It’s here that I saw the glazed, pioneer-peacefulness emanating from the settler women. In their floral, mid-shin missionary skirts, they strolled with brain-wiped confidence along Al-Shuhada Street, where no Palestinian may tread. A gang of fascist trad-wives. Their presence depends on hollowing out the eyes, palms, and bellies of Palestinian children who follow the occasional passersby through the now-enclosed alleyways of the old market, begging them to buy their trinkets, each one emblazoned with “Palestine”, “Jerusalem”—the names we give our hearts. 

*

Settler-colonialism—the inherently genocidal structure of land and resource expropriation—is bound inside a number of conundrums centred around the concept of childhood, and the real existence of people categorised, variously, as children. 

Many theories of child development grew alongside—and are pivotal to—colonial expansion. The story that the human develops from a pre-mature, wild, animal-adjacent creature into a self-regulating, rational, mature and therefore fully human adult has become a common sense assumption.¹ This has enabled colonialisms to inscribe their to-be-colonised subjects as child-like: ignorant, savage, technologically naive, requiring a firm hand. As Ashis Nandy has argued, “much of the pull of the ideology of colonialism and much of the power of the idea of modernity can be traced to the evolutionary implications of the concept of the child in the Western world-view.”² The colonised cannot care for themselves or their land. Nandy again: “the metaphor of childhood was mobilised to justify imperialism.”³

Sarah de Leeuw argues that children are unique reminders of indigenous⁴ continuity on the land and are therefore prime targets of colonial management. In other words, they must be captured very young:

“As embodiments of extant Indigeneity, Indigenous children were threats to settler-colonial imaginations. So something had to be done with Aboriginal children. That something occurred through residential schools and imprinted itself on the bodies of children.”⁵

The child removal policies that forced Aboriginal children into so-called residential schools in so-called “Canada” under the guise of saving them from their supposedly know-nothing child-like parents, sought to instigate a process of de-indigenisation and thus, deterritorialisation. Settler colonialism, de Leeuw continues, “relegated groups of people to a perpetual state of truncated childhood while simultaneously removing their children in order that those children mature into adults who embodied radically different cultural traits than their ancestors.”⁶ The intention was to sever children from the tender ties of knowing the particularities of their situatedness in time and space (to borrow from Laura Ann Stoler). An internal epistemicide, a severing of the self from the routes and ways of her worlds. Dislocation. 

When carceral geographies are thrust onto the bodies of racialised children, it is done to dispossess them of their historic and ongoing attachments to, and presence on, their lands. It seeks to destroy the validity of their being on these lands. These carceralities function differently in different settler colonial spaces, though the intention to amputate—both literally⁷ and metaphorically—is common. 

Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian has written extensively on how the colonial management of Palestinian children operates through an always classed, racialising process of making-demonic instead of a making-helpless. The Zionist entity captures and tortures the born-guilty instead of the born-to-the-wrong-group. The idea that Palestinian children are born with the potentiality of “terrorism” is embedded in the militarised Israeli psyche, and within the entity’s legal processes. One of “Israel”’s contemporary modes of deterritorialising Palestinian children is child incarceration in the West Bank.

Two legal systems have operated in the West Bank since 1967: civilian law applies to “Israeli” settlers and military law applies to Palestinians, including children as young as 12 who can be imprisoned, arrested and prosecuted like adults. “Israel” defines settler children as under-18, but Palestinian children as under-16, thereby creating “two different childhoods along national lines in the OPT.”⁸ Every year, “Israel” prosecutes 500-700 Palestinian children within its military courts, and approximately 13,000 children have been imprisoned since 2000. The most common charge is stone throwing. Children are usually arrested near settlements or checkpoints. Children who have been released in prisoner swap deals since 7 October 2023, or who have been arrested in Gaza, have described disturbing new levels of violence—extreme overcrowding, beatings, minimal food, dogs in cells, tear gassing of cells, purposeful beating of already injured boys—alongside the systemic use of solitary confinement and sexual violence. 

It is profitable and necessary for the Zionist entity to expend its resources on arresting and charging children for a number of reasons. Firstly, because approximately 86% of children are denied bail, they tend to plead guilty as it’s better than awaiting trial in detention which can take months to schedule. This allows military courts to report an almost 100% conviction rate, which in turn justifies the entity’s carceral apparatus: checkpoints, watchtowers, digital monitoring, cages, murders, genocide, and very existence.

Secondly, juvenile incarceration often results in further limitations⁹ on a child’s freedom of movement, thereby shrinking the space in which Palestinian children can exist. They are severed from their peers, land, community, and opportunities to actively struggle for liberation. By ensuring that imprisonment continues beyond the space-time of the prison itself, Zionism seeks to make incarceration the condition of Palestinian life. It aims to create petrified, passive subjects shrunken into ever smaller and more silent domains so as to destroy Palestinian futurity in advance of itself, and ensure settler dominance. 

This “unchilding,” to borrow from Shalhoub-Kevorkian, this “thingification,” to borrow from Aimé Césaire, attempts to exile Palestinian children from articulating, as a political demand, their desire for childhood. The making-demonic of Palestinian children exiles them beyond even the supposedly protected zone of the human, and abandons them inside the non-space and the non-time of “death zones.” Laleh Khalili observed that during the Second Intifada, the IOF’s Southern Command Unit headed by Brigadier General Zvika Fogel had “unofficially declared death zones in Gaza, where anyone entering could be shot.”¹⁰ In the death zone—not the “war zone,” not the “conflict zone” as Shalhoub-Kevorkian notes—presence means death, presence is killability: 

“The spatial implications of “death zones” are particularly relevant to Palestinian children because, by expanding the culpability of “terrorist” violence to certain areas (rather than certain bodies), children fall into the spatial category of presumed guilt. The concept of “death zones” produces a politicised space in which all inhabitants—the “dangerous” populations, the taken-for-granted enemy—threaten the colonising state.”¹¹

Palestinian children are constructed as terrorist Others who can—with legal “legitimacy”—be stolen from their lives and imprisoned; who can be shot dead in the street without consequence (at a rate of one child every two days in the West Bank since 7 October 2023); who can be slaughtered en masse; abused; disappeared. The mass murder of children in Gaza is the crescendo of over a century of Zionist violence against Palestinian children. It must be understood as being part of a continuum of organised violence across Palestine in its entirety, contra Zionist cartographies and historiographies.

The presumed guilt of the Palestinian child, and by implication, of all Palestinians, but particularly those in Gaza right now, provides the legal and literal ground for settler society to plant itself. Without even moving she is already blocked from almost all sides; the born-guilty Palestinian existing in her home/land has crossed a border into the zone of killability. 

The entity’s strategy is cartographic. The Gaza “strip” itself is an invention, its border created by what bound it: the early settlements that locked it in, then stripped it. On 1 December 2023, the IOF published a map of Gaza split into numbered zones to politely give Palestinians a guide to escape death. The map was a euphemism for there is nowhere left to run. The colonial strategy of divide and rule played out genocidally: map, zone, label, name, capture, chase, pack, objectify, cram, shoot, bomb, burn, starve, poison, shrink, annihilate. More and more people in less and less space until there is nowhere, until they are dust. Burned to death in tents. Eviscerated by chemical weapons. Disappeared into 30 foot-deep craters. After the Rafah Tent Massacre on 26 May 2024 a woman held out her palm to the camera, presenting to us a small heap of ash: My six children, world, they became the size of a handful of sand. 

*

The first space is the womb. Management of colonised territory begins inside the bodies of colonised women. If nationalisms are always gendered—the mother/land we must protect and that protects us (its children), the father/land we must make proud and that will be proud of us (its children)—then the bourgeois, heterosexual family unit is their underwriter. In an ethno-religious fascistic nation like “Israel”—which masquerades as a bastion of liberal, LGBTQ, feminist, democratic values surrounded by a sea of savagery—purity is of paramount, defining importance; and so reproduction becomes a preoccupation.

Palestinians throughout historic Palestine outnumber “Israelis.” When we see entire Palestinian lineages in Gaza being wiped from the civic register, we are also seeing the extent of Zionist anxiety to “win” the “demographic race”—an anxiety that has plagued the entity since its formation.¹² “Israel”’s pro-natalist biopolitics, its thriving fertility economy, its encouragement of Jewish people the world over to make Aliyah, and its historic coercion of the Jewish people of Iraq, Morocco, Yemen, Egypt and Algeria to emigrate to the newly formed Zionist colony reveal its foundational ontological bind. Commitment to a racially pure, Jewish-majority state means “Israel” “has two options in front of it: equality (and thus self-negation) or genocide.”¹³ While the entity has never stopped choosing the latter, its existential nervousness will never be fully soothed so long as Palestinian life continues. As Nasser Abourahme elegantly puts it: “Political orders that cannot close their moments of foundational conquest and consign that conquest’s violence to the political unconscious are vulnerable orders. They are unsettled orders.”¹⁴ Palestinian children are a constant, unsettling reminder of the unclosable moment. The management of childhood, reproduction, and demography is therefore a focal point of the settler state’s ethno-nationalist self-making. 

Chandra Talpade Mohanty described how “Third World Women” are re/produced through some Western feminist discourses:

“…as a homogenous ‘powerless’ group often located as implicit victims of particular socio-economic systems…victims of male violence…victims of the colonial process…victims of the Arab familial system…victims of the Islamic code.”¹⁵

Liberal media and academia have reproduced these ideas throughout this genocide: the image of the bereft Palestinian mother publicly mourning her children has, again, become the image of the Palestinian woman. “Israel”’s genocidal spectacle is, then, framed not only as self-defence but as a “protective duty towards women and LGBTQ people”¹⁶ and, crucially, children. The massacres of “women and children” become “collateral damage” in a “just war” against the savage Palestinian male (or: “Hamas”).

The Zionist entity has been making the claim that killing Palestinian children is unfortunate but necessary since its inception. Golda Meir, one of the entity’s first prime ministers, wrote “…we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons.” The murder of women and children is used to legitimise the murder of men, which is used to conceal the fact that everyone is a target, particularly children. Everyone killed in Gaza dies at least twice. First, at the point of their own death, and second, when their death is used to justify the deaths of others. The aim is to dissolve indigenous society and presence on the land and plant the settler in its stead, “this urge to destroy, which is then followed by an idealised replacement, is the central policy of the settler-colonial rulers.”¹⁷ Fifty per cent of Gaza’s population is—or was—under 18. 

The Zionist entity’s preoccupation with children does not only speak to an obsession with social engineering, but to the fact that Palestinian children have always been active agents of, and in, resistance. This irks and troubles liberal do-gooder mentalities that would rather fix Palestinians as objects of superhuman resilience or pitiful mammalian vulnerability; that would rather line up the shoes of children in some European capital and weep about how they cannot take it anymore. But the fact is, it is Palestinian children who led the First Intifada (1987-1993), also known as “the children’s revolt,” and participated in the Second Intifada (2000-2005); it is Palestinian youth who articulated the Unity Intifada (2021); it is the youth of Beita who unsettle the settlers, turning each night bright, unsleepable, with lasers, torches and burning tyres; it is Palestinian kids who grew up witnessing multiple onslaughts on Gaza, the West Bank and beyond, who joined multiple resistance factions and are fighting today; and it is Palestinian and Arab youth all over the planet who are leading today’s global movement for and with Palestine. 

But Zionism cannot break the will to resistance, for it is identical to the will to life. This is not a poetic claim but an ordinary truth: it is not possible to pacify and petrify any collective identity forged in love and struggle. 

An 11-year-old Palestinian girl in 2013: “Israel said the first Palestinian generation will die and the next one will forget. No one could forget what happened for the last generations. My father and mother told me, and I will tell my children. We will not forget. Even if I said nothing, every place reminds you.”¹⁸

*

When I saw the video of a girl finding her mother under the rubble, identifying her by a strand of her hair curling out from underneath the concrete, I confess I entered into a slightly altered reality. It is hard to hold onto meaning there. Sometimes, I think the meaningless means some part of me, or us, is dead too. I don’t know what that means yet. It’s formless, like silence. Like waiting. Like listening. Here are some of the questions gathered by the Palestine Trauma Centre from children in Gaza: 

Do children who have their legs amputated grow new legs?

Do the Israeli pilots who bomb children have children?

Will the dogs that ate the dead bodies of the martyrs turn into humans?

After we die, will I hear your voice? 

One hears the black heralds of a reality almost entirely under the spell of the rational, “adult” world. Only a total annihilation of the conditions of these questions’ existence would be an adequate answer. 

Ashis Nandy wrote about Cecil Rhodes’ sense that “children could be dangerous.” Nandy: “The colonial ideology required the savages to be children, but it also feared that the savages could be like children.”¹⁹ In other words, children can break through, tunnel under, and fly over the logical, violent constructions that the world of “adults” has built to cage them. Palestinian children are witnesses to, and archivists of, the ravages of Zionism. They are the authors, carriers, and distributors of collective memory. Children interrupt Zionist historiography by simply existing. They discomfit liberal, humanitarian discourses by being active agents in every aspect of their lives under occupation. They study. They dance. They make light. They remember. They survive. They live. 

Perhaps the world of adults should be scared.

Throughout her incarceration, TZ wrote to me about the books she was reading, the various positions Hong Kong protestors took on transnational solidarity (particularly with regards to the Movement for Black Lives), and the ways in which her and her comrades fight and continue to fight the carceral state.

Rather than witnessing someone’s desires for freedom wilting, I received letters that recounted the kinds of protests TZ practiced inside. From the removal of books and fighting the assaults faced by other inmates, TZ fought each and every injustice, exclusively, to no avail. She was thrown into solitary confinement, her letters revoked and suppressed, her personal library destroyed—everything terrible happened. As her reader and former professor, as someone who cares about her, I began to worry about how they might extend TZ’s sentence or charge her with something else absurd to induce her capitulation.

Upon her release and during our first call, I asked TZ why and how she continued to challenge the system from inside the prison, when change proved to be almost impossible, and she tells me:

“Even if I cannot change the system…
what I did not do, will change me.”

***

An excerpt from TZ’s letter, Spring of 2023

…I feel like we are all trapped in cages, either visible or invisible. I (we) wanted to fight and win, but when you are in a fight, it becomes so personal and physical. The stress, pressure and pain are too much to handle. More than 80% of the protestors I know said that they will leave Hong Kong once they are released. Some of them said that they will never come back again. No one wanted to lose, but it’s so difficult to keep standing up and standing at the front during the fight. It’s scary and sometimes I am angry that I was scared.

Sometimes, I examine myself, wondering if I was tamed already. Did the fight become a fight inside boundaries? Did our vague speeches become a kind of ceremony, a meaningless routine?

I really admire those who sacrifice their lives to fight: 10, 20 years. Being in prison for over 2 years is already wearing me out. I can’t imagine how to face this reality once I am out (even here in prison, a lot of prisoners teased us and asked how much we were paid [by foreign intelligence agencies] to protest).

I wish to have the determination, courage and strength even after many years of failure and frustration. I hope I will never yield to this reality…

We were taught and told that standing up and against is wrong. Especially here in prison. They only allowed us to say “yes madam” and “sorry madam.” So I’d rather keep my mouth shut. But I am not sure if it is a sign of giving in, too. It reminds me of a song by an indie band in Hong Kong…”You have to be very strong. If you want to do something wrong”

***

I’ve been thinking about TZ’s encapsulation, the refusal to deny oneself, and the strength to hold onto the desire to fight against this reality.

It has become customary to ask those who fight injustice: What good does it do? And if their actions do not immediately change the world in ways we can quantify, they are admonished as being foolish, or critiqued for trying something that did not work or made no visible impact. This is the normalization of utilitarian theory as life, where maximal impact is measured by those removed from action. Utility, impact, often in the form of policy, law, and socialized “good” becomes placed above questions such as those posed by TZ: Who will you become if you stop yourself from what you were going to do? How will you change when you practice and condition yourself to capitulate? Why is it acceptable to repress and deny yourself? When someone imagines moving and acting towards global liberation rarely are they asked: How will it change you and your life if you repress this want, this desire and political ambition?

Because of TZ, I want to write a treatise against the ways in which utilitarian thinking has mutated our activism, our education, our action, our lives. I want to write declarations that defend trying, and trying again, because why not. This would be a manifesto that proclaims empowerment is not the state of feeling good in this reality, but a practice of life unsurrendered to living.

This to-be-written-manifesto would try its hardest to rush against the liberal machine that’s naturalized neutrality as a good, and public inaction as the ultimate site of protection. So many people I know—and sometimes respect—impulsively explain that so-and-so cannot be done because of the potential criticism and/or the risk that it carries. They imply they’re waiting for a better strategy or a better plan evacuated of immediate stakes. Under utility, so many of us have trained ourselves to explain why someone cannot, rather than protect the site of why someone does.

There is a need for more theory and practice that protects those who have tried (perhaps imperfectly) so that we might try again (imperfectly).

*

Whilst TZ and her comrades prepared themselves to be released back into the world, she tells me that the world outside did not prepare for their re-entry. Of this, she describes “a gap between us and the world outside” that remains open.

The journalist Kanis Leung recently reported on the job discrimination that Hong Kong activists have encountered upon their release, and perhaps under the national security law, the mass mobilization and collectivity of 2019 seems distant from present day interactions.

TZ relays how HSBC, a British bank based in Hong Kong, recently sent letters to protestors informing them that given their political actions, they are not considered trustworthy, and thus, their bank accounts will be shut down. The protestors surmise that similar letters will be sent to others as they are released from prison. Their activism has neutered them of value, and without value the economy no longer wants them in the system; thus, it will block them from all forms of participation.

The economist Ha Joon Chang has remarked on how economic use logic has usurped all vectors of life. As in, everyone now feels like they have to explain or apologize for being economically viable or unviable. It is considered good to make money and live a life that makes sense in economic terms. It’s a sin and a folly to study and live on the fringes of capitalist accumulation. Chang compares our simulacra to a moment in which the Vatican held power through the Bible but the text was in Latin—a language outside the scope of most of the population—and forbidden from translation. He suggests that the Bible and its language held pivotal power, but was mystified to the population through its willfully opaque language. The power of the church to shape reality in its image and control lives came through the mystification of a text whose authority is questioned today, a precedent for how contemporary actions, desires, and pains that cannot be translated or understood in economic terms are suppressed and criminalized. Perhaps some of us today believe the Bible should no longer be the center of power and logic in life—and thus neither the Bible nor its translation barriers should affect how we currently live our lives (though this would not remove us from the moralism Christianity retains). Likewise, perhaps one day, we will imagine neither money nor economic use to be the center of power, and those with the most access to its language and syntax, no longer considered superior.

Under the ruse of this reality and utility, the protestors have been denied visas, bank accounts, employment, and more.

I think about TZ’s statement that the world did not prepare—or change—while they were held inside. This world did not work towards a transformation that could hold their lives upon release. Instead, this world made up more rules as to why they should be disallowed access to the very systems forged to constrain their freedoms, in order to demonstrate how their monopolies and authorities are perversely implicated to their existence.

Defiance will cost you more than your life—remains the message of obedience. The protestors now face all the systems they and the world outside could not defeat: private banking systems, wage-labor and its ongoing exploitation; hegemony as reality.

Some might say, such punishments are unsurprising and within the rights of corporations. Within the logic and reality of utilitarianism, the bank prevails.

*

Texts such as Merle Woo’s ”Three Decades of Class Struggle on Campus” and ”Training for Exploitation: Politicising Employability and Reclaiming Education” are pivotal to conversations about student protests and the antagonisms between education and its utility. In delineating her support for the student-led fight against the University of California’s investments in South African Apartheid, Woo writes how the university attempted to discipline students against independence and political ambition. She pinpoints the institution’s tactics:

“Keep young people down, ignorant, destabilized. Make them compete for every good grade they get. Students have no economic power so their survival depends on grades. Not knowledge, or maturity or integrity. Academic life depends on grades and degrees and the false promise of a good job in the future. Turn them into arrogant snobs, ashamed of their immigrant or poverty-stricken, ‘uneducated’ ancestors.”¹

This eerily mirrors the introduction for Training for Exploitation, which reads:

“Students are often implicitly expected to turn off their critical and political faculties when they enter a ‘professional practice’ seminar dedicated to self-marketing, art /design copyright or fundraising.”²

I imagine passing out copies of Woo’s essay and Training for Exploitation in class, wondering how its self-referential status will function pedagogically. I imagine the students—victims of the neoliberal design they are often blamed for being unable to defeat—staring at the text, flipping through the pages slowly. I imagine our discussion of student protests, and then, future jobs. What kind of job will you have, or want? How will you measure your own impact?

In order for the reality and study of student protest and exploitation to not be one of enclosure (which is neither the objective of Woo’s writing nor Training for Exploitation), I would want to bring in a short piece by Sigmund Freud, his “Contribution to a Discussion on Suicide,” in which he writes:

“Secondary school should achieve more than not driving its pupils to suicide. It should give them a desire to live… The school must not take on itself the inexorable character of life: it must not seek to be more than a game of life.”³

This contention against the gamification of life brings me back to TZ and her proposition that all that she does not do also becomes marked on her life. It’s so easy to celebrate the wins and to glamorize the losses as part of some life lesson or pathway to more glory. It’s so classically predictable to narrate around winning and success—Freud could see it! It’s so easy to instruct others and pretend, yourself, that the goal of this life game is the maintenance of all that is set forth as reality. Rather than: What is your desire to live and how did you change today? What did you not deny yourself today as practice for tomorrow?

***

Mid-2023

I cannot find the right word to describe how I felt when they threw all the books away. I knew that it was going to happen because they had thrown away all the donated books in the other workshops. I rehearsed this scenario in my head… I was determined to ‘raise my hand’ no matter the consequences. And it happened yesterday afternoon. The madam brought in dozens of plastic bags and threw away all the books. Hundreds of books, without hesitation…

We had so many nice books in our common bookshelf, both Chinese and English. We had “Road to Freedom,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “The Book Thief” …we had religious books, course books, language-learning books. It was such a nice thing, wasn’t it, that people here read and find their power? To understand, to learn and to become someone better? Wasn’t this the goal of the correctional service department? Rehabilitation—the first priority of the prison?

But they just threw away all our books. They took every single book out from the locker, they even tore them apart, threw them into plastic bags and treated them as rubbish. One hour ago, those were still books that were cherished by different prisoners. Accompanied them for so many sleepless nights. What happened?

Solidarity is considered toxic here…You are not allowed to be happy in prison, let alone united. It is dangerous and provocative especially when protesters are involved. Last year, they locked 18 people in solitary confinement for over 3 months for sharing chocolate with a protester. They said it was an act of bribery, a seed of provocation and a path to possible revolution (a riot, they called it).

I told myself, if they eventually throw away the books in our workshop I will complain, I will protest, I will resist… I don’t care if they are going to lock me up or throw away all my letters. I just know that it’s not ok to throw away books. It’s not okay to stop people from sharing, reading, learning.

…

We are not allowed to share books, or anything in prison, not even a piece of tissue to someone in need. Well, of course we still do it secretly, under the table. But we all know it is not allowed. No sharing, no giving, no creating, no greetings; life here is about keeping our eyes closed and keeping our mouth shut. The less you know, the less you care, the safer you will be.

…

***

“what brutal hours, what brutal days,
do not say, oh find the good in it, do not say,
there was virtue; there was no virtue, not even in me”

—Dionne Brand, Ossuaries (2010)

In the spring of this year, I heard Ashanti Alston—a former member of the Black Panthers Party and Black Liberation Army—speak at Brown University, where he opened the talk by stating, “Practice is the criteria for truth.” And I wonder about the relationship between practice that’s often left out in discussions of truth, that TZ and other student activists continue to push, almost organically.

Over the phone, TZ speaks without hesitation about her current learning efforts. She tells me how herself and other released protestors have formed book and movie clubs, where they get together and learn about the world. She tells me how stupid she thinks single axis activism is: Is farming and the environment not connected to capitalism and gender and everything else? How can you just fight for one thing? When she speaks, I don’t sense the fear that radiates from so many—myself not exempted.

TZ’s disregard for the fear of authority feels like the kind of air I want to breathe: TZ doesn’t narrate herself as a victim. Her politics strives above game crumbs, above even the enclosed, mystified self as authority. When I ask her about this defiance and refusal to surrender, to capitulate and fear, she says, “The authority is afraid that you’re not afraid and that you’ll keep learning.” Before adding, “They’re afraid that you’ll think of a better solution—and you’ll do it again.”

Perhaps one way to prepare for a world that can hold those who fought and continue to fight is training to do it again.

*

Acknowledgements

This text would be formless without Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung, who generously guided and edited it, and offered a space for TZ’s letters. I’m forever grateful to TZ, for existing.

Tarn Street is where we would go if we wanted to get out of it all. Yes, this is where we would go. Once a long street full of life, it’s been chopped down to a mere 30 metres. Nevertheless, this remnant is a refuge if you want it. Yes, Tarn Street in The Elephant & Castle, that nebulous neighbourhood in Southwark, South London. Nearby, the Heygate Estate was 1100 public housing flats which have been demolished to provide some petty manifest destiny for the upmarket Elephant Park development. So, our muscled memory walk from The Heygate was always along New Kent Road, down Meadow Row, past the Rockingham Anomaly—London’s only patch of subterranean peat, a 300 metre wide circular depression in the landscape, our lucky charm curiosity—and then you’re there. Tarn Street. We’ll get back to it, but first…

We pass these newly built ruins that sting our eyes: here indeed be “Regeneration.” That word! Those imprecise words they love—“progress,” “regeneration,” “reinvigorating,” “transforming,” “revitalisation.” We’re fucked when those words come out to play. This Tarn Street, this Elephant, this Southwark, England, the U.K.—overseas investors, financial vehicles, sovereign wealth funds from Qatar, Canadian, and Dutch civil servants’ pension funds and offshore capital land right here, all as part of the intercity, inter-regional and global competition to attract serious money to lay waste. These civilised servants of the state favour growth and profit, love the damned GDP and believe in the fiction of The Economy with its one-trick-pony reliance on new housing as the answer to recession and crisis.

Here in Southwark, Tony Blair’s years of New Labour governance and planning were ridden wild by the Council in a demented Centrist rodeo, resulting in a total disaster for local people over the last decades. Blair’s first speech on winning power in 1997 was made nearby, on some steps at the Aylesbury Estate. We needed to “refashion our institutions to bring this new workless class back into society,” he said, locating the council estate as the locus of feckless work-shy Britain. What could they aspire to, these scum of the Earth? Should they believe in the myth of a meritocracy where hard work, good personal management, aspirational and middle class values of individualism and property ownership in all its forms (material as assets, relational as status, interpersonal as a weapon) would magically remove basic structural disadvantages for anyone now shameless enough to remain poor?

This civic determinism was spearheaded by Peter John O.B.E, Leader of Southwark Council from 2010 to 2020. Although a dull probate lawyer by day, by night Peter John had dreams to Get Things Done and so rushed into a deal with the developers, Lendlease, to knock down The Heygate as the first part of ‘rebalancing’ the area. The Elephant Shopping Centre would be knocked down later. He was determined to “deliver progress.” Demolish public housing. Demolish space to shop and socialise cheaply. A trail of stigma and manufactured ignorance about the lives of working-class people was heaped upon Heygate tenants. “Regeneration” needed to produce its own accompanying poetries of hate:

“…is this the Third World or what?… sink estate, plagued by crime drugs and prostitution, violence and deprivation… if you give people sties to live in, they will live like pigs… apocalyptic movie, hooded teenagers, dogs, mothers pushing prams, crime-racked labyrinth of grey high-rise, doomed behemoth, failed utopia, mugger’s paradise, meths-drinking weirdos… sorry but it looks shocking.”

Peter John said that “the way to solve a housing crisis is to build new homes” and so, in a massive act of state-led social cleansing, from 2014 onwards, 3000+ mostly private homes came to pass on the ruins of the Heygate. The Council—a double helix of ignorance and ideology, petty corruption and stupidity—tried to convince locals they were doing something progressive; but all promises made to Heygate tenants were relentlessly broken, and they were dispersed far and wide across the borough. “Regeneration” is much more complicated than simply the rich trampling the poor; “gentrification” is a redundant description of complex processes of community destruction in the always uneven, classed, and raced economies of inner city living. Ain’t no Black in Elephant Park—just delis!

Perhaps, in his apartment in fancy Shad Thames, Peter John looked into his mirror in 2015, sized himself up and extrapolated from his pale reflection that he was the future Southwark. “Regeneration” is fashioned in its own image: those who deliver it can only imagine themselves as the archetypes for the desired demographic switch. Later, Peter John was able to polish his Order of the British Empire—awarded for his political services—before stepping down from council life to hang out with those consultants who were the PR people for Pinochet.

But the bourgeoisie has always known that kind of bad faith inside out. It produces and enjoys its own theatrical spectacle. It is the class most founded on image, on showing itself (off). It enjoys front row seats to the spectacle but never knows whether to keep looking at the stage or to watch out for trouble. Everything predicated on the Good Life and nothing for anyone else. Not one of them is innocent. They really believe in the poetries of the developer’s brochures:

“…Discover your next chapter, imaginative designs, luxury finishes, inspirational locations and cutting-edge architecture, curating your life, so you’re always surrounded by the things and people you love, living well is a way of being, communal gym, elevated garden, fast WiFi, sky lounge to enjoy the views of London, 24-hour concierge service, located in vibrant, thriving communities, meaningful environments that contribute to your wellbeing, curating your space, it is an ability to make a positive difference in your own life…”¹

2.

So we found ourselves in shitty Tarn Street once more because we wanted to study those dense layers of progress with their own possessed imagery. A bunch of us took a playful walk on 10 April 2024 and talked about “The Encounter,” where one way of living, with all its discontents, meets modes of supposed modernity, which are then experienced as great waves that violently sweep away how you have lived and how you have grown together in that living. Here come new things, new people, new phantasmagorias; always with contempt for what they have displaced. We read aloud from Chapter 31 of Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt (1984) which describes a meeting of this kind: desert communities of a fictionalised Saudi Arabia encounter the arrival of the American oil companies which rewrite their fates under a new regime of petrocapitalism. Tarn Street—a place astoundingly heavy with The Weight of Progress embedded within its material structures, dead labour, and the spectres and spooks of proletarian longing which still seep from the terrain. Malodorous intent. What can be found in this fragment?

Overhead, the railway bridge dominates, those trains so loud, interrupting our reading of Munif. Those vast stone pillars, the iron ribs of the bridge, the dense brick work. The expansion of this railway line from The Elephant to the new Blackfriars happened in 1860, 20 years after Railway Mania and unregulated laissez-faire expansion—the hidden hand here, the chopped-off hands there. Smack bang in the years of empire those train lines displaced the locals in some of the first clearances of poor people in London; no compensation, no rights, just eviction.

Five years later Francis Galton’s article Hereditary Talent and Character kickstarted the English eugenics movement. Who can put their hand up and say they don’t see a parallel between social cleansing and Galton’s breakdown of populations into Desirables, Passables and Undesirables? Heygate tenants were infamously described by Council officials as the “wrong sort of people” and seen as a surplus population who still had the cheek to live in the area. An “undeserving poor” reimagined for the social sadism of the 21st century. The opposite of regeneration is degeneration and eugenicists had a fear of regression. At the Elephant, us scum have been called upon to ‘improve’ ourselves because the deranged, the disturbed, the disabled, the disadvantaged have all become suspect, a problem that needs ‘solving.’

Another train pounds above us, time is skewed; steam, whistles and sparks and soot. The English romance of the smoky passenger train masks the colonial technologies that allowed the new steam boats to reach the colonies, and allowed those extracted and looted raw materials and commodities to be exported via new railway lines. Such trains were the vanguard of British “civilising” missions. Here at Tarn Street was a large coal depot for black fossil fuel to be burnt in locomotive fireboxes. Through this black miasma we see behind us the lovely 1930s London County Council public housing (with promises of inside toilets) where blocks are named Telford, Stephenson, Rumford, Rennie, Rankine after the gentlemen engineers of the industrial revolution. Their contribution to infrastructure: roads, canals, iron bridges, railways, docks, warehouses, stream engines, shipping. The combined power of mechanisation and capital. No modernity without industrial revolution. No industrial revolution without empire.

So, from this Wealth of Nations, our Tarn Street got its name. Nearby, Tarn’s Department Store expanded decade by decade to cover a whole block from here to New Kent Road by the 1890s. This department store, so beautifully painted and deconstructed in Emile Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise (1883), with so much Victorian pride in its own commerce, entices us inside. So many things in a world of having. Behind the scene’s gendered labour, petty management catered to the whims of the bourgeoisie. Tarn’s left a beautiful archival paper trail of illustrated brochures, catalogues, leaflets, advertisements, price lists, dockets, invoices, documents, receipts and so on where in essence they reproduced images of themselves in their own poetry of having stuff:

“…silks, velveteens, ribbons, furs, lace, french merinos, cachemires, damasks, wool brooches, english serges, pompadours, sideboards, dining tables, walnut chairs, overmantels, mahogany bookcase, couch, settee, bamboo screen, gents easy chair, ebonized pedestal, newest colours—eucalyptus, serpent, lizard, goblin…”²

Just back from the railway arch is the HQ of the Salvation Army, the evangelical Protestant sect and serious conniver with British imperialism. Established in 1865 the Army wanted to guide the “submerged tenth out of the jungle of Darkest England” but only through a philanthropy with ropes attached. Their idea was a process of “regeneration:” gathering up the outcast poor via calculated “invasions” of godless communities bringing food, shelter and, of course, work. Essentially the same justification as the regressive stigma foisted more recently on us heathen locals. The crucible of material conditions that produce any “anti-social behaviour” can be prayed away and solved by appeals to be a better Spirit, rather than being brought out of poverty by a society that cares for all. Enter a regenerated Empire of Souls. Anyhow, the Salvation Army have now flogged off their building for £45 million to developers for a scheme premised upon “local people directly benefiting” and being a “community-oriented scheme,” yet it is actually a 425 room hotel and 25 storeys of offices.⁴ Hallelujah!

Outside, here in this street, in this constellation of histories and aggressions, where wealth did not abolish poverty, we continue to loiter on this carpet of bones and slime. Richer folks new to the area walk across, never slipping, but never quite getting their feet free of the adhesive pulp of proletarian lives.

3.

So, we feel that Tarn Street exists for those who want to get out; for those who don’t want stuff and who aren’t nostalgic. For those who wish to remain irrational. So, here we are, here and now, at Tarn Street where there’s nowhere left to run. But why is there nowhere left to run? Because of Tarn Street and what it means to you. Loner. Runner. Loser. Tarn Street is our chosen ground. Spin around and all the blood in your mind and body reads the landscape clearly and correctly. Centripetal imaginations are powerful on this archipelago of unease: old stores, old people, dead and buried, the long gone Columbian restaurant Leños & Carbón (literally Logs & Coal), the nearby Hand in Hand pub and Eileen House; anti-gentrification bases which were squatted before demolition, strangers feeding the pigeons, and that bricked-up door to nowhere in the railway arch which always felt like it could be a way out.

The base materialism of their progress is our decay. But it cannot last and it cannot hold: our resistance is everywhere and the poetries that we have produced are lived and not in words.

Katie Lake, draper’s assistant in Tarn’s in the 1870s, later admitted to Newington Workhouse where she died from tuberculosis.

The owner of the coffee stall on Tarn Street in the 1950s, cursing his midnight customers, both good and bad.

Maisie, an affable sex worker, who was Bert Hardy’s local guide to the area for his post-war photo portrait of The Elephant in Picture Post, 8 January 1949.

Ebele, the Nigerian woman who came to the now demolished Palace Bingo two or three times a week for community.

Our lecturer friend at her University—itself a development partner in the “regeneration”— disciplined by management for speaking out against their complicity in social cleansing.

Emad, the Egyptian who ran his computer shop in the Shopping Centre and learned Spanish to help the local Colombian community, who was forced out of his business by the “regeneration.”

Janet, who bought her wedding dress in the Shopping Centre 45 years ago, but now roams the area in her mobility scooter without her daily trip to Jenny’s Cafe. She speaks of the Centre as “a beautiful love affair which will never die.”

The Polish Nanny, the Filipino Cleaner, the Brazilian Deliveroo rider, the Afghani phone repairer, the Albanian chef, the English student charity mugger signing you up for some more “we are all in this together”—and everyone else still standing.

So, here we all are. Here we are at Tarn Street, huddling in our fragment. It’s ok, maybe. The mountains of the Elephant & Castle have moved. An Elephant, you say? A Castle, you said? Our escape is a political-poetic act or the other way around! Or, us placing a hand on the brickwork, the metal pillar, the grimy pavement or the billboard soaked in black tar, our faces reflected in that dark mirror and we feel our soft flesh and blood start to corrode these poor histories. We were always the anomaly! We are the remaining fragment, too. It’s The End but we aren’t yet dead.

10 November 2023 was the thirty-fourth day of Israel’s onslaught on Gaza. Over 11,000 Palestinians had been murdered, over 27,000 had been injured, around 1.6 million had been internally displaced, and the full electricity blackout was in its thirty-first day, tens of thousands of buildings and homes had been turned to rubble, half the hospitals were shut down, two thirds of primary health care services were unable to operate, half the schools had been destroyed, all education had ceased, and death by starvation was already predicted.

The poem was an exorcism of rage and grief through words, and of words. I wanted to attack language itself for its continuous role in manufacturing consent for the ongoing genocide. The production of lies and enforcement of silence have their special roles too; not least in Germany where repression of pro-Palestinian speech and protest seem to find incredible new depths to sink to daily. Not to mention Germany’s material support for the murder of Palestinians: it is one of the largest funders of military supplies to Israel, sending 326.5 million euros ($353.7m) in equipment and weapons in 2023. And yet Germany still finds the mental flexibility to deny the accusation brought by Nicaraguan lawyers before the ICJ that it was aiding genocide.

None of this was acknowledged in the invitation, nor were any words of solidarity suggested or extended. I replied to the invitation saying that as a Palestinian writer, advocate of Palestinian resistances to settler colonial occupation and genocide, and signatory of the Strike Germany campaign I could not take part unless all institutions involved were to meet the movement’s demands, and release public statements about having done so. Although I knew this was an impossible demand, it was important for me to explain that it was impossible and undesirable for me to take part without these institutions publicly realigning their positions. The reply I received stated that my position was understood and supported and expressed a hope for a “changed climate.” However, the invitation to act together towards actually doing something, risking something, or sacrificing something to change anything was not taken up.

Why would I allow my words opposing the genocide of my people to be displayed on the national institutions of one of the nations funding and supporting that genocide, and violently quelling any opposition? The institutions that would pin us like dead animals onto neatly labelled displays within that thing called culture will continue to use us for decoration; to be strung up around their dead monuments unless we commit, as many have, to an anarchic, compassionate, permanent refusal of everything that silences us by giving us a voice.

The only words on the only walls that matter to me right now are the words Palestinians of Gaza are writing on the walls of their destroyed city, saying who is buried underneath that wall, the date of the massacre, and the promise to return and to rebuild.

Decolonial Hacker’s interventions into the digital territories of institutions do not seek to quell or quiet the possibilities of disruptive language in exchange for promises of entering into “culture” and its self-aggrandising realm of visibility. Nor does it accept that refusing and critiquing those institutions that collaborate in imperial deathscapes would render us, as Stuart Hall has said, permanently minor, invisible and marginalised. Rather, what it hopes to do—and what I hope to do in my brief visit as Guest Editor—is bring together a few voices of thinkers who are able to articulate and sing about these dark times, and who remind me that refusal is always the yes inside the no.

