing to what we actually do. Perhaps
the term is being used pragmatically for a myriad
of makings and doings. Am I not inclined, then, to
squeeze too much out of a sheer pragmatic application
of this particular word to artistic work? It is hard to
say. An abstraction of language is at work in the use
1
112
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (Oxford: Routledge, 2001).
Bojana Kunst
SPECULATION
of the word “project” because its sheer signification
is never brought to task. It is directly related to the
peculiar temporality implied by its use. “Project” always
denominates, not only as a specific term, but also
a temporal attitude or temporal mode, where the
completion is already implied in the projected future.
A significant amount of what artists and cultural
workers do today seems to be caught up in this
unaddressed and never-approached “projective time”.
Over the course of this “projective time”, artists are
expected to successfully negotiate both realized and
unrealized projects in addition to projecting new
imaginaries upon the future. However, such acts of
imagination always depend on a successful calculation
between the present and the future; the project
can only be finished (or rather, the projection can
only be completed) if there is a successful financial
implementation that enables the promise to be realized
in the end. The main paradox here is that artists
are constantly challenged to imagine and to form
proposals for the future. To do this, they perpetually
rehearse ways of imagining that which has yet to
come or that which has yet to happen. Paradoxically,
despite that so many creative people are preoccupied
with imagining and creating proposals for the future,
we are living in a time that is deeply characterised
by the impotence and impossibility of imagining and
creating modes of political and economic life different
from the ones that we already know.
In their discussion Fate Work, Stephano Harney and
Valentina Desideri talk about how our current relation
to the future has impacted our notion of work.
Under capitalism, the future is an open field ahead
of us that we can shape and construct through our
work. Since we’re condemned to have a future, we’re
condemned to work, and at the same time, if you are
condemned to work, you are condemned to have
a future. So if you want to realize your dreams you
have to work (always assuming that those dreams are
something that belong to a future scenario and not the
present one). If you want to avoid work, you have to
work just as hard because you have to find a way; you
have to have a plan, a strategy. Whatever you choose,
you will be working and you will be acting strategically
towards a goal, and therefore you’ll be productive.
In order to change this dominant fate that wants to
control the future, and therefore stays in the realm of
the known, you have to sabotage this double machine
of work and future, so that it stops functioning for a
while and so that a space is opened up (a present), and
later, the future will come.2
II.
The intriguing relation between work and the
future underlines the overwhelming use of the word
“project” in artistic work as well as in other creative
work in general. This overwhelming denomination,
which is used for all kinds of cultural products and
artistic works, namely contains a peculiar temporal
dimension that has never been stressed or questioned
as such. With this in mind, I would like to reflect upon
how this peculiar temporality is framing contemporary
artistic processes of making, collaborating and creating.
“Projects” have turned out to be the ultimate horizon of
creation today. “Project” is also a name for a multitude
of singular works, ones that come into existence
as a continuity of endless additions (supplements);
however, the ultimate horizon of the project can never
be reached or exceeded.
In this peculiar continuity, it is always important
to start again. After each completion, there is always
a breakthrough in which something different has to
appear. Something very perplexing is at work here:
regardless of the myriad possibilities it presents,
it nevertheless projects its own completion as
the ultimate horizon of work. Yet even while this
“projective temporality” as I’ve described in the first
part of the paper somehow opens many possibilities,
it does not produce the differences among them: at
the end what always arises is a completion of already
projected possibilities.3 This is, of course, a paradox—
in the continuity, one always has to begin again;
2 Stefano Harney and Valentina Desideri, Fate Work: A Conversation,
as yet unpublished, private notes.
3 The use of the word, “project” may also be brought to light with
the help of Gilles Deleuze and his conceptualisation of the difference
between virtual and possible: the project can only disclose the
possible; it does not belong to the virtual. The possibility is already
implemented in it. In that sense, it does not belong to the realm of
change.
however, the new start is not about differences but
about another promise for the future; another indebted
engagement to that which has yet to come. In such a
temporal dimension, a link is forged between the work
of artists and other creative forces on one hand, and
the productive processes of capitalism on the other.
Observable here is that through the new modes of
working, art is losing its constitutive role in society.
The role of art is closely related to both the inventive
and imaginative temporal dimensions of being,
and the perceptive complexity that accompanies
them, which are difficult to maintain through these
projective modes of working. Projective temporality
also influences the acceleration of imaginative and
creative work, and, in the race to reach the horizon,
demands continuous transformation toward a new,
even more radical individualisation of the subject.
As Maurizio Lazzarato has said, creativity plays a
central role in society today, but at the same time,
it has never before been so standardised. Related to
this is the fact that the production of subjectivity is at
the core of contemporary capitalism. “Moreover, in
the current economy, the production of subjectivity
reveals itself to be the primary and most important
form of production, the ‘commodity’ that goes into
the production of all other commodities.”4 With this
production of subjectivity, Lazzarato is describing the
standardisation of social, affective and communal sides
of the contemporary human being, which belong to
the production of value under capitalism today. The
consequence of the standardisation of those forces
(or of human potentialities, which Agamben has
reflected upon) is the radical individualisation and
homogenisation of subjectivity. This is, of course,
closely connected with contemporary post-Fordist
modes of working, whereby language and creativity
(but also movement and lifelong learning) are the
primary means of the production of value.
