Column

Ruth Marsh (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist working in immersive, world-building practices. They are a queer, non-binary person of settler ancestry based on unceded Mi'kmaw territory in K'jipuktuk, Mi'kma'ki (also known as Halifax, NS). They are interested in playfully queering the intersections between DIY culture and science fact/fiction/fabulation to ponder positive mutations and imagine with beings and environments.

When asked by a curious onlooker if Full Moon is meant to represent a boy butt or a girl butt, Arjun Lal patiently explains that holes don’t have a gender. Soft, floppy, warm, and delicate, Full Moon must be treated with gentleness and respect. 

Lal, Interdimensional Wormhole Navigator and Galactically Certified Booty Technologist, harnessed aeons of queer magic and advanced gender technologies to create a cosmic portal to infinite queer dimensions. Full Moon took the form of a roughly 6 x 6 x 3.5 metre inflatable butt with a glorious hole at its centre. 

Full Moon’s hole is both a lens and a transportation device. Seekers can gaze into it and view other dimensions either wholly or in flashes and glimpses, to the extent that they are ready to see them. Lal, who is also the leading Milky Way authority on inflatable rocket science, explains that Full Moon’s technology is as much about penetrating into other dimensions as it is about being gratefully received into them. This push-and-pull is necessarily exchanged with equal energy and care in order for the portal to function. 

It is the assertive yellow of a Kraft Single, a flotation device, a sunrise, Big Bird, and a ripe banana all at once. It conjures up all sorts of other eager fruits, begging to be harvested. Full Moon’s weight has been carefully calibrated to be equivalent to the mass of 18 average-sized balloons. Tethered to the ground of its site, it bobbed in place like a cheeky, twerking, bouncy castle by day, and shone boldly like holy golden arches at night. 

Each of Full Moon’s puckered seams was lovingly hand-sealed by Lal, supported by a highly attuned team of queer and gender diverse acolytes, each of whom whisper-infused tender spells and reverent incantations into its hundreds of feet of soft edges. Anyone trained by Lal for this purpose will tell you that this kind of magic is just science that can’t yet be explained in our current earthly lexicon: “Infinite queer dimensions provide infinite queer magic,” Lal explains, with a wink. 

Hairless, hairy, hard, heavenly, heavy, hirsute, hot, huge, hunky, husky, irregular, and always perfect; the end location is constantly shifting. 

Bilious, saucy, scandalous, seductive, sensational, sexy, shimmering, silken, sinewy, skanky, slutty, flexible, and strong; the portal and its passengers must navigate their journey mutually, not based on a preconceived end goal, no utopias, but as a collaborative experience that serves the combined learning and pleasure of Full Moon and its guests. 

Entering it physically, though, requires care and patience. First, one must penetrate it with a light teasing fingertip; next, a knuckle; a pause; a breath in; a finger; two fingers; another pause; a whole hand; a fist; a surrendered forearm; and finally the portal will dilate to receive its passenger in their entirety. 

Full Moon is called something different in every unique dimension: Starfish, Stargasm, Backdoor Beauty, Glazed Donut, Strawberry Wallet, Hershey’s Kiss, Cherry Tootsie Pop, Peach Ring, Badonkadonk, Pear, Hams, Buns, etc. This is a very small sample as these terms are most easily translated into our limited Earth ontologies. The fact that these names often harken back to food is no coincidence. As Lal explains, “The portal is delicious.” 

Folks who have travelled through the soft portal thus far have limited language to express their experience, yet consensus is that the sensation is overwhelmingly warm and tight, engulfing but not claustrophobic, sort of the perfect marriage between a butterfly cocoon and an automatic car wash. “It swallows you whole like a wave,” said one delighted traveller. 

Another traveller, moved by their experience, reported that “plowing Full Moon with openness and clear intention generates new crops in infinitude.” Asked exactly what was meant by this, the shy individual blushed and became unwilling or perhaps unable to elucidate. 

Full Moon was inflated at sunrise in a portal-activation ritual performed by Lal, who matched its psychic harmony in a bold cadmium-yellow tracksuit. When fully engorged, it became a bright and curious presence on the Dartmouth waterfront, easily spotted from both sides of the Halifax harbour. 

Full Moon was carefully chosen to lie on the nexus of several ancient homosexual ley lines to maximize the crackling energies already present in this popular cruising area. Citizens engaging in nighttime pleasure rituals in the public park reported the spontaneous appearance of colourful sparks as well as the muffled sound of basslines of increasing rhythm, intensity, volume, and catchiness on the final nights leading up to the portal’s appearance. 

Seekers of Full Moon, standing back to admire its James-and-the-Giant-Peach proportions, felt drawn in by its energetic vortex. Its smooth, slick, and seductive surface tempted seekers to run shy warmed hands over its sinuous bulges. Upon gaining its trust and affinity, one could hardly deny oneself (or, indeed Full Moon) the pleasure of giving a friendly, resonant SLAP. Reverberations of which travelled throughout its surface as though it were an outsized jelly mould. 

On the night Full Moon landed, multiple folks reported finding themselves staring into its hole, having no memory of getting there. Simultaneously, bags of abandoned groceries were spotted at several nearby crosswalks and at least three dogs were found (and thankfully, returned), trailing long leashes while running furiously in concentric butt-shaped patterns, all within a kilometre of the park’s periphery. 

A citizen fishing on the docks outside of the nearby metro transit terminal reported seeing a loaded ferry spontaneously flash out of existence and then reappear, fully intact, 15 minutes later. Thankfully, a collision was narrowly avoided. Metro transit authorities questioned passengers after the fact but none had any clear memory of this event, though several folks mentioned that their smartphone clocks had moved ahead by a quarter of an hour and could not be coaxed back to normal until after the closing of the festival. 

Even now, months after Full Moon’s departure, its presence lingers in the hearts and minds of folks who connected with it. Some have reported seeing a glowing yellow aura while hearing the haunting sound of what has been variously described as Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love,” The Weather Girls’ “It’s Raining Men,” and Lil Nas X’s “Montero,” at Full Moon’s former location. The trees surrounding it resisted shedding their leaves a full month behind trees elsewhere, and dog walkers have reported that the whole park feels energized and renewed. Additionally, nighttime park-goers have spoken of Full Moon’s warm presence continuing to enrich their lunar rituals. 

Like any cosmic phenomenon, Full Moon’s long-term effects are hard to parse but the dominant consensus is that, once experienced, it’s very hard not to long for its presence again. When asked where and when the portal will make its next appearance, Lal says that this can’t yet be known as sacred queer magic is a power that doesn’t abide by earthly rules. However, Lal did say with confidence that Full Moon will return in good time, manifesting where it is most needed.

Writer

Gossip, as “unverified” information, has complex relations to power. As a historically maligned oral tradition, with gendered roots, it asks that we question our sources—who we trust and why—as well as who has been afforded belief or legitimization over others. In this issue, gossip takes various forms, from a mode of subversion under settler-colonial states to speculative fiction; it is revealed in the archives, in silence, and in its failures to resist authoritarian imaginings or institutional exploitation. After all, why do we gossip?


Gossip

A man standing near a waterfront in front of a large orange balloon with a hole in the middle.

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Sexuality

Riffing off Arjun Lal’s installation _Full Moon_ (2022), Ruth Marsh transports us through a hole, a butt, and a portal, into infinite queer dimensions and potential.


Composition: Full Moon Ritual

Laurel V. McLaughlin is a writer, curator, and art historian based in New Haven, CT. Her work examines research-based sculpture, installation, new media, social practice, and performance concerning globalized migration and ecological networks. McLaughlin is completing her PhD in the History of Art at Bryn Mawr College, and her work has been published in _Art Papers_, _BOMB Magazine_, _The Brooklyn Rail_, _Performa Magazine_, _Contact Quarterly_, and _Performance Research_, among others.

Ana Mendieta’s last words were supposedly “No, no, no!” according to an onlooker, prior to falling to her death from the window of her 34th-floor New York apartment building. In my dissertation research on Mendieta’s work, I have refused to write about her death prior to examining her work, and I have refused to read her work through her untimely death. Resisting the spectacularization of her death and the inaccurate focus of its tragedy in her work, I instead hope to view Mendieta’s work on its own terms, not disavowing biography, but holding it in check. 

But as I listened to curator Helen Molesworth’s six-episode podcast _Death of an Artist_ (2022) in silence—not without occasional guffaws—I began to wonder more deeply about Molesworth’s “interrogat[ion of] both the silence and the protest” resounding throughout Mendieta’s life and legacy. What kinds of silences are at work in this narrative? Even before Molesworth’s podcast, Carl Andre’s final moments with Mendieta became blaring spaces of speechlessness alongside the subsequent scholarly silences around her death—the latter in resistance to spectacle, femicide, racism, xenophobia, and the art market’s then-current and ever-perpetuating investment in cis-het white male artists. The silences are manifold and entangled within systemic structures at work in the ’80s that still persist. Thus, the binary that Molesworth identifies in the narrative of singular lethal silence vs. righteous protest seemed too broad to be _the_ crux of the tragedy. I found myself turning to the nuanced vicissitudes of silences, plural—ranging from private hushes to publicly mandated and legal instances of censorship, the continuance of that silencing into the present, and Mendieta’s own use of quietude—to understand her life, work, and even death, anew. 

I recall Mendieta’s last three words of emphatic and final dissent because they seem to operate historically in the wake of her death as manifold silences, ongoing silencing, and a transformative silence. One could argue that Molesworth’s meticulous research into both the physical evidence and cloud of hearsay surrounding Mendieta’s death already acknowledged numerous gaps, as she investigated over 200 sources, including interviews with art critic Peter Schjeldahl and the anonymous feminist collective Guerrilla Girls, archival audio from researcher Robert Katz, newspaper accounts from the trial room, murmurings from the New York gallery scene, and firm assertions from friends and family. In these conversations across six episodes, with titles such as “The Haunting,” “What the Wall Label Doesn’t Tell You,” and “The Feminist Cabal,” Molesworth teases out the multilayered context of the purported crime, from Mendieta’s early life in revolutionary Cuba and her flight as a child via the US-backed secret Operation Pedro Pan, to her schooling at the University of Iowa in the painting and the intermedia programs, followed by her enthusiastic move to New York City. She dwells upon what cannot be uttered, what remains caught in between the lines, such as the supposedly acrimonious conversation between Andre and Mendieta concerning their differing art world recognition, prior to her death; those that remained loyal to Andre during the ensuing court case; and the ways in which scholarship has reacted to issues of biography. 

As a _Hyperallergic_ review opined, the very recounting of her death could easily skew toward a true-crime spectacle.[^1] Molesworth herself tries to avoid this tone and methodology, while also admitting its partial inevitability given the decades of scrutiny and critical gossip—or gossip that aims to protect in the face of power structures—embroiled in the death of the artist. It is necessary, and admirable even, that Molesworth not only attempts to face the ongoing silencing in many directions, piecing together the accounts familiar to scholars and audiences alike with those wholly new, but also reflects on her own motivations, the nature of the broken US legal system, and the ways in which historical accounts are implicitly biased by the author and listeners. There is also the underlying perpetual silence from Andre and his cadre of supporters that reverberates across the decades after his exoneration. There is the perceived public silence from friends who knew not only about the case, but about Mendieta’s disposition, who actually speak in this podcast and in other accounts, but whose voices perhaps failed to circulate widely. In tandem with Andre’s silence, there is the conspicuous quiet from many historians in the field who write about Andre without mentioning Mendieta, presuming that the artwork can be severed from the artist. 

But eliding this multiplicity of silences is first and foremost another kind: the transformative silence that Mendieta herself espoused in her works. Such embedded silence takes on various timbres, colours, and attitudes, reveling in awe. I choose to dwell upon this particular kind of silence that invites viewers to partake in Mendieta’s legacy, as my own protest to both the overfocus on her death _and_ the ongoing silencing of those who knew her, but also to emphasize the kind of silence for which I imagine she yearned. 

In _The Black Angel_ (1975), Mendieta stands shrouded by the dark wings of a bronze angel towering above the other graves, embodying a black and red powder silueta on the ground with an X through it.[^2] Mendieta’s performance and film resonated with the death of a son whose Czech immigrant mother, Teresa Feldevert, wanted to commemorate through the angel monument. The epitaph reads: “I was not granted time to bid adieu / Do not weep for me dear mother / I am at peace in my cool grave.” You will not see an image of this work as the estate prefers not to provide images for writing concerning her death. Perhaps more appropriately, you will see this drawing by Tania Bruguera, who intones Mendieta’s statements in the podcast. 

Made in homage to Mendieta’s _Silueta_ series, with nails protruding from a figure’s mouth, _Mouth with Nails (Untitled) / Boca con clavos (Sin título)_ (2003) conjures both the Afro-Cuban power figure nkisi nkondi as well as a silencing. Bruguera’s self-rendering reference to the silueta represents herself as both empowered and possibly besieged by external forces, much like Mendieta in _The Black Angel_. The two works offer mutual resonance concerning speechlessness and death, but crucially not Mendieta’s own. Instead, they open portals of potential reconceptualizations regarding silence, vibrating with liminality, nature, duality, death, and life of their own accord.

[^1]: Alex Santana and Néstor David Pastor, “The Death of an Artist Podcast Failed Ana Mendieta,” Hyperallergic, December 7, 2022, https:// hyperallergic.com/785803/ the-death-of-an-artist-pod cast-failed-ana-mendieta
[^2]: See Jane Blocker, “The Black Angel: Ana Mendieta in Iowa City,” in The Latina/o Midwest Reader, ed. Omar Valerio-Jiménez, Santiago R. Vaquera-Vásquez, and Claire F. Fox (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2017). 


Paining of a human-like outline with strokes coming out of the mouth on a beige canvas. 

