Post-Plantation: Lusanga International Research Centre for Art and Economic Inequality

March 17, 2017



Render of the White Cube in Lusanga. © OMA.



The Repatriation of the White Cube
Launch of the five year-research program of LIRCAEI
April 21–22, 2017
Lusanga International Research Centre for Art and Economic Inequality
Bulungu Territory, Kwilu Province
Democratic Republic of the Congo
www.humanactivities.org



Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise
Avenue Wagenia 1
Commune de la Gombe
Kinshasa
D.R Congo

Institute for Human Activities
Postbus 17031
1001 JA Amsterdam
The Netherlands

On April 21–22, a quintessential White Cube will be inaugurated on a former Unilever plantation in Lusanga, 650 km southeast of Kinshasa, D.R. Congo. Designed by OMA, this White Cube is a central element of the Lusanga International Research Centre for Art and Economic Inequality (LIRCAEI). Located in the heart of the plantation system and at the crossroads of global inequality and climatological change, the research center aims to become a vector for a social and ecological shift. LIRCAEI is a joint initiative of the plantation workers' cooperative Cercle d'art des travailleurs de plantation congolaise(CATPC) and the Institute for Human Activities (IHA).
The festive and solemn inauguration of the White Cube will mark the launch of the five-year research program of LIRCAEI. In Lusanga, the White Cube will attract both the capital and the visibility needed for plantations workers to buy back land and develop a new economic and ecological model on-site: the post-plantation.
With the establishment of LIRCAEI, the iconic modernist White Cube will be recontextualized in the setting that has historically underwritten its development. In economic terms, plantations have funded not just the building of most European and American infrastructure and industries, but also that of museums and universities. On an ideological level, the violence and brutality unfolding on one side—the plantation zones—has informed and haunted the civility, taste and aesthetics championed at the other: the White Cubes. By colliding these two opposite poles of global value chains with each other, LIRCAEI aims to overcome both the monoculture of the plantation system—that exhausts people and the environment and the sterility of the White Cube—a free haven for critique, love, and singularity, that, more often than not, reaffirms class divides.
To mark the opening of the new research program centered on the definition and implementation of the post-plantation, CATPC is curating an exhibition on the interconnectedness of art, ecology and the economy. CATPC’s newest works will be unveiled alongside contributions by other prominent Congolese and international artists. The exhibition will serve to activate the White Cube and put it in the service of Lusanga's people. The opening weekend will also feature a concert, public discussions, a film program and a ceremony celebrating the repatriation of the White Cube. The recently published monograph dedicated to CATPC’s work, edited by Sternberg Press, will also be presented during that weekend.
The White Cube will include an internet platform that connects its research to plantations and museums worldwide. Plugged into these international networks, the White Cube will transform the former palm oil plantation of Lusanga into a legitimization machine, investigating and relaying the strategies of resistance alongside visions for the future of plantation workers globally. Within five years, LIRCAEI seeks to have designed the blueprint for a new economic model in which art serves as an engine to start inclusive and ecological post-plantations throughout the Congo.

The program will be held in Lingala and French, with assistance for English speakers. Admission is free. A fee will be charged for lodging and meals. Visitors are advised to take contact with the travel coordinator at: office@humanactivities.org

Participating artists include: Sammy Baloji, Djo Bismar, Marlene Dumas, Michel Ekeba, Eleonore Hellio, Carsten Höller, Irene Kanga, Mathieu Kasiama, Jean Katambayi, Jean Kawata, Mananga Kibuila, Huguette Kilembi, Mbuku Kimpala, Mao Kingunza, Thomas Leba, Jeremie Mabiala, Blaise Mandefu, Daniel Manenga, Mega Mingiedi, Emery Mohamba, Daniel Mvuzi, Cedrick Tamasala and Luc Tuymans.
CATPC is published by Sternberg Press and includes texts by Ariella Azoulay, Eva Barois De Caevel, Eléonore Hellio, Ruba Katrib, Alexander Koch, J. A. Koster, Renzo Martens, René Ngongo, Els Roelandt, Charles Sikitele Gize, Charles Tumba and Françoise Vergès, and photos by Léonard Pongo.
OMA is responsible for designing the master plan for the Lusanga International Research Centre for Art and Economic Inequality, including the White Cube. The project is overseen by their managing partner architect David Gianotten. The executive architect is Arsene Ijambo, general secretary of the Association of the Architects of the Congo (SAC).
The opening weekend of LIRCAEI is organized by IHA and CATPC, in partnership with OMA, the Ministry of Arts and Culture of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and KASK - Ghent School of the Arts.
The opening weekend of LIRCAEI is also supported by the Gieskes Strijbis Fund, the Mondriaan Fund, Bralima, Stichting Educatie en Cultuur and the Prince Claus Fund.

goddess

False-face computer vision camouflage patterns for Hyphen Labs’ NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism

HyperFace Camouflage

This is a temporary page. HyperFace launches Jan 16. Sign up for launch notification here
at Sundance Film Festival 2017.