A photomontage by Hannah Höch entered the Edinburgh holdings of the Scottish National Galleries in 1995 through the bequest of marmalade-heiress Gabrielle Keiller. This belongs to the series From an Ethnographic Museum (1924–34), which was most complete in its presentation during the artist’s solo exhibition in student housing for Masaryk University in Brno, Czechoslovakia, in 1934. There, ten works from the series were exhibited, with the show’s organiser, František Kalivoda, elaborating the “combative and playful” aspects of photomontage as a contemporary medium in his accompanying lecture. In a rare statement issued in tandem with her first solo exhibition, five years before, Höch herself suggested that such strategies were deployed with an agenda: “I want to blur the fixed boundaries that we people have drawn around everything in our sphere, with obstinate self-assurance…” Speaking from the Hague in 1929, the artist’s invocation of “we people” presumably names European society, implicating herself in a dominant culture that she otherwise unnerves. Yet, questions remain over how permeable at home, or rapacious abroad, “our sphere” might be—indeed they hover over the need to possess a sphere, to claim ownership of a realm, at all.

To make the works in this series, Höch used strategies learnt from looking at ethnographic museums. She plundered illustrated journals of the 1920s, typically for images of either idealised European womanhood, or objects looted through European colonial violence. Then she decontextualised her plunder, splicing them together for her own display purposes—producing a series she dubbed “der Sammlung”, or, “The Collection.” Does her work critique or repeat harm in the name of the ethnographic museum? Given the impossibility of doing both simultaneously, it does neither: harm is only in the background. At the forefront of her project is a messing-with, a limit-pushing, a desire to elude and confound.

The Höch collage in Edinburgh is usefully thought in relation to its companions—with sister works housed most salubriously in New York and Paris—but it is also particular. For me, it exposes the wanton, freakshow cravings that lace the museographic display in Europe of booty from Africa. The torqued figure, set on a pedestal but not quite contained by the prison bars, is a creation of modernity, coloniality and capitalist patriarchy, which is doomed to a monstrous form by those entangled forces.

Nazi vilification of Höch’s art as “degenerate” would seek to quell her monster forms without addressing their galvanising energies.

How do we flex critical possibilities through Höch’s work today?

*

The Scots-Ghanaian artist Maud Sulter perhaps saw the Höch collage in a 1988 exhibition of Keiller’s collection in Edinburgh. Certainly, Sulter’s Syrcas, a photomontage series from 1994, is (amongst other things) a response to From an Ethnographic Museum. In the bibliography for her Syrcas publication, Sulter notes Maud Lavin’s book Cut with the Kitchen Knife: the Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch, which had come out just the year before.

Syrcas reignites the transcultural fireworks to be detonated through collaging photographs. The public forum invoked by Sulter’s title is not the ethnographic museum, however, but the circus—syrcas in Welsh, as spoken in the country of the commissioning institution, Wrexham Library Arts Centre. Images of objects looted for museum storage afar feature powerfully in the collages, but the emphasis lies on their being at large in the complex lived juxtaposition and entanglement of European and African visual cultures. Comprising sixteen works across five carefully composed clusters, there is a density and orchestration that belies synoptic visual analysis. The circus theme, which is elaborated most explicitly in the accompanying poem, Blood Money, draws on another series of works produced in Germany at the same time as From the Ethnographic Museum: August Sander’s 1926 photographs of circus artists, usherettes, labourers and their families, a troop uniting different racialised identities, pictured in Köln not performing or otherwise at work but in their down time, as a part of his project “Citizens of the Twentieth Century.” This work, in book form, also features in Sulter’s bibliography for Syrcas. Of all the ethnicities invoked in Blood Money, ‘Celt’ and ‘African’ come closest—between them—in summarising the artist’s own heritage.

Syrcas reverberates with many such pluralities, which both thrive and struggle to survive within European nation states. Picking up on something of Höch’s own line of enquiry, it reels with the impossibility of any art canon, or canon of beauty, ever being adequate to the essential extravagance of cultures.

Höch had access to off-prints of the journal Der Querschnitt, which she routinely snipped into for her research and art. With more strategic violence, perhaps, Sulter gathered much of her source material by mutilating a book: the only one in the World of Art series that centred African practices. This publication was written by the director of the Hunterian Museum, in Sulter’s home city of Glasgow, where the “ethnography” collection has since been renamed “world cultures.” Perhaps the Sowei figure collaged in black-and-white reproduction on top of a tinted postcard of a placid Alpine scene, in Syrcas: Noir et Blanc: Trois, offers her sister figure in the Hunterian collection a narration of their shared predicaments and possibilities. Having been “dropped out of history” by the infamous European “exhibitionary complex” of the nineteenth century, so as “to occupy a twilight zone between nature and culture” (to quote Tony Bennett), they may now—in holding precisely that space—exude a newly compelling power for those upon whom the costs of seeking to disconnect from nature, in order to manage and monetise it, are finally dawning. In Noir et Blanc: Trois, the carved headdress is as monumental as the Alps and exceeds the landscape’s frame, standing proud, while the pine trees below hint at the raffia costume of a gathering performance by the Sowei who may yet bring on, spiritually, a new and transcultural generation of females.

Sulter was not so interested in her small, papery originals for Syrcas. She photographed these and made large-scale prints for the purposes of exhibition, such that the figures and figurines she included approached life size—addressing us as bodily equals in the gallery space. The violence of her action with scissors on that African Art book should not overshadow the care simultaneously taken to maintain the integrity of the photographed objects she liberated.

After touring the UK as a solo show, Syrcas was circulated to the first Johannesburg Biennale of 1995. In South Africa, surely the pictures looked European and the poem sounded English. The continental shift must have also inverted the references in the work: the stolen objects photographed came closer to their homes; and the rural landscapes pictured moved very far away. The Johannesburg building in which Syrcas was exhibited, the Electric Workshop, brought industrialisation powerfully into its cultural frame. In her review for Third Text, the artist Candice Breitz writes of the space in a way that opens up the operation and affect of Syrcas in particular:

“Unlike the Museum Africa, a venue which is characterised by the sanitised ambience we expect of museums, the Electric Workshop speaks unequivocally of labour and decay. It is an industrial warehouse complete with hanging cranes, dusty alleys, unfathomable nooks and crannies and no pre-existing divisions which could be used to separate exhibitions. Its chaotic sense of violent fragmentation and architectural anarchy is both melancholic and disturbingly moving.”

Yet there is also something forceful and positive about the riotous comings-together in Syrcas.

*

The work in Höch’s series From an Ethnographic Museum held by the National Galleries of Scotland excerpts the lower half of an especially famous face. From the eye sockets and bridge of the nose downwards, we see Iy’Oba Idia, who lived c. 1490–1540 in the royal court of Benin, carved there in ivory around a century later. Höch could not have known she’d taken her scissors to the Queen Mother, as her image had not yet been identified in Europe, given the lumping in of this effigy amongst Britain’s amassed spoils of colonial war.

The face of Idia was brought back into active function, channelling ancestral powers in a new ceremonial occasion, through FESTAC, the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture staged in Lagos in 1977. As recently articulated by Chimurenga’s publication dedicated to that event:

“Part restitution of looted, centuries-old heritage and part conspicuous consumption fuelled by a booming petro-Naira, the flood of Idia images that attended FESTAC constituted a potent decolonial move and a brilliant branding project all at once. Untethered from her home in captivity and replicated over and over again in the land of her ancestors, Idia was deployed by the Nigerian Government to tell a very particular story: the story of a nation destined to act as a beacon for all black people and as the economic powerhouse of a global south shorn of its colonial shackles. Recast as a clarion call to the oppressed by a military dictatorship in thrall to the capitalist system undergirding this selfsame oppression, she emerged as a powerful tool of hegemony in the hands of the Obasanjo regime. Rarely has instrumentalization of art to political ends been handled with such brio.”

I come to the Höch collage in Edinburgh post FESTAC—or, rather, following my understanding of FESTAC from the “cultural kaleidoscope” offered by Chimurenga (to borrow a description from curator Elvira Dyangani Ose). As such, I find the British Museum—but not global capitalism—has been exorcised from the work, leaving a face whose fracturing conveys the scars of the one and ongoing subjugation by the other.

*

In On the Periphery (1976), Scottish poet Veronica Forrest-Thomson ventures a “Conversation on a Benin Head,” yet she is snagged by Macbeth’s dagger and R. D. Laing’s knots (neither of which matter if you don’t know them; but, if you stay in Scotland, you may). I hide behind her freestanding line in the middle of this troubling poem: “Whatever it was I didn’t do it.” Not even a comma is allowed to pace this defensive move, which remains blurted. Yet her preface to the poetry collection it sits within is more measured and rousing. A call to arms, it urges the taking and making of art into ‘a new and serious opponent—perhaps even a successful opponent—to the awefulness of the modern world.’

*

With its central figure the product of collaged visuals from reading material, the work by Hannah Höch is maybe most happily consulted one–to–one in the prints and drawings room in Edinburgh—or online, invited into your personal space. As such, it is somehow less captive to the avid alien gazes that it arguably puts into question, yet risks reproducing when framed, glazed and hung formally on a museum wall. I offer the work here as a guest—and you, if you choose to stay with it, will decide upon how engaging it might be.

Across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the consolidation of the capitalist world-system under British hegemony, what Robinson termed “the delusions of mediæval citizenship” came to be supplanted by the logics of race and Herrenvolk, which attest to the fact that “European civilization, containing racial, tribal, linguistic, and racial particularities, was constructed on antagonistic differences.” ‘Race’ as both metaphysic and mechanism shaping the practices of domination and exploitation was born in Europe. The Herrenvolk frame dominated as a mystification and legitimation of power on European soil in such myths as “Anglo-Saxonism” or the “Germanic race” while race “became largely the rationalization for the domination, exploitation, and/or extermination of non-‘Europeans’ (including Slavs and Jews).” This parenthetic comment is striking, both for its suggestion about the perceived non-Europeanness of Jews and for its allusion to the question of racial genocide, both of which are not further explored in Black Marxism.

In what follows, starting from the working hypothesis that the prism of racial capitalism can provide some profane illumination on the problem of the relationship between slavery, colonialism, and the Holocaust, I want to consider two distinct if interrelated questions. First, what might it mean to frame antisemitism as a modality of racial capitalism? Second, are we obligated to retain, as Robinson does in Black Marxism, the category of “civilization” to interpret and explain racial capitalism?

While the best-known products of the Frankfurt School’s research on antisemitism foreground the rhetorical, psychological, and metaphysical roots of Nazi Jew-hatred and anti-Jewish violence, the original research project on antisemitism published in 1941 by the exiled Institute for Social Research’s journal could be read as a contribution to a theory of racial capitalism avant la lettre. Its starting point is lucid and forthright: any effort to theorize antisemitism that treats it merely as an irrational and age-old cultural and psychological prejudice is doomed to irrelevance.

What is called for is a materialist framework for identifying the specificity of modern antisemitism that would be able to historicize its emergence from the crucible of capitalist social relations, thus accounting for the polemical association of Jews with the real abstractions of capital and law, and especially with money as a solvent of social order.

While racial capitalism may be encapsulated, following Ruth Wilson Gilmore, as the enshrining of the inequalities generated by capital—as a way to capitalize on race—the dominant form of antisemitism gleaned by Adorno and his colleagues is that of a racialization of capital. This allows the propagandizing of the social war on Jews as a struggle against abstraction. Instead of purely repudiating antisemitism as manipulation or prejudice, the Institute sought to detail how certain Jewish social character traits identified, magnified, and distorted by the antisemite “find their roots in the economic life of the Jew, in his particular function in society and in the consequences of his economic activity.”

The first is the notion that Jews do the “dirty” (if immaterial) work of capital, namely in their function as “middlemen.” As the Institute’s project notes: “From olden times the practice of extending credit has prevented the antagonism between the possessors of power and the economically oppressed population from leading to recurrent catastrophes.” But in the throes of crisis, the Jew becomes the perceived factor of impoverishment. The increasing importance of intermediary functions to modern capital is then the basis for the “maneuver of distraction” that presents an intrinsically Jewish “non-productive capital” as the source of social ills. Emblematic of this operation is the imaginary world of Richard Wagner’s music drama Der Ring des Nibelungen, which “contrasts the heroic productive Siegfried, a mixture of the munition manufacturer, the condottiere, and the rowdy, with the dwarf, a symbol of the owners, merchants, and the resentful, eternally complaining proletariat.” The Nazi struggle against Roman law—which the legal theorist Carl Schmitt played a prominent role in advancing—is then traced back to the political economy of Jewish life under capitalism, with its complement of ideological effects:

Since its Roman origin, civil law has been the law of creditors. Whereas it recognizes no difference between any groups or individuals but aims at the universal protection of property, it is a priori antagonistic to the debtor. Historically, because of the creditor role of the Jews, deriving from their functions as bankers and merchants, we find them usually on the side of Rational law. Their foes, on the other hand, favor a vague natural law based on the “sound instinct of the people.”

This affiliation with juridical abstraction, grounded in the historical trends determining the social positioning of certain Jews within the ambit of European racial capitalism, is then presented as the further basis for associating Jews with abstract intellectual labor tout court.

The ‘Research Project on Antisemitism’ was, among other things, an effort to explore how the antisemitic and fascist phobia for abstraction—and the related image of the Jew as the enemy of racial concreteness and authenticity—could be understood as the distorted refraction of real social processes marking the history of European racial capitalism. This effort was not without its pitfalls: in seeking to blast an emancipatory core out of the lethal stereotype of the Jew as the bearer of life-denying abstraction, it affirmed abstract thought’s “divest[ing of] human relationships and things of their taboos,” thereby seeming to abet a view of enlightenment rationality as the suppression or supersession of savagery.

Moreover, by seeking to base the very possibility of Nazi persecution in the political-economic shift out of a market economy, in the delinking of German capitalism from the anonymous, abstract, and impersonal compulsions of the market, it misrepresented Nazism as an authoritarian planned economy. This advanced a rather undialectical claim for the virtues of a market individualism whose termination was interpreted as the basis of the Jews’ “becoming superfluous.”

This theme of superfluity also emerges from a contemporaneous work, La conception matérialiste de la question juive (translated as The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation), completed in 1942 by the Jewish Belgian Trotskyist militant and resistance fighter, Abraham Léon, murdered at the age of 26 in Auschwitz. In contrast to the Institute’s 1941 hypothesis, Léon developed some of Max Weber’s arguments about the Jews as a “people-class”—a group ascribed interstitial commercial and capitalist functions within a feudal world—to argue that it was the full transition to capitalism, rather than the rise of monopolies or authoritarian states, which had rendered the position of European Jews intensely precarious. While the Jews represented money-capital in a non-capitalist mode of production, with the intensification of the real subsumption of society by capital they retained their vestigial stigma as the people of abstraction, while losing any correlated social role. As Léon observed: “In relation to the people whose traditional bases of existence it destroys, capitalism blocks the road to the future after having shut the path to the past… The first to be eliminated by decadent feudalism, the Jews were also the first to be rejected by the convulsions of agonizing capitalism… The Jewish masses [in Eastern Europe] found themselves stuck between the anvil of decadent feudalism and the hammer of rotting capitalism.”

For Léon, as for Adorno (the principal author of the Institute’s research project), the study of contemporary antisemitism at the inception of its exterminatory turn meant giving primacy to the differential effects of racial capitalism over the continuum of anti-Jewish prejudice across European history. Tragically, neither Léon nor Adorno explored the way in which antisemitism could be understood relationally; how, following Claire Jean Kim, “racialization processes are mutually constitutive of one another” across “more than one scale at a time.” One way of addressing this relationality and “triangulating” anti-indigenous, anti-Black, and anti-Jewish racisms and their respective modalities of violence, is to think of the figure which is the sine qua non and foil of the discourse of civilization: the savage.

The savage is both emblematic of the epistemic violence of racial abstraction, and a device through which colonial racial capitalist practice constituted its domination, dispossession, and exploitation of differently racialized peoples. In an unpublished 1975 text on W.E.B. Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction, ‘Marxist Theory and the Black Savage,’ Robinson pointed to this centrality of savagery to the formation of racial capitalism:

…the stories of “advanced civilizations” require as a confirmation of themselves a negation: the Savage. “Civilizations” prove their historical significance by the destruction and/or domination of the Savage. Interestingly enough, the decline of “civilizations” is marked by myths of the reappearance of the Savage. American social ideology and historical consciousness had two such savages as their opposition: the Indian and the African. The destruction of the native Savage and the domination of the imported (alien) Savage were positive proofs of the superiority and historical mission of the new nation—the new American people.

These figures of savagery could, in turn, serve a disciplinary and ideological function in “the socialization of subsequent generations of less well-integrated classes and ethnic groups.” In Black Marxism and a brilliant later essay on the playwright Eugene O’Neill, Robinson would elaborate on the role of Irish “savagery” as a template for “the destruction of the native savage and the domination of the imported one.” This is a striking example of a process that Gilmore has starkly encapsulated as follows: “capitalism and racial practice codeveloped because the racial practice was already there and it had nothing to do with Black people.”

But what lines can be drawn between antisemitism and the colonial triangulation of indigenous, Irish, and Black “savagery”?

We easily forget that the very perception and understanding of First Nations in the Americas was shaped by a Biblical frame that employed the theological script of Jewish history to make sense of indigeneity. As the Italian historian of ideas Giuliano Gliozzi details, the “Judeo-genetic theory” of the origin of the indios played a critical role in the ideological—which is to say theological-juridical—battles between the Spanish Crown and the conquistadores over the forms of domination and exploitation to be applied in the newly-conquered territories. As Gliozzi writes, “what moved the men of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to formulate determinate hypotheses on the origin of the Americans was not an abstractly ‘ethnological’ interest but the need to justify and prefigure particular socio-economic relations in the colonial policy towards the New World.” Used by conquistadores to justify the hyper-exploitation, expulsion, and death of those who could be seen as having denied Christ, the “Jewish Indian” theory fell away due to a shift in the perquisites of colonial racial capitalism, namely as the colonists became more dependent on reproducible and taxable agrarian labor rather than sheer plunder and the abuse of native peoples as disposable enslaved workers in Spanish mines.

The same Biblical frames could then travel to other colonial settings as rationales for divergent policies. While the Biblical-juridical framing of “savagery” would give way to secular, Lockean-commercial rationales for dispossession, as well as polygenetic theories of race in the eighteenth century, the “Jewish Indian” theory proved quite resilient. The historian Craig Steven Wilder has traced its persistence in the first century and a half of the American university, and underscored its profoundly relational character. As he observes,

When European and European-American intellectuals explored Judaism and Jewish history for clues to the origins of native America they were also rummaging through the legacies of Christian antisemitism. One example: the axiom that God sent plagues and wars to punish native American communities for hedonism went largely unchallenged in the colonies and the assignment of Jewish ancestry to native Americans however speculative made this heavenly verdict even more credible: if Indians were Jews under this logic then they were not the innocent occupants of an unknown land but unrepentant sinners who had long… escaped God’s wrath.

Conversely, as justifications for dispossession came to take a more secular cast in the mid-eighteenth century, it meant terminating the proselytizing, pedagogical effort to “civilize” the natives. As Wilder notes, “there was little profit in struggling to uplift native Americans whom secular knowledge and religious knowledge now judged unsalvageable.”

[The] ascendance of… the biological racism that questioned the humanity of non-European people also redefined social relations among people of European descent. Early racial categorization traced human color and geography—Asians, Africans, Europeans and Americans—but it did not take long for Atlantic intellectuals to question whether such regional and complexional fissures were the only evidence of divine or natural favoritism: if dark skin was a timeless indicator of inferiority then there were likely also indicators of Jewish cultural spiritual and even biological inequality; in fact the very history of frustrated Christian missions and failed conversion crusades made Christian antisemitism receptive to racialization.

This is also why Wilder implores us “to think carefully and critically about the ways in which the histories of African Americans, Native Americans [and] colonial Jews actually get braided together in the eighteenth-century world and can never be understood without reference to each other.”

Studying a specific instance of Catholic anti-Jewish racism in a nineteenth-century example of “blood libel” in Damascus, the Italian mythologist and critic Furio Jesi would also note the persistence of the mutual constitution of anti-indigenous, anti-Black, and anti-Jewish racism, while underscoring the differential way in which a specifically Jewish “savagery” was projected by an antisemitism that straddled theological and civilisational logics.

Unlike the fascist racism of the 1930s, Jesi argues,

…nineteenth century antisemitic Catholic racism does not [include] the same accusation of “inferiority” [in] Blacks and Jews. It consists instead of the will to condemn the heinous deeds of a people which because of its intrinsic, “phrenological” (racial) nature, inexorably tends towards evil, to the ferocity of “savages” and which nevertheless (unlike Blacks) is not wholly “savage” but rather has hypocritically and externally civilized itself—and which has thus been able to continue to satisfy its blood-thirsty instincts within the very fabric of “civilized” societies. We are not dealing with a racism oriented towards the general perspective of all the human “races,” but with a racism that aims to distinguish, among apparently “civilized” men, and not among the others, those who hypocritically mask under semblances of civility their true “savage” nature, their “crude, ferocious and bloodthirsty spirit.”

For Jesi, in the end, an immanent critique of the “anthropological machine” that ceaselessly generates these fatal couplings of power and difference was not sufficient. It was necessary, as he put it, “to push beyond bourgeois culture, not merely to try to slightly deform its frontier barriers.” This means, inter alia, to break with the very idea of civilization; including that of Western civilization as an explanatory category.

In his exploration of the origin, evolution and differentiation of the word “civilization,” the French historian Lucien Febvre located its first usage in a 1766 text: Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger’s L’Antiquité dévoilée par ses usages. In this first usage—which turns out to have been interpolated posthumously by the Baron d’Holbach—civilization is yoked to continuity, understood as unceasing development, improvement, and social pedagogy. The passage reads as follows:

When a savage people comes to be civilized, this act of civilization should never be brought to an end by giving it fixed and irrevocable laws; it must be made to see the legislation it has been given as a continuous civilization.

What comes to dominate at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is the idea of a “single series, a continuous chain of peoples,” in keeping with the Abbé Raynal’s formula that “all the policed peoples were savage and all the savage peoples, left to their natural impetus, are destined to become policed.”

As we confront the entangled, recombinant and disputed histories of slavery, colonialism and the Holocaust, as we try to think with historical lucidity nourished by political principle about interlocking genocides past and present, the idea of civilization proves to be a corrupted compass.

Whether in Dan Diner’s formulation of “civilization breaks” or even in Robinson’s use of the term in Black Marxism, talk of civilization limits our capacity to truly confront the relational character of racialization. That is, it impairs our ability to address the discontinuity and mutability of the racial regimes through which difference is enshrined, abjected, and weaponized under capitalist—which is to say, colonial and imperial—conditions.

I am grateful to Michael Rothberg, Zoé Samudzi, and Ben Ratskoff for inviting me to deliver a version of this text at the Civilization Breaks conference they organized in 2022.

We ask, then, what are the forms that can reckon with the rift exposed on the cultural front—against the passivity and philistinism of the spectator and toward a feedback between form and content? Walter Benjamin’s opening fragment in One Way Street (1928) articulates these stakes, describing the relationship between action and writing.

This Open Call draws on the historical role of artists and writers at this juncture. We are particularly interested in annotations, communiqués, reports, plays, poetry. Above all, we are interested in writing that thinks within its time—haunted by the limits and struggles of the real, and seeking new forms to accommodate it.

Bertolt Brecht lived in Los Angeles, in exile, from 1941 until 1947; in 1945, he began adapting The Communist Manifesto (1848) into hexameter verse, based on Lucretius’ De rerum natura (1473 c.). To make sense of the absence of leftist rebellion as Hitler fell, Brecht concluded that the German working class had forgotten Marxism. Brecht’s manifesto was an intervention—how could memory be re-activated; a relation de-automated? With Brecht’s unrealized project in mind, we propose that the manifesto is a poem, Palestinian resistance is a poem, the student uprising a poem. With what lexicon can we describe, echo, and grasp it?

We are inviting pitches that respond to this Open Call. Four writers will be commissioned to work with Guest Editor, Sanja Grozdanić, to produce one 1000 word text each, for $500 AUD.

The successful candidates will be selected by Sanja Grozdanić with Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung. Please ensure that you familiarize yourself with the work on Decolonial Hacker, as well as the “hacking” dimension of the project through downloading the extension for Google Chrome / Firefox before submitting your application.

Please email applications as a single PDF, including a pitch of no more than 350 words, CV of no more than two pages, and two writing samples up to 1200 words each, to eugene@decolonialhacker.org.

Please format the name of your PDF as ‘LastName_FirstName_OpenCall2024’.

Education City is located 50 kilometres outside Karachi covering an area of approximately 9,000 acres. It is intended to be “a hub for the imparting and generation of knowledge in the presence of world-class infrastructure and campus facilities and a pool of highly qualified academics.” The provincial cabinet approved this project back in 2006, declaring the neighbourhood of Deh Chuhar—named after the date palm trees that populate the land—as Education City. Twenty-two institutions of higher education have since acquired land in Education City. Universities are pushed to invest in property in line with Higher Education Commission requirements that they possess a minimum amount of land in order to be recognised as an institution.¹ While boundary walls and security barriers now proliferate across this landscape, construction of campuses is yet to begin.

The project received new impetus last year when the government announced that infrastructural development for Education City would finally begin in July 2023. The survey of Akram Jokhio’s land is the result of this new resolve. Local communities and activists fear that more land will be grabbed across Deh Kotero, Deh Darsanna Channo, and Deh Dair in the name of “education.” These communities, of Sindhi and Baloch ethnicity, identify as maqami, or, indigenous to this land, and have been inhabitants for generations.² They see through the mirage of Education City that arrives at the heels of large scale real-estate development projects that have been violently occupying indigenous land in the surrounding villages over the past decade. Hafeez Baloch, a Sindh Indigenous Rights Alliance activist tells us “Higher education is, afterall, a dhanda (corrupt business). Its most essential ingredient: land.”

The development of Education City is part of a larger process of the enclosure, occupation, and privatisation of agricultural lands and pastoral commons in Karachi’s Malir district since the 2000s. Education City is located next to two mega real-estate development projects, Bahria Town and DHA City, led by a private developer and the military respectively, built on over 50,000 acres. Each of these projects serves to conveniently further the perceptions and valuation of land for the other.

The inception of Education City illustrates well the instrumentalisation of education by the military-development nexus, and the complicities and collusions of the higher education sector in transforming agricultural and pastoral lands into urban real estate. The occupation of Karachi’s indigenous landscapes and the dispossession of maqami communities is not only about possession of land but it is also a possession of the imagination. It is the undoing of a way of life, of modes of relation and inhabitation that are illegible and indigestible for the neoliberal extractivist state.

We present here three images, anecdotes, visions of wilderness, to explore the entanglements of education, visuality, and land accumulation. We explore what the symbiosis of knowledge and land enclosure looks like in Karachi today, paying attention to the visions and landscapes that are conjured in these processes. A case of 5000 disappearing trees, a dream of a knowledge city, and a disappearing-reappearing river: each of these fantastical envisionings tells the story of a neoliberal, militarised modernity shaped and secured through the unabated annihilation of land and ecological knowledge nurtured by maqami communities. Each of these images illustrate the weaponisation of the university against other ways of knowing.

1.0 Seeing and Unseeing the Land

Education City is threatening the settlements, livelihoods, agricultural fields and pasturelands of forty villages located between the Sukhan and Malir rivers. In public discourse, this land is perceived as empty. Much like the survey maps of Education City, the aforementioned Bahria Town’s promotional videos depict a barren landscape, describing the location prior to its real-estate development as “ghairabad, banjar aur ghairmehfooz” (uninhabited, barren and insecure). These images and imaginaries participate in what Samia Henni calls the regime of emptiness that continually erases indigenous life to create frontiers of wild and empty spaces, where ‘discovering’ land and resources is made possible.³

“What can be more favourable than an open plain for the evolutions of a disciplined army!”, colonial explorer Richard Burton wrote of Sindh, in a text titled The Unhappy Valley in 1851.⁴ In the text he describes Karachi as “A regular desert… a glaring waste… nothing but an expanse of sand, broken into rises and falls by the furious winds … a barren rugged rock rising a few feet above the level of a wretched desert plain close to the sea, and supporting some poor attempts at human habitations.”⁵ The hot, dusty, wasteful expanse of Burton’s dreams that he projected onto Karachi has become a continued tradition in the state’s representations of maqami settlements in the city: strange, wild, and empty plains ripe for the taking.

Maps were central to Burton’s enterprise as he set out to make a case for the invasion of what he imagined to be a crucial frontier. Burton describes Karachi not only as wasted land awaiting colonial cultivation and civilisation, but also as “an excellent base for warlike operations.”⁶ These dual, entangled processes of development and destruction are echoed in the military-development nexus that makes and unmakes Karachi today. Elsewhere we have described how the production of “terror maps” in English print media in the early 2010s played a crucial role in building public support for the paramilitary Karachi Operation that ravaged the city from 2013 onwards.⁷

The maps reproduced an imperial visuality that, alongside media discourse, presented a city on the brink, teeming with violence. They carved and crafted ‘red zones’ and ‘no-go zones,’ marking new borders across the city and conjuring visions of danger, terror, and insurgency. The scientificity of the map, which allowed these visualisations to be consumed as objective and truthful representation, became a supporting means through which the paramilitary force began to assert its command over the ‘urban jungle’ of Karachi.

The Karachi Operation had a special mandate to police, surveil, and secure the vast suburbs of Karachi. Cast as simultaneously barren and insecure, the city’s outskirts became available sites for the entangled processes of securitisation and development. The borders of the no-go zone gave way to militarised world-city making. The Education City Act was drafted the same year that the paramilitary Karachi Operation was launched. Press releases were circulated presenting Education City as a smart city: “the most powerful weapon to combat all sorts of mafia operating in Karachi”; and an urgent solution that will swiftly “take the troubled city of Karachi to an era of peace and prosperity.”⁸ The Education City, alongside real-estate development, utilised and built upon the militarised visuality of insecurity to legitimise urban expansion and expropriation across what was once considered the city’s ‘green belt.’

While claiming to open up and make the city transparent, the maps demarcating ‘no-go zones’ worked to close down space at the peripheries of the city, creating sites of exception for the unfolding of unchecked and unseen violence. As paramilitary forces and developers cordoned and check-pointed their way through these villages, the maps became self-fulfilling prophecies. Just as, in the case of Akram Jokhio, the erasure of 5000 trees from the surface of the map is prophetic of the disappearance of 5000 trees from the surface of his land. The survey map of Jokhio’s land, existing as a self-referential image, declares that there is nothing here. It claims that land which has been cultivated and cared for over generations is uncultivable and inhospitable—silencing a rich, expansive world of locally cultivated and deeply rooted ecological knowledge, practice and relations. A joint project of ecocide and epistemicide in the name of education and an abstracted type of knowledge.

2.0 City, Knowledge, Wilderness

On 26 October 2020, Imran Khan, then Prime Minister of Pakistan, took to Twitter to post a 40-second 3D animation of Namal Knowledge City located in Mianwali district. The caption read: “The Master Plan of my dream to build Pakistan’s first knowledge city.”

In the video, we are shown an aerial span of a large university campus, set against the rugged mountains of the Salt Range. The campus is depicted as picturesque and idyllic, with perfectly rounded trees, manicured gardens, a flowing river and modern infrastructure. Where the campus ends, we see the green land fade into a stark and stony beige. The university is visualised as heralding the literal ‘blooming’ of this arid landscape, its imported greenery accentuating the imagined barrenness of the surrounding mountains. This new knowledge city espouses a “Green Namal” philosophy. Its website explains: “The word GREEN symbolizes the colors of paradise while the word Namal (translated anmoal in Urdu) means priceless (invaluable) land.”

Namal Knowledge City is planned by US-based architectural firm Ashai Design, which has designed countless elite gated communities, five-star hotels and palaces in Dubai. As Julian Bolleter argues in Desert Paradises, Dubai’s urban planning visions have frequently employed paradisiacal images of greening the desert as a tool for political legitimisation.⁹ Within this rhetoric, transforming the desert into green land gets framed as “divine responsibility,” as developers interpret Islamic visions of heaven as a garden with a flowing river. Development thus takes on religious and moral overtones, seeking to embody values of redemption, cultivation, and modernity. This is a fitting narrative for Khan, who amassed his popularity through the excessive ideological use of Islamic teachings and rhetoric.

Namal Knowledge City proudly proclaims that it is based on the premise of “protecting the natural, social and physical environment of Namal Valley.” However, the master plan unveils an imported, neoliberal aesthetic of manicured gardens, artificial water streams, and perfectly rounded trees. It paradoxically envisions a complete reconstruction of nature to align with the neoliberal demands of city making, predicated on the annihilation and erasure of local ecology. The farce of environment preservation undoing the landscape. Namal Lake—while marketed as the most prominent natural feature of Namal Knowledge City—is also the result of colonial engineering and interventions to land. It was created by the British while building a dam in 1913, in their mission to bring order and progress to what they conceived of as wasted landscapes. It is testament to a landscape endlessly cut and moulded to meet the fantasies and images of those in power.

When Khan first announced this project back in 2005, he posted a video showing himself standing amidst the salt range mountain, pointing in the far distance to the chosen location of Namal University. He exclaims, “When I saw this wilderness, I imagined a knowledge city.”¹⁰ A few sentences later, he emphasises again: “The land stretches for miles and miles ahead in this wilderness.” Images of dense, wild vegetation, replace the imagined barrenness visualised in the master plan.

Wildness turns everything in sight into a threat, where unruly lives exist in unruly landscapes. Development and security intertwine, as fear and threat are embedded in, and are byproducts of, the process of securing new frontiers. Located at the border of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab provinces, the Mianwali district is often described in the media as an inhospitable terrain that gives refuge to insurgents. Imran Khan’s invocation of wilderness paints the perfect backdrop for the creation of a new securitised order through the civilising and surveillant missions of the university. This not only legitimises the university’s land-grab, but also justifies the necessity of the university as a militarised and militarising enclave.

The use of wilderness tropes dates back to the building of Pakistan’s first university campus. In 1952, the MRV Master Plan of Karachi envisioned the new campus of Karachi University in the heart of the city. However, as a series of powerful student protests gripped the city the following year, a different location 12 kilometres outside the city centre was selected for construction. With this move, the government accomplished a twofold agenda of removing the destabilising threat of students from the city centre, and occupying/transforming indigenous commons into a fold of the city. Popular narratives still describe the land, prior to the building of the campus, as “jungle zameen”: wild land. However, Khuda Dino Shah, a senior indigenous activist, tells us that Karachi University land used to be one of the two main historical pasturelands around Karachi. In the monsoons this hilly terrain would come alive with streams and ponds, and pastoral communities and herders from across Sindh would arrive to spend their summers.

Both the Namal Knowledge City and Education City are premised on the bordering, enclosing and erasure of land. Education City proudly claims one of its core principles as creating “a city as a school” rather than “a school in the city.” In the name of world-city making, students are removed from social embeddedness in a city, to an elsewhere emptied of its communities, and thus turned into an isolated elsewhere, a tabula rasa. The neoliberal hyper-capitalist university is placeless; its existence predicated upon displacement and dispossession both from—and of—land and knowledge.

3.0 Libraries, Rivers, and Roads in/against the Wilderness

The colonial concept of ‘The Jungle,’ derived from the Sanskrit word Jangala casts certain lands, and consequently the inhabitants of those lands—human and nonhuman—as wild and wasteful landscapes. Interestingly, while the English ‘jungle’ conjures images of dense, lush, vegetative, tangled forests, the original Sanskrit jangala referred to dry land with scattered trees, and thus cast such lands as favoured, pure, and even fertile.¹¹ Yet, today, the colonial legacy of imaging dry land as barren, wasteful and wild, is a central part of the state and the developers’ toolkit, deployed alongside a systematic drying of Karachi’s wetlands through extractivist practices like sand mining and construction into riverbeds and waterways. This imagining of Karachi as a desolate wilderness in need of securitisation is the consistent, connective thread across all sites and contexts we have worked in: from the university campus and the coastal islands to the pastoral peripheries—Karachi’s dry/wet/lands. In stark contrast to this colonial narrative, this dry/wet/land has been for many, including us, a rich, fertile and bountiful plain in which to generate life and knowledge, subsequently allowing us to conduct our ecstatic eco-pedagogies.

Nature does not only give many of us sustenance, it also gives us knowledge, in abundance: collective ecological knowledge, memory, and thought generated and transmitted over millennia. The annihilation of this knowledge is central to the state’s project of endless land accumulation aimed at the concentration of power. The annihilation and transformation of land and all that it holds, the life it fosters, is essential to the state production of power by means of nationalism. The jangala, conflated as much with danger and insecurity as it is with emptiness, becomes a site in need of urgent intervention and transformation. The university takes on the noble mission to discipline and transform this unruly space, its unruly people. What are the subversive practices and wild thoughts, contained within these desolate landscapes that threaten to derail the state? What is the knowledge this land holds and withholds?

The Malir River, essential to the history of habitation in Karachi, is both waterway and knowledge system. Today the pathway of this river, systematically devastated over decades by illegal sand mining, is under threat from a road: the Malir Expressway. Just as the 5000 trees are unseen and unmade, the river is unmade and unseen. The Malir River is an ephemeral river, a mysterious form that comes and goes. Ecological memory means some communities, those who have lived with and along this river for generations, can see the river even when its waters dry out. The river is evasive and illegible, it defies the map-form. But it always comes back to undo what was built in its path, just like the constantly shifting sands of the desert. The temporalities of the river and the desert are much more expansive than the temporalities of the infrastructures that intervene upon them. In his travelogue, Burton writes of this terrain whilst exasperated by frequent dust storms, “There is little remarkable in it, except that we are morally certain to lose the road.”¹²

Among the spaces that stand in the path of the Malir Expressway is the Syed Hashmi Reference Library (SHRL), a kind of knowledge commons. The SHRL was founded in 2005 by Baloch historian, linguist, translator, and revolutionary Saba Dashtiyari, who was killed by the state in 2011, at the height of the fifth insurgency in Balochistan against the Pakistani state. Despite this devastation, and despite continued threats from the state, this library continues to create space for endangered thought and languages. Yet, having survived the endless assaults on the Baloch community and the Balochi language by the Pakistani state, this library is now threatened by a road. A road that claims to be a crucial infrastructure to foster connectivity between Karachi and the future Education City.

During a recent visit to the library, custodian Ghulam Rasool Kalmatti shared with us a text he wrote on Malir, a string of memories that weave a map of a Karachi that is drawn not by borders or boundaries but by expanding, contracting, intersecting river pathways. Earlier, during a conversation at a roadside dhaba, SIRA activist Hafeez Baloch had drawn a map of the Malir River. Lines everywhere, tentacular, wild thought. Against the colonial map that sets out to abstract in order to occupy, this moment redeems the map-form. As Hafeez’s pen runs out of ink the lines break and pause. His words and his markings don’t always align, as thoughts and traces diverge and converge, seek out and stray from each other. Each etched line and each uttered name is an invocation. This map, made with a dry pen on a disposable dhaba napkin, is not a fixed document, not a finished form, but map as pedagogy; a map marking connections, drawn in/as connection. It is not a series of stagnant markings on paper, but an energetic form: our conversation and relations, our continued engagements and invocations, animate and breathe life into it, and vice versa. In that sense this map is a kind of talisman. As we move through space and time with it, it forms a thread between worlds: past and present, here and elsewhere, visible and invisible. In Kalmatti and Hafeez’s maps there are no clear boundaries between water and land, river and desert, wet and dry—they are elusive, ephemeral, sandy and slippery. Wild thoughts.

