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In Voices Blog

Exploring the uncanny: a zine 

[Editor's note: the fourth anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine was last week. To recall that event and to help prevent it from being forgotten amid the other recent invasions and acts of aggression, we're publishing this zine created by Russian dissidents and participants of the 2024 gd:c summer school. The first text is an introduction of the project by gd:c alumnus Nikolai Brandes, upon which follows an introduction to zines as a dissident medium by Dasha Sotnikova, the zine's creative progenitor, and finally the zine itself. Enjoy. Remember. Fight.]

Zines as cultural infrastructure. A workshop at the 2024 global dis:connect summer school

Nikolai Brandes
  Punk, feminism, skateboarding, environmentalism, graffiti, queer culture: anyone who wanted to stay informed about social controversies, events and news from the underground scenes in the 1980s or 1990s could hardly do without zines. In many parts of the world, zines — DIY magazines produced by independent collectives on photocopiers and mimeographs — were a central communications medium in dissident scenes. They enabled dialogue on issues that were rarely covered in the mainstream media, received no public funding or were actively excluded from culture and its infrastructures, such as television, museums and movie theatres. The circulation of zines connected people with similar interests across cities and national borders. Zines helped to overcome political, spatial and social isolation.[1] When Moscow-based Dasha Sotnikova proposed holding a zine workshop at our 2024 global dis:connect summer school, we organisers were instantly intrigued. Our intention was to approach cultural infrastructures broadly and ask that they react to geopolitical disentanglements and exclusions in global flows of capital and cultural trends. We were interested in transformations of existing cultural platforms and the emergence of new infrastructures. Zines immediately appealed to us as an exciting subject.[3] Dasha's point of departure is her own experience in Russia. One might immediately think of the history of samizdat literature; that is, small-scale, grassroots publications used in the Soviet Union to circulate banned and deviant texts, including translations from abroad. Yes, Dasha is indeed interested in these historical references.[4] Still, the current global revival of zines is more than just an aesthetic phenomenon that satisfies a demand for analogue, collective work with genuine, tactile results. Zines continue to break down barriers and give space to subversive, unwanted, surprising voices. In her introductory presentation, Dasha showed what zine-making means for Russia's cultural underground, for communication with imprisoned dissidents and for exchange with nonconformists throughout the country. Our homemade zine was therefore about more than just creating an appealing product, a collective work process or experimenting with free-form text. Rather, the workshop was itself an exercise in building independent infrastructures with the simplest of means. (The shopping list Dasha sent me before the workshop included paper, black pens, needle and thread.) We not only learned about the Russian present, but also prepared ourselves for the not-so-unthinkable changes in our own environment. The directives from Bavarian authorities and universities to use gendered language and avoid more recent, inclusive terms in official publications and correspondence indicate how fragile freedom of speech can be, even in Germany. Here we share excerpts from the zine we compiled on the last day of our summer school under Dasha's guidance. We would like to thank all participants who agreed to publish their contributions and contributed to the process. Special thanks go to Tamara Zhukova, Olya Chermashentseva and Alisa Yamshchikova, who contributed to this zine from Moscow. We would also like to alert readers to the fact that some contributions touch on violence and rape. Please use discretion as to what’s right for you.   [1] On zines as explicitly transnational media, see, for example, Babara Dynda, 'Queering Sexual and Gender Citizenship in (Anarcho-)Feminist Zines in Post-Socialist Poland', Journal of History 57, no. 3 (2022). [2] My fellow organisers included Christopher Balme, Hanni Geiger, Nic Leonhardt and Tom Menger. For more on this event, see https://www.globaldisconnect.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/CFP_gdc_summer_school_2024.pdf. [3] Some starting points for thinking about zines as infrastructure can be found in Maggie Matich, Elizabeth Parsons and Rachel Ashman, 'Zine Infrastructures as Forms of Organizing within Feminist Social Movements', Gender, Work & Organization 31, no. 3 (2022) https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12970. [4] For more on the continuity of alternative print media in Russian-speaking countries, see A.S. Metelkov, 'Alternative Book Publishing in Russia: from a Lubok to a Zine', Book. Reading. Media 2, no. 4 (2024) https://doi.org/10.20913/BRM-2-4-1.
Bibliography
Dynda, Babara. 'Queering Sexual and Gender Citizenship in (Anarcho-)Feminist Zines in Post-Socialist Poland'. Journal of History 57, no. 3 (2022): 385-419. Matich, Maggie, Elizabeth Parsons and Rachel Ashman. 'Zine Infrastructures as Forms of Organizing within Feminist Social Movements'. Gender, Work & Organization 31, no. 3 (2022): 1049-71. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12970. Metelkov, A.S. 'Alternative Book Publishing in Russia: from a Lubok to a Zine'. [In Russian]. Book. Reading. Media 2, no. 4 (2024): 255-66. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.20913/BRM-2-4-1.  

From alienation to solidarity: communes and zines as new forms underground of cultural infrastructure

Dasha Sotnikova
  THE RIGHT TO SPEAK The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine was (and remains) a mind-changing tragedy for many in the Russian opposition, including independent publishers and artists. As literature has always been a valuable cultural medium for Russophone culture, it could not help but respond to the invasion with the tools at its disposal. At the time, the literary agenda was fully dedicated to covering the tragedy, and no cultural or symbolic space remained in the underground artistic community for their artworks that tried to reflect on events sensitively. More importantly, after the initial affective artistic expressions and subsequent repression had transpired, the Russophone literary community had to reckon with their right to create their art in Russian — the official language of aggressor state. After continuous silence, we realized that, as artists, we can’t keep silent as long as we’re still alive, so we recalled the experience of dissident artists who managed to preserve underground culture even under past Soviet totalitarianism.   (IR)RELEVANT INSPIRATION In the history of uncensored Soviet-era poetry, some underground cultural societies have united creators from very different fields. An outstanding example is the Moscow Conceptualist artistic movement founded by Ilya Kabakov, Viktor Pivovarov and Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov. They experimented with postmodern combinations of pop-art, performance and visual poetry, problematising Soviet realism and the meaning of art itself. Beyond Conceptualist literature, samizdat was a unique cultural medium and alternative mode of expression for underground authors, such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn; Boris Pasternak; Mikhail Aizenberg; Elena Shvarts; Chuvashian poet Gennadii Aigi; the progenitors of barracks poetry, which revealed the horror of Soviet poverty, Yan Satunovsky, Igor Kholin, Genrikh Sapgir and dozens of others. Their texts would never be officially published in the Soviet Union, although their multicultural heritage significantly shaped modern Russophone art. With these impressive forbears in mind, we began to imagine ways of preserving underground culture. However, the current political situation differs much from that in the Soviet Union in two key respects. First is the escalation of Russian fascism, for which we too are responsible. Second, how cultural infrastructure works in Russia has changed greatly.

Anarchist poetry against imperialist narratives

In response to the first challenge, we sought to critically rethink the influence of so-called ‘classical’ Russian literature, its core figures and narratives. Government agencies have carefully curated this canon, gradually amplifying the imperialistic propaganda. The results of our critical reflection needed to be presented in new literary texts and literary critique. We address the second challenge of cultural infrastructure by creating new underground venues and forms of textual representation. Currently, as the right and possibility of preserving Russophone underground culture is seriously imperilled, poetry connected to anarchist currents is a cultural space where independent minds can still continue the tradition of dissident art, reflect on their personal responsibility for the ongoing violence of the Russian government and support its victims. And here, as in the gd:c summer school, I wish to share the ideas and findings of my friends — artists whose bravery I admire and who inspire me to struggle for peace and freedom.

Literary strategies to address xenophobia

One of the main trends of modern uncensored and unconventional Russophone poetry is a desire for intermediality and multilingualism. And it is more than a literary fad. The scariest consequence of the authoritarian regime suffered by ordinary residents is (self-)isolation, which (artificially) feeds xenophobia and exacerbates isolation. The only way to overcome it is to find the Other in oneself and to break the artificial boundary between friend and foe. That is why young poets and artists from Russia and Belarus, despite political persecution, work collectively and combine cinematic, poetic and artistic elements to overcome the isolation of a particular cultural field. In such conditions, the lack of cultural infrastructure is especially acute.

Where do we exist?

Safe spaces for mutually enriching dialogue among professional creators, investigators and people interested in modern culture; problematising governmental policy; and searching cooperatively for ways to express political opinions are vitally important functions of non-governmental cultural infrastructure, especially in authoritarian regimes. Although activism under the oppression of arbitrary state violence seems almost impossible, artistic practice remains one mode of struggle for personal identity and against those for whom any identity seems to be dangerous. After the war began, a few free and safe places remained for creators to maintain dialogue with poets and artists inside and outside Russia and to organise underground anti-war charity events and conferences. The venues were diverse: independent bookshops, theatres, cultural centres, libraries, galleries, pubs, university lecture halls. But now most of them are closed or under governmental control. However, the poetic flow has produced its own forms of free expression.

Artist communes

One format consists of performances followed by conceptual video artworks in the modern communes. They are produced by young people who continue to oppose the regime through art practices. Such performances mostly aim to raise money for political prisoners and refugees. In such structures, poetic and political values are often united, meaning solidarity, cooperation, horizontal connections and overcoming anthropocentrism. K is one such structure.[1] It is an independent cooperative that unites manufacturers, leftist thinkers and artists who refuse to collaborate with the government, and cooperative marketplaces. Their primary aim is to connect autonomous professionals to underground societies. All members take important decisions about the manufacturing process collectively and voluntarily choose their roles in it. Their principal aim is to attract donations to support non-commercial initiatives, such as venues for underground art festivals, activist projects, human rights organisations and crisis centres. Beyond this, they also try to preserve the independent underground initiatives that do still exist in modern Russia. In addition to their active manufacturing process, K’s residents contribute to the development of underground cultural processes, including writing and filmmaking. Apart from providing a free platform for cultural events, including poetry readings, book launches, performances and so on, they have set up a publishing house that prints modern leftist and anarchist zines as well as poetry books and cinema journals. Its founders claim that samizdat as a form of cultural infrastructure is valuable and necessary in authoritarian regimes; it is also the medium with the greatest artistic freedom and independence. It inspires artistic experiments and innovations with its bravery. For example, European black-metal and dungeon-synth fanzines as well as American libertarian science fiction and anarchist samizdat fascinate with their unique designs and unexpected content.

The cheaper, the freer

However, for samizdat production no publishing house is needed, as long as the authors can manage with the simplest materials and publication facilities. Samizdat zines have become one of the most accessible forms of cultural infrastructure, where diverse cultural, social and political narratives come together. Zines are becoming another venue for artistic dialogue and reflection. One example is Burning, a poetry zine by modern poet, videographer and performer M. The zine is based on a poetic cycle directly connected with current political events in Eastern Europe. The latter addresses the issue of breaking with one’s parents because of radically different political views. One of the author’s touchstone books about this problem is Powers of Horror by Julia Kristeva.[2] Its key metaphor, which significantly influenced the zine, refers to the milk foam that children in Soviet pioneer camps had to eat with hot milk, although most found it disgusting. Kristeva compares the act of vomiting this foam to emancipation from parental desire, which means obtaining subjectivity. The zine probes childhood as an uncomfortable and unsafe space, despite the kitsch view of childhood as a carefree paradise. All in all, the zine is about catastrophe, in the face of which all the opposition members are equal. That is why the zine aims to transcend the deification of the author, whose putatively privileged vantage point might let them communicate some special truth to the readers. This idea is expressed through the format of zine and its content. The zine consists of six poems and imitates the design of an official document. This design reflects the feeling of being swallowed by violent governmental machine, where a person’s life and death are determined by a signature on senseless paper, such as a draft card. The images, digitally composed and edited, contain simulated mugshots of the authors' friends. The layout was printed on a risograph, which is how the cheapest issues are produced. This technical decision helped to stylise the zine according to the author’s aim of self-elimination. Apart from the great number of artefacts, such as erased faces and torn paper, left by the risograph, the author used the simplest font available: Times New Roman. Finally, the design communicates the eerie feeling that children in Soviet (and modern) Russian kindergartens and schools experience. Samizdat zines are normally limited print runs of 100 copies and distributed through independent bookshops (that is, those that sell uncensored literature) and social networks. Common sensitive topics, the desire to express one's genuine political views and the cheapest publication process unite modern dissident poetry culture with Soviet samizdat culture. These projects and processes are important to me, although there are other valuable issues and performances beyond such manifestations of modern Russian dissident culture. Obviously, local resistance to the repressive policy of the fascist government may not make much difference on a global scale, but it does affect interpersonal relations. Modern underground culture lets us preserve the solidarity that the state’s authoritarian violence seeks to take from us. However, all these intentions are insufficient without transitional resonance, and I'm eager to maintain connections with artists from different cultural backgrounds who share similar aims. Xenophobia and alienation are not national problems, so we need sincerity and courage to face them all together. We believe that the world shifts each time we choose solidarity instead of fear and open dialog instead of violence. [1] The single-letter pseudonyms in this piece are to protect the organisations and individuals involved from persecution. [2] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
Bibliography
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.  

Exploring the uncanny

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3 March 2026
In Uncategorized, Voices Blog

gd:c voices part II: virtuous epistemic circles

[Editor's note: this post continues the interview with our postdocs that we began last month.]  

How does your research shape the focus, and how is it shaped by the focus?

SQ: Temporality is not just an aspect of my research; it is the central object of my inquiry. In my current postdoctoral project I use trees to examine how modern societies have understood, measured and imagined time and history. Trees preserve material traces of past climates and human interventions, and they often outlive the people who study, manage and exploit them. Because they embody multiple temporal scales – biological, environmental and historical – trees reveal much about modern ideas of temporality as a constitutive feature of modernity itself.

Tree rings reflect growth and age (Photo: Susanne Quitmann)

My research focuses on the emergence of dendrochronology — the science of analysing tree-rings — in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the United States, Germany and Sweden. Rather than writing a disciplinary history of dendrochronology as a scientific field, however, I examine how humans’ interactions with trees shaped thinking about natural, historical and social time. I am especially interested in how scientific practices, environmental knowledge and material encounters with trees cast new temporal frameworks and scales.

Wood samples at the Arizona Laboratory of Tree-Tring Research (LTRR), University of Arizona—the birthplace of dendrochronology (Photograph used with permission of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, University of Arizona)

Engaging with temporalities as a research focus here at gd:c has provided a conceptual framework for approaching this history and linking it to larger questions of globalisation. Time was not a single, shared, homogenous framework; it was produced unevenly through processes of movement, exchange, circulation and rupture. Drawing on both my work on dendrochronology and my earlier research on British child migrants, and in dialogue with my colleagues at gd:c, I am developing the concept of temporal dis:connectivity as a shared analytical framework for the research focus. I hope that this concept will give researchers a shared way of thinking about temporalities along the lines of global dis:connectivity and a lasting, common language to talk about it. At the same time, our research focusses aren’t hermetically sealed. For example, I am interested in laboratories in the history of dendrochronology as sites where temporal knowledge was produced, stabilised and contested. I also welcome the opportunity to further develop the concept of temporal dis:connectivity in relation to cultural infrastructures, where time becomes a resource and where different temporal regimes intersect. AG: As an art and fashion historian, my work reveals how cultural production was structured and sustained through infrastructural frameworks and design strategies. The cultural infrastructure of the fashion system encompasses ateliers and factories for production; magazines, exhibitions, fairs and fashion shows for dissemination; and stores, markets and social media for consumption. In my current research, cultural infrastructure goes beyond spaces and events to include networks of designers and manufacturers. Particularly from the early 20th century, they were organised through various national and international associations, shaped by alliances, dependencies, connections and disconnections.  As Yuniya Kawamura has argued in Fashion-ology, designers are key figures in the production of fashion; they personify fashion, and their designs objectify fashion. I would add that the centralisation of fashion production and its associated politics become evident through the designers’ strategies, which include their own infrastructure: the concept, making and presentation of a collection at a specific venue. In addition to these artistic practices, design strategies also involve entrepreneurial ventures to establish their work globally through cultural infrastructure.

