Fake Hybrid Sites Palimpsest by De Gruyter Arts

Academy of the Arts of the World / Cologne

Edited by Madhusree Dutta and Nanna Heidenreich

11 Preface MADHUSREE DUTTA, NANNA HEIDENREICH 17 Speaking Nearby Stories on Leakages MADHUSREE DUTTA 36 The Sanguineous Imaginary The Afterlife of Blood BISHNUPRIYA GHOSH 57 Anthroponarcissism How can you be reflected in water that is itself so densely populated and animated? BINI ADAMCZAK 73 Intelligence Leaking Paranoia Networks ANDREAS NIEGL 86 Leaking ... Archives ... BELiT SAĞ 101 Shadow Courts for Shadow Libraries A Legal Trial of a Passion Crime LAWRENCE LIANG

129 Time in Translation—Die übersetzte Zeit MONIKA RINCK 141 What’s in a Name? Invasive Species: Transfers, New Kinship Relations, and the Right to Remain NANNA HEIDENREICH 158 Logistical Futures The Chinese Dream, Debordering Labor, and Migration MORITZ ALTENRIED, MANUELA BOJADŽIJEV, MIRA WALLIS

173 Intelligence Leaking Imperial Frontiers ANDREAS NIEGL 190 Post Office JAN LEMITZ 196 Elevator Underwear Performing Fashion MONIKA GINTERSDORFER, HAUKE HEUMANN, FRANCK E. YAO ALIAS GADOUKOU LA STAR

221 Anywhere or Here Art and Society Revisited MI YOU 233 Poetry & Bullshit On the Unboundedness of the Situation ZORAN TERZIĆ 257 Intelligence Leaking Two Biographies ANDREAS NIEGL 272 Who Wants to Fuck in a Box? SUSANNE SACHSSE, MARC SIEGEL 291 Biographies 296 Image Credits

Preface

The attempt to neatly separate always goes wrong, in one way or another. Boundaries are leaky. Concepts, languages, cells, symptoms, objects, values, humans, and other species are identified and named, but they do not stay in place. They multiply or remain in the state of being copied, and just as they take shape they disappear, turn cryptic. Compound systems emerge; symbioses, parasitisms. Attachments, infestations, infatuations. And speculation and ghostization. This anthology is dedicated to such phenomena of productive leakage. A leak is a hole or crack through which contents may accidentally pass, and/or an intentional disclosure of something secret or private. This book in itself is leaky. It addresses leaky states, making them the center of attention—that is, part of the agenda. But since it is based on the very idea of leaky states informing the thought and material practice as opposed to ideas of order, binaries, and belonging(s), it should contain unintentional leaks, too. Containment of leaks is a contradiction in itself and such a contradiction is part of putting fluid practices within the bounds of a book. So, in a way, this book intends to keep open the status of being unmade as it goes through the process of the making of it. The foundation of this publication can be traced to the program principles of the Akademie der Künste der Welt (Academy of the Arts of the World, ADKDW). In the period 2018 to 2021, ADKDW steered its artistic program around four thematic axes: fake, hybrid, sites, palimpsest. The themes were envisaged as a grid with horizontal and vertical lines: Sites at Stake is about the various stakes that work in the making and the un-making of a site—be it a dwelling or a memorial, minority public culture or hegemonic popular culture, postindustrial ruin or fortification against the disease milieu, and so on. 11

This theme graphically expands horizontally at both ends.

