153 | 2021

SABRINA RAHMAN

Invoking Voids in the Archive

“Ojekoo, we have read your letter. Many years have passed and fi-
nally it has reached us. There were times when we gave up, doubting that your letter, letters like this, even existed. Still we kept on hoping, waiting, anticipating, imagining—what if?” It is with these words that Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński opens The Letter (2018). Against the backdrop of an empty black space, decorated with the tones of an otherworldly soundscape, the invocation begins by greeting an unknown subject in Ga. As the first installation of her latest project, aptly called Voids, the short film immediately calls into question the linearity of time and geography. Who are “we,” what is this written voice we have been searching for, and why the salutation in Ga? The letter in question is an archival find, and one that resonates the artist’s experience as a Black woman living in Austria. Kazeem-Kamiński, whose artistic practice spans cultural theory, writing, and the visual arts, unearthed the letter while researching the conditions behind Peter Altenberg’s 1897 book Ashantee. This collection of prose sketches is based on the author’s encounters with a group of West Africans from the British colony of the Gold Coast, today’s Ghana, in the scope of a so-called “Völkerschau.” During the summer and autumn of 1896 and 1897, around seventy people—presumed to be members of the Ashanti tribe—were displayed as an ethnographic exhibit in Vienna’s Zoological Garden. Altenberg’s colonial gaze is challenged by Kazeem-Kamiński’s discovery of the written word of Yaarborley Domeï, a human display claimed to be the wife of the Ashanti chief, according to the editors of the weekly magazine Wiener Caricaturen. In an open letter that was published in the magazine on October 18, 1896, written in Ga and translated into German via English, we hear the voice of the performer, who was arraigned for scratching a white woman in the face in an act of self-defense. Domeï’s letter concludes by stating her desire to return to Accra, revealing that her connection to the Ashanti is indeed tenuous and performative, and thus reframing the agency of the Black body in Viennese history. This radical shift of perspective is the foundation of Kazeem-Kamiński’s piece; in revealing the voids of the Eurocentric archive, the viewer enters an alternative world of possibilities, one in which the “spectacle” has become the spectator, and racialized bodies of the past are conjured to make sense of the present.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 153/2021, pp. 7–18.

SABINE WEIER

On the Origins of Hate Speech

A state of complicity arose between Der Stürmer (The Stormer) and its readers, as Christine Meisner notes, hence giving rise to an unbridled angry mob of people who reciprocally drove each other to make ever more inhumane claims. The anti-Semitic hate sheet was published between 1923 and 1945. Its extermination rhetoric radiated from the editorial office in Nuremberg and contributed to paving the way for the unprecedented crime of the Holocaust. The readers themselves provided the material of their own accord: from across the Reich they submitted letters, poems, photographs, and self-made drawings, they used slander and libel, they spread the topos of “racial defilement,” and they cited the names and addresses of Jewish neighbors and merchants, outright demanding that these people disappear from society. Around half a million copies of the weekly newspaper were in circulation, and up to two million in the case of special editions. Pages from the newspaper were pinned up in “Stürmerkästen” (Stormer boxes) in public squares and in front of schools, factories, or churches. Local NSDAP chapters, businesses, and private initiatives hung up these boxes, at times festively inaugurating them with a marching band. The community functioned like a social medium: everyone was posting and reading.

At the Nuremberg trials, the founder and editor of Der Stürmer, Julius Streicher, was sentenced to death by hanging. The judges classified the acts of preaching and spreading hatred against Jews as a crime against humanity. Yet the individuals who sent in material were never indicted. Don’t they also need to be held accountable? This question haunts Meisner. She grew up in Nuremberg. At first, she researched racism at a distance, tracing the steps of the Atlantic slave trade. After the racially motivated series of murders by the National Socialist Underground (NSU), with three victims in Nuremberg alone, the artist started researching right-wing networks in Germany, which led her to the Nuremberg City Archives, where the Stürmer material has been housed since 1946 under the call numbers E39/I and II. The US military had given the archive to the city. Some of the documents made it to the States, many disappeared, but tens of thousands have been preserved. In her installation Unschärfe im Möglichen – Episode 1: Einsendungen aus Berlin (Unsharpness in a Possible – Episode 1: Submissions from Berlin, 2020),¹ Meisner presents documents from the Stürmer-Archiv, contextualized by sixty-five pages of commentary and meticulously researched facts. At the moment, she is reviewing submissions from Vienna for Episode 2. A wealth of material is available from both cities.

¹ Unsharpness in a Possible – Episode 1: Submissions from Berlin was on view from September 5 to November 1, 2020, as part of the 11th Berlin Biennale at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 153/2021, pp. 19–30.

AZIZA HARMEL

“Not a Woman, Not a Plant, Not a Picture, Not a Drawing, Not a Body, Not a Landscape, Not a Photograph, Not a Sculpture, Not Stillness and Not Movement.”—A Reading of Rahima Gambo’s Work

“If the flying fish seems absurd, nothing prevents us from thinking that despite the endless caulking, the outside oozes and comes to form an ocean that reflects the face of whoever is watching, and becomes a mirror without being one. They say that the ocean gleams but no one sees himself or herself in it.”—Fernand Deligny¹