These findings may be directly related to some
of the characteristics of contemporary performance
production. Interest in young performance work has
significantly increased in the last decade, with the
development of numerous forms of support (networks,
residencies, educational formats, etc.) as a corollary.
There are numerous reasons why this is so. However,
if we try to analyse this through the dynamics of
contemporary production and the perspective of
artistic labour, insights emerge. What is interesting
about the status of young artists on the market is that
4 Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on
the Neoliberal Condition, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012), 16.
113
they are not necessarily in the spotlight because of
the projects they have already finished, but because
of the “promise” they embody as regards their “young
practice”: their work has actually to materialize. It thus
comes as no surprise that much art today is produced
through numerous residencies, open processes,
showings, and works-in-progress; where unfinished,
still-incomplete work—noting that it does, however,
have to be promising work—is shown and exchanged,
its value circulated, and, through this exchange,
subsequently affirmed.
This phenomenon indicates first and foremost the
instability of contemporary artistic value that has to
be mediated and tested continuously; and secondly,
it tells us a lot about the work that young artists
produce today. Artists participate in the production of
subjectivity (a promising one, an experimental one,
a challenging one, a daring one), which at the same
time is, with all its imaginative and creative force,
constantly in a state of “experimental precariousness”:
a work force that is only illusorily well-paid, and
which constantly has to be on the move in terms of
travelling from residency to residency. It must share the
process of aesthetic transformation with its audience
in addition to being prepared for lifelong learning.
The “openness of the work” here is not necessarily
connected to complexity and duration but is subjected
to a rigid relation between work and the future. It is
subjected to both the administration of the future and
the recognition of the values that have yet to come.
In this regard, a fruitful venue for formal analysis that
would draw upon the example of young performance
artists is the way in which “experimental openness” is
administrated through projective temporality, and of
the surreptitious imposition of radicalism upon their
experimentation and research processes. To that, one
might also add the temporal acceleration of productive
subjects that is evidenced in the position of artists in
society today: they are highly individualized and selfadministrated autonomous productive monads who
all compete on the market with their enumeration of
projects.
Indeed, this situation is not without its
consequences. When it comes to understanding
the value of artists’s work, the market is not actually
interested in the pieces themselves, but rather in
artistic life, or even better: in the life of the artist.
Here, the ideal intertwining of life and work is
achieved through the project-work. There is a lot
of speculation in the current economy about the
value of the artistic life as it becomes a perfect model
114
of contemporary living, and it is tightly fused with
different economic processes (such as gentrification).
It is not the fact that artistic life is fascinating per se,
but exactly this fusion of art, life and work is at the
core of urban land speculation in addition to the
popularity of specific modes of working through radical
individualisation and project-oriented sociability. The
problem, however, lies in the fact that the the lives of
those who are involved in the continuous creation
of projects in the cultural and artistic field are deeply
affected by the projective temporality of work. In many
cases, the abstract omnipresence of such a state of
affairs literally absorbs the experience of artistic work
and work-making, and at the same time forms the
peculiar temporality of subjectivity that is involved in its
completion. The enumeration of projects is therefore
connected to the notion of time acceleration.
Projective temporality is closely intertwined with the
subjective experience of time. For many, contemporary
subjectivities are increasingly experienced as the
simultaneity of many projects, be they private, public,
social, intimate, or otherwise. It seems as if the time
frame of each individual project also influences
the rhythm of the transformation of subjectivity,
which must be flexible, yet at the same time move
toward an accomplishment; a materialization; an
implementation. Such a changing and flexible work
force must always aim itself toward finalization, toward
the accomplishment of that which was promised in
the present, toward the realization of possibilities.
On that point, one last comparison with another
current problematic social dimension is perhaps useful.
The dynamic of projective temporality may concur
with the role of debt in today’s economic, social and
political relationships. Debt is, as we know, a strategy
for managing the temporality of subjectivity—and
the project itself very often functions in exactly the
same way that debt does (though sometimes the
word “promise” is preferred in the cultural and artistic
sectors because it evokes a sense of generosity). The
projective temporality of both work and activity is
also intertwined with the acceleration of that same
activity, where the unexpected happens only because
of the outburst of crisis, exhaustion and withdrawal;
the difference between the two may only make itself
known in the moment of break and total exhaustion.
The main problem of such continuous movement
toward completion and consummation is in the fact
that we are not referring to chronological temporality
here, where something is following something else
from before. Nor is it a narrative line. A project is also
not a progression; we are constantly projecting, but we
don’t actually move anywhere, because with projective
temporality, no difference is produced.
In a project, an equilibrium between the present
and future is set up, in the sense that whatever has
yet to come is already projected in the present.
The possibility of the future only emerges in the
balance with the current power structures: projective
temporality is never related to the time out of joint; to
the now without a future. It is precisely current power
structures that also give us the belief that it is possible
to foresee what is actually unforeseen.5 This balance
(or lack thereof) is precisely the reason why many
people feel that present time is somehow disappearing.
