Performing Memory: Corporeality, Visuality, and Mobility after 1968 9781800739963, 9781800739970

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MAKING SENSE OF HISTORY Studies in Historical Cultures General Editor: Stefan Berger Founding Editor: Jörn Rüsen Bridging the gap between historical theory and the study of historical memory, this series crosses the boundaries between both academic disciplines and cultural, social, political and historical contexts. In an age of rapid globalization, which tends to manifest itself on an economic and political level, locating the cultural practices involved in generating its underlying historical sense is an increasingly urgent task. Recent volumes: Volume 47 Performing Memory: Corporeality, Visuality and Mobility after 1968 Edited by Luisa Passerini and Dieter Reinisch

Volume 42 Transcending the Nostalgic: Landscapes of Postindustrial Europe beyond Representation Edited by George S. Jaramillo and Juliane Tomann

Volume 46 Thinking Europe: A History of the European Idea since 1800 Mats Andrén

Volume 41 Territory, State and Nation: The Geopolitics of Rudolf Kjellén Edited by Ragnar Björk and Thomas Lundén

Volume 45 Borders in East and West: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives Edited by Stefan Berger and Nobuya Hashimoto Volume 44 Historical Reenactment: New Ways of Experiencing History Edited by Mario Carretero, Brady Wagoner and Everardo Perez-Manjarrez Volume 43 Dynamics of Emigration: Émigré Scholars and the Production of Historical Knowledge in the 20th Century Edited by Stefan Berger and Philipp Müller

Volume 40 Analysing Historical Narratives: On Academic, Popular and Educational Framings of the Past Edited by Stefan Berger, Nicola Brauch and Chris Lorenz Volume 39 Postwar Soldiers: Historical Controversies and West German Democratization, 1945–1955 Jörg Echternkamp Volume 38 Constructing Industrial Pasts: Heritage, Historical Culture and Identity in Regions Undergoing Structural Economic Transformation Edited by Stefan Berger

For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website: http://www.berghahnbooks.com/series/making-sense-of-history

Performing Memory Corporeality, Visuality and Mobility after 1968

Edited by Luisa Passerini and Dieter Reinisch

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2023 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2023 Luisa Passerini and Dieter Reinisch All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Passerini, Luisa, editor. | Reinisch, Dieter, editor. Title: Performing memory : corporeality, visuality, and mobility after 1968 / edited by Luisa Passerini and Dieter Reinisch. Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2023. | Series: Making sense of history ;Volume 47 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023000755 (print) | LCCN 2023000756 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800739963 (hardback) | ISBN 9781800739970 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Performing arts--Political aspects. | Collective memory in the performing arts. | Body image in the performing arts. Classification: LCC PN1590.P64 P485 2023 (print) | LCC PN1590.P64 (ebook) | DDC 709.2--dc23/eng/20230306 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023000755 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023000756 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-80073-996-3 hardback ISBN 978-1-80073-997-0 ebook https://doi.org/10.3167/9781800739963

Contents

List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgementsix Introduction1 Luisa Passerini and Dieter Reinisch Part I. Body in Movement/Body in Constraint Chapter 1.  Bodily Ways of Knowing and Remembering: Movement, Kinaesthesia and Mobility Marina Nordera

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Chapter 2.  Corporeality and Militant Performance during Northern Irish Prison Protests, 1971–1983 Dieter Reinisch

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Part II. Spectacle and Activism Chapter 3.  Soviet Media after 1968: Visuality, Corporeality and Identity71 Bohdan Shumylovych Chapter 4.  Bartering and Cross-Border Embodied Performances Annelis Kuhlmann

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Chapter 5.  The Filmmaker as Saboteur: Found Footage and Radical Appropriation in Llorenç Soler’s Militant Films 122 Pablo La Parra-Pérez

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Contents

Part III. Reports from the Field Chapter 6.  A Letter to the Future: Autumn Knight’s WALL (2016/2019) at the Studio Museum in Harlem Cori Olinghouse

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Chapter 7.  Philadelphia Immigration Stories: Making the Aural Visual Janneken Smucker159 Afterword176 Alexander Etkind Index181

Illustrations

Figures 4.1.  The Trilogy of the Innocent: The Tree, The Chronic Life and Great Cities under the Moon. Icon Collage Photo: Odin Teatret.

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4.2. Policeman and musical polar bear dancing. Cultural barter as performance parade. Odin Teatret Archives. Photo: Anette Vilstrup Roien.

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4.3. ‘On this lonely planet’. Television viewers sing with Phillip Faber and the Danish National Girls’ Choir during lockdown. Photo: DR.

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4.4. Al Madina Theatre in Beirut in hybrid media collaboration with Odin Teatret, Holstebro, Denmark. Photo: ILITA.

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5.1. Street advertising in Identity Document (Llorenç Soler, 1970). Courtesy of Llorenç Soler and Filmoteca de Catalunya.

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5.2. Factory time-keeper in Identity Document (Llorenç Soler, 1970). Courtesy of Llorenç Soler and Filmoteca de Catalunya. 134 5.3. Vietnamese Napalm victim photographed by Horst Faas in Identity Document (Llorenç Soler, 1970). Courtesy of Llorenç Soler and Filmoteca de Catalunya.

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Illustrations

6.1. Autumn Knight, WALL (2016/2019). Performance, total run time approximately forty-five minutes. Danspace Project, New York, NY. Sydney Rodriguez, Krystique Bright, Mzuri Hudson, Sandra Parris, Shelly Montrose, Leila Fuentes, Tanisha Jones, Niala Epps. The Studio Museum in Harlem; Museum purchase with funds provided by the Acquisition Committee 2017.4. Photo © Paula Court. 144 6.2. Autumn Knight, WALL (2016/2019). Process notes, 2019.

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6.3. Autumn Knight, WALL (2016/2019). Rehearsal still. Autumn Knight (pictured in red and standing to the right), Leila Fuentes, Tanisha Jones and Niala Epps. Danspace Project, New York, NY. The Studio Museum in Harlem; Museum purchase with funds provided by the Acquisition Committee 2017.4. Photo © Paula Court. 150 6.4. Autumn Knight, WALL (2016/2019). Rehearsal still. Danspace Project, New York, NY. The Studio Museum in Harlem; Museum purchase with funds provided by the Acquisition Committee 2017.4. Photo © Paula Court. 155 7.1. OHMS index for Anna Lavin’s interview, with search results and image associated with segment about influenza showing. Courtesy of Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky Libraries.

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7.2. Excerpt from biographical sketch of Armand DiStefano, created by student Denise Meikle, Spring 2018. Courtesy of Philadelphia Immigration and Denise Meikle. 163 7.3. Irina Melekhina’s high school portrait, circa 1980. Courtesy of Irina Melekhina.

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7.4. Mingchu Pearl Huynh’s painting of the Buddha and Bodhisattvas images for worship. Photo was taken on 27 July 1982 in the American Buddhist Confederation Temple in New York City, where she created the paintings. Courtesy of Mingchu Pearl Huynh. 170

Acknowledgements

We have taken as a point of departure for the present volume the European Research Council Project ‘Bodies Across Borders: Oral and Visual Memory in Europe and Beyond’ (BABE). We, as the co-editors of this book, were involved in BABE in different capacities, Luisa Passerini as the Principal Investigator, and Dieter Reinisch as a participant in various initiatives taken by the Project in collaboration with Alexander Etkind, who has closely followed the process of construction of this volume and authored its Epilogue. This volume compiles papers presented in one form or another in the BABE seminars, workshops, summer schools and conferences. The contributions by Janneken Smucker and Cori Olinghouse aptly evoke the experiment of the Summer Institute co-organized by BABE with the Oral History Master of Arts, Columbia University (NY) ‘Memory, Visuality and Mobility’ (EUI, 19–30 June 2017), an example of inter-institutional collaboration. We want to extend special thanks for this to the director of the Oral History Master Programme (OHMA) at Columbia University, Amy Starechesky and the co-director Mary Marshall Clark. Since the inception of this project, we have received vital support from several friends and colleagues. In particular, we want to thank the series editor Stefan Berger who believed in the project from the beginning, the anonymous reviewers of Berghahn, and editors Mark Stanton and Sulaiman Ahmad. In addition, we want to thank the EUI Department of History & Civilization, its Head Regina Grafe, while Laura Borgese and Anna CodaNunziante helped to provide vital administrative support for this book project. Finally, we want to thank our language editor Helen Aitchison.

Introduction Luisa Passerini and Dieter Reinisch

This volume deals with a cluster of concepts that constitute the components of memory in a historical perspective: visuality, corporeality and mobility. Its chapters examine various interactions between the three terms of this cluster. ‘After’ or ‘post’ 1968 is the temporal positionality that we have decided to take in this book for the contextualization of these themes. Therefore, we have chosen to start with a reflection on the temporal positionality of our collection of essays, trying to clarify in which sense we use the expression ‘after 1968’. The field of knowledge that will be explored concerns the performative dimensions of remembering and communicating. In this perspective, memory is considered as an interactive process, in which the body, both mobile and constrained, is a point of both departure and reference. ‘Performance’ and ‘performing’ are terms that have taken up multiple meanings, being used in various research fields as well as in the arts. To give a complete survey of the state of studies would require a very large space, as it involves a series of disciplinary domains that would rather call for a survey of the state of the arts, which is outside the scope of the present book. However, we would like to specify that we retain some of the shared meanings of these terms as they are employed in memory studies and cultural history. Among such meanings, the following are particularly relevant to define our field. First of all, we take into consideration the aspects of memory that concern the execution of bodily actions (including the refusal of movement and the resulting forms of passivity), which can also have a dimension of activism aimed at producing change (see Reinisch

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and La Parra-Pérez in this volume). Secondly, we stress the public element of corporeal memory and its performances, their sides as somatic exhibitions and cultural enactments touching both everyday life and special moments connotated as artistic (see Nordera, Kuhlmann and Olinghouse in this volume). Finally, we include the reference to the ability to present – in words too – one’s and others’ experiences in various contexts, including the educational (see Shumylovych and Smucker in this volume), thus closing the circle of oral, visual and bodily memory’s implementation. The inter- and trans-disciplinary nature of these terms takes inspiration from history, anthropology, theatre and dance studies as concerns our present effort.1 Memory studies is thus confirmed to be a cross-field of disciplines and forms of knowledge connecting a plurality of disciplinary approaches.2 A recent innovation in the field of memory has been enlarging its scope to the visual and the corporeal, from the oral and the written.3 We have taken as a point of departure for the present volume – with the intention of going further, by implications, associations and contrasts – the European Research Council project ‘Bodies Across Borders: Oral and Visual Memory in Europe and Beyond’ (BABE).4 The BABE research combined various lines of enquiry on memory, the main ones being: (1) the exploration of the construction of visual memory through art, notably video art, photography and cinema, focusing on migration across European borders; and (2) the collection of visual memories through interviews with subjects moving towards and across Europe – subjects who were asked not only to narrate their itineraries of migration but also to offer some visual documentation (drawings, photographs, short videos) of their journeys. This methodological procedure recognizes that visuality is closely connected with corporeality and, in the project’s case, with mobility, moving bodies being conceived as embodied subjects. The main research achievement of the BABE project has been the exploration and analysis of the changes induced by global mobility into oral and visual memories of Europe, focusing on the traces of memory produced by mobile people and visual art production and circulation. This interpretative approach considered oral and visual data as documentation of subjectivity and used textual and content analysis as well as the analysis of the narrative structure. The BABE project generated a series of debates, workshops and exhibitions, from which the present collection has extracted and updated a selection of writings, united by a temporal perspective (‘after 1968’), and an approach situating the Eastern-Western Europe link in the context of memory studies.5



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Methodological Excursus To make clearer the roots of our approach and contextualize it, we will now take what can be called a generational ego-historical digression. By this phrase, we intend to apply the category of ego-histoire not to a single person, as in the classic examples by Pierre Nora in his seminal collection,6 but rather to a generation – or, better, to some cohorts within a generation of oral historians working in the fifty years between the 1970s and the present.7 In those decades the concept of identity was superseded by the much larger concept of subjectivity, and soon of intersubjectivity. At the same time, the subjects of many oral history projects in Europe during those decades ranged from daily life and material culture of the subaltern classes to the history of specific jobs in the course of disappearance and especially to the exploration of various forms of identity (such as those of women and gender, ethnic groups, generations and ages). In the course of that whole process, it also became clear that discursive narration was not sufficient to record the phenomena under study, in which the visual and corporeal dimensions were of the utmost importance. For many oral historians, it was the experience of studying migration that represented the turning point. For some of us, it was especially the series of results and inputs that came from the BABE project that brought about the enlargement of the concept of intersubjectivity. The experience of interviewing mobile people strengthened the intuition on the connections between discursive narration and narrative images, which had been at the basis of the decision to adopt a type of methodology not restricted to words, whether written or oral. Certainly, the request posed to BABE interviewees who were the subjects of migration to draw in visual format their itinerary of mobility and/or to present photographs and short videos of it was rather naïve. The naïveté stood primarily in the assumption that two separate domains existed, that of the words that composed the oral interview and could be transcribed, and that of the images, created in various ways by the subjects of the interviews. Their responses shattered this simplistic assumption, in as far as the respondents insisted on not separating images and words: their ‘maps’, as we called their visual products, almost never consisted only of drawings, but on the contrary, most of the time included written comments and explanations.8 Such recurrent coupling is undeniably linked with the functioning of memory, especially experiential memory. The insertion of visuality in the effort to study the process of remembering movement and mobility necessarily brought with it the attention to the visual and the corporeal. In its turn, this pushed us to stretch the very concept of intersubjectivity from the mental and textual domains (as

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had been the case in its first formulations during the second half of the 1970s) to visuality and corporeality. In the course of this itinerary, underdeveloped mentions of possible concepts such as ‘visual intersubjectivity’ occasionally emerged. It was the self-reflection on what this implied for the relationships between bodies that unfolded such types of ideas as well as the implications of the inter-relation between the interviewees and the interviewers. In the course of the BABE project, the researchers found themselves confronting similar experiences in the dual relationship typical of most interview encounters, both partners having experienced mobility in one way or another.9 The expression ‘bodies across borders’ thus assumed new meanings, referring not only to the bodies crossing actual borders, in the sense of ‘migrant bodies’, but also to the bodies of those who were eager to understand such experiences, themselves or their relatives and antecedents having often shared that type of movement. Taking ‘seriously’ the extension of the meaning of intersubjectivity to visuality and corporeality, therefore, originated from and at the same time contributed to an enlargement of the methodology adopted for recording memory as well as of the very technique in the procedure of interviewing, and consequently of the documentation resulting from it.10 Most importantly, the final stage of the process, that is, the way of writing the history of memory, or, better, writing historically about memory, underwent some modifications, curving decisively towards the use of dialogues and conversations, and privileging the publication of results and elaborations online – because of such advantages as allowing multiple images in colour – in respect to publications on paper.11 Undoubtedly this change was also part of the general trend in history towards increasing and making explicit the role of the writing subject.12 However, adding the visual to the discursive in memory studies also presented some risks, such as over-rating the value of visuality and underrating its deep links with verbal and written narration. It can happen that the attention to the expressions of the face and body of the interviewees – as well as to the tone and sound of their voices and other oral details such as interjections and laughter – can be reduced when delegated by the interviewers to technical means like the camera, at least in respect to the close and participant observation that was originally personal and could be documented only by ethnographical diaries of various kinds. While it was the experience of interviewing mobile people that strengthened our intuition on the connections between word and image, given the recurrent joint presence of both in the replies by the BABE interviewees, the tension between the visual and the corporeal contributed not only to the stretching of the concept of intersubjectivity but also to our own reflection on its implications for ourselves as researchers. Interviewing



Introduction

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migrants evidenced the holes or erasures in documenting their lives, partially because of their own will, and partially because of the difficulties of the enterprise and the traumas impacting on the process of remembering harsh times.13 An important role was also played by the input from scholars studying dance performance and from performers themselves. The performance group ‘Company Tant’amati’14 interacted with the exhibition in Florence, as we will explain further below. Indeed, the comprehension of this dimension was highlighted by the experiment of staging three exhibitions of the results of the research project, in Palermo, Turin and Florence.15 With all this, the awareness emerged that the disconnections between memory and ways of performing it – which is a form of memorizing it – are real, and we should not go too far in stressing the coherence between the two, as if the process of remembering, especially when stimulated by the interview, could be smooth and full. At the same time, stressing a wider sense of the intersubjective nature of the construction of memory implied for us an increased recognition of the process of historical research as always incomplete and unfinished – ‘interminable’, to borrow a Freudian term – and thus reflecting the erasures present in memory for various reasons, from voluntary silences to spontaneous forms of amnesia. There is always a certain degree of censorship in collecting testimonies because intersubjectivity is mediated not only by the past experiences of the involved subjects but also by the technology available.16 This was evident very early in the history of oral history, when reflection on the interview as a shared construction of memory was theorized, but also when the use of tape recorders became widespread.17 Later on, when the filming of interviews became a common practice because of low costs and easy technology, there was a further enlargement of the scope of the recorded testimony, but contemporarily a further form of censorship on the visual and corporeal experience of the encounter, whether dual or collective, appeared.18 This is especially relevant in recording for and during the didactic use of oral history, in which the operation of recording selects areas of the classroom and moments of exchange between learners and teachers. Thus, the global diffusion of oral history went hand in hand with the complications of its technology, its advantages and risks. The wider the range of technical devices used for the purpose of recording, the subtler the possibility of censorship and erasures. Fortunately, this promoted increased attention to silences and lacunae: a more refined reflection on and interpretation of the intricate nature of memory stimulated borrowings from psychoanalysis and the attention to erasures became operative in the understanding of the testimonies.19 We hope to have at least to some degree reproduced all this in the present volume.

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Finally, for what concerns corporeality, suffice it to say that to record a performance incurs even more risk of isolating it from its context, unless the performers themselves express the sense of loss and deprivation that constellates the lives of mobile people. And this was indeed tried out by the performers who made a special effort to incorporate the lessons of the BABE products and translate them into gestures and bodily movements. All this contributed to our understanding of the links and disjunctures between words and images, which we have tried to represent in the choice of papers for the present volume. After this methodological digression, it is time to return to the explanation of the reasons for our choice of temporality for this volume.

‘After’ 1968 In a purely temporal perspective, the period ‘after 1968’ is characterized by numerous features: a heightened level of oppression and exploitation; an increased threat of the destruction of the environment and the ecological system; more frequent and extended mobility, often with tragic motivations and consequences but also wider creativity, not only in the specialized fields of art but also in daily life; the challenge to create new social movements of protest continuing with the inspiration offered by the late 1960s, but also an increasing awareness of the legacy of colonialism and imperialism; and the spontaneous birth of new types of social phenomena, like the Occupy movements and the widespread ecological movements largely although not only composed of young and very young militants.20 Not all these features are legacies of 1968; on the contrary. Legacies of 1968 are more easily found in the history of subjectivity. For instance, certain features of alternative lifestyles have become usual in many countries, such as the reduction of deference in work, family and gender relationships; and the postponement of institutional marriage for couples, and at the same time the increasing recognition of the right to form homosexual rather than exclusively heterosexual couples. All these processes had been underway for significant, even long periods of time, but have been evidenced by the types and levels of consciousness that the movements of 1968 promoted. However, in the last two decades, the use of the term ‘post-1968’ has gone beyond a descriptive temporal phrase and has taken up the meaning of a historical change of global scope during the past fifty years.21 Some interpreters have analysed the 1968 movements’ repercussions that have taken place in a ‘perverse’ way, in the sense in which Boltanski and Chiapello used this term. They argued that global capitalism neutralized and counteracted the requests of the protests by perverting them, with a series of



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appropriations such as the one that transformed the demand for freedom of work into the extreme flexibility of workers, forced to comply with obligations of mobility that were both geographical and professional. The ‘perversion’ consists in a series of détournements that touch on production, work, tourism, cultural industry, sexual life and leisure. Rather than considering the 1968 movements as characterized by political defeat, this interpretation combines the recognition of their impact on cultural and artistic domains with the political and economic uses of their message.22 Another interpretation, which is very cogent within a history of subjectivity, is the relevance of the ‘post’ from the point of view of memory understood as involving psychological processes. Lisa Baraitser has interpreted waiting and delaying as modes of doing politics, considering the aftermath of 1968 as a period of particular turmoil. Again, 1968 – in a broad sense – covers the period of worldwide militant ferment from 1966 to 1977. According to this interpretation, 1968 both changed and did not change the world and was imbued with generative and traumatic elements that continued in its ‘aftermath’. These elements fostered a retrospective attachment to the scenes of 1968, suggesting a retrospective narrativization of collective action that at the time aimed at creating new political possibilities. In Baraitser’s view, such retrospective attachment is indispensable in order to situate 1968 into historical time by creating an intergenerational perspective: ‘what will come to have been a historical period when the noise of the present has subdued’. For Baraitser, the Freudian concept of delayed or deferred action (Nachträglichkeit) indicates the specific temporality of subjectivity. Retroactivity is also the key to the process by which the transition from the individual to the collective dimension takes place. Therefore, there are profound reasons for the obsession with the longue durée and prolongations of 1968: ‘the temporal delay that produces historical truth binds psychic time to the legacy of previous generations’.23 While we take into account this kind of historical interpretation, we have not embarked on a search for the multiple meanings of the ‘aftermath of 1968’, given the specific goals of the present volume, that is, the focus on the cluster of the concepts ‘corporeality, visuality and mobility’ and how they relate to memory. In our intentions, which reflect those of some of the contributors to the volume, this expression includes a reference to possible changes of the balance of power in the state of the world, as well as of intersubjective politics and the relationships between individuals and collectivities. The exchange with the contributors to this volume has led us to connect the expression with other similarly used terms, like ‘long 1968’ and the ‘long 1960s’. We are aware that the existing scholarship has expanded these terms enormously in time and space, thus adding to their vagueness. Yet, we believe that our effort in the exchange between us – as

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editors – and the authors will be useful to clarify some aspects of this historiographical tangle. When we set out to invite scholars to contribute to this volume, we had not initially selected them for their temporal focus. It was only after we had compiled a list of contributors that the shared focus on the period after ‘1968’ became evident. This came as no surprise: 1968 presented a turning point in human history. Arguably, the events associated with that year shaped history and politics like no other moment between 1945 and 1989. ‘1968’ is a widely used designation that has profoundly impacted the social sciences. At the same time, this impact has not been coherent and monodirectional, as the contributions collected in this volume show, reflecting the multiple interpretations of the events associated with ‘1968’. Thus, this book reproduces the different understandings of ‘1968’ and ‘post-1968’ by the authors – some approach it pragmatically, discussing developments after 31 December 1968, while others use terms that range from ‘long 1968’ to the ‘long 1970s’. This volume reflects the broad and divergent interpretations of ‘1968’ and how it became a turning point in modern history, for all the chapters deal with events and developments that originated after 1968. For this reason, we do not aim to provide a definition of ‘1968’; instead, the contributors provide their own interpretations under the umbrella of the events that shaped post-1968 society. Some interpreters converge on the conclusion that ‘1968’ is a historical period longer than just this year, adopting the expression ‘long 1960s’,24 while others have introduced the term ‘long 1970s’,25 such as Dieter Reinisch in his recent publications.26 Indeed, the events that led to the worldwide movement of 1968 started much earlier with the emergence of the US civil rights movement in the late 1950s; some might point to the workers’ uprisings against bureaucratic regimes in the GDR and Hungary in 1953 and 1956, respectively, like the forerunners of the movement in the European East, and some might detect their roots in the immediate aftermath of World War I and the emergence of anti-colonial conflict. This struggle reached one of its most critical conjunctures with the Tet offensive launched by Vietcong fighters in 1968. The events of 1968 might not be a classical revolution in the Marxist sense, but they can rightly be described as a revolution, albeit more in the political and anti-colonial sense than economically. For Hobsbawm, 1968 was, if anything, a ‘cultural revolution’.27 If 1968 was the start of the long 1970s, when did it end? A possible reply is 1979/80. 1979 was the last year of republican, anti-colonial revolutions, and, at the same time, the harbinger of religious violence. Iran, Zimbabwe and Nicaragua are three examples. The rise of the secular nationalist Saddam Hussein in Iraq and the intervention on behalf of a progressive, secular government in Afghanistan by the Soviet Union are other examples of initially



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leftist – though eventually failed – attempts to establish a new, more multipolar world order. Simultaneously, these events foreshadowed a turning point in history. The Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua sparked the intensification of counter-revolutionary activities by the USA, most infamously linked to the Iran-Contra affair under President Ronald Reagan two years later. 1979 also saw the first signs of replacing secular movements with religious fundamentalist movements with the siege of the Great Mosque in Mecca in November of that year. However, we could argue that the main turning points marking the end of the long 1970s were the elections of Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in the USA one year later. These two elections heralded the beginning of neoliberalism as the dominant ideological and economic system. ‘1968’ marked the emergence of new social movements, such as, but not limited to, environmental movements, feminist movements and cultural movements. In parallel, old social movements adopted new political programmes and tactics through the influence of these new social movements. Hence, ‘1968’ became a critical crossroads for the worldwide protest movement to an extent not seen since the emergence of the organized working class and labour movements of the late nineteenth century. Over the decades, these new social movements changed their tactics and politics. Some, such as the environmental movement, developed into political parties and followed a parliamentary road in the form of Green parties. Yet, these new social movements remained the dominant protest movement until a new wave of social movements emerged in the aftermath of the economic crisis that hit the world in 2008. The anti-austerity protest movements replaced the children of 1968 with new forms of protest as the economic factor was brought back into the game – something lost in the repercussions of 1968, and accelerated by the events of 1989.28 Adopting such an interpretation would stretch the ‘long 1968’ over five decades, even into the twenty-first century. However, it would ignore the fundamental break in human history that emerged in 1989/91 with the end of the bipolar world and the Cold War. The above-outlined considerations sketch out the divergent interpretations and meanings of ‘1968’. For a long time, the term was associated predominantly with May 1968 in Paris, the student protests at Berkeley and Columbia universities, the US civil rights movement and the anti-colonial war in Vietnam. However, the two waves of protest that resulted in the longest and bloodiest conflicts – Northern Ireland and the Basque Country – are hardly ever associated with 1968.29 Northern Ireland’s 1968 started with the emergence of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), which held its first march in the summer of 1968 and ceased its work on 30 January 1972, when a British army regiment killed fourteen civilians

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participating in a peaceful march. On this day, Northern Ireland’s 1968 turned into a fully-fledged war that lasted until 1998.30 The same goes for Eastern Europe. The Russian-influenced sphere and Yugoslavia saw the emergence of relevant protest movements in those years – the Prague Spring being only the most well-known of these in the West. We consider it a strength of this volume that these under-researched 1968s form a significant part of its content, with one chapter on Northern Ireland and two on the Soviet Union. Besides defining our position in terms of temporality, we would like to clarify our positionality in terms of geopolitical space. We are aware that our approach is situated within the dimension of Eurocentrism, not only because it deals with a North Atlantic space – Europe and North America – but also because it grows out of debates concerning the cultural heritage of these areas.31 We have chosen to ‘erode from within’ this tradition, continuing and prolonging the approach exemplified by some of our previous works.32 Recognizing that we cannot simply jump out of the Western tradition and advocate its criticism and radical reformulation from its margins or externally to it, we decided to keep our engagement in showing the potential of contradictions and (interstitial or central) innovations within this culture. The regional focus of this volume is on the Global North in general and the Atlantic region in particular. Nevertheless, this volume emerges from a tradition in our historical discipline that aims to go beyond Eurocentric interpretations of history. In our opinion, an anti-Eurocentric approach is not an approach that leaves aside merely the geographical boundaries of the Global North but also historiographical conventions within European historical writing. How important and challenging a non-Eurocentric approach to historical writing about Europe is has recently been discussed by J. C. Sharman. In his thin volume, he attempts to analyse the rise of Europe to world domination in the early modern era from a non-Eurocentric perspective.33 Our effort echoes these attempts. A non-Eurocentric approach to researching European history should try to understand the modern world system and its origins by acknowledging its dominant position since the Atlantic revolution at the beginning of the long nineteenth century and aiming for an understanding of how this dominant position came into being and how this domination is performed vis-à-vis other world regions since then. The BABE project was an example of this understanding as it tried to draw the memories of those forced from their homes to Europe due to a world system that is controlled by the North Atlantic region. Its focus was, therefore, although located in Europe, anti-Eurocentric, by trying to understand the place of migration to Europe and the mechanisms that lead people to migrate. Giving voice to those from outside Europe who



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migrated to Europe may contribute to widening the narrow margins of Eurocentric scholarship. Similarly, this volume also attempts to provide research on Europe and the Northern Atlantic region, writing the Global North into history as a subject of anti-Eurocentric historiography. In other words, we aim to unlink the European and North Atlantic perspective from regional perspectives of the world towards an understanding of the dynamics that shaped the Eurocentric world system.

Activism and Artivism In the perspective of this book, centred on performativity, the meaning of the terms ‘after 1968’ and ‘post-1968’ retains a reference to activism and transgressive politics, although transformed by the context of our present time and the limitations of our effort to cross different disciplinary fields. One difference can be found in the fact that our time is often characterized by a sort of nostalgia for old forms of activism, while the contributors to this book do not indulge in regrets for the past.34 Rather, they seek to find possible political reverberations of cultural practices (for instance, Kuhlmann and Reinisch, each in their own way), much in accord with the oppositional logic that has pervaded performance studies after the 1980s.35 The implicit reference to events and processes of the 1960s and 1970s, such as civil rights protests, anti-war demonstrations, women’s liberation marches and other forms of social/political/cultural subversion and resistance, remains in the background against which the contributions to this book are posited. The extension of the expression ‘post-1968’ signals the need to understand and give unity to a series of historical phenomena. Some are closely connected with protest, and in this sense the parameters defining the ‘long 1968’ have been pushed both backwards – to the 1950s – and forwards, given that for some historians that cycle of social and political struggles lasted well into the 1980s. It is noticeable that all these terms – ‘after/post1968’, ‘long 1968’ as well as ‘long 1960s’ – can take up different meanings in various countries, indicating either a different timing of the ‘explosion’ (for instance, 1964 in Berkeley, California; 1972 in Ireland; 1973 in Greece36) or the extraordinary length of the series of protests (as in Italy, where the unrest continued for ten years in various spheres of activity). Indeed, 1968 as an event and/or a process can be considered in different countries from the points of view of short, medium and longue durée. Such temporal multiplicity is linked with its global spatial dimension. Insights into this question emerge from some contributions to the present book. Part II is an eloquent example. In his chapter on militant

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cinema in Spain during the 1960s and 1970s, Pablo La Parra-Pérez adopts the term ‘long 1968’ in order to underline the transnational cultural transfer unleashed by 1968, exploring how ideas and images travelled across time and space – and the double dimension of the specificity of local context and the expanded circuit of referents. Indeed, one of the merits of La Parra’s chapter is to stress the relevance of the Latin American context for the study of a Spanish avant-garde film director. His chapter also makes another important reference to the change of the international scene on the basis of parallelism between Eastern and Western Europe, which is one of the subterranean themes of the present book. La Parra’s reference is to the similar destiny of two film festivals, one in Pesaro, Italy, in 1967, and the other in Leipzig, GDR, in 1968 (heavily censored by its own management). Both festivals contributed to generating a turning point in the history of cinema, not only in the sense of a radical transformation of international film festivals but also in the more general sense of promoting encounters and processes of mutual film learning and exchanges between actors and directors. Thus, the connection between activism and artivism emerges as one characteristic of the long memory of ‘1968’ and its transformation over time. Still within the second part of the present book, Kuhlmann situates the cultural turn that took place with 1968 (not only within the institutional systems of education but also in the general cultural domain) in two events, the Prague Spring and Paris’s May ’68, respectively in Eastern and Western Europe, which converged in giving rise to various forms of the counterculture. From a historical perspective, Kuhlmann writes, this turn has affected our perception of memories, performances, interventions and actions so that the very notion of theatre changed rapidly. In the theatre, Kuhlmann argues, a shift took place from a text-based culture to a new media age of image and sound – which has much to say about our concern with orality and visuality. Her study of the Odin Teatret stresses the innovations in the tradition of exploring human life conditions in theatre laboratories through experimenting with bodily expressions in the performing arts. More specifically, she shows how the transformation of the cultural barter as social interaction into a spectacle was one of the consequences of the post-1968 era on the performing arts. Indeed, one aspect of ’68 that had an enormous influence on the arts, or perhaps originated from them, was the decision to destroy/reduce the walls between art and daily life, between politics and daily life, thus bringing the concept and practice of performance into every domain of social interaction, including corporeality in its various forms. In this case, too, artivism is understood as a development of past activism, a reformulation, and an afterthought of the legacy of the 1960s on the identification between art and daily life.



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In his chapter within the same Part II, Bohdan Shumylovych, who analyses the Soviet media spectacle on the interplay of visuality, corporeality and identity in the late 1960s and early 1970s, provides a further example of the divergent understandings of ‘post-1968’. His analysis of Soviet television and how this visual medium created a specific form of corporeal identification in the post-1968 period is relevant also because he focuses on Soviet Ukraine. Other than the developments in Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, the developments surrounding 1968 in other Eastern European and Soviet-controlled countries are still a research lacuna. Little is known about the smaller Maoist, pro-Chinese protests in Moscow and the South Caucasian republics, and Maoist-influenced anti-Vietnam War protests in Central Asian republics, while even less focus has been put on Soviet Ukraine. Shumylovych provides an intriguing insight into the role of Ukraine’s subjectivity and identity and how both were formed in the final two decades before the collapse of the Soviet system. He researches these phenomena by using letters from the post-1968 era. These letters provide a fresh insight into what Shumylovych calls the ‘everyday working of Soviet culture’. In this way, he describes ‘the post-1968 mediatized public imagination’. For him, the post-1968 period lasted until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The event that sparked these changes was the Czechoslovak crisis in 1968. He demonstrates how the Prague Spring had a lasting impact on Eastern Europe’s cultural life beyond the Czechoslovak borders. The late 1960s subsequently saw a reform of television, even in the USSR itself. In the following two decades, Soviet television unfolded before the background of multiple protests that evolved in cycles. To understand these protests and the modified cultural policies in the socialist countries after 1968, Shumylovych adopts the framework of the ‘long European 1960s’.

Visuality, Corporeality and Mobility From our perspective, the issue of visuality is at the foreground in this triad, remaining at the core of our title and our book, which intends to explore how the three interact to shape the concept of performing memory. For instance, Shumylovych’s chapter presents the power of Soviet television to shape the imagination and to contribute to creating forms of corporeal identification after the Czechoslovakian crisis of 1968. It suggests that Soviet Ukrainian media created popular phenomena, which were not only visual but also shaped explicit corporeal practices. This is particularly interesting because of the correspondence it indicates with the conjunction between visuality and corporeality, as analysed

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in other chapters we have already mentioned, such as Kuhlmann’s, in which the setting of the analysis is the theatre, understood as a privileged locus coupling visuality and corporeality. Moreover, she adds to this dyad the third element of our cluster, the mobility between countries and between creative genres, as well as between the role of media in daily life and social events. A similar international movement – of the gaze – is present in La Parra’s analysis of militant films. This triad amounts to the specific composition of memory in the perspective we have chosen for this volume. As hinted in our Excursus, some of the present book’s chapters draw directly from experiences that occurred during the process of research for the BABE project, as is the case with Nordera’s chapter, which takes its cue from the performance created for the BABE exhibition in the Florence State Archive.37 The author draws on her own field notes taken during the preparation of the performance, which allows the reader to figure out some of the intersubjective links between the actors of the research project. Nordera was acting as promoter and advisor for the performance group ‘Company Tant’amati’, as well as advisor to the project team on the central issue of the presence of bodies and movement in studying new forms of European citizenship and mobility. Her chapter here represents an ex-post reflection on that manifold experience of advising. Nordera shows the relations between multi-perception, visuality and mobility, including migration, and introduces the concept of kinaesthetic empathy as embodied intersubjectivity, while mobility can be visualized and remembered as a form of choreography. Dancing is considered as a social practice (which is in keeping with the idea of theatre acting presented in Kuhlmann’s chapter). The experience of the migrants was a crucial clue in this process. The encounter with persons or objects allowed some migrants to talk about or visually depict their feelings and emotions in terms of intercorporeality. Most of them reflected on the inner perception of imaginary projection towards the future, the land, the person or the condition they were aspiring to, starting from concrete multimodal bodily perceptions, and expressing interculturality in creative ways. The performers practised immersion in the exhibition for several days, which resulted in the piece Nos gestes migratoires (Our migratory gestures). They started by observing audio-visual documents in which women and men presented the drawings they had realized remembering their mobility, and then the performers tried to establish a relation between corporeal dispositions, gestures, narratives and the graphic evidence itself. In Nordera’s contribution, dance knowledge is considered as an embodied conceptual tool employed in trying to understand how ways of standing, walking, moving, perceiving the body, its weight and shape in space and in time are evidence of particular ways of experiencing the



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human condition and the world in which we live. It also investigates the intertwining of cultural memory, individual experience and embodiment in order to make explicit the non-discursive, tacit knowledge experienced and memorized through the body and movement during migration itineraries.

The Structure of the Volume The present book starts with a contrast between the picture given by Dieter Reinisch of the bodies of Northern Irish prisoners, constrained in a way that was at the same time physical, moral and cultural, on the one hand, and on the other hand the analysis by Nordera of the possibilities of the human body in movement, in the ways and with the meanings described above. Reinisch’s chapter opens with the description of a tragic hunger strike in Brixton Prison in 1920. Paradoxically, the description of how protesting prisoners used their bodies by inflicting pain on them – through no-wash protests or hunger and thirst strikes – acts as a revelation of more possibilities of the human body, even when deprived of mobility and visibility, and with the prospect – in the intents of the persecutors – of denying the memory itself of/to the embodied subjects. Thus, all the elements of our constellation combined into performing memory – visuality, corporeality, mobility – are evoked in the first section of Reinisch’s chapter in a negative form, as produced by the ‘militant performances’ of the prisoners in their fight for national liberation. The practice of nudity took on political value as a form of resistance to the criminalization policy from 1976 onwards. The subjectivity of those resisting developed despite the very high cost it required, to the point of death. Thus, the link between individual and collective bodies on the one hand and individual/collective identities on the other becomes very evident in spite of the immobility and invisibility of the actors/subjects. The contrast between these innovative violent performances and the creative performances theorized by Nordera creates a field of tension in which the rest of the book is inscribed. The chapter by Reinisch also offers an insight into the question of temporality when he refers to the historiographical neglect of the developments in Ireland and the Basque Country during the long 1960s. He mentions that in the late 1960s, Northern Ireland went through a war that would have the most violent and, arguably, longest-lasting consequences of the 1968 protest movement, and argues that the way this war started is a largely overlooked episode of the global events in 1968 and the following years. Not only have the Basque Country and Northern Ireland been overlooked so far, but beyond Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, Eastern Europe can also be added to this

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list. At the time we are finalizing this Introduction, Europe has become the terrain of war, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It hardly needs mentioning that torture, detention and cruelty towards the bodies of the ‘enemy’ have become once again a current topic in this continent. We ascertain with dismay that this topic of our present volume is more up to date than we ever again expected on European territory. What follows in the present volume is organized along the lines touched on in this Introduction. After the first part, devoted to presenting two opposite ways in which human bodies can perform ‘activity’ and ‘passivity’ in different historical circumstances and contexts, the second part deals with the relations between spectacle and activism in visual and corporeal performative forms of memory. The third part is composed of contributions written as ‘Reports from the Field’, a title that intends to stress their nature as works in progress. They represent one of the results of the Summer School jointly organized at the European University Institute (EUI) by the BABE project (Department of History and Civilization, HEC, EUI) and the Oral History Master of Arts (OHMA, Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics, INCITE, Columbia University, New York, NY). Their value lies in the effort to show the performative sides of teaching and learning,38 with particular attention to the research on and transmission of oral and visual memories. Our shared conviction is that the fields of experimental pedagogy and didactics, in which performativity plays a crucial role, should be one of the directions in which memory studies continue in the future. A relevant methodological challenge of the BABE project was represented by the implications and consequences of the research for transmission and conservation of memory in its performed dimensions: teaching and archiving. An important implication of the triple nature of memory as performance can be found in teaching, as the contributions in the ‘Reports from the Field’ section show. Equally, the issues raised by the archival processing of materials collected during fieldwork resonated with exploring a wider meaning of ‘archive’ thematized by contemporary art practices and debates. The contributions by Janneken Smucker and Cori Olinghouse aptly evoke the experiment of the above mentioned Summer School, an example of inter-institutional collaboration, in which both Smucker and Olinghouse participated. Smucker’s contribution is valuable not only for its topic but also for the context in which the dimension of teaching is brought to the forefront. She focuses on a series of university courses, which she conducted at West Chester University with a colleague, on oral histories with immigrants to Philadelphia, PA. Such courses were not only based on new interviews carried out by the students but also drew on archival resources such as



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interviews conducted in the early 1980s. While the archiving experience is particularly significant for any researchers engaged in the transmission of memory, it was even more so in this case because the students were trained in combining visual elements with audio, and they were expected to create digital storytelling projects by comparing two historical waves of immigration. Therefore, this teaching included a reflection on the multisensory experiences of memory and its transmission through historical work, including the use of digital technology. The instructors gave particular attention to the ways in which the subjectivity of the students was affected by the narrations on/of migration and developed the concept of multisensory subjectivity, thus enlarging the scope of the relationship between visuality, the nexus corporeal/virtual, and mobility, and exploring its potential for teaching and transmitting memory. In this perspective, historical interpretation could be understood as an intersubjective act. The reflections by Cori Olinghouse on embodiment, memory and performance enlarge this picture to the transmission of memory in the experience of creating the special archives required by corporeality. In fact, she analyses the process of transmission between curators, choreographers, artists in general and archivists in the show WALL, an experiment that gathered an intergenerational cast of Black women in a performance layered with sounds, rituals and actions. Performance requires multiple strategies for archiving as it resists being rendered into reproducible forms. As an artist-archivist who has trained alongside archivists handling experimental film and video, Olinghouse set out to archive performance and found connections between the archiving of time-based media and the very act of performing. Tracing the author’s own experience in designing a method for the migration of embodied knowledge into a museum’s collection, her chapter emphasizes the systems of care required to develop an unconventional archive that is uniquely generative for the artwork. The author’s role relies on closely listening to the work and the artist to develop a model that extends the ethics of the work itself. Using an embodied approach to archiving, which explores the body as a repository of knowledge and draws from performance forms and cultures that use orature, improvisation, ritual, storytelling and choreography, this method focuses on the somatic and sensorial dimensions of memory and history. Significantly for this book, Olinghouse’s approach combining oral history and dramaturgical sensibilities favours the relational and intersubjective dimension of our type of research. We want to end by pointing out what we consider significant features in the structure of the present book. The chapters insist on some methodological similarities: the connections between bodies and words, between

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politics and domains currently labelled as ‘artistic’ and daily life, the interpretation of memory as intersubjectivity in its various forms. Thus, there are concerns that are central to all the chapters, although in different ways, places and disciplines. Appended to all this, the Afterword by Alexander Etkind is a significant conclusion to our work, we feel. First of all, because it testifies to the links between our research and a cultural institution like the European University Institute, dedicated to forming young cultural and political operators. Second, because Alexander Etkind is a scholar who has deeply innovated the field of memory studies and has always encouraged us to pursue new ways of reflection through exchanges and joint initiatives. Third, and decisively, because he draws a link from the long 1968 to what he calls the long 2020. Etkind emphasizes the bodily protests that we discussed in this volume and witnessed in the recent protests in Russia and Ukraine, the role of hunger strikes and prison protests, outlining the similarities between the Irish protests and those by Oleg Sentsov and Alexei Navalny. Thus, his Afterword points at some crucial aspects of the research and traces the links between our historical research and contemporary events. Luisa Passerini is Professor Emerita at the European University Institute, Florence, where she was also Principal Investigator of the European Research Council Project ‘Bodies Across Borders: Oral and Visual Memory in Europe and Beyond’, 2013–2018. Passerini has analysed the concepts of Europeanness and European identity from the theoretical and historical points of view. She has studied the subjects of social and cultural change: the African liberation movements; the movements of workers, students and women in the twentieth century; and the mobility of migrants to and through Europe in the last decades. In this endeavour, she has used memory in its oral, written and visual forms. Among her books: Conversations on Visual Memory (2018); Women and Men in Love: European Identities in the Twentieth Century (2012); Memory and Utopia: The Primacy of Intersubjectivity (2007); Europe in Love, Love in Europe (1999); Autobiography of a Generation: Italy 1968 (1996); Fascism in Popular Memory (1987). Dieter Reinisch is a Government of Ireland Irish Research Council Fellow in the School of Political Science and Sociology, University of Galway, and an Adjunct Professor in International Relations at Webster University, Campus Vienna. He holds a PhD in History from the European University Institute in Florence, and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS). Before joining the University of Galway, he held research positions at the Central European University in Budapest, the University of St. Andrews, and Ruhr University in Bochum. Since 2016, he has served on



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the editorial board of the academic, open access journal Studi irlandesi: A Journal of Irish Studies, published by Florence University Press. In addition to this volume, he is the author of Learning Behind Bars: How IRA Prisoners Shaped the Peace Process in Ireland (University of Toronto Press, 2022) and Irish Republican Counterpublic: Armed Struggle and the Construction of a Radical Nationalist Community in Northern Ireland, co-edited with Anne Kane (Routledge, 2023).

Notes 1. Possible references would constitute a huge list, but among the classics that can be quoted from this genealogy of thought are: Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990); Marvin Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction (1996); Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction (2002); Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik (eds), Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture (2013); Philip Auslander (ed.), Performance: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies (2003). 2.  Berger and Niven, Writing the History of Memory; Berger, History and Identity. 3.  Luisa Passerini, ‘Preamble: The Mobility of Memory in the Context of Intersubjectivity’, in Passerini, Trakilovič and Proglio, The Mobility of Memory, 1–8. 4.  The research project BABE was funded by the European Research Council; based at the European University Institute, Florence, 2013–2018; and directed by Luisa Passerini. It was hosted by the Department of History and Civilization, EUI, Florence, during the years 2013–2018. The project included several directions of research, the most important being the following: interviewing migrants towards and across Europe; interviewing artists who produced artworks on mobility at the borders of Europe and studying their production; and creating an archive of audio-visual material at the Historical Archives of the European Union, Florence, based on the testimonies of approximately four hundred interviewees and comprising around one thousand audio-visual documents. The results of the research are based on the collection of individual and collective audiovisual interviews, visual material produced spontaneously or induced during the fieldwork, archival documentation, participant observation in exhibitions, theatre performances, and various websites including social media websites related to the topic of migration and colonial history. Besides the project’s website and blog, close collaborations with art scholars, videomakers and curators played a crucial role in the organization of three exhibitions and the production of two documentaries. Finally, numerous collective and individual publications have been produced by the project. 5.  More specifically, the temporal focus on the term ‘post-1968’ emerged as a consequence of a workshop organized by Alexander Etkind at the European University Institute in February 2017. Some of the contributors to this volume, including the editors, presented at the workshop. 6.  See Nora, Les lieux de mémoire; Nora, ‘Between Memory and History’. 7.  For an overview of the emergence of oral history, see Cauvin, Public History; Ritchie, ‘Introduction’. 8.  Passerini, Conversations on Visual Memory. 9.  Passerini, Trakilovič and Proglio, The Mobility of Memory. 10.  See Williams, ‘Doing Video Oral History’; Lichtblau, ‘Case Study: Opening up Memory Space’. 11.  Passerini, Conversations on Visual Memory.

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12.  Ariès, Perrot and Duby, A History of Private Life. 13.  This thought has been adopted from the ‘right to opacity’ as argued by Edouard Glissant; see Crowley, ‘Edouard Glissant: resistance and opacité’. 14.  Composed of Erika Zueneli, Olivier Renouf and Juan Benitez. 15.  See attached links and references for the BABE project. 16.  Dieter Reinisch discusses this aspect for his own field research: Reinisch, ‘“Is Austria a Catholic Country?”’. 17.  See, e.g. the journal The International Journal of Oral History, edited by Ronald J. Grele, and his contribution to oral history: Passerini, ‘In Conversation with Ron Grele’; ‘Ronald J. Grele: Selected Bibliography’. 18.  Sheftel and Zembrzycki, ‘Slowing Down to Listen in the Digital Age’. 19.  Freund, ‘Toward an Ethics of Silence?’; Romano, Talking about Silence. 20.  Mathieu, ‘The Space of Social Movements’; Mark and Rupprecht, ‘Europe’s “1989” in Global Context’; Klimke and Scharloth, 1968 in Europe; Passerini, Autobiography of a Generation. 21.  Della Porta and Diani, Social Movements; Tilly, Castañeda and Wood, Social Movements, 1768–2018. 22.  Boltanski and Chiapello, Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme, 98n, 101. 23.  Baraitser, Enduring Time, 93–113, 18. 24.  Hall, ‘Protest Movements in the 1970s’. 25.  Villaume, Mariager and Porsdam, The ‘Long 1970s’. 26.  Reinisch, Terror; Reinisch and Sindelar, ‘IRA Terror in Austria?’. 27.  Hobsbawm, ‘1968, the Year That Changed Everything’. 28.  Della Porta, Social Movements in Times of Austerity. 29.  Reynolds, Sous les Pavés… the Troubles. 30.  De Fazio, ‘Political Radicalization in the Making’; Reynolds and Parr, ‘Northern Ireland’s 1968 at 50’. 31.  For a state of the art and acknowledgement of an intellectual stance on the concept of European cultural heritage and its usage, see Tuuli Lähdesmäki, Luisa Passerini, Sigrid Kaasik-Krogerus and Iris van Huis (eds), Dissonant Heritages and Memories in Contemporary Europe, in the list of BABE products appended to this Introduction. 32.  For instance: Stråth, Europe and the Other; Passerini, `From the Ironies of Identity‘. 33.  Sharman, Empires of the Weak. 34.  Crangle et al., ‘Somewhere Bigger and Brighter?’; Della Porta and Tufaro, ‘Mobilizing the Past in Revolutionary Times’; Reinisch, ‘Sport, Memory, and Nostalgia’. 35.  McKenzie, Performance Studies. 36.  Kornetis, Children of the Dictatorship; Ó Dochartaigh, From Civil Rights to Armalites; Prince and Warner, Belfast and Derry in Revolt. 37.  The exhibition ImmagineMemoria was promoted jointly by BABE and the Historical Archives of the European Union in April 2018. See the documentary by Valerio Finessi, ImmagineMemoria in the list of BABE products appended to this Introduction. 38.  Garoian, Performing Pedagogy; Dolan, Geographies of Learning.

Links and References for the BABE Project Website now including posts previously on blog: https://babe.eui.eu/ (Site of the Department of History and Civilization, EUI). Ebook: Luisa Passerini, Conversations on Visual Memory. http://hdl.handle.net/1814/60164. Documentary by Valerio Finessi, ImmagineMemoria, https://youtu.be/98Rnim9gjCw.



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Tuuli Lähdesmäki, Luisa Passerini, Sigrid Kaasik-Krogerus and Iris van Huis (eds), Dissonant Heritages and Memories in Contemporary Europe. London: Palgrave, 2019. https://www. palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030114633. Luisa Passerini, Milica Trakilovic and Gabriele Proglio (eds), The Mobility of Memory: Migrations and Diasporas across European Borders. New York: Berghahn Books, 2021.

Bibliography Ariès, Philippe, Michelle Perrot and Georges Duby. A History of Private Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Auslander Philip (ed.). Performance: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, London: Routledge, 2003. Baraitser, Lisa. Enduring Time. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Berger, Stefan. History and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Berger, Stefan, and Bill Niven. Writing the History of Memory. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Boltanski, Luc, and Eve Chiapello. Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme. Paris: Gallimard, 2011. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Carlson, Marvin. Performance: A Critical Introduction. Abingdon: Taylor and Francis, 1996. Cauvin, Thomas. Public History: A Textbook of Practice. London: Routledge, 2016. Crangle, Jack, Fearghus Roulston, Graham Dawson, Liam Harte and Barry Hazley. ‘Somewhere Bigger and Brighter? Ambivalence and Desire in Memories of Leaving the North of Ireland during the Troubles’. Irish Studies Review (2022), 1–21. Crowley, Patrick. ‘Edouard Glissant: Resistance and Opacité’. Romance Studies 24(2) (2006), 105–15. De Fazio, Gianluca. ‘Political Radicalization in the Making: The Civil Rights Movement in Northern Ireland, 1968–1972’. PhD dissertation. Emory University, 2013. Della Porta, Donatella. Social Movements in Times of Austerity: Bringing Capitalism Back into Protest Analysis. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015. Della Porta, Donatella, and Mario Diani. Social Movements: An Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020. Della Porta, Donatella, and Rossana Tufaro. ‘Mobilizing the Past in Revolutionary Times: Memory, Counter‐Memory, and Nostalgia during the Lebanese Uprising’. Paper presented at the Sociological Forum, 2022. Dolan, Jill. Geographies of Learning: Theory and Practice, Activism and Performance. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001. Freund, Alexander. ‘Toward an Ethics of Silence? Negotiating Off-the-Record Events and Identity in Oral History’, in Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembrzycki (eds), Oral History Off the Record (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 223–38. Garoian, Charles. Performing Pedagogy. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999. Hall, Simon. ‘Protest Movements in the 1970s: The Long 1960s’. Journal of Contemporary History 43(4) (2008), 655–72. Hobsbawm, Eric. ‘1968, the Year That Changed Everything’. The Statesman, 8 May 2008. https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2008/05/marxist-historian-1968-student. Klimke, Martin, and Joachim Scharloth (eds). 1968 in Europe: A History of Protest and Activism, 1956–1977. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008. Kornetis, Kostis. Children of the Dictatorship: Student Resistance, Cultural Politics and the ‘Long 1960s’ in Greece. New York: Berghahn Books, 2013.

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Lichtblau, Albert. ‘Case Study: Opening up Memory Space: The Challenges of Audiovisual History’, in Donald A Ritchie (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Oral History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 277–84. Mark, James, and Tobias Rupprecht. ‘Europe’s “1989” in Global Context’, in Juliane Fürst, Mark Selden and Silvio Pons (eds), The Cambridge History of Communism: Volume 3: Endgames? Late Communism in Global Perspective, 1968 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 203–23. Mathieu, Lilian. ‘The Space of Social Movements’. Social Movement Studies 20(2) (2021), 193–207. McKenzie, Jon. ‘Performance Studies’, in Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth (eds), The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. https://litguide.press.jhu.edu/cgibin/view.cgi?eid=203. Nora, Pierre. Les lieux de mémoire, 3 vol. Paris: Gallimard, 1984–1992. Nora, Pierre. ‘Between Memory and History: Les lieux de mémoire’. Representations 26 (1989), 7–24. Ó Dochartaigh, Niall. From Civil Rights to Armalites: Derry and the Birth of the Irish Troubles. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Passerini, Luisa. Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1996. Passerini, Luisa. ‘From the Ironies of Identity to the Identities of Irony’, in Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 191–208. Passerini, Luisa (ed.). Conversations on Visual Memory. Florence: European University Institute, 2018. Passerini, Luisa. ‘In Conversation with Ron Grele’. The Oral History Review 46(1), 161–66. Passerini, Luisa, Gabriele Proglio and Milica Trakilovic. The Mobility of Memory: Migrations and Diasporas across European Borders. New York: Berghahn Books, 2020. Plate, Liedeke, and Anneke Smelik (eds), Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 2013. Prince, Simon, and Geoffrey Warner. Belfast and Derry in Revolt: A New History of the Start of the Troubles. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2012. Reinisch, Dieter. ‘“Is Austria a Catholic Country?”: Trust and Intersubjectivity in Post-Conflict Northern Ireland’. Oral History Review 48(2) (2021), 136–53. Reinisch, Dieter. ‘Sport, Memory, and Nostalgia: The Lives of Irish Republicans in Internment Camps and Prisons, 1971–2000’, The International Journal of the History of Sport 36(13–14) (2019), 1180–96. Reinisch, Dieter. Terror: Eine Geschichte politischer Gewalt. Vienna: Promedia, 2022. Reinisch, Dieter, and Melanie Sindelar. ‘IRA Terror in Austria? Small-Scale Political Violence in Late 1970s Vienna’. Irish Studies Review (forthcoming). Reynolds, Chris. Sous les Pavés… the Troubles: Northern Ireland, France, and the European Collective Memory of 1968. London: Peter Lang, 2014. Reynolds, Chris, and Connal Parr. ‘Northern Ireland’s 1968 at 50: Agonism and Protestant Perspectives on Civil Rights’. Contemporary British History 35(1) (2020), 1–25. Ritchie, Donald A. ‘Introduction: The Evolution of Oral History’, in Donald A. Ritchie (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Oral History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3–19. Romano, Gabriella. Talking about Silence. Florence: HEC, European University Institute, 2020. ‘Ronald J. Grele: Selected Bibliography’. The Oral History Review 46(1) (2019), 191–95. Schechner, Richard. Performance Studies: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2002. Sharman, Jason C. Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020.



