156 | 2021

UYRA SODOMA

Re-enchanting Life

A tree that walks, Uýra Sodoma, is a mutating creature, perhaps a deity, that personifies and embodies the forces of life—life that is the forest, the Amazon Rainforest. These multiple beings invoke the process of molting as a form of resistance that reclaims and reoccupies the body, dissenting, insurgent, resurgent. By enabling the natu­ral process of transmutation to enliven a new body and a new being, Uýra announces a deeper transformation that is more than needed, a transformation toward the more-than-human, toward the sacred and the good life on earth.

Is this a provocation to acknowledge the innate, inner potential of our bodies to become attuned, enchanted, and transformed? Visualizing the invisible, Uýra’s ancestral-futuristic performance embodies and merges scientific and Indigenous worldviews to claim ecological and social justice, devouring and healing the wounds caused by white-supremacist, sexist, and colonial control of the bodies and territories in all corners of the planet. This is an invitation to the reenchantment of life. (Daniela Brasil)

Artist contribution in Camera Austria International 156/2021, pp. 13–20.

LEANNE BETASAMOSAKE SIMPSON

Mino-Bimaadiziwin: The Good Life

Mino-Bimaadiziwin is a concept and a living practice within Anishinaabeg thought. The Anishinaabe or Ojibwe people’s homeland is located roughly around the Great Lakes in Canada and the United States. I am from the eastern part of this territory, the Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg, and our home is the north shore of Lake Ontario. Mino-Bimaadiziwin was generated by my ancestors living in this region for tens of thousands of years, practicing ways of living that were intimately and sustainably embedded in settings that attached us to global ecosystems. Mino-Bimaadiziwin is often translated from my language as “the good life.” Mino is a prefix meaning that something is good, or well, balanced, healthy. Bimaadiziwin is life, or the art of living, a process, a particular way, or ways of living life.

Translation is a powerful, political, and oftentimes dangerous process for Indigenous peoples. Extracting a single concept or phrase from our complex knowledge systems—taking it out of embodied practice and placing it in text, translating it, often literally, into English, and then repeating it in all kinds of different contexts—is a practice of dilution. As writers and academics (myself included) cycle and recycle these artifacts, meaning can shift; and complex ways of world-building can be reduced to paragraphs in studies, phrases, or hashtags. Certain concepts, ones that academics have latched on to, take on an importance that they might not have originally carried, because they are now well known to outsiders; and these same concepts can easily be recoded to signal all kinds of things in colonial societies.

This is the weight of writing about Mino-Bimaadiwizin, when there are an endless number of other concepts in Nishnaabemowin that could be used just as effectively as a window into the complex thought that builds Nishinaabe worlds in the present. The way through this dilemma, for me, has been to center the land and land-based practice in my own life and work. The land has a way of leveling things, and of cutting through what we think we know, forcing us to engage in the practices of our peoples if knowing our peoples is a priority. The knowledge that has sustained my people is generated with the land, from tens of thousands of years of practicing living within a register where the accumulation of wealth was thought of as a mistake, the idea of property was seen as selfish, and borders were more like zones of decreasing presence, with the arching principle that an individual’s life must be lived in a way where they give more than they take.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 156/2021, pp. 21–24.

RAPHAËL GRISEY / BOUBA TOURÉ

Happiness Against the Grain

A Geography of the Foyers
A first photograph: two friends in suits are standing in a parking lot in front of a factory smiling at the camera. They both are wearing a tie and a watch. It is 1971, Saint-Denis, rue Pinel. The factory depot building hasn’t been used as a working station of the railway company SNCF since a few years back, but instead as one of the first foyers, or housing for migrant workers, run by Assotraf.¹ The factory was transformed into a “dormitory town” of its own, hosting more than 1,000 people in a place initially arranged to shelter 500, with sixteen in one room. The so-called migrant workers had been first moved out of three different nearby barrack and slum complexes ruled by slumlords; most of them came from Gajaaga and Guidimakha, the two banks of the Fankhoré River (also known as the Senegal River) defining the borders of Mauritania, Mali, and Senegal, which were drawn during colonial times. We are a few blocks away from the slums of the Plaine d’Aubervilliers, which have grown endlessly since the Second World War and welcomed, in different periods, Spanish, Portuguese, and African workers’ and refugees’ families. Since the nineteenth century, the area—part of the so-called red belt (because of its strongly communist affiliation) surrounding the bourgeois city center—has been a place of systematic segregation and criminalization of the unwanted population, such as homeless, refugees, or workers, for their reassignment outside the ring, as shown in the film Aubervilliers (1946) by Eli Lotar.² Most of the foyer residents would work in nearby metallurgic industries spread across the Plaine Saint-Denis.

