161 | 2023

CARLOS KONG

An Image Is a Migrant Is a Monument Is a Memory

ALEXANDRA JUHASZ

A Media Practice as Harm Reduction

In an online written introduction, Sky Hopinka relays four disconnections of relevance for his 2017 video Dislocation Blues, itself (de-)centered on the Dakota Access Pipeline protest camp (April 2016 – February 2017), as (re)mediated by cameras, microphones, screens, songs, rumors, participants, witnesses, infiltrators, nostal­gia, editing, and the colors blue and rose.¹ With video, he dislocates bodies, loves, dreams, and the wild, and yet they remain—“[a] dislocated body is still a body”²—no, not intact, and yes, acknowledged; no, not forever, but yes, held for now. Video and activism as care, not cure; Indigenous media art as epochal change process of the Anthropocene. The work testifies to the losses of bodies, love, dreams, and the wild in the face of racist capitalism’s scorched-earth policies and late-stage capitalism’s (social) media; a practice of holding all these things, and us, as they go. Hopinka uses video—his images and edits—to (dis)locate what he saw at Standing Rock alongside the words of Indigenous compatriots Terry Running Wild (recorded contemporaneously) and Cleo Keahna (shot later on a computer), as two of many more singing and seeing of [the] blues: “[a] dislocated love is still love.”³ We will lose, we have lost, our bodies, love, dreams, and the wild to late-stage media capitalism; and yet, there they (we) are, in rearview mirrors, in reflections of screens, in the loss and making of language with video: “[a] dislocated dream is a still a dream.”⁴ Activist video has been used to document protests and people, to inspire action, to testify to abuse, to critique and also create power, to see, love, and save ourselves. In a media/environmental ecosystem where activism slows but can’t end the building of greed’s pipelines, Dislocation Blues is a holding environment that disorders and reclaims the existential vacuum of our rupturing reality as a process of harm reduction: “[a] dislocated wild is still the wild.”⁵

1 “Sky Hopinka Introduces his Film ‘Dislocation Blues,’” MUBI, Notebook Column, October 23, 2017, https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/sky-hopinka-introduces-his-
film-dislocation-blues.
2 Ibid. (italics in the original).
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 161/2023, p. 25–34.

ROSALYN D’MELLO

Milking Time

An hour into my eleven-month-old’s nap, I mustered the resolve to finally unclog my LAMY fountain pen. I cannot trace the exact moment when it became useless. I know only that as soon as my milk began to flow more gracefully, the Beryl crystal ink began to dry. I wonder if this series of events could constitute Copernican dimensions. I came across the phrase while reading the blurb of Sarah Manguso’s book Ongoingness: The End of a Diary. For over two decades, Manguso obsessively sustained a diaristic practice that had assumed spiritual proportions. Her recording of the nothing that was inherent in the mundane was rooted in hypergraphia, the overwhelming urge to write, and graphomania, the obsessive impulse to write.

It was only two days later that I was finally able to reassemble the LAMY. Even now, as I write this, my fingers tremble at the fear of being interrupted. The handwriting looks and feels strange. All these months the only things I have committed to paper are J’s nap timings and minutes of work meetings and to-do lists and grocery lists. The hand feels unpracticed, like I have lost all my stealth. If someone were to analyze the nature of my current scripture, they may accurately conclude that I’m suffering from the in-betweenness of interruption, or am symptomatic of a state of constant interruptions. In order to be productive and functional I have had to contain my desire to be irrepressible, like damming the words so that the spilling over is not allowed to happen. The anxiety about not being allowed, by circumstances, to begin a sentence keeps me from trying. It doesn’t mean, though, that my thoughts are unfinished. I have never, until the Copernican event of motherhood, had this luxury of clarity. I have encountered an interiority so startlingly seductive and fascinating that I am even afraid to transcribe the goings-on in my brain. Like being on some kind of LSD trip, perhaps. The recounting of it can never sufficiently recreate the hallucinogenic effects of the physiological and psychological experience. Last evening, I began and finished a book, a first since motherhood. I have read plenty—essays, theses, proposals, all for work, as a proofreader and editor. But for leisure, only perhaps a poem here and there because it appeared in my inbox, or because it appeared on my Insta timeline. Just now, for example, I read a poem that asked why one should write, and the answer, or the poem’s response, was because someone, somewhere, might have a wound the shape of your words, and reading it reminded me that there is so much power in the afterlife of words, that the literary always transcends the here and now, and speaks to the continuum that is time.

Time is the protagonist of Manguso’s book Ongoingness. Perhaps I felt compelled to read it because D cited it as we were exchanging notes about breastfeeding, and I told her how I have been experiencing time differently, but also how breastfeeding offers me swathes of time during which I am almost obligated to “be” or to exist in a state of pure being, and she mentioned this book and Manguso’s concept of inhabiting time, which spoke to me, because I recently wrote about what it means to actually “have” the time one finds. I found a way of accessing the book immediately, because I had found a pocket of time to have, and after consulting several shadow libraries, I downloaded a copy and installed it on Google Books so that I could read it on the go. I think I was expecting to find in the book a startling, brilliant exegesis on what it means to milk time, which I knew to be the subject of my essay. Instead, I found a confessional about a writer addicted to recording and chronicling everything that happens or doesn’t happen to her over a twenty-five-year period, this corpus of over a million words running through several diaries. It was the Copernican events of her pregnancy and subsequent motherhood that irrevocably altered her anxieties around time and selfhood. I thought, is this what it means to be irrepressible? This compulsiveness?

