PREVIEW Foam Magazine #62 M/OTHERLANDS

#62 international photography magazine TRANSNATIONALTHEISSUE M ⁄ OTHERLANDS

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Are we able to navigate the complex, possibly denser than ever, intersection between identity politics and identitarian movements in today’s Europe? Are the images we are creating, producing and disseminating able to actually say something about us, our sense of belonging, and our chances to access the possibility of We?

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2 CONTENTS ONNOTIONSWHAT’SONEDITORIALFEATURESbyTheEditorsMYMINDGradaKilombaAlfredoJaarNEW:SILVIAROSITextbyAwaKonatéBOOKSHELFMariamaAttahINTERVIEWAkramZaatari&NinaMöntmannOFWEElisaMeddeNATIONALISMMonicaYoun M/OTHERLANDSJULIAN RÖDER Text by Kolja MOUSTextARCHITECTURETextVANMIRELLEReichertTULDERbyLoraineFurterFORENSICbyStefanosLevidisLAMRABATTextbyEylemAtakavTANJAOSTOJI Ć Text by Marina THEDETECTABILITYVISIBILITY,PaulenkaANDPOLITICSOFSEEINGbyClausGuntiSAFEENOUGHTOBEBRAVEbyAlaaAmmar&FabianHollePIAARKETextbyAndersKoldIGORCHEKACHKOVTextbyCatLachowskyjTHEARCHIVEOFPUBLICPROTESTSTextbyKarolinaGembaraCOLOPHONVIACHESLAVPOLIAKOVTextbyBorysFilonenko31241411643 289288265255241233225215205193181169STEVE MCQUEEN Text by Renée Mussai KARIM EL MAKTAFI Text by Nadine Khalil KAROLINA WOJTAS Text by Arkadiusz Antosz OLIVER LEU Text by Zeynep Kubat LOVE CAN BE RUDE TOO by Daniel C. Blight A FRAMEWORK FOR ROMAUNDERSTANDINGREPRESENTATIONbyAncaPuscaWELCOMETOTHEARACHNOCENEbyNata ša Petrešin-Bachelez VINCA PETERSEN Text by Gem Fletcher EKIN ÖZBIÇER Text by Kim Knoppers JAKOB GANSLMEIER Text by Ulrike Kremeier HOME IS NOT A PLACE by Taous R. Dahmani & Johny Pitts ONNowbyPHOTOGRAPHSFiepkeVanNiel&YouSeeMeMoria165153137127113103978973594933

What role can photography play in reimagining the concept of nation? And what does it mean to belong, to have access to? The m/otherlands issue of Foam Magazine constitutes our very proud contribution to a challenging and timely project co-organ ised by The Racial Imaginary Institute, the CUNY Graduate Center and The Poetry Project, titled On Nationalism: The Fragility and the Possibility of ‘We’. Through a network of exhibitions and programming at sites including David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles, Foam in Amsterdam, and the CUNY James Gallery in New York, the symposium looks to ask: How can we reimagine nation, tribe, and community? What practices of listening, sharing, and making could be enacted across varying visions of community, decolonisation and self-determination?Asaresponse to the questions that such a theme raises, the works and words on these pages explore the ways in which identity intersects and conflicts with nationalism and the idea of nation-state within the European context. Our goal was to look behind the postcard image of Europe in order to determine and uncover the aspects that are often invisible the body of the iceberg. Throughout the con ception period, we called this intangible place the ‘limine’ a mostly invisible threshold defining the fortress’ borders of Europe. With this issue we asked ourselves how do photography and visual culture inform and reimagine the concept of iden tity? What does it mean to belong? What happens in the liminal space between belonging and having access to? And how do whiteness and (contemporary) coloni alism regulate, inform and influence this space? We attempted to tackle the com plex intersection possibly at its peak in Europe currently between identity politics and identitarian movements, while highlighting examples and experiences of trans national movements of solidarity throughoutAlongsideEurope.aplentiful range of port folio artists, our feature section brings together a list of contributors that kindly shared with us some thoughtful contribu tions to this issue. Our bookshelf feature has a renewed form: we asked Mariama Attah to compose a thorough review of Mark Sealy’s latest publication Photography, Race and Representation . For the What’s New section, Awa Konaté writes about a new body of work by Silvia Rosi, titled Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense , currently premiering at the MAXXI Foundation in Rome. We feel honoured to host a conversation between acclaimed artist and co-founder of the Beirut-based Arab Image Foundation Akram Zaatari and art historian Nina Möntmann. They speak about the motivations and the many layers behind his work, and the idea of art

3EDITORIAL

— The Editors

ist as archeologist. During the production of the magazine, we also received fantastic news: Karolina Wojtas, latest recipient of the Florentine Riem Vis Stipendium has been pronounced winner of the C/O Berlin Talent Award 2022. Her work abzgram will be presented in a solo exhibition from 28 Jan 4 May 2023 at C/O Berlin. Amongst the incredible contribu tions within the long form sections of the magazine, we are proud to present a deep and inspiring conversation between Taous R. Dahmani and Johny Pitts, which also includes a premiere selection of images coming from Johny’s forthcoming book Home is Not a Place, made in collaboration with Roger Robinson and to be published by HarperCollins in late September 2022. The exhibition by Johny Pitts, supported by the inaugural Ampersand/Photoworks Fellowship will be exhibited at Graves Gallery, Museums Sheffield from 10 August 24 December 2022 and Stills Gallery, Edinburgh from 9 March 10 June 2023. We are deeply grateful for all these generous and fertile collaborations, and for our readers allowing us to provide critical possibilities and plural thinking: it is thanks to all of you that we can aim at creating the possibility of We.

6 WHAT’S SilviaNEW

7WHAT’S ArticleRosiNEWbyAwaKonaté

SILVIA ROSI is a London-based artist working with photography and video to explore ideas of memory, migration and diaspora. She graduated from the London College of Communication in 2016 with a BA in Photography. Re cent exhibitions include the Jerwood/ Photoworks Awards at Jerwood Arts (2020), In the Now: Gender and Nation in Europe at LACMA (2021) and the festival Circulation(s) at Le Centquatre-Paris (2022).

The word of God speaks in Ewe. Bound in a red hardback, a bible is displayed in front of a waxed fabric made in Togo, an important country for its production. This particular print is almost as red as the bible, printed with a set of numbers and alphabet letters, accompanied by images of rulers and pages. Suits are tailored using this fabric and are only worn by those who have successfully learnt and mastered the alphabet. Consumed in learning, dressed in this uniform, Rosi is almost unidentifiable; hidden, yet somewhat undetectable to a colonial gaze.

10 WHAT’S NEW

of the 1900s, the Germans standard ised Ewe in an attempt to civilise Togolese dialects, particularly through Christian missionaries. The French prohibited Ewe in the early 20th century but failed to erase its dominance outside institutional settings. To this day, Ewe retains a certain status of literacy to it.

An adult Rosi sits on her mother’s lap. They mirror and support each other. They both stare ahead. Their lips are closed and still. They do not appear to be speaking, verbally that is. Rosi’s hand is clenched, holding the wired shutter, the cable like an umbilical cord. Lightness and heaviness, dis comfort and rest, are suspended. The child learns through the body of the mother. As does the mother learn through their child of other ways to speak, and other ways to hold quietness. Rosi’s photography does not simply voice a loss, rather she tries to give language to this loss, to speak of how to deal, sit, and embrace this loss.

All images: Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense © Silvia Rosi, 2022. Work produced with the support of the MAXXI Foundation National Museum of XXI Century Arts, Rome and AWABVLGARI.KONATÉ is a London and Copenhagen-based curator and founder of Culture Art Society (CAS). Her curatorial practice foregrounds archival research and interdiscipli nary frameworks of African/diasporic artists with a focus on photography and the moving image. She has devel oped a range of projects pursuant to creating curatorial interventions within the public and institutional realm. She has worked with The Showroom, Serpentine Galleries, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, and the Danish Film Institute, to mention a few. Awa’s writings have been published in Third Text, Phaidon, and more.

The chapter ‘Black Atlantic’ takes a focus on the physical and conceptual ideas of taking up space through visibility and the feeling of being freed or re stricted by this. The projects shape a context for how varied this response can be. From James VanDerZee photographing the — until then — invisible Black middle classes of the early 1900s in Harlem, to documenting the forced relocation and dislocation frozen in cultural memory by Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen’s Promised

This question of power and agency also extends to the responsibility of curating and staging African photo graphy and the role physical spaces play in providing, or failing to provide, a suitable contextual space, or even in helping to define what is meant by ‘African photography’.

As the director of an organisation established to support the artistic practice of minority voices, Sealy’s ability to reflect on and recognise his own position of privilege in this context demonstrates a level of self-awareness mirrored throughout the texts in this book. Here, he goes on to deftly explain the shortcomings of the term ‘African photography’. This is to release the artist or body of work from the burden of being othered, an act which minimis es the accomplishments of an artist or body of work owing to its original context and the subsequent colonial expectations and blind spots of the art world.

The past thirty years, overlapping and approaching from different angles and times, acknowledge that we are living in a future. Photography: Race, Rights and Representation has chronicled this journey and acts as foundation for the next thirty years of noting victories, charting progress, and restoring agency to people and their experiences.

The query points to those in positions of privilege, namely curators and directors, who possess the ability to gather the many threads of history, to demonstrate assertive, inclusive collection management and curato rial approaches, and to provide a more accurate and reli able understanding of how artists tell their own stories.

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Land. LaToya Ruby Frazier is also named as a practition er who defiantly takes space while returning the discom fort onto the viewer. Black Atlantic also speaks to the onus of othering and presents the work of Rotimi Fani-Kayode as a prime example. The essay points out the predictable and thin comparisons to the work of Robert Mapplethorpe who also used the male body as his central concern. FaniKayode demonstrated a complete grasp of the cultural and artistic references within his photographic frame. He telegraphed the desires of Black men, his sexuality in relation to his African-ness, and his confidence in his practice yet he still had to overcome the failure of the art sector to recognise this. In reference to earlier texts in this book, Sealy reaffirms the need for institutions to become active in legitimising art forms. He remarks that this period of the 1980s and 1990s was a time of an emergent activism in the arts in the UK and notes that Fani-Kayode was part of this movement and was the second chair of Autograph ABP. One contemporary collection cited as an example of the diaspora collecting the diaspora is Kenneth Montague’s photographic collection. It is presented as an example of assertive, inclusive collection management and curatorial approaches and has been the site of origin of a number of bold exhibitions.Theconversation maintains momentum in ‘Forward-Facing People’. The chapter opens with an interview between Sealy and Hall on the hindrance and expectation of representation for artists and institutions. The chapters and individual entries don’t shy away from posing questions and acknowledging that answers aren’t always within reach. It is the thirty-year overview that acts as a reminder that change, or even the recognition that change needs to be made, is often slow and sometimes invisible. ‘Experiments with Time’ plays with the elastic, elusive nature of photography; its ability to flex and adapt over time in response to the viewers of the photographs themselves who also accumulate meaning and memory over time, revising initial impressions and interpretations with the benefit of hindsight. This leads to the photograph being read as a portal, a way of going back in the past to collect material and then moving into the future through a reinvention and expansion of art history.

The set of images featured in the centre of the book act as a refresher for the names, projects, themes, and thoughts that have been mentioned throughout.

The title refers to an exhibition of the same name curated by Sealy in 2015 and organised by Ryerson Image Centre in collaboration with Autograph ABP where Sealy is Director. The exhibition and chapter pose the question of how images have historically been used in framing positions of ethics, moral obligations and responsibility, what human rights have looked like over the span of the past few decades, and for whom. Both exhibition and chapter demonstrate photography’s pivotal power in establishing hierarchies of human rights and human worth, and explain the process of determining who was able to have a history, and who had histories rewritten on their behalf.

Cultural amnesia, slavery, exploitation and visual violence are key notes in chapter two, ‘Human Rights, Human Wrongs’.

The original platforms that a number of these texts were intended for draw together to form an interesting compi lation of ideas. While they are presented in themed chap ters, rather than laid out in chronological order, the progress and direction of travel over the past three decades can still be followed the earliest contribution dating back to 1995. They form an outlook that filters across a number of approaches and ambitions. They offer per sonal experience, curatorial concerns, opinion, and art critique.

The final chapter ‘Photography: Promises to Make a Revolution’ opens with five short acts starting at the point in time when the ability to fix photographs was discovered. Sealy speaks of the camera as a key tool in colonialism and of wrangling history and hierarchies into place. Sealy reminds us of the power and importance of counter narratives, in questioning set histories, in reposi tioning, researching, and reasserting broader viewpoints.

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INTERVIEW 15 MöntmannAkramZaatariNinainconversationwithPortraitsbyMohamadAbdouni

Akram Zaatari, Photographic Currency, 2019. Photograph by Hashem el Madani, featuring Abdel-Rahman Al-Qady. Saida, early 1950s. Courtesy of the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery Beirut / Hamburg

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Akram Zaatari, Photographic Currency, 2019, Traditional quilt, satin/linen fabric, cotton-filled, hand-made by Mustapha Al-Qady, Saida, Lebanon; Courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery Beirut / Hamburg. Photo: Volker Renner Akram Zaatari, The Reinvention of Orient, 2022. Courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery Beirut / Hamburg

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THEME TEXT24 NOTIONSOF

25 by Elisa THEMEMeddeTEXT NOTIONSWE

26 ‘In the broad social sciences as well as in the discourse on politics, there is no consensus on how we should understand the nation — what its origins are, or on its meaning and value. By contrast there is widespread acceptance that nationalism — whether understood as doctrine, ideology, sentiment, identity, or movement — is a modern phenomenon. But after this, agreement largely ends. Two central divides exist with respect to mapping the nation and hence its relationship to nationalism. Is the nation old or new? Is it predominantly cultural or political? That is to say, even as most would accept that the nation (and nationalism) is both cultural and political, which is the dimension that is more important for grasping its (their) nature? From these two basic divides in perspective stem a whole host of ambiguities of comprehension and assessment that has created a situation whereby all theories of the nation and nationalism are partial.’