Hybrid Transactions explores the meaning of hybridity in the face of unprecedented exchange of peoples, cultures, goods, technologies, languages, and fears and fantasies in the contemporary time, and especially in the context of the neo-territorialism of the 21st century. As interface hybrid creates a face-to-face horizontal movement. found : erased : palimpsest is related to public historians. A public historian is a proposed entity who participates in narrativizing and crafting a larger and noncodified history by lending, annotating, and speculating her/his/their personal, familial, and social memories. This one drills down through piled up layers of memory—creating a vertical axis downward. Original Fakes engages with the production processes that subvert the market hegemony by employing various “post-original” methods, such as upcycling as a material practice in a smart postcolonial maneuver, reinventing artisanal skills in postindustrial labor practice, individualization of technologies, Shanzhai-fication of production, inversion of the politics of appropriation, and others. Hence this phenomenon emerges/insinuates slowly from obscurity—making it a vertical movement upward. ADKDW’s repertoire of FAKE HYBRID SITES PALIMPSEST—comprising exhibitions, performances, screenings, discussions, recordings, writing, as well as methods of projections, exchanges, and archiving—is not catalogued here. Instead, this anthology takes cues from these different formats, pushing the ideas further, sometimes shrinking them into microscopic views, and at other times expanding them to overscaled proportions into essays on leakages. For reasons that are too obvious, the emerging new fluidity in the context of the pandemic—a time span in which a centurial phenomenon has shrunk and leaked into an excruciatingly long and meandering present—flows through the essays. Some contributions are written by academics, some by artists, some are actually both, some are writers, poets, performers, or something else altogether. The tonalities do not always match each contributor’s assigned field: there are image compositions, there is prose, analysis, and translation. Translation appears as recombination attuned to the sound of poetry; also between locations, frames of reference and concepts, and various forms of scholarly thinking across disciplines. They were thought about and written in different languages. Hence the resulting publication is also a work of translation (into English), although some parts of the book remain between languages. The essays are organized by the following coordinates: structures of blood, species, viruses, and archives; networks of laws, ideologies, languages, and labor; and imagination of bodies, fashion, arts, copy, and poetry. Some of the works that were curated and produced within the program of ADKDW are presented in the form of photographic documents. These are interspersed between the essays; suggesting links, providing frames to the arguments, and also at times coun-

tering them. The meticulous yet flamboyant design by Sherna Dastur holds the book together, providing the material expression for the concepts that inform the essays, multiplying them—including the very materiality the book is printed on: paper—into different layers. The editors would like to thank their institutions, the ADKDW and the University of Applied Arts Vienna (Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien) for their generous support of this book project. We would especially like to acknowledge Dr. Gerald Bast, the president of the Angewandte, for trusting this expanded and expansive project, and pledging full support to it although Nanna Heidenreich had only just joined the institution. Topping the list is also the team of ADKDW for their unwavering support for the tenure of Madhusree Dutta, an artistic director who was decisively an other in the local context, and painstakingly realizing the wild ideas that stemmed from her trans-locational situatedness. The list of names in this category is too long to present here, but the contributions of each individual team member has been crucial in the four-year-long journey that has culminated in this publication. Next comes the large number of curators, artists, writers, performers, designers, archivists, activists, and researchers from across the globe who participated in the ADKDW program and whose works have influenced the contours of this book. Some of those works are tangibly represented and others have intangibly informed it. We would also like to thank the publisher, Edition Angewandte and De Gruyter for making such a—literally—multilayered book possible. Before a book takes on shape it goes through many hands and over many desks of copy editors, proofreaders, translators, as well as people who take care of contracts, permissions, and finances. We warmly thank all these people for being our collaborators in this adventure. This book is also a culmination of our decade-long friendship and collaboration through various projects, and in that sense it has been in the making for a long time. Madhusree Dutta and Nanna Heidenreich August 2021

Where Do the Walls of the Museum Go When They Are Forgotten?, artwork by Ali Eyal (in Hands, 2021, curated by Madhusree Dutta and Ala Younis): A failed museum project on sloping land on an imaginary farm is transported to another/safer location in an oversized torn jacket. The curator of the failed museum has met some sleeping caterpillars who came to the site attracted by the nutrient rich colors of the destroyed artworks. The jacket-museum now turns into a womb for the caterpillars, wrapped in fragments of Iraqi paintings (copied by the artist) that went missing during the US-led invasion.

Speaking Nearby1 Stories on Leakages MADHUSREE DUTTA

“I do not intend to speak about. Just speak nearby,” Trinh T. Minh-ha, in the spoken commentary in the film Reassemblage, 16mm, 1982. She elaborates on the idea later as “[a] speaking that reflects on itself and can come very close to a subject without, however, seizing or claiming it. A speaking in brief, whose closures are only moments of transition opening up to other possible moments of transition—these are forms of indirectness well understood by anyone in tune with poetic language.” Nancy N. Chen, “Speaking Nearby: A Conversation with Trinh T. Minh-ha,” Visual Anthropology Review, 8, no. 1 (1992) 82–91.