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Sheftel, Anna, and Stacey Zembrzycki. ‘Slowing Down to Listen in the Digital Age: How New Technology Is Changing Oral History Practice’. The Oral History Review 44(1) (2017), 94–112. Stråth, Bo (ed.). Europe and the Other and Europe as the Other. Bruxelles: Peter Lang, 2010. Tilly, Charles, Ernesto Castañeda and Lesley J. Wood. Social Movements, 1768–2018. 4th ed. London: Routledge, 2020. Villaume, Poul, Rasmus Mariager and Helle Porsdam. The ‘Long 1970s’: Human Rights, EastWest Détente and Transnational Relations. London: Routledge, 2016. Williams, Brien R. ‘Doing Video Oral History’, in Donald A Ritchie (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Oral History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 267–76.

Part I

Body

in Movement/Body in Constraint

CHAPTER

1

Bodily Ways of Knowing and Remembering Movement, Kinaesthesia and Mobility Marina Nordera

Standing, walking, balancing. Not yet dancing, only trying to perceive what is there before the movement. Exploring motor anticipation. Awakening the awareness of kinaesthesia as augmented perception. Belonging while moving. Belonging in/by moving with some other people. Questioning intercorporeality as an enacted form of intersubjectivity. Standing, walking, balancing: in time, in space. The gaze measures proportions and distance. Visualising, mapping, scoring. Attempting to go somewhere and arriving somewhere else. Continuing to walk, despite the wall rising just ahead. Keeping going, stepping forward and insisting on clearing a passage in that corner between two walls. Falling. Climbing. Falling again. Standing, walking, balancing. What the body does (not) remember. Fragments of images and imagination shake the spine and the limbs. Resonance of gestures in one’s own memory and in the gestures performed by somebody else. No matter if they are present, absent, retrieved from the past, or about to be forgotten. Standing, walking, balancing. Indicating several paths. Being tired. Some parts of the body are more tired than others. Yet insisting on movement, again and again. Being alone. Moving alone. Trying to know what is happening to the other(s). Filling with (e)motion each part of the body. Feeling in each part of the body. Feeling with the skin. Breathing through the skin. Activating a larger perception, larger than the body, overflowing beyond this room, beyond this territory. Standing, walking, balancing. Deepening inner perception while standing still. The deeper the weight sinks into the floor, the larger the imagination opens the space. Agency is in the balance. Longing for belonging. Just wait, just

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go. Playing dead just for a while. Implementing the same movement without having the same story to tell. Telling herself/himself a story. Wandering around without knowing where to go, but always knowing who you are, who I am, who they are. Trusting the body, the bodies. Searching for agency somewhere very deep in the flesh, between the diaphragm and the centre of gravity. Recognising there the evidence of embodied cognition. Carrying something. Surprising yourself by arriving somewhere from somewhere else. Keeping on listening with the skin, until the end.

This is the transcription of the draft notes I made on paper while observing the dancers Erika Zueneli, Olivier Renouf and Juan Benitez1 on 24 April 2018, as they moved through the space of the exhibition ImmagineMemoria: Archivio di un’Europa in costruzione,2 one of the final outputs of the project ‘Body Across Borders: Oral and Visual Memory in Europe and Beyond’ (ERC BABE).3 As a dancer and dance scholar, I was involved in this research project as a member of the scientific board. Specifically, I was tasked with bringing to the collective discussion the attention to bodily ways of knowing and remembering, and with inviting the research team to be aware of the presence of bodies and movement in studying forms of European citizenship and mobility. I was also asked to conceive a performative event in the space of the cited exhibition and organized in the frame of the final conference which took place on 26–27 April 2018 at the European University Institute in Florence.4 This chapter first of all aims to make explicit the issues at stake in the non-discursive, embodied, tacit knowledge memorized during individual and collective itineraries, in order to investigate the intertwining of the perception of space and physicality of moving people with cultural memory. It also raises some reflexive concerns about the materiality of gestures, the iteration of movements, the construction of figures, the forms of perambulation and the ways of inscribing them in a real or imaginary space and in memory as raw material to reinvent, re-enact and perform the kinaesthesia of mobility. In this process, movement and visuality are conceived as interconnected in the crystallization of perceptions, emotions and corporeal memories, and dancing is conceived as a situated activity and a specific embodied subjective and intersubjective experience for each performer or spectator. Finally, it suggests choreography as an operational concept and a heuristic model for understanding the visual representation of bodily and intercorporeal experiences lived by subjects engaged in migratory processes and scholars involved in this particular fieldwork. In doing so, it analyses the tension between the power embedded in the strategies of control of the geographical as well as the choreographical space, and the agency of people engaging individual bodily experiences in mobility as well as in performance.



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Intercorporeality as Performed Intersubjectivity At the very moment in which I was making the notes transcribed in the opening section of this chapter, I was attending a creative process as a unique and complicit spectator. The three performers were preparing the improvised performance Nos gestes migratoires (Our migratory gestures) by appropriating the space and impregnating their bodies with the gestures emerging from the close contact with the materials displayed in the ImmagineMemoria exhibition: drawings, maps, texts, photographs, films and video-interviews collected, produced and studied in the course of individual and collective enquiries of the BABE research project. The performers had the possibility to access some of those materials a few weeks in advance, in a digital form. They could also explore the website of the BABE project and read some of the articles written by members of the research team. In addition to that, we had some informal conversations about the main theoretical and methodological issues structuring the scholarly fields of memory, mobility and visuality activated by the project. In imagining this performative event, I chose to collaborate with the dance company Tant’amati – and especially with the artistic director Erika Zueneli5 – because of the particular sensibility expressed in their bodily work for the relations between movement, perception and visuality, as well as for the issues related to the mobility of embodied knowledge across disciplinary and geographical borders. After training as a ballet dancer in Florence, Zueneli discovered modern and postmodern dance in New York in the 1980s and the nouvelle danse française in Paris in the 1990s. She worked as a dancer in many French and Belgian troupes while developing her work as a choreographer with the companies she founded: L’Yeuse, with Olivier Renouf (Paris, 2000) and Tant’amati (Brussels, 2013). In her artistic practice the gaze is a choreographical gesture in itself and visuality an essential tool in dance composition. Many of her pieces are inspired by visual artists for which the treatment of space and spatiality, gesture and perception are central issues, such as for example Edward Hopper for Noon (2000) and High Noon (2003) or Jackson Pollock for Daybreak (2007, 2014). Her more recent works are based on iconographical research in visual arts, using the body as a potential living site in which surviving (historical) images are concretely transfigured through incarnation, inner perception and movement. Olivier Renouf, Zueneli’s L’Yeuse co-founder, was trained both as a visual artist and as a dancer.6 His activities as a choreographer lie at the border between these two disciplinary fields: for example, the piece Baking Circus (2000) is a performed self-portrait in the manner of Francis Bacon; L’homme renversé (2000) and Champs (2008) are the results of a poetic and poietic dialogue with Giuseppe Penone’s arte povera. Renouf also creates

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sculptures, by using the potential of objects full of memories and transformed by time, using them as choreographical and scenographical props in site-specific projects. Finally, Juan Benitez, born in the Canary Islands and living in Brussels, is a dancer and a performer particularly interested in somatic practices and yoga. He explores the transformative power of body memories, images and imagination on organicity, inner micro-movements and the emergence of gesture. In order to prepare the performance Nos gestes migratoires, after having investigated the space and the staging of the exhibition before the event, Zueneli, Renouf and Benitez worked in an immersive way for a few days. Adopting a site-specific approach, they explored the very structure of the environment: walls, corridors, hallways, steps, stairs, platforms. These inventively suggested to them a variety of itineraries, trajectories, circulations, barriers, obstacles, escape routes of a possible or obstructed mobility.7 Through close and direct observation8 as well as immersion, adopting a sensitive and not a predetermined approach to images and sounds, they impregnated their bodies with corporeal and rhythmic qualities emerging from the exhibited materials. In this way they tried to establish an intercorporeal and intersubjective relation with the subjects whose fragmentary life narratives and stories were mediated in visual, audiovisual and written forms by the BABE research team, and then presented in the exhibition. These documents became the starting points for an imaginative processing of salient gestures, iteration, variation of muscular tonus, bodily inscription in space and time. Some macro-actions such as running, carrying, falling, pointing, pushing, looking over, dragging feet, hiding, unexpectedly alternated with pauses, silences of the body, slight trembling and micro-gestures such as snapping fingers, caressing hands, eyelids closing, wide open mouths. They activate and expand their bodily awareness through multimodal perception, a human skill defined by cognitive psychology as a phenomenon in which the experience of the world passes at the same time through the different senses, which can be influenced one by the other. In this process, the information received from one sense affects what is perceived by the others. Professional dancers and performers are meticulously and specifically trained in perceiving bodily experience through proprioception – the bodily perception of the body itself referring to stimuli from inside the organism – and kinaesthesia – the sensation by which body position, weight, muscle tension and movement are perceived by sensory organs. These two terms – proprioception and kinaesthesia – are sometimes used interchangeably, as the phenomena to which they refer are internally simulated and stimulated by the performers with and through the other senses so that ‘the link between bodily experiences and visual/auditory information



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can sometimes be so tight that the mere presence of the latter can automatically induce the former’.9 Stimulating proprioception and kinaesthesia by their living and moving presence in the space, the performers produce forms of attentional and intentional multimodality and enable themselves to transmit and mediate embodied memories to the audience. During this corporeal exploration of the multiple spatial and audiovisual stimuli offered by the exhibition, the performers outlined a fragmented and intuitive approach to the crucial question of mobility and belonging. However, they did not enact this process in a descriptive or metaphorical way, rather they stimulated kinaesthetic empathy in the persons momentarily inhabiting the same space and freely inscribing their individual itineraries through it. The phenomenon of kinaesthetic empathy has been observed in the field of Dance Studies since the 1930s by dance critic John Martin. According to Martin, ‘We live in a constant stream of emotional reactions, greeting every object, every situation, with favor or disfavor in varying degrees, reviving memories of previous experiences over the same neuromuscular paths, and making movements or preparations for movement according to the resultant of all these sources of testimony’. The very function of the dancer’s activity is then ‘to lead us [the audience] into imitating his actions with our faculty for inner mimicry in order that we may experience his feelings’. In fact, ‘all types of gestures and facial expression convey meaning to us automatically because we have felt similar muscular experiences ourselves and recognize the postural attitudes and their emotional connotations as having happened to us’.10 More recently Dee Reynolds and Matthew Reason have criticized Martin’s approach as it seems to conceive the audience as an undifferentiated and generalized entity. According to them, Martin ‘ties kinesthetic empathy to a problematic model of intentionality and also ignores the possibility that different audiences expect and receive different kinds of pleasures from dance, watching with different motivations and interpretative strategies’.11 If Martin was thinking of concert dance in which the artists on the stage are clearly separated from the spectators in the theatrical space, in the case of Nos gestes migratoires the performers shared the same space with the audiovisual documents of the exhibition and with each one of the persons composing the public in order to stimulate, as suggested by Reynolds and Reason, different motivations and interpretative strategies. By making perceptible the infrastructures of feelings in the quality of their actions, the performers addressed and involved each one of these persons more as a single citizen than as part of an indistinct public of a spectacle. A dense network of intersubjective and intercorporeal resonances was thus activated in real

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time between the performers, the women and men to whom the BABE project has given a voice through the exhibited documents and each one of the citizen-spectators inhabiting the space of the performance. Many temporalities coexisted in the very moment in which the performance took place, creating unexpected access to individual and collective bodily ways of knowing and remembering. This presentation of the creative process of the performance of Nos gestes migratoires aims to propose a direct entry into the matter of this contribution. From the perspective of Dance Studies, the field of my academic activities, not only can dance be considered a metaphorical space for thinking and reflecting on bodies and mobility in space, but rather dancing should be considered as a social practice and a performing art to be studied as an embodied cultural and historical phenomenon. Scholars working on dancing practices are often called upon to explain what their object of study is and if it really exists, since according to common opinion, dance disappears as soon as it appears. Paradoxically, this impermanence is the essence of the fascination it provokes, not only in the common perception but also in some rhetorical statements iterated by the aesthetics and the theory of arts. The discourse on this alleged impermanence makes dancing practices and performative arts ambivalent historical objects and allows the construction of a narrative that is more a matter of oblivion than of memory. On the contrary, dancing activities are as permanent as life itself, in the sense that they are intensely inscribed in corporeal experience, in time and space. They are relevant means for the transmission and sharing of tacit knowledge and emotions. They are attributed with very concrete and lasting effects on their audiences – penetrating individual consciousness, mobilizing kinaesthetic empathy, feelings and emotions, stimulating a sense of community, activating perception and memory in the very matter of the body. Last but not least, despite the fact that the Western intellectual tradition, which favoured the transmission of experience in written form, placed the various manifestations of dance on the side of orality, and thus of loss, these practices leave traces in time, from which stories and history continue to be written. In other words, dance is not an abstract concept, a universal phenomenon in human behaviour or a repository of aesthetic objects, but rather dancing is a situated activity and a specific experience for each individual as a performer, as part of an audience, or both. From this point of view, tacit knowledge and grounded cognition (intended as a way of knowing in which the environment, the situations, the body, and their simulations in the brain’s modal systems ground the central representations in cognition) are considered here as conceptual tools employed in trying to understand how standing, walking, moving, perceiving corporeal weight and shape in space and in time are evidence



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of particular ways of experiencing the human condition and the world in which we live.

Kinaesthetic Empathy as Embodied Intersubjectivity The study of visuality, intersubjectivity and memory in relation to migratory processes could be expanded and developed by taking into account tacit knowledge, body memories and intercorporeality as components of the ‘fabric of social becoming’.12 In the experience of movement in everyday life, kinaesthesia – the sensation by which bodily position, weight, muscle tension and movement are perceived by the subject – and kinaesthetic empathy – the perception of the movement of somebody else – are closely interconnected in the construction of intersubjective relations systems. Since the second half of the nineteenth century, in his theory of empathy, Theodor Lipps argued that when observing a body in motion spectators could experience an ‘inner mimesis’, feeling as if they were enacting the actions while observing them.13 Lipps’ ideas were taken up by John Martin, the dance critic quoted earlier in this chapter, in order to elaborate a reception theory of modern dance that, unlike ballet, was not based on imitative gestures and literary narrative. Martin suggested the notion of metakinesis, an experience of movement closely associated with emotions in the neuromuscular system that revives memories of previous experiences. These notions related to the process of kinaesthetic empathy and based on empirical observation have been confirmed by cognitive scientists of the Parma school who, since the 1990s, studied some specialized groups of premotor neurons activated by performing as well as by observing intentional actions, called ‘mirror neurons’.14 Starting from the 2010s, the experimentations emerging from this research field demonstrated that intercorporeality and, consequently, embodied intersubjectivity are grounded in human sensory motor systems, intensely connecting actions and movement intentions to body memories, sensations and emotions.15 Susan Foster, grounding her position in her experience as a dancer and a dance scholar, has criticized the biological universalism of this theory and has stressed the large variability of the experience of kinaesthetic empathy, depending on individual corporeal memory, as well as cultural and historical context. Therefore, according to her, the intertwining between kinaesthesia and kinaesthetic empathy is always situated in time and space and needs to be carefully analysed in cultural terms.16 Incidentally, the mirror neurons theory has also been reformulated over the years since the 1990s, including through various collaborations with dance scholars and experimentations with dancers. As an example, the mirror neurons theory has been

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applied to the field of dance in order to understand the intercorporeal relation produced by movement not only between performers and audience, but also between performers themselves.17 In a study of the relationship between training, skill level and resonance realized with a group of professional dancers trained in classical ballet, Calvo-Merino and others observed that mirror neurons were more intensely activated when observing other dancers performing ballet than when observing the movements of Brazilian Capoeira practitioners.18 This study demonstrates that resonance is more intense if the skills and techniques implied in movement are familiar to the observer. It also shows that the ‘mirror system’ integrates observed actions of others with an individual’s personal motor repertoire, and suggests that the human brain understands actions by motor simulation. The decision of the performers of Nos gestes migratoires to use ordinary gestures, movements that are not determined by a corporeal training, a particular skill level or an identified cultural meaning, contributed to stimulate the sensorimotor system of each person composing the audience according to a shared memory of gestures and body techniques in which multiple cultural resonances were possible. Dance anthropologist Theresa Buckland, in an essay on cultural memory and the politics of embodiment, states that ‘dance has a particular propensity to foreground cultural memory as embodied practice by virtue of its predominantly somatic modes of transmission’.19 Furthermore, she underlines that this kind of approach helps to formulate larger questions about ‘whose body in performance?’ so that issues of gender, social status, kinship, ethnicity and power, as well as the reflexive concern related to the specific bodily experience of the subjects, can be addressed. In this perspective, individual experience must be considered and investigated as embodied, because the changing perceptions of posture, balance, walking and space participate in the intersubjective processes of cultural construction of body techniques and the individual and collective memory of movement. For instance, posture – the simple act of standing – is the result of the sensorial and motor systems working together to produce continuous adjustments in order to resist gravity. This system of perceptions and movements that we experience as natural, as an ordinary biomechanical action, is responsive to emotional and imaginative stimuli connected to body memory. More precisely, Hubert Godard, through the functional analysis of gesture and movement in dance, tries to identify the empty zone without movement situated before the action, this moment in which the poetic charge and the colour of the action is already at stake. He defines pre-mouvement as ‘this attitude towards weight, gravity, which already exists before we move, in the mere fact of standing, and which will produce the expressive charge of the movement we are going to execute’.20



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If we stand or walk in a particular way, coloured by emotions and expression, it is because our body has incorporated the kinaesthetic memory of people we have stood and walked with for a long time, and because our body has inhabited spaces in which we have stood and walked from childhood. For instance, Blandine Bril demonstrated that the different ways of giving a massage or carrying babies before they are able to walk has some influence on the way they will stand or walk, and especially perceive space around them later on in their life.21 These forms of transmissions of movement and body techniques are not merely biomechanical, or neutral, but they are individually characterized by affects and the qualities of intersubjective relations that they are made of. In processing perceptions, feelings and emotions, the body becomes a dynamic and living site of memory, and the transmission of body knowledge takes place through different embodied mnemonic practices. The case presented by the anthropologist Kathryn Geurts22 is significant in this sense. Investigating the cultural meaning system of Anlo people in south-eastern Ghana, she discovered that in their culture balance (the act of maintaining, achieving or restoring a state during any posture or activity) is conceived as one of the senses, and balancing – in a physical and psychological sense as well as in literal and metaphorical ways – is an essential component of what it means to be human. Much of the perception system that Western conceptions of the body define as the senses falls into the Anlo category of seselelame (literally feel-feel-at-flesh-inside), in which what might be considered sensory input, including the Western sixth-sense notion of intuition, comes from bodily feeling and the interior milieu. Geurts relates how Anlo society privileges and elaborates what we would call kinaesthesia instead of the five senses as generally conceptualized by dominant Western culture. This example demonstrates that each performance of the body is a ‘kinaesthetic art whose apperception is grounded not just in the eye but in the entire body’.23 At the same time, the viewers of this performance can ‘internally simulate’ movement sensations of ‘speed, effort, and changing body configuration’.24 If movement is a bodily experience for the person who moves, but also for the person who is looking at him/her moving, the experience of the viewer is not only a visual one, but a corporeal one. Spectators of movement experience kinaesthetic empathy when, even while standing or sitting still, they feel they are participating in the movements they observe, and experience at the same time related emotions, feelings, ideas, memories and imagination. In fact, the understanding by cognitive psychologists and neurophysiologists of how the act of remembering or forgetting works through not only perception but also movement, and the existence of non-representational instances of movement memory, has shed new light on the study of

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embodiment, body techniques and their reception.25 In this regard, the kind of storage or summary of motor knowledge we have acquired during our lifetime, defined as ‘motor repertoire’, is understood as a unique vocabulary of actions for each of us, based on both our anatomical structure and our life experience. Since cognitive sciences have offered new evidence that the vision of a (moving) body activates in the spectator a dynamic process connected to the memory of prior sensorimotor associations, memory is no more conceived as a reservoir that can receive an uninterrupted accumulation of elements to be remembered, but as a dynamic and creative process transmitted through living intersubjective and intercorporeal practices which are constantly replayed, recycled, re-created and actualized. Corporeal and intercorporeal experience, therefore, is a way of knowing in itself, and the body an archive of sensorial knowledge,26 preserving and at the same time processing materials of individual memory as well as activating collective narratives.

Visualizing and Remembering Mobility as Choreography When, in preparing the performance Nos gestes migratoires together with the performers, we observed the maps and drawings realized by the interviewed persons about their migratory itineraries in the frame of the BABE project, we were struck by the fact that the body was very rarely represented as such, in its anatomical accuracy of form and configuration and in behavioural posture or disposition. Instead, we observed that the ensemble of multimodal perceptions constituting proprioception, kinaesthesia and kinaesthetic empathy – such as the verticality of the posture, the perception of weight, the awareness of space and distance, or the movement itself – were expressed in many different ways through graphical signs, symbols and visual metaphors, as well as through the choice of colours and the organization of the space on the page. Moreover, in observing audiovisual documents in which women and men presented the maps and drawings they had made remembering their mobility, we tried to establish a relation between corporeal dispositions, gestures, narratives and the graphic evidence itself. When retrieving memories of their journey, some of the participants interviewed by the BABE research team focused on primary physical needs and stimuli: hunger, pain, thirst, fatigue, sleep. Some others made explicit the connections between movement, time and space by measuring distance, describing rhythms of progression, visualizing accelerations and stops. The encounter with persons or objects allowed some others to talk about or draw their feelings and emotions in terms of intercorporeality, narrating



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or representing persons, often anonymous, encountered during the mobility. Quite interestingly, through intersubjective dialogue stimulated by the scholars conducting the interviews, most of the subjects reflected on the future, the land, the person or the condition they were aspiring to in terms of inner bodily perceptions. The presence of the body, with its primary needs, is overwhelming during the mobility to the point that the moving person is constantly in a state of perceptual alert in which all the senses are stimulated at the same time in order to prevent danger, escape the present and to project herself/himself towards the future. The corporeality created by the intertwining of concrete multimodal bodily perceptions is that of a processual body, seized by the flow of life and in constant elaboration, in which the form never imposes itself as a graphic, visual sign. In fact, in the functioning of visual memory, vision does not work in isolation from the other senses.27 On the one hand, bodily perceptions of the body itself (proprioception) and of the body moving in space (kinaesthesia) contribute to constructing the image of the body and its mobility in space. On the other hand, visuality can make explicit the non-discursive, tacit knowledge experienced and memorized through the body and movement during the complex itinerary of a migration, without implicating representational language. This is the case for some individual bodily experiences of the space as expressed in the drawings and maps illustrating different aspects of the journey. Jack Goody suggests that the graphic process conditions the nature, structure and organization of knowledge – as a crucial instrument of its acquisition and transformation. Graphical gesture then is a device for the selection and classification of information which can be memorized visually and provides a technology of knowledge with its own logic, namely the ‘graphic reason’.28 In this perspective then, graphical gesture is always embodied, and carries within itself the signs of the lived experience of space. Anne-Marie Christin, studying the relations between text and image, claims that the act of writing – ideogram or alphabet – has its origins in the image and only depends on a kinaesthetic and embodied process originating from the visual inquiry of a surface.29 A sign does not represent anything in itself, but it becomes meaningful by virtue of its visual value, as an image to be considered in relation to other images sharing the same ‘screen’ (or, in our case, space) within the system in which we consider it. In order to think about movement and mobility in relation to graphic reason, visuality and space, I suggest using choreography as an operational concept and a heuristic model. In reference to its etymological meaning, introduced in French language and culture with the publication of Chorégraphie, ou L’art de décrire la dance par caractères, figures et signes démonstratifs by Raoul Auger Feuillet in 1700,30 I am conceiving choreography as

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the process and the result of writing or drawing dance on paper through a text, a code or an image in the form of a ‘script, sketch or score’.31 As a matter of fact, the act of dancing is a complex experience engaging simultaneous multimodal perceptions, which are visual, auditory, tactile, kinaesthetic and proprioceptive. This experience needs to be ‘reduced’,32 in order to be transferred into a visual synthetic graphical sign and to fit onto a sheet of paper. The transfer of movement on paper implies the choice of representing only a few elements of this complex perceptive experience. In a choreographing process, activated for a prescriptive, descriptive or preservative purpose, each choreographer chooses to emphasize one or another relevant aspect of a complex movement. One may transcribe duration or rhythm by indicating a sequence of displacements, another may privilege patterns, inscribing rhythmical references, or step names and sequences. Others, using stick figures, are more interested in bodily positions and postures or weight transfers. Furthermore, choreography could be employed for exploring different ways of visualizing tacit knowledge. The choices made by those doing the drawing, according to the method or system he/she adopts, are based on subjective dispositions as well as on cultural habitus and epistemological paradigms, and need to be studied in relation to his/her position and role in the community and context. As art historian Michael Baxandall points out, the construction of an image is always related to the social experience of the viewer. According to Baxandall, in the interpretation of the perceptual signal of sight, each viewer adopts his/her own cognitive style on the bases of three variable and indeed culturally relative kinds of thing that the mind brings to interpreting images: a stock of patterns, categories and methods of inference; training in a range of representational conventions; and experience, drawn from the environment, in what are plausible ways of visualizing what we have incomplete information about. In practice they do not work serially, as they are described here, but together.33

In order to translate an experience into a visual sign according to agreed rules and insofar as the viewer is unable to account for the simultaneous operation of the various factors of the vision, he/she chooses methods of description or representation that simplify the complex aspect of reality. Each way or process of representing an action then reflects specific conceptions of the body, as well as space, time, movement, gesture and perception, in short, all the components of the activity and the body techniques that they make fit onto the page and possibly seek standardization. In conceiving choreographies, the authors draw from their own experience in composing, learning and transmitting not only the form of a movement but also previously acquired tools for its perception, analysis,



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description, memorization and classification. We can then see these artefacts as the transcription and recollection of selected elements of the visual and bodily experience. As stated by Susan Foster about choreography (the art of writing dance on paper) and chorography (the art of describing or mapping a region) in the seventeenth century, a double dynamic is activated in the visualization of the body in space: on one side, the modern ‘regime of orientation’ deals with control of the space and the power over it; on the other side, individual bodily experience of the space challenges general ideas about geography.34 As an example of this double dynamic, I would like to remember a personal (and probably shared) experience. During the lockdown of spring 2020, like many others I experienced a different relation to my urban environment in Nice, France. Obliged to limit my daily walk to one hour within one kilometre of my home, inside the perimeter of that restricted area I discovered places, paths, buildings, trees and walls that I had never seen before when driving or walking to a specific destination. The deeper knowledge of these elements of the space fostered new ways of inhabiting it. Repeating almost the same walk every day for two months as the weather and season changed, I experienced unexpected bodily ways of knowing and remembering a very well-known but still brand new environment in which my multimodal perception and bodily movement has been constantly replayed, recycled, re-created and actualized. The lockdown in the autumn of 2020 renewed this experience, inscribing it in the temporality of the autumn, when the night came increasingly early, the air was getting colder and colder, and the vegetation changed in density, colour and scent. Also, during these walks, when I encountered people on my route, I felt that I was strongly controlling proxemics (the use of space and nonverbal communication by movement, gestures and facial expressions) and intercorporeality, conditioned by the forced distance and the desire to transfer the smile hidden by the mask into the eyes, the posture and the whole movement of my body. At the same time, I was trying to perceive in the corporeal behaviour and in the trajectory of the person that I was about to encounter her/his corporeal response to my walking (and smiling) presence. My way of approaching the environment and its moving inhabitants was not only mental, linguistic, visual, but deeply kinaesthetical: (e) motional. This somatic dimension of individual (and collective) experience could be analysed in light of what Jacques Rancière calls the ‘distribution of the sensible’, which he defines as ‘the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it’.35

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Struggling with time and space constraints, discovering and appreciating new ways of knowing and remembering through kinaesthesia, I understood with my (walking/dancing) body the distinction introduced by Tim Ingold between plotlines and guidelines in the conception/visualization of space. During my lockdown promenades I was no longer perceiving the space as a plotline, a geometric construction to be seen at a glance from outside and to be contemplated as an art object invoking the authority of a master. Rather, I was inhabiting a specific territory and community following a guideline, a visualization of space implying the choice and realization through immersion and embodied cognition of an itinerary in space during time.36 Dance anthropologist Deidre Sklar, observing ‘how ethnographic studies might incorporate felt kinetic knowledge to address the cultural meanings inherent in movement’, affirms that, ‘while it has been traditional practice to erase the researcher’s body from the ethnographic text, “subjective” bodily engagement is tacit in the process of trying to make sense of another’s somatic knowledge. There is no other way to approach the felt dimensions of movement experience than through the researcher’s own body’.37 In the frame of the BABE project, Luisa Passerini has defined the mapping process as having a direct reference to the subject, both the researching and the travelling one, to whom it attributes activity and reflection. She also suggests that a collective embodied memory of space is deeply anchored in emotion and imbued with emotional force.38 My experience when assisting with the performance of Nos gestes migratoires was of being a link in a chain of transmission, along with the other spectators, of kinaesthetical perception, emotions and feeling in an immersive dimension. The guidelines of our common space were drawn by the interviewed persons, the scholars interviewing them, the general public and the performers. All together we engaged in a creative approach to choreographing as a process to retrace and perform individual and collective geographies of memory and belonging, with the aim of questioning dominant imaginaries about mobility. Metaphorically and effectively, we shared the embodied process of choreographing as a tool to think about body perception and memory of movement in a transcultural perspective, to take into account the creativity of the subject in art forms as in individual itineraries, and to trace intercorporeal guidelines for mapping imagination. Marina Nordera is a dancer and a cultural historian (PhD European University Institute, Florence). She is a Full Professor and member of the Centre transdisciplinaire d’épistémologie de la littérature et des arts vivants at Université Côte d’Azur, where she runs the PhD programme in Dance Studies.



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She has published on dance historiography and the history of dance transmission, body and gender in early modern Europe. She is now editing A Cultural History of Dance in the Early Modern Period (1450–1650), vol. 3 of A Cultural History of Dance (Bloomsbury). With Susanne Franco, she is coeditor of Dance Discourses: Keywords in Dance Research (2007), Ricordanze: Memoria in movimento e coreografie della storia (2010) and The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Memory (forthcoming). She is also co-editor of Les arts de la scène à l’épreuve de l’histoire (2011), Pratiques de la pensée en danse (2020), three issues of the online journal Recherches en danse (2014, 2015, 2016) and Traversées: carrières, genre, circulations (forthcoming).

Notes 1.  Company Tant’amati; for more information, see https://www.erikazueneli.com/ tant-amati. 2.  This exhibition, held at the State Archives of Florence from 5 April to 5 May 2018, in collaboration with the Historical Archives of the European Union, is documented at www. youtube.com/watch?v=98Rnim9gjCw. 3.  ‘The project proposes to study intercultural connections in contemporary Europe, engaging both native and “new” Europeans. These connections are woven through the faculties of embodied subjects – memory, visuality and mobility – and concern the movement of people, ideas and images across the borders of European nation-states with a focus on Italy and the Netherlands. Memory, here, is understood not merely as oral or direct memory but also as cultural memory, that reveals itself in several cultural products. Our research aims to understand the possibility of new forms of European belonging as they develop in an increasingly diasporic world. After having been an area of emigration for centuries, today’s Europe is not only a key site of immigration but also a crucial point of arrival in a global network designed by mobile human beings.’ https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/295854. 4.  For the full programme, see https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/295854. 5.  See her biography at https://www.erikazueneli.com/erika-zueneli. 6.  See his biography at http://www.olivierrenouf.com/olivierrenouf.html. 7.  Some excerpts of the performance are visible in the already-cited documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98Rnim9gjCw. 8.  I am referring here to the observation process as defined in ethno-anthropology as ‘observation directe par imprégnation lente et continue’ (‘direct observation through slow and continuous impregnation’, cf. Laplantine, L’Anthropologie, 17) or as close observation: ‘a method in which a researcher takes part in the daily activities, rituals, interactions, and events of a group of people as one of the means of learning the explicit and tacit aspects of their life routines and their culture’ (Musante Dewalt and Dewalt, Participant Observation, 1). 9.  De Vignemont, ‘A Multimodal Conception of Bodily Awareness’, 8. See also the concept of kinaesthetic crossmodality proposed by Reynolds, ‘Hearing Touch and the Art of Kinaesthetic Crossmodality’. 10.  Martin, Introduction to the Dance, 48–49. 11.  See Reynolds and Reason, ‘Kinesthesia, Empathy, and Related Pleasures’, 55, and also, by the same authors, Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices. 12.  Crossley, Intersubjectivity. 13.  Lipps, ‘Einfühlung, Innere Nachahmung und Organempfindung’.

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14.  Rizzolatti, Fogassi and Gallese, ‘Neurophysiological Mechanisms Underlying the Understanding and Imitation of Action’. 15.  Ammaniti and Gallese, The Birth of Intersubjectivity; Gallese, ‘Before and Below “Theory of Mind”’; Gallese and Cuccio, The Paradigmatic Body; Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain. 16.  Foster, Choreographing Empathy. 17.  Calvo-Merino et al., ‘Towards a Sensorimotor Aesthetics of Performing Arts’; Cross et al., ‘The Impact of Aesthetic Evaluation and Physical Ability on Dance Perception’. 18.  Calvo-Merino et al., ‘Action Observation and Acquired Motor Skills’. 19.  Buckland, ‘Dance, Authenticity and Cultural Memory’, 1. 20.  Godard, ‘Le déséquilibre fondateur’, 45. See also Godard, ‘Le geste et sa perception’, 236. 21.  Bril, ‘Culture et portage de l’enfant’. 22.  Geurts, Culture and the Senses. 23.  Daly, Dance History and Feminist Theory, cited in Warburton, ‘Of Meanings and Movements’, 73. 24.  Hagendoorn, ‘Some Speculative Hypotheses’, 79. 25.  Carmona, ‘Practices of Remembering a Movement in the Dance Studio’; Stevens, ‘Memory and Dance’. 26.  Lepecki, ‘The Body as Archive’; Bissell and Caruso Haviland, The Sentient Archive. 27.  Galvez-Pol, Forster and Calvo-Merino, ‘Beyond Action Observation’. 28.  Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind. 29.  Christin, L’image écrite ou la déraison graphique, 6. 30.  Feuillet, Chorégraphie. 31.  I am deliberately using the three categories proposed by Nelson Goodman, without distinguishing them. See Goodman, Languages of Art, 177. 32.  The humanistic concept of ‘in artem reducere’ defines the process of textualization of practical or technical knowledge through different graphic processes. See DubourgGlatigny and Verin, Réduire en art, 269–91, and also Kandel, Reductionism in Art and Brain Science. 33.  Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, 32. 34.  Foster, ‘Chorography and Choreography’, 68–75. 35.  Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 12. 36.  Ingold, Lines: A Brief History, 155–60. 37.  Sklar, ‘Reprise: On Dance Ethnography’, 70–71. 38.  Oral presentation of the BABE project in November 2013.

Bibliography Ammaniti, Massimo, and Vittorio Gallese. The Birth of Intersubjectivity: Psychodynamics, Neurobiology, and the Self. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014. Baxandall, Michael. Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972. Bissell, Bill, and Linda Caruso Haviland (eds). The Sentient Archive: Bodies, Performance, and Memory. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan, 2018. Bril, Blandine. ‘Culture et portage de l’enfant’. Spirale 46(2) (2008), 121–32. Buckland, Theresa Jill. ‘Dance, Authenticity and Cultural Memory: The Politics of Embodiment’. Yearbook for Traditional Music 33 (2001), 1–16.



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Calvo-Merino, Beatriz, Daniel E. Glaser, Julie Grèzes, Richard E. Passingham and Patrick Haggard. ‘Action Observation and Acquired Motor Skills: An fMRI Study with Expert Dancers’. Cerebral Cortex 15(8) (2005), 1243–49. Calvo-Merino, Beatriz, Corinne Jola, Daniel E. Glaser and Patrick Haggard. ‘Towards a Sensorimotor Aesthetics of Performing Art’. Consciousness and Cognition 17(3) (2008), 911–22. Carmona, Carla. ‘Practices of Remembering a Movement in the Dance Studio: Evidence for (a Radicalized Version of) the Radical Enactive Cognition Framework in the Domain of Memory’. Synthese 199(4) (2020), 1–33 Christin, Anne-Marie. L’image écrite ou la déraison graphique. Paris: Flammarion, 1995. Cross, Emily S., Louise Kirsch, Luca F. Ticini and Simone Schütz-Bosbach. ‘The Impact of Aesthetic Evaluation and Physical Ability on Dance Perception’. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 5(102) (2011), 1–10. Crossley, Nick. Intersubjectivity: The Fabric of Social Becoming. New York: SAGE Publications, 1996. Daly, Ann. ‘Dance History and Feminist Theory: Reconsidering Isadora Duncan and the Male Gaze’, in Laurence Senelick (ed.), Gender in Performance: The Presentation of Difference in the Performing Arts (Hanover: NH: Tufts University/University Press of New England, 1992). De Vignemont, Frédérique. ‘A Multimodal Conception of Bodily Awareness’. Mind 492 (2014), 989–1020, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24490403. Dubourg-Glatigny, Pascal, and Hélène Verin. Réduire en art. La technologie de la Renaissance aux Lumières. Paris: MSH, 2008. Feuillet, Raoul Auger. Chorégraphie, ou L’art de décrire la dance par caractères, figures et signes démonstratifs. Paris: chez l’auteur, et chez Michel Brunet, 1700. Foster, Susan L. Choreographing Empathy. New York: Routledge, 2010. Foster, Susan L. ‘Chorography and Choreography’, in Nicole Haitziger and Karin Fenbook (eds), Denkfiguren – Performatives zwischen Bewegen, Schreiben und Erfinden: Für Claudia Jeschke (Salzburg: Epodium, 2010). Gallese, Vittorio. ‘Before and Below “Theory of Mind”: Embodied Simulation and the Neural Correlates of Social Cognition’. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 362 (2007), 659–69. Gallese, Vittorio, and Valentina Cuccio. The Paradigmatic Body: Embodied Simulation, Intersubjectivity, the Bodily Self and Language. Mainz: Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, 2016. Galvez-Pol, Alejandro, Bettina Forster and Beatriz Calvo-Merino. ‘Beyond Action Observation: Neurobehavioral Mechanisms of Memory for Visually Perceived Bodies and Actions’. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 116 (2020), 508–18. Geurts, Kathryn. Culture and the Senses: Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African Community. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Godard, Hubert. ‘Le désequilibre fondateur’. Les Vingt Ans d’Art Press, special issue (1992). Godard, Hubert. ‘Le geste et sa perception’, in Isabelle Ginot and Michelle Marcel (eds), La danse au XXeme siècle (Paris: Bordas, 1995). Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbol. 2nd ed. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1976. Goody, Jack. The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Hagendoorn, Ivar. ‘Some Speculative Hypotheses about the Nature and Perception of Dance and Choreography’. Journal of Consciousness Studies 11(3–4) (2004). Ingold, Tim. Lines: A Brief History. London: Routledge, 2007. Kandel, Eric. Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018.

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Laplantine, François. L’Anthropologie. Paris: Éditions Payot, 2001. Lepecki, André. ‘The Body as Archive: Will to Re-Enact and the Afterlives of Dances’. Dance Research Journal 2 (2010), 28–48. Lipps, Theodor. ‘Einfühlung, Innere Nachahmung und Organempfindung’. Archiv für gesamte Psychologie 1 (1903), 465–519. (Translated as ‘Empathy, Inner Imitation and SenseFeelings’, in A Modern Book of Esthetics [New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979], 374–82.) Martin, John. Introduction to the Dance. New York: Dance Horizons, 1975 (orig. 1939). Musante Dewalt, Kathleen, and Billie R. Dewalt. Participant Observation: A Guide for Fieldworkers. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2002. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. London: Continuum, 2004. Reynolds, Dee. ‘Hearing Touch and the Art of Kinaesthetic Crossmodality’, in Patrizia Veroli and Gianfranco Vinay (eds), Music-Dance: Sound and Motion in Contemporary Discourse (New York: Routledge, 2017), 222–34. Reynolds, Dee, and Matthew Reason. ‘Kinesthesia, Empathy, and Related Pleasures: An Inquiry into Audience Experiences of Watching Dance’. Dance Research Journal 42(2) (2010), 49–75. Reynolds, Dee, and Matthew Reason (eds). Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices. Bristol, UK: Intellect Ltd, 2012. Rizzolatti, Giacomo, Leonardo Fogassi and Vittorio Gallese. ‘Neurophysiological Mechanisms Underlying the Understanding and Imitation of Action’. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 2 (2001), 661–70. Rizzolatti, Giacomo, and Corrado Sinigaglia. Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions and Emotions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Sklar, Deidre. ‘Reprise: On Dance Ethnography’. Dance Research Journal 32(1) (2000). Stevens, Catherine. ‘Memory and Dance: “Bodies of Knowledge” in Contemporary Dance,’ in Pil Hansen and Bettina Bläsing (eds), Performing the Remembered Present: The Cognition of Memory in Dance, Theatre and Music (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 39–68. Warburton, Edward C. ‘Of Meanings and Movements: Re-Languaging Embodiment in Dance Phenomenology and Cognition’. Dance Research Journal 43(2) (2011), 65–83.

CHAPTER

2

Corporeality and Militant Performance during Northern Irish Prison Protests, 1971–1983 Dieter Reinisch

One hundred years ago with the Irish War of Independence in full swing, the Sinn Féin Lord Mayor of Cork, Terence MacSwiney, went on hunger strike while imprisoned in Brixton. During his hunger strike, MacSwiney said: ‘It is not those who can inflict the most but those that can suffer the most who will conquer’.1 On 25 October 1920, MacSwiney’s prison protest ended in his death, sending shock waves throughout Ireland. His self-sacrifice for the independence of his country inspired anti-colonial movements throughout the British Empire.2 Hunger strikes are already reported as a form of protest against authorities in early medieval Ireland. For instance, it has been reported that Ireland’s patron saint St. Patrick staged a 42-day hunger strike against God on the Holy Mount in the fifth century.3 Despite a century-old pagan tradition of using hunger strikes as a form of political and social protest in Gaelic Ireland, it was the British suffragettes that reintroduced the hunger strike as a form of political violence in modern Ireland.4 Irish anti-colonial nationalists quickly adopted the hunger strike in their fight against the British Empire.5 It became a tactic of resistance and form of political violence for subsequent generations of Irish republicans – most infamously during the War of Independence and the following civil war which ended in 1923, as

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well as during the 1940s, when several IRA members went on hunger strike in Belfast prison and other prisons in the southern Republic of Ireland.6 Less than fifty years after MacSwiney’s death and the partition of Ireland, a new phase in the violent anti-colonial conflict emerged. In 1968, as a direct result of the radicalization of a peaceful civil rights movement in Northern Ireland, the province erupted. The following year the British Army was deployed and the three-decade-long war, known as the Northern Irish Troubles, started.7 Among the main theatres of this conflict were the internment camps and prisons. Irish prisoners carried out protests in enemy jails on both sides of the Irish border and the no-wash protests and hunger and thirst strikes were the most harrowing. Prisoners used their own bodies for two reasons: to protest about the pain inflicted on their bodies by prison warders, and to legitimize and de-criminalize the national liberation struggle of what was perceived as ‘their people’ outside the camps and prisons.8 This chapter will introduce hunger strikes as militant performances of the prisoners in their fight for national liberation.9 Militant performances are processes through which diverse groups may be integrated or fused, through the successful communication, interpretation, reception and acceptance of meaningful, radical political action that includes the use of physical force. Building on Anne Kane’s adoption of sociologist Jeffrey Alexander’s writings on social performance and the civil sphere, for the Irish context,10 the chapter discusses how militant performances facilitated the establishment of countercultures in Northern Ireland. In her 2019 chapter, Kane describes how revolutionary violence by the Provisional IRA facilitated the building of an alternative nationalist civil sphere – a nationalist counterpublic – during the Northern Irish Troubles.11 The civil sphere is a sphere of ‘solidarity, in which individual rights and collective obligations are tensely intertwined’.12 This chapter will extend Kane’s approach to the role of prison protests, self-sacrifice and the hero cult by considering the prison protests as fostering these countercultures. Between 2014 and 2018, I conducted life-story interviews with thirtyfour former Irish republican prisoners.13 All narrators had been held in internment camps and prisons in Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland or abroad between the introduction of internment in August 1971 and the closure of the high-security jail HMP Maze in summer 2000.14 Some of my interview partners had participated in various forms of prison protests, including the hunger strikes. In parallel to the prison protests of the 1970s and early 1980s, the Provisional Irish republican movement emerged as a mass movement in the Catholic ghettos in Northern Ireland. The prisoners played an integral part in this process. As stated above, among the main theatres of the Northern Irish conflict were the camps and prisons. Through their struggles, prisoners became



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heroic figures for their communities and those who died were seen to have sacrificed their lives for their nation. Following Alexander, I understand the prison protests as political performances – namely as ‘social processes by which actors, individually or in concert, display for others the meaning of their social situation’.15 The solidarity cultures that emerged from these protests both inside and outside the prisons were critical in the establishment of the broader nationalist countercultures.16 The anthropologist Jeffrey Sluka described these cultures of resistance in dialectic relationship to the cultures of terror in Northern Ireland.17 In essence, in this counterculture, prisoners are remembered as living martyrs of the struggle. Through this hero-like status they were able to influence political developments in- and outside the prisons. To illustrate my argument, this chapter is divided into five parts. Following a brief history of the origins of the Northern Ireland conflict and corporal prison protests in modern Ireland, this chapter will, first, introduce prison protests as militant performances by Irish republicans during the Northern Irish Troubles. Second, the chapter shows how bodily forms of protest against the perceived injustices of the British occupation are remembered in the context of martyrdom and myth-building in contemporary Ireland. The fourth section will outline how former prisoners are remembered as heroes of their communities. This is followed by concluding remarks.

The Northern Ireland Conflict: Ireland’s Post-1968 Violence The conflict in Northern Ireland has constituted the most protracted armed conflict in the western hemisphere to date, resulting in the deaths of more than three thousand people between 1968 and 1998. Three groups of armed forces are involved in this conflict: the first includes the British Army, the British Police Force in the North of Ireland Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), later renamed the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), and the British intelligence service, mainly MI5. The second group includes loyalist paramilitary organizations such as the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). The political ideology of these groups is ‘Unionism’. Unionism supports the Union between the North of Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom. Loyalism, on the other hand, is a socio-political term that describes, often working-class, Unionists willing to take up arms in defence of this Union. The third group are republican paramilitaries such as the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), the Official IRA, as well as those groups opposed to the current conflict transformation process like the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA),

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the Real IRA, the Continuity IRA and the New IRA. These Irish republicans are Irish nationalists, overwhelmingly Catholic, who support the reunification of the British North with the Republic of Ireland. The range of different actors proves that it is wrong to characterize the conflict as religious. As political scientist Joanne McEvoy states, the conflict does not contain a religious element in any real sense but is rather ‘about two groups with allegiance to two different national communities. [Hence, it] is about national identity whereby the Nationalist community look to the Republic of Ireland as the “motherland” whereas the Unionist community looks to Britain as their patron state’.18 Ireland is considered as England’s oldest colony. During the Plantation era in the seventeenth century, loyal settlers from the Scottish Lowlands were relocated to Ireland to control the native Catholic population. These new settlers were predominantly Presbyterian and faithful to the Crown. The decade between 1913 and 1923 is commemorated as the Decade of Centenaries.19 These ten years were formative for the history of Ireland. Threatened by Home Rule and independence, Unionist Protestants formed the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) in 1912, introducing the ‘gun in Irish politics’, as social scientist J. Bowyer Bell put it.20 Irish nationalists responded with the formation of the Irish Volunteers in the autumn of 1913. Echoing Woodrow Wilson’s call for the ‘rights of small nations’, republicans saw the British involvement in the Great War as their chance to stage the Easter 1916 uprising, declaring an independent Irish Republic. However, within a week the rising had been suppressed and thousands of Irishmen were shipped to internment camps in North Wales. At the Westminster elections in December 1918, the republican party Sinn Féin secured 80 per cent of the Irish seats, and in January 1919 these elected candidates formed the first independent Irish parliament in the twentieth century, in Dublin. This revolutionary act provoked the War of Independence between Irish nationalists and the British Empire, ending with the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921. Back then, Northern Ireland emerged as a political unit.21 After the partial independence of the southern twenty-six counties, the North remained under British sovereignty but enjoyed an exceptionally high level of autonomy. The Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) enjoyed overwhelming support from the Protestant majority of the population, winning every election and forming every government. Niall Ó Dochartaigh writes that these governments ‘maintained Protestant working-class support by emphasising the danger to the state’s existence posed by any breach in Protestant solidarity and supporting the extension of British welfare provisions to Northern Ireland after the Second World War. The Catholic minority, forming a third of the state’s population, was almost completely excluded from the exercise of power at all



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levels’.22 He concludes that ‘Catholics tended to be concentrated at the bottom of the social scale, dominating unskilled jobs and the ranks of the unemployed, whereas Protestants were heavily overrepresented in skilled industrial employment, in business, and in the professions’.23 This political system was called the Orange State, referencing the colour of Northern Irish Protestantism. It was a de facto one-party system based on sectarianism. In an Irish context, sectarianism means Protestant supremacy along with anti-Catholic discrimination in all social, political and cultural spheres of public life. This was the situation in which the civil rights movement was formed in January 1967. The primary demand of this civil rights movement was ‘One Man, One Vote’. Furthermore, they protested about discrimination at workplaces and in public housing. The campaign became a mass movement with public demonstrations being organized by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA). Initial protests passed off peacefully, although they were opposed by loyalists who felt that the campaign was a cover for republicans who wanted to end the Northern Ireland state rather than reform it. A march organized in Derry on 5 October 1968 had been banned and when the four hundred people who gathered in defiance of the ban began to march, the RUC used batons to disperse them. The police action was filmed, and nationalist opinion was so outraged that the next march over the same route attracted over ten thousand people. Four days later, on 9 October 1969, students at Belfast’s Queen’s University organized a demonstration protesting police brutality in Derry. A meeting held later at the university led to the formation of the People’s Democracy (PD), which organized the ‘long march’ from Belfast to Derry in January 1969.24 On 1 January, this march set off with very few participants and little public support. Chris Reynolds writes that ‘by the time it reached the Burntollet Bridge on the outskirts of Derry, where it was met by a well-organized and allegedly police-supported ambush, participation and support had swollen, elevating those involved to the status of heroes and martyrs for the civil rights cause in Northern Ireland. Despite this success, the subsequent violent backlash saw the PD accused of radicalizing the civil rights movement and undermining the “steady, steady approach” to moderate elements thus far’. General elections were called for 24 February 1969 in which the PD participated. Reynolds concludes: ‘The PD had moved to another stage in its development. Its originality was diluted, and a process began that would end with the PD being subsumed into the more general revolt that would become the “Troubles”’.25 While the civil rights movement existed for another three years, the political situation in Belfast deteriorated. In July 1969, Protestants burned down Catholic houses on Bombay Street, located at an interface area in

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West Belfast. Continuing pogroms marked a turning point in Northern Irish history. The British Army was deployed into the province, and radicalized activists became increasingly frustrated with the peaceful protests of the NICRA. At the same time, extreme Unionists and loyalist paramilitaries, supported by the British Army, the RUC and the sectarian government, drove Catholic families from their houses, introduced curfews in Catholic areas, set up roadblocks and arbitrarily raided homes. The British government also began to force the Northern Ireland government to introduce specific reforms. As events began to spiral out of control, the Provisional IRA emerged, initially to defend the nationalist and Catholic areas in Belfast and Derry. At this point, the British government became convinced of the need to introduce internment.26 The legislation that was to have the most severe impact on the future course of Northern Ireland was the restructuring of the Special Powers Act of 1922 by the local Stormont government in 1971. This restructuring enforced an internment policy allowing the arrest, detention and imprisonment of activists without trial.27 A civil rights march to protest internment was held in Derry on 30 January 1972. That peaceful civil rights demonstration became known as Bloody Sunday after British soldiers opened fire at twenty-three unarmed civilians as they passed through the Catholic housing estate of Bogside. Thirteen died at the scene, while the death of another man four months later was attributed to his injuries. Many of the victims were shot while fleeing from the soldiers, some were killed while trying to help the wounded. Bloody Sunday marked the end of the civil rights movement.28 1972 was the bloodiest year of the conflict; it left over five hundred people dead, half of whom were civilians. In his influential book on 1968, former activist and Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Todd Gitlin, neglects to mention the developments in Ireland during this period.29 The worldwide protest movement in the long 1960s that the book covers includes events in France, the USA, Italy, even Latin America and Prague, but excludes Ireland. When researchers discuss political violence, they focus on small guerrilla and radical student groups both on the left and the right while neglecting the wars that shaped parts of Western Europe in the aftermath of 1968 in Northern Ireland and the Basque Country. Yet, Northern Ireland stumbled into a war that would have the most violent and, arguably, long-lasting consequences of the 1968 protest movement. How this war started is a primarily overlooked episode of the global events in 1968 and the following years,30 as are the internment camps and prisons, which became one of the main theatres of this war in the following three decades.