The English word ‘desert’ comes from the Latin de (to undo) and serere (to join together). To desert is to unmake and disconnect what is connected, ordered, sensible, joined together. The desert is a space where boundaries collapse. It is a site only invoked by some for its lacks, its absences, its undoings. While this ‘desert’ insists on emptiness and disconnect, Balochi words for it conjure abundance and connection: raik, raikpad, dasht. Raik, meaning an area filled with sand; Raikpad, meaning walking through deep sand; or Dasht, meaning an area of land where people are settled.

The wild and vast frontiers of Karachi are, today, the site of conflict between the visions of the neocolonial university and the wisdom and knowledge within the land. A fixed, factual knowledge preserved on dead leaves of paper against the illegible, unfixable, living tides of the river, and shifting sands of the desert. A knowledge that can be carved with concrete into the land, against a knowledge that teaches you how to move with it. The enclosure of the land and the enclosure of knowledge in the university are symbiotic processes, each one impossible without the other. Like the map that disappeared Jokhio’s 5000 trees, to imagine the university you are first forced to unsee the land, and the thoughts that it nourishes.

In 1914, suffragettes in Britain slashed the imperial heteropatriarchal screen by breaking windows and slashing artworks. Almost as soon as they undertook this cutting, Europe turned its colonial technologies and tactics on itself in a spasm of mass murder now remembered as the First World War, one of whose outcomes was the formation of Israel as a settler colony. On 8 March 2024, International Women’s Day, a pro-Palestinian (and female presenting) activist revisited the 1914 strategy in the face of another genocide, slashing a portrait of Lord Arthur Balfour, whose 1917 Declaration as British Foreign Secretary directed the British Mandate to create a Jewish “national home” in Palestine.² To slash the screen is to tear apart white, colonial reality, loosening its hold of past “nightmares…on the brains of the living” and (re)opening the possibility for decolonial ways of seeing.³

1.0 Visualizing and Countervisualizing

Why does slashing the screen have such resonance? It creates and makes palpable a countervisuality that refuses colonial visuality, properly understood. Visuality is not ‘all that there is to see.’ It was a term coined in English by historian Thomas Carlyle—arch-reactionary and apologist for colonialism and slavery alike.⁴ For Carlyle, visuality is the way the Hero, or great man (gender entirely intended), visualizes history. While Carlyle has long been forgotten, his idea of the great man lives on from the cult of biography to the embrace of heroic leadership in national and international politics. Visuality is a specifically colonial way of seeing, a rendering of the world into what I’ve called the “white reality” seen by white sight.⁵

White sight creates and sustains hierarchy as an infrastructure of white supremacy. White sight erases all human and non-human life from what it surveys so that it can claim what remains as terra nullius; nothing land, “a land without a people.” White sight projects a white reality onto the world that is then extracted via single-point perspectival vision. This projection conforms to René Descartes’ famous philosophical principle “I think therefore I am,” as long as one expands it in the manner of Algerian decolonial thinker Houria Bouteldja: “I think therefore I am the one who decides, I think therefore I am the one who dominates, I think therefore I am the one who subjugates, pillages, steals, rapes, commits genocide.”⁶

For all this philosophy, Carlyle’s visuality was not a practical tool. It was made into one by his friend, the art critic and teacher John Ruskin. Both Ruskin and Carlyle publicly defended Governor Eyre of Jamaica when he violently repressed the Morant Bay uprising in 1865, killing over 400 people. Writing in support of Eyre, Ruskin asserted it was clear “that white emancipation not only ought to precede, but must by the law of all fate, precede, black emancipation.”⁷ He defined an imperial way of seeing to enable this emancipation in his book on perspective. Disdaining the “window on the world” technique of perspective drawing devised during the Renaissance, Ruskin imagined “an unbroken plate of crystal” a mile high and a mile wide but of no thickness.⁸ In short, a screen. It was crucial to Ruskin that the view through the screen not “be distorted by refraction,” even though it was imaginary. He showed students how to create what he called a “sightline” on this screen, which looks like a rifle sight. Empire became an immense diorama for British people, separating them from those colonized. Those behind the glass were subject to observation and depiction but had no claim to representation. More than that, they became targets, seen through a scope. Ruskin’s imperial way of seeing was one where everything was crystal clear to the white English viewer through a square mile window. By separating it also distanced, allowing the British army to slaughter its colonized subjects from Amritsar to Omdurman without mercy and without psychological distress.

2.0 Slash Dada

The suffragettes clearly understood Ruskin’s imperial way of seeing. Beginning in 1908, with a great acceleration in 1912, the Women’s Social and Political Union broke shop, museum and other institutional windows as a visible sign of support for women’s suffrage. Emmeline Pankhurst declared “The argument of the broken windowpane is the most valuable argument in modern politics.” By breaking the actual glass of capitalist circulation and display, it broke the imperial way of seeing and created a visible resistance. Next, the feminist strike targeted artworks in museums around England. Most of the women that attacked art did so using butchers’ cleavers, a symbolic gesture. It emphasized the violence of the imperial world view that the women were cutting into. These suffragette actions refused imperial heteropatriarchy, and in doing so, they created the first readymades. Perhaps the best known was Mary Richardson’s attack on Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus (1647-1651) in London’s National Gallery. Just as important was Margaret Gibb’s slash of Millais’ portrait of none other than Thomas Carlyle. Despite later assertions that paintings were attacked at random, the National Portrait Gallery Warden reported on 16 July 1914 that when he “asked which the picture was…the woman answered ‘Oh, it’s the Millais Carlyle.’”⁹ Gibb knew exactly what she was doing. It made perfect sense to cut into Carlyle’s patriarchal and racist world view.

At her trial, Gibb declared: “This picture will have an added value and be of great historical interest, because it has been honored by the attention of a militant.”¹⁰ For me, at least, that’s true: I’ve been to see the painting to look at the cut that Gibb made. Her Slashed Carlyle, as I like to think of it, was an intense undoing of imperial patriarchy’s way of seeing, cutting through Carlyle’s eyes. In the photograph usually circulated by the National Portrait Gallery, these cuts can be seen quite clearly. A different photograph from the time, reproduced by the Emily Davison Lodge (artists Hester Reeve and Olivia Plender) in their 2014 Sylvia Pankhurst Lecture, shows both these cuts and the way in which the smashed glass somehow fell within the frame and gathered inside it along the bottom edge of the picture, where it was dated by someone “July 17, 1914.” This was Dada, not the infantile gesture of drawing a mustache on the Mona Lisa. Gibb and the other slashing women made visible apertures in imperial white reality, gendered masculine. Their actions created a moral panic, leading to women being banned from the National Portrait Gallery and other institutions.

Two weeks after her attack, the advent of the First World War ended this insurgency. On 30 July 1914, the anti-war communist Rosa Luxemburg, theorist of the general strike, sat on the platform of a rally organized by the Second International in Brussels. With her head in her hands she was unable to speak, despite being repeatedly called on by French socialist Jean Jaurès. Luxemburg could already see how decades of socialist planning to resist the call to war were about to be demolished by a wave of heteropatriarchal white patriotism, promoted above all by self-interest.¹¹ For W. E. B. Du Bois, reflecting on “The African Roots of the War” in 1915, this defection amounted to the creation of a “democratic despotism” of white-identified people over the colonized and those Du Bois called the “darker races.” Faced with the choice to refuse this war, white workers opted instead for despotism and the promise of their share of increased wealth, over peace.

3.0 Slash 2

In March 2024, Palestine Action slashed and threw paint on Balfour’s portrait at Trinity College, Cambridge. This action followed a previous paint-throwing attack on another portrait of Balfour in the House of Commons, echoing suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst throwing a stone at a portrait of the Speaker in 1913. Olivia Plender and Hester Reeve created an “imagined photograph” of Pankhurst’s action in 2014. No need for that today as Palestine Action videoed their event. The clip opens with a tight view of the Balfour portrait, a white bust of some other dignitary also in frame. In front of the portrait is an activist busily spray painting it red. They concentrate on painting Balfour’s face, covering its bottom right quadrant, but the picture hangs a little too high for them to reach it all. It’s Neo-Dada: defying the patriarchy in one of its sanctuaries.

There’s a cut (as in, edit) and they are seen slashing the canvas. First, they cut a rough cross, followed by vertical slashes and a circular movement. They hold a piece of paper in their left hand, which they consult during the action, suggesting it was so carefully planned that the cutter was concerned they might forget some steps. These actions cause strips of the canvas to dangle. In the photographs released by Palestine Action, a triangular section of the canvas has fallen out, revealing the wooden stretcher of the painting. Unlike the 1914 cut by Gibb, Balfour’s face was not slashed. What is striking in the film is the very loud sound of the canvas being cut in short, decisive bursts, recorded close to the action. It is the sound of countervisuality.

With over half-a-million views on Instagram, this performance has found an audience. As with Gibb’s Slashed Carlyle, Palestine Action’s Slashed Balfour is a better, more interesting and more compelling work than its substrate. It had several goals: One was to remind audiences in the UK—and its allies—of the 1917 British decision to create a “Jewish” state in Palestine, when only 60,000 Jewswere living there. As Balfour later said, the British view was “Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad [is] of far more profound import than the desire and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs, who now inhabit that ancient land.”¹² It further called attention to the role of Cambridge University in general, and Trinity College in particular, as investors in Elbit Systems, an Israeli arms manufacturer. There have been increasing calls for Britain and the United States to stop sending weapons to Israel in the light of the appalling death toll, making this now seem like part of the mainstream conversation. Notably, the slashing action did not cause continuing outrage, with most coverage appearing the day of (or day after) it happened.

Some might take this as evidence that the action did not “work.” Perhaps a better question would be what “work” now means in the context of decolonial solidarity. The white reality slashed by Palestine Action is not quite the same as that cut into by Margaret Gibb. It is “something worse,” as McKenzie Wark has put it; a racial capitalism centered around data. The Israel Defense Force has been using AI to define its targets in Gaza, with a parameter of 15-20 “acceptable” civilian casualties as default, which may help explain the high numbers. Even so, by the standards set during the 19th century colonial “small wars,” 30,000 dead is not exceptional.¹³ At the “battle” of Omdurman alone, 12,000 were killed and another 13,000 wounded. For Dan Hicks, the lethality of these wars was such that he calls them collectively “World War Zero.” What is so disrupting about Israel’s punitive expedition in Gaza is, rather, this mix of 19th century high imperial lethality and 21st century high tech. It’s that connection which can be seen through the slash.

To slash the screen is to reveal “a tear in the world,”¹⁴ as poet Dionne Brand has put it, specifically to tear white reality. Such a tear could be seen when the statue of former British Governor Cecil John Rhodes was removed from the University of Cape Town campus in 2015. So too when the statue of slave owner Robert E. Lee was removed from Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2021. Palestine Action’s Slashed Balfour takes the tear inside the museum and inside the university. It is often said that the kind of world that this countervisuality imagines is impossible. To which W. E. B. Du Bois riposted a century ago: “Impossible? Democracy is a method of doing the impossible.” Through the tear in white reality, it might be possible to imagine a democracy, whether in the former Ottoman province of Palestine or in the United States. What does that look like?

Legal analyses of the Court’s decision are abundant.⁵ They sit on the spectrum from technical and purportedly value-neutral outputs of legal formalism, to more honest efforts at teleological appraisal. To a student of critical legal theory, one can only sensibly judge the proceeding by reference to its capacity to advance its (supposedly)⁶ anti-colonial purpose. That purpose can be pitched at differing levels of generality. It is, in its most fundamental modality, the free and unfettered exercise of Palestinian self-determination. But to realise that purpose presupposes that certain material conditions will come into existence: an end to Israeli occupation, the reversal of settlement activity, emancipation of Palestine’s natural resources, formalisation of Palestinian borders (and not under the regressive “Bantustan” conditions of the Oslo Accords)⁷, governmental independence. In turn, this demands that Israel relinquish its daily genocidal toolkit: targeted killings, arbitrary detention, torture, indiscriminate bombing, starvation.

Against this background, we can draw three observations about the possible fate and significance of the proceedings in delivering Palestinian self-determination. The first is that even a favourable outcome to the proceeding will scarcely assist to achieve an end to genocide in Gaza. The likely passage of years until any resolution on the merits will dilute the practical force of a finding of genocide. By then, Israel will have taken up other strategies for depredation and annexation, which will invite their own legal scrutiny and further belated judicial rulings down the line.

To know this, we need only look backwards. Most of the material conditions of Israeli settler colonialism have been tested before international courts at some point. Every available (legal) avenue has been pursued. In 2004, the ICJ gave an ‘advisory’ opinion (upon request by the UN General Assembly) that Israel’s construction of a security fence in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and its attempts to alter the demographic composition of Palestine violated international humanitarian law (“IHL”) norms governing occupation, Palestine’s right to self-determination,⁸ and various protections under international human rights law.⁹ The Court, too, observed that Israel could not rely on its right to self-defence to justify construction of the wall;¹⁰ and that its construction created a fait accompli on the ground that was tantamount to de facto annexation.¹¹ The Court ordered, inter alia, that construction cease and that the wall be dismantled. Israel did not comply and continues to pursue its settlement activities with impunity.

In 2021, the International Criminal Court (“ICC”) decided, after six years of preliminary examination, to commence an investigation into war crimes committed by individuals in Palestine since 13 June 2014. This followed a determination that the Court had jurisdiction to do so, on the basis that Palestine was a “State” for the purposes of the Court’s founding treaty, the Rome Statute.¹² But the Court could not—and did not—determine whether Palestine was a State for all purposes under international law.¹³ It acknowledged the ICJ’s 2004 advisory opinion and endorsed its conclusions in some respects (including Palestine’s entitlement to self-determination).¹⁴ Investigation will take the best part of a decade;¹⁵ fact-finding will be enormously difficult amid Israel’s monopoly on access to Palestine and certain non-cooperation; and the Court will likely be unable to execute an arrest warrant on any Israeli who is ultimately charged.

There are pending proceedings, too. There is an inter-state complaint by Palestine against Israel to the Committee administering the Convention for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, alleging a violation of the prohibition on apartheid.¹⁶ Palestine brought an ICJ proceeding against the United States in 2018, alleging that the relocation of their embassy in Israel to Jerusalem violated treaty obligations governing consular relations. No decision on jurisdiction has yet been made. Countless fact-finding missions by human rights bodies have also presented evidence of Israel’s grave and persistent breaches of IHL and human rights law in the Palestinian territories since 2000.¹⁷ Finally, in December 2022, the UN General Assembly submitted a request for an advisory opinion on the consequences of various Israeli “policies [and] practices”¹⁸ in Palestinian territory under IHL, human rights law, the UN Charter (including the prohibition on the use of force), General Assembly and Security Council resolutions, and the Court’s 2004 advisory opinion.¹⁹ The scope of this proceeding may appear the broadest so far, but the Court has at times been inclined to reformulate and narrow such open-ended questions.²⁰ At any rate no opinion is imminent, and when it does arrive Israel’s “policies and practices” will have likely accelerated and morphed.

Seen in this light, the South Africa proceeding is but a node in a fragmented litigation strategy—what is sometimes odiously described as ‘lawfare.’ By its nature, a court’s jurisdiction is limited to resolving the dispute before it. As framed, South Africa’s claim alleges breaches of the prohibition against genocide. It does not reagitate Israel’s obligations under IHL, including to avoid indiscriminate loss of civilian life. It does not consider the criminal liability of Israeli officials for the commission of war crimes or crimes against humanity, nor Israel’s state responsibility for authorising that conduct. Nor does it, in express terms, call for inquiry into ongoing violations of the Palestinian right to self-determination or statehood. These issues have been or will be ventilated to certain extents in separate proceedings.

This flows onto a second observation. Against this history of litigation, one aspect to South Africa’s proceeding is truly unprecedented: the claim of genocide. One tool from which Israel draws discursive power is its emotive manipulation of international legal concepts. The Holocaust, being an “intense national preoccupation” and the “basis for Israel’s identity,”²¹ renders genocide the concept most susceptible to manipulation. Zionism attributes the enactment of the Genocide Convention to a singular desire to avoid any repeating of the Holocaust—only a partial truth as Raphael Lemkin, the moving force behind the Convention and inventor of the word ‘genocide,’ had in mind other genocides too.²² Zionism positions the Holocaust as the “paradigmatic example” of genocide,²³ against which any later allegation falls to be assessed and which Zionism says Palestine wishes to reprise. By this exploitation of the Holocaust, which Pankaj Mishra traces back to the former Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin,²⁴ Zionism can operate in what Boaz Evron described as a state of complete freedom from “any moral restrictions, since one who is in danger of annihilation sees himself exempted from any moral considerations which might restrict his efforts to save himself.”²⁵

The separate opinion of Judge ad hoc Barak, Israel’s appointee to South Africa’s proceeding—dissenting, naturally—is replete with textbook narrative manipulation of this kind. Before deigning to consider the provisional measures application before the Court, Barak gratuitously relates his own Holocaust experience,²⁶ the relevance of which, he says, is that genocide is “more than just a word” to him; it is “deeply intertwined with [his] personal life experience.”²⁷ This makes him “deeply aware of the importance of the existence of the State of Israel.”²⁸ Later, he suggests that applying the Genocide Convention to Israel’s conduct in Gaza would “dilute the concept of genocide.”²⁹

If genocide were to be established, one suspects the only ‘dilution’ would be to the potency of Israel’s claims as its worldwide scrutineer. To hold Israel against the very concept it most jealously gatekeeps involves a daring feat of legal imagination. A ruling of genocide—the “crime of crimes”³⁰—would shatter Israel’s moral hold over the concept. There would be a mighty symbolic force in that result, an “epoch-making event”³¹ by which international law can show that in matters of ‘high politics’ it does not yield to power or selective patronage. In that event, moral cowardice might lead Zionists to reassert their hold over the concept and discredit the Court’s handling of it (an option for which Judge Barak appears to be laying the foundations from within).³² That appears the more natural response for a political ideology premised on a persecution complex. Our hope must be that the refraction of the moral weight of genocide back onto Israel causes a volte-face of the kind we have never seen in nearly 80 years—one familiar word that brings on a prick of conscience, and a coming to terms with its own barbarity. Then they may realise that genocide is “more than just a word” to the Palestinian, too.

This brings me to my final observation, as to the clash of narratives beneath it all. Zionism has long been able to outwardly project its self-image with monolithic coherence. As Dylan Saba observes, Zionism has mastered the “language of minoritized grievance” so that its exercises of State power, however excessive, are to be understood as against its “transhistorical” narrative of anti-Semitism.³³ In turn, international law has reified this narrative, conferring on Israel the legal incidents of statehood and the corresponding advantages of incumbency. And so, in one breath, Israel can invoke the customary right to self-defence and deny its availability to any Palestinian entity. Where the decolonial animus within international legal scholarship holds the law against Israel, it then resorts to emotive manipulation of the kind which, for instance, leads it to describe South Africa’s proceeding as “blood libel.”³⁴

The Zionist hold over history draws greater strength, still, from Israel’s ongoing campaign to fragment every aspect of the Palestinian experience: their territories, families, possessions, infrastructure, and daily lives. Physical, cultural, and historical fragmentation has been a technique repeatedly used in the pursuit of the Zionist goal to annex and eradicate Palestine.

How, then, does the current proceeding fit in?

On the one hand, it bears contemplating whether the proceeding in its present form and scope invites further fragmentation of the Palestinian narrative. Because the incumbent territorial and political arrangements from which Israel benefits have been enshrined and legitimised by law, they can only be unwound with a countervailing force of law. After all, law supplies the analytical vocabulary we use to make sense of the dispute—rights, genocide, apartheid, self-determination, self-defence—and ascribes or withdraws political and moral legitimacy.

However, South Africa’s case can only legally proceed on a temporally and experientially miniscule fragment of the Palestinian story: the commission of genocide, one particular legal concept, over a finite period of time from late 2023. Other parts of the Palestinian story can only be presented insofar as they are relevant to the precise fragment under the microscope.

Further, that fragment is being conveyed through an intermediary state. This is a forensically apt arrangement, which circumvents any complaint about Palestine’s non-statehood; but it surely carries some symbolic cost to Palestine’s agency and its burgeoning attempts to participate as a state in international fora. The very same limitations constrain each past or pending piece of international litigation. One wonders, then, how we can unwind a state of affairs ossified over 80 years by procuring rulings which do not question, and indeed perpetuate, the generative injustices which lie beneath—the Balfour Declaration, the end to the British mandate, the Nakba?³⁵ Are the cases not litigating the expressions of Zionism and not their source?

This is a continuing challenge for the Palestinian political program. But there is reason to hope that, perhaps, the cumulative effect of this strategy will be to eventually uproot the Zionist narrative and produce some change to material conditions.

Recourse to a fragmented litigation strategy is not optimal. But the number of judicial determinations confirming the illegality of Israeli settler colonialism so far obtained is a product of great imagination in the face of suffocating constraints. And it is slowly compiling an ever-clearer, deeper and transhistorical picture of Israeli brutality. In that respect, the pending ICJ advisory opinion on Israeli “policies and practices” offers the best hope for the sort of comprehensive legal adjudication that so far has eluded our grasp—one which goes back to 1948 and parses each step, each grievance. Perhaps with the benefit of that fragment, and of this one which speaks of genocide, no longer can Israel hide behind its “long-cultivated persecution mania.”³⁶

As Mishra observes:³⁷

All these universalist reference points – the Shoah [Holocaust] as the measure of all crimes, antisemitism as the most lethal form of bigotry – are in danger of disappearing as the Israeli military massacres and starves Palestinians, razes their homes, schools, hospitals, mosques, churches, bombs them into smaller and smaller encampments…

And so, Sisyphean as it may seem, there is something to be gained from this exercise. We will continue to prise open the Court’s maw, and take from it whatever fragments we can. And from those fragments to which Israel reduces us, we will piece together our own narrative, and “turn the whole hegemonic picture upside down.”³⁸

Against the backdrop of Aimé Césaire’s view that poetry is an effective tool in affirming cultural consciousness, it is broadly understood that The Arts are a powerful means of expressing and conserving cultural authenticity. But what does one do when the vehicle for the propagation of Culture is stalled by a pernicious colonial imposition—bureaucracy, that is, Henry VIII’s “red tape”? It is pernicious precisely because of its utility and power, and it was bequeathed by the colonial masters in their effort to order our affairs and manage our ebullient societies to their benefit.

Faced with the challenges of independence and post-colonialism, we proceeded to apply red tape indiscriminately to all sectors of society. Our civil servants reigned supreme, wielding their new powers, not realising that creativity, expression, and matters of the soul and heart required nothing more than freedom, a lack of constraint, exuberance, and optimism. All powerful motivators, yet, so easily stifled by red tape.

If, as Césaire says, poetry is pre-scientific, then creativity is ex-bureaucratic. To understand this in its most potent form, one need only look through the window on the web into the minds of the ‘soulless’ superintendents of Nigeria’s creative heart. The very word ‘bureaucracy’ proclaims its enervating quality—the very opposite of the energy it should channel. The edifices of officialdom stifle creativity by their very existence: “Federal Ministry of Information and Culture!” Orwellian in the eager precedence given to ‘Information’. Culture is an afterthought, an add-on, a mere distraction from the important task of spinning and PR-ing and orienting the people towards the hidden agenda of the non-cultured powerful.

On the official ministry website, we find a sterile presentation of our culture. One imagines a middle-ranking bureaucrat, steeped in civil service conformity, attempting to capture Nigeria’s cultural essence on a page in cyberspace. Burdened by ennui, ticking a box on the sitemap of banality, working to deliver another item constricted by the ubiquitous red tape that binds even cognition. Stifling a yawn, another traditional titbit is added—a festival that a tourist might deem worth attending, or an out-of-date catalogue of painters, authors or entertainers. Slightly more inspired, the bureaucrat sifts through a pile and selects a colourful, cliched picture of a grinning dancer with a chalk-lined face and a grass skirt, to feed the decades-old, foot-pounded, drum-beaten stereotype of a happy African doing what Africans do.

The website is a visible symptom of systemic malaise, a misguided attempt to bureaucratise rather than enable culture, a blindness to the reality that a nebulous national essence cannot be grasped, let alone encapsulated by a bored bureaucrat with broadband. It cannot be shaped by the blunt instruments of governance nor packaged and presented in the language of policy and planning.

A co-parent of Negritude, Léopold Sédar Senghor outlined one of the challenges African nations were faced with as how “to access modernity without trampling on our authenticity”. Trampling, stifling, ignoring, misrepresenting—there are many ways to carelessly squeeze the life out of our authenticity. What can’t be done is to mandate it back into existence.

The Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, also known as FESTAC ‘77, provides a sorry yet instructive tale. The first edition was held in Dakar in 1966. With colonies becoming sovereign nations in quick succession, the twin waves of Afrocentrism and Pan-Africanism were swelling, and along with them, our collective chests. Pride and self-recognition buoyed our creative spirits and the plans for the second edition of an ambitious cultural exposition were set in motion, aiming for a Lagos extravaganza in 1970. First a coup, then the civil war intervened (ominous signs of our dangerous postcolonial flaws), but eventually, three weeks in 1977 were set as the new dates. As planning progressed, clashes of style and sensibilities emerged. As Senghor might have said, it was “un-decalage”, with artists from Fela Kuti to Wole Soyinka voicing major concerns. It was clear to committed cultural players that most of the myriad cultural seeds sown would die off in the boardrooms of government ministries.

One cannot spend the millions that the project consumed and not make a splash. It is impossible to bring together thousands of writers, academics, and artists to participate in film screenings, drama and music productions, daily colloquiums, durbars, regattas yet fail to generate numerous sparks of genuine creativity. It is impossible for Black artists worldwide to converge and not anticipate an explosion of Black and African culture on the world stage. This was also a major infrastructural project—a FESTAC village was built to accommodate 17,000 participants, which was nothing compared to the handsome 5000-capacity National Theatre, complete with conference facilities and cinemas. Fleets of luxury coaches were purchased for the comfort of the thousands of visitors. Across the country, the bureaucrats rushed half-baked projects to the fore. As long as these projects had a FESTAC tag, they could lay claim to a line in the budget and become part of the grand show.

The star of FESTAC burned brightly for some weeks, and then came the inevitable anti-climax. Post-festival plans were thin on the ground. The Arts had enjoyed fleeting global limelight, Nigeria had gained many new friends but the majority moved on. The National Theatre was abandoned to slowly crumble into disrepair, a metaphor for the trajectory of the Arts under successive Nigerian military administrations. Even the treasure-trove of donations of artefacts and gifts from 5 dozen countries (to be held on trust for Africa) were reduced to fodder for the civil servant’s files. Documented, described, and carefully put away—the files bound with red tape.

To accommodate the artefacts, The Centre for Black and African Arts and Civilization, CBAAC, (one of the parastatals overseen by the FMIC) was established by military Decree No. 69 of 1979. It remains a lifeless repository that makes no pretence of living up to the ambitions of its founding principles of “promoting and propagating Black and African Cultural Heritage.” It exists in a large grey edifice in Lagos Island, the drab façade enlivened only by colourful zigzag patterns on the pillars that frame the front door. These weak embers fall short of the expected wildfires that we hoped would set the continent aflame. You cannot mandate culture into existence. Of course, culture cannot die out. While there are humans, Culture will find light, flow through time, meandering and changing in profound ways in obeisance to invisible laws. After FESTAC ‘77, keepers of the national authenticity of a country of (then) 67 million stretching from the fringes of the Sahara in the North to the ocean-soaked southern beaches, are still stubbornly finding means of creative expression in the face of national economic decline and misgovernance. Northern Nigeria presents a recent example of such resilience. A Governor dispensed with red tape and invited Book Buzz Foundation to curate an annual book festival in 2017. Mostly state-funded, and importantly with little red tape involved, the creatives were given the space to do what they do best. The inaugural edition of ‘KabaFest’ showed how hungry Northern Nigerian youth had been for a platform to express themselves creatively—to perform poetry, discuss literature, listen to music and browse the visual arts. Since then, inspired by Kabafest, nine book festivals have emerged in some Muslim-majority, hyper-conservative states. Initiated by lovers of Culture, in tune with local sensibilities, they are pushing the boundaries, exploring, creating and interacting. These gatherings that celebrate poetry, literature, drama, and other art forms are a testament to the doggedness of private citizens who understand the value of the Arts and its capacity to be a vehicle for cultural authenticity.

More than ever, then, we seek an administration that understands the value of cultural expression, and how to create space for it to flourish. Economics aside, there is also the problem of technology. The symptoms of cultural cachexia are beginning to show, with social media encouraging a dangerous trend of superficiality and an inverted value system. A generation that is used to fishing for ‘clicks’ no longer has the metrics for judging merit. Creativity does not pander to cheap ‘likes’, but that is becoming the currency of online existence. We are reverting to the base instincts that we have tried to shed on our journey to postcolonial cohabitation.

Hiding behind their screens, we resort to easy violence, celebrating it, elevating disrespect, shock, and impunity. Creativity is diverted to the invention of crude pranks, cruel insults, or the unfiltered raw exhibition of private life turned into public performance—the more dysfunctional the better. Everything is measured by clicks. The playing field is tilted towards the crass.

In the midst of all this, the civilising influences struggle, leaving poets, visual artists, performers, musicians, authors, and creative pioneers to fight for the attention of a dwindling number of patrons. From time to time the stars align for a few and they gain exposure or ‘go viral.’ Like the Ghetto kids from a deprived rural neighbourhood in Uganda, fired by innocent joie de vivre and a captivating modern rhythmic talent, they danced their way to internet fame. Or the Nigerian video makers who turned the concept of objet trouvé into imaginatively cloned scenes from Hollywood hits, with every vignette matching the original, act for act, word for word, except the set and props are mundane, upcycled objects. Their inventiveness rewarded, the Ikorodu Bois have been adopted by generous do-gooders and they deserve nothing less. Such stories bring a warm glow to the spirit, but they are a cause for optimism only in the way the first green shoots in a scorched field remind us of what has been lost. When a country has not developed a means of identifying and nurturing creativity, even the talented are left to the mysterious algorithms of TikTok or Instagram and the random confluence of intangible forces that constitute virality. But culture cannot thrive on virality alone. There must be a system, and that, unfortunately, is the domain of diligent bureaucrats.

Each of our 37 states has its “Ministry.” Taking the lead from the FMIC, they are rarely granted full status, instead, ab initio, they are bundled with other ‘leftover’ sectors: Tourism or Youth, or Welfare or Women’s Affairs. Not mature enough to exist on its own, ‘Culture’ must hobble along, twinned by fiat. An ironic thought occurs to me; perchance Culture would fare better if it were shackled to all ministries—a reminder to all that, in an ideal world, every sector should be charged with infusing national authenticity into their policies. Each hemi-ministry performs similar official role-fulfilment, after the list of cultural treasures has been drawn up, the half-hearted fight for a chip off the new budget begins. A plea for maintenance (pest extermination, painting, roof repairs, or shelving), replacement costumes, transport, or rehearsal fees. Then—slightly higher on the excitement scale—there is the duty to add a dash of ‘authentic’ culture to official events. This will usually involve dancing and drumming, or occasionally a drama sketch, which will also include dancing and drumming. Occasionally, there is a surprise that pushes the boundaries, something new, arresting and genuinely inventive. Invariably, it is a talent or group of talents that have defied oblivion and demanded the attention of officialdom by their sheer creative force.

Poetry is well-placed to invade such rare spaces. Give them an inch and they will give you a verse. We run a monthly Open Mic event at Ouida Lagos, and our space can no longer accommodate the throngs of young people who are using their talent to articulate their joy, triumphs, trauma, or hopelessness. They come together and speak up for the typical Nigerian who is just trying to survive and thrive, in the face of adversity. We desperately need those who can sum up our anguish, commit it to a page or release it on stage. We need the special language of poetry to fight for access to our culture, to reject not just the alien but the homegrown impositions that are nevertheless alien. We need those who will write over the red tape and release Nigeria’s creative potential.

So dear bureaucrats of Black Africa, we need you, but we need you to understand that our culture is not only being reined in by the colonial museums hoarding our plundered artefacts, nor by the universities and cultural institutions who have given our poets, writers and artists a place to flourish, nor by the publishers abroad who get to call the tune because it is they who package our wordsmiths. It is not they who pay lip service to Culture and have reduced our authenticity to drums, grass skirts and daubs of face paint. It is you: our rule-bound, conformist, risk-averse bureaucrats who do not grasp the sacred and profound duty you have, and have no idea how to discharge it. And when, despite this, Culture, authenticity, creativity and talent manifest, do not strangle them with Red Tape.

Colonialism starts with language. What the colonizers steal first, are mothers’ concepts.

I grew up as Bakhtiari—an Indigenous people of the Zagros mountains in South Western Iran. I was sent to school in the closest big city. The Tehrani-centric education system was based on modern Western “scientific” dogmas and canons. From the age of seven, I was told that what I had learned before that age was outdated and backwards, which made me believe that my mother was an ignorant person because, unlike what my urban teachers had taught me, she used only one word for both “lateness” and “distance.”

My mother, like other Bakhtiaris, used the word dour for both spatial and temporal distance. Bakhtiaris have mainly lived in the Zagros mountains. Known as one of the largest nomadic pastoralist groups in Iran, Bakhtiaris use the intersection of time and space as a basic dimension for their social navigations in everyday life. When talking about a specific date, it is always related to place: “the year of big flooding,” “the locusts’ year,” “the year no frogs were seen.”

Bakhtiaris use the same word for distance and lateness because of an old knowledge that time is inseparable from space. Time indeed is shaped by space: what we know as the calendar system divides time into days, months, years, and is formed through the earth’s rotation within the solar system.

Geography, which is a knowledge about our relations to places and spaces, is a social construction materialized through cartography, borders, calculations, and the measurement of distances. Time is also a social construction. When my state-centric education separated time from space, time became sorted, abstract, emptied.

Colonization does not only turn space into empty space; as unpeopled space. It also turns time into void time. When the Indigenous people of Zagros were forced into the national project of modernization, time became linear, chronological, and centralized. Accordingly, their time turned into days, weeks, and months; emptied from mountains, valleys, rivers, forests, locusts, and frogs.

Schools, alongside state-run television and popular culture, replaced mothers’ and grandmothers’ storytelling. We had to learn the national history from which we are excluded; placed in the “waiting room of history.”¹ Modern notions of history had been created with us outside of it. We were told that we had arrived “too late.”² Temporal segregation and disorientation are crucial in order to segregate and displace people spatially. Our belatedness was registered with labels. We have been named as a “tribe”—first by European anthropologists and then by the Iranian authorities. “Tribe” is rooted in a racial ideology which hierarchizes different communities according to a social evolutionist typology. Within the imaginary of linear time, tribes belong to the past. A backward people. A delayed human being.

“Where are you from?” is not a question about geography but rather about time.

To which part of the history of progression do you belong?

“Are you from the now, contemporary to us?”

or

“Are you from the past? Backward? Contemporary with our ancestors?”

Temporal asynchronism leads to asymmetrical spatial power relations. If a people are belated, then their land is assumed uninhabited. A vacant territory, open to be occupied. Particularly if it has vast oil reserves, like the land of the Bakhtiaris. The stealing of land and its wealth was not possible without the stealing of mothers’ concepts, without systematically turning their knowledge into non-knowledge, their words into non-words.

2.0 HEIRAN / حيران

It took several decades to realize it was me who was ignorant, not my mother. I first came to this realization after learning from Indigenous peoples from other continents how the epistemology of coloniality functions. A coloniality of power that constructs what Miranda Fricker calls “epistemic injustice.”³ Epistemic injustice means to systematically discredit the colonized person’s capacity as a knower. The state-centric education I received made mothers’ knowledge classified as non-knowledge. It was through interacting with Indigenous peoples from North America, Sweden, Taiwan, and South America, that I realized we are Indigenous peoples and not tribes. While the latter refers to differences and partition, the former indicates a networked history of dispossession and state violence.

This insight came late. To realize that the core tenets of my education—its schools of belief and hierarchies of knowledge—had been a tool of oppression against myself and people like myself, and that as a scholar, I was using methodologies which possessed such a history, was shocking. That I practiced and taught the same methodologies and theories which had harmed and dismantled my own people made me heiran.

Heiran means astonished and anxious. Heiran refers to a mood, a frame of mind, marked by confusion and fear. However, heiran is also a moment of revelation. To let the self into the realm of heiran is an intellectual adventure. It is to step into an unknown road with no sign or signal. It is to leave the safe and well-traveled “main road” with a clear destination, and instead enter a byroad shrouded in fog. You know you are not safe, that you might walk along the edge of the abyss. You also know that on the main road, you were already at the bottom of the abyss.⁴

To walk on the main road is what Jean-Paul Sartre called “the bad faith,”⁵ to live another person’s life. This bad faith denies your freedom as a knower. Bad faith is to think and act without freedom. Bad faith is when you hear your own mother’s voice not as speech but as noise. To exit the main road is to reclaim your freedom as a knower. Colonial epistemologies fortify differences through the description of differences. Scientific, objective, reliable, calculative methodologies naturalize and depoliticize differences and thereby confirm certain images of the “other.” The depoliticized description of difference reproduces mechanisms that confirm and reinforce practices against the racialized and “poor” other, where they are pushed to live other lives: the lives of “tribes,” of “migrants,” of “refugees,” of the “stateless.” The landscape of heiran is a ruinous landscape. Heiran emerges from ruination and loss at the same time, though it carries an intellectual curiosity and is therefore oriented towards hope. Ruination and hope are two aspects of heiran. Heiran refuses but also takes up refusal in generative ways, always meaning to open up alternative ways of knowing.

What is to be done, the methodology, when being heiran?

If heiran is a state of wonderment, then its conjugation is to wonder. To wonder is synonymous with to speculate. The method of heiran is “speculating the impossible,” which is an attempt to understand the past and the present when all you have are methodologies, concepts, and archives that have been constructed against you. Saidiya Hartman shows us how this speculative method manifests when one writes history from below. She coined the term “critical fabulation”⁶ to describe her tools of making productive sense of the gaps and silences in official archives and narratives. Critical fabulation is an attempt at seizing fleeting images of the past in a present moment of colonial denial.⁷ Inspired by the approach of working “from below” in Black feminism, the methodology of heiran combines research with speculative narratives in order to actualize hidden historical moments to unsettle the official narratives and to make whole what has been smashed.

3.0 MONQALEB / منقلب

While on the byroad of heiran—the condition of bewilderment and anxiety, of fear and confusion—one’s consciousness turns upwards only to have it fall down, making them monqaleb. Derived from the Arabic word inqilab, Iranians use enqelab for revolution. While the etymology of revolution stems from a “rolling back” (re-volve), enqelab is about mutation. Enqelab results in becoming monqaleb; that is, an inner transformation. While the promises of revolution can be stolen and result in the return of despotism (like Iran in 1979), enqelab and one’s becoming monqaleb engenders new subjectivities, and creates the conditions where it is possible to speculate the impossible; to imagine life beyond the ruins of nation-state systems. If we regard politics as a battle over the imagination, then it is the only battle we have a chance at winning. The battle itself, the rebellion, is the moment of liberation.

Freedom is already won during the struggle for it.

