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I show
you mine
if you
show me
yours
Hira Nabi Alice Wong Claude Nassar Astrid Feringa
Faiza Ahmad Khan Hanna Rullmann Thandi Loewenson
Elena Guzman Laura Menchaca Ruiz Mariangela Mihai
Elena Gorfinkel Sander Hölsgens (ed.)
I show you mine if you show me yours
November 2021
Editor
Sander Hölsgens
Graphic design
Judith Leijdek kers
Fonts
Coconat by Sara Lavazza
Ortica by Benedetta Bovani
thanks to
Badass Libre Fonts for Womxn
design-research.be/by-womxn/
With the generous support of
XTR Film Society
Institute for Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology, Leiden University
This publication is part of Documenting Complexity (NWO CISC.KC.212)
Contents
Note from the editor
Contact zones
~ Deep Listening and
Documentary Witnessing ~ a
personal manifesto
Reconstructing Reality
I’m home, where are you? –
A
reflection on home, and the
relation of home with the
production of the self
Trapped by the Image –
Spectating the border in the
Dampa Tiger Reserve
Never look at the sun
Movements: Battles and
Solidarity
Against lists
Sander Hölsgens
Hira Nabi
Al ice Wong
Claude Nassar &
Astrid Feringa
Faiza Ahmad &
Hanna Rullmann
Thandi Loewenson
Ethnocine
Tra n. T. Kim-Trang
Elena Gorfinkel
Note from the editor
Contact zones
In 1990, filmmaker, writer and music composer Trinh Minh-ha
published Documentary Is/Not a Name – a radical critique of the
colonial histories of non-fiction film. Focusing on socially engaged
filmmakers, she asks: Who are actually standing behind and in front
of the camera, and what does that mean? Whose stories are told, and at
whose merits? In what ways are filmmakers complicit in the structures
of inequality inherent to documentary cinema? And how, why, and for
whom do these filmmakers aspire to effect social change?
This publication brings together filmmakers, designers and artists
whose audiovisual work is shaped around intersectional feminism and
decolonial perspectives to craft spaces for resistance. This attunement
to radical documentary practices means examining hybridity and
unexpected contact zones, or that which is located across and beyond
the institutionalised forms and formats of documentary film. It means
exploring the unstable aesthetics, politics, and technologies of situated
forms of storytelling.
Yet a critical engagement with the documentary project also implies an
intimation of how the world folds and unfolds, veils and lays bare, gives
and takes: it gestures towards the myriad of ways that documentary
makers attend to the world around us to challenge structural injustice.
Centering around questions of collectivity and solidarity, the works and
articles presented here trace the generative potential and productive
frictions of documentary.
Sander Hölsgens
Secrets unite us, and those same secrets divide us. We live in a deeply divided world, filled with
many secrets; some ripe to reveal themselves, others gone, perhaps lost forever. How do you unveil a
secret? It is not so hard so as to be impossible but it does require patience, sometimes a great deal of
patience.
This is a call to deepen the engagement that is already taking place between our bodies and our
senses and the places that we move through. When we come across something new and unfamiliar,
do we take recourse first to our sensory interpretation or to an intellectual understanding? How do
we make sense of affective experience?1 I believe that the current breakdown of the hyper-mediated
present, as experienced during the pandemic allows us to be more than capable of immediate
experience – that we are able to reach out and connect with one another, and with non-human living
beings. We are yet able to find new kinds of language that may not require us to speak them, and
that we can receive input that can be wordless and rich in meaning.
What is deep listening? How can we practice it? To my mind, it is linked closely with adopting a
practice of stillness. Of waiting in watchfulness, of slowly becoming aware of everything that is going
on around you, everything that is coming into contact with you: all the sounds rushing in through
your ears, the rhythms and the beats, the repetition and pattern of reverberations around you. The
scents that are also pushing their way in if you let them.
The most important thing that I learnt and keep learning is patience.
What happens when you stop making impatient demands?
When you simply observe, and listen.
Everything else around you comes to life.
You stop becoming the agitated and restless conductor of the orchestra around you.
You just let everything play – with all its discordant, chaotic, messy and jangling notes. And watch
how it harmonizes.
I use my camera as a way of visual note taking, as a way to journal and to remind myself of what was.
What continues to be, and what no longer is. But at some point, this seemingly passive act shifted.
Where there were homes in Deir Yassein, you’ll see dense forests—
That village was razed. There’s no sign of Arabic.
I too, O Amichai, saw the adresses of beautiful women
And everything else, just like you, in Death, Hebrew, and Arabic.
They ask me to tell them what Shahid means—
Listen: it means “The Beloved” in Persian, “witness” in Arabic
Excerpted from
Ghazal,
by Agha Shahid Ali.
~ Deep Listening and
Documentary Witnessing ~
a personal manifesto by Hira Nabi
I was no longer just making images with my eyes and the lens of the camera, taking snapshots of the
world around me, freezing it in time and space, I had become a kind of conservator.
I realized that as I bear witness to all kinds of changes unfolding around me, in some way I am being
charged with responsibility. I have in front of me countless narratives and testimonials, and they
cannot rest only with me. It’s an act of trust placed upon me that I have to fulfill. To be a witness is to
carry that testimony forward, to not break the chain, to not let it die or be forgotten. And that is an
act of expanding love.
If art loses its connection with truth and reality, it ceases to be filled with vitality and energy. In many
ways, it ceases to matter. We are all bearing witness to the rapidly transforming world around us, as
it continues to be excavated, terraformed, paved over, submerged, built upon and ravaged. We witness
the lives of so many others as we witness our own in the wake of these large-scale transformations
– we share in joy, pain, glory, sacrifice, love, despair and recognize it, acknowledging its existence by
our witnessing of it.
Artists have long been accustomed to wearing the mantle of story-tellers, but if they are to be truth-
tellers as well as story-tellers, they, we, must face up to the possibilities of truth. That once told, it
cannot be untold. These truths have often come to me by way of other people, other bodies, other
places, other terrains, and other languages. What kinds of protections can they afford to guard
themselves against danger or exposition? What can I offer to them, and to us collectively? I need to
remember to be mindful of all of this as I consider ways of truth-telling.
What does it mean to be brave or heroic? Sometimes when you back away from actions that may
appear brave or heroic, knowing that their consequences, like a bullet or loss or earnings will not
come for you but for others. And knowing that you step away, move slantly, and look elsewhere.
Perhaps you find a new way or you shelf it away for another time. Truth and time operate in parallel
categories. Sometimes the time is ripe, and sometimes you have to wait, and be crafty as you prepare
it for ripening.
“The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you” –
Rainer Maria Rilke.
1 Laura U. Marks Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema 15. Immigrant Semiosis University of Toronto Press | 2007
Alice Wong is a Story Designer
based in Eindhoven and teaches
at Design Academy Eindhoven in
the department of MA Information
Design as a Specialist Tutor.
She translates research findings into
a multi-perspective story. She aims
to increase awareness of truths and
to render complex information more
comprehensible and shareable.
Her research question is rooted in
understanding how our perception
of reality is shaped by media. Her
principal topic of interest lies in
the intersection of biographical
documentary, media and social
phenomena.
www.missalicewong.com
RECONSTRUCTING REALITY
Written by
Alice Wong
Based on a real story
The theory of evolution is a constant
recreation of the reality, we find
new evidence everyday. -
Richard
Dawkins
Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Print.
Scan QR code to watch
Reconstructing Reality (11-min)
https://vimeo.com/141674484
password: storytelling1
According to the Jean Piaget’s
Developmental Stage Theory, during
the preoperational stage, children
begin to represent the world with
words and images which reflect
increased symbolic thinking and go
beyond the connection of sensory
information and physical action.
Children in that stage believe
that others identify, believe and
experience the same way they do,
they are unable to recognize others
viewpoints exist.
Piaget, Jean, David Elkind, and
John H Flavell. Studies In Cognitive
Development. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1969. Print.
Children use death in their fantasies
as part of the developmental
process.
Anthony, Helen Sylvia. The Child’s
Discovery Of Death. London: K. Paul,
Trench, Trubner & Co, 1940. Print.
