https://sarmadmagazine.com Sarmad Wed, 09 Mar 2022 19:56:43 +0000 https://sarmadmagazine.com en https://sarmadmagazine.com/A-n-idealized-portrait-of-the-art-worker-crumbling Mon, 26 Jul 2021 14:55:40 +0000 Sarmad https://sarmadmagazine.com/A-n-idealized-portrait-of-the-art-worker-crumbling A(n idealized) portrait of the art worker crumbling by Alina Lupu ︎︎︎ 15 Aug 2021 Welcome! In this position, your role is to plot (alongside equally driven young - emphasis on young! - professionals) an evolving proposition about the future of art, and the role of the artist in society. You must be committed to the development of the next generation of artists and to innovating. You must be energetic, collaborative, caring (think, someone’s mom), open-minded (since you’ll be required to work overtime), creative (at this point words just lose meaning, don’t they?) and have a deep knowledge of the field in which you work (and if you have that you’ll realize that your best bet at making an income will never truly be through your artistic practice, it’s better if you get accustomed to the idea early in your career). You will be given the responsibility and freedom to inspire and maintain an innovative output. You won’t be given guidance on how to do that at any point throughout your practice, but that builds character. It means you’ll need to roll up your sleeves plenty of times and stretch your working time to the point where you’ll question ever stepping into this field altogether. Worry not though! All of your peers will also be artists with a strong position in the (international) field. Notice how I slipped international in there between brackets? What this means is that they will come from other countries, they will study within a country in the global North. They will build up a practice locally, but with every show they will be a part of, even if their output won’t be tangential to their upbringing in their country of origin, that very country of origin will be listed in their bio, next to their name, to stand for openness and international outreach. You’ll be hard-pressed to find an institution or exhibition space that won’t instrumentalize someone’s original background for clout. Nevertheless, this is fine, since you’ll have to bring some critical edge to the table and you can comment on this variation of exoticizing in your work. Work through it. You’ll be pushed to examine, undermine and leave the cultural comfort zone of assumptions, conventions, and privileges. Oh, but don’t talk about class! Or it’s fine if you do if you’re pointing your criticism downwards, to the downtrodden, just don’t point your criticism up. The King of the Netherlands comes for a visit? Iron your best frock and/or practice your curtsy. You don’t want to shoot yourself in the foot professionally after all of this struggle, do you? What you need to do is to, for example, use your critical faculties as a way to discover unknown and hidden connections, absurdities, and free space. Call these the paradoxes of capitalism, I suppose! Like how the freedom of the arts is seen as an absolute end goal, yet the encroaching spread of private funding is threatening said freedom, but you’re asked to not raise questions. Like how you have to be a critically acclaimed artist by 27 to access housing and a studio, since there’s an age limit placed on these resources, most likely by those that benefited from squatted buildings in the 80’s to build their practices and now they’ve turned landlords and committee members and are actively sabotaging a new generation of talent. What the hell is talent anyway? Like the fact that you have to be under 35, or under 40 or 28 to apply to certain prizes, yet said prizes don’t have any issues setting themes in tune with the times, among which the idea of telling you to slow down, be mindful, take your time, and be sustainable in your practice. Art could then be considered as a critical and meaningful way to play with the perception of knowledge, conventions, and social codes. It requires imagination, intuition, humor, and a keen eye for presentation. Only it’s not some of these things. And it can’t be if the ones that have access to it squeeze into an ever more narrow mold. D & I. The art field values a diverse and inclusive composition of itself. It considers that working in a diverse field makes us more effective, innovative and the work more enjoyable. It doesn’t do much to actually and actively promote diversity and inclusion though, except mentioning it in all institutional brochures and budget plans since the local government recently got woke to the fact that the art field is not at all representative of the composition of the country as a whole. They’ll want you to be well organized, strategically smart, a social sponge with a good sense of humor, and an outspoken mind matching their vibe. And to have a critical view of current social issues and other shifting paradigms confronting the contemporary world. You should be enthusiastic about questioning established norms and behaviours through art and design and be an advocate of critical new skills. You should be critical, but not too much - critical enough to have a good sense of humour at parties. Don’t get bitter! The ability to work collaboratively is a must. But you’ll find quite some issues in being taught to work collaboratively when the format of education you’ve been put through treasures individuals, with individual studios, with individual problems, in individual living quarters they can’t afford, while individually complaining about their condition and doing jack shit about the collective. At the end of the day though all you can count on is: Showing up. Shutting up. Making space. Criticizing and being criticized. It is the discomfort that sits on top of one’s belly after an evening meal and reading the precarious 12-hour contract the dream job offered, which doesn’t pay the rent in a city where only baby boomers, their children & some expats can afford mansions and the rest sit in tiny houses with paper-thin walls. At times you’ll find yourself being overly white, western, urban, lower class, male-female, precociously precarious, a 12-hour-shifter, no-pension-planner, dreaming of sunnier days, of flowers in the sidewalks, laughing all the way to the bank, taking the subway, containing your feelings, starting to believe you’re in love, each reflection in a window reflecting back your bright face. Then again employers trade on the persistent myth that when we do something we love, that labour no longer counts as work. Imagine, in this case, what it must feel like to be your own boss! You’ll realize you’re well embedded and that you operate in a vibrant local and regional biotope of academic, engineering, arts & music, research institutions, and initiatives. That you interface with a growing international network of like-minded institutions and groups and are in a continuous process of strengthening and deepening the research dimension, challenging the boundaries of both the arts and the sciences. You’ll let out a gentle sigh, and then a scream. At the end of it all, if all else fails, remember that it's a process. The alternative. Existing outside the confines of this field, with an awareness of its limitations, understanding its lingo, but refusing to engage, might be the only true form of resistance. You’ll look at yourself with some form of honesty or another and wonder, throughout your practice:  What are the opportunities you have refused? What are the institutions you have boycotted? What are the types of labour that are vital to your artistic practice, but that you generally leave off of your CV? What type of work that you’re doing remains unacknowledged? Where do your ethics lie? What or rather who has rejected you? “We’re sorry to inform you…” What or rather who can you reject in turn? Can you, at the end of the day, refuse? Only by the time you realize that you could refuse, it might be honestly too late. You’ll have to sift through the discourse, cringe, grin and bear it and work on carving out an alternative to it – do whatever you’ve got to do to stay in it and stay sane. Endnotes: In trying to figure out what a contemporary art worker’s profile would be, I took a step backward and compiled their profile out of job openings for positions within the field of art and design, indirectly attributed in the text, since it's by looking at what others think you should be, that you figure out where you might fit - and then decide to collaborate or run for dear life. The full list of references are:  - Job openings ArtEZ: https://www.artez.nl/dit-is-artez/werken-bij-artez/vacatures - Amal Alhaag - A scream is never a dispossessed footnote, sonsbeek 21-24 catalogue - Onomatopee - Catalyst of public engagement: https://www.onomatopee.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Catalyst-of- public-engagement.pdf - Job Opportunity Lecturer Photography, Transformation Design - https://www.wdka.nl/news-events/job-opportunity-lecturer-photography- transformation-design - There is Nothing New Under the Sun, Kata Geibl, 2019  - This is a Work of Fiction, Alina Lupu, 2019- Docenten ArtScience Interfaculty - https://www.kabk.nl/nieuws/vacature- docenten-artscience-interfaculty- Art Goss’s Curriculum Veto initiative - coming soon! https://sarmadmagazine.com/Alina-Lupu Sat, 31 Jul 2021 10:43:30 +0000 Sarmad https://sarmadmagazine.com/Alina-Lupu ︎︎︎ About AlinaAlina Lupu is a Romanian-born and bred, Dutch-based post-conceptual artist and writer. The focus of her practice is on precarious living and working conditions for art workers and laborers in general. In September 2020, she joined the program committee of Kunsthuis Syb in Beesterzwaag and she is a recent board member of Platform BK, where she strives to improve the position of (international) art workers and to stimulate the public debate on the role of visual art in society.  