— Vanaik

www.versobooks.com/blogs/3578-marxism-and-nationalism

Achin

THEME TEXT

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THEME TEXT

As I am writing these words, I am sitting on a high-speed train crossing multiple borders across Western Europe. No one asked me for an ID or passport, and most likely no one will. Should something happen to me while travelling, the health system I am part of will cover the costs. My phone and internet rates will be the same for the whole trip, as if I were home in the Netherlands. My rights in my chosen home are pretty much the same as they are in my ancestral home, Sardinia. My passport is red. For many of my generation, this is pretty much what Europe means: freedom of movement, travel and work without papers, the virtual possibility to relocate pretty much everywhere within the continent at will. Yet, this is just the surface. There are quite substantial differences within the single countries, especially when it comes to welfare, salaries, efficiency, corruption. Some of these differences are almost clichés: salaries are better in Northern Europe, quality of life is better in Southern Europe, and so on. One could even think this postcard image is after all not that far from the dream of a united Europe which fuelled its very creation. During World War II, it was the spreading of internationalism, as an opposite to nationalism, that triggered the establishment of political foundations for the project of a united continen tal Europe. Amongst the social movements that started in the 19th century, the idea that humans could, and should, unite for the common good grew stronger and steadier. Most importantly, they started setting moral values of solidarity, equality and mutual support away from a religious context or dictate. The foundation of the Council of Europe dates back to May 1949, finally bring ing a number of sovereign nations around the table to talk common ground. The European Convention on Human Rights came shortly after, in 1950. In a continent devastated by war and nationalist psychosis, internation alism was seen by many as a golden chance, a necessary step towards something better — or at least different. From then on, a great deal of energy has been spent, in a political and economic sense, to create and build on a shared European identity. Ideally, a transnational identity, one that would thrive on the achievements and successes of the integration process of the European Union, along with the catchy motto ‘United in Diversity’. People’s Europe, instead of Nation’s Europe. Ideally. It was under such intense, strong emotions and expecta tions that a renewed need for a shared visual identity of Europe started taking shape. Henri Cartier-Bresson published The Europeans in 1955, after having travelled across the continent for years in search of humanity, the common business of living amongst the people of Europe. A seminal example of humanist photography, The Europeans displayed an unforgiving, yet hopeful, collective portrait of the people inhabiting the western part of the continent. Cartier-Bresson came constantly back to the project during his life, expanding it and enlarging it until about 1991, only a couple of years after the end of the Cold War, and the fall of Berlin’s Wall. His Europe is complicated, passionate, at times illogic but full of life, and contributed greatly to creating the postcard-ready visual identity of Europe: the rural but genuine Europe, full of art and at decadent beauty, the laborious Europe, the poor but dignified post-war Europe, and so on.

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MONICA YOUN is the author of Blackacre (Graywolf Press, 2016), which won the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America and was also shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Award, longlisted for the National Book Award, and named one of the best poetry books of 2016 by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and BuzzFeed. Her previous book Ignatz (Four Way Books, 2010) was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has been awarded the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Witter Bytter Fellow ship from the Library of Congress, and a Stegner Fellowship. A former constitutional lawyer and the daughter of Korean immigrants, Monica is an associate professor of English at UC Irvine. Her fourth book FROM FROM is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in March 2023.

All in all, I guess it ended up being a particularly opportune time to be talking about nationalism, although I have no doubt that opportune times will continue to present themselves. We asked each moderator to ask one question of each participant: ‘As a fellow worker in the imaginary, how do you think about the re lationship between nationalism and the “we”? How do you see these concepts at play in your work?’

THE RACIAL IMAGINARY INSTITUTE (TRII) is an Interdis ciplinary Cultural Laboratory based on the premise that race is one of the prime ways history lives in us. Working as a collective of artists, writers, know ledge-producers and activists, it was co-founded in 2017 by authors Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda. In 2018, TRII organised the historic symposium ‘On Whiteness’, reuniting a dazzling array of thinkers, artists and activists seeking to examine white ness as a source of often unquestioned or even unobserved power, and make visible variations of this dangerous ideology that has been intentionally positioned as neutral. The essays that resulted from the event have been pub lished in July 2022 by Self Publish Be Happy with the title On Whiteness: The Racial Imaginary Institute We were living in a nation that was more explicitly white nation alist than it had been in some time, and on the receiving end of a seemingly endless series of headline-grabbing crises, which seemed painfully to keep re-inscribing the old fault lines of dominance, exploitation and hatred on an exhausted and rapidly warming world building ever higher walls and more weapon ised borders on the globe and in the human imagination.

We found ourselves asking, is there anything worth salvaging in this idea of nationalism? Of nation? Of tribe? Will affective ties that start at the level of cohort, of community, inevitably turn exclusionary, become lethal after obtaining access to power? And as artists and as workers in the imaginary, how can we re-imagine nation, tribe, community? What practices of listening, sharing, and making could be enacted across varying visions of community, decolonisation and self-determination? How can we build upon this idea of the ‘we’ which is both so fragile and yet so suffused with potential? So, we initially planned the symposium for May 2020. In the interim, some stuff happened… We saw a world wall itself off, close its doors to an extent unprecedented in modern times. We saw the incarcerated, the unhoused, the impoverished, the precarious left to the ravages of the virus. We saw Black and Brown workers euphemised as ‘essential’ while treated as expendable. We saw the well-to-do ordering Amazon, buying country homes and watching their investment portfolios soar. We saw, as we have always seen, genocidal campaigns against Palestinians, Uyghurs, Kurds and so many other state less people go without response or any realistic hope of respite; We saw the West abandon Afghanistan, Haiti, Ethiopia, Libya and other nations to violent turmoil and destitution, with out taking responsibility for its own legacy of enslavement, colo nialism, imperial capitalism and globalised white supremacy. We saw people across the world raise their voices in pro test against state-sponsored anti-Black violence and the carceral state, and we saw those in power respond with business as usual. We saw the world on fire, and the governments of the world seemingly unable or unwilling to stop fueling the fire. We saw a would-be dictator attempt to subvert, then to overthrow U.S. democratic government, and we saw even insur rectionist violence and open treason normalised. We saw an actual dictator invade a neighboring nation, and all of the supposed tools of diplomacy and international consen sus fall short to avert large-scale, continuing violence.

STEVE MCQUEEN Year 3 33

‘Watching1 photographs’ is borrowed from Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone Books, 2008.

3 — Text by Renée Mussai cally48certified, collectively multiplied. It is, too, an invitation to contemplate the myriad personal and socio-political ques tions many amplified by the pandemic that arise from this profound photo graphic campaign of visibility orchestrated by McQueen, conducted both within and outside the confines of the museum. Seen by millions, Year 3 was installed on 600 billboards across London’s thirty-three boroughs, including at 200 railway plat forms and 100 underground stations. What do these images tell us about citizenship, community and belonging, or the value of communality, conformity and commonality? What questions and identity politics will they the year-three pupils grapple with? How will they mould their, the city’s, and our collective futures in light of planetary emergencies, health, climate, social and racial justice campaigns waged globally? Unfolding wars and invasions in Europe and beyond? Must they con tinue to contend with hyphenated identi ties, gendered inequalities and structural binaries? What conscious decisions, inher ited privileges or force of circumstance will determine their fates and the fate of others whose lives they will touch? What ecologies of care and kinship might they practise? What groups might they form in the future, what ideologies and actions will they resist, insist, desist?

2 The notion of ‘response/ability’ is adapted/borrowed from Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark; Whiteness and the Literary Imagination Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. ‘Images3 of tomorrow’ is borrowed from Samuel R. Delany’s Starboard Wine: More Notes on the Language of Science Fiction. New York: Dragon Press, 1984.

As I look at this profound archive of photo graphically rendered young social selves again two years later, things feel more precarious and divisive than ever, and I wonder not if, but how the experience of the pandemic has shaped them, changed and rearranged them? And as someone with a personal repertoire of largely mono chromatic/homogenous school photo graphs, where whiteness was the norm and (my) Black- or Brown-ness the exception, I wonder, too, what such collective nation portraits might look like in other parts of Europe today, and as images of tomorrow?

RENÉE MUSSAI is a research-led curator, writer and scholar with a special interest in Black feminist Afrodiasporic photographic and visual arts practices. She is senior curator and head of Curatorial & Collections at Autograph, London, as well as as sociate lecturer at the University of the Arts London and Research Associate at VIAD, University of Johannesburg. She has curated numerous exhibitions internationally, including the criti cally acclaimed Black Chronicles (2014 –18; publication forthcoming) and Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness (2017–2021) and edited award-winning artist mono graphs such as Lina Iris Viktor: Some Are Born To Endless Night Dark Matter (Autograph, 2020).

p. 33 Steve McQueen, Year 3, 2019. St Cyprian’s Greek Orthodox Primary © Steve McQueen & Tate pp. 34-35 Steve McQueen, Year 3, 2019. Alpha Preparatory School © Steve McQueen & Tatepp. 38-39 Steve McQueen, Year 3, 2019. Clifton Primary School © Steve McQueen & Tatepp. 40-41 Steve McQueen, Year 3, 2019. Class Photograph © Steve McQueen & Tate pp. 44-45 Steve McQueen, Year 3, 2019. Northway Primary School © Steve McQueen & Tate p. Installation46 view of Steve McQueen Year 3 at Tate Britain, 12 November 2019 – 31 January 2021 © Tate pp. 36, 37, 42, 43 Billboards photographed in situ by Theo Christelis © Steve McQueen & STEVETate MCQUEEN was born in London and currently lives and works in London and Amsterdam. He is one of the most renowned artists and filmmakers of his generation, creating works to be shown in gallery spaces in addition to the cinematic films: Hunger (2008), Shame (2010), the Oscarwinning 12 Years a Slave (2013) and most recently Widows (2018), as well as the series Small Axe, an anthology of five films shown on BBC and Amazon (2020). McQueen won the Turner Prize in 1999, represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2009, and was awarded an OBE in 2002, a CBE in 2011 and received a Royal Knighthood in 2022. Year 3 (Tate, 2022) is available as an exhibition book, containing 300 of the 3,128 exhibition class photographs.

STEVE MCQUEEN

KARIM EL MAKTAFI Searching for Heritage 49

— Text by Nadine Khalil

NADINE KHALIL is an independent arts writer, researcher, and curator. After a decade-long stint in art pub lishing, she is currently advising art institutions such as the Ishara Art Foundation, Goethe-Institut, and the NYUAD Arts Center on editorial strategy and content development. She is the former editor of Dubaibased contemporary art magazine, Canvas (2017–2020), and Beirut-based magazines A mag and Bespoke (2010–2016). Nadine has authored a series of artist monographs (Paroles d’Artistes) on Lebanese artists Samir Sayegh, Hanibal Srouji, and the late filmmaker Jocelyne Saab, and curated for Euro pean film festivals such as MidEast Cut and the Arab Independent Film Festival.

KARIM EL MAKTAFI

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The nuance in El Maktafi’s work is that he focuses on what is hidden from view to uncover layers of meaning. For example, his documentation of a tribal 8th-century equestrian Moroccan ritual celebrating autumn’s grape harvest includes an image of a man shrouded in a traditional djellaba from which the edge of a sabre peeks out. The photo is cropped in a way that you can only see an exposed hand, ornate textiles and part of the horse but not a full figure. The series encapsulates the subtlety of movement, the need to synchronise the firing with speed and male camarade rie. Even in his most expository work, El Maktafi doesn’t reveal everything at once. He doesn’t define things, preferring an open-ended look at the ties that bind and the significations of space, as opposed to place.

All images from the series Searching for Heritage © Karim El Maktafi, courtesy of the KARIMartistEL

MAKTAFI is a MoroccanItalian photographer. In 2013, he graduated at the Instituto Italiano di Fotografia, Milan. Karim works on long-term projects between Italy and Morocco exploring concepts such as identity and a sense of belonging through documentary and portrait photography. His work has been exhibited at the Triennale de Milano, Museum in der Kulturbrauerei in Berlin, the Pavillon Populaire in Montpellier, Macro Testaccio Museum in Rome and other photography festivals in Europe. Karim has been published in the Washington Post Magazine, National Geographic USA, Internazionale, Vice, amongst others.

the natural environments depicted lack signifiers that attach them to a par ticular place the textural rocky forma tions marking the beginning of the Atlas Mountains or the dying agave plant could sit just as easily in South America. ‘I began my practice with landscapes but I’m try ing to connect more with people’, the artist explains. In Ghorba, he photographs sec ond-generation Moroccans living in Italy, some without papers (and who don’t face the camera) and others in profile views, or showing off their line-up haircuts. Pre sented in a grid composed of passport-style photographs with gaping spaces between them, they seem to defy the homogenisa tion of identity cards while adhering to the passport’s rigid visual language. Like an in complete archive, this work points to those living on the fringes of European society and yet essential for its industry.

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All images form the series azbgram © Karolina Wojtas, courtesy of the artist KAROLINA WOJTAS draws from the imagination of children and transforms this material into walk-in installations. She graduated from the Film School in Łódź, Poland and the Institute of Creative Photography in Opava, Czech Republic. She was nominated for the reGeneration Prize of the Musée d’Elysée in Lausanne, the Plat(t)form of the Fotomuseum Winterthur, and was awarded the ING Unseen Talent Award 2019 in Amsterdam. Her works have been shown at the Fotofestiwal in Łódź (2021), the Kraków Photomonth (2020), and the Noorderlicht International Photo Festival (2020). Karolina is the recipient of the 2022 C/O Berlin Talent Award, and her work will be presented in a solo exhibition from 28 January to 4 May 2023 at C/O ARKADIUSZBerlin.

ANTOSZ is a fresh graduate of the Łódź Film School, with a major in Screenwriting. Winner of, amongst others, the international series project competition Canal+ Series Lab and the script competition of the Script Fiesta Festival. He creates scripts for various visual forms, but also other literary texts. In his works, Arkadiusz most willingly explores magical realism and the world of a small town.

Sex education in Polish schools does not exist. There is (barely) ‘Preparation for family life’ (because the word ‘sex’ is vulgar) Might my sexual orientation be wrong because I like boys instead of girls? Is it normal that my period is too heavy? Can I get pregnant from a blow job? No! Stop! Blow job?! Period? Homosexuality?! You cannot talk about such things! There is no place for such profanity in school! You will learn that the most important need of women is the need for love, which finds fulfilment in finding a husband and begetting children. In matters of sex, you will learn (at most) that the best method of contraception (the word ‘contraception’ should also be pronounced in a whisper) is a calendar method, recommended by the priest teaching religion classes.