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Death

Sound

Laurel V. McLaughlin engages Helen Molesworth’s podcast _Death of an Artist_ to consider the discursive silences surrounding Ana Mendieta’s death. McLaughlin explores silence as both a refusal to make a spectacle out of the artist’s life, and a possible disavowal of responsibility in her death. How might addressing these silences offer a more complex recognition of Mendieta’s work?


One Thing: Silences in _Death of an Artist_

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Editorial

Joy Xiang (she/her) is a writer and editor, born in Shanghai and based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Her work and life engages erotics, migration, material flows, and media nostalgia and futurity. She is currently Editor at _C Magazine_. 

Like many others, I have reveled in gossip. Certain gossip strikes a sweetness of “being in the know” about something you have a right to share in, but are not supposed to gain from an outsider position (or for which there are barriers to gaining). I learned everything useful I know from people talking. Conversely, I also learned from fiction. 

The sensational tabloid _Weekly World News_ (_WWN_) was prominent in my parents’ convenience store, and in my earliest kid mind because of its Bat Boy character looming in black-and-white on the front cover, his fanged maw opened threateningly in a silent screech. Bat Boy was constantly pursued by US government officials. I believed he was real and might jump out at me from the dark. _WWN_ existed alongside teen gossip rags like _Tiger Beat_, and a row of porno mags barely hidden on the top shelf behind cardboard barriers. It’s perhaps with my first full production cycle as editor that I also think of my first intimate experiences of newsstands. _WWN_, declaring itself “the world’s only reliable newspaper,” might be akin to _The Onion_ today, if you took it seriously as satire. 

This issue on gossip began with the idea that the dictum “not confirmed as being true” has many edges. As Alex Quicho writes in her feature “Gossip After Dictatorship,” popular gossip can also serve as political mythmaking toward a national imagination. Writing after the 2022 Philippine presidential election, Quicho explores how the Marcos family has used strategic content to maintain the aura around their power and rehabilitate their reputations. Gossip is the unverified, but that doesn’t preclude caution—rather, gossip can teach you about caution. It requires that we question our sources as we come into knowledge; gossip trades in both trust _and_ critical judgment. 

Because gossip exists before or beyond verification, it functions as an information commons that cuts across class and power divides. While Western European thought and Enlightenment values have legitimized an exclusionary rationality, including in art history, the unverified holds potential if wielded carefully. Gossip asks us: who has been afforded belief? The position you speak from, as always, is important. Rouzbeh Shadpey’s feature, for instance, poetically and incisively uses the memory test, a medical diagnostic tool, to frame the divide between lived collective memory and History, Palestinian realities and German state narratives—a divide that took place in engagements with documenta fifteen last year. 

As I took stock of _C Magazine_’s archives since 1984, Dallas Fellini’s letter in C146 “Humour” (Summer 2020) struck a chord. There, they speak about organizations increasingly parading the term “visibility” without deeper structural change, leaving marginalized artists “exhausted with the idea of being seen, and instead desperately wishing to be heard.” Reflecting on gossip’s slyness, it can hold the flipped strategy of being “heard and not seen,” refusing to be legible in the usual ways. 

Steph Wong Ken writes about how online open letters to the Canadian arts community may be the last way for letter writers to widely express the harm they experienced. These letters’ circulation may gather a form of social power, even as implicated institutions or individuals remain materially unimpacted. Like Wong Ken, ma ma’s interview with artist Jumana Manna invokes the gendered roots of gossip, which was historically demonized to prevent women from building community. Through probing Manna’s film _Foragers_ (2022), gossip as the passing of subversive oral knowledge is seen in how Palestinian communities continue to forage indigenous herbs despite restrictions by the Israeli state. Within a gossip issue, it seemed important to consider silencing too. Laurel V. McLaughlin, in One Thing, speaks about the silences regarding Ana Mendieta’s death, including in scholarship as a way to resist spectacle in the artist’s life and work. Yet, McLaughlin also compels us to ask how silence risks disavowing responsibility in Mendieta’s death and a more complex picture of her work’s resonance now. 

Marsya Maharani and Petrina Ng, current stewards of Gendai, bring a sweeping feature that feels significant for putting on paper the obvious truths of racialized arts practitioners working within institutions that remain racist, punitive, and performative. The effect is a critical mass of anonymized accounts of abuses in the workplace, collected through conversation and collective practice. This anonymity also makes it possible to see yourself in those experiences, as Maharani and Ng write: “If you think this is about you, it is... and it isn’t.” Maharani and Ng ask what the use of gossip is when networks of power are so intricate. Emily Guerrero, an archivist attuned to whose stories reach the status of canonization in collections, writes that gossip can be a way to cut through institutional bullshit. Guerrero explores Cait McKinney and Hazel Meyer’s mail art project on the feminist sex wars in 1980s Vancouver to illuminate the archivist’s role as one of reading between-the-lines. “[P]art wayfinder and part witch,” this role is further made surreal when the archive concerns communities that are your own. 

There _is_ the type of gossip (good and bad) internal to communities, and passed along over generations. This kind of gossip is taken up in Cole Pauls’s comic _Chäshų Kadini_ that opens this issue as the Artist Project. Writing alongside Pauls’s work, Whess Harman reflects on his larger artistic practice, which “approaches telling an allegory of colonialism from the proverbial secret rez store that lets in joy and excitement, the same way we look for the stories we can romanticize in gossip.” In Composition, Ruth Marsh brightly riffs off of Arjun Lal’s installation _Full Moon_ (2022)—as a hole, a butt, and a portal, into infinite queer dimensions and potential. 

Through these turns of gossip, I couldn’t help but wonder, not unseriously, what makes art criticism different from gossip? They may seem antithetical: art criticism takes from journalism’s objectivity and fact-checking. Yet, in a field where we aim to make more and more space for the formerly “unverified,” perhaps being absolutely certain is a kind of end to critical thought, conceding to the violence of Western positivist logic. When you haven’t seen yourself in those realms, you’ve looked toward the in-between anyways, to what has not been put on paper (yet). Art criticism shouldn’t strive for certainty. Bat Boy, for me, dissipated into story and lies, but the _gossip_ (the curiosity, the questioning)—it was real. 

Aaditya Aggarwal is a writer and film curator based in Toronto and New Delhi.

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Social

Relational

 Editor Joy Xiang reflects on the issue’s theme: _Gossip_

Editorial: Gossip

Feature

ma ma is a Toronto-based curatorial collective consisting of Magdalyn Asimakis and Heather Canlas Rigg.

Jumana Manna is a visual artist and filmmaker. Her work explores how power is articulated, focusing on the body, land, and materiality in relation to colonial inheritances and histories of place. Through sculpture, filmmaking, and occasional writing, Manna deals with the paradoxes of preservation practices, particularly within the fields of archaeology, agriculture, and law. Her practice considers the tension between the modernist traditions of categorization and conservation and the unruly potential of ruination as an integral part of life and its regeneration. Jumana was raised in Jerusalem and lives in Berlin. 


##### ma ma: Thank you, Jumana, for taking the time to speak with us. We approached you about this conversation because the theme of gossip has been important to us as a collective for many years, and we saw our particular interests weaving through your recent writing and work, especially in your film _Foragers_ (2022). The film depicts scenarios related to the restrictions placed on Palestinians that prevent them from foraging wild herbs, and the privatization of these flora by Israel. Despite regulations that result in fines and legal trials, Palestinians changed their approaches to foraging in ways that subvert the Israeli state. We are interested in the scenes of knowledge-sharing between neighbours and family, and are curious to learn more from you about how gossip factors into your research and art. 

In our practice we think a lot about forms of knowledge that have been historically categorized as invalid, such as familial knowledge, lived experience, spiritual practices, folklore, and, notably, gossip. Gossip, in our minds, is a little different in that it has been not only considered illogical knowledge, but actively criminalized in order to prevent women from building community with each other.[^1] As Silvia Federici notes, the original use of the term found its roots in emotional relationships—to a godparent, a midwife, or female friends—and morphed into a vernacular term referring to women merely speaking to one another.[^2] The vilifying of these conversations is what has created the current negative connotation of the word, that gossip refers to destructive conversations. In our work, we are interested in embracing the power of gossip as a practice of connection, solidarity, and matrilineal knowledge transference, and imagining how that can undermine patriarchal domination. 

Keeping this in mind, we were fascinated by _Foragers_ for a number of reasons, and wanted to learn more about your research process: specifically, how the relationships between your parents, extended family, neighbours, and yourself factored into putting this film—and adjacent writing—together. 

**Jumana Manna:** I am grateful that you invited me to think about gossip as it was not something I’d thought much about in relation to my work. The contemporary definition of gossip, according to the online Oxford dictionary, is casual or unconstrained conversation or reports about other people, typically involving details that are not confirmed as being true. I indulge in this kind of gossip, like most people. It can be a lot of fun and at times tiring and boring. So we ought to reconsider how we engage in gossip and why. In revising its historical meaning, Federici helps us reconsider it as a way of releasing interpersonal tensions, building trust among friends, and fostering community relations. This overcomes the toxicity of certain modes of gossip that serve to demean and compromise others. 

My research process for _Foragers_ involved a lot of gossip. I gathered stories that serve as the backbone of the script from my aunts and other characters you see in the film. Stories they lived and stories they heard in their village about people getting caught by patrol, the negotiations, the fines, their successful and failed escapes. 

**

The film is inspired very much by my mother, and aunts. The tenderness toward one another and the plants, their expression of love through food, in contrast to the pettiness and violence of the Israeli settler state that invades the most intimate of spaces and relationships... to the land, to one another. It’s very close to home and so is much of the research. In this sense, the film is different from my previous work that involved a lot more archival, literary, and field research. It is a story I grew up with, and felt intuitive to write. 

The exchange of knowledge around plants as a strengthening of community ties—how to pick what, where, and when—may, in the historical sense of the word, be framed as gossip. A transfer of ancestral knowledge and bid to hold on to a relation with the land, its temporality, and social bonds outside of state control. 

Federici’s revision of the history of the commons, which is a big focus of her work in the book you shared with me, has also been very relevant. Foraging is part of this history of the commons that predates the history of states and their sedentary economies. Throughout modernity, through enclosures of the state and increasing private property over time, this commons was severely reduced. Yet, though forms of memory and know-how have eroded, they have never been completely forgotten or discontinued. 

> **ma ma:** Could you tell us a bit about the early stages of _Foragers_? 

**JM:** For a number of years I had an idea of shooting what I thought would be a short film of my parents’ foraging in Suba, an old Palestinian village in the Jerusalem mountains. It was destroyed in 1948, and established soon after by the Jewish army as kibbutz Tzova. The kibbutz’s main income today comes from its glass factory that produces laminated, tempered, and bullet-proof glass for military vehicles. The non-built areas of the kibbutz, including parts of the old village, are filled with many kinds of edible plants and fruit trees, making Suba a regular foraging spot for my parents. 

The film started there, through the pleasure of foraging, getting lost in the overgrown weeds in springtime, and my parents’ quirky and obsessive dynamics and love for leafy greens. This act of love and foraging in a depopulated village, whose original residents are permanent refugees, was a powerful starting point. I see it as an affirmative act of Palestinian presence and continuity despite the rupture of the Nakba.[^3] A refusal to forget the historical and ongoing ethnic cleansing, through maintaining a relationship to the land and all that grows on it. I shot that scene of my parents first, as well as the scene of my mother going to visit her sisters and Zeidan, their old neighbour in ‘Akbara, a small village in the Upper Galilee. I edited these three days of footage and started both writing the longer film and applying for funding to continue the shoot. 

>**ma ma:** In this film, as with your larger practice, you explore the intersection of women’s labour with the natural environment. Can you talk about this? 

**JM:** Federici reminds us that capitalist accumulation is structurally dependent on the free appropriation of immense quantities of labour and resources, much of which has been slave labour, female labour, and the extraction of raw materials including seeds and plants. Therefore, when showing the agency of “nature” or the agency of women, there is an alliance between the two, and together they form a joint critical force. 

The issues I work on are not women’s labour, per se. But I take a feminist lens of a story that is not only about the living conditions of women. My two latest films, _Foragers_ and _Wild Relatives_ (2018), deal with land and plants. Some characters happen to be women, but the intersection of women’s labour and the natural environment is only one aspect. The films primarily think about the contradictory practices of preservation efforts within colonial legacies, and how everyday life and practices of care, toward seeds, the land, plants, and intersocial relations, show alternative approaches to preservation that are not embedded in the hierarchies of coloniality. 

That labour is divided and gendered is important to my work. In _Wild Relatives_, many of those doing the manual labour in the fields are women. Men drive the tractors, women sow the seeds. The scientific labs of the agriculture research centre I follow are mixed, gender-wise. In _Foragers_, the foraging is done by both men and women; this is true in contemporary reality and throughout history. Whoever is out in the land, for whatever purpose, will often bring back something they found on the way... and often that can be men, as women are busy with the domestic work. But a lot of foraging also happens close to the home. So, based on what I know from Palestine, I can’t really speak of foraging as specifically female knowledge. Now, how the plants are then treated once entering the house, the cleaning, chopping, and cooking of the leaves... medicinal remedies, dishes, and so forth—yes, this has been predominantly female labour and knowledge that is passed down from mothers to daughters. 

>**ma ma:** Yes, it is often the case that matrilineal knowledge finds its space and is nurtured in domestic contexts. How does that manifest in the kitchen scenes in _Foragers_? We are interested in the various ways that channels of information flow between women, and how that works to undermine governmental rule and settler-colonial violence.

**JM:** The kitchen scene in _Foragers_ is my aunts and mother cooking and eating together. They get a phone call from Zeidan and arrange to pick up ‘akkoub from him. They chat about family members, and about the food. Aishe explains how her granddaughter doesn’t like her maternal grandmother’s mujadara because she cooks with rice, not burghul! Usually rural folk in Palestine prefer it with burghul as, historically, rice is more associated with cities as it was imported. A neighbour, also family member, Um Mohammad, sits on the couch but doesn’t join for the food. She’s old and sad and struggles with hearing loss. They talk about her. So it’s a gossip scene, with a lot of empathy and love. 