https://sarmadmagazine.com/Made-in-Bangladesh-Manufacturing-Hyper-real-Identities Tue, 14 Sep 2021 14:32:45 +0000 Sarmad https://sarmadmagazine.com/Made-in-Bangladesh-Manufacturing-Hyper-real-Identities Made in Bangladesh: manufacturing hyper-real identitiesby Shadman Shahid ︎︎︎22 Sep 2021 see the image this essay is dealing with on ad.nl A girl stands topless in front of a white blank wall. She stands tall and proud, looking unabashedly towards the camera. The camera is placed slightly below her eye level, presenting her with an air of importance and she demands respect. Her luscious black hair makes her seem exotic and untethered, like someone who rides wild horses or even better someone who would ride you like a horse. Right in the centre of the image are her bare, firm, round, ample breasts and the words “Made in Bangladesh” branded over her. Her small pleasing nipples peek through the letters, not entirely visible, teasing. From her breasts, her arms lead the viewer’s attention to a pair of jeans. She holds open the jeans, with the purpose of showing the bareness even more blatantly and boldly. This is a superficial reading of a photograph that was used in an ad campaign by American Apparel. This is what we, the viewers, see at its surface, that’s what is visible to us at first glance. But once we have a closer look, understand the context and look beyond the rectangular frame, we see that the image goes beyond the blatant objectification of a human body. We see the undeniable markings of neocolonial tendencies of appropriating and recreating hyper-real identities. A beacon for women empowerment Let us begin at the source: American Apparel is a clothing company that was founded in 1989. They enticed the spotlight to shine on to them by creating an image for themselves of a company that practiced fair labor conditions and by presenting themselves as a beacon for women empowerment in our time. They were known for their provocative advertising often lauded for challenging old traditions and belief systems. In 2014 the founder and then CEO of the company, a Canadian white man named Dov Charney, was sued by multiple women, including his employees, for sexual harassment. In spite of the very real accounts of the victims made public, American Apparel as a company kept backing the Man. Finally, he was fired after it became apparent that it was impossible to make the outpour of the horror stories vanish with sly PR tactics. This reluctance to take immediate action makes it apparent that no matter what American Apparel might want us to think their values are, they are not the harbingers of women’s empowerment they think themselves to be. The photograph changes once we have this information. The mind starts to wonder what the conditions were during the shoot? What was going through the mind of the model? What interactions did she have with the photographer and the artistic director? And now, do I sense the unease in her eyes? Does the body look slightly uncomfortable? Are her hands grabbing the pants tensely? I am not sure if we all will see the same thing but would the photograph not change completely once we think of all these issues? Liberated; not Bangladeshi and not American either Below the photograph there is a text. Again, at first glance seems to be innocent, describing the person we are looking at. The text is as important as the photograph itself and without it the final image is incomplete. Without the text, the American Apparel image can be read as yet another pseudo-voyeuristic and somewhat pornographic attempt at appropriating and objectifying an oriental female body, reminiscent of the postcards from Algeria over a century ago that Malek Alloula writes about in the Colonial Harem. With the text, the intentions and consequences become even more pronounced. The heading of the text introduces the audience to the model’s name, which is neither typical Bangladeshi nor American. Rather an appropriated version of a Bangladeshi or perhaps Arabic name. Maks is easier to pronounce than Maksuda, I guess. Then the text begins by telling us that first and foremost, she is an American Apparel employee. That is her leading identity and from here on she embodies the company’s ideology. This anthropomorphizes the company while at the same time, objectifies the human, not an uncommon strategy for advertisers to use. The Marlboro man comes to mind as an example. The text then goes on to deploy orientalist and civilizational discourse to tell the story of Maks. She was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh but because of a “crucial life-changing decision” taken by her parents she migrated to the United States and was raised there. Thank god for that, because now she can reestablish the myth of the American dream. She initially followed her parents’ religion, and therefore a conventional Islamic tradition, but in high school she somehow achieved enlightenment and forwent her old, backward ways of thinking. She is now fully liberated, unwilling to call herself American or Bangladeshi and unwilling to fit herself into a conventional narrative set by others. She has successfully escaped from Islam and backward, uncivilized Bangladesh with its repressive social mores and “Islamic traditions”. Those Muslim others And there was a narrative already in place by the media and the hyper-real identity of the Muslim was already vividly shaped, so why not capitalise on that as well. There are countless academic texts written since the Iranian revolution on the negative representations of Muslims by the western media and the portrayal of Islam as a backward religion of violence. Saifuddin Ahmed and Jörg Matthes talk about it in great details in their writing “Media representation of Muslims and Islam from 2000 to 2015: A meta-analysis”. So, a mere mention of the word “Islam” triggers the deep anxieties in viewers which they have been nurtured with for decades by the western media. But at the same time the text reminds us of the “American” identity and puts it in a superior position and the traditional Islamic culture is judged as backward. It shows how American Apparel defeats the backward ideology of the invisible enemy, rescues the oppressed woman and emancipates her by allowing her to take off all her clothes. In the process it upholds true American values of individuality, equality and freedom. Patriotic sentiments in the American viewers activated. America, Fuck yeah! Freedom is the only way. But freedom for whom and at what cost? Exploiting the exploitation of workers Why the branding on the flesh of this newly liberated brown body? “Made in Bangladesh'', what is the purpose of this? As acclaimed Bangladeshi-American feminist scholar Dr. Dina Sidiqque points out “The absent referent here is the Bangladeshi garment worker, whose conditions of work are veiled or covered up, and who represent the opposite of the secular feminist reality now inhabited by Maks. The absent presence of the Bangladeshi garment worker (underaged, malnourished and hyper-exploited) is essential for the “social message” embedded in the American Apparel campaign. It signals presumed conditions of horror in Bangladeshi sweatshops.” The image was made after one year of the Rana Plaza disaster. The Rana Plaza disaster was a structural failure that occurred on 24 April 2013 in Bangladesh, where an eight-story commercial building collapsed. The search for the dead ended on 13 May 2013 with a death toll of 1,134. Approximately 2,500 injured people were rescued from the building. It is considered the deadliest structural failure accident in modern human history and the deadliest garment-factory disaster in history. The advertisement was a direct response to that incident. The factory collapse made visible the working conditions of the Bangladeshi garment workers to the western world. As the building housed several factories that produced garments for the western world, western consumers immediately started to question the ethical values of the fashion industry. Questions were raised on the exploitative nature of the fashion industry in general. American Apparel went a step further and exploited the exploitation of the workers. The everyday girl The campaign does not stop there, as it was clearly the advertisement’s intention to be controversial and being successful at that, the campaign was run in news outlets and magazines being attacked and defended by numerous writers. It made sure that the advertisement had a long life in the attention cycle. In an interview with Fashionista, the artistic director of the advertisement campaign mentioned that American Apparel values a “healthy body image”, not dowsing the women in their pictures with make-up, not retouching them in Photoshop, etc. They value the everyday girl and don’t find supermodels cool. This too, however, is not as innocent and chivalrous as it first appears to be, rather it is an ironic strategy and completely unoriginal which the process creates an identity of the stereotypical everyday girl. This method of advertising or propaganda has already existed for decades. Edward Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud. By blending Freud’s theories of the unconscious with Gustave Le Bon's researches into crowd psychology and Wilfred Trotter's theories of herd instinct, Edward Barneys started to develop the initial concepts of public relations or in other words a non-violent, subtle, acceptable method of manipulating the crowd. One of his very first clients was the American Tobacco Company. In 1928 George Washington Hill, president of American Tobacco Company, was faced with an unsolvable conundrum. While men smoked with the utmost freedom with a delusional sense of pride and manliness, women who smoked were considered whores and prostitutes at best and even prison sentences were handed out to them to punish this kind of immoral behavior. The 1920s were a time of intense movements demanding equality for women. Edward Bernays exploited that collective