Szymborska72

While PFFL is an omitted subject, reli gion is one of the most important subjects at school. Religion? So lectures about all religions? Noooooo. Religion class trains you how to be a good Catholic. After all, everyone in Poland should be Catholic. You will learn the most necessary things: 20 secrets of the rosary (more important than the multiplication table), how to be God’s soldiers, what is a sin (almost everything), that sperm in a condom is a bunch of trapped souls and homosexuality is a disease. You don’t want to attend religion classes? Really? Okaaaay. Poland is a very tolerant country. You can sign out. All you need to do is submit an official letter to the head master signed by your parents, deal with leaflets describing the consequences of this act, public stigma and probably words sim ilar to what my friend heard: ‘Good luck on the way to hell ’ . Fuck sex education. It’s better to watch porn to find out what sex in real life is like, and have a specialised teacher who will tell you how to pray the rosary correctly.

Do I hear that right? Yes, it’s a school

(a Polish Nobel Prize winner for Literature), tried to answer a high school final’s task of interpreting her own poem. She did it in her own way. It turned out that if she had to write the final exam, she would have received so few points for this interpretation that she would not have passed. Because the ANSWER KEY said something else. Funny? For us it is funny. The funniest is what is real. This is only an urban legend, but no one, neither the student nor the teacher, would be surprised if it happened in Whyreality.isit like that? Because the Polish education system is not changing. It is a system that was meant to PRODUCE (not educate) tamed civilians who would be the most productive workforce and ask no Couldquestions.itchange?

KAROLINA—No?adultyouschoolDoGooood-byyeee-miiiss-teeaaa-cheer.bell!youfeelthatyouarereadytolive?Haspreparedyouforeverything?Areeducatedwellenoughtofunctioninlife?Oh,howsad.Dealwithit.TextbyArkadiuszAntoszWOJTAS

•

LESSON THREE: Sex, drugs & religion SURVEY (check if you have noticed) • virgin moustache • your tits started to grow • pimples appeared on your face • hair growing in strange parts awkward excitement in parts of your body that until now were only used for Noticedpissingat least two of the given options? This is the time. A strange shame, igno rance, and uncertainty. Embarrassing ques tions you’d rather not ask your parents, so you hope to find answers in school.

What do you think? Cur rently, the Minister of Education is Mr Czarnek, who gave the National Education Commission medal to an exorcist for fight ing Satan, and publicly claims that women are wrong for not doing what they were called by God to do: to bear children. So, how do you survive? How do you break the Sometimes,system?

something is born out of noth ing. Obstacles can stimulate, but only the strongest will survive. Unless you are lucky/ rich/have parents with connections.

OLIVER LEU Leopold’s Legacy 73

‘With a raised rifle — symbolising power and courage — Baron Dhanis accepts the surrender of an Arabian chief, bow ing submissively at his feet. Yet the vic tor restrains the urge of his exaltation, and with a protective gesture receives the grateful tribute offered to him by the freed African, in the form of a small child, emblematic of the bright future that the Congo is facing.’

Ons Volk Ontwaakt, 1913

— Text by Zeynep

OLIVER LEU studied Comparative Theology and Indology in Cologne and Bonn before he turned to photo graphy. He trained as a photographer at the University of Applied Sciences in Bielefeld. In his artistic practice, Oliver is concerned with questioning religion, the construction of history, the abuse of power and the consequences of colonial pasts. Since 2014, Oliver has developed these ideas in his project on Leopold II, for which he is researching and photographing the various forms of representation of the colonial history of Congo in Belgium. Leopold’s Legacy was published by the Eriskay Connec tion in ZEYNEP2020.KUBAT is a curator and writer. In her work, she focuses on the crossroads between art, culture and society. She is coordinator and core editor for rekto:verso magazine. She is also chief editor of TYPP Journal (Sint Lucas School of Arts Antwerp) and editor for FORUM+, journal for art and research. She is a board member of several institutions and organisations in the contemporary arts field. Zeynep curates exhibitions in contemporary art, mainly focusing on intersectional artistic practices, and often acts as artistic advisor.

All images from the series Leopold’s Legacy © Oliver Leu, courtesy of the Imageartistp.74list:(top to bottom): From the archive of the RMCA, Tervuren (B). HP.1946.1058.1-24_ PHOTO_1, photo A. Gautier, 1897 From the FelixArchief, Stadsarchief Antwerpen. GP#5862 p.84 (bottom): From the archive of the RMCA, Tervuren (B). HP.1946.1058.1_ SCAN_14, photo A. Gautier, 1897

archiving88 machine, every photograph, every film is a priori an archival object’.

OLIVERKubat

Furthermore, the positivist craze of the 19th century and the creation of the archive is inextricably linked to imperialist coloni alism. The photographic medium has been an essential tool to manipulate the narra tives that are procured by these archives. By photographically reproducing and altering the carriers of our colonial past in the form of public art and architecture, Leu seems to prepare them to be stored in the past. In this way, he tries to ‘[delve] into critical transactions predicated on open ing up new pictorial and historiographic experiences against the exactitude of the photographic trace’ (Enwezor, 2008). Yet, more than satisfying our intrin sic mal d’archives or archive fever, as Derrida identified the desperate wish to control all available knowledge, Leu’s photographic practice unravels such authoritative bounds. As Enwezor reminds us: Classifying information, data, or knowl edge is today a pervasive method of regula tory control of the archive. And this con trol over the flow of information is strengthened by other networks of archival manipulation or data generation’. The rearrangement and collage into new pos sible monuments by Leu reveals the ambiguous and fragmentary meaning that such carriers of constructed narratives hold. The archive always departs from a teleological viewpoint, a linear relationship between past, present and future. Leu’s work shakes up the temporality of the documented monuments, and creates an intermedial atemporal zone to question the effects of colonialism: what will these monuments mean in the future if we don’t decide to change them today?

LEU

89 RUDE LONG READ ANDBRITISHLOVECANBETOONATIONALISMRACIALWHITENESS BY DANIEL C. BLIGHT

On the news, I learn the opinions of people with which I have seemingly little in common. British nationalists draw a burnt nostalgia from the past and speak about this country in a way that has no humanity and disturbingly mythical roots. What binds them together is a force so expansive and violent that it prefers not to be seen, but can be heard everywhere in regal brass and slow drums. 90 LOVE CAN BE RUDE TOO ↑↑ page:Previous T-Shirt,Kids MatiRene ć ©2021. DayVE MatiReneIII,Skegness, ć 2020© ← BlueandWhiteRed MatiRene, ć ©2019 ↓ TattooWaveNewatRene MatiRene, ć ©2020

I never really liked this place and now I look closely I realise it was ruined long ago and is kept alive only by the vacuous perpetuity of Empire. My childhood self would be happy to know there are white dragons here, but they breathe dissimulation, not fire, and they leave very little to my imagination. All the stories I have been told all the myths that subliminally form me have been replaced by cold histories in my mind. The Old English State Linked to France, 1066–1453 The New Nationalism, 1453–1603 British England, 1603–1783 Englishness and Empire, 1783–1967 Englishness and the Decline of Britishness, a Pub1

PostscriptIntoPopulism1968–2018theFuturefrom

As artist Rene Matić observes in a set of ostensibly documentary photographs, England doesn’t really exist, apart from in the minds of those nationalists that choose to identify the nation as a white island which excludes the lives of anyone who is not sitting at the top of what Feagin and Ducey call the elite-white-male dominance system. This is a long history dating back at least to the 1600s that has found rejuvenated life today. In May 2022, a UK Government report3 leaked in the Guardian titled ‘Windrush scandal caused by “30 years of racist immigration laws” report’ details how secretive legis lation intends to reduce the number of Black and Brown people migrating to the nation. Covertly, the Tories have bought into Far-Right, ‘Great Replacement’, white nationalist propaganda, and played it out in policy. In their images, Matić gets as close to this system as anyone might want to, studying it through a combination of critical symbolism, political subversiveness and person al intimacy.Matić’s photographs are, according to Hannah Black, ‘anti-symbolic’. These are images that counterframe old and tired nationalist symbolisms by re-staging them, or rudely interrupting them (as the artist states in their own description of their practice on their website). Part of this re-staging is to centre love over white nation alist symbolism. In a nation of hate, love can be rude too, Matić seems to say.

On YouTube, I watch a CGI white dragon on a red flag blowing in the wind at what looks like a sunset, presumably in England. The video is set to music from Land of Hope and Glory. I feel compelled to watch it a second time. In the comments, nil db says ‘Raise the White Dragon, England first’. I search inside myself for any feeling of pride or nostalgia. All I find there is the arrogance of misanthropy. What would a flag that unites everyone on this island look like, I wonder? What kind of symbol, or image, could counter-frame the violence of that white dragon on a red flag? If there exists a flag which represents love, I hope I’d recognise it.

‘To construct the nation, you have to construct those outside of it’, says Dalia Gebrial. I am writing from the inside, yet I don’t want to be here. To accept my own nationhood is to accept the way my body is invisibly and silently marked within a circle of white racial protection. To other white people, I am achromic, part of a norma tively white demos. My identity or nationhood is never in question. In this way, my whiteness constitutes the nation, outlining the meaning of me and folding it into a structure of white racial domination. Outside of the social structure of white racial dominance are those individuals deemed not autochthonously British. Black people, Brown people and people of colour are catego rised as second-class citizens and actively discriminated against. Nations are ‘necessarily exclusive’.2 Contem porary Britain is cold too.

In Kids T-Shirt (2021), the cotton flexibility of words and clothing combine to form a close-cropped sign. The word ‘England’ (a place that doesn’t exist) is ironically positioned next to the tagline ‘PRIDE OF EUROPE’. This image says one thing and means another: England is warped into embarrassing form; pride is figured as a rhetorical contradiction. I search inside myself for a feel ing of national pride. Again, nothing.

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96 LOVE CAN BE RUDE TOO

Rene’s work is in several prominent collections including Tate, London, UK; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, FR; UK Government Art Collection, London, UK; Martin Parr Foundation, Bristol, DANIELUK.C.BLIGHT works on various forms of the essay, fiction and poetry, and has written for magazines and journals including 1000 Words, Aperture, Frieze, The Guardian, Philosophy of Photography, Photo works, Vogue Italia, and contributed chapters to publications from Man chester Art Gallery, UCL Art Museum, Art Museum of Estonia, FOMU Belgium, the Australian Centre for Photography and Rowman & Littlefield. His first edited book, The Image of Whiteness: Contemporary Photography and Racialization, was published by SPBH Editions and Art on the Underground in 2019. He is currently working on a monograph provisionally titled Photography’s White Racial Frame (Bloomsbury, 2024).

The invitation to feel whole is at the core of contempo rary British nationalism. Brexit was exactly this invitation when it highlighted and rejuvenated far-right racial oth ering by posing the question ‘Stay or leave?’ The question might as well have been ‘Do you wish to feel whole again?’, offered in the form of rhetoric by a misguided, exploitative and racist ruling elite. Although any British national could vote, this question was framed as if it was being entirely posed to the white working class.5 The figureheads of the elite-white-male dominance system asked for us to believe in British national sovereignty in order to see it, because the order of Brexit is an order that makes and breaks the promise of the image of British wholeness apart from the supposedly lesser image of Europeanness. Along visual-symbolic lines, Brexit pits the British flag, underpinned by the St. George’s Cross, against the flag of Europe. By setting up a visual counter-frame in their images, Matić works against what might be called the current intersections of conspiratorial Far-Right nationalism and racial whiteness. Hannah Black describes the artist’s photographs as anti-symbols representative of a kind of convergence. The artist is seen ‘interspersing images of white British nationalism — through snapshots of traditional iconography, slogan t-shirts and the union jack with moments of love and intimacy’. I look within these images for a sense of hope not offered to me in the worn symbols of the nation Matić and I were both born in yet have had very different expe riences of. The regal myths of old England impress upon me not a sense of nostalgia for white dragons, but a fear that so many white racial identities can still be tethered to such a great British lie. I never really liked this place but at least I recognise love here now.

1 All the chapter titles from Jeremy Black (2018), English Nationalism London: C. Hurst & Co. Simon2 Clarke and Steve Garner (2010), “Britishness” in White Identities: A Critical Sociological Approach. London: Pluto Press. Amelia3 Gentleman (2022), “Windrush scandal caused by ‘30 years of racist immigration laws’ report” in the Guardian. London: Guardian News & Media Ltd. Kalpana4 Seshadri-Crooks (2000), Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race. New York: NeemaRoutledge.5Begum, Aurelien Mondon & Aaron Winter (2022), “Between the ‘left behind’ and ‘the people’: Racism, populism and the construction of the ‘white working class’ in the context of Brexit” in Shona Hunter & Christi van der Westhuizen, Routledge Handbook of Critical Studies in Whiteness. London: Routledge.

RENE MATIĆ lives and works in London. Their work brings together themes of post-Blackness, glitch feminism and subcultural theory in a meeting place they describe as rude(ness) to interrupt and exist in/between. Recent solo exhibitions include in spite of, instead of, Quench Gallery, Margate, UK (2022), flags for countries that don’t exist but bodies that do, Arcadia Missa, London, UK (2021), Born British Die British, VITRINE Gallery, London, UK (2021).

97LONG READ REPRESENTATIONFRAMEAWORKROMA BY ANCA PUSCA STANDINGUNDERFOR-

98 A FRAMEWORK FOR UNDERSTANDING...

The spectrum of Roma representation is large, spanning different forms of popular culture — from photography to film, posters to graffiti, newspapers to documentaries, oral traditions to social media as well as more traditional forms of formal representation arts and crafts, as well as political representation. Across these different representations, there is always an uneasy focus on: 1. capturing the ‘authentic’ Romani figure (across a population of millions, spread across multiple countries and continents, engaged in multiple fields and activities, the ability to find to ‘quintessential’ representation is, of course, futile); 2. preserving the entertainment value of ‘exotic’ Roma representations as separate from less exotic depictions of Roma poverty and discrimination; and 3) finding agency even in carefully scripted performances, particularly through new opportunities for self-representation. This piece suggests that the transition from early photographic depictions of Roma, such as Josef Koudelka’s photo graphy, to new reality TV shows focusing on Roma, such as Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, and more recently Roma imagery generated by the increasingly large number of Roma NGOs and aid groups, marks an important turn in Roma representation: the recognition that invisibility is no longer possible, and that visibility needs to be even more carefully managed.

While the Roma have traditionally managed their security by carefully controlling how they became visible to others remaining for the most part invisible, their increased exposure through the necessity of migration, the emergence of new surveillance technol ogies and the rise of more intrusive forms of represen tation, has forced them to find creative ways to main tain secrecy and hence security even under increased visibility. This appears to have been achieved through a fine-tuning of their performance under the ‘gaze’ of oth ers. This fine-tuning has been recently assisted by a significant rise in funds favouring positive depictions of Roma life and culture, Roma’s presence in the arts and Roma education as well as an increased willingness on behalf of Roma communities to grant photographers and film-makers access to their homes and private environment in tightly controlled circumstances.