I don’t know if they are undermining settler violence as such. But domesticity in this context is a place of care and strength (domesticity, or the family, is also a place of trauma, abandonment, neglect, and violence, so this is certainly contextual) where the cooking of the criminalized plants happens in the most organic of ways oblivious of the restrictions of the Israeli state. In the structure of the film, then, I would suggest this scene and others serve as an antidote to the absurdity of the patrollers and court hearings, the audacity of the Israeli state claiming its scientific expertise. They are scenes of tenderness and desire set against the cruelty and coldness of the colonizing state. 

>**ma ma:** That is a great way to frame it. Ultimately, the type of intimate knowledge you describe cannot be regulated or dissolved. Similar to the historical treatment of gossip, the attempt to control the foraging of za’atar and ‘akkoub is an attempt to destabilize a type of power. This is reflected in your memory of your grandfather, who would tell your father, “They can take your land and house away from you, but knowledge is yours to keep.” [^4] 

**JM:** Indeed... 

>**ma ma:** It is noteworthy that Palestinian indigenous practices and expertise are dismissed in order to make this colonial capitalist project work. To your point, clipping za’atar, miramiyyeh, and ‘akkoub properly is what encourages fresh growth. Neglecting this locally known fact by forbidding it only serves to comply with the judicial system, not any natural or social context. 

**JM:** That’s something claimed by “Wardeh,” or Najmeh Hamdan, one of the characters being interrogated for collecting wild-growing za’atar. This is likely true for herbs like za’atar and sage (miramiyyeh), especially if enough beds are left to flower, so that their buds can pollinate and seeds can spread. To my knowledge, this is less relevant with the case of ‘akkoub, which is a thorny thistle. In any case, these issues that were more obvious for previous generations are complicated today as there is a planetary condition of ecological imbalance, and overpopulation of humans. The population of Palestine in the ’40s was around one and a half million; today, Palestinians and Israelis combined living in historical Palestine are nearly15 million. This means much higher demand for food from fewer areas with arable soil. So how to forage responsibly, in which quantities, and when to leave areas untouched for regeneration is an important question that needs further research and a lot of community engagement and education. It is important that it is done in dialogue with those who know the land and its cycles, who have lived as stewards on it for millennia. Not, like in the case of Israel, as a tool of oppression to further alienate natives from and punish them for their ties to the land. 

>**ma ma:** You mentioned that your mother’s knowledge of foraging practices runs deep. In your 2020 _e-flux_ essay “Where Nature Ends and Settlements Begin,” [^5] you refer to your aunts as “perpetual scofflaws.” Can you tell us more about this? 

**JM:** This was somewhat of a joke. As in, due to the absurd criminalization of ‘akkoub and za’atar, and the fact that my mother and aunts continued collecting despite and in spite of the ban, [it] makes them... law-breakers, scofflaws. I found the image of my elderly aunts, with their baskets and kitchen knives roaming the mountains around their village, labelled as a “threat to nature and to the state” to be enraging, hilarious, and motivating for the making of the film. 

My mother, like the majority of Palestinians of her generation and those before her, had a rural childhood, which meant a lot of time outdoors and cooking meals based on what food grew in their vicinity. She has a wide pool of knowledge about wild-growing edibles, their names, tastes, and ways of cooking that she learned from her mother and older sisters, and that I am very happy to have inherited. 

>**ma ma:** Can you talk about the fictive elements of _Foragers_? Is fiction a strategy you turn to often in your film work? How do you feel it lends to subversion? 

**JM:** There are fictive elements, in the sense of written scenes performed by actors or non-professional actors; this is in fact the vast majority of the film, as nearly nothing was such that I just happened to follow with my camera. Some scenes are more “fictional” than others, but the entire film is a blurring of these boundaries, using the wide spectrum that lies between these two broad understandings of documentary and fiction. 

In terms of production, fiction is fun as you are in full control of the situation. Everyone on set understands what needs to happen, and it is performed for the camera. After having worked a lot in more traditional documentary situations that involve more negotiations, fiction (although more costly) feels like such a relief. So part of it is coming to a point where I know what image I am looking for, and I’d rather create it with as much precision as I can than look for it, if that makes sense. Beyond my personal trajectory, I wanted to avoid any dealings with the Israeli nature patrol and courts, so fiction was the most obvious way forward. 

What the space of fiction—or shall we just call it the set, the construction of cinema—provides is a site of fugitivity from the bounds of unfreedom: that is, the everyday life under occupation. The cathartic power of cinema can be one of the sites for propositions of self-determination. On set is the freedom to say things as one would like, to break free from both reality as such as well as the sciences of forensics and move toward a truthfulness of experience and expression. Samir, for instance, in the final court-hearing scene, uses the set as a place to express things more easily than he would have done in an actual court of law. “This law is shit,” he says to the state attorney. “This land isn’t yours and neither is the plant.” We can think of this freedom to act and speak one’s mind as a site of subversion, or a site of rehearsal for liberating and liberated futures. 

Beyond the scenes with the actors are the scenes with nature that, for me, try to capture a beauty and force of the landscape that often feels more than real. These scenes, which somewhat share the space of poetry and fiction, attempt to foreground the agency of nature, the plants and lands that all this historical drama centres around. I’ve gotten several comments from audiences on how they've never seen the Palestinian landscape like this. This may in part be related to the misconstruction of Palestine as a desert. But perhaps more importantly, it is true that due to the immensity of the human tragedy in Palestine, nature is rarely treated as the foreground or central protagonist.

**>ma ma:** In a sense, fiction here functions in a similar way to gossip in that it can sidestep legal governance. Your description of the use of cinema as a way to move toward “a truthfulness of experience” really resonates with the practice of gossip in _Foragers_. To end, we wanted to ask, if gossip is defined as untraceable information that flows between women, how would you say that it factors into your practice as a whole? 

**JM:** The everyday, the domestic, the minor histories and actions are what constitute my practice in both film and sculpture, especially when mapping out broad matrices of economy and power. There’s a book by Norman Bryson I like a lot, called _Looking at the Overlooked_ (1990). In it, he traces the history of still life painting and how it rose to importance with colonial trade in spices and plants. And how that once-lower plane, of feminized, domestic space, became the centripetal site of empire... the dinner table, basically. This book and its analysis speaks to me and the themes I’ve worked on. The kitchen is a site of power dynamics, musical performance, family dynamics, challenging hegemonic histories, exploring intimacy and desire. These are all things that factor into my practice, and that I now realize share the space of gossip. 


Speaker

Two women sitting at a table in a kitchen preparing food.

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Food

Landscape

Memory

ma ma and Jumana Manna unfurl gossip as a subversive oral tradition in Manna’s film _Foragers_ (2022). Manna speaks about the transfer of ancestral knowledge, minor histories, and social bonds outside of state control, as Palestinians continue to forage wild herbs despite Israeli restrictions.

Perpetual Scofflaws

Perpetual Scofflaws: Jumana Manna Interviewed by ma ma

Steph Wong Ken is a writer currently based in Tkaronto, near a forest of black oak. [stephwongken.com](http://stephwongken.com)

Writing a letter, in the before-internet times, was an acknowledgement of distance. Physical distance but also psychic, of waiting for a response for days or weeks in the hopes of confirming an invisible thread that linked you to the receiver. Traditional open letters, often published in newspapers (or in this very magazine), are typically solicited, and respond to a particular person or a piece of writing with what you could call “the general reader” in mind. 

In the now times, there’s a third form, what I’m calling the online open letter. Over the years, my social media feed has become populated by online open letters directed at the Canadian arts and culture sector, sandwiched between ads and posts about new babies or food. Some of the letters are addressed directly to art institutions. Others are addressed specifically to a person in leadership in the arts, to a member of the arts community, or to several people in positions of power. The format varies from a formal letter style with a traditional address (“Dear” or “To the board of”) to a more personal or casual framing, like an entry from the notes app made public.
 
Disseminated online, this type of open letter is removed from a physical form. These letters can be shared, copied, bookmarked, and screenshot by potentially anyone with access to them. As open-source texts, there is no way to control how online open letters are consumed once they are published (beyond the “delete post” or “delete comment” buttons and the like, but there are limitations to these too). Their lack of physicality means they can exist in perpetuity, a catch-22. Though they are more accessible than a letter sent in an envelope, and are less likely to be hidden or destroyed, they can also get swept up in the online churn of endless content, becoming another thing to stare at, or scroll past. 

This form moves private details into the public space in the relatively unmoderated world of the internet. Deviating from the typical exchange between sender and receiver, online open letters speak to an audience that is not as easy to identify, a sort of mass of followers or contacts as well as algorithms working in the background. Online, these letters become a form of what we could call digital gossip. The exchange of information, so intrinsic to gossip, also becomes ever-present, an invisible thread that expands further afield, to whomever is online, to me or you, or to all of us. 

In “Witch-Hunt: Gossip Has Always Been a Secret Language of Friendship and Resistance Between Women,” Hannah Black highlights the immense value of a community of gossips, noting, “Without the love of gossips, most of us would be either dead or dead inside.”[^1] Black explores the shifting societal attitude toward gossip, originating in friendships between women, a communal bond that was then dismantled by the individualistic drive of capitalism. Aligning gossip with the witch hunt, Black notes: “The witch-hunt, then, was a war against women; it was a concerted effort to demonize them, and destroy their social power,” and later, that “the gossip, like the witch, was persecuted as if she were an outlaw instead of the heart of her community [...]. The gossip’s transgression is that she is very social. She’s too social. She makes it seem like the social might have... Its own reality?!”[^2]

As Black highlights, marginalizing the social power of gossip meant it could only operate beyond societal expectations or behaviours, particularly for female-presenting people and those who lived outside of the norm. The reality of gossip, by necessity, is created through casual conversations behind closed doors, or hanging out and exchanging details that could seem trivial or basic, or simply like “idle chatter.” It can also now be found on Twitter, on server channels, in shared Google spreadsheets, as well as in one of the most coveted private online spaces: the group chat, where all manner of gossip is dropped and shared, a balm to the performativity of social media. 

Black notes how gossip can act as a warning, particularly essential in an environment where violence toward marginalized folks is the norm: “[T]he network of gossips do their best to let each other know who cannot be trusted, where you should be careful, who has been lucky and who has not.”[^3] It would seem like sharing an open letter online, as a form, would be one of the best ways to warn others, disseminating information across many different groups of people. But we know online living hasn’t fulfilled promises of connection, instead it has monetized our content back to us and created a swamp mess of advertising, scams, and personal opinions. As Black explores in her piece, gossip was already easily dismissed by colonial and capitalist powers. In the fractured, chaotic online world, it becomes even easier to pull apart, simply move on from, or worst of all, forget. 

Many of the online open letters I’ve read are written by Black, Indigenous, POC, queer, neurodivergent, and female-presenting people, speaking against institutional wrongdoing or about an abuse of power that has profoundly shifted their lives. This speaks to the marginalized history of gossip, and its ongoing vitality in these communities, taking shape now online. By merely existing, these letters become public records of warning, touching on the community of gossips Black believes is a “work of love.”[^4]

The labour of gossip feels especially visible in the form of an open letter, which despite its public face, still feels somewhat intimate and personal. Finding the right words to describe a painful situation requires focus and care, especially in a space where disbelief can sometimes feel like a type of currency. This is fractured further by proximity: often open letters in the Canadian arts community address another community member or an institution within the small, insular network that is the arts in Canada. There is an awareness of a given audience, but also the risk of speaking to only a select group of people, a silo of readers. There is no guarantee the letter will be recognized by those outside of this insular audience, a failing perhaps of the everywhere-all-at-once nature of the internet, as well as the closed space of the arts community. 

Some writers of these letters state they expect no response or actions taken simply because of their words. The personal and professional stakes of exposing gossip can be very high, especially within the close-knit Canadian art world. In an environment that sustains itself on grant funding, references, and community support, the letter writer is incurring a risk to their community standing when they bring public attention to private conflicts. Outside of its audience, a letter may be shared online as a form of processing for the writer, a sort of internal confirmation that something is not right. When a letter writer states they expect no response, this could also be a form of self-protection, and a way to set expectations, for themselves and for us as readers. 

In _Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto_, Legacy Russell explores the role of glitches in the fabric of online life, recontextualizing glitches as different forms of presence on the internet, from cosmic to error to virus to ghosts.[^5] In one section on glitch ghosts, she examines the effects of the disappearing body online, which allows us to ghost the gender binary while also making us less visible or fractured in other ways. Black’s framing of gossip in the realm of women is complicated by Russell’s exploration of the disappearing body, a fragmented online self that can exist beyond the binary. The latter notes that, “as bodies disappear within the everyday interactions of the Internet, that which we might have assumed as inherently private—our public bodies—remain at risk of becoming increasingly public, the abstract fragments of our online selves making moves independent of those chosen of our own volition.”[^6]

If open online letters are a form of digital gossip, they also become something more than themselves once they are shared. There is a vulnerability in possibly giving up your volition, and bodily presence, to the mass audience of the internet, which is heightened further by the fracturing of self that can happen as part of this exchange. This may be why there is an initial discomfort or resistance to online open letters; they pierce through the smooth easy fabric of mindless scrolling, and they grow beyond the life of a letter; they become part of the fabric of a community. By giving presence to a problem, so far kept private, there also emerges a shift in responsibility. We the community have been informed, and though we may scroll past, we can’t claim we “didn’t know.” 

Black characterizes gossip as an undeniable social power, where “worlds appear from her big mouth.”[^7] But worlds often do not appear once an open online letter is shared, at least in my experience. These letters tend to be met with silence, denial, or inaction. Just because a letter is written and published does not mean there is any guarantee of a response, but this seems especially less likely online, where the internet’s limited attention span also creates limited possibilities for accountability. A public letter may shift things in private, but it never seems to feel like enough, and it rarely meets the stakes of what is outlined in the letter. And if we extend Black’s idea of the social as its own reality, we could also see online life as its own reality, where “the internet is ‘a room of one’s own.’”[^8] The choice to publish a letter online—framed as an act of reinvention and reclamation—could be seen as the best and only option to communicate. In this context, an online response to an online open letter would hold potentially even more weight and significance. 