US Vogue, March 15, 1953, Photo: © Vogue Archive, Condé Nast (March 15 1953 | Vogue)

Since the early 2000s, designer councils and fashion shows outside the traditional fashion capitals (Paris, New York, London, Milan) have sought to decentralise the global fashion system and disrupt its hierarchical and Eurocentric structures. Fashion weeks in cities like Jakarta and Dakar provide alternative platforms for local designers and textile traditions.  I am examining the roots of these national fashion policies, which aimed to strengthen regional economies, enhance prestige for local and indigenous craftsmanship, and export cultural heritage worldwide. Which artistic, commercial and industrial infrastructures helped to promote national design in the 20th century? Which transnational parallels run through the strategies and motivations of different fashion institutes? How and why were these institutions and associations supported by the government? https://youtu.be/TC9gGBwISUw In the postwar period, I am especially interested in fashion (re)presentations at international events such as the Olympic Games and world's fairs. They played an important role in framing how cultures, including dress practices, are aestheticised and made legible to global audiences. Designers mobilized dresses as symbols of (national) identity to inspire their designs, without considering the risk of cultural appropriation when elements are extracted, commodified and detached from their original cultural context. I am focusing on these strategies of global visibility and export alongside the institutional promotion of national fashion through institutes, associations and individual designers.

A German fashion magazine promoting what they called 'Mexican' fashion, inspired by the 1968 Summer Olympics held in Mexico City (Photo: Aliena Guggenberger)

CF: My research has long focused on experimental spaces at the fault line between the planetary and the global. Working at the intersection of architectural and environmental history, I study how built environments and infrastructures — laboratories, observatories and simulation facilities — mediate planetary processes such as seismic wave propagation, atmospheric circulation, oceanic currents, soil formation and the limits of life in extreme environments, rendering them globally legible. Whether examining geophysical observatories around 1900 (see my Planetary Disequilibrium), or, more recently, planetary analogues, I ask how these processes are translated into architectural form, experimental protocol, and infrastructures of knowledge, and what kinds of dis:connections emerge in that translation.

ESA-DLR LUNA - Moon analogue, Cologne, Germany. (above) Rehearsal - simulated moonwalk at the LUNA facilities as preparation for future lunar surface operations. Photo: © ESA/DLR - M. Diegeler. / (below) Virtual reality (VR) model of LUNA’s main hall containing the regolith test bed area with dust chamber visible. Image: © ESA/DLR-F. Saling.

  This perspective also shapes my approach to the laboratories of dis:connectivity research focus here at gd:c. Rather than treating laboratories as bounded, local sites, I see them as mediating environments where abstract models of our planet assemble global relations. Laboratories extract signals, samples and processes from particular environments and render them comparable across distance and scale. In doing so, they connect the world through shared standards, models and datasets, while simultaneously disconnecting those abstractions from the social, ecological and political conditions that sustain them.

Concordia Station - planetary analogue, Dome C plateau in Antarctica. Operated jointly by the French Polar Institute IPEV and the Italian Antarctic Programme PNRA. Photo: © ESA/IPEV/PNRA-J. Lacrampe/N. Purvis.

These questions are at the centre of my current research project on planetary analogues. The project examines analogue environments — Antarctic research stations, lunar and Martian simulation facilities, underwater habitats and extreme desert sites — where Earth itself is reconfigured to stand in for other planets or future worlds. I approach these sites as laboratories of dis:connectivity: spaces that make planetary conditions actionable within global scientific, political, and technological regimes by selectively isolating variables, staging rehearsals and projecting futures, while unevenly displacing risk, labour and environmental exposure. 
NASA JETT test series, San Francisco Volcanic Field near Flagstaff, Arizona, May 2024. The Joint Extravehicular Activity and Human Surface Mobility Program Test Team develops, integrates, and executes human-in-the-loop tests and analog missions. Drone footage of NASA astronauts Kate Rubins and Andre Doublas. Video: jsc2025m000255 © NASA/JSC.
Thinking through the gd:c research focus has sharpened my view of these analogue sites. Approaching laboratories through dis:connectivity unearths the tension between the planetary and the global. The planetary refers to processes that exceed human scale and control, while the global names the infrastructures and institutions through which those processes are stabilised, managed and governed. Planetary analogues, understood as laboratories, sit precisely in between. They translate planetary uncertainty into global regimes of knowledge and governance, often producing new asymmetries while promising preparedness and resilience.

Digital plants laboratory showcasing global dis:connections. Sonia Sobrino Ralston and Simon Lesina-Debiasi, Run Dry: Digital Infrastructure and Landscape Loss in Mesa, Arizona, 2025, Information Plus Conference at the MIT Media Lab, Cambridge. (Images courtesy of the artists.)

  In this reciprocal way, my research shapes the research focus as a shared space of inquiry, always in dialogue with our fellows’ projects, each coming from a different disciplinary and methodological perspective. The research focus likewise continues to sharpen my understanding of laboratories as sites where the planetary and the global rarely align seamlessly, but instead meet through friction, negotiation and experimentation. This is what makes laboratories such fertile ground for research at gd:c. Continue Reading
17 February 2026
In Voices Blog, Voices Startseite

A pillow for collective dormancy

işıl eğrikavuk
I arrived at global dis:connect as an artist fellow in the fall of 2025. Being an artist and academic, I often find myself operating between these two worlds: one is more open to process, play and experimentation, and the other is usually more precise and well-planned. While I had already been asked — and had sent off — by mid-summer the title of the presentation I was to give at gd:c in November, I was not sure what exactly I would want to present to my colleagues in Munich. Should I have continued my ongoing garden project, which I had been running with my students at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) for the last four years, or should I have used the limited time available to enter a new domain and work on something else? First, a little background on my practice: I am an artist with a background in performance art and community art practices. My work often involves collaborations with various groups of people — artists and non-artists — as well as my students. I have also been teaching art for almost twenty years, the last eight of which have been in Berlin. As a member of UdK’s teaching faculty, I started a garden project in 2021 together with my students, called the other garden. the other garden resulted from several personal and collective experiences. First, I am the only non-European instructor in my faculty and sometimes find myself on the wrong side of the language barrier. Second, there is a lack of diversity and inclusivity programs for newcomers like me. Finally, our building lacks a café or social space for the students and staff. After battling some bureaucracy, we set up the garden, where my students and I are growing non-native wild plants (weeds), which are othered in the anthropocentric plant hierarchy. It soon became both a garden behind our faculty building located on Mierendorffstraße and a classroom and community space for us. There, we began to hold our classes, organise artist talks, cook, eat, experiment with art and talk about otherness — both within and among humans as well as non-human beings. In only a few years, this little area has become a much larger community than I imagined, with now over a hundred students who have experienced being part of it.

Fig. 1-2: the other garden (image: Işıl Eğrikavuk)

    Yet,when I arrived in Munich, I did not know what a green city I would find, nor was I exactly aware of the location of gd:c. Walking in the mornings from the English Garden to my office, looking outside from my desk during the day onto the Maximilian Park, I felt surrounded by a much larger green environment and was able to take more time to notice its changes day by day. One of my initial ideas was to see if I could start another garden, perhaps in the backyard of the gd:c building. But soon after arriving in Munich, I realised that there would neither be enough time nor the right moment during my six-month stay in the city. I also noticed that it was already October, and the turn of the season was obvious in the city’s flora. The weather was starting to get chilly; trees were shedding their leaves, and the colors were turning crimson, then yellow and brown. There was a sense of slowing down and stillness, almost like the preparation we humans do before going to bed: getting rid of heavy clothes, cleaning up and getting ready to quiet down. It was clearly not the right time to start a garden. I began to spend longer moments just observing the park’s edge from my desk, tracing the slow colour changes of the trees. Jenny Odell calls this kind of attentiveness ‘doing nothing’: not idleness, but radical presence. ‘To do nothing is to hold yourself still’, she writes, ‘so that you can perceive what is actually there’.[1] In those moments, I was not inactive. I was practicing a different form of engagement, like the trees, one that did not seek to produce or prove, but simply to be.

Fig. 3: a gd:c autumn (Işıl Eğrikavuk, November 2024)

Wintering

Around the same time, I started reading Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May.[2] It was inspiring to read both May’s personal story of wintering in life as a metaphor for difficult times, as well as her research on strategies and rituals of coping with cold weather in other geographies and of her own experiments with it, especially with the cold sea in winter. May discovered swimming, or cold dipping, as a way of making peace with the harshness of the winter. This ongoing experiment generated its own community of like-minded friends and new acquaintances who celebrated the winter instead of recoiling from it. We were not necessarily in the winter months yet, but we were moving toward them. The trees were clearly preparing for their own wintering cycle, recognising their need for rest and retreat. It was the human-made homes, offices and buildings that separated us from this both by protecting us from the coming cold and by disconnecting us from what was happening around us. The daily rhythm of looking at computer screens, preparing another paper or talk and the self-induced pressure to write was constant. Academia does not have time for wintering. We were used to — and even willing — to continue producing without making time for rest. But what if resting, I thought, just like dormancy in the plant world, is not absence but a different kind of presence: a quiet form of survival, preparation and transformation? As Robin Wall Kimmerer suggests in Braiding Sweetgrass, plants model a wisdom of rest and regeneration, teaching us to honour cycles and recognise the value of dormancy.[3] In the garden, dormancy is never a failure or inactivity. It is a pause that makes growth possible, it is a surrender to the season that honours time, energy and environmental rhythm. Trees do not resist winter; they embrace it, slowing their metabolism, conserving energy, drawing inward. Their apparent stillness holds unseen labor, the storing of sugars, the thickening of bark, the quiet preparation for what’s to come. In contrast, the institutional calendar asks us to bypass these organic pauses, rather to produce in all seasons as if the soil never needed to remain uncultivated. But perhaps, like the trees, we humans too need seasons of dormancy. Not to disappear, but to process, to replenish, to wait with intention. In that sense, wintering is not just metaphor,  it’s an ecological imperative.

A common dormancy experience

With those thoughts in mind, I started to imagine a collective experience of dormancy — or rather, an invitation to it. A cultural motif appeared in my thoughts, originating from my country, Turkey, where newlyweds are presented with a two-person pillow upon marriage. There is also a saying that reflects the object: Bir yastıkta kocayın, which means ‘May you age on the same pillow together’. I began sketching what a pillow for my academic community might be like. A tall pillow of several meters, where we could rest our heads together for a moment and doze off in the building where we work. How could we connect to one another while disconnecting from our work? I started toying with the idea. First, I took a German-size pillow from the house where I was staying. German pillows are notorious among foreigners for their size — usually 80x80 cm. I went outside into our garden and began to fill it with fallen leaves from the horse chestnut trees. I wanted to put dried leaves in this pillow to create some form of commonality between our tree-kin and our dormancy experiences. To sleep while being accompanied by living organisms — to be closer to the outside, beyond our walls. After making my first pillow and filling it with leaves, I started photographing myself in the office building, sleeping in different places: at my desk, on the stairs, in the kitchen, under the Einstein painting in our foyer…

Fig. 4-7: an experiment in photography and research (Işıl Eğrikavuk, November 2024)

By mid-November, as my talk was approaching, I decided to really make a giant pillow, which I could fill together with my colleagues as a performance. After some searching, I found a Turkish tailor who agreed to sew my two-meter-long pillow from old bed linens. Together we made the pillow. Below, you can see images from our collective pillow-filling and leaf-picking performance, which we executed at the end of my talk and to which I invited my colleagues and guests. Before we did that, I showed them a video of myself sleeping on my first pillow in the gd:c backyard, for which I also wrote this text:

Dear you,

Good morning. Good night. Good morning. Wake up. Are you awake? How did you sleep last night? Was it a deep sleep, or did you wake up in the middle of the night? Do you dream? What was your last dream? The leaves are falling down. I can see them falling one by one from the window of my office. Sometimes I hear machines collecting the leaves, making the streets all clean and tidy for us humans. When I went foraging a few weeks ago, our guide told us that dropping their leaves is like emptying their guts for the trees. They become lighter and calmer, ready to rest. We have a maple tree here in the garden, and a couple of beech trees. My plant-identifying app tells me we have a Turkish hazelnut, but I don’t believe its 58% accuracy. It stands on its own, and I mostly worry about it being alone. I keep waking up in the middle of the night these days. Between 4–6 a.m. is a half-dormant time for my body. I try to meditate, but can’t fall back asleep. On those days, my eyes close and my head becomes heavy — sometimes hard to carry. What’s a garden when it is dormant? When life simply shifts underground and we, the outsiders, can’t see much happening? What happens when the work of being a plant becomes invisible — its activity slowing down, yet continuing in other forms? What happens when a tree is quietly resting? Is resting a detour, when one is paused, storing for the next day, month, or coming season? Dear you, do you ever feel dormant? When was your last dormancy? Dear you, do you want a rest? What if we rested together — communally, like trees? Dear you, can we connect with one another through being dormant, with our different forms, bodies, and lengths of rest?

Fig. 8-11: a Collective Dormancy Experience, performance by Işıl Eğrikavuk and participants, gd:c, (Işıl Eğrikavuk, November 2024)

Dormancy as resistance

To be dormant is not to disappear. It is to resist the demand to constantly produce, to perform alertness, to stay visible. In a world and an academy that celebrates speed, output and accumulation, choosing to slow down is a quiet act of rebellion. Dormancy is resistance to timelines that don’t fit our bodies, to institutional rhythms that forget we are made of cycles, not straight lines. Like the plants in our garden, like the trees outside the gd:c offices, we too need time to retreat, to shed, to lie fallow. The giant pillow we filled together was not only a resting place; it was a proposition, a shared pause, an embodied refusal. A collective reminder that rest, disconnectivity and absence is presence. It is care. It is preparation. It is political. [1] Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2019), 11. [2] Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times (New York: Riverhead Books, 2020). [3] Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013).
bibliography
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013. May, Katherine. Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. New York: Riverhead Books, 2020. Odell, Jenny. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Brooklyn: Melville House, 2019.
how to cite:
Eğrikavuk, Işıl, 'A pillow for collective dormancy', Ben Kamis ed. global dis:connect blog. Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, 3 February 2026, https://www.globaldisconnect.org/02/03/a-pillow-for-collective-dormancy/.
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3 February 2026
In Uncategorized, Voices Blog, Voices Startseite

gd:c voices: 3 postdocs – 3 research focusses – 2 questions

Dis:connectivity is at the heart of our work at gd:c. Instead of seeing globalisation as a linear process of increasing integration or fragmentation, dis:connectivity assumes connection and disconnection occur simultaneously through absences, detours and interruptions. Dis:connectivity is not an anomaly of globalisation; it’s what gives globalisation form. After having looked at absences, detours and interruptions across historical periods, regions and disciplines, we’re now turning our attention to cultural infrastructures, temporalities and laboratories of dis:connectivity. These focusses help us to coordinate our research and to compare our results. They also let all our individual projects speak to one another with a common vocabulary. In this ReFocus mini-series, our three postdocs introduce the three research focusses they coordinate. Aliena Guggenberger, Susanne Quitmann and Clemens Finkelstein each reflect on how their particular focus enriches globalisation research and outline how their own projects and collaborations at gd:c are shaped through cultural infrastructures, temporalities and laboratories of dis:connectivity.

Aliena, Susanne and Clemens (from left to right)

What does your research focus explore?

AG: Infrastructure is commonly understood as a set of economic facilities, such as transportation and communication networks. A cultural perspective emphasises how infrastructure shapes social relations. For example, while airports facilitate physical exchange and connections around the globe, cultural infrastructure enables social interaction through various activities and spaces, including art. Henri Lefebvre, in The Production of Space, conceptualises representational spaces (unlike planned or conceived space) as users live in them, experience them and endow them with meaning through images, narratives and embodied practices. 

Marina Abramovíc: The Artist is Present, MoMA New York 2010 (Image: Andrew Russeth via Wikimedia)

For me, that means cultural infrastructure plays an active role in constituting our shared knowledge. Places like theatres, museums, libraries, archives and cultural heritage sites support the creation and preservation of artifacts and performances. In their digital expansion, these institutions operate as globally accessible platforms, revealing intersections between various collections, like Google Arts and Culture does. Yet such innovation can also concentrate power and restrict/limit access as well, since each institution curates its own content and presents its own narrative. I like exploring how the immediate geographic locations of cultural infrastructures contextualise their history and how they encourage participation and critical thinking beyond their locations.

National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh (Image: Aliena Guggenberger)

SQ: Research on globalisation and global dis:connectivity has mostly focused on spaces and spatial relationships, like laboratories and cultural infrastructures. But time is just as important. Disruptions, absences and detours are as much about space as they are about time. They involve pauses, delays and haste. Time is a central variable in both the natural sciences and the humanities. In the sciences, time is mostly an objective, measurable value. In the humanities, by contrast, time is something people experience and interpret.

Watching time pass (Image: Susanne Quitmann)

Societies, groups and individuals can have different temporalities. Everyone experiences and lives in time, but research tends to overlook it. This began to change with the temporal turn in the humanities and the social sciences in the early 21st century, when researchers started to examine how time operates in areas ranging from the arts to social and environmental history. While some of this work touches on the issue of globalisation, and some studies of globalisation address temporality, the connection between processes of globalisation and temporality is still not fully understood.