HyperFace OpenCV Prototype ©Adam Harvey

HyperFace is being developed for Hyphen Labs NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism project at Sundance Film Festival and is a collaboration with Hyphen Labs members Ashley Baccus-Clark, Carmen Aguilar y Wedge, Ece Tankal, Nitzan Bartov, and JB Rubinovitz.

NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism is a transmedia exploration of black women and the roles they play in technology, society and culture—including speculative products, immersive experiences and neurocognitive impact research. Using fashion, cosmetics and the economy of beauty as entry points, the project illuminates issues of privacy, transparency, identity and perception.

HyperFace is a new kind of camouflage that aims to reduce the confidence score of facial detection and recognition by providing false faces that distract computer vision algorithms. HyperFace development began in 2013 and was first presented at 33c3 in Hamburg, Germany on December 30th, 2016. HyperFace will launch as a textile print at Sundance Film Festival on January 16, 2017.

Together HyperFace and NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism will explore an Afrocentric countersurveillance aesthetic.

For more information about NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism visit nsaf.space
How Does HyperFace Work?

HyperFace works by providing maximally activated false faces based on ideal algorithmic representations of a human face. These maximal activations are targeted for specific algorithms. The prototype above is specific to OpenCV’s default frontalface profile. Other patterns target convolutional nueral networks and HoG/SVM detectors. The technical concept is an extension of earlier work on CV Dazzle. The difference between the two projects is that HyperFace aims to alter the surrounding area (ground) while CV Dazzle targets the facial area (figure). In camouflage, the objective is often to minimize the difference between figure and ground. HyperFace reduces the confidence score of the true face (figure) by redirecting more attention to the nearby false face regions (ground).

Conceptually, HyperFace recognizes that completely concealing a face to facial detection algorithms remains a technical and aesthetic challenge. Instead of seeking computer vision anonymity through minimizing the confidence score of a true face (i.e. CV Dazzle), HyperFace offers a higher confidence score for a nearby false face by exploiting a common algorithmic preference for the highest confidence facial region. In other words, if a computer vision algorithm is expecting a face, give it what it wants.
How Well Does This Work?

The patterns are still under development and are expected to change. Please check back towards the end of January for more information.
Product Photos

Please check back towards the end of January for product photos
Notifications

If you’re interested in purchasing one of the first commercially available HyperFace textiles, please add yourself to my mailing list at Undisclosed.studio
Notes
Designs subject to change
Displayed patterns are prototypes and are currently undergoing testing.
First prototype designed for OpenCV Haarcascade. Future iterations will include patterns for HoG/SVM and CNN detectors
Will not make you invisible
Please credit image as HyperFace Prototype by “Adam Harvey / ahprojects.com”
Please credit scarf rendering prototype as “Rendering by Ece Tankal / hyphen-labs.com”
Not affilliated with the IARPA funded Hyperface algorithm for pose and gender recognition


©2004-2016 Adam R. Harvey. All Rights Reserved.

Afrofuturist Artists Craft A Virtual World For Women Of Color

01/18/2017 12:45 pm ET | Updated Jan 23, 2017

“Neurospeculative AfroFeminism” combines technology and fantasy to expand your imagination and physically optimize your brain.
By Priscilla Frank


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It was the summer of 2016 and molecular and cellular biologist/multidisciplinary artist Ashley Baccus-Clark was gifting herself a day of self-care. The police shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile had left her, like so many black Americans, anguished and weary. She tried to ease her heartache by visiting Storm King, the 500-acre sculpture park in upstate New York where hulking man-made forms dwell among rolling green fields.


Because it was summer, Baccus-Clark packed some sunscreen for the journey. But after applying the milky substance to her face, she was left with a purple residue caked atop her flesh, a subtle reminder that, even with something as mundane as sun protection, people of color are too often disregarded.


“Women of color have to modify products to fit who they are as people,” Baccus-Clark explained in an interview with The Huffington Post at New Inc, an incubator attached to and led by the New Museum. “Why should I have to spend my time and energy worrying about something like sunscreen? There is so much technology designed by POC [people of color] that isn’t made without POC in mind.”


She decided, then, to make some sheer sunscreen herself. And that simple, low-tech solution led to the monumental, virtual reality project “Neurospeculative Afrofeminism,” which will premiere this Friday in the New Frontier section of the Sundance Film Festival.
HYPHEN-LABSFrom left: Ashley Baccus-Clark, Carmen Aguilar y Wedge, Ece Tankal, and Nitzan Bartov.


Baccus-Clark is one member of Hyphen-Labs, a team of international women who combine art and technology to represent, protect and honor women of color. The team, who have worked together since 2014, also includes Carmen Aguilar y Wedge,a Mexican-American engineer with Cuban roots; Ece Tankal, an architect, moving image maker and multidisciplinary designer from Turkey; and Nitzan Bartov, an architect, game designer and artist from Israel.


With one foot grounded in contemporary reality and another in an imagined future, Hyphen-Labs renders both physical products and virtual reality narratives that specifically cater to black women. For the physical aspect of “Neurospeculative Afrofeminism,” Hyphen-Labs engineered a variety of speculative beauty products and accessories designed for women of color, manifesting the belief that self-care is more than just a luxury but a means of survival. A sunscreen safe for dark skin was object one.


