Regimes of Invisibility in Contemporary Art, Theory and Culture

Regimes of Invisibility
in Contemporary Art,
Theory and Culture
Marina Gržinić • Aneta Stojnić • Miško Šuvaković
Editors
Regimes of Invisibility
in Contemporary Art,
Theory and Culture
Image, Racialization, History
Contributions by
Marina Gržinić, Adla Isanović, Alanna Lockward, Federica Martini, Aleksa Milanović,
Andrea Pócsik, Aneta Stojnić, Miško Šuvaković, Šefik Tatlić, Jelena Todorović
Editors
Marina Gržinić Aneta Stojnić
Institute of Fine Arts (IBK) Faculty of Media and Communications
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna Singidunum University
Vienna, Austria Belgrade, Serbia
Miško Šuvaković
Faculty of Media and Communications
Singidunum University
Belgrade, Serbia
ISBN 978-3-319-55172-2 ISBN 978-3-319-55173-9 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55173-9
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CONTENTS
1 Introduction: Image, Racialization, History 1

Miško Šuvaković, Aneta Stojnić and Marina Gržinić
Part I Theoretical-Political Interventions
2 Racialized Bodies and the Digital (Financial) Mode

of Production 13
Marina Gržinić
3 Politics and Aesthetics of Databases and Forensics 29

Adla Isanović
4 The Emancipation of Necrocapitalism: Teleological

Function of Liberalism and the Optimization of Hegemony 45
Šefik Tatlić
5 The Impact of Western Society onto the Identity

Politics of Sexual and Gender Minorities in Colonial
and Post-colonial India 61
Aleksa Milanović
v
vi CONTENTS
Part II Visual and Curatorial Deconstructions
6 Radical Contemporaneity 77
Aneta Stojnić
7 Affective Constructions: Image—Racialisation—History 89

Miško Šuvaković
8 Spiritual Revolutions: Afropean Body Politics and the

“Secularity” of the Arts 103
Alanna Lockward
Part III Histories Disclosed
9 “Contingent monuments:” Constructions of Publicness

in the Fascist Italy Exhibitionary Complex 1920s–1940s 125
Federica Martini
10 Screened Otherness: A Media Archaeology

of the Romani’s Criminalization 141
Andrea Pócsik
11 The Painting and Its Histories: The Curious Incident

of Rembrandt’s Painting Quintus Fabius Maximus 159
Jelena Todorović
Index 169
LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES
Table 7.1 “Affective construction” created by Miško Šuvaković 100

Fig. 6.1 Marina Gržinić, Aina Šmid, Digital montage no. 7, (1 m per
70 cm), 2015, Copyright by Gržinić/Šmid 78
Fig. 6.2 Marina Gržinić, Aina Šmid, Digital montage no. 3, (1 m per
70 cm), 2015, Copyright by Gržinić/Šmid 79
Fig. 10.1 Zsid, Hungary, 1909, by János Sági. Copyright by Museum
of Ethnography, Budapest 142
vii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Image, Racialization, History
Miško Šuvaković, Aneta Stojnić and Marina Gržinić
The idea for the book Regimes of Invisibility in Contemporary Art,

Theory and Culture: Image, Racialization, History started with the
international conference of the same title held at the Faculty of Media
and Communications (FMK), Singidunum University in Belgrade
(Serbia) in September 2015. Wonderfully vivid and fruitful discussions at
the conference opened up numerous urgent questions that we felt would
need to gain further articulation and elaboration in a context and format
that surpasses such a singular academic event. Therefore we decided to
develop this book as an innovative and current perspective on the topic of
global capitalism in relation to questions of race, class, gender and migra-
tion, as well as historicization and (de)coloniality, also allowing us to
include more authors and a variety of positions. The outcome is a truly
transdisciplinary and transdiscursive platform.
Regimes of Invisibility in Contemporary Art, Theory and Culture:
Image, Racialization, History is a volume that places a focus on the
M. Šuvaković (*) · A. Stojnić

Faculty of Media and Communications, Singidunum University, Belgrade, Serbia
e-mail: miodrag.suvakovic@fmk.edu.rs; aneta.s7@gmail.com
M. Gržinić
Institute of Fine Arts (IBK), Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Vienna, Austria
e-mail: m.grzinic@akbild.ac.at
© The Author(s) 2017 1

M. Gržinić et al. (eds.), Regimes of Invisibility in Contemporary Art,
Theory and Culture, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55173-9_1
2 M. ŠUVAKOVIĆ ET AL.
regimes of in/visibility and representation in Europe. The aim of this

volume is to revisit theories of art, new media technology and aes-
thetics under the weight of political processes of discrimination, racism,
anti-Semitism and new forms of coloniality in order to propose a new
dispositive of the ontology and epistemology of the image, of life and
capitalism as well as labour and modes of life (naked life). Today the
processes of neoliberalism, fascism and racism are realities in Europe, as
well as reflections of global power relations. The division into citizens,
non-citizens and refugees (as the lowest category of non-citizens) has
sharpened the processes of fascism and racialization to their extremes
and are spilling out on both sides of the borders of fortress Europe.
This book offers analyses of radical artistic, activist and cultural prac-
tices as well as cutting-edge theoretical and philosophical approaches,
and as such stands as a proper theoretical intervention into the above-
mentioned histories and realities. As such the book is intended for
scholars, students and philosophers as well as artists with an interest
in the artistic and theoretical practices that affirm critical thinking at the
intersection of art, culture and politics.
The authors of the chapters in the book conducted a thorough exam-
ination of what these process mean for artistic and cultural practices, as
well as and even more so for the present conditions of life and labour.
Contributions by Marina Gržinić, Adla Isanović, Alanna Lockward,
Federica Martini, Aleksa Milanović, Andrea Pócsik, Aneta Stojnić, Miško
Šuvaković, Šefik Tatlić and Jelena Todorović form ten chapters. They are
art and media theoreticians, philosophers, sociologists and art historians
from Europe and elsewhere. These writers of different generations, various
theoretical backgrounds and positions provide us with key threads for
rethinking the connections, relations, crossroads, entwinements and jux-
tapositions of the regimes of representations, regimes of invisibility, insti-
tutionalization and normalization of racialization as well as a contested
process of historicization with its far-reaching consequences.
A number of contributors in their analyses foreground the importance
of Marina Gržinić’s theoretical-political discourse on one side and the
artistic-media practice of Marina Gržinić and Aina Šmid on the other. In
this last respect Miško Šuvaković discusses the affective constructions in
contemporary art in relation to the mentioned video-film work, while
Aneta Stojnić exposes genealogies of politics of the image.
We understand the significance of Marina Gržinić’s position for the
topics foregrounded in this book in a twofold way. Firstly, authors like
INTRODUCTION: IMAGE, RACIALIZATION, HISTORY 3
Adla Isanović and Šefik Tatlić draw upon Gržinić’s development of the
concept of necropolitics. While Achille Mbembe articulated the concept of
necropolitics to explain a process of total exploitation in Africa and in the
context of the Middle East, Marina Gržinić was the first to use necropo-
litics for explaining and understanding the processes in Europe and parti-
cularly in the former Yugoslavia. Secondly, as stated, authors as Miško
Šuvaković and Aneta Stojnić delve into analyses of the artistic critical
video-film practice by Gržinić and Šmid.
The book is divided in three sections that resonate with one-another,
each focuses on specific set of questions related to the regimes of invisi-
bility in contemporary art, theory and culture.
Marina Gržinić analyses the work of Gilles Deleuze, Jonathan Beller
and Suvendrini Perera, elaborating on the status of images in the capitalist
mode of production. Jonathan Beller, with his cinematic mode of produc-
tion, calls for the possibility of re-reading the proposed line of concatena-
tion of selected films of the twentieth century, which Gilles Deleuze
conceived in the 1980s. Deleuze recuperates a selected history of the
twentieth century Western auteur film through two images, two notions
of body-mental relations to/within film: the movement-image and the
time-image. Beller’s cinematic mode of production gave these images the
missing frames of labour, of capitalist production relations and of the
capitalist means of production. With the digital (financial) mode of pro-
duction we can go further and ask what the film images of the twenty-first
century are. The list is long, though some images can possibly be enlisted
as brands: the event-image, the militant-image, the commodity-image. At
this point we have to radicalize the status of these images of the digital
(financial) mode of production even more and ask: (1) What is the
racialized unconscious of these images? (2) What is their status in relation
to the imperial, colonial, necropolitical and racial line that cuts global
neoliberal capitalism from within and heavily conditions the contemporary
production of its financial-images?
Adla Isanović opens a discussion on the politics and aesthetics of
databases. The database is becoming one of the dominant means of
knowledge production and circulation and one of the widespread methods
of cultural expression. Actually, database logic and aesthetics appear to be
something that is imposed as a norm. Its inclusion is visible in science,
media, social networking, state-governing, policy making, juridical pro-
cesses and military interventions. Furthermore, the database is recognized
as a dominant genre in (new) media art, but its influence is visible in a
wider range of art practices, including contemporary presentation/exhibi-

tion models and forms. The chapter by Isanović argues that the database as
a norm and major neoliberal governmental technology emerges, coexists
with, and embodies changing relations within what Michel Foucault has
called governmentality. It analyses how faith in data and its accompanied
politics, practices and forms of knowledge production and forms of visi-
bility are configuring and shifting the relations of contemporary subjects
and objects and their realities. In doing this the analysis relates as well to
the forensic turn (Eyal Weizman) and to its prevailing forensic methodol-
ogy and aesthetics conducted through different “forums,” as for example
of international humanitarian politics, law and art. Today databases are
widely promoted as gender-, class- and race-neutral, even emancipatory. If
the database is propagated as a desired cultural form of our age it is
necessary to rethink which of those forms are celebrated as democratizing.
Šefik Tatlić’s chapter deals with necroplitics and analyses of the process
that he terms “emancipation of necrocapitalism.” Unlike other great
modernist projects such as socialism, capitalism’s institutionalism, as well
as its ideological and political discursivity, was not designed to operate in a
capacity in which politics or wider discursive formations of power would
be an extension of politically ideological discursivity. Since racism, atavism
and primitivism are inherently entwined in paradigmatic Western huma-
nist projects, capitalism’s ideological and teleological coherence depends
on the level of deriving these discourses from the humanist projects into its
own teleological interiority, which are then modernized and normalized as
proper modernist discourses. Necropolitics and racialization therefore
serve as modes of this deriving, modernizing, applying and normalizing.
Capitalism essentially needs necropolitics because it allows it to equal
structural application and normalization of atavistic and racialist discourses
(that perpetuate the privileges of the First World) with the sustainment of
humanist discursivities (such is liberalism), also because it allows capitalism
to represent its dedication to preserving such humanist-centrism as a token
of existence of some teleological grounding, vision and coherence.
Necropolitics therefore provides statehood to capitalism.
Aleksa Milanović’s chapter deals with how Western concepts of
(homo)sexuality and (trans)gender identities have affected and still affect
the understanding of these phenomena and the creation of identity politics
in a non-Western cultural context that already had established different
models of understanding gender and sexuality. This text deals with the
influence of Western society on the identity politics of sexual and gender
minorities in colonial and post-colonial India, investigating the problem of

hybridization of the indigenous gender and sexual identity minorities. It
also explores the emergence of identity, community and activist forms of
struggle characteristic for Western culture and which are found in post-
colonial India as the result of modern globalization processes.
Aneta Stojnić’s chapter explores an understanding of the politics of the
image in the videos by Marina Gržinić and Aina Šmid. Covering a span of
over thirty years (from the 1980s until today), video works by Gržinić and
Šmid speak about the historical account of events in the transition from
socialism to post-socialism; they also expose the conditions of contempor-
ary global necrocapitalism, levelling a harsh critique of discrimination,
racism and fascism in Europe today. In this regard their work takes a
historical position in terms of artistic, cultural and political questioning
and critiquing the construction and deconstruction of the political project
of the former Eastern Europe in relation to the so-called former West, as
well as understanding the contemporary relations of segregation and
exploitation in Europe, particularly in terms of class, race and gender.
Stojnić’s text gives special attention to the format of the videos and the
conceptual usage of image and text in works presented at an exhibition by
Gržinić and Šmid as part of the symposium Image, Racialization,
History.
Miško Šuvaković’s case study is the artistic-theoretical-cum-media
practice of Gržinić and her close accomplice Aina Šmid, which changed
and accelerated from the early 1980s to the present in the midst of a global
economic and racial crisis. The objects of his chapter are affective con-
structions that appear in contemporary art and theory in lieu of artworks,
cultural and social positioning and theoretical interpretation. Šuvaković’s
affective constructions refer to different media, post-media, behavioural,
activist and theoretical modalities of artists’ actions in the real world, with
all the consequences that such actions bring about, whether expectedly or
unexpectedly, directly or indirectly. Those consequences are aesthetic,
epistemological or political effects—inscriptions that we recognize as
traces of actions that attract, maintain and absorb my/our attention.
Relations of the aesthetic qua sensuous and sensitive, the epistemological
as that which is oriented towards understanding, and the political as active
social positioning in relation to a given centre and a given margin make an
artist like Gržinić’s work recognizable in our time. Šuvaković also discusses
the cognitivization of an artistic and theoretical sample posited as a phe-
nomenon, effect, and, ultimately, an affectively acting construction in the
domain of aesthetic, epistemological and political attraction. In the con-

text of this discussion affect denotes the intensity of the effect of a given
construction, while attraction denotes the way of attracting the attention
that an affective construction performs on an individual or a collective
“body”.
Alanna Lockward’s chapter introduces a Vodoun ceremony that her-
alded the beginning of the end of Europe’s savage capitalist enterprise in
the Caribbean and elsewhere. According to Laurent Dubois she states that
we are all descendants of the Haitian Revolution, and therefore accoun-
table to its ancestry. Lockward discusses how the liberation and Pan-
Africanist legacies of the maroon leaders that created the first Black
Republic is present in the work of some Afropean Decolonial
Aesthetics/Aesthesis practitioners, such as Teresa María Díaz Nerio,
Jeannette Ehlers, Quinsy Gario and Patricia Kaersenhout, as well as in
other Caribbean (Diaspora) artists. Apart from the paradigmatic work of
Renée Cox honouring the legacy of the Jamaican heroine Queen Nanny of
the Maroons, who was their armed and spiritual leader, there is also the
radical legacy of Ana Mendieta, who combined in her work some of the
basic premises of maroon life, namely a permanent dialogue with nature
and its spirits. Nicolás Dumit Estévez and Charo Oquet, for example,
resonate with the spiritual legacies of marronage, consistently contributing
to dismantle one of the most successful fallacies of modernity: the so-
called secularity of the arts. Furthermore, Miami-based Adler Guerrier
revisits Charles Mingus’ Haitian Fight Song in a film where his interpreta-
tion of the flâneur defies the painful erasure by colonial archives on the
African continent and elsewhere of Black radical legacies. This particular
type of awareness of an urban landscape as a space where the mere
presence of a Black body represents both a transgression and an affirma-
tion of being is reminiscent of the spirit of armed struggle of those run-
away warriors. In this sense, these artists are expanding the stamina of
Decolonial Aesthetics/Aesthesis by focusing their attention on the forms
of sensing and inhabiting the world that the modern/colonial order has
suppressed.
At the centre of Federica Martini’s chapter is a demand for a historical
perspective that should reflect on the reasons that led to separate exhibi-
tion-making from other cultural productions promoted and authored by
the Fascist intelligentsia. The same is necessary to understand why Fascist
exhibitions have been investigated in a mono-disciplinary fashion that
contradicts, on the conceptual level, the regime’s inclination for trans-
disciplinary practices suggested by other art historians as well. So far, as

current historical and architectural analyses of 1930s Italian exhibitions are
concerned, fine arts shows have been separated from “non-art shows for a
mass audience” (Claudio Fogu). This estrangement implies reducing
installations to a pure design exercise or to a means for disseminating
propaganda and celebratory statements, whereas the history of exhibitions
has long claimed displays as autonomous aesthetic forms. However, the
most critical development in this respect is the possibility to address the
layering of histories and experiments that disturbingly correlate Fascist
exhibitions to avant-garde experiments—a task that the author of the text
pursues by juxtaposing contemporary art and trans-disciplinary exhibitions
in an international context.
The chapter by Andrea Pócsik argues that scientific and popular
cultural visual representations and their blurred boundaries have a signifi-
cant and mutual influence in creating “Gypsy otherness” more effectively
than any previous forms. Criminalized travelling and poverty depicted as
the fault of the poor became the solid pillars of Gypsy images and help
justify, maintain and further the exclusion of this ethnic minority from the
“nation.” The author focuses on an early cinema newsreel and the crime it
represented in 1908, which received sensational press coverage at the time
in Hungary when a wayhouse owner and his family were murdered and
robbed. According to historical documents, mainly press releases, only
travelling Gypsies were accused, and then sentenced based on the testi-
mony of a child. The author also draws parallels with a late-modern media
rite emphasized by a fictional documentary that followed the murder of
Marian Cozma in a night club in 2009 in Veszprém (Hungary). Cozma,
the Romanian handball player who played for HC Dinamo Bucureşti and
KC Veszprém, was celebrating with his teammates when they got into an
altercation with a group of 25–30 Romani people. Cozma was stabbed to
death. Looking at the dual Gypsy image at the dawn of the twentieth
century and today we can identify phenomena that exemplify the inter-
relations of popular (visual) culture and sciences.
Jelena Todorović’s chapter investigates images that created the landscapes
of fictive history throughout the ages and that themselves often had greatly
mystified histories of their own. Great masterpieces have always inspired awe
and admiration but also myths regarding their creation and often their dis-
appearance. Lost works of art have long been the source of particularly
elaborate myths. However, in certain instances the real history of an image is
often far more intricate than the most incredible myth created around it. One
such work is a long-lost masterpiece—Rembrandt’s “Quint Fabius Maximus”

from the State Art Collection of the Royal Compound in Belgrade (SAC).
Before the Second World War this painting was considered the authentic work
of the master and one of the key paintings in his oeuvre. During the first half of
the twentieth century it changed several hands until, in 1932, it was bought
for the SAC (State Are Collection) of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Last seen in
the Palace in 1941, it was captured by the German army and its trail was lost
somewhere during the Second World War. However, its mythical history
commences only after the war, when the legend of “Tito’s mysterious gift of
Rembrandt” was created. As any myth, this one was equally devoid of any
sense of reality. Its real history was altogether different. This chapter researches
the real history of Rembrandt’s painting, its fate during the war and its
reappearance in archival documents. It shows how images create histories
themselves not only through their subject matter or the politics of collecting
but through their incorporation into the public imagination.
Taken as a whole this book is firmly embedded in the present moment,
when due to rapid and major changes on all levels of political and social reality
the need for rearticulation in theoretical practices and rethinking of historical
narratives becomes almost tangible. As such, this book stands as a proper
theoretical intervention into the above-mentioned histories and realities.
The editors wish to thank all the contributors for the hard work they
invested in this project. Also, the editors are especially grateful to the
Faculty of Media and Communications, Belgrade for the generous sup-
port that made this project possible.
Miško Šuvaković (PhD) is Dean of Faculty of Media and Communications,

Singidunum University, Belgrade, and professor of theory of art and media in
the PhD program of trans-disciplinary humanities and theory of art. He works on
theories of avant-gardes, neo-avant-gardes and contemporary art. He has pub-
lished around fifty books in the Serbian, Slovenian and English languages.
Aneta Stojnić (PhD) is a Belgrade-born theoretician, artist and curator. She

received her PhD in Theory of Arts and Media at the University of Arts in
Belgrade in 2013. Since 2014 she holds the position of assistant professor at the
Faculty of Media and Communications in Belgrade (FMK, Singidunum
University). In 2015 she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Academy of Fine
Arts in Vienna, and in 2013–2014 she was a postdoctoral research fellow at Ghent
University, Research centre S:PAM (Studies in Performing Arts & Media). She was
a visiting scholar at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in the Conceptual Art
study program (2013) and an artist in residence at Tanzquartier Vienna in 2011.

In 2012 she was writer in residence at KulturKontakt Austria. She published two
books: Theory of performance in digital art: Towards a new political performance
(Orion Art, Belgrade, 2015) and Jacques Lacan (Orion Art, Belgrade, 2016), and
authored a number of essays on contemporary art and media, as well as various
artistic and curatorial projects.
Marina Gržinić (PhD) is a philosopher and artist who lives in Ljubljana and works
in Ljubljana and Vienna. She is researcher at the FI SRC SASA (Research Center of
the Slovenian Academy of Science and Arts) Ljubljana and professor at the
Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. She has published ten books (monographs and
translations). In 2014, in collaboration with Šefik Tatlić, she co-authored the book
Necropolitics, Racialization and Global Capitalism: Historicization of Biopolitics
and Forensics of Politics, Art, and Life (Lexington Books, USA, 2014). Gržinić has
been active as a video artist since 1982 and in the last thirty-five years has also been
making installations and performative exhibitions in collaboration with the artist
and art historian Aina Šmid from Ljubljana. http://grzinic-smid.si/
PART I
Theoretical-Political Interventions
CHAPTER 2
Racialized Bodies and the Digital (Financial)

Mode of Production
Marina Gržinić
I want to radicalize the status of images of the digital (financial) mode of

production, even more, to ask: (1) what is the racialized unconscious (see
the adjective in front of the unconscious) of these images, and (2) what is
their status in relation to the imperial, colonial, necropolitical and racial
line that cuts global neoliberal capitalism from within and heavily condi-
tions contemporary necropolitical capitalist production and its financial-
images?
INTRODUCTION
I elaborate on a new type of image that I claim to be exemplary for
financial capital and its mode of digital production. I name it, following
Suvendrini Perera, the ‘trophy’ image1 that is emblematic not only for the
time will live in but also carries a process of desubjectivation in itself that is
in fact a brutal racialization that is a systematic procedure of discrimina-
tion, differentiation, seizure, and closure by capital. When I speak about
subjectivation I think about a political subjectivity that is not essentialist,
as we know the subject is only a name for a form of agency. The processes
M. Gržinić (*)
Institute of Fine Arts (IBK), Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Vienna, Austria
e-mail: m.grzinic@akbild.ac.at

14 M. GRŽINIĆ
of neoliberal global capitalism produce only a subject that from a tradi-

tional emancipatory point of view is not a subject at all.
In the time we live the subject seems to be the most despised notion
today. Objects matter, though not the subject. The art historian David
Joselit stated that we have to rethink visual politics and the hopes posed
onto the image. He is skeptical of the ideological promises of representa-
tion in regards to the video of Eric Garner’s murder, an indictment of
image or format. On 17 July 2014, Garner died in Staten Island, New
York City after a NYPD officer put him in a chokehold for about 15 to 19
seconds while arresting him. Joselit states that the difference between
format and medium lies largely in the heterogeneity of the components—
aesthetics, data, history, the scene of an action—which is anathema to
traditional concepts of medium. When Bruno Latour talks about assem-
blages he is talking about linkages, not the abstract infinity of a network. It
is difficult to quantify the limits of extension. For instance, one must think
about what is folded into images as well as what extends out from them.2
We find ourselves with a shift toward humanity instead; in this process what
is left outside is precisely de-humanization. When millions are killed in the
name of humanity and the military machine is put to work, specifically after
2003, then even though all seems to be done in the name of humanity it is
in fact done in the name of the process of the logic of capital humanization.
Šefik Tatlić emphasizes the specific status of this humanity, as he argues it is
about the logic of capital’s humanization.3
Though this does not mean a substitution of one form of agency with
another, in global capitalism all these modes and conditions reside close to
each other.
The film World War Z (2013) presents this idea.4 A former United
Nations employee named Gerry Lane traverses the world in a race against
time to stop the zombie pandemic that is toppling armies and govern-
ments and threatening to destroy humanity itself. At the end of the film
Lane explains they were able to rescue themselves from the zombies by
creating a masking agent, that people used to evacuate people or fight
back, and also that they live one near the other, as being masked they do
not recognize each other. The masking simply makes a further differentia-
tion between those who should live and those that are obsolete.
The system of financialization that is connected with necropolitics links
to the principal mode of our relation to economy. With an intensified
system of precarity, and with the normalization of war as a main social
relation, all these features financialize the status of the image in itself.
RACIALIZED BODIES AND THE DIGITAL (FINANCIAL) MODE OF PRODUCTION 15
Millions of them are around and they also diminish the possibility of
apprehension, of agency. This provokes a new logic of distribution, circu-
lation of images, etc.
PART 1: FROM THE CINEMATIC IMAGE TO . . .
We can turn our attention to several political genealogies of the image, no

longer asking what the image is but how are different images constructed. The
attempt is to think the image inside the juridical and administrative systems,
also media and economics discourses that produce images. Furthermore, to ask
how life and death are administered and distributed? Following Beatriz
Preciado, I can question: “Why do certain bodies have access to the techniques
of governance and apparatus’ of verification while others do not? Why are
certain bodies considered as political subjects while others simply are not? How
is it possible to intervene in the systems of representations and the discourses
that determine and distribute life and death chances?”5
In the 1990s I did some initial work in the matter. I made use of two
paradigms, or time and image models, developed by Gilles Deleuze in two
of his famous books: The Movement-Image6 (first published in 1983) and
The Time-Image7 (first published in 1985). The books examine mutations
in the history of cinematic signification. D. N. Rodowick in his compelling
book Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine8 explains that, for Deleuze, “the
semiotic history of film is coincident with a century-long transformation
wherein we have come to represent and understand ourselves socially
through spatial and temporal articulations founded in cinema, if now
realized more clearly in the electronic and digital media.” (Rodowick,
Preface, xiii). For Deleuze the idea is not to produce another theory of
film but to realize how aesthetic, philosophical, and scientific modes of
understanding converge to produce cultural strategies for imagining.
What is specific to the image, as Deleuze writes, “is to make perceptible,
to make visible, relationships of time which cannot be seen in the repre-
sented object and do not allow themselves to be reduced to the present.”
(Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Preface to the English edition, xi).
Both books are about cinema, but Deleuze also uses cinema to theorize
time, movement, and life as a whole. The movement-image ranges from
the silent era to the 1970s and includes the work of D. W. Griffith, Abel
Gance, Erich von Stroheim, Charlie Chaplin, Sergei Eisenstein, Luis
Buñuel, Howard Hawks, Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Sidney
Lumet, and Robert Altman. In short, Deleuze’s movement-image draws
16 M. GRŽINIĆ
upon the American silent cinema, the Soviet school of montage, and the
French impressionist cinema, whereas the time-image originates in the
modern European and New American cinemas, for example, the films of
Alain Resnais. I can state that these cinematic images are two Deleuzian
models of time (Deleuze’s interest was precisely the relation of time and
space). What is even more necessary to expose is their respective spatial
rendering of time (i.e., time through space) which divides the movement-
image from the time-image. Reading them, I proposed the following
temporal, spatial, and compositional characteristics:9
THE MOVEMENT-IMAGE—INDIRECT-TIME INTERVAL—

EXTERIORITY OF SPACE—ORGANIC FORM
THE TIME-IMAGE—DIRECT-TIME INTERVAL—ANTERIORITY

OF SPACE—SERIAL FORM
Before I explain them I can state that these cinematic images are two
Deleuzian models of time. What is even more necessary to expose is their
respective spatial rendering of time (i.e., time through space) which divides
the movement-image from the time-image. The main platform of this
unusual idea derives from Deleuze’s re-thinking of the interval—the space
or division between photograms, shots, sequences—and how the organiza-
tion of intervals informs the spatial representation of time in cinema.
TIME THROUGH SPACE

The Movement-Image—Indirect-Time Interval—Exteriority
of Space—Organic Form
Close your eyes and recall sequences from Eisenstein or Keaton films. This
is the movement-image, where the linking of images is going on through
motoric actions. In the movement-image the interval is part of the image
or sequence, either as the ending of one action or as the beginning of
another. According to Deleuze, in the movement-image (e.g., with
Eisenstein and Keaton) time is reduced to intervals defined by movement
as actions, and the linking of such movements is accomplished through
montage. The movement-image can only provide an indirect image of
time as exteriority or extensiveness in space.
The Time-Image—Direct-Time Interval—Anteriority

of Space—Serial Form
Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (1961) is an exemplary case of the time-
image in which acts of seeing and hearing replace the movement. In the
time-image, therefore, the interval becomes an autonomous value, giving us
a direct image of time. The interval no longer facilitates the passage from
one image to another in any detectable manner. According to Rodowick, in
the time-image the interval functions as an irreducible limit; the flow of
images or sequences bifurcates and develops serially rather than continuing
as a line or integrating into a whole. The time-image produces a serial rather
than organic form of composition, as is the case in the movement-image.
Since the linking of images is no longer motivated by action, the nature of
the space changes, becoming disconnected or empty.
However, the movement-image and the time-image each manage this
relation with time differently. The time-image presents the anteriority of
space as creative evolution, the pure form of time as change or Becoming.
This is seen in Godard’s films. The time-image asks what happens when
actions no longer master time. Deleuze, via Rodowick, argues that the
image must turn from exteriority in space toward a process of genesis in
mental relations of time.
Jonathan Beller in his book The Cinematic Mode of Production:
Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle10 establishes a critique
of Deleuze’s big cinema auteur genealogies. Beller also looks at cinema
during the twentieth century, but establishes on both theoretical and
historical grounds the process of the emergent capitalization of percep-
tion. He exposes not an orientation in time and space but rather sees a
capitalization of time and space through these same images and auteurs.
Even more, he says that the two Deleuzian cinema images reinforce the
current global economy. By exploring a set of films made since the late
1920s, Beller argues that through cinema capital first posits and then
presupposes looking as a value-productive activity. He argues that cinema,
as the first crystallization of a new order of media, is itself an abstraction of
assembly line processes and that the contemporary image is a politico-
economic interface between the body and capitalized social machinery.
We are approaching, much more accurately and militantly, the trophy
image.
What are the forms of subjectivization?
18 M. GRŽINIĆ
THE MOVEMENT-IMAGE—INDIRECT-TIME INTERVAL—

EXTERIORITY OF SPACE—ORGANIC FORM—NATION
My answer is that from the organic form of the movement-image we see
that cinema is intrinsically involved in the formation of the masses, if not
the nation. The best example is precisely The Birth of a Nation (1915), the
American silent epic directed by D. W. Griffith and starring Lillian Gish.
The screenplay was adapted from the novel and play The Clansman, both
by Thomas Dixon, Jr. Griffith co-wrote the screenplay (with Frank E.
Woods) and co-produced the film (with Harry Aitken). The film chroni-
cles the relationship of two families in the American Civil War and
Reconstruction era: the pro-Union Northern Stonemans and the pro-
Confederacy Southern Camerons. The assassination of President
Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth is also dramatized. The film was
a commercial success, though it was highly controversial owing to its
portrayal of black men (some played by white actors in blackface) as
unintelligent and sexually aggressive toward white women, and the por-
trayal of the Ku Klux Klan (whose original founding is dramatized) as a
heroic force.11
In the time-image in auteur cinema a process is established through
the formalization of the postwar middle class of the consumerist,
intellectual bourgeoisie in the West. This middle class responds to
the neo-avantgarde demands of new wave cinema. The new wave in
film is a step toward the formalization of film structure, excellently
explained by Godard’s famous dictum “it’s not blood, it’s red.” I
challenged this in the era of postsocialism, marked also by the
Balkanization of the former Yugoslavia (the Srebrenica genocide in
the 1990s in Bosnia & Herzegovina being its symptomatic horror),
and proposed its reversal for many film experiments: “it’s not red, it’s
blood.”
THE TIME-IMAGE—DIRECT-TIME INTERVAL—ANTERIORITY OF

SPACE—SERIAL FORM—POSTWAR MIDDLE CLASS, A NEW FORM
OF INTELLECTUAL, THE BOURGEOISIE
The best example is the previously mentioned Alain Resnais. His film
L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961) is famous for its enigmatic narrative
structure, in which truth and fiction are difficult to distinguish and the
temporal and spatial relationship of the events is open to question. At a

social gathering at a château or baroque hotel, a man approaches a woman.
He claims they met the year before at Marienbad and is convinced that she
is waiting there for him. The woman insists they have never met. A second
man, who may be the woman’s husband, repeatedly asserts his dominance
over the first man, including beating him several times at a mathematical
game (a version of Nim). Through ambiguous flashbacks and disorienting
shifts of time and location the film explores the relationships among the
characters.12
Shifts in the Space-Time Paradigm