The open letter format creates a strange grey space between online activity and real-life actions. Once the letter loses our attention, it can sometimes feel like there is no “other” component to its digital presence, especially a public or visible one. It’s a failure of communication and it’s also possibly the only viable way to communicate an issue to a broader audience. Yet its existence, and dissemination, gives it a type of social power, further reinforcing the value of gossip. 

For Russell, there is no way out of the rules of the online world, what she calls “an immersive institutional edifice.”[^9] Rather than wallow in its problems, Russell is more interested in how it can be used to the advantage of those who could be considered a “glitch” or those who would like to exist as “glitches” in the system. She notes, “[cyberspace] is a space with many worlds, and within these worlds, vastly different understandings of what utopia might look like or become—and for whom.”[^10] She advocates not for a dismantling of cyberspace but “rather mutiny in the form of strategic operation.”[^11] 

Online open letters, and by extension digital gossip, could be seen as part of this mutiny, puncturing through the flat scroll of our feeds, and forcing us to pay attention to voices, and bodies, that cannot function in private. Though we may not all agree with the content, these letters prompt us to talk about it and, by extension, continue to feed our community of gossip.

[^1]: Hannah Black, “Witch- Hunt: Gossip Has Always Been a Secret Language of Friendship and Resistance between Women,” _TANK Magazine_ 70 (Spring 2017), 111. See also https://tankmagazine.com/issue-70/features/hannah-black 
[^2]: Ibid., 108–9.
[^3]: Ibid., 111.
[^4]: Ibid.
[^5]: Legacy Russell, _Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto_ (New York: Verso, 2020). 
[^6]: Ibid., 66.
[^7]: Black, 109.
[^8]: Russell, 42. Russell’s quote recontextualizes Virginia Woolf’s 1929 text (and de facto feminist argument) within the internet age.
[^9]: Ibid., 25.
[^10]: Ibid., 26.
[^11]: Ibid., 25. 


A piece of paper with the words “TO PUT TRUST IN STRANGERS” burning at the corners.  

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Institutional critique

Internet

Steph Wong Ken asks if the influx of online open letters addressed to the Canadian art world might gather a form of social power, even as implicated parties remain materially unaffected.  


"Worlds appear from her big mouth": The Mutiny of Online Open Letters

Emily Guerrero is an archivist and community librarian living on the unceded territories of the xᵂməθkᵂəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ílwətaɬ Nations. They last wrote about gossip for the journal _Archivaria_ in 2022. Emily is a parent and a Leo.

>##### 1. 

Late last summer, during a particularly delirious stretch of juggling two jobs and no spare childcare, I came home from job No. 2 to a large manila envelope on my kitchen table. Bearing stamps from the ’80s, but recently postmarked and featuring a red stamp declaring “Archive!”, the envelope spilled out a thick file folder labelled _Censorship_. Its initial title, _Porn_, peeked out underneath the label, covered but not erased. The file, full of clippings, photos, and notes, was a temporary portal from my messy kitchen to ’80s feminist Vancouver, created and sent to me via archival crate digging, a bit of time travel, and a hefty dose of gossip. 

>##### 2. 

An archive, by design, is a sleight of hand. Full of records documenting activities, organizations, and lives, its base goal to contain and preserve a legible history for future transmission is the direct result of colonial positivist logics of objectivity and capture. Collections are presented as naturally occurring phenomena, disconnected from the many hands and systems of power that touched and shaped the information within: who chose to record some information and omit others, why the processing archivist selected these files and discarded others, whose stories and activities reach the bar of becoming history. 

When new collections are added to an archive, they first need to be formally processed. Processing requires going through every box and every file to learn their contents and organizational idiosyncrasies, and then mapping these into a finding aid, a kind of treasure map to what lies within. As much as possible, dimensions, authorship, dates, format of contents, and anything else deemed important is recorded. In much of archival theory, processing is an objective exercise: information is only taken from what is on the physical object in front of you. Files are removed and returned in their “original order.” Emotions aren’t part of it. In practice, archival work can start to feel more like a good gossip session. There’s the focus on the mundane details; a vague illicitness that comes from the porousness of information moving from private to public; the possibility of digging out unexpected connections that illuminate systems of power and refusal. 

The archive I know best is the Crista Dahl Media Library and Archive, housed within VIVO Media Arts Centre in Vancouver on xwməθkwəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱ wú7mesh, and səl̓ ílwətaɬ territories, where I worked for several years. The space holds the records of all of VIVO’s 50 years of projects, publications, and administration, along with the records of social activists, other defunct ARCs, and media artists who have lived in the city. It is also home to the largest collection of video art and independently produced media in Western Canada, spanning formats from open-reel to born-digital. The materials held in any given archive are connected in some way by virtue of being placed together in the space, whether that be geography, shared identity, or relationship to an institution. When the records amount to a network of artists, arts workers, and activists across half a century, these connections become a deep web of relationships. 

As an archivist, your role is part wayfinder and part witch; you have to know enough about every collection to be able to point a researcher in the right direction (while never _quite_ having time for your own research). You need to know how to teach students to read a finding aid and systematically navigate numbered folders, while also paying attention to the nudges at the back of your brain that point you to that one file with the hand-bill from 1975 that you KNOW you saw last winter. Requests for digitization open up stories about how a mildly fraudulent EI claim provided the funds for a film project; which “collaborators” were on-and-off girlfriends for a decade; who might have an ambivalent relationship to their past work. In other words, you become the biggest gossip. 

>##### 3. 

The analogue and tactile delight I received in the mail last summer was one half of a recent mail art project _The images, such as they are, do have an effect on us_ (2022) by Hazel Meyer and Cait McKinney.[^1] Using the archives at VIVO as a site of activation, Meyer and McKinney were drawn to material that documented fierce splits among feminist organizers in Vancouver throughout the ’80s. The dossiers chart out two political camps within ’80s Vancouver, an outpost of the larger feminist sex wars. On one side, radical feminists argued that all sexually explicit media was harmful and a form of gendered violence; in 1982, members of the Squamish Five calling themselves the Wimmin’s Fire Brigade eventually took direct action by firebombing multiple porn shops in the city. At the same time, another group of activists and artists were organizing against the creep of government censorship of queer art, leading campaigns and conferences. 

Participants in the project signed up in advance and were mailed at random one of two files, representing a “working file” from activists within each group. The files, with labels _Porn_ and _Censorship_, are a mix of archival reproductions and speculation. “Some of the records are real, others we imagined based on scraps, remnants, and gossip,” reads the project description. (The respective titles are another sleight of hand—the contents of each dossier speak more directly to the other issue, a type of opposition research.) 

_Porn_ is full of news clippings about anti-censorship organizing: handbills from conferences (and itemized receipts for the videos screened at them); a jumble of hand-jotted notes on sheets of a “while you were out” pad of paper; a library due-date card for the dyke S&M classic _Coming to Power_ (1981) by SAMOIS; a ticket stub from “Confused: Sexual Views” (1984), the video installation by Paul Wong that was censored by the Vancouver Art Gallery before its debut. 

_Censorship_ gathers more hand-jotted notes and quotes pulled from the archive, alongside a Polaroid of a porn collection used in anti-pornography workshops; press clippings about the Red Hot Video bombings; a communiqué from the Wimmin’s Fire Brigade. The object that made me pause the longest was a small scrap of fabric with a hot-pink label: “A STICK WRAPPED WITH CLOTH MATERIAL SOAKED IN GASOLINE OR SIMILAR LIQUID.” Paging through both folders from _The images, such as they are, do have an effect on us_, the differing tactics unspooling in front of me showed two deeply diverging conceptualizations of control and violence. This schism runs straight through to today—the political deal that anti-porn feminists Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin made when they pushed to get anti-obscenity laws enacted in Canada is the earlier version of current TERF/“gender-critical” feminists’ alliance with right-wing attacks on the bodily autonomy of trans people.[^2] Meanwhile, the fight against censorship led by queers and sex workers has continued as the terrain of struggle has moved from physical media to the internet. 

This mix tape from the VIVO archive is part of a larger archival remediation project, Archive/Counter-Archive, which organizes research and case studies at audio-visual archives across Canada, focusing on community-based collections “created by Indigenous Peoples (First Nations, Métis, Inuit), Black communities and People of Colour, women, LGBT2Q+ and immigrant communities.”[^3] At VIVO, the case study is centred on the theme of gendered violence. When McKinney and Meyer started looking, they were drawn to material in several separate collections in the archive that detailed this schism around pornography and censorship within Vancouver feminisms. Ideas around gossip, pornography, censorship, and a queer public are ones that the artists have delved into before. Their installation _Tape Condition: degraded_ (2016) at The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives in Toronto played with digitization, consent, and the murky place porn holds in recording gay histories. A VHS digitization station was erected in a cozy and purposely timeless space, simultaneously evoking aesthetics of the ’80s and the present day. The ongoing performance lecture _The Digital Afterlives of Queer Porn Archives_ (2016–ongoing) considers what to do with _Slumber Party_ (1984), a DIY porn created by lesbians in Toronto in protest of censorship. Long rumoured to exist, the only known remaining copy was tracked down by McKinney and Meyer through chains of gossip and friends of friends, a single 8 mm tape with a complex history radiating behind it and forwarding to the present.[^4] 

>##### 4.

Gossip can be useful, a way of cutting through institutional bullshit and bypassing the unspoken rules that so many of us trip over as we enter spaces that never thought of us existing and don’t particularly care to imagine us now. It can also be deeply fun. 

As a queer living in proximity to dyke neighbourhoods my whole adult life, and working in arts spaces a good chunk of that time, the lines between history and gossip sometimes feel beside the point. Maybe this is a universal experience of the researcher, but I feel a disorienting specificity when researching and writing about the scenes and communities that are, well, mine. The degrees of separation between figures in the archival record and my life outside its walls are often few, and sometimes nil. At what point does gossip turn into passing on a shared history? What does public vs. private look like in spaces where people’s jobs, intimate relationships, and artistic production are hopelessly intertwined? I have no definitive answers, but I’m greedily drawn to these connections, to the unexpected crossovers that give me the dirt and the back story. 

A paradox of the archive, especially felt by those who have sorted and discarded files, is that there is never “one” “true” story—and as often as not, there is a chasm right where you are looking for these histories. _And_, the scraps and gossip found within them are so often precious fragments, requiring and deserving of care to knit back together.[^5] 

Another paradox—archives are endlessly appealing spaces of research-creation, _and_ the core job of the archivist is to wrangle millions of sheets of paper and videos in various decaying formats, contending with a near-constant backlog of items to process, tasked with making sense of the histories in our care as we go along shepherding these objects into a future. 

In a conversation over Zoom, McKinney and Meyer talked to me about their mutual love of vintage stationery and the mundane ephemera that might or might not be saved. As McKinney explained, “A lot of the stuff we’re referencing in the folders are kind of like documents we made up to represent gossip or scandals as they’ve been told to us. An example would be Paul Wong’s ‘Confused Sexual Views’ being removed from the Vancouver Art Gallery. It was in the press. It was in the news; we could also ask Paul for his records about it, or his take on it, but we were wondering if there were good records of the actual everyday experience of that having happened, what would they look like, and so Hazel had this pad of blank ‘while you were out’ phone message things, so we made one to represent Paul getting this phone call from the Vancouver Art Gallery. Which is not the phone call itself, and probably never even happened, but it’s a nice sort of way to create a record of this gossipy thing.” 

This slippage between things that exist in the world today and the things that might have once, or are desired to have, existed is one of the pleasures of _The images, such as they are, do have an effect on us_. Archival spaces like VIVO’s hold a dense network of relationships, their records imbued with all the affection, joy, hurt feelings, and drama relationships entail. Like almost any archive, this one is an incomplete history, shaped by structural inequities, colonial violence, and silences. One way of considering this network is as an ecosystem, created by those whose stories are held within, those who work with the records daily, and those connected to the space via projects and affinities.[^6] When making sense of these deep entanglements, this ecosystem of papers and tapes and digital files, what can you do but gossip alongside them? 

[^1]: Full dossiers can be seen at: http://archive.vivomediaarts.com/dossiers
[^2]: For a deeper analysis, see Jude Ellison S. Doyle’s article “How the Far-Right Is Turning Feminists into Fascists,” _Xtra_, April 1, 2022, https://xtramagazine.com/power/far-right-feminist-fascist-220810
[^3]: From https://counterarchive.ca/welcome
[^4]: For more on _Tape Condition: degraded_, see Amy Fung’s article “Gay Liberation, Sex Dungeons, Gossip, and What We Want in Art,” _Canadian Art_, September 13, 2016, https://canadianart.ca/features/hazel-meyer-cait-mckinney 
[^5]: The term “precious fragments” is a reference to the scholarship of Kim Lawson, whose work and mentorship has shaped a lot of my archival practice. From the title of her 2004 thesis, “Precious Fragments: First Nations Materials in Archives, Libraries and Museums” (master’s thesis, University of British Columbia), https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0091657 
[^6]: This line of thinking is indebted to Vanessa Kwan and Dan Pon at grunt gallery, from the catalogue for grunt’s exhibition “An Insufficient Record: The photo-ethics of preserving Black Vancouver” (2022) curated by Nya Lewis. 

A black and white drawing of a stack of vhs tapes with the the titles “Jungle Boy – John Greyson, Chinese Characters – Richard Fung, Frankly, Shirley – Margaret Moores, Blush Productions, Compliation.”

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History

Feminism

Emily Guerrero writes on Hazel Meyer and Cait McKinney’s _The images, such as they are, do have an effect on us_ (2022)—a mail art project on the feminist sex wars in ‘80s Vancouver—to explore the systems of power that determine whose stories become history. 

Gossipy Scraps, Gossip(ing) Archives

Marsya Maharani (she/her) is a researcher, arts administrator, and curator working with the collectives Younger Than Beyoncé and Gendai. Marsya’s doctoral research explores practices of collective care and radical friendship as grounds for work culture and labour practices.

Petrina Ng (she/her) is an artist and organizer. In addition to her work with Gendai, she is also a member of the collectives Durable Good (a small publishing studio) and Waard Ward (a floristry and gardening initiative that supports newcomers).

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Work

Marsya Maharani and Petrina Ng, current stewards of Gendai, collect a critical mass of anonymized accounts from racialized art workers navigating institutions that remain exploitative. They make the case for the prioritization of exploited workers over institutional reform, all towards collectively-led ecosystems.

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We Should _Talk_:  Obvious Truths About Working in the Arts

Alex Quicho is a writer and associate lecturer at Central Saint Martins. _Small Gods_, her book on terror and transcendence in drone technology, was published by Zer0 Books in 2021. 

##### Gossip is a grand tradition in Philippine politics and letters. Rumours syphoned from politicians’ inner circles have ousted and reinstated rulers. Inventories of presidential excess, repeated in essays, novels, artworks, speeches, and chain messages, detail symbols of corruption as potent as if in a recurring dream. Scandalous images circulate until they reach critical mass—instigating the popular protest, impeachment, or coup d’état—making gossip the primary medium of our political life. 

Take Jessica Hagedorn’s classic _Dogeaters_ (1990), for example, where the power of a fictional oligarch is described with the force of a hundred idle tongues:                                                                                                                                                    
                                
>Because he tells the President what to do. [...] Because he collects primitive art, renaissance art, and modern art. Because he owns silver madonnas, rotting statues of unknown saints, and jeweled altars lifted intact from the bowels of bombed-out churches. [...] Because he plays polo and breeds horses. [...] Because he owns everything we need, including a munitions factory. Because he dances well: the boogie, the fox-trot, the waltz, the cha-cha, the mambo, the hustle, the bump. [...] Because he owns _The Metro Manila Daily_, _Celebrity Pinoy Weekly_, Radiomanila, TruCola Soft Drinks, plus controlling interests in Mabuhay Movie Studios, Apollo Records, and the Monte Vista Golf and Country Club. [...] Because he was once nominated for president and declined to run. Because he plays poker and wins. Because he is short, and smells like expensive citrus. Because he has elegant silver hair, big ears, slanted Japanese eyes, and the aquiline nose of a Spanish mestizo. Because his skin is dark and leathery from too much sun. Because he is married to a stunning, selfish beauty with a caustic tongue.[^1]

In _The New York Review of Books_,[^2] Deborah Eisenberg writes that the narrative of _Dogeaters_ surfs a “richly informative current _of_ gossip” filtered from “people who travel in various orbits around that center of power.” Gossip, however, isn’t just synonymous with intelligence-gathering. A taste _of_ power, shared by a momentary insider with a thrill, can easily become a taste _for_ power—because who doesn’t want to be on the inside, for life? As the politician or oligarch becomes as omnipresent as any celebrity facing tabloid time, idle speculation assembles an indecent template for living. Authoritarian play-acting is practiced by the provincial elite, who reproduce the spectacle of singular power in small-scale behaviour. Special treatment comes cheap. Anyone with a bit of money can style themselves as a little dictator, tinting the windows of their lifted SUVs diplomatic black, oiling their social lives generously with bribes. (Or so I hear.) When contortions of respect dictate relations at every level, it is in the interest of the rich to be crass. The aspiration is to be careless enough for the favour to be called in, so that exceptional status—that is, being “above the law”—is broadcast loud and clear. 

Today, the Filipino national consciousness is undergoing a violent convulsion as Ferdinand “Bong-bong” Romualdez Marcos Jr., son of the former dictator, assumes power after three decades of familial exile in sunny Hawai‘i under protection of the United States. After years of behind-the-scenes reputation laundering, disseminated across Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok, the Marcos regime’s legacy appears as the most solid hallucination in the vaporous nightmare of the present. The country’s perennial ills have been reattributed to democracy’s biggest backers through equal parts fake news and real institutional failure. Anti-Marcos groups have been freshly defined as “liberal elites” by opponents wise to global tides of disfavour, while deft editing skips over cycles of local plunder and global extraction. By deferring responsibility and downplaying systemic factors, the Marcos campaign may well have trained individual anger on easily caricatured opponents, yet disinformation is not entirely to blame. In fact, the junior Marcos’s rise to power follows a pattern common to fledgling democracies. A 2015 study by James Loxton published by _The Journal of Democracy_ found that “in over one-half of new democracies, voters returned the [authoritarian successor] party to power in free and fair elections.”[^3] Dynastic ties in business, media, and politics lend “authoritarian successors” an air of competency seen in contrast with the leaders of democratic parties who have had the misfortune of tangling, in imperfect practice, with the bitter challenges of a post-authoritarian and neocolonial political landscape. 

Since the reign of Marcos Sr., melodrama has formed the gleaming core of Filipino statecraft. The senior Marcoses unleashed melodrama to the soapy, gendered max, with the dictator and his wife styling themselves as _malakas_ (“the powerful”) and _maganda_ (“the beautiful”) of Philippine legend. Ostentatious architectural undertakings, thundering statesmanship, and ludicrous injections of capital into the arts disguised the couple’s iron rule and sleights of hand as they emptied state coffers for personal use. _Their_ plunder was artful: tales of a populated island cleared just for their exotic animals, the entire stock of Saks Fifth Avenue (or was it Barneys?) pillaged, in one swoop, for their coterie. Even their code-and pet-names—the first lady was known as the “Iron Butterfly”—contributed to an image of the regime as elegant and “civilized”: one that perfumed away the corpses of dissidents left in the streets and drowned out tortured cries with operatic arias. 

In contrast, it was the naked display of bullet-ridden citizens that strengthened the public image of Rodrigo Duterte, who styled himself as a strongman so tough on narcotics that his “war on drugs” claimed the lives of 12,000 people.[^4] Duterte’s bolshy disruption of political decorum—he once described Pope Francis and Barack Obama using “a term that translates as ‘son of a whore’”[^5]—cast him as a gritty outsider, though the Duterte family’s hold on politics has been anything but marginal. But where Duterte spat gobs in the face of the establishment—in turn revealing how he relies on it, as all self-styled “saviours” depend on their sworn enemies—the younger Marcos has pursued complete avoidance. He ghosted public broadcasts where he was to debate his by-the-book opponent, human rights lawyer and vice-president Leni Robredo. He refused to talk to the press about his tax evasion or faux Oxbridge degrees, becoming a living “no comment.” Rather than command the will and mythos of the people from centre stage, as his parents strove to do, Marcos Jr. focused on the digital fringes. He popped up on popular channels hosted by micro-celebrities to reach voters whose attention had long strayed from the political theatre. 

●● **

I like to think of gossip as our earliest network infrastructure. In my parents’ day—that is, in the ’60s— households could cut their telephone bills by sharing a festively named “party line.” At any moment, social plans and sweet nothings could be interrupted by someone, somewhere in your neighbourhood, unwittingly picking up the receiver to start their own conversation. In a close-knit community, your business is de facto everyone else’s. Across a few group chats, I’ve seen a political meme depicting a group of older women in cotton house dresses with their hair up in Velcro rollers, gathered in a circle. Captions vary, the gist of the joke being that idle gossip exchanged by aunties can surpass insider information shared at 5G speeds. 

As a Filipina of a certain demographic, most of my knowledge of the dictatorship comes from gossip. It’s second-hand. Stories of escape, collaboration, and revolt have been disputed and polished over at least one lifetime. The more lurid the details, the better they’re engraved in memory. These stories are fused to the original lifeline against authoritarianism through whisper networks and clandestine get-togethers. Family friends photocopied radical materials during their night shifts to distribute before dawn. Others played host to revolutionary meetings in the stockrooms of stoner cafes, or the green rooms of black magic nightclubs. All of this was, I suppose, “gossip as resistance” in the way that is so valourized, yet so poorly practiced, in the present day. It’s true that whisper networks can form a protective bubble, helping individuals steer clear of predators and other dangers without necessarily changing the circumstances of that abuse. It’s also true that gossip can be collectively galvanizing. As Juaniyo Arcellana writes of _Ermita_, a radical magazine that dispersed political critique in the guise of far-out lifestyle pieces and psychedelic illustration, “If you can’t say it direct, you have to say it sideways.”[^6] That strategy has even surpassed the time of dictatorship to work against modern-day corruption. Rumours of the cases of Château Pétrus, priced at over US$2,000 a _bottle_, downed by ex-president Joseph Estrada at a time when minimum wage topped at US $225 or 9,000 PHP a _month_, accelerated the mass People Power II movement in 2007, leading to Estrada’s impeachment and life imprisonment for plunder.[^7] 

But what use do we have for gossip now, when disinformation—with all its rapidly mutating rumours, revisions, and conspiracies—has replaced the authoritarian “party line” as the dominant mode of political communication? Today, tsismis is aided by modern technologies, shooting from phone to phone flanked by the cute stickers and Boomer copypastas of Viber and WhatsApp group chats. Divergence, context collapse, luridness, and gross exaggeration—once ways to disrupt the tightly managed façade of the dictatorship— have been harnessed by those looking to foment their existing political power. The tactic fails to unify: the Latin root for _tsismis_, shared with the Spanish _chisme_, means “to split or divide.” 

Jonathan Corpus Ong, an associate professor of global digital media, attributed Marcos Jr.’s rise, in part, to “turbocharged folklore” shared through a sophisticated “architecture of disinformation” that implicates creative professionals, freelancing on contract, as much as it does pay-per-post trolls.[^8] Over-the-top tales of the dictatorship’s aesthetic prowess, infrastructural know-how, and political might are contrasted in hyper-quick montage with the diplomatic waffling of progressive leaders. The fact that these families have retained their power, in rumour and in practice, bolsters their allure to people who have seen little change to their circumstances in 34 years and counting of liberal democracy. The force of conservative narrative—with its penchant for legend, tradition, and selective nostalgia—lends itself well to snackable video, snapped up by larger-than-life personalities whose swift editing and caricatured delivery succeeds in the now-mature attention economy. Marcos Jr.’s communications team gambled, correctly, that effective political discourse was no longer taking place on traditional “neutral” ground. At any rate, careful policy makes for poor content. 

“It’s everywhere: the insistence that history can be seen as tsismis,” says artist Pio Abad, whose multi-disciplinary works directly address the regime and its contested legacy. “The cultural sphere has a lot to answer for in maintaining that dissonance, particularly with regards to the rehabilitation of the Marcoses. It was through said cultural gap that they were able to ingratiate themselves.”[^9] 

Abad works diligently to retrieve facts from the murk of historical dissonance, like how a restorer patiently dissolves filth from canvas. He works to create immovable monuments of what is in the process of being buried by strategic content overload. He makes solid what risks vanishing into thin air. In _Thoughtful Gifts_ (2021), Abad uses stark black ink to draw every item passed from the Marcoses to the Reagans in gratitude for America’s support of the regime. Simpering letters from Ferdinand to Ronald (in one, the Philippine president declares himself Reagan’s “humble servant”) are engraved in fat marble blocks. Elaborate tiaras, necklaces, brooches, and earrings are painstakingly reproduced in Abad’s _The Collection of Jane Ryan and William Saunders_ (2014–ongoing). The collaboration with jewellery designer Frances Wadsworth Jones, who is also Abad’s partner, brings the jewellery collection—which was confiscated by US customs when the Marcoses arrived in Hawai‘i and is currently hidden due to legal and political battles over its ownership—into public view. Each piece is printed in ivory resin so that it appears, as critic Izabella Scott writes in _Studio International_,[^10] as a collection of “spectral objects [...] which have been deprived of life.” Excess isn’t absent here. Rather, Abad sands off seduction to lay power bare. These works are not unlike the meticulously researched reconstructions of the collective Forensic Architecture, whose artwork-investigations have gone on to inform humanitarian objectives around the world. But where Forensic Architecture uses testimony and reconstruction for instrumental ends, counteracting the legislative opacity of the aggressor state, Abad’s reconstructions appeal to a more emotive register. The sombre, solid quality of historical occurrence is a neutralizer for shiny, bombastic power. 

Abad is direct about a political system that has mastered the manipulative power of embellishment, what Ong and his co-writers call “emotive political narratives that chip away, if not totally replace, the foundational histories of [the Philippines].”[^11] In Ong’s telling, the playbook for Philippine politics is closer to that of world-building and fandoms—that is, fantasy— than serious partisan face-offs. Imaginative conjurings of alternative history are willed into reality by superfans through memes, tabloid stories, major memorial events like the reinstatement of Ferdinand Marcos’s body in the Libingan ng mga Bayani (Hero’s Cemetery), and splashy TV productions like _Maid in Malacañang_ (2022). Yet Ong notes that “truth-denying tendencies” form part of each camp’s political realities, regardless of partisan position; the flip side of such overactive political imaginations convince people that “all forms of knowledge can be politicized and dismissed as biased.”[^12] Where does that leave us? When authoritarianism is so elaborately represented, and all its fantasies have magicked up a political afterlife, it may be left to the artist to state the cold, hard facts. 

[^1]: Jessica Hagedorn, _Dogeaters_ (New York: Penguin Books, 1991).
[^2]: Deborah Eisenberg, “Tyrannical Days,” _The New York Review_, June 20, 2022, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/06/11/jessica-hagedorn-tyrannical-days
[^3]: James Loxton, “Authoritarian Successor Parties,” _Journal of Democracy_ 26, no. 3 (2015): 157, https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/authoritarian-successor-parties 
[^4]: Human Rights Watch, “Philippines’ ‘War on Drugs,’” https://www.hrw.org/tag/philippines-war-drugs
[^5]: Richard C. Paddock, “Becoming Duterte: The Making of a Philippine Strongman,”_The New York Times_, March 21, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/21/world/asia/ro drigo-duterte-philippines-president-strongman.html
[^6]: Lobregat Balaguer, “Tropico Vernacular,” _Triple Canopy_, May 3, 2016, https:// canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/tropico-vernacular
[^7]: James Sturke, “Estrada Given Life Sentence for Corruption,” _The Guardian_, September 12, 2007, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/sep/12/philippines
[^8]: Jonathan Corpus Ong and Jason Vincent A. Cabañes, _Architects of Networked Disinformation: Behind the Scenes of Troll Accounts and Fake News Production in the Philippines_ (2018), https://doi.org/10.7275/2cq4-5396 
[^9]: Pao Vergara, “A Conversation with Pio Abad on the Artist-as-Citizen,” _Art Plus Magazine_, November 26, 2022, https://web.archive.org/web/20221126095449/https:/artplus.ph/a-conversation-with-pio-abad-on-the-artist-as-citizen 
[^10]: Izabella Scott, “Pio Abad – interview: ‘The Backbone of My Practice Is Family: Personal and Political Narratives Entwined,’” _Studio International_, January 8, 2020, https://www.studiointernational.com/pio-abad-interview-the-col lection-of-jane-ryan-william-saunders-ferdinand-imelda-marcos-phillilpines 
[^11]: Jonathan Corpus Ong et. al., “Parallel Public Spheres: Influence Operations in the 2022 Philippine Elections,” _Media Manipulation Casebook_, October 27, 2022, https://mediamanipulation.org/research/parallel-public-spheres-influence-operations-2022-philippine-elections 
[^12]: Ibid. 

 Ferdinand Marcos’ letter to the President from October 20, 1988. 

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Politics

Myth

Propoganda

Writing after the 2022 Philippine presidential election, Alex Quicho considers how the Marcos family has used hearsay to maintain power and rehabilitate their reputations. Quicho engages the work of artists like Pio Abad, whose work intervenes in political mythmaking.


Gossip After Dictatorship

Rouzbeh Shadpey is an artist, musician, and writer with a doctorate in medicine and inexhaustible exhaustion. He currently resides in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal.

>“The very dichotomy of memory and history lives in the air we breathe, and it has become fashionable to prefer one over the other.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              
— Maria Stepanova, _In Memory of Memory_, 2017 


There is a test that boasts an impossible claim: to measure memory.[^1] I have administered this test at two moments of my life separated by so wide a window of time and space that I question whether the person that binds them is still one and the same. The first time was in a warmly furnished Victorian-era house during a crisp Montreal winter. Inside the house was a memory clinic: beyond it, a few metres out, a building whose name used to be the “Protestant Hospital for the Insane.” It no longer bears this name. Today, it is a university-affiliated mental health hospital, which is to say it is an asylum. I was a psychiatry resident, interested in matters of the brain. 

Years later, separated by an ocean, I would readminister the test to a group of individuals that were not patients but international art tourists. Gathered inside the rotunda of the Fridericianum—the Kassel museum that quinquennially transforms into the centre of documenta’s operations—I conducted a workshop on institutional memory, forgetting, and history.[^2] These themes, which have stayed with me since my days as a medical student, took on a new sense of urgency amid the hostile climate of documenta fifteen. Much ink has spilled about the formation and subsistence of this climate, and its steadfast weathering of every artist and worker involved in the reproduction of, supposedly, the world’s most important exhibition of contemporary art.[^3] I have no desire to revisit these same arguments. I, like many others, am exhausted. 

Nevertheless, I seek to work out a larger, lingering suspicion that reaches beyond documenta and its fatigue: that what assailed ruangrupa and every other artist, participant, archive, puppet, film, space, and sound of documenta fifteen was—also—a memory test. With the distance of time and the vantage of rest, I expand on the text written as a preamble to my aforementioned workshop, with the intention to neither diagnose nor evince truths. Rather, what I offer is a paradigm shift: how might the conceptual framework of the memory test elucidate the unrelenting interrogation of Palestinian collective memory and revolutionary histories that took place during documenta fifteen? More importantly, how might it afford us greater vigilance toward future instrumentalizations and false diagnoses of “the very dichotomy of memory and history [that] lives in the air we breathe”? 

The divide between memory and history becomes brutally apparent in its weaponization. Akin to a psychic caesura, it is enforced upon Palestinians by a German memory test that demands they relinquish their national identity, history, and land to forgetting—and commit to memory the guilt of their oppressor’s oppressors. Last May, on the anniversary of the Nakba, Berlin police arrested over 170 people who had gathered in the streets to commemorate the events of 1948. Having banned the gatherings pre-emptively on grounds that they “posed an ‘immediate risk’ of antisemitic violence,” police proceeded to arrest anyone in the street who uttered or bore the signifiers of Palestinian belonging: keffiyehs, flags, freedom chants.[^4] Simultaneously, separate state injunctions across Germany were issued, barring vigils in memory of the slain Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. An ominous quickening could be sensed animating the longue durée of Palestinian erasure at the hands of the German state, whose violence seemed to double down on the very act of remembrance itself. This was a memory test that bore the injunction to forget. 

A mere month later, within this psychic and political landscape, documenta fifteen emerged. For 100 days, Germany became the stage for a city-scale art exhibition whose predominant focus was to reimagine art as community-building praxis. The collective ruangrupa were at the head of this project, conceptualized according to the principles of lumbung—a methodology of collective sharing and redistribution originating from Indonesian community practices of organizing rice barns and allocating their stores to people in times of need. Artists were present, as were activists, organizers, thinkers, craftspeople, and others whose practices are not so readily identifiable. 

The invited artists and collectives were predominantly cultural practitioners from a place we—for lack of a better imagination—refer to as the “Global South.” Time was spent sharing knowledge, laughs, and food. Time was spent venting frustrations about the stressors and daily aggressions of life in Kassel: death threats by local neo-Nazi groups, online smear campaigns, bad faith accusations of antisemitism, unpaid wages, suspended visas, breaches of contract, censorship, and so on.[^5] Some people, having had enough, left. Far too many stayed. 

At certain moments, it feels as if all that is left of these events is the uneven passing of time itself. In case studies of advanced dementia, when all interest in the contingencies of reality have dissipated, it is remarked upon that patients persist in inquiring about the time. Even in the deepest throes of forgetfulness, our sense of time—our longing _for_ time—remains steadfast. “What is a man without memory?” writes Mira Mattar. “Is it bliss he resides in, is it fantasy, is it the present? What elastic terror is always pulling him back?”[^6] In the film programs, archival materials, and various enlivenings of oral histories that composed much of documenta fifteen’s artistic offerings, Mattar’s questions reverberated. For an instant, as the festival celebrated its opening, it appeared as though a constellation of histories that eschewed the amnesia of colonial narratives had succeeded in spreading out, over, and beyond the city of Kassel. Then began the attempts at erasure. 

In _Figures of History_, Jacques Rancière conceptualizes the “document” as the material bearer of historical writing, that which aims to record the events of history in an exhaustive manner. In contrast to the “monument,” which “preserves memory through its very being,” the “document” seeks to tell a story.[^7] It is a tool used to make “memory _official_.”[^8] The relationship between memory and documents is thus one of subservience: memories require documents for their immortalization. Under this light, the memory test becomes the quintessential document—that document whose aim is to make official not the single memory, but Memory itself. _La mémoire et le souvenir_. It is the prior memory we gamble whenever we consent to its testing along the latter’s empirical fault-lines. For what is at stake in our examination is not so much the memories we hold (or forget), but that we have memories _at all_. To understand this is to understand why so much anti-Palestinian intimidation and censorship at documenta fifteen has been directed toward archival materials: revolutionary publications, educational and documentary films born of anti-imperial and anti-Zionist pan-nationalisms, artworks made at the turn of the century, and so on. In addition to recounting specific historical events, these documents, through their material presence and exhibition, testify to a people’s right to memory. And, as such, they corrupt Rancière’s neat dichotomy. In the careful hands of the dissident artist, the document, until now a simple record of history, rises to the test of memory— and becomes a monument. 

July 10, 2022. A facsimile of the 1988 issue of the feminist Algerian women’s journal _Présence de femmes_ was removed from the documenta exhibition space of Archives des luttes des femmes en Algérie without their knowledge or consent. In 1988, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) declared an independent Palestinian state while exiled in Algiers. In that same year, the most important uprising Algeria had seen since its independence—the October Riots—occurred, harbinger of the country overthrowing its one-party system. _Présence de femmes_ in 1988 was dedicated to the women of both these revolutions. 

Among the images displayed in the journal, two were accused of being antisemitic. These belonged to the artists Burhan Karkoutly and Naji al-Ali, famous for his signature character Handala. The first portrayed a Palestinian child held at the ear by a Zionist soldier; the latter, a Palestinian woman fighting one. Shortly after their removal, both images were exonerated by the boards that were assigned to their “legal” review—and the journal returned to its exhibition.[^9] 

The original illustrations by Karkoutly in _Présence_ belonged to a 1979 children’s book by the Palestinian novelist and revolutionary Ghassan Kanafani entitled _Atfal Ghassan Kanafani (The Children of Ghassan Kanafani)_. Under what circumstances should a nation demand of a people fighting for liberation that they depict their executioner—the militia responsible for the murder of their children—tactfully? When the nation in question identifies with the soldier, not the child? 

In their public statement released on August 10, 2022, the Archive des luttes des femmes en Algérie, not knowing how else to respond to the bad-faith accusations of antisemitism wielded against them, sought refuge in history. That is, they relinquished their documents to _historicity_. Pressured into appeasing the oppressor, the collective concedes: their documents belong to a dead, historical past, and thus, can only be understood and interpreted accordingly. Such were the unspoken terms and conditions. To secure its return to the exhibition, the journal, a living record of Palestinian freedom dreams, had to be fossilized into a historical artefact. As I read the collective’s statement, Gaza was in flames, caught beneath another merciless round of bombings by the Israeli state. History, it seemed, was very much present. 

When I search online for Naji al-Ali’s cartoon of a Palestinian woman kneeing an Israeli soldier in the groin during the First Intifada, there are no results. Instead, Google suggests, did I mean “Israeli soldier _kneeling_ on Palestinian woman?” Syntax changes everything: the reel is now long. No victory is complete. 

●● ** 

During a medical memory test, five predetermined words are given to a patient to remember. The administrator slowly speaks each of these twice. After five minutes, and a string of unrelated questions, the patient is asked if they can repeat the words they have been entrusted with. For each forgotten word, they are deducted a point. At the end of the test, a score is tallied that determines whether the patient merits a diagnosis of dementia—and the abdication of autonomy it begets. 

Last summer, in the rotunda of the Friedericianum, I asked participants in my workshop to rescript the memory test so as to create documents against which to test the institution and its processes of forgetting. One of their tasks was to select five words they desired documenta fifteen to commit to remembrance. At the end of the workshop, everyone scattered their palimpsestic tests around a fountain that adorned the centre of the rotunda. There was a short break, followed by a pair of readings by the writers Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung and Sanja Grozdanić. The day concluded with a screening of the Moroccan poet and filmmaker Ahmed Bouanani’s 1971 film _Mémoire 14_. 

Made entirely with archival footage from the Centre cinématographique marocain, _Mémoire 14_ sought to resurface the lessons of history by refusing the erasure of Morocco’s colonial and pre-colonial past. As a result, much of its 104-minute reel was destroyed. What remains today of the film—24 precious minutes—is a testament to the resilience of memory in the face of state censorship. Over its carefully montaged sequence of black-and-white footage, a weary voice can be heard reciting verses to Bouanani’s eponymous poem. It opens—and closes—with a conceit. “Happy is he whose memory rests in peace.” 

Over by the fountain, the memory tests had gotten damp. On one of them, the ink still dry, someone had written the five words: FREE. PALESTINE. FROM. GERMAN. GUILT. 


[^1]: MoCA—which stands for Montreal Cognitive Assessment—is a screening and diagnostic test created by the neurologist Dr. Ziad Nasreddine in 1996. Its purview is the measure of memory, along the six neuropsychological spheres of cognition: attention, retention, orientation, abstraction, visuo-spatial execution, and language. It is today considered the gold standard in the diagnosis of dementia around the world, having been translated into over 40 languages.
[^2]: “Undiagnosing documenta” was presented in the context of _Privation in Three Acts_, a one-day program by Decolonial Hacker in dialogue with the public program of LE 18 (Marrakech).
[^3]: For quality writing on the events of documenta fifteen, see for example: Mi You, “What Politics? What Aesthetics?: Reflections on Documenta Fifteen,” _e-flux_ 131, November 2022, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/131/501112/what-politics-what-aesthetics-reflections-on-documenta-fifteen; Paris Lettau, “documenta fifteen,” _Memo Review_ 28, July 16, 2022, https://memoreview. net/reviews/documenta-fifteen-by-paris-lettau 
[^4]: Hebh Jamal, “Palestinians in Germany Fear New Level of Repression after Nakba Day Crackdown,” _+972 Magazine_, May 21, 2022, https://www.972mag.com/berlin-palestinians-nakba-protest-police 
[^5]: “Censorship Must Be Refused: Letter from lumbung Community,” _e-flux_, July 27, 2022, https://www.e-flux.com/notes/481665/censorship-must-be-refused-letter-from-lumbung-community 
[^6]: Mira Mattar, _Affiliation_ (Bristol: Sad Press, 2021), 8. 
[^7]: Jacques Rancière, _Figures of History_, trans. Julie Rose (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), 22. 
[^8]: Ibid.
[^9]: Archives des luttes des فيشرأ femmes en Algérie ,رئازجلا يف ءاسنلا تالاضن “Statement / Déclaration,” August 10, 2022, https://archivefemdz.hypotheses.org/811 


A spread out pile of forms with colourful writing on them

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Medicine

Using the medical diagnostic tool of the memory test, Rouzbeh Shadpey poetically reflects on how the divides between Palestinian realities and German state narratives, and between lived collective memory and official History, informed engagements with documenta fifteen.


The Injunction to Forget: documenta fifteen and the Test of Memory

Letter

##### Dear _C_, and everyone who’s around what the alphabet signifies to you, 

I have to start this letter by saying that I did hesitate to read your latest issue, “Chinatown.” I’m a settler from South Korea, so my physical appearance discretely tells that my race is East Asian. I can’t even count how many times I’ve encountered micro-aggressive or racist strangers labelling me as Chinese. I’d react by saying, “I’m not Chinese.” When global hate crimes surged nonsensically “because of” COVID-19, I heard some Koreans blaming China, while others (including myself) were in solidarity with all victims of hate crimes regardless of ethnicity. I’d find myself relieved, walking in Chinatown, but I’d also know that I can’t speak or read the languages in Chinese grocery shops and bubble tea cafes. This ambivalence made me hesitate to read your issue. I didn’t know if I wanted to be distinctively excluded from the “Chinese” group, or if I’d still look for momentary solace there. 

That was why I exhaled an empathetic breath when reading Shawn Tse’s conversation with Kiona Callihoo Ligtvoet, in “A Garden in Chinatown on Indigenous Land.” The interview allowed me to connect the conflicted feelings I had walking in Tkaronto’s Chinatown to larger ideas of inclusion and exclusion. The article by Godfre Leung and photograph by Chad Wong of Vancouver Chinatown also reminded me of what I saw when visiting the neighbourhood last year. Many non-profit organizations were out there on the almost empty streets, giving food packages to unhoused people. In Vancouver Chinatown, I did not find a polarized boundary between Chinese and non-Chinese communities. What I saw was people helping people through direct action. When I finished reading your issue, the word Chinatown started to signify different ideas; it is a place that emanates with care to me. There, I feel less concerned about racial discrimination, for it is an area made by and for people who once were/are excluded (myself included). 

##### Warmly, 
##### Ivetta S. Kang 

##### Dear _C Magazine_, 

When I first immigrated almost 20 years ago, Toronto’s Chinatown seemed to me exactly as Elisa Yon describes the Chinatown in Vancouver—“a tourist destination.” Chinatown was, to my limited understanding, a simulacrum. The China that it was built to reflect no longer existed by the time I was born. The gate in the middle of Spadina Avenue was unlike the sleek skyscrapers that made up the majority of my hometown. The tiny shops were decidedly not the supermarkets that I was used to frequenting with my parents. I resented Chinatown playing into Western stereotypes. Chinatown itself was a shanzhai representation of China. 

Thankfully, I’m no longer nine years old. I know now that Chinatowns are not supposed to mimic China—this is impossible. As an immigrant from the mainland arriving in the early aughts, my Chinese identity was and continues to be distinct from that of earlier generations of immigrants, many of whom were from Hong Kong and southern China. Chinatowns across North America were built by these early migrants who needed a haven for themselves, where a vague imitation of the architecture and cuisine from back home were all they had. Chinatowns are not authentically Chinese, but they _are_ an authentic manifestation of the Chinese diaspora in North America. Just as Karen Tam argues that shanzhai is “a method of resistance,” so was the creation and development of Chinatowns: to resist a dominant settler culture that exploited our bodies to build a nation that we weren’t allowed to enter. The continuing existence of Chinatowns, along with their shanzhai products and fusion foods, is a testament to how we take our identities into our own hands, and subvert the forces of assimilation. 

Reading the essays in your recent issue made me realize that Chinatowns had been foreign to me because they represented a heritage that was never quite my own. But as I’ve grown, I’ve mapped my own memories onto Chinatown, finding solace in a layered space for my increasingly layered identities. It will never be the home I’ve left behind, but it has become part of a home I love. 

##### Sincerely, 
##### Sophie Zhou 

154Letters.pdf

 Letters reflecting on issue 153 “Chinatown.”

Letters

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Editor

Maandeeq Mohamed is a writer and researcher. Engaging Black Studies and related cultural production, her writing is featured in _Real Life_, _C Magazine_, and _Canadian Art_. 

Reviews Editor

Designer

Publisher

Artist Project

Whess Harman is Carrier Wit’at and based on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh. Their multidisciplinary practice includes beading, illustration, text, and poetry. As a mixed-race, trans artist they work to find their way through colonial exhaustion and queer melancholy with a balance of rage and humour. Songzhuang Art Centre (Beijing); and the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa). He has participated in the Montreal, Sydney, Beijing, Moscow, and Curitiba Biennales. His work can be found in the collections of FRAC (Lorraine); National Gallery of Canada; Art Gallery of Ontario; Musée d’art contemporain (Montreal); Mendel Art Gallery (Saskatoon); and the Weatherspoon Art Museum (Greensboro).

I joke about my habit of eavesdropping and being nosy, but I’m not sure anyone has actually believed me. I’m real serious though! The things I hear! The things I never repeat and deliberately urge my mind to make blurry by shoving them behind frosted glass doors. There are so many things that simply are not my business! 

In my community, when you say someone is “being gooz” it means that they’re being nosy. “Gooz” is the Carrier word for whisky jack, a bird that my grandfather always described as being nosy (watching for scraps) when he was on our clan trapline. My grandfather was gossiped about a lot, and still is to this day despite passing 20 years ago. The gossip surrounding him created a tangible ripple effect that my Nation continues to deal with internally, regarding that very trapline the phrase may have originated from. In the end, there was a lot of “being gooz” in our community that didn’t go so good. 

The story in Cole’s comic is exactly the kind of thing I would have known about as a nosy kid, even if I didn’t totally understand what everyone was talking about. I didn’t grow up on the reservation, but I did grow up in a small town slash landing pad for every family member, including the raucous house parties. I heard a lot of nasty gossip about the people around me, some deserved and most not, all doused in a thick gelatinous slime of colonial trauma. But the story in Cole’s comic was the kind that I also hold on to; those stories that usually get passed down a couple generations and become a kind of folklore. It’s the “being gooz” that goes good. Well, at the small sacrifice of having your entire community know who you’re snagging and doing an entire genealogical and clan check by word of mouth. Though it’s not the worst way to learn about your family tree, if it means being able to go back a generation or two in freakishly intense detail. Gossip can be educational! 

There are many folk hero–style stories in small Indigenous communities; we really are oral storytellers. Sometimes that takes the shape of gossip and sometimes it gets _real_ mean, but the stories I hold on to and give importance are the ones where we can’t help but see the humour through them, even with the asides of colonial interruption peppered in. 

Cole’s someone that I’ve always wanted to find out that I’m cousins with. Alas, it is unlikely, unless in more recent history some perfect formula of cross-pollination happened circa the Potlatch Ban onward (there’s that aside). Historically, we are Nation neighbours though, and we know enough of the same families that talking to Cole is like talking to family at the end of a driveway behind a big pickup while nudging all the rez dogs away from the bins of fish in the back. Though I guess I don’t normally ask my family to borrow their Gengoroh Tagame comics. 

I was relieved when Cole pitched this comic to me; I was anticipating that we’d buckle to the pressure to use the platform to say something. A majority of our work requests tend to be centred on a few select things: on the positive end of the spectrum, educational materials for our Nations; and then disproportionately on the negative end of the spectrum, residential schools, pretendians, and land rights. Personally, I’m running out of different and patient ways to state the obvious and spending that much time with those materials has been increasingly traumatic, especially when low fees, late payments, and deadlines are thrown in on top of it all. There’s really nothing like rolling up with “Here’s all the ways our communities got fucked” and being expected to be grateful and engaged with the opportunity to tell only that story. 

Which is why Cole’s work has always stood out to me as being generous. His _Dakwäkãda Warriors_ comic series approaches telling an allegory of colonialism from the proverbial secret rez store that lets in joy and excitement, the same way we look for the stories we can romanticize in gossip. Because for every story we lovingly tell about auntie-cuzzins, beading circles, and hunting trip mishaps, we do have five other things about colonial trauma. But creating some cyber-Sasquatch characters and making sure to let steam off with some _Pizza Punks_ does feel more balanced and valuable to me. 

Addressing the deep, dark issues is important, but so is building up our communities from within. Cole is someone who really does care about the community of artists and zinesters he’s building around him. He listens to the gossip but speaks up when something demands a full stop or verification. He’s used it to protect a lot of other young, up-and-coming Indigenous comic artists from harmful people in our community and from harmful institutions, _and_ to help shape our own projects into opportunities we’re actually excited about. 

If there’s gossip about Cole, I know it to be the good kind. His work is not visible at the capital A art world level most of the time, but Cole is someone
who’s already a community folk hero for us, and that means a lot, gossip be damned.



Cole Pauls is a Champagne and Aishihik Citizen and Tahltan comic artist, illustrator, and printmaker hailing from Haines Junction (YT). He holds a BFA in Illustration from Emily Carr University. Residing in Vancouver, Pauls has created three graphic novels: _Dakwäkãda Warriors_ (2019), _Pizza Punks_ (2021), and _Kwändür _(2022).

Artist

Curator

Cole Pauls, _Chäsu̧ Kadini_ (Say That Again), excerpt, 2023 

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Indigenous

Storytelling

Guest curated by Whess Harman, Cole Pauls’s comic _Chäshu̧ Kadini (Say That Again)_ illustrates a kind of oral storytelling in small Indigenous communities that becomes the stuff of folklore. Harman writes that Pauls’s larger practice “approaches telling an allegory of colonialism from the proverbial secret rez store that lets in joy and excitement, the same way we look for the stories we can romanticize in gossip.” 

_Chäshu̧ Kadini (Say That Again)_ by Cole Pauls: Text

Review

Yasmina Price is a writer and film programmer completing a PhD at Yale University. Her work focuses on Black Cinema, revolutionary visual culture in the Global South, and the experimental practices of women artists.

A festive crowd of revellers appears as a grainy image, their movements static and strange. The tortured fluidity of this parade interrupts itself, inserting shards of immobility into the flow of collective movement. In _The Wretched of the Earth_ (1961), Frantz Fanon anatomized the colonial world order as “compartmentalized, Manichaean and petrified, a world of statues.” He also named its counterpoint, the visions of the colonized, as “muscular dreams, dreams of action, dreams of aggressive vitality.” A revision of this opposition between the rigidly carceral containment of colonization and the kinetic transformation of decolonizing efforts plays out in Maxime Jean-Baptiste’s short experimental documentary _Moune Ô_ (2022). From his position in the French Guyanese diaspora, Jean-Baptiste approaches filmmaking and performance as multiform studies in displaced geographies, colonial memory, embodied knowledge, and the histories of Black peoples. 

_Moune Ô_ eases into itself with a black screen, a choral soundtrack, and a title card setting the scene in 1990 on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, Paris, for the première of _Jean Galmot_, _aventurier_ (1990). This rather forgettable film participated in the larger project of European, colonialist memory work, generating celebratory narratives that reduced the scale and reality of imperial horrors to fanciful tales of innocent heroes. Spilling over with stereotypes, this biographical movie was based on the life of Jean Galmot, a French writer whose time in Guyana in the 1910s involved running a gold mine and amassing political power, yet who was self-styled as a “defender” of Guyanese colonial subjects. Galmot fulfilled the formula of the intrepid (white, Western, male) adventurer, in a film saturated with clichés and fetishistic colonial imagery of triumphant conquest. 

Jean-Baptiste’s video emerges from a recuperated cinematic family history, as his father was an extra in _Jean Galmot, aventurier_ and appeared in a televised segment of the première. The carnival at the beginning of _Moune Ô_ was part of the première festivities and organized by the actors/extras who were part of the local Guyanese diaspora, as well as the French film crew. The fanfare presented a contradiction of sorts: on the one hand, it did emerge from the Guyanese diasporic community and expressed a communal spirit. On the other hand, the première displaced the carnival from its roots in Caribbean practices with particular social, religious, and political functions by making it do double duty as a convenient promotional tool for the production of _Jean Galmot_, _aventurier_. In its opening seconds, Jean-Baptiste’s experimental documentary introduces a form of commodified cultural slippage intimately tied to cinema’s complicity in the machinery of colonization. 

_Moune Ô_ begins, then, with a charged disarticulation of movement, disrupting the temporal and spatial order of the première footage. Many in the crowd wear red, black, or white masks that conceal their faces, turning them into a swell of semi-anonymized, brightly coloured hats and costumes. The procession is bathed in a cold, abrasive, too-bright light that emphasizes the conditions of display and exposure. The footage seems to be glitching, their forward momentum stalled, their gestures stiff, slow, and almost artificial. This is in stark contrast to the smooth continuation of the accompanying song, “Mouvement d’avion” (1922) by Edgar Nibul, which was the introductory soundtrack to _Jean Galmot_, _aventurier_. By applying these disruptive modifications to the première footage, Jean-Baptiste complicates the encounter between the colonial containers of the older film and its soundtrack, and still active colonial dynamics. Thinking back to Fanon, the artist’s irresolvable mash-up up of colonial petrification and decolonial animation threatens the sanctity of the former’s smooth narratives without assuming an oversimplified antidote in the latter. This broken gestural language of _Moune Ô_ is leveraged to offer a dissenting way out for the visual trace of people whose bodies were managed and displayed in _Jean Galmot_, _aventurier_. 