Along with the sunscreen, the artists pioneered the prototype for a visor with a dichroic reflective surface that allows its wearers to see but not be seen. The incandescent head gear, made with cooperation from AB Screenwear, is meant for scenarios where people of color enter a predominately white space. Instead of code-switching ― or shifting their self-presentation in order to blend in ― the visor reflects any antagonistic gazes back at the watcher. The accessory symbolizes, as the artists explain, “that what we fear most is often a reflection of ourselves.”
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For their third product, Hyphen-Labs designed a pair of earrings that function as cameras and recording devices, meant to document both micro- and macro-aggressions in a safe and discrete manner. The jewelry, a collaboration with Michelle Cortese, responds to the failure of dashboard cameras and bodycams to accurately capture the ambiguous encounters through which black lives are lost without satisfactory explanation. While phones are often confiscated when they would be most useful, the earrings offer an inconspicuous and, in fact, really cute way to chronicle what POC endure on a daily basis.


While some of the Hyphen-Labs products help users survey their environment, others are meant to protect them from what the lab has identified as systematic surveillance employed by government officials. Collaborating with privacy artist Adam Harvey, the team created a silk headscarf whose pattern triggers facial recognition software to the point of overwhelming it. If at a protest, for example, hundreds of people wore the scarf, the cameras would be so triggered by the textiles they would shut down.


The idea for the headscarf emerged when Hyphen-Labs’ Ece Tankal, wearing a necklace with an eye pendant, was playing with Snapchat filters, and the app’s facial recognition software mistook Tankal’s necklace for a human eye. She wrapped herself in their carefully designed headscarf during our interview while Carmen tried to Snapchat a picture. The phone bugged out, as little puppy dog filter faces quickly popped up and disappeared all over the scarf’s fabric on the iPhone screen.
HYPHEN-LABS


The artists’ final product is called “The Octavia.” Its technology riffs off high-definition transcranial direct current stimulation (HD-tDCS), a non-invasive brain stimulation technique which uses electrical currents to stimulate regions of the brain. The procedure is currently used to alleviate depression and anxiety in patients, as well as to optimize a user’s mind by augmenting memory to increase creativity and work flow. In Hyphen-Labs’ take, the electrodes are combined with self-cleaning natural hair extensions in order to be weaved into textured or natural hair.


It is this final product that is at the core of the second aspect of “Neurospeculative Afrofeminism,” a virtual reality experience premiering at Sundance’s New Frontier Art festival on Jan. 20. The immersive film takes place at a “Neurocosmetology” lab ― think futuristic hair salon ― owned by a woman named Brooks. The setting alludes to the long history of salons as safe spaces for women of color and fertile ground for political and philosophical discussion.


As the viewer, after putting on your Oculus Rift helmet, you’re plunked into a chair in Brooks’ salon, ready to receive your Octavia electrodes ― aimed to increase your neuroplasticity. Your first view is of yourself in the mirror, as a black woman with long pigtail braids. This, in itself, is a powerful gesture, allowing people of all races and genders to physically see themselves as a woman of color, virtually stepping into the skin of another.


The products from Hyphen-Labs’ line are strewn about the virtual salon setting, confusing the space between real and imagined futures. While Brooks prepares you for your extensions, she chats with Naima, the salon matriarch, their conversation smoothly teetering between topics of ancient tradition and futuristic fantasy.
HYPHEN-LABS


Before Brooks inserts the Octavia, she warns there may be some intense visuals when the electrodes hit. Moments later, you are floating in a 3D hallucinatory dreamscape with mountains made of water and a giant eye hovering in the sky. It’s the kind of fully transportive experience that can only occur in VR, a technology that allows you to float through a dreamed-up world.


Although the viewer doesn’t actually receive Octavia electrode implants during the VR experience, the effect of the 10-minute art piece is intense. Even the simulation of receiving the extensions is palpable. The Hyphen-Labs team intends to examine just how palpable, with plans to eventually conduct anthropological and neuroscientific research on whether or not experiencing the VR piece changes how viewers engage with the world.


“We are afraid of what we don’t know,” Aguilar y Wedge explained to The Huffington Post. “By simulating engagement [with women of color], we are trying to lower fear and prejudice.” Eventually, the women hope to conduct mobile functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans on viewers while they encounter the artwork to determine if VR has a measurable effect on the brain.
HYPHEN-LABS


Hyphen-Labs also hopes to use the work to introduce communities to VR who might not otherwise have access to the emergent technology. The artists hope that by seeing familiar characters represented in the work, young women of color will be inspired to pursue science and tech themselves. “Where are all the black women in neuroscience?” Baccus-Clark asked. “As Marian Wright Edelman said, ‘It’s hard to be what you can’t see.’”


The necessity of black representation in film and art have made their way into the public consciousness, belatedly, in the past few years. In both arenas, it’s equally valuable to see people of color both on view and behind the scenes, as actor or image and artist, director, producer, etc. In the realm of VR, there are additional opportunities to identify and empathize with people of color.


“It’s about world building,” Aguilar y Wedge added. “This world is built for black women, but all are welcome.” The technology physically positions viewers in situations they may not otherwise encounter, not only engaging with people of color but feeling like one themselves. Many believe VR has more potential than any other medium to dispel racial bias.


