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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
In Blog, Blog 2024

Odyssey of oblivion: a chronicle of displacement from the Kerkennah Islands

rim harmessi
 

Was not the earth of God spacious enough for you to emigrate therein? [1]

  Since 2020, I have frequented Kerkennah Islands — my mother’s homeland — to document illegal migrants’ attempts to reach Europe and follow the traces of their journeys. As destitution drove migrants to a distant shore, the archipelago became a harbour for human trafficking and corpses tainted its beaches with the stench of death.[2]

The Kerkennah Islands

The Kerkennah Islands, located off the coast of Tunisia, have gained notoriety as a transit point for illegal immigration. African migrants converge here, united in the pursuit of a better life in Italy or Malta along the Central Mediterranean route (CMR).[3] The CMR claims hundreds of lives each year, accounting for more than 90 per cent of deaths in the Mediterranean in 2016.[4] Tunisia is bearing the brunt of this tragedy, with 729 deaths in 2023. The majority of which occurred off the coasts of Sfax (349) and Kerkennah (140).[5]

A different view on migration

Being from the island, it has always held a primal allure for me. I envision it as a place of genesis where generations of mothers reach back to the source: the first mother and universal woman. Instinctively, the only compelling commentary on what was taking place on its shores lay in the voices and experiences of women. And while the hardship of the crossing is shared by all who attempt it, the gender-based vulnerability makes it riskier for women, who make up half the world's refugees and are disproportionately susceptible to abuse. UN statistics reveal that 60 per cent of preventable maternal deaths occur in humanitarian settings, and an estimated one in five refugee or displaced women have endured sexual violence.[6] Personal narratives in the form of documentary photography have helped tackle migration issues. Images of people with distinct names and faces, crying mothers in the chaos of capsized vessels and lifeless babies washing ashore next to striped parasols are potent tools for fundraising and policy-reform appeals. But is there a different approach in the same medium, one that would resonate with equal force. My work explores the narratives beyond immediate emotional effects. The focus shifts from ‘the displaced woman’ as a singular entity to the concept of displacement and how women actually experience it. These faceless figures embody the collective experience, and the lack of identification reflects the marginalisation that migrants face as their identities are replaced with the ‘Migrant Persona’.

Imperfections as narrative

Analogue photography is the medium that gives this project its voice. Shot primarily in the Kerkennah Islands, the work embraces the imperfections inherent in 35mm film. Scratches, light leaks, missing frames, faded hues and occasional blurs all complement the themes of absence that permeate the narrative. Further amplifying this concept are deliberate technical and chemical manipulations. Double and triple exposures, premature stops, bleaching, burning, etc. emphasise erosion and erasure, implying a sense of discontinuity. This exploration extends beyond the captured image. Collage and textual footnotes are also visual elements suggesting that absences define the Mediterranean as a fluid border. My aim is to transcend mere documentation, for it is insufficient to understand the psychological complexities of flight. I aspire to unveil and reimagine the feminine migration journey from the islands where I took the photographs. In four chapters, each echoing a specific location, emotional state and pivotal step in this odyssey, the narrative unfolds in a linear fashion, mimicking a traveller's physical journey. A fixed point of departure contrasts with the open-ended unknown in every clandestine voyage.

Chapter 1 LAND: SCENES FROM THE ISLAND

The first chapter depicts the point of departure. Earthy tones dominate the scenes, evoking a sense of connection to one's roots. These are not the perfect vistas commonly associated with Kerkennah, the vibrant tourist destination. Instead, the focus shifts to the marginalised scenery, easily overlooked by those seeking the allure of orange sunsets and glistening waters. Here, amidst the seemingly ordinary, lies the hidden face of the place that bears the invisible scars of human exodus. Vast, empty and abandoned spaces (Fig. 01) symbolise the vacancy that coexists with the buzz on the island. They underscore the duality of presence and absence, the actual scarcity and perceived abundance, and reflect the substitution of the land's fertility with aridity.

Fig. 01: Abandoned car, Kerkennah (2020), 35mm colour film, digital scan.

Double and triple exposures (Fig. 02) are visual metaphors to convey coexisting yet contrasting realities. The serene island life, steeped in tradition and governed by the quotidian rhythms, contrast with the ‘criminal’ world that emerges mainly after dark.

Fig. 02: Shore , Kerkennah (2021), 35mm colour film, digital scan.

  Any sense of belonging is fleeting, a mirage shimmering in the desert. The land offers no solace, no promise of a future. This chapter serves not as a haven but as a crucible to steel travellers for the journey.

Chapter 2

WATER: FIRST CONTACT WITH THE MEDITERRANEAN

The second chapter explores what it means to be a woman on such a journey. This overflows with a feminine presence. The concept of vessel-like entities is explored through the philosophy of inner and outer spaces. The outward journey is mirrored by the physical vessel, the ship, braving the elements. The inward journey is embodied by the female form, a vessel carrying the weight of the unknown (Fig. 03). Both journeys converge towards a shared destination.

Fig. 03: Woman chained , Kerkennah (2021), 35mm colour film, digital scan.

I have further manipulated some film. Bleaching, for example, dissolves colour so that the bleached area appears white in the negative and black in the print (Fig. 04). This erasure reinforces the theme of absence, exploring the transit from a place where the migrant was once present to a void through a visual metaphor for disappearance. Infiltrating a new space blends into the act of vanishing from the old one. The profound loss created by these journeys is often overlooked. The physical absence from one’s home, the replacement of familiarity with fear and estrangement, the emotional void left behind for loved ones and the silencing of the harrowing migrant experiences all add another layer of absence. Migration itself becomes a catalyst for absence, the severing of ties to surroundings and social connections is a journey into a liminal space, a state of being neither here nor there. The origin leaves an echo in memory even after physical departure. It is not merely a geographic point but a nexus of experiences, emotions and histories.

Fig. 04: Bleached away, Kerkennah (2021), 35mm colour film , digital scan (Post processing: bleaching of the negative).

  While tension and anxiety permeate this chapter, the island is not as gloomy as the journey would suggest. Those not compelled to escape experience its vibrancy and charm with postcard-worthy sunsets and sunrises (Fig. 05). Not all enjoy that luxury. Postcolonial conditions, exploitation and discriminatory migration policies condemn entire regions to cycles of poverty and deprivation. For many women, the island could never be anything more than a sojourn. Philosophical meditations on absence take on a new dimension when juxtaposed with the harsh reality of the Mediterranean as a colonial sea.[7] Gaps and voids are geo-politically relevant, defining the experience of those who traverse it.

Fig. 05: Postcard series , Kerkennah (2021), 35mm colour film , digital scan.

 

Chapter 3

PILGRIMAGE: THE JOURNEY WITHIN AND AT SEA

  Traversing the central Mediterranean can take several days. This section examines the heart of the voyage. Fully in black and white, it reflects the sacred nature of this transformation as a testament of faith and resilience. Each soul will emerge renewed, irrevocably altered and absolved.

Fig. 06: Mother and Son (2022), Black & White 35 mm film, digital scan.

  Black-and-white photography detaches itself from reality by stripping away vibrant hues, and it feels surreal because we experience the world in colour. But in this narrative, such detachment is necessary for the metaphor to sink in. We witness not the singular struggle of one migrant, nor a solitary woman's plight. Instead, this chapter is about a cluster of migrant women from several backgrounds aiming at the same end. Therefore, we must transcend individual journeys, aiming instead for a global phenomenon encompassing the full range of roles women play from daughter to mother and everything in between (Fig. 06).

Fig. 07: Parts of a sum (2021), Black & white 35 mm film. Intentional light leaks, digital scan (in-camera processing, light leaking).

  The narrative embraces intentional light leaks while photographing, mimicking water effects (Fig. 07). Fragmented portrayals of the female form are deliberate, as their sum may allow reconstruction of the body that once left the shore.

Fig. 08: Sum of parts (2021), Black & white 35 mm film. Intentional light leaks, digital scan (in-camera processing, light leaking).

  The experience and the tragedy remain obscure from the outside, but we yet hope that the vessels reach their destination whole ( Fig. 08).

Chapter 4

THE GREAT BEYOND: ARRIVAL OR LACK THEREOF

 

Fig. 09: Blouse on shore, Kerkennah (2021), 35mm colour film , digital scan.

The seemingly straightforward concept of arrival gains complexity on this trip. What does this hard-won destination signify for the individual? And for those lost at sea, claimed by the fear that haunted their journey, arrival is a grim fulfilment of prophecy. How do the adventurer and the observer grasp this notion (Fig. 09)? From the European perspective, the Mediterranean remains a frontier, a line dividing ‘us’ from ‘them’.[8] Eurocentric narratives paint the region with a broad brush, privileging the protection-worthy global North over the struggling South. This fosters not only the erasure of entire cultures through continued colonial marginalisation, but also a stark dichotomy in the perception of the same absence, referring to the migrants’ absence as well as that of the destination’s inhabitants.

Fig. 10: Gaze (2022), 35mm colour film, digital scan.

  Even in the celebrated kind of arrival, a disquieting truth lingers. Crossing this fluid border disorients identity, expanding beyond measure the emotional rift caused by the severance of intimate ties with land, people and perhaps life itself (Fig. 10). This project began as a personal odyssey, a quest to grasp the complexities of womanhood, the trauma of displacement and the resilience of the migrant spirit. I sought to illuminate, through the lens of femininity, secret journeys across the Mediterranean Sea (Fig. 11). Ultimately, however, the exploration raised more questions than answers.

Fig. 11: Womanhood (2022), 35mm colour film , digital scan.

Yet a single question persists. And it is essential. And it is relentless: Where did she go? And what should we do about it?     [1] Quran. 'Surah An-Nisa [The Women] 4:97', in The Qu'ran: Arabic Text with Corresponding English Meaning, ed. and trans. Saheeh International (1997). [2] For more on this tragic pattern, see 'Four bodies recovered off Tunisia following migrant boat accident', 2022, accessed 15 May 2024, https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/45687/four-bodies-recovered-off-tunisia-following-migrant-boat-accident; 'Tunisia: Navy recovers seven bodies from Mediterranean Sea', 2023, accessed 15 May 2024, https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/51170/tunisia-navy-recovers-seven-bodies-from-mediterranean-sea; 'Tunisia recovers around 210 bodies of migrants', 2023, accessed 15 May 2024, https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/48625/tunisia-recovers-around-210-bodies-of-migrants. [3] Liska Wittenberg, Managing Mixed Migration: The Central Mediterranean Route to Europe (New York: International Peace Institute 2017). [4]  'Tunisia's Kerkennah Islands: A land for smuggling', The New Arab, 2018, accessed 2 June 2024, https://www.newarab.com/analysis/tunisias-kerkennah-islands-land-smuggling. [5] Riman Abouelhassan, Middle East and North Africa: Migrants Deaths [sic] and Disappearances in 2023,  (United Nations Migration, IOM, 2024). [6] 'Women refugees and migrants', UN Women, accessed 30 June 2024, https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/in-focus/women-refugees-and-migrants. [7] M. Borutta, & S. Gekas, ‘A Colonial Sea: the Mediterranean’, 1798–1956. European Review of History: Revue Européenne d’histoire (2012). [8] Michael A. Kozakowski, 'Making “Mediterranean Migrants”: Geopolitical Transitions, Migratory Policy, and French Conceptions of the Mediterranean in the 20th Century', Cahiers de la Méditerranée 89 (2014) 10.4000/cdlm.7776.
bibliography
Abouelhassan, Riman. Middle East and North Africa: Migrants Deaths [sic] and Disappearances in 2023: United Nations Migration, IOM, 2024. 'Tunisia's Kerkennah Islands: A land for smuggling'. The New Arab, 2018, accessed 2 June 2024, https://www.newarab.com/analysis/tunisias-kerkennah-islands-land-smuggling. 'Four bodies recovered off Tunisia following migrant boat accident'. 2022, accessed 15 May 2024, https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/45687/four-bodies-recovered-off-tunisia-following-migrant-boat-accident. Kozakowski, Michael A. 'Making “Mediterranean Migrants”: Geopolitical Transitions, Migratory Policy, and French Conceptions of the Mediterranean in the 20th Century'. Cahiers de la Méditerranée 89 (2014): 181-93. https://doi.org/10.4000/cdlm.7776. 'Surah An-Nisa [The Women] 4:97'. Edited and Translated by Saheeh International. In The Qu'ran: Arabic Text with Corresponding English Meaning, 1997. 'Tunisia recovers around 210 bodies of migrants'. 2023, accessed 15 May 2024, https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/48625/tunisia-recovers-around-210-bodies-of-migrants. 'Tunisia: Navy recovers seven bodies from Mediterranean Sea'. 2023, accessed 15 May 2024, https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/51170/tunisia-navy-recovers-seven-bodies-from-mediterranean-sea. Wittenberg, Liska. Managing Mixed Migration: The Central Mediterranean Route to Europe. New York: International Peace Institute 2017. 'Women refugees and migrants'. UN Women, accessed 30 June 2024, https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/in-focus/women-refugees-and-migrants.  
citation information
Harmessi, Rim, 'Odyssey of oblivion: a chronicle of displacement from the Kerkennah Islands', Ben Kamis ed. global dis:connect blog. global dis:connect, 24 September 2024, https://www.globaldisconnect.org/09/24/odyssey-of-oblivion-a-chronicle-of-displacement-from-the-kerkennah-islands/.
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24 September 2024
In Blog, Blog 2024

Picturing the sea of absence

florian bachmeier
  In my work as a documentary photographer, particularly in my reports on refugees and their escape and migration routes from the Mediterranean and the war in Ukraine, I have consistently explored the theme of absence. Initially perhaps unconsciously, and later more deliberately, this concept became a central motif. Photography is a powerful tool, capable of evoking profound emotional reactions and shaping narrative discourses. As a medium, photography has an inherently intimate relationship with the concept of absence. Absence in photography refers to the deliberate omission or lack of elements in an image that one might ordinarily expect to find. This approach can serve various conceptual purposes and is intentionally used to achieve a specific effect. By omitting certain elements, photographers can amplify the significance of the objects that are present, guiding the viewer's perception. Absence in photography thus also fulfils a narrative function. In documentary photography, for instance, the absence of people in a place that would usually be bustling with activity can powerfully comment on social, political and emotional states. This absence can evoke feelings of isolation, loss and emptiness, prompting deeper reflection. It serves as a blank space, a hint of what is not visible in the image. It challenges viewers to think about the unseen and the unspoken. The blank space metaphorically represents absence or what is past and transient. Absence in photography creates a potent aesthetic impact. The presence of absence is, in a sense, the full stop, the ‘sudden awakening’ in the sense of Roland Barthes,[1] in many of my photographs.

Fig. 1: The horizon stretches across the sea off Lesbos Island, embodying the profound absence left behind by those who once sought refuge on its shores. Lesbos, Greece, 2017 (Image by the author)

Since my stays and travels to the hotspots of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in the Mediterranean, I have been deeply engaged with these concepts as a photographer. Through my images from places like Idomeni, the transit camp in northern Greece, the Moria camp on the Greek island of Lesbos, warehouses in the Serbian capital Belgrade, refugee shelters in Bulgaria and the Spanish enclave Ceuta on the African continent, I strive to document and analyse absences. Absence here is not only the physical lack of something but also the emotional, social and cultural void created by flight, displacement and migration.