IRA GLASS
In a good story, getting rid of the boring
part and going right to the part that’s
getting to your heart and you know, you
just have to be ruthless.
MIKA
This is the way you left me, I’m not
pretending... No hope, no love, no glory...
no happy ending... This is the way that we
love, like it’s forever... Then live the
rest of our life, but not together...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Who cares what you feel like? What matters
is what’s true!
ALICE WONG
How do you know that your life is real?
What do you base that on?
WHITE TEXT ON BLACK BACKGROUND:
Reconstructing Reality
CARL GUSTAV JUNG
Fantasy has a proper reality, that is not
to be forgotten. Fantasy is not nothing,
despite the fact we can’t measure it. It is
a manifestation of something.
FADE TO BLACK.
ALICE WONG
When I was three and a half, I could see
people were surrounding a big box and
weeping. I didn’t know what was inside. My
mother lifted me up, looking down I could
see it was my father, dressed in a suit,
his hands held together with his eyes
closed. My mother said, ‘See? Your father
is sleeping.’ I could see, he looked like
the sleeping beauty. Why would people cry
because of my father sleeping? My mother
patted him on his chest a few times, then
asked me to stick out my hands to wave
goodbye. And I did. Goodbye? Ok, goodbye.
Some days later, my mother and older
brother were busy packing on the dinning
table, I climbed onto the chair and asked
‘What are you doing? Why are you packing?’,
my brother replied, ‘We are moving to Hong
Kong.’ I didn’t understand, ‘What is Hong
One of the earliest studies
conducted on children’s
understanding of death was in
the early 1930’s by Schilder and
Wechsler at Bellevue Psychiatric
Hospital in New York City. In this
study they looked at children’s
attitudes toward death by using a
question-discussion method where
they showed children pictures and
asked questions about the pictures.
They also used a “doll test” which
involved the clinician poking the
doll so that it fell with a loud noise.
This was repeated and the child’s
response noted. Their main finding
was that children perceive death as
“deprivation”and that “death does
not appear as the natural end of
life.” This study while remarkable
for its time, has limits especially in
the population chosen, who were all
boys under the care of Bellevue.
Shendge, Manisha. Let The Little
Children Come. 2008. Print.
Schilder, Paul, and David Wechsler. ‘The
Attitudes Of Children Toward Death’.
The Pedagogical Seminary and Journal
of Genetic Psychology 45.2 (1934): 406-
451. Web.
‘We always find uncertainty more
unpleasant than unpleasant
certainty.’
Stevens, Michael. Why Are We Morbidly
Curious?. 2014. Web. 10 Feb. 2015.
Kong?’ They explained, but I wanted to
stay in Holland, my mother now slightly
irritated responded, ‘Okay! If you want
to stay, stay here by yourself!’ I began
imagining life if I stayed in Holland, with
no one to play with, as my father was still
asleep.
WHITE TEXT ON BLACK BACKGROUND:
CARL SAGAN
It’s only children nowadays, who ask the
big questions, because they don’t know
enough not to.
FADE TO BLACK.
ALICE WONG
Just after we moved to Hong Kong, I
learned from a TV show that, if a person
fell asleep and didn’t wake up again,
that person was dead. It was then, that I
realised that my father had died.
When I was seven, playing at my friend’s
house and my friend asked, ‘Do you know
how your father died?’ I said, ‘No,’ and
she whispered, ‘My father told me that
your father died from cancer, your father
smoked, right?’ I had no clue what she was
talking about.
At home I asked my mother how my father
died, she replied, ‘Why do you ask this
question? And why do you want to know? If
anyone asked you how your father died, just
tell them that he died in a car accident.’
Apparently, my father had lots of friends
and liked helping others, like a big
brother for people to look up to…
According to my mother, my father died on
his way to his work after an urgent phone
call, maybe the phone call was from a
friend who needed help, and probably he was
driving too fast and that’s why he crashed.
My mother was insisting that I should study
in England instead of The Netherlands, only
later I understood why.
While I was studying in The Netherlands,
I searched around online and in local
newspaper archives to see if there’s
any news information related to the car
accident… no ndings, zero.
Then I decided to visit my aunt, she told
me, ‘You used to lived near by the end
station of Tram 13 in Amsterdam, your
father usually took this tram to his
work, I do think your mother had made a
good decision to go back to Hong Kong
and managed to sell everything before
you moved. Only the guy who bought your
mother’s car didn’t pay much and then he
drove away in it. Then I followed up,
‘Do you know how my father died?’, ‘This
question you should better ask your mum’,
she said.
Later, I asked my mother for the truth,
she replied, ‘Why? How come you suddenly
come up with this question? Just focus on
your study rst, and I promise to let you
know the truth after the end of the school
trimester.
ALAN WATTS
You must be able to verify, there’s to
say, verify things, hypothesis. You make a
prediction based on your statement…
ALICE WONG
How could someone buy a crashed car and he
could even drive away in it after a fatal
crash?
ALAN WATTS
A statement which was de-veried, shown to
be untrue, might be meaningful…
ALICE WONG
Hold on! What if my father committed
suicide? What if he is still alive?
ALAN WATTS
But untrue.
ALICE WONG
Maybe he is now walking somewhere?
ALAN WATTS
And it comes up true, you veried it…
ALICE WONG
Or he had another woman and left my mother?
He committed crime? And put in jail? What
if he was murdered?
ALAN WATTS
If it doesn’t come true, you haven’t
veried it, you de-veried it.
ALICE WONG
Chased by a car till he crashed? Kidnapped
then murdered?
ALAN WATTS
But a statement that you can’t think of
any way of verifying it, isn’t this theory
meaningless? What evidence if someone could
produce it, would you regard disproving
your ideas?
ALICE WONG
Eventually, my mother told me that my
father was assassinated.
ANNOUNCEMENT
September 30th, 1992 Amsterdam, on the re
escape of his apartment was shot dead a 36
year-old Chinese.
ALICE WONG
I accessed the police archive in Amsterdam,
the les consisted of a detective report,
a forensic report, an autopsy report,
9 witness reports, and some police
photographs, etc. The police found 7 bullet
cases at the crime scene, which means the
assassin had shot 7 times, 3 times he
managed to hit my father, there were 9
witnesses…in order to understand what each
of them was doing and seeing at the certain
moment, I made a timeline. According to
the reports, the assassination happened
within 20 minutes, starting at 6:45 a.m..
My Father was leaving the apartment to work
and the suspect was hanging around the
staircase on the rst oor…
The guy who was living in the opposite
building could hear a man yelling in a
foreign language, he looked out and saw
my father hitting on a window. At rst,
no one responded, my father walked to the
staircase, sat on the stairs and bent
forward, then stood up again, started
hitting on the window with both hands.
A guy with his underpants came out and
immediately returned and closed the door…
(SIREN)
5 witnesses could see the suspect, he
was either non-Dutch, Asian, Japanese or
Chinese, 20 to 40 years old, with black
straight hair, dark short hair, or no black
hair, medium length till the neck, spiky on
the top and long on the back.
Actually my parents saw it coming, my
father had already booked a ight to Hong
Kong. On the day he was murdered, was
his last day of work in the factory that
produces hearing devices, he was supposed
to take a ight the next day.
While my mother found my father bleeding
on the ground with holes in his head, she
held him in her arms and tried to stop the
bleeding, in his ears…were his headphones,
and the music was still playing…
My mother told me that, she couldn’t sleep
these nights since I have asked her to tell
me the truth. It’s very tough for her to
recall all these memories, she has been
trying so hard to get rid of them, she
confronted me, ‘Do you know how hard for me
to deal with it? Have you ever considered
how I feel?’
RICHARD DAWKINS
Who cares what you feel like? Who cares
what feels good? Who cares what makes you
feel comforted? Who cares what helps you
sleep at nights? What matters is what’s
true.
FRANK SINATRA
How little we know..
ALICE WONG
I know my father died.
FRANK SINATRA
How much to discover…
ALICE WONG
And a lot of questions arise…
FRANK SINATRA
What chemical forces ow…
ALICE WONG
What was he involved in? Who murdered him?
FRANK SINATRA
How ignorant bliss is…so long as you kiss
me..