However, the strong emotions VR is known for inducing are not necessarily positive. Many have written about experiencing the “empathy machine” gone haywire, with some narratives provoking anger or hatred in the viewer instead of compassion, yielding the opposite of the intended effect. VR artists like Nonny de la Peña are known for dropping the viewer into gut-wrenching and difficult scenarios, such as domestic assault. But Hyphen-Labs seems less concerned with heated narratives and more with the simple gesture of making visible what often is not, letting the viewer come to her own conclusions.


There are plenty of other prejudices the women of Hyphen-Labs are also out to eliminate. The belief, for example, that beauty products are of lesser import than high science. “They are both things that we value,” Baccus-Clark said. Or that advancements in the physical world are more legitimate than those built in the realm of art or fantasy.


“Neurospeculative Afrofeminism” premieres this weekend at Sundance, overlapping with the presidential inauguration. The artists believe their work offers a potent antidote to the small-minded world approach of the president-elect, although the issues and inequalities Hyphen-Labs addresses plagued American culture long before Donald Trump was in the picture.


For the artists, the inauguration offers a moment to reflect on many of the longstanding prejudices that America has tried to sweep out of sight. Now is the perfect moment to confront the wounds of our country, and finally, truly, begin to heal. In the face of ignorance, bigotry and ego, Hyphen-Labs serves up radical optimism, self-care, education, awareness and acceptance, through objects as mundane as sunscreen and as otherworldly as a hand-crafted alternate reality.


“We want to subvert victimization,” Aguilar y Wedge said. “The only limit is our imagination.”


“Neurospeculative Afrofeminism” will run Friday, Jan. 20, through Friday, Jan. 27, 2017, from 1 to 8 p.m. and Saturday, Jan.28, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Claim Jumper in Park City, as part of Sundance’s New Frontier Art.
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Priscilla Frank Arts Writer, The Huffington Post

Les Fleures Animées von Grandville

My rage ... (bell hooks)

My rage intensivies because I am not a victim. It bums in my psyche with an intensity that creates clarity.(...) It is the way to freedom for both colonized and colonizer. The mutuality of a subject-to-subject encounter between those individuals who have decolonized their minds makes it possible for black rage to be heard, to be used constructively.“ (bell hooks, 1995, S.18)

‘The album is a love letter to men’: meet feminist supergroup Les Amazones d’Afrique

A collective of female stars including Angélique Kidjo, Mariam Doumbia and Nneka is singing out against gender inequality in west Africa over a soundtrack of funk, blues and dub
Les Amazones d’Afrique: left to right, Mariam Koné, Nneka, Mouneissa Tandina, Rokia Koné, Mariam Doumbia, Pamela Badjogo, Kandia Kouyaté and Mamani Keïta. Photograph: Tiago Augusto

‘We are sick of seeing women suffer because of violence,” says Pamela Badjogo, Afro-jazz and blues singer. “In the family, in the war zones. We want it to stop.”
Badjogo is a member of the supergroup Les Amazones d’Afrique, an all-female collective of west African musicians campaigning for gender equality. It might seem a worthy premise on which to build a powerful creative expression but their album République Amazone blends ancient rhythms seamlessly over funk and blues with dabs of dub. Tracks are sang intermittently in English, French and Mandinka, and tackle love, oppression and female empowerment. These 12 musicians and singers, among them Grammy-winning Angélique Kidjo, Mariam Doumbia of the legendary duo Amadou and Mariam, and international popstar Nneka, believe music can trigger change and be a weapon to address the systematic disempowerment of women across Africa.

The project itself began with just three Malian singers: Oumou Sangaré, Mamani Keïta and Doumbia. These towering, glamorous presences, well-known on the world music scene, spent time with Valerie Malot (of French music agency 3D Family) in Bamako, the capital of Mali, in 2014. She became their de facto manager. “I saw how beautiful their lives were – with their perfume, fashion, music and divination, and I found myself connecting more and more with them,” says Malot. The conversations they had around gender led to some big realisations. “What we found out was that female repression in the continent and in the world, is something that touches every woman. It’s not a question of colour, or culture. It’s something generic. All women can relate to it.”
While Sangaré (who would decide not to continue working on the project) had experienced polygamy and forced marriage, Keïta had spent many years in Paris struggling as a female musician. After Malot proposed the idea, they decided to come together to help support and raise money for the Panzi Foundation, which has treated more than 85,000 girls and women with gynaecological injuries in the Democratic Republic of Congo, over half of whom were survivors of sexual violence.

Love’s Labour’s Cost: The Political Economy of Intimacy

By Emma Dowling / 13 February 2016
On Valentine's Day, Emma Dowling makes a powerful case for thinking about the structure of social relationships rather than simply 'the one'. Her excavation of the political economy of intimacy analyses how the ideology of work has penetrated the affective registers of our social lives, while at the same time, we are paying for capitalism's crisis as financialisation and austerity attack our structures of social reproduction. Drawing on feminist critiques of women's unwaged housework, Dowling assesses the uneven and gendered distribution of emotional labour today. Love's work, therefore, must be challenged and transformed: as our material precarity increases, rejecting precariousness in our love relations would be a start in building affective resistance and with that, other possible worlds of love and care.


