Place Matters: Critical Topographies in Word and Image 9780228014850

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PL ACE M AT T E RS

Edited by

Jonathan Bordo and Blake Fitzpatrick

PLACE M AT T E R S CRITICAL TOPOGRAPHIES IN WORD AND IMAGE

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2022 isbn 978-0-2280-1390-7 (cloth) isbn 978-0-2280-1391-4 (paper) isbn 978-0-2280-1485-0 (epdf) Legal deposit fourth quarter 2022 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of grants from the Creative School and the School of Image Arts of Toronto Metropolitan University and the Centre for Theory, Culture, and Politics, the Nind Fund, and the Dean’s Enhancement Fund of the Faculty of Arts and Science of Trent University.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Place matters : critical topographies in word and image / edited by Jonathan Bordo and Blake Fitzpatrick. Other titles: Place matters (Montréal, Québec) Names: Bordo, Jonathan, editor. | Fitzpatrick, Blake, 1955- editor. Description: Many but not all the contributions in this volume originated as presentations at the Critical Topography conference in 2015. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20220265852 | Canadiana (ebook) 20220265925 | isbn 9780228013907 (cloth) | isbn 9780228013914 (paper) | isbn 9780228014850 (epdf) Subjects: lcsh: Place (Philosophy) in art. | lcsh: Place (Philosophy) in literature. | lcsh: Landscapes in art. | lcsh: Geocriticism. | lcsh: Symbolism. Classification: lcc n8236.p46 p53 2022 | ddc 709.1—dc23

This book was designed and typeset by studio oneonone in Minion 11/14

My daughter – daughter of the blind old man – Where, I wonder, have we come to now? What place is this? – Sophocles

Contents

Artist contributions follow pages 70 and 230 Figures | xi Acknowledgments | xvii Prologue: RE: PLACE | xix W.J.T. Mitchell Introduction | 3 Jonathan Bordo and Blake Fitzpatrick

Landscape, Art, and Ecology 1 From Nature? The Critical Landscapes of Poussin and Cézanne | 23 Paul Duro 2 Newfoundland Painting and the Metaphysics of Light | 44 Jennifer Dyer The Quiet Zone and the Myth of the Virtual | colour section 1 Daniel Froidevaux and Elisa Gonzalez 3 Placing Here: Finlay, Fulton, and Skelton and the Formation of the British School of Aesthetic Chorography | 55 Jessica Becking 4 The “Art of Walking” according to the Puritans | 71 Jason LaFountain

The Hamish Fulton Album 5 Fulton’s Walks: Between Documentation and Experience | 87 Blake Fitzpatrick

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Contents

6 Hamish Fulton Interview | 92 Hamish Fulton, Jonathan Bordo, and Blake Fitzpatrick 7 Walking with Hamish Fulton into the Vanishing Point vers le Canada | 105 Jonathan Bordo Walk Texts | colour section 1 Hamish Fulton

The Anthropocene, Ruins, and Nuclear Exposure 8 Placing the Anthropocene | 117 Peter C. van Wyck

The Anthropocene Project | colour section 1 Edward Burtynsky 9 A Haunt of Jackals: Towards a Critical Topography of Ruins | 129 Ihor Junyk The Chornobyl Exclusion Zone | colour section 1 David McMillan Rooting in the Ashes | colour section 1 Katy McCormick X Marks the Spot | colour section 1 Robert Del Tredici

Borders and Trauma 10 Conversations on Walls | 153 Margaret Olin The Olive Tree, the Land, and the Palestinian Struggle against Settler Colonialism | colour section 2 Rehab Nazzal Crossing | colour section 2 Mark Ruwedel

Contents

11 Manto’s Madmen: Partition and Psychoanalytic Displacement in “Toba Tek Singh” | 176 Anhiti Patnaik

Memory and the Keeping Place 12 The Darkest Tapestry: Indian Residential School Memorialization and the Model for a “Keeping Place” in the Qu’Appelle Valley | 193 Amber D.V.A. Johnson Pole Positions under Vancouver’s Burrard Bridge: Exposure and Intersection on Indigenous Land in Bell Tower of False Creek | colour section 2 Randolph Jordan 13 The Community for Which the Land Longs: Cape Town’s District Six Museum | 213 Christiaan Beyers 14 Ai Weiwei’s Memory Work at Lesbos, Greece | 231 Kara York

Geopoetics 15 The Messon of the Island of Lesbos: Toponym as Evidence in the History of Ideas, or Introduction to Ten Poems from The Name of Sappho’s Daughter | 249 Jesper Svenbro Epilogue: Announcing the Disaster | 273 Jonathan Bordo Postscript | 283 Jonathan Bordo Contributors | 289 Index | 297

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Figures

0.1 The Tamir Rice Memorial Gazebo. Photo courtesy of Rebuild Foundation and photographed by Chris Strong. | xxiii 1.1 Nicolas Poussin, Israelites Gathering the Manna, 1639, Musée du Louvre, Paris. | 25 1.2 Nicolas Poussin, Stormy Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe, 1651, Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt. | 27 1.3 Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake, 1648, The National Gallery, London. | 30 1.4 Paul Cézanne, Le Pont de Maincy, ca 1879, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. | 35 1.5 Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1890–95, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh. | 37 1.6 Ker-Xavier Roussel, Cézanne Painting (Turned Away from Easel), Jan. 1906, courtesy of the Bridgeman Art Library. | 39 2.1 Will Gill, Still Boat 2, 2011, image courtesy of the artist. | 46 2.2 Will Gill, Cape Spear 2, 2009, image courtesy of the artist. | 47 2.3 Kym Greeley, Yesterdays Gone 1, 2012, image courtesy of the artist. | 49 2.4 Greg Bennett, In the Morning, 2011, image courtesy of the artist. | 52 3.1 Map showing the location of the Chinati Foundation within the state of Texas. Image courtesy of Google Maps. | 56 3.2 Aerial satellite imagery of the Chinati Foundation. Image courtesy of Google Maps. | 57 3.3 Richard Skelton, Limnology, 2012. Image courtesy of the artist. | 67 4.1 John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, 4th ed., 1680, frontispiece by Robert White. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, dc. | 75 4.2 Meindert Hobbema, Landscape with a Wooded Road, 1662, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia. | 77 4.3 Francis Alÿs, Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes Doing Something Leads to Nothing), 1997, Mexico City. | 78

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4.4 Richard Long, Line Made by Walking, UK, 1967. | 79 6.1 Hamish Fulton, ajawaan (Toronto: Art Metropole, 1987), unpaginated. | 93 6.2 Hamish Fulton, ajawaan, detail – first panel of six-panel fold-out, 1987. | 93 6.3 Hamish Fulton, rock fall echo dust, 1988, image courtesy of the artist. | 96 6.4 Hamish Fulton, five knots for five days of walking, in Camp Fire (Eindhoven, Netherlands: Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, 1985), image courtesy of the artist. | 99 6.5 Hamish Fulton, a shepherd walking with his sheep and dogs, 2005, image courtesy of the artist. | 102 7.1 Hamish Fulton, Chomolungma Flag, 2009, image courtesy of the artist. | 112 9.1 Hubert Robert, Imaginary View of the Gallery of the Louvre as a Ruin, 1796, Louvre Museum, Paris. | 131 9.2 Hubert Robert, Burning of the Opera in the Palais-Royal, 1781, Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation, Houston. | 137 9.3 Hubert Robert, Demolition of Saint Jean en Grève, 1800, Musée Carnavalet, Paris. | 138 9.4 Max Avdeev, After the Storm: Pictures after the Fall of Donetsk Airport, 2015, image courtesy of buzzfeed.net. | 139 9.5 Capsar David Friedrich, The Abbey in the Oak Forest, 1809–10, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin. | 141 9.6 Max Avdeev, After the Storm: Pictures After the Fall of Donetsk Airport, 2015, image courtesy of buzzfeed.net. | 142 10.1 Margaret Olin, Eruv attachment: pvc conduit, microfilament, and tape, New Haven, Connecticut, 2012. Photograph courtesy of the author. | 155 10.2 Margaret Olin, Murals painted by graffiti artists Blu and Vince Seven, Bethlehem, 2015. Photograph courtesy of the author. | 159 10.3 Margaret Olin, Murals for Sajed Mizher and Raed al-Salhi with a mural of the Handala figure between them, Dheisheh, 2019. Photograph courtesy of the author. | 163 10.4 Margaret Olin, Two competing murals for Jihad al-Jaafary by Ahmed Hmeedat and an anonymous artist, Dheisheh Refugee Camp, 2015. Photograph courtesy of the author. | 164 10.5 Margaret Olin, Mural in memory of Uday Abu Jamal and Ghassan Muhammad Abu Jamal, Dheisheh Refugee Camp, 2015. Photograph courtesy of the author. | 166 10.6 Margaret Olin, Mural in memory of Qusai al-Afandi by Ayed Arafah, Dheisheh Refugee Camp, 2017. Photograph courtesy of the author. | 169 10.7 Margaret Olin, Mural designed by Ahmed Hmeedat and executed by children supervised by Hmeedat, Dheisheh Refugee Camp, 2015. Photograph courtesy of the author. | 169

Figures

10.8 Margaret Olin, Civil Administration officers follow an activist through the eruv boundary of Mitzpe Yair, a settlement outpost in the South Hebron Hills, occupied Palestine, 2015. Photograph courtesy of the author. | 171 12.1 Amber Johnson, Map of the Qu’Appelle Valley Region that marks significant sites. | 198 12.2 Amber Johnson, A page from the journal of Henry Kelsey. | 199 12.3 Amber Johnson, A map of pitching trails and sites in Saskatchewan. | 201 12.4 Amber Johnson, Sacred Indigenous ribstone also known as the “The Smiling Buffalo Stone” at the Museum of History, Gatineau, Quebec. | 203 13.1 District Six Museum exterior wall. Photograph courtesy of the District Six Museum. | 215 13.2 District Six Museum interior. Photograph courtesy of the District Six Museum. | 218 13.3 Horstley Street memorial cairn. Photograph courtesy of the District Six Museum. | 220 13.4 Mounted poem, District Six Museum. Photograph by Henry Trotter. | 223 13.5 Memory Hall, District Six Museum. Photograph courtesy of the District Six Museum. | 225 14.1 Ai Weiwei, F. Lotus (2016). Photograph courtesy of the artist. | 239 14.2 a + b Ai Weiwei, Laundromat (New York: Jeffrey Deitch Projects, 2016). Photo: Kara York. | 243 15.1 Map of Lesbos. | 252 16.1 Blake Fitzpatrick, Brewery Pond, Port Hope, 1992. Image courtesy of the artist. | 272 16.2 Blake Fitzpatrick, Brewery Pond, Port Hope, 1992. Image courtesy of the artist. | 274 16.3 A car with an anti-Semitic sign. Photograph by Laura Hancock for Cleveland.com. | 279 17.1 a + b On the left, statue of Egerton Ryerson, Toronto Metropolitan University, June 2021. On the right, statue removed, Toronto Metropolitan University, July 2021. Photo: Blake Fitzpatrick. | 284–5 17.2 Kootenay Indian Residential School, Cranbrook, bc. Courtesy of Christopher Eugene Lee, Flickr. | 286

Plates 1 Daniel Froidevaux and Elisa Gonzalez, Melissa and Jennifer, image courtesy of the artists. 2 Daniel Froidevaux and Elisa Gonzalez, Green Bank Telescope Parabolic Dish, image courtesy of the artists.

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Figures

3 Hamish Fulton, Coast to Coast Walks on the British Isles, 1971–2010, image courtesy of the artist. 4 Hamish Fulton, Walking Slowly on the Condor’s Outline, 1972, image courtesy of the artist. 5 Hamish Fulton, Guided and Sherpa-Assisted Climbs of Three Small Mountains, 2008, Galerie Tschudi Zuoz, Switzerland. 6 Hamish Fulton, Kailash Kora, 2007, image courtesy of the artist. 7 Hamish Fulton, Kailash, 2011, image courtesy of the artist. 8 Hamish Fulton, Tree Boulder, 2016, image courtesy of the artist. 9 Edward Burtynsky, Oil Bunkering #1, 2016, Niger Delta, Nigeria, image courtesy of the artist. 10 Edward Burtynsky, Oil Bunkering #2, 2016, Niger Delta, Nigeria, image courtesy of the artist. 11 Edward Burtynsky, Oil Bunkering #4, 2016, Niger Delta, Nigeria, image courtesy of the artist. 12 Edward Burtynsky, Oil Bunkering #5, 2016, Niger Delta, Nigeria, image courtesy of the artist. 13 Edward Burtynsky, Saw Mills #1, 2016, Lagos, Nigeria, image courtesy of the artist. 14 David McMillan, View of the Nuclear Power Plant from Prypiat Rooftop, 1994, image courtesy of the artist. 15 David McMillan, View of the Nuclear Power Plant from Prypiat Rooftop, 2016, image courtesy of the artist. 16 David McMillan, Blue School Gymnasium, Prypiat, 2003, image courtesy of the artist. 17 David McMillan, Flags in Kindergarten Stairwell, Prypiat, 1994, image courtesy of the artist. 18 David McMillan, Flags in Kindergarten Stairwell, Prypiat, 2016, image courtesy of the artist. 19 David McMillan, Kindergarten Floor, Prypiat, 2006, image courtesy of the artist. 20 David McMillan, Red Floor, School, Prypiat, 2004, image courtesy of the artist. 21 David McMillan, View of Forest, Prypiat Dental Hospital, 2012, image courtesy of the artist. 22 Katy McCormick, Giant Pussy Willow, Hiroshima Castle, 770 metres from the hypocenter, 2019, image courtesy of the artist. 23 Katy McCormick, Twin Camphors, Sanno Shrine, Nagasaki, 800 metres from the hypocenter, 2018, image courtesy of the artist. 24 Katy McCormick, Camphor, Misasa Elementary School, Hiroshima, 1850 metres from the hypocenter, 2017, image courtesy of the artist. 25 Katy McCormick, Yoshino Cherry, Yasuda Girls High School, Hiroshima, 2110 metres from the hypocenter, 2019, image courtesy of the artist.

Figures

26 Katy McCormick, Plane No. 1, Tenma Elementary School, Hiroshima, 1,270 metres from the hypocenter, 2017, image courtesy of the artist. 27 Katy McCormick, Camphor, Yamazato Primary School, Nagasaki, 600 metres from the hypocenter, 2017, image courtesy of the artist. 28 Robert Del Tredici, Hiroshima Peace Museum, 13 November 1984, image courtesy of the artist. 29 Robert Del Tredici, Savannah River Site, South Carolina, 6 August 1983, image courtesy of the artist. 30 Robert Del Tredici, Great Bear Lake, nwt, Just beneath the Arctic Circle, 26 October 1997, image courtesy of the artist. 31 Robert Del Tredici, Nevada Test Site, Nye County, Nevada, 29 October 1984, image courtesy of the artist. 32 Robert Del Tredici, Yuily B. Khariton, Moscow, 12 June 1994, image courtesy of the artist. 33 Robert Del Tredici, Karoul, Kazakhstan, 11 August 1991, image courtesy of the artist. 34 Robert Del Tredici, Port Hope, Pop. 18,000, on the Shore of Lake Ontario, 22 May 2010, image courtesy of the artist. 35 Robert Del Tredici, Liberty Fire Hall, Middletown, Pennsylvania, 19 March 1980, image courtesy of the artist. 36 Rehab Nazzal, A view of destruction of olive-planted hills in Bethlehem region, November 2015. Photograph courtesy of the artist. 37 Rehab Nazzal, Millennia-old olive trees in my family’s orchard in Jenin area, 2019. Photograph courtesy of the artist. 38 Rehab Nazzal, al-Badawi olive tree, al-Walaji, Bethlehem district, April 2019. Photograph courtesy of the artist. 39 Rehab Nazzal, Israeli soldiers guarding bulldozers that they deployed to uproot Beit Jala’s ancient olive trees, August 2015. Photograph courtesy of the artist. 40 Rehab Nazzal, Israeli bulldozers uproot olive trees after cutting their branches, August 2015. Photograph courtesy of the artist. 41 Rehab Nazzal, Protesters tearing down a gate installed by the occupying forces to designate their land as a “closed military zone,” September 2015. Photograph courtesy of the artist. 42 Rehab Nazzal, The site of Bir Oneh in Beit Jala before and after its destruction, confiscation, and building a section of the Israeli Apartheid Wall, 2015 and 2017. Photograph courtesy of the artist. 43 Rehab Nazzal, A gate built through the Apartheid Wall in Beit Jala for Palestinian farmers to access their farms with individual permits by the occupying power, March 2017. Photograph courtesy of the artist. 44 Mark Ruwedel, Crossing #2, 2001. Photograph courtesy of the artist. 45 Mark Ruwedel, Crossing #6, 2003. Photograph courtesy of the artist.

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Figures

46 Mark Ruwedel, Crossing #7, 2004. Photograph courtesy of the artist. 47 Mark Ruwedel, Crossing #8, 2004. Photograph courtesy of the artist. 48 Mark Ruwedel, Crossing #14, 2005. Photograph courtesy of the artist. 49 Mark Ruwedel, Crossing #15, 2006. Photograph courtesy of the artist. 50 Mark Ruwedel, Crossing #18, 2006. Photograph courtesy of the artist. 51 Mark Ruwedel, Crossing #25, 2009. Photograph courtesy of the artist. 52 City Map and White Print Company, 1935, Kitsilano Indian Reserve, ca 1935. Public domain document courtesy of the City of Vancouver Archives (Reference code: am1594-: map 432-: 1973-044.1). 53 James Crookall, A road beside the Burrard Bridge, 1936. Public domain photograph courtesy of the City of Vancouver Archives (Reference code: am640-S1-: cva 260-565). 54 Randolph Jordan, K’aya’chtn Totem Pole carved by Darren Yelton in 2006. Photograph courtesy of the author. 55 Randolph Jordan, Electronic billboard on Kitsilano Reserve #6. Photograph courtesy of the author. 56 Randolph Jordan, K’aya’chtn Totem Pole and electronic billboard on Kitsilano Reserve #6, photograph with in-camera superimposition. Photograph courtesy of the author. 57 Randolph Jordan, K’aya’chtn Totem Pole and Burrard Bridge, photograph with in-camera superimposition. Photograph courtesy of the author. 58 Randolph Jordan, K’aya’chtn Totem Pole and electronic billboard next to Burrard Bridge. Photograph courtesy of the author. 59 Randolph Jordan, K’aya’chtn Totem Pole and electronic billboard, 2017, Super 8mm film footage from short film Bell Tower of False Creek. Photograph courtesy of the author.

Acknowledgments

To begin, we offer our thanks to all who have contributed to this collection of essays and images. Many but not all the contributions originated earlier as presentations at the Critical Topography conference in 2015. Colleagues in the Critical Topography Research Group at Trent University and the Documentary Media Research Centre (dmrc) at Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University) gave of their time and ideas to contribute to the artistic and intellectual scope of the conference and provided additional support as the publication moved forward. We thank the two host institutions, Trent University and Toronto Metropolitan University, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for their support of the conference. This publication would not have been possible without the support and engagement of colleagues and graduate students who generously committed time to the various tasks and chores of producing an edited collection. Jessica Becking and Anhiti Patnaik, then doctoral candidates in the Cultural Studies PhD program at Trent University, made substantial contributions as members of the editorial team. Their participation was funded, in part, through a research mentorship assigned to Jonathan Bordo as the director of the Cultural Studies PhD program and with funds awarded to Blake Fitzpatrick from The Creative School, Toronto Metropolitan University. Special thanks to Yves Thomas and Gerda Cammaer for their assistance with the Critical Topography conference at Trent University and Toronto Metropolitan University, and to faculty colleagues in the dmrc for their collective support of the publication. Thanks also to Moritz Ingwersen (Trent University and Dresden Technical University) for constructive comments in a review of the text and to Paul Duro and Margaret Olin for their insight and guiding wisdom concerning earlier drafts of the introduction. We are indebted to W.J.T. Mitchell for his timely and prescient prologue. We thank Alan Cohen for his contribution of the cover image. His photograph marks a punctum for the book, an X where the Berlin Wall once stood.

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Acknowledgments

Financial support for this publication was generously provided by the following sources at Toronto Metropolitan University: the Creative School and its Publication Support Fund; the School of Image Arts; and the dmrc. We also wish to acknowledge the following sources of funding at Trent University: the Centre for Theory, Culture and Politics and its director, David Holdsworth, for seed funding for the publication; the Nind Fund and President Leo Groarke; the Humanities and Social Sciences Dean’s Enhancement Fund and Mark Skinner; as well as James Parker, vice president of research, for encouragement from the outset of the project and throughout. Finally, we would like to acknowledge the trust and patience of Jonathan Crago, editor in chief at McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Prologue RE: PLACE W.J.T. Mitchell For Jonathan Bordo

Why does place matter? “Location is everything” is the mantra of the real estate agent. But what about “ideal estate,” the immaterial and invisible properties that lurk in a location? Ralph Waldo Emerson, surveying the farms of New England, insisted that “there is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of all these men’s farms, yet to this their land-deeds give them no title.” We must now add to the poet the scientist who exposes the potentials and the poisons hidden beneath the surface, the photographer or painter who reframes or overwrites the landscape with a critical topography, the historian who reminds us what took place in a place while erasing its traces, or the journalist or detective who reveals what is taking place in the present moment. Place is the foundational term of a critical topography that attempts to triangulate the properties of a site and a situation. Both a noun and a verb, a material thing and an intentional act, place secures the grounding of landscapes (views, pictures, vistas) and spaces (practices, processes, movements). “I placed a jar in Tennessee” is Wallace Stevens’s declaration of poetic sovereignty over a state, a gesture as arbitrary as the juridical boundaries of a “state” or (in Canada) a “province.” It took dominion everywhere The jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush Like nothing else in Tennessee. Is the jar a funerary urn? A symbol of what Jonathan Bordo calls “poisoned mimesis”? Is it a harbinger of a deadly viral contamination of the environment and the global dominion of the Anthropocene, when the effect of human beings on the climate exceeds that of a natural process like rain and hundreds of species go extinct every day? The picturesque landscape, as Blake Fitzpatrick shows, may conceal invisible toxins. William Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty (1753) made clear that the

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serpentine pathway into the beautiful countryside may be a poisonous snake like the one who (in Milton’s telling) “curl’d many a wanton wreath, in sight of Eve / To lure her eye.” Susan Sontag’s observation that “a devastated landscape is still a landscape” showing “beauty in ruins” is documented by photographers such as Richard Misrach, who creates gorgeous images of bomb craters in the Nevada desert. Or, in this volume, by Edward Burtynsky’s photographs of ruins.1 At the centre of Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia is the pastoral scenery of the cemetery, removed from its traditional place amid the community churchyard to the countryside as a place “set aside” from the topography of everyday life.2 The globe, globalization, and the planet triangulate the far horizon of our concepts of landscape, space, and place at the present time. The globe is the model or image of our world, the spherical landscape that revealed itself to the first astronauts as the “good green earth” seen from orbit. Globalization is the process by which that earth has been subjected to the dominion of spatial practices (voyages, commerce, communications, colonization, conquest). We see this most dramatically in the present moment of suspension in the spring of 2020, an epoché in which air travel has been radically reduced and people are confined to their homes or to “essential services” of food and health. But in a larger sense the planet has now emerged as our place, a tiny island in the endless sea of time and space, the only sustainable habitat that our species is ever likely to know. The planet is for now our resting place, or, as Bordo would put it, our “keeping place” where the relics and fossils of our existence will be stored.3 What is the role of time and temporality in matters of place? Newtonian space, or “absolute space,” implied a boundless, indefinite time to go with endless extension. But places are bounded spaces where temporality is punctuated, imprinted by events and moments, the storage of the past, and the possibility of a future. A page in a book is a place in an unfolding temporal sequence of narrative or argument, which is why we speak of “losing our place.” The ancient arts of oral memory relied on mnemonic “loci,” usually arranged in an architectural structure, where “topics” could be stored for retrieval by a critical topography.4 Our contemporary machines of digital memory and cyberspace have created new localities – websites, chat rooms, dark webs, networks, domains – and transformed perception of old places like street corners and front porches5. The arts of imagination help us see the future and track what is happening to our places. Between memory and imagination are moments of suspension and heightened attention to the present.6 This volume, the work of many years and hands, is coming to fruition precisely at such a moment. This prologue is being written at the end of the spring of 2020, on the eve of the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, at the peak of what may turn out to be a revolutionary moment in human history. It is written in the midst of a planetary pandemic, covid-19, which drives whole populations into social isolation at exactly the same time that a mass movement is rushing crowds of people together to protest

Prologue

the long-standing plague of police violence against Black people in the United States. Launched a few weeks ago by a video of policeman with his knee on the neck of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the imagery and protest movement have gone viral around the world. The two events have merged in the images of masked faces with the words “I Can’t Breathe” emblazoned on them. The mask protects the bearer from spreading the coronavirus, which attacks the lungs, at the same time as it bears the last words of George Floyd as he smothered, crying out the words of more than one Black man or woman under the knee of systemic racism.7 A system is not a place or a case but a network of relations among cases and places, and the concept of systematicity is what underlies the strong analogies between racism and a virus. Both are forms of contamination and contagion, leaping across borders, jumping from one place to another, the one infecting bodies and respiratory systems, the other minds and behaviours.8 I write this prologue in Chicago, on the South Side, where police murders of Black men are legion and the virus runs wild. Laquan McDonald, a seventeen-year-old shot sixteen times in October 2016 by Jason Van Dyke (a cop with a long record of bad behaviour) for the crime of ignoring a police order to halt. The site (4100 South Pulaski Road) and the sight are memorialized in a squad car video that was suppressed by the Chicago police for more than a year to insure Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s re-election. Harith Augustus, a thirty-seven-year-old barber with a permit to carry a gun (on Seventy-First Street this is understandable), is shot in the back fleeing from cops who tried to cuff him. The role of place in Augustus’s killing is especially symptomatic of the contemporary mediation of place, and especially of events that “take place” in specific locations. Police body cameras are, of course, now ubiquitous, though too frequently turned off “accidentally” as an incident is about to occur. The street where Harith Augustus was killed was surveilled by police bodycams, dashcams, and multiple security cameras, in addition to the cell phones of bystanders. The South Side’s investigative collective, the Invisible Institute, collaborated with Forensic Architecture to compel the city to release the archive of video evidence and to produce a re-creation of the killing with meticulous precision.9 The evidence, in the literal sense of that which is evident or seen clearly exceeds what any human eyewitness could have seen or remembered. Now we are all privileged witnesses to what took place in what the law calls the “split second” of police decision-making and routinely uses as an alibi for trigger-happy behaviour. Forensic Architecture breaks down the split-second frame by frame, adding re-enactments, crosscut with different camera angles, and populated by figures of human bodies and mannequin-like simulacra to fill in missing spaces, perspectives, and movements. We even have the dominating position of an overhead camera that captures the startle reflexes of bystanders when the shots ring out. The video and eyewitness testimony of Harith Augustus’s killing has set a new standard for the documentation of the place and time of a lethal event.

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But at least as interesting as these forensic images is the displacement of a site of murder and memory. On the grounds of Theaster Gates’s “Arts Bank” at 6760 South Stony Island is a gazebo, reconstructed from the material that was removed from its original location in Cleveland, where it was the site of the police killing of a fourteen-year-old Black boy who was playing with a toy pistol.10 The city of Cleveland was planning to demolish the gazebo, but the boy’s mother, Samaria Rice, worked with Gates’s Rebuild Foundation to bring the materials to Chicago where they were stored for three years, then reconstructed and rededicated on 25 June 2019, what would have been Tamir’s seventeenth birthday (see figure 0.1). Despite the sacred aura of the gazebo, Gates resists the words “memorial” and “commemoration” in favour of “a place for children to play.” Accordingly, the gazebo was accompanied by the balloons and teddy bears that were left by the Cleveland community after Tamir’s killing, and the grounds were sowed with letters to Tamir written on “plantable paper” by kids in 826chi, a neighbourhood writing program co-sponsored by the Rebuild Foundation. Most significant, the Stony Island site is “not the final resting place” for the gazebo. In effect, Rebuild has become the temporary host of a place that will someday find a permanent home in Cleveland. Wherever it is finally located, it seems clear that it has become much more than a memorial, a site, or even a work of art. What it offers instead is a return to original meaning of a gazebo, a place from which to see. Places, like feasts, are movable. They can be erased and forgotten, lost in space, or maintained and rebuilt. Both their appearance and disappearance, their making and unmaking, are the work of critical topography. I have situated this prologue in the present tense, a tense present that finds the world in the grip of a double plague of violence and virus. One of Shakespeare’s most vicious villains tells us that “the past is prologue,” but in our time the best prologues are located in the present, the here and now, this time and place. Antonio’s ominous words are, of course, meant to urge his comrades to participate in the murder of Prospero. But the more pertinent meaning for our time is the claim that the past is merely a prologue to a moment of suspension in which we have a chance to make a different future. But what about the much narrower place from which I am writing, my booklined study in Hyde Park, a few blocks from the University of Chicago where I work. As I write in self-isolation, the university is closed for an indefinite period. The time and place of this writing might best be described as what Roman Catholics call Limbo, a site of indefinite waiting and uncertainty. It is where the virtuous pagans dwell until the Last Judgment. In contrast to Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, it is not a place of reward or punishment but a kind of waiting room. It is the perfect moment for a brilliant director like Jordan Peele to bring out a revival of that classic place in American television, The Twilight Zone. The world seems to hold its breath in a state of sequestered indecision. Yet decisions are being made, and events take place, even in this cloistered location. Outside my front window I see Kenwood Park,

and the corner where a few years ago a Black man drove his car to a stop while dying at the wheel, a victim of a gang drive-by shooting. On my computer screen I watch a webinar of my Black colleagues debating whether urban universities should have private police departments to protect their students from the dangers of the surrounding neighbourhood. Is my university a citadel or a colonizing empire, hiding behind its walls or expanding, gentrifying, and removing the largely Black population of the South Side? Undoubtedly both, and (one hopes) something more, something better. The place-time in which I write, then, is what the phenomenologists call an epoché, the moment of meditative suspension in contrast to the epoch, the historical turning point. Is our epoché leading us into an epoch? Are we living in the midst of a revolution? A radical reformation? Or a temporary, ephemeral hiatus? At the very least it provides for the lucky hermit scholar like myself a moment of reflection on place and time, perhaps even a Cartesian meditation on the glowing computer screen on which these words and images arise and link me to every place in the world, to my neighbours, and to my composer-spouse performing Dada poetry on YouTube three floors below me. Beyond that, it provides a moment to contemplate the longue dureé of America as an exceptional place, idea, and unfinished project in

0.1 The Tamir Rice Memorial Gazebo, reconstructed on the Stony Island Arts Bank’s North Lawn, pays tribute to the memory of Tamir Rice and all others who have lost their lives to racially motivated police brutality.

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human history. That exception is revealing itself today, not only as the often-invoked ideal of Enlightenment democracy and human perfectibility, but as the actual site of a dark, unfinished history of slavery and racial violence, accompanied by a constitutional right for every citizen to carry instruments of murder. The monuments to slaveholders and traitors are attacked and defended in a displaced re-enactment of the Civil War while the country holds its breath, or declares “I can’t breathe,” awaiting a fateful decision in 135 days, on 3 November 2020. All the while, a few blocks away, Lake Michigan is rising to record heights in response to climate change and a transformation of the keeping place we call our planet.

Notes 1 Jonathan Bordo takes up these images in his epilogue to this volume. See also the numerous picturesque photographs of urban ruination in Detroit, a genre that has come to be known as “ruin porn.” See Eli Rosenberg, “Motown or Ghostown? Ruin Porn in Detroit,” Atlantic, 20 January 2011, www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2011/01/motown-or-ghostown-ruinporn-in-detroit/342582/. 2 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22–7. 3 Jonathan Bordo, “The Keeping Place,” in Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade, ed. Robert Nelson and Margaret Olin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 157–82. 4 Frances Yates’s The Art of Memory (London: Routledge, 1999) is the classic study of mnemotechnics as a spatial practice built on topoi and figures. 5 See, e.g., the “Ring” application, which turns a doorbell into a camera with a wireless link to your smartphone. 6 Freud’s concept of “suspended attention” (Gleichschwebende Augmerksamkeit), the ideal mindset of the analyst in the therapeutic setting, seems relevant here. See also Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 1997). 7 George Floyd’s last words echo those of Eric Garner, strangled in a chokehold by New York City cop Daniel Pantaleo on 17 July 2014. 8 See W.J.T. Mitchell, “Present Tense, Part 3: The Two Plagues Converge,” Critical Inquiry blog, 8 June 2020, https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/06/08/present-tense-part-3-the-two-plaguesconverge/. 9 See Eyal Weizman et al., “The Killing of Harith Augustus,” Forensic Architecture, 18 September 2019, https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/the-killing-of-harith-augustus. Forensic Architecture is an independent investigative collective organized by Eyal Weizman at Goldsmith’s College, London. The Invisible Institute, founded and headed by Jamie Kalven, is an investigative organization based on the South Side of Chicago in the Experimental Station, a community-based arts and activism collective headed by artist Dan Peterman. 10 The Stony Island Arts Bank is a hybrid gallery, media archive, library, and community centre, as well as home of the Rebuild Foundation. Founded by artist Theaster Gates in 2015, it is one

Prologue of numerous sites (see also the South Dorchester Projects, the Currency Exchange Café, and the Washington Park Arts Incubator) in the neighbourhood supported by the University of Chicago’s Art + Public Life program. For further discussion of these projects, see the transcript of my conversation with Gates in the final session of our fall 2014 course, W.J.T. Mitchell, “Art and Public Life,” asap Journal 1, no. 1 (January 2016): 51–76.

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Introduction Jonathan Bordo and Blake Fitzpatrick

The Place Question – “X Marks the Spot” This collection is about place through the study of places. We begin by offering as a first site one of the most moving and urgent articulations of place in the European literary tradition as written by Sophocles, in Oedipus at Colonus. The play begins with the place question: My daughter – daughter of the blind man – where, I wonder, have we come to now? What place is this?1 Oedipus and Antigone have reached Athens having fled from Thebes. Their destination was Athens to which they would seek asylum. With these two facts as a background, the question Oedipus asks divides into two. The first is a question about space. It asks about the very spot where they have stopped. The question expresses an action in the here and now. The specific location as a space-time nexus is situated at a spot, a rock where Oedipus insists on stopping, refusing to take a farther step. The rock is the spot marked by an X. Such is the place. One might say the place question is modally charged, meaning that there are an abundance of instances of it. Where am I now? implies the question, Where was I before? The two questions together might lead to other questions: Why am I here? Who am I to be here at this place now? These questions in turn might lead to the question, By what right am I to be at this spot? Oedipus and Antigone travelled from Thebes to Athens. They were in flight. Their destination was Athens, to which they would seek asylum. The particular spot where they have stopped is quite precisely on the perimeter of a sacred precinct in the suburb of Athens that bears the place name Colonus. As Oedipus comes to recognize that Colonus is his final resting place, foretold in prophecy, he is forced to prove that he has the right

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to dwell there forever. Thus, an accumulation of the previous modes of the question leads to the last questions in the series of place questions: What permits Oedipus to be there? By what right is he there? If Oedipus is there at Colonus, expelled from Thebes, seeking refuge in Athens, his seemingly theoretical question, Where am I? contains the deeper question, the question of right, What right do I have to be here? Nowhere are the existential, ethical, and philosophical issues about place more critically and acutely posed in terms of the obligations that are owed to strangers or, even more broadly the obligations that are owed to the earth, than in Oedipus at Colonus. The place question as it unfolds in Oedipus at Colonus is not a theoretical question, and nor is it speculative. No universal account is sought; it does not seek the essence of things. Rather, it is defined by the singularity of this very spot here, this moment now, the singularity of instants making up a temporal interval with the clock ticking. The place question is urgent, attached, rooted to the spot, and wearied by the journey and the causes that forced the journey; hence it invites, if not urges, the telling or narration of the journey. Oedipus at Colonus provides a paradigm for this collection in the first instance because everything that unfolds is in relationship to a singular site. Everything that takes place is bounded by a place name. A place thus comes into existence through the relationships that govern a name and a location. Call this the Sophoclean approach to place marking. It proceeds from language and symbolic deciphering to reach somewhere as the spot. Many of the essays can be parsed in terms of the Sophoclean manner of raising the place question in the pursuit of a determination of place as X marking the spot. Indeed, the place names and the contents of the contributions in the collection that will follow are initiated by a word that gives an account of a place by name. From the rock at the entrance to the sacred site, one might also consider the pond in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden Pond and apply to it the place question. Everything at the pond unfolds, in terms of its physical circumference but also as being the specific spot for the narratives various moods, temporalities, incidents, happenings, encounters, witnessing and tracings as if it were a response to the place question. Virtually all Thoreau’s writings, including those concerning Walden, the journals, Maine Woods, the sojourn to Canada, and the social ethics and political essays, might all be understood as epicycles, revolving around the place name Walden as the X that marks the spot of an environmental poetics. The spot, the X under the name, resists speculative detachment in the theorizing of space. The name attaches a being to a place by the name-utterance Dasein initiated by the indexical utterance da.2 Attachment or “attached” is the very word Thoreau uses in “The Bean-Field” in his pursuit of a justification for his conduct and mode of life.

Introduction

What was the meaning of this so steady and self respecting, this small Herculean labor, I knew not. I came to love my rows, my beans, though so many more than I wanted. They attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like Antaeus. But why should I raise them? Only heaven knows. This was my curious labor all summer, – to make this portion of the earth’s surface, which had yielded only cinque-foil, blackberries, johnswort, and the like, before, sweet flowers, produce instead this pulse? … But what right had I to oust johnswort and the rest, and break up their ancient herb garden?3 Surely it is noteworthy that the question of “by what right” that inaugurates Thoreau’s discourse at Walden has an unmistakable kinship with the place question in Oedipus. Thoreau’s “curious labor” begins with the recognition that he has no right to oust johnswort and the rest, “and break up their ancient herb garden.” In place of that right, there is the justification offered by the works.4 Both in Sophocles and in Thoreau the question of “what right” arises in the context of a sojourn. In the case of Oedipus, it is the journey of flight; in the case of Thoreau, it inaugurates both the interval of his nearly two years at Walden and writing that documents his journeys on the land, as if walking itself counted as steps in an argument, an idea mentioned by Cavell.5 Thoreau’s residence at the pond is referred to as a sojourn, even if it was a sojourn in his neighbourhood and not the long and dusty road from Thebes to Athens. In its urgency it is existentially loaded with the precariousness of Oedipus’s existence itself. Place theory inevitably offers then an ethics of place. Thoreau’s residence at the pond will span yet another sojourn, another epicycle of Walden, leading to another pond on Thoreau’s descent from Mt Ktaadn to the spot where he discovers the true “wilderness.” And the very mention of the mountains marks this spot where archaic declarations were made – “Sinai” – the Sermon on the Mount. And that discovery, that proclamation to have discovered true wilderness, is to have found a place that is at the same time a non-place since it would prohibit human dwelling. It is thus one thing to be attached, another to long for attachment, another to map out the quest, and finally another to seek to return. It is in the quest for dwelling, the attachment to place, that the second keyword of this edited collection is put in play: landscape.

Landscape Place absorbs space, as full rather than empty. Secured existentially through the singularity of a spot, the very sense of place merges and collapses into landscape as signifying the compulsion that human beings have to declare emphatically their belonging and attachment to a place. Landscape is a portmanteau for almost every-

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thing that human beings invest into their material surroundings, fit for human dwelling, or “indwelling”6 in the case of the dead.7 In his book Keywords, Raymond Williams sketches a history of the word culture, noting that it is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.8 Interestingly, Williams identifies the word nature as being the most complex word in the language.9 The study of landscape is thus doubly bound in complexity, sharing in the overlap of these two most complicated terms. According to Williams, the early use of the word culture, from the forerunner cultura, encompasses meanings such as “to tend” or “to cultivate.” Here one might recall Thoreau’s cultivation of crops in the bean field. Culture is rooted in the lexeme col – from which Williams derives two distinct yet related derivatives – colonus and cultus.10 The former is the root of the place name Colonus, where Oedipus’s sojourn ends. In Williams’s rendering, it gathers all the senses of “culture” that have to do with dwelling, residing, occupying, human inhabitation, investment, and habitus (Bourdieu). “Culture” as “colonus” brings the overheated word colony into service and by extension, colonialism,11 though Williams does not include these words in this study. In this respect, whatever is intended by culture has to be understood in the first instance as that concerning human dwelling, attachment, and occupancy. Initially, it begins with “place,” in so much as it becomes a somewhere through its inscription in the symbolic. The signifying aspect of this inscription is inseparable or undetachable from the things that have settled in the earth there. In this, “culture” might be a retaining wall, a fireplace, a path, or a trail marker carved into a tree and yet it can also provide a place name for the imaginary and the totality.12 The sense of culture as “colonus,” as material inscription and emergent symbolization, leads Williams to his second connotation of culture as “cultus,” from which we derive the word cult as a domain marked off semiotically as special, framed, and placed in quotation marks, where something is marked as a representation through an explicit semiotic operation that begins with the marking out of a distinct zone to establish something as a double. A pony is inscribed on the wall of a Neolithic cave. It is a picture, or mimesis in short. Culture as “cultus” makes explicit the symbolic value of culture by signing and framing something as special. In its markings, a sacred site is both inscriptional and representational: for example, architecture as both in a place and about it. Thus, not all representations are inscriptions whereas all inscriptions are representations. A wall is a wall. It is an inscription on the land that need not represent anything. Representation is distinguished from inscription when materially or symbolically it is marked out as separate, as if a detachment had been affected through framing. If a wall marks an inscription in the land, the Berlin Wall is a representation, signifying both a location and a politics. Similarly, the framing of a stop sign, the proscenium of a theatre, the pediment of a temple, or the frame for a picture all mark out zones of distinctiveness. Through such markings,

Introduction

a doubling takes place. “Cultus” is about the double of representation and the repetition of habitual practices. The cultivation of land, from the ceremony celebrating the harvest to the repetition of the cycle, carries within itself the capacity to break free from a lived panoply of inscriptional practices that attach humans to a somewhere, to a place. That something is a representation, a thing that represents a thing, that has to be recognized as such, just as a sign has to be taken as a sign. No repetition, no double. It is at the interstices of dwelling and the ritual performative sense of culture that the word-concept landscape arises, almost as if it has crossed over or sutured the gap between the two senses of culture, opening up a distinction between signifying practices that are inscriptional and those that are representational. In this way, landscape is a construal that mediates and regulates the distinction between culture and nature. Landscape allows for a partition of “place” and “non-place” in, for example, wilderness as a place/non-place. Consider the example of wilderness as both topos and topic of landscape. Wilderness betokens a limiting case as a condition of nature: what is wild or bereft of human presence and dwelling, or a zero-degree site undisturbed by human intervention. At the same time, wilderness also connotes a non-place, as a place apart from or beyond human access. It is a paradoxical non-place within a place, or an utterly saturated cultural space that posits a blank. Wilderness is an ambivalent operator as place and non-place par excellence, since it signifies a place or condition of maximum and minimum human investment. Both exalted and devastated, in its picture form it carries a double charge such that the positive sublime of an exalted condition of exclusion readily transforms into ruins. This is the case nowhere more than in some of the early photographs of Edward Burtynsky, in which the ruin of manufacturing has forced a shift in category from place to the non-place of toxic leftovers, inhospitable spaces devoid of human occupancy, now and into the future. Wilderness is thus a paradigm for the place as a non-place. Overall, landscape is the semiotic engine that mediates between the two senses of culture that Williams has enunciated. W.J.T. Mitchell has insisted that landscape is a semiotic operator of “mediation,” which he formulated as a thesis.13 As a shifter within culture, landscape reaches criticality under conditions of modernity whereby reality is assigned to picturing with painting as a paradigm for representation in general. This fact has led many thinkers and cultural theorists to position picturing as the decisive mode for grasping modernity as a ruptural event in human culture.14 Landscape becomes inseparable from picturing and its legislative powers over the real in modernity. Representation assumes a dominant position over inscription, with inscription referring to the materiality of the surface on which pictorialization takes place. The pictorial form of the landscape performs roles of authorization and legitimation, offering, almost contract-like, a stable and autonomous object distinct

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and separate from the portion and parcel that it purports to represent. The picture operates as if it were autonomous, hundreds of years before Immanuel Kant announced the so-called autonomy of the aesthetic. Modern pictorialism sidesteps the material real, offering it up through the mediation of the picture. Here, for example, there is a difference between the idea, the name, and the picture of wilderness. Canada, as the proper name of the wilderness, arose from the lexico-cartographic practices of the French empire, which assigned as a general place name for the northern transatlantic territories, Nouvelle France or Canada, where Canada betokened both terre des sauvages and “here there is nothing.” Jean-François Lyotard would call this a différend. From this observation, it is noteworthy that A.Y. Jackson named his first major painting of the north woods Terre Sauvage (1913). The picture aesthetic of the wilderness is both (and ambivalently so) exalted and terra nullius. The offer of a critical genealogy of the picture landscape exposes the imbalance of representation over inscription. It is as if pictures were instruments and title deeds for the occupation of the land. In this inverted operation of mimesis, the thought is quite understandable. By exposing this inversion through critically deconstructing its legitimating claim, the power of landscape could be deflated and landscape as a meta-semiological operator becomes “obsolete.” This is understandable because the picture landscape became historically inseparable from Western strategies for the securing and legitimizing of captured lands declared terra nullius, or shown as wilderness or empty of prior human occupations, as if getting rid of colonialism implied getting rid of landscape. All this confirms the hegemony of the picture landscape and pictorialism. Yet the post-colonialist critique contributed to weaken the hold of the picture as the conveyor of the aesthetic of landscape.15 Landscape, however, cannot be discharged so easily by dispelling it in a Wittgensteinian way: as a captivating picture and a symbolic instrument of colonial oppression. The power that landscape exercises over the human imagination is a constant and renewing symbolization of the overwhelming human need for attachment. The weakening of the hold of the picture landscape only strengthens the attachment to the land, as the shift from modern landscape pictorialism to contemporary environmental art demonstrates. In that shift, landscape came to be refigured and reassigned bringing the aesthetic into the material “real” itself, a shift from representation to inscription. While Robert Smithson’s receding monumental intervention of Spiral Jetty has come to exemplify land art, it was not in America but in Britain in the 1980s that a major shift took place in the landscape conveyance from painting to language – in particular, among artists and poets, from picturing to “aesthetic chorography.” Aesthetic chorography is thought to occur at the “intersection” of nature and culture, as if culture could reconstitute or re-nature “nature.” No mere practice of fixed picture objects, landscape became an embedding practice of place inscription connected

Introduction

to the sojourns of place finding. British artists had and continue to have reparative ambitions, tied to contributions to healing the land and acts of apology, everywhere and always a trace that diminishes rather than increases the human footprint. In many of these aesthetic practices, the search is for an aesthetic analogue for an ethical injunction – to leave no traces, in Andy Goldsworthy’s phrase, to find a way, “to shake hands with a place,” or to pass through places as a sojourn, to mark the passage with photos and word glyphs, as in the works of Richard Long and Hamish Fulton.16 In this regard, Fulton may be the most dedicated in his hands-off approach with a mandate to take nothing but camera and notebooks on his walks. Fulton’s practice as a walking artist and the deep respect for nature that informs his practice is discussed by Fitzpatrick and Bordo in the Hamish Fulton Album in this volume. This contemporary family of practices recalls Thoreau, the Group of Seven in their canoe sojourns, and Emily Carr in her engagement with Indigenous peoples of the forest. The so-called wilderness art of the Canadian painters of the first half of the twentieth century inaugurated a painting practice to yield an aesthetic of landscape where their plein-air pictures on boards were like notebooks: as if they were inscriptions, a kind of notation. Its practice was undeniably chorographic. The Group of Seven were followers of Cézanne, not Caspar David Friedrich. In their records they sought a viable attachment, and, in that, their pursuit was asymbolic. They were following the way set out by Thoreau, but as visual art, not language.17 If the picture landscape sought to absorb the materially real into the picture, the new art sought to embed the art in the land itself and to restore to language the reparative task of giving history to the new practices of inscriptions. Language becomes the invisible bulwark against the operations of clearance and terra nullius. Robert MacFarlane describes precisely the way that language itself carries its own ecology while conveying “a new nomenclature of landscape and how we relate to it, so that conservation becomes a natural form of human awareness, and so that it ceases to be under-written and under-appreciated and thus readily vulnerable to desecration.”18 In these practices poets sought to align language to place through the demonstration that language itself, in the place names and the vocabulary of place, carries the deep history of a place; without language, the land is left bereft, a terra nullius, standing reserve ready for the bulldozer and the wind farm. To paraphrase MacFarlane quoting Emerson, language holds the fossil record of a place. Once again landscape extends from and prolongs place in the pursuit of an appropriate and reparative relationship to the land, and yet there is a shift from picture and representation to the embeddedness of art as contributing to the securing of place in the expanded field of the environment. These contemporary landscape practices also give the photograph a special role in orienting the aesthetic to the document. In his essay in the collection, Paul Duro marks this moment as the beginning of the aesthetic turn to the document when Paul Cézanne works with the photograph to secure chorographically a fixed spot

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from which to hold Mont Sainte-Victoire as a temporal constant. This marks the moment when landscape art seeks to make of itself a document of the material real, not an idealization of the landscape as sacred, but landscape as the land, the earth itself, as place. To accomplish that attachment required a special role be assigned to the photograph, as that which attests to somewhere as a place as if it establishes facts on the ground.19 Cézanne’s disposition of the photograph as a material contribution to painting introduces the photograph as the third medium, after painting and writing, as carrying its own aesthetic and ontological weight. Photographic modernism in the early to mid-twentieth-century landscape work demonstrated a tendency to undercut the evidentiary aspect of the photograph as a vindication of its art value and as an agent of the aesthetic sublime. While the vestiges of these practices continue, there have been exhibitions, theorists, and photographers to counter such tendencies and to position the photographer as an evidential witness or documentarian within a reinvented landscape tradition. The influential exhibition, The New Topographics (1975), helped shape the terms and the style of this work for a generation of landscape photographers and brought mapping terminology to the forefront of a practice that was mindful of the history of photography, conversant with the topographic style of nineteenth-century geological-survey photographers and the visual strategies of contemporary conceptual art. Responding to the here and now of contemporary landscape, these photographers questioned, as curator William Jenkins notes, “what it means to make a documentary photograph.”20 One can observe these tendencies in the photographic work of Mark Ruwedel and Edward Burtynsky, two prominent contemporary landscape photographers who have been influenced by the “New Topographics” movement.21 A publication of Ruwedel’s early black-and-white photographs, titled Written on the Land (2002), directly references the etymology of the word topographic combining topos and inscription. In Ruwedel’s work, a concern with inscriptional and evidential remnants as written on the land is marked by, for example, the found wreckage and detritus of human passage, as exemplified by the empty, “desecrating” plastic water bottle, itself a contribution to the geological record, as shown in his recent colour photographic collection Crossing. Edward Burtynsky is celebrated for his photographs of the ruination of the industrial landscape. His exquisitely beautiful photographs and minimal captions avoid explicit political statement in favour of an implicit understanding of the disastrous effects of extractive industrial processes on the environment. Discursively understated, while descriptively intensive, his approach is in keeping with what William Jenkins identified as the New Topographics open question on the photograph’s status as a document. Recent works associated with The Anthropocene Project depict environmental ruin through documented publications and experientially rich media installations of photography, film, and Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality (vr/ar) with Burtynsky’s now-signature aerial perspective directed to the earth below.22 The

Introduction

critical distance of the photographer’s topographic vantage point has been instructive in producing a visual pedagogy of the Anthropocene, the declaration of a geological reclassification made to take into account the irreparable transformation of the earth through human technological intervention. While Burtynsky has led the way in visually chronicling global instances of the Anthropocene, the Atomic Photographers Guild, with leading members contributing to the collection,23 have been the nuclear era’s photographic witnesses, patiently documenting the invisible, measuring the toxicity of the earth as inaugurated by the Trinity A-bomb test in the Alamogordo desert region of New Mexico, on 6 July 1945. This test prefigured the first atomic attack on a civilian population in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ushering in the nuclear age. The earth was thus caught in the deadly grip of carbon, on the one side, and nuclear fission, on the other.24 Overall, landscape is a semiotic operator that is asked to perform too many semantic roles: whether as psychological sponge, mediator, or deeded ownership. Landscape is a glue that inhibits analysis while inviting a psychoanalysis of its agency as a force of attachment. Landscape is thus an idea-concept deeply saturated with value, which requires a vocabulary beyond itself, an object in need of vigilance and critique. By way of new tools and language, critical topography provides an interdisciplinary approach to place-based investigations resolved by way of visual or textual means and with broad and overlapping relevance to the sciences, arts, and humanities. What then is critical topography?

Critical Topography: Word and Image Critical topography is a method of elaboration concerning place. It draws “landscape” analytically into its conceptual framework, a step required because landscape is an omnivorous word that consumes meaning or becomes overinvested with emotional attachments and evocations. Critical topography refers to the way we understand critical thought to range over a place, or how thought and symbolic forms invent place as text and image. The term critical in critical topography allows us to demonstrate why and how place matters. It is a modal operator that is fixed as well as mobile, inscriptional as well as representational, medial as well as mediating. It thus opens up the study of empirical, documentary, aesthetic, and theoretical articulations of a site through critical investigations of one of three forms of authorship in the collection: photographic works with short artist statements; image/texts combining visual and analytic work; and scholarly analysis of sites or visual-textual depictions of sites. The term topography is the appropriate word to designate the turn to place as an interdisciplinary approach in the sciences, humanities, and arts. Geographers translate topos as a kind of place with properties and characteristics added on, so as to

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(graph – as a kind writing) inscribe an objective, empty concept of space. From the Greek root top, we get both topos and topic. The lexeme top-, with the same root, sits uneasily between geography and rhetoric. The former is a bounded space of human inscription and dwelling, while the latter is a space that holds a pattern of thought. Both topic and topos denote a kind of occupancy inscribed with people and language. In either case, without writing, there is no place. Topography – because it informs place – fixes a place in objective physical space or as the space of language. It designates the brackets within which there is a human habitus or the dwelling of thought. Two paradigms, one textual and the other visual, one concerned with words and the other with images, are brought together in this collection. Each provides a variant of X marks the spot as a mode of articulation in regard to site. Authors who contributed essays and who took a textual-symbolic approach to place attempt to close the gap between the real of the world and the real of language. The second approach, photographic in turn, has evidentially secured the spot as a material real. Critical topography does not privilege one mode over another so much as it brings both together in a dialogical interplay of topos, topic, image, and text. Images, photographs specifically, ground singularity, and they make the evidential claim that this is the singular place. The contributors to this volume begin with a singular place, marked by a name that is subject to elaboration. Elaboration can be textual or visual – a sequence, layout, filmic montage, or poem – all forms that come back around to extend the unary word-sign that marks a place. Hamish Fulton produces walks that are later turned into walk texts, with words that point to subjective impressions, or a history drawn out of a place. Words may thus become memory tokens, or political counterpoints, extensions beyond the frame of the known and the visible of the photograph. Elaboration may take the form of a response to an environment, as argued in Jennifer Dyer’s essay on the modulating conditionality of light in the art of Newfoundland painters. It may also take the form of the returning witness, often photographic, to sites marked by past events and foreclosed futures. For example, David McMillan began photographing the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone in 1994. As of 2019, he has made twenty-two trips to the zone over a twenty-five-year period, often returning to the exact same location to update the photographic record of the catastrophe. Each return offers the opportunity for the elaboration of a previous “here and now.” In McMillan’s case, every subsequent photograph in his expanding archive elaborates on a history that is itself unfinished, a time of incremental change marked by the detritus of human activity in a ruin that is uninhabitable now and into the future.25 In this way, we may speak of a genealogy of place, stations marked by the analysis and interpretations of singular “spots,” as well as various elaborations of the historical, social, political, environmental and emotional investments of a given place.

Introduction

Critical topography aspires to be an approach of discursive elaboration that permits the assemblage of material conditions with the signifying tokens of words and images. The tasks of critical topography are to mediate and to diminish the gap between representation and referent, to be both in the world and about the world at the same time. At the outset of the introduction, and with the introduction’s epigraph, we discussed Oedipus at Colonus to initiate reflection on the place question: What place is this? What is its name? Where am I? How and with what responsibilities may I be here? Such place questions may be asked about each contribution in this collection. It may be asked about the earth itself. We started with Oedipus at Colonus because of the urgency of the place question. The urgency makes it a companion now for our unsettled time. Like Oedipus in exile seeking refuge at Athens, we are witnessing the forced exodus of people dispossessed of country and nationality, seeking refuge, asylum and crossing borders, even more destitute than Oedipus at Athens. Oedipus is a king and is known to the Athenians; he is not a stranger. Mutual obligations permit him entry. Today, borders slam shut and walls are being constructed as if these movements, with humans in dire straits vilified as invading aliens, are threatening a way of life for those most privileged. A shuttering, not seen since the refugee crisis in 1930s Europe with the rise of fascism, has been mobilized raising urgent ethical questions regarding the obligations that are owed to strangers, the respect for the commons, and the inviolability of the earth.26 Yet the flight of human populations seeking refuge across national borders, echoes the urgent need of Oedipus. Climate change has set entire populations of not just human beings in movement, seeking the wherewithal to survive in a geological era recently announced as the Anthropocene. The refuge question thus concerns the very surface of the earth itself and its loss as an abode of refuge for all living beings. Thus, the place question need not be Colonus at Athens but the world now before us – the Greek island of Lesbos as a refuge, the ruinous effects of the Chinese economy on Tibet, the ego in Arcadia, Mont Sainte-Victoire, olive trees in Palestine, the A-bombed trees of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an institution of and condition of madness. These are but some of the sites that initiate the “place question” through the contributions that follow, as inaugurated in the volume’s prologue by W.J.T. Mitchell and summed up in Jonathan Bordo’s epilogue and postscript, a coda that announces the disaster as that which encircles the collection’s difficult contents. Between these two brackets, the collection is organized by a set of intersectional topographies that include landscape, art, and ecology; the Anthropocene, ruins, and nuclear exposure; borders and trauma; memory and the keeping place; and geopoetics.

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Topographies Landscape, Art, and Ecology Many of the essays within the collection are concerned with scapes, initially of course with the prefix land – landscape. Landscape discourses include the essay on Nicolas Poussin and Cézanne by Paul Duro in his account of landscape painting in art history. The essay by Jennifer Dyer on the metaphysics of light in Newfoundland painting takes up light as that which not only illuminates but also functions as a mediality in the eco-aesthetics of Newfoundland visual artists. Extreme quietness is sought in the dense forests of West Virginia, as Daniel Froidevaux and Elisa Gonzalez’s experimental documentary film takes us to the National Radio Quiet Zone, a haven for those suffering from “electrical sensitivity.” Their discussion describes a zone that is free of virtual communication, a wilderness of technological quiet where the politics and corporate interests of communication networks are met with a resistance played out in the landscape. The ethics and aesthetics of walking, in the work of the British walking artist Hamish Fulton is addressed in a cluster of contributions by Jessica Becking, Jason LaFountain, Jonathan Bordo, and Blake Fitzpatrick. Becking’s essay places Fulton in a context that inaugurates a shift from American “land art” to the multigenerational work of British artists and writers, often working with small presses to propose a British practice of aesthetic chorography. The essay by art historian Jason Lafountain locates the origins of walking as a contemporary environmental-art practice in the Puritan traditions of walking and notation. Lafountain’s essay provides an intellectual history on the art of walking to prefigure the work of contemporary artist Hamish Fulton (initially situated by Becking). Fulton defines himself as a “walking artist,” not a landscape artist, so as to emphatically reject the hold that landscape has on contemporary art history and practice. He turns instead to walking as a spiritual, physical, and regenerative exercise, finding in the walk a way of thinking and being with nature. In the interview that accompanies Fitzpatrick and Bordo’s introduction and conclusion to The Hamish Fulton Album, the walk as Fulton’s contribution to contemporary art is revealed as a practice governed by self procedures, language, images, and the environmental-ethical injunction to “leave no trace.” This injunction takes on urgency as political, corporate, and cultural systems, including those of the gallery, threaten the autonomy of the natural ecosystem, as revealed in the interview and a portfolio of Fulton’s walk texts.

The Anthropocene, Ruins, and Nuclear Exposure The Anthropocene as a geological time or epoch stands over a dense network of ecological threats. Peter C. van Wyck’s essay “Placing the Anthropocene” charts a lively debate that seeks to identify the starting point for the new era. Consensus

Introduction

seems to be gathering on the introduction of radioactive material into the atmosphere and the earth’s sediments by way of nuclear weapons, beginning with the Trinity A-bomb test in New Mexico in 1945 as marking the beginning of a new epoch. Edward Burtynsky’s photographs of landscapes marred by human activity, point to voids and permanent change in the earth’s ecosystem. Part of the larger collaborative work The Anthropocene Project, combining photographs, a documentary film, and ar installations, Burtynsky’s portfolio of aerial images survey practices of oil bunkering in Nigeria and document the vast tracts of land made toxic by crude oil leaked into the waterways and forests. Ruin in the nuclear realm and in other zones of conflict fuels reflection on spaces now remaindered into the hither zone of non-places. Modes of ruination are addressed by Ihor Junyk in his essay on Max Avdeev’s photographic documentation of the Donetsk airport in Ukraine. This was the site of intense fighting between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed separatists that left this once state-of-the-art facility in ruins. The nuclear subject raises the ultimate example of ruination with complications in thought and representation as a result of the invisibility of radiation, the secrecy surrounding sites of nuclear power and weapons production, and the extreme toxicity and interminable time spans of nuclear materials and waste. Nuclear ruins as the remnants of past catastrophe will forever be remainders, complicating again the temporality of the ruin as a figure of the past. David McMillan’s retrospective documentation of the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone shows a place devoid of human occupancy, where nature proliferates unencumbered, as the city of Prypiat decays into a ruin for all of time. In Katy McCormick’s photographs of the A-bombed trees of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we return to Japan, site of the first atomic attacks on a civilian population, to take up the question of survival as evidenced in these silent witnesses – still-standing reminders and warnings of nuclear destruction. Robert Del Tredici’s exploration of the nuclear era took him initially to Hiroshima to meet the bomb’s first survivors. This experience launched a project to photograph the bomb at its source. His critical topography of the nuclear industry has consistently involved going to where X marks the spot, predominantly in the United States and Canada, to map the nuclear heartland and to make visible the locations where nuclear secrets are stored.

Borders and Trauma Borders mark the perimeter of a site, and they are contested zones where the determining logic of inside/outside, and self and other, are enforced. Margaret Olin’s essay, “Conversations on Walls,” marks a line that cuts across the landscape, offering an account of the eruv as a marker and a boundary. A line demarcating an interior zone, with a history echoing back to the European “ghetto” marks the boundaries of another ghetto: that of a refugee camp in Olin’s essay and photographic work

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documenting walls in the Dheisheh Refugee Camp. Rehab Nazzal’s essay, “The Olive Tree, the Land, and the Palestinian Struggle against Settler Colonialism,” examines the extraction of olive trees from occupied settlements in the West Bank as the destruction of traditional Palestinian settlements and the borders by which they are marked. Borderlines marking zones of exclusion introduce into the collection the motif of refuge. This motif includes Mark Ruwedel’s photographs of the MexicoUSA border. His photographic project Crossing is a work that documents the clothing and remnants left by migrants as proxies for now-absent bodies and an indication of systemic failure in American border policy. If X marks the spot, then many essays have an X as their originating motif, a “lieu de mémoire” or heterotopia as the locale for the investigation. Such is the case for an asylum at the border between India and Pakistan, as shown in Anhiti Patnaik’s examination of a short story by Sa’adat Hasan Manto. Considering the historical trauma that ensued after the partition of India, Patnaik writes of the difficulty, if not impossibility, of the ever crossing a border between a former and future self and of Manto’s partition writing as providing a site for a historical trauma not otherwise spoken.

Memory and the Keeping Place If sites of memory, idiosyncratically or institutionally constituted, work to preserve locales as sites of the past, the “keeping place” gives additional emphasis to practices of recollection, ritual, and the contributions of witnesses as a way of living with the past.27 Amber Johnson calls for the creation of the Qu’Appelle Valley Keeping Place as a model for commemoration to bridge the gap between Indigenous and settler memory at the site of a former residential school in Saskatchewan. In addressing the keeping place as a site of memory activated by living witnesses, Johnson’s essay introduces a suite of offerings from Randolph Jordan and Christiaan Beyers, which critically address post-colonial relations between Indigenous and settler communities over a difficult past and the need for reinvented memorial structures to remember history and, as Ariella Azoulay suggests, “potential history.”28 Jordan’s photographic project of Pole Positions juxtaposes two poles erected by the Squamish Nation on lands below the Burrard Bridge in Vancouver. Jordon’s photo essay is a small-scale relational study of structures of indigeneity in a singular location that brings into dialogue the past and the present through double exposure in the photographic frame. Christiaan Beyers’s essay examines the political mobilization of memory in Cape Town’s District Six Museum. The museum reclaims the history of the District Six community and their forced removal from this area by the apartheid government. A “keeping place” for a displaced community, the “survivance” of the museum is at issue due to the steady encroachment of development within the area. The site is contested, pitching the development of new homes against the museum as the holder of homes in absentia; Beyers’s essay, like the museum’s founding, af-

Introduction

fords a paradigmatic space for debate on memory, heritage, and citizenship. Kara York’s essay revisits the outlandish cell phone photograph of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, assuming the pose of the young Syrian boy, Alan Kurdi, whose lifeless body washed up on shore after drowning in the Mediterranean Sea on 2 September 2015. Ai Weiwei’s re-photograph was controversial, and the use of his celebrity drew viewers back to look again at what became a testimonial image to the site of an outrage. As York shows, the outrage is due to not only the needless loss of life but also the lack of response to the refugee crisis on the part of the international community. York’s essay sets the contemporary stage for Jesper Svenbro’s geopoetics of Lesbos as an ancient site of refuge, going back to the Trojan War.

Geopoetics The Winter 2000 issue of Critical Inquiry published a special section titled “Geopoetics.” The title was promising, suggestive of a shift of emphasis in the study of landscape, mostly directed toward the genre of landscape in art. We return to geopoetics, as it rightly describes Jesper Svenbro’s contribution to the collection. His text is prose and poetry, commentary, argument, narrative, and the assertion of facts, working from the evidence of the facts of language itself. His text has as the object of its disclosure a particular place, the island of Lesbos at the end of the Trojan War and the flight of the family of the greatest Greek lyric poet Sappho from Troy to Lesbos. Svenbro discloses the site through the elaboration of the evidence of toponyms. Svenbro’s discourse might be taken as an extended prose poem working from and grounded in a constellation of names (which he refers to as anthropnyls) around the place name Lesbos at the epicentre. If the topos of the Svenbro text is Lesbos, it has as its precipitating cause (if not theme), refuge and the disaster, for it happens that Svenbro’s scholarly work has long been in Greek poetics and Sappho in particular. Svenbro is thus attuned to the flight of refugees who almost three thousand years ago (and five hundred years after the fall of Troy) fled from what is now Turkey in the vicinity of Troy to Lesbos. Ancient and contemporary flights of refugees form the correlation of disaster then and now, to converge in his text, perhaps even at the very same beach where the family of Sappho landed and the body of Alan Kurdi was found. Hospitality and the obligation to the stranger is the motif that links the family of Sappho to Svenbro’s text and the plight of Syrian refugees with the archaeology of language providing the stage for the Ai Weiwei selfie performance so tellingly discussed in Kara York’s essay in the collection. His geopoetics renders a rigorous account of place through the evidence of names in a poetic form, recalling Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things). Svenbro has contributed to the discovery of a different role for poetry in the present as a documentary aesthetics. It is right that the collection should end with this geopoetics.

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To conclude, the collection exposes a discursive formation at the intersection of the word and photograph in matters of place. With two exceptions, the texts are in the literary form of essays, emerging out of the disciplines of literature and art history, as well as others informed by or advancing cultural theory. The essays include visual materials as illustrations and forms of evidence. There are also photographic contributions that consist of distinct albums of photographs supplemented by written texts that provide context. Two major photographic contributions have global import in what they communicate through singular sites: the nuclearization of the world and the Anthropocene as a fateful geological assertion of end times, as if the nuclear clock and the environmental clock had almost reached midnight. Whatever is shown in the singular and particular is a manifestation and proof of this planetary condition having as its theme the very fate of the earth. The earth itself is a place, the most endangered place of all in view of the infinity of living worlds that are there on its surface. The visual point of view is maximally topographic and macroscopic, as if a telephoto lens directed from outer space is looking at the tiny fraught space of wounded earth. From the written perspective, the fragile vessel of language carries the medicine of survival and places its trust in the healing powers of analysis, narrative, and storytelling. Words and images may form a complimentary couplet. When taken together, these two modes strengthen the truth requirements of the document, diminishing falsification and placing a demand on the aesthetic to pay attention to facts and details to advance civic awareness. Multiple entry points through images and texts carve openings in the intermingling of disciplines and find pathways through which broad histories are elaborated in situated details, bending the study of landscape through the keyhole of singular sites and investigations of place matters. Thus, the collection points to place-based inquiry as a shared responsibility for our place on the earth, a coming together of the sciences, humanities, and the arts to develop a set of propositional concerns for what we have identified as critical topography.

Notes 1 Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, in The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. David Grène and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 3:111–4. 2 The first philosophical mention of Dasein as the designation of the subject in the world belongs to G.W.F. Hegel. 3 Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1971), 155. 4 Groundless ground, Calvinist sources of pragmatism and anti-foundationalism, and why anti-foundationalism through Thoreau is not to be associated with anti-realism.

Introduction 5 See Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1981). Thoreau bequeaths us in his will, the place of the book, and the book of the place. He leaves us in one another’s keeping, as Cavell states in the last sentences of his remarkable book. 6 Robert Pogue-Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), x. 7 See Rachel E. Cyr, “From Negation to Affirmation: Witnessing the Empty Tomb in the Era of Forensic Scientific Testimony” (PhD diss., Trent University, 2017). 8 Raymond Williams, Keywords (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 87–93. 9 Ibid., 184–9. 10 Ibid. 11 See Rehab Nazzal’s chapter in this volume. 12 Hamish Fulton tells in this volume of a particularly unsettling experience when he encountered the paddle of Archie Belaney (Grey Owl), on a trail in the landscape surrounding Lake Ajawaan, Prince Albert National Park. 13 W.J.T. Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” in Landscape and Power, ed. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 5. 14 Michel Foucault, Hans Blumenberg, and Heidegger to name the obvious. 15 For an early post-colonialist critique of wilderness, see Jonathan Bordo, “The Terra Nullius of Wilderness: Colonialist Landscape Art (Canada and Australia) and the So-Called Claim to American Exception,” International Journal of Canadian Studies 15 (1997): 13–36. 16 The roots of a British approach to land-based writing and artworks is discussed in Jessica Becking’s chapter in this volume. Also in this volume, Jonathan Bordo and Blake Fitzpatrick contextualize the work of Hamish Fulton as an international walking artist in chapters 7 and 9 and in an interview (chapter 8). 17 See Jonathan Bordo, “Wilderness as Symbolic Form – Thoreau, Gruenewald and the Group of Seven,” in Reflective Landscapes of the Anglophone Countries, ed. Pascale Guibert (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011), 149–72. 18 Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks (London: Penguin, 2015), 31. 19 See Paul Duro’s chapter in this collection. 20 See William Jenkins, The New Topographics (Rochester, ny: International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, 1975). 21 See Karen Love, Mark Ruwedel: Written on the Land (North Vancouver: Presentation House Gallery, 2002); Mark Ruwedel, Mark Ruwedel: Scotiabank Photography Award (Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, 2015); Edward Burtynsky, Manufactured Landscapes (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 2003); Edward Burtynsky, Jennifer Baichwal, and Nicholas De Pencier, Anthropocene (Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, 2018). 22 See Burtynsky et al., Anthropocene. 23 The Atomic Photographers Guild is an international collection of photographers dedicated to making visible the nuclear era. Founded by Robert Del Tredici, it now includes approximately forty photographic artists. Guild members contributing to this collection include Robert Del Tredici, Blake Fitzpatrick, Katy McCormick, David McMillan, and Mark Ruwedel.

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24 See John O’Brian, ed., Camera Atomica (London: Black Dog, 2015), and Peter C. van Wyck, this volume. 25 For a discussion of the before-and-after photographic strategies of Edward Burtynsky, David McMillan, and Hiromi Tsuchida, see Blake Fitzpatrick, “Disaster Topographics,” in Image and Inscription: An Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Photography, ed. Robert Bean (Toronto: Gallery 44 and yyz Books, 2006), 53–63. For David McMillan’s Chornobyl photographs (with an insightful essay by Claude Baillargeon), see Growth and Decay: Prypiat and the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, 2018). 26 E.g., Jacques Derrida, Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London: Routledge 2001). 27 See Jonathan Bordo, “The Keeping Place (Arising from an Incident on the Land),” in Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 157–82. 28 See Ariella Azouley, Potential History, Unlearning Imperialism (New York: Verso, 2018).

LANDSCAPE, A R T, AND ECOLOGY

1

From Nature? The Critical Landscapes of Poussin and Cézanne Paul Duro

One of the best-known comments attributed to Paul Cézanne is that he wished to refaire Poussin sur nature (to do Poussin again from nature).1 The remark has generally been held to mean that Cézanne’s intention was to invest his art with the objectivity and rigour associated with Nicolas Poussin’s supposed classicism while addressing “nature” as the true object of the painter’s attention.2 If this hypothesis is accepted, then other, equally happy, associations may be brought into play. Poussin’s famously stoic temperament – the natural result, it was believed, of his cool-headed Norman origins – was seen as a salutary corrective to the meridional Cézanne’s intemperate personality. Furthermore, the latter’s remarks that the artist should “treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone,” or that “art is a harmony parallel to nature,”3 seem designed to call Poussin to mind, all the while offering a useful antiimpressionist stance of interest to those artists and critics who had a vested interest in promoting the claims of post-impressionism.4 Yet rather than maintaining the frequently articulated but ultimately untenable argument that Cézanne shares Poussin’s fundamental aims, we need to look elsewhere for a more compelling reason for the continuing interest in associating the two artists. In this essay, I want to argue that their approach to painting may be appropriately compared, but not because of any stylistic affinity or artistic doctrine, rather because both artists’ approach to painting offers compelling parallels in the way they address the representation of nature.

Addressing the Subject The critic and historiographer André Félibien remarked in 1667 that “painters represent many things, such as landscapes, animals, buildings and human figures. The most noble of all these [kinds of painting] is that which represents a History in a composition of several figures.”5 The significance of Félibien’s distinction between history painting and genre painting, including landscape – in other words between

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“high” and “low” subject matter – is a distinction between two incommensurate forms of picturing. The former is the result, or so those who thought like Félibien argued, of an intellectual process, of a refined and idealized nature, while the latter takes as its model the everyday appearance of things, with all the idiosyncrasies and unsalutary manifestations of imperfection such a practice implies. In Félibien’s classification, landscape falls between still life (nature morte or “dead nature”) and history painting (la peinture d’histoire). In a relation of this kind, landscape painting requires of the viewer a different kind of viewing, one that Todd Olson describes as “demand[ing] attention to a composition in which human agency was subsumed by a modest appeal to a rural setting and quotidian activities.”6 An inventory of paintings owned by the collector Michel Passart identifies a painting by Poussin of the Virgin in a landscape as a peinture, that is, a history painting, while an untitled large landscape by the same artist is described as a paisage or landscape.7 However, this elementary and reductive distinction between history painting and everything else, including landscape painting, can only be sustained if we regard landscape painting uncritically or as a straightforward copy of the natural environment. A critical landscape painting, that is, a landscape that seeks to go beyond appearances – and both Poussin’s and Cézanne’s landscapes are always critical – are never merely facsimiles, whether real or imagined. Rather they are discursive sites, constructed realms that do not so much frame a scene as open up a world. When seen from this point of view, a landscape painting is less a painting of a landscape than a representation of nature readied for our understanding. At this point the reader may feel that I am merely stating the obvious. After all, what painting, whether landscape or otherwise, is not to some extent “readied for our understanding”? Yet there is good reason to think that neither Poussin nor Cézanne was prepared to leave the matter to chance. In 1639, Poussin wrote from Rome to his patron Paul Fréart de Chantelou that his new acquisition, The Israelites Gathering Manna in the Desert, was on its way to Chantelou in Paris, and begged his patron to lire (read) the story depicted in order to see whether each thing is appropriate to the subject. Seeming reluctant to leave the matter there, Poussin instructs Chantelou on what to look out for – “which figures languish, which are astonished, which are filled with pity, perform deeds of charity, are in great need, seek consolation etc.”8 It may seem that Poussin’s concern is exclusively with the actions of the figures, yet the landscape is manifestly not observed reality and is not meant to appear so. Rather it is an imaginative site designed to bring to mind the condition of the Israelites immediately before the miraculous fall of the manna that saved them from starvation. The jagged and rocky outcrops that dominate the landscape are testimony to the hopelessness of the Israelites’ situation. Succour can only come from divine intervention, and the more aware figures reach up toward heaven, imploring God’s help. But, while the setting may seem little more than an appropriately austere backdrop to the narrative, Poussin is surely evoking, via the harsh

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1.1 Nicolas Poussin, Israelites Gathering theM anna, 1639, oil on canvas, 58.6⬙ × 78.7⬙, Musée du Louvre, Paris, France.

and unforgiving landscape, the Israelites’ harsh and laborious journey to the Promised Land. We recall that Félibien places the depiction of landscape below the representation of human action, but above still life, on the grounds that while a landscape does not always contain human presence, it is itself nature in that it lives in a way that still life does not. Roger de Piles, writing in 1708, goes one step further in distinguishing between two kinds of landscape painting – the “heroic” and the “pastoral.” The “pastoral” tends to depictions of uncultivated countryside “without ornament, and without artifice,” which include, “besides a great character of truth, some affecting, extraordinary, but probable effect of nature [along with] … those graces with which she adorns herself much more, when left to herself, than when constrained by art.”9 Beyond this, however, the heroic embraces the Aristotelian dictum that nature must be represented not “as we every day casually see her [but] … as we think she ought to be” (my emphasis). The heroic style is a composition of objects, which, in their kinds, draw, both from art and nature, every thing that is great and extraordinary in either. The situations are perfectly agreeable and surprising … and if nature appear not there, as we every day casually see her, she is at least represented as we think she ought to be. This style is an agreeable illusion, and a sort of

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inchantment [sic], when handled by a man of fine genius, and good understanding, as Poussin was, who has so happily expressed it.10 Drawing from both art and nature, the heroic style points to the key distinction separating the “truth” of nature from nature improved through reference to what Charles Perrault describes as “the idea of the beautiful, which not only unspoiled nature, but even ideal nature, has never attained.”11 Poussin maintains a carefully crafted identity in the latter, in which landscape is employed as a foil to the representation of human action.12 Designated as paysages historiques (historical or ideal landscapes in the classificatory system of the hierarchy of the genres), it has been convincingly argued that Poussin’s intention is to represent an “allegorized” landscape that is neither pure landscape nor a straightforward history, but when read allegorically, reveals an occluded meaning beyond the heroic/pastoral divide.13

Rainy Day Blues In 1651, Poussin painted Stormy Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe. The title refers to the story recounted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses of two star-crossed Babylonian lovers whose parents had forbidden the match. Planning to meet in secret one night by a spring outside the city walls, Thisbe, who arrived first, was confronted by a lioness whose jaws drip blood from a recent kill. Thisbe flees, but in her terror drops her cloak, which the enraged animal tears to shreds. Pyramus, finding the bloodied cloak, wrongly assumes Thisbe has been mauled and in remorse for his tardiness plunges his sword into his side. Returning to the spring and finding her dying lover, Thisbe falls upon Pyramus’s sword. A letter to his friend and fellow painter, Jacques Stella, offers an extensive description of the painting, outlining how Poussin “tried to represent a tempest on earth,” and adding, as if to emphasize the importance of the meteorological conditions to framing the painting as a landscape, “all the figures one sees there are playing their roles according to the weather.” I have tried to represent a tempest on earth, imitating to the best of my ability the effect of an impetuous wind, air full of darkness, rain, lightening bolts and flashes falling in several places, not without creating a certain disorder. All the figures one sees there are playing their roles according to the weather; some are fleeing through the dust, in the direction of the wind that is driving them along; others, on the contrary, are going against the wind, walking with difficulty, covering their eyes with their hands. On one side, a shepherd is running, abandoning his herd, seeing a lion that has downed a number of cowherds and is attacking others, some of whom are defending themselves while others are prodding their cattle and trying to escape. Amidst this

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disorder, the dust is rising in great whirlwinds. A dog some distance away is barking, his fur abristle; he does not dare approach. In the foreground of the painting, one sees Pyramus lying dead on the ground, and near him Thisbe, who has succumbed to grief.14 Stormy Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe studiously avoids any imputation of “copying” nature in favour of an evocation of an imaginary realm in the environs of Babylon. It is remarkable just how much space Poussin devotes in the letter to description, as if he cannot bring the painting to life in any way other than to engage his reader with a minutely ekphrastic description of the actions of the figures (like fleeing or walking with difficulty), what they engaged in doing (prodding cattle), their gestures (covering their eyes), and their emotions (succumbed to grief). It is only in the last line that Poussin turns to the story, “In the foreground of the painting, one sees Pyramus lying dead on the ground, and near him Thisbe, who has succumbed to grief.” If we recall Poussin’s instruction to de Chambray to “read” The Israelites Gathering Manna in the Desert, we realize he means his patron to “read” or recollect the story in Exodus 16:11–36. While Poussin requires de Chantelou to pay attention to the poses and expression of the figures, his task is to accord the pictorial narrative to its textual source.

