ARCHIVO PAPERS

The Contact Zone

2023-02-06T16:58:27+00:00

Since its origin, photography has had a close relationship with the manner in which discoveries have been displayed and understood by the Western world. Even if the accessibility to photographs is currently understood as a global phenomenon, the careful study of digital archives and photographic narratives of the other reveals a biased and defective gaze. Based on Marie Luise Pratt’s proposals of the “Contact Zone”, this essay reflects upon the complexities in the representation of foreign lands, people, and objects as a way to understand the historical power relationships embedded in photographic images and archives.

An Infidel’s Interpretation of the Islamic State Mother and Child Case

2023-01-15T15:28:21+00:00

An Infidel’s Interpretation of the Islamic State Mother and Child Case reframes images of Islamic State wives and children as Madonna and child artworks to trouble ideologies that represent such women and children as enemies, as dangerous minds, as detritus, unworthy of statehood. The overlaying of news photographs of Islamic State mothers and children atop artworks referencing the Madonna and child also serves to decolonize traditional, art historical, visual analyses of artworks employing the Madonna and child motif. The additional redrawing of each overlay in the style of a court sketch satirically comments upon the violence of law as well as the violence of its denial.

Film as Body, Land and Story

2023-01-28T21:10:05+00:00

Dancing the Space Inbetween

Directed by Lacy Morin-Desjarlais.
Written by Lacy Morin-Desjarlais, Michele Sereda

CA, 2015, color, 7 min.

Dancing the Space Inbetween is a short dance film conceived by Lacy Morin-Desjarlais in collaboration with Michele Sereda, inspired by the Regina Indian Industrial School’s unmarked cemetery in Regina, Saskatchewan.

This review focuses on the short dance film, Dancing the Space Inbetween. It approaches Indigenous perspectives and storytelling to honor stories of Indigenous people and the land.

In search of the “hybrid reality” of the visual cultures

2023-03-05T19:54:49+00:00

There is no one unique indigenous visual culture. It is as complex and hybrid as the land of an indigenous community, both its present and historical version, as social relations of any community. This special issue is hybrid. It reproduces the established power relations with the format of presentation, the language of publication or their referential framework. But, also, we hope, it contributes to the ongoing process of decolonisation and deconstructs at least some of the colonial influences.

The contributions that make this special issue – written and visual reflections about different genres of visual representation – complement each other and intentionally or unintentionally transform the issue into the community of voices. They engage in the discussion with textual, visual, aesthetic and analytical forms of representation, bringing some questions to the surface and leaving others behind the stage. Together they remind the readers and selves that the process of decolonisation is not even close to be done.

Yãmĩy

2023-01-26T22:30:51+00:00

Among the Tikmũ’ũn, community life is organized around their relationship with a myriad of spirit-people from the Atlantic Forest, the Yãmĩyxop, and their respective sets of chants. Many of these chants are sung collectively, as the most fundamental way of relating to the Yãmĩyxop spirits, who are invited to visit the villages to sing, dance, and eat during the rituals.

In this series of photographs entitled “Yãmĩy”, Sueli Maxakali presents an afternoon of celebration in her village, during the passage of these spirits. During these occasions, women approach the yãmĩy spirits to play, dance, sing and feed them. This interaction is guided by a delicate etiquette of the look. Magnificent and masked, the Yãmĩyxop are also fierce and dangerous. One must never look them in the eye. In this photographic series, the artist captures this etiquette of the look of tikmũ’un women through images that play with the relationship between the visible and the invisible. The series challenges the viewer’s gaze as a mode of “quasi-seeing”, that allows to see just a little or not at all. Here, the author deliberately escapes fixed framings, the sharpness of the images and often confuses bodies and landscape, provoking the Western gaze in its eagerness to see and understand everything. As one of these yãmĩy, the xũnĩm spirit-bat sings: “My image in the eye/my image in the eye listening/nieces/look just listening.”

Sueli Maxakali holds a PhD in Literary Studies (Recognized Erudition) from UFMG. She is a photographer, filmmaker, writer, scholar, and leader of the Tikmũ’ũn (Maxakali), an indigenous people from the region between what are now the Brazilian states of Minas Gerais, Bahia, and Espírito Santo. Her works have been exhibited in Brazil and abroad, including ICA London, Luma Arles, Jeu de Paume, State of Fashion Biennale and Bienal de Arte de São Paulo. Sueli Maxakali currently lives and works in Aldeia-Escola-Floresta (Minas Gerais, Brazil), where she develops an educational art project focused on environmental conservation.

Matérialité

2023-03-24T14:52:53+00:00

Mohini Chandra is an internationally renowned artist and researcher based in England, UK. Her artistic work expands from the personal scale of her multi-layered cultural identity into inquieries on the global flow of people and cultures. She inscribes herself in the history of the Indian diaspora in Fiji, which caused decades of mass immigration from India to the Pacific region in the late 19th century through the colonial “Indentured labour system”. From this transcultural perspective, Mohini Chandra reflects on the mutual conditionality of cultural identities in our globalised world, while critically engaging with the content of representation itself. Her visual practice adresses the role of the photograpic within certain hegemonic narratives that shape our imagery of migrants and indigenous communities today. Apart from this, she seeks alternate ways of storytelling, using a wide range of media.