- Hackney Flashers, Who's still holding the baby?, 1978

They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work.

They call it frigidity. We call it absenteeism.

Every miscarriage is a work accident.

So reads a feminist pamphlet calling for Wages for Housework written by Silvia Federici in 1975. “We are all housewives because no matter where we are they can always count on more work from us, more fear on our side to put forward our demands, and less pressure on them for money, since hopefully our minds are directed elsewhere, to that man in our present or our future who will ‘take care of us.’”

Taking care in order to be taken care of. That was the deal of heteronormative love. Underpinning the romantic ideal was the domestic contract between the two parties of the heterosexual couple. Each partner entered into the relationship on the basis of a gendered agreement, a reproductive deal: she would cook, clean, have sex, bear children and care for him, while he was to pay the bills and fulfil his role as care-taker – then he could expect to be taken care of. Since the sexual revolution and tide of social change in the 1960s, feminist and queer struggles challenged the inequality and desirability of this set-up – that women’s housework was seen as the ‘labour of love’ undeserving of remuneration, whereas men’s work outside the home, brought both social agency and power in the home thanks to his wage.

The neoliberal restructuring of the state and the economy alongside the rise of the service industry and the entry of large numbers of women into (often low-)paid work have macerated this reproductive deal. If in a sense the nuclear family arrangement has crashed, it hasn’t so much been undone as it has been fragmented into its constituent parts, with the roles outsourced to different paid and unpaid assistive workers. Migrant cleaners, nannies and au-pairs, sex workers and psychotherapists shatter the middle-class myth of the self-sufficient couple. And it is still women who are doing much of this kind of work. Women, Arlie Hochschild wrote in The Managed Heart in 1984, have been taught to have an instrumentalised relationship to their feelings. It is these abilities that are easily put to work – and nowhere more than in the political economy of intimacy.

Yonki Shonibare - The British Library

Clip: The Missing Picture, "The Deportation"

Rithy Panh

Loewentheil+Collection+of+African-American+Photographs

https://digital.library.cornell.edu/?f%5Bcollection_tesim%5D%5B%5D=Loewentheil+Collection+of+African-American+Photographs

Wer war Seidenfaden?

Als im Januar 1827 Gerichtsdiener des Justizamtes Obernkirchen in den verschneiten Wäldern am Bückeberg eine notdürftig verscharrte Leiche entdeckten, nimmt einer der spektakulärsten Fälle der deutschen Kriminal- und Justizgeschichte seinen Lauf. Mehr als 10 Jahre sollte es dauern, bis das Verbrechen gesühnt und die Urteile vollstreckt waren.
Dabei macht nicht die Tat - ein Mord unter Dieben - diesen Fall so außergewöhnlich, sondern die Biographie des Täters.
Johann Heinrich Seidenfaden wurde 1797 in Rolfshagen geboren, und wuchs in einer Zeit auf, deren verbreitete Massenarmut später als „Pauperismus“ in die Geschichtsbücher einging.
Wie sein Komplize Wilhelm Mühlhaus entstammte auch er der sozialen Unterschicht, beide waren uneheliche Söhne hessischer Husaren und machten früh Bekanntschaft mit Verbrechen und Gefängnis.
Aus Angst vor Verrat ermordeten Seidenfaden und Mühlhaus 1825 im Wald bei Obernkirchen ihren Komplizen Wilhelm Faul.

 
Steckbrief von Wilhelm Faul
(zu der Zeit war er im Bückeberg versteckt)Das Verbrechen wurde wenig später aufgedeckt, es folgte die Inhaftierung und 1831 das Todesurteil durch das Obergericht Rinteln.
Doch während Mühlhaus 1831 auf dem Rintelner Heinekamp vor den Toren der Stadt öffentlich enthauptet wurde, gelang Seidenfaden zuvor die Flucht aus dem Gefängnis und das Untertauchen in den Niederlanden.
Unter dem Namen „Wilhelm Wiggers“ trat er in die Dienste der niederländischen Armee ein, wo er sich im Niederländisch-Belgischen Sezessionskrieg, bewährte. Anschließend beorderte man ihn in die von Aufständen erschütterte südamerikanische Kolonie Surinam für den Wachdienst im Hafen von Paramaribo und die Jagd nach entlaufenen Sklaven.

Uniform eines westindischen Jägers um 1830

e-flux Architecture - Thomas Keenan - Or are we human beings?

Superhumanity
February 14, 2017


A club of patriotic French women assemble in a church during the French Revolution, 1973. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.