The human mind has the ability to
choose information that reaches
consciousness. This ability varies
from focused attention to com-
plex dissociation. Both senses and
memory are processed this way. For
example, during focused attention,
we can make our senses to only
notice unique features when looking
for something. If we look for Mr.
Jones in the crowd and know that
he is wearing a bright purple hat, we
filter out all other hats. Mr. Jones
could be standing twenty feet away,
and we might not notice him if he
wore something else. Similarly, when
processing memories, we only pay
attention to the topics that we are
interested in and discard noncon-
forming information. For example,
when we try to remember how many
cakes we had during the last picnic,
we may ignore the total number of
soda cans. The information is not
sought and is ignored; that is kept
out of consciousness.
The selectivity of our senses and
memories is enhanced when a topic
is emotionally charged. Signifi-
cant pleasing events and facts are
reliably stored in memory and are
easy to recall. By contrast, unpleas-
ant events and facts are undesir-
Watts says that we only know black,
because we know white. We only
know sorrow, because we know
happiness.
We only know death, because we
are alive, here I don’t know how my
father died, let alone knowing how
he lived.
Watts, Alan. The Dream Of Life - Alan
Watts. 2013. Web. 7 Jan. 2015.
able, and the conscious mind takes
The human mind has the ability to
choose information that reaches
consciousness. This ability varies
from focused attention to com-
plex dissociation. Both senses and
memory are processed this way. For
example, during focused attention,
we can make our senses to only
notice unique features when looking
for something. If we look for Mr.
Jones in the crowd and know that
he is wearing a bright purple hat, we
filter out all other hats. Mr. Jones
could be standing twenty feet away,
and we might not notice him if he
wore something else. Similarly, when
processing memories, we only pay
attention to the topics that we are
interested in and discard noncon-
forming information. For example,
when we try to remember how many
cakes we had during the last picnic,
we may ignore the total number of
soda cans. The information is not
sought and is ignored; that is kept
out of consciousness.
The selectivity of our senses and
memories is enhanced when a topic
is emotionally charged. Signifi-
cant pleasing events and facts are
reliably stored in memory and are
easy to recall. By contrast, unpleas-
ant events and facts are undesir-
able, and the conscious mind takes
deliberate steps to keep them from
surfacing. Consciously rejected
memories of this type are known as
‘suppressed memories.’ Some very
traumatic memories are suppressed
unconsciously and are known as
‘repressed memories.’
Confabulated memories are memo-
ries pertain to events and facts that
never happened or did not happen
as recalled. In another words, the
ALAN WATTS
Somehow we think we understand things,
when we have translated them...
ALICE WONG
Who was my father actually?
FRANK SINATRA
How little it matters, how little we
know…
ALAN WATTS
It seems that the human being really has
a very simple kind of mind.
ALICE’S TEACHER FROM ALICE IN THE
WONDERLAND
Alice! Alice! Alice! Alice! Alice.
memories are made up. Although
confabulation may involve seem-
ingly biographical events, but in
fact, many confabulated memories
and stories have nothing to do with
biographical experiences.Memories
that form during or shortly after a
traumatic incident tend to be true,
but may become altered beyond
recognition over time. The out-
come depends on the progression
of memory consolidation and on the
neuropsychological damage the vic-
tim suffers as a result of her abuse.
Some victims of rape, brutal physical
assaults, or helpless observers of
murder of a loved one completely
change their stories as time passes.
These responses are indicative of
dissociative disorders and disrupted
memory consolidation. The dissocia-
tion is not just a matter of the latest
trauma. Traumatic experiences
in childhood have major influence
on the remembering of current
traumas. The childhood traumas
predetermine how much the victim
dissociates and how she reacts to
future traumas.
Pages, Lucid. ‘Repressed Memories’.
Lucid Pages. N.p., 2000. Web. 12 Mar.
2015.
I’m home. Where are you?
–
A reflection on home, and the relation
of home with the production of the self
Claude Nassar & Astrid Feringa
We, “humans”, seem to be plagued with a kind of amnesia that makes us seek what we run from. We
seek stability, we seek home while, arguably, the only way we can have home and stability, is by things
staying the same, and things can only stay the same within the embrace of oppressive normativity.
But when physical presence has an expiration date printed on a residency card, home loses its
stability and opens beyond the familiar building, nuclear family, or nation. Home becomes a
conversation that emerges during a party, that we pick up at breakfast, continue through a film we’re
producing, lay to rest in a book we’re reading, only to remerge when we leave.
The core of our redefinition of home comes from Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “the refrain”: a
rhythmic repetition of order in chaos (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: ch:11). From here sound and image
become a defining factor of home that can be used whether to expand the spatial parameters of
home, or to modulate the way home relates to the rest of the world.
My mind keeps going back to that one night that undoubtedly set everything in motion. When you
came with the late train from The Hague to Arnhem, to join me in a Gabber party that everyone else
had already bailed on. Before that night, we sporadically talked in school, but now we were having
Gin Tonics in my living room and the conversations take flight into unfamiliar intimate territories.
We started talking about our homes; where we grew up, in what landscapes, houses, rooms, and
accompanied by what music, noises, sounds and smells, and who I was there to what people.
I show you mine if you show me yours: YouTube videos with drone shots of Lebanese beaches, pine
tree woods, snow-covered mountains, Frisian horses in green fields, lakes scattered with white
triangular sails. We looked at each other’s roots through Google Maps–tracing that specific road we
would take driving up the mountain in a few months, the sharp turns in that road, the car accident
that happened there, the ‘90s trance song that was playing when this happened and still reminds you
of that accident every time it plays. The highway that at a certain point crosses underneath a canal,
and the boat going over at the exact moment we’d drive under.
Home is drawing “a circle around that uncertain self and fragile centre, to organise a limited
space” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988). By organising a section of space, both material and mental, that
corresponds to the self. A section of space where we can recall and create memories and where
objects correspond to familiar associations. A section of space safe enough to expand time. We
produce a home when we create a familiar space that we can rivisite: a space of order from which
theorder of time and the rhythm of life emerges. Leaving home, returning home.
That night, we danced to the only rhythm that seemed to overwhelm and alleviate the intensity of
experiencing a Dutch art school: 4/4 kick drums at 200 bpm. Hardcore: the high speed body that is
perhaps as much part of capitalist society as its resistance. “What if dancing so fast can be a way to
appropriate speed, not for being more productive, but for the opposite: speed becoming a vehicle for
sensations, for eluding control?” (Vereertbrugghen: 2018) An intensity that brought me back to my
teenage years; an intensity that propelled me from my teenage years to meet in the common rhythm
of euphoric sensory overload.
Home is a circle of familiarity around the self. A rhythm; a skip to the beat. “But the song itself is
already a skip: it jumps from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos and is in danger of breaking
apart at any moment” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988). A rhythm that starts from my body’s ability to
recall movements; movements of organs, movements of sound, and movements of thought, memories
and imaginings. A rhythm that emerges from the oscillation between the past and the present, while
the body travels through the non-linear temporalities of superimposed meanwhiles, in between the
drum and the clap in the present of linear time. An ability that precedes and goes beyond thought,
that spreads through the body and through that informs thought and its speeds.
Tell me about home, about the sounds, the smells ... what were your summers like?
Home is not a place, or an image that we project. Home is a fundamental property of thought. It is the
collective body of you, me, Jackie, our spaces, our plants, and our books through which we imagine,
film, and produce the world. It is fundamental, but it is a constructed patch of order in chaos. A space
that we order. A circle that we draw around the plastic self by remembering, by making a film, by
sharing digital videos, by having conversations, and by imagining together, through each other.
How can home as the “refrain” expand beyond the building, the family and the nation, to become
a rhythmic relation with our human and non-human environment? And what role can sound and
image play in the production of home, the understanding of the self, and the production of our
world?
As we gradually move away from artistic practice as our main source of economic (in stability, we
are slowly liberating ourselves and each other from filmmaking as functional practice towards
filmmaking as common (self) expression. Film stops being an art piece consumable by the art
industry and becomes a block of incommensurable present sensation. An offering of a present as a
present; a juxtaposition of a past meanwhile of one of us, in the present of the other. To feel as the
other, to think through one another. Not to make films about being together but to be together and
film in a common world (Emmelhainz, 2019).