It is important to think that the cinematic images of Deleuze can be
conceptualized as time rendered through space. In the 1980s, prior to
new media technology, all is still bound to space, though with the analysis
of the society of control that presses more and more because of new video
and media technology time is advancing. This is described by Deleuze in
his text “Postscript on the Societies of Control.”13
In differentiation to Deleuze’s cinematic images, the society of con-
trol’s mode of production of territory and theory, body and mind, is
replacing the older modernist production of space (according to Henri
Lefebvre14). From the 1990s on, due to new media and technology, we
witness a production of time as a process that involves temporalization, as
was the case with space and territory. Both space and time are not some-
thing natural. Rather, they are subjected to artificial processes of change,
production, and modification. Deleuze is precise in his “Postscript on the
Societies of Control” when he talks about modulation. However, I should
note that I am not a Deleuzian. I only want to capture and analyze the
ontological status of the image produced in these two books by Deleuze,
also to investigate what is possible to refer to as the philosophy of film in
the Western context.
The temporalization of time is a process showing that time is not a
natural dimension that is in synchronicity with our psychological feeling of
time. Time was accelerated and new categories emerged (also in relation to
history, which I can quickly summarize as long, short, and immediate
history) that changed the perception of any information. This temporali-
zation of time, the production of time, the way in which time is sped up,
changes with technology. Each technology—the last is Tele-presence
(accessing real spaces through the Internet via Tele-directed-robotics)—
20 M. GRŽINIĆ
is used to shorten this difference between time scales. That is why it is

possible to say via Richard Beardsworth15 and his predictive thoughts that
we can detect a process of constant tension between the nature of the
technical tool that allows the mediation of time and the human experience
of time.
This tension can most immediately be seen with the digitalization of
memory support-systems and the digitalization of archives: our experi-
ence of time is being rapidly foreshortened, creating a tension between
the international nature of the electronic techniques and the corporal
realities that make up much of human life. It is also clear, via
Beardsworth, that future technical intervention into the genetic “ingre-
dients” of what is perceived as human will accelerate processes of
evolution at such a speed (if this will remain the right term, again
according to Beardsworth) that present conceptions of history, inheri-
tance, memory, and the body will need to be dramatically reorganized
if the definition of what is “human” is not to become a monopoly
game between the technosciences and capital.
A popular solution for this humanity is the film Lucy (2014) by Luc
Besson, where the human, white, and gendered16 (of course) can only do
something with enhancement, with psychotropic substances—what
Beatriz Preciado17 calls the farmacopornographic, hot punk capitalism of
today.
In the end of the film what rests after this enhancement of the body
with psychotropic substances is the total absorption of the human in the
computer circuits, to become one with the flash drive. Professor Norman,
a film character, takes a monolithic flash drive offered by the advanced
supercomputer before it disintegrates to dust. Del Rio, another character,
asks Professor Norman where Lucy is, immediately after which Del Rio’s
cell phone sounds and he sees a text message: “I AM EVERYWHERE.”
This is a comic metaphor for an immensely huge number of images and a
new logic of their distribution and circulation; also, the system of finan-
cialization with debt as our principal mode of relation to life. It is possible
to prevent such a situation through processes that grasp the radically
artificial condition of the production of time and space, and the aspects
of technology that are inherent to such productions. Time and space in
their relation with technology and capital (e.g., the connection of biology
and genetics through technology) can help to delay (but unfortunately
never to prevent) future catastrophes and to give contingency a new
powerful space.
Furthermore, it is important to grasp that without technical devices

today we cannot re-capture the experience of time: the dimension of
remembering and the dimension of anticipating time. Without memory
support techniques, from photography to CD-ROMs or the Internet and
DVD archives, the experience of the past would also not be possible. The
temporalization of time precisely articulates a lifetime as a process deeply
rooted in prosthetics.
It is important to precisely understand this constructed character of the
time-space paradigm that is subjected to constant re-articulation. The
same is true for real-time telecommunications, operating at the absolute
speed of electromagnetic waves and allowing local Internet users to com-
municate with any point on Earth, as if there were no geographical or
spatial distance. The relation with technology is of crucial importance;
technology increasingly gives an amplified dimension of fictionality and
spectrality to time. That is why living in the age of absolute fictionalization
displays a constant need to point out that this or that is going on in real
time. Time is fictionalized at such a level that we are losing the dimension
of the “reality” of time.
To understand the significance of what is going on in this shift in the
space-time paradigm we must constantly—so to speak, in time—map and
interpret the changes in the time-space paradigm, also to experience the
sensations produced by various technologies of moving and digital images,
for example, photography, the film apparatus, and virtual reality.
PART 2: IN CYBERSPACE WITH THE VIRTUAL-IMAGE

I have described the two principal time-machine paradigms of the image
conceived by Deleuze (the movement-image and time-image) as a spatial
rendering of time in order to suggest a third model: the virtual-image. The
outcome is the following display:
SPACE THROUGH TIME

The Virtual-Image—Real-Time Interval—Non-Space—Synthetic
(Artificial, Simulated) Form
What occurs within the virtual-image is a reversal of the basic relation of
time and space established by the Deleuzian cinematic images. In Deleuze
it is time rendered through space. In the virtual-image space is rendered
22 M. GRŽINIĆ
through time; even more in the virtual-image, the interval disappears; real-
time is no longer (in)direct time but a time without intervals, where space
has the value of zero (non-space). Moreover, the non-space, which may be
defined as a cyberspace index, produces a meaning in which the distribu-
tion of information is the result of a complete process of computer
calculation. This is not the movement-image’s differentiation and integra-
tion of neither meaning, nor the time-image’s relinking of irrational divi-
sions, but rather a simulation process. Instead of the organic form of
composition that belongs to the movement-image and the serial form of
composition that belongs to the time-image, the virtual-image produces
artificial and simulated (synthetic) forms.
If for the two Deleuzian forms of images we can still find some natural
elements, some psychological dimension of the sense of reality of time, in
the virtual-image the real-time interval covers exactly this traumatic experi-
ence of having forever lost (the organic dimension of) time; the real-time
interval is the pure sign of the artificiality of time. In these virtual time-space
relations the determinant factor is no longer the speed of information
transfer but rather the speed of data calculation time. It is as if that invisible
barrier (the speed of light at which television and radio information circu-
lates) were at the point of being overtaken by the immobile speed of
calculation. Now, again, I have to ask what is the form of subjectivity or
desubjectivation in the virtual-image? The answer is the multitude as a
swarm, the fleeting nomadic bodies of apparition and dispersal.
THE VIRTUAL-IMAGE—REAL-TIME INTERVAL—NON-SPACE—

SYNTHETIC (ARTIFICIAL, SIMULATED) FORM—THE MULTITUDE,
SWARMS
The Internet, although being a purely dematerialized unit, is perceived
as a new space, inherently crucial for the production and dissemination
of the surplus value of capital. If the Internet is a space vitally bound to
capital it is because it is controlled, censored, and economically
invested, and its borders are regulated. All became perfectly clear after
9/11, when the Internet, perceived as a space of absolute freedom, was
shut down for a week. The stock exchange lost a significant percentage
of its investments and the authorities intensified the control and mon-
itoring of the Internet.
It is important to emphasize the constructed character of the discourse

of space—as the space paradigm is, so to speak, never grounded in space
but always ex-, an-, or non-space. “The non-place of cyberspacetime,” as
Nguyen and Alexander pointed out, “contains innumerable networks
resting on logical lattices abstracted from unthinkably complex data fields
that unfold across an endless virtual void.”18 A non-space can be under-
stood here and now, not as a form of utopic space but above all as a
conceptual matrix, a paradigm of such a space. At this point a path to
follow might also be examined in reverse mode, by taking spatial mod-
alities inherent in cyberspace as a starting point and transposing them back
into reality. This means that some of these paradigms can perhaps be
functional outside the realm of the computer. In his book Spectres de
Marx,19 Jacques Derrida put the term “spectre” into play to indicate the
elusive pseudo-materiality that subverts the classic ontological oppositions
of reality and illusion. NEUE SLOWENISCHE KUNST (NSK) STATE
IN TIME from the 1990s is an excellent case of these changes. In an
attempt to emphasize the synthetic dialectical moment developed we are
compelled to ask ourselves how can we label this spiritual element of
corporeality (NSK) and this corporeal element of spirituality (embassies
in concrete private spaces)? I propose we conclude the following:
SPECTERS.
NSK State in Time is the specter of the state; NSK Embassies are the
specters of Embassies. As Beardsworth has shown in his book Derrida
and the Political: “Any country, any locality, determines its understand-
ing of time, place and community in relation to this process of ‘global’
spectralization.”20 Furthermore, we can re-articulate NSK State in
Time as a precise vision of the evacuation of the specific historical,
social, and political space of the former Eastern Europe after the fall of
the Berlin Wall. As Peter Lamborn Wilson, alias Hakim Bey, stated in
his lecture at the Nettime meeting “Beauty and The East” in Ljubljana
in 1997, the Second World has been erased and only the First and
Third Worlds are left. In place of the Second World, Bey argued, there
is a big hole from which one jumps into the Third. NSK State in Time
is a transposition as much as it is also a spectralization of the evacuation
of the specific historical, social, and political space of the former
Eastern Europe, of this non-space condition. It is possible to find the
same condition in the center of the myth of a liberating and innocent
cyberspace.
24 M. GRŽINIĆ
PART 3: IN THE MIDST OF THE TROPHY IMAGE, OR EUROPE’S

FORGOTTEN HISTORY: FROM “HUMAN ZOOS” TO “HUMAN
TROPHIES” DISPLAYED IN COLONIAL MUSEUMS
These genealogies were able to be pulled out in such a form until 9/11.
After that, the processes of a shift from biopolitics to necropolitics and the
whole discourse from a virtual-image changed radically—especially after
2008 and the financial crisis. The first change was that it was possible to
propose a new image, one that suits the digital (financial) mode of pro-
duction for the twentieth century. The suggestion of a digital (financial)
mode of production was a result of the analysis of what was proposed by
Jonathan Beller in 2006. Beller analyzed film production in the twentieth
century and, in order to distance himself from Deleuze, proposed the
cinematic mode of production. The proposal was that twentieth-century
film history cannot be a concatenation of Western film auteur visions but
that instead it is necessary to include the relation of capital-labor and the
overdeterming regime of perception, esthetics, and affects. As the result of
these relations Beller proposed the cinematic mode of production as the
mode of production for twentieth-century capitalism; in analogy, and
seeing the relation between capital and labor and new media technology,
it was possible to state that the digital mode of production is the over-
determing regime of perception, esthetics, and affects, capital and labor for
twenty-first-century global capitalism.
My thesis is that it is necessary to insist on a division from the inside of
financial global neoliberal capitalism and the digital mode of production
and its images. This division has to be conceptualized around the imperial,
colonial, necropolitical, and racial lines that cut global neoliberal capital-
ism from within. The imperial, colonial, racial division, though expelled
ferociously from global financial capitalism, is returning with a vengeance,
dividing film productions and reframing their images through racialized
labor, racialized images, and the racialized other. I also state that the
outcome of the process of racialization that permeates and conditions
global capitalism is also in parallel with what Catherine Malabou proposes,
though on the formal level only. She elaborates on the division inside the
unconscious that was never possible to be thought of—that is, she refers to
two types of the unconscious: the “Freudian unconscious” that is the
libido unconscious, and the “cerebral unconscious.”21
This reconfirms another of my theses, that with global capitalism a
process of differentiation is not concerned with a notion and its counter-
notion, but with a division inside the notion itself that is always a process
of its enhancement, of its fragmentation as multiplication. That also means
that the processes of necropolitics that insist on racialization touch the
core of the unconscious itself.
What is the emblematic image of the digital mode of production? It
is not the cinematic image, nor the virtual-image, nor the militant
image, not even the commodity-image. I argue that the emblematic
image of the time we live in is the trophy-image. It implies that the
historical formats of global capitalism base their regime of affect, vison,
and perception not through the space-time paradigm but via violent
and direct modes of governmentality and dispossession. The outcome is
the following display:
RACIALIZED SPACE AND TIME

The Trophy-Image—Without Time—Erased Space—Racialized Form
In conceptualizing the trophy-image I found its main elaboration in
Suvendrini Perera and her text “Dead Exposures: Trophy Bodies in the
Terror Zone,”22 which brilliantly captures the status of the non-human,
racialization, and of freedom. Perera articulates the trophy-image through
a trophy body. The trophy is produced via digital devices (phones and
computers) of the digital financial capitalist mode of production. The
trophy-image is an outcome of colonialism and presently involves coloni-
ality and racialization processes, implying that the colonial/racial divide is
at the center of the Western biopolitical machine that has been hence
transformed into a necropolitical machine.
The trophy-image is a set of iconological/representational and geopo-
litical/ideological forces as they intersect “inside the trophy body” that is
“the tortured or killed non-human.” The trophy bodies are the selfies that
circulated worldwide in 2004, depicting the bodies of Abu Ghraib and
their, as termed by Perera, “symbolic, ideological and affective detours
across other spaces, sites, temporalities.” During the war in Iraq that
began in March 2003, personnel of the United States Army and the
Central Intelligence Agency committed a series of human rights violations
against detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. These violations
included physical and sexual abuse, torture, rape, sodomy, and murder.
The abuses came to light with reports published in late 2003 by Amnesty
International and the Associated Press.
26 M. GRŽINIĆ
From Abu Ghraib it is possible to talk about trophy-images as selfies

and connect them back to colonialism, also to expose a specific body:
the non-human. Joseph Pugliese tracks how “the entire apparatus of
the biopolitics of race—its colonial and imperial dimensions; its discri-
minatory, exclusionary and necropolitical effects—are all [ . . . ] rendered
culturally intelligible and biopolitically enabled by the category of the
absolute non-human other: the animal.”23 Perera takes the next step
and says the animal conflates with the native in many different contexts;
when she speaks about Australia we can talk of the refugee body as
being obsolete, superfluous in Lampedusa in Italy and in Calais in
France, etc.
The absence of time depicts not an erasure of time but rather a condi-
tion of immobilization. Perera states that what characterizes trophy bodies
are their condition of being seized, caught, captured, affixed, and immo-
bilized within violent regimes of visibility and power. As they are crafted
within an order of bodies “as political flesh and affect,” trophy bodies are
the product of complex economies (visual, discursive, aesthetic, and scien-
tific) that locate them as a specific genre among an exemplary brand of the
nonhuman.
The space is no zero, as it would be in the 1990s, and subtracted, as
Alain Badiou would say. On the contrary, it is literally an erased space that
mirrors the persistent erasure of history in necrocapitalism. Again, this is
not the end of history but its performative, administrative procedure of
seizure. The form is racialized, which means it is no longer solely tem-
porarily or spatially constituted but is re/produced through constant
regimes and conditions of racialization. We may ask then about the
processes of subjectivation.
THE TROPHY-IMAGE—WITHOUT TIME—ERASED

SPACE—RACIALIZED FORM—THE WRETCHED
(THE SUPERFLUOUS AND THE DISPOSABLE)
The answer is the wretched, with a direct reference to Fanon.24
Through violent processes of dehumanization we see figures of “dis-
identification” rather than “relations of resemblance” to the human. The
outcome of the processes of racialization is in the last instance a flesh that
has the status of a political flesh—that does not establish a limit but instead
is the limit to any capitalist neoliberal politics.
NOTES
1. Suvendrini Perera, “Dead Exposures: Trophy Bodies and Violent Visibilities
of the Nonhuman,” in borderlands 13, no.1, 2014.
2. David Joselit, Against Representation. In conversation with David Andrew
Tasman, 2015, http://dismagazine.com/discussion/75654/david-joselit-
against-representation/
3. Marina Gržinić, Šefik Tatlić, Necropolitics, Racialization and Global
Capitalism: Historicization of Biopolitics and Forensics of Politics, Art, and
Life, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014.
4. World War Z is a 2013 American apocalyptic action horror film directed by
Marc Forster. The screenplay by Matthew Michael Carnahan, Drew
Goddard, and Damon Lindelof is from a screen story by Carnahan and J.
Michael Straczynski, based on the 2006 novel of the same name by Max
Brooks. The film stars Brad Pitt as Gerry Lane, a former United Nations
investigator who must travel the world to find a way to stop a zombie
pandemic.
5. Beatriz Preciado, Testo junkie. Sexe, drogue et biopolitique, translated in
French from Spanish by Preciado, Paris: Edition Grasset, 2008.
6. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson
and Barbara Habberjam, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,
1 edition, 1986.
7. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and
Robert Caleta, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1 edition,
1989.
8. D.N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, Durham: Duke University
Press, 1997.
9. Cf. Marina Gržinić, “Deleuze’s time-image models and the virtual-image,”
in Polygraph, no. 14, Durham: Duke University, 2002, 101–114.
10. Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and
the Society of the Spectacle, Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2006.
11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birth_of_a_Nation
12. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Year_at_Marienbad
13. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” in October, Vol. 59,
winter 1992, 3–7. The text was first published in French in 1990.
14. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith,
Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Originally published in 1974.
15. Richard Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political, New York: Routledge,
1996.
16. A woman, accidentally caught in a dark deal, turns the tables on her captors
and transforms into a merciless warrior evolved beyond human logic.
17. See Preciado, Testo junkie. Sexe, drogue et biopolitique.
28 M. GRŽINIĆ
18. Dan Thu Nguyen and Jon Alexander, “The Coming of Cyberspacetime and
the End of the Polity,” in Cultures of Internet, 1996, 102.
19. Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx, Paris: Galilée, 1993.
20. See Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political, 146.
21. Catherine Malabou, and N. Vahanian, “A Conversation with Catherine
Malabou,” in Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 9, 2008, 1–13.
22. Suvendrini Perera, “Dead Exposures: Trophy Bodies and Violent Visibilities
of the Nonhuman,” in borderlands 13, no.1, 2014.
23. Joseph Pugliese, State Violence and the Execution of Law: Biopolitcal
Caesurae of Torture, Black Sites, Drones, New York: Routledge, 2013, 33.
24. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington, New
York: Grove Press, 1963.
Marina Gržinić (PhD) is a philosopher and artist who lives in Ljubljana and works
in Ljubljana and Vienna. She is researcher at the FI SRC SASA (Research Center of
the Slovenian Academy of Science and Arts) Ljubljana and professor at the
Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. She has published ten books (monographs and
translations). In 2014, in collaboration with Šefik Tatlić, she co-authored the book
Necropolitics, Racialization and Global Capitalism: Historicization of Biopolitics
and Forensics of Politics, Art, and Life (Lexington Books, USA, 2014). Gržinić has
been active as a video artist since 1982 and in the last 34 years has also been making
installations and performative exhibitions in collaboration with the artist and art
historian Aina Šmid from Ljubljana. http://grzinic-smid.si/
CHAPTER 3
Politics and Aesthetics of Databases

and Forensics
Adla Isanović
The database is becoming one of the dominant means of knowledge

production and circulation and one of the widespread methods of cultural
expression. Actually, database logic and aesthetics appear to be something
that is imposed as a norm; its inclusion is visible in science, media, social
networking, state-governing, policy-making, juridical processes, and mili-
tary interventions. Furthermore, the database is recognized as a dominant
genre in (new) media art, though its influence is visible in a wider range of
art practices, including contemporary presentation/exhibition models and
forms.
Although archives have been and have done different things at different
times and under different regimes (from the Greek archeion, the French
National Archives, Stasi Archive offices, to databases), they have always
been a site of knowledge production in which political power resided.
Today, databases are widely promoted as gender-, class- and race-
neutral, even emancipatory. If the database is propagated as a desired
cultural form of our age it is necessary to rethink those forms that are
celebrated as democratizing.
A. Isanović (*)
The Academy of Fine Arts, University of Sarajevo, Sarajevo,
Bosnia and Herzegovina
e-mail: adla_isanovic@yahoo.co.uk

30 A. ISANOVIĆ
This text aims to open a discussion on the politics and aesthetics of

databases. It argues that the database as a norm and major neoliberal
governmental technology emerges, coexists with, and embodies chan-
ging relations within what Michel Foucault has called governmentality1;
it analyzes how faith in data and its accompanied politics, practices and
forms of knowledge production and visibility are configuring and shift-
ing the relations of contemporary subjects and objects and their realities.
In doing this, the analysis relates as well to the forensic turn (Weizman)
and to its prevailing methodology and aesthetics conducted through
different “forums,” for example, of international humanitarian politics,
law and art.
EXPANDING THE VISIONS OF GOVERNMENTALITY BEYOND THE

WEST AND BACK
As Foucault has shown, governmentality cannot be reduced to the State
but instead includes all acts, institutions and rational efforts aimed at
systematically shaping, managing and regulating the conduct of human
beings. Critical analyses of changing relations in governmentality thus
need to include three dimensions of government: rationalities (which
render reality thinkable in such a way as to make it governable), techniques
(the means whereby political reasons are translated into practice) and
subjects of government (diverse types of selves, persons, identities and
agents which government aims to produce and cultivate through such
activities).2
Introducing the notions of biopolitics and biopower3 in the 1970s,
Foucault articulated why and how the biopolitical state became capable
of exercising authority over the conduct of populations and individuals at
every level, to “foster” life or “disallow it to the point of death,” all in the
name of the benefit of its own population.
However, as several authors (Achille Mbembe, Marina Gržinić, Ann
Laura Stoler) recognize, the concept of biopolitics is not sufficient for
understanding the changes and current logic of global capitalist neoliberal
governability. Foucault’s work was not directly theorizing how colonial-
ism is intrinsic to the process of biopower in the past and present. Visions
of governmentality need to be expanded out of Eurocentric self-regard,
beyond the “West,” both in relation to past and present. The “Rest” and
the “Other” were key sites for the development of modern governmental
practices then and are key sites of the development of global capitalist
POLITICS AND AESTHETICS OF DATABASES AND FORENSICS 31
neoliberal governance that inherit, extend and naturalize its power today.
Moreover, these have been the key sites for the execution of its power, for
trying to establish the universality of so-called Western law and exception
to it at global level—or, more precisely, for the constitution of “Western
law” by the state of exception (Agamben4).
Giorgio Agamben rearticulated biopolitics of the state precisely as its
effect. Elaborating on the biopolitical setting of an “extra-legal sphere,” he
argues that camp,5 as “the space that is opened when the state of exception
begins to become the rule,”6 is “inaugural site of modernity”7 and “the
fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West.” 8 According to Agamben,
a tendency of diversification and separation has been existent since the
category of sovereignty was conceived as a power which decides what or
who can represent the political body and what or who is an exception. Such
power is decisive over life and diversifies it from bios (the qualified life;
political being; citizen) to zoe (the bare life; body; homo sacer).
The condition of abandonment, in which law is “in force without
significance,”9 has become a ruling condition, and camp is no more an
exception of the political space we are living in but rather its constitutive
part in which “we are all virtually hominis sacri”10 (Agamben).
However, to fully understand how conditions were set we must theo-
rize colonialism and include the coloniality of biopower, not only as an
issue of the past but also as an active element in governmentality and the
present. There is a missing link since, as Ann Laura Stoler argues, modern
biopower is the product and process of colonial settings.11 If colonialism is
not theorized its power remains naturalized within the theory we use to
explain it.
Achille Mbembe makes the necessary link by adding the concept of
necropolitics to conceptualize the “contemporary forms of subjugation of
life to the power of death”12 that are related to the state of exception,
technologies of destruction and war machinery of the global capitalist
neoliberal world. Marina Gržinić elaborates further that the current logic
is that of “let live and make die,” and that racialization, exploitation,
abandonment and the creation of “deathscapes” for the production of
capital’s surplus value are implemented not only in the Third and Second
but in the First capitalist world as well.13
It is important to stress that all debates about and interventions into
human rights, justice, law (and their exceptions) are today observed
through the prism of humanitarianism. This intensification of the rhetoric
of humanitarianism is linked to shifts in international politics after 1989
32 A. ISANOVIĆ
and especially 2001. Several authors wrote about this shift, including
Gržinić, who elaborated on the transformation of the imperial nation-
state into war-state and on the entrance of the concept of global justice
shaped by the war-state which, in her words, brings “an Agambenian
state-of-exception in which international justice becomes an act of
perverted benevolence, an exception of the law, yet guaranteed by
the law.”14
Discussions on tactics and ethics of humanitarianism intensify with the
necropolitical shift, when governing death becomes one of the main
activities. Humanitarianism enters the discussion to maintain an illusion
of social care. Through its narrative it neutralizes critique, justifies the
state-of-exception and legitimizes use of violence.
In the context of ex-Yugoslav countries these tendencies, together with
the brutal and systematic de-historicization (Gržinić, Buden, Močnik15)
and fantasies of /“ideology of transitology” presented as a process of
“normalization” (Buden16), are in the function of neo-colonialism (that
occurs under the mask of democratization). They are engaged in keeping
us between a delated past and unachievable goals (future).
It must be stressed that on a global scale this is also a period of
the digitalization and development of “communicative capitalism”
(Dean), a form of late capitalism in which, as Jodi Dean elaborates,
values that are central to democracy (e.g. ideals of access, inclusion,
discussion and participation) take material form in network commu-
nication technologies.17
These new conditions request efficient instruments, and this is where
the database enters.
DATABASE AS MAJOR GLOBAL NEOLIBERAL GOVERNMENTAL

TECHNOLOGY
Today, the coloniality of power is digital (Benfield18). Digital technologies
and databases are defining the conditions of the global, neoliberal capital-
ist and colonial system and facilitating possibilities of collection, ownership
and control; from human body becoming an archive, biometric data on
refugees, emigrants, forensic archives and financial data to data-mining
and “deadly algorithms” (Schuppli19) that drones use for killings in so-
called humanitarian interventions.
These technologies are presented as ethically correct since they are used
to calculate/predict what would be “the lesser evil” (Weizman20), the
least collateral damage or the “humanitarian minimum” to prevent the

greatest harm, which is an argument used to defend all kinds of legal
exceptions, from managing war to financial speculations. They are pre-
sented not as deadly but careful, not as military but humanitarian weap-
ons, not as killing but saving lives (especially of those who are using them).
In the end this is to set the foundation for the acceptability of the perverse
idea of “killing well” instead of “living well” or “dying well.”21
As Eyal Weizman writes, calculation as a technique of government is
undertaken by the powerful and “‘on behalf’ of those it subjugates.”
Actually, this power is based “in the very ability to calculate” and to “act
on these calculations.”22
Databases are materializations of biopolitical and necropolitical rela-
tions. Computers, as Wendi H.K. Chun reminds us,23 since their early
developments were tools of biopolitics managing whole populations,
including the apparatus of security.24 Today, concrete political practices
and decisions are determined by the knowledge that is obtained from
these programmed memories and databases; they are even executed by
semi-autonomous decision-making technologies.
With the recent hype over so-called Big Data there is a rising naïve
enthusiasm of the empirical value assigned to it by default. The dominant
decontextualized, dehistoricized and depolicizing formalism in addressing
these technologies is not sufficient for understanding what the database
represents or does today. Rather, such theory is in the service of the
current state of capitalism.
However, significant theoretical work was already done to help us
destabilize, politicize and redefine the conventional notions of the archive.
This includes work by Benjamin, Foucault, Derrida and Agamben on
archive and knowledge production.
Foucault defines archive as “the law” that establishes what can be said,
transformed and preserved.25 Today it is possible to link Foucault’s “system
of utterability” and “the law of what can be said” to the technological
notion of the program, its invisibility and practice, in order to understand
its function and structure within every database today.26 What is visible and
speakable is also defined by the archive’s “dark margin” or the unsaid
(Agamben27), by absences and repressed, unarchivable, irretrievable infor-
mation or elements of forgetting. In the digital age only data that has
addressable meta-data can be accessed and visible. Furthermore, permanent
storage and preservation are being replaced by permanent transfer, by the
recycling of memory.28 That brings us to the great irony of the information
34 A. ISANOVIĆ
age: in the last few decades we have recorded and also lost more data than
ever before. Although we are aware of the limitations of archival knowledge,
as Derrida points out, we are burning with a passion for the archive.29 The
drive to collect, organize and store human records (to archive) is closely
related to governmentality and life politics. As both Benjamin and Derrida
recognize, the archive—as much as and more than being a question of the
past (the order of memory)—is a question of the present and the promise of
the future, and this is where political power is situated.
This is particularly visible today, when data-mining techniques and
database practices, predictive analytics and other methods to extract
value from data are used to calculate, predict and shape the future based
on produced and collected data.
As Chun notes, the database (based on memory) encapsulates the
logic of programmability (new media “proliferates ‘programmed
visions,’ which seek to shape and to predict—indeed to embody—a
future based on past data”30), and belief in it feeds the current organiza-
tion of the modern liberal state.
Fantasies of communicative capitalism (i.e. fantasies of abundance,
participation, unity, wholeness31), as Dean recognizes, continue to pro-
duce ambivalent experiences—threats of total control and promises of
emancipation, or, to use Rancière’s terminology, the logic of police and
the logic of politics.
Thus, following Foucault’s, Deleuze’s and Agamben’s definition of
apparatuses32 (dispositifs), I define the database as the major technology
of power of global neoliberal governmentality with the capacity to strate-
gically capture, model, control and secure the gestures, behaviours and
discourses of living beings, determining what we have been, what we are
no longer and what we are becoming,33 thus operating at the intersections
of power relations and relations of knowledge.
PRACTICES AND FORMS OFKNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION AND

VISIBILITY
After a contextualization and definition of the database I would like to focus
on current practices and forms of knowledge production and visibility. In
doing this I relate to the forensic turn (Weizman34), to prevailing forensic
methodology and aesthetics conducted through different “forums,” for
example, connected to international humanitarian politics, law and art.
As Weizman recognized there is an emergent sensibility attuned to

material investigation that has become evident in contemporary law,
politics, human and environmental sciences, popular entertainment,
etc.35 New technologies and scientific methods that are used for captur-
ing, reading, displaying and analysing data are playing a key role in the
politics of visibility, ways of seeing, knowing and communicating (pre-
senting and persuading), in ordering the visible.
They also expand the capacity of witnessing and transform the role of
testimony. More precisely, emergent forensic sensibility seeks to evict the
human testimony (the fragility of witnesses’ memory, subject complexities
and ambiguities of language). Instead, it turns to material science, prob-
ability calculations and /or even in some cases (semi)automated interpret-
ing technologies, promoting objects, data, forensic practices and
technologies as neutral, objective and more trustworthy (while ignoring
the fact that all of them are linked to series of mediators36 which are all
subjected to error).
In general there is a change of focus from testimony to the commu-
nicative capacity of things, from speaking subject to “objects that speak.”
The subject as witness is silenced and is being replaced by object-oriented
juridical culture.37
Forensics, as the presentation of objects as subjects-of-debate, is not only
a science but also has an aesthetic dimension.38 As Weizman notes, a forum
is constituted “as a shifting triangulation between three elements: a con-
tested object or site, an interpreter tasked with translating ‘the language of
things,’ and the assembly of a public gathering.”39 Things have to be made
“evident (visible), credible [ . . . ] persuasive”40 through narrative presenta-
tion, through mediated speech that animates objects as if they were human
subjects (e.g. “bones that speak,” “data that tell”). Interpreters are profes-
sional scientific experts speaking on behalf of things (e.g. objects, data,
images), but also, as Weizman stresses, “automated or semi automated
technologies of detection and imaging.”41 In an age which celebrates
automatization, algorithmic regime and integration of language with
code, these technologies are promoted as having the greatest authority.
Current changes and strategies of attributing essential human charac-
teristics (such as the potentiality of language or the capacity of speech) to
objects is a process that is occurring simultaneously to the process of
dehumanizing individual beings and reducing them to “bare life” (with
the impossibility of witnessing, of knowing, of being perceived as human/
subject), which is a widespread practice today.
36 A. ISANOVIĆ
Although camp’s settings and the form of witnessing have transformed,

changing relations between subject and object and the positions they
occupy today, this shift from voice to body, “seeking the ultimate truth
about the subject in objectified qualities of the body,”42 particularly in
modern policing (e.g. the body as archive), remind us of the techniques
that dominated criminology in previous centuries and evoke (old) colonial
practices and connotations.
***
I believe that we need to acknowledge the existence of real archives and
forums because they function as a very material link between knowledge
and power. Therefore, I address two actual examples.
The first is the archival/forensic practice of the The International
Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) that was established
in The Hague by the United Nations (UN) in 1993 soon after discovering
traces of extreme violence in the region (at that point intervening not
military but juridically in the ongoing war, along with the strategy of
sending humanitarian aid and UN observers).
The second example is related to the re-appearance of similar archives
and of database/forensic aesthetics in the context of contemporary art.
Both are directly related to the intervention in the field of the visible
(what is speakable, thinkable, possible) and to the politics of visibility.
“THE ICTY’S ARCHIVE/DATABASE”

In 2009, journalists revealed that from 2005 to 2006 the prosecution staff
of the ICTY in The Hague systematically destroyed around 1,000 items
recovered at mass graves in Srebrenica and kept in the tribunal’s archive as
possible evidence in processes on the war crimes and genocide in Bosnia
and Herzegovina.43
These included personal belongings of war victims, ID cards, passports,
photographs, parts of clothes and other personal items found with the
bodies of the Srebrenica victims during the exhumations. The destruction
was authorized in the prosecutor’s office at the ICTY.44 Neither the
Bosnian government nor surviving family members of victims were con-
sulted or informed about it.45 The chief prosecutor explained that these
objects were destroyed because they were no longer needed by the tribu-
nal, also because the tribunal staff thought they might spread infectious
diseases.46 He also stressed that the ICTY took photos of these items and
entered them in the court’s database.
The tribunal provided a digital replica and was willing to enable access
to the local community. It does not “smell bad” anymore, it is indexed,
standardized, flexible and it can be reused for various purposes. So where
is the problem? Objects were processed by the court, so why are locals not
able to close this chapter of transitional justice and move on?
First, the digital return is not really the return. Second, the right to
make such a decision over the destiny of these remains, this act of violence
and its justification (for “hygienic reasons”), is problematic in many ways.
Experts described this act as scandalous. Preservation would not impose
serious threats to human health, and this act was in opposition to the
principles of professional forensic practices, because the goal is always to
preserve evidence as much as possible.47 Keeping in mind the executor’s
strategic erasure of traces, this destruction might be perceived as an
accessory to the crime—as “killing the witness.”
Moreover, the ICTY prevented the local community, which had pro-
vided the material, to decide if the remains had some kind of value (e.g.
personal, or community, historical, memorial, educational, juridical).
Instead, through this operation, the tribunal produced a “non-value”—
it identified what cannot have a voice and what is not worth preserving.
The source community, due to racial divisions, did not fit the image of the
“author” or “judge,” and in that way it lost control over its own
representation.
The coloniality of power is highlighted by appropriating the right to
ownership and control, in relation to victims, family members and the
state from which objects were taken.48 This act reveals the renewal of the
colonial right to intervene into some states that are now dubbed “failed”
(as infantile, unsuccessful, weak, unable to exercise self-care and control),
without the possibility or the right to decide on its own citizens.
The act highlights the sovereign power behind it which reserves the
sole right to decide what can represent the political body or an excep-
tion to it, the sole right to include or remove files from the order of the
visible.
Archival destruction, as the site of colonization (and exposure to
sovereign violence), also indicates that the archive is not only a biopo-
litical (Foucault) but also, and rather, a necropolitical technology
(Mbembe).
By digitizing dematerializing remains they disappear from the realm of
the physical and their status changes. Also, due to their digital form they
can easily be transformed, mobilized, modified and reused elsewhere.
38 A. ISANOVIĆ
Where do these traces re-appear, where are they mobilized today? The
answer is in the (safe) field of contemporary art, which brings us to our
second case: public exhibition as a “forum.”
PUBLIC EXHIBITION AS A “FORUM”

London’s “Wellcome Collection” as part of their exhibition on the
history, science and art of forensic medicine (Forensics: The anatomy of
crime49) in 2015 presented a piece they commissioned from Šejla
Kamerić, a Bosnian artist with a strong visibility on the European art
scene.
The commission was not accidental, keeping in mind the Bosnian
forensic reality and the fact that in the last twenty years its mass graves
and war crimes played a crucial role in the development of forensic science.
Kamerić’s piece Ab uno disce omnes (latin. “from one, learn all”) is
presented as an interactive work in progress consisting of an in situ multi-
media installation and a growing database that is searchable on the web.
The database contains photo and video footage, legal and military docu-
ments, forensic reports, interviews, testimonies, press material and web
links related to the Bosnian forensic reality (material that was collected and
captured through the eyes of the artist and the public that was invited to
contribute to it by adding new material50). At the exhibition site inside a
mortuary fridge files from this database are randomly selected and con-
stantly reshuffled, so that no narrative can establish dominance. In the
description of the work it is noted that:
[t]he indiscriminate nature of this continuous stream of images resembles a

digital organism constantly mapping and reassembling information about
itself as its data content continues to grow.
The work itself is described as “a living memorial in the form of data.”51

Apart from Kamerić’s work the artistic practices of attending crime
scenes, appropriating forensic objects, discussing evidence within a
forum of public exhibition and/or constructing databases (instead of
linear narratives) are today quite diverse and more frequent than in the
previous “era of the witness” (that was marked by presentations of human
testimony). This invites us to rethink the de-contextualization of a “docu-
ment” and its re-appearance and mediation though a specific aesthetic
representation in a new assembly—the art-field.
What place does that file occupy in the art-field? What does it “do,” or
what is expected from it? Does it open a new forum for discussion? Does it
mean politics in Ranciere’s sense, “that you speak at the time and in a place
you’re not expected to speak.”52 What is its capacity for subverting the
existing order and master/slave relations?
It certainly has that disruptive potential, but not by default. In many
cases such practices do not go beyond normalizing aesthetics, or they simply
place a sign of equation between artistic and political inclusion, forgetting
that in such cases it is often about participation in a limited space that was
designed for it. However, the promise remains since there are some other
artistic and theoretical strategies that are engaged in resisting and subverting
norms and mastery in de-normalization, de-classification and critical analysis
of the performativity of epistemological practices.
DATABASES AND (IM)POSSIBILITY

The forensic shift is born of a particular historical moment that privileges
the computer-based technological and the digital over other forms of
knowledge. This includes faith in data, algorithmic regimes and the data-
base as norm. They belong to the same era in which humanitarianism is
unquestionably seen as good, the database as neutral and things as having
more credibility than human beings.
If the database is propagated as a desired and even “emancipatory”
form, what is indirectly celebrated are its fragmentary, dynamic, relational
and manipulative qualities: simultaneity, automation, flexibility and above
all the “belief in programmability.”
Data presented as the “given” is strategically dehistoricized, cleaned of
any ideological connotations and presented as “initial evidence” that is
unquestionable and even “natural,” since its nomological principle and the
law is hidden or made invisible.
However, data, code, algorithms and programming languages are not
apolitical things but rather dynamic, functional and power-related instruments
which define what is speakable and executable today. They define possibility.
As Wendi Chun writes, “the dream is: the resurgence of the seemingly
sovereign individual, the subject driven to know, driven to map, to zoom
in and out, to manipulate, to act,” while at the same time she/he is
tracked, controlled, privatized, exploited, abandoned. Databases, as mem-
ory machines, activate such dreams (and nightmares)—based on past data
they offer a promise of a calculable future.53
40 A. ISANOVIĆ
NOTES
1. Governmentality as a notion, formulated by Michel Foucault, comes from
his lectures held in 1978–1979. Those include a lecture entitled
‘‘Governmentality” [1979], in which Foucault gives a threefold definition
of governmentality:
“1. The ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and
reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very
specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population, as
its principal form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential
technical means apparatuses of security.
2. The tendency which, over a long period and throughout the West, has
steadily led towards the pre-eminence over all other forms (sovereignty, disci-
pline, etc) of this type of power which may be termed government, resulting, on
the one hand, in formation of a whole series of specific governmental appara-
tuses, and, on the other, in the development of a whole complex of savoirs.
3. The process, or rather the result of the process, through which the state of
justice of the Middle Ages, transformed into the administrative state during
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, gradually becomes ‘governmentalized’.”
Michel Foucault, “Governmentality” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in
Governmentality, (eds. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller),
1991, 102–103.
2. Jonathan Xavier Inda, “Analytics of the Modern: An Introduction,” in
Anthropologies of Modernity: Foucault, Governmentality, and Life Politics,
Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005, 2.
3. Biopolitics—referring to a way of organizing, managing and regulating the
“population” considered as a biological entity, species-being; biopower—
referring to a range of techniques for the subjugation of bodies and control
of populations.
4. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2005.
5. Evoking the concentration camps, the refugee camp, the detention camp.
6. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1998, 96.
7. Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2000, 122.
8. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, 102.
9. Ibid., 35.
10. Ibid., 68.
11. See Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History
of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, Durham: Duke University
Press, 1995.
12. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” in Public Culture 15/1, 2003, 39.

13. See Marina Gržinić, “From Biopolitics to Necropolitics and the Institution
of Contemporary Art” in Pavilion – Journal for Politics and Culture, no.14
(“Biopolitics, Necropolitics, de-coloniality,” guest ed. Marina Gržinić),
2010, 9–93.
14. Marina Gržinić, “Contextualisation of the Notion of State and of
Contemporary Art in Global Neoliberal Capitalism,” in State in Time,(ed.
IRWIN), Wivenhoe/New York/Port Watson: Minor Compositions, 2014,
64. (Gržinić is referring to Pierre Hazan, Judging War, Judging History:
Behind Truth and Reconciliation, Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2010).
15. Gržinić writes of the “evacuation of memory and history,” (lecture: Marina
Gržinić, “The emergence of the political subject,” in Emancipation of the
Resistance, Kontrapunkt, Skopje, 2013); For Rastko Močnik, “the notion of
the ‘East’ performs a historical amnesia” (as cited in Boris Buden, “The
post-Yugoslavian Condition of Institutional Critique: An Introduction,”
Transversal, eipcp, 2007). In the same text Buden warns that “far from
not being able to catch up with the West [ . . . ] we are actually not able to
catch up with our own past.”
16. See Boris Buden, “The post-Yugoslavian Condition of Institutional
Critique.”
17. Jodi Dean, “Communicative capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of
Politics,” in Cultural Politics 1/1, 2005, 55.
18. Dalida María Benfield, “Introductory notes,” in Worlds & Knowledges
Otherwise 3/1 (“Decolonizing the Digital/Digital Decolonialization”),
2009.
19. Susan Schuppli, “Deadly Algorithms: Can legal codes hold software accoun-
table for code that kills?,” in Radical Philosophy 187, UK, 2014, 2–8.
20. Eyal Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from
Arendt to Gaza, New York: Verso, 2012.
21. On “necro-ethics” see: Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, New
York: The New Press, 2014.
22. Eyal Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils, 17.
23. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory,
Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011, 7.
24. Dreams of programmability, of operationality and optimization, were
initiated by and put in place through the interweaving of biology (i.e the
idea of code in biology), computer/database technologies and governing
(illustrated by numerous examples from the past and present, from
Mendelian genetics, eugenics, and other contemporary practices in which
the “human body becomes an archive”). See Wendi Chun, Programmed
Visions, xii.
42 A. ISANOVIĆ
25. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, London: Routledge,

2002, 146–147.
26. Rudi Laermans and Pascal Gielen “The Archive of the digital an-archive,” in
Image & Narrative 17 (The Digital Archive), 2007.
27. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive,
trans. D. Heller-Roazen, New York: Zone Books, 2002.
28. See Wolfgang Ernst, “The Archive as Metaphor: From Archival Space to
Archival Time,” in Open! Platform for Art, Culture & The Public Domain,
Amsterdam, 2004.
29. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
30. Wendy Chun, Programmed Visions, xii.
31. Jodi Dean, Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive,
Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010.
32. See Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, New York, 1985; Michel
Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh,” in Power/Knowledge Selected
Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, 1980, 194–228; Gilles
Deleuze, “What is a Dispositif?,” in Two Regimes of Madness, New York:
Semiotext(e), 2006, 338–348; Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus:
and Other Essays, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009.
33. Gilles Deleuze, “What is a Dispositif?,” 345.
34. Eyal Weizman, “Introduction: Forensis,” in Forensis: The Architecture
of Public Truth, (ed. Forensic Architecture), Berlin: Sternberg Press,
2014, 10.
35. Ibid. 10.
36. As Weizman writes: “Forensics is the product of a series of mediations and
intermediaries: sensors, modes of capture, algorithms to calculate them,
experts to present them, and forums to debate and decide on how to act
upon them. Each of these mediators has its own grammar, and is, of course,
politically conditioned in a different way.” Eyal Weizman, “Introduction:
Forensis,” 9.
37. Ibid.
38. Forensic Architecture at http://www.forensic-architecture.org/project/
39. Eyal Weizman, “Introduction: Forensis,” 9.
40. Ibid., 10.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid., 22.
43. In 2009 the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) released a
report that the American journalist Michael Montgomery wrote on his blog,
giving indications of this destruction of war evidence related to the
Srebrenica genocide. Srebrenica was the scene of one of Europe’s biggest

mass executions since Nazi crimes, when in the summer of 1995 more than
8,000 Srebrenica residents, in what had been designated as a United Nations
“safe area,” were killed and buried in mass graves by Bosnian Serb and
Serbian forces. Many of the victims are still missing. It should be noted
that BIRN also reported about a similar scandal related to the destruction of
documents in The Hague that were linked to possible crimes committed in
Kosovo during 1999 (the destruction of some physical evidence allegedly
found in Albania, indicating possible illegal trade in human organs).
44. In the mandate of the Chief Prosecutor Carla del Ponte.
45. Moreover, until a news release in 2009, a tribunal spokesperson declined to
make any comment on such accusations, saying that the information was
“confidential.”
46. At the time of the revelation the Chief Prosecutor was Serge Brammertz.
47. There are non-expensive, widely-available technologies to “freeze-dry”
documents that are in decay. These processes can preserve, restore docu-
ments and even remove smells. The goal is always to preserve evidence as
much as possible, but until today there is no official explanation why that
was not the case with the Srebrenica material. (Source: Michael
Montgomery, “Un admits evidence from Srebrenica was destroyed,” CIR,
May 6, 2009, http://cironline.org/blog/post/un-admits-evidence-srebre
nica-was-destroyed-505).
48. They were completely excluded from the property discourse. Some Bosnian
politicians complained that destroyed ID cards (of the dead) were property
of the state and that the ICTY did not have any right to own it or to destroy
it. Also, victims’ relatives stressed that unlike the ICTY’s practice, in exhu-
mations coordinated by locals families are offered the chance to decide what
to do with remains that are found with bodies. Representatives of victims’
relatives announced they would start a legal process against the ICTY, but
currently there is no information about the development of this case.
(Source: BIRN)
49. Exhibition “Forensics: The anatomy of crime,” Wellcome Collection,
London, 26.2.- 21.6.2015. See http://wellcomecollection.org/forensics
50. See Ab Uno Disce Omnes website, 2015. http://abunodisceomnes.wellco
mecollection.org/
51. Ibid.
52. Jacques Rancière in an interview by Truls Lie, “Our police order: What can
be said, seen, and done,” in Eurozine, 2006.
53. Wendi Chun, Programmed Visions, 8.
44 A. ISANOVIĆ
Adla Isanović lives and works in Sarajevo. She holds a PhD in Philosophy from
the Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU in Ljubljana, where she finished her thesis on
the theme of databases and art in the function of knowledge production in the
digital age. She completed an MA in New Media (HEAA—School of Applied Arts)
and an MA in the Research-Based Postgraduate Program “Critical, Curatorial,
Cybermedia Studies” (ESBA—School of Fine Arts), Geneva University of Arts and
Design, Switzerland. Currently, she is Associate Professor at The Academy of Fine
Arts in Sarajevo.
CHAPTER 4
The Emancipation of Necrocapitalism:

Teleological Function of Liberalism
and the Optimization of Hegemony
Šefik Tatlić
DEPOLITICIZATION OF IDEOLOGY
An analysis of the mainstreaming of liberalism in the First World’s dominant
ideological discursivity requires a brief historicization of the progression of
alignment of capitalism’s requirements and paradigmatic Western humanist
projects. Since capitalism does not have any teleology but the one it can
derive from Western, Eurocentric humanist projects, it is important to
thematize the progression of liberalism into the ideological mainstream of
the First World in this context. If we take into account that the mainstream-
ing of older humanist projects (such was the Enlightenment) was organized
on the basis of the First World’s requirements that needed the particular
notion of progress to be univerzalized, then it could be said that the main-
streaming of modern liberalism that started in parallel with the development
of modernity in the late nineteenth century all the way to the mid-twentieth
century, was organized on the same basis. The parallel historical develop-
ment of liberally prefixed discursivities and capitalist modernity should be
seen as a development subjected to the requirements of capitalism.
Š. Tatlić (*)
Unaffiliated/freelance, Bihać, Bosnia and Herzegovina
e-mail: tatlic.s@gmail.com

46 Š. TATLIĆ
In the wake of the Second World War, full mobilization of liberally

prefixed discourses into ideological mainstream of the West was marked by
an analysis that focused on the ideological potency of the generic sub-
stance of liberalism: liberty itself. In the 1950s British liberal theoretician
Isaiah Berlin articulated two conceptualizations of liberty: negative and
positive, as he defined them. Negative liberty, Berlin argued:
[ . . . ] is involved in the answer to the question “What is the area within

which the subject—a person or group of persons—is or should be left to do
or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons?”1
To paraphrase Berlin, negative liberty is liberty from something, a pre-

rogative of an individual not to be interfered with by power. Berlin then
conceptualized the notion of positive liberty. This kind of liberty is:
[ . . . ] involved in the answer to the question “What, or who, is the source of
control or interference that can determine someone to do, or be, this rather
than that?”.2
Berlin argued that positive liberty implied that a higher amount of control
over the individual inevitably led to such a structuring-subjectification that
produced subjectivity as a direct extension of wish-fulfillment of some
power that created it. However, as structuralist theory uncovered, sub-
jectification (the ideological weaving by itself), operates on the basis of an
already coopted individuality. As Louis Althusser argued:
[ . . . ] ideology has always-already interpellated individuals as subjects, which
amounts to making it clear that individuals are always-already interpellated
by ideology as subjects, which necessarily leads us to one last proposition:
individuals are always-already subjects.3
So, while Berlin deemed that a positive conceptualization of liberty, as

liberty for something, allowed power to interfere with the individual, he
failed to apply the same logic to the concept of negative liberty, leaving it in
an alleged ideological limbo that allowed the subject not to be interfered
with by power. The historical development of liberalism—particularly its
neoliberal phase that focuses on an individual-centric society, which is
allegedly primarily governed by economy, not power—flirted and/or was
based outright on the tenets of negative liberty. However, and although
he “favored” negative liberty, Berlin did not say that either of these
two conceptualizations of liberty were finished projects or ultimate
THE EMANCIPATION OF NECROCAPITALISM: TELEOLOGICAL FUNCTION . . . 47
blueprints that would have instituted liberty as explicit political and ideolo-
gical program. He postulated that both conceptualizations had merit but in
that sense in which he saw that positive conceptualization, supra-personal
order (positive liberty), could or would function as the infrastructure for the
exercise of negative liberty. This was pluralism in its ideological infancy.
Berlin argued that:
Pluralism, with the measure of “negative” liberty that it entails, seems to me

a truer and more humane ideal than the goals of those who seek in the great
disciplined, authoritarian structures the ideal of “positive” self-mastery by
classes, or peoples, or the whole of mankind. It is truer, because it does, at
least, recognise the fact that human goals are many, not all of them com-
mensurable, and in perpetual rivalry with one another.4
So, the First World’s revered concept of pluralism, that contains a “mea-
sure of negative liberty” and that recognizes the fact that “human goals are
many” operates under the supra-personal socio-political order based on
tenets of positive liberty (liberty for something), within which principles of
negative liberty are all subdued not only to logics of capital but also to
epistemological logics of the cosmopolitan center of capitalism (the First
World). As Colombian decolonial theoretician Santiago Castro-Gómez
argued:
[ . . . ] a single way of knowing the world, the scientific-technical rationality

of the Occident, has been postulated as the only valid episteme, that is to say
the only episteme capable of generating real knowledge about nature, the
economy, society, morality and people’s happiness. All other ways of know-
ing the world have been relegated to the sphere of doxa, as if they were a
part of modern science’s past, and are even considered an “epistemological
obstacle” to attaining the certainty of knowledge.5
The First World’s pluralism is deemed by the same world, that is, its
capitalist supra-personal order, as the format under which other (in
terms of diversified) opinions or goals would be exercised only under the
presumption that the ultimate goal of diversified opinions is attaining the
“scientific-technical rationality of the Occident.” Although this rationality
poses as if it has nothing to do with the categories of race, ethnicity and
religion, capitalism and the First World utilizes these very categories as
organizational principles of society upon which ideological potency and
48 Š. TATLIĆ
the political function of such “rationality” exists. This exemplifies capital-

ism’s pluralism only as the diversified format in which old, racial and
religious privileges are being perpetuated through the process of racializa-
tion. Racialization is the term that was introduced by Marina Gržinić in
2009, and it is, as Gržinić argued:
[ . . . ] a control axis on which endlessly differential forms of capitalist expan-

sion are being conceived. Structural racism is the core logic of global
capitalism. Racialization is its internal administrative, judicial, and economic
procedure, which regulates the space of financial capitalism as well as the
system of representation, theory, and discursivity.6
The First World therefore emphasizes the pluralist format in the produc-
tion of society only because it allows it to sustain and perpetuate the
internal racialist mechanism for deriving (and sustaining) privileges.
This pluralist format is therefore only a supra-personal dimension of the
order in which invidual-centric privileges are being derived on racial basis
which are themselves rationalized by and/or through humanistically pre-
fixed narratives (human rights) that postulate that some are or should be
inherently more privileged than others. Capitalist pluralism is therefore
endowed with a humanistic aureole that masks pure racism into an “ini-
visible hand” that governs, from the inside, a paradigmatic democratic
pluralist society. This is the same “hand” that filters those more optimal
for adopting pluralism as modernist legacy from those not optimal enough
for this and who should (allegedly) be led by the First World toward this
goal.
If we analyze Berlin’s thought in the context of the development of
liberalism from an individual-centric regime (negative liberty), that
attacked certain aspects of the state in the 1970s, 1980s and the 1990s,
to a supra-personal (positive liberty) regime that retained the shape of
racist imperialism that was redeployed explicitly after 9/11, it is obvious
that liberalism at first was never in a dichotomic relation with the reac-
tionary, Eurocentric, epistemological program of the First World.
Therefore in the aftermath of the Second World War, after the fall of the
Wall, or in the aftermath of 9/11, that same world did not coopt liberally
prefixed rhetorics (freedom of speech, “civilizational” rhetorics, etc.), it
rediscovered liberally prefixed discursivities as what they always were—a
modernized format of perpetuating old colonial, racial and imperial ten-
dencies embedded in the First World’s mainstream epistemological logic.
If we presume that Berlin’s observations were utilized in the postmodern

reorganization of capitalism, we can notice that at the beginning of the
millennium, there was an explicit conjoing of both concepts of freedom.
Tenets of negative freedom were applied under the aegis of liberation of an
individual from the yoke of the collective (society as political category, the
state as the producer of society), while the tenets of positive freedom were
applied in that capacity in which the capitalist state and the logics of capital
were equaled with the sustainment of the hierarchies of exploitation in the
capacity of the infrastructure of liberation.
The ideological conjoing of tenets of negative and positive liberty does
not only institute an ambiguous notion of pluralism (which in capitalism is
only racialized pluralism), into an ideological program, it drives a wedge
between politics and ideology. This allowed capitalism to reduce politics
to an administrative art of managing hegemony, while ideology, deprived
of its connection with politics, is being, or had been, organized as an
instrument of imposing universalized notion of progress under which an
epistemological Eurocentric privilege and the First World’s geopolitical
centrality is being perpetuated. As the aftermath of the attacks on Charlie
Hebdo showed, far-right fascist populism and liberal-democratic, social-
democratic discourses—as that miserable (post-Charlie Hebdo) rally in
Paris showcased—merged themselves in protection of only one, rigid,
interpretation of pluralist society, the one in which a single hegemonic
logic dictates the limits of political horizons of “diversified” society, also
dictating the limits ideology can have in relation with politics. It is clear
now that liberally prefixed discursivity attacked not only the politically
ideological aspect of the institutionalized power (the State) that contin-
gently posesess a prerogative to circumvent the interests of capital, it
attacked the connection between politics and ideology in both structuring
political power and in defining political antagonism. The First World’s
agenda that reduces social struggle to a struggle for social justice that does
not seek to conquer state power and its apparatuses and that represents
solidarity, humanitarianism and other non-systemic concepts as if they
were politically ideological programs (which they are not) is not political
antagonism, it is merely a poor ideological excuse for the utter lack of
politically ideological antagonism.
In this context, it is important to notice that the latest ideological
strategy that is employed in the First World’s hegemony (and its colonial
periphery) and that is trying to disembody left ideology and particularly
communism from anti-fascism is the logic that normalizes fascism/
50 Š. TATLIĆ
Nazism. But, this ideological strategy is just a fragment of a wider logic

that deprives ideology of a political dimension and that reduces it to a
naturo-centric, “non-artificial” register that structurally connects, even
preconditions, any notion of historical progress with an imperative that
states that politics must not have a connection with an ideology that could
either tackle current hegemony or require the politics to transcend the
interests of capital.
If we deem that the fundamental function of politics is to tackle and
restructure the very format under which power, ideology and the principles
of manufacturing society are being organized, this depoliticization of ideol-
ogy that liberalism as a reactionary program (in conjunction with explicit
right-wing neoconservativism and clerofascist discourses) perpetuates, is
firmly marked by an institutionalization of one particular ideological pro-
gram. That program is a white, hegemonic, colonial and Eurocentric
imperial universalism that, through global capitalism as a relation of dom-
inance, poses not only as the defender of pluralist values but also as its
precondition. Given that the notion of progress was already defined by the
First World’s colonial epistemology as progress from pre-capitalism toward
capitalism, it is now obvious that the depoliticization of ideology defines the
notion of progress as progress from having liberty(ies) toward keeping those
liberties applied and/or as an instrument of imposing one particular version
of liberty. This allowed capitalism to disclose its agenda as hegemonic
because it represented the mobilization of the state’s oppressive apparatus
as a mobilization that allegedly defends the “economy” as the infrastructure
of liberation. The depoliticization of ideology did not just represent aesthe-
ticized pseudo differences as authentic ideological differences; it produced
an ideological dictate that claims that the domain of “economy” was not
structurally connected with capitalism as the power structure. It meant that
politics could have been mobilized in the service of capital, that is, as the
machinery for applying death, the commodification of death and perpetua-
tion of death as a political program.
The main effect of the depoliticization of ideology was therefore necro-
politics. This term was coined in 2003 by Achille Mbembe, but we are
focusing on this concept in that historicized capacity in which Marina
Gržinić saw it as the “historicization of biopolitics”7 that is, we interpret it
as a paradigmatic principle upon which politics and ideology is being
defined, reproduced and utilized, which all leads to necrocapitalism.
Decolonial theoretician Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee dealt with this notion
in 2006, defining necrocapitalism in the following context:
The necrocapitalistic capture of the social implies new modes of govern-

mentality that are informed by the norms of corporate rationality and
deployed in managing violence, social conflict and the multitudes. No
conflict is tolerable that challenges the supreme requirements of capitalist
rationalization—economic growth, profit maximization, productivity, effi-
ciency and the like.8
Gržinić introduced the concept of necrocapitalism into the analytical

vocabulary in 2008, and as she noted:
The most important point is to understand that neoliberal necrocapitalism

lives from the intensification of its two primal conditions of reproduction:
deregulation and privatization.9
As Gržinić argues:
Neoliberal necrocapitalism is continually being produced and reproduced,

not only economically and politically, but obviously institutionally, socially,
and culturally as well.10
Necrocapitalism is therefore an imperial formation of power, a proper

name of global capitalism in which necropolitics is being used both as an
instrument of perpetual and systemic exercise of imperial, subjugating
logics and strategies and as an instrument that presents these logics as if
they were politically-ideologically substantiated. All of this testifies that
global capitalism is contained in necrocapitalism (not vice versa) and that
the creation of the dichotomy among politics and ideology allowed capit-
alism to reorganize (more precisely, optimize) its own topography of
power—more precisely, its infrastructure/superstructure binary. If the
economy stood as part of an infrastructure, and if the state and its appa-
ratuses stood as part of the superstructure, now the “economy” was
represented as if it belonged to the domain of the superstructure. This is
a completely bogus stunt, since the “economy,” particularly in postmo-
dern necrocapitalism, remained a direct extension of power. However, on
the level of discursivity of power, this postmodern reorganization of
capitalism actually did place the economy in the domain of the super-
structure, which also meant that the state and its apparatuses were actually
situated in the domain of the infrastructure.
52 Š. TATLIĆ
THE SOVEREIGNTY OF HEGEMONY

Althusser, by interpreting classic Marxian theory of the “social whole” noticed
that:
[ . . . ] Marx conceived the structure of every society as constituted by

“levels” or “instances” articulated by a specific determination: the infra-
structure, or economic base (the “unity” of the productive forces and the
relations of production) and the superstructure, which itself contains two
“levels” or “instances”: the politico-legal (law and the State) and ideology
(the different ideologies, religious ethical, legal, political etc.).11
Althusser notices immediately that on the basis of this spatial and/or

topographic metaphor:
[ . . . ] it is possible to say that the floors of the superstructure are not

determinant in the last instance, but that they are determined by the effectivity
of the base; that if they are determinant in their own (as yet unidentified
ways), this is true only insofar as they are determined by the base.12
Althusser emphasized the structural connection between these two

instances, more precisely, he emphasized that the superstructure is always
determined by the power of infrastructure, not by contingencies entailed
in the superstructural domain. It could be said that this topography of the
“social whole” applies to all modern formats of socio-political order, but
what is specific for necrocapitalism is that these infrastructural and super-
structural domains were reorganized in the following way. The economy
was represented as if it was structurally detached from power, while it was
actually pushed into the domain of the superstructure—but only as the
direct extension of power, not as detached from that power. The emphasis
liberally prefixed discursivities gave to economic matters in the form of the
free market, financial capitalism, attention economy and otherwise the
whole plethora of discursivities (that tried to replace political control
over society with technology or economy itself), testified to the fact that
the economy, while it was being structured as detached from power, was
simultaneously becoming a direct extension of power.
In regard to Althusser’s interpreting of the classic Marxian theory of the
state, State power and State apparatus stood side by side while the
Ideological State Apparatus (ISA), was added to this formula. If the main
potency of the ISA resided in the fact that it posed as structurally detached
from dominant power discourses (and it could be said that it did), then now
the function of the ISA is not to pose as a mask of the alleged lack of
structural connection between power and economy, but to equal the infra-
structure of exploitation with the infrastructure of liberation on an ideolo-
gical and epistemological level. In general, now it is possible to notice that
postmodern capitalism successively and gradually, after the fall of the Wall,
after the 9/11 and after the 2008, crisis of capital, allowed itself to disclose,
to openly admit that the unmitigated transfer and inherent cooperation
between the infrastructural and superstructural domains existed. Hence,
this allowed capitalism to openly pronounce that it indeed is a system of
exploitation, although capitalism continued to conceal that its hierarchies of
exploitation are racially, ethnically and religiously segregated.
So, if structural theory deemed that the economy constitutes the infra-
structure and that the state, state apparatuses, law, culture, etc., constitute
the superstructure, today we witness that it is vice versa. In necrocapitalism,
the state, its apparatuses, the law, oppressive machinery, etc. constitute the
infrastructure, while the economy, structurally organized as purely ideolo-
gical discurse, is actually the superstructure. In other words, this paradig-
matic twist allowed capitalism to format the economy as the mere and direct,
ideological, cultural and epistemological, extension of infrastructural power.
Amidst these optimizations of hegemony it could be said that the economy,
not in terms of production, distribution/exchange and consumption, but in
terms of utilizing production, distribution and consumption for aims that
evade maximizing of profit, actually ceased to exist, if it ever existed in its
fundamentally nominal capacity. Since economy was, within the necrocapi-
talist system, reduced to such a transfer of values between the power and
society that is unarticulated by any kind of politically ideological discursivity,
it could be said that the economy simply does not exist. All that was left was a
pure oppressive power and a society commodified, mobilized and/or turned
into such a commodifiable category, into a necropolitical category open to
imposition of death and organized as proto-necro contingency.
Society always was and is, not only in capitalist discursive formations of
power, an extension of power, but, in necrocapitalism, the main mode of
relation between power and society is organized as the mode of appease-
ment and/or cooperation which made society into a direct, unmitigated
extension of power. This is a precondition that allowed necrocapitalism to
deploy necropolitics against society in the form of mass enslavement
deployed in the First World and in the form of mass killings deployed in
the non-Occidental (Third) World. This paradigmatic twist, that placed
54 Š. TATLIĆ
the oppressive power in the infrastructural domain and that placed the
economy in the superstructural domain, constitutes an inner architec-
tonics of capitalism whose dynamics operates on the basis of the gradual
merger of these two structural domains that constitute necrocapitalism. In
this way necrocapitalism became unleashed, emancipated and ultimately
gained sovereignty.
At the same time, this hegemonic homogenization of the order was
ideologically represented as its strict opposite, as alleged ephemerization
of capitalism as a power structure, which is a stunt that only ephemerizes
and/or erases non-Occidental histories, knowledges, epistemologies and
subjectivities in the name of geopolitical and temporal dominance of the
First World. As Gržinić argued:
While the East is excluded more and more from the materiality of its history,
knowledge, memory, etc., the West is just performing it. It plays with a
speculative format of itself; it wants us to think that its roots of power and
capital are fictional!13
This empherization of capitalism as the structure of power is, as Gržinić

indicated, a performative gesture that also entails relativization of commun-
ism and fascism under the aegis of judging all totalitarian regimes; it entails a
fictionalization of the colonial role of the First World and a fictionalization
of an explicit appllication of necropolitics, all in the name of actual homo-
genization of capitalism, hence necrocapitalism. It is important to notice
that this homogenization is a proper name for globalization of capitalism in
terms of imperialist spread, not in terms of informatization, multicultural-
ism, etc. As Angela Davis, whose insights in light of reinvigorated racial
oppression in the US are becoming extremely pertinent, noticed:
The discourse on globalization sometimes conveys the impression that

capital has only recently become global, and that these global migrations
are a byproduct of what is called the information age. It is important to
remember that capital has a long and brutal history of moving across
national borders—imperialism, as Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg observed so
long ago, is not a minor consort of capitalism, but rather a fundamental
feature of its development.14
It should be noted that explicit optimization of capitalism as imperialism

was therefore possible on the basis of mainstreaming liberally prefixed
ideological discursivities that subjected society to the power of capital

exactly to that measure to which the same society was represented as if it
was/is being liberated. The society, which is now a pure extension of
power, was, with the help of principles of negative liberty, represented as
if it was structurally detached from power while it was actually induced
into power to that measure to which the distance among the power and
society became almost undetectable. All of this was possible on the basis of
an ideological and epistemological formula that equaled the survival of the
capitalist infrastructure of enslavement (and its racial, segregatory and
imperial logics) and the survival of possibilities of liberation of the same
society. As an effect, society became reduced to individual-centric quanti-
tude that is hipstercized into a miserable “corrective” of power whose
oppressive dimension now firmly stands as the infrastructure of enslave-
ment that poses as the infrastructure of liberation.
The analysis of racist, imperial oppression that capitalism and its center
(the First World) exercises in the name of liberty should not be reduced to
mere noticing of the “hypocrisy” of capitalism’s order. This analysis must
openly pronounce this logic as hegemonic logic that actually entails a lack
of hypocrisy, because capitalism transparently exercises hegemony, mass
killings and highly diversified and racially motivated expendability of
populations exactly as a precondition of (its own, universalized, notion
of) liberty. The Gramscian concept of hegemony exemplified that:
[ . . . ] the realization of a hegemonic apparatus, in so far as it creates a new

ideological terrain, determines a reform of consciousness and of methods of
knowledge: it is a fact of knowledge, a philosophical fact.15
We are referring to Gramsci’s early twentieth-century theories exactly because

nothing substantial has changed. It is perhaps important to notice that an
amount of, otherwise very constructive critical discourses such as situationism
and perhaps the so called post-structuralism, tended to focus too much on
crystalized emanations of power in the form of media-negotiated realities
and/or emulated, meta-realities to which such hegemonic traits were begin-
ning to be attached to. Gramsci spoke about the ideological utilizing of
epistemology and, given that socio-political order is usually being sustained
on the basis of mass compliance with its epistemological pillars, it is only a
question how, in the name of what and for whom, this compliance was or is
being organized. In necrocapitalism, that compliance is organized in the name
of capital and in the name of sustainment of racial matrices in the
56 Š. TATLIĆ
manufacturing of social differentiation. In other words, if an internal architec-

tonics of necrocapitalism is exemplified by a formula that states that everything
is one, but that one is not one, then everything (the hegemonic one) of
necrocapitalism’s architectonics entails a logic that dictates that destruction
and subjugation of heterogeneity (in an epistemic, ideological, political and
teleological sense) is the precondition of preserving a hegemonic one.
However, the paradigmatic twist in the topography of power and
the consequent merger of economy and power backfired on capitalism
itself in that sense in which capitalism as the structure of power was
deprived of ideological coherence and teleological potency which could
not be structured solely on the basis of ideological legitimization of
maximization of profit into a teleologically viable coherence.
Fukuyama’s “end of history” and general post-ideological narrative
actually proved as curtailing for capitalism itself. Lenin deemed that
imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, but now it could be said
that the more capitalism became imperialism, the more it found itself
deprived of a potent teleological substance required for the rationaliza-
tion of its purpose.
THE TELEOLOGY OF TRANSGRESSION