Ben Okri’s proposal: Her father’s books were not read in a normal way. Some of them were read with the hands. Some were read by placing them at the centre of the forehead. One of the books could only be read with eyes closed. Another one could only be read in dreams while the reader was asleep, with the book under the pillow. There was a special book of her father’s which could only be read by the dead. It was placed in their coffins, over the heart. There was one book that was only read by drinking. Water was poured on its waterproof pages and the water was drunk. The words filled out in the blood and heart and brains, till the reader became the words. There was another special book that was read in the wind. The book was left dangling, the wind blew its pages, and the reader, with the light on their face, read the words which the wind dispersed.28

The Freedom Artist, a novel with a foreword that simply says “Read Slowly,” is an allegorical storystorehouse that weaves together three distinct strands of power-politics, wisdom-myth, and imagi nation-flight with innumerous brief propositions disguised as stories. A writer who writes invisible books, a girl who treasures a word-angel on her forehead, another girl who goes missing for committing blasphemy by asking “who the prisoner is” slowly descend on the time of post-truth-contemporary that lay in deep somber. Ben Okri, The Freedom Artist (London: Head of Zeus, 2019), 228.

MADHUSREE DUTTA

Hand to Eye, artwork by Antje Van Wichelen with Maxime Gids (in Hands, 2021, curated by Madhusree Dutta and Ala Younis): A transparent viewing box, modeled on the first cinématographe (1895), made of plexiglass, aluminium, iron, and wood with hand-printed 16mm film and 3D printing. A series of anthropometric photographs of colonized hands are printed on 16mm film strips for viewing with the newly created-old fashioned cinématographe. Van Wichelen induces manually activated motion into the frozen motifs of the archive photographs by reproducing them on film strips inside the hand-crank viewing device.

Fig. 1 Sweet William, Robert Sherer, 2013 (HIV+ and HIV- blood on paper)

The Sanguineous Imaginary The Afterlife of Blood BISHNUPRIYA GHOSH

1. At the Gallery A primal scene from the HIV/AIDS epidemic: the blood-on-paper paintings of Southern U.S. artist Robert Sherer who archives HIV+ and HIV– blood as a collective record. Sherer began to paint with his own blood after accidentally slicing an artery one day. With a degree in botany from the University of Alabama, at the time Sherer was attending the Atlanta College of Art. It was the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic: in 1998, the antiretroviral therapies (ART) had only been out for just a few years. Sherer’s fellow artists had been falling victim to the epidemic, and blood had attained symbolic status as the mode of transmission for the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Unlike any other, the HIV/AIDS epidemic underscored the role of blood as a life-sustaining resource for both humans and microbes: its regenerative capacities had to be protected from death and its operations as a medium of transmission had to be controlled. Blood nourished the virus; blood passed easily from host to host. Exhortations to “get tested” had become commonplace in American public life as had biomedical knowledge of spiraling viral copies and diminishing T-cell counts. Amid mounting contagion hysteria, varying compositions of blood came to roost as the epidemic’s sanguineous imaginary. Gazing at the bright spurt from his artery that was splattering his paintings, Sherer could not turn away. Emptying the ink from his quill pens, he began to paint in blood.1 Trained in botanical illustration, he painted “nature” in its bucolic innocence, its delicacies. Alert to vital materialities, to blood’s viscosity and fragility, Sherer thinned his blood with anticoagulants and mixed it with inks to increase its brightness. Soon, an HIV+ friend donated her blood for a painting; shortly thereafter, Sherer’s refrigerator was stacked with donations.2 As he framed each blood portrait in Victorian oval frames, the feared medium of transmission became collectible art. Sherer’s blood catalog opened as part of a thematic exhibition called The Body as Commodity at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (then known as Nexus) in 1999. The drawings were installed on a vivid red velvet-covered wall that immersed viewers in the media substrate of the paintings and of infection. When I interviewed him in April 2017, he picked Sweet William, the vital record of a fellow artist who had since passed, as the centerpiece of the show (fig. 1). The painting drew on Sherer’s early sketches,

In an effort to save several of his drawings from the bloody flow, Sherer emptied a nearby jar of pencils to cover the puncture and then watched with morbid fascination as the container filled. He bandaged his wound with duct tape, sealed the jar, and placed it in his minirefrigerator; next day, he remembered the jar and attempted to paint with its contents—any self-respecting artist would try this, he said. Very quickly he discovered that after only five to ten small brushstrokes exposure to air caused the blood to begin clotting, so he began to experiment. Subsequent research into the nature of his new medium led Sherer to explore salienation and a variety of other anticlotting additives and procedures.

