Books by shela sheikh
Table of Contents, Preface and Introduction to Shela Sheikh and Uriel Orlow, eds., Uriel Orlow: T... more Table of Contents, Preface and Introduction to Shela Sheikh and Uriel Orlow, eds., Uriel Orlow: Theatrum Botanicum (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2018)
Book description:
Uriel Orlow: Theatrum Botanicum
Edited by Shela Sheikh and Uriel Orlow
Contributions by Sita Balani, Melanie Boehi, Clelia Coussonet, Karen Flint, Jason T. W. Irving, Nomusa Makhubu, Bettina Malcomess, Karin van Marle, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll
This publication emerges from Uriel Orlow’s Theatrum Botanicum (2015–18), a multi-faceted project encompassing film, sound, photography, and installation that looks to the botanical world as a stage for politics. Working from the dual vantage points of South Africa and Europe, the project considers plants as both witnesses to, and dynamic agents in, history. It links nature and humans, rural and cosmopolitan medicine, tradition and modernity across different geographies, histories, and systems of knowledge—exploring the variety of curative, spiritual, and economic powers of plants. The project addresses “botanical nationalism” and “flower diplomacy” during apartheid; plant migration; the role and legacies of the imperial classification and naming of plants; bioprospecting and biopiracy; and the garden planted by Nelson Mandela and his fellow inmates at Robben Island prison.
This publication is made up of two intertwining books: one documents the works of Theatrum Botanicum, including the scripts for two films; the second is a compendium of brief, commissioned essays that aims to offer an accessible snapshot of the complex and multifaceted issues that inform and are raised by the artworks. The independent but interrelated essays, which either speak directly to the artworks or follow lines of inquiry alongside them, cover perspectives from postcolonial cultural studies; art criticism and art history; natural history, botany (including ethnobotany and economic botany), and conservation; jurisprudence and critical legal studies; and critical race studies.
Design by In the shade of a tree (Samuel Bonnet, Sophie Demay, and Maël Fournier-Comte)
June 2018, English
21.5 x 29 cm, 368 pages, color ill., softcover
ISBN 978-3-95679-415-5
http://www.sternberg-press.com/index.php?pageId=1835&l=en&bookId=729&sort=year%20DESC,month%20DESC
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Edited by Shela Sheikh and Uriel Orlow
Contributions by Sita Balani, Melanie Boehi, Clelia Co... more Edited by Shela Sheikh and Uriel Orlow
Contributions by Sita Balani, Melanie Boehi, Clelia Coussonet, Karen Flint, Jason T. W. Irving, Nomusa Makhubu, Bettina Malcomess, Karin van Marle, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll
This publication emerges from Uriel Orlow’s Theatrum Botanicum (2015–18), a multi-faceted project encompassing film, sound, photography, and installation that looks to the botanical world as a stage for politics. Working from the dual vantage points of South Africa and Europe, the project considers plants as both witnesses to, and dynamic agents in, history. It links nature and humans, rural and cosmopolitan medicine, tradition and modernity across different geographies, histories, and systems of knowledge—exploring the variety of curative, spiritual, and economic powers of plants. The project addresses “botanical nationalism” and “flower diplomacy” during apartheid; plant migration; the role and legacies of the imperial classification and naming of plants; bioprospecting and biopiracy; and the garden planted by Nelson Mandela and his fellow inmates at Robben Island prison.
This publication is made up of two intertwining books: one documents the works of Theatrum Botanicum, including the scripts for two films; the second is a compendium of brief, commissioned essays that aims to offer an accessible snapshot of the complex and multifaceted issues that inform and are raised by the artworks. The independent but interrelated essays, which either speak directly to the artworks or follow lines of inquiry alongside them, cover perspectives from postcolonial cultural studies; art criticism and art history; natural history, botany (including ethnobotany and economic botany), and conservation; jurisprudence and critical legal studies; and critical race studies.
Design by In the shade of a tree (Samuel Bonnet, Sophie Demay, and Maël Fournier-Comte)
June 2018, English
21.5 x 29 cm, 368 pages, color ill., softcover
ISBN 978-3-95679-415-5
http://www.sternberg-press.com/index.php?pageId=1835&l=en&bookId=729&sort=year DESC,month DESC
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Papers by shela sheikh
The Bureau des Dépositions (Bureau of Depositions) is an ensemble of ten co-authors with varying ... more The Bureau des Dépositions (Bureau of Depositions) is an ensemble of ten co-authors with varying legal and administrative statuses, the majority of whom were born and lived in Guinea, West Africa, prior to making their journey to France in 2016 or 2017 in order to demand asylum. The Bureau, declared an immaterial work, also comprises a series of performances and ongoing research-creation processes that are signed in co-authorship. This includes the performance Exercises de justice spéculative (Exercises in Speculative Justice), through which the Bureau's codependence is asserted in the face of deportation orders from France that threaten both the lives of the undocumented members and the work that is the Bureau des Dépositions. Through the strategic use of French laws that protect the integrity of art works, author's rights (droits d'auteur) are mobilised in order to petition for the co-authors' right to remain in France, with the gamble here being that this could potentially be more effective than appealing to rights of asylum or the sanctity of human (non-citizen) life. As such, the Bureau seeks to create (legal) precedence and participate in the processual transformation of law and life. The performance is not simply about migratory violence, but is a speculative work whose «transformative properties» are used in order to protect the lives of the artists-a work that both points to the limitations of existing (Western) justice and exceeds it, suggesting an alternative conception of justice embodied by the Bureau. Having witnessed the Exercises in October 2020 in Marseille, we provide a narrative of the work, its genesis and precedents, and a series of reflections upon themes raised, including: the representation of minority speech within and beyond contemporary art, economies of testimony, intellectual property rights and collective creative practices, histories of sans papiers activism in France, the production of criminal lives, a politics of the living and the performance of justice. In our reading, the work enacts a decolonial aesthetics that intervenes through an alternative framework of representation and justice. An English translation of a partial score of the Exercises de justice spéculative performance is also included.
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Architectural Review , 2021
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Subjectivity , 2020
Transcript of presentation given at Professor Couze Venn Memorial and Celebration, Goldsmiths, Un... more Transcript of presentation given at Professor Couze Venn Memorial and Celebration, Goldsmiths, University of London, 22 May 2019
Part of a special issue of Subjectivity dedicated to the work of Couze Venn - https://link.springer.com/journal/41286/onlineFirst/page/1
Response to Couze Venn, After Capital (Sage, 2018)
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The Contemporary Journal 1, Nottingham Contemporary, 2020
Through a reading of Jacques Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other: Or, the Prosthesis of Origin,... more Through a reading of Jacques Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other: Or, the Prosthesis of Origin, this text explores the maddening paradoxes of identity, translation, the mother tongue, and the coloniality of language and culture. How to speak of oneself and one’s experience when one has no ‘proper’ language in which to do so – when one’s testimony must always be an act of translation? When translation – both literally and in an expanded sense – is simultaneously both possible and impossible? When one’s relationship to one’s ‘own’ language (the so-called mother tongue) is both cause and symptom of a ‘disorder of identity’? And when the desire for the mastery of language and self-representation involves the risk of precisely the (colonial) expropriation or usurpation that is being testified to?
https://thecontemporaryjournal.org/issues/on-translations/the-madness-of-the-mother-tongue
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Propositions for Non-Fascist Living, Tentative and Urgent , 2019
Published in:
Maria Hlavajova and Wietske Maas, eds., Propositions for Non-Fascist Living, Tenta... more Published in:
Maria Hlavajova and Wietske Maas, eds., Propositions for Non-Fascist Living, Tentative and Urgent (Utrecht and Cambridge, MA: BAK, basis voor actuele kunst; MIT Press, 2019), pp. 125–40
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/propositions-non-fascist-living
Summary:
Artists, theorists, activists, and scholars propose concrete forms of non-fascist living as the rise of contemporary fascisms threatens the foundations of common life.
Propositions for Non-Fascist Living begins from the urgent need to model a world decidedly void of fascisms during a time when the rise of contemporary fascisms threatens the very foundations of a possibility for common life. Borrowing from Michel Foucault's notion of “non-fascist living” as an “art of living counter to all forms of fascism,” including that “in us all… the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us,” the book addresses the practice of living rather than the mere object of life.
Artists, theorists, activists, and scholars offer texts and visual essays that engage varied perspectives on practicing life and articulate methods that support multiplicity and difference rather than vaunting power and hierarchy. Architectural theorist Eyal Weizman, for example, describes an “unlikely common” in gathering evidence against false narratives; art historian and critic Sven Lütticken develops a non-fascist proposition drawn from the intersection of art, technology, and law; philosopher Rosi Braidotti explores an ethics of affirmation and the practices of dying.
Propositions for Non-Fascist Living is the first in a BASICS series of readers from BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, engaging some of the most urgent problems of our time through theoretically informed and politically driven artistic research and practice.
Contributors include:
Rosi Braidotti, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Jota Mombaça, and Thiago de Paula Souza, Forensic Architecture, Marina Gržinić, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, Patricia Kaersenhout and Lukáš Likavčan, Sven Lütticken, Jumana Manna, Dan McQuillan, Shela Sheikh, Eyal Weizman, Mick Wilson
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Kronos: Journal of Cape History, 2019
Available open-access at http://www.scielo.org.za/pdf/kronos/v44n1/09.pdf
**Please support the ... more Available open-access at http://www.scielo.org.za/pdf/kronos/v44n1/09.pdf
**Please support the journal**
Part of special issue, ‘Missing and Missed: The Subject, Politics and Memorialisation’, Kronos, vol.44, no. 1 (2019),
http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_issuetoc&pid=0259-019020180001&lng=en&nrm=iso
Taking leave from obstacles to the creation of an ‘environmental public’ in contemporary post-apartheid South Africa and the political silencing and objectification of both nature and racialised subjects, this article interrogates and seeks to expand a specific figure: that of the witness. In the broader, global context of environmental violence, the witness – who, according to classical theories of testimony, is a sovereign subject who speaks in their own name – is considered in the context of constructed categories of active/passive and subject/object as these play out across race, nature and shifting conceptions of the human. The title, ‘the future of the witness’, prompts two questions: (i) In the context of (missing) environmental publics, in what ways we must reconceptualise the figure of the witness – on ontological, epistemological and political levels – as we move into the future? (ii) Faced with ever-escalating Anthropocenic destruction, is it possible for a witness to testify not only to past events and experiences, as per the generally accepted temporal schema of witnessing, but also to ongoing experiences that unfold into the future? In responding to these questions, it is argued (a) that the witness can no longer be considered as an isolated figure, but rather must be conceived as part of a testimonial constellation; and (b) that, in responding to ecological concerns, this constellation must be a more-than-human collective: an entangled form of sociality between humans and nonhumans that does not take recourse to modernist categories of ‘human’ and ‘nature’.