Thus, we not only have less and less time for work
because we are so preoccupied with a foreseen but
as-yet-unrealised future, but also, with projective time,
artists and other cultural workers have actually become
more and more abstracted from the current context
of work. In such a situation, all work contexts seem
to be the same (especially as they are increasingly
managed in the same way); the differences between
communities and collaborative complexities have
become invisible; and, with that, they have also been
disempowered of their political power. Furthermore,
with the projective mode of working, subjectivity is
abstracted from the present social, cultural and political
contexts of work; from their antagonistic and multiple
forms of complexity. At the same time, contemporary
modes of working suffer from a real deprivation of
time—an actual one, not only a theoretical one: we
never actually have time.
What we lack is the actual time of the present,
because we have sold off the present in return for a
project outline. A constant dispossession of duration
is likewise at work in our society. Such a resistance to
duration underpins the current discussions about crisis
and austerity measures. Austerity measures purify the
present, shortening the duration of life lived “in the
present”: it is as if we believe that only through such
acts will the future arrive, and that we will emerge from
our crisis. The present is thus a debt that we owe to
the future: in order to live better we should not live in
the present. However, the problem is that the future
is never truly imagined anew, but remains even more
5 We can again make the comparison with debt—debt namely is
calculated future. It is no coincidence that debt is understood as
the theft of time. Debt has to neutralize time, since every possible
deviation of the debtor has to be put aside. From this, it can be said
that debt changes a society into a society without time. In Lazzarato’s
The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition
(Boston: MIT Press, 2012).
tightly bound to the constellations of power in the
present. Only when we are able to simply be “alive”
in the present will radical alternatives begin to bloom
once again.
That so many people consistently lack time is
paradoxical, especially when the act of considering
the possibilities of a project implies the future. It seems
that the more there is to a project and the more
possibilities there are to be completed in the future,
the less time there is at our disposal to endure in the
present (or in many different presents) and, with that,
also less time to enable social, collaborative, political or
intimate relations. The only way in which we maintain
a relation to our present is through its administrative
and managerial regulation, which is combined with the
constant evaluation and re-evaluation of what we have
done. The goal is always to reach something within
the horizon of the project. In that sense, the project
becomes the ultimate horizon of our experience.
Ironically, one of the words most used in cultural
production to complete a project (especially in the
academic sphere, but also in the arts) is “deadline”. At
the end of any given project stands a mortal limit; a
pure completion; a consummation of creative life,
with no after-experience. At the same time, an illusory
feeling that everything continues on into eternity
somewhat lightens up this tension, because there
are so many projects to complete. In this “projective
endlessness”, there are many mortal limits to be
crossed, and at the same time the future is radically
closed-off. Time-deprivation is therefore cancelling
the imagination and the creation of radical gestures
in addition to disabling all experimentation with an
enduring present. In that sense, it is directly related to
artistic and aesthetic practice, because it is diminishing
complexity, perceptual manifoldness, availability and
the sustainability of antagonisms.
Closely related to the role of time as one of the
primary objects of capitalist production of value
and privatisation is a project’s projected time frame.
Temporality is at the core of the production of
difference. It is the material of social and aesthetic
change. It is precisely this potentiality that is
diminished in many societies today, due to the
administrative accomplishment of possibilities and as
projective speculation of a planned but not-yet-lived
future. Art production and creation must therefore
rethink the relation between temporality and its
production, and find new ways in which to push the
time “out of joint”; out of the speculative balance
between that which is and that which has yet to come.
115
MATERIALS
Burak Delier
We Will Win Survey,
Selections
2. Do you agree that art should be a critical power?
In 2008, I contributed to Taipei Biennial with a
site-specific intervention with the Shijhou tribe. In
collaboration with inhabitants and a support group
of the tribe, I constructed a banner that claimed: “WE
WILL WIN”. The banner “spoke” from the ground up
to the heights where powerful elites both plan and
surveil their city. The intervention was located at the
center of contested plans to dismantle housing for the
purpose of “improving the quality of life” in a larger
operation of “urban renewal”.
Invited to rework the project for the 2010 Taipei
Biennial, I decided to conduct a survey that explored
the impact of the WE WILL WIN intervention and the
implications of the critical practice that it entailed. The
format of the survey was appropriated from market
research techniques. In the first section, I investigated
the general idea of how art is perceived. The
questions in the second section related specifically
to the work, attempting to explore what exactly,
if anything, the work managed to accomplish in
people’s perceptions.
The survey addressed four groups that had a direct
interaction with the art world: 1) Decision makers /
managers, 2) Curators / Artists, 3) Audience members
and 4) Staff / Interns. The aim was to understand
public perceptions of the WE WILL WIN intervention,
and at the same time disclose the different agendas
within the culture industry. For Manifesta Journal
16, readers will find excerpts from the book, which
included the resulting data and its accompanying
text. The surveys will achieve their purpose if they
can make even a modest contribution to ongoing
discussions of the role of art in the context of
governmental power.