state of mind to convince women how smoking cigarettes would lend them a worthwhile victory in the fight for equality. So, he set out to do exactly that with an ad campaign known to us now as Torches of freedom. He decided that the women hired for the project had to be convincing and appealing enough to influence the masses, yet not too good looking or ‘model-y’. In other words, the everyday girl. So, at the height of the Easter Parade, a young woman named Bertha Hunt, who was Bernays’ assistant at that time, stepped out into the crowded fifth avenue and created a scandal by lighting a Lucky Strike cigarette. And the rest was history. Cigarettes became torches of freedom, and centuries of work done by feminists and activists was appropriated by consumerism, the beginnings of neo-liberal exploitation of freedom movements. The Made in Bangladesh advertisement is just one example in a long line of such exploitations. Guilty? Let me absolve you of all responsibilityThe text concludes by mentioning that the sole item of clothing that she is wearing in the picture is in fact made by American Apparel who manufacture only in America and who pay their skilled workers properly. They also have healthcare. The image ends with American Apparel written in bold letters, the last thing the audience will see before turning away from the image. This is a play on the guilt of the western viewer and offers them absolution from that guilt. The guilt of having privileged lives as the majority of the world suffers, the guilt of having to satisfy their needs of the latest fashion trends by exploiting thousands of men, women, and children, some of them even dying while making clothing. The road to absolution is simple and easy. Buy American Apparel. So, what does the image of the provocative, unveiled, branded, “not-American-but-not-Bangladeshi”, liberated, self-actualized, exotic-looking, everyday girl born in Bangladesh but raised in America, achieve in the end? Its primary goal, like any other advertisement, may be to trigger the libido in the viewer and the reptilian brain in us so that we become less logical and our psychological defenses get somewhat compromised and therefore we become more prone to manipulation. But ultimately it does more than that. Through a neoliberal twist to old narratives of orientalism and the western savior, it manages to manufacture, propagate and reestablish identities of: Bangladeshis, the oppressed woman, the free woman, the everyday woman, the “American woman”, the American dream, the followers of Islam, the invisible garment worker, the benevolent buyer, the absolved westerner all at once. All of which are hyper-real in nature. - Alloula, Malek, et al. (1986) “The Colonial Harem”, NED - New edition ed., vol. 21, University of Minnesota Press, 1986.- Ahmed, Saifuddin & Matthes, Jörg. (2016), “Media representation of Muslims and Islam from 2000 to 2015: A meta-analysis”, International Communication Gazette, vol: 79 issue: 3, pp. 219-244. -https://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2011/03/08/american-apparel-ceo-dov-charney-accused-of-forcing-teen-to-be-sex-slave - Siddiqi, Dina M. “Solidarity, Sexuality, and Saving Muslim Women in Neoliberal Times”, Women's Studies Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 3/4, 2014, pp. 292–306. - Bernays, Edward. “Propaganda”, Ig Publishing, 2004. - https://fashionista.com/2014/03/american-apparel-made-in-bangladesh-campaign https://sarmadmagazine.com/Shadman-Shahid Tue, 14 Sep 2021 14:33:58 +0000 Sarmad https://sarmadmagazine.com/Shadman-Shahid ︎︎︎ About ShadmanShadman Shahid is a photographer and educator born and raised in Dhaka, Bangladesh. His work deals with the precarity of the corporeal and the spiritual human conditions in contemporary society. His photographic methodology walks the line between documentary and fiction and usually, in his work, the content drives the aesthetics. He relies heavily on magic realism as a storytelling method. His photographic works have brought him a few accolades including World Press Photo’s Joop Swart Masterclass, BJP ones to watch in 2016, Burn emerging photographer of the year in 2018 and Winner of Bird in Flight prize 2019. He is currently based in the Netherlands, as the head of the Department of Photography & Society (MA) at the Royal Academy of Art in Hague. He is currently represented by East Wing Gallery.  https://sarmadmagazine.com/Striking-Normativity-The-Art-of-Being-Surprised Thu, 27 Jan 2022 17:07:07 +0000 Sarmad https://sarmadmagazine.com/Striking-Normativity-The-Art-of-Being-Surprised Striking Normativity: The Art of Being Surprisedby Diana Al-Halabi ︎︎︎31 Jan 2022 “I started out like all of us start out, a coward, afraid. It is not to say I am not afraid now, it is to say that whether I am afraid or not, I count less, I value myself more than I value my terrors. It does not mean I don’t have them, once I take that position I can look at them and see what it is they teach me” Audre Lorde. An artist who once fought the institution for Palestine, once fought for her right to education, for her right to visas and freedom of movement and – with all due humbleness – was told “you are courageous, you lead by example”, has recently gone through a breakup. And the voice she is fighting in her head, is that which keeps telling her: “How will you make it alone? You are just a woman”. Yes, as non-normative as an artist such as myself could seem to her family members, her peers, and herself, the internalized voice of patriarchal construct – if paid attention to– could be the battlefield of daily life, and not many would dare to declare that the war is happening, and that the war is televised in disguise.  Why disguise? I came to art and writing refusing to compromise, refusing anything that is less than the “truth”, as well as refusing pretentious art. And when I was told by a writer I admire, “all art is pretentious”, I kept fighting this notion, saying mine is not. Up until I was invited to write this essay on normativity. I realized that I have lost a good portion of pretentiousness with my breakup, the dose that makes you think highly, assertively and confidently enough of yourself to write. It was in a moment of sterile confrontation with my screen that I recalled how my whole graduation project was a feminist one that spoke of how I was deceived by the patriarchal gaze to think I am smaller than the world. We often confuse pretentiousness with inauthenticity, but I came to forget that as a woman – which I discovered, sociopolitically, that I am one back in 2017– I had to wear a good chunk of pretentiousness on top of my vulnerability to outlive the craziness of everything that I was told to be “normal”. Normal, if I come to define it, is that which contributes to normativity by making girls wish to be boys instead of wishing to abolish patriarchy, just as I did when I was a child. This is the definition of norma/l/tivity. I pretend to be strong, I pretend that I can, I pretend to admit confidently that I don’t know. And even in this essay I will pretend that my voice will be heard, I will pretend that I have something you must read, I will pretend that I can reference as if I have read the whole book, but believe me, I didn’t, and I won’t. Because as Nina Wakeford (my former MFA tutor) once told me in a studio visit, this is how artists read, they will get what stimulates them out of a book and go to their own creative work. Therefore, I will write like an artist, and everything I cite in this essay, is the only thing I know, and I know nothing beyond it. That is the pretentious truth I insist to tell you here.   Now let’s talk about normativity. In David lynch’s film Inlands Empire, a woman narrates the tale of a little boy who “opened the door, and saw the world, […]”. A sentence that stopped me and made me think, where does the world start? Does the world exist in our houses? When we open the door? Or is it everything we see as we leave the walls of our houses? Do we see the world every time we go to the supermarket? Or does it start as we land in another country? And if it starts as we land in that other country, does it mean that the world we see there goes unnoticed by the people already living in it? The incomprehensible difference in the perception of the world inside a hospital for instance and a world outside of it, whether you are a visitor, a patient, or a doctor, is one example of thinking of worlds that coexist simultaneously in space and time. A world on a cancer patients floor is utterly different from that of a birth giving floor. And while we navigate through those worlds, as truth seekers, we are left with a multiplicity of lenses to look at the “worlds” which contain us and the “other” by and large. But the worlds we are trying to address here aren’t as simple as the example that I just laid out, a world of many worlds, meaning a world ruled by differences, which in a great number of times are detested , fought, or simply pushed down and silenced by whoever got power, and succeeds to misuse it. The major (meaning those who are ruling, marginalizing, and oppressing) and the minor (meaning those who are ruled, marginalized, and oppressed) play an important role in this dance of differences which is ultimately a vertical one. While democracy intends to play the role of opening the space for each voice to rise, whether it is right or wrong, it ought to keep one condition intact for it to serve its value: the acknowledging and agreeing that differences exist, which would become the only common point of departure for a discussion to arise. Nonetheless, institutions – and here allow me to speak of some of the art institutions specifically from my personal experience – tend to claim the democratic right to freedom of speech, a decolonial curriculum and a critique on normativity, while they instrumentalize those claims in order to be accepted under the new normative standards of the art