Moving, via South Africa, from the European Holocaust to global humanitarian and forensic practices, through European and North American science and technology studies as well as Amerindian thinking, the article gathers a generalised set of questions and propositions that might in turn be folded back into specific locales. Key is the classic postcolonial question of who ought to or has the right to speak in the name of whom. Where the witness is often denied self-representation or, more gravely, entirely absent or missing, the article surveys various practices of supplementary witnessing. However, such practices ofen find themselves caught within a representational dilemma whereby, despite the necessity of defending the rights of humans and nonhumans alike, ‘speaking for’ or ‘giving voice’ to dispossessed or missing subjects – including nature – runs the risk of further replicating the original colonial matrix of being, knowledge and power that is being contested. Drawing from aesthetic and speculative practices, the article asks what possible strategies might be available for navigating the challenges of representation and for conceiving of more-than-human environmental publics that contest the neoliberal indivisualization of responsibilty and actively bear witness both to unfolding environmental degradation and possible more liveable futures.
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Available to download at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09528822.2018.1483899
Th... more Available to download at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09528822.2018.1483899
Through a reading of Jumana Manna’s feature-length film, Wild Relatives (2018), this article explores the geopolitics of seed saving, reading global efforts to preserve genetic biodiversity in the face of climate change through the logic of the pharmakon (ie, as both poison and cure). The film follows the journey of seeds between the Global Seed Vault at Svalbard (Norway) and the Bekaa Valley (Lebanon), where seeds from Syria are being cultivated due to the ongoing civil war, probing the relationship between the preservation and (re)patriation of seeds on the one hand and global conflict and humanitarianism on the other, and considering local cultivation practices vis-à-vis the lasting legacies of the developmentalist, geopolitical agendas of the US-sponsored Green Revolution. The article situates the film within Manna’s broader oeuvre, problematising the epistemological and temporal logic of heritage practices that seek to preserve both cultural and natural diversity. As such, the article demonstrates the neo-orientalist and neo-colonial logic of cryopreservation as a form of ‘imperialist nostalgia’ or techno-capitalist wizardry. Adapting anthropologist Michael Taussig’s notion of ‘agribusiness writing’ to the institutionalised, globalised images and narratives of productivity, bio-conservation and peacemaking, Wild Relatives is interpreted as a form of ‘apotropaic’ (‘countermagical’) film-making that warns against the appropriative, ‘green banking’ and ‘green washing’ logic of techno-scientific sorcery and celebrates the reciprocal, co-evolutionary plant–human relations of which the seed itself is an archive.
Third Text, Volume 32, issues 2–3 (2018)
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The Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions, 2018
The Wretched Earth
Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions
Guest Editors: Ros Gray and S... more The Wretched Earth
Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions
Guest Editors: Ros Gray and Shela Sheikh
Third Text, Volume 32, issues 2–3 (2018)
This special issue presents new research on, and in some cases generated through, contemporary art practices that both explore and intervene in the cultures, politics and systems of representation, as well as their attendant desires and violences, generated through human interaction with the soil. Our proposition is that, in order to do full justice to Fanon’s diagnosis of ‘the wretched of the earth’, we must understand more deeply the extent to which this is due to the fact that the earth itself is wretched, and that part of this condition has been the destruction of ‘ecological’ relations with the earth. The phrase ‘the wretched earth’ signals our ongoing engagement with anti-colonial and anti-imperialist writers such as Fanon, but also the need to go beyond their reconfigured humanism to think about the multiple human and nonhuman cohabitations that constitute the soil and, more broadly, our more-than-human commons.
Full issue: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ctte20/current
Introduction:
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Filipa César, Ros Gray, Raphaël Grisey, Shela Sheikh, Bouba Touré and Nicole Wolf. 2018. ‘Fugitiv... more Filipa César, Ros Gray, Raphaël Grisey, Shela Sheikh, Bouba Touré and Nicole Wolf. 2018. ‘Fugitive Remains: Soil, Celluloid and Resistant Collectivities’. In: Cooking Sections, ed., The Empire Remains Shop. New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City
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Shela Sheikh, "Translating Geontologies" in AND NOW: ARCHITECTURE AGAINST A DEVELOPER PRESIDENCY:... more Shela Sheikh, "Translating Geontologies" in AND NOW: ARCHITECTURE AGAINST A DEVELOPER PRESIDENCY: Essays on the Occasion of Trump's Inauguration, ed. James Graham (New York: The Avery Review/Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2017), pp. 165–84
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Published in Avery Review, special issue, 'And Now: Architecture Against a Developer Presidency',... more Published in Avery Review, special issue, 'And Now: Architecture Against a Developer Presidency', January 2017
Linked via e-flux conversations
In The Avery Review, Shela Sheikh, who teaches postcolonial studies at Goldsmiths, explores how Elizabeth A. Povinelli's concept of "geontopower" can be used to illuminate indigenous struggles in the US, such as the movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline, as well as the settler-colonialist nature of Trump-fueled nationalism. Elaborated in Povinelli's recent book Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism, geontopower is "a set of discourses, affects, and tactics used in late liberalism to maintain or shape the coming relationship of the distinction between Life and Nonlife” (p. 4). The concept is offered as a supplement or update to the concept of biopower, whose exercise, argues Povinelli, is more and more being replaced by the exercise of geontopower. Sheikh writes that by "translating" Povinelli's idea of geontopower to a North American context, we can gain insights and tools not only for understanding US settler colonialism today, but also for struggling against it. Read an excerpt from Sheikh's piece below, or the full text here. (An excerpt from Povinelli's book Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism appeared in the December 2016 issue of e-flux journal.)
http://conversations.e-flux.com/t/translating-geontologies-to-conceptualize-and-combat-settler-colonialism/6026
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Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, ed. Forensic Architecture (Berlin: Sternberg, 2014), 2014
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Stamatina Dimakopolou, Christina Dokou, Efterpi Mitsi, The Letter of the Law: Literature, Justice and the Other (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2013), 2013
In Herman Melville’s tale of Wall Street, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” the eponymous central charac... more In Herman Melville’s tale of Wall Street, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” the eponymous central character repeatedly utters variations upon the famous “formula” (as Gilles Deleuze names it), “I would prefer not to”—a response which, ultimately, leads him to his death in the “Tombs” of Manhattan. The paper takes this response, proffered to the lawyer-narrator (the man of the law) as its central theme, showing how this enigmatic “response without response,” in the
words of Jacques Derrida, can be read as exemplary of the aporetic and at times terrifying
relationship between responding and responsibility, above all where this is bound up with
literature and law. Tracing Derrida’s fleeting responses to “Bartleby” across his oeuvre, and supplementing these explicit namings of Bartleby with readings of texts silently haunted by
Bartleby’s ghostly figure, the paper points towards the inherent affinities between the writings of Derrida and Melville. It suggests that, whereas Bartleby’s response has often been read as paradigmatic of a “passive resistance” that can be put to political use, in a Derridean line of thinking it points towards the experience of an “arche-passivity,” as a heteronomy that is the only possibility of freedom and responsibility, which offers no (ethical or political) program or strategy other than the experience of “knowing not to know”—an experience exemplified by what Derrida names “the secret of literature” that “Bartleby” is.
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Interviews by shela sheikh
Blog entry: https://slought.org/blog_posts/a_willful_erasure_of_those_very_acts_of_erasure
Full i... more Blog entry: https://slought.org/blog_posts/a_willful_erasure_of_those_very_acts_of_erasure
Full interview download: https://slought.org/media/files/s534-2016-03-22-erasures_interview.pdf
In 2010, Fazal Sheikh visited Israel and the West Bank for the first time. Sheikh had been invited to join This Place, a project initiated by the photographer Frédéric Brenner to explore the region through the lenses of twelve internationally-renowned photographers.1 During the course of the many extended visits to the region that were to follow, Sheikh produced three bodies of work—Memory Trace, Desert Bloom, and Independence/Nakba— published collectively by Steidl in 2015 as The Erasure Trilogy. Together, through their juxtaposition of the photographic image and text, the three volumes trace the legacies of the Arab–Israeli War of 1948 and its lasting impact on the Palestinians, Bedouins, and Israelis of the region. While Desert Bloom, the work produced for This Place, has been exhibited in the traveling group exhibition that began in 2014, this spring marks the first simultaneous exhibition of all three elements.2 Collectively presented under the title Erasures, the trilogy internally opens up in a movement of dispersal across multiple institutions, each with differing remits, and with this distinct, albeit often overlapping, audiences: the Slought Foundation (Philadelphia), the Brooklyn Museum, the Pace/MacGill Gallery, and Storefront for Art and Architecture
(all New York), the Al-Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary
Art (East Jerusalem), and the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center (Ramallah).3 To mark the occasion of this ambitious curatorial gesture, the interview that follows has been published through the Slought Foundation, where Sheikh is currently artist-in-residence. This discussion, which took place in Zurich in the summer of 2014, was initially commissioned by the This Place project, and appeared in an abridged and edited form in the group exhibition catalogue, published by MACK.4 Here, Sheikh re ects upon his initial responses to the region, the genesis and challenges of each of the elements of the trilogy, as well as the relations between them and his hopes for their effectivity, and his mode of working more broadly. As such, together with the extensive documentation provided both within the Erasure Trilogy publications and across the venues, as well as a series of artist’s talks programed for this spring, the conversation lends further context to the multi- platformed curatorial event of Erasures, which takes as its point of departure the following works: ...