Fig. 2: Amid the barbed wire and bleak surroundings of Idomeni camp, the absence of certainty and stability hangs heavily over the refugees waiting at the closed border. Idomeni, Greece, 2016 (Image by the author)

The meaning of absence

Absence, at its core, is a state or feeling of lack. When one considers the inhumane conditions in the camps, this lack or absence, the shattered hopes and the associated pain become particularly visible. The absence or loss of home, security, family, belonging and identity. In the worst cases, it is the absence of any hope. These absences are tangible and experiential both physically and psychologically. Photography can capture and depict these absences profoundly. I think of the emptiness and hopelessness in the eyes of many individuals portrayed and the bleak, chaotic landscapes of camps like Idomeni or Moria, which seem to gnaw like festering wounds at their surroundings. Pieces of torn clothing on barbed wire fences and other obstacles, faded photographs of those left behind or deceased, abandoned belongings left by those who had no choice but to leave their previous lives behind. Possessions lost on the run or hoarded in a drenched tent. Traces of escape through hostile territory. Motifs that represent and symbolically condense absence, repeating themselves in varied yet similar forms, becoming a constant that runs through the situation of refugees and their flight.

Fig. 3: Empty blankets and drenched sleeping bags, painting a poignant picture of absence in the heart of the refugee camp. Idomeni, Greece, 2016 (Image by the author)

Susan Sontag argued that images, photographs, have the power to haunt us and elicit emotional reactions, something pure narrative storytelling often fails to achieve.[2] She describes the haunting quality of photographs that penetrate deeply into our consciousness, compelling us to reflect on what we see. I hope that my images from these camps and of the people I have been able to accompany on their journeys will ultimately serve not just as mere records but as windows into the reality of these people who otherwise remain largely invisible. They hopefully challenge viewers to confront the harsh reality of refugees and their flight, grasping the intolerable absences that shape their lives. Perhaps photography can thus serve as an alternative, complementary method to highlight, investigate and reflect on such dissociations and absences. Traditional sociological investigations rely on empirical and quantitative methods to collect and analyse data. But do these methods capture the deeper emotional and psychological dimensions of these existential human experiences? Here, photography as a medium can be a valuable complement. It can make the invisible visible, showing gaps and voids created by absences and document them. Camps like Idomeni or Moria are places where absence is omnipresent. The people who have to live in these camps have fled their home countries to escape war, persecution and poverty. They have left everything behind — houses, apartments, possessions. Often, they have lost loved ones. They have often experienced the unspeakable, carrying deep traumas with them. Arriving in one of these camps, they find themselves in a sort of limbo, a space between the past they have left behind and a future that remains uncertain. Many images from these contexts, including my own, depict people living in cramped spaces under often unbearable conditions, in cold, in extreme heat, without access to vital and basic services, without access to clean water, food and basic medical care.

Fig. 4: In the dim confines of a Belgrade warehouse, traumatised refugee Mohammed washes in freezing temperatures, the stark absence of safety and home evident in his solitary ritual. Belgrade, Serbia, 2017 (Image by the author)

Absences in refugee camps and other locations along migration routes refer pragmatically but primarily to the lack of resources necessary for a commodious life. There is often no medical care, injuries often remain untreated or are inadequately treated, chronic illnesses go untreated, and the lack of psychological support exacerbates the trauma many refugees have experienced and suffered. On migration routes and in camps, there is also a constant, often life-threatening lack of security. Extreme cold, constant rain and the outbreak of a fire like in Moria often have catastrophic consequences. Violence, abuse and exploitation are widespread. Security forces, where present, are often unable to adequately protect the residents. Women and children are particularly at risk and often suffer from sexual harassment and abuse. The sanitary conditions in the camps and informal settlements along migration routes are often catastrophic. There is no sanitation. As previously mentioned, there is a lack of professional psychosocial support and networks to provide mutual support. Conflicts between people of different nationalities often occur. All this exacerbates the burdens refugees already face. Many suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety disorders. These absences have serious impacts on individuals and communities. They undermine human dignity and worsen the already precarious living conditions of refugees and those in flight. In some of my photographs, I depict the architecture of makeshift, hastily erected shelters that often provide no protection. I show people who have to live in hiding, who must remain invisible. I show their sparse meals, their torn clothes, their injuries, the effects of violence and the hardships they endured during their escape. There are images of blankets, drenched sleeping bags, camps in inhospitable areas, pictures of worn-out children's shoes—a sad reminder of a childhood denied to the wearers of these shoes, likely to remain thus. Images that tell of a lives in a constant state of emergency in the sense of Giorgio Agamben,[3] particularly relevant in this context and these places: a situation where seemingly normal laws and rights are suspended in response to a crisis, creating a space where human rights are systematically suspended. Especially the camps exist in a state of lawlessness, operating as legal grey zones, and this state of emergency has long become the norm. Ideally, images evoke emotional reactions — this, at least, is my hope and drive as a photographer — and make the absence of normality, of safety palpable. They hopefully speak a clear language and show the deep scars caused by this life on the run. Can photographs, as visual stimuli, evoke affective responses? Can they compel viewers to engage with the situations they depict, to connect with the people in these images? Images are a bridge between viewers and refugees, who are otherwise only perceived as abstract numbers in statistics.   [1] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida. Reflections of Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). [2] Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973). [3] Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
bibliography
Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Reflections of Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973.  
citation information
Bachmeier, Florian, 'Picturing the sea of absence', Ben Kamis ed. global dis:connect blog. Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, 10 September 2024, https://www.globaldisconnect.org/09/10/picturing-the-sea-of-absence/.
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10 September 2024
In Blog, Blog 2024

The shore of humanity

jonathan jonsson
  This article shows how the Mediterranean Sea became a symbol for involuntary exile and the war-time disintegration of reality in the works of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.[1] Endlessly rolling waves express the uncertain and undulating lives of Palestinians exiled from their native soil. A horizon without land illustrates the inability of the displaced and traumatised to visualise a future. Rejecting this disintegration, Darwish used poetry to turn the sea of exile into a space of agency and re-creation.

Fig. 1: A young Mahmoud Darwish in Cairo. (Photo: Al Akbar)

This analysis builds on my previous phenomenological analysis of Palestinian literature.[2] I also draw on mediaeval Arabic philosophy and Anette Månsson’s work[3] to show how Darwish uses language to construct a new world out of chaos, making sense of his frequent allusions to religious and historical texts. In his poetry, Darwish employs what historian Peter Burke calls a ‘polyphonic history’,[4] oscillating between the distant and near, the foreign and known. The story of Palestine is both ancient and modern, sacred and profane, narrated by contrasting but interwoven voices. Passages from the Torah, the Gospels and the Quran as well as Mesopotamian and Greek myth echo synchronously in his poetry.[5] In September of 1982, Mahmoud Darwish was forced to cross the Mediterranean: a displacement painful enough to tear his world into pieces. For 10 years, he had lived in Beirut, a city he came to love. The Lebanese capital had been home to tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees since their forced expulsion in 1948, when the state of Israel was established. In addition to housing refugees, Beirut had become the cultural capital of Palestinian intellectuals in exile as well as the base of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). This Palestinian presence was perceived as a threat by certain Lebanese groups. In 1975, tension between Lebanese Christian militias and Palestinian armed groups exploded into violence, triggering a 15-year civil war.[6] Israel was one of several foreign powers that intervened, eventually launching a full-scale invasion, besieging Beirut in the summer of 1982. For seven weeks, the city was bombarded from sea, air and land. Thousands of civilians died, and the city’s scars remain visible today. In August, Israel attained their goal. The PLO fled the city. Mahmoud Darwish followed them to Tunisia in September. The siege was an apocalyptic event for the poet, and he experienced the final departure as the end of his world. In his autobiographical Dhākira li-l-nisyān (Memory for Forgetfulness) from 1986,[7] Darwish uses the Mediterranean as a symbol of existential nothingness, the final frontier of total emptiness stretching out in front of the displaced person, offering no visible future. He compares the ships full of Palestinians leaving Beirut to the biblical flood:
And in a short while, we shall travel to it [the sea], in the modern ships of Noah, to a blueness that leads to an unending whiteness, that reveals no shore. Where to.. Where in the ocean will the ocean take us?[8]
Dhākira li-l-nisyān describes one day in August during the height of the siege, when the Israeli forces unleashed all available firepower on the city in order to compel a surrender. In the fractured and fragmented book, part autobiography, part prose poem, part intertextual experiment, the reader enters Darwish’s mind as the world dissolves around him. Eventually, he accepts that despite all steadfastness and refusal, he will have to surrender to the sea. As he goes to bed at the end of the day, the final words of the book are:
The sea walks in the streets. The sea hangs from the windows and the branches of dried out trees. The sea descends from the sky and enters the room. Blue.. White.. Foam.. Waves. I do not love the sea.. I do not want the sea, because I do not see a shore, or a dove. I do not see anything in the sea except the sea. I do not see a shore. I do not see a dove.[9]
In Genesis 8:11, Noah waits for a dove to return with a sign that there is once again land above the water. In referencing the biblical flood, Darwish is watching the horizon, seeing only more water. No shore. No dove. The imagery of the flood does more than describe his sense of dislocation. All the world seems turned into water, even the windows and the branches of trees. Darwish belonged to a generation raised on the ideals of Arab nationalism, which included the promise of a future in which the postcolonial Arab nation-states would come together, eventually liberating Palestine. This dream faded slowly and painfully in the latter half of the 20th century. The United Arab Republic of Syria and Egypt ended in 1961 after only three years. Israel won a major victory in 1967, shocking the Arab world and inciting the ongoing occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. In 1979, Egypt signed a peace agreement with Israel. The Lebanese Civil War was the final blow to the dream of unity, as Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese factions fell on each other in overlapping conflicts and brutal massacres. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon during this civil war is characterised by literary scholar Stephan Guth as the ‘total collapse of all hope’[10] among Arabic intellectuals. Under this flood lay the mutilated remains of the hopes and ideals on which Darwish was raised. The truths that structured his old reality had slowly fractured over the previous two decades, cleaving his world. In 1982, he found himself in an unfamiliar world where all ideals seemed hollow, and all structure was lost. All that remained was the chaos of foaming waves, tossing him around without the promise of a shore or a dove. However, a cosmic flood is not merely an end. The waters also carry the seeds of a new world. Like the roaring primordial chaos in mythologies around the world, his sea contained the potential for creation.[11] For Darwish, this was only possible if intellectuals finished the job of dismantling the old world. Meditating on the role of writers in times of war in Dhākira li-l-nisyān, he writes:
It is fitting that we honour the awe which these hours are unfolding, the hours in which human existence is transferred from one shore to another, and from one time (ṭawr) to another. And it is fitting that old poetry knows how to be silent in humility in the presence of this newborn. And if it is necessary for intellectuals, or some of them, to turn into sharpshooters, then let them endeavour to shoot their old concepts, questions, and morals.[12]
The word ṭawr can mean a time period, but also a state or phase of being. The collapse of a time and a movement from shore to shore is also a shift in the fundamental structure of lived reality. Throughout his creative dismantling of the old world, Darwish held his silence, unable to write poetry during the siege. However, he promised to one day go back to writing poetry:
When the guns quiet down a bit. When I unleash (ʾufajjir) my silence, which is full of all these voices. When I find my adequate language.[13]
The word ʾufajjir also means to bombard or to explode – his silence would one day be his way to return fire. When land rose from the waves of the sea, Darwish knew that he would find a budding language in the graveyard of old poetry, concepts, questions and ethics. In a poem written shortly after his departure from Beirut in September of 1982, Hymn to the Rising Shadow (1983), the first-person character has a conversation with a voice that repeatedly asks him, ‘What are you looking for, young man, in the broken boat of the Odyssey?’[14] He answers, ‘For a wave that I lost in the sea’. The voice asks him if the migrant does indeed find a wave. The reply is:
The migrant finds a wave that has drowned and brings it with him. A sea for you to live in, or to be lost. A sea for the new September or the return of the four seasons. A sea in front of you, in you, a sea behind you.[15]
Unlike Odysseus, Darwish is denied a nostos, the heroic journey home. Instead of returning to Palestine, he is plunged further into the sea, on the broken boat of the Odyssey, with nothing but sea in front of and behind him. However, by absorbing the sea into him, ‘a sea to live in’ that reaches into his being, he can seize a drowned wave and to bring it back to shore. His only weapon to do this is the Word. In Dhākira li-l-nisyān, the reader follows Darwish as he navigates the streets of Beirut in the morning, with artillery shells raining around him. He captures the moments before rebirth and re-creation, describing a disintegrating world:
The waves have married the moss of a rock on a distant shore, and I have just emerged from this marriage which has lasted for a million years. I have just emerged, but I did not know where I was. I did not know who I was. I did not know what my name was, nor the name of this place. I did not know that I had the capacity to tear out one of my ribs in order to discover a dialogue against this absolute silence. What is my name, and who named me? Who will name me: Adam![16]
The power to name someone Adam is traditionally reserved for the Creator. This right passes unto man in Genesis 2:19, where Adam is tasked with naming the animals. Naming is power, and as Månsson notes, ‘[t]o narrate, write and name is to make the speaker a subject, an act that is of utmost importance to the migrant’.[17] The rib Darwish tears out of his own body could be an allusion to Eve.[18] In this paper, however, I read his rib as a form of embodied pen. His own living body becomes the source of a new dialogue, one written against the madness of war, one with the potential for creation.[19] This theme is reinforced by an excerpt that directly follows the question ‘Who is going to call me Adam?’ from the introduction to the historical work Al-kāmil fī al-tārīkh by mediaeval writer Ibn al-Athīr (1160 - 1233 CE).[20] In the excerpt, Ibn al-Athīr engages with various transmissions from the Prophet (ḥadīth) in order to establish the order in which God formed the elements of creation; the Pen (al-qalam), the Tablet (al-lawḥ), the Throne (al-ʿarsh), water (al-māʾ), etc. These elements all occur in the Quran, in verses such as 11:7, where God is:
وَهُوَ ٱلَّذِى خَلَقَ ٱلسَّمَـٰوَٰتِ وَٱلْأَرْضَ فِى سِتَّةِ أَيَّامٍۢ وَكَانَ عَرْشُهُۥ عَلَى ٱلْمَآءِ He who created the heavens and the earth in six days, and His Throne was on the water…
In Dhākira li-l-nisyān, the excerpt begins in the middle of Ibn al-Athīr’s discussion about the Pen:[21] ‘Then God created, after [creating] the Pen and commanding it (ʾamarahu) so that it wrote all that exists until the Day of Resurrection, a fine mist…’[22] This is followed by alternative theories on the order of creation. The intertext is never explained in the work. It could simply be one example of collapsing time. Al-kāmil fī al-tārīkh contains lengthy description of the crusades, told by the contemporary Ibn al-Athīr. By weaving this into a narrative on modern Beirut, Darwish creates a polyphonic history where the crusades appear to be ongoing in the streets of Beirut in 1982, fusing the madness and violence of past and present. However, this passage does something more. Discussing the order in which God formed the elements of creation through his verbal command is also a discussion on narration and emplotment of the world. I follow the theologians and philosophers Imām al-Ghazālī (d. 1111) and al-ʿĀmirī (d. 992) who read Quranic elements such as the Pen and Tablet as symbolising metaphysical moments of creation. The Pen, corresponding to Intellect (νοῦς) in Neoplatonic philosophy, writes the cosmos into being following the command (ʾamr) of God, the Aristotelian first cause.[23] This λόγος, the Word of God, issued from His Throne (al-ʿarsh), is inscribed upon the Table (al-lawḥ). According to al-Ghazālī, this Preserved Table, on which all of Being is inscribed, analogous to the Neoplatonic World Soul, is what prophets access directly in moments of inspiration (ilhām).[24] Seeing the Table means witnessing the truth that ontologically precedes our lower plane of existence. Being follows divine writing-into-being onto this Table – creation is this Word incarnate. This is the power metaphorically seized by Darwish. He goes beyond the divine gift of naming objects. Instead, he demands the right to name himself, turning himself into a creator. His torn-out rib becomes a pen with which he can inscribe a new cosmic order upon his own table, reforming the world through discourse.[25] If the shattered world of Beirut lied formless and empty,[26] then the poetry of Darwish was the spirit hovering over the surface of the sea, ready also to grant the power of naming to whoever would hear and follow him. In his Hymn to the Rising Shadow, he tells the listener:
Take what remains of you, take me on as a helper in the presence of the ruins. Take A flaming Dictionary And triumph! … And triumph at the end of history![27]
Even if history met an end in Beirut, the fragmented words remaining under the flood, the drowned waves ready to be brought to shore, offers not only rebirth, but even triumph.