Only during rebellion can the heiran move from confusion to a state of consciousness, from fear to clarity, from isolation to solidarity. The urgent question is how to bring the heiran—with all their individual experiences—together and turn them into a collective, accumulated, historical experience of heiran. This relationality turns an I into a we. The characters in Albert Camus’s works are heiran; faced with the absurdity of the world, they have only one way out: rebellion. As he writes in The Rebel (1951), “I revolt, therefore we are.”⁸

4.0 ZAMAN / زمان

Zaman translates to time and era, though it also means a critical moment. A moment of opening. A moment of change. It is the quality of time, or as the Ancient Greeks named it, Kairos (in opposition to the quantified time, Chronos). Zaman is the time of change.

When the revolutionaries of 1830 took over the streets of Paris, they fired their weapons at the clock towers. This anti-clock revolutionary action was a symbolic protest against capitalist ideas of “progress.”

In 2020, refugees burnt down Moria, their camp in Lesvos, Greece. This was a refusal of the spatio-temporal partitioning the camp had imposed upon them. To burn down a camp is to refuse camp temporality, the temporality of refugee-ness. Protests against anti-Black racism in the United States or anti-migrant racism in Europe are protests against temporal segregation, against justice being constantly delayed, against the stealing of their time. When Iranian women began burning their compulsory veils during the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in fall 2022, they burned the symbol of a state which had delayed their access to education, the labor market, and citizenship rights. They burned the symbol of a temporal border that dispossessed them of time.

Fire the clocks!

Stop the time!

Burn down the capitalist temporality!

A temporality that is against the poor,

the Indigenous people

that is against birds, frogs, the earth!

To burn down racist and sexist temporalities is to create better futures for all. When a young woman screamed at the Budapest International Airport before she was forced onto an airplane, deported to Kabul, nobody heard what she said. Or rather no one wanted to hear; a willful act. But her words remain: “One day you will be refugees, too, like me, and on that day you will remember this day.”

Her words trigger uncanniness because they unearth and unmask a possible future we do not want to imagine. Her words are unsettling as they force us to confront the fact that her past and our future are dialectically interrelated.

Ten years after the end of World War II, Aimé Césaire implied that at the end of the colonial project was Hitler. What Nazism did in Europe was what colonialism had done for centuries outside of Europe. The outcome of colonial racism was Hitler.⁹ The dehumanization of the colonized led to dehumanization of the colonizer.

If, at the end of the colonial project was Hitler, who is waiting for us at the end of the border project?

5.0 TAVAKOL / توكل

When I stepped onto the byroad, with neither a sign nor signal, walking in the fog, I realized I needed other concepts, different from what my Tehrani and Swedish education had given me. I need new concepts to reconnect with my mother and her history. I need to steal back the concepts that had been stolen from me. I have to recollect concepts as a performative practice, not as a collection of isolated fragments from a completed past, but rather, as a collection of concepts in a past which is incomplete and always in a state of becoming. I need my mother’s concepts as tools that can link different experiences across time and space: from colonial practices and bordering practices to fossil capitalism.

This final concept I bring forward is tavakol. Tavakol ala allah, an Islamic concept, which means to trust in God. Tavakol was another concept my mother insisted upon when talking to me, but I never took her words seriously. She tried to help me not lose hope in a hopeless world. My mind, shaped by a European academic education, rejected this concept. But now I want to reclaim it, though differently. Tavakol, for me, is part of a secular struggle for justice. Tavakol means to hope when there is no hope. It means to trust in solidarity and rebellion. Tavakol in dreaming and in recalling stolen knowledge. Tavakol in thinking beyond spatial and temporal bordering, in imagining a future otherwise, and a day beyond the day which has come.

To the question of what she is doing now, she giggles before answering: Crochet, sister. The answer feels out of sync. It does not correspond to the image of Almaza that I have. I don’t comment out of politeness, perhaps, accepting the fact that people may change. I try to understand the course of events before this ‘crochet’ moment erupted. I ask why the company fired her, or ‘encouraged her to resign.’ She answers with a single handed stroke of her hair, pulled back in an undyed ponytail, and a smile.

Almaza details her five year saga with management trying to get rid of her. They deemed her too old to be a receptionist; the face of the company, welcoming customers. Initially, she refused to resign, despite management’s attempts to marginalise her by freezing her annual raise, bringing a younger employee to sit next to her on the small reception desk, placing her desk next to the main entrance of the company, as if she’s a guard not a receptionist, trying to find mistakes in her work, unofficial meetings asking her, politely, to leave, but nothing would shake her. She loved her work; she loved dealing with people, she loved solving problems and calming angry customers, the buzz around the reception area. Such pressures even brought her to think of creating a World Receptionists’ Union, to defend their rights and attend to their needs. She was determined not to budge, even ready to fight head on. She threatened to reveal their sexism and ageism, to bring them to court, to expose their actions to the press. But after a few years of resistance, realising that the world is dirty and her being a single person against a huge international company, she gave in. It was only when, for the third time, that management sought to persuade her to leave, that she felt the weight of being unwanted and unwelcome in a place that she gave the last decade to.

Almaza would spend three to four hours a day on the road from her home in Silwan, Jerusalem, to her office in Ramallah and back, with a couple of hours spent waiting at Qalandia checkpoint along the way. Sometimes she’d spend three hours on the way back alone. Driving a car with a stick shift only to move thirty centimetres every few seconds had me suffer immense pain in my back and legs. But manual cars consume less fuel, which is vital with a low salary like mine.

Almaza says she’s attached to her car, before adding this is perhaps her problem: she gets attached to people, to work, to things, though more often than not, these attachments only ever bring about disappointment.

How do you spend your days now, then? I ask. She sets her alarm for six in the morning as before. She wakes up, drinks her coffee, then listens to the radio programme she used to when she drove to work, where interviews and political commentary on the situation in Palestine is commingled with songs. Now, she would walk around her small studio apartment for its entire duration. She then reads the news for a while before heading to her elderly parents’ home, which is nearby, has a late breakfast with them, and starts crocheting until the afternoon, wherein she returns to her flat to read, fix dinner, then head to sleep at ten. She does not see many people. But she sticks to her daily routine so she does not slip into depression or despair, or worse, insomnia: I need to go to sleep and wake up in these times, also out of fear of insomnia. She explains she became an insomniac for a few weeks after she lost her job.

The history of insomnia is long in Almaza’s life. It started when she lost her children. Almaza got married when she was seventeen years old. She had two kids then asked for divorce a couple of years later. It was agreed that she retained custody. After three months, when her kids went to visit their father, they weren’t allowed to come back. There were no Palestinian courts to go to, and she didn’t want to go to the Israeli courts responsible for incarcerating Palestinians, including her brothers. Thus began Almaza’s most painful experience, accompanied by years of insomnia; an experience that would shape her life in ways she could never have anticipated.

Early on she realised she needed money to buy a car so she could get her children to visit her. She also needed money to spend on them. This saw her going to her family to say she wanted to work. After resistance, they accepted. At the time, a woman had two possible jobs, as a seamstress or a hairdresser. She hated both and couldn’t imagine doing either. But she thought of it as a start. She joined a hairdressing course, and halfway through, she left to join a course on computer literacy, which included skills in typing. It was a new field, then, and she discovered it as something she liked. Eventually, this brought her to work as a typist in a press office run by a group of Palestinian Marxists. This coincided with the uprising of 1987, where her job was to collect news reports from journalists across Palestine and subsequently transcribe and assemble them into a news bulletin. She describes how she would call the mayoral offices of small villages and towns to collect such news. Until the late 1990s, Palestinians weren’t granted permission by the Israeli occupation authorities to get phone lines. The exception for this policy were mayoral offices, as mayors were appointed by the Israeli intelligence services. Almaza would wait on the line until someone fetched the journalist, then proceed to type the news. She recalls her actual difficulties with writing, given that she left school quite early on, in the eighth grade. At that job, Almaza also met G., a Jewish-American leftist who came to Palestine after she and a Palestinian Marxist fell in love. G. would soon turn into a member of Almaza’s family, and Almaza’s best friend. They both worked hard in the office, spreading news of the uprising to international outlets, until their work came to the attention of the Israeli authorities and the office was forced to shut. Left again with no job, Almaza joined, with G., a Palestinian women’s union. G., at the time, encouraged Almaza to study sign language, a field in which G. specialised. It was, during this period, too, that Almaza began a struggle with her father. She desired to remove the headscarf she had to put on when she got married. Her father said this could only happen over his dead body. Almaza thus began a series of at-home protests, carrying around cardboard signs demanding permission to take off this headscarf, then a series of strikes: the first entailed not leaving her room for days, while the other was of hunger. Before she finally left to study sign language in Jordan, as there were no such institutions to teach it in Palestine, let alone a Palestinian sign language, she informed her father that she would take off her headscarf there, and she would return home without it. Upon finishing the course, Almaza rushed back to Jerusalem, to show her father that she actually followed through on her promise. When her father saw her, he walked away, refusing to greet or speak to her. But on the following day, he suddenly invited her to join him to visit the wider family, walking with her proudly.

With her sign language certificate, Almaza, alongside G. and other leftists, started work on creating a school for deaf Palestinian children. It was during this endeavour that she also started working on the first Palestinian sign language dictionary. She would, however, leave the group; they wanted her to become a teacher at this school, while she demanded the hiring of qualified teachers, not someone who hardly completed the eighth grade. Still, she suggested teaching these teachers sign language. Her insistence and unyielding position on the matter meant clashing with the other feminists and leftists in the group, including G., who all accused her of being pedantic. The sign language dictionary was completed and published, but the work that she did, including her comparisons with Egyptian, Jordanian, and Israeli sign languages, and meeting its practitioners to invent a Palestinian sign language, are recognised in the dictionary in the form of a special thanks, for her patience, and nothing more.

Disillusioned with this group and how they came to be more concerned with power than the realities of social life, she returned to typing and took work as a typesetter in a major Palestinian newspaper, as well as typing scripts on behalf of Palestinian playwrights. Almaza eventually worked in a Palestinian theatre only to be reminded, repeatedly, by the management that she had never finished secondary school, to stave off her protests against her meagre salary. But by then she had managed to buy an old, small car, allowing her to see her kids more often and drive around with them; her dream. At the same time, she pursued a two year diploma in office management, after convincing the college to accept her despite not having finished school.

When she graduated, Almaza was thirty years old. At that stage, she decided she wanted to leave everything behind and start a new life in a new city. It was Rome. A friend there, whom she knew from the women’s union, told her of a vacancy for a typist and proof-reader of an Arabic magazine to be launched by a Libyan media company. Almaza was hired but found the job dull, and asked her friend to help her, again, in finding another. She received an offer to be an editing assistant at an Arabic TV station broadcasting from Italy, but it was around this time that, as Almaza was preparing to update her immigration status with this new work contract, her bag got stolen with her Jordanian passport and Israeli travel document and ID. Almaza remembers the bemused Italian police when she reported the theft, with her place of birth: Palestine; passport: Jordanian, travel document and identity card: Israeli. After two months of torturous humiliation accompanying her visits to the Israeli embassy in Rome, she was given a travel document valid for one month, and ordered to return to Palestine and renew her papers in Jerusalem. Back in Jerusalem, back as a secretary in the theatre, back as a receptionist for a Non Governmental Organisation that brought Palestinian businesswomen and female workers under one umbrella, back crossing the checkpoints, back to work in Jerusalem’s old city with a cultural organisation. After this last job, unable to stand the methods of the Israeli occupation in the Old City, Almaza went back to Ramallah, where she landed what she considered the job she loved most: a receptionist at a mobile phone company.

What now? I ask. Enjoying her time off, she says, the first break from the blender that she felt her life had been thrown into for the last four decades. Now I’m just on the edge of the blender, not in its heart. Unemployment brought stillness to a mad life.

Why on the edge and not completely out? I ask. Because we are still in Silwan, she replies, surrounded by settlers who push us increasingly out of their way and against each other. There was a small piece of land, she explains, where kids used to play. The settlers seized it, put up a high fence and turned it into a basketball court with a gate which only opened for their children.

The neighbourhood kids now play in the small alleyway in front of our house. Their screaming and shouting all day drives us mad, gives me immense headaches. They are just in front of our door all the time. So, every day you are faced with the settlers and the Israeli sense of superiority, where you are made to understand that you, as a Palestinian, deserve nothing, not even a spot for your children to play, or a parking lot for your car, a proper road to cross.

Almaza catches herself, and lifts the tone of defeat that momentarily seeps into the air. But we’ll always find new ways to continue. We have to. One needs to keep rejecting the conventional solutions offered to them, to the many of us.

Almaza continues to crochet; the pieces she’s producing now are a record of how long she’s gone without work.

Almaza is 56. She was born during the 1967 war at home, during curfew.

CHORUS: THE INTERNS
For our purposes, INTERN refers to those not born to the aristocracy occupying any number of poorly paid (or wholly unpaid) positions in an institution.

As such, INTERN may well emerge from the middle classes but is defined by a self-conscious downward mobility.

To the rich man, INTERN is not exactly poor. Since she is ambiguously young and—by virtue of what she wears and how she speaks—appears to desire the same things he does; she may be invited to the party. She will not be invited to the dinner: that is the rule and distinction.

As Rilke noted, “every angel is terrifying.”

SEVEN INTERNS sit on the floor in uncomfortable leisure, in front of a HEAVY DRAWN CURTAIN. THE HEAVINESS OF THE CURTAIN is its only quality.

NO PAUSES BETWEEN RUMOURS
SPEECH SHOULD BE OVERLAPPING
A CONTINUOUS STREAM.

SIGN
THE RUMOURS WERE AS FOLLOWS.

INTERN 3
The workers knew the owner of the institution and aforementioned apartments by name only. Whom they referred to as their ‘boss’ was an appointment and, as such, expendable like a broker, like a marionette, like a functionary.

INTERN 4
This was not, generally speaking, an exceptional situation, and indeed the overwhelming banality of it was what eventually lent it promise.

INTERN 5
Living in the city (like every city) meant living in the wake of failed revolution. Can despair keep you going?

INTERN 6
Still, they needed beauty.

INTERN 7
Still, they longed for love.

CURTAIN.

2.0 ACT 1, SCENE 2

WORKERS are at a dimly lit bar. They sit as a party of three at a table for nine. Since they have occupied the central (and indeed) only large table, VARIOUS UNNAMED CHARACTERS drop in and out of the scene moving furniture. This is a wordless transaction; it is dark outside; busy and loud inside.

WORKER 1
I wrote my letters of resignation this week. Yes, plural. In the first I wrote something subtle but scathing about my awareness of the context of my employment. Knowing that the terms with which I described life would be contested, it became difficult to articulate the altogether simple proposition that you can’t make ‘art’ without sustaining life…

WORKER 2
O, WORKER! If we’re still talking about art, that is! Against their lexicon of euphemism and torturous allusion, you must arm yourself with facts! Only this will offer a more serious politics!

CRITIC (turning around from the parallel single table, interrupting with droll despair) 
O, my WORKER! Might makes right now, more than ever! I don’t think you have the numbers for your peasant uprising. You aren’t prepared for what is coming. 
(louder)
Before every end is a period of transition, and that is the situation we’re in. There will be no art in the end; it is apocalyptic, and in our unhappy time, algorithmic.

INTERN 7 (turning around from the bar counter)
CRITIC is insisting that the enemy is not will but representation. WORKER is failing to comprehend that justice is the opposite of law (Derrida).

Nothing will happen today.

CURTAIN.

3.0 ACT 1, SCENE 3

A room furnished in a minimalist, modernist style. The walls are left unrestored; according to ARCHITECT, the marks and decontextualised graffiti invite you to contemplate the WEIGHT OF HISTORY.

DIRECTOR sits alone at a long, communal table diagonal to a small kitchen installed with multiple instant coffee machines where INTERNS are occupied. Cut flowers on the table indicate that this is a transactional space.

CHORUS: THE INTERNS
to the hum of coffee machines beeping and aluminium pods dropping; leave the stage after speaking;

INTERN 3
What the critic meant to say was: generous funds have been allotted to raze this neighbourhood.

INTERN 1
The workers are ambivalent about their work, waiting for a moment of politicisation; as if such a moment would declare itself for them to rise to it.

INTERN 4
Moments do not declare themselves; they fade into one another.

INTERN 7
It is difficult to say whether their lack of solidarity betrays a genuine emotional incapacity or a wilful abnegation of their professed beliefs.

INTERN 5
They have correctly identified the coordinated, violent extraction at hand, and they observe the manner by which intellectual, artistic or creative labour is instrumentalised to passively obscure it, more or less.

INTERN 2
Whoever cannot fly, should fall faster.

DIRECTOR
[facing the audience]
Here at INSTITUTION, we’re interested in artists that refuse legibility. This is an ANTI-ASSIMILATIONIST POLITICAL POSITION—their coded inscrutability stands against the IDENTITY POLITICS we sadly see surfacing in CITY. What do the insurrectionists want? They accuse us of recuperating old slaughterhouses and factories to turn them into trivial sites of capital or, even worse, entertainment.
[turning to the side]
Nothing is happening. Of course, I know all about WORKER. After all, I once was one. I moved away from resentment and vows of purity toward a stoic realism. Will WORKER save themselves?
DIRECTOR OFFERS A TRICK QUESTION.

CURTAIN.

4.0 ACT 1, SCENE 4 

WORKERS are at a dimly lit bar. They sit as a party of three at a table for nine. Since they have occupied the central (and indeed only) large table, VARIOUS UNNAMED CHARACTERS drop in and out of the scene moving furniture. This is a wordless transaction; it is dark outside; busy and loud inside.

WORKER 2
I wrote my letters of resignation this week.
Yes, plural.

Of course, I could list the working conditions at INSTITUTION; but in our unhappy cities, talking about such conditions is like talking about the weather—so I consulted CRITIC, who knows everything about the bourgeois aesthete.

WORKER 3 (interrupting)
Did he tell you to read Schopenhauer? To consider his love for his pet poodle, loathing for his mother? Some people are born with their tail between their legs.

When INSTITUTION applies the logic of war, insisting that to destroy is to save, it will not be overwhelmed with half-hearted appeals to moral imperatives.
SOMEBODY shuffles a deck of cards. One in four says EVICTION NOTICE.
Still, nothing happens today. The purgatories of good taste remain standing.

SIGN
IT’S LONELY IN THE SADDLE SINCE THE HORSE DIED.

CURTAIN.

I begin this text on viscerality and its evisceration where I do most reflections on the violence of settler-colonialism—in the shadow of Frantz Fanon.

“The colonized intellectual who wants to put his struggle on a legitimate footing, who is intent on providing proof and accepts to bare himself in order to better display the history of his body, is fated to journey deep into the very bowels of his people.”¹

Throwing caution to the wind, we embark on this voyage that many believe Fanon to be firmly opposed to. To be sure, Fanon does warn about the dangers of journeying into the bowels, but to read his words as a deterrent of its undertaking would be a grave mistake. Fanon does not dismiss the importance of the viscera as a site of affective and somatic resistance to colonization; rather, he warns against its exploration through modes of self-autopsying—those forensic operations bent on seeking national culture in the nostalgic entrails of colonial cadavers. As a revolutionary psychiatrist who treated patients during (and in the lead up to) the Algerian revolution, Fanon’s appreciation of the visceral is evident in his extensive—and prescient—psychiatric writings on the inextricable link between colonization and psychosomatic afflictions which were at the time just beginning to be understood under the umbrella of ‘cortico-viscerality.’² Perhaps what is at stake for Fanon is not the exploration of the visceral landscape but how it is undertaken—which roads are traveled, and in whose vehicle. Land is gutted into scenery when we are made passengers in our own bodies, travelers relegated to peering out the window where there used to be but the thin film of separation between immediacy and feeling. The visceral knows no borders: it is the radical interpenetration of the outside within, the sketched contours of a fullness we call hunger whose stomaching becomes the work of living. Besides, a camera can’t record what it’s hell bent on destroying.

And yet, there will always be those who film to heal.³

1.0 The Prisoner

Within Occupied Palestine, a prisoner writes a letter (or a poem, or a book). On a piece of paper half the size of an A4 sheet, he writes microscopically between perpendicular columns that have been penciled in. His words, barely legible to the naked eye, take on an elliptical shape as they populate the page, descending its length rather than crossing its width. The prisoner tightly folds the paper and bundles it with a dozen similar ones. He begins to wrap this sheaf of letters in scraps of plastic amassed from bags that litter the prison, rolling it into a cylindrical shape no larger than a centimeter in width, and three to four in length. He burns the edges of this plastic—fusing it together, encapsulating within its skin his precious words. He swallows the pill.

2.0 The Patient

A patient visits a gastroenterologist to rule out occult gastrointestinal bleeding. His iron reserves are low and the doctor suspects his gut of betraying him via slow exsanguination. Physical examination draws the portrait of a person whose inner eyelids are bone white, stool pitch black, and breath shallow with fatigue. Traditional endoscopy can’t reach the small bowel, the patient is told, where the lesion most likely lies. As an efficient and more comfortable alternative, the doctor proposes video-capsule endoscopy. It’s easy, the doctor reassures him, as he pulls out something resembling a slightly oversized pill from his medical cabinet. It contains a camera lens on one end, and across its body reads the word “PillCam.”

3.0 The Cotard Colonizer: A Case Study

1880: Describing the case of Mademoiselle X—the 43 year old woman whose symptoms would become the substrate of her attending psychiatrist’s eponymous syndrome—Dr. Jules Cotard details the following:

“We have been observing since a few years… a patient who presents a quite singular hypochondriac delusion. She affirms that she has no brain, nerves, chest, stomach or entrails; she has only left, in her own words,the skin and bones of the disorganized body. This delusion of negation extends even to the realm of metaphysical ideas which were once the object of her strongest convictions: She has no soul, God no longer exists, the devil either. [Mademoiselle X] no longer being but a disorganized body, does not need to eat to live, she could not die of a natural death, she will exist eternally unless she is burnt, fire being the only end for her.”⁴

Cotard Syndrome, also referred to as ‘Walking Corpse Syndrome,’ describes a psychic constellation of symptoms defined by delusions of nihilism that vary in scope and intensity. These may range from the absence of specific organs to the absence of existence entirely—of the self or the world around it. The Cotard patient’s nihilism gives rise to a paradoxical belief: that they are immortal. The fault lines of the fracturing Cotard psyche reveal a secret intimacy between two metaphysical views which appear, at first glance, irreconcilable. Nihilism and immortality share close footing in the Cotard patient, whose delusional self-eviscerating often spills into the realm of indestructibility.

In their irreducible conviction that they are already dead, the Cotard patient successfully transcends mortality. And, in doing so, sublimates their suicidal drive into one that is rational. The act of suicide becomes a mere empirical demonstration, a receipt that proves their non-existence. This is the psychotic garb of a body without organs, one that delusionally empties itself of viscerality in order to feel nothing and destroy everything. This is the psychosis of settler colonialism.

I want to consider the schema of settler colonialism as being symptomatic of Cotard’s syndrome. That the colonizer’s desire for genocide and conquest is the symptom of a self-annihilating drive that is propelled by delusions of immortality, fed and nourished by delusions of nihilism. Like the Cotard patient, the colonizer’s suicidality may take the shape of a durational assault: that slow death by starvation that became the tragic misfortune of Mademoiselle X. Indeed, nihilistic delusions—whether preoccupied with missing viscera or the lack of a bodily self entirely—lead to starvation because one feels they do not need to eat. Why would they, after all, with no stomach to fill, or gut to lubricate? And yet, some still do. Such is the case of the German jurist Daniel Paul Schreber, who writes in his Memoirs:

“I existed frequently without a stomach; I expressly told the attendant… that I could not eat because I had no stomach… Food and drink taken simply poured into the abdominal cavity and into the thighs, a process which, however unbelievable it may sound, was beyond all doubt for me as I distinctly remember the sensation. In the case of any other human being this would have resulted in natural pus formation with an inevitably fatal outcome; but the food pulp could not damage my body because all impure matter in it was soaked up again by the rays. Later, I therefore repeatedly went ahead with eating unperturbed, without having a stomach…”⁵

Schreber, avowing to the attendant that he has no appetite because he is missing a stomach nevertheless continues to eat. How?

Because of hunger.

“For this too exists
to be hungry without appetite.”⁶

+ + +

Settler colonialism is fueled by hunger. All-consuming, it is a faim sans fin—an unending hunger—which has grown autonomous of the appetite which birthed it. This hunger cannot be housed by the modest shelter of the stomach wall, whose elasticity can only extend so far. Once its threshold is reached, the stomach wall alerts hunger to its limits, imposing the law of its diet. The stomach—as an organ of moderation—becomes a physiological obstacle to the Cotard Colonizer’s unfettered appetite, leaving him to hallucinate its amputation. Bifurcating the appetite from the body—in an act of psychic self-mutilation—the Cotard Colonizer becomes hyperphagic, unable to be sated by the violence he sows. In his study of phantom internal organs, T.L. Dorpat distinguishes phantom limb sensations in patients who have lost internal organs with those who have lost external ones, noticing that those whose amputations lie in the viscera do not report sensations of “‘having an internal organ’, but rather of having sensations normally associated with the functioning of the organ in question.”⁷ This is phantom hunger, the weapon of the Cotard colonizer—that of which echoes Antonin Artaud when he says, in his radiophonic voice:

“there are those who say that consciousness
is an appetite,
the appetite for living;

and immediately
alongside the appetite for living, it is the appetite for food
that comes immediately to mind;

as if there were not people who eat without any sort of appetite;
and who are hungry.

For this too exists
to be hungry without appetite;

well?”⁸

+ + +

Well.

If the colonizer has deluded himself into thinking his organs are missing, where does he believe them to have disappeared? According to Jasbir Puar, he hallucinates them as the Other.

Addressing the Israeli Defense Forces’ practice of tallying the number of shot knees during the Great March of Return in Gaza, Puar notes:

“This art exceeds the process of tabulation, as it involves a scrambling of fleshly registers, of limbs, of organs, of blood. To explain and redress the violence of dividualization, there is often a recourse to the presumed relay of humanism: the perpetrators have to dehumanize the protestors, or have never humanized them, in order to maim and kill them… Dividualization does not rehearse the primacy of human forms and in fact exploits humanist attachments to these forms… it is that the dividual, not the individual, is the instrumentalized unit of such a biopolitics.”⁹

The philosophy and practice of maiming has become a primary vector through which biopolitical control is maintained in the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Addressing the asymmetry between the liberal (white) subject of disability rights and the Palestinian protester—whose “permanent disability” results from “a state of perpetual injuring”—Puar brings to our attention a unit of maiming that escapes the ethical framework of the individual: the organ.¹⁰

Looking through the gun scope of the Israeli sniper, we see a gaze that is fixed at the level of the dividual: on knees, tendons, capillaries, limbs, and spilled organs. The gun sight of the sniper, operating like the chemical process of preparing a microscopic slide, brings its specimen into sight through fixing it. This is what Puar calls an “unseeing and reseeing of corporeality”: a total and totalizing Gestalt shift between ground and figure whose ultimate goal is the cutting of their binding tie altogether.¹¹ As Puar remarks, “one learns not to see the limb as missing a/the body.”¹²

We begin to understand, here, that an amputation has been hallucinated into existence well before the act of maiming. Once the bullet is fired and lodged into the knee, an injury is produced whose palliative care will most likely involve the amputation of the afflicted limb. What ensues is a positive feedback cycle which reinforces the cognitive distortion of both the sniper and the state. This perceptual reshaping should be understood as the symptom of a larger settler-colonial desire to separate organ from organism, part from body, visceral from viscera, and figure from ground.

According to Henri Bergson, the difference between machines and organisms lies in the realm of time: machines are spatial entities whereas organisms contain time and can only be comprehended in relation to a past. In light of this, dividualization becomes the logic of ontological separation pushed to its extreme: a dispersion into geometric space that disavows the colonized as organs of a national body, as a people with a past.¹³ To counter eviscerations, both real and hallucinated, revisceralization becomes a tool and philosophy of resistance for Palestinians.

4.0 Revisceralization: Counter-technologies of Palestinian Liberation

The cabsulih emerged as a makeshift form of communication for Palestinian revolutionaries. Their large-scale incarceration, intensifying in 1967, was an attempt by the forces of occupation to fraction, atomize, and isolate the revolutionary spirit and resistance of Palestinians. Using what was available to them—material scraps and their bodies—prisoners hid their words, and those of their comrades, in the depths of their bowels.¹⁴

Upon ingestion, the cabsulih inscribed the social into the individual’s flesh, making them the body of its message. The prisoners’ viscera became constitutive of a complex subdermal network of written communication that defied the colonizer’s attempts at carceral containment. During the travel of cabsulih from M2M through kisses with loved ones and across the netting that divided families from inmates, or A2(M2A…), a community of political captives came to be formed. Spanning across and beyond prisons, the creation of a visceral commons effectively rehabilitated the political prisoner into a once again active participant of the Palestinian national movement.

We are reminded here of Mikhail Bakhtin’s analysis of the potentiality of the grotesque viscera as a space within which “the confines between bodies and between the body and the world are overcome.”¹⁵ The cabsulih—in conjunction with the prisoners that carry it—can be understood as a cosmotechnics of Bakhtinian viscerality, situating the bowels as a site of radical interchange and interorientation where the individual body ends and the collective body begins.

+ + +

Sumud is not a philosophy as much as it is an organic practice, a commitment, and a collectively shared system of beliefs that sinews the psychic and social body in the face of occupation. In the words of Muhammad Funun, a Palestinian politial prisoner in the 1970s, “its roots grow, bloom, and deepen like a living entity, and it is nourished by every preceding experience.”¹⁶

Against the everyday violence of living under occupation, Palestinian psychotherapeutic practice becomes a source—and manifestation—of sumud. In Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (2021), Lara and Stephen Sheehi explicate a theory of psychoanalysis rooted in the indigenous practices of Palestinian clinicians and their patients who create spaces of psychic liberation, which is to say, spaces of social and political resistance. What crystallizes in their accounts is a Palestinian clinical practice that actively seeks to break “the circuit of disavowal and splitting that is at the heart of disenfranchising Palestinians not only of their land but of their very being and selfhood.”¹⁷ At the heart of this resistance is a refusal of depoliticized psychoanalytical practice that abstracts psychic suffering from the violence of occupation, and the struggle for national liberation.

Acknowledging the psychic lifeworlds of their patients as a material, empirical, reality, the Palestinian clinician rejects depoliticized frameworks of mental health as vehicled by the Israeli state and the international community through the UN and NGO complex. These are the trauma-centered and resilience-based models of therapy which further atomize Palestinian subjectivity into the perfect victim, or, in the words of David Eng, the “good liberal objet worthy of repair.”¹⁸

Instead, what Lara and Stephen Sheehi highlight are practices congruent with Fanon’s theory of sociogeny, existing at the intersection of the personal (individual), the social (collective), and the poetic (imaginative). Recognizing that the violence of living under occupation “always enters the room,” the Palestinian clinician refuses to pathologize dissent through diagnostics which reduce symptoms to the realm of disorder. Instead, symptoms may be recognized as the result of “functioning within the reality principle that stops up the flow of the unconscious, the social, and the intersubjective.”¹⁹ At times, they may be understood as the very sign of sumud itself. Such is the case of the anger, frustration, and violence which protects the Palestinian from entering into the dissociative terrain of dialogue with the oppressor. It is also the nature of the delusions of a Palestinian Jerusalemite living in the Old City who is afraid that leaving the gates of his house would bring him to be “lifted up” and swept away. By situating patient experiences within Palestinian intersubjectivity, the Palestinian clinician resists the dismemberment of the psyche under the guise of psychoanalytic innocence.²⁰ Instead, as the Sheehis remark, they cultivate a networked practice that “reproduces the social and psychological processes and practices of sumud by shoring up Palestinian psychological defenses…through connecting them to shared experience.” Such is the work of revisceralization, that which, in the words of Karim Kattan, imagines how the archipelago can become a continent. ²¹

5.0 Missile Pill

M2A was invented by Gavriel Iddan, an Israeli military scientist whose work on missile technology as the head of the electro-optical design section of the RAFAEL (Armament Development Authority) would equip missiles with the gift of sight.²² In the 1980s, Iddan engineered the camera that would become the missile’s seeker—a video-technological prosthetic which allowed it to capture and guide itself to its victim. Three decades after its conception, the organ come to be known as ‘the eye of the missile’ would turn its gaze towards new visceral horizons. In order to facilitate the biotechnological surveillance of those areas of the intestines which lay beyond traditional endoscopy’s reach, Iddan miniaturized the seeker and encapsulated it within a pill. A missile pill.

Thus, M2A was born.

The abbreviation—short for “mouth-to-anus”—is a decidedly gay expression commonly used within medicine to describe afflictions of the entire digestive tract.

In 2000, M2A—now rebranded as Pillcam— became the first commercialized instance of video-capsule endoscopy (VCE), receiving its FDA approval just a year later. Marketed as a minimally invasive alternative to traditional endoscopy, Pillcam’s smooth plastic pill journeys effortlessly through the digestive tract propelled by natural peristalsis. It takes two pictures per second across approximately eight hours. 57,000 color images are uploaded in real-time to a computer worn by the patient, reconstructed into a diagnostic video-voyage. “It’s like swallowing a missile that doesn’t explode,” says the C.E.O of Given Imaging: the company Iddan created to transform the seeker into Pillcam, from a missile that does explode into one that doesn’t.²³ Given Imaging is now being developed under the Minimally Invasive Therapies Division of US biomedical giant Medtronic.

What is being sketched here is not the shameful past of an otherwise ingenious medical invention. Pillcam is inscribed within the longue durée of a cosmotechnics that transforms Palestinian death into Israeli-European-American gut health. Its technology—conceived and perfected in a process Ali Abunimah describes as Israel’s “field testing” of weapons in “real time”—continues to be refined with each and every devastating cycle of destruction wrought upon Gaza.²⁴ To abstract Pillcam from its genesis is to mislead patients about the risk they incur during its ingestion. Adhering to the philosophy of technic, Pillcam constitutes an extension of the body’s organs and memory.²⁵ However, unlike most technology, its extension is directed inwards. As the eye of the missile enters the patient’s body, so too does its memory: of the violence it has witnessed, the violence made possible by its witnessing. Within the bowels, Pillcam spreads like a mnemonic vector of disease, contaminating its host’s tissues. Such adverse effects are unacknowledged by the medical sciences under the pretext of the M2A digestive tract—a pipeline between eating and shitting where the labor of digestion is nullified and made apolitical. It is the digestive equivalent of a colonial myth that espouses there can be contact without contamination. ²⁶ As patients with leaking guts, we are wary of narratives pertaining to digestive sovereignty. Within colonial relations, Ewa Macura-Nnamdi reminds us, “eating always subjects… because it rests on an assumption that to ingest is to accept what one eats… and the world it brings in its wake.”²⁷ It is this very world that we, as patients, refuse to swallow.

6.0 The Patient

As patients in the face of Pillcam, we enact our power through refusal. In this process, we turn our illness into a weapon directed against the necropolitics of the Israeli state.²⁸ Refusal becomes an act that protects the gut and its capacity to feel—a blockade against bearing in one’s body the mnemonic traces of colonial violence waged against Palestinians for over seven decades. We are aware that Pillcam remembers its dismemberments, that its lens is imprinted with a negative consciousness that leaks as it travels inside us—the absorption, ingestion, and digestion of which is deeply harmful for our bodies, minds, and spirits. In our pursuit of health in illness, and the fight against the illness that is occupation, we refuse to be complicit in colonial evisceration. Turning our viscera into a weapon which operates in solidarity with the fight for Palestinian freedom, we honor that eternal gnawing of the gut we sometimes call our gut feeling.

In the last few years, we’ve heard these ideas called new: finding a way around banking regulations; cutting through bureaucracy, and sidestepping laws. Like so many technological innovations, the ideas are ancient ones rebranded. What was a threat to the state becomes a promise of liberation.

The vernacular of your father’s calls have their own simple rhythm. It almost sounds like nothing is happening. On paper, it is equal to nothing being transferred at all, not in any way that can be traced. The affect of the call is breathtakingly casual, considering it extends over a distance of two solid days by plane with a person he’s never met. The sums entrusted to this stranger seem improbable. The tenuous delicacy seems too much of a risk. But the system rests on a mutual double bind: the stranger is trustworthy because they’ve not been revealed to be otherwise, that they’ve established trust through this script many times before. If the chain is broken, word will get back. The stranger will be out of commission.

Here, to move and exchange outside a system is bound up in relational methods and social tokens: in understanding that monetary exchange is, somehow, just a surrogate for what can be better equalized through a fairer system, or a more distributed global exchange of capital. There’d be, ideally, corrections for war and colonial pillage, the coffers of nations restored. Gold stores replenished. Certain treasuries reconstructed. Certain invasions undone. The rebalance that would make for a system that didn’t require finding so many workarounds.

In place of this fantasy reform in a hyper-capitalist world that only recreates and intensifies the methods of the past, cash-based reparations become interpersonal proposals for an iterative, modest form of correction the state doesn’t provide. The coins of remittances sent from work sites abroad become a way to balance the scales. Broken up into billions of piecemeal transactions, their methods cannot become one hero’s story of innovative change. Still, they remain defiant. Defiance is a way to think of these microsystems in terms of belief and trust, instead of fraud and danger and illegitimacy. What is illegitimate in relation to an illegitimate state?

Hawala, then, as a nearly illegible practice, shows a real warmth to its exchanges that take place below, beneath, and outside, on lines gone dead. Its precarious methods amount to billions of dollars. With its own guidebooks and coded languages, it forms minor ecologies of collaboration which replicate structures very close to an ancient peer-to-peer network of sharing information. Not a blockchain in the mix, but exchanges necessary for asylum seekers, for refugees, for migrant workers, for soon to be climate-change exiles, for digital nomads of all kinds, for precarious app-labor. Hawala serves their sovereignty over their own lives, their own communities and families, and it will continue even as servers churn and heat under the banner of Web3.

Just as Web3’s claims and abstractions must be tied to a material analysis, so too should a system like hawala. Any decentralized system should have its claims to be outside the center—and its own possible reestablishment of a center—examined. To understand the politics of the current moment through the history of hawala is to demand more of Web3’s wildest utopian propositions. What are today’s decentralized governance models doing to dismantle inequity through the whole system? What do they do to reinforce the center and perpetuate inequity? What would a true decentralized system do to the center?

When your father calls the hawaladar, they become a unit that defies probability; they make a calculus and art of producing belief. A tiny miracle. They establish an understanding. Faith, suspended. Pressure falls on the nuanced inflections of their conversation, an equally ancient art form of establishing conspiracy between two strangers. When I meet you, strange client, I coax you into believing I will ferry your funds to their destination. My reliability as a hawaladar rests on your trust in my reputation; to betray it is to lose my only currency. This decentralized exchange, taking place in illegible quiet backchannels, suggests a distribution contingent upon weird intimacy.

The transaction becomes as unlikely as the reason for it. The client left a village and is now situated with an address and a name a world away. Here is a system that, when unlocked and decoded, allows a transfer without record, held only in the mind. The memory of a former home that will soon be referenced in statements and asides like, “I haven’t been there in ten years.” “I haven’t been there in twenty years.” “It’s been … oh [a beat] thirty years?” “Yes; I missed my mother’s funeral. I missed my father’s funeral, too.” And still, he picks up to call, to reestablish the node, the groove, nothing traced or encoded or made eternal; only memory stores. The memory maintains a sense of self moving across time across the traumatic break, away from a war, a crisis, a reason to leave, an idea that drew one away. Life elsewhere that would be better, a mirage substantial enough to hurtle oneself at it. Shotput.

A decentralized model moves to dismantle the logic of extraction and oppression that made it necessary in the first place. By localizing exchange in a highly accountable network where agents are ethically bound, the agents are accountable to one another, and further to the community flung around the world that depends on them. Having neither a ledger nor a trace strengthens the distributed trust. Trust in common, thecommons established by the script, its double and triple meanings, encodings.

Hawala holds traces of rangier, more fractal, modular, re-composable, evolving technologies of belief, exchange, and distribution, that are rooted in context, in the realities of inequity. A reciprocity that just sounds like two people passing time, doing something of no note, a minor happening on one day, a little call about a thing he has to take care of.

Editor’s Note: This text was commissioned as part of Decolonial Hacker’s online screening of Shobun Baile’s Trust Study #1 (2020), which occurred between 28 June—12 July 2022.

He said that there were lots of times when these kinds of things happened—when doors wouldn’t open, and for no discernible reason. He attributed this to the “spirits of the place.”

Since 2016, I’ve been collecting ghost stories from current and former British Museum staff, and can attest that on many occasions the British Museum’s passageways have been blocked or left open—doors positioned contrary to operating procedure, unnerving those tasked with maintaining order in the museum. Describing an episode involving the often uncooperative doors which enclose the Sutton Hoo Gallery, one warder marvelled, “When we reviewed the CCTV back, you can see me and my colleague walk through, and then these doors, you see them just go like that…”, unfolding their fingers and slowly spreading them apart, “[opening] up inwards for no reason whatsoever. You’d need a very, very big breeze to open them up like that.”

Another warder, recalling a separate incident that took place in the Sutton Hoo Gallery, rejected the possibility of wind blowing the doors open: “Someone tried to put it down [to] wind. Well, if it was wind, how is it that the other doors didn’t open up? Where would the breeze come from?” He shook his head, as if to restate his bewilderment, “ That door should never have been open.” The Sutton Hoo Gallery is thick with such trickery. According to yet another warder:

“Between galleries 42 and 41, the doors were notoriously old and warped and difficult to shut. We got the one door, but then it just wouldn’t quite meet the other, and so my colleague slammed it, and kept slamming it, and then all of a sudden, the door that was closed flung back open. He felt something push against his chest.” With this, the warder pantomimed his wrist thrusting forward, as if pushing his colleague’s sternum and launching him—“a big lad”—into the air. His supervisor watched helplessly as “He got knocked right back off his feet, and onto his backside. And then the doors slammed. Bang!”

Patsy Sorenti, a psychic medium and historian of the Anglo-Saxon period, later asserted that at least some of the disturbances in Gallery 42 were caused by the conversion of the adjacent Medieval Christian Relics Gallery into the Islamic Gallery, spawning a rebellion among its incorporeal keepers, against the living guardians of the museum.

“Whoever was looking after that, whoever was linked to those objects, maybe more than one person, has got the hump, because you swapped Christianity for Islam, and in the Medieval world, in those times, that was the devil. Because you represent the people who work here [you] are responsible. That’s why the doors closed on you, and that’s why your man was thrown. That’s what it is – you’ve replaced Christianity, you have replaced it with something that’s a devil to us. You displaced us for that.”

Sorenti implies that the ideology and worldview of the ghosts who ejected staff from Gallery 42 remains fixed in the paradigms of the Medieval world. Suspended in the prejudices of their time, these spirits are enlisted in a conflict catalysed by one collection displacing another, by their holy objects being put uncomfortably close to those of their enemies.

While curators at colonial museums are afforded the privilege of neglecting the energetic import of the collections that they work with, for the warders, cleaners, and overnight security staff this is not so easily done. As a member of the permanent nights once told me, “You get objects that hold energy, and [people] go with those objects.”²

While curators research, catalogue, and prepare artefacts for exhibition, it is the lower-waged workers who spend the majority of their working hours on the museum floor, closely observing both the displays and visitors. While the museum trustees sleep, insulated from the blowback resulting from their decisions, it is the security, visitor services, and cleaning staff being thrown from, and chased out of galleries on the night shift. Unsurprisingly, the once-airborne warder described above left his position at the museum soon after his encounter.

These occurrences inside the Sutton Hoo Gallery are part of a greater constellation of stories where British Museum workers have been subject to unseen presences whose auras are unmistakably threatening. For instance, alarms are sometimes triggered to lure staff in, only for the spirits to toy with them—to let them know who really holds power inside the museum. These spectral flexes occasionally prompt museum workers to quit or withhold labour.

“There was a time when the cleaners refused to clean the cases in the mummy gallery because the mummies would move,” recalled Jim Peters, a long time Collections Manager. “So they refused. They genuinely believed that the mummies were moving, and refused to go in there. So, the museum had to do something about it, and get different people in.”

What to make of the cleaners’ collective refusal to enter the Upper Egyptian and Sudanese galleries? That a meeting of the broader British Museum staff was held to address this disquietude is testament to the enduring taboo of the exposed corpse, even in colonial and ethnological museums where their display has been naturalised by centuries of presenting bodies—both exhumed and unburied—so publicly. Mr. Peters seemed unconvinced by the museum’s account of the mummies’ alleged movement:

“The fact that the cleaners said they’d seen their wrappings rippling… The museum said, ‘Oh that was just the cleaners over-cleaning the cases! They’d caused a build up of static ‘cause the cases hadn’t been opened for awhile, so it built up the static charge in the air, and it meant things seemed to be moving, but they weren’t really.’ Everyone just went ‘Ahh thanks for explaining that, we can go back to work now…’ But you know, you’d have to be quite close, and they’d have to be quite light fabrics, and you’d have to be really aggressively over-cleaning… I never really bought that, but that was the resolution.”

Here, an ambiguity arises. Is it the aim of the spirits to obstruct the museum’s day-to-day operations, or is this manner of disruption simply the most effective way to declare their presence? If, by a process of deduction, informed by innumerable nights spent on patrol, the warder can find no “rational” cause for an entranceway being closed off or left agape, their mind may well turn towards the many powerful, restless, and unruly presences long held captive by the museum. The agency held in these so-called objects taunts the museum’s order, showing over and again a willingness to sabotage its smooth running, daring those who serve the museum’s interests to police what they can neither touch nor see.

Viewed through the lens of these hauntings, the museum appears as something akin to an object-prison: its hauntings like prison strikes, where cultural entities stage small revolts against their indefinite detention as stolen heritage, and their involuntary collusion in the public glorification of plunder and desecration of the sacred.

Since so many of earth’s sacred structures have been vandalised, dismantled and put on display in museums, perhaps the path to making them whole includes the slow, cumulative closing off of the museum’s arteries night after night—in a kind of ghostly insurgency.

Oral accounts are the substratum where the internal folklore of haunted museums tends to settle. Even the more senior members of staff shy away from filling out written reports of spirit activity, for fear of undermining their own credibility. “We try not to make fools of ourselves if we don’t have to!” one warder explained on behalf of his colleagues. Consequently, many such experiences go unvoiced. A previous director of the museum quashed attempts at collecting its ghost stories for publication, and so these stories are traded on patrol and at the pub, amongst those who know better than to speak dismissively of the “spirits of the place.”

“We was on another patrol, different part of the building. I can’t take you to these ones unfortunately, because it’s in the back of house, in an area they call the old horse stables. It’s primarily an old gallery that no one ever uses anymore, still objects down there, and a bit of a staff area. So I’ve gone up to turn the lights off. As I turn the lights off, it was like; you know when you get like a tingling sensation, like someone’s right behind you? It wasn’t dark at the time. The lights were still on, but it felt like someone…”

Her voice scattered as she sought to convey the feeling of being violated in a makeshift storage space.

“The only way I could perceive it was, someone had put their hand in, and grabbed my spine and sent the biggest chill up my spine… I kind of ignored it, and said to my colleague, ‘that was weird, you can unlock that in the morning. I refuse to go back there.’ He’s a Welshman, he was like, ‘Don’t worry about it, it’s fine, it’s fine…’ He went back in the morning to unlock it, and I followed him. When we got back to the same area again, I got the same chills but he actually had jelly legs as well, for no reason whatsoever… It completely put me off that whole area… It was that feeling of, ‘I’ll get up your back. I want you out my area’, and for him to say that he felt his legs go like jelly […] it even freaked him out, and we just went out of there as quick as you could say ‘boo.’ We were gone. We were gone.”

At the height of the British Empire, beset by rebellions and revolts, the British considered themselves masters of counterinsurgency, but such tactics are toothless against combative spirits. Conflicts that are presented as cooled, hardened and relegated to history books, reawaken nightly in museum corridors and storerooms, in ongoing battles of attrition: if a ghost causes a museum employee to acknowledge their presence, or hastens the worker’s exit from the institution, these may be seen as victories. It may be that their grievances have been felt, if not entirely understood. Or it may well be that divestment from the institution of the museum is precisely the sort of outcome the spirits desire.

Though they may appear anecdotal, dwelling as they do at the precipice of the unspoken, such small victories are many. When I asked one warder if he had the contact information of a woman he was on patrol with years ago, when a disembodied voice spoke to them on the North stairs just after midnight outside of the China and South Asia Gallery, he admitted he wasn’t sure how to get in touch.

“She’s left here a number of years ago now. She was very uneasy. She always felt something in this museum.”

A man tells me that the art world’s present bend toward embracing blockchain and crypto is a train that will leave with or without me on it. There is snideness to his words: that the conductor is about to blow their whistle, previous conductors have already blown their whistles, that this whistle I’m hearing is the last. An ultimatum dressed up as advice. But my impulse is not to get on the train. In fact, I’d rather like to blow it up.

He speaks of NFTs as a form of revolutionary chattel that shifts the balance of power in the art market toward artists, as an expansion in the possibilities of how they can earn money, and thus being an entirely good thing. Everest Pipkin has written on why utopian framings of NFTs—and crypto more broadly—are pernicious: that they obfuscate and impede how we ought to imagine and strategise ways out of existing social inequalities, not to mention the immediate consequences participating has on the climate catastrophe. In the end, crypto-art and NFTs represent the further refining of the ways in which the market already regulates the logic of accumulation and possession under capitalism. There’s not much use arguing against those who want to make money—our conditions of existence dictate that much. To quote the artist Jesse Darling, “The point is the money, not the object. And I’m all for people making money, but let’s not talk about that shit like it’s art.”

Web3, with its grift that users can assert proprietary ownership over a piece of the imagined digital landscape, might calcify a similar logic. If the object of Web3 is to syphon power and influence away from Big Tech, why does it appear that we’re now doing the same thing these companies have always done—carve out and acquire property—only in more fragmented ways touted as “decentralised” and “autonomous”? And, why must we be quick to adapt ourselves to these ‘new’ regimes of accumulation, under the particularly gross metaphor of the internet being a landscape we must conquer? Nothing about these technologies is liberatory or ideologically advanced to the extent of figuring them as the emancipatory tools that they promise to be. Aligning yourself with Web3 and the crypto marketplace is at best a short-term salve. It may feel as though you operate on a piece of land beyond the surveillance of Zuckerberg et.al. You might even make a quick buck. But without advancing the principles of collective bargaining, one risks the creation of another world that exists only in service of private wealth and accumulation. Colonialism and capitalism grow stronger through shifting into forms that trick us into believing what’s happening is their antithesis. The consensus, it appears, is that shaping the world on these terms, in this moral image, is ok.

Ten months have passed since Decolonial Hacker began. We have published nine long-form texts traversing a range of subjects: setting out new principles for governance at MCA Australia, bringing to light how the severance clause operates in the New Museum Union’s contract, and explicating how the relationship between hip-hop and state mediations of culture by the Cuban Rap Agency inscribe a national artistic grammar on the island nation, to name a few.

What began as a project that sought to document a list of structural grievances and misdoings about cultural institutions is slowly moving into a field that is beyond the immediate, obvious purview of the art world. Museums and their fraught working conditions are only a constitutive part of a greater depravity, and our activism and thinking must grapple with this larger reality even if the art world is the reference point we have familiar to us as cultural workers.

In the first months of Decolonial Hacker’s publication period, I had the feeling that a large part of our audience was expecting ‘call outs’ on particular directors and institutions which could easily circulate as industry gossip. I do not wish to indulge this tabloid mentality. It is an insult to the rigour, research, and personal experiences of the authors. If all one can do is read their essays and mine them for scandal, then they have entirely missed the point of how this platform conceives critique, and the type of thinking this platform seeks to advance. To be more direct, we have been concerned—and will continue to be concerned—with what it means to imagine and work toward the annihilation of unjust structures. Yet this work, I have realised, will continue to be framed as scandalous and too radical by some. For instance: before the publication of a particular essay last year, the Australia Council for the Arts—this project’s funding body—was contacted by a museum director who, knowing only that a text was being written about their institution, sought to quash the piece. This went so far as the Federal Government portfolio issuing a ‘please explain’ to the Council, with the substantive question being whether public money had been misappropriated in funding Decolonial Hacker.

I share these anecdotes and arguments to say that there are so many things about ‘culture’ and the industry that mediates it that enrage me. Certainly, I have become less interested in the idea that the art world or its institutions can be reformed. Going forward, I will continue to resist the pressure of Decolonial Hacker becoming a program that is fast, reactionary, and gossip-oriented. I hope that the work done here feels measured, illuminating, and intellectually expansive. This work, however, does not have the man I spoke of earlier in mind. Nor his friends already on the train, the museum director, the Government. They sneer at the stained and battered concrete platform I stand on, yet it remains the vantage point from which I can see the passage of history most clearly. So get on the train, I want to tell them, get on the damn train.“

Dance little asshole dance
oh he gets elected, like a Calvinist
He says, I have these guts
Men, I have these guts.

+ + +

Having dedicated whole
regions to the destruction
you inspire, the
logic will be to go on doing it
doing it. Having proceeded by
the logic
of your per-
sonal vaccuum
you will perceive your continued
lightlessness
as an excuse to go on. having
gone on
as you have. And so one continues.”

From Alice Notley’s, Logic, (2011).

Phonographic recording signalled the first moment in history when humans were able to listen to an event whose present had already passed. These sonic documents were produced during colonial fieldwork in an ‘arrangement’ to “collect as many examples of traditional music as possible, in order to create and follow theories about the origin and evolution of music.”¹ Recorded between 1893 and 1954, the wax cylinders at the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv form part of the world’s most prestigious collection of phonograph recordings.

From its outset in 1900, the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv was closely collaborating with the Museum für Völkerkunde (now the Ethnologisches Museum). The ideological starting point for that institution and its discipline was primarily formed by racial and cultural fallacies like that of evolutionism, which established itself as the most important explanatory principle of ethnology in the 19th century. Western evolutionist theory postulated that people move from primitive to highly developed cultures, producing a subdivision of ethnic groups between ‘civilised peoples’ and so-called endangered ‘primitive peoples’ who were supposed to be rescued by the former. Based on this thesis, research expeditions and the so-called ‘civilising mission’ of colonialism can be derived. In addition to the main ethnographic medium of photography, the documentation of sound was also instrumental in legitimising colonial ideology and its construction of ‘colonial truths’.

After being relocated several times in the early 20th century, the current site of the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv was opened in 1952, within the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin-Dahlem—an affluent suburb south-west of the city centre. In 1999, the collection was inscribed onto the ‘Memory of the World’, a UNESCO register that reifies a predominately European history of heritage.² The Phonogramm-Archiv and its collection of 16,000 wax cylinder recordings will soon move into the infamous Humboldt Forum in Berlin. Concurrently, 20,000 artefacts from the archive’s ‘parent’ institution, the Ethnologisches Museum, will venture into a new permanent exhibition inside the reconstructed Berlin Palace on Museum Island. Though, not all will meet a public fate: nearly half a million objects held by the institution will remain locked up somewhere on the city’s periphery.

Here is a sound in three acts: the life and death of a wax cylinder is excavated from its suspension inside the Phonogramm-Archiv. Orbiting around one immortalised event—a field recording of the Balinese chant Kecak made by Dutch ‘ethnomusicologist’ Jaap Kunst—we examine the granularities of sound to disrupt the object’s authorship and entangle it with a decolonial methodology. Gazing into the interstices of silence and noise, we shift our attention beyond the wax cylinder’s recording of Kecak and onto the entirety of its recorded event. Through the processes of recording and listening to the sound of history, a project of sonic divergence emerges.

1.0 Recording

Phonographic recording transfers sound onto the surface of an object. Technically, this recording method is the most direct means of transferring sound onto a ‘physical support’ to ensure that its trace is reproducible. Sound can thus be propagated onto a variety of materials: metal, wood, liquid, string, or wax, for example. The choice of surface is key in the determination of the recording’s sound quality and tonal characteristics. The first ever phonographic recording was made with ink, whereby sound was marked onto a sheet of paper by a vibrating needle. This was, however, more of a visual representation of sound as it could not be played back. Decades later, wax quickly became a popular medium for the widespread dissemination of sound when the first commercial model of Thomas Edison’s phonograph was made available to a public audience in 1888.³ In the ‘cutting’ of a recording, a stylus inscribes grooves onto the wax cylinder’s surface as a visible transcription of the event. This method allows minimal obstruction between the vibrations of air into the phonograph’s ‘diaphragm’ and the stylus’ marking onto the wax surface. The process aims to produce the fewest possible interferences between the event recorded and its material trace. These vibrations carved onto a wax cylinder are rendered into marks that an event may leave—of both their preservation and transformation into something else. Though, the cylinder’s recording might be better understood as an entirely new event, one unlike the ‘original’ as a result of its transformation.

These ‘markings’ of sound reproduced onto the wax cylinder also have a tendency to disappear from the surface if listened to too many times. In fact, the quality and preservation of this object depends precisely on how much it is used: the more you replay it, the more it abrades. In order to ‘save’ the wax cylinder, the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv has entered into a game of (im)mortality in its method of reproduction: the so-called ‘galvano-plastic’ process made it possible to produce a negative form of the wax cylinder from copper. Through a process of galvanization, the object is coated in a conductive material and slowly rotated whilst suspended inside a copper plating solution. The speed of its rotations increase, and its charged shell thickens. However, as the copper particles attract and form a negative mold, the seventeen hour-long procedure inevitably results in the destruction of the positive form.

In the museum and archive, the original stops living. The wax cylinder knows this all too well.

Towards the end of the 20th century, the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv began a tedious process of digitizing its collection of wax cylinders. Transferring the ‘best’ reproductions or still-intact originals onto DAT cassettes, the archive’s digitization has served to revive each cylinder’s event an infinite number of times. However, this process produces further divergence.

During the wax cylinder’s transposition from analog to digital, an archivist must set the correct speed of revolution in order for the most accurate sound to be copied over. The Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv diverged from a commercial recording norm of 160 revolutions per minute (rpm), and would copy a wider range between 75 and 250. The preferred method to set the recording speed is via a pre-recorded reference tone of 435 Hz.⁴ However, half of the Phonogramm-Archiv’s collection is missing such a tone, so other reference points for establishing the original rpm have been sought out: transcribed notations, metronome markings, and collector’s statements heard at the start or end of a recording.⁵ Another common method has, at times, involved archivists themselves:

“A rough setting can be attained through indications in the documentation about the performers and the instruments that are used. However, the assessment becomes difficult in those cases where the recording is of a music culture one is not familiar with.”⁶

An archivist unfamiliar with the challenges of digitising a wax cylinder may, accidentally, create incidental sonic debris, such as inflections of tone and pitch that diverge the original’s recording. The re-production of histories beyond the Phonogramm-Archiv’s understanding or experience is left to the institution’s archivist who risks disrupting and creating further distance to the event during the process of digitisation.⁷ As two opposing technologies reckon with each other, the cylinder’s reality is translated from a physical inscription to a binary code of 0s and 1s.

During a digital sound recording, the membrane of a microphone vibrates as sound waves are received. This vibration is then transformed into an electrical impulse, interpreted by converters as binary code. The output of this process is not the sound we hear, but a very faithful imitation of an event that has been recorded. The analog recording impresses the vibration of air onto the physical surface and, while playing it back, re-stages the same vibration. By contrast, the digital recording adjudicates what is a ‘signal’ from what is ‘noise’, removing everything considered error or inaccuracy to keep the sound ‘clean’.

The phonograph’s recording—by precisely inscribing that sound wave—‘stops’ a moment in time, and with it acquires all the imprecision of its own temporality and technique. Whilst analog recording engraves the moment, its digital successor imitates it: an approximation of the original event.

A distinction between that which is analog and that which is digital: wax cylinder recordings are noted for having strong background noise. Such noises represent an inseparable part of the wax cylinder’s intention: to mark the metaphorical distance between listeners and the time-space where the recording was first produced.

To produce the possibilities of listening to an event again and again, the Phonogramm-Archiv attempts to immortalise the life of the wax cylinder. During the process, however, we diverge further from the story of its original, mechanical capture. Revolutions may falter under their own weight of change.

2.0 Listening

Today, the Phonogramm-Archiv’s collection of wax cylinders reside in an annex of the Ethnologisches Museum in Dahlem, a building constructed in the style of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) during an expansion in 1973. Before entering the building, we register ourselves with a security guard and await the arrival of the collection’s archivist. Brought through catacomb-like corridors, doors of mountainous weight and stairwells painted white with pale green lacquered handrails, we arrive at the resting place of Jaap Kunst’s wax cylinder.

Not dissimilar to other institutions, the depot we found ourselves in is an environment of conditioned circumstances. It has a temperature of nineteen degrees celsius and a relative humidity of fifty percent, a syncopated soundtrack of humming neon lights and murmurs from an air conditioner, all of which when taken together attempt to mimic a neutral space. Here, in this performatively coy room are musical instruments from gamelan orchestras, whose only emitted sounds are those of silence. Originating from the Southeast Asian islands of Bali and Java, these instruments are accustomed to a climate of high temperatures and humidity. Their primary functions were spiritual: to be played at religious rituals and ceremonies, as well as traditional performances. Now, however, the ensemble is attuned to a spiritual decay—conservational poison is used to ‘preserve’ their function for archival purposes only—inside storage within the depot of Berlin’s Ethnologisches Museum.

Neighboring the gamelan storage room, the first audio recording of a Balinese Sanghyang resides here. An inventory of empty, ‘silent’ wax cylinders necessary to capture this event had been allocated to Kunst by the Phonogramm-Archiv’s then-director Erich von Hornbostel in exchange for his act of sonic collecting. These cylinders embarked on an extended journey—from Berlin to the Sunda Islands and back—as Kunst went on to produce 300 or more recordings on his trips to Indonesia, documenting musical performances and rituals. We seek arrangements for listening to this performance, and attempt to move as close to its recorded event as the wax cylinder allows.

Inside the Phonogramm-Archiv, the room we’re in is just large enough for three. Monochrome, ethnographic photographs from a non-European continent decorate otherwise plain walls, while drawers are labeled by geography: ‘Afrika’, ‘Asien’, ‘Amerika’ and ‘Ozeanien’. On the table we’re led towards, a Hi-Fi receiver is connected to a pair of speakers and a myriad of playback devices for a variety of mediums—vinyl records, magnetic tape, analog audio cassettes and compact discs. We immerse ourselves into Kunst’s recording of the Kecak via the wax cylinder’s digitized successor, a DAT cassette tape.

Every transferred sound begins with a short, customary introduction which signposts from which cylinder and collection the listener is about to hear:

Additional materials of correspondence, provenance and consignment accompany the phonographic recording. Yellowed papers of different grammage, typesets, handwriting and signatures compose together what feel and appear as the past breaking into the present. A watermark shines through one prominent sheet: a mark which signifies the longing of its maker, towards the distant islands the sounds of these cylinders were first captured on. Another sheet of paper reveals terse descriptions of all fifteen wax cylinders recorded by Kunst in Bali:

It remains uncertain who exactly wrote these descriptions. Scribed in German, the curators of the archive assure us that both the director of the Phonogramm-Archiv at the time Erich Moritz von Hornbostel and his colleague Curt Sachs were diligent in avoiding disrespectful formulations. Whoever it was, these words reprise another compression of the actual acoustic event.

Confined to this room at the Phonogramm-Archiv, one’s listening to Kecak is directly produced by the archive’s prefigured auras of hospitality and hostility: the latter feeling affected through the bureaucracies a visitor must face to be given permission to access the collection’s hold. Given the inability to revisit the recording’s original event, any act of listening to its field recording will forever reanimate the conditions in which a colonial gaze captured it. Though, in this space of re-listening, the hands of coloniality and premature technology are easily forgotten. The field recording we listen to operates not only as a narrow range of frequencies, but narrow-minded vectors of power: it comes to represent a recording of an assumed, objective reality. The DAT cassette dislocates the event of Kecak and echoes its sound further away. Is there room for narrative to diverge inside the Phonogramm-Archiv?

3.0 Diverging

In recent years, the act of listening to the wax cylinder had been temporarily transposed outside of the Phonogramm-Archiv listening room—though this public display was only down the corridor.⁸

 In 2013, as part of the Humboldt Lab Dahlem programme the exhibition Seeing Music: Lichtklangphonogramm transformed the optical and mechanical characteristics of the archive’s wax cylinder collection, producing novel installations that facilitated an alternate perception of listening. The artists behind the exhibition—Melissa Cruz Garcia, Aleksander Kolkowski, Matteo Marangoni and Anne Wellmer—produced a mixture of site-specific installations: magic lanterns that visualised a cylinder’s textural grooves, self-made ‘gramoscopes’ that hacked a gramophone’s tunnel by transforming it into a projector of light and image, and a multi-body listening booth of selected recordings from collection. Described as an artistic treatment of ethnographic material, the artists facilitated an ocular engagement with an event originally recorded as something purely sonic.⁹ When asked about the exhibition’s potential to inform the Humboldt Forum’s unconfirmed future display of wax cylinders, Ethnologisches Museum director Lars-Christian Koch appeared skeptical of the presence of artistic intervention within this space:

“As an ethnological museum, we have an educational mission. We are not an art museum. If we want to seriously convey what other music cultures are like, how they treat sound in their processes, how they shape sound, then the question is, how much art or artistic design we require to optimize this conveyance.”¹⁰

‍Koch’s hesitancy to open up room for such narratives in the space of the Humboldt Forum is unsurprising given the long-standing aversion between ethnographer and artist.¹¹

 His intention to ‘optimize’ artistic interpretation neglects the reality that both the music and cultures recorded were done so on the aforementioned colonial terms. Silencing the noise contained in these field recordings omits its glaring context from the museum’s “educational mission”, not too distant from a former ‘civilising mission’. If Seeing Music’s artistic intervention of re-interpreting the wax cylinder is not welcome at the Humboldt Forum, another means of listening must be sought out beyond the confines of the listening room. By decentering the diegetic sound of Kecak heard within this particular wax cylinder, we turn instead towards the recording’s incidental, underscored noise to listen to its other realities that were present at the time of recording. 

Our ears hone in: the Dutch colonial rule of Bali began in 1849 and reached full control after two puputans (mass suicides) by the royal houses of Badung and Klungkung, in 1906 and 1908 respectively. At this juncture, a cultural policy known as Baliseering (Balinisation) was enforced to prohibit the ‘modernisation’ of Bali and maintain it as a ‘living museum’. Such realities were inaudible, beyond sound and the Phonogramm-Archiv’s collection, and stand to be heard in the noise of Jaap Kunst’s recording.

In More Brilliant than the Sun (1998), artist and theorist Kodwo Eshun advocates for a methodology that enables another kind of listening. Eshun’s alignment of Afrofuturist frequencies with jazz, breakbeat, as well early techno productions, drove him to propose a means of listening to artistic compositions outside that of Western theory and its canonical methods of analysis. Instead, he carves out an idiosyncratic guidebook for “dense personal narrations of imaginations” that emphasises an auditory experience’s material output: vinyl grooves, record sleeves and liner notes included.¹²

Sound artist Pedro Oliveira has framed sonic fiction’s potential through its ability to voice previously unheard stories, to modify the perception of sound and its effect/affect, in ways that are as much political as they are aesthetic.¹³ He writes: 

“Eshun’s sonic fictions are…a means by which the subaltern speak, sound, and unfold their knowledge as theory and culture. Sonic fictions are the proposal for a radical divorce from so-called universal (metropolitan and/or Eurocentric) theories of musicology and social and cultural studies, to make room for other systems to claim their space.”15

Utilising Eshun’s methodology of sonic fiction onto the colonial artefacts in the Phonogramm-Archiv comes highly charged, however. We must first decouple artistry from artefact, renouncing Jaap Kunst—and any field recordist complicit in the archive’s creation—from the role of artist in their production of the wax cylinder’s recording. Doing so allows us to listen with the noise and not with its producer: a reminder of the place and context through which the cylinder was first inscribed, a reminder of the spatial and temporal distance between listener and event—the listening room and Bali. In other words, we decenter the ethnographer as producer and compose a means of listening beyond their control.

A step further, our interest in sonic fiction is woven and informed by Saidiya Hartman’s notion of ‘critical fabulation’: a discursive practice that deals with representing what the archive deliberately omits. In Hartman’s essay Venus in Two Acts (2008), she attempts to tell an impossible story: the account of an enslaved young girl, brutally killed whilst captive on a British slave ship. The personhood of Venus, named only once in the legal documents from the trials that followed, emerges at the very limits of the archive. Hartman’s writing is at times autobiographical, leaning into a similar empiricism to that of Eshun’s sonic fiction that reveals her authorship in (parallel to) the story of Venus. As much a counter-history as it is critical theory, Hartman welds the gaps between silence and noise. In our own undertaking, such gaps—marked between Jaap Kunst’s original recording of Kecak onto a wax cylinder and our own act of listening today—establish an opportunity to compose a historical narrative counter to that which was originally inscribed.

Woven together, a sonic fabulation is one that must tell one of many impossible stories contained within the Phonogramm-Archiv. To displace Jaap Kunst’s gaze and mediation, we drum up another imaginary. Widening the aperture for analysis beyond soundwaves alone, a sonic fabulation of the wax cylinder and other, similar objects departs from the depot and listens with the yellowed documents left behind, the broken wax seals of colonial correspondence, and the haphazard commentary made by archivists which are bundled up with preserved recordings. With each act of sonic fabulation, the wax cylinder’s suspension inside the archive might then be slowly loosened.

To tell a story ‘against’ the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv, as Saidiya Hartman might say, is to tell a story of the wax cylinder’s sonic debris. What was once consequential, the unintended and immovable residue of its mechanical recording, is felt out differently as a sense-making tool for critical ways of interpreting the sonic artefact. Turning directly towards this space in between silence and noise, other subjects for listening emerge.

Throughout the wax cylinder’s unstable course of living, revolutions may result in death. At a rate somewhere between 80 and 250 per minute, their divergence narrates its own story.

The rickshaw was brought to India in 1880. Men hefted the bulky iron frame onto their shoulders to transport passengers across the streets of Kolkata, moving slowly even as they ran beside horse-drawn carriages. The rickshaw was once normalized and invisible, but now it is a subject of history: in cinemas, calendars, hoardings, ministry brochures, museums and amateur photographs.

The rickshaw is an emblem of Kolkata. Every few years, a moral outrage threatens to relegate the fragile vehicle to the scrap yard—did it not represent indentured labour under the Raj?

The reformed rickshaw—a three-wheeled cycle attached to a two-seater—has replaced most of the hand-pulled rickshaws across the city. More recent reforms are ‘greener’ and ‘smarter’ tuk-tuks or e-rickshaws, all fibreglass and battery-powered, strengthened to ply pockmarked streets. These have been gradually installed in rich residential areas or in potential ‘smart cities’—areas that have been modernized through ubiquitous technological installations, all geared towards the collection of data and its optimization. Kasba and Rajarhat, once populated by labourers from Tangra’s tanneries and working-class farmers of Sonarpur, is now home to a flailing logistics/IT sector. With the e-rickshaw and the tuk-tuk, this informal, union-led, unorganized labour sector has entered the automobile market.

Each rickshawwallah is now a driver with their own unique biometric identification. But the rickshaws are expensive and the batteries require yearly replacement; most manual rickshaw workers cannot afford such an investment. With this excuse, ride-sharing apps like Ola and Uber have been acting as third-party suppliers of vehicles, leasing them to drivers on the condition that monthly payments are made. The old communist vanguard wanted to phase out the vehicle but the current Trinamool Congress never promised the same. As plans for development become election promises, only some manual rickshaws are replaced for e-rickshaws, producing a technological transformation so piecemeal it appears as ornamentation.

Elsewhere, the rickshaw returns to the trappings of an object. An acrylic painted skeletal form adorns the exterior of a gallery and studio in Hindustan Park, right next to a quaint café. The café, too, boasts of artistry and the beauty of accidental heirlooms—its interiors are cobbled together with odds and ends to achieve curated asymmetry. Rusted pipes, old turquoise mosaic tiles as tables, small mirrors and scarves, coloured sockets, each square inch a frame. Next to each other, the two buildings signal towards kitsch, and through that mingling, fragments of a history and legacy.

I always meet my friends at these cafes, my friends, all of whom belong to the arts and the academy, who remind me that the coffee is good here. When one such café is teeming with people, we walk for a minute and find another just like it—a café retaining the structure of the house that came before it, hollowed out of its inhabitants and filled with dimming light, its green venetian windows part of the decor. Seated, we see others just like us—students, early career researchers, old professors and teachers, publishers, the upwardly mobile office-going crowd. The longer you spend in a city, the easier it is to recognize the contours and shape of a class in a single individual. We wonder why the old return to this city to settle down, we pontificate about the allure of the language and the transport. ‘What is it about Kolkata that every inhabitant claims a stake in this cultural and regional pride?’

Sometimes, we eavesdrop, and something of this practiced regionalism creeps into our gossip. We point and say: these people are the business class, these are the non-Bengalis. We point at the handpicked books and say, wouldn’t our friends love to read this?

1.0 The Gentrification of Heritage: Calcutta Architectural Legacies Project

Since 2016, the citizen-led initiative, the Calcutta Architectural Legacies Project (CAL) has aimed to protect and preserve a particular artifact: the old residential houses of the eighteenth and nineteenth century—constructed by ‘anonymous builders and masons’—just as Calcutta gazed upon the allure of modern cosmopolitanism. The houses lining the streets of Bakulbagan, Hindustan Park, Kidderpore, Paddapukur, Bhowanipore, Ballygunj and others present a unique legacy and heritage, a ‘jumble’ and a ‘jugaad’ of architectural styles instead of a discernible characteristic¹. Unlike other public work initiatives, like the People’s United for Better Living In Calcutta (PUBLIC) or Kolkata Environment Improvement Project (KEIP), the CAL has focused on art and architecture and held court in influential venues².

Officially, the protection and preservation of heritage sites depends upon mandated state and central governmental bodies. A plot of land containing a town, a monument old enough to confer religious significance, a place of birth and death, or an object of historical or social weight can be classified within three tiers of priority and then verified. In the state, the West Bengal Heritage Commission can verify claims or classify cultural artifacts as heritage, pass laws to protect it from sale, redevelopment or vandalism and even nominate it to be classified as a UNESCO World Heritage site, conferring further protective measures.

Bengal also has a host of other museums and libraries, most of them established as part of the colonial civilizing mission which have their own, fraught, curatorial practices³. On a national scale, the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP), a right-wing conservative government in power for the last eight years, have spearheaded the Heritage City Development and Augmentation Yojana (HRIDAY) in 2015, bringing twelve cities into its fold to celebrate their particular religious and cultural import. These projects arrive on the heels of the UNESCO recommendation to preserve Historic Urban Landscapes in 2011.

Alongside these projects, CAL demands legislative reform to reclassify the heritage of the city itself, framing the view of the street (viewed from the ground) as a unique aesthetic experience—much like the High Streets Heritage Action Zones in London or the Berlin Modernism Housing Estates.

The most plausible reason for CAL’s small modicum of success can be ascribed to the description of a particular antagonist: the real estate market. CAL reports that the real estate market has been bulldozing these heritage houses of the city for larger housing projects or town planning, sometimes with the consent of the ignorant owner, and sometimes coercively with the help of local party officials. CAL suggests that properties sold to real estate agents be exchanged through a transfer of property rights, transforming land value to architectural value. New homes, hotels, cafes, stores, and even gyms could then be established within the pre-existing structure once it has been sold. The boutique stores and cafes I describe lining Hindustan Park have changed hands in this manner—although many similar properties are currently being delisted and auctioned off to the highest bidder. The success I mention is relative and contextual.

But history is fickle in the hands of a country; success is always relative, prelude to a riot, swaying like a flag⁴. Once history has been claimed, it can be demolished; once law changes hands (as it so often does), another past can be revived, a temple built, a power wielded. What permanence and protection can ‘heritage’ claim after the demolition of Babri Masjid on 6 December, 1992? What does law and legislative reform count for when the construction of a Ram temple can begin during a pandemic (in August 2020) built over the same site that was systematically razed?

In his essay, ‘The Cult of Monuments’, Alois Reigl states that all cultural artifacts are identified and cared for on the basis of three distinctive memory values: a commemorative value, a historic value or an age value, although these values are often derived in combination or exclusion⁵. Commemorative value is deliberate and functional; the artifact working as a mnemonic device, such as a memorial site or tomb. Historic value represents something fundamental in the development of the human, and the artifact demands perpetuity and timelessness. Age value, however, is the delight in ruins: in change and material dissolution. In this frame, cultural artifacts like the aforementioned residences of Calcutta represent humanistic development whose conservation confers a historic value upon their material fabric(s). This is the history of the bhadralok within an urban cosmopolitanism, the dream of internationalism instead of the globalization we have been saddled with.

But memory is a ghost, a spectre, an abstraction. As art, architecture conspires with memory. The heart of the CAL project is neither art nor architecture but home. The home is peopled, roomed, ‘in the shape of a life grown old’⁶. The memory may be singular, but the home never remains static or uniform. The citizen in the shade of this conservationist project is the propertied, the homeowner. Each monumental memory holds renovation and dispossession. In the writings of Amit Chaudhuri—the mascot of the CAL project—Reigl’s age value is distinctly idealized, and his dismay about ‘gentrification and boutiquification’ appears to privilege a less interventional conservational practice, akin to how one would treat the maintenance of a loved home.

Moreover, age value is pronounced in Chaudhuri’s idea of modernity, an age already past. This modernity is aestheticized, explained as ‘born with the aura of inherited decay and life’⁷. Elsewhere, he claims that ‘urban dereliction can be beautiful’⁸. This is the modernity that Partha Chatterjee will call ‘ours’ as an ambiguous response to the colonial project⁹. The CAL project desires to remember it, hopefully without nostalgia.

This is different from the historic value sought by the large-scale project of HRIDAY. These sites belong entirely to the past, painted a specific saffron, dotted across the country in many smaller ancient cities like Varanasi or Ayodhya. Varanasi, for example, is a city revered as the locus of many Hindu myths; its ghats on the river Ganga, in particular, are a pilgrimage site and a ritual cremation ground. In 2014 and 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi campaigned (and won) his parliamentary seat from the banks of Varanasi. HRIDAY too is concerned with modernity, albeit one where history is made mappable, accessible, even mutable. Here, the guarantee of a networked Brahminical Hindu tradition hopes to make urban migration a pilgrimage¹⁰.

Despite varying conceptions of modernity, the citizen’s institution and the national(ist) project go through the same processes, the same courts of legality and the same markets of the iconic/exotic, as they move from one local listing to an international one. In the manner in which it exists, heritage only obscures its fetishistic character. CAL’s attempt to revive the urban through the moral imperative of law will always produce gentrification, the congealing of a history into a flavour or character, producing a modernity that fits into the embedded and simultaneously exhibited.

2.0 Urban Planning via Techno-capitalism

The post-Independence Kolkata city has never attained the same fervent activity it did under the British. Some blame it on lack of colonial resources, some mourn the partition, some bemoan the flight of capital after the Naxalbari riots, some claim that the Bengali bhadralok (much less the working man) is inherently incapable of collecting rents or doing ‘business’, some claim deindustrialization or fragmented proletarization and underdevelopment, some still say that the central government has crippled it with debt. The city throngs with a sense of injustice so double-edged it becomes cinematic: streets named after the auteurs of social realism, walls thick with blazoning bills against capitalism. Origins are doubted: did the thirty-year-long communist government capitalize on this sense of victimization or did it produce it, with our contemporary still carrying the stench?

The city continues, metro line stretching into the semi-urban through demolition—inhabitants promised relocation/inadequate compensations—for the flashier development of profitable enterprises. Along the stretching eight-lane Eastern Metropolitan Bypass, several starred hotels build floating swimming pools and restaurants, while above it extends the 9.2 kilometre long Maa flyover (opened up in 2019) and the proposed stanchions of the Chingrighata flyover, bypassing environmental concerns about damaging the ecosystem like it had in the 1980s to build Salt Lake City. Land grabs in the present economy derive legitimacy from colonial laws that destroyed the wetlands—the ‘organic’ classified as the ‘public’ or ‘government owned.’ Ecological crisis is regarded as opportunity.

Despite Kolkata’s chief minister, Mamata Banerjee, championing a ‘greener’ city, efforts have moved in a singular fashion towards technological and financial transformation. Locales like Kasba, Ballygunj, Rashbehari Road, Tollygunj, and Hindustan Parkare are outfitted with fibre optic cables—CCTVs and drone technology gaze upon the debris of residential skyscrapers, and rampant investment and freedom has been accorded to logistical companies (data mining and analytics, fintech, blockchain),cybersecurity and cybernetic development (facial tech, e-governance, etc.).

Smart city development and e-governance measures tend to materialize slowly and unevenly across high density areas of interconnection, lacking the necessary infrastructural stability to build on disparate topologies¹¹. Outfitting with ubiquitous tech or the Internet of Things (IoT) makes a city unable to shift and adapt over time or space, producing dissimilitude and dissonance, warranting (corporate) mediation.
When a city is established over the old co-operative or public land, everything becomes privatized. The tenders of roads and rails float on the internet only to enable the supply chains of e-commerce—enabled by the situational information produced within a smart city—as informal labour and the local kirana store become obsolete. The embedding of technologies in the smart city begins to make the spaces visible to the structures of control, whether social or technical, while producing a growing surveillance industry¹².

A smart city is likely to capture and collect on pre-existing infrastructure as well as pre-existing epistemes. As the city renders itself visible on remote sensing and spatial technologies, the by-lanes grow narrower and busier. The old can seamlessly meld into the new in already connected areas, even in the old residential areas, traversable only by pedestrians and smaller vehicles.

Follow the rickshaw outside Howrah and the ports, where children of the peripheries blacken their lungs on the lithium of dead batteries deposited on electronic waste piles. Follow the rickshaw, from the raided union to the co-opted union, from mobility to iconicity, from the environmental concern to the technological development, and you will find the character of a city petrified against a homely wall.

Six years ago, a friend and I walked through the streets of South Kolkata, exploring a neighbourhood I had just moved into. We walked up to sleepy shop-owners and peered through gates, asking for directions like it were a field exercise in intellectual rigour.

‘What street are we on?’ he would say, and I would follow that up with a perplexing, ‘How far does it go?’

In a derelict park overlooking three old houses, we collated our findings. There were many discrepancies: our memory of the street did not match the address painted on shop fronts or embossed on nameplates of new houses. The distance between one street and another was longer Google maps than the quick ‘take-a-left’ explanations from the locals we encountered. There were new structures where streets were supposed to end and dead-ends at bus-stops. We stopped once we were tired, convinced that we did not know where the truth began or where it was imposed by force, giving ourselves over to a rickshawwallah to take us home.

The Calcutta Architectural Legacies project seemed to creep alongside us, claiming this slatted window and that circular verandah as part of a protected culture, a visual archive. Old bare-bodied men peered out to remind us of generations of propertied wealth, porches decorated with plants threatening the footpath. But the city was new, too, crowded and teeming, full of poor migrants from Bihar, Jharkhand, the Northeast, even Nepal or Tibet, speaking a language they were yet to entirely learn. Some slept under bridges and set up stalls on the footpaths as they waited and jostled for citizenship. While setting up the apartment, I watched an old municipal worker set up a home across the street, complete with a mattress and a mosquito net on the porch of an old residence built in the nineteenth century. Now, drones and surveillance cameras begin to take over the airspace, anti-homeless infrastructure covers the land, especially after whispers of bad hygiene and poverty threaten upperclass demographics. The parks and public infrastructure that were once meant for loitering become gated and ticketed, sites of cultural influence or heritage.

I don’t know how to mourn a city that I never saw, the city that Calcutta Architectural Legacies wishes to protect through legislative reform, regulations and ticket prices. But I do know space is privatized with every building that becomes listed for protection. There’s no reason for this to happen. In large parts of Europe, the Alternative Spaces Movement was rooted in the idea of the commons, squatting and informal housing, housing rights, where the home is a ‘site of cooperation, emancipation, and self-organization.’

But the heritage project tends towards reform, towards politics, towards investment and development and all that comes murkily dragged through the newly-fitted pipes. Insofar as it compromises towards preservation, law, colonial and bourgeois legacy, globalization and the very capital it antagonizes—it eschews the radical potential of what inspired it. It gives up on a robust social landscape of housing rights and a freedom of movement to replace it with a building; it gives up on the land we know for the icons we strain to remember.

Urbanization is a never-ending process, and we continue, variations on the city’s history calcifying into listed properties. We hang frames on all the walls. We gasp in transgressive pleasure at the artistry of it all.

Defining culture in ideological terms can itself reflect a preoccupation with economies on the margins, as Cuban state actors tend to emphasize. But despite its political valence, Cuba’s investment in hip-hop culture is best seen as a reflection of the government’s multifront response to an increasingly globalized media environment—one at odds with the state’s residual and seemingly anachronistic socialism. The very existence of the Rap Agency thus raises questions about culture’s ability to sustain an institutional program within a “revolutionary” framework. In light of hip-hop’s increasingly dominant orientation in global culture, how does rap coincide with the language of liberation?

Cuba’s decades-long effort to “re-invent situations” by reshaping hip-hop in the country’s self-image calls to mind an idiosyncratic attempt to reintroduce the genre to its apparently revolutionary roots. The Cuban party-state has guided this process by a consciously layered and ironically-inverted means of détournement. This is to say that Cuba’s cultural efforts—enshrined in the Rap Agency—embody the way forms shaped by global capital, like rap, are re-examined and (re-)redefined as counterculture. That this intervention has been mediated by the state alone makes it, like much else about Cuba, unique. Ultimately, the kinds of cultural processes that define the island nation provide avenues for approaching alternate models of association and cultural participation at social margins.

In March 2007, the journalist Dalia Acosta declared hip-hop in Cuba dead by scholarly consensus. Reflecting on the findings of a study sponsored by the University of Havana, Acosta wrote that hip-hop was “struggling to survive in a country where it lacks performance venues, receives only weak institutional support, and has to compete with more commercial music styles,” namely its younger sibling rival reggaetón. In the article—aptly titled “Hip-hop is out, but Rap is Definitely Cool”—Acosta further quoted an anonymous musicologist from the state-run Cuban Institute of Music (ICM), who said, “I think […] the hip-hop movement is on the wane, perhaps because it has already fulfilled its social function, or because its historical time is over.”

The musicologist’s sentiments are reflective of a distinctly Cuban concern with political memory and social utility, all in the face of uncertainty. This is especially so, considering the then-recent end of economic troubles (amid a thaw in Cuban-Russian relations) as well as Cuba’s political leadership changes, initiated by Fidel Castro’s retirement announcement the year before. But, with hindsight, the statement is no less jarring—even ironic—given that, mere months later, Acosta wrote another article documenting the sheer diversity of Havana’s underground rap scene.

In this article, conversely titled “Rap Calls for ‘Revolution Within the Revolution’,” Acosta quotes a long-time hip-hop artist named Afro Velásquez, who says, “Our dream is to sign a contract with a foreign record company … But the most radical, the most orthodox, don’t want to be bound to any recording company.”

That Velásquez would use the words “radical” and “orthodox” in such a pointed way evinces the curious and seemingly contradictory position in which Cuban society finds itself. In Cuba, to be called socially orthodox—a term that, anywhere else, might imply conservatism—here reflects one’s commitment to the revolution. To be called radical means the same thing.

While some underground artists profiled in Acosta’s later article maintained their independence from—or even defiance of—state authority, they nonetheless all framed their music in revolutionary terms that mirror the state’s ideological language. One artist, allegedly detained by police for his outspoken lyrics, plainly spoke of a desire to see the country “revolutionize the political sphere and the minds of the people.” His words read like something out of Che Guevara’s diaries: Motorcycle, Congo, Bolivian.

Two years after Acosta’s articles, Catherine Jheon profiled the director of the Cuban Rap Agency, Susana García Amaros, in an article for The Toronto Star titled “Hip-Hop, Cuba’s New Revolution.” In the article, García was careful to praise the involvement of state authorities as crucial to the wider visibility of Cuba’s burgeoning hip-hop culture. Jheon also interviewed affiliated artists, one of whom likewise affirmed that the Agency had been, in his words, “an important tool for my music and my career.” And so, the inconsistent proposals offered by state sources in both Acosta’s articles and in Jheon’s—wavering between the twin poles of self-importance and blunt recognition of economic reality—suggest that the government’s official statements are at odds with what it is willing to admit in private: When viewed from a purely economic angle, the state’s participation in hip-hop has yielded uneven results. Indeed, Acosta’s earlier article makes clear that many Cuban youth seem more attracted to the “commercial” alternatives offered elsewhere in the circum-Carib world than they are to state-sanctioned rap.

Nonetheless, the varied attitudes to hip-hop shared among both state-aligned and more “apolitical” actors shed light on a reality that exists in spite of the residual Cold War-era stereotypes: Cuba, in fact, does possess a diverse cultural dialog, as well as a changing politics.

The Cuban government’s official position on hip-hop has itself changed. It has softened from the stance of consternation it adopted in the early 1990s—when the state initially rejected the genre as a product of global capitalism’s excesses, or, worse, a counter-revolutionary export—shifting to open embrace by decade’s end. This change, both real and radical, was in no small part due to the profound austerity and cultural conflict that characterized Cuba in the 1990s, during the country’s so-called “Special Period in a Time of Peace.”

Initiated by the dissolution of the Soviet Union—till then, Cuba’s top source of foreign aid and subsidy—the Special Period was defined by a Cuban economy in free-fall. The economic situation greatly exacerbated the degrees of scarcity and social precarity experienced by everyday Cubans, already severe from the longstanding United States-led blockade. These changes forced the Cuban state to quickly “pivot to culture” in the face of an unprecedented and rapidly changing geopolitical situation. Equally important, the Special Period fostered burgeoning underground economies that trafficked not only in physical goods, but ideological imports from abroad. Fittingly, hip-hop came to Cuba by these very accidents of globalization—literally smuggled in, as the story goes, in the form of a twelve-inch copy of Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight.”

In any sense, by the time of the Special Period, the island was already culturally primed for the genre’s arrival. In a 2002 report on race and identity in Cuba by the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), Margot Olavarria writes evocatively of the moment:

Half an hour’s drive east of Havana is the suburb of Alamar, home to 300,000 Cubans … It was here that in the 1980s, young residents would construct antennas to put out on their balconies to capture the sounds of “la Mona,” R&B and rap music from Miami radio stations WEDR 99 Jams and WHQT Hot 105. That is how the sounds of U.S. hip-hop arrived … Young, mostly black Cuban men adopted the genre, first by imitating it and eventually infusing it with their own roots and reality, transforming it into a space for self-expression that both reflects and constitutes their identity.

In light of this chronology, it can be said that moments of upheaval like the Special Period cast a particularly strong shadow: against Cuba and the kind of complex sociocultural gestures that allowed for rap to emerge on the island. In this way, Ariel Fernandez, an editor of the Rap Agency’s magazine, Movimiento, points out that rap became first and foremost the “natural language” through which Cuban discontents—often young people born well after the revolution—could feel comfortable voicing social criticisms within a shared idiom constituting “constructive” personal-political narratives.

This phenomenon naturally evolved with a distinctly Cuban flavor of incorporation and cultural perseverance. Even before hip-hop, much of Cuba’s widely-exported popular music reflected the kind of assimilative, “melting-pot” tendencies possible at diverse cultural margins. In a 1999 feature in the Village Voice titled “La Revolución Embraces Hip Hop, with Fidel’s Blessing,” Danny Hoch argues that Cuban rumba—a genre derived from combining Africanized rhythms and instruments with a distinctly Afro-Hispanic orality and featuring storytelling and chanted rhyming—was “arguably … the first rap in the Americas, far predating Jamaican toasting.” As Fernandez himself puts it, the “transfer of culture” manifested by rap’s emergence in Cuba suggests “not a ‘phenomenon that fell out of the sky’,” but, rather, reflects residual cultural conventions of assimilation that have always been present on the island.

Thus, understanding Cuban hip-hop as a reflection of national subjectivity provides one key to which the seemingly paradoxical nature of the country’s current climate may be unlocked. In this sense, Afro-Cuban hip-hop affirms a national narrative, solidifying a broader countercultural offensive against globalhegemonies, those from los Yanquis or otherwise. In this social sense, Cuban hip-hop succeeds: by deconstructing, inverting, and reinvigorating forms inherited from elsewhere in the Black Atlantic, like hip-hop. Recalling the words of Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman—whose 1956 essay “A User Guide to Détournement” seemed to foreshadow and speak to the very soul of Cuban revolutionary aspiration—such

Détournement not only leads to the discovery of new aspects of talent; in addition, clashing head-on with all social and legal conventions, it cannot fail to be a powerful cultural weapon in the service of a real class struggle … It is a real means of proletarian artistic education, the first step toward a literary communism. Some observers, like the sociologist Sujatha Fernandes, have commented on the Cuban government’s “co-option” of hip-hop. It is more accurate to say that, rather than being appropriated, rap has been détourned by the state, re-contextualized to express a view culturally consistent with some elements of ideology.

That state organs like Cuba’s Ministry of Culture and its Rap Agency would be explicitly involved in such a process at all, though, ironically inverts Debord and Wolman’s definition of détournement, who likely wrote their essay with revolutionary artists in mind. That the state literally “discovers new aspects of talent”—rappers—and in turn markets and promotes their work, further shows the extent to which it draws identities closer, to one another and to itself.

In this way, Cuban hip-hop is both radical and reactive. It furthermore explains the use of revolutionary themes and language by some Cuban hip-hop artists, even those critical of the government. In Acosta’s second article, one artist even claims to have named his latest album Revolution within the Revolution. When discussed in popular sources, Cuban rap—like many things associated with the island—seems to invariably present a spectrous political prism. It is one through which others can reaffirm an ideological orientation toward the island’s revolutionary government, at the same time allowing them to dismiss the country’s citizens as merely passive actors. Much of what has been written on Cuban hip-hop in these sources neglects the emergence of the genre as an embodiment of Cuban culture and its unique political character. It is important to recall that Cuba is not a country of faceless denizens, but a republic with a distinct history, one steeped in racial diversity and radical culture.

In a 2006 article, The New York Times’ Mark Lacey interviewed creators involved in the Havana hip-hop scene. When asked about the Rap Agency, one artist apparently waved his hand, exclaiming, “We don’t want to be in any agency … It’s the same as slavery for us.” Like Acosta’s article, Lacey documents the perceived decline of hip-hop on the island, amid the increased popularity of reggaeton: “The [Havana] hip-hop festival, held every August, was a flop last year [2005], and was canceled this year [2006],” he writes. Not many primary sources detail what has happened since, and the Cuban government has offered few definitive statements with regard to its fate.

While hip-hop’s popular cultural moment, in the word’s of Acosta’s musicologist, may have passed, its mere existence—and support by the state—points to the possibility of shared countercultural spaces within media and economic environments determined by global capital. This is largely made possible through the détournement of cultural products, like hip-hop.

The Cuban Rap Agency provides an example by which frameworks of alternate modernity, as well as their limitations, can be assessed. The Cuban revolutionaries of the Granma themselves saw the impulse to artistic experimentation as nothing less than, in the words of Nicola Miller, “a manifestation of the urge for freedom … experimentation of form—if not always of content—was deemed to be essential to a revolutionary culture.” Hip-hop is a naturally experimental and mercurial form; its roots lie firmly in subalternity. As Cuba firmly enters the post-Castro era and approves new constitutional reforms—legalizing private property and removing de jure references to communism—it raises the question, what is next for global counterculture, and who, if anything but the subaltern themselves, will be its patron and vanguard?

The critic Nora N. Khan shared an Instagram story last summer in which she wrote, “Gaslighting is the psychological mindfuck common in abusive relationships—and our relationships with institutions are fundamentally abusive.”¹ I think about this often. Though the term’s frequent circulation online has all but drained it of meaning, I can’t come up with a better way of describing New Museum management’s behavior than gaslighting: a form of manipulation in which an individual or institution makes you question the reality of your interactions with them and the legitimacy of your feelings arising from those interactions. Gaslighting is, for instance, reporting to the HR representative—as I did in 2019—that you felt as though you’d been coming to work every day with a target on your back and being informed, in a brief email a few days later, that the museum did not tolerate retaliation. (Even under bare-bones US labor law, retaliation against workers for organizing is prohibited; this email was clearly intended to minimize the museum’s legal liability.) It’s the museum’s attorney insinuating that those of us on the bargaining committee were delusional for proposing that the museum offer healthcare to part-time employees—a proposal we kept on the table until the final days of contract negotiations—and then, less than a year later, the museum sending out a self-congratulatory press release announcing that they would begin to cover part-timers’ healthcare (no mention of the union, natch).

After nine months of negotiations and the threat of a strike, we won a strong first contract—a huge accomplishment. My comrade on the bargaining committee, Lily, told me a union organizer friend of hers, upon hearing about our contract win, asked, “Isn’t it such a complicated feeling?” A combination of pride at the material improvements we’d won for ourselves and our colleagues; disappointment that despite all our efforts, we knew we still deserved more than what this first contract offered; exhaustion; and relief that such an intense process had finally come to an end.

As one of the union’s spokespeople, I’ve shared highlights of our contract with press and the public: in the first year of our five-year contract alone, we won average salary increases of 8.2% for full-time staff and 15.7% for part-time front-of-house workers; we reduced employee healthcare contributions and won a healthcare stipend for part-timers; we pressured the museum to finally let our union meet at the museum; we put into effect a grievance and arbitration procedure, increased paid time off, and implemented a pay increase for employees temporarily taking on someone else’s work.

Here, though, I want to delve deeper into part of the contract, to draw out the context in which it came together and the implications it has for past, current, and future New Museum employees. As Mark C. Suchman writes, “To make sense of a contractual practice, one must understand both the economic and the cultural environments that gave it birth.”² Suchman treats contracts as social artifacts—lenses through which we might understand the relationships and social, cultural, and political norms that underpin these documents. He writes:

“Contracts evoke normative principles and illuminate social experiences—at times expressing identity, solidarity, forbearance, and faith, and at times expressing differentiation, inequality, domination, and distrust. ‘Best efforts’ clauses become signals of goodwill, and security liens become statements of suspicion; negotiated revisions become shows of mutuality, and preprinted forms become indicators of oppression; warranties become emblems of quality, and disclaimers become marks of deficiency.”³
At the New Museum, our contract attempted to rectify numerous workplace issues, from the obvious (extremely low pay, high turnover, lack of diversity in better-paid positions) to the more intangible: few avenues for dealing with abusive managers, a toxic culture that glorified overwork and deemed low-level staff easily replaceable.

With so much to bargain for in our first contract—and so much resistance from management to even the most basic union proposals—we had to prioritize certain parts of the contract over others. Our priorities in negotiations were determined through an extensive survey sent to all union members and conversations with our colleagues throughout the process. Unsurprisingly, the top of the list featured proposals for higher pay, lower healthcare costs and extending healthcare to part-time workers, and improved time off policies (especially parental leave, since the museum only offered three weeks of paid leave to new parents when we unionized). Management’s attorney, a partner at a white-shoe law firm, repeatedly claimed that there was only “one pot” of money at the ostensibly small New Museum; it’s unclear if his fee of around $1,500 per hour (our estimate) was coming out of that pot too. As a result, we were unable to devote as much energy to standard but less pressing proposals like layoff provisions and recall rights. At the time of our negotiations in 2019, there hadn’t, to our knowledge, been layoffs at the New Museum—or most museums in New York—in years.

The layoff provisions in the New Museum Union contract are as follows:

1. In the event of a layoff among employees in Visitor Services or the Store, the least senior employee in their respective department shall be laid off first. Such employees are eligible to elect to fill any vacancy within their respective departments that occurs within twelve (12) months of their layoff. In the event that there are fewer vacancies than eligible laid off employees, preference for election shall be by seniority.
2. In the event of a layoff in other departments of the Museum, where employees’ skill and ability are equal, the least senior employee among those in the same affected classification within a department shall be laid off.
3. In the event that the Museum fills a position within twelve (12) months of a layoff, the Museum shall offer the position to the most senior employee laid off from the same department and classification in which the Museum is filling the position.

We also eventually agreed on the following severance provisions for laid-off employees:

Clauses (1) and (2) distinguish between front-of-house departments, where most workers share the same or similar job titles, and other departments at the museum, which are primarily based in the office and where there are only one or two employees per title. For the former, straight seniority enables those who have been at the museum the longest to retain their jobs amid layoffs and to return to work first if the museum rehires for laid-off positions. For the latter, the contract avoids straight seniority, including the phrase “where employees’ skill and ability are equal” to account for the fact that office staff often have very different duties, even those who work in the same department (a designer can’t simply take on the work of an editor, for instance, although both work in External Affairs). Clause (3) concerns recall rights, which require the museum to offer relevant open positions to laid-off employees before opening those positions to other applicants for a year after the layoffs.

We also eventually agreed on the following severance provisions for laid-off employees:

Considering that many people did not stay at the museum for more than a year or two—a direct result of being underpaid and overworked—some of the severance provisions we won might seem insubstantial. Vox Media Union’s contract, for instance, provides for a minimum of eleven weeks’ severance pay for laid-off employees. But severance seemed abstract to us, contingent upon an unlikely situation, whereas increases to our salaries and implementing guaranteed annual raises would have immediate material effects on all of our lives. Management had also tried to make severance contingent upon employees signing a non-disclosure agreement, a proposal we vehemently refused and successfully kept out of our contract.

Then, in early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic hit New York. In mid-March, our union sent a letter to Lisa Phillips, New Museum’s director, encouraging her to allow employees to work from home if their jobs permitted to reduce the likelihood of infection for all staff. Shortly thereafter, museums across the city closed to the public as increasing numbers of COVID cases cropped up in New York. I was able to work from my apartment, where I continued copyediting exhibition catalogue materials until April 2, when I was furloughed. Most of my colleagues in the union, particularly the outspoken supporters, were furloughed or laid off as well. At around 9:30 AM that day, the president of our local union received a call from management’s attorney informing her of the job cuts (a legal requirement rather than a courtesy), and by 10 AM, most of us had received calls from our bosses informing us that we were no longer employed by the museum, whether temporarily or permanently. All of us lost access to our work email accounts by noon.

Because of our contract, New Museum management had the right to institute layoffs and furloughs as needed, but it also stipulated that the museum must negotiate with the union over the effects of these layoffs and furloughs. In several meetings with management representatives and their lawyer—no less antagonistic than they had been in bargaining—we pushed them to justify the specific positions terminated (some of which, like the Marketing Associate and Grants and Corporate Sponsorship Manager, still had plenty of work to do) and to extend healthcare for those of us who had lost our jobs (we were, after all, at the start of a global pandemic). Since we had won severance provisions in our contract, no one was forced to negotiate severance for themselves in an economic downturn and, in many cases, with unsupportive or actively hostile supervisors.

In her fittingly titled book Contract and Contagion (2012), Angela Mitropoulos calls contracts “future-oriented technologies”: mechanisms for anticipating future conditions and attempting to control or account for their outcomes.⁴

At the New Museum, our union contract was shaped by our understanding of existing issues and our desire to mitigate them going forward. We didn’t, and perhaps couldn’t, predict a global pandemic that would reshape economic relations well beyond the art world. Mitropoulos writes,

“The contract is capitalism’s most cherished axiom. It is a projective geometry of obligation and its interiorised calculus. Emerging simultaneous with capitalism, it has been crucial … to the organisation of private property and the subjective dispositions of capitalist legal architecture. It is also, I would suggest, the very sense of the performative. Briefly put: contracts are preoccupied with the transformation of contingency into necessity as a specifically capitalist problem. … [C]ontracts are part of the making of what they say.”⁵

A contract is a way of structuring the present to account for—and determine—what’s to come. Inevitably, a union contract operates within the capitalist framework in which we all live, yet workers use union contracts to push back on the profit motive, growth imperative, and devaluing of workers’ labor that define institutions under capitalism. In this, the contract is one tactic among many, from petitions and social media campaigns to work stoppages and strikes.

Though no one in our union anticipated the pandemic, few of us were surprised at New Museum management’s response: using the closures and economic downturn as a pretext to purge museum staff of union supporters. While museums across the country instituted layoffs and furloughs, the New Museum’s job cuts disproportionately targeted those involved with the union: our entire steward committee (including myself) was laid off, as were four members of our six-person bargaining committee (the other two were furloughed for months). Of twenty-five total layoffs, sixteen were union members; many of the others were low-paid security and maintenance workers. Every single executive and all but three mid-level managers retained their jobs. As a union, we bargained with the museum over the effects of these layoffs and furloughs, pushing for extensions to our recall rights (which the museum denied) and our healthcare coverage (which they agreed to extend for an additional month).

We also filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) regarding the museum’s discrimination against union organizers and supporters—a violation of our contract as well as US labor law. Filing charges with the NLRB is a lengthy process even without a pandemic raging, and the Labor Board, then headed by Trump appointees, sent the charges back through the grievance and arbitration process outlined in our contract rather than hear the case outright. This is how I ended up, just a few weeks ago—more than a year after the layoffs, our recall rights freshly expired—in a Zoom conference with a handful of union comrades and as many still-employed New Museum managers, listening as their lawyer yet again attempted to rewrite history. His opening statement lasted half an hour: in it, he made dubious claims about our work no longer being necessary during the pandemic. Who was posting to social media? Who was editing the newsletters and the catalogues that were still in production?

“It’s easy to throw around allegations of discriminatory animus,” he noted patronizingly. “Supposedly there was all kinds of hostility against the union by the museum. Supposedly it says it was a hostile and tense negotiation.”⁶ Supposedly—a word meant to cast doubt over my and my colleagues’ experiences of condescension, outright hostility, and retaliation at the bargaining table and in our day-to-day work. It was enough to force out a number of organizers even before the layoffs, enough to leave us with lasting trauma—and according to the New Museum, it never happened.

Afterwards, the arbitrator called a ten-minute break, during which I planned to prepare to testify but instead collapsed on the floor in a panic attack. Ultimately, I didn’t have to testify—given the unpredictability of an arbitrator’s decision, we agreed to a settlement with the museum in which they will recruit some of the laid-off bargaining unit positions. This agreement doesn’t bring employees back to work, nor does it compensate us for being unfairly dismissed; the museum flat-out refused the latter and, frankly, none of us wanted to work there again. But the settlement offers us a means of rebuilding the strength of our now-decimated union. Like a contract, it looks to the future.

Classical music’s self-diagnosis as a “heritage” art form¹ coincided with its dwindling participation and interest from the wider and global public in the 1950s. Since then, maintaining the relevance of classical music to a more contemporary and multicultural audience has been challenging. With the average age of an attending audience member being in their late 60s to early 70s, a typical response by opera companies has been to increase reliance on government funding and gradually raise ticket prices.

Once a year, Australia’s largest performing arts company, Opera Australia, announces its upcoming season. The annual highlights consist of the Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour and its mainstage series program. The focus of the company has become increasingly narrow, conservative, repetitive, and dare I say, Verdi-oriented. Rather than expanding its horizons to become a more sustainable cultural institution, the company has appeared to double-down on its mission to present opera in its “golden age,” perpetuating the notion that operatic theatre is a place for nostalgic spectacle. Is the claim of “heritage” an excuse to continue staging problematic spectacles in the name of classical tradition, or is it the only viable manner to save this—self-admittedly—dying classical art form?²

I have wavered between opera’s traditionalism as a response to economic realism or viewing it as complacent creative direction and have fallen towards the latter. Although I acknowledge that components of heritage and tradition exist in all art, I have learned that Opera Australia represents a space that actively excludes the new, the young, and the so-called ‘Other’.

2.0 Act II.

“Examine this boat all over, and see if you find any leaks. I can see them. And what am I to do? The world is expecting an opera from me, and it is high time it were ready. We’ve had enough now of Bohème, Butterfly, and Co.! Even I am sick of them!”
Letter by Puccini to Tito Ricordi
New York, February 18, 1907³

Opera Australia perceives their art form as nothing more than a rotating ethnic degustation menu cycling between their three most performed opera composers: Puccini, Verdi and Mozart. The company’s opulent presentation of “popular” opera does little to inspire the imagination, and to borrow from music critic Nancy Groves, leaves no rhinestone unturned.⁴ Relying on a programme where fantastical displays of culture do little else but Orientalise suggests that Opera Australia and its demographic are dependent upon these worn-out productions that use Oriental culture for the sole purpose of nostalgic spectacle.⁵ It should be noted that there are other non-exoticised options—for example in 2021 they are staging Bluebeard’s Castle by Bartok. This token work aside, the rest of 2021 consists of staples of the operatic catalogue all composed before the year of 1912; Puccini twice, Offenbach and a whooping four works by Verdi!⁶ Simply gazing at the choices of Opera Australia’s mainstage, it is difficult not to consider these repeated choices a musical safari masquerading as fine art. These are works of their time, with the 2021 season presenting operas spanning 1844 to 1911, but why must their performance and production be performed in a manner that can only be described as archaeological?³

By archaeology, I refer to Opera Australia’s presentation of the entire art form as artefact and archive. Archaeology, in its most basic form, is the blending of humanities and science to study human history through material culture. In this sense, Opera Australia’s reinvigoration of a living form of performance art appears to rely predominantly upon the music of the dead. However, artefacts and archive are novel curiosities: when performed, they hold little relevance to a space that cannot deny the contemporary perspective of its living audience. Unlike the disciplines of archaeology and heritage, the performing arts are not centred upon the study of the past. Opera is not simply an act which can be archived, never to have its inherited cultural value questioned or interrogated. The interpretation of opera as a form of cultural heritage is a continually evolving process in which ideas are expressed and stories are told.

In other words, opera is a living practice that depends upon performers and performance to bring it to life. What a shame that so many of the living are required to rehash what those who have passed might have seen two hundred years ago! The novelty of such an archaeological performance begins to wear thin. Insisting upon anachronistic approaches such as brownface (as I will analyse below) makes these forms of opera indifferent to the nuanced realities of contemporary life, thus reinforcing arrogant and racist hierarchies where the white gaze remains in a position of authority.

In 2016, the National Opera Review published the following statement and series of recommendations regarding the artistic vibrancy of Australian opera companies:

“Opera Australia and Opera Queensland, in particular… [reduced] the number of mainstage productions and/or performances they offer and, in the case of Opera Australia [offer] longer runs of frequently repeated popular mainstage operas. The unintended consequence has been that audience numbers for mainstage opera have declined and employment opportunities for artists have significantly decreased. The Review considers that such a situation is not sustainable.

…

Other initiatives are required to increase artistic vibrancy, including supporting the development of new Australian works; presenting works in association with festivals; and increasing the use of digital technology… Such recommendations would also support increased employment opportunities for artists.”⁷

One could argue that the integration of digital technologies in Opera Australia’s presentations is an admirable response to the Review’s recommendations, most notably in their restaging of Madama Butterfly in 2019 and Aida in 2019-21. Although these performances can be commended for their visual delivery, their grandiose presentations do not mask the heart of the issue. A clear case study would be the 2019 production of Madama Butterfly directed by Graeme Murphy, as shown in the image below.

In Madama Butterfly, Puccini’s main character Cio-Cio san is frequently referred to as Opera’s most hysterical mother. In Murphy’s restaging, rather than interrogate the sexist overtones of hysteria bestowed upon Cio-Cio San and the racist characterisation of Japanese women as overtly feminised and fragile, his production chose to reinforce tired, patriarchal stereotypes. In particular, the stage design sought to enhance these fantastical tropes of sexual exoticism in the name of ‘authenticity’. The integration of 10-LED screens into the stage design was lauded as a “so much going on visually,”⁸ yet, it is nothing more than a backdrop to the problematic representation of the characters themselves. It is difficult to see beyond the bondage-themed presentation of Cio-Cio San and the sexualised fantasy that is depicted around Japanese culture, given that Murphy’s Madama Butterfly exaggerates an already fetishised image of Japanese women through his integration of kawaii girls and Japanese bondage. This panders to the obsession of the Western gaze and its objectification of Asian women, here, quite literally strung up like marionettes to be played and toyed with for sexual gratification.

The only thing authentic about this repulsive simulation of Asian women is that such Orientalist characterisations continue to negatively affect those lives. Perhaps Murphy’s justification for this shallow representation of ‘The East’ is that the production was an effort to pay respects to Puccini’s Butterfly, and to garner a wide audience to support such an expense; sex sells. Operas such as Murphy’s, in their obstinate belief of ‘authenticity,’ perpetuate a deliberate misrepresentation of non-white cultures and people of colour. Opera Australia’s claim of modernisation through incorporating digital media does not alter the core of the performance nor its unsavoury presentation: technology is but a thin veneer for its enhancement and reprisal.

Similar to Murphy’s Madama Butterfly, Opera Australia’s upcoming production of Verdi’s Aida also relies upon projection and digital media. Like the 2019 Butterfly’s insistence upon exaggerating a sexualised caricature of Asian women, the trailer for upcoming Aida expresses nothing but a cheap depiction of Egyptian culture that trades in antiquated tropes of half-naked women, gaudy gold costumes and ceiling-high walls adorned by hieroglyphics. Technology does not reduce the problematic spectacle that the company has chosen to rely upon, thus driving home a key point: using modern technology does not in and of itself modernise the presentation of your subjects.

The form of authenticity that Opera Australia believes in is fundamentally flawed: their productions are not ‘authentic’ in the sense of an actual historical or contemporary reality. Rather, they are only ‘authentic’ to the extent that they habitually reinforce a racialised Orient from and for an anachronistic Western perspective. This so-called ‘authentic theatre’ is little more than a shallow impression of other cultures that the 21st century has long since understood as racist. More directly, Opera Australia’s interpretation of the ‘genuine Orient’ is measured by racist conceptions of authenticity.

Opera Australia’s 2015 production of Aida encapsulates the consequences of this misplaced desire for an ‘authentic’ spectacle at the expense of people of colour and their dignity. The dreadlocks and brownface in which Australian baritone Michael Honeyman performs in is a cumulative result of artistic direction, costume, and makeup. Perhaps Opera Australia’s aim was to preserve a sense of mystical exoticism in the name of heritage. Or perhaps it was a misplaced effort to honour the original desires of the Viceroy of Egypt, outlined in the following excerpt from 1870:

“The Viceroy wants the opera to retain its strictly Egyptian colour, not only in the libretto but in the costumes and the sets… Add to this the exotic quality of the mise-en-scène…To create imaginary Egyptians as they are usually seen in the theatre is not difficult…”⁹

We no longer require the conjuring of imaginary Egyptians or “Oriental Peoples”¹⁰ as they are “usually seen in theatre” as the West may have in 1870. More than 150 years later, opera need not rely on such outdated modes of presentation. This archaic reimagining of Ancient Egypt and the peoples of Ethiopia reinscribes outdated cultural and sociopolitical norms of the 19th century as a contemporary reality.¹¹ By the same token, we no longer need to watch Carmen, Aida and Butterfly wail their arias clad in extravagant costumes that are more complex than their characterisation. The perpetuation of an Orientalist fantasy through creative direction, makeup, and set and costume design is not only damaging to an art form that is already perceived as exclusive, but reveals that the success of opera companies at large is derived from an institutional insistence upon performing exoticised nostalgia in the name of authenticity.

An underlying presumption of opera is that if traditional Orientalist spectacles are not upheld, companies will lose their customary audience due to a loss in ‘quality.’ The dubious implication of quality being tied to outdated modes of casting and creative direction is a knee-jerk response from those conservatives who are in service to the ‘old ways.’ Opera Australia’s current productions rely on caricatures and actively contribute to the ongoing stereotyping of people of colour and their cultures, rather than engaging music, theatre and art to connect deeply with contemporary and local audiences. Opera Australia has the opportunity to inspire, reflect and tell deeply engaging stories that would no doubt attract younger and newer audiences. Instead the company chooses to pander to the its own ego and increasingly ageing demographic. It seems that traditional opera remains one of the final bastions for large-scale racial and cultural appropriation.

The inbuilt mythology of opera as the height of classical music has allowed for the perpetuation of such institutionally lazy practices. Internationally, opera has garnered a reputation for its feeble relationship to reality and has regularly drawn headlines for its outdated love affair with ethnic exoticism.¹² But to say that this is all opera has to offer is false. Rather, the fault lies in companies such as Opera Australia who have propagated this unsustainable presentation of a living art form that has far more to showcase than archival reworkings.

3.0 Act III.

In 2011, the Artistic Director of Opera Australia, Lyndon Terracini, delivered the 13th Annual Peggy Glanville-Hicks address. With a great deal of optimism and passion, he proclaimed:

“Brave programming is having the courage to program what critics will criticize you for, but will make a genuine connection to a real audience, who will become passionate supporters of the art form.”¹³

Since his announcement as Director in 2009, only three Australian Operas have been commissioned or produced for its mainstage; one by Brett Dean (2010), one by Kate Miller-Heidke (2014), and one by Elena Kats-Chernin and Justin Fleming (2019), out of the estimated total of 152 operas. His call for “brave programming” rings hollow when all but less than 2% of all the mainstage operas staged under his direction to date have come from the well-trodden past. Furthermore, Terracini’s desire to encourage a healthy culture of critique came to a hypocritical juncture when, in 2015, he made headlines for barring two music critics from Opera Australia’s media list.¹⁴ Diana Simmonds of Stage Noise and Harriet Cunningham of Sydney Morning Herald were barred by Terracini due to their public critique of his artistic direction and parochial, Verdi-heavy programming. The critics received similar emails from the Opera Australia’s media department, with the one to Simmonds stating that “in response to some of your recent writing about the company, Lyndon asked that you be removed from the media list.”¹⁵ Terracini’s response to critique unveils Opera Australia as a company that is indifferent with making genuine connections with contemporary audiences, too staid to change even in the face of widespread criticism. Insofar as Opera Australia’s integration of digital technology is a flimsy veneer for its supposed modernisation, was Terracini’s impassioned 2011 proclamation nothing more than an offhand gesture to disguise the true culture of the company?