1. For further details, see www.this-place.org.
2. Venues and dates of the traveling group exhibition, of which Desert Bloom is a part, are available at www.this-place.org. Elements of Desert Bloom were also displayed in 2014 as part of the group exhibition “Now You See It: Photography and Concealment” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
3. For full details, see www.slought.org /resources/erasures.
4. Fazal Sheikh interviewed by Shela Sheikh in Charlotte Cotton, ed., This Place (London: MACK, 2014), pp. 111–25; also available at www.this-place.org/photographers /fazal-sheikh/.
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Podcasts by shela sheikh
Iko Flow , 2020
In part 1 of this episode, Otobong Nkanga will be hosting a conversation between Felwine Sarr, Pr... more In part 1 of this episode, Otobong Nkanga will be hosting a conversation between Felwine Sarr, Professor of Romance Studies at Duke University (North Carolina) and Shela Sheikh, Lecturer in the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. The discussion draws parallels between ways of understanding and engaging with living and more than living entities that inform economic processes and production knowledge. Our guests share their reflection on alternative modes of thinking pluralities of tangible and immaterial resources as a way to build communities of living.
Within the Ikọ zone we will listen to two poems, Pre-Loved Bodies and Sauna for Our Lifelong Displacements, written and read by Kechi Nomu, a poet and writer living in Nigeria.
https://www.ikoflow.com/episode-4-1
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The Botanical Mind (online), 2020
For the final podcast of the series, Ros Gray and Shela Sheikh will introduce how planting was ce... more For the final podcast of the series, Ros Gray and Shela Sheikh will introduce how planting was central to colonialism and explain why it is vital that we recognise the ongoing effects of colonial botany and the plantation system. They will discuss how gardens – from botanical collections to municipal parks – are historical sites of exclusion and labour as well as leisure and enjoyment, detailing the hierarchies that exist within these spaces, and describing how artists have actively sought to decolonise these spaces through planting with reference to ongoing projects in London.
https://www.botanicalmind.online/podcasts/the-coloniality-of-planting
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Book Reviews by shela sheikh
Collectively Annotated bibliography: On Artistic Practices in the Expanded Field of Public Art, 2020
Contribution to: Collectively Annotated bibliography: On Artistic Practices in the Expanded Field... more Contribution to: Collectively Annotated bibliography: On Artistic Practices in the Expanded Field of Public
Art (Visible Project; Public Art Agency Sweden, 2020)
Available online at https://www.visibleproject.org/blog/annotated_library/,
https://www.visibleproject.org/blog/text/collectively-annotated-bibliography-on-artisticpractices-
in-the-expanded-field-of-public-art/
Annotated review of
1. Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (London: Verso, 2019)
2. Katya Garcia-Anton, ed., Sovereign Words: Indigenous Art, Curation And Criticism
(Oslo/Amsterdam: OCA/Valiz, 2018)
3. Ros Gray, Cinemas of the Mozambican Revolution: Anti-Colonialism, Independence and
Internationalism in Filmmaking, 1968-1991 (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2020)
4. Anne Garland Mahler, From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and
Transnational Solidarity (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2018)
5. Jennifer Bajorek, Unfixed: Photography and the Decolonial Imagination in West Africa (Durham
and London: Duke University Press, 2020)
6. Malcom Ferdinand, Une écologie décoloniale: Penser l’écologie depuis le monde caribéen (Paris: Seuil,
2019)
7. La Colonie, ed., Colonial and Postcolonial Prostitution (Paris: La Découverte/La Colonie
éditions, 2019) (English and French)
8. Åsa Sonjasdotter, Peace with the Earth: Tracing Agricultural Memory, Reconfiguring Practice
(Berlin: Archive Books, 2020)
9. Sakiya: Art | Science | Agriculture, vol. 01 (Ramallah: Sakiya, 2019)
10. Industria, June 2020
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Books by shela sheikh
Book description:
Uriel Orlow: Theatrum Botanicum
Edited by Shela Sheikh and Uriel Orlow
Contributions by Sita Balani, Melanie Boehi, Clelia Coussonet, Karen Flint, Jason T. W. Irving, Nomusa Makhubu, Bettina Malcomess, Karin van Marle, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll
This publication emerges from Uriel Orlow’s Theatrum Botanicum (2015–18), a multi-faceted project encompassing film, sound, photography, and installation that looks to the botanical world as a stage for politics. Working from the dual vantage points of South Africa and Europe, the project considers plants as both witnesses to, and dynamic agents in, history. It links nature and humans, rural and cosmopolitan medicine, tradition and modernity across different geographies, histories, and systems of knowledge—exploring the variety of curative, spiritual, and economic powers of plants. The project addresses “botanical nationalism” and “flower diplomacy” during apartheid; plant migration; the role and legacies of the imperial classification and naming of plants; bioprospecting and biopiracy; and the garden planted by Nelson Mandela and his fellow inmates at Robben Island prison.
This publication is made up of two intertwining books: one documents the works of Theatrum Botanicum, including the scripts for two films; the second is a compendium of brief, commissioned essays that aims to offer an accessible snapshot of the complex and multifaceted issues that inform and are raised by the artworks. The independent but interrelated essays, which either speak directly to the artworks or follow lines of inquiry alongside them, cover perspectives from postcolonial cultural studies; art criticism and art history; natural history, botany (including ethnobotany and economic botany), and conservation; jurisprudence and critical legal studies; and critical race studies.
Design by In the shade of a tree (Samuel Bonnet, Sophie Demay, and Maël Fournier-Comte)
June 2018, English
21.5 x 29 cm, 368 pages, color ill., softcover
ISBN 978-3-95679-415-5
http://www.sternberg-press.com/index.php?pageId=1835&l=en&bookId=729&sort=year%20DESC,month%20DESC
Contributions by Sita Balani, Melanie Boehi, Clelia Coussonet, Karen Flint, Jason T. W. Irving, Nomusa Makhubu, Bettina Malcomess, Karin van Marle, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll
This publication emerges from Uriel Orlow’s Theatrum Botanicum (2015–18), a multi-faceted project encompassing film, sound, photography, and installation that looks to the botanical world as a stage for politics. Working from the dual vantage points of South Africa and Europe, the project considers plants as both witnesses to, and dynamic agents in, history. It links nature and humans, rural and cosmopolitan medicine, tradition and modernity across different geographies, histories, and systems of knowledge—exploring the variety of curative, spiritual, and economic powers of plants. The project addresses “botanical nationalism” and “flower diplomacy” during apartheid; plant migration; the role and legacies of the imperial classification and naming of plants; bioprospecting and biopiracy; and the garden planted by Nelson Mandela and his fellow inmates at Robben Island prison.
This publication is made up of two intertwining books: one documents the works of Theatrum Botanicum, including the scripts for two films; the second is a compendium of brief, commissioned essays that aims to offer an accessible snapshot of the complex and multifaceted issues that inform and are raised by the artworks. The independent but interrelated essays, which either speak directly to the artworks or follow lines of inquiry alongside them, cover perspectives from postcolonial cultural studies; art criticism and art history; natural history, botany (including ethnobotany and economic botany), and conservation; jurisprudence and critical legal studies; and critical race studies.
Design by In the shade of a tree (Samuel Bonnet, Sophie Demay, and Maël Fournier-Comte)
June 2018, English
21.5 x 29 cm, 368 pages, color ill., softcover
ISBN 978-3-95679-415-5
http://www.sternberg-press.com/index.php?pageId=1835&l=en&bookId=729&sort=year DESC,month DESC
Papers by shela sheikh
https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/the-coloniality-of-planting
Part of the Garden issue https://www.architectural-review.com/magazines/ar-1478
Part of a special issue of Subjectivity dedicated to the work of Couze Venn - https://link.springer.com/journal/41286/onlineFirst/page/1
Response to Couze Venn, After Capital (Sage, 2018)
https://thecontemporaryjournal.org/issues/on-translations/the-madness-of-the-mother-tongue
Maria Hlavajova and Wietske Maas, eds., Propositions for Non-Fascist Living, Tentative and Urgent (Utrecht and Cambridge, MA: BAK, basis voor actuele kunst; MIT Press, 2019), pp. 125–40
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/propositions-non-fascist-living
Summary:
Artists, theorists, activists, and scholars propose concrete forms of non-fascist living as the rise of contemporary fascisms threatens the foundations of common life.
Propositions for Non-Fascist Living begins from the urgent need to model a world decidedly void of fascisms during a time when the rise of contemporary fascisms threatens the very foundations of a possibility for common life. Borrowing from Michel Foucault's notion of “non-fascist living” as an “art of living counter to all forms of fascism,” including that “in us all… the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us,” the book addresses the practice of living rather than the mere object of life.
Artists, theorists, activists, and scholars offer texts and visual essays that engage varied perspectives on practicing life and articulate methods that support multiplicity and difference rather than vaunting power and hierarchy. Architectural theorist Eyal Weizman, for example, describes an “unlikely common” in gathering evidence against false narratives; art historian and critic Sven Lütticken develops a non-fascist proposition drawn from the intersection of art, technology, and law; philosopher Rosi Braidotti explores an ethics of affirmation and the practices of dying.
Propositions for Non-Fascist Living is the first in a BASICS series of readers from BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, engaging some of the most urgent problems of our time through theoretically informed and politically driven artistic research and practice.