116
Totally agree
Agree
Disagree
3. Do you think that art is a democratic and egalitarian field?
Totally disagree
Yes
16.7% [3]
38.9% [7]
38.9% [7]
5.6% [1]
17.2% [5]
62.1% [18]
13.8% [4]
6.7% [2]
No
38.9% [7]
61.1% [11]
12
We
Will
Win
31% [9]
69% [20]
14.6% [36]
50% [123]
30.5% [75]
4.9% [12]
55.9% [137]
44.1% [108]
9.8% [6]
64% [39]
23% [14]
3.3% [2]
57.4% [35]
42.6% [26]
117
4. If Yes: Why?
Freedom of expression
5. If No: Why not?
Openness to all
Other
Labor exploitation conditions
100% [0]
0% [0]
0% [0]
Discrimination
Other: see page 39
Totally agree
Agree
Disagree
Totally disagree
10% [1]
60% [6]
30% [3]
0% [0]
27.8% [5]
55.6% [10]
16.7% [3]
10% [2]
55% [11]
35% [7]
10.3% [3]
34.5% [10]
48.3% [14]
6.9% [2]
83.8% [114]
12.5% [17]
3.6% [5]
3.8% [4]
74.5% [79]
21.7% [23]
4.5% [11]
32.1% [79]
53.7% [132]
9.8% [24]
75.7% [25]
21.2% [7]
3% [1]
0% [0]
72% [18]
28% [7]
4.9% [3]
34.4% [21]
50.8% [31]
9.8% [6]
55.6% [5]
44.5% [4]
0% [0]
118
8. Do you agree that criticality depends on specificity? (We mean a mode of
address from a specific person, group or place to a specific person, group or place.)
14
We
Will
Win
119
Yes
A. What would you say is important for a young artist’s success?
14. Did you like the project?
10. Do you think that art should be autonomous from dominant political and
economic power?
No
Yes
Attitude
Originality
No (for comments see page:41-50)
Luck in balancing all of the above
Self and the Other, it’s like osmosis of excrement
Priority of the artworks
Desire and ambition
The true nature of creation
81.2% [13]
18.8% [3]
61.1% [11]
38.9% [7]
To enlarge the declining mainstream concept
The idea of the artist himself, messages he wants to convey, to interact and communicate
Subvert stereotype
Personal taste and appreciation, also the level of practice
The passion and true heart of life
58.6% [17]
41.4% [12]
28
We
Will
Win
62.1% [18]
37.9% [11]
38
We
Will
Win
The sensibility and the ability of expression
Fresh issue
Style, an artistic conception and creativity
Need the strong heart
Cosmology
Talent and luck
Fortune and chance
Creativity
The political position and sensitivity of one’s own
The power to touch people’s heart
70.3% [173]
29.7% [73]
79.7% [189]
20.3% [48]
Need more creation
Think seriously the essence of the art itself
Unique version
Self-characteristic
Sustaining power
The crossover and diverse generosity and appreciation
All of the above
77% [47]
23% [14]
69.5% [41]
30.5% [18]
Being prolific
Personality, passion
Individuality
Humanities
Above all
Creativity
120
121
B. If No: Why not?
C. If Yes: With a keyword or two, please indicate why?
It’s another structure
The core and the edge
The talent is different
Art could be subjective
From every perspectives, art is different from other fields, no matter it is at school, in the
market or perspectives from general people
The capability
Art is everything, and a free form of display thoughts. Therefore, politics that shows in art
is not talking about politics, its just showing what artists idea about the life he experienced
Now, everybody regards it as a commodity
The difference of gift and talent, the resistance of living environment and volition
Opposing
Change
All of the above
Clear, eye-catching
Trying to know the truth from different perspectives
It is controlled by elites
Justice doesn’t really exist
I do not think democracy is a correct word to describe art world
Above all. More self-formed class (rank) theories
Different backgrounds, different talents, different institutions, different situations, different
surroundings, different histories, different power relations...
It is one of the modalities of cultural-colonialism and globalization
All above
The political situation in Taiwan interferes with different aspects of life
There is no equality
Art is merely a medium, there’s no ontological essence in it
The value of art is disgraceful, and the method of evaluation is nonsense
Mostly they are just toys of the rich
It does not belong to the structure of such procedure
The maturity of the society
The gap between the rich and poor
Art is subjective
Once you are in connection with the authority, there is central and margin
Consciously
Minority
Pure
The influence
Attitude, a position/a view
Soft power
Yes, we should be win!