As we have briefly noted in the first chapter, capitalism does not have a
teleological program. The only teleological discursivity it can operate with
is the teleology of a First World’s humanist project. Unlike other great
modernist projects, such as socialism, capitalism’s institutionalism as well
as its ideological and political discursivity were not designed to operate in
that capacity in which politics or wider discursive formations of power
would be an extension of politically ideological discursivity. Since racism,
atavism and primitivism are inherently entailed in paradigmatic Western
humanist projects, capitalism’s ideological and teleological coherence
depends on the level of deriving these discourses from humanist projects
into its own teleological interiority which is then being modernized and
normalized as proper modernist discourses (which is why racism is, as
Gržinić noted, capitalism’s primal ideology).
Necropolitics and racialization therefore serve as modes of this deriving,
modernizing, applying and normalizing. Capitalism essentially needs necro-
politics because it allows it to equalize structural application and normalization
of atavistic and racialist discourses (that perpetuate the privilege of the First
World) with a sustainment of humanocentric discursivities (such is liberalism);
also because it allows capitalism to represent its dedication to preserving such

humanocentrism as a token of existence of some teleological grounding, vision
and coherence. Necropolitics therefore provides statehood to capitalism. The
mainstreaming of liberally prefixed discursivities along with the postmodern
reorganizations of capital—that entailed the interplay among deterritorializa-
tions and reterritorializations of capital—installed a new paradigm within the
epistemology of the capitalist regime that produced a non-limitation of capital
as the only normative capitalism could have organized. This allowed for the
exponential spread of capital, while after capitalism produced a unipolar world
it also created a teleological hole at the center of the relation between power
and society. This hole, produced by the arbitrariness at the center of capital-
ism’s ideological coherence and behind the employment of necropolitics, had
to be filled with the generic substance of capitalism; trangression. As Gržinić
noted:
[ . . . ] arbitrariness does not function as a mask for the absence of some

profound “possibility.” Nor is it a “new form” of capitalism based on
mandatory transgression. Rather, arbitrariness is a symptom of an ideology
based on utter emptiness—or more precisely, based on an emptiness that is
being filled by transgression.16
On the basis of Gržinić’s argument, it is possible to notice that arbitrariness

entailed in the ideological core of capitalism never stays dormant—it is always
and simultaneously being filled by transgression, which as such is being pro-
duced into a normative defined by a lack of limits. Hence, since progress was
reduced to its own generic substance by necrocapitalism (a mere propulsion of
linearly comprehended history), it is possible to notice that liberalism’s own
generic substance, liberty—as an ideological format that legitimizes unrest-
rained liberty of capital and unrestrained liberty of applying atavistic logics—
was also reduced to a mere transgression from which teleological substance is
being derived and structured into a dominant program that substantiates the
purpose of capitalism. What is peculiar and very dangerous with the utilized
ideologem of liberty (in this case transgression), is that its contingency is, by its
immediate epistemological presence, already determined or limited and rea-
lized as a possibility which is already its fulfillment. This is not a question, or not
only, a question, of coopting (of liberty), this is a question of the organization
of limit on the basis of delimitations inherently entailed in necrocapitalism’s
discursivity.
58 Š. TATLIĆ
Foucault has argued, in the wider context of the function of transgression,

that:
Transgression is neither violence in a divided world (in an ethical world) nor

a victory over limits (in a dialectical or revolutionary world); and exactly for
this reason, its role is to measure the excessive distance that it opens at the
heart of the limit and to trace the flashing line that causes the limit to arise.17
In this context, a measuring of the excessive distance at the heart of the

limit could be seen as the stretching of capital into the furthest territorial
and deterritorialized reaches of existence; although it could be said that
transgression as such does provide enough teleological substantiality to
capitalism, it could not be said that it continues to do so unrelated to the
discursive power that organizes it in that way. A measuring of the distance
trangression reaches is therefore a way of structuring teleological coherence
on the basis of merging of contingencies of hegemony and contingencies of
liberty, which is a process that simultaneously fulfills its purpose and con-
stantly searches for it on the basis of an intensification of the employment of
necropolitics. The search for liberty based on the search for possibilities of a
hegemony under which it is organized is therefore only a process of trans-
mutation of liberty into hegemony and vice versa. The teleological function
of liberalism in necrocapitalism, to which it provides a humanistically pre-
fixed rationale, is not to provide a purpose to liberalism, nor to transgression
as such, but to provide a purpose to the system that can only employ
transgression as an ideological program and the epistemological pillar
upon which it bases its reproduction.
In simple terms, it means that other transgressions—those that advo-
cate a limit that did not originate from epistemological logics entailed in
the alliance of capitalism and the First World’s humanist projects—are
forbidden, while at the same time transgressions employed by this regime
are intensified in the name of preserving possibilities of any trangressions.
The emancipation of necrocapitalism is not in any way the liberation of
capitalism from itself, nor it is a mark of the emergence of some liberal
hegemony—it is a process of enfranchizement and/or inauguration of
capitalism into the only kind of epistemological relation toward the new
in the sense of politically ideological contingencies of history. In that
capacity, it is a process of depriving history of its articulatory, applicatory
and politically ideological dimensions that preemptively, actually and a
posteriori eradicate the politically ideological dimension of the new in the
name of propelling of the old, the same in the form of the stretching of
immediate relations of dominance and epistemological logics that sustain
it. The only non-axiomatical eschatological and teleological trajectory
necrocapitalism operates with is that trajectory that conditions the possi-
bility of possibilities by its own logics, by the imperative that states that it is
only necrocapitalism that can propel history forward.
The struggle against capitalism should be perceived as an anti-
imperialist struggle, which also means that the left’s struggle should
be more Copernican and decolonial than reduced to criticism of eco-
nomic logics. When we say Copernican and decolonial, we refer to a
need for dismantling the centrality of the First World in metapolitical
register. This dismantling is at the same time a political gesture that
epistemologically connects immediate relations of power and humanis-
tically prefixed discourses that pose as detached from that power. This
means that the struggle of the left must be politically-ideologically
organized, not primarily as the struggle for social justice, but as the
struggle for politically ideological order—a socialist state that would
tackle the current and produce another institutions and another epis-
temological normative. To say it in the spirit of this text, it is the
infrastructure that matters.
NOTES
1. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958) in Isaiah Berlin, Four
Essays on Liberty, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969, 2.
2. Ibid.
3. Louis Althusser, On Ideology—Radical Thinkers, Book 26. New York,
London: Verso, 2008, 49–50.
4. See Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” 31.
5. Santiago Castro-Gómez, “The Missing Chapter of Empire,” in Cultural
Studies, 21:2, 2007, 428.
6. Marina Gržinić, “A Refugee Protest Camp in Vienna And the European
Union’s Processes of Racialization, Seclusion, and Discrimination”, in e-flux
journal #43/03, New York, 2013.
7. Marina Gržinić, “Subjectivisation, Biopolitics and Necropolitics: Where do
we Stand?,” in Reartikulacija journal #6, Ljubljana, 2009, 23.
8. Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee, “Live and Let Die: Colonial Sovereignties and
the Death Worlds of Necrocapitalism,” in borderlands ejournal, 5:1, 2006.
9. Marina Gržinić, “The State of Things,” in Reartikulacija journal #5,
Ljubljana, 2008, 9.
60 Š. TATLIĆ
10. Marina Gržinić, Šefik Tatlić, Gržinić, Necropolitics, Racialization and

Global Capitalism: Historicization of Biopolitics and Forensics of Politics,
Art, and Life, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014, 31.
11. See Louis Althusser, On Ideology—Radical Thinkers, 8.
12. Ibid. 9.
13. Marina Gržinić, “De-Coloniality of Time and Space,” in Reartikulacija
journal #10,11,12,13, Ljubljana, 2010, 15.
14. Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy—Beyond Empire, Prisons, Torture,
New York, Toronto, London, Melbourne: Seven Stories Press, 2005, 82.
15. Antonio Gramsci, The Gramsci Reader—Selected Writing 1916–1935, ed.
David Forgacs, New York: New York University Press, 2000, 192.
16. See Marina Gržinić, “A Refugee Protest Camp in Vienna And the European
Union’s Processes of Racialization, Seclusion, and Discrimination.”
17. Michel Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” in Language, Counter-
memory, Practice—Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, ed.
Donald F. Bouchard, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977, 35.
Šefik Tatlić (PhD) is a theoretician from Bosnia-Herzegovina. He holds a doc-

torate in sociology and his work focuses on political philosophy, decolonial theory
and political sociology. Some of his recent publications include the book The Logic
of Humanization of Capital—Legitimization of Oppression and Devaluation of the
Function of Political Power (Orion Art, Belgrade, 2015). He is co-author (with
Marina Gržinić) of the book Necropolitics, Racialization and Global Capitalism:
Historicization of Biopolitics and Forensics of Politics, Art, and Life (Lexington
Books, USA, 2014). He has been writing regularly for Reartikulacija publication
(Ljubljana, Slovenia) and has published many theoretical texts in various countries
and delivered a number of public lectures.
CHAPTER 5
The Impact of Western Society onto

the Identity Politics of Sexual and Gender
Minorities in Colonial and Post-colonial
India
Aleksa Milanović
GLOBAL QUEERING
When speaking of globalization we cannot escape the question of if it is a

one-way process which consists of the Westernization/Americanization of
the world, or if it is a multiform process which inevitably leads to changes
inside the local cultures and which are not necessarily resulting in losing
local specificities in the domination of the imperial-Western cultural mod-
els. Globalization can be understood as a form of cultural imperialism and
as imposing/creating a homogeneous global culture modeled by the
Western/American culture, or it can be comprehended as a process lead-
ing to the hybridization of local cultures. In the first case global culture is
seen as inauthentic, domineering and destructive culture which destroys
local authentic cultures whose value lies exactly in their fixed forms. But if
we turn to a somewhat different view of globalization we can look at the
concept of authenticity differently, realizing that authentic is not
A. Milanović (*)
e-mail: aleksa.milanovic@fmk.edu.rs

62 A. MILANOVIĆ
something pure and fixed and it is not lost in the encounter with global
culture—it is just inscribing itself in it.
The cultural import according to this opinion always experiences changes in

the environment where it is used and that is the “dialectical process” which
is called by various names like cultural mutation, appropriation or
hybridization.1
The question of globalization and Western cultural imperialism can be

noticed in the case of gender and sexual identities and practices, and this
issue has been actualized in the last decade of the twentieth and the
beginning of the twenty-first century when numerous texts problematiz-
ing this phenomenon appeared. A certain number of the authors posed a
thesis which expressed the thought of a certain influence of globalization
on forming the international gay and lesbian identity in a way that it could
be seen as one, universal gay/lesbian identity.2 Other authors criticized
that thesis, leaning on the results of the anthropological research of the
local cultures, especially following the anthropologist and globalization
theoretician Arjun Appadurai who claims that:
[ . . . ] globalization does not necessarily or even frequently imply homoge-

nization or Americanization, and to the extent that different societies appro-
priate the materials of modernity differently, there is still ample room for the
deep study of specific geographies, histories, and languages.3
What is concretely stressed by the critics of the global queering thesis is the
fact that although the conditions for spreading Western models of sexual
and gender identities had been established at the site of non-Western
cultural spaces, local identities connected to sexuality and gender did not
vanish or disappear in Western models—once influenced by them, they
had been modified.4
Western models of (homo)sexual and (trans)gender identities had some
influence on the local concepts and understanding of sexuality and gender,
not only because of mass (global) media and (gay) tourism but also
because of the global phenomenon of actualizing the issue of human
rights, which became “the ‘pervasive criteria’ by which nations approach
a universal standard of civilization, progress, and modernity.”5 During the
nineties, sexuality began to be an important question involving a focus in
the discourses of international human rights movements. The Australian
THE IMPACT OF WESTERN SOCIETY ONTO THE IDENTITY POLITICS OF SEXUAL . . . 63
Tonen case6 of 1994, enacted by the United Nations Human Rights

Committee, was the first example of a legal decision in the field of
human rights and discrimination. This case annulled the remaining sod-
omy-related laws in Australia, as the anti-discrimination law is already
contained in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
which Australia had signed and which was the basis on which the case
was built. In the same period a large number of NGOs (re)oriented on
campaigns and goals aimed at improving and protecting sexual and gender
minority rights on an international level. Organizations such as
International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association
(ILGA) or International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission
(IGLHRC), based in Bruxelles and New York, engage themselves world-
wide, which caused Joseph Massad to call them Gay International in his
controversial text Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the
Arab World.7 Criticizing the work of these and similar organizations,
Massad tried to point toward their negation of local identities and aggres-
sive imposition of the imperialist epistemology and universal homosexu-
ality discourse to Arab and Muslim states. Such an approach, according to
Massad, inevitably leads to the creation and imposing of a binary structure
at the level of hetero/homosexuality which actually did not exist there
before.
The activist practice of lobbying and arguing institutionalized in
Western contexts and which concerns fighting for the cause of lesbian,
gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) communities and their influence in
politics and state institutions related to the issues of gender and sexual
minorities spread to the rest of the world through the actions and activities
of international LGBT organizations and other human rights NGOs. In
her text Post/Colonial Queer Globalisation and International Human
Rights: Images of LGBT Rights, Aeyal Gross analyzes the campaign
initiated in 1998 by Amnesty International which focused on sexual and
gender minority rights. The main slogan of the campaign—Gay rights are
human rights—points to the organization’s intention to position gay
identity as the universal mark of homosexual identities and practices all
around the world, at the same time universalizing the very phenomenon of
human rights together with the concept of human.8 Analyzing the photo-
graphs which were part of this campaign, Gross, contrary to Massad,
concludes that although the intention and acts of universalizing gay
identity in the process of globalization and human rights movements
exist, we cannot speak about the simple imposition of the Western notion
64 A. MILANOVIĆ
of homosexuality; it is more a process of mixing and hybridization of

identity in the encounter of the local and global. Seen in this light the
globalization of (homo)sexuality can be understood as a process leading to
deconstruction and denaturalization of sexual and gender identities and
toward new questions and constructions of entirely new categories.
IMPOSING WESTERN EPISTEMOLOGY

One of the main questions in postcolonial studies is: who can speak in
the name of subordinated social groups located in postcolonial regions, in
the name of those who do not take part in cultural imperialism? In the
discourse of Western postcolonial studies is there a space or even the
possibility to hear the voices of those who do not belong to that discourse
but who are being discussed? This issue was raised by the Indian theore-
tician and feminist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her text Can the
Subaltern Speak? Gayatri Spivak took the term subaltern from Antonio
Gramsci, who used it to designate those groups of people who are, in the
context of cultural hegemony, cast aside from the established structures of
political (self)proclaiming. In the context of postcolonial theory Spivak
insists on not considering this term equal to subordinated, since in the case
of subaltern we speak of those who are at the margins of society because of
their discursive subordination.
Discourses of knowledge coming from the West have been established
as self-evident, the only ones which are valid, and as the universal models
of analyzing, representing and understanding of the world around us—
even the world that is not close to the Western subject in time nor in space.
Western science, philosophy, history, medicine, religion and literature,
and also language took the position of a universal knowledge which
excludes and marginalizes all the other models of thought by classifying
them as folklore, mythology or superstition. Stressing the aspect of colo-
nizing force ingrained in these practices, Spivak introduces the term
epistemic violence and says that:
[ . . . ] the clearest available example of such epistemic violence is the remo-

tely orchestrated, far-flung, and heterogeneous project to constitute the
colonial subject as Other.9
Creating a binary opposition between them and us or between the Western

and non-Western subject can be also characterized as a neo-colonial
project and as another way of establishing Western domination and con-

trol over the non-Western world and culture. Criticizing Foucault and
Deleuze, among others, who pointed to discursive and representational
models of construction of subjectivity, she sees their Western-intellectual-
elitist base as a problem, as a privileged position which is in itself a lack,
something that prevents them the possibility to represent and speak for
subaltern groups. In other words, Spivak questions the ability of Western
critical theory to grapple with this problem without at the same time
contributing to silencing those who are represented and spoken about
through that theory.
By the imposition of Western epistemology, the Western model of
(homo)sexuality and (trans)gender has become the pattern through which
these phenomena are defined, interpreted, analyzed and even processed by
the state ideological apparatuses on a global level—both in the contemporary
and the colonial era. Following that, what should not be ignored in issues of
cultural globalization, sexual minority rights and (homo)sexual and (trans)
gender identities of non-Western cultures is the analysis of the relations of
societies toward these phenomena during the colonial period (if there was
any), and certainly during the post-colonial era, in which the process of
globalization is surely an integral part. The relation of colonizer toward
sexuality and gender influenced the way in which the colonial heritage
connected to narratives of sexuality and gender that had been posed as a
base for the analysis of local cultures and attitudes toward these issues in the
post-colonial era. Reorganization of the social situation in the colonial
context, the establishing of the Western value system and classification/
categorization of sexual practices and identities, as well as their legal regula-
tions in society served as an important segment of imposing imperial ideol-
ogy. Contemporary categorization of gender and sexual identities, as much
as their hybridization and position in today’s non-Western culture, are
mostly the product of actual colonial influences in that space.
WESTERN CONCEPT/CONSTRUCT OF HOMOSEXUALITY, TRANS*

IDENTITY AND ITS TRANSPOSITION TO INDIA IN THE COLONIAL
AND POST-COLONIAL ERA
Sexual practices of individuals haven’t been connected to identity cate-

gories, leading the subject embracing them to feel closer to a certain group
of people until the nineteenth century. The term “homosexuality” first
66 A. MILANOVIĆ
appeared in the work of the Austrian writer Karl-Maria Kerbeny, published

in 1869; it came into wider use with the term “heterosexuality” through
the work of Richard von Kraft Ebbing, an Austrian psychiatrist and the
author of the study Psychopatia Sexualis. Psychopatia Sexualis, published in
1886, was one of the first studies concerned with homosexual and bisexual
practices. Kraft Ebbing saw homosexuality as a form of gender variation
and classified it as a psychosexual problem.10
Medical discourse in general, with its view on homosexuality as a
psychological problem, served as a base for the social stigmatization of
certain sexual practices and for the social construction of the homosexual
as a transgressor. Foucault theorized the relations of Western society
toward the sexuality, pointing to the fact that it must be seen as a cultural
category constructed and modelled through social institutions with the
aim of establishing control. Foucault speaks about that in his book The
History of Sexuality I:
This new persecution of the peripheral sexualities entailed an incorporation

of perversions and a new specification of individuals. As defined by the
ancient civil or canonical codes, sodomy was a category of forbidden acts;
their perpetrator was nothing more than the juridical subject of them. The
nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history,
and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a
morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiol-
ogy. Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his
sexuality.11
Medical discourse in the beginning of the twentieth century also proble-

matized transgenderness. In his study The Transvestites12 (1910), German
sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld insisted on differing the phenomenon of
transgenderness from the phenomena of homosexuality and fetishism. He
claimed that gender diversity is a regular natural phenomenon and he
made a categorization consisting of over 60 possible types of gender/
sexual varieties. Hirschfeld proposed the term “transvestite” in 1910 using
the Latin words trans (over/outside) and vestus (clothed). Today the
prefix trans is used to denote a vast range of gender differences and a
great number of gender identity types. In the middle of the twentieth
century the sexologist and endocrinologist Harry Benjamin popularized
the term “transsexuality,” and based on his clinical approach there was a
whole medical process concerning transexuality that was developed and is
still used today. Transgenderness and transsexuality as well as homosexu-

ality were pathologized and classified as psychological disorders, and as
such they were given a code in medical nomenclature. Starting from 1973,
when the American Psychiatric Association took homosexuality of the list
of mental disorders, which led to the same move by the World Health
Organization in 1990, a large number of Western countries accepted that
decision, and in the majority of these countries homosexuality has been
decriminalized. However, transgenderness and transsexuality are still on
the list of mental illnesses in the nomenclature of the World Health
Organization; they are listed within the subcategory of Gender identity
disorders, which is part of the group Disorders of adult personality and
behavior. The positioning of homosexuality and transgenderness as mental
illnesses inside the medical discourse has been affecting general opinion
until today, promoting the attitude in legal discourse through which
certain rights and freedoms in society are still not guaranteed for persons
identifying as such. Institutional homophobia and transphobia encourage
social homophobia/transphobia and vice versa, which results in stigmati-
zation and discrimination at all levels.
The movement for trans* rights was developed within the movement
for the rights of LGBT persons until the beginning of the 1990s, or until
the appearance of the text Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose
Time has Come, which was written by transgender activist and writer Leslie
Feinberg. The author calls for a rethinking of gender differences and
points to the latitude of the trans* identity spectre.13 During the 1990s
the development of queer studies and transgender studies focused atten-
tion on the problems of the trans* community and on their status in
society. This activism was founded (and still is) on the fight for gaining
the right to change gender/sex labels in personal documents and the right
to medical treatment related to sex reconstruction, which does not include
forced sterilization. A very small number of Western countries has regu-
lated the legal status of trans* persons, and just recently there have been
some changes in legal status which could be regarded as positive.
This short review of the concepts and constructing of homosexuality
and transgenderness, and also of creating the mechanisms of resistance of
the LGBT community in the Western context, serves as a map of relations
of Western society toward these phenomena which was consequently
transposed to non-Western cultures. The example of India is a clear case
of Western influence in the fields of legal and social status of nonheter-
osexual persons and persons who do not fit into a binary sex/gender
68 A. MILANOVIĆ
model. The Western influence through globalization also had an impact

on the process of hybridization of gender and sexual identities.
The spectre of different sexual and gender identities in today’s India is
wide and includes different forms of gender expression and sexual prac-
tices of which some are impossible to be “translated” or, better to say, to
fit into Western models of gender and sexual identities. In her text
Towards a Sociology of Gender Diversity: The Indian and UK Cases,
Surya Monro focuses on three main models of gender and sexuality
existing today in India: nonclassified sexual activity, hijras and koti, and
the Western model. She maintains that these three types of categorization
are the products of class, racial and colonial relations, as well as gender and
sexual inequalities which underline Indian society.14
Identification on the basis of sexuality or gender in contemporary India
is deeply influenced by the belonging of the individual to a certain class—
caste, as well as the (historical) colonial and post-colonial influence of the
West. Models that Monro identifies as hijras and koti represent a category
in which it is hard to distinguish gender and sexual identity, for they are
intertwined, with neither dominant. In her ethnographic study of hijras
Gayatri Reddi states that hijras are just one of the numerous koti identities.
The koti “family” has at least five members, or identities, that I know of:
hijra, zenana, jogin, siva-sati, kada-catla koti—differentiated on the basis of
idealized asexuality, dress, kinship patterns, religion, respectability, and the
centrality of the body to their understanding of self.15
Each one of these identities is important in differing categories, and all

identities, if seen through the prism of Western understanding of gender
and sexuality, belong to the trans* identity category except kada-katla
koti, which is close to gay identity. The phenomenon of hijras certainly
drew the most attention of Western anthropologists, so it is not surprising
that it is a category most widely recognized in the context of third gender
and atypical gender models of Southern Asia. Hijras’ visibility and con-
nection to a community with a structure based on specific rituals, hier-
archy and mutually shared life surely contributed to this situation.16
According to the written historical sources, the community of hijras in
South Asia has existed for more than 4,000 years and has been connected
to the culture of eunuchs “that was common across the Middle East and
India, where Eunuchs worked as guards, advisors, and entertainers.”17
During British colonial reign in India they were sorted into the so-called
criminal casts—a new category which was introduced by the British

government.18 Hijras were seen as serious criminals and the Criminal
Tribes Act which was introduced in 1872 in order to register and control
the communities which were seen as dangerous contained a detailed
description of the forbidden acts, which included clothing and wearing
jewellery for males in public as well as in the private space. Included in the
category of criminal casts were also the individuals that broke Section 377
of the Indian Penal Code, introduced in 1860 by the colonizers. This part
of the law was instituted with the purpose of criminalizing all “unnatural
acts,” into which homosexual adult relations were also grouped, and this
law is still active today. The High Court of Delhi suspended this law in
2009, proclaiming it unconstitutional. However, only four years in 2013
the Supreme Court of India overruled this and brought the law back to
legitimacy, stating that the decision of annulling this law could only be
enacted by the Parliament.19
Hijras were surely discriminated against by this law since many of them
are involved in sexual work and engage in sexual relations marked as same-
sex or homosexual. Nevertheless, today the status of this law is unusual: in
2014 the Supreme Court of India ruled that transgender persons should
be legally recognized (thus also including hijras) as a third gender, to be
listed in the official identification documents as such.20 This law also
brings legal protection to this gender minority, which also lessens the
discrimination of this community which currently lives on the margins of
the society. However, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code puts their
rights into question and exposes them to different interpretations on a case
by case basis.
Legal regulation of the hijra status is greatly based on the experience and
practice of Western countries, which included the status of transgender
persons into their legal interest from the late 1990s. Legal recommenda-
tions related to the third gender in India are mostly derived from Western
terminology regarding gender identities and the sex status of individuals,
proposing legal solutions based on models adopted by European Union
countries, even referring to the European Convention on Human Rights.21
By legalizing medical interventions related to sex reconstruction hijras
receive the possibility of transitioning into the binary sex/gender matrix
which actually hybridizes their identity. Sex reassignment surgery includes a
number of institutional steps, starting from psychiatric evaluation, endocri-
nology treatment and surgical genital reconstruction, leading to the crea-
tion of sex characteristics closer to those of a female. Following this the sex
70 A. MILANOVIĆ
status of these individuals is legally standardized, which further induces

rejecting the hijra identity or its hybridization in cases when a person
continues to be part of the community which she belongs to, practicing
the same way of life and customs as before. Until recently the sex status of
hijras was not the uniform element of their identity. A great number of these
community members chose nirvan—an operation which involved castra-
tion and which was done at illegal clinics or by people who did not have
medical training for this kind of job. Hijra category also includes intersexual
persons, as well as persons who did not choose to do any medical correc-
tions on their genitals.
The third model of gender and sexuality mentioned by Monro as a
Western model includes identity categories produced by Western culture—
gay, lesbian, transgender, transexual, bisexual identity and MSM (men who
have sex with men), which refers to homosexually oriented persons and
which was constructed in 1990 by the epidemiologists who researched
AIDS.22 According to the anthropologist Suparna Bhaskaran, the appear-
ance of these identities and emerging communities around them in India is
the result of intersecting the social processes of modernization, politics of
development, economic liberalization, trans/national activism and develop-
ment of the NGO sector related to sexual minorities and the AIDS
epidemic inside post-colonial India.23 The fast processes of privatization
and economic liberalization after the 1980s opened up India to global
markets and global communication networks, speeding up the exchange
of ideas and involving India in the contemporary paths of cultural globaliza-
tion. All these processes influenced the emergence and development of
identity politics and models for gender and sexual minority movements so
characteristic for Western culture. In fact, several big NGOs working in
India were founded in Europe and the United States, while others founded
in India were formed by people who lived in the West for some time. One
of the most important NGOs related to sexual minorities and AIDS in India
is Naz foundation, which was founded in 1994 from the organization NFI
(Naz foundation international), established in the 1980s in London.
Trikone, representing the LGBT community in Southern Asia, was formed
in 1986 in San Francisco. Ashok Row Kavi, journalist and one of the most
famous LGBT activists, founded the Humsafar organization in Mumbai
after his return from Canada in 1994. He also established Bombay Dost, the
first magazine in India dealing with alternative sexualities. This magazine
had a very important role in promoting LGBT identity and creating the
LGBT community in India. International funds which support projects
related to movements for rights of sexual and gender minorities and AIDS
prevention contributed greatly to the development of NGOs. As such they
are indirectly responsible for the specific development and hybridization of
identity politics in India.
It is pretty much clear that globalization took an important part in
changes in identity politics and movements for the rights of sexual and
gender minorities. But here the influence of the West started much earlier
than recent globalization processes. Indigenous gender and sexual iden-
tities were redefined much before the global gay culture phenomenon and
its impact on changes in regards to identity politics and movements for the
rights of sexual and gender minorities. Today in India both of these
models are present—local and global (Western), which are both constantly
redefined and hybridized through this post-colonial space and under the
influence of both local culture and global processes.
The goal of this study, which is itself aiming at analysis of the gender
and sexual minority identities in India today, is not only to identify the
ways in which globalization processes and Western influences change
identity politics in the non-Western world but also to point to a
strength of the elements that lead to those changes. In the other
words, this example clearly illustrates the power of Western culture,
which is in the first place through medical and legal discourse, influen-
cing forms and inducing redefinings of gender and sexual identity
categories. Bending to fulfill a binary gender model and normatives
dictated by Western society is a process that started a long-time ago
and was so entrenched that stopping it or doing anything in order for it
to be slowed down or neutralized would be practically impossible. A
conclusion that stems from this points to a possible solution to the
problem—redirecting the notion of the Western way of seeing gender
and sexual identities.
NOTES
1. Jelena Đorđević, Postkultura: uvod u studije kulture, Beograd: Clio, 2009, 388.
2. Dennis Altman, “Global gaze/global gays,” in Sexual identities: queer politics,
edited by Mark Blasius, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001, 96–117.
Katie King, “There are no lesbians here: lesbianism, feminism and global gay
formations,” in Queer Globalizations: citizenship and the Afterlife of
Colonialism, edited by Arnaldo Cruz Malave and Martin F. Manalansan IV,
New York and London: New York University Press, 2002, 33–45.
72 A. MILANOVIĆ
3. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization,

Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, 17.
4. Tom Boellstorff, The gay archipelago: sexuality and nation in Indonesia,
New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2005.
5. Carl F. Stychin, “Same-Sex Sexualities and the Globalization of Human
Rights Discourse,” in McGill Law Journal, vol. 49, Montreal: McGill
University Press, 2004, 954.
6. Natalie E. Serra, “Queering International Human Rights: LGBT Access to
Domestic Violence Remedies,” in Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the
Law, Volume 21, Issue 3, American University Washington College of
Law, 2013, 595.
7. Joseph Massad, “Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab
World,” in Desiring Arabs, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
2007, 160–191.
8. Aeyal Gross, “Post/Colonial Queer Globalisation and International Human
Rights: Images of LGBT Rights,” in Jindal Global Law Review, Volume 4,
Issue 2, Jindal Global University, Haryana, 2013.
9. Gayatri Spivak, “Can the subaltern speak?,” in Marxism and the
Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg,
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988, 271–313.
10. Richard von Kraft Ebbing, “PsychopathiaSexualis with Special Reference to
Contrary Sexual Instinct: A Medico-Legal Study,” in The Transgender
studies reader, edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, New York,
London: Routledge, 2006, 21–28, 21.
11. Michel Foucault, The Will to Knowledge. History of Sexuality Volume 1,
(trans: R. Hurley), New York: Pantheon Books, 1998, 43. (here cited
from: Mišel Fuko, Volja za znanjem: istorija seksualnosti I, (trans: J.
Stakić) Karpos, Loznica, 2006, 52.
12. Magnus Hirschfeld, “The Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress,”
in The transgender studies reader, edited by Susan Srtyker and Stephen
Whittle, New York, London: Routledge, 2006, 28–39.
13. Leslie Feinberg, “Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has
Come,” in The transgender studies reader, edited by Susan Stryker and
Stephen Whittle, New York, London: Routledge, 2006, 205–221.
14. Surya Monro, “Towards a Sociology of Gender Diversity: The Indian and
UK Cases,” in Transgender Identities: Towards a Social Analysis of Gender
Diversity, edited by Sally Hines and Tam Sanger, New York, London:
Routledge, 2010, 242–259.
15. Gayatri Reddy, With respect to sex: negotiating hijra identity in South India,
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005, 52.
16. “Although relatively untouched by police jurisdiction, hijras across the
country have divided themselves according to municipal police divisions,
in accordance with the demarcation of districts in mainstream society. They

elect their own council of elders to settle group disputes, referred to as
pancayats, who rule over a select group of hijra communities within a
particular region. They have regional meetings as well: simply through
word of mouth, tens of thousands of hijras have been known to converge
on a single area.” Kira Hall, “‘Go Suck Your Husband’s Sugarcane!’: Hijras
and the Use of Sexual Insult,” in Queerly phrased: language, gender, and
sexuality, edited by Anna Livia and Kira Hall, Oxford, New York: Oxford
University Press, 1997, 430–460, 430.
17. Surya Monro, “Towards a Sociology of Gender Diversity: The Indian and
UK Cases,” in Transgender Identities: Towards a Social Analysis of Gender
Diversity, Sally Hines and Tam Sanger (eds.), New York, London:
Routledge, 2010, 242–259, 248.
18. “The constitution of this colonial category—a ‘criminal caste’—involved the
construction and detailed elaboration of ‘a body of knowledge defining the
nature, habits, and characteristics’ of individuals so classified. This knowl-
edge base was premised not only on prevailing understandings of the nature
of Indian society (and caste in particular), but also on constructions of
crime, deviance, and vagrancy in Victorian England.” Gayatri Reddy, With
respect to sex: negotiating hijra identity in South India, Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 2005, 27.
19. http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/XCOl7cJw5t3DgnQZsFYIFO/BJP-
supports-decriminalization-of-homosexuality-Shaina-NC.html.
20. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-27031180.
21. Speeches delivered by Hon’ble Mr. Justice P. Sathasivam, Chief Justice of
India at Tamil Nadu State Judical Academy, http://www.hcmadras.tn.nic.
in/jacademy/Article/PSJ-CJO-SPEECH-Royappetah.pdf.
22. Rebecca M. Young and Ilan H. Meyer, “The Trouble With ‘MSM’ and
‘WSW’: Erasure of the Sexual-Minority Person in Public Health Discourse,”
in Am J Public Health, 2005, 1144–1149.
23. Suparna Bhaskaran, Made in India Decolonizations, Queer Sexualities,
Trans/national Projects, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Aleksa Milanović is a PhD candidate and teaching assistant at Faculty of Media

and Communications in Belgrade. He completed his BA and MA studies at the
Faculty of Geography, University of Belgrade and also MA studies at University of
Arts in Belgrade, interdisciplinary studies in Art and Media Theory. His interests
include transgender studies, queer theory, postcolonial studies and culture studies.
PART II
Visual and Curatorial Deconstructions