Contributors include:
Rosi Braidotti, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Jota Mombaça, and Thiago de Paula Souza, Forensic Architecture, Marina Gržinić, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, Patricia Kaersenhout and Lukáš Likavčan, Sven Lütticken, Jumana Manna, Dan McQuillan, Shela Sheikh, Eyal Weizman, Mick Wilson
**Please support the journal**
Part of special issue, ‘Missing and Missed: The Subject, Politics and Memorialisation’, Kronos, vol.44, no. 1 (2019),
http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_issuetoc&pid=0259-019020180001&lng=en&nrm=iso
Taking leave from obstacles to the creation of an ‘environmental public’ in contemporary post-apartheid South Africa and the political silencing and objectification of both nature and racialised subjects, this article interrogates and seeks to expand a specific figure: that of the witness. In the broader, global context of environmental violence, the witness – who, according to classical theories of testimony, is a sovereign subject who speaks in their own name – is considered in the context of constructed categories of active/passive and subject/object as these play out across race, nature and shifting conceptions of the human. The title, ‘the future of the witness’, prompts two questions: (i) In the context of (missing) environmental publics, in what ways we must reconceptualise the figure of the witness – on ontological, epistemological and political levels – as we move into the future? (ii) Faced with ever-escalating Anthropocenic destruction, is it possible for a witness to testify not only to past events and experiences, as per the generally accepted temporal schema of witnessing, but also to ongoing experiences that unfold into the future? In responding to these questions, it is argued (a) that the witness can no longer be considered as an isolated figure, but rather must be conceived as part of a testimonial constellation; and (b) that, in responding to ecological concerns, this constellation must be a more-than-human collective: an entangled form of sociality between humans and nonhumans that does not take recourse to modernist categories of ‘human’ and ‘nature’.
Moving, via South Africa, from the European Holocaust to global humanitarian and forensic practices, through European and North American science and technology studies as well as Amerindian thinking, the article gathers a generalised set of questions and propositions that might in turn be folded back into specific locales. Key is the classic postcolonial question of who ought to or has the right to speak in the name of whom. Where the witness is often denied self-representation or, more gravely, entirely absent or missing, the article surveys various practices of supplementary witnessing. However, such practices ofen find themselves caught within a representational dilemma whereby, despite the necessity of defending the rights of humans and nonhumans alike, ‘speaking for’ or ‘giving voice’ to dispossessed or missing subjects – including nature – runs the risk of further replicating the original colonial matrix of being, knowledge and power that is being contested. Drawing from aesthetic and speculative practices, the article asks what possible strategies might be available for navigating the challenges of representation and for conceiving of more-than-human environmental publics that contest the neoliberal indivisualization of responsibilty and actively bear witness both to unfolding environmental degradation and possible more liveable futures.
Through a reading of Jumana Manna’s feature-length film, Wild Relatives (2018), this article explores the geopolitics of seed saving, reading global efforts to preserve genetic biodiversity in the face of climate change through the logic of the pharmakon (ie, as both poison and cure). The film follows the journey of seeds between the Global Seed Vault at Svalbard (Norway) and the Bekaa Valley (Lebanon), where seeds from Syria are being cultivated due to the ongoing civil war, probing the relationship between the preservation and (re)patriation of seeds on the one hand and global conflict and humanitarianism on the other, and considering local cultivation practices vis-à-vis the lasting legacies of the developmentalist, geopolitical agendas of the US-sponsored Green Revolution. The article situates the film within Manna’s broader oeuvre, problematising the epistemological and temporal logic of heritage practices that seek to preserve both cultural and natural diversity. As such, the article demonstrates the neo-orientalist and neo-colonial logic of cryopreservation as a form of ‘imperialist nostalgia’ or techno-capitalist wizardry. Adapting anthropologist Michael Taussig’s notion of ‘agribusiness writing’ to the institutionalised, globalised images and narratives of productivity, bio-conservation and peacemaking, Wild Relatives is interpreted as a form of ‘apotropaic’ (‘countermagical’) film-making that warns against the appropriative, ‘green banking’ and ‘green washing’ logic of techno-scientific sorcery and celebrates the reciprocal, co-evolutionary plant–human relations of which the seed itself is an archive.
Third Text, Volume 32, issues 2–3 (2018)
Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions
Guest Editors: Ros Gray and Shela Sheikh
Third Text, Volume 32, issues 2–3 (2018)
This special issue presents new research on, and in some cases generated through, contemporary art practices that both explore and intervene in the cultures, politics and systems of representation, as well as their attendant desires and violences, generated through human interaction with the soil. Our proposition is that, in order to do full justice to Fanon’s diagnosis of ‘the wretched of the earth’, we must understand more deeply the extent to which this is due to the fact that the earth itself is wretched, and that part of this condition has been the destruction of ‘ecological’ relations with the earth. The phrase ‘the wretched earth’ signals our ongoing engagement with anti-colonial and anti-imperialist writers such as Fanon, but also the need to go beyond their reconfigured humanism to think about the multiple human and nonhuman cohabitations that constitute the soil and, more broadly, our more-than-human commons.
Full issue: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ctte20/current
Introduction:
Linked via e-flux conversations
In The Avery Review, Shela Sheikh, who teaches postcolonial studies at Goldsmiths, explores how Elizabeth A. Povinelli's concept of "geontopower" can be used to illuminate indigenous struggles in the US, such as the movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline, as well as the settler-colonialist nature of Trump-fueled nationalism. Elaborated in Povinelli's recent book Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism, geontopower is "a set of discourses, affects, and tactics used in late liberalism to maintain or shape the coming relationship of the distinction between Life and Nonlife” (p. 4). The concept is offered as a supplement or update to the concept of biopower, whose exercise, argues Povinelli, is more and more being replaced by the exercise of geontopower. Sheikh writes that by "translating" Povinelli's idea of geontopower to a North American context, we can gain insights and tools not only for understanding US settler colonialism today, but also for struggling against it. Read an excerpt from Sheikh's piece below, or the full text here. (An excerpt from Povinelli's book Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism appeared in the December 2016 issue of e-flux journal.)
http://conversations.e-flux.com/t/translating-geontologies-to-conceptualize-and-combat-settler-colonialism/6026
words of Jacques Derrida, can be read as exemplary of the aporetic and at times terrifying
relationship between responding and responsibility, above all where this is bound up with
literature and law. Tracing Derrida’s fleeting responses to “Bartleby” across his oeuvre, and supplementing these explicit namings of Bartleby with readings of texts silently haunted by
Bartleby’s ghostly figure, the paper points towards the inherent affinities between the writings of Derrida and Melville. It suggests that, whereas Bartleby’s response has often been read as paradigmatic of a “passive resistance” that can be put to political use, in a Derridean line of thinking it points towards the experience of an “arche-passivity,” as a heteronomy that is the only possibility of freedom and responsibility, which offers no (ethical or political) program or strategy other than the experience of “knowing not to know”—an experience exemplified by what Derrida names “the secret of literature” that “Bartleby” is.
Interviews by shela sheikh
Full interview download: https://slought.org/media/files/s534-2016-03-22-erasures_interview.pdf
In 2010, Fazal Sheikh visited Israel and the West Bank for the first time. Sheikh had been invited to join This Place, a project initiated by the photographer Frédéric Brenner to explore the region through the lenses of twelve internationally-renowned photographers.1 During the course of the many extended visits to the region that were to follow, Sheikh produced three bodies of work—Memory Trace, Desert Bloom, and Independence/Nakba— published collectively by Steidl in 2015 as The Erasure Trilogy. Together, through their juxtaposition of the photographic image and text, the three volumes trace the legacies of the Arab–Israeli War of 1948 and its lasting impact on the Palestinians, Bedouins, and Israelis of the region. While Desert Bloom, the work produced for This Place, has been exhibited in the traveling group exhibition that began in 2014, this spring marks the first simultaneous exhibition of all three elements.2 Collectively presented under the title Erasures, the trilogy internally opens up in a movement of dispersal across multiple institutions, each with differing remits, and with this distinct, albeit often overlapping, audiences: the Slought Foundation (Philadelphia), the Brooklyn Museum, the Pace/MacGill Gallery, and Storefront for Art and Architecture
(all New York), the Al-Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary
Art (East Jerusalem), and the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center (Ramallah).3 To mark the occasion of this ambitious curatorial gesture, the interview that follows has been published through the Slought Foundation, where Sheikh is currently artist-in-residence. This discussion, which took place in Zurich in the summer of 2014, was initially commissioned by the This Place project, and appeared in an abridged and edited form in the group exhibition catalogue, published by MACK.4 Here, Sheikh re ects upon his initial responses to the region, the genesis and challenges of each of the elements of the trilogy, as well as the relations between them and his hopes for their effectivity, and his mode of working more broadly. As such, together with the extensive documentation provided both within the Erasure Trilogy publications and across the venues, as well as a series of artist’s talks programed for this spring, the conversation lends further context to the multi- platformed curatorial event of Erasures, which takes as its point of departure the following works: ...
1. For further details, see www.this-place.org.
2. Venues and dates of the traveling group exhibition, of which Desert Bloom is a part, are available at www.this-place.org. Elements of Desert Bloom were also displayed in 2014 as part of the group exhibition “Now You See It: Photography and Concealment” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
3. For full details, see www.slought.org /resources/erasures.
4. Fazal Sheikh interviewed by Shela Sheikh in Charlotte Cotton, ed., This Place (London: MACK, 2014), pp. 111–25; also available at www.this-place.org/photographers /fazal-sheikh/.