Fig. 2: Waves breaking on the Raouché rocks on the Lebanese shore. (Photo: Zheka Boychenko)

This book-length poem, Hymn to the Rising Shadow, was performed by Darwish at the opening of the Palestinian National Council session in Algiers in February 1983. As I have noted, the PLO was in renewed exile, at a point in history where all hope of liberating Palestine seemed lost. One might have expected the session to be a sombre event, but Darwish read his poetry with a victor’s voice. Covered in sweat but smiling warmly, his voice only rose throughout the 80 minutes it took him to read the entire poem.[28] Notables in the audience, including Yasser Arafat, smiled proudly and cheered loudly throughout the performance. For Palestinians, seizing the joy of life after moments of defeat has become an art in itself. Like the murals covering the West Bank wall, creativity is a way for Palestinians to claim their humanity and show pride in the face of occupation and degradation. In 1995, Darwish explained in an interview that his new poetic calling was to write the history of Troy. By creating a poetry of the vanquished, he could fill the void left in the Greek heritage, where history had only been written by the victors who completed their nostos. Paradoxically, he claims, being the poet of Troy makes him appear as a victor:
What I mean is that the language of despair is poetically stronger than the language of hope, because there is space in despair to contemplate destiny (al-maṣīr), and to survey the shore of humanity, in a way that is not granted the victor. This is because despair is the poetic, psychological, and linguistic ground which brings the poet closer to God, to the essence of things, to the first poetic speech.[29]
In his poetry, Darwish keeps the hope of recovery after loss alive. To return to the first speech means speaking a new world into existence, transforming the remnants from a life of defeat into triumph with the help of a burning dictionary. He was able to view the shore of humanity from the sea of absolute fragmentation, reclaiming his own threatened existence in the void of exile. With nothing but the sea surrounding him, he was able to build a new world from waves that had drowned. In the current madness of the world, as the burned bodies of children in Gaza make us question humanity, threatening us with a new Flood drowning all meaning and hope, the poetry of Darwish reminds us that while there is any life left, there is reason to hold onto hope. [1] Maḥmūd Darwīš (1941 – 2008). I use the standard transliteration ‘Mahmoud Darwish’ throughout this article. [2] I have previously explored the experience of time and the body in the work Dhākira li-l-nisyān by Darwish, which informs this article. See Jonathan Jonsson, 'The Music of Human Flesh: The Lived Time and Body of Exile in Ḏākira li-l-nisyān by Maḥmūd Darwīš' (MA University of Oslo, 2022), https://www.duo.uio.no/handle/10852/101155; Jonathan Jonsson, 'Ord är ett hemland!', Babylon 23, no. 2 (2023), https://doi.org/10.5617/ba.11498; Jonathan Jonsson, 'Nakbans epistemologi', Kamilla Østerberg and Henrik Wathne eds. Salongen, Norsk Tidsskriftforening, 27 May 2024, https://www.salongen.no/artikkel/israel-palestina-konflikten/krig/204866. [3] This essay would not have been possible without Anette Månsson, 'Passage to a new wor(l)d: Exile and restoration in Mahmoud Darwish's writings 1960-1995' (PhD Uppsala University, 2003), 161-84, 217-32. [4] Peter Burke, 'The historian's dilemma: Domestication or foreignizing?', in History as a Translation of the Past: Case Studies from the West, ed. Luigi Alonzi (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), 102. [5] Darwish considered it his right as a Palestinian to live in all these cultures, to let all these voices from his homeland speak to him. In opposition to Zionist discourse, he maintained that he had this right since he was not a stranger to the land. See Mahmoud Darwish, 'Maḥmūd Darwīš li-l-Wasaṭ: Min ḥaqq al-shiʿr iʿlān al-hazīma', Al-Wasaṭ 1995, 54. [6] Fawwaz Traboulsi, A History of Modern Lebanon, 2nd ed. (London: Pluto Press, 2012), 189. [7] Mahmoud Darwish, 'Al-zamān: Bayrūt / Al-makān: Āb', Al-Karmel, no. 21-22 (1986). Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are by the author with assistance from Raghad Abu Shaker. [8] Darwish, 'Al-zamān', 95. The double periods are from the original Arabic text. Darwish uses them when he wants the reader to take a slight pause, or when he wants to emphasise a point, as if he were reading a poem and pausing slightly. This is opposed to single periods and ellipses (...), which are more used for thoughts trailing off. Darwish is first and foremost a poet, and he also brings creative use of puntuation to his prose. [9] Darwish, 'Al-zamān', 96. [10] Stephan Guth, 'Novel, Arabic', in Encyclopaedia of Islam Three Online, ed. Kate Fleet et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2014).https://doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_COM_27115. [11] See Månsson, 'Passage to a new wor(l)d', 220-21. [12] Darwish, 'Al-zamān', 35. [13] Darwish, 'Al-zamān', 34. [14] Mahmoud Darwish, Madīḥ aẓ-ẓill al-ʿālī (Beirut: Dār al-ʿawda, 1983), 108. [15] Darwish, Madīḥ aẓ-ẓill al-ʿālī, 108-09. [16] Darwish, 'Al-zamān', 22. [17] Månsson, 'Passage to a new wor(l)d', 211. [18] Thank you to Ben Kamis for this observation. Reading the rib as Eve works well with an analysis by Stephan Milich, in which a concern of Darwish’s poetry is to encounter the fe/male Other in the mirror, often in the form of the recurring Jewish lover. See Stephan Milich, 'Maḥmūd Darwīsh; A Plurality of Voices for Invoking the Other', in A Companion to World Literature, ed. Ken Seigneurie (Toronto: J. Wiley & Sons, 2019). [19] For a deeper analysis of the interface between the living body, text and the world, see  Jonsson, 'The Music of Human Flesh', 47-54. [20] Darwish, 'Al-zamān', 22-23. [21] See e.g. Quran 96:4-5 for an example of the Quranic Pen. [22] ʿIzz  al-Dīn Abu-l-Ḥasan, ʿAlī Ibn al-Aṯīr, Al-kāmil fī al-tārīḫ, al-muǧallad al-ʾūla (Beirut: Dār Bayrūt li-l-ṭibāʿa wa-l-našr, 1960), 16. [23] Elvira Wakelnig, Feder, Tafel, Mensch: Al-ʿĀmirīs Kitāb al-fuṣūl fī l-maʿālim al-ilāhīya und die arabische Proklos-Rezeption im 10. Jh. Islamic Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 160-61. [24] Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad Ibn Muḥammad al-Ghazzālī, Die Wunder des Herzens, trans. Adel  El Domiaty (Braunschweig: Adel El Domiaty, 2022), 74. [25] On the porous borders between the lived body, language, and reality in the poetry of Darwish, see Jonsson, 'The Music of Human Flesh', 47-54. [26] ṯōhū wā-ḇōhū, see Genesis 1:2. [27] Darwish, Madīḥ aẓ-ẓill al-ʿālī, 7-8. [28] For a video of the performance, see Amor Ben Rhoma, Mahmūd Darwīsh fī qaṣīdatihi al-malḥamiyya «Madiḥ al-ẓill al-ʿālī» (kāmila), 1983 (YouTube, 2020).https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1HeUma-EkU . [29] Darwish, 'Maḥmūd Darwīš', 57. For a full analysis of this quote, see Jonsson, 'Ord är ett hemland!', 39.  
bibliography
  al-Dīn Abu-l-Ḥasan, ʿIzz ʿAlī Ibn al-Aṯīr, Al-kāmil fī al-tārīḫ, al-muǧallad al-ʾūla. Beirut: Dār Bayrūt li-l-ṭibāʿa wa-l-našr, 1960. Ben Rhoma, Amor. Mahmūd Darwīsh fī qaṣīdatihi al-malḥamiyya «Madiḥ al-ẓill al-ʿālī» (kāmila), 1983. YouTube, 2020. Burke, Peter. 'The historian's dilemma: Domestication or foreignizing?'. In History as a Translation of the Past: Case Studies from the West, edited by Luigi Alonzi,  London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. Darwish, Mahmoud. 'Al-zamān: Bayrūt / Al-makān: Āb'. Al-Karmel, no. 21-22 (1986): 4-96. ———. Madīḥ aẓ-ẓill al-ʿālī. Beirut: Dār al-ʿawda, 1983. ———. 'Maḥmūd Darwīš li-l-Wasaṭ: Min ḥaqq al-shiʿr iʿlān al-hazīma'. Al-Wasaṭ 1995. Guth, Stephan. 'Novel, Arabic'. In Encyclopaedia of Islam Three Online, edited by Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas and Devin J. Stewart. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Ibn Muḥammad al-Ghazzālī, Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad. Die Wunder des Herzens. Translated by Adel  El Domiaty. Braunschweig: Adel El Domiaty, 2022. Jonsson, Jonathan. 'The Music of Human Flesh: The Lived Time and Body of Exile in Ḏākira li-l-nisyān by Maḥmūd Darwīš'. MA, University of Oslo, 2022. https://www.duo.uio.no/handle/10852/101155. ———, 'Nakbans epistemologi', Kamilla Østerberg and Henrik Wathne eds. Salongen. Norsk Tidsskriftforening, 27 May 2024, https://www.salongen.no/artikkel/israel-palestina-konflikten/krig/204866. ———. 'Ord är ett hemland!'. Babylon 23, no. 2 (2023): 32-46. https://doi.org/10.5617/ba.11498. Månsson, Anette. 'Passage to a new wor(l)d: Exile and restoration in Mahmoud Darwish's writings 1960-1995'. PhD, Uppsala University, 2003. Milich, Stephan. 'Maḥmūd Darwīsh; A Plurality of Voices for Invoking the Other'. In A Companion to World Literature, edited by Ken Seigneurie,  Toronto: J. Wiley & Sons, 2019. Traboulsi, Fawwaz. A History of Modern Lebanon. 2nd ed. London: Pluto Press, 2012. Wakelnig, Elvira. Feder, Tafel, Mensch: Al-ʿĀmirīs Kitāb al-fuṣūl fī l-maʿālim al-ilāhīya und die arabische Proklos-Rezeption im 10. Jh. Islamic Philosophy. Leiden: Brill, 2006.
citation information:
Jonsson, Johnathan, 'The shore of humanity', Ben Kamis ed. global dis:connect blog. global dis:connect, 23 July 2024, https://www.globaldisconnect.org/07/23/the-shore-of-humanity/.
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23 July 2024
In Blog, Blog 2024

Travelling Back: revisiting 19th-century transfers between Munich and Brazil

sabrina moura
  
A German translation of this post is available on the ZI Spotlight blog published by the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte München.

Fig. 1: Felix Ehlers, Travelling Back (2024), Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich.

Travelling Back is an exhibition presented at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte between February and April 2024, offering a critical perspective on the narratives and collections brought from Brazil to Munich by Bavarian scientists Johann Baptist von Spix (1781–1826) and Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius (1794–1868) in the 19th century.[1] My research on this topic was made possible through a fellowship at the Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect.

Fig. 2: Felix Ehlers, Travelling Back (2024) Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich.

The exhibition follows the scientists' extensive three-year journey across the Brazilian hinterland, including the Amazonian region, and raises crucial questions about the colonial underpinnings of the scientific pursuits of the natural-history project between Munich and Brazil in the 19th century. It examines the various displays and interpretations of Spix and Martius's collections from their arrival in Germany to the present, shedding light on the dis:connections in the production of knowledge behind these scientific endeavours. The aim is not only to explore the public reception of these experiences through a historical lens but also to engage in a critical examination through the perspectives of present-day dialogues and initiatives. Here, we feature various chapters of the exhibition along with the documents, images, publications and artworks presented at the show.

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Fig. 3: Carl Friedrich Heinzmann. 'Vögel-Teich am Rio de S. Francisco '. In Atlas zur Reise in Brasilien, Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius,  Munich: Lidauer, et al., 1823.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, scientific expeditions were part of a global natural history project guided by a knowledge-making mission that was seemingly nobler than that of the colonial conquest. In pursuit of science and universal knowledge, the exploration of new territories, the naming of new species and the act of collecting became part of a classificatory rationale rooted in Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae (1735).

Fig. 4: C. Hess. 'Astrocaryum gynacanthum. Bactris pectinata. Bactris hirta'. In Historia naturalis palmarum. Opus Tripartitum (1823-1850), by Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius.

In this context, the expedition of Johann Baptist von Spix and Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius to Brazil — commissioned by King Maximilian I Joseph of Bavaria (1756–1825) in association with the Austrian Empire — stands out as a key undertaking in European scientific exploration of South America. The desire to explore the biodiversity of the tropics was facilitated by the opening of Brazilian ports in 1808, following the transfer of the Portuguese royal court to Rio de Janeiro. This pivotal event marked the end of Portugal’s policy of limiting foreign scientists’ access to its colony — a restriction that had notably hindered Alexander von Humboldt’s plans to explore this region.

Fig. 5: Matthias Schmidt. 'Anodorhynchus Maximiliani. Tab. XI'. In Avium species novae by Johann Baptist von Spix, 1824.

 

Fig. 6: Felix Ehlers, Travelling Back (2024) Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich.

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Fig. 7: 'Map of Brazil showing 1817-20 route followed by Martius and Spix'. In Flora Brasiliensis On-Line,  São Paulo: Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo, 1820.

Spix and Martius arrived in Brazil through the port of Rio de Janeiro in July 1817. They spent about six months there, acclimatising and preparing for the subsequent stages of their expedition. In the first half of 1818, they embarked on a journey on foot and by mule, accompanied by a varying entourage, through the interior of Brazil from the southeast to the northwest. In later years, they reached and explored the vast Amazonian regions, where they encountered numerous indigenous groups, including the Juri, Miranha and Tikuna peoples. From these communities, they collected artifacts and conducted detailed descriptions related to their physical characteristics, habits and languages.  

Fig. 8: E. Meyer, 'Trinkfest der Coroados’, facsimile. In Atlas zur Reise in Brasilien (1823-1831), by Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius,  Munich: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek

Fig. 9: Van der Velden. 'Tanz der Puris'. In Atlas zur Reise in Brasilien (1823-1831), by Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius,  Munich: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek

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Fig. 10: 'Spix und Martius Ausstellung, Masken und Federschmuck '. In Sammlung Fotografie & Schriften,  Munich: Museum Fünf Kontinente München, 1928.

 

Fig. 11: 'Spix und Martius Ausstellung, Masken und Federschmuck '. In Sammlung Fotografie & Schriften,  Munich: Museum Fünf Kontinente München, 1928.

  During their years in Brazil, Spix and Martius periodically sent reports and various items to Munich to account for the Kingdom of Bavaria’s investment in their expedition. Upon returning to Europe in 1820, they focused on analysing and cataloguing their findings, which included numerous ethnographic objects, minerals, plants and animal species. These items are now part of the Bavarian state collections.  

Fig. 12: 'Dauerausstellung der Spix und Martius Sammlung '. In Sammlung Fotografie & Schriften,  Munich: Museum Fünf Kontinente München, 1930.

 

Fig. 13: 'Unter Indianern Brasiliens’, Ausstellungsplakat. In Sammlung Fotografie & Schriften,  Munich: Museum Fünf Kontinente München, 1979.