1.2 Nicolas Poussin, Storm y Landscapewith Pyram usand Thisbe, 1651, oil on canvas, 75.8⬙ × 107.7⬙, Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt, Germany.

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However, in Stormy Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe, Poussin reverses the thrust of this earlier injunction to place the landscape at the centre of his description. This may seem little more than Poussin demonstrating his ability to work in a different genre, but as Félibien remarks with reference to the painting, “He was able to paint perfectly all sorts of subjects, and even the most extraordinary effects of Nature, however difficult they may be to represent; accompanying his landscapes with appropriate actions and stories, as in this one, which is unpleasant weather, he found a sad and lugubrious subject.”15 In other words the story of Pyramus and Thisbe was chosen to fit with Poussin’s desire to paint a storm scene, and not concoct a setting to match the action. There is textual evidence to suggest this is indeed the case. Jan Bialostocki has noted that a chapter in Leonardo da Vinci’s Treatise on Painting, published in 1651, the year Pyramus and Thisbe was painted, was devoted to the depiction of a storm. It is hard to believe that Poussin, who was responsible for the drawings that formed the basis of the illustrations to the text, was not inspired to try his hand at a storm as subject, and instead chose the lugubrious story of Pyramus and Thisbe to be its appropriate narrative complement. In that, Poussin reverses the assumed hierarchy that centres on human action or relegates the landscape to the background.16 Roger de Piles, perhaps with Félibien’s comments in mind, addresses the presence of figures in landscape painting from the point of view of their role in supporting the landscape, “I am persuaded, that the best way to make figures valuable is, to make them so to agree with the character of the landskip, that it may seem to have been made purely for the figures… The artist must, in fine, remember, that as the figures chiefly give life to a landskip, they must be dispersed as conveniently as possible.”17 De Piles’s comment implicitly distinguishes between staffage, that is, figures who “accessorize” a landscape, such as a shepherd tending his flock, and figures who “give life to a landscape,” something more than presence, but human action – as is the case with Stormy Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe, in which several unnamed figures fill out the narrative in the middle ground, leaving the principal action to the two protagonists. In short, de Piles argues there is a symbiosis between the primary characters and the landscape that renders both mutually indispensable. The figures don’t just give life to the landscape; the landscape in turn gives life to the primary characters and rounds out their characters, such that when we read (lire) the story, both the landscape and the characters appear more charged, more real.18

Living up to Expectations In the eighteenth century, the connoisseur and critic Pierre-Jean Mariette claimed that Poussin had two modes of establishing a composition. The first was the compositional studies foundational to the work of the history painter, while the other

The Critical Landscapes of Poussin and Cézanne

was the close study of landscape “d’après nature,” including “des effets piquans [sic] de lumière” (the striking effects of light).19 This may well sound precociously protoimpressionistic; it is worth noting that Mariette concludes with a detailed description of how these studies were brought to a finished state: “Furnished with these studies, he then composed, in his studio, those excellent landscapes in which the spectator is transported back to … those enchanted vales described by the poets.” Mariette’s reference to “those enchanted vales described by the poets,” recalls the importance, for northern Europeans, of the “antique lands” that formed the terminus of their travels. Joseph Addison recalled that, before he undertook his Grand Tour (1701–03), he “took care to refresh my memory among the classic authors,” adding that, “the greatest pleasure I took in my journey from Rome to Naples was in seeing the fields, towns and rivers that had been described by so many classic authors, and have been the scenes of so many great actions,” especially since the modern road is “extremely barren of curiosities.”20 Addison wisely recognized the value of classic authors in mediating the experience; the “great actions” they describe gave a necessary literary gloss to what was before the modern traveller’s eyes. In the 1760s, Tobias Smollett described the Roman Campagna as “almost a desert,” and he continued, “It is nothing but a naked withered down, desolate and dreary, almost without enclosure, cornfield, hedge, tree, shrub, house, hut, or habitation; exhibiting here and there the ruins of an ancient castellum, tomb, or temple, and in some places the remains of a Roman viaduct.”21 Under the circumstances, the experience of place did not live up to expectation.22 It was neither picturesque nor recognizable as the poets had described it, and thus its status as landscape painting required the gloss of literature to reveal its potential as a site of classic memory.23 Poussin’s landscapes do not reflect the actuality of this terrain in his own day, nor do they lack for signs of human habitation. Where buildings do exist, they are for the most part not the ruins that Smollett encountered but those of a timeless classicism – archaeological additions that “serve to maintain a decorum for the story … in order not to breach the total harmony of the image.”24 Poussin’s intention, then, is to ready the spectator for the experience of landscape, not as it was in his own day but as the poets had described it. This potential for meaning beyond what the landscape or the story purports to represent is the key that unlocks meaning in allegories such as Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake. In such cases, the landscape is central to both the composition and the subject and the narrative action occupies a complementary role in the representation.25 Yet as Sheila McTighe has argued, the difficulty in elucidating meaning in the painting may be due not to the obscurity of discovering the classical source for the narrative but our failure to understand that Poussin’s contemporaries read not a narrative but “pictorial signs.”26 In the former dramatic action is the object of the representation, while the latter (even when it contains an identifiable narrative or story) seems more concerned with “reading” nature.

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1.3 Nicolas Poussin, Landscapewith aM an Killed byaSnake, 1648, oil on canvas, 46.5⬙ × 77.9⬙, The National Gallery, London.

The most substantial early critique of the painting, François Fénelon’s Dialogues des Morts (1712), invents an imaginary conversation between Poussin and Leonardo da Vinci in which Fénelon has Poussin agree that Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake is rather a “caprice,” that is, a work of the imagination, rather than a history. “This type of painting suits me very well,” Poussin is made to say, “so long as the caprice is well ordered, and that it takes nothing away from true nature.”27 The distinction is significant, as it recalls Aristotle’s celebrated distinction between poetry and history in the Poetics.28 In foregrounding the poetics of painting without being constrained by the conventions of historical or textual truth, Fénelon turns the tables on history painting without giving ground on Poussin’s desire to be seen as a “peintre savant.” Fénelon’s Poussin, then, is at pains never to breach the boundary between history painting and landscape painting. But these moves toward landscape never amount to a genre transgression, or the abdication of Poussin’s standing as a history painter. In the eighteenth century, Denis Diderot commented on Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake in his salon of 1767. In a passage designed to establish a hierarchy among three kinds of landscape – the pastoral, the poetic, and the heroic – and three painters – Jacques-Philippe de Loutherbourg, Claude-Joseph Vernet, and Poussin,

The Critical Landscapes of Poussin and Cézanne

Diderot remarks that even if Vernet were not superior to de Loutherbourg in all aspects of technique, he would still be much more interesting than the latter who “only knows how to introduce herdsmen and animals into his pictures,” while Vernet “scatters all kinds of people and incidents through his paintings, and these people and incidents, while truthful, are not natural, everyday features of the fields.”29 But Vernet, “as ingenious, as inventive” as he is, cannot compare to Poussin “where the ideal is concerned.” In a lengthy description of the painting, Diderot shows how Poussin interjects “fear and trembling into the middle of a rustic scene.” The background of his canvas is filled by a noble, majestic, immense landscape; no more than rocks and trees, but very imposing ones. Your eye wanders through many different levels of depth, from the closest to the most distant points. On one of these levels, at left, some distance off, in the background, a group of travellers who are resting, and conversing, some seated, some reclining, all perfectly safe. On another level of depth, further forward, in the center of the canvas, a woman washing her laundry in the river; she listens. On a third level of depth, further left, quite far forward, a crouching man, but he’s begun to rise and casts his gaze, a mixture of anxiety and curiosity, towards the left of the scene; he has heard. In the extreme right foreground is a standing man, transfixed by terror, ready to flee; he has seen. But what is the source of his terror? What is it he’s seen? He has seen, in the far left foreground, a woman lying on the ground, encircled by an enormous snake that devours her and drags her into the depths of the water, where her arms, head, and hair are already hanging.30 Diderot’s long description was undoubtedly an opportunity for the writer to flesh out his views of the paintings exhibited in the salon of 1767 (Poussin’s painting was not even in the exhibition); but paintings of a similar genre that were in the exhibition, such as those by Vernet, Diderot were treated at even greater length. The implication must be that, for Diderot, Poussin’s landscapes, whether heroic, pastoral, or allegorical, demand a more or less lengthy narrative description to communicate the story. It is noteworthy that, while Diderot begins with the “noble, majestic, immense” landscape, the rest of this long passage is devoted to a description of the actions of the figures. Most significantly, he concludes his description with a justification that speaks more to history painting than to any accepted definition of landscape, exclaiming, “What a beautiful whole! What resolution! One single idea engendered this picture.” He then swivels back to acknowledge that the painting is manifestly a landscape, but adds: “Such are the scenes one must know how to imagine if one wants to be a landscape painter. It’s with the aid of such fictions that rustic scenes can become as interesting as historical events, or even more so.”31 In this last comment Diderot squares the circle between history painting and

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landscape painting in acknowledging that “such fictions” are necessary to raise a landscape from the representation of the merely rustic into the realm of poetry. And when he argues, “Such are the scenes one must know how to imagine if one wants to be a landscape painter,” it is hard not to believe that the landscapes of interest to Diderot, as to Poussin are, in the words of Mariette, “those excellent landscapes in which the spectator is transported back to … those enchanted vales described by the poets.”32

The Necessity of Theory If, as Diderot implies, Poussin’s use of the landscape idiom was a measured incursion into the genre of history painting the better to instill a sense of poetry into his art, then what are we to make of Cézanne, whose work is not concerned with the poetics of painting as Mariette or Diderot would have understood the term, but whose unparalleled attention to the motif engages the artist, and the spectator, with an equally compelling commitment to exploring the poetics of the image? But before we examine Cézanne’s understanding of the art of the landscape painter, a significant problem presents itself – just what did Cézanne mean when his interlocutors report him as claiming he wished “to do Poussin again from nature”? The phrase has haunted commentators from the time of its reported utterance in 1904, recollected at a distance of seventeen years by Emile Bernard, who published “A Conversation with Cézanne” in 1921. I found myself obliged to postpone my plan for a Poussin done entirely from nature and not constructed from notes, drawings and fragments of studies. At last a real Poussin, done in the open air, made of colour and light, rather than one of those works thought out in the studio, where everything has that brown hue resulting from a lack of daylight and the absence of reflections of sky and sun. (Emphasis added)33 There is nothing in Cézanne’s claim that he was thinking primarily of landscape painting. Indeed, given that the remark was made in the context of a comment about one of Cézanne’s monumental Bathers, it is hard to justify thinking of landscape at all. Yet the text of the conversation included reference to “transporting a canvas of that size, and the endless difficulties raised by suitable and unsuitable weather,” suggesting that the conditions for plein-air painting were uppermost in his mind.34 Does this mean that we would do well to reject any connection between Cézanne and Poussin? Not quite, for while Cézanne ultimately must be seen as approaching Poussin’s art “from nature,” I want to quote in full Bernard’s version of Cézanne’s celebrated remark in order to tease out just what these corrections might entail:

The Critical Landscapes of Poussin and Cézanne

As you know, I have often done studies of bathers, both male and female, which I would have liked to make into full-scale work done from nature; the lack of models forced me to limit myself to these sketches. Various obstacles stood in my way, such as finding the right place to use as a setting, a place which would not be very different from the one which I had fixed upon in my mind, or assembling a lot of people together, or finding men and women who would be willing to undress and remain still in the poses I had decided upon. And then I also came upon the problem of transporting a canvas of that size, and the endless difficulties raised by suitable and unsuitable weather, where I should position myself, and the equipment needed for the execution of a large-scale work. So I found myself obliged to postpone my plan for a Poussin done entirely from nature and not constructed from notes, drawings and fragments of studies. At last a real Poussin, done in the open air, made of colour and light, rather than one of those works thought out in the studio, where everything has that brown hue resulting from a lack of daylight and the absence of reflections of sky and sun.35 The comment shows that Cézanne had no intention of replicating the working methods of Poussin. The “sketches” Cézanne refers to as being poor substitutes for “a Poussin done entirely from nature” were quite contrary to the “concrete study of nature” that he preferred. Likewise, the “problem of transporting a canvas of that size, and the endless difficulties raised by suitable and unsuitable weather” were equally alien to traditional practice, since the remark implies working on not only sketches but also a finished canvas in the open air. Remember that Poussin built a model stage on which he could display small wax figures lit by candlelight, only to realize that Cézanne’s ambition for “a Poussin done entirely from nature” would have been incomprehensible to the older artist. Cézanne cannot mean he is seeking to emulate Poussin’s landscapes or adopt any of his methods of constructing a composition. Cézanne was adamant that “painting from nature is not copying the object, it is realizing one’s sensations.”36 But if this is so, then just what should we understand by “a Poussin done entirely from nature”? As Richard Kendall has pointed out, this version of Bernard’s recollections appeared more than a decade after the conversation took place, and furthermore, it is likely that Bernard tailored Cézanne’s remarks to suit his own purposes at a time when the “formalist” Cézanne was seen as the linchpin between nineteenth-century modernism and twentieth-century abstraction. Yet there is good reason to take Bernard’s account seriously. While it cannot be a verbatim recollection of Cézanne’s comments, both its length – suggesting something more than the seductive reductionism of an aphorism – and the kind of concerns Cézanne introduces into his comments, should convince us that here we are in the presence of his mature thoughts on the art of painting.37 Cézanne’s comments are in line with the idea that Poussin was both the problem

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and solution to the academicism of French art; the problem because Poussin was seen as the origin of the academicism evident in the often dreary submissions to the annual Prix de Rome competition, and the solution because Poussin’s art was itself deemed to have been modelled on an earlier, purer classicism, and as such a return to an originary nature that Cézanne himself identified with.38 It was, in short, a return to the model in nature that Poussin had himself studied.39 Yve-Alain Bois has argued that Cézanne’s theory of art is known only in fragmentary form, culled after the fact from letters, conversations, and anecdotes. Yet fundamental to his art is the necessity of theory itself, so long as it was indissolubly linked to practice, and not offered as a precept or doctrine anterior to the artist’s experience of picture-making. This mutual inflection is the logic that allows Cézanne to realize his sensations as an “equivalence of relations” between the painting and its model that is quite separate from the servile copying of nature, on the one hand, or the imitation the poets, on the other.40 For Cézanne, pictorial composition – the process of arranging, ordering, and selecting – was itself the end of painting, a point that Georges Braque recognized when he noted that “Poussin and Rubens confused composition with staging. It was opera and stage directing. But with Cézanne, composition is really painting.”41 Braque might seem to anticipate Clement Greenberg’s observation that, for Cézanne, “The real problem would seem to have been, not how to do Poussin over according to nature, but how to relate – more carefully and explicitly than Poussin had – every part of the illusion in depth to a surface pattern endowed with even superior pictorial rights.”42 Yet Cézanne recognized that Poussin’s compositions were far from staged, but complex visual forms from which he could learn: “Ah, Poussin’s arabesque! He knew what he was doing all right. In the Baccanalia in London, in the Flora in the Louvre, where do the lines of the figures end and those of the landscape begin? … It is all one.”43 That Cézanne aspired to emulate the complexity of Poussin’s historical landscape composition is evidenced by his undertaking a copy, in 1864, of The Arcadian Shepherds in the Louvre – a model to which he returned in two pencil studies as late as 1887–90.44 We need to read Cézanne’s approach to Poussin not in a spirit of opposition, or even of a Poussin “corrected” from nature, but as a foundational quality he had learned from Poussin’s approach to composition.

The Visible and the Invisible If we consider Cézanne’s Le Pont de Maincy of 1879–80, we see immediate evidence of his radical refusal to “stage” his composition. For Cézanne, the mise-en-scène of the composition was precisely not theatrical; rather, he approached the question of the presentation of the motif with the same attention Poussin pays to the representation of a narrative. Significantly, Cézanne described this process with the same verb

The Critical Landscapes of Poussin and Cézanne

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1.4 Paul Cézanne, LePontde M aincy, ca 1879, oil on canvas, 23⬙ × 28.5⬙, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France.

as Poussin – lire (to read) – with the difference that, for Cézanne, the “text” was nature: “To read nature is to see it, as though through a veil, in terms of an interpretation in patches of colour following one another according to the law of harmony. These major hues are thus analysed through modulations. Painting is classifying one’s sensations of colour.”45 From this perspective Cézanne’s groundbreaking innovation – to make the motif stand in place of a narrative – is the critical advance in his later painting. While Poussin’s pictorial composition follows the story, in Cézanne the reverse is true; the pictorial structure is generated out of the problematic of representation. This is Cézanne’s “veil” – to eschew not only literature but also our expectations of how a painting works so as to problematize the gap between painting and referent. As Kenneth Clark perceptively points out in an analysis of Le Pont de Maincy, it is as if Cézanne put up the trees as scaffolding, “then feared they would arrest the movement of the picture and lead to too great insistence on contours.”46 With this visual paradox in mind, we can now see that the tension in the relation between the trees, bridge, and parapet is intentional. If we look at the way the bridge cuts back into picture space (we are constrained to believe that this is one reason why the left parapet is set farther back than its twin on the right), then we understand that this is how Cézanne saw the angle from his viewpoint. Instead of adhering to the necessity of describing a vertical as a vertical (in studio doctrine verticals in

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nature must be drawn as verticals), Cézanne has produced a right angle, but it is one that accords with the apparent slope of the bridge on its orthogonal axis, and not as it would appear in nature. Cézanne thus represents the bridge lying parallel to the picture plane, forcing him (since he knows the angle to be ninety degrees) to describe the pier as tilted away from the perpendicular. The same may be said for two trees, which bisect the bridge on the left. Here the right angle is formed by an imaginary line between them – a line that significantly meets the bridge at precisely the point where the trees intersect. Cézanne’s approach demands that we recognize that painting’s potential to attain a perfect mimesis is forever beyond our grasp.

Myriad in Perception In removing himself from the organon of pictorial representation (perspective, frame), Poussin effectively returns to representation an autonomy that ruptures the continuum between beholder, referent, and representation. This is perhaps what Cézanne meant when, with reference to an unfinished painting of women bathing beneath trees in a meadow, he reportedly said to Joachim Gasquet: “That will be my painting … that’s what I will leave behind … But what about the centre … What am I going to group them round? … What I want is something like a gap, a gaze of light, an invisible sun keeping close watch on all my figures, bathing caressing, intensifying them … in the middle.”47 Jean-François Lyotard comments on this “gap” at the centre of the visual pyramid. Space is no longer in any way representational, it embodies, on the contrary, the deconstruction of the focal zone by the peripheral curved range of the field of vision… It is as if the painter positioned us, no longer in the spatial cube, but at the entrance to the eye, enabling us to see what we suppose happens on a retina looking at the Montagne Sainte-Victoire, thus enabling us to see what seeing is.48 Lyotard’s formulation is helpful in addressing Cézanne’s critical agenda. Perspective is collapsed into the picture plane. No longer trapped by perspectival logic at the apex of an imaginary pyramid, the certainty of Cézanne’s, and therefore our, viewing position is thrown into doubt. How close should we approach the painting? At what point in our scrutiny, if ever, does the composition resolve itself in a mountain, rooftops, a tree? Where and how do we enter the painting? What is our – or rather Cézanne’s – point of departure? Cézanne’s task was to prevent too close an identification between the surface of the canvas and the Albertian picture plane. In a letter to his son Paul in 1906, Cézanne remarks, “The same subject seen from a different angle gives a subject

The Critical Landscapes of Poussin and Cézanne

for study of the highest interest and so varied that I think I could be occupied for months without changing my place, simply bending more to the right or the left.”49 With this comment we are faced with the importance of the viewing subject being fully present to the painting. As in the history paintings of Poussin, whose remark on originality – that a familiar subject is “singular and new” when it is given a new and serious treatment – Cézanne’s repetitions rework familiar themes. Camille Pissarro, who observed that Cézanne was not an impressionist, “because all his life he has been painting the same picture,”50 did not mean that Cézanne was content merely to copy himself or nature. Rather the remark should be interpreted as an acknowledgement that Cézanne could find unlimited potential for observation in a highly restricted number of motifs, simply by adjusting his point of vision or stance. With Mont Sainte-Victoire in particular, Cézanne found a theme that engaged him in this way throughout his later career. One such study is of the mountain in what appears to be winter, with a cold blue-grey sky and leafless trees.

1.5 Paul Cézanne, M ontSainte-Victoire, 1890–95, oil on canvas, 21.7⬙ × 25.7⬙, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh.

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If we consider the relationship of the foreground trees to the distant mountain, we see that they seem to lie on approximately the same picture plane. The effect is facilitated by the way Cézanne is reluctant to allow his lines to intersect. The profile of Mont Sainte-Victoire is interrupted several times by the bare branches of the foreground trees (an effect accomplished through the later application of grey-blue paint that softens and at times occludes the outline). Cézanne has made no effort to reconcile these ambiguities or to have elements of the composition anchor the trees in “real” space. And while the branches of the trees at one point seem to lie on the same plane as the mountain, other branches lower down fuse into the immediate foreground. This perspectival inconsistency is perhaps what Greenberg is alluding to when he wrote, “Cézanne sacrificed verisimilitude, or correctness, in order to fit drawing and design more explicitly to the rectangular shape of the canvas.”51 That such visual inconsistencies are paradigmatic of Cézanne’s later work is no new observation. But let us ask ourselves, from the point of view of Cézanne’s approach to picturing, why that might be so. In the first place the painter has refused for himself, as he has refused us, a privileged position from which we might view the landscape. Cézanne himself claimed, “Painting does not mean slavishly copying the object: it means perceiving harmony among numerous relationships and transposing them into a system of one’s own by developing them according to a new, original logic.”52 In removing himself from the “logic” of the representation, he is effectively returning to painting an autonomy or, perhaps better, a resistance to conventional apprehension that Poussin would immediately identify with, even if Cézanne’s representational strategies would surely remain incomprehensible to the older artist. A photograph of Cézanne, one of a series taken of the painter in January 1906, the year of his death, shows the artist outside his studio at Les Lauves in Aix-enProvence. He is in the act of placing a canvas he has been working on in oils against a wall immediately behind him (placing, not picking up, as it is unlikely Cézanne would have encumbered himself with a palette before positioning the canvas). A large folded umbrella – another landscape painter’s accessory – leans against the wall. The canvas is most probably a number 25 (81 × 60 cm) or number 30 (92 × 65 cm), and the subject appears to be one of the depictions of Mont Sainte-Victoire that Cézanne was known to have executed from this spot. Cézanne works standing up. There is no sign of an artist’s stool or other means of working seated. A pot for oil or turpentine hangs from a support that indicates the canvas, when on the easel, is to be positioned at the height of a man working standing up. A related photograph, this one in all probability taken immediately before the photograph just discussed, shows Cézanne at his easel. The sun is high in the sky, and Cézanne has tilted his canvas forward so that the sunlight does not shine directly on its surface. He is standing, and looks obliquely across at Mont Sainte-Victoire. His posture is alert, tense, the brush in his right hand poised to transcribe the patches of light and colour

1.6 Ker-Xavier Roussel, CézannePainting (Turned Awayfrom Easel), January 1906, photograph, 3⬙ × 3.5⬙.

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he sees. He does not stand upright but seems to approach the motif in the manner of a hunter stalking his prey (“changing my place, simply bending more to the right or the left),” nor does he position himself at a set distance from the canvas as required by the laws of perspective. For Cézanne a fixed viewpoint is unthinkable; rather he is in dialogue with the painting surface, alternating between standing and crouching, moving from side to side, oscillating between closeness and distance from the canvas. The canvas thus becomes not a screen, still less a window, but the site of a resistance, of a negotiation with the picture plane. This is modern landscape painting in its critical mode, freed from expectations of the picturesque, on the one hand, and the limitations of copying unmediated nature, on the other. The information the photograph reveals illuminates Cézanne’s comment cited above about being “occupied for months without changing my place.” In “bending” to the motif, Cézanne embodies a world of possibilities unimagined by Poussin. The art of Cézanne is made up of an infinite number of moments – any of which, from the first to the last, may constitute the totality of the representation. A landscape by Cézanne is radically anti-ideal, insofar as it does not so much constitute a pictorial composition as bring a motif into being in dialectical relation with the picture plane (bringing a motif into being is exactly what the ideal eschews – our expectations are all met in advance of the artist’s intervention). Thus the work Cézanne has set himself is to transfer this “sensation,” the result of close observation of the motif, from artist to spectator without remainder. This is why we are unable to look hurriedly at a Cézanne painting. Our point of entry – like that of the artist – is always shifting and indeterminate; a painting by Cézanne throws down a challenge to the spectator to pay attention to the way the artist has approached the motif, yet without the expectation we will be able to solve the visual inconsistencies. The branch of a tree fails to bisect the outline of a mountain; the roof of a farmhouse does not accord with the laws of perspective; the contour of a field refuses to resolve itself into a discernible rectangle – Cézanne seeks to defer the moment of legibility, to require of the spectator a reading that slows reading to a painful crawl toward understanding. With Cézanne, painting is permanently in a state of becoming. While Poussin’s approach to the art of painting is clearly different from that of Cézanne, the difference lies more in a distinction between conceptions of nature than the way each artist sought to co-opt or impose their own way of seeing. While for Cézanne the motif in nature provides the whole experience of art, for Poussin art is always the imitation of nature – nature, that is, in its sublime form. In both cases the spectator is obliged to study the paintings to arrive at a provisional understanding – in the case of Poussin to see the way the paintings realize a narrative in pictorial form; in the case of Cézanne to see the motif brought into being as pictorial form. Poussin’s success lies in the spectator’s ability to judge the extent to which the artist has rendered a textual source visually intelligible, while Cézanne’s success lies

The Critical Landscapes of Poussin and Cézanne

in problematizing the process of perception. The nature that each wished to reveal is not at odds with the expectations of their times, or for that matter with each artist’s stated goals. If Poussin saw in landscape painting a legitimate site for the activity of the seventeenth-century history painter, Cézanne proposed an advance on impressionism that engaged the spectator with a reading analogous to Poussin’s spectator. This perhaps, is what Cézanne meant by “refaire Poussin sur nature” – his desire to retain the complex model of reading that underpins Poussin’s art while engaging the spectator’s attention through the presentation of the infinitely complex perceptual problems found in any attempt to translate the motif in nature. It is this engagement with the spectator that finally links Poussin and Cézanne. Both require a critical reading of their paintings. They entail the active engagement of the spectator, who is presented with a challenge that calls in each case for a concentrated effort of reading. That in one case this reading is based on a textual source, while the other it is unambiguously visual, matters little. In both cases the task is the same – to unlock the truth behind the representation without falling into mimesis.

Notes 1 Richard Kendall, Cézanne and Poussin: A Symposium (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993). See also John House’s chapter in the same volume, “Cézanne and Poussin: Myth and History,” 129–49. Here, House suggests that the first published iteration of Cézanne’s comment may be found in a 1905 publication by Charles Camoin, which renders the celebrated aphorism as “vivifier Poussin sur nature” (to give life to or to refresh). 2 For a comprehensive discussion of the variants of Cézanne’s celebrated aphorism and their significance for an understanding of Cézanne’s late painting, see Richard Shiff, Cézanne and the End of Impressionism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984), 178–84. 3 Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Cézanne: L’exposition du Grand Palais (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1996), 18, exhibition catalogue. 4 Shiff, Cézanne and the End of Impressionism, 175–84. 5 Claire Pace, Félibien’s Life of Poussin (London: Zwemmer, 1981), 47. 6 Todd P. Olson, Poussin and France: Painting, Humanism, and the Politics of Style (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 2002), 227–8. 7 Ibid., 221. 8 Louis Marin, “Reading a Picture from 1639 according to a Letter by Poussin,” in Sublime Poussin, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 1999), 5–28. 9 Roger De Piles, The Principles of Painting, To Which Is Added the Balance of Painters (London: J. Osborne, 1708), 124–5. 10 Ibid., 124. 11 Charles Perrault, Parallèle des anciens et des modernes (Paris: Jean-Baptiste Coignard, 1688–97), 3:214.

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Paul Duro 12 Richard Verdi, “The Reputation of Poussin’s Landscape Paintings in France from Félibien to Cézanne,” in Kendall, Cézanne and Poussin, 13–29. 13 Sheila McTighe addresses Poussin’s “landscape allegories” from the point of view of the influence of seventeenth-century libertine and Stoic philosophy, in McTighe, Nicolas Poussin’s Landscape Allegories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 18–52.

14 Louis Marin, “Description of a Painting and the Sublime in Painting,” in Porter, Sublime Poussin, 66–104. 15 André Félibien, Entretiens sur les vies et les ouvrages des plus excellens peintres anciens et modernes (Paris: D. Mortier, 1666–88), 4:127; quoted in this translation in Marin, “Description of a Painting,” 70. 16 Pierre Rosenberg, Nicolas Poussin 1594–1665 (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux 1994), 456, exhibition catalogue. I would like to acknowledge Anhiti Patnaik’s helpful comment about the critical and complementary relationship between landscape and narrative in Poussin’s paintings that emerged out of our discussions during the editorial process. 17 De Piles, Principles of Painting, 140–1. 18 I thank Jessica Becking for drawing my attention to de Piles’s nuanced understanding of the reciprocal relationship between the figures and the landscape. 19 Pierre-Jean Mariette, Description sommaire des desseins des grands maistres d’Italie, des Pays-Bas et de France, du cabinet de feu M. Crozat (Paris: P. Mariette, 1741), 114; quoted in Verdi, “The Reputation of Poussin’s Landscape Paintings,” 17–18. 20 Elizabeth A. Bohls and Ian Duncan, eds, Travel Writing 1700–1830: An Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 5, 7. 21 Paul Fussell, The Norton Book of Travel (London: Norton, 1987), 218. 22 Richard Wrigley, “Infectious Enthusiasms: Influence, Contagion, and the Experience of Rome,” in Transports: Travel, Pleasure, and Imaginative Geography, 1600–1800, ed. Chloe Card and Helen Langdon (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 1996), 75–116. 23 See Paul Duro, “A Disturbance of Memory: Travel, Recollection, and the Experience of Place,” in Rhetoric, Remembrance, and Visual Form: Sighting Memory, ed. Anne Teresa Demo and Brad Vivian (London: Routledge, 2012), 49–66. 24 McTighe, Nicolas Poussin’s Landscape Allegories, 6. 25 T.J. Clark, The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 2006). 26 McTighe, Nicolas Poussin’s Landscape Allegories, 134. 27 François Fénelon, Dialogues des morts de Fénelon; suivis de quelques dialogues de Boileau, Fontanelle, d’Alembert (Paris: Hachette, 1888), 263. 28 Stephen Halliwell, The Poetics of Aristotle: Translation and Commentary (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 41. 29 John Goodman, “The Salon of 1767,” in Diderot on Art (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 1995), 2:241–2. 30 Goodman, Diderot on Art, 2:242. 31 Ibid.

The Critical Landscapes of Poussin and Cézanne 32 Verdi, “Reputation of Poussin’s Landscape Paintings,” 17–18. 33 Richard Kendall, Cézanne by Himself: Drawings, Paintings, Writings (Edison: Chartwell Books, 1994), 293. 34 Émile Bernard, “Une conversation avec Cézanne,” Mercure de France (1 June 1921), cited in Kendall, Cézanne by Himself, 293. 35 Kendall, Cézanne by Himself, 293. 36 Ibid., 299. 37 Richard Kendall, “The Figure in the Landscape,” in Kendall, Cézanne and Poussin, 88–108. 38 Paul Smith, “‘Real Primitives’: Cézanne, Wittgenstein, and the Nature of Aesthetic Quality,” in Value, Art, Politics: Criticism, Meaning and Interpretation after Postmodernism, ed. Jonathan Harris (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), 93–122. 39 Shiff, Cézanne and the End of Impressionism, 180. 40 Yve-Alain Bois, “Cézanne: Words and Deeds,” trans. Rosalind Krauss, October, no. 84 (Spring 1998): 31–43. 41 Georges Braque, cited in this translation by Terrence Maloon, Classic Cézanne (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales 1998), 10–11, exhibition catalogue. 42 Clement Greenberg, “Cézanne,” in Art and Culture (London: Thames & Hudson, 1973), 50–58. 43 Kendall, Cézanne by Himself, 300. 44 Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Copier-Créer de Turner à Picasso: 300 oeuvres inspirées par les maîtres du Louvre (Musée du Louvre: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1993), 184–5. 45 Kendall, Cézanne by Himself, 299. 46 Kenneth Clark, Landscape into Art (London: John Murray, 1949). 47 Kendall, Cézanne by Himself, 300. 48 Jean-François Lyotard, Discours, Figure (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971), 204; quoted in this translation in Mary Lyndon, “Veduta on Discours, Figure,” Yale French Studies 99 (2001): 22. 49 Lyndon, “Veduta on Discours, Figure,” 21. 50 William Rubin, Cézanne: The Late Work (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1977), 131. 51 Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology, ed. Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison (London: Sager Publications, 1982), 5–10. 52 Kendall, Cézanne by Himself, 298.

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Newfoundland Painting and the Metaphysics of Light Jennifer Dyer

I am going to look at the way certain contemporary Newfoundland visual artists use light in their presentations of land and seascapes. My aim is to show how their use of light opens on to a metaphysic of vitalist materialism and ultimately an ethos of unconditional concern, one which leads to a theory of eco-aesthetics. The use of light in these images presents the fundamental feature of new materialism: namely the irreducibility of activity, or the immanent activity of transformation where the activity of existence of each thing is that which cannot refer to anything besides itself to explain its existence. In this sense, I argue that light, in these images, is a form of noise, following Steve Crocker’s definition of noise that appeals to both Marshall McLuhan’s description of it as the space of transformation and Michel Serres’s notion of it as the milieu, means or medium, of movement. McLuhan famously described electric light as “pure information … a medium without a message” that “shapes and controls human association and action.”1 Ironically, it is precisely because of his description of light as “pure information” that I ascribe it the status of noise. This is because light functions in these works as pure mediality, irreducible to anything beyond itself. It has no law or telos beyond its indeterminately ongoing activity of transformation and connection. As pure mediality, this light is therefore affective: it is engaging, intersensory, and interrelational, bearing a structure of existential memory and anticipation. For these reasons, I argue that light in these images offers an ethos of unconditional concern or attention, inspired by the thinking of Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch and following the formulations of Jean-Luc Nancy. Light offers a new participatory, interactive, and mutually concerned way of engaging with the non-human world of the natural environment, one that figures largely in Newfoundland and Labrador’s natural landscape.

Newfoundland Painting and the Metaphysics of Light

Painting Light Mieke Bal argues that in contemporary neo-baroque artworks, light tends to be signified by white paint, and this white light performs a “second-personhood” function.2 Neo-baroque artworks have a number of features, such as space that oscillates between two- and three-dimensionality, a fluctuation between micro- and macroscopic scale, and an illusion of the viewer sharing a relational space with the image.3 Bal argues that this mirrors the viewer’s position in the work and allows for a sensual materiality of the image, one that viewers’ experience as a visual touch. Here, light is the feature that reaches out to viewers, bringing us into the shifting itinerary of the image to move in and through its space, changing not only what the image is seen to do but also what we do in relation to it. Light is second personhood because it stands in dialogic relation to the viewer, which is to say light does not merely inspire engagement with the artwork (a third-person position) but engages us meaningfully in the activity of the image.4 Light addresses the viewer, interpolating us in its activity. In this way, the presentation of light in visual art has the capacity to incite bodily participation among viewer and image, an interactive participation that changes them both. Ultimately, in this analysis light draws relations and substantiates spaces. Light creates bodily contact with a medium farthest removed from matter. Bal refers to Roland Barthes’s theory of photography to explain how this contact works. According to Barthes, photography (literally light writing) works not only iconically but also, and more important, deictically, existentially indicating that which was. By way of the indexicality of the image, light that substantiates relational space or matter in fact substantiates it from within. Light materializes matter. That is, light draws us into the space of photographic images where we then follow the work of light that materializes their spaces. Visually, we go where the light takes us, here toward the materialization of a particular view of the region. This means that light leads us iconically into the image to move us indexically throughout it, materializing its space or objects into matter that is sculpted out from within. This movement is communal and participatory because we are engaged with the image in the construction of the image. It is immanent, materialist, and vitalist because the activity that makes the image what it is comes from the structure of the image itself, and it is active, constructive, and ongoing until we choose to end our engagement with it. This work of light is made obvious in Will Gill’s digital video artwork Cape Spear, where the viewer is initially faced with a dark landscape and immersed in the sounds of ocean waves crashing ashore with wind blowing in the background, only to be directed by the movement of light to see differently. Glowing orbs of fibreglass draw us to their light amid the dark oceanscape: they are fed into catapults and shot into the ocean of Cape Spear, North America’s most easterly coastline. The movement of the light of these illuminated orbs at once opens the landscape to visuality and

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draws us toward and on to the violent movement of the waves, making viewers visually feel an experience that would otherwise be unavailable to them. In a different way Greg Bennett’s work, In the Morning, encourages us to attend to the act of looking itself by having viewers follow the only development happening in the image: the development of perspectival space created by the changes in light. In Bennett’s realist imagery, light and visuality are intimately connected. Bennett takes seriously that light itself is the medium by which we see. For this reason, the true realism of his painterly practice is animated in and through the narrativity of light in his paintings. This means that when we follow the gradations and differences of the light’s illumination into the space of the image, we are following the narrative of how we see, a narrative that is given to viewers through the differences of light. Bennett’s work is exemplary in situating the viewer’s activity within the space of the picture plane – our visual engagement with the light is part of the meaning of his painting – and in this way Bennett’s work narrates the viewer’s engagement with the world itself, outside the artwork, as a fundamental feature of both the world and the art. That is to say, light is indexical of – or points out to us – our immersion in the visual realm. Light in Bennett’s image emphasizes that the visual activity of looking is part and parcel of the activity of meaning-making. We are involved in the meaning of the painting.

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Light Gives Life In this theory, I am arguing that light acts as a force of existence as it is presented in these images. It is not only iconic of activity or the “pure information” of being; it is also indexical of activity, directing our attention to an interpretation of light as the force of existence making the land- or seascape what it is. That is to say that in these images, light is active. Light acts in these images and, in doing so, it actualizes the things it illuminates; it represents the immanent activity of things. To better understand this semiotics of light, I turn to C.S. Peirce’s semiotic cosmology. Light is, in Peircean terms, firstness: being as indeterminate freedom that seeks realization via determination.5 It is pure information or mediality. Peirce holds a tripartite cosmology and semiotics. This means that just as there is sign, interpretant, and object in his semiotic theory (thus holding to a realism that is lacking in Saussurean semiosis, which doesn’t include an object in its system), Peirce’s cosmology holds to firstness, secondness, and thirdness in the structure of being. Where firstness is ecstatic activity or indeterminate presence in Peirce; secondness is self-determination, reaction, or the ground of difference; and thirdness is ordination, the ground of continuity or freedom realized as the individual in relation to others. In terms of the 2.1 Opposite Will Gill, StillBoat2, 2011, video still from Firefly. 2.2 Left Will Gill, CapeSpear2, 2009, still from CapeSpearvideo shoot #2.

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work of light in the artworks I examine, light is firstness, leading to the realization of different elements of the image, which then leads to a certain visual itinerary or structure of the image, opened by the work of light. Yet there is another aspect of Peirce’s structure which is opened by light here, for Peirce’s ontology is a theory of the communication of being where there is no goodness without existence and, further, the communication of existence is a fundamental good, the necessary condition of all other goods. Existence is bound with goodness because being is a matter of connection: unconditional communication with or concern for the other. In other words, giving itself, which is the bare ground of unconditional communication, is at the basis of each element of this theory, where the communication of being is a giving of being to independent centres of activity. It is agapastic – unconditional giving to or concern for another. As James Bradley explains, the claims made here are that activity is movement “from … to”; activity is originary and, as such, self-actualizing and unconditioned; this unrestricted movement of “from … to” is the communication of being to an indeterminate multiplicity of independent centres of activity; this means that originary ablative movement is a giving away and a dative movement (from … to).6 What we find is a theory of active existence. It suggests active existence is intelligible, self-explanatory, and (because it is self-explanatory) infinite or inexhaustible. Active existence is understood as a matter of moving from spontaneous presence (Peirce’s notion of firstness) to self-differentiation (Peirce’s secondness) to persistent continuity (Peirce’s thirdness). This is based on the activity of actualization that makes each thing what it is, and that cannot be reduced to anything besides itself or referred away to something else, whether it is mind, god, or the no-hypothesis hypothesis as cause, rule, or telos. Reading light as activity, the act is irreducible. Light points to the activity of existence, the space of transformation of inexhaustibly ongoing existence that is a constant giving from light to the developing structure of the image. Kym Greeley’s large silkscreened paintings perform this giving of light, from one area of saturation to another. An image such as Yesterdays Gone 1, offers two visual ways into the itinerary of the image. The first is the rich but flat blue sky that draws the viewer into and onto the surface of the image, directing us down to the jagged line of the forest treetops that interrupt the smoothness of the sky’s dark light. Here, the blue light that catches our eyes opens on to treetops, telephone poles, and wires, each of which is painted in a flat black, but which individuates in relation to its emergence out of the blue light. The second way into the image is the luminous yellow median line of the road, a yellow light that begins below and out of the picture plane and which moves up through the middle of the image and toward the blue light sky. This line sets up a structure to the painting, not only the traditional onethird ground and two-thirds sky of landscape paintings (because it stops one-third up from the bottom, separating ground from sky), but also because it is mirrored on the edges of the road it delineates by two thin white stripes (the edges of the road)

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and by dots of yellow reflectors marking the edge between road and wood. Where one force of light opens on to the individuation of the landscape elements, the other opens a reading of landscape imagery; one sets up the individual features of the landscape itself whereas the other sets up the semiotic of reading the image as a landscape painting. While the image is still and empty of actors, it is alive and activated by the contiguity of two types of light that activate our seeing experience as a visual movement through the image.

Noise As Crocker notes, Marshall McLuhan called the medium or the space of transformation in communication “noise”: that which purportedly interferes with the message indicates, in fact, the presence of the very medium itself.7 McLuhan used the metaphor of the electric light bulb as an example of pure information, but pure information here is nothing other than mediation itself, that which ultimately is the message that affects receivers. There is no communication without the medium: the means of transforming an object into a message (or a sign). Crocker argues, further, that Michel Serres considers mediation similarly, arguing that when we consider the

2.3 Kym Greeley, YesterdaysGone1, 2012, acrylic on canvas on board, 24⬙ × 36⬙.

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medium an inert space between a sender and receiver, then mediation appears to stand in the way of the ideal of immediate communication.8 But every message must move through a middle ground or milieu to communicate at all: the noise of the medium is the becoming of the message. It is how the relations of communication relate, and it is therefore constitutive of communication, either between sender and receiver or between past and present, and present and future. That is, mediation turns repetition into iteration, the repeating of a term that is not exactly the same. The presence of the medium is registered in the transmission of information. When Serres argues that the noise is “parasitic,” he argues that the medium always acts on relations: it acts on relations, not things, affecting what happens next, what we understand next, what effectively is “nextness.”9 Mediation creates a milieu. I argue that light in these images generates the milieu representationally; it reveals the activity that makes the land and seascapes what they are. Returning to Will Gill’s work, we can read light as the noise of the medium – that which both structures the image and structures our viewing activity of it – again in his Cape Spear video and also in Firefly, commissioned in 2011 for the exhibition Electric Speed, celebrating the birth of McLuhan. In each work, light performs a particular function, marking unnoticed things as remarkable, relating previously unrelated scenes and objects together, and giving a narrative to the landscape, one that previously goes unnoticed. In Cape Spear, this happens when the glowing fibreglass orbs are launched into the water. While the water was present and apparent prior to the orbs, it is the movement of their glowing light that reveals the activity of the ocean itself. Not only does light, not surprisingly, make the ocean visible, but here it makes the ocean an actor in its own performance because the light reveals the activity of the ocean, its waves, and the relations between the waves, and between the waves and the rocky shoreline. To watch the glowing lights is actually to watch the movement of the water, what at first blush seemed a monolithic and uniform expanse but through Gill’s mediation of light is seen to be a continually interacting multitude of wave-movements, where each wave is similar to the others but actualizes differently. In relation to this, Firefly traces the movement of light in an otherwise stillcoastal environment. Unremarkable scenes of a fishing community, such as its church, marina, and wooded paths, are transversed by shooting rays of light (what I understand are laser-tag lights that act as fireflies), transforming the nature of the coastal environment from monotonous stillness to active interconnections of water, woods, culture, and things. Again, the “fireflies” alter how things are related; the light in these images acts out the changing interrelations between objects, such that the coastal environment becomes alive for the viewer. The light acts as noise because its function is the transformation of space: it creates a new milieu of meaningfulness of the coastal landscape, transforming the static timelessness of the place into an active space, a milieu of differentiation.

Newfoundland Painting and the Metaphysics of Light

For Henri Bergson, this revelation of change and difference is the point of freedom: the irreducible acts of a thing are free, acts that not only originate from the thing itself but which also express all of that thing in their activity. Psychically, Bergson argues that acts are intersubjective: “We are free when our acts spring from our whole personality, when they express it, when they have that indefinable resemblance to it, which one sometimes finds between the artist and his work.10 Free acts are those that transform. This is not the freedom of choice, but the freedom of embodied beings that act in a world of other beings, all of whom are not the same after the act is actualized. This means that freedom is not a property of things or a transcendent quality but immanent in the relations that things have with other forms of life. For Bergson, as for Peirce, this free activity goes all the way down: plants, rocks, all things have a “zone of indeterminability” or capacity for being otherwise bestowed by the activity of existence on elements of material organization. For Bergson, matter must contain within itself the conditions for indeterminacy of life that it generated. The activity of existence generates a “reservoir of indeterminacy” to matter that expands it and makes it a resource for life; while conversely, matter is both the internal condition of freedom and the external constraint of life. As Elizabeth Grosz argues, the activity of existence is at the mercy of materiality (which she says tends toward determination, calculation and spatialization); but it is also the field in which free acts are generated.11 Grosz argues, “Immersed in matter and an eruption from it, life [or active existence] is the continuous negotiation with matter that creates the conditions for its own expansion and the opening up of, matter to its own virtualities.”12 She argues that when contracted, materiality is regular, fully actual, and in the present, reborn at each moment. When expansive, it is “part of the flow of pure duration, carrying along the past with the present,” opening indeterminately on to a future.13 Freedom is, in these terms, a capacity to act in terms of one’s past but also to act spontaneously inconsistent with that past. I am arguing that the light in these images draws us into and onto the image’s surface, engaging as a visual interlocutor to respond to the space enacted and represented by it. In some images here, light hits the viewer first as white paint closest to us, drawing us into the colour perspective; in others, light is the actor whose movements offer a narrative path with which we intersubjectively relate and visually act along. Greeley’s use of light acts like a wall of bright colour that stops the urge to view depth. Her use of light brings up short the act of looking and forcing one’s eyes down, from the yellow, orange, or blue sky into the other colour fields that constitute the subject matter where we visually make relations between spaces and things that alter (from close to distant, from weighty to airy) as we connect one patch to another, in turn, throughout the image. The work of light in the images by David Kaarsemaker expand on to forms that materialize as the light seems to reveal them, only to dematerialize as we look to a contiguous or connected area of the image. Kaarsemaker’s

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2.4 Greg Bennett, In the M orning, 2011, oil on canvas, 35⬙ × 56.25⬙.

Bedroom 2, for instance, makes explicit the work of light as noise. Light is overtly the medium of meaning-making in Kaarsemaker’s painting, for it is light that both brings shapes into the foreground as identifiable objects and mystifies them into the obscure background as we move through it. Light is constructive, substantiating, form-giving, and not wholly predictable of the things it reveals in these images. I go as far to say that in these, light acts as a mode of self-making, an élan vital that inheres in the landscapes as self-revelatory.

Freedom What I suggest is that following the work of light in these paintings shows various ways of picturing how the activity of existence of things is immanent to them. This immanent activity is a freedom, one which is lodged in autonomy and not bestowed by others. Yet this free activity is also relational, for it is a consequence of indeterminacy or the forward thrust of existence that carries a past into the present and the present into future actualizations. This free activity communicates being; it is pure mediality or noise. Yet it relates to the good, or the just, as Jean-Luc Nancy explains: “I must be given what is due to me, just as others must be given their due. This means that there can never be justice for one person alone; such a thing doesn’t even make sense … justice exists solely in relation to the other.”14 One could argue here that the work of light performs the nature of justice, the nature of the way by which the environment it illuminates should be treated. Taking the light as a form of eco-

Newfoundland Painting and the Metaphysics of Light

aesthetics, the point here is not that the environment requires its own form of justice (that makes no sense). The point is that, following Nancy, the environment requires due recognition; its active existence does not need a special kind of justice bestowed on it, but rather agapastic attention or unconditional concern to enable its free activity. That is, the light reveals that with due recognition we can work to open relations between human and natural environments that enable the free activity of each. As Grosz argues, this picture undermines those of determinists and libertarians. For the point of free, indeterminate, and ongoing relational activity is that whether we argue that with enough knowledge we can eventually predict the outcomes of our actions (and target particular environmental expansion or contractions) or that, on the contrary, all free acts are inherently open and could have been done otherwise (the wild, unpredictability of nature hypothesis), both positions assume that the actor is the same after it acts and that its options remain the same.15 The point here is that on this analysis, free activity is integral to what a thing is – creating the milieu by which it relates to others and becomes itself – and with each act of existence a thing expresses itself anew. With each act of existence, it demands a new, just relation to others. Whatever else it is doing, the light that interpolates us into these images is enacting a just relation to the land- and seascapes, engaging viewers to more action by justly viewing the becoming activity of others.

Notes 1 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw Hill: New York, 1964), 23–4. 2 Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 203. 3 Bal, Quoting Caravaggio, 50. 4 Ibid., 203. 5 C.S. Peirce, Collected Papers, ed. C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss (LaSalle: Open Court, 1931–35), 6:214. 6 James Bradley, “The Triune Event: Event, Ontology, Reason, and Love,” in Event and Decision: Ontology and Politics in Badiou, Deleuze, and Whitehead, ed. R. Faber, H. Kripps and D. Pettus (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 105. 7 Stephen Crocker, Bergson and the Metaphysics of Media (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 11. 8 Ibid., 70–80. 9 Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. L.R. Scheh (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 206. 10 Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F.L. Pogson (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1911), 172.

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Jennifer Dyer 11 Elizabeth Grosz, “Feminism, Materialism, Freedom,” in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, ed. D. Coole and S. Frost (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2010), 150. 12 Ibid., 151. 13 Ibid.

14 Jean-Luc Nancy, God, Love, Justice, Beauty: Four Little Dialogues, trans. S. Clift (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 43. 15 Grosz, “Feminism, Materialism, Freedom,” 144.

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Placing Here: Finlay, Fulton, and Skelton and the Formation of the British School of Aesthetic Chorography Jessica Becking I don’t own this land. I’ve only got permission to fly here. But in walking it over and over again and paying it the greatest attention I’ve made it mine. I know where its animals live, and how they move about it. Know that the larks sleep on the top of the hill, but on sunny mornings they move to warm themselves on eastward slopes … I move toward the larks as if I could see them.1 – Helen MacDonald, H Is for Hawk (2016)

Chinati in Marfa, Texas, is an out of the way place to say the least. Situated just 96 km from the Mexican border, Marfa is 623 km from San Antonio, 691 km from Austin, 837 km from Dallas, 961 km from Houston, and 305 km from El Paso International Airport, the nearest international airport. Occupying 340 acres of desert, the Fort D.A. Russell military installation was originally established to protect West Texas from Mexican bandits and was active through two world wars before being abandoned in 1946. Minimalist artist Donald Judd purchased the site with the help of the Dia Foundation in 1979 with the intention of creating a museum that would showcase and preserve site-specific contemporary art installations. Donald Judd would renovate the property extensively, converting the existing structures and outdoor spaces into site-specific installations and gallery spaces, a project he pursued until his death in 1994. In the years since his death, under the directorship of Judd’s long-time collaborator, Marianne Stockebrand, Chinati has grown into an internationally recognized contemporary art museum that invites artists from around the world to participate in artist-in-residence programs and curates a wide range of both academic and aesthetic content. In 1995, shortly after Judd’s passing, the Chinati Foundation held its inaugural symposium, titled “Art in the Landscape.” This symposium brought together a veritable who’s who of the contemporary land-art scene and academia at that time. Talks were offered by Carl Andre, Michael Charlesworth, Hamish Fulton, Lucy Lippard, Anne Reynolds (who discussed the documentary process of Robert Smithson), James Turrell, and Richard Shiff. The symposium sought to rethink land art in the

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late twentieth century. The talks offered at the Chinati symposium advanced the landscape tradition, away from both the highly commodified unique art object so prized in the high modernist period and the kind of colonialist landscape art that W.J.T. Mitchell identifies as “an exhausted medium, no longer viable as a mode of artistic expression.”2 Paintings by the Group of Seven, Tom Thomson, and Emily Carr (also collectively known as the Algonquin School) are commonly understood to be the kind of colonialist landscape art described by Mitchell in the statement above. Although they do not necessarily employ all the same symbolic devices as their nineteenth-century predecessors who made human presence and dominion over nature obvious, the painters of the Algonquin School should be understood as operating in an appropriative and colonialist mode: as Jonathan Bordo explains, they attempted to picture the wilderness, a condition which is, in essence, unable to be pictured.3 As Bordo explains, “Because the wilderness alleges the zero degree of history, the indigens who are imputed to dwell in the wilderness are considered to be in a wild or savage state, even deemed to be flora and fauna, and/or deemed thus

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3.1 Opposite Google Maps image showing the location of the Chinati Foundation within the state of Texas, and its location in relation to major Texan cities. 3.2 Left Google Maps aerial satellite imagery of the Chinati Foundation.

to not be there at all.”4 The Chinati symposium sought to place the pictured landscape tradition aside, so that land and nature as an interactive aesthetic experience might be explored. Particular interest was placed on the ways in which the artists in attendance created intrusions into the land or refigured the land to shape the experience of the viewer, thus making the gallery or installation-going patron the primary witness through their interactive experience. During the panel discussion of the Chinati Foundation’s symposium, the presenters were asked a series of questions about land art, the role of scale and words in land art and how land art fits within the wider landscape tradition. In response, Carl Andre read Wallace Stevens’s “The Anecdote of the Jar,” remarking that the poem “feels precisely like what it is to make a work of sculpture.”5 In Stevens’s poem, the speaker places a jar on a hill and in his doing so, “It made the slovenly wilderness / Surround that hill.”6 Andre, in his remarks, picks up on the fact that by making a work of sculpture and placing it somewhere, the sculpture inherently has an organizing and framing effect on the surrounding landscape. In Andre’s practice, as in the practices of Judd, Smithson, Turrell, and many other American land artists, this is the intent of their art. Their sculptures are not created as objects unto themselves but rather as insertions into the environment whose function is to order or direct the experience of the viewer. Hamish Fulton’s response is noteworthy.

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It is a little difficult for me to just deposit into this conversation my points of view. It is difficult because my art is about walking. It is not about the issues of U.S. land art or European outdoor sculpture. The differences center around either constructing something or nothing in the landscape. What I build is an experience, not a sculpture. My wish is to leave as few traces of my passing as possible. My walking experiences are the reverse of creating sculptural changes, subtractions or additions to the land.7 Fulton’s remarks were not acknowledged at the time, and artists and scholars present carried on with their conversations about landscape as a political device and sculpture as a marker of human presence left behind as an enduring symbol of that presence (in essence fulfilling the same functions as a traditional landscape painting). Fulton’s remarks, however, are suggestive of the differences between what the Americans call land or earth art and the British land- and place-oriented art created concurrently. We might consider Fulton’s ajawaan (1987) as illustrative of the differences between US and UK approaches to land-oriented art. ajawaan is an artist’s book that records the eight days that Fulton spent walking in Saskatchewan’s Prince Albert National Park. The book includes three main components: a white cover with the title and artist’s name; a single page that bears the image of a still lake broken only by the concentric rings of a singular disturbance below which is printed the walk particulars; and a five-panel accordion pull-out that bears the panoramic image of a very still lake on top of which Fulton has printed fifteen columns of seven four-letter words. The words present us with a paired-down narra- tion of his walk in a multi-sensory way that captures Fulton’s sensations along his journey. This description of ajawaan is a record of Fulton’s walk work, a work that is no longer accessible by an observer or gallery patron. It is only accessible at one remove, through Fulton’s art book. His presence at Prince Albert National Park is now but a recorded memory. As we can see from ajawaan, Fulton’s art is not easily understood when brought into conversation with the works of Andre, Smithson, Judd, and Turrell. Rosalind Krauss’s essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” originally published in 1979 and reprinted in 1983 as part of Hal Foster’s collection The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, presents the work of Fulton as existing, within the expanded field of postmodernist sculpture, somewhere between landscape and non-landscape. Krauss includes Fulton’s work under the category of “marked sites” where the site of his work is marked by his having worked there and photographic (or other) recordings of his having worked there.8 The “form” Krauss assigns to the work engaged in by Fulton suggests an intimate, tactile connection with the place itself; however, it also understands and presents walking as occupying a kind of sculptural mode wherein, not unlike a site-specific sculpture by Judd, the presence of the person or object in the land informs or frames the ways in which we experience the site that

Finlay, Fulton, Skelton, and the School of Aesthetic Chorography

it marks. As such, in Krauss’s presentation, walking art then becomes not dissimilar to a landscape painting, the land which surrounds the sculpture becomes presented to us anew, reframed by the artist’s “work.” Using Krauss as their guide, American academics understand Fulton’s art as existing within the same sculptural, land-art typology as that of Andre, Smithson, and Turrell. This categorization of Fulton’s work suggests that it is the goal of Fulton’s work to effect what Michael Fried terms “an objectification of experience.”9 From Fulton’s perspective, nothing could be further from the truth. Fulton rejects both painting and sculpture, and as such he rejects an art of “objectification.” As shown previously, Fulton’s object is his own experience of walking somewhere. The pieces that are ultimately brought into the gallery are a translation of that experience, a referential document and not an “artwork” in the conventional sense. Fulton’s remarks capture this disconnect and allow us to better understand how what Krauss offers is in fact a misinterpretation of walking art. The American approach to land or earth art has come to dominate art-historical discussion of artists who work outdoors with natural materials. This discussion translates into a pervasive narrative that doesn’t tell the whole story and in many ways glosses over distinctions and divergent growths that have occurred in American and British approaches to nature, the land, and most importantly, place since the 1960s. In many ways, the late 1960s marked a nodal point in art history for the explosive interest in land- and place-oriented art practices. In the very short span of a few years, we see dramatic developments on both sides of the Atlantic in the aesthetic and poetic expression of the artist’s relationship with nature and the land. Art history has tended to present this story in such a way as to see the land-oriented art practices of this period as repetitions of the same theme and collect them together under the category “land” or “earth art.” Art history looks to the work of Smithson, Michael Heizer, and Walter de Maria as performing a radical shift out of the gallery and studio and into the land. This return to the land as a site to be experienced reconsidered the relationship between humans and the land in new and increasingly material and performative ways. Land was no longer something to be looked at from outside, no longer something to be framed; rather it was something to be experienced. Drawing on the theoretical work initiated by minimalism and conceptualism, land or earth art sought to de-commercialize the unique art object, turning attention toward the value of experiences. As Jonathan Bordo writes of contemporary art, certain distinguishing traits of contemporary art are … the way that time and work mark it as imitation. Through the emphasis that this art places on its practice as work, time and its transitory aspect come to the fore. Rather than advancing art as an ergon (work), as an achievement or oeuvre, its perpetuity as a form, instead contemporary art emphasizes the work art has to do. It has tasks, agendas, and once completed its work is over.10

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It is on this point, in many ways, that the US and UK approaches to aesthetic experience in the land diverge. Although the American school of land art sought to de-commercialize the unique art object and explore experience as a mode of artistic expression, US earth/land art retained its deep connections to the galleries of New York and pursued many of the same ends as their more commercialized counterparts in terms of legacy and restricted access, actively engaging in practices of “landscaping” as a means of inscribing themselves and their existence into deep time. We might consider Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) or James Turrell’s Roden Crater (1979–present), in this regard. Both Smithson and Turrell perform massive alterations of the places they engage artistically. Spiral Jetty was created with bulldozers, “displacing some 6,000 tons of black basalt rock and earth from the adjacent shore to form a coil 1,500 feet long and approximately 15 feet wide, winding counter-clockwise into the lake.”11 This work changed not only the appearance of the lake in which it was built but also the adjacent shoreline. Rozel Point in Great Salt Lake, Utah, bears no resemblance to the place it was before Smithson. We could say the same of the Roden Crater. The place it occupies inside an extinct volcanic cinder cone in the Painted Desert region of Northern Arizona, bears no resemblance to the place it was before Turrell. Shaping the bowl of the crater alone, required the movement of over 1.3 million cubic yards of earth.12 When complete, Roden Crater will feature six tunnels and twenty-one viewing spaces, all of which were created to allow for the viewing of natural light as a time-and-place-bound phenomenon. Turrell harnesses the light of the sun during the day and the light of the stars, planets, and moon at night to provide viewers with the opportunity to experience these phenomena in a way that is impossible in our light-polluted world. In 2015, the opportunity to experience Turrell’s crater came with the hefty price tag of US$6,500.13 These exclusive sites are characteristic of the American land-art approach and speak to the legacy value that seems to be common among American land artists of Smithson and Turrell’s generation. These artists are ultimately interested in leaving something behind that inscribes their existence and their presence on earth into deep time. In the aforementioned panel discussion at Chinati, Carl Andre referred to this impulse as “the same as the dog pissing on the lamppost.”14 Land-art installations in the American tradition are a marker of territory and presence. By contrast, land-oriented art practices in the UK born out of the same international art milieu and informed by similar theoretical and aesthetic concerns and issues, particularly with respect to landscape traditions, drew more heavily on the Arte Povera movements of Italy and the Artist Book movements of the early 1960s. Several young British artists, including Richard Long, Andy Goldsworthy, and Hamish Fulton, connected over the emerging concerns of minimalism, conceptualism, and the dematerialization of the art object while also being deeply influenced by existing cultural eccentricities and interests with respect to walking, nature, place, and the

Finlay, Fulton, Skelton, and the School of Aesthetic Chorography

documentation of experience. Their interests in these matters however, occurred on a shortened and more human timescale than the American school. The time-bound work of their art occurred in seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years: not millennia. Retrospectively, we can now understand these practices and approaches to the land as distinctly British, at least in comparison with the American. Moreover, we can recognize them not as derivative of American earth/land-art traditions, but rather as an organic return to land-oriented practices and the celebration of place that has been present in the cultures of the British Isles for millennia. We might reimagine these post-1960s aesthetic approaches to the land by UK artists as in a conversation with one another, not over land or landscape or even nature but, rather, over place and the role of experience in art.

The British School of Aesthetic Chorography A chorography, from the Greek chōros and graphos, is an articulation of a specific site, one which requires a subject (human or otherwise) in order to find expression because it exists not only in space but also in time. This is distinct from a topography that offers a more generalized overview of a place – a place as defined by its relationship to other places. One might consider the maps and text offered at the beginning of this essay as a topographic exemplar, wherein we understand Marfa’s location within Texas by the extent of its remove from major Texan cities such as Austin, Dallas, and Houston. We might imagine this distinction between topography and chorography as the difference between writing about place and writing in place. Unlike topography, which offers an objective location, chorography requires a witness for whom the place exists. The witness, by expressing their experience of a place, effects an inscription of the self onto the place; yet unlike Andre’s “dog pissing on the lamppost,” this inscription is metaphysical. In the chorographer’s inscription, the presence of the self yields token words, thoughts, a stop-time, or a fragmentary memory, which endure beyond the experience by virtue of its expression or recording. This report of this place, at this moment, then comes to exist as a spectre over the place, leaving the place itself unaltered. This articulation of chōros as this place right here, this place in relation to an individual and that individual’s experience of that place, captures the nature of the aesthetic practices of several UK-based artists whose work engages in ethical and aesthetic explorations and articulations of place that simultaneously seek to avoid the conventions of landscape. Through these articulations, artists who we might consider to be part of this school perform subjective celebrations of the natural and the particular in ways that leave these things untouched. Chorography is a method that produces an understanding of the depth of place and highlights the essential role that memory plays in our identification of somewhere

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as unique and special. Chorographies also permit an ephemeral marking of place, which goes beyond the work of the monument, milestone, or X on a map and invites time and experience into the conversation. Such ephemeral marking of place presents the here and now for a subject in a way that is recorded and permitted to coexist alongside the place’s forward march in time, an excerpted moment, a fragment of a memory. When the excerpt takes on an aestheticized form, it increases the likelihood that it will persist beyond the momentary experience and individual memory of it and “translate” the place as an experiential entity that exists materially in time and space (for those who have not or cannot experience it for themselves). A distinctly British approach to land-oriented art practices arose in the late 1960s and flourished into what we call the British School of Aesthetic Chorography; a school that encompasses two generations of artists connected by shared environmental ethics, documentary techniques, and interest in the particularity of place and of natural processes that occur at that place (and their use of the book as a means of sharing their work with the world). Key figures of the first generation of the school, who were active in the 1960s through to the 1990s, include Hamish Fulton, Richard Long, David Nash, Roger Palmer, and Andy Goldsworthy; yet this list could easily be expanded to include several more artists who engage in similar practices. In 2013, Nicholas Alfrey, Joy Sleeman, and Ben Tufnell curated a retrospective exhibition titled Uncommon Ground: Land Art in Britain 1966–1979.15 The twenty-four artists included in this exhibition, including those named above, should be included in this school. Publications created to accompany the exhibition explain how the exhibition “reveals the distinct forms that Land Art took here in Britain: predominantly conceptual and ephemeral, hand-made and organic.”16 This statement serves to perpetuate the narrative that British land-oriented artistic practices are derivative of American land art and shows the pervasiveness of the homogenizing land-art typology, even though some of the artists whom the curators chose to include, namely Fulton, reject the categorization. It also makes an important observation about the characteristics and general approaches of such art created in the 1960s and ’70s by members of this school. To understand and appreciate that the approach to the experience of land and place employed by British artists during the second half of the twentieth century is distinct from the American land-art movement, one must consider the pre-existing UK land-oriented art practices of the late 1950s. The origins of the British School of Aesthetic Chorography were deeply influenced by the work of Scottish artist and poet Ian Hamilton Finlay. Although already an author of poetry, short stories, and plays, in 1958 Finlay began to engage in practices that dramatically influenced both the literary and visual-art worlds through the founding of Wild Hawthorn Press in Edinburgh. This small publishing partnership between Finlay and Jessie McGuffie began publishing the works of various contemporary artists and poets, Finlay in-

Finlay, Fulton, Skelton, and the School of Aesthetic Chorography

cluded. From the start, the press was known for the “uncompromising quality of its publications and for the possibilities offered for formal innovation.”17 Through the press and his other endeavours, Finlay created a number of literary and artistic forms, including the booklet-poem, the poem/print, the one-word poem, and the “concrete” poem,18 all of which have made important formal contributions to the concrete poetry and the artist-book mode.19 Wild Hawthorn Press also set the standard for small locally focused presses with an interest in producing art publications open to formal experimentation and innovation. Many of these presses also take a particularly chorographic approach to their content through their interest in the small and the particular, the local, and the natural. In many ways, their publications become emblematic of the places they locate and present while doubling as a memory of that place at a particular point in time. This practice is continued today by other excellent presses, including Thomas and Laurie Clark’s Moschatel Press, Simon Cutt’s Coracle Press, Nicholas Johnson’s Etruscan Books, and Richard Skelton and Autumn Richardson’s Corbel Stone Press. Place, notably, was not only important to Finlay on the page; he was also known for his site-specific practices and his public sculptures, many of which relied as heavily on language as his printed objects. Finlay’s “avant-gardening” and sculptural poetic practices would culminate in his Little Sparta, the extensive gardens that surround his home in Stonypath, Dunsyre, Scotland. These gardens are marked by Finlay’s neoclassicist “concrete” poems, sculptures, and site-specific installations that draw together Finlay’s diverse passions and politics, and engage in a conversation with the place and the local, discussing and drawing attention to what is there, as well as what was there and things that have occurred there over time. By engaging in such practices of marking and deploying language as a means of drawing attention to phenomena at a particular site, similar to the way a sundial draws attention to the passage of time and to the earth’s movement, Finlay’s endeavours engage in a critical topographical discourse with Stonypath. The gardens at Little Sparta contain and are a record both of the place itself and of the things that took place there over the course of Finlay’s life. Consider, for example, Finlay’s Bring Back the Birch,20 a poem-object that calls for the now-absent birch tree to be returned. The stone recalls a tombstone in its vertical orientation, its pentagonal, steepled shape and its placement on the ground. It stands to mark an absence and to recall what once was. In this way it both acts as a marker of place and a holder of memory. It also performs poetically in its alliteration (“Bring,” “Back,” and “Birch”); in word length (Bring – 5 letters, Back – 4 letters, the – 3 letters, Birch – 5 letters) which loosely recalls the haiku; and in the availability of letters such that between the words “bring,” “back,” and “the” there are all the letters required to spell “birch.” While at first glimpse these assertions may seem a stretch, Finlay was known for his one-word and concrete poems, as well as poems that show the alphabet missing certain letters. One of his

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printed poems, wave/rock (1968),21 originally a poem-object in cut glass (1966), provides a solid example of Finlay’s poetic practice and the nature of Finlay’s relationship to words. wave/rock (1968) shows the collision and superimposition of two words, wave and rock, to suggest a third word: “wrack” (seaweed). As Finlay wrote in a letter to Emmett Williams in 1967, “The poem is ‘about’ two imposing forces, but being a poem presents them in equipoise, resolved.”22 To Finlay, a single word could be a poem, and the appearance of the word on the page or, more so, on a sculptural object, worked to explore the extent of our semiotic relationship with the word and the poem as needing to be “about” something. Finlay’s acute sense of place, both on the page and in the material world as well as his deep affinity for language were two critical contributions he made to the British School of Aesthetic Chorography. Over the course of his life, Finlay collaborated extensively with other artists and craftspeople, and was known for his prolific output. His collaborative spirit would also begin to build a network of artists, writers, and scholars who would be early contributors to this school and inspirational conduits to a second generation of artists working in the same milieu. These early contributors and collaborators include Thomas A. Clark, Gael Turnbull, and Simon Cutts. Through his collaborations, Finlay would also contribute to the rise in a particular kind of public sculpture, which, though more commercial in approach, remains highly connected to place, engaging with the natural and finding ways of enacting a kind of conservation or preservation through the work. We might consider the work of first-generation artist Peter Randall Page and second-generation artist Gordon Young in this regard. It is important to note that Finlay was not alone in harnessing his deeply rooted sense of place. We have traditionally understood the art of the Algonquin School as operating in the pictorial landscape mode, understood to veil nineteenth-century imperialist practices. That is arguable, however, when one takes into consideration their artistic production practices of accessing remote places on foot and creating records of that place en plein air with limited palettes on small pine boards. These small, in situ paintings, in their recording of a landscape that was rapidly changing due to forestry practices and urban sprawl, are in fact aesthetic chorographies. Rather than being viewed as operating strictly within the appropriative, pictorial landscape mode, these paintings could arguably be understood to be expressions of place, places that were loved and cared for by these artists through their ongoing engagement with them. That this expression of love for place, particularly the kinds of places celebrated by the Algonquin School’s paintings, has become engrained in the Canadian imaginary speaks to the profound conservationist power that aesthetic chorography can have.

Finlay, Fulton, Skelton, and the School of Aesthetic Chorography

The Second Generation The transition point between the first and second generations of the British School of Aesthetic Chorography is marked by the Common Ground Trust, a non-profit organization founded in 1983 by Sue Clifford, Angela King, and Clifford Deakin. Since then, the Common Ground Trust has been working productively for the conservation of local places. Open Air Production’s documentary on the Common Ground Trust,23 On Common Ground, aimed “to seek imaginative ways to engage people with their local environment” and invites viewers to rethink their relationship with the natural and material world around them. The Common Ground Trust is responsible for a number of publications that call for individuals to celebrate and protect the local distinctiveness of their areas, and for the commission and placement of public sculpture along public rights-of-way to encourage people to engage with their surroundings anew. We can see in the work of the trust many of the tendencies and values cultivated by the first generation of this school. We also see with the trust an expansion of these ideals and a extension of conservationist values to everyone, particularly through the education system at the elementary level. As a consequence, we now have a second generation of the British School of Aesthetic Chorography. This second generation of artists and creators was shown the local distinctiveness of the places that surround them and that those places are deep enough and rich enough to create a lifetime of work. It is possible to dwell and to create in one place. There is a wealth of possibilities right here. There is no need to go elsewhere. This increased attention to the local is a marked shift between the first and second generations of this school. Fulton, Long, and Goldsworthy all spent much of the early part of their careers engaging with places that weren’t home. Fulton has walked through over twenty-five countries, circumnavigating glaciers and ascending to the top of Mt Everest. Long and Goldsworthy have similarly performed their respective practices at sites around the world. Goldsworthy’s Nova Scotia Icicle (2001) was created during a residency in Nova Scotia, Canada, as a response to the meandering forms he saw the rivers taking as he flew over the province.24 Long’s Papers of River Muds (1990) collected mud from rivers around the world and used them to make “papers” that were collated into an artist’s book, published by Lapis Press.25 Contrarily, we can see immediately in the work of second-generation aesthetic chorographic artists a deepening interest in the poignancy of the chōros, as this place right here, experienced by me. In this, the size and number of the places explored by one artist decreases while the engagement at a singular site simultaneously deepens. This can be seen in the work of Alec Finlay, son of Ian Hamilton Finlay. The 2016 residency he undertook in Cairngorm National Park, located just a couple hours north of where Finlay grew up in Stonypath, looked at “the role that place-names have in shaping our connection and understanding of … landscapes.”26 This residency culminated

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in a series of multimedia projects, including a blog, manifesto posters, a short film, maps, a book (jointly published by Common Ground Trust and Trees for Life), and a series of photographs of handmade luggage tags that were used to both mark places and suggest the ways in which the place name deepens our understanding of human and ecological history at that site. Finlay’s residency brought history, folklore, linguistics, culture, and ecology to bear on a single site. This deep approach to a singular place resulting in a multimedia creation is characteristic of Finlay’s aesthetic chorographic process. Second-generation artists associated with this school are also known for their active engagement in collaborations with the first generation, as well as their expansion into new media, including music and videography, and their engagement with topics such as alterity, what the Centre for Alterity Studies terms “non-human otherness.”27 There is also an increased interest in narrative and what is loosely termed “nature writing” or “geo-humanities” which cultivates a poetics of place. Artists of this generation include the likes of Richard Skelton, Autumn Richardson, Alec Finlay, Robert MacFarlane, Helen MacDonald, and many others who are actively creating works of literature, poetry, music, and art that retain many of the same characteristics as those in the first generation. These second-generation artists, writers, and poets have also introduced a new central theme to the school: loss. Working through various kinds of loss – the loss of language, memory, place, or a loved one – informs and drives in many ways the work produced by these artists, writers, musicians, and poets. Among the first-generation artists, there was a sense of wonder at the world that surrounds us and a finding of ways of expressing and sharing that wonder in nature, the land, place, and its processes whilst moving through and exploring it. Yet the second generation brings a conservationist and preservationist imperative to their work. This shift toward a conservationist mode among the second-generation artists, in many ways, has been informed by the work of the Common Ground Trust, on the one side, and the less productive influence of the declaration of environmental crisis, on the other. Loss as a theme in the work of these second-generation artists is accompanied by an increased fascination with the concepts of home, belonging, and memory. We might consider the work of Richard Skelton as one example of how this second generation of aesthetic chorographic artists have drawn on and extended existing traditions of this school while allowing themselves to become increasingly steeped in a handful of places. Skelton and his partner, Autumn Richardson, maintain the paradigm of the small independent art press in their Corbel Stone Press; they extend the media scope of the school into the auditory, creating esoteric soundscapes that hold in resonant tones the undulations and capacious weight of the landscapes they inhabit wholly. Skelton’s Limnology (2012)28 is an edition of concrete poetry that explores the phenomenon of waterways. For this volume, Skelton draws on the dead and dying languages used throughout history in the British Isles, collecting and pre-

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serving a host of inland “water” words, from the Icelandic á for “a river” to the Welsh ystre meaning “line, string, row, series, stream; ford; limit, boundary; battle.” Skelton then uses these words, interspersed with English meditations and poetics, to show the flow of water from the source to the sea both visually and poetically. His predominantly free-verse English poetry, which structurally takes on the meandering forms of a river or the delicate trickle, one letter at a time, of a tiny stream, is interspersed with pages that are thick with dead and dying words for the river and the ways in which it moves and engages with the world around it. The words shiver across the page in a verbal-visual current, suggestive of what they are trying to say but cannot. In using languages that most have forgotten, and by layering letters hard upon one another, not unlike Finlay’s wave/rock (1968), Skelton captures the sublinguistic communications that happen between humans and natural phenomena. We don’t need a word to know the water, but there is also so much that the water knows but cannot say. As a phenomenon that is living but not alive, the river has a memory that is older than humanity. It writes itself into the land in a language that humans cannot understand, for its inscription is out of scale, both in time and in place, with human understandings of these concepts. Skelton’s Limnology (2012) is also accompanied by an audio cd of the same name. It holds the music he composed to accompany his poetry. The piece is twenty-nine 3.3 An image of one of Richard Skelton’s poetic objects from his Lim nology(Cumbria, UK: Corbel Stone Press, 2012).

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minutes in length and builds in a crescendo of chaotic, whirling, and churning sounds that are predominantly string- and percussion-driven, increasing in speed and layered complexity to the one-third mark, where the chaos at once comes together and slows slightly, though we remain aware of the complexity bubbling just beyond the audible. There is a haunting, otherworldly quality to the piece, an echoey call that builds and recedes only to repeat again a few moments later. In the piece you can hear the currents, the rise and the fall, the multitude of ways the topography affects the journey of water through various waterways to meet the ocean. The rhythmic chaos that is Skelton’s Limnology, both on the page and acoustically, speaks to the deep connection that Skelton developed with Cumbria, where he lived at the time. The county of Cumbria is where one will find England’s famous Lake District, known especially for its exquisite topography and waterways. This magical place boasts the highest peaks and the deepest lakes in England. The rolling fells and the unique ecologies that occur in the Lake District are made all the more special by the presence of ancient woodlands and a wide range of species that are found nowhere else in the UK. Water is what carved out the landscape here and what continues to connect and support the unique biodiversity. Skelton’s poetry suggests this, picking up on the ways in which water moves some things while leaving others behind. The letters and words are the alluvium, parts of the whole that are available to thought and memory, even though the bulk has been washed out to the sea of forgetting.

Conclusion What has been presented above is a loose reframing of the British land-oriented art practices of the last sixty years. British land-oriented art practices were not derivative of American innovations; rather they were an organic reconfiguring of themes, trends, and traditions that have had a long representation in the cultures and languages of the British Isles. This essay opened with a quotation from Helen MacDonald’s heartbreaking and joyous memoir H Is for Hawk, in which she trains a goshawk as a means of working through the grief of her father’s sudden passing. The text explores the themes of home, belonging, place, nature, the wilderness, community, and loss. Macdonald, in her grief, becomes wilder and more unsettled than the hawk, and it is through connections to place that she is able to find stability and peace. In this quotation we see landscape presented anew and the form that it takes in the careful hands of the aesthetic chorographer. Landscape is no longer about the ownership of place through commerce or birth; it is no longer about ownership at all. Landscape instead becomes about presence, attention, and the deep knowledge of what goes on at a place that extends beyond the human. What gives Helen the right to be present in that spot is

Finlay, Fulton, Skelton, and the School of Aesthetic Chorography

not a legal document; it is the special attention that she has paid to the place and the almost ritualized walking and observation that has taken place throughout her ongoing engagement with the place. We can see these themes and practices in the work of the artists mentioned above. Aesthetic chorographers continue to find new and exciting ways of articulating and sharing their place, their “right here,” with the world. Their work however also is beginning to change the meaning of place. It moves us away from the traditional topographic and geographic representations of place and space, approaches which inherently invite mercantile conversations about property, ownership, and borders. The work of the aesthetic chorographer presents the relationship with place as symbiotic, derived from experience and time, and devoted to a place and the connection that comes about as a result of the care and attention paid to both the natural and the human elements of place.

Notes 1 Helen Macdonald, H Is for Hawk (London: Penguin, 2016), 239–40. 2 W.J.T. Mitchell, Landscape and Power, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 5. 3 Jonathan Bordo, “Picture and Witness at the Site of Wilderness,” in Mitchell, Landscape and Power, 297. 4 Ibid., 297. 5 Marianne Stockebrand, Art in the Landscape (Marfa, tx: Chinati Foundation, 2000), 119. 6 Wallace Stevens, “The Anecdote of the Jar,” in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, ed. Wallace Stevens. (New York: Knopf, 1990), 76. 7 Stockebrand, Art in the Landscape, 119–20. 8 Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1987), 43–56. 9 Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood (1967),” in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 148–72. 10 Jonathan Bordo, “History Lessons: Imitation, Work and the Temporality of Contemporary Art,” Art History 31, no. 4 (2014): 806–25. 11 Robert Smithson, “Spiral Jetty,” Dia, accessed 1 September 2021, www.diaart.org/visit/visit-ourlocations-sites/robert-smithson-spiral-jetty. 12 Skystone Foundation, “About,” Roden Crater, accessed 1 September 2021, http://rodencrater. com/about/. 13 M.H. Miller, “James Turrell Allowing Limited Visitors to Roden Crater for $6,500 a Person,” artnews, 19 February 2015, www.artnews.com/art-news/news/james-turrell-allowing-limitedvisitors-to-roden-crater-for-6500-a-person-3634/. 14 Stockebrand, Art in the Landscape, 120. 15 Southbank Centre, Uncommon Ground: Land Art in Britain 1966–1979 (London: Hayward, 2013).

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16 Southbank Centre, “Uncommon Ground: Land Art in Britiain in 1966–1979 Education Information Pack,” accessed 1 September 2021, www.artscouncilcollection.org.uk/sites/default/files/ Uncommon%20Ground%20-%20Education%20Pack.pdf. 17 Yves Abrioux, Ian Hamilton Finlay: A Visual Primer (London: Reaktion Books 1992), xi. 18 A poem carved into an object designed to be set in an environment/place, therein entering into a linguistic and sculptural discourse with the place for which it was designed and placed. 19 Abrioux, Ian Hamilton Finlay, 2. 20 Ian Hamilton Finlay, Bring Back the Birch (Stonypath) (Dunsyre, UK: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1984). 21 Ian Hamilton Finlay, wave/rock (Dunsyre, UK: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1968). 22 Alec Finlay, Ian Hamilton Finlay: Selections (London: University of California Press, 2012), 28. 23 Open Air, On Common Ground (London: Open Air Productions, 1993). 24 See Thomas Riedelsheime, dir., Rivers and Tides (Germany: Mediopolis Film, 2001), on Andy Goldsworthy. 25 Richard Long, Papers of River Muds (Culver City, ca: Lapis Press, 1990). 26 Common Ground Trust, “A World among Wolves,” Common Ground, accessed 1 September 2021, www.commonground.org.uk/a-wolf-among-wolves/. 27 “Information,” Centre for Alterity Studies, accessed 1 September 2021, www.alteritystudies.org. 28 Richard Skelton, Limnology (Cumbria, UK: Corbel Stone Press, 2012).

The Quiet Zone and the Myth of the Virtual Daniel Froidevaux and Elisa Gonzalez

The National Radio Quiet Zone covers a remote region of West Virginia and is home to the world’s largest steerable radio telescope. Initially established by the US government to protect the observatory from terrestrial radio frequencies, the quiet zone is now attracting a growing community of people who identify as electrically sensitive (es). This unique environment is both a centre for scientific inquiry and a growing refuge for those looking to escape the effects of technological progress. The Quiet Zone is an evolving experimental documentary project (consisting of an audio-video installation and a medium-length film) that contemplates the tenuous connection between the telescope and a community attempting to minimize the pervasive influence of communications technology on their lives. Following three “electrosensitives” as they adapt to a new life in the quiet zone, the project shifts between the narratives of these individuals and a formal cinematic depiction of the Green Bank telescope, drawing a subtle parallel between them. The project is conceptualized around the problem of making the invisible visible, taking inspiration from the unseen force of electromagnetism that lies at the centre of our story. Both the telescope and the es community are acutely sensitive to electromagnetic fields (emfs). Electrical sensitivity is a medical condition that remains clouded by debate, and most research conducted on the disorder can find no evidence of a direct causal connection between the reported symptoms associated with es and exposure to emfs. The structure and form of our project is designed to reflect this uncertainty. We are not interested in the scientific validity of the illness; instead, our focus is on the subjective accounts of the electro-sensitives that we document. We believe their decision to move to the quiet zone can be read as an act of political opposition to the proliferation of communications infrastructure and an opportunity to contemplate the radical impact of wireless technology on culture. The project explores the idea of illness largely by leaving out a discussion of its source. Stories from extended interviews with es subjects are used to form a minimal narrative for each individual, but the high-frequency cellular and WiFi transmissions they believe cause their disorder are treated as aporia: a thing that makes itself known by its absence. In the same way that the astronomers at the Green Bank telescope can detect the presence of a black hole by an absence of radiation, we encounter the presence of high-frequency emf transmissions by their absence. To be more specific, our encounter with a vast array of emfs is suggested by the use of sound recordings

Daniel Froidevaux and Elisa Gonzalez

on and around the telescope, and in moments mediated by instrumentation such as computer monitors and field-recording devices used to detect abnormal signals. The soundscape for both the film and installation was created using induction microphones that are capable of recording emfs when applied in close proximity to a signal. Thus, we were able to suggest something of the emf environment without actually making it visible. This minimal and abstract soundscape creates an aural framework for the film, providing a continuity that reminds us of the absent presence of emfs. The aesthetic of both the film and installation oscillates between the intimacy of the scenes filmed with the electro-sensitives and the stark formal depiction of the telescope. Members of the community are filmed using hand-held camera to capture a sense of unease that parallels the anxiety they experience. In contrast, the telescope and observatory are filmed with a static camera, limiting movement in favour of strong framing that highlights the astounding otherworldly architecture of the telescope. Workers on the telescope are filmed from behind or obscured by machinery to emphasize the importance of the technology itself, presenting the telescope as a subject to be portrayed and investigated. The order in which footage from the telescope and its control room are presented simulates the path of radio waves as they enter the parabolic dish of the telescope and are reflected, received, and transmitted from analog signal to digital code. This exemplifies our desire to pair content – in this case, the actual path of radio waves – with form, or how the images are sequenced in the film. Finally, The Quiet Zone is a film about place, and so scattered throughout the film are sequences that depict the social and physical landscape in and around Green Bank. Music from the local community centre, and the Allegheny Mountain Radio station are heard over montages that represent the seemingly idyllic rural lifestyle of the locals. Depictions of nature are used to ground the film, while also reflecting both visually and sonically on the idea of quiet. The decision to follow an experimental aesthetic and formal structure comes from our desire to challenge more traditional media depictions of the es community that treat them as a banal human-interest story – imagine a place with no cell phone reception. Taking our cues from more recent documentary work that draws from both experimental and documentary traditions, we are also interested in a reinvestigation of the formal possibilities of documentary. In an interview following a screening of his film Leviathan, noted filmmaker, scholar, and head of Harvard University’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, Lucien Castaing-Taylor argues that “it’s unfortunate that documentarians … often don’t see any reason to engage with so-called ‘experimental’ or ‘avant-garde’ traditions, and on the flip side, a category like ‘experimental’ implicitly sets itself off against a domain that is thereby defined as non-experimental, as if documentarians just follow the rules and regulations of a genre by rote.”1

The Quiet Zone and the Myth of the Virtual

This idea has led us to explore and experiment with structure. We have come to see narrative as a formal quality of documentary that can be employed to suggest an abstract concept: in our case, the idea that there is a deep connection between the sensitivity of the telescope and the sensitivity of the es community that tells us something about the electromagnetic environment which we otherwise could not represent in a more traditional documentary mode. There is also a political dimension that we see in their story that ties together a politics of place that is often overlooked in discussions about contemporary communications. Too often the space of the internet is described as a virtual realm with no physical presence. The term implies that the internet somehow exists in an ontological vacuum, abstracted from real-world political considerations. What the virtual designation conveniently omits is that the politics of communications networks is one that is played out on the landscape. There is, in fact, a very real contest for the conquest of both the visible landscape and invisible dominion of the electromagnetic spectrum by private enterprise in concert with the corporatist state. What we communicate, how we communicate, who profits from it, and who is in control of data traffic, as well as the massive proliferation of surveillance, is all linked to how the production of the internet is played out on the environment. What the story of the Quiet Zone highlights is that the virtual is a myth that we’ve inherited from early discourse about the internet. In a utopian version of this story, it’s the place a truly democratic society can emerge; while a more critical view asserts that this space is deeply flawed, resulting in all kinds of social, cultural, and political problems as it detracts from our experience of the real. But both versions of this story maintain that the internet is not a part of our shared landscape. We believe that the es community’s decision to abstain from participating in wireless communications must be read as political resistance and not solely as a contentious health issue. Indeed, electro-sensitives are active and politically organized in their opposition to the largely unquestioned proliferation and encroachment of wireless communication infrastructure. Given the widespread dissemination of information regarding the mass surveillance of citizens by both the state and private enterprise, it’s amazing that the es community is so often cast as group of paranoid conspiracy theorists. Perhaps this designation serves as a convenient strategy of avoidance for those unwilling to engage in the ongoing political battle over control of the internet. Perhaps the Quiet Zone is a place of resistance, and quiet itself, a condition for revolutionary thought and action.

Note 1 L. Castaing-Taylor, “nyff Press Conference: Leviathan (Interview at Lincoln Film Center),” 30 September 2012, YouTube video, 37:15, www.youtube.com/watch?v=clOCqCIt-vE.

Plate 1 Melissa and Jennifer – Melissa Chalmers and Jennifer Wood (who identify as electro-sensitives) overlook the valley that houses the Green Bank Telescope in the heart of the National Radio Quiet Zone, West Virginia.

Plate 2 Green Bank Telescope Parabolic Dish – Mike Holstine (NRAO business manager) walks onto the 2.3-acre dish of the Green Bank Telescope. The GBT is so sensitive it can detect the energy “equivalent to a billionth of a billionth of a millionth of a watt … the energy given off by a single snowflake hitting the ground.”

Walk Texts Hamish Fulton

Plate 3 Coast to Coast Walks on the British Isles, 1971–2010.

Plate 4 Right Walking Slowly on the Condor’s Outline, 1972. Plate 5 Below Guided and Sherpa-Assisted Climbs of Three Small Mountains, 2009, nails and painted wood with pencil text, 9.5⬙ × 15.7⬙, Galerie Tschudi Zuoz, Switzerland. Plate 6 Opposite Kailash Kora, 2007.

Plate 7 Kailash, 2011.

Plate 8 Tree Boulder, 2016.

The Anthropocene Project Edward Burtynsky

The Anthropocene Project is a multidisciplinary endeavour from the collective of Edward Burtynsky, Jennifer Baichwal, and Nick de Pencier. Composed of large-scale photographs, a feature documentary film, video installations, and augmented reality installations, this project takes as its starting point the research of an international group of scientists, the Anthropocene Working Group (awg), who are making a case to formally change the name of our present geological epoch in recognition of lasting human changes to the earth’s system. The Anthropocene Project will be anchored by approximately thirty-five photographs on themes of the human signature, such as extraction, the effects of climate change, and terraforming of the earth from locations as diverse as Nigeria, Canada, Indonesia, China, Australia, and Germany.

NIGERIA OIL BUNKERING Seventy per cent of the Nigerian government’s revenue is tied up in the oil resources of the Niger Delta, with petroleum products making up 90 per cent of all export revenues for the country.1 Since the discovery of oil in 1956, when the nation was still a British protectorate, the resource has proved both a blessing and a curse.2 For decades, multinationals have abdicated responsibility for devastating oils spills on land and water. Despite gaining independence in October of 1960, much of Nigeria’s oil wealth continues to be diverted outside the country. As a result, poor communities have begun pirating crude oil from pipelines – often with the support of benefiting local elites and politicians – in a process known as “bunkering.”3 Tapping into pipelines, makeshift microrefineries are set up on a temporary or semi-permanent basis to turn the crude into low-grade fuel. Highly dangerous, these systems – and the broken pipelines that feed them – leak volumes of crude oil and toxic byproducts into the surrounding forests and waterways. Some government-commissioned estimates suggest that two hundred and fifty thousand barrels are stolen every day, but accurate figures are unknown.4 To build and access the pipelines, large areas of ancient forest are opened up through logging and burning.

Plate 9 Oil Bunkering #1, 2016, photograph, Niger Delta, Nigeria.

Notes 1 “Nigeria – Executive Summary,” export.gov, accessed 4 April 2018, www.export.gov/apex/ article2?id=Nigeria-Executive-Summary. 2 Adam Vaughn, “Oil in Nigeria: A History of Spills, Fines and Fights for Rights,” Guardian, 4 August 2011, www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/aug/04/oil-nigeria-spills-fines-fights. 3 “Crude Politics: A Broken Oil Industry Is the Source of Many Woes,” Economist, 28 March 2015, www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2015/03/28/crude-politics. 4 Adam Nossiter, “As Oil Thieves Bleed Nigeria, Report Says, Officials Profit,” New York Times, 19 September 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/09/20/world/africa/nigerias-politicians-profit-fromindustrial-scale-oil-theft-report-says.html.

Plate 10 Oil Bunkering #2, 2016, photograph, Niger Delta, Nigeria.

Plate 11 Oil Bunkering #4, 2016, photograph, Niger Delta, Nigeria.

Plate 12 Right Oil Bunkering #5, 2016, photograph, Niger Delta, Nigeria. Plate 13 Below Saw Mills #1, 2016, photograph, Lagos, Nigeria.

The Chornobyl Exclusion Zone David McMillan

I first photographed the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone in 1994. Within its millions of acres, there are fields left to lie fallow and cities and villages where the vestiges of the defunct Soviet Empire and the everyday remnants of the lives of the former citizenry remain. I’ve photographed almost exclusively within the city of Prypiat, in northern Ukraine. Once home to forty-five thousand people, it was built to house the workers from the nuclear power plant, and several apartments were still under construction at the time of the accident. The city was considered one of the finest places to live in the former Soviet Union, with many schools, kindergartens, playgrounds, hospitals, and cultural facilities, but it will never be lived in again. Within this area, virtually untouched by civilization since the 1986 accident, there have been dramatic changes that have become the subject of my photographs, particularly the proliferation of nature and the deterioration of the built environment. Plate 14 View of the Nuclear Power Plant from Prypiat Rooftop, 1994.

Plate 15 Right View of the Nuclear Power Plant from Prypiat Rooftop, 2016. Plate 16 Below Blue School Gymnasium, Prypiat, 2003.

Plate 17 Left Flags in Kindergarten Stairwell, Prypiat, 1994. Plate 18 Below Flags in Kindergarten Stairwell, Prypiat, 2016.

Plate 19 Right Kindergarten Floor, Prypiat, 2006. Plate 20 Below Red Floor, School, Prypiat, 2004.

Plate 21 View of Forest, Prypiat Dental Hospital, 2012.

Rooting in the Ashes Katy McCormick

Trees are some of the earth’s oldest living creatures, marking time in decades, hundreds, and thousands of years. Bridging earth and sky, they tower above us in the light and air, and they tunnel below us in the dark earth. We rely on them to clean our air and to provide food, shade, and shelter; they remind us that we belong to an interconnected ecosystem. Scientists have even theorized that proximity to trees increases our happiness. In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, above all else, trees signify peace. As the last generation of hibakusha (“explosion-affected people”) of Hiroshima and Nagasaki pass on their stories, silent witnesses – the hibakujumoku or A-bombed trees – still stand. Living in school yards, temple grounds, and city squares, these trees, like countless non-combatant humans and animals, were subjected to the devastating impacts of the atomic bombs. Lovingly tended, the hibakujumoku are “living memorials” rooted among the ashes of destroyed neighbourhoods and lost lives. Some, like the five-hundredyear-old twin camphor trees at Sanno Shinto Shrine in Nagasaki, remind us of our insignificance, while others, like the plane trees at Tenma Elementary School in Hiroshima, remind us of the indiscriminate killing of children in the attacks. Predicated on embodied witnessing, my work portrays the trees as venerated individuals with palpable vitality. Each is a survivor of a human-engineered split-second attack on all life, a high-stakes gamble whose consequences have dangerously multiplied with the development of hydrogen bombs. Working as an empathetic outsider, I aim to bring Hiroshima and Nagasaki into the present by imaging the persistence of life in the face of total destruction. In the wake of nuclear holocausts, the A-bombed trees returned from blackened trunks, giving survivors hope for a second chance; my images emphasize the tenacity of life, urging hope for a post-nuclear future.

Plate 22 Opposite Giant Pussy Willow, Hiroshima Castle, 770 metres from the hypocenter, inkjet print on bamboo paper, 48⬙ × 36⬙, 2019.

Plate 23 Twin Camphors, Sanno Shrine, Nagasaki, 800 metres from the hypocenter, inkjet print on bamboo paper, 48⬙ × 36⬙, 2018.

Plate 24 Camphor, Misasa Elementary School, Hiroshima, 1850 metres from the hypocenter, inkjet print on bamboo paper, 48⬙ × 36⬙, 2017.

Plate 25 Yoshino Cherry, Yasuda Girls High School, Hiroshima, 2110 metres from the hypocenter, inkjet print on bamboo paper, 48⬙ × 36⬙, 2019.

Plate 26 Plane No. 1, Tenma Elementary School, Hiroshima, 1,270 metres from the hypocenter, inkjet print on bamboo paper, 48⬙ × 36⬙, 2017.

Plate 27 Camphor, Yamazato Primary School, Nagasaki, 600 metres from the hypocenter, inkjet print on bamboo paper, 48⬙ × 36⬙, 2017.

X Marks the Spot Robert Del Tredici

Icon of a new era, the Bomb is the guardian we cannot live without – while promising to kill us faster than a heart attack even as it obliges us to babysit its wastes for more millennia than we are able to count. The Bomb exists in a zone between reality and hallucination. Undeniably real, it is more dynamic than we understand, goes deeper than we know, costs more than we can tally – and remains culturally invisible. I sometimes sense that the Bomb has been watching us more than we have been able to watch it. Its uncanny presence among us warps our sense of horizontal space and vertical time, of and place and distance; of fire, water, earth, and sky; and of our dna, of our death, and of our destiny. With euphoria and denial in tow, we base our core sense of well-being on the hope that the Bomb’s Long-Time Hair-Trigger Bluff will prevail over all challenges and mishaps until the crack of doom. It has not been easy to get a grip on such a psycho-material object. So, I settled on going to X marks the spot in the nuclear age. I began with Hiroshima. Its A-bomb survivors imparted three insights: 1) if you weren’t there when the Bomb fell, you can have no idea of what went on; 2) this must never happen again to anyone for any reason; and 3) nuclear weapons and human beings cannot coexist. After Hiroshima I tracked down all twelve H-bomb factories in the usa and visited uranium mines in the Canadian North; nuclear test sites in Nevada and Semipalatinsk; and in a Moscow apartment captured the Face of the Cold War. I am currently documenting the town of Port Hope, Ontario (pop. 17,000), site of the world’s oldest and largest uranium refinery, going strong as a uranium finishing plant, having moved its refining to the town of Blind River, Ontario (pop. 3,500). Nuclear places are rich in mystery and history, meaning and emptiness. I consider them, reluctantly, sacred sites – Home Grounds of an irreversible era, our Square Zeros, our undying No Man’s Lands. I talk about them often. And sometimes they speak to me.

Plate 28 Right Hiroshima Buddha was melted by the heat from the atomic bomb on 6 August 1945. Hiroshima Peace Museum, 13 November 1984. Plate 29 Below Plutonium Production Reactor irradiates depleted uranium, transforming it into weapons-grade plutonium. It is one of five such reactors at this site. Savannah River Site, South Carolina, 6 August 1983.

Plate 30 The World’s First Uranium Mine – Dene native Joe Blondin oversees disintegrating ore-sacks at the Port Radium Mine, which provided uranium for the first atomic bombs. Great Bear Lake, NWT, Just beneath the Arctic Circle, 26 October 1997.

Plate 31 The N Tunnel was used for underground nuclear testing. Nevada Test Site, Nye County, Nevada, 29 October 1984.

Plate 32 Yuily B. Khariton built the Soviet Union’s first atomic bomb and helped develop the Soviet H-bomb. He was three times decorated by Stalin as a Hero of Soviet Labor. Moscow, 12 June 1994.

Plate 33 Above Test Stop Kazakhstan Kazahks protest Soviet nuclear testing on a hill overlooking the Semipalatinsk Test Site. Karoul, Kazakhstan, 11 August 1991. Plate 34 Left Port Hope Uranium Finishing Plant began as a radium refinery in 1932, then became a uranium refinery that provided uranium to the US Bomb program for two decades. Port Hope, pop. 18,000, on the shore of Lake Ontario, 22 May 2010.

Plate 35 Protest at Three Mile Island – Mother and day-care operator Joyce Corradi voices her objection to the nuclear industry’s plan to clean up the town’s ruined reactor by releasing radioactive gas into the air around her town. Liberty Fire Hall, Middletown, Pennsylvania, 19 March 1980.

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The “Art of Walking” according to the Puritans Jason LaFountain

Before the walks of William Wordsworth or the flâneur, before the engagements of the Surrealists, the Situationist International, Arte Povera, Fluxus, or the experiments in walking of artists such as Richard Long, Hamish Fulton, and Francis Alÿs, there was a Puritan “art of walking.”1 In this paper, I introduce this art and explicate the appeal walking held for English and American Puritan practical theologians, who were also Puritanism’s primary art theorists. Writings on the art of walking are part of a larger body of Puritan literature that defines godly practice as the “art of living.” Expounding on numerous walking-related passages in the Old and New Testaments, regarding the walks of Noah, Enoch, David, Christ, Paul, and others, writers such as the Caroline Puritan Robert Bolton theorize the art of living as an art of walking. In a 1626 treatise, Some Generall Directions for a Comfortable Walking with God, Bolton writes, “Let us infinitely loue, and learne exactly the most sweete and heauenly Art of walking with God!”2 The art of walking is called “exact walking,” “circumspect walking,” and “worthy walking.”3 It is also termed “precise walking,” “strai(gh)t walking,” “walking like Christ,” “walking in the Word,” and “walking in God’s statutes.” Puritan writers from John Preston to Thomas Taylor to Nathanael Vincent and beyond into New England Puritanism take up the subject. In 1728 Benjamin Colman composed a funeral sermon for Cotton Mather titled The Holy Walk, wherein he describes Mather as a Puritan Enoch.4 Just five years earlier Mather had published a funeral sermon “characterizing” Joseph Belcher as a Noah-like walker.5 The art of walking, while not fully dissociated from corporeal literalism and what we might call “actual” walking, is mainly a metaphorical art. The art of walking dematerializes its Puritan practitioner, even as it partly materializes, or images, a physically absent Christ. As for the various modern and contemporary figures I have mentioned, the Puritan focus on pedestrianism serves as a strategy for destroying the boundary between a bracketed or elevated sphere (of art, or of heaven – the source of Puritan

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art) and the practice of everyday life. It is a solution to the problem of sin, a Christian variation on the saying of Diogenes: “Solvitur ambulando” (It is solved by walking). The theologian Robert Banks has pointed out that the apostle Paul’s “most characteristic way of talking about the Christian life is as a ‘walk.’ [Paul] does this on 32 occasions in his writings.”6 He draws on Old Testament passages in which life or good practice is described as “going,” “travelling,” “progress,” or “increase” (hālak in Hebrew).7 Banks also notes that “the Dead Sea Scrolls contain many references to holy and unholy behaviour in which the terminology of walking is present.”8 No doubt Paul’s abundant walking in the course of his ministries was a major source of his interest in the metaphor.9 Paul emphasizes process over destination, underlining the necessity of everydayness in godly walking.10 As described in Romans 13:13, this walking is “behaving becomingly”; “becoming” is associated here with both beauty and progress.11 Although Paul insists on walking as metaphorical, in line with a Christian typological investment in New Testament anti-literalism, Banks rightly acknowledges that “traces of the literal meaning of the term π π [peripatein] 12 … survive in his metaphorical use of it.” Before turning to the Puritan theorization of the art of living as an art of walking, I will first provide a brief introduction to their discourse of the art of living more generally. Building on patristic writings and anticipated in the pre-Reformation-era literature of heretical groups such as the English Lollards, the French reformer John Calvin advanced an iconoclastic theory of Protestant people as “living images” in relation to practices such as ministerial preaching and the sacraments of baptism and communion. Defined in opposition to “mere,” “dead,” “manmade,” “material” pictures, Calvin understood godly Christians to be lively pictures of God or Christ.13 Later Calvinists, including the Puritans, would extend Calvin’s image theory. In a 1601 tract, A Warning Against the Idolatrie of the Last Times, the Elizabethan Puritan William Perkins writes, “Man is a liuing image of God, made by the very hand of God: and in this respect a thousand fold more excellent then all Images made by the hand of man.”14 Almost a hundred years later, the American Puritan Cotton Mather remained aligned with Perkins in thinking about images. In the appendix to his 1698 funeral sermon on John Baily, A Good Man Making a Good End, Cotton writes, “The Images of the Lord jesus christ on the Wall, are not Agreeable unto a well instructed Christian. But instead of that, the Christian would fain have an Image of the Lord Jesus Christ, in the Dispositions of his own Heart & Life.”15 English and American Puritans wed their conceptualization of eupraxia (defined as “the idea of the art of good practice”) to Calvin’s image theory. The most important account of eupraxia in Puritanism can be found in the English divine William Ames’s Latin treatise Technometria of 1633.16 Technometria means “measure” or “survey of art,” and in Ames’s system, practices of material-making such as painting and sculpture are classed among “the less dignified arts.”17 The Puritan idea of good or godly living as art supersedes these other artistic practices. The art of living tempers

The “Art of Walking” according to the Puritans

the rejection of justification via good works in Calvinist culture; the theorization of “art work” in Puritanism supplies a bridge through which actions or works could signify within a religious culture to which the doctrine of election was also critical. As Puritan ministers commonly write, drawing on scriptural descriptions of the mechanics of Christian labor, the deity “works works” through believers who practise the art of living. The English Puritan Isaac Ambrose writes, “We are workers together with Christ.”18 Puritan image theory is linked to this discourse, so that their art and image theory are actually one and the same. The Puritan notion of life as a work of art is called the “art of living to God,” or “the art of living.” It is called “techné” and “the technology of divinity.” It is termed “the art of doing,” “the art of doing good,” “the art of arts,” “excellent art,” “spiritual art,” and “divine art.” Drawing on Aristotle’s theorization of eupraxia, writers refer to it as “the art of happiness.”19 Writers often refer to its practitioners as “artists.” These Puritan artists are also said to be “living images,” “lively images,” “living paintings,” “right images,” “pictures of God,” “pictures of Christ,” “true images,” “true portraits,” and even (as I will discuss) “divine Landskips.” This idea of art is theorized in comparison with other period art forms, including painting, sculpture, and drawing (all of which are defined as art beginning in the early modern period). The art of living is made available to us today primarily through printed texts, as well as some manuscripts. These texts describe the art and document the Puritan artists or living images who engaged in its practice. Thus, Puritan practical theology is in essence a philosophy of art. And Puritan biography is a history of art.20 “Thou canst neuer possibly be fitly qualified, either for the right vnderstanding, or sauing practice of this sacred and sweetest Art, of walking with god; except thou resolue, to stand for euer sincerely at the swords point against all sinne,” writes Robert Bolton, the Caroline Puritan with whom we began.21 As to other Puritan authors, “walking with god,” is to Bolton “sacred,” even the very “sweetest” form of artistry. To walk artfully is to follow in the footsteps of Christ and those who have imitated him through the art of living. As part of a lengthy tradition of Christian image theory in which poor persons are understood to be true images of Christ, in a 1657 publication titled The Saints Delight the London minister Thomas Watson terms the poor “walking pictures of Christ,” and he even recommends perambulating poor people as focuses for Puritan meditational practice.22 The historian of English Nonconformity N.H. Keeble has observed that it is perhaps surprising that early modern Protestants, including Puritans, were so invested in the pilgrimage as a model for Christian living, given that they rejected the literal practice of pilgrimage that had been and to some extent continued to be important in Roman Catholicism. They criticized literal pilgrimage as materially wasteful, suggesting that the money related to its practice and attendant image culture was better spent on social causes such as poor relief: giving money or other aid to the poor was, to Puritans, curating right images. Keeble

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argues that in early modern Protestantism metaphorical pilgrimage thrived as an iconoclastic critique and displacement of the literal pilgrimage.23 In this literature, it is not only the poor who are “walking pictures.” All godly Christians are aptly regarded as “walking pictures of Christ,” elected to displace the mere, material images created by those persons whom we usually label “artists.” In a sermon delivered before the House of Commons in 1642, Thomas Hill of Northampton describes the godly as “living, walking Pictures of Divine Truth.”24 In a 1660 discourse on the Beatitudes, Thomas Watson writes, “Gods children resemble him in meeknesse and holinesse; they are his walking pictures; As the seale stamps its print; and likenesse upon the Wax; so doth God stamp the print and effigies of his own beauty upon his children.”25 A few pages later Watson suggests that all Christians are poor, walking pictures: “The children of God are his walking pictures; and if we are of God, we love those who have his Effigies and Pourtraiture drawn upon their souls … If we are of God we love his children though they are poor; we love to see the image and picture of our father, though hung in never so poor a Frame.”26 This concept of the walking picture appears in Puritan practical theological literature throughout the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In a 1693 publication, Thomas Manton, a friend of Watson, directs readers to “Imitate Christ in his Holiness, which was a part of his Glory, and will be yours … Here we should be walking Pictures of Christ, that others may see the Face of Christ in us. Tread in his Steps. Live so holily, that if the Bible should be lost, it may be found again in our Holy Lives.”27 The Puritan art of walking is not so much an outright rejection as a reorganization of the terms of pilgrimage. The object of Catholic pilgrimage was typically a relic or miraculous cult image, the so-called acheiropoieton, or image not made with human hands. The walking picture is likewise an image not made with human hands: a divine and unconstructed image. But, and this is different, it is a picture with feet – the art of walking is art that emphasizes the foot over the hand. One of the main objects of traditional pilgrimage, the unconstructed image, is wed to the medium according to which pilgrimage is accomplished: walking. One of the great early modern bestsellers, and one of the most widely read books in late Puritanism, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress – first printed in 1678 and then expanded to two parts and constantly reprinted – is an allegory of life organized as a walk across a landscape, from the City of Destruction to the Heavenly Jerusalem. Its frontispiece includes Robert White’s well-known sleeping portrait of Bunyan down below, and Christian, the main character, walking up above. In the second part of the book, first published in 1684, Christian’s wife and children make the pilgrimage. One could certainly pursue an ambitious rereading of The Pilgrim’s Progress specifically in terms of the art of walking. As Christian walks he reads a book, a smallformat Gospel, and this is significant. His walking is a reading, and his reading is a walking (he reads print and in walking he “makes prints,” with the aim of conforming

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4.1 John Bunyan, ThePilgrim ’s Progress, 4th ed., 1680, frontispiece and title page. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC.

them to the printed text he holds). In Isaac Ambrose’s terms, Christian endeavours to “make the word and works face one another.”28 Like meditation and prayer, reading printed godly texts was central to the Puritan art of living. On his walk, Christian encounters many characters virtuous and vicious. The virtuous characters and his book are right patterns; thus, Goodwill and Sincere are pitted against the iniquity figured in characters like Mr Worldly Wiseman and Lord Hate-Good. The art of walking is standing, or not falling. But walking is also a moving medium, not standing still, rather progressing. It is growth in Christ, or what Puritans sometimes call “life multiplied.” For the Puritans the art of walking is an attempt to reconcile the boundaries between art and life even as it knocks them down. A give and take between a real world and a dreamed world undergirds the Puritan conceptualization of the art of living, and the art of walking. There is also a close relation between the art of walking and early modern Protestant definitions of meditation. In his important treatise on meditation, dating to the first decade of the seventeenth century, Bishop Joseph Hall, who was dubbed “the English Seneca,” recommends walking as among the most effective forms of meditation.29 As the Puritan divine Edmund Calamy would

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write in 1680, in a meditational manual inspired by Hall’s, “A man that is often in meditation, is often in Heaven, often walking with God and Christ.”30 A few later art-of-walking-related projects help to illuminate the appeal of the art of walking to Puritans. Henry David Thoreau’s famous essay titled “Walking,” first published in 1862, is, in many respects, an extension and augmentation of the art of walking according to the Puritans. New England transcendentalism owes much to New England Puritanism, and Thoreau is a remarkable interpreter of the Puritan tradition.31 Thoreau opens the essay by linking his idea of “the art of Walking” to the etymology of the verb “to saunter.” He writes, “The word is beautifully derived ‘from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going à la Sainte-Terrer,’ to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, ‘There goes a Sainte-Terrer,’ a Saunterer, – a Holy Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean.”32 Thoreau eventually provides a different account of the art of walking than the Puritans do, but not before arguing that all walkers, like the Puritan saints, are elect. He says of the art of walking: “It comes by the grace of God. It requires a direct dispensation from Heaven to become a walker. You must be born into the family of the Walkers. Ambulator nascitur, non fit [The walker is born, not made].”33 Thoreau’s idea of the walker as Holy Lander relates to a concept developed in the writings of some of the Puritan authors at which we have been looking. In a work called Autarkeia, or the Art of Divine Contentment, first printed in 1653, Thomas Watson writes that the “true Saint [is] a divine Land-skip or Picture, where all the rare beauties of Christ are lively pourtrayed and drawn forth.”34 This notion of the Puritan saint as landscape is peculiar. What does it mean for a person to be a landscape painting? (As used here, the term “Land-skip” refers specifically to the pictorial genre of landscape.) Although in some ways the literature on the art of walking emphasizes sight over site, the abstract and to some extent visually available walking picture, or divine Land-skip, is another kind of site – perhaps a “non-site” – to use artist Robert Smithson’s term. The experience of travel here is virtual, or what Smithson calls “a vast metaphor.”35 The walker/walking picture/divine Land-skip is conceived as a pictorial deposit of a holy land that Puritan believers will never literally visit. One text that inspired Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Symon Patrick’s Parable of the Pilgrim (1665), describes “spiritual progress as the only genuine pilgrimage,” and godly Christians as the only genuine sites/sights: “These are the Holy Places we desire to behold. A man dying unto sin, presents us with the fairest sight of Christs Sepulchre. It sets us upon Mount Olivet when we meet with a Soul of a Coelestial conversation.”36 We might also think about the godly Christian as divine Land-skip in light of Puritan writing on form – or rather writing against form. The Puritan artist is said to work in anti-formal form, and the living image’s forms are anti-formal. In early

4.2 Meindert Hobbema, Landscapewith aW ooded Road, 1662, oil on canvas, 42⬙ × 51.5⬙. Philadelphia Museum of Art: William L. Elkins Collection, 1924, Philadelphia.

modern England, landscape as a genre was defined as a depiction of the “interior parts” of a country.37 One imagines the early modern landscapist standing with his or her back to the sea. The resulting image was a picture of an interior. We can think of the anti-formal form of the Puritan artist/living image in similar terms. The antiformal Puritan is an artist inwardly directed, and as such he or she turns his or her back on the world at large. The living image’s imagistic inwardness becomes its own form of showing and its inward forms a new kind of pictorial exteriority at odds with externalization.38 The artful walker is not, as in a painting by the Dutch artist Meindert Hobbema, a subservient figure marking or traversing a dominating landscape. The formal Christian, whose practice is (to use Watson’s term) mere “bodily exercise,” is a staffage figure, subordinate to, existing in service of, a wider world.39 The artful walker is anti-staffage; he or she is insubordinate (to the world in which he or she has been positioned), rising up by the grace of God to become, him or herself, a part of something larger. The Puritan artist is not neatly framed but moves always outward, toward the framing edge. Perhaps not coincidentally, Thoreau also defines his Holy

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4.3 Francis Alÿs, ParadoxofPraxis1 (Som etim esDoing Som ething Leadsto Nothing), 1997, Mexico City, still from video documentation of an action, 5 min. © Francis Alÿs.

Lander as anti-staffage: “The landscape-painter uses the figures of men to mark a road. He would not make that use of my figure.”40 A project by the Belgian artist Francis Alÿs, Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes Doing Something Leads to Nothing), can further help us to think about the problem of form as it pertains to the Puritan theorization of the art of living as an art of walking. In this action, Alÿs moves a large block of ice through the streets of Mexico City (where he has lived and worked for many years) on a hot day. At first he pushes it with his entire body. Then as it becomes smaller he kicks the block, until it eventually melts and then disappears. The art of walking is described as melting, or becoming more fluid, in the literature of Puritan practical theology. Heated by the fire of God’s love, the godly Christian has a melted heart or a melted spirit.41 Like Alÿs’s action, the art of good practice liquidates the godly Christian’s icy sinfulness or formal qualities. With reference to the politics of Alÿs’s practice – this work is political in content, if not explicitly so – Mark Godfrey has suggested that for Alÿs “walking is a weapon.”42 It is likewise in Puritan art theory – recall Robert Bolton’s statement that the art of walking requires one “to stand for euer sincerely at the swords point against all sinne.” Alÿs has been compared to St Francis in his development of a latter-day form of world-weary walking as preaching.43 Puritans refer to sin as “sitting,” or as “walking contrary” to God or Christ. Sinners are, according to these writers, “all head and no feet.” The art of living is characterized, conversely, as “walking antipodes to sin.” It is following Christ, who is, in the words

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4.4 Richard Long, LineM adebyW alking, 1967, UK, photograph, gelatin silver print on paper and graphite on board, image: 14.8⬙ × 12.8⬙, framed: 24.5⬙ × 32.5⬙ × 1⬙. Tate: Purchased 1976. © 2021 Richard Long. All Rights Reserved, DACS, London/ARS, NY.

of Thomas Watson, the “map of perfection.”44 The art of living is, also in the words of Watson, “living in the world above the world.”45 (The word Land-skip takes on new meaning in relation to such a statement; one imagines the artful Puritan skipping above, or just plain skipping, the land.) Watson remarks, “Half of him is on this side and half is in the holy Land … tis hard to tell whether he be in the body, or out of the body.”46 The photograph reproduced in figure 4.4 documents the most famous of the early works of the British walking artist Richard Long, his “temporary sculpture” titled Line Made by Walking. Rudi Fuchs has compared this work to Kasimir Malevich’s Black Square of 1915 – “a painting which cancelled all previous art in one grand, abrupt statement of conviction,” writes Fuchs.47 Long himself makes similar claims about the inventiveness of his early production. He would probably be surprised to learn that several centuries earlier in England, Puritans were preoccupied with theorizing and practicing an art of walking.48 Whereas the literalism of Long’s walking art is at odds with the Puritan investment in metaphor, the Puritans and an artist such as Long have things in common, especially the iconoclasm of their walkingrelated practices. Like much early performance art, Line Made by Walking worked

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against commodification. It could not be owned, except as documentation. The form it took was the wearing away of the world.49 In Puritan religion, the straight line often serves as the figure of perfect practice. Near the beginning of The Pilgrim’s Progress, Bunyan relates a conversation between Christian and Good Will. Good Will explains to him the value of straightness: “Good Christian, come a little way with me, and I will teach thee about the way thou must go. Look before thee; dost thou see this narrow way? That is the way thou must go. It was cast up by the patriarchs, prophets, Christ, and his apostles, and it is as straight as a rule can make it.” Christian then asks, “Is there no turnings nor windings, by which a stranger may lose the way?” Good Will answers, “Yes, there are many ways butt down upon this; and they are crooked, and wide; but thus thou may’st distinguish the right from the wrong, that only being straight and narrow.”50 The world is portrayed as crooked, confusing, and labyrinthine in Puritan literature. The Puritan believer was in need of a schema to counter the muddle of the maze. Writing to former parishioners in England in 1632, the pastor Thomas Weld of Roxbury, Massachusetts, underlines the importance of “the rule” for the Puritan believer. He clarifies how the rule relates to self-perfection: “Conceive us not as if we went about to justify ourselves or dream of perfection, no God knows we think ourselves the poorest and unworthiest of all his servants justly else he might spew us out of his mouth [Rev. 3:16]. Only we desire to breathe after perfection and to know what is the rule and to walk in it.”51 In 1645, the minister Thomas Shepard of Cambridge, Massachusetts, writes of the inflexibility of “God’s rules”: “crook not God’s rules to the experience of men…but bring men unto rules, and try mens estates herein by that … attend the rule … stand or fall according to the rule.”52 Thus the artful Puritan “walks according to the rule.” Although good works could not guarantee salvation, good works were evidence of one’s being/having been elected. In Ephesians 2:10, Paul writes of the godly Christian: “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.” By conforming to the rule, one gained assurance of election. In relation to Old Testament accounts of virtuous behaviour, Puritan authors write of the “singularity” of the artful walker. “Singular” Puritan saints walk in close imitation of the footsteps of Christ, thereby becoming walking pictures of him. Their conformity to the metaphysical body of Christ disappears their materiality or subtracts their form. Comparing Christ to the vanishing point of a picture made in single-point perspective, Thomas Watson writes that Christ is “the centre where all the lines of his Fathers love do meet.”53 The art of living might be conjured as a Puritan who is simultaneously walking to and away from us, toward, in the words of Michel de Certeau, “the missing body” – the vanishing point – that is Christ.54

The “Art of Walking” according to the Puritans

Notes I would like to thank Jonathan Bordo and Blake Fitzpatrick for inviting me to speak at this thought-provoking conference. Thanks, too, to Jessica Becking and Anhiti Patnaik for their generous editorial assistance. 1 For informative accounts of walking in modern and contemporary art, see Nancy Forgione, “Everyday Life in Motion: The Art of Walking in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris,” Art Bulletin 87, no. 4 (December 2005): 664–87; Lori Waxman, “A Few Steps in a Revolution of Everyday Life: Walking with the Surrealists, the Situationist International, and Fluxus” (PhD. diss., New York University, 2010); Karen O’Rourke, Walking and Mapping: Artists as Cartographers (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 2013); and Lexi Lee Sullivan, Walking Sculpture, 1967–2015 (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 2015). 2 Robert Bolton, Some Generall Directions for a Comfortable Walking with God (London, 1626), 32–3. 3 See John Preston, Exact Walking, in Sermons Preached Before His Maiestie, and Upon Other Speciall Occasions (London, 1637); Thomas Taylor, Circumspect Walking (London, 1631); and Nathanael Vincent, Worthy Walking (London, 1671). 4 Benjamin Colman, The Holy Walk and Glorious Translation of Blessed Enoch (Boston, 1728). 5 See Cotton Mather, A Good Character. Or A Walk with God Characterized (Boston, 1723). 6 Robert Banks, “‘Walking’ as a Metaphor of the Christian Life: The Origins of a Significant Pauline Usage,” in Perspectives on Language and Text: Essays and Poems in Honor of Francis I. Andersen’s Sixtieth Birthday, July 28, 1985, ed. Edgar W. Conrad and Edward G. Newing (Winona Lake, in: Eisenbrauns, 1987), 303. 7 Ibid., 305. 8 Ibid., 306. 9 Ibid., 311–12. 10 Ibid., 309. 11 Ibid., 310. 12 Ibid., 312–13. 13 The Lollardy were iconoclastic and anti-materialistic English heretics who, in a variety of ways, anticipated the Protestant Reformation. On living versus dead images in Lollards, see Margaret Aston, “Lollards and Images,” in Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion (London: Hambledon Press, 1984), 135–92. For a discussion of Calvin’s related views about living versus dead images, see Randall C. Zachman, Image and Word in the Theology of John Calvin (Notre Dame, in: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). 14 William Perkins, A Warning Against the Idolatrie of the Last Times (Cambridge, 1601), 93. 15 Cotton Mather, A Good Man Making a Good End (Boston, 1698), 82. 16 See William Ames, Technometry, trans. Lee W. Gibbs (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979). 17 See Ames, Technometry, the ‘Chart of Technometry’ on pp. 34–35 and item 131 on page 118. 18 Isaac Ambrose, Media: The Middle Things (London, 1652), 163. 19 For more on the art of happiness, see Jason LaFountain, “Happiness as Puritan Art Object,”

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Jason LaFountain in Happiness or Its Absence in Art, ed. Ronit Milano and William L. Barcham (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 75–90.

20 For a more complete account of the art of living in Puritanism, see Jason David LaFountain, “The Puritan Art World” (PhD. diss., Harvard University, 2013). 21 Bolton, Some Generall Directions, 34–5. 22 Thomas Watson, The Saints Delight. To Which Is Annexed A Treatise of Meditation (London, 1657), 218. 23 N.H. Keeble, “‘To Be a Pilgrim’: Constructing the Protestant Life in Early Modern England,” in Pilgrimage: The English Experience from Becket to Bunyan, ed. Colin Morris and Peter Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 238–56. The Protestant concept of the figurative pilgrimage is a latter-day version of the mental pilgrimage as theorized during the Middle Ages. 24 Thomas Hill, The Trade of Truth Advanced (London, 1642), 16. 25 Thomas Watson, The Beatitudes, or A Discourse Upon Part of Christs Famous Sermon on the Mount (London, 1660), 300. Watson’s play on the “footprints” made by walking and pictorial “printing” seems significant. I discuss this more below. 26 Ibid., 307. 27 Thomas Manton, A Fourth Volume Containing One Hundred and Fifty Sermons on Several Texts of Scripture in Two Parts (London, 1693), 349. 28 Ambrose, Media, 163. 29 Joseph Hall, The Arte of Divine Meditation (London, 1607), 62–3. 30 Edmund Calamy, The Art of Divine Meditation (London, 1680), 100. One might compare Christian interest in walking meditation with practices of walking meditation in Buddhism. 31 On the Puritan literary tradition as a precursor to transcendentalism, see, e.g., Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 1975). 32 Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” in Henry David Thoreau: Collected Essays and Poems (New York: Library of America, 2001), 225. 33 Ibid., 226. 34 Thomas Watson, Autarkeia, or the Art of Divine Contentment (London, 1653), 12. 35 Robert Smithson, quoted in Alexander Nagel, Medieval Modern: Art Out of Time (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2012), 121. 36 Symon Patrick, quoted in Keeble, “‘To Be a Pilgrim,’” 244. Note that “spiritual progress as the only genuine pilgrimage” are Keeble’s words. 37 The first definition of “landscape” appearing in the Oxford English Dictionary describes it as a picture of “inland scenery, as distinguished from a sea picture, a portrait, etc.” 38 For more on anti-formal form in Puritanism, see chapter 4 in LaFountain, “Puritan Art World.” 39 Thomas Watson, “Epistle to the Reader,” in Saints Delight. 40 Thoreau, “Walking,” 231. The thematics of the critical topography conference helped me to better appreciate that the iconoclastic art of walking, with practitioners who are defined as divine landscapes, can be linked to the Puritan colonization of New England, itself an iconoclas-

The “Art of Walking” according to the Puritans tic procedure. The Puritan “right to land” can be tied to the idea of the godly Puritan as divine landscape, and the subjugation of the land and its Native American inhabitants tied to hierarchies rehearsed in their art and image theory, in the inversions of their practical theology. The divine landscape makes the world and its “worldly” inhabitants its staffage. On Puritanism and colonial land rights, see David Grayson Allen, “Vaccuum Domicilium: The Social and Cultural Landscape of Seventeenth-Century New England,” in New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century, ed. Jonathan L. Fairbanks and Robert F. Trent (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1982), 1:1–10. It also bears mentioning that two recent essays have analyzed the references to the Crusades in Thoreau’s “Walking,” as well as how his interest in westward walking connects to the politics of Manifest Destiny. See Andrew Menard, “Nationalism and the Nature of Thoreau’s ‘Walking,’” New England Quarterly 85, no. 4 (December 2012): 591–621; and Benjamin A. Saltzman, “Towards the Middle Ages to Come: The Temporalities of Walking with W. Morris, H. Adams and especially H.D. Thoreau,” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 5, no. 2 (June 2014): 235–52. I thank Holly Clayson for calling my attention to the Menard article and Luke Fidler for informing me about the Saltzman essay. 41 Watson writes, e.g., “There is a great difference between the hardnesse in the godly and the wicked; the one is natural, the other is only accidental; the hardnesse in a wicked man, is like the hardnesse of a stone, which is an innate continued hardnesse; the hardnesse in a childe of God, is like the hardnesse of Ice, which is soon melted with the Sun-beams; perhaps God hath at present withdrawn his spirit, whereupon the heart is congeal’d as Ice, but let Gods spirit as the Sun, return and shine upon the heart, now it hath a gracious thaw upon it, and it melts in love.” See Thomas Watson, The Godly Mans Picture, Drawn with a Scripture-Pensil (London, 1666), 327. 42 Mark Godfrey, “Walking the Line: The Art of Francis Alÿs,” Artforum (May 2006): 260–7. Paradox of Praxis I reflects on the inverse relationship between labour and profit in economies like that of Mexico. 43 Russell Ferguson, Francis Alÿs: Politics of Rehearsal (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2007), 64. 44 Watson, Saints Delight, 371. Antipodes refers to geographical oppositeness. In this regard the lands below the equator are a type for the art of living to God, and the lands above the equator a type for sinful behaviour (or vice versa). 45 Ibid., 287. 46 Ibid., 286. 47 Rudi Fuchs, quoted in Clarrie Wallis, “Making Tracks,” in Richard Long: Heaven and Earth, ed. Clarrie Wallis (London: Tate, 2009), 46. 48 For a thought-provoking history of the art of walking, albeit one that omits Puritans, see Geoff Nicholson, The Lost Art of Walking: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Literature of Pedestrianism (New York: Riverhead Books, 2008). 49 Long’s line, or figure, is more ground than the ground itself. Joseph Hall writes of the “ground” of the art of meditation: “Witnesses of holy men may serue for colours; but the ground must be onely of God.” Hall, Arte of Divine Meditation, 145–6. 50 John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. Roger Sharrock (New York: Penguin, 1987), 27.

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Jason LaFountain 51 Thomas Weld, quoted in Puritans in the New World: A Critical Anthology, ed. David D. Hall (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 2004), 35.

52 Thomas Shepard, The Sound Beleever, in The Works of Thomas Shepard First Pastor of the First Church, Cambridge, Mass.: With a Memoir of His Life and Character (Boston: Doctrinal Tract and Book Society, 1853), 1:140. 53 Watson, Saints Delight, 363. Isaac Ambrose writes of “recollection” that it is akin to the convergence of the rays of the sun in a magnifying glass: “When all within us is opened, and explicate, and exposed to the view of the Lord; when we call in our thoughts and affections, and recollect them together, as the lines in the Centre, or as the Sun-beams in a burning-glasse, That makes Prayer to be hot and fervent; whereas otherwise it is but a cold and dissipated thing, that hath no strength or efficacy in it.” Ambrose, Media, 36. 54 Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, vol. 1, The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 79–82.

THE HAMISH FULTON ALBUM

5

Fulton’s Walks: Between Documentation and Experience Blake Fitzpatrick

Hamish Fulton is a walking artist. The walk is the art. “No walk, no work” is a statement by Hamish Fulton to summarize his practice. Fulton adds a further qualification, stating, “A walk has a life of its own and does not need to be materialized into an artwork.”1 The walk as art and what Fulton makes of the walk by way of artworks stand apart, necessitating artistic strategies that are often self-effacing in the presence of what exceeds the frame of representation. Documentary theorist Bill Nichols refers to such encounters as invoking questions of magnitude – an awareness of the magnitudes that exceed the grip of textual or aesthetic organization, a glimpse across the gulf that separates representation and experience.2 In Fulton’s case, works comprising descriptive photographs with minimal textual documentation (or in many of his later works, textual pieces without photographs) mark the occurrence of the walk while deferring to the magnitude of an experience that exceeds representation. And yet, despite the excess that characterizes such experience, there remains a need for documentation to hold the contingent to an instant and to verify and record aspects of the walk itself. Fulton’s insistence on the primacy of experience over object is what defines him as a walking artist.3 In these two words, “walking artist,” walking comes first. The walk is of the moment, the present, a here and now.4 Fulton’s art is the walk as experience, but the documentation of the walk gives shape to that experience through the interplay of words and images, text, typography, and the delineation of topography in forms ranging from large-scale paint and vinyl installations to small-scale wooden constructions. Beyond the topographic disclosures of the walk, the work opens questions concerning images and words and their differing relation to experience. This is a relation that can’t be seen as neutral as experience doesn’t happen in a vacuum. There is no neutral place to stand in a landscape, no landscape to walk through that hasn’t been permanently altered by human activity, embedded in history, politics, or to provide a specific example, effected by fallout from above-ground

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nuclear testing as a global marker in the time of the Anthropocene.5 How such histories are deferred or acknowledged in the documentation of a walk is a key question in the work of Hamish Fulton.

Walk Texts: Words and Images We start with land, traversed by way of the walk. Fulton walks on the land, not in the landscape.6 The distinction is important. The walk is the work, a physical experience, topographically on the land, first and foremost. The singularity of the walk comes before representation and is not bound by representational categories such as “landscape” or “land art” that would pre-code the walk into forms already cast in the terms of the art world. The walk is always textually inscribed in what Fulton calls a “walk text.” Consistently, it is words that document and describe aspects of the walk, but they may be joined with photographic images. Walks down roads and paths,7 documented through a combination of words and images in a non-illustrative relation to one another, produce walk texts that are open-ended, a recognized signature of Fulton’s work and a touchstone for a number of contemporary landscape photographers.8 The photographs may include ground and sky, a horizon line, a path through a bramble of trees, or a view of the walk to come. The view of the photograph is necessarily retrospective, authenticating as Roland Barthes suggested of all photographs the that-has-been. Yet the view of a path before the camera is a view that takes one to tomorrow’s destination, such that a photographic record of that-has-been can also be an image of that-will-be. These are past images of forward movement, pictures of the futurity of a past event. The accompanying text provides multiple layers of signification that register ephemeral occurrences, the deep histories of sites and a contextual listing of the duration, location, and date of the walk. For example, “Dark Grey Fox with a White Tipped Tail” initiates the textual component of the walk text, concluding in this case with the documented specifics, “A Four Day Walk in the Costal Hills Near Port Aux Basques Newfoundland August 1981.”9 In the walk texts, words and images do not illustrate one another so much as link together in associative couplings across separate descriptive fields. Open-ended observation, things seen and heard by Fulton, reference a magnitude that subverts what Nichols refers to as the “comforts” discourse provides, the structures that bracket the walk in terms of days, distances, and location.10 In this case, a dark grey fox observed by Fulton is imperceptible in the photograph that accompanies the text, establishing a relational pact between words and images that is less a matter of evidence and more a condition of desire, memory, or projection. In the walk text, the descriptions offered are minimal, especially when

Fulton’s Walks: Between Documentation and Experience

set against the expansiveness of the landscape and the hours, days, and weeks walked. The walk is time-based, a multitude of moments, exceeding the arrested temporality of the still photograph or the descriptive particularity of words. This partiality deflects authority back to the walk itself as something bigger, opening the gap between experience and what follows as documentation. In this, Fulton defines himself as a walking artist; the walk is what occasions thought and representation, but it is always beyond, unassimilable for the viewer. The walk is physical, a work of endurance, embodied – everything that the walk texts can’t be. Fulton ascribes to the principle of “leave no trace,” which has as its corollary, “take no trace,” that is, leave stones unturned and in their spot or take nothing back beyond thoughts, words, and sometimes photographs. This, of course, raises problems for art historians and collectors. One can’t own a walk and, as previously noted by Fulton, a walk does not need to be materialized into an artwork, which constitutes an affront to the gallery system and the singularity of the self-contained work of art. Fulton’s insistence on the walk as principle and method is part of the eco-ethic of the artwork; its sense of reverence is for what is beyond itself, the natural environment to which it refers and defers. In a number of Fulton’s text-based works, eco-criticism and the search for aesthetic forms commensurate with the magnitude of issues confronting the natural world have evolved and enmeshed with those of politics. In a series of large floor-to-ceiling text pieces titled Chinese Economy, Fulton has addressed Tibetan freedom and justice under Chinese rule.11 Each piece in the series of approximately ten works follows a pattern, as seven-letter words, read singularly from top to bottom, spell out in simple block type fundamental terms in the language of domination and resistance. For example, in one of the works, capital letters in red spell out “chinese” “economy,” then shift to black to include the words “tibetan,” “history,” “eternal,” “kailash,” then shift back to red for the final term, “rangzen.” The word “rangzen” means independence, and in this work, Fulton gives it the final word. Chinese Economy is the title of an iterative work, and in its repeated serialization it puts an ongoing call for Tibetan justice before viewers. It is in this response, reordering language to particular ends, evolving as history itself evolves, that the project of walking may be said to claim the critical in a practice of critical topography. Hamish Fulton tests the limits of words and images to indicate the immeasurable in walks on the land. His walks are mobile elaborations of the place question, and his attention to words, photographic images, and structures of documentation locate his concerns at the centre of the issues addressed by the collection. Fulton’s walk texts offer a poetic and conceptual recapitulation of place through words and images that may quote the evidential conventions of documentation, if only to ultimately undo them. By way of such reflexivity, his work occasions an opportunity to turn the conceptual underpinnings of the collection on itself, shifting attention from

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landscape to the chorographic aspect of critical topography.12 Finally, we benefit from Hamish Fulton’s reflections as a walking artist in an interview conducted by Jonathan Bordo and myself and further contextualized by Bordo in his chapter, “Walking with Hamish Fulton into the Vanishing Point vers le Canada.”

Notes 1 See Raimund Stecker, ed., Hamish Fulton und Peter Hutchinson (Düsseldorf: Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, 1998), point 14. 2 Bill Nichols, “Representing the Body: Questions of Meaning and Magnitude,” in Representing Reality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 231. 3 Fulton states, “An object cannot compete with an experience. A completed walk is like an invisible object.” See Hamish Fulton, Words from Walks, a fifteen-page leaflet published as a gallery handout, accessed May 2022, https://galerie-tschudi.ch/press/Words-from-Walks_ Hamish-Fulton.pdf, 3. 4 Fulton writes, “‘Walk Texts’ are about past events. Walking ‘in the moment’ is walking now.” Ibid., 3. 5 See Peter van Wyck’s chapter in this volume. 6 Fulton, Words from Walks, 3. 7 See Hamish Fulton, Roads and Paths (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 1978). 8 The landscape photograph with textual inscription below the image has become a recognized signature in Fulton’s work, and it can be seen in the practice of a number of contemporary landscape photographers including Mark Ruwedel (see Ruwedel’s chapter in this volume). Fulton’s use of a path or road to lead the viewer into the photograph finds a parallel in Ruwedel’s similarly constructed photographs of abandoned rail lines, consistently centred in the frame, reaching out to a horizon. On the mat below the photograph, inscribed in pencil, Ruwedel locates the landscape photograph in a historical context. While formally similar to Fulton’s practice, the textual gaze is oriented in different directions. Fulton’s texts draw inward, to the walk itself, explicating the walk event through experiential observation and locational reference while Ruwedel’s texts look outward to the further expanse of history. For an excellent video introduction to Mark Ruwedel’s practice, see “Mark Ruwedel – Studio Visit | TateShots,” 6 December 2013, YouTube video 4:02, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kv64hL0 VaGg. See also Ruwedel’s discussion of his project Crossing (in this volume), in “Mark Ruwedel – Exposed at Tate Modern,” 15 July 2010, YouTube video 2:20, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Abec BgtWehE. 9 Hamish Fulton, Camp Fire (Eindhoven, Netherlands: Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, 1985), unpaginated. 10 Nichols, “Representing the Body,” 234.

Fulton’s Walks: Between Documentation and Experience 11 See Jonathan Bordo and Blake Fitzpatrick’s interview with Hamish Fulton in this volume, and a portfolio of Fulton’s stunning walk texts, including a work from the Chinese Economy series in this collection. 12 The shift to chorographic concerns is addressed by Jessica Becking’s essay in this volume on the British School of Aesthetic Chorography.

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Hamish Fulton Interview Hamish Fulton, Jonathan Bordo, and Blake Fitzpatrick

Blake Fitzpatrick: Hamish, thank you for meeting with us online today. I sent you some questions in advance and we added a few new ones, so let’s get started. W.G. Sebald has said that the purpose of photographs in his work is twofold: verification and arresting time. What is the function of the photograph in your earlier work? Hamish Fulton: I would say that the photograph relates to mood as opposed to evidence. It’s not really so serious as to be called evidence; it’s more that I was showing people what a place looked like. If you make a walk, and you tell people that you’ve made this walk going from that place to this other place, then where’s the evidence to prove that? A photograph doesn’t definitively prove what you’ve done, especially in relation to say a road walk across Spain, walking from one coast to the other. You can take a photograph of the road but that doesn’t prove that you walked down it. A photograph just shows you the road that you could have taken from a car. I agree with the idea of verification and stopping time, but it is not scientific verification. It’s the kind of general art type of verification, and of course there is that it was taken at that moment in time, so I can get these two points here. Jonathan Bordo: Further to that, as an artist working with photographs, how do you relate to the aesthetic concern that Sebald had with photographs? Is this a concern in your work? hf: I think once we are able to move on from the issue of evidence, proof, then I think you do go into the whole issue of composition, style of photograph, and the kind of associations that you would like to make by the style of the photograph and subject matter in the photograph. In my early works made in the early 1970s, I would take photographs of paths or roads, the way ahead, and I was aware at that time of English nature photography from the 1930s, where people photographed the English countryside, so then you’re kind of drifting toward

6.1 Top Hamish Fulton, AJAW AAN (Toronto: Art Metropole, 1987), unpaginated. 6.2 Bottom Hamish Fulton, AJAW AAN, detail – first panel of six-panel fold-out (Toronto: Art Metropole, 1987), unpaginated.

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romanticism, nostalgia, an association with landowners, the English class system, and workers in the fields. You start to go off the topic of walking. bf: Let’s turn to the walk texts – there are works created out of words sometimes with a photograph, as in the bookwork ajawaan. In such work, lists provide a description of sights and sounds from the locale. Is there a correlation that connects the minimalist text to the maximum of experience on the walk itself? Could you talk about the relation between the words and the experience of the walk? hf: In the bookwork ajawaan there is a whole array of words that relate to what I could see there at the lake, which may not be seen in the photograph or that I heard and which you can’t hear in the photograph. I think that at the time of making the work, one issue was to allude to things that are available to your other senses. But all using the same number of letters for each word. I mean, for example, I camped right near where that panoramic lake photograph was taken, and I had to get into the tent at a certain point because the quantity of the insects was absolutely incredible and so was the sound of the insects just a few inches from my head. I’m inside the tent, the insects are just outside the tent wall, and it was the nearest thing to listening to a European cathedral choir; my imagination changed the sounds of the insects into being like a singing choir, but it was not a choir. It was, in fact, insects. bf: I’m wondering about the modesty of these four-letter words as playing against or in contrast to that massive “full choir” experience and all that remains outside of the text. hf: Yes, all of these different issues are related to reduction, and brevity. It’s not a matter of US minimalism – it’s brevity. The text could drift toward the form of a haiku. One aspect of the walk to and beside Lake Ajawaan is that this is where the Englishman Archie Belaney, known as Grey Owl, lived in a cabin. And then there’s the beautiful lake itself, which is very important because there were amazing loon calls from the lake at dusk and this is also a very powerful sound image. There is a little side trail in the Prince Albert National Park that leads to his canoe paddle leaning against a tree, and on the paddle there was a carving of a beaver. Seeing this was a shock. It was a little bit like meeting a person very suddenly: you turn a corner and there’s his paddle leaning against a tree. I think about the issue with Archie Belaney as a fake Indian. But by today’s indoor standards, what he actually did was of course really incredible – whether he dyed his hair and all the rest of it, that’s another story. But what he did do was amazing because he did inspire a lot of people with a message about nature, the importance of nature, the life in the woods, in the trees, and real respect for the abilities of Indigenous peoples. He saved the beaver from endlessly being turned into

Hamish Fulton Interview

men’s top hats. He protected nature and I think that’s really very important, especially today. Years ago, I made a small show in a Hastings museum, and upstairs there was a tv screen presentation of a film about Grey Owl at Ajawaan. This was a private privilege for me, but his message about respect for nature was never re-emphasized and was sadly lost under museum dust. jb: Blake and I have spent quite a lot of time thinking about your words and we wanted to share a poem from Rilke’s Night trilogy with you. In the “Ninth Elegy,” Rilke enunciates so simply and clearly what I understand as the most fundamental proposition of environmental aesthetics: The traveler doesn’t bring from the mountain slope into the valley some handful of sod, around which all stand mute, but a word he’s gained, a pure word, the yellow and blue gentian. What if we’re here just for saying: house, bridge, fountain, gate, jug, fruit tree, window, – at most: column, tower … but for saying, understand, oh for such saying as the things themselves never hoped so intensely to be.1 Might you comment on this passage from Rilke, and may I ask you whether it expresses the arte povera of your métier? Further, might you comment on Rilke’s highly poetic notion of the proper use of words? Perhaps not the particular list he offers in the poem, but your selection of words and your making of lists and offering of words. hf: I have read Rilke, but I haven’t read this particular quote. You know, a handful of sod, I mean this is Earthworks, so now we are considering Walter De Maria’s Earth Room. That was my first thought when that came up, but that’s perhaps not what you’re thinking of. By the way, I remember seeing Earth Room in Munich. But – this is different – it does bring up the issue of earth and all the microscopic life in a handful of earth, but then we’re going on to the issue of the words, the colours which remind me of Japanese haiku because a haiku may be as simple as: blue sky green grass yellow flower. It’s so simple, and yet that description is correct and accurate – not overblown or underblown and that’s just what it is. jb: But consider the words from your Baffin Island walk, “rock fall echo dust.” Those are your words – those are the words you’re bringing back. hf: Yes, those are the words brought back. Not things, just words. About that work, what happened was that there was a bend in the Owl River, and the sun melted the ice at the top of a cliff above the river. Then it was just like a natural avalanche, the sun melted the ice, rocks were released, they tumbled down those

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6.3 Hamish Fulton, ROCK FALLECHO DUST, 1988.

cliffs, there was an echo and then there was a cloud of dust and the sound disappeared. Back to as it was before. jb: So, the four words are actually that moment. hf: Yes, they are that moment. This is the gravitational drop. Direttissima.2 They go from rock to dust. bf: And you resist bringing these sorts of objects into the gallery. Is your restraint in the use of art materials a symbolic gesture? If so, what is being symbolized and is there an ethics to the gesture of restraint? hf: Absolutely, human beings have been building things in nature and using natural materials for thousands and thousands of years, but this is not the right approach anymore – bringing nature indoors, or taking manufactured objects made in a factory out into the desert. All these permutations produce the wrong message about nature today. I used to work with John Weber in New York (the Weber Gallery) and in a conversation with John, I said that land art is all about money. He said it’s not actually, it’s about getting away from the restraining space of the gallery. But whatever you’re going to make in the desert to facilitate this modern human design imposed onto the land will cost money. And so, in society, you have everybody minding their own business, working with their blameless

Hamish Fulton Interview

life, not wishing any harm to anything. And yet we’re all trapped inside these industrial technological systems, so that whatever we do we’re contributing to extinction. The Anthropocene. So therefore, it seems to me if you’re an artist, the very last thing that an artist should do is put rocks into the international art market or change the shape of the land. We have been at this for decades, in short, covering the Earth with concrete. jb: Well, your work is initiated by an ethical consciousness about issues like leave no trace, which is actually stated in the Rilke poem, so there is an ethical insight which wants to find an appropriate aesthetic form in your work. It’s clearly an ethical injunction about leaving things alone and dealing with the question of the residue that comes to be put in the gallery. hf: Thank you, Jon. You’ve got it. This whole issue hasn’t had an airing yet. The topic of materials being removed or added to nature hasn’t been aired. It’s still basically an untold story and the dominant and deeply ingrained art history is very much bound up in sculpture and objects, the remodelling of the ground, the human imposition on nature. This is Genesis. Imagine if you’re on a hilltop somewhere in the Canadian subarctic, and everywhere that you look in every direction what you see is nature. A place that the Indigenous peoples have travelled through with meandering rivers with names and histories going back thousands of years, and yet what you can see is just trees and water and then you compare that with Levitated Mass by Michael Heizer. You realize that this sculpture comes from an extremely different mentality and is an iconic representative of a dominant order in art history. However, what is equally as important is that I, as a brother artist, have no right to condemn another artist. What is at stake here is a one-sided art history. People are impressed by the organization to remove not a giant boulder, but a giant piece of rock from its natural birthplace and transport it at great expense to a location dedicated to human culture. You can’t put down another artist for creating and doing what they want to do, for exercising their freedom, but there is still no critique of land art from an ecological perspective. The same can be said for Roden Crater. I don’t come to this issue just from a European point of view. I’ll mention just two non-art books that have helped and advanced my thinking: Jerry Mander, In the Absence of the Sacred (1991), and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (2014). bf: One of the issues raised by an approach based on restraint is that restraint is a symbolic gesture but an invisible one because while you’re restraining there’s no gesture to comment on. It is a paradoxical gesture because it negates itself as symbolic gesture. hf: Yes, you are absolutely right. Whereas, if you can actually see something that

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someone’s made you’ve got something to talk about. And what is not talked about is my fundamental, initial decision. Art historians have not yet caught up with, have not seen this issue of restraint, so my thanks to you, Blake, for this opportunity, for me being able to comment. Making art about walking, not walking and sculpture, is complicated by the fact that there is still no information out there about this particular practice. It’s still an unknown art form. There are conferences with not only visual artists but different people with their particular interests in walking, so it is a real subject but the invisibility of it as art is a factor. I find it very creative because someone can have a really amazing experience and yet what they produce is quite minimal, maybe very small. But the danger is that because the object is physically slight, people may wrongly assume that the walking experience itself, was also slight. jb: On the one hand, you have this really broad thing which is I’m going for a walk, for example, I’m going for a walk to the store, what we might call a necessary condition. But it seems to me that what you’re doing has something in addition to that, something that marks the walk as being aesthetic. How is a “walking artist” different than an artist who walks? hf: One thing about my walks is that they are completed walks. A walk needs to be completed, a completed walk is like an invisible object, an invisible object in a complex world. Once a walk has been completed, it can never be erased; unlike a pencil drawing, you can’t erase it. But this makes the walk an invisible object, or a construction, even though it’s not within the terms of the normal use of word construction, because a construction should be a thing. The point of it being completed is important because I can be at home with an idea and then I go out somewhere else to realize and construct this idea. So it’s not conceptual art, because conceptual art exists in the world of ideas and concepts, but what I’m interested in is having an idea for a walk, which I then transform into a physical experience, so it’s a transformation. It’s important to emphasis experience, the walking experience, not objects, not heavy art, and not forgetting that weight equates to economic value. I think that one of the issues is the question of intention, what is the intention of the person. When I make a walk and I complete the walk, I have an intention and I feel when I’m walking that I’m building something. I’m making something, whereas when I’m walking, you know with friends and family, then I’m not going to be making something. But I’m still doing the same physical activity of walking, but the intentions are really quite different. I have certain rules which for my own conscience I must observe. Art walks, in fact have quite different personalities from so-called normal walks. There are functional walks and by comparison, purposeless walks.

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bf: Let’s consider the documentation of the walks. You so often set in place a word or numerical system that seeks to build a correspondence between the walk and the walk text or what you may call “picture writing” for images that have a textual aspect. For example, in a detail from a walk on the Isle of Lewis and Harris, Scotland, summer 1973, you have produced a photograph of a string tied with five knots, the title of the work being Five Knots for Five Days of Walking. Could you talk about this in terms of staging a correspondence between words, walks, and making visible the issue of language and documentation? hf: Yes, this is really coming from what Indigenous peoples have produced, like moon counting sticks, where time is marked on a stick or a calculation is made with a collection of pebbles. In this case, you could go from A to B tying knots and but then from B back to A untying the knots. I made a shape, which is not the shape of the walk. It’s not a map of the walk, but what’s important is to say that what was put into the international art market was this photo-text, the string itself was never for sale. My string works from the early 1970s were inspired by the ancient Andean quipu accounting systems. And that raises the issue of words, because the Five Knots requires words, without them what you’re looking at is very ambiguous. You need the words – it is a 6.4 Hamish Fulton, FIVEKNOTSFOR FIVEDAYSOFW ALKING, in Cam p Fire(Eidenhoven, Netherlands: Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, 1985).

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bit like the piece ajawaan, with all those words in that work. The words could allude and speak to things that are not in the photograph. What happened with the photograph was that there was so much emphasis, in the early ’70s anyway, on landscape photography, so instead of the topic being walking, art historians and critics shifted the discussion away over to landscape photography and then of course landscape photography would take you to English landscape paintings and so on right back into the English class system. Then it’s all going further away from walking, so in order to bring it back and make it less ambiguous the words could provide more information. At the end of the ’70s, early ’80s, just the idea that if you have a framed photo-text work and you took off the words and you had the photograph and no words, then you wouldn’t know what the walk was, whereas if you took away the photograph you would still have some information in words about what the walk was. The idea was really to try to in some way to emphasize walking. jb: The language I would use for these acts of documentation is that those acts are the tokens of the walk. We’re not saying that they are a picture of the walk. They’re not mimetic, but they are the tokens with respect to your having completed the walk. We’re not talking about the photograph as evidence – the proof that you were there, so much as the idea of a witness, the string is a witness for my having been there and then the language is what comes to be necessary for it to refer to that having been a completed walk as a work. The work is the walk. The intention makes it something more than my going for a walk to the store, is that there is an intention going into the walk so it’s not the walk as there is a preparation for it. hf: I just wanted to be clear that it’s not from the position of anything hierarchical; in a certain sense these walks exist equally. Equally, they are signs of still being alive. jb: Yes, but it’s your distinctive way of doing what you do which is special in relation to this art-aesthetic question, it is what gives it an emphasis of a certain kind and not another emphasis. It’s a very small category inside walking, and you’re not saying that other people should do it, but it is organized inside itself with what I want to call this aesthetic intention that is in accordance with your rules. I’ll put it another way, your walks are the work – the work of art. hf: I’d agree, and it’s taken me a very long time to actually say that and not to then retract it or doubt it, to be confident and say, the walk is the art. It’s just my contribution to contemporary art. Not a painting or an impressive sculpture but a decision to emphasize walking and nature. Taking a step back, and thinking about how we live, which asks what our priorities are.

Hamish Fulton Interview

jb: That’s why it’s really great with your tokens, you see. It’s not that the things you bring back from the walk are meant to be the evidence of your having done the walk. Your objects, including words, are tokens, speculative testimony of you’re having done it. Your tokens are not mimetic in the way that Richard Long’s photographs are mimetic. There are circles marking a station of his walk that the photograph captures. Your few, restrained, and sparse tokens are not like that at all. They are without mimetic aspiration. Have I got that right? hf: Well, it’s impossible to re-present the experience of a walk; anyone can understand that it’s impossible. And I like your choice of the word token, perhaps like a Swiss tally stick. bf: Let’s talk about scale in your work. You produce works of various scales, small wooden constructions, photographic images of various sizes, and large imposing word pieces in galleries. How do you think about scale in relation to the problem of conveying the experience of a walk? hf: In relation to scale, the words in a work are the same words, whether it’s a postcard or writ large on a wall. You might choose two words – glacial boulder – together, they may be fifteen metres long and two metres high. Then you’re relating the subject (glacial boulder) to scale on the wall. Sometimes I make mountain skylines, and sometimes it’s just the line of a mountain or another time it’s two colours, one is sky, and one is the mountain shape itself. The peaks of the mountain are going up and maybe they’re four metres up the wall on a five-metre wall. The viewer who is standing in front of it will need to look upwards at the mountain peak which is one way of relating to the experience of being in the actual landscape and looking up at a rock wall above you. In a sense, it’s a comment on traditional landscape canvas painting. bf: Here is another walk text that references a walk “on Spain.” The text reads: a shepherd walking with his sheep and dogs a 2498 kilometre walking journey on spain starting from the atlantic coast at finisterre indigenous peoples day 12 october 2005 ending by the banks of the rio tajo in toledo. Here we have a reference to walking journey “on Spain.” It’s fascinating that you want to differentiate between walking on the land not in the landscape. Could you talk about what that implies, and also I’m curious about the significance of the walk starting on “Indigenous Peoples Day 12 October 2005.” hf: Yes, people speak about being in the landscape, but I thought that it would be more descriptive, more physical, to say that you are on the land, or on the road,

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6.5 Hamish Fulton, A SHEPHERD W ALKING W ITH HISSHEEP AND DOGS, 2005.

on the mountain. This is simply more literal. The starting date was Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and I can confess that at the beginning when I did the first layout version of this print, I had written Dia de la Hispanidad, but that was exactly the wrong inference because of Columbus and the Doctrine of Discovery, Manifest Destiny, and Terra Nullius. At this juncture, I note that recently protesters beheaded a statue of Columbus. Returning to the issue of my choice of words, I then changed them to Indigenous Peoples’ Day, which is a recent development in

Hamish Fulton Interview

other countries (such as the US), because as far as Thanksgiving goes, Indigenous peoples are not giving thanks for what eventually transpired after the arrival of the conquistadors. bf: Yes, the shift in text acknowledges a counter-celebration, writing over history from an Indigenous perspective. I wanted to raise this because, Hamish, you’ve been very interested in Indigenous issues, so I assume that this would be an important reference for you. hf: Yes, but it’s not my observation. I’ve been influenced by other people. jb: This opens up a discussion about political affiliations and histories in your work. We are interested in your work in relation to Tibet and China. Starting with the work Chinese Economy, how did you come to organize the piece, listing and therefore bringing into relation “chinese economy,” “tibetan history,” “eternal kailash,” and “rangzen”? Your chorographies have now changed, this is the language you’re using. It’s all about urgency, and it’s all about politics and domination and that is different than your earlier work, which was much quieter. It would seem that the Chinese Economy pieces are huge for you – it is a transformative moment for you in 2007. hf:Absolutely, thank you for identifying this development. The Chinese economy is the power that pays for everything, and it also pays to keep various ceos quiet in every country of the world. The ccp [Chinese Communist Party] knows that in the West we may have our ideas about democracy and freedom but we also like money. Politicians and ceos of international corporations can have all sorts of ethical ideas, but the Chinese know that money will keep people quiet or will get them to do something for China. So this is in relation to the title at the top of the work. I must have made at least ten versions of these Chinese Economy texts, and the bottom word on the one you are looking at is “rangzen,” which means independence, and independence is the complete opposite of an autonomous region. Another seven-letter word I use on the lowest seventh line is silence. The Chinese economy pays to silence weak Western leaders, ensuring that they never mention Tibet. However, now with the coronavirus maybe, perhaps, this will change. Where has that ancient Chinese Taoist wisdom gone? Tibet today is the template for the rest of the world. This is the same template for East Turkestan, Hong Kong, the template for Taiwan, and then it would spread to Nepal and other neighbouring countries. China is not a nation. It’s a civilization, and so it has very long-term plans, we know they’re not bothered by waiting thirty, forty, fifty years. They completely changed Tibetan culture; they destroyed so much. They rewrote the history, but we still have Eternal Kailash, the mountain. I went round Kailash again in 2011, and I’m a witness to the fact that the

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Chinese built a road around Mount Kailash on top of the ancient and historic animal and pilgrim footpath. bf: So let me ask, does this work give an indication of a future direction in your work, more political, immediate? Is that where your work is now? Because it seems to me this is a long way from some of those early works we started with in the discussion of landscapes. hf: Yes, you are right, but at the same time, the continuous subject really is respect for nature. So that’s really been the topic from the beginning until now, but the visual results are quite different and my early works, which as you say, are more peaceful. Today, as opposed to the ’70s, it is so clear that the powerful corporate systems that we inhabit never consider nature, which is also very similar to the approach of contemporary art, where nature existing for itself, to live its own animate and inanimate life within the ecosystem, is never highlighted. In 2013, I met an Australian who specializes in the study of mining in Tibet. The amount of sacred Tibetan mountains that China has violated is incredible, so then there was a protest of a thousand protesters and of course many of them were rounded up and thrown into prison and once you go into those prisons, you may never come out or maybe you are in there and you get tortured and so it goes on and on and on. The issue is that some peoples have always respected nature going back centuries, and other people, like Christian Europeans, have always seen nature in terms of using it, as in ancient horticulture and agriculture. However, very much more serious disruptions exist like interfering with rivers, hence the Three Gorges Dam. It reminds me of that statement by Thoreau – “For one that comes with a pencil to sketch or sing, a thousand come with an axe or rifle.” My point here is, that this is not 1950, and since 1950 disrespect for nature has become the norm. We fell ancient trees to erect new electricity pylons “for the good of the community,” but merely the human community. We never change our ways and include the biotic community. Finally, I’d like to say that I have such fond memories of my fourteen-day camping walk beside the Milk River in southern Alberta, Canada. Thank you. Thank you, Blake and Jon, for the opportunity to attempt to answer your questions.

Notes 1 Rainer Maria Rilke, “Ninth Elegy,” in Duino Elegies, trans. Edward Snow (New York: North Point Press, 2001). 2 Direttissima: a climbing term for the most direct route up a mountain – straight up.

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Walking with Hamish Fulton into the Vanishing Point vers le Canada Jonathan Bordo

The traveler doesn’t bring from the mountain slope into the valley some handful of sod, around which all stand mute, but a word he’s gained, a pure word, the yellow and blue gentian. What if we’re here just for saying: house, bridge, fountain, gate, jug, fruit tree, window, – at most: column, tower … but for saying, understand, oh for such saying as the things themselves never hoped so intensely to be. – Rainer Maria Rilke, “Ninth Elegy,” Edward Snow translation

Witness Tokens Consider Hamish Fulton a Rilkean traveller, descending a mountain slope. He is a walker. He carries little, leaves few deliberate traces of himself. He does not bring some handful of soil to show, wonderstruck that he was there. Yet he has retuned from a sojourn full of story. If not a hand full of soil, what does Fulton bring back from his walking? He brings back a few things, mostly words, some photographs, a few artifacts. He deals in assemblages of words and images, by way of posting signage or making terse visual reports. He seems to bring back very little or offers very little at least in what he exhibits in periodic stops in the world of the art gallery. What he shows is restrained, even impersonal, a minimum. The outward, the manifest, and the visual give very little away about the walk itself, its happenstance, incident, intention, and duration. The walks themselves primarily fill and enrich deep recesses in his inward experience. His body itself is the archive. His walk métier is quiet. The walk, the more it is thought as inward experience, the more inaccessible and remaining “outside,” as if the walk were a special state of being, an it that is outside and external “in itself.” What is offered, shared, and made visual are tokens, at best indicators, because they carry the fingerprint of the artist, indications or memes yet not depictions. To be sure, he is mostly a solitary walker, and in the solitude of

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the walk he is the romanticist wandering subject encountered in Rousseau, Wordsworth, Caspar David Friedrich, and Thoreau, the wanderer fantasy of Schubert expressed in the epigraph passage from Rilke. The reader might recall Travis, who with a plastic jug of water walks across a desolate mesa, perhaps in the direction of Paris, Texas, in the Wenders film of that title. Yet both are walkers in that tradition who receive recognition in view of that tradition. Travis discards the empty water jug, while Fulton leaves nothing deliberate, no castoffs, whether water or the circles of Richard Long. The walking subject takes nothing material from the land and leaves little but his footsteps as carbon trace. The walk itself is the art. Achieving the passage of an absent presence is perhaps the ideal of the Fultonian art. Hamish Fulton turns the walk itself into his art, referring to himself as a “walking artist.” His art is both the walk and what he draws from it since his resolution is “to make art resulting only from the experience of [the] individual walk.”1 Thus the walk is both material for the art and the work of art. The tokens that he subsequently offers are the witnesses to his walk. The viewer has nothing else but these tokens as the remnants of the works, to stand mute before them, to ask questions, to ponder, to take them as suggestions. These tokens are such tenuous signs and clues, enough to announce not enough to allure. The temptation is great, even overwhelming, to want to pick the trillium, to resist the sudden and overwhelming urge to nick a smooth pebble and put it in a pocket. Once on a trek in Ayuituq National Park, the stinging bite of the cold streams led those in the crossing almost uncontrollably to reach down in the numbing cold and gather a few glistening pebbles as keepsakes. Unbelievably, a park warden popped up and ordered us to empty our packs and return the stones on the way out of the park – nothing was to leave except ourselves. A “wilderness” customs check. Later, back in the hamlet of Pangnirtung, the locals referred to the park affectionately as the rock pile in their backyard, while each dwelling had its own small pile of rocks to make Inukshuk and other artifacts part of the export trade – a differential ethics was in place for denizens and visitors.2 The visitors were a university group part of a landscape field school, invited to attend a ceremonial whale hunt. They were expected as witnesses, meant to mediate with Greenpeace activists should they arrive to interrupt it. This was in the summer of 1998, on the occasion of the creation of the territory of Nunavut. Ten years earlier, in 1988, Hamish Fulton accomplished a walk somewhere in the vast expanse of what was then called Baffin Island.3 Fulton refers to the poster-like picture object as a “container”: it’s not difficult to imagine such a sign in its strict yet elegant functionality, familiarly framed by a red rectangle as border, as a publicity poster at a station in the London Tube. The contents of the poster consist of four words, which Fulton refers to as a “walk text.” The four words that he visually exhibits are vertically arrayed.

Walking with Hamish Fulton into the Vanishing Point

Rock Fall Echo Dust These four words corroborate the Rilkean admonition to bring back words instead of wildflowers, rocks, or sod from a sojourn into nature. The four nouns are words as things and signs. Words for Rilke are the right tokens to demonstrate that “we are here just for saying.” Fulton has substituted words for things, one kind of precious thing for another. Not just words but also images such as drawings and photographs are also appropriate stand-ins, proxies for the things themselves that were there and left behind. Such substitutions are ethical in their import.4 The aesthetic gesture of this substitution so succinctly articulated by Rilke expresses the essence of an ethics of the environment, an Arte Povera. The photograph suggests Cumberland Sound leading to the Hamlet of Pangnirtung as its location. Fulton in his critique both of landscape and land art is parsimonious even in his offering photographs because photographs and pictures in general carry mimetic allure. He seeks to separate his walk on the land from a landscape through which he is passing. He eschews landscape, on the one hand, because it is a picture and land art, on the other, because it turns the land into a picture – Robert Smithson’s circles, or his Spiral Jetty. If picturesque means quite simply that, it gives a special emphasis or inflection to a picture, which is why both landscape and land art “encult” the picturesque. Still, both the poster and the photograph as artifacts serve as witness tokens. They prepare specific place-related questions such as, Where in Baffin Island did he walk? Where did the falling rock incident take place? (Was it in Ayuituq National Park? After all, what was then called Baffenland is an island of the magnitude of England. One might also ask right-ofpassage questions: Did he carry a gun? Did Inuit give him permission since what might be wild nature is also Inuit lands?) rock fall echo dust is a model that accomplishes the Rilkean injunction to leave alone, disturb nothing, take nothing away except that which you brought with you in accordance with Fulton’s anti-mimetic constraints that grip his witness tokens. There can be neither an ethics nor aesthetics emanating from that ethics without the witness tokens that recall the personal experience of the sojourn. The walk is in the past, leaving few traces on the land. It has vanished and yet there is a record. The walk texts at the core of which are words come after the walk. Only once the walk has been completed can the text be written. As he says, “Walk texts are about past events.” Fulton is very stringent about the conditions governing walk texts, in part explaining why words are given ontological primacy over photographs. A word is uttered while a picture, mediated by an apparatus, is taken. Photographs without words are orphans.

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Chorographic Acts Because there are such witness tokens that are posited and exhibited after the walk, Hamish Fulton’s walks can be understood as chorographies. The witness tokens demonstrate that he was there, as well as the intention of his being there, the walk, the purpose of the walk, and the fulfillment of the walk. Witness tokens mark spots with an X where he was in his passage on the land. They are stops or stations of the sojourn. When Rilke says “here,” he does not mean here on the surface of the earth, a topographic vagueness, somewhere on Baffin Island. Here means right here where Fulton stood to experience the rockslide. Here for Rilke is a fully singular and local designator, a chorographic generator. “Hereness” is carried in and through the walk, performatively inscribed and recorded in the words that are subsequently articulated and exhibited. Talking the walk comes after taking the walk. Chorography marks the here and now, an event in space-time that posits a being for whom it is here and now. All living beings are chorographic in the way here and now is marked by them, even if it is particular, even distinctive, for human beings to mark here and now with the word token da – pointing and saying as a performative act (bird song). The four words put the walk into quotation marks, retrospectively turning the walks into chorographic acts. rock fall echo dust is exhibited by Fulton as a list, the sequence of the cause and effect of an incident in real time at a spot X on the way. The sojourner on his way encounters a rockslide, large enough to cause an echo through the valley in which he is walking, leaving dust in its wake. The four words are a koan, or visual onomatopoeia. rock fall echo dust carries the moment of pure presence, the witness to a natural event, right there at that moment and nowhere else. The witness tokens are retrospective performances of the cogito of place. To better understand the ethical constraints which Fulton has imposed on his walk practice, one might compare the walk text rock fall echo dust as chorographic enactment with the rather notorious, even brutish, chorographic gesture “Kilroy was here.” The latter, too, begins as a chorographic speech act that engraves the permanent mark of its utterance. The stark comparison of rock fall echo dust to “Kilroy was here” and a slash mark gouged into a tree carries both a lesson and a distinction at the intersection of the ethical and the aesthetic at the heart of chorography. It is one thing to ask the place question, Where am I? It is another iteration of the question to ask, Why am I here? And the further question, By what right am I here? The slash is a violent chorographic act of possession and occupation. The cogito of place asserts the “Me” as a proof of being here once at this moment in the now, which is turned into a second act of possession, of making somewhere mine: occupation, to possess it – the bulldozer, the subdivision, the golf links. The will to occupation leaves deliberate palpable traces, which violate the injunction of the Ril-

Walking with Hamish Fulton into the Vanishing Point

kean poet to leave no trace behind, leave alone as if not there. Indeed, the Rilkean injunction backs up and seeks to retract the act of possession and occupation. It comes to be asserted as an ethical injunction to prevent something from happening again as if it had never happened (the myth of wilderness and the Garden of Eden). The injunction to leave no trace seeks to annul the very possessive “myness” already contained in the assertion of pure presence of the cogito of place. The English rendered as “doesn’t” in the poem condenses the range of the original German modalities of should not, ought not, and must not. “Doesn’t” imposes a ban, prohibition, and taboo, in short. This marks the moment when the aesthetic enters into discourse with the ethical in the very formation of an art form. There is no prohibition without a prior violation. It is perhaps precisely in the recognition of this reason that Fulton insists that his walk words can only be enunciated after the walk has been completed as a proof of the renunciation of possession. He cannot renounce his own experience. The words are the residue of the walk. Is this why Reinhold Messner took photographs of his shadow climbing? Traditional art has always been confronted by prohibitions. Consider the iconophobia of showing God in the Abrahamic tradition. The environmental turn absorbs an instruction about the content of its work (exposing the face of divinity, nature as divinity), the form and the medium in conformity with the injunction leave alone, leave no trace. This injunction, applied vigorously, would seek to diminish the mimetic urge to capture Nature as a picture. Finding an aesthetic form commensurate with the ethical injunction is at the heart of Fulton’s walking art. Many environmental artists might be considered in terms of this criterion. Here one might compare Fulton’s labour to that of contemporary colleagues Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy.5 Yet his practice is a relentless critique of the mimetic as if it were a kind of transgression or theft. Whatever the effacement, Fulton is at least convinced that he is the possessor of his personal experience, which the ethical norm cannot escheat, deny, or take away. Fulton, Long, and Goldsworthy remain companions in their art.

The Walk as the Work The zone of the aesthetic as a kind of walk is rather emphatic in its need for language, unlike Travis in Paris, Texas, who remains mute. Consider in this regard climbing a mountain. When Petrarch in Jacob Burckhardt’s account is quoted as saying that he was the first person to climb Mt Ventoux,6 while Thoreau asserts that he is the second or third to climb Mt Ktaadn,7 and George Mallory famously quips “because it [i.e., Everest] is there,” they all signal their climbing the mountain as a special, selfmotivated act with no other purpose than to climb it for its own sake. Language announces the intention. This does not deny the shepherd with his flock on the side

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of the mountain or the Indigenous peoples for whom the mountain is a sacred site – even though such a declared aesthetic intention is overtly transgressive and imperial. This aesthetic intention, though comparable to the religious or theophanic purpose of Moses climbing the mountain to receive the Word, does not posit a greater purpose or good beyond the intrinsic purpose to climb the mountain for its own sake, a one-item agenda. Words precede and prepare the sojourn by announcing the intention. Words as tokens succeed the sojourn at a minimum to mark its closure. For Fulton, all the things that he brings from the walk diminish what I am calling picturesque mimetic capture. His walk texts are intended as reminders, telltales, indicators, signs, or condensations of his personal experience while pointing to that which has been omitted, left outside, and made absent: the walk in-itself. How many walks? What are the motifs of the walks? For Fulton, the walk itself is the epicentre of the work of art. It is a transcendental. For it all, this does not eliminate the need for and the pursuit of chorographic details. Thus, walking is to be thought of as a kind of making that is like writing and painting, expressed as tokens that the artist scatters after the sojourn of the walk is completed. It’s one thing to climb the mountain, quite another to visit the mountain and to paint it as Cézanne painted Mont Sainte-Victoire for twenty some years of his life, leaving thirty paintings among his last before he died in 1904. These are his works of art, individual paintings naming Mont Sainte-Victoire as the motif. Fulton’s walks are aesthetic enactments. The walks, when completed, are over. They have vanished. On either side of the walk, what makes it a walk aesthetically is that it carries as a preparation for the walk an intention and that it leaves tokens, records, notes, indicators of the walk having been fulfilled. In other words, the walk as an aesthetic act unfolds in three stages – a before, during, and after. One might say the essence of his art has as its purpose to show the act of walking as an event in the diminishment of human presence. The epicentre of his walk works are the walks themselves, as if each walk were a work on the comparison with the paintings of Cézanne. Andy Goldsworthy manages the work criterion differently both from Cézanne and Fulton. For Goldsworthy, the ephemera are punctuated by time – the salmon weir floats out to sea, the icicle melts, or the project is near completion. One way or another this transience must leave a photographic record. Fulton’s walks are aesthetic enactments, where the walk itself is the central chorographic episode in a three-part narrative. The walks of Fulton are the epicentre of his work as art. The walk as an object is left out. The walks themselves are absent. They are outside representation. This takes on a philosophical import because the work or the epicentre of the work, the walk itself, is an X that marks the spot of the work as absent or missing. One might say after Kant that the walks are both things in themselves and the transcendental object = X. Fulton leaves us tokens that stand for the event having happened, drained of mimetic capture. They are at best indicators of the walks, telltales, evidences, ruminations. The tokens reference the walk. The walk as the work of art exists outside

Walking with Hamish Fulton into the Vanishing Point

representation, while Long and Goldsworthy give great effort to secure their works as fully representational imitations of nature. The walk works of Hamish Fulton are ineffable. This is a rather special way of appreciating the depth of sincerity of what Fulton might intend when he considers himself a walking artist: he intends that the walk itself is the work of art.

The Critical Perspective of ambulo ergo sum Words as the primary witness tokens combine with other objects from photographs to other material things to testify to the walk. Here one might recall the way that Freud shows how precious words are to betoken the dream, and both a walk and a dream are alike in their ephemerality. Words like botanical monograph and rock, fall, echo, dust are such fragile and intense condensations of personal experience. So much is condensed in these words, and so when these words are accompanied by images and even artifacts a tracing is being offered to an inner universe. That tracing is a chorography. Later in his career when Fulton himself fell under the spell of mountains and the compulsion to climb, he added a new constellation of words and place names – Mt Kailish, Chomolungma in Tibet, Everest in Nepal, as word tokens and anchors for new chorographies. Yet his Himalayan sojourn challenged the very carrying capacity of his fragile economy of words to trace his chorographies. Take Chomolungma. Chomolungma is the name Fulton gives to the Himalayan mountain also called Everest. He offers us a différend Chomolungma/Everest. Does Fulton’s climbing Chomolungma not carry a history going back to the failed British expedition to conquer what the British called Mt Everest? Does Fulton naming the mountain by its indigenous Buddhist name acknowledge and rectify the cultural assault of the British? Was Fulton’s climb an apology? Such questions fall in the gap between the walks and their sparse and infrequent enunciations as words, images, and frames. Such questions arise from an archive and the studium of the artist. We need to rub against the pure words and ask the artist. The place names enunciate in a condensed form differential history, and it is in the Himalayan sojourns that this différend is expressed to hold an ongoing protest first offered in the poster bearing the word-name tokens. These are not koanic nouns. They are concepts and rubrics. Another image-text, titled Chinese Economy, refers to the colonial occupation of Tibet just as the Mt Kailash around which he walked has been turned into a highway to facilitate both industrial intervention and Chinese tourism.8 Is it that he first went to Tibet through China, then became aware that entrance was closed by the Chinese totalitarian occupation? Is this why he approached the same mountain from the Everest side and Nepal? At once a long, quiet, narrative, chorographic tracing from 2007 to 2011, these works express in their walk text the pain, abhorrence, disgust, and

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outrage of Tibetan history. This culminates in Fulton placing the flag of Tibet on the summit of Mt Everest in Nepal. Placing his flag on the summit of Mt Everest is a politically charged chorographic protest. It brings out what has always been present in his walk art. His walk practice from the beginning has always been filled with the most acute sensitivity of someone who has taken in his surroundings walking on land not as landscape, a soaking in the depth of human occupations and interventions, where many of his walks have trod through colonial occupation and displacement of indigenous peoples by the conquistadors of the modern way. An aesthetic witness has yielded deep documentary truths that have been afforded to him by the solitary modesty of passage as a walker, as if he were barely ever there. Perhaps it is only with the flag on Mt Everest and the poster called Chomolungma that Fulton comes out fully as a civic witness, revealing that his walking art has always been an act of civil disobedience, a protest that announced itself as such when he placed the flag of Tibet on the summit of Mt Everest in Nepal.

7.1 Hamish Fulton, Chom olungm aFlag, 2009.

Walking with Hamish Fulton into the Vanishing Point

Notes 1 Hamish Fulton, Words from Walks (unpublished leaflet). 2 Jonathan Bordo, “The Keeping Place (Arising from an Incident on the Land),” in Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade, ed. Robert Nelson and Margaret Olin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); and Laurence Dunne, “Eyewitness to a Whale Hunt: Theory, Event and Apology in the Inuit North,” Topia 32 (September 2014): 201–28. 3 See Hamish Fulton, rock fall echo dust (1988), in this volume. 4 The local photographer at Pangnirtung got into hot water when he suggested that the hunters ought to take pictures of the whale rather than shoot it. 5 See Jonathan Bordo, “Witness in the Errings of Contemporary Art,” in The Rhetoric of the Frame: Essays on the Boundary of the Artwork, ed. Paul Duro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and the follow-up essay Joanthan Bordo, “History Lessons: Imitation, Work and the Temporality of Contemporary Art,” in Theorizing Imitation in the Visual Arts, ed. Paul Duro (London: Blackwell, 2015). 6 Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (New York: Harper & Row, 1958). 7 Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1972). 8 See Hamish Fulton, Kailash Kora (2007), in this volume.

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THE ANTHROPOCENE, RUINS, AND NUCLEAR EXPOSURE

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Placing the Anthropocene Peter C. van Wyck

“All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.” The story reveals the meaning of what otherwise would remain an unbearable sequence of happenings. – Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times Modern natural science and technology, which no longer observe or take material from or imitate processes of nature but seem actually to act into it, seem, by the same token, to have carried irreversibility and human unpredictability into the natural realm, where no remedy can be found to undo what has been done. – Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance in their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction. It may be that in this respect precisely the present time deserves a special interest. Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man. – Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

This chapter is part of a larger work that explores a range of nuclear landscapes and situations. Of particular interest now are nuclear waste repositories. For the past two decades I have done fieldwork at Yucca Mountain, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (wipp) in the United States (recently shuttered because of an incident involving nuclear waste and cat litter), Bure in France, Forsmark in Sweden, and Onkalo in Finland. Technically, each of these projects is unique – responding to particular regulatory and jurisdictional constraints, and the specific geological, biophysical, and cultural characteristics of the siting locations – but I am interested in how these projects deal with questions of risk and futurity, records and memory (their metadata), and how these (and other) emplacements stage not the “annihilation of space by

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time,” as Karl Marx put it of capitalism – but in light of the timescales of the earth into which they intervene – with the “annihilation of time by space.”1 In another sense this project is about tracing the itinerary of the unstable atom from its wartime commencement to its civilian uses and effects – in this sense it is continuous with work I’ve been doing with Julie Salverson for quite some time.2 What, for example, connects Hiroshima and Fukushima? Jean-Luc Nancy, for example, sees a “vexatious rhyme.” He writes: “It is not possible to ignore what is suggested by the rhyme of these two names, for rhyme gathers together – reluctantly against all poetry – the ferment of something shared.”3 The eight short passages that follow are part of a longer text that explores this something shared, what Nancy calls the nuclear paradigm, in relation to the lively contemporary circulation of the concept of the Anthropocene.

Trauma I wish to think about the present moment, about questions concerning ecological threat, and in particular, its most recent moral and aesthetic narrative, the Anthropocene. There is really no reason for me to join in the repetitious and unremitting chorus to announce and introduce this concept to you. Let me simply observe that in just over two decades Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer’s modest proposal for the end of the Holocene and the commencement of the Anthropocene has gathered a remarkable degree of traction across a vast spectrum of disciplines – nourishing and provoking humanists and scientists alike, and producing a distinctive, discrete stratum of inscription and mediation within contemporary cultural stratigraphy. Today we witness a veritable avalanche of papers and conferences and installations and exhibitions and performances, all attempting to come to terms with the tricky instability of the name; the profound destabilization and transformation it announces and incites; the curious and troubling “we” denoted by the name and gathered in the concept; the conspicuous displays of career-building cognitive workers; all the technical disputes within the geological community to decide the if and the when and the where of the Anthropocene – fire, agriculture, fossil fuels and the industrial revolution, atmospheric carbon 14, the so-called CO2 Orbis Spike of 1610, extinctions, plastics, the Great Acceleration.4 The list of contenders is long and bewildering. We come to see that an Anthropocene is indeed here and now, but like many things, it’s just not evenly distributed. Just ask someone in Kiribati, or China, or Fukushima. Or Iqaluit. All this frenzied activity … dour and repetitious, weirdly parochial, neurotically anxious, and increasingly territorial and competitive. It matters not that the term has yet to be officially adopted by the geological community; it’s like a contagion, a trickster meme that seeks to name and locate the

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trauma of the present according to a wildly varied and decidedly incommensurable field of needs.

Stories Contested – or perhaps just promiscuous – the Anthropocene is open for suggestion. For example, it tells a story of another human Fall (here the catastrophe was the sedentary shift of the Neolithic, a paleo-Anthropocene – the itinerancy of the nomad wins again); or it tells a story of the telos of technical disaster (the catastrophe here taps into the “hydrocarbon corpse juice,” as Reza Negarestani puts it,5 to underwrite the infernal entropy machines of the industrial revolution); or it tells a story of human fading (a revenge of the deep ecologists where we posit a final and misanthropic end to human exceptionalism); or, on the contrary, it tells a story of human ascension (one in which homo faber is again and definitively placed at the helm of the recently diagnosed “bateau ivre,” Earth, as a prime mover; only this time not with a biblical mandate/alibi/mantra to have dominion vis-à-vis fish, birds, and other things that moveth about, but this time as a full-on, planet-fucking, telluric agent. In each case, we lurch toward an ending that has effectively already happened, amplifying our experience of the burden of the past – and future – in new and painful ways. All of this, it seems to me, attempts to bring the anthropocenic trauma – figuring precisely the collapse of “natural” and “human” history,” as Dipesh Chakrabarty argues6 – a geo-trauma par excellence – and its principal figurations of climate change, evolution, biodiversity, futurity, and significantly, a world without us – into language. “The Anthropocene is therefore not simply a disputed designation in geological periodization [though that it certainly is] but a philosophical event that has struck like an earthquake, unsettling the tectonic plates of conceptual convention.”7 Like an earthquake. So, when the ground lurched into motion, and the ocean rose up, and the nuclear station went dark on that Friday in March 2011– a restive catfish and a feral dragon came together in a new place and name: Fukushima. Another performance of the end of the natural catastrophe – an ending becoming exceedingly difficult to disavow – the Anthropocene, we might say, dramatizes what Fukushima demonstrates. The earthquake and the tsunami – emphatic reports from the Pacific Ring of Fire – struck not only buildings, machines, containment vessels, and bodies of all kinds, but politics and economics and values and history. And this kind of loose coupling – where, for example, post-glacial tectonics meets energy policy by way of industrial design and historical land-use patterns – is in no way exceptional; it is merely crystalized in nuclear technologies and practices.

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Spike Not far from Craigellachie, British Columbia, there is a stone obelisk commemorating the site at which, at 9:22 a.m. on 7 November 1885, the “last spike” was driven into (presumably) the last tie, by the Honourable Donald A. Smith. The spike and the obelisk mark the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway, from its then western terminus Port Moody to Montreal in the east. There is some lively controversy as to whether the last spike was made of silver or iron (and whether there were two or more of them); whether it was stolen by Van Horne’s secretary (which seems to be the case), and whether one of them may be in the possession of the family of a certain “Mrs. Remnant,” late of Yellowknife. In any case, the spike, plural though it may be, holds together – in the manner of a material/semiotic quilting point8 – a familiar set of narratives about Canada. That is, it stabilizes a certain complicity of agreement (“the ribbon of steel that bound our fledgling country together,” as Prime Minister Stephen Harper put it in his 1996 apology9) – even as it has occluded others.10 There is another spike in the works, or maybe in the works. A golden one – a Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point, it’s called. This one is fascinating, and it is concerned both with founding and regulating a certain mode of commemoration and agreement, and also with a kind of telluric bookkeeping. In defining any unit within the International Chronostratigraphic Chart, the critical thing is “the fixing of its boundary.”11 This spike’s history is also murky, some saying that the practice arose from the railway;12 others dispute this.13 But more than sixty of these spikes have so far been placed at various far-flung points around the globe. Spikes are indexed to major shifts in earth systems that produce a clear trace or inscription … flourishings, extinctions, glaciations, abrupt climate shifts.14 They are typically the result of prolonged debate; the Holocene, for example – the twelve-thousand-year period of relatively warmth and stable climate into which each of us was born – was only ratified and marked in 2008.15

Imprescriptibility Michael Madsen, director of Into Eternity – a documentary about the Finish deep geological repository, Onkalo – suggested that the nuclear practices of the past seventy years amount to the commission of “a crime against humanity in the future.”16 Although he’s not the first to suggest this – a similar claim is being made by the Algerians – it is nevertheless striking.17 The implication here is that the toxicity of the present has no ethical horizon beyond which the future could not hold

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us responsible, could not call us to account; its juridical status in lockstep with its material longevity. And of course no one wants to think about this – particularly not those responsible for designing and implementing repositories. Abe van Luik, for example, who was a kind of folksy patriarch of the American initiatives (Yucca and wipp 18), suggested publicly at a 2014 Nuclear Energy Association (nea) meeting that the time for shame is over – it’s a problem that simply needs to be solved; nothing that should trouble us more than that. I guess shame is just too Holocene, as Bruno Latour might quip.19 In any case, such a crime, if it is one – a future rendered toxic – might fall under a sign of what one would call an “imprescriptibility” – a concept elaborated by Vladimir Jankélévitch, Jacques Derrida, and others.20 In a significant way, it would have to – the duration of this particular toxic hyperobject, let us say, while not infinite exactly, is without question an unimaginably large finitude. “An imprescriptible crime is one for which there is no statute of limitation. It is a crime that is eternally prosecutable.”21 As Derrida puts it, “In this law there is a sign toward the eternal right to judge crimes which are held inexpiable, beyond history, beyond time, beyond any given period of time. This means that the horizon of the forgiving of the unforgivable is now determining the human community, at least potentially [he hedged].”22 “A law beyond the law. A history beyond history.”23 But this would not exactly be the imprescriptibility of crimes against humanity that the United Nations affirmed in 1968. For Jankélévitch the singularity of the Shoah was inexpiable, beyond the forgivable insofar as there could be no conceivable punishment proportionate to the crimes committed. Unforgivable, and for this reason eternally prosecutable. But the imprescriptibility here arises not only through the bonds of community through time – that is, through memory and archive and practice – but also, and particularly from an imprescriptibility that is vibrated and motivated by the geoarchive of radiotoxic matter itself. The irreparable landscape as the mode of transmission. Where memory and the law alone can bear witness to the crimes of the camps, material imprescriptibility is dependent on neither. To the three great wounds suffered upon Western civilization noted by Freud almost a century ago – the cosmological, biological, and psychological – the Anthropocene heralds a fourth – the ontological wound.

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Meanwhile In 2012 Paul Crutzen changed his mind. He would no longer advocate the industrial revolution as the critical Anthropocene boundary. In an interesting interview about what might constitute a beginning, a decisive boundary point marking the end of the Holocene, he said: I’m starting to think the strongest signal … is just nuclear explosions … the test cases of atomic material. There were the first two nuclear explosions in Japan, but then [much more] testing took place, and anytime that radioactive material came into the world, into the sediments, we had an example of a good marker.24 Leaving aside the general mendacity of writing off Hiroshima and Nagasaki as test cases, he continued, saying that he is now “more in favour of declaring the nuclear tests as the real start of the Anthropocene.”25 And more recently, others have come to agree. The Anthropocene Working Group – Jan Zalasiewicz & Co. – has recently turned its attention to questions of a nuclear onset as well.26 This poses the possibility that we might now fix the “real start” of the Anthropocene on a specific date and time: 05:29:15 (more or less)27 on 16 July 1945. Absurdly, the Anthropocene began on a Monday morning, in the infernal instant of the piously named Trinity detonation, “perhaps the apogee of all imaginable Anthropocenic performance art,” as I put it elsewhere28 – its signature, the spectacular display of the invisible; radioactive decay. Thus registered, the human-induced planetary trauma could then be marked on a calendar, and with it the concept of globality itself is rendered decidedly material. From that point onward, the concept of globality becomes quite real – and at least as real as our hapless though intimate involvement in a 4.6-billion-year cascade of improbable events.

Matter “As no doubt we all know, no single instant, no atom of our life (of our relation to the world and to being) is not marked today, directly or indirectly, by that speed race of nuclear arms.” This is how Derrida figured it thirty years ago.29 Waste was never on his radar. He goes on to ask if this war of speed is something specific to the nuclear age “or rather the brutal acceleration of a movement that has always already been at work?”30 Indeed. The global dusting of plutonium, cesium, and strontium in fallout, some four hundred or so kiloCuries (or, about ten tons of plutonium), is very much already

Placing the Anthropocene

at work.31 And has been for quite some time.32 I think here of the “natural analog” reactors discovered at Oklo in Gabon (some sixteen distinct reactor zones located so far). Somewhere between 2 and 1.8 billion years ago, these natural-fission reactors went critical over a period of a hundred and fifty thousand years, splitting uranium235, producing plutonium. Just who does the earth think it is? But more likely we would point to the testing that took place over a period of sixty-eight years – over two thousand detonations we know of, and probably more – leaving no point of the globe untouched and many points of the globe untouchable.33 Or the accidents, of course, such as the burn-up and crash over the Indian Ocean in 1964 of the American snap-9a navigational satellite, depositing plutonium-238 fuel into the stratosphere, effectively tripling the global amount of this plutonium isotope already deposited by nuclear testing; or the moment in 1978 when the Soviet satellite Cosmos 954 burst through the atmosphere over Canada’s Northwest Territories, spreading some sixty-five kilograms of fissionable uranium over an area of 124,000 square kilometres (perversely regifting uranium previously mined from the very same region, one notes). And this is to say nothing of the repositories – immortal signatures, geological intrusions, poison and remedy, more than a dozen under construction right now – an allopathic network; geo-territorial archives … compendiums of matter – these emphatic landscapes make the atmospheric and terrestrial deposition look decidedly homeopathic. And the chilling thing about radiotoxic nuclides is that unlike climate, for example, which is borderline impossible to predict over long timescales, we know exactly the state of this matter through time. Seventy years of nuclear production, accumulation, expenditure, testing, leakage, contamination, and fallout have come to imprint the globe and its biota indelibly. We know exactly what is being projected into time, effacing time – we are involved in this temporality already.

Field Note: The Work of Art in the Age of Nuclear Waste A note written at the lieu de mémoire of Verdun, on the occasion of an nea meeting in September 2014. Yesterday, a representative of the Dutch nuclear agency covra made the most astonishing presentation concerning their temporary repository for high-level waste – habog, it’s called. The Dutch decided that they must keep their spent fuel at the surface for a minimum of a hundred years. It’s quite a beautiful building – a work of conceptual art designed by the artist William Verstraeten on the theme of

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metamorphosis. It is painted bright orange and emblazoned with the equations of Einstein and Planck in huge, friendly green letters. And every twenty years the building will be repainted with a colour less bright, until a hundred years from now the colour will be close to white – helpfully indexing the radioactivity within. Not long ago, the director of the project decided that the extra space inside could be pressed into cultural service. Within a few years the facility had entered into agreements with seven regional museums and galleries, were storing an array of artworks and museum pieces, and running cultural programming throughout the year. Now, leaving aside the plausible observation that this is merely a strategic attempt to absorb the benediction of art for the waste of modernity, this is a surprising development. The aesthetic possibilities of waste … waste as a mode of (auto-preserving) cultural heritage. Waste to be curated, cared for. By us. A keeping place, as Jonathan Bordo would put it. Does this – I wonder to myself – suggest a way out of the lonely aporias into which, with our dark thoughts, we so often slip?

Toponym What kind of temporal depth of field is appropriate to fix the Anthropocene – so far, a mere blip on the geological time scale? Why does any of this matter? The golden spike, a marker; a perfect performance of ostensive definition. A neurotic gesture in its faint hope of organizing global conditions, quite literally, with a punctum. A wish – in the face of bewildering necessities – for the efficacy of the symptoms to be restored – all the neurotic ever seeks – we want the old future back!34 It comes to look like a wild therapeutic intervention – a wild analysis.35 The tired angel turns, for the first time – The Anthropocene: a symptom seeking to name a trauma; and a toponym for which the map is identical to the territory. Yes, I think that a fitting commencement of an Anthropocene would be the nuclear – but where does that take us? But maybe the better question is how to think about this material imprescriptibility – for which the nuclear is simply a paradigm – as an ethical call to the present. Just as we ought not to allow that all this remain a technoscientific problem, as the geoengineers marshal in the wings – we’ve seen already how this can go – but neither can we afford the theoretical luxury of a brooding nuclear sublime.

Placing the Anthropocene

Notes 1 See Anne Pasternak and Nato Thompson, “Forward,” in The Last Pictures, ed. Trevor Paglen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), viii–xi. 2 E.g., Peter C. van Wyck and Julie Salverson, “Through the Lens of Fukushima,” in Through Post-Atomic Eyes, ed. Claudette Lauzon and John O’Brian (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020), 199–210. Julie Salverson is a playwright and theorist at Queen’s University. 3 Jean-Luc Nancy, After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 14. 4 Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill, “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature,” ambio: A Journal of the Human Environment 36, no. 8 (2007): 614–41. 5 China Miéville, “Fiction by Reza Negarestani,” World Literature Today 84, no. 3 (2010): 12–13. Reza Negarestani, “Notes on the Figure of the Cyclone,” in Leper Creativity: Cyclonopedia Symposium, ed. Ed Keller, Nicola Masciandaro, and Eugene Thacker (Cincinnati: Punctum Books, 2012), 287–98. 6 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change,” New Literary History 43, no. 1 (2012): 12. 7 Elizabeth Johnson et al., “After the Anthropocene: Politics and Geographic Inquiry for a New Epoch,” Progress in Human Geography 38, no. 3 (2014): 439–56. A sentiment echoed by Jean-Luc Nancy: “An earthquake and the tsunami it caused become a technological catastrophe, which itself becomes a social, economic, political, and finally philosophical earthquake …”; Nancy, After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 34. 8 “It’s the point of convergence that enables everything that happens in … discourse [and outside it, I would add] to be situated retroactively and prospectively,” as Jacques Lacan puts it. See Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 3, The Psychoses 1955–1956, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 1993), 268. 9 Stephen Harper, “Address by the Prime Minister of Canada on the Chinese Head Tax Redress,” Government of Canada, 22 June 2006, www.canada.ca/en/news/archive/2006/06/addressprime-minister-chinese-head-tax-redress.html. 10 E.g., historically, questions of acknowledgment and redress for the Chinese Canadians, who, having built much of the railway, were then subject to a punitive head tax. 11 Jan Zalasiewicz et al., “When Did the Anthropocene Begin? A Mid-Twentieth-Century Boundary Level Is Stratigraphically Optimal,” Quaternary International 383 (5 October 2015): 196–203. 12 Charles H. Holland, “Does the Golden Spike Still Glitter?,” Journal of the Geological Society 143, no. 1 (1986): 7. 13 See Stephen Walsh, Felix Gradstein, and J.I.M. Ogg, “History, Philosophy, and Application of the Global Stratotype Section and Point (gssp),” Lethaia 37, no. 2 (2004): 204. 14 The Anthropocene Working Group (awg), part of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, has been charged to assess whether the Anthropocene – as a potential geological

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Peter C. van Wyck time unit – is “stratigraphically reasonable”; whether it is “useful to Earth Scientists”; when its beginning should be placed; how it should be defined (a Global Stratotype Section and Point or golden spike, or a Global Standard Stratigraphic Age – i.e., a date); and, at “what hierarchical level it should be placed: age, epoch, period, era or eon.” See Anthropocene Working Group, Newsletter of the Anthropocene Working Group, no. 4 (London: Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, International Union of Geological Sciences, and International Commission on Stratigraphy, 2013), 2. The awg had hoped to reach consensus in time for the 2016 International Geological Congress – the “35th World Cup of Geosciences,” according to the conference webpage. 15 Mike Walker et al., “Formal Definition and Dating of the gssp (Global Stratotype Section and Point) for the Base of the Holocene Using the Greenland ngrip Ice Core, and Selected Auxiliary Records,” Journal of Quaternary Science 24, no. 1 (2009): 3–17. A site in Greenland was selected because it “contains a proxy climate record across the Pleistocene–Holocene boundary of unprecedented clarity and resolution” (Walker et al., “Formal Definition,” 3).

16 Michael Madsen, dir., Into Eternity (Denmark: Films Transit International, 2010). 17 Algeria has asserted the claim of imprescriptibility with respect to the seventeen nuclear tests carried out there by the French government between 1960 and 1968. See Patrice Bouveret, Patrice and Jean-Marie Collin, “Radioactivity under the Sand Analysis with Regard to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear War,” Heinrich Böll Foundation, 2022, https://eu.boell. org/sites/default/files/importedFiles/2020/07/13/Collin-Bouveret-2020-Radioactivity-UnderThe-Sand.pdf. 18 On 26 March 1999, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant – the world’s first permanent, underground disposal facility for nuclear waste – received its first shipment. It arrived by truck from the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The wipp was to have continued in operation until 2039 or so, and then would be sealed shut. Once filled and closed it would then need to attend to the small matter of the design and construction of a system of signs to protect the security of the site for a regulatory period of ten thousand years. Three hundred generations. They’ve been working on this. What no one involved could see coming arrived, predictably, on 14 February 2014, when waste drum #68660 – which had been received from Los Alamos two weeks prior – experienced a “violent exothermic reaction.” I.e., it exploded, contaminating the underground facility, exposing twenty-two workers, and causing a series of radioactive plutonium and americium releases at the surface – something that could never happen. So, fifteen years – and nineteen billion dollars – into its ten-thousand-year life, the wipp was incapacitated for nearly three years, at an estimated cost of half a billion dollars. See James Conca, “wipp Nuclear Waste Repository Reopens for Business,” Forbes, 2017, www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/ 2017/01/10/wipp-nuclear-waste-repository-reopens-for-business/. As you probably know, inorganic cat litter is often made with a particularly absorbent form of clay called bentonite. Bentonite-based cat litter is also routinely used by the nuclear waste industry as a desiccant to stabilize highly acidic and other liquid radioactive wastes for disposal. Organic cat litter, on the other hand, is not made from bentonite; it is made from wheat.

Placing the Anthropocene While bentonite stabilizes and moderates chemical heat-producing reactions, organic cat litter in this context acts as fuel; it produces the makings of a bomb. Since September 2012, Los Alamos has packed over five thousand barrels of radioactive waste, including waste drum #68660, with organic kitty litter – brand-named “Swheat Scoop” but mislabelled as inorganic kitty litter. It took an explosion, and the crippling of the only functioning nuclear waste repository, before anyone noticed this mistake. An irreparable landscape. 19 Bruno Latour, “Telling Friends from Foes in the Time of the Anthropocene,” in The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis, ed. Clive Hamilton, François Gemenne, and Christophe Bonneuil (New York: Routledge, 2015), 145–55. 20 See Vladimir Jankélévitch, “Do Not Listen to What They Say, Look at What They Do,” Critical Inquiry 22, no. 3 (1996): 549–51; Jankélévitch, “Should We Pardon Them?,” Critical Inquiry 22, no. 3 (1996): 552–72; Jankélévitch, Le Pardon (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1967). And also, Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London: Routledge, 2001); Richard Kearney, “On Forgiveness: A Roundtable Discussion with Jacques Derrida,” in Questioning God, ed. John Caputo, Mark Dooley, and Michael Scanlon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 52–72. 21 Chris Kaposy, “‘Analytic’ Reading, ‘Continental’ Text: The Case of Derrida’s ‘On Forgiveness,’” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 13, no. 2 (2005): 219–20. 22 Kearney, “On Forgiveness,” 55–6. 23 Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, 33–4. 24 Crutzen, quoted in Paul Voosen, “Geologists Drive Golden Spike toward Anthropocene’s Base,” Greenwire, 17 September 2012, www.eenews.net/stories/1059970036. 25 Ibid. 26 Zalasiewicz et al., “When Did the Anthropocene Begin?” 27 It strikes me as kind of funny, but there are a number of competing claims about the actual time of the detonation. Bainbridge, the test director who was of course there at the time, reported “05:21:15 a.m. mwt plus 20 s minus 5 s error spread.” See K.T. Bainbridge, “Trinity,” in Los Alamos Technical Series (Los Alamos: Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, 1947). Yet the Wikipedia page cites 05:29:21 a.m., other sources – such as Joseph P. Masco, “5:29:45,” in Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations, ed. Ivan Karp, Lynn Szwaja, and Thomas Ybarra-Frausto (Durham, UK: Durham University Press, 2006), 102–6 – report 05:29:45 a.m., and Zalasiewicz et al., “When Did the Anthropocene Begin?,” reports (without citation) 05:29:21 Mountain War Time (+/- 2 s). Kyoko Hayashi also reports 5:29:45. See Kyoto Hayashi, From Trinity to Trinity, trans. Eiko Otake (Barrytown, ny: Station Hill Press, 2010). 28 Peter C. van Wyck, “Nuclear Topographies: Review of Shiloh Krupar’s Hot Spotter’s Report.” 2014, from http://societyandspace.com/reviews/reviews-archive/krupar-2013-hot-spottersreport-reviewed-van-wyck/. 29 Jacques Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now (full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives),” Diacritics 14, no. 2 (1984): 20.

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30 Ibid., 21. 31 For perspective, Yucca Mountain was designed to contain about six hundred tons of plutonium. 32 See Keld A. Jensen and Rodney C. Ewing, “The Okelobondo Natural Fission Reactor, Southeast Gabon: Geology, Mineralogy, and Retardation of Nuclear-Reaction Products,” Geological Society of America Bulletin 113, no. 1 (2001): 32–62. So, contrary to conventional belief, plutonium is not a synthetic element. 33 See Leo Heaps, Operation Morning Light: Terror in Our Skies: The True Story of Cosmos 954 (New York: Paddington Press, 1978); Eilene Galloway, “Nuclear Powered Satellites: The U.S.S.R. Cosmos 954 and the Canadian Claim,” Akron Law Review 12, no. 3 (1979): 401–15. 34 Bruno Latour, “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto,’” New Literary History 41, no. 3 (2010): 485–6. 35 It seeks above all to name the trauma – look! – a trauma that quite precisely overwhelms “our” capacity to conceptualize and represent it – which is, and has always been, geologic. The physical trauma – from which, I note, the very idea of trauma arises – turns out to be continuous with psychic trauma and is no longer linked by a metaphorical-hermeneutic transposition. See Peter C. van Wyck, The Highway of the Atom (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), §2.04.

9

A Haunt of Jackals: Towards a Critical Topography of Ruins Ihor Junyk

Babylon will become a heap of ruins, a haunt of jackals, an object of horror and hissing, without inhabitants – Jeremiah 51:37

We live in an era besotted with ruins. Whether it is the ruin tourism that thrives in post-industrial cities such as Detroit, the proliferation of websites and coffee-table books featuring beautiful photographs of ever more exotic forms of ruination such as crumbling Soviet industrial facilities or abandoned Antarctic whaling stations, or the post-apocalyptic ruinscapes that increasingly dominate our fictions, ruins have emerged as the key chronotope of our time.1 Indeed, not since the Romantic era have ruins so dominated our literary and pictorial landscapes. And yet, despite their contemporaneity, I will argue that there is something decidedly outmoded about these ubiquitous representations of ruination today. Deeply indebted to the eighteenth-century picturesque tradition, the ruins figured in contemporary culture are the work of time. They are the products of a process of gradual dissolution that slowly returns culture to nature. Why refer to this process as outmoded? Because the deep time of gradual entropic decay is not the temporality of our own supermodernity.2 As Paul Virilio has so extensively documented, we live today in an era of accelerated modernity defined by speed, violence, and catastrophe. We do indeed inhabit a landscape of ruins, but these are the ruins of Homs or the Donetsk airport, not the Via Appia. Despite the fact that catastrophic ruins are a crucial part of the contemporary spatial imaginary and, for many people, everyday experience, contemporary cultural theory lacks a language to talk about them. All too often the ruins wrought of catastrophe are ignored or dismissed in favour of aesthetic ruins that can be discussed in well-established terms inherited from an Enlightenment-era discourse on aesthetics. Ruins that do not conform to the characteristics of the aesthetic entropic ruin are not seen as ruins at all. As Andreas Huyssen so succinctly puts it, “Bombings,

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after all, are not about producing ruins. They produce rubble.”3 As a new approach to sites and spatial practices, critical topography has an important role to play in developing a language and methodology for dealing with catastrophic ruins and bringing them into critical discourse. This essay is an attempt to do just that by anatomizing the entropic ruin. I look at key texts in the development of this conception, focusing in particular on Denis Diderot’s “Salon of 1767” and Georg Simmel’s essay of 1911, “The Ruin.” Then, going back to the moment of the emergence of the entropic ruin, I identify an alternative conception, the catastrophic ruin, which appears simultaneously but for various complex reasons has been repressed in the aesthetic discourse of the West. Using contemporary photography, I elaborate on this conception and end by identifying five themes that an emerging critical topography can focus on to counteract the neglect that this form has suffered in modern critical discourse. “From the First World War to the Chinese Three Gorges Dam,” writes the archaeologist Alfredo González-Ruibal, “the archaeology of supermodernity is the archaeology of superdestruction – of life and matter.”4 Looking at our images of ruination, however, an anthropologist from another planet would think we live in a time of bucolic pre-modern serenity. In contrast to the pleasing and seductive character of so-called ruin porn, catastrophic ruins are completely unaesthetic, formless, and horrifying. But these sites can become crucial windows into the being of the present, and critical topography can play an important role in helping us to see them and speak about them.

The Entropic Ruin Throughout the early modern and modern periods, ruins have been a key form in Western art and aesthetic theory. A preoccupation with the ruin first emerged during the Renaissance. For the scholars of this period, the detritus of ancient Greece and Rome formed a vast and mysterious cipher that spoke to the lost knowledge of a distant past. It was, however, with the eighteenth century that a modern conception of the ruin, still operative today, began to emerge. Parallel to the development of modern archaeology, which sought to uncover and understand the fragments of antiquity, the ruin became a popular object in the art and architecture of the time – represented in countless paintings and sited in gardens according to a new theory of picturesque landscape design. Along with the seemingly ubiquitous presence of ruins in visual culture came an attempt by critics and philosophers to theorize the ruin – to define what in fact a ruin was and to determine the aesthetic effects that it had on its spectators. A seminal effort in this regard can be found in Denis Diderot’s “Salon of 1767.” In this piece Diderot deals with several paintings by Hubert Robert (see figure 9.1), who was referred to as “Robert des Ruines” by his contemporaries for having cornered

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9.1 Hubert Robert, Im aginaryView oftheGalleryoftheLouvreas aRuin, 1796, oil on canvas, 45⬙ × 57.4⬙, Louvre Museum, Paris, France.

the market on representations of ruination. This allows Diderot to wax philosophical about the nature and impact of the ruin in general. Contemplating the Ruin of a Triumphal Arch and Other Monuments, Diderot is able to articulate “the first tenet of the poetics of ruins.” Our glance lingers over the debris of a triumphal arch, a portico, a pyramid, a temple, a palace, and we retreat into ourselves; we contemplate the ravages of time, and in our imagination we scatter the rubble of the very buildings in which we live over the ground; in that moment solitude and silence prevail around us, we are the sole survivors of a nation that is no more.5 In this dense passage, Diderot elaborates the key aspects of the discourse on ruins that will hold sway over the entire modern period. In Diderot’s conception, the ruin is caused by the “ravages of time.” Deep time sets in motion an entropic process that turns monumental structures into “debris.” The spectator contemplates this debris, but the materiality of the ruin is not his ultimate interest. Indeed, it is only a prop in what is ultimately a process of immaterial contemplation. As spectators we “retreat into ourselves” and “contemplate the ravages of time” in the abstract, imagining the destruction of even our own buildings and civilization. The ruin, then, is ultimately an allegorical figure. It is of interest not in and of itself, in its

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particularity or materiality, but only to the extent that it can catapult the spectator beyond it into a condition of abstract contemplation on the nature of temporality itself. It serves, in other words, as a kind of giant vanitas that encourages meditations on the inevitability of frailty, mortality, decline, and death. These meditations are characterized by “a state of sweet melancholy” and heightened imagination that I have referred to elsewhere as “reverie.”6 A spectacular account of the reverie induced by the contemplation of ruins can be found in the work of Diderot’s contemporary, the Comte de Volney. His Les Ruines, ou Méditation sur les révolutions des empires, published in Paris in 1792, is a strange account of the author’s travels in Egypt and Syria. He begins by invoking the genius of ruins and noting the states of reverie that these figures induce in him: “Hail, solitary ruins! holy sepulchres and silent walls! you I invoke; to you I address my prayer. While your aspect averts, with secret terror, the vulgar regard, it excites in my heart the charm of delicious sentiments – sublime contemplations.”7 The author journeys to Palmyra to “visit its celebrated ruins.” After three days of travelling, he arrives at the Valley of Caves and Sepulchres and is struck by a scene of stupendous ruination, “a countless multitude of superb columns, stretching in avenues beyond the reach of sight. Among them were magnificent edifices, some entire, others in ruins; the earth every where strewed with fragments of cornices, capitals, shafts, entablatures, pilasters, all of white marble, and of the most exquisite workmanship.”8 Overcome by a state of “religious pensiveness,” he turns to “high contemplations” and finds himself slipping into a “profound reverie.” What follows is an extended phantasmagoria in which Volney pictures the ruined city come back to life, meditates on the fates of ancient cities such as Nineveh, Babylon, Persepolis, and Jerusalem, once so splendid and now shattered and broken, and imagines a future Europe reduced to a similar state of ruination. In a condition of “profound melancholy” he is visited by the genius of ruins who lifts him into the heavens where he is granted a moment of vision – a single transcendent glimpse of ubiquitous cosmic ruination. The conception of the ruin elaborated by Diderot and Volney at the very beginning of the eighteenth century would prove to be quite durable. We can find it virtually unaltered in another influential text on the ruin published a century and a half later in Georg Simmel’s eponymous essay of 1911. Like Diderot, Simmel locates the ruin at the intersection of the natural and the cultural. And like Volney, he sees it as less the trace of some particular event than the product of a timeless cosmic battle, the “world-pervading original enmity” between nature and spirit. The products of the spirit are ruined not by human action but by natural forces operating within the horizons of geological deep time, “The same forces which give a mountain its shape through weathering, erosion, faulting, and the growth of vegetation, here do their work on old walls.”9 Indeed, for Simmel, any evidence of human agency in ruination is enough to invalidate the ruin as ruin. “A good many Roman ruins,” he argues, “however interesting they may be otherwise, lack the specific fascination of

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the ruin – to the extent, that is, to which one notices in them the destruction by man; for this contradicts the contrast between human work and the effect of nature on which rests the significance of the ruin as such.”10 If architecture represents the perfect balance of nature and spirit, in the ruin the balance is tipped to the side of nature. This victory, however, is not a cause for despair. The ruin does not represent the annihilation of form – the collapse into formlessness and chaos. Rather, in the manner of the Aufhebung, the ruin recuperates form at another level. “Still, so long as we can speak of a ruin at all and not of a mere heap of stones,” writes Simmel, “this power does not sink the work of man into the formlessness of mere matter. There rises a new form which, from the standpoint of nature, is entirely meaningful, comprehensible, differentiated.”11 Paradoxically, then, ruins affirm meaning and the coherence of form. Although the spectacle of ruination is a “cosmic tragedy,” it isn’t a random or meaningless one. Because “destruction here is not something senselessly coming from the outside but rather the realization of a tendency inherent in the deepest layer of existence of the destroyed,”12 this spectacle can be contemplated with aesthetic pleasure. Where for Diderot the ruin sparks an exquisite melancholy, for Simmel it stimulates a nostalgia that he captures in a Romantic trope. The nostos of the ruin is a great cosmic homecoming, a return to the “good mother,” as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe calls “nature.”13 The nostalgic contemplation of this return engenders feelings of pleasure and equanimity in the spectator. “When we speak of ‘returning home,’” Simmel notes, “we mean to characterize the peace whose mood surrounds the ruin.”14 We can see, then, that despite their manifold differences, Diderot and Simmel have very proximate understandings of the ruin. First, both Diderot and Simmel naturalize the ruin. They reject the process of human ruination and accept as ruins only those objects that have been transformed through contact with natural forces and the entropic effects of time. Second, the two authors dematerialize the ruin. They turn away from the materiality and particularity of individual ruins and use their physical form as a springboard for immaterial contemplation. Third, in a related gesture, they atemporalize the ruin. They pull the ruin out of history and into the static atemporality of eternal forms. The second and third operations make the entropic discourse of ruins a kind of idealism. And fourth, the texts aestheticize the ruin. The appropriate reaction to the ruin is posited as an aesthetic one. The spectator engages in detached contemplation of the ruin and experiences the jouissance of one or another form of reverie, such as melancholy or nostalgia. These conceptions of the ruin have been completely metabolized culturally and have come to seem natural, if not inevitable. However, if one puts some pressure on these conceptions, they begin to appear rather strange. One of the key reasons for this strangeness is the fact they are badly out of step with the historical conditions of their time. Diderot and Simmel are writing not in some bucolic pre-modern moment but in the shadow of modernity – an era inhospitable to the naturalism

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and long, peaceful time horizons called for in their theories of the ruin. Simmel’s conception of the ruin emerges not only at a point in time when the cataclysmic impact of capitalism and industrialism was meticulously documented and understood, but also a mere four years before the outbreak of the First World War; a conflagration that resulted not only in mass death but also the wholesale ruination of urban areas and landscapes. But the fundamentally destructive character of modernity was well anatomized even before the First World War. Consider, for example, Karl Marx’s classic discussion of modernity in the Communist Manifesto. Here, Marx describes a period of vertiginous change in which “all that is solid melts into the air.” At the heart of this maelstrom of destruction is the “epidemic of overproduction.” In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity – the epidemic of overproduction. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.15 For Marx, then, capitalist modernity does not represent progress beyond the primitive destructiveness of a pre-modern war of all against all. Rather, it brings about a destructiveness far beyond anything ever seen in the pre-capitalist world, which becomes the very heart of the modern project. Even during the Enlightenment, at the very beginnings of the period under consideration, we can find modernity being characterized as a time of ruthless technological destruction. Consider the following excerpt from Diderot’s contemporary Voltaire, who mocks the war machine of Kant’s philosopher-king, Frederick of Prussia.

Towards a Critical Topography of Ruins

First the cannons battered down about six thousand men on each side; then volleys of musket fire removed from the best of worlds about nine or ten thousand rascals who were cluttering up its surface. The bayonet was a sufficient reason for the demise of several thousand others. Total casualties might well amount to thirty thousand men or so … Passing by mounds of the dead and dying, [Candide] came to a nearby village which had been burnt to the ground. It was an Abare village, which the Bulgars had burned, in strict accordance with the laws of war. Here old men, stunned from beatings, watched the last agonies of their butchered wives, who still clutched their infants to their bleeding breasts; there, disemboweled girls, who had first satisfied the natural needs of various heroes, breathed their last; others, halfscorched in the flames, begged for their death stroke. Scattered brains and severed limbs littered the ground. Candide fled as fast as he could go to another village; this one belonged to the Bulgars, and the heroes of the Abare cause had given it the same treatment. Climbing over ruins and stumbling over corpses, Candide finally made his way out of the war area.16 Far from a moment of progress and development, for Voltaire, Enlightened modernity, as represented by one of its key figures, is a time of contingency and atavistic destruction. These accounts present ruinscapes that are profoundly at odds with the entropic ruin theorized by both Diderot and Simmel. Marx and Voltaire show us a modernity of not Arcadian peace unfolding in the fullness of time but precipitous change dominated by military and industrial technologies. Indeed, the dissonance between these accounts and those of Diderot and Simmel is so extreme that it suggests the workings of a reaction formation. In psychoanalytic theory, a “reaction formation” is a defence mechanism deployed by the ego to protect it from guilt or anxiety-provoking instincts and emotions. To master these problematic impulses and experiences, the ego channels what it perceives to be negative affect into its opposite.17 So, for example, if feelings of hatred generate intolerable anxiety, the ego can cope by emphasizing love for the object in question. This psychoanalytic analogy isn’t perfectly applicable to the case of the modern ruin because for the latter, it is the very character of the object that is being altered, not just the affect associated with it. But if we can accept this imperfection, I think that the concept of reaction formation can shed light on the emergence of the entropic ruin as an aesthetic category. As modernity began to unleash ever more powerful destructive forces, writers like Diderot and Simmel compensated for the anxiety this generated by creating the phantasmatic opposite of the ruination they saw all around them. Not a contemporary ruin, created by the catastrophic release of enormous military and industrial energies and inspiring horror, but a ruin caused by natural forces, unfolding in the fullness of time and sparking various pleasing states of reverie.

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However, a crucial fact of reaction formation as a concept is that the anxietyproducing affect is not overcome but merely repressed. According to Charles Rycroft, “the original, rejected impulse does not vanish, but persists, unconscious, in its original infantile form.”18 And as Freud has shown us, the repressed can return in various compulsive and uncanny guises.19 Interestingly, we seem to see precisely this in Diderot’s text. Inspired by Hubert Robert’s work, Diderot is led to a moment of lyrical reverie: “The ideas ruins evoke in me are grand.” Diderot continues in the same vein, “Everything comes to nothing, everything perishes, everything passes, only the world remains, only time endures. How old is this world! I walk between two eternities.”20 Diderot is here on the terrain of the entropic ruin; a world of deep time, gradual natural decay, and aesthetic contemplation. And yet, within a few pages he has a very different experience. Observing the effect of the setting sun on Robert’s paintings, the critic imagines the salon bursting into flames – consumed by “a large nearby conflagration” that threatened the entire building. While Diderot wants to describe the placid entropic ruin, he ends up invoking, seemingly in spite of himself, its catastrophic Other. The repressed returns in uncanny hallucinations that check and problematize Diderot’s entire account. The process of ruination, this episode seems to tell us, is not simply one of gradual, aesthetic decomposition. It can also be one of contingency, speed, and horror.

The Catastrophic Ruin Diderot’s choice of image is striking, because in the years immediately following his Salon, a series of catastrophic fires swept Paris. In 1772 the hospital at the Hôtel-Dieu burned to ground, and in 1781 the residents of Paris witnessed the “terrifying” spectacle of the fire at the Paris Opéra (the adjective is Réstif de la Bretonne’s).21 The latter half of the eighteenth century was also a time of giddy real estate speculation. Eager to capitalize on the bubble, speculators strongly advocated for the destruction of old and decrepit buildings to clear the way for new developments. The late eighteenth century saw a wave of church demolitions, starting in 1787 when the Church of the Innocents in Paris was destroyed. Robert des Ruines developed a new kind of aesthetic to capture this atmosphere of contingency and rapid destruction. The paintings produced by Robert in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were no longer the bucolic entropic ruins theorized by Diderot, but the relentlessly contemporary catastrophic ruins that compulsively returned in the philosophe’s fantasies (see figure 9.2). Consider, for example, Robert’s Demolition of Saint Jean en Grève (see figure 9.3). The painting shows the levelling of the decrepit fourteenth-century structure. A crowd has gathered to watch the event, as was actually the case – demolitions were

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9.2 Hubert Robert, Burning oftheOpera in thePalais-Royal, 1781, oil on canvas, 100 3/8⬙ × 65 3/4⬙, Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation, Houston, Texas.

popular public spectacles at the time. However, in contrast to the picturesque tradition where the presence of people emphasizes the human scale of ruins and their function as props for anodyne contemplation, here every effort is made to present the site of ruination as being inhospitable to human presence. The witnesses situated at the bottom left of the painting express awe at the spectacular immolation of the antique building, while those at the bottom right flee in terror. As Nina Dubin notes, this painting (and other similar paintings by Robert) relies on hyperbole: “Robert inflates the scale of his ruins out of all proportion, dwarfs their human witnesses, and marshals the outmoded trademarks of baroque scenography – gusts of smoke, walls of flame, floating heaps of dust – as if to conjure a city bewitched.”22 In addition

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9.3 Hubert Robert, Dem olition of SaintJean en Grève, 1800, oil on canvas, 31.4⬙ × 27.9⬙, Musée Carnavalet, Paris, France.

to the scenography of the baroque, however, we might also see here the tropes of the sublime. Along with the beautiful and the picturesque, the sublime was part of the triumvirate of key aesthetic experiences explored by both Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke in the late eighteenth century. “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger,” writes Burke in On the Sublime and Beautiful, “that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime.”23 Robert’s painting may be seen as a virtual summa of the modalities of the sublime elaborated by Burke in “Part Two” of his contemporaneous treatise: “Suddenness, Obscurity, Terror, Vastness, Magnitude in Building, etc.” Dubin has seen in this

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mobilization of the sublime a kind of sensationalism that facilitated and pandered to the values of the new financial elites of the capital who had amassed staggering fortunes by speculating on insurance and real estate. “Exalting unforeseeable collapse,” she writes, “his portraits of the capital’s decimated monuments, it could be said, helped condition their audience to a new order of risk. In glorifying the recent remains of unpredictable disaster, Robert sanctioned a world in which the past no longer provided a reliable compass. And for those socialized to embrace contingency, Robert’s ruins offered gratifying aesthetic returns.”24 The connection between the unhinged speculative economy of the late eighteenth century and the new vogue of ruin art is brilliantly established in Dubin’s essay. Perhaps somewhat less convincing is the imputation of complicity on the part of Robert in this new topsy-turvy world. Even if one accepts this complicity, I believe that Robert’s paintings allow for a radically different kind of reading. Instead of glorifying ruination, these paintings bear witness to the fearful new realities of modernity and disaster capitalism. Couldn’t his use of the tropes of the sublime be a means of forcing his spectators to recognize the world they inhabit? Couldn’t these aesthetic representations be a necessary corrective to a quiescent fantasy of the entropic ruin, with its denial of history, technology, and violence? Approached in this manner, Robert appears not as a marginal figure in the history of Western art but as a crucial forebear in the development of a new aesthetics of the ruin. He stands at the beginning of a tendency in modern art that has grappled

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9.4 Photograph by Max Avdeev, taken after the fall of Donetsk airport in 2015 and published as part of a series titled Afterthe Storm :PicturesaftertheFallof DonetskAirport, 2015.

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with the legacy of the entropic ruin and has developed a new language for the representation of contemporary catastrophic ruination. This line is particularly evident in contemporary photography. Diverse artists such as Edward Burtynsky, Jeff Wall, Robert Polidori, Joel Sternfeld, and Camilo José Vergara have all challenged the dominant entropic tradition and expanded the contemporary imaginary of ruins. In what follows, I want to briefly look at a number of recent images by Max Avdeev to highlight some of the key differences between entropic and catastrophic ruins. Max Avdeev’s photo essay After the Storm: Pictures after the Fall of Donetsk Airport (see figure 9.4) documents the ruins of the Donetsk airport in eastern Ukraine. Extensively renovated for the Euro 2012 soccer tournament, the airport became a key battleground between Ukrainian forces (popularly known as “cyborgs” because of their superhuman endurance) and Russian-backed separatists. After months of hellish fighting that often took place between floors or through holes in walls, the betterequipped separatist forces launched a major offensive which drove the Ukrainian forces from the airport and left this state-of-the-art facility in ruins. The lead photograph of Avdeev’s series shows a desolate, wintry wasteland with the ruined hulk of the airport terminal in the background. Consciously or not, the photograph echoes Caspar David Friedrich’s The Abbey in the Oak Forest (see figure 9.5).25 Both images feature desolate winterscapes with ruins at the centre that are framed by trees. However, despite the manifold similarities between the two images, they represent two different conceptions of the ruin. Friedrich’s painting shows the ruins of a gothic church. Oak trees have grown into the space where the church once stood. The forms of the ruins and the trees echo and blend into one another. After centuries of slow decomposition, the church has returned to nature. The theme of passing time is explored in other aspects of the painting as well. The ruins of the church sit in a decaying graveyard while a group of spectral monks in funereal procession carry a coffin into the ruins of the church. Vanitas vanitatum, the painting seems to say … all is destined to fade away. And yet it is not a decomposition into chaos that awaits us. For through the opening in the church wall, a cross is visible, betokening the promise of transcendence, coherence, and meaning. Other pictures in contemporary ruins photography have recycled Friedrich’s tropes to produce pleasing images of entropic decomposition. And while Avdeev’s photograph utilizes many of the same tropes, their meanings are inverted and subverted. The powerful oak trees that cradle the ruin in Friedrich’s painting are in Avdeev’s photograph puny, blighted stumps that are powerless to help the wreck return to the “good mother.” Indeed, instead of culture becoming nature, the photograph demonstrates the industrialization of the natural world. The form and mottled texture of the tree trunks echo the rusted metallic structure that dominates the foreground on the right, while the tire tracks that stretch across the snowy ground rhyme with the scars that puncture the facade of the terminal building. The natural world

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9.5 Caspar David Friedrich, TheAbbeyin theOakForest, 1809–10, oil on canvas, 43.3⬙ × 67.3⬙, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany.

is no longer a haven from mechanization and war, but is desecrated and despoiled by those very processes. The themes of materiality and technology are picked up in other photographs in the series. Texture is an important element in all the photographs. We get an almost haptic sense of the mottled trees, the flakes of rust on the metal post, the crumbling stone. Instead of fleeing into ethereal realms, Avdeev’s camera lingers on the materiality of the ruins. And these are not the noble materials of antique ruins – or even natural materials. One of his photographs from the After the Storm series gives us a tightly framed tableau of modern ruination. Fragments of concrete mix indiscriminately with rusty shell casings, dirty strips of fabric, and at the centre, the focus of the composition, a filthy packet of Nescafé. This is not the aesthetic ruin as a window on orderly eternal Forms. This is the ruin as an aesthetics of abjection and chaos. No attempt is made to naturalize these scenes – to present destruction as the effect of time or, to recite Simmel, as “the realization of a tendency inherent in the deepest layer of existence of the destroyed.” Rather, ruination is relentlessly presented as “something senselessly coming from the outside.” Traces of violence and military technology are ubiquitous. In almost every image from Avdeev’s series, we see automatic weapons, shell casings, and belts of ammunition, combatants, scars, and craters made by rockets (see figure 9.6). The traces of violence and evidence of swift, calamitous ruin that characterize the pictures of Donetsk airport are wholly foreign to the genre of ruin porn which typically focuses on bucolic scenes of culture returning to nature. While Avdeev’s

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9.6 Max Avdeev, AftertheStorm : PicturesaftertheFallofDonetsk Airport, 2015.

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photographs certainly spark a strong emotional response, the abjection of these images thwarts the tendency towards lyrical reverie elicited by the entropic ruin. Instead, it is the sublime emotions elicited by Robert’s catastrophe images that are called upon. One cannot help but feel horror at the scale of the catastrophic ruination and despoiled landscapes. However, it is not only affect that is solicited by these images; they demand thought and critical inquiry as well. We are forced to ask, How could this have happened? How is it that in contemporary Europe such a state-ofthe-art facility as the Donetsk airport could be reduced to such a pile of rubble as this? To answer these questions, the images force us to think politically. Signs of politics are everywhere. One of the combatants wears a St George’s ribbon; another, the flag of “Novorossiya” – both potent symbols of the revanchist politics embodied and abetted by the Putin regime. There can be no comforting escape to an apolitical aesthetic or lyrical reverie; we are forced to think, to question, to choose.

Towards a Critical Topography of Ruins

Towards a Critical Topography of Ruins If, then, philosophical aesthetics has systematically developed a distorted account of ruins, how might critical topography, inspired by the most challenging and innovative forms of ruin art, approach these key sites in the spatial imaginary? The obvious answer is to significantly broaden the conception of the ruin and to bring denigrated and elided catastrophic ruins back into critical discourse. Further, as a corrective to the exclusions, repressions, and oversights of the philosophical tradition, critical topography should pay particular attention to the following five themes.

Culture The aesthetic tradition has cast the entropic ruin as exclusively the product of time and nature. Indeed, recall that for Simmel, evidence of human intervention was enough to invalidate the ruin as ruin. However, the slow entropic decay privileged in these accounts seems more and more like a nostalgic fantasy. As noted above, the psychological and political elision of this human capacity for destructiveness seems suspiciously like a “reaction formation” meant to cope with feelings of helplessness and anxiety. Critical topography should contend with this anxiety and open itself to an investigation of the ruin as a product of human culture. War zones where combatants use advanced forms of technology to wreak destruction, such as at Donetsk airport, are obvious sites for a critical topography of ruins. But in other, less obvious cases, human agency should also be highlighted and explored. While the ruination in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone might seem (or be represented as) the impact of time and nature unchecked by human presence, it is ultimately the effect of nuclear catastrophe and the complex politics and economics of the late-Soviet period. A similar point is made by critics of “Detroitism” – the ruin-porn photography that presents the Motor City’s decaying landmarks as natural phenomena devoid of human presence. Critics such as John Patrick Leary argue that this kind of approach takes what is a complex social phenomenon (with tangled roots in issues of race, politics, and economics) and recasts it as a purely natural spectacle.26

Materiality The entropic tradition has been profoundly uninterested in the materiality of ruins. As I have argued, ruins as things have been interesting to this tradition only to the extent that they serve as a springboard for the abstract contemplation of grander and more heroic themes. This leap has served a therapeutic purpose. By treating ruins in an allegorical fashion, one does not need to attend to the violence that caused the ruination and the pain and death that has come in its wake. The allegorical leap allows one to maintain the fantasy of wholeness, coherence, and meaning. The

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shattered materiality of the catastrophic ruin provides no comfort on this score. It forces the viewer to contend with the idiotic meaninglessness of destruction or, better perhaps, the assault on meaning that destruction perpetrates. A further reason that the contemporary discourse on ruins avoids materiality is that contemporary materials do not decay in the way that ruins are supposed to. As Andreas Huyssen argues, “Modernist architecture points to another historical boundary of an imaginary of ruins à la Piranesi. Concrete, steel, and glass building materials aren’t subject to erosion and decay the way stone is. Modernist architecture refuses the return of culture to nature.”27 This “problem” was already identified in the 1930s by Albert Speer, who developed his theory of “ruin value” to deal with the unheroic character of modern materials. Looking at the destroyed streetcar depot in Nuremberg, the architect was disgusted by the “dreary sight” of “iron reinforcements,” which had “protruded from concrete debris and had already begun to rust.” It was evident to Speer that “buildings of modern construction were poorly suited to form that ‘bridge of tradition’ to future generations that Hitler was calling for. It was hard to imagine that rusting heaps of rubble could communicate these heroic inspirations which Hitler admired in the monuments of the past.”28 This unheroic dreariness that had once disgusted Speer should now inspire critical topography. Critical topography should reaffirm the “thingness” of ruins and investigate their materiality and particularity. Concrete, glass, and steel constitute the material essence of supermodernity and any interdisciplinary field that wants to understand our contemporaneity must spend time with them. Recent work by the Ruin Memories group has demonstrated that attention paid to “abject” material such as concrete yields substantial dividends.29 More than this, a focus on the dogged materiality of things is a necessary corrective for a culture increasingly infatuated with a discourse of immateriality and virtuality. As Alfredo González-Ruibal argues, “Behind the clean and invisible networks of globalization and digital media” is “a materiality that is not reducible to social constructions and symbolic meanings.”30

Temporality As noted, the discourse of entropic ruins is an atemporalizing discourse. Its interest is ultimately in universal truths of human experience. Paradoxically, there is something repetitious and myopic in this approach. Every ruin reveals the power of time and the vanity of earthly things. Critical topography should resist this idealizing gesture and resituate the ruin in history. Ruins do not merely open a window into timeless verities but also provide material testimony to the major currents and upheavals of modernity: industrialism, war, globalization, and environmental crisis. The entire history of this period is written in ruins if we have the eyes to see it. Further, the catastrophic ruin embodies an extraordinarily complex temporality. Unlike entropic

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ruins, which are theorized as existing exclusively within deep time, catastrophic ruins present a kind of palimpsest of temporalities. On the one hand they embody a temporality of speed and immediacy. While this has typically been seen as foreign to the nature of the ruin, the etymology of the word “ruin” reveals that this time sense is in fact fundamental. The Oxford English Dictionary lists as one of the roots of the word ruin, the “classical Latin ruīna – headlong rush, headlong fall, downward plunge, collapse (of a building).”31 Far from being some kind of illegitimate importation that I am trying to smuggle in at this juncture, velocity and precipitous collapse are in fact, written into the very dna of the term ruin. But the catastrophic ruin as an embodiment of speed is not simply the opposite of the entropic ruin, as an embodiment of slow, gradual decline. The catastrophic ruin also embodies structures of durée, often several at once, which interact in complex ways. An interesting example of the layering of rapid and long-duration temporalities is what Bjørnar Olsen has termed “sticky heritage.” Olsen considers “the material legacy of the former Soviet empire as manifested in remote towns and settlements on the Kola Peninsula in NW Russia.”32 After the collapse of the Soviet Union, these once-prosperous areas fell into rapid decline. But while “much of this Soviet legacy may indeed qualify for the term ‘ruins,’” as Olsern argues, these are not abandoned ruins to be admired in the picturesque tradition. People continue to live in these ruins of socialism. “When did the Soviet Union end?” Olsen is prompted to ask. Uncannily, for many in Kola, it never did. The ruins that they live in exist within and prop up an alternative temporality that diverges from the one that dominates the historical record; a temporality in which the Soviet Union is still ongoing.

Abjection The entropic ruin is a beautiful or at least picturesque object. Ruin porn has attained enormous popularity because it is visually stunning and seductive. I have no categorical objections to ruin porn, and I have no desire to engage in a puritanical evisceration of beautiful images. However, I will note that as a discipline concerned with spaces and places, critical topography cannot limit itself to the beautiful or picturesque. Many of the key sites of modernity are not beautiful places. They are sites of pain, and death, and suffering. They are not pleasing or edifying to look at, and yet look we must. Further, as I discussed in my section on materiality, modern materials often do not decompose in an aesthetic manner. The disintegration of concrete, glass, steel, and synthetic materials does not produce the picturesque effects we want and expect from our ruins. Ruins such as these blur the boundary between culture and waste, and correspond powerfully to what Julia Kristeva has called the “abject,” or that which “disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules.”33 While the entropic ruin shares in and shores up the oppositions that

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lie at the heart of the modern regime of sense-making, the catastrophic ruin throws these oppositions into question. In the catastrophic ruin, then, many of the invisible mappings that define the real are made visible.

Politics As my examples have hopefully illustrated, catastrophic ruins stand at the very heart of the key political issues of our time. War, terrorism, accidents, climate change, industrialization, and deindustrialization have left a trail of ruins across the modern period. While aesthetic contemplation in the key of reverie has been the appropriate mode of reception of entropic ruins, the catastrophic ruin calls for a critical political engagement. Working with catastrophic ruins can play a powerful role in the work of de-sublimation, puncturing the pretensions of ideological abstractions and bringing them back to earth. The ruins of the Donetsk airport reveal the truth of the Russkiy Mir proclaimed so triumphantly by the Putin regime. Further, if, as Paul Virilio has claimed, supermodernity can be characterized by the “politics of disappearance,”34 a critical topography of ruins has an important corrective function to play. It forces us to look at sites and events that both powerful interests and our own squeamishness encourage us to look away from. By looking steadfastly at the destructive character of supermodernity, critical topography can affirm its critical character and make an intervention into the thorny debates plaguing our troubled century.

Afterword I wrote this essay shortly after the second battle of Donetsk airport had left the structure in question in ruins. Photos of the blasted hulk of the building awakened sufficient horror in me that I felt inspired to question a long-standing aesthetic tradition that had made a fetish of ruination. In my essay I expressed suspicion of and disgust with the discourse of “Russkiy Mir”: a putative “civilizing mission” whose true face, I argued, was revealed in the squalid fragments of the once resplendent terminal. Little could I have guessed how prescient these comments would prove to be. On 24 February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, sharply escalating the war that had been ongoing since 2014. Although various outlandish “justifications” of the invasion were given – resistance to nato expansion and “de-Nazification” chief among them – it soon became abundantly clear that conquest and genocide were the goals of the “special military operation.” In a reprise of the total war of the 1940s, cities and civilian areas were targeted indiscriminately, resulting in a level of ruination against which the destruction of the Donetsk airport paled in comparison. Bucha, Irpin,

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Borodyanka, and Chernihiv have been decimated. Homes and buildings have been ruined; lives have been destroyed; people have been raped, tortured, killed, and tossed into mass graves. And most horrific of all has been the fate of Mariupol. The name of this city has already entered the pantheon of martyr cities, joining the likes of Guernica, Coventry, Grozny, and Aleppo. Once a bustling port of almost half a million souls, “Russkiy Mir” has effectively wiped Mariupol from the map. According to reports, there have been tens of thousands of civilian casualties and more than 90 per cent of the city’s buildings have been damaged or destroyed. At the time of writing, the last Ukrainian defenders and numerous civilians have taken refuge in the underground passageways of the sprawling Azovstal steel plant. But I want to end on a note of optimism, not elegy. On the day before writing this, while struggling with what to say, I met with my mother. During the Second World War she survived bombing in the very places now so heavily embattled – Kharkiv, Zmiiv, Merefa. In a weird moment of synchronicity, she shared with me a video that was broadcast on the Ukrainian news channel tsn. The story profiles Vera Pylipivna Honcharuk, an eighty-three-year-old woman from Gorenka outside Kyiv, whose house was left in ruins by Russian Grads. Partially destroyed was the peech – the traditional Ukrainian bake oven. In the news story, Vera Pylypivna describes how she repaired the peech herself so she could bake paska – Ukrainian Easter bread. Cynics will scoff at the simplicity of the allegory, but I found something deeply moving in the sight of this humble woman making order from destruction with her gnarled and weathered hands. I thought of William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Commenting on the prospect of nuclear annihilation, Faulkner articulated his faith that humanity would not only “endure,” it would “prevail.” It would do so because it has “a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.” This spirit lives on in women like Vera Pylipivna. Ukraine will not only endure, it will prevail.

Notes 1 See, e.g., Jamie Rann, “Beauty and the East: Allure and Exploitation in Post-Soviet Ruin Photography,” Calvert Journal, 31 July 2014, http://calvertjournal.com/features/show/2950/russianruins-photography; Jakob Schiller, “Ghostly Plane Wrecks Found in Remote, Exotic Locations,” wired, 29 April 2013, www.wired.com/2013/04/finding-beauty-in-wrecked-and-rotting-air planes/; Vincze Miklós, “8 Abandoned Antarctic Whaling Stations and Bases That Are Still Amazing,” io9, 4 July 2013, http://io9.gizmodo.com/8-abandoned-antarctic-whaling-stationsand-bases-that-a-471066973. 2 See Marc Augé, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London: Verso, 1995). For me, the term is preferable to postmodernity in that it presents the contemporary moment as a hypertrophy or metastasis of the modern, rather than as somehow beyond it.

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Ihor Junyk 3 Andreas Huyssen, “Nostalgia for Ruins,” Grey Room 23 (April 2006): 8. 4 Alfredo González-Ruibal, “Time to Destroy: An Archaeology of Supermodernity,” Current Anthropology 49, no. 2 (April 2008): 247–79. 5 Denis Diderot, Diderot on Art, vol. 2, The Salon of 1767, trans. John Goodman (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 1995), 196–7. 6 See Ihor Junyk, “‘Not Months but Moments’: Ephemerality, Monumentality, and the Pavilion in Ruins,” Open Arts Journal 10, no. 2 (December 2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.5456/issn.20503679/2013w02ij. 7 C.F. Volney, The Ruins (New York: Twentieth Century Publishing, 1890), n.p., www.gutenberg. org/files/1397/1397-h/1397-h.htm. 8 Volney, Ruins, chap. 1. 9 Georg Simmel, “Two Essays,” Hudson Review 11, no. 3 (Autumn 1958): 381.

10 Ibid., 380. 11 Ibid., 381. 12 Ibid., 382. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., 383. 15 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, ed. A.J.P. Taylor (London: Penguin, 1967), 86. 16 Voltaire, “Candide,” in The Norton Anthology of World Literature (New York: Norton, 2012), 3:358–9. 17 See Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James. Strachey (New York: Basic Books 1975). 18 Charles Rycroft, A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (London: Penguin,1995). 19 See Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Malden, ma: Blackwell, 1998), 154–67. 20 Diderot, Diderot on Art, 198–9. 21 Quoted in Nina Dubin, “Robert Des Ruines,” Cabinet 20 (Winter 2006), www.cabinetmagazine. org/issues/20/dubin.php. 22 Dubin, “Robert Des Ruines.” 23 Edmund Burke, On the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Charles W. Eliot (New York: P.F. Coller, 1909). 24 Dubin, “Robert Des Ruines.” 25 This may indeed be a conscious reference. Avdeev’s Twitter feed includes a photo that is a selfconscious updating of Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, indicating that he is familiar with Friedrich’s work. However, it isn’t necessary that this be a conscious reference. As I note above, The Abbey has established several conventions that images of entropic ruin often draw on. Avdeev may be positioning his picture against images such as these. 26 John Patrick Leary, “Detroitism,” Guernica: A Magazine of Art & Politics, 15 January 2011, www.guernicamag.com/features/leary_1_15_11/. 27 Huyssen, “Nostalgia for Ruins,” 20.

Towards a Critical Topography of Ruins 28 Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs (New York: Macmillan 1970), 56. 29 Gavin Lucas, “Concrete Modernity,” Ruin Memories: A Portfolio, accessed 3 March 2016, http://ruinmemories.org/2013/06/concrete-modernity/. 30 González-Ruibal, “Time to Destroy,” 15. 31 “Ruin, N.,” oed Online (Oxford University Press), accessed 4 March 2016, www.oed.com.cat1. lib.trentu.ca:8080/view/Entry/168689. 32 Bjørnar Olsen, “Sticky Heritage,” Ruin Memories: A Portfolio, accessed 4 March 2016, http://ruin memories.org/2013/07/sticky-heritage/. 33 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4. 34 Paul Virilio and Sylvère Lotringer, Pure War (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 89.

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Conversations on Walls Margaret Olin

A wall carries political and historical burdens. It separates, confines, and acts as a boundary. The surface of a wall, in turn, represents those functions as a page from a book or, more accurately, a curated exhibition. Potentially, every wall offers a space for drawings, posters, and works of art, for scribbling and graffiti. A wall has curators. Some walls have meanings that may be parallel to, coexist with, conflict with, or oppose these functions of delineating space. The Vietnam Memorial in Washington, dc, was planned, commissioned, and constructed, names emblazoned upon it. Memorials for the victims of the attacks in New York City on 11 September 2001 appeared on pre-existing surfaces such as shelters at bus stops, walls around hospitals or churchyards. These walls now appear unplanned and uncurated, although further scrutiny can sometimes cause that impression to dissipate.1 Sometimes different curatorial and artistic intents conflict on a wall, making it into a site of discourse. The walls in this chapter all contain the seeds of conflicts between curatorial ideas and the function of spatial delineation of the wall itself. The first two examples concern walls of gated communities whose openings or lack thereof constitute their meanings and the reasons for the changing exhibitions on their surfaces. The exhibitions on these walls concern primarily the meanings of walls – the walls on which they are located and of walls in general. The final, longer, discussion concerns a formerly gated community, the Dheisheh Refugee Camp in Palestine, where the walls of the buildings have become an evolving site of discourse that transcends the walls and allows meanings visibly to traverse them.

A Minimal Definition of “Wall”: The Eruv The first wall exhibition under discussion tries to formulate an answer to the question, What is a wall?2 Because work was forbidden on the Shabbat, and transporting objects from within a private home to a public space counted as work, Jews could

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not carry objects – or people – outside their own homes on Shabbat. The solution was to create an area called an eruv, within which Jews could act as though the boundaries of their private homes were expanded on Shabbat into a public space, to include their neighbours, relatives, and synagogues. The notion of a partnership was born, in which the residents of a walled courtyard could band together to treat their combined homes as a single private abode once a week on Shabbat for the purpose of carrying. To form a wider partnership, it followed, a larger walled courtyard must be constructed that would encompass several smaller courtyards and homes. Hence the questions arose, What is a wall? And how can one be erected that acts as a wall only once a week? The solution perhaps seems counterintuitive. I have written above that a wall performs an act of separation. But a wall does not merely separate and shape enclosed spaces; it also defines places where the space opens, that is, its entryways. Normally a wall must have some kind of opening, and the kind of opening it has can define what kind of wall it is. Consequently, the Talmudic thinkers who found themselves faced with the problem of constructing a symbolic courtyard started by defining the basic fact of the wall as the possession of an opening. After all, try to think of a wall without an opening. The essential symbolic feature of the wall they conceived was thus a gate. They distilled the essence of the wall down to its bare minimum: continuous gates, each consisting of symbolic posts and a lintel. It is possible to walk though this wall at any point since all the gates are open, but on Shabbat it is forbidden for observant Jews to do so unless their hands and pockets are completely empty. Within the eruv, however, they are free to carry such objects as prayer books and handkerchiefs. Non-Jews, of course, may freely walk through the eruv’s gates at any time. The eruv is a construction of symbols built on a spatial boundary that barely exists. Most European eruvin ended in the Nazi era, but there are hundreds in Canada and the United States and elsewhere, many only a few decades old. They create borders within neighbourhoods and divide the spaces of cities. The White House and other government buildings have been in the Rabbi Rabinovitz Memorial Eruv in Washington, dc, since 1990, but, as in other eruvin, few residents within its perimeters realize that they live in it. The reason for this is that the makers of eruvin hide them in plain sight, planting their markers among the utility poles and wires that form a maze above eye level in most cities. The signs hide among mysterious objects made of metal, tape, and cloth that cling to utility poles. Shoes that often hang over the wires by their laces could be thought of as this wall’s graffiti. Generally, the key to identifying the eruv is a floor protector, a rubber tip meant for the bottom of a chair or cane, that instead perches bottom-up on top of a plastic polyvinyl chloride (pvc) conduit attached to a utility pole high in the air, above it a utility wire or monofilament. The pvc conduit acts as the gate’s post, while the monofilament

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10.1 Eruvattachment: PVC conduit, microfilament, and tape in New Haven, Connecticut, 2012.

serves as the lintel. Even non-Orthodox Jews rarely recognize any of the signs of this important Orthodox Jewish practice or even know of its existence. The eruv is architecture’s minimum. But what it saves in material, the eruv makes up for in mental labour and detailed research. The program of the eruv is the entire urban neighbourhood, and its building materials, the appropriated accumulation of urban life. Thus, in a modern city, the construction of an eruv requires an investigation of the urban systems whose meticulousness rivals many another architectural project. Natural boundaries such as a shoreline or a slight depression in the earth, artificial boundaries such as fences, walls, and utility wires, must all pass certain tests to be redefined as interconnecting “gates” or “doorways.” Only then can one attain a complete and unbroken courtyard, taking into account traffic and pedestrian patterns and the routes of freeways and other major roads and plazas.3 An understanding of the material nature of the eruv does not arise from an iconographical study of objects placed into or on a building as decoration or symbolism, but rather from a study of the materials of spatial demarcation, a quintessential product of conceptual street art. Since the lines are inconspicuous, a map, generally available online, is necessary to avoid accidentally straying outside the gates. Often, the map needs voluminous annotation and constant updating. To negotiate the eruv, then, resembles following the directions of a Situationist dérive, in which a set of seemingly arbitrary rules governs all steps for one day a week. Or we could think of it in terms similar to those that Michel de Certeau uses to describe habitual movements in cities, as a rewriting or narrativizing of the city.4 The utility wires, pvc

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covers, and other materials used for an eruv relate a story of place, read on the place itself through the materials used to delineate it. The entire wall consists, then, only of signs, signs readable only by a few. This feature of the design – now you see it, now you don’t – often pre-empts the opposition the eruv might arouse on the part of other members of the community. But it also adds to the reputation that the eruv has garnered as just that kind of furtive action likely to attract opposition. The eruv’s oscillation between its secretive invisibility and its brazenly visible attempt to remap the city characterize both aspects of the practice, public and private. Because the materials both display and hide the eruv, much of it in the service of camouflage and the rest serving to make the invisible eruv visible again, the performance of the eruv involves repairing and reorganizing its signs. Every Thursday, the eruv must be checked and any loose fishing line or missing pvc conduit fixed. Otherwise, the eruv is “down,” and it is forbidden to carry. For this purpose, signs are written into the wall: the rubber tip at the top of the conduit is affixed only for the use of the eruv checker, and, when microfilament is used, little flags made of tape or bits of cloth are affixed to help the checker see the wire.5 The materials of an eruv act as props in a performance concerning the visibility not of a border but a community. Furthermore, permission for an eruv must be obtained from secular authorities, usually by leasing the city for a nominal sum. Franz Kafka captures this performative aspect of the eruv in a journal entry of 1911: “The telephone and telegraph wires in Warsaw are, through bribes, supplemented so that they form a complete circle, which turns a city into an enclosed area in the sense of the Talmud, like a courtyard, so that even the most pious can move within this circle on Saturday carrying odds and ends like handkerchiefs.”6 Kafka’s description suggests the complex set of rules devised by the rabbis about carrying objects during the Shabbat. They are just as complicated as the rules devised to ameliorate the situation created by the first set, with multiple stipulations and seemingly trivial consequences. It is not the materials, the added wires that are significant, but these actions: the people putting up imaginary courtyards, bribing officials, and then moving about, carrying their handkerchiefs, that reveals the eruv as a means of articulating relationships between people. The act of eruv-making, then, turns on the distinction between what the eruv reveals and what it hides. Tracing lines in the city subtly shifts the way the city looks by changing the way the people move in it and hence the kind of community this movement makes possible. The nearly invisible eruv is itself a malleable sign; the more invisible, the more malleable. As though they were traces of ruins destroyed long ago, invisible but still superimposed in memory like a palimpsest, the slight indications of the eruv conveying differing symbolic meanings to those who see them. The eruv can be regarded as protective and educational, the architectural equivalent of a warm embrace when it allows a woman to push her aged grandfather to the

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synagogue in his wheelchair. Or it can be seen as a devious way for Jews to try to rearrange public utilities and urban neighbourhoods to achieve for themselves mysterious, materialistic, and trivial ends. The eruv’s practitioners often regard it as merely a practical amenity, a machine that serves a purpose, no more spiritual than an acoustic aid in a synagogue. Yet all recognize that an invisible border can be as strong and even coercive as a fence or a wall. The fear of what invisibility can hide is often greater than the fear aroused by a visible threat. This explains Kafka’s bemusement concerning the eruv. Any subtle line can make members of the community visible to one another or hide them from one another. It can determine their mode of living together. Or separately.

Wall Posts and Conflict Tourists: The “Separation Fence” in Palestine Perhaps openings are the most important fact of all walls, not only that of an eruv. Every wall needs an opening, and many openings need gatekeepers. A gatekeeper may be as simple as a lock or as complicated as an army. The remaining walls in this chapter have or once had a special form of gate called a checkpoint, and a special form of gatekeeper that consists of a guard or guards backed by the might of an army. In the summer of 1980, during a research visit to East Berlin, I spent a great deal of time looking at the Antifaschistischer Schutzwand (the anti-fascist protective wall), better known as the Berlin Wall. It could barely be seen since it was fronted by a large swath of inaccessible land behind a barrier patrolled by a soldier. On the western side, however, the wall was approachable and eventually it became a mecca for the graffiti artists of West Berlin. Even here it took years – four years after my visit in 1980 – before graffiti artists on the western side of the wall took it upon themselves to turn it into a gallery. The artist Thierry Noir initiated the practice.7 He appears painting on the wall in Wim Wenders’s 1987 film, Himmel über Berlin.8 In 1986, he released a photograph of a man walking his dog along the colourful side of the wall, with an army truck parked on the other, bleaker side.9 A few years later, the wall was gone and only the gate known as Checkpoint Charlie remained, preserved as a memorial in the middle of a street near a busy intersection. By 2013, the longest portion of the Berlin Wall still in place was a 1.3 km segment known as the East Side Gallery.10 This huge outdoor gallery acts as a memorial for the wall that once divided Berlin, and even more for the euphoric moment when it came down. What remains is not exactly the wall properly understood, that is, the one painted by Noir and others. It was rather an inner wall. Left unpainted when the wall was up, it is now treated as a graffiti gallery. Artists paint on both sides of it. Very likely many visitors believe that they are seeing the wall as it looked when Berlin was divided, but in fact the wall functions, as its name implies, primarily as a thematically curated exhibition space.

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Now, however, its own wall defeated, the East Side Gallery focuses on other coercive regimes. The wall has become a gallery for temporary exhibitions on human rights. In the summer of 2013, the photographer Kai Wiedenhofer mounted an exhibition at the East Side Gallery. “Wall on Wall” focused on other separation walls worldwide, for example, Israel’s “separation fence.” In Palestine, checkpoints continue to function and the wall winds its way back and forth through the landscape, cutting off patches of land and dominating the view from picture windows like those in the library at Al-Quds University in Palestine. This wall, unlike the one in East Germany, is approachable. Any native of Bethlehem will be happy to point out places through which it is sometimes possible to see between the tall concrete slabs and enjoy the sight of Orthodox Jews praying at Rachel’s tomb. Through those same openings one can listen over loudspeakers from military installations to announcements that are barely audible through the narrow openings. Internationals, including activists and conflict tourists, are the audience for the wall and, for the most part, its artists as well. They cover it with murals and graffiti in English, Spanish, French, German, and Korean, among other languages, expressing support for the Palestinian cause. The Brooklyn-based artists How and Nosm (Raoul and Davide Perre, German-Spanish identical twins) spent two weeks in Palestine under the auspices of the charity Medical Aid for Palestine, during which they held workshops for local women and children and painted a mural on the wall. The anonymous street artist Banksy became a curator of the wall in 2005, bringing with him several other artists to form a gallery of street art and a Christmas shop called Santa’s Ghetto. In the process he helped launch a tourist industry there. The Italian artist Blu, one of those invited by Banksy, painted a wall around a Christmas tree. His painted wall notably lacked any opening at all, a challenge to the defining characteristic of a wall as a gate that reveals the impossible situation created by the wall on which it is painted. Outside it a clump of tree stumps suggests the destroyed olive groves of Palestinian farmers. Vince Seven, an artist sometimes identified as French and sometimes as Palestinian, later partially obscured Blu’s mural with a mural for Leila Khaled, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (pflp), who early in her political career had acted as a hijacker. Throughout the wall, texts in various languages equate the wall with other causes and old campaigns of resistance. In 1968, during a police riot outside the Democratic Convention in Chicago, demonstrators chanted, “The whole world is watching.” On the wall the same slogan appears under a pair of watchful eyes, acquiring an enhanced meaning. Very likely, access to an international community is the aim of most of the messages on the wall. Most of them implore the international community to do whatever they can to end the occupation and, while they are at it, to end other forms of discrimination in other parts of the world as well. One message reads, “Free Palestine,” followed in much larger letters by “& Cyprus.”11

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There are, notably, also venues on the wall for Palestinian voices to be heard. In the “Wall Museum,” for example, a series of placards organized by the Arab Educational Institute, an ngo, displays reports of dreams by Palestinian women. These surely serve in part as an outlet for the women involved in the program. Even here, however, the texts are in English, and hence ultimately for the benefit of non-Arabic speakers. In Bethlehem, international visitors hire guides to show them the famous murals by Banksy or sign up for group tours of the wall.12 Street artists display their wall credentials on their websites.13 One can find pictures of these murals in journalistic accounts, in coffee-table books, and online.14 Anthropologists study the images and talk to locals about them. But when we pull back to look at the wall in its own neighbourhood, we understand why few locals care to stroll near it. Even next to the section of the wall most popular for tourists, the one near Bethlehem where at this writing the remains of Banksy’s show still exist, and which borders on the Aida refugee camp, the wall is

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10.2 Murals painted by graffiti artists Blu (right) and Vince Seven in Bethlehem, 2015.

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primarily a parking place for cars and for the disposal of refuse. Marooned structures and the remains of commercial ventures near the wall make it seem all the more desolate. People move through a checkpoint located near this part of the wall. Once they leave, they do not turn back to look. A small number of residents have tried to spruce up the area by the wall with gardens, terracing, and playgrounds; and Banksy opened the “Walled-Off Hotel,” adjacent to the wall, where tourists gather and art exhibitions are held. A visitor wandering by the wall by Wi’am, the Palestinian Conflict Resolution Center, will likely be invited to sit on an attractive terrace, sip tea, and perhaps enjoy a tasty lunch. Zoughbi Zoughbi, Wi’am’s director, explains that when the wall was built, lower prices and other incentives encouraged ngos to move into spaces next to it. He saw this as an opportunity, he said, to use attractive landscaping in the area around the wall as a form of resistance.15 But many Palestinians disapprove of decorating the wall. “Why decorate a hangman’s noose?” one artist asked me.16 Banksy famously reported that a local Palestinian told him to go home because he did not want the wall to be beautiful.17 A sociologist argues that Palestinian voices are silenced on the wall because they are drowned out by the international cacophony of what he calls “conflict tourists.”18 But the hesitation to “beautify” the space perhaps also helps explain why Palestinians do not dominate the discourse of the wall.

Memorial Conversations: The Walls of the Dheisheh Refugee Camp Although mostly silent on the separation wall, Palestinians pursue an active discourse on other walls. I devote the remainder of this essay to one set of such walls, in the Dheisheh Refugee Camp. Like the Berlin Wall, these walls also contain a checkpoint, now a memorial like Checkpoint Charlie. The camp, on the outskirts of the city of Bethlehem, was founded in 1949 on an area of .309 square kilometres for refugees from villages in East Jerusalem and Hebron. At first it consisted of tents, later replaced with concrete houses by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, and by 2006 it was heavily built up with multi-storey structures and narrow streets to house approximately fifteen thousand registered inhabitants. The barriers around the camp, instituted during the second Intifada, remained in place until 1995, when Israeli soldiers left after the Oslo Accords were signed.19 The camp remains under the supervision of the unrwa, and it is consequently independent of Bethlehem and Palestine. As in most refugee camps, the large image of a key at the entrance marks the new space as temporary and ties it to other more permanent spaces that the refugees claim as home. As the camp acquired buildings with walls, its outdoor space offered a home for graffiti, mostly political messages and slogans. Beginning during the second Intifada (2000–05), pictures began to accompany the slogans. Within a few years, pictures dominated the outdoor cityscape

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of the camp, much as they do the separation wall.20 Today, the camp’s walls are lined with murals along with graffiti. Fighters, rock-throwers, and other generic figures lurk around corners of the walls as though waiting for Israeli soldiers who do, indeed, appear, usually in the middle of the night. Occasional international artists come to paint on walls in the camp, and one or two copies of Banksy’s murals can be found as well. But most of the murals are memorials. The entrance to the camp, dominated by the memorialized checkpoint and a memorial for the lost homes of the inhabitants, offers only a foretaste of the memorials seen everywhere in the interior of the camp. These include memorials to young people killed by Israeli soldiers, among them Jihad al-Jaafary and Qusai al-Afandi; Mu’in al-Atrash, who lived for nine years as a paraplegic before dying of his wounds; and Ahmed Mesleh, behind whose face are names of other children from the camp who were killed. Other memorials honour fallen Palestinian leaders such as Abu Ali Mustafa, who headed the pflp until he was assassinated by Israeli forces; leaders of culture such as Ghassan Kanafani, an assassinated writer and political leader; and foreign assassinated revolutionary leaders such as Che Guevara.21 The walls, crowded with oversized faces of the dead, turn a refugee camp visually into a memorial city whose retrospective character has attracted the attention of nearly every observer. The writer David Grossman, visiting Dheisheh in the 1980s, referred to the lives led by the residents as “double and split.” Tin cans filled with geraniums decorated the top of the fence around a small yard, but they seemed to draw their abundance from “some far source of fruitfulness” of gardens past.22 A flower garden does not only bring beauty into the camp. Residents and visitors alike see the effort to plant a garden as a memorial; it counts as an attempt to bring into the camp a reminder of a lost village. A design initiative that has worked in the area took note of this: “Spatial practices … oscillate between pragmatic and creative solutions in a congested space and visionary celebration of an idealized past. These solutions, more or less unconsciously, constitute the will to reproduce the inner spatial qualities and characteristics of the villages of origin, as stubborn and spontaneous acts of preservation of memories.”23 A Palestinian living in Dheisheh can offer a visitor a bag of fresh sage grown in a can that is identical to a bag of sage offered the same visitor from a garden in South Hebron, the origin of some refugee families. Some observers might not realize that even the graffiti on the walls is overwhelmingly memorial. “Jihad is our teacher,” reads one message, “and in our hearts – martyr’s road comrades.” 24 Elsewhere, more general calls for revolution or expressions of loyalty to Palestine fill the walls. Graffiti next to murals of martyrs is generally more specific. It consists of such phrases as “Your memory is alive in us,” “You did not die in us,” “You are alive in us,” or simply “We will not forget you,” the phrase followed or proceeded by a proper name, often that of the martyr whose image is painted nearby.

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The memorial muralists work within homogeneous stylistic parameters. A section of a wall is painted white. On it is a large face. All the faces are roughly the same size, painted in black and white. As they go about their lives the people wend their way through narrow streets between these monochrome faces of the dead. For more than a generation, children who pass between these walls every day have watched new martyrs added and occasionally others disappear. The children, too, have opportunities to draw on the walls. Sometimes frames are painted, and the children draw within them. Judging from the abundance of scribbly graffiti, they also have unofficial drawing sessions. But even the walls that hold children’s drawings are generally painted white and suggest the seriousness with which their work is taken. The makers of the murals describe the visual culture of the camp as “an embodiment and an expression of the right of return,” a characterization that suggests a memorial practice.25 This memorial culture gives a unified impression, as though the camp artists were all one person. Yet though certain styles predominate, there are variations among them. More important, the implicit statements made by these visual works differ and respond to one another. Indeed, that so many of the walls are memorials does not mean that the murals either turn the camp into a museum or a historical chronicle of the camp. The memorials are part of a conversation that turns on what, in Palestinian culture generally, and in Dheisheh more specifically, needs to be memorialized and how. The term “memorial conversation,” then, would seem to identify more properly the practice of mural-making than the term “memorial culture.” To explain the practice: the murals do not happen spontaneously; rather, the organization of a memorial typically follows a procedure. While the process is in part opaque to outsiders, a mural appears to start with someone’s initiative, after which a representative of a political party (often the dominant pflp) grants a permit, assists the group behind the mural to look for a good wall, acquire materials and art supplies, and makes a request to an artist. The list of martyrs is long. The period between December 2014 and March 2015 saw seventeen new murals. According to the artists, no money exchanged hands.26 Individual property was not involved because the exterior walls are considered common property.27 In the conversations of the artists, the expression “the common” looms large, as it does in Palestinian camp literature and in scholarship on refugee camps throughout Palestine.28 “The common” stands for an essential element of many refugees’ way of life. Unlike the character of the separation fence, for example, which suggests the surface of a no man’s land, “the common” entails responsible collective ownership and recalls the agricultural custom of owning land in common, now extended to other kinds of property. People in the camp self-consciously relate this idea to the activity of drawing on the walls by calling the walls part of “the common.” I assume that not everyone in the camp would subscribe to this thought, but

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10.3 Murals for Sajed Mizher, foreground, and Raed al-Salhi, background, with a mural of the Handala figure between them in Dheisheh, 2019.

even within those who do, “common” does not mean uniform or homogeneous, but rather held in common. It means that a variety of people can participate in any conversation that goes on along the wall. The “common” is the public sphere, and some of the conversations that occur in it are startling. While the conversations are visible on the wall, the act of painting them can be events, with groups of people participating in the work. The painting of the “unity mural,” for instance, was organized as a community event. The mural represented leaders from the Palestinian Liberation Organization (plo), the pflp, and Fatah. Yasser Arafat, Abu Al Mustafa, and others were pictured together with the assassinated leader of Hamas. Although this painting involved the participation of more parties and many helpers, most murals are painted by one artist, alone, and at night to avoid distractions. The paintings are not considered illicit or illegal; when they are pleased with the results, the painters make them the cover photo of their Facebook profiles or feature them on their websites. Discussions arise during the commissioning and the execution of murals, regarding important concepts that pertain to how the mural makers and their audiences envision Palestine. Each mural contributes to the formation of a history. A conversation can turn to the questions: What constitutes a martyr? How must a martyr have met his fate? Must a martyr have been Palestinian? Can a still-living sympathizer

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from Hezbollah be commemorated on the walls of Dheisheh? If it is generally agreed that a martyr must not be a passerby caught up in the action by accident, then must a martyr have been armed? What kind of combat counts? These questions are discussed in living rooms and in the kitchens and meeting rooms of ngos, but more significantly they are posed and answered visually. The character of these discussions on walls is to an extent directed by the political parties. Certain codes prevail. Colour codes for stencilled images, for example, mandate that pflp is generally coloured red, the plo black, and Hamas green. Within a common style and common concerns, however, some latitude allows each artist to make decisions. “Conversations,” rather than “disputes,” or more agonistic words describe the discourse best, because remarkably, dissenters rarely deface murals. The answer to a mural with which one does not agree is another mural. Visual disagreements – over the final outcome of a mural, its subject, or how it is represented – are registered not on a mural, by making marks on it, but spatially on walls, by painting alternative murals that speak to one another. The Hezbollah figure mentioned

10.4 Two competing murals for Jihad al-Jaafary, a twenty-year-old who was shot by Israeli troops on the roof of his house in early 2015: on the left by Ahmed Hmeedat, and on the right by an artist who preferred to remain anonymous in Dheisheh Refugee Camp, 2015.

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above, for example, is commemorated near the “unity mural” but not on it with the dead of Fatah, the pflp, and Hamas. The entire conversation is plain to view, not under erasure. The martyr Jihad al-Jaafary was the subject of a more elaborate visual controversy. In a mural by Ahmed Hmeedat, al-Jaafary wears a dancing costume and smiles at passersby in close-up. White doves fly in a cloud that seems to emanate from him. In the corner, however, a black dove mysteriously flies over a barbed wire fence toting an M-16 rifle. This dove is the wry result of negotiations with the pflp over al-Jaafary’s claim to the status of a martyr. Al-Jaafary was nineteen years old, standing on a roof of a three-storey building, when Israeli soldiers shot him during a raid on 24 February 2015. In some news reports, he was watching the raid, which, as commonly agreed, would qualify him only as a bystander caught up in the action. In other accounts, he had been throwing stones at the soldiers from the roof.29 Across the street from Hmeedat’s mural, an artist sponsored by Fatah had created a mural of a stone-throwing youth, his face covered, with an inscription that identifies him and makes reference to the height of the roof. The pflp needed to compete with a mural of its own, since the two groups both wanted to claim the new martyr. After the mural by the Fatah activists appeared, posters appeared in which the youth is seen carrying a clearly photoshopped M16 assault rifle, a weapon that, according to Hmeedat, the youth never owned. The pflp nevertheless requested that Hmeedat portray the martyr with such a weapon. This contradicted his artistic conception of a smiling youth in dancing costume, surrounded by doves, looking like anything but a hardened soldier. In conversation, the pflp representatives suggested a solution: if the martyr would not tote guns himself then perhaps the doves could. In another context, a proposition of this sort might generate humour about art designed by committees, but in this case it generated the gun-toting black dove. The three depictions of the youth are on the same street near al-Jaafary’s home where they can all be taken in at a glance. It is also acceptable to refuse to make a mural for a particular martyr. While the discussion about the mural of al-Jaafary seemed cloaked in black humour, and others suggest searching discussions about Palestine and its allies, these discussions can be disturbing, at least to outsiders. In the autumn of 2014, Uday Abu Jamal and Ghassan Muhammad Abu Jamal broke into a synagogue in Jerusalem and killed some of the worshippers. They were in turn killed and quickly became martyrs. Hmeedat, painter of the armed dove, refused the pflp’s request to paint a memorial mural for them, citing his refusal to memorialize killers of civilians. The synagogue assassins, like martyrs who detonated themselves in shopping malls, fell into this category. Although the request came from the pflp, the commission did not represent his vision of the values for which the organization stood or should stand. The artist who eventually carried out the commission remonstrated that he regarded the two synagogue attackers as heroes; he was proud to have painted the first

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10.5 Mural in memory of Uday Abu Jamal and Ghassan Muhammad Abu Jamal in the Dheisheh Refugee Camp, 2015.

mural honouring them. The parents of the attackers, he added, had invited him to meet them so that they could thank him in person. It was very moving.30 That said, there were limits on what he would agree to represent. On the mural he depicted only the head shots most commonly used in the media and on posters of the two, faces to which he attributed resolve and determination. Yet the artist refused when urged to use what he called “such obvious” references to the murders as the meatcleaver used by one of the assailants, an iconography often used by the media and in demonstrations after the attack. He insisted, he said, on total artistic control before he would agree to paint the mural.31 Remarkably, the same photographs that appear on posters and banners and were reproduced in paint on a wall of Dheisheh to represent the stalwart and determined character of the killers are also used as grim mug shots in Western media reporting on the event.32 While most of the other murals mentioned here remain on the walls, cared for and renewed, this mural is the only one allowed to disintegrate. After four years it was nearly invisible.33 The feelings reported by the makers of the murals are less remarkable than the fact that such discussions can be carried on openly between co-workers even in the presence of a visitor. Indeed, sometimes the more uncomfortable issues are obfuscated in print. Pathways, a 2011 booklet published in English as part of the outreach program, “Campus in Camps,” run by Al-Quds Bard College shows a mural of female suicide bomber Ayat al-Akhras, one of the murals that Hmeedat refused to paint. Al-Akhras, whose mural sits by the entrance to a girl’s school, was an early female suicide bomber from Dheisheh. In 2002 she detonated herself in a supermarket in

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Jerusalem, killing a security guard and an Israeli teenager as well as herself. The pamphlet identifies her, however, not as a suicide bomber but only as “one of the martyrs in the camp,” and adds, “She was assassinated in 2002.”34 On the walls, however, rather than in print, the images are more explicit, and far from being only propaganda. They constitute competing visual arguments about how to narrate Palestinian identity, how to define Palestine historically, and how to determine the direction that a political struggle should take. Their memorial character expresses eloquently the importance of the past, but the conversation is about the future. These discussions make possible the evolution of street art in Dheisheh. Perhaps as a result of such discussions, a significant change may be occurring. If it is, its first signs may involve colour. Ahmed Hmeedat, while still in keeping with the memorial character of the wall, tried to widen the subjects of the memorials to include deceased cultural figures.35 Some cultural figures were also murdered like many of the martyrs on the wall, and count as martyrs themselves, even when it is not always clear who killed them and what group was responsible for their assassinations. Some like the political cartoonist Naji al-Ali, probably died for his oppositional art.36 Ghassan Kanafani, a novelist who was also a prominent member of the pflp, was also murdered most likely for his political activities. But Mahmud Darwish, the famous Palestinian poet, died of natural causes. Hmeedat painted these cultural figures next to quotations from their work. The bright colours Hmeedat used for cultural figures distinguished them from the black-and-white representations of political leaders and martyrs and made them more appealing to the public. The representations have the effect, as do the works of the cultural figures, of bringing Palestine to life in full colour. Palestinian cultural heritage, the artist argues, is at the heart of the right of return. As a result of these murals in Dheisheh, he was commissioned to cover with cultural figures a long wall along a playground in the nearby Aida camp. Hmeedat’s Palestine, made up of poets and intellectuals, gets full play there. Along with al-Ali, Darwish and Kanafani, the poets Samīħ al-Qāsim (1939–2014), Ibraham Touqan (1905–1941), and Tawfiq Ziad (1929–1994) line up along the wall, all of them accompanied by quotations from their works. The project emphasizes the significance of Palestinian culture and the faces of its emissaries. When passersby initiate conversations with the artist as he works – asking Hmeedat, for example, why he isn’t painting Yasser Arafat – he takes the opportunity to tell them why they need to be acquainted with the leading figures of their cultural heritage. Hmeedat is aware, however, that even if the locals do not recognize the cultural figures, they will recognize the quotations from the poets that are placed next to their faces. Indeed, some novels of the occupation, such as Ghassan Kanifani’s Return to Haifa, are well known enough for street artists to write their titles on the walls with, or without, the names of their authors, counting on the residents to recognize them.37

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The implication, then, is that the artist aims at making the authors’ faces as familiar as their works, so that they, and not only political and military martyrs, can serve as role models for the children who grow up in their company. Some artists go further. They question the necessity of covering the walls with a lugubrious roster of endless martyrs. They feel impatient with the culture of death and longing for the past. While one reaction to this could be to refuse to paint martyr pictures, in practice it can be difficult to deny a request by a friend or relative of the deceased. Like Hmeedat, another artist, Ayed Arafah, deployed colour to enliven the streets lined with stark black-and-white images. He turned to painting martyr pictures in colour. With bleakness saturating the atmosphere and dominating the visual field, a startling colourful portrait of a martyr may signal a change as street culture, and the discussion around it, evolves.38 Finally, it is worth mentioning one non-memorial image that frequents the walls in Dheisheh. Handala, alter ego of the political cartoonist Naji al-Ali, mentioned above, is a ten-year-old barefoot refugee child whose creator draws him from the back, his hands folded behind him. In al-Ali’s cartoons, Handala most often passively surveys one or another disaster of his time. Alone or in the context of one of these cartoons, Handala is ubiquitous throughout Palestine and in the Diaspora. He appears on walls as well as backpacks, cups, bumper stickers, and political posters. I have written about this figure elsewhere, but in this context one aspect of his visual treatment is worth emphasizing.39 Sometimes, in the cartoons of al-Ali, or in the variations on them created in the camp, the image breaks through the wall. In one cartoon near the camp’s entrance, Handala offers flowers to “Beirut,” represented as a girl in a window. In a mural created by children and supervised by Ahmed Hmeedat, Handala is shown, still with his back toward us, opening up the wall to disclose a brighter future. Neither the images in Dheisheh nor the discussions that circulate around them speak to foreign visitors, and especially many Israelis, to whom they often demonstrate a shocking disregard of potential coexistence with Israel. But Israel and Israelis do not appear in the vocabulary of the walls. Indeed, the conversations rarely touch on Israel or even the Occupation. All the visual conversations about Palestinian identity are internal. Yet they have the potential to open conversations to new meanings, to open the future to new vistas, and to create openings that can turn walls into gates.

Afterthought: Unlocking the Eruv Certainly, a wall delineates space, but the conversations that these membranes make possible, that take place near them and about them, delineate the wall. They are factors that define what and whom a wall excludes or is willing to accept. To return to

10.6 Top Mural in memory of Qusai al-Afandi, originally painted in black and white, both versions by Ayed Arafah in the Dheisheh Refugee Camp, 2017. 10.7 Bottom Mural designed by Ahmed Hmeedat and executed by children supervised by Hmeedat, Dheisheh Refugee Camp, 2015.

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the eruv with this in mind, is to realize that potentially an eruv is considerably more than the beautiful religious practice that it seems to be. It seems to be a subtle way to contemplate the idea of a boundary, to mark space and make community while acknowledging others among whom one lives. To listen to this conversation of exclusion and inclusion closely, however, is to realize that merely the fact of an open boundary line does not guarantee that the eruv itself is open. When I began to think about the eruv some years ago, I thought of this symbolic wall or rather its gates as a border as neutral and as open as a border could be while still delineating space. But I have begun, slowly, to realize that an eruv, like other walls, also exists in the conversations around it. The most visible conversations on the eruv are generally limited to the small objects dangling from the lines to help the person who checks the lines weekly see the nearly invisible demarcation. In Israel, the chief rabbinate authorizes an eruv in every town, and a typical Israeli eruv distains the camouflage thought to be indispensable in most other countries. In addition, many communities do not rely on these citywide eruvin but establish their own in their own neighbourhoods. Clearly recognizable, specially constructed eruv poles mark the “walls” of the shared home, or rather the “gates” that signify the essence of a wall. The eruv flag, a piece of tape tucked unobtrusively near the pole in North American eruvin, is in Israel a curling red ribbon of plastic or rubber that waves over the middle of the street or boulevard.40 Eruv checkers have few problems locating boundary lines, and the eruv announces its demarcation of space with pride. In Palestine, however, the potential of an eruv gate to close is readily apparent. There, the eruv plays a part in the systematic appropriation of land, one among several visual signs as seen in borders and structures and other materials and shapes that articulate the land. In South Hebron, the shared homes that eruvin delineate consist of settlements and outposts of settlements that Israel has constructed in Palestine. They often seem different, however, from those in Israel. Rather than the colourful ribbons used elsewhere, eruvin here display broken bottles and dented or crushed cans, suggesting little care for their appearance. The choice corresponds to the aesthetic sense, or lack thereof, in some of the settlement outposts where settlers tend arbitrarily to use whatever construction material comes to hand to build the community’s dwellings. More significantly, eruvin seem to take a stand on literally the front lines of a battle for territory. Eruv lines extend for miles through what appears to be wilderness, through farmland and uninhabited areas where according to some analyses, eruvin are not supposed to go. Which authorities grant permission for the eruv to travel through these unsettled areas? In these settlements, or rather near them, eruvin help create facts on the ground that can encourage dispossession. They work with other signs, such as untended olive trees that seem to prove that a piece of land is free for expropriation because Palestinians have abandoned it.41 These untended trees appear

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often in places where Palestinians are barred from their lands and only the fear of violence keeps them away. Similarly, when, after a successful legal claim, land reverts to its Palestinian owner, broken or abandoned eruv poles often signal the change.42 But the only way to learn something definitive about the kind of border constituted by an eruv is to walk through one. In 2015, I passed through a “gate” of an eruv, under the plastic bottle that marked it, by a settlement in South Hebron. An antioccupation activist stood on one side of the eruv, while authorities of the civil administration manned the other side. As I entered, one of the officers took my passport and recorded its number. I realized that I had passed through a real border. In the settlements, every eruv gate – and the wall of an eruv is nothing but gates – can count as a checkpoint.

10.8 Civil Administration officers follow an activist through the eruvboundary of Mitzpe Yair, a settlement outpost in the South Hebron Hills of occupied Palestine, 2015.

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Notes 1 See Margaret Olin, Touching Photographs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 202–22. 2 On the theory and practice of the eruv, see Yosef Gavriel Bechhofer, The Contemporary Eruv: Eruvin in Modern Metropolitan Areas (Jerusalem: Feldheim, 1998). See also Margaret Olin, “The Materiality of the Imperceptible: The Eruv,” in Sensational Religion: Sensory Cultures in Material Practice, ed. Sally Promey (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 2014), 183–204. For a more extensive discussion of the material in the section, please see my chapter “Reshaping the City: The Eruv as Stealth Architecture,” in Resistance and the City: Challenging Urban Space, ed. Christoph Ehland and Pascal Fischer (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 143–163. 3 Bechhofer, Contemporary Eruv. 4 Guy Debord, “Theory of the Dérive,” Situationist International Online, trans. Ken Knabb, accessed August 2017, www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/theory.html; Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California, 1984), 115–30. 5 Olin, “Materiality of the Imperceptible,” 188–91. 6 Franz Kafka, Tagebücher: Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Hans-Gerd Koch, Michael Muller, and Malcolm Pasley (Darmstadt, Germany: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1990), 276. 7 Thierry Noir was the first artist to paint murals on the wall in April 1984. Thierry Noir, “The Story of the Berlin Wall,” Thierry Noir: Temporary Web Entourage, accessed 23 September 2021, www.galerie-noir.de/index.html. 8 Wim Wenders, dir., Der Himmel über Berlin (1987; Barrie, on: Criterion Pictures, 2009). 9 See Thierry Noir, “This Image of the Berlin Wall Was Taken in 1986 by Thierry Noir at Bethaniendamm in Berlin-Kreuzberg,” Wikimedia Commons, accessed May 2017, https://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Thierry_Noir#/media/File:Berlinermauer.jpg. 10 For images and the history of the East Side Gallery, see “Berlin East Side Gallery,” East Side Gallery, accessed January 2016, www.eastsidegallery-berlin.de/. For illustration of other works in this section as well as the East Side Gallery, see Margaret Olin, “Conversations on the Periphery 1: Wall on Wall,” Touching Photographs,10 April 2015, https://touchingphotographs. com/2015/04/10/conversations-on-the-periphery-1-wall-on-wall/. 11 Seen in 2015 on the separation wall bordering Abu Dis, near Al-Quds University. 12 For a tour of murals by Bansky, see “Banksy Tour,” Murad Tours, accessed August 2017, www. muradtours.com/Pages/BanksyTour.aspx. A number of groups offer alternative or political tours of Bethlehem including the wall. See also “Free Bethlehem Alternative Walking Tour,” freetour.com, accessed August 2017, www.freetour.com/bethlehem/free-bethlehem-walkingtour. 13 See “Murals,” Ericailcane, accessed August 2015, www.ericailcane.org/sito2/?cat=4. The work of some of the artists whom Banksy brought is largely destroyed, but much of it can still be seen on the artists’ websites. See, e.g., Tristan Manco, “Santa’s Ghetto Bethlehem,” Tristan Manco.com, accessed August 2017, www.tristanmanco.com/santas-ghetto-bethlehem/. 14 See Amahl A. Bishari, “Conclusion: Framing Graffiti: Voice, Materiality, and Violence,” in Back Stories: U.S. News Production and Palestinian Politics (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 2012), 233–56. Bishari offers a useful discussion of the way in which photojournalism uses wall

Conversations on Walls graffiti. See also David I. Hanauer, “The Discursive Construction of the Separation Wall at Abu Dis: Graffiti as Political Discourse,” Journal of Language and Politics 10, no. 3 (2011): 301–21. 15 Zoughbi Zoughbi, personal communication with author, June 2014. 16 Yazan Ghareeb, personal interview with the author, March 2015. 17 Banksy, Wall and Piece (London: Century, 2005), 142. 18 Craig Larkin, “Jerusalem’s Separation Wall and Global Message Board: Graffiti, Murals, and the Art of Sumud,” Arab Studies Journal 22 (2014): 134–69. 19 The accuracy of the information on Dheisheh is rather difficult to ascertain. See “profile: dheisheh camp,” United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, accessed August 2017, www.unrwa.org/sites/default/files/dheisheh_refugee_camp.pdf. Some of the registered inhabitants may no longer live in the camp. 20 For works in English that touch on the murals, see Sanjay Asthana and Nishan Havandjian, Palestinian Youth Media and the Pedagogies of Estrangement (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 97–100. 21 See Janet Gunn, Second Life: A West Bank Memoir (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); and Charles Frueling Springwood, Open Fire: Understanding Local Gun Cultures (Oxford: Berg, 2007). See also “Martyrs of Dheisheh Camp,” Facebook, accessed October 2016, www.facebook.com/326035990806730/photos/?tab=album&album_id=326173120793017. This page contains photographs and names of about thirty camp martyrs. 22 David Grossman, The Yellow Wind, trans. Haim Watzman (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), 6. 23 See “Dheisheh’s Common Green,” 2012, Brave New Alps, accessed August 2017, www.bravenew-alps.com/dheishehs-common-green/. See also Brave New Alps, “Dheisheh’s Common Green,” Common1: Collective Dictionary (Dheisheh Refugee Camp: Campus in Camps, 2013), 74–89, accessed August 2017, www.campusincamps.ps/projects/common-1/. For a discussion of the spatial memory embedded in the camps, see Khaldun Bshara, “Spatial Memories: The Palestinian Refugee Camps as Time Machine,” Jerusalem Quarterly 60 (2014), 14–30; and Khaldun Bshara, “The Spatial Practices in the Palestinian Refugee Camps,” Campus in Camps, accessed August 2017, www.campusincamps.ps/projects/khaldun-bshara/. 24 I am grateful to Amr al-Shawaf for translations. 25 See Aysar al-Saifi and Murad Odeh, The Pathways: Reframing Narration (Dheisheh Refugee Camp: Campus in Camps, 2013), 6, accessed August 2017, www.campusincamps.ps/projects/06the-pathways/. 26 This and other information were supplied to me by the muralists and their liaisons, and via a personal interview with Mohammad Maali, Ahmed Hmidat, Abu Jabel and Montasseral-Atersh conducted in March 2014. 27 See Alessandro Petti, Sandi Hilal, and Eyal Weizman, “Al Mashà or The Return to the Common,” Architecture after Revolution (Berlin: Steinberg Press, 2013), 178–87. This does not, however, mean that artists do not ask permission or that their work cannot be destroyed in the interests of property development. A mural of 2014 on a free-standing wall in front of a vacant lot gave way in 2015 to a new store, as the owner had warned the artist that it would.

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28 The term al-masha (common) dates from the Ottoman empire, when people did not own the land but had the right to use it, to cultivate it together. The particular form of life that developed then has continued in the camps, and it has become mythologized to the extent that the “commons” is used as part of the justification of a nomination of Dheisheh for inscription on the World Heritage List. It exemplifies criterion 3, stipulating that the candidate “bear a unique or at least exceptional testimony to a cultural tradition or to a civilization which is living or which has disappeared.” Refugee Heritage, “Part 3: Justification for Inscription,” E-flux Architecture, last modified March 2017, www.e-flux.com/architecture/refugee-heritage/100713/justifica tion-for-inscription/. See also Petti et al., “Al Mashà”; Common1: Collective Dictionary; Bshara, “Spatial Memories, 27 and passim. 29 See “Israeli Troops Shoot and Kill Palestinian Youth,” Al Jazeera, 24 February 2015, http:// america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/2/24/israeli-troops-shoot-and-kill-19-year-old-palestinian. html. Here, the youth is described as having been struck by an Israeli bullet after going to the roof to see what all the commotion was about. See also Budour Youssef Hassan, “Aspiring Chef Shot Dead by Israeli Soldier,” Electronic Infitada, 25 February 2015, https://electronicintifada. net/content/aspiring-chef-shot-dead-israeli-soldier/14304. Here Omaima Abu Aisheh, a friend and neighbour of al-Jafari, stated, “He was throwing stones when an Israeli sniper shot him with a bullet in his chest.” 30 Mohammad Maali, Ahmed Hmidat, and et al., personal interview with the author, March 2015. 31 Cited from a personal interview with the artist in June 2015. For iconography that uses a machete, see e.g., Ismael Mohamad, “Palestinians Celebrate Attack on a Jerusalem Synagogue,” upi, accessed October 2016, www.upi.com/News_Photos/view/upi/083c71421e85e35fc0b44 f6231caa116/Palestinians-Celebrate-an-Attack-on-a-Jerusalem-Synagogue/. 32 This mural has since been allowed to fade and has been replaced by a mural on another subject. It is the only mural I have seen in Dheisheh to meet such a fate. 33 Since this essay was written, the same artist has completely repainted the mural and this time included the murder weapon. 34 Saifi and Odeh, Pathways, 28. A variety of news media covered the bombing some of which may be found here: “Ayat al-Akhras,” Wikipedia, accessed May 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Ayat_al-Akhras. 35 Ahmed Hmidat, personal interview with the author, 201416. 36 See also Orayb Aref Najjar, “Cartoons as a Site for the Construction of Palestinian Refugee Identity: An Exploratory Study of Cartoonist Naji Al-Ali,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 31 (2007): 258. 37 I would like to convey my thanks to Amr al-Shawaf for drawing my attention to the title of this novel in the graffiti and for deciphering the graffiti on the walls of the camp through my photographs. 38 Arafah also expressed an interest in planning sculptural installations of animals in the camps. Ayed Arafah, personal interview with the author, January 2017.

Conversations on Walls 39 Margaret Olin, “How Long Will Handala Wait? A 10-Year-Old Barefoot Refugee Child on Palestinian Walls,” in Timescapes of Waiting: Spaces of Stasis, Delay and Deferral, ed. Christoph Singer, Wobert Wirth, and Olaf Berwald (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 176–97. 40 For images and information about the eruv, see Margaret Olin, “Introduction to the Eruv,” mavor Journal, accessed 13 June 2020, https://mavcor.yale.edu/conversations/collections/ introduction-eruv. 41 For an account of some of the legal battles, see Michael Sfard, The Wall and the Gate: Israel, Palestine, and the Legal Battle for Human Rights (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2018). 42 Some artists have taken the Israeli eruv both in Jerusalem and in the occupied West Bank as a subject. See the special issue “Visualizing the Eruv,” Images 5 (2011), and Margaret Olin, “The Materiality of the Imperceptible,” 196–9 in this issue.

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Manto’s Madmen: Partition and Psychoanalytic Displacement in “Toba Tek Singh” Anhiti Patnaik

Times are tougher than they were in his time and we are now more intolerant as a nation. – Nusrat Jalal (née Manto) If I cannot bend the higher powers, I will stir up Acheron. – Freud

On the seventieth anniversary of India’s independence from British rule and the partition of its territory into Pakistan and East Pakistan (contemporary Bangladesh), it is worth remembering the works of Sa’adat Hasan Manto. A journalist, screenwriter, and icon of Partition literature, Manto is best remembered for his short story “Toba Tek Singh” (1952–53). The plot is set in an asylum where a territorial exchange of Hindu and Muslim “madmen” is in process. The event no doubt refers to the limbo that followed the birth of Pakistan on 14 August 1947, and India’s declaration of Independence from imperial rule on 15 August. Even present-day readers, who have not personally experienced the Partition, are haunted by Manto’s depiction of the communal violence that broke out. Manto is that rare writer, completely uninterested in taking sides, who shows how no one can ever fully cross a border or become “Hindustani” or “Pakistani” overnight. Crossing the border means crossing being – becoming a new self, another self, an Other. The trauma caused by this crossing-over made madmen of all involved in partition, as they left behind their roots and past identities and were forcibly made to embrace a strange new land as “home.” By situating the action in an obscure “lunatic asylum,” which the frenzy of the Partition had momentarily overlooked, Manto makes the asylum the last refuge for sanity. He mourns the death of the nation at the story’s conclusion by focusing on the corpse of his protagonist, who dies on a piece of no man’s land between India and Pakistan: “On one side, behind barbed wire, stood together the lunatics of India and on the other side, behind more barbed wire, stood the lunatics of Pakistan. In between, on a bit of earth which had no name, lay Toba Tek Singh.”1

Partition and Psychoanalytic Displacement in “Toba Tek Singh”

Manto witnessed the fragmentation of India’s northwestern region into Pakistan by the English barrister Cyril Radcliffe in August 1947. Radcliffe was hastily commissioned by Lord Mountbatten, the last British governor general of India, to create a territorial zone exclusively for Muslims in order to effect a compromise between Gandhi, Nehru, and Jinnah’s divergent demands for political sovereignty.2 This arbitrary and rather ill-considered division of territory, which prompted a disheartened, disillusioned Jinnah to observe that Pakistan was nothing but a “shadow and a husk, a maimed, mutilated and moth-eaten”3 travesty of the place he had originally envisioned for Muslims, culminated in the mass migration of almost fourteen million people across the newly created borders. Although it is difficult to ascertain the actual numbers, about two million perished in this migration as a result of the communal holocaust4 that ensued. Gangs of killers set whole villages aflame, hacking to death men and children and the aged while carrying off young women to be raped. Some British soldiers and journalists who had witnessed the Nazi death camps claimed Partition’s brutalities were worse: pregnant women had their breasts cut off and babies hacked out of their bellies; infants were found literally roasted on spits. Foot caravans of destitute refugees fleeing the violence stretched for 50 miles and more. As the peasants trudged along wearily, mounted guerrillas charged out of the tall crops that lined the road and culled them like sheep. Special refugee trains, filled to bursting when they set out, suffered repeated ambushes along the way. All too often they crossed the border in funereal silence, blood seeping from under their carriage doors. Across the Punjab, the limbs of thousands of corpses poked from shallow graves like twigs, gnawed on by wild dogs.5 The Partition of India is as fundamental a historical trauma for the Indian subcontinent as the Nazi Holocaust is for contemporary Europe. Despite official attempts to repress or distort its facts, the Partition insistently returns to haunt India and Pakistan like a traumatic memory. Not for nothing did Sigmund Freud extend his psychoanalytic concept of trauma to the collective experience of the Jews in Moses and Monotheism (1939). It became a political and historical elaboration of his theory of repression in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899). Invoking this Freudian tradition, epitomized by Cathy Caruth in her 1995 collection of essays, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, this chapter examines how Manto’s short story “Toba Tek Singh” broke through state censorship and repression by inventing an “aesthetics of trauma.” The psychoanalytic concept trauma accurately describes India and Pakistan’s selective remembrance of Partition violence and communal genocide. Much has been said and written on the subject from a “nationalist” point of view, as Jessifer Yusin astutely observes, but “an uncomfortable silence shrouded dialogue about

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the Partition, and when the fiftieth anniversary was celebrated in 1997 the seeming official policy of silence continued to prevail over the wounds that persisted in collective memory.”6 Manto’s Partition writings thus occupy a paradoxical position – being alternately valorized or condemned depending on the biases (nationalist or otherwise) of his critics. This is because his short stories gave voice to “the wounds that persisted in collective memory.” Manto invented an aesthetic means to engage with historical violence in all its literal intensity. He highlighted the power and endurance of this trauma, particularly in the political friction that continues to dictate the relations between India and Pakistan. Even as trauma originates from a particular event or crisis, it resists being located at that event. It defies comprehension and cannot be articulated through conventional historiography. Manto’s writing is unique in that it provides a site or locus for that trauma to locate itself. His aesthetics of trauma represents the wound that could not be spoken, not only because there was no existing vocabulary for it at the time but also because the state did not allow it to speak. Cathy Caruth, in her introduction to the volume Trauma, poignantly writes, “The traumatized, we might say, carry an impossible history within them, or they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess.”7 Manto’s writing narrates precisely this “impossible history” from the vantage point of the survivor. Focusing on narratives of survival such as Manto’s short stories, rather than simply on the political nitty-gritty of the Partition, allows one to bring back the horror of the massacre into remembrance. Survival suggests that there has been a death or an unprecedented crisis, which requires a new manner of listening, articulating, and recording. Had there been a vocabulary to describe the crisis, it would not be a traumatic event. Trauma, according to Caruth, is an event that cannot be processed by the conscious mind and can only be perceived in fragments, images, and inassimilable forms. It refers to a psychic wound that gets progressively buried deeper and deeper into the layers of the unconscious. It is a hidden or concealed wound that does not allow the full extent of its damage to be gauged.8 While paraphrasing Freud from multiple important sources, Caruth further develops this definition of trauma in her book Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996): “The wound of the mind – the breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world – is not like the wound of the body, a simple, healable event.”9 Trauma is a crack, abrasion, or rupture, which is not consciously known, visible, or locatable but exiled into the inscrutable terrain of the unconscious. Since the source of the trauma cannot be localized conventionally, it manifests or leaks out through flashbacks, dreams, and repetition compulsion. In response to Freud’s conceptualization of trauma as an exiled memory or a refugee lost in the unconscious, Caruth formulates her theory of the “voice.” She argues that despite the inscrutability of the wound as a result of its repression, trauma can manifest in a manner that is almost aesthetic or performative. Employing a literary reference to Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, wherein

Partition and Psychoanalytic Displacement in “Toba Tek Singh”

the hero Tancred hears the voice of his dead lover Clorinda speak out from within a tree, Caruth writes that trauma exceeds or circumvents its repression by “crying” out, “(in) a voice that is paradoxically released through the wound.”10 This chapter argues that Manto’s writing, much like Caruth’s interpretation of Tasso’s text, stands out within Partition literature by giving voice to the wound … by not “crying” of or about it but through it. Much of the violence represented in Partition literature, in fact, resembles survivor statements of the Nazi Holocaust. Holocaust survivors were forced to negotiate between what Dori Laub identifies as “the imperative to tell” and “the impossibility of telling, and therefore, silence about the truth commonly prevails.”11 In a short story titled “A Stroll through the New Pakistan,” Manto breaks this “silence” by describing his experience of walking through Lahore as a survivor of the Partition. Since Lahore was no longer in “India,” but suddenly in an entirely new country called “Pakistan,” Manto notes how its topography has become foreign while essentially remaining the same. He sees minute toponymic transitions or displacements that signify this psychic “distortion,” such as the renaming of public squares, for example “Lawrence Bagh” renamed “Bagh-e-Jinnah,” or of retail stores: “‘Pakistan Zindabad – This shop has been allotted to Syed Anwer Husain Mohajir from Jalandhar.’ And so on … Outside a building I even saw this: ‘Pakistan Zindabad – This property belongs to a Parsi.’ Meaning don’t allot it by mistake thinking it to be a Hindu’s.” A nation’s borders, no matter how militarized, are nothing but an extension of the citizen’s psyche. Borders are so analogous to the citizen’s mind that the very act of shifting them results in collective trauma. Manto shows how the partition of the land was anything but neat, leaving behind an unfamiliar, split, or schizophrenic space. Even the most law-abiding and “worthy” citizens had to grapple with the fact that they had become refugees, aliens, and “madmen” overnight. Manto’s narrative begins with an account of this collective trauma and estrangement: “It was a strange season and a strange morning.”12 Manto’s tone becomes darker and more sardonic, especially in his description of Bombay during the riots in the short story “Bombay during Partition.” The next day I was at Claire Road, near my house, when I saw a body near the petrol pump. It was the corpse of an ice-seller, a Hindu, whose cart was next to him. The ice was melting. The drops mingled with the blood that had coagulated around him. It looked like jelly. Those were strange days. There was chaos, mayhem, panic everywhere and from the womb of this anarchy were born two nations. Independent India and independent Pakistan.13 This image of congealed blood recurs in the collection of short stories Siyaah Hashiye, translated as Black Margins. In “Jelly,”14 the image is repeated when a child salivates at the sight of a murdered ice-cream man’s blood mixing with melted ice on the street, and he begs his mother to buy him some red jelly. It is clear that at this

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point the violence of the communal riots had reached such a peak that even a child had become completely benumbed and desensitized. “Jelly” is but one example of how Manto, as a survivor, brings back the horror of death into historical remembrance. Instead of focusing on who was politically right or wrong, or choosing between the cause of Hindus, Muslims, or Sikhs, Manto shifts the reader’s attention almost entirely to the dismembered corpse of the nation. Manto’s aesthetics of trauma is borne not only from his skill as a writer and journalist but mainly from his sense of burden, guilt, and responsibility at being a survivor. Robert Jay Lifton, in an interview with Caruth, accurately observes that “extreme trauma creates a second self ” or a “double,” that speaks in an entirely new language beyond ordinary human ability. This language comes from the experience of “being shattered” and the struggle to “put together the pieces, so to speak, of the psyche, and to balance that need to reconstitute oneself with the capacity to take in the experience.”15 Like the desensitized child in “Jelly,” who unwittingly narrates a survivor’s experience of Partition violence, Manto is forced to represent what Lifton calls “a situation that one has little capacity to imagine.” He accomplishes this by transforming his survivor’s guilt into the responsibility of a witness who can break the deadlock of traumatized silence by providing narrative testimony. It is worth asking at this point how trauma – a psychoanalytic term that implies an individual or subjective reaction to a shocking or painful event – may be applied in a wider sense to mean the collective experience of a nation or community? Even if the source of the trauma is the same, that is – the Partition – the experience of trauma is never uniform or identical for each survivor. How then, may one use a category like collective or historical trauma? Kai Erikson’s contribution to Caruth’s volume Trauma is immensely useful in this regard. With respect to survivors of violent or tragic events, like the Partition of India, Erikson writes that “sometimes the tissues of community can be damaged in much the same way as the tissues of mind and body.” This would mean that “traumatic wounds inflicted on individuals can combine to create a mood, an ethos – a group culture, almost – that is different from (and more than) the sum of the private wounds that make it up. Trauma, that is, has a social dimension.”16 In such a case, the entire community of survivors experiences symptoms similar to the deep shock, amnesia, psychic distortion, and inexpressibility of individual trauma: “The moment becomes a season, the event becomes a condition,” to quote Erikson. This produces a somewhat paradoxical community of survivors whose kinship is based on a shared spiritual experience of pain, estrangement, and loneliness. Erikson argues that, unlike the immediacy of trauma’s shock and repression in an individual’s psyche, collective or historical trauma has a more gradual, everyday quality to it. This is certainly captured best by Manto’s image of jelly. Just as one would expect the normal pulses of life to start beating again – the scene of a mother and child shopping at a crowded marketplace – the child’s seemingly normal

Partition and Psychoanalytic Displacement in “Toba Tek Singh”

or quotidian request for red jelly became a piercing reminder of how deep-rooted the trauma actually was. Manto’s writings thus endure in the literary canon despite his active disavowal of both nationalist and pacifist stances. His authorial tone, filled with bitter irony and cynical subversion, is aimed equally at the newly formed governments of India and Pakistan. This resistance to any nationalist or recognizably “moral” standpoint brought on Manto several charges of sedition during his life. He had already faced three obscenity trials in India before 1947, but soon after he relocated to Lahore in 1949, Manto stood on trial in the newly formed Pakistan. The prosecution counsel succeeded only in one case, in which Manto was forced to pay a fine for promoting prurience. But his trials problematized the role of literature in bearing witness to a collective trauma by portraying a nightmarish, unseemly, abject, and horrifying history. In other words, his writing stood out for giving the wound a “voice,” by exposing the urgency, immediacy, and visibility of the wound. The whole point of psychic repression, according to Freud, was to delay the impact of an event or reality that, precisely because of its immediacy, was traumatic for the individual. Caruth rightfully notes, “The historical power of the trauma is not just that the experience is repeated after its forgetting, but that it is only in and through its inherent forgetting that it is first experienced at all. And it is this inherent latency of the event that paradoxically explains the peculiar, temporal structure, the belatedness.”17 By extension, Manto’s trials prove that his writing was censored and repressed because the wound was so recent, so immediate; it was still raw, still inassimilable … still being exiled from historical consciousness. It is further interesting to note that Manto’s aesthetics of trauma was also rejected, possibly misunderstood, even by his fellow radicals and writers. He was infamously expelled from the Progressive Writers Association of India (pwa) in 1949, for not being the “correct” kind of progressive. The secretary general of the pwa, Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi, justified this action in his critique of Manto’s Siyaah Hashiye: “What I can see is a field littered with dead bodies where the writer is stealing cigarette butts and money from their pockets.”18 Qasmi’s reduction of Manto’s literary stance to a pickpocket is crucial if one is to understand his politics as a writer of historical trauma. In his essay “Why I Write” Manto admits that his stories do not take shape in his conscious mind or emerge from active deliberation but lie waiting in his pocket until he accidentally discovers them. Manto describes himself as “one who picks his own pocket and hands over the contents to you. Have you ever seen such a fool as me?”19 Although this was Manto’s own estimation of his style, it would be wrong to take a committed ironist at his word, as Waqas Khwaja does when he calls Manto a “fraud” – because “he never lets out in his stories what he was himself, and in the end he became a character created out of his own imagination.”20 Rather, Manto’s confession is useful because it shows that he envisaged authentic progressive literature

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to be a spontaneous or surreptitious retrieval of a silenced and repressed truth. This sort of aesthetics of theft or recovery becomes particularly relevant when applied (in the sense of a salve or ointment) to the psychic wound caused by the Partition. In rebuttal to the charges of sedition, obscenity, and irreverence that were repeatedly made against him, and also by way of defending his political commitment to the truth, Manto writes: I am no sensationalist. Why would I want to take the clothes off a society, civilization and culture that is, in any case, naked? Yes, it is true I make no attempt to dress it – because it is not my job; that is a dressmaker’s job. People say I write with a black pen, but I never write on a black board with a black chalk. I always use a white chalk so that the blackness of the board is clearly visible.21 How else but through theft or accidental discovery could a hidden wound or scar ever be known? Through his metaphor of society as a dark, opaque blackboard, Manto vindicated his writing as the site from where trauma could become “clearly visible.” Within the scope of early twentieth-century psychoanalytic theory in Europe, Freud’s theory of trauma is best worked out in his magnum opus The Interpretation of Dreams (1899). Here, he argued that a dream was one of the many ways through which trauma expressed itself or “cried out” to the conscious mind. Instead of describing the dream as something abstract, arbitrary, or numinous,22 Freud explained it purely in cathartic terms. Freud treated the dream as a work of art23 that was cathartically experienced by the sleep-weakened conscious mind. The dream’s purpose was to create suitable conditions for trauma to manifest in a non-literal or symbolic way (since the main methodological issue with trauma was that it was too literal) that could circumvent repression. By that logic, the Freudian dream functions somewhat like Manto’s retrieval or theft of a story that has been buried deep or been lost. The Freudian dream also scratches with “white chalk” on the surface of the dark, inscrutable, and irreducible terrain of the unconscious. The dream was thus inherently subversive; a stirring up of “Acheron,” as Freud put it in his citation of Virgil’s Aeneid.24 The dream could trick the repressive apparatus of the conscious mind by disguising or remediating the source of trauma through symbols and metaphors, and further, by revealing only a fragment of itself.25 Freud hypothesized that this fragment took the most urgent source of disturbance, or the most immediately traumatic memory, and diluted it with other, more traumatic (and therefore, more repressed) events from the past that were similar in the tropes they dealt in. Or it selected a relatively minor disturbance as the main trope, behind which the dream could conceal more pressing traumas. By so doing, the dream not only gave voice to the hidden wound but also enacted a “wish-fulfillment”26 for the wounded ego.

Partition and Psychoanalytic Displacement in “Toba Tek Singh”

Manto died in Lahore in 1955, an outlander and refugee wishing to return to Bombay. “Toba Tek Singh,” composed two years before his death, may in fact be seen as a literary expression of this wish-fulfillment. Unlike his other Partition stories, which focus on the sheer scale of communal violence that this mass migration generated, “Toba Tek Singh” is Manto’s contemplation on the psychic wound that a nation collectively sustains and represses when its territory is arbitrarily spliced. It dramatizes a conundrum that the newly formed governments of India and Pakistan must inevitably have faced in 1947. Set in a lunatic asylum (presumably in a part of the Punjab province allocated to Pakistan), Manto’s short story mocks the government’s misguided attempt to effect a neat segregation of Muslims by deporting all its Hindu and Sikh inhabitants. “Toba Tek Singh” deals with this topographic and political aporia – whether a migration of madmen should also be initiated on the basis of their religious affiliation? The madman was, after all, a sort of citizen and must be assimilated into Indian or Pakistani. Although Manto imagines this situation with the bitterest of irony and symbolism, there is some historical evidence to account for such a policy undertaking during the Partition. The outstanding feature of the work of the hospital during the year was repatriation of the non-Muslim mental patients from Western Pakistan. Since this was scheduled to coincide with the transfer of the Muslim patients from many other states besides Punjab in India, and since this exchange was canalised through Amritsar, it involved considerable preliminary organisational work. Four hundred and fifty non-Muslim mental patients were received from Lahore out of which 282 Punjabi patients were accommodated in the Amritsar mental hospital, the remaining having been sent on to the Inter-Provincial Mental Hospital, Ranchi. As against this, 233 Muslim patients drawn from different mental hospitals in India were evacuated in the opposite direction to Lahore. That against an estimated non-Muslim population of six to seven hundred of the Mental Hospital, Lahore at the time of the partition only 317 patients were actually exchanged at the time of the transfer, is a tragic fact which sadly betrays the treatment meted out to those unfortunate victims who could not be retrieved earlier from the Lahore hospital.27 The trauma of the inmates being selectively exiled and relocated thus, which is so casually called a “tragic fact” in the Annual Report of the Punjab Mental Hospital of Lahore (1950), is given its due diligence in Manto’s “Toba Tek Singh.” The protagonist, a Sikh madman named Bishan Singh, is incapable of speaking anything but a strain of gibberish. This gibberish is a perfect symbol for the failure of politicians like Mountbatten, Gandhi, Nehru, and Jinnah to reach a peaceful point of compromise.

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The strain of gibberish and paranoia of the protagonist also reflects the inability of those refugees who survived the Partition to reasonably articulate the trauma that they witnessed and suffered. Hence, Manto assumed the burden of the witness and gave voice to this wound, or testified against the state-sanctioned violence that was collectively experienced. The hybridity of Indian society was erased by the violent religious segregation caused by the Partition, as a result of which, Manto’s short story shows that the Partition had made refugees and madmen of everyone. The asylum’s inmates confuse themselves with the politicians responsible for the Partition and go about declaring themselves to be Jinnah, Gandhi, or Tara Singh. Perhaps they wanted a stake in this massive historical event; to feel as if they had some semblance of agency in the Partition like the politicians involved. Or perhaps Manto makes this allegorical connection to show that the politicians responsible for this holocaust were madmen. One is unsure whether madness, in the story, is the referent or consequence of Partition. Just as the inmates confused their own subjectivity with that of the leaders who orchestrated the Partition, Bishan Singh dies when he fails to ascertain whether Toba Tek Singh, his ancestral village, was allocated to India or Pakistan. His persistent question, Where is Toba Tek Singh? is not only a topographic but also existential one. At the denouement, Bishan Singh dies not in India or Pakistan but on a piece of no man’s land that the narrator identifies as “Toba Tek Singh.” Just before sunrise, Bishan Singh let out a horrible scream. As everybody rushed towards him, the man who had stood erect on his legs for fifteen years, now pitched face-forward on to the ground. On one side, behind barbed wire, stood together the lunatics of India and on the other side, behind more barbed wire, stood the lunatics of Pakistan. In between, on a bit of earth which had no name, lay Toba Tek Singh.28 The nation is metonymically represented or “displaced” in Bishan Singh’s corpse, Bishan Singh being sometimes called Toba Tek Singh by the inmates of the asylum. Yusin states that the border, in this story, becomes “the site of a referential potential that emerges from trauma.” Manto’s displacement of the man with the land shows how borders “exists not in between two nations but in between knowing and not knowing, between a geographical reality that binds together two nations and an inconceivable abstract that inscribes itself into a cartography of the mind that cannot clearly distinguish between the self and the land, and thus between identities.”29 A contemporary reader of “Toba Tek Singh,” whether self-identifying as Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh, is forced by the power of Manto’s rhetoric to accept that Bishan Singh’s martyrdom acknowledges all the lives that were lost in the “mad” decision to partition India.

Partition and Psychoanalytic Displacement in “Toba Tek Singh”

Manto’s metonymic displacement of Bishan Singh’s body with his village Toba Tek Singh is an example of how his aesthetics of trauma allowed him to bypass his editor’s censoring agency. Although “Toba Tek Singh” is one of Manto’s most shocking stories, brimming with abjection and the potential to retraumatize or even “infect” the reader with its paranoia, loneliness, and estrangement, it did not face a trial for sedition or censorship. It remains one of the most iconic and popular Partitionera texts in contemporary India. Perhaps by the time that he wrote it, Manto had understood that historical trauma could not be spoken or written in its “literality” but had to be veiled through symbolic condensation or metonymic displacement. Manto’s aesthetics of trauma thus, rests somewhere in between what Caruth calls “the elision of memory and the precision of recall.”30 As aforementioned, the dream’s potency to narrate trauma, particularly the nightmare that simply repeats a traumatic event in its literality, comes from its aesthetic or cathartic structure. Applying Freud’s principle, that a dream overcomes censorship and repression by dramatizing a “wishfulfillment” for the wounded mind, one might claim that Manto’s “Toba Tek Singh” circumvented censorship by also narrativizing a symbolic wish-fulfillment for the nation. “Toba Tek Singh” is a pithy fragment of what could have been a more extensive memoir of the Partition, but it survives precisely because it is pithy and symbolic. By connecting Manto’s aesthetics of trauma to the Freudian conceptualization of the dream, it is actually Freud’s tribute to subversive literature that becomes obvious. Caruth makes the connection between literature and Freudian psychoanalysis quite explicit when she observes, “If Freud turns to literature to describe traumatic experience, it is because literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing.”31 Freud himself provided a lengthy justification for his comparison of psychic repression to literary censorship. A writer must beware of the censorship, and on its account he must soften and distort the expression of his opinion. According to the strength and sensitiveness of the censorship he finds himself compelled either merely to refrain from certain forms of attack, or to speak in allusions in place of direct references, or he must conceal his objectionable pronouncement beneath some apparently innocent disguise.32 Freud noted that the dream was an “apparently innocent disguise” or refugee that slipped through the conscious mind’s relentless censorship. Since the dream allowed only those latent experiences to become manifest that could meet at a common nodal point, the final fragment of the experienced dream was compelled to winnow through a raging flood of dream-thoughts and elect one that had maximum points of convergence. This was why the dream was effective in disturbing the conscious mind, even if it was not fully remembered on waking. The remembered fragment of an already

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fragmented and nebulous dream was so impressive on its own that Freud pointed out how his subjects often felt the need to share their dreams. The dream’s modus operandi gave voice to a concealed trauma via an “overdetermined”33 or condensed nodal point, like a radial intersection of rivulets, so that the raging flood of all dreamthoughts could not burst through the dam. Freud visualized the dream to be a nodal point at which “knowing” and “not knowing” intersect. This nodal point, where “X marks the spot,” was determined, or rather overdetermined in remarkably aesthetic ways. For instance, in his chorographic interpretation of his dream of the “botanical monograph,”34 Freud argued that concealed behind the symbol of the monograph were layers and layers of traumatic memories, emotions, and associations. From a childhood memory of ripping his father’s books to the more immediate guilt of not reciprocating his wife’s affection by purchasing flowers, Freud discovered that his dream had given voice to multiple wounds accrued over his life. He thus interpreted the symbol of the botanical monograph to be a platform or “conglomerate” of multiple traumas layered over one another like a palimpsest or “geological conglomerate in which each fragment of rock required a separate assessment.”35 By way of conclusion, Freud’s chorography of the dream as a symbolic fragment prompts one to contemplate the power of the fragment as an aesthetic medium for wish-fulfillment. In a state of extreme pressure, be it violent political crisis or the repression of a new trauma in an individual’s psyche, the fragment is both obscure enough to evade censorious authority and yet clear enough to communicate a subversive message. Of Manto’s aesthetics of trauma, Tarun K. Saint writes, “His imaginative foray into the abyss was a courageous attempt to bear witness to the extent of damage done, as well as the survival of the impulse to resistance, even if in fragmentary form.” Saint goes on to clarify that it is actually Manto’s choice of the fragmentary form of the short story (afsana) that allows his Partition narratives to become a “self-reflexive mode of ‘fictive’ testimony which captures both the direct impact of fiendish forms of collective violence as well as the persistent after-effects of historical trauma.”36 An important political question about sanity and space is couched within Manto’s critical topography of the asylum. Those who attempted to explain got entangled in the confusion that Sialkot, which earlier had been in Hindustan, was now reported to be in Pakistan. Who knew whether Lahore, which was now in Pakistan, would not go over to Hindustan the following day, or the whole of Hindustan would not turn into Pakistan? And who could say with certainty that some day, both Hindustan and Pakistan would not entirely from the face of the earth altogether?37 The lunatic asylum, with its syncretic racial and religious identities, represents a microcosm of pre-Partition India. A madman in confused terror about the news of

Partition and Psychoanalytic Displacement in “Toba Tek Singh”

the Partition climbs up a tree stating, “I want to live in neither Hindustan nor Pakistan … I’d rather live on this tree.”38 What is striking about Manto’s choice of the madman as mouthpiece is not that it was an unconventional perspective from which to narrate the horrors of the Partition, but rather that it was the only perspective from which he could have written the story. It was, to recall a Freudian term, “overdetermined” as the nodal point for political critique. Through the power of metonymic displacement in “Toba Tek Singh,” Manto successfully did what no contemporary writer would dare to do: he pointed the accusatory finger at the politicians who fathered India and Pakistan but in such as way as to not have it chopped off for sedition.