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The Prison Protests Irish republican prisoners played a decisive role in the history and politics of Ireland throughout the twentieth century. Following the 1916 Easter Rising and the execution of sixteen of its leaders, thousands of suspected republicans were arrested and shipped from Ireland to the Frongoch internment camp in Wales. These prisoners used their time in the camp to prepare for the independence struggle following their release, making Frongoch a ‘University of Revolution’.31 Since then, political prisoners have determined the course of the Irish conflict on both sides of the border. In the southern Republic of Ireland, thousands of republicans were either imprisoned during the civil war or interned by the Irish government between the 1930s and 1960s.32 With the outbreak of the so-called Troubles in Northern Ireland, the republican prison population reached its highest numbers on both sides of the Irish border since 1923. Although no sufficient data on republican imprisonment is available for the Republic of Ireland, it is estimated that approximately 20,000–25,000 republicans and loyalists were either interned or imprisoned in British internment camps and prisons between 1969 and the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. The main internment camps and prisons were, among others, the Long Kesh internment camp, succeeded by the high-security prison HMP Maze, Co Antrim, and Portlaoise Prison, Co Laois. As stated, the British Army was deployed to the region in the summer of 1969 following violent clashes and pogroms against the Catholic population in the previous weeks and months. To control the situation, a series of sweeping laws gave the British security forces, including the British Army, the RUC and the UDR, enormous powers to arrest and detain citizens. These new laws permitted the authorities to target republican and loyalist activists. On 9 August 1971, the British Army launched its Operation Demetrius, interning 342 people in the first twenty-four hours.33 In parallel to these developments, English judge Lord Diplock submitted the Diplock Report. The findings of this report allowed a single judge to convict any suspected terrorist on the sole basis of a confession, which could be procured by any member of the RUC. These legislative changes were followed by the abolishment of the Northern Irish parliament at Stormont and the introduction of Direct Rule from London after Bloody Sunday in 1972. The Emergency Provisions Act came into being in 1973. This act stipulated that all those detained and sentenced to more than nine months’ imprisonment were from then on to be granted Special Category Status, and, thereby, republican and loyalist prisoners were from then on legally distinct from ordinary prisoners.34

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This policy change was forced by a hunger strike of the IRA prisoners led by the earlier Belfast republican veteran Billy McKee in Crumlin Road Prison. McKee and his fellow prisoners demanded Prisoners of War Status based on the claim that Irish prisoners arrested after the 1916 Easter Rising had also been granted POW Status by the British government, similar to the captured German soldiers during the First World War. Because of this Special Category Status, the republican prisoners in Northern Ireland enjoyed a great deal of autonomy. They were, furthermore, exempted from regular prison work, were permitted to wear their own clothes, could receive more visitors, letters and parcels than ordinary prisoners, and were organized within their own military structures. The internment camps and prison authorities recognized this military structure and, thereby, the British government acknowledged the prisoners as distinct from ordinary criminal prisoners.35 In 1975, however, Lord Gardiner concluded in a report that ‘the introducing of Special Category Status for convicted prisoners was a serious mistake’.36 The Gardiner Report served as a pretext for the British Labour government to revoke Special Category Status from March 1976 onwards. After that date, prisoners convicted of terrorist acts or membership of republican paramilitaries were treated as ordinary prisoners and held in the newly built H-Blocks, while those prisoners sentenced before this date continued to enjoy Special Category Status just yards away in the huts of Long Kesh internment camp. The H-Blocks and the Long Kesh huts together formed Northern Ireland’s central high-security prison HMP Maze, twenty miles west of Belfast. The first prisoner to be convicted after the phasing out of Special Category Status was Kieran Nugent. He entered the H-Blocks on 15 September 1976 and as he refused to wear a prison uniform, he was thrown into his cell naked. The only thing he had to cover his body was a blanket.37 This act of resistance to the new criminalization policy started the blanket protest of the IRA and INLA prisoners. The prisoners used the blanket protest to object against their criminalization, demanding to be treated as political prisoners because – as they argued – their struggle was political, not criminal. The protest for political status continued until 1981; at this stage, the republican prisoners had introduced the tactic of hunger strikes. Over the summer months, ten prisoners died on hunger strike; while on hunger strike, Robert Sands – who would be the first prisoner to die – was elected MP to the British parliament in a by-election held in May 1981. One hundred thousand mourners attended his funeral in West Belfast. The 1981 hunger strikes of IRA and INLA prisoners, which brought the Troubles to a wider international audience, became a defining moment in Irish history.38 They set Sinn Féin on track to become a mass movement



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that, eventually, embraced the conflict transformation process for the following two decades.39

Corporal Protest as Militant Performance The human body has been used by social movements advocating political violence around the world.40 The hunger strike as a form of protest has a remarkably long tradition in Ireland; indeed, its origins stretch back to the pre-Christian era. In the twentieth century, Ireland saw the rise of a militant suffragette movement. This movement used a range of violent tactics, among these corporal protests – including hunger strikes. Many of the suffragettes were also active republicans, and it was through these women activists that the hunger strike as a form of political violence was reintroduced in twentieth-century Ireland. Republicans quickly adopted this tactic and used it throughout the following decades. The first Irish republican to die from hunger striking was Thomas Ashe, in 1917. Many more died, either during the hunger strikes or as a direct consequence of the protests in several hunger strike waves during the War of Independence in 1922/23, and during the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. In Northern Ireland, the Provisional IRA was on a truce from February 1975 to January 1976.41 The British government used these months to reconsider counterinsurgency and introduced a new strategy. The new strategy became associated with three terms: Ulsterization, normalization and criminalization. A committee headed by John Bourn, a senior civil servant, drafted the document ‘The Way Ahead’, which concluded: ‘The best way forward is to seek to drive an increasing wedge between the terrorist and the great majority of people on both sides of the community who are heartily sick of violence’.42 One way to achieve this was the criminalization of the prisoners. This meant that from March 1976, all new convicts were held in the newly built H-Blocks, rather than the internment camps; and everyone convicted after this date would not be treated as a political prisoner but a criminal prisoner. As outlined above, the first prisoner to be sentenced under the new regime was Kieran Nugent, who initiated the blanket protests. He was soon followed by three hundred other prisoners who became known as the Blanketmen. From 1976 to 1981, the prisoners in the H-Blocks, and later also the women in HMP Armagh, used their bodies as weapons against the criminalization of their struggle – a struggle they considered to be wholly political. With the start of the blanket protest in late summer 1976, the republican prisoners ‘turned their bodies into instruments of resistance’, as sociologist Denis O’Hearn explains.43 The prison protest was among a set of

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political and violent performances during the Northern Ireland conflict.44 Anne Kane writes that ‘to perform a cultural text before an audience, actors need access to the means of symbolic production’ (emphasis in the original).45 In this context, the social-symbolic text is understood as ‘the bundle of everyday codes, narratives, and rhetorical configurings that are the objects of hermeneutic reconstruction’.46 Jeffrey Alexander, who understands symbolic production as ‘culture in its “presence”’, explains that these ‘mundane material things [that] allow symbolic projections to be made … objects that can serve as iconic representations to help them dramatise and make vivid the inevitable motives and morals they are trying to represent’.47 Outside the camps and prisons, these objects are primarily guns, Armalite and bombs. With very few exceptions, such as explosives and bomb-making compounds smuggled into Portlaoise Prison in the 1970s and the gun that was used to kill loyalist Billy Wright in HMP Maze in 1997, these objects were not available to stage violent performances inside the camps and prisons. The only tools the prisoners could always access were their own bodies. In this way, the body became the prime object and site of violent performance. In connection with the burning down of the internment camp Long Kesh by the republican inmates in summer 1974, O’Hearn observes that the prisoners learned to ‘use their powerlessness as a weapon’.48 Two years later, through the criminalization policy, the H-Blocks became a new stage for violent performance.49 Michel Foucault analyses punishment as a political technology of the body aimed at the production of submissive subjects. This means that discipline and punishment are directed at the subjective transformation of individuals from dangerous criminals to docile citizens. By criminalizing the prisoners, the British government aimed at producing docile bodies.50 These docile bodies are made and controlled through three distinctive means. The first one is hierarchical observation. This control, through observation, was professionalized in Northern Ireland with the building of the notorious H-Blocks. Their H-shaped architecture enabled easy access and non-stop observation of all four landings in the block from the control room. Thereby, the H-Blocks are merely a modern form of the Victorian Panopticon prison architecture. The second distinctive feature of modern disciplinary control is its concern with normalizing judgement, while the third feature is examination.51 However, one crucial difference between the prisoners analysed by Foucault and the republican prisoners in Ireland is the notion of marginalization. While Foucault says that marginalized groups are genuinely part of modern society and, at the same time, are perpetually on the border of society, I argue that political prisoners in Ireland are not marginalized but rather heroes of their community. In that way, the demands



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of the republican prisoners were taken up and turned into a political programme for successful action by the outside communities.52 The H-Blocks were constructed as modern variations of the Panopticon to fulfil the state’s vision of a pure community of prisoners and a disciplined society, to use the words of Foucault. These are, Foucault writes, the ‘two ways of exercising power over men, of controlling their relations, of separating out their dangerous mixtures’.53 The tower of the Panopticon enables the permanent surveillance of the prisoners. The supervision control room in the centre of the H-shaped blocks in HMP Maze controls all four wings and the two yards of each H-Block and thus serves precisely that purpose. In the modern Northern Irish variation, the circular structure of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon was turned into an H-shaped building, while the tower became the control room. Thus, the objective of the H-Blocks was to supervise the prisoners, and, at the same time, to make them invisible to the outside world. ‘This invisibility is a guarantee of order’, writes Foucault.54 Republican prisoners refused, however, to be made invisible. The prisoners resisted and by resisting they transformed themselves from ‘objects of information’ to ‘subjects in communication’. They achieved this by collective resistance on two levels: the body and the mind. This chapter introduces how the bodily resistance helped to establish a counterculture outside the prisons, while my previous research discussed the resistance of the mind.55 There is a substantial body of academic literature discussing the corporal resistance of the Irish republican prisoners in the Panopticon-like H-Blocks. Between 1976 and 1981, the prisoners used their bodies to resist their classification as ‘criminals’. They did this first by wrapping their bodies in blankets, by refusing to wash or cut their hair, by smearing their excrement on the cell walls, and, finally, by using their bodies to embark on the ultimate struggle, through hunger strikes. All these forms of corporal protest have been widely discussed. Allen Feldman’s ground-breaking study of the body through the first decade of the Northern Irish conflict, from 1969 until 1981, gives ‘a genealogical analysis of the symbolic forms, material practices, and narrative strategies through which certain types of political agency are constructed in Northern Ireland’.56 For this purpose, he looks particularly at bodily, spatial and violent practices. In his analysis, the body is the locus of manifold material practices. Thus, ‘political agency is not given but achieved based on practices that alter the subject’. In other words, the ‘politicised body’ emerges as both artefact and instrument of agency: it is a political institution.57 The body of the hunger striker and resistance through this body is also the topic of two articles by George Sweeney.58 Rachel Oppenheimer discusses the role of the no-wash protests in the Irish republican prison

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struggle.59 In addition to the research on the male Blanketmen and hunger strikes in HMP Maze, a growing body of literature discusses the body of Irish republican women prisoners during the no-wash protests in HMP Armagh where Irish republican women were held. Begoña Aretxaga was among the first to discuss ‘the dirty women’;60 this was followed by her analysis of the control over the incarcerated women’s bodies through stripsearches.61 Following Aretxaga, others have taken the body of imprisoned women during the no-wash protests as their research topic.62 All these studies devote particular attention to the role of menstrual blood in the protests and its symbolic meaning in the context of the Northern Ireland conflict. Thus, both corporal resistance on the part of men during the 1981 hunger strikes in HMP Maze and women during the no-wash protests in HMP Armagh in the late 1970s have regularly drawn the attention of academics over the past three decades. Although resistance by and through the body has been analysed in the Northern Ireland conflict, resistance by and through the mind has mostly been neglected. Foucault writes, ‘because, without any physical instrument other than architecture and geometry, it [the resistance] acts directly on individuals; it gives “power of mind over mind”’.63 I will add three adaptations to Foucault’s writings on prisons and imprisonment. First, I argue that contrary to Foucault’s notion of prisoners as being on the margins of society, political prisoners of a national liberation movement, in particular Northern Irish republican prisoners, are considered heroes and martyrs of their community. Second, rather than being a lonely and isolated experience, political imprisonment in Ireland is a collective experience due to the unique right to segregation of the republican prisoners both in the Republic and Northern Ireland. This collective experience of imprisonment, third, enables the subject, the individual prisoner, to perform acts of resistance if supported by the collective. These forms of protest can be either political, as in the case of the no-wash and blanket protests and the hunger strikes, or cultural, as in the case of performing Irish sports and speaking the Irish language in a British prison.64 From the seventeenth century, the Irish language was banned by the British authorities, as well as other forms of Irish cultural expression, such as playing Gaelic sports; for this reason, from the late nineteenth century on, speaking Irish and playing these sports became a form of political and cultural resistance to British rule in Ireland. Notably, these three aspects adapting Foucault’s theory developed from criminal prisoners to political prisoners of national liberation movements, such as Irish republicans. Foucault does not address what happens if prisoners resist becoming docile citizens in the framework of the prison by resisting normalization – in the Irish context, by refusing to be labelled and treated as ordinary criminals.



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By demanding recognition as political prisoners, they went so far as to resist their criminalization and the criminalization of their struggle even at the cost of death.65 Aretxaga wrote that the ‘identity of the political militant had to be destroyed’. In the British prisons in Ireland, this was achieved through random beatings, poor and inadequate diet, constant visibility, vulnerability to British warders, repression of national and cultural identity, isolation, controlled movement, restriction of visits, body searches, and denial of control over their excretory functions during the years of the no-wash protests. She concluded that all these steps ‘were directed at defeating the will of autonomous individuals and transforming them into dependent infantilised subjects through physical and humiliating practices’.66 This finally led to a British prison system in Ireland that Erving Goffman described as ‘total institution’.67 Under those circumstances, prisoners established a self-understanding as political subjects in the prisons fostered by learning, reading and discussing. This process distinguished them from ordinary criminal prisoners. The prisoners themselves made use of their new awareness in their resistance inside the camps and prisons. While the young recruits revolted against British repression on the streets of Belfast and Derry, it was primarily inside the prisons that these young men developed their political knowledge. Their subjectivity developed inside the prison but, as Foucault writes, this ‘subjectivity (not that of great men, but that of anyone) is brought into history’ by revolt. This revolt inside the prison was the struggle against criminalization which made the inmates relevant actors in the course of Irish history. Hence, Foucault writes, one has ‘to be respectful when singularity revolts, intransigent as soon as power violates the universal’. The universal is, in this case, the struggle for self-determination and political recognition of the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland. Indeed, it was the republican prisoners who continued this struggle inside the prisons.68 Foucault argues that the disciplinary techniques introduced for criminals became the model for other modern sites of control so that prison discipline permeates all spheres of contemporary society. This central thesis of his book Discipline and Punish is reflected in the prison struggle during the Northern Irish conflict.69 By revoking Special Category Status, the British government not only criminalized the republican prisoners but was also – by treating them as ordinary criminals – delegitimizing the anti-colonial struggle of the Catholic community. In other words, by resisting their criminalization, the prisoners fought to legitimize the struggle of the Catholic communities. In essence, if the prisoners were labelled as criminals, their actions were terrorist, but if the prisoners had Prisoner of War Status, their political violence served political change. Republican prisoners not only fought for improvements of conditions inside the prisons, but also understood their struggle as a tool to legitimize

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the armed struggle for Irish freedom. In other words, if the prisoners were recognized as political prisoners rather than criminals, their actions also had to be recognized as legitimate warfare and not terrorism. While this self-understanding as Prisoners of War was contested both by the British government and international law,70 I agree with Adrian Grounds and Ruth Jamieson that ‘their definition of themselves as volunteer soldiers was largely shared by their communities’.71 Neil Ferguson writes that the reintegration of prisoners, as outlined by the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, has been highly divisive because ‘the idea that they need to be reintegrated into communities which they went to prison to defend is absurd’ for former political prisoners in Ireland.72 Grounds and Jamieson argue along these lines that ‘the presence of military command structures inside the prisons was given de facto recognition by the authorities’.73 After the 1981 hunger strikes, the republican prisoners were gradually granted the rights they demanded of the British government and the prison authorities. By winning de facto political status, the prisoners achieved victory, not only for themselves but also for their community. To be sure, as outlined above, the prisoners fought not only against the criminalization of their struggle but also against the criminalization of the struggle of their community. The theatre of the protests against criminalization was the prison; the audience was the Catholic community in the working-class areas outside the prison. By staging a militant performance with their bodies during the years of the blanket and no-wash protests, which eventually culminated in hunger strikes, the protesting prisoners – the Blanketmen – attained the status of martyrs within their communities.74 In other words, the ten dead martyrs and the Blanketmen as living martyrs are remembered as heroes by their communities outside the prisons. By staging the militant performances in front of an audience, a counterculture emerged in the Catholic and nationalist ghettos in Northern Ireland. The republican party Sinn Féin emerged as a mass movement during the years of the prison protests. The emerging nationalist counterculture, fostered by the militant performances in the prisons, made the militant performance outside the prison, the newly formulated ‘long war’ strategy of the Provisional IRA, possible.

Prisoners: Heroes of Their Communities The republican prisoners established themselves as heroes of the community because of the self-sacrifices they made in front of their supporters. Erving Goffman writes that he has been using the term performance to refer to all the activity of an individual which occurs during a period marked by his continuous presence before a particular set of observers and which has



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some influence on the observers.75 As Stephen Hopkins outlines, the torture and sacrifice of the prisoners, especially those engaged in the no-wash protests and hunger strikes, aligned with Catholic martyrdom narratives and spoke forcefully to even those nationalists who were not supportive of the Provisional IRA.76 Kane continues: ‘Soon, the prisons became stages of a variety of innovative violent performances with enormous outcomes in terms of support for the republican movement and counter-public development’.77 Former political prisoners of national liberation movements and anticolonial movements often hold outstanding roles within public life. When, in April 1955, leaders of newly independent states and national liberation movements met in the Indonesian city of Bandung, it was a defining moment for the decolonization of the Global South. Richard Wright reported that ‘most of the leaders of these nations had been political prisoners, men who had lived lonely lives in exile, men to whom secret political activity had been a routine matter, men to whom sacrifice and suffering had been daily companions’.78 As this account and national liberation leaders such as Abdullah Ocalan, Nelson Mandela and many other examples demonstrate, former political prisoners gain a unique position within their communities through their sacrifice, which is interpreted not as a personal sacrifice but a sacrifice made for their communities and nations. In her study on commemorations in Palestine, Laleh Khalili concludes that ‘already the themes of heroic resistance, of sacrifice for the nation, and a defiant pride in the sovereignty of former colonies informed narratives of anti-colonial struggle’.79 This observation is also correct for Ireland, as I have demonstrated in my previous research.80 Being a former IRA prisoner earns an individual prestige and a higher status within nationalist communities. This view of prisoners as heroes within their communities who gave their lives for the struggle to defend their communities is comparable to the image of martyrs.81 In the Catholic communities of Northern Ireland, former prisoners, in particular former Blanketmen, are seen as living martyrs. They are hailed as heroes within their communities for the very fact that they spent time behind bars for their community, and through this self-sacrifice and the militant performances, they put on their show for the benefit of other people, as Goffman writes.82 This image of ‘heroes’ develops against the reality that most prisoners face considerable psychological and social difficulties following their release.83 Previous research by Adrian Grounds and Ruth Jamieson, Kieran McEvoy et al., and Peter Shirlow has examined the impact of imprisonment upon republican ex-prisoners.84 All studies show that most ex-prisoners suffer from mental health issues and display symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

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Jamieson and Grounds observed ‘striking and consistent echoes’ of war veterans’ literature in their study with former political prisoners in Ireland. Five main topics emerged in their survey with former prisoners; these are: feeling like strangers at home; effects of separation on family relationships; the ‘unspeakability’ of war experience and the ‘masking’ of feelings; the strength of the primary group bonds; and militarized masculinities.85 They argue that many of their interview partners had felt like strangers when they returned home, that they believed their prison experience had changed them, and that the lives of those outside had developed differently to their own lives inside. Despite these emotional barriers, local communities in Northern Ireland treat political prisoners as their heroes and martyrs. John Morrison writes that ‘historically, the prisoners have been among the most trusted and revered actors with the Irish republican movement’.86 Another example that underlines the support of the community for the political prisoners is the fact that the prisoners’ ‘definition of themselves as volunteer soldiers was largely shared by their communities’.87 To be sure, republican prisoners, as well as loyalist prisoners, do not belong to a marginalized and socially excluded group. They are seen as heroes in their local community. David McKittrick writes about youth in Belfast in the year 2009: But kids still see paramilitary veterans strutting about their districts, noticing their status and their sometimes expensive lifestyles. Many loyalist figures were not just killers but also gangsters, ostentatiously sporting chunky jewellery, revving around in 4x4s, holidaying in Dubai. Sadly but inevitably, some kids adopt them as role models, admiring them as men of power and stature. One small boy asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, replied: ‘An ex-prisoner’.88

Maurice Goldring stressed the critical role of the political prisoners in the struggle of their community. According to Goldring, one of the main aspects of the struggle was to make martyrs, and the two groups who can become martyrs of the community are on the one hand the dead activists of the movement and on the other hand the political prisoners: In the newsletters produced by Coiste, the ex-prisoners’ republican organisation, you find the slogan ‘Fifteen thousand prisoners, one hundred thousand years in jail’ repeated continuously. From a strictly military point of view, this slogan is an aberration: it is an admission of defeat and the opponent’s victory. Generally, in a war, the propaganda emphasises the number of enemy prisoners and enemy victims rather than those of one’s side. However, neither the IRA nor ETA publishes literature where it is written: ‘1500 enemies killed, 15,000 wounded and £2 billion in material damage’; or ‘three journalists killed, five local councillors executed’. The purpose of armed struggle is not an impossible military victory, but foremost the creation of martyrs. The celebration of martyrdom revolves around two main areas: the graveyard and the jails.89



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The public perception of Long Kesh/HMP Maze is not just that of an internment camp and high-security prison, but somewhat of a legendary place, a political statement, a place of heroism, worship and martyrdom. Remembering the former prisoners as martyrs who suffered in these legendary institutions, where Bobby Sands and his nine comrades died, still inspires the nationalist counterculture today.

Concluding Remarks In 1976, the British government launched a new strategy in its war-torn province Northern Ireland. Part of this new strategy was the criminalization of political prisoners and the struggle of the Provisional IRA, with the intention of alienating the republican activists from the Catholic population. However, this plan failed because the prisoners used it as the foundation from which to perform their martyrdom, consolidate support in Catholic and nationalist communities, and legitimate the republican armed struggle. As I show in this chapter, the criminalization policy – not solely of the prisoners but also of the republican struggle – compelled the prisoners to stage militant performances against the new strategy. These militant performances were a series of corporal protests between 1976 and 1981 in the H-Blocks of HMP Maze and between 1979 and 1980 in the women’s jail HMP Armagh. Through these protests, performed for the Catholic ‘audience’, particularly those in the working-class ghettos, the British strategy of criminalization turned the Blanketmen into heroes of their community. In this way, a mass movement in support of the protesting prisoners emerged in the form of the National H-Block/Armagh Committees, mass demonstrations, successful Anti-H-Blocks candidates and so on, and this established a counterculture. During the years of the Northern Ireland conflict, the Provisional IRA made use of this counterculture to pursue their strategy of the long war. Since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, the hunger strikers who died, and the living former Blanketmen, are remembered as self-sacrificing heroes of their community. The significant influence on the outside community that the prisoners had due to their corporeal performances becomes evident in the oral history interviews with a former leader of the loyalist Red Hand Commando. Winston Churchill Rea fought the Provisional IRA and conducted random sectarian murders of Catholics in Belfast. In an interview with an oral history project, archived at Boston College Massachusetts and quoted in a court case against Rea in November 2020, he is recorded as saying that while some in the loyalist community ‘were gloating’ over the deaths of the republican hunger strikers, he ‘didn’t gloat’. On the contrary, ‘I salute

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these people’ because following their ‘beliefs’ to the grave was ‘something I just could not do’.90 The corporal protests of the prisoners made an even stronger impression on their own communities, even among those who did not support their political beliefs. From 1976 to 1978, the republican prisoners refused to cooperate with the prison authorities in the first act of their performance. During those years, the protest established cultures of solidarity within the prison, outside the prisons, and eventually between the prisoners and the outside communities. During those years, the republicans turned their bodies into instruments of resistance against the criminalization of the democratic, national struggle of the Catholic working class. The collective mobilization of protest among the prisoners brought the struggle of the Northern Irish Catholics to national and international political prominence – a struggle that was eventually successful. For this very reason, the former Blanketmen are remembered as the heroes of their communities. It is this remembrance culture that fosters a counterculture in Northern Ireland today. Dieter Reinisch is a Government of Ireland Irish Research Council Fellow in the School of Political Science and Sociology, University of Galway, and an Adjunct Professor in International Relations at Webster University, Campus Vienna. He holds a PhD in History from the European University Institute in Florence, and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS). Before joining the University of Galway, he held research positions at the Central European University in Budapest, the University of St. Andrews, and Ruhr University in Bochum. Since 2016, he has served on the editorial board of the academic, open access journal Studi irlandesi: A Journal of Irish Studies, published by Florence University Press. In addition to this volume, he is the author of Learning behind Bars: How IRA Prisoners Shaped the Peace Process in Ireland (University of Toronto Press, 2022) and Irish Republican Counterpublic: Armed Struggle and the Construction of a Radical Nationalist Community in Northern Ireland, co-edited with Anne Kane (Routledge, 2023).

Notes 1.  Several different versions of this quote are recorded; for an overview of hunger strikes in twentieth-century Ireland, see Miller, A History of Force Feeding. 2.  Grant, Last Weapons. 3.  Fields, Martyrdom, 51. 4.  Grant, ‘British Suffragettes and the Russian Method of Hunger Strike’. 5.  Biggs, ‘The Rationality of Self-Inflicted Sufferings’. 6.  Flynn, Pawns in the Game.



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7.  For an introduction to the history of contemporary Ireland and the Northern Ireland Troubles, see Mulholland, Northern Ireland: A Very Short Introduction; Paseta, Modern Ireland: A Very Short Introduction. 8.  For an introduction to the prison protests in Ireland between 1971 and 1983, see Aretxaga, ‘Dirty Protest’; Reinisch, ‘The Fight for Political Status’; O’Hearn, ‘Repression and Solidary Cultures of Resistance’. 9.  I want to thank Anne Kane (University of Houston-Downtown) and Melanie Janet Sindelar (Charles University Prague) for their helpful comments in the process of writing this manuscript. They are not responsible for any errors or the opinions expressed. 10.  Alexander, Giesen and Mast, Social Performance; Kane, ‘The Civil Sphere and the Irish Republican Movement’. 11.  Kane, ‘The Civil Sphere and the Irish Republican Movement’. 12.  Alexander, The Civil Sphere, 53. 13.  I approached these interviews as life-story interviews. The narrators were recruited through personal contacts and snowballing. Before conducting the interviews, I obtained consent from the narrators to record and transcribe the interviews. Due to the sensitivity of the issue, the recordings cannot be made available to any third party. The interviews usually lasted between two and three hours. Before embarking on the research, I had obtained ethical approval from the European University Institute, my affiliated institution during the data collection, for this research. Each interview partner signed a consent form prior to the interview that stated, among other things, that he participates voluntarily in the research project and that he was given the opportunity to remain anonymous. 14.  Reinisch, ‘Subjectivity, Political Education, and Resistance’; Reinisch, ‘Sport, Memory, and Nostalgia’; Reinisch, ‘The Fight for Political Status’. 15.  Alexander, Giesen, and Mast, Social Performance, 32. 16.  O’Hearn, ‘Movement Inside and Outside of Prison’; Ross, Smashing H-Block. 17.  Sluka, ‘Cultures of Terror and Resistance in Northern Ireland’. 18.  McEvoy, The Politics of Northern Ireland, 8. 19.  Kidd, ‘1916 and All That’. 20.  Bell, The Gun in Politics. 21.  Lynch, The Partition of Ireland. 22.  Ó Dochartaigh, ‘Northern Ireland’, 181. 23.  Ibid, 181. 24.  Reynolds, Sous Les Pavés…; Reynolds and Parr, ‘Northern Ireland’s 1968 at 50’; Prince, ‘The Global Revolt of 1968 and Northern Ireland’; Bosi and Prince, ‘Writing the Sixties into Northern Ireland’; Prince, Northern Ireland’s ’68. 25.  Reynolds, ‘The Collective European Memory of 1968’, 4. 26.  McCleery, Operation Demetrius and Its Aftermath. 27.  Bennett, ‘Detention and Interrogation in Northern Ireland’. 28.  Ó Dochartaigh, ‘Bloody Sunday: Error or Design?’. 29.  Gitlin, The Sixties. 30.  Reynolds, ‘Northern Ireland’s 1968 in a Post-Troubles Context’; Reynolds, ‘Beneath the Troubles, the Cobblestones’. 31.  Murphy, Political Imprisonment and the Irish. 32.  Maguire, IRA Internments and the Irish Government. 33.  McCleery, Operation Demetrius and Its Aftermath. 34.  Caesar, ‘Captive or Criminal?’. 35.  McKeown, Out of Time. 36.  Reinisch, Learning behind Bars, 12. 37.  Ibid., 17.

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38.  Beresford, Ten Men Dead, 131–33; Bonakdarian, ‘Iranian Consecration of Irish Nationalist “Martyrs”’. 39.  Whiting, Sinn Féin and the IRA. 40.  Dingley and Mollica, ‘The Human Body as a Terrorist Weapon’. 41.  Morrison, ‘1975: The Truce That Changed the Troubles’. 42.  Cobain, Anatomy of a Killing, 43. 43.  O’Hearn, ‘Repression and Solidary Cultures of Resistance’, 518. 44.  Brown and Viggiani, ‘Performing Provisionalism’; Hopkins, ‘Bobby Sands, Martyrdom and the Politics of Irish Republican Memory’. 45.  Kane, ‘The Civil Sphere and the Irish Republican Movement’, 189. 46.  Alexander, Giesen and Mast, Social Performance, 1, 4. 47.  Ibid., 37. 48.  O’Hearn, Nothing but an Unfinished Song, 66. 49.  Kane, ‘The Civil Sphere and the Irish Republican Movement’, 197. 50.  Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 23. 51.  Ibid., 172. 52.  Ross, Smashing H-Block. 53.  Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 198. 54.  Ibid., 200. 55.  Reinisch, ‘Subjectivity, Political Education, and Resistance’. 56.  Feldman, Formations of Violence, 1. 57.  Ibid., 1–8. 58.  Sweeney, ‘Irish Hunger Strikes and the Cult of Self-Sacrifice’; Sweeney, ‘SelfImmolation in Ireland’. 59.  Oppenheimer, ‘“Inhuman Conditions Prevailing”’. 60.  Aretxaga, ‘Dirty Protest’. 61.  Aretxaga, ‘The Sexual Games of the Body Politic’. 62.  McAuliffe and Hale, ‘“Blood on the Walls”’; Lyons, ‘Feminist Articulations of the Nation’; Banerjee, Muscular Nationalism; Wahidin, ‘Menstruation as a Weapon of War’; Side, ‘Mairéad Farrell in the Armagh Gaol’. 63.  Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 206. 64.  Reinisch, ‘Sport, Resistance, and Irish Republican Identity’; Reinisch, ‘Sport, Memory, and Nostalgia’. 65.  Aretxaga, ‘Dirty Protest’, 124. 66.  Ibid., 129. 67.  Goffman, Asylums. 68.  Foucault, Faubion and Rabinow, Power, 452–53. 69.  Foucault, Discipline and Punish. 70.  Caesar, ‘Captive or Criminal?’; Walker, ‘Irish Republican Prisoners’. 71.  Grounds and Jamieson, ‘No Sense of an Ending’, 354. 72.  Ferguson, ‘Northern Irish Ex-Prisoners’, 273. 73.  Grounds and Jamieson, ‘No Sense of an Ending’, 354. 74.  Kearney, ‘Myth and Martyrdom’; Hopkins, ‘“Our Whole History Has Been Ruined!’”; Hopkins, ‘Bobby Sands, Martyrdom and the Politics of Irish Republican Memory’. 75.  Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. 76.  Hopkins, ‘Bobby Sands, Martyrdom and the Politics of Irish Republican Memory’. 77.  Kane, ‘The Civil Sphere and the Irish Republican Movement’, 196. 78.  Wright, The Color Curtain, 10. 79.  Khalili, Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine, 14. 80.  Reinisch, ‘Subjectivity, Political Education, and Resistance’; Reinisch, ‘Prisoners as Leaders of Political Change’.



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81.  Doyle, ‘Republicans, Martyrology, and the Death Penalty’; Hopkins, ‘“Our Whole History Has Been Ruined!”’. 82.  Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. 83.  Grounds and Jamieson, ‘No Sense of an Ending’, 348. 84.  Jamieson and Grounds, No Sense of an Ending; McEvoy et al., ‘The Home Front’; Shirlow, ‘The State They Are In’. 85.  Grounds and Jamieson, ‘No Sense of an Ending’, 349–50. 86.  Morrison, ‘Fighting Talk’, 605. 87.  Grounds and Jamieson, ‘No Sense of an Ending’, 354. 88.  David McKittrick, ‘Belfast: A City of Alienated Youth’, The Independent, 20 June 2009. 89.  Goldring, ‘Jours tranquilles à Belfast’, 134. 90.  ‘Loyalist Rea Claims He Sparked Republican Feud, Court Heard’, Irish News, 1 December 2020.

Bibliography Alexander, Jeffrey C. The Civil Sphere. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Alexander, Jeffrey C., Bernhard Giesen and Jason L Mast. Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Aretxaga, Begona. ‘Dirty Protest: Symbolic Overdetermination and Gender in Northern Ireland Ethnic Violence’. Ethos 23(2) (1995), 123–48. Aretxaga, Begoña. ‘The Sexual Games of the Body Politic: Fantasy and State Violence in Northern Ireland’. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 25(1) (2001), 1–27. Banerjee, Sikata. Muscular Nationalism: Gender, Violence, and Empire in India and Ireland, 1914– 2004. New York: New York University Press, 2012. Bell, J. Bowyer. The Gun in Politics: An Analysis of Irish Political Conflict, 1916–1986. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1987. Bennett, Huw. ‘Detention and Interrogation in Northern Ireland 1969–1975’, in Sibylle Scheipers (ed.), Prisoners in War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 187–203. Beresford, David. Ten Men Dead: The Story of the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike. London: Grafton, 1987. Biggs, M. ‘The Rationality of Self-Inflicted Sufferings: Hunger Strikes by Irish Republicans, 1916–1923’. Sociology Working Paper 3 (2007). Bonakdarian, Mansour. ‘Iranian Consecration of Irish Nationalist “Martyrs”: The Islamic Republic of Iran and the 1981 Republican Prisoners’ Hunger Strike in Northern Ireland’. Social History 43(3) (2018), 293–331. https://doi.org/10.1080/03071022.2018.1472884. Bosi, Lorenzo, and Simon Prince. ‘Writing the Sixties into Northern Ireland and Northern Ireland into the Sixties’. The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture 2(2) (2009), 145–61. Brown, Kristian, and Elisabetta Viggiani. ‘Performing Provisionalism: Republican Commemorative Practice as Political Performance in Post Agreement Northern Ireland’, in Lisa Fitzpatrick (ed.), Performing Violence in Contemporary Ireland (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2010), 225–48. Caesar, Samantha Anne. ‘Captive or Criminal? Reappraising the Legal Status of IRA Prisoners at the Height of the Troubles under International Law’. Duke Journal of Comparative & International Law 27(2) (2017), 323–48. Cobain, Ian. Anatomy of a Killing: Life and Death on a Divided Island. London: Granta Books, 2020.

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Dingley, James, and Marcello Mollica. ‘The Human Body as a Terrorist Weapon: Hunger Strikes and Suicide Bombers’. Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 30(6) (2007), 459–92. Doyle, David Matthew. ‘Republicans, Martyrology, and the Death Penalty in Britain and Ireland, 1939–1990’. Journal of British Studies 54(3) (2015), 703–22. Feldman, Allen. Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Ferguson, Neil. ‘Northern Irish Ex-Prisoners: The Impact of Imprisonment on Prisoners and the Peace Process in Northern Ireland’, in Andrew Silke (ed.), Prison, Terrorism and Extremism: Critical Issues in Management, Radicalisation and Reform (London: Routledge, 2014), 270–83. Fields, Rona M. Martyrdom: The Psychology, Theology, and Politics of Self-Sacrifice. London: Praeger, 2004. Flynn, Barry. Pawns in the Game: Irish Hunger Strikes 1912–1981. Cork: Collins Press, 2011. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Allen Lane, 1977. Foucault, Michel, James D. Faubion and Paul Rabinow. Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. James Faubion. Vol. 3. New York: New Press, 2000. Gitlin, Todd. The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. Bantam, 1993. Goffman, Erving. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1961. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Harmondsworth, 1978 [1959]. Goldring, Maurice. ‘Jours tranquilles à Belfast’. Les cahiers de médiologie 13(1) (2002), 131–38. Grant, Kevin. ‘British Suffragettes and the Russian Method of Hunger Strike’. Comparative Studies in Society and History 53(1) (2011), 113–43. Grant, Kevin. Last Weapons: Hunger Strikes and Fasts in the British Empire, 1890–1948. San Francisco: University of California Press, 2019. Grounds, Adrian, and Ruth Jamieson. ‘No Sense of an Ending: Researching the Experience of Imprisonment and Release among Republican Ex-Prisoners’. Theoretical Criminology 7(3) (2003), 347–62. Hopkins, Stephen. ‘Bobby Sands, Martyrdom and the Politics of Irish Republican Memory’, in Quentin Outram and Keith Laybourn (eds), Secular Martyrdom in Britain and Ireland: From Peterloo to the Present (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2018), 263–86. Hopkins, Stephen. ‘“Our Whole History Has Been Ruined!” The 1981 Hunger Strike and the Politics of Republican Commemoration and Memory’. Irish Political Studies 31(1) (2016), 44–62. https://doi.org/10.1080/07907184.2015.1126927. Jamieson, Ruth, and Adrian Grounds. No Sense of an Ending: The Effects of Long-Term Imprisonment amongst Republican Prisoners and Their Families. Monaghan: Seesyum Press, 2002. Kane, Anne. ‘The Civil Sphere and the Irish Republican Movement, 1970–1998’, in Jeffrey C. Alexander, Trevor Stack and Farhad Khosrokhavar (eds), Breaching the Civil Order: Radicalism and the Civil Sphere (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019). Kearney, Richard. ‘Myth and Martyrdom: Foundational Symbols in Irish Republicanism’. Kearney R. Navigations: Collected Irish Essays 2006 (1976): 32–47. Khalili, Laleh. Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Kidd, Colin. ‘1916 and All That: Lessons from a Decade of Centenaries for Ireland and the UK’. Juncture 22(4) (2016), 264–68. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2050-5876.2016.00872.x. Lynch, Robert. The Partition of Ireland: 1918–1925. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Lyons, Laura. ‘Feminist Articulations of the Nation: The “Dirty” Women of Armagh and the Discourse of Mother Ireland’. Genders 24 (1996), 110–49.



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Maguire, John. IRA Internments and the Irish Government: Subversives and the State, 1939–1962. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2008. McAuliffe, Mary, and Laura Hale. ‘“Blood on the Walls”: Gender, History and Writing the Armagh Women’, in Gillian McIntosh and Diane Urquhart (eds), Irish Women at War: The Twentieth Century (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2010), 171–86. McCleery, Martin. Operation Demetrius and Its Aftermath: A New History of the Use of Internment without Trial in Northern Ireland 1971–75. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. McEvoy, Joanne. The Politics of Northern Ireland (Politics Study Guides). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008. McEvoy, Kieran, David O’Mahony, Carol Horner and Olwen Lyner. ‘The Home Front: The Families of Politically Motivated Prisoners in Northern Ireland’. British Journal of Criminology 39(2) (1999), 175–97. McKeown, Laurence. Out of Time: Irish Republican Prisoners, Long Kesh, 1972–2000. Belfast: Beyond the Pale, 2001. Miller, Ian. A History of Force Feeding: Hunger Strikes, Prisons and Medical Ethics, 1909–1974. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Morrison, John F. ‘1975: The Truce That Changed the Troubles’, in James Windle, John F. Morrison, Aaron Winter and Andrew Silke (eds), Historical Perspectives on Organized Crime and Terrorism (London: Routledge, 2018), 93–108. Morrison, John F. ‘Fighting Talk: The Statements of “the IRA/New IRA”’. Terrorism and Political Violence 28 (3): 598–619. Mulholland, Marc. Northern Ireland: A Very Short Introduction. Vol. 82. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Murphy, William. Political Imprisonment and the Irish, 1912–1921. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Ó Dochartaigh, Niall. ‘Bloody Sunday: Error or Design?’ Contemporary British History 24(1) (2010), 89–108. Ó Dochartaigh, Niall. ‘Northern Ireland’, in Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth (eds), 1968 in Europe: A History of Protest and Activism, 1956–1977 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 137–51. O’Hearn, Denis. ‘Movement Inside and Outside of Prison’, in Lorenzo Bosi and Gianluca De Fazio (eds), The Troubles in Northern Ireland and Theories of Social Movements (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017), chap. 8. O’Hearn, Denis. Nothing but an Unfinished Song: Bobby Sands, the Irish Hunger Striker Who Ignited a Generation. New York: Nation Books, 2006. O’Hearn, Denis. ‘Repression and Solidary Cultures of Resistance: Irish Political Prisoners on Protest’. American Journal of Sociology 115(2) (2009), 491–526. Oppenheimer, Rachel. ‘“Inhuman Conditions Prevailing”: The Significance of the Dirty Protest in the Irish Republican Prison War, 1978–81’. Éire-Ireland 49(1) (2014), 142–63. Paseta, Senia. Modern Ireland: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Prince, Simon. ‘The Global Revolt of 1968 and Northern Ireland’. The Historical Journal 49(3) (2006), 851–75. Prince, Simon. Northern Ireland’s ’68: Civil Rights, Global Revolt and the Origins of the Troubles. New ed. Dublin: Merrion Press, 2018. Reinisch, Dieter. Learning behind Bars: How IRA Prisoners shaped the Peace Process in Ireland. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022. Reinisch, Dieter. ‘The Fight for Political Status in Portlaoise Prison, 1973–7: Prologue the H-Blocks Struggle’. War & Society 40(2) (2021).

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Reinisch, Dieter. ‘Prisoners as Leaders of Political Change: Cage 11 and the Peace Process in Northern Ireland’, in Martin Gutmann (ed.), Leadership in Historical Context (Basel: Springer International Publishing, 2019). Reinisch, Dieter. ‘Sport, Memory, and Nostalgia: The Lives of Irish Republicans in Internment Camps and Prisons, 1971–2000’. The International Journal of the History of Sport (2019). https://doi.org/10.1080/09523367.2019.1692821. Reinisch, Dieter. ‘Sport, Resistance, and Irish Republican Identity in Internment Camps and Prisons,’ in Dittmar Dahlmann, Gregor Feindt and Anke Hilbrenner (eds), Violence, Discipline and Leisure: Sport in Penal and Internment Camps (Goettingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017). Reinisch, Dieter. ‘Subjectivity, Political Education, and Resistance: An Oral History of Irish Republican Prisoners since 1971’, PhD dissertation. European University Institute, 2018. Reynolds, Chris. ‘Beneath the Troubles, the Cobblestones: Recovering the “Buried” Memory of Northern Ireland’s 1968’. The American Historical Review 123(3) (2018), 744–48. https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.3.744. Reynolds, Chris. ‘The Collective European Memory of 1968: The Case of Northern Ireland’. Études irlandaises 36(1) (2011), 73–90. Reynolds, Chris. ‘Northern Ireland’s 1968 in a Post-Troubles Context’. Interventions 19(5) (2017), 631–45. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2017.1336462. Reynolds, Chris. Sous Les Pavés… The Troubles: Northern Ireland, France and the European Collective Memory of 1968. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2014. Reynolds, Chris, and Connal Parr. ‘Northern Ireland’s 1968 at 50: Agonism and Protestant Perspectives on Civil Rights’. Contemporary British History (2020), 1–25. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/13619462.2020.1785291. Ross, F. Stuart. Smashing H-Block: The Rise and Fall of the Popular Campaign against Criminalization, 1976–1982. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011. Shirlow, Peter. ‘The State They Are In: An Independent Evaluation’. Belfast: University of Ulster Social Exclusion Research Unit, 2001. Side, Katherine. ‘Mairéad Farrell in the Armagh Gaol’, in Fiona McCann (ed.), The Carceral Network in Ireland (Cham: Springer, 2020), 155–77. Sluka, Jeff. ‘Cultures of Terror and Resistance in Northern Ireland’. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 18(1) (1995), 97–106. Sweeney, George. ‘Irish Hunger Strikes and the Cult of Self-Sacrifice’. Journal of Contemporary History 28(3) (1993), 421–37. http://www.jstor.org/stable/260640. Sweeney, George. ‘Self-Immolation in Ireland: Hungerstrikes and Political Confrontation’. Anthropology Today (1993), 10–14. Wahidin, Azrini. ‘Menstruation as a Weapon of War: The Politics of the Bleeding Body for Women on Political Protest at Armagh Prison, Northern Ireland’. The Prison Journal 99(1) (2019), 112–31. https://doi.org/10.1177/0032885518814730. Walker, Clive. ‘Irish Republican Prisoners: Political Detainees, Prisoners of War or Common Criminals?’ The Irish Jurist XIX new series (2) (1984), 189–225. Whiting, Matthew. Sinn Féin and the IRA: From Revolution to Moderation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Wright, Richard. The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995.

Part II

Spectacle

and

Activism

CHAPTER

3

Soviet Media after 1968 Visuality, Corporeality and Identity Bohdan Shumylovych

This chapter revolves around two major topics: the power of Soviet television to shape a specific imaginary and imagination and how this visual media created certain forms of corporeal identification after 1968. Every understanding of the body depends on historical contexts and an examination of the relationship between corporeality and identity often involves vision. David MacDougall argues that ‘seeing not only makes us alive to the appearance of things but to being itself’.1 We often assume that the things we see have the properties of being and our understanding of this rests on extending our feeling of being into our seeing. But visuality and corporeality are not abstract concepts, they can refer to the historical ways in which bodies were imagined and materialized.2 The imaginary connection shaped by identity and the body was vital in the former USSR because perceptions of the body were imperative components of public beliefs about what constituted a Soviet human being.3 There was a mutual interdependence between myth and ritual in the USSR,4 and Soviet people were supposed to embody certain socialist values in all their daily activities. The Soviet state developed a set of political rituals and public expressions of emotion to mark a citizen, to indicate that the person was included in the political world.5 To be a good Soviet citizen entailed learning to speak in the right way and to express the right feelings; it was a public performance that most individuals accepted.6 Distinct

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corporeal identity, the so-called normative Soviet body, emerged due to specific practices of seeing, shaped by the ideologically determined scopic regime.7 Hence, Soviet identity required a corporeal and visual identification, and television – being ritualistic, performative and repetitive – played a critical role in this process. Tamara Stratienko, who was one of the leading presenters on Soviet Ukrainian television and the recognizable face of the television show Sunny Clarinets, stated in an interview in 1986 that the audience of the programme was, if not fifty million (almost the entire population), then at least twenty million people (the estimated audience of national television in Soviet Ukraine). Apparently, entire villages wrote collective letters to Tamara Stratienko. In one letter, sent by farmers from a village in the industrial Donetsk region, Stratienko is praised for what she expressed on screen: ‘So much kindness, so much sincerity on her face that, without noticing it, you start to smile … the Sunny Clarinets programme is good in and of itself, but when it is led by Tamara Nikolaevna, for us it’s a holiday’.8 As the letter reveals, for certain groups of Soviet people television was an extremely important source of emotional identification. Because of this, television shows frequently acknowledged the high number of viewers’ letters that had been sent. In fact, many of these letters were read out during broadcasts and viewers often received written responses from media managers. In February 1981, the radio folk festival Golden Keys received the second highest number of letters on national radio and, in April of the same year, the television festival Sunny Clarinets was ranked first among all programmes on Ukrainian Television.9 These Soviet Ukrainian media festivals10 remained in the top ranks throughout the 1980s, before and after political perestroika. In 1986, eight years after its introduction on national television, Sunny Clarinets was able to attract tens of millions of viewers in Ukraine and its presenters were well known across the country.11 Although many of the letters sent to Soviet Ukrainian television’s headquarters have been lost, some were reprinted in other sources, which I cite in the following arguments.12 It is indicative that these sources were ideologically shaped, and thus researchers must deal with them not as historical documents but as second-order interpretations. The practice of writing letters to the institutions of power worked in the USSR as an ideological instrument, and in different periods this activity had different functions and results. When the Soviet archives were partially opened for historical studies, many Western scholars were keen to find the so-called ego-documents and sources of personal character that would unfold the complicated facets of the average Soviet person. Researchers have come upon, as Matthew E. Lenoe asserts, ‘hundreds of thousands of reader letters to newspapers,



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dating back to the earliest years of Soviet history’.13 Thus, this sub-discipline of Soviet history emerged. Among the innovators14 to study the supposed Soviet subjectivity in the 1980s was the American historian Sheila Fitzpatrick,15 followed by many others.16 In the 1990s and 2000s these studies of letter-writing not only in the USSR but under other Soviet-style political regimes17 continued, though researchers were still focused on the pre-war period or the years that followed 1945.18 As a consequence, we know much more about the Soviet subjects during the early history of the Soviet Union,19 and much less about late Soviet citizens before the collapse of the USSR.20 The discussions about the validity of studying such sources have endured for some time and scholars are aware of the pitfalls and the positive aspects of ‘reading the letters’ of Soviet people, especially those which were sent to the institutions of power. The genre of letter-writing was established in the early Soviet period and we know that officials perceived letters as an important aspect of socialist democracy. Letters indicated the involvement of common people in the socialist system and their ‘voices’ were used by officials as a metaphor for the people. Researchers recognize, however, that the production of letters or the purpose of writing them in the USSR was governed by conventions established by the communist power. Matthew E. Lenoe confirms that: ‘Party leaders and officials constructed the practice of letter-writing, soliciting letters from their subjects, setting the agenda for their correspondence, coaching them on acceptable ways to address power … For Party authorities the solicitation of letters was a tool of power’.21 Therefore, the above-mentioned studies exemplify that socialist powers needed citizens’ letters to absorb popular opinions and to monitor the state apparatus, facilitate the non-market economy, and control certain social privileges or institutions. The ordinary Soviet person would typically write letters that followed a frame developed by officials and Soviet intelligentsia. These letters were not about their writers’ personal desires, thoughts or opinions on socialism or matters of everyday life in the USSR; typically they had an agenda already established by officials. The writers of letters were conceived as activists and as serious citizens (often they were communists), who would regularly use this form of engagement for personal advancement or for entering the party system. In this context, Soviet letters to the media can be treated as sources that present a glimpse into the interactions between rulers and ruled.22 But even though letters can be treated as direct windows on the everyday working of Soviet culture during specific periods and seen as the instruments of power, they also show the public identity of their subjects. Letters not only reveal how the state governed it subjects and how they learned the language of ideology, but also exemplify the public character of people. Thus, letters

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written by people to the institutions of power under Soviet-type regimes should always be treated as problematic texts, which require careful handling and comparison with other sources. Being interpreted (mainly recited in a dissimilar context) by media managers or officials, citations from the letters of Soviet citizens exemplify how these managers ‘deciphered’ messages and how people understood the media. I find these sources relevant, especially if we want to understand specific symptoms of the post-1968 mediatized public imagination. I try to elaborate on some arguments that are provoked by certain questions. If Soviet television as an audio-visual media indeed triggered certain corporeal identifications after 1968, was this the result of a purposeful cultural policy or was it merely derived from a specific ‘visual dictionary’ of the era? Consumers of ideological media shows, which made up the overwhelming majority of public visual products in the USSR, were invited to become collaborators in the collective process of gazing, during which stable models of the so-called correct and normative worldview were formed. But the role played by corporeality in the construction of this worldview still needs to be established.