Perhaps you have been struck by the frequency and regularity with which people find it necessary to state what one might think was the most obvious thing in the world: that they are human beings, or that they would like to live like them.
Here's an example from the front lines of the so-called “refugee crisis” in Europe last March: "'May God take his revenge on them—everyone who did this to us—from whatever country they come from,' said Raife al-Baltajy, a Syrian from near Aleppo, as she waited for a bus with her family. 'May god take his vengeance out on them. Isn't it sinful? Are we animals? Or are we human beings?' She said she had been living in Syria for four years under the shelling, but traveled to Turkey, then to the Greek island of Lesbos, where she took a ferry to the mainland and on to Idomeni."1
Or this claim from another Syrian refugee who spoke out from his new home in the United States: "'I was born as a human and raised as a human. I have been in some situations that made me feel not like a human,' [Refaai Hamo, a civil engineer] said. 'I would like to grab any opportunity I can to prove I am a human being and if I don’t have that opportunity, I refuse to live anywhere I don’t feel like a human.'”2
How do we understand this repeated need of people in situations of displacement, conflict, and injustice, to ask others whether they, the speakers, are in fact human, which is to say, their need "to prove I am a human being"? What is going on when people say this? It seems obvious, but in fact it's one of the most complicated, enigmatic, unstable things that can possibly be said. We should not take its possibility for granted.
That said, people have been saying it, more or less, for a while. Versions of the claim have a long history—think back to Josiah Wedgewood's famous anti-slavery medallion of 1787, featuring a shackled African figure knelt in a plea and bearing the inscription "Am I not a man and a brother?," or to the even more economical signs borne by the Memphis, Tennessee sanitation workers on strike in the spring of 1968, "I am a Man." This rich provenance makes the utterance somehow even more perplexing: haven't we learned this yet? Why do people still need to say this? What accounts for the persistence of this claim?
To begin to understand and appreciate these words, "I am a human being," we need to back up and ask just what sort of speech act is being performed here. I will call it a claim, whether it's formulated as a question ("Am I not ..."), a desire ("we want to live like ..."), a simple declaration or an apparent tautology ("I am a ..."). In each case, the statement makes a claim, and a claim on others.
I would suggest that rights, especially what we call human rights, are better treated as things we claim rather than things we have. This may seem like a minor matter of words but I believe that it has the potential to challenge profoundly the ways we think about and act with the discourse of human rights. It does not weaken the force of these claims to admit that they are only, or just, that, claims; in fact, it might make them stronger by making them less essentialist, dogmatic, sacred, or as Michael Ignatieff once put it, idolatrous.3 I think this can help us appreciate a number of things, including: what it means to say that human rights are being “violated,” the fact that what counts as a right—and who counts as a rights-bearer—can and has varied so dramatically over time and place, the common experience that the would-be universality of rights is so hard to grasp, and the fact that rights language can serve to propel campaigns of domination and not just struggles against injustice.



Memphis sanitation workers, the majority of them African American, went out on strike on February 12, 1968, demanding recognition for their union, better wages, and safer working conditions after two trash handlers were killed by a malfunctioning garbage truck. As it dragged on through March, with the Memphis mayor refusing to negotiate, the strike gained national attention. As they marched, striking workers carried copies of a poster declaring “I AM A MAN,” a statement that recalled a question abolitionists posed more than 100 years earlier, “Am I not a man and a brother?”
A few years ago, introducing the mammoth photobook The Face of Human Rights, Walter Kalin economically summed up the contemporary status of his topic with this formulation: "Human rights are the product of an historical process which has not yet reached completion."4
Here the modesty of the concession to history is balanced, or even overwhelmed, by the confident faith in a progressive expansion signaled by the little phrase "as yet." The fact of incompletion is paradoxically the sign of more to come.
And yet we could detach this narrative of ongoing accomplishment from its teleology and see in it an important insight about human rights as a thought and practice: in spite, it seems, of their would-be eternality and universality, human rights are structurally incomplete, without fixed limits. This happens not despite this aspiration to universality, but because of it. The universe of their extent is not given in advance, and in fact we could say that the struggle to define its extents—which is in fact the struggle to determine who or what is and is not the subject or bearer of those rights—constitutes the story and the history of human rights. Because rights are a matter of claims, which is to say, disputations, and because those claims require evidence and demand assent, the subjects and the borders of rights are structurally in flux.
The contemporary world offers at least two contradictory answers to the question of how that "process" is coming along.

A Decorative Cosmology Bridging Heaven and Earth

In her new exhibition, Tamara Gonzales continues to mine our material culture to chart the world all around.


A view of Tamara Gonzeles’s Ometeotl exhibition (all images by the author for Hyperallergic)

At the heart of Tamara Gonzales‘s new body of work at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery is a room of tapestries woven by artisans in the Peruvian towns of Písac and Ayacucho. They are vibrant interpretations of the artist’s drawings and they add yet another layer to the decorative language she continues to mine from the material world around her.

Gonzales is known for incorporating visual culture that has traditionally been more associated with lived culture — lace, graffiti, embroidery, textiles — rather than the world of art galleries. A large functional maraca is propped up by the entrance, which signals the inclusive and non-hierarchal attitude towards influence she celebrates in her work.A large maraca sculpture near the entrance of the exhibition, “Maraca más grande con plumas” (2016)

Past the over-sized maraca, there is a corridor of small drawings dominated by a curvilinear window motif that offers her a compositional frame to puncture, cover, and react to. But even with this structure, the drawings have an experimental energy that pokes and pushes, often jostling forms that resemble easter eggs, stick figures, plants, or the scribblings of a rudimentary language.