Fighting for the justice
1. The truth 2. the legal violence of bureaucrat
Simple, direct
40
We
Will
Win
Art is a kind of privilege
Hyped Marketing
Not correlated
It isn’t totally democratic
Equally co-existed
Clever and engaged
Provocative, funny and strong
Poetic
Art intervenes the society, introspection, criticizing. Caring about the issue on the
marginalized society
Because of its political engagement
Concerning the locals
It strictly go into the system by way of the hierarchy of global art
Art intervenes the public area in the society
Power and people
Locality and to be visualized
It is meaningful and beautiful
Deep into the edge of the city, to unveil the problems
Humanity
Concise and powerful
Not obvious
Clear appeal
Flustering, bold
Art is always unique
122
123
Make a statement
Cool
Against the real estate company
Contradiction
To arouse people’s attention
Ambitious
Co-exist with the local
Retort
Free and critic
To tell the truth
Public engagement and the conscious of democracy
Introspection
Let people know the truth
Belief
Bless, exposure, return
Justice
Beautify
42
We
Will
Win
Integrate with the reality
To reflect the reality
Draw people’s attention to this issue
Reality
Concern the community
Revolution right
Represent people’s thoughts
Gold
It’s a breakthrough
Cool
It’s a new style of expressionism and peace
Devotion
Crash effect
Independence
Art exists for people’s life
Admiring and supporting
To fight with desire
To care about the minority, to tell the truth, no dirty secret behind
Collaboration and win
To express the feeling of minority
Social practice
The concept and expression is simple and clear which is very impressive
Reality
The power of art to combine with life, and make it better!
Power, influence, and discovering
Protect the minority
To express the expectation of local people peacefully but strongly
Self-expressive
Hope
124
Justice and mercy
At least it’s optimistic
Just three words but simple and clear
Social participation
It’s worth to be discussed, it’s controversial
We will win!
Re-exam the problem
To introspect and insist
Thank you!
Announce and challenge
Speak for the people
It’s creative and speak for the local
Care
Creativity
Rebuild and become better
Challange and sensitive
It’s so meaningful
Criticality and popularity
Anomie
Human rights
Let people pay attention to this issue
It’s special and unique
This artwork comes from love towards human beings
To be direct
To be disappearing
To be critical
Reflect the reality and criticize the cliché of bureaucracy
None
Reality
Cool and meaningful
Golf course
The conscious of the locals
Simple and clear
Keep working!! and you will be cool
Practical involvement
Controversial village, gentrification
Meaningful and active
It’s surviving art
To go beyond
To be critical
To express rationally
Straightforward, powerful, a kind of social movements
To be clear
In chaos
To help the minority to win
Natural and environmental care
To care
It’s a bridge
It should be promoted
Observe the little things
Intervention, society
To be meaningful
To be symbolic
To arouse public opinion
Design
It improves people’s life, not for the benefit of itself but entire human beings
To change everything from head to toe
To reflect and convey the message
To be powerful
Once you insist, you will win
To be simple and clear
To speak it out
Announcement
Competition
Love and care
44
We
Will
Win
Protection and anti-capitalism
Social justice
Deference
To speak out
We will win
Influence, concern
To gain extra leverage
To be critical
Digest people’s thinking toward future
To look for the beauty in our living space
Power
Fight, free speech
Reality
Attention-drawing ,not radical,think differently
To speak out for the locals
Social related
It’s sharp
The cliff
Show the justice of society
Attentive
Things that exist in reality
To be meaningful
Social care
Freedom
Culture and ethnic groups
To be meaningful
To fight with authority
To fight for the truth
Honest, terrific
Win-win situation
It’s decayed
Criticize, it’s critical and disguised
125
D. If No: With a keyword or two, please indicate why not?
To criticizes the government’s political thinking and lack of humanitarian thinking
To care
To be honest
The reality
To be influential
To be powerful
To go beyond
Fighting
To use the simple slogan express our thoughts to the government
Justice
To show the reality
To speak for the people
Win
To support the minority and against the authority
To express people’s thoughts clearly
To be engaged in the society, to observe and to introspect
To resist
Very good
Living right
To be provocative
Great!
Localization, to speak out
Power of the truth
To claim equal rights and against bureaucracy
The value of existence
Special & good for loca people
To challenge and care
To be friendly
The silent protest
46
We
Will
Win
Urban renewal
For the sake of people’s welfare and keep originals
Stress out minority issues
Accuracy
Enjoy
Cool
Speak for art and see the truth lies within
Peace
Have given much thought
Clear appeal
We
Interesting
Concern, care, and speak for the people
Myth
Environmental protection, safety
Independent, critical
Seeable
Concern, minor group
Minorities
Lower golf course
Anger
Isolation
It can be replaced by other forms
Political profit
It’s a social event, which change people’s life. Art project that change people’s mind. I don’t
think this is an art piece than a social event
Using English for the slogan is bit weird here and it isn’t so catchy
Too direct
It’s a bit prejudiced
Esoteric, disconnected, poor museum display
Invalid
The authenticity that people joined with this issue
Grandstand act
Politicalization
What you want to say from the picture?
Invalid, fake issue
Hard to feel its effect
Invalid, fake issue
The work was torn down too fast, and it didn’t lead to any protest. Not sure if it was the
compromise of the artist or the people in the tribe didn’t support it
It consumes the source material/ topic
No creativity
Power
To combine art with life
Justice
Supporting minorities
Autonomy
Daring, resolution and focusing
Speaking for the minorities
We will win
Practical and provoking
Humanity
Express the truth
Reminding and existence
Exposing abuses
Radical point of view
Simple&powerful
126
Hollywood copy
No feeling
A closed statement, murmuring
Chaotic
You want to be on the headline
It’s a social movement, not art
Politics
You can’t call it art
You are trying to create conflicts
It’s too biased
I don’t have interest in it
Not aesthetical
127
Not so beauty
Trivial
What do you want to show?