  Publishing was a significant aspect of their work. One of their most renowned publications is the multi-volume series Reise in Brasilien (1823–1831). Historian Karen Macknow Lisboa notes that this work interweaves scientific discourse with a romantic perspective of nature, which was popular among German naturalists in the 19th century.[2] The book portrays an idealised vision of tropical nature, which contrasts with a hierarchical perception of human societies. The text contains numerous passages in which indigenous people are described as inferior to Europeans. ‘The temperament of the Indian is almost wholly underdeveloped, and appears as phlegm’, they wrote in the first volume of Reise in Brasilien.[3]  

Fig. 14: 'Brasilianische Reise, 1817-1820’, Ausstellungsplakat. In Sammlung Fotografie & Schriften,  Munich: Museum Fünf Kontinente München, 1995.

 

Fig. 15: 'Caryocar brasiliensis, V12 P1 t.73.'. In Flora Brasiliensis by Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius, August Wilhelm Eichler, Ignaz Urban and et al., 1840-1906.

  Their work also resulted in several illustrated scientific publications. Flora Brasiliensis (1840–1906) is an example where Martius aimed to describe all known Brazilian flora up to that time. The first issue was published in 1840, and it took more than half a century to complete. Martius did not live to see the work’s completion and, after his passing, other botanists undertook the project. It is still used as a reference in contemporary botany.  

Fig. 16: C. Hess. ' Elaeis melanococca '. In Historia naturalis palmarum. Opus Tripartitum (1823-1850), by Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius, 1823-1850.

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Following Spix and Martius’s return to Munich in 1820, a significant aspect drew the attention of the local press: the presence of two indigenous children who had crossed the Atlantic with them. These children, named Isabella Miranha and Johann Juri, after their Christian baptism, were survivors from a group of six indigenes taken from Amazonia by the Bavarian scientists.  

Fig. 17: 'Ueber Brasilien'. Eos. Zeitschrift zur Erheiterung und Belehrung (Munich), 20 March 1821, 93.

 

Fig. 18: 'Ueber Brasilien'. Eos. Zeitschrift zur Erheiterung und Belehrung (Munich), 20 March 1821, 94.

  Early articles from 1820 generally depicted the children as wild and unresponsive. Descriptions of Miranha often emphasised her hair, likening it to a horse’s to underscore her ‘wild’ origin. In contrast, Juri was described more positively, as a ‘not unattractive boy with friendly eyes’. These physical depictions often influenced the interpretations of their behaviour.[4] Juri was characterised as good and calm, while Miranha was considered unkind and cold. As time passed, these accounts began to change. For example, when the girl started playing with dolls or sewing, the press noted these as adaptations to European education and habits. However, this didn’t last long. Shortly after arriving in Munich, Miranha and Juri passed away. The boy succumbed to a long and painful pulmonary illness in 1821, and the girl followed a year later. Newspapers report that even after his passing, Juri remained of interest for scientific research, as evidenced by the creation of a wax impression of his head.[5] A posthumous tribute to the children was undertaken by the Queen Karoline of Bavaria, who commissioned the Bavarian artist Johann Baptist Stiglmaier (1791–1844) to create a bronze mortuary stele to adorn their tomb at Munich’s Old South Cemetery. The stele was removed from the cemetery and is now possessed by the Münchner Stadtmuseum.  

Fig. 19: Johann Baptist Stiglmaier. Grabrelief der Kinder Juri und Miranha. c. 1824. Münchner Stadtmuseum, Sammlung Angewandte Kunst. Photo by Sabrina Moura.

  The practice of bringing indigenous individuals to Europe for scientific scrutiny dates back to the 16th century. Ethnographer Christian Feest notes that in the 1820s, at least seven Indigenous individuals from Brazil were living in Europe, either in imperial or noble households or displayed to the public, with only one returning to Brazil.[6] The remains of at least three became part of museum collections.

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The images in Spix and Martius’s books were created before the invention of photography in 1826 and, like many illustrations in travel accounts, went through several layers of interpretation before being made available to the public. Their initial sketches, whether created on-site or later, were subject to successive re-readings as they were prepared for publication by 19th-century engravers. In the following centuries, these images entered the public domain and gained wide circulation, appearing in exhibitions and on the internet. To better understand them, it is essential to acknowledge the multiple lives and contexts that these images traversed. Portraits, such as those of Miranha, Juri and other indigenous people featured in Reise in Brasilien, shed light on the pictorial conventions that guided ethnographic representations in travel accounts. These portraits also highlight the frequently stereotyped perceptions of indigenous peoples prevailing in European society.

Fig. 20: Felix Ehlers, Travelling Back (2024) Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich.

  The disparities between the drawings contained in the Martiusiana archives at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, created in 1821, and the final versions subsequently published in the Reise in Brasilien atlas serve as a poignant reminder that images, much like texts, are discursive constructs heavily influenced by perception, interpretation, language and the techniques available at the time of their creation.

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Fig. 21: 'Miranha'. In Atlas zur Reise in Brasilien (1823-1831), by Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius,  Munich: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek

 

Fig. 22: 'Iuri'. In Atlas zur Reise in Brasilien (1823-1831), by Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius,  Munich: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek

  The encounter with the portraits of Isabella Miranha and Johann Juri at an exhibition in São Paulo is a pivotal moment in the novel O Som do Rugido da Onça (2021), authored by Brazilian writer Micheliny Verunschk. This scene depicts a significant instance when one of the book’s main characters, Josefa, enters an exhibition room and is met with the gaze of the two indigenous children represented in the portraits. They appear to be looking at her with an eerie sense of life. Verunschk’s narrative skilfully intertwines Josefa’s contemporary experiences with the historical past of Juri and Miranha, particularly imagining the inner life of Isabella Miranha, referred to as Iñe-ê in the novel. Through her fiction, the author offers readers a unique perspective, allowing them to explore how imagination and speculation — or ‘critical fabulation’ in the words of Saidiya Hartman — can breathe life into a story that, despite being the subject of discussions and numerous publications, remains noticeably absent from public spaces of memory.  

Fig. 23: An excerpt from Micheliny Verunshk. O Som do Rurgido da Onça São Paulo: Cia das Letras 2021.

  Fiction has also been a means for other authors to grapple with these experiences, as evidenced by the work of writer Henrike Leonhardt Unerbittlich des Nordens rauher Winter (1987) and by Carl Friedrich von Martius himself, who, in 1831, wrote Frey Apollonio: Roman aus Brasilien (1992). Published more than a century later, this novel blends first-person and third-person narration to recount the story of the young scientist Hartoman, who serves as Martius’s alter ego.[7]  

Fig. 24: Cover of Verunshk, Micheliny. O Som do Rurgido da Onça São Paulo: Cia das Letras 2021.

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Fig. 25: Yolanda Gutiérrez, Jana Baldovino (dancer), David Valencia (dancer), Cornelia Böhm (audio) and Felix Ehlers (photo). URBAN BODIES PROJECT. 2023. Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect.

  Verunschk’s writing engages in a dialogue with two significant works in this exhibition: Isabela People (2020) by Gê Viana and Urban Bodies, Munich (2023) by Yolanda Gutierrez. These pieces employ visual intervention and performance as powerful tools to reveal new presences of Juri and Miranha in the contemporary landscape of Munich. Their artistic approaches delve deep into the possibilities of reimagining the existence of these figures in the present, allowing for the emergence of alternative memories and rewriting their histories.  

Fig. 26: Gê Viana. Isabel Miranha. 2020. digital collage.

  The artist Frauke Zabel’s practice revolves around the counter-narratives that emerge through the mapping of various locations in the city, where she traces collections, historical sites and tributes dedicated to Spix and Martius in Munich’s public spaces. In her piece for this exhibition, entitled the palm trees grouping themselves as follows: (2023), she investigates Martius’s studies on palm trees, forming her own collection of evidence to narrate the history of these plants as research subjects. Zabel’s collection examines the symbolism, exoticisation, profitability and knowledge production related to palm trees in colonial and neo-colonial contexts.  

Fig. 27: Frauke Zabel. die Palmen sich wie folgt gruppieren: . 2023. mixed media.

  Elaine Pessoa, through her work Exploratorius (2023), questions the future of images in what she terms the ‘colonialism of data’. Pessoa interacts with the drawings, diaries and visual documents that constitute the scientific accounts of Spix and Martius’s travels. Through a series of experiments with artificial intelligence and manual artistic interventions, including staining, painting and scarring, she reinterprets representations of Brazilian tropical landscapes, jungles, forests and biomes.  

Fig. 28: Elaine Pessoa. Exploratorius. 2023. mixed media.

  Furthermore, artist Igor Vidor adds a unique dimension to this artistic dialogue by digitally intervening in the images of the Reise in Brasilien atlas. He integrates the character Blanka from the video game Street Fighter into the landscapes originally documented by Spix and Martius. Blanka, a green-skinned mutant boy who finds himself in the Amazon after a plane crash, undergoes a significant transformation due to contact with plant chlorophyll, which explains his appearance and abilities. In Vidor’s work, Blanka becomes an unexpected visitor, disrupting the narrative of the Bavarian explorers by adding elements of fantasy and surrealism to their depicted reality.  

Fig. 29: Igor Vidor. Travels in Brazil: Spix, Martius and Blanka, #1. 2022. digital collage.

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Fig. 30: Opening conference of the exhibition Travelling Back (2024). Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich. Photo: Arturo Bonhomme.

  Beyond the exhibition space, discussions about Travelling Back have expanded into a series of debates and media coverage that are crucial for understanding how the expedition is perceived today, both in academic circles and among the general audience, as exemplified by the opening conference on 9 February 2024. It featured artists Frauke Zabel and Yolanda Gutiérrez, alongside writer Micheliny Verunschk and historian Karen Macknow Lisboa. Each speaker related the points of departure — visual arts, history and literature — that led them to explore Spix and Martius's travels to Brazil and their implications for contemporary public discourse.  

Fig. 31: Frauke Zabel speaks at the opening conference of the exhibition Travelling Back (February 2024), Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich. Photo: Sabrina Moura.

  While their works engage with aspects that are often uncomfortable for those seeking to preserve the legacy and reputation of the Bavarian scientists, it is important to distance these critical views from political attacks on historical biographies. Rather, they seek to highlight colonial dimensions in the history of the natural sciences, prompting discussions beyond simplistic narratives that overlook the complexities of knowledge produced from such experiences.  

Fig. 32: Micheliny Verunshk visits the location of ancient tomb of Iuri and Miranha at the Munich Old South Cemetery (February 2024). Photo: Sabrina Moura.

  Thus, a critical history of science, in dialogue with the arts, intersects with the politics of memory. It underscores that history is a field for contestation, that should challenge the pitfalls of homogeneous temporal linearity and single narrators. Travelling Back attempted to escape these risks by portraying Spix and Martius as just two among many other narrators of this Bavarian-led journey through the hinterlands of Brazil.  

Fig. 33: Micheliny Verunshk, Yolanda Gutiérrez and Karen Macknow Lisboa at the location of ancient tomb of Iuri and Miranha at the Munich Old South Cemetery (February 2024). Photo: Sabrina Moura.

  [1] I thank Ann-Katrin Fischer and Sophia Fischer for their invaluable support as curatorial assistants. [2] Karen Macknow Lisboa, 'Da Expedição Científica à Ficcionalização da Viagem: Martius e seu romance indianista sobre o Brasil', Acervo 21, no. 1 (2011), https://revista.arquivonacional.gov.br/index.php/revistaacervo/article/view/91. [3] Johann Baptist von Spix and Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius, Reise in Brasilien: auf Befehl Sr. Maj. Maximilian Joseph I. Königs von Baiern in d. J. 1817-20 gemacht, vol. 1,1 (Munich: Lindauer, et al., 1823), 241. https://www.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/details/bsb11212343. [4] Maria de Fátima Costa, 'Os ‘meninos índios’ que Spix e Martius levaram a Munique', Artelogie. Recherche sur les arts, le patrimoine et la littérature de l’Amérique latine 14 (2019), https://doi.org/10.4000/artelogie.3774. https://doi.org/10.4000/artelogie.3774. [5] Klaus Schönitzer, 'From the New World to the Old World', Journal Fünf Kontinente: Forum für ethnologische Forschung 1 (2014). [6] Christian Feest, 'Botocudos in Europe in the 1820s', (2022), https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.29215.43686. [7]  Lisboa, 'Da Expedição Científica'.  
bibliography
Costa, Maria de Fátima. 'Os ‘meninos índios’ que Spix e Martius levaram a Munique'. Artelogie. Recherche sur les arts, le patrimoine et la littérature de l’Amérique latine 14 (2019). https://doi.org/10.4000/artelogie.3774. Feest, Christian. 'Botocudos in Europe in the 1820s'. (2022). https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.29215.43686. Lisboa, Karen Macknow. 'Da Expedição Científica à Ficcionalização da Viagem: Martius e seu romance indianista sobre o Brasil'. Acervo 21, no. 1 (2011): 115-32. https://revista.arquivonacional.gov.br/index.php/revistaacervo/article/view/91. Schönitzer, Klaus. 'From the New World to the Old World'. Journal Fünf Kontinente: Forum für ethnologische Forschung 1 (2014). Spix, Johann Baptist von and Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius. Reise in Brasilien: auf Befehl Sr. Maj. Maximilian Joseph I. Königs von Baiern in d. J. 1817-20 gemacht. Vol. 1,1, Munich: Lindauer, et al., 1823. https://www.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/details/bsb11212343.  
citation information:
Moura, Sabrina, 'Travelling Back: revisiting 19th-century transfers between Munich and Brazil', Ben Kamis ed. global dis:connect blog. global dis:connect, 9 July 2024, https://www.globaldisconnect.org/07/09/travelling-back-revisiting-19th-century-transfers-between-munich-and-brazil/.
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9 July 2024
In Blog, Blog 2024

Facing Gaia: Justin Brice Guariglia’s landscape photography in an ecological perspective

peter seeland
  In 2015, artist Justin Brice Guariglia participated in NASA's Operation Ice Bridge, flying over Greenland and photographing the Galloping Glacier near Jacobshavn. This glacier is among the fastest melting in the world, and few places illustrate the effects of climate change as starkly.[1] Guariglia observed the melting ice and heard the cracks splitting the archipelago. Later, he spent months working with gesso, acrylic and plastics on these photographs, creating tactile surface textures like Jacobshavn I (Fig. 1, 2).[2]

Fig. 1: Justin Brice Guariglia: JACOBSHAVN I, 2015/2016, Acryl, Polystyrene Panel, 325.12 x 243.84 x 4.44 cm, Private Collection. (reproduced with artist’s permission)

  A year later and about 800 kilometres northwest of Jacobshavn, French philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour flew over Baffin Island to Canada, where he spoke on perceptions of nature in the era of climate change. From the airplane, he looked down on Earth. Baffin Island, the largest island in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, has been covered with ice for millennia. Yet, instead of a frozen white desert, Latour saw barren tundra for hours. In recent decades, the island's ice sheets have retreated by more than half due to global warming, and during the 2016 heatwave the island was almost ice-free.[3] Latour was deeply affected by the sight of the cracked, sparse ice. Bitterly, he compared the ravaged landscape to the tortured face and surface of Munch's The Scream. He said, ‘It was as though the ice was sending me a message’.[4] Greenland and the Arctic are considered ‘ground-zero zones’[5] of climate change, and it's telling that both Guariglia and Latour are so moved by these landscapes. The artificial transformation of nature becomes a visual experience for both, and it seems to be a new experience and a new relation to nature that is emerging through this direct confrontation. Latour describes the experience as an emotional dialogue, and Guariglia processes it through art. So, to what extent is Jacobshavn I a new image of nature and of a changing relationship between us and nature? How can comparing Latour’s theories and Guariglia’s art help us think through the climate crisis? This essay compares Guariglia’s artistic treatment of the Anthropocene with Latour’s theoretical approach, contextualising both in the broader discourse on the Anthropocene. This comparison demonstrates how art can reflect the relationship between humans and nature. Additionally, it illustrates how art can foster the creation of new, less destructive representations of nature, which are attuned to the challenges of the Anthropocene. Art could thus shift consciousness, providing a novel approach to the challenges of the Anthropocene.

Art and ecology

Researching contemporary art from an ecological perspective involves integrating environmental crises, their impacts on our conceptions of ourselves as humans, how we understand nature, and how we deal with them. It also entails investigating the relationship between humans and nature. These discussions are often labelled with the term Anthropocene, omnipresent in popular and academic discourses. Sometimes appearing in unreliable articles, sometimes taken as a given in serious discussions, or heavily criticised by researchers, the term is plagued by confusion.[6] The literature counts many essays on the Anthropocene and its impact on humans, culture and society, often under the umbrella of ecocriticism in philosophy, sociology, history and literary criticism, including aesthetics and art.[7] Bruno Latour, a luminary in the Anthropocene discourse, has engaged intensely with ecology, art and the humanities.[8] As Phillipe Pignarre notes, ‘Latour is really the thinker of the Anthropocene’.[9]

Jacobshavn I and the Anthropocene discourse

Jacobshavn I is intertwined with aspects of Latour's thought and the Anthropocene discourse in general. Knowing that Guariglia engages deeply with the discourse of Anthropocene, several pivotal aspects of the discourse and how viewers perceive Jacobshavn I.

Disorientation

The object depicted in the work remains utterly vague. Various visual elements intensify the disorientation, including the perspective, the size and the materiality of the representation. The image implies no particular vantage point, leaving the viewer's position unclear and compelling them back into their own subjective standpoint. Such disorientation characterises the Anthropocene. Bruno Latour diagnoses a new climate regime in the Anthropocene, as nature becomes a decisive actor.[10] A nature previously passive and objectified suddenly becomes an active, potent actor. This leaves humans in aporia, completely alienated from such nature. Further, nature as the setting of human existence and experience threatens to dissolve. The destructive element of changing the natural environment induces ontological upheaval of the world's structure, according to Latour.[11] Nature is no longer a constant. Humans have no fixed point to position themselves in the world's structure.[12] Jacobshavn I mirrors this disorientation. The lack of Euclidean perspective reflects the subject's aporia in understanding nature through the Anthropocene.[13]  

Fig. 2: Detail: Justin Brice Guariglia: JACOBSHAVN I, 2015/2016, Acryl, Polystyrene Panel, 325,12 x 4,44 cm, Private Collection. (reproduced with artist’s permission)

Unreadability

The representation is also unreadable, which recalls and surpasses disorientation. Every visual detail eludes reference; it remains entirely unclear what material is depicted where. The representation resists any cultural and subjective assimilation by the viewer, defying intuitive understanding. Unreadability is also present in the Anthropocene discourse. The Anthropocene is characterised by a ‘clash of scales’.[14] Scales that elude human perception are juxtaposed. The spatial scales of global crises, the temporality of millennia into the future and past and the quantitative dimensions of pollutants and destruction are hardly imaginable, let alone perceptible. The point of no return, when Earth's equilibrium catastrophically tips, exceeds human imagination. Thus, unreadability is inherent to the Anthropocene.[15] Guariglia evokes unreadability through form. The monumental white in Jacobshavn I also evokes unreadability by swallowing details and dazzling the viewer. The dominance of white recalls the ubiquity and therefore the ungraspable nature of the Anthropocene.[16] Latour also notes that previous concepts of nature and Earth deviate from reality, as symbolised by globes and maps.[17] Latour sees this deviation as a hallmark of modernity and defines it as the state in which every connection between our imagination of the world and its reality independent of us is severed. In this state, humans have lost the ability to perceive true nature.[18] It has become unfathomable, just like Jacobshavn I.

Interconnectedness

Paradoxically, the disorientation and unreadability connect the viewer to the work. The unfinished cognitive and perceptual processes demand resolution. The work appears simultaneously near and distant, familiar and strange. This dis:connectivity is also present in the Anthropocene discourse. Recognising the catastrophic consequences of dichotomising nature in the 20th century, James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis developed the Gaia hypothesis in the 1970s.[19] This introduces a holistic understanding of nature, radically departing from modern dualism.[20] With Gaia, the Greek deity and personification of Earth, they symbolically refer to nature as a network of all organisms, including humans and animals in addition to rivers, mountains, and the micro- and macrocosmos. Nature is therefore a planetary collaborative-processual network that integrates humans as one part among others. Humans are not outside nature but an integral part of it. We are deeply connected and existentially bound to the network, and the network’s existence depends on our prudent interaction with the environment.[21] Hence, a posthumanist image of humanity and nature emerges. Nature is no longer the other, the observed and the foreign; humans are part of it. The separation of subject and object collapses, forming the conceptual basis of the Anthropocene.[22] Bruno Latour, building on the Gaia hypothesis, refers to this understanding of nature as the Terrestrial. He implies reciprocity between humans and the world, positioning humans as actors among many equivalent actors in the network. Humans are not the counterpart of the world but immanent within it. The goal of Latour's anthropology of modernity is to dissolve the separation of humans from nature, revealing it as an ideological construction.[23] Interconnectedness is thus an essential component of both the Anthropocene discourse and Guariglia's work. The complex and seemingly insoluble entanglement of viewer and artwork reflects the dis:connective human-nature relationship advocated by Latour.

Uncanniness

Disorienting, unreadable, disconnected and yet connected, Jacobshavn I evokes discomfort and uncanniness. It is not the familiar and comfortable image of nature emphasising beauty; it is uncanny and strange. As Beatrice Galilee, curator at the Metropolitan Museum, describes Guariglia’s works, they are ‘beautiful but terrifying’.[24] This uncanniness is also present in the Anthropocene discourse. Thomas Friedman refers to this relationship with an incomprehensible world we are destroying ‘global weirding’.[25] The writer Amitav Ghosh says nature now reciprocates the human gaze, becoming alive in an uncanny yet familiar way.[26] Thus, in the Anthropocene, humans share their consciousness uncannily with other beings, perhaps even with the planet itself. Humans are inseparably connected to nature, so we can no longer retreat to our subjectivity or reduce nature to objectivity. Horn, invoking Kant, calls this the ‘Sublime in the Anthropocene’.[27] It is a disturbing intimacy with a world that can no longer be grasped solely as the human lifeworld.[28] Moreover, the sheer complexity and the real possibility of global environmental collapse are in themselves frightening and uncanny. Bruno Latour also perceives the uncanny in the Anthropocene, as evidenced in his account of flying over Baffin Island. He writes, ‘In the age of the Anthropocene, all the dreams of die-hard environmentalists, of experiencing how humans, by now paying more attention to nature, would be healed of their political disputes, have burst. We are all irrevocably entering a simultaneously post-natural, post-human, and post-epistemological epoch!’.[29]

Materiality and spatiality

Guariglia also realises a concrete understanding of spatiality. Initially, he depicts space downward from the sky to the Earth's surface, before creating a second, new spatiality. Printing with heavy acrylic paint and meticulous work with gesso, acrylic and polystyrene, a unique material spatiality emerges on the surface. Thus, Guariglia first appropriates landscape photographically and then bases a new space on it. The materials he uses are highly anthropogenic. Plastic and acrylic hardly decompose; they are products of the Anthropocene. The work embodies a material dialectic, where industrial materials depict natural glaciers. Guariglia assumes the role of natural forces with his art, creating and shaping landscapes. This act recalls humanity's role in the Anthropocene.[30] Latour also considers traditional concepts of nature as constructs and instead proposes a new concept that, while just as constructed, more accurately represents the character of nature: the critical zone. Like Guariglia, he introduces a new planetary spatiality. Latour defines the critical zone as the space from the lower atmosphere to the ground with its vegetation.[31] The globe model, most popularly captured in the Blue Marble (Fig. 3), is thus the counter-model to the critical zone. Nature as a globe is merely an insufficient dataset that that lacks an experiential perspective.[32] It is a mere ‘geometrization of the immeasurable’.[33] In contrast, the critical zone is where life occurs, which Latour describes as ‘everything we care for, everything we have encountered’.[34] The critical zone frees the imagination from the Blue-Marble conception of nature and returns the actual human lifeworld back to experiential surfaces. It is a new understanding of the planet as ‘skin of the living earth’,[35] recalling Guariglia’s model of nature. While the critical zone is heterogeneous and dynamic, it does not totalise nature. Similarly, the cracks and surfaces of Jacobshavn I are heterogeneous, dynamic and resist totalisation. Moreover, the critical zone, given environmental destruction, is uncanny and disturbing.[36]  

Fig. 3: Blue Marble (AS17-148-22727), 1972, recorded by Apollo 17 (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Marble#/media/Datei:The_Earth_seen_from_Apollo_17.jpg)

Photography also plays a crucial role. Guariglia's starting point, NASA’s aerial photograph of a landscape, epitomises the scientific-objectifying gaze on nature. This is transformed by reworking the surface with plastic, acrylic and gesso into a new space and an indefinitely durable object. Simultaneously, the work induces the opposite effect of a scientific photograph: it disorients, defies legibility, is uncanny. Guariglia reveals the fallacy and consequences of attempting to subsume nature under a scientific, binary perspective, while simultaneously proposing a counter-design. Guariglia demonstrates that nature in the Anthropocene has become unreadable, and the unreadability prompts reflection on what is seen. He gazes on the critical zone, confronting the viewer with the living skin of Gaia. Moreover, landscape emerges, according to W.J.T. Mitchell, as an identity-forming, dynamic process.[37] A semiotic and hermeneutic reading reveals it to be a construct, a dialectic between the viewer and nature.

Conclusion

Guariglia's work reconceives nature and humanity. Initially, it conveys the status quo in the Anthropocene. It reflects the state of nature and its impact on our understanding of nature and humanity. Thus, the work rejects dichotomous understandings of nature and conveys a counter-image: interconnected, fragile yet sublime. The work visualises Gaia in the sense of the critical zone, evoking new experiences and awareness. For Bruno Latour, art is a crucial mediator of his ideas. According to Latour, the dogma of modernity has deprived us of the concepts necessary to transcend old thought patterns and to experience nature as a critical zone. Thus, art and science make the critical zone more tangible in the Anthropocene. Both pursuits complement each other: while the arts aid comprehension, science predicts and elucidates. Beyond Latour, art plays a pivotal role in the Anthropocene discourse. If the crisis-driven transformation of the environment in the Anthropocene is rooted our understanding of and relationship to nature, as conveyed through art, then our worldview can only shift through new representations of nature. Art alone cannot avert climate catastrophes, but it can critically reflect on the Anthropocene. Art can disrupt structures and imagine alternatives through aesthetics. Treating the Anthropocene artistically does not mean resolving aporias but making them visible. Curator Tim Wride describes Guariglia’s works as follows: ‘The work is not didactic. […] The statement is completely enmeshed in the materiality of it. The work creates opportunities for dialogue. Scientists want to explain, while artists want to ask questions’.[38] Art has the potential to mediate a new understanding and relation between human and nature, maybe one more holistic and connected.   [1]The retreat of the ice is impressively illustrated in this NASA graphic: 'Ice Loss from Jakobshavn Glacier', NASA, 2015, accessed 25 February, 2024, https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/86436/ice-loss-from-jakobshavn-glacier. [2] Alina Cohen, 'Justin Brice Guariglia’s Powerful Photos of Melting Glaciers: In the studio with the first artist to join a NASA mission', Galerie Magazine, 2017, https://galeriemagazine.com/justin-brice-guariglia-creates-powerful-photographs-of-melting-glaciers/. Guariglia's website shows works from the same series and works depicting agricultural areas and mining. He always uses a similar technique and pictorial formula: 'Justin Brice - Artwork', accessed 25 February 2024, 2024, https://www.justinbrice.com/artwork. [3] Rebecca Anderson et al., 'A millennial perspective on Arctic warming from 14C in quartz and plants emerging from beneath ice caps', Geophysical Research Letters 35, no. 1 (2008), https://doi.org/10.1029/2007GL032057. [4] Ava Kofman, 'Bruno Latour, the Post-Truth Philosopher, Mounts a Defense of Science', New York Times (New York) 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/magazine/bruno-latour-post-truth-philosopher-science.html. Accessed 28.10.2024. [5] "USC Fisher Museum of Art: Earth Works: Mapping the Anthropocene ", USC Fisher Museum of Art, URL: Earth Works: Mapping the Anthropocene – USC Fisher Museum of Art, last access 22.05.2024. [6] The concept of the Anthropocene should be used advisedly. Despite its many definitions and the attendant vagueness, the term is strategically useful. I understand Anthropocene to refer to the conceptual synthesis of all the symptoms of global, crisis-ridden and man-made environmental transformations. Humans are emerging as a new global geological force that is profound shaping the planet, and these transformations represent a break with the environmental and living conditions of the last 12,000 years. Symptoms are not only scientifically measurable, social and political changes, but also the effects on our understanding of ourselves and nature. The Anthropocene is not meant as a concrete scientific geological-stratigraphic epoch – a controversial claim beyond the scope of this essay. For more on the term and its history, see Eva Horn and Hannes Bergthaller, Anthropozän. Zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius Verlag, 2019), 8-25. [7] Félix Guatarri combined aesthetics and ecology long before the term Anthropocene emerged. See Félix Guattari, Les trois écologies (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1985). For an overview of the discourse on aesthetics and the Anthropocene, see: Horn and Bergthaller, Anthropozän. Zur Einführung, 120-43. [8] Ludolf Kuchenbuch, 'Bruno Latours Anthropozän und die Historie: Feststellungen, Anknüpfungen, Fragen', Historische Anthropologie 26, no. 3 (2018): 381, https://doi.org/10.7788/hian.2018.26.3.379. [9] Kofman, 'Bruno Latour, the Post-Truth Philosopher'. [10] Bruno Latour, Anthropocene Lecture: Bruno Latour (Berlin: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, 2018). https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/video/anthropocene-lecture-bruno-latour. [11] Horn and Bergthaller, Anthropozän. Zur Einführung, 124-25. [12] Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 101. [13] Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, 'Disconnected', in Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2020), 75. [14] Horn and Bergthaller, Anthropozän. Zur Einführung, 128. [15] Horn and Bergthaller, Anthropozän. Zur Einführung, 128-31; Timothy Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge. The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (London: Taylor & Francis, 2015), 7. [16] Moritz Baßler and Heinz Krügh, Gegenwartsästhetik (Constance: Wallstein, 2021), 5. [17] Latour deconstructs the idea of the globe in detail. See chapters one and two of Bruno Latour, Kampf um Gaia. Acht Vorträge über das neue Klimaregime (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2020). [18] Latour and Weibel, 'Disconnected', 75. [19] The term first appeared in James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, 'Atmospheric homeostasis by and for the biosphere: the gaia hypothesis', Tellus 26, no. 1-2 (1973). [20] Modernity and the present are characterised by dichotomous natural-aesthetic ideas. These are largely rooted in ancient philosophy, from which the separation of spiritual-inner subject and material-outer object is derived. These tendencies resonate with modern subject-object dualism. On the one hand, the subject interacts with nature. The subject, therefore, intends, reflects and acts largely according to reason. At the same time, the subject is affective and can act irrationally. As an active entity, it confronts material, object-like nature and defines it as the passive outside itself. Nature is thus understood as intentionless, unconscious, continuous, calculable and technically manipulable. This dualism is general in application and Western in origin. Eva Horn, 'Challenges for an Aesthetics of the Anthropocene', in The Anthropocentric Turn: The Interplay between Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Responses to a New Age, ed. Gabriele Dürbeck and Philip Hüpkes (New York: Routledge, 2020). [21] Latour and Weibel, 'Gaia', 166. Peggy Karpouzou and Nikoleta Zampaki, 'Introduction: Towards a Symbiosis of Posthumanism and Environmental Humanities or Paving Narratives for the Symbiocene', in Symbiotic Posthumanist Ecologies in Western Literature, Philosophy and Art: Towards Theory and Practice, ed. Peggy Karpouzou and Nikoleta Zampaki (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2023). [22] Horn and Bergthaller, Anthropozän. Zur Einführung, 28. [23] Kuchenbuch, 'Bruno Latours Anthropozän', 380. [24] Ted Loos, 'A Man on an Eco-Mission in Mixed Media', New York Times (New York), 10 October 2017. [25] Thomas Friedman, 'Global Weirding Is Here', New York Times (New York), 17 February 2010. [26] Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 91. [27] Horn and Bergthaller, Anthropozän. Zur Einführung, 131. [28] ibid.,129-132. [29] Latour, Kampf um Gaia, 248. Author’s translation. [30] Baßler and Krügh, Gegenwartsästhetik, 214. [31] Kofman, 'Bruno Latour, the Post-Truth Philosopher'. [32] Latour and Weibel, 'Seven Objections against Landing on Earth', 14. [33] Peter Sloterdijk, Sphären II: Globen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999), 47. Author's translation. [34] Kofman, 'Bruno Latour, the Post-Truth Philosopher'. [35] Latour and Weibel, 'Disconnected', 13. [36] Bruno Latour, Kampf um Gaia. Acht Vorträge über das Neue Klimaregime (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2020), 334. [37] W.J.T. Mitchell, 'Introduction', in Landscape and Power, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 1-5. [38] Loos, 'A Man on an Eco-Mission'.
bibliography
Anderson, Rebecca, Gifford Miller, Jason Briner, Nathaniel Lifton and Stephen DeVogel. 'A millennial perspective on Arctic warming from 14C in quartz and plants emerging from beneath ice caps'. Geophysical Research Letters 35, no. 1 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1029/2007GL032057. Baßler, Moritz and Heinz Krügh. Gegenwartsästhetik. Constance: Wallstein, 2021. 'Justin Brice - Artwork'. accessed 25 February 2024, 2024, https://www.justinbrice.com/artwork. Clark, Timothy. Ecocriticism on the Edge. The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept. London: Taylor & Francis, 2015. Cohen, Alina. 'Justin Brice Guariglia’s Powerful Photos of Melting Glaciers: In the studio with the first artist to join a NASA mission'. Galerie Magazine, 2017. https://galeriemagazine.com/justin-brice-guariglia-creates-powerful-photographs-of-melting-glaciers/. Friedman, Thomas. 'Global Weirding Is Here'. New York Times (New York), 17 February 2010. Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Guattari, Félix. Les trois écologies Paris: Editions Galilée, 1985. Horn, Eva. 'Challenges for an Aesthetics of the Anthropocene'. In The Anthropocentric Turn: The Interplay between Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Responses to a New Age, edited by Gabriele Dürbeck and Philip Hüpkes,  New York: Routledge, 2020. Horn, Eva and Hannes Bergthaller. Anthropozän. Zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius Verlag, 2019. Karpouzou, Peggy and Nikoleta Zampaki. 'Introduction: Towards a Symbiosis of Posthumanism and Environmental Humanities or Paving Narratives for the Symbiocene'. In Symbiotic Posthumanist Ecologies in Western Literature, Philosophy and Art: Towards Theory and Practice, edited by Peggy Karpouzou and Nikoleta Zampaki,  Berlin: Peter Lang, 2023. Kofman, Ava. 'Bruno Latour, the Post-Truth Philosopher, Mounts a Defense of Science'. New York Times (New York), 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/magazine/bruno-latour-post-truth-philosopher-science.html. Kuchenbuch, Ludolf. 'Bruno Latours Anthropozän und die Historie: Feststellungen, Anknüpfungen, Fragen'. Historische Anthropologie 26, no. 3 (2018): 379-401. https://doi.org/10.7788/hian.2018.26.3.379. Latour, Bruno. Anthropocene Lecture: Bruno Latour. Berlin: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, 2018. ———. Kampf um Gaia. Acht Vorträge über das neue Klimaregime. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2020. Latour, Bruno and Peter Weibel. 'Disconnected'. In Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth, edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel,  Cambridge: MIT Press, 2020. ———. 'Gaia'. In Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth, edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel,  Cambridge: MIT Press, 2020. ———. 'Seven Objections against Landing on Earth'. In Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth, edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel,  Cambridge: MIT Press, 2020. Loos, Ted. 'A Man on an Eco-Mission in Mixed Media'. New York Times (New York), 10 October 2017. Lovelock, James and Lynn Margulis. 'Atmospheric homeostasis by and for the biosphere: the gaia hypothesis'. Tellus 26, no. 1-2 (1973): 2-10. Mitchell, W.J.T. 'Introduction'. In Landscape and Power, edited by W.J.T. Mitchell,  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. 'Ice Loss from Jakobshavn Glacier'. NASA, 2015, accessed 25 February, 2024, https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/86436/ice-loss-from-jakobshavn-glacier. Sloterdijk, Peter. Sphären II: Globen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999.
citation information:
Seeland, Peter, 'Facing Gaia: Justin Brice Guariglia's landscape photography in an ecological perspective', Ben Kamis ed. global dis:connect blog 2024, https://www.globaldisconnect.org/06/26/facing-gaia-justin-brice-guariglias-landscape-photography-in-an-ecological-perspective/.
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26 June 2024
In Blog, Blog 2024