I conducted several written and verbal interviews with Sherer from 2017 to 2020. During these conversations, he outlined the ethical parameters he set for blood donation, which included extended discussions with donors about the history of the blood paintings.

BISHNUPRIYA GHOSH

his practice of speculative botany, in which he rendered specific parts of plants expressive: the distended thorn on the rose, the sexual organs of flowers.3 As a portrait in flowers, Sweet William resonated with Sherer’s grandmother’s sense that the prettiest blooms were the ones cut down early. The exhibition opening in Atlanta became mourning as those who recognized references broke down. In this sense, Sherer’s blood catalog represents HIV/AIDS artworks of the early period.4 But I was captivated by something else: by Sherer’s “excorporation” of the vital medium that gave his “blood paintings” (as he calls them now) indexical value and by his relocation of the individual “milieu interior” in deceptively bucolic natural settings. The botanical milieu invoked the ecological dimensions of blood, a transitive substance recalcitrant to containment in molar forms.5 In fact, its primal leakiness was the basis of the blood hysteria of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Blood flowed between humans even as viral load tests disclosed secret multispecies distributions (x viral particles in y ml blood). This sense of distributed subjectivity is stronger still in Sherer’s insect paintings where swarms saturate the visual landscape, recalling disease vectors and multiplying microbial life. In Hookups, the insect-saturation Fig. 2 Hookups, Robert Sherer, 2013 (HIV+ and HIV- blood on paper)

indexes southern climates as well as natural fecundities across species (fig. 2). Sherer told me that the sexual connotation of Hookups was equally a response to televangelists who saw

The Sanguineous Imaginary: The Afterlife of Blood

Sherer noticed his interest in speculative botany was informed by a willed departure from the strict protocols of scientific depiction. Eschewing realism, for him, enabled a discovery of inner workings as the surrealists once argued; this was combined with the Victorian aesthetics that he inherited from his grandmothers.

See “Artist Talk: Robert Sherer and Kia Labeija” at KSUTV (Kennesaw University TV), 8 March 2016, http://ksutv. kennesaw.edu/play.php?v=00030017&fbclid=IwAR1LT 5v7bgdcCHLmjB6NeIouIqQgkaeMiNjcCLDceD_bZD7x RiRV82VUEzM.

Molar typically refers to a body of matter as a whole as distinct from the molecular atomic properties of matter.

Intelligence Leaking Paranoia Networks ANDREAS NIEGL

Leaking … Archives ... BELiT SAĞ

Shadow Courts for Shadow Libraries A Legal Trial of a Passion Crime1 LAWRENCE LIANG

The genesis of this trial lies in a performance staged at Sarai Reader 09, an exhibition curated by Raqs Media Collective in 2012 while the Delhi High Court was hearing a petition filed against a photocopy shop in Delhi University.

CHARACTERS Defence Counsel : Lawyer who specializes in representing people accused of crimes of passions related to books Yann Martell: Witnesses # 1, Author Dr. Norman Weiner: Witnesses # 2 Psychiatrist Nicholas Basbanes: Witnesses # 3 Historian of bibliophilia Walter Benjamin: Witnesses # 4 Writer and book thief Dr. Pradeep Sebastian: Witnesses # 5 Expert on Booklust Dr. Tina Narula: Witnesses # 6 Book pirate and diviner detective Jury Members: Twelve Anonymous jury members chosen from the arts and daily life ...................................................................................................