Her true subject matter is the material world. She has an indiscriminate appetite for cross-cultural pollination and distills the dissonance of contemporary life into these objects that can seem as jarring as they are soothing.

The title of the exhibition, Ometeotl, refers to a nebulous concept of spirituality that some scholars of Mesoamerican culture dispute, but it is commonly believed to refer to the “creator of all creation” for the Anawak people and a compound of “dual” and “cosmic energy” in the native language of Nahuatl. That ambiguity of the term perfectly reflects the primordial soup that has spawned these works, at once mythic, while relishing their connection to earthly forms.

Looking at her paintings, you can feel unmoored from the boundaries of form as they swim in waves of moody azure, crimson, and the muddy waters of darker hues. The paintings vibrate and ripple in your mind’s eye as they play with proportion — always challenging the relationship of ground and subject — to settle visually like a shaken snow globe. Many of the large paintings, like “Two Moons” (2016), feel contradictory, contrasting the washes of violet paint against the frenzy of patterns that form the sky and ground for a setting Mesoamerican roundel.

The showstoppers, though, are the tapestries. Gonzales’s starry fields and human-like forms are translated into undulating visions of horror vacui. They are her best works yet, offering us a unique synthesis of the world around her but allowing it to develop into these intensely colored objects (she says the women doing the embroidery were given free reign to translate her drawings, based on patterns they normally embroider). The works, which are all untitled and made of alpaca and wool, convey a sense of cosmic cartography. If anything, the embroideries make the paintings seem more conventional, showing how her many bodies of work may overlap but travel in different directions.

The paintings are declarations of the known, the drawings are suggestions of what can be known, while the woven works are proposals for what we may never ever truly know.Tamara Gonzales, “Two Moons” (2016)Tamara Gonzales, “I Am the Hummingbird” (2016)The room of embroidered worksTamara Gonzales’s untitled drawing (2015) and the related untitled tapestry (2016)
Untitled tapestry (2016)

2nd Annual Black Feminism, Womanism and the Politics of Women of Colour in Europe

2nd Annual Black Feminism, Womanism and the Politics of Women of Colour in Europe
A One-Day symposium | Amsterdam, 7th October 2017




2nd Annual Black Feminism, Womanism, and the Politics of Women of Colour in Europe

A One-Day Symposium
Saturday, 7th October 2017,
Amsterdam, The Netherlands

In September 2016 in Edinburgh, we welcomed over 100 activists, practitioners, artists and scholars to critically debate contemporary Black feminist and womanist theories and practices in Europe. Our first event demonstrated the possibilities of building solidarity across race, class, gender, sexuality and legal status. However, the symposium also highlighted the inter-generational tensions between veteran and newer activists and scholars about how to build and sustain inclusive and democratic Black feminist spaces for education and action.

For our second symposium, we seek to expand and deepen our debates about the theory and practice of Black feminism and womanism in Europe but also spotlight the very real conflicts between different types of women who identify as Black feminists and womanists. Our aim is to examine how we might build community, collective strategies for survival and a politics for social justice in an unstable European context wracked by a variety of crises linked to austerity measures, racist and xenophobic public discourses about migration and the rise of far right political parties and groups.

We seek activist narratives, academic papers, practice-based reflections and art/music/film contributions related, but not limited, to:
Theorising European Black feminism and womanism
Gendering racial capitalism
Building Black feminist and womanist activist spaces
Black feminism and sex work
Women of colour and the European racial contract
Developing transnational, intersectional and intergenerational coalitions
Queering European Black feminism and womanism
Race, gender and affective relations
Gendering migration experiences
Women of colour and digital diasporas
Black feminism and Black Lives Matter in Europe
Black feminism and trans* women’s rights
Women of colour and anti-fascist resistance

Please send titles and abstracts of no more than 300 words, which include your name, affiliation and contact details to woceuropeconference@gmail.com by Monday 3rd April 2017.
Organising committee

Akwugo Emejulu, University of Warwick

Marly Pierre-Louis, Tracian Miekle, and Lene Hypolite, Amsterdam Black Women’s Meet-Up

Little Miss Kwakoe 2009

Womanism

Unification is a key cornerstone of Womanist ideology.

Womanism is a social theory based on the racial and gender-based oppression of black women, and other women of marginalized groups. There are varying interpretations of the term "womanist", and efforts to provide a concise and all encompassing definition have only been marginally successful. At its core, womanism hones in on the everyday issues and experiences of both black women and women of marginalized groups, but more importantly, womanism hopes to create an even-leveled environment for all people.[1]

Theory[edit]