Socialist Television after the Czechoslovakian Crisis of 1968 After the end of World War II, Soviet television developed similarly to that in other European countries but with one crucial difference: it did not depend on advertising or private capital. Because of this, the state bore the major financial burden to sustain and develop media, but policies dictated programming. Thus, in the 1950s and early 1960s, media content in the USSR was mainly pedagogical in form and paternalistic in discourse, while entertainment was framed as cultural and educative. This situation changed after 1968, partially because of the Czechoslovakian crisis, which was part of European social movements from 1960 to 1980.23 During these two decades there were multiple protests that did not have a singular focal point in 1968, but rather evolved in cycles. My arguments are shaped by the idea of a long European 1960s, which opposes the idea of erecting, as Sarah Žabić put it, a ‘historiographic wall between East and West’.24 Before the Prague Spring, the socialist reformers unexpectedly liberalized socialist television in order to advance political and social change. In its aftermath, party leaders used media to achieve normalization, often pitting television stars against political dissidents in televised spectacles. The reform undertaken after the Prague Spring of 1968 in Czechoslovakia influenced both socialist and Soviet media production. Media was normalized not only politically,25 but also culturally. Certain forms of entertainment that



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had previously been considered alien were now permitted and appreciated. Vaclav Havel’s ‘greengrocer’ (an ordinary person) experienced this normalization and the ways in which state-endorsed ideologies were played out on television, particularly through serial films.26 In the late 1950s and 1960s, before the Prague Spring, audiences in socialist countries often sent letters to the television headquarters to complain that television lacked sincerity and was boring.27 Socialist broadcasting was aimed at moulding and educating perfect citizens, thus programming was intended to teach viewers social norms according to the states’ expectations.28 Because of this, individuals were searching for entertaining media content elsewhere. Enjoyable programming frequently rivalled the popularity of official primetime news programmes and people in socialist countries enthusiastically sought cheerful radio or television programmes on capitalist media channels. Audience research in socialist countries showed that people considered television ‘primarily as a source of entertainment and relaxation’,29 therefore officials had to adjust to new tendencies since they wanted to compete with capitalist broadcasting for the hearts and minds of viewers. As Soviet officials claimed, after working all day long, people wanted and had the right to enjoy themselves in front of the television set.30 But this enjoyment had to be culturally appropriate, not just entertaining. This political turn for putting appropriate entertainment on socialist screens coincided with the overall dependency on media and the subsequent media criticism of the late 1960s. Guy Debord’s condemnation of capitalist media as pacifying technology, which turns life into the spectacle,31 could also be applied to Soviet realities. After 1968,32 especially following the reforms of television in the USSR, this media could attract a huge audience. Some scholars have claimed that from the late 1960s viewers wanted entertainment and escapism, making this audience similar to any other.33 In the 1970s, Soviet television officials were urged to focus on youth issues, patriotism and promoting good taste, and to make genuine Soviet content that would be attractive to millions.34 Editors also had to react to the growing popularity of Western music among the Soviet youth and to include acceptable versions of this music in their programming. Entertainment line-ups were usually connected through programming to the news or important Soviet events, be it New Year celebrations or the party congress. Finally, the Soviet media succeeded in making their own popular and ‘culturally suitable’ media spectacle, so that Ellen Mickiewicz famously observed in the 1980s: The television viewer is very much the consumer and not the actor, no longer the Homo faber that Marx envisioned – the creative and active contributor, the person who does things; the ‘new Soviet man’ is now in front of the television

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set, and so is the rest of the family. Socially oriented and organized activities, the collective – so important to Soviet goals in character education – have declined since the introduction of television.35

An important part of this cultural socialist media spectacle36 was programming, especially the programmes dedicated to folk culture. Soviet media (radio and television) had actively promoted folk and amateur culture since the 1950s. In 1975, Soviet Central Television introduced the international television festival Raduga [Rainbow], solely dedicated to folk arts and creativity [narodnoie tvorchestvo].37 This television show was hosted by the famous Soviet journalist and TV presenter Anna Shatilova and it aimed to show worldwide folk art practices on multiple television programmes. The first edition of the television festival Rainbow attracted seventeen states as participants and in 1976 this had increased to twenty-four states, reaching thirty-four by 1983 and fifty-seven by 1985. This festival had a mass audience and mass participation as it featured popular folk collectives from different republics of the USSR and abroad. Numerous authors declared that they lived in an era ‘when the true meaning of folklore for today and tomorrow was only beginning to be realised’38 and admitted that folk content flooded Soviet television and fascinated hundreds of thousands of viewers.39 Soviet republics opened new singing fields and venues especially designed for folk choir singing. Amateur and folk arts flourished, attracting huge audiences not only in the USSR but also abroad.40 The Italian actress Paola Borboni (1900–1995) admitted in 1985 that she expected that television would destroy folk arts, but in the USSR it apparently promoted traditional culture and fuelled a new folk revival.41 In each Soviet republic there were multiple programmes on national or regional television dedicated to folklore and folk singing. Every day there was a radio or television programme in Soviet Ukraine that broadcast folk and amateur music. Indeed, many people admired various forms of Soviet folklore and folklorism. It is important to highlight that folklorism is different from folklore or folk culture. Writing about the phenomenon of folklorism in the late 1990s, Guntis Šmidchens called for the normalizing of folklorism, trying to define it as a form of sub-folklore. For him, folklorism denotes the conscious use of folklore as a symbol of ethnic, regional or national culture. He states: Folklorism refers to a subcategory of folklore, one with specific meaning and function in the lives of the performers and audience. Folklorism is the conscious recognition and repetition of folk tradition as a symbol of ethnic, regional, or national culture. This repetition may have economic or political consequences, or both, but it responds to the needs of the people who embrace folklorism.42

Thus, folklorism, as the conscious use of folk traditions and symbols of national culture, is also part of real folklore. Similarly, Soviet media in the



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1970s and 1980s was not only a means of communication but functioned as a form of sub-folklore, which also produced and maintained folklorism. Soviet officials consciously used folk arts as symbols of culture and politics in their media programming. For instance, participants (folk and amateur collectives) of the Soviet media folk festival Raduga [Rainbow] had to compete and were evaluated by two juries – one professional and one nonprofessional. These juries differentiated between folklorism and ‘real folk culture’ and supported forms of televisual adaptations of folklore.43 Writing about such media festivals and other Soviet serial television and radio programmes, Noia Zorkaia claimed, similarly to Šmidchens, that media in the USSR should be considered not just as a producer and communicator of folklorism, but as a certain form of sub-folklore.44 A survey by the Centre for Scientific Programming45 at Gosteleradio found that almost 40 per cent of the audience were happy with mediatized folklore and folklorism on the Soviet screen and almost 50 per cent stated that they had watched such television programmes.46 This was an important quantitative claim and television editors could openly argue that they produced programmes not only for the minor group of amateurs and folk artists (around eleven million active participants in the USSR)47 but for all Soviet people, or at least half of them (here the estimate might be more than fifty million citizens).48 In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Ukrainian television reached approximately fifty million inhabitants, so the television audience was likely to be close to the entire population of the republic. During this period, about nine out of ten citizens could watch national broadcasting in Soviet Ukraine.49 It was a good time to start making new programmes, which would not only cover but unite the national audience. In 1978, Soviet Ukrainian television produced its own popular television programme called Sunny Clarinets [Soniachni klarnety]. The name of this programme recalled the first book of poetry by Pavlo Tychyna (1891–1967), printed in 1918. Tychyna was inscribed in the canon of Soviet Ukrainian culture and his poems are still taught in schools. He was valued not only for his revolutionary poetry but also for his lyricism and romanticism, especially his romanticizing of folk people and nature. Some Ukrainian critics have called Tychyna the peasants’ Orpheus – the ‘clarinettist’ who ‘lived, worked, sensed out of nature and folk culture’.50 In 1978, media managers in Kyiv came up with the idea to commemorate the people’s lyricist by naming the folk music festival after his famous collection of verses. The idea of the festival was to combine poetry and folk songs from various regions of Ukraine (clarinets worked as a metaphor for music and the sun stood for nature, connected to folk culture51) in a televised competition. Each week, folk collectives from two regions of Soviet Ukraine would

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compete on the television screen,52 however, in contrast to recent television programmes such as America’s Got Talent (NBC television network) or Britain’s Got Talent (SYCOtv company), the prize was not a vast amount of money but rather mutual appreciation, popularity and love, expressed through letters from viewers. Popular neo-folk media programmes in Soviet Ukraine show that in the early 1980s the mediascape combined centralized, all-union news and entertainment programmes of Central Television with popular local television programmes. These programmes were mostly appreciated for their fairy-tale-like character, picturesque folklorism or ‘sincere’ folklore, which was performed in the form of television contests. Thus, media producers in Soviet Ukraine managed to create a specific media spectacle, which combined the real and imagined worlds of socialism, often helping to reimagine Ukraine through televisual space. The media folk festivals were extremely popular. Oleh Vergelis, a Ukrainian journalist, called the national television that initiated such media festivals the ‘reservoir of structured happiness’.53 Sunny Clarinets was one of the most popular programmes on Ukrainian television, personally supported by the person responsible for media in late Soviet Ukraine, Mykola Okhmakevych (1937–2013). Okhmakevych served as the head of the national media committee between 1979 and 1991, having replaced Mykola Skachko (1911–84) who had developed and run the national television network in Soviet Ukraine during the 1960s and 1970s. Television editors worked in close cooperation with officials from the Ministry of Culture and they often visited different regions of Ukraine to select the best folk or amateur collectives. They also relied on the knowledge and professional capacities of regional editors, who knew the music scene and could broadcast the best folk ensembles to the centre (Kyiv). Peasants and villagers admired this programme and even competed in order to be broadcast on national television. Some television editors from Sunny Clarinets (like Elina Volokh) admitted that they often cried tears of joy during these performances and the letters from spectators echoed this sentiment. Officials monitored each programme, however, and their major prerequisite for media professionals was an ‘exceptional and absolute devotion to folk people’.54 When the audience heard a 37-year-old woman (and mother of eleven children) singing beautiful songs on television, the viewer could imagine that she personified the resilient and indomitable character of the nation.55 Sometimes the number of people eager to participate in regional contests for Ukrainian television was so high that the police were called in for crowd control.56 In February 1984, the Ukrainian television folk contest Sunny Clarinets dedicated its programme to the All-Union Festival of Amateur Artistic



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Creativity [Vsesoiuznyi Festival Samodeiatelnogo Khudozhestvennogo Tvorchestva], which aimed to commemorate forty years since the liberation of Ukrainian lands from Nazi forces in 1944. An official narrator reiterated typical Cold War claims about war and peace: We live in peace now, but in our memory will always persist the commemoration of the last war … this memory passes to children, and now even to grandchildren … We hope that the human mind will not allow the destruction of the planet. And songs will always be heard over/in our country, and music will sound. In the name of this, we work and live.57

The programme’s reporter meant that ‘we work and live’ not just in the name of songs and music that might play all over the country, but in the name of peace for the whole planet. However, the connection of suitable music and beautiful (in this case folk) songs to the purpose of life (the symbolic meaning) of Soviet people was more than figurative. Officials imagined that amateur culture, folk songs and proper music should play a vital part in Soviet life under communism. These forms of culture indicated that the USSR was a progressive state, heading in the right direction of human development. The amateur culture was not only about aesthetic education or the ideological indoctrination of Soviet people, it was also about their happiness. When asked how ‘normal’ people58 differed from those practising various non-professional arts, the amateur artist Vitalii Kobeliatskyi responded that those who accomplished some arts were always happy.59 A life full of art, joy and accomplishment60 was seen as the ultimate goal of socialism. The important element of television folk programming was its localization and connection to specific regions, thus, Ukrainian television offered a picturesque, emotional and imaginary media space, which had a real and physical dimension. This was a specific national media(land)scape, which helped socialist Ukrainians to imagine their ancient cultural past or exposed them to ‘ancient but always actual’ national roots. Moreover, Soviet Ukrainian television also shaped a special audience, or rather regionally segmented audiences, peculiar ‘communities of sentiment’.61 Depicting national life and culture by means of audio-visual methods, showing emotionally charged folk programmes, being responsive and available, Ukrainian television shaped the feeling of a family, or as Appadurai frames it, ‘sodalities of worship and charisma’.62 Soviet Ukrainian media festivals strove to shape a common folk-nation for people living in scattered regions of the vast country, connected only through media.63 The imaginary connection between media, land/earth and folk culture came to Ukrainian viewers in the form of media rituals (such as media folk festivals), which sought to convey authorized information through meaningful symbols.64

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Soviet Television and Its Corporeal Effects The success of Soviet television in normalizing its subjects into good socialist media consumers came into effect in the early 1980s, so that many people in Soviet Ukraine could not imagine their lives without television. Bronstein B.M. from the small town of Novoiavorivsk wrote to the Ukrainian media committee in 1981, saying that for his family television was a window to the world: ‘Where else can you see the leading theatre, performances of prominent actors, journalistic reviews, or presentations of our outstanding contemporaries commenting on the problems of current reality. If television does not show this, nobody will’.65 A collective letter to Kyiv from a village in the Poltava region stated that the villagers could not imagine life without a television set because now they knew what was going on in the universe. The Kanobolotskyi family from Dnipropetrovsk even declared that the whole family had been captivated by television for twenty years: ‘For our family, television is a daily holiday in the house, exciting, deep and exceptionally fundamental holiday. How can it be possible to live without such joy? It is simply impossible to imagine it’.66 Neia Zorkaia, who often produced critical reviews on Soviet television content, cited a viewer from Angarsk: ‘I work at a school, and there is little free time, so for me the hour spent watching television is a very great joy and I am waiting for tomorrow’s [media] evening’.67 She also cited the famous director Ingmar Bergman, who was supposedly a big fan of television. Neia Zorkaia concluded in the mid-1970s that television brought together all kinds of different people, from the average Soviet teacher to a famous Swedish film director.68 She argued that the power of television was in the mythical structure of its programming as well as in its serial, repetitive character. In other words, Soviet television not only offered folk programming for its audience, it was also a form of folk culture in itself. My arguments follow Neia Zorkaia’s proposal to consider Soviet television as not just an ideological or informational institution, but as a form of media folklore.69 In following this argument, I also refer to Jack Z. Bratich, who states that television has the same transformative power as a fairy-tale, creating a fairy-tale reality.70 He maintains: ‘The powers of transformation once embodied in the wonder tale now find expression in reality television’s immersion in everyday life’.71 The evidence from Soviet Ukraine shows that the regional media, despite using clichés of socialist realism, had the power to transform both Soviet myth and ritual (everyday banalities embedded with purpose), turning them into a media spectacle or new media folklore. Combining visual media and sound, television hybridized the imagined and the real. It combined fairy-tales and the socialist reality and turned these into a fairy-tale-reality.



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In the following section I argue that post-1968 Soviet Ukrainian media created popular phenomena, which were not only visual but also shaped explicit normative corporeal practices. These practices functioned as ritualized media acts through which the socialist body was moulded, visually defined and encouraged. Thus, continual social performances, like practices of media visuality, developed into instruments of Soviet cultural hegemony and maintained specific identities. The imaginary connection shaped by identity and the body was vital, since perceptions of the body were imperative components of public beliefs and ideas of a Soviet person. Media images of masculinity and femininity, injustice and order, care and control embodied in a film or television were formally and meaningfully connected and performed. The concept of the performativity of identity questions whether there is a distinction between a real body and one that is non-real, between the mediatized/imagined body and the performed self. Soviet media bodies shaped identities, which resulted from various acts and media performances without which there would be no identity at all. The acts and performances of televisual identity construction compelled viewers to believe not only that a particular identity was appropriate and real (like a Soviet Ukrainian identity), but even that an entity such as a corporeal identity itself was an essential component of being a Soviet person. Audio-visual media, such as Soviet television, expressed formal variations that resulted in the creation of the subject where differences were played out over the shape and surface of the individual’s body. The singing media body (television image), or visually imagined national body’s surface was the critical signifier of difference and thus there was a visual politics of the body. Therefore, identity shaped by Soviet media was the product of recognizing similarities (evoking cohesion) and of recognizing differences (evoking lack) with others through the media of the body’s shape and surface schema. This had important consequences: the psychological process of triangulation or self-alienation through visual identification shaped identity, in which people knew themselves through their external images.72 Through folk media events, like the Rainbow festival or Sunny Clarinets, Soviet television upheld various differences and identities.73 Raisa Kirsanova pointed out that Soviet ethnographers indicated a certain ethnic paradox created by Soviet folk festivals and television.74 She claimed that even if a person did not have a strong national identity, television folk festivals gave him/her the possibility to compare ethnic costumes and songs, therefore helping them to rediscover a sense of national belonging. She referred to the works of the Soviet ethnographer Yulian Bromlei (1921–90), the director of the Institute of Ethnography (Soviet Academy of Sciences), who declared that nationality (ethnicity) was often coded in dress and that a person could perform or reveal identity through their clothing.75 Indeed,

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when a group of people construct their identities by recognizing differences from others, ‘they participate in an exotropic activity; not only do they see other groups but also they recognize how they themselves are seen’.76 A critical process within identity construction is the perception and expression of distinctiveness from others.77 Difference is not about biological facts, it is made by cultures, which mark bodies and recreate themselves. The definition one holds of one’s own body is dependent not only on having a discrete image of oneself but also of the orientation of one’s own body in relation to others.78 Individuals become aware of themselves when they recognize that they are different from others. Divisions and statements of difference create the subject not in terms of what one has and is, but in terms of what one does not have and what one is not.79 On the television screen, this work of visual coding/decoding is intensified, since everything that a person sees on the screen becomes amplified and strengthened through the imagination. Similar concerns were expressed by Melihat Yunisov in 1988 when writing about the Soviet creative industry: ‘In the immediate life that he/she encounters daily, after getting on to the local television screen becomes larger, becomes higher, becomes measurable with the life of the entire country and the planet’.80 This widely discussed ability of Soviet television to amplify reality would therefore work to magnify ethnic or national differences.81 Through their power to create collective experiences of the mass media, socialist and Soviet folk television fostered special communities of sentiment or ‘sodalities of worship and charisma’.82 These communities were likely to shape wider groups of people with certain ideas about nationhood. The impact of television over the imagination and imaginary of Soviet people is often described by analysing media content or ideology, transmitted through the screen.83 But beside these ideological messages, television worked as an object and important intermediary. Ingrid Richardson argues that: ‘The television as physical object – as material shape, substance and electronic interiority – enters into the domestic lifeworld, and impacts upon the placement of other bodies and objects there, and the spaces and habits of home life’.84 This material box was perceived as a container (television set) within another container (the privacy of the house or apartment), which was inscribed into the visual regime of knowledge. This ‘set’ of technology, that allowed tele-vision, contained an important epistemology, mainly that what can be seen, what turns to show itself, is what can be said to exist. Multiple folk television programmes inspired people to believe that folk and national culture existed, and they possessed some ‘ever-flowing springs’, from which emanated truth and wisdom. This metaphor combines the physical earth with some mediatized folk qualities, turning the landscape into a media(land)scape. In 1981, Sheremeta P. from Zhmerynka (central



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Ukraine), who adored the neo-folk programming of Soviet media, wrote to the Ukrainian Media Committee to state that: ‘Folk songs cannot get old, because they flow as living water from the golden source of folk wisdom and truth, the folk song is immortal!’85 Such claims were extensively collected by officials to prove that folk culture was the only way to counter the ‘rotten and false’ nature of foreign popular culture. Romantic views about the deep and eternal connection between people and the earth/land, folk songs and the national spirit were endlessly uttered by officials and widely published by cultural workers close to officials. These axioms were then reiterated in letters sent to Soviet institutions, like the Ukrainian Media Committee, as internalized and commonly shared wisdom. Therefore, we often encounter repetitive formulaic phrases, such as those found in N. Kravchenko’s letter from the central Ukrainian Cherkasy region: ‘The folk song is primarily the history of the earth/soil and indicates the immortality of the spirit of the people … This is the deep world of real life and struggle, the world of hope and anticipation that does not leave a person in their most difficult hours’.86 Holentiuk, from the city of Lutsk, claimed that when listening to the folk radio festival Golden Keys he could see ‘the glorious past of our people’, but also that the programme helped him to enjoy the happiness of the beautiful present.87 Folk media festivals thus helped many Ukrainians to reconnect with national traditions or even history. Of course, Soviet Ukrainian identity was in constant flux, creating a sense of self or selves from a range of possibilities and the construction of identity required repeated performances during which an already established set of meanings became mundane and legitimate.88 This identity was a performative act that endlessly needed repetition, and media played a crucial role in this process. But besides this, the power of television was in its domestic placement, since by the late 1960s television had become a necessary component of the socialist culture of family life. Television actively transformed and created the conditions for both the message and its reception. Richardson called this phenomenon the spatio-somatics of television, emphasizing the phenomenology of media, which we need to treat not as an instrument or extension of the human body, but rather as a combination of the human body, space and technical vision – telesoma.89 Corporeal identity, as an imagined mediabody (telesoma), was a performative phenomenon and as such it was always in the process of becoming. Hence, Soviet Ukrainian identity was not a stable phenomenon but rather can be considered as ‘a constituted social temporality’.90 Television programmes, which continuously offered visual connection to the imaginary national past, had the power to maintain this identity as social temporality. For instance, in January 1982, Petrenko N. from Kyiv wrote that, for her, folk songs embodied:

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The precious gems of the poetic genius of working-people and the never-fading colour of national holy culture. Over millennia folk singers and poets endowed the song with inspiration, tenderness, flight of thoughts and affection … Folk songs have always been a companion of warriors and rebels; they fought for the liberation of the people.91

Many folk programmes on Soviet TV and radio combined past and present. Through this process, media (and technology) functioned as fundamentally temporal and intervened in the processes by which people made meaning of the world.92 Soviet Ukrainian television and its media folklorism not only represented the culture of the past but also maintained the culture of the socialist present. Thus, Soviet Ukrainian television created a specific fairy-tale reality, in which the real and imagined, mythical and political coexisted93 and these features shaped its audience. Both a television set and a human have their own ‘bodies’ which form an inter-corporeal relation, in which a person can extend their own corporeality into the world through metaphors. Since humans perceive themselves as containers and other entities as containers with insides and outsides, embodied metaphors help them to understand the world, or to make it real. Lakoff and Johnson argue94 that our perceptions (for instance of space) are fundamentally grounded in our embodiment and at the same time in the compound variety of metaphors that we collect. For instance, the frame ontology (where the media screen is considered as a metaphor for a window-frame) of visual perception presupposes that a screen ‘divides space into that which is “inside” and that which lies “outside” its boundary’.95 Thus, we can assume that this ontology allowed the viewer to travel beyond their home, in which the television set was situated. Many people, like Nastenko from the Ternopil region, appreciated television programmes that aimed to recover national traditions and allowed a reminiscence of the past. After watching a programme, which offered a window to a remote past, he claimed in a letter to a media committee: ‘We have seen and listened to the native word of our parents and ancestors as they celebrated the tradition of our nation’.96 After Sunny Clarinets, N. Sokil from the industrial Dnipropetrovsk region wrote that due to such television content, ‘A person connects his soul to the national headspring and a cradle of folk art, it’s as if the wings grow the most, so it enriches and cleanses the person of the routine, greyness or sorrows of everyday life’.97 The native world of one’s ancestors, seen through the poetic metaphor of a cradle or a spring/water well,98 obviously had the magical power to reconnect a person with the past. But this imaginary past also possessed the power to evoke the meaning of life, to get away from the greyness or sorrows of everyday life. The magnifying eye of television worked as a magic mirror with which the Soviet people could travel to a different reality, a media fairy-tale reality.



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Soviet television’s folk-like and ritualistic character made people believe in what they had seen on the television screen. For instance, I.M. Kocherovskyi from L’viv trusted in the way in which the folk programmes connected him with the past: ‘Everything was shown as it was once in reality … We were brought to the depths of the soul by all that is wonderful and pleases the hearts – songs, chants, folk carols’.99 Thus, this person saw a televised media performance as if it was showing real folk culture. Besides presenting performance as reality, television also had the power to re-establish among the audience specific feelings of belonging. Some people, who lived in other Soviet republics and could watch Ukrainian television, rediscovered their lost sense of national belonging through such folk media, like Ivashchenko L. from Chisinau (Moldova).100 A. Shpak from the Murmansk region in the Russian Federation said that when he listened to Ukrainian folk songs, he imagined himself travelling back to Ukraine. His mediatized imaginary brought him to the banks of the Dnipro River and his father’s house.101 This fairy-tale reality of socialist television was often conveyed through media rituals, such as radio or television festivals. Researchers of ritualized cultural forms admit that, historically, these short-term events were intended to celebrate various bonds (ethnic, national or religious). Festivals, carnivals and fairs ‘have been important forms of social and cultural participation, used to articulate and communicate shared values, ideologies and mythologies central to the worldview of relatively localized communities’.102 Soviet media festivals possessed the power to represent these localized communities and to shape them into certain groups of solidarities. At the same time, however, such festivals represented and encouraged various aspects of cultural and national differences. They could easily adjust cultural performance for media consumption, or imitate ethnic or national authenticity through a highly kitsch folklorism, which at the same time could awaken real feelings of belonging.

Conclusions After 1968 and prompted by the USSR invasion of Czechoslovakia, some cultural policies were modified in socialist countries. Officials strived to develop an appropriate popular culture that could attract citizens and compete with Western capitalist media. As a result of this normalization and media reform, the Soviet mediascape developed folk or neo-folk programming, which was extremely popular among audiences. Ritualistic, repetitive, picturesque and very emotive television programmes visualized folk culture and produced adapted neo-folk, which was often called folklorism.

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By producing multiple popular television shows for Soviet audiences, officials and media producers created in the 1970s a specific media(land)scape, a certain imaginary which combined real and imagined worlds. As in many other countries, Soviet Ukrainian television functioned as a major instrument of national imagination and therefore identity formation. But its mediascape103 worked differently to other socialist countries: it enforced de-territorialization (supranational, Soviet identity) and at the same time re-territorialization (local, national) of identities in Soviet Ukraine.104 Radio and television created remote spaces of media through which moving images (television) and voices (radio) met de-territorialized viewers and in such places ‘imagination has become a collective, social fact’.105 The Soviet mediascape created a paradox, where local identities were universalized through socialist modernization and at the same time were promised an imagined local homeland (similar to the German Heimat106) as offered by regional/republican television. Furthermore, Soviet television developed in the 1970s not just as an ideological or informational institution, but as a form of media folklore that produced a specific media fairy-tale reality. My analysis of archival sources related to Soviet Ukrainian television after 1968 exemplifies that this popular television also shaped specific corporeal practices. The Soviet regime of visuality in the 1970s aimed to form socialist persons as political beings,107 while visual bodies developed the signifying practices within the fields of social pyramids and of essential organization of the public.108 Soviet television as an audio-visual media maintained important needs for identity – corporeal, regional or national. Folk television programmes had the power to create subjects with certain forms of identity because they played out differences, indicated by visual bodies, costume and language. Soviet Ukrainians not only saw other ethnic/ national groups on their TV screens, but also recognized how they themselves were seen. A TV set as a container was placed in the most important spaces of socialist apartments – namely the living room, bearing important metaphors about truth and reality. It influenced the bodies and other objects in these private spaces, being inscribed into the visual regime of knowledge. Thus, everything that was seen through the screen and the box container was perceived as really existing. Therefore, folk television programmes that conveyed cultural phenomena from the remote past gave Soviet citizens the possibility to travel in time and space. This black container that brought to an apartment a metaphor of the screen or a window made people believe their physical bodies and visible-on-a-TV-set bodies were the same, or belonged to the same family or a community of sentiment. Such spatiosomatics of Soviet television combined the human body, space and technical vision into a new corporeality.



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Working as an imaginary as well as a physical container, through which people could travel in time and space, Soviet television shaped a particular social temporality. Visual media functioned as fundamentally temporal and intervened in the processes by which people made meaning of the world. Thus, embodied visual metaphors helped Soviet people to realize the world, to make it real. This situation after 1968 indicated the crisis of identity in socialist societies, where media spectacle, certain forms of narcissism and aestheticism started to dominate. Like in the Western societies, where the performance of identity (as practice and experience) had become entangled with the media and everyday lives,109 socialist media fostered performative corporeality in which audiences recognized themselves reacting to other televisual performances. From a communication media, Soviet television partially turned into something through which one could experience and as something to which one could relate.110 Bohdan Shumylovych has a master’s degree in modern history from the Central European University (Budapest, Hungary, 2004–2005) and a diploma in art history from the L’viv Academy of Arts (Ukraine, 1993–99). He was a fellow of several grant programmes and worked with the archive of the Faculty of Visual Arts at George Washington University, Washington (USA) and the archive of the Open Society Institute (www.osaarchivum. org) in Budapest. In 2020 he received a PhD from the European University Institute in Florence and lectures at the Cultural Studies Department of the Ukrainian Catholic University (Lviv, Ukraine). At the Center for Urban History (L’viv), he coordinates the public history programme, gives lectures, participates in the development of the thematic exhibitions, and carries out research. The main focus of his work is media history in EastCentral Europe and the Soviet Union, as well as media arts, visual studies, urban spatial practices and creativity.

Notes 1.  MacDougall, The Corporeal Image, 1. 2.  Bailey, Prehistoric Figurines, 118, 140. 3.  Yarskaja-Smirnova and Romanov, ‘“Glaznoi Sovetskii Chelovek”’. 4.  Clark, The Soviet Novel, 252. 5.  Yekelchyk, Stalin’s Citizens, 3. 6.  Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 220; Halfin, From Darkness to Light; Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin. 7.  Jay, ‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity’. 8.  ‘Letters’ (January 1982), Arkush 254–55. 9.  ‘Letters’ (1981), Arkush 325.

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10.  Television festivals were a popular genre of Soviet media, which combined live competitions and features of a media show, recorded in a studio. The most popular television festival in the USSR was Pesnya goda (Song of the Year), which started in 1971. 11.  ‘Visnyk’ (1986), Arkush 61. 12.  My archival sources come from the Central State Archives of Supreme Bodies of Power and Government of Ukraine, abbreviated as TsDAVO. See https://tsdavo.gov.ua/en. 13.  Lenoe, ‘Letter-Writing and the State’, 139. 14.  Letters were studied by the earlier school of Sovietology, but not to a great extent. See Inkeles and Geiger, ‘Critical Letters to the Editors of the Soviet Press’. 15.  Fitzpatrick, ‘Signals from Below’; Fitzpatrick, ‘Supplicants and Citizens’. 16.  White, ‘Political Communications in the USSR’; Lampert, Whistle-Blowing in the Soviet Union; Freeze, From Supplication to Revolution. 17.  Dimitrov, ‘What the Party Wanted to Know’. 18.  Fürst, ‘In Search of Soviet Salvation’; Parker, ‘Voices of the New Soviet Woman’; Shaw, ‘Soldiers’ Letters to Inobatxon and O’g’ulxon’. 19.  Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain; Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism; Halfin, Terror in My Soul; Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind. 20.  Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More; Beliakova, ‘“We Ask You to Put an End to Lawlessness”’. 21.  Lenoe, ‘Letter-Writing and the State’, 140. 22.  It is important to highlight that the periods of Soviet history after 1968 differ substantially from the early Soviet power system. The 1970s and 1980s did not witness violence to the same degree as in the 1930s or 1940s, thus sending letters to the authorities could involve very different expectations and results, for both sides of the communication. 23.  See the valuable reassessment of protest in post-war Europe: Klimke, Pekelder and Scharloth, Between Prague Spring and French May. 24.  Žabić, ‘Martin Klimke, Jacco Pekelder, Joachim Scharloth’, 489. 25.  Bren, The Greengrocer and His TV. 26.  Vaclav Havel likened Czechoslovakian popular media culture to a form of socialist propaganda in his essay, the title of which referred to an official TV show. See Havel, ‘Zpívá Celá Rodina (The Whole Family Sings)’. 27.  See for instance Czechoslovakian examples, Bren, The Greengrocer and His TV, 119. Christine E. Evans stressed that Soviet television producers largely ignored the complaints about boring programming. See Evans, Between Truth and Time, 50–51. In the early 1970s, Erich Honecker described East German television as boring, and called on broadcasters to provide their audiences with more entertainment. See Havens, Imre and Lustyk, Popular Television in Eastern Europe, 18. 28.  Mickiewicz, Split Signals, 26–27. 29.  Mihelj, ‘Popular Television in Socialist Times’, 17. 30.  Bren, The Greengrocer and His TV, 121. 31.  Debord, Society of the Spectacle. 32.  See how Ukrainian officials and the general public reacted to Prague Spring in 1968: Wojnowski, The Near Abroad, 105–40. 33.  Mickiewicz, Split Signals, 153. 34.  Gleb Tsipursky claims that debates about the socialist upbringing and taste had already intensified in 1956–57. See Tsipursky, Socialist Fun, 134–63. 35.  Mickiewicz, Split Signals, 210. 36.  Kellner, Media Spectacle. 37.  International Television Festival Rainbow [Raduga] was initiated by the Main Editorial of Folk Arts at Soviet Central TV in 1975. This editorial also produced famous programmes like Our Address – USSR, To Wider a Circle, Meeting with Stage Masters and so on, which were



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broadcast from prestigious venues in Moscow, such as the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall, the Moscow Conservatory and the Moscow Television Theatre. See the recollections of V. Kozlovskii who served as vice-director of the editorial: Kozlovskii, Televideniie; Kozlovskii, ‘Narodnoie tvorchestvo - stremleniie k prekrasnomu’. 38.  Alekseyev and Maksimov, ‘Fol’klor i Tekhnicheskaia Kommunikatsiia’, 30. 39.  Ibid., 13. 40.  Vasilieva, ‘Samodeiatelnost’. 41.  Zorkaia, ‘Khorovod v elektronnom luche’, 34. 42.  Šmidchens, ‘Folklorism Revisited’, 56. 43.  Zorkaia, ‘Khorovod v elektronnom luche’, 37. The number of countries participating in this media event doubled between 1976 and 1985, from twenty-four to fifty-seven. 44.  Zorkaia, Na Rubezhe Stoletij, 300. 45.  This centre was reorganized in 1970 from the Scientific-Methodological Division, the structural part of the Soviet Media Committee (Gosteleradio SSR). See Evans, Between Truth and Time, 51–52. 46.  Kozlovskii, ‘Narodnoie tvorchestvo - stremleniie k prekrasnomu’. 47.  Shekhtman, Iskusstvo Millionov, 7. 48.  On Soviet television audiences, see Evans, Between Truth and Time, 49–81. Russian pop-journalist Fedor Razzakov claims there were some 130 million daily Soviet viewers in 1986. See Razzakov, Gibel Sovetskogo TV, 264. Even though there are no sources to back Razzakov’s claims, this number seems plausible. 49.  ‘Planning’ (1981). 50.  Barka, Khliborobskyi Orfei Abo Kliarnetyzm, 9. 51.  Folk people or farmers were often compared with nature, which was a ‘blessing’, since they were unspoiled by civilization. At the same time, however, nature was a sign of backwardness. 52.  This television programme was broadcast on Saturdays, the same day that the Rainbow festival was broadcast from Moscow. Thus, people living in Ukraine could enjoy both all-Soviet folklore and national folklore, with the programmes shown on the same day but different channels. 53.  Vergelis, ‘Ukraiino zhadai pro talant’. He admits that professionals from Ukrainian TV were behind the Sunny Clarinets festival – Tamara Pavlenko, Tamara Stratienko, Natalia Riabchuk and Elina Volokh. 54.  Ibid. 55.  Often such programmes really targeted farmers, who wrote collective letters to Ukrainian TV to express their gratitude for being able to see the ‘nature of the Ukrainian village and its beautiful singing’. See ‘Letters’ (1981), Arkush 31. 56.  Vergelis, ‘Ukraiino zhadai pro talant’. 57.  ‘Soniachni Klarnety’ (1984), Arkush 36. 58.  The idea of ‘normal people’ was often used by Soviet media. Alexei Yurchak widely used the notion of ‘normal people’ in his work: Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More. Sheila Fitzpatrick even used this concept as the title of her critical review of Yurchak’s book. See Fitzpatrick, ‘Normal People’. See how the idea of normal people is incorporated in other works on the late Soviet 1980s: Klumbyte and Sharafutdinova, Soviet Society in the Era of Late Socialism, 8; Zigon, ‘HIV Is God’s Blessing’, 150. 59.  ‘Soniachni Klarnety’ (1984), Arkush 41. 60.  American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi discovered in the 1980s that joy is a crucial aspect of happiness that humans can achieve. He separated pleasure from enjoyment, considering the latter as a source of experiencing novelty and accomplishment. See Csikszentmihalyi, Flow, 46. See more detailed work on joy: Meadows, A Psychological Perspective.

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61.  Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 8. 62.  Ibid., 8. 63.  Ukraine is a vast country and even today it experiences challenges in its road infrastructure, thus many regions of the country are not connected with each other. The major instrument for imagining a nation and Ukrainian territory was the Soviet media, therefore a television festival bringing together various ethnographic regions on the TV screen functioned as ‘print capitalism’ in nineteenth-century Europe, albeit more emotionally charged. 64.  Elena Petrushanskaia claims that television shaped the basic daily and yearly rituals of common people, which often reflected ancient mythical/poetic traditions. See Vartanov, Televideniie Mezhdu Iskusstvom I Massmedia, 274–75. In this respect Soviet television could be seen as similar to a ritual, described by Victor Turner: Turner, The Drums of Affliction, 1–2. The structure of Turner’s ritual is analysed here: Deflem, ‘Ritual, Anti-Structure, and Religion’, 5. 65.  ‘Letters’ (1981), Arkush 247–48. 66.  Ibid., Arkush 254. 67.  Zorkaia, ‘Otmenno Dlinnyi, Dlinnyi Film’. 68.  Ibid. 69.  Zorkaia, ‘Khorovod v elektronnom luche’. 70.  The term ‘fairy-tale reality’ (or ‘fairy-reality’) derives from media theory. A similar notion, which unites reality television and fairy-tales, was conceptualized by Jack Z. Bratich, who used the concept of ‘faireality tales’. I use ‘fairy-tale reality’ instead of ‘faireality’ because the former notion describes the magic and imaginary power of fictional television while the latter is connected to the specific genre of reality television. Since my thesis is not concerned with reality television, I propose the term fairy-tale reality to describe the imaginary or fictional character of socialist television. 71.  Bratich, ‘Programming Reality’, 20. 72.  Benvenuto and Kennedy, The Works of Jacques Lacan, 47; Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative’. 73.  For media events characterized by the conjunction of live and remote, interrupted and pre-planned broadcasting, see Katz and Dayan, Media Events, 7–14. 74.  Kirsanova, ‘Telefestival “Raduga” i Traditsii Narodnogo Kostiuma’, 69–70. 75.  Bromlei, Etnos i Etnografiia, 7. 76.  Bailey, Prehistoric Figurines, 141. See also: Robert Stam and Ella Shohat, ‘Narrativizing Visual Culture: Towards a Polycentric Aesthetics’, in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (London: Routledge, 1998), 27–49. 77.  Bailey, Prehistoric Figurines, 141. 78.  Schilder, The Image and Appearance of the Human Body; Gatens, Imaginary Bodies; Gatens, ‘Power, Bodies and Difference’, 229. 79.  Bailey, Prehistoric Figurines, 141. 80.  Yunisov, ‘Samodeiatelnyi Chelovek’, 98. 81.  Sappak, ‘Iskusstvo Kotoroie Rozhdaietsia’; Ksenofontov, ‘Eto ne film, eto po nastoyashchemu’. 82.  Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 8. 83.  Evans, Between Truth and Time; Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time. 84.  Richardson, ‘Telebodies and Televisions’, 184. 85.  ‘Letters’ (1981), Arkush 217–18. 86.  Ibid., Arkush 18. 87.  Ibid., Arkush 19. 88.  Mirzoeff, An Introduction to Visual Culture, 174. 89.  Richardson, ‘Telebodies and Televisions’, 190. 90.  Butler, ‘Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions’, 421.



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91.  ‘Letters’ (January 1982), Arkush 22. 92.  Barker, Time and the Digital, 27. 93.  McLuhan, ‘Myth and Mass Media’, 340. 94.  Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By. 95.  Richardson, ‘Telebodies and Televisions’, 179. 96.  ‘Letters’ (1981), Arkush 9. 97.  Ibid., Arkush 10. 98.  See the metaphor of the water well in Iurii Illienko’s film Well for the Thirsty (1965), which was banned by officials for its anti-Soviet depiction of reality. 99.  ‘Letters’ (1981), Arkush 9. 100.  Ibid., Arkush 217. 101.  Ibid., Arkush 217. 102.  Woodward, Taylor and Bennett, The Festivalization of Culture, 1. 103.  Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and Difference’. 104.  Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 3. 105.  Ibid., 5. 106.  This German concept depicts, as Appadurai claims, ‘a human need for locality’, conveying a sense of belonging. See Eigler and Kugele, Heimat, 1. The idea of Heimat is often used to analyse national identity and also features in media studies. See Palmowski, ‘Building an East German Nation’; Kostetskaya, ‘East or West, Rodina Is Best’; Vickers, ‘Moving Homes and Homelands on Television’. 107.  Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’; Bordo, ‘Feminism, Foucault and the Politics of the Body’. 108.  Butler, ‘Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions’, 419. 109.  Hill, ‘Media Audiences and Reception Studies’, 5. 110.  Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, 92–93.

Bibliography Alekseyev, Eduard, and V. Maksimov. ‘Fol’klor i Tekhnicheskaia Kommunikatsiia’, in V. Maksimov and A. Sokolskaya (eds), Fol’klor i Viktorina: Narodnoie Tvorchestvo v Vek Televideniia (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1988), 12–31. Appadurai, Arjun. ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’. Theory, Culture and Society 7(2) (1990), 295–310. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Bailey, Douglass Whitfield. Prehistoric Figurines: Representation and Corporeality in the Neolithic. London: Routledge, 2005. Barka, Vasyl. Khliborobskyi Orfei Abo Kliarnetyzm. New York: Suchasnist, 1961. Barker, Timothy Scott. Time and the Digital: Connecting Technology, Aesthetics, and a Process Philosophy of Time. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2012. Beliakova, Nadezhda. ‘“We Ask You to Put an End to Lawlessness”: Soviet Believers’ Letters of 1960–1980s as a Form of Communication with the Government’. Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences 236 (2016), 310–14. Benvenuto, Bice, and Roger Kennedy. The Works of Jacques Lacan: An Introduction. New York: Martin’s Press, 1986. Bordo, Susan. ‘Feminism, Foucault and the Politics of the Body’, in Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick (eds), Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 1999), 246–57.

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Bratich, Jack Z. ‘Programming Reality: Control Societies, New Subjects and the Powers of Transformation’, in Dana Heller (ed.), Makeover Television: Realities Remodelled (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007). Bren, Paulina. The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010. Bromlei, Yulian. Etnos i Etnografiia. Moscow: Nauka, 1973. Butler, Judith. ‘Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions’, in Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick (eds), Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 1999), 416–22. Clark, Katerina. The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual. 3rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper Perennial, 2009. Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black&Red, 1970. Deflem, Mathieu. ‘Ritual, Anti-Structure, and Religion: A Discussion of Victor Turner’s Processual Symbolic Analysis’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 30(1) (1991), 1–25. Dimitrov, Martin K. ‘What the Party Wanted to Know: Citizen Complaints as a “Barometer of Public Opinion” in Communist Bulgaria’. East European Politics and Societies 28(2) (2014), 271–95. Eigler, Friedrike, and Jens Kugele (eds). Heimat: At the Intersection of Memory and Space. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012. Evans, Christine Elaine. Between Truth and Time: A History of Soviet Central Television. London: Yale University Press, 2016. Fitzpatrick, Sheila. Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Fitzpatrick, Sheila. ‘Normal People’. London Review of Books, 25 May 2006. Fitzpatrick, Sheila. ‘Signals from Below: Soviet Letters of Denunciation of the 1930s’. The Journal of Modern History 68(4) (1996), 831–66. Fitzpatrick, Sheila. ‘Supplicants and Citizens: Public Letter-Writing in Soviet Russia in the 1930s’. Slavic Review 55(1) (1996), 78–105. Foucault, Michel. ‘The Subject and Power’. Critical Inquiry (1982), 777–95. Freeze, G. L. From Supplication to Revolution: A Documentary Social History of Imperial Russia. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Fürst, Juliane. ‘In Search of Soviet Salvation: Young People Write to the Stalinist Authorities’. Contemporary European History 15(3) (2006), 327–45. Gatens, Moira. Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality. London: Routledge, Psychology Press, 1996. Gatens, Moira. ‘Power, Bodies and Difference’, in Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick (eds), Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 1999), 227–34. Halfin, Igal. From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000. Halfin, Igal. Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Havel, Vaclav. ‘Zpívá Celá Rodina (The Whole Family Sings)’, 25 August 1975. https:// archive.vaclavhavel-library.org/Archive/All?event=15330&lang=en. Havens, Timothy, Aniko Imre, and Katalin Lustyk (eds). Popular Television in Eastern Europe during and since Socialism. Routledge Advances in Internationalizing Media Studies. London: Routledge, 2012. Hellbeck, Jochen. Revolution on My Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Hellbeck, Jochen. Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.



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Hill, Annette. ‘Media Audiences and Reception Studies’, in Elena Di Giovanni and Yves Gambier (eds), Reception Studies and Audiovisual Translation (John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2018), 3–20. Ihde, Don. Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Inkeles, Alex, and Kent Geiger. ‘Critical Letters to the Editors of the Soviet Press: Areas and Modes of Complaint’. American Sociological Review 17(6) (1952), 694–703. Jay, Martin. ‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity’, in Nicholas Mirzoeff (ed.), The Visual Culture Reader (London: Routledge, 1998), 66–69. Katz, Elihu, and Daniel Dayan. Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Kellner, Douglas M. Media Spectacle. New York: Routledge, 2003. Kirsanova, Raisa. ‘Telefestival “Raduga” i Traditsii Narodnogo Kostiuma’, in V. Maksimov and A. Sokolskaya (eds), Fol’klor i Viktorina: Narodnoie Tvorchestvo v Vek Televideniia (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1988), 69–78. Klimke, Martin, Jacco Pekelder and Joachim Scharloth (eds). Between Prague Spring and French May: Opposition and Revolt in Europe, 1960–1980. New York: Berghahn Books, 2011. Klumbyte, Neringa, and Gulnaz Sharafutdinova. Soviet Society in the Era of Late Socialism, 1964–1985. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012. Kostetskaya, Anastasia. ‘East or West, Rodina Is Best: Shaping a Socialist “Heimat” in German and Soviet Film of the Occupation Period’. German Life and Letters 69(4) (2016), 519–36. Kotkin, Stephen. Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Kozlovskii, V. ‘Narodnoie tvorchestvo – stremleniie k prekrasnomu’. Soviet Television History, http://www.tvmuseum.ru/ (blog). Retrieved 22 January 2017 from http://www. tvmuseum.ru/catalog.asp?ob_no=7190. Kozlovskii, V. Televideniie. Vzgliad Iznutri. 1957-1996 Gody. Moscow: Gotika, 2002. Ksenofontov, Valentin. ‘Eto ne film, eto po nastoyashchemu’. Ogoniok, 1 January 1968. Lacan, Jacques. ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’, in Michael Ryan and Julie Rivkin (eds), Literary Theory: An Anthology (Hoboken: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 441–47. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Lampert, Nicholas. Whistle-Blowing in the Soviet Union: Complaints and Abuses under State Socialism. Berlin: Springer, 1985. Lenoe, Matthew E. ‘Letter-Writing and the State: Reader Correspondence with Newspapers as a Source for Early Soviet History’. Cahiers Du Monde Russe. Russie-Empire Russe-Union Soviétique et États Indépendants 40(1–2) (1999), 139–70. ‘Letters’. Ukrainian Committee of Television and Radio, 1981. Fond 4915, Opys 2, Sprava 56. TsDAVO of Ukraine, Central State Archives of Supreme Bodies of Power and Government of Ukraine. ‘Letters’. Ukrainian Committee of Television and Radio, January 1982. TsDAVO, Fond 4915, Opys 2, Sprava 572. TsDAVO, Central State Archives of Supreme Bodies of Power and Government of Ukraine. MacDougall, David. The Corporeal Image. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. McLuhan, Marshall. ‘Myth and Mass Media’. Daedalus 88(2) (1959), 339–48. Meadows, Chris. A Psychological Perspective on Joy and Emotional Fulfillment. London: Routledge, 2013. Mickiewicz, Ellen Propper. Split Signals: Television and Politics in the Soviet Union. Communication and Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

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Mihelj, Sabina. ‘Popular Television in Socialist Times’, in Timothy Havens, Anikó Imre and Katalin Lustyik (eds), Popular Television in Eastern Europe during and since Socialism (London: Routledge, 2012). Mirzoeff, Nicholas (ed.). An Introduction to Visual Culture. London: Routledge, 1999. Palmowski, Jan. ‘Building an East German Nation: The Construction of a Socialist Heimat, 1945–1961’. Central European History 37(3) (2004), 365–99. Parker, Hannah. ‘Voices of the New Soviet Woman: Gender, Emancipation and Agency in Letters to the Soviet State, 1924–1941’. PhD Thesis, Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England: University of Sheffield, 2018. ‘Planning’. Ukrainian Committee of Television and Radio, 1981. Fond 4915, Opys 2, Sprava 21. TsDAVO of Ukraine, Central State Archives of Supreme Bodies of Power and Government of Ukraine. Razzakov, Fedor. Gibel Sovetskogo TV: tainy televideniia ot Stalina do Gorbacheva, 1930–1991. Moscow: EKSMO, 2009. Richardson, Ingrid. ‘Telebodies and Televisions: Corporeality and Agency in Technoculture’. PhD Thesis, Sydney: Western Sydney University, 2003. Roth-Ey, Kristin. Moscow Prime Time: How the Soviet Union Built the Media Empire That Lost the Cultural Cold War. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. Sappak, Vladimir. ‘Iskusstvo Kotoroie Rozhdaietsia’. Voprosy Literatury (1962). Schilder, Paul M. The Image and Appearance of the Human Body: Studies in the Constructive Energies of the Psyche. Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1978. Shaw, Charles. ‘Soldiers’ Letters to Inobatxon and O’g’ulxon: Gender and Nationality in the Birth of a Soviet Romantic Culture’. Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 17(3) (2016), 517–52. Shekhtman, Leonid. Iskusstvo Millionov. Moscow: Znaniie, 1968. Šmidchens, Guntis. ‘Folklorism Revisited’. Journal of Folklore Research 36(1) (April 1999), 51–70. ‘Soniachni Klarnety’. Ukrainian Committee of Television and Radio, 1984. TsDAVO, Fond 4915, Opys 2, Sprava 1910. TsDAVO, Central State Archives of Supreme Bodies of Power and Government of Ukraine. Stam, Robert, and Ella Shohat. ‘Narrativizing Visual Culture: Towards a Polycentric Aesthetics’, in Nicholas Mirzoeff (ed.) The Visual Culture Reader (London: Routledge, 1999), 37–59. Tsipursky, Gleb. Socialist Fun: Youth, Consumption, and State-Sponsored Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1945–1970. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016. Turner, Victor. The Drums of Affliction: A Study of Religious Processes among the Ndembu of Zambia. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968. Vartanov, Anri Surenovich (ed.). Televideniie Mezhdu Iskusstvom I Massmedia. Moscow: Gosudarstvennyi Institut iskusstvoznaniia, 2015. Vasilieva, Zinaida. ‘Samodeiatelnost: V Poiskakh Sovetskoi Modernosti’. NLO 4(128) (2014). http://magazines.russ.ru/nlo/2014/128/9v.html. Vergelis, Oleh. ‘Ukraiino zhadai pro talant… Legendarna TB programa “Soniachni klarnety” kolys’ vidkryla sotni samorodkiv’. ZN, 29 December 2010. https://dt.ua/CULTURE/ ukrayino,_zgaday_pro_talant__legendarna_tb-programa_sonyachni_klarneti_kolis_vidkrila_sotni_samorodk.html/. Vickers, Paul. ‘Moving Homes and Homelands on Television: (West) Germany’s Heimat and Poland’s Dom’. Oxford German Studies 47(1) (2018), 103–24. ‘Visnyk’. Ukrainian Committee of Television and Radio, 1986. Fond 4915, Opys 2, Sprava 2949. TsDAVO, Central State Archives of Supreme Bodies of Power and Government of Ukraine.



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White, Stephen. ‘Political Communications in the USSR: Letters to Party, State and Press’. Political Studies 31(1) (1983), 43–60. Wojnowski, Zbigniew. The Near Abroad: Socialist Eastern Europe and Soviet Patriotism in Ukraine, 1956–1985. 1st ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. Woodward, Ian, Jodie Taylor and Andy Bennett (eds). The Festivalization of Culture. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2014. Yarskaja-Smirnova, Elena, and Pavel Romanov. ‘“Glaznoi Sovetskii Chelovek”: pravila (podo)zreniia’, in Yarskaja-Smirnova, Elena, and Pavel Romanov (eds), Vizualnaia antropologiia: regimy vidimosti pri sotsializme (Moscow: Variant, CSPGS, 2009), 7–17. Yekelchyk, Serhy. Stalin’s Citizens: Everyday Politics in the Wake of Total War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Yunisov, Milihat. ‘Samodeiatelnyi Chelovek: Sledy k Televizionnomu Portretu’, in V. Maksimov and A. Sokolskaya (eds), Fol’klor i Viktorina: Narodnoie Tvorchestvo v Vek Televideniia (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1988), 95–104. Yurchak, Alexei. Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013. Žabić, Sarah. ‘Martin Klimke, Jacco Pekelder, Joachim Scharloth, Eds. Between Prague Spring and French May: Opposition and Revolt in Europe, 1960–1980. New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2011’. Peace & Change 38(4) (2013), 488–90. Zigon, Jarrett. ‘HIV Is God’s Blessing’: Rehabilitating Morality in Neoliberal Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Zorkaia, Neia. ‘Khorovod v elektronnom luche’, in V. Maksimov and A. Sokolskaya (eds), Fol’klor i viktorina: narodnoie tvorchestvo v vek televideniia (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1988), 32–46. Zorkaia, Neia. ‘Otmenno Dlinnyi, Dlinnyi Film’. Sovetskij Ekran, no. 1 (1975). http://akter. kulichki.net/se/01_1975.htm. Zorkaia, Neia Markovna. Na Rubezhe Stoletij: U Istokov Massovogo Iskusstva v Rossii 1900–1910 Hh. Moscow: Nauka, 1976.

CHAPTER

4

Bartering and Cross-Border Embodied Performances Annelis Kuhlmann

The notion of bartering has a long history in the fields of both anthropology and economics. Originally, bartering entailed the exchange of goods for other goods, rather than the exchange of goods for money, but as long as the credit and debt relationship has a temporal dimension, many anthropologists would argue that bartering lacks lasting social ties. However, if we apply the notion of bartering to the field of performing arts, in particular to theatricality and performativity, there is a chance to overcome the limitations of space-time, due to the interaction embedded in the very event. At this point, the notion of bartering can be seen as a potential tool for a social movement.1 According to Jacques Rancière, the borders become meaningful through sensory perception and can only be eligible and understandable for people via forms of aesthetic sensitivity that we learn as geo-political subjects.2 The theatre group Odin Teatret, based in Holstebro, Denmark and founded by Italian-born theatre director Eugenio Barba, took up cultural bartering as a practice form. A cultural barter could take place in a crowded urban district or isolated rural zone, in ghettos, among immigrants or within specific ethnic or religious minorities. It could also take place in hospitals, community centres, prisons, schools, and it could engage with, for example, the fire brigade, the police, a rock club, rappers, a church and its parishioners, the patients of a psychiatric institution, children in a kindergarten and



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many other groups of people. The constellation of participants in a cultural barter is often surprising because the encounter itself upturns and challenges common social patterns. In the context of theatre, bartering highlights the physical exchange involved in interculturalism, as described by Adam Ledger and others.3 Performance practices are negotiated with the audience demonstrating their knowledge of particular civil practices or, for instance, craftsmanship, biographical accounts or culinary traditions. This negotiation of practices allows the exchange of the spectators’ knowledge with the actors’ performance skills. It is ultimately an exchange of cultures. In this case, there is also an audience to the bartering, which often ends in a public promenade performance in pedestrian precincts, at local sports facilities or parks, where people can easily join in. The barter process can be seen as a device in cultural activism that, in Ian Watson’s words, has a sense of the boundary-crossing qualities of the performance paradigm in Eugenio Barba’s bridge-building concept of Barter Theatre.4 The bartering in Odin Teatret’s early practices was strongly related to a democratization of culture, an attempt to make theatre relevant for people who were complete strangers to theatre in general terms, and therefore regarded actors as foreigners. According to Watson, bartering in the realm of theatre has ‘much to offer our understanding of the world’.5 At the centre of such understandings of cultural encounters, the notion of interaction between participants in a shared performance is key to the idea of cultural barter. This particular interaction also draws on terminology from the German theatre scholar Erika Fischer-Lichte’s book, Ästhetik des Performativen.6 Fischer-Lichte investigates what happens when not only spaces are shared but also bodies and a time-space of co-existence, which becomes characterized by an eternal feedback loop. Among her favourite and very famous examples are the works of German artist Joseph Beuys (1921–86) and the Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović (born 1946). Marina Abramović has in particular devoted almost her entire oeuvre to strong performative exchanges, namely engaging with the audience. I shall come back to her work later in this chapter. Odin Teatret has embraced the notion of bartering for almost fifty years as an exchange of performing skills.7 The bartering has been used as a way to overcome the cultural and spatial boundaries between theatre and audience groups as well as between actors and onlookers. The unconventional and hybrid form of theatre that Odin Teatret’s cross-border bartering represents raises not only artistic issues but also cultural, political, and even health considerations. The aim of this chapter is to investigate the notion of bartering as an intercultural and social performance practice. It does so by exploring a set

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of examples that offer ways of embodied communication across borders, where physical creativity and aesthetics are employed as anti-conflict criteria for cross-border embodied memories. The chapter opens with a discussion of a barter event that took place in Denmark during the Covid-19 pandemic in the first half of 2020. This durational event was documented by Danish television. The second part of the chapter takes the notion of cultural barter back to its historical origin in 1974. In the third part, this perspective is then applied to the use of cultural barter as an aesthetic tool in Odin Teatret’s The Trilogy of the Innocent – Three Landscapes of the Past, Present and a Near Future, directed by Eugenio Barba. The sources for this part come from research carried out by Ian Watson, Maria Shevtsova, Patrice Pavis and Adam Ledger, as well as my own research.8 Finally, in the fourth part of the chapter, the whole idea of barter as a dynamic life-affirming performance of cross-border embodied memories will be discussed as a means of engaging with temporality and theatre/performance historiography.

Cultural Barter I should like to start by framing the notion of cultural barter. Cultural barter implies that human and artistic presence can be achieved by using

Figure 4.1. The Trilogy of the Innocent: The Tree, The Chronic Life and Great Cities under the Moon. Icon Collage Photo: Odin Teatret.



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performance as a form of currency without any exchange of money.9 The barter often consists of a series of actions typically performed by two groups – a group of actors and a group of citizens. For example, farmers ‘perform’ a choreography with agricultural vehicles and demonstrate these actions to a group of police officers who in turn demonstrate their traffic signals (arm movements, hands with white gloves, whistles and so on). This exchange concept is applicable to other groups. The two groups perform their actions to one another while an audience watches, and this

Figure 4.2. Policeman and musical polar bear dancing. Cultural barter as performance parade. Odin Teatret Archives. Photo: Anette Vilstrup Roien.