Podcasts by shela sheikh
Within the Ikọ zone we will listen to two poems, Pre-Loved Bodies and Sauna for Our Lifelong Displacements, written and read by Kechi Nomu, a poet and writer living in Nigeria.
https://www.ikoflow.com/episode-4-1
https://www.botanicalmind.online/podcasts/the-coloniality-of-planting
Book Reviews by shela sheikh
Art (Visible Project; Public Art Agency Sweden, 2020)
Available online at https://www.visibleproject.org/blog/annotated_library/,
https://www.visibleproject.org/blog/text/collectively-annotated-bibliography-on-artisticpractices-
in-the-expanded-field-of-public-art/
Annotated review of
1. Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (London: Verso, 2019)
2. Katya Garcia-Anton, ed., Sovereign Words: Indigenous Art, Curation And Criticism
(Oslo/Amsterdam: OCA/Valiz, 2018)
3. Ros Gray, Cinemas of the Mozambican Revolution: Anti-Colonialism, Independence and
Internationalism in Filmmaking, 1968-1991 (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2020)
4. Anne Garland Mahler, From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and
Transnational Solidarity (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2018)
5. Jennifer Bajorek, Unfixed: Photography and the Decolonial Imagination in West Africa (Durham
and London: Duke University Press, 2020)
6. Malcom Ferdinand, Une écologie décoloniale: Penser l’écologie depuis le monde caribéen (Paris: Seuil,
2019)
7. La Colonie, ed., Colonial and Postcolonial Prostitution (Paris: La Découverte/La Colonie
éditions, 2019) (English and French)
8. Åsa Sonjasdotter, Peace with the Earth: Tracing Agricultural Memory, Reconfiguring Practice
(Berlin: Archive Books, 2020)
9. Sakiya: Art | Science | Agriculture, vol. 01 (Ramallah: Sakiya, 2019)
10. Industria, June 2020
Book description:
Uriel Orlow: Theatrum Botanicum
Edited by Shela Sheikh and Uriel Orlow
Contributions by Sita Balani, Melanie Boehi, Clelia Coussonet, Karen Flint, Jason T. W. Irving, Nomusa Makhubu, Bettina Malcomess, Karin van Marle, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll
This publication emerges from Uriel Orlow’s Theatrum Botanicum (2015–18), a multi-faceted project encompassing film, sound, photography, and installation that looks to the botanical world as a stage for politics. Working from the dual vantage points of South Africa and Europe, the project considers plants as both witnesses to, and dynamic agents in, history. It links nature and humans, rural and cosmopolitan medicine, tradition and modernity across different geographies, histories, and systems of knowledge—exploring the variety of curative, spiritual, and economic powers of plants. The project addresses “botanical nationalism” and “flower diplomacy” during apartheid; plant migration; the role and legacies of the imperial classification and naming of plants; bioprospecting and biopiracy; and the garden planted by Nelson Mandela and his fellow inmates at Robben Island prison.
This publication is made up of two intertwining books: one documents the works of Theatrum Botanicum, including the scripts for two films; the second is a compendium of brief, commissioned essays that aims to offer an accessible snapshot of the complex and multifaceted issues that inform and are raised by the artworks. The independent but interrelated essays, which either speak directly to the artworks or follow lines of inquiry alongside them, cover perspectives from postcolonial cultural studies; art criticism and art history; natural history, botany (including ethnobotany and economic botany), and conservation; jurisprudence and critical legal studies; and critical race studies.
Design by In the shade of a tree (Samuel Bonnet, Sophie Demay, and Maël Fournier-Comte)
June 2018, English
21.5 x 29 cm, 368 pages, color ill., softcover
ISBN 978-3-95679-415-5
http://www.sternberg-press.com/index.php?pageId=1835&l=en&bookId=729&sort=year%20DESC,month%20DESC
Contributions by Sita Balani, Melanie Boehi, Clelia Coussonet, Karen Flint, Jason T. W. Irving, Nomusa Makhubu, Bettina Malcomess, Karin van Marle, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll
This publication emerges from Uriel Orlow’s Theatrum Botanicum (2015–18), a multi-faceted project encompassing film, sound, photography, and installation that looks to the botanical world as a stage for politics. Working from the dual vantage points of South Africa and Europe, the project considers plants as both witnesses to, and dynamic agents in, history. It links nature and humans, rural and cosmopolitan medicine, tradition and modernity across different geographies, histories, and systems of knowledge—exploring the variety of curative, spiritual, and economic powers of plants. The project addresses “botanical nationalism” and “flower diplomacy” during apartheid; plant migration; the role and legacies of the imperial classification and naming of plants; bioprospecting and biopiracy; and the garden planted by Nelson Mandela and his fellow inmates at Robben Island prison.
This publication is made up of two intertwining books: one documents the works of Theatrum Botanicum, including the scripts for two films; the second is a compendium of brief, commissioned essays that aims to offer an accessible snapshot of the complex and multifaceted issues that inform and are raised by the artworks. The independent but interrelated essays, which either speak directly to the artworks or follow lines of inquiry alongside them, cover perspectives from postcolonial cultural studies; art criticism and art history; natural history, botany (including ethnobotany and economic botany), and conservation; jurisprudence and critical legal studies; and critical race studies.
Design by In the shade of a tree (Samuel Bonnet, Sophie Demay, and Maël Fournier-Comte)
June 2018, English
21.5 x 29 cm, 368 pages, color ill., softcover
ISBN 978-3-95679-415-5
http://www.sternberg-press.com/index.php?pageId=1835&l=en&bookId=729&sort=year DESC,month DESC
https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/the-coloniality-of-planting
Part of the Garden issue https://www.architectural-review.com/magazines/ar-1478
Part of a special issue of Subjectivity dedicated to the work of Couze Venn - https://link.springer.com/journal/41286/onlineFirst/page/1
Response to Couze Venn, After Capital (Sage, 2018)
https://thecontemporaryjournal.org/issues/on-translations/the-madness-of-the-mother-tongue
Maria Hlavajova and Wietske Maas, eds., Propositions for Non-Fascist Living, Tentative and Urgent (Utrecht and Cambridge, MA: BAK, basis voor actuele kunst; MIT Press, 2019), pp. 125–40
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/propositions-non-fascist-living
Summary:
Artists, theorists, activists, and scholars propose concrete forms of non-fascist living as the rise of contemporary fascisms threatens the foundations of common life.
Propositions for Non-Fascist Living begins from the urgent need to model a world decidedly void of fascisms during a time when the rise of contemporary fascisms threatens the very foundations of a possibility for common life. Borrowing from Michel Foucault's notion of “non-fascist living” as an “art of living counter to all forms of fascism,” including that “in us all… the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us,” the book addresses the practice of living rather than the mere object of life.
Artists, theorists, activists, and scholars offer texts and visual essays that engage varied perspectives on practicing life and articulate methods that support multiplicity and difference rather than vaunting power and hierarchy. Architectural theorist Eyal Weizman, for example, describes an “unlikely common” in gathering evidence against false narratives; art historian and critic Sven Lütticken develops a non-fascist proposition drawn from the intersection of art, technology, and law; philosopher Rosi Braidotti explores an ethics of affirmation and the practices of dying.
Propositions for Non-Fascist Living is the first in a BASICS series of readers from BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, engaging some of the most urgent problems of our time through theoretically informed and politically driven artistic research and practice.
Contributors include:
Rosi Braidotti, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Jota Mombaça, and Thiago de Paula Souza, Forensic Architecture, Marina Gržinić, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, Patricia Kaersenhout and Lukáš Likavčan, Sven Lütticken, Jumana Manna, Dan McQuillan, Shela Sheikh, Eyal Weizman, Mick Wilson
**Please support the journal**
Part of special issue, ‘Missing and Missed: The Subject, Politics and Memorialisation’, Kronos, vol.44, no. 1 (2019),
http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_issuetoc&pid=0259-019020180001&lng=en&nrm=iso
Taking leave from obstacles to the creation of an ‘environmental public’ in contemporary post-apartheid South Africa and the political silencing and objectification of both nature and racialised subjects, this article interrogates and seeks to expand a specific figure: that of the witness. In the broader, global context of environmental violence, the witness – who, according to classical theories of testimony, is a sovereign subject who speaks in their own name – is considered in the context of constructed categories of active/passive and subject/object as these play out across race, nature and shifting conceptions of the human. The title, ‘the future of the witness’, prompts two questions: (i) In the context of (missing) environmental publics, in what ways we must reconceptualise the figure of the witness – on ontological, epistemological and political levels – as we move into the future? (ii) Faced with ever-escalating Anthropocenic destruction, is it possible for a witness to testify not only to past events and experiences, as per the generally accepted temporal schema of witnessing, but also to ongoing experiences that unfold into the future? In responding to these questions, it is argued (a) that the witness can no longer be considered as an isolated figure, but rather must be conceived as part of a testimonial constellation; and (b) that, in responding to ecological concerns, this constellation must be a more-than-human collective: an entangled form of sociality between humans and nonhumans that does not take recourse to modernist categories of ‘human’ and ‘nature’.
Moving, via South Africa, from the European Holocaust to global humanitarian and forensic practices, through European and North American science and technology studies as well as Amerindian thinking, the article gathers a generalised set of questions and propositions that might in turn be folded back into specific locales. Key is the classic postcolonial question of who ought to or has the right to speak in the name of whom. Where the witness is often denied self-representation or, more gravely, entirely absent or missing, the article surveys various practices of supplementary witnessing. However, such practices ofen find themselves caught within a representational dilemma whereby, despite the necessity of defending the rights of humans and nonhumans alike, ‘speaking for’ or ‘giving voice’ to dispossessed or missing subjects – including nature – runs the risk of further replicating the original colonial matrix of being, knowledge and power that is being contested. Drawing from aesthetic and speculative practices, the article asks what possible strategies might be available for navigating the challenges of representation and for conceiving of more-than-human environmental publics that contest the neoliberal indivisualization of responsibilty and actively bear witness both to unfolding environmental degradation and possible more liveable futures.