Author and poet Alice Walker is credited with coining the term "womanist". From the original introduction of womanism as a social perspective, the term has evolved to envelop varied, and sometimes opposing definitions. Linda Hogan asserts that the term womanist has come to represent a feminist of color, specifically black women, since the Feminist Movement has been experienced by many as intrinsically racist.[2] While feminismcan be alienating to minorities, womanism allows black women to affirm and celebrate their color and culture in a way that feminism does not.[2] In the words of theorists such as Clenora Hudson-Weems and Alicia Boisnier, Black women struggle to identify with traditional feminism, because they do not identify with the issues that feminism typically advocates.[3] Alternatively, Delores Williams, a womanist theologian, associates womanism with the traditions and activism formed from the conditions, events, meanings and values within the African-American community. Williams further asserts that the task of the Womanist theologian is to embody activism by seeking out the voices of the unheard and the experiences of the neglected. She identifies the distinct difference between the experiences of the black woman and the white woman that makes it difficult to identify with feminism. One of the key components of feminism is to end a woman's subjugation to her male counterpart, yet there are other oppressive forces that black women face that takes precedence over the perceived subjugation of the black woman by the black man.[2] This represents an expectation and experience of the black woman as one filled with the quest for knowledge, competence, and authority that surpasses the individual, but encompasses the group.[4] This idea of community rather than individuality is further illustrated by the portrayal of a woman as the embodiment of her environment.[1] In this way womanism does not focus indiscriminately on the experiences of black woman, but desires the reconciliation of all people to their spirituality, their relationships with each other, and their relationship with nature. It characterizes women as willful and capable thereby contrasting the image of a women as subservient and inferior.[5] In doing so, womanism empowers women, and challenges them to break from the traditional definition of womanhood.

Histoire des Robes , 1990

Annette Messager (French, born 1943) Title:
Histoire des Robes , 1990 Medium: dress and photographs Size: 99 x 156 cm. (39 x 61.4 in.)

Willem de Rooij: Blue to Black (2013) and Black to Blue (2015)

In particular, two large-scale sublime textiles Blue to Black (2013) and Black to Blue (2015) trace the global legacy of the Dutch colonial project, looking at textile industries in Ghana and Indonesia where one of the two works was produced with the support of the IMA. More recent developments in de Rooij’s work with hand-woven fabrics can be seen in the series of seven stretched textiles shaped as tangrams (a Chinese dissection puzzle). In this body of work from 2015, hand-spun thread in two colours form the warp and weft to create rich monochromes. Also investigating the ambiguous relations between colour and "meaning" is the iconic work Orange, created by de Rijke/de Rooij in 2004 (his collaboration with Jeroen de Rijke, 1994–2006). This series of slides use a single colour to make reference to an expansive range of subjects. Bouquet XVI (2015), is a monumental dried floral arrangement, sourced locally, that reveals the artist’s multilayered and complex approach to materials and concepts, referencing climate, drought, and the still-life tradition so prominent in Dutch art history. In a surreal twist, Farafra (2013), extends the presence of the natural world through sound.


Since 2009, the artist has taken his inspiration from the structural polarity of woven fabric and thus initiated a reflection around contrast and nuance. These weavings aim to generate meaning through the material they are made of, not through external references. For this exhibition, Willem de Rooij presents four handwoven works and a large wax print on cotton.
Rather than a treated surface, like that of a painting, these woven works are created by use of different mixtures of synthetic polyester sewing thread. Conceived as one installation, the five works make use of the same two colors : black and blue.

The monochromatic appearance of the weavings on closer inspection reveals a gradual transition from one shade of colour to another. The colorimetric modulations facilitate constant shifts in the viewer’s perception of the works on show. Taken in their entirety, they embody sameness as well as difference, the individual and the collective.

The weavings presented at the Chantal Crousel Gallery are part of a larger series, for the creation of which Willem de Rooij restrained himself to a limited number of colors and sizes. The titles of the works, often anagrams derived from names of locations or persons connected to the work add to the myriad cross-references between the various works in this series.

Produced especially for this exhibition, the wax print Blue to Black reminds of former colonial trade-routes and the resulting migration patterns between Asia, Africa and Europe.
In the 19th century Dutch colonial trading companies industrialized the traditional Indonesian Batik fabric printing process. While buyers in Indonesia proved resistant to the mechanical produce, new markets opened in West Africa, where the printed fabrics remain popular also today. Blue to Black was produced by the Ghana Textile Printing Company (GTP) in Tema, Ghana. GTP is owned by a Dutch firm even today; in this line of industry, ancient colonial structures are still at work.

Over the last five years, the notion of "referentiality", or the development of strategies to bypass external references became important elements in de Rooij’s work. Throughout his career, the artist has analyzed the conventions of presentation and representation and assesses the tension between sociopolitical and autonomous image production.


About the artist

Willem de Rooij, born 1969 in Beverwijk, the Netherlands, now lives and works in Berlin, Germany. De Rooij studied art history at the University of Amsterdam and art at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. He is currently Professor of Fine Art at the Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main and Guest Advisor at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam. In 2014 he was nominated for the Vincent Award, Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, The Hague. Recent solo exhibitions include: Entitled (2016), MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany; The Impassioned No (2015), Le Consortium, Dijon, France; Character Is Fate (2015) Witte de With, Rotterdam, the Netherlands; Index: Riots, Protest, Mourning and Commemoration (2014), Arnolfini, Bristol, UK; Using Walls, Floors and Ceilings(2014), the Jewish Museum, New York, USA; Farafra (2013), Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen, Norway; Untitled (2012) at Kunstverein München, Munich; Crazy Repelled Firelight (2011), Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York, USA; and Intolerance (2010) at Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany.