Following Fanon the human interactions in
colonies are heavily defined by violence infringed by colonists and perpetuated
in inner conflicts among colonized. Violence has become a psychic state
inherent to all interactions. His psychoanalytically loaded essay The
Wretched of the Earth from 1961 was first published close to the end of the
Algerian War (1954-1962) and describes a situation of colonial based structures
in such a radical way, that a permanent revolution seems to be the only way to
reach a single goal: Getting rid of colonists and the structures established by
them. But also getting rid of an identity ensured by the colonial condition.
The terminology between oppressors and oppressed is based on terms as white,
Europeans, colonists on one side and brothers, oppressed and slaves
on the other. The struggle he proposes does not leave any option for
intellectual, left wing conciliative or mestizo-nationbuilding discourses. I
dare to say, that his radical approach aims a 'Third World' revolution against all
different kinds of colonial and post-colonial oppression regimes disguised in
different forms of government. Fanon's harsh analysis became a classic and a
reference, since almost 50 years later the need to claim the sovereignty of the former colonies
as nations and the respect for also culturally defined spaces, endangered by
the appetite for natural resources or geopolitical hegemony,
remains.
Nonetheless, as we will see below, it seems that writing
harsh essays has become a tool of the conservative colonialist point of view
now and the ability to question and encode strategies of liberation in images a
tool of decolonialists.
In
Wong Hoy Cheong's photographic re-enactment of six European paintings from
around the 19th century entitled Days of Our Lives we find an
example of appropriation in fine arts. The appropriation defined as:
the ways in which post-colonial societies take over those aspects
of the imperial culture […] that may be use to them in articulating their own
social and cultural identities. […] post-colonial theory focuses […] on an
exploration of the ways in which the dominated or colonized culture can use the
tools of the dominant discourse to resist its political or cultural control.[1]
Wong's
act of appropriation is through a 'literal' but wilfully altered cite. Only by
being literal the implied critique to the European Fine Arts, its archives and
an European identity is possible. By re-enacting mimetically through
photography and introducing elements according to the principles of European
academic painting, in stead of trying to create an image following these
principles, he achieves to dismantle these principles and the values attached
to them in different ways. The changed
characters and their attributes are aimed to
question the implicitness in which these are considered as given and
might even lead the spectator to wonder about the place the human groups shown
in the photographies were given in European paintings of that time. The title
taken from the ongoing soap opera Days of Our Lives that began in 1965
might suggest that the colonial condition reaffirmed through images is an
ongoing process.
Wong brings up the term 'Europeanness' to refer
also to a shift in the identity of those migrant that are part of today's
European reality. He questions “notions such as Frenchness or Britishness or
Germaness [that] are not only in constant flux but needs to be reenvisioned.
What constitutes "Europeanness" now?”[2]
considering the large migrant population –also of second and third generation–
that is now part of each of these countries. In fact, the question about
European identity and its images is an ongoing discussion. The migrants and
their children and the integration of both became a mainstream topic that was
taken out every time a party, a politician or author had to gain popularity in
a campaign or –to mention a recent incident in Germany– when a book had to be
sold as a Bestseller[3] blaming
Muslim migrants for the incompetence of an elite the author belongs to[4]. The
fact that even non-European migrants testified the correctness of some of Thilo
Sarrazin's thesis, that mix up demographic biologist with cultural concepts,
emphasizing on the danger by the inherit ignorance and violence of Muslim
migrants for the development of Germany, ensures also the provocative effect of
the piece by Wong Hoy Cheong shown at the end of 2009 at the Biennale in Lyon
and affirms the need to 'reenvision'. Gerhard Paul in his essay on depiction of
'Europeaness' looks for a sole shared image of European identity. The only
medium that might provide this in an abstract but strong way, is a poster from
the 50s for a contest that transports a metaphor that works also in a Christian
sense: Europe as an imaginary sailing
ship, its sails the flags of European countries.[5] Paul
concludes that, even if there are strong images from the postwar era, he could
not find any depiction of an concrete historic event, that is shared in a same
European sense, and that Europe remains a cluster of
national identities[6].