Through a reading of Jumana Manna’s feature-length film, Wild Relatives (2018), this article explores the geopolitics of seed saving, reading global efforts to preserve genetic biodiversity in the face of climate change through the logic of the pharmakon (ie, as both poison and cure). The film follows the journey of seeds between the Global Seed Vault at Svalbard (Norway) and the Bekaa Valley (Lebanon), where seeds from Syria are being cultivated due to the ongoing civil war, probing the relationship between the preservation and (re)patriation of seeds on the one hand and global conflict and humanitarianism on the other, and considering local cultivation practices vis-à-vis the lasting legacies of the developmentalist, geopolitical agendas of the US-sponsored Green Revolution. The article situates the film within Manna’s broader oeuvre, problematising the epistemological and temporal logic of heritage practices that seek to preserve both cultural and natural diversity. As such, the article demonstrates the neo-orientalist and neo-colonial logic of cryopreservation as a form of ‘imperialist nostalgia’ or techno-capitalist wizardry. Adapting anthropologist Michael Taussig’s notion of ‘agribusiness writing’ to the institutionalised, globalised images and narratives of productivity, bio-conservation and peacemaking, Wild Relatives is interpreted as a form of ‘apotropaic’ (‘countermagical’) film-making that warns against the appropriative, ‘green banking’ and ‘green washing’ logic of techno-scientific sorcery and celebrates the reciprocal, co-evolutionary plant–human relations of which the seed itself is an archive.
Third Text, Volume 32, issues 2–3 (2018)
Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions
Guest Editors: Ros Gray and Shela Sheikh
Third Text, Volume 32, issues 2–3 (2018)
This special issue presents new research on, and in some cases generated through, contemporary art practices that both explore and intervene in the cultures, politics and systems of representation, as well as their attendant desires and violences, generated through human interaction with the soil. Our proposition is that, in order to do full justice to Fanon’s diagnosis of ‘the wretched of the earth’, we must understand more deeply the extent to which this is due to the fact that the earth itself is wretched, and that part of this condition has been the destruction of ‘ecological’ relations with the earth. The phrase ‘the wretched earth’ signals our ongoing engagement with anti-colonial and anti-imperialist writers such as Fanon, but also the need to go beyond their reconfigured humanism to think about the multiple human and nonhuman cohabitations that constitute the soil and, more broadly, our more-than-human commons.
Full issue: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ctte20/current
Introduction:
Linked via e-flux conversations
In The Avery Review, Shela Sheikh, who teaches postcolonial studies at Goldsmiths, explores how Elizabeth A. Povinelli's concept of "geontopower" can be used to illuminate indigenous struggles in the US, such as the movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline, as well as the settler-colonialist nature of Trump-fueled nationalism. Elaborated in Povinelli's recent book Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism, geontopower is "a set of discourses, affects, and tactics used in late liberalism to maintain or shape the coming relationship of the distinction between Life and Nonlife” (p. 4). The concept is offered as a supplement or update to the concept of biopower, whose exercise, argues Povinelli, is more and more being replaced by the exercise of geontopower. Sheikh writes that by "translating" Povinelli's idea of geontopower to a North American context, we can gain insights and tools not only for understanding US settler colonialism today, but also for struggling against it. Read an excerpt from Sheikh's piece below, or the full text here. (An excerpt from Povinelli's book Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism appeared in the December 2016 issue of e-flux journal.)
http://conversations.e-flux.com/t/translating-geontologies-to-conceptualize-and-combat-settler-colonialism/6026
words of Jacques Derrida, can be read as exemplary of the aporetic and at times terrifying
relationship between responding and responsibility, above all where this is bound up with
literature and law. Tracing Derrida’s fleeting responses to “Bartleby” across his oeuvre, and supplementing these explicit namings of Bartleby with readings of texts silently haunted by
Bartleby’s ghostly figure, the paper points towards the inherent affinities between the writings of Derrida and Melville. It suggests that, whereas Bartleby’s response has often been read as paradigmatic of a “passive resistance” that can be put to political use, in a Derridean line of thinking it points towards the experience of an “arche-passivity,” as a heteronomy that is the only possibility of freedom and responsibility, which offers no (ethical or political) program or strategy other than the experience of “knowing not to know”—an experience exemplified by what Derrida names “the secret of literature” that “Bartleby” is.
Full interview download: https://slought.org/media/files/s534-2016-03-22-erasures_interview.pdf
In 2010, Fazal Sheikh visited Israel and the West Bank for the first time. Sheikh had been invited to join This Place, a project initiated by the photographer Frédéric Brenner to explore the region through the lenses of twelve internationally-renowned photographers.1 During the course of the many extended visits to the region that were to follow, Sheikh produced three bodies of work—Memory Trace, Desert Bloom, and Independence/Nakba— published collectively by Steidl in 2015 as The Erasure Trilogy. Together, through their juxtaposition of the photographic image and text, the three volumes trace the legacies of the Arab–Israeli War of 1948 and its lasting impact on the Palestinians, Bedouins, and Israelis of the region. While Desert Bloom, the work produced for This Place, has been exhibited in the traveling group exhibition that began in 2014, this spring marks the first simultaneous exhibition of all three elements.2 Collectively presented under the title Erasures, the trilogy internally opens up in a movement of dispersal across multiple institutions, each with differing remits, and with this distinct, albeit often overlapping, audiences: the Slought Foundation (Philadelphia), the Brooklyn Museum, the Pace/MacGill Gallery, and Storefront for Art and Architecture
(all New York), the Al-Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary
Art (East Jerusalem), and the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center (Ramallah).3 To mark the occasion of this ambitious curatorial gesture, the interview that follows has been published through the Slought Foundation, where Sheikh is currently artist-in-residence. This discussion, which took place in Zurich in the summer of 2014, was initially commissioned by the This Place project, and appeared in an abridged and edited form in the group exhibition catalogue, published by MACK.4 Here, Sheikh re ects upon his initial responses to the region, the genesis and challenges of each of the elements of the trilogy, as well as the relations between them and his hopes for their effectivity, and his mode of working more broadly. As such, together with the extensive documentation provided both within the Erasure Trilogy publications and across the venues, as well as a series of artist’s talks programed for this spring, the conversation lends further context to the multi- platformed curatorial event of Erasures, which takes as its point of departure the following works: ...
1. For further details, see www.this-place.org.
2. Venues and dates of the traveling group exhibition, of which Desert Bloom is a part, are available at www.this-place.org. Elements of Desert Bloom were also displayed in 2014 as part of the group exhibition “Now You See It: Photography and Concealment” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
3. For full details, see www.slought.org /resources/erasures.
4. Fazal Sheikh interviewed by Shela Sheikh in Charlotte Cotton, ed., This Place (London: MACK, 2014), pp. 111–25; also available at www.this-place.org/photographers /fazal-sheikh/.
Within the Ikọ zone we will listen to two poems, Pre-Loved Bodies and Sauna for Our Lifelong Displacements, written and read by Kechi Nomu, a poet and writer living in Nigeria.
https://www.ikoflow.com/episode-4-1
https://www.botanicalmind.online/podcasts/the-coloniality-of-planting
Art (Visible Project; Public Art Agency Sweden, 2020)
Available online at https://www.visibleproject.org/blog/annotated_library/,
https://www.visibleproject.org/blog/text/collectively-annotated-bibliography-on-artisticpractices-
in-the-expanded-field-of-public-art/
Annotated review of
1. Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (London: Verso, 2019)
2. Katya Garcia-Anton, ed., Sovereign Words: Indigenous Art, Curation And Criticism
(Oslo/Amsterdam: OCA/Valiz, 2018)
3. Ros Gray, Cinemas of the Mozambican Revolution: Anti-Colonialism, Independence and
Internationalism in Filmmaking, 1968-1991 (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2020)
4. Anne Garland Mahler, From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and
Transnational Solidarity (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2018)
5. Jennifer Bajorek, Unfixed: Photography and the Decolonial Imagination in West Africa (Durham
and London: Duke University Press, 2020)
6. Malcom Ferdinand, Une écologie décoloniale: Penser l’écologie depuis le monde caribéen (Paris: Seuil,
2019)
7. La Colonie, ed., Colonial and Postcolonial Prostitution (Paris: La Découverte/La Colonie
éditions, 2019) (English and French)
8. Åsa Sonjasdotter, Peace with the Earth: Tracing Agricultural Memory, Reconfiguring Practice
(Berlin: Archive Books, 2020)
9. Sakiya: Art | Science | Agriculture, vol. 01 (Ramallah: Sakiya, 2019)
10. Industria, June 2020
Inhabiting the Ends of the World / Habiter les fins du monde
Due to the COVID19 situation, the 2020 symposium will be postponed to 2022.
https://symposiumphaenomenologicum.wordpress.com/
The Showroom, London
An afternoon symposium speakers convened by Uriel Orlow and Shela Sheikh with invited speakers Sita Balani, Jason Irving and Philippe Zourgane. The symposium will respond to themes in Orlow's exhibition Mafavuke’s Trial and Other Plant Stories, and explore aspects of knowledge production and suppression both historically and in the present moment though the lens of the botanical and the postcolonial.
FILIPA CÉSAR, ROS GRAY, RAPHAËL GRISEY, SHELA SHEIKH, BOUBA TOURÉ, NICOLE WOLF
SATURDAY 22 OCTOBER, 12.00PM – 4.00PM
In this roundtable seminar we shift our gaze from the infrastructures and cultural imaginaries enacted by British colonialism to broader relations between colonialism, cultivation (cultural and agricultural) and representation across the colonised world, and their lasting legacies in the neo-colonial relations of contemporary neoliberal globalization. In reference to colonial agricultural industries, we turn specifically to the soil, both literally and in the collective imaginary, as the site of exploitation and of resistance. We will consider soil in the context of historical anti-colonial struggles and moments of decolonisation, contemporary alter-globalization and anti-capitalist formations (such as ecological movements and agricultural cooperatives), and the promise of future collectivities. We are interested in the practices of representation, above all (but not limited to) ecologies of the moving image, and the role of aesthetics—both historically and currently—within ‘fugitive’ practices.
The panel of artists, activists and theorists will explore the connective tissues between soil and celluloid, in both their materiality and metaphoricity, and the importance of the soil to what we might call ‘cine-geographies’. Questions to be addressed include, but are not limited to: How to ‘activate’ or ‘re-wild’ the fragilities and potentialities of colonial remains—be these scarred landscapes or dissonant archival film material—for our present moment? Between soil, celluloid and political struggle, what assemblages might be (re-)animated? What forms of non-hierarchical human/non-human community and collectivity might these give rise to? How can film-making practices align with those of permaculture in the creation of ecosystems and networks, and in the roles assigned to marginal plants/images? From the plundering accumulation of colonialism to the primitive accumulation of capital, what might be alternative economies and relations to the soil and the image? What are the political ecologies of the audio-visual, and how might this relate to contemporary ideas of the ‘commons’ and/or ‘undercommons’? What nascent ecologies of knowledge—derived from local and ‘minor’ practices, submerged histories and memories of the land and soil—can be unearthed?
Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center, Ramallah, Palestine
Speaker(s): Munir Fakher-Eldin, Vivien Sansour, Shela Sheikh, Beth Stryker, Omar Imseeh Tesdell, Marcell Mars, Nida Sinnokrot
Historically, colonialism and cultivation have been intertwined. Botanical taxonomy has underpinned European colonial expansion and served as a precursor for racial hierarchization. If this now-hegemonic classification system, instituted by Carolus Linnaeus (1707–1778), can be likened to contemporary practices of bioprospecting and appropriating indigenous/local knowledge for the profit of transnational corporations, what critical, legal, literary and aesthetic tools might we employ in order to interrupt this ‘monoculture of knowledge’ of contemporary science and global neoliberal capitalism? How does the colonial construction of knowledge relate to contemporary questions around access to resources (file-sharing, seed banks, agricultural commons) and the suppression of ‘ecological’ thinking? Faced with contemporary biopiracy and epistemicide, how might we conceive of alternative practices of piracy and the commons that ‘harvest’ not only knowledge but also memory and the imaginary? This event includes the opening of the Community Garden, BookScanner, and Moving Garden and is in collaboration with SAKIYA.
18+19 March 2016
Organised by the Centre for Cultural Studies
Goldsmiths, University of London
Full information at https://cultivationconference.wordpress.com
20 April 2016
Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York
http://storefrontnews.org/archive/2010s/on-memory-and-place/
On the occasion of the opening of Memory Trace by Fazal Sheikh, Storefront for Art and Architecture will also present, Reading Images: On Memory and Place, moderated by Fazal Sheikh and exhibition curator Eduardo Cadava, with the participation of Sadia Abbas, Emmet Gowin, Amira Hass, Rashid Khalidi, Rosalind Morris, Shela Sheikh, and Michael Wood.
It is perhaps because we have not yet fully understood the power and force of memory and its essential relation to forgetfulness and betrayal that there can be no end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The war has provided evidence over the course of several decades not simply of the inevitable complicity between victory and defeat, between war and the rhetoric of peace, but also between memory and forgetfulness. These complicities have in a sense even revealed a determination to make war permanent.
In an ongoing peace process that seems to take the form of what Michel Foucault once called “a coded war” (the continuation of war through other means), there seems to be an insistence on certain ways of remembering the past, and of using these remembrances to understand the present and to imagine the future.
At stake in this conflict are questions of territory and the ownership of land, of legacies and inheritances, political and national identities, ethnic, religious, and cultural conflicts, discrimination and economic oppression, and violence and retaliations of all kinds. Many of these questions can be viewed through the lens of what Mahmoud Darwish in 1973 called “a struggle between two memories.”
However various its manifestations may be, the question of memory affects every dimension of the conflict. If not for the struggles over what memory can be, or over which memories have more authority or force, there would, in fact, be no conflict. This is not to say that the violence, the injuries, the deaths, the destruction, the discrimination, and oppression that characterize the conflict are only issues of memory, but rather that they would never occur without this “struggle between two memories,” often one that is between more than two memories.
Goldsmiths, University of London
11 June 2016
Beginning with an examination of the place of both nature and sexual difference in Derrida’s reading of Antigone, as this unsettles the Hegelian schema of recognition, this paper poses the wider question of whether, and how, deconstruction may be a resource for decolonial feminist thinking, above all where this concerns a praxis surrounding contemporary indigenous struggles, notably around land and burial rights. Surveying recent shifts within the field of decolonial feminisms, the underlying question here is whether the generally upheld exclusion of deconstruction from decolonial thinking in fact serves to limit and undercut, rather than further, its operativity. The “applicability” of this potential cross-fertilization between the two bodies of thought to indigenous struggles is further explored through Gayatri Spivak’s use of the untranslatable term “planetarity” (distinguished from planetary, the planet, earth, world, globe and globalization in their common usage), as a radical alterity and, precisely, the absence of any applicable methodology where this is to be understood as a form of environmentalism that functions according to the interests of globalization and imperialism.
20 November 2015
Speakers
John Narayan (University of Warwick)
Matthieu Renault (University of Paris 8)
Shela Sheikh (Goldsmiths, London)
Howard Caygill (CRMEP)
Lucie Mercier (CRMEP)
Peter Hallward (CRMEP)
In Goran Hugo Olsson's recent film essay Concerning Violence: Nine Scenes from the Anti-Imperialist Self-Defence (2014) Lauryn Hill recites the line from Fanon's Wretched of the Earth that 'the colonised man is an envious man'. The film largely confirms Sartre's view in his Preface to Fanon's last work that the resentment of the colonised is both justified and justifies the violence of anti-colonial resistance. Fanon in short continues to be read in terms of the Hegelian master-slave dialectic and its privileging of the struggle for recognition. But does this do justice to Fanon's philosophical formation and views? This workshop will explore this issue by returning to Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, highlighting its debt to Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals and emphasising Fanon's search for an affirmative anti-colonial philosophy and politics.
Significantly, it is in Donner la mort (1992), within a discussion of responsibility, response (without which there would be no responsibility) and decision – of the monstrously terrifying yet utterly banal ordeal of nonknowledge (the mysterium tremendum) that is exemplified in God’s command to Abraham’s to sacrifice Isaac, yet is nonetheless experienced on a daily basis in every decision and in the response implied in every relation to the other – that Derrida’s response to Bartleby’s response is inscribed. Whilst for Kierkegaard Abraham transgresses the ethical order by keeping God’s command secret and not speaking, Derrida argues that Abraham does speak, does respond, albeit without responding; by responding indirectly, through his silence on the one matter which takes over his whole discourse: the secret between him and God.
For Derrida, this experience of responding without responding and of the secret (as that which characterizes the experience of trembling) is exemplified in Bartleby’s response. Just as Abraham speaks in tongues, the tense of Bartleby’s ‘singularly insignificant statement’ resembles a nonlanguage or a secret language; one which offers no determinable content (no determinable constative) and neither promises nor predicts, neither refuses, negates, denies, accepts or affirms (offers no ‘operative’ performative), yet nonetheless responds, taking on ‘the responsibility of a response without response’; the responsibility of the ‘relation without relation’ that is here addressed by moving away from the specificity of Derrida’s discussion of Bartleby’s response towards a more general discussion of the aporias of the response, decision and responsibility per se in light of law, duty, différance and the madness of the laws of substitutability and excess engendered by the trace or the re-mark of iterability. Through introducing Derrida’s later readings of the work of Cixous, the necessity for a certain secrecy as the condition of responsibility, terrifying as this may be, is advanced through a consideration of literature as the very space and possibility of the secret.
Furthermore, Bartleby’s response is considered in terms of the performative act of responding (of responding to the singular other, and before the universalisable law or the institutional agency of alterity). This ‘act’ is here read in light of a certain passion: one that is not that of a subject and, like Bartleby’s response, as secret (for there is no passion without secret, and vice versa), does not respond, either for itself or to anyone else, before anyone or anything. Absolute nonresponse, as Derrida writes in the almost contemporaneous text, Passions (1993), which cannot be called to account or drawn into a trial or process [procès], be it philosophical, ethical, political or juridical. For Derrida, this passionate secret – more original and secret than the modalities of power and duty, because fundamentally heterogeneous to them – may appear to give rise to a process (indeed it always does so), and may lend itself to it, but it never surrenders to it: a postulation that is here read in light of Derrida’s assertion in Donner la mort that Bartleby’s ‘I would prefer not to’ is ‘a sacrificial passion that will lead him to his death, a death given by the law.’
The passion of Bartleby’s ‘singularly insignificant statement’ is also read in light of the ‘arche-secret’ of the trace and différance as the ‘performative act’ of a responsibility or relation to the law that is impassive yet (as with khora) neither simply active nor simply passive; a thinking which is in turn considered in light of Derrida’s response to what Hélène Cixous names the ‘Omnipotence-otherness’ [Tout-puissance-autre] of literature (the activity of the passive ‘what happens’ of the all-powerful, powerless other); of literature as exemplary of the secret that is ‘without a content separable from its performative experience, from its performative tracing’; and in light of literature’s infinite power to keep the secret undecidable and sealed from what it says, even as it is publicly avowed.
For Derrida, Bartleby’s response is a ‘sacrificial passion that will lead him to his death, a death given by the law, by a society that doesn’t even know why it acts the way it does.’ Addressing Bartleby’s response as a question of passion, sacrifice, the secret, and responsibility, the paper looks firstly to Derrida’s The Gift of Death, where Bartleby’s response is read in light of Abraham’s ordeal on Mount Moriah, the terrifying ordeal that becomes exemplary of the aporia of responsibility that we are faced with in every decision, response and relation to the other. Arguing that this aporia is predicated upon an experience of language which must be suffered and endured, yet nonetheless responded to and grappled with, the paper subsequently looks to other texts, sketching out a thinking of différance as another name for ‘passion,’ albeit a paleonymic passion that is not bound up in, but rather comes before, the dichotomy active/passive. This passionate experience is in turn is addressed in terms of Bartleby’s response which, it is argued, following Derrida, ‘takes on the responsibility of a response without response’; a responsibility that consists of ‘actively’ or ‘affirmatively’ responding to the experience of language, as passion (as ‘acti/passivity’), and to the ‘who’ and the ‘what’ of the other.