To showcase this change and adaptation, the article focuses on the photography of Koudelka, a Czecho slovakian photographer, and a series of new reality television shows including Big Fat Gypsy Wedding.

These empirical case studies were chosen for a series of specific reasons: 1. Koudelka served as one of the first models of ‘good’ Roma photography and remains one of the most celebrated Roma photographers of all

Romani Gypsies 1 and Travellers through the lens of early photography, reality television, and contemporary aid organisations 2.

99LONG READ time. His approach to the subject is unique both in its lack of ‘intentionality’ as well as the staging of his photographs, which was often led by the subjects, thus reversing the authority of the photographer. Koudelka is also photographing his subjects at a key point in time both in terms of the technological development of photography — subjects are increasingly familiar and aware of the impact of this technology as well as in terms of specific state policies towards the Roma — forced settlement; 2. the new reality show Big Fat Gypsy Wedding serves as a key juxtaposition that hopes to underline both changes as well as a some times-unacknowledged consistency in the (self-) representation of Roma. They point to increasing control over the filmed performance, a shift towards the use of more fluid recording technologies such as film which allow for depictions to more clearly situate themselves in particular moments in time, as well as an increased desire and fascination with accessing long-guarded parts of gypsy life: their homes, their family life, their interactions within the gypsy community, their jobs; 3. images generated by Romani NGOs and aid groups, such as Casa Bună, led by a Romanian activist of Romani origin, which largely serve to depict the group’s programming but also to help with visibility and fundraising purposes.

photographs, mainly portraits, reflect his particular initial training, as a theatre/stage photographer and focus on his subjects as performers. Having learned to carefully control the way in which they portray themselves to the outside, his subjects are indeed performing, with Koudelka allowing them to direct him towards a particular perspective, object, or RomaniaGypsies,

Koudelka started photographing Gypsies in the context of 1960s Czechoslovakia, a time of forced settlement for the Gypsies which tied many of them to rural isolation and poverty — as well as a time of great unrest in the country particularly after the 1968 Russian invasion, which Koudelka also photographed. Koudelka is not a gypsy, and although he had a rural upbringing, his village did not have any gypsies. The choice of gypsies as a subject, as he explains it, was quite arbi trary at first, mainly as a result of his love for gypsy music and his personal friendship with several gypsy musicians and poets. He saw his photographs of gypsies in Slovakia as being directly connected to his own identity as Slovakian and has always argued that his photographs of Slovakian gypsies were better than those he took of gypsies elsewhere, suggesting that he experienced a different kind of connection not only to the subject of his photographs, but also the familiarity of theKoudelka’ssetting.

PhotosMagnumIKoudelkaJosef©1968.

those lessons, basic educational supplies, sports lessons. Their revenue stream is largely based on dona tions mainly through a government program that allows individuals and companies to choose to donate a certain part of their taxable income to their charity of choice. The representation of Romani groups has, not surprisingly, changed quite a bit through time, but maintains an inherent tension around how and who controls their visibility, and when that visibility can ‘do good’ and when it does not. A closer look at the different depictions discussed here, shows that although they are often part of separate and tight-knit communities with sometimes separate cultural affinities, Romani groups live alongside and within societies in a symbiotic relationship: they are both a part of, and sometimes apart, they are both visible and invisible, they are both proud and afraid, they are both similar and different, but they are consistent of interest to an outside world who is curious, inquisitive and eager to paint a clear picture. What emerges is, perhaps not surprisingly, no single picture, but a mosaic of a very diverse community that is an intrinsic part of its home state and society.

102 A FRAMEWORK FOR

UNDERSTANDING...ANCA

An earlier, expanded version of this article was published in International Studies Perspectives Volume 16, Issue 3, 2015, pg. 327-344. Farova,3 Josef Koudelka: 8.

PUSCA is executive editor in International Relations at Palgrave Macmillan, where she publishes across different areas of International Relations, with a focus on IR Theory, International Political Economy, IR Methodology and Pedagogy, Human Rights, and Critical IR. She holds a PhD in International Relations from American University, and was previously a senior lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London and visiting adjunct professor at the CUNY Graduate Center, The New School and Columbia University.

2

Koudelka’s Gypsies are just as much a part of Slovak society and culture, as UK and US Gypsy communities are a part of those respective societies, or as Romanian Romani communities in Ferentari, Bucharest, are a part of Romanian society.

1 The use of the term ‘Romani Gypsies’, a juxtaposition of the politically correct form of addressing the Roma community Romani, and the often more derogative form of Gypsy, is intentional here and serves: a) to distinguish between the Traveller community of Ireland and the UK and the broader Romani community in Europe and beyond; and b) to point to the extent to which photographic and film representations more often than not ‘tag’ the community with the term Gypsy rather than Romani not always in derogatory form. Through out the article I refer to these communities as: Romani Gypsies when talking about non-traveller groups and representations that openly refer to them as Gypsies; as Gypsies when talking about both traveller and non-traveller groups who are openly addressed as Gypsies; as travellers when talking specifically about traveller groups with represen tations referring to them as such.

WELCOMETOTHEARACH-NOCENE: LONG READ 103 BY NATAŠA PETREŠIN-BACHELEZ WATER TRANSFORMINGTHETHROUGHSEEPINGCRACKS,THECATEGORYOFHUMAN. ON OFCOMMISSIONSTHREETHEPROJECTNOTFULLYHUMAN,NOTHUMANATALL1

Yet,LetArachnotopiaArachnosoulArachnosphereArachnoscapeArachnoscopemespeak!Ihavenotongue in this arachnomorphic Thebody,cosmic winds that blow through my web intone my diction. Bury me in the foundation Of this new house, And I will lace your concrete with my spider silk. Stronger then Kevlar®, a transfer of power, Extending fourfold, bulletproof, Withstanding all the pressures the universe Andexerts.we will be catapulted so far, galaxies will whizz by. And suddenly you realize: You are sailing through suspended time aboard Europa Enterprise.

Deep//// earthen time running, IOut.am Arachne, the archetypical spider, My web is the superstructure. I am text. I am he, she, it, we, they. The non-place where all the metaphors meet.

104 WELCOME TO THE ARACHNOCENE

Andreja Dugandžić, Jelena Petrović, Lala Raščić, Europa Enterprise, excerpt of the film script, 2018 How can a person take ownership of a mountain? Ownership of a wood? Ownership of a lake? This is ridiculous. How can we naturalize this? How can we believe that a piece of paper can allow someone to gain ownership of such things?

Five centuries of resistance

Five centuries of courage

My altered senses altered my mind, I operate in the other aeon. The Arachnocene! The dawn of the new mythical being.

It’s your seed Forever within us It’s your essence It’s your seed Forever within us Brought to life by the sun Flourishing within the Pachamama Daniela Ortiz, from The Empire of Law, video, 2019

Keeping the essence alive Five centuries of resistance Five centuries of courage Keeping the essence alive It’s your essence

The Sensing Salon, reading of the question “how is the Covid-19 pandemic affecting the human?”, 2020 ↑↑ EE-o RaLala©2018, šč i ć , artisttheofcourtesy ↓ ofviewInstallation EE-o RaLala©2018, šč

It opens up the cracks, both the cracks of the Tower in the card, but also the cracks that appeared in the Reiki readings. They appeared both when we’re treating the root chakra and asking what grounds this crisis, but also what is the larger connection of this crisis and always cracks appeared and these images of infiltration and something like water seeping through the cracks, and exposing “something that was already distressed that which was already distressed, and that was a long time coming”… It also foregrounds that healing is possible, that is the Star coming through the reading, which is the potential for healing that is there, unseen but present, and the Star is literally watering the ground.

i ć ,

DottFredPhoto:artist.theofcourtesy

page:Previous

The foundations for the project Not Fully Human, Not Human at All were laid a few years ago. In 2016, KADIST formulated a new series of regional projects that would enable an institutional collaboration in a given region on the one hand and engage commissions of three new artistic projects on the other.

Processes of rapid civic mobilisation and mutualisation of various supporting structures and organisations appeared in total contrast to increasingly violent and dehumanising laws that were popping up like mush rooms from the European Union. It was as if Europe was negotiating the security of its borders and defining the movement of human beings as if it were a stock exchange. While on the rise this past decade, extreme right-wing parties have made themselves very present in promoting even more inhumanity and manipulation within these borders. This tendency has gripped all of Europe and become ever more threatening under the new sanitary conditions of the Covid-19 pandemic. During this time, it became clear that the political and sanitary strategies put in place during a time of global pandemic horribly echoed the disposability of certain racialised peoples and communities.

105LONG READ

The invitation to conceive this European regional project arose after having had the pleasure to work with KADIST for a few years and after being involved in a few collaborative projects on a European scale. Origi nating from former Yugoslavia and having experienced through my family members the twisted fate of people who sought refuge in order to escape the bloody civil war in Bosnia, I was alert to what was happening to the groups of forced migrants and refugees within the space of the European Union since 2015 whether on its most eastern or most southern maritime borders.

Analysing a multitude of dehumanising acts — from a more distant past to current actual forms within the European geopolitical space — became the gravita tional centre of this project with the aim of creating a discussion with the artists and collaborating institu tions about white privilege, processes of racialisation, and importantly, how all of this is challenged within the institutional landscape of art. The title of the project is borrowed from Donna Haraway’s text ‘Ecce Homo, Aint’ (Ar’n’t) I a Woman, and Inappropriate/d Others’6 where she refers to Hortense Spillers and her seminal text ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book’ when describing enslaved women’s lack of any legal subjectivity. With this essay, Spillers created a milestone text for Black feminist studies in which she drew connections between the structures of

the112Sensing

1 This text is a condensed version of the introduction to the publication Not Fully Human, Not Human at All, published by Archive Books with KADIST and Kunstverein in Hamburg 2021, following an exhibition that took place at these both venues. This version focuses on the three projects in particular that have been commissioned for this several years long research project by KADIST. Donna2 Haraway, ‘Ecce Homo, Aint’ (Ar’n’t) I a Woman, and Innapropriate/d Others: Human in a Post-Humanist Landscape, 1989: ‘Slaves were unpositioned, unfixed, in a system of names; they were unlocated and so disposable. In these discursive frames, white women were not legally or symbolically fully human, slaves were not legally nor symbolically human at all’. Hortense3 Spillers, ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book’, Diacritics, vol. 17, no. 2, 1987, pp. 65–81. Fatima4 El-Tayeb, European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Fatima5 El-Tayeb, Ibid, p. xv. Malcom6 Ferdinand, Une écologie décoloniale. Penser l’écologie depuis le monde caribéen, Paris: Seuil, Keynote2019.7 lectures accompanied each of the three commissioned projects: Jelena Petrović opened the seminar in relation to Lala Raščić’s project in Prizren, Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso introduced Daniela Ortiz’ project in Aalst, and Raquel Lima closed the Sensing Salon’s assembly in Lisbon. Drawing8 from Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter, Alexander G. Weheliye presents the concept of ‘racializing assemblages’ that construes race not as a biological or cultural classification but as a set of socio-political processes that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans. In: Habeas Viscus. Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human, Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. NATAŠA PETREŠIN-BACHELEZ is an interdependent curator, editor and writer. Amongst the exhibitions she curated are Contour Biennale 9: Coltan as Cotton (2019, Mechelen) and Defiant Muses: Delphine Seyrig and the Feminist Video Collectives in France (1970s-1980s) at LaM, Lille and Museum Reina Sofia, Madrid (2019–2020, with Giovanna Zapperi). She was chief editor of the Manifesta Journal (2012-14) and of L’Internatio nale Online (2014–2017). She curated the project Not Fully Human, Not Human at All, organised by KADIST, Paris (2017–2021). Together with Elena Sorokina, she is co-founder of the Initiative for Practices and Visions of Radical Care. In 2021, she has been appointed cultural programmes manager at the Cité internationale des arts, in Paris.

Salon formulated a question according to the limits of the pandemic: ‘what is the effect that the Covid crisis is having on the Human?’ This was addressed through different divination techniques, poetical and political readings the tarot cards of The Tower (‘an image of collapse, of collapse of the struc ture, the social structure that were no longer needed and need to go’), crossed by the Ten of Cups (‘a certain way of coming together’) came to the centre of this Thereading.three commissions of the project analyse contem porary aspects of processes of dehumanisation in order to observe how they relate to the myths and narratives on which Europe has been founded. These artists narrate the toxicity of the societies where they live and point to the importance of embracing strate gies of re-humanisation or new genres of the human as ethical, ecological, aesthetic and affective preoccupa tions. I sincerely hope that together with these projects, we can offer the readers some tools on how to undo the processes of dehumanisation that are instilled in contemporary Europe today. I am grateful for all the criticality, confrontation and care that was shared among everyone in this project.

WELCOME TO THE ARACHNOCENE

VINCA PETERSEN No System 113

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music drew people in, the com munity that grew around the raves kept people invested in the culture. People came to the raves from all sections of soci ety. ‘There were students, old punks, sin gle mums sick of living in council flats, city people, country people’, Petersen says. ‘It was a space where everyone was welcome and equal. There was a sense of extended family, and being part of it was healing. It seemed to be something everyone was missing, and everyone needed that’. The social constellation around each travelling sound system further exempli fied the notion of a chosen family. This irre pressible intimacy that often goes unseen in the retelling of rave culture is the life force of No System. Petersen’s photographs of Big Nick reading to the kids, Harry cooking dinner or Carol trying to sort out the living room are perhaps her most radi cal. They describe the reparative gestures that went on behind the scenes that cul tivated a sense of unity, interdependence and belonging within the group. ‘Cooking on fires, bathing in lakes, dancing, having fun it’s about breaking us down to our simplest parts’, Petersen says. ‘Even if you experience something like this once, the feeling stays with you. Things don’t have to be long-lived to make a difference’. Throughout this experiment in collectivi ty, what was most contentious was the cam era. Although Petersen was part of the community, she was forced to grapple with her innate urge to photograph. Initially, the resistance was due to the need for anony mity. Even in Europe, the raves were only semi-legal, and the police were always watching. Perhaps more pertinent was the relationship between the camera and free dom. ‘They were suspicious that I was not in the moment if I was photographing,’ says Petersen. ‘They would say, “are you not feeling this as much as us? Is this not remarkable enough?” Their questions dis turbed me’. Over time, Petersen reconciled her compulsion to photograph, accepting her desire to make images as fundamental to who she is. ‘[Photography] was always secondary to the moment’, she says. ‘If something extraordinary happened, I never took my camera out’.