Map of current de facto time zones as of March 2025 (UnaitxuGV, Heitordp and others via Wikimedia)

CF: I understand laboratories in a broad sense. For me, they include not only scientific research sites but also observatories, field stations, archives, exhibition spaces, simulation environments as well as artistic and design studios. Across these diverse settings, laboratories operate in similar ways: they simplify complexity, translate environments into models and data, and they stage the global as something that can be compared, tested and anticipated.

Laboratory settings across time and practice: (top) Art Lab in the Park by Street Lab, Queens Museum, NYC (2020) - a series of socially-distanced open-air art studio sessions, photo: © Street Lab (CC BY-NC 4.0); (left) An alchemist in his laboratory with his family: to the right they are shown calling at the poorhouse, destitute after the husband's failed experiments. Engraving after Pieter Brueghel the Elder, c.1558. Wellcome Collection 35278i (Public Domain); (right) Quantum Lab - Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) (2020). Two-color pulse sequences are generated for spin lifetime and spin coherence measurements in a dilution refrigerator. Photo: © ORNL (CC BY 2.0).

This is why I see laboratories as a connective hinge between the other research focusses at gd:c. As cultural infrastructures, they organise access, visibility and authority in knowledge production; as temporal devices, they structure anticipation, delay, repetition and projection. Laboratories are often imagined as controlled spaces that are removed from the world they study. Yet from the perspective of globalisation research, I approach them less as enclosed environments than as sites where global relations are assembled, interrupted and reconfigured. This helps me explore them as spaces of dis:connectivity in which elements of the world are temporarily extracted from their contexts, transformed into objects of knowledge and reconnected in new, often asymmetrical ways.

How does your research focus enrich globalisation research and how is the focus related to dis:connectivity?

CF: Seen through the lens of dis:connectivity, I approach laboratories as anything but neutral sites. The experiments they house select and abstract some connections while obscuring others. Knowledge produced in laboratories often circulates globally, while the material, social and ecological consequences of experimentation remain unevenly distributed. This asymmetry is no accident: historically, laboratories have been closely linked to imperial, extractive and modernising projects, while also serving as spaces of critique and alternative world-making.

Planetary laboratories and their dis:connected worlds of science, technology and extraction: (left) the Columbus Laboratory module aboard the International Space Station, where experiments abstract planetary processes under microgravity, photo: © NASA; (right) the Sunrise Dam Gold Mine in Western Australia, an extractive landscape whose materials — gold among them, integral to aerospace electronics—circulate into orbital infrastructures, even as the social and ecological costs of extraction remain unevenly grounded, photo: © Calistemon (CC BY-NC 4.0).

What interests me in particular is how laboratories today increasingly operate as anticipatory sites. In the context of climate change, technological acceleration and planetary transformation, they are where futures are modelled, risks are simulated, and thresholds are crossed. Studying laboratories as sites of dis:connectivity allows me to situate future-oriented debates in historical analyses of globalisation, tracing how experimental spaces and built environments have always shaped the governance of human and more-than-human futures under conditions of polycrisis and existential risk.

Anticipatory laboratories staging speculative futures of dis:connected globalisation beyond Earth. Cylindrical Colonies for a population of over a million (1976). Image: © NASA Ames Research Center / Rick Guidice - AC75-1086.

SQ: Our research at gd:c has only just begun to explore the relationship between temporality and global dis:connectivity. However, rereading existing scholarship through the lens of temporality, we see that the connection was there all along. Adding the two concepts of temporal dis:connectivity and dis:connected temporalities can only enrich our investigations. Temporality is central to how we experience globalisation and deglobalisation as well as to public debates about these phenomena, from fast-moving financial markets and disrupted supply chains to migrants waiting in transit and the idea of uneven historical change in different parts of the world.

Renaissance table clock (Image: Susanne Quitmann)

I am particularly interested in the latter phenomenon: the perception of diverging civilisational temporalities and varying cultural and political references between the present, the past and the future. I would argue that  focussing on temporalities in  the study of globalisation and dis:connectivity helps us better understand how global dis:connections are made, strained and experienced.

Arriving ship on a pocket watch (Image: Susanne Quitmann)

AG: Considering cultural infrastructure as a material framework helps make the highly theorised and complex research on globalisation more tangible to me. Cultural activities and spaces are visible platforms for discussing global narratives, whether they are brought to life on stage, presented loudly in public conversations or, more subtly, documented in books or materialised through exhibits. All these experiences foster critical thinking.  During the COVID-19 pandemic I first truly recognised the importance of cultural infrastructure not only as space for artistic expression, a repository of collective memory, but also as a connector. Debates about whether cultural infrastructure counts as an essential service shook its foundations and challenged its resilience. Ongoing cuts to the budgets of cultural institutions reinforce the injustice in disparate access and participation, forfeiting potential connection and replacing it with greater isolation.

Design exhibition (Salone des Mobile), Milan (Image: Aliena Guggenberger)

While these micro-fractures may be hard to see, the vulnerability of cultural infrastructure is unmistakable in its symbolic and public positioning. It is exposed to digital threats such as cyberattacks as well as to analogue forms of violence, including the deliberate targeting and destruction of cultural heritage sites in times of war.

Ruins of a theatre in Mariupol (Image: Lirhan2016 via Wikimedia)

In the current political climate, I think it is more essential than ever to promote and practice intercultural dialogue. It is therefore inspiring to see how the diverse approaches at gd:c – scholarly research as well as artists’ perspectives – uncover striking parallels in the study of global and local cultural infrastructure. This shared knowledge encourages a can-do attitude and collaboration, even beyond our time here. [Editor's note: the interview continues here.] Continue Reading
20 January 2026
In Voices Blog, Voices Startseite

Between Bogotá and Munich: Godula Buchholz and South American art in Germany

claudia cendales paredes

Fig. 1: Godula Buchholz in Bogotá, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Zentralarchiv, IV-NL Buchholz 24.

The German art historian and gallerist Godula Buchholz (*1935) lived and worked in Bogotá, Colombia from 1951 until 1963, before returning to Germany where she has resided ever since. Her work as an art historian and gallery owner between two regions (Colombia/South America and Germany/Europe) features connectivities and dis:connectivities. As a young German immigrant in Colombia, initially dis:connected from her new country, she was able to connect with artists, institutions and intellectual networks in South America and Europe, thus promoting cultural exchange between them. After returning to Germany in 1963 and founding her pioneering gallery in 1965, she was able to benefit from these experiences and connections. However, having to start over, given that she hadn’t been living there for long, and deciding to dedicate herself to promoting South American art, which was little known in the West German art scene, she found herself dis:connected again. Still, she was able to manage the tensions inherent in dis:connectivity and establish her work, playing a key role in the presentation and consolidation of South American art and artists in Germany. This article focuses on her work in Colombia and later in Germany, particularly from 1965, when she founded the Galerie Buchholz in Munich, until 1977.[1] It sheds light on her role in promoting cultural exchange between South America and Germany and as a pioneering art historian and female gallery owner in Munich.

Godula Buchholz’s work at the Librería Buchholz in Bogotá

In 1951, Godula Buchholz emigrated with her family to Bogotá, Colombia. Her father, the bookseller and art dealer Karl Buchholz (1901-1992), was tasked with disposing of the works confiscated during the Nazis’ degenerate-art campaign. After the war, Buchholz emigrated to Bogotá with his family and founded the Librería Buchholz, which existed until 1992.[2] The Librería Buchholz followed the model of a bookstore-gallery, as Karl had also opened in Berlin, Madrid and Lisbon, and became a hub for the intellectual and German-speaking community in the city (fig. 1).

Fig. 2: Cover of the catalogue of the exhibition Arte Actual Alemán in Caracas, Lima and Bogotá, 1960, SMB-ZA, IV-NL Buchholz 33.

Fig. 3: Cover of the exhibition catalogue Arte Actual Alemán in Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Santiago de Chile, 1962, SMB-ZA, IV-NL Buchholz 33.

Fig. 4: Godula Buchholz during the exhibition Arte Actual Alemán in Montevideo, SMB-ZA, IV-NL Buchholz 25.

Godula studied art history in Paris between 1955 and 1958. She then returned to Bogotá and worked at the bookstore, where she organised numerous art exhibitions from 1958.[3] The Librería’s exhibitions focused on Colombian artists, like Alejandro Obregón, as well as German artists living in Colombia, such as Guillermo Wiedemann and Kurt Levy. It also featured mostly graphic works of some European artists, like Pablo Picasso. Moreover, she presented some group exhibitions of modern German art, such as Arte Gráfico Alemán Contemporáneo (1958) and Arte Gráfico Abstracto Alemán (1959).[4] As the South American public’s first exposure to some German artists, the travelling exhibition Arte Actual Alemán, presented in 1960 in Caracas, Lima and Bogotá aroused great interest and was important for her career. It displayed 137 paintings and 44 sculptures assembled for Karl Buchholz by the Deutsche Künstlerbund in Berlin. In 1962 Arte Actual Alemán was also presented in Buenos Aires, Montevideo and Santiago de Chile, accompanied by Godula Buchholz (fig. 2-4). During the exhibition, she visited some of the artists based there. Thus, she put together a new exhibition, Pinturas suramericanas hoy, which she completed with more works from artists in Peru, Venezuela and Colombia and was presented in late 1962 in Bogotá and Caracas (fig. 5). This exhibition inspired a new travelling exhibition entitled Südamerikanische Malerei der Gegenwart, which marked her return to Germany in 1963.

Fig. 5: Cover of the exhibition catalogue Pinturas Suramericanas de Hoy, SMB-ZA, IV-NL Buchholz 33.

Galerie Buchholz München 1965-1977: exhibiting South American art in Germany

Südamerikanische Malerei der Gegenwart was presented between 1963 and 1964 in four German cities, Berlin, Bonn, Baden-Baden and Pforzheim, and surveyed contemporary trends in eight South American countries for the first time in Germany. Buchholz selected 28 young artists who had helped develop painting in South America from approximately 1958 to 1960, such as Fernando Botero and Rómulo Macció (fig. 6-7).[5] While the exhibition was running at the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Baden-Baden, Buchholz met the director Dietrich Mahlow (1920-2013), who offered her a job as an assistant curator, and she worked there from 1963 to 1965.[6] After deciding to open her own gallery in Germany, but having long lived elsewhere and unsure of where to locate it, she followed Mahlow's recommendation and decided on Munich, despite being unfamiliar with the city or its art scene. She found a suitable space on a mezzanine floor at Maximilianstraße 29, and she opened the Galerie Buchholz in 1965 (fig. 8).[7] It was probably the best place for a gallery, as by the 1960s there were already several galleries located in Maximilianstraße, one of Munich's grand boulevards.[8]

Fig. 6: Cover of the exhibition catalogue Südamerikanische Malerei der Gegenwart, SMB-ZA, IV-NL Buchholz 33.

Fig. 7: Godula Buchholz at the opening of the exhibition Südamerikanische Malerei der Gegenwart in Bonn, SMB-ZA, IV-NL Buchholz 25.

Fig. 8: Galerie Buchholz in Munich, ca. 1972, Godula Buchholz archive, Munich.

The Galerie Buchholz exhibited international contemporary art, with a focus on South American artists.The gallery also had a special interest in Spanish and Portuguese art l.[9] The gallery’s first exhibition was Malerei aus Südamerika in 1965, which featured the works of five painters from Bolivia, Colombia and Peru, including Fernando Botero, Fernando Szyszlo and the French artist Fernand Léger with graphic works (fig. 9).[10] In the exhibition catalogue, Godula alluded to the connection to the Librería in Bogotá, but despite profiting from its support and advice, she made her own decisions regarding her gallery in Munich.[11]

Fig. 9: Cover of the exhibition catalogue Malerei aus Südamerika at the Galerie Buchholz, Munich, Godula Buchholz archive, Munich.

In 1965 she also organised other exhibitions in the Galerie Buchholz, including Graphik aus Südamerika (14.9.-23.10.1965) and in subsequent years several individual and group exhibitions on South American artists (fig. 10-11).[12] When Godula founded the Galerie Buchholz in Munich in 1965, 20th-century  art from Latin America was neither very popular nor very present in Munich and greater West Germany.[13] Although some of the artists she presented had already exhibited in Germany before, such as Jesús Rafael Soto, Julio Le Parc and Sergio de Camargo, others were nearly unknown in Germany, such as Fernando Botero and Edgar Negret. In the introduction to Woman Art Dealers Creating Markets for Modern Art 1940–1990, Véronique Chagnon-Burke refers to female gallerists, especially those operating before the 1970s, as pioneers — serious entrepreneurs who carved out spaces for themselves in a male-dominated art world. They worked as small business owners when there were few women in positions of power, and they took risks, exploring both new tastes and territories.[14] Although this book does not cover Godula Buchholz, that description fit her well, as she decided to explore new tastes and new territories first in Colombia, presenting German art, but especially in Germany, presenting South American art in her own gallery.

Fig. 10: Exhibition catalogue Grafik aus Südamerika, Godula Buchholz archive, Munich

Fig. 11: Brochure of the Galerie Buchholz, Godula Buchholz archive, Munich

Like other female gallery owners interested in emerging and overlooked art and managing artists’ early careers, Buchholz contributed greatly to Fernando Botero’s renown in Germany and Europe, as she, Botero and other sources have acknowledged.[15] As she described in a recent interview, establishing her gallery and introducing artists like Botero required much practical work, such as importing the works from South America and elsewhere to Germany, and employing different strategies to popularise the unfamiliar artists, as evidenced by Botero’s promotion. In the early 1960s, Buchholz discovered Botero’s work at an exhibition during her stay in Bogotá. She included him in exhibitions in South America, like Pinturas suramericanas hoy, and in Germany, like Südamerikanische Malerei der Gegenwart, as mentioned above. After opening her gallery in Munich, she visited him in New York and represented him for a few years.[16] Prior to 1977, she organised, supported and participated in numerous exhibitions about him at her gallery and elsewhere in Germany,[17] such as two 1966 exhibitions, one at the Galerie Buchholz in Munich and Botero's first solo exhibition in a European museum at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, which she curated.[18] She also collaborated with other galleries and museums, contacting them and offering them works, as when she contacted the Galerie Brusberg in Hanover to promote Botero. When German and South American art magazines and newspapers reported on the exhibitions and the growing appreciation for the artists she featured, she collaborated with some of them, providing information and photographs. She also edited catalogues of the exhibitions presented at her gallery, featuring photographs, sometimes her own.[19] From 1970, she began editing art books, starting with a book related to a travelling exhibition of Botero (fig. 12).[20] She also participated in art fairs, such as International Kunstmesse Basel and the Kölner Kunstmarkt,[21] where in 1968 she was one of the few  female gallery owners to be present with her gallery.[22] In 1976, Godula Buchholz stated in an article that, of the South American artists the gallery had supported, Botero was the first to achieve international recognition.[23] While the interest his work generated in Germany was an important factor, Godula's work supporting and promoting paved the way.

Managing connectivities and dis:connectivities

Godula Buchholz is almost completely unknown in Colombia, despite having played an important role working with her father at the Librería Buchholz, whose relevance in the cultural sphere of 20th-century Colombia is widely acknowledged. After her return to Germany, Godula Buchholz did pioneering work as a woman gallery owner at the Galerie Buchholz in Munich, which has not yet been recognised. A few years ago, when researching South American art networks with West Germany in the post-war period, I came into contact with her work, initially through her father's archive in Berlin. Through further research and interviews with her, I discovered her important work in the promotion of modern art and cultural exchange between Germany and South America, topics that are part of my research focus. I found an affinity with her and wanted to learn more about her work. This paper gives a brief overview of some preliminary results of my research on her and her work, especially about the connectivities and dis:connectivities between two regions and interests.

Fig. 12: Fernando Botero in his studio, photograph by Godula Buchholz, Godula Buchholz archive, Munich.