Act I Prologue SETTING A courtroom lined up with books, it could double up as a library. DEFENCE COUNSEL: It is time, members of the jury, for us to begin our proceedings. You have assembled here to deliberate and decide on a matter of extreme importance, concerning as it does the future of libraries, the nature of the copy, the scope of copyright, and rights of readers in the digital era …. Oh my apologies, I messed up my briefing notes and these are notes from a parallel hearing of this case that is taking place in the Delhi high court. We are assembled to debate a broader question in this court, and to my mind the most important legal question in copyright law is: What is love? Who is sane and who is insane? This case that you are hearing is taking place alongside a “real” case that is being heard in the Delhi high court, and in that sense, we are a shadow court, but as Lady Gaga has aptly said if there are no shadows then you are not in the light, and we shall see that in law, as in life, shadows can shelter the deepest truths. All of you are aware that in January 2020, a group of publishers who control the biggest share of the academic journal and book market in the world have filed a copyright infringement case against two websites, LibGen and Sci-Hub. These two sites have been a lifeline for scientists, researchers, and students in most parts of the world that have little access to expensive databases or indeed to good quality libraries. Built by communities of readers, these shadow libraries have

LAWRENCE LIANG

made it possible for anyone in the world to have access to their own library of

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Level of Confidence by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (in Global Positioning System Not Working, 2018, curated by Madhusree Dutta) is an art project to commemorate the mass kidnapping of 43 school students by the police in Mexico in September 2014. It consists of a facerecognition camera that is trained to incessantly look for the faces of the disappeared students. When a spectator stands in front of the camera, the system uses algorithms to find which student’s facial features match that of the spectator and gives a “level of confidence” by marking how accurate the match is. The artist has made the project software available for freely exhibiting the project anywhere in the world at https://www. lozano-hemmer.com/texts/manuals/level_of_confidence_specs.pdf. The project also exists as open source software to be modified and applied to similar content in different contexts.

What’s in a Name? Invasive Species: Transfers, New Kinship Relations, and the Right to Remain NANNA HEIDENREICH

Biodiversity is one of the major issues of the present time, and runs along the borders between science, politics, society, economics, ecology, and ethics.1 In 1992, the first Biodiversity Conference was convened, the 15th edition of which will take place in Kunming, China in 2021, the year I am writing this text. Recent years have also seen the rise of numerous new institutions, the establishment of research programs and networks as well as foundations and NGOs that speak to both thematic and (research) political interests and the allocation of funding, such as the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) in Halle-Jena-Leipzig,2 the EU project BiodivERsA,3 and the international research group AlienScenarios.4 Biodiversity as a concept stands for an idea of “nature” and as such has become naturalized. But what does this diversity in/of nature mean? Does it describe the current state of things or make proposals for the future? Does it mean a politics of diversity for nonhuman animals? Or a posthuman queer program? My questions are rhetorical. For any talk of diversity is closely linked with concepts of categorizing, which can be seen not least in the introduction of a “proxy logic,” as environmental humanities scholar Ursula Heise has called it, and according to which certain “flagship species” (Heise fittingly calls them charismatic megafauna) stand in for the threat to species diversity as a whole, and plants, as opposed to animals, virtually never get past the threshold of attention.5 That is, unless they are seen as a threat to other species and designated as invasive, alien, and/or non-native. And this is the classification that interests me here: those that do not belong, that migrate without permission, those that are seen as a threat, those that do not stick to the rules, those that are “too much” and “too many,”6 those that reproduce without permission.

See Uta Eser, “Biodiversität: Ein wissenschaftliches oder politisches Konzept?” Biodiversität. Denkanstöße, no. 7 (2009), ed. M. Steinhaus, Stiftung Natur und Umwelt Rheinland-Pfalz, 36–45, https:// snu.rlp.de/fileadmin/4_Mediathek/PDF/Denkanstoesse/2009_SNU_Denkanstoesse_07.pdf, here 38. Thanks to media artist and critter scholar Marcus Held for pointing out Uta Eser’s work to me, and for his critical comments on this text, as well as for numerous answers to my endless questions about this or that species, on conservation discourses, on media-artistic engagements with naturecultures.

https://www.idiv.de/de.

https://www.biodiversa.org/2.

https://alien-scenarios.org/.

Ursula K. Heise, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 22–23. In the same chapter Heise points out that speaking of “species” is equally problematic, simply because what we understand species to mean is defined and conceived in different ways, see 25f.