I met Rahima Gambo in 2019 in Bamako, the capital of Mali, during the twelfth edition of the Bamako Encounters – The African Biennale of Photography, where she was showing her work. She told me that she immediately saw multiple eyes in me because she can recognize those of us who struggle at the edge of belonging to several worlds. It takes one to know one. I co-curated the twelfth edition of the Bamako Encounters, along-
side my dear colleagues Astrid Sokona Lepoultier and Kwasi Ohene-
Ayeh, under the artistic direction of Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung. When Astrid, Kwasi, and I arrived, Bonaventure had drafted the biennale’s conceptual framework, working with the title Streams of Consciousness, and each of us took some time to develop positions on what this title could mean in relation to photography. It led us to dialogues and flows of thought and enabled us to question how a flow of thought might be captured through photography. Not captured for the sake of, or from the anxiety of having to serve or materialize our inner voices, but more as a way to think about how to unsettle notions of presence and visibility and how the act of photographing can demand an unsettling form of attention when compared with the “living world” that surrounds us. The work of Gambo immediately resonates when thinking of such endeavors. The lines traced in Gambo’s work read like riddles. They transcribe her walks as maps of perception and gestures. Like footsteps in the snow, lines cross and intersect for a moment and then drift apart again. Nothing about these walks is orchestrated. A Walk (2018–ongoing) is a survey based on improvised paths. Discussing the work, Gambo writes: [A Walk is] open-ended, with no beginning, middle or end, that yields stills, moving images, and an assemblage of found objects I sculpt together, from objects I pick up on my “path.” Found things could be sound, it could be video, it could be torn photographs, discarded material, a stick or a leaf. It is a psycho-geographical survey that visually maps an interior cartography from the external environment that I traverse.²

¹ Fernand Deligny, “Art, Borders . . . and the Outside,” in The Arachnean and Other Texts, trans. Drew Burk and Catherine Porter (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2015), n. p.
² Taken from a conversation between the author and the artist, “Foam Talks: Talent Edition,” on January 21, 2021, which can be listened to at: https://foam.org/museum/programme/foam-talks-talent-edition.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 153/2021, pp. 31–42.

ANTHONY DOWNEY

Egypt’s 2011 Internet Shutdown: Digital Dissent and the Future of Public Memory—Heba Y. Amin, Abdelkarim Mardini, and Adel Iskandar in Conversation

January 28, 2021

On the 10th anniversary of the Egyptian Internet shutdown, Heba Y. Amin revisits—in conversation with Abdelkarim Mardini, the co-developer of Speak2Tweet, and the Middle East media scholar Adel Iskandar—the importance of Speak2Tweet through her artistic project called Project Speak2Tweet (2011–ongoing). . . .

Anthony Downey One of the questions that came to the fore throughout the discussions leading up to this event was concerned with the issue of digital memory—specifically with how digital memory shapes, if not predefines, our understanding of historical events. Digital mediation and the future of collective memory are rendered all the more complex when we consider the 2011 Egyptian revolution, which began ten years ago on January 25, 2011. Two days later, on January 27, the Mubarak regime shut down the Internet and cell phone networks across the entire country. Connectivity was resumed on February 2 and, as we know, Mubarak was ousted on February 11, 2011. Reflecting on how we access the specificities of that moment through digital means raises significant questions about historical consciousness and, perhaps more specifically, about how we collectively access the events of history. When we google the Egyptian revolution today, a number of further concerns arise: Whose versions of history do we see? Who owns those narratives? Who benefits from those versions of events? And what will the digital archive do to our future understanding of historical events in Egypt and, indeed, across the region?

Heba Y. Amin We cannot talk about digital remembrance without addressing the ways in which our online activities have shifted so dramatically in the last year alone due to the pandemic. Even though we have become dependent on online technological tools, their architectures remain predominantly invisible to the average person. If we can’t explain our technological systems, then we can’t critically engage with them. There is no doubt that the digitization of information has influenced our historical consciousness and continues to shape our memories; but, despite the web’s predisposition to remember everything, we cannot actually rely on the mere presence of collective data to secure a sense of coherence or continuity in preserving history.¹ Our seemingly unlimited capacity to store information has allowed us to access and create multiple conflicting narratives, including the conspiracy theories and post-truth content being pushed with online memes and other digital artifacts.

¹ Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 153/2021, pp. 43–54.

AÏCHA DIALLO

A Living Archive of Commoning

Since 2017, through different crossroads including those in Dakar, New York, and Leipzig, Christian and I have been engaged in an ongoing exchange. For me, this has grown into a most anticipated ritual that reflects our shared visions on cultural productions, pedagogy, commoning, and actual life.

Aïcha Diallo I would like to begin our conversation with your ongoing project École du soir (Evening School), which actually draws from the legacy of Ousmane Sembène, the Senegalese filmmaker. What does this project mean to you?

Christian Nyampeta École du soir is more than a project; it is quite dear to me. It is a method at the heart of most things I have done. It started in 2009, although I did not have a name for it back then. At the time, during and right after my studies in industrial design in London, I used to organize screenings at home. This was partly a reaction to my frustration with my design course, and also an intervention within the limiting prospects that the formation supposedly offered me. I was frustrated by the lack of a discernible social function in the practice of design for industrial production. So in a way, I was searching for a doing or a making located outside of those large-scale, for-profit manufacturing systems. No one can really agree on the definition of design, perhaps the same as art. But there is one distinctive characteristic: industrial design commodities are for, and result from, mass production. So in a way, I was interested in the inversion of this axiom. What would be necessary for achieving a production by the masses?

So the activities at my home in London in my semi-derelict flat slated for demolition became an integral part of the research about how the home could be a place of cultural and political production. Friends would gather, cook, and listen to music, make films, but they would also screen works in progress, ranging from self-produced works of all sorts to documentaries they were making for the BBC. Some friends had a key to my flat, such that, sometimes when I wasn’t there, some event would happen anyway. It made sense that my first ever external artistic activity was a series of contributions to the “living research” project The Grand Domestic Revolution initiated by Binna Choi with Maiko Tanaka at Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory in Utrecht. It was a multifaceted exploration of the domestic sphere with the intention of imagining new forms of common living and working. It was launched in 2009 and has continued in many other cities since.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 153/2021, pp. 55–66.