[1] The gallery existed until 2015 in Munich and elsewhere. 'Godula Buchholz: 1965-2015 Galerie Buchholz', 2021, accessed 15 May 2025, https://www.werkraum-buchholz.com/die-galerie.html. [2] Godula Buchholz, Karl Buchholz Buch- und Kunsthändler im 20. Jahrhundert - Sein Leben und seine Buchhandlungen und Galerien Berlin, New York, Bukarest, Lissabon, Madrid, Bogotá (Cologne: DuMont, 2005), 190. [3] Buchholz, Karl Buchholz, 195, 99. [4] Buchholz, Karl Buchholz, 202. [5] Südamerikanische Malerei der Gegenwart, ed. Städtische Kunstsammlungen Bonn (Bonn: Haus der Städtischen Kunstsammlungen, 1963). [6] Godula Buchholz, 'Questions about the life and work of Godula Buchholz and the Galerie Buchholz, Munich', interview by Claudia Cendales Paredes, 15 February & 11 May 2025. She participated in exhibitions like Illustrationen in 1964. See Illustrationen, ed. Godula Buchholz and Dietrich Mahlow (Baden-Baden: Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, 1964). [7] Buchholz, interview. [8] These galleries collaborated to promote themselves in the Interessengemeinschaft Galerien Maximilianstraße and from the beginning of the 1970s they organised annual joint exhibitions. The Galerie Buchholz participated in Handzeichnungen in 1976. See Handzeichnungen: Gemeinsame Ausstellung der Galerien in der Maximilianstrasse München, ed. Jörg Schellmann, Jürgen Weihrauch, and Hartmut Stöcker (Munich, 1976). [9] Buchholz, interview. [10] Malerei aus Südamerika (Munich: Galerie Buchholz, 1965). [11] Buchholz, interview. [12] See the list of the exhibitions held there in 'Godula Buchholz'.. [13] See the brief description inMichael Nungesser, 'Moderne Kunst aus Lateinamerika: Rezeptionsbericht zur Lage in Deutschland', in De orbis Hispani linguis litteris historia moribus: Festschrift für Dietrich Briesemeister zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Axel Schönberger and Klaus Zimmermann, vol. 2,  (Domus: Frankfurt, 1994), 1804-05. [14] Véronique Chagnon-Burke, 'Introduction: women art dealers: creating markets for modern art, 1940-90', in Women Art Dealers Creating Markets for Modern Art, 1940-1990, ed. Véronique Chagnon-Burke and Caterina Toschi (London: Bloomsbury, 2024), 1. [15] Buchholz, interview; Gottfried Sello, 'Botero-Ausstellung in Baden-Baden Paradies der Dicken', Die Zeit, 3 April 1970; Heinrich Wigand Petzet, 'Botero Ausstellung in Baden-Baden — Feist und reglos: gequollener Kuchenteig', National-Zeitung Basel (Basel), 14 April 1970; Chagnon-Burke, 'Introduction', 1. [16] Buchholz, interview. [17] See the list of the exhibitions in 'Godula Buchholz'. [18] 'Godula Buchholz'; Fernando Botero,  (Munich: Galerie Buchholz, 1966). [19] Buchholz, interview. [20] Fernando Botero; 'Godula Buchholz'. [21] Bernhard Rohe, 'Der Kölner Kunstmarkt', Das Kunstwerk XXI, no. 11-12 (1968). [22] See the photograph of the participants in 'Kunstmarkt Köln ’68', Aachener Nachrichten (Aachen), 14 November 1968; Buchholz, interview. [23] Godula Buchholz, 'Galerie Buchholz', Das Kunstwerk XXI, no. 5-6 (1974).
bibliography
Buchholz, Godula. 'Galerie Buchholz'. Das Kunstwerk XXI, no. 5-6 (1974). ———. Karl Buchholz Buch- und Kunsthändler im 20. Jahrhundert - Sein Leben und seine Buchhandlungen und Galerien Berlin, New York, Bukarest, Lissabon, Madrid, Bogotá Cologne: DuMont, 2005. ———. 'Questions about the life and work of Godula Buchholz and the Galerie Buchholz, Munich'. By Claudia Cendales Paredes. 15 February & 11 May, 2025. Chagnon-Burke, Véronique. 'Introduction: women art dealers: creating markets for modern art, 1940-90'. In Women Art Dealers Creating Markets for Modern Art, 1940-1990, edited by Véronique Chagnon-Burke and Caterina Toschi,  London: Bloomsbury, 2024. Fernando Botero. Munich: Galerie Buchholz, 1966. 'Godula Buchholz: 1965-2015 Galerie Buchholz'. 2021, accessed 15 May 2025, https://www.werkraum-buchholz.com/die-galerie.html. Handzeichnungen: Gemeinsame Ausstellung der Galerien in der Maximilianstrasse München. Edited by Jörg Schellmann, Jürgen Weihrauch and Hartmut Stöcker. Munich, 1976. Illustrationen. Edited by Godula Buchholz and Dietrich Mahlow. Baden-Baden: Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, 1964. 'Kunstmarkt Köln ’68'. Aachener Nachrichten (Aachen), 14 November 1968. Malerei aus Südamerika Munich: Galerie Buchholz, 1965. Nungesser, Michael. 'Moderne Kunst aus Lateinamerika: Rezeptionsbericht zur Lage in Deutschland'. In De orbis Hispani linguis litteris historia moribus: Festschrift für Dietrich Briesemeister zum 60. Geburtstag, edited by Axel Schönberger and Klaus Zimmermann, Vol. 2. Domus: Frankfurt, 1994. Rohe, Bernhard. 'Der Kölner Kunstmarkt'. Das Kunstwerk XXI, no. 11-12 (1968). Sello, Gottfried. 'Botero-Ausstellung in Baden-Baden Paradies der Dicken'. Die Zeit, 3 April 1970. Südamerikanische Malerei der Gegenwart. Edited by Städtische Kunstsammlungen Bonn. Bonn: Haus der Städtischen Kunstsammlungen, 1963. Wigand Petzet, Heinrich. 'Botero Ausstellung in Baden-Baden — Feist und reglos: gequollener Kuchenteig'. National-Zeitung Basel (Basel), 14 April 1970.
citation information:
Cendales Paredes, Claudia, 'Between Bogotá and Munich: Godula Buchholz and South American art in Germany', Ben Kamis ed. global dis:connect blog. Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, 16 December 2025, https://www.globaldisconnect.org/12/16/between-bogota-and-munich-godula-buchholz-and-south-american-art-in-germany/.
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16 December 2025
In Blog, Blog 2025, Voices Blog, Voices Startseite

Atlantique:s — on global dis:connection in Mati Diop’s films

Fabienne Liptay

Fig. 1: Atlantiques, Mati Diop, 2009, 16 mins., film still, trigon-film.

Mati Diop’s short film Atlantiques (2009) is a visual poem about the ‘oceanic time-lag’[1] experienced through migration. Relating to Senegal’s migrations piroguières in 2005 and 2006, when thousands of young Africans left their homes to embark on often-deadly voyages to Spain, the film tells the stories of these men, interweaving the lived experiences of the protagonists from Dakar with the ghostly recollections of the dead. Speaking about ‘the most burning desire to throw oneself into the sea’[2] — a quote drawn from the accounts of survivors of the 1816 shipwreck of the Medusa on the way to Senegal (which inspired Théodore Géricault’s painting The Raft of the Medusa, 1819) — these ghost stories blur the lines between documentary and fiction to create an oneiric nocturnal imaginary of migration and exile. Mati Diop returns to these stories ten years later in her debut feature film Atlantique (2019), which looks to the ocean both as a mythological and political space from the perspective of the women who were left behind in Dakar. The almost eponymous titling of the films blurs the understanding of their relationship in terms of both identity and difference. In my commentary on the short film Atlantiques and the feature film Atlantique, I would like to share some thoughts and observations about how the disjunctive relations constructed within and between these films — their manifold doublings and splits — can be seen as a genuine contribution to a political aesthetics of global dis:connection. Atlantiques, the 15-minute short, shot by Diop herself on low-grain video (mini-DV), begins with the dark enigmatic image of turning cogs, rusty as if drawn from the sea. They resemble a reel-to-reel tape recorder playing the voice of a man who recounts his experience of encountering death on his passage over the ocean in a pirogue. The voice seems to be speaking from beyond, the man’s body absent from the image, leaving us uncertain whether he survived the ‘Siram’, the giant wave that hit the boat. The film ends with equally enigmatic images, now bright and glaring, giving an interior view of a system of rotating lenses in the lantern of a lighthouse, which flood the darkness with bright flashes of light before slowly fading at dawn. The rotation of the lenses echoes the turning movement of the tape recorder at the beginning of the film. This scene was likely filmed at the Mamelles Lighthouse in Dakar, sitting on a hill overlooking the Atlantic Ocean at the westernmost tip of Africa. While it was built under French colonial rule in 1864 as a landmark of imperial control of the region, the film lends the lighthouse a transformative visual presence. Like a nocturnal dream machine, it seems to return the fears and hopes that guide the journey on the pirogue, captured in the phrase ‘Barcelona or death’ (Barça ou Barsakh) that has become a common expression in Senegal, originally coined by the migrants.[3] Framed by the images and sounds of returns that open and close the film are scenes of three young Senegalese men, friends sitting on the beach around a fire, the sparks faintly illuminating the dark and grainy images, while they discuss the perils of migrating to Europe to escape the miseries of life in Africa. The scenes are staged but at the same time documentary, the scripted dialogues based on the recollections of the protagonists (one of which is Mati Diop’s cousin) who use their real names. One of the men, Serigne (Serigne Seck) has taken the risk of leaving on a pirogue, recounting his experience, his two friends inquiring about his reasons for leaving. Has Serigne returned from his journey alive, after having been deported or as a ghost after dying at sea? The dialogue gives evidence for both interpretations, just as the opening scenes with his recorded voice. The scenes around the campfire on the beach are interspersed with images of mourning women, a mother and a sister, as well as a close-up of the gravestones of men who died at sea, among them Serigne’s gravestone bearing the date of his death. Do these scenes of mourning and memorial precede or follow the friends’ meeting at the beach? The film’s temporal experience is one of haunting, of a time out-of-joint that Derrida described in Specters of Marx as ‘a disjointed now that always risks maintaining nothing together in the assured conjunction of some context whose border would still be determinable’[4] and that has since become a recurring concept in postcolonial thought, figuring in the many ghost stories that have emanated from it.

Fig. 2: Atlantique, Mati Diop, 2019, 104 mins., film still, MUBI.

Regarding the state of migration in contemporary films, among them Diop’s Atlantique, Ekow Eshun speaks of a ‘liquid Africa’, a political aesthetics of both renewal and remembrance that finds its expression, among other motifs, in images of the sea. ‘From its title onward, the sea is the gravitational force that shapes lives and events in the Dakar-set Atlantics. (…) As the camera lingers again over its surface, we contemplate the water as a repository of countless stories of desire and departure, loss and mourning’, allowing the ‘film’s transition from drama told in the tradition of European realism to a hauntological fable replete with ominous occurrences: mysterious fires and gesturings to the mythic and mystic, chiefly through the figure of the djinn, an Islamic spirit that is able to take the form of humans or animals’.[5] Atlantique, Mati Diop’s feature debut that followed her short film ten years later in 2019, spells out the haunting presence of ghosts, verging on the genre of zombie films infused with West African tales of spiritual possession. Here, the dead men return from the sea, inhabiting the bodies of the women at night to call for justice, for being paid the wages they had been denied after months of work on a construction site. Yet, an aesthetics of dis:connectivity expressing the state of migration is not simply achieved in terms of representation or narrative, however fragmented and ambiguous. Rather, it manifests itself in the multiple disjunctures, the frictions and folds, the absences and missing links that structure the films in both their internal relations as well as their relations to each other. In light of the feature film, Diop’s short film has frequently been discussed as a precursor, the experiment from which the later film could emerge. What escapes such conventional consideration is the spectral logic itself, the disjointed time of the present that renders the relation between both films more complicated than that of a simple succession or development. On the level of the plot, the film tells the story of young lovers, Ada (Mama Sané) and Suleiman (Ibrahima Traoré), who are separated from the first moment they appear on screen: a train cuts between them, raising dust, as they meet in the streets of Dakar, hindering them from coming together. Later at the beach, they are separated even in their embrace: she does not dare to tell him that her parents have arranged for her to soon marry a wealthy businessman; he does not dare tell her that he will be leaving in a pirogue later that night. ‘You’re just watching the ocean — you’re not even looking at me,’ she complains. He departs without saying goodbye. The film stays in Dakar with Ada and the other women; we don’t get to see anything of the men’s departure or their fatal journey across the sea, not even the stranded boat that is said to have been found by Spanish fishermen and might have been theirs. What is absent or disappears from the scene, what becomes unavailable for representation, returns in the film’s atmosphere — an atmosphere full of sandy heat, humidity and sea spray, of granite dust, smog and orange haze, polluted with the promises of cosmopolitan progress and haunted by the colonial past.[6] As Diop has stated in interviews, many of the film’s scenes were shot at the site of the 1944 Thiaroye massacre by French forces of West African soldiers who had fought for the French army, following their demand for equal pensions, which is echoed in the worker’s demand for payment in Atlantique. Here, spectrality is also heavily evoked by the films’ cinematography, the dark and grainy images, shot with a highly light sensitive 35mm camera (VariCam 35) that renders tangible the invisibilities of migration as a remnant of colonisation. ‘The men who died at sea,’ as the film’s cinematographer Claire Mathon states, ‘return via the (sweating) bodies of young girls’.[7]

Fig. 3: Atlantique, Mati Diop, 2019, 104 mins., film still, MUBI.

Mati Diop, as a French-Senegalese director, has created such disjunctive dialogue between films before, with her short A Thousand Suns (Mille soleils, 2013), in which she relates to the Senegalese film classic Touki Bouki (1973), directed by her uncle Djibril Diop Mambéty.[8] A Thousand Suns was made for the 40th anniversary of Touki Bouki, staged around an open-air screening of the celebrated film in Dakar by night in the presence of its lead actor Magaye Niang, 40 years after having played Mory, the film’s young rebellious protagonist who, at the last minute, decides not to take the ship to Paris with his girlfriend, returning to cattle herding in a repetition of the film’s opening scene. A Thousand Suns is particularly interested in the coincidence that the actor, just as the character he played, never left Dakar. The opening sequence of the film shows this character, now an elderly man, still herding zebus like he did in the former film. Inscribing the lived time of the actor’s body into the fictional character, collapsing and multiplying fictional and documentary layers, the film creates a fractured temporality, in which the man seems to be endlessly returning, visibly aging, yet displaced from progression in time. What has happened in the 40 years since Touki Bouki, the actor is asked at the screening. Shrouded in the blue light of projection, he remains silent with his mouth agape. The plural of the film’s title A Thousand Suns reverberates this disjuncture of time, while the film lends an aesthetics to the philosophical concept of spectrality through the many shifts and splits between different visual and narrative registers, genres and materialities.

Fig. 4: Atlantique, Mati Diop, 2019, 104 mins., film still, MUBI.