French Painting And The Nineteenth Century with a Postscript by Alfred Flechtheim

burcu dogramaci
 

James Laver, French Painting And The Nineteenth Century. B.T. Batsford Ltd., 1937, with Alfred Flechtheim’s 'Postscript', pp. 101–114.

  I acquired the book French Painting And The Nineteenth Century, published in London in September 1937, from an online antiquarian bookshop a few months ago. The background to this is an ongoing inquiry into artistic exile in London after 1933 conducted in the course of a research project I have been leading since 2017.[1] I was interested in the volume because it contained the last text by the gallery owner Alfred Flechtheim, who, as a German Jew facing persecution at home, sought refuge in London. This text has received little attention, yet it relates how intensively Flechtheim tried to re-establish his livelihood in the British capital. Perhaps even more striking is how it documents his momentous work for the recognition of nineteenth-century French art. French Painting And The Nineteenth Century is also a dis:connective object: it is connected with and results from Flechtheim's life in exile, but it also points to the fissures of exile and thus to an existence marked by voids and upheavals. At the same time, the book recalls an incomplete memory, one that is also related to exile. For Flechtheim’s disenfranchisement and persecution, the financial decline and destruction of his successful galleries, as well as his emigration, banished his work to oblivion decades. Only with the major exhibition and publication Alfred Flechtheim. Sammler. Kunsthändler in the Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf in 1987 did Flechtheim return to art history. A major provenance research project in 2014, which involved 15 museums, followed the links between items in the collection and the gallerist Alfred Flechtheim.[2] Flechtheim was a successful gallerist, with art spaces in Berlin and Düsseldorf, as well as the publisher of Der Querschnitt magazine. Flechtheim exhibited the most important modern artists of his time, including Rudolf Belling, George Grosz, Oskar Kokoschka, Georg Kolbe, Pablo Picasso, Renée Sintenis and many more. When the National Socialists seized power, Alfred Flechtheim and his company, which was already struggling in the Great Depression, became the target of racist attacks in which he was targeted as a Jew, a cultural Bolshevist and an outstanding patron of the artistic avant-garde.[3] In 1937, the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition in Munich not only defamed many of the artists whom Flechtheim represented but also attacked the gallery owner himself in texts displayed throughout the exhibition.[4] Flechtheim had been living abroad since 1933 and worked for the Mayor Gallery at 18 Cork Street in London. Later, he was also the official representative of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler’s Paris gallery. Flechtheim’s aim was to introduce French and German modernism to the London art market and to raise its profile. Paintings by Paul Klee opened in January 1934, and an exhibition on George Grosz followed in June the same year.[5] Although Flechtheim greatly influenced these and other exhibitions at the Mayor Gallery and provided loans, his name remained largely unmentioned.[6] Flechtheim also worked with the Agnew Gallery and was responsible for its new focus on French Impressionism.[7] Other collaborations included the Alex Reid & Lefevre Gallery and The Leicester Galleries. However, his contribution to the acceptance of continental modernism barely registered with the public. In London, Flechtheim − unlike in Düsseldorf and Berlin − could not conduct his business under his gallery name.  

First page of Alfred Flechtheim’s “Postscript” (p. 101) in James Laver’s French Painting And The Nineteenth Century. B.T. Batsford Ltd., 1937.

  In October 1936, Flechtheim organised the Exhibition of Nineteenth Century French Painting at the New Burlington Galleries, which brought together work by Manet, van Gogh and Cézanne. Alfred Flechtheim died in 1937. His body was cremated at Golders Green Crematory in London. Posthumously, the final text he authored appeared in James Laver’s French Painting and The Nineteenth Century.[8] The book is dedicated to Flechtheim: ‘In Memory of ALFRED FLECHTHEIM who died 9th March 1937 “Marchand de Tableaux Créateur”.’ The book brings together many of the paintings shown at the Exhibition of Nineteenth Century French Painting. Flechtheim himself selected many of the images and edited the texts. In his postscript, he describes how he organised the exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries and why he always championed French art. His text formulates a credo that can be read as a reflection of his situation as an exiled art dealer and as a pacifist statement on the political situation:
Art need be none the worse for being national or provincial, but really great art soars above racial frontiers and belongs to the world. [...] Such an art, to borrow J.B. Manson's words, ‘can be understood with few exceptions by the whole world. It affords a common meeting ground, and transcends all those considerations of imperialism and politics which are the cause of international strife and ill will.’[9]
 

Gerty Simon, Portrait of Alfred Flechtheim, London, c. 1935 (The Bernard Simon Estate, Wiener Holocaust Library Collections).

  From the book French Painting And The Nineteenth Century, further connections lead, for example, to the exhibition 20th Century German Art, which also took place in 1938 at the New Burlington Galleries in London and was organised in reaction to the National Socialist Entartete Kunst exhibition. Another connection points to the photographer Gerty Simon, for whom Flechtheim curated a solo exhibition at the Camera Club. This exhibition Camera Portraits featured 58 portraits. The exhibition also included a portrait of Flechtheim. Simon photographed Flechtheim around 1935, during the period of his professional re-emergence in London, which brought him into contact with leading galleries in the city. The portrait continues a traditional convention. As early as the 1920s, Flechtheim was portrayed in severe profile by Hugo Erfurth and Frieda Riess. Flechtheim’s striking features, with his distinctive nose and hair combed back severely from his face, were similarly emphasised in Rudolf Belling’s Portrait Alfred Flechtheim (1927). Gerty Simon’s photograph shows the art dealer in the approved side view. The face is brightly lit and stands out against the dark background. The picture is tightly cropped and focused entirely on the head. The dark circles around the eyes and the clouded eyelids give the subject a melancholy expression. Simon's photograph of Flechtheim and the book French Painting And The Nineteenth Century are important sources for reconstructing the gallery owner’s activities and professional networks in London. French Painting And The Nineteenth Century provides insights into the artistic taste, aesthetic preferences and persuasions of the gallerist: ‘The final choice of the illustrations, and much of the editorial work on the book were undertaken by the late Alfred Flechtheim, whose enthusiasm was a stimulus to all concerned in its production’. Flechtheim selected what was available to him from English and other private collectors and museums; in this respect, one can speak of an immediate reaction to the available opportunities or of a canon in the sign of exile.   [1] Specifically, the ERC Consolidator Grant research project ‘Relocating Modernism: Global Metropolises, Modern Art and Exile (METROMOD)’. [2] Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, ‘Alfred Flechtheim. Kunsthaendler der Avantgarde’, Alfred Flechtheim. Kunsthaendler der Avantgarde, 29 March 2022, http://alfredflechtheim.com. [3] Cordula Frowein, ‘Alfred Flechtheim im Exil in England’, in Alfred Flechtheim. Sammler. Kunsthändler. Verleger (Duesseldorf: Kunstmuseum Duesseldorf, 1987), 59. [4] Ottfried Dascher, “Es ist was Wahnsinniges mit der Kunst”. Alfred Flechtheim. Sammler, Kunsthändler, Verleger, Quellenstudie zur Kunst 6 (Waedenswil: Nimbus. Kunst und Buecher AG, 2011), 394. [5] Frowein, ‘Alfred Flechtheim im Exil in England’, 60. [6] Dascher, “Es ist was Wahnsinniges mit der Kunst”. Alfred Flechtheim. Sammler, Kunsthändler, Verleger, 331. [7] Frowein, ‘Alfred Flechtheim im Exil in England’, 61. [8] Alfred Flechtheim, ‘Postscript’, in French Painting And The Nineteenth Century, ed. James Laver (London: B.T. Batsford Ltd., 1937), 101–14. [9] Flechtheim, 114.

bibliography
Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen. ‘Alfred Flechtheim. Kunsthaendler der Avantgarde’. Alfred Flechtheim. Kunsthaendler der Avantgarde, 29 March 2022. http://alfredflechtheim.com. Dascher, Ottfried. “Es ist was Wahnsinniges mit der Kunst”. Alfred Flechtheim. Sammler, Kunsthändler, Verleger. Quellenstudie zur Kunst 6. Waedenswil: Nimbus. Kunst und Buecher AG, 2011. Flechtheim, Alfred. ‘Postscript’. In French Painting And The Nineteenth Century, edited by James Laver, 101–14. London: B.T. Batsford Ltd., 1937. Frowein, Cordula. ‘Alfred Flechtheim im Exil in England’. In Alfred Flechtheim. Sammler. Kunsthändler. Verleger, 59–64. Duesseldorf: Kunstmuseum Duesseldorf, 1987.  
citation information:
Dogramaci, Burcu, 'French Painting And The Nineteenth Century with a Postscript by Alfred Flechtheim', Ben Kamis ed. global dis:connect blog. global dis:connect, 11 June 2024, https://www.globaldisconnect.org/08/02/french-painting-and-the-nineteenth-century-with-a-postscript-by-alfred-flechtheim/.
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11 June 2024
In Blog, Blog 2024

The people who make global dis:connect happen – part II 

This post is a continuation of the last, where we began introducing the research assistants who greatly lighten the load of running this place, leaving us with more time and joy for which we are immeasurably grateful.
 

dogukan

What do you research, and what attracts you to the topic? My academic interests are broad, ranging from history, German and English to pedagogy, but I enjoy working on ancient history the most. My research focuses on the history of the everyday and social history of the Roman Empire in late antiquity. So far, I have worked on the communicative power of clothing, fashion and outward appearance in Roman life and on the spread of Christianity through Sicily in late antiquity. I really enjoy this subfield, as I get to explore the details that formed ancient people’s identity and to some extent bridge the gap to people who seem so far away from today’s reality.   What tasks do you handle at global dis:connect, and what do you enjoy the most? Apart from assisting our fellows and team members, I savor working in gd:c’s  dissemination efforts as a content creator and PR advisor for social media. My biggest passion and best capability is loving things of any kind deeply and, most importantly, sharing the things I love deeply with other people. At gd:c I get to share the very essence of our institute via words, photographs and videos, which I cherish.   What’s your credo and why? Per aspera ad astra. An ancient saying my beloved and very inspiring Latin teacher taught me. It reminds me what I am capable of and where I can go — ad astra. At the same time, it expresses what you have to go through to get to the stars — per aspera. Work hard and truly believe in your yourself to overcome any limit. It might be cheesy, but it has proven to be true.    