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 161/2023, p. 35–40.

CHIARA BARDELLI NONINO

The Garden of Forking Pasts

It’s quite hard to understand what you are looking at: small fragments of paper worn out by time and usage, a thick patina of dirt darkening whatever they used to represent, now completely unintelligible. They look like weird Arte Povera artifacts, layered with a greasy, organic substance, like something out of Jannis Kounellis’s studio.

These blackened scraps are actually tarot cards, used for decades by an Indian psychic to read the future—only it’s almost impossible to recognize which card is The Fool, or The Hanged Man, or The High Priestess. They look like bottomless wells, dark portals. Nonetheless, apparently the man can read them with an uncanny precision. You need to take a leap of faith.

When Alba showed me the haunting pictures she took of them, they seemed like the perfect metaphor for what she has been trying to do with her latest work, Occult (2019–23). Like a patient conservator, she embarked on a journey to reconstruct her obscure past, dipping into one black hole after the other, and reemerging with a small detail, a forgotten memory, an unnamed feeling that could paint a more accurate picture of her family’s early life.

Alba Zari was born in Bangkok in 1987, in a cult called Children of God (COG) at the time, founded in 1968 by a former pastor by the name of David Berg. He was known by his followers by a plethora of titles—King David, David Moses, Mo, Dad, or Grandpa—and communicated with them through various media: letters, comics, ser­m­ons, flyers, and, of course, photographs. The doctrine preached looks almost too outrageous to be true: among polyamory, tantric sex, and liberation from sexual taboos, Mo’s teachings included inciting incest, underage intercourse, and “flirty fishing,” a form of religious prostitution which was considered a way of recruiting new members and of giving birth to “Jesus babies,” children born within the sect. Alba and her brother were two of those babies.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 161/2023, p. 41–50.

SARAH ZÜRCHER

A Diasporic Perspective through the Lens of Memory, Displacement, and Maritime Traffic

How to refer to Zineb Sedira’s practices and use of diasporic perception in the light of her evolutionary process? Her works are first of all multidisciplinary and consist in using family recollections, film, literature, emotional and physical landscape, caricature, and other creative means to tackle issues of identity, gender, environment, and collective memory in a postcolonial context. In doing so, she draws on her personal history and raises awareness of discrimination, colonization, and racism, through various struggles of liberation and other forms of resistance. Sedira inscribes territorial landmarks onto artistic landscapes to constitute human stories that expose what is “unspoken” in history. The artist intermingles colonialism, mobility, and “Global Trade” by forging bridges between East, West, North, and South and their different cultures in a globalized world and by drawing on personal experiences with her own family and her intellectual artistic community, such as Sonia Boyce, Latifa Echakhch, Fayçal Baghriche, or the curator Gilane Tawadros.¹ Constantly fascinated by the notion of movement, displacement, and by issues of origin and authorship, she reconsi­ders the theme of geographical or cultural uprooting, but also examines it historically, through varied modes of narration that function as envelopes of memory, tied to social, economic, and political dimensions.

I.Genesis

In 1992, as Sedira was studying at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London, Stuart Hall’s “cultural studies” and the British Black Arts Movement (BAM) were playing a fundamental role, examining the postcolonial thoughts and archives in the United Kingdom. From the very beginning, Sedira focused on the visual and historical image by emphasizing cultural-theoretical concerns. A Scream for Liberation (1995), or Don’t do to her what you did to me(1998/2001), a kind of talisman in her eyes, denotes the disinte­gration of a photograph and of calligraphy, referring to her sister who died at a young age. Sedira has been a storyteller from the very beginning. She creates compelling and intersubjective narratives, where image and text dissolve, but are nonetheless filled by a kind of affectionate and emotional vocabulary rather than an alienated one. However, with her captivating narrative, her eyes² that appear in many films, such as Silent Sight (2000), are often hypnotic and enthralling. Their duality works as an invitation to what Frantz Fanon describes as the fundamental dilemma of forced colonization, the spatial and expressive tensions of a diasporic life and its subsequent displacement.³

1 “Global Trade,” as Glenn Lowry mentions it in his essay “Zineb Sedira’s Eyes: Movement and Displacement” for her monograph, Zineb Sedira, published by the Sharjah Art Foundation in 2018, p. 80.
2 The “I” voice or first-person narrator close to Ishmael in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick becomes an overlay or an intersection of the “I” voice that represents each one of us, each viewer (the I as the artist and the audience at the same time).
3 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 1986).

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 161/2023, p. 51–62.