The sight of zebus crossing the street returns in Atlantique, recalling once again the opening and closing scene in Touki Bouki that had already refigured in A Thousand Suns. This time they appear even more untimely, crossing the urban building site where a futuristic tower, the only digitally rendered object in the film, is being constructed in the real-estate development area of the city of Dakar, reminiscent of the unrealised project for a multi-million-dollar luxury tower hotel that Senegal’s former president Abdoulaye Wade wanted to build together with Gaddafi as a symbol of their shared vision of Africa. Against this vision of economic development and progress in global capitalism, the film sets an alternative future—a future that, in Derrida’s words, is rendered possible through ‘disjunction, interruption, the heterogenous’.[9] ‘One does not know if the expectation prepares the coming of the future-to-come or if it recalls the repetition of the same, of the same thing as ghost. […] It is a proper characteristic of the specter, if there is any, that no one can be sure if by returning it testifies to a living past or to a living future, for the revenant may already mark the promised return of the specter of living being’.[10] It is this ‘future-to-come’ (l’avenir) that is announced in the final scene of the film, in which Ada, after her reunion with the ghost of Suleiman, reflects on her memories as prophecies. Flipping the perspective, the camera now looks at Ada from beyond the refracted mirror in the beach bar, that site of spectral returns where the dead men’s images appeared, while she speaks the closing lines: ‘Ada, to whom the future belongs. I am Ada’. [1] Dora Budor, 'Oceanic Time-Lag: On Mati Diop’s Atlantics', MOUSSE Magazine, Mousse Publishing 2020, https://www.moussemagazine.it/magazine/mati-diop-dora-budor-2020/4 February 2025. On this point, see also Dennis Lim, 'Crossing Over', Film Comment, Film at Lincoln Center, 1 July 2019, https://www.filmcomment.com/article/crossing-over/5 February 2025; Olajide Salawu, 'The Method of Abjection in Mati Diop's "Atlantics"', Third Text: Critical Perspectives on Art and Culture online (8 June 2020), http://www.thirdtext.org/salawu-atlantics, http://www.thirdtext.org/salawu-atlantics; Gigi Adair, 'The Spirit of Migrancy: Mati Diop’s Atlantique', Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature 46, no. 1 (2022) https://doi.org/10.4148/2334-4415.2208. [2] That is, 'le plus ardent désir de se jeter à la mer'. Alexandre Corréard and Henri Savigny, Naufrage de la frégate La Méduse, faisant partie de l'expédition du Sénégal, en 1816 (Paris: Corréard Libraire, 1821), 124. [3] See, for example, Stefano degli Uberti, 'Victims of their Fantasies or Heroes for a Day? Media Representations, Local History and Daily Narratives on Boat Migrations from Senegal', Cahiers d’études africaines 54, no. 213-214 (2014) https://doi.org/10.4000/etudesafricaines.17599. [4] Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamut (New York: Routledge, 1994), 1. [5] Ekow Eshun, 'A Liquid Africa: Fluidity as Practice and Aesthetics in Diasporadical Trilogía', liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies 5, no. 1 (2021) https://doi.org/10.1215/26923874-8932595. [6] See Lindsay Turner, 'In the Atmosphere: In Mati Diop’s Atlantics, every breath takes in the evaporated substance of history', The Yale Review Summer 2020 (1 June 2020). [7] Claire Mathon, 'Claire Mathon, AFC, discusses her work on Mati Diop’s film “Atlantics”', AFC, Association Française des directrices et directeurs de la photographie Cinématographique 2019, https://www.afcinema.com/Claire-Mathon-AFC-discusses-her-work-on-Mati-Diop-s-film-Atlantique.html?lang=fr. [8] On this film, see for example James S. Williams, 'A Thousand Suns: Traversing the Archive and Transforming Documentary in Mati Diop’s Mille Soleils', Film Quarterly 70, no. 1 (2016); Melissa Anderson, 'Family Ties', Artforum, 19 January 2015, https://www.artforum.com/columns/melissa-anderson-on-mati-diops-a-thousand-suns-222788/. [9] Derrida, Specters of Marx, 44-45. [10] Derrida, Specters of Marx, 123.
bibliography
Adair, Gigi. 'The Spirit of Migrancy: Mati Diop’s Atlantique'. Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature 46, no. 1 (2022): 1-16. https://doi.org/10.4148/2334-4415.2208. Anderson, Melissa. 'Family Ties'. Artforum, 19 January, 2015. https://www.artforum.com/columns/melissa-anderson-on-mati-diops-a-thousand-suns-222788/. Budor, Dora, 'Oceanic Time-Lag: On Mati Diop’s Atlantics', MOUSSE Magazine. Mousse Publishing 2020, https://www.moussemagazine.it/magazine/mati-diop-dora-budor-2020/. Corréard, Alexandre and Henri Savigny. Naufrage de la frégate La Méduse, faisant partie de l'expédition du Sénégal, en 1816. Paris: Corréard Libraire, 1821. degli Uberti, Stefano. 'Victims of their Fantasies or Heroes for a Day? Media Representations, Local History and Daily Narratives on Boat Migrations from Senegal'. Cahiers d’études africaines 54, no. 213-214 (2014): 81-113. https://doi.org/10.4000/etudesafricaines.17599. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamut. New York: Routledge, 1994. Eshun, Ekow. 'A Liquid Africa: Fluidity as Practice and Aesthetics in Diasporadical Trilogía'. liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies 5, no. 1 (2021): 75-88. https://doi.org/10.1215/26923874-8932595. Lim, Dennis, 'Crossing Over', Film Comment. Film at Lincoln Center, 1 July 2019, https://www.filmcomment.com/article/crossing-over/. Mathon, Claire, 'Claire Mathon, AFC, discusses her work on Mati Diop’s film “Atlantics”', AFC. Association Française des directrices et directeurs de la photographie Cinématographique 2019, https://www.afcinema.com/Claire-Mathon-AFC-discusses-her-work-on-Mati-Diop-s-film-Atlantique.html?lang=fr. Salawu, Olajide. 'The Method of Abjection in Mati Diop's "Atlantics"'. Third Text: Critical Perspectives on Art and Culture online (8 June 2020). http://www.thirdtext.org/salawu-atlantics. Turner, Lindsay. 'In the Atmosphere: In Mati Diop’s Atlantics, every breath takes in the evaporated substance of history'. The Yale Review Summer 2020 (1 June 2020). Williams, James S. 'A Thousand Suns: Traversing the Archive and Transforming Documentary in Mati Diop’s Mille Soleils'. Film Quarterly 70, no. 1 (2016): 85-95.
citation information:
Liptay, Fabienne, 'Atlantique:s — on global dis:connection in Mati Diop’s films', Ben Kamis ed. global dis:connect blog. Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, 2 December 2025, https://www.globaldisconnect.org/12/02/atlantiques-on-global-disconnection-in-mati-diops-films/.
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2 December 2025
In Blog 2025, Voices Blog

Rethinking cultural infrastructures in post-Assad Syria: a forum 

[editor's note: the gd:c blog has been on hiatus for several months because life got in the way, but we're thrilled to be back with this post about one of our in-house events and written by one of our directors. Enjoy.]
christopher balme

The forum participants in the gd:c library, i.e. our in-house cultural infrastructure.

From 16 to 17 September 2025, global dis:connect hosted our first forum. The forum is a new format for gd:c to explore how support for the arts can be rethought in countries and regions undergoing major transitions. The arts are subject to the same forces of globalisation as other areas of cultural and social life. They are highly diverse and at the same time often remarkably similar on an institutional level. Art fairs, theatre, film and music festivals, as well as iconic architecture for their presentation can be encountered around the globe. Yet their status and forms of delivery vary in the extreme, especially in countries and regions marked by ‘turbulence’.[1] Our forums address a set of recurrent questions. Who do these institutions serve? Do they justify their funding? Do they even receive public funding, or are they dependent on the vagaries of private philanthropy and sponsorship? Are they subject to direct political influence, or do they operate ‘at arms’ length’? Are arts institutions required to respond to touristic-heritage demands rather than artistic imperatives? How are local and national activities embedded in wider regional networks? We devoted the first forum to post-Assad Syria as a reaction to the events of December 2024, which saw the fall of the Assad regime and the takeover by a former jihadist group led by Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa. Once the most important cultural centre in the region, years of war and mass emigration have left the cultural landscape of Syria in disarray. The workshop gathered artists, directors of funding bodies and curators from Syria and neighbouring countries to rethink how cultural infrastructure might be reconceived going forward. The challenges facing cultural infrastructure globally pose themselves in Syria in extremis, as much material infrastructure has been destroyed and the former structures of a largely state-controlled arts scene no longer function. The conditions in Syria drove us to pose many questions in the discussion. What remains of existing cultural infrastructure — both material and immaterial — and what new forms can still be imagined and built? What possibilities and promises can emerge from these shifting landscapes? Which networks can be activated or reconfigured, and how might the region's cultural life position itself within broader regional and global artistic ecologies, particularly in relation to questions of alliances, dependencies and hierarchies in the arts? Christopher Balme; Sophie Eisenried, gd:c’s curator responsible for our cooperation with the arts; and Dr. Ziad Adwan, a Berlin-based Syrian dramatist, researcher and former lecturer at the Syria’s Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts, organised the event. With Adwan’s help, we assembled a group of largely Syrian participants, all of whom work outside the country: Abdallah Al-Kafri (Syria/Lebanon), Raed Assfour (Jordan),  Hala Khayat (Syria/Dubai), Hadeel Abdelhameed (Australia/Iraq), Helena Nassif (Lebanon), Junaid Sarieddeen (Lebanon) and Alma Salem (Syria/Canada). Anne Eberhard (Goethe Institute, Beirut) and the Syrian director and dramaturge, Rania Mleihi (Munich), joined us on the second day. Planning began in early 2025 with the circulation of a concept paper outlining the idea of the forum and how we understand the term cultural infrastructure. We distinguish between three different forms:
    • material: buildings, venues, spaces, heritage sites;
    • immaterial or intangible: the cultural capital of artists and creatives; their networks; sources of funding; and
    • institutional: mainly cultural organisations, which in post-socialist societies such as Baathist Syria are/were still largely state-funded. In liberal democracies they are augmented by different kinds of commercial and non-profit organisations.
There are many ways to study infrastructure, which has become an expanding area of  interdisciplinary research. It is important to remember that infrastructure is not just purely functional but also has a rhetorical use, what the anthropologist Brian Larkin terms the ‘poetics of infrastructure’[2] and Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta and Hannah Appel, have called the ‘promise of infrastructure’.[3] A second stage of preparation involved mapping existing infrastructure in Syria using Google Maps. Such maps are commonplace, and many cities develop them as online resources. In the UK, the West Midlands Combined Authority, the Greater London Authority, and even local councils such as Milton Keynes provide them. Further afield, cultural infrastructure plans have also been developed in cities such as Sydney, Vancouver and Amsterdam. While such cities produce such maps for diverse reasons, ranging from self-promotion to a genuine need to inform their citizens, the situation in Syria meant it was a largely remedial and reparative exercise. After ten years of war, the question was: what still existed and in what state of repair? Our criteria indicated not just name and location but also functionality, genre and governance (figure 1)  

A section of the cultural infrastructure map, which can be accessed here.

  The workshop ran over two days and combined plenary sessions and breakout groups. The opening session took the map as a point of departure for an extended discussion of what cultural infrastructure entails in a postwar and post-socialist situation. The workshop was overshadowed by recent events, namely massacres of civilians: Alawites in Latarkia and Bedouin and Druse minorities in Sweida. These events, plus the continuing war in Gaza, influenced the atmosphere of discussions. The optimism of early 2025 had given way to uncertainty and even pessimism, not only about the political future of the country but also whether the arts, broadly understood, would have a place in a regime controlled by a government with roots in jihadism. An initial round of discussions opened a set of topics that would recur over the two days. For example, Helena Nassif asked what values can the arts defend, what meta-narratives do we want to construct? Alma Salem wondered how the arts can be embedded in the ongoing political discussions regarding the constitution, elections, and justice, especially when there is already evidence of individual freedoms being denied. Hadeel Abdelhameed pointed to the example of Iraq, which had undergone similar levels of destruction and internecine violence. Now, however, cultural venues and the their spatial memories have gained importance, as evidenced in the renovation of Iraqi buildings in last two years, such as the city of Ur. Abdallah Al-Kafri emphasised the importance of peer organisations in the region while acknowledging that philanthropy and donations had become more complicated with the welfare state in crisis. Currently, there are huge distractions and divisions amongst NGOs in the field of culture. For Junaid Sarieddeen, director, dramaturge and founding member of the Beirut-based Zoukak Theatre Company, a key aim must be to sustain the region’s cultural and religious diversity, which often figures as its weakness because of its potential for dissension. That can/should, however, be used as an advantage. Syria has, as he put it, a ‘super local economy’, created by over a decade of war. Co-convenor Ziad Adwan argued that this element of locality meant that, in the transition phase at least, one should think in terms of pop-up or recurrent festivals rather than extended seasons. The cultural-infrastructure map could be used to identify venues. Raed Assfour, director of the Jordan-based Al-Balad Theatre, a multi-purpose cultural centre, emphasised the need to support regional movements. In three breakout sessions, smaller groups focused on specific topics: alternative venues and training models, national vs. regional curating and models of support beyond state/public institutions. In the latter, for example, the role of NGOs, international funders and philanthropic foundations was discussed. While the traditional supporters, such as the European cultural institutes (British Council, Goethe Institute, Institut français etc.) certainly played a part in supporting local activities by, for example, creating safe spaces for performances and exhibitions outside state control, their financial contribution was relatively modest. Perhaps the most successful example of collaboration between locals and outsiders is in the field of archaeology, which can draw on exceptionally long-lasting partnerships going back decades. Participants emphasised the wide range of non-state and non-public funding. Apart from international philanthropy such as the Ford Foundation and the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA), which have a long history of supporting the arts, one should also remember that support can come from numerous sources, corporate as well as private families and their foundations. Oil companies have funded art books, churches have supported choral singing, and amateur traditions such as ancient Syrian chants, a Christian singing tradition going back many centuries with claims to the status of a immaterial cultural heritage. The Beirut Museum of Art (BeMA), currently under construction, exemplifies the complex networks of support that extend beyond Lebanon and include UNESCO, the Washington-based Middle East Institute and the Getty Foundation. The Arab Theatre Training Centre (ATTC) based in Lebanon (executive director Raed Assfour) has received long-term support from SIDA, as well as other funding organisations such as the Swiss Agency for Development & Co-operation (SDC) in Jordan and the Anna Lindh Foundation. NGO funding is extremely complex, and there is too little research into the wider field of non-state funding. The second day opened with a plenary paper by Anne Eberhard, current director of the Goethe-Institut (GI) in Beirut and responsible for re-opening the GI in Damascus. The closure of the institute in 2012 due to the war had been countered to some extent by the Damascus in Exile programme, which involved many artists from the Syrian diaspora, especially those based in Berlin. Eberhard outlined current activities and the difficulties in restarting support for artists in Syria, such as a new cultural project fund. Its implementation is still hampered by bureaucratic barriers, such as the difficulties in transferring funds to Syria, which is still not possible. The challenge is to rebuild the networks in Syria. In March 2025, a delegation led by the German Federal Foreign Office that included members from the Goethe-Institut, the German Archaeological Institute, the German Academic Exchange Service and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation visited the country during a period of optimism. Though the desire to reopen remains, the Goethe Institut is beholden to directives of the Federal Foreign Office. The plenary sessions on second day were connected by the idea of ‘strengthening networks’ and looked at ‘community-based production’, ‘inter-city connections’, and ‘diasporic perspectives’. Community-based production belongs to the positively connoted terms, sometimes associated with the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of ‘community-building’, that circulate in the NGO world.[4] In a wide-ranging discussion participants interrogated both the term itself (‘how to translate the NGO term community into Arabic or other languages’) and its application, as for example when the Syrian government began implementing ‘community projects’ under the patronage of the First Lady, Asma Fawaz al-Assad, in the early 2000s. A positive example was the Lebanon-based theatre group Zoukak, which initiated drama therapy workshops in refugee camps during the 2006 war with Israel. A recurrent critique targeted the equation of ‘community’ with ‘village’ or similar traditional forms of organisation. Helena Nassif proposed redefining the term to mean ‘working with groups in a context’, which also include artist collectives and various kinds of humanitarian actions. The topic of strengthening networks through intercity connections addressed a series of questions including whether artists in the region’s main cities form a shared community and how these ties might be strengthened. Another question revolved around competition vs. collaboration: when do inter-city cultural initiatives risk competing for the same limited funds instead of complementing each other? The importance of hub cities was also discussed, referring in this case Beirut and formerly Damascus. How can the latter regain that function? The current situation sees numerous smaller networks and a productive path might be to form coalitions to encourage them to come together. The importance of diasporic networks for rebuilding cultural infrastructure in new Syria is unquestioned, but discussion focussed on the extent to which diasporic voices can legitimately speak for a future Syrian context and whether the current conditions even permit a large-scale return of exiled artists. On the other hand, diasporic institutions (festivals, galleries, archives) could serve as ‘extended infrastructure’ for Syria. There was consensus that future planning must include diasporic artists because of the sheer numbers involved. As the participants all belong in one way or another to the diasporic network, although it is not formally organised as such, everyone was ready to contribute to strengthening immaterial infrastructure — such as knowledge transfer, networks and funding models. The final section of the workshop was an open mic and provided the opportunity for all participants to formulate plans and ideas for the future of the region, under the current or even a new government. Contributions ranged widely over deeply felt expressions of pain and loss over what has happened in the ‘cradle of civilisation’ formulated by Helena Nassif. It will be necessary to create for Syria, she argued, ‘a new sociality’ after the decades of oppression and war. Ziad Adwan asked: ‘what are my extensions today as a theatre maker towards Palestinians, Lebanese, Jordanians?’, thus positioning his artistic activity very much in a regional context. He wondered also how to evaluate the mapping project as well as how to record the deliberations of the forum itself (there is no audio or video recording). Perhaps one could think of a medium-term research project. Alma Salem stressed the need to reframe the region away from purely geopolitical arguments to geocultural ones to create more positive, constructive narratives. The regionalisation discussed in the workshop is not an objective to be achieved but is an already existing organic reality. The workshop was a short but intensive interaction bringing together theatre directors, curators, actors, cultural policy makers who were either Syrian or had strong ties to the country. Most described themselves either as expatriates or in exile. All were dedicated to re-establishing the once-vibrant arts scene in Syria, particularly Damascus, but also in other cities such as Aleppo. It was clear at the end of the two days that the forum format had initiated intensive discussions, renewed ties and laid the foundation for further initiatives. Much will depend on the stabilisation of an extremely fragile political situation and whether the current ‘transitional’ government can reconcile its Islamist orientation with the freedom of expression necessary for artistic culture to be re-established.   [1] Milena Dragićević Šešić and Sanjin Dragićević, Arts management in turbulent times: Adaptable Quality Management: navigating the arts through the winds of change, trans. Vladimir Ivir, ed. Esther Banev and Francis Garcia (Amsterdam: European Cultural Foundation & Boekmanstudies, 2005). [2] Brian Larkin, 'The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure', Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013). [3] Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta and Hannah Appel, 'Introduction: Temporality, Politics, and the Promise of Infrastructure', in The Promise of Infrastructure, ed. Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018). [4] Hossein Mousazadeh, 'Unraveling the Nexus between Community Development and Sustainable Development Goals: A Comprehensive Mapping', Community Development 56, no. 2 (2024) doi:10.1080/15575330.2024.2388097.
bibliography
Anand, Nikhil, Akhil Gupta and Hannah Appel. 'Introduction: Temporality, Politics, and the Promise of Infrastructure'. In The Promise of Infrastructure, edited by Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta and Hannah Appel,  Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. Dragićević Šešić, Milena and Sanjin Dragićević. Arts management in turbulent times: Adaptable Quality Management: navigating the arts through the winds of change. Translated by Vladimir Ivir. Edited by Esther Banev and Francis Garcia. Amsterdam: European Cultural Foundation & Boekmanstudies, 2005. Larkin, Brian. 'The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure'. [In English]. Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013): 327-43. Mousazadeh, Hossein. 'Unraveling the Nexus between Community Development and Sustainable Development Goals: A Comprehensive Mapping'. Community Development 56, no. 2 (2024): 276-302. https://doi.org/doi:10.1080/15575330.2024.2388097. Continue Reading
25 November 2025
In Blog, Blog 2024

De facto border. The division of Cyprus in contemporary photography by Heinrich Völkel

samira yildirim
This essay deals with the question of how artists show and document the topography and landscape of a border. Since the end of the 20th century, borders have been developed into a global network of ‘sorting machines’ in which integration, separation and transfer take place.[1] Artists conduct artistic field research along borders and with their works of art capture artificial divisions, politically negotiated and often militarily guarded barriers of the world. Art is, therefore, part of the practice and research of topography, which is made up of the Greek words tópos for place and gráphein for drawing or writing, referring to the description, measurement and representation of a place. Although we see the green and built borders in the images, they simultaneously disappear through their reification, as we aesthetically experience representations of water, sand, mountains, trees, rivers, meadows, cities, villages, roads, traffic routes and infrastructures, which in turn is antithetical to the knowledge of the violence of borders. The Mediterranean plays an important role as a border because it is much more than just a tourist destination for holidaymakers, but also a geopolitically relevant location of the EU’s external border regime. Fortress Europe marks its border to the south in the Mediterranean with various counterparts, and it is being successively expanded and upgraded, making it a constant source of conflict. The absurdity of carving a constructed border into natural topography is clearly illustrated by the sea. Broad and deep waters are already insurmountable hurdles for us humans. Declaring them political borders plays into the hands of states, as no border architectures are required here to demarcate one territorial state from another. At the same time, maritime borders have the advantage of appearing natural, which makes them ‘less vulnerable to attack’.[2] As a border, the Mediterranean is complex and controversial, as the Mediterranean space is formed in the past and future primarily through its relationships, as Fernand Braudel pointed out in his extensive La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II in 1949.[3] This incongruity between political, cultural and social connections and divisions is the subject of numerous contemporary artists who analyse the Mediterranean as a hybrid border region.

Camera view of absences

OSTKREUZ — a Berlin-based photographers’ cooperative — produced Über Grenzen in Berlin and Dresden in 2012.[4] Through the medium of photography, the members of the cooperative approached social questions about borders, clarifying that borders inscribe themselves onto everyday life and humans’ living spaces as well as onto nature. They can take on military, social, architectural and ethical forms. The topography of a border can never be captured in its entirety and remains fragmented in the images. A line on a map can depict the entire course of a border. The topographical works, on the other hand, present very limited and individual perspectives. Heinrich Völkel is a member of OSTKREUZ and integrated motifs of deserted streets, abandoned buildings, UN observation posts and a dilapidated airport into his photo series The Green Line. These are places that separate Northern Cyprus from the Republic of Cyprus. The Green Line, a buffer zone established by the United Nations Peace Keeping Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP) in 1964, is intended to maintain a ceasefire and covers around three per cent of the island. The zone stretches from east to west, shrinks to six metres wide in the capital Nicosia and widens to seven kilometres elsewhere. It separates the Turkish Cypriot north from the Greek Cypriot south. The buffer zone passed through three stages of escalation and isolation.[5] Between 1955 and 1963 there was the so-called ‘Mason-Dixon line’ — barriers between the Greek and Turkish neighbourhoods. British colonisation of the island ended in 1959 with Treaties of London and Zürich Agreements, thanks to which Cyprus gained sovereignty. The second stage of the escalation took place in December 1963, with serious riots that led to a ceasefire agreement and the physical barrier of the Green Line — a semi-open cordon with checkpoints and the ability to close certain areas in the event of conflict. After the Greek military coup and the subsequent occupation of the north by Turkish military forces in the summer of 1974, the buffer zone was closed and fortified, representing the continuing third stage. On 15 November 1983, the parliament of the Turkish Federated State of Cyprus proclaimed its independence, which is not recognised by any UN member except Turkey. As a result, the island’s internal border has been a de facto and not a de jure border since 1974. Attempts at reunification have failed and have no prospect of success. Borders of this kind are provisional and permanent sources of conflict.

Fig.  1: Heinrich Völkel: UN buffer zone, Airport Lefkosia, Nicosia, 2012. A former international airport with the decommissioned Hawker Siddeley Trident of Cyprus Airways. The airport was between the fronts during the fighting and has been closed ever since. Photo from The Green Line series. Copyright Heinrich Völkel/Ostkreuz

Heinrich Völkel took photographs in deserted villages, in Nicosia and its natural surroundings in the border area. Völkel sought traces of the island’s partition. The pictures show barricaded streets and rooms lined with barbed wire and loopholes as well as a green mountain ridge, which is named as a UN observation post in the title of OSTKREUZ’s picture.[6] The border between the north and south appears in all the pictures, evoking a formerly united island. The motif of Nicosia International Airport, which ceased operation in 1974 due to the conflict and is now located within the buffer zone, provides an example. In one picture, we see a plane, derelict and gutted, with smashed windows, missing doors, a dirty surface and barbed wire (figure 1). The aircraft belonged to Cyprus Airways and is still parked at the defunct airport in Nicosia. The airline lost two planes and the airport infrastructure as a result of the war. Lakarna military airport in the south, which was expanded in the same year, and Ercan airport in the north have been used since the island’s partition. Another picture shows a waiting room on the airport grounds. The room is dilapidated, the seat cushions and the floor are littered with bird droppings (figure 2). The photographs confirm the absence of something once present. Half a century has passed since the buffer zone was established, and the images show that this provisional and persistent condition has become permanent without resolution. Völkel’s visual language shows that nothing remains of the former coexistence but absence. Constance de Gourcy describes this emptiness and absence as a ‘double presence’, which results in an ambivalent relationship between two sides: […] absence is not only the opposite of presence as might be suggested by the overtaking — which is also a replacement — of the ‘double absence’ by the ‘double presence’, but an institution of meaning which defines a system of places and relational modalities between members geographically distant from a given collective.[7]

Fig.  2: Heinrich Völkel: UN buffer zone, Airport Lefkosia, Nicosia, 2012. Waiting room of the unused airport. Photo from The Green Line series. Copyright Heinrich Völkel/Ostkreuz.

According to De Gourcy, the experience of absence, which inevitably arises through migration and border crossings, is generated by the missing or the stranger and their relationship to the original place across distances.[8] In relation to Cyprus, the absence of each group in the other creates a connection between them. From 1963 onwards, the populations segregated, with Turkish Cypriots relocating to the north and the Greek Cypriots moving south or leaving the island altogether. Evidence of this relocation remains, and Heinrich Völkel focused on the gaps left by this absence. For example, the classroom covered with straw and a blackboard in the centre of the picture with a quote by Kemal Atatürk: ‘Ne mutlu Türküm diyene’ – ‘Happy is the one who calls himself/herself a Turk’ (figure 3). The abandoned school is located in the south and was being used as a cattle shed at the time of the photo. The inscription on the blackboard is an oath that was used in Turkish schools to instil children with Turkish nationalist sentiment.

Fig.  3: Heinrich Völkel: Pitargou, Cyprus (South), 2012. School building of the abandoned Turkish-Cypriot village of Pitargou. Photo from The Green Line series. Copyright Heinrich Völkel/Ostkreuz.

The picture simultaneously documents the former presence of a Turkish Cypriot population in the south as well as a failed multi-ethnic reality that could have obtained in Cyprus after its independence. In the repurposed classroom, Atatürk’s sentence seems like a curse. Völkel’s photographs of the internal Cypriot border not only show the moment when the photograph was taken and the status quo of this border; they also point to a past in which two groups lived in the same place. Heinrich Völkel’s photographic practice is documentary, and he works in series: ‘Only this sorting and arranging approach to the material turns images of non-pictorial realities into documentation’.[9] He conducts field research by capturing places, perspectives and motifs of a topographical border. A single photograph does not seem to do this justice. The images document a moment and, following Barthes, are a repetition of ‘what has been’.[10] In Camera Lucida, Barthes describes the past tense of what is shown: The Photograph is an extended, loaded evidence — as if it caricatured not the figure of what it represents (quite the converse) but its very existence. The image, says phenomenology, is an object-as-nothing. Now, in the Photograph, what I posit is not only the absence of the object; it is also, by one and the same movement, on equal terms, the fact that this object has indeed existed and that it has been there where I see it.[11] In Völkel’s photograph, the past is doubly present: there is the moment of the photograph in which the classroom was used as a cattle shed and the reference to a more distant past of the classroom as a place of teaching and educating Turkish children. Völkel refers to two periods: before and since the division of Cyprus.

The ambivalent character of ‘green borders’

Can a border be everywhere? Border studies since the 1990s have called for a transition from a geopolitical to a biopolitical definition of borders, according to which the focus shifts to people and their perception. Biopolitical borders demand a pluralised view, as Nick Vaughan-Williams, for example, puts it: ‘[B]orders are not natural, neutral nor static but historically contingent, politically charged, dynamic phenomena that first and foremost involve people and their everyday lives’.[12] Especially when it comes to topographies, borders are a difficult phenomenon to depict, but a fascinating one, as they consist more of practices than of motifs. And yet in art we see the motifs of built architecture, such as walls and fences as well as green borders, such as mountains and seas that are also international borders. In the history of art, the pictorial beauty of landscapes is usually a sign of aesthetic, romantic and sublime observations that offer an impression of nature. The invisibility of borders in landscape images reinforces their ambivalent character and implies the political utilisation of nature. When looking at the pictures, the apparent naturalness of ‘green borders’ is disturbed, as the art reveals political borders in natural settings as constructions. In other words, a border only becomes visible in its function as such in connection with the idea of traversing it. In the case of Cyprus, Heinrich Völkel’s works show that transfer and exchange across the border has been at a standstill for decades.
[1] Steffen Mau, Sortiermaschinen: Die Neuerfindung der Grenze im 21. Jahrhundert (München: C.H. Beck, 2021), 19. [2] Anke Hoffmann, 'Border Sampling – oder von hier nach hier', in Nevin Aladağ. Border Sampling, ed. Matthias Lenz and Regina Michel (Friedrichshafen: Rober Gessler, 2011), 5. This work was published in conjunction with an eponymous exhibition at the Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen, 21 October–4 December 2011. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are by the author. [3] Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’epoque de Philippe II. (Paris: Armand Colin, 1949). [4] OSTKREUZ — Agentur der Fotografen, Über Grenzen = On borders (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012), exhibition catalogue for Über Grenzen, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 9 November – 31 December 2012; Deutsches Hygiene-Museum Dresden, 17 May – 11 August 13. [5] Jon Calame and Esther Charlesworth, Divided Cities. Belfast, Beirut, Jerusalem, Mostar, and Nicosia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 123. [6] OSTKREUZ — Agentur der Fotografen, Über Grenzen, 132. [7] Constance De Gourcy, 'The Institutionalization of Absence in the Mediterranean', Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée, 2018, http://journals.openedition.org/remmm/11687. [8] Gourcy, 'The Institutionalization of Absence'. [9]Renate Wöhrer, 'Die Kunst des Dokumentierens. Zur Genealogie der Kategorie "dokumentarisch"', in Beyond evidence. Das Dokument in den Künsten, ed. Daniela Hahn (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2016), 45-57. [10] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida. Reflections of Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 85. [11] Barthes, Camera Lucida, 115. [12] Nick Vaughan-Williams, Border Politics. The Limits of Sovereign Power (Edinburgh: University Press, 2009), 1.
bibliography
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Reflections of Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Braudel, Fernand. La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’epoque de Philippe II. Paris: Armand Colin, 1949. Calame, Jon and Esther Charlesworth. Divided Cities. Belfast, Beirut, Jerusalem, Mostar, and Nicosia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Gourcy, Constance De. 'The Institutionalization of Absence in the Mediterranean'. Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée, 2018, 1-12. http://journals.openedition.org/remmm/11687. Hoffmann, Anke. 'Border Sampling – oder von hier nach hier'. In Nevin Aladağ. Border Sampling, edited by Matthias Lenz and Regina Michel,  Friedrichshafen: Rober Gessler, 2011. Mau, Steffen. Sortiermaschinen: Die Neuerfindung der Grenze im 21. Jahrhundert. München: C.H. Beck, 2021. OSTKREUZ — Agentur der Fotografen. Über Grenzen = On borders. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012. Vaughan-Williams, Nick. Border Politics. The Limits of Sovereign Power. Edinburgh: University Press, 2009. Wöhrer, Renate. 'Die Kunst des Dokumentierens. Zur Genealogie der Kategorie "dokumentarisch"'. In Beyond evidence. Das Dokument in den Künsten, edited by Daniela Hahn,  Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2016.
citation information:
Yildirim, Samira, 'De facto border. The division of Cyprus in contemporary photography by Heinrich Völkel', Ben Kamis ed. global dis:connect blog. Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, 5 November 2024, https://www.globaldisconnect.org/11/05/de-facto-border-the-division-of-cyprus-in-contemporary-photography-by-heinrich-volkel/.
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5 November 2024
In Blog, Blog 2024

Intermarium: Israel between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea

shaul marmari

Neighbours[1]

Sirens went off in Eilat on 31 October 2023. Soon after, aerial targets were intercepted off the coast of Israel’s southernmost city. The Houthi regime, which controls much of Yemen, subsequently declared that it had attacked Israel in response to the war in Gaza. Since then, the Shiite movement whose slogan calls for ‘death to Israel’ has launched numerous missile and drone strikes against Eilat, while at the same time targeting civilian ships plying the Red Sea. On 20 July 2024, the Israeli air force retaliated by massively bombing Al-Hudaydah. The odd conflict between Yemen and Israel exposes a forgotten geopolitical reality that connects these two seemingly unconnected countries. While direct military conflict between countries situated almost 2000 kilometres apart seems inconceivable, the missiles, drones and aircraft that traverse the Red Sea remind us that both countries adjoin a common body of water. Sharing a sea is more than a geographical detail. After all, water connects more than land does; its surface facilitates movement and allows coastal inhabitants to exchange. Eilat shares not only a landscape with Al-Hudaydah, but also a long history of caravans and dhows that once crisscrossed the region. Today, only traces of these ancient connections remain; the histories of the Bedouin, Sudanese, Eritrean, Ethiopian and Yemeni communities in contemporary Israel evoke old migration routes that antedate the arbitrary borders of nation states. Yet Israel is seldom associated with the Red Sea. Recently, the slogan ‘from the river to the sea’ — referring to the Jordan River and the Mediterranean — has brought other aquatic images into the public discourse. It is especially the Mediterranean that has become the cornerstone of Israel’s self-understanding. The Red Sea, by contrast, seems out of place. Its relative absence from the collective consciousness renders the conflict between Israel and Yemen almost bizarre. Was the Red Sea always absent? Must it remain absent? A rough sketch of Israel’s historical relation to the Red Sea shows that the southern sea once briefly occupied the Israeli mind before it was eclipsed by other maritime visions. This brief history of emersion and suppression can afford new vistas for the contemporary Israeli imagination.

Strategic sea

On 10 March 1949, during the final stages of the First Arab-Israeli War, soldiers of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) raised an impromptu flag over the old British police station in Um al-Rashrash on the Gulf of Aqaba. The iconic photograph of the Ink Flag symbolises the conquest of the territory allocated to the Jewish state by the UN partition plan of 1947. As the forces reached the southernmost point of the newly declared State of Israel, they took control over some 10-kilometre strip of Red Sea coast. Um al-Rashrash would become the site for Israel’s only port city on the Red Sea: Eilat.

Fig. 1: Micha Perry. The Ink-Drawn National Flag. 1949. Government Press Office, https://www.flickr.com/photos/government_press_office/7621028734/.

The Israeli leadership recognised the significance of these territorial gains. Located between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, Israel saw an opportunity to bridge East and West. Israeli leaders let their imagination run riot with ideas about digging a canal to connect both seas — visions that still occasionally resurface.[2] While this fantasy hasn’t materialised, access to the Red Sea was immediately perceived as a strategic asset. David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, spoke highly of the new route leading from Eilat to South and East Asia, where Israel could make new friends. Yet Israel’s optimistic marine visions confronted a gloomy reality. Israel had to share the Red Sea with Egypt, its then-bitterest enemy, which was seeking regional hegemony. Egypt controlled the Straits of Tiran and could close the coveted maritime route leading to Eilat at will. To counter that threat, Israel sought allies around the Red Sea. Besides the remnants of the declining colonial empires, like British Aden and French Djibouti, the Ethiopian Empire proved most valuable once it annexed Eritrea and obtained access to the Red Sea in 1951. Israel and Ethiopia shared not only similar legendary genealogies back to King David but also geopolitical interest of undermining Egyptian hegemony.

Fig. 2: Nadav Mann. An Israeli military advisor (Shmuel Eitan, second from right) in Ethiopia. 1963. National Library of Israel, https://www.nli.org.il/en/images/NNL_ARCHIVE_AL990049703970205171/NLI#$FL79244584.

In this geopolitical situation, the Red Sea became a locus of military, diplomatic and commercial activity. Throughout the first decades of its existence, Israel’s energy was largely directed southwards. Even prosaic transactions, like shipping canned meat from Eritrea to Eilat, became charged with strategic meaning. An incident involving a meat-laden ship sailing from Massawa to Israel in 1954 almost escalated into a full-scale war. Such a war indeed broke out in 1956, when Israel, together with France and the United Kingdom, attacked Egypt and temporarily captured the Sinai Peninsula. From an Israeli perspective, the main objective was to secure freedom of navigation in the Red Sea. This goal continued to dominate Israeli policy in the years leading up to the 1967 war.[3]

Fig. 3: Unknown. The Israel ship ‘Queen of Sheba’ en route from Eilat to Massawa, calling at Sharm al-Shaikh. 1956. Government Press Office, https://gpophotoeng.gov.il/fotoweb/Grid.fwx?search=D329-097#Preview1.

A Red Sea moment

In centralised Israel, state interests trickled down to all spheres of life. Red Sea strategy was accompanied by growing curiosity about that mysterious space, which first had to be mapped and studied. During the brief occupation of the Sinai Peninsula in 1956-57, Israeli marine biologists explored wildlife around Sharm al-Shaikh, while a second expedition made it as far south as the Dahlak islands, off the Eritrean coast, in 1962.[4] A delegation of zoologists and parasitologists travelled to Ethiopia in 1958, followed by two expeditions of geologists, geneticists and physicians. One member of an archaeological expedition to the island of Tiran summarised the relationship between knowledge and power: upon Israel’s founding, the Red Sea straits ‘suddenly acquired military importance’; the events of 1956 ‘afforded opportunities for field study in relative favourable conditions’.[5]

Fig. 4: Benno Rothenberg. A woman looking towards the Gulf of Eilat/Aqaba. undated. National Library of Israel, https://www.nli.org.il/en/images/NNL_ARCHIVE_AL997009858550305171/NLI#$FL169950643).

Beyond scientific knowledge, the military and diplomatic interest inspired literary and artistic engagement with the Red Sea too. Author Nathan Shaham was among the first to have sailed from Eilat to Massawa after the 1956 war, and his impressions from Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia were narrated in the Hebrew travelogue Journey to the Land of Cush, which was colourfully illustrated by artist Shmuel Katz. The renowned Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever too travelled to Eilat and Sinai and was captivated by the landscapes. His poetry after 1949, praised by David Ben Gurion,[6] is permeated with images of wadis, coral reefs and — recurring in his desert poems — a great silence:
In the Sinai Desert, on a cloud of granite Sculpted by the Genesis-night, Hewn of black flame facing the Red Sea, I saw the Great Silence.[7]
For a moment, then, the Red Sea — its shores, water, landscapes and surrounding cultures — captivated Israelis. They expressed their fascination in various ways, for example through popular music. The folk duo Hillel and Aviva, with their darbuka and homemade flutes, became known for their desert songs; the Arava (steppe) trio recorded country tunes about Hebrew cowboys; and Lior Yeini employed a cool bossa nova to portray the Red Sea reefs as an escape from city life. The song To Eilat (1970) presented the city as a ‘gate to the south’, oriented towards Djibouti, Mombasa and Kolkata. There, the European capitals of Paris and Rome are but a hazy mirage.

Fig. 5: Uncredited. The Sinai Peninsula, taken from the Gemini XI space shuttle. 1966. National Library of Israel, https://www.nli.org.il/en/images/NNL_ARCHIVE_AL990035790120205171/NLI#$FL19169324.

The fascination with the Red Sea intensified after the Six-Day War in 1967, when the IDF defeated the Egyptian army and conquered the Sinai Peninsula, this time with long-term plans. Having more than tripled its size, Israel had become a Red Sea power, ruling over the vast Sinai Desert, the Gulf of Aqaba and the Tiran Straits. While Sinai was not as subject to Messianic projections as was the occupied West Bank — supposedly the heartland of biblical Israel — the conquered desert was similarly envisaged to be populated by Jewish pioneers. As the new frontier aroused an old Zionist passion for colonisation, hundreds of Israeli idealists flocked to Sinai to make the desert bloom. Several Jewish settlements — Ofira (Sharm al-Shaikh), Di Zahav (Dahab) and Neviot (Nuweiba) — concentrated along the Red Sea coast to become centres of fishing and tourism.

Fig. 6: Moshe Marlin Levin. Ofira. 1975. National Library of Israel, https://www.nli.org.il/en/images/NNL_ARCHIVE_AL997008872695805171/NLI#$FL151612284.

Fading space

During those years of occupation, a new Israeli identity began crystalising. In the spirit of the global 1960s and 1970s, the highly militarised territory, with its pristine beaches and solemn deserts, became fertile soil for ideas about nature, free love and recreational drug use. In that geopolitical hotspot, hippie culture merged with Zionist idealism, military duty, Oriental fantasy and biblical myth. Former settlers recall a feeling of idyllic freedom and liberation from modern life.[8]

Fig. 7: Boris Karmi. An Israeli plays the guitar in Nuweiba. 1975. National Library of Israel, https://www.nli.org.il/en/images/NNL_ARCHIVE_AL997009324688405171/NLI#$FL159538630.

The Neviot music festival that took place in Nuweiba in August 1978 marks the climax of Israel’s Red Sea era. Thousands of partygoers travelled to the remote Red Sea settlement to participate in what has often been described as the Israeli Woodstock. Amid the occupied land, they slept under the starry skies, swam naked and danced to Hebrew covers of Stevie Wonder. Singer Mickey Gavrielov recalled being ‘thrown into a world where the experience was different from your familiar reality’.[9] That experience was short-lived. While thousands were dancing in Nuweiba, negotiations between Israel and Egypt were underway. In September, the Camp David Accords were signed, paving the way for Israeli-Egyptian peace. The agreement prescribed that Israel withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula. As Ofira, Neviot and Di Zahav were evacuated, it shrank back to its 10-kilometre strip of Red Sea coast in Eilat. As the leadership was determined not to dwell on the past, Israel’s 15 years in Sinai have largely vanished from the collective memory. The memories of the coral reefs and the barren mountains have faded, kept alive today only by a handful former inhabitants of the evacuated settlements.[10] Once the peace treaty with Egypt ensured safe shipping to and from Eilat, there was no longer any need for Israel to operate militarily or diplomatically in the Red Sea. That Israel’s newfound ally in the region disappeared when Ethiopia sank into a long civil war only diminished the region’s appeal. Without rivals or friends, the Red Sea lost its geopolitical and cultural meaning. As Israeli ships safely plied its waters, the sea became a conduit that moves goods so smoothly that they leave no impression. From a strategic arena, it became a non-issue or ‘non-space’ — a transitory zone without any meaning.[11]

Fig. 8: Sa’ar Ya’acov. The closed gates of the Neviot holiday village shortly before its evacuation. 1982. Israeli Government Press Office, https://gpophotoeng.gov.il/fotoweb/Grid.fwx?search=D320-064#Preview1.

At the same time, Israel turned its gaze elsewhere. In 1978, the year of the Neviot festival, an essay collection by Jacqueline Kahanoff suggested a new direction. Kahanoff, an Egyptian-born Israeli essayist, had previously published a collection of translated African stories, following the Red Sea orientation of the time. Her 1978 book From East the Sun turned away from Africa and the Red Sea towards the Levant. Together with the journal Apirion that has appeared since 1982, the publication marks growing Israeli interest in the Mediterranean.

Mediterraneanism and Erythreanism

Israel has a long history with the Mediterranean. While Zionism turned most of its energy and eros to the land, ‘conquering the sea’ played an important secondary role. In Zionist thought, the conquered water was always the Mediterranean, along whose coastline large Jewish settlements developed. Ultimately, the Mediterranean served as the setting for the Zionist drama of Aliyah, of Jewish migration to the Land of Israel. Fantastic Zionist plans to storm Palestine from the south, from the Red Sea, were overshadowed by the heroic narrative of crossing the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean has featured prominently in Zionist thought, affording Jews ways of belonging to the region while evading the hostility of the Arab and Muslim Middle East. For Israelis who feel trapped in their imagined outpost of Western civilisation, the Mediterranean provides an alternative self-image that is neither entirely Western nor Eastern.[12] Instead, the Mediterranean space emerges as a zone of cosmopolitan, fluid, syncretic identities between East and West. By adopting that kind of Mediterraneanism, the implied argument goes, Israel could forge greater harmony with its neighbours and among its internal divisions. Mediterranean identity contains more than lofty ideas.[13] It suffuses Israeli culture, where Greek music, Turkish mezze and a ‘Mediterranean temper’ are unanimously prized. Feeling thoroughly Mediterranean, Israelis forget or suppress any connection to the Red Sea. That Africa is next door, that Massawa is closer to Eilat than Palermo to Tel Aviv, is ‘cognitively, culturally and politically repressed and denied’.[14] And while the beaches of Eilat are still a popular tourist destination, they are drained of cultural meaning; grandiose attractions like waterparks and skating rinks dominate the landscape. Tellingly, even Eilat’s Queen of Sheba hotel, whose namesake’s kingdom flanked the Red Sea, invites its guests to ‘explore the culinary delights of the Mediterranean’.[15]

Fig. 9: Moshe Milner. Water slide in Eilat. 2005. Israeli Government Press Office, https://gpophotoeng.gov.il/fotoweb/Grid.fwx?search=D927-032#Preview1.

Israeli consciousness appears to have completely shifted away from the Red Sea and towards the Mediterranean. When the geopolitical reality required, however, Israel turned to the Red Sea with military, political, commercial, scientific and cultural enthusiasm. The connections it formed in that space only dissolved when the geopolitical circumstances changed. Israel’s history with the Red Sea is thus one of dis:connection, of globalisation and deglobalisation.[16] But some connections remain. The Negev Bedouin, the Sudanese and Eritrean refugees, the Ethiopian and Yemeni Jewish communities, and the aging hippies of Ofira and Neviot all share affinities to the south. In Eilat, the colloquial designation for flipflops as ‘Djiboutis’ still recalls past ties overseas. The Red Sea need not resurface only in relation to drone and missile strikes; Israel might strike a better balance between Mediterraneanism and Erythreanism.[17]

Fig. 10: Boris Karmi. Nude swimming in Eilat. 1967. National Library of Israel, https://www.nli.org.il/en/images/NNL_ARCHIVE_AL997009325145805171/NLI#$FL159554099.

 
[1] A longer version of this essay appeared in Hebrew in Hazman Hazeh magazine in March 2023 (https://hazmanhazeh.org.il/red-sea/). [2] See, for example, Mordechai Chaziza, 'The Red-Med Railway: New Opportunities for China, Israel, and the Middle East', Begin-Sadat Center Perspectives 385 (11 December 2016). [3] Eitan Barak, 'Between Reality and Secrecy: Israel’s Freedom of Navigation through the Straits of Tiran, 1956–1967', The Middle East Journal 61, no. 4 (2007). [4] Meirav Reuveny, 'The Heinz Steinitz Marine Biology Laboratory in Eilat: Science and Politics between Father and Son', in Dubnow Institute Yearbook, ed. Yfaat Weiss (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018), 486-88. [5] A.P. Schick, 'Tiran: the Straits, the Island, and its Terraces', Israel Exploration Journal 8, no. 2 (1958): 122. [6] Jowita Panczyk, 'Is the War Over Yet?', Shaul Marmari ed. Mimeo: Blog der Doktorandinnen und Doktoranden am Dubnow-Institut, Leibniz-Institut für jüdische Geschichte und Kultur – Simon Dubnow, 18 December 2013, https://mimeo.dubnow.de/is-the-war-over-yet/. [7] Avram Sutzkever, 'The Great Silence', in A. Sutzkever: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Benjamin Harshav (Oakland: University of California Press, 1991), 343. [8] For recent recollections, see Osher Assulin and Yoav Gross. Sinai. Israel: Kan11, 2022. [9] Rachel Neiman, 'Looking back on the 1978 "Woodstock of Israel"', Nicky Blackburn ed. Israel21c, 9 October 2017, https://www.israel21c.org/looking-back-on-the-1978-woodstock-of-israel/. [10] For examples, see the testimonies on http://myofira.com/en [11] Marc Augé, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1995). [12] Yaacov Shavit, 'The Mediterranean World and “Mediterraneanism”: The Origins, Meaning, and Application of a Geo-Cultural Notion in Israel', Journal of Mediterranean Studies 3, no. 2 (1988): 112. [13] Alexandra Nocke, The Place of the Mediterranean in Modern Israeli Identity (Boston Brill, 2009); David Ohana, Israel and Its Mediterranean Identity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). [14] Eitan Bar-Yosef, A Villa in the Jungle: Africa in Israeli Culture (Jerusalem: Van Leer Institute Press and Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2013); Haim Yacobi, Israel and Africa: A Geneaology of Moral Geography (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016). [15] Quoted from http://www.dinearound.eu/en/189/195/132/eilat/hilton_eilat_queen_of_sheba . [16] Roland Wenzlhuemer et al., 'Forum Global Dis:connections', Journal of Modern European History 21, no. 1 (2023) https://doi.org/10.1177/16118944221148939. [17] This point has also been made by Ofri Ilany, 'Israelis Need to Stop Turning Their Backs on the Red Sea', Haaretz (Tel Aviv), 13 May 2016, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2016-05-13/ty-article/0000017f-f571-d044-adff-f7f933f70000.
bibliography
Assulin, Osher and Yoav Gross. Sinai. Israel: Kan11, 2022. Augé, Marc. Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Translated by John Howe. London: Verso, 1995. Bar-Yosef, Eitan. A Villa in the Jungle: Africa in Israeli Culture. Jerusalem: Van Leer Institute Press and Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2013. Barak, Eitan. 'Between Reality and Secrecy: Israel’s Freedom of Navigation through the Straits of Tiran, 1956–1967'. The Middle East Journal 61, no. 4 (2007): 657-79. Chaziza, Mordechai. 'The Red-Med Railway: New Opportunities for China, Israel, and the Middle East'. Begin-Sadat Center Perspectives 385 (11 December 2016). Ilany, Ofri. 'Israelis Need to Stop Turning Their Backs on the Red Sea'. Haaretz (Tel Aviv), 13 May 2016. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2016-05-13/ty-article/0000017f-f571-d044-adff-f7f933f70000. Neiman, Rachel, 'Looking back on the 1978 "Woodstock of Israel"', Nicky Blackburn ed. Israel21c, 9 October 2017, https://www.israel21c.org/looking-back-on-the-1978-woodstock-of-israel/. Nocke, Alexandra. The Place of the Mediterranean in Modern Israeli Identity. Boston Brill, 2009. Ohana, David. Israel and Its Mediterranean Identity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Panczyk, Jowita, 'Is the War Over Yet?', Shaul Marmari ed. Mimeo: Blog der Doktorandinnen und Doktoranden am Dubnow-Institut. Leibniz-Institut für jüdische Geschichte und Kultur – Simon Dubnow, 18 December 2013, https://mimeo.dubnow.de/is-the-war-over-yet/. Reuveny, Meirav. 'The Heinz Steinitz Marine Biology Laboratory in Eilat: Science and Politics between Father and Son'. In Dubnow Institute Yearbook, edited by Yfaat Weiss,  Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018. Schick, A.P. 'Tiran: the Straits, the Island, and its Terraces'. Israel Exploration Journal 8, no. 2 (1958): 120-30. Shavit, Yaacov. 'The Mediterranean World and “Mediterraneanism”: The Origins, Meaning, and Application of a Geo-Cultural Notion in Israel'. Journal of Mediterranean Studies 3, no. 2 (1988): 96-117. Sutzkever, Avram. 'The Great Silence'. Translated by Barbara Harshav and Benjamin Harshav. In A. Sutzkever: Selected Poetry and Prose, edited by Benjamin Harshav,  Oakland: University of California Press, 1991. Wenzlhuemer, Roland, Tom Menger, Valeska Huber, Heidi J. S. Tworek, Sujit Sivasundaram, Simone M. Müller, Callie Wilkinson, Madeleine Herren and Martin Dusinberre. 'Forum Global Dis:connections'. Journal of Modern European History 21, no. 1 (2023): 2-33. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1177/16118944221148939. Yacobi, Haim. Israel and Africa: A Geneaology of Moral Geography. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016.
citation information:
Marmari, Shaul, 'Intermarium: Israel between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea', Ben Kamis ed. global dis:connect blog. Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, 22 October 2024, https://www.globaldisconnect.org/10/22/intermarium-israel-between-the-mediterranean-and-the-red-sea/.
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22 October 2024
In Blog, Blog 2024

Material bleeding: the erasure of Ajami neighbourhood and its evidence on Givat Aliyah/Jabaliyeh Beach

tal hafner

 

In this essay, I look at expressions of historical erasure in the form of environmental colonialism as it appears in the Ajami neighbourhood and on the Givat Aliyah Beach, which is also known in the local Arab community as Jabaliyeh Beach in the city of Yaffo, also known as Yaffa.

Fig. 1: Givat Aliyah / Jabaliyeh Beach (Image: Tal Hafner)

First, some historical background: in 1947 the UN adopted the Partition Plan for Palestine, which certified Israel as an independent state and caused the Israeli War of Independence, known among Palestinians as the Nakba.[1] The city of Yaffo, which is an ancient port city on the Mediterranean shore and one of the most important Arab cities in Palestine, was occupied in 1948. It was annexed to Tel Aviv in 1950 after the war, most of its remaining Arab residents fled their homes while the rest were  concentrated in Ajami, an originally Arab neighbourhood, south of the old city walls. Of about 70 000 Palestinian residents, 5000 remained in Yaffo after 1948.

In 1950 the Absentees’ Property Law was passed in the Knesset, declaring that any person who left their property in Israel or Palestine for up to six months from the beginning of the war would generally forfeit their property to the state of Israel.[2] Palestinians who lived in one neighbourhood in Yaffo and were transferred to Ajami had no rights to their homes, neither the old nor the new.

From 1949 to 1992, the municipality of Tel Aviv-Yaffo had Ajami and the adjacent Jabaliyeh neighbourhood marked for demolition and did not issue any permits for construction or renovation.[3] In accordance with the city plan, between 1960–1985 the municipality demolished large parts of Ajami and re-evacuated some of its residents. Jewish immigrants were settled in the remaining empty houses in Ajami upon arrival to the new state and were given the option to move into a shikkun apartment block (the ‘national housing blocks’ of Israel) in the new south-eastern neighbourhoods of Yaffo after the citrus orchards had been uprooted. At the same time, the Arab residents were forced to live in the wreckage and voids of ruined houses until they were ‘legally’ evicted by various means.[4]

The debris was then dumped on the Ajami coast, accreting into a monstrous district dumping site extending 15 meters above sea level and 200,000 square meters into the sea, which was known as ‘the Garbage Mountain’.[5]

Fig. 2: Works done to strengthen the Kurkar ridge above the beach where old Christian and Muslim cemeteries lie. (Image: Tal Hafner)

In the early 2000’s, an environmental protest led to the site being converted into a park called Midron Park/the Jaffa Slope Park/Mutanazahun Munhader Yaffa, and by 2010 a beautiful landscape obscured the memory of the underlying layers and blocking almost all direct access to the sea in this coastal town that had survived millennia.

Midron Park is not the first case of using greening tactics — a type of environmental colonialism that, in its local Israeli version, turns demolished Palestinian neighbourhoods and villages into aestheticised green lungs and national parks for the leisure of the Israeli public.[6] I still couldn’t help but wonder — why greening? Why not just erase and be done with it?

According to WJT Mitchel, landscape is primarily a multi-sensory physical medium that encompasses codes of cultural meaning and value. He also states that the imperialistic perception sees ‘cultural’ and ‘civilised’ movement into ‘natural’ landscapes as a ‘natural’ process, an inevitable historic ‘development’.[7] Such movement toward creating the Zionist landscape was based on the concept of ‘Making the desert bloom’ (Hafrahat Hashmama). Another expression of this principle is ‘redeeming the land’ (Geulat Hakarka), referring to the need to revive the local environment that has been neglected by the other peoples living on this land since the Jews last left about 2000 years ago.[8] The Zionists needed to see the land as almost non-existent so they can turn it into their new homeland.

The notion of ‘making the desert bloom’ has several potential various historic and cultural sources:

  • In the biblical creation myth, on the third day God created the land and then covered it with vegetation, so bare land is incomplete. Generally, the desert is a place of hardship in the Bible, especially Exodus, in which the Israelites were freed from slavery in Egypt and wandered in the desert for 40 years before arriving to the promised land of Canaan, the land of Israel-to-be.
  • Another biblical reference is from Jeremiah, 2:2:

‘The word of the Lord came to me: “Go and proclaim in the hearing of Jerusalem:

‘This is what the Lord says:

“I remember the devotion of your youth,
how as a bride you loved me
and followed me through the wilderness,
through a land not sown.”’[9]

This is Jeremiah conveying God’s words to the Israelites in Jerusalem, acknowledging the people’s love and commitment to him before arriving in the promised land and surviving all the hardships of the desert.

  • A relatively current possible influence is European folklore and (especially German) forest culture. Until Zionism arose in late 19th-century Europe, the Jewish people were without a country or a plan to acquire one, so there was no folklore about it. Then, as talk about migrating to the promised land started, they absorbed pre-existing folklore and appropriated them.[10]
  • Another current idea about making the desert bloom connects to a broader Zionist motivation to restore what the Jewish people lacked in their diasporic life. This would include returning to the Promised Land, reviving ancient Hebrew as a modern national language and reappropriating the ‘Jewish body that was thought to be weak to break from ascription as ‘the people of the book’. There are countless instances of Zionists making the desert bloom while reappropriating their own bodies, gaining strength through the hard labour in the fields.[11] Another hypothesis by Schama is that the tree roots were the Zionists’ own metaphorical roots. If exile is desert, Israel should be a forest.[12]
  • A further process that coincides with Zionism and has accelerated the greening of the country profusely is the reconceptualisation of the national holiday Tu Bishvat. Tu Bishvat is a date in the Jewish calendar relating to the ripening of the crops that had been negligible. But since the beginning of the 20th century, the Zionist movement has turned it into a national planting holiday, a familial happening of planting all over the country.[13]

All these potential explanations help account for why environmental colonialism was chosen over pure destruction.

Afforestation was one of the first and main actions to take root in this land and green it, taken mainly by the Jewish National Fund, and to this day the JNF is reframing archaeological findings to give them a connection to Jewish ancient history.[14] Most Arab villages in Israel were demolished on purpose, some completely disappeared from  the landscape, but almost half of those villages’ remains have been included in postwar nature reserves and national parks, greened and unknown to most of the passersby on their Saturday family outings.[15]

Coming back to Yaffo, Ajami and the Park, I had no idea about this history of Yaffo, though I was born in Tel Aviv and had lived there most of my life. Only when I moved to one of those shikkun buildings and started visiting Jabaliyeh Beach, which borders the southern part of Midron Park, did I become aware of this history. No, there was no sign, no explanation anywhere, but there was physical material that made me start asking questions.

Over my frequent visits to the beach, I eventually noticed something strange: on the sand, mixed with the seashells, lay all this debris of what seemed to be pieces of homes. Some are tiny, some the size of my palm and some bigger, in all shapes and colours and textures, scattered on the beach but definitely not from the sea.

Fig. 3: Human debris among natural maritime rocks and shells on the beach. (Image: Tal Hafner)

After some physical and theoretical digging, I realised that they came from beneath the park, from what it is still concealing from the time it was the garbage mountain, before it was sterilised and greened. Those pieces were taken by the currents, by nature. They were not dumped there as part of the garbage mountain because, above that section of the coast, blocking the access from the city to the beach, is a Kurkar ridge on which old cemeteries reside that have remained intact since before 1948. These pieces are relics that the park hides — they preserve and recall the absent homes, people, history and culture. They, to this day, carry the city’s trauma, because not only bodies bleed; material can bleed too. The environment retains this collective memory of its prior residents, it unearths them, hiding them in plain sight.

My photographs portray some of these pieces from the beach. I can’t say for sure whether they are from Ajami, but from what I was able to gather about the architectural history of the neighbourhood, they might be.

Fig. 4: Current aerial photo of Yaffo coastline. The cemeteries are on the lower third of the image. Image: Google Maps, 2024.

Though not connected directly, it has become impossible to talk about Jewish-Israeli-Arab-Palestinian conflict without mentioning Hamas’s attack on the Gaza Envelope area on 7 October 2023 and the subsequent Israeli retaliation on Gaza. No greening is happening at the moment, neither as a colonialist tactic nor as a rehabilitation technique; only wreckage, carnage and desperation. Though not symmetrical in scale, human pain and grief are equal anywhere in the world. I wish to end my essay with the hope of peace, freedom and prosperity for all in my homeland and anywhere on this planet.

Fig. 5: A green tile, a fragment of a home, on a beach, part of what was and could still be a paradise. (Image: Tal Hafner)

[1] For an overview of the social climax before and after 1948 in Palestine/Israel, see Dan Rabinowitz and Daniel Monterescu, ‘Reconfiguring the “Mixed Town”: Urban Transformations of Ethnonational Relations in Palestine and Israel’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 40 (2008). For an overview on Jaffa/Tel Aviv and the Jaffa Slope Park specifically, see Naama Meishar, ‘UP/ROOTING: Breaching Landscape Architecture in the Jewish-Arab City’, AJS Review 41, no. 1 (2017); Ravit Goldhaber, ‘”The Jaffa Slope Project”: An Analysis of “Jaffaesque” Narratives in the New Millennium’, Makan: Adalah’s Journal for Land, Planning and Justice 2, The Right to a Spatial Narrative (2010); Sharon Rotbard, White City, Black City: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa, trans. Orit Gat (London: Pluto Press, 2015).

[2] Knesset, ‘Absentees’ Property Law 5710-1950′, (United Nations, 1950). https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-209845/.

[3] Sebastian Wallerstein, Emily Silverman and Naama Meishar, Housing Distress within the Palestinian Community of Jaffa: The end of protected tenancy in absentee owership homes (Technion – Israel Institute of Technology Faculty of Architecture and Planning et al., 2009), 2, https://bimkom.org/eng/wp-content/uploads/Housingdistressjaffa.pdf.

[4] There are three typical reasons for eviction: the death of the initial owner or their legal heirs under certain conditions, illegal renovation or construction (which covered every renovation or construction project because no permits were issued), and failure to pay rent (though many tenants were not aware of the process and lost touch with the representatives of the Israel Land Administration that was in charge of collecting it). See Wallerstein, Silverman and Meishar, Housing Distress, 2-3.

[5] Naama Meishar, ‘In search of meta-landscape architecture: the ethical experience of Jaffa Slope Park’s design’, Journal of Landscape Architecture 7, no. 2 (2012): 12 https://doi.org/10.1080/18626033.2012.746086.

[6] For more about such green erasure, see the works of Na’ama Meishar as well as Noga Kadman, Erased from Space and Consciousness: Israel and the Depopulated Palestinian Villages of 1948, trans. Dimi Reider (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015).and; ‘From Nakba to Return’, Zochrot, 2024, accessed 2024, https://www.zochrot.org/welcome/index/en.

[7] W. J. T. Mitchell, Holy Landscape, ed. Larry Abramson, trans. Rona Cohen (Tel Aviv: Resling 2009), 30, 34.

[8] Kadman, Erased from Space.

[9] ‘Jeremiah 2:2’, in the Bible (NIVUK) (BibleGateway).https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Jeremiah%202&version=NIVUK

[10] Mitchell, Holy Landscape, 72.

[11] Haim Kaufman and Yair Galily, ‘Sport, Zionism and Ideology’, Social Issues in Israel 8 (2009).

[12] Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 14; Mitchell, Holy Landscape, 58.

[13] Amir Mashiach, ‘From Past to Present – An Analysis of the Various Sectors in Modern Israel Based on Jewish Identities from Ancient Times’, Social Issues in Israel 17 (2014): 53.

[14] Kadman, Erased from Space, 42, 70.

[15] Kadman, Erased from Space, 11, 68.

bibliography

Goldhaber, Ravit. ‘”The Jaffa Slope Project”: An Analysis of “Jaffaesque” Narratives in the New Millennium’. Makan: Adalah’s Journal for Land, Planning and Justice 2, The Right to a Spatial Narrative (2010): 47-69.

‘Jeremiah 2:2’. In the Bible (NIVUK): BibleGateway.

Kadman, Noga. Erased from Space and Consciousness: Israel and the Depopulated Palestinian Villages of 1948. Translated by Dimi Reider. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015.

Kaufman, Haim and Yair Galily. ‘Sport, Zionism and Ideology’. Social Issues in Israel 8 (2009): I-VII.

Knesset. ‘Absentees’ Property Law 5710-1950′. United Nations, 1950. https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-209845/.

Mashiach, Amir. ‘From Past to Present – An Analysis of the Various Sectors in Modern Israel Based on Jewish Identities from Ancient Times’. Social Issues in Israel 17 (2014): 38-68.

Meishar, Naama. ‘In search of meta-landscape architecture: the ethical experience of Jaffa Slope Park’s design’. Journal of Landscape Architecture 7, no. 2 (2012): 40-45. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1080/18626033.2012.746086.

———. ‘UP/ROOTING: Breaching Landscape Architecture in the Jewish-Arab City’. AJS Review 41, no. 1 (2017): 89-109.

Mitchell, W. J. T. Holy Landscape. Translated by Rona Cohen. Edited by Larry Abramson. Tel Aviv: Resling 2009.

Rabinowitz, Dan and Daniel Monterescu. ‘Reconfiguring the “Mixed Town”: Urban Transformations of Ethnonational Relations in Palestine and Israel’. International Journal of Middle East Studies 40 (2008): 195-226.

Rotbard, Sharon. White City, Black City: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa. Translated by Orit Gat. London: Pluto Press, 2015.

Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.

Wallerstein, Sebastian, Emily Silverman and Naama Meishar. Housing Distress within the Palestinian Community of Jaffa: The end of protected tenancy in absentee owership homes. (Technion – Israel Institute of Technology Faculty of Architecture and Planning, The Philip M. and Ethel Klutzneck Center for Urban and Regional Studies, The Community Planning Lab, Planners for Planning Rights and BIMKOM, 2009). https://bimkom.org/eng/wp-content/uploads/Housingdistressjaffa.pdf.

‘From Nakba to Return’. Zochrot, 2024 2024, https://www.zochrot.org/welcome/index/en.

citation information:
Hafner, Tal, ‘Material bleeding: the erasure of Ajami neighbourhood and its evidence on Givat Aliyah/Jabaliyeh Beach’, Ben Kamis ed. global dis:connect blog. global dis:connect, 8 October 2024, https://www.globaldisconnect.org/10/08/material-bleeding-the-erasure-of-ajami-neighbourhood-and-its-evidence-on-givat-aliyah-jabaliyeh-beach/.
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8 October 2024