CHAPTER 6
Radical Contemporaneity
Politics of the Image in the Video-Films
by Gržinić and Šmid
Aneta Stojnić
INTRODUCTION
This essay is intended as one possible reading of the politics of the image in
the video-films of Marina Gržinić and Aina Šmid. Covering the span of
over 30 years (since the 1980s until today), the video works by Gržinić
and Šimd deal with a historical account of the events in the transition from
socialism to post-socialism and ultimately neoliberal capitalism. They often
deal with the time and space of the former Yugoslavia in which the process
of this transition was executed in the most violent way, employing the war
machine and the necropolitical and necrocapitalist mechanisms of subju-
gation and expropriation. However, the artists’ position is not geopolitical
but critical/theoretical, meaning that their artistic analyses include other
parts of Europe and the world. Their recent works precisely expose the
condition of contemporary global necrocapitalism, leveling a harsh cri-
tique of discrimination, racism, and fascism in Europe today. In this regard
the oeuvre of Gržinić and Šmid takes a historical position in terms of
artistic, cultural, and political questioning and critiquing the construction
A. Stojnić (*)
e-mail: aneta.s7@gmail.com

78 A. STOJNIĆ
Fig. 6.1 Marina Gržinić, Aina Šmid, Digital montage no. 7, (1 m per 70 cm),
2015, Copyright by Gržinić/Šmid
and deconstruction of the political project of the former Eastern Europe in

relation to the so-called former West, as well as understanding the con-
temporary relations of segregation and exploitation in Europe in terms of
class, race, and gender (Fig. 6.1).
One of the central questions that we can ask is what these relations and
processes mean for artistic and cultural practices, as well as for the present
conditions of life and labour in so-called new democracies which are in fact
equalled with new capitalisms. One of the major problems with post-
socialist societies resides in the fact that introducing democracies in the
former Eastern Europe was equaled with the introduction of neoliberal-
ism, as if one could not even be thought without the other. In this way the
chance to think new forms of democracy de-linked from capitalism was
missed in the historical momentum after 1989.
For the purpose of this essay my analysis focuses on the conceptual
usage of the image and text in relation to the socio-political and ideolo-
gical processes that are the topics of the works. This concerns four works
RADICAL CONTEMPORANEITY 79
Fig. 6.2 Marina Gržinić, Aina Šmid, Digital montage no. 3, (1 m per 70 cm),
2015, Copyright by Gržinić/Šmid
representative of the four distinctive approaches we can designate in the

vast artistic output by Gržinić and Šmid.1 Of key concern is the relation
between image and text and the ways it becomes performative, and as such
political (Fig. 6.2).
CASE 1: LABYRINTH
The video work “Labyrinth” (1993) was developed as a video dance
project that attempted to deal with and comprehend the schizophrenic
conditions of the war-torn (former) Yugoslav space. I put former in
brackets here because former-Yugoslavia, ex-Yugoslavia, or post-
Yugoslav space/time are all terms which imply that a certain historiciza-
tion of Yugoslavia had already happened. In 1993, however, the war
80 A. STOJNIĆ
was at its peak and there was not yet the time-space created for such a
historical distance. In art as well as theory “post-conflict spaces” are
usually approached with a certain historical distance that enables us to
deal with traumatic pasts or collective trauma. It is crucial to understand
that trauma is not simply a record of a past experience like a memory, but
that it “registers the force of an experience that is not yet fully owned.”2
According to Cathy Caruth:
While the traumatized are called upon to see and to relive the insistent
reality of the past, they recover a past that encounters consciousness only
through the very denial of active recollection. The ability to recover the past
is thus closely and paradoxically tied up, trauma, with the inability to have
access to it.3
At the time of the production of “Labyrinth” the conditions and forms of

life were falling apart in a most brutal necropolitical way while the already
non-existing country has not yet began to comprehend its new conditions
as an “ex” space. Therefore, we could say that the work was dealing with
the injury itself, the cause of the trauma as it was happening. I would call
this approach a “radical contemporaneity,” where the political stand
towards the traumatic event is generated via the attempt to critically
comprehend, a kind of in situ artistic analyses of the deterioration of life.
As stated by the authors:
The crucial moment of the video work is the “installation” of the body in
the traumatic places of the outer and inner world. The architecture of misery
and deprivation: refuges camps, zoological gardens, rooms with odds and
found images etc., forms a specific territory that forces the body, the psyche
and memory (of dancers) to final solutions.4
Developed in a format of an experimental video dance project, this piece is

characterized by a specific use of visual language, while there is no spoken
or written text used at all. The imagery, choreography, and music are the
main poetic and aesthetic carriers of meaning.
In a surrealistic manner the artificially constructed “inner world” based
on Magritte’s paintings is juxtaposed with documentary footage from
Ljubljana camps for refugees from Bosnia and Herzegovina. The “inner”
and “outer” worlds are connected through choreography of image and
body. Hectic and mechanical dance movements create an uncanny feeling.
This uncanniness produced by the mechanical movements of a human

body is emphasized by the matching soundtrack, as well as the editing of
the video dominated by fast-changing frames and overlapping of “inner”
and “outer” spaces. The viewer is taken into a frightening labyrinth of a
broken reality; the nightmarish atmosphere of the video functions on a
predominately affective level. The dancing bodies are neither dead nor
alive; they resemble dysfunctional mechanical dolls or broken cyborgs/
robots. Such dehumanisation of the body aims precisely at the core of war
trauma. A qualified form of life as we knew it is gone and what we are
confronted with is what Agamben called “bare life,” that is life exposed to
death.5 The new reality that has come to the forefront is a necropolitical6
one.
CASE 2: NAKED FREEDOM

In their performative video work “Naked Freedom” (2010), Gržinić and
Šmid focus on questioning the possibilities of social change under the
conditions of financial capitalism. The aim is to explore the possibilities for
subjectification as well as agency across critical, political, social, and artistic
discourses. The video collages and acts on at least three parallel and
connected levels:
(1) Exploring the possibility of art and cultural practices for generating
the communities, agencies, and relations that could lead to social
change.
(2) Unfolding the links between hetero-normative and nationalistic
violence, which is a backdrop of the link between nationalism and
capitalism, particularly in the conditions of transitional turbo-
capitalism.7
(3) Precise analyses of the changed conditions for Africa as well as
African non-European Union (EU) residents in Europe after the
fall of the Berlin Wall.
The work was created through a collective process which involved the
embodiment of theoretical, social, political, and performative discourses.
As stated by the artists, the video:
connects Ljubljana, Belgrade and Durham/USA and presents a conceptual

political space of engagement that allows for rethinking what local
82 A. STOJNIĆ
community is, who can be part of contemporary communities, who is often

left out, and what is the price to be paid.8
The first part is a collective video performance that in a post-conceptual

manner combines heavy theoretical discourse with video art language. On
the formal level visual text (video) and language (i.e., spoken text and
subtitles) function as three parallel and equal layers of the work. In a
staged setting, performers give a theoretical analyses in order to explore
the real work and social relations in terms of art, culture, and life in the
context of global neoliberal capitalism. At the beginning the process of
video-making is deconstructed in a statement by one of the performers:
Video has become democratised today. Due to digital technology it is

becoming cheaper. It is more accessible in the first capitalist world.
Therefore making video art is a funny thing to do. Everyone can be a
video artist, just give them a camera.
This precise and provocative statement is there to make us think how can
we (then) make relevant art in the conditions of financial capitalism. The
approach to video-making in “Naked Freedom” offers one possible
answer: it is necessary to have a clear political and theoretical position
that has to be precisely expressed as such. In other words the “artist
statement” is no longer a description tangential to the work but its very
backbone and an integral part of the piece.
The second layer which connects all the others in this video consists of
performative drawings and animation by Siniša Ilić, an artist and performer
from Belgrade. He employs this technique in order to deconstruct the
various forms of violence (from heteronormative to nationalistic) and to
connect different spaces within the realm of culture, art, and activism,
struggling to survive in the conditions of turbo capitalism and turbo
nationalism/fascism in a society devastated in transition.
The third part of “Naked Freedom” consists of footage of a conversa-
tion between Gržinić and Kwame Nimako, a theoretician from Ghana
who lives in Amsterdam where he is in charge of NiNsee (National
Institute for the Study of Dutch Slavery and its Legacy). Their debate
focuses on the status of Africa and non-EU citizens in Europe from a
decolonial position and in the light of (post)colonial relations of sub-
jugation, exploitation, and appropriation of labour and life. In this con-
versation it is indicated that after the re-discovery of the former Eastern
Europe as a new (much closer and more convenient) space to be

exploited, former colonial EU countries could finally completely discard
an already-exhausted Africa. At the same time mechanisms of necropo-
litics began to be executed in the European space (previously under the
exclusive governance of biopolitics and biopower) chiefly through racia-
lization, denying the right of free movement to “non-citizens” (increas-
ing the crisis of and for asylum seekers), the criminalization of migrants
and the violent creation of the non-citizen figure as a subject of
necropolitics.
CASE 3: RELATIONS
“Relations” (2012) is a documentary made on the occasion of the 25th
anniversary of the lesbian group ŠKUC-LL (1987–2012). This documen-
tary provided a much-needed historicization of the lesbian movement in
the former Yugoslavia and as such presents an invaluable and empowering
testimony of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer or Questioning,
and Intersex (LGBTQI) practices, struggles, and genealogies in the
region. The film testifies to a diversity of marginalization processes and
follows the struggles of lesbian and LGBTQI communities in Slovenia and
the former Yugoslavia through the decay of late socialism into the turbo-
nationalism of the 1990s which prepared the terrain for the normalization
of global neoliberal capitalism in the twenty-first century. This is not
simply a struggle for any kind of visibility of lesbian and LGBTQI move-
ments but is rather a militant demand for historical visibility. At the same
time, it is a quest for dismantling the hegemonic, heteronormative, homo-
phobic and clerofascist history that excludes it. In this way this project
stands as a struggle for the field of knowledge and delinking from a
colonial matrix of power that regulates gender relations and dynamics.
The film is developed in a classical documentary format that relies on
conversations with key actors in the movements combined with footage
of historically significant events as well as spaces around which the com-
munity was generated. The critical discourse of the movement and
historical events around it is visualized through interviews, documenta-
tion of art projects, subcultures, nightlife, and political action. However,
by speaking about the historical account of the events in the post-
socialist space it also exposes the condition of contemporary global
capitalism and gives a harsh critique of discrimination, racism, and fas-
cism in Europe today. The violent processes are traced through the story
84 A. STOJNIĆ
of pride parades in the different republics of the former Yugoslavia,

around which fascist-homophobic attacks exploded, and how public
discourse around it changed according to the different political climate
in the countries that were entering or preparing to enter the EU. These
processes are also traced through a story about homophobic marriage
legislations pushed after 2004, when Slovenia became a member of the
EU. In the documentary this is approached through discussions and
analysis of the “climate” that followed the rejection of a new family
code in Slovenia that would partially permit same sex couples to gain
the same rights as heterosexual families. The family code was rejected on
a referendum in March 2012, when the majority decided against basic
human rights for same sex unions and their children. In December 2015
another referendum for this bill that would allow same sex marriages was
held and once again rejected.
In such a context it seems important to point out that “Relations” was
realized independently in the full sense of the word. This means that it did
not receive any budget or support from any government, non-govern-
mental, private, or EU organization or foundation. In this way it stands
out as a piece that was created out of the sheer necessity for writing (or in
this case recording) a very specific marginalized history by contextualizing
the lesbian movement and the LGBTQI community within, and in rela-
tion to politics, economics, culture, and arts, as well as legal institutional
structures. As such it stands as a testimony of the political strength and
endurance of the lesbian movement in spite of discrimination, of its artistic
and cultural potential, critical discourses and emancipatory politics. In the
early twenty-first century, in her writing, Gržinić developed a crucial concept
that implies the necessity of a shift from “sexually queer” towards becoming
“politically queer.” This film occupies such a political position (Fig. 6.2).
CASE 4: SEIZURE
“Seizure” is a very specific experimental documentary that combines an
artistic and curatorial approach in one format—a kind of curated video-
film. As a starting point it takes three film programs curated by Gržinić
between 2014 and 2015 in Ljubljana, Zagreb, and Vienna, where she
presented four women artists: Adela Jušić (“The Sniper,” 2007), Anja
Salomonowitz (“The 727 Days without Karamo,” 2013), Heiny Srour
(“Leila and the Wolves,” 1984), and Nevline Nnaji (“Reflections
Unheard: Black Women in Civil Rights,” 2013). All four women express
strong political positions in their work.
Jušić challenges the war machine which regulated the gaze, affects and life
from the 1990s on in the Balkans, dealing with the topic of the sniper told
through personal history with the Sarajevo siege. As noticed by Gržinić: “it is
a premonitory work that announces a topic (the sniper) of mainstream
Hollywood films and counter positions in the art world (Rabih Mroué in
his works from 2012).” Salomonowitz’s documentary deals with the violent
administration of asylum and migration laws in Austria. She focuses on the
influence of these laws on intimate relations, particularly how these laws
incapacitate bi-national couples and children from bi-national families that
are seen as racially different in Austria and the EU. Srour examines the often-
neglected role of Arab women in contemporary Palestine and Lebanon. She
expresses the quest for emancipation from ideas of film narration based on
the nineteenth-century bourgeois novel and seeks for a structure that would
reflect the existing consequences of colonialism. Nnaji offers an overview on
the Black women’s movement in the United States with a focus on double
subjugation and discrimination related to access to the labour market in the
capitalist regime of whiteness. She shows how black women are discrimi-
nated against both by gender bias and a racialized labour division.
“Seizure” brings together these positions in a simple yet precise way,
tracing connections and genealogies between only seemingly disparate
histories and positions. It consists of conversations between Gržinić and
the artists, footage of their public talks as well as inserts from their works.
The video is made in a minimalist way in a very literal sense of the word.
The format of the image is exceptionally small—in the middle of a black
regular-format screen there is a small vertical rectangle which contains the
video-film. It creates the feeling that it could have been shot with a mobile
phone, or that you are watching the work on an interactive multipurpose
screen (as most of the screens we normally encounter are) rather than a
“proper” cinema setting. This peep show has a twofold effect: it states a
demand for a precise focus, and it questions the regimes of visibility in the
conditions of video art production. As stated by Gržinić:
Seizure is about rewriting counter-histories in film and video productions. The

topic of peeping is here exposed as drawing boundaries, of how to live without
innocence in different regimes of art, technology, databases. It means not
glancing from behind onto film productions but being face to face with the
86 A. STOJNIĆ
selected film directors and their work. It is not simply about oppositions, but
about suspicious, implicated, agencies and film instruments.
“Seizure” is also about modes of contemporary artistic production as much

as it is about the connections between specific authors and poetics. It is a
precise theoretical and curatorial analysis made in the moving image medium.
CONCLUSION
In the three decades of artistic production by Gržinić and Šmid it is possible
to notice a certain genealogy of the shifts in relation between image and
text, and consequently the poetics and aesthetics (or ethico-aesthetics in
Deleuzian terms), in their works. The relation between image and text in
their video-films is always conceptual and conditioned by the topic in
question. However, we can notice that with the change of historical periods
a different language is needed. We have traced this from an uncanny poetic
dance video that functions on the pre-verbal level (“Labyrinth”) through a
theoretical discourse exposed in the video essay (“Naked Freedom”) to
classical documentary (“Relations”) and finally dismantling the video
form, re-constructing it and seizing it anew in a format where the language
and the content is delegated to other authors (“Siezure”).
This shift is prompted by the sharp and accurate sense of the contem-
porary context that each of the works is addressing, what I have termed
radical contemporaneity. Always intended towards artistic-political inter-
vention in the specific reality and conditions of life, the work of Gržinić
and Šmid has been and continues to be timely both in terms of its content
as well as its mode of address.
NOTES
1. This selection of works were presented at the exhibition “EUROPE after the
Cold War: Memory, History, Visuality” that I curated as a part of conference
“Image, Racialization, History” at Faculty of Media and Communication in
Belgrade (September 2015).
2. Cathy Caruth, “Recapturing the Past: Introduction” in Cathy Caruth (ed.),
Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1985, 151
3. Ibid.
4. Work description at http://grzinic-smid.si/?p=473
5. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, tr. Daniel
Heller-Roazen, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
6. In his famous essay “Necropolitics,” Mbembe argued that Foucault’s con-
cept of biopolitics is no longer sufficient to explain contemporary relations
of power. Unlike biopolitics that govern from the perspective of the produc-
tion and regulation of life, necropolitics regulate life from the perspective of
a production and regulation of death (in Latin: necro). The notion of
“necropolitics” refers to life reduced to its bare existence, in other words,
to life at the verge of death. This new logic of capital and its processes of
geopolitical demarcation of world zones is based on the mobilization of the
war machine. While Mbembe articulated the concept of necropolitics to
explain a process of total subjection in Africa, Gržinić was the first to use
necropolitics for explaining and understanding processes in Europe.
7. The term turbo-capitalism was elaborated by Marina Gržinić in relation to
“turbo-fascism,” a term coined by the late feminist Žarana Papić in 2000, in
order to explain the violent discriminatory processes of the hegemonic and
separatist nationalism during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, and specifically
the Serbian militaristic reality in the 1990s. “The prefix “turbo” refers to the
specific mixture of cultural and political references [ . . . ] but there is still
fascism in its proper sense” (Gržinić, “The emergence of the political sub-
ject,” 2013 https://emancipationofresistance.wordpress.com/grzinic/).
8. Work description at http://grzinic-smid.si/?p=413
Aneta Stojnić (PhD) is Belgrade-born theoretician, artist, and curator. She

received her PhD in Theory of Arts and Media at the University of Arts in
Belgrade in 2013. Since 2014 she holds the position of assistant professor at the
Faculty of Media and Communications in Belgrade (FMK, Singidunum
University). In 2015 she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Academy of Fine
Arts in Vienna, and in 2013–2014 she was a postdoctoral research fellow at Ghent
University, Research centre S:PAM (Studies in Performing Arts & Media). She was
a visiting scholar at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in the Conceptual Art
study program (2013) and an artist in residence at Tanzquartier Vienna in 2011.
In 2012 she was writer in residence at KulturKontakt Austria. She published two
book: Theory of Performance in Digital Art: Towards a New Political Performance
and Jacques Lacan (Orion Art, Belgrade, 2015) and authored a number of essays
on contemporary art and media, as well as various artistic and curatorial projects.
CHAPTER 7
Affective Constructions: Image—

Racialisation—History
Miško Šuvaković
DIALOGUE: THE DIALECTIC OF A PROFILE

There is no stable territory, time interval, or identity. There are changes of
rhythm. Unexpected turns. Practices speed up, then slow down, then
speed up again. The transparent turns opaque. Times change. It is not
easy to coordinate relations of understanding the meanings and affects of
events.
To speak of someone, a specific person, means to isolate or at least
index, out of permanent change or flux, the manifestations of recognising
resistance to the prescribed, apologetics to the projected, or subversion of
the imposed. Isolating or indexing marks a specific “profile.” A given
profile among other profiles, faces, figures, or familiar people. My discus-
sion here of Marina Gržinić’s work in art and theory and her collaboration
with Aina Šmid is guided by indices and appropriations that are cogniti-
vised, turning a profile qua project into a figure qua phenomenon—that is,
into a rather close or indeterminately remote person. In between a profile
qua project and figure qua phenomenon, I seek to develop a discussion of
her artistic and theoretical work in the midst of a crisis-ridden
contemporaneity.
M. Šuvaković (*)
e-mail: miodrag.suvakovic@fmk.edu.rs

90 M. ŠUVAKOVIĆ
The objects of my exploration are affective constructions that appear in

contemporary art and theory in lieu of artworks, cultural and social posi-
tioning, and theoretical interpretation. By affective constructions I refer to
different media, post-media, behavioural, activist, and theoretical modal-
ities of artists’ actions in the real world, with all the consequences that such
actions bring about, whether expectedly or unexpectedly, directly or
indirectly. Those consequences are aesthetic, epistemological, or political
effects—inscriptions that we recognise as traces of actions that attract,
maintain, and absorb my/our attention. Relations of the aesthetic qua
sensuous and sensitive, the epistemological as that which is oriented
toward understanding, and the political as active social positioning in
relation to a given centre and a given margin make Gržinić’s work recog-
nisable in our time.
Then, I also discuss the cognitivisation of an artistic and theoretical
sample posited as a phenomenon, effect, and, ultimately, an affectively
acting construction in the domain of aesthetic, epistemological, and poli-
tical attraction. In the context of this discussion, affect denotes the inten-
sity1 of the effect of a given construction, while attraction2 denotes the
way of attracting the attention that an affective construction performs on
an individual or a collective “body.”
My case study is the artistic-theoretical-cum-media practice of Marina
Gržinić and her close accomplice Aina Šmid, which changed and acceler-
ated from the early 1980s all the way to our own time, in the midst of a
global economic and racial crisis. It is a heterogeneous assembly of antag-
onistic events, which Marina Gržinić indicated in this statement:
The question today that stays for art and theory, the social and the
political is the question of the social bond and our place inside it. Are
we capable of action, critical analysis, resistance, or better to say insur-
gency? If yes, how?3
EFFECT, INTENSITY, AND RECONSTRUCTION: DIFFERENCES IN

HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY
The question “If yes, how?” forces me to deal with the historical mod-
alities of the pragmatic production and cultural communication, that is,
social intervention accomplished in “affective constructions” in different
historical and geographical contexts of situating society, culture, and art.
AFFECTIVE CONSTRUCTIONS: IMAGE—RACIALISATION—HISTORY 91
In order to offer mutually comparable examples from a multitude of

possible examples, I point to three historical and geographical situations:
• Projective affective constructions performed in French neoclassical

painting on the eve of the 1789 bourgeois revolution
• Introspective affective constructions performed in German New
Objectivist (Neue Sachlichkeit) painting, photography, and film in
the Weimar republic between 1919 and 1933, and
• Critical-reflexive affective constructions performed in Marina Gržinić
and Aina Šmid’s activist, video-, and theory-oriented artistic practice
between 2000 and 2015, that is, at a time of global economic, social,
and racial crisis.
In these examples the question “If yes, how?” relates not only to formal
techniques of academic neoclassical idealistic realist painting, expressionist,
critical para-realism in painting, film, or photography, and referential and
theoretically reflected political post-media activism. It is linked with the
complexity, in Lacanian terms, the indiscernibility of technique and ideol-
ogy4 which means the indiscernibility of means of performing affective
constructions within fields of events that are recognised (viewed, heard,
felt, reflected) as social reality in the instability of shaping life, the aware-
ness of life, and modalities of critiquing a given reality. This concerns three
different realities:
• The reality of constituting a bourgeois sociality through the ideal of

the Republic
• The reality of the crisis of bourgeois capitalism turning into market
capitalism
• The reality of the crisis of global neoliberalism.
These will be rough comparisons around the question “If yes, how?”.
The question “If yes, how?” relates to the pictorial and Platonistically
idealised genre-painting scene in La Mort de Socrate (The Death of
Socrates, 1787); it also relates to a discursive politicisation of dying,
death, and suicide, defined by the ideals and values of an imaginary
Republic. The Republic is ideally constituted on contractual public laws
as the opposite of the feudal state, which rested on non-transparent
expressions of the sovereign’s will. David’s style, based on academic
rational preciseness, rhetorically stresses the classical formal-sensual ideal
92 M. ŠUVAKOVIĆ
of the Greek body politic and the meaning of the enlightened republican
politics of late eighteenth-century France. Academic and classical painting
rhetorically emphasises the intertwining of political discourse, pictorial
figures, and knowledge about the republic—in fact, an affective construc-
tion. Although David’s painting shows a scene from a Plato dialogue it
does not speak of “Greek democracy” but of Socrates as an allegorical
figure, that is, a French citizen in disguise, a republican, who has borrowed
the universal body of the old Athenian. The Socrates in David’s painting is
not the Socrates of Plato’s philosophy, although he does represent
Platonist bourgeois humanist idealism. He, Socrates, is a respected
French citizen and republican who speaks not of Athens and its democracy
but, rather, that he, as a citizen of France, acknowledges the laws of the
Republic as an expression of the will of its citizens and not his own
individual will or that of the sovereign as the essence of the state. The
state is not a feudal order, an expression of the sovereign’s will, but the
public sphere of political life. The classicist procedure of David’s painting
produces an affective construction, that is, an affective identification, bio-
logical, existential, and political, with revolutionary changes, soon to
come, and the genesis of the new political subject of bourgeois capitalist
society.
The question “If yes, how?” also relates to the pictorial disorder of
George Grosz’s Die Stützen der Gesellschaft (The Pillars of Society, 1926).
The question is posed by an intentional distortion of visible reality, search-
ing for the domain of subjectification of alienated capitalist power behind
the visible public sphere of the acting of political agents. It constitutes an
ambiguous linking of the expressive with the caricatural in deconstructing
the profaned political ideal (we might say Platonist bourgeois idealism) of
the modern bourgeois Republic and its ideological and false construction
of public sociality. Grosz’s painterly critique of capitalist power politics
rests on a caricatural-expressive debiologisation, or, to put it more pre-
cisely, a visually deformed biology and existence are represented as an
ideological cultural visual text hiding real bodies in its antagonisms and
conflicts. The idealism of early-bourgeois neoclassical realism (for
instance, David’s) has been replaced with Grosz’s cynicism5 as a visual
subversion of the biopolitical order of the Weimar Republic. References to
modern power politics—a dependent judiciary, public and secret militar-
ism, class hierarchical identities, manipulative control of media, an anti-
revolutionary Stimung, corrupt public sphere—are turned into a
grotesque faux-epic play with rhetorical pictorial figures or “pillars of
society.” Those figures do not mimic reality or, more accurately, do not
offer an ideal of visible reality but instead show the political ontology of
the then bourgeois contemporaneity as a compromised liberal orthodoxy,
which, in order to survive its crisis, must resort to radical means, that is,
embrace the dispositives of Nazism.
The question “If yes, how?” also relates to the diagrammatic, photo-
graphic, and video recording of a cognitivised and politicised logics of the
documentary as the procedural basis for critiquing the post-Cold War
social fiction, which means ideology. This is ideology under media pres-
sure—that is, an intensified ideology or media flux. This is ideology at
work or, to put it even more dramatically, an ideology that penetrates the
skin, modifying biology between bodily and social matter. In their video
works and printed posters, addressing their focus on contemporaneity,
Marina Gržinić and Aina Šmid use montage techniques to present visual-
documentary, visual-symbolic, often self-referential and theoretical-politi-
cal affective constructions with which they show that there is no space or
scene behind the visibility of power. They show (and by showing they
interpret) that contemporary visibility is structured as a field of the antag-
onisms and conflicts of the economic, political, gender, and racial restruc-
turing of subjectivity, that is, self-perception in the unstable complexity of
a global world. Their techniques of answering the question “If yes, how?”
rest on reworking the techniques of the avant-gardes: collage, montage,
relating written or spoken text, and images, a stripped-down linking of
subjectifying and objectifying biology and existence in relation to the
body, etc. The avant-garde techniques are reworked through modalities
of mass media production and its immanent destabilisation—a critical
demonstration of the non-transparent mechanisms of media power as
cognitivised transparent strategies of contemporary art. This is a dialectical
confronting of the individual and the collective with critical questions
concerning the type or quality of the relations of current forms of life
within race, class, nation, generation, production, consumption, oppres-
sion, or desire for liberation and decolonisation. Their realised affective
constructions enable the circulation of affect and, along with it, of pack-
aged meaning relating to the stage of the “human condition” in contem-
poraneity. Also, their realised affective constructions point to the limits to
which one may or can go in terms of the norms, proscriptions, and, to be
sure, horizons of being in “turbo-contemporaneity.” All those terms
prefixed by “turbo”—turbo-neoliberalism, turbo-realism, turbo-fascisms,
etc.—point to the populist character of contemporaneity, which stages
94 M. ŠUVAKOVIĆ
accelerations of reality (turbo-sphere) in such a way as to make it look like

post-reality or depoliticised reality or a domain beyond biopolitical media-
political surveillance, control, and regulation. At the same time the prefix
“turbo” denotes populist accelerations of the everyday, up to the specta-
cularisation of racial, ethnic, sexual, or generational violence.
Comparing David’s Socrates, Grosz’s pillars of society, and Marina
Gržinić and Aina Šmid’s diagrammatic montage models of the turbo-
sphere suggests that the character of “affective constructions” changed
with the transformation of forms of life in the West and then also in the
global structures of contemporaneity.
WHO ARE YOU? WHO AM I?

In their artistic and theoretical-artistic production, Marina Gržinić and
Aina Šmid confront regimes, that is, processings—of individual and col-
lective subjectification, primarily in the public sphere. Subjectification
denotes the practice of constructing a subject—that individual who,
under certain conditions and circumstances of spatiotemporal dialectics,
pronounces and demonstrates the social “I,” “you,” or “we.” She presents
herself to the other, to herself in individual terms, and to herself in
collective terms as a constructed identity that carries the entire weight of
the affective existence (memory, cognition, sensibility, anticipation, com-
munication) of forms of life. The critique of spatiotemporal
affective subjectification is one of the fundamental indicators of their
theoretical and artistic work within turbo-contemporaneity. To expose
the structure—and that means the skeleton of contemporary capitalism
in the West—means to confront, critically and subversively, the limits of
the West’s immanence.
In their works they keep reconstructing traumatic instances of subjecti-
fication, presenting them in the sensory regime as decisive “affective
constructions” of media events, performative acting, and theoretical inter-
pretation. The war in the former Yugoslavia, open and covert violence
against members of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) com-
munities, racial violence and genocidal wars in the Third World, migration
and anti-migration policies, biopolitical usage of the economic crisis, etc.
are the modalities through which they present their affective constructions
(video works, posters) and critique of cognitive models of the illusions of a
post-historical and depoliticised neoliberalism. That is why issues relating
to knowledge, capital, and power are important issues related to all
everyday forms of life—whether Southeast European, African, migrant, or

anywhere and anytime, in the Heart of Europe and on the edges of
geopolitical interest maps.
Their affective constructions, whether in graphics, media, texts, lectures,
or behavioural performances, appear in the real world as realisations of the
mono-polar, bipolar, and in certain cases poly-polar subjectification of a
decolonising individual or community comprised in the individual and
comprising the individual. Even the relations between art and theory,
politics and art, and between the two authors point to the overcoming
of the mono-polar solution to subjectification. For them political bipolar-
ity is the basis of the poly-polar potentiality of understanding social
antagonisms and conflicts.
Mono-polar subjectification is defined by a solid normalised identity
and by embracing identity as an external necessity that generates the
internal reality of a consistent system of power. This is colonisation of
the individual by means of an ostensibly consistent subject. It is ideology
at work, which, qua representation, covers and thereby erases racial,
gender, class, and ethnic differences on behalf of a common denominator
of knowledge in the function of capital and power. Capital and power are
revealed as the ontological foundation of every solid identity as the basis of
the community, in the function of production, exchange, and consump-
tion—that is, belonging, excluding the other, and accepting the inevit-
ability of “one” as opposed to the multitude.
Bipolar subjectification is an expression of crises of subjectification
losing its solid foothold in the micro- and macro-world of the synthesis
of capital and power. Difference, basic difference, appears as the opacity of
the self-reflection of the whole in already installed mirrors of social power
consensuses and their corresponding identities. These are cracks and
inconsistencies in the practice of colonising the individual becoming a
subject. Therefore, violence against the other in ethnic, racial, or gender
terms becomes a mechanism of maintaining the colonial order, whether in
ethno-religious warfare, violence against the LGBT community, or rejec-
tion of Third World asylum-seekers. Colonisation transpires not in some
far-off locale but right at the centre of the West’s everyday way of life. This
is the place that Gržinić and Šmid subject to criticism and self-criticism,
through the undefined difference between artistic and theoretical practice.
In the context of Gržinić’s work in theory, poly-polar subjectification or
the decolonisation of the colonised individual or community is the prac-
tice of queer politicisation, a critical estrangement of mono- and bipolarity
96 M. ŠUVAKOVIĆ
in their normative or traumatic quality. It is the decolonisation of the

consistent, stabilised subject. By estranging it one encounters the potenti-
alities of subjectification that subvert the norm, canon, or organised
micro- or macro-doxa (the family, narrow or wider social community).
Gržinić and Šmid show that colonisation is both an external and internal
part of the ordering of forms of life in the everyday context of the Western
world, including feelings, actions, understanding, memory, and anticipa-
tion. Decolonisation, then, is the practice of critically confronting one’s
own individual and collectivised bodies in an effort to free subjectification
from the trap of collectivisation—that is, to multiply the poly-polar subject
and render it irreducible to the subjected one in the scheme of colonial
and anti-colonial politics.
Their affective constructions are realised media or performer case-indi-
viduals or case-communities that are posited against the ethnic, gender,
racial, and legal homogeneous order demanded by the bureaucratic prag-
matics of contemporary capitalist states and their representatives in educa-
tion agencies, the organisation of everyday life, expression of creativity,
official conduct, and administrative indexing in the registers of bourgeois
identities. As an artistically and theoretically generated affective construc-
tion, an individual or a community causes a disturbance in the illusory
consensus at the foundations of the hierarchical, and that means dominat-
ing control and regulation of contemporary forms of life. Moreover, an
affective construction is not only the level of a verbally, visually or graphi-
cally, visually or documentarily, or behaviourally expressed political or
ethical position but also above all the effect of a certain intensity of social,
psychical, biological, and existential forces whereby bodies in a community
come together or apart, that is, whereby the individual confronts her own
difference from the community and from her own racial, gender, or class
body. This is where the horror of human existence appears—that my brain
is not my thought/feeling, that there is a difference that is subject to the
external antagonisms and conflicts of the struggle for survival, for dom-
ination, or the decolonisation of the body and its subjectifications.
What matters in terms of the phrase-question “If yes, how?” is that
Gržinić and Šmid conceptually design and redesign modalities of the
aesthetic effects (the sensuous, sensible beautiful, ugly, sublime) of an
affective construction. In specific unpredictable contexts of geopolitical
and geo-cultural capitalism, realised affective constructions acquire the
functions of (a) the subversive collapsing of existing constellations of
everyday life in real socialism, transition socialism, or global capitalism,
(b) a critical interpretation of the state of affairs in a cross-section of