Jean-Baptiste’s formal manipulations accentuate the sinister glean surrounding the première footage, and the representational violence of _Jean Galmot_, _aventurier_’s portrayal of Guyanese peoples. The dry tone of the title cards that recur throughout _Moune Ô_ make the link explicit by referring to those who made the 1990 film as “these new adventurers, whom we called filmmakers, who would come from France, armed with their cameras, and remake everything, burn everything, rebuild everything, capture everything, for the film.” This efficiently draws a line to the ethnographic and anthropological impulses of European photographers and filmmakers in the 19th and 20th centuries, who used these visual tools as an addendum to their political and economic domination of the African continent, determining a form of optic invasion that migrated to its diasporas in the Caribbean. Cinema offered another way to classify, regulate, exoticize, and dehumanize a lesser “Other,” and ideologically supported imperialist projects. _Moune Ô_ has a place in the arc of cinema by Caribbean and African descendent filmmakers whose lineage began by developing avenues of representational correction and historical intervention, offering oppositional counter-images to the stranglehold of white-supremacist and colonialist domination over the visual. 

The sonic leads the way as the film takes a subtle tonal shift. “Mouvement d’avion” fades away, and is replaced by the chilly, wordless ambient sounds of kwajbasket’s “The Only Thing Left” (2014). A title card names the stakes of colonial subjects appearing in the dominant visual terrain: “Our bodies seem to have been used in this film, like puppets, like wordless beings, like extras.” The image cuts to a medium close-up of two young Black boys in matching green and blue jackets. The boy on the left looks up in adorably inquisitive interest, while the boy on the right smiles widely in delight. This transition is effective in indicating the intergenerational continuations of visual exploitation, from the Guyanese peoples featured in _Jean Galmot_, _aventurier_ to the imperilled future indexed by the two kids. The more reserved child on the left is also wrapped in the arms of a woman (perhaps a mother or an auntie) who guides his hands in a little dance—a gentle but still compelled performance. Later, _Moune Ô_ shows dark silhouettes moving around a fire, followed by a title card reading, “The crowd pushes me towards the explosion, and now the smile I put on tears my face off.” Uneasily recalling the boy made to dance, this language points to the danger of performing for or in view of the colonial gaze that threatens the identity of the colonized person as anything other than a being constantly surveilled and controlled. 

_Moune Ô_ stages a counter-narrative, summoning the counter-public who sees themselves not in the heroic adventuring of _Jean Galmot_, _aventurier_, but in the peoples whose worlds were invaded by these conquering ideologies. Through a formal and political rewind, Jean-Baptiste’s technologized modifications of the première footage create a retroactive challenge to colonial memory. Images of _Jean Galmot_, _aventurier_ return as a materially haunted and broken travelogue. The jagged tempos of the phantom pantomimes in _Moune Ô_ recall another kernel from Fanon in _Les damnés de la terre_: that decolonization would entail a “program of complete disorder.” There is a transformative necromancy to this incendiary work: a resurrection on amended terms of power. 


A group of people walking down a street at night while playing music.

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_Moune Ô_ — Maxime Jean-Baptiste

Fan Wu is currently seeking synthesis between _qi_, Daoist energy cosmology, and _libido_, Freudian erotic drive. He loves to be in touch: write to him at fanwu4u@gmail.com.

“I write endlessly in the register of prayer.” 

>I’m supposed to “review” your book, Emanations. How do I do this when pertinence only appears as a stain? I half-heartedly resist the temptation to take this line, on endless prayer, to be the key to your book—not without reference to where it appeared last, in Sisyphus’s Music Box, where you said it was a prayer with neither subject kneeling nor object knelt for, but a prayer suspended in the “hidden remains I intuit.” So I don’t take the first person personally, even when it taunts at the existence of a human self: 

“I am bound because ignorance makes me sick 
I am bound because ignorance makes me sick 
I am bound because ignorance makes me sick” 

>Ignorance is sickening because it’s still bound to a paradigm of knowledge; it appears only relative to knowledge as its failure. But non-knowledge is a third term that baffles the paradigm, that steps away from the binary, that sits outside the duality of enlightenment and ignorance; the self that would draw that distinction is an illusory inheritance of Western metaphysics. Deliciously, yours is a lyric poetry where the speaker’s throne has always already been vacated. In that empty space there’s a shard of life that stutters itself into a tentative form, barely discernible from the formless: in the tired whirr of repetition, Beckett’s bouquet’s wilted. Good riddance to the bad subject—make room for the withdrawn, the retreated, the renunciatory trace: 

“Near, like amber, a voice that is put away shackles itself to a figment.” 

>Distance is sexy, if sex is the parabolic intensification of nearness until you almost believe that _touch_ has transpired. All the more sexy when it suggests warmth, whether in the colour of amber or in the rub of voice. Any voice will do, so long as it’s draped in the honey of having lost itself. Distance is not to be mistaken for abstraction: there’s flesh here, wreathed in restraint and half-light; the body that only flickers piecemeal into view is nonetheless undeparted. I relish the echo of who I imagine is your forebear: “On a table, in the empty room: here is no ptyx / Abolished bauble of sonorous uselessness.” But yet also, Mallarmé could never. 

“In a room I am where you are not thinking.” 

>Prathna, do you feel society, or at least its undercurrents, pivoting toward the unknowable? We fumble for the divine, turn our own pockets out for mysticism’s last dregs. As a child of scientists, I thought rationalist empiricism had secured its place at the end of history and didn’t think twice. Then suddenly I felt droves of people abandoning the edifice of science, which promised truth—or at least freedom from illusion. If our moment in time calls for a restitution of cosmology’s importance, your poetics is the shadow side of a planet going retrograde. Yet the energy that drives your book from line to line is not mystical: it does not claim a first-hand experience of the divine. The last strains of intuition do not disclose meaning, but necessity: 

“the price of pleasure
I sold and gained stillness 
so I could live” 

> With what’s left of ourselves a staircase of tatters, we preserve our lives. We shuffle our drives to prioritize _vital nourishment_. You show us how the marketplace of renunciation is full of paradoxes: that we must sell in order to get back a sliver of life—enough to count for survival. I can’t shake the Zhuangzi line where he proclaims with deadly simplicity, “Knowledge is infinite. Life is finite. If we use our finite life to chase infinite knowledge, we run ourselves around until we run aground”: 

“They say many things about the body 
Once it has exited
The room or returns
Unoccupied by thinking” 

>Reading _Emanations_ is an exercise in the suspension of thinking, if thinking is the kind that reaches for understanding and so fills the room with its tireless seeking. I feel like so much of your language is at the threshold of Attachment, like every sentence has already packed its bags, like it has the determination to leave home and a sense of closure behind. Speaking in divergences, I have to show everyone this stanza because I love it and it makes me crave: 

“It does not matter if 
I am flattened out 
for the wanton
but not willing 
to be sold as allegory
I am disorganized life 
the mending
sear of reason grasping for the breach” 

> Though pleasure as we know it has paid a heavy price, still it works itself through the cracks— through the subtlety of language, of sounds bouncing off each other, _reason to breach, wanton to willing_, of the contradictions of cauterization that know well the pains of healing. Since ancient times _emanationism_ is the belief that from a primal Godhead radiates the energy of existence outward into the world we know as such. The human layer is at a far remove from that core of emanation: so fallen, we receive only the faintest rays. What does an emanation do when the classical image of God the hierarch is no longer at the head? When instead the source of power that makes waves for us to live by is the hard-won, hard-fought sense of wonderment at the world—and for re-enchantment to breach the surfaces of exhaustion? 

“How often do I speak to you
In a voice of what you call God or wonderments 
What will it take for you to know that it’s enough 
To wander into marvels” 


Cover of poetry collection Emanations by Prathna Lor.

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_Emanations_ was published by Wolsak & Wynn, Hamilton, 2022.

_Emanations_ — Prathna Lor

Of the several mind-numbing effects of hallucinogens, tunnel vision is a common one. At once episodic and habitual, the loss of peripheral sight seemingly colours Moyra Davey’s sedating feature-length work _Horse Opera_ (2022). In isolated close-ups, Davey constructs a visual journal of her pandemic isolation: stacks of books and records; artefacts and paraphernalia littering living quarters; hilly, wintry, pastoral outdoors; a black mastiff lazily trudging through snow; and birds pecking at feeders hanging from tree branches. Reminiscent of iris shots from early silent cinema, Davey’s gaze imitates tunnel vision with indulgent candour, particularly lensing the physicality of horses. 

Portrayed with gratuitous, matter-of-fact _tendresse_, circular frames capture equine genitalia—peeing, pulsating—mostly vaginal. Scoring this fixation is a parallel fictional account. In Davey’s signature torpid drawl, she recites her writings on Elle, the protagonist of her diaristic text. Narrated in third person throughout the course of her film, Davey juxtaposes her own ailing solitude with the character’s experiences of raving sociality. 

Elle seems attuned to her own tunnel vision. She is described by Davey as a single mother who self-medicates and frequents loft parties in New York City. “Elle is happy when her head is ripped,” Davey narrates, “but by the end of the night when the lights come on and they stand around chatting, she can’t bear it.” Using psychoactives like LSD, cocaine, and crystal, she keenly observes the sartorial choreographies and comportments of party guests. When alone, Elle reads the writings of essayists like Hilton Als, Anne Boyer, and Elizabeth Hardwick. She registers her ageing body, with its insomnia and medicinal dependencies. “Thinking about the infusion that would soon be administered to her, Elle is hit with a surge of guilt for submitting to such experiences,” Davey writes of the character waiting at the doctor’s office, seemingly familiar with the dual sensations of drug use—ecstasy and dissatisfaction—both in undergoing treatment and as recreational habit. 

The artist sutures Elle’s narcotized stream of consciousness with documentarian, candid shots of foals, mares, and surrounding fauna, evoking the trippy circularity and telescopic inertia of Virginia Woolf’s “tunnelling process.” In a diary entry from August 30, 1923, Woolf—who Davey recalls Als referring to as “suicide bitch” in the latter’s collection of essays _White Girls_ (2013)—writes: “How I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters: I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humour, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect and each comes to daylight at the present moment.” 

Music, punctuating in interludes, appears to be Davey’s tunnel, activating the inner lives of _Horse Opera_. Entwining Elle’s liquor-laced delirium against the artist’s own agrarian remove in the country, beloved radio and vinyl tunes consistently cascade in and out of her hour-long, autofictional cinema. From Leon “Ndugu” Chancler’s underheard, disco-hued R&B cover of Andy Gibb’s “Shadow Dancing,” to The Edwin Hawkins Singers’ ecstatic version of the Five Stairsteps’ “O-o-h Child,” tracks from Davey’s personal collection inflect her narration of Elle’s inebriated, dissociated interiority. 

An orchestra of the outdoors also apostrophizes these narrative threads. While walking her dog late one evening, Elle is “surprised to hear how many birds sing after dusk.” Music similarly pairs with the ambient chorus of daily life that surrounds Davey— neighing ponies and stallions, pouring rain clouds, or hands rummaging through kitchen items and barn supplies. In a few instances, moody ballads, LSD-inspired rhythms, and dance hits anticipate detailed captures of horse privates. The artist’s care for the barn creature crescendos in such iris shots of its cavernous mouth, trotting hoof, and languid flank. In a memorable sequence, the symphonic motions of her hands clean a saddle before carefully wrapping red cloth around a horse’s front leg. 

One then wonders: how entangled are Davey’s horses with her imaginary Elle, and with Davey herself? Pronounced by the artist’s fish-eyed attention to animalia, this query echoes throughout the multispectral universe of _Horse Opera_. At one point, Davey is seen lying supine like a corpse, covered by a blanket that reads “prochaine station,” inside what appears to be a basement. For the first time in the film, a body assumes the state of complete, staged stillness—not pacing, nor tending to domestic tasks or farm chores. Not prancing, not chewing, nor yawning, nor urinating, as in the case of her horses. Revealing the falsity of a singular protagonist, her brief enactment of death, with its liveable likeness and campy stagnation, oddly grounds the artist’s biodiverse autofictions. Maybe this is the elegiac, primal state that Davey’s zooted, infirm bibliophile Elle has only ever felt in fragments, but perhaps longs for in perpetuity. 


A woman is looking at herself in in multiple mirrors while speaking into corded headphones.

Header

C Mag

Issue 154

Gossip

Credits

Related Events

Letters

Letters

Editorial

Editorial: Gossip

Explore Issue by Images

Features

Perpetual Scofflaws

"Worlds appear from her big mouth": The Mutiny of Online Open Letters

Gossipy Scraps, Gossip(ing) Archives

We Should Talk: Obvious Truths About Working in the Arts

Gossip After Dictatorship

The Injunction to Forget: documenta fifteen and the Test of Memory

Artist Projects

Chäshu̧ Kadini (Say That Again) by Cole Pauls: Text

Columns

Composition: Full Moon Ritual

One Thing: Silences in Death of an Artist

Reviews

Moune Ô — Maxime Jean-Baptiste

Emanations — Prathna Lor

Horse Opera — Moyra Davey

“ᐊᖏᕐᕋᒧᑦ / Ruovttu Guvlui / Vers chez soi / Towards Home” — asinnajaq, Carola Grahn and Ingemar Israelsson, Geronimo Inutiq, Joar Nango, Taqralik Partridge, Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory, Futurecasting: Indigenous-led Architecture and Design in the Arctic

“Codes of silence” — Shirley Bruno, Aleesa Cohene, Caroline Monnet, Cauleen Smith “Sunny Side Up and other sorrowful stories” — Mike Bourscheid

For Zitkála-Šá — Raven Chacon

“I don’t know you like that: The Bodywork of Hospitality” — Eglė Budvytytė, Jean-Charles de Quillacq, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Celina Eceiza, Adham Faramawy, Mounir Fatmi, Oliver Husain and Kerstin Schroedinger, Luis Jacob, Lynne Marsh...

“JUNK IS NO GOOD BABY” — Justin Chance, Nina Hartmann, Lyric Shen, Mike Yaniro

“THREE SONGS” — Laura Taler

“Practice as Ritual / Ritual as Practice” — Buseje Bailey, Marie Booker, Claire Carew, Grace Channer, DZI..AN, Khadejha McCall, Mosa McNeilly, Chloe Onari, Barbara Prézeau Stephenson, Winsom Winsom