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encounter between the involved groups forms the cultural barter. The barter is transformative, as it both presents and shares with the audience a highly unconventional experience in which often unexpected moments occur. The aim is to conquer difference and to achieve a collective experience, which crosses societal borders. Although bartering generally involves face-to-face contact, the global lockdowns that have occurred during the Covid-19 pandemic have generated a surprising number of successful ‘virtual’ cultural barters – namely on screens. This outcome is not only due to the global situation in which performing virtually has become a necessity, for significant educational institutions as well as for smaller theatre companies. A global platform for performance has become inevitable. The computer screen itself obviously represents a boundary between performers and onlookers/participants, but many performers have put great effort and ingenuity into overcoming the disconnection that screens represent. Throughout history, theatre has shifted through different practices of negotiating space for the very encounter between the stage and audience. Depending on the function of the theatre through conventions of ritual, art, politics and so on, the proximity between the physical stage and audience was emphasized with reference to the notion of theatrum mundi, meaning the world as a theatre.10 Lately, the theatrum mundi has re-emerged in discussions about cultural barter and immersive strategies. The relational practice of cultural barter reveals how different structures in the social web of human beings can be used artistically. Despite artistic evolutions over the many years of its existence, Odin Teatret has retained a spectacular and recognizable way of articulating the complexity of its relationships with the surrounding world. Bartering has always been part of the activities of this theatre group, which focuses on both an inclusive and a participatory side of the theatrical encounter between performers and audience. Bartering generates a community feeling which often gives the participants a sense of being and belonging to an ensemble and a tool of civic engagement.11 Obviously, experiences of cultural barter depend on the spectators, or the participating and interacting bodies. Some critics have questioned the intercultural position of those ‘conducting’ the cross-cultural encounters as a way of exploring the metaphor of debt or even guilt as an unbalanced and oppressive exploitation of cross-cultural communication. This perception is often rooted in a postcolonial discourse, where interculturalism has been seen as a sign of ethnocentric, often Eurocentric, cultural appropriation and where the notion of otherness can become highly problematic, for instance as seen from the third world.12 If one sees the notions of borders and bordering as filters, granting protection from both internal and external influence, then they could be



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compared to other aspects of security in society such as military, economic and migration security. However, borders also exist in a theatrical context, often characterized as mirroring situations, reflecting an action in a new light. In Aristotle’s Poetics this filter of reflection is called ‘mimesis’, referring to the playwright’s artistic reproduction of reality, which makes the spectators experience, reflect and empathize with the characters situated in the tragedy. However, in the contemporary performing arts context, a border is not regarded as a mirror, at least not a ‘realistic’ mirror, but rather as what could be called a distorted mirror, creating a sense of a rupture between the producer of the expression and the receiver of the message. The border unmakes the mimesis of the reflection effect, to allow the audience to discover the other rather than just ‘seeing’ the self and to encounter the other without losing the self. In Elin Diamond’s words, what is involved here is ‘mimesis in syncopated time’, referring to Gertrude Stein’s use of the musical term in her explanation of the nervousness she perceived as an emotional syncopation between the audience and the events on the stage.13 Diamond underlines the notion of syncopated time because the mirroring implies that there is a little delay (the syncope) in the identification on both sides of the mirroring, which weaves the relationship to time into temporality. Furthermore, the physical presence of both partners in the encounter together in the present moment underlines the whole experience of barter. The concept of cultural barter is regarded as a way of challenging bodies to perform differently in their own right, in a coordination of time across physical and metaphorical borders. None of the participants in the barter would define any power relationship or aesthetic quality of the barter. One of the major aims of barter involves exploiting/using a capital of existing professions and creative talents in a population. It is an inclusive practice and there is a general understanding that everybody can contribute something to achieve social and cultural sustainability through performative transcultural exchange. Abilities of all kinds are recycled in the encounter; everyday competences meet with exceptional talents. Some competences are performative and may belong to the world of theatre with reference to performances, some of which are already considered as classics. These classics contribute to writing our history of the present, even when they are woven into daily actions. However, not only classics, but also historical events attract people to participate in re-enactments.14 One can say that history is becoming recycled through re-enactments, which seen from a contemporary perspective become a sort of critical adjustment to expectations about the future. The re-enactments of narratives or events from the past prepare us for the future of history in the medium of the theatre.15

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Part One – Caring for Sharing Denmark has a long tradition of song in which folk songs and psalms have become part of the country’s cultural heritage. Ever since the midnineteenth century, when Denmark lost Southern Jutland to Germany in the war of 1864, singing has been strongly connected to democratic values and even political resistance, unifying the population on both sides of the border. This singing tradition has continued into the twenty-first century and the values associated with shared communal singing are important for keeping people connected. During the first half of 2020, people all over the world experienced social distancing due to the restrictions imposed because of the Covid19 pandemic. During this period, people realized how much they missed meeting others in person. Social isolation led to a longing to escape from the enclosed spaces in which people live and a desire to cross the boundaries that had been erected to protect public health. In some cities, people sang or even danced on their balconies as an expression of solidarity with their neighbours, using a new form of body language to communicate their emotions. Young people found ways to play tennis on the roofs of buildings and, in general, an overwhelming creativity emerged out of the lockdown situation. Famous performing artists, like musicians and actors, also showed their solidarity with audiences and an enormous number of artists gave web-based performances accessible to everybody. At Easter, in the imposing Duomo of Milan, the building in which Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem was first performed in 1874, the famous singer Andrea Bocelli performed in a solo concert called ‘Music for Hope’, which was transmitted to millions of people all over the world. I chose to mention this example because I found Bocelli’s concert a moving attempt to acknowledge the communal loneliness many experienced and to commemorate those who had suffered and died because of the pandemic. While it was not strictly a cultural barter, the symbol of diminishing the border was present with regard to the co-presence in ‘a spiritual barter’, as it took place in a church and Bocelli could be seen and heard online everywhere thanks to the streaming services. A particular kind of solidarity arose in various communities, giving the impression that out of deep necessity people had become far more aware of the importance of connecting with and helping their neighbours and of sharing social, artistic and humanistic values as if they were living in a global village. The dissemination of news, especially at the beginning of the lockdown, became more important than ever. Consequently, digital platforms as well as radio and television channels gained new functions and



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importance and became extraordinary meeting points via podcasts, concerts and performances. In Denmark, on the very first day of the country’s lockdown – Monday, 16 March 2020, when the geo-political borders closed – a prompt initiative came from the conductor of the Danish National Girls’ Choir, Phillip Faber. Faber is a well-known host on two national Danish television channels owing to his commitment to bringing classical music to broader audiences. He invited the entire country to join him, virtually, in singing together in real time. The first attempt was streamed on Facebook, on the Danish National Girls’ Choir page, while the other sessions were transmitted on Danish radio and television Channels 1 and 2. Faber’s project was an attempt to allow song to tear down what could be called (using a theatre expression) the imaginary ‘fourth wall’, behind which the actors perform – as though they are separated from and unaware of any audience. In fact, actors in conventional theatre houses are often unable to see out into the audience anyway because of the stage lights. This helps them to perform as if they were within an enclosed space, where, on the contrary, only the spectators can see the actors. This ‘wall’ is imaginary; it does not exist as a physical reality. In theatre conventions with the fourth wall, involved actors would not directly interact with the audience. Interaction would take place in more immersive performance structures and in video games. A television screen can be seen as such an imaginary fourth wall, and in the situation concerning Faber and the television viewers it turned out to become a symbolic wall, from the television media to the walls isolating the population in their homes.

Figure 4.3. ‘On this lonely planet’. Television viewers sing with Phillip Faber and the Danish National Girls’ Choir during lockdown. Photo: DR.

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Choir as Symbol of Gathering The Danish National Girls’ Choir consists of about fifty young women and girls aged between fifteen and twenty-two. It was founded in 1938, shortly before the beginning of the Second World War. Faber took over as the conductor of the choir in 2013 and both he and the choir have become a strong brand in the fields of classical and popular music, human voices and musical teambuilding – as well as being a flagship of Danish culture across borders. Many people in Denmark remember the tradition of morning song from their childhood. Some remember singing folk songs and national anthems at school, while others mainly recall romantic old songs, owing to the religious nature of many of the traditional songs, which they sang when they were children. There is an educational transformative aspect to the tradition of beginning each new day with a morning song. In the context of the pandemic, breathing has been a crucial topic, not only because of the consequences of the virus, affecting respiration, but also because of the resonating association with the tragic death of black American George Floyd on 25 May 2020. Floyd’s last words – ‘I can’t breathe’ – have become a symbol of racial injustice and suffering across the world. When singing, you not only fill your lungs with air, acquire cultural habits and learn songs by heart from an early age. You also, perhaps more instinctively, learn about the poetic rite of greeting the rising sun with a song. You gain a physical sense of being alive and ready to face a new day. In the context of this chapter, I regard morning singing as a collective activity, which has the quality of cultural barter in the case described below. Each day, Faber started by guiding his viewers through a few physical warm-up exercises (e.g. stretching the muscles around the mouth and rolling the hips), the purpose of which was to prepare the participants physically for the daily singing session. He encouraged and complimented the participants (whom he could not see, of course), representing up to one quarter of the population, who followed his exercises in their kitchens or dining rooms.16 Usually, Faber chose the two songs, but people were also asked to request songs via Facebook or email. Even the Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, and the Crown Princess Mary proposed their favourite songs, adding anecdotes about the singing habits of their respective families. The constantly changing suggestions gave the impression that social differences no longer applied and that the audience somehow all belonged to the same intimate national family. This intimacy also appealed to foreigners who were not familiar with this Danish tradition of communal song. The interaction also added a positive dimension to a situation of uncertainty, insecurity and potential fear.17



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At first glance, this somewhat peculiar practice looked quite strange because the physical presence of the barter was an almost childish illusion. However, after several days, once the regulation of public behaviour due to Covid-19 had been generally accepted by the population, people started to embrace this means of feeling connected to each other across the borders and boundaries that lockdown isolation had suddenly imposed. To many people’s surprises, the screen did not limit the experience of bodily presence or the feeling of being together despite the isolation. These fifteen-minute singing sessions turned into a collective daily ritual involving people of all ages, including Danes abroad in the global diaspora all over the planet. According to Helmuth Plessner’s philosophy in music anthropology, sound has a voluminous quality, which corresponds to the human body and, as Theocharis Raptis has pointed out, seeks to overcome a split in the body-mind dualism.18 Furthermore, it was as if the notion of the choir and the antiphon singing, for example from an ancient Greek tragedy, regained new life as a representative of the people’s physically present voices. The sense of belonging to a collective is strong. There is no leader in a choir; when singing in a choir, you soon realize that the individual is only valued because of the collective force of listening to all the other voices. The direct and metaphorical participatory value of being part of the collective singing became clear: each private home had become a performance venue from which the participants contributed with their own voices to a choir, singing songs that often referred to Danish history. Phillip Faber led the lockdown singing in Denmark for exactly one hundred days, ending symbolically on Midsummer’s Eve, the longest day of the year, which Danes normally celebrate with bonfires in public parks and on the beaches and with singing outdoors. Many were sad to see the end of these community singing sessions, saying that it had been the highlight of their isolation during Covid-19 and that they would otherwise have felt very much alone. After Faber’s sessions stopped, children’s television programmes continued with singing in the mornings, and later it became a renewed tradition in Friday night entertainment programmes. Healing Wounds The participatory act of singing collectively, albeit via the television or computer screen, became a lifeline for many people. This act of communicating by singing traditional songs had an almost therapeutic effect on the participants. The emotions connected to lockdown isolation reminded elderly people of their experiences during the Second World War, when

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community singing (known as ‘Alsang’) was practised in 1940–43 as a celebration of freedom and democracy. On 4 May 2020, during the lockdown, ‘Alsang’ was used to mark the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Denmark in the Second World War. The singing underlined a sense of cohesion in Denmark. Similarly, the month before, Queen Margrethe II’s 80th birthday festivities were cancelled and instead became an occasion for national singing on live television throughout the day. Of course, such episodes may sound unusual in modern times, but in the case of lockdown, a sense of solidarity seemed to absorb the whole country. Protests were practically invisible – despite the emergency situation – and critical voices remained almost silent. However, although singing is considered a national pastime, the inclusiveness of this very act is not a given. The lyrics for every song were transcribed on screen, but a sense of belonging to the shared heritage must have ultimately depended on the audience’s individual historical and socio-ethnic background. It was as if the imageries of the historical lyrics regained a contemporary meaning and were making sense in an unexpected way. Memory of Crisis By symbolic coincidence, it was also during the lockdown that Denmark was able to celebrate the centenary of its reunification with Southern Jutland after the First World War. The community singing each morning contributed to inspire strong emotions about the reunification and a sense of pride in the status of the current border with Germany. The unavoidable existential isolation of certain groups of the population during the lockdown reverberated in the historical and national context of unification with Germany and made people realize how important cross-border activities are to break the feeling of isolation and promote a sense of belonging to a global community. The singing united people and gave strength to many during a vulnerable period of isolation. The collective condition of isolation and the experience of vulnerability made it possible for them to regain a sense of dignity. Paradoxically, for many people, this long-lasting period of insecurity and isolation strengthened the sense of social connectedness and security. Regarding the work of the previously mentioned artists Joseph Beuys and Marina Abramović, both have focused on the transformative power of art and performance. Abramović’s work over the last forty years has often explored the notion of time, as if stretching the moment of co-presence, when both performer and audience literally breathe the same air. Her use of durational time became legendary in her 2½-month performance Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present, at MoMA, New York City, 2010, when



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she sat on a chair, confronted with visitors, each day in the main hall of the museum (for 750 hours in total – the performance was later turned into an artistic documentary film). This performance puts the notion of durational presence literally in the public eye and it is a specific creative negotiation with temporality. The sense of endurance in endlessness became a thrilling part of this kind of cultural barter. Inside MoMA, in a parallel exhibition space, Seven Easy Pieces, a series of her former performances, were being re-enacted by younger artists, using the bartering dynamics as an aesthetic principle, playing repeatedly on the tense give-and-take situation as a subject of risk and trust. The re-enactment side has been used by theatre scholar Rebecca Schneider in her book, Performing Remains (2011), in which the author reflects on ownership of history. The notion of ownership refers to the sense of belonging to history, which many people experience strongly when they participate in re-enactments of, for example, battles of the American Civil War. Through re-enactment, Schneider argues, participants reflect more on their present situation, recapturing the relationship to the past through what has been perceived in her distinction as fake, false or faux. These two examples point at re-enactment, which becomes a major key to revaluate our understanding of representation in performance, and this practice of time and temporality opens towards a newer understanding of performance historiography.19 Schneider’s primary case can equally be seen elsewhere, like in Denmark, where the remains of the fortifications close to the German border frequently frame re-enactments of historical battles from the wars in the mid-nineteenth century.20 The emotions connected to such historical issues became revitalized through the cross-border performing activities. From this note on re-enactment, we shall now return to the initial point of reference and examine some more examples of the bodily exchange across borders, namely from the cultural barter tradition as practised by Odin Teatret – to which it traces a particular historiography.

Part Two – Cultural Barter The notion of cultural barter has been connected to Odin Teatret since 1974, when the actors started exploring ways of engaging with their audience. Historically, this can be considered as one of the consequences of the post-1968 era on performing arts, when the cultural barter as social interaction eventually became a spectacle. The first barter took place in Carpignano, a small village in southern Italy, where Eugenio Barba and the actors from Odin Teatret’s ensemble spent several months to understand

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themselves as actors and as strangers, not only playing musical instruments in the streets but also wearing multi-coloured clothing.21 The actors, who came from different countries and did not speak Danish, appeared to be strange in Denmark and needed to master other means of expression. For a long time, they were artistically exploring strangeness as an approach to engage with a de-familiarization of ‘normality’. They concluded that the condition of being experienced as foreign and of ‘otherness’ could be transformed from artificiality into an aesthetic tool. This approach involved both techniques from the Russian formalistic tradition from Viktor Shklovsky’s essay ‘Art as Device’ (1917) and from Bertolt Brecht’s ‘Short Organon for the Theatre’ (1948), in which the Verfremdungseffekt was explained.22 The inhabitants of Carpignano responded to the presence of the actors by offering to sing some of their own songs that would traditionally accompany the tobacco and olive harvests, songs about unrequited love and death. The residents of Carpignano were not accustomed to theatre at all. They were not familiar with the conventional expectations of theatre audiences and instead they responded instinctively to what they experienced, and the improvised exchange situation of the cultural barter became a reality emerging from the practical encounter.23 Theatre had been removed from its conventional framework, and by doing so, a new gateway was opened: the Italian theatre scholar Ferdinando Taviani called it the ‘fourth door’.24 On the one hand, the actors needed to prove their professional identity in a direct confrontation with the local population. On the other hand, Eugenio Barba realized that his own actors – due to their varied national origins – no longer had any common traditional, historical or cultural ties. As a striking contrast to the general impression of the televised morning songs during the Covid-19 pandemic, with the Odin Teatret, the feeling of not belonging to a common cultural background underlined the necessity to search for ways to bridge the gap between actors and onlookers to achieve genuine participatory interaction in an unconventional but shared space, preferably outdoors. As always with Odin Teatret, the barter arose not as the result of a fixed idea, or a concept or philosophy, but out of necessity.25 In the exchange described above, no money changed hands; it was rather an exchange involving the performative side of human behaviour. ‘In its simplest form, a barter entails one group of people performing for another and rather than the second group paying money, it performs for the first group.’26 What is involved is an exchange of non-material goods such as songs, dance and acrobatic demonstrations and the two parties in the exchange also share their own performing skills. The symbolic dimension of a cultural barter sometimes produces the effect of commenting on society because of the imbedded strangeness in the



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barter, but this kind of socio-cultural exchange does not specifically involve what could be described as ‘staging the world’ of similarities. It is much more a world of differences, using relational spaces that occur between people when they meet, or when they try to overcome obstacles and barriers – like those encountered by Phillip Faber as part of his Danish lockdown singalongs. While editing this chapter, the cross-border performances obtained yet another legitimization in the ruins of Lebanon after the August 2020 Beirut explosion. A hybrid theatre-training laboratory was launched in November 2020 in a collaboration between Odin Teatret and the Al Madina Theatre in Beirut. The fragility of performing groups in a ruined community like Beirut was turned into a strength. After some repair work was undertaken to the Al Madina theatre it became possible to establish an online bridge via the internet streaming of a theatre laboratory situation from Odin Teatret and to share this physical training via a big screen with young performers from Beirut. This hybrid laboratory form helped to build motivation and confidence for the future. At the same time, the cross-bordering physicality would also aim at eliminating the situation in which young people are deprived of access to any type of cultural activities. Not only was the training shared; across the border, the participants saw films, work demonstrations and performances, as well as communicating virtually. The examples above point towards the fact that crossing borders in a bodily relationship is both a psychological and a physical journey. The kind

Figure 4.4. Al Madina Theatre in Beirut in hybrid media collaboration with Odin Teatret, Holstebro, Denmark. Photo: ILITA.

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of barter undertaken by Odin Teatret often involves actors or performers making such spectacular and unexpected noises that the local people become interested in responding. Odin Teatret describes the kind of bartering they engage in as follows: Odin actors present themselves through their work to a particular milieu, which, in return, replies with songs, music and dance from its own local culture. The barter is an exchange of cultural manifestations and offers not only an insight into the other’s forms of expression, but is equally a social interaction, which defies prejudices, linguistic difficulties and differences in thinking, judging and behaving.27

This is where the foreignness also covers outsiders, refugees, those in exile and people with disabilities by pointing to connecting energies and emotions.

Part Three – Barter as Aesthetic Device in The Trilogy of the Innocent Bartering is deeply integrated in Odin Teatret’s work. As Maria Shevtsova has emphasized, there is ‘a dialectic between the barters and the productions – the working process, the long sessions of improvisation’.28 When experiencing Odin Teatret’s productions, they do not give only one privileged singular gaze to the plurality of an audience as a collective. In the productions, there is room for a multitude of autonomous gazes and viewpoints, as the space does not use a central perspective and the narrative of the performance is not composed according to linear principles in the production. The actors and the spectators are all participants, and they complement each other. Not only do the actors build bridges to the audience, but the spectators also build a bridge to the performance. Bartering is visible within ensemble productions, for example in The Trilogy of the Innocent. This performance trilogy is about the ambivalence expressed through the impossible dichotomy between innocence and guilt.29 A dual effect in the barter occurs between these two conditions, when the spectator identifies with the subject. The extended title of the trilogy is given as Three Landscapes of the Past, Present and a Near Future, and in this context the performance negotiates time as a place. It is not only the past or the future that worries us. Presence in present times is the challenge, with questions on how to relate to others when (not only under Covid-19) direct human connection in communities is difficult to realize and thus also co-existence has turned out to be a precarious phenomenon in the theatre space. This focus on time addresses the immersive strategy of the trilogy, which as a physical performance also exercises a strong negotiation with the spectators’ presence. The ambivalent aspect of this trilogy is that not only



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explicit crimes but ‘ignorance also implies passive complicity’.30 Orphans, widows, women who experience the war, raise the overall question of whether anyone is guilty at all. This sense of endless war leaves victims in a desperate situation and they experience only enough of the recent past and the near future to see their present life in perspective. Temporality is thus not only a question of how one lives in the present time, but also of how to construct our narratives accordingly. For example, the dramaturgy of a contemporary performance challenges the mainstream model of Gustav Freytag, whose Technique of the Drama (1863), which emerged in the age of industrialization and was later identified as a normative model, became known as ‘the Hollywood model’. Freytag’s theory established a vertical structure of hierarchically organized values of perception, whereas in a contemporary theatre, like Odin Teatret, the organic perceptual structures call for a rhizomatic web structure of dramaturgy.31 Each performance in the trilogy is a complex interwoven pattern of narrative fragments using conventions from across history and continents. Over the next few pages, I will outline the performances in The Trilogy of the Innocent: The Tree, The Chronic Life and Great Cities under the Moon. Landscape of the Past: The Tree – A Land Abandoned by Birds (1990–2000) The Tree (2016) is about child soldiers. The performance shapes the space figuratively: we are clearly all in the same boat as spectators, not only in a material sense, seated on the inflatable seating, but also cast adrift as a collective floating island. These images relate to theories on fluidity and unstable realities, connected to the philosophy of Zygmunt Bauman and theories of late modernity by Anthony Giddens. At a certain moment in The Tree, the curtain motif serves to divide the oval space lengthwise, separating the spectators on each side of the curtain. The two monks (Aurelianus and Serafinus), like two representatives of the audience, cannot see each other either. Only the imagination allows people on one side of the curtain to understand what is happening on the other side. This moment challenges not only the cognitive skills of the spectators but also the shared sense of being together across the border of one split performance space. This spatial set-up is minimalistic to question the physical performance space itself, in which the set is not rigid and closed. Like Peter Brook in The Empty Space (1968), Barba seeks to fill his preferred empty spaces with ‘actions that unleash a kinaesthetic commitment and are sensorially convincing for the spectator’.32 For Barba, the actor-spectator relationship is regarded as a barter, embedded in the theatrical space, where the typically close proximity between actors and spectators offers both an aesthetic and a real living space, in which the spectator participates or contributes to a

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mutual ritual of presence. This is an example of what Erika Fischer-Lichte coined Ko-präsenz (co-presence), building a bridge and giving the kind of strength that goes with belonging to a community.33 A separating curtain was used to imply other means of significations between ‘us’ and ‘them’ on either side of the curtain. Furthermore, at one point in The Tree, a huge piece of white fabric with holes cut into it suddenly came down from the ceiling and was draped over the spectators’ heads. This led literally to a rupture in the narrative, as if unmaking mimesis by symbolically cutting off the spectators’ heads by letting them stick their heads through the holes of the woven cloth. Later in the production, the same image was reproduced with the ensemble’s heads appearing through the white curtain. At this point, the relationship between the two episodes gave association to ideologically enhanced barter about political forces that ‘cut off heads’. Thus, in The Tree, bartering not only involves performance knowledge but also reveals new performance historiography about overcoming borders.34 ‘Changing Countries More Often than Shoes’ – Great Cities under the Moon Let us take a brief look at The Present 2010–18, which is the second landscape in this war trilogy, Great Cities under the Moon (2003), with its subtext of refugees cut off from their roots. The expression ‘Changing countries more often than shoes’ comes from Bertolt Brecht’s poem An die Nachgeborenen, representing Brecht’s poetry from his exile in Denmark during the Second World War.35 The performance tells the story of different people whom Brecht met and it describes some of those who have influenced Odin Teatret itself. The encounters form a through-line of actions in this part. The actors sit on chairs in a new moon configuration, each holding a musical instrument, as if they were members of a chamber orchestra. Sitting on these chairs, the actors do very few physical actions for about half an hour. This is exceptionally unusual for Odin Teatret, which is famous for its lively performances involving highly expressive movement and spectacular body language. Significantly, this performance consists of remains from the performance Brecht’s Ashes (1980–84). The actual performance thus also raises the question of what remains when the original performance is no longer performed. To ask such a question is really to ask how we engage with the past. What do we preserve in history and for whom, how and when? For example, what remains from the post-1968 era?36 This question has regained significance, since the immaterial materiality in a way replaced very concrete materials on the empty stage, while the performers negotiating with the audience through their interactions built a pathway for the cultural barter as materiality. This relational issue is a matter for late performance historiography.



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The history of Great Cities under the Moon began in 2000, as part of a session at the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA). A barter took place between the actors from Odin Teatret and actorpatients from a psychiatric hospital in Bielefeld, Germany. The group from the hospital performed segments from Dreigroschenoper (Threepenny Opera) by Bertolt Brecht. In 2000, the director of Dreigroschenoper was relatively young, but he had seen Odin Teatret’s Brecht’s Ashes two decades before and based on that experience he was very excited about having Odin Teatret re-enact the production as scenes of bartering. The Odin actors were able to choose some scenes from Brecht’s Ashes to present, and because those scenes were out of the context of the original performance, they appeared as leftovers, which had remained in the performers’ artistic repertoire, forming a living archive. For Eugenio Barba, this lack of expression provided the starting point for building Great Cities under the Moon ‘on the ruins’ of the original performance. Normally, the actors fill the theatre space with their bodies and voices. In this case, however, the focus was on the quality of the strengths that remain when the previous vitality is removed. At one point, the actors embody the cities and take turns to say: Look! The cities under the moon: Guernica …, Coventry …, Stalingrad …, Dresden …, Warsaw …, Beirut …, Sarajevo …, Grozdny …, Grozdny …, Kabul …, Kabul …, Bagdad …, Bagdad …, Bagdad …, Bagdad …

Texts about UN peacekeeping forces are also part of this production. Today, it is likely that Mariupol would be added to the list of cities. The text fragments in Great Cities under the Moon come from different authors such as Bertolt Brecht, Jens Bjørneboe, Ezra Pound and Walter Benjamin. Popular protest music from the 1960s is associated with building bridges to places in the world where massacres and brutality have left writers, dramaturgs, actors and theatre directors with the obligation to bear witness to the world audience as an act of remembrance. Instead of emphasizing the wounds and pain of those who have suffered or survived, the actors decided to refrain from presenting an emotional account and let the torso perform the core of the message in a condensed way by putting the greatest possible energy into the minimal outer expression. Altogether, Great Cities under the Moon is a poetic account of the affects imposed by war and exile. In the performance, this crucial behaviour is reflected in the wars, while the performance implodes to explode. Appearing deliberately lifeless, the actors show how human beings can be evil to others without remorse. This is another example of the de-familiarization technique, which invites the spectator to become affected in a bartering way with a negotiation of associations of the present time. In The

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Chronic Life (2011), people eat without being hungry and drink without being thirsty. The Chronic Life explicitly stages temporality in its very title as something both dubious and durational. The performance is situated in the trilogy’s third landscape, The Future (2031), and it deals optimistically with peace. In The Chronic Life, a Latin American boy searches for his father across several continents. The topic of the performance clearly refers to the terrible experiences during twentieth-century dictatorships in countries such as Chile and Argentina and to terrible situations such as in Chechnya where many husbands, fathers and sons simply disappeared. The scenography for The Chronic Life is a raft, with the audience sitting on the two banks of a river.37 At one point, a horizontal curtain appears in the shape of a huge Danish flag, pulled across the space, accompanied by a Danish nationalistic footballhooligan song. The way the flag ruptures the perception of space can be seen as Eugenio Barba’s artistic response to a sort of colour blindness, referring to social threats to the self-esteem of a population. Barba does not avoid politics, but he quite often uses dedications to draw attention to the realities behind a tragedy. Thus, in the programme for The Chronic Life, the performance is dedicated to ‘Anna Politkovskaya and Natalia Estemirova, Russian writers and human rights activists, murdered by anonymous thugs in 2006 and 2009 for their opposition to the Chechen conflict’. In the case of The Chronic Life, the dedications refer to the political role of theatre in society. In doing so, the performance itself takes a crossborder position regarding hidden or forgotten wars in a global community. This productive and disruptive process of transgressing the border between hidden lives/hidden deaths as an image of separation and isolation in a community takes the situation in the performance into a political war zone. At the end of the production, the spectators are witnesses of war, only separated from the crimes by a red and white police cordon. Under their seats, a red rope light silently pulsates as if pumping blood. This final image of a state of emergency as a symbol of everyday life takes the spectators into an exiled state of mind in which a comfort zone and war zone reflect the inter-relationship between exiled and onlookers, outsiders and insiders. It is as if the artistic conflict is about how to conquer difference and the performance reflects a barter-like transformation of this conflict. Blindness is a recurring theme in Barba’s work. Most striking is the decision to have the character of the boy in The Chronic Life spend almost the entire performance with bandaged eyes, in clear contrast to the task in which he is engaged (searching for his lost father).38 Despite being blinded, the young actor manages to hurtle around the stage. In this case, the blindness also articulates the metaphor of blindness, for example the symbolic border between seeing and not seeing.



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Intercultural Challenge Barba’s interest in cultural barters in terms of intercultural exchanges between performance cultures has gained much popularity around the world. However, it has also given rise to some criticisms, especially regarding the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA), founded in 1978 by the late Sanjukta Panigrahi and Eugenio Barba. The idea was to ‘gather a multicultural network of performers and scholars giving life to an itinerant university whose main field of study is Theatre Anthropology’.39 In many of the ISTA sessions, the world heritage of performing arts was studied according to the idea of the transmission of performance techniques, since ‘knowledge of the pre-expressive principles which govern the scenic bios can make it possible for one to learn to learn’.40 Some scholars believe that in its attempt to build an intercultural relationship between global performance cultures with the aim of learning to learn, ISTA went far beyond the limits of typological theatre. The critics argued that such intercultural barters situate the notion of otherness as not only a cliché for performance tourism, but as a burden derived from colonialism. Joanne Tompkins and Julie Holledge41 were among the first feminist scholars to investigate the interculturalist discourse, and Una Chaudhuri has also emphasized some of the characteristics: Interculturalists today must think through not only, as before, such enticingly poetic categories as ‘Otherness’, ‘difference’ and ‘encounter’ but also the rapidly expanding and institutionalized discourses organized around words like diaspora, border, cosmopolitanism, postcolonialism and globalization.42

The intercultural challenge is being updated at this time when questions of agency are on our minds. During Covid-19 we have become aware that all lives matter. All should matter not only in terms of medical treatment but also regarding the isolation that many people have experienced because of social distancing. The intercultural challenge is not only an aesthetic one but also a political one, which especially in postcolonial studies will need re-examination in historiographical discourses. Considering this perspective against the overall theme of this chapter, it becomes urgent to ensure that the bartering and cross-border embodied performances can occupy platforms where equality between participants through screens or in live performances will be a central issue.

Part Four – Barter and Temporality During a time in which there is a focus on embodied memories in terms of public statues and monuments embodying slave state leaders, traders,

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colonialists, missionaries and other representatives of our history, the representation of bodies across time evokes a discourse of responsibility towards historiography. It has increasingly become an imperative to dig into the history of our bodies and how they have inscribed themselves as part of a global community. This historiographical imperative relates to the need for care for the present times. More recently, worldwide attention has been drawn to the (gendered) issue of care, which has been re-signified by the Covid-19 experience. ‘Bodies across borders’ is a field which demands further (re)investigation. In theatre and performance historiography it is important to investigate how theatre and performance have been dealing with the ways in which we treat the foreign body. The treatment of the body in performances can also often be seen in light of the ways in which the nation is understood. The Covid-19 pandemic has introduced mankind to the practice of social distancing. If we look at the strange capacity of humans to remain emotionally close to each other at a physical distance, we may similarly also be able to gain some useful knowledge about how we perceive bodies in theatre and performance, since in the theatre, essentially, bodies encounter bodies across borders. When you look at life during the Covid-19 pandemic as a suspended situation, the corresponding narrative to this demands other terms of being – also analytically. I am referring to the sense of shock about 9/11 2001, which demanded new ways of looking at bodies. A new condition emerged in which time could no longer measure events as usual.43 The Post-1968 Era in Theatre and Performance Seen from a Pandemic Turn From a European academic point of view, history after the Second World War can be seen as a narrative of disruption. No single lens of perception is possible or would allow only one singular historiographical presentation. On the contrary, it has become necessary to find ways to represent the caesura in time as we have seen, or to establish how the disruptions have produced a series of so-called ‘turns’, from the linguistic turn and the performative turn towards the Anthropocene. It seems that the pandemic turn has something to teach us, namely that by its nature it challenges our shared responsibility to respond artistically to global events. It has almost become a tradition in humanities to represent the year of 1968 as a turning point, relating to an identification of a cultural turn. In a historical perspective, this turn has affected our perception of memories, performances, interventions and actions. The events of May 1968 not only caused a revolution in the university and education sectors but were also regarded as having an important impact on the discourse of the cultural domain, at least in Scandinavia.44 This cultural turn is particularly associated



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with two events that occurred almost simultaneously: the Prague Spring and May 1968 in Paris, the so-called youth revolution, which led to a political counterculture shaped by activism, claiming to free the people from hierarchical bourgeois institutions. The counterculture after 1968 often took on quite radical orientations, although, at least seen in retrospect, ‘revolutionary’ strategies were frequently dramatized or romantically described as being performative by nature, sometimes transferring the theatre terminology to what the French philosopher Guy Debord called ‘the society of the spectacle’. It was consequently also present in statements about the citizen as so-called passive spectator.45 Following the logic of the line drawn above and according to a Scandinavian perception of the historical events around 1968, the tradition also tells us that in many ways there was a relatively close relationship between performance culture and the new left-wing political agenda of the younger generation, especially among intellectuals and artists. Seen from the perspective of the Danish welfare state, this has been a dominant narrative regarding the paradigmatic change. In the field of post-war theatre productions and performances, changes had nevertheless already begun in the mid-1950s, when French and Eastern European absurdists were introduced in Denmark by the dramaturg Christian Ludvigsen (1930–2018), helping to launch the first theatre laboratory in Denmark.46 The 1968 turn is reflected in various approaches to institutions and public spaces via happenings, interventions, anti-nuclear demonstrations, anti-Vietnam War demonstrations and so on. The notion of theatre changed rapidly during the same period. Theatre was no longer regarded exclusively as a container for entertainment. Instead, the events taking place on stage were perceived as extending far beyond the bricks of the buildings in which they took place. The very genre of performance took over many theatre-like activities.47 In connection to early theories, expressed as audience reception theories, aesthetic conceptualizations such as in Umberto Eco’s The Open Work (1962), Wolfgang Iser’s Der implizite Leser (1972), as well as in Roland Barthes’ ‘La mort de l’auteur’ (1967), provided a turning point for theoretical engagement with the audience.48 The participatory embeddedness was a key to understanding how participatory strategies would allow audiences to be involved in the barter. It was as if the mission of the historical avant-garde of the first decades of the twentieth century had been revived in the light of performance, often labelled neo-avant-garde internationally, but probably more of an investigation of improvisation, audience participation, environmental theatre and collective creation. Theatre and performance diffused into new spaces such as galleries and black boxes and could be site-specific, rather than specific to the site of the conventional theatre stage.49 This resulted in a sort of

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democratization of performance platforms, and led to new working methods, such as collaborative theatre, performance groups and theatre laboratories. These diverse ways of organizing performing arts have one thing in common: they do not focus on the dramatic text as a point of departure. They are part of what Hans-Thies Lehmann has called, coined with this book, Postdramatisches Theater (1999).50 It seems reasonable to claim that theatre and performance art from the 1960s onwards started contributing to rewriting our history of identities to some extent. By this, I do not mean national identity but a global identity with and through theatre and performance in the age of globalization. In the twenty-first century, the new generations of theatre labs are presenting their work standing on the shoulders of the previous generations of innovative artists. It will be interesting to see what kinds of theories and bodily representation in performance space will appear, which borders will disappear, and when we will need to write their history, our history. Annelis Kuhlmann is Associate Professor at Aarhus University, Denmark. Her background is in dramaturgy, French and Russian languages, and literature. She has published extensively on performance analysis as well as on directing as theatre historiography. Her most recent publications include Grønlands Teaterhistorie – på vej (2019; [Greenlandic Theatre History – On Its Way]), ‘Performing Memoria’ (2019), as well as articles in journals including Nordic Theatre Studies, Peripeti, Passage, and Mimesis. In addition, she is the research director of the Centre for Theatre Laboratory Studies (CTLS), a collaboration between Odin Teatret, Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium, and Dramaturgy, and she is co-founder of the Centre for Historical Performance Practice (ChiPP).

Notes 1.  Nail, Theory of the Border. 2.  Rancière, Dissensus; Schimanski and Wolfe, Border Aesthetics. 3.  Ledger, ‘Intercultural Theatre’; Pavis, The Intercultural Performance Reader, 41 ff. 4.  Watson, ‘Ways of Understanding the Culture’, 333. 5.  Watson, ‘Theater as Social Science’, 574. 6.  Fischer-Lichte, Ästhetik des Performativen. 7.  Watson, ‘Intercultural Performance’; Ledger, Odin Teatret Theatre in a New Century. 8.  Watson, ‘Intercultural Performance’; Shevtsova, ‘Reinventing Theatre’; Watson, ‘The Social Physics of Festuge’; Pavis, ‘Intercultural Theatre Today’; Kuhlmann and Ledger, ‘The Tree of Performance Knowledge’. 9.  In 1987, Odin Teatret travelled in Peru and the encounter between Indian tribes and the theatre group was documented as a performance exchange in the light of theatre meets ritual. See http://www.odinteatretarchives.dk/losarchivos/el-archivo-de-material-filmico/ examples/video-theatre-meets-ritual-1976 (accessed 2 October 2020).



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10.  Quiring, Theatrum Mundi. 11.  Radosavljević, The Contemporary Ensemble, 215 ff. 12.  Bharucha, Theatre and the World Performance. 13.  Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis, 103 ff. 14.  Schneider, Performing Remains. 15.  Heeg, ‘Reenacting History’; Heeg, Das Transkulturelle Theater. 16.  The population of Denmark is 5.8 million. 17.  Wierød Borčak, ‘Community as a Discursive Construct’. 18.  Raptis, ‘Philosophical Anthropology and the Human Body’. 19.  Schneider, Performing Remains, 20. 20.  Daugbjerg, Borders of Belonging. 21.  Barba, Theatre: Solitude, Craft, Revolt, 113–25. 22.  Shklovsky, Theory of Prose; Brecht, Brecht on Theatre. 23.  Barba, Theatre: Solitude, Craft, Revolt, 116. 24.  Taviani, ‘Slottet’, 30 ff. 25.  D’Urso, L’étranger qui danse. 26.  Watson, ‘Theater as Social Science’, 574. 27.  See Odin Teatret’s website, https://odinteatret.dk/about-us/about-odin-teatret/ (accessed 15 July 2020). 28.  Shevtsova, ‘Reinventing Theatre’, 106. 29.  All Odin Teatret’s performances over the years deal with dilemmas relating to war, in one way or another. 30.  See https://odinteatret.dk/the-odin-experience/performances/the-trilogy-of-theinnocent/ (accessed 15 July 2020). 31.  Kuhlmann and Ledger, ‘The Tree of Performance Knowledge’, 146. 32.  Barba, On Directing and Dramaturgy, 23; Brook, The Empty Space. 33.  Fischer-Lichte, Ästhetik des Performativen, 114 ff. 34.  Kuhlmann and Ledger, ‘The Tree of Performance Knowledge’. 35.  ‘Gingen wir doch, öfter als die Schuhe die Länder wechselnd’, from the collection Svendborger Gedichte (1939), in Brecht, Gedichte, 145. 36.  Schneider, ‘New Materialisms and Performance Studies’. 37.  The audience sat on two banks of a river, watching the performance as movements in a constantly changing flow, while at the same time also experiencing the reactions of the spectators sitting on the opposite bank. This performance dramaturgy refers to Barba’s apprenticeship at the beginning of the 1960s at Jerzy Grotowski’s Teatr Laboratorium in Opole, Poland. 38.  Sofia Monsalve originally played the boy. Since 2016, this character is played by Carolina Pizarro. 39.  Barba, ‘Theatre Anthropology’, 26. 40.  Barba, The Paper Canoe. 41.  Holledge and Tompkins, Women’s Intercultural Performance. 42.  Chaudhuri, ‘Beyond a “Taxonomic Theater”’, 35. 43.  Jackson, ‘When “Everything Counts”’, 240 ff. 44.  Duelund, ‘Cultural Policy in Denmark’, 53. 45.  Hallward, ‘Staging Equality’; Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 2; Kuhlmann, ‘The Iron Curtain’, 58–70. 46.  Perrelli, Bricks to Build a Teaterlaboratorium. 47.  Barba, The Paper Canoe, 101–35. 48.  Eco, The Open Work; Iser, The Implied Reader; Barthes, Image, Music, Text. 49.  Bishop, ‘Black Box, White Cube, Gray Zone’. 50.  Freeman, ‘No Boundaries Here’; Lehmann, Postdramatisches Theater.

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Bibliography Barba, Eugenio. The Paper Canoe: A Guide to Theatre Anthropology. London: Routledge, 1995. Barba, Eugenio. ‘Theatre Anthropology’, in Kirsten Hastrup (ed.), The Performers’ Village: Times, Techniques and Theories at ISTA (Graasten: Drama, 1996). Barba, Eugenio. Theatre: Solitude, Craft, Revolt. Aberystwyth: Black Mountain, 1999. Barba, Eugenio. On Directing and Dramaturgy: Burning the House. London: Routledge, 2010. Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text: Essays. Fontana paperbacks; 6135. London: Fontana Press, 1990. Bharucha, Rustom. Theatre and the World Performance and the Politics of Culture. London: Routledge, 1993. Bishop, Claire. ‘Black Box, White Cube, Gray Zone: Dance Exhibitions and Audience Attention’. TDR: Drama Review 62(2) (2018), 22–42. doi: 10.1162/DRAM_a_00746. Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre, ed. Marc Silberman, Steve Giles and Tom Kuhn. London: Bloomsbury, 1956. Brecht, Bertolt. Gedichte. Vol. 4. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1960. Brook, Peter. The Empty Space. Repr. ed., Pelican Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986. Chaudhuri, Una. ‘Beyond a “Taxonomic Theater”: Interculturalism after Postcolonialism and Globalization’. Theater 32(1) (2002), 33–47. doi: http://dx.doi. org/10.1215/01610775-32-1-33. Daugbjerg, Mads. Borders of Belonging: Experiencing History, War and Nation at a Danish Heritage Site. Museums and Collections, Vol. 5. New York: Berghahn Books, 2014. Diamond, Elin. Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater. London: Routledge, 1997. Duelund, Peter. ‘Cultural Policy in Denmark’. The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society 31(1) (2001), 34–56. doi: 10.1080/10632920109599578. D’Urso, Tony. L’étranger qui danse: album de l’Odin Teatret 1972–77, ed. Tony D’Urso and Ferdinando Taviani. Rennes: Maison de la culture de Rennes, 1977. Eco, Umberto. The Open Work. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. Ästhetik des Performativen. Orig.-Ausg. 1. Aufl. ed., Edition Suhrkamp; 2373. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004. Freeman, John. ‘No Boundaries Here: Brecht, Lauwers, and European Theatre after Postmodernism’. NTQ 29(3) (2013), 220–32. Hallward, Peter. ‘Staging Equality: On Rancière’s Theatrocracy’. New Left Review 37 (2006), 109–29. Heeg, Günther. ‘Reenacting History: Das Theater der Wiederholung’, in Günther Heeg, Micha Brau, Lars Krüger and Helmut Schäfer (eds), Reenacting History: Theater & Geschichte (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2014). Heeg, Günther. Das Transkulturelle Theater. Vol. 130, Recherchen. (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2017). Holledge, Julie, and Joanne Tompkins. Women’s Intercultural Performance. London: Routledge, 2000. Iser, Wolfgang. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Paperback ed., 4. print. ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Jackson, Shannon. ‘When “Everything Counts”: Experimental Performance and Performance Historiography’, in Charlotte Canning and Thomas Postlewait (eds), Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010). Kuhlmann, Annelis. ‘The Iron Curtain, the Wall and Performative Verfremdung’, in Peter I. Barta (ed.), The Fall of the Iron Curtain and the Culture of Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 58–70. Kuhlmann, Annelis, and Adam Ledger. ‘The Tree of Performance Knowledge: Eugenio Barba’, in Paul Allain (ed.), Grotowski, Brook, Barba (London: Methuen, 2018), 145–203.



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Ledger, Adam J. ‘Intercultural Theatre’, in Odin Teatret: Theatre in a New Century (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 159–91. Ledger, Adam J. Odin Teatret Theatre in a New Century. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatisches Theater. Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren, 1999. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatic Theatre. London: Routledge, 2006. Nail, Thomas. Theory of the Border. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pavis, Patrice. The Intercultural Performance Reader. London: Routledge, 1996. Pavis, Patrice. ‘Intercultural Theatre Today (2010)’. Forum Modernes Theater 25(1) (2010), 5–15. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/fmt.2010.0009. Perrelli, Franco (ed.). Bricks to Build a Teaterlaboratorium: Odin Teatret and Chr. Ludvigsen. Bari: Edizioni di Pagina, 2013. Quiring, Björn. Theatrum Mundi: Die Metapher des Welttheaters von Shakespeare bis Beckett. Berlin: August Verlag, 2013. Radosavljević, Duška. The Contemporary Ensemble: Interviews with Theatre-Makers. London: Routledge, 2013. Rancière, Jacques (ed.). The Emancipated Spectator. London: Verso, 2009. Rancière, Jacques. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. London: Continuum, 2010. Raptis, Theocharis. ‘Philosophical Anthropology and the Human Body: The Contribution of Helmuth Plessner to a Music Education beyond the Dualism’. Philosophy of Music Education Review 27(1) (2019), 68–86. doi: 10.2979/philmusieducrevi.27.1.06. Schimanski, Johan, and Stephen F. Wolfe. Border Aesthetics: Concepts and Intersections. 1st ed. Time and the World, Vol. 3. New York: Berghahn Books, 2017. Schneider, Rebecca. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. London: Routledge, 2011. Schneider, Rebecca. ‘New Materialisms and Performance Studies’. TDR/The Drama Review 59(4) (2015), 7–17. doi: 10.1162/DRAM_a_00493. Shevtsova, Maria. ‘Reinventing Theatre’. New Theatre Quarterly 23(2) (2007), 99–114. doi: 10.1017/S0266464X07000012. Shklovsky, Viktor. Theory of Prose, ed. Benjamin Sher. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998. Taviani, Ferdinando. ‘Slottet’, in Iben Nagel Rasmussen (ed.), Den fjerde dør: på vej med Odin Teatret (Copenhagen: Nyt Nordisk Forlag, 2012). Watson, Ian. ‘Theater as Social Science: A Comparative Study of Eugenio Barba’s Barter Performance and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots’. Modern Drama 39(4) (1996), 574. Watson, Ian. ‘Ways of Understanding the Culture: Re-examining the Performance Paradigm’. New Theatre Quarterly 16(4) (2000), 333–46. doi: 10.1017/S0266464X00014081. Watson, Ian. ‘Intercultural Performance: Barter, Cultural Exchange and Reception’, in Günther Berghaus (ed.). New Approaches to Theatre Studies and Performance Analysis (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2001), 83–96. Watson, Ian. ‘The Social Physics of Festuge: Odin Teatret at Home’. New Theatre Quarterly 31(2) (2015), 179–96. doi: 10.1017/S0266464X15000275. Wierød Borčak, Lea. ‘Community as a Discursive Construct in Contemporary Danish Singing Culture’. SoundEffects (Aarhus, Denmark) 9(1) (2020), 81–97. doi: 10.7146/ se.v9i1.113023.

CHAPTER

5

The Filmmaker as Saboteur Found Footage and Radical Appropriation in Llorenç Soler’s Militant Films Pablo La Parra-Pérez

Sabotage tends to suggest a form of inflection, one that sees the ground of its daily activity as a diachronic map and tremendous reserve of materials, aspects, and properties constantly contested and open to inversions. —Evan Calder Williams, ‘Manual Override’ I pinched film stock from the production company if needed. I pinched consciously; I have no regrets! —Llorenç Soler, interview with the author, 20 December 2016 In a 1975 essay, the Cuban filmmaker and theorist Julio García Espinosa rephrased the opening of the Communist Manifesto to describe the international circulation of militant cinema throughout the 1960s and 1970s: ‘an image is haunting the world’.1 A precarious, combative image that irradiated from the Cuban revolution spread across Latin America in the form of Third Cinema, and took hold in Europe and the US amidst the 1968 cycle of struggles calling for a radical transformation of the means of film production. Certainly, as many scholarly contributions make clear, the development of militant cinema during that period took the form of an intricate,



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transnational network of contacts, encounters and exchanges – what Kodwo Eshun and Ros Gray have termed a ciné-geography.2 This chapter analyses a series of militant films made clandestinely by Llorenç Soler in Spain in the late 1960s and 1970s. Soler became a pioneering figure in the emerging – and largely unknown – militant film culture that sprang up in Spain in the last years of the Franco dictatorship and throughout the transition to democracy. In particular, the chapter focuses on one of the most remarkable techniques of Soler’s militant films: his systematic engagement in found footage filmmaking and détournement – a practice based on the recycling and appropriation of a variety of images and sounds. Although Soler’s pieces undoubtedly aimed to intervene in local problems, proposing a mordant critique of everyday life under the Franco regime, I will situate his film practice in a wider framework of analysis. Specifically, I will pay particular attention to his gradual process of radicalization, taking into account a transnational network of referents, with a particular focus on Latin America. My approach, thus, goes well beyond the examination of a particular filmmaker’s trajectory: by situating Soler’s militant film practice within a wider ciné-geography, this chapter aims to raise questions about how radical ideas and images travelled across time and space in the ‘Long 1968’, a term that calls for an expanded understanding of the international cycle of struggles of 1968, both in temporal and geographical terms.3 As Kostis Kornetis observes, the Long 1968 was crucially shaped by processes of cultural transfer ‘whereby imported cultural items [were] integrated into a home cultural repertoire’.4 Such a transnational perspective, thus, allows me to break with the tendency to analyse anti-Franco dissident practices such as Soler’s within a framework premised on local exceptionalism, adopting instead what Arif Dirlik terms a ‘double vision’: an analytical strategy that examines both the specificities of the Spanish context and the assimilation and appropriation of an expanded circuit of referents that extends beyond national boundaries.5

The Assistant In the 1960s, Llorenç Soler led a double life. In a sudden and unusual professional turn, he resigned from his engineering job in Barcelona’s port to become a self-taught filmmaker. After working as an assistant in advertising agencies, Soler launched Filmagen, his own small production company specializing in industrial and promotional films. He was also occasionally hired as a technical assistant by filmmakers in the orbit of the Barcelona School, such as Gonzalo Suárez and Carles Duran.6

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Alongside these day jobs, Soler was engaged in his own parallel, and prolific, film activities in his spare time. He diverted resources, technical materials and footage from his official jobs to fund a series of militant films that circulated in non-commercial networks in Spain and abroad. As Soler cryptically observed in an interview with Enrique Vila-Matas in 1970: ‘I earn enough money making industrial cinema, and this allows me to fund my “independent” films. That is, I make a living from one kind of cinema but die of making another’.7 Elsewhere, the filmmaker would define this other kind of cinema as a form of ‘guerrilla warfare’: low-budget films, made with 16-mm film stock in a deliberate attempt to evade the severe state controls that regulated professional filmmaking under Francoist laws – what Soler called ‘the machinery of censorship, permits, certificates, and petitions’.8 Soler’s film activities, thus, took place on the fringes of what is normally considered to constitute film culture: he had ‘minor’ technical roles in art-film projects, was employed in the culturally discredited realm of institutional and industrial cinema, and made low-budget militant films that did not follow the programmatic line of any particular political organization. As a self-proclaimed anarchist, Soler was never affiliated to any clandestine party, although he was actively involved in anti-Franco dissident circles. Inhabiting an interstitial position between his day jobs and his militant films, thus, Soler fits within Janet Harbord’s definition of the ‘assistant’. This category, borrowed from Giorgio Agamben, provides Harbord with a model for reconsidering a series of minor figures that have been pushed into the background in dominant histories of cinema: a ‘troop of peripheral figures [that] lead us through digression and detour to the place of the para-text, the parody or the parable, to the side of or a commentary upon a principle [sic] text’.9 Certainly, one of the most remarkable strategies in Soler’s guerrilla films was his engagement in found footage filmmaking, a radical practice that entailed the appropriation and resignification of images and sounds from disparate sources, including his own legitimate film activities. Soler’s Largo viaje hacia la ira/Long Journey to Anger (1969) is crucial to understand his filmic and political radicalization, and, especially, his use of recycled images. The film provides a compelling critical portrait of the urban crisis of Barcelona in the late 1960s, a moment in which the city underwent massive transformations as the result of both the arrival of large numbers of rural migrants and the devolvement of new speculative real-estate public policies. The film largely revisits footage from a piece shot by Soler three years earlier, entitled Será tu tierra/It Will Be Your Land (1966), commissioned by the Patronato Municipal de la Vivienda, the public institution responsible for housing reform in Barcelona. Although It Will Be Your Land was



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far from a radical film, its focus on the harsh living conditions of migrant workers in the slums of Barcelona meant that its sponsors deemed it intolerable, forcing Soler to produce a second version that explicitly praised the public housing policies of the Francoist administration. This clumsy censorship would be redeemed in his 1969 Long Journey to Anger, a kind of militant remake that reuses footage from It Will Be Your Land and is framed with a new radical script and re-edited with new footage. This episode inaugurated an approach that would become a crucial strategy for Soler’s militant films: to treat his own collection of original footage as an archive from which to appropriate images and sounds to create new militant works. In the late 1960s and early 1970s – a period he terms ‘the frenetic years’ in his memoirs – he worked tirelessly on militant filmmaking that largely relied on this procedure.10 However, before turning to some particular examples it is necessary to reconstruct a series of referents that would be instrumental in his process of filmic and political radicalization.

Towards a Deprovincialized History of Détournement In their well-known pre-Situationist 1956 manifesto, published in Les Lèvres Nues, Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman famously defined détournement as a tactic of ‘extremist innovation’ based on a radical principle: that ‘any elements, no matter where they are taken from, can be used to make new combinations’.11 The manifesto underlined that cinema was an ideal field of experimentation to achieve the ‘greatest effectiveness’ of détournement since ‘most films only merit being cut up to compose other works. This reconversion of preexisting sequences will obviously be accompanied by other elements, musical or pictorial as well as historical’.12 This call to action is fundamental to understand a wide array of cultural-political practices directly or indirectly inspired by Situationist aesthetics, from the détournement of adverts, popular comics and countless other forms of visual pop culture in leaflets and magazines to film experiments such as the 1968 cinétracts and Debord’s first feature film, based on his homonymous 1967 book, La société du spectacle/The Society of the Spectacle (1973). While it would be apt to import this French Situationist term as a conceptual tool to approach Soler’s militant films, we should be wary of understanding his works merely under this umbrella. Instead, I would like to follow a more expansive analytical strategy for a number of reasons. First, a factual one: when asked in a personal interview about his knowledge of Situationist literature and cinema at the time, Soler said that he was not familiar with this constellation of references until much later.13 Second, as recent contributions have pointed out,14 the canonical reading of the various 1968 and post-1968

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movements has heavily relied on a France-US axis that has obscured lesserknown cultural-political circuits; to this general observation, we could add, following Kristin Ross,15 the ‘megalomaniac pronouncements’ made by the late Debord about this leading position in the 1968 events, something that has led to a perhaps excessive centrality of Situationist referents to apprehend much more complex radical circuits in the period. If we are to reconstruct the references, learning processes and experiences leading to Soler’s militant turn and, specifically, his signature use of found footage, I think we need to pay attention to an expanded ciné-geography, one that crucially points towards Latin America and delineates a deprovincialized history of filmic détournement.16 In an important contribution, Jesse Lerner contests anglophone-oriented histories of found footage filmmaking by putting at the fore a series of crucial Latin American contributions. Going back to Brazilian modernism and Oswald de Andrade’s 1928 Anthropophagic Manifesto, Lerner delineates ‘an important tradition of appropriation and recycling within the history of the Latin American avant-garde’ in which the practice of ‘recycled cinema’ occupies a central position as ‘a strategy of decolonization and as a powerful model for Latin American cultural production’.17 Lerner’s genealogy rightly recognizes in post-revolutionary Cuba a crucial node in this genealogy of recycled cinema, in particular the early steps of the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry, ICAIC), established in 1959. Many ICAIC film productions were based on copyright violations and the appropriation of a variety of printed and audiovisual sources, including fragments from US commercial films seized by the revolutionary government – as explicitly staged in a 1960 ICAIC newsreel (n. 49), in which a group of revolutionary militants literally dismantle the offices of Warner Brothers and United Artists in Havana.18 The figure of Santiago Álvarez is a crucial referent in this regard. Appointed head of the newsreel section of the ICAIC at its foundation, Álvarez’s practice relied heavily on collage and the savage appropriation of third-party images and sounds to create agit-prop films. In a context of limited resources and time (many of his films were immediate reactions to pressing political issues), Álvarez described his own practice as accelerated underdevelopment – a term that, as Kristi M. Wilson reminds us,19 points to a radical subversion of the ‘economy and means of production’ of dominant film culture in a context of scarcity and anti-imperialist struggle. Álvarez’s short film Now! (1966), arguably his most famous piece, perfectly illustrates this mode of film production. A cri de coeur against white supremacism in the US, Now! is entirely made of American newsreel fragments and photos of civil rights mobilizations recomposed, in a brilliant exercise of montage,



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to the sound of the homonymous anti-racist song by Lena Horne, whose lyrics were censored in the United States. Álvarez’s radical montage aesthetics had a crucial influence in many contemporaneous Latin American film experiments. Among these, one example undoubtedly stands out: the monumental Argentinian film La hora de los hornos/Hour of the Furnaces (Grupo Cine Liberación, 1968). In 1969, right after the release of the film, Fernando E. Solanas and Octavio Getino (the driving forces of the Cine Liberación) published their hugely influential essay ‘Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World’, which became the touchstone of Third Cinema theory.20 Accompanied by such a powerful programmatic theorization, Hour of the Furnaces became a topic of obsessive debate in radical milieux in Latin America and beyond, being seen either as a model to inspire local forms of militant film practice or as a highly problematic ideological artefact due to its unapologetic praise of Peronism – this was especially the case in Europe and the United States.21 In particular, the first chapter of the film, entitled ‘Neocolonialismo y violencia’ (‘Neocolonialism and Violence’), had a remarkable international circulation.22 This segment stood out for its use of aggressive montage procedures, turning it into a cult piece of both political and aesthetic avantgarde, to recall Robert Stam’s seminal analysis.23 Over ninety minutes, the spectator is confronted with an anti-imperialist call to action in which new footage collides with a variety of appropriated sources. These include written texts – mostly quotes from Thirdworldist thinkers and revolutionary leaders; moving and still images – such as film fragments from newsreels and Argentinian documentaries such as Tire Dié (Fernando Birri, 1960), as well as excerpts from advertising and industrial cinema, archival documents, photographs and illustrations; and sounds – in a dense soundtrack that combines a didactic-essayistic voice-over with pop songs and elaborated soundscapes built from a variety of sources. Soler had first-hand knowledge of this constellation of Latin American referents, from Álvarez to Hour of the Furnaces, and they would play a major role in his ongoing understanding of film and political radicalization. In the next section, I examine the material and personal networks that made the encounter between Soler and these film models possible.