No
Should increase amount
Can’t agree with it
Self-satisfied
The message is too plain without any self-reflection and self-criticism
No comment
If the mudflows and landslides happened, just don’t ask for the national compensation
Flat
Can’t attract people’s attention
It’s the issue of politics, so we should solve it in a political way
To write in metaphor has less direct effect than you expected
48
We
Will
Win
To be influenced by ideology
Decontextualized, innocent
Not controversial
Safety is the only concern
Repetition
The benefits
To be extreme
Art and politics should be separated
To remove the imprint
To disturb
Too idealistic
Strange
Like a political statement
Protection
To be cruel
The form of this work is too simple
No sense of aesthetics
The image is lack of group power
Powerless
To appropriate
Useless,hypocritical
Some places are not supposed to live, we should not compare them with others
Art should be independent from subjective criticizing
Temporary spokesman
More like a slogan
Local referendum and leave it to the government
To interfere with the tribe
Art doesn’t need to be defined
It’s just scoop
Art shouldn’t be integrated with politics and business
Nonsense
Not beautiful like a art should be
No feeling
Too sharp
Benefit
Ordinary
It’s a conscious embedded performance art, to mock social prototype, implying violence
and abuse
The opposite
Ordinary
If you want to express something clearly, these words are not enough. To criticize something
Temporary, passers-by, scoop, spokesperson
Not complete enough
in the name of art, with a political point of view doesn’t make sense to me. Will more people
think of this as a kind of art? Where is the beauty of it? I don’t see any aesthetics within
It’s cliche
The target is too obvious
Failure or success, it’s all up to politics
Pretentious and kitsch
In vain
Chaos
Effortless
Lost
It’s silly! too many contemporary artists are going to the wrong direction
A waste
Too controversial
To be critical
Over-confident
So what?
Conflict
It’s fake
Demonstration
Some where i belong
Is it powerful?
Real estate company
To lose the motive of pure beauty
Too controversial
Stunt
I don’t understand
So what
Shallow and simple
Not remarkable enough
Very documental
Worries
It’s too political, not like art
Advantages and disadvantages. Art shouldn’t be subjective
Close to life
Vulnerable
I can’t see its aesthetics
What is the point? Is it only an artist show?
On purpose
At present
Provoking ethnic disharmony
Oppression
50
We
Will
Win
Too political
Art is to influence people for what they constantly see and hear, but not criticizing
Vulgar
Effect, response
Controversy
Political appeal
Art production shouldn’t be connected to demonstration
Lower golf-course
It’s just social appeal
Political art
The statement is too abrupt
Too critical
Freedom
128
129
GAME
Valentina Desideri
Political Therapy
Feelings and emotions are generally considered to
be features of the individual, and their connections
with society often disregarded. Shame, for example,
is defined in the Oxford Dictionary as “A painful
feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the
consciousness of wrong or foolish behaviour,” but
“wrong” or “foolish” are categories defined by social
norms. A feeling such as shame might then provide
the opportunity to collectively question social values
(i.e. Why do I feel this way? Why is this wrong? Is it
wrong? How are the categories of right and wrong
defined, and by whom? et cetera). Most often,
however, this opportunity is not taken up, as the
negative feelings produced by the violent encounter
with social norms rest solely on the individual, who is
made to bear those feelings alone. When their weight
becomes too great, she may resort to therapy. Once
again consulting the Oxford Dictionary, therapy is
revealed to be a “treatment intended to relieve or heal
a disorder.” Yet, a disorder is a social category defined
against a category of order, of normality; of an ideal
healthy subject that consequently becomes the goal
of the therapy. However well-intentioned, such an
understanding of therapy as a “fixing” procedure
avoids questioning the very categories of thinking
that give rise to the “problem” in the first place.
If we instead assume that feelings and emotions
are not only a feature of the individual, but are also
features of the social, then we must also recognize that:
(1) troubling feelings are not only individual problems
but political problems, (2) what we normally consider
political problems, or issues, affect people on all levels:
physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual, (as Denise
Ferreira da Silva has aptly put it),1 they therefore cannot
exclusively be dealt with on an intellectual level.
Political therapy is a playful way I have found to
engage with this issue. Anyone is welcome to practice
it. It entails individual sessions of approximately
one hour, and it mixes direct discussion of political
issues with hands-on healing in order to develop
other languages and ways of dealing with politics.
The session addresses a political problem that has
been brought forward by the patient. In operation,
a “political problem” is any problem, thought or
question that has a political dimension for the
person who experiences it. It may be something that
bothers or preoccupies her, regardless of whether it is
primarily lived out on a practical, personal, ideological,
conceptual or existential level. What a political
problem may be is a category for us to define further.
POLITICAL THERAPY
Patient Information Leaflet
What is Political Therapy?
Where I should practice Political Therapy?
Practiced between two individuals, Political Therapy deals
You can practice political therapy anywhere political problems
with problems of a political nature and creates the conditions
present themselves that you want to deal with. You may also
to develop other languages to talk about and live through
practice political therapy with whomever you would like,
politics. There is no specific discipline or theory behind it. Its
during conversations about politics. You can do it at home, at
practice develops as it happens. Neither the therapist nor the
work, at a dinner party, at an art fair, at a conference, when you
patient is responsible for any kind of “solution” to the problem.
or someone else around you has a political problem, at friend’s
Instead, the problem is treated as an occasion for language
place, at an occupation... as long as you have enough space for
to develop, for speculation to happen and for politics to be
the patient to lie down.
felt. It is a form of therapy for those who neither need, nor
To practice you can make your own deck of fake therapy cards.
want, to be fixed. The role of therapist and patient are always
You can find the existing cards here: http://faketherapy.
exchangeable.
wordpress.com/cards-deck
What is Therapy?
How should I give / receive Political
Therapy?
“Therapy is not the return of the sick body to normality but
of Being to what is possible to be.”
Franco “Bifo” Berardi
2
One person takes the role of the Therapist (T) and the other
person takes the role of the Patient (P).
T invites P to tell her what her political problem is. T and P
“Perhaps one day we will know that there wasn’t any art but
only medicine.”
consult each other briefly in order to formulate P’s problem in
J.M.G. Le Clèzio
as a question.
3
the most concise and clear way. This is best if it is formulated
T invites P to embody her political problem and to lie down
Should I give / receive Political Therapy?
either on her front or back, in a comfortable and relaxed
Yes.
position.
T shuffles the set of fake therapy cards and picks the first four
Who should give / receive Political Therapy?
cards from the top of the deck.
Whoever puts him / herself in a position to give or receive a
T can start from the indication written on the cards to give a
political therapy session is someone interested and open to
pretend “hands-on healing” session to P until T feels that it is
discovering new ways of discussing politics. He or she does
enough. Minimum time is ten minutes.
not mind pretending, and is a person capable of engaging in a
T tells P that she has finished and then asks P, who is still
present with no future goals or guarantees, who is nonetheless
embodying the problem, how she is feeling and if any images,
fully committed and clear in his or her intentions.
thoughts or sensations during the therapy have come to P’s
mind.
What are the possible side effects of Political
Therapy?
T and P engage in a discussion about the problem starting
Some feel uncomfortable touching or being touched. In that
with the original issue.
from what they experienced during the therapy, connecting it
case it is enough to communicate this to your partner or stop
the session entirely at any moment. It is also possible that your
Option: T and P can write a conceptual map together, putting
political behaviour may change in unforeseeable ways; you
the problem / question in the middle of the page and linking
must be willing to take that risk.
it out to all the thoughts, ideas and possibilities that have
emerged from the discussion. They shall continue until they
both feel it has been enough.
2 Franco “Bifo” Berardi, personal communication.
1
130
Denise Ferreira da Silva, personal communication.
3 J-M. G. Le Clézio, Haï (Paris: Flammarion, 1971): 7.
131
Contributors
Curator and writer Cosmin Costinaş (b. 1982,
Gal Kirn (galkirn [at] gmail.com) holds a
Romania) is now the director of Para/Site,
PhD on the topic of French Contemporary
Hong Kong, after having been the curator at
Philosophy and Socialist Yugoslavia (University
BAK: basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht (2008–
of Nova Gorica). Co-editor of Encountering
Leeza Ahmady is an independent art curator
2011), the co-curator of the 1st Ural Industrial
Althusser (Continuum), Yugoslav Black
and educator based in New York. She is the
Biennial, Ekaterinburg (in 2010), and the editor
Wave Cinema (JvE Academy) and editor
director of Asian Contemporary Art Week,
of the documenta 12 magazines, Kassel/
of Postfordism and its Discontents (JvE
a city-wide biennial exhibition with public
Vienna (2005–2007).
Academy/Peace Institute), he does research
programs at major museums and galleries in
New York.
at the ICI-Berlin on the topic of the Politics of
Ann Cvetkovich is the Ellen C. Garwood
Memory in the (post-) Yugoslav context.
Centennial Professor of English and Professor
Karim Aïnouz is a Brazilian-Algerian filmmaker
of Women’s and Gender Studies at the
A philosopher, dramaturge and performance
and visual artist, and is currently in the throes
University of Texas at Austin and is the author
theoretician, Bojana Kunst is a professor at
of production of his next feature, Praia do
of An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality,
the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in
Futuro, which is shot in Germany and Brazil.
and Lesbian Public Cultures (2003) and
Justus Liebig University Giessen, where she
Depression: A Public Feeling (2012).
directs their international Master’s program in
Ariella Azoulay (http://cargocollective.com/
Choreography and Performance.
AriellaAzoulay) is at Brown University and is
Burak Delier (b. 1977) is an Istanbul-based
the author of Civil Imagination (Verso, 2012)
artist who explores the relationship between
Cuauhtémoc Medina (cuauhtemoc [at]
and From Palestine to Israel, a Photographic
capitalism and contemporary artistic
manifesta.org) is an international curator,
Record of Destruction and State Formation
practices.
art critic and historian based in Mexico
(Pluto, 2012).