historical and geographical dispositives, and (c) the production of alter-
native models that can hardly be absorbed by the dominant culture and its
mechanisms of controlling the everyday in contemporaneity.
Gržinić and Šmid have acted in three different political systems. First, they
acted in real or self-management socialism, referencing tactics between the
Slovenian retro-avant-garde,6 Neue slowenische Kunst,7 and alternative post-
punk counterculture.8 Retro-avant-garde is a postmodernist critically or
cynically motivated—concept of artistic acting, grounded in late socialism.
It was predicated on a simulation and eclectic presentation of politically
anachronistic and totalitarian models of expression, characteristic of the
anti-modernism of fascist and anti-utopianism of national-socialist art and
the art of projective and didactic socialist realism. The retro-avant-garde at
that time quoted and pointed to avant-garde utopian iconographies and
their establishment and depletion in 1980s society. The basic position of
retro-avant-garde poetics and ideology was that any art was subject to
political manipulation—except art using the language of that same manip-
ulation.9 Retro-avant-garde art generates cathartic situations by presenting
and simulating the depoliticised traumatic, censored, and forbidden places of
modernist culture, that is, cultures that suppressed and dissimulated their
own historical traumas. Unlike NSK, Gržinić and Šmid did not hark back to
the history of avant-gardes; rather, they avant-gardised, which means pro-
voked and critically presented and subverted the present: late socialism and
events surrounding the collapse of the second Yugoslavia. They realised their
affective constructions by positioning themselves against the bureaucratic
depolitication in late socialism, understood as pro-Western postmodernism.
They revealed the non-political domains of sexuality, popular culture, public
opinion, cultural myths, and identification schemes as the antagonistic field
of real politics, mediated through art with hints of an alternative activism.
Second, Gržinić and Šmid acted in transitional post-socialism, referen-
cing the tactics of post-media activism whereby the social void of the
former Eastern Europe was confronted with post-political conflict vio-
lence, the conflict of still living traces of bureaucratic socialism, an emer-
ging affective construction of neoliberal capitalism, and a brutal and crude
reconstruction of the fatal affectivity of national states. As a critical testi-
mony their work primarily refers to the collapse of Socialist Yugoslavia in
the late 1980s and 1990s. Turbo-fascism and Turbo-realism refer to the
brutality of the Yugoslav wars and the collapse of self-managing socialism
in nationalist wars and hidden simulations of the primitive accumulation of
98 M. ŠUVAKOVIĆ
capital. While most theorists of post-modernity have perceived the “post-

political” in Lyotardian terms, as overcoming the rigidity of every politics,
Gržinić theoretically interpreted the “post-political” as an ideological and
manipulative hiding of real politics in the time and space of transitional
Eastern Europe. The essence of capitalism includes dissimulating ideolo-
gical representations and presenting ideology as the reality. Her obsessive
commitment to the politicisation of the “non-/post-political” looked like
a sort of “anti- postmodernist terrorism.” It led toward identifying the
politics of the moment when one system was replaced by antagonisms and
a condition of conflict for which theory at the time had yet to come up
with a name. In Gržinić and Šmid’s video works a special function was
performed by the transformation of the socialist body into a body pertain-
ing to the transition, with all the market sexualisations and existential
erasure of gender identity as a political identity. The market economy
replaced the politics of gender. Precisely in that context Gržinić intro-
duced, in theory and practice, the problematic of queer politics. They
devised a politics of estranging the normatively neutralised physiological
by pointing out that gender is a place of political struggle just like any
other practice of subjectification. Furthermore, the verbal-theoretical or
visual-media discourse of their works about conflicts and antagonisms was
a projection of the contours of affective constructions of the “former West.”
Just as Europe’s East went into the transition with a hasty carelessness that
resulted in a criminalised privatisation, Europe’s West failed to recognise that
the changes in the East were essentially—and that means ontologically—
changing the WEST itself as the centre of hegemonic power and politico-
economic domination, which in metaphysical terms means the truth.
Third, Gržinić and Šmid have acted at the when and where of global
capitalism’s progress from its imperial expansion stage into that of perma-
nent biopolitical crisis and global technological disciplining of humankind.
This turn in their theory and art was influenced by decolonial critical
discourse, for instance that of African thinker Achille Mbembe. If biopolitics
is the politics of controlling and shaping life then necropolitics is the politics
of controlling and shaping death in colonial and neocolonial systems:
Late-modern colonial occupation differs in many ways from early-modern

occupation, particularly in its combining of the disciplinary, the biopolitical,
and the necropolitical
In this essay I have argued that contemporary forms of subjugation of life
to the power of death (necropolitics) profoundly reconfigure the relations
among resistance, sacrifice, and terror. I have demonstrated that the notion
of biopower is insufficient to account for contemporary forms of subjuga-
tion of life to the power of death.10
Juxtaposing the politics of life and the politics of death enabled Gržinić and
Šmid to switch from the geopolitical locality of Eastern Europe and the
former Yugoslavia to the global non-territory of the flexible and accelerated
movement of affective constructions that cannot be located around a single
ethnic group or mixture of similar groups, but around the global issue of race
as that of a renewed research and provoking of the complexity of identity
within and via humankind. The issue of race today is not an issue of us who
are here and them who are out there, but precisely the issue of the presence
of the racial, racist, and antiracist in the everyday of every society inside global
networks, territories, and cancelled spaces. It concerns the transnational
networking of capital, global migrations driven not only by economic factors
but also the struggle to survive on the part of individuals and micro-/macro-
communities. The identity of asylum-seekers had to be re-examined and
brought to a functional phenomenality analogous to gender, class, racial,
generational, and professional identity. Issues of colonisation, the postcolo-
nial, and the decolonial are posited by affective constructions of subjectifica-
tion of individuals as well as micro-communities and the latter’s networked
position in the global/initiated order of the contemporary world. Issues
pertaining to individuals are posited as those of humankind and vice versa.
This is a multi-polar dialectics—different from Hegel’s “plus” and “minus,”
since it involves multiplying the pluses and minuses with all the modifications
of form that cannot be reduced to the transformation of a thesis and antith-
esis into a new quality but a hybrid scattering of qualities, whose phenom-
enality leaves the safe zones of culture and enter the social spaces of the
struggle of the multitude of the potentialities of life and death. Juxtaposing
theorisations of the politics of life and the politics of death leads toward
understanding the fundamental consequences of the neoliberal global trans-
formation of material into immaterial work, and thereby subjection of the
actuality and potentiality of the global population. One should note this
distinction between humankind and population.
In terms of theory, for Gržinić this meant a critical moving stimulated
by the dialectic of bio- and necro-politics from the “politics of difference”
(gender emancipating politics linked with liberal societies) toward recon-
structing a universal politics, that is, meta-politics that will enable a queer
subversion of ostensibly universal dispositives at the foundations of the
100 M. ŠUVAKOVIĆ
modes of governing contemporary human life. Her seeming desexualisa-

tion of queer does not mean that she abandoned the issue of gender but
that she marked the exploration of conditions and circumstances that are
more general than gender and that determine gender in relation to politics
of death and politics of life. Therefore, her artistic-theoretical affective
constructions acquire the character of an expansive multiplication of cases-
triggers and thereby sensory-conceptual breakthroughs of our expecta-
tions of art as an autonomous cultural practice. Gržinić’s and Šmid’s work
marked an important transition from the cultural to the social.
A CONCLUSION ABOUT THE LOGISTICS OF MOVING

Where we must pause is the positing of models that take over the actualising
potential of critical action on the very order of belief—or, to use a rhetori-
cally stronger term, faith (Table 7.1). One must attack—and that is precisely
the core of the intense activity of Gržinić’s and Šmid’s affective practices—
the very order of the appropriation of alternative practices and their removal
from the dialectic tension of biopolitics and necropolitics into the domain of
the cultural production, exchange, and consumption of “normative” life.
How to arrive at a strategy and tactics for attacking the appropriation
mechanisms of contemporary global capitalism? By renouncing the politics
of remembrance, which must be reconstructed as a political history; also by
subverting faith: the theology of the teleological planning of performing
dominance over politics of life and death. That is why the diagram above
must have an additional aspect: a vector of moving. No cell in the diagram
may remain stationary for long or perform the same function. Vectorising its
place and moment in relation to function turns an “affective construction”
into a sort of immaterial blow. But before any serious approach to imma-
terial blows there arises the question whether the spectres and scourges are
material or immaterial, whether they are biopolitical or necropolitical.
Table 7.1 “Affective construction” created by Miško Šuvaković

Affective construction
Theoretical practices Practical theories
Biopolitics Necropolitics
Forms of life Politics of death
Mono-polar Bipolar Poly-polar
Critical potential of individual and collective subjectification
NOTES
1. Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” in Parables for the Virtual—
Movement, Affect, Sensation, Durham: Duke University Press, 2002, 27.
2. Sergei Eisenstein, “Montage of Attractions, An Essay,” in The Film Sense,
San Diego: Harvest Book, 1975, 230.
3. Marina Gržinić, “Biopolitics and Necropolitics in Relation to the Lacanian
Four Discourses,” conference presentation, Simposium Art and Research:
Shared Methodologies. Politics and Translation, Barcelona, 6–7 September
2012. http://www.ub.edu/doctorat_eapa/wp-content/uploads/2012/
09/Marina.Grzinic_Biopolitics-Necropolitics_Simposio_2012.pdf.
4. Jacques Lacan: “As far as I am concerned, I would assert that the technique
cannot be understood, nor therefore correctly applied, if the concepts on
which it is based are ignored. It is our task to demonstrate that these
concepts take on their full meaning only when orientated in a field of
language, only when ordered in relation to the function of speech,” in
“The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” in
Écrits. A Selection, London: Routledge, 2001, 29.
5. Peter Sloterdijk, “The Weimar Symptom: Models of Consciousness in
German Modernity,” in Critique of Cynical Reason, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987, 384–386.
6. Marina Gržinić, Fiction Reconstructed. Eastern Europe, Post-Socialism & The
Retro-Avant-Garde, Vienna: Springerin, 2000.
7. Neue Slowenische Kunst, Zagreb: GZ Hrvatske, 1991.
8. Aleš Erjavec and Marina Gržinić, Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Ljubljana:
Mladinska knjiga, 1991.
9. Mladen Stilinović, “Footwriting,” in Dora Hegyi, Zsuzsa Laszlo, Emese
Suvecz, and Agnes Szanyl (eds.), Art Always Has Its Consequences: Artists’
Texts from Croatia, Hungary, Poland, Serbia, 1947–2009, Budapest: tranzit.
hu and Berlin: Stenberg Press, 2011, 91.
10. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” https://www.dartmouth.edu/~lhc/
docs/achillembembe.pdf, 27, 39–40.
Miško Šuvaković (PhD) is Dean of Faculty of Media and Communications,

Singidunum University, Belgrade, and professor of theory of art and media in
the PhD program of trans-disciplinary humanities and theory of art. He works on
theories of avant-gardes, neo-avant-gardes, and contemporary art. He has pub-
lished around fifty books in the Serbian, Slovenian, and English languages.
CHAPTER 8
Spiritual Revolutions: Afropean Body

Politics and the “Secularity” of the Arts
Alanna Lockward
“By creating a society in which all people, of all colours, were granted
freedom and citizenship, the Haitian Revolution transformed the world.
It was a central part of the destruction of slavery in the Americas and
therefore a crucial moment in the history of democracy, one that laid the
foundation for the continuing struggles for human rights everywhere.”
—Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: A History of the
Haitian Revolution, Boston: Belknap Press, 2005, 6–7.
“In my language, the tz’utujil, a visual artist, a medical doctor, a
musician and a spiritual guide are all called q’manel.”
—Benvenuto Chavajay, interview by Salazar Ochoa, “Identidad,
descolonialidad y resistencia, un acercamiento al pensamiento de
Benvenuto Chavajay,” in La Hora, 30.01.2015. Free translation
by the Author.
Marronage, the lifestyle, ethics and socio-political organization of run-

away communities outside the plantation, has been an intrinsic compo-
nent of the radical imagination of countless liberation struggles in the
Americas. The interest in these transcendental yet hidden narratives is
consistently gaining attention in the humanities. Its legacies and current
A. Lockward (*)
Alanna Lockward, Founding Director of Art Labour Archives, Berlin, Germany
e-mail: artlabour@yahoo.com

104 A. LOCKWARD
entanglements in Afro-Equadorian communities confirm that ethno-

education and marronage are inseparable. Teachings of the ancestors
that have been labelled as “primitive” and even “diabolical” by state
and private educational systems are now part of a decolonized curriculum
entirely conceived and implemented by maroon descendants.
There are distinct analytical and ethical implications embedded in the
problematization of enslavement, the Triangular Trade and the plantation
system when their factual co-existence with marronage is silenced. Oral
archives are instrumental in this regard and performance art and the
moving image are invaluable in challenging this erasure. Analysing the
problem of freedom under subjugation has proven to be a theoretical
conundrum, hence the lack of self-awareness on this issue in canonical
and even liberation philosophies. The same applies to the arts. Such a
downfall is brilliantly exposed by Carol Boyce Davis in a film review with a
lapidary title: “12 Years a Slave Fails to Represent Black Resistance to
Enslavement.” To substantiate her analysis she writes:
Northup indicates that not a day passed without him contemplating escape.
References to the Great Pine woods are a constant symbolic evocation of the
possibilities for living elsewhere than on the plantation. The journey between
that “free” space and the plantation marks the boundaries between being free
and being enslaved. Northup chooses the plantation, and in the end attempts to
secure his freedom the “legal” way in a context where the illegality of slavery
itself was in question. But in focusing so much on the plantation, the film misses
the Great Pine woods, as a free space symbolically and literally. Thus in the end
we see Northup getting his freedom ostensibly through the beneficence of a few
white people who supported him, and then actually attempting to go through
the courts when black people still were not able to testify against whites.
In an often quoted statement Édouard Glissant affirms that,
[t]he fact remains, and we can never emphasize it enough, that the maroon
is the only true popular hero of the Caribbean . . . an indisputable example of
systematic opposition, of total refusal.1
However, some of his critics argue that in his writings maroons are
limited to “fragmentary and opaque utterances,”2 and I add that mar-
oon women are symptomatically invisible. Fortunately, the celebrated
photographic series by Renée Cox honouring the legacy of Queen
Nanny of the Maroons contributes to expand the imprint of women
narratives in this scenario. This Jamaican national heroine who lived in
the first half of the eighteenth century was abducted from Ghana
SPIRITUAL REVOLUTIONS: AFROPEAN BODY POLITICS AND THE . . . 105
and became an expert in guerrilla tactics. She has been considered the
most relevant cultural and spiritual leader of the maroons, liberating
more than eight hundred abducted Africans in a span of thirty years.
Another female maroon figure discussed further on is the character
Yambaó in the film by the same name (1957), analysed by Teresa
María Díaz Nerio in her lecture-performance “Ni ‘mamita’ Ni ‘mula-
tita’” (2013).
In Sergio Giral’s Maluala (1979) the portrayal of maroon resistance is
accomplished majestically. Although verbal, mental, and physical abuse
intertwine in a symphony of cruelty, Giral’s faithful accounts show how
resistance counteracts the barbarism of the European “civilizing” mission
with courage and blood, supported by prayers of Islam, Yoruba, Congo,
and Christian traditions. Quilombo, Palenque, Maniel, and Manigua are
some of the many names of those physical and spiritual safe spaces where
maroons reinvented themselves as inhabitants of a free world, creating
their own rituals in conversation with their surroundings. The following
ideas discuss the relationship between body politics and the liberation Pan-
Africanist legacies of the maroon leaders that created the first Black
Republic and some Afropean Decolonial Aesthetics/Aesthesis practi-
tioners working basically with performance and moving image. In the
embodied and screened narratives of Caribbean Diaspora artists, including
Teresa María Díaz Nerio, Jeannette Ehlers, Quinsy Gario, and Patricia
Kaersenhout—members of what has become the working group BE.BOP.
BLACK EUROPE BODY POLITICS – as well as in others residing in the
USA or the Antilles, such as Adler Guerrier, Nicolás Dumit Estévez,
Barbara Prézeau-Stephenson, and Charo Oquet, the three axis of maroon
legacies, namely the constitution of a safe space, the development of
experimental spiritualities and the strategies of armed struggle are arrest-
ingly eloquent.
BE.BOP. BLACK EUROPE BODY POLITICS has been my con-
tribution as a curator to the further expansion of these Caribbean
radical endowments by means of introducing the modernity/colonial-
ity/decoloniality options of de-linking from the colonial matrix of
power to the discussion of Black and African Diasporas artistic practices
in Europe and beyond. BE.BOP operates as a safe space, a quintessen-
tial maroon category, and as such has become an utterly rewarding
collective experience. Rolando Vázquez, an active member of the
group and co-founder with Walter Mignolo and myself of the
Transnational Decolonial Institute, explains how the collective concep-
tualization of Decolonial Aesthetics/Aesthesis3 is particularly relevant
in the issues at stake:
106 A. LOCKWARD
Unlike contemporary art that is ensnared in the search for the newest
abstraction, Decolonial Aesthetics/Aesthesis seeks to bring to the fore
those other forms of sensing and inhabiting the world that have been
subsumed under the long history of this western-centered world, of the
modern/colonial order. In my view, decolonial artists are not seeking
innovation and abstraction for the sake of it, they are not seeking the
recognition of the contemporary art world; rather, they are bringing to
light through their practices, through their bodies and communities the
histories that have been denied, the forms of sensing and inhabiting the
world that have been disdained or erased.4
Body and landscape, the mediated experience of our surroundings, are

quintessential elements of what the Situationists articulated as psycho-
geography, considering it “the study of the precise laws and specific effects
of the geographical environment, whether consciously organised or not,
on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.”5
A maroon reading of this useful concept involves the necessary unrig-
ging of the masquerade known as modernity and its inseparable shadow,
coloniality.6 Given that European modernity has been prolific in the
politics of confusion—namely the interchangeable usage of terms such as
modernism, modernization, and modernity to designate similar but dif-
ferent phenomena—I start by clarifying how decoloniality sees the rela-
tionship between body and landscape within the colonial matrix of power.
Colonial matrix of power is a term coined by Aníbal Quijano in the early
1990’s. Later, Walter Mignolo and Madina Tlostanova (2009) analysed
how it has operated since the sixteenth century within its four intercon-
nected spheres. In all of these spheres the notion of the individual
illustrates the first disambiguation from the Situationists’ symptomatic
reproduction of a so-called universal human condition, so treasured by
the rhetoric of modernity. According to this narrative the category
“human” is self-explanatorily white, patriarchal, hetero-normative,
Christian, and European. It is in the struggle to dominate entire popula-
tions outside of this notion of an “authentic” human that the economic
enterprise known as European colonialism came into being with brutal
and continuous consequences. One of the four spheres of this modus
operandi of coloniality is related to the control of knowledge and sub-
jectivity. For the purpose of substantiating my arguments, this is where the
focus is set.
Before further elaborating my arguments I briefly name the other three

spheres which offer an equally transcendental understanding of how an
entire system known as modernity/coloniality has until today ruled
human relations within the context of the nation-state. The first is the
violent appropriation of land and its resources, which ensured that control
of the economy rested in the hands of a few. The second sphere is the
control of political, financial, military, and governmental organizations
which give authority to either the same few or others associated with
them. Third, we find the control of the public sphere organized around
the inevitability of the nuclear family and its hetero-patriarchal capitalist
gender relations. This set of spheres has mutated in different periods and
moments, changing its rhetoric “according to the needs and the leading
forces shaping them” as Mignolo and Tlostanova observe:
In the period from 1970 to 2000 neo-liberalism was consolidated in the

wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The neo-liberal agenda translated
the previous mission of development and modernisation, into the
Washington Consensus of granting the market economy priority over social
regulation.7
If we listen to the lyrics of Aboriginal Australians we experience how

these four spheres are articulated dramatically in the relationship
between landscape and body. In these spiritual landscapes, coloniality
—which is the preservation of the modus operandi of colonialism after
formal decolonization—challenges the so-called crisis of testimony
inherent to modernity/coloniality. Australian Aboriginals experience a
reality inseparable from their spiritual world, which they call
“Dreaming,” in the same way than Dominican and Haitian Vodoun
practitioners understand the human condition as being one with the
ancestors. Those cosmological landmarks that have been considered
unworthy of being legitimized by canonical historiography in the name
of the so-called secular imperative of modernity have been carefully
preserved orally; their physical locations and psycho-geographies are
poetically embedded to those accounts. There is freedom of movement
among these narratives, one which is completely lacking in Ferguson,
Melilla, Gaza, the Mexican-US border, Guantánamo—the “highlights”
of coloniality today. In other words, in all those places the romantic
endeavours of the Situationist’s flâneur8 or flâneuse become irrelevant
and even aggravating when mirrored with the criminalization of
108 A. LOCKWARD
movement institutionalized in Europe by Frontex9 as well as the anti-

Black racial profiling on the rise both in England as well as on the
continent.
Legendary decolonial flâneuses such as Maya Deren and Ana Mendieta
have imprinted their own bodies in both natural and urban landscapes,
challenging coloniality and becoming obligatory references on the subject.
In “At Land” (1944) Maya Deren immerses herself in a time-space capsule
using her own body as the leitmotiv that links dreamlike scenes taking
place in different contexts. This notion of inseparability between the
visible and the invisible is a direct output of her scholarly and personal
involvement with Haitian Vodoun cosmologies. As the mother of (North)
American experimental cinema Deren was also a film theorist, like Jean-
Luc Godard and Sergei Eisenstein, but unlike them her writings and films
are almost exclusively discussed in feminist courses. In her outcast status
we can clearly trace the so-called secularity of the arts in action. Haitian
Vodoun as a philosophical point of departure is, according to this Western
notion, simply unthinkable. As Shelley Rice explains:
[Maya Deren’s] years in Haiti and her intense involvement with [Vodoun]
can be seen as her quest to experience a living culture that gave “credibility
to the unreal,” and thereby embody the vision she sought in her experi-
mental films. Maya Deren’s most significant contribution to postmodern
discourse might be her profound understanding of the ties that link the
avant-garde and the “primitive” [sic], the Western and the Other.10
In the forest of Bois Caiman, a Vodoun ceremony heralded the begin-

ning of the end of Europe’s savage capitalist enterprize in the Caribbean
and elsewhere. According to the opening quote by Laurent Dubois we
are all descendants of the Haitian Revolution, and therefore accountable
to its ancestry. Jeannette Ehlers is a Caribbean diaspora artist born and
based in Denmark who has consistently followed this predicament in her
digital video art, photography, and performances. In Black Magic at the
White House (2009) she performs a Vodoun dance reminiscent of the
foundational narrative of the Haitian Revolution. The video is staged in a
landmark house of Copenhagen built, as countless similar continental
architectural highlights, with profits from the transatlantic slave trade.
The silencing of Danish brutal and corrupt history is defiantly challenged
by the ubiquitous and phantasmagorical appearance of the artist whose
presence is alternatively erased and exaggerated. Today this building,
Marienborg, is the official Summer residency of the Danish Prime

Minister. This notion of inseparability between the visible and the invi-
sible on the spiritual and material realms is masterfully articulated by
Michel Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of
History (1995). In other words, the Haitian’ Revolution’s canonical
erasure is inseparable from the counter-narrative of Vodoun’s oral his-
tory and its systematic demonization by the West. As explained earlier,
legendary avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren is a case in point.
Sound is as crucial in Black Magic at the White House as in the rest
of Ehler’s video art. The drumming in crescendo is a powerful remin-
der of the vibrations that brought together the maroon leaders who
summit in Bwa Kayiman with white freemasons, dissidents from the
plantation system, and heralded the biggest blow ever received by
modernity/coloniality until today. Black Bullets (2012) was shot in
black and white (b/w) at Henri Christophe’s phenomenal Citadalle
Laferrière—the biggest fortress in the Americas, and in the context of
these ideas the biggest monument to marronage, since it was built by a
maroon leader following the notion of a safe space, as mentioned
before one of the basic premises of this radical lifestyle. The fact that
in Black Bullets the monument itself is rendered invisible speaks
volumes about Ehler’s phenomenal skills as a storyteller. We see a
line of school students slowly marching along the horizon suspended
in a sea of ever connected clouds. They drown at the end of the
horizon and reappear again at the left edge of the screen.
Accompanied by a discretely hypnotic soundtrack, this interpretation
of the continuities of resistance is poetically embedded to what Erna
Brodber has described as the Continent of Black Consciousness11:
That so many persons at so many different times and in so many different

areas felt spontaneously moved towards this behaviour is what gives Pan-
Africanism its essence. This feeling, common to so many, described a
Continent of Black Consciousness which included Africa and the geogra-
phical areas to which Africans were dispersed from the early days of New
World’s slavery to Garvey’s time.
The second component of this video triptych, Off the Pig, reproduces
the voice of Angela Davis describing how resistance to enslavement has
been an intrinsic part of its history from day one. The hymn of the
Black Panther Party is chanted while images of one of Port-au-Prince’s
110 A. LOCKWARD
best-known neighbourhoods, Cité Soleil, are projected. The third ele-

ment, The March, is positioned in the middle of the installation and
resembles a rhizome but in fact is a neurone permanently growing in
all directions. The following quote by freedom fighter Malcolm X is
vigorously conclusive on how these continuities of marronage are
clearly detectable beyond the Caribbean in the African continent itself.
Asked about the influence of the descendant of Jamaican maroons, the
legendary Marcus Garvey, in his own mental and spiritual liberation,
Malcolm X responded:
[M]ost people in the Caribbean area are still proud that they are Black,
proud of the African blood and their heritage, and I think this type of pride
was instilled in my mother, and she instilled it in us too, to the degree that
she could. [ . . . ] In fact she was an active member of the Marcus Garvey
movement. [ . . . ] It was Marcus Garvey’s philosophy of Pan-Africanism that
initiated the entire freedom movement, which brought about the indepen-
dence of African nations and had it not been for Marcus Garvey and the
foundation laid by him, you would find no independent nations in the
Caribbean today. [ . . . ] All the freedom movements that are taking place
in America were initiated by the work and teachings of Marcus Garvey.12
In her latest piece, in front of an audience, Ehlers finally performed what

she had done previously in works such as Black Magic in the White House,
as well as in Three Steps of Story (2009). However, instead of dancing, in
this her first live performance, Whip it Good! (2013), she challenged the
audience with a deceivingly simple action: whipping. A human-size white
canvas hung from the ceiling of Ballhaus Naunynstrasse, a post-migrant
theatre space in Berlin, and she flogged it with in-crescendo intensity for
fifteen minutes. She then stopped and invited the audience to repeat the
action. One by one, people stood up to follow her appeal. The white
canvas was by then tainted with charcoal which the artist rubbed on the
lash each time. During the discussion session that followed some painful
and puzzling issues arose: Why do we as Black people feel so uncomfor-
table when a white man or woman is holding the whip? Why do we as
Black oppressed people feel so guilty about showing our anger in public?
How long should we keep talking about the aftermath of African ensla-
vement? Who can claim the legitimacy of holding the whip? Who is the
“authentic” Black and African Diasporic subject? Many of these ques-
tions might remain open, as they have been for as long as we have been
defying the silencing of the colonial matrix of power on the Black

experience. Before continuing the discussion on these ideas on marro-
nage as a psycho-geography of resistance I would like to quote a defini-
tion by Agustín Lao Montes, an Afro-Colombian decolonial thinker,
since it feels closer to my own experience as a member of the
Caribbean Diaspora:
If the world-historical field that we now call the African diaspora, as a

condition of dispersal and as a process of displacement is founded on
forms of violence and terror that are central to modernity, it also signifies
a cosmopolitan project of articulating the diverse histories of African peoples
while creating translocal intellectual/cultural currents and political
movements.13
In her combined attention to both African and Caribbean historical

narratives Amsterdam-based Dominican artist Teresa María Díaz Nerio
has consistently polarized gendered dramatizations at both ends of the
spectrum, on the one hand the despotic hyper-virility of a dictatorial
persona and on the other the tragically exploited nudity of Sara
Bartman, objectified to the point of absurdity. Frozen in a landscape of
epic dimensions, these historical reverberations are also accompanied by a
meticulous manual work.
Throne of Gold and Trujillo’s Island (2007) illustrate the narratives that
she has mainly heard from historical and familiar accounts and later on
invested considerable time in researching. In these two performances Díaz
Nerio comments on the hyper-masculinity embedded in an autocratic
persona. Avoiding over-simplifications by mimicry or caricaturization,
these portrayals rely on a hieratic mode.
In a radically new direction the staged paralysis of these performances is
transformed into dance and spoken word in the lecture-performance Ni
“mamita” Ni “mulatita” (2013). In her analysis of the hyper-sexualized
“mulata” and the “faithful servant” or “mamita” in the Cuban film Yambaó
(1957), Díaz Nerio describes how these figures emerged in Cuba during
colonialism, often becoming symbols of nationalist renderings after inde-
pendence. Alternatively dancing a rumba, screening sequences of the film
and reading her analysis, Díaz Nerio departs from the hypothesis that:
These roles are so ingrained in Caribbean women’s view of themselves that it

greatly affects their choice of social performance. In turn, these stereotypes
112 A. LOCKWARD
are being taken for granted by white Europeans, which in the long run
contributes to perpetuate the misrepresentation of Caribbean women and
in this regard prevents their accessibility to other spheres of life in the
West.14
The film features rumbera Ninón Sevilla and is set on a plantation in 1850s
Cuba. Sevilla plays the role of a “mulata” called Yambaó, personifying
Ochún the goddess of love in Cuban Yoruba religion; also Caridad, a
maroon heroine nurtured and trained by her grandmother in the safe
space of a hidden cave. Her character is brownfaced, a common practice
of this popular genre of Mexican films of the 1940s and 1950s known as
“Rumbera Cinema,” embodying a category that Díaz Nerio has named
“Light Skin Blackmestizas.” The stereotypes of the domesticated enslaved
“mamita” or hyper-sexualized seductress “mulatita” played by these
actresses are pervasive even today—the hypermediated persona of
Jennifer López as a “hot Latina” is a case in point. As Kamala
Kempadoo points out:
[These] two main stereotypes of Black femininity have been identified as

specific to the [Caribbean] region during [enslavement]. The first drew
from general perceptions of Africans by Europeans as “slaves by nature”
and defined slave women as passive, downtrodden, subservient, resigned
workers and the second centred on Black female sexuality and sexual func-
tions whereby notions of slave women as sexually promiscuous “cruel and
negligent as mother, fickle as a wife,” and immoral, became widespread.15
By challenging these heteronormative parameters Díaz Nerio provides a much

needed space for knowledge creation from a Black woman’s perspective,
simultaneously honouring African ancestral devotions. In her performance
at Nikolaj Kunsthal (Copenhagen) as part of BE.BOP 2014. SPIRITUAL
REVOLUTIONS AND THE “SCRAMBLE” FOR AFRICA she was playing
the clapsticks, an instrument of Cuban Rumba that marks the rhythm, while
the audience took their seats. Dressed in yellow—the colour that identifies
Ochún as the goddess of rivers and love—she rang bells at different moments
to invoke the loas. Towards the end, as a final decolonizing gesture, Díaz
Nerio removed from her neck an iruke, a consecrated horse tail amulet
used in Cuban Yoruba religion, in this case made from her own hair
sprinkled with gold leaves and a nazar boncuğu, a Turkish evil eye
pendant. By swinging this intercultural amulet above the heads of the
audience and whispering a protection blessing, she creates a moment of

intimate communion materialized in the name of some of the spirituali-
ties that inform her daily life in Amsterdam.
The Haitian Vodoun equivalent of Ochún is Erzulie Fréda. In Barbara
Prézeau-Stephenson’s The Fréda Circle (2013) the myth of the seductive
Erzulie Fréda is invoked by the Vodoun chanting of seven women while
they embroider petals of artificial flowers on a transparent veil circle
measuring five meters in diameter. Originally conceived as spiritual and
emotional support for women who lost their partners during the earth-
quake, the essential components of this piece celebrating womanhood and
solidarity, spoken word and embroidery, are also exposed in The
Fabrication of the Creole Woman (2014), presented at Yale University.
Six women (including Prézeau-Stephenson) prepared blog posts about the
role of sewing in their families. After contemplating and sharing these
stories they came together, bringing assorted scraps of fabric brought from
home. This work dedicated to Audre Lorde was a multi-media perfor-
mance experience documented through pictures and texts that spoke
volumes about the reinterpretation of socio-political misconceptions
across racialized class boundaries, facilitating much needed curative spaces
in the island and beyond.
The social mosaic of religious beliefs, rituals, and healing has been an
integral part of Bronx-based, Dominican artist Nicolás Dumit Estévez’s
praxis since 2001, specifically with his iconic piece La Papa Móvil, pre-
sented during the III International Theatre Festival in Santo Domingo.16
This was his first local appearance after relocating to the traditional dia-
spora landmark of many Dominicans: New York City. Twelve years later
his characteristic interactive approach to what is known as performance art
has crystallized in C Room, the third work presented on the island after his
departure. As a collective re-enactment in the context of carnival, C Room
could be understood both as a return as well as an epistemic turn in the
artist’s long-term engagement with public space. For example, La Papa
Móvil queered practices of Catholicism, the official religion of the
Dominican Republic; C Room found inspiration in what is known as
Popular Religiosity or Dominican Vodoun, legally proscribed even today
as “an outrage to public decency” and therefore considered as a punish-
able criminal activity.17
Haitian and Dominican Vodoun became powerful religions in zones of
liberation, where newcomers from the African continent learned by trial
and error how to communicate with the citizens of the forest, the rain, the
114 A. LOCKWARD
rivers, and stones, assisted by their native African spirits and camouflaged
under the tutelage of Catholic imagery. The original idea of C Room18 was
to emulate the consultation room of Dominican Vodoun, which the artist
himself experienced growing up in Santiago de los Treinta Caballeros. In
his own words:
If anything, I recall the surprising naturalness with which as a child, I

understood that a man or a woman, irrespective of their sexual identifi-
cation, could be mounted, possessed, by a gender-fluid loa. In short,
some of the horses, people who received spirits, were my first introduc-
tion to queerness before the term made it to the academic world, or
before I knew its English double meaning. As the Afro-Caribbean altar
was the locus where I was exposed to the vast possibilities of perfor-
mance art, and initiated as an artist who could have the freedom to turn
upside down, not only the lithograph of Saint Anthony, but also gender
rules.19
The “Server of Mysteries” channels the spiritual imperatives of the loas or

spirits, incarnating the triple role of priest/ess, healers, and oracles,
embodying therefore the cult in itself.20 This fluidity, as well as an absence
of animal sacrifices, temples and a hierarchy of religious authorities, are
other elements that characterize Dominican Vodoun as a mixture of
Kardecist Spiritism and Haitian Vodoun.21
During the eight hours of C Room, Estévez was simultaneously artist,
performance facilitator, and spiritual catalyst. Guests entered through the
rear part of the Museo Folklórico Don Tomás Morel, into the only room
that this devastated native had to offer. Mirroring the quintessential
chaotic atmosphere of the institution, Estévez installed all types of props
that guests could use to forge their own carnival personae—those who
were performance artists in their own right also brought their own ele-
ments. At a certain moment Estévez became aware that his peers’ savoir-
faire and mastery of the carnival had to lead the way and, in doing so,
resonated with the characteristic fluidity of Dominican Vodoun. The
result was documented photographically and on video and eventually
inserted surreptitiously over three or four days as five-second silent com-
mercials on two local television stations. This second component success-
fully overlapped carnival and national independence celebrations,
challenging the separation between art and life while at the same time
contributing to counteract patriotic discourses with carnival’s endemic
queerness. The artist’s conclusion of C Room’s epistemic turn is concise:

the carnival is both an orifice and a vortex, it swallows-up any attempt of
“Art” to impose an agenda. By embracing this self-evident truth Estévez
continues to expand his ambitions of creating spaces of interaction where
the congenital voyeurism of “Art” becomes neutralized—or rather, it
dissolves into oblivion.
A work outside of what Huey Copeland refers to as “the storied
history of performance”22 is Miami-based Adler Guerrier’s Is What
Chomsky Said About Prometheus (Nine to Five) (2001), a three-channel
video featuring a man in a suit carrying a briefcase. He waits at the bus
stop; walks down the street; walks into a building; enters a cafeteria.
However, his activities begin at 9 pm, when it is dark and downtown is
completely deserted. This is definitively the view of an immigrant that
sees himself as part of the scene, not as an accessory; there is a strong
sense of dignity and self-respect in this perspective. According to
Guerrier23 this film was based on three jazz compositions: Charles
Mingus’s Haitian Fight Song [1955], Duke Ellington’s Fleurette
Africaine (African Flower) [1963], and the Modern Jazz Quartet’s
Valeria [1972]. Haitian Fight Song is the piece more strongly con-
nected to the above-mentioned sequences of the film, where the idea of
the Situationist’s flâneur is linked to the maroon leaders who conceived
and ultimately achieved the first successful enslaved peoples uprising.
This particular type of awareness implied by the presence of the Black
body in the urban landscape represents both a transgression and an
affirmation of being. In Guerrier’s native Haiti young people also trans-
gress the unmarked boundaries of class and racialization by becoming
contemporary pa gen pwogram, defying pervasive notions of belonging
attached to public spaces, such as those beaches that until very recently
were only accessible to the elite, as well as the streets of Pétion-Ville
which today are as promiscuous socially as the traditionally crowded
areas of downtown Port-au-Prince. This displacement of landscapes’
“legitimacy” dooms any attempt at social engineering to be an exercise
in futility. The illegality of the Black body is a de facto impossibility in
Haiti and the absurdity of its criminalization is what keeps the legacy of
the Haitian Revolution a glorious reminder in the face of Ferguson et
al. In Haiti the Black body in the landscape has a decolonial history that
is as real as it gets, a living and defying memory that has been consis-
tently and painfully erased by canonical historiography as mentioned
before in Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s study.
116 A. LOCKWARD
The maroons never completely disengaged from colonial society. As in