I’m home. Where are you?
References
– Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1988. A thousand plateaus: capitalism and
schizophrenia. London: Athlone Press.
– Vereertbrugghen, Lisa. 2018. Artist statement of the performance Softcore -
a Hardcore Encounter Emmelhainz, Irmgard. 2019.
– Jean-Luc Godard’s Political Filmmaking. Mexico City: Palgrave Macmillan.
This Emerald Dove, Leopard Cat and Civet
were recorded early 2015 by a camera trap
placed in the Dampa Tiger Reserve in Mizoram,
eastern India, as part of a study on the Clouded
Leopard in the region.1 It was only a few days
later that this same camera was set off as one
of the several insurgent groups active in the
area, the National Liberation Front of Tripura,
kidnapped two members of a government road
crew and made their way through the forest
towards Bangladesh.2
Dampa is a 500 sq km protected forest that
borders Bangladesh on its western flank and
as many as twelve insurgent groups operate
in these parts, crossing regularly between the
two countries. The Indian government also
claims that Bangladeshi immigrants use the
reserve to cross over into India illegally. In a
bid to deter migrants and insurgent groups,
the government has started to deforest and
fence off the 62 km border stretch that forms
one edge of the reserve,3 which simultaneously
poses a serious concern for the migration of
wildlife between the Indian and Bangladeshi
parts of the forest.4
Between the newly built fence, the cross-border
movement by people as well as wildlife, the
forest’s legal protection status and the local
community’s claim to forest resources, the
Dampa Tiger Reserve, as many other border
landscapes,5 forms a complex assemblage of
intersecting mobilities, rights, infrastructures
and technologies – registered, in part, by
camera traps. In this short text we’d like to use
the Dampa Reserve as a case study of these
overlapping movements of human and other-
than-human species that may occur at borders,
and investigate how forms of environmental
governance and viewing practices contribute
to the enforcement of borders. In particular, we
will address the role of imaging devices, such as
camera traps, as observers and agents within
these border ecologies. As the use of these
imaging devices can range from gathering
data on wildlife to more overt surveillance of
people for poaching activities, as well as being
witness to traditional and communal forest
practices, we wish to interrogate the presence
and the gaze of the camera and those who are
spectating.
The Image: Uncommoning the Forest
The Dampa Reserve is one of the fifty-one Tiger
Reserves in India and is a designated ‘Protected’
forest, a mandate established in the Forest Act
of 1878 under British colonial rule, alongside the
classification of a ‘Reserved’ forest.6 Reserved
forests are areas in which most activities and
access to resources are prohibited by the
state, whereas in protected forests certain
activities and use of particular species (for
example felling certain types of wood) might
be permitted by the state under specific
circumstances.7 The Forest Acts of 1865 and
1878 have had a significant impact on the way
in which local inhabitants and conservationists
alike interact with and perceive forests. For
the colonial state, the designation of areas as
‘protected’ or ‘reserved’ was a legal instrument
Trapped by the Image
– Spectating the border in the
Dampa Tiger Reserve
Faiza Ahmad Khan & Hanna Rullmann
Emerald Dove
that are made visible by the traps are for that
time less accessible for the common use of
forest resources. The process of imaging then
functions as an act of enclosure, contributing to
the ‘uncommoning’ of the forest, and becomes
instrumental in the governance and control
of local inhabitants and migrants. In Dampa
interrelations between the local population
and conservationists and forest guards act as
a buffer for these mechanisms of governance,
mitigating degrees of visibility and rendering
an image inscribed with the complexities of
human and non-human cohabitation at the
border.
The Gaze: Hierarchies of spectating and
resistance
The very fact of the camera making certain
activities visible has a significant effect on
people’s behaviours in the areas surveyed
by these traps, and at the same time places
importance on the questions: who is recorded
and who is watching? Camera traps, or any
imaging device for that matter, are inherently
laden with an asymmetry of power where
the subject being viewed has very little or no
agency, while those spectating, forest guards
or conservationists, are in the position to
exercise authority and control. Surveillance not
only then renders an area as prohibited and
actions as illegal but turns people into potential
criminalised subjects – a potentiality that elicits
cautious behaviour, wary of the power of those
who are watching.
Speaking to various people working with
camera traps in the field,13 in Dampa and
elsewhere in India, reveals that these
hierarchies of spectating play out in a myriad of
to appropriate land and exert control over
forest resources: by 1947 these areas reached
close to a total of 100.000 sq miles, meaning
that the Forest Department controlled around
one-fifth of the country.8 Within this process,
long standing local community rights to
resources and communal practices in the forest
became either prohibited (in reserved forests)
or heavily regulated (in protected areas).
Everyday common activities such as collecting
firewood or fishing now needed state sanction
and violations were criminalised.
To this day these forest and environmental
protection laws form the basis of current
regimes of governance and control in India’s
conservation areas. Despite the fact that several
villagers still live inside Dampa9, activities
such as hunting, fishing and gathering
forest produce, or, in fact, just merely being
present, are considered to be illegal by law.
The camera traps deployed throughout Dampa
regularly register these types of everyday
activities alongside more unusual ones such
as the kidnapping described above. Dampa’s
conservationists and forest guards make
concerted efforts to minimise the camera’s
effects on the community by for example
placing cameras together with villagers and
making sure that no cameras are installed
without an announcement to local inhabitants.
However, instances of for example poaching
and timber felling do on occasion get reported
to authorities.10 In their article Human Bycatch,
Sandbrook et al. describe how camera traps
have increasingly become part of what they
call ‘conservation surveillance.’11 Through
an extensive survey among camera trap
researchers they establish that, while camera
traps are generally intended to identify or
count certain species, it is often the case that
images that (coincidentally) register human
activity are used to inform enforcement in
regards to for example hunting.12
In other words, camera traps can be seen as
perpetuating a similar logic to the colonial
Forest Acts of 1865 and 1878: they make visible
human activities in the forest that would
otherwise go unseen, which then propels them
into the realm of illegality. Therefore, the areas
Leopard Cat
ways. There have been incidents in other parks
where forest guards have extorted bribes from
villagers whom they have seen on the camera
traps. Or, in more benign outcomes, women
who would go to the forest to collect firewood
or fodder and considered the forest to be a
space where they could be free, would now veil
their faces as men might be watching. A drone
operator shared that people would go into
their houses when drones were doing a survey
because they didn’t want to be caught doing
something that might be construed as illegal by
the Forest Department. Sandbrook et al. draw
on Foucault’s work on governmentality and
consequently Agrawal’s ‘environmentality’14 and
contend that conservation surveillance through
the gaze of imaging devices contributes to a
regime that causes people to police their own
behaviour when in the presence of a camera
trap. In other words, it seeks to turn people into
‘environmentally-friendly subjects who support
conservation objectives and avoid damaging
behaviour’.15
At the same time, those recorded often find
ways of resisting and circumventing the image.
In Dampa conservationists encourage villagers
to walk behind the camera rather than in front
of it, when they do go into the forest, hoping
that in time this behaviour will develop into
them not going into the forest at all. While
cameras don’t often go missing or get damaged,
there are reports of memory cards having
been removed. One researcher received a text
message from a group of village boys to say
they had her memory card because they wanted
to see what the camera saw, inverting the gaze
and dislodging the dynamics of power between
the subject and the spectator.
Securitisation through imaging nature
Over the last decades increasing global
migration has led to ramped up securitisation
in border zones, oftentimes playing out in
natural landscapes. As in Dampa, surveillance
in these areas can oscillate between recording
environmental subjects and tracing illegal
movement. For example, the EU is currently
running a project aimed at developing ‘through
foliage detection’: surveillance technologies
that can detect activity under the cover of
trees.16 These imaging technologies are meant
to surveil activities such as poaching and
deforestation, as well as cross-border illegal
migration.17 In his article Negotiating the
Gaze, conservation researcher Trishant Simlai
notes that it is these ‘shifting objectives’,18 from
conservation purposes to the monitoring of
illegal activity, that lead camera traps to have
a significant impact on the way people behave
and relate to the landscape. Moreover, the
way in which camera traps (and other imaging
devices) make human activity visible and
therefore illegal further enforces a distinction
between ‘spaces for nature and spaces for
people’,19 as described by Sandbrook et al.,
echoing the effect of the regulations imposed
by the 19th century Forest Acts. This dichotomy
in turn renders an understanding of the forest
as pristine and ‘free of sharp inequalities and
internal tensions’,20 a perception of nature
that clouds the politics of the image and the
gaze produced by the camera trap. It is this
blurred line between environmental cause and
securitisation that aids the formation of the
above described ‘environmentalities’,21 enabling
states to exercise indirect power through
environmental governance, extending the
border fence through the lens of the camera
trap.