Thinking this ‘response without response’ in terms of a ‘relation without relation’ (the ‘x without x’ through which Derrida responds to Blanchot), it is argued that every responsible relation to the other, as other, must necessarily entail a certain secret; a secret which once again is addressed in terms of passion, différance and a certain necessary violence, and in terms of a certain literariness of writing. The paper then turns to a thinking of Bartleby’s response as what Derrida, in response to the writings of Hélène Cixous, names the ‘Omnipotence-otherness [Tout-puissance-autre]’ of literature, in so far as Bartleby’s ‘singularly insignificant statement,’ in the very ambiguity of its sense and modality and in its resemblance of a secret language, can be read as an exemplary act of resistance. Finally, this is addressed in terms of what Derrida, again responding to Cixous, names the ‘puisse’; yet another paleonymic reinvention in which ‘power [puissance]’ is reformulated as a certain non-power (what we might call the powerlessness of an arche-performative) that, as an ‘originary subjunctive,’ feeds back into a thinking of the messianic ‘perhaps’ of Bartleby’s response.
Between each of the three ‘takes,’ the difference is minimal. The focus of this paper, however, is the opening locution in each case: ‘I am the martyr…’ – a performative utterance that in effect constitutes the signing of an oath which arguably brings about the act of martyrdom, and from which point the soon-to-be martyr cannot return.
Historically, martyrdom and testimony have always been inextricably linked: martyrdom has always implied some form of witnessing and/or bearing witness, as is testified to by the shared etymologies in both Arabic and Greek. Taking ‘I am the martyr x’ as exemplary testimony, it is argued that in the thought of Jacques Derrida the reverse can be postulated: that each and every singular instance of testimony implies an act of martyrdom, and that the suffering of a generalised passion both of and for testimony (or any performative act) is unavoidable and – ultimately – constitutive. This is argued predominantly in terms of Derrida’s treatment of the aporia between the singular, ‘live,’ performative act/event of testimony and the technical, machine-like and repeatable; through a thinking of différance as passion; and through Derrida’s reconceptualisation of the performative act/event as constituted by a certain form of affect, ‘radical’ passivity, non-mastery and im-puissance.
Secondly, having outlined Derrida’s reading of the poetic date in Celan’s work, and the manner in which Celan’s poetry displaces the limit between the supposedly ‘external’ date (the calendrical, archivable, historical date) and the more essential incorporation of the non-conventional date within the poetic text, the date is subsequently addressed in terms of what Derrida names ‘the law of caesura,’ with caesura here being understood in terms of wounding, incision, interruption and discretion in the body of both the word, the poetic text and the archive (as generalised text). For Derrida, wherever a date takes place, there is, a priori, the experience of a wound. Just as the date must be effaced in order to be preserved and to commemorate, all experience of singularity (including the concept of the archive in general) must necessarily undergo the pain of this self-wounding; an experience that is exemplary in the poetic of Celan. In terms of the archive, it is demonstrated that it is only through the ageless dating, wounding and self-effacement of the body of the word or (poetic) text, as mark or trace, that the possibility of the historical, archivable inscription is opened.
Finally, the paper moves to a consideration of Celan’s 1960 ‘Meridian’ address, in which Celan’s ‘effort of trumping sovereignty,’ in Derrida’s words, is aligned with ‘the poetic act’ –or simply ‘poetry’ itself – as an act of freedom. Here a consideration of Celan’s re-conceptualisation of sovereignty (what Derrida calls the ‘hyper-majesty of poetry), through his thinking of the punctual present-now of the poem, is woven back into Derrida’s prioritisation of the caesura in Celan’s poetry, and presented alongside Derrida’s own deconstruction of sovereignty and mastery through a generalised thinking of the caesura, demonstrating how the caesura at work in Celan’s poetry informs the caesura of the Derridean event.
By taking the ‘encounter’ between two historical testimonies – those of Derrida and the martyr Jamal Satti – as a starting point and by demonstrating the sufferances of testimony and the archive, the thesis aims to reconcile Derrida’s philosophical thinking with historical enquiry. By supplementing these testimonies with further ‘performances’ of passion and encounters with other reader-writer-witnesses from the realms of philosophy, literature and art, the scandal that is ‘I am the martyr (x)’ becomes at once both extraordinary and the ordinary story of language. Reading this ‘and’ through the ‘x’ of repeatability and substitutability, the aporias of testimony are folded into the wider context of such tele-mediated martyr-testimonies and their terrifying force and effect.
Supervisors: Professor Howard Caygill, Dr. Elina Staikou
Examiners: Professor Eduardo Cadava, Professor Alexander García Düttman
Invited participants: Cécile Boex, Lecturer at EHESS ; Leyla Dakhli, Research fellow at
Centre Marc Bloch – Berlin ; Omar Dewachi, Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers
University – New Jersey ; Carolina Kobelinsky, Research fellow at CNRS – LESC ; Shouri
Molavi, Lecturer at American University – Cairo ; William Walters, Professor of Politics
at Carleton University - Ottawa.
Archives are sites where power is actively negotiated, contested, and confirmed. More
than sites, they are social and material practices, such as researching, collecting,
classifying, and the ‘turning of real lives into writing’ (Foucault 1979). Archiving involves
rationalities and classification, yet it goes back to a ‘fever’, a desire (Derrida 1995): a
passion, be it a passion for order, rationality, control or simply for records. But these
records are an addition of traces, not the reality, and not even its full representation. These
paradoxes and impossibilities have not weakened our ‘taste for archive’, on the contrary,
it seems that Derrida’s critique renewed the interest and creativity in the use of archives
as a research practice, method and field of observation. The scientific fragility of archives
– their subordination to affects and power – seems to have paradoxically propelled them
as emancipatory tools for knowledge and political resistance. Several reasons come to
mind to explain this. Archiving materializes the epistemic, material and social relations
between power and knowledge. It thus offers a site of critical observation (Ann Stoler’s
urge to “move from archive-as-source to archive-as-subject”, 2010), which can be further
used to build knowledge from outside the positions of power that have a monopoly on the
production of archives themselves. Archiving can blur to the highest level the frontiers
between knowledge production and political intervention, for instance at the crossroads of
artistic, expert and critical knowledge productions, or through collaborative/inter-subjective
forms of knowledge production. These blurring create viable zones of observation, writing
and intervention but can also expose to many tensions and conflicts of loyalty.
In these contexts, the creation, subversion and critical readings of archives are often
anchored in an attention to the missing, the absent or the hidden. This unfolds in different
initiatives. Some are driven by the need for producing (grass-roots) archives when none
existed before, which comes with a reflexion on the reasons for this absence. Others
search for traces of violence and hidden histories in archives created for purpose of
government and control. A central theme in these works is that of violence and the
dialectics of the seen and the unseen: violence invisible and invisibilized, or the violence
of invisibilization (of certain affects, people, ways of life, histories, places, etc. etc.) But
then, are archives and counter-archives a matter of equal representation and visibility, or
a challenge to the epistemic order that produces in/visibility? What are their relations tothe present: How do we handle the curentness of the past (that is precisely not ‘archived’)?
(How) can we archive the present?
Gathering friends and colleagues across disciplines, the workshop wishes to create a
space of dialogue on these questions, departing from one specific topic: working with/on
archives, how do we come across and address the question of secrecy?
There is a passion for secrecy as much as there is one for the archive: for Marc Bloch, the
two obstacles to historical knowledge — built on archives – were “carelessness that looses
the documents, and, even more dangerous, the passion for secrecy” (1941). Beyond the
question of access to records, the notion of secrecy refers to affects but also to social and
political bounds and relations – relationality being a dimension of secrecy as a practice of
power (Simmel, 1908; Taussig, 1999). This has to do with the practice of ‘lying in politics’
(and Hannah Arendt’s analysis on the subject (1969) are based on the Pentagon papers
leaked from the national security archives). But secrecy as a social practice has also to do
with the protection of records and data, by professional secrets, ethical codes of conduct
or ‘regulations on personal data protection’. While touching very real ethical and political
issues we encounter at different levels in our works, these regulations are also perversely
used, not to protect anyone, but as obstacles to any initiatives that are not subordinated to
the neoliberal administrative and managerial rationalities that produced them. Which is yet
another side of the power-knowledge nexus.
This, as well as Arendt’s reflection on the Pentagon papers, builds further on the idea
suggested by Simmel and Taussig that understanding how secrecy works enlightens the
understanding of power (Walters and Luscombe, 2017). But secrecy is highly polysemic.
It refers to what exists and is kept hidden – then, the focus is on concealment, and the
relation to data is closer to that of fact-finding and counter-investigation. It can also refer
to what is unspoken, intimate, private – what has a hard time surfacing even for the
producer/keeper of the record: a thread followed by Stoler when she looks at the private
correspondence of colonial administrators to understand the intimate life of power. Here,
unlike for the concealed/leaked administrative records, the relation to data is no more that
of investigative rationality but requires different epistemologies and writings.
These reflections open several paths for further exchange. At a methodological level, we
may have to clarify the relationships between archiving and the creation and uses of online
databases: what are the different logics at play? What are the procedures of objectification
and subjection encrypted in the technologies at use? Another central question is that of
the relation between archives, bodies and the secret: readings of the archives can
enlighten how (past or invisibilized) experiences are embodied; suppressed bodies can
resurface through the archive, bodies can also become archives — archives of violence
or of social and political practices for instance. These uses confront us, however, to the
paradox of veracity and truth when it comes to violence: the standards of veracity that
require to find more sources and establish their falsifiability can amount to demanding the
impossible, and be another way to reconducting a violence that is at the roots of the lack
of archives, their scarcity or their incompleteness.
The workshop wishes to be a space of open, informal discussion in order to explore these
questions and raise many more in relation to our respective fields of research, writing and
archival activism