In the series "Matérialité" (2017) Mohini Chandra combines found and appropriated images from India and the Pacific, that she explored in the collections of the Musée du quai Branly in Paris. Within this institutional frame, her series also reflects on the museum‘s role as a site for preserving and disseminating normative visual culture that have proven to be very stable. Against this persistant mode of representation, which the archival image still provides, the artist raises the argument of the “unknowability” of colonial relationships and experiences.

Since graduating from the Royal College of Art, Mohini Chandra‘s work has been exhibited worldwide in the USA, United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa and Nepal. Besides her participation in biennials, such as the Third Oceanic Performance Biennial (Auckland), the Biennial Focus Festival of Photography (Mumbai), the Houston FotoFest Biennial, as well as in the Chennai Photo Biennale, her work is held in international collections including the Arts Council Collection UK and Autograph(London). She is the receiver of numerous prestigious grants and awards.

Ghosts, Holes and Hybrid Spaces

2023-01-12T21:26:07+00:00

Identifying colonialism as the “dispossessor of Sámi futures,” the research on which this paper draws investigates the role of Sámi creative expressions in decolonizing/ indigenizing Sápmi and imagining possible futures through a decolonial framework encompassing decolonizing methodologies and critical arts-based research. The artistic practices of Sámi artists Elina Waage Mikalsen and Joar Nango were discussed through in-depth conversations held with them and in light of decolonizing theories seeking to de-link artistic expressions from the “colonizing gaze of authenticity” fostered by Western modernity and coloniality.

Furthermore, the paper argues for considering decolonization and indigenization as complex and interlaced processes, part of a global-local spectrum. While Sámi creative expressions are political in a transformative and healing way, they can foster the creation of Sámi-owned spaces, where to discuss both local and cosmopolitical concerns while considering Sámi sovereignty as the right to pursue Sámi’s self-determined futures.

This dying goat is a school

2023-01-02T13:10:55+00:00

This text traces how my initial idea for researching the practice of Indigenous trophy hunting picture-making transformed into an opportunity for methodological self-reflection regarding the knowledge and representation of indigenous peoples. After an introduction, I will recount how I, as a white non- Indigenous artist and researcher from Belgium, ended up on the island of Taiwan and in Indigenous territories. In section two, I will discuss precedents of other white non-indigenous researchers and artists working in similar Indigenous contexts, and that could be understood through a relational model. Thirdly, I will expand on the methodological boundaries that Indigenous scholars themselves demand of non-indigenous involvement with Indigenous research, a grounded model. In the fourth section, I will elaborate on a proposal for grounded visitation introduced by Indigenous scholars for outsider engagement with Indigenous lifeworlds. And fifth, finally, I will revisit my experience of filming an Indigenous hunter’s killing of a mountain goat through a semi-autobiographical short story.

The Touchstone of Vision

2023-01-02T12:22:31+00:00

This article looks at the Dutch and Surinamese Maroon film Stones Have Laws (Dee Sitonu a Weti, 2018), as an example of unlearning colonial modes of perception, authorship, participation, and framing reality, through transcultural collaboration. Exploring the tension between the image as document and as medium, I look at the ways this project interacts with the history of ethnographic filmmaking in its observational, reflexive, and participatory forms, and the postcolonial notion of the returned gaze. Connecting Indigenous, decolonial and phenomenological theories of the reciprocity of vision and plurality of lifeworlds, I argue that this work demonstrates how the image can act as a reminder of the ways our senses and conceptions of reality are interrelated with that of more-than-human beings and environments. Translocal collaborations call on both filmmakers and viewers to co-create a vision that is shaped by multiplicity, consent, temporal commitment, and contextual grounding.

To Dance in the Dark

2023-02-06T13:36:39+00:00

This visual essay draws attention to the diversity in the meaning of “the image” beyond Occidental visual culture. Written alongside the interactive animations of the decolonial, feminist, Indian artist Kinnari Saraiya, this text opens up a space for the shared commonalities between the indigenous Carib and the Indian poetics of touch and proprioception. The importance of interrogating the historical, cultural and ontological injustices embedded within colonial reality, its mentality and gaze cannot be understated. In the sensory scale of races, a hierarchical world structure was created by the natural historian Lorenz Oken (1779 – 1851) (Howes, 2013). Here, the civilised European eye-man who focused on the world with imperial visuality was positioned at the top and at the bottom was the African skin-man who used touch as his primary sensory modality.

This essay focuses on an indigenous concept which is conceptualised here as skin-thinking. Skin-thinking thinks through the lesser known sense of proprioception or kinesthesia - the sense of self-movement, force, and body position. And skin, unlike the eyes which are closed during our sleep, is always thinking, always processing information from the many worlds we inhabit. We can rethink the concepts of close proximity and co-presence as we use our fingertips to move through worldbuilding artworks such as, prakṛtiḥ, nṛtya, laya (2022 onwards) and Seven Acts of Nature’s Devastating Dance (2023 onwards). Finger kinesthesia is a form of haptic perception that relies on the forces experienced during touch (Graham-Rowe, 2006). As the rhythm of our fingers dance us, (as informational beings) through these worlds, our mind creates virtual, illusory haptic shapes. Prioreception, our skin-thinking sense is what allows us to see in the dark.