world, which is supposedly to serve justice. But what the art world’s institutions often miss about normativity and its critique, is that by being the container and the contained at once, art can’t function by itself without it being the vessel that upholds and seeks truth and justice in all worlds in- and outside of itself. Therefore, the mission of art is perhaps to keep self-critiquing to the extent of deconstruction, in order not to give birth to double-faced norms as a result of a lack of integrity and a lack of surprise. Once an intellectual named Adel Nassar, told me: the time we stop being surprised at injustice would be the time that injustice wins. In Revisiting normativity with Deleuze, Rosi Braidotti and Patricia Pesters encapsulate Deleuze’s monistic ontology with the following: “This could also be described as a metamethodological shift or an ongoing experiment with evaluative judgements that cultivate affirmative and creative modes of becoming.” It is modes of becoming that art institutions should seek in order not only to be ahead of the so-called normative that we know, but also the normative that is becoming. Neutrality as a norm Art institutions that consider themselves to be apolitical follow a method of “neither one nor the other”, a use of negation that renders the neutral to be innocent. However, they perpetually fail this innocence, as they distance themselves from the fact that censorship is the dominant virtue they abide by. Censorship in so called ‘neutral institutions’ or ‘apolitical ones’ becomes the paradoxical act of taking a position to decide who is “the one” and who is “the other”, instead of being under the so-called “neutral” frame of “neither the one nor the other”. In other words neutrality never existed and would never exist without it being tied to censorship, which becomes the “either, or” rather than the “neither, nor”. Therefore, I can confidently state here, that in such institutions there was never neutrality in the first place. It is fundamental to take into account the process that has been done in the last decades in art institutions, which shaped them to represent inclusivity, less male dominance and racial division. But this process is not an accomplished task that took place in the past so to speak, it is and it must be an ongoing process. In other words, to acknowledge the change and the efforts done in the past – predominantly by non-white cultural practitioners– is not to accept that tokenizing and instrumentalizing inclusivity – predominantly done by white opportunists in position of power– of the present should go unnoticed. The mission of acting upon a virtue of integrity and justice wouldn’t be a given norm as long as institutions are still afraid to speak about Palestine and present colonial powers for the sake of their own funding. Cornel West in a talk titled What It Means to Be Human? stated that “The education at its highest level is about fusing the formation of our critical thinking that’s linked to the maturation of compassionate and courageous people, now we raise a question: is courage a dominant virtue in our universities? Hell no! It is about smartness, it’s about status, and too often arrogance and condescension. Courage is tied to fortitude, and fortitude is tied to certain humility […]” In the light of the virtue of courage in Universities, in May 2021, students of the Dutch art academy Piet Zwart Institute (myself among them) hung a banner in solidarity with Palestinian people, against the catastrophic atrocities they face under the Israeli settler-colonial state for 7 decades. The Hogeschool Rotterdam removed their banner under the claim that “no political speech is allowed on the campus building”. When students refused such an approach, they stated that a decolonial curriculum in theory must be a decolonial one in practice. It is needless to state how crucial it is for professors, managers, and deans of art universities, to educate themselves beyond surface levels when it comes to anticolonial matters. When he ordered the banner to be taken down, the dean of WDKA and PZI, Mr. Jeroen Chabot stated that his preference of showing solidarity with Palestine manifests in rather subtle ways than hanging a banner or issuing a statement (in other words: freedom of speech). And that was by sending students on excursions to Ramallah. A statement that defines being at the surface beyond comprehension. And I wonder if I should explain here in this essay the definition of an Apartheid, as I had to explain to him in that meeting. It was enough to state that I am a Lebanese student in his university to prove that his method of solidarity is a false equation by default. The white innocent way of solidarity failed to acknowledge that, as a Lebanese student, I won’t be able to make it to Ramallah through Tel Aviv. In 1971 Nikki Giovanni in conversation with James Baldwin, asks “why should a writer be free to write what they want to write, while say a teacher isn’t free to teach what they want to teach?” Baldwin answers “a teacher who isn’t free to teach what they want is not a teacher […] and to teach – in the conditions which black people of America find themselves–  is a revolutionary act”. With this spirit, tutors of diverse backgrounds and precarious contracts in WDKA came forward together with some students from PZI to put an Alternative Working Assembly. As a response to the closed meetings the dean had suggested to solve the banner issue, the AWA took an alternative road into this discussion, in which meetings around anticolonial matters and institutional demands were addressed in a public assembly. Through this Alternative Working Assembly (AWA) we have been working against bureaucracy, against its vertical architecture, and against time slaughter. The corridors of bureaucracy are by design a massive labyrinth for demands to get lost, normative bureaucracy becomes the dominant architecture that pushes down any intention of change. In the building of bureaucracy (the institution by default), we all live in the aisles of nonplace, where demands are buried under the guise of time, transmission, and process. To think of normativity, one must first stop, and then, think. I solely believe that normativity is everything that happens outside of the act of “stopping and thinking”. In an interview of Hannah Arendt in 1964 with Joachim Fest, she states that to carry on without “stopping and thinking”, is to be restless under this bureaucratic Machina which cancels the person and causes the sense of responsibility to evaporate. Contrary to how that bureaucratic Machina operates, demands that collectively were set in the AWA are to be publicly announced around February 2022 in another public assembly. The unpaid labor that tutors and students put into this assembly goes beyond the institution and its crooked bureaucratic vertical system. A grassroots model of resistance was born in May 2021, and as it works itself into demands against the institution, it is as well a model to be directed towards all systems of power. In the pursuit of a collective sense of responsibility and ongoing transformation of the normative, the question remains, how do we draw an enabling potential for change from that which constrains us? What questions must you ask yourself, if you are a student or an employee in a museum, or a cultural practitioner in order to revolt? And what questions must you ask yourself as a professor, a dean, a museum director, in order to reform? https://sarmadmagazine.com/Diana-Al-Halabi Thu, 27 Jan 2022 17:07:49 +0000 Sarmad https://sarmadmagazine.com/Diana-Al-Halabi ︎︎︎ About Diana Diana Al-Halabi Born in Lebanon, 1990, Diana is now a Rotterdam-based Artist. She pursues an interdisciplinary practice, with a focus on moving image, text, and painting. Her autoethnographic research-based projects are at the core of her practice. Departing from the personal to the political, and through an intersectional feminist lens, Al-Halabi explores notions such as the patriarchal gaze, cognitive anthropometry, top-down structures of power, and freedom of movement. ︎ ︎ https://sarmadmagazine.com/Who-do-you-think-you-are-NL Wed, 09 Mar 2022 19:56:43 +0000 Sarmad https://sarmadmagazine.com/Who-do-you-think-you-are-NL Who Do You Think You Are? by Raffaella Huizinga ︎︎︎9 March 2022 I said who do you think you are Oh, oh (do you think you are, I said) Ooh some kind of superstar (oh, oh, oh) You have got to swing it, shake it, move it, make it Who do you think you are Trust it, use it, prove it, groove it Show me how good you are Swing it, shake it, move it, make it Who do you think you are Trust it, use it, prove it, groove it Show how good you are Spice Girls  1997 Als voormalig fotograaf denk ik na over de complexiteit van fotografie. Mijn fotografische archief (2009 – 2018) bestaat uit het fotograferen van ‘De Ander’. Individuen en of groepen mensen die te maken hebben met uitsluiting, onderdrukking, niet tot weinig of verkeerd gerepresenteerd worden. Klassiekers als onder andere dragqueens, circusartiesten en nudisten passeerden mijn lens. Onbewust van sociaal-culturele inbedding vast in koloniaal denken en doen, droeg ik bij aan stigmatisering door stereotypen te reproduceren.  In trotste samenwerking met Sarmad en onderdeel van ‘Reviewing the Archive*’ kijk ik terug op mijn oude werk en werkwijze als fotograaf. Door mijn fotografische archief onder de loep te nemen, te analyseren, bekritiseren, te onderzoeken en verder te kijken, denk ik na over de over de positie van de witte westerse fotograaf, ongelijke machtsrelaties, herhaling van beeld, en ‘De Ander’. Reviewing the Archive Who do you think you are? Een ‘Hell Hole’, noemde Donald Trump Brussel in 2016, tussen de aanslagen in Parijs en Brussel. Alle ogen waren gericht op Molenbeek, deelgemeente van Brussel en thuisbasis van een aantal aanslagplegers. Na de terreuraanslagen in Brussel op 22 maart 2016 ontstond er veel negatieve beeldvorming over deze wijk en rondom de islam. Ik vond het nodig dat er een positief geluid uit de wijk zou komen. Motief? Een positief beeld creëren, het alledaagse. Waarom? Omdat Molenbeek slecht in het nieuws kwam. Wat had ik hier mee te maken? Niets. Een jaar na de aanslagen verbleef ik voor een tiental dagen in Molenbeek om een fotoserie te maken over hoe het nu ging met de inwoners van deze wijk. Mijn aanpak was om mensen op straat aan te spreken, te portretteren en vervolgens te vragen hoe het is om in Molenbeek te wonen. Ik bezocht plekken die een invulling konden geven aan het positieve beeld dat ik wilde creëren, zoals: natuurparken, re-integratie organisaties, sociale cafés en kleurrijke winkels. Ook wachtte ik op interessante plekken waar ik mijn vooraf verzonnen beeld kon invullen met de toevallige voorbijganger. Ik zocht naar blije gezichten en een divers beeld. Zo ontstond mijn eigen Disneys ‘It’s a small world after all’ attractie.  Ik verkocht het beeldverhaal aan het Brussels stadsmagazine Bruzz en de Nederlandse krant Trouw. In Trouw werden de beelden geplaatst in een groot artikel, geschreven door Marijke de Vries, een Nederlandse journalist en destijds woonachtig in Molenbeek. Marijke had onderzoek gedaan naar hoe de inwoners van Molenbeek zich voelden na de aanslagen, en dat was niet best. Mijn lachende en vrolijke portretten schitterden naast het minder vrolijke onderzoek naar hoe mensen in Molenbeek zich daadwerkelijk voelden, namelijk: in de steek gelaten. De serie werd ook in de Brusselse stadskrant Bruzz getoond. Ik vroeg aan schrijver Sytske van Koeveringe een tekst te schrijven over de deelgemeente. Een stuk dat paste bij de insteek van de foto’s, namelijk een positief beeld, iets dat zou afsteken tegen het negatieve beeld en narratief in de media. Zij wilde nu eens niet het Molenbeek van de verloedering, de leegstand, de hangjongeren en het afval op straat laten zien. Want gedurende de week die ze er doorbracht werd ze vooral getroffen door de mensen die ongevraagd dat stempel 'Molenbeek' krijgen maar intussen het leven leven, zoals ieder ander. (Van Koeveringen, BRUZZ - Editie 1563, 2017) Mohamed el Bachiri was gastredacteur van de Bruzz editie waarin mijn serie getoond werd. Mohamed verloor zijn vrouw tijdens de aanslagen op 22 maart 2016 te Brussel. Tijdens een mooi en indringend tv optreden waarin Mohamed de kijker oproept de verbinding met elkaar aan te gaan in plaats van elkaar te haten, komen zijn woorden bij vele kijkers binnen. Later schrijft hij het indrukwekkende boek ‘een Jihad van Liefde’. Een mooi boek waarin de vooroordelen waar de inwoners van Molenbeek mee te maken hebben goed naar voren komen. Er zijn echt wel sociale problemen in Molenbeek. Het is een gemeente met een grote Marokkaanse bevolking en de werkloosheid is er huizenhoog. Maar het Molenbeek uit de media vind ik angstaanjagender dan de gemeenschap die ik ken. (Bachiri & Van Reybrouck, 2017) Mohamed schreef het volgende naast mijn fotoserie in de Bruzz1: ‘Het is triestig dat we de dag van vandaag zulke reportages moeten maken. Maar tegelijk is het ook nodig. Het is maar door de ander te kennen dat we hem kunnen begrijpen en de verschillen kunnen overstijgen.’ Ik weet niet of Mohamed het woord ‘triestig’ heeft bedoeld op de manier waarop ik het woord nu interpreteer. Achteraf gezien is het triestig te noemen dat ik een beeld heb gecreëerd dat ik van tevoren al in mijn hoofd had, namelijk de inwoners van Molenbeek in een positief daglicht zetten. Ik, een bevoorrechte witte vrouw die willekeurig mensen op straat aanspreekt en portretteert, om zo mijn verzonnen verhaal te vertellen, te kunnen verkopen, en iets bij te dragen aan een ‘genuanceerde wereld’. Oftewel The White Savior. Waarom had ik deze fotoserie gemaakt? Voor wie had ik deze fotoserie gemaakt? Wat weet een bevoorrechte westerse witte vrouw als ik van uitsluiting? Waarom wordt mijn positie niet tot weinig bevraagd? Waarom wordt mijn voorkomen voor lief genomen? Kan ik foto’s maken van een groep waar ik niet toe behoor? Positie - Mijn deelname aan Whiteness Het voorrecht of privilege je vrijelijk binnen de samenleving te bewegen is afhankelijk van factoren als afkomst, sociaaleconomische klasse, gender, fysieke en mentale vermogens en seksuele identiteit. Hoewel discussies over privileges vaak gaan over het ontbreken ervan, is het minstens zo belangrijk om na te denken over de manier waarop privileges bepaalde machtsstructuren overeind houden. Veel inwoners van Molenbeek gaven hun glimlach aan mij en de camera. Ik spreek nauwelijks Frans en dus poseerden de mensen door middel van handgebaren. De gewenning van de camera die vanaf onze jeugd onlosmakelijk verbonden is met opgroeien en we dusdanig als vertrouwd beschouwen, maakt dat mensen gauw poseren. Een foto lijkt een nauwkeurigere relatie te hebben tot de zichtbare realiteit dan andere kunstzinnige nabootsingen ervan, zoals bijvoorbeeld schilderkunst. Doordat het waarheidsgetrouw líjkt, kan een foto als onschuldig of onschadelijk worden gezien. Foto’s zijn echter nooit onschuldig vanwege verschillende facetten. Een foto is een momentopname van een situatie, waarbij er door timing en kadrering altijd dingen zijn die niet worden getoond. Welke invalshoek en welk moment wordt gekozen is aan de fotograaf, die heeft de ‘macht’ te vangen wat die wél wil tonen, en weg te laten wat niet. Maar deze veronderstelde onschuld zit niet alleen in het medium fotografie. De vanzelfsprekendheid van mijn verschijning speelt hierin ook een grote rol. Het maatschappelijke systeem zit zo in elkaar dat ik, een witte en westerse bevoorrechte vrouw, word gezien als de norm; veilig, betrouwbaar en vanzelfsprekend. Dit is een overblijfsel van de oude erfenis van het kolonialisme. Het lijkt misschien op onschuld maar is het niet. Het is veronderstelde onschuld. Als iets of iemand wordt verondersteld onschuldig te zijn, terwijl dat niet zo is, kan dit zorgen voor buitengewoon schadelijke en kwetsende situaties. Ik dacht daadwerkelijk dat ik iets goeds zou kunnen doen voor de Molenbeekse gemeenschap door een ander beeld te laten zien. Het geboren vertrouwen dat ik met deze fotoserie iets goeds zou kunnen betekenen en het niet stilstaan bij mijn positie zegt veel over mijn geschiedenis. Whiteness wordt gezien als de norm in de westerse samenleving en wordt daarom onzichtbaar. Het gevolg is dat de westerse witte mens zich niet bewust is van hun invloed op de westerse maatschappij. Gloria Wekker omschrijft het in haar boek Witte Onschuld zeer treffend: Alsof de koloniale bagage van reinheid, zuiverheid, onbevlektheid, van goede kwaliteit, onschuld, superioriteit (Van Dale 1992), die de term ‘wit’ met zich meedraagt door louter wilskracht afgeworpen of weggedacht zou kunnen worden.  (…) Een onderdeel van wit privilege is het behoud van de zogenaamde onzichtbaarheid, de on-benoembaarheid, de normaliteit en de naturalisering van witheid. Wit is alleen onzichtbaar en onbenoembaar in de ogen van veel van degene die die positie bezetten, niet in de ogen van zwarte mensen en migranten. (Wekker, 2017, p.245 - 246) Het is belangrijk om kritisch naar mijzelf en mijn werkwijze te kijken, niet als slachtoffer maar als aanstichter. De aanstichter die op pad gaat met alleen haar eigen doel, om onder het genot van witte privileges een verhaal te vertellen dat geen rekenschap geeft aan haar eigen positie. Ik ging naar Molenbeek om een beeldverhaal te maken, dit te verkopen aan een krant, en daarmee aan iedereen te kunnen laten zien dat ik iets ‘goeds’ had gedaan. Het is mij duidelijk dat mijn eigen positie voor een lange tijd onzichtbaar was voor mijzelf. Omdat mijn positie altijd als ‘gewoon’ wordt beschouwd, heb ik deze nooit hoeven bevragen of verdedigen. Als wit persoon wordt mijn positie niet uitgedaagd, maar continue bevestigd. Door mij bewust te zijn van mijn bevoorrechte positie, en van het feit dat de fotoserie werd gemaakt vanuit mijn eigen behoefte, maakt de terugblik op deze serie alleen maar problematischer. Dat betekent niet dat je als wit mens niets meer kunt doen of in ieder geval niets goeds kunt doen. Die gedachte is te makkelijk. Het is belangrijk om na te denken over je positie als fotograaf, over de verantwoordelijkheid die je draagt voor het beeld en het verhaal dat ermee wordt verteld. Dus hoe kun je andermans verhaal vertellen met bewustzijn van je eigen positie en behoeftes? The White Gaze Het valt mij op dat binnen de fotografie de positie van de westerse fotograaf die ‘De Ander’ fotografeert niet tot weinig wordt bevraagd. Wat zou er gebeuren als bijvoorbeeld Dana Lixenberg haar positie zou benoemen, wellicht spreken over de ongemakken van haar witte aanwezigheid tijdens het maken van portretten in Watts, Los Angeles voor haar project Imperial Courts (1993-2015)? Lixenberg portretteerde de bewoners uit bevooroordeelde wijken. Ze wilde tegenwicht bieden aan de eenzijdige manier waarop de media zuid-centraal Los Angeles in beeld bracht, vooral tijdens en na de Rodney King-rellen van 1992. Of het koffietafelboek ‘Before They Pass Away’ van Jimmy Nelson uit 2013. Nelson reisde voor zijn project de gehele wereld rond om inheemse bevolkingen te fotograferen. Voordat deze inheemse bevolkingen uitsterven kunnen we, onder het genot van een koffie op de bank, nog genieten van de modieuze portretten die over de gehele wereld gemaakt zijn. De foto’s weerspiegelen een koloniale, destructieve visie over (inheemse) volkeren die zich veelal niet kunnen identificeren met deze vorm. Braziliaanse Yanomami-spiritueel leider Davi Kopenawa, zegt over Nelsons portretten: “Deze man wil alleen zijn eigen ideeën op de foto’s opdringen, in boeken publiceren en aan iedereen laten zien zodat mensen hem een geweldige fotograaf vinden”. Eigenlijk hebben Nelson en ik veel gemeen, we knijpen onze ogen dicht voor wat echt gebeurt en bevragen onze positie niet. We zouden er met onze witte billen nooit achter komen wat er daadwerkelijk gebeurt. De oplossing is daarom niet om er maar een westers sprookje van te maken en ons dit vervolgens toe te eigenen. Zitten deze mensen te wachten op een witte kolonist die hen als antropoloog komt fotograferen als 'anderen'? Wat als Lixenberg en Nelson open zouden zijn over hun behoeftes en positie? Open op een manier waardoor de kijker ook bewust wordt van hun en diens eigen positie. Zijn de participanten zich ervan bewust dat ze bijdragen aan een westerse representatie? Deze verantwoordelijkheid mag de fotograaf nooit bij de participant neerleggen. De fotograaf is en blijft de initiatiefnemer, en moet zich daarom bewust zijn en bewust omgaan met diens positie. Research into a (im)possible way Afgelopen jaar (2021) ben ik een aantal keer terug naar Molenbeek gegaan om te reflecteren op de fotoserie die ik er maakte in 2017. Ik was op zoek naar de ongelijke machtspositie tussen mij als fotograaf en de bewoners in mijn vorige serie te doen wankelen. Dit keer vroeg ik de inwoners van Molenbeek om mij te positioneren voor de camera, vervolgens mij te fotograferen en indien de taalbarrière het toeliet een tekst onder de foto te plaatsen. Wat zou er gebeuren als we de rollen omdraaien? Ik bleef mij ervan bewust dat ik nog steeds de initiatiefnemer was, degene die de beelden en daarmee de macht weer terug in handen zou krijgen. Ik hoopte op een beeld dat iets over de bewoners zou vertellen in plaats van over mij, net zoals mijn fotoserie in 2017. Maar de foto’s resulteerden in een jolige bedoeling. De inwoners van Molenbeek zetten mij in als stand-in voor de spullen die zij verkochten of als opvulling van de ruimte. Achteraf gezien zette ik de inwoners in een veel vreemdere positie, waardoor deze poging op voorhand al gedoemd was te mislukken. Het bleek een goede manier om voorbij het verlammende schuldbesef te komen en een andere manier van handelen te kiezen. Opnieuw resulteerde het veronderstelde (on)schuldbesef in een gebrek aan perspectief en het vermijden van engagement. De beelden vertelden weer niets over de inwoners van Molenbeek. Tijdens mijn bezoek in Molenbeek in 2021 stuitte ik op de fotoserie ‘Puissance Molenbeek’ een onderdeel van #Imagne1080. #Imagne1080 is een jongerenproject van het Huis van Culturen en Sociale Samenhang in Molenbeek. Het project, begeleid door oprichter Zakaria El Bakkali en fotograaf Johanna de Tessieres, geeft Molenbeekse jongeren de kans om zich via film en fotografie te uiten. Naar aanleiding van de tentoonstelling sprak ik met Zakaria en Johanna over het project ‘Puissance Molenbeek’. Zij vertelde dat de jongeren zich bewust zijn van de vooroordelen die heersen over hun wijk. Tijdens de workshops ontstond de behoefte om de grote groep sportende vrouwen die Molenbeek heeft (waarvan een aantal de fotografie workshop volgde) door middel van fotografie te tonen. Door een intensieve samenwerking tussen de jongeren en de begeleiders ontstond de fotoserie ‘Puissance Molenbeek’. Een interessante fotoserie die een inclusief beeld toont van Molenbeekse vrouwen die verschillende soorten sport uitoefenen en resulteerde in een tentoonstelling. In dit geval gaat het niet alleen om de samenwerking en een tentoonstelling, maar om iets veel groters: representatie. De jongeren kunnen zich identificeren met de beelden, trots zijn dat ze daar staan en andere jongeren kunnen zien dat het tof is om bijvoorbeeld als moslimvrouw te voetballen. Zakaria en Johanna hebben geïnvesteerd in gesprekken met de jongeren en hun families over wat een foto teweeg kan brengen, wat het betekent om een foto tentoon te stellen en werkten samen met de jongeren tijdens het selectieproces. ‘Puissance Molenbeek’ is een mooi project waar duidelijk te zien is dat er gehandeld is vanuit de behoeftes van de Molenbeekse jongeren, en dat men zich bewust was van positie en representatie. Het gaat niet om degene die het gemaakt heeft, maar over wat er op het beeld staat en wat dat beeld kan veroorzaken: in dit geval representatie die vooroordelen overstijgt. ‘Maar, ik bedoelde het niet zo.’   Anousha Nzume - Hallo Witte Mensen  De tekst van Mohamed Is een goed zetje geweest om te blijven reflecteren op de serie. ‘Het is triestig dat we de dag van vandaag zulke reportages moeten maken’. Het heeft mij aan het denken gezet over mijn motief om de serie te maken, en mijn positie als witte westerse fotograaf. Het werk zegt veel over mijn idealen, mijn ijdelheid en mijn geschiedenis. Ik was alleen geïnteresseerd in mijn eigen verhaal. Impulsief ingrijpen om te helpen in plaats van eerst luisteren naar wat mensen eigenlijk willen. Maar dan alsnog, zitten die mensen hier eigenlijk op te wachten? Whiteness blijft een lastig onderwerp, omdat het zo diepgeworteld is in het Nederlandse maatschappelijke systeem. Veel mensen, waaronder ikzelf, zijn zich niet bewust van dit structurele probleem. Ik moet mijzelf herinneren aan de complexiteit van whiteness, aan de dominantie van witte zelfrepresentatie (in fotografie en beeld) en de hardnekkigheid van de witte norm. Tegelijkertijd moet ik ervoor waken mezelf niet buiten het probleem van whiteness te plaatsen, simpelweg omdat ik mij bewust ben van mijn positie en privileges. Het blijft problematisch dat ik naar een ‘probleemwijk’ ging in de overtuiging dat ik het representatieprobleem van Molenbeek zou oplossen, terwijl ik naïef was, en geen weet had van de koloniale bagage en witte privileges die ik zelf meedroeg. Mijn enorme bewijsdrang om vooroordelen over Molenbeek, maakte dat ik de bewoners als 'De Ander' fotografeerde, en niet openstond voor wat er echt in de wijk gebeurde. Ik merk dat ik de afgelopen tijd op zoek ben geweest naar een ethische manier om 'De Ander' te fotograferen , maar misschien is de conclusie wel dat dit moet ophouden. Er zijn genoeg fotografen, beeldmakers, schrijvers en kunstenaars die zich kunnen identificeren met de groep waarover het gemaakte werk gaat. De wereld heeft geen witte redders nodig. Je kunt je bewust zijn van je bevoorrechte positie, macht en alle complexiteit die erbij komt kijken, maar overstijgt dat echt hetgeen waar het daadwerkelijk over zou moeten gaan? Er zijn mooie voorbeelden van hoe deze complexiteit getoond wordt, maar dit is vaak gepaard gegaan met ongemakken en uitglijders*. Het is belangrijk om over alternatieve vormen na te denken en te leren van fouten om zo nieuwe inzichten te krijgen en niet, zoals ik deed, in oude patronen terug te vallen. Zakaria en Johanna tonen een mooi en geëngageerd project met en over de jongeren van Molenbeek, en creëren door intensieve samenwerking van binnenuit een fotoserie die een oprecht positief beeld toont. Iets wat ik graag had willen doen, maar onbewust van sociaal-culturele inbedding vast in koloniaal denken en doen nooit had kunnen bereiken. De hobbelige weg die whiteness is vraagt veel effort en verdieping. Zoals Mohamed schrijft in ‘Jihad van de liefde’: 'De toekomst? Die begint bij de geschiedenis.' 1. El Bachiri, BRUZZ - Edition 1563, 2017 Bachiri, M. E., & Van Reybrouck, D. A Jihad of Love (2017). De Bezige Bij. de Vries, M. (2017, March 22). Een jaar na “Brussel” voelt Molenbeek zich in de steek gelaten. Trouw. https://www.trouw.nl/nieuws/een-jaar-na-brussel-voelt-molenbeek-zich-in-de-steek-gelaten~baac3c0f/ Van Koeveringen, S. - edition 1563. (2017, 22 maart). BRUZZ. https://issuu.com/bruzz.be/docs/binder_bruzz_1563 Wekker, G. (2020). Witte onschuld: paradoxen van kolonialisme en ras (01 ed.). AUP Algemeen. Nzume, A. (2017). Hallo witte mensen (Dutch Edition) (01 ed.). Amsterdam University Press. * Bieke Depoorter – Agata   Depoorter, B. (2022). Agata. Bieke   Jan Hoek – My Masai   Hoek, J. (2017). Jan Hoek - My Maasai, The Maasai Photographed By Eastern African photographers (1ste editie). APE. https://sarmadmagazine.com/Who-do-you-think-you-are-ENG Wed, 09 Mar 2022 18:54:00 +0000 Sarmad https://sarmadmagazine.com/Who-do-you-think-you-are-ENG Who Do You Think You Are? by Raffaella Huizinga ︎︎︎9 March 2022 I said who do you think you are Oh, oh (do you think you are, I said) Ooh some kind of superstar (oh, oh, oh) You have got to swing it, shake it, move it, make it Who do you think you are Trust it, use it, prove it, groove it Show me how good you are Swing it, shake it, move it, make it Who do you think you are Trust it, use it, prove it, groove it Show how good you are Spice Girls  1997 As a former photographer, I think about the complexity of photography. My photographic archive (2009 – 2018) is made of photographing 'the other'. Individuals and/or groups of people who have to deal with exclusion, oppression and who are poorly represented. Typical subjects such as drag queens, circus performers, nudists went through my lens. Unconscious of the extent to which my sociocultural viewpoint was impacted by deeply embedded colonial ways of thinking and doing, I endorsed and reinforced negative cultural stereotypes and stigmas. In proud cooperation with Sarmad and as part of the Reviewing the Archive* project, I revisit my old photographic work and examine my processes of image making. As I go through my archive, analysing and reflecting, I think about the position of the white western photographer, about the unequal power dynamics, the repetition of images, and ‘The Other’. *  Reviewing the Archive is a three-part series of essays in which I look back at my work and image-making methods as a photographer. Reviewing the Archive Who do you think you are? A “Hell Hole,” Donald Trump called Brussels in 2016, between the Paris and Brussels attacks. All eyes were on Molenbeek, a sub-municipality of Brussels and home to a number of attackers. After the terrorist attacks in Brussels on March 22, 2016, there was a lot of negative image about this neighborhood and around Islam. I thought it was necessary that there should be a positive sound from the neighborhood. Motive? Creating a positive image, the everyday. Why? As a contrary to the negatively stereotyped media coverage of both Molenbeek and Islam. What did I have to do with all this? Nothing at all. A year after the attacks, I stayed in Molenbeek for ten days to make a photo series about how the inhabitants of this district were doing. My approach was simple. I would address people on the streets, take their portrait then quiz them about their lives there. I specifically chose locations which could give substance to the positive image I wanted to create; parks, reintegration organisations, social cafes and colourful local shops. I strolled around interesting spots waiting to capture a passersby who fitted my pre-invented image of a happy and diverse community. I basically built my own version of Disney’s 'It's A small World' attraction. I sold the photo series to Dutch newspaper Trouw. Trouw used the pictures alongside a feature by Marijke de Vries, a Dutch journalist living in Molenbeek at the time. My smiling portraits sat incongruously beside her sombre account of how the citizens of Molenbeek actually felt: abandoned. The series was also published in the Brussels city newspaper Bruzz, in a special edition. I asked writer Sytske van Koeveringe to write a text about Molenbeek to accompany the images. A piece that matched the approach of the photos, namely a positive image, something that would contrast with the negative image and narrative in the media. She didn't want to show the Molenbeek of the decay, the vacancy, the loitering youth and the waste on the street. During the week she spent there, she was especially struck by the people who readily received the stamp 'Molenbeek', while they were just living their lives, like everyone else. (Van Koeveringen, Bruxelles - Edition 1563, 2017). Mohamed el Bachiri, who had lost his wife in the Brussels bombing on 22 March 2016, was the guest editor on the Bruzz special edition. His eloquent plea for love and unity in a television interview shortly after the attack, where he calls on the viewer to connect with each other instead of hating each other, resonated with many viewers. His best-selling book A Jihad for Love, gives a moving account of the prejudices the inhabitants of Molenbeek suffer every day. There are real social problems in Molenbeek. It’s a district with a large Moroccan population and unemployment is high. But the Molenbeek of the media is more frightening than the community I know. (Bachiri & Van Reybrouck, 2017) Mohamed wrote the following next to my images in Bruzz1: “It’s sad we still have to make such reports. But at the same time it’s necessary. It’s only by knowing the other that we can understand and transcend the differences.” I don't know if Mohamed meant the word ‘sad’ in the way I interpret it now. In hindsight, it’s sad that I had had tried to create an image that I had in my mind beforehand, namely, to show the people of Molenbeek in a positive light. I, a privileged white woman, who arbitrarily stops and photographs passers by in order to create an invented story, sell it, and contribute something to a 'nuanced world’. In other words, a White Saviour. Why did I create this photo series about Molenbeek? Who did I create the series for? What does a privileged western white woman know about exclusion? Why is my position seldom questioned? Why is my appearance taken for granted? Can I take photos of a group I don’t belong to? Position - My participation in Whiteness Our right or privilege to move freely within society depends on various factors, including race, socio-economic class, gender, physical and mental abilities and sexual identity. Although discussions about privilege often centre around defecit, it is at least as important to consider how personal privilege maintains certain power structures. Many residents of Molenbeek gave their smiles to me and my camera. My French is pretty abysmal so I used hand gestures to get people to pose as I wanted. The habituation of the camera, which has been inextricably linked to growing up from childhood and which we regard as familiar, means that people are quick to pose. Photography is seen to have a more accurate relationship with visible reality than the other arts, such as painting, and, as a result, can be viewed as inoffensive or innocent. But a photograph is never wholly innocent. A photograph is a snapshot of a situation. Through timing and framing, parts of the moment are obscured or revealed. Which angle and which moment are chosen is up to the photographer, who has the 'power' to capture what he wants to show, and leave out what he does not. But this supposed innocence doesn’t just apply to the medium of photography.  The normality of my appearance also plays a major role in this. Our social system is such that as a white, Western, privileged woman, I am perceived as the norm, and as such, safe, reliable and natural. This is one of the effects of the legacy of colonialism. It may seem like innocence but it isn’t: it is a supposed innocence. If something or someone is assumed to be innocent, but they are not, extremely dangerous and hurtful situations may arise. I truly believed that by offering an alternative way of seeing Molenbeek, I could do something good for the community. Instead, my innate sense of confidence that my photo series could affect change, and a lack of awareness of my own position, betrayed my background. Whiteness is seen as the norm in Western society and therefore becomes invisible. As a result, Western white people are unaware of their influence on Western society. Gloria Wekker describes it very accurately in her book Witte Onschuld (White Innocence): As if the colonial baggage of purity, immaculateness, of good quality, innocence, superiority (Van Dale 1992), which the term 'white' carries with it, could be thrown off or thought away by sheer willpower. (…) Part of white privilege is the preservation of the so-called invisibility, indescribability, normality and naturalization of whiteness. White is invisible and unnameable only in the eyes of many of those who occupy that position, not in the eyes of black people and migrants. (Wekker, 2017, p.245 - 246)   Wekker’s book made me think more about my motives and position as a White Western photographer. It is important that I take a good critical look at myself and my method of working - not as a victim, but as instigator. An instigator who, from a position of white privilege and to serve her own ends, sets out to tell a story while failing to take her own position into account. I went to Molenbeek to make a photo series, sell it to a newspaper and show the world I was doing something ‘good’. It has become more clear to me that for a long time, my position was invisible to myself. Because my position has always been considered 'normal', I never had to question or defend it. As a white person, my position is not challenged, but is constantly confirmed. Looking back to the photo series I made just for me with this newfound awareness of my own position, I realize how problematic it really is. It doesn’t mean that, as a white person, I think I can’t do anything any more, or at least nothing good. That’s too easy. It’s important to consider your position as a photographer, the responsibility you have for the image and the story that it tells. So how do you tell someone else's story with awareness of your own position and expectations? The White Gaze It seems to me that the position of Western photographers who photograph ‘The Other’ is rarely questioned. What would happen if, for example, Dana Lixenberg were to call out her own position, perhaps to talk about what it meant to be a white presence when she was making the portraits in Watts, Los Angeles for her Imperial Courts (1993-2015) project. In this series Lixenberg photographed residents from communities against which there were serious prejudices. She wanted to counterbalance the one-sided media portrayal of South Central Los Angeles, especially during and after the 1992 Rodney King riots. Or take Jimmy Nelson's (2013) Before They Pass Away coffee table book. Nelson travelled around the world photographing the world's last surviving indigenous tribes so we could enjoy them from the comfort of our sofa’s. The photographs reflect a colonial, destructive vision of indigenous peoples that the communities themselves can never identify with. Brazilian Yanomami spiritual leader Davi Kopenawa, says about Nelson’s portraits: “This man only wants to impose his own ideas on the photos, publish them in books and show them to everyone so that people find him a great photographer.” In fact, Nelson and I have a lot in common, we close our eyes to what is really happening and forget about our own position. With our white butts, we’re unlikely to uncover what’s really going on anyway. We turn everything into a Western fairy tale and then appropriate it. Are these people waiting for a white anthropologist to turn up and start photographing them as ‘others’? What if Lixenberg and Nelson were open and transparent about their motivations and positions? What if they did it in such a way that the viewer was also made aware of theirs? Are the participants aware that they are contributing to a Western representation of themselves? This responsibility should never be left to the participant. The photographer is and remains the initiator, and, as such, has a duty to ensure awareness and be conscious of their position. Research into a (im)possible way In 2021 I went back to Molenbeek a few times to reflect on the photos I’d made there in 2017. I was looking for a way to rectify the power imbalance between me operating the camera and the subjects who found themselves in front of it. This time, I turn the roles around and put the residents of Molenbeek behind the camera and got them to pose me in front of it. Where the language barrier allowed, I also asked them to add captions to the photos they made. I remained conscious of the fact that I was still the initiator, the one who would keep the images - and also the power. I was hoping for images that would convey more about the residents than about myself, as the 2017 photo series had done. But the resulting photos were all rather flippant in tone, with the residents showing me posed among the stuff they were selling, or just filling up space. In retrospect, I realised that I’d placed the residents in a much more peculiar position and that it was inevitable my attempt would fail. It turned out to be a good way of getting past the paralysing sense of guilt and choosing a different course of action. Once again, the supposed innocence, or absence of it, resulted in a lack of perspective and engagement. My pictures revealed nothing about the residents of Molenbeek. During one visit, I came across the photo documentary, ‘Puissance Molenbeek’, (Molenbeek Power) part of the #Imagine1080 youth project organised by Molenbeek’s House of Cultures and Social Cohesion (Maison des Cultures et de la Cohésion Sociale). Initiated by founder Zakaria El Bakkali and photographer Johanna de Tessieres, the project offered young Molenbeekers an opportunity to express themselves directly through film and photography. Speaking about the project, Zakaria and Johanna told me how the young people are well aware of the prejudices that stigmatise their neighbourhood. During the workshop they’d come up with the idea of using photography to illuminate the large group of women in Molenbeek who participate in sport (some of whom attended the photography workshop themselves). Intense collaboration between the project participants and the organisers produced a fascinating series of photos that reflect the inclusive diversity of the neighbourhood and resulted in the exhibition ‘Puissance Molenbeek’. The point here is not just the cooperation or an exhibition, but about something much bigger, namely representation. The youngsters are able to identify with the images, be proud that they are part of them, and to inspire others what they believe is possible for them. Zakaria and Johanna invested a lot of time in talking to the young people and their families about what a photo can trigger, what it means to have a photo on display. They also worked with young people during the selection process. ‘Puissance Molenbeek’ is a beautiful project in which respect for the needs of the Molenbeek youngsters, awareness of position and representation can clearly be seen. Rather than being about the photographers, it’s about the stories the images are telling and what that can lead to. In this case, a representation that transcends prejudices. But, that’s not what I meant.  Anousha Nzume - Hallo Witte Mensen (Hello White People) Mohamed's comment on my photo series in Bruzz magazine motivated me to keep reflecting on the series. ‘It’s sad that we have to make such reports today’. It made me think about my motive for making my series, and about my position as a white Western photographer. The work says a lot about my ideals, my vanity and my history. I was only interested in my own story. I responded to my own impulsive urge to help instead of first listening to what people really want. But then again, are the people actually waiting for this? Whiteness remains a difficult subject. I believe it is deeply rooted in the Dutch social system. Many people, myself included, are unaware of this structural problem. I must keep reminding myself to be conscious of the complexity of whiteness, of the dominance of white self-representation (in photography and image) and of the persistence of the white norm. At the same time, I must be careful not to detach myself and assume that because I am aware of my position and privileges I am no longer part of the whiteness problem. It’s problematic that I went to a so called “troubled neighborhood” in the belief that I could solve their representation problem, blissfully ignorant of the colonial baggage and white privilege that I carry. In my eagerness to dispel prejudices about Molenbeek and Muslims, I photographed the residents as ‘The Other’, and was not open to what was really going on. I notice how recently I’ve been looking for a way to ethically photograph ‘The Other’ in a community. But perhaps the conclusion is simply that it should stop. There are plenty of photographers, imager makers, writers, artists, etc., who can identify with the group that the work is about. The world does not need white saviors. You can be aware of your privileged position, power, and all the complexity that comes with it, but does that really transcend what it should actually be about? There are some good examples of how this complexity is shown, but often they are arrived at through discomforts and missteps*. To gain new insights, it is important to think about alternative forms and to learn from ones’ mistakes, and not, as I did, fall back into old patterns. Zakaria and Johanna show a beautiful and committed project with and about the youth of Molenbeek, and through intensive collaboration create a photo series from the inside that shows a genuinely positive image. Something I would have liked to have done, but unconscious of my deeply rooted colonial ways of thinking and doing, could never have achieved. The bumpy road that is whiteness demands a lot of effort and reflection. As Mohamed writes in ‘A Jihad for Love’: “The future? It starts with history.” Translated by Judy Ellington and Britt Kroon 1. El Bachiri, BRUZZ - Edition 1563, 2017 Bachiri, M. E., & Van Reybrouck, D. A Jihad of Love (2017). De Bezige Bij. de Vries, M. (2017, March 22). Een jaar na “Brussel” voelt Molenbeek zich in de steek gelaten. Trouw. https://www.trouw.nl/nieuws/een-jaar-na-brussel-voelt-molenbeek-zich-in-de-steek-gelaten~baac3c0f/ Van Koeveringen, S. - edition 1563. (2017, 22 maart). BRUZZ. https://issuu.com/bruzz.be/docs/binder_bruzz_1563 Wekker, G. (2020). Witte onschuld: paradoxen van kolonialisme en ras (01 ed.). AUP Algemeen. Nzume, A. (2017). Hallo witte mensen (Dutch Edition) (01 ed.). Amsterdam University Press. * Bieke Depoorter – Agata   Depoorter, B. (2022). Agata. Bieke   Jan Hoek – My Masai   Hoek, J. (2017). Jan Hoek - My Maasai, The Maasai Photographed By Eastern African photographers (1ste editie). APE. https://sarmadmagazine.com/Raffaella-1 Wed, 09 Mar 2022 18:54:45 +0000 Sarmad https://sarmadmagazine.com/Raffaella-1 ︎︎︎ About Raffaella Raffaella Huizinga (NL 1990) is a former photographer who is reflecting through text on her old photography practice. She thinks about the position of the white western photographer, unequal power dynamics, the repetition of images, and ‘The Other’. In 2019 she participated in the residency of ‘Het Vijfde Seizoen’ where she wrote a manual 'How to act ethically when making photographs with and about people?'. Besides writing about the complexity of photography, Raffaella teaches at the Nederlandse Academie voor Beeldcreatie, Nederlands Fotomuseum and 100% Hedendaags.   https://sarmadmagazine.com/episode-one Thu, 22 Jul 2021 16:34:23 +0000 Sarmad https://sarmadmagazine.com/episode-one ︎Episode 1 - Mental health with Hamja Ahsan In this first episode, our theme is mental health and in order to address that, we talked about introversion, the sometimes-unbearable weight of being a full-time professional artist, depression as a defense mechanism of our bodies, the 27 club and about doing absolutely nothing, both as healing and as a source of more anxiety. Also available to listen to on Apple Podcasts, or Google Podcasts. Hamja Ahsan (b. 1981) is an artist, writer, activist and curator based in London and Maastricht. His practice encompasses conceptual writing, building archives, performance, video, sound and making zines. He is currently a resident artist at Jan Van Eyck Academy 2020-2021 in Netherlands. He is on the editorial board of the Radical Mental Health magazine Asylum. Intro music was made by Behzad Abbasy, which is a cover of Who Knows by Jimi Hendrix, a 27-clubber.Some links to things we talk about in the conversation BOOK Shy Radical  Asylum magazine DIY Cultures zine festival Zine Camp Printroom  The article on depression The O Show episode The performance artist whose name was not in the end mentioned (Tehching Hsieh) More about Hamja AhsanHamja is the author of the book Shy Radicals: Antisystemic Politics of the Militant Introvert, a work of speculative fiction about a revolutionary political party like the Black Panthers for shy, quiet, introvert and autistic spectrum peoples with a utopic homeland called Aspergistan. The book was recently made into a documentary film, which is now out in international festivals, by Ridley Scott Associates.Hamja was recently awarded the Grand Prize at Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts 2019, curated by Slavs and Tartars for the commissioned work Aspergistan Referendum based on the Shy Radicals project.  He is the founder and co-curator of the DIY Cultures festival of creative activism, zines and independent publishing since 2013 in London. He was also shortlisted for the Liberty human rights award for Free Talha Ahsan campaign, his brother,  on extradition and detention without trial under the War on Terror. His campaign work was supported by A. L. Kennedy, Riz Ahmed and Noam Chomsky, amongst others. His recent writing was anthologised in No Colour Bar: Black Art in Action 1960-1990. He has presented art projects at PS1 MOMA New York Art book week, Tate Modern, Gwangju Biennale, Shaanakht festival Pakistan and and CCA Warsaw Poland.Hamja is a guest lecturer in contemporary art practice and visiting artist at universities across the UK and Europe, including Goldsmiths, Royal College of Art, Artez Stadium Generale (Netherlands), Staedelschule (Frankfurt, Germany) and Oxford University. His Shy Radicals book is the syllabus on several University curriculums from Ivy League Brown University, New York University and Ghent University (Belgium). Support and sustain Hamja's tours, artwork and activismTrailer of Shy Radicals FilmAsylum magazine ︎     @hamjaahsan︎     @shyradicals Book  Shy Radicals: Antisystemic Politics of the Militant Introvert