Uta Eser explains what key terms are used to described the reproductive power of “invasive species” as problematic: masses, drives, outbreak, libidity, virility, see Der Naturschutz und das Fremde. Normative und ökologische Grundlagen der Umweltethik (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1999), available here as a pdf: https://www.umweltethikbuero.de/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Der_Naturschutz_ und_das_Fremde.pdf, 152f.

NANNA HEIDENREICH

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(1) Three years ago biophysicist He Jiankui was the first to use a gene editing tool— CRISPR-Cas9—to alter the genetic makeup of two human embryos. The removal of the CCG5 gene was meant to protect them from a possible HIV infection (the father is presumably HIV positive). Ever since then, speculation has arisen as to whether the goal had really been to tune the brains of Nana and Lulu, the names of the two babies born in November 2018. I (almost) share a name with one of the babies, which enticed me to use this presumed close relation to reflect on other critical thresholds—above all transfers and migrations of so-called invasive species. I am interested in the values associated with them: what is considered unwanted, what is judged, what gets met with action, and which are unintentionally or actively promoted (and by what means), which count, and if so, how? How are they categorized, classified, and registered; where do the entries and enumerations end, and what allows us to have unclassified circumstances in thought? HIV-1 and HIV-2 infections are considered zoonoses, that is, diseases that can be transferred from animals as reservoir hosts to humans (or vice versa). The diagnosis of a zoonosis, according to science journalist David Quammen in his book Spillover, contains a temporal component. Diseases are only designated as such when the transfer takes place from animal to human in the present with a certain regularity.7 Historically, we might speculate, nearly all infections were potentially zoonoses, and “about 60 percent of all human infectious diseases currently known either cross routinely or have recently crossed between other animals and us.”8 This historical aspect is relevant, since the classification of invasive species is regularly connected with a historical break, the invasion/ discovery of America by Columbus in 1492. In this respect, the timeliness in the definition of zoonoses (including, alongside HIV, COVID-19, SARS, Ebola, but also rabies and Lyme disease) is in turn particularly relevant when the research on them also contains an ecological component. Recently, this has even become the focus: where and how do encounters take place that facilitate a viral transfer? Human interventions and human actions are the basis for categorizing species as new (neobiota),9 but these extractive interventions are also the reason for the increase in zoonoses: deforestation, clearance, resource depletion, etc. At the symposium Hotspots: Migration und Meer10 I curated for the ADKDW in Cologne in 2019, I drew out some of the connecting lines between migration 7

See David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic (New York: W.W. Norton, 2012), 105.

Ibid., 14.

What’s in a Name? Invasive Species: Transfers, New Kinship Relations, and the Right to Remain

Neobiota can be divided into neophytes (plants), neozoa (animals), and neomycetes (fungus). Generally, the terms alien or invasive species have become more common, both in specialized texts as well as other sources, such as the various media formats (print, social media, TV, radio), political directives, and so on. On the history of these terms—in German and English—see the 1999 book (already long out of print) by the environmental ethicist and biodiversity expert Uta Eser, Der Naturschutz.

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https://www.adkdw.org/en/article/1672_hotspots_migration_und_meer.

Intelligence Leaking Imperial Frontiers ANDREAS NIEGL

Post Office JAN LEMITZ

Elevator Underwear Performing Fashion MONIKA GINTERSDORFER, HAUKE HEUMANN, FRANCK E. YAO ALIAS GADOUKOU LA STAR

des Personnes Élégantes) from

of clothing, which can be

Kinshasa and Brazzaville are

activated performatively—

known all around the world.

or not, in the absence of

Since the 1920s, they have

subversive appropriation,

been practicing a subtle kind

overwriting, and an

of social activism with outfits

autonomous narration. I,

that sophisticatedly combine

Monika Gintersdorfer, was

colors and materials—as

asked to work on this topic,

Tariq Zaidi dubs it: “a way of

and immediately shared the

turning the tables on power and

commission with Franck E.

rebelling against the economic

Yao alias Gadoukou la Star

conditions they live in.”1

and Hauke Heumann. They

They have become an inspiring point of reference

1. Introduction

are longtime protagonists in our theater and dance group

for many movements in which

Gintersdorfer/Klaßen and

original, copy, and hybrid, that

have thoroughly integrated

which is owned and borrowed,

the transition between

enter into combinations whose

performance and fashion on

component parts can no longer

stage and in nightclubs into

be separated.

their personal practice.