Contact Zones Recent academic contributions emphasize the role played by international film festivals during the 1960s and 1970s as ‘cinematic contact zones’ that allowed personal encounters and processes of mutual film learning and

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exchange among heterogeneous actors.24 Soler’s first contact with a major film festival was in 1966, when a first cut of his film 52 domingos/52 Sundays (1967)25 reached the International Festival of Ibero-American and Filipino Documentary Film held in Bilbao. Established in 1959, the Bilbao festival was one of a series of specialized documentary festivals that sprang up from the mid-1950s onwards, from the SODRE at Montevideo (1954) to Oberhausen (1954) and Leipzig (1955), among others. As María Luisa Ortega points out, the actual development of these festivals soon surpassed their original institutional goals, becoming spaces of tension and resistance against the ideological and aesthetic boundaries imposed by their state sponsors.26 Bilbao is a paradigmatic example of this paradox. Organized by the Francoist Instituto de Cultura Hispánica (Institute of Hispanic Culture, ICH), the festival coincided with Columbus Day and aimed to promote a neo-imperial idea of Hispanidad by bringing together films produced in former Spanish colonies. Despite the ICH’s original intentions, however, the venue stood out for its screening of foreign films, Latin American ones in particular, that otherwise had no commercial distribution in Spain.27 It is in this context that Soler first had the chance to watch Santiago Álvarez’s Now!, a film that made a deep impact on him at a moment when he was eager to find models for his own militant film practice. In fact, immediately after the Bilbao festival, Soler entirely reworked the editing of 52 Sundays, in what could be seen as an attempt to assimilate and put into practice Álvarez’s masterful use of montage.28 52 Sundays did not go unnoticed by the progressive critics and filmmakers present in Bilbao. Boosted by the positive critical reception, the film reached two of the most important film venues for radical cinema in Europe: Pesaro in 1967 and Leipzig in 1968. I cannot discuss here in detail the complex history and vicissitudes of both film venues – except to sketch their crucial importance for reconstructing the ciné-geography of the militant image. Established in 1965, the Mostra Internazionale del Nuovo Cinema de Pesaro not only became a vibrant forum for the promotion and discussion of the so-called ‘new cinemas’ of the 1960s, but, above all, it also offered a crucial contact zone between Latin American radical filmmakers and their European peers. Pesaro continued the legacy of another influential and largely forgotten film venue, the Rassegna Internazionale del Cinema Latinoamericano (1960–65),29 which confirms the crucial role that Italy played in the international configuration of militant film networks in the 1960s, as I will stress later. Beyond film screenings, Pesaro created ‘a radically new festival format’, including solid programmes of seminars, roundtables and publications, becoming a central model for the radical transformation of other international film festivals from the late 1960s onwards.30



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The link between Soler and the vibrant Italian radical film scene would strengthen just a few months later in Barcelona, when Soler collaborated as director of photography in the shooting of Helena Lumbreras’s film Spagna 68: el hoy es malo pero el mañana es mío/Spagna 68: Today Is Bad but Tomorrow Is Mine (1968), the first of many collaborative militant film projects between the two filmmakers. Lumbreras was a Spanish director who had trained at the Centro Sperimentale in Rome and had returned to Barcelona clandestinely to shoot this piece about the different fronts of anti-Franco dissidence that sprang up in Spain around 1968. The project was funded by Unitelefilm, the production and distribution company of the Italian Communist Party – a crucial organization to which I will return shortly.31 In 1968, Lumbreras and Soler joined the Italian contingent attending the Leipzig International Documentary Film Festival to present Lumbreras’s Spagna 68 and Soler’s 52 Sundays. Like Pesaro, Leipzig was another fundamental node in the ciné-geography of the militant image. As Caroline Moine points out, although Leipzig was inextricably intertwined with the official cultural diplomacy of the GDR, it also became one of the most important ‘contact and frontier zones’ for international radical filmmakers in the 1960s and 1970s, a complex and often contradictory ‘site of screenings but also of exchanges and meetings between delegates coming from all around the world’.32 At Leipzig, Soler had the occasion to personally meet a wide array of filmmakers, including Álvarez himself and other luminaries of international radical cinema – from Chris Marker and Joris Ivens to the protégés of the GDR’s film apparatus, Walter Heynowski and Gerhardt Scheumann. Leizpzig ’68, though, was anything but a peaceful edition. That year witnessed the clash between the state-socialist discourse of the GDR authorities and newly emerging New Left sensibilities. In a heated atmosphere marked by the May unrest across Europe and, above all, in Czechoslovakia, the festival’s management cancelled the scheduled screenings of all the films related to 1968 struggles worldwide, leading to a protest of many international contingents attending the festival, including Soler and Lumbreras.33 Although some delegates such as Chris Marker decided to boycott Leipzig after this incident, Soler would return to the East German festival just one year later with his Long Journey to Anger, winning the Fipresci award for his film. This hectic sequence of events and encounters not only illustrates Soler’s first major international successes, but, above all, his recognition, and first-hand knowledge, of the international militant cinema community. As Soler himself put it: Until 1968 I did not know how to situate the films I wanted to make. Then I learned that there was a powerful international movement of filmmakers that

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had decided to put their images at the service of the exploited. … I felt that I was morally part of that collective without borders.34

While Soler’s films had this remarkable reception abroad, their distribution in Spain was largely limited to underground circuits. Despite the many legal impediments, though, Soler’s films circulated in the incipient networks of alternative film distribution and exhibition that sprang up in Spain in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Among them, the case of El Volti in Barcelona stands out as a particularly successful experiment. This clandestine network, run by a group of young anti-Franco militants in their early twenties, amassed a film catalogue of more than fifty titles over the years.35 Beyond Soler’s works, it included militant films made by other Spanish filmmakers and collectives such as Lumbreras, the Comissió de Cinema de Barcelona and the Grupo de Madrid. They also distributed copies of classic Soviet cinema and feature films of assorted origin that had no commercial distribution in Spain due to censorship, from Viridiana (Luis Buñuel, 1961) to Nuit et brouillard/Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1956). But, above all, El Volti treasured a selection of international militant films that reached Barcelona from Italy, specifically from Unitelefilm. A 1970 letter addressed to the film critic and Catalan independentist militant Josep Maria López Llaví and preserved at the Unitelefilm archives at the AAMOD reveals that catalogues of militant cinema were sent from Rome to Barcelona, and that film reels were dispatched to Perpignan, in southern France, to be smuggled into Catalonia.36 The films sent by Unitelefilm provided an entire generation of activists with footage on the worldwide unrest of the Long 1968 that they may not have had otherwise, with militant films about the Uruguayan Tupamaros, the Zengakuren in Japan, the worker mobilizations in Italy, and the Vietnam War. But, above all, as film historian Román Gubern recalls,37 the item most in demand in El Volti’s catalogue undoubtedly was a copy of ‘Neocolonialism and Violence’, the aforementioned first part of Hour of the Furnaces, which also arrived from Italy. El Volti’s films circulated in a clandestine or semi-clandestine network that Gubern famously called ‘the internal political market’, that is, ‘alternative spaces to commercial film exhibition such as factories, schools, universities, parishes, film clubs, etc.’.38 Among these underground venues, Soler’s apartment in Barcelona became an important meeting point for young activists and cinephiles. For instance, in a striking personal testimony, Joan Martí i Valls recalls the day he met Soler during a clandestine screening of 16-mm film materials held at the filmmaker’s apartment in 1968. For Martí i Valls, then a twenty-year-old militant member of the Maoist organization Bandera Roja, this meeting represented an irresistible call to film action:



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This screening opened my eyes to many things; above all, it demystified the idea I had of cinema. I discovered that with a camera in your hand and a fistful of ideas, you could ‘fight the system’, create trouble, disseminate your own vision of ‘reality’ instead of the official version. This was neither amateur cinema nor commercial cinema. This was… how to put it… this was INDEPENDENT cinema, that is, FREE CINEMA, and that’s exactly what my twenty-year-old self and my nonconformity were demanding. This was… a world of possibilities in a language that was riveting.39

In a personal interview, Soler recalled that when the copy of Hour of the Furnaces arrived in Barcelona via El Volti, he immediately arranged a screening at his apartment, stressing the strong impact that the film had on him.40 Under the dictatorial rule of Francoism, in a context marked by a scarcity of radical visual referents, Soler’s film practice was extremely sensitive to the input, models and exchanges with the films he encountered. After all, as Harbord puts it, aren’t the assistants ‘eternal students, [whose] learning is never done’?41

Unmaking Desarrollismo Although Soler’s guerrilla films circulated in Spain and abroad in the late 1960s and he had already become an inspiring model of militant filmmaking in activist circles, Soler did not stop making industrial cinema and institutional advertisements. An exploration of the collection of the Filmoteca de Catalunya reveals that Soler directed or participated in many commissioned films covering diverse topics, from a film made for Industrias Metalúrgicas de Navarra about the serial production of metal components for the national automobile industry to a film about the training of workers commissioned by the Industrial School of Tarragona, funded by the Francoist Ministry of Education and Science, or a film intended to praise the rapid urban development and real-estate fever of Barcelona, just to cite a few examples.42 In other words, Soler’s ‘legal films’ gradually specialized in lauding the virtues of desarrollismo (developmentalism), the new socio-economic orientation of the so-called ‘Second Francoism’. It is important to expand briefly on this concept. After the defeat of the Axis powers in WW2, Spain gradually forged a strategic alliance with the US and opened to foreign markets, putting an end to the autarkic era that followed the Civil War. A new generation of Opus Dei cadres, popularly known as ‘technocrats’, gradually sidelined the Fascistinspired Falangist sectors of the regime and led an accelerated modernization of the country based on three successive Development Plans that spanned from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s. The technocrats’ desarrollismo, enthusiastically backed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, resulted in massive foreign investment, the accelerated industrialization of

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the country, and the consolidation of tourism and the real-estate sector as the mainstays of the Spanish economy, which saw the second-highest growth rate in the world, after Japan, in what was described – from early on – as the ‘Spanish miracle’.43 Such a process, however, was anything but miraculous: in a country under a dictatorial rule that persecuted every form of dissidence and did not recognize any democratic or labour rights, desarrollismo rather was, to use Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi’s term, a process of ‘authoritarian modernization’.44 While Soler was making these commissioned films he abhorred, many of the guerrilla films he made in his spare time can be seen as a radical subversion of the desarrollista principles and imagery that are lauded in his legitimate productions. Through recycling and détournement, Soler would turn the aesthetics of desarrollismo against itself. He used his position to collect rushes, outtakes and copies of films, resulting in an obsessive accumulation of audiovisual material; he even stole film stock and equipment from the production companies he worked with. This unruly film practice was not only a pragmatic tactic motivated by the asphyxiating context of scarcity of means and political repression, aggravated by the fact that Soler’s passport had been confiscated in 1970 in reprisal for his political activities.45 It reveals an additional layer of political meaning, a form of situated radical practice that fits within Evan Calder Williams’ definition of sabotage: ‘the deployment of a technique, or activation of a capacity, at odds with the apparatus, system, or order within which it is situated and for which it was developed’.46 The militant short films that Soler secretly made and distributed in 1970 represent a series of different experiments in this direction. For instance, in El Altoparlante/The Loudspeaker (1970), he edits a succession of tightly framed faces of workers entering a factory with a soundtrack that reproduces a series of triumphal discourses declaimed by Franco.47 A film such as Noticiario RNA/RNA Newsreel (1970) combines outtakes and new footage to parody the sound and visual aesthetics of NO-DO, the official newsreels of the Francoist state. However, I would like to focus on a particular film made in that year that warrants a close reading: Carnet de identidad/Identity Document (1970). First, it is perhaps the most ambitious work of collage and détournement executed by Soler in this period. The film also illustrates, with extraordinary clarity, the influence of the Latin American constellation of referents delineated above. Lastly, a digital version of the original 16-mm film was recently made available online by Filmoteca de Catalunya, allowing access to an otherwise obscure source.48 Identity Document takes the form of an overwhelming stream of images and sounds, many of them taken from Soler’s own legal productions or stolen from third-party sources. The piece starts by situating the spectator in a very precise space-time: Barcelona, 1969. Through some press clips



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and audio recordings, Soler evokes the ‘homage to the national flag and the army’ organized by the City Council in front of the University of Barcelona in January 1969. This ceremony coincided with the 30th anniversary of the so-called ‘liberation of Barcelona’ (that is, the capture of the city by Francoist troops in 1939), and was framed as an institutional response to recent dissident actions: just a few days earlier, a large group of university students had attacked the rector’s office, defenestrated a Spanish flag and a bust of Franco, and hung revolutionary banners on the university’s façade.49 Such a symbolic opening, showing a decadent military regime reacting to increasingly radical forms of dissidence, leads to an audiovisual collage of dense symbolic complexity that could be read as a mordant visual parable of the contradictions of desarrollismo. For instance, in a signature exercise of visual autophagy, Soler assembles a torrent of images détourned from his own industrial films. The spectator is confronted with a visual collision. On the one hand, the film evokes an imaginary of capitalist modernity through industrialization and commodification, with footage of medical and lab procedures, systems of scientific organization of labour, assembly-line operators, industrial meat processing, fashion films, advertising and erotic comics (Figure 5.1). On the other hand, the traditionalist banality of everyday life in Spain constantly interferes in many forms, from press clips about bullfighting stars and traffic jams to bizarre news such as the announcement that a Baby Jesus estampita (prayer card) had been sent to President Johnson to accompany the Apollo 8 crew to outer space. As this visual collage unfolds, a profuse voice-over commentary, alternatively read by a professional voice actor and Soler himself,50 accompanies the images with an additional variety of registers and strategies that include

Figure 5.1. Street advertising in Identity Document (Llorenç Soler, 1970). Courtesy of Llorenç Soler and Filmoteca de Catalunya.

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a parody of ‘institutional’ voice-over narrations (the kind of affected commentaries that one would expect to find in Francoist NO-DO newsreels, industrial cinema or advertising) to the recital of excerpts from different literary sources (attributed in the final credits to James Joyce, Albert Camus, Herbert Marcuse, Ernesto Che Guevara and Peter Weiss, among others).51 As Vicente Benet observed, this symbolically overloaded combination of disparate images and sounds offered contemporary spectators, already familiar with the events and materials that converged on screen, the chance to decode all kinds of political subtexts and to establish critical relations.52 Take, for instance, the conflation of images depicting systems of scientific organization of industrial labour – epitomized by the Fordist figure of the timekeeper and clock-in electronic devices, both introduced in Spanish factories in the desarrollista years, and the oral description of the ‘rational’ organization of Nazi camps – taken from the testimonies gathered by Weiss for his play The Investigation (Figure 5.2). This interplay between image and sound opened up a vast field of associations, tinged with Marcusian undertones,53 between the concentration camps and industrial exploitation as necessarily complementary facets of capitalist modernity, an association amplified by the fact that the Franco regime was originally established with the military and political support of Nazi Germany (something that Soler obsessively reiterates in the film, in which Nazi swastikas flicker here and there, almost as reminders of the ‘original sin’ the regime was trying to whitewash during the 1960s). In the aggressive détourned aesthetics of Identity Document, the direct influence of Hour of the Furnaces is apparent. I would like to briefly examine two examples of this influence. The first is a sequence in which Soler reuses

Figure 5.2. Factory time-keeper in Identity Document (Llorenç Soler, 1970). Courtesy of Llorenç Soler and Filmoteca de Catalunya.



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some footage he shot at an industrial meat processing plant which had hired him to produce some promotional films. The slaughter and butchering of pigs at the plant is resignified and intercut with a series of visual ‘consumerist’ counterpoints – a fashion model, advertising in the streets of Barcelona, a car advert – and an ironic soundtrack using Muzak-like tunes and parodying motivational speeches addressed to the youth. To a large extent, this sequence transposes the formal structure of a passage from Hour of the Furnaces, in which the slaughter of a cow is edited with advertising images to the mellow sounds of the Swingle Singers playing Bach. Interestingly, this sequence in the Argentinian film was in turn echoing the well-known conclusion of Стачка/Strike (Sergei Eisenstein, 1924) in which the defeat of the striking proletariat is fused with the killing of a cow at the slaughterhouse.54 Such a chain of referents, thus, opens a transhistorical genealogy of visual motifs among different moments of cinematic radicalism, in what could be seen as an iconological transmission of gestures across time and space. My second example is the last scene of Identity Document. With a kind of abrupt Kuleshov effect that radically modifies the meaning of everything that came before, we encounter a still image of a Vietnamese father carrying his napalm-wounded child. The image remains for three minutes (Figure 5.3). This iconic photograph, taken by Horst Faas for the Associated Press, was widely reproduced in the international press – not by chance, iconic images, especially from the Vietnam War, were a major source for Álvarez’s

Figure 5.3. Vietnamese Napalm victim photographed by Horst Faas in Identity Document (Llorenç Soler, 1970). Courtesy of Llorenç Soler and Filmoteca de Catalunya.

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agit-prop newsreels. Soler edits Faas’s image with a soundtrack that purposefully reproduces a mechanical listen-and-repeat drill from an Assimil English course, one that specifically focuses on ways of expressing indifference and double negations. By using this harrowing image as a poignant conclusion to his portrait of the antinomies of contemporary Spanish society, Soler brings the war home, if I may borrow the title of Martha Rosler’s coetaneous collage series.55 This political aesthetic decision confirms that the atrocities committed against Vietnamese victims were also perceived by Spanish radicals as the ultimate evidence of the criminal nature of advanced capitalism, a general observation with an additional layer of meaning: the diplomatic and economic collaboration between the US and Francoist Spain, formalized in the Madrid Pacts of 1953, had a very precise condition – the use of Spanish soil to establish US military bases. Once again, the formal resonance with Hour of the Furnaces is clear: the chapter ‘Neocolonialism and Violence’ also concludes with a three-minute static shot of a still image, in that case a close-up of the photograph of the dead Ernesto Guevara in Bolivia.56 In both cases, the silent image of a victim of imperialism returns the spectators’ gaze, as if calling for a political response from the audience. This is, literally, what Solanas and Getino aimed to do with their film, as they emphasized in their Third Cinema essay: to turn every screening into a film act, that is, into an active scenario of political discussion and analysis.57 And this is exactly the radical gesture, based on an extraordinary confidence in the political capacity of the moving image, that Soler aimed to bring to the underground Spanish film scene, in the hope that it could fuel the anti-Franco dissidence. Pablo La Parra-Pérez is Professor and Head of the Research Department at Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola (University of the Basque Country, affiliated centre; EQZE) and principal investigator of the research project ‘Zinemaldia 70: All Possible Histories’, launched by the San Sebastian International Film Festival and EQZE. He holds a PhD from New York University with a dissertation entitled ‘Displaced Cinema: Militant Film Culture and Political Dissidence in Spain (1966–1982)’ (2018). His work has been published in journals such as the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Sociologias and Alphaville, and in volumes such as 1968 and Global Cinema (Wayne State University Press, 2018) and Global Perspectives on Amateur Film History and Cultures (Indiana University Press, 2021).

Notes 1.  García Espinosa, Una imagen recorre el mundo. 2.  Eshun and Gray, ‘The Militant Image’.



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3.  On the term ‘Long 1968’, see Dreyfus-Armand et al., Les années 68; and Sherman et al., The Long 1968. 4.  Kornetis, ‘“Everything Links”?’, 39–40. 5.  Dirlik, ‘The Third World’, 295. 6.  The Barcelona School was an avant-garde group active in the late 1960s. It included a series of filmmakers, artists and intellectuals who produced a series of auteur films. For a classic study, see Riambau and Torreiro, La Escuela de Barcelona. 7.  Vila-Matas, ‘Lorenzo Soler’, 18. 8.  Molina-Foix, ‘Cineastas independientes’, 79. 9.  Harbord, Ex-Centric Cinema, 171. 10.  Soler, Los hilos secretos de mis documentales, 41–54. 11.  Debord and Wolman. ‘A User’s Guide to Detournement’, 14–15. 12.  Ibid., 19. 13.  Llorenç Soler, interview with the author, Barcelona, 20 December 2016. 14.  Gerhardt and Saljoughi, ‘Looking Back’, 2; and Sherman et al., The Long 1968, 2. 15.  Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives, 193–94. 16.  My use of the term ‘deprovincialized’ largely draws on Harootunian, Marx after Marx, 2. 17.  Lerner, ‘The Image Belongs to Those Who Work with It’, 110. 18.  The powerful symbolic reference of this newsreel has been underlined by different authors. See, for example, Balaisis, ‘Modernization and Ambivalence’, 7; and Lerner, ‘The Image Belongs to Those Who Work with It’, 110. 19.  Wilson, ‘Ecce Homo Novus’. 20.  Solanas and Getino, ‘Towards a Third Cinema’. 21.  For a comprehensive survey of the international reception of Hour of the Furnaces in different contexts, see Hennebelle, ‘L’impact du troisième cinéma’. 22.  This was allegedly the ‘less Peronist’ segment of the film and was addressed to international audiences. For a detailed analysis of the different scope and target audiences of parts two and three of Hour of the Furnaces, see Mestman, ‘Third Cinema/Militant Cinema’. 23.  Stam, ‘The Two Avant-Gardes’. 24.  I borrow the term ‘cinematic contact zone’ from Djagalov and Salazkina (‘Tashkent ’68’), who in turn derive it from Mary Louise Pratt, in a groundbreaking study on the Tashkent Film Festival. 25.  52 Sundays is the first film Soler made outside of any legal or commercial structure. It portrays a group of working-class apprentice bullfighters aspiring to a professional career as toreros, beyond their limited horizons in the slums of Barcelona. 26.  Ortega, ‘Mérida 68’, 361. 27.  On the limited circulation of Latin American cinema on Spanish commercial screens under Francoism, see Elena and Mestman, ‘Para un observador lejano’. 28.  Bilbatúa, ‘Cine documental independiente catalán. Lorenzo Soler’, 42. 29.  The Rassegna was held in Santa Margherita Ligure (1960–61) and Sestri Levante (1962–64) and culminated in an ambitious international conference held in Genoa in 1965 entitled ‘Third World and World Community’. I am very grateful to Masha Salazkina for calling my attention to this crucial formation. 30.  In 1967, the main topic of discussion at Pesaro was ‘Language and Ideology in Film’. See Mostra Internazionale del Nuovo Cinema, Per una nuova critica; and de Valck, Film Festivals, 28. 31.  For an analysis of later militant film projects led by Lumbreras and her pivotal position between Italy and Spain, see La Parra-Pérez, ‘Workers Interrupting the Factory’. 32.  Moine, Cinéma et guerre froide, 20.

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33.  Soler vaguely recalls that he and Lumbreras joined the protest with a letter (see García Ferrer and Martí Rom, Llorenç Soler, 41). An internal report of the Italian delegation at Leipzig also suggests that Lumbreras’s film was directly involved in the controversy (Valentini, Venturo. 1968. “Alcune note sul Festival del Documentario. Lipsia 16-23/11/1968”, AAMOD, Archivio Unitelefilm, b. 40, f. 437). 34.  Soler, Los hilos secretos de mis documentales, 39–40. 35.  To reconstruct the experience of El Volti, see Elena and Mestman, ‘Para un observador lejano’, 86–87; and Torrell, ‘El Volti’. 36.  Letter from Unitelefilm to Josep Maria López Llaví, 23 April 1970, AAMOD, Archivio Unitelefilm, Spagna; b. 37, f. 417. 37.  Gubern, ‘Notas sobre el cine clandestino’, 179. 38.  Ibid., 179. 39.  As a striking confirmation of the impact of this transformative encounter, shortly after Martí i Valls would become one of the most active promotors of El Volti and a militant filmmaker himself; García Ferrer and Martí Rom, Llorenç Soler, 101–2. 40.  Llorenç Soler, interview with the author, Barcelona, 20 December 2016. 41.  Harbord, Ex-Centric Cinema, 179. 42.  I am indebted to Enrique Fibla-Gutiérrez for his help in locating these film materials. 43.  For a general introduction to desarrollismo, see De Riquer i Permanyer, ‘Social and Economic Change’. 44.  Graham and Labanyi, Spanish Cultural Studies. 45.  Soler’s passport was seized after his participation in the sit-in of three hundred antiFranco intellectuals at the Abbey of Montserrat, in protest against the Burgos trial of sixteen ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna/Basque Country and Freedom) militants who were sentenced to death, an event he documented with his 16-mm camera. 46.  Williams, ‘Manual Override’. 47.  This soundtrack was taken from a record that was given to him as part of a National Tourism Film Award that Soler won in 1964 with a promotional film about the Lleida Pyrenees. 48.  See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HrkKTMAtr0 (accessed 14 July 2022). 49.  ‘Un grupo de estudiantes asaltó el Rectorado’, La Vanguardia Española. 50.  As Soler explained years later, he used to ask the professional voice actors he hired for industrial commissions to record additional texts that were used in his guerrilla films (García Ferrer and Martí Rom, Llorenç Soler, 38). 51.  Although the credits list all these sources, only literal quotations from Weiss’s play The Investigation are fully recognizable in the film’s commentary. 52.  Benet, ‘Entre el compromiso social y el experimentalismo’, 287–88. 53.  Not by chance, both Marcuse and Weiss were translated and published in Spain in the late 1960s, and their works were well-known in radical Left milieux. 54.  This was observed in Stam’s seminal analysis of the film, recently revisited by De Grandis, ‘The Hour of the Furnaces’. 55.  Rosler’s series, entitled Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful (1967–72), recombined images of Vietnam War victims amid placid domestic scenarios taken from US interior design magazines. As Antonio Monegal points out (‘Iconos polémicos’, 17–18), the strategy of ‘bringing’ the icons of war crimes to local settings, forcing a clash between seemingly heterogeneous contexts, became one of the central strategies of anti-Vietnam War activism. 56.  For an in-depth analysis of the last image of Hour of the Furnaces (and its replacement in later versions of the film in the 1970s), see Mestman, ‘La Hora de los Hornos’. 57.  Solanas and Getino, ‘Towards a Third Cinema’, 247–49.



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Bibliography Published Sources Balaisis, Nicholas. ‘Modernization and Ambivalence in Octavio Cortázar’s “Por Primera Vez”’. Cinema Journal 54(1) (2014), 1–24. Benet, Vicente J. ‘Entre el compromiso social y el experimentalismo: el estilo de los primeros filmes de Llorenç Soler’, in Miquel Francés (ed.), La mirada comprometida: Llorenç Soler (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2012), 277–392. Bilbatúa, Miguel. ‘Cine documental independiente catalán. Lorenzo Soler’. Nuestro Cine (61) (1967), 42–43. De Grandis, Rita. ‘The Hour of the Furnaces: A Film “Happening”’, in Christina Gerhardt and Sara Saljoughi (eds), 1968 and Global Cinema (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2018), 117–43. De Riquer i Permanyer, Borja. ‘Social and Economic Change in a Climate of Political Immobilism’, in Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi (eds), Spanish Cultural Studies: An Introduction. The Struggle for Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 259–71. Debord, Guy, and Gil J. Wolman. ‘A User’s Guide to Detournement’, in Ken Knabb (ed.), Situationist International Anthology, revised and expanded edition (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006), 14–21. Dirlik, Arif. ‘The Third World’, in C. Fink et al. (eds), 1968: The World Transformed (Washington, DC: Publications of the German Historical Institute/Cambridge University Press, 1998), 295–317. Djagalov, Rossen, and Masha Salazkina. ‘Tashkent ’68: A Cinematic Contact Zone’. Slavic Review 75(2) (2016), 279–98. Dreyfus-Armand, Geneviève, et al. (eds). Les années 68: le temps de la contestation. Brussels: Complexe, 2000. Elena, Alberto, and Mariano Mestman. ‘Para un observador lejano: el documental latinoamericano en España’, in Paulo Antonio Paranaguá (ed.), Cine documental en América Latina (Madrid: Cátedra, 2003), 79–92. Eshun, Kodwo, and Ros Gray. ‘The Militant Image: A Ciné‐Geography’. Third Text 25(1) (2011), 1–12. García Espinosa, Julio. Una imagen recorre el mundo. Mexico DF: Filmoteca de la UNAM, 1982. García Ferrer, J.M., and Josep Miquel Martí Rom (eds). Llorenç Soler. Barcelona: Associació d’Enginyers Industrials de Catalunya, 1996. Gerhardt, Christina, and Sara Saljoughi. ‘Looking Back: Global Cinema and the Legacy of New Waves around 1968’, in Christina Gerhardt and Sara Saljoughi (eds), 1968 and Global Cinema (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2018), 1–20. Graham, Helen, and Jo Labanyi (eds). Spanish Cultural Studies: An Introduction. The Struggle for Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Gubern, Román. ‘Notas sobre el cine clandestino en Catalunya bajo el franquismo’, in J. Vidal-Beneyto (ed.), Alternativas populares a las comunicaciones de masas (Madrid: Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, 1979), 177–80. Gubern, Román. Viaje de ida. Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 1997. Harbord, Janet. Ex-Centric Cinema: Giorgio Agamben and Film Archaeology. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. Harootunian, Harry. Marx after Marx: History and Time in the Expansion of Capitalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Hennebelle, Guy. ‘L’impact du troisième cinéma. Résultats d’une enquète internationale’. Tiers-Monde 20(79) (1979), 623–45. Kornetis, Kostis. ‘“Everything Links”? Temporality, Territoriality and Cultural Transfer in the ’68 Protest Movements’. Historein 9 (2009), 34–45.

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La Parra-Pérez, Pablo. ‘Workers Interrupting the Factory: Helena Lumbreras’s Militant Factory Films between Italy and Spain (1968–1978)’, in Christina Gerhardt and Sara Saljoughi (eds), 1968 and Global Cinema (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2018), 363–84. Lerner, Jesse. ‘The Image Belongs to Those Who Work with It: Recycled Cinema in Latin America’, in Jesse Lerner and Luciano Piazza (eds), Ism, Ism, Ism: Experimental Cinema in Latin America (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 108–27. Mestman, Mariano. ‘La Hora de los Hornos, el peronismo y la imagen del “Che”’. Secuencias 10 (1999), 52–61. Mestman, Mariano. ‘Third Cinema/Militant Cinema: At the Origins of the Argentinian Experience (1968–1971)’, trans. Jonathan Buchsbaum. Third Text 25(1) (2011): 29–40. Moine, Caroline. Cinéma et guerre froide: histoire du Festival de films documentaires de Leipzig: 1955–1990. Paris: Sorbonne, 2014. Molina-Foix, Vicente. ‘Cineastas independientes: Una tendencia del cine español’. Nuestro Cine (77–78) (1968), 68–90. Monegal, Antonio. ‘Iconos polémicos’, in Antonio Monegal (ed.), Política y (po)ética de las imágenes de guerra (Barcelona: Paidós, 2007), 9–35. Mostra Internazionale del Nuovo Cinema (ed.). Per una nuova critica: i convegni pesaresi 1965– 1967. Venezia: Marsilio, 1989. Ortega, María Luisa. ‘Mérida 68: Las disyuntivas del documental’, in M. Mestman (ed.), Las rupturas del 68 en el cine de América Latina (Madrid: Akal, 2016), 355–89. Riambau, Esteve, and Casimiro Torreiro. La Escuela de Barcelona: el cine de la ‘gauche divine’. Barcelona: Anagrama, 1999. Ross, Kristin. May ’68 and Its Afterlives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Sherman, Daniel J., et al. (eds). The Long 1968: Revisions and New Perspectives. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. Solanas, Fernando E., and Octavio Getino. ‘Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World (1969)’, in Scott MacKenzie (ed.), Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 230–50. Soler, Llorenç. Los hilos secretos de mis documentales. Barcelona: CIMS 97, 2002. Stam, Robert. ‘The Two Avant-Gardes: Solanas and Getino’s The Hour of the Furnaces’, in Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski (eds), Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2014), 271–86. Torrell, Josep. ‘El Volti: Una distribuidora clandestina bajo el franquismo’, El Viejo Topo 281 (2011), 57–62. ‘Un grupo de estudiantes asaltó el Rectorado’. La Vanguardia Española 22 (18 January 1969). de Valck, Marijke. Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007. Vila-Matas, Enrique. ‘Lorenzo Soler, Cinco Años de Cine Independiente’. Nuevo Fotogramas 1111 (1970), 18. Williams, Evan Calder. 2016. ‘Manual Override’. The New Inquiry, 21 March. Wilson, Kristi M. ‘Ecce Homo Novus: Snapshots, the “New Man”, and Iconic Montage in the Work of Santiago Alvarez’. Social Identities 19(3–4) (2013), 410–22.

Archival Sources Archivio Audiovisivo del Movimento Operaio e Democratico (AAMOD), Rome (Italy). Filmoteca de Catalunya, Barcelona (Spain).

Part III

Reports

from the

Field

CHAPTER

6

A Letter to the Future Autumn Knight’s WALL (2016/2019) at the Studio Museum in Harlem Cori Olinghouse

In 2018, the Studio Museum in Harlem (Studio Museum) acquired Autumn Knight’s WALL, the first performance to enter their permanent collection. Tracing the author’s own experience in designing a method for the migration of embodied knowledge into a museum’s collection, this chapter emphasizes the systems of care required to develop an unconventional archive that is uniquely generative for the artwork. The author’s role relies on closely listening to the work and to the artist to develop a model that extends the ethics of the work itself. Using an embodied approach to archiving, which explores the body as a repository of knowledge and draws from performance forms and cultures that use orature, improvisation, ritual, storytelling and choreography, this method focuses on the somatic and sensorial dimensions of memory and history. Unlike several existing performance works that have been acquired in museum collections, deriving their structures from a history of score and task-based compositional methods, WALL sits at the nexus of social and artistic practice; it is both a performance work and a form of social action. Rewriting the terms for performance conservation, the process of acquiring WALL initiates a model for acquisition that invites future interpretation and modularity, and applies a call-and-response methodology as initiated through Knight’s practice.

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Figure 6.1. Autumn Knight, WALL (2016/2019). Performance, total run time approximately forty-five minutes. Danspace Project, New York, NY. Sydney Rodriguez, Krystique Bright, Mzuri Hudson, Sandra Parris, Shelly Montrose, Leila Fuentes, Tanisha Jones, Niala Epps. The Studio Museum in Harlem; Museum purchase with funds provided by the Acquisition Committee 2017.4. Photo © Paula Court.

WALL gathers an intergenerational cast of Black femmes in a performance ritual layered with sounds and actions. Wearing various shades of electric blue and seated in a line, the performers gaze past the audience while carrying out small gestures. Two participants sit close together, holding hands, while others grind fragrant herbs, such as cardamom, lavender, rosemary or fresh lilies with a stone. Behind them, two women in red perform the actions of wall building, simulating bricklaying, stacking and bulldozing. One of the women in red sings a song about walls. The performance offers a philosophy of social assembly, a strategy for bringing Black femmes into solidarity, which comes alive in the space between movement and stillness, abstraction and narrative, and protest and performance. As described in the Studio Museum’s press release, ‘Knight creates a sanctuary through this performance: a loosely defined internal space where burdens can be placed, imagination is fostered, and mental and physical survival strategies can emerge’.1 The ensemble, local to each staging, embodies a range of ages, body types, sexualities, class demographics and dis/abilities. Following Knight’s 2016–17 artist-in-residence term, the artist challenged the Studio Museum’s customary practice of acquiring an objectbased work by proposing a performance for the collection, which would require the migration and long-term care of embodied knowledge. Part of the difficulty of acquiring WALL was maintaining the integrity of an ephemeral and variable work held within a social body. Performance persists through the active migration and transmission of physical presence and embodiment, in sharp contrast to the ways in which museums are structured to preserve ideals of stasis, fixity and physical integrity.2 In performance, memory is a medium that takes place within, between and through bodies; it mutates and becomes transfigured through the social. Notions of authenticity and fixity prized by the visual arts and museums clash with performance’s dynamics of process and variability, which undermines ideas of an ‘original’ and a ‘copy’. In the context of performance conservation,



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a straight attempt to translate the original is not only impossible, but can result in a stilted representation, foreclosing the future life of the work and/or flattening and deadening its future lives.3 Black performance forms in particular draw upon the continued transmission and transmutation of embodiment through such devices as orature and ritual, which challenge conventional notions of the archive and western systems of knowledge production. In considering Knight’s work for the collection, the Studio Museum would have to contend with the many complexities involved in stewarding performance works, including the ways in which embodied memory, Black performance theories and Knight’s vision evade colonial systems of knowledge transfer. In 2019, I was invited by the Studio Museum to work with Autumn Knight to act as a bridge between the artist and institution during the preparations for the acquisition. I was brought in to collaborate on contextual documentation, to imagine how future performances will be staged, and to develop a structure for how the Studio Museum will circulate and care for performance works in the future. For Knight’s work in particular, my role was to bring attention to the embodied knowledge in the work, asking how it might live in the museum’s collection and in future iterations. In our first conversation, Knight expressed her desire to work with someone familiar with dramaturgy, choreography, embodied practice, as well as performance archiving and acquisition in an effort to negotiate between her practice and the institution. This included creating perceptual distinctions between object and performance-based work, and advising on the necessary systems of care, infrastructurally, for performance works. The original methodology I developed for Knight’s WALL drew upon two decades of experience performing, restaging, archiving and curating performance, and figuring out how people might restage performances in the future. For the purposes of this chapter, I focus on the intersubjective encounter between me and Knight, attending to the language and concepts embedded in WALL as a generative means for structuring the acquisition process. In what follows I relate conversations and share field notes and observations created in the moment. As intimacy is part of what’s necessary in my approach, I write in the present tense, using ‘Autumn’ rather than ‘Knight’ to signal this change in relation. The following inquiry, which I have devised over many years, guides this process: What are the essential parts of this work that need to be carried forward with each iteration? What aberrations can occur through each subsequent iteration? How can the documentation act as a portal into the work and the practices that surround the work? How can future interpretations mutate in such a way that doesn’t overly codify the work – a way that keeps the performance alive?

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Process: Sequence of Collaboration 13 July 2019, Quantum Listening: Our initial discovery period takes place in residency at Abrons Art Center (Abrons) in New York City and in my Brooklyn artist studio over two months, in sessions that last for about four to six hours. Prior to meeting with Autumn, I screen the video documentation from the 2016 performance at the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston, Texas where she is joined by her mom, sister-in-law, her mom’s best friend, her godmother, collaborator Natasha L. Turner, and other women in her life – the women who make up her ‘wall’. I am attempting to read a form of code, a language and social philosophy that Autumn has developed over years of living alongside these important female figures. Scribbled across my notebook are the following words and phrases: ‘Persona’, ‘Verbal and nonverbal inflections’, ‘Distancing versus autobiography’, ‘Gaze’, ‘Gravity’ and ‘Wall’. As I continue viewing, my first impressions continue to thicken: A wall of women sit alongside one another as if forming a blue horizon or a wave paused in mid-motion. Their gaze is outward and inward, almost as if looking at a mirror or an ocean, or gulf. The stillness operates as a form of protest. The stillness is formidable.

Through this process of active witnessing, I am setting down my observations and assumptions as a means to generate further enquiry for my work with Autumn – a critical preparatory process where I generate textual description as a way to externalize my internal thought process. I experiment with political theorist Jane Bennett’s notion of ‘words as sticky substances’, using words at the ‘level of their sensuous specificity’4 – knowing that a sensory attunement to language will be required for future transmitters. Understanding how to read the codes that travel within particular performance forms requires a quality of quantum listening, what composer Pauline Oliveros describes as ‘listening to more than one reality simultaneously’5 – a form of listening that’s about listening to listening to listening. Part of this practice is to enquire into the compositional elements, aesthetics and memory structures embedded in the work. What is the attention to memory as a material? How is memory operating within, between and through bodies? Is it aural, muscular, spatial, social or rhythmic, for example, in the ways memory is encoded through the body while grooving to music? What kind of memory palace or loci is being utilized? How can this be understood by way of facilitating the staging of work in the future? 16 July 2019, Approaches to Directing: On our first day of working together, Autumn asks, ‘How do we carry the trace?’ – a question that helps me think of the physical nature of this work throughout our process together. I ask Autumn about the origins and elements of WALL, along with her practices of creating and directing. During our conversation, I bring



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up the word ‘distancing’, a dynamic I observe in the way the performers in WALL produce with their bodies a sense of public and private space. Autumn reveals that distancing is a concept used in drama therapy, which has therapeutic ramifications and is part of how the client or patient figures out where, as she says, ‘to exist between the outer representation and the internal self’.6 Over and under-distancing gives clues for how boundaries are negotiated – whether a person is holding up a wall or spilling past their own boundaries to reveal too much. She talks about the concept of elasticity and the movement between registers. I offer the descriptor ‘telescoping’, to which she responds: … telescoping is a perfect, perfect, perfect term. There’s something this person doesn’t want to talk about. There’s a flatness and a kind of colluding with them to keep that thing way over there. … So how do I, not bring it boom right there to you, but bring it a little bit closer. … not all the way close because that’s too close, because obviously that person needs some distance. So how to pull it in a little bit, a little bit closer, a safe enough distance.7

I learn that Autumn’s directing approach has both performative and therapeutic effects, drawn from her background in theatre and drama therapy – a detail I take note of for later conversations about physical transmission. The concept of telescoping emerges, in the context of our interview, through my attention to her verbal and nonverbal cues – the words repeated or emphasized, her gestures and body language. The process is relational and requires sensitive negotiation, moving alongside Autumn to understand unspoken strategies embedded in the work. Autumn has a facile ability to use her body to dilate interpersonal senses of space, either leaning in and shortening her gaze, or leaning back and extending her gaze, which has the effect of creating intimacy or distance. Much like the concept of telescoping that we uncover through this process, interviewing is its own elastic process, influenced by the improvisational exchange of words, gestures and expressions. 17 July 2019, Visual Mapping: On day three, we start our session by talking through the elements of WALL in a process I have developed called visual mapping. I have structured it to elicit descriptive and embodied details about the concept and transmission of Autumn’s performance, uncovering some of the nonverbal strategies embedded in WALL. A long roll of paper extends across the table and onto the floor. Autumn whips out two microphones connected to a large speaker and sets the stage for our interviewing process. Even though I am supposed to be asking questions, I feel like I’m in an episode of Sanity TV, Autumn’s ongoing performance series. She is the host and I am the guest. At one point, she refers to me as Christopher Robin from Winnie the Pooh – a descriptor that brings levity throughout the project, while also signalling to my white positionality and to the ways in which Christopher lives in his imagination, asks too many questions and

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Figure 6.2. Autumn Knight, WALL (2016/2019). Process notes, 2019.



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is naive. Working artist-to-artist, we share backgrounds in improvisation and humour-based work. Although we have radically different subject positions, these creative sensibilities assist in guiding the process. I ask Autumn to talk me through the elements she has written on the map. My role is to act receptively as a witness, while Autumn moves through a recollection process, as we both recognize emerging patterns and structures. I find that the materiality of the words on the page, their colour, size, texture, placement on the page, act as a form of mnemonics – triggering particular embodied memories. I begin with broad strokes, asking Autumn to describe the elements of WALL in a stream-of-consciousness series of associations. Once we generate a map of content, I look for recurring words, ideas, linguistic phrases and signals of repetition. Within these areas of repetition, I urge Autumn to linger – excavating further meanings and recollections. Rather than coming in with a pre-determined narrative I am looking to illustrate, I learn improvisationally – allowing unforeseen connections to rise to the surface of our dialogue. The approach allows for a digesting of complex ideas. My agenda is not linear or narratively focused.8 Several keywords are mapped across the page in a large rhizome-like structure. A skeleton for WALL’s compositional structure emerges. Words cascade across the page with no seeming beginning or end. Starting on the left-hand side of the drawing and moving from top to bottom are the following elements: VULNERABILITY GRINDING FEMMES/WOMEN FIRMNESS RESPONSIBILITY FOR SELF IN FRONT & BEHIND THE WALL ME & NATASHA BODIES RED ‘SHE WAS LOVED!’ (Toni Morrison) WALL CHOREOGRAPHY BLUE RESISTANCE WHERE SACRED(NESSES) BLACKNESS(ES) BUILDING WALLS MOVEMENT & STILLNESS WHO TIME CARE EYES, VISION, SIGHT DIGNITY

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By breaking the work into its concepts and embodied elements, I can then assist with the migration of this information into transcripts for future transmitters. In some ways, asking an artist to map their complex ways of knowing can be an impossible task – in part, because embodied knowledge lives cellularly, generationally, ancestrally. Memories are held as part of a social body carried down through multiple pasts and futures. WALL is a project that is lived by Autumn and past participants. It is inevitable that aspects of the work will remain occluded, particularly with Autumn’s description of the choreography as ‘subtle’, using ‘undetectable movements’ that are ‘under the radar’. She says: I was thinking about the history of trying to hide what you’re doing, having to suppress yourself and being expressive in the extremities without giving things away. Signalling, communicating very subtly. … Thinking about … how do slaves coordinate running away? What type of nonverbal communication had to happen? What were the hand signals that were developed? … What was the eye vocabulary?9

This makes even more explicit the reality that we will never ‘capture’ everything – a notion that can lend intense scrutiny, further altering the nature of the work. I am reminded to preserve a space of opacity, attuning to the ways in which documentation has the potential to extend gestures of care or harm, grasping or sharing, enclosure or access. 3 October 2019, Unconscious Gestures: It is one day prior to the New York City premiere of WALL. Autumn begins the rehearsal by working with each participant to uncover what she calls their ‘unconscious gestures’. She speaks quietly, asking, ‘What is something that you do? What is an unconscious gesture that you do/have?’10 Her words are intimate, meant only for the women seated at the wall. Mia Matthias, Sixx Teague, Sydney Rodriguez, Krystique Bright, Mzuri Hudson, Sandra Parris, Shelly Montrose, Leila Fuentes, Tanisha Jones and Niala Epps sit alongside one another, forming a fierce assembly in the horizontal expanse of Danspace Project. Autumn takes Tanisha Jones along the wall of participants – an experiment I suggest as a way to test Autumn’s idea to have a carry-over person Figure 6.3. Autumn Knight, WALL (2016/2019). Rehearsal still. Autumn Knight (pictured in red and standing to the right), Leila Fuentes, Tanisha Jones and Niala Epps. Danspace Project, New York, NY. The Studio Museum in Harlem; Museum purchase with funds provided by the Acquisition Committee 2017.4. Photo © Paula Court.

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for future performances. Jones is the assistant curator at the Jerome Robbins Dance Division at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Known for her stewardship of performance histories and archives, I invited her into the cast of WALL, interested to see what performing would elicit in someone who has an investment in maintaining the future of Autumn’s work. Later on, Jones describes the transformation that takes place in this nonverbal space – that she’s ‘struck by Autumn’s ability to discern from each participant the intrinsic movements and gestures that fit each person’.11 She describes the process as ‘internal, deeply conceptual, contemplative, and reflective’. There is a space for individuality in the work, while also being part of a collective. In speaking with Autumn about these ideas, she says: … when I work with other people, there is a desire to bring out what’s a part of them already, but also, let’s also see if we can … reimagine yourself as something slightly different. … Not for the sake of changing who you are but stretching yourself, augmenting reality, just enough, to extend reality. Because I think something happens in the augmenting of reality that we don’t do enough of. I think the threat is when we’ve been asked to do it for too long or too deeply, so minor stretches… elasticity, if you will.12

Knowing that unconscious gestures are fundamental to the future transmission of the work, I direct Autumn to create a series of scores entitled ‘WALL SCORES’, which invite future interpreters to reimagine and reconfigure WALL within a set of constraints. Drawn from our interviewing process, these scores respond to information elicited through our transcribed conversations. Addressed to ‘future organisers, curators, producers, and/or artists, as yet identified’, here is an excerpt: Study each person. Look for the unconscious gesture that reveals some aspect of that being. Exaggerate and repeat. Until it becomes a moving living thing. Is hypnotic, but doesn’t need to be paid attention to. ‘Subtle’, ‘undetectable’ and ‘under the radar’ – striving for these qualities. Communicate the sensitivity to notice someone’s embodied, unconscious gesture.13

Wall Work At a certain point, I realize that we are touching only one piece of WALL, an understanding that comes from learning about Autumn’s project WALL WORK,14 which is part of a larger community-oriented practice. In WALL, spatial formations, such as the line of seated women, behave as a form of code or embodied communication. The formations are effervescent and sensorial, shaped by Black femme subjectivities and ritualized actions of grinding, building walls, singing, lamenting and praying. As a Gulf Coast artist, the spatial tensions are precisely invoked. Autumn understands that spatial

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arrangements can have brutal or transformative consequences.15 The amount of distance between the participants in the wall and the audience creates a threshold, or as Autumn describes, ‘It’s not an endless distance, but there’s a gulf’.16 Down to the way she directs the gaze, asking the performers not to look at the audience directly, but to soften their gaze a few feet in front of them. The focal length inscribes this gulf space, designating what can be let in and what must stay out. WALL provides a temporary and porous home, fortified through its mobility, nonetheless. On 5 December 2019, we meet with the Studio Museum to focus on structuring the ways in which WALL can be sequenced out in time and broken into different combinations and permutations, along with the physical transmission of WALL. At the time of the meeting, I realize the acquisition is its own form of WALL WORK – that I inadvertently drew from the participatory nature of Autumn’s practice to bring together the ecosystem of players supporting WALL, initiating a means of knowledge transfer from Autumn to myself, to the curatorial and conservation team. Before we gather, I ask the Studio Museum personnel to review all the transcripts, documentation and WALL SCORES as a jumping-off point, imagining what it would be like to receive these materials in the future. These all now reside in Autumn’s and the Studio Museum’s collection, as resources for future stagings of WALL. Extending Autumn’s call-and-response logic, our session is structured as an eight-hour working group, moving between presentations and discussions, in what assistant curator and exhibition coordinator Eric Booker describes as ‘an ongoing reciprocal process’ to find a way for WALL to be a ‘Living breathing entity in the future’.17 I am so grateful for the participation of Booker, Amarie Gipson, Connie Choi, Gina Guddemi, Legacy Russell and Yelena Keller – an incredible team, or behind-the-scenes ‘wall’ essential for the migration of Autumn’s work into the Studio Museum’s collection. Concepts from Autumn’s practices, such as ‘elasticity’ and ‘modularity’ help to inform ways of thinking about the form and structure of the performance acquisition – how to incorporate these into the museum’s processes and protocols and extend these gestures in the future. We return to my initial enquiry to consider the boundaries and limits of the work, or as Eric Booker says, how might we ‘preserve both the fluidity and some constraints?’18 Drawn from our experiment with Tanisha Jones, we recommend having a ‘carry over’ person, a performer from a previous iteration who acts as a griot or storyteller to transmit their embodied knowledge of the work. Autumn communicates her interest in collaborating with future institutions to reimagine WALL – not wanting a borrowing institution to flatten the complexity of the work by way of copying a prior iteration directly from video.



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In the conversation we invite Autumn to read from her WALL SCORES, which act as a provocation for future transmitters. The scores invite interpreters to ‘Think of what a wall is and can be’, and to imagine the work in various durations of time. The first lines read as follows: The work can be modular: 5 min, 15 min, 45 min, 2 hours, 10 hours, 3 days? What can be unpacked or unfolded if the piece is longer? The strength of the wall. The wall can consist of as many persons needed.

Wanting the language to be accessible to a range of future participants, Autumn draws from Malcolm X’s statement, ‘Make it plain’. We decide that the scores will be one of the first elements a borrowing institution will receive upon signing the loan agreement. Another innovation presented during this meeting is a document created by Eric Booker with Amarie Gipson called an ‘Ethical Outline’, akin to an access rider,19 which must be signed in conjunction with the loan agreement, binding future institutions to ways of caring for the performers. Moved by the exceptional care taken by Gipson and Booker in working with the cast of WALL, this document emerges from my request to document their own process, locating this as an essential part of their access work with Black femme performers. In our meeting, Gipson expresses, ‘be mindful that the entire performance is ritualistic and centered around the lives and experiences of Black women. Their participation is essential to the performance’s success. Please be willing and ready to accommodate any needs in real time’.20

Reflections: How Do We Carry the Trace? The challenge of translating a performance work for acquisition is to maintain the integrity of sensorial and somatic knowledge formations within the context of a museum’s collection. While the term ‘embodiment’ is being used increasingly and differently across contexts and disciplines, a shared interpretation is the frustration with binary constructs such as: body/mind, object/subject, and knower/known. Embodiment is the idea that memory is grounded in sensory and lived experience, and that cognition is shaped by the entire organism and cannot be removed from a situated and social point of view. The consequences of not honouring embodied knowledge within museum structures extend their devastating colonial effects, which makes bodies into objects and prioritizes commodities over subjects.21 Within this episteme, embodied knowledge oozes beyond the edges of physical buildings or records – because of memory, because of bodies, because of the

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sensuous. Speaking further to the sensorial dimensions of Black archival structures, Legacy Russell writes: Black and queer archives require new technologies and vernaculars, must operate differently … as these histories are somatic, they live with us, we carry them on our bodies, in the stories we share, in the movement(s) we make. Thus the spaces we build and our archives within – in our bars, on our dance floors, in our collection congregation – must be engaged sensorially, sonically, intergenerationally.22

Given that the acquisition of performance by museums is fairly new and uncharted territory, there are few public accounts of the process. My approach emphasizes embodied and ‘living archives’ methods and strongly recommends – indeed, insists – that museums collaborate with embodied practitioners who can bring focus to the memory structures and ways that embodied knowledge travels and migrates in and through bodies. It’s essential to be able to qualitatively understand how transmission is taking place, which means attuning to the memory structures that underlie particular forms. A living archives approach brings an adaptive and responsive framework. Rather than attempting fixity, the archive operates regeneratively, working with memory to capture multiple perspectives over time. The archive is dynamic and contains both pre-existing and newly generated documentation produced from past, present and future iterations. Part of this means creating new documentation in collaboration with an artist and setting up structures so institutions can continue gathering documentation in future performance iterations, accessioning materials back into the archive. This includes creating a built-in system for review, redaction and expansion. I also advocate for participatory forms of interviewing and description, which directly involve artists and communities in shaping their own complex representations. Combining oral history and dramaturgical sensibilities, my approach favours the relational and intersubjective. I share an affinity with dramaturg Katherine Profeta who characterizes her work as existing in a state of motion, which is different from the interpretation that a dramaturg’s role is to ensure that a script is being properly adhered to in the adaptation of a theatrical play. Profeta talks about the idea of ‘oscillating’ in the movement between an outside and inside perspective, research and experience, while always asking questions, listening, excavating and activating archival material.23 For the interviewing process I also applied a feminist ethics of care, drawn from Laura Marks’ notion of haptic criticism ‘as a way to “warm up” our cultural tendency to take a distance’,24 where the ‘eyes themselves function like organs of touch’,25 inviting a tactile relation – a touching, more than looking. In the context of working in studio visits with Knight, this included finding ways to be in embodied proximity rather than in some



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imagined objectivity, drawing also from Donna Haraway’s idea of situated knowledges, which argues for taking the ‘view from a body, always a complex, contradictory, structuring, and structured body, versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity’.26 A standardized approach using existing templates could not replace what emerges through working intimately to translate the deeply embedded aspects of the work. I didn’t want to task Knight with the labour of filling out artist questionnaires and forms, much of which require further collaboration and conversation. The process made me realize I want to push harder on relational and collaborative approaches, and challenge the field to produce more archivists invested in the body and embodiment, making sure that these archivists are as or more diverse than the artists they work with.