leonie

What tasks do you handle at global dis:connect, and what do you enjoy the most? At global dis:connect, my responsibilities primarily revolve around supporting the planning and execution of events, which involves tasks like coordinating logistics, managing communications and ensuring everything runs smoothly on the day of the event. What I find most enjoyable is the opportunity to work closely with a team, brainstorming ideas, problem-solving together and ultimately seeing our efforts come to life in successful events.   Would you like to have photographic memory and why? Having a photographic memory would indeed be advantageous, especially for tasks like rapidly absorbing and synthesising a lot of literature, which would be incredibly useful for my upcoming bachelor's thesis. Additionally, having instant-recall abilities would make me the ultimate walking encyclopaedia ready to amaze everyone with facts at any given moment!   Who is your favourite character from a novel or film and why? Treebeard from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. As one of the Ents, guardians of the forests, Treebeard personifies nature's voice and symbolises resistance against the destructive forces of human evil. While he seems too slow and deliberate in the beginning to achieve anything, he later transforms into a leader determined to save Middle Earth. I also love his deep understanding of the world and its history. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1njDtvLIoA

simon

What tasks do you handle at global dis:connect, and what do you enjoy the most? At global dis:connect, my primary duty is to design posters and flyers for our workshops. Additionally, I plan and assist with the preparation of these events. What I find most enjoyable is the opportunity to meet fascinating new people during these occasions as well as the creative freedom I have when designing.   What do you define as home and why? My home isn't a physical location, but a place where my friends and family are. It's a place where I feel at ease, can enjoy wonderful experiences and where time seems to fly by.   What’s your credo and why? My credo in life is that everything will unfold as it's supposed to. There's no need to overthink things because life has a plan for each of us, regardless of whether we worry or not.      

theresa

What aspects of the research at global dis:connect pique your curiosity and how does it overlap with your research? While globalisation in general is a topic I am extremely interested in, I am especially passionate about migration processes and their impact. Colonisation, the migration connected to it and their effects on society are core topics at global dis:connect, and the impact in particular on past and contemporary literature is a topic I am really interested in.   What do you define as home and why? To me, home is less a specific place than a feeling thaf is mostly connected to people I feel really comfortable with. Whether it‘s going out and having a couple of drinks, travelling to new countries or just hanging out at home talking about live and joking around, my home is wherever my favourite humans are.   Who is your favourite character from a novel or film and why? My favourite fictional character would have to be Chandler Bing from the TV show Friends, maybe just because no other person has ever made laugh as hard and feel incredibly connected to them at the same time. His self-deprecating humour and his use of sarcastic comments at every possible opportunity have taught me that it‘s incredibly important not to take life too seriously.   Continue Reading
28 May 2024
In Blog, Blog 2024

The people who make global dis:connect happen 

[Editor's note: Our Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect began 3 years ago, and we've come a long way since then. Like the bedrock on which great buildings rest or the air that keeps a jumbo jet in flight, one of the principal forces behind our success is invisible: the people who perform the countless tasks required to keep a major international research institution afloat. Perhaps least visible are the research assistants who run the events, fetch the literature, support the research and keep the experienced researchers on their toes. Indeed, their invisibility is a sign of how well they do their job. So in a few coming posts, we'll be profiling some of the people behind our public-facing work, and we're starting with the invaluable research assistants — nine promising young scholars with bright futures and big ideas. We provided them with a list of questions and asked them to each answer three to give you a better idea of who we are and how we do what we do.)

Clemens

What aspects of the research at global dis:connect pique your curiosity and how does it overlap with your research?

I am interested in exploring different historical perceptions of globality. Therefore, it is especially inspiring to see how the research projects conducted at gd:c interpret the ‘gap’ between dis-connection and connectivity differently, each providing a deeper understanding of how processes of interaction work, not only on a global scale.

  What tasks do you handle at global dis:connect, and what do you enjoy the most? As a student assistant, you get exposed to a variety of tasks. I particularly enjoy assisting with research and conferences, which are a great opportunity to welcome people from around the world to gd:c.   What do you define as home and why? Anywhere with enough books (they don’t even have to be great ones), coffee and good company to spend the day. I have always been fascinated by stories of all kinds.   Bonus question: what do you research, and what attracts you to the topic? I’ve covered various periods, spaces and topics during my studies at LMU. I am currently researching scientific endeavours in the Arctic and Antarctic during the 19th century as part of my master's degree. What is fascinating about the polar regions is that while being imagined as most remote and uninhabitable spaces, they are at the same time (literally) central to the earth and our modern understanding of it as a global system, rendering them highly dis:connective.

Daniel

What do you research, and what attracts you to the topic? I am researching the connection between art and outer space. The manifold intentions, types of communication, projects and the very literal dis:connectivity that this topic have to offer are exciting.   Would you like to have photographic memory and why? Absolutely not! It would certainly be beneficial to hold trivia and lovely memories in your mind forever. However, I also imagine that abstract thinking can be neglected as a result and that certain memories can often take an emotional toll on you.   Who is your favourite character from a novel or film and why? The future king of the pirates — Monkey D. Luffy from the anime series One Piece. Some anime are masterful cultural treasures with fantastic stories and rich characters. The series is older than I am but not yet finished, so Luffy has not only accompanied me for a lifetime but has always put a smile on my face with his cheerfulness and steadfastness throughout his journey. https://youtu.be/rvoUeOgsh3I

Felix

What tasks do you handle at global dis:connect, and what do you enjoy the most?

Soon after I started working at gd:c, I developed a video trailer with Christian Steinau to convey dis:connectivity in multimedia and set up the gd:c YouTube channel. I now responsible produce our Fellows Close Up series for YouTube support the workshops and events. My favourite part is meeting such a wide variety of people from all over the globe with very different backgrounds and all the new perspectives I gain through getting to know them and the inspiring conversations I have with them.

  What do you define as home and why?

Multiple places can make me feel ‘at home’, meaning cared for, free, safe, peaceful and happy. Home can be every beautiful mountain ridge, lakeside and beach where I can create beautiful memories with someone I love. Home is not a physical place but a mental state. Home is where the people live that are family to me.

  What skill would you like to learn and why? I would like to be able to read minds, even though I definitely don´t want to know most of other people’s thoughts. Still, I´d like to know and understand, what is going on in their minds. Also, as a writer of fiction, I see people in my daily life sometimes, and I think about what their story could be – wouldn’t it be interesting to know if stories I imagine come close to reality?  

Peter

What do you research, and what attracts you to the topic? I have a keen interest in global history, particularly in global art history. My research thus far has focused on significant global exhibition platforms such as the documenta in Kassel and the Venice Biennale. I find that art serves as a vital medium for dealing with and expressing current, future and past processes of globalisation through imagination. Exploring questions about the effects, constitutions and methodologies of globalisation as well as art’s role in it, intrigues me deeply because it links my personal interests with important contemporary issues.   Who is your favourite character from a novel or film and why? It's Ulysses because he has accompanied me since my childhood. His superpower is not divine strength or invulnerability, but his cunning and smartness, which make him an amiable hero.   What skill would you like to learn and why? It would be wonderful to speak every language in the world. Imagine the ease of understanding different cultures, making friends and feeling at home wherever you go!      

Sophia

What do you research and what attracts you to the topic? I'm researching theatre theories, and I really like them because they try to theorise something as complex as a theatre situation and performance. Theatre is also such a lively subject, but I love reading about it and thinking about all the possibilities and ideas that are possible with it.   What aspects of the research at global dis:connect pique your curiosity and how does it overlap with your research? Theatre is also a global phenomenon, and theories about theatre, especially outside the European context, are very interesting and sometimes not really well researched. I really enjoyed Nic Leonhardt's and Anna Heller’s Workshop Stages of Performing in Pahlavi Iran (1925-1979), learning so much about Iranian theatre.   Would you like to have a photographic memory and why? No, I don't want to have a photographic memory, because forgetting some things, but also keeping good memories, is a natural part of life. I would also like to enjoy some plays repeatedly. So I'd like to be able to enjoy them each time without knowing exactly what changed from one viewing to the next. Continue Reading
14 May 2024
In Blog, Blog 2024

The German colonial empire, seen from its end

matthias leanza
  How do empires end? What influence do the ties and divides that shape imperial formations have after their downfall? And in what sense is the nation-state a legacy of empire rather than its negation? My essay ponders these questions using the example of German colonialism. It looks at the evolution of the German colonial empire from the 1880s in light of its sudden demise following World War I, arguing that the nation-state — in Germany and overseas — was among its most important legacies. However, the nation-state could only become a legacy of German colonialism because anticolonial activists failed to convert the overseas empire into a federated entity. The attempt at federal reform may have been futile, but it would have significantly altered the historical trajectories of all countries involved. Therefore, despite being an unlikely outcome, this counterfactual provides a contrast to assess what nation-states ultimately are — a product of decaying empires.

Anticolonial federalism

Fig. 1: Martin Dibobe as train driver in Berlin. (Image: Historisches Archiv der BVG)

On 27 June 1919, the day before Germany signed the Treaty of Versailles, Martin Dibobe (born Quane a Dibobe) submitted a petition to the German Colonial Office on behalf of the Duala people in Cameroon.[1] This was not Dibobe’s first interaction with the Berlin authorities. Born to a Duala chief in 1876, Dibobe had been in Germany for over two decades by that point.[2] He had come in 1896 to participate in a state-organised colonial exhibit at the Berlin Trade Fair, where 103 individuals from various German colonies were to present their ways of life to the public.[3] After the fair, some decided to stay and settle in Germany, including Dibobe. He completed vocational training and subsequently worked as a train driver for Berlin’s urban rail and subway company. A fierce supporter of the November Revolution, Dibobe hoped to negotiate better terms for his people and extend the emergent republican order to the German colonies, all of which had been seized by the Entente Powers during the war. In June 1919, he organised a petition to the Weimar National Assembly with the support of 17 other members of the Duala community in Germany before turning to the Colonial Office again, as he had done on previous occasions.[4] The list of demands was extensive, but they all revolved around one core issue: Cameroon and the other German colonies in Africa were to remain with Germany. The residents of those territories were to be treated as Germans with equal rights and duties, regardless of their race or ethnicity.[5] The petition proposed introducing the German civil code and judicial system, including the abolition of corporal punishment, indentured labour and all colonial laws enshrining racial segregation.[6] At the same time, Cameroon was to maintain some degree of autonomy from Germany’s federal government — for example, by having three presidents of its own, each representing a different population group, and a separate tax fund — while obtaining permanent representation in the Reichstag.[7] As the primary liaison between the Duala diaspora in Germany and Cameroon, Dibobe seemed to be the natural candidate for this office. The German government would retain the right to appoint Cameroon’s governor, who had to ensure law and order in the territory.[8] However, the incumbent could be held accountable and even dismissed if the population expressed dissatisfaction with his performance. By contrast, all other public offices had to be occupied by people of African descent, thus establishing a permanent balance of power between the former metropole and the former colony. Although this proposal clearly distinguished between German citizens from Europe and German citizens from Africa, Dibobe left no doubt that the latter, too, were Germans in every sense of the word. ‘Since we are Germans’, he explained, ‘we demand equality, even if in public life we are always referred to as foreigners. This misapprehension must be eliminated by the present government through public announcements’.[9] These demands implied nothing less than the transformation of Germany’s colonial empire into a multiracial and transregional federation, where being German and being African were fully compatible. The proposal demonstrated that decolonisation did not necessarily mean secession, as it did in anticolonial nationalism.[10] Instead, exit from empire could also involve attempts to reshape existing ties according to the principle of plurality. Dibobe represented a political stance best understood as anticolonial federalism, which combines elements of both connection and disconnection. Later generations of activists from various European colonies would adopt this stance independently of him, as it promised to reconcile equality with difference.[11] The Minister for the Colonies, Johannes Bell, one of the envoys who signed the peace treaty in Versailles, even briefly mentioned the Dualas’ petitions in the National Assembly.[12] But in the end, Dibobe’s radical proposition for a postcolonial Africa, which was centred on federal integration rather than national independence, went unnoticed. In Bell’s account, the loyal people of Cameroon simply preferred to share their fate with Germany, preferring to perish together than become French spoils of war.

Double standards

Neither Dibobe’s plea for a federal reorganisation of the German colonial empire nor the widespread desire among the German population to retain their imperial status, as voiced by Bell and many other officials, had any chance of success. Dibobe lost his job and tried to return to Cameroon with his German wife and two of her children from a previous marriage in 1921, but they only managed to travel as far as Monrovia, where he had relatives.[13] The pervasive rhetoric of national self-determination notwithstanding, the Entente Powers had no intention of abolishing colonial rule. Instead, self-determination became a justification for carving up the empires of the vanquished in Europe, while the overseas empires of the victors remained intact and even expanded through the mandate system.[14] When discussing the terms of the peace deal, one deputy of the National Assembly, the high-profile conservative Arthur von Posadowsky-Wehner, expressed his discontent as follows: ‘There is so much talk among our enemies of the self-determination of peoples. Why doesn’t England introduce this right to self-determination in Ireland? Why doesn’t it introduce this principle in India? Well, one interprets things as one pleases’.[15] The recurrent theme of national self-determination had arisen in the National Assembly’s opening session in February 1919. Friedrich Ebert, the chairman of the Social Democratic Party, welcomed the elected deputies in his capacity as the head of the provisional government, particularly emphasising the female deputies present.[16] Although women remained underrepresented — only 37 of the 423 deputies were women — they participated for the first time in the legislative process, evidencing that the November Revolution had infixed the principle of popular sovereignty. Invoking US President Wilson’s principles for the postwar order, Ebert maintained that the German people had earned favourable peace terms, including Germany’s reinstatement as a colonial power. They were just as much victims of Prussian militarism as the countries against which the German Reich had waged war: ‘The German people have fought for their right to self-determination at home; they cannot now cede it to the outside world’.[17] Certainly, the victors had a different idea for Germany’s future.[18] As the peace treaty stipulated, the occupied German colonies were to be administered as League of Nations mandates based on a concept of imperial guardianship, while the country’s multiple border regions in Europe became part of neighbouring nation-states, some newly created.[19] This uneven application of self-determination followed the colour line, deepening the North–South divide in the global political system. For Germany, this regulation entailed a double loss of empire, both in Europe and overseas, which was met with a politics of resentment. During the war, when state borders were fluid, Germany’s imperial ambitions evolved into grandiose visions of hegemony over continental Europe and central Africa, but the war resulted in the opposite. Beyond being vanquished, the perceived relegation to an ‘ordinary’ nation-state without imperial peripheries prompted deep resentment.[20] This sentiment is a desire for revenge despite, or because of, an inability to change the situation, giving birth to what Nietzsche called ‘indignant pessimists’.[21] This affect is arguably what spurred the numerous protest rallies advocating for the return of the colonies in the run-up to the peace settlement, and it was clearly manifested in a revisionist discourse centred around the theme of the ‘lie of colonial guilt’.[22] For the political campaigner Martin Hobohm, the loss of Germany’s colonial empire amounted to nothing less than the confinement of the German people in Europe, cutting the country off from its global lifelines.[23] Fig. 2: Andree, R. and A. Scobel. 'Karte von Afrika'. Bielefeld: Velhagen & Klasing, 1890.Fig. 2: Andree, R. and A. Scobel. 'Karte von Afrika'. Bielefeld: Velhagen & Klasing, 1890.