Civet
1 These images are reproduced here with permission from conservationist and researcher Priya Singh.
2 M. Rajshekhar, “In a tiger reserve in Mizoram camera traps are taking pictures of gunmen,”
Scroll.in
, March
19, 2015.
https://scroll.in/article/713794/in-a-tiger-reserve-in-mizoram-camera-traps-are-taking-pictures-of-
gunmen.
3 A government issued status report on the forest clearance and building of the fence notes that ‘The main
objective of this project is preventing infiltration by Bangladesh Nationals which is of National Importance’.
NBCC (India) Limited,
Sub: Status report - Clearance of Dampa Tiger Reserve Forest (DTRF) Mizoram
, June 7,
2016.
http://forestsclearance.nic.in/DownloadPdfFile.aspx?FileName=6111412541214J27B4ibbfence.pdf&FilePath=../
writereaddata/FormA/Justification/.
4 Site Inspection Report, Dr. MK Ranjitsinh and Dr Rajesh Gopal, 8 April 2011, pg 2.
5 We look at the Dampa Tiger Reserve in the context of both of our contributions to the Border Ecologies
Network, a platform that brings together researchers, activists, artists and other practitioners investigating
the implication of (constructed) natures in border security projects as well as the ecological impact of border
infrastructures. See: www.borderecologies.com.
6 Sumit Sarkar,
Modern Times: India 1885-1947
(Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2014), 80.
7 Sumit Sarkar,
Modern Times: India 1885-1947
(Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2014), 80.
8 Sumit Sarkar,
Modern Times: India 1885-1947
(Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2014), 80.
9 Eleonora Fanari, “Relocation from protected areas as a violent process in the recent history of biodiversity
conservation in India,”
Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal
2(1) (January 2019): 64.
10 Reports primarily lead to so-called ‘promissory notes’, where violators are asked to give in writing that
they will not repeat their offense.
11 Chris Sandbrook, Rogelio Luque-Lora, and William M. Adams, “Human Bycatch: Conservation Surveillance
and the Social Implications of Camera Traps,”
Conservation and Society
16(4) (2018): 494.
12 Chris Sandbrook, Rogelio Luque-Lora, and William M. Adams, “Human Bycatch: Conservation Surveillance
and the Social Implications of Camera Traps,”
Conservation and Society
16(4) (2018): 494.
13 During March and April 2021 we interviewed various researchers working with imaging devices in the field
of conservation in India. They are the source for the experiences described here.
14 Environmentality refers to the politics and relations of power inscribed in environmental governance. See:
Arun Agrawal,
Environmentality: technologies of government and the making of subjects
(Durham: Duke
University Press, 2005).
15 Chris Sandbrook, Rogelio Luque-Lora, and William M. Adams, “Human Bycatch: Conservation Surveillance
and the Social Implications of Camera Traps,”
Conservation and Society
16(4) (2018): 494.
16 This project, named ‘Foldout’ is funded by the EU under the Horizon 2020 programme.
See: https://foldout.eu.
17 Foldout trials are taking place at border areas in Finland, Greece and Bulgaria, but also in a nature reserve
in French Guyana. See: https://foldout.eu.
18 Trishant Simlai, “Negotiating the Gaze,”
Sanctuary Nature Foundation
, 2020.
https://www.sanctuarynaturefoundation.org/article/negotiating-the-gaze.
19 Chris Sandbrook, Rogelio Luque-Lora, and William M. Adams, “Human Bycatch: Conservation Surveillance
and the Social Implications of Camera Traps,”
Conservation and Society
16(4) (2018): 501.
20 Sumit Sarkar,
Modern Times: India 1885-1947
(Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2014), 79.
21 Chris Sandbrook, Rogelio Luque-Lora, and William M. Adams, “Human Bycatch: Conservation Surveillance
and the Social Implications of Camera Traps,”
Conservation and Society
16(4) (2018): 501.
We are told that you should never look at the Sun: its beauty a furious violence of light, beyond our
meagre abilities.
It takes one astronomical unit – that’s 499 seconds, or 8 point 317 minutes – for the light from the
Sun to hit the Earth: for it to warm our skin and for it to trigger, within a landscape of sensitive folds,
a congregation of 35 billion to delight, in unison, at this cosmic touch. Golden rays transmogrify
into golden hues; gold tones of the deepest, most complex shades; an impossible surface of shadows
that somehow withstood all that rage, and forged it into something tender, something we can touch,
something we can hold.
Perhaps we may find beauty not just in our skin, but in the fact of all that brilliance, which—having
travelled so astronomically far—chose to settle here, not in rest, but in the pursuit of an alchemy
that could only have been created within us. When they made of us a black object—something to be
found, captured and conquered through shadows—they never appreciated that this was darkness
forged of the most abundant and powerful of light. Here, in this blackness, is a riotous, alchemical
beauty in which the celestial impossibility of holding light is rendered everyday, ordinary. Here is a
phosphorescent jewel, glowing and vibrant—a mesmerising dark by the very fact of light.
We are told that you should never look at the Sun: its beauty a furious violence of light, beyond our
meagre abilities. And yet, until it fell upon this body—black and ordinary—the Sun never knew how
beautiful it could be.
Thandi Loewenson
*
I am at the University of Zambia. The campus is composed of a series of majestic
concrete structures connected by open walkways, and roughly hewn stairwells
and corridors. The building is heavy and ponderous, and we manoeuvre tenderly
through its arteries, careful not to brush too hard or too close against it: the
roughness of brick and concrete making one acutely aware of the softness
and sensitivity of skin, flesh and body. Nonetheless, this relation is not at all
antagonistic. Although the Sun is unrelenting, the buildings resist the heat due to
their weight, and provide a cover of shade that is an instant relief. Creeping plants
have elegantly sutured their tendrils to the structure’s exaggerated concrete
cantilevers, draping curtains of leaves that dapple the light where it manages to
break through. This is an institution for intellectual inquiry, and the negotiation
between building and body brings the sensitive and physical nature of this into
sha rp focus.
Built just after independence as the government ploughed earnings from newly
nationalised mines into public infrastructure, it is hard not to find beauty in these
spaces. Copper transmogrified into concrete and, along with this, an institution
for nurturing Zambian knowledge and scholarship: the campus is a tangible
Never look at the sun
example of the geological, architectural, political and economic entanglements
between mine and city.
While crumbling in parts, overall time has been kind to the architecture.
Rainwater run-off has stained a handsome patina over its harder surfaces and
accentuated the intentional imperfections of the shutter cast concrete. Cracks
have provided opportunities for mosses to take hold, softening its rougher edges,
and cooling and shading the open stairwells and undercrofts.
We close the delicate glass louvres so the electric fan in the corner of the room
can more efficiently do its work. Out of the window, two newer additions to the
campus compete with one another. One building in particular stands out, in
gleaming red brick and with a large white marble lintel across the entrance. Shiny
raised letters announce it as the Chinese-built ‘Confucius Institute.’ K- points
out a neighbouring grey building, concealed from the street by the Institute and
overpowered by its grandeur. I’m told it was built by ‘the Americans.’ Laughing, he
suggests that the appearance and relationship of these two buildings is indicative
of tussles between these interests, seeking influence and control over the
country’s resources elsewhere. Here in the city, we find buildings that are not only
reflective of extraction in the country but also act as agents through which that
extraction can be facilitated. But the older buildings on campus give us pause and
I feel it in my skin: a tension, a glimmer, a brush with life otherwise. How beautiful
it could still be.