Notes 1 Sa’adat Hasan Manto, “Toba Tek Singh,” in Black Margins, ed. Muhammad Umar Memon and trans. M. Asaduddin (New Delhi: Katha, 2003), 216. 2 For more details on the history of the Partition of India and the role played in it by its key leaders M.K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru of the Indian National Congress and Muhammad Ali Jinnah of the All-India Muslim League, read Nisid Hajari, Midnight’s Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India’s Partition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015). See also Gyanendra Pandey, “The Three Partitions of 1947,” in Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 21–44. Pandey’s chapter offers a detailed analysis of the three alleged political conditions that resulted in the Partition and its atrocities. Pandey identifies the first as the most commonly attributed cause, namely, the Muslim League’s demand for a sovereign state called Pakistan from 1940 onward; he identifies the second as the consequent division of the Muslim-majority provinces of Punjab and Bengal, and the third, the segregation of people from both sides of the border resulting in the largescale communal violence. Pandey’s third causal factor is often considered an aberration by historians who insist on a mythic or idyllic notion of the unity of India’s diverse traditions and people before the event. 3 Hajari, Midnight’s Furies, 134. 4 I use the term holocaust consciously. While acknowledging the specificity of its context in Second World War Germany and the atrocities committed by the Nazis against the Jews on communal and eugenicist lines, I use the term to refer to the state-sanctioned violence experienced during the Partition of India. It is in the same vein that Hajari also compares its scale and horror to the Nazi Holocaust. 5 Quoted in Hajari, Midnight’s Furies, 18 6 See Jennifer Yusin, “Beyond Nationalism: The Border, Trauma and Partition Fiction,” Thesis Eleven 105, no. 1 (2011): 24. 7 Cathy Caruth, “Introduction,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Caruth (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1995), 5. 8 Caruth writes, “While the precise definition of post-traumatic stress disorder is contested, most descriptions generally agree that there is a response, sometimes delayed, to an overwhelming

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Anhiti Patnaik event or events, which takes the form of repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviours stemming from the event, along with numbing that may have begun during or after the experience, and possibly also increased arousal to (and avoidance of) stimuli recalling the event. This simple definition belies a very peculiar fact: the pathology cannot be defined either by the event itself – which may or may not be catastrophic, and may not traumatize everyone equally – nor can it be defined in terms of a distortion of the event, achieving its haunting power as a result of distorting personal significances attached to it. The pathology consists, rather, solely in the structure of its experience or reception: the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it. To be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event.” Caruth, “Introduction,” 4. 9 See also Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996).

10 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 2. 11 See Dori Laub, “Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle,” in Caruth, Trauma, 61–75. 12 The full text may be found in Aakar Patel, ed. and trans., Why I Write: Essays by Saadat Hasan Manto (Chennai: Tranquebar Press, 2014), 64. 13 Ibid., 61. 14 Sa’adat Hasan Manto, “Jelly,” in Memon and Asaduddin, Black Margins, 187. 15 See Cathy Caruth, “An Interview with Robert Jay Lifton,” in Caruth, Trauma, 128–50. 16 See Kai Erikson, “Notes on Trauma and Community,” in Caruth, Trauma, 183–99. 17 Caruth, “Introduction,” 8. 18 Quoted in Sarmad Sehbai, “Why Was Manto Considered a Threat to the Progressives?,” Herald, May 2012, updated 18 January 2017, https://herald.dawn.com/news/1152826. 19 Patel, Why I Write, 10. 20 Quoted in Waqas Khwaja, “Poetics of Storytelling,” Herald, May 2012, updated 17 January 2017, https://herald.dawn.com/news/1152828/poetics-of-storytelling. 21 Cited in Rakshanda Jalil, “Loving Progress, Liking Modernity, Hating Manto,” Social Scientist 40, no. 11/12 (November–December 2012): 43–52. A detailed account of Manto’s relationship with the progressives may also be found here. 22 See Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, ed. and trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 36. 23 Freud writes, “The incapacity of dreams to express these things must lie in the nature of the psychical material out of which dreams are made. The plastic arts of painting and sculpture labour, indeed, under a similar limitation as compared with poetry, which can make use of speech; and here once again the reason for their incapacity lies in the nature of the material which these two forms of art manipulate in their effort to express something.” Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, 328–9. 24 The original quotation reads, “Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo,” and it is cited by Freud in his chapter “Psychology of the Dream Processes.” Ibid., 604. It is translated by

Partition and Psychoanalytic Displacement in “Toba Tek Singh” James Strachey in the epigraph to his edition of The Interpretation of Dreams so: “If I cannot bend the higher powers, I will stir up Acheron.” Ibid., 3. 25 Freud writes, “We very often have an impression that we have dreamt a great deal all through the night and have since forgotten most of what we dreamt. On this view, the dream which we remember when we wake up would only be a fragmentary remnant of the total dream-work; and this, if we could recollect it in its entirety, might well be as extensive as the dreamthoughts” Ibid., 297. 26 Ibid., 147. 27 See Taruk K. Saint, “The Long Shadow of Manto’s Partition Narratives: ‘Fictive’ Testimony to Historical Trauma,” Social Scientist 40, no. 11/12 (November–December 2012): 56. 28 Manto, “Toba Tek Singh,” 216. 29 Yusin, “Beyond Nationalism,” 27–30. 30 Caruth, Trauma, 152. 31 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 3. 32 Freud, Interpretation of Dreams 167. 33 Ibid., 309. 34 Ibid., 193. 35 Ibid., 124. 36 Saint, “Long Shadow,” 53. 37 Manto, “Toba Tek Singh,” 216. 38 Ibid., 214.

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MEMORY AND THE KEEPING PLACE

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The Darkest Tapestry: Indian Residential School Memorialization and the Model for a “Keeping Place” in the Qu’Appelle Valley Amber D.V.A. Johnson

One of the darkest hues in that tapestry came from the fact that the main thrust of the colonial system’s assimilative strategy had concentrated on the young, on the thousands of Thomas Moores, boys and girls, Indian, Metis, and Inuit, across the land.1 The most powerful moments were often the quietest. At an exhibition of photographs from the residential schools, you could see people gazing into the small faces in the pictures. In the light of understanding that flickered in their eyes came the realization that these were children. Just children. And in moments like those, when realization gives way to understanding, resolve takes hold. It is then that the truth becomes not only known but felt. It is then that we move from a state of apology to one where true reconciliation can begin. It is those quiet moments in the hearts of all Canadians that we seek.2 How is it that we know nothing about this history? What does the persistence of such invisibility in the face of the living presence of survivors tell us about our relationship with Indigenous peoples? What does our historical amnesia reveal about our continuing complicity in denying, erasing, and forgetting this part of our own history as colonizers while pathologizing the colonized?3

In recent decades, there has been an increasing interest in the study of the memorialization of sites of trauma, the relationship between memory and history, and the link between collective memory and nation building. In Canada, the legacy of the Indian residential school (irs) system continues to haunt the story of our nation. Any memorialization of the impact of the irs system must acknowledge that assimilation policy and church involvement was part of the unremitting and ongoing project of colonization, land dispossession, and disenfranchisement of Canada’s Indigenous population. The final report of the Truth and Reconciliation

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Commission (trc) was the result of an ongoing battle to nationalize and educate the remembrance of the irs system. Putting the trc’s recommendations at their simplest, there is an urgent need for the education of every Canadian (settler and Indigenous) in the history of the irs system.4 The irs system was intended as a tool of acculturation.5 In the beginning, settler and Indigenous peoples valued the education of Indigenous children. After Confederation, between 1870 and 1877, every numbered Treaty (1 to 7) included a provision for education.6 Over 130 Indian residential schools were constructed across Canada. Yet something went wrong early in the creation of the system. What do we know today? During the era of the irs system, there were hundreds of accounts of the abuse of Indigenous children. Indigenous children suffered. They were emotionally, sexually, and physically abused; they were starved (often in the name of science but more often due to lack of funding);7 they were given drugs that damaged their minds and bodies;8 they died from diseases without comfort;9 they died of exposure trying to travel home;10 they died from culture shock; they died from broken hearts; they died due to the indifference of those who had promised to care for them; and they died in a loveless void. Many Indigenous children were never reunited with their families and were lost. Those who survived bear the burden of the past and have inadvertently transferred trauma to their children and their children’s children. We live in an age where the subject of memory has surpassed academic scholarship and has entered the national discourse. National memory in Canada, as in other settler societies, is a product of colonialism. The mainstream historical narratives of Canadian collective memory can be traced to the colonial period, and settler Canadians continue to tell the same stories over and over again. Stories of discovery, pioneering, settling the wilderness, and the struggle for survival in a harsh environment constitute our national story. Colonial narratives are often “circular” in nature.11 They “represent an Odyssey consisting of an outward movement followed by interaction with exotic and colonised Others in foreign surroundings.”12 In Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, Lorenzo Veracini argues that “narratives are a fundamental part of everyday life, and their construction constitutes an act that allows nations, communities, and individuals to make sense of the world.”13 However, he characterizes the national narrative of settler-colonial nations as one of “penetration into the interior, settlement, endurance and success.”14 Veracini points out that “a settler colonial narrative form should be seen as opposed to an indigenous one.”15 However, “history and academic discourse, and the narratives that are produced and reproduced in a variety of contexts are crucial in all processes of indigenous reconciliation in settler polities.”16 In its most basic form, the practice of memory and memorialization of trauma sites includes the intent to acknowledge events of the past, tell the truth about what happened, and prevent it from occurring again. It also must be recognized that the practice of memory can have different meaning for every individual. What is often

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missing from memorialization sites is the recognition that diverse methods of remembrance bring distinct views of what could be taught, what could be learned, and how this learning/teaching is to be achieved within the realm of traumatic history. The idea of placing a “keeping place” on or near the ruins of the irs near Fort Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan, was considered carefully. This consideration was also connected to authenticity. Bordo argues, “Both an artwork and the material artifact have to occupy a space. They are defined by the physical locations that they occupy.” Accordingly, the Qu’Appelle site could be seen as the authentic site for an irs “keeping place.”17 Bordo states that it has “everything to do with its attachment to a locality.”18 He uses the Bibliothek monument in Berlin as an example of this attachment. The memorial was created with the “aim of marking the infamous Nazi book burning of 10 May 1933.”19 The city of Berlin invited Micha Ullman (an Israeli-born sculptor and professor of art) to design a monument for the Bebelplatz.20 Ullman created a monument on the exact site of the first Nazi book burning on Berlin’s Bebelplatz (formerly known as Opernplatz or Opera Square, the former “cultural epicentre of Berlin”).21 The Bebelplatz is a large open square that occupies a city block and is bordered by the State Library, the entrance to Humboldt University, the War Memorial, the Faculty of Law, and the Opera House and Symphony Hall.22 The memorial was inaugurated in May of 1995. To visit the monument, you must peer through a window into the earth, into a “ghostly white, underground room of empty shelves that Ullman has installed.”23 A steel tablet set into the cobblestone pavement beside the monument quotes Heinrich Heine’s words: “Where books are burned, so one day will people be burned as well.”24 Ullman’s memorial is thought to be one of the most poignant Holocaust memorials. It does not “stage a performance” but “produces an empty space from which books and bodies are absent.”25 By incorporating Heinrich Heine’s words into the memorial, Ullman uses the “medium of a memorial to create a context, a space that invites those who pass through it to perform an act of commemoration.”26 Bordo states that the Bibliothek is a mahnmal (a German word for monument that means “to prompt thinking again, to reflect”), performing its work through absence rather than presence.27 It allows the viewer to think about what is missing, what was lost, and what can never be found or recovered. Bordo recalls this absence as a lack of “closure.”28 He finds that the “aesthetic of absence leaves a visible and irreparable scar.”29 The memorial inspires reflection on not only the book burning’s consequences but also the legacy of the place in which it is situated. The Bebelplatz is surrounded by keeping places such as the library and the faculty of law, which “hold the records and are the records.”30 One of the challenges of this paper is to address the ongoing role that colonialism plays in the relationship between settler and Indigenous peoples. Although concepts such as colonialism and imperialism are often thought to be antiquated, the issue of contemporary colonialism endures.31 Yet as Adam J. Barker states, contemporary colonialism has changed its approach. There is no longer a need to establish “physical

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colonies, forced military suppression of peoples, slave labour and other classic characteristics.”32 Rather, contemporary colonialism is a constantly changing formation of different agendas that “probe Indigenous resistance for signs of weaknesses that can be exploited.”33 The rereading and reframing of historical situations can help to educate Indigenous and settler peoples and “thus foster a renewed openness to the possibility of broader and deeper understandings that can traverse perceived cultural, civilizational, and temporal divides.”34 To understand contemporary colonial efforts, past colonial relationships and experiences must also be considered.35 A large part of creating a new model for commemoration and education is to analyze and read the historical landscape and to act on opportunities that exist for the development and creation of a model that incorporates and moves toward “a new way of living in relation to Others.”36 In the Canadian historical narrative, the result of European colonization of Western Canada created “a number of biological, material, and cultural episodes of métissage,” or Indigenous métissage.37 Indigenous métissage can serve as a connection between Indigenous and settler communications and relationships that avoids hybridity but promotes a national collective memory. As Dwayne Donald states, “There are sites across Canada that have contentious histories in that the stories that Aboriginal people tell of them do not coincide with Canadians’ histories and memories of those same places.”38 John Milloy addressed this fact in his essay “Tipahamatoowin or Treaty 4? Speculations on Alternate Texts,” stating that “such disagreements are not merely historic or benign. Rather, they remain active.”39 Such divergences in meaning have long prejudiced “the relationship between the two founding peoples.”40 The rift that currently exists between Indigenous and settler peoples will not be “diminished as these two cultural practices continue to exist, order, operate and speak their differing truths.”41 Donald points out that in many cases across Canada, cities, towns, and communities “were built at places that have specific cultural, spiritual and social significance to Aboriginal peoples.”42 Settler Canadians cannot have the same connections to those places, however; when the significance of a specific place is “conceptualised as uniquely layered with memories and experiences of different groups of people who now live together,” this creates a “Métissage.”43 Milloy states that “this persistent space of difference between cultures and their ways of talking about their world and their history is also an opportunity, a site for useful historical work, albeit of an unusual kind.”44 It is interesting to examine the etymology of the word métissage. If we return to the root of the word Métis, there are interesting connections between the Greek root and the Canadian corruption of the word. Metis was an ancient Titaness, descended from Gaia and Uranus. She was a “figure of skill and craft, and of cunning, a trickster with powers of transformation who resisted notions of purity by weaving and blurring textiles.”45 The root of the word métissage comes from the “Latin mixticius, meaning the weaving of a cloth from different fibres.” Erika Hasebe-Ludt and Nane Jordan state that incorporating the ancient Greek meaning of “weaving” with the modern

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Canadian interpretation allows for the appropriation of the term as a “research approach and a literary praxis” to “encourage genuine exchange, sustained engagement, and the tracing of ‘mixed and multiple identities’ in the ‘messy threads of relatedness and belonging.’”46 Donald also uses the metaphor of braiding as a unifying “research sensibility.”47 He points out that “staying true to intricate layers of colonial constructs,” the researcher is a weaver who produces a “textual braid or bricolage, ‘that is, a pieced-together, close-knit set of practices that provide solutions to a problem in a concrete solution.’” 48 He further focuses on Indigenous métissage as a way to “reread and reframe Aboriginal and Canadian relations…informed by Indigenous notions of place.”49 Donald states that “colonial frontier logics” continue to damage the relationship between settler and Indigenous peoples.50 He states that the only way to “unpack” layers and layers of colonial relations between Indigenous and settler peoples is to create a “safe zone” that allows Indigenous and settler peoples to “face each other across historic divides, deconstruct their shared past, and engage critically with the realization that their present and future are similarly tied together.”51 Taking inspiration from Australian archaeologist John Mulvaney’s model of the keeping place, Jonathan Bordo’s “The Keeping Place (Arising from an Incident on the Land)” is a foundational theoretical text for this model.52 Bordo theorizes that the use of the keeping place could create a new strategy of curatorship that places importance on a practice of memory that “acknowledges living witnesses” who are “interested, engaged and culturally specific custodian-witnesses.”53 Bordo states that “to curate a “site” as a locale of memory means to bring it within the regimen of a practice of memory.”54 In terms of memory, the keeping place “contrasts with the modern practices of memory.”55 He understands the whale hunt that took place in July 1998 at Kekerton as a “keeping place,” a place “material and fixed, immaterial and indefinite.”56 The Qu’Appelle Valley region of Saskatchewan is the focus of the Qu’Appelle Valley Keeping Place approach that will produce the model that is the subject of this chapter. The Qu’Appelle Valley region is rich in historical and contemporary Indigenous and settler interactions. It is a physical environment that is laden with sites of memory.57 The foundation of this approach begins with the examination of the historical geography of the Qu’Appelle Valley region. It examines various historical interactions between Indigenous and settler peoples through the study of historical and cultural artifacts to better understand the lasting effects of colonization on the past, present, and future relationship. Each artifact is linked to the Fort Qu’Appelle Valley region. Through the “reading” of historical artifacts, this paper examines the “métissage” between settler and Indigenous individuals, which include the following elements: “the journal,” “the trail/map,” “the pictograph,” and “the monuments/sacred stone.” Where can this analysis lead us? It is important to note that this is not a general history but an analysis of particular artifacts as moments in the historical timeline of

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the region. The analysis of those moments facilitates the exploration and identification of the rise of colonial thought (academic and otherwise) and by what means such became engrained in Canadian national collective thought and memory.

The Artifacts The Journal/Journey of Henry Kelsey When we walk, weave, observe, sing, tell stories, draw, and write, we are “proceeding along the lines of one kind or another.”58

The story begins with the missing journal of Henry Kelsey. Henry Kelsey was the first recorded English Hudson’s Bay Company (hbc) explorer to venture into Saskatchewan in 1690.59 Kelsey interacted with the Indigenous groups that he encountered. He travelled with them and he lived among them, but he was also an agent of the hbc. Between 1690 and 1692, he lived and travelled with the Nakota/Assiniboine and the Cree and wrote a journal during this time in Saskatchewan.60 Although he was not a geologist or a cartographer, his survey of the province is an invaluable glimpse into

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12.1 Opposite Map of the Qu’Appelle Valley Region that marks significant sites. 12.2 Left A page from the journal of Henry Kelsey.

the region before European occupation.61 It also provides an important glimpse into the spread of imperialist thought in the plains region. The narrative of Kelsey and his journal would never have occurred without the assistance of the Indigenous guides who escorted him into the wilderness of pre-contact Saskatchewan. Donald points out that an important goal of engaging in Indigenous métissage is to “attend to the complexities of colonial and neo-colonial engagements in a reciprocal manner and find ways to write about those complexities using a language that sparks shifts in historical consciousness.” 62 Unfortunately, we do not have any idea of what Kelsey’s Indigenous guides thought or felt about him, but perhaps we can interpret their actions through the idea of métissage. It is not clear if Kelsey paid his guides to take him on his journey across Saskatchewan, though he most likely did. We can perhaps imagine that Kelsey’s Indigenous guides liked him enough to incorporate him into their community: that they took care of him, protected him, fed him, and shared their shelter. Although we have the physical object (a written journal), it is the journey of Kelsey

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that becomes the true artifact. As Donald states, “artifacts are imbued with meaning when human hands craft them, but also when human beings conceptualize them as storied aspects of their world.”63

Walking the Line: Indigenous Maps/Trails The second object is the Indigenous trail/map. David Turnbull states that “trails are knowledge artifacts.”64 Essentially, the précis of hodology is also a form of métissage, as the “hodological emphasis on the concept of trails … is central to a performative understanding of the coproduction of knowledge and space.”65 The significance of people walking “on the land is the vehicle to creating a ‘sentient ecology.’”66 For some, it is never as simple as walking across a landscape but is combined with “the act of tracking, of moving through the environment, following prey, and reading the signs, creates a complex of intellectual and cognitive connections and, at the same time, a physical trail.”67 By moving through the landscape in patterned movements (such as a seasonal round), it becomes an “archive or repository of traditional knowledge.”68 The knowledge that is produced from moving through the land “defines the cultural landscape.”69 Patricia McCormack states that Indigenous groups in the plains “constructed and maintained cultural landscapes that are ancient, with a ten-thousand year-old lineage.”70 She points out that they created “cultural landscapes” by travelling across the landscape by foot creating complex “networks of trails.”71 The trail is also a social network, and “road systems are multifunctional.”72 They function as not only physical routes for movement across the landscape or for the passage of trade goods but also “ways” that people interact with one another.73 Tim Ingold in his work The Life of Lines states that “If the same track is trodden often enough, the many individual prints merge into a continuous path … footprints are individual; paths are social.”74 Indigenous peoples often “lived their maps” through ritualistic movements “such as pilgrimages through mythologised landscapes or ceremonial enactments. The performance of the practice is itself a map.”75 Trails were often the first artifacts “along with strings and stories … and they may have been the foundational practices on which human cognition, knowledge and technology are based.” 76 Through the sharing of Indigenous maps, the people shared not only “a physical trail” but also “a complex of intellectual and cognitive connections.” 77 Therefore, the sharing of the “map” became the sharing of “knowledge,” and through syncretism the colonizer appropriated Indigenous knowledge.78 By appropriating the knowledge that Indigenous peoples shared about the trails, paths, or roads that intersected the plains region, the colonizers also appropriated the “journey” connected to the act of following a path to the telling of a story. 79

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12.3 A map of pitching trails and sites in Saskatchewan.

Pasqua’s Pictograph The third object is the pictograph that was created by Chief Pasqua nine years after the signing of Treaty 4. In 2000, a historical ledger-paper document known as the North American Indian Pictographic Treaty Record, dating from 1883 (nine years after the signing of Treaty 4 in 1874) was put at auction in London, UK, by a descendant of W.H. Barneby. 80 The pictograph is composed of two panels (totalling about 33 cm deep and 42 cm wide). The panels contain pencil drawings of different situations and items. The first panel depicts Chief Pasqua’s general understanding of the treaty negotiations; the second panel depicts an accounting of the treaty provisions that he received over the years between its creation and the treaty signing. Blair Stonechild states that the pictograph is extremely rare and no other record “exists from the First Nations side of the negotiations” of the numbered treaties.81 How did the pictograph end up in the collection of an English gentleman? In the spring and summer of 1883, W.H. Barneby accompanied by friend Meysey Clive and brother-in-law Arthur Mitchell made his second trip to Canada.82 After his return to England, Barneby wrote a book chronicling his adventures in the west titled Life

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and Labour in the Far, Far West. He stated that his mission on this trip was not only to “enjoy a pleasant trip” but also to collect information about farming and immigration to help assist English settlers interested in immigrating to the United States or Canada.83 Barneby visited Fort Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan, in July of 1883 and happened upon the end of “the principal annual gathering of the Saulteaux and Plains Cree of the Treaty 4 area” who had just held a “thirst dance.”84 Barneby, Arthur T.H. Williams,85 and the rest of his party (and a number of tourists) were welcomed by Chief Pasqua (the Plain) who introduced him to six other chiefs in attendance. It is believed that Pasqua intended to convey to the Queen of England that the Indigenous participants of Treaty 4 did not feel that they had been treated fairly in the treaty negotiations. The capture of the pictograph and its time in the hands of men such as Barneby was a failed attempt at métissage. Barneby did not see the pictograph as a message or as a protest of broken treaty promises. They viewed it as a curiosity. It was something to collect, a trophy that they could hang on a wall and show off at dinner parties. In a way, the pictograph “experienced” colonization as certainly as Pasqua’s people did.

The Monument and the Smiling Buffalo Stone The fourth object is the Smiling Buffalo Stone. It’s not clear what inspired Edmund Morris (son of the famous numbered treaty negotiator Alexander Morris) to develop the plans for the treaty memorials for Fort Qu’Appelle (Treaty 4), Fort Carlton (Treaty 6), and Fort Pitt (Treaty 6). However, some point to the death of his father and connected with the time he spent among Indigenous peoples as possible inspirations. He brought his idea for a monument to the Saskatchewan branch of the Western Art Association and formed a fundraising committee.86 He even went as far as to enlist the help of friends Walter Allward87 (who was a well-known sculptor) and John Pearson88 (architect) to devise a design for the Fort Qu’Appelle monument. Interestingly, there are numerous reports that Morris had planned to incorporate an ancient Indigenous sacred stone from the region into the monument. He first mentions the stone in his diaries dated 1909: that he had discovered a “large rock, crudely shaped like a head, large mouth from ear to ear and eyes, hollow in the rock where the Crees placed offerings. It was their custom & is still, I believe, to make journeys to this spot about July.”89 This ancient ribstone, alternately known as the “Smiling Buffalo stone,” “the Lizard,” “the Berry Creek ribstone,” and the “Morris stone,” was collected by Morris sometime between 1909 and 1911 during his travels across Alberta. Morris knew that the Indigenous peoples of the region regarded the stone as a sacred object. He stated that in his proposed inscription for the monument: “The stone on this pedestal was carved by ancient aborigines. The Cree regarded it as sacred and were wont to journey north of the Red Deer River to Berry Creek where

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on a hill the rock stood. Here they assembled in large numbers and went through certain religious rights.”90 He removed the stone from its sacred site and had it “shipped to Fort Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan where it was to form part of a cairn to the Cree Indians, to commemorate the Signing of Treaty No. 6 … [I]t was not used in the cairn and eventually appeared in the National Museum in Ottawa.”91 On 21 August 1913, Morris drowned while on a sketching holiday in Quebec. His dreams and design for the Fort Qu’Appelle monument died with him, and the association went forward with the present monument. A stark sandstone obelisk (31 feet in height) resides today in the centre of town in Treaty Park located at Company Avenue and Fifth Street. The “Smiling Buffalo” stone was located by myself and Dr John S. Milloy (in early 2020) at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Quebec. The process of repatriation has begun between the museum and several Indigenous communities from Alberta. n n n

12.4 Sacred Indigenous ribstone also known as the “The Smiling Buffalo Stone” at the Museum of History, Gatineau, Quebec, 2020.

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Employing the theory of Indigenous métissage and the analysis of historical artifacts and their meaning provides a “sensibility … a way to hold together the ambiguous, layered, complex, and conflictual character of Aboriginal and Canadian relations without the need to deny, assimilate, hybridize or conclude.”92 Such study begins by reading the lines of prose in the journal of Henry Kelsey and follows his steps across the wilds of pre-settler Saskatchewan. It watches Chief Pasqua as he drew his pictograph for Queen Victoria in hopes of communicating his record of Treaty 4. It traces the network of pathways that criss-cross the prairies and meet at the crossroads of Fort Qu’Appelle. It tracks the theft, relocation, and loss of an Indigenous sacred stone. From the earliest years of colonization to the contemporary remnants of imperialistic thought and assimilative actions, the analysis of certain historical artifacts and how they are woven into the colonial narratives is the first step in the creation of a foundation for the “keeping place” that can be accessed by Indigenous and settler peoples and encourage the “re-storying” of our collective memory. In each instance, and with each artifact, a collective narrative can be found. In each instance, the semiology of the artifact has shifted and fluctuated throughout the colonial era and into the contemporary. For example, artifacts such as the pictograph have become important in the contemporary era as a symbol of the past and of Indigenous people’s movement into the future. For others like the sacred stone, their meaning has become clouded through the passage of time and the negative repercussions of colonialism. To that end, it is significant to reread and reframe the historical geography of the region focusing on the effects of colonialism. By analyzing the various artifacts, it is clear that métissage has always played an important part in the national collective narrative. However, it is evident that with an Indigenous métissage “sensibility,” a new discourse can be created through the commemoration of colonial activities.93 The national collective story can be revisited and reframed thus paving the road for a new relationship between settler and Indigenous peoples. To create a collective history that is inclusive to Indigenous and settler memory, there must be a “safe” zone where the two can meet. Inspired by the work of Donald, Mulvaney, Bordo, and Martin Nakata, I have envisioned how to create a “bridge of reconciliation” between Indigenous and settler memory. Where can Indigenous and settler peoples meet to reconsider our collective history? The Fort Qu’Appelle Keeping Place is the proposed repository for the preservation of irs memory from Indigenous and settler peoples and the education of all Canadians. It will be a safe place, a place to keep things, a place to show things, a place to feel things, and a place to know things. However, how as Canadians can we come together through a difficult history and find one another in the keeping place? One of the main issues that remains a sore spot for many Indigenous peoples is education. In my experience, the question pops up repeatedly. Who can educate? How can we weave together

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Indigenous and settler perspectives while remaining respectful to both? How do we memorialize the irs system? We are left divided on apology, on the meaning of reconciliation, on policy, and on human rights. There are irreconcilable differences between many aspects of Indigenous and settler thoughts about memory. How can we bridge this gap? How do we find the keeping place? What the future holds as a nation depends on what we create in the cultural interface at the keeping place. Martin Nakata created the theory of the “cultural interface” in his doctoral PhD dissertation in 1997.94 The cultural interface is an Indigenous theoretical space that was developed to examine the intersections between Indigenous and Western knowledge systems including documentation, appropriation, and use in academic and scientific circles.95 Nakata states that, though an interest in Indigenous knowledge has increased in recent years, there is a negative impact for Indigenous peoples.96 As a postmodern methodology, it views the difference between Indigenous and Western knowledge systems as “so disparate as to be ‘irreconcilable’ on cosmological, epistemological and ontological grounds.”97 Nakata states that the amalgamation of Indigenous knowledge into Western knowledge systems is not possible without the introduction of a “cultural interface.”98 He points out that “what is needed is consideration of a different conceptualization of the cross-cultural space, not as a clash of opposites and differences but as a layered and very complex entanglement of concepts, theories and sets of meanings of a knowledge system.”99 The cultural interface is an educational theoretical model to assist in the navigation of the colonial landscape of settler and Indigenous relationships since contact. It can be considered to be a space that is both physical and representative, where settler and Indigenous peoples can come together to understand and create a collective discourse surrounding the legacy of colonization and create tools to challenge antiquated power systems through mutual engagement. I have mentioned that Canadians are all responsible for the re-storying of the narrative of Canada. In many situations, this re-story is blocked by fear, anger, guilt, and trauma. Indigenous knowledge, thought, oral history, and methodologies have all suffered in Western knowledge systems. Anger toward the Western system is completely justified. However, this has left settler memory on the periphery. Due to past wrongs, settler memory is often depicted as colonial and inclusive. This is completely true. Settler memory finds its way into the national narrative and often obliterates Indigenous memory and thought. Nevertheless, it must be included alongside Indigenous memory, or the interface will not work. Donald states that “the act of weaving a textual braid of diverse texts provides a means for Métissage researchers to express the interconnectedness of wide and diverse influences on an ethically relational manner.”100 There is a need to recognize that in order to create a keeping place, it is necessary to work collectively to intertwine settler and Indigenous memory “in a way that highlights difference (racial, cultural, historical, socio-political,

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linguistic) without essentializing or erasing it, while simultaneously locating points of affinity.”101 Understanding and following the tenets of Indigenous métissage allows the cultural interface to weave together “all these different intersections” in a place of understanding.

Notes 1 John S. Milloy, A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2017). 2 Sara Anderson, “Murray Sinclair: Education Is Key to Reconciliation,” Kairos, 9 June 2016, www.kairoscanada.org/murray-sinclair-education-key-reconciliation. 3 Paulette Regan, Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling, and Reconciliation in Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010), 23. 4 This project pays special attention to several different goals that were laid out by the commission, which include: “[to] acknowledg[e] Residential School experiences, impacts and consequences,” “promote awareness and public education of Canadians about the irs system and its impacts,” “identify sources and create as complete an historical record as possible of the irs system and legacy [, which] shall be preserved and made accessible to the public for future study and use,” and “support commemoration of former Indian Residential School students and their families.” Additionally, it is significant to note that several Canadian universities have created archives and repositories for trc materials. This includes the University of British Columbia’s Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre in Vancouver, and the University of Manitoba’s National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation in Winnipeg. This is an excellent beginning for the continued education and knowledge of irs history. Both of these institutions also offer storage facilities for historical records and survivor testimonies as well as public access and education. They are focused on providing a controlled environment for survivor stories, records, and other information. See “trc Website,” National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, accessed 24 September 2021, www.trc.ca/about-us/our-mandate.html. 5 John S. Milloy states that “it was a policy of assimilation, a policy designed to move Aboriginal communities from their ‘savage’ state to that of ‘civilisation’ and thus to make in Canada but one community – a non-Aboriginal one.” See Milloy, National Crime, 3. 6 Sheila Carr-Stewart, “A Treaty Right to Education,” Canadian Journal of Education 26, no. 2 (2001): 125. 7 Between 1948 and 1952, two long-term studies were conducted without the consent of subjects who were students at six residential schools. In the beginning, inspectors visited the schools to check on the health and nutrition of Indigenous children. It was quickly discovered that there was increasingly poor nutrition in the schools and that the “food typically failed to meet the governments own stated basic nutritional requirements.” It was decided that this was due to lack of funding during the postwar period. In 1947, federal Nutritional Services Director Lionel Pett began a research project that would use Indigenous children as research subjects. Ian Mosby states that “without necessary changes to the per capita funding formula of schools,

Indian Residential School Memorialization there was little likelihood that the student’s nutritional status would improve in any meaningful way. This meant the schools had become, through decades of neglect by Indian Affairs, a possible laboratory for studying the human requirements for a range of nutrients as well as the effects of dietary interventions on a group of malnourished children.” Put simply, those who were supposed to help stop the malnourishment of Indigenous children found it easier to use those already starving children as subjects to study the effects of further malnourishment. Ian Mosby, “Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition Research and Human Biomedical Experimentation in Aboriginal Communities and Residential Schools, 1942–1952,” Histoire sociale/ Social History 46, no. 1 (2013): 159–60. 8 Indian agents often wrote to their superiors to comment on child abuse through drugs such as luminal, a derivative of phenobarbital. This type of drug is normally used to control severe epileptic seizures. The effects of this drug can produce a wide range of effects from mild sedation to death. It is often used in capital punishment, through death through chemical injection. The Nazis used luminal in their medical experiments during the Second World War. They tested this drug on hundreds of children. See “School Files Series – 1879–1953 (rg10): Volume 6431,” Library and Archives Canada, accessed September 2021, www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/discover/massdigitized-archives/school-files-1879-1953/Pages/item.aspx?PageID=2471313. 9 Dr Bryce was not interested in national policy or assimilative reform. Rather, he was concerned with the high death rate of Indigenous students in Indian Residential Schools. Megan Sproule Jones states that “without questioning the aims or the budget of these institutions, he advocated sweeping reforms for native education to ensure that native children received the same basic comforts as white children in public schools.” Megan Sproule-Jones, “Crusading for the Forgotten: Dr Peter Bryce, Public Health, and Prairie Native Residential Schools,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 13 (1996): 206. 10 Chanie Wenjack was an Ojibwe (Anishinaabe) boy who ran away from the Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School in Kenora, Ontario. It is not totally clear why Chanie decided to run away; some said it was due to loneliness, others that it was due to physical and sexual abuse. On 16 October 1966, he and two other boys, Ralph and Jackie MacDonald, ran away from school and made it to Redditt, Ontario. There they stayed with the MacDonalds’ uncle, Charly Kelly. After four days, Chanie, using a rail map, attempted to follow the CN rail line over six hundred kilometres to his home at Ogoki Post on the Marten Falls Reserve. Wearing only a light windbreaker, Chanie died of exposure and malnourishment at Farlane, Ontario, on 23 October 1966. He was discovered by railway workers, and it was determined that he died of exposure and hunger. Chanie was buried at his reserve on 27 October 1966. Chanie’s death brought national attention to the treatment of Indigenous children in residential schools. In 1973, Indigenous students at Trent University lobbied and named Trent’s largest lecture hall after Chanie. In 2018, Trent launched the Chanie Wenjack School for Indigenous Studies. See Georgia Carley, “Chanie Wenjack,” The Canadian Encyclopedia, 7 April 2016, www.thecanadian encyclopedia.ca/en/article/charlie-wenjack. 11 Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 96.

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14 Ibid., 98. 15 Ibid., 101. 16 Ibid., 112. 17 Jonathan Bordo, “The Witness in the Errings of Contemporary Art,” in The Rhetoric of the Frame: Essays on the Boundary of the Artwork, ed. Paul Duro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 106. 18 Ibid., 107. 19 James Young, “Germany’s Memorial Question: Memory, Counter-Memory, and the End of the Monument,” South Atlantic Quarterly 96, no. 4 (1997): 867. 20 Micha Ullman was born to German Jews who immigrated to Mandate Palestine in 1933. 21 Jonathan Bordo, “History Lessons: Imitation, Work and the Temporality of Contemporary Art,” Art History 37, no. 4 (2014): 822. 22 Ibid., 822. 23 Young, “Germany’s Memorial,” 867. 24 Ibid., 867. 25 Na’ama Rokem, Prosaic Conditions: Heinrich Heine and the Spaces of Zionist Literature (Evanston, il: Northwestern University Press, 2013), xi. 26 Ibid., xi. 27 Bordo, “History Lessons,” 822. 28 Ibid., 822. 29 Ibid., 822. 30 Ibid., 822. 31 Adam J. Barker, “The Contemporary Reality of Canadian Imperialism: Settler Colonialism and the Hybrid Colonial State” American Indian Quarterly 33, no. 3 (2009): 325. 32 Ibid., 326. 33 Ibid., 326. 34 Dwayne Donald, “Forts, Curriculum, and Indigenous Métissage: Imagining Decolonization of Aboriginal-Canadian Relations in Educational Contexts,” First Nations Perspectives 2, no. 1 (2009): 1–24. 35 Dwayne Donald, “Indigenous Métissage: A Decolonizing Research Sensibility,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 25, no. 5 (2012): 534. 36 Ibid., 534. 37 Étienne Rivard, “Colonial Cartography of Canadian Margins: Cultural Encounters and the Idea of Métissage,” Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization 43, no. 1 (2008): 46. 38 Donald, “Indigenous Métissage,” 542. 39 John S. Milloy, “Tipahamatoowin or Treaty 4? Speculations on Alternate Texts,” Native Studies Review 18, no. 1 (2009): 92. 40 Ibid., 92.

Indian Residential School Memorialization 41 Ibid., 94. 42 Donald, “Indigenous Métissage,” 542. 43 Ibid., 542. 44 Milloy, “Tipahamatoowin or Treaty 4,” 94. 45 Tim Ingold writes that “the threading, twisting, and knotting of fibres were among the most ancient of human arts. From which all else is derived, including both building and textiles.” Ingold, Lines: A Brief History (London: Routledge, 2016), 2. 46 Erika Hasebe-Ludt and Nane Jordan, “‘May We Get Us a Heart of Wisdom’: Life Writing Across Knowledge Traditions,” Transnational Curriculum Inquiry 7, no. 2 (2010): 2. 47 Donald, “Indigenous Métissage,” 544. 48 Ibid., 544. 49 Ibid., 533. 50 Ibid., 534. 51 Ibid., 534. 52 John Mulvaney coined the term “keeping place” in the late 1980s as a method to prevent future incidents like the Kow Swamp excavations and subsequent destruction of the remains from ever occurring again. 53 Jonathan Bordo, “The Keeping Place (Arising from an Incident on the Land),” in Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 174–5. 54 Ibid., 174–5. 55 Ibid., 176. 56 Ibid., 175. 57 This includes the following: the site of the signing of Treaty 4, the site of the Qu’Appelle Indian Residential School (Lebret) and the Fort Qu’Appelle Sanatorium (Fort Qu’Appelle), the Treaty 4 marker (Fort Qu’Appelle), Northwest Mounted Police Post (Fort Qu’Appelle), the Riel Rebellions (troops mustered out of Fort Qu’Appelle), Chief Sitting Bull’s last stop before his expulsion to the United States (Lebret and Fort Qu’Appelle), a crossroads of various historical trails that connected the area to the Northwest Territories, a Grand Trunk Pacific Railway station and junction (Fort Qu’Appelle) and a Hudson’s Bay Trading Post (Fort Qu’Appelle). 58 Ingold, Lines, 19. 59 Henry Kelsey (1667–1724) was an English fur trader, explorer, and hbc agent. He was the first recorded European to travel through the Canadian West, including the present-day provinces of Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Alberta. He arrived in Canada in 1684 at the age of seventeen and started his career with the hbc as a mail carrier. By 1690, Kelsey was sent by hbc governor George Geyer to journey up the Nelson River to find trading partners among the Indigenous groups in the region. Using the help of Indigenous guides from the Cree band, Kelsey travelled and encountered several different Indigenous groups including the Nakota. It was also speculated that Kelsey married an Indigenous woman in the late seventeenth century as well as having an English wife back in England. Kelsey was also a master mariner and commanded an hbc frigate moving goods and provisions. He was appointed governor of York Factory in 1717

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Amber D.V.A. Johnson and governor of all the Hudson’s Bay settlements in 1718. Kelsey travelled between Canada and England over six times (in 1684, 1694, 1696, 1698, 1706, and 1714) and eventually returned to England in 1722. He died two years later in 1724. Bruce Greenfield, “‘Now Reader Read’: The Literary Ambitions of Henry Kelsey, Hudson’s Bay Company Clerk,” Early American Literature 47, no. 1 (2012): 31–58.

60 Dale Russell, “The Puzzle of Henry Kelsey and His Journey to the West,” in Three Hundred Prairie Years: Henry Kelsey’s “Inland Country of Good Report,” ed. Henry Epp (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, 1993), 74. 61 John McConnell, “The Land That Kelsey Saw,” in Epp, Three Hundred Prairie Years, 11. 62 Donald, “Indigenous Métissage,” 544. 63 Ibid., 542. 64 David Turnbull, “Maps Narratives and Trails: Performativity, Hodology and Distributed knowledges in Complex Adaptive Systems – An Approach to Emergent Mapping,” Geographical Research 45, no. 2 (2007): 142. 65 Ibid., 142. 66 Tim Ingold, “Footprints through the Weather-World: Walking, Breathing, Knowing,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, n.s., 16 (2010): s121–s139. 67 Turnbull, “Maps Narratives and Trails,” 142. 68 Gerald A. Oetelaar and D. Joy Oetelaar, “People, Places and Paths: The Cypress Hills and the Niitsitapi Landscape of Southern Alberta,” Plains Anthropologist 51 (2006): 376. 69 Patricia McCormack, “Walking the Land: Aboriginal Trails, Cultural Landscapes and Archaeological Studies for Impact Assessment,” Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress 13, no. 1 (2017): 11. 70 Ibid., 12. 71 Ibid., 12. 72 Timothy Earle, “Paths and Roads in Evolutionary Perspective,” in Ancient Road Networks and Settlement Hierarchies in the New World, ed. Charles D. Trombold et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 10. 73 Ibid., 10. 74 Tim Ingold, The Life of Lines (London: Routledge, 2015). 75 Turnbull, “Maps Narratives and Trails,” 143. 76 Ibid., 142. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid. 80 The document was purchased by an anonymous Canadian collector for $87,000. In 2007, it was purchased by a group composed of Saskatchewan’s Pasqua First Nation and the Royal Saskatchewan Museum for $174,000. The document was repatriated in a ceremony on 21 June 2007 and is housed at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Regina. Blair Stonechild, “Recovering the Heritage of Treaty Number Four,” in Plain Speaking: Essays on Aboriginal Peoples and the

Indian Residential School Memorialization Prairie, ed. Patrick Douaud and Bruce William Dawson (Regina: University of Regina Press, 2002), 1. 81 Bob Beal, “An Indian Chief, an English Tourist, a Doctor, a Reverend, and a Member of Parliament: The Journeys of Pasqua’s Pictographs and the Meaning of Treaty Four,” Canadian Journal of Native Studies 27, no. 1 (2007): 110. 82 William Henry Barneby, Life and Labour in the Far, Far West (London: Cassell, 1884), 11. 83 Interestingly, Barneby claimed to be travelling around the West collecting information for Englishmen who wished to immigrate to Canada. However, he suggested in his book that English gentlemen should not immigrate to Canada lest they become involved with Indigenous women and exile themselves from Britain forever. He landed at New York and travelled to St Louis, Denver, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Victoria, the Cascade Mountains, Nanaimo, Seattle, Portland, Spokane, Helena, Glyndon, Winnipeg, Brandon, Qu’Appelle, Regina, Medicine Hat, Calgary, Moose Jaw, St Paul, Chicago, Toronto, Montreal, and through Quebec. Barneby, Life and Labour, 11. 84 Stonechild, “Recovering the Heritage,” 2. 85 Arthur Trefusis Heneage Williams was a militia officer, businessman, and politician (a close friend of Prime Minister John A. Macdonald, he served as member of Parliament and Conservative Party whip in the House of Commons). He grew up in Port Hope, Ontario, where his father was the first mayor. He had been involved in the local militia in Port Hope since the 1860s but took command of the Forty-Sixth East Durham Battalion in 1866. He travelled to the west to secure funding and investments due to troubles from a number of bad investments in Ontario. He continued his command of his militia company and joined Major General Frederick Dobson Middleton in the subduing of the Métis resistance at the battle of Batoche. On 4 July, he died from complications of fever while travelling on the steamer The Northwest. Desmond Morton, “Williams, Arthur Trefusis Heneage,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, accessed 21 September 2021, www.biographi.ca/en/bio.php?id_nbr=5905. 86 In 1908, the Winnipeg Branch of the Women’s Art Association of Canada decided to establish its own organization called the Western Art Association. The aim of the association was to celebrate and promote pioneer life in the province and celebrate and offer a marketplace for handicrafts and art history education. It also promoted and encouraged public interest in the study of art in Western Canada and maintained a permanent collection of Indigenous artifacts, organized the loan of artifacts to other museums, and held studio tours and lecture series. They aided in the establishment of a branch of their association in Fort Qu’Appelle. From this branch, the association staged several events, lobbied for the creation of an art gallery and a museum, established a tearoom and a shop specializing in settler and Indigenous handicrafts. They also worked to sponsor scholarships for female artists to access the Winnipeg School of Art. In 1914, they helped to open a marketplace for the sale of local sewing, cookery, toys, and carving. The Saskatchewan branch remained open until 1921 with its main years of activity spanning 1908 to 1916. Virginia G. Berry, Taming the Frontier: Art and Women in the Canadian West, 1880–1920 (Calgary: Bayeux Arts, 2005).

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87 Walter Seymour Allward (1876–1955) was a Canadian monumental sculptor best known for the Canadian National Vimy Memorial in France. His other notable works include the Boer War Memorial Fountain in Windsor, the South African War Memorial in Toronto, the BaldwinLafontaine Monument in Ottawa, and the Bell Telephone Memorial in Brantford. 88 John A. Pearson (1867–1940) was a Canadian architect involved in the design of the Centre Block on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, including the Peace Tower. 89 Edmund Morris, The Diaries of Edmund Montague Morris: Western Journeys, 1907–1910 (Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum, 1985), 121. 90 Jean McGill, “Edmund Morris among the Saskatchewan Indians and the Fort Qu’Appelle Monument,” Saskatchewan History 35, no. 3 (1982): 105. 91 Note that Fedirchuk and McCullough made an error on the treaty number. Gloria J. Fedirchuk and Edward J. McCullough, “Prehistoric Art and Spiritualism: A Perspective from Pine Coulee, Alberta,” Alberta Archaeological Review 22 (1991): 12. 92 Donald, “Indigenous Métissage,” 536. 93 Ibid. 94 Martin Nakata, “The Cultural Interface: An Exploration of the Intersection of Western Knowledge Systems and Torres Strait Islanders’ Positions and Experiences” (PhD diss., James Cook University, 1997). 95 Martin Nakata, “Indigenous Knowledge and the Cultural Interface: Underlying Issues at the Intersection of Knowledge and Information Systems,” ifla Journal 28 (2002): 2. 96 Ibid., 2. 97 Martin Nakata, “The Cultural Interface,” Australian Journal of Indigenous Education 36 (2007): 7–14. 98 Ibid., 8. 99 Martin Nakata, “Australian Indigenous Studies: A Question of Discipline,” Australian Journal of Anthropology 77, no. 3 (2006): 272. 100 Donald, “Forts, Curriculum and Indigenous Métissage,” 8. 101 Ibid., 9.

13

The Community for Which the Land Longs: Cape Town’s District Six Museum Christiaan Beyers

On the outside wall of the District Six Museum, there is a large photograph of a girl in mock curtsy before a nondescript wall of a building in the now demolished District Six – site of infamous forced removals in South Africa. The caption of the photo states, “no matter where we are, we are here” – the words of former resident Mrs Abrahams taken from a memory cloth for the museum at its opening in December 1994, a few months after democratic elections ushered in a post-apartheid era. Where is the “here,” this “District Six,” found in the museum? We might answer this question quite literally – the museum stands at the foot of the former District Six in Cape Town. An estimated sixty thousand residents were progressively thrown out from the inner-city precinct following its proclamation as a “white-group area” in 1966. It was razed to the ground by the apartheid government between 1968 and 1982,1 and renamed Zonnebloem (Sunflower) after an eighteenthcentury colonial farm. Some churches and mosques were left standing, but not much else. Since the museum’s creation it has acted as guardian of the collective heritage of the former neighbourhood, and celebrated the “spirit” of mutual care and conviviality that flourished there despite the realities of the wider apartheid city. It declares this spirit to have survived forced removal, dispersion, and segregation in racially designated residential areas on the urban periphery. This avowal clearly indicates that more is required to address our question. The caption posits the museum as the locus of a deep attachment to the land. “Here” cannot be understood without referring to the “we” that longs for it. Although the form of this collective subject is indeterminate, it is felt to have a definite presence in relation to the land. Indeed, “no matter where we are, we are here” also happens to be the main slogan of the museum’s current Hands On District Six campaign, which aimed to assert the active presence or “spirit” of its former residents and “their quest to be reunited with the land they lost.”2 Hence my starting postulate – in the museum, “District Six” is the name of a project in which land and community are to be mutually constituted as a cause of justice.

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The wider context is the official land restitution program, through which the portion of land that still lies vacant is subject to claims.3 In line with the discourse on restitution, the museum takes as its mission mobilizing memories of life in the neighbourhood toward its symbolic and physical reclamation. This is not a straightforward matter. Consider the introduction to the exhibit The Memorial Park: The Cultural Precinct of District Six. Reclaiming Our Heritage In the absence of the physical fabric of District Six and as the land is prepared to welcome returnees home, the museum aims to support the rebuilding of a community that is true to the idea and spirit of District Six. The label plainly describes the relationship of the museum to the planned construction of a memorial park in District Six. On further consideration, however, this carries confounding dilemmas that run to the heart of the museum’s identity. How is a community true to the spirit of District Six to be “rebuilt” on its ruin? And what role can the museum play in facilitating this? Developing the area entails clearing the rubble and erecting new buildings and streets. This, in turn, changes the basic conditions for memorialization and the possibilities for the political mobilization of memory. Restitution-related housing construction – which has moved at a snail’s pace – is primarily concerned with functionality for living and commerce, rather than heritage. Moreover, in recent years there have been several private developments on the land, which pay no attention to heritage. Time does not stand still, even for iconic ruins, and the land under claim in District Six is prime real estate lying at the centre of Cape Town. Currently the core challenge for the museum is how to shore up cultural heritage in the face of powerful forces vying for access to that land. Beyond practical issues of institutional viability, this reflects back on the basic question, How, over time, does site become expressed in and by the museum as the defence of memory and a way of life, and thus as a fundamental cause of justice? This essay aims to cast this question into sharper relief by providing an account of some of the stories, memory objects, artworks, and practices that come together in the museum to stage the lost original – District Six as a neighbourhood, community, way of life – over the site of its ruination. The discussion is centred in the transition between two of its foremost exhibitions. In 1994, Streets: Retracing District Six established the museum as the house of memory and created its most enduring mimetic structure, one that evokes the former neighbourhood in a contrast with the purported “emptiness” of ruined landscape. The second exhibition, Digging Deeper, created in 2000, worked more directly with a changing landscape. It also engaged more critically with District Six’s intangible heritage in ways that avowedly transcended nostalgia and spawned a series of parallel projects over the next decade.

Cape Town’s District Six Museum

13.1 District Six Museum exterior wall.

This expanded the scope of the museum’s memory work and connected it to the future redevelopment of the land. My discussion hence shifts to the changing aesthetics and politics of the museum over the next decade – in terms of not only its evolving set of strategies of representation and public intervention but also as a symptomatic manifestation of some of the tensions arising within the museum in the field of restitution. The essay concludes briefly with the most recent period, during which the museum’s standing in relation to the site has been challenged as new houses have been built for claimants, other developments have encroached on the land, and more powerful actors have sought to impose their visions for its future.

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Survivance and the Poetics of Place Museum is a term of ambivalence here, for this museum has defined itself not primarily as a repository of archives and artifacts but as a kind of “keeping place”4 for a displaced community. The District Six Museum Foundation was established in 1989 as part of the Hands Off District Six campaign to prevent the development of the land without consulting former residents. Its first temporary exhibition was in 1992, and in December 1994 it opened its permanent exhibition in the Buitenkant Street Methodist Church. A banner suspended from the exterior balcony declared, “In this exhibition (museum), we do not wish to recreate District Six as much as repossess the history of the area as a place where people lived, loved, and struggled.” In the words of two founding trustees of the museum, the term museum evoked “a space for the healing of memories,”5 and “something that suggested a solidity, a continuity and permanence that could withstand even the force of the bulldozer and the power of a regime committed to the erasure of place and community.”6 Statements like these reveal an integral connection to the desolation of the landscape. For years, the land was left vacant by prospective developers that did not want to be associated with its infamy as a symbol of apartheid brutality; however, in the 1980s, the Cape Technikon was built on part of the land as a “whites-only” postsecondary educational institution. It is now open to Black students and was renamed the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (cput) in 2016. Nonetheless, the concrete symmetry of its functionalist structures continues to accentuate the laying to waste of what went before. Demolition in District Six left little standing, and the urgent challenge for the museum was how to keep alive and cultivate its rich intangible heritage in relation to “salted earth.” I want to suggest the term survivance – survival as remembrance and resistance through language, and first of all the spoken word – as useful figuration of what is at stake for this museum. Gerald Vizenor, Chippewa author from Minnesota, uses survivance in the North American context to mean “an active sense of presence over absence, deracination, and oblivion.”7 “Absence” refers to the very identity of “indian” as a colonially imposed category, dominated by associations of victimhood and tragedy, since such “simulations of the other have no real origin, no original reference.”8 Thus, narrative creates a space for the absented as presence. Oral stories, in particular, are “creations of fugitive motion, a sense of presence that must be heard, and these oral creations are evermore; otherwise, our presence and restitution of sound and seasons would be traced to the sinecures of literature.”9 Without wanting to minimize the complexity of transposing this concept to a new context, I reinterpret survivance in this essay to refer specifically to the ongoing effort in the museum to constitute and represent “a community’s yearning for ‘its land.’” The museum works with memories that often carry nostalgic connotations – the same ones often circulated in the wider marketplace of memory – but seeks

Cape Town’s District Six Museum

also to transcend these by “presencing” District Six in the difficult way of a persisting trauma and struggle. Active presencing is evident in the surplus of forms that carry forth the spirit of a body now lying as broken fragments and crushed debris. Museum literature refers to a “notion of a landscape that is constructed, contested, idealized and representative, indeed, over-represented in image, sound and text.”10 One might say that the task of the museum is to revive the aura of the objects stripped of their original environment, precisely by generating a new space of their belonging. Symbolically, this new belonging consists of a kind of mourning, but one that is to be transfigured as a return, a resistance. And if “here” is the place of loss and return – the land – its physical form is on its own scarcely capable of sustaining memory’s address. Making of this landscape a place of return requires more than interpretation of ruins and representation of what existed there before. It requires ongoing inscription of the presence of “community,” the repeated instantiation of a relation of identity and pure interiority between the collectivity of those displaced and the place from which they were thrown. The museum becomes the house of the absented community through a very particular “poetics of place.” It can be contrasted to Gaston Bachelard’s poetics of space, in which the house figures as a symbolic hearth where imagination and memory commune, a protective container of childhood daydreams. The District Six Museum works with a traumatized landscape defined by violent temporal and spatial rupture, one that is no longer capable of the “principle of psychological integration.”11 And unlike Bachelard’s preferred poet who seeks the solitude by which to discover poetic images that arise in memory but ultimately exceed these origins, the museum seeks to re-member community as the locus of a wound, and thus deliberately to reinhabit the dissociative space of ruination so as to make of it a place of survivance.

Streets and Encounters Upon passing through the front doors of the museum, one’s attention is immediately drawn to a large street map on the ground, and immediately behind it, a column of streets signs. A wall of black-and-white photographs borders the map to the right, and larger hanging portraits of notable political and literary figures on semitransparent cloths are suspended from the ceiling over the second-floor balustrades. Recorded voices can be heard alongside conversations of people in the museum. A large hanging calypso cloth with handwritten names and addresses, and memories and poetic fragments, borders the map on the immediate left. The map, street signs, portrait gallery, and memory cloth are the key components of Streets, which continues to provide the founding symbolic structure of the museum. Streets was inaugurated as a temporary exhibit and organized around the original District Six street signs collected by a foreman in the demolition of District Six, who

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13.2 District Six Museum interior.

was persuaded to donate these to the museum – a symbolically charged story that is often recited as exemplary of reconciliation in written accounts or by guides on the museum floor. When the exhibit was moved to its permanent home in the church, the seventy-five street signs were hung in a series of lines from the second-floor interior balcony, and later reshaped as a rectangular column reaching toward the ceiling, with a pile of rubble at its centre representing District Six land.12 The “signs acted as a catalyst for new ideas” and led to the creation of the floor map of the old neighbourhood. Former District Six residents were called on “to reclaim their addresses

Cape Town’s District Six Museum

by writing their names onto the map.”13 During the period of the map’s creation, former residents would inscribe their family names on the canvas at the location of their former homes, and along the edges artists and poets included poetic text and images.14 Recreating the physical and emotional coordinates of a world, inscriptions personalize an otherwise abstract cartographic representation, thus neutralizing its violence, but also giving it a materiality inextricably rooted in this place called “museum.” Moreover, the whole of the ruined landscape – including those parts overtaken by subsequent developments – is thus defined as a memorial space. It seems obvious that the rust-bitten street signs no longer serve to orient but are meant to trigger memories of the lives of former residents. Nonetheless, they are deeply mimetic in recalling District Six streets as contours of everyday life. Walter Benjamin saw street names as carrying metaphysical charges akin to other proper names that mark identity. Far from being arbitrary signs, street names come to embody the sensuous nature of the physical entity to which they refer through a series of “nonsensuous correspondences,”15 making “the city … a linguistic cosmos.”16 The “corners” that mark intersections are particularly loaded with significance for organizing the experience of the city and neighbourhood.17 Such magical force is transmitted to the museum as the most poignant form of memory – of places inhabited and experienced together with others. The map stages encounters, not only between its various contemporary visitors – former residents, school children, artists, local and international scholars, tourists, and dignitaries – but also with narrative personalities inscribed on its surface. Through the chronotope of the street, memory comes alive in recognizing the recollections of others; remembering unfolds relationally.18 Although the map is no longer in the stage of creative inscription, it continues to be interactive. In stories and personal anecdotes, long-time guides “bring to life” now-famous landmarks such as the Hanover Street (the bustling main street), Seven Steps (leading to Hanover Street), the Fishmarket, the mosques and churches, and Horstley Street. Standing on the map, one can also “encounter” the persons in the photographs on walls all around from a situated vantage point, particularly the family portraits on the wall immediately bordering the map.19 The map sets up the experience of the museum as a space of living memory. One is able to create a storyline as one walks around it,20 and this in turn furnishes a rubric by which to organize one’s encounter with other parts of the museum. Extending outwards, one finds a mixture of historical and poetic texts, images, and soundscapes – mostly incorporated in subsequent installations – by which to unfold a narrative. For example, covering the chapel wall is a remarkable 8 × 8m fresco by Peggy Delport – artist, founding trustee, and early curator of the museum and dedicated to Human Rights Day in 2006, with the self-same title, No matter where we are, we are here. It seems to portray a surplus of community relations in a way that punctuates the vast emptiness of the landscape.21

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13.3 Horstley Street memorial cairn.

During its formative period, the museum engaged practically with the District Six site mainly by conducting interpretive walking tours, and by organizing or partaking in occasional parades and marches. Each year there was a “walk of remem- brance” on the 11 February anniversary of the declaration of District Six as a “white-group area.” The march proceeded to the site of the former Seven Steps, where pilgrims marked the occasion by laying a stone on a growing cairn. We can call this a form of inscription – it creates a concrete landmark as an index of placeness. The cairn has become charged with emotion and significance, but it has proved tremendously vulnerable in part because its value is only a function of this particular indexicality – as we shall see later. In 1997, a Public Sculpture Project was launched, during which over sixty artists created as many installations around the site of District Six. Their aim was not to alter the site, but rather in some way to enhance the perception of its significance. Most of the sculptures were about marking loss, working with ruins, and “recalling spirits, exorcising ghosts.”22 Many of the works were fashioned mainly or entirely out of materials found at the site, and the works were “without exception anti-monumental, many of them being intentionally transient – destined to disappear or be removed, like the former residents and homes of District Six.”23 Artistic form accentuated both how little of the built environment of District Six remained and the creative opportunity that this seemed to afford.

Cape Town’s District Six Museum

Spirit and Ruin: From Streets to Digging Deeper Since its creation, the museum has defined itself as a “community museum,” but it also sought to critically appropriate the term community from its apartheid-era usages and deploy it instead toward a non-racial politics. The museum’s intellectual and activist roots are in the non-racialism movement in the Western Cape, and the Non-European Unity Movement in particular, and it continues to insist – against the currently dominant ideology of multiracialism – that “racial” groupings are historically relative and fictional social constructs.24 While popular discourse has attributed a “coloured” racial identity to the district, in the museum it is “a place which constantly problematized and decentred the totalizing impulses of colour, class, religion, gender and political belief,” so that its “distinctiveness … lay in its ability to take difference and to sublimate it within a community identity.”25 “District Six” is thus named and renamed as “spirit” – against flat municipal demarcation, and more important, against its designation within apartheid-era racial nomenclature. To listen to key figures in the museum describe its methodologies for actualizing community and representing place is to gain a sense of the collective will to remember, but also to create. The publication culminating the first decade of the museum’s life, Recalling Community (2001), asserts that the museum’s aim is not so much to collect and archive material artifacts as to rekindle and cultivate District Six’s “intangible spirit of community,”26 such that “the path through which each object arrives, and the relationship of the community to the objects that they have entrusted to us, animates the museum.”27 Valmont Layne, director of the museum from 2002 until 2008, refers to the District Six colloquial term kanala, which “evokes community mindedness and generosity,” to consider how spirit is thought to constitute place: “Notions of ephemerality and spirit are key to contemporary understandings of the place, partly because it no longer exists, and partly because its legacy depends so much on the capacity of its former residents to evoke it in numerous ways.”28 Ethics and cultural life are summoned –even simulated into being. Recalling Community captures a key moment in the museum’s history as it shifted its attention from Streets to the major exhibition to follow, Digging Deeper. The book portrays the museum as a space in which “ordinary people have been able to describe themselves as they wish to be seen.”29 Testimony is the life-blood of museum, and has been conceived of in the context of the ongoing collective production of social history: “The past is not so much an archive awaiting unveiling, but a tapestry on which individuals and groups are able to inscribe themselves.”30 Subsequent literature describes the development of a range of “memory methodologies designed to incorporate people’s experiences,”31 particularly oral history and other “modes of representation and enunciation that privilege aural, mythical forms in conversation with visual culture and visual representation.”32

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The participation of the community in “making the poetic spaces of the museum”33 is often rendered as inscribing itself onto the land. In the official pamphlet guide of Digging Deeper, Delport summarizes this issue eloquently and at the same time poses the first question as an imperative. The museum project came into existence in the emptiness and dust of a process of erasure: of place, structure, history and name. Within this space then, if names and places are continually inscribed, and identities, faces, features and moments, minutely recalled and reconstructed, it reflects the roots of this project in the legislated obliteration that later precipitated the museum into being.34 Consider the story of the pigeons that returned to District Six, told by an ex-resident and museum guide – Noor Ebrahim. It appears repeatedly: in Ebrahim’s autobiography;35 in his chapter in Recalling Community; as a poetic fragment on a tiled floor alongside pieces by other writers; and recounted by the museum guides for visitors. When Noor’s family relocated from District Six, the poem recounts that he took his fifty racing pigeons with him and after three months decided to set them free “to see if they will come back to this new home”36 that evening – which they didn’t. On his way to work the next day, Noor found them at the site of his levelled home in District Six, “They did not fly away when I approached them, but looked into my eyes as if to say ‘where is our home?’” (museum inscription). With home now impossible, the museum – where the story is housed, as it were – serves as a kind of home in absentia. Methods and forms for inscribing collective spirit as presence are more complex and multi-layered in the Digging Deeper exhibition when compared to Streets. This exhibition was installed in different spaces within the church building, and it was guided by the idea that “the human responses and actions that are generated in the spaces of the museum are more significant than its physical form.”37 Past the main exhibition hall, three memory rooms introduce a new organizational component, “an aesthetic mapping of [District Six] working class lived experience in the museum.”38 Most significant is “Nomvuyo’s room” – a re-creation of Nomvuyo Ngcelwane’s family room based on her memories and records, and her autobiography.39 It consists of a neatly kept bed, a small kitchen table, a freestanding closet, and a crockery cupboard all looking on a historical photograph of the docks and the sea inserted into a window frame. A soundtrack plays radio programming from the time when Ngcelwane lived there, as well as segments of an interview with her. The spectator is thus drawn into a carefully curated space of domesticity in a particular social and historical context. Here the private interior realm supplements the world of the street, and from within it one hears the activity “outside,” as it were, on the museum floor.

Cape Town’s District Six Museum

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13.4 Mounted poem in the District Six Museum.

On the upper-floor balcony of the main church hall, other characteristic spaces of social life in District Six are represented in a series of thematized, semi-enclosed nooks – Hanover Street, Bioscopes and the Carnival, the Old Washhouse, Working life, Bloemhof Flats, Barbers and Hairdressers, and Langarm bands.40 Digging Deeper also situates social life in District Six in relation to broader historical and political currents. Panels located along the outside walls of the ground floor of the main hall of the Church develop a South African historical context within which to situate the early formation of District Six, its place in relation to wider resistance to segregation and apartheid, and its demolition and the struggle for restitution. With the explicit aim of transcending the reification of District Six as a bounded entity, Digging Deeper was a response to the general concern among those working at the museum that its typically nostalgic discourse appeared tired and seemed to resonate with the consumptive desire of less-than-critical “tourists” for redemptive motifs. At the core of its methodological approach was a reflection on the nature of the documentary sources taken up in the production of historical narrative. It also incorporated specific oral histories into the overarching narrative of traumatic dispossession and return, both as inscription and as soundscape.41 However, despite the prevailing intellectual critique of romanticized notions of “community” during this period, what might be called spiritual poetics – a poetics that conjures a collective

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ethos and aesthetic sensibility as a creative and animating force – arguably continued to ground the spectrum of practices constituting the museum’s particular survivance. Even when not the explicit object of museum practice, representation can be seen to carry spirit, for more than mere semiosis, it “shares in or acquires the properties of the represented.”42 Landscape becomes the onto-semiological mooring of a collective aura,43 a testament of and imperative for memory. The museum responds to this imperative by standing as a kind of polyphonic abundance, a “controlled cacophony.” This is sometimes thematized, as when the museum is described as “a place of carnivalesque intoxication, of sights, sounds and smells,”44 and further conveyed in a concert of celebratory images, of minstrel troupes or “Malay Choirs” passing by during the new year’s festivities, young people frequenting the “bioscope” for Saturday afternoon films, family members at weddings, activists and organic intellectuals at political meetings, and the like. In the evolving elaboration of site within the museum, District Sixers appear as the neighbours, teachers, friends, artists, parents, children, worshippers, and storytellers longed for by the land itself, which is first of all the physical wreckage of their former lives.

Reclaiming District Six, Reclaiming Cape Town The mobilization of representational excess has an enabling social and political context – land restitution. District Six’s position as a flagship case for the restitution program has provided tremendous impetus for the museum’s work and helped it attain an exemplary profile among so-called sites of conscience. In its second decade, the museum increasingly sought to leverage its privileged standing to influence the redevelopment of District Six and to effect a broader change in the city. Around 2001, the museum adopted a more forward-looking vision of justice as the basis for memory work. It was guided by the conviction that the planned physical restoration of land to restitution claimants should occur in tandem with memorializing the former neighbourhood. Many in the museum had also seen the redevelopment and memorialization of District Six as a basis for urban transformation based on a nonracial social ethos. District Six was redefined through processes that simultaneously involved close engagement with particular sections of its landscape and an articulation of District Six with other sites in the city, thus moving beyond a District Six– focus. This aesthetic and political evolution continues the methodological and interpretive framework of Digging Deeper, extending it in new directions. The museum’s shifting focus is exemplified by intensified activities centred on Horstley Street, which was located on the upper end of the District Six and is one of the only original streets still visible today. It experienced some of the first forced removals from District Six, when in 1901 city health authorities blamed African dock-

Cape Town’s District Six Museum

workers living on the street for spreading the bubonic plague, and summarily relocated them to a makeshift “location” on the outskirts of the city. Horstley Street is the main focus of the Memory Hall, another key component of the Digging Deeper exhibition, located at the back of the church building. Memory Hall addresses the redevelopment of District Six, and it is where one can find the label cited at the outset of this essay, proclaiming the museum’s intention “to welcome returnees home” “in the absence of the physical fabric of District Six.” The exhibit contains a striking glass-covered underground installation representing a scaled-down version of the archaeological remains of a house, set before a wall-sized photograph of the current site. The label overlaying that photograph explains that it has been a priority for the museum since 1993 to establish a memorial park at Horstley Street “as the central space of a redevelopment process that pays respectful attention to memory.” Horstley Street is also the focus of a campaign to have District Six declared a National Heritage Site, which has brought the museum into tense dealings with the state over the future of the land.45 Launched by the museum and the South African Heritage Resources Agency in 2004, the initiative aims to establish Horstley Street

13.5 District Six Museum’s Memory Hall.

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as a Heritage Precinct and create a memorial park there. District Six has national significance as pre-eminent site of forced removals in South Africa, it was reasoned, and its most valuable heritage is intangible given the destruction of the area.46 The memorial park was to be the focal point for engagement with the whole District Six site, and a central reference for conceiving its redevelopment. The application was provisionally approved in 2006, but has remained stalled ever since, and the measure of protection against development on the land that it afforded has lapsed. Nonetheless, it has been (and continues to be) the focus of a concerted campaign by the museum. Finally, we turn to a series of new initiatives in the decade after launching Digging Deeper that aimed at broadening the scope of museum activity and influence, and using District Six heritage to stake a symbolic claim to the future of the city. The most extensive exhibition in this period was Fields of Play, which – as its introduction panel states – treats the “intersection of memory, football, and forced removals in Cape Town,” and thus “extends its gaze beyond the area of District Six to incorporate a spectrum of communities that were forged after forced removal.” It was installed in the new Homecoming Centre, set up in 2003 in a recently acquired building down the street from the museum’s main building. The new centre additionally housed offices of the District Six Beneficiary Trust representing restitution claimants, and meeting rooms where ex-residents could obtain assistance related to their claims. In May of 2005, an international conference, “Hands On District Six: Landscapes of Postcolonial Memorialization,” “intended to reflect on ten years of [the museum’s] growth as an institution, and to prepare to play a role in the return of the community to the barren landscape of District Six.”47 It also sought to leverage memory-informed redevelopment toward wider social transformation, in coming to terms with the past, promoting non-racialism, and bringing about urban integration. The most dominant voices from the museum argued for greater reflexivity and sophistication in memory work; however, their academic discourse tended to alienate many exresidents.48 Common cause could be found in narratives of resistance – first to apartheid oppressions, and lately to commodification and new forms of dispossession. Nonetheless, notions of a once idyllic life had seemed to become inextricable from expressions of collective trauma and redemption. In its 2008 publication, City, Site, Museum, the museum is portrayed as actively engaging with the changing landscape of District Six to influence the redevelopment of the area. While the museum had always conceived of itself as a privileged vantage point on Cape Town, “a place representing the centre, almost the eye of the city,”49 it had come to assume the status of a paradigmatic memorial space of forced removals in South Africa, seeking to shape public debate on memory, heritage, and citizenship. However, as formal democracy entered its third decade, transition-era funding diminished thus making it harder to sustain the museum’s increasingly ambitious public agenda.50 The museum’s deepening involvement with developmental

Cape Town’s District Six Museum

processes also arguably contributed to its entanglement with state and other institutions, and the messy stakeholder politics centring on this land.

Conclusion: Development and the Absented In relation to the allegory of Noor’s pigeons, to remember is to be-long – as a community to the land. As a concert of memory and art works (and workings), the museum fashions itself as the indwelling of community – the survivance of a displaced people. After Streets, the museum took a more critical direction, problematizing nostalgic narratives and poetics, and seeking to develop more complex and reflexive narratives and a social history “from below,” as well as turn the area into a strategic site for wider transformation. Nonetheless, the language of spirit and return has arguably remained at the heart of the museum’s overall representational strategy, if only because it resonates with most ex-residents. Fighting for the cultural estate of District Six has become more and more complicated over time for reasons that this essay could only briefly allude to, including the wider politics centring on this land, new forms of state involvement in restitution and heritage, and decreased funding and capacity. The number of former residents alive is diminishing, and urgently raising the question of how to transmit District Six’s heritage to new generations. This as the museum struggles to maintain some dominion over the District Six name as it circulates in wider chains of signification, and as visitors’ interpretations of its exhibits commonly rely on platitudes.51 This essay emphasized the changing landscape of District Six. The museum has continued to campaign for National Heritage status, but this quest potentially conflicts with the evolving priorities of official restitution-related development because it aims to get hold of land earmarked for housing construction to protect it for memorial purposes.52 Restitution-related development has been slow, with only 24 homes completed by 2005, 139 by 2014, and a further 108 apartments are being transferred to claimants as this chapter goes to print.53 There have also been several other developments, much to the chagrin of claimants. In 2014, without consulting the museum, the cput built a two-storey student residence that encloses the cairn of stones with walls, thus depriving the pilgrimage site of free access and of its visual connection to the physical surroundings. One can see how the remaining vacant land may be “filled in” at an accelerated pace. This has posed a fundamental challenge to the museum’s “poetics of place.” Initially, the ruined landscape of District Six was a somewhat dormant backdrop to performances of communality. The museum’s second decade was marked by a more active engagement with the site, toward the ends of influencing its redevelopment, and as a basis for asserting a politics of citizenship in the city. In the current, posttransitional phase, the museum has needed to revisit what it is to work in a space of ruination. It has become clear that despite its fame and appearance of solidity, the

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District Six museum is a fragile “keeping place,” vulnerable to powerful forces that seek to capture the land for development, and dependent for its own survival on the “community” that it helps to constitute. Beyond an invocation of “never again,” and the consummation of spirit over broken body, the challenge has become how to keep the museum itself alive and central to the task of making District Six a place of survivance where collective will materializes.

Notes I wish to thank Jonathan Bordo and Anhiti Patnaik for valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper. 1 Crain Soudien, “District Six: From Protest to Protest,” in The Struggle for District Six: Past and Present, ed. Shamil Jeppie and Crain Soudien (Cape Town: Buchu Books, 1990), 143–84. 2 d6m, Hands On District Six, museum pamphlet (Cape Town: District Six Museum Foundation, n.d.). 3 The Restitution of Land Rights Act of 1994 provides for the restoration of rights in land of those dispossessed after the 1913 Land Act as a result of racial laws and their descendants. 4 Jonathan Bordo, “The Keeping Place (Arising from an Incident on the Land),” in Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade, ed. Robert Nelson and Margaret Olin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 157–82. 5 Stan Abrahams, “A Place of Sanctuary,” in Recalling Community in Cape Town (Cape Town: District Six Museum Foundation, 2001), 3. 6 Peggy Delport, “Museum or Place for Working with Memory?,” in Recalling Community in Cape Town, 11. 7 Gerald Vizenor, “Aesthetics of Survivance: Literary Theory and Practice,” in Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence, ed. Gerald Vizenor (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 1. 8 Gerald Vizenor and A. Robert Lee, Postindian Conversations (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 85. 9 Gerald Vizenor, Fugitive Poses: Native American Scenes of Absence and Presence (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 63. 10 Bonita Bennett and Chrischené Julius, “Where Is District Six? Between Landscape, Site and Museum,” in City, Site, Museum: Reviewing Memory Practices at the District Six Museum, ed. Bonita Bennett, Chrischené Julius, and Crain Soudien (Cape Town: District Six Museum Foundation, 2008), 59. 11 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (New York: Orion Press, 1964), xxxii. 12 Peggy Delport, “Signposts for Retrieval: A Visual Framework for Enabling Memory of Place and Time,” in Recalling Community in Cape Town, 34. 13 Sandra Prosalendis et. al., “Punctuations: Periodic Impressions of a Museum,” in Recalling Community in Cape Town, 81. 14 Chrischené Julius, “‘Digging [D]eeper than the Eye Approves’: Oral Histories and Their Use in

Cape Town’s District Six Museum the Digging Deeper Exhibition of the District Six Museum,” Kronos 34, no. 1 (2008), www.scielo. org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0259-01902008000100005. 15 Walter Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Peter Demet (New York: Harcourt, 1978), 335. 16 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Keven McLaughlin, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge, ma: Belknap Press, 1999), 522. 17 See Alexander Regier, “The Magic of the Corner: Walter Benjamin and Street Names,” Germanic Review 85 (2010): 189–204. 18 Maurice Halbwacks, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 19 On the museum’s photographic exhibits, see Tina Smith and Ciraj Rassool, “History in Photographs at the District Six Museum,” in Recalling Community in Cape Town, 131–45; Katie Markham, “Two-Dimensional Engagements: Photography, Empathy and Interpretation at District Six Museum,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 25, no. 1 (September 2017): 1–22. 20 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 21 See Peggy Delport, “‘No Matter Where We Are, We Are Here.’ Beginnings: The Fresco Wall of the District Six museum,” in City, Site, Museum, 131–51. 22 Emma Bedford and Tracy Murinik, “Re-membering that Place: Public Projects in District Six,” in The District Six Public Sculpture Project, ed. Crain Soudien and Renata Meyer (Cape Town: District Six Museum Foundation, n.d.), 18. 23 Ibid., 22. 24 See Ben M. Kies, The Contribution of the Non-European Peoples to World Civilization. (A. J. Abrahamse Memorial Lecture (Cape Town: The Teachers’ League of South Africa, 1953); Ben M. Kies, “What Has Happened in the Non-European Unity Movement?” (International Printers, 1959). 25 See Crain Soudien, “Memory and Critical Education: Approaches in the District Six Museum,” in City, Site, Museum, 114. Several commentators have criticized the museum for propagating an image of District Six as a “coloured space”; Markham, “Two-Dimensional Engagements”. 26 Prosalendis et. al., “Punctuations,” 77. 27 Ibid., 82. 28 Layne, “‘Sounds and Voices,’” 80. 29 Ibid., 84. 30 Prosalendis et. al., “Punctuations,” 85. 31 Bennett and Julius, “Where Is District Six?,” 59. 32 Valmont Layne, “‘Sounds and Voices, Colours and Landscapes’: Aesthetics for a Community Site Museum,” in City, Site, Museum, 83. 33 Ibid., 83–4. 34 d6m, “A Guide to the District Six museum,” n.p. 35 Noor Ebrahim, Noor’s Story: My Life in District Six (Cape Town: District Six Museum, 1999), 42–3.

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36 Noor Ebrahim, “Guided Moments in the District Six Museum,” in Recalling Community in Cape Town, 57. 37 Peggy Delport, “Digging Deeper in District Six: Features and Interfaces in a Curatorial Landscape,” in Recalling Community in Cape Town, 154. 38 Valmont Layne and Ciraj Rassool, “Memory Rooms: Oral History in the District Six Museum,” in Recalling Community in Cape Town, 149. 39 Nomvuyo Ngcelwane, Sala Kahle, District Six: An African Woman’s Perspective (Cape Town: Kwela Books, 1998). 40 d6m, “A Guide to the District Six Museum and the Digging Deeper Exhibition” (Cape Town: District Six Museum, n.d.). 41 See Julius, “‘Digging [D]eeper.’” 42 Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993), 47–8. 43 See the introduction to this volume. 44 Layne, “‘Sounds and Voices,’” 92. 45 T. Sunduza, “District Six Museum on Its Operations and Business Plans; Department of Arts and Culture on 2nd Quarter Expenditure Report; Budgetary Review and Recommendations Report,” Parliamentary Monitoring Group (pmg), 21 October 2013, https://pmg.org.za/ committee-meeting/16603/. 46 Lucien Le Grange, District Six: Heritage Impact Assessment (Mowbray: Lucien le Grange Architects and Urban Planners, 2003), 28, https://sahris.sahra.org.za/sites/default/files/heritage reports/District%20Six%20Heritage%20Impact%20Assessment.pdf. 47 d6m, cited in Christiaan Beyers, “The Cultural Politics of ‘Community’ and Citizenship in the District Six Museum, Cape Town,” in “Citizenship, Politics and Locality: Anthropological Perspectives,” ed. Catherine Neveu, special issue, Anthropologica 50, no. 2 (2008): 368. 48 See ibidi, 359–73; Michelle Rickett, “Locating the Past in a Shifting Present: Spaces of Memory, Identity and Change around District Six, Cape Town” (PhD diss., University of Manchester, 2008). 49 Delport, cited in Bennett and Julius, “Where Is District Six?,” 52. 50 Sunduza, “District Six Museum on Its Operations.” 51 Markham, “Two-Dimensional Engagements.” 52 Bonita Bennett and Chrischené Julius, interview with author, 2014. 53 Devdiscourse News Desk, “Final return of District Six Phase 3 beneficiaries to ancestry land,” 6 May 2022, www.devdiscourse.com/article/headlines/2028028-final-return-of-district-sixphase-3-beneficiaries-to-ancestry-land. Five thousand homes are projected in total (City of Cape Town, 2020, “New D6 Slides summary of Development Framework,” https://resource. capetown.gov.za/documentcentre/Documents/Graphics%20and%20educational%20material /D6_SDF_Meeting_Presentation_26Nov2020.pdf).

The Olive Tree, the Land, and the Palestinian Struggle against Settler Colonialism Rehab Nazzal

This essay presents a visual account of the Israeli settler-colonial encroachment into Palestinian land. Based on my experience, and adopting a settler-colonial theoretical framework focused on studies of genocide and the tradition of documentary photography, I provide participant-based analysis and visual documentation of Israel’s destruction of Palestinian land and the uprooting of its ancient olive trees in the Palestinian district of Bethlehem. The photographs in this essay are linked to a project titled Walking under Occupation (2005–present), which I began when I visited Palestine in 2005, after being denied my right of return by the Israeli occupying power for over twenty years.1 I returned to my home and family as a visitor with an Israeli permit. When I entered the country through the Israeli-controlled border crossing between Jordan and the West Bank, I was shocked by the destruction I witnessed in my country in comparison with how it had been before I left in 1980. The suffocation of Palestinian lives, the destruction of the landscape, and the proliferation of illegal settlement colonies, military bases, and surveillance structures have transformed the country into colonized zones that combine European settler colonialism with contemporary methods and technologies of control and oppression. I spent a month walking across Palestinian cities, villages, and refugee camps, and through the battered landscape. The simple act of walking in a colonized land is unlike walking in any other place. It reveals the trauma that the land and its people endure. Just some of the manifestations that Walking revealed in 2015–17 included segregated roads, firing zones, concrete walls, barbed wire, segregation signs, permanent and temporary checkpoints, watchtowers, and construction cranes and bulldozers razing the hills for quarry stones or constructing illegal Jewish-only colonies. These scars on the land that mark the country’s inhabitants, topography, and history suffocate everyday life. Walking trails through olive groves in the Palestinian hills of Bethlehem or Jerusalem are disappearing, replaced by colonies, “buffer zones,” “firing zones,” “seam zones,” or “settlers’ leisure zones.” Millennia-old Palestinian olive trees are “beheaded,” burned, uprooted, stolen, sold, or transplanted into Jewish colonies by Israel’s forces and armed settlers.

Rehab Nazzal

Growing Up in the Land of Olives I was born and grew up in the Jenin area of northern Palestine, in the midst of olive groves and orange orchards. My family comes from the town of Qabatia near the city of Jenin, where houses are interspersed among old olive trees. Between Jenin and Qabatia we used to have a bustan (farm). There, on the bustan where we used to spend every summer, my understanding of and relationship to the land, its soil, plants, and herbs, developed. After Israel’s 1967 invasion of the West Bank and Gaza, the borders of Palestine were sealed entirely, and its surviving inhabitants were disconnected from the outside world. It was the beginning of a long imprisonment in our own space. Israel began a systematic destruction of the economy, starting with the agricultural sector, by gradually controlling the water sources and dominating the local market, flooding it with cheap products. The effect on farmers and their lands was devastating. Many abandoned their farms and became workers in Israel. My family had no choice but to cut down our orange orchards. The occupying power of Israel, however, found olive production not so easy to control due to olive trees’ reliance on rainwater, the low cost of tending the trees, and the ability to store the oil for long periods, unlike

The Olive Tree, the Land, and the Palestinian Struggle

Plate 36 Opposite A view of destruction of oliveplanted hills in Bethlehem region, November 2015. Plate 37 Left Millennia-old olive trees in my family’s orchard in Jenin area, 2019.

other agricultural products. Over the years, my father planted hundreds of olive trees with his own hands and cared for hundreds of others passed on to us by our ancestors. Some of these trees are estimated to be more than a thousand years old. These ancient trees look like living monuments in their magnitude. They are silent witnesses to the tragic events in Palestine. For Palestinians, olive trees signify connection to and rootedness in the land. They signify life’s continuity beyond human mortality. Olive trees’ ability to survive the harshest weather conditions, including drought and poor soil, and their ability to grow in the mountains and wadis (valleys), indicate their resilience. Palestinians regard olive trees as their children, care for them with love until they mature and become independent, but never abandon them. When olive trees reach eighty or ninety years old, the length of an average human life, their growth slows greatly, but their fruit is not affected by the passing of time. Olive tree cultivation originated in the Mediterranean region alongside the first human settlements between 11,000 and 7000 bce.2 It is believed that the oldest olive tree in the world is located in al-Walaji village in Bethlehem district. In May 2017, I visited the old tree, named al-Badawi (the Nomad), which, according to Palestinian and Japanese experts, is over four thousand years old. Al-Badawi looks like a whole family of trees combined into one; the layers of its trunk reflect centuries of continual growth. The experience of looking, walking around, and sitting under al-Badawi is unique and incomparable to any other experience. Al-Badawi is a living, precious monument.

Rehab Nazzal

Plate 38 Al-Badawi olive tree, al-Walaji village, Bethlehem district, April 2019.

Manifestation of Israel’s Settler-Colonial Genocide The tree is the source of the problem. It’s not just an incidental thing like [it is] in the Bible. Here, the tree is not only a symbol of the Arab’s occupation of the land, but it is also the central means through which they carry out this occupation. … It’s not like the tree is the enemy’s property, in which case the Bible tells you not to uproot it because it has nothing to do with the fight. Here it has everything to do with it. The tree is the enemy soldier. Like children, their trees look so naïve, as if they can’t harm anyone. But like [their] children, several years later they turn into a ticking bomb.3

The olive tree as a source of livelihood and signifier of the rootedness and perseverance of the Palestinians in their homeland was targeted by the colonial Zionist-European project in Palestine from the very beginning. Uprooting trees served (and continues to serve) the mandate of the Jewish state and Jewish National Fund and their representation of Palestine as uninhabited desert. In 1948, the newly established state of Israel took steps to “legalize” the land seizures and destruction after uprooting eight hundred thousand Palestinians from their homes and lands. Immediately fol-

The Olive Tree, the Land, and the Palestinian Struggle

lowing the Nakba, Israel razed over 530 Palestinian villages, towns, and urban areas, uprooted millions of olive trees, and planted pine forests over their ruins. Discriminatory laws issued by the new state denied expelled Palestinians their right to return while welcoming Jews regardless of their nationality.4 The infamous Fallow Lands Regulations (1948) enabled the state to forcibly seize the lands of Palestinians expelled during the Nakba by declaring their lands “closed zones” and barring Palestinian landowners from reaching these lands, which were then deemed fallow. The state then “legally” seized the land and reallocated it to its agencies. Hundreds of thousands of donums (a donum equals a thousand square metres) of Palestinian land were transferred to Jewish settlers. The Absentee Property Law of 1948, based on the framework of the Fallow Lands Law, was used to secure the permanent reallocation of Palestinian lands to unrestricted Jewish-Israeli ownership.5 Explicitly colonial, this law authorized Israel to confiscate the land of “the present absentees,” those Palestinians who were not present in their normal place of residence between 29 November 1947 and 1 September 1948. The designation “present absentees” referred to internally displaced persons. Some of these “present absentees” were living in tents within view of their villages, but were denied the right to return, along with hundreds of thousands of others who fled to Gaza, the West Bank, and the surrounding Arab countries (twothirds of the Gaza population are Nakba refugees).6 Land seizing and uprooting of olive trees has intensified since the 1967 second Nakba. The Applied Research Institute of Jerusalem estimates that 2.5 million trees have been uprooted since 1967, one-third of which were olive trees and the remainder consisting of other types of fruit trees, including around 34,000 palm trees.7 This slaughter of olive trees intensified between 2007 and 2011 when attacks by armed settlers increased 315 per cent.8 Between 2010 and 2015, settlers vandalized over 50,000 olive trees and saplings.9 According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (unocha) in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, in January 2015 settlers “uprooted or vandalized around 5,600 trees across the West Bank.”10 This number constituted “60 per cent of all trees uprooted or vandalized in the whole of 2014.”11 Settlers from illegal settlements and outposts in the West Bank torch trees, break or cut down the branches of old trees, uproot newly planted trees, and “poison the trees by drilling their trunks.”12 The Israeli legal system is complicit in this violence. Out of “260 complaints regarding vandalism of Palestinian-owned trees filed in the past ten years, only six indictments have been served, with a zero-conviction rate.”13 In Gaza, the security “buffer zone” that extends six hundred metres beyond the 1967 Green Line encompasses up to 30 per cent of agricultural land. unocha figures indicate that 7,300 donums of land with olive trees located along the Israeli wall at the borders with Gaza have been destroyed during Israeli military operations.14

Rehab Nazzal

Seizing the Cremisan Valley and Lynching Ancient Olive Trees in Bethlehem Region in 2015 The Bethlehem governorate is located in the central West Bank, about ten kilometres south of Jerusalem. It consists of three historic cities (Bethlehem, Beit Jala, and Beit Sahour), another nine municipalities, three Nakba refugee camps (Dheisheh, Aida, and al-Azzeh), and thirty-eight rural and urban towns and villages. The total population of the Bethlehem governorate in 2016 according to the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics was 221,000. It covers an area of 660 km2, of which Israel controls 87 per cent. Bethlehem region faced Israeli colonization immediately after the 1967 occupation when the notorious settlement of Gosh Azion was established only four months after the invasion. On 17 August 2015, I was a witness to Israel’s practice of land theft and destruction. In the morning of 23 August 2015, the residents of the predominantly Christian town of Beit Jala in the district of Bethlehem, home to fifteen thousand people, woke up to the sound of bulldozers uprooting ancient olive trees in their agricultural and recreational land, the Cremisan Valley. Israeli soldiers with armed vehicles and bulldozers began marking and numbering the trees, cutting branches (ironically, the olive branch is a symbol of peace), and bulldozing trunks. The purpose was to create a buffer zone and construct a section of the Apartheid Wall. The Valley has been a target of annexation for many years.

The Olive Tree, the Land, and the Palestinian Struggle Plate 39 Opposite Israeli soldiers guarding bulldozers that they deploy to uproot Beit Jala’s ancient olive trees, August 2015. Plate 40 Left Israeli bulldozers uproot olive trees after cutting their branches, August 2015.

Blueprints for Israel’s Apartheid Wall show the Cremisan Valley on the Israeli side. The targeted land (which constitutes three thousand donums), is privately owned by fifty-eight Palestinian families from Beit Jala as well as by the Salesian Sisters’ Convent and School and the Salesian Monastery and Cellars. These landowners have challenged Israel’s plan to confiscate their land in the high court of the occupation state. The court proceedings reveal the actual aim of the confiscation: to connect the Gilo colony, built on over 2,700 donums of Bethlehem land, with the Har Gilo colony, also built illegally in 1968 on confiscated land. A few months earlier, in April 2015, the Israeli high court ordered the state to reroute the Wall to ensure the “connectivity” of Bethlehem’s community with the convent and monastery.15 Despite the ruling, state bulldozers invaded and began destroying the site and uprooting tens of ancient olive trees. While Israeli bulldozers, soldiers armed with machine guns, tear gas grenades, and sound bombs, and military vehicles equipped with tear gas launchers, stood on one side, enraged protesters, including the landowners, clergymen, and community leaders stood on the other. First, the settlers cut off branches, then, after tying the trunks to a bulldozer, they uprooted the trees. Witnessing the lynching of ancient olive trees was painful and shocking. Extermination of the colonized people is extending here in front of my eyes into the slaughter of their culture and the trees that sustain human life itself. My use of the terms lynching and slaughter to describe the uprooting of Palestinian olive trees is deliberate in order to suggest that genocidal acts also include other living things. My experience urges us to rethink our perception of the rights of nature, including of fruit trees, and the need to create agency for these living monuments.

Plate 41 Protesters tearing down a gate installed by the occupying forces to designate their land as a “closed military zone,” September 2015.

I was torn apart both by the desperation of the landowners, who were prevented from protecting their trees by armed soldiers, and the helplessness of the trees themselves. The Nakbas had been brought into the present. As I watched the destruction of the land and massacre of the olive trees, I spoke with some of the landowners. The uprooting of these trees “began without warning or notification,” said landowner Issa Alshatleh. Our neighbours notified us early this morning that Israeli bulldozers are uprooting our olive trees. We were outraged and rushed to the land but were denied access to it. Israeli soldiers told us that our land has been declared a “closed zone.” This land is a source of livelihood for my family and my brothers’ families; they are depriving our six families of the olive trees our ancestors have planted. It is criminal.16 After the destruction began in the Cremisan Valley on 17 August, the landowners in Beit Jala appealed to the occupation high court for a second time. In January 2016, the court rejected the landowners’ appeal and ruled for the continued building of the Apartheid Wall on their land. The court’s ruling states, “a buffer zone is needed to protect Israel’s citizens.”17 In this case, the “buffer zone” consists of a thirty- to hundred-metre-wide trench alongside an eight-metre-high concrete wall. Landowners were promised two openings in the Wall: a gate for people from the school and monastery to access their land, and a second one for farmers to access their olive and fruit orchards.

Plate 42 The site of Bir Oneh in Beit Jala before and after its destruction and confiscation as well as the building of a section of the Israeli Apartheid Wall, 2015 and 2017.

Rehab Nazzal

The decision of the Israeli high court, an institution that is part of the settler-colonial system, which refers to settlers living in colonies built on confiscated West Bank land as “Israel’s citizens,” violates international law on many levels, including the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949), which states: “An occupier may not forcibly deport protected persons, or deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into occupied territory” (Art. 49). It also violates the International Court of Justice ruling of July 2004 that affirmed that the Wall “is contrary to international law,” and, “Israel accordingly has the obligation to cease forthwith the works of construction of the Wall being built by it in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including in and around East Jerusalem.”18 By confiscating three thousand donums of the Cremisan Valley, mostly planted with olive and fruit trees, Israel not only deprives the residents of Bethlehem of their farmland, livelihood, and last remaining recreational site, but also entirely isolates Bethlehem from its sister city, Jerusalem. The section of the Wall that passes through the valley, completed in 2017, makes landowners foreigners to their own land farms. They need “permits” from the occupying power to access their land through military gates guarded by soldiers who control when they open and close. They also need a permit to visit relatives on the other side of the Wall. Palestinians throughout the West Bank whose land between the Wall and the 1967 Green Line has been annexed can only approach those lands through gates. Currently, “there are 85 agricultural gates along the length of the [Wall]. Of these, only nine open daily and the majority (63) only open for a few weeks during the annual olive harvest.”19 Not unlike the siege of Gaza, some West Bank communities, like the city of Qalqilya, are entirely walled and gated, and their residents depend on the occupying authority’s permits to entre or exit their city or reach their farms.20 Permits are not easy to obtain. According to UN sources, 42 per cent of applications for permits to access olive groves behind the Wall were denied in 2011 and 39 per cent in 2010. If a family member is politically active or has been detained or imprisoned during a protest, for example, everyone in that family might be denied permits. My conclusion is a question: if the act of uprooting hundreds of thousands of olive and fruit trees, seizing land, shattering communities, and inflicting blockades on millions in open-air prisons do not constitute genocide, then what is genocide?

Notes This is a modified copy of the essay first published as “The Olive Tree and the Palestinian Struggle against Settler-Colonialism” in Canada and Beyond 8, no. 1 (2019), http://dx.doi.org/ 10.33776/candb.v8i1.3679. 1 After I left Palestine to pursue my studies at Damascus University in 1980, I was denied return

The Olive Tree, the Land, and the Palestinian Struggle by Israel after finishing my degree. According to the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs (passia), between 1967 and 1994, Israel stripped over 100,000 residents of Gaza and some 140,000 residents of the West Bank of their residency rights, many of them students or young professionals working abroad who were barred from ever returning. “Israeli Occupation,” passia, accessed August 2021, http://passia.org/media/filer_public/97/62/9762 ddc5-ad9a-4fdc-a65d-29884aa6d96c/factsheet_israeli_occupation.pdf. 2 Ioannis Nikolaos Therios, Olives (UK: cabi, 2009), 1–7. 3 A 2006 interview with the Israeli settler chief inspector David Kishik by Irus Braverman; see Irus Braverman, “Uprooting Identities: The Regulation of Olive Trees in the Occupied West Bank,” p o lar : Political and Legal Anthropology Review 32, no. 2 (2009): 237. 4 Nur Masalha, “The Palestinian Nakba: Zionism, ‘Transfer’ and the 1948 Exodus,” Global Dialogue 4, no. 3 (2002): 89. 5 Masalha, “Palestinian Nakba,” 90. 6 Ibid., 90–1. 7 “The Economic Costs of the Israeli Occupation for the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” The Palestinian Ministry of National Economy in Cooperation with the Applied Research Institute–Jerusalem, accessed August 2015, www.mne.gov.ps/pdf/Economiccostsofoccupationfor Palestine.pdf. 8 The Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy, miftah, “Olive Trees, More than Just a Tree in Palestine,” 13 July 2017, www.miftah.org/Display.cfm? DocId=25491&CategoryId=4. 9 Ibid. 10 United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (ocha), “West Bank: Largest Number of trees Recorded Vandalized by Israeli settlers in a Single Incident since 2005,” 31 January 2015, www.ochaopt.org/content/west-bank-largest-number-trees-recordedvandalized-israeli-settlers-single-incident-2005. 11 Ibid. 12 Yesh Din, “Data Sheet,” October 2015, http://files.yesh-din.org/userfiles/Datasheet_English_ Oct%202015.pdf. 13 Ibid. 14 State of Palestine, “Localities in Bethlehem Governorate by Type of Locality and Population Estimates, 2007–2016,” Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, accessed September 2021, www.pcbs.gov.ps/Portals/_Rainbow/Documents/betlhm.htm. 15 According to the passia, since June 1967 the Israeli occupation authorities have expropriated some 79 per cent of West Bank and Gaza Strip territory. See “Settlements and the Wall: Preempting the Two-State-Solution,” passia, accessed September 2021, www.passia.org/media/ filer_public/7c/00/7c005e51-840d-4eaf-a910-23e5d8c01793/settlements-wall.pdf. 16 Issa Alshatleh, interview with the author, 20 August 2015. 17 B’Tselem, “Barrier to Separate Beit Jala Residents from their Lands, Laying Groundwork for

Plate 43 A gate built through the Apartheid Wall in Beit Jala for Palestinian farmers to access their farms with individual permits by the occupying power, March 2017.

The Olive Tree, the Land, and the Palestinian Struggle Annexing Settlement,” The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, 12 November 2015, updated 10 February 2016, www.btselem.org/separation_barrier/ 20151112_beit_jala_separation_barrier. 18 ocha, “Humanitarian Bulletin Monthly Report,” United Nations: The Question of Palestine, September 2015, www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-195488/. 19 Ibid. 20 ocha, “The Humanitarian Impact on Palestinians of Israeli Settlements and Other Infrastructure in the West Bank,” United Nations: The Question of Palestine, July 2007, www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-196054/.

Crossing Mark Ruwedel

The Crossing series, begun in 2002, was displayed at approximately the midpoint in the chronology of the exhibition, Mark Ruwedel: Scotia Bank Photography Award, at the Ryerson Image Centre (2015). In retrospect, this group of photographs seems to point both forward and back in relation to my work as a whole. It also represents a more overt position on the notion of a politicized landscape, and it is a response to both the title of the conference and to the current political situation in the United States. In 2002, I was working on my Ice Age project, photographing pre-Columbian sites and landscapes in the deserts of the American Southwest. While hiking in search of a very particular desert geoglyph, the Stone Horse, I noticed a lot of garbage in the washes I had to cross. This in itself was not surprising: the deserts are full of trash, and I have often photographed what people discard, what has been left behind. This detritus was different, however. There were lots of water bottles, as well as inner tubes, clothing, and other personal effects. It became clear to me that this was evidence of undocumented traffic across the US-Mexico border, a stone’s throw from where I was walking. The border there is represented by the All-American Canal, which explains the preponderance of inner tubes and perhaps the discarded clothing. The seemingly insignificant details contained in the photographs (the exception being Crossing #14, which shows a Guatemalan passport, a significant detail indeed) speak of unseen political and social forces and their effects on the lives of anonymous individuals. “On a specific level one might wonder about social conditions that would motivate the individual who once carried the passport to undertake such an arduous journey, the extent to which the image of his/her chosen destination corresponds to what he/she will find on arrival and what sort of advantage might lie in the lack of a documented identity. On a broader level, one might consider the connective networks for the movement of people, capital and commodities that are central to the experience of modernity, the inscription of their changing forms on the American West, the interests they serve, the violence to which they are attached and the implications they hold for the future.”1

Note 1 Grant Arnold, “The Future’s Remains: The Photographs of Mark Ruwedel,” in Mark Ruwedel: Scotiabank Photography Award (Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, 2015).

Plate 44 Left Crossing #2, 2001, archival inkjet print. Plate 45 Below Crossing #6, 2003, archival inkjet print

Plate 46 Crossing #7, 2004, archival inkjet print.

Plate 47 Left Crossing #8, 2004, archival inkjet print. Plate 48 Below Crossing #14, 2005, archival inkjet print.

Plate 49 Opposite Crossing #15, 2006, archival inkjet print. Plate 50 Above Crossing #18, 2006, archival inkjet print.

Plate 51 Crossing #25, 2009, archival inkjet print.

Pole Positions under Vancouver’s Burrard Bridge: Exposure and Intersection on Indigenous Land in Bell Tower of False Creek Randolph Jordan

I’m standing under Vancouver’s Burrard Bridge on the hundredth anniversary of the 1913 reserve payouts, the government’s first major push to clear the Kitsilano Indian Reserve that once stood here. Established as Indian Reserve No. 6 in 1877, the land was gradually carved up and sold off for use by the railway, the bridge, industrial works, private marinas, and a public park.1 Today the air is thick with January fog on the shore of False Creek, blotting out the high-rise skyline for which Vancouver has come to be known (the City of Glass).2 The view is eerily similar to what you might see in archival photos such as the one below taken by James Crookall in 1936. On days like this it’s easy to imagine slipping into a past filled with the smoke of industry and the clearance of Indigenous dwellings, all the more poignant now as the area beneath the bridge was recently reinstated as reserve land following the decommissioning of the railway’s right of passage through the area in 1982. To complicate matters, the reserve was awarded to the Squamish Nation at the expense of competing claims by the Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.3 I think about Nicholas Blomley’s call to “unsettle” the city through alternative modes of imagining its spaces and their construction as places by different communities with overlapping uses and histories.4 The fog’s ability to wipe out markers of contemporary place-making, generally geared toward effacing Indigenous history, offers an opportunity to rethink the land according to new realities. My Bell Tower of False Creek project5 is a set of related media works that use photographs, sound recordings, and films to explore the potential for creative unsettling Plate 52 City Map and White Print Company, 1935, Kitsilano Indian Reserve, ca. 1935, lithograph.

Plate 53 Opposite James Crookall, A road beside the Burrard Bridge, 1936, photograph. Plate 54 Above K’aya’chtn Totem Pole carved by Darren Yelton in 2006, photograph.

Plate 55 Electronic billboard on Kitsilano Reserve #6.

of the space beneath Vancouver’s Burrard Bridge, oriented around the positions of two poles that serve as distinct markers of Indigenous presence on the land beneath Burrard Bridge. One is a traditional K’aya’chtn totem pole, arms outstretched across the water to welcome visitors, carved by Darren Yelton and erected in 2006 to mark the return of the land to Squamish title.6 The other is an electronic billboard, visible from the bridge surface, erected in 2009 to generate revenue for the Squamish band. The photographic component of Bell Tower of False Creek focuses on the process of double exposure to play with the notion of “pole positions,” bringing visual elements into dialogue with one another in ways that challenge appearances on the ground. In the first double exposure presented below, the two poles are presented

Plate 56 K’aya’chtn Totem Pole and electronic billboard on Kitsilano Reserve #6, photograph with in-camera superimposition.

together from an impossible vantage point. As it happens, the best conditions for overlapping exposures are heavy grey skies, or fog, with a lot of texture that can serve as a solid background against which objects in the second exposure appear relatively opaque. It is fitting that weather conditions that help erase some of the markers of modernity allow for a starker contrast between these two poles on film, suggesting a host of issues in this area around legal land claims, intersecting practical uses of the land, notions of Indigeneity, and attitudes toward the built environment. In this photographic series I aim to frame these issues around three elements fundamental to the image capture process: exposure, position, and intersection.

Randolph Jordan

Exposure The process of exposing a frame of film calls to mind the idea of land as a blank slate to be developed according to specific intention, one distinct facet of colonial attitudes toward Indigenous lands. Double exposure challenges single claims to a bounded area, allowing for overlap between different uses of the frame that might complement one another, stand in contradiction, or any number of alternatives. As a photographic technique, double exposure is well suited to visual exploration of land claims issues in contested areas. On-site, the billboard provides a figurative double exposure in its superimposition of public advertising over scenic views, an affront to prevailing civic attitudes toward Vancouver in general and the area around Burrard Bridge in particular.7 Billboards in such prominent positions are very rare in Vancouver since the 1974 signage bylaw severely curtailed public advertising in an effort to reduce visual pollution and rebrand the city as “Spectacular by Nature.”8 But the laws don’t apply to reserve lands, and this particular billboard stands as a brilliant move by the Squamish Nation to generate considerable revenue from an awkwardly shaped parcel of land under the bridge. As such, the billboard upends stereotypes about Indigenous use of land and the long-time association between Native cultures and “unspoiled” wilderness. The billboard also confronts the appropriation of totem poles by settler cultures as a safe marker of Indigeneity long past and with no current claim to the land.9 This pole isn’t safe, because it marks a contest to the use of this land in the present. Exposing the frame twice to reveal the poles together, a vantage point impossible on the ground, invites the viewer to contemplate the ways in which their contemporaneity challenges received wisdom about urban Indigeneity.

Position Position is essential to the functioning of the two poles. The billboard requires visibility from the bridge surface to attract the eyes for which advertisers will pay. Simple enough. The welcome pole, on the other hand, is placed at the exact spot where the Kitsilano Trestle Bridge once crossed the shoreline, the first transgression of the original reserve area in 1899, demolished just as Vancouver was on the push for Expo ’86 to capture the world’s attention as one of its most beautiful and “livable” cities. The False Creek area, previously industrial for many decades, was newly redeveloped around the principles of gentrification and primed to boom. The welcome pole thus stands, in part, as a sign of competing claim to “best” use of this valuable land and is oriented in the same general direction that the trestle bridge once ran, contrary to the traditional use of such poles to orient the arms toward the mouth of a bay in order to welcome arrivals by sea. In the second of my double-exposure images, I graphically reorient the pole to face the bridge, and the bay on the other side, posing

Exposure and Intersection in Bell Tower of False Creek

a visual question about the pole’s relationship to the bridge and my own position in relation to both. On the one hand, the bridge was an early example of how urban development robbed Indigenous peoples of their land. On the other hand, the bridge is now instrumental in the new use to which the Squamish Nation is putting the land. Understanding the billboard as positive marker of urban Indigeneity requires an alternative perspective, an ideological shift that I am attempting to emulate through the camera’s ability to offer perspectival reorientation within the frame.

Intersection The process of double exposure always reveals points of intersection between the exposed planes, an effect I am interested in for its potential to reveal the uneasy copresence of elements brought together within a single frame. Across this photo series I explore a range of possibilities in rendering evidence of double exposure visible within the frame through variable points of intersection between the two layers. This variability is perhaps most obvious in compositions that highlight the remarkable graphic similarity between the two poles when viewed from directly beneath. Although purely coincidental, identifying the aesthetic similarity is one path to acknowledging the billboard as a legitimate sign of twenty-first-century urban Indigeneity, challenging the stereotypes of an ancient, dead culture that position totem poles as historical artifact rather than current practice.10 In the film component of this project, I animate the process of understanding the work of one pole in relation to the other through a dissolve that allows the two poles to share the same space in the frame with continually shifting levels of intersection. Here opacity and transparency both have their functions, the dominance of one pole yielding to the next, while the process of transition provides a sense of ephemerality that can evoke the transient nature of the land, spirits of the past lingering in the present moment, and the need to account for history while acknowledging the present.

Variations in Motion The spatial reorientation of pole positions across my photo and film works documenting Burrard Bridge reveal my fluctuating positionality, enacted through the very process of capturing the images themselves. Exposing two shots on a single frame requires that I move between shooting locations between each exposure, grafting the element of time onto each photograph as a function of memory. Since these images are captured on analog cameras with no monitor on which to review shots on-site, framing double exposures requires that I keep the first frame in mind as I compose the second. Thus, the positioning of the landmarks within the frame is a function of

Plate 57 K’aya’chtn Totem Pole and Burrard Bridge, photograph with in-camera superimposition.

Plate 58 K’aya’chtn Totem Pole and electronic billboard next to Burrard Bridge, Photograph.

Plate 59 K’aya’chtn Totem Pole and electronic billboard, 2017, Super 8mm film footage from short film Bell Tower of False Creek.

Exposure and Intersection in Bell Tower of False Creek

how my continually shifting position on the land affects my memory of each composition as I prepare the next. This is a fitting exercise for my desire to document the legacy of appropriation, remembered and forgotten, on lands that continually shift status as uses intersect. Yet my process – similar to the sound compositions that I have made alongside these images – functions along the lines of what Dylan Robinson describes as “hungry listening,” a term that identifies the assimilation model enacted on lands and cultures by original settlers as a form of hunger that persists through their descendants to inform contemporary encounters with Indigenous art.11 The assimilative instinct is apparent in my own attempts to make of the land what I will through my acts of media capture. In my desire to interpret the “meaning” of these poles in their positions on this land, a function of Indigenous knowledge to which I am not privy, I am hungry. And there is a danger, here, in my “sampling” of Indigenous work, like the welcome pole, into images, films, and sound compositions that rely on claims to the infinite and inevitable cross-referencing across global peoples that provides licence to cultural appropriation.12 At least the fate of the land itself will not be decided by me, and my documentation in the Bell Tower project might stand best as a marker of the instability underlying the final years of this unsettled space, now primed for another major shift as the Squamish Nation begins a major residential development project flanking the bridge in 2021.13 Those who bemoan the “blight” of the billboard’s affront to Vancouver’s “view imperative”14 now face a substantial perspectival reorientation around twenty-first-century Indigeneity.

Notes 1 Susan Roy, “Mapping Tool: Kitsilano Reserve,” Indigenous Foundations, accessed May 2022, http://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/mapping_tool_kitsilano_reserve/. 2 Douglas Coupland, City of Glass: Douglas Coupland’s Vancouver (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2009). 3 Jean Barman, “Erasing Indigenous Indigeneity in Vancouver,” bc Studies 155 (Autumn 2007): 29. 4 Nicholas Blomley, (2004) Unsettling the City: Urban Land and the Politics of Property (New York: Routledge, 2004). 5 Randolph Jordan, “Unsettling the World Soundscape Project: The Bell Tower of False Creek, Vancouver,” Sounding Out!, 3 September 2015, https://soundstudiesblog.com/2015/09/03/unset tling-the-world-soundscape-project-the-bell-tower-of-false-creek-vancouver/. 6 Elizabeth Newton, “Kitsilano K’aya’chtn,” Creators Vancouver, 19 August 2016, https://creators vancouver.com/welcoming-figure/. 7 Megan Stewart, “Bringing the Squamish Nation into the Global Market,” Vancouver Magazine, 2 March 2010, www.vanmag.com/the-rise-of-the-squamish-nation. 8 Nancy Noble and Mari Fujita, Neon Vancouver, Ugly Vancouver (Vancouver: Museum of Vancouver, 2011), 6.

Randolph Jordan 9 Barman, “Erasing Indigenous Indigeneity,” 29–30. 10 Ibid. 11 Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening: Resonant Sound Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 2. 12 Ibid., 130. 13 Jon Azpiri and Simon Little, “Squamish Nation Approves 11-Tower Development Near Burrard Bridge,” Global News, 11 December 2019, https://globalnews.ca/news/6284011/squamish-nationdevelopment-near-burrard-bridge/. 14 Lance Berelowitz, Dream City: Vancouver and the Global Imagination (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2005), 25.

14

Ai Weiwei’s Memory Work at Lesbos, Greece Kara York

someone will remember us I say even in another time – Sappho1

Fragments of Remembrance on the Greek Islands I became interested in the idea of refuge with its promises and deficiencies after following a series of freshly laid footprints, desperate to pursue them in their immediacy before they faded away with the passage of time. The first footprint was the photograph of the young Syrian boy, Alan Kurdi, whose deceased body was found on the shoreline of Kos, Greece, in 2015. The image of the toddler was so gut-wrenching, so visceral, that rare kind of photograph that remains in one’s mind even years after it has been witnessed. There tends to be an irresistible outrage that is sparked with the image of the dead child, in the way that the child is somehow able to become representative of every child, or of the innocence and unsullied qualities that are associated with the child. Suffused with sentimentality, images of children typically create tunnel vision, thereby preventing viewers from looking beyond what the traumatic images portray. The Turkish press photographer who took the photograph of Kurdi, Nilüfer Demir, describes the beach at Kos that day as being a “children’s graveyard,” yet she chose to focus her camera on one fragment, one tiny aspect of the scene that day, one occurrence in an international crisis.2 Where were Alan’s mother and brother, who also perished in the same failed sea voyage? The other children that Demir references? Who will remember the individuals whose images have not been sealed in perpetuity by the act of photography? My quest to understand more of the current refugee crisis, inspired in large part by Kurdi’s image but also by the desire to move beyond the tunnel vision, led me to

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other fragments and other pieces of an impossibly massive narrative. Yet I kept returning to that last question, the question of remembrance. Alan Kurdi had a name, a family, a story, an identity. But what of the thousands lost at sea? The unmarked graves, the unidentified bodies washed ashore from the Mediterranean Sea, the unrecovered bodies? It is much easier to empathize with an individual, rather than the overwhelming statistics and the anonymity of numbers. The numbers reveal a narrative along these lines: since 2015, millions of individuals have crossed the Mediterranean, the vast majority stopping at one of the Greek islands – including Lesbos, Kos, Chios, Leros, and Samos – before continuing to Athens and from there to central Europe. Between 2015 and 2016, Lesbos alone had experienced an influx of close to six hundred thousand migrants; its infrastructure, sanitation system, and the inhabitants themselves groaning under the pressure of providing shelter and basic necessities to unforeseen numbers of people.3 The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees regularly publishes “fact sheets” that provide access to key statistics for islands such as Lesbos, including the average number of migrant arrivals per month, the total number of aid workers and refugee housing units, and so on.4 The problem with such data, however, is that information alone is incapable of really reaching people; it is, by nature, objective and necessarily deficient of affect. The moral outcry that followed the publication of Kurdi’s image, however, demonstrated that affect is sometimes necessary to inspire action, that perhaps we need to occasionally experience or witness pain and loss to desire to do something about it. At the end of 2015, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei travelled to Lesbos, a place that has taken on the burden of being a gateway to Europe, a midpoint marked by not only the refugees that pass through but also the individuals that perish before even reaching the island. On the surface, it seemed like an unlikely pairing: why did this artist travel to this particular place? Ai Weiwei planted himself on the very beach that had been traversed by thousands of refugees, and he performed his own death in front of the camera.5 But he not only performed his death, he also, shockingly, re-enacted the death of Alan Kurdi. Ai Weiwei used this shock to point viewers toward Lesbos, and in doing so, he reinforced its position as a place of historical and present-day significance, a place which constitutes the material and conceptual inspiration for several of the artist’s refugee-related artworks. Importantly, the image became a plea for a humanitarian response, a cry for empathy. In Ai Weiwei’s burgeoning Refugee Project, a collection of artworks, exhibitions, and documentary materials relating to the refugee crisis in Europe and beyond, the artist and his artworks – works which often employ materials associated with migrant journeys – move throughout the world, creating an ever-widening community of viewers who become connected through materialized memory to the island of Lesbos and the refugees’ plight. Communities, centring around fragments of remembrance, often made accessible by works of art. What joins these present-day actions to the deeper archaeological

Ai Weiwei’s Memory Work at Lesbos, Greece

layers of the island? The writings of Sappho, the celebrated Greek lyric poet, are excavations from the past, surviving elements written on frail papyrus, reassembled like incomplete puzzles. Her words, which opened this paper, demonstrate the desire to be remembered, even if that memory is several generations or countless centuries removed. To be remembered is to leave a lasting footprint, an inheritance, a legacy. For Sappho, she leaves behind fragments, as we all do; memory is frustratingly incomplete, prone to fracture, constantly presenting itself in different ways to different people. Sappho writes not of valiantly won battles or epic journeys. But she intimately addresses the individual reader, speaking of love and longing, joy and disappointment, memory, and community. Writing on the island of Lesbos in the seventh century bce, her words spread forth across time and space, thereby ensuring that to read Sappho is to be connected to her and by extension to Lesbos. Intended to be sung as part of a choral performance, the poems have always been about community. According to Indra Kagis McEwan’s Socrates’ Ancestor, the chōros “is the group that dances, as in the chorus of a Greek tragedy. But choros can be, simply, any group … Choros in this generic sense, is people doing something together, a group with a shared purpose.”6 The relational and heterotopic capacity of art means that the reader becomes part of the chōros that surrounds and participates in Sappho’s work. Like the poems of Sappho, Ai Weiwei’s Refugee Project connects us to a community of people: the countless migrants that pass through the island, the people of the island – past and present – and the viewers of Ai Weiwei’s art. Each refuge-inspired work that Ai Weiwei creates is deeply concerned with the act of remembering as a community, a chōros of not mere viewers of art but engaged participants. This essay explores several works created by Ai Weiwei since 2015, all of which possess a direct material connection to Lesbos. The artworks come to represent and embody journeys to – and the failures of – refuge; these works, in their commemorative capacity, create a community that embroiders viewers together with the people of Lesbos, as well as the many migrants that have passed through the island. Ai Weiwei’s Refugee Project creates fragments of remembrance that centre around an historically significant place, and historically significant events, with each fragment building on the next and creating incalculable layers of meaning. Lesbos is important because of its history as a place of refuge. But it is also essential to account for its position as a nexus, a passage between places and times, a threshold, an island that welcomes people in, but rarely to stay. Lesbos is a border, and as a border it further distinguishes other borders: of inclusion and exclusion, of death and grievability. When Ai Weiwei performed his death, he pointed viewers precisely to the question of the border, inevitably causing viewers to ask, Do borders matter more than people? If not, then how do we remember those who risked their lives to reach safety? Ai Weiwei’s Refugee Project is, at its core, about the political decision to care – and to remember.

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What Is This Place? Brief Historical Moments The photograph of Alan Kurdi brought considerable attention to the Greek islands, which for many refugees are the main points of entry into the European Union. When Ai Weiwei travelled to Lesbos to establish a studio, to document and participate in the humanitarian efforts on the island, and to create artworks in response to his experiences, he caused the viewers of his art to turn their eyes toward a place that perhaps is best known as being home to the poets Sappho and Alcaeus or as a popular tourist destination. But what is this island, and what stories does it possess? Marc Shell spends a considerable amount of time exploring the historical and philosophical definitions of island in Islandology, ultimately suggesting a definition that synthesizes its original meaning – of “water-land,” a “mixture of water and land at the limiting, or defining ‘coast’” – with the newer meaning, “water defined against land.”7 Implied in both definitions is both a sense of isolation and thus vulnerability in being surrounded by water, and an inevitable in-betweenness, often demarcated by its position between there and somewhere else. To address the latter, Lesbos is defined by its midway position, stationed between the East and the West, an attribute that has rendered it a logical gateway for those seeking entry into Europe. Perhaps its isolation, in the sense of it being water-bound, is the quality that leaves it open to foreign occupation. The question of whom the island belongs to has been an important part of its past, even up until the middle of the twentieth century. Each period of the island’s history forms a layer in the archaeological and cultural memory of Lesbos. There are still prominent traces of the ancient and classical periods on the island – the remains of an ancient theatre in the city of Mytilene, a Doric temple, various Byzantine ruins – along with the ghosts of the several hundred years of Ottoman rule, as evidenced in architecture and the enduring mosques.8 Lesbos became part of the Kingdom of Greece in 1912, but it sustained one final occupation, by the Nazis during the Second World War. Far from being an “island unto itself,” Lesbos is defined by its long history of occupation, and the many cultural influences that have accompanied each controlling faction. An event of significance occurred just after Lesbos became a Greek territory, a moment that profoundly shaped the island and its current inhabitants, providing Lesbos with a story of refuge with direct ties to the present. Representing this event is the Statue of Asia Minor Mother, which stands prominently on the shore of Epano Skala in Lesbos. It commemorates the Hellenic families, long inhabitants of Turkey, at this point – specifically the mothers and their young children –who were forced out of Turkey at the end of the Greco-Turkish War from 1914 to 1922, many of whom landed and settled in Lesbos. It is a lasting reminder of the island’s history of migration and its tradition of hospitality, a commemorative site proclaiming the island’s

Ai Weiwei’s Memory Work at Lesbos, Greece

identity as a place of refuge. The expulsion of Greeks from Asia Minor during this time means that, in the present-day, descendants of those individuals and families constitute 60 per cent of Lesbos’s population.9 Our relationship to the past exists in fragments and details that are never complete and never able to provide a satisfyingly comprehensive narrative. I offer this admittedly brief overview of some of the island’s major historical events to trace somewhat of a path toward the present, an attempt at finding threads throughout the island’s history that might connect to an overarching and well-entrenched ethos of hospitality. The shoreline that Ai Weiwei planted himself on for the purposes of making a political statement is the same water-land boundary that welcomed the Hellenic refugees from Turkey and that has been traversed by various foreign powers. Resting on the strata of the island’s entire cultural memory, Ai Weiwei points viewers to a lineage of hospitality, to a tradition of welcoming others, to a place whose inheritance shapes how its inhabitants choose to act. In Daphne Matziaraki’s short documentary 4.1 Miles (2016), viewers are introduced to a seemingly genuine spirit of empathy and sacrifice on the part of the islanders. Kyriakos, a coast-guard captain, and his crew engage in ocean-rescue operations in their attempt to save as many lives as possible from haphazardly constructed and dangerously overfilled migrant vessels. As the burdened captain navigates his boat to shore after a particularly frantic rescue, the camera shows dozens of islanders standing on the shore praying, readying themselves with blankets and first-aid kits, a village coming together in concern and desire to help. The people of Lesbos – many of whom are themselves the descendants of refugees, as previously mentioned – are shown to be welcoming the migrants as neighbours, providing whatever care possible. It is a touching scene, but one that is also intended to demonstrate that the people of Lesbos are doing something while the rest of the world apparently is not, and it is, in this sense, very specifically framed. “The world needs to know what’s happening here! We can’t be going through this alone!” shouts an onlooker on the shore, as a migrant body passes by. This indignant and emotionally fuelled outburst seems to resonate in many of Ai Weiwei’s artworks and statements regarding the refugee crisis as it has unfolded in Lesbos and other parts of the world. Sometimes outrage is the only means of getting people to pay attention. It is significant to note that 4.1 Miles provides a perspective that is entirely focused on the border space, right where the island touches the sea – the waters, the beach, the shoreline shops – and it never once strays from this critical area. Viewers are never taken to the interior of the island, and we are not permitted views of the refugee camps. The water and the beach are where the drama unfolds, in the frenzied rescues that often determine who lives and who perishes. Not seeing the next phase of the journey, viewers are unsure of the fate of each refugee. Thrown into a state of

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permanent transience and precariousness, 4.1 Miles leaves viewers to meditate on the fact that those who cross over on to the island still have a long journey ahead.

The Monumental Work of Ai Weiwei’s Refugee Project When Ai Weiwei visited Lesbos in the winter of 2015–16, he proclaimed that a monument should be established to recognize the dangerous journeys that migrants undertake to flee from violence and persecution. His desire to establish a monument, to recognize those both living and dead, demonstrates an attempt to honour through memory, to publicly account for the journey of the migrant. According to Margaret Olin, “Memorial practices seek to fold the remembered into the community of the living, or to fold the community of the living into the remembered.”10 Olin also notes that monuments serve to connect history and memory in their provision of a means for individuals to understand their relationship with the past.11 Ai’s invocation to create a memorial seeks to accomplish something like this, with a monument creating relationships between the living and the dead, but his desire to monumentalize the present – and a currently unfolding event – means that his memorial has had to take on a different form than the traditional Statue of Asia Minor Mother. Instead, Ai Weiwei’s monument is an archive. The Refugee Project is a dynamic and ongoing archive of the events of the global refugee crisis as recorded by Ai Weiwei. It consists of the documentary work that he has recently done throughout the world, in preparation for the documentary film Human Flow (dir. Ai Weiwei, 2017), the accumulation and distribution of the resulting documentary images using social media applications, and the many exhibitions and installations that the artist has been involved with since 2015 in cities including New York, Athens, Prague, and Florence. With most of the artist’s activities published on his Instagram account, Ai Weiwei has become a chronicler of the refugee crisis through his own eyes, alongside providing bits of his personal and professional life displayed following a four-year period without a passport. Having spent his childhood as an internally displaced person (idp) in a Chinese exile camp due to his father’s nonconformity with China’s communist leaders, having been the subject of government censorship and detention, many of Ai Weiwei’s works arise from a deeply rooted personal history as an exile; the artist’s past and the inheritance that he carries with him are essential to the work.12 Through his Refugee Project, Ai meshes his narrative with the broader refugee narrative, and in doing so, the works that are part of this large body of work become individual memorials that have a profoundly subjective undertone.

Ai Weiwei’s Memory Work at Lesbos, Greece

Borders: The Beach Photograph The issue of Ai Weiwei inserting himself into Lesbos’s refugee narrative rose to prominence with the previously mentioned beach photograph. Images are fleeting. In the digital realm, where one is confronted with image upon image, the tendency is to briefly look or scan (often with slight disinterest), and just as quickly to forget. Some images, of course, have staying power in their ability to stick in one’s memory, easily offering themselves up for recall. Ai Weiwei’s photograph on the beach subtly references the unpredictable nature of the image in relation to memory; to counteract the possibility of forgetting Alan Kurdi and by extension the hardships faced by millions of displaced persons, Ai provides another layer of remembering by re-enacting the scene. Was he mocking or trivializing the death of a child, as many detractors accused him? If Alan’s image was so unforgettable, why did we need another layer of memory? In the simplest of explanations, the photograph leaves a footprint: we had to know that Ai Weiwei was there. This is not to disregard the various concerns that have arisen in response to the photograph, or to suggest that there was no other way for Ai Weiwei to convey his message. But one also must look at the medium itself and the function that it serves. According to Ariella Azoulay in Civil Imagination, the photograph is, first and foremost, “the source of information. It is a document, a testimony, a certificate, a means of making a certain situation present for spectators who might belong to a different time or place.”13 Ai Weiwei’s beach photograph is testimony, and as testimony it brings the situation in Lesbos into consciousness by using art as its channel. More than providing information, however – and without usurping or diminishing the power of Alan’s photograph – Ai Weiwei pictured on the beach offers a critique of the lack of response by the international community as he seemingly says, I am here, on this island – what are you doing to help? When he stated that “the border is not in Lesbos. It really [is] in our minds and in our hearts,” he further implores his viewers to reflect on the ways in which refugees have been dehumanized.14 Positioned on the liminal space of the shoreline, Ai Weiwei comes to embody the in-betweenness and marginality of migrant identity: between water and land, past and future, stability and precariousness, citizenship and non-citizenship, and self and other. As a borderland in the sense of being a gateway into Western Europe, Lesbos is simultaneously a place and a non-place, both a geographical location and a condition of the heart, and Ai Weiwei’s beach photograph causes one to reflect on the fact that the imposition and defence of borders often occurs at the expense of people: stateless, de-subjectivized, abjected. Who will grieve for those whose bodies wash ashore in Lesbos and elsewhere? Dominick LaCapra suggests that the simulation of trauma, often seen in testimonial art such as Ai Weiwei’s, involves a “(self) shattering, unbound, or associative play,” which serves to come to terms with traumatic events.15 This shattering of the

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self, in the imitation of the ultimate form of abjection – death – draws attention to the issue of whose life is worth grieving. According to Judith Butler, “Without grievability, there is no life, or, rather, there is something living that is other than life … sustained by no regard, no testimony, and ungrieved when lost.”16 Ai Weiwei’s performance of death and abjection reflects the condition – the lack of grievability – that is imposed on the migrants that traverse the same shoreline. Like his entire Refugee Project, Ai Weiwei’s beach photograph is a tactic for memorializing the lives of those who are often reduced to statistics and the lives that are lost at the border. It is also a bearing witness, which acts as an X marks the spot, a gesture oriented toward a particular point of significance, an indexical sign intended to turn viewers in the direction of the X: Lesbos.17 In this sense, Lesbos is a site that operates in a heterotopic manner, being spatially marked off from the rest of society as an island, but also connecting itself to other times and spaces, a fact that is made even more prominent by Ai Weiwei’s extensive documentary endeavours on the island.18 The photograph can be conceived of as a work of both mourning and memory, utilizing shock and outrage to get us to look, and then to look beyond – beyond Lesbos, beyond Ai Weiwei, beyond the work of art itself. Ai Weiwei’s Refugee Project, as a burgeoning and incomplete archive, is similarly heterotopic, transitive, and migratory, and it is this very capacity of the work of art, in its ability “to find a place for itself outside itself,” in the words of Jonathan Bordo, that enables it to create communities of viewers throughout the world, united by an ethical appeal to respond.19

Journeys: The Materiality of Refuge The beach photograph was controversial and unsettling, and this was precisely the point: to engender a sense of what LaCapra would refer to as “empathic unsettlement” with an aim to inspire dialogue or, perhaps, action.20 Following the release of the image, Ai Weiwei has engaged in a series of artistic interventions and exhibitions throughout Europe and North America which employ material items discarded by refugees on the beach in Lesbos, including life jackets, emergency blankets, clothing, and rafts. Elaborating on many of Marcel Mauss’s ideas on exchange and the lives of things, Bill Brown’s essay “Thing Theory” discusses how material objects possess different meanings in different contexts. He argues that once an object is “released from the bond of being equipment, sustained outside the irreversibility of technological history, the object becomes something else.”21 Thus when the mayor of Lesbos donated fourteen thousand life jackets to Ai Weiwei to create works of art, they were no longer practically useful; instead they would enter the realm of art, taking on a new life and a new purpose, yet not erasing the history of past use.22

14.1 Ai Weiwei, F.Lotus(2016).

At the Belvedere in Vienna, Austria, a sprawling Baroque-era complex of palaces and stables, just over one thousand lifejackets are arranged into two-hundred and one lotus flowers in the large pond in front of the Upper Belvedere. Each lotus-flower assemblage is combined to form the letter F, a recurring motif in Ai Weiwei’s work, and lending itself to the title of the work, F. Lotus. Ai’s use of the letter F or the middle finger are obstinate gestures of dissidence, but they also indicate his tireless championing of the freedom of expression, especially given the widespread use of censorship in his home country. But the letter F has additional resonance in this work: it also stands for Flüchtling, the German word for refugee. Along with the several connotations of the letter F, there is great significance to the use of the lotus symbol. In Buddhist practice, lotus flowers indicate rebirth and spiritual awakening, because they grow and thrive in the murkiest of waters. Employed in F. Lotus, the lifejackets have been repurposed and reclaimed in the service of art. Left on the beaches in Lesbos, no longer functional (because most of them had serious defects to begin with),

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and thereby rendered into refuse, the lifejackets rise out of the decrepitude of their former state, to temporarily find new life as a lotus flower, as art.23 But the lifejackets that constitute F. Lotus are more than mere aesthetic objects; they carry with them the narrative of their past, a form of materialized memory that attaches itself to tangible things.24 Monica McTighe’s Framed Spaces: Photography and Memory in Contemporary Installation Art, discusses how memory settles into the crevices of objects, documents, photographs, and art installations, where its transitive nature enables viewers to both reflect on the past and come to terms with the instability of the present.25 F. Lotus is thus marked by several layers of meaning, from the connotations of the letter F, to the symbolism of the lotus, to the memory of traumatic narratives that accompany and are embodied within the lifejackets. F. Lotus is but one example of Ai Weiwei’s repurposing of material items associated with journeys to refuge. In other works, he wraps the columns of Berlin’s Konzerthaus with lifejackets, affixes life rafts to the exterior of Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, and utilizes clothing and shoes worn by refugees in Laundromat (2016) at Jeffrey Deitch Projects in New York City. The material items are immediately recognized for their association with journeys to refuge, and their tangibility implores viewers to commemorate the hardships and loss involved in these journeys. In a 2002 essay, French curator Nicholas Bourriaud describes how contemporary art is relational in its ability to create meaningful connections between art and its spectators. He states that contemporary art “is formed by intersubjectivity, [which] takes being-together as a central theme,” and where the meaning of the work is collectively determined.26 As individuals gather around Ai Weiwei’s refuge-related installations – in person or by looking at pictures online – the works not only become widely dispersed. They demand involvement from their viewers, moving beyond the walls of the gallery and creating ever-widening communities.

Communities: Objects, Photographs, Social Media Nicholas Bourriaud’s writings on relational art focus primarily on installations. Frequently our experiences with installation art arise from photographic documentation of the installations, meaning that our interactions with such artworks are often indirect, and technologically mediated. Monica McTighe discusses how photography has come to be an integral component of installation, delving into the complex “ways that photography and installation art reinforce, enrich, and contradict each other.”27 McTighe’s ideas are rich and nuanced, inevitably resting on the ways that photography can contribute to a shared sense of experience, even when viewers are not in the same room or directly in front of a work of art. The sense of “being-together” that Bourriaud discusses may mean being together by looking at the same art, but

Ai Weiwei’s Memory Work at Lesbos, Greece

they also may mean looking at the same images or even websites or digital applications. Being-together as a concept has changed drastically with the advent of social media and the widespread use of smartphones. Ai Weiwei’s Refugee Project recognizes these changes and employs digital technology to distribute images of his installations and documentary artworks to a global audience. Resting at the core of his endeavour is an archival impulse, a seemingly insatiable need to document as much as possible, not only to raise consciousness but also to sear into memory: we cannot remember what we do not see or witness. The most prominent manifestation of this archival impulse arises in Ai Weiwei’s near-obsessive use of the image-based social media application, Instagram, to document his Refugee Project and his associated global travels. The use of this application has several implications: for one, it permits followers of Ai Weiwei’s account to comment on his photos, to share the images with others, and to potentially interact with the artist himself; second, the extensive use of “selfies” reminds spectators that the images are not only documents of crisis, but they are also part of the artist’s personal testimony; and finally, the use of Instagram takes Ai Weiwei’s work to an audience much broader than his gallery exhibitions could procure, enabling his art and its associated commentaries to reach new communities. A prominent example of Ai Weiwei’s use of social media is seen in a work known as Refugee Wallpaper, which has appeared in several exhibitions throughout the world. Consisting of thousands of images of migrants, ocean rescues, refugee camps, and Ai’s journey to document it all, Refugee Wallpaper is entirely composed of iPhone photographs that had been previously posted to the artist’s personal Instagram account. Rather than serving as mere objects of contemplation, the images demand a response. In place of disinterested looking, the wallpaper, as a relational, dialogic series of photographs, necessitates engagement. To look at Refugee Wallpaper is, in countless images, to look into the eyes of the migrant: not always shown as part of the mass, in many cases individuals or families are provided with their own framed image, or series of images. While it is impossible to see every photograph on the wallpaper, for each viewer a few will stand out, and connections will be made. According to Margaret Olin, the gaze can be implicated in shame, but it can also involve responsibility: “to share a gaze suggests responsibility toward the person looking back at me,” whether through a refusal to participate in the oppression of others, or – I would add – the desire to act to prevent further injustice.28 Looking at the individual images that are part of Refugee Wallpaper has the effect of creating a sense of community. The gaze in Refugee Wallpaper is used as a means to push viewers toward activism, to drive the images beyond the walls of the gallery, outside a purely aesthetic, contemplative space. But at the same time, the work needs the aesthetic quality that it does retain, as its vehicle for bringing people together and initiating a community that is based on the notion of shared subjecthood that Olin defines; witnessing the photographs in Refugee

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Wallpaper becomes an act of responsibility that arises from the fact that crisis situations often create or reinforce communities.29 To view these images is to be united to the refugees in Lesbos and beyond. As previously mentioned, the photographs in Refugee Wallpaper were taken with an iPhone and posted on Instagram. Ai Weiwei’s employment of “amateur technologies” such as smartphones and social media offers a reflection on how social interactions have largely become mediated by technological means. Relationships are often based on Facebook storylines and chronological Instagram feeds, and the instantaneity that is afforded by such applications fuels the desire for presentness. It is important to note that the artist frequently appears in the images in Refugee Wallpaper, typically in the form of “selfies,” essentially an image of the photographer taken by the photographer. The insertion of the artist into the images depends on his status and ability to be easily recognized, but it also renders the images into the artist’s testimony, irrefutable evidence that he was there. Paul Frosh, a popular communication scholar, has noted that selfies – conceived as gestural entities – “invite the viewer to infer and adopt a physical position in relation to the photographer. Manifested in the suggestion of bodily contact, the gestures propose a particular kind of sociable interaction: the act of accompanying and the subject position of companionship.”30 Through Ai’s selfie aesthetic, there is the sense that we are being “introduced” to the individuals that he poses with, and that, in turn we are being initiated into relationship them. For those unable to attend one of Ai Weiwei’s exhibitions that features Refugee Wallpaper (or any of his works, for that matter) Ai’s Instagram becomes a “photographic neighbourhood,” in the words of Olin, where individuals can interact with one another, and where a community can be built.31 This is not a perfect relationship, however, in that the only individual available to participate in conversation is the artist himself. But the use of social media in this case becomes an attempt at employing digitally based social interactions as a means of reaching a broader audience and hopefully inspiring social engagement. Seen especially in Refugee Wallpaper, replete with selfies and photographs of Ai Weiwei, the gestural nature of photography and its aspirations toward creating relationships and communities becomes clear. Perhaps what is most important regarding the selfie aesthetic is the intentional, bodily posturing of the selfie, which encourages viewers to do more than simply look at Ai’s massive visual archive in both the physical and virtual formats: it invites response. Ai Weiwei’s Instagram account functions as an archive that accompanies and embodies his entire Refugee Project, and this archive is marked by its dynamism; it is constantly transforming as the images are viewed by more individuals throughout the world, and as the various responses, reactions, and comments pile on one another, evidence of a steadily growing community. 14.2 a + b Opposite Ai Weiwei, Laundrom at(2016).

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Conclusions Beginning his “Refugee Project” in the land of Sappho, on an island whose history is marked by notable periods of foreign occupation, Ai Weiwei connects his viewers to Lesbos as a site where the pursuit of refuge, and the inevitability of loss, is inscribed on the landscape. At first glance, this seems to have nothing to do with Sappho, whose poems speak more of intimate relationships than political climes.32 Yet at its core, Sappho’s poetry was always intended to be about a community, a chōros that both participates in and surrounds the performance of art, a community that traverses the historical record. Sappho’s model finds resonance in contemporary art, which is frequently marked by its interactivity and intersubjectivity, and similar to her poems, Ai Weiwei’s Refugee Project connects us to a community, both past and present: the people of the island, the migrants that temporarily find refuge there, the viewers of Ai Weiwei’s art. Can art really connect us in such profound ways? The endurance of Sappho’s poetry demonstrates that it is a strong possibility. There still exists an expectation that art is contemplative yet somehow inert, in the sense that art is not expected to exceed its place in the aesthetic realm. But when art is a witness, it can no longer be purely contemplative; instead, testimonial art exists somewhere more along the lines of what Ariella Azoulay calls “practical contemplation,” a form of reflection that has a purpose.33 Contemporary art such as Ai Weiwei’s demands something of its viewers, but it does not outline what it expects, and the responses are diverse, even polarizing, at times. Like empathy, which is often conjured up by artworks that engage with the traumatic or the overwhelming, the viewers’ response is difficult, if not impossible, to control.34 But at the very least, Ai Weiwei’s memory work at Lesbos means the question of civic responsibility must be considered. Remembering is a political act. So, too, is the taking of a photograph, the creation of a work of art, and the act of looking at pictures.35 Ai Weiwei’s Refugee Project began in Lesbos, and, in one way or another, each refuge-related work that Ai creates is somehow connected to the island, its history, its people. As viewers of his art, we are also profoundly connected to Lesbos as the nexus point that mediates the relationship between the migrant’s past, present, and future. In alignment with Nicholas Bourriaud, who suggests that contemporary artworks can each be thought of as “a proposal to live in a shared world,”36 Ai Weiwei’s memory work at Lesbos causes viewers to question what that shared world might look like, and what we might do to share that world, in the spirit of human compassion.

Ai Weiwei’s Memory Work at Lesbos, Greece

Notes 1 Sappho, fragment 147, in If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, trans. Anne Carson (New York: Knopf, 2002), 297. 2 Ismail Kupeli, “We Spoke to the Photographer behind the Picture of the Drowned Syrian Boy,” vice Online, accessed 10 July 2016, www.vice.com/en/article/zngqpx/nilfer-demir-interview876. 3 Daphne Matziaraki, dir., 4.1 Miles, 2016; Greece: UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. 4 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, “Lesvos Island – Greece Factsheet,” Operational Data Portal Refugee Situations, unhcr Online, 12 November 2015, https://data2. unhcr.org/en/documents/details/46447. 5 The well-known photograph of Ai Weiwei on the beach in Lesbos, Greece, taken by Rohit Chawla for India Today, unfortunately cannot be published in this volume. In the image, Ai Weiwei lays facedown on the craggy shoreline, his body posed in a manner reminiscent of the equally ubiquitous photograph of Alan Kurdi. 6 Indra Kagis McEwan, Socrates’ Ancestor (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 1993) 74. 7 Marc Shell, Islandology (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 2014), 19. 8 Richard Stillwell et al., “Lesbos, Greece,” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites Online, accessed 11 July 2017, www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0006: entry=lesbos. 9 Anna Pantelia is a Greek photojournalist whose work has been featured in countless major news sources. Her Lesvos series includes photographs, archival and found materials, and historical information on the Asia Minor Catastrophe and the current refugee crisis. Anna Pantelia, Lesvos: Where Sympathy and Sanctuary Endure (photographic series), Anna Pantelia Photography (website), 21 February 2016, https://annapantelia.com/portfolio/lesvos-wheresympathy-and-sanctuary-endure/. 10 Margaret Olin, “The Winter Garden and Virtual Heaven,” in Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 149. 11 Ibid., 149. 12 For more substantial biographical information on Ai Weiwei’s experiences as an idp and his detention by the Chinese state, please refer to the documentary film Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, dir. Alison Klayman (New York: Sundance Selects, 2012). 13 Ariella Azoulay, Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography (London: Verso, 2012), 60. 14 Henri Neuendorf, “Ai Weiwei Sets Up Lesbos Studio and Calls for Monument Dedicated to Refugees,” 14 January 2016, Artnet, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/ai-weiwei-lesbos-studiomonument-refugees-401285. 15 Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000) 105. 16 Judith Butler, Frames of War (London: Verso, 2009), 15. 17 In his discussion of Homer in Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire (1987), Jonathan Bordo explores how Potsdamerplatz becomes X marks the spot, or the site for the unfolding of the archive of

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Kara York Berlin’s past (“The Homer of Potsdamerplatz – Walter Benjamin in Wim Wenders’s Sky Over Berlin/Wings of Desire, A Critical Topography,” Images 2, no. 1 [2008]: 97). Arguably in a similar fashion, Lesbos is positioned as a site of significance in relation to the larger refugee narrative in Europe and beyond.

18 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22–7; and Monica McTighe, Framed Spaces (Hanover, nh: Dartmouth College Press, 2012), 19. 19 Jonathan Bordo makes this statement with respect to Micha Ullman’s Bibliothek countermonument in Berlin, arguing that art steps outside itself when it takes on a sense of civic responsibility. Bordo, “History Lessons: Imitation, Work and the Temporality of Contemporary Art,” Art History 37, no. 4 (2014): 820. 20 LaCapra, Writing History, 105. 21 Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 15. 22 Anny Shaw, “Greek Island Donates 14,000 Refugee Lifejackets to Ai Weiwei,” Art Newspaper Online, 3 February 2016, http://theartnewspaper.com/news/greek-island-donates-14-000refugee-lifejackets-to-ai-weiwei-/. 23 The lifejackets are made in Turkish sweatshops and sold for an exorbitant amount of money, yet they have “little use in a real emergency” according to Meghan Werft, “Artist Ai Weiwei.” 24 McTighe, Framed Spaces, 74. 25 Ibid., 18. 26 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (France: Les Presses du Reel, 2002), 15. 27 McTighe, Framed Spaces, 22 28 Margaret Olin, Touching Photographs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 30. 29 Ibid. 30 Paul Frosh, “The Gestural Image: The Selfie, Photographic Theory, and Kinesthetic Sociability,” International Journal of Communication 9 (2015): 1617. 31 Margaret Olin, Touching Photographs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 150. 32 An interesting point worth mentioning is that, due to political turbulence on Lesbos, Sappho was exiled from the island sometime between 605 and 590 bce. It is unknown whether she returned. Page duBois, Sappho (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015). 33 Azoulay, Civil Imagination, 63. 34 Dominick LaCapra considers how “empathy is an affective component of understanding and it is difficult to control” in the sense that one cannot anticipate the individual response to traumatic events. Writing History, Writing Trauma, 102. 35 John Berger argues that “every image embodies a way of seeing,” in Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972), 10. Berger’s insights into looking at images involve a recognition of how social and political relations are inscribed within images. The extension of this insight is that the act of looking is a historically constructed, political act. 36 Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 22.

GEOPOETICS

15

The Messon of the Island of Lesbos: Toponym as Evidence in the History of Ideas, or Introduction to Ten Poems from The Name of Sappho’s Daughter Jesper Svenbro

Many of you probably know the story: in January 2014, two new Sappho fragments came into circulation. As an old Sappho reader, poet, and retired philologist with several Sappho studies on my conscience, I reacted immediately: this was the first time I had experienced anything like this. Sappho! The news caught me with exceptional force and seemed to me so outstanding that I felt called to document my immediate experience. “Are you unable to make something out of this? All these studies have not served for anything at all!” I exclaimed in my mind. The result, a poem with the Ezra Pound–sounding title “Canto,” was published in a Swedish newspaper by the end of February, as if it was important for me to document, for myself, and to some extent “for posterity,” my first reading of the poem before my critical reason had time to settle. During the year that followed, I gathered my scattered papers, book chapters and poems about Sappho into a volume, which was published in September 2015. It struck me then that they were marked by a Marxist perspective, which I now, with four decades of distance, found surprisingly relevant. In my preface I even write that I “congratulate myself for having begun my scientific Sappho study with a Marxist approach.” After completing another book about Sappho, this time a collection of poems titled The Name of Sappho’s Daughter, I still hold the same position, even if the poetry collection gives priority to the poetic impulse rather than to the “intellectual” one. It is this collection of poems from 2017 that I would now like to present somewhat closer. In my spontaneous reading of the newly discovered twenty-line Sappho fragment, I had as a matter of course identified the poem’s addressee as Doricha, the courtesan that Sappho’s brother is supposed to have fallen in love with down in Egyptian Naukratis, where he exported wine. With “Always the same refrain …” I translated the fragment’s first words, the “refrain” corresponding to the notion inherent in Greek thrúlēstha and giving the addressee poetic competence. A “Sappho Day” at the Mediterranean Museum in Stockholm on 15 March 2015 gave me the occasion to focus

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on a previously known but misunderstood Sappho fragment, number 15 Lobel-Page. Like the new one, this fragment assigns to Doricha poetic competence, now with the help of the verb from the first line of the Odyssey: ennépein. I added that Charaxos and Doricha found each other in Naukratis for the first time, after which Charaxos probably returned home to Lesbos to return the following year with a fully stocked ship and buy her freedom. Then, of course, he did not leave her alone in Egypt! He took her home to Lesbos, where she became his wife and bore him several heirs, according to what we learn in the ancient Souda dictionary. Sappho’s indignation at her brother’s marriage to a courtesan and former slave from Egypt is the reaction of an aristocrat over a mésalliance with heritage-related complications. Charaxos is the eldest brother of the family. It was at that point that I found myself when, in an explicitly experimental perspective, I began writing poems about Sappho. As you can understand from the title of the poetry collection, proper names play an important role in the book – and not just the name of Sappho’s daughter. Given my long-time interest in Greek anthroponomy (see already Phrasikleia, 1988), I focused on the names given to the members of Sappho’s family (father, brothers, and daughter) but soon – thanks to the fifth chapter in Detienne’s Maîtres (1967) – focused on a most significant place name, the toponym figuring in the title of this introduction, Messon. It goes without saying that Greek anthroponyms do not obey the same logic as Greek toponyms, even if they share the semantic transparency as well as the commemorative function of what is currently referred to as “significant names.” Bouneima (Dividing-the-Ox) is the name of a city in Epirus founded by Ulysses after a sacrifice and the subsequent feasting on the divided ox. The name commemorates the foundation. Now you might ask yourself, What does all this have to do with contemporary poetry? For decades, I have had the following passage from T.S. Eliot’s “The Social Function of Poetry” (1943) on my mind: “Of course it is always possible that poetry can find a different role in the future than it has had in the past.” Now I wanted to embark on a new project where I could use the narrative form that I had developed in a series of document-oriented collections from the past decades. Of these collections Mein Vater der Pastor exists in German translation since 2004, and another, Romanzo di Guerra, in Italian since 2013. My project was to practise a kind of experimental cultural anthropology to deepen our familiarity with the world that was Sappho’s. I even imagined that the use of the metres of “Lesbian song,” the Alcaic and Sapphic stanzas, would be a way of “experimentally” approaching Sappho’s world, and about a third of the poems in the collection is actually written in metres that we associate with Sappho and Alcaeus.1 In the same way as Hermann Usener in a little-known but magisterial book (Götternamen) wanted to write the most remote history of Greek religion with the help of the names of the gods,2 I thought that it would be possible to write the very old

Toponym as Evidence in the History of Ideas

story of Sappho’s Lesbos using the personal names in Sappho’s world. I develop this position in the poem “The Square Sail,” but it is programmatically present already in the first poem (“First Prologus to the Charaxos-Poem”). To illustrate further my stance and approach to names, I’ll say this. In my book Phrasikleia (1988) I devoted a chapter to the logic of Greek name-giving with an excellent article by Max Sulzberger as my starting point. If Odysseus’s son is called Telemachos, literally “Far-off-fighter,” the name does not primarily refer to its carrier, who only as an adult will be able to correspond to it, but to Telemachos’s father, Odysseus, who is not only “fighting at distant Troy” but who is also one of the Homeric world’s best archers. When the same Odysseus on his way home from Troy finally gives the Cyclops his true identity, he presents himself as the “city-destroyer” Odysseus, ptolipórthios, an epithet that condenses one of his principal achievements, the destruction of Troy. After returning home to Ithaca, he has a son who receives the name Ptoliporthes, virtually identical to the epithet quoted. In other words, the proper name of the son summarizes one of his father’s great feats. Every time you ask, “Why are you called Ptoliporthes?” the answer is the story of the Wooden Horse and the subsequent destruction of the Troy, which in this way is condensed and commemorated in the name. If this is the logic of Greek name-giving, we just have to apply it to the names present in Sappho’s world, I thought. And that’s what I do in the poem “The Square Sail.” Sappho’s brothers are named Charaxos, Erigyios, and Larichos, and together they picture the early deceased father, winegrower, already wine exporter as his eldest son Charaxos was going to be, athletically built, vigorous, accompanied by seagulls – like the plowman or the skipper. Winegrower, I said. That’s no small picturesque detail of the tradition around Sappho’s family. For a millennium, the wine from Lesbos was very highly valued in the Mediterranean world. As a Marxist, I should of course have paid attention to this circumstance forty years ago! This predicament must in fact have characterized the island’s entire economic life and in addition promoted the Dionysus cult into a first order Lesbian worship, though the god is mentioned only once by Sappho. The turning point in my collection is situated on pages 60–1 where you find the poem “The Winegod’s Mask” retelling in seven Sapphic stanzas a story familiar from Pausanias. Dionysus has a special cult in Methymna, in the northern part of the island, where the mask was on display. The theme of Lesbian wine production is then being developed into the handful of poems that follow this poem and receives its most pregnant formulation in “Overdetermination,” dedicated to the Swedish Plato and Althusser translator Jan Stolpe. In this poem it is said that the political level of the society where Sappho lived was in a state of extremely rapid development. This links the poem to a theme already present at an early stage in the collection, a theme that gives focus to the Lesbian

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statesman and Presocratic thinker Pittacus. The poem “Dialogue at the Wedding Reception” begins this thematically coherent sequence. In fact, the poem’s set-up is inspired by Pierre Bourdieu’s account3 of Michel Foucault’s funeral, providing the sociologist with a unique occasion to witness concretely the “social field” where Foucault had belonged (normally an abstract construct). This incident provided me with the opportunity to apply Bourdieu’s view of Foucault’s funeral to Charaxos and Doricha’s wedding party as opening a social space where it would be possible to have the sociologically interesting players in Sappho’s world react with one another (as if it were a chemical experiment). Pittacus, opposing the vendetta, suddenly finds himself face to face with Sappho, who encouraged her brother to love his family and hate the enemy. Thereupon the portrait of the great Lesbian Presocratic is developed and refined. First in “With Pittacus, We Suddenly Stand in the Midst of the History of Ideas” and then in “Clarification (on Request),” based on an outstandingly important fact: J.-P. Vernant (1962) has attracted attention to the bouleutḗrion planned by the philosopher Thales, the “council,” placed in the “middle” (méson) of a federation of Ionian city states; for Vernant this never-realized project marks a decisive stage in the history of political thought. Now, the fact is that at least half a century earlier we find a Mésson (with boulḗ, “Council”) located in the “middle” of Lesbos’s three main cities, Mytilene, Eresos, and Methymna. Thales’s project must therefore be considered as copied on a political topography already existing in Lesbos – which places the island in the vanguard of political thought in Sappho’s and Pittacus’s epoch. To the original selection of nine, one poem is added, focusing on the specific linguistic situation of Lesbos and written, as mentioned above, in one of Hölderlin’s favourite metres, the Alcaic stanza.

15.1 Map of Lesbos.

Toponym as Evidence in the History of Ideas

First Prologus to the Charaxos-Poem Before the Charaxos-poem begins, a rich heiress on the island of Lesbos marries a nobleman from the north, “named after the river Skamander,” Skamandrōnymos. He comes from the land around ancient Troy and is obviously not called Skamandronymos but simply Skamandros, Skamander, or Skamandrios like the son of Hektor in the Iliad. It is a name that is transmitted in the Trojan royal family. Of course, they are no longer kings, several centuries after the Trojan war. Rather the local nobility, eugeneîs, which may be translated as “well-born.” Compared to his wife, named Kleis, he stands out as dark in skin and small in stature. As far as he is concerned, he has no land to inherit up at Troy. And is therefore enthusiastic about the perspective to be responsible for his new wife’s country estates, mainly consisting of vineyards in the northern part of the island, around Dionysus-centred Methymna. In an amazingly short time, he makes her property profitable. The vines grow naturally on the terraces, but traditionally no props are used here, they grow along the ground. A crowd of vineyard workers, slaves, belong to his household, but Skamander has initiated, together with local potters, a necessary and significant production of amphorae, indispensable for the exportation of wine. For what he has had in mind has been exportation, northwards to Troy, eastward to Lydia and Sardis, and finally, southwards to Naukratis, situated at the westernmost branch of the Delta. He soon realizes that Egypt is his essential destination. not only because the Egyptians value his wine above other wines but because he thus avoids excessive transport by land. Like this his cargo goes from one port to another. Sailor he was from the outset! He and his wife will have four children together, of whom his favourite daughter clearly resembles her father. The same small stature, the same dark skin colour.

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She wears a very un-Greek name, Psappho, which eventually will be streamlined to Sappho. Their eldest son, on the other hand, resembles his mother and has a very Greek name, Charaxos, formed from the verb , meaning “plow land, plow the sea,” as if the father’s “cleaving” of clods, and of Mediterranean waves were condensed in a single name. The adjective charaxípontos really exists! He has already accompanied his father to Naucratis “plowing the waves.” The younger brothers Erigyios and Larichos have names of which the first alludes to their father’s “athletic physique,” the other to the “gulls” following the ship far out to sea. Larus minutus, “dwarf gull,” is also found in the Nile Delta, whose bird richness even Lesbos cannot surpass. Lar-ichos formed as Phryn-ichos, the pioneer tragedian’s name or nickname. Here, the prologue gets stuck, since Skamandronymos suddenly dies. Tradition transmits no cause of death. Just that Sappho is six years old when this happens.