Following Daniela Kneissl[7] the need
to forge an idea of an Europeaness had its most intense production of images in
the 50s. An exhibition from 1959 entitled Das menschliche Antlitz Europas,
initiated as a response to the exhibition from 1955 The Family of Man at
the MoMA by Edward Steichen, was conceived as a contest and gathered mostly
amateur photographies from European countries. The aim to construct a concrete
European image was achieved through a cluster of images, mostly portraits and
landscapes. Finally an image entitled “Zigeuner Junge” (Gipsy boy) showing a
close up of a boy's face who looks sceptically downward was selected. The idea
of an identity expressed through constant Migration and a high amount of
symbols and rituals impregnated by Christianity summarize her results taken from
the exhibition held in Munich[8]. But Days of Our Lives
as a 'reenvision' of European identity[9] from
outside belongs to a recent and ongoing trend its start I dare to situate for
Germany in the Nineties, expressing a desire of gathering images of contemporary
Europe through new media and from an
transcultural perspective.
[1] Ashcroft, Griffiths and
Tiffin, Post-Colonial Studies – The Key Concepts (London, NY: Routledge)
2003; 19
[2] Wong Hoy Cheong, “Days
Of Our Lives - Statement by the artist,” September 2009, acessed February 22, 2012.
http://universes-in-universe.org/eng/nafas/articles/2009/wong_hoy_cheong.
[3] I'm
referring to Sarrazin, Thilo, Deutschland schafft sich selbst ab. Wie wir
unser Land aufs Spiel setzen (München: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2010).
[4] Geyer,
Christian, “So wird Deutschland dumm” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March
25, 2010.
Accessed March 21, 2012, http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/buecher/rezensionen/sachbuch/thilo-sarrazin-deutschland-schafft-sich-ab-so-wird-deutschland-dumm-1999085.html.
[5] A
Poster by Rey Dirksen, winner of the European Recovery Program (ERP) poster
contest. Regarding these abstract images intended to create a positive image
Paul considers that even these are characterized by formerly strong images, but
that the metaphors remain weak, contradictory and incapable of bearing merely
positive expectations. I'd like to add the metaphor of the ship regarding
immigrants shiftet in the 90s to “the ship is full” and “Europe as fortress”. Conf. Paul, Gerhard :
Europabilder des 20. Jahrhundert – Bilddiskurse – Bilderkanon – visuelle
Erinnerungsorte in: Drechsel; Jaeger; König (2010) Bilder von Europa –
Innen- und Außenansichten von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart; Bielefeld, Transcript, 261-262.
[6] Idem.
Ibid. Even depictions of political unity like the The Tennis Court Oath
by David, or Guernica as an 'icon of war', or the images by Muchas
from Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau are interpreted in very
different ways among European schoolbooks.
[7] Kneissl,
D., “Zwischen Universalismus und Begrenzung – Europavisualisierung als
Europakonstruktion in den 1950er Jahren” in: Drechsel; Jaeger and König. Bilder
von Europa – Innen- und Außenansichten von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart (Bielefeld, Transcript, 2010), 281.
[8] Idem.
Ibid. The exhibition Das menschliche
Antlitz Europas was conceived by Tas Toth,
who emigrated in 1956 from Hungary and together with his wife prepared in only 18 month
the exhibition. From the 4287 images gathered from 27 countries, 274 were
selected for the exhibition. Germany was over-represented with 1789 images and 102
selected.
[9] It
might be by chance that right next to the Bienale catalogue's entry of Days of
Our Lives appears an art project with Gipsy women by ??? The constant
negotiation related to the complexity and the contradictions of “Europeaness”
seem also be embodied in the negociation with Gipsy people.