The man on the left is Bouba Touré and the photograph was taken with his Kodak Retinette. A friend might have pressed the button for the pose.

The photographic archive of Bouba Touré speaks; let’s take this photograph as an anchor to begin to unfold storytelling and to introduce the various cases of rural and urban situatedness within the generative archive of Sowing Somankidi Coura.³

¹ Assotraf is one of the paternalist and philanthropic social landlords or foyer “managers,” such as ADEF (Association pour le développement des foyers / Home Development Association), AFTAM (Association pour la formation des travailleurs africains et malgaches / Association for the Education of African and Malagasy Workers), Soundiata, and later Sonacotra and Adoma.
² This segregation and criminalization have been documented in various literary and filmic works, such as La zone (The Zone) by Georges Lacombe, as early as 1928.
³ Sowing Somankidi Coura is a research endeavor by Raphaël Grisey in collaboration with Bouba Touré around the permacultures and archives of Somankidi Coura, a self-organized cooperative along the Senegal River founded by a group of former African migrant workers and activists in France in 1977 after the Sahel drought of 1973. It unfolds and generates cine-geographies that reveal the boundaries between the liberation struggles of migrant workers in France, the Pan-African history of the cooperative, and the potentialities of permaculture.

Artist contribution in Camera Austria International 156/2021, pp. 25–36.

TONY COKES / NAOKO KALTSCHMIDT

Urban Protests and Negative Spaces: Displacement from Public Life

“The theft of large refrigerators by people with no electricity, or with their electricity cut off, is the best image of the lie of affluence transformed into a truth in play.”¹ These words by Guy Debord from the 1965 article “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy” are one of the essential components of Black Celebration (1988)—alongside other text passages penned by such dissimilar authors as the musicians Martin L. Gore and Morrissey, the artist Barbara Kruger and the Situationist International. The subtitle of this early piece by the US artist Tony Cokes reads A Rebellion Against the Commodity—and it immediately evidences a directionality that is critical of capitalism. In addition to the plain text inserts, which prominently stand for themselves in white lettering against a black background, this video also has two further components: on the one hand, archival material from newsreel footage of the violent uprisings of Black citizens in Boston, Detroit, Los Angeles, and Newark during the 1960s; on the other, the aggressive-sounding soundtrack by the Canadian postindustrial band Skinny Puppy from the 1980s. Cokes creates a complex framework from these seemingly disparate elements, giving rise to a—quite deliberate-confrontational aesthetic and method for approaching and examining these brutal conflicts that emerge again and again. Seen here are scenarios that resemble each other and are agonizingly repeated: burning buildings, images of destruction and looting—and white task forces, often heavily armed, along with Black individuals being arrested.

Taking an approach based on essay films, Cokes succeeds here most impressively in creating a differentiated yet by no means purely affirmative investigation of a historical phenomenon: “I happen to think that affective forms like popular music can encode histories, social difference and political struggles even as they seem merely to evoke pleasure or sublimate suffering.”² Whereas the recordings by news channels reveal themselves as tendentious or at least rather one-sided, text and sound allow for more multilayered commentary. Without downplaying or even whitewashing the violence, here the conditions, backgrounds, and reasons for these processes—discrimination and structural racism, social inequality, precarious living and working conditions, to name just a few aspects—are put into words:
“You look to us. You wonder how we carry on when all hope is gone.” . . . “You decree today that life is simply taking and not giving.” . . . “Looting, which instantly destroys the commodity as such, also discloses what the commodity ultimately implies: the army, the police and other specialized detachments of the state’s monopoly of armed violence.”

¹ Guy Debord, “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy,” in Situationist International Anthology, ed. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981/2006), pp. 194–203, esp. p. 197 (italics in the original).
² Tony Cokes, If UR Reading This It’s 2 Late: Vol. 1–3 (London: Goldsmiths Press, 2019), p. 81.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 156/2021, pp. 37–40.