— Text by Gem Fletcher

VINCA PETERSEN

All images from the series No System © Vinca Petersen, courtesy of the artist VINCA PETERSEN is a British photographer and artist, based in Ramsgate. Her photography book No System documents her life in the 1990s, travelling around Europe with sound systems, and putting on free parties. Vinca’s work has been shown in group exhibitions at Tate Modern, Turner Contemporary and Saatchi Gallery, and is held in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

GEM FLETCHER is a writer, pod caster and photo director for Riposte Magazine. Her work has been pub lished in the British Journal of Photo graphy, Elephant, the Guardian, It’s Nice That and An0ther and she has written catalogue texts for Rhiannon Adam and Flora Hanitijo, amongst others. In 2019, Gem launched The Messy Truth podcast, a series of candid conversations that unpack the future of visual culture and what it means to be a photographer today. Guests include Antwaun Sargent, Catherine Opie, Farah Al Qasimi, Carmen Winant, Kimberly Drew, Quil Lemons, Brea Souders and Laia Abril.

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With hindsight, it’s clear that the weddings of the Turkish jet set consolidated her ear lier interest in Turkish social classes and hierarchy. As the only child of a left-wing, secular, middle-class family, she was edu cated at a French high school in Istanbul that was attended by the daughters and sons of the city’s very richest. She was fas cinated by the combination of intellectual and economic elites, and by the differences in class and Özbiçer’shierarchy.series Replica (2019), Auto Orientalism (ongoing) and Blue Flag (2012–2013) amount to aesthetic research into the Turkish way of life and its class system. They express a curiosity about her own class, other classes, and the places where they mix or clash. In her photographs, she subtly and sensitively uses humour to lay it all bare. She never ridicules people but tries to look at other classes as she does at her own, with wonder, surprise and an aesthetic eye. ‘I feel like a tourist in Turkey. I belong and I don’t belong. Who are we? What is it to be Turkish, living west of Asia and east of Europe?’ — Text by Kim Knoppers

EKIN ÖZBIÇER

the pictures look staged; even the leftovers of fruit on the white tablecloth of the abandoned lunch table look lovely. The cinematographic setting and the posi tioning of people or objects in the architec tonic space contribute to that impression. The photos suggest that nothing has been left to chance, yet the opposite is true. ‘I am holding the camera, eyes open, clickclick-click, forgetting that I photograph’. For fashion and editorial shoots for magazines including Vogue and Marie Claire, or for brands like Kutnia and Begüm Khan Özbiçer does indeed stage-manage her photographs. But for her autonomous work Özbiçer sees the challenge in finding scenes from indeterminate daily life and freeze them with her camera scenes in which she does not intervene at all, but that nevertheless seem staged. Replica is the re sult of shooting many photos, intuitively but with an exceptionally trained eye, and a careful selection process afterwards. Öz biçer retained this way of working from a job she had while she was studying for her degree in Fine Arts at Marmara University, as an assistant photographer of weddings in high-society Istanbul.

All images from the series Replica © Ekin Özbiçer, courtesy of the artist EKIN ÖZBIÇER moved to Prague to study Photography at FAMU after studying Ceramics at Marmara Uni versity’s Fine Arts department, while working as a photographer’s assistant. During her stay, she produced the Slavia series. Her Blue Flag series, depicting the life and aesthetics of İzmir’s summer resort beaches, was featured in SALT’s Summer Homes: Claiming The Coast exhibition. She is currently working on Auto-Orientalism, a series documenting her native KIMTurkey.KNOPPERS is an art historian working as an independent curator and writer. Currently, she is working on projects in Albania, Turkey, Greece and Switzerland. She is based between Selçuk, Turkey and Amsterdam, the Netherlands. From 2011 to 2021, she was curator at Foam, photography museum, where she worked on over seventy group and solo exhibitions at the intersection of contemporary photography and other disciplines. In addition, she studied the origin of the medium in several exhibitions and es says. Kim has contributed to various magazines including Unseen Magazine and Aperture, and has written essays for many catalogues and artist books. Kim is a lecturer at the MA Photogra phy at ECAL in Lausanne, where she initiated the course Do Not Disturb — Curating in Progress

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the public debate revolves around radical right-wing images, it usu ally concerns images with a clear message and effect: degrading, glorifying violence, racist and anti-Semitic. This includes inhu mane memes that circulate in relevant chat groups, banners with violent fantasies that visualise unmistakable threats at demon strations and images and symbols with irrefutable reference to National Socialism. This also includes inscriptions of any such sign or symbol on the human body. At first glance, ambiguities and ambivalences seem to run counter to the propagandist aims of right-wing ideologies and their forms of articulation. However, by now, radical right-wing image prac tices make use of a full spectrum of visual strategies, and deliberately placed ambigui ties and latencies are part of the scheme: today, not every radical right-wing image is immediately recognised as such. Protagonists within the radical right have attained a competency working with visual media and strategies of community building that seems yet to be adequately analysed. They adopt popular and sub cultural aesthetics and re-encode them. They develop signs, pictorial worlds and narratives that seem compatible with the so-called ‘centre’ of civil society. And they purposefully stage image-powerful events in order to feed their visual messages into the media’s circulation of images. All the while, visual ambiguities are implemented strategically: they protect images from censorship and producers from prosecu tion; they address new target groups beyond pertinent ‘scenes’, and they stoke a culture of distrust and doubt of the perceived, a culture in which radicalised ideologies supposedly gain plausibility. At the same time, they unequivocally aim to produce communitarian systems and identities.

JAKOB GANSLMEIER

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Haut, Stein examines traces of in scriptions of (de)radicalisation processes and right-wing extremist ideologies from yesterday and today. The project points to the ongoing virulence of German history and vehemently objects to the idea that the chapter of fascism and National Socialism has been written to its end.

All images from the series Haut, Stein © Jakob Ganslmeier, courtesy of the JAKOBartist GANSLMEIER’s interests lie in documenting long-term projects that deal with contemporary issues. Jakob recently graduated from the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague and in 2014, he co-founded the platform FOG, which displays and disperses documentary positions in a printed magazine and online.

ULRIKE KREMEIER is assistant professor at the University of Leipzig’s Institute of Philosophy and works as an independent curator since 1990. She has participated in several international exhibitions and projects. After working for several years in France and Austria, she founded Plattform in January 1995 in Berlin: a place of production, distri bution and communication for con temporary art, on the border between practice and theory.

— Text by Ulrike Kremeier

BY JOHNY PITTS & TAOUS R. DAHMANI 153IN CONVERSATION PLACEHOMENOTISA

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At the end of May, I sat down with writer and photographer Johny Pitts to talk about his work — we mentioned his now cult book Afropean (2020) but mainly focused on his forthcoming publication Home is Not a Place (2022) made in collaboration with Black British poet, musician, and performer Roger Robinson. In many ways, this conversation is the continuation of an ongoing dialogue Johny and I started when working together on the 12th issue of The Eyes Magazine entitled ‘B-Side’ (2021) . Omnipresent in our exchange, the idea of the ‘B-Side’ guides us through conversations about identity, nationalism, belonging, and their links to image-making.

Pitts describes his most recent work as a way of using ‘Blackness as a prism through which to look at Britain. Adding to that, the massive disjunction between North and South and its links to class’. We sat down in his South Lon don studio, the interior of which reflects Pitts’ diversity of interests from non-fiction, to hip-hop, to 1990s films — his studio is also a heaven for photography geeks and collec tors of all sorts.

155HenriIN CONVERSATION

JOHNY PITTS: Yes. We started working on ‘B-Side’ during lockdown; now that we are slowly coming out of it, I realise that like many who were unable to produce new work, I spent my time thinking about the idea of the archive, and some of Jacques Derrida’s conceptions of it; archiving as a method of suppressing and sublimating his tory as well as preserving it. ‘B-Side’ represents an imagined archive, in some ways; of bodies of work taken by the types of photographers who have long been left out of the photography canon because they don’t or even can’t adhere to the usual methods by which classic photography is produced. I’m always thinking about how an archive should be a living, breathing thing. Things fall between the cracks of the mainstream because they aren’t deemed valuable. My work is really about how all these scraps from a working-class life can be elevated into something called an archive. How can that build a foundation that I didn’t feel I had when I was growing up? How can you encourage others to create this collage of Black working-class expe rience so that it feels sustained and then eventually we can move forward? The ‘B-Side’ game is the theoretical framework under which I could imagine doing this. A native of the working-class north of England, my lack of funds was not really in line with photography’s canon from

TAOUS R. DAHMANI: I think we need to start with ‘BSide’ since, in a way, it informs your literary and musical references but also how you take and consider photographs, right?

JP: Personally, I like to know my history. I like to know what has been done before as much as possible so that I can tap into that and use it to empower my own work. We need generations of different practitioners speaking to each other. But there’s also something quite punky about kids just doing stuff, each generation has a slightly different take on things. A friend told me that Kano had never heard of Rakim. At first, I was disgusted by that it’s possible that Kano wouldn’t exist without Rakim whether he knows it or not. But the more I thought about it, the more I kind of loved that Kano had never heard of Rakim — he may have been reinventing the wheel, but at least he was designing his own vehicle. And as the writer Gary Younge once told me; ‘no energy is ever lost, even if the evidence is not immediately apparent’.

TD: Speaking of punk and doing what you want, I would like to ask you about the sort of playfulness present in the book, especially in composition and iconography. I’m thinking of an example, the photo of fish and chips and the Black hand. Debunking stereotypes, I guess. I mean, it’s so simple, but it’s also it’s so strong.

TAOUS R. DAHMANI is a historian of photography, researcher and writer based between London and Marseille, France. She is currently writing a PhD on the relationship between political actions and photographic gestures. She is also content editor at The Eyes, a trustee of the Photo Oxford Festival and on the editorial board of MAI: Visual Culture and Feminism. Taous is the curator of the 2022 Louis Roederer Discovery Award at the Rencontres d’Arles.

trying to elevate the Black community by showing it in our Sunday best, dressed in the most fly clothes or in our best Kente Cloth. I want to say, you don’t have to be a king or queen — in fact, I’m against the monarchy in general — and you don’t have to be superhuman; you can just be human. And I want to try and capture that everyday humanity.

Afropean: Notes From Black Europe (Penguin Random House). Translated into French, German, Italian, and Spanish, it has won the 2020 Jhalak Prize and the 2020 Bread & Roses Award for Radical Publishing, and is the recipient of the 2021 Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding.

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All images from the series Afropeans and Home is Not a Place © Johny Pitts, courtesy of the author Home is Not a Place by Johny Pitts and Roger Robinson will be published by HarperCollins late September 2022. The exhibition by Johny Pitts, supported by the

PITTS & DAHMANI

TD: The Black Art photographic scene in the 1980s in Britain was having that exact same conversation around the necessity (or not) of creating positive images to push against negative stereotypes. They were talking about that constantly: conversations come back.

JP: Even if I try to navigate the B-side of most things, every so often I want to play around with clichés by subverting a stereotype. In Afropean, I took a picture of the Eiffel Tower but it’s actually a keychain sold by a Senegalese man at the bottom of the iconic monument. I got that from the stuff Gordon Parks did with the stars and stripes in his American Gothic. So I’m trying to quietly subvert national clichés. In Home is Not a Place there are moments when I’m just playing with visuals so often adopted by British nationalism; for example, there’s a whole series of images where I incorporate the Union Jack, but it’s just not how you usually see the Union Jack juxtaposed. It’s not that I was always looking for that kind of image, but it’s interesting to visually subvert ideas of nationalism; by just letting something else creep in, you know.

ofjournalRacism)ENARJOHNY2022.Edinburgh24MuseumswillAmpersand/PhotoworksinauguralFellowshipbeexhibitedatGravesGallery,Sheffieldfrom10August—December2022andStillsGallery,from9March—10JunePITTSisthecuratorofthe(EuropeanNetworkAgainsttheaward-winningonlineAfropean.comandtheauthor

165LONG READ BY FIEPKE VAN NIEL & NOW YOU SEE ME MORIA ONPHOTOGRAPHS

On the other hand, other refugees from Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Congo to mention a few are not portrayed or seen as ‹real refugees’. Europe has shown them its dark side and hypocrisy, creating miserable refugee camps where they are stuck, preventing them from using safe passages to flee and causing many deaths by drowning in our waters.

In a second way, the image of the refugee is victimised, allowing citizens to feel pity yet preventing them to question why those people are in that circumstance and what our governments’ responsibility is. In contraposition, Zahra from Now You See Me Moria decides to represent herself as she dreams: in a gallery exhibition, surrounded by her paintings. She is a talented self-taught painter who dreams of becoming an artist in a country safe for herself and her family. Identifying with the people portrayed in photography and finding common ground will more likely only trigger a certain feeling of who ‘they’ are (as Sontag uses, they): ‘Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing “we” can do but who is that “we”? — and nothing “they” can do either — and who are “they”? then one starts to get bored, cynical, So,apathetic’.does‘real’ solidarity exist? Can we feel connection and empathy with portraits of people who are not similar to us? Or do we only react and take action with portraits of refugees who are white, who look like our father, brother, sister or mother? Unfortunately, the answer Europe keeps giving is clearly Islamophobic and racist. It’s not about ‹real refugees’ or ‹real solidarity’; the unprecedented action Europe is having towards Ukraine is rooted in your skin colour and religion, not only about how close Ukraine is to Europe compared to other countries, that’s just a hideous excuse to avoid accepting what we keep doing to our most vulnerable people. How do you choose to become a ‘real human’? ACT.

NOW YOU SEE ME MORIA was initiated in August 2020 by Noemí, a Spanish photographer and editor who lives and works in the Nether lands and Amir, a young Afghan refugee. In an effort to make people in Europe aware of the inhumane situation in Moria, they launched an Instagram account sharing photos and stories about daily life in the Moria migrant and refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos. Later on, more people joined their collective: from residents in Moria and other refugee camps in Europe to world wide graphic designers with whom they created poster campaigns, to citizens who will hang the posters, to curators from museums where they created exhibitions, to Paradox’s Raoul Gottschling and Christian Knöpfel, with whom they created the action book.