Haiti and other Caribbean palenques, also in Colombia, the total abolition
of enslavement was an integral part of the future envisioned by its leaders
and inhabitants, and many recorded accounts attest to this fact.24
Maroons had to create new maps, new orientation strategies, and new
spiritualities all connected to the common goal of securing survival. The
plantation remained a locus of oppression and a constant reminder of the
fragility of their condition. Similarly, the museum is a place where
Afropean decolonial artists visit mainly to obtain some supplies and occa-
sionally to attend a request for their presence. Quinsy Gario’s campaign
Zwarte Piet is Racisme presentation at the Museum of Contemporary Art
(MACBA) in Barcelona as part of Transfigurations Curatorial and Artistic
Research in an Age of Migrations (2014) is a wonderful example of how
the so-called secular imperative of modernity was dismantled on its own
terrain. Gario started his performance-campaign after a phone call from his
mother. She was in tears because someone had just called her Zwarte Piet
at her job. Quinsy’s Mom is an accomplished woman who has an amazing
elegant aura and who raised her two sons to be proud Black men. After
being raised as everyone in the Netherlands under the general assumption
that racism is a subject of the past, as well as colonialism, and that of course
Christmas is not a religious celebration but rather a “cultural” one (yet
another powerful example of the fallacy of “secularity”), it was to be
expected otherwise from him. Maybe that he would have asked his mother
to calm down and buy herself something nice to forget the incident.
Instead he chose to do something about it, as many activists in the
Netherlands have done before him many times—those who planted the
seeds of what today has become the most effective coup d’etat for the
Dutch establishment’s perennial denial of its structural racism. The Black
and People of Color Coalition in the Netherlands has many reasons to
celebrate. Gario’s contribution is extremely significant due to its multi-
dimensional and dialogical approach.
I remember joining the celebrations of the abolition of the enslave-
ment triangular trade in Amsterdam in 2011, and I also remember my
immediate reaction to the t-shirts hanging from a booth. After buying
a couple of them I invited Quinsy for BE.BOP 2012. BLACK
EUROPE BODY POLITICS. What is extremely telling about this
curatorial impromptu was that I had never in my life heard about
Zwarte Piet, and there were no explanations or illustrations about
what this was. All I needed to see was a t-shirt denouncing something
in Europe that was racist. To read that phrase made me instantly
happy. My reaction is symptomatic of how difficult it is to utter that
word in the realm of academia or the arts on the continent. The fact
that this discussion has arrived in the realm of the museum is illustra-
tive of how seriously some institutions are engaging in a dialogue with
decolonial thought. Furthermore, the undeniably Christian, heteronor-
mative, and patriarchal values embedded in the figure of the Zwarte
Piet have been successfully unmasked. Institutionalized blackfacing in
Europe has arrived at its final days and to witness this historic achieve-
ment as members of the African and Black Diasporas in Europe is
particularly healing.
Being a descendant from Surinamese parents born in the
Netherlands, Patricia Kaersenhout’s artistic journey became an investi-
gation of her Caribbean background in relation to being raised in a
West-European culture. A recent interest in performance has intro-
duced her Black radical imagination to a mesmerized audience. Her
performance Stitches of Power. Stitches of Sorrow (2014) combines her
long interest in (in)visibilities with the juxtaposition of moving image,
sound, three-dimensional objects, and audience participation. By means
of unveiling the inherent violence of the apparently innocent act of
embroidering she triumphantly conveyed key contestations of epistemic
disobedience. The narratives of the Continent of Black Consciousness
become embodied knowledge during the thirty minutes in which mem-
bers of the audience alternated their seats and the portion of a shared
piece of cloth where their stitches were permanently embroidered as a
collective memento. Kaersenhout herself was embroidering in a separate
chair. Silence is almost ritualistic, while the voice of Angela Davis on a
loop challenges the white reporter who asks her opinion on violence
over and over. On the floor a sequence of the film Cobra Verde (1987),
in which a young Black woman is emerging from the pits of a slave ship
to face imminent rape, is projected. The atmosphere is simply electrify-
ing. At the end of the performance each piece of fabric is revealed. The
artist has been embroidering a gun manufactured by a factory founded
by Heinrich Carl von Schimmelmann, a German born Dane aristocrat
who owned sugarcane plantations in the Caribbean, was active in the
Triangular Trade (specifically in Ghana), and was instrumental in the
foundation of the infamous Danish East Indian Company. All along the
118 A. LOCKWARD
audience has been collectively stitching a huge portrait of an anti-

colonial fighter, a Dahomey Amazon, carrying a von Schimmelmann’
rifle on her shoulder, bare-breasted and defiant.
I would like to finish with a powerfully illustrative anecdote on the
urgency of establishing alternative archives of Black knowledge as pro-
posed by Fatima El Tayeb at a recent meeting on decolonizing the
museum organized at the MACBA in Barcelona by Paul B. Preciado. El
Tayeb presented before me, and as I usually do in my keynotes I started by
screening a video by a BE.BOP artist. On that occasion it was the video
documentation of Stitches of Power-Stitches of Sorrow. During the ensuing
discussion El Tayeb pointed out how important it is to recognize the voice
of the person speaking on the video. Symptomatically, none of the mem-
bers of the audience—all committed to learning and more familiarized
with decolonial thought—was able to recognize the voice of Angela Davis
saying:
[When] you talk about a revolution, must people think: violence; with-
out realizing that the real content of any kind of revolutionary thrust lies
in the principles, in the goals that you are striving for, not in the way
you reach them.
This is a classic example of how the psycho-geographies of our internal

landscapes have been systematically silenced by Western narratives, but
also of how the legacies of maroon armed struggle are articulated by those
still considered today as impossible subjects in the four spheres of the
colonial matrix of power.
NOTES
1. Celia Britton, Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of
Language and Resistance, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia,
1999, 60.
2. Régis Antoine quoted by Britton (1999), 61.
3. Decolonial Aesthetics Manifesto: https://transnationaldecolonialinstitute.
wordpress.com/decolonial-aesthetics/
4. Email conversation with Rolando Vázquez, 26.02.2015.
5. Guy Debord, “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” 1955,
trans. Ken Knabb, in Situationist International Online, http://www.cddc.
vt.edu/sionline/presitu/geography.html
6. The modernity/coloniality research program was inspired by the ground-

breaking contribution of Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano. It offers a
tool to dismantle the continuities of colonialism after formal decolonization.
Decolonial thinkers consider postcolonial studies to be limited in scope
since, in addition to omitting this inextricability, their genealogy is anchored
in rather provincial theories of (post)modernity based largely on Eurocentric
historical and intellectual genealogies.
7. Walter D. Mignolo and Madina Tlostanova, “Global Coloniality and the
Decolonial Option,” in Kult 6–Special Issue (Fall 2009), 134–36.
8. “Literally translatable as ‘stroll; strolling; sauntering,’ flânerie is most often
associated with a rich tradition of unencumbered, non-confrontational
movement through physically and socially shifting Francophone geogra-
phies. In late nineteenth-century Parisian visual and poetic discourse the
aimless looking of the ‘gentleman of leisure’ was key to understanding the
city’s spatial transformation into a center of modern capital. For Haitian
writers in the 1920s living under American occupation the wanderings of
bourgeois pa gen pwogram, meaning those with no programme or schedule,
were seen as central to the gathering of native knowledges that might be
amassed and mobilised in the making of a national culture. Amid the
upheavals of mid-twentieth-century France the related concept of the
dérive or drift—an uncharted, meandering journey through an urban land-
scape—would become central to the radical practice of the Situationist
International, particularly the group members’ exploration of ‘the effects
of the geographical environment on the emotions and behaviours of indivi-
duals.’” Huey Copeland, “Sinous Coordination: On the Photography of
Adler Guerrier,” in Adler Guerrier: Formulating a Plot. Exh.Cat. Miami
2014, 45.
9. Frontex is an external and internal borders program founded in 2005 with
the fastest growing budget in the European Union—a European Union that
was first known and conceptualized as inseparable from (the exploitation of)
Africa, therefore named by its founders as “Eurafrica” (Hansen and Jonsson
2011). Indeed, there are irrefutable historical continuities between the
Berlin-Africa Conference (1884–1885), the original Eurafrica (European
Union) project, and current “mappings” of migration routes in the
African Continent. This border externalization “initiative” could be defined
as a de facto “cartographic war” against Africa. http://www.frontex.europa.
eu/.
10. “Like Claude Cahun, she was a friend of André Breton. Deren, however,
denied any connection with the movement’s aesthetic aims. The Surrealist
obsession with duality—with the lines separating the real and the imaginary,
the rational and the irrational, the waking life and the dream—was, in fact,
diametrically opposed to Deren’s fascination with the continuity of life and
120 A. LOCKWARD
death, the physical and the spiritual, and ‘I’ and the ‘non-I.’ Her films were
intended as imaginary arenas where this point of contact could be visualized
—where boundaries normally fixed could dissolve, or become wildly flex-
ible; where protagonists could move freely between dreams and waking life
without ever resolving the differences between the two; where nature and
culture, urban and rural environments could be separated (and linked) by a
single step; where past and future selves could meet along the road,
fracturing into clones moving along parallel paths of time and space.”
Shelley Rice, Inverted Odysseys: Claude Cahun, Maya Deren, Cindy
Sherman, New York: MIT University Press, 1999, 70.
11. Edna Brodber, The Continent of Black Consciousness: On the History of the
African Diaspora from Slavery to the Present Day, London: New Beacon
Books, 2003, 102–3.
12. Noel Leo Erskine, “What Method for the Oppressed?,” in Lewis V.
Baldwin and Paul R. Dekar, “In an Inescapable Network of Mutuality”:
Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Globalization of an Ethical Ideal,
Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock, 2013, 251.
13. Agustín Lao Montes, “Hilos Descoloniales. Trans-localizando los espacios
de la Diáspora Africana,” in Tabula Rasa, Bogotá, Colombia, No. 7, July –
December, 2007, 55.
14. Teresa María Díaz Nerio, Ni “mamita” ni “mulatita,” (2013). Performance
text. Manuscript.
15. Kamala Kempadoo, “Gender Race and Sex: Exoticism in the Caribbean,”
2000. http://www.desafio.ufba.br/gt5-003.html. Quoted by Teresa Maria
Diaz Nerio in Ni “mamita” Ni “mulatita”: Caribbean women’s stereotypes
and the Diaspora (2014). Manuscript.
16. After La Papa Móvil in 2003 Estévez undertook a series of pilgrimages
entitled For Art’s Sake, evoking the pilgrimage of El Camino de Santiago
de Compostela (Spain), where Catholic devotees travel to the reliquary of
St. James the Apostle. Estévez’s secular twist took him on pilgrimages to
museums in the New York metropolitan area, each time with a new penance
(on his knees, walking backwards) while spreading “the Word”—of Art.
This project raised issues such as art as ritual, the artist as an emblem of
secular religion, the place of the museum in the modern art world, and the
legitimizing figure of the curator.
17. Law 391 of 20 September 1943 was promulgated during Trujillo’s dictator-
ship. It decreed the practice of African-based religions to be illegal, and in
spite of the activism of public intellectuals and artists it is still in force today.
Dagoberto Tejeda Ortiz, El Vudú en Dominicana y en Haití, Santo
Domingo: Edición Indefolk, 2014, 96–7.
18. This first component of the experience took place at the Museo Folklórico
Don Tomás Morel in Santiago de los Treinta Caballeros (Dominican
Republic) on 26 January 2014. At that time it was an institution temporarily

closed to visitors due to a traumatic loss of part of its collection. In the early
1960s Don Tomás Morel, a Dominican folklorist and avid collector,
launched a museum in his home that became the main repository of the
material culture of Santiago de los Treinta Caballeros. The collection took
the shape of an eclectic archive (from artisanal kitchen tools documenting
life in the countryside to authentic pre-Columbian artifacts) exhibited with
contemporary replicas. The centerpiece of his archive was a considerable
collection of carnival costumes and masks. Still shaken by the loss of most of
its objects due to the vandalism inflicted by one of its employees, the
Museum is still an invigorating space for Santiago’s cultural memory.
Nicolás Dumit Estévez’ statement for “C Room” (2013). Manuscript.
19. From a talk presented by the artist at the event “Gender and the Caribbean
Body,” 28 April 2014, organized by CUNY Diversity Projects Development
Fund and Barnard College. Manuscript.
20. Luis Alejandro Peguero Guzmán, “¿Vudú Dominicano o Vudú en Santo
Domingo?,” in Boletín Americanista 49,1999, 213.
21. There are different opinions on the provenance of Dominican Vodoun.
Some, like Fradique Lizardo, argue that since the Spanish colony of Saint-
Domingue (today the Dominican Republic) received enslaved Africans
before Haiti, Dominican Vodoun predates the Haitian one.
22. “Taken together, Guerrier’s flâneur-style pictures from the late 1990s to the
present offer a peculiar articulation of imagistic practice that stands in
contrast both to contemporary large-format color photography, which
aims for the immersive effect of a tableau, and to the storied history of
performance documentation, perhaps the series’ closest analogue in terms of
its structural underpinnings. [ . . . ] Even more importantly, in his practice
there is no initial target that spurs either action or interaction, distinguishing
his work not only from performance art more broadly, but also from
influential models of African diasporic urban intervention predicated on
the [B]lack subject’s visual recognition by unnamed passersby. As opposed
to Stanley Brouwn’s requests for directions in early 1960s Amsterdam,
Adrian Piper’s cross-dressing as a black man on the make in 1970s
Cambridge, or William Pope.L’s abject crawls through 1980s Manhattan,
the ambit and ambition of Guerrier’s movements through space seem less
testaments to the racialization of civil society and more functions of the
unknowable terrain of his own subjective inclinations at a given moment in
time.”
23. Huey Copeland, “Sinuous Coordination: On the Photography of Adler
Guerrier,” in Adler Guerrier: Formulating a Plot, 44.
Rebecca Zorach, “Place Becomes Sweet and Great. A Conversation with
Adler Guerrier,” in Adler Guerrier: Formulating a Plot, 80.
122 A. LOCKWARD
24. Anthony McFarlane, “Cimarrones and palenques: runaways and resistance in

Colonial Colombia,” in Slavery & Abolition, 6 (3), 1985, 142.
Alanna Lockward is a Caribbean author and independent curator. Her nomadic

character is imprinted in the multidimensional perspectives of her writings after
living in Mexico, Haiti, the United States, and Australia. She currently lives
between Berlin and Santo Domingo. She is the founding director of Art Labour
Archives, an exceptional platform centred on theory, political activism, and art.
Her interests are Caribbean marronage discursive and mystical legacies in time-
based practices, critical race theory, decolonial aesthetics/aesthesis, Black femin-
ism and womanist ethics. Lockward is the author of Apremio: apuntes sobre el pen-
samiento y la creación contemporánea desde el Caribe (Cendeac, 2006), a collection
of essays; also, the short novel Marassá y la Nada (Santuario 2013). Un Haití
Dominicano. Tatuajes fantasmas y narrativas bilaterales (1994–2014) is a compi-
lation of her investigative work on the history and current challenges between both
island-nations (Santuario 2014). She was cultural editor of Listín Diario, research
journalist at Rumbo magazine and columnist for the Miami Herald. Her essays
and reviews have been published internationally by Afrikadaa, Atlántica,
ARTECONTEXTO, Arte X Excelencias, Art Nexus, Caribbean in Transit, and
Savvy Journal. In 2014 she was the guest columnist for Camera Austria (Graz).
She is currently Adjunct Professor at the Communications Department of
Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra in Santo Domingo.
PART III
Histories Disclosed
CHAPTER 9
“Contingent monuments:” *Constructions

of Publicness in the Fascist Italy
Exhibitionary Complex 1920s–1940s
Federica Martini
As early as 1926, Mussolini shared his expectations for Italian art, declar-
ing that on the “well-prepared ground” of Fascism “a new and great art
can be reborn, that is both traditionalist and modern.”1 He concluded his
intervention asserting:
We must create, otherwise we will merely exploit our heritage. We must

create a new art for our time: a Fascist art.2
In Mussolini’s statement, the common identification between totalitarian

regimes and neo-classical art is challenged by a more shaded vision that
while underlining the continuity with tradition also emphasizes the impor-
tance of an aesthetic counter-force that is prospective and productive. But
if we read between the lines of this declaration, partly justified by the need
to serve both conservative and progressive supporters of the regime, we
*Emilio Gentile, Fascismo di pietra (Stone Fascism), Bari: Laterza, 2007, 164.
F. Martini (*)
Head of Maps—Master of Arts in Public Spheres, Ecole Cantonale d’Art du Valais,
Sierre, Switzerland
e-mail: federica.martini@ecav.ch

126 F. MARTINI
see evidence of a set of stereotypes related to visual culture produced

under Italian Fascism from 1922 to 1942. These stereotypes have been
poignantly deconstructed by historian Wolfgang Schivelbush in The Three
New Deals.3
In the book the univocal identification of Fascisms with backward-
looking neo-classicism is said to obfuscate the affinities of totalitarian
states with avant-garde and forward-looking aesthetic projects which
emerged from the 1920s through the 1940s.4 A corollary of
Schivelbush’s hypothesis is that the fortune of neo-classical style in the
1920s–1940s was not fuelled by totalitarian states only, but also the
numerous democratic countries that privileged a non-modernist taste in
their official architecture and art.5
In Schivelbush’s reading we see how totalitarian states have, to different
extents, opportunistically and consciously opted for both modernist or neo-
classical approaches in order to accommodate imperatives of social function-
ality. Furthermore, the stress on social function highlights one crucial motive
of the massive symbolic production undergone by Fascist dictatorships: the
shift from a private patronage supported by overbearing nineteenth-century
capitalism to a vision of State cultural policy.6 This convergence is powerfully
represented by the spectacularization of daily life that was pursued in both
political orders,7 where the phantasmagoric displays at World Fairs proved
instrumental in the construction of new life styles and rites.
In the case of Italian Fascism, representing aspects of public life in
spectacular terms served the double objective of “aestheticizing politics”
and “politicising aesthetics”8 in an effort to produce a new audience, the
“Italian people,” subject to the regime propaganda. As the nineteenth
century has already shown large-scale exhibitions were a privileged site for
educating the masses in new ideologies. Along this line the World Fair
display was appropriated and re-used in 1930s Italy. Far from being an
episodic experience, writes historian Emilio Gentile, “one may say that the
organisation of exhibitions was, together with architecture and city plan-
ning, Fascism’s favourite form of aesthetic expression as well as the most fit
to represent its vision of life.”9
In spite of Gentile’s challenging claim about the centrality of exhibi-
tion-making in the Fascist approach to culture it is curious to note that his
hypothesis (formulated in 2007) has been reported in several footnotes of
essays and books exploring cultural production in Fascist times, but it has
not stimulated an analysis of Fascist displays from the perspective of
exhibition history, which is the aim of this essay. Besides some insightful
“CONTINGENT MONUMENTS:” CONSTRUCTIONS OF PUBLICNESS . . . 127
research on cultural policies and shows (Marla Stone), or the analysis on

the building of national identity through Italian fine art surveys at home
and abroad (Emily Braun, Diane Ghirardo, Francis Haskell), Fascist exhi-
bition-making has not yet been discussed as a consistent cultural situation
in the visual arts, supporting the production—and not only the display—of
discursive formations.10
A historical perspective should request reflections on the reasons that led
to separate exhibition-making from other cultural productions promoted
and authored by the Fascist intelligentsia. The same is necessary to under-
stand why Fascist exhibitions have been investigated in a mono-disciplinary
fashion that contradicts, on the conceptual level, the regime inclination for
trans-disciplinary practices suggested by Gentile. So far as current historical
and architectural analyses of 1930s Italian exhibitions are concerned, fine
arts shows have been separated from “non-art shows for a mass audi-
ence.”11 This estrangement implies reducing installations to a pure design
exercise or to a means for disseminating propaganda and celebratory state-
ments, whereas the history of exhibitions has for a long time claimed
displays as autonomous aesthetic forms. However, the most critical devel-
opment in this respect is the possibility to address the layering of histories
and experiments that disturbingly correlate Fascist exhibitions to avant-
garde experiments—a task that I pursue by juxtaposing contemporary art
and trans-disciplinary exhibitions in an international context. In this com-
parative exercise the Fascist exhibitionary complex appears as a double-
sided Janus looking both at the classical past and at present modernity, but
propelling towards a hypothetical future. This duplicity further emerges
with respect to notions of publicness (that correlates both to new forms of
relation to a wider audience, and to a set of potential new venues for
culture) developed in the exhibitions discussed in this essay.
The pressure placed on the centrality of the mass in the Fascist cultural
project somehow overshadows the multiplicity of publics involved. Similar
to nineteenth-century World Fairs in providing a frame for the emergence
of a national identity, Fascism also set the conditions for the construction
of its complementary counter-part, that is, the other, antinomian subject
that, particularly around the 1930s and the Ethiopian war, will be repre-
sented through the adoption of the propaganda stereotypes of European
colonial exhibitions.12
In this perspective, going back to Schivelbush’s thesis, we understand
the co-presence of modernist and neo-classical aesthetics as the persistence
of two nineteenth-century political orders, expressed by the 1930s taste
128 F. MARTINI
for large-scale shows. First, the capitalist idea of progress, refurnished as a

key element of the new “secular religion” that Italian Fascism wanted to
promote and address in particular to a national audience, and which I
analyse in the following pages with regards to the Rome Quadriennale and
the Mostra della Rivoluzione fascista; second, the Italian colonial experi-
ence in 1935–1936, presented as a form of continuity with a historical,
Roman past and a will to expand the Italian race, which I discuss with
regards to the Venice Biennale and the project of Roma EUR.13
“MAKE IT MODERN:” THE ROME QUADRIENNALE AND THE

MOSTRA DELLA RIVOLUZIONE FASCISTA
In reviewing differences between Mussolini and Hitler’s approaches to art

Claudio Fogu reports the concerned reactions of Georges Bataille to the
Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista (The Exhibition of the Fascist
Revolution) that opened in Rome on October 28, 1932. Celebrating
the 10th anniversary of the Marcia su Roma (March on Rome), the
show took place in an extremely symbolic exhibition space—the Palazzo
delle Esposizioni, situated in the central Via della Nazione. One of the
four millions visitors to the Mostra, Bataille shared his discomfort in a
letter to Raymond Queneau:
The exhibition is filled everywhere with black flags with embroidered skulls,
especially in the shrine of the dead. One of these flags figures in the
reconstruction of Mussolini’s squalid studio in Milan. I am quite astonished.
( . . . ) It won’t evidently lead me to buy a shining croix de feu, nor it will
change me a bit, but the effect is very strong.14
The effect Bataille potentially referred to is the disquieting recognition of

avant-garde radical aesthetics that were employed in the exhibition of the
Fascist Revolution. The massive recourse to monumental photography
and photo-montage echoed with El Lissitzky’s photo-murals for the
1928 Soviet Pavilion at the Cologne International Press Exhibition and
the 1930 Hygiene Exhibition in Dresden.15 Similar to the “exhibition
design grammar” articulated by Lissitzsky in the Cologne and Dresden
pavilions,16 the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista juxtaposed press clip-
pings and written documents with fragments of human bodies in gigantic
photo-montages; the massive use of dynamic typography, sometimes playing
with advertising-style repetition, added a sound quality to bi-dimensional
images; multi-media installations were inserted to increase the cinematic

effect of the exhibition path; sculpture and three-dimensional collages were
involved in the general exhibition discourse the way bas-relief is normally
integrated in architecture. The life-like quality of the exhibition was
enhanced by the translation of the visual noise of the street (and of the
square) that had attracted Futurist attention since 1910, together with the
monumentality of architecture.
We may wonder why, if the similar exhibition strategy employed by
Lissitzsky in his Soviet Pavilions in Dresden and Cologne were immedi-
ately recognized as avant-garde experiments, the display of the Mostra
della Rivoluzione Fascista could not escape the realm of the popular, non-
visual art large-scale show. A first explanation is that the Mostra is prob-
ably the most examined exhibition since the “cultural turn” in Fascism
studies and, as such, was mainly and widely analysed as a political event,
where the political side stands out as the content while the aesthetics are
considered a mere display of contents elaborated elsewhere.17 A second
hypothesis is suggested by Antonella Russo with regards to how the
Mostra was historicized. Russo remarks that Fascist critics denied all
connections with the “Bolshevik avant-garde” so strongly that the word
“photo-montage” was abolished from the catalogue and substituted with
the more Italian “photo-mosaic.”18
It is obvious that artists and rational architects such as Giuseppe
Terragni, Marcello Nizzoli or Mario Sironi were perfectly aware of
ongoing international researches and consciously appropriated them. Yet
the images and narratives exhibited in the Mostra were presented and
conceived as documents of the Fascist political performance rather than
as autonomous artworks. Accordingly, art critic Margherita Sarfatti argued
that the Mostra was not meant to only exhibit the Fascist political order
but rather demonstrate it.19 This demonstration passed through the exhi-
bition form itself, as well as from the temporal focus expressed by the wish
to display “history in action” and, following Mussolini’s order, to build
“una cosa modernissima,” “a very modern thing” that would not copy the
past but rather mirror the dynamism of the contemporary era. Likewise, in
1931, the art critic Pietro Maria Bardi advocated for a new intimacy
between “architecture, painting and sculpture, in order to excogitate
exhibition forms that may be considered as art.”20
The proximity between art forms and the political exhibitions, then,
was envisioned by several art critics close to Fascism and apparently
shouldered by Mussolini himself. The main gap between an avant-garde
130 F. MARTINI
vision of the exhibition and its appropriation within a Fascist discourse lies
in its manipulation into a means for building something else. In doing so
modernist aesthetics and classical ruins alike no longer considered for their
distinctiveness merged in the general plan for the construction of the
Third Rome, the centre of the Fascist imperial project. Hence, the tension
between invention and re-invention in the vocabulary of Fascist exhibi-
tion-making did not play out as a mere symbolic gesture. Under both the
classical and the modernist agenda the address of the show was decided in
accordance with its intended function within the new calendar of State-
driven political rites. Borrowing Tony Bennet’s considerations on the
nineteenth-century Universal exhibition, we see how art and political
shows produced under Fascism transformed “displays of machinery and
industrial processes of finished products and objets d’art, into material
signifiers of progress—but of progress as a collective national achievement
with capital as the great co-ordinator.”21 Where Bennet talks about capital
we may read Fascist dictatorship, being aware, as Marla Stone argues, that
themed exhibitions in the 1930s equally operated in complicity with the
industrial development of the country.22
Increasingly during the 1930s the design of industrial and Fascist
political exhibitions overlapped because of their shared concern with a
mixed progressive and conservative vision; they both inherited one pri-
mary aspect of the early twentieth-century avant-garde exhibition:23 their
mission to “transform the audience” through bringing modernism at
home.24
Instead of claiming that modernism was being imported from abroad,
exhibitions in Fascist times invented a national breed for the forms they
adopted. Founded in 1927, the Roman Quadriennale also aimed at creating
a national version of an international format, in this case the Venice Biennale,
with the clear intention of displaying works that were likely to enter public
collections and contribute to re-orient in a modernist sense national museum
symbolism. Directed by the artist Cipriano Efisio Oppo, the first
Quadriennale took place in 1931 in the Palazzo delle Esposizioni – the
same location as the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista. It is because of the
Quadriennale that the nineteenth-century architecture of the building was
updated in a more rationalist fashion in order to suit the exhibition of
modern art. If participation in the Venice Biennale was regulated by a
selection committee including international experts, the Quadriennale was
an emanation of the Fascist Artists Union. Artists could freely apply and
propose their work for the Quadriennale, and could also be part of the jury.25
In a situation of general eclecticism of visual arts production under the

Fascist regime, Oppo was outspoken in his expectations about Italian art:
“We think that the Italian tradition in the art corresponds to: narrative
clarity; elegance; an idea of beauty correlated to Nature ( . . . ); but also, no
symbolic, pessimistic, incorporeal distortion; no taste for horrid, mon-
strous, strange, deformed, abstruse elements.”26
Because of the important acquisition budget of the Quadriennale, this
aesthetic memento would transcend the exhibition walls and permanently
inscribe itself in Italian public art collections. Thus transformed in a hybrid
event, partly temporary exhibition, partly commission system, the
Quadriennale would feed new works in the collection of the Galleria
Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome.27 Besides considering the State as a
patron for Italian artists, and particularly for the young generations, Oppo
imagines the four editions of his Quadriennale (1931–1943) as a contact
zone between the art scene and the public. In order to achieve this Oppo
put exhibitions at the centre of his art strategy, as noted by the art
historian Paolo Fossati:
The exhibition works as a means of reciprocal conditioning between parti-

cipant artists; it forces to make intentions and expectations visible even more
than the languages and forms that are shown in the galleries.28
By 1934, the Fascist Government started publishing a calendar of

periodical exhibitions organized across the country. The need for
such a tool provides evidence of the massive proliferation of exhibi-
tions in twelve years of Fascist rule in Italy—a generalized culture of
events that was mindful of Futurism’s aversion for the museum while it
also sustained the will to “sacralize politics” through regular “cult
events.”29
Before its secular history (related to guilds and art academies) the
presentation of art in public exhibition spaces echoed the religious calen-
dar and responded to the necessity to share new cultural production with a
wider audience. In the nineteenth-century Universal Exhibitions, the time
and the agenda of the periodic show, was inscribed in the production
system and participated in the related new secular rituals. In doing so the
periodical and temporary exhibition called into question the balance
between dynamism and eternity that Fascism pursued in its visual art and
architecture policy.
132 F. MARTINI
EDITING FAÇADES, CONSTRUCTING EXHIBITION SPACES: THE