Fast-forward to 2017 when Opera Australia’s CEO Rory Jeffes announced that Opera Australia was the world’s most profitable opera company, and that it is “the world’s only major opera company where ticket sales exceed half of turnover.”¹⁶ Opera Australia continues to receive a large amount of annual state and federal funding—a combined average sum of between $24 and $26 million which increased to the amount of $37 million in 2020.¹⁷ As Professor Jo Caust asks us to consider, “Does opera deserve its privileged status within arts funding?”¹⁸

While opera’s history as a ‘luxury’ art form may be read as a classist and exclusionary pastime, the nature of Opera Australia’s public funding renders it in service to the public. It is an assumed responsibility when an organisation is granted such a degree of public support that they serve the public and its local practitioners. To address this observation, the following excerpt is taken from Marketing Beyond Your Core Audience by Georgia Rivers, a publication featured by Opera Australia:

“The classical performing arts are expensive… But the classical performing arts are part of our cultural heritage, so they won’t die out. They will join the superficial market that maintains art galleries and museums… It’s fleeting, but it keeps historic collections afloat… Our goal is to make seeing an opera at the world’s most famous opera house the default for every visitor to Sydney, regardless of their interest in opera.”¹⁹

The average ticket cost to the opera is over $100AUD,²⁰ whereas access to view the permanent collections of state galleries and museums is often free. Why not seek to imagine the experience of opera along similar lines of accessibility? What might be inferred from Opera Australia’s goal is that their current model is geared towards tourists rather than the public who fund their artistic operations. The company’s relative indifference in trying to foster an innovative and sustainable culture of classical music through engaging with local practitioners and audiences is representative of practices within the industry at large. Opera Australia is merely a symptom.

The argument that classical music exists to only re-perform the greatest hits of the Western canon over the last 400 years implies that anything out of the ‘expected’ such as music by women, by people of colour, or anything commissioned in the recent decades, does not fall into this mythologised category of ‘the greatest music.’ Ironically, what has been elevated to the status of ‘the greatest music’ was commissioned and performed during their historical periods in which new music was constantly created and celebrated. At some point in history, all of Bach, Beethoven, Verdi and Puccini was new music. Today, attempts to broaden the nature of representing certain productions, their creative direction and the variety of composers being commissioned in the classical music world are met with hesitation and cyclical arguments about contemporary music not being economically viable.²¹ Perhaps these staunch critics against contemporary music and hearing new voices should be reminded that one of the most revered works of the 20th century, Igor Stravinsky’s La Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring), caused a riot amongst the audience when it was premiered on the 29 of May 1913 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris. In Ciaran Frame’s publication, The Living Music Report 2020,²² the following statistics are laid out pertaining to the programming culture of major Australian orchestra and classical music companies:

18% of works were written by living composers
10% of works were written by Australian composers
4% of works were written by female composers
1% of works were written by CALD Australian composers
1% of works were written by First Nations composers

Such figures would not be considered acceptable in any other industry, let alone one that subsists on public money, totalling $81.9 million for Australian orchestras and $37 million for Opera Australia in 2020, to exist.²³

4.0 Act IV.

The archaic practices Opera Australia continues to champion does a grave disservice to living practitioners who desire a pathway out of the archive. It comes at the expense of musicians and technicians that are active in their pursuit of new modes of storytelling, and who willingly interrogate and challenge the artform’s problematic elements within their own practices.

Opera Australia’s Orientalist fantasies are dislocated visions of ‘authenticity’ that do not deserve its privileged, government funded support. Their diminutive presentation of opera does little to create a thriving and sustainable future for classical music at large. If the focus of Opera Australia was to create art in a healthy culture of critique and public forum, opera would live beyond its self-imposed categorisation as a “historic collection.”²⁴ Like historical artefacts, perhaps Opera Australia deserves to be processed, tagged and placed into a box deep within the bowels of a quiet collector’s archive. Because any organisation that insists upon relying on the privilege of the dead, presented in the manner of the dead, deserves the trajectory it draws for itself.

I have written this piece because I believe in words and their careful organisation as carriers of sincerity. I believe that contemporary art institutions like the MCA have the potential to show us what a vastly different future may look like and, in doing so, render the action of social transformation irresistible. While our cultural institutions continue to tread water, many others in “The Arts” today are moving towards a more democratic future in which the basic needs of everyone are met—defined by life and ways of living that understand freedom, joy and pleasure as collective pursuits. As one friend said to me when discussing the merits of this undertaking: “We should critique institutions we care about—how else will they grow with us?”

1.0 Institutional “Diversity”

It is clear to me that an organisation’s identity goes beyond bricks and mortar—indeed, the people working at all levels of an organisation are the organisation. It is they who embody its values, decide upon the nature of the institution’s presence in the community, and what an experience of that organisation will be like for groups and individuals who engage with it.

When considering who holds power and how this is maintained, in my view, there has historically been a culture of white hegemony at work within the management of the MCA. I wish to be clear that this is the reality everywhere in the country, and that it is the museum’s failure to buck this trend that I am disappointed by. Between 2015 and 2018, I spent two years at the museum as a “Gallery Host” and observed a fundamental separation between those working in positions of authority—on what was known as “Level Four”—and everyone else.

To echo the sentiments of Lilly Lai, published in their essay last year, there exists a clear racial hierarchy at the MCA that manifests along the fault lines of this division.³ In the wake of Lilly’s essay being published, an outraged arts community expressed their anger on an MCA Instagram post. The MCA, responding to the community in the comments section of their post, provided statistics pertaining to diversity at the museum: that 22% of all employees were culturally and linguistically diverse, and that 10 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff were employed at the time of writing. This was rightly derided, because it ignored the status of those people of colour within the hierarchy of the organisation.⁴

While the current chair of the MCA board is of Lebanese background, and a First Nations woman works as part of the senior curatorial team, a broader look at the board and leadership departments reveals that decisions regarding how the museum operates are still made by a largely white group of people.⁵ Whether or not they have the best interests of the museum at heart, these numbers indicate the damaging ways in which—as Andy Butler writes—whiteness is considered normal at work.⁶ Speaking of the beginning of her tenure as director of the MCA, Elizabeth Ann Macgregor (largely known in the industry as Liz-Ann) is quoted as saying “let’s be honest, the misogyny…it was relentless.”⁷ The strong presence of women in leadership and curatorial positions today is evidence of the concrete steps taken to address the inequalities she saw in the first days of her job. However, if Liz-Ann can accept that the misogynistic culture at the MCA was so normalised and undetectable to those it did not oppress in the late 90s, then surely the question has to be asked whether whiteness and its hegemony in the same institution might have a similar presence and systemic impact on staff of colour today. As someone who has worked there, the answer given by the museum—in response to a question asking how it could address “systemic issues” at work—that “we can find no evidence of systemic issues at the MCA” seems to ignore the reality we are living in and the histories that have shaped cultural institutions today.⁸ Whilst Macgregor said in the same interview that the MCA “can and should do more”, and that it would solicit staff feedback as part of its forward strategic planning, to outright reject the idea that any systemic societal issues have found their way into the museum is a troubling starting point.

As a measure that acknowledges and seeks to amend the situation, the MCA’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Policy is a step in the right direction.⁹ When it was established in 2015, the policy was the first of its kind in the world. How does the museum remain accountable to the ethos of this policy today, as a holistic practice that informs the way everything is done at work, and how is its value regularly communicated to the broader public? In other words, beyond numbers, what are the experiences of First Nations peoples and people of colour working at the MCA? How do white, institutional standards make it difficult, if not impossible, for other cultural protocols to be practiced there? What we need is the mandate for a kind of work that wholly embraces the notion of a collective, decolonial project.¹⁰ “Diversity” as it is wielded by institutions today is useless if people from other backgrounds and their art are made to conform to (or are only understood by) pre-existing norms when they enter a space.

2.0 Gallery Hosts

While at the MCA, I worked alongside a close group of hosts of colour. In the absence of a direct manager with any obvious lived experience of the subtle ways that racism works, we supported each other through near-daily instances of racially motivated microaggressions from a largely uninformed public. Our long, mostly rehashed conversations (mostly had outside of working hours) reflected the powerlessness we felt to change things. Though decisions made at board, directorial and curatorial levels will inevitably affect gallery hosts the most, we were not involved in decisions regarding the material reality of our time at work.

For example, the decision to accept and display a donated painting titled The Supremes by Matthys Gerber in 2015, negatively affected many women hosts of colour. The artist—a man who has neither directly experienced discrimination because of the colour of his skin nor the gender he presents to the world—depicted three, life-sized figures of African American women, their image transplanted from photographs found in dominatrix magazines. The artist covered these strong, assertive figures in a wash of white paint, making them nearly invisible to the viewer so as to “render visible the unnerving bind between racial and sexual dominance and the history of western painting in all its guises.”¹¹ Regardless of his intentions, a number of the women hosts of colour that I spoke to at the time (many also artists) were frustrated by the ways in which these historically objectified bodies had been deployed by Gerber as an easy sign. The painting reproduced a gendered and racialised power imbalance—one that Gerber benefits from in his day-to-day—as a means which arguably furthered his career. Many gallery hosts felt uncomfortable being made to share a space with this object, within which they were obliged to discuss its artistic value with members of the public, many of whom were culturally insensitive—which is not to say these members of the public embody an inherent moral failing, but rather, that museums present works in ways which ultimately foreclose the expanding of a non-specialist audience’s visual and cultural literacy. A complaint made by one host did not seem to be successful in changing anything, and in the absence of an engaged museum audience (something that larger-scale arts institutions around Australia have failed to cultivate) some resorted to forging “incident reports” with the same complaint, made to seem as if it had come from concerned members of the public.

With this example, I hope to demonstrate that there are no real-time opportunities for gallery hosts at the MCA to involve themselves in decision-making at work, and that the consequences of even the smallest curatorial choices can have a big impact on their experience. Many “all-staff” meetings were held at times when hosts, security and maintenance workers onsite were “on the clock” and could not attend. Just as in wider society, it feels like those without power at the MCA aren’t able to know how decisions get made and by who, yet are entirely familiar with the consequences these decisions have on their working lives. At the time of my working, it felt as if there was a culture at the MCA rooted in the idea that there was only so much power to go around, and that any suggestion of doing things differently was a threat to the distribution of this power. Sincere criticism felt unwelcome, and discontent often seemed to be suppressed in ways that felt hard to articulate when it was happening. I remember a particular incident in which hosts organised to meet up with a union representative. The meeting was conducted covertly at a nearby pub after hours, with many too anxious to sign an attendance roll for fear of being discovered by management. In stark contrast, while working as a gallery host at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, our manager would openly inform us of union meetings happening inside the building and encourage us to attend, such was our right.

Rather than being entrusted with the kinds of responsibilities that would ground their role within a trajectory of growth and professional development, the little agency and opportunities afforded to gallery hosts inherently renders them disposable to the MCA.¹² In my opinion, hosts—and in particular hosts of colour—are doing essential, on-the-ground cultural work for the entire institution, practising protocols around cultural safety, talking and listening to visitors in resourceful and innovative ways that should be learnt from and remunerated accordingly. They must be given a formal role in deciding how the institution is run—not only because they are disproportionately affected by small decisions, but, because, as casual and part-time employees they are the only ones at the MCA who actually invest and share space with the museum’s visitors on a day-to-day level. The involvement of gallery hosts in decision-making would enrich the organisational identity and artistic program at the MCA, which is so often rendered homogenous by the limited experiences of racism of the few people there with authority.¹³

3.0 Leadership

Regarding leadership at the MCA and in the arts more broadly: In light of news that Liz-Ann will resign as director later in the year, I do not know why the twenty-two-year duration of her leadership has been communicated in benign and reverent terms by mainstream media.¹⁴

A similar phenomenon occurred in 2011, when after thirty-three years, Edmund Capon retired from the role of director at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. To me, such an extended tenure is not cause for celebration, as one person cannot represent the interests of everyone in a diverse, evolving community. Over time and without redistributing directorial responsibilities, a director’s understanding and style of leadership is likely to become increasingly myopic. There are governments and political systems around the world with mechanisms built into them to avoid this kind of situation occurring. I see a synchronicity between the high number of white directors and curators at major arts institutions in this country, and the protracted periods of time in which they serve their role.

What if we were to imagine an eight-year time limit for leadership positions at contemporary art museums, as a means of ensuring that these spaces remain responsive to the changing needs of the community around them? I encourage the MCA’s incoming director to publish a resignation letter on their first day in the job, dating it eight years into the future or a similar length of time. This is a way of remaining accountable to the vision that secured them the position in the first place, as well as ensuring the cultural and social heterogeneity of the MCA.

Some might ask whether eight years is long enough for a new leader to establish a right way of organisational being. This question stems from a desire for determinacy, and assumes that given enough time, a “good” director could build something perfect in opposition to what we have now. It assumes that there is a natural “end point” to organisational evolution, a great golden horizon which when arrived at means we have managed to decolonise our museums. It assumes that there are categorically good and bad museums, good and bad directors, and as such, that a director’s legacy may only be viewed from an enclosed position of either scorn or admiration. A desire for determinacy exists at the heart of organisational logic today, manifesting in this pursuit of perfection that conflates doing right or wrong with being right or wrong. Far from constituting a complete project, new forms of institutional structure and protocol need only confuse this desire; sharing, as Ashon T. Crawley writes, “a negation of desired stasis and stillness, a rejection of objects as impenetrable, of knowledge as exhaustible, the potentiality for further discovery expired.”¹⁵ There is no end to institutional transformation, and moving towards one would be antithetical to the experience of living itself. The path to a more equitable museum defines itself within the development of an ethics of perpetual transformation, one emphasising the collective use of institutional space rather than its conquest.

4.0 Funding

While I do not think it is difficult to make more space for people of diverse backgrounds at the top of our museums, I appreciate that it is hard for any organisation to implement a program centred on radical institutional reform when it is beholden to the conservative wishes of those who afford it the money it requires to operate.¹⁶

A central priority of organisations is subsistence, and in lieu of reliable, self-generating revenue streams lost to COVID-19, this has become even harder for the MCA in recent times. According to the museum’s website, each year it raises 70% of its income from non-government sources.¹⁷ Though released before the outbreak of COVID-19, the most recent annual report from 2019 states that 78% of the museum’s revenue for that year came from places other than the state and federal governments.¹⁸ If this is true, then the MCA is largely free from contorting the nature of its labour to fit those soft (and often performative) state-funded categories of “diversity instead of antiracism, inclusion instead of decolonisation, identity instead of ideology.”¹⁹ It begs the question: why have the museum’s organisational operations and programming largely been so uninspiring? In theory, the MCA should be working with the agility, dynamism, intellectual and creative freedoms that an “entrepreneurial” approach to funding provides for.²⁰

To avoid any suggestion that operations and programming at the MCA are beholden to the expectations of its corporate and private sponsors, the museum must be honest about which public it actually functions to serve. This ‘public’ is financially elite, drawn to philanthropy not simply as a means of virtuously “giving back” to society, as is so often claimed, but also as a means of garnering the complementary forms of capital required to maintain the power these benefactors enjoy in other spheres of political and economic life.²¹ If this were to be the case, for things to be any different, artists, arts workers and members of the everyday public would need to severely re-examine the ways in which they engage with our institutions. However much it is agitated for from the outside, an attitude of radical transformation must ultimately be exemplified by those in charge of our museums. Calls for drastic change are often countered by those who hold power with the argument that an overhaul of institutional traditions would see many places cease to exist at all. I would agree that a structural overhaul would have the potential of rendering the MCA unrecognisable by accepted standards, but there seems to be a common assumption made by those with authority which conflates the reduction of their individual privileges, enjoyed over others in the organisation, with the degradation of the organisation itself. I would argue that it is the responsibility of those working at the MCA to make the unrecognisable recognisable, and the seemingly impossible possible, with the relative freedoms and resources afforded to it as a leading venue for contemporary art in Australia.

5.0 Exhibition practice as a compelling culture in action

To “make contemporary art and ideas widely accessible to a range of audiences” is too simplistic a vision within the narrow scope of possibilities the MCA provides its staff, a reflection of the standards that museums more broadly are expected to operate by today.²² These have been inherited from the Western-normative tradition of Modernity, and play into a romanticised understanding of art that reifies the authority of a few individuals working in museums to prescribe meaning to everyone else.

Describing the ways in which institutional strategies of audience engagement treat community as a canvas and the institution as the artist, Jiva Parthipan and Paschal Daantos Berry locate a top-down hierarchy, within which organisations make the work (exhibitions, public programs and other discursive platforms) before engaging their audience to understand it.²³ This standard practice ignores the desires and requirements of the community, and understands audiences as an anonymous, homogenous mass, upon which the more “valid” subjectivities of a curator or artist may be tested.

How one or two individuals can be tasked with organising a program representative of an entire institutional community is beyond me. I would like to advocate for a method of exhibition-practice in which collaboration constitutes much of the work itself, involving all constituents of the museum; from artists, hosts, maintenance workers, educators, community members, accountants and curators, to board members and benefactors. The involvement of everyone in the production of knowledge would recognise that the MCA’s audience also includes those historically at the bottom of the hierarchy, who undoubtedly have unique knowledges to share, and that there is still so much to learn for those at the notional top. In drawing people from disparate parts of the building together in an exhibition practice that positions the work done at the MCA as research, the historical boundaries ossified within the museum’s structure would realign, demonstrating the ways in which, perhaps, such hierarchies could be done away with altogether. This would be an important step to make within a process of decentralising the museum’s authority, a process which might begin to centre the formation of stronger relationships (and accordingly the redistribution of funds) with smaller arts organisations, artist-run initiatives, activists and grassroots movements.

It is also important to remain accountable to past exhibitions and their message. I worked as a curatorial assistant on NIRIN—the First Nations-led, 22nd edition of the Biennale of Sydney. Since its closure, I have observed the ways in which this landmark exhibition has been wielded by numerous marketing teams of partner venues as a signifier of their own inherent worth, with the fact of its occurrence an implicit reason by which to continue business as usual, which is to say without a truly decolonial ethos. Rather than being co-opted by institutions to validate the way things are, I think that an exhibition like NIRIN should have long-lasting effects on the ways an institution functions. Put simply, has the MCA as an organisation made space to formally ask itself what the significance of such an undertaking was, what it has learnt about itself as an organisation operating within the interconnected worlds presented by NIRIN, and how it will continue to practice its message in the future? Space needs to be made for these important discussions.

To the MCA directly: I would suggest that towards the end of each exhibition, formally ask yourselves whether you managed to achieve your goals. These should be collectively decided upon when a show is conceived, and situated within a program of institutional learning and self-discovery—because we need to change the notion that our institutions always know what they’re doing. How do the themes of the exhibition you are discussing relate to the MCA and its location on stolen land, for example? Conduct sessions where you ask yourselves how you are staying true to the legacy of each of your undertakings within a program. Make this an open and transparent process, accessible to everyone. Centre voices from the margins of your organisation and be prepared to change the way you work depending on their requirements. Importantly, bring your broader audience along with you on this learning journey.

I understand that these kinds of protocols will slow things down considerably, lessening the amount of exhibitions that the MCA can present each year. My point is that the MCA’s programming shouldn’t be measurable in years at all. Producing a smaller number of exhibitions would allow the museum to be more intentional with them, finding new ways of fostering a live dialogue between artists, audiences and the structures of the institution itself, that transcend the ways exhibition standards have historically organised time and space. Provide proper support for experimental, ephemeral and non-commodified practices at the MCA. Ask, “How else can art be involved in changing the way we work?” How can a contract become a space for artists to intervene in the reproduction of institutional norms for example, or a board meeting? Rather than a rapacious focus on reaching new audiences, how can an institution also serve those it is already responsible for in new ways? Time and space must be made for the provocations and concerns of artists and workers everywhere within the structure of the MCA, because this is the only way the institution can be seen as putting a compelling culture in action, one which can be practiced outside of the museum by those in pursuit of a more democratic society.

6.0 Concluding acknowledgement

Though this essay will, inevitably, be judged according to institutional standards, I hope I have conveyed that these standards aren’t fit to measure the inexorable beauty of our lives at all. I would like to acknowledge the work of the First Nations peoples and settlers of colour who have come before me, having made a place in which these words may settle and a lineage along which they may be understood. Both older and younger than myself, their refusal to have their personhood understood in institutional terms has almost always been misconstrued as an attack, rather than being written about in the generous language used to canonise the similar work of their white peers within the art historical tradition of institutional critique. I would like to acknowledge the work of First Nations peoples and settlers of colour currently working in institutional spaces, creating pockets of resistance and refusal every day, informed by practices of love and care. Their continued existence in these spaces exemplifies the meaningful inspiration I have advocated for in this piece of writing, and provides a standard which I implore the MCA to invest in learning from.

Editor’s Note (updated 16 July 2021): For readers of this piece on the Decolonial Hacker extension, to return to the MCA website and engage with Richard Bell’s current digital intervention as part of “Richard Bell: You Can Go Now” (4 June—29 August 2021), go to the ‘DH’ icon at the top right-hand corner of your browser and select ‘HIDE’.

At the end of March, Spanish artist Santiago Sierra’s project Union Flag, which planned to drench a union jack flag in the blood of Indigenous peoples whose lands were colonized by the British, was cancelled by art festival Dark Mofo in Lutruwita (Tasmania, Australia). In his statement on the cancellation of Union Flag, Sierra does not apologize to any offended Indigenous communities—addressed in Dark Mofo’s call for blood as an undifferentiated mass, and with whom he did not consult. He instead invokes his “good intentions” and history of a supposed decolonial art practice as justification for the validity of the work. Sierra seems genuinely confused and offended by the “vitriolic” reactions to the piece. After all, he writes,“all blood is equally red”¹. Isn’t the real strength of art to be able to speak on social issues? The cancellation of this project, he implies, demonstrates a lack of faith in the potential of art to contribute to decolonial critique.

Perhaps the world is simply not ready for the controversial commentary of such principled and stalwart allies, or perhaps Sierra is a poor example. As Indigenous-Australian cultural critic Tristan Harwood writes, this is an artist who traffics in trauma. As he has done throughout his career, Sierra’s work is formed “by identifying, exploiting and repackaging the suffering of those people who have already suffered the most.” Whether by tattooing sex workers, paying undocumented people to sit under boxes, spraying Iraqis with foam, or turning German synagogues into gas chambers, it is not, as Harwood argues, the unjust structures of our capitalist societies, but the trauma of others which is in fact Sierra’s raw material.

In his own words, those who perform their suffering under Sierra’s name are his “collaborators”. Although the first definition of collaborator implies an equal and reciprocal relationship—a situation that clearly does not exist in any of his works—the second definition of the word complicates its reading: a traitor, one who works with the enemy. Is this an attempt by Sierra to disavow the power imbalance inherent in the creation of his work, or a call to implicate his subjects in their own oppression?

Sierra has always defended his work in terms of his (and the privileged gallery goer’s) complicity in its creation. “The problem is the existence of social conditions that allow me to make this work”, he says. I should not be allowed to do this, he argues, and yet I do, and isn’t that a momentous revelation on the depravity of our society? The art world seems to think so. Guilt, as Benjamin Murphy argues in a positive review of Sierra’s body of work, is the best and strongest motivator for the privileged. Acknowledging their own complicity “like a shock of cold water”, the viewer is inspired to action by works that evoke empathy and revulsion.

The conflation of performative gestures which “point to issues” or “raise awareness” in elite social spheres with artworks that enact social change is so uncontroversial it seems banal to point it out directly. The entire practice of Institutional Critique is predicated on this belief, and lauded cultural workers continue to be stalwart defenders of the power of “moral queasiness” to catalyze social change.² Art historian Claire Bishop is not alone in her derisive dismissal of Sierra’s critics as merely concerned with “Marxist reification” or morally preaching “political correctness”³; as her much deeper assumptions of how social change operates continue to remain largely uncontested.

At the core of Sierra’s work and Bishop’s analysis is what I have referred to elsewhere as NGO-logics. NGO-logics locate the power to direct social change outside of impacted communities, and assume the largest problem in creating a more just and equal society is that relatively more powerful people are unaware or unsympathetic to the realities faced by the oppressed. The audience for such work is therefore never communities in struggle themselves (who have always recognized and practiced complex solidarities), but potential benevolent allies, only waiting to be awakened to action by the devastating emotional punch of an enlightened artist’s work.

2.0 Fractal 2: Silence

Tap. announces that Israel will neither “listen to moral preaching” nor stop its bombardment of Gaza until “complete quiet” has been achieved. So far, complete quiet has been achieved for 13 Israelis and 256 Palestinians. The International Community agrees that on this topic, silence is preferable to moral preaching.

Tap. bombs the press offices of Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye and AP in Gaza. After Israel demolishes the Gazan press offices, and after a cease fire is struck, 13 Palestinian journalists arearrested, along with Muna and Mohammed El-Kurd, whose family is facing eviction in Sheikh Jarrah. The El-Kurds, who received international media attention for their English language interviews and social media posts are charged with ‘riotous acts’ and ‘disturbing the public order’.

Tap. releases an internal reporting guide which outlines the appropriate silences in German discourse on the topic of Israel and Palestine: “we never question Israel’s right to exist as a state or allow people in our coverage to do so. We never refer to an Israeli ‘apartheid’ or ‘apartheid regime’ in Israel. We also avoid referring to ‘colonialism’ or ‘colonists.’”

Audre Lorde wrote “your silence will not protect you…in the cause of silence, each of us draws the face of her own fear.” On the 73rd anniversary of the Nakba, I march with 15,000 others through the streets of Berlin in support of Palestine. There are many signs tying the responsibility for Gazan casualties to German guilt and settler colonialism. Together, we shout: Deutsche Waffen, deutsches Geld morden mit in aller Welt! (German weapons, German money, complicit in murder all around the world!) We point to German industries benefiting from Palestinian death. We point to international collaborators and their studied silences. Are these not also gestures? The guilty audience is inspired to action: German media erupts, charging the demonstrators with Antisemitism.

The art world tells us that it is the task of the progressive artist/informant to remove once and for all that most stubborn of intolerable German alibis – we didn’t know anything about what was happening. If we did, we would have acted. If we did, things would have been different. But this is a lie. It was never a lack of German knowledge that failed to stop the Holocaust⁴, and it is not the guilt of past ignorance, but the guilt of past complicity that motivates the twisted logic of the Antideutsche, the slander of postcolonial scholars as Antisemites, or the silencing and blacklisting of Antizionist Jewish voices in this country – including at the institution where I currently study.

In Germany, guilt has indeed inspired the action of the privileged. It is guilt – the intolerable knowledge that their ancestors were willing collaborators in genocide – that has reduced German memory to a frozen landscape of eternal victims and eternal perpetrators. Today, it is guilt which guards Nazi crimes as a uniquely German topic, ignoring their many willing collaborators across Europe (and indeed the world), and as Michael Rothberg argues, playing into dangerous revisionist histories which strengthen a growing far right across Europe. If guilt is the best mechanism we can imagine for social change, in Germany its limitations are made explicit. What then, are the responsibilities of artists like Sierra who take on political themes in the present? To look for patterns? To raise awareness? Or something else?

3.0 Fractal 3: Both Sides

Tap. Clashes. Tap. Tensions. Tap. Conflict. Tap. Looters. Tap. Dispute.

Tap. Both sides.

It is important, when listening to the divisive media these days, not to allow oneself to become overly emotional and gravitate too far in any one direction. When observing (from a safe distance, of course) blockades, riots, air strikes, looting, or police stations burning, it is always best to call for calm from both sides. Remember that it is the middle ground which is the ideal and morally correct position, because it is safely distant from the extremists at the margins – both those who demand the right for ethnostates and carceral borders to exist, and those who demand the right to exist at all. The most rational position between genocide and survival is somewhere in the middle (total extermination is of course quite extreme and therefore to be avoided). Remember that both sides must shoulder an equal share of the responsibility for the outcome of a conflict, regardless of unequal power imbalances that might have led to it. This is how compromise works. Remember too, that it is not a nuanced understanding to offer unconditional support to any one faction, regardless of the need to at least acknowledge said unequal power dynamics.⁵ It is an unfortunate truth that some colonial violence is legitimate because (realistically) some amount of oppression needs to be considered acceptable; the key is to be able to engage in rational debate about how much. These issues are historical after all, and very complicated, and taking a position on them is always a moral issue, never a structural one.

We must be realistic that the crucial work of reconciliation may be beyond the capabilities of the artist, but in these debates the art world still has much to contribute. When making curatorial decisions, it is important, as Dark Mofo creative director Leigh Carmichael put it in his defense of Sierra’s Union Flag, that the work one chooses “could be seen as difficult from the left and the right, so we find ourselves in the middle”. Finding oneself in the middle means that you will inevitably receive criticism from both sides – a sure sign that one has arrived at the correctly balanced and objective position. Although it may not be popular, this is the ideal location from which to defend oneself against charges that one is silencing free speech, not being sufficiently rational and nuanced, or flatly propagandistic. Ambiguity is after all, the ideal position for art to exist within, lest the artist choose a side and risk their work slipping into tedious and embarrassing didacticism.⁶

An openness to interpretation by a wide audience is a defining attribute and major strength of the arts. In contrast, propaganda can be easily recognized by its proximity to a strong political position (i.e. moral preaching), which is in very poor taste, both conceptually and aesthetically, and will definitely not get you invited to any cool art parties. It is therefore essential, while gesturing to the privileged, that social or political themes be addressed only in terms of individual actions, best limited to the gallery space or industry publications. Inspiring the viewer to action is best confined to the following areas: consumer choices, voting behaviors, philanthropic requests or a vague feeling of personal discomfort. Power imbalances should certainly never be addressed structurally, lest the guilt one is trying to inspire be misunderstood as a call for accomplices and drags the viewer too far to any extreme. To accomplish this balancing act is the mark of a gifted artist and true ally.

4.0 Fractal 4: Real Estate Disputes

Tap. In 1975, Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker officially opens ‘Canada Park’ in the no-man’s-land between the West Bank and Jerusalem. The park is built over the ruins of three Palestinian villages, whose residents were expelled by Israel in 1967. It is a popular tourist destination, and continues to be funded by Canadian organizations.⁷

Tap. On May 19, environmental group Fridays for Future Canada releases a statement in solidarity with Palestine, connecting the Palestinian struggle to the ongoing colonial occupation of so called Canada, including criticizing the Canadian government’s complicity in continuing to arm Israel. The statement is endorsed by Fridays for Future chapters worldwide, except for the German group, who calls it Antisemitic. The statement ignites a debate in the German green movement in which politicians denounce diverse Indigenous worldviews and place-thought as ‘esoteric bioregionalism’ and Nazi-style ‘blood and soil’ ideology.

Tap. German Culture Minister Monika Gruetters praises the recent German decision to return Nigeria’s Benin Bronzes, looted by the British in 1897 (over 500 of which are housed in the newly opened Humboldt Forum in Berlin), as contributing to “understanding and reconciliation” between the two countries.

Tap. What is happening in Sheikh Jarrah today, the Israeli foreign ministry informs us, has nothing to do with ethnic cleansing by a colonial power, but is merely “a real estate dispute.”

Here in the heart of empire, our streets are named for both colonizers and Karl Marx. Here in the heart of empire, the denizens of culture finance both Israeli rockets and the restaging of colonial violence as postcolonial critique. Here in the heart of empire, you are free to argue for the return of looted artefacts, but not for land return (from the river to the sea, on Turtle Island, or anywhere else). Here in the heart of empire, #noborders extends only as far as the edge of the West Bank’s apartheid wall.

In defense of the cancelled Union Flag project, Sierra invokes a long history of criticizing nationalism and support for decolonization in his work. His 2015 project Black Flag, in which Sierra organized the raising of what he calls “the anarchist black flag” at the North and South pole “to occupy the world,” is to be properly interpreted as a decolonial rebuke of nationalism. Thus, through the alchemy of the artist’s good intentions, the colonial gestures of planting a flag or drenching a colonial symbol in Indigenous blood are transformed into serious decolonial critique.

“This is what settler colonialism does”, Laleh Khalili writes, “it turns land, a piece of living and loving, a sacred milieu, one to which the Indigenous inhabitants have an intimate connection into property”. On this, the Israeli and Canadian governments, Marx⁸, the German green movement, and Sierra are all in agreement: land is mere resource, raw material, inert object to be claimed (according to political preference) by nationalists or anti-nationalists, white supremacist Germans or Antideutsche, capitalists or communists, all with the same commitment to occupation and conquest.

My ancestors arrived on Turtle Island as colonizers from Scotland (1819), Denmark (1928), Germany (1800s), and certainly other places that I have no record of. But colonization is not a list of dates marking conquests and arrivals. It is not history. Colonization is an ongoing relationship that encompasses both the human and nonhuman world, relationships “formed and maintained by a series of processes for the purpose of dispossessing, that create a scaffolding within which [Indigenous] relationship to the state is contained”.⁹ Under the colonial state, land is turned from relation into mere property¹⁰, ancestors become objects, and (if you’re talking to any Marxists) dispossession is flattened to proletarianization.

It is not a coincidence that the colonial Australian, Canadian, and German governments all use exactly the same word when referring to the present inconvenience of looted ancestors and looted land: reconciliation. It is always reconciliation, rather than Indigenous sovereignty or land return which marks the limit of the liberal colonial imagination. It is always, in the words of Hermann Parzinger, head of the Prussian Cultural Foundation, “coming to terms with colonial injustice” that marks the horizon of colonial efforts – Vergangenheitsbewältigung – coming to terms with the past.

In Germany, the past is also a real estate dispute. In the settler colonial imagination, the past, like land, is a location; merely property waiting to be owned, traded, or mastered. And like property, memory of the past must also be governed by the rules of the capitalist marketplace, a zero-sum competition for scarce resources. “The Hallmark of liberalism, the form of thinking par excellence of the economy”, write the Dispositions Collective, “is to make competition the only acceptable mode of antagonistic relationships.” As such, memory – like looted ‘objects’, like land – must be hoarded behind national borders and into colonial museums by the all knowing white possessive.¹¹ Behind these borders, only the right type of Germans have the right to pass judgment on their memory culture; define the correct emotional attitudes when discussing it, and act as the sole experts in its display and curation. In the zero-sum colonial imagination of scarce resources, there is no space for entanglement of memories and the potential multidirectional solidarities such entanglement might produce.¹² Behind these border walls of institution and nation, the dispossessed continue to be objects of possession. As artist Shellyne Rodriguez, who organizes with Take Back the Bronx, put it in a recent talk for Strike MoMA: “Behind the vitrine or behind bars, these are the root of our options.”

In his recent Berlin project The 3 Commandments of Postcolonialism, Sierra seeks to engage the current debate on Berlin’s ethnographic museums by cataloguing the economic value of Museum Island’s marketable assets while simultaneously proclaiming “Stop the stealing. Return the Stolen. Compensate the victims” on a public plaque. This work, he argues in his defense of Union Flag, is another clear example of his support for decolonization. Again, as with the colonial state, relationship is transformed into real estate dispute. Not listening. Still not listening.

Can what has been stolen ever be returned, as Sierra proclaims? Can the scale of the violent and ongoing loss ever be compensated? The revolutionary potential of the entangled histories imagined by decolonial Indigenous organizers is not merely in property changing hands (moderated exclusively through the correct colonial channels), but in upending the colonial worldviews that define land, ancestors, and historical memory as property to begin with. “Under the museum, under the university, under the city,” a recent Strike MoMA banner outside the Museum of Modern Art in New York city reads, “the land.”

5.0 Fractal 5: Accomplices

In English, guilt does not pack the same ideological punch as the German Schuld, which combines guilt with fault, debt and obligation. The struggle in Germany today is not only to overcome German guilt for the atrocities of their ancestors, but to overcome the understanding of colonization as historical, and the colonial state as predicated not only on absolute claims to historical ancestry, but on the type of relationships it upholds and maintains. It is the struggle to reclaim the revolutionary potential¹³ of debt from the liberal quicksand of guilt, and to reimagine the better world our debts to one another might build.¹⁴ This is what German discussions on Palestine and decolonization more broadly do not address, and why Sierra’s work continues to be appreciated as radical social critique rather than what it really is: a fundamentally conservative reflection of the shallow colonial imagination.

What then, is demanded of the guilty on the European continent like Sierra? Like myself? Austrian-Belgian Auschwitz survivor Jean Améry argued that the proper attitude of Germans after the Holocaust should be one of Selbstmisstrauen, or “self-mistrust.” In making art, in writing these words, I look for the fractal patterns:

Tap. The ease with which I might turn relation into property or take what is not mine to claim.

Tap. The prestige I might accumulate by merely pointing at injustice.

Tap. The powerful audience I might find who would agree that my intent is more important than my impact.

Tap. The acts I might justify, believing in the power of guilt to liberate.

Guilt, which always centers the powerful and closes off the potential for messy solidarity with the safety of tokenism, is not the same as Selbstmisstrauen. Selbstmisstrauen is an opening and a constant reminder that it is through our actions that we must continually make ourselves accountable. It is a reminder that our politics are located in our everyday social relations – in relationship, not just the ‘correct’ analysis, or the clever artistic gesture. It is not a lack of knowledge that is a barrier to action, but the ways in which the already powerful marshal their substantial resources to defend their vested interest in maintaining violent systems of inequality. Decolonization is not “occupying the world” in the name of anarchism or the arrogance of making postcolonial commandments for which one is accountable only to grant funders, festival curators and entrepreneurs, and it is not a white settler artist writing essays in Berlin.

I am not the descendent of German Nazis, but of European colonizers to what is currently Canada. I am able to study in Germany today because I am the beneficiary of racist, genocidal segregation policies that still govern colonized Turtle Island, policies from which the Nazis learned much and which still inspire apartheid regimes today. My debts are also unpayable. I hold at the front of my mind Susan Sontag’s warning that “No ‘we’ should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain”¹⁵ I hold at the front of my mind, a commitment to abolition that is grounded in the belief that none of us are disposable, and that the demand for uniquely evil perpetrators or perfectly sympathetic victims is also violence. We, the beneficiaries of the horrific acts of our ancestors, are also not disposable. To act in true solidarity, to dismantle the structures they have built for us at the expense of so many others – to do more than merely gesture at atrocity – we must believe it.

Art has the power to go so much further than any gesture towards the Documenta set could ever offer. It shapes worlds. In these teachings I am indebted to the work of Black and Indigenous revolutionaries and thinkers like Sylvia Wynter, who argues it is our capacity for symbolic storytelling which makes us uniquely human¹⁶, and Gloria Anzaldua who understood that “Nothing happens in the ‘real’ world unless it first happens in the images in our heads”¹⁷. They have taught me is not the guilt of the privileged that shakes the foundations of empire, it is the revolutionary power of the stories we tell ourselves in building our collective power. It is our interwoven, repeating fractals of memory and resistance – not as property, but as cross pollinated seeds of the radical imagination that are the foundation of a better world. Those are the patterns I am watching most closely for.

Some say that the result is one of London’s most ambitious and unique architectural achievements: a city within a city! But this conclusion usually leaves out the Barbican’s more important legacy: being the site of one of the UK’s biggest industrial strikes. In fact, as well as being a marvel of architecture, the Barbican includes many histories of collective action by workers who have demanded more from the centre across its 60 year history. This is the only way that the most precarious workers at the institution have been able to access the rights freely handed out to other employees. Not bad for a building with so many leaks.

1.0 The Battle of the Barbican

These radical histories began when work started at the Barbican site in 1962. The site was so big that each part of the project was split into segments and each one was overseen by a different building company. The workforce that populated the site was incredibly diverse and notably full of migrants—featuring workers from Ireland, Jamaica, the West Indies, India and different countries in Eastern Europe.