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Refugees are mostly represented in outlets in two differ ent ways: as a group arriving on boats or in a close-up of a mother or father with a crying child. The concern with the first way is that it is very difficult for citizens to connect with a group which has no names or personal stories. In addition, the words ‘tsunami’, ‘invasion’, and ‘crisis’ usually accompany those images and are respon sible for creating negative stereotypes about refugees.

All images © and courtesy of Zahra and Now You See Me Moria

FIEPKE VAN NIEL is an art historian based in the Netherlands. Her research focuses on the intersection between photography, female history, labour and migration.

JULIAN RÖDER Mission and Task 169

This is a condensed version of the essay ‘Border Management in the Space of the Viewer’, originally published in Julian Röder: World Wide Order (Hatje Cantz, JULIAN2014).RÖDER

— Text by Kolja Reichert

All images from the series Mission and Task © Julian Röder, courtesy of the JULIANartist RÖDER was born in 1981 in Erfurt and currently lives in Berlin. After training as a photographer at the Ostkreuz Agency, he studied photo graphy at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig and the HAW in Hamburg. His pictures always have a strong subtext, they point beyond what is shown to general social conditions and developments. They constantly oscil late between document and staging. With a

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As with intelligent cars and houses, both developers and politicians use the words ‘smart borders’ in describing these sys tems, Röder states: ‘Borders are no longer defined by fences but data and information’. This is increasingly true for the people who approach these borders. Within the politics of Eurosur, these individuals are not viewed as the starting point for possible solutions but as the source of a problem. A highly nervous system invents disruptive factors to legitimise its existence. Ultimately, up until now, locating refugees was not the most pressing problem; still, more ship wrecked people were sighted than saved in the Mediterranean.Rödertransposes these situations into the exhibition space, a space of con stant border crossings that are difficult to control: crossings between the pictorial space and the imaginary space. Here, the dispositions of the image, of what it shows, and my own dispositions enter a negotia tion that is in principle interminable and open to change. This stands in contrast to the depicted image-generating processes, which aim at increasingly preventing nego tiations between the responsible viewers (with an agency) and whose application in Homeland Security will someday only seem a matter of course.

Continuous-Wave Radar, Southern France (2013), which was developed under the leadership of the French state-owned com pany Direction des Constructions Navales (DCNS) for the European Union’s border security programme Eurosur. Borne by a surveillance blimp, it is designed to work in interaction with swimming drones and satellite data to provide seamless day and night surveillance of an area encompass ing the EU’s external borders up to 200 nauticalThemiles.seaas a place of longing, depicted in the photographs of Hiroshi Sugimoto and Michael Schmidt as marking the limits of human accessibility, thus becomes a thoroughly mapped and functionalised space, which is conveyed by Röder’s photo graph Monitoring Zeppelin, Southern France (2013) in a pointed but matter-of-fact manner. A boat belonging to the coast guard, a drone, and a zeppelin make their rounds in a self-satisfied performance of their duties.Devices such as these solidify bor ders, which, being complex and highly sensitive in their manifold aspects, are more resistant than water, barbed wire, or cement. They are able to keep people at bay preventing them from even encounter ing a border. They make it possible to send refugees back to their harbour of origin, even before an asylum application can be processed. Politics employ technology (or is it the other way around?) in order to be able to circumvent established law. This is where an extreme form of the space of the viewer is established, in which the Other is nothing more than an anonymous dot on the screen an object of knowledge production being denied any voice in the process.

andassociationreceivedandLeipzig,Heartworks,andthe2006,forhallecuratorKOLJAshowapproach,conceptual-documentaryJuliandevelopsseriesthatstructuresofpowerandeconomy.REICHERTisanartcriticandfordiscourseatBundeskunstinBonn,Germany.Inhiswritingnewspapersandartmagazinessincehehasaddressedthecrisesofartmarketandtheshiftingrolesmodesofoperationofexhibitions,museums,andaudiences.hastaughtatStädelschule,HGBUdKBerlin,KHWeißensee,InstitutKunstinBasel.KoljaawardsforhiswritingfromtheofGermanKunstvereinetheAkademiederKünsteBerlin.

TULDERVANMIRELLE EuropeanPartBeing 181

VAN TULDER has the ability to dig deep into archives, intui tively grasping the political and social dimension of these historical artifacts. She immediately translates this archival knowledge into a bold and urgent graphic language producing collages, zines and newspapers, playfully push ing the archives into the streets (and vice versa). With cultural heritage at the centre of her projects, she creates poetic interventions that confront the violent histories of European museums, and its multiplicity in postcolonial identity. Mirelle works as an image researcher for MacGuffin Magazine, Amsterdam, she is a research associate at the Research Center for Material Culture (part of NMVW), and a participant at Werkplaats Typografie.

LORAINE FURTER is a graphic designer and researcher based in Brussels since 2007. She is specialised in editorial design, hybrid publishing and intersectional feminism. She designs and edits paper publications as well as web and digital ones, and is particularly interested in the interac tion between these media.

— Epeli Hau’ofa, ‘Pasts to Remember’, We Are the Ocean: Selected Works — Text by Loraine Furter

MIRELLE VAN TULDER

All images from the series Being Part European, riso print, 42 × 59,4 cm © Mirelle van Tulder, courtesy of the MIRELLEartist

and192giving it visibility, and arguing that Global South countries don’t have appro priate conditions are common arguments against restitution. In the best of cases, numbers are ridiculous: twenty-six royal objects were recently given back by France to Benin.In front of Tulder’s compositions, I keep on thinking about the empty shelves of European museums, in the realm of the ‘what if’. Why not empty the shelves? Minimalist and conceptual art is celebrated in other departments of the same or similar institutions. In fact, museums could still be filled with objects those made by the colonial powers to conquer the lands and to bring all these other objects here. But these are often on purpose left out of the narrative.The images of stolen objects could still have a space in the European museums of the future: they were constructed with the ethnographic-colonial European gaze and used as instruments to advertise and catalogue the objects. They are part Euro pean. Their compositions tell the stories of their displacement. Tulder’s panels highlight the different backgrounds and framings. From pictures shot in their origi nal contexts, to objects floating in a vacuum of geometric levels of grey walls, shot repeatedly under several angles, measured. In these compositions, Tulder uses each sentence of the poem ‘Being Part Euro pean’ to re-shuffle the catalogue, creating a new gathering. A work in progress. What stories do these objects whisper to each other, across the gutters of the composi tions, and through the walls of the shelves? That the past is ahead, in front of us, is a conception of time that helps us retain our memories and be aware of its pres ence. What is behind us cannot be seen and is liable to be forgotten readily. What is ahead of us cannot be forgotten so readily or ignored, for it is in front of our minds’ eyes, always reminding us of its presence. Since the past is alive in us, the dead are alive—we are our history.

Across

Pushbacks the

Evros/Meriç River

193FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE

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LEVIDIS is a researcher and visual practitioner. At Forensic Architecture, he oversees the agency’s work on borders and migration. His PhD dissertation, submitted in 2020 at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, and titled ‘Border Natures’, interrogates the entangle ment of border defence strategies with the natural environment at the external borders of the EU, with a focus on the Greek case. Stefanos own spatial and visual practice has been presented and published internationally, and his investigative research has been submit ted to courts in support of human rights cases.

of Muhammad Gulzar and Muhammad al-Arab in early March 2020 capture a punctuating moment dur ing which this otherwise obscure region came to the global spotlight. Gulzar, from Pakistan, had spent several years of his life as a worker in Greece before being shot by the border fence by Greek bullets. Al Arab, from Aleppo, was shot dead by Greek soldiers firing their weapons over a dry, vegetated trench where the river used to run at the time of demarcation. These shootings are not distinct but are in conti nuity with the long-term, albeit previously low intensity, weaponisation of the river border. They are slow violence mutating into kinetic force. How does one go about representing this military-environmental assemblage? How can we speak about and evidence a kind of violence that is not only designed to take place out of sight but is also diffuse, cross-scalar and temporally elusive and is equally distributed between, and enforced through, muds, vortices, twigs, fog, snow as it is through fences, unaerated containers, filthy cells, batons, tie-wraps and bullets? How to investigate the river waters as a weapon and an obviatory device without losing sight of the bullet? And, inversely, how to speak about torture at the hands of border guards without overlooking the real but calculated threats of exhaustion and hypothermia? How might we visualise a ‘border nature’? Such are the questions that our team at Forensic Architecture engagedThewith.work ran from 2018 to 2022 and in many ways is still ongoing. The evidence produced was submitted in a number of local and international legal and political fora, was published in the media, discussed in assemblies and shown in cultural spaces across WeEurope.consider these investigations a small contribution in support of the thou sands of testimonies of people who have suffered violence at the world’s borders. Testimonies which, when weighed against the word of state perpetrators, are hastily discarded and discredited. We, therefore, sought to develop an arsenal of methodolo gies that can shield and amplify the voices of people on the move and can confront oppressive border regimes and the increas ingly violent attacks these launch not only against migrants’ bodies but against truth itself. Ultimately, we wanted to trouble sedentary notions of territory, belonging, and statehood in this interstitial landscape.

ARCHITECTUREAll

FORENSIC

images from Pushbacks Across the Evros/Meriç River © Forensic Architec ture, courtesy of the agency FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE (FA) is a research agency, based at Goldsmiths, University of London, investigating human rights violations, including violence committed by states, police forces, militaries, and corpora tions. FA works in partnership with institutions across civil society, from grassroots activists to legal teams, to international NGOs and media organi sations, to carry out investigations with and on behalf of communities and individuals affected by conflict, police brutality, border regimes and environ mental violence. Their investigations employ cutting-edge techniques in spatial and architectural analysis, opensource examination, digital modelling, and immersive technologies, as well as documentary research, situated interviews, and academic collaboration.

Findings from their investigations have been presented in national and inter national courtrooms, parliamentary inquiries, and exhibitions at some of the world’s leading cultural institutions and in international media, as well as in citizen’s tribunals and community STEFANOSassemblies.

— Text by Stefanos Levidis

MOUS LAMRABAT

Blessings

from Mousganistan 205

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create beauty and richness in the most aesthetically thought-provoking of clashes. Lamrabat’s images collectively serve one aim: to challenge our percep tions of identity. His images decentralise and subvert ideas around womanhood. For instance, when we think of a Muslim woman, we are surrounded by stereotypical images, usually produced, reinforced and reproduced by mainstream media. Muslim women’s bodies and images become focal points for political contest, in this context.

A case in point here would be the Time Magazine cover, from back in 2005, which created a debate by putting a Muslim veil on the Mona Lisa, for an article about the ‘influx of immigrants into Europe’. Lamrabat’s work, however, deconstructs this idea by taking the emphasis off woman hood and the male gaze, and replacing it on universally recognised icons. This is a clever ploy on part of the artist, it disturbs the male, Western, prejudiced gaze and defines a new look into the images of the East. Indeed, his work brings together the west and the east; fashion and photography; the popular and the traditional; religious and rebellious; familiar and the unfamiliar.

— Text by Eylem Atakav

The images capture the in-betweenness and what it means to belong to more than one culture. Aesthetically moving, thoughtprovoking, subtle yet simultaneously powerful photographs that celebrate this in-betweenness. The space his photographs creates is rich culturally, visually, and philosophically.InBlessings from Mousganistan, the artist shares a message of love through a colourful and eclectic visual experience. He combines two different cultures while challenging our visual expectations of both cultures. He is both. His art is both. There fore, his work is a unique celebration of his own identity, which also reminds us how unified our approach to multiculturalism could be. Lamrabat’s photography has the power to make the viewer stop and reflect on what it means to be human in a world that repeatedly reinforces difference. His utopian land offers a rich tapestry of images against the background of a liminal space that promotes compassion and peace, at a time when we all certainly need it.

MOUS LAMRABAT

All images from the series Blessings from Mousganistan © Mous Lamrabat, courtesy of the artist MOUS LAMRABAT is a photographer, born in the north of Morocco. As a young child, his family moved to Belgium where he grew up. After finishing his studies as an interior architect, he was eager to learn to work the camera. In an auto-didactic way, he developed his own unique vision on fashion photography and later on managed to fuse his Moroccan roots, tradition and culture with the western world he grew up with. The urge to show this rich Moroccan heritage through an artistic eye is present in everything he portraits and the inspiration he gets from his mother land is EYLEMendless.ATAKAV is professor of Film, Gender and Public Engage ment at the University of East Anglia where she teaches courses on women and world cinema; gender, Middle Eastern media, and documentary. She is the author of Women and Turkish Cinema: Gender Politics, Cultural Identity and Representation (2012) and editor of Directory of World Cinema: Turkey (Intellect, 2013). Eylem is the director of Growing Up Married — an internationally acclaimed documentary about forced marriage and child brides in Turkey; and co-director of Lifeline, a new documentary that reveals the reality of working in the frontline of the domestic abuse sector in the UK during the pandemic.

TANJA OSTOJIĆ Looking for a Husband with EU Passport 215

From: O @net4you.co.at To: ho tanja@ Sent: 27. august 2000 23:02 Attach: Subject:.jpgRe: Looking for a husband with EU passport dear Tanja, want to put a garment upon you, would marry you, when you really would be mine for ever, … however, wish you a good night all the best and take care markus

From: John H To: @diplomats.com Sent: Saturday, January 05, 2002 5:32 Subject:AM Looking for a Husband Hello Dear Lady, I know this is a bit late but I just now found your add and site. Are you still in the market for a husband? I don’t want to go into any great details if I am wasting my John,time.43 years old in Texas

TANJA OSTOJIĆ All images ©

Passport, 7Video-stillsLoyd,Deivan,Klemensappearance):andContributors/candidatesThecombinedParticipatory2000–05webproject/mediainstallation‘Ad’photobyBorutKrajnclettersphotosby(inorderofMarkusO.R.,G.,JohnH.,MarkS.,LuchezarB.,UdoW.,Hasikesh,Svenjafrom‘CrossingOver,’min,DV,by:TanjaOstoji ć and Klemens Golf YES photo collage: Klemens Golf Wedding Bread: Jelica Radovanović Courtesy: Tanja Ostojić p. 221 Untitled / After Courbet (L’origine du monde), 2004 Colour photograph, 46 × 55 cm Photograph:

/David

MARINA PAULENKA is director of exhibitions for Fotografiska Berlin and has fifteen years of experience in artistic direction, curating, education, leadership, management and develop ment in culture and art institutions and organisations, but also in her own artistic practice. She was artistic direc tor of Unseen Foundation and Unseen, an Amsterdam-based platform for contemporary photography that presents the latest developments in the field of photography and amplifies the careers of boundary-pushing artists. Prior to her role at Unseen, she worked as artistic director and curator of the Organ Vida International Photography Festival, the leading institution for contemporary photography in Croatia.