City, Mexico, a researcher at the Instituto
Valentina Desideri (valedesideri [at] gmail.
de Investigaciones Estéticas at the National
London-based artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s
com) practices both Fake and Political
University of Mexico, and the curator of the
ongoing project, Aural Contract, has been
Therapy, makes performances, and, among
last Manifesta 9: The Deep of the Modern.
presented at Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm
other things, writes biographies by reading
(2012) and Homeworks 5, Beirut (2010). He is
people’s palms.
Professor at Columbia University (New York)
until 2007, Marc Nichanian is today a visiting
now developing a radio documentary trilogy
produced by The Showroom London and
Georges Didi-Huberman is a philosopher
Casco Utrecht, as part of a PhD at the Centre
and art historian who has published some
forthcoming book, Mourning Philology, will be
for Research in Architecture at Goldsmiths
forty books about history and the theory of
released by Fordham University Press in 2013.
College. images in addition to having curated several
internationally-renowned exhibitions.
Mustapha Benfodil is an Algerian writer,
professor at Sabanci University (Istanbul). His
Maja Petrović-Šteger (mp333 [at] cam.ac.uk)
is a social anthropologist who researches
playwright and journalist who has written
A renowned scholar in Middle East studies
various contexts where bodies—whether
several plays and novels, among which is Les
and former Associate Professor of Middle
living, dead, or in the form of medically usable
Bavardages du Seul, which was awarded the
Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York
remains—become the sites of economic, legal,
2004 Algerian prize for Best Novel.
University, Khaled Fahmy is currently
political, scientific and artistic attention. She
Professor and Chair of the History Department
has conducted long-term fieldwork in Serbia,
at the American University of Cairo.
Tasmania, and with the Swiss art collective
Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz (www.
etoy.
boudry-lorenz.de) live and work in Berlin,
where they have been collaborating since
Marcelo Gomes (marcelogomesfilms [at]
1998.
gmail.com) is a Brazilian scriptwriter, director
Rasha Salti is an independent curator,
and video artist from Recife. He graduated
freelance writer and international
from film studies at Bristol University.
programmer for the Toronto International
Robert Burghardt is assistant professor at
the Academy of Fine Arts (Nuremberg) and is
Film Festival.
interested in collective art practices. In 2009,
he obtained a degree in Architecture at TU—
Berlin.
132
133
documentary film director she was trained
to be. Lately, she has been seen on an
unspecified dirt road humming Elvis’ “Trying
to Get to You” from the legendary Sun Studio
recording sessions.
A consulting professor at Goldsmiths
College, London, and president of the French
Committee for the Memory and History of
Slavery, Françoise Vergès (cus01fv [at] gold.
ac.uk) has collaborated on many cultural and
artistic manifestations and has published
cover image
Kosmaj monument,
designed by Dušan Djamonja
(1967).
Photo © Robert Burghardt
Hito Steyerl never managed to work as the
Colophon
PUBLISHED BY
Manifesta Foundation
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
widely on the topic of colonial memories,
alternative cartographies, post-colonial
museography and diasporic worlds in the
CHIEF EDITOR
Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez
Indian Ocean.
Since January 2011, Adnan Yıldız has been
The contents of this journal are
published according to the terms
of the Creative Commons License
unless otherwise mentioned.
Attribution—Non-Commercial—
No Derivatives
ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Virginie Bobin
the artistic director of Künstlerhaus Stuttgart.
He is currently producing a series of solo
exhibitions called the Artistic Dialogues at
GUEST EDITOR
Rasha Salti
Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, and another called
Methodical Inquiries at Polistar Gallery,
Istanbul, in addition to a discussion-based
event program called Critical Voices, at
MANAGING EDITOR
Lisa Mazza and Georgia Taperell
Assisted by Yvonique Wellen
Künstlerhaus Stuttgart and Platform3, in
Munich.
COPY EDITOR
Shannon d’Avout
GRAPHIC DESIGN
g.u.i., Paris:
Nicolas Couturier
Bachir Soussi-Chiadmi
TRANSLATIONS
Ariella Azoulay: Tal Harn
(Hebrew—English)
Mustapha Benfodil: Alena Jones
(French—English)
Georges Didi-Huberman: Shane
Lillis (French—English)
Marc Nichanian: Gil Anidjar
(French—English)
Françoise Vergès: Shane Lillis
(French—English)
All commissioned and reproduced
texts are published here with
the full consent of their authors.
Every effort has been made
to contact the rightful owners
of all content with regards
to copyrights and permissions.
We apologize for any inadvertent
errors or omissions. If you wish
to use any content please contact
the copyright holder directly. For
any queries regarding copyright
please contact subscription@
manifesta.org.
Manifesta Journal is made possible
with the generous support of
Prinsengracht 175 hs
NL - 1015 DS Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Tel. + 31 (0) 20 672 1435 (office)
Fax + 31 (0) 20 470 0073
subscription@manifesta.org
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OF REGRET AND O THER BA CK P A GES

Transcription

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