By all accounts, the health and safety measures on-site were poor (even by the already scary industry standards of the 60s and 70s). Demands for better working conditions ended up costing the City of London years of building delays, though it also cost the lives of some workers as well as irreparable physical damage to others. Guess all those names couldn’t fit on a plaque as easily as Chamberlin, Powell and Bon.

In those days, minimum standards needed to be set by the workers hard and fast if they didn’t want to be taken advantage of, which is, in part, why unions and union representatives (called stewards) were so crucial to construction sites.

Let me paint you a picture of what you could expect working at the Barbican.

The Turriff site was among the first sites of action in what would be a long term struggle between workers and management. There were no toilets—just boxes full of chemicals that workers fashioned into makeshift latrines. The employers refused to build flushing toilets until at least two floors of the site had been built up and, as a consequence, workers began walking to St. Paul’s Cathedral to use their toilets en masse. It was not uncommon that the site was only ever half full, given that many workers were en route to the bathroom. It wouldn’t be long before all working rights followed them right into the toilet. In 1976, John Laing (one of the construction firms working on the site) tried to force workers who were building the arts centre to handle cladding material that had been proven to carry asbestos. Talk about needing a risk assessment! In protest of this, 500 workers walked off the site in an all-out strike lasting two weeks.

This is a story that ends with some kind of positive change—there are others that bore no resolution.

Take the Barbican’s iconic concrete texture for instance: well, you can thank a group of half a dozen workers (most of whom were Black) for doing that by hand using bush-hammers all across the Barbican site. This work was infamously horrible, extremely dirty and resulted in the majority of these workers suffering from ‘white finger’—also known as Hand-Arm Vibration Syndrome—causing long term damage to nerves in their arms, wrists, hands and fingertips. No amount of union action could ever fix that. The building looks a little more brutal once you know how it was made so beautiful.

As you can imagine, big bosses and architects were annoyed that unions might ask for bathrooms and even have an opinion on what material could be used to clad their buildings. So, in 1965, they decided that they were done with it! First, they sacked 380 workers when some of them refused to show their union cards, then they tried to hire a few hundred other workers on the condition that they sign a contract giving up their right to strike. This “deal” led to a huge collective push against the document, not just by workers at the Barbican but across London. In that same week, 2,000 workers from across London’s biggest construction sites went on strike in solidarity with the Barbican workers. Unionised workers formed pickets on various Barbican sites, and construction came to a halt. The construction company attempted to bring other workers in on a bus, but this was stopped at the picket line by striking workers who smashed the coach to bits. As a result, and under mounting union pressure, the construction firm agreed to re-employ all previously sacked workers and scrapped the proposed contract.

By 1966, the architects were extremely behind on their architectural plans and kept issuing changes to the construction site, which in turn impacted workers’ abilities to operate, and more importantly, their ability to earn bonus payments (which made up for their low wages). Workers would build a wall, only to be told days later that the architects didn’t want the wall THERE they wanted it HERE. The Barbican’s concrete structure made this even more difficult as it meant that everything was more or less permanent. For the architects, the ends justified the means; especially when they weren’t the ones that had to pick away at dried concrete for months.

Long story short, architectural delays combined with issues relating to non-standardised bonus payments (which were, in part, based on how quickly workers could finish architectural plans, though difficult to do if plans change every other day) led to a unilateral walkout by workers on all sites controlled by the construction firm Myton. Myton responded with a six week lock out, closing the site and halting work. This turned out to be somewhat of a blessing in disguise, giving Myton an opportunity to renegotiate bonus standards with the union. Another blessing, perhaps, is that the six-week lockout gave the architects time to catch up with their site plans. Of course, the construction workers were not paid during this time as the site remained fully closed. In this period, Myton agreed to rehire all but the six stewards that had been most involved in the initial walk out. Workers refused to return to the site without these six stewards. What was supposed to be an unpaid holiday for the workers became a yearlong battle between them, the construction companies and the City of London, halting the Barbican’s construction for 14 months and making it one of the longest labour disputes in British history. You probably won’t find that on the Barbican’s website.

What’s impressive is that union bosses actually tried to re-open the site, although they were outmatched by the workers’ solidarity with the stewards. Myton tried desperately to sneak people on-site in buses and with police escorts, but the workers stood their ground and scared them away. Crowds of between 700-800 workers would surround the buses and rock them backwards and forwards, and, in other instances, workers from nearby sites would throw bricks at the buses. These tactics kept the site closed for over a year.

By 1967, however, the site was still closed, with both the stewards and strike committee calling for an end to the strike as it became clear they would not win. The architects never took responsibility for the disputes, and never once communicated with the workers. You will find this to be recurring behaviour for the Barbican’s so-called “creative upper class”.

Despite the delays, the Barbican Arts Centre finally opened in 1982 in an opening attended by the Queen and Margaret Thatcher—great! Unfortunately, this is not the end of the labour struggle: it seems that the people doing all the work on site at the Barbican are always overlooked.

2.0 ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!: Cleaners Fight for Equal Pay at the Barbican

In 2013, the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB) campaigned for a London Living Wage for cleaners at the Barbican, most of whom were migrants earning £6.19 per hour—what one might call poverty wages. Many workers at the Barbican, who were employed by the sub-contracted company Mitie, reported being racially abused, insulted and threatened. At this point, the City of London and all its official employees were proudly receiving a London Living Wage—though not the cleaners!

On 21 March 2013, the cleaners went on strike, followed by a protest on 27 April and an occupation of the Barbican’s foyer on 4 May, amongst other actions throughout the campaign. In 2014, the City of London finally caved and said that while they REALLY wanted to give the cleaners a living wage, it was really REALLY difficult to negotiate with Mitie. They promised that once they started a new contract with Servest, they would make sure to renegotiate their wages.

By the time 2015 rolled around, wages were still the same and Mitie continued to refuse the Barbican cleaners a living wage. The cleaners began to organise again—this time with IWGB’s sister union United Voices of the World (UVW). Cleaners working during this time reported regular racial abuse from management and were only entitled to minimum legal sick pay (which means you get nothing the first three days off and then £96.35 per week, which is maybe just enough to pay your rent, your food, your transport and any other needs you might have, including the needs of your partner, your parents or your kids! That’s about £13.76 per day which won’t get you much further than a lunch from Pret when you live in London.) The result of this was that workers were faced with the Dickensian choice of staying home and falling into poverty or going to work sick. Not much of a choice when you want to survive.

In one instance, a cleaner came to work on crutches as they could not afford to lose their wage. The Barbican team responded by calling the police—throwing the worker out of the arts centre. When UVW’s campaign started, Mitie threatened to sack any cleaner who joined the protests.

Amongst other actions, on 25 April 2015, UVW staged a protest in the centre and another on 31 October 2015. As a result of this three-year struggle, in April 2016, the London Living Wage was finally “won”  for all cleaners employed by the City of London, including those at the Barbican. A full two years after this wage was not so much “won” but rather bestowed upon all other staff at the Barbican. That same year, the new cleaning company, Servest, tried to sack all the UVW members who had campaigned for the London Living Wage.

This was one of UVW’s first wins as a grassroots union, and led to many similar campaigns across the country and other institutions in London. They became one of the first groups of unionised workers to ask for full sick pay, as well as being one of the few unions to represent the rights of migrant workers. Again, this is perhaps one of the Barbican’s most unsung achievements—being a location for radical union organising!

3.0 Exhibit B: The Human Zoo

While cleaners campaigned for rights that are given to most producers, curators and directors at the Barbican, in 2014, the Barbican programmed Exhibit B. Exhibit B was a performance installation conceived by the white South African artist Brett Bailey that looked to—in a “serious and responsible manner”—showcase the atrocities and racism experienced by enslaved Black people in Europe and the UK. How? By re-staging Human Zoos of the 20th century and filling their spaces with Black actors in tableaus of racist subjugation. The Barbican felt it was an installation that highlighted the inequality and abuse that had happened, emphasising racism as a thing of the past, rather than providing opportunities to think through how this inequality might subsist at the institution exhibiting the work. Bailey instrumentalised the histories and memories of pain from Black communities to create art that was meant to “challenge” the viewer—but at whose expense?

To no one’s surprise (other than to the Barbican programmers and directors, apparently) this show triggered many visitors and workers. The result was a petition calling for the show to be cancelled (which gained a total of 22,800 signatures) organised by the Boycott The Human Zoo campaign, led by Sara Myers, a journalist and activist from Birmingham. This was followed by a protest of 200 people blocking the performance entrance on the opening night. The show was cancelled.

This was the Barbican’s response:

“We find it profoundly troubling that such methods have been used to silence artists and performers and that audiences have been denied the opportunity to see this important work.”

We hope that they feel similarly about Barbican Stories by platforming it in their own bookshop! Lest we forget they were so passionate about staging work that critiqued racism in 2014.

4.0 2020: Again? Really?

Fast forward to 2020 and we see the catastrophe of the COVID-19 pandemic intersecting with—among other things—the global uproar following the murder of George Floyd in the United States, which was followed by the performative circus of “anti-racism” responses by the Barbican and the whole arts sector in general. Most memorably, in June 2020, “A statement from Sir Nicholas Kenyon, Managing Director of the Barbican” was posted on the Barbican website which includes the following line:

“The Black Lives Matter movement has demonstrated the urgent need for us to take action in showing an active commitment to eradicating racism in all its forms.”

A tall order for an organisation built on discrimination!

In November 2020, it was announced that the Barbican Centre’s front-of-house staff, who are on precarious zero hour contracts, would not be receiving a 20% furlough top up from the City of London, which they received throughout the first wave of the pandemic. They were expected to get through a pandemic on 80% of the London Living Wage, which is not a living wage at all, especially when it doesn’t include sick pay. This does not include staff who did not work during the re-opening period (due to sickness or otherwise), who will now have to reapply for their jobs. The administrative staff and creative upper class of the Barbican continue to receive 100% of their furlough and the benefits that come with being a contracted employee.

Front-of-house staff were the people who opened the centre when the country came out of the first lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic. These are the staff that make up the majority of the Barbican’s non-white workers, many of whom are migrants. The fact that our lowest paid workers are migrants or marginalized people cannot be disentangled from the mechanics of racism, and definitely does not live up to the commitment of eradicating racism in even the most basic forms, let alone “all” of them.

In November, the GMB Union created a petition to ask that the Barbican Centre’s front-of-house staff receive a full top up. At the time of writing, this petition has been signed by 3,045 people. The Barbican’s response has been to say that nothing can be done.

‍Management continues to wash their hands of responsibility and tell workers that this has been a difficult time for e v e r y b o d y.

5.0 2021 and beyond

In line with the Government’s COVID-19 roadmap to re-opening the country, the doors open on 17 May 2021.

Almost all of the Barbican’s casual staff don’t show up for front-of-house shifts. They have moved out of London or found employment in places that value them more. The Barbican’s creative upper class have to become hosts and invigilators to open the centre.

Barbican Stories is published.

Barbican employees are shocked at the stories and recollections of racism in the book. They can’t believe that this is all true and so they dive into their minority workforce to find out for themselves, once and for all. Unconvinced and under mounting public pressure, the Barbican hires an external consultant (a friend of a director) to publish a public race report that concludes: whilst the Barbican could do better, there is no systemic issue.

2,000 workers across London’s cultural sector create a picket line in solidarity with Barbican workers. The demands of the protest are impossible and necessary.

During the Barbican’s opening concert, as the conductor enters the stage to fill the auditorium with music, it is instead filled with the sound of 400 people standing up and leaving the orchestra on stage with no audience. A violinist cries.

All the employees of colour evacuate and the Barbican is left with a purely white workforce. There is a palpable sigh of collective relief: if there’s no one but white people, then we can’t be racist!

Artists stop aligning themselves with backward institutions so cultural producers at the Barbican have to become artists to fill the programme.

Whiteness clings to the walls like moisture. Visitors are too ashamed to cross the picket line.

Coffees go undrunk, B R U T A L tote bags collect cobwebs, the conservatory grows wild. The ducks leave the lake in solidarity. Old Barbican guides litter the foyer. The orange carpet turns grey with dirt.

Eventually, audiences don’t need a picket to stop them from coming to the centre. A primed and ready-to-pay cultural audience now reflects the fastest growing demographic in London. Now, these younger and more diverse audiences that make up the city’s landscape find different and better cultural spaces that actually care about them and reflect their lives without skirting around the ugly facts. Why see another token diversity event when there are now whole institutions dedicated to the complexity of the diaspora?

One by one, lights are cut from the Barbican’s many rooms and offices. They grow dusty in the absence of people. Moss grows between the cracks in the concrete.

The only room that remains open is the directorate office.

The directors maintain a throne of old catalogues, leaflets and newspaper clippings, in a never-ending meeting where the only thing on the agenda is to dust.

One unremarkable day, the Barbican ruins collapses in on itself. The debris blows away to reveal an ON SALE sign.

The only thing worth anything at the Barbican is the land it used to occupy (and even that won’t cover the debt left behind by the brutal beast).

Blitz Property Developers find EC2Y 8DS and they love a bargain.

Once again, the site is raised by the Blitz.

6.0 Histories, texts and interlocutors that have marked our thinking: 

“Communist Carpenter” - Barbican Archive Mixtape: A History of the Barbican Estate by Jack Wormell (2020)

Building the Barbican 1962-1982: Taking the industry out of the dark ages by University of Westminster Researchers: Christine Wall, Linda Clarke, Charlie McGuire and Olivia Munos - Rojas (2012)

The Barbican Archive

Building the Brutal - How we built the Barbican

CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF THE PRODUCTION OF THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT (PROBE) - University of Westminster

Barbican Living 

IWGB cleaners occupy the Barbican Centre for a Living Wage, For Worker’s Power (2013)

“Fuck off back to your own country!” - Video: IWGB cleaners occupy the Barbican Centre for a Living Wage (2013)

‍BARBICAN CLEANERS FIGHT FOR A LIVING WAGE AFTER CATERING STAFF VICTORY, The Multicultural Politic (2013)

7.0 The UVW Archive:

“The City of London’s artistic and cultural megaplex was mistreating its cleaners, but they fought back and the tables were swiftly turned.”

#Barbican

Campaigns: The Barbican Centre

We are all Alberio

Reporting on Exhibit B: Barbican criticises protesters who forced Exhibit B cancellation, Guardian, (2014), #boycottthehumanzoo

*Editor’s Note: The original version of this essay forms the introduction to the book Barbican Stories. This essay has been edited for the purposes of Decolonial Hacker.*

From the Dutch West India Company to the Rockefeller dynasty to the bankers, speculators, and warmakers who sit on the board of MoMA today, their accumulation has only been possible through our dispossession. A system of imperialism, colonialism, and racial capitalism with gendered violence at its core. We stand in solidarity with all those who strike against patriarchy every day, at work, at home, in the fields, in the prisons, in the detention centers, in the streets, in the shelters. Stolen land, stolen people, stolen labor, stolen wealth, stolen worlds, stolen horizons. This is the modernity to which MoMA is a monument.

When we strike MoMA, we strike its blood-soaked modernity. The monument on 53rd Street becomes our prism. We see our histories and struggles refracted through its crystalline structure, and foreclosed futures come into view. The museum is converted into a theater of operations where our entwined movements of decolonization, abolition, anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism can find one another. Why strike MoMA? So that something else can emerge, something under the control of workers, communities, and artists rather than billionaires.

1.0 The Case Against MoMA

Any day now, hedge fund billionaire Leon Black is likely to resign as the chair of the board of MoMA. It has been six weeks since the deep financial ties between Black and Jeffery Epstein resurfaced in the headlines. Black has already announced that he is stepping down from Apollo Global Management, but MoMA remains silent about his ongoing role at the museum. Artists and community groups have demanded that Black be removed, and calls for action have been circulating publically for a month. Last week anonymous sources confirmed to the media that Black is facing pressure from other members of the board to step down. They know his continued presence on the board is a recipe for crisis, but getting rid of him could set a precedent and put at risk MoMA’s use of his priceless art collection 😱. The museum administration is in a classic decision dilemma.

Whether Black stays or goes, a consensus has emerged: beyond any one board member, MoMA itself is the problem. MoMA Divest offered a summary of its reasoning as follows, “Five MoMA board members — Steven Tananbaum, Glenn Dubin, Steven Cohen, Leon Black, Larry Fink — have been identified and targeted by different groups over the last year for their ties to war, racist prison and border enforcement systems, vulture fund exploitation, gentrification and displacement of the poor, extractivism and environmental degradation, and patriarchal forms of violence. Board members also have ties and donate to the NYPD Police Foundation. In short, the rot is at the core of the institution, which includes PS1.” We agree, and also point to Honorary Chair Ronald Lauder, the cosmetics billionaire who is also president of the Zionist lobbying group World Jewish Congress and a major Trump donor. Deserving of recognition as well is board member Patricia Phelps Cisneros, whose billions come from the right-wing Grupo Cisneros media-industrial empire in Latin America. Speaking of Latin America, let’s shine a light on Steven Tananbaum, Jeff Koons enthusiast and chief investment officer at Golden Tree Assets, one of the hedge funds involved in extracting wealth from the people of Puerto Rico through the PROMESA debt-restructuring program. And how could we forget Paula Crown and James Crown of the General Dynamics armaments fortune, whose Crown Creativity Lab on the second floor of the museum hosts The Peoples Studio, an “experimental space where visitors can explore the art and ideas of our time through participatory programs.” This is the condition of modernity that we find at Modernism Central: death-dealing oligarchs using art as an instrument of accumulation and shield for their violence.

At the ground level, MoMA is also a messed up workplace. Elitism, hierarchy, inequality, precarity, disposability, anti-Blackness, misogyny. Remember the back-end workers who were furloughed and fired last year while the high-ups have carried on in luxury. As an estimated two thirds of the arts and culture jobs of the city have been lost, MoMA’s “David Rockefeller Director” Glenn Lowry continues to take home 2.3 million dollars a year, or 48 times the amount earned by an educational assistant. Sources have confirmed that just before the pandemic, MoMA management dis-invited unsalaried contract workers from the 2019 Christmas party, including people who had been there for decades. HR posted a memo in the Operations Room. A small detail, but it says a lot. Shout out to the O Room!

This document comes from a movement perspective that de-exceptionalizes the museum. We refuse to acknowledge the separation of the museum from the rest of society. We see MoMA as existing on the same plane as the violence of the ruling class that has controlled it since its inception with the oil wealth of the Rockefellers in 1929. No more rationalizing the regime. They have long enabled the killing of our people and non-human relations and they have always expected us to thank them for their philanthropy. Yes, we know that Aggie Gund read The New Jim Crow and sold a Lichtenstein to fund the Art For Justice Fund. It was a project in collaboration with Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation. The man who declared “it would be a grave error to demonize wealthy people” following the ouster of Kanders from the Whitney, and who called the cops on Ford Fellows and their friends when they protested his “nuanced” support for new jails. If any doubts remain about the connection of the Ford Foundation, liberal philanthropy, and counterinsurgency, we direct you to this classic study.

What about the art? We love art, but we have zero allegiance to the art system of which MoMA is the epicenter. Art exists beyond MoMA. Art is not a luxury, and it is a vital part of our communities and movements. Art is one of the few means of production available to oppressed peoples for the creation and sustaining of worlds in the face of death and destruction. The aesthetic forms and imaginative powers of art require material support: economies of solidarity, platforms of cooperation, infrastructures of care and mutual aid. But the political economy of the art system is antithetical to these life-affirming practices. It is predicated on property, scarcity, competition, and assimilation. One canon. One center. One meta-narrative of modernity, however diversified and globalized it may have become. It is governed by gatekeepers, critics, and canon-makers who try to create the measure by which art lives or dies, giving access to a select few while leaving the rest with the false choice between eating and making art. It doesn’t have to be this way.

As 150 artists and art workers put it in their open letter last month, “we must think seriously about a collective exit from art’s imbrication in toxic philanthropy and structures of oppression, so that we don’t have to have the same conversations over and over, one board member at a time. This thinking can only catalyze action once we state plainly: We do not need this money. Museums and other arts institutions must pursue alternative models, cooperative structures, Land Back initiatives, reparations, and additional ideas that constitute an abolitionist approach toward the arts and arts patronage, so that they align with the egalitarian principles that drew us to art in the first place.” Such calls for collective exit change the terms of the conversation, and point in the direction of something beyond MoMA.

There is no blueprint for dismantling MoMA, but here is the starting point: whatever comes after MoMA, it must preserve and enhance the jobs of museum workers, and enact reparative measures for communities harmed by the museum over time, beginning with the legacy of land dispossession. The agenda is open, but any path forward must be premised on the acknowledgement of debts owed: from top to bottom and horizontally too, between and within groups, communities, and movements. We need a just transition to a post-MoMA future. MoMA has been a toxic force, but there can be growth and healing in the aftermath of toxicity. May a thousand mushrooms bloom in the ruins of the modern museum.

2.0 Their Archives Are Our Receipts

Leon Black is but the latest in a succession of predatory billionaires running MoMA since the Rockefellers. Their petrochemical industrial extraction laid the groundwork for capitalist globalization and its political, financial, and cultural infrastructures over the course of the 20th century. Standard Oil was the nucleus of the modern fossil-fuel regime. Chase Bank, the Rockefeller-led instrument by which the New York City’s working class was pulverized during the 1975 fiscal crisis of the state, was an early experiment with neoliberal austerity that would soon be expanded worldwide. The Rockefeller Drug Laws were an essential mechanism of mass incarceration after the Black revolt of the 60s. As Governor, Nelson Rockefeller also called the shots of the Attica Massacre. Central to the Ford/Rockefeller presidential administration which scrambled to maintain U.S. hegemony after the victory of the North Vietnamese was strategic cooperation with the apartheid regimes of Israel and South Africa. The list of crimes by the Rockefeller dynasty against people and the planet is endless.

Throughout the 20th century, the Rockefellers and their class allies underwrote and led the museum, overtly weaponizing art in the service of empire. They enabled fascist admirer and white supremacist Phillip Johnson to become the king of Modern Architecture, a legacy which has recently become a point of action for the Black Reconstruction Collective. Well-documented collaborations between MoMA and CIA. The Museum of Primitive Art, stocked with cultural objects looted from Africa, the Pacific, and the Americas and now housed in the Met. Partnerships with the Cisneros dynasty through the Americas Society/Council of the Americas, and now the Cisneros Institute at MoMA itself.

These are just some of the connections between the history of MoMA and the history of empire. Let us peruse the archives of MoMA. Their contents are our receipts. Shine a light on them. Unseal the history whose legacies burden us today. The research has already commenced. From the Rockefellers to Fink, you will see that there is zero degree of separation between MoMA and the highest echelons of the global ruling class.

3.0 Strike is a Verb

Striking MoMA is done in solidarity with all those seeking to get free, تحرر , as is said in Arabic. Strike is a verb, not a static tool. It is reinvented through the process of organizing and building relations. It is an activity that can take many forms by various people and groups. To strike is to exercise the power of refusal, a negation that is coupled with affirmation. Unauthorized acts of disobedience and noncompliance in order to shake the powers that be. A diversity of strategies, tactics, and techniques. Workers withholding their labor from the boss, workplaces taken over and collectivized. As legendary labor organizer Lucy Parsons put it, “My conception of the strike of the future is not to strike and go out and starve, but to strike and remain in, and take possession of the necessary property of production.”

Strike concerns workers and workplaces in the sense of waged labor of course, but as we have seen with International Women’s Strike, “When the strike ceases to be the exclusive prerogative of unions, it stops being a decision made from above, and therefore, the strike stops being an order to simply comply with or adhere to. The strike appropriated by the women’s movement is literally overflowed: it must account for multiple labor realities that escape the borders of waged and unionized work, that question the limits between productive and reproductive labor, formal and informal labor, remunerated and free tasks, between migrant and national labor, between the employed and the unemployed. The strike taken up by the women’s movement directly targets a central element of the capitalist system: the sexual and colonial division of labor.”

Striking happens every day, in ways large and small. From invisible acts of subversion to the great General Strikes that have shut down cities, states, and empires. W.E.B. Dubois described the destruction of slavery by the enslaved as a General Strike, one whose tactics included everyday resistance, armed rebellion, and mass exodus. Strike thus has a deep connection to abolition and the Black Radical Tradition and is especially resonant at MoMA given ground-breaking shows like Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, and Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America.

As the 220 arts professionals who signed the 2019 MoMA Divest Letter point out, the museum is adjacent to and entwined with the systems of police, prisons, and profit, exemplified by Blackrock CEO Larry Fink. Going after the oligarchs at MoMA is another way to strike at the profiteers of detention, dispossession, and death. At the museum, those who underwrite prison-industrial complex are within arm’s reach. They gather there routinely for openings, galas, garden parties, and board meetings. Their billions in assets hang on the wall, works of art twisted into ornaments of repression and ciphers of extraction. The structure itself physically abuts the ultra-luxury 53W53 MoMA Tower, where some of them and their best friends live.

Campaigns, actions, and letters chip away at the regime’s facade from the outside. Inside, every time workers organize, defy the boss, care for a coworker, disrespect secrecy, or enact other forms of subversion, cracks are created in the core. Cracking and chipping, chipping and cracking. As the walls that artificially separate the museum from the world collapse, we reorient away from the institution and come together to make plans. Let us strike in all the ways possible to exit from the terms of the museum so we can set our own.

4.0 Operational Terms for Striking MoMA

We proceed on our own terms, not those of the museum. We agree to organize with care, generosity, and patience as we build new relations and deepen existing ones.

1. Multiple Frames/Interwoven Struggles

   No struggle is left behind as we move together and separately, but in agreement. At MoMA, the frames of abolition, decolonization, anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism overlap in the course of struggle. The dismantling of patriarchy is the warp and the weft of these movement paths. Each allows us to see different things, recognize our blindspots, and to strengthen our movements. We were never meant to know each other, forcibly separated by their divide-and-conquer tactics. We commit to mutually refuse all efforts to isolate our struggles into issue silos, understanding that single-issue organizing easily falls into the hands of those seeking to undermine our collective liberation.

2. Recognize Debts/Operationalize Solidarity

   No to the non-profit-industrial complex. No to the ally-industrial complex. No to the diversity-equity-inclusion complex. No to the model-minority-assimilation complex. No anti-Blackness. No white nonsense. No toxic masculinity. No heteronormative culture. No anti-poor or anti-working-class sentiments. No ableism. No “progressive except for Palestine.” Yes to collective liberation; yes to becoming accomplices, co-conspirators, race traitors, class traitors, de-assimilators; yes to all those who are ready to put something on the line, to operationalize their privileges and redistribute their resources in whatever forms these may take, from property deeds to printer ink. Solidarity involves discomfort but offers togetherness in the face of extreme alienation. If it comes easily and doesn’t require a cost, it’s probably not solidarity. Solidarity is the enactment of the social debts we owe each other. Sharing what you’ve got. Material commitments in light of unevenly shared histories of harm. Commitments to care, to act, to take risks, to speak out, to give as much as one can, and then some. Working on oneself so as to not reproduce systems of harm and oppressive behavior in the process of showing up for each other. Acknowledging debts and acting accordingly forms bonds of reciprocity and healing. Building relations between movements, communities, families, friends. As we weave our struggles together by taking action and holding each other with care, another political imaginary emerges. An intercommunalist, intergenerational imaginary that dis-identifies from the nation-state, from the museum, and its underlying myths of modernity. The experiences of our people most intimately and immediately affected by the violence of these forces must always be a central catalyzing point for our work.

3. Against Liberal Governance/Exacerbate the Crisis

   No to liberal governance. Governance is the watchword of museum-reformers, inside and out. If only, they say, there were better protocols and principles, we could put our house in order. Better representation. More participation. More diversity, equity, and inclusion. An audit. A task force. More meetings. More Zooms. More trainings. More consultation. A new structure for the board. Guidelines for the acceptability of funds, separating the clean money from the dirty money. Honest billionaires rather than crooked ones. Artist involvement to keep things authentic. An art historian or two to set the moral compass with humanistic values, or maybe even to consult about the meaning of decolonization. Those who allow themselves to be included and instrumentalized in this way undermine our collective liberation. Another kind of institution is possible, but it cannot be on the terms of the existing regime.

4. Multiply Demands/Resist Cooptation

   No demands that further assimilation back into the art system. Demands can set horizons, shape the imagination, and amplify desires. But at present, any demand that seeks to reform MoMA without challenging its authority to control the process legitimizes the regime. They may say they want to talk, but the museum will use this to buy itself time. Conversations, dialogues, and forums about the “future of the museum” that loop back upon themselves to infinity. Strategic incorporation of this or that demand to placate this or that group, with the intent of waiting out and breaking up the formation. Invocations of the “outside agitator” to question motivations, loyalties, and tactics, deflecting attention from the harm that the museum is causing.

5. Heighten the Contradictions/Act Where You Are

   No one is pure in a colonized world. We all live by our contradictions. Working at MoMA and disgusted with MoMA? Being an artist and hating the art system? Teaching at a university and wanting to tear it all down? Studying freedom in college while you go deeper into debt? Struggling to pay rent but displacing someone else? A Ford Fellow who protests the Ford Foundation? Oppressed but also contributing to the oppression of others? This is the entangled dystopia of our present. We can see contradictions as impediments and be consumed by frustration, ambivalence, and despair, or we can acknowledge and heighten them. Quiet forms of subversion, deep conversations, mobilizations, large and small: each act we take further undermines the principles that sustain MoMA.

6. Mapping Power/Addressing Workers

   No to the erasure of class in discussions of the museum. MoMA has its own clear hierarchy of power. The board ponies up the money and calls the shots. Management keeps them happy. Curators, critics, and artists provide the culture and the intellectual legitimacy. Then there are the staff, unionized and not. Food service workers, janitors, guards, art handlers, installers, ticket-takers, copyeditors, educators, those who know the operations and logistics of the infrastructure inside and out. Generations of skill, knowledge, craft, and dedication. We know there is an ongoing history of worker resistance at MoMA. To the workers: we know you have acted and continue to act. You have our unconditional solidarity. Workers are essential stakeholders in overturning the institution and creating something else in the process.

7. Refusing Partitions/Activating Platforms

   No to the separation and specialization of roles that the art system expects of us: worker, artist, curator, critic, organizer, journalist. Striking MoMA requires us all, outside, inside, and otherwise. In practice these boundaries are already blurred, but the museum will invoke them in order to isolate us, demobilize us, and prevent us from sharing experiences, knowledges, resources, and power. We see that platforms at the museum are already being activated in furtherance of movement work, going against the grain of the institution. Platforms at the museum can become spaces of assembly beyond the museum’s authority, creating spaces where we can get together and figure things out.

8. Art/Memory

   No to the white mythology of the museum, which claims to be a temple of memory. Whose memory? Whose framing? Who decides? Generations of artists, critics, and curators have interrogated the museum’s meta-narrative, moving the dial of representation in the direction of justice. But museums have proven time and again they want the art, not the people. The people are pushing back, declaring with their actions that museums are not neutral. Artists as organizers, organizers as artists. Efforts are proliferating to hold museums responsible for all the harm they continue to cause to workers, to artists, to the communities at their doorstep, to people around the world, from Indianapolis Museum of Art, to Montclair University, to the British Museum, to the Quai Branly. We are especially inspired by the work of the Congolese comrade Mwazulu Diyabanza and his collaborators who have directly enacted the reversal of imperial plunder on which that French museum is founded. We are learning from each other, and reconnecting with legacies, promises, and lessons that came to a head in 1968, without apology. Museums and universities were activated as sites of struggle, from the Third World Liberation Front, to Women Students and Artists For Black Art Liberation, to the Guerilla Art Action Group. Proliferating groups, transgressive interventions, non-reformist reforms, visionary programs, ancestral reckonings and re-connections, demands that the museum “decentralize its power structure to the point of communalization.” These are some of the memories that speak to us today. Our memories, our art, our aesthetics exist, before, beyond, and in spite of MoMA, and the empty, linear, homogenous time of colonial modernity. The ancestors are all around us. When we strike MoMA, we’re making the worlds our ancestors deserve(d).

9. Art/Freedom

   No to conflating art with MoMA. No to defending MoMA in the name of protecting Culture and Civilization from the iconoclasts and barbarians. No to the myth that freely creating art requires resigning ourselves to unfree conditions in society because we need their money, their resources, their recognition. Yes to partisans of art. Yes to art embedded in the culture of movements. Yes to aesthetics rooted in struggle. Yes to art for its own sake, if that means we are down with creating and conspiring to get free, whatever our style, school, or medium. Meme-makers and abstract painters, monument topplers and postmodern sculptors, designers of banners and drawers of lines, unpopular musicians and obscure sound artists, live-streamers and cinephiles, wardancers and pole-dancers, dream-diviners and archive-searchers; critique-ers of institutions and those who never recognized the institution in the first place. Artists of all kinds that do not recognize such distinctions in their life and work. What matters is being engaged in the struggle and breaking the dependency-complex that MoMA has created for art, ideologically and materially. When we strike MoMA, we free up space for a renewal of art as envisioned in the freedom dreams of Suzanne Césaire, “And this is the domain of the strange, the marvelous, and the fantastic, a domain scorned by people of certain inclinations. Here is the freed image, dazzling and beautiful, with a beauty that could not be more unexpected and overwhelming. Here are the poet, the painter, and the artist, presiding over the metamorphoses and the inversions of the world under the sign of hallucination and madness.”

10. Diversify Tactics/Practice Creativity and Care

    MoMA can be approached from all angles using numerous strategies and tools. Diversity of tactics, diversity of aesthetics. Plan and organize with care and generosity. Agitate and affirm. Work with others on the basis of trust and affinity. Anticipate counterinsurgency. Do not forget that when we strike MoMA, we are hitting an essential nerve in the global body of the ruling class.

5.0 Steps Forward: A Two Phase Process

With the above terms as a framework, this document intends to initiate a two-phase, stakeholder-led decolonization process for MoMA without the authority of MoMA. Launching on April 9th and extending to June 11th, the first phase of the process is a ten week sequence of conversations, actions, and more. These activities will lay the groundwork for the second phase of the process: a spokescouncil-based convening that can determine the shape, steps, and mechanics of a just transition to a post-MoMA future that prioritizes workers and communities.

6.0 Phase 1: Strike MoMA @ MoMA: Ten Weeks of Art, Action, and Conversation

Phase 1 launches with a day of action on April 9th. Stay tuned for details. There will be three orientations in advance of April 9th: a general orientation, an orientation limited to BIPOC folks, and an orientation for those wishing to contribute from beyond New York, including at an international scale. To participate in these orientations, contact strikemoma@protonmail.com.

The subsequent ten weeks will encompass a variety of activities, including trainings, writing projects, agitprop campaigns, and direct actions at the museum and beyond. Weaving these activities together will be a series of movement conversations, online and in person, that will function as the intellectual and relational infrastructure for phase 2 of the process. An important component of these conversations will be collective research, archival investigation, and speculative visioning concerned with post-MoMA futures.

Working groups are already forming to participate in these ten weeks and beyond:

Curators and Educators for Decolonization (CED). For more information, contact curatorseducatorsdecolonize@protonmail.com.

Artists for a Post-MoMA Future (APMF). For more information, contact artistspostmoma@protonmail.com.

7.0 Phase 2: Convening for a Just Transition to a Post-MoMA Future

Shaped by a spokescouncil of stakeholders and independent of the authority of MoMA, this convening, held at the end of the ten weeks, will determine the next steps for disassembling the museum in light of its harmful history: determining the mechanics of divestment and transfer of assets, the redistribution of properties and the repurposing of infrastructure; establishing funds for reparations, rematriations, and Indigenous land restoration; sustained support for just transition of workers to cooperative self-management and solidarity economies. As MoMA winds down and we extract our imagination from its orbit, our energies, resources and labor power will be freed up for creating alternatives in its place. Alternatives controlled by workers and communities, not billionaires and their enablers. This could be a first step for a city-wide process.

8.0 Authorship of This Document

This living document dated as of March 23, 2021 is authored by StrikeMOMA Working Group of the International Imagination of Anti-National Anti-Imperialist Feelings (IIAAF). It is generated by StrikeMOMA Working Group in conversation with dozens of other groups and individuals, including but not limited to:

Artists for a Post-MoMA Future
Comité Boricua En La Diáspora
Curators and Educators for Decolonization
Decolonize This Place
Direct Action Front for Palestine
Forensic Architecture
Formers Employees of MoMA
Global Ultra Luxury Faction
Insurgent Poets Society
MoMA Divest
Take Back the Bronx
Wardance Collective
We Will Not Be Silent

Finally, this document does not offer signatories and does not seek to establish a coalition. This document intends to facilitate the growth of a formation in which individuals, collectives, and groups engage in shared struggle. Strike MoMA.

By intervening in the digital territory of institutions and building a dedicated space where discussions about their actions can exist, we hope for more people to actively imagine and posit better alternatives for institutional governance. Here, at the beginning, it’s difficult to be doctrinal as to what Decolonial Hacker will do in its lifetime, for we are certainly open to deviations along the way. Decolonial Hacker is at its core a community driven initiative, and we aspire to join the growing chorus of people acting and thinking in good faith to conceive of what a “better institution” might look like, in an industry that is constantly reproducing systems of domination (to paraphrase the words of filmmaker, writer, and theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha).

Many advocate for the annihilation of cultural institutions in their present form, or rather, invoke an Afropessimist logic to pave the fabled alternative: destruction as an act of creation. Others may reject this negation and take a reformist stance that detoxifies the institutional body and infuses it, instead, with different kinds of corrective politics. There are others, too, whose alignments are more akin to a compromise between these camps, which is perhaps the clearest way one might locate the starting position of Decolonial Hacker. In other words, we see the idea of an “annihilated institution” as aspirational, while remaining conscious of, and receptive to, the various hurdles that stand in the way of this. In other words, we aren’t interested in defending arguments in favour of the fundamental existence of institutions, nor do we seek their return to a “state of innocence.” Our contributors might help us enunciate, nuance, and sublimate the distance between destruction and reformation, both of which are, nevertheless, products of a generative discontent with places bestowed the responsibility of representing “culture.”

As Decolonial Hacker’s founding editor, I have wondered whether this project is worth embarking on at all—that is, whether this project is but a mere reflection of some elemental naivety for a “better world.” But is there dignity in resignation? In a time where so many reactionaries are afflicted by, and platformed for, some kind of fashionable jadedness or fatalism with our institutions writ large, it appears more noble to seize the purported impossibility of change and work toward a foundational shift. Who will shoulder this burden? The old adage “if not us, then who” only feels trite here because it’s true. And indeed, herein lies an act of doing, one in pursuit of that something else along the way.

Download the extension for Google Chrome here, and for Firefox here.

Decolonial Hacker is now accepting pitches for texts – on any cultural institution in the world – between 2000–3000 words for the first publication period between now and September 2021. The fee for each text is $500AUD funded by the Australia Council for the Arts. Please submit pitches to eugene@decolonialhacker.org by 2 April 2021. If possible, please include a writing sample.

Decolonial Hacker is made possible by the indefatigable efforts of visual designer and web developer Joan Shin, and developer Caspian Baska. I owe Joan and Caspian my deepest thanks for their ongoing spiritedness, collaboration and work. I must thank Sanja Grozdanić, Miranda Samuels, Emerald Dunn Frost and Kai Wasikowski, who have been so generous in sharing their intelligence and kindness to make this project feel all the more viable. I am grateful to Soo-Min Shim, Jazz Money, Naomi Riddle, Michael Fitzgerald and Lisa Long for their friendship in all steps of this project. And finally, Decolonial Hacker owes thanks to numerous peers for their sharp and thorough feedback on the user experience and design.