“The shoes that speak, the shoes

Complex systems that

The big names of

that have a passport, the shoes

include self-proclaimed

international fashion like to tap

that travel first class, the shoes

mannequins appearing on their

into the power of figures from

say hello to you” sings the

own behalf, who acquire their

the alternative scene to bolster

Ivorian singer and styler Abou

clothes from a wide variety of

their campaigns. For example,

Nidal (La chaussure qui parle,

sources, bringing their chosen

Gucci and Vogue hired muxe

2007), in tribute to the elegant

identities to the fore on the

and muxe performer Lukas

and extravagant attire that

streets, in nightclubs and on

Avendaño for a 2020 photo

carries the magical potential

social networks.

shoot. Muxe is a long-existing

of leaping over class divides,

Big brands are celebrated,

third gender Indigenous to

overcoming border controls,

but recontextualized in unusual

Zapotec/Binnizá cultures

and flying through socially

style-mix combinations: in

of Oaxaca who subverts

enforced barriers.

Ivorian clubs, for instance,

binary gender roles and is the

vocal animations tell hyperreal

existential starting ground for

boucantiers, sapeurs, urban

stories about the multiple

Lukas’ performances. Gucci

dancers, and singers have been

relations of fashion items with

also invited philosopher and

implementing codes in which

their wearers.

queer theorist Paul B. Preciado

For years, African

fashion is made visible in its various qualities through the

This essay is about the transformative power

motions of dance. The Congolese Sapeurs (Societé des Ambianceurs et

to star in the first episode of the film series “At Home: Ouverture of Something that Never

https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/ congo-style-sapeurs-sapeuses-afri ca-avant-garde/index.html

Ended,” with a message about the love revolution. Hengameh

Yaghoobifarah, fashion blogger and columnist for the taz newspaper, starred in an advertising campaign for the high-end KaDeWe (Kaufhaus des Westens) department store in Berlin, shortly after vehemently criticizing the German police. And as communities linked to them, we wonder if this is how we use the publicity and power of big brands, or how big brands use the publicity and relevance we give them.

Developing an outline of the history of espionage is necessarily a form of speculative theory. Espionage’s effects are masked by a general understanding of political and economic processes as (pre-) determined. Espionage, however, is itself the practice of influencing and redefining these processes: to make specific political intent appear as part of an abstract process of history and thus erase itself. Only when it fails does espionage become recognizable as a political force. But even then its recognition is often shifted (temporarily or spatially), the extent of which is defined by the following factors: —

the ability of an intelligence agency to avoid leakage of their documents into the public sphere; that is, the power to contain, which is directly linked to the political and economic power of its respective nation-state;

—

the complex relationship of espionage and counter-espionage. The latter uses the uncovering of foreign operations both as a strategic tool for planning their own and as an ideopolitical token, implying that it is always the other nations that spy on the “benign nation”;

—

the partial or total collapse of a political system, which destabilizes a secret service’s ability of containment and reveals the archives of espionage or at least those documents that have not been destroyed in time. These factors also define any attempt to create a timeline of

espionage. This process is always abductive, in the sense of Charles Sanders Peirce: it presupposes a hypothesis despite an inherent lack of proof. It can only grasp its object based on examples that have crossed the threshold from successful espionage (without a trace) to failure—of an individual, an agency, or a political system. Consequently, arranging the fragments that have seeped through to the surface points up the blank spots between these (arbitrary) events—and those blank spots are not areas of inactivity, as might be assumed for more overt topics, but are replete with the endless potential for covert activity; any evidence of which has either been hidden or destroyed.

ANDREAS NIEGL

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Near Face of the Moon by Evariste Richer (in Hands, 2021, curated by Madhusree Dutta and Ala Younis). Space is the place for imagination—but also the site of new frontiers, for profit raking (asteroid mining), and billionaires’ dreams of leaving their mark; additionally, it is an urgently contested legal space. Dice used to be thrown to make or break a fortune; they represent a simultaneous sense of flamboyance and premonition. In this work Richer pixelates the moon with 20,736 dice, and creates a kind of mandala to meditate on the world—and the universe.