Thandi Loewenson, Lusaka, 2019 & London, 2021
The numbers we use to classsify them
Photos exist outside the boundaries
that we enclose them
To categorize. To seperate. To place boundaries around excess
###########XXX
####
Elena
When I am no longer here on this physical plane what will be left behind of me? A series
of numbers meant to categorize me within a system that disenfranchised me? A square
photo meant to surveil and confirm my status as a second-class citizen? A plastic card
with an insignia that reinforces the settler state- the gender binary- linear notions of
time? Is what will be left of me a series of documents filed away in state cabinets? Files
from a state that framed my basic being and needs as excessive? If we listen to images
as Tina Campt asks us to do, what would they say? W hat would they refuse? How might
images thrive in their exceeding and breaking of boundaries? How might the archives of
our visual excess be remembered on this earth?
To categorize people into a set of numbers and files is to dehumanize. When I think
about my time standing in long lines to ask for food and basic necessities--I think about
how I became a series of numbers-- a folder to be filed away on someone’s desk. But I
wasn’t and am not.
I am Elena Herminia Guzman--named after my abuelas who came from Puerto Rico.
A name with history and meaning whose being struggles to exist within the mouths of
those who were not meant to carry the shards of history.
Sitting silently in a chair next to my father as we filled out the paperwork for
our New York state benefits that would allow us to get monthly food stamps
and government health care, I grasped the edge of my pink sweater tightly
between my palm and fingers. I wore this pink sweater all the time--Mostly
because the air conditioning in these bureaucratic spaces was so frigid.
Somehow I seemed to always be in these places. But I also loved that the
sweater was name-brand, Abercrombie & Fitch. It made me feel like I wasn’t
only defined by my poverty. Like I had status. I hadn’t known much about the
brand except it was one of those fancy stores on Fifth Avenue in New York
I never dared walk into. I found this sweater in the local secondhand thrift
store--Goodwill. As I waited for my father to finish filling out the paper the
caseworker typed our information into the computer-processing our whole
existence into a federal database of people applying for food benefits. The
caseworker paused her work for a moment to look at us and remarked, “you
don’t look like you’re poor--why are you applying for benefits?”
Hey, brown girl with the hoop earrings and crown of majestic divinity around
your head. You were meant to break this world, pick up the shattered pieces
and mold a new space where your fullness does not have to seep out the
boundaries meant to hold you back. a place where you can exist in
Excess.
Ethnocine
“I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background” 1
“At certain times I have no race, I am me .”3 When i am wrapped in My mother’s rebozo,
snug tightly against her bronzed body, i am earth and Sky, brown and free.
“This land was Mexican once, was Indian always, and is, And will be again. Yo soy un puente t endido
del mundo gabacho al del mojado, lo pasado me estirá pa’ ‘trás y lo presente pa’ ‘delante .” 2
Laura Menchaca Ruiz
When my brother was born—my mother and father’s first child—my family was
separated by an invisible line drawn onto the surface of the earth. According to my
mother, she gave birth to my brother alone, in Alta California. The white nurses and
doctors were dismissive of her cries, she says, and left her unattended in her hospital
room on the brink of death, her belly swollen with life. Whether they were unable
or unwilling to help her, I don’t know, but despite them, my mother gave light to my
brother through the sheer force of her own body, heaving him into existence from the
cosmic earth of her womb. And as his body emerged from hers, in a mezcla of genetic
material and generational trauma, my father was 2,444 miles away in Zacatecas, México,
submerging his mother’s body deep into the earth of another sort of womb. How did you
survive?” I ask. “Your brother wanted to live,” she replies, “and that made us want to live.”
Months later, my maternal grandmother traveled 2,549 kilometers from Michoacán
to Baja California to hold her first grandchild. She crossed five states, and several
climates—subtropical highlands, high desert, oceanic—but that final line, the one
that split California in two, she couldn’t cross. “You don’t have papers,” they said. So, my
mother and father crossed, from San Diego to Playas de Tijuana. My father crossed using
the papers he had acquired from indenturing his body to picking our fruit, laying our
water pipes, landscaping our yards, building our freeways, and my mother, using the
papers whose ink was still drying after marrying my father. They crossed the line to just
the other side, where the waves crashed over and against it, tugging it into its undertow.
Sometimes, I try to imagine that moment. My grandmother on one side and my mother
on the other, huddling as closely together as possible, sand creeping into their shoes,
both women cradling my brother, whose tiny body hovered over that line, caught between
two worlds. My father, straddling the line to snap a record of that moment—where green
cards and visas and passports disintegrated into a watery earth-womb.
Years earlier, my mother, tiny and just learning to read the world, crossed her first line
on the way to the market, holding her abuelita’s hand. Her abuelita noted, “Now we are in
Sonora, and we’ve just left Michoacán.” “How do you know?” my mother asked. “Because of
the line.” “Which line?” “The one there, the invisible one.” My mother darted back across
the invisible line and stepped over it, back and forth, back and forth, then ran back and
quietly latched onto her abuela’s hand.
“What were you doing?” abuela asked.
“I wanted to see if it felt different on the other side.”
“Did it?”
“No.”
References
– Hurston, Zora Neale (1928). “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.” González-
Torres, Felix (Madrid, 1977). “Untitled.”
– Anzaldúa, Gloria (1987). Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.
– Hurston, Zora Neale (1928). “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.”
Mariangela Mihai
1980
May
The Birth Certificate: Linda? That’s a capitalist name!
No ma’am, it’s from that Hungarian
film, Linda, who’s good at karate.
Can’t put that in the birth certificate, choose something
else.
Ok, Maria Angela then, but spelled in one word, with one a in the middle.
That’s odd,
sounds foreign.
Nonono, it’s two Romanian names, but they look different.
Ummm, I guess,
okay...
1986
The Perfume:
Cici and I hold hands at the intersection between Independence street and
DN1, the only Romanian, two lane, highway.We do not understand what we see. A foreign
woman is throwing money and food at people.. She speaks German, I think. Four teachers
fight with passersby and the students with each other. It gets violent. Someone screams.
I see blood. A man films us, right eye glued to the viewfinder. The woman throws heavy
items on the street and light ones as high as possible.
Sunflower oil, flour, soaps, spices,
candy, chewing gum, baby powder, unknown items.
Desperate for novelty, a chaos of
bodies jumping up to catch things mid-air: perfect cinema. The chewing gum looks good,
I consider it. The camera man leans on my shoulder gently, as he steps into the highway
absent-minded. His laughter sounds like the hunger that beats us every fall. His perfume
smells like...freedom?
The Train Station:
I hold mom’s hand, away from the tracks. The platform is chock-full
of men.
Don’t forget the soap!
one woman screams to her husband.
Get pantyhose, get
pantyhose!
another follows.
Dad, I want some gum...
I hope he heard me. Once a month, the
Moscow-Vienna Express train stops in our forsaken town, for precisely one minute and
forty seconds. Women and children watch from afar as the men bee-swarm the cabins to
exchange communist money for foreign goods. Dad buys a red cowboy shirt from a Polish
girl, make-up and two packs of Kent for mom from a German lady and no chewing gum.
Maybe next time, okay.
Our neighbor Nicu grabs a candy from his son’s bag and hands it to
me. Mom asks dad
How the foreign ladies smelled like?
Like money, like freedom, like good
soap?
Were they pretty?
No answer.
1987
The Color TV:
After three weeks of false promises, Lulu finally lets dad and I see his color
TV. It’s beautiful. Half red-half yellow. We watch the news: it’s funny, the tyrant’s chin, red
like a devil’s. On the way back home, dad says Lulu lied. He just painted a piece of glass in
rows of red and yellow and set it in front of the B&W TV.
There was no color TV, you didn’t
notice?
I’m devastated.
Bambi’s Mom:
B&W or Red & Yellow, there’s never anything on TV. The Tyrant’s lies we
laugh at as we cry; the news I’m told are propaganda; movies with young engineers who
marry teachers from the countryside; financial reports that exceed the national quotas;
and Sundays, five minutes of Cartoons. From 3:05 to 3:10 PM. It took Bambi’s mom one
month to die. My first mourning.