JÖRG HEISER

No Good Life without Remembrance

The right to a good life in the city implies, I would suggest, the right to remember.¹ “Good life,” one might automatically think, occurs wherever we can be carefree, without being reminded of past horrors, misdeeds, and crimes against humanity, where such things remain below the line of our immediate horizon. Yet the opposite is the case. This starts with an assertion made by the philosopher George Santayana in 1905: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”² This aphorism did not appeal to a culture of remembrance, though it might sound that way, but rather took issue with a naive belief in progress—yet even here one finds a connection, for something like sustained progress, if there is such a thing, is not in fact possible without a past that is remembered, not repressed. René Magritte, in his painting La Légende des siècles (The Legend of the Centuries, 1950), visualized the Santayana quote quite vividly: a droll little coffeehouse chair made of wood is standing atop a giant, stony Fred Flintstone chair reminiscent of Stonehenge. Intervolved within a single image are the monstrosity, mysticism, and grandomania of a sunken past, the narcissistic, small-minded self-centeredness of the present, and the lack of historical perspectivity because that present does not know its own place.

Most of all, it is impossible to take part in the good life without the right to remember, for this would inevitably mean that one group can enjoy the good life at the cost of another group’s good life. In other words, real participation is essential in enabling a truly shared, just, and good life. And this real participation must take all of those into account who, in the past and in the present, have been marginalized, stigmatized, persecuted, or who even have risked life and limb and been destroyed; the survivors, the family and friends, those who found themselves in the resulting radius of shock and trauma.³ All of this might seem intuitively obvious—but what does it mean in concrete terms? I will take a relatively drastic approach to illustrating it by discussing the way the past has been dealt with in the case of National Socialism and its afterlife up to the present day. The cities of Vienna, Graz, and, most especially, Nuremberg will serve as examples in my analysis.

¹ I first discovered the phrasing of a “right to remember” or to memory in the work of the artist Ulf Aminde. Apparently, it came up in connection with efforts on the part of Aminde, along with a group of affected persons and residents, to create a memorial at Cologne’s Keupstraße, the site of the 2004 nail bomb attack carried out by the National Socialist Underground. Numerous people were injured, some severely. On this, see the Change petition, https://www.change.org/p/wir-fordern-die-realisierung-des-mahnmals-an-der-keupstrasse-in-k%C3%B6ln, and Stefan Dege, “Memorial for victims of Cologne NSU attack faces hurdles,” Deutsche Welle, June 27, 2019, https://www.dw.com/en/memorial-for-victims-of-cologne-nsu-attack-faces-hurdles/a-49381129.
2 George Santayana, The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (New York: Scribner, 1905), chapter “Reason in Common Sense,” p. 284, https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/15000.
³ This particularly strong call for affected persons to be allowed and invited to participate in a public culture of remembrance within a city, through commemorative plaques, street names, and/or artistically conceived memorials, was the focus of a conference called “Public Art: Das Recht auf Erinnern und die Realität der Städte” (The Right to Remember and the Reality of Cities) held on October 22–24, 2021. It was conceived and carried out by the author in collaboration with Gürsoy Doğtaş and María Inés Plaza Lazo and commissioned by the City of Nuremberg (specifically, the building department) and the Kunsthalle Nürnberg. Contributions by the following individuals in particular influenced the conceptual thread I pursue in this essay: Gürsoy Doğtaş, Ulf Aminde, Ayşe Güleç, members of the initiative “Das Schweigen durchbrechen,” Talya Feldman, İbrahim Arslan, Birgit Mair, and Noa K. Ha.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 156/2021, pp. 41–44.

NICOLE SIX & PAUL PETRITSCH

Echo Space: A Sphere of Activity and Agency

As part of the project The City & The Good Life, carried out from September 2020 to May 2021 by Camera Austria in collaboration with many different partners, the artists Nicole Six & Paul Petritsch developed Site-Specific (Public) Lessons, thus creating a framework for activities within the city—a space of agency characterized by participation, exchange, and transfer. This was juxtaposed by the Echo Space in Camera Austria’s exhibition room, which is usually only accessible through the main entrance and foyer of the Kunst­haus Graz.

The concept of the Echo Space provided for an exterior stairwell leading from the street outside into the exhibition space, making it directly accessible to visitors: a space within the city that anyone could engage with. A basic configuration lent shape to the room: a wall of posters and elements made of foam, serving both as a means of presentation and as places to sit or recline while visiting the exhibition. Framing the activities in this space were book presentations, a bulletin board for news and announcements of noncommercial activities, and other offers (films, videos, a Lesezirkel). A poster series accompanied various guided tours from the exhibition venue and downtown Graz into and through different neighborhoods.