Toponym as Evidence in the History of Ideas

The Dialogue at the Wedding Reception Not that they would have sought each other’s company in the crowd of the wedding reception but once they were face to face they knew exactly what they wanted to say to each other. Sappho wanted to ask Pittacus why he so generously had sided with Charaxus and allowed his home to be the wedding celebration’s starting point, – without which no procession, no pómpa, could have been realized. And got the answer that Pittacus had felt immediate sympathy for Charaxus, despite the fact that the Penthilids, among whom he himself had ended up through his marriage, found themselves in inherited conflict with Sappho’s and Charaxus’s family. When a majority of people elected him dictator or rather: the island’s aisymnḗtēs he had taken a principled stand against any clan strife and believed to have found an ally in Charaxus; inversely, Charaxus had expressed his admiration for Pittacus’s daredevil action up at Trojan Sigeion, as his family, Sappho’s own, had special attachments to the region. Scamandrius had personal memories of the Achilles-cult at Troy and would not have tolerated the ambitions of the Athenians. What business was Sigeion of theirs? – Pittacus now arrived at his own question to Sappho. He was very direct. He asked her why she, in her poetry, so emphatically encouraged her brother to hate the enemy and keep love exclusively for his own kin. “We can’t go on living like this.” His saying had already begun to pave its way: “Forgiving is better

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than revenge.” Vendetta is a theoretically infinite chain of retaliatory actions, but now Pittacus thought he had found the support of a young philosopher from Miletus, who recently had said that nature, cosmos, the inhospitable universe, follows the principle of the vendetta but that human society, Ragnar Thoursie’s Sundbyberg, is built like a rampart4 against the order of the vendetta. Human society is not part of natural history. We have walked out of it. This is our Pact.

Toponym as Evidence in the History of Ideas

With Pittacus, We Suddenly Stand in the Midst of the History of Ideas “Among the sayings of Pittacus, this single one has more weight than a whole dialogue of Plato,” is what you tell me with provocative emphasis. Difficult to decide whether you are serious. In any case, Alcaeus was the first one to profit from its application, as Pittacus – when the captured poet, in his misery, had been dragged before him – ordered his immediate release for the reason that “forgiving is better than vengeance.” The formula, in which we thus may recognize his weightiest saying, is the quintessence of what the most subtle minds of the archaic epoch concluded after tackling the problem of the theoretically infinite series of retaliatory actions. The only way of bringing an end to it was simply – forgiving, Which takes the agents of the vendetta by surprise, disarming them. Forgiving is the quintessence! “True victories are won without bloodshed,” reads Pittacus’s own corollary to his saying. During the century preceding Sappho and Alcaeus, the Lesbians had transposed, into a society at peace, the practices of the Homeric assembly of warriors, taken as the model for the decision-making of the political community as well as for its distribution of common property. Politics first and foremost geometry: Circle and Middle, Circle and Mésson. The citizens posted in a circle when what is common is placed in the middle in order to be distributed with equity or when the individual citizen takes the floor addressing the assembly. In Lesbos, Mésson is legible in the place name Messa, In our time the address for a good dozen of people. The toponym the irrefutable testimony about this phase in the history of ideas.

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Indicating the midpoint of a circle on which the three main localities find themselves: Eresos, Methymna, and Mytilene. After ten years of dictatorship, Pittacus lays down his power in the Mésson: the collective community regains leadership. The political history of Lesbos is henceforth unclear, you say, but I retort that its ulterior history is that of Greece as a whole.

Toponym as Evidence in the History of Ideas

Bedfellows Imagine a political meeting some time right at the end of the sixties, it’s late at night, the smoke from “Prince” and “John Silver”5 is dense in the room when a male attendee (at once vague and opinionated) under the heading “Other matters” suggests a discussion on the new predicament with women beginning to come together and in analogy with the traditional left groups beginning to call one another “comrades” – How are we going to deal with this? Whereas members of the ancient Greek revolutionary parties call one another hetaîroi, Sappho’s “companions” are designated with feminine hétairai (etaírais aeísō in fragment 160: “I’ll sing of my comrades”). But is this really the way we are to understand it? A witty head suggests: “Bedfellows.” One hears crude laughs from meeting participants (exclusively male). Laughter echoes right down in ancient Greece. Not only do women sign up and meet on a regular basis. In their capacity of “bedfellows” they must also be sleeping with one another. Right? In Greek Sappho’s companions will, in addition, be “luxury whores”: hétairai. So begins Western comedy’s sordid exploitation of the simple word “comrade” hetaîros hetaíra. Proud of their reputation of having invented democracy In spite of the precedence of the Lesbians (see above pp. 257–8) the Athenians cherish this smokescreen in the history of ideas: Why try to look beyond it When the Lesbians can’t even speak neat and clear Greek?

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Clarification (On Request) You write “the precedence of the Lesbians.” Now I have to exact an explanation from you. For how long is this dizzy Pythia going to manifest herself in what you call “her nightly dictation”? A clarification is needed! – ok. My old teacher Jean-Pierre Vernant has told me how his Origines from 1962 were originally intended as a contribution in a political debate carried out inside the French Communist Party: “If it is politics we are doing, then I present in this book the very foundation of what I think politics must be: debate without restrictions! Please refute me, if I’m wrong!” From Origines I have myself for almost half a century brought with me two key passages to be found in Herodotus. Key passage No. 1: I.170 with Thales’s bouleutḗrion, placed “in the middle” of Ionia, as the political centre of a federation of Ionic cities: epoch-making, even though the project (from c. 550) was never realized. Key passage No. 2: III.142 when the tyrant Polycrates dies in 522, he is succeeded by Maiandrios, who lays down his power (arkhḗ) “in the middle” and proclaims the equality of all Samians in exchange of a sacred land plot; extraordinary moment, even though the project was never realized. These two key passages point toward Cleisthenes and the democratic revolution in Athens (510). Not until very recently have I realized that they have unavowed Lesbian models. The first model goes back at least to the VIIth century and is a topographic reality – Mésson in Lesbos,

Toponym as Evidence in the History of Ideas

already the political centre for the island’s three towns (with a common “council” boulḗ, Aeol. bólla, on top of all); the second model may be dated to ca 580 when Pittacus on his own initiative lays down his power (arkhḗ), after having brought the island’s constitution in order during a decade and received a sacred land plot in compensation. Finally, the fact that the famous allegory of the ship of state, familiar from Plato, as formulated by Alcaeus (fr. 208), has an explicit reference to the mésson as the “middle” of the allegorical ship: òn tò mésson, it says, with a term that the poem’s listeners couldn’t possibly dissociate from the place name, although the poem makes it refer to the “middle” of the ship.

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The Square Sail Let me put it like this: after returning from the Trojan war Odysseus has a son born to him who is given the name Ptolipórthēs, synonymous with the epithet that the hero is endowed with in the ninth Book: “city-destroyer,” in Greek ptolipórthios. As a square sail, it may be developed into a story, short or long (the Odyssey a bulging canvas), and is itself the story’s elementary form, its minimal version, hard rolled up waiting for a favourable wind. Minimalistic this name states something about the father but still nothing about its carrier, the big challenge of whom it will later become: the best the carrier of the name can do is to show himself worthy of it, live up to it, so that the son may resemble his father. In preliterate society, such a name is as stable as an inscription. – In the same way as Hermann Usener who has written the history of Greek religion at its remotest with the names of the gods as his only evidence, it is reasonable to use human names as evidence in order to write that human history for which evidence proper is missing. The working hypothesis is ready. What we are waiting for? – Charaxos is the name of the son. What does his name state about his father? Charássei: “He cleaves clods and/or sea waves.” But in addition chárax means “prop” for the vine, a fact that contrasts with the Lesbian way of letting the vines creep along the ground. Should we imagine that the father introduced the continental way of cultivating vines, thus revolutionizing the entire island’s viticulture? In any event, he was his native wife’s “prop” or “support” in a wedding symbolism with which Ovid and even Shakespeare have made us familiar: the wife is the vine, the husband the supporting elm tree.

Toponym as Evidence in the History of Ideas

The younger sons are called Erigyios and Larichos. Eri- is a reinforcing prefix not seldom found in Greek proper names. Homeric gyîa means “limbs” and this gives the name the meaning “athletic.” It states that the father was strongly built. Larichos establishes a connection with láros, “gull” although the a is long in the name but with rare exceptions short in the bird-name. The ending -ichos is familiar from other proper names, Phrynichos, “Toad,” and closer to us: feminine Doricha. The name Larichos states that the father in some sense was accompanied by gulls, which may apply to sailors as well as plowmen. Together the three names of the sons suggest a man who has his livelihood from the vineyard and wine export over the sea. Hear his square sail resound in the wind! Now if the name is as stable as an inscription, this finally signifies that history based on written evidence starts with the study of the oldest surviving proper names in Greece. Sappho’s father then stands forth as something far more substantial than that roaming shade with the Trojan prince name Scamandrius.

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Overdetermination As a newlywed, I wanted to read Capital with my wife; the idea was that we together form a study group. Today it seems both self-evident and reasonable that she refused to take part. And yet, I would really have liked to read with her the first chapter with note 33, which the other night presented itself to me with extraordinary force, when I realized how the social formation of Sappho’s Lesbos was structured. My wife was sleeping peacefully and would surely not have been inclined to discuss the matter at that moment. Io dormo! (Her favourite quotation from Un Americano a Roma, 1954.) But this is what I thought in my half slumber: society’s superstructure was determined by the economic base, ok. But in a more complex way than is generally believed. If the cultivation of vines is the dominant economic activity on Lesbos and gives the society its mode of production, it is nonetheless a fact that the island’s society is first of all determined by the religious level, primarily by the Dionysus-cult-as-the-particular-form-of-Lesbian-consciousness and only secondarily by the economic not to mention the political level. The Dionysus-cult dominates everything. In the last instance, the social formation is of course determined by the economy, by its wine exportation, by its wine trade as a whole with a division of labour producing identifiable classes: landed nobility, merchants, craftsmen, small farmers, slaves. Society as a whole is an “overdetermined totality,” and not only determined by its economy. It happened that my path crossed Althusser’s in the corridors and staircases of the École Normale on the rue d’Ulm. He made a warm fatherly impression when he came there in his windbreaker and green wellies on the way to or from the library. His sympathetic eye

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I remember it still. It was raining outside. A few years earlier I had written to him with a fatuous question on Marxism’s relationship to psychoanalysis. The question seems today unreal, dépassé. I should have asked him to clarify the concept of overdetermination that he had borrowed from Freud. For the fact remains that his exercises in Pour Marx make it possible to give note 33 the importance it deserves. The social formation is determined (1) by its religious level, (2) by its economic and (3) by its political level, which around 600 bce evolves much faster than the others, it moves at a furious pace compared with the long-established Dionysus cult and the routines of the economic activity. The totality, the overdetermined one, is suddenly destabilized! But what is obvious here, says Marx, is that Lesbian society could not live by religion. The manner in which the Lesbians gained their livelihood inversely explains why the Dionysus cult played the chief part. When I get that far, I hear my wife’s quiet breath and have no heart to awake her. For Jan Stolpe

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Vingudens mask

The Wine God’s Mask

Så förtäljs det, Pittakos: flera gånger hade man lagt ut sina nät i havet norr om ön men inte fått minsta fisk när plötsligt en sällsam

So the tale runs, Pittakos: several times they had cast their nets into the sea north of the island but not caught the smallest fish when suddenly a strange

tingest följde med över båtens reling drypande av sjögräs och tång: snart rengjord slog den våra fiskare med förfäran, – ogrekisk, olik

object followed over the boat’s railing dripping of seaweed and wrack: soon cleaned it struck our fishermen with horror, – un-Greek, different

alla gudabilder de sett, en Främlings mask, ett ljudlöst skrattande mansansikte: havets gröna glitter i träets tomma hålor till ögon.

from all images of gods they had seen, a Stranger’smask, a silently laughing male face: the green glitter of the sea in the empty eyeholes of the wood.

Fruktan fyllde dem när de så med masken återvände in till Methymna, brisen förde dem tillbaka till utgångspunkten, medan de noga

Fear filled them when thus with the mask they returned to Methymna, the breeze bringing them back to their starting point, while they carefully

undvek maskens skrämmande sätt att stirra dem i ögonen. Som om all makt tillkom Honom. – Från Methymna beslöt man genast sända beskickning

avoided the mask’s frightening way of staring them in the eyes. As if all power was given Him. – From Methymna it was decided to send a prompt mission

för att fråga Pythia i Delfi vad mans skulle ta sig till med den underbara masken av olivträ; oraklet bjöd dem att i Methymna

to ask the Pythia in Delphi what measures should be taken with the wonderful olive wood mask; the oracle told them to dedicate it

ägna den en kult under namnet , Dionysos Fallen. Så skedde; avbild göts i brons och finns till beskådan upphängd borta i Delfi.

in Methymna under the cult name , Dionysus Fallen. This was done; a copy was cast in bronze and is hanging to be beheld in faraway Delphi.

Pausanias X.19.3

Pausanias X.19.3

Toponym as Evidence in the History of Ideas

Instagram with Dionysus Mask , π , Alcaeus, fr. 366 Lobel-Page

No sooner had we understood that the vineyards were the basis of prosperity in faraway Lesbos, than Dionysus stood out in the role that belonged to him. It was through Dionysus that the Lesbians understood their life-world. The foreign mask was hanging in Methymna. It was through the foreign god that the Lesbians were breathing. What does “foreign” mean here, as applied to a god whose name is as old as Linear B? Dionysus is perfectly Greek. In Methymna he places alterity at the centre of the island’s symbolic order. This is his project wherever he comes. The foreign, the Lydian or Oriental is at home in the self-understanding of the Lesbians. The Other is not pushed away! Sappho, too, inhabits this thought. Dionysus’s mask is the sign of becoming-other. Wine the medium of becoming-other even when moderate wine drinkers meet. I wear a mask, I’m not myself. I have become other. First-person singular is the mask called “I,” with a glittering interior, called “myself,” reflexive as a mirror. Persona, π π ! “I know with myself (“I’m con-scious”),” says Sappho, Grammar is her theatre. “I am the spectator of my desire.” Thus, Dionysus marks the horizon of Sappho’s thought. One. If we do not take Charaxos’s contribution seriously, Sappho’s poetry will remain incomprehensible. Two. If we do not take Dionysus seriously, her poetry will remain an enigma to us. Three. For a long time I reproached myself in silence

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for not having mentioned with a single word what had been going on daily during my writing: the evacuation of four hundred thousand refugees to Lesbos, a drama that, inversely, put Lesbos on the world map for the artist Ai Weiwei. His Instagrams showing him among Syrian refugees with thousands of life jackets and punctured rubber lifeboats. The sea in the evening sun. His face: a Dionysus mask. For Jonathan Bordo

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Skandal i Athen: Solon lär sig en Sapfodikt utantill

Scandal in Athens: Solon Learns a Sappho Poem by Heart

Platon, Protagoras 341 c

Plato, Protagoras 341 c

Hur ska vi tolka Prodikos’ arrogans när han hos Platon hävdar att Pittakos var uppvuxen i ett ”barbariskt” tungomål, präglat av oklarheter,

How are we to interpret Prodicus’s arrogance pretending, in Plato, that Pittacus was raised in a “barbaric” language, lacking in clarity,

där, till exempel, ”svårt” kan betyda ”ont”? Han menar faktiskt att det för Pittakos var ”ont” att vara föredömlig, inte alls ”svårt.” Vilken oförskämdhet!

where, for example, “hard” may mean “bad”? He actually means that for Pittacus it was “bad” to be an exemplary man, not at all “hard.” The cheek of it!

På samma sätt är Sapfo ju ”uppvuxen i ett barbariskt tungomål,” jämförbart med skånska, eller bättre: danska, oskönt och nästintill obegripligt,

In the same way, Sappho is “raised in a barbaric language,” comparable to South-Swedish, or better: Danish, harsh, almost beyond comprehension,

föraktat i det högfärdiga Athen, som inte kunde glömma sitt nederlag i slaget vid Sigeion där ju lesbierna – oväntat framgångsrika –

spurned by haughty Athenians, who could not forget their defeat in the battle of Sigeion where the Lesbians – how unexpected their victory! –

som ättlingar till Trojas förgjorda folk stack upp: nu måste Lesbos förlöjligas till varje pris, dess dialekt blev självskriven måltavla för besvikna

as descendants of the doomed people of Troy took heart: now Lesbos had to be ridiculed at any cost, its dialect became the self-evident target for disenchanted

athenare. Men utan att påverkas förstod då Solon, statsman och själv poet, hur Sapfos dikt skulle värderas: “Lugnt kan man dö, om man lärt sig detta!”

Athenians. But unimpressed by this Solon, statesman, himself a poet, understood how Sappho’s poetry should be valued: “You can die calmly, if you have learned this!”

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Note to Namnet på Sapfos dotter (The Name of Sappho’s Daughter, Stockholm, 2017) May Doricha sense you equally harsh, O Kypris, may her boastful epic cease Telling how he came back a second time For her love. Sappho, Fr. 15 Lobel-Page

In the light of my book on Sappho (Lund, 2015) I think one could reasonably pretend that the new fragments that came into circulation at the beginning of 2014 represented a long-awaited breakthrough for my understanding of Sappho – for example, in the sense that a fragment like the overlooked No. 15 suddenly started to radiate meaning in the dark. Doricha obtained unexpected consistency in the new fragment’s first line (“refrain” thrúlēstha) and in fragment 15 (“[boastful] epic”” π ennépoisa) implying that she is in possession of poetic competence; in addition, we must pay attention to the Souda dictionary’s similarly overlooked notice that the former slave, later hetaira, became Sappho’s sister-in-law and mother of Charaxos’s children. Not just any Egyptian prostitute, in other words! And in turn, Charaxos cannot have been any wine merchant. From this “breakthrough” it was only a step to develop a sort of “experimental” cultural anthropology – in Marcel Detienne’s anthropological meaning of the word experimental – to deepen our familiarity with the world that is Sappho’s. It is in this perspective I would like to see the poems here presented, in which the poetic impulse takes precedence over the philological one.

Notes 1 E.g., “Scandal in Athens” is written in Alcaic stanzas, Hölderlin’s favourite four-liner. In my view, it is an experimental lyrical poem as intellectual as Alcaeus’s “Ship of State” (fr. 326) or Hölderlin’s “Rousseau.” As a matter of fact, the use of Lesbian metres, contrasting with my current verse-making, is part of my “experimental method,” as it presents an occasion to discover “the linguistic room available,” framing the possibilities of a poem by Sappho or Alcaeus. What is the discursive economy of a poem consisting of 7 × 38 syllables (as Sappho, fr. 1, the formal equivalent of “The Wine-God’s Mask”)? What are the limits of the lyric form as experienced from the inside, in other words, the limits of what can be said in it? 2 See John Scheid, “Conférence de M. John Scheid,” École pratique des hautes études, Section des sciences religieuses 105 (1996–97): 311–5.

Toponym as Evidence in the History of Ideas 3 See Pierre Bourdieu, Manet: une revolution symbolique (Paris: Seuil, 2013). 4 A reference to Olof Palme’s favourite poem. 5 Standard Swedish cigarette brands in the late 1960s.

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16.1 Blake Fitzpatrick, BreweryPond,PortHope, 1992, photograph.

Epilogue: Announcing the Disaster Jonathan Bordo

Poisoned Mimesis The image, full of suggestion, is directive of the intentions of this collection. First, the photograph presents a tranquil landscape scene, a pond, a sample of the picture landscape, an inevitable constant and starting point of the collection. The image is accompanied by a diagram-like inscription suggestive of hydrology and engineering. This overwriting disturbs the landscape, upsets its sentiment – when is landscape not the expression of sentiment? A reminder of that sentiment and even the real estate value of landscape happens also to be a picture by Blake Fitzpatrick. Returning to the initial photograph, one might say that the overwriting brings out the invisible of the photograph. It elicits that which cannot be seen. That which the photograph cannot show is the toxic invisibility of radiation. Brewery Pond was poisoned. The photograph cannot show its toxicity. Yet, as Sontag so neatly puts it, “After all a devastated landscape is still a landscape. There is beauty in ruins.”1 This insight, so restrained with the Fitzpatrick photographs, is hyperbolically, even bombastically, true in the environmental-industrial-devastation photographs of Edward Burtynsky, who perhaps more than any other contemporary photographer, fashions photographs as beautiful ruins at the limits of the aesthetic sublime, jeopardizing a separation between the aesthetic object and the document. Yet, no matter the restraint of the Fitzpatrick or the excess of the Burtynsky, the photograph in its very medium is limited as to what it can show. It seldom can show what it seeks; its aspiration falls short whether it is the invisible below the surface of what can be seen as with Brewery Pond or whether its topic resides outside the frame. To make the invisible visual whether invisible beneath the appearance or outside the frame expresses the double limitation of the photograph and language’s impingement on the photograph. Brewery Pond is a poisoned mimesis. It appears attractive when it should repel, corroborating perhaps unintentionally the aesthetic judgment of Oscar Wilde that “the search for beauty is the poisonous secret of life.”2

16.2 Blake Fitzpatrick, BreweryPond,PortHope, 1992, photograph.

Epilogue

Announcing the Disaster The poisoned mimesis of Brewery Pond, the poison beneath the tranquil surface announces the theme of this collection. The theme is disaster, and the poisons that mark the disaster are initially material invisibles that begin in material things that reach the surface and become apparent as life-threatening manifestations under certain circumstances. The domain of the toxic invisible is removed from the commonplace. To view requires that one be a witness to the invisible. Only in retrospect does the theme become irresistible, inevitable. How could disaster be the topic? Disaster reached the surface with covid-19. There are then three promontories – climate change, uranium poisoning, and pandemic. All three, arising from and products of scientific knowledge, and each with an entity and a devastating efflux from it. How could the pandemic that faces the world in this present juncture draw a line with a date? Surely it has to be there in the reckoning. It follows rather than pursues Benjamin’s angel of history. Only at the beginning and the end of this collection as book can disaster come to the fore as the theme of the book. Disaster might be said belatedly to be the leitmotif of the collection and yet to speak about it, to address it, to find the appropriate language is a delicate matter. Yet the very naming of disaster as the theme of this work returns to the outset of this collection and to the place question itself posed for the first time in the tradition of Western literature by Oedipus at Colonus, the question that will be posed over again as initiating the discourse of place – Where am I? What gives me the right to be here? The place question inaugurates the journey as a backward derivation, an account for the how and why of Oedipus rooted to that spot and not somewhere else. To find the why and the how, the unfolding narrative of justification must return to the outset of the initiating play in the Oedipus cycle to Oedipus the King just as one must return to Aeschylus Eumenides to find out why Colonus is a sacred site prohibiting human presence. The Oedipus cycle is inaugurated by the report of the disaster: King, you yourself have seen our city reeling like a wreck already; it can scarcely lift its prow out of the depths, out of the bloody surf. A blight is on the fruitful plants of the earth. a blight is on the cattle in the fields, a blight is on our women that no children are born to them; a God that carries fire, a deadly pestilence, is on our town,

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strikes us and spares not, and the house of Cadmus is emptied of its people while Black Death grows rich in groaning and in lamentation …3 The proem to Oedipus Rex presents a summary of the disaster that faces the City of Thebes – famine, sterility, plague. In their connection one might say that it is not a black swan of the unpredictable and the unforeseen, that which was omitted from the calculations. The pileup of causes is a black elephant, the accumulation of forces which have congregated in the room of our collective planetary life for quite some time and gone unnoticed. The black elephant of the ancients provides a cue for the black elephant of the disaster today. How different are the responses? The ancient response to the disaster in the Oedipus tragedy sets in motion an inquiry into the cause. The cause is to seek after hidden transgressions and crimes. The cause is to be found in human conduct – moral transgression. The cause in Oedipus is driven by and in pursuit of meaning. So the truths of transgression disclosed at the conclusion of Oedipus Rex have to be revisited, retrieved, recalled. The Oedipus story has to be retold to prove that Oedipus is an exception, a sacred man, and that he and only he is entitled to find his resting place at Colonus, the sacred precinct of the Eumenides. This is the resolution to the disaster initiated by the Oedipus cycle. Cause and meaning converge; destiny is origin. In the inquiry into disaster that faces the planetary life of the world today, only belatedly does the investigation turn cause back to the pursuit of meaning and reach the form of life (Lebensform) in the senses that the later Ludwig Wittgenstein intended.4 The inquiry into the disaster commences with the matters of evidencedriven facts – the objective nature of carbon, of uranium, of a virus. The analysis and diagnosis of science precede and prepare the cultural inquiry into a form of life that has led to the convergence and proliferation of these forces into a threat to the very permanence of terrestrial life. This is the domain of Arthur Eddington’s two tables.5 On the one hand, there is that which we experience as the commonplace, and on the other, there is that which we come to know through science. We don’t have access to the theoretical entity itself, and instead we are offered fabulous visualizations. The mimesis is poisoned only through that recognition, and it is that which turns what we experience into testimony, that which witnesses the disaster. The congregation of these forces is the black elephant in the room, and it has led to the introduction of a morally tinged and culturally saturated category of the Anthropocene, a category to designate a civilization hurdling to its destruction. Where geology ends and culture begins needs to be sorted out – a task for contemporary self-understanding. For even the understanding of the covid-19 virus is a manifestation of the Anthropocene, because the human incursion into the habitats of dwindling wild nature is the likely etiology of the pandemic virus. The destruction of wild

Epilogue

habitat is ubiquitous and causal with respect to climate change. The destruction of the Amazon rain forest proceeds apace, the Amazon River a transmitter of the pandemic. The denial multiplies and is recursive. So the virus likely has its causal source in climate change. Climate change caused by carbon emissions in a mix with radiation and the clearances of wild habitats link Wuhan to the Amazon to the great fires of Australia.

The Disease Carrier or Camus’s La Peste In the pandemic that now consumes the world, perhaps no literary work except Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year is more often cited than Albert Camus’s La Peste (The Plague). A novel, in its initial composition written during and published clandestinely in the Second World War, unfolds on two tracks. It is a fictitious chronicle of the bubonic plague that befell Oran, Camus’s hometown, and it is an allegory about the Nazi occupation. Its external signifier cannot be discounted. Its clandestine version was grasped immediately as a commentary on the conditions of the Occupation. In this respect it is comparable to Les Enfants de Paradis, also made under the conditions of the occupation and which was also understood as allegory. Both the novel and the film were considered as acts and calls to resistance and would have been viewed by the Nazi state and its Vichy comprador state as acts of treason, punishable by death.6 A reader and viewer today will have only heard the rumour of it as allegory and perhaps at best find it a matter of detective hermeneutics to establish the sites of intersection and the tracks of the correlative. The need to combat fascism is a universal imperative through its correlation to the plague, as if the right to resistance were a given. It is not justified. It is assumed. The need to resist the tyranny of the Nazis draws from one virus as if to strengthen the resistance to combat the other. Such a correlation between pandemic disease and tyranny becomes more and more apparent in this day, barely even requiring the urgency of the metaphorical exchange of one virus for another without the slightest of even metaphorical suggestion. At the time, Camus was bold in his correlation of the virus of pandemic to the condition of living under tyranny by the imposition of the symbolic form of the Rat as a signifier – plague-carrying rats correlated to the Nazi occupiers. In the interval between a fictive narrator and an authorial subject, Camus posits the civic witness as a subject to unify the two tracks of narration into testimony as an assertion of and call to resistance.7 The two tracks form a structure that is articulated in the opening chapter, setting out the conditions for narration as testimony as if the unfolding fiction were a chronicle having the same truth status as Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, the model for Camus. The unfolding of the disaster is described as if it were a first-person eyewitness account from the point

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of view of someone who was there on-site, travelled the topography of the disease, and who had access to the documents that could corroborate his testimony, applying the conditions for the constitution of a subject that are delineated as a philosophical prelude to the narrative. The pandemic that besets Oran is presented in terms of the symbolic form of the Rat as the disease carrier of the bubonic plague. The notion of a carrier, whether as the carrier of a disease or as the carrier of language, is of crucial importance because of the symbiotic investment in the very notion of a carrier both as an instrument and an agent – the Rat as the carrier of the disease, the Rat as an agent of the disease. The virus is inseparable from the carrier for Camus, who shies way from its scientific virology in the way that covid-19 is understood and exposed and made visual as its own distinct entity, constantly under examination and report. The virus of the plague is materially invested in the carrier, making cause and meaning, instrument and agent, inseparable. Under what circumstances does a carrier as agent become a subject? In view of the literary, political, and moral purposes of the novel, one might say Camus needs and depends on the full symbology of the rats as carrier, agent, and finally subjects. In the disease carrier of the Rat, the virus is fully charged with symbolic agency, an explosion of cultural significations: rats on ships, harbours, the sewers, les bafond, the underground of life, vermin, the scourge, the scapegoat. The rat as a signifier is so overdetermined and culturally saturated. The rat incubates ancient memory. Yet Camus leaves out or at least doesn’t mention a contemporary attribution of the rat as the carrier of pandemic, which defines the novel as an allegory written during the occupation. For the era of National Socialism, the Rat was the symbolic form of the Jew in the Nazi demonology. Mass murder of the Jews was seen as a hygienic measure. That symbology was part of the anti-Semitic campaign in France and Vichy. The plague understood allegorically provided Camus with the literary means to pervert the symbology of the Rat, redirecting it from the victims to the Nazis as the occupying force of France in the same way that the rats had come to occupy Oran. What starts as a signifier becomes an oversaturated symbolic form. In his perversion of the symbology of the rat, Camus redirected it from the victim (the Jew) to the victimizer (the Nazis). It is in that perversion of his linkage between civic testimony and resistance that it is effected. Taking in the toxin of hatred, becoming the victim, marks the moral transition from disease carrier as agent to disease carrier as subject: the civic witness.8 In the present pandemic and the conversion of one virus for another, the resistance to covid-19 has found Black Lives Matter as a correlative and efflux. It is precisely the construal of the Rat as a symbolic form that makes contemporary the Camus account in the situation of the present pandemic with the outbreak of racist violence in the United States. covid-19 is a stimulus for racism in the United States in the way that brings out all the endemic social contradictions of a society incapable even of liberal social welfare in the way that liberty rights are entwined with racism. W.J.T.

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Mitchell effects this correlation of covid-19 as a virus and the virus of racism effecting both as a causality and as dis-analogy. Mitchell writes: This is an instructive moment for glimpsing the critical dis-analogy between the virus and racism. Covid-19 is a singular global event that has opened up an epoch in human history, a pandemic that will run its course in the indeterminate future. Racism, by contrast, is endemic, so long-lasting that it can be compared – imperfectly – to “original sin,” a built-in flaw in human nature itself. It is the very imperfection of the viral analogy that makes it so powerful as a component of our teachable moment. Because it is not solely a matter of analogy, similarity, and iconicity, but the relation of temporal and spatial adjacency – the uncanny coincidence of the virus, its mandate of social isolation with the unforgettably traumatic image of the police murder of one man, George Floyd, just a few weeks before the writing of these words. Pandemic and endemic converged on May 25, 2020 in an image that, need I say it, “went viral” around the world in a few days, sparking massive protests whose scale and duration seem unprecedented.9

16.3 A car with an anti-Semitic sign among the protestors gathered outside of the Ohio Statehouse calling for the lifting of restrictions.

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The virus, understood from the outset as an entity of science, becomes a necessary condition for civic subjects to recognize themselves (not the rats) as disease carriers. Such recognition of one’s being is itself a civic act that affirms the community. It is an act of voluntary adherence and acquiescence, an ethical act as such. With Camus, the allegory of the resistance to the plague was in the foreground while tyranny was being read offstage as the unsaid condition for which one was called to resist. At this point there is no need for allegory. Under the conditions of the present pandemic, is it active and voluntary adherence that steers a middle course in civic democracy surrounded by encroaching authoritarianisms of the right and left? The resistance that has erupted against racism is thus prepared by these two adherences of testimony. The one cannot be separated from the other. Both affirm universality. Testimony marks the passage, itself a step in resistance just as the wearing of masks and masks worn in mass Black Lives Matter protests are themselves active demonstrations of resistance.

Witness to the Disaster A general theory of place has not been offered,10 perhaps because there is something that is particular and even insistent in the very idea of place as inhibiting a general theory with its inevitable conceptual pursuit of a typology. In place of typology, instead a mathesis singularis that advances testimony both as a poetics and a documentary aesthetics. Let contingency and the times settle on the topics and sites. Perhaps it is better to dig deep into the very singularity of place and seek to delineate all the circles that emanate from a stone breaking the still surface of a pond at dusk with a loon call in the distance.11 Critical topography is intended to inspire such digging, delineating, recording, to invite random sitings, to mark the passage when the cogito of place becomes the testimony to a place. The theoretical disposition of this collection emphasized singularity, through description and analysis and case study, chorographic in its situatedness and monadological in its elaborations. Place then can be defined as a keeping place in the depth of investments, a spot that keeps things, memory, secrets, raptures, abominations, and poisons that are disclosed. A nuclear storage site, a cabinet of curiosities, the unconscious of Freud are all such keeping places. One example after another springs from the essays in the collection and most are cast in the shadow of disaster. This collection is marked by the here and now. Enunciating the disaster and finding the right articulacy for it is difficult not least because in the words of Maurice Blanchot “disaster impoverishes all experience, withdraws from experience all authenticity.”12 It drives us into the silence of trauma so acutely and presciently described in the oft-quoted words of Benjamin: “Was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown

Epilogue

silent – not richer, but poorer in communicable experience? ”13 W.G. Sebald in The Natural History of Destruction advanced the need for a kind of aesthetic writing that should break through that silence by finding an aesthetic form of testimony that sticks close to the facts and the obliterating of experience.14 Such becomes the task of the aesthetic document in testifying to the here and now and the tangible. Art shares a role in the service of truth at a time when tyranny begins by denying the facts of the disaster. Tim Snyder puts it this way: “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom … if nothing is true then all is spectacle.”15 At the beginning of the twenty first century, in the era of ecological disaster, we are faced not with modernity’s projection of the wilderness out of the discontents of the human life form; rather we are left with the earth as ruins. What is beyond terrestrial existence, for humans and all living beings who depend for their survival on inhabiting the surface of the earth, the very earth as a keeping place. And yet there is still an urgent truth to the last sentence of Candide: Voltaire’s imperative to cultivate our garden16 as the way to stay with the trouble.17 The spot marked X under a name, a new name over the sedimentary layers of names, offers a trowel, lever, set square, and edge for resistance in response to the overwhelming urgency to protect the common through its cultivation. This collection offers a testimony for this need to resist. Staying the course is a matter of staying in place.

Notes Acknowledgments: My special thanks to Paul Duro, Moritz Ingwersen, David Luban, Tom Mitchell, Margaret Olin, Jesper Svenbro, Yves Thomas, and Andrew Wernick, whose help, consideration, and thoughtfulness helped nudge the collection into its final form as reflected in this epilogue. 1 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), 81. 2 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2011). 3 David Grène and Richmond Lattimore, The Complete Greek Tragedies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 1:11–112. 4 Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (New York: Harper, 1969). 5 The two tables refer to the philosophically celebrated distinction between the theoretical table of physics and a commonplace work table as enunciated by Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (London: J.M. Dent, 1928). 6 See Jonathan Bordo, “Resistance as Wish Fulfillment,” in Berlin Memnopolis (forthcoming). The chapter offers a genealogy from Camus, through Marcel Ophuls and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, to Patrick Modiano. 7 Shoshana Felman, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Routledge, 1992). The work of Shoshana Felman has been singularly groundbreaking for the advancement of an aesthetics of testimony save for that of Carlo Ginzburg.

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Jonathan Bordo 8 See Laura Hancock, “Some Ohio Coronavirus Protesters Using Anti-Semitic Symbolism,” cleveland.com, 19 April 2020, updated 21 April 2020, www.cleveland.com/open/2020/04/ some-ohio-coronavirus-protesters-using-anti-semitism-symbolism.html. 9 W.J.T. Mitchell, “Present Tense 2020: For an Iconology of the Epoch,” Critical Inquiry 47, no. 2 (2021): 370–406. See also W.J.T. Mitchell, “The Historical Uncanny,” in Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 195–205, which focuses on the coincidence of the event of 11 September 2001 with the ongoing biopolitical controversy about cloning. 10 The American philosopher Edward Casey, more than anyone, has pursued that goal to enunciate such a comprehensive general theory of place. See Edward Casey, The Fate of Place (Berkley: University of California Press, 1997). See also Edward Casey, Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). 11 Here I emulate the third note of Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, applying his insight on the singularity of the photograph to the singularity of place. See Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill & Wang, 2010), 8–9. 12 Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 51. 13 Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Selected Writings (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2003). 14 “There was a tacit agreement, equally binding on everyone that the true state of material and moral ruin in which the country found itself was not to be described. The darkest aspects of the final act of destruction, as experienced by the great majority of the German population, remained under a kind of taboo like a shameful family secret, a secret that perhaps could not even be privately acknowledged.” W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction (New York: Knopf, 1999), 9–10. 15 Tim Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017), 65. 16 “Mais il faut cultiver notre jardin,” in Voltaire, Candide (Paris: Larousse, 2011), 216. Note, it’s “our,” not “my” garden. 17 I help myself to the happy phrase of Donna Haraway to give a title to a not-so-happy condition. See Haraway, Staying with the Trouble (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2016).

Postscript Jonathan Bordo

The riddling Sphinx induced us to neglect mysterious crimes and rather seek solution of troubles at our feet. (Sophocles, Oedipus the King, Grène translation, lines 130–3)

Place Matters opened through the marking of the final resting place of Oedipus at Colonus in the sacred park of the Eumenides. Place Matters ends with the X of unmarked burial sites of Indigenous children at the former residential schools. Oedipus at Colonus ends with closure, “enterrement” at Colonus. Oedipus has found his final resting place, the sacred man in a sacred place. The sudden and unexpected disclosure of unmarked “graves” of Indigenous children at former residential schools in Canada cannot be passed over in silence. The unmarked burial sites of 215 children were first discovered on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in May 2021. Since then, an estimated eighteen hundred unmarked graves have been discovered. These sites and the grim histories they carry cry out for justice. Instead of Oedipus telling his story, it falls to the peoples of Canada, its citizens, as a matter of civic obligation, to take in these truths and draw lessons from them, initiate concrete and transformative acts, acts as apologies in order to move forward from these terrible truths at our feet. The crimes arise from the residential school system of Canada from 1882 to 1996 that compelled under law Indigenous children to be taken from their families, wrested from their ancestral lands, and forcefully sequestered in such schools for their re-education and assimilation into “Christian Industrial Civilization,” in the terminology of Egerton Ryerson, one of its foremost architects and the namesake of a university that has been renamed so as to reconcile itself with his legacy. Initiated in the Province of Canada in the 1840s the project was carried through into the creation of the schools as originating acts of the new nation, the Dominion of Canada, in 1867, becoming the institutions of residential schools in 1882.There were

17.1 a + b Above and opposite In the fall of 2021, Ryerson University began a renaming process to reconcile the legacy of Egerton Ryerson. A period of community consultation to identify a shortlist of possible names followed, during which time many referred to the university as X University. In April 2022, the university announced its new name – Toronto Metropolitan University. On the left, statue of Egerton Ryerson, Toronto Metropolitan University, June 2021. On the right, statue removed, Toronto Metropolitan University, July 2021. Photo: Blake Fitzpatrick.

Postscript

150 such schools operating in Canada between 1882 and 1996. It is estimated that a hundred and fifty thousand children were subjected to this regime. Three eras are to be ascertained: the first era is of its inception from 1847 to 1882; the second era, its implementation and administration from 1882 to 1996, might be called the regime of Duncan Campbell Scott, its chief administrator and overseer for almost half a century; and the third era, from 1996 to the present, recently entered, constitutes the era of the disclosure of the crime, the need for recognition, apology, and restitution, inaugurated by the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples and given direction by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (trc). Considered as a topography, residential schools were a system spread across the country as part of the federal power with the Indigenous child as the stigmatic subject and victim. Considered as an architecture, the schools were not camps, asylums, or penal institutions hidden out of site. They had the public prominence of hospitals.

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They were built as forward-looking and progressive edifices of public architecture in plain view as contributions to the civic space. Its horror was concealed in plain view. It was not even an open secret. The remains of approximately a thousand children have so far been discovered at two burial sites of two former residential schools. A conservative estimate has mentioned 4,100 buried while Senator Murray Sinclair, chair of the trc, estimates that there may be as many as 10,000 buried children. Statistics alone will not suffice to countenance the enormity of this calamity, crimes against humanity in plain view.

17.2 Kootenay Indian Residential School, Cranbrook, BC, instituted as an amalgamation of the St Eugene’s and St Mary’s mission schools of the Oblate order, between 1890 and 1970. Since 2000 it is the St Eugene Golf Resort and Casino. The unmarked burial site of 182 Indigenous children was uncovered in June 2021.

Postscript

What then about an apology? What counts as an apology? One needs to distinguish between the corporate and institutional apology delivered by the anonymous and representative agent that substitutes for and eviscerates the need for active engagements by individuals. Consider instead the pursuit of other ways to act that take in slowly and deliberately, for example, the life of a single child, in the way that Chanie Wenjack became for Gord Downie a singular phantom figure, internalized within himself. Downie’s song “The Stranger” replaces the inevitable formal, mechanical repetition compulsion of the monument into a concrete and singular act of apology as itself a step in restorative justice. The song is the apology. It contains a microhistory and helps elicit the need for survivor testimonies. Consider the labour of apology as a kind of place work. In terms of place marking, three archives can be discerned: the archive of the document and writing, for which the library and the archive are its institutional depositories; the archive of the ground, for which the photograph is often an evidentiary object and where archaeological approaches have a role; and finally, the archive of practice and testimony, which requires existential Subjects, living subjects as witnesses.1 The archive of practice is testimonial and occupies the gap between the archive of the document and the archive of ground. It is a practice of the civic witness. Place marking, by engaging all three archives, provides the reason for the keeping place as a distinct structure and institution. It was the ambition of Amber Johnson in the chapter that is included in this collection to motivate the idea of the necessity of a keeping place at Fort Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan, the site of a former residential school. The keeping place arises most particularly at sites of disturbance and contested memory.2 It both keeps the past as past and is a conduit for living memory. In recognizing this duality, a keeping place is often a self-conscious différend because it creates an entity that has these two distinct tasks to perform at the same time, which might collide. Each and every residential school in the system should be declared and marked as a memorial. Yet the compelling reason why the former residential schools should be keeping places is because they are memorial sites, whether the grieving families wish the children to be returned home or be reburied ceremonially on the very grounds of the particular residential school. The memorial is the ground to invite and gather survivor testimonies, making it a gathering place to remember, a further step to decolonize history. The former residential schools should be active memorial sites, keeping places, an archive of survivor testimony and a counter-monument to brush history against the grain and inhibit the smoothing out of the inevitable official monument. The former residential school as keeping place would thus become also a site to educate and inform – a library, archive, cultural centre, new school! To have taken in and absorbed the history is itself a blow. A commitment to learning is itself part

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of an apology and a step in restorative justice. Beyond the speculative and the pragmatic, learning is itself a concrete act. The former residential school as a keeping place has testimony as its compelling reason for existence.

Notes 1 See Peter C. van Wyck, The Highway of the Atom (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), 15. 2 See Jonathan Bordo, “The Keeping Place (Arising from an Incident on the Land),” in Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade, ed. Robert Nelson and Margaret Olin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 157–82.

Contributors

jessica becking is interim principal of Otonabee College at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario. Her current research seeks to establish the British School of Aesthetic Chorography as partaking in a unique and multimedia aesthetic expression of place and nature, in addition to exploring the role of the book and the printed object in that field. She is also actively involved in the creation of concrete place poetry, which seeks to explore the non-verbal ways nature communicates with us. She holds a PhD in cultural studies from Trent University, an ma in creative writing and publishing from Kingston University, UK, and a ba Hons in Celtic studies and English literature from Trinity College, University of Toronto. christiaan beyers is chair and associate professor of international development studies and faculty member of the doctoral program in cultural studies at Trent University. His research focuses on rights claims, forced displacement, and memory and memorialization in South Africa. He has also written on Mikhail Bakhtin, and more recently, on forced migration in Ecuador. Journals in which his work appears include Development and Change, African Affairs, Journal of Southern African Studies, Journal of Latin American Studies, Journal of Contemporary African Studies, Anthropologica, and Studies in East European Thought. jonathan bordo is professor of cultural studies and former director of the Cultural Studies PhD Program at Trent University. Critical topography as a theoretical approach to study place and landscape is articulated in many published essays, including “Picture and Witness at the Site of the Wilderness” in W.J.T. Mitchell, ed. Landscape and Power (2000); “The Keeping Place,” in Nelson and Olin, eds, Monuments and Memory (2004); “History Lessons” in Duro, ed., Theorizing Imitation in a Global Context ( 2014), and “Walter Benjamin at The City Library of Berlin” in Images: The Jewish Journal of Art History and Visual Culture (2019). The book projects

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Canada the Proper Name of the Wilderness and Essays in Art Theory and Culture presently engage him. A life member at Clare Hall, Cambridge University, Jonathan is also a practising poet. edward burtynsky is regarded as one of the world’s most accomplished contemporary photographers whose works are included in the collections of over sixty major museums around the world. Major (touring) exhibitions include Anthropocene (2018) and Water (2013) at the New Orleans Museum of Art & Contemporary Art Center; Oil (2009) at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, dc; China (2005 five-year tour); and Manufactured Landscapes (2003) at the National Gallery of Canada. Film collaborations include Jennifer Baichwal’s Manufactured Landscapes (2006); Watermark (2013); and the third film in the trilogy, anthropocene: The Human Epoch, which opened in theatres across Canada in October 2018 and in the United States in September 2019. Burtynsky’s distinctions include the inaugural ted Prize in 2005, which he shared with Bono and Robert Fischell; the Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts; the Outreach award at the Rencontres d’Arles; the Roloff Beny Book award; and the 2018 Photo London Master of Photography Award. Most recently he received the 2019 Lucie Award for Achievement in Documentary. He currently holds eight honorary degrees. robert del tredici is an artist, photographer, and teacher who has been tracking the nuclear age since 1979. His first nuclear book, The People of Three Mile Island (1980), explored nuclear power through the eyes of those affected by America’s gravest nuclear catastrophe. His second book, At Work in the Fields of the Bomb (1987), documented, over a six-year period, the US nuclear-weapons complex. He started photographing the Soviet nuclear-weapons industry when he was called back to the United States to be principal photographer and editor for three reports for the US Department of Energy’s attempts to clean up its H-bomb factories – reports concerning the past, present, and future. Del Tredici’s photography and artworks have been exhibited in Berlin, London, Hiroshima, Stockholm, Essen, Washington, dc, Montreal, Toronto, Boulder, and Ottawa. His art includes a book-length series of pen-and-ink drawings and silkscreen prints to Moby-Dick, and thirty collages (Evolution Pages) on 9/11 and the War on Terror. He founded the Atomic Photographers Guild in 1987. He currently teaches the Art of Animated Film course at Concordia University in Montreal. paul duro is emeritus professor of art history at the University of Rochester, New York. His books include Rhetoric of the Frame: Essays on the Boundaries of the Artwork (1996), The Academy and the Limits of Painting in Seventeenth-Century France (1997), and Theorizing Imitation in the Visual Arts: Global Contexts (2015).

Contributors

jennifer dyer is associate professor and department head of Gender Studies at Memorial University in Newfoundland and Labrador. Her research is twofold, including studies in feminist aesthetics and in gender diversity, but it derives from the same phenomenological, new materialist roots that prioritize infinitely ongoing, fully felt, and meaningful becoming-processes. She has published Serial Images: The Modern Art of Iteration (2011) and Gender Diversity in the Ancient World (2020), and she has written on the role of infinity in new media art, material culture studies, the social role of art, and especially on both art advocacy and parental advocacy for trans kids. blake fitzpatrick is professor, School of Image Arts at Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University). Fitzpatrick has exhibited his photo-based work in solo and group exhibitions in Canada, the United States, and Europe. He is a member of the Atomic Photographers Guild and has published on the work of Guild photographers. His collaborative research project with artist Vid Ingelevics, The Mobile Ruin, charts the afterlife of the Berlin Wall, post-1989. Recent iterations of the project include exhibitions at the Canadian Embassy in Berlin, Prefix ica, and Harbourfront Centre in Toronto. Fitzpatrick’s writing and visual work have appeared in numerous journals and in edited collections, including The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada (2011), Camera Atomica (2015), and Through Post-Atomic Eyes (2020). He is co-editor of Critical Distance in Documentary Media (2018), contributing a chapter on the aerial image for the collection. daniel froidevaux is a documentary filmmaker and cinematographer whose work has been exhibited in galleries and festivals internationally. Froidevaux is particularly interested in how the aesthetic strategies of non-fiction cinema can be used to explore and critique ideas that constitute our understanding of the world and of ourselves. He believes that documentary cinema offers the possibility of unique modes of knowledge, communication, and interaction, and he is committed to cinema as a space for contemplation. His most recent film, The Quiet Zone (2017), co-directed with Elisa Gonzalez, premiered at Hot Docs in 2017, culminating a fiveyear-long project that first came to life as a video installation. Froidevaux holds an mfa in documentary media from Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University). hamish fulton was born in England in 1946 and grew up in the shipbuilding city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Fulton attended three London art schools, where with other students he made his first “art walk,” 2 February 1967. In 1969 he had his first one-person show at the Konrad Fischer gallery in Düsseldorf, and later that year with Nancy Wilson he visited various Native American sites such as Pine Ridge

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Reservation and Wounded Knee. In 1973, after completing one walk of just over a thousand miles, Fulton made a final commitment to make art resulting only from the experience of individual walks. Various exhibitions followed, including his 1990 exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada. In 2000 Fulton joined a commercial expedition to climb Cho Oyu in Tibet without bottled oxygen, reaching an altitude of 8,175 metres. Tate Britain provided Fulton with an exhibition in 2002, and on 19 May 2009 Fulton summited Chomolungma (Mt Everest) using bottled oxygen and the help of Nepalese Sherpas. elisa gonzalez is a filmmaker and educator rooted in the fine arts. She holds an mfa in documentary media from Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University) and a bfa in photography from Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design. Elisa is a recipient of funding awards from the Canada Council for the Arts and the National Film Board of Canada, among others. Her recent work explores the inherent structures of power in technology, the environment, and the individual through contemporary documentary form. amber d.v.a. johnson is a historical investigator and researcher. Her work focuses on the study of trauma, memory, and memorialization. Her PhD dissertation concerns the creation of a keeping-place model for the Indian Residential School system. She is currently a research partner with Dr John S. Milloy at Collie Historical Research & Consulting. They work together to provide academic support to organizations such as the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society. randolph jordan teaches in the Humanities Department at Champlain College in Montreal. His research, teaching, and creative practice reside at the intersections of sound ecology, media studies, and critical geography. He has published widely on the ways in which the fields of acoustic ecology and film-sound studies can inform each other, with a recent emphasis on the cinemas of British Columbia. He has coedited a collection with Milena Droumeva titled Sound, Media, Ecology (2019), and he is completing a book manuscript titled Acoustic Profiles: A Sound Ecology of the Cinema. His short film Bell Tower of False Creek has screened at festivals internationally, and he worked as sound curator and designer for the Impostor Cities exhibition featured in the Canadian pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2021. ihor junyk is professor of English literature and cultural studies at Trent University and the coordinator of the Trent-Durham College program in Journalism and Creative Writing. His work on literature and visual culture has appeared in leading humanities journals such as Grey Room, Modern Fiction Studies, and Comparative

Contributors

Literature. He is also the author of Foreign Modernism: Cosmopolitanism, Identity, and Style in Paris. jason lafountain is higher education and development coordinator for the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project, in Chicago. He previously taught art history at Northwestern University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. At saic, he also directed the first-year program in art history from 2019 to 2021. With John Davis and Jennifer Greenhill, he is co-editor of A Companion to American Art (2015). His chapter in this volume grew out of his Harvard University doctoral dissertation, “The Puritan Art World” (2013). katy mccormick is associate professor and co-director of the Documentary Media Research Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University), where she teaches photography and documentary media. Her photographic work, exhibited in both Canada and the US, examines commemorative sites, monuments, and memorials that reveal narratives and social histories embedded in landscapes. McCormick’s exhibition Rooted among the Ashes: Hibakujumoku / The A-bombed Trees opened 6 August 2022 at the Quaker Heritage Center Museum at Wilmington College, Ohio, and will subsequently be shown at the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum, in Independence, Missouri, in 2023. Her work is included in Through PostAtomic Eyes, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2020. She is a member of the Atomic Photographers Guild. david mcmillan began his career as a painter but eventually realized his sensibility was more attuned to photography. His interests grew from a formal concern with colour and space to depicting the often-uneasy relationship between nature and culture. This led him, in 1994, to visit the guarded zone around the Chornobyl nuclear power plant, which had been evacuated after the 1986 accident. The initial visit was productive, and McMillan decided to return the following year; he has now photographed in the area twenty-two times. One of the unanticipated consequences of this lengthy involvement has been the opportunity to witness the surprising proliferation of the natural world coinciding with the vanishing traces of civilization. This work has been brought together in the book Growth and Decay: Prypiat and the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. w.j.t. mitchell is professor of literature, visual art, and media at the University of Chicago and senior editor of Critical Inquiry. He is the author of numerous books on images and words as political forces and philosophical questions, including Iconology (1986), Picture Theory (1995), What Do Pictures Want? (2005), and Image Science (2015). More recent books include Seeing through Race (2012), based on the W.E.B.

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DuBois Lectures at Harvard University. His collection of essays Landscape and Power (2005) is in its second edition, and includes contributions from Edward Said, Ann Bermingham, and Jonathan Bordo. He is currently working on a new book, Seeing through Madness, and Mental Traveler, his memoir of his son’s struggle with schizophrenia, was published in 2020. rehab nazzal is a Palestinian-born multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto. Nazzal’s work deals with the effects of settler-colonial violence on the bodies and minds of colonized peoples, on land, and on other non-human life in colonized territories. Her video, photography, and sound works have been exhibited internationally in both group and solo exhibitions and screenings. She has published two photography books: Portraits of Resistance (2018) and Driving in Palestine (forthcoming 2023). Her multimedia installations include Walking under Occupation (2008), Divide (2010), At Home (2012), Invisible (2014), and Choreographies of Resistance (2018). Nazzal held the position of assistant professor at Dar al-Kalima University of Arts and Culture in Bethlehem, Palestine, and has taught photography at Simon Fraser University, University of Western Ontario, and Ottawa School of Art. She holds a PhD in art and visual culture from University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, an mfa from Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University) in Toronto, and a bfa from the University of Ottawa. margaret olin is senior lecturer emerita at Yale University in the Departments of Religious Studies. She has written on art historiography and art theory, photography, and Jewish Art. Among her books are The Nation without Art: Examining Modern Discourses on Jewish Art (2001); and Touching Photographs (2012). With Robert S. Nelson she co-edited Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade (2003), and with Amos Morris-Reich, Photography and Imagination (2019). She also co-edits, with Steven Fine and Maya Balakirsky-Katz, the journal Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture. Her photographic work has been shown in the United States, Germany, and Israel. A book of her photographs, The Bitter Landscapes of Palestine, with texts by David Shulman, is in preparation. anhiti patnaik is assistant professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Birla Institute of Technology and Sciences–Pilani, India, where she teaches cultural studies and crime and new media. She is a fellow of the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University, and the Institute of World Literature at Harvard University. She was awarded the Ontario Trillium Fellowship that fully funded her doctoral research in Cultural Studies at Trent University. A scholar of Victorian and World Literature, her articles have been published in the international journals NeoVictorian Studies, Victorian Network, Brontë Studies, Journal of World Literature, and Journal of International Women’s Studies. She is currently working on a comparative

Contributors

project on the criminal trials of Oscar Wilde and Saadat Hasan Manto that is endowed by the Kanner Fellowship in British Studies, Clark Library, ucla. mark ruwedel received his mfa from Concordia University in Montreal in 1983 and taught there from 1984 to 2001; he is currently professor emeritus at California State University. He received major grants from the Canada Council for the Arts in 1999 and 2001. In 2014 he was awarded both a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Scotiabank Photography Award, and he was shortlisted for the Deutsche Borse Photography Prize in 2019 and the Prix Pictet in 2021. Ruwedel is represented in museums throughout the world, including the J. Paul Getty Museum; Victoria and Albert Museum; Los Angeles County Art Museum; Metropolitan Museum, New York; Yale Art Gallery; National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc; National Gallery of Canada; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He was included in the National Gallery of Canada’s Biennial in 2012. Ruwedel’s work was the subject of an Artists Room at Tate Modern in 2018. Publications include Westward the Course of Empire (2008); 1212 Palms (2010); Pictures of Hell (2014); Mark Ruwedel Scotiabank Photography Award (2015); Message from the Exterior (2017); Dog Houses (2017); Ouarzazate (2018); Palms/ Capri (2019); and Seventy-Two and One Half Miles across Los Angeles (2020). Ruwedel’s archive is housed at Stanford University Libraries, Special Collections. jesper svenbro graduated in Classics from Lund University (Sweden) before studying with Eric Havelock at Yale in 1969–70, when Adam Parry directed him toward the creative Marxism of Jean-Pierre Vernant in Paris. Vernant’s research centre offered the intellectual milieu where he finished his doctoral dissertation on the origins of Greek poetics, “La parole et le marbre,” submitted in 1976 at Lund (new French edition and Swedish translation published in 2021). Svenbro spent the rest of his career as a research fellow – successively as attaché, chargé, and directeur de recherche – at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, concomitantly publishing eighteen collections of poetry in his native tongue and in 2006 joining the Swedish Academy, Stockholm. Major works include: Phrasikleia: Anthropologie de la lecture en Grèce ancienne, dedicated “to the memory of Eric Havelock” (1988, with an English translation in 1993); with John Scheid, Le métier de Zeus: Mythe du tissage et du tissu dans le monde gréco-romain (1994, with an English translation in 1996); La tortue et la lyre: Dans l’atelier du mythe antique (2014, with a German translation in 2017); and Three-Toed Gull: Selected Poems, translated by John E. Matthias et al. from the Swedish (2004). peter c. van wyck is professor of communication and media studies at Concordia University in Montreal. His research and writing arise from multidisciplinary training in forestry, ecological sciences, environmental and cultural studies, philosophy, and media studies. He has published and lectured widely on environmental themes

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including deep ecology, the predicaments of the Anthropocene, and nuclear history and culture. He is author of the award-winning monographs Signs of Danger: Waste, Trauma, and Nuclear Threat (2005) and Highway of the Atom (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010). Recent essays include “The Anthropocene’s Signature,” an essay for The Nuclear Culture Source Book, edited by Ele Carpenter (2017); “The Lens of Fukushima,” with Julie Salverson, for Through Post-Atomic Eyes, edited by John O’Brian and Claudette Lauzon (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021); and “Sounding Out the Nuclear: An Atomic Opera,” with Juliet Palmer and Julie Salverson, for Toxic Immanence, edited by Livia Monnet (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022). He is currently working on a new monograph titled The Angel Turns: Memos for the End of the Holocene, completing a trilogy of nuclear-themed books. kara york is an educator and a researcher in Peterborough, Ontario. Her interdisciplinary research considers contemporary art, the use of documentary as an aesthetic and ethical practice, and notions of place and memory. Her doctoral thesis, titled “Fragmented Repositories: Memory Traces, Documentary Desires, and the Archive in Contemporary Art,” considers Ai Weiwei’s documentation of disaster and displacement in the broader context of contemporary art’s impulse to collect and archive artifacts of trauma.

Index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Abbey in the Oak Forest (Friedrich), 141 abjection, 141–2, 145–6, 155–6, 185, 238 Abrioux, Yves, 70n17 After the Fall of Donetsk Airport (Avdeev), 139 Ai Weiwei, 17, 232–44, 268 AJAWAAN (Fulton), 119 Algonquin School, 9, 56, 64 Althusser, Louis, 264–5 Andre, Carl, 55, 57, 60 “Anecdote of the Jar” (Stevens), xix, 57 Anthropocene, xix, 10–1, 13–15, 18, 88, 97, 117–24, 125n14, 276 Anthropocene Project, The, 10, 15; Edward Burtynsky, plates 9–13 anxiety, 135–6, 143 apartheid, 16, 213, 216, 221, 223, 226 apology, 9, 111, 205, 285, 287–8 architecture, 6, 133, 144, 155, 285–6 archive, 105, 111, 121, 221, 236, 238, 242, 287 art installation, 240–1 art of living, 71–3, 79–80 Arte Povera (movement), 60–1, 107 Atomic Photographers Guild, 11, 19n23 attachment, 4–6, 8–11, 195, 213 attention, 23–4, 32, 40–1, 44, 47, 53, 63, 68–9, 89, 144 Avdeev, Max, 140–2 Azoulay, Ariella, 16, 237, 244, 245 Bal, Mieke, 45, 53n2 Banksy, 158–61, 172n12 Barthes, Roland, 45, 88, 282n11 Becking, Jessica, 14 Belaney, Archie (Grey Owl), 94–5

belonging, 5, 66, 68, 197, 217, 227 Benjamin, Walter, 219, 229n15, 275, 280–1, 282n13 Bennett, Greg, 46 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 82n31 Berger, John, 246n35 Bergson, Henri, 51 Berlin Wall, the, 6, 157, 160 Beyers, Christiaan, 16 Black Lives Matter (blm), 278, 280. See also Floyd, George; police violence Bois, Yve-Alain, 43n40 borders, 13, 15–16, 170–1, 176–9, 184, 233, 237–8; India-Pakistan, 176–8 Bordo, Jonathan, xix, 14, 56–7, 59–60, 124, 195, 197, 238 Bourdieu, Pierre, 6, 252 Brewery Pond (Fitzpatrick), 272, 274 British School of Aesthetic Chorography, 55–70 Bunyan, John, 74–6, 80 Burke, Edmund, 138 Burtynsky, Edward, xx, 7, 10–11, 15, 140, 273, plates 9–13 Butler, Judith, 238, 245n16 Camera Lucida (Barthes), 45, 282 Camus, Albert, 277–80 Canada, 8, 193–205, 283–5 Cape Spear (Gill), 47 Caruth, Cathy, 177–81, 185 Casey, Edward, 282n10 Cavell, Stanley, 5 Cézanne, Paul, 9–10, 23–4, 32–41, 110 Charaxos, 250–4, 262, 267, 270 children, xxii, 161–2, 168, 179, 193–4, 206n7, 231–2, 283, 285–7 Chinati (Marfa, Texas), 55–7, 60

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Index Chinese Economy (Fulton), 89, 103–4, 111–12, plate 6 Chomolungma (Fulton), 112 Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, 12, 15, 143, plates 14–21 chorography, 61–2, 90, 108–12, 186; aesthetic chorography, 8–9, 61–9; the British School, 61–5 chronotope, 129, 219 Clark, Kenneth, 35 climate change, xxiv, 13, 119, 146, 275–7 collective memory, 178, 193–4, 196, 204 colonialism, 6, 16, 56, 82–3n40, 102–3, 111–12, 176–7, 193–206, 216 commons, 13, 162–3, 174n28 community, 16, 68, 104, 121, 156, 170, 180, 213–17, 219, 221–4, 233, 244, 280 conservation, 65–6 covid-19, xx, 275–9 critical topography: aesthetic chorography, 8, 14, 61–4; as approach, 13; chorographic aspect as act, 108, 110, critical, 8, 89, 146, 11, 111–12; footprint, 231, 233, 237; as foundational term, xix; as interdisciplinary inquiry, 11–12; tasks of, xx, 13, 130; themes, 143–6, 280; trace, 9, 58, 72, 89, 97, 105–9, 120, 132, 140, 156, 234–5. See also chorography culture, 6–7, 97, 143 De Certeau, Michel, 80, 155, 229n20 Del Tredici, Robert, 15, plates 28–35 Derrida, Jacques, 121–2 Detienne, Marcel, 250, 270 Dheisheh Refugee Camp (Palestine), 153, 160–8 Diderot, Denis, 30–2, 130–6 Dionysus, 251, 253, 264–5, 267–8 disaster, 13, 17, 119, 139, 168, 273–81; ecological, 28 displacement, xxii, xxiv, 16, 74, 112, 179, 184–5, 187, 216–17, 227, 236–7 District Six Museum (Cape Town, South Africa), 16, 213–28 document, 5, 9–11, 16, 18, 107, 205, 223, 237, 273; documentary aesthetics, 11, 15, 17, 59, 78–80, 87–9, 99–100, 110, 232–6, 240–1, 250, 278, 281, 287. See also experience: documentation of; photograph/photography: as document/ documentation Dominion of the Dead, The (Pogue-Harrison), 19n6 Donald, Dwayne, 196–200, 204, 205 Donetsk airport (Ukraine), 115, 140–3, 146 Duro, Paul, 9–10 dwelling, 3–7, 12, 65; “indwelling,” 6, 227 Dyer, Jennifer, 12

eco-aesthetics, 14, 44, 52–3 eco-ethic, 89 education, 194–204, 287–8 Ehland, Christoph, 172n2 epoché, xx, xxiii eruv, 15, 153–7, 168–71 Eumenides (Aeschylus), 275 eupraxia, 72–3 experience, 40, 45–6, 76, 101, 180, 234, 240, 276, 280–1; documentation of, 57–62, 87, 89, 94, 98, 105–11 F. Lotus (Weiwei), 239 Fate of Place, The (Casey), 282 Félibien, André, 23–5, 28 Finlay, Alec, 65–6 Finlay, Ian Hamilton, 62–4 Fitzpatrick, Blake, xix, 14, 272–4, 284 Floyd, George, xxi, 279 Foucault, Michel, 252 fragment, 182, 185–6, 231–3, 235 frame, 6–7, 57, 59 Freud, Sigmund, 111, 121, 136, 177–8, 181–2, 185–7, 265, 280; suspended attention, xiv Fried, Michael, 59 Friedrich, Caspar David, 9, 106, 140–1 Froidevaux, Daniel, 14, plates 1–2 Fukushima, 118 Fulton, Hamish, 9, 12, 55, 57–9, 62, 65, 85–113, plates 3–8 gate, 154, 157–8, 168–71 gaze, 90, 241 geopoetics, 13, 17 Gill, Will, 45–6, 50 globalization, xx, 144 Goldsworthy, Andy, 9, 62, 65, 79, 106, 109 Gonzales, Elisa, 14, plates 1–2 graffiti, 153–4, 157–62 Great Bear Lake (Del Tredici), plate 30 Greeley, Kym, 48–9, 51 Grossman, David, 161 Group of Seven. See Algonquin School heterotopia, xx, 16, 238 Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 11, 15, 118, 122 home, 65–6, 68, 133, 170, 176, 214, 222–3, 225, 287 Huyssen, Andre, 129, 144 Indian Residential School (irs) system, 16, 193–4, 204–5, 206n4, 206n7, 208n8, 283–8 Indigenous métissage, 196–7, 199–200, 202, 204–6

Index Indigenous peoples, 9, 16, 94–5, 97, 99–103, 110, 112, 193–206, 283–8 Ingold, Tim, 200 inscription, 6–12, 61, 67, 118, 120, 219–23, 273 island, xx, 234 Islandology (Shell), 234 Israelites Gathering Manna in the Desert, The (Poussin), 25 Jankélévitch, Vladimir, 121 Johnson, Amber, 16, 287 Jordan, Randolph, 16, plates 52–9 Judd, Donald, 55, 57–8 Junyk, Ihor, 15 Kaarsemaker, David, 51–2 Kailash Kora and Kailash (Fulton), plates 6–7. See also Chinese Economy keeping place, xx, 16, 124, 195, 197, 204–5, 216, 228, 280–1, 287–9 Kootenay Residential School, Cranbrook, bc, 286 Krauss, Rosalind, 58–9 Kristeva, Julia, 145–6 Kurdi, Alan, 17, 231–2, 234, 237 LaCapra, Dominique, 237–8 LaFountain, Jason, 14 Landmarks (Macfarlane), 9 landscape, 5–11, 14, 24–5, 68–9, 76, 87, 102, 107, 217, 224, 273; cultural, 6, 200; as foil, 26; geopoetics as shift, 17; heroic, 25–6; as medium, 56; nuclear, 117; and painting, 32, 40, 49, 64; pastoral, 25; picturesque, xix, 29, 40, 107, 129–30, 137–8, 145; as portmanteau, 5; staffage, 28, 77–8; usages of, 4, 8–9, 12, 17–18, 63–4, 66–7, 99–100, 109–10, 180, 183–4, 216, 273, 275, 278. See also critical topography Landscape and Power (Mitchell), 19, 69, 297 Landscape with Man Killed by a Snake (Poussin), 30 Latour, Bruno, 121 Laundromat (Weiwei), 243 “leave no trace” injunction, 9, 14, 89, 97, 108–9 Le Pont de Maincy (Cézanne), 35 Lesbos, Greece, 17, 232–9, 242–4, 250–2, 264, 257–8, 260, 267–8 lieu de mémoire, 16, 123 light, 33, 44–53; as noise, 44, 49 Limnology (Skelton), 67 Lippard, Lucy, 55 Little Sparta (garden, Ian Hamilton Finlay’s), 63 local, the, 63, 65, 108

Long, Richard, 9, 62, 65, 79, 106, 109 McCormick, Katy, 15, plates 22–7 MacDonald, Helen, 66, 68–9 McEwan, Indra, 233 Macfarlane, Robert, 9, 66 McLuhan, Marshall, 44, 49–50 McMillan, David, 12, 15, 19n23, plates 14–21 McTighe, Monica, 240 McTighe, Sheila, 29, 42n13 madness, 176, 183–7 Manto, Sa’adat Hasan, 16, 176–87 martyrdom, 163–8 Marx, Karl, 118, 134–5, 249, 251, 265 materiality, 7, 45, 51, 80, 131–3, 141, 143–5, 219, 238–40 meditation, 49–50 memorial, 161–8, 193–5, 204–5, 214, 219, 224–6, 234; as conversation, 162–4 memory, 16, 61–2, 66, 121, 193–4, 197, 204, 214, 216–17, 221, 226–8, 234–7, 244 Messon, Lesbos, 250, 252, 257, 260–1 Milloy, John, 196, 203 mimesis, 6, 8, 36, 41, 101, 107, 109, 110, 214, 219, 229; poisoned, xix, 273–6 Mont Sainte-Victoire (Cézanne), 37 monument, 202–3, 236, 287; anti-monument, 220 Monuments and Memory (Nelson and Olin), 20, 113, 209 mountains: Everest, Ktaadn, and Sinai, 5, 109–11; Rainer Maria Rilke, 95, 101–5. See also Chomolungma; Kailash Kora and Kailash; Mont SainteVictoire mourning, 217, 238 mural, 158, 162–8 museum, 216–17 naming, 179, 219, 250, 262–3, 275, 284–5 Nancy, Jean Luc, 44, 52–3, 118 narrative, 46, 66, 105, 111, 119, 204, 219, 226–7, 232, 235, 240 National Crime, A (Milloy), 193–213 National Radio Quiet Zone, 14; Froidevaux and Gonzales, plates 1–2 Natural History of Destruction, The (Sebald), 281 nature, 6, 8, 23, 25, 94–5, 96–7, 104, 132–3; as text, 35 Nazzal, Rehab, 16, plates 36–43 new materialism, 44 New Topographics (exhibition and movement), 10 Newfoundland (Canada), 12, 14, 44–53, 88; Cape Spear, 45

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Index nostalgia, 94, 133, 214, 216, 223, 227 nuclear era, 11, 15, 18, 87–8, 118–19, 143, 147 nuclear waste, 117, 120–4, 280, 126n18 Odyssey (Homer), 250–1, 262 Oedipus at Colonus (Sophocles), 3–5, 6, 13, 275, 283 Oedipus Rex (Sophocles), 275–6 Olin, Margaret, 15–16, 236, 241–2 Olson, Todd, 24 On Collective Memory (Halbwachs), 229n18 overdetermination (Althusser), 251, 264–5 painting, 8, 10, 23–4, 33–5, 72; person as a, 73, 76; as picturing, 7, 36; pictorial composition, 34–8, 45, 48; poetics of, 30; practice of, 9, 38, 40 Palestine, 158–60, 170–1 Palme, Olaf, 271n4 pandemic, xx, 275–80 parks: Colonus, 3–7, 275–6, 283; Prince Albert National Park (Lake Ajawaan), 58; Walden, 4–5 Partition (Indian), 176–80, 183–7, 187n2 Patnaik, Anhiti, 16 Peirce, C.S., 47–8, 51 photograph/photography, 10–11, 88–9, 240–2, 244, 273; as document/documentation, 9–10, 92, 100, 107, 110, 237–8; as art installation, 240; as light writing, 45; as remembrance, 231–2; Atomic Photographers Guild and, 11, 19n23; English nature photography, 92, 100; of Alan Kurdi, 231; of ruins, 140–3; W.G. Sebald, 93 Phrasikleia (Svenbro), 250, 251 pictograph, 201–2, 210n80 pilgrimage, 73–4 Pilgrim’s Progress, The (Bunyan), 75 Pittacus, 252, 255–8, 261, 269 place, as keyword, xix–xxiv; and culture, 5–6; Dasein and cogito of, 3, 4, 18n2, 108, 109, 280; as dwelling, 5, 6, 7, 12, 112, 117; as inscription, 8; as habitus (Bourdieu), 6, 12; as indwelling (PogueHarrison), 19n6, 227; as keeping place, xx, xxiv, 13, 193–213, 287, 288; and landscape, 5–8. See also displacement; X marks the spot place/non-place, 7; place finding, 9; place-time (epoché), xxiii; placing, 14, 18, 38, 55, 57, 112, 117, 195; question of, 3–13, 108, 275; taking place, xix; Sophoclean approach to, 3–5; semantics of place, xix, 6–12, 61–2; and situation, xix, 24, 25, 71, 117, 154, 156, 158, 180, 196, 201, 237, 252, 278; as sojourn, 4, 5, 6, 9, 105, 107, 108, 110, 111. See also displacement; site plague, xxi, 225, 276, 277–8, 280. See also keeping place Plague, The (Camus), 277–8, 280

Plato, 251, 257, 269 police violence, xxi pond. See ajawaan; Brewery Pond; Walden Pond Poussin, Nicolas, 23–36, 40 Pripyat, Ukraine. See Chornobyl Exclusion Zone protest, xx–xxv, 104, 111–12, 279–80 psychoanalysis, 177–8, 180, 182, 185–6, 265 punctum, xvii, 124 Puritanism, 74, 78, 80; and walking, 71–2, 74–8 Qu’Appelle Valley (Saskatchewan), 16, 195, 197, 202–4, 209n57 racism, xxi, 221, 226, 278–80 reclamation, 214–15, 218–19, 224–8 refuge, 4, 13, 15–17, 147, 176, 231, 233–5, 238–40, 244 refugee, 13, 17, 178, 183–4, 231, 233–5, 237 refugee camp, 15–16, 153, 159, 160–9 Refugee Project, the, 232–44 Refugee Wallpaper (Weiwei), 241–3 remembrance, 177–8, 216, 232–3, 244 representation, 6–8, 38, 41, 110–11, 224–7; picturing, 7–9, 24, 36; of nature, 23, 29–30, 40–1, 221 restitution, 214, 216, 223–8, 285 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 95, 97, 105, 107–9 Robert, Hubert, 130–1, 139, 142 rock fall echo dust (Fulton), 96 ruins, xx, 10–11, 15, 129–47, 156, 214, 273; catastrophic ruin, 130, 136–43, 146; entropic ruin, 130–6, 139–40, 144–6; ruin porn, 145 Ruwedel, Mark, 10, 16, 90n8, plates 44–51 Sappho, 17, 233, 244, 249–52, 254–5, 257, 259, 267, 269–70 Sebald, W.G., 92, 281 Serres, Michel, 44, 49–50 Shiff, Richard, 41n2, 55 Simmel, Georg, 132–5, 141, 143 site, xix, 4, 6–7, 11–12, 15, 61, 287; heritage, 225; non-site, 76; of discourse, 153; of memory, 197, 234; of ruination, 137, 214, 220; sacred site, 203, 275; site-specific installation, 55, 58–9, 63. See also place, as key word Skelton, Richard, 66–8 Smithson, Robert, 8, 60, 76, 107 Snyder, Tim, 281 sojourn, 4–6, 105, 107–8, 110, 111 Sontag, Susan, xx, 273 Sophocles. See Oedipus at Colonus; Oedipus Rex space, xx, 5, 108, 168–9 Stevens, Wallace, xix, 57 Stormy Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe (Poussin), 27 sublime, the, 7, 10, 40, 124, 138–9, 142, 273

Index survivance, 16, 216–17, 224, 227 Svenbro, Jesper, 17 Tamir Rice Memorial Gazebo (Chicago), xxiii testimony: and Ai Weiwei, 242; civic, 278; and District Six Museum, 221; keeping place, relation to, 288; and Manto, 180, 186; as material (ruins), 144; as narrative, 180, 186, 277; photograph as, 237; as poetics and documentary aesthetics, 280–1; as resistance, 280–1; as abstract expressionism, 101 Testimony (Felman), 281n7 Thoreau, Henry David, 4–5, 6, 9, 18n4, 76, 104 time, xx, 62, 108, 131–2, 136, 140, 144–5 “Toba Tek Singh” (Manto), 176–7, 183–7 toponym, 17, 124, 179, 250, 249–71 topos, 7, 11–12 toxicity, 11, 15, 120, 273, 275 trace, 9, 120, 132, 234–5 trauma, 16, 118–19, 122, 124, 143–4, 176–87, 187n8, 217, 226, 237–8, 244, 280–1; aesthetics of, 177–8, 180–1, 183, 186; intergenerational, 194; sites of, 178, 182, 184, 193–5 Trinity A-bomb test (Alamogordo, New Mexico), 11, 15, 122 trees: Edward Burtynsky, Saw Mills #1, plate 13; Hamish Fulton, Tree Boulder, plate 8; Rehab Nazzal, olive trees, plates 36–40; Katy McCormick, A-bomb trees of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, plates 22–7; Randolph Jordan, K’aya’chtn totem pole, plates 54–9. See also Abbey in the Oak Forest; Le Pont de Maincy Turrell, James, 55–60

Usener, Hermann, 250, 262 van Wyck, Peter C., 14 Virilio, Paul, 129, 146 Vizenor, Gerald, 216 Walden Pond (Thoreau), 4–5 walk text, 12, 88–9, 94 walking, 71–84; as art, 9, 14, 58–9, 60, 65, 77–9, 87– 90, 98–101, 105–12; as meditation, 75; as picture, 74–6; Francis Alÿs, Paradox of Praxis 1, 78; Hamish Fulton, plates 3–8; with God, 73–4; Richard Long, Line Made by Walking, 79. See also Pilgrim’s Progress, The walls, 153–75; Alan Cohen, cover; eruv as wall, 168–72; Rehab Nazzal, plates 42–3; Margaret Olin, 153–75, 164, 166, 169 Wenjack, Chanie, 207n10, 287 Wilde, Oscar, 273 wilderness, 5, 7–9, 14, 56, 106, 109, 170, 194, 199, 281 Williams, Raymond, 6 witness, 10, 12, 57, 61, 106–8, 111, 121, 137, 180–1, 184, 232, 238, 244, 275, 287; as a responsibility, 180, 241–2; civic, 112, 277–8, 287; eyewitness, xxi, 277; to disaster, 276, 280–1; to the invisible, 275; tokens of, 100, 105–8, 111 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 276 work of art, 73, 89, 100, 106, 110–11, 123–4, 238, 244 X marks the spot, 12, 16, 62, 110, 118, 238, 281 York, Kara, 17

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