The Radio:
I count the steps from school to grandma’s house. 579. Her name is Laura. She’s
a cook, an ironic profession, in a country without food. The MacGyver of soup: 1 carrot, ½
onion, a spoon of flour, and the rest, love. We listen to radio plays, as she cooks. Here, the
radio is peaceful. At home, we turn it on after dark, under blankets, at the smallest volume.
The Free Europe
channel brings news from abroad and Michael Jackson songs.
How does
freedom feel like, dad?
I don’t know.
Will we ever be free?
Maybe, if the Americans save us.
1988
The VHS Machine:
That guy in Block B5, 4th floor has one. The one bedroom apartment
feels and smells like a can of sardines. First one, a Bruce Lee movie. Never seen anything
more beautiful. The older kids are throwing silent karate chops in the air, the adults laugh,
internally. The VHS machine, illegal. Prison time kind of illegal. Illegal to assemble at night
in groups more than 5 too. Illegal to watch foreign media, illegal to imagine life beyond
these borders. Illegal to laugh, to cry, to hope
unauthorised
.
The Uniform:
I “forget” the apron of my communist uniform at home, on purpose.
The teacher scolds my dad for neglecting me.
She leaves home in full uniform, I swear.
Whatever the binary is, it can go to hell. Mother agrees, petitions for boys pants. Request,
rejected. She petitions to move me to woodshop class. Request granted. Reluctantly.
The Book Store:
The bookstore employee is more powerful than God.
The Food Stores:
Empty.
Breadlines:
Neverending.
Electricity:
Rarely. -18C outside, worse
inside.
The Poets:
Dad writes a poem a day. He recites it to us in the evenings in the voices of his
favorite poets.
The Police Station:
12 am. We bang on the metal door, I feel courageous. And free. A new
recruit opens, bewildered.
I want to declare myself a Dissident. Down with Communism,
Down with Ceausescu!
Go home, Gaby, you’re drunk.
Down with the tyrant! F*ck the police!
On the way back home dad says
That kid was wise; I am drunk.
I feel a sense of freedom
still, but I didn’t do my homework.
1989
November
The Tyrant
Act 1: Big day. I recite his 40 functions in front of the school inspectors.
Nicolae Ceausescu,
general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party, president of the Socialist Republic
of Romania, supreme commander of the army, genius of peace and socialism,
our Father
who eats our bread
. F***, I forgot dad said that’s a joke between us, only.
Act 2: Anda, Cipri and I deface the tyrant’s portrait. Cipri gives him bad teeth. Anda, a
pirate hat. I add an erring and the eye patch. One of the communists’ kids “barks.” The
teacher beats us with the sharp side of the ruler in front of the class. She beats Cipri
harder, because he’s a boy. Me less ‘cause I have good grades. By the last hit, I stopped loving
her. At night, my right hand doubles in size and turns purple.
What happened?
Nothing
mom, I fell while playing soccer.
December
The Flag:
Alice and I are playing in her grandma’s kitchen. The radiophonic theater sounds
different today. Caramitru, whose voice we all love, annoys me.
This is not a play. I repeat,
this is NOT a play. This is a Revolution!
He screams, no theatrical intonation.
I hate this
play.
Alice turns off the radio, in agreement. Her grandma rushes in crying and hugs us
violently. We don’t understand what’s wrong. She cannot speak. My right ear hurts, pressed
against her hip. With the left, I hear a few choked words:
We are free, my little girls, we are
free!
I don’t believe her, until mom picks me up in a hurry. We pass by townsfolk chanting
Revolution! Down with Communism!
in front of the police station. The flags are missing
their communist middles. I’m not afraid. No way anyone would ever dare to deface The Flag.
This
must
be freedom.
1990
January
The History Books:
Our teacher speaks to us like adults for a moment. How to undo
decades of harm, how to reframe history, she asks? We open our brand new history books.
Russia didn’t invent everything. Communism, not Capitalism, is evil. Look at that, we didn’t
win all the battles with the Turks. We are now part of The World. Before class ends, she
calls Cipri, Anda, and I to the front. We hesitate, fearing the ruler.
I’m sorry I beat you that
day. You were courageous to show how we all felt. Little heroes. I hope you can forgive me
someday.
An adult apologizing, how odd. Feels good though. I forgive her on the spot.
31 Independence Street
I sometimes think about the camera man. Did he make a film? Were we the subjects of a
foreign news cycle on nameless people fighting for their lives behind the iron curtain? Who
saw us, starved beasts, drawing blood from each other over chewing gum and baby powder?
I think about how gentle he pushed me aside, to get a better angle of hunger. I think about
his intoxicating perfume, the smell of freedom, the insult to the injury that lingered far
beyond his fugitive wolfish presence. I want to tell him four things:
My name is Linda. I used to live on Independentei Street. I hated the tyrant. I was 6.
Two weeks before this writing I gave a talk at
the University of Southern California’s Pacific
Asia Museum on my latest project,
Movements:
Battles and Solidarity,
which is about two
conversations that I’m having with history
across three screens: one socio-political, the
other filmic. The talk, occurring just a week
after the mass shootings at spas and massage
parlors in Atlanta that killed eight people - six
of whom were Asian women, took on added
significance for me after a year of increased
anti-Asian violence related to the pandemic.
Perhaps due to the venue and timing, some in
the audience sought a response in my work
to recent events. The immediate connections
regarding representations of Asian-Americans
in the dominant culture’s imagination were
made during the Q&A, particularly popular
movies’ depictions of Vietnamese women as sex
workers during the war, and it prompted me to
bring in a third conversation, my history as a
war refugee.
Movements
focuses on significant events in
high fashion and the garment industry during
the years 1972 – 74 and in the global context
of the Vietnam war, so let me start there. My
extended family and I left Vietnam in 1975 and
arrived in Iowa by way of refugee camps. Two
years later, my siblings and I saw the first Star
Wars movie, which seeded my dream of going
to space. I started high school thinking that
I’d be an astronaut someday but in learning
that my vision would preclude me from being
one, I turned to another love, fashion. While
other teens were reading Seventeen magazine
or the likes, I subscribed to W magazine and
held hopes of studying fashion design at
Parsons. I ended up at Grinnell College instead,
and once it was clear that I was best at and
encouraged to pursue art, I transferred to the
University of Iowa where I discovered video
art and an experimental approach. I moved to
Orange County, and after a year of working
the graveyard shift at a local newspaper, I
enrolled at the California Institute of the Arts
for graduate school, and there I was introduced
to critical theory and more experimentation.
That’s how I became an artist.
Runway revolution
Back in November of 1973, there was the
Battle of Versailles, a fashion show that paired
five American designers (Oscar de la Renta,
Stephen Burrow, Halston, Bill Blass, and Anne
Klein) with five French luminaries (Yves Saint
Laurent, Pierre Cardin, Emmanuel Ungaro,
Christian Dior, and Hubert de Givenchy) in
order to raise money for the restoration of the
Palace of Versailles. In 2016 I read about this
show in the book,
The Battle of Versailles: The
Night American Fashion Tumbled into the
Spotlight and Made History
, by Robin Givhan,
and it inspired the making of
Movements
.
The show was a transformative, revolutionary
moment in American fashion because before
that American designers were typically
copying French styles, and after the show
they had put themselves on the map. This
came about through ready-to-wear, which,
interestingly enough, was an economic model
that saved haute couture, which was rapidly
declining at the time. With ready-to-wear and
race-conscious models of diverse race and
ethnicities, this was the civil rights movement’s
moment in fashion as it was in America at
large. And there was disco, disco providing
the energy, the vibe for the show itself. By all
accounts, the Americans won this battle of
Versailles against the French.
Movements
consists of three screens, the first
one dealing with this fashion show. Each of
Movements: Battles and Solidarity
by Tran, T. Kim-Trang
children.
Pulling back historically, the book
Empire
of Cotton: A Global History
by Sven Beckert
was particularly influential to my thinking
about war capitalism. The book addresses that
term in discussing how Britain used war as a
mechanism to corner the global cotton trade,
enabling the west to gain supremacy in the
19th century. This was the first instance of war
capitalism. While it was not a direct goal of the
war, I now ask whether or not the American
War in Vietnam could be a modern instance
of war capitalism having some residual effects
benefiting American fast fashion.