Aftercare In working on this process,27 I now understand Autumn Knight’s WALL as itself a process of care work, revealing the ways in which memory travels and is kept alive through social formations. WALL gestures to the invaluable ways of knowing that circulate within Black performance practices, alive in their constant transmutation and reconfiguration. The acquisition of WALL then requires different forms of care and stewardship than typically exist in museum collections. Through the acquisition, WALL grows in two directions. First, through the continued performances of WALL into the future, and second, through the regenerative archive that expands with each iteration, constructing a larger wall of Black femmes stretching across spacetimes. Within the archive, WALL carries a fractal logic, increasing its surface area within a finite boundary. The museum holds a piece of the wall – the concept, contextual documentation, and the structure for carrying on the work’s futurity, which can only happen through the physical transfer of memory and embodied knowledge. The women whose labour inscribes WALL can never be held within an archive or museum collection, except in the form of memory or testimony. The acquisition and staging of WALL Figure 6.4. Autumn Knight, WALL (2016/2019). Rehearsal still. Danspace Project, New York, NY. The Studio Museum in Harlem; Museum purchase with funds provided by the Acquisition Committee 2017.4. Photo © Paula Court.

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requires exceptional care, given that the essential aspect of the work is the process of bringing Black femmes into solidarity. The acquisition of WALL further signals to the ways in which embodied knowledge cannot be held as property, pointing to how value itself is part of the incommensurability between bodies and what tries to contain them. The idea is something that poet scholar Fred Moten spoke about in the ‘Value Talks’ series at the Museum of Modern Art, a public event series examining ephemeral forms in the institutional context. He says: I’m interested in making a claim for what is invaluable… part of what black studies means for me is dealing with a paradox: You’re talking about people who are also commodities. The very way in which you are conceived of as having no value – that is precisely because you have been assigned a value. Literally: a price. That paradox is something I feel I want and need to work through.28

And so, following Moten, the proposal to acquire WALL is devastatingly simple: it lays the ground for the care of Black femmes and to insist on their vibrant persistence in the future. Cori Olinghouse is an interdisciplinary artist, archivist and curator living in Brooklyn, New York. She is the founder and director of The Portal, an artist-driven initiative dedicated to poetic and creative forms of archiving. Recently, she collaborated with video artist Charles Atlas on a movingimage installation of Trisha Brown’s archival materials for Judson Dance Theater: ‘The Work Is Never Done’, an exhibition for the Museum of Modern Art. Formerly, as archive director for the Trisha Brown Dance Company, she developed a living archives methodology to assist in the legacy planning for Brown’s company and archive, a company she danced for from 2002 to 2006. She holds an MA in Performance Curation from Wesleyan University and serves as visiting faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

Notes 1.  The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Studio Museum in Harlem Announces Fall 2019 Exhibitions and Programs, 2019, https://studiomuseum.org/press-release/ studio-museum-harlem-announces-fall-2019-exhibitions-and-programs. 2.  Time-based media conservators Johanna Phillips, Pip Laurenson and Jill Sterrett have contributed vital knowledge for the care and preservation of installation, media and performance-based works, approaching these mediums as ephemeral formats. Despite their critical innovations, strategies for translating and migrating embodied knowledge have not been extensively invented or developed. 3.  My approach engages notions of translation and interpretation. For further discussion of these ideas, see Olinghouse, ‘Mapping the Unruly’, 19. 4.  Bennett, ‘Powers of the Hoard’.



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5.  Oliveros, ‘Quantum Listening’, 1. 6.  Knight, interview by Cori Olinghouse, ‘Telescoping: Approach to Practice’. 7.  Ibid. 8.  I initially developed these ideas as part of my graduate thesis at Wesleyan University (Olinghouse, ‘Mapping the Unruly’, 50). 9.  Knight, interview by Cori Olinghouse, ‘Sketching Out the Elements of WALL’. 10.  Knight, interview by Cori Olinghouse, ‘Telescoping: Approach to Practice’. 11.  Tanisha Jones, personal interview, 9 March 2020. 12.  Knight, interview by Cori Olinghouse, ‘Telescoping: Approach to Practice’. 13.  The WALL SCORES, transcripts and documentation are now held in the collections of the artist and the Studio Museum in Harlem. 14.  While in residency at Abrons, Autumn was also developing WALL WORK, a project devoted to survivors of domestic violence. 15.  In 2019, Eric Booker organized Autumn Knight: WALL, the first New York City performances held at Danspace Project. In the performance programme he writes: ‘At a time when walls are at the forefront of our collective consciousness, Knight’s performance speaks volumes. The borders and prison walls that restrict and confine so many, as well as institutional walls that invisibly bar entry, all register as contentious sites for people of color. Walls of refuge – those that protect our homes, clubs, or temples – also form vital spaces of care. Knight references several such structures within our geopolitical imaginary – the Western Wall, or Wailing Wall, in Jerusalem and the Galveston Seawall in Texas – while considering their spirituality and permanence’. Booker, ‘Autumn Knight: WALL’. 16.  Knight, interview by Cori Olinghouse, ‘Sketching Out the Elements of WALL’. 17.  The Studio Museum in Harlem, private working group, 5 December 2019. 18.  Ibid. 19.  One example of an access rider is ‘Johanna Hedva’s Disability Access Rider’, which guides and challenges institutions in understanding how to work with disabled artists and communities. Hedva, ‘Hedva’s Disability Access Rider’. 20.  The Studio Museum in Harlem, private working group, 5 December 2019. 21.  In The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Diana Taylor describes performance as a way of knowing, uncovering the ways in which embodied knowledge formations have been colonized by imperial histories of archiving. 22.  Russell, ‘Sadie’s Inspiring Work…’. 23.  Profeta, Dramaturgy in Motion, preface, xvii. 24.  Marks, Touch, introduction, xiii. 25.  Ibid., 2. 26.  Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges’, 589. 27.  ‘Aftercare’ is a term that Autumn Knight brought up in our last conversation with the Studio Museum, discussing the need to close the space upon the completion of performances, as a way to care for the participants beyond the frame of the event. 28.  Fred Moten quoted in Beasley and Moten, ‘On Poetry and the Turntable’, 139.

Bibliography Beasley, Kevin, and Fred Moten. ‘On Poetry and the Turntable’, in Triple Canopy and Ralph Lemon (eds), On Value (Triple Canopy, 2016), 121–43. Bennett, Jane. ‘Powers of the Hoard: Artistry and Agency in a World of Vibrant Matter’. Public lecture presented at The New School, New York, 13 September 2011. Booker, Eric. ‘Autumn Knight: WALL’. New York: Danspace Project, 2019. http://danspace.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/AutumnKnight_web.pdf.

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Haraway, Donna. ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’. Feminist Studies 14(3) (Fall 1988), 575–99. Hedva, Johanna. ‘Hedva’s Disability Access Rider’. sick woman theory, 22 August 2019. https:// sickwomantheory.tumblr.com/post/187188672521/hedvas-disability-access-rider. Knight, Autumn, interview by Cori Olinghouse. ‘Sketching Out the Elements of WALL’. 15, 17, 18 July 2019, The Studio Museum in Harlem. Knight, Autumn, interview by Cori Olinghouse. ‘Telescoping: Approach to Practice’. 16 July 2019, The Studio Museum in Harlem. Marks, Laura U. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Olinghouse, Cori. 2017. ‘Mapping the Unruly: Imagining a Methodology for the Archiving of Performance’. Master’s thesis, Wesleyan University, 2017. https://doi.org/10.14418/ wes01.2.217. Oliveros, Pauline. ‘Quantum Listening: From Practice to Theory to Practice Practice’. MusicWorks (75) (Fall 2000), 1. Profeta, Katherine. Dramaturgy in Motion: At Work on Dance and Movement Performance. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015. Russell, Legacy. ‘Sadie’s Inspiring Work…’. Instagram, 18 August 2020. https://www.instagram.com/p/CEC8ONklcdk/?igshid=al0bx6v903xo. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.

CHAPTER

7

Philadelphia Immigration Stories Making the Aural Visual Janneken Smucker

After attending the BABE summer school in Florence in 2017, I embarked on teaching a multi-semester series of university courses centred on oral histories with immigrants to Philadelphia, co-taught with my West Chester University colleague Charles Hardy. During Spring 2018, we focused on the early wave of immigration to this east coast American city, which at the turn of the twentieth century was known as the ‘Workshop of the World’. Philadelphia experienced a dramatic demographic shift with the addition of over three hundred thousand immigrants from Europe, with heavy concentrations of Russian Jews, Italians and Irish, as well as other eastern and southern Europeans.1 Students worked closely with interviews that Hardy and others working with him had conducted with elderly Philadelphians in the early 1980s, curating multisensory experiences with digital audio, period photographs and other primary sources. In Spring 2019, we trained another cohort of students to conduct a new set of interviews with late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century immigrants to Philadelphia, who came from vastly different parts of the world, including Western Africa, Iraq, China, Southeast Asia and Latin America. Again, students combined visual elements – this time provided by their narrators – with the audio, in order to interpret these life stories on the Philadelphia Immigration website. In Spring 2021, students combined audio from both old and new

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interviews to create digital storytelling projects comparing these two waves of immigration. By mixing together the interviews recounting immigration experiences one hundred years apart, the Philadelphia Immigration project reveals the distinctions and commonalities between these two immigration waves not through demographical statistics, but through intimate human moments only possible through oral history. But rather than have these words remain static as a transcription, or available only as audio files, these multisensory experiences allow visitors – as well as the students who curated these interviews – to be transported to other times and places, as the narrators recount their memories through words accompanied by visual elements. This chapter, a report from the field, discusses the ways in which digital technologies can allow for these multisensory interpretations, analyses how visual elements accompanying the interview audio add another dimension of subjectivity to the oral histories, and shares the impact of Philadelphia Immigration on its student participants.

Project Overview The seed for the Philadelphia Immigration project was planted in 2017 as immigration skyrocketed to the top of policy discussions in the United States following the election of Donald Trump – coinciding with the largest wave of immigration in the nation’s history. My colleague Charles Hardy and I wanted to contribute towards an inclusive classroom climate by encouraging students to develop empathy towards individuals from diverse ethnic and economic backgrounds, helping them gain a greater understanding of issues facing immigrants both in the present and historically. At the same time, we hoped our students would develop transferable skills in the digital humanities, public history and oral history. Finally, we wanted our course to be actively engaged with the surrounding community; based in suburban Philadelphia, West Chester University’s student body is comprised largely of students from Philadelphia’s ring suburbs and from smaller towns across the state. These students often feel apprehensive about the city and have little experience interacting with the immigrant communities that populate it. This course had the potential to change that outlook and to introduce students to neighbourhoods and individuals that they might otherwise not encounter. And in addition to these objectives, the resulting digital history project we conceived would provide access to and interpretation of previously unavailable historical sources. The first semester of the course was possible due to a rich and relatively untapped historical archive: interviews that Hardy and others working with



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him conducted with aging Philadelphians in the early 1980s for a radio documentary series he produced called ‘I Remember When: Times Gone But Not Forgotten’, exploring a broad range of life experiences in early twentieth-century Philadelphia.2 The interview cassette tapes had been collecting dust in Hardy’s basement for decades, so the first step involved transferring their ownership and copyright to the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries, where they were promptly digitized. Building on a model that Hardy, Nunn Center director Doug Boyd and I had developed in a previous collaboration, Goin’ North: Stories from the First Great Migration to Philadelphia, we assigned each student enrolled in the first semester of the course an interview. First, they listened to the interview closely, sometimes needing to decipher thick accents and garbled recordings. Through close listening they pulled out keywords – proper names and key themes – which we used to build a thesaurus of terms that students used to create their indexes using OHMS (Oral History Metadata Synchronizer), an opensource software platform for indexing audio into segments, much like creating a table of contents for a book. But rather than just adding chapter titles to the interview, OHMS also enables the indexer to add natural language descriptions, keywords and subject headings, images and GPS coordinates. In essence, a highly curated OHMS index of an oral history interview turns an audio interview into a multisensory experience that users can search to find the exact moment when an interviewee discusses a certain topic. The assignment gave students great power in translating narrators’ words for imagined public audiences. ‘I had never done anything like this before and it really challenged me as a student’, explained Kolby Gonzalez. ‘You have all this history and you are like the textbook author and you have to pick out what chapters, the titles, the tags, what’s most important for your audience…. This class made you the historian.’3 An end user of an OHMS index – a researcher, educator or casual internet browser – can then search the interview for topics, and when available, transcribed passages. For example, users can search Anna Lavin’s 1982 interview to see if and when she discusses the influenza pandemic of 1918. The OHMS search results reveal that Lavin mentions the flu at 31:46 and 53:39 in the interview (see Figure 7.1). Clicking on those segments allows the user to hear Anna’s specific recollections of that event, involving quarantines and family members who succumbed to the illness.4 OHMS indexes further allow the inclusion of photographs, external links and GPS coordinates, as described in detail below, and shown in Figure 7.1. In addition to creating indexes, each student drew on their interview and external research to craft a biographical sketch of their narrator. This

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Figure 7.1. OHMS index for Anna Lavin’s interview, with search results and image associated with segment about influenza showing. Courtesy of Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky Libraries.

assignment required the heaviest lifting in terms of both learning the historical context and thinking creatively about an individual’s life experiences. We asked students to turn to the most compelling moments in narrators’ interviews as a starting place, and to build a narrative arc shaped by the narrators’ words. Students built these sketches as exhibits in Omeka, the opensource content management system (CMS) that houses the entire Philadelphia Immigration project. Omeka’s strength as a CMS designed to showcase cultural heritage projects enables easy integration of images and other media with the exhibit text. In addition to massaging interview excerpts into a captivating life story, students selected images and other primary sources that could evoke the time period and illustrate the events described (see Figure 7.2). This semester’s final major assignment was a digital storytelling project created by small groups of students who drew on multiple interviews to explore themes surrounding immigration in early twentieth-century Philadelphia. This too required creativity, and certainly resulted in another dimension of subjective interpretation of the interviews. The most successful projects were published on the Philadelphia Immigration website, including ones exploring the various types of work immigrants engaged in, the challenges of assimilating while retaining ethnic identity, the influenza pandemic of 1918, work and life at the Stetson Hat Company (see below), and the search for the American Dream.5 Each of these projects integrated audio and visual imagery to explore the topics.



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Figure 7.2. Excerpt from biographical sketch of Armand DiStefano, created by student Denise Meikle, Spring 2018. Courtesy of Philadelphia Immigration and Denise Meikle.

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The second semester of the course echoed the rhythm of the two major assignments – the OHMS index and the biographical sketch – but first required students to conduct a new oral history interview with a recent immigrant to Philadelphia. Partnering with the Free Library of Philadelphia, we conducted interviews with twenty immigrants and migrants from Puerto Rico. Each student indexed an interview and created a biographical sketch, this time benefitting from living narrators who generously supplied photographs and other memorabilia, as well as the ability to walk the streets of the neighbourhoods where their narrators lived, rather than simply imagine a world one hundred years prior. In both semesters of the course, students took ownership of this process, as they strove to tell their narrators’ stories, compelled by ‘a personal responsibility to [paint them] in the right light’.6

Multisensory Subjectivity The two key assignments in both semesters of the course – the one using archival interviews and the one training students to conduct new interviews – allowed students to enrich the interviews with visual elements, creating a multisensory experience. For the archival interviews, occasionally students were fortunate enough to discover primary sources from their narrators’ lives, either through online genealogical databases, by contacting living family members, or through internet searches for public domain images. This was the case for student Denise Meikle who worked with the interview of Armand DiStefano (1912–87), the son of Italian immigrants who grew up in a South Philadelphia rowhouse. His father opened a gramophone and record shop in 1917, which doubled as an ice cream parlour and catered to the growing number of Italian immigrants to the city, which by 1920 had reached 63,223.7 Touring Italian American opera stars often stopped by the Victor Café to sing to customers, a tradition that has continued to the present day. Armand recalled the atmosphere of his family’s record store: Knowing the food and knowing the music business and liking music – you know, tell me an Italian in those days that didn’t like opera – at any rate, he decided he wanted to go into business for himself…. We catered, we had a big Italian clientele, naturally, living in an Italian neighbourhood… my dad would import records and he would sell records that no other stores would even attempt to stock. Our forte was opera, Italian folksongs…. We sold a lot of Victrolas… we had the listening booths, but they were no more private than the Grand Central Station…. In those days I would take the records in and play them individually for the customer while he sat down, had a smoke, smoked a stogie…. The men in those days or the young fellas seemed to know what the



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operas were all about…. They seemed to know what they wanted…. In the early ’30s during the Depression time, [my father] would have his friends come over on Sunday, we would give a concert, we would play records. We would have wine, even though it wasn’t allowed to be sold, it was homemade wine… and we would sit down, and I would play the records, and we would listen for hours on end just to music, keep ourselves occupied.8

With the DiStefanos’ well-documented family history, Denise was able to contact Armand’s family members, who generously let her use historical family photos of the Victor Café to make her curation of Armand’s interview come to life (see Figure 7.2). Further, she used the PhillyHistory. org database from the City Archives to find photos of the house where Armand grew up. As Armand describes the house at 1237 Christian Street, listeners can see a historic photo of the house and a map with its GPS coordinates marked. Denise’s biographical sketch features a circa 1950 photo of the record store and café, picturing Armand’s father and other family members. Like a documentary film, the OHMS index and biographical sketch combine the aural and the visual, allowing end users to not just read or listen to the interview, but to see the actual Philadelphia sites Armand describes, and even to listen to some of the family’s favourite music.9 In contrast, some narrators left behind no written or visual record of their lives, at least none that students could track down. In these cases, student curators had a more subjective task: they needed to identify images and other primary sources that could serve as stand-ins for archival photos and ephemera from the narrator or family members. This was the case for Bryce Evans’ work with the interview of Johnny Mulligan, a Scottish immigrant who arrived in Philadelphia in 1922. Based on his 1982 oral history, he led a very colourful, dramatic life, performing as part of an Irish dance troupe, playing in an industrial soccer league, and boxing professionally. But sadly, Evans found no records of these exploits, perhaps due to this common name or maybe because Mulligan made his life out to be even more colourful than it was. According to the interview, Mulligan was known as ‘Scotty’ Johnny Mulligan because he was one of four successful professional boxers in the Philadelphia region who shared this surname. In fact, one of the only documentary references to him is a newspaper boxing column reporting on ‘“Scotty” Johnny Mulligan’s bout against “Young Mulligan”’.10 Without a paper or photographic trail, students needed to use their historical imagination to make an oral history interview come alive visually. In contrast to a documentary film, this kind of recreation is more akin to a feature film based on a non-fiction book, a biopic of sorts. Students could use artistic licence, to some extent, by finding images that evoked the time period and circumstances in which the narrator lived, with added colour

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from images inspired by the specific memories recalled. This curatorial process was a powerful rhetorical act, in which students superimposed their interpretation of an individual’s life story on that life, through the selection of photographs and primary sources. One way to add visual elements to the interview was to include images of places the interviewee mentioned. This is what Evans did in adding a historical photo of the Cambria Athletic Club where Mulligan boxed to the interview index segment he titled ‘Memorable fights against “Swat” Jimmy Mulligan’. The newspaper photo clipping grounds Mulligan’s memories in a specific historical space. As Mulligan recalled in his interview, the battery manufacturer Exide hired him and paid him more reliable wages than the purses he earned in boxing matches, but told him that working on the assembly line was optional: I was playing soccer… when you are a good soccer player everyone is after you…. These people come out to me; I play centre forward, which is position that is hard to get played in soccer… what they call a striker…. They hired me to play for Exide… play soccer only…. I didn’t have to do no work if I didn’t want to…. I trained…. We played in the industrial league… you couldn’t call it a professional league, because we were all working men.11

Taking further creative licence, Evans used an image of a Philadelphia soccer team from 1938 – not a team for which Mulligan played, but a representative stand-in from perhaps a decade after Mulligan’s heyday playing for Exide. It is not accurate, just as that fictionalized biopic is not accurate, but it adds colour and flavour, allowing the listener/viewer to picture Mulligan as a soccer player. Clearly, inclusion of the photo adds a dimension of subjectivity, that would be quite different with a different team of players. Perhaps a stronger choice was his use of a magazine advertisement for Exide. The 1918 Exide advertisement published in The Literary Digest that Evans featured in his biographical sketch of Mulligan makes no reference to soccer, but it does show a fit, young, shirtless man in athletic shorts holding the Exide logo forth.12 This image, in contrast to the team photograph, is allegorical, suggesting, as the advertisement copy reads, Exide batteries’ ‘ability to put real “power and punch” into automobile starting and lighting’. The admen likely intended the figure of the towering young man to metaphorically evoke the ‘giant that lives in a box’, which the company used to describe its product. Yet the listener/viewer of Mulligan’s oral history can imagine it as a portrait of Mulligan himself.13 One of the most successful pairings of visual and aural elements came from graduate student Leonard Lederman, who used the voices of three interviewees who worked in Philadelphia’s Stetson Hat Factory to voice



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over a silent industrial film created by the Stetson company around 1920. The result is that the viewer sees the various steps of the hat-making process depicted in the film – processing furs, forming the hat, sizing and trimming – while the narrators describe the work. Heard alone, the narrators’ descriptions of the hat-making process are abstract, especially to twentyfirst-century listeners. But through Lederman’s careful editing of the film and the audio excerpts, the factory floor comes alive, with the narrators’ words embodied by the factory workers featured in the film. When Antony Catalano describes how, You started from scratch, it was amazing to see. You had a big bag of fur, rabbit fur or beaver fur, it all depended on what you were making, you understand? And this machine used to blow the fur onto this here cone, and the cone would spin around, and as the hot water would hit it, all this fur would move onto this here cone, and then automatically that would come out… and it would shrink this thing down to a normal size, and from there it would go to the finishing department14

and the listener can actually see the fur, the machine, the cone and the worker representing Catalano.15 When students in the second semester of the course interviewed recent immigrants to Philadelphia, we encouraged narrators to bring with them photographs, memorabilia and objects symbolic of their immigration experiences to the interviews so students could scan or photograph them. At first glance, these mementos appear less subjective, as the narrator selected them, rather than a student imagining the lives of a long-since dead interviewee. Rather, the subjective act of providing visual representation of the past was shifted to the narrator. Although some of the interviewees neglected to bring photographs or ephemera with them, and others simply airdropped family photos from their smartphones to the college students’ devices, some fulfilled our request in highly evocative ways. Irina Melekhina, along with her Jewish husband and new-born daughter, fled the Soviet Union’s Ukraine as refugees during the 1991 Soviet coup d’état attempt. After living for two years in Brooklyn while her Soviet-trained dentist husband retrained in American dental school, the family moved to Northeast Philadelphia. Although our students conducted most of the Philadelphia Immigration interviews, I had the privilege of interviewing Melekhina, though student Kayla Di Paolo curated her interview for the digital project. Melekhina brought a wealth of photographs and mementos of her childhood and young adulthood in Soviet Ukraine. These visual elements – a circa 1980 portrait of Irina in her ‘Young Pioneer’ school uniform, a photograph of Irina in a ballerina costume, and a commemorative high school class photograph of her military training cohort dressed as Komsomol – contextualized Melekhina’s memories of her youth

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by showcasing actual moments, even if they were filtered through her selection of these photographs. She also brought a few tourist souvenirs, including a set of Russian nesting dolls, a postcard with a Ukrainian map, and a small poster of Lenin with the Soviet flag draped behind him, items she described as ‘traditional Russian’. When sharing these items at the end of the interview, she said that friends in Ukraine had sent them to her for her to remember where she came from. When I asked her how she felt when she saw these objects, she answered, ‘I like it, it’s part of my culture. I put them on display in my house, and when my girls look at them they know it’s from Russia’.16 These items seemed more connected to an imaginary past viewed through the rose-coloured glasses of nostalgia, rather than to the difficult period she recalled in her interview of the years prior to seeking refugee status and emigrating to the United States. However, when she spoke in vivid detail of her family’s harrowing escape via Moscow airport and arrival at JFK airport in New York City, listeners can almost see the events she describes through her words: Actually, you know, Alissa was like two years old and we were so exhausted from all this stuff that had happened in Moscow. And I remember like it was so bright and was so colourful. I even said to my husband, ‘Oh my god, it is so colourful here’. It didn’t used to have, you know, this brightness in the Soviet Union because it was so grey and black and white, but in JFK it was, you know, everything colourful and people were smiling. We actually came from airport and were thinking like ‘Oh my gosh, when do people smile?’17

When critiquing our students’ drafts, we conveyed to them how significant their choices of images were, and they recognized that adding these visual elements could – like a film based on a book – subjectively alter the end user’s perception of an individual’s oral testimony. But just how subjective should their choices be? At times, this question elicited vibrant classroom discussion as we collectively worked through drafts as a class, suggesting alternative images when necessary. In Di Paolo’s draft of her curated OHMS index of Melekhina’s interview, she used a photograph from JFK airport showing bright lighting and popping colours, but it was of an unknown date, and likely not from around the Melekhina family’s 1991 arrival. In my feedback, I suggested she drop that particular photo, as it did not effectively add a visual representation of Irina’s powerful description, reminiscent of Dorothy waking up in the colourful Land of Oz. A photo of a cheery and bright airport lounge would have added too much subjectivity to this memory that most listeners could vividly conjure in their imagination. Ultimately these decisions were in and of themselves subjective, with students, including Di Paolo, trying several options before settling on visual choices that felt right. For example, after testing several images from the public domain, she chose two powerful visual elements to convey the dire



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Figure 7.3. Irina Melekhina’s high school portrait, circa 1980. Courtesy of Irina Melekhina.

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situation Melekhina’s family faced in the Soviet Union: a photo – from Vilnius rather than from Kiev – of a grocery store with barren shelves and news video footage of the August coup taking place, with tanks rolling through Moscow on the very day Irina headed to the airport. Senior honours college student Mikaila Barba interviewed the president of the Northeast Philadelphia Chinese Association, Mingchu ‘Pearl’ Huynh, at the Northeast Regional Branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia. Huynh’s life would make great material for a biopic, yet Barba had no need to visually fictionalize Pearl’s life because she too brought many elements of visual culture to her interview, including photos from her childhood in Vietnam, experiences in the late 1970s living in a refugee camp on Kuku Island, working in New York City offices in the 1990s and her circa 2000 wedding. Barba had excellent material to work with, but she also made strong curatorial choices, featuring the family snapshots from the refugee camp, while also linking to a 1979 Washington Post article, ‘Refugees Bring Order to Life in Camps’, about life on Kuku Island. But perhaps the most compelling photograph is of a teenage Pearl, posing with her own artwork of the Buddha and Bodhisattvas, displayed in the American Buddhist Confederation Temple (Figure 7.4). Barba framed Pearl’s life story as ‘A Search for Self’, and this evocative image of a refugee girl in western clothes practising Buddhism exemplifies this journey.18

Figure 7.4. Mingchu Pearl Huynh’s painting of the Buddha and Bodhisattvas images for worship. Photo was taken on 27 July 1982 in the American Buddhist Confederation Temple in New York City, where she created the paintings. Courtesy of Mingchu Pearl Huynh.



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Just as students interpreting the archival interviews did, some students working with new interviews had little visual material to work with that came directly from their narrators. Student Courtney Richards commented on this obstacle in her end-of-semester reflection essay: ‘I think one challenge I faced was a lack of pictures for my biographical sketch. I wish I did have more pictures, so individuals reading her piece could really understand who she was’.19 This was also the case for the interview that student Annika Soderberg conducted with Min ‘Mandy’ Wang, who moved from Hunan province in the People’s Republic of China in 2018 to join her Chinese American husband living in Philadelphia. In contrast to Melekhina or Huynh, Mandy shared only a few recent family snapshots from her smartphone, featuring her husband and preschool-age son. Soderberg sought additional images that could contextualize Wang’s life story, but realized how hard it was to add colour without simplifying or exoticizing Wang’s experiences. For example, Wang mentions the fireworks industry in her hometown of Liuyang, so Soderberg found a photograph showing a fireworks factory, as this was a concrete image to latch onto. Yet Wang does not discuss the factory at any length, and it is ultimately a very minor subject within the longer interview. But because she had a suitable image, the biographical sketch Soderberg created features the photograph of the fireworks factory prominently, elevating its importance relative to other topics.20 Does Soderberg’s subjective use of this image ultimately add or detract from Wang’s story?

Outcomes of the Course Ultimately this series of courses has been successful, meeting several of our intended outcomes. As a public facing digital history project, Philadelphia Immigration makes both older archived interviews and recent interviews discoverable to researchers and members of the public through a simple Google search. And these end users can not only find and search the interview audio, they can also engage with the students’ interpretation of these interviews. This happened when a relative of Armand DiStefano was conducting family history through an internet search and discovered family photos and the biographical sketch focused on the Victor Café. He emailed his own images, including a census record from the small village of Acquafondata in Italy from where the family emigrated. Philadelphia Immigration has extended the interviews’ reach and audience. From the students’ perspective, the project provided an opportunity to not only gain concrete technical skills in working with audio editing, software platforms OHMS and Omeka, and archival metadata, but also to listen

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closely and interpret what they heard. Brady Day described the impact of hearing his narrator’s immigration story: ‘I learned how much you could connect with someone just by listening to their life story. I knew nothing about Enitan before I went into the interview, and afterwards as we walked toward the subway station, we talked as if we have been friends for a while. Learning about someone’s life story and hearing what makes them who they are today is very intimate’.21 For those like Day who conducted new interviews, it provided an opportunity to get to know someone with life experiences quite distinct from their own. As Bryce Evans noted, ‘Doing an oral history interview is definitely a good way to work on breaking an egocentric point of view because when you’re interviewing someone else about their life, they are the only person that matters’.22 Students also learned about history, specifically regarding what it means to be an immigrant, both recently and one hundred years ago. Several students connected this specifically to gaining new appreciation for Philadelphia: ‘The communities are more diverse than I realized and many people are open to talk about their life in those communities. It’s exciting to think that there are many stories like my interviewee’s in Philadelphia…. This project has made me more eager to experience the city of Philadelphia in new ways, now that I have a better knowledge of the history and trends of immigration there’, recounted Soderberg.23 Kelsey Bastien likewise noted that she ‘gained a newfound appreciation for the influence that immigrants have had on the city. The city of Philadelphia feels richer to me, now that I know more about those who reside in the region’.24 Perhaps Courtney Richard summed it up best by noting that she learned ‘to never make assumptions about a person before having the opportunity to meet them’.25 The subjectivity of both the interview and its interpretation was not lost on the students. Laura Gomez explained that the interview with Marco Jara ‘had a lot of details’, and that when creating his biographical sketch, she had to ‘be very smart when picking the quotes and making sure that I was not telling but showing. Another challenge was to pick … the right photographs’.26 Graduate student Colleen Dougherty noted that her index of Xichuan ‘Matt’ Zhang’s interview ‘will help others to understand how oral history is not about being accurate but how the narrator recalls parts of their life…. I wanted to give justice to his words…. It took time for me to understand that my job was not to tell his story, but rather let him tell it’.27 We emphasized to our students that oral history allows another kind of accuracy, much different than the so-called objectivity of seemingly factbased ‘hard’ sources; the accuracy is in the narrators’ retelling and recollecting, as they make sense of and own their experiences. At the time of this writing, Hardy and I are finalizing our syllabus for the third semester of this series of courses. This iteration should prove to



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be the most intersubjective, as students’ primary task will be creating digital storytelling projects integrating the Philadelphia immigration stories of one hundred years apart to explore the commonalities and differences of the early twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. How will students interpret the love story of Marco Jara and his American-born flight attendant husband, who fell in love in Cancun in 2014, prompting Jara to immigrate to Philadelphia, or Gilda Cetrullo of Abruzzo, Italy, whose father in 1920 did not approve of her socialist boyfriend? What kinds of connections will they make between the war-torn immigration journeys of Isatu Kallon of Sierra Leone, who arrived in the United States in 2013 after fleeing the Rebel War, and Ukrainian Max Tannenbaum, who was conscripted into the Red Army during World War I and fled to Poland before arriving in Philadelphia in 1924? What visual elements will students use to convey the importance of education in the lives of Russian Jew David Kaplan, who arrived in Philadelphia in 1911, or Nigerian Abolaji Amosu, who came in 2006? This next group of students will have the power of historical interpretation, always a subjective act, and I am eager to see their results.28 Oral history in the college classroom is not new in and of itself, but working with oral history in the digital environment has created new affordances for integrating both visual and aural elements, rather than merely interacting with an interview as a textual source. By giving students the power to curate and interpret interviews – whether archival or newly conducted – they can test their creativity and rhetorical abilities as they create access not only to the narrators’ words, but to their subjective interpretations that combine visual elements, metadata, original audio and natural language. We hope that long after our students forget the details of the narrators’ immigration experiences – the ships’ itineraries, first jobs in the United States, the names of their elementary schools – they will be able to look at their work on Philadelphia Immigration with pride, knowing they made interpretive, subjective choices that will allow these memories and experiences to endure and be shared with future audiences. Janneken Smucker is a Professor of History at West Chester University, specializing in digital and public history and material culture. She also serves as co-editor of the Oral History Review. In the classroom, she integrates technology and the humanities, working with students to create digital projects. Janneken also consults on digital projects for non-profits and museums and leads workshops on digital tools and strategies.

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Notes 1.  West Chester University and Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, ‘Philadelphia Immigration’, 2019, http://phillyimmigration.nunncenter.net/; Klaczynska, ‘Immigration (1870–1930)’. 2.  ‘“I Remember When: Times Gone But Not Forgotten” Radio Episodes’, Philadelphia Immigration, 2019, http://phillyimmigration.nunncenter.net/exhibits/show/ radio-show/episodes. 3.  Kolby Gonzalez, interview by Charles Hardy, video, 19 June 2018, West Chester University: HIS 480/HON 451 Oral History Project, Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, https://kentuckyoralhistory.org/ark:/16417/xt76t14tmj7q. For more on student use of OHMS in the classroom, see Boyd, Fernheimer and Dixon, ‘Indexing as Engaging Oral History Research’; Smucker, Boyd and Hardy, ‘Connecting the Classroom and the Archive’. 4.  Anna Lavin, Interview: Anna Lavin (1st interview), Philadelphia Immigration, interview by Charles Hardy, 14 July 1982, I Remember When: Times Gone But Not Forgotten, Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, http://phillyimmigration.nunncenter.net/items/ show/835. 5.  See all digital storytelling projects from this semester at ‘Stories’, Philadelphia Immigration, 2018, http://phillyimmigration.nunncenter.net/stories. 6.  Kelsey Bastien, Reflection #2, Philadelphia Immigration Stories, May 2019. For this and all other student reflections cited in this chapter, students have provided me with permission to quote from them directly. 7.  Klaczynska, ‘Immigration (1870–1930)’. 8.  Armand DiStefano, Interview: Armand DiStefano, Philadelphia Immigration, interview by Charles Hardy, 30 January 1984, I Remember When: Times Gone But Not Forgotten, Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, http://phillyimmigration.nunncenter. net/items/show/829. 9.  Denise Meikle, ‘The DiStefanos and the Victor Café’, Philadelphia Immigration, 2018, http://phillyimmigration.nunncenter.net/exhibits/show/armand-distefano/victor-cafe. 10.  Ellick, ‘Breezy Boxing Bits’. 11.  Johnny Mulligan, Interview: Johnny Mulligan, Philadephia Immigration, interview by Charles Hardy, 17 July 1982, I Remember When: Times Gone But Not Forgotten, Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, http://phillyimmigration.nunncenter.net/items/ show/857. 12.  ‘“Exide”, Starting & Lighting Battery for Automobiles’, advertisement published in The Literary Digest, 14 September 1918. 13.  Bryce Evans and Charles Hardy, ‘The Lightweight Champion of North Philadelphia’, Philadelphia Immigration, 2018, http://phillyimmigration.nunncenter.net/exhibits/show/ mulligan/champion. 14.  Antony Catalano, Interview: Antony Catalano, Philadelphia Immigration, interview by Charles Hardy, 25 June 1982, I Remember When: Times Gone But Not Forgotten, Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, http://phillyimmigration.nunncenter.net/items/ show/865. 15.  Lederman, The Making of a Stetson Hat. 16.  Irina Melekhina, Interview: Irina Melekhina, Philadelphia Immigration, interview by Janneken Smucker, 9 March 2019, I Remember When: Times Gone But Not Forgotten, Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, http://phillyimmigration.nunncenter.net/items/ show/1058. 17.  Ibid.



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18.  Mingchu Pearl Huynh, Interview: Mingchu Pearl Huynh, Philadelphia Immigration, interview by Mikaila Barba, 16 March 2019, I Remember When: Times Gone But Not Forgotten, Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, http://phillyimmigration.nunncenter. net/items/show/1062; Zach, ‘Refugees Bring Order to Life in Camps’; Mikaila Barba, ‘A Search for Self’, Philadelphia Immigration, 2019, http://phillyimmigration.nunncenter.net/ exhibits/show/mingchu-pearl-huynh/search-for-self. 19.  Courtney Richards, Reflection #2, Philadelphia Immigration Stories, May 2019. 20.  Min ‘Mandy’ Wang, Interview: Min ‘Mandy’ Wang, Philadelphia Immigration, interview by Annika Soderberg, 14 March 2019, I Remember When: Times Gone But Not Forgotten, Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, http://phillyimmigration.nunncenter. net/items/show/1060; Annika Soderberg, ‘The Chinese American Dream’, Philadelphia Immigration, 2019, http://phillyimmigration.nunncenter.net/exhibits/show/min-wang/ chinese-american-dream. 21.  Brady Day, Reflection #2, Philadelphia Immigration Stories, May 2019. 22.  Bryce Evans, Reflection #2, Philadelphia Immigration Stories, May 2019. 23.  Annika Soderberg, Reflection #2, Philadelphia Immigration Stories, May 2019. 24.  Kelsey Bastien, Reflection #2, Philadelphia Immigration Stories, May 2019. 25.  Courtney Richard, Reflection #2, Philadelphia Immigration Stories, May 2019. 26.  Laura Gomez, Reflection #2, Philadelphia Immigration Stories, May 2019. 27.  Colleen Dougherty, Reflection #2, Philadelphia Immigration Stories, May 2019. 28.  The results of the 2021 course are now published as part of the Philadelphia Immigration website. Students created podcasts, lesson plans and other interpretive digital stories. See http://phillyimmigration.nunncenter.net/stories.

Bibliography Boyd, Douglas A., Janice W. Fernheimer and Rachel Dixon. ‘Indexing as Engaging Oral History Research: Using OHMS to “Compose History” in the Writing Classroom’. Oral History Review 42(2) (Summer/Fall 2015), 352–67. Ellick, Theodore. ‘Breezy Boxing Bits.’ The Morning Post (Camden, NJ), 1 March 1923. Klaczynska, Barbara. ‘Immigration (1870–1930)’, in Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia (Camden, NJ: Rutgers University, Camden, 2014). http://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/ archive/immigration-1870-1930/. Lederman, Leonard. The Making of a Stetson Hat. West Chester University, 2018. http:// phillystetsonhatfactory.weebly.com/the-making-of-a-stetson-hat.html. Smucker, Janneken, Doug Boyd and Charles Hardy III. ‘Connecting the Classroom and the Archive: Oral History, Pedagogy, & Goin’ North’. Oral History in the Digital Age, 2017. http://ohda.matrix.msu.edu/2017/?p=4412. Zach, Paul. ‘Refugees Bring Order to Life in Camps’. Washington Post, August 27, 1979. https:// www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1979/08/27/refugees-bring-order-tolife-in-camps/5b619221-66e3-45ff-a614-4b6a0d20bbcd/.

Afterword Alexander Etkind

Focused on moving and suffering bodies, this volume produces a new perspective on 1968 and its cultural memory. Some fifty years have passed since those events. Fifty years – two cultural generations – are needed to make the work of memory culturally productive. Slowly digesting revolutions, wars or major crises, high culture (novels, films, museums and much more) requires half a century for making sense of the event, learning how to represent its past occurrence, and founding a tradition of such representation.1 A recent boom of interest in 1968 fully reflects the variegated, heterogenous character of that long year, which ranges from student uprisings to political assassinations, from the Vietnam War to the occupation of Czechoslovakia and, as this volume demonstrates, from Irish hunger strikes to Ukrainian TV shows. A breakthrough of progressive and utopian thinking, 1968 also saw the peak of the Cold War which led to the global consolidation of the forces of law, order and reaction. The outcomes were vastly different on the two sides of the Iron Curtain, and memories of these events have been different as well. While the eventual suppression of the student revolution led to the major disenchantment that was typical for West European and North American intellectual circles, abrupt endings of the Prague Spring and the Soviet Thaw led to new awakenings in Central Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The Polish Solidarity movement, the Soviet Perestroika, and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia were direct descendants of 1968, and their leaders had their formative experiences in that period. If the atmosphere of 1968 produced a victorious progeny anywhere in the world, it was in the Soviet sphere of influence; indeed, biographies of the key figures of the Soviet Perestroika – Mikhail



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Gorbachev, Andrei Sakharov and many others – demonstrate the crucial impact of 1968 on their long political lives. The Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall were still there, but the cultural barter, to use a great concept that Annelis Kuhlmann introduces in this volume – penetrated them from both ends, softened with accelerating speed and, finally, demolished in a political turmoil. But the itineraries of ideas and aspirations on the opposite sides of the Iron Curtain were vastly different. The current volume sets an ambitious task to give justice to the events and the memories of Western and Eastern Europe, and even though no symmetry has been achieved, the ambition is timely and very important. In this political field which saw myriads of marching and fighting bodies, the experience of an individual body sounds like an unusual subject. It is indeed relatively new to the studies of cultural memory as well as for the studies of political protest. In his illuminating chapter, co-editor Dieter Reinisch demonstrates how hunger strikes and other individual actions of the Northern Irish prisoners secured their moral victory. Their battle was long and its political outcomes are still developing, but it had some parallels in the period. Self-immolation of Jan Palach, who sacrificed his body in protest against the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968, was a model for several Czech and Hungarian activists. Examples from a more recent period throw a comparative light onto these Irish and Czech experiences of 1968. In 2018, a Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov went into a hunger strike after four years spent in a Russian prison; his strike lasted 145 days, and he was force-fed for a part of this period. Later Sentsov was released in a prisoner swap between Russia and Ukraine. Another such case is Alexei Navalny, a leader of the Russian protest movement of the 2010s who went on hunger strike in April 2021. Navalny was imprisoned in a penal colony near Moscow after his voluntary return from Germany, where he was treated for poisoning, a political assassination. For both, their ultimate weapon was their own suffering bodies. This reinvented biopolitics of protest partially repeats what the ancient martyrs did while they were fighting with their times. It also responds to the most urgent needs of our era, which would remain tragically unanswered otherwise. Both hunger strikes, Sentsov’s and Navalny’s, received international publicity that was, for the inmates of Russian prisons, almost unprecedented. There were many hunger strikes in the Gulag system in the 1930s–50s, but their archival or oral history traces were known only to the later historians. It was the Russian scientist Andrei Sakharov, a man of 1968, who was the first to realize the performative and international potentials of a hunger strike. A Nobel Peace Prize laureate (1975), Sakharov voluntarily presented his body to hunger, humiliation and torture in 1974, and then in 1984 and again in 1985. His suffering aimed at pressing Soviet leaders to address human rights problems

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and to start the process later known as the Perestroika. He became a deputy of the first democratically elected Soviet parliament and an international celebrity. In 1988, the European Parliament instituted the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, which both Sentsov and Navalny received after their hunger strikes. Rooted in the corporeal experience, such extreme versions of biopolitical self-expression have become increasingly popular in modern art. In the 2010s, Russian actionists such as the Pussy Riot team and Petr Pavlensky, contributed their vigorous performances – arguably, the most original and effective branch of political art – to the global culture of resistance and protest. Writing in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, watching the news about the BLM and anti-vaccination riots in the US and Europe, and anticipating the Russian-Ukrainian hostilities, I feel that memories of 1968 provide helpful contexts, and also analogies, to these events. Combining political troubles around the globe with the pandemic, the climate catastrophe and the re-emerging Cold War, the long 2020 was similar to the long 1968 but also different from it. Complex, multi-dimensional and openended, both historical periods tested the limits of cotemporaneous polities on all levels, national, supernational and global. Both periods questioned and overcame grand narratives that survived the hegemonic ideologies of the preceding historical moments. The turmoil of 1968 rejected an unstable synthesis of structuralism, neo-Marxism and psychoanalysis that could be called the Paris consensus. The turmoil of 2020 rejected the Washington consensus, a mix of neoliberal economics, the post-Cold War foreign policies and financial globalization. Both periods saw a sharp, intensive growth of social activism; unexpected and unexplained, this political awakening looked ever-accelerating until it was suppressed or just died in the later periods. But in both periods, rejection of old narratives did not lead to consolidation of new ones. After 1968, disenchantment and fragmentation were playing on the ruins of the rejected narratives, and we will probably see something similar after the pandemics of 2019–21. But differences between these two historical moments were no less remarkable than similarities. The current volume correctly emphasizes the fluid, emotional messages of the long 1968 that eschewed critical theory and articulation but found their expressions in the turbocharged gestures of resistance and protest. Intellectual history knows that trajectories of ideas do not sync well with political developments and cultural fashions. Asynchronous relations between thoughts and actions are as typical for the crisis of 2020 as they were characteristic for the long 1968. In the public realm, a remarkable element of the current crisis addressed neither the institutions nor the personalities of the established order, but its monuments. A targeted aggression against the monuments to the past, a radical remaking of the monumental



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order has become a global process. Without any plan or coordination, monuments to planters, slave traders and officials who helped them have been toppled or vandalised on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean – in the US, England and Belgium. The local authorities approved some of these actions, but the initiative usually came from the protesting people. This process could be compared to the massive removal of monuments to the Bolshevik leaders that happened in Russia after 1991 and then in Ukraine after 2014. Nothing similar occurred in 1968; this particular focus on the monumental culture was not characteristic for that period. The protesting masses were focused on institutions and their leaders rather than on monuments and memorials. One reason for this difference is the immense, unifying power of the TV screen in the 1960s and 1970s that is the subject of Bohdan Shumylovych’s chapter in this volume. TV shows, which could have run for years or even decades, not only constructed but also preserved stable, lasting identities: ‘Media images of masculinity and femininity, injustice and order, care and control embodied in a film or television were formally and meaningfully connected and performed’, Shumylovych writes. This stabilizing function of a TV show has been entirely lost in the Internet-based culture of the 2020s. Transmitted by social media, the news, posts and comments have no continuity; every day they start their game anew, and though the producers could have had certain strategic, mid-term ideas and projects, they would not and should not be perceived on the receiving end. Only the old-style material culture – urban structures, natural or rather man-made landscapes and highlights and, most importantly, monuments and museums – flesh out those lasting identities and continuities that are still available to a modern person. Monuments are important because they emulate individual bodies and provide them with historical meanings, often articulated in the inscriptions or information boards, and circulating in the urban folklore. Whether they are loved or hated, monuments are important anchors of identities, and they easily become the targets of aggression or revenge when things go wrong. Toppling a monument or moving it to a museum gives a definitive feeling of victory, which eluded the more ambitious masses of 1968 that were determined to end a war or overthrow a president. Because of the figurative, personal and corporeal character of many of these artefacts, their destruction or de-piédestalisation does send a powerful message that helps to deconstruct, for better or for worse, frozen identities and sclerotic social orders. Targeting the political regime rather than its cultural symbols but then returning, unavoidably, from the revolutionary squares to the repetitive, serialized production of their TV screens, the protesters of 1968 did not get those relatively easy satisfactions that toppling the monuments gave to the protesters of 2020. For the defeated activists of 1968, biopolitics of the self-tortured, self-destroyed body was their only consolation; for the

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victorious activists of 2020, toppled or destroyed monuments were the ways and means of self-refashioning. Important as they are, belated retributions to the hated bodies of the distant past will not mitigate the very real challenges of the twenty-first century. Deep issues such as inequality, climate crisis and post-pandemic recovery need radical changes which are well beyond the politics of memory. It would be premature to conclude that in comparison to the long 1968, the long 2020 was more symbolic and less apolitical. There is an irony to the fact that while the movements of 1968 raised predominantly political issues that they largely failed to resolve, and left cultural legacies instead, the movements of 2020 operate mostly within the symbolic space but will, unavoidably, come to confront political, economic and material challenges. Alexander Etkind is a Professor at the Central European University in Vienna. Before moving to Vienna, he was the Mikhail M. Bakhtin Professor of History of Russia-Europe Relations in the Department of History and Civilization, European University Institute, in Florence. He has a PhD from the University of Helsinki. He was a visiting professor at New York University and Georgetown University, and a resident fellow at Harvard, Princeton, the Woodrow Wilson Center.

Note 1.  Stephen Greenblatt formulated this ‘fifty-year effect’ in his study of Shakespeare’s, and specifically Hamlet’s, relation to the Reformation. In my Warped Mourning, I compared this generalization to a similar time-lag in the twentieth-century cultural responses to Stalinism and the Gulag; see Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, 248; Etkind, Warped Mourning, 21.