Text by Marina Paulenka Tanja Ostoji courtesy of the artistpp.216–219 a Husband with EU David Rych Tanja Ostojić TANJARychOSTOJIĆ is a Berlin-based performance and interdisciplinary artist, researcher and educator, inter nationally renowned as a pioneer of institutional critique from the gender perspective and for her work in the field of socially and politically engaged art and art in public space. Since 1994, she presented her work in a large number of solo and group exhibitions and festivals globally, such as Venice Biennale, Brooklyn Museum in New York, Busan Biennale in South Korea, among others. Tanja received numerous prizes, grants and fellowships, while her artworks are included in relevant museum collections, have a high level of theoretical reference and have been analysed and included in numerous books, journals and anthologies.

what224todo or how to find real love. The emails are creative, some short and some also spooky usually accompanied with a photo suggesting the male body in sur prisingly staged moments. Thinking out loud here, it is hard to imagine this ‘predating app’ that existed twenty years ago, and how differently people communicated then compared to today, when you can find someone in one second and meet the next hour. Letters were also coming from women, lesbians who were attracted to Ostojić’s self-portrait — showing her bald, skinny and shaved body without gestures that could convey inviting messages or enter the realm of diverse gender possibilities. The letters and visuals were collected in the handmade artbook Wedding Book After the intense correspondence with the German man Klemens G., Ostojić arranged their first meeting as a public per formance in the field at the forefront of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade in November 2001. They performed an official marriage in Belgrade several weeks later, and with a marriage certificate and all other documents, Ostojić was ready to apply for a family unification visa. Eight weeks later, she moved to Düsseldorf where her story in Germany began. Of course, the wedding party was transformed into a divorce party at the opening of her Inte gration Project O ffice installation at Project Room Gallery 35 in Berlin in 2005. The contract signed between two artists trans forms the power of institutional marriage in otherManydirections.thoughts come to mind about the new history of transition side effects such as trafficking in women, prostitution, pragmatic marriages, and so on. The power of the body becomes the power of gender ing. Her reflection on gender issues plays with economic and political issues that follows political geography and distinc tion of Europe in the EU. It’s interesting to see how far her ad went when we know how some participants respond artisti cally, trying to transform their bodies into a trans body agent. Her artwork becomes appropriative material for expressing the different notions of gender. She becomes an analogue avatar of someone’s imagination, the forerunner of the gaming heroine who gave a voice to even today’s taboo topic of gay affiliation in one city of Belgrade.

Copyright:

—

ć,

Looking for

‘It was a very demanding project’, Ostojić says, looking back on her artistic way of creating significant changes in peo ple, especially women’s lives.

OFPOLITICS 225 BY CLAUS GUNTI LONG READ SEEINGDETECTABILITYVISIBILITY,ANDTHE

‘Migration has turned into a security issue’, German Member of the European Parliament Özlem Demirel (Die Linke) has repeatedly warned, addressing aerial surveillance of European borders in several questions to the European parliament. 226 VISIBILITY, DETECTABILITY AND...

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Europe,ofThresholdtheatShipwreck

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More specifically, we will address the paradoxical situat ion of migrants both seeking to escape the panoptic gaze, while also trying to make visible the unbearable conditions they endure in their journey towards another life. As the founders of Forensic Architecture’s Forensic Oceanography project, Charles Heller and Lorenzo Pezzani have pointed out it is fundamental to think about migration in aesthetic terms, defining the notion after French philosopher Jacques Rancière, as the politics of ‘framing and re-framing the visible and the invisible’.2 Visibility and invisibility are thus central to the tension between showing migration as a territory of suffering and death, and the need for anonymity for migrating populations to escape surveillance and hopefully find safety. On another level, this tension also appears in the contrast between border patrols trying to spot migrants, and the work of NGOs and forensic agencies, which aim to visually document these agencies’ activities.

In recent years, the use of various surveillance and deterring technologies, ranging from sound cannons to drones, satellites or artificial intelligence-driven lie detectors, has considerably increased.1 Combined with the substantial growth of physical barriers on the outer frontiers of the Schengen area and the outsourcing of certain aspects of migration politics to countries outside the union (e.g. Libya as the border control in the Mediterranean or Rwanda as the detention of migrants processed in the UK), this technological turn marks a clear repressive shift, only making the conditions of the already fragile migrating population worse. In this context, images and visibility play an impor tant role. In our contemporary image-driven societies, to be seen or for that matter not to be seen — constitutes a core political and philosophical problem, which has numerous ramifications in pretty much every aspect of everyday life. The tenuous tension between privacy and social media, images as vectors of self-expression in the context of identity politics, or the recent rise of auto mated image recognition and identification, all heavily rely on visibility of some sort. They bring along ethical questions, which derive from the way how seeing, showing or hiding are interrelated with digital infra structures. In the context of this issue on European nationalism, we will look into the interconnections between visibility and the increasing use of imaging technologies used to ‘secure’ Europe’s outer borders.

Shipwreck at the Threshold of Europe, Lesvos, Aegean Sea (2020, fig. 1), a collaboration between Syrian artist Amel Alzakout and Forensic Architecture,

Architecture,ForensicandAlzakoutAmel1:Fig.

As famously pointed out by German artist and theorist Hito Steyerl in her movie How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013), camouflage and concealment have become an essential strategy to escape both surveillance capitalism and repressive governmental forces. Her film addresses aerial surveillance infrastructure in relation to digital technologies: in public satellite imagery, a pixel depicts a 50 × 50 cm square, rendering an individual virtually invisible and anonymous, while military-grade techno logies are much more precise. The film thus explicitly points out the importance of images and their circulation in our contemporary societies, at the imbalance between military and public, stressing the complexity of the inter face between the physical world and digital environments. But it also highlights, implicitly, the role artists have in this context today. Since the advent of mass surveillance after 9/11, numerous artists have been very active in the field of counter-surveillance, looking back at governmental agencies and military activities. They have also suggested counter-measures, ways of escaping the surveillance gaze, or helped to identify its technical infrastructure. More recently, the notion of forensics, a set of strategies which aim at analysing the behaviour of military or police forces, produces counter-investigations and counter-narratives, which question the legitimacy and the methods of governmental forces and confront visibilities controlled by the state, and the opaqueness of their activities for the public eye.

SeaAegeanLesvos, Architecture)ForensicandAlzakoutAmel©still,(film2020,

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1 See for example Kaamil Ahmed and Lorenzo Tondo, ‘Fortress Europe: the millions spent on military-grade tech to deter refugees’, The Guardian, Sophie06.12.20212Hinger, ‘Transformative Trajectories. The shifting Mediterranean Border Regime and the Challenges of Critical Knowledge Production. An Interview with Charles Heller and Lorenzo Pezzani’, in Movements. Journal for critical migration and border regime studies, Vol. 4., No. 1, 2018 3 See Matthias Monroy, ‘Billions for Europe’s biometrics giants’, Security Architectures in the EU, 09.2022

CLAUS GUNTI is an art historian, lecturer at the University of Art and Design Lausanne (ECAL) and coordinator at the Centre de la Photographie Genève. His research primarily focusses on the intersection of art and technology, new forms of photographic practices, recent developments in imaging technolo gies (drones, CGI, VR or GAN imagery) and digital culture. In 2021, he co-published the book Automated Photography with Milo Keller and Florian Amoser, outcome of the eponymous research project at ECAL. you will close your eyes to the memory of the images. Then you will close your eyes to the facts. Finally, you will close your eyes to the context. If we show you a human burned by napalm, we will hurt you. If we hurt you, you will feel that the demonstration of the effects of napalm is at your expense’. These new visual forms and strategies developed by the discussed artists in this short essay show how we ought to address images, facts and con texts, reflecting a clear shift away from the documentary or photojournalistic trope. And incidentally, stresses the importance of visual literacy to grasp the complexities of the contemporary world.

SAFEENOUGHTOBE 233 BY ALAA AMMAR & FABIAN HOLLE LONG READ BRAVE

234 SAFE ENOUGH TO BE BRAVE

LIMBO The LIMBO workshop series was, and is currently still, situated in the art institution Framer Framed and organised by PhD researcher Fabian Holle (representing Refugee Academy, VU Amsterdam) and co-researcher Noa Bawits, who works at Framer Framed and studies a Master in Sociology at the VU. LIMBO consisted of eight consecutive Sundays, facilitated by LGBTQI+ community organisers and community members with a refugee or migrant background. In this relatively short period of time, our goal was to build community by creating an environment of care. A space that is safe, welcoming and meaningful for LGBTQI+ people with a refugee back ground (from now on referred to as ‘queer refugees’). A space to experiment, be awkward or fail without pressure to perform. The idea was to facilitate workshops given by the (queer refugee) community for the (queer refugee) community. The workshops entailed: rope play, consent and boundaries by Maha Youssef; story creation by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz; poetry by Sunni Lamin; bio graphical drawing by Parisa Akbarzadehpoladi; fimo clay by Jerrold Saija; clowning by Mala Badi; and making dolls or objects with fabric and stitching by Sarah Naqvi. Our main focus was creating an in-between space in which queer refugees would feel brave enough to share their stories and creativity. A space of mutual support in which they could feel relatively safe and comfortable with the uncomfortable. In line with Cairo, we argue that ‘[a]lternative spaces to the larger, dominant narrative give credence to one’s value and humanity. These spaces where existence is resistance, are created out of needs, an answer to an inner calling to be affirmed in this world’.

LIMBO is a place for queer exilic narratives. Queer for us is not about sexuality. Queer means to be in touch with your inner feminine and masculine energy as a whole, regardless of gender norms imposed by society. Being queer is being yourself unapologetically in all colours, shapes, ways and forms. Being queer means taking steps to dismantle heteronormativity.

We, Alaa and Fabian, first read the phrase ‘safe enough to be brave’ in a piece written by Fabian’s supervisor professor Halleh Ghorashi for the LIMBO booklet (2022). We were moved by this reflection on her journey with engaged scholarship, and particularly by this phrase, because it perfectly captured what we’ve been working on in the LIMBO workshop series. We felt that we were seen and recognised. The workshop series culminated in a public presentation opened with performances, co-organised by Sehaq Queer Refugees Group, on 27 March 2022 at Framer Framed in Amsterdam. After the opening, we read the 2021 book Holding Space by Aminata Cairo, which has a chapter with the same title: ‘Safe Enough To Be Brave’. The book was lent to Fabian by their colleague Kay Mars after a research team meeting. Alaa first started reading Holding Space and was immediately inspired by Cairo’s stories about care, courage, and connection.

We, the authors, met in December 2021, a bit more than a month before LIMBO started. Initially unrelated to the research, we became close friends. Alaa then became a participant in LIMBO and later a collaborator providing psychological first aid to other participants. Alaa has worked with refugees and creative practices in the Syrian Red Cross around 2014/2015. Their personal refugee background, Red Cross training, Gerrit Rietveld Academy training, and experience in community building through (techno) dance and art made their contribution very meaningful.Theworkshop series was developed during November/December 2021, when the Netherlands was still in lockdown due to Covid-19 measurements. With corona measures in full effect, everything was uncertain: Would the art institution be allowed to open? Could we be in a space together with more than four people? Would participants and workshop facilitators be anxious to meet in groups? Would we spread the virus amongst ourselves, forcing those infected into isolation? Considering such uncertainties, Fabian started pitching ideas to people in their network that had experiences with art, queerness and the refugee community, to come up with something in co-creation that would art together helped us look for a safe space not in the outer world anymore, but within ourselves” (Ariya).

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and presented an open mic. Lamin is twentythree years old and just recently came from the Gambia to the Netherlands. He asked for asylum, and received his residential permit only a few weeks prior to the start of LIMBO. He asked participants to share the poem they had composed in the workshop. It was moving for us to see participants opening up in front of a full crowd. Not long ago, they were quiet and timid, hardly taking up any space. At times speaking so softly that it was challenging to understand. In the week prior to the opening, Lamin offered coaching sessions which we were not aware of during the process. It came as a surprise when we saw them in front of the microphone. One participant shared that this was the first time, at age fifty, she could speak about her sexuality and how much she loved LIMBO. Another participant, Jackie, shared the following poem: The sun’s rays are melting Into orange, red and purple Here we will stand With dreams and faith As darkness creeps in The sun’s rays are waking Into orange, red and purple Here we still stand With hope and promise As darkness fades away It was heart-warming to see care, connection and courage coming together. We were impressed by the poems, Lamin’s way of moderating the entire event and the courage portrayed. Participants felt safe enough to be brave, even in such a large public event. This moment reminded us of Cairo’s words about courage: ‘Courage can be big, and courage can be small. If one has been conditioned and grown used to being silent, it takes courage to speak up. Just opening one’s mouth and speaking can be a courageous act. Sometimes it takes a lot of work to come to that first effort to break the silence. For those who are always quiet even a whisper can make a statement. Perhaps we should start by understanding courage as making a

SAFEstatement’.ENOUGH TO BE BRAVE

FABIAN HOLLE (they/them) graduated as a theatre maker at the HKU (University of the Arts Utrecht) in 2004. They worked with directors, choreographers and artists, cofounded the theatre collective Ponies (2005–2015) and performed in drag. In 2020, they completed a Master in Sociology (cum laude) at VU Amsterdam. They won the 2020 ARC-GS MA Thesis Prize (Amsterdam Research Centre for Gender and Sexuality at UvA), in which they analyse how art-practicing queer refugees challenge exclusionary social structures. Together with Maria Rast and professor Halleh Ghorashi, the master thesis was rewritten and published. Currently, Fabian is a PhD candidate within the research project: Engaged Scholarship and Narratives of Change.

All images from the series Queer Function Mushroom © Alaa Ammar ALAA AMMAR (they/them) fled to the Netherlands from Syria in 2015. In Syria, Alaa obtained diplomas in psychology and communication. Before the Netherlands, Alaa worked on creative practices with refugees in the Syrian Red Cross in 2014/2015, where they obtained multiple trainings. In the Netherlands, they study at Gerrit Rietveld Academy and volun teered at Secret Garden, an organisa tion for LGBTQI+ refugees. They are currently building community through a collaborative project that includes techno dance, art and performance. At LIMBO, their work is mainly focussed on connecting migrants and refugees through creative processes, and together working out first steps to start their new lives.