This cluster of interventions opened up the framework for developing an open and flexible exhibition model. Camera Austria and the city—exemplified by the Eggenberg district—functioned here as permeable spaces for working and archiving, with the exhibitions and interventions themselves arising and manifesting within urban space. The city and the venue thus became vessels of communication that were connected by numerous interior and exterior interventions.

Artist contribution in Camera Austria International 156/2021, pp. 45–52.

FOLKE KÖBBERLING

Temporary Neighbors

The three-part work Nachbarn auf Zeit (Temporary Neighbors, 2019) questions the potential of art in urban space from a conceptual, legal and ethical point of view. Do the sheep fall under §11 of the Animal Protection Law because they are “on display”? Are the participating residents the actual work of art, while the sheep are merely grazing? In addition to a demonstration involving 200 sheep and 500 people, which started in front of Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt, passed by Bellevue and the central square Großer Stern, before arriving at Hansaplatz, this project drew attention to the precarious situation of itinerant shepherds, as well as the dire condition of our cities, where cars are given more space than humans, let alone animals.

The motto of the International Building Exhibition (Interbau) of 1957, which conceived the Hansaviertel as the “City of Tomorrow,” draws a connection between the sheep and the Hansaplatz. What does the city of tomorrow look like in the face of climate change and rampant species extinction? In the scope of Nachbarn auf Zeit, the sheep herd served as a catalyst and mental symbol of the question of how urban green spaces can be configured and used in a climate-friendly way. To this end, five sheep remained in the Hansa­viertel for a month after the demonstration—as temporary neighbors.
The lawn next to the Hansa Library was converted into a sheep pasture with a stable. Local residents took care of the sheep: they became sponsors of the animals and fed them, took them to the pasture in the morning and brought them back to the stable in the evening. While spending time with the sheep, the neighbors often got to know each other for the first time, or connected on another level. The idea of the “social green”—a core Interbau idea—was revived in this manner, and the green space was turned into a place of social interaction.

Artist contribution in Camera Austria International 156/2021, pp. 53–60.

ROSALYN D'MELLO

Die Metamorphose

The beryl stains on my fingers forge a connection between blood and ink. Did I choose this shade of pigment for its resemblance to blood and flesh and red wine? Was I anticipating a miracle? Following my fascination for Curtis Mayfield’s proposition of “inside songs,” I lingered on his single “Give Me Your Love.” The funk strains seemed to lead me to Solange, whose interventions evoke Miss Lauryn Hill, and I dwelled on the word legacy, which urged me back to a thought I’d had a few days ago, about the beginning of a book in the Bible that composes a meticulous genealogical account of Christ’s origins to establish his Messiah-ness, which in turn spawned, retrospectively, a memory of something he is recorded to have said that I internalized during my girlhood days as a practicing Catholic: “I have come to give you life, life in all its abundance.” In my attempts to relinquish the kyriarchal foundations of my Christian upbringing, I have been relying on evangelical feminism to foster a more empowered conception of what this promised abundance might mean. I am no longer lured by the promise of happiness. I seek only an unbridled joy that is the consequence of feminist jouissance. A joy that is hinged to relating the interiority of my selfhood with all that lies outside the boundaries of my organismic being, thus metabolizing my consciousness.

I remain obsessed with my tongue, its muscularities and its disabilities, the difficulties it has had to encounter in enunciating sounds alien to my oral universe. Since April 2020 I have been enabling it to surrender to the intricacies of the German language, in the hope of facilitating my inhabitation in South Tyrol, my marital Heimat. It is within its lingual papillae that my displacement is most invisibly felt, and I struggle daily to interpret the information it receives, records, and disseminates to my brain. My tongue has always punctuated the queerness of my appearance. I have only to unfold my mouth to speak to see the notes of slight revulsion on the face of my immediate listener. They don’t know what to make of the elaborate birth mark that occupies the left tip. I think of my tongue as a frontier, the first line of resistance to that which is not habituated. Does my tongue have feelings, I wonder. Do I feel what my tongue feels, or does my tongue feel independent of me? Is my tongue an autonomous region?

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 156/2021, pp. 61–66.