At the same time, I wanted to counterbalance
the horror of that bombing with the
experiences of other females during the war.
We hear in the six-channel audio the voice of
Hanoi Hannah (Trinh Thi Ngo was a legendary
radio broadcaster for North Vietnam who made
English-language broadcasts directed at US
troops); music from the CBC Band fronted by
Nam Loc, which was known as the Vietnamese
Beatles that played a lot of Western rock covers
but also their own original songs in concerts
for US and South Vietnamese troops (they
eventually settled in Texas); to footage and
songs from female Viet Cong soldiers doing
military drills, being transported as POWs, and
sewing.
Labor once cheaper than cotton
The sewing connects the third screen to the
previous two, and its title, Labor Once Cheaper
Than Cotton, refers to slave labor that enabled
the cotton trade. The third screen highlights
the question, “who enabled American fashion at
the time?” I chose to focus on garment workers
whose collective taking of power was not unlike
the Versailles models and the women fighting
the Vietnam war. During the years 1972-74, part
of the militant “Long 70s”, there were three
wildcat garment worker strikes that challenged
both capital and business union leadership.
One strike was in El Paso, Texas against the
the screens have hand-made elements on them
with the first one having a hand-embroidered,
full life-sized figure of the American model Billy
Blair, standing at 5’ 10”. Considered by many to be
the star of the Versailles show, Blair performed
this character that would conjure up a scene
of diverse models “voguing” ahead of its time,
coming to life on the runway. At a moment when
race and class seemed triumphant, the models
wore quick fashion (not quite as fast as today), the
profits from which would ensure haute couture’s
survival, but were themselves underpaid, and,
while celebrated, they were not integrated.
After an unsuccesful search in Los Angeles
to have Blair’s life-size figure embroidered on
the first projection screen, I was fortunate to
connect with a studio in Vietnam via an artist
contact in the Propeller Group that would not
only be able to hand embroider the image for me
but to do it at a fraction of the cost. It took three
Vietnamese women about six weeks to complete
this impressive work. The delicately detailed
threading in their typical work resembles a
painting more than embroidery.
War capitalism
From the height of being clothed to the depth of
nakedness. In looking at the wider context beyond
the Versailles book one world event leapt out.
A year prior, halfway around the world from
Versailles, the photojournalist Nick Ut captured
the gruesome scene of the American dropping
of a napalm bomb on a small village in Vietnam
on June 8, 1972 in the iconic image of the “napalm
girl”. I created a line drawing of this image for
the center screen. The difference is stark, but
there is also potentially the similarity in the
movements of these bodies, of the nine-year-
old girl (Phan Thi Kim Phuc), with peeling skin
flapping on her body, flayed by napalm, who
strides in a fashion not unlike the cat-walking
runway models of Versailles. I made the drawing
on the second projection screen using a hot knife
to cut through the fabric to reference napalm’s
searing effects and the singed skins of the village
Farah Pants manufacturing company by
mostly Chicanas. Another was by the African
American workers, predominantly women, in
Andrews, South Carolina at the Oneita Knitting
Mills. And lastly, the Chinese American workers
in San Francisco struck against the Jung Sai
company, which was a subsidiary of Esprit de
Corp.
I see similarities in the movements of the
striking workers marching down the street, to
Kim Phuc running away from napalm blasts,
and the models cat-walking on the runway.
Printed on this screen are graphics of the
striking women. Their marching provides
visual support for the women on the other
screens to the tune of Solidarity Forever
sung by Pete Seager and also by me for the
soundtrack.
Interspersed throughout the video projected
on these three screens I have included archival
footage of Edweard Muybridge’s Victorian
female models. Muybridge was famous for his
animal motion studies, particularly proving
that former California Governor, Leland
Stanford’s horse, Occidental, galloped with all
four feet off the ground. His female models.
shot at the University of Pennsylvania, were
unnamed, and many of the poses, especially
nudes, were problematic then and, for different
reasons, are problematic now.
The physical comparison that I have been
making among the transnational women in
Movements
is in conversation with this motion
study, and in this second conversation with
history, I engage with a filmic history. The two
conversations, then, are about not only the
similarities and differences in the women’s
physical movements but also their political,
cultural and economic movements. We are in
another significant moment of history, and
I feel compelled to set down my own history,
my artist origin story in connection to these
other histories and the women in
Movements
.
I make work from an intersectional feminist
Vietnamese refugee artist perspective
addressing race, class, gender, and disability.
I see the shared physical and revolutionary
movements among these models, females of
the Vietnam war, and militant garment workers
that have helped to empower diverse women as
the very solidarity that we all need now.
Lists of films will not save you.
Lists of films will not save films.
Lists of films will not reorganise how films gain and lose value.
Lists will not preserve all those thousands and thousands of films decomposing in alleys, basements,
storage lockers: films lost, unseen, and unpreserved.
Lists of films will not write new film histories.
Lists are not neutral or innocent or purely subjective.
Lists do not enshrine your hallowed taste, they only dilute it.
Lists are attentional real estate for the fatigued, enervated, click-hungry.
Lists aggregate the already known and consolidate power.
Lists count and account and ceaselessly weigh and measure ‘genius’ and ‘greatness’ as if they are
empirical substances.
Lists convert numerical appearance into that seeming empiricism of the prodigious.
And who in the longue durée has been bestowed those plaudits?
Lists won’t create new canons – especially not of lost women, queer, trans, Black, Latinx, global south,
decolonial and anti-colonial filmmakers.
Who will ask Barbara Hammer, Kathleen Collins, Kira Muratova, and Sara Gómez for their lists?
Lists pretend to make a claim about the present and the past, but are anti-historical, obsessed with
their own moment, with the narrow horizon and tyranny of contemporaneity. They consolidate and
reaffirm the hidebound tastes of the already heard.
Lists colonise the mind and impoverish the imagination.
Lists will always disappoint, even as they promise an inexhaustible world, an infinite plenum.
Lists bludgeon the dispossessed with a metric of popularity, as if it is a universal value.
Lists assert property, mastery, possession.
Lists are an anti-film politics.
Lists are metrics.
Metrics are our enemy, and the enemy of art and of political struggle. Every list is by necessity
impossible, and must remain unwritten, a private reckoning. The unwritten list tarries with the
inevitable vortex of unknowability into which all films will certainly fall, unless we can defend and
describe them better, making space for their work as live and active forms.
Burn the list to free your ass.
The impulse to list is allied with collection, a desire to record, to archive, to remember, to preserve
experience and the aesthetic feeling of films one might not otherwise recall. These are meaningful,
important and historically enshrined activities, on their own terms. But in this hyper-mediated
moment, the recirculated compulsory form of the list – list as desiderata of consumption, a grocery
receipt of your watching – has become an instrument of commodity fetishism, of algorithmic
capture, of priapic, indulgent self-exposure. Look closely. Who exactly produces this flurry of lists?
Against lists
How many lists must we read to know that their makers have captured the essential existence of
these works in a graspable net? Ceaselessly writing, reading and consuming this polluted ocean
of lists, we enter into the rotten mercantilism of the cinephilic soul. Perhaps more pernicious
practices aggrieve film culture, but even so, lists are as banal and telling a symptom as any of this
spoiled, melting world.
Torch your list. If you must count, write as many words about any film not on your list.
Read as many words about a woman filmmaker or filmmaker from the global south.
Or convert those words and characters into units of time, watching a film never on your list.
A potlatch of lists: redistribution of resources redirected from the collective energy of list-making.
Claiming aesthetic supremacy begins with the list. Would that we had other ways to create spheres
of value or to abolish the shallow terms of value altogether, and along with them the capricious and
impoverished arbitration of what counts as cinematic art, art worth watching and worth fighting
for. The list consolidates as if self-evidence, reasserting in all that it doesn’t list, all that its lister
failed to learn, to see, to know.
Lists are for laundry, not for film.
If we wash out our eyes and ears and minds, we will find that what clings to us, after the suds clear,
are the tendrils of another cinematic world, of images, spaces, voices, passages, struggles, and time:
time recovered from its theft by narcissistic cinephilia’s allegiance with capital.
Elena Gorfinkel
Originally published in Another Gaze (29 November 2019)