IMAGE STATEMENT

The image series is called Queer Function Mushroom All images are digitally edited photographs. In this series, Alaa Ammar shows artists participating in LIMBO. This image series is connected to Alaa’s docu mentary portraying the function mushroom. The film shows members in the LIMBO workshops as well as their connections to other commu nities and contexts. The first picture shows Ariya (he/him) from Iran. Ariya is an artist and graphic designer who has been in the Netherlands for five years. Ariya makes digital art works that represent healing journeys into the unconsciousness. They are borderless manifestations of intro spection about life, society, the past, the now, and carefully dreaming intentions for the future. The second portrait shows Alaa (they/them) from Syria. Alaa is a visual artist, activist and art director of underground events. They provide psychological first aid within LIMBO and have been in the Netherlands for six years. They use film, photography and perfor mance while frequently collaborating with (mostly queer) artists from various disciplines. The third portrait shows mAmin (they/them) from Iran. mAmin is an artivist, conceptual artist, currently practicing at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. mAmin has been in the Netherlands for eight years. Their multi-disciplinary prac tice revolves around storytelling, photography, design and placemaking as a means of constructing radical togetherness through the celebration of difference. The last portrait shows Sarah Naqvi (they/ them) from India. Sarah is an Indian contemporary artist. Their work has been described as subversive, and covers topics such as gender, sexuality, race and religion. They advocate for various social and feminist causes including that of body positivity. Sarah has been situated in the Netherlands as well as in India for two years.

PIAUntitledARKE 241

The254images of people affixed to the maps of Scoresby Sound not only serve as a bandaid, but they also introduce the work as a palimpsest, where maps and people are layered on top of one another with consid erable historical depth. The archival photos, originally taken on a trip by the Danish telegraph operator Svend Lund Jensen to Scoresby Sound in 1947 incredibly, cap turing the artist’s mother, Birgitte Justine Piparajik Arqe are protected by parch ment as in old photo albums. Furnished with cartographic signatures on the parch ment, they were included in the Danish polar explorer Svend Lauge Koch’s report from his expedition to the area in 1931–34, an expedition closely related to Denmark’s attempt to convince and eventual succeed in convincing the World Court in The Hague that all of North East Greenland was Danish territory. The artist’s maternal grandmother had been shipped there in 1925 as a pawn in the ongoing territorial dispute between Denmark and Norway. In total, eighty-seven people from ten fami lies 1,000 kilometres south were enlisted to methodically change the history of the land’s national affiliation. These are the historical upheavals Arke takes up in her legends about this spot on the big island.

PIA ARKE

— Text by Anders Kold All images © Pia Arke Estate pp.244–245, 248–249 Legende I–V, 1999 Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Acquired with funding from Anker p.Fonden243 Untitled (Self-portrait, Undressing in Interior), c. 1989 Series of 6 photographs, print (2021) after negatives in Pia Arke LouisianaEstate Museum of Modern Art.

Arke’s work returns the people to a place that previously had only been rendered in the maps as lines, colours and signatures and introduces a new body on top of the maps. With in-depth knowledge of the colonial power’s historical archives and documents, she adds the emotional per spective of subjective history, mixing her own history with that of her mother as a young woman. Legend I–V is where the artist most painfully makes us perceive the fateful interplay of the mineral and the organic landscape and body in her art, alongside the phenomenon of separation in the broadest possible sense. Her friend from Scoresby Sound, Susanne Mortensen, dies from cancer, as Arke herself eventually did. The healing in the artwork was, and remains, a perspective on the future. That’s what art can do.

Donation: Pia Arke Estate

PIA ARKE was is a visual artist, performer, writer and photographer from Kalaallit/Greenland. She is known for her self-portraits and landscape photographs of Kalaallit Nunaat/Greenland, as well as her paintings and writings focusing on colonisation and the complex ethnic and cultural relations between Denmark and Greenland. Throughout her career, Pia has used the metaphor of her own mixed (mestizo) heritage as a pretext to describe these historical relationships, and to address themes such as Arctic Indigenous identity and ANDERSrepresentation.KOLD is a curator and head of acquisitions at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Apart from the Pia Arke exhibition, he has curated shows with, among others, Asger Jorn and Jackson Pollock, Jeff Wall, Poul Gernes, Tal R, Ed Ruscha, Cecily Brown and Ann Veronica Janssens.

The text is a translation by Glen Garner and condensed version from the exhibi tion catalogue Pia Arke. Dream and Repression, edited by Lærke Rydal Jørgensen and Anders Kold, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2021.

IGOR CHEKACHKOV Daily Lives of Displaced 255

CAT LACHOWSKYJ is a freelance writer and editor. Prior to pursuing a career in writing, she trained as a photography archivist in Toronto and holds an MA in Photographic Preservation from Toronto Metro politan University. She has completed residencies and fellowships at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Ryerson Image Centre, the Rijksmuseum and the MFA Houston, and her writing has appeared in many books and magazines, includ ing the British Journal of Photography, Rvm Magazine, doc! Photo Magazine, and Unseen. Cat lives and works in Athens.

— Text by Cat Lachowskyj

IGOR CHEKACHKOV

when264subjectivity is shattered, when private space is violently removed. This explains the features of diasporic communities like my own, where Ukrainian dance, singing, and church things that Chekachkov has never engaged with in Ukraine proper are necessary pillars of cultural main tenance. But while I grew up with ghosts, Chekachkov was photographing the living. Born, raised, and living in Ukraine, Chekachkov didn’t feel aligned with a cohe sive Ukrainian identity until the war broke out. ‘I never really identified as “Ukrain ian” because the idea of identifying with a nation or government didn’t sit right with me’, he reflects. ‘But something has shifted, and it’s less about identifying with borders and more about valuing freedom. It’s not just about the territory that is being taken from us it is about evil. For me, thinking about Ukrainian identity as synonymous with freedom makes things more concrete, more obvious. We can fight for that’. The state-sanctioned nationalism that many rightly question in their own countries crucially shifted in the wake of chaos. Can this newfound synthesis even be called nationalism at all? This is what makes Chekachkov’s work so powerful. Despite such horrific loss, his photographed people and spaces are evi dence of intricate subjectivities capable of conjuring a private life an identity — in the worst of times. These aren’t disaster images calling you to attention, laced with national symbols and the explosions of war. They are something quieter, deeper. Borders shift, but people persist on the ground and diasporically, ushering in new forms of intergenerational personhood. Chekachkov restores subjectivity to our people while making space for collective identity to manifest through shared prac tices and domestic activities, not tropes or stereotypes. ‘The small stones that build our identity are from private life and pri vate spaces’, he reflects. ‘What we are trying to do now is simply be who we are that is what Ukrainian identity is for us’.

All images from the series Daily Lives of Displaced © Igor Chekachkov, courtesy of the IGORartistCHEKACHKOV started as a photojournalist in 2008 and covered a wide range of cultural, mass and sports events. The path through photographic fields, weaving through years of work and searching, led him to art photography which he still explores today through the boundaries between public and intimate spaces. His work has been published in Forbes, National Geographic, The Guardian, Le Monde, WirtschaftsWoche, Forbes, and others.

Igor is a member of UPHA (Ukrainian Photographic Alternative) and UAPF (Ukrainian Association of Professional Photographers) group, National Society of Photo Artists of Ukraine.

THE ARCHIVE OF PUBLIC PROTESTS Protest 265

Archive of Public

PROTESTSAllimages©The

KAROLINA GEMBARA is a photo grapher, researcher and an activist. Her work revolves around issues like home, belonging, migration, changing lands and identities. Recently, she has been focusing on the political situation in her home country. She is interested in using photography as a tool, a pretext for collaboration and creating processes. In recent years, she has undertaken several participatory projects with refugees and migrants.

PROTESTS (A-P-P) is a semi-open platform for distributing images connected with social and political tensions in Poland from 2015 until now. A-P-P brings together visual traces of social activism, grassroots initiatives opposing not just political decisions but also breaches of democratic norms and human rights. It is a collection of images that constitutes a warning against rising right-wing populism and discrimination in the broadest sense of the term: xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny, and also the climate crisis. A-P-P gathers together photographs in a single, easily accessible collec tion, which will remain accessible to researchers, artists and activists.

initiatives,280 and thirdly most importantly in my opinion we protest too. Personally, I might consciously reject motherhood but I don’t want anyone to be refused abortion. In other words, we photograph the pro tests whether it’s the Women’s Strike, Equality Parade, pro-refugee gatherings, Belarusian pro-democratic diaspora or recently Ukrainians and their supporters because we identify with the values these groups represent, as we are often part of them. My A-P-P colleague Paweł Starzec writes in ‘Non objective eye’: ‘photograph ing protest is a social activity (…) because the person holding the camera is a member of a specific social group’. Therefore, the archive drops the pretense of objectivity and pure reporting whilst not giving up on the in-depth study of the protests and does not undermine its visual outcome. Still, the documentation itself isn’t enough. Although the images are avail able online for researchers, activists and not-for-profit media outlets, representing resistance is not our only task. Since the national media channels present a false or distorted picture of the protest and the remaining independent media quickly move on, we try to create a narrative that would exist beyond the established places and focus on amplification. Apart from an online presence, we created a free newsprint publication consisting of protest images, slogans and testimonies of protest par ticipants or people affected by a certain crisis, the victims of war or environmental issues. The Strike Newspaper was deliv ered directly to the protesters and also to cultural places, bookshops and, at times, wheat-pasted in public spaces. Its open form and straight reference to the cause (through the design, colours etc.) easily turns it into a protest tool, a banner or a window poster. This initiative triggers another level of image circulation it is giving back the images to the protesters in a printed form and, at the same time, the protesters use them to express their demands. The recent exhibition of A-P-P at Ł ód ź Fotofestiwal focused only on the documentation of the news paper usage.Considering the constant dissemi nation and the double (or multiple) role in the protest, the members of the A-P-P look critically at photography’s old para digm, described by Barthes as ‘it was there’ and move on to ‘being there’, as it better describes the medium-tool.

Karolina collaborates with the Archive of Public Protests and is a member of Sputnik Photos. Her PhD dissertation focuses on subjective narratives of historical migrations. Karolina is based in Berlin and Warsaw.

— Text by Karolina Gembara

THEProtestsARCHIVE OF PUBLIC

THE ARCHIVE OF PUBLIC

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288 COLOPHON ISSUE #62, M/ TYPEFACESDESIGNARTSALESASSISTANTEDITORSEDITOR-IN-CHIEFOTHERLANDSElisaMeddeHenriBadaröhKatyHundertmarkElisaMeddeEDITORSHenriBadaröhKatyHundertmark&DISTRIBUTIONCarolineBrakelDIRECTORStudioHamidSallali&LAYOUTAyumiHiguchiStudioHamidSallaliSignifier(KlimTypeFoundry) Maria (Phil Baber) Circular Mono (Lineto) Pilat (General CONTRIBUTINGType)ARTISTS & WRITERSMohamad Abdouni, Alaa Ammar, Arkadiusz Antonz, Forensic Architecture, Pia Arke, Eylem Atakav, Mariama Attah, Daniel C. Blight, Igor Chekachkov, Taous R. Dahmani, Karim El Maktafi, Avra Fialas, Borys Filonenko, Gem Fletcher, Loraine Furter, Jakob Ganslmeier, Karolina Gembara, Claus Gunti, Fabian Holle, Alfredo Jaar, Nadine Khalil, Grada Kilomba, Kim Knoppers, Anders Kold, Awa Konaté, Josef Koudelka, Ulrike Kremeier, Zeynep Kubat, Cat Lachowskyj, Mous Lamrabat, Oliver Leu, Stefanos Levidis, Rene Matić, Steve McQueen, Elisa Medde, Jeff J. Mitchell, Nina Möntmann, Now You See Me Moria, Richard Mosse, Renée Mussai, Tanja Ostojić, Ekin Özbiçer, Marina Paulenka, Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, Anca Pusca, Vinca Petersen, Johny Pitts, Viacheslav Poliakov, The Archive of Public Protest, Lala Raščić, Kolja Reichert, Julian Röder, Silvia Rosi, David Rych, Fiepke van Niel, Mirelle van Tulder, Karolina Wojtas, Monica Youn, Akram Zaatari, TRANSLATIONSZahraGlenGarner(Pia Arke), Benjamin Morris (Jakob Ganslmeier), Liz Waters (Ekin Özbiçer) FRONT COVER Untitled / After Courbet (L’origine du monde), 2004 Colour photograph, 46 × 55 cm Photograph: David Rych Copyright: Tanja Ostojić/David BACKRychCOVERImagefrom the series Mission and Task © Julian Röder, courtesy of the artist SPECIALMirelvaTHANKSBerghout, C/O Berlin, Bruno De Cock, Fred Dott, Pia Arke Estate, Eamon Foreman, Adam Harvey, KADIST, Svenja Kirsch, Steve McQueen, Ibrahim Nehme, Ruth Pilston, Claudia Rankine, Emily Skillings, Nicholas Tammens, Niina Ulfsak, Emilie Villez, Monica Youn PRINTING & LITHOGRAPHY NPN 4817MinervumDrukkers7250ZMBreda, NL Postbus 5750 4801 ED Breda, NL PAPERIgepa Nederland BV Biezenwei 16 4004 MB Tiel, NL EDITORIAL ADDRESS Foam 1017KeizersgrachtMagazine609DSAmsterdam, NL T +31 20 551 65 00 F +31 20 551 65 SUBSCRIPTIONSeditors@foam.org01Forsubscriptioninquiries, please contact: DISTRIBUTIONonline@foam.orgFordistributionopportunities and conditions, please ADVERTISINGmagazine@foam.orgcontact:FoamMagazineislooking to team up with like-minded brands and organisations. For information, please contact: magazine@foam.org or Stefanie Hofman at stefanie@foam.org STOCKISTSFoamMagazine is available at the best book shops worldwide. For a full list of stockists look at: EANfoam.org/magazine/stockists8710966555231-00062 © Photographers, authors, Foam Magazine BV, Amsterdam, 2022. All photographs and illustration material are the copyright property of the photographers and/or their estates, and the publications in which they have been published. Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders. Any copyright holders we have been unable to reach or to whom inaccurate acknowledgement has been made are invited to contact the publishers at: Allmagazine@foam.org.rightsreserved.No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photo-copy, recording or otherwise without prior written permission of the publishers. Although the highest care is taken to make the information contained in Foam Magazine as accurate as possible, neither the publishers nor the authors can accept any responsibility for damage, of any nature, resulting from the use of this information.

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