STEFAN TARNOWSKI

Paola Yacoub: After the Flood. “Les fleurs de Damas“

There was a sea change in 2011. We were flooded with images. These documented an extreme variety of events; events streamed directly onto our screens, from torrents of protests pouring out onto the streets to state oppression attempting to staunch their flow. Nowhere more so than in Syria, when protests burst across the country in March that year.
On 14 December 2011 a discussion was held at Le Bal, Paris, between Paola Yacoub and Catherine David, titled “Do we agree?” This was the first time Paola Yacoub presented the images that came to constitute the series “Les fleurs de Damas” (The Flowers of Damascus), even though the photographs were taken in 2002. With the revolution in Syria and the flood of images it produced, Paola Yacoub, rather than embark on an analysis of those images, went against the grain: back over her personal archive. Doubtless, this was in part because the events across the border resonated uncannily with Lebanese history. Typical formulations in the media would soon include phrases such as: “Will Syria be the next Lebanon?” Yacoub writes of the period when the series was taken:
“What was the situation in Beirut in 2002, the year in which these photographs were taken? From 1975 to 2005, the Syrian Army occupied Lebanon. In 1978, they laid siege to the neighbourhood of Achrafieh for a number of months. Before the Syrian army’s withdrawal in 2005, following the assassination of Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, the Syrian regime’s influence over Lebanon was deeply entrenched. Before 2005, the Syrian army worked in tandem with the police and intelligence apparatus, forming a formidable structure for social control. And despite the withdrawal in 2005, Syrian influence over Lebanon did not cease. The secret services, the Mukhabarat, continued to control the city, as they did before their withdrawal. Even today, a number of organisations allied to the regime remain in Lebanon, as does its police and intelligence apparatus. Assassinations continue with a regularity that does not fail.”

Text feature in Camera Austria International 127/2014, pp. 11–24.

RAIMAR STANGE

Peter Friedl: Sixteen Fragments on “Anarchivism”

I. What does (scientific) archiving mean? According to my Duden dictionary, it is something like the systematic compilation and preservation of documents, usually of historical, legal, or political nature. The archival act is devoted to thoroughness and, at least ideally, to a systematic and thus comprehensible order, making it possible for anyone to use the archives resulting from such archival activity. This is known to have become problematic, especially in the neo-liberal times of today where there is an inherent tendency to turn any and everything (even the archives themselves) into a commodity and thus facilitate a transfer to “private” ownership. In recent decades, apparently in response to Atlas by Aby Warburg, the modus operandi of archivisation has nonetheless—or perhaps precisely for this reason?—become enormously popular in art circles. One need only think of—pars pro toto and arbitrarily selected—Walid Raad, or Emily Jacir, or Piotr Uklański’s book project The Nazis (1999), or, naturally, many of the works by Hans-Peter Feldmann.

II. Peter Friedl’s long-term project “Theory of Justice” (1992–2010) is, for one, characterised by the artist himself as an “archival project”, which he frequently qualifies as a “shrinking” archive. Yet in other instances, Peter Friedl has emphasised—in well-calculated contradiction—that “Theory of Justice” is not actually an archive but rather more like a “collection”. In an essay about Friedl’s aesthetics, Hilde Van Gelder speaks of an “anti-archival impulse” and throws the term “larger montage” into the discursive game as a positive description of his work.

III. Slobodan Milošević and his spouse are seen here as a petit bour
geois married couple. The former president of the Serb Republic, and of the later Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, is shown utterly devoid of power-sated glamour. He was later indicted for genocide by the UN War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. In 2006, Milošević died without having yet been sentenced.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 127/2014, pp. 25–36.

NORMAN M. KLEIN

Trevor Paglen: Invisible Kingdoms: A Feudal History of Black Budgets

Trevor Paglen’s photographs announce an invisible surveillance empire, supported by black budgets. Vast as it is, this empire barely knows where its data is going. And yet it is deadly, despite how ironic, like a comic picaresque novel—filled with secrecy.
How do we get to the bottom of a phantasmagoria of this kind? Suppose we reverse the scenario, as an experiment. Let us say that fifty million Americans have witnessed this surveillance empire. It is an
open secret. It even generates premonitions—as a kind of folklore.
We find these premonitions fleshed out in movies, like the Bourne series, and recent Bond films, where jump-cut montage seems to express milliseconds of big data. It is like the secret room in a symbolist house. The room is invisible from the outside, but constantly on our mind; as in Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel House of Leaves.
In point of fact, the banking world is also overwhelmed by invisible empires. Each of these tend to be unseen parasites that deregulate big government, in order to give free rein to tax havens, derivatives, and flash trading. Here we can say with confidence that fifty million Americans have felt these parasites at work, as an open secret that crashed the world economy.
Invisible kingdoms have a long history, of course, going back to organised religions and military secret societies, like the Knights Templar. They were certainly a key to Baroque early modern politics, circa 1700. They are remembered today as the occult Enlightenment, in Harry Potter novels, in the Baroque trilogy by Neal Stephenson.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 127/2014, pp. 37–50.

ALANNA LOCKWARD

Decolonising the (White) Gaze 3 / 4. Healing Sara Bartman in the “Continent of Black Consciousness”

In her seminal essay “Marcus Garvey & the Continent of Black Consciousness”, Erna Brodber synthesises her notion of the inseparable entanglement of the narratives of Blackness in the US South with those of the English-speaking Caribbean, contributing to the extensive Caribbean and US conceptualisations of pan-Africanism à la W.E.B. Du Bois as well as à la Marcus Garvey:
“That so many persons at so many different times and in so many different areas felt spontaneously moved towards this behaviour is what gives Pan-Africanism its essence. This feeling, common to so many, described a Continent of Black Consciousness which included Africa and the geographical areas to which Africans were dispersed from the early days of New World’s slavery to Garvey’s time”.2
Correspondingly, Brodber uses her novel Louisiana (1994) as a vehicle to poetically embed her contribution to Black Diaspora Studies in a history that is still waiting to be properly acknowledged as such.
Current art discourses and practices are based on a notion of Western supremacy, the notion of pan-Africanism for example, is mostly related to the continent and the alliances between its countries. In Black Diaspora Studies, by contrast, and Brodber is a paradigmatic example in this regard, two names inevitably come to mind when the term is mentioned: W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey. The repetition of their names within a short interval is inspired by my determination to insert the legacies that inform the ways in which I interpret global coloniality. With few exceptions such as Puerto Rico and the Sahrawi nation, that are both “real” colonies, prevalent systems of representation and legitimation in the art world are immersed in the plantation system mentality of coloniality (colonialism without colonies).

2 Erna Brodber, The Continent of Black Consciousness. On the History of the African Diaspora from Slavery to the Present Day (London: New Beacon Books 2003), pp. 102–103.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 127/2014, pp. 68–69.