Bibliography Etkind, Alexander. Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2013. Greenblatt, Stephen. Hamlet in Purgatory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Index  

A AAMOD (Archivio Audiovisivo del Movimento Operaio e Democratico), 130, 138n33, 138n36, 140 Abrons, 146, 157n14 acquisition, 37, 143, 145, 152–53, 155–56 Acquisition Committee, 144, 150, 155 activism, 11–12, 16, 21, 67, 69, 117 actors, 12, 14, 47–48, 54, 57, 60, 75, 80, 97, 99, 102–3, 107–8, 110–13 acts, 15, 17, 34–35, 37–38, 51–52, 56, 81, 105–6, 113, 145, 149, 152–53 acts of resistance, 52, 56 adaptations, 56, 154 aesthetics, 32, 42n35, 44, 91, 98, 121, 132, 134, 146 afterlives, 44, 137n15, 140 agency, 27–28, 55, 94, 115, 157 Alsang, 106 Álvarez, 126–27, 129, 135 Americas, 78, 157n21, 158 anger, 124–25, 129 anthropologie, 41n8, 44 anthropology, 2, 68, 96 anti-conflict criteria, 8–9, 45, 57, 59, 98 appropriation, 7, 123–24, 126 archive, 16–17, 19n4, 44, 86–87, 130, 138n33, 138n36, 140, 143, 145, 154–58, 157n21, 164–65, 171, 173–75 Aretxaga, Begoña, 56–57, 63n8, 64n60, 64n61, 64n65, 65

Aristotle, 101 Armagh Gaol, 64n62, 66–68 armed struggle, 19, 58, 60–62 art, 12, 20n31, 29, 39–40, 42n32, 55, 87, 108, 121, 124, 126 artistic, 7, 29, 100–101, 107, 113–14, 143, 165 artists, 17, 19n4, 29, 31, 102, 106–7, 117– 18, 137n6, 143–45, 149–51, 154–56, 157n13, 157n19 artivism, 11–12 arts, 2, 12, 19n1, 19n4, 20n31, 22, 32, 39–41, 41n9, 42n31, 42n32, 43–44, 79, 87, 120–21 artwork, 17, 143, 170 Ashe, Thomas, 53 Ästhetik, 97, 118n6, 119n33, 120 Asylums, 64n67, 66 audience, 31–32, 34, 58, 75–80, 84–87, 88n27, 97, 99–104, 106–7, 110–12, 117, 119n37, 136–37, 137n22, 152 audiovisual, 14, 17, 19n4, 22, 30–31, 36, 79, 81, 132–33, 159–62, 167, 171, 173 B BABE, ERC, 2–4, 6, 14, 16, 20n15, 20n31, 20n37, 20, 28–30, 32, 36, 40, 42n38 Barba, Eugenio, 107–8, 111, 113–15, 119n21, 119n23, 119n32, 119n37, 119n39, 119n40, 119n47, 120, 170

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Mikaila, 175n18 Barcelona, 123–25, 129–33, 135, 137n6, 137n13, 137n25, 138n40, 139–40 barter, 97–102, 105, 107–13, 115, 117, 121 bartering, 96–117, 119n9, 121 Barthes, Roland, 117, 119n48, 120 Bastien, Kelsey, 172, 174n6, 175n24 Beirut, 109, 113 Belfast, 20n36, 22, 46, 49–50, 52, 57, 60–61, 65n88, 65n89, 66–68 Belgium, 29, 179 belonging, 27, 31, 40, 85, 91n106, 100, 105–8, 112, 119n20, 120 Benjamin, Walter, 113 Berlin, 92–93, 120–21, 177 Bilbao, 128 blanketmen, 52–53, 55–56, 58, 61 Bochum, 18, 62 bodies, 4, 14–17, 27–30, 32–42, 44, 46, 52–58, 65–66, 71–72, 81–82, 86, 91–92, 100–102, 116, 143–44, 146–47, 149–50, 153–56, 176–77, 179–80 Bodies Across Borders, 2, 4, 18, 28, 116 Bodily Ways, 2, 6, 12, 14, 18, 27–41, 41n9, 43, 90n90, 91n108, 92, 107, 109 borders, 51, 54, 96, 98, 100–102, 104–7, 109, 111–12, 114–16, 118, 118n1, 118n2, 119n20, 120–21 boundaries, 10, 97, 100, 102, 105, 120, 123, 128, 147, 152, 155 Boyd, Doug, 161, 175 Brecht, Bertolt, 108, 112–13 British Army, 9, 46–47, 50–51 British Empire, 45, 48, 66 British government, 50, 52–54, 57–58, 61 British Suffragettes, 45, 62n4, 66 broadcast, 72, 76, 78, 88n27, 89n37, 89n52 Brook, Peter, 111 Brooklyn, 146, 156, 167 Brussels, 29–30, 139 Budapest, 18, 62, 87 building walls, 144, 149, 151 Butler, Judith, 19n1, 21, 90n90, 91n108, 92 C Café Victor, 164–65, 171, 174n9 camps, 46, 51–52, 54, 57, 134, 170, 175n18, 175

capitalism, 6, 20n22, 21, 75, 85, 133–34, 136, 139 care, 17, 81, 102, 116, 143–45, 149–50, 153–56, 156n2, 157n15, 157n27, 179 Catalunya, 130–35, 139–40 Catholics, 20n16, 22, 46, 48–51, 57–59, 61–62 censorship, 5, 124–25, 130 centenaries, 48, 66 Central European University, 18, 62, 87, 180 Central State Archives of Supreme Bodies of Power, 88n12, 93–94 centre, 28, 55, 77–78, 89n45, 97, 136, 166 century, 9–10, 39, 41n3, 45, 48, 51, 53, 56, 102, 117–18, 173, 176, 180 Chaudhuri, Una, 115, 119n42, 120 childhood, 35, 104–5, 167, 170 children, 9, 20n36, 21, 78–79, 96, 104–5 China, 159, 171 choices, 6, 36, 38, 40, 166, 168, 170, 173 choir, 103–5 chorégraphie, 37, 42n30, 43 choreography, 14, 17, 28–30, 36–40, 42n16, 42n34, 43, 99, 143, 145, 149–50 Chronic Life, 98, 111, 114 Cineastas independientes, 137n8, 140 Cine Documental Independiente Catalán, 137n28, 139 ciné-geography, 123, 126, 128–29, 139 cinema, 2, 12, 122, 124–28, 130–31, 135– 36, 137n22, 137n24, 137n30, 139–40 Cinéma, 137n32, 140 cities, 59, 65n88, 66, 83, 113, 120, 124, 133, 159–60, 164, 172 citizens, 31–32, 51, 54, 56, 71, 73, 75, 77, 85, 92, 99 civilians, 9, 50 civilization, 16, 19n4, 20, 89n51, 93, 180 Civil Rights, 11, 20n36, 22, 50, 67–68 civil rights movement, 8–9, 21, 46, 49–50, 126 Civil Sphere, 46, 63n10, 63n11, 63n12, 64n45, 64n49, 64n77, 65–66 civil war, 51, 107, 131 class, 92, 144, 161, 168 cognition, 28, 32, 40, 43–44, 153 Cold War, 9, 79, 176, 178 collaboration, 16, 19n4, 33, 41n2, 109, 118, 129, 136, 146, 154–55, 161



Index

collection, 2–3, 19n4, 63n13, 77, 119n35, 120, 125, 131, 143–45, 154, 157n13 colonialism, 6, 19n4, 48, 59, 115–16, 145 colour, 4, 34, 36, 39, 49, 84, 114, 149, 165–66, 168, 171 commemorations, 59, 77, 79, 102, 124, 133–34, 138n51, 167 Communism, 22, 73, 79, 92, 122 communities, 38, 40, 47, 53–56, 58–62, 85–86, 105–6, 109–10, 112, 114, 116, 119n17, 121, 160, 172 company, 5, 14, 29, 41n1, 42–43, 78, 156, 162, 166 complexities, 100, 133, 145, 152 concept, 3–4, 7, 12–14, 17–18, 20n31, 89n58, 90n70, 101, 145, 147, 150, 152, 155 concert, 31, 47, 102–3, 165 conflict, 8, 46–48, 50, 53, 66, 114 conjunction, 8, 13, 90n73, 153 Connal Parr, 20n30, 22, 63n24, 68 connections, 3–4, 12, 17, 36, 41n3, 54, 79, 83, 110, 117, 149 consciousness, 6, 32, 43, 92, 157n15 consolidation, 61, 132, 176, 178 constellation, 15, 97, 125, 127 construction, 2, 5, 19, 28, 32–34, 38, 40, 62, 74, 94 containers, 82, 84, 86–87, 117 contents, 2, 10, 78, 139, 149, 161–62 context, 2–3, 16, 19n3, 20n20, 22, 46–47, 56, 73–74, 104, 126, 131–32, 137n21, 138n55, 144–45, 153–56 continents, 16, 111, 114 contrast, 15, 78, 108, 114, 144, 165–66, 171 contributions, 7–8, 11, 14, 16, 19n5, 20n17, 32, 75, 121–22, 125–27 control, 28, 39, 48, 50–51, 54–57, 73, 78, 81, 92, 179 conventions, 38, 73, 100, 111 conversations, 18, 19n8, 19n11, 20, 22, 29, 145–47, 151, 153, 155, 157n27 Cork, 45, 66 corporeality, 2–7, 12–15, 17, 31–32, 34, 36–37, 39, 71–72, 74, 80–81, 83–84, 86–87, 87n1, 91–94, 178–79 Corporeality and Militant Performance, 45–61, 63n6, 65n80, 67

183

corporeal memories, 2, 28, 33 corporeal performances, 16, 61 corporeal practices, 13, 81, 86 corporeal protests, 47, 53, 55–56, 61–62 counterculture, 12, 46–47, 55, 58, 61–62, 117 countries, 11, 14, 72, 74, 79, 82, 86, 89n43, 90n63, 102–3, 106, 108, 131–32 Court, Paula, 144, 150, 155 Covid-19, 98, 100, 102, 105, 108, 110, 115–16, 178 craft, 97, 119n21, 119n23, 120, 161 creative, 14–15, 29, 32, 36, 40, 41n11, 44, 82, 149, 156, 166 creativity, 6, 40, 76, 79, 87, 98, 102, 162, 173 criminalization, 15, 52–54, 57–58, 61–62, 68 criminals, 52–58, 65, 67–68, 136 crisis, 9, 13, 87, 106, 124, 176, 178, 180 critics, 77, 100, 115, 128 Cross-Border, 96–98, 109, 114 Cross-Border Embodied Performances, 97–117, 119n9, 121 cross-border performances, 107, 109 cultural barter, 12, 96–102, 104, 107–8, 112, 115, 177 cultural heritage, 10, 102, 162 cultural memory, 15, 28, 34, 41n3, 42n19, 42, 176–77 cultural policies, 13, 21, 74, 85, 125 cultural practices, 11, 41n11, 44 cultural transfer, 12, 123, 139 cultural turn, 12, 116 cultures, 12–13, 42n21, 42n22, 42–43, 47, 62, 63n8, 65, 76–79, 82, 84, 94–95, 97, 120–21, 178–79 curators, 17, 19n4, 145, 151, 156, 159, 161, 166, 168 curtain, 111–12, 114 cycles, 11, 13, 74, 122–23 Czechoslovakia, 13, 15, 74, 85, 129, 176–77 D dance, 14, 29, 31–34, 40–41, 41n10, 42n17, 42n19, 42n23, 42n25, 42n37, 42–44, 154, 158 dancer, 28–31, 33–34, 40

184

Index

Dance Studies, 2, 28, 31–33, 40 Danish, 98, 103–5, 108–9, 114, 117, 120 danse, 41, 43, 119n25, 120 Danspace Project, 144, 150, 155, 157n15, 157 death, 45–47, 50, 57–58, 60–61, 64n38, 65n81, 65–66, 104, 108, 114, 136, 138n45 Debord, Guy, 75, 88n31, 92, 117, 125–26, 137n11, 139 defeat, 7, 60, 131, 135, 179 democracy, 102, 106, 123 democratization, 97, 118 Denmark, 96, 98, 102–9, 112, 117–18, 119n16, 119n44, 120–21 Derry, 20n36, 22, 49–50, 57 description, 6, 15, 38–39, 134, 146–47, 150, 154, 161, 167–68 Detroit, 92, 139–40 developments, 8, 12–13, 15, 49–51, 79, 87, 122, 127–28, 131, 140, 157n14 devices, 5, 37, 97, 108, 134, 145, 167 diaspora, 21–22, 41n3, 105, 115 differences, 74, 81–82, 85–86, 90n78, 91–92, 100, 104, 109–10, 114–15, 173, 178–79 Digital Age, 20n18, 23, 175 digital projects, 160, 167, 171, 173 digital storytelling projects, 17, 160, 162, 174n5, 175n28 digital technologies, 17, 29, 102, 159–60, 173 dimension, 3, 5, 7, 10–12, 16, 39–40, 104, 108, 160, 162, 166 director, 12, 80–81, 113, 129, 156 Dirty Protest, 56, 63n8, 64n60, 64n65, 65–67 disciplinary, 2, 11, 29, 57 discipline, 2, 10, 18, 54–55, 57, 64n50, 64n53, 64n63, 64n69, 66, 68 discourse, 32, 66, 74, 100, 115–16, 129 Discursive Construct, 3, 119n17, 121 dissidence, 129, 132–33, 136 distance, 27, 36, 39, 116, 146–47, 152, 154 DiStefano, Armand, 163–65, 171, 174n8, 174n9 distribution, 39, 44, 128–30 documentary, 19n4, 20n37, 20, 41n7, 92, 127, 138n33, 140, 165

documentary film, 107, 128, 140, 165 documentation, 2, 4, 19n4, 145, 150, 152, 154–55, 157n13 drama, 111, 120, 147 dramaturgy, 111, 117–18, 119n32, 120, 145, 154, 157n23, 158 Dubai, 60 Dublin, 22, 48, 65, 67 Duby, Georges, 20n12, 21 E Easter, 48, 51–52, 102 Eastern Europe, 2, 10, 13, 15, 88n27, 92, 94, 117, 176–77 East German, 88n27, 94, 129 Eco, Umberto, 117, 119n48, 120 economics, 9, 96, 126, 136, 139, 160, 178 Edinburgh, 67–68 education, 12, 75, 79, 100, 116, 131, 173 elections, 9, 48–49, 52, 160 El Volti, 130–31, 138n35, 138n39, 140 Emancipated Spectator, 119n45, 121 embodied knowledge, 17, 29, 143–45, 150, 152–56, 156n2, 157n21 embodied memories, 31, 35, 40, 98, 115, 145, 149 embodied practice, 34, 96, 145, 154 embodiment, 14–15, 17, 28, 33–34, 36–37, 40–43, 41n3, 84, 87, 143–45, 150–51, 153–55 emergence, 8–10, 19n7, 30, 51, 58, 106 emotions, 14, 28, 31–33, 35–36, 40, 44, 71–72, 93, 101–2, 105–7, 110 empathy, 33, 41n11, 44, 160 Empires, 20n33, 22, 45, 48, 65–66 Empty Space, 111, 119n32, 120 encounter, 39, 115, 118n9, 127, 135, 138n39, 160 enemies, 16, 46, 60 engagement, 10, 40, 73, 100, 117, 123–24, 174n3, 175 ensemble, 36, 100, 110, 112, 144 entertainment, 74–75, 78, 88n27, 105, 117 entities, 31, 81, 84, 152 environment, 6, 9, 30, 32, 38–39, 117, 173 episodes, 15, 50, 106, 112, 125, 147 era, 10, 48, 53, 74, 76, 89n58, 93, 131, 177 escape, 30, 37, 102, 168 essay, 34, 66, 88n26, 120, 122, 127, 171



Index

ETA, 60, 138n45 ethics, 17, 21, 63n13, 92, 143, 153–54 ethnicity, 3, 34, 81, 162 Eurocentrism, 10–11, 100 Europe, 2–3, 10–12, 16, 18–19, 19n4, 20n20, 20–23, 28, 40–41, 41n3, 67–68, 74, 87, 120, 127–29, 159, 178 Evans, Bryce, 88n27, 89n45, 89n48, 90n83, 92, 165–66, 172, 174n13, 175n22 events, 8–9, 11–13, 15, 18, 28–30, 50, 96, 98, 101, 116–17, 126, 156, 157n27, 161–62, 176–78 everyday life, 2, 64n75, 65n82, 66, 73, 80, 84, 87, 114, 123, 133 exchange, 5, 7, 12, 18, 96–97, 99, 101, 107–10, 115, 123, 128–29, 131 exhibitions, 2, 5, 14, 19n4, 20n37, 28–31, 41n2, 130, 152, 156, 156n1 exile, 59, 110, 112–14 experience, 2–4, 14–15, 17, 28, 30–40, 56, 87, 100–102, 105–6, 111, 113–14, 126–27, 140, 153–54, 172–73, 176–77 experiment, 5, 16–17, 33, 120, 125, 130, 132, 140, 146, 150, 152 exploitation, 6, 100–101, 134 exploration, 2–3, 31, 94, 131 exploring, 12, 16–17, 27, 38, 97, 100, 108, 161–62 expression, 4, 7–8, 11–12, 31, 35, 39, 80, 82, 101–2, 108, 110, 112–13 extension, 4, 11, 48, 83 F Faber, Phillip, 103–5, 109 factory, 130, 132, 134, 137n31, 140, 166–67, 171 fairy-tale reality, 78, 80, 84–85, 90n70 family, 60, 66–67, 76, 79–80, 83, 86, 88n26, 92, 161, 164–65, 167–68, 170–71 farmers, 72, 89n51, 89n55, 99 Fascism, 18, 131 father, 85, 114, 135, 164–65, 173 Faubion, James, 66 femininity, 81, 146, 179 Feminism, 9, 19n1, 21, 64n62, 66, 91n107, 91, 120, 154, 158 Feminist Theory, 42n23, 43, 91–92, 158

185

Ferguson, Neil, 58, 64n72, 66 Fernheimer, Janice W., 174n3, 175 festivals, 72, 76–79, 81, 83, 85, 89n52, 89n53, 91n102, 95, 128–29, 137n24, 138n33, 140 fields, 15–16, 18, 20n16, 31–32, 34, 62n3, 66, 96, 115–17, 134, 141, 155, 160 fieldwork, 16, 19n4, 28, 44 fight, 15, 45–46, 65n86, 67, 131, 177 figure, 43, 47, 98–99, 124, 133–35, 144, 147– 48, 150, 161–63, 165, 169–70, 176, 179 film festivals, 12, 127–28, 137n30, 140 Filmmaker, 122–35, 137n2, 137n6, 138n39, 139 Filmoteca, 131–35, 139–40 films, 90n81, 93, 122–34, 136, 137n6, 137n22, 137n30, 138n33, 138n42, 138n51, 138n54, 138n56, 139–40, 167–68, 176 Fitzpatrick, Lisa, 65 Fitzpatrick, Sheila, 73, 88n15, 88n19, 89n58, 92 Florence, 5, 14, 18–19, 19n4, 22, 28–29, 40, 41n2, 62, 87, 159 flow, 37, 83, 89n60, 92 folk, 76–80, 82–86, 89n51 folk arts, 76–77, 84–85, 88n37 folk culture, 76–77, 79–81, 83, 85 folklore, 76–78, 89n38, 89n52, 91, 94, 179 folklorism, 76–78, 85, 89n42, 94 folk songs, 76–77, 79, 83–85, 102 footage, 122–26, 130, 132–33, 135, 170 foreigners, 83, 97, 104, 110, 116, 128, 131, 178 formations, 48–49, 64n56, 66, 137n29, 151, 153, 155, 176 Foucault, Michel, 54–57, 64n50, 64n53, 64n63, 64n68, 64n69, 66, 91n107, 91–92 framework, 13, 56, 108, 123, 154 France, 22, 39, 50, 68, 130 Franco regime, 121, 123–25, 128, 131–34, 136, 137n27 Frankfurt, 68, 120–21 freedom, 7, 106, 138n45, 178 front, 58, 75, 129, 133, 149, 152 frontiers, 43 function, 31, 34, 57, 72, 76, 93, 100, 102, 154, 179

186

Index

furnaces, 127, 130–31, 134–36, 137n21, 137n22, 138n54, 138n56, 139–40 G Gallese,Vittorio, 42n14, 42n15, 42–44 Galway, 18, 62 gaze, 14, 27, 29, 43, 110, 136, 146–47, 152 GDR, 8, 12, 129 gender, 3, 6, 19n1, 21, 34, 41, 43, 65–67, 94 generations, 3, 7, 18, 20n20, 22, 45, 67, 117–18, 130–31, 176, 180 Genoa, 137n29 genre, 41, 73, 88n10, 90n70, 117 geographies, 10, 20n38, 21, 29, 40, 123 Gerhardt, Christina, 137n14, 139–40 Germany, 91n106, 93–94, 97, 102, 106–7, 113, 134, 139, 177 gestures, 6, 14, 27–31, 33–34, 36–39, 135– 36, 144, 147, 150–52, 155, 178 Getino, Octavio, 127, 136–38, 137n20, 138n57, 140 Giesen, Bernhard, 63n10, 63n15, 64n46, 65 Glissant, Edouard, 20n13, 21 Global Cinema, 136, 139–40 globalization, 5, 11, 22, 91, 100, 115, 118, 120, 136, 178 Godard, Hubert, 34, 42n20, 43 Goffman, Erving, 57–59, 64n67, 64n75, 65n82, 66 Gomez, Laura, 172, 175n26 Goodman, Nelson, 42n31, 43 Goody, Jack, 37, 42n28, 43 government, 8, 18, 48, 50, 52–54, 57–58, 61–62, 88n12, 91, 93–94, 126 Graham, Helen, 132, 138n44, 139 Greenblatt, Stephen, 180 Grele, Ronald J., 20n17, 22 groups, 33–34, 46–48, 60, 82, 85–86, 97, 99–100, 106, 108, 130, 133, 137n6, 137n25 guerrilla films, 124, 131–32, 138n50 guides, 44, 120, 137n11, 139, 145, 157n19 gulf, 146, 151–52 H Hale, Laura, 64n62, 67 hand, 5, 15, 37, 47, 60, 108, 131, 133, 150

happiness, 78–79, 83, 89n60 Hardy, Charles, 159–61, 172, 174n3, 174n4, 174n8, 174n11, 174n13, 174n14 Harlem, 143–44, 150, 155–56, 156n1, 157n13, 157n17, 157n20, 158 Havana, 126 Havel,Vaclav, 75, 88n26, 92 H-Blocks, 52–55, 61, 67 heads, 78, 112, 126, 136 hearts, 75, 85, 104 Heimat, 86, 91n106, 92–94 Heller, Dana, 92 Helsinki, 180 heroes, 46–47, 49, 54, 56, 58–62, 64n79, 66 Heynowski, Walter, 129 highlight, 76, 88n22, 105, 179 Historical Archives, 19n4, 20n37, 41n2, 160 historical contexts, 5–8, 10–12, 16–18, 32–33, 67–68, 71–72, 98, 101, 106–7, 116–18, 160, 162, 165–66, 178–79 historiography, 8, 10–11, 15, 74, 98, 107, 115–16 history, 2–12, 16–19, 19n2, 19n4, 20–22, 47–48, 51–52, 65–68, 73, 83, 92–93, 100–101, 107, 111–13, 116, 118, 126, 160–61, 171–73, 180 HMP Armagh, 53, 56, 61 HMP Maze, 46, 51–52, 54–56, 61 Hobsbawm, Eric, 8, 20n27, 21 Holledge, Julie, 115, 119n41, 120 homes, 48, 50, 60, 65n84, 67, 82, 84, 91n106, 94, 103, 105, 121, 123 hour, 80, 83, 107, 112, 127, 130–31, 134– 36, 137n21, 137n22, 138n56, 139–40, 146, 153 house, 49–50, 80, 82, 85, 120, 124, 138n55, 146, 162, 165, 168 Houston, 146 human beings, 8–9, 15, 32–33, 41n3, 79, 100, 108, 113 human body, 15–16, 34, 53, 64n40, 66, 83, 86, 90n78, 94, 119n18, 121 humanities, 42n32, 102, 116, 160, 173 humans, 23, 30, 33, 43, 79, 84, 89n60, 91n106, 104, 114, 116 Hungary, 8, 87, 177 hunger, 15, 36, 46, 53, 177



Index

hunger strikes, 15, 18, 45–46, 52–53, 55–56, 58–59, 61, 62n1, 62n4, 64n58, 65–68, 176–78 husbands, 114, 167–68, 171, 173 I icons, 29, 54, 98, 135, 138n55, 140 ideas, 12, 14, 74, 77, 81–82, 89n58, 91n106, 97–98, 115, 131, 153–54, 156, 156n3, 157n8, 177–78 identification, 12–13, 71–72, 74, 81, 101, 116, 132 identity, 3, 13, 15, 18, 19n1, 19n2, 20n32, 21–22, 57, 71–73, 81–83, 86–87, 132–35, 179 ideological, 9, 72, 74, 79–80, 86, 127–28 ideologies, 47, 73, 75, 82, 85, 178 images, 3–4, 12, 29–30, 37–38, 59, 81–82, 111–12, 114, 122–27, 132–36, 139–40, 161–62, 164–66, 168, 170–71 imaginary, 14, 28, 71, 79, 81–87, 90n70, 90n78, 92, 103, 133, 157n15 imagination, 13, 27, 29–30, 34–35, 71, 74, 82, 86, 90n63, 144, 147, 165, 168 immersion, 14, 30, 40, 80, 100, 103, 110 immigrants, 16–17, 41n3, 96, 159–60, 162, 164–65, 167, 172–73 imperialism, 6, 92, 136, 157n21 implications, 2, 4, 16 impression, 62, 102, 104, 108, 146 imprisonment, 50–51, 56, 59, 66 improvisation, 17, 29, 108, 110, 117, 143, 147, 149 Imre, Anikó, 88n27, 92, 94 independence, 45, 48, 51, 53, 65n88 individuals, 7, 54, 56–57, 71, 75, 81–82, 160, 162, 166, 171 industrialization, 72, 84, 111, 124, 126–27, 131, 133–35, 138n50, 165–67 information, 29–30, 37–38, 41n1, 55, 79–80, 86, 150–51, 179 Ingold, Tim, 40, 42n36, 43 inhabiting, 35, 39–40, 77, 108, 124 injustice, 47, 81, 104, 179 innovations, 2, 10, 12, 15, 59, 125, 153, 156n2 institutions, 55, 57, 61, 63n13, 72–74, 80– 81, 83, 86–87, 117, 126, 145, 152–54, 156, 157n15, 178–79

187

instruments, 37, 53, 55–56, 62, 73, 81, 83, 86, 90n63, 108, 112 intellectuals, 117, 137n6, 138n45, 176, 178 intercorporeality, 14, 27–31, 33–34, 36, 39, 84 interculturalism, 14, 41n3, 97, 100, 115, 118n3, 120–21 internment, 46, 50, 67 internment camps, 22, 46, 48, 50–54, 61, 68 interpretation, 2, 5–10, 17–18, 31, 143, 145, 151, 153–54, 156n3, 160, 162, 171–73, 175n28 intersubjective, 5, 7, 14, 17, 28, 30–31, 33–37, 145, 154, 173 intersubjectivity, 3–5, 18, 19n3, 22, 27, 33, 41n12, 42n15, 42–43 interventions, 8, 12, 68, 116–17 interviews, 2–5, 16–17, 19n4, 46, 60–61, 63n13, 121–22, 124–25, 147, 154, 158– 62, 164–68, 170–73, 174n4, 174n8, 174n11, 174n14, 174n16, 175n18, 175n20 investigation, 116–17, 134, 136, 138n51, 139 IRA (Irish Republican Army), 19, 22, 45–48, 50–53, 55–56, 58–62, 63n10, 63n11, 63n32, 64n39, 64n44, 64n45, 64n49, 64n64, 65–68 Iran, 8–9, 64n38, 65 Iraq, 8, 159 Ireland, 18–19, 21–22, 45–54, 56–60, 62, 62n1, 63n8, 63n21, 63n31, 63n32, 64n38, 64n58, 65n90, 65–68, 176–77 Iser, Wolfgang, 117, 119n48, 120 isolation, 37, 57, 102, 105–6, 114–15 Italy, 11–12, 18, 22, 107–8, 128–30, 137n31, 138n33, 140, 159, 164, 171, 173 itineraries, 3–4, 28, 30–31, 36–37, 40, 115, 173, 177 Ivens, Joris, 129 J Jamieson, Ruth, 58–60, 64n71, 64n73, 65n83, 65n84, 65n85, 65n87, 66 Japan, 130, 132 Jara, Marco, 172–73

188

Index

Jerusalem, 157n15 Jill, Theresa, 21, 42 Jola, Corinne, 43 Jones, Tanisha, 144, 150–52, 157n11 journey, 2, 36–37, 109, 170 K Kane, Anne, 46, 54, 59, 62, 63n9, 63n10, 63n11, 64n45, 64n49, 64n77, 66 Keller,Yelena, 152 Kennedy, Roger, 90n72, 91 Khalili, Laleh, 59, 64n79, 66 killing, 64n42, 65, 135 kinaesthesia, 14, 27–28, 30–33, 35–41, 41n9, 41n11, 44, 111 Kirsanova, Raisa, 81, 90n74, 93 Kirsch, Louise, 43 kitsch folklorism, 85 Klimke, Martin, 20n20, 21, 67, 88n23, 88n24, 93, 95 Knabb, Ken, 139 Knight, Autumn, 143–45, 147, 150–52, 155, 157n15, 157n27 knowing, 27–43, 146, 150–51, 155, 157n21, 164, 173 knowledge, 36–37, 39–40, 42n32, 44, 78, 82, 97, 115–16, 125, 127, 129, 143, 145 Kornetis, Kostis, 20n36, 21, 123, 137n4, 139 Kreiswirth, Martin, 22 Krüger, Lars, 120 Kugele, Jens, 91n106, 92 Kuhn, Tom, 120 Kyiv, 77–78, 80, 83, 170 L Labanyi, Jo, 138n44, 139 land, 14, 37, 79, 82, 86, 111, 119n35, 124–25, 180 landscapes, 82, 98, 110–12, 114, 179 language, 37, 42n31, 43, 73, 86, 131, 145–46, 153, 173 Latin America, 12, 50, 114, 122–23, 126– 28, 132, 137n27, 140, 159 laws, 51, 88n20, 91, 120, 124, 176 Laybourn, Keith, 66 leaders, 51, 59, 61, 64n80, 68, 74, 105, 115, 127, 176–77, 179 learning, 16, 19–21, 20n38, 38, 41n8, 57, 62, 63n36, 67, 126, 131, 172, 176

Lebanon, 21, 109 lectures, 87, 157 Ledger, Adam, 97–98, 118n3, 118n7, 118n8, 119n31, 119n34, 120–21 legacy, 6–7, 12, 128, 139, 152, 154, 156, 158, 180 Leipzig, 12, 128–29, 138n33, 140 Lemon, Ralph, 157 Lenin, 168 Lenoe, Matthew E., 72–73, 88n13, 88n21, 93 Lerner, Jesse, 126, 137n17, 137n18, 140 lessons, 6, 66, 175n28 letters, 13, 72–75, 78, 83–84, 87n8, 87n9, 88n13, 88n14, 88n18, 88n21, 88n22, 89n55, 90n65, 93–95, 143–55 liberation, 15, 46, 74, 79, 84, 106, 127, 133, 140 life, 6–7, 12–14, 35–37, 59–60, 79–80, 82– 84, 91n110, 92–93, 115–16, 145–46, 161–62, 165–66, 170–72, 175n18, 175 links, 4, 6, 14–15, 18, 20n15, 20, 30, 40, 129, 137n4, 139 listeners, 165–68 listening, 17, 28, 83, 105, 143, 146, 154, 161, 164, 172 literary, 19n1, 21–22, 93, 134, 138n51, 166, 174n12 literature, 22, 40, 55–56, 60, 118 live, 37, 88n10, 91n94, 93, 106, 115, 153 Liverpool, 68 living archive, 113, 154, 156 lockdown, 39–40, 100, 102–3, 105–6 logic, 11, 37, 117, 152, 155 London, 21–23, 43–44, 51, 65–67, 90n76, 91–94, 120–21 Long Kesh, 51–52, 54, 61, 67 love, 18, 78, 173 loyalist prisoners, 47, 49–51, 54, 60–61, 65n90 Lustyk, Katalin, 88n27, 92 Lviv, 85, 87 M MacDougall, David, 71, 87n1, 93 MacKenzie, Scott, 140 MacSwiney, Terence, 45–46 Madrid, 130, 136, 139–40 magazines, 125, 138n55, 166



Index

Mainz, 43 making, 20n30, 21, 77, 106, 124, 131, 159, 174n15, 175–76 Manchester, 67 Maoist, 13, 130 maps, 3, 29, 36–37, 40, 122, 149–50, 156n3, 157n8, 165, 168 Marcel, Michelle, 43 Marcuse, Herbert, 134, 138n53 Mariager, Rasmus, 20n25, 23 Mariupol, 113 Martí, Joan, 130, 138n33, 138n39, 138n50 Martin, John, 21, 31, 33, 41n10, 44, 67, 92–93 martyrdom, 47, 60–62, 62n3, 64n44, 64n74, 64n76, 65n81, 66 martyrs, 47, 49, 56, 58–61, 64n38, 64n79, 65–66, 177 Marx, Karl, 8, 75, 137n16, 139 materiality, 28, 112, 149 materials, 16, 19n4, 28–30, 54–55, 82, 111–12, 122, 124, 132, 134, 152, 154, 156, 170–71, 173 Matthew, David, 66 Matthias, Mia, 150 McCann, Fiona, 68 McEvoy, Kieran, 59, 63n18, 65n84, 67 McIntosh, Gillian, 67 McKittrick, David, 60, 65n88 Mecca, 9 media, 13–14, 17, 71–87, 88n10, 88n36, 89n43, 90n70, 90n73, 91n93, 91n106, 91n109, 93–94, 179 meeting, 49, 88n37, 102–3, 129–30, 146, 152–53, 171 Meikle, Denise, 163, 174n9 Melekhina, Irina, 167–69, 171, 174n16 Melihat Yunisov, 82, 90n80, 95 members, 28–29, 40, 51, 112, 130, 171 memory, 2–5, 7, 12, 14–18, 19n3, 21–22, 27–36, 39–41, 41n3, 42–44, 66, 68, 79, 143–44, 146, 153–55, 166–68, 176–80 metaphors, 31–32, 35, 73, 77, 82, 84, 86, 91n94, 91n98, 93, 100–101, 105 methodology, 2–4, 6, 16–17, 79, 143, 145, 154, 156, 158 Mickiewicz, Ellen, 75, 88n28, 88n33, 88n35, 93 Middletown, 21, 42

189

migrants, 4–5, 14, 18, 124–25, 164 migration, 2–3, 10, 14–15, 17, 19n4, 21– 22, 28–29, 33, 36–37, 143–44, 150, 152 Milan, 102 militant films, 14, 123–25, 127–31, 136– 37, 137n31, 138n39 militant image, 128–29, 136n2, 139 Militant Performance, 15, 45–61, 63n6, 65n80, 67, 125 militants, 6, 11, 53, 57, 126, 130, 132, 138n45 military, 52, 58, 60, 101, 134, 167 mimesis, 33, 101, 112, 118, 120 mind, 38, 42n15, 43–44, 55–56, 75, 79, 87n6, 88n19, 92, 114–15 Minneapolis, 91, 158 mirror, 33–34, 42n15, 44, 84, 93, 101, 146 Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 90n76, 90n88, 93–94 Mississippi, 68 mobility, 2–4, 6–7, 13–15, 17–19, 19n3, 19n4, 19n9, 21–22, 27–32, 36–37, 40–41, 41n3 mobilizing, 20n34, 21, 32, 62 model, 17, 28, 31, 37, 57, 111, 124, 126– 28, 131, 135, 143 modern art, 156, 178 modernity, 87n7, 90n61, 90n82, 91n104, 91, 93, 111, 139 modernization, 131, 137n18, 139 Moldova, 85 MoMA, 106–7 moments, 2, 5, 100, 135, 160, 162, 168, 178 Monaghan, 66 Monegal, Antonio, 140 money, 78, 96, 99, 108, 124 Monsalve, Sofia, 119n38 Montevideo, 128 Montrose, Shelly, 144, 150 monuments, 115, 127, 178–80 Morrison, John, 60, 64n41, 65n86, 67 Morrison, Toni, 149 Moscow, 13, 89n37, 89n52, 90n83, 91–95, 168, 170, 177 Moten, Fred, 156–57, 157n28, 157 motion, 27, 33, 44, 154, 157n23, 158 movement, 3–4, 6–9, 14–15, 18, 27–31, 33–41, 41n3, 42n23, 43–44, 46, 52–53, 56–61, 149–51, 154, 180

190

Index

Mulligan, Jimmy, 165–66 Mulligan, Johnny, 165–66, 174n11, 174n13 Mulligan,Young, 165 multisensory experiences, 17, 158–61, 164 Murmansk region, 85 museums, 17, 107, 120, 143–46, 150, 152–56, 173, 176, 179 music, 44, 75–79, 99, 101–5, 108, 110, 112–13, 119n48, 120–21, 158, 164–65 myth, 47, 64n74, 66, 71, 80, 85, 90n64, 91n93, 93 N Narodnoie tvorchestvo, 76, 89n37, 89n46, 91, 93, 95 narratives, 2–4, 7, 14, 17, 30, 36, 54–55, 59, 90n76, 94, 101, 111, 178 narrators, 46, 63n13, 79, 159–62, 164–65, 167, 171–73 nation, 47–48, 59, 61, 64n62, 66, 76–78, 81–82, 84–86, 89n52, 90n63, 91n106, 103–4, 106, 131, 133 national identity, 48, 50, 81, 86, 91n106, 118 nationalist communities, 48, 58–59, 61 nationalists, 45–47, 49–50, 58–59, 61, 114 nationality, 15, 46, 56, 59, 62, 67, 72, 78–79, 81–84, 94, 106 nature, 2, 5, 16, 37, 43–44, 77, 83, 89n51, 89n55, 116–17, 146, 150, 152 Navalny, Alexei, 18, 177–78 Nazi Germany, 79, 134 negotiation, 21, 97, 100, 107, 110, 113, 147 neighborhoods, 102, 160, 164 neocolonialism, 127, 130, 136 neo-folk, 83, 85 neoliberal economics, 9, 95, 178 Netherlands, 41n3 New Brunswick, 65 New England, 43 news, 60, 67, 75, 78, 102, 133, 178–79 newspapers, 72, 93, 127, 132, 134, 136, 137n18, 165 New York, 21–23, 42–44, 65–67, 91–93, 95, 120–21, 139, 144, 146, 150–51, 155–56, 157n15, 157, 168, 170 Nicaragua, 8–9

Nikolaevna, Tamara, 72 Niven, Bill, 19n2, 21 normalization, 53, 74–75, 85, 108 North America, 10, 176 North Atlantic, 10–11 Northern Ireland, 9–10, 15, 19–22, 20n30, 45–63, 63n7, 63n17, 63n18, 63n22, 63n24, 63n27, 63n30, 64n72, 65–68 nostalgia, 11, 20n34, 21–22, 63n14, 64n64, 68, 168 Nugent, Kieran, 52–53 O Oakland, 140 Oberhausen, 128 objects, 30–32, 36, 52, 54–55, 82, 86, 144–45, 153, 155, 167–68, 172 obligations, 7, 39, 46, 113 observers, 14, 30, 34, 36, 41n8, 58–59, 126, 136–37, 137n27, 138n35, 139 Öcalan, Abdullah, 59 Odin Teatret, 12, 96–100, 107–13, 118, 118n7, 118n9, 119n27, 119n29, 120–21 O’Hearn, Denis, 54, 63n8, 63n16, 64n43, 64n48, 67 OHMS, software platforms, 16, 161–62, 164–65, 168, 171, 174n3, 175 Okhmakevych, Mykola, 78 O’Mahony, David, 67 online, 4, 41, 102, 109, 132, 164 Operation Demetrius, 51, 63n26, 63n33, 67 Oppenheimer, Rachel, 55, 64n59, 67 opposition, 11, 60, 93, 95, 114 oral history, 2–3, 5, 16–18, 19n7, 19n10, 20n17, 21–23, 61, 159–62, 164–66, 172–73, 174n1, 174n3, 174n4, 175 orality and visuality, 12, 32, 42n38, 168 order, 9, 31, 55, 81, 132, 176, 178–79 organization, 9, 19n4, 36–37, 67, 86, 124, 129, 134 Outram, Quentin, 66 Oxford, 22–23, 41–42, 44, 65, 67, 92–95, 121, 139 P pain, 15, 36, 46, 113 paintings, 42n33, 42, 170 Palermo, 5



Index

Palestine, 59, 64n79, 66 Palo Alto, 180 pandemic, 102, 104, 116, 178 Panopticon, 54–55 paradox, 81, 86, 128, 156 Paris, 9, 12, 21–22, 29, 43–44, 117, 140, 178 parody, 124, 132, 134–35 Parr, Connal, 20n30, 22, 63n24, 68 Parris, Sandra, 144, 150 participant observation, 4, 19n4, 41n8, 44 participants, 76–77, 97, 100–101, 104–5, 107, 109–10, 115, 144, 150–53, 157n27, 160 participation, 49, 76, 85, 100, 105, 108, 117, 138n45, 152–54 peace, 19, 46, 62, 66–68, 79, 95, 113–14 peasants, 77–78 Pekelder, Jacco, 88n23, 88n24, 93, 95 perception, 12, 14, 27–30, 32–36, 38, 40, 42n20, 43, 81–82, 84, 111, 114, 116–17 performance, 5–6, 12, 14–17, 19n1, 21, 28–30, 32, 35–36, 40–43, 80–81, 85, 97–103, 106–7, 109–18, 118n8, 119n37, 120–21, 143–47, 151–57, 157n15 performative, 16, 28–29, 32, 81, 83, 90n90, 91n108, 92, 96–97, 101, 116–17, 118n6, 119n33, 120 performers, 5–6, 14, 28–32, 34, 36, 100, 106, 109–10, 112–13, 115, 144, 147, 152–53 performing, 13, 15, 17, 19n1, 20n38, 21–22, 64n44, 65, 107–9, 118, 119n14, 119n19, 121, 157n21, 158 performing arts, 12, 32, 34, 42n17, 43, 96, 101–2, 107, 115, 118, 151 Perrot, Michelle, 20n12, 21 perspective, 6–7, 10–11, 13–14, 17, 32, 34, 37, 40, 98, 101, 110–11, 115, 117, 154 Peru, 118n9 phenomena, 3, 6, 11, 13, 30–32, 76, 81, 83, 86, 110 Philadelphia, 16, 159–62, 164–67, 170–73, 174n13, 175 Philadelphia Immigration, 159–73, 174n1, 174n2, 174n4, 174n5, 174n6, 174n8, 174n9, 174n11, 174n13, 174n14, 174n16, 175n17, 175n18, 175n20

191

philosophy, 43, 108, 111, 119n18, 121, 144, 146 Photo, 98–99, 103, 109, 126, 144, 150, 155, 165–66, 168, 170 photographs, 2–3, 29, 127, 129, 135–36, 161, 164, 166–68, 170–72 planet, 79, 82, 103, 105 players, 56, 152, 166 Poland, 94, 119n37, 173 police, 47, 49, 78, 96, 99, 114 political, 18, 21–22, 45–62, 63n14, 64n80, 65–68, 71–76, 95, 114, 117, 124–25, 132, 134, 136, 139–40, 176–79 politics, 7–9, 11–12, 42n35, 42, 44, 63n18, 63n20, 64n44, 64n74, 64n76, 65–68, 91n107, 91, 93, 120–21 Politkovskaya, Anna, 114 Pollock, Jackson, 29 popular culture, 19n1, 22, 83, 85, 88n10 popularity, 75, 77–78, 86, 88n10, 88n26, 88n27, 88n29, 92, 94, 113, 115 population, 48, 51, 72, 77, 101–6, 108, 114, 119n16 Portlaoise Prison, 51, 54, 67 portrait, 124, 136, 166–67, 169 post-1968, 6, 8, 11–13, 19n5, 74, 81, 107, 112, 116, 125 postcolonialism, 100, 115, 120 Postdramatisches Theater, 118, 119n50, 121 posture, 34–36, 38–39 Pound, Ezra, 113 power, 28, 30, 48, 50–51, 54–57, 71–74, 80, 82–86, 90n78, 91n107, 92–94, 156n4, 157, 166, 173 practices, 14–15, 21, 29–30, 32, 55, 72–73, 81, 86–87, 97, 100–101, 125–26, 143– 46, 151–52, 157n6, 158 Prague, 50 Prague Spring, 10, 12–13, 74–75, 88n23, 88n32, 92–93, 95, 117, 176 Prehistoric Figurines, 87n2, 90n76, 90n77, 90n79, 91 presentations, 32, 42n38, 43, 64n75, 65n82, 66, 72, 80, 116, 152 Prince, Simon, 65 prisoners, 15, 46–47, 51–62, 64n80, 65–66, 68, 177 prison protests, 18, 45–47, 51, 53, 58, 63n8

192

Index

prisons, 15, 22, 46–47, 50–52, 54–59, 61–62, 63n16, 66–68, 96, 157n15 process, 3–7, 11–12, 14, 30–31, 37–38, 40, 46, 82–84, 123, 125–27, 132, 143–49, 151–56, 166–67, 178–79 production, 2, 7, 19n4, 54, 110, 112–14, 117, 122–23, 126, 129, 131–32 Proglio, Gabriele, 19n3, 19n9, 21–22 programmes, 9, 40, 41n4, 72, 75–79, 83–84, 87–88, 88n37, 89n52, 89n55, 127–28 programming, 74–77, 80, 83, 85, 88n27, 90n71, 92, 156n1 project, 14, 17–19, 19n4, 28–30, 144, 147, 150, 155, 157n14, 157n15, 157, 160, 162, 171–73, 174n5 Propper, Ellen, 93 proprioception, 30–31, 36–37 prose, 119n22, 120–21 Protestants, 22, 48–49, 68 protesters, 15, 50, 52, 58, 61, 179 protest movements, 9–10, 15, 21, 50, 139, 177 protests, 6, 9, 11, 13, 18, 45–47, 49–50, 52–53, 55–59, 61–62, 64n60, 64n65, 67–68, 138n33, 177–78 province, 46, 50, 61, 171 Psychiatry, 65, 96, 113 psychoanalysis, 5, 93, 178 Psychology, 7, 35, 44, 66, 81, 89n60, 92–93 public history, 19n7, 21, 87, 160, 173 Puerto Rico, 164 R Rabinow, Paul, 64n68, 66 radical cinema, 128–29 radicalization, 19–21, 20n30, 43, 46, 49– 50, 62, 66, 123–25, 127–28, 131–32 radio, 72, 75–77, 84–86, 93–94, 102–3, 161, 174n2 Rancière, Jacques, 39, 42n35, 44, 96, 118n2, 119n45, 120–21 Raptis, Theocharis, 105, 119n18, 121 reality, 80, 82, 84–86, 90n70, 91n98, 92, 101, 103, 108, 111, 114, 146, 150–51 reception, 33, 36, 46, 83, 91n109, 93, 121, 128, 130, 137n21 recognition, 5–7, 57, 76, 129

recollections, 39, 89n37, 149, 161, 172 records, 3–6, 21, 63n13, 138n47, 138n50, 153, 161, 164–65 recycling, 123–24, 126, 132, 140 reforms, 13, 49–50, 66, 74–75, 124 refugees, 110, 112, 167–68, 170, 175n18, 175 regime, 8, 39, 53, 72, 82, 86, 95, 131, 133–34 regions, 10, 39, 51, 72, 77–80, 83–85, 90n63, 172 religion, 8–9, 48, 90n64, 92, 94, 96, 104 remembering, 3, 5, 27–41, 42n25, 43–44, 61 remembrance, 62, 113 Renouf, Olivier, 20n14, 28–30 repetition, 76, 80, 83, 149 representation, 22, 28, 32, 37–38, 107, 111, 116, 118, 145, 147, 167–68 repression, 57, 63n8, 64n43, 67, 132 republicans, 8, 46–49, 51–62, 65n81, 65–66 research, 5, 11, 13–14, 16–19, 19n4, 28– 29, 40, 41n8, 55–56, 59, 62–63, 63n13, 98, 136, 161 resistance, 15, 20n13, 21, 52–53, 55–57, 62, 63n8, 63n14, 63n17, 64n43, 64n55, 64n64, 64n80, 67–68, 178 responsibility, 116, 149, 164 revolt, 20n36, 22, 49, 57, 63n24, 67, 93, 95, 119n21, 119n23, 120 revolution, 8–10, 20n34, 21, 46, 48, 51, 87n6, 88n16, 88n19, 92, 116–17, 126– 27, 176, 179 rhythms, 30, 36, 38, 164 Riabchuk, Natalia, 89n53 Richard, Courtney, 172, 175n19, 175n25 Richardson, Ingrid, 82–83, 90n84, 90n89, 91n95, 94 Ritchie, Donald A., 19n7, 22 ritual, 17, 65, 71, 90n64, 92, 100, 105, 112, 118n9, 143, 145 ritualistic, 72, 81, 85, 151, 153 Robin, Christopher, 147 Rodriguez, Sydney, 144, 150 Romanov, Pavel, 87n3, 95 Rome, 129–30, 140 Rosler, Martha, 136, 138n55 Rupprecht, Tobias, 20n20, 22



Index

Russia, 10, 16, 18, 62n4, 66, 85, 89n48, 93–94, 114, 118, 168, 173, 177–80 S Salazkina, Masha, 137n24, 137n29, 139 Sands, Bobby, 52, 61, 64n44, 64n74, 64n76, 66–67 scenes, 7, 12, 50, 113, 129, 135–36 Scharloth, Joachim, 20n20, 21, 67, 88n23, 88n24, 93, 95 Schechner, Richard, 19n1, 22 scholars, 5, 7–8, 11, 18, 28–29, 32, 37, 40, 72–73, 75, 115, 122 schools, 16, 18, 77, 80, 88n14, 96, 130–31, 157, 159, 167, 173 Schütz-Bosbach, Simone, 43 Scott, Timothy, 91 screen, 72, 77, 82, 84, 86, 100, 105–6, 109, 115, 134, 137n27 screening, 128–31, 136 self-sacrifice, 45–46, 58–59, 61, 64n58, 66, 68 sensorial dimensions, 17, 34, 143, 151, 153–54 sentiment, 78–79, 82, 86 sequence, 38, 125, 129, 134–35, 146 sessions, 103–5, 113, 115, 146–47, 152 Shakespeare, William, 121, 180 Sharafutdinova, Gulnaz, 89n58, 93 Sheffield, 94 Sheftel, Anna, 20n18, 21, 23 Sher, Benjamin, 121 Shevtsova, Maria, 98, 110, 118n8, 119n28, 121 Shirlow, Peter, 59, 65n84, 68 Shklovsky,Viktor, 108, 119n22, 121 Shohat, Ella, 90n76, 94 Sierra Leone, 173 sign, 36–38, 89n51, 100 signals, 38, 88n15, 92, 99, 145, 149, 156 Silberman, Marc, 120 Silke, Andrew, 66–67 simulations, 32, 38, 144 Sindelar, Melanie, 20n26, 22 singing, 76, 78, 81, 89n55, 102–6, 108, 151, 164 Sinigaglia, Corrado, 42n15, 44 Sinn Féin, 45, 48, 58, 64n39, 68

193

Situationist literature and cinema, 125–26, 139 Sixties, 63n24, 63n29, 65–66 Sloniowski, Jeannette, 140 Smelik, Anneke, 19n1, 22 Šmidchens, Guntis, 76–77, 89n42, 94 social distancing, 102, 115–16 social interaction, 12, 107, 110 socialism, 13, 71, 73–75, 78–87, 88n26, 88n29, 88n34, 90n70, 92–95, 173 social media, 19n4, 179 Social Movements, 6, 9, 20n20, 20n21, 20n28, 21–23, 53, 67, 74, 96 Social Performance, 46, 63n10, 63n15, 64n46, 65, 97 Social Science, 8, 48, 118n5, 119n26, 121 society, 8, 54–57, 66, 88n31, 91–93, 100– 101, 108, 114, 117, 120, 125 Sociology, 18, 21, 50, 53, 62, 65, 67, 136 Soderberg, Annika, 171–72, 175n20, 175n23 Solanas, Fernando E., 127, 136–38, 137n20, 138n57, 140 soldiers, 50, 52, 58, 60, 88n18, 94, 111 Soler, Lorenzo (Soler, Llorenç), 122–34, 133–36, 137n7, 137n10, 137n13, 137n25, 137n28, 138n33, 138n34, 138n39, 138n40, 138n45, 138n47, 138n50, 139–40 solidarity, 46–48, 62–63, 63n8, 64n43, 67, 85, 102, 106, 144, 156 solitude, 119n21, 119n23, 120 songs, 78–79, 81, 84–85, 88n10, 102–6, 108, 110, 114, 127, 144 soul, 84–85, 88n19, 92 sounds, 4, 12, 17, 30, 79–80, 105–6, 121, 123–27, 132, 134–35, 144 soundtrack, 127, 132, 135–36, 138n47 sources, 72–75, 89n48, 89n60, 124, 126– 27, 132, 134–35, 138n51, 139, 159–60, 162, 164–66, 172–73 Soviet, 13, 71–77, 79–83, 85–86, 87n4, 88n14, 88n18, 88n22, 88n37, 89n58, 91–95, 167–68, 176–78 Soviet media, 13, 71–87, 88n10, 89n37, 89n45, 89n58, 90n63, 91n90, 93, 95 Soviet people, 71–73, 77, 79, 81–82, 84, 87

194

Index

Soviet television, 13, 71, 74–76, 80–82, 84–87, 88n27, 89n48, 90n64, 93 Soviet Ukraine, 13, 72, 76–81, 83–84, 86, 167 space, 10, 12, 27–40, 78–79, 82–84, 86–87, 102–3, 107–11, 114, 117, 144, 147, 150–52, 157n15, 157n27 Spain, 12, 123–24, 128–34, 136, 137n27, 137n31, 138n53, 140 Special Category Status, 51–52, 57 spectacle, 12, 16, 31, 69, 75, 88n31, 92, 107, 117, 125 spectators, 28, 31, 35–36, 40, 97, 100–101, 103, 110–14, 119n37, 127, 132–34, 136 spheres, 10–11, 46, 49, 57 sport, 20n34, 22, 56, 60, 63n14, 64n64, 68 Stack, Trevor, 66 staging, 5, 30, 58, 109, 119n45, 120, 144, 146, 152, 155 Stalin, Joseph Vissarionovich, 87n5, 87n6, 92, 95 Stalingrad, 113 Stalinism, 92–93, 180 Stam, Robert, 90n76, 94, 137n23, 138n54, 140 stars, 74, 133, 164 state, 20n31, 21, 35, 37, 48–49, 65, 67–68, 73–76, 79, 88n13, 88n21, 93–95, 114, 117, 128–29 status, 34, 47, 49, 58–60, 106, 168 Stein, Gertrude, 101 Sterrett, Jill, 156n2 Stetson Hat Company, 162, 166–67, 174n15, 175 stories, 28, 30, 32, 41, 154, 161, 164, 171– 72, 174n5, 175n28, 180 Stormont, 51 storytelling, 17, 143, 152 Stratienko, Tamara, 72, 89n53 strength, 10, 60, 106, 109, 112–13, 153, 162 structures, 15, 17, 36–37, 52, 55, 58, 111, 135, 137n25, 143, 145, 149, 152, 154– 55, 157n15 struggle, 8, 19, 46–47, 52–53, 55–62, 83, 126, 139 students, 9, 16–18, 21, 49–50, 131, 133, 159–68, 171–73, 174n6, 175n28, 176 studies, 3, 12, 32–35, 41n3, 56, 59–60, 66, 73, 94, 177, 180

Studio Museum in Harlem, 143–45, 150, 152, 155–56, 156n1, 157n13, 157n17, 157n20, 157n27, 158 Suárez, Gonzalo, 123 subjectivity, 2–3, 6–7, 15, 17, 38, 40, 54, 57, 63n14, 64n55, 64n80, 160, 162, 165–68, 172–73 subjects, 2–5, 28, 30, 33–34, 37, 40, 54–57, 73, 80–82, 107, 110, 177, 179 summer, 9, 46, 51–54, 175 support, 48–49, 59–62, 77, 134 Sweeney, George, 55, 64n58, 68 symbols, 36, 43, 54–56, 65–66, 76–77, 79, 102–4, 106, 108, 114, 179–80 systems, 6, 9, 12, 17, 33–35, 37–39, 131– 34, 143, 145, 154, 162 T tactics, 9, 15, 28, 32–33, 37–38, 40, 41n8, 45, 52–53, 125, 132 Tant’amati, Company, 5, 14, 29, 41n1 Tashkent, 137n24 teaching, 16–17, 75, 159 Teaterlaboratorium, Nordisk, 118, 119n46, 121 techniques, 4, 34, 57, 108, 111, 113, 120, 123, 132 technology, 5, 23, 37, 43, 54, 75, 82, 84, 91n110, 91, 93 telescoping, 147, 157n6, 157n10, 157n12, 158 Televideniie Mezhdu Iskusstvom I Massmedia, 89n37, 90n64, 93–94 television, 13, 72, 74–87, 90n64, 90n70, 91n106, 93–94, 98, 102–3, 105–6, 108 television festivals, 72, 76, 81, 85, 88n10, 90n63 television programmes, 75–78, 82–85, 89n52, 105 television screen, 78, 82, 85, 103 temporality, 2, 6–8, 10–11, 15, 19n5, 32, 39, 96, 98, 101, 107, 111, 114–15 tension, 4, 15, 28, 30, 33, 107, 128, 145 terror, 20n26, 22, 47, 51–53, 57–58, 63n17, 64n40, 66–68, 88n19, 92 testimonies, 5, 19n4, 31, 130, 134, 155, 168 Texas, 146, 157n15 Thatcher, Margaret, 9 Theater, 118n5, 119n26, 119n42, 120–21



Index

195

theatre, 12, 14, 46, 96–98, 100–101, 103, 107–11, 113–18, 118n3, 118n8, 118n9, 119n10, 119n12, 119n21, 120–21 theories, 16, 21, 32–33, 42n15, 43, 67, 111, 118, 118n1, 119n22, 120–22 Third Cinema, 122, 127, 136, 137n20, 137n22, 138n57, 140 Ticini, Luca F., 43 Tompkins, Joanne, 115, 119n41, 120 Toronto, 19, 62, 67, 95 Torreiro, Casimiro, 137n6, 140 torture, 16, 59, 177 tourism, 7, 132, 164, 168 tradition, 10, 12, 32, 42, 45, 84, 104–5, 108, 116–17, 126, 133 trajectories, 30, 39, 123, 178 transcription, 28, 38–39, 150–52, 157n13, 160–61 transformation, 12, 30, 37, 80, 106, 114, 122, 124, 128, 138n39, 151–52 transmission, 16–17, 32, 34–35, 40, 115, 135, 144–45, 147, 151–52, 154 transmitters, 17, 146, 150, 153 tree, 39, 98, 111–12, 118n8, 119n31, 119n34, 120 Troubles, 20n29, 21–22, 49, 51–52, 63n30, 64n41, 65, 67–68 Trump, Donald, 160 trust, 22, 28, 107 truth, 7, 82–83, 86, 88n27, 89n45, 89n48, 90n83, 92 Tufaro, Rossana, 20n34, 21 Turin, 5 turmoil, 7, 177–78 turn cultural, 12, 116 linguistic, 116 Turner,Victor, 90n64, 94, 146 TV, 76, 79, 86, 88n25, 88n27, 88n30, 90n63, 92–93, 179 Twentieth Century, 18, 53, 62n1, 67, 114, 167, 180 Tychyna, Pavlo, 77

United States, 8–9, 122, 126–27, 131, 136, 138n55, 160, 168, 173, 178–79 Unitelefilm archives, 129–30, 138n33, 138n36 University, 16, 18–19, 21, 49–51, 62, 63n9, 66–68, 87, 91–95, 115–16, 133, 140, 156–59, 161–62, 180 USSR, 13, 71–77, 79, 85, 88n10, 88n16, 88n37, 95

U Ukraine, 72, 77–80, 83, 85, 87, 88n12, 88n32, 89n52, 89n53, 89n55, 89n56, 90n63, 93–95, 167–68, 176–77 United Kingdom, 9, 47

W WALL, 12, 27, 30, 64n62, 67, 103, 143– 53, 155–56, 157n9, 157n13, 157n15, 157n16, 157–58 Wang, Mandy, 171, 175n20

V value, 4, 15–16, 37, 85, 102, 105, 156–57 Verdi, Giuseppe, 102 Vergelis, Oleh, 78, 89n53, 89n56, 94 Verin, Hélène, 42n32, 43 victims, 50, 60, 111, 136 victory, 58, 60, 176–77, 179–80 video, 2–3, 17, 19n4, 29, 103, 140, 146, 152, 156, 174n3 Vienna, 18, 22, 62, 180 Vietnam, 8–9, 130, 135–36, 138n55, 170, 176 viewers, 35, 38, 72, 75–76, 78–81, 84, 86, 89n48, 104, 167 Viggiani, Elisabetta, 64n44, 65 village, 72, 78, 80, 89n55, 102, 107, 171 Vilnius, 170 violence, 8, 15, 46, 49–51, 53–55, 59, 64n56, 65–66, 68, 88n22, 127 visibility, 15, 57, 86 vision, 36–38, 55, 71, 83, 86, 123, 131, 145, 149 visitors, 52, 107, 160 visual arts, 2, 29, 87, 132, 144 visual culture, 90n76, 90n88, 93–94, 170 visualising, 2–4, 12–15, 17–18, 19n4, 27– 30, 36–40, 41n3, 43, 71–72, 74, 80–87, 133, 135, 147, 168 visual Memory, 2, 16, 18, 19n8, 19n11, 20, 22, 28, 37 voices, 4, 10, 32, 73, 86, 88n18, 94, 104–6, 113, 166 Volokh, Elina, 78, 89n53

196

Index

war, 9–10, 15–16, 44–46, 48, 50, 52–53, 57–58, 60, 67–68, 79, 104–7, 111–14, 120–21, 135–36, 138n55, 176, 178–79 Warner, Geoffrey, 20n36, 22 Warsaw, 113 Washington, 87, 139, 170, 175, 178 water, 83, 91n98, 167 Watson, Ian, 97–98, 118n4, 118n5, 118n7, 118n8, 119n26, 121 waves, 9, 17, 45, 146, 159–60 weapons, 53–54, 64n40, 66, 68, 177 Weiss, Peter, 134, 138n51, 138n53 window, 73, 80, 84, 86 Winter, Aaron, 67 witnesses, 88n22, 113–14, 146, 149 Wolfe, Stephen F., 118n2, 121 Wolman, Gil J., 125, 137n11, 139 women, 11, 14, 17–18, 53, 56, 66–68, 119n41, 120, 144, 146, 150–51, 153, 155 workers, 7–8, 18, 83, 125, 130–32, 140, 162, 167 working class, 9, 48, 58, 61–62, 137n25

workshops, 2, 19n5, 159, 173 world, 7–11, 53, 55, 74, 76, 83–85, 87, 100–102, 104, 113, 115–16, 119n12, 120–21, 129–32, 137n29 worship, 61, 79, 82, 170 Wright, Richard, 59, 64n78, 68 X Xichuan, 172 Y youth, 60, 65n88, 94, 135, 167 Yunisov, Melihat, 82, 90n80, 95 Yurchak, Alexei, 88n20, 89n58, 95 Z Žabić, Sarah, 74, 88n24, 95 Zembrzycki, Stacey, 20n18, 21, 23 Zimbabwe, 8 Zorkaia, Neia, 77, 80, 89n41, 89n43, 89n44, 90n67, 90n69, 95 Zueneli, Erika, 20n14, 29–30