Spheres of influence

This view echoed a pervasive theme of colonialist discourse in Germany since the mid-19th century. Recalling Malthus, this discourse crystallised around the idea that colonial settlements represented a solution to overpopulation.[24] Emigration could help curb unchecked population growth, but it created its own problems — most notably, the loss of able-bodied men and women to competing nations. Expanding on Adolf Zehlicke’s adaptation of Malthus to the German situation, Friedrich Fabri advocated in 1879 for the establishment of colonial settlements.[25] To this end, a national emigration office was to be established and convert emigrants into settlers. However, the first impulse toward realising this idea came from voluntary associations, not from the state. The German Colonial Association, founded in 1882, soon emerged as the key player. It was conceived as a national umbrella organisation to coordinate various local initiatives. At the inaugural meeting in Frankfurt, the explorer and founding member Hermann von Maltzan explained that the previous associations were too local to affect the national consciousness and politics. That is why it had become imperative to create a nationwide umbrella organisation.[26] At the same time, Maltzan urged his fellow members to lower their expectations regarding the capabilities of such an entity. Establishing settler colonies was not yet viable. Fabri, who also attended the meeting, vehemently objected, arguing that only colonial settlements would forestall further population drain.[27] The statutes that the assembly eventually adopted, however, were unequivocal: in keeping with the founding call, they rejected the maximalist program of settler colonies and constrained the organisation’s purpose to lobbying for trading colonies without participating in their establishment.[28] Germany thus had a national lobby organisation promoting colonial expansion, but it had no colonies — something that only began to change thanks to a disparate group of political entrepreneurs.[29] In the early 1880s, various merchants and companies pushed for their ventures on the African coasts and in the Pacific to be protected by the German state. They hoped for a competitive advantage over other businesses, as foreign investors would either have to pay heavy tariffs or be excluded from the market. These scattered, largely uncoordinated initiatives took place in an international environment where competing powers jealously monitored each other’s expansion, which fuelled desires for territorial gains and fears of falling behind. The result was a self-reinforcing process of expansion that only halted when virtually all available territory had been claimed. The West Africa Conference of 1884–85 sought to regulate this process in its broad outlines, but expansion into the African interior and its piecemeal partition were organised in a decentralised manner through bilateral agreements.[30] The expansion into the Pacific followed a similar pattern. Thus, the European powers carved out their spheres of influence. Of course, this was not a new phenomenon, as a debate among legal scholars and political scientists around 1900 quickly established.[31] The spheres, however, were comparatively small and gave rise to a patchwork of territorial claims. The imperial periphery could no longer be integrated into overarching hemispheres as in earlier times when far fewer powers were involved. Initially, these spheres were only defined near coastlines, while the hinterlands remained open as frontiers for potential expansion. Yet even after the borders had been settled, which in some cases took until the 1900s, these territories were far from evenly integrated. When the German Reich took them over from private companies and gradually established colonial states, they displayed a pronounced core–periphery structure.[32] The reach of the colonial administration was limited to a core that faded into an active military frontier, pushing gradually into the hinterland. In virtually all colonies, some regions remained beyond colonial authorities’ control, often where local communities had already formed their own states. These regions represented an internal exterior, located within the sphere of influence but outside the colonial state. This layered governance architecture informed how the victors of World War I redistributed the German colonies as mandated territories among themselves. For instance, the East African kingdoms of Burundi and Rwanda, administered by the Germans on the model of indirect rule, were transferred to Belgium, while Tanganyika fell under British control. It is nonetheless remarkable how enduring the borders of the originally established spheres of influence have proven. Even a century later, around three-quarters of the land borders established under German rule persist today.[33] Together with the borders changed in the interwar period, they represent the fault lines along which the colonial empires disintegrated in the decolonisation that followed World War II, leaving territorial fragments behind that underlay postcolonial nation building.[34]

Fig. 3: 'Die deutsche und englische Interessensphäre an der Ostküste von Afrika'. Munich: Franz Moises, 1889.

In the public eye

The colonial empire also left a lasting imprint on the metropole and its political system. As already indicated, the loss of Germany’s status as a colonial power coincided with an internal reorganisation that transformed the country into a republic. Max Weber, who was directly involved in the preparation of the draft constitution by the Ministry of the Interior, suggested as early as December 1918 replacing the office of the Kaiser with a democratically elected president.[35] As a political official, the president’s job was to counterbalance the bureaucracy with its rational, legal orientation and bring an element of charismatic leadership into the state machinery. If Weber had had his way, the new constitution would have omitted the federalist aspects of the German state altogether. But he was well aware that such a radical change had no chance for political reasons — the Entente Powers would never allow it.[36] Nevertheless, the constitution endowed the Reich president with far-reaching powers. These included the right to dissolve the Reichstag and the prerogative to appoint the government, which consisted of the chancellor and his ministers.[37] However, as the central organ of the legislative branch, the Reichstag could hold the government accountable and even withdraw its confidence, while the Federal Council (Reichsrat), the representation of the states on the national level, maintained a back seat in the political process.[38] This power-sharing arrangement was the result of developments that had been underway for several decades by that point, developments that had been fuelled by Germany’s overseas expansion. It is true that the German colonies were mainly governed by ordinances and decrees, rather than by proper law, which made it easy to circumvent parliament with its legislative powers.[39] In addition, decisions regarding the overseas empire were at the discretion of the Kaiser, who, on behalf of the Reich, exercised sovereignty (Schutzgewalt) over the colonies, officially referred to as protectorates (Schutzgebiete).[40] This meant the Kaiser alone could decide on spending the revenues generated by the colonies, but this was precisely the problem. The colonies’ inability to support themselves financially gave the Reichstag a powerful lever. Because this situation was not expected to change, the Reich leadership decided early on to show goodwill and involve the Reichstag in determining the overall colonial budget, not just the subsidies.[41] Thus, the national parliament drew strength from the financial weakness of the overseas empire. Each year, from January to March, parliament transformed into a public forum where representatives from various parties ruminated on Germany’s colonial affairs. The spokesperson of the Reichstag’s Budget Commission, Ludwig Bamberger, set the tone in 1891. As was to become customary in future budget debates, he briefly addressed some technical issues before moving on to an hour-long assessment of the colonial policy.[42] The head of the Colonial Department in the Foreign Office, the legal expert Paul Kayser, responded right away, making some corrections and explaining his department’s policy.[43] Although the Reich leadership could usually secure majorities for its budget proposals, the Reichstag showered it with criticism during the legislative process. Each party used the colonial issue to raise its profile.[44] Above all, however, they collectively created a counterpart — the government — whose members had to explain themselves to the public. A particularly strong catalyst for this development were the countless cases of violent misconduct by colonial officials that impelled the government to act.[45] For example, Kayser maintained in 1893 that no abuse of office across the colonies had ever come to his attention.[46] The Reichstag made sure that this would soon change. In early 1894, the Social Democrats placed some hippo whips and other instruments of torture on display in the Reichstag building, explaining that they had come directly from Cameroon.[47] Just the day before, August Bebel had raised the brutal flogging of the wives of Dahomey soldiers ordered by Cameroon’s deputy governor, Heinrich Leist.[48] Reich Chancellor Caprivi, who attended the session, felt compelled to react and rejected the allegations against Leist.[49] However, his refusal to take responsibility elicited criticism, even from the conservative parties, recalibrating expectations regarding the accountability of senior government officials.[50] Tensions peaked in 1906 when the Reichstag denied additional funds for the contentious war against Herero and Nama in South West Africa. In a bold move, the government dissolved parliament, asserting its constitutional dominance in this trial of strength.[51] But this incident also revealed the undeniable influence the Reichstag had gained over national politics. The colonial empire made no small contribution to this structural transformation, which bolstered a core institution of the emergent German nation-state. Its effects would outlast the colonial era, forming part of its enduring legacy.
[1] 32-point petition to the Imperial Colonial Office in Berlin, personally submitted by Martin Dibobe together with Thomas Manga Akwa on June 27, 1899, BArch, R 1001/7220, 224–9. A reproduction can be found in Adolf Rüger, 'Imperialismus, Sozialformismus und antikoloniale demokratische Alternative: Zielvorstellungen von Afrikanern in Deutschland im Jahre 1919', Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenchaft 23, no. 7 (1975). [2] For a biographical sketch, see Eve Rosenhaft and Robbie Aitken, 'Martin Dibobe', in Unbekannte Biographien: Afrikaner im deutschsprachigen Europa vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zum Ende des Zweiten Weltkrieges, ed. Ulrich van der Heyden (Berlin: Kai Homilius, 2008). [3] Anne Dreesbach, Gezähmte Wilde: Die Zurschaustellung "exotischer Menschen" in Deutschland 1870-1940 (Frankfurt: Campus, 2005); George Steinmetz, 'Empire in Three Keys: Forging the Imperial Imaginary at the 1896 Berlin Trade Exhibition', Thesis Eleven 139, no. 1 (2017). [4] Stefan Gerbing, Afrodeutscher Aktivismus: Interventionen von Kolonisierten am Wendepunkt der Dokolonisierung Deutschlands 1919 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2010), 57-60; Andreas Eckert, Die Duala und die Kolonialmächte: Eine Untersuchung zu Widerstand, Protest und Protonationalismus in Kamerun vor dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (Münster: Lit, 1991), 216-25. [5] Points 1 and 20. [6] Points 2 t0 4. [7] Points 26, 27 and 31. [8] Points 5, 7 and 15. [9] Point 20. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are by the author. [10] Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Michael Goebel, Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Naitonalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). [11] Frederick Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945-1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014); Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019); Frederick Cooper and Jane Burbank, Post-Imperial Possibilities: Eurasia, Eurafrica, Afroasia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023). [12] 'Proceedings of the German National Constituent Assembly, 96th Session', 330 (11 October 1919): 3023. [13] Robbie Aitken and Eve Rosenhaft, Black Germany: The Making and Unmaking of a Diaspora Community, 1884-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 103, 07-08. [14] Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End, 1917-1923 (London: Penguin, 2017); Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 1815 to the Present (New York: Penguin, 2012), ch. 5-6. [15] 'Proceedings of the German National Constituent Assembly, 40th Session', 327 (22 June 1919): 1122. [16] 'Proceedings of the German National Constituent Assembly, 1st Session', 326 (6 February 1919): 1. [17] 'Proceedings of the German National Constituent Assembly, 1st Session',  2. [18] Margaret MacMillan, Peacemakers: Six Months that Changed the World (London: John Murray, 2001), ch. 13-16. [19] See also Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). [20] Sean Andrew Wempe, Revenants of the German Empire: Colonial Legacies, Imperialism, and the League of Nations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). [21] Friedrich Nietzsche, 'Nachgelassene Fragmente: Anfang 1888 bis Anfang Januar 1889', in Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, vol. 8.3,  (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1972), 219. [22] There were at least 84 such rallies between December 1918 and March 1919, as documented in BArch, R 1001/7220, 262–72. The term ‘lie of colonial guilt’ was popularised by Heinrich Schnee, Die Koloniale Schuldlüge (Munich: Süddeutsche Monatshefte, 1924). [23] Martin Hobohm, Wir brauchen Kolonien (Berlin: Engelmann, 1918), 23.. [24] Klaus J. Bade, Friedrich Fabri und der Imperialismus in der Bismarckzeit: Revolution - Depression - Expansion (Freiburg: Atlantis, 1975), 135-44. See also Sebastian Conrad, Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany, trans. Sorcha O´Hagan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). [25] Freidrich Fabri, Bedarf Deutschland der Colonien (Gotha: Perthes, 1879), 86. [26] Hermann von Maltzan, Rede des Freiherrn Hermann von Maltzan auf der constituierenden Generalversammlung des Deutschen Kolonialvereins zu Frankfurt am Main am 6. Dezember 1882 (Berlin: Julius Sittenfeld, 1882). [27] Report in Frankfurter Journal und Frankfurter Presse on 6 December 1882, BArch, R 8023/253, 46. [28] Statutes of the German Colonial Association in Frankfurt, BArch, R 8023/253, 68–9. [29] For recent studies, see Kim Sebastian Todzi, Unternehmen Weltaneignung: Der Woermann-Konzern und der deutsche Kolonialismus 1837-1916 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2023); Dietman Pieper, Zucker, Schnaps und Nilpferdpeitsche: Wie Hanseatische Kaufleute Deutschland zur Kolonialherrschaft trieben (Munich: Piper, 2023). [30] Norbert Berthold Wagner, Die deutschen Schutzgebiete: Erwerb, Organisation und Verlust aus juristischer Sicht (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2002), 172-74. [31] Martin Hasenjäger, Der völkerrechtliche Begriff der "Interessensphäre" und des "Hinterlandes" im System der außereuropäischen Gebietserwerbungen (Greifswald: Kunike, 1907); Andreas Weissmüller, "Die Interessensphären:" Eine kolonialrechtliche Studie mit besonderer Berücksichtigung von Deutschland (Würzburg: Boegler, 1908). [32] For example, see Giorgio Miescher, Namibia's Red Line: The History of a Veterinary and Settlement Border (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). [33] For more information, see African Boundaries: A Legal and Diplomatic Encyclopaedia, ed. Ian Brownlie and Ian R. Burns (London: C. Hurst & Co, 1979). [34] Jörg Fisch, The Right of Self-Determination of Peoples: The Domestication of an Illusion, trans. Anita Mage (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 203-17. [35] Max Weber, 'Aufzeichnung über die Verhandlungen im Reichsamt des Innern über die Grundzüge des der verfassungsgebenden deutschen Nationalversammlung vorzulegenden Verfassungsentwurfs vom 9. bix 12. Dezember 1918', in Gesamtausgabe, ed. Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Wolfgang Schwentker, vol. 16: Zur Neuordnung Deutschlands,  (Tübingen: Mohr, 1988), 56-90; Weber, 'Deutschlands künftige Staatsform', 98-146. [36] Weber, 'Aufzeichnung über die Verhandlungen', 57. [37] Ernst Rudolf Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte seit 1789, vol. 6: Die Weimarer Reichsverfassung (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1981), 307-28. [38] Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte, 349-89. [39] Harald Sippel, 'Recht und Gerichtsbarkeit', in Die Deutschen und Ihre Kolonien: Ein Überblick, ed. Horst Gründer and Hermann Hiery (Berlin: be.bra, 2018), 201-21; Wagner, Die deutschen Schutzgebiete, 304-06, 14-19. See also Marc Grohmann, Exotische Verfassung: Die Kompetenzen des Reichstags für die deutschen Kolonien in Gesetzgebung und Staatsrechtswissenschaft des Kaiserreichs (1884-1914) (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001). [40] Wagner, Die deutschen Schutzgebiete, 273-82. [41] Grohmann, Exotische Verfassung, 70-76. [42] 'Proceedings of the Reichstag, 131st session', 118 (1 December 1891): 3172-78. [43] 'Proceedings of the Reichstag, 131st session',  3178-79. [44] Woodruff D. Smith, The German Colonial Empire (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 143-50. [45] For a vivid case study, see Rebekka Habermas, Skandal in Togo: Ein Kapitel deutscher Kolonialherrschaft (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2016). [46] 'Proceedings of the Reichstag, 55th session', 128 (1 March 1893): 1346. [47] 'Proceedings of the Reichstag, 53rd session', 134 (19 February 1894): 1340. However, the instruments of punishment were laid out the previous Saturday, 17 February. [48] 'Proceedings of the Reichstag, 51st session', 134 (16 February 1894): 1294-95. [49] 'Proceedings of the Reichstag, 51st session',  1295. [50] 'Proceedings of the Reichstag, 51st session',  1296. [51] Erik Grimmer-Solem, Learning Empire: Globalization and the German Quest for World Status, 1875-1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 344-49.
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Leanza, Matthias, 'The German colonial empire, seen from its end', Ben Kamis ed. global dis:connect blog. Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, 30 April 2024, https://www.globaldisconnect.org/04/30/the-german-colonial-empire-seen-from-its-end/.
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30 April 2024