VENICE BIENNALE
In 1920s Italy the space for new exhibition practices resulted from the
disruption of existing urban and institutional situations, the visual coloni-
zation of public institutions, as well as from the re-invention of a display
aesthetics referencing total artworks, monumentality and periodicity bor-
rowed from the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth
century. Whereas the appropriation of existing buildings rendered the
seizure of long-lasting institutions visible to public opinion and supported
the notion of continuity, the refusal of museum eternity surfaced with
unprecedented strength in the approach to the exhibition architecture.
Influenced by the contingency of the pavilion-like buildings that hosted
the shows, the construction of sites for modernist display was not alien to
the methodology applied when creating new sites for the ancient ruins.
The past and the notion of Roman tradition are the basis for a form of
internationalism that fit the empire project. However, the modernist
exhibition experience provided tools for a spectacular anesthetization of
politics that could appeal to the masses.
The convergence between modernism and neo-classicism also emerged
in the multi-functionality of exhibition sites. As mentioned in the previous
paragraph, between the 1930s and the 1940s the Palazzo delle
Esposizioni in Rome hosted the Quadriennale d’Arte, the Mostra della
Rivoluzione Fascista in 1932 and the Mostra Augustea della Romanità
(The Augustan Exhibition of Romanitas) in 1937–1938.30 At every new
show the façade would be re-designed by a pool of architects in order to
mark the character of the exhibition hosted inside. In the case of the
Palazzo in Rome the frequent revision of the façade contributed to the
erasure of the nineteenth century spirit of the architecture.
Involved in the conception of the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista,
the artist Mario Sironi emphasized the official Fascist position in this
statement: “A façade that belongs to the nineteenth century in form and
spirit cannot be Fascist.”31 Rationalist architects Adalberto Libera and
Mario De Renzi followed the general feeling summarized in Sironi’s
statement and conceived a red-blood façade articulated in four gigantic
fasces and two “X,” each representing the decade that started with what
was called the Fascist revolution. The title of the exhibition would cross
the fasces horizontally, sustained by a platform roof that framed the main
entrance to the show.
A similar façade-operation was enacted in the Gardens of the Venice

Biennale where the building of a national identity, equally pursued by the
Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista, was parallel to the establishment of a
complex international discourse. At the end of the nineteenth century the
original Venice Biennale exhibition was situated in the central Palazzo
delle Esposizioni, with galleries that were shared by Italian regions and
selected foreign countries. Following the evolution of Italian diplomatic
history, in 1907 the world compressed into the regional and national halls
of the Palazzo delle Esposizioni began to expand into the surrounding
Giardini di Castello. This is how, between 1907 and 1995, the Gardens of
the Venice Biennale took on the appearance of a micro-theme park32
defined by its number of national pavilions. The desire to recount an
“expanding cosmopolitan sensibility,” to follow art critic Lawrence
Alloway, is evident in the topographic map of the Venice Biennale, and
it shows the complicity of this exhibition with World Fairs.33
Things changed between 1928 and 1930, when the Fascist government
realized the potential of the Venice Biennale as a tool for internal and
external propaganda and appropriated the institution.34
The plan to make the Biennale the perfect ground for displaying Italian
artistic identity internationally and consolidate political affinities with
foreign states did not only surface in the institutional re-organization of
the exhibition. A physical pendant of this program was embodied in 1932
by the reconstruction of the Palazzo delle Esposizioni façade. Designed by
Antonio Maraini, sculptor and Secretary General of the Venice Biennale,
the façade was implemented by Venetian architect Duilio Torres. The
main entrance was topped by the lettering “Italia” placed side by side
with a Venetian lion on the left and a Roman eagle on the right—both of
them sculpted by Tony Lucarda. In the guide to the exhibition, the art
critic Ugo Nebbia described the new façade as an architecture “of modern
taste, even though constituted by traditional elements.”35
This classic-modern monumentality represented, in historian Eric
Hobsbawm’s terms, an “invented tradition,” as it exemplified the novel
political order through a symbolic appropriation of a moment in the
historical past.36
Many other similar acts took place in the Venice Biennale Giardini,
starting in the 1930s with the re-construction of the Bavarian pavilion.
One year after his seizure of power in 1933, Hitler’s first official visit
abroad was to Italy and included a stop-over at the Venice Biennale. On
this occasion he decided to have the Bavarian Pavilion destroyed and
134 F. MARTINI
entrusted to architect Ernst Haiger the design of a new building, the

current German Pavilion, meant to be closer to Nazi neo-classical aesthetic
ideals.37 After the Second World War in the 1950s the architectures built
in Fascist times were still in place at the Venice Biennale, as was the
institutional frame of the 1930s. Without discussing the structure of the
Biennale, once again the Italian government, led since 1948 by Christian
Democrats, re-appropriated the Esposizione internazionale d’arte in order
to serve its cultural diplomatic agenda.38
This new outset is discussed in relation to the spaces of the exhibi-
tion, challenged by the installation designs of the Italian architect Carlo
Scarpa (1948–1972), who would also conceive the new façade of the
Palazzo delle Esposizioni between 1962 and 1968 and take away the
lettering “Italia” on top of the main entrance.39 Again, in the aftermath
of the Second World War a number of façade revisions or even re-
buildings were performed partly out of the need to increase the exhibi-
tion spaces, but also in order to substitute the seventeenth- and eight-
eenth-century nationalistic décor with a modernist aesthetics and
national image.
The experience of the Quadriennale in Rome and the Venice Biennale
is symptomatic of the approach to large-scale periodic exhibitions in
Fascist cultural production. Within the existing museum of fine arts system
works needed to be placed in a Salon-like fashion. But where possible, as in
the case of the Quadriennale, the Biennale and the Mostra della
Rivoluzione Fascista, the exhibition started from the construction or the
correction of its own architectural space. The façade was the external
symptom of the operation, as the internal exhibition space would be
equally rationalized and re-arranged to serve the exhibition path, often
theme-based and organized in chapters like in the 1932 Venice Biennale
and in the contemporary Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista. Transcribed in
the terms of the totalitarian State the avant-garde exhibition became
monumental and competitive, and its dialogical and critical attitude was
substituted by incontrovertible claims. However, besides having pillaged a
number of motifs from the avant-gardes, Fascist exhibitions also produced
new formats based on misunderstanding of their radicalism. The aim to
attract a wide audience was often fulfilled through a conceptual transfer of
practices at work in art in public spaces into exhibition-making. Thus, the
work on show was not necessarily located on a pedestal at the centre of the
room but could be diluted in the big picture provided by the exhibition
theme or framed by the architecture.
Emilio Gentile suggests that it is from this very process of “building

exhibitions” that Mussolini may have developed the idea of delegating the
conception of the Third Rome to a show—the new imperial city that
should have started in Rome within E42, and a Universal exhibition that
should have opened its doors in 1942 but never took place. Similar to the
Crystal Palace, first created in London for the World Fair in 1851 and
eventually disseminated around the world in other World Fairs, the Third
Rome model developed for the E42 and would be rebuilt in the province
of the empire. The plan, wrote architect Marcello Piacentini in 1937, was
to design buildings for the exhibition and then maintain them. The new
city should have looked like an “immense Roman Forum ( . . . ) with
squares, arcades, landscape, arches ( . . . ).”40 The aesthetic was close to
Giorgio De Chirico’s estranged urban spaces and their disquieting empti-
ness. Again, we read the intention to develop “a classical vision, that is also
modern, very modern,” and we find a trans-disciplinary collaboration with
Cipriano Efisio Oppo, the Quadriennale director, commissioner of E42
and responsible for the artworks that would be produced in conjunction
with the new buildings.
After having simulated public life inside pavilions and galleries the
Fascist exhibitionary apparatus moved to the public space, in a 1:1 urban
scale. In the event the museum discourse was applied to city planning and,
particularly, to the promotion of ruins in Rome. One notable example is
the construction of the life-size display case designed by Vittorio Ballio
Morpurgo for the Ara Pacis, the monument built in 9 B.C. under
Augustus and displaced by Mussolini to serve his imperial vision of the
city. Of these ideologies, notes Emilio Gentile, shows were to perennial
monuments the contingent, other side of the coin, even when, as Pietro
Maria Bardi proposed in 1931, exhibitions were intended to be a ground-
breaking medium that, in a technocratic vision, would take the place of
other, dematerialized practices:
We are in an era in which cinema has dispensed with the reading of novels, in
which the radio brings music into the home, and where potentially exhibi-
tions may provide a new form of aesthetic journalism.41
Meant to be on the front of a “journalistic” society, exhibitions corre-

sponded to an era that focused on the present and looked forward to a
golden future to come. The utopia and the tragic dream of progress under-
lying this discourse would end with the war. In the early 1940s the
136 F. MARTINI
distinction between display and real architecture got blurred as war pressured
institutions and buildings to re-functionalize according to mutated needs. In
1943 the pavilions of the Venice Biennale were transformed into a movie set
in order to allow the production of propaganda films, while Cinecittà in
Rome was used as a prisoner camp. The last 1942 Venice Biennale hosted
the exhibition of works created by Italian soldiers at war. After the war the
Roma E42 city area would stand as a large-scale contemporary ruin along
with many others because of bombings, and in anticipation of those ruins
that other World Fairs and real estate speculation would leave around Italian
cities in the following decades. The Second World War, in advance of
cultural studies, would tragically impose a merging of high and low culture,
distributing fine arts and outsiders’ production into unexpected locations.
It is, of course, this loaded past that makes analysing exhibitions in Fascist
times difficult, as it implies acknowledging in them not only a political
dimension but also a cultural one.42 Consequently, many investigations of
1920s–1940s exhibitions have often unconsciously accepted Fascist claims
about their difference from the past, therefore overshadowing the reasons for
the persistence of some aspects of Fascist culture in our contemporary times.
To understand these appropriation gestures we need to disregard the Fascist
vehement attack against nineteenth-century aesthetics in order to see that like
the Venice Biennale the Fascist exhibition apparatus is deeply indebted with
the tradition of national exhibitions that intensified around the foundation of
the Italian State in the 1860s and across the last part of the nineteenth
century. Nor is this history separated from twentieth and twenty-first-century
blockbuster fine arts exhibitions focusing on national identities and theme-
based, mass-oriented industrial large-scale shows that would emerge in Italy
in the 1950s, the last one in order being the 2015 Expo in Milan. In this
sense “contingency” and “short-term” are not necessarily synonyms.43
NOTES
1. Cited in Jeffrey Schnapp and Barbara Spackman (eds.). “Selections from the
Great Debate on Fascism and Culture: Critica Fascista 1926–1927,” in
Stanford Italian Review, No. 8, 1990, 235–72.
2. Ibid.
3. Wolfgang Schivelbush, Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America,
Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933–1939, New York:
Metropolitan Books, 2006.
4. Ibid.
5. Building on Franco Borsi’s notion of “state monumentalism,” Schivelbush
points out that the neo-classical turn applies to dictatorships and democratic
governments alike when it comes to “manifest power and authority.” See
Franco Borsi, The Monumental Era: European Architecture and Design,
1929–1939, New York: Rizzoli, 1987.
6. Wolfgang Schivelbush, Three New Deals.
7. See Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in
Mussolini’s Italy, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
8. Emilio Gentile, Le origini dell’ideologia fascista (The Origins of Fascist
Ideology), Bologna: Il Mulino, 2011. See also Maurizio Vaudagna (ed.),
America-Europa, l’estetica della politica, Bari: Laterza, 1989.
9. Emilio Gentile, Fascismo di pietra, 164–165.
10. Marla Stone, The Fascist Revolution, The Bedford Series in History and
Culture, New York: Bedford/St. Martins, 2012 and The Patron State:
Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy, Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1998; Diane Ghirardo, “Architects, Exhibitions, and the Politics of Culture
in Fascist Italy,” in Journal of Architectural Education, No. 45, 1992, 67–
75; Claudia Lazzaro, Roger J. Crum (eds.), Donatello among the Blackshirts:
History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy, Ithaca &
London: Cornell University Press, 2005; Emily Braun, Mario Sironi and
Italian Modernism: Art and Politics Under Fascism, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000; Francis Haskell, The Ephemeral Museum: Old Master
Paintings and the Rise of the Art Exhibition, New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2000. Another relevant study in the field is Benjamin H. D. Buchloh,
“The Dialectics of Design and Destruction: The Degenerate Art Exhibition
(1937) and the Exhibition internationale du Surréalisme (1938)” in
October, No. 150, Fall 2014, 49–62.
11. See Claudio Fogu, “Exhibition Art and Fascist Historic Culture,” in The
Historic Imaginary: Politics of History in Fascist Italy, 184 and Marla Stone,
The Patron State, 129–30.
12. Nadia Vargaftig, “Les Expositions coloniales sous Salazar et Mussolini
(1930–1940),” (Colonial Exhibitions under Salazar and Mussolini) in
Vingtième siècle. Revue d’histoire, No. 108, October–December 2010, 44.
13. Ibid., 48.
14. Claudio Fogu, The Historic Imaginary: Politics of History in Fascist Italy, 3.
15. Antonella Russo, Il fascismo in mostra (Fascism in Exhibition), Roma:
Editori Riuniti, 1999, 50.
16. Jorge Ribalta, Universal Archive: Condition of the Document and the Modern
Photographic Utopia, Barcelona: MACBA, 2007.
17. See Alessandra Tarquini, Storia della cultura fascista (History of Fascist
Culture), Bologna: Il Mulino, 2011.
138 F. MARTINI
18. Antonella Russo, Il fascismo in mostra.

19. Margherita Sarfatti, “Architettura, arte e simbolo alla Mostra del Fascismo,”
(Architecture, art and symbol in the Exhibition of Fascism), in Architettura:
Rivista del Sindacato Nazionale Fascista Architetti, No. 12, January 1933, 1.
20. Cit. in Sergio Polano, Mostrare: l’allestimento in Italia dagli anni Venti agli
anni Ottanta (Showing: Installation in Italy from the 1920s to the 1980s),
Milan: Lybra, 1988, 525.
21. Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, London: Routledge, 1995.
22. Marla Stone, The Patron State, 129–30.
23. Martha Ward, “What’s Important about the History of Modern Art
Exhibitions?” in Thinking about Exhibitions, ed. Reesa Greenberg, et al.,
London: Routledge, 1996, 323.
24. Ibid.
25. The selection principle would vary according to the geographical compe-
tence of the exhibition: local, regional, national or international. See Paolo
Fossati, “Pittura e scultura fra le due guerre,” (Painting and sculpture in
between the two wars), in Storia dell’arte italiana—Il Novecento, Torino:
Einaudi, 1982, 231–32.
26. Cipriano Efisio Oppo, Mostre, figure e paesaggi (Exhibitions, Figures,
Landscapes), Torino: Fratelli Buratti, 1930, 9.
27. This model was already at work with the Venice Biennale, which since 1895
has been the marketplace for several Italian public collections.
28. Paolo Fossati, “Pittura e scultura fra le due guerre,” 233.
29. “Museums: cemeteries! . . . Identical, surely, In the sinister promiscuity of so
many bodies unknown to one another.
Museums: public dormitories where one lies forever beside hated or
unknown beings. Museums: absurd abattoirs of painters and sculptors fer-
ociously slaughtering each other with color-blows and line-blows, the
length of the fought-over walls!”. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “First
Manifesto of Futurism,” in Umbro Apollonio, ed. Documents of 20th
Century Art: Futurist Manifestos,. New York: Viking Press, 1973, 19–24.
See also Emilio Gentile, Fascismo di pietra, 165.
30. See Gigliola Fioravanti (ed.), Partito Nazionale Fascista. Mostra della
Rivoluzione Fascista (National Fascist Party, Exhibition of the Fascist
Revolution), Roma: Archivio Centrale dello Stato, 1990, 15.
31. Mario Sironi, Scritti e inediti (Published and unpublished writings), Milano:
Feltrinelli, 1980, 135.
32. See Antoni Muntadas, On Translation: I Giardini, Actar – Spanish Pavilion,
51st Venice Biennale: Barcelona 2005;
Federica Martini and Vittoria Martini, “I Giardini: Topography of an
Exhibition Space,” in Alfredo Jaar. Venezia, Venezia, ed. A. Valdes,
Barcelona: Actar, 2013.
33. See Lawrence Alloway, The Venice Biennale 1895–1968: From Salon to
Goldfish Bowl, Greenwich: New York Graphic Society, 1968, 139, 146. At
the time internationalism was only one side of the coin, as the biennale was
initially designed by the Venetian City Council as an antidote to the crisis of
the Grand Tour. Meant to enhance the local art market, the presence of
foreign artists in the show also attests the need to validate the Venetian art
scene through an international event. This aspect clearly emerges when
considering the selection of artists and genres on display. The stark predo-
minance of landscapes and “vedute” in the galleries and the chronic delay of
the Biennale’s first editions in presenting the avant-gardes reveal two main
drives of the exhibition. See Shearer West, “National Desires and Regional
Realities in the Venice Biennale, 1895–1914,” in Art History, No.3,
September 1995, 404–12. This is due to the will of creating an international
self-portrait of the local scene more than reflecting on current international
experiments; also, to the search for an increased visibility of the Venetian art
scene. See Maria Mimita Lamberti, “I mutamenti del mercato” (Changes in
the market), in Storia dell’arte italiana—Il Novecento, 100–1.
34. Marla Stone, The Patron State, 37.
35. Ugo Nebbia, “Guida sommaria dell’esposizione” (Short Exhibition Guide),
in XVIII Esposizione internazionale d’arte Venezia 1932—Estratto dal fas-
cicolo di maggio della Rivista Le Tre Venezie, year VII, No. 5, 15.
36. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
37. The new German pavilion was inaugurated in 1938 on the occasion of the
20th Art Biennale. At the time the diplomatic exchanges of symbolic archi-
tectures between Italy and Germany also included the building of a new
embassy for Italy in Berlin (1938–1943), conceived by German architect
Friedrich Hetzelt in collaboration with Albert Speer and offered to
Mussolini as a gift. This logic was exposed in 1993 when Hans Haacke’s
participation in the German Pavilion focused on the memory of Hitler’s visit
to Venice. Using the ruins of the previous Bavarian pavilion and the German
symbolic past, the title of his intervention, Germania, also refers back to
Third Reich-architect Albert Speer’s project of urban renewal in Berlin to
position it as a world capital.
38. Nancy Jachec, Politics and Painting at the Venice Biennale, 1948–64. Italy
and the Idea of Europe, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007.
39. See Orietta Lanzarini, Carlo Scarpa. L’architetto e le arti. Gli anni della
Biennale di Venezia 1948–1972, Venezia: Marsilio, 2004.
40. Marcello Piacentini quoted in Claudio Parisi Presicce, “La ‘visione classica,
ma moderna, modernissima . . . ’ che ispirò il piano urbanistico dell’E42”
(“The classical but modern, very modern vision that inspired the E42 city
plan,” in Vittorio Vidotto (ed.), Esposizione Universale Roma. Una città
140 F. MARTINI
nuova dal fascismo agli anni ‘60 (Universal Exhibition Rome: A New City of
Fascism in the 1960s), Roma: De Luca, 2015, 11.
41. See Antonella Russo, Fascismo in mostra.
42. On this issue, see Alessandra Tarquini’s insightful survey on the construc-
tion of Fascist culture as a research subject in her Storia della cultura
fascista, 11–47.
43. I would like to acknowledge the invaluable support of Romina Pallotto,
head librarian at the Istituto Svizzero in Roma, in obtaining several sources
employed in this research. My gratitude equally goes to Clementina Conte,
responsible for the consultation for the historical archives of the Galleria
Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, where I was able to consult the Fondo
Maraini.
Federica Martini (PhD) is an art historian and curator. Since 2009 she has been
head of the Master programme MAPS—Arts in Public Spheres at the Ecole
Cantonale d’Art du Valais, Sierre, Switzerland. In 2015–2016 Martini was a fellow
at the Swiss Institute in Rome. She was a member of the Curatorial Departments
of the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, Musée Jenisch Vevey and
Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts/Lausanne. Her recent projects and publications
include Vedi alla voce (Swiss Institute Milan; MAXXX Sierre; Kunstmuseum Thun,
2015); Open Source and Artistic Research (SARN, 2014); Publishing Artistic
Research (SARN, 2014); Tourists Like Us: Critical Tourism and Contemporary
Art (with V. Mickelkevicius, Vilnius: Vilnius Academy Press, 2013); Pavilions/Art
in Architecture (with R. Ireland, ECAV-La Muette, 2013); Just Another
Exhibition: Histories and Politics of Biennials (with V. Martini, Milano: postmedia-
books, 2011).
CHAPTER 10
Screened Otherness: A Media Archaeology

of the Romani’s Criminalization
Andrea Pócsik
INTRODUCTION
1
In 1909 when this photo was taken, all the characters might have been
occasional or regular viewers of early cinema productions due to the
democratic performance conditions of the magical new medium of mov-
ing images (Fig. 10.1). The gendarmes, the civil inhabitant couple, the
Gypsy2 man with his daughters and the photographer himself might have
shared the same experience in a market tent screening of a travelling
cinema show owner or in one of the cheap movie theatres of the time.
But what might they have thought about the short newsreel3 connect-
ing the travelling Gypsy lifestyle to the sensational, cruel crime—the
Dános-case—after which controlling and disciplining these groups
became a crucial task for authorities and citizens, as the photo above
shows. The Dános-case was a press sensation in 1908, when a way house
owner and his family were murdered and robbed. According to historical
documents, mainly press releases, only travelling Gypsies were accused and
sentenced in the end based on the testimony of a child.4
What did the representation of “otherness” mean to them? Knowing
nothing about the ontology of the technical image but having increasingly
A. Pócsik (*)
Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest, Hungary
e-mail: pocsik66@gmail.com

142 A. PÓCSIK
Fig. 10.1 Zsid, Hungary, 1909, by János Sági. Copyright by Museum of

Ethnography, Budapest
more experiences about private and press photos, also entertaining early
cinema productions, did they think about the way they were made? The
partial reception history shows that some of them did but most of them
did not.5 In order not to fall into the trap of speculation, in this case study
I am using the non-linear, content-driven media archaeological approach.
This might be more useful than teleological film historical research in
revealing what role technical images played in the travelling Gypsies
becoming the main enemies at the time of the embourgoisement of the
turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century and how the patterns of this
process can be recognized again a century later in the mediated crimina-
lization of Hungarian citizens of Roma origin.
I argue that scientific and popular cultural visual representations and
their blurred boundaries have a significant mutual influence and help to
create “Gypsy otherness” more effectively than any previous forms.
Criminalized travelling and poverty depicted as the fault of the poor became
the solid pillars of Gypsy images and helped justify, maintain, and further
the exclusion of the ethnic minority from the “nation.” Departing from a
reconstructed early cinema newsreel and the crime it represented in 1908,
SCREENED OTHERNESS: A MEDIA ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE ROMANI’S . . . 143
I draw a parallel with a late-modern media rite extended by a fictional

documentary following the murder of Marian Cozma in a night club in
2009 in Veszprém, Hungary. Cozma, the Romanian handball athlete who
played during his career for HC Dinamo Bucureşti and KC Veszprém, was
celebrating with his teammates in the night club when they got into an
argument with a few Romani people. Cozma was stabbed to death.
The Foucauldian panopticon, a disciplinary model of the scopic regime
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, revealed the relations
not just between sight and power but also the (surveillance) devices and
methods of sciences, especially the new social sciences (ethnography,
sociology, statistics) that played a crucial role in the establishing and
development of modern industrial societies.6
This fact is striking; since popular visual productions were confirmed,
their representational strategies were well-argued by scientific theories.
Looking at the dual Gypsy image at the turn of the previous century and
today through a magnifying glass we can identify phenomena that exem-
plify the interrelations of popular (visual) culture and sciences.
POETS AND ROGUES

Although Gypsies began to settle in Hungary in the fifteenth century, and
though there were many differences in their social status, they were char-
acterized by a sort of “duality”: “well-behaved,” settled Gypsies were
differentiated from travelling ones. “The use of the word ‘Gypsy’ without
any attribute was determined by the—fictitious, putative or real—character-
istics of the travelling ones,” as sociologist Csaba Dupcsik argues.7 The
period of dualism8 with a growing number of technical images and powerful
social research became a sort of transition between the romanticism of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the labeling and measuring devices
of the first part of the twentieth century used for describing Gypsies.9
“There are two types of Gypsies. One is born to be a poet, the other is
born to be a rogue.” This was written by a journalist in the new boulevard
newspaper Vasárnapi Újság (Sunday News) after the Dános-case in 1908,
allegedly according to the court sentence.10
Art historian Emese Révész, in analyzing press illustrations of the second
half of the nineteenth century, reveals that Gypsies are paralleled with the
outlaw, liberty fighters and homeless emigrants forced to hide in their own
homeland and are also depicted with nostalgic solidarity.11 Half a century
later photographic representations examined by the anthropologist Péter
144 A. PÓCSIK
Szuhay inherit the dual image from nineteenth-century literature and art:
the assimilated Gypsy, with the general habits and mentality of common
citizens, mostly musicians; and their opposite—the wild, liberty-loving,
mysterious travelling Gypsies that are dangerous to society. Photographers
were mostly interested in the latter.12
These photos justify sociologist Éva Kovács’ observations. In her study
about Roma representation in late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century
Hungarian fine art, she argues:
Gypsies become the pendants of the African and Asian primitives of

Western-Europe. ( . . . ) Meanwhile it made possible to exile them to the
physical and mental periphery of the society, and at the same time to
interpret marginal existence as “Gypsy.”13
We can find a peculiar trace of connecting early social scientific observa-

tions with imagination turned into fictional scenes in the caricatures of the
ethnographer Ákos Garay; his drawings are made on the basis of his
ethnographic observations (photos) and serve popular press demands by
making a joke of Gypsy life.14
These Gypsy-images can be found even more frequently in Volksstücks15:
the Gypsy characters become suspicious because they are aliens or funny
because of their uneducated behavior. Early ethnographic discourses, for
example, Antal Herrmann’s16 “civilizatoric” approach,17 must have been
equally influential. Even if statistics18 proved that among the number of
travelling Gypsies criminals were very low, prejudices were growing against
the whole group. This ideological climate became even more problematic
after the Dános murder. (Herrmann himself began to work for the Gypsy
Department at the Ministry of Inner Affairs, responsible for settling travelling
Gypsies). A couple of years later his ethnographer son, in a popular scientific
lecture given in Temesvár, describes the Gypsies as a “Dános-murder-type”
mob and the settled Gypsies of Temesvár as a sensational exception.19
“GYPSY-CRIMINALITY” AND THE URGE OF “TRUTH-TELLING” A

CENTURY LATER: A COUNTRY STABBED IN ITS HEART
A hundred years later, in 2009, a fictional sports documentary was made
about the murder of a prestigious Romanian handball player in a
Veszprém night club, committed by criminals of Roma origin.
Obviously, in our late-modern media environment the representation
and visibility of Roma is a much more complex and heterogeneous issue. I

chose this film and the public discourses generated around the case
because its patterns (structural elements) can be paralleled with the repre-
sentation of the early twentieth-century Dános murder.
The history of the term “Gypsy-criminality” (not explicitly, but impli-
citly used in the film) goes back to the Kádár-era. After the change of the
political system in 1989 the term was no longer applied publicly but still
used in the inner circles of the police. A sort of break-through came in the
year 2006. A non-Roma citizen ran over a Roma kid with his car when
driving through a Roma village and the inhabitants beat him to death. The
term itself became the subject of analyses and discussions; the rather
problematic juxtaposition of political correctness and “truth-telling” in
revealing crucial social phenomena like poverty and segregation were used
as arguments and counter-arguments in political debates.20 What is strik-
ing in these discussions is that, like the time of the Dános murder, all the
statements and social scientific (anthropological, sociological) facts and
research results were contextualized in a criminal way.21
Lóránt Bódi gives a detailed analysis of the Cozma-film, summarizing
the arguments for the use of the term that were generated by a racist
public statement of the head of the Miskolc police force just a few weeks
before the Cozma-murder. The protesters interpreted the denial of Gypsy-
criminality as the limitation of freedom of speech. “Why to prohibit a term
that helps to understand, describe reality and to find solutions?,” they
asked. According to some media analyses these changes had even more
problematic consequences; in the mainstream media the interpretational
framework of radical right wing forces appeared and became normal.
Concerning the visual representation of the Roma after the change of
the political system, I refer to Tímea Junghaus’ study in which analyzing
the dual Gypsy image described above is complemented with J. T.
Mitchell’s arguments.22 Mitchell explains how the mechanisms of racism
with its visual violence splits its subject into two, making it invisible and at
the same time hyper-visible, making it the object and target of both
adoration and hatred. Junghaus argues that in many photos taken in the
past decades the main “theme” is the abject “victim”—the Roma people.
These photos consciously distort and manipulate their Roma subject until
it is expedient for the eliciting of disgust (and the maximum possible). She
enriches the argumentation with Julia Kristeva’s thoughts about the
“abject”: “[ . . . ] what society marks as ‘filth/dirt,’ ‘which distracts the
order imagined or constructed by society’.”23 Sociologist Angéla Kóczé in
146 A. PÓCSIK
her study on “the body of Roma men and women in the media con-
structed by racist gazes,” through a feminist, post-colonialist approach,
uses:
interpretational frameworks that reveal and let us see the complex hierarchal
functioning of media that are registered by empirical data but do not
problematize the “observational gaze.”24
She goes further and analyzes the various forms of violence highlighting
the relevance of epistemological,25 symbolical,26 and structural, physical,
mental27violence in Roma representation.
In the Cozma-film we can find “creative” formal and narrative devices
of epistemological and structural violence. Visually the film builds up a
dark and a light side, using YouTube videos about the frightening demon-
stration of the criminals in their home town, juxtaposing them with the
normal life and mentality of handball fans and their deep emotional
sorrow. It gives an example of a “good Gypsy” attitude by interviewing
the Gypsy baron of the country as an authentic “legal representative”
(who was “elected” just after the Olaszliszka street-lynch murder in
2006). He apologised “in the name of his folk.”28 Another interview is
constructed by the filmmakers in order to question the credibility of the
EU Parliament member of that time, Viktória Mohácsi, a liberal civil right
activist of Roma origin.
NEW GENRES AND FORMS CREATING BLURRED BOUNDARIES

BETWEEN THE “PUTATIVE OR REAL GYPSY
CHARACTERISTICS”: A “RECONSTRUCTED NEWSREEL”
FROM 1908
The Dános murder and robbery was one of the largest sensations in the
press of the early twentieth century, particularly in the new boulevard
papers. Travelling Gypsies were accused of the cruel crime and then
sentenced, the judgement based on the testimony of a child.
Investigation methods of the time were rather questionable; a booklet
for investigators was published in which the author states that travelling
Gypsies smell of fat and mice, so it is easy to recognize them in the crime
scene.29 Media researcher György Gaál made a detailed discourse analysis
of the press reception of the case, revealing the distorting and prejudicial
elements, thus characterizing the dysfunctional features of home affairs,

including institutions and political powers using and interpreting the case
for their own interests. What is striking in these sources is that scientific
argumentation, proofs, and laic beliefs (references to “folk soul” and
morality) and visual data (photos as sensations) are built into the real or
putative circumstances of the crime and its interpretation in the public. All
in all, these scientific and laic statements and conceptions were interwoven
in the context of the brutal murder and robbery.
I argue that the new genre of reconstructed news (at the beginning of
the twentieth century) as an early form of the feature film drama consti-
tutes the essence of the interconnection of these discursive fields.
According to Magyar:
First films advertised as “natural shots” recorded moments of life, land-

scapes. Just when filming itself seized to be a sensation, then the topic of
films became sensation itself. But the real sensation—the murder, the tra-
gedy—was impossible to catch, so the most exciting cases for the public
were filmed afterwards: on the burial ceremony of the victims, shots about
the characters of the event, etc.
The audience was compensated for the missing excitement with dra-
matized scenes. The title of the film about the Dános murder, The Life
of the Travelling Gypsies (The Dános Murder and Robbery), shows this
method well; since they had no authentic shots, only the photos of the
accused but not yet sentenced “murderers,” they used it at the end of
the film. Before that they shot a “primitive” feature film in the style of
Volksstücks about chicken thief women, cooking in front of the tent,
horse theft, and chase. Magyar reveals from historical sources that some
cinema owners warned the audience about the “cheating,” but some
did not.30 Thus the film assumed the function of other popular visual
genres (e.g. the caricatures of Ákos Garay based on his own ethno-
graphic photos); the ways of a peripheral, outcast existence were played
by Gypsy characters. But this colorful fiction was complemented with
the evidence of the suspects’ photo. In the films of the turn of the
century not just fiction and reality were mixed but also the “Gypsy,”
identifiable with his/her phenotypical features, was constructed, whose
recognition was made easier with the devices of film form and narra-
tion. Criminalization underpinned with heavy photographic evidence
148 A. PÓCSIK
reached mass audiences more effectively and became a visceral device of

manipulation exploiting the corporeality of film.
“GOOD ROMA, BAD ROMA”

The sport documentary was directed by Gábor Kálomista, a handball fan,
and produced by his own film company. Although in an interview he calls
the film a “memento, a film of memories” and says that his purpose was
not to investigate but to record the facts objectively before they get
distorted in the media, it repeated and confirmed racist, anti-Roma opi-
nions. Lóránt Bódi, in his analysis using the typology created by Bill
Nichols, identifies it with the expository type of documentary that
addresses political issues from a certain point of view. “Expository doc-
umentary facilitates generalization and large-scale argumentation. ( . . . )
Expository mode emphasizes the impression of objectivity and well-sup-
ported argument”31 —argues Nichols. According to Bódi their main
formal devices are montage sequences and binary oppositions that are to
support explicitly a certain argumentation.32
It is important to note that the Cozma-murder happened in January,
three months before the governmental elections. Populist argumentation
by politicians often referred to crimes and disorder.33
This case was suitable for thematizing several Roma-related topics in the
context of criminality, thus winning possible electors, making capital of it.
Bódi gives examples of public visits by politicians and future government
members at the crime scene, giving press conferences in which the respon-
sibility of the socialist government of the period was usually highlighted.34
Although persuasion is an inherently existing rhetorical feature of
documentaries, it is only one such feature.35
But as Bódi states, this film fulfilled not only the function of documen-
tary but also became a crucial, integral element of the media rite following
the event. The media researcher Lajos Császi gives a detailed description of
events that can serve as the fundamentals of such rites: gossip, scandals,
catastrophes.36 According to Neodurkheimean sociology rites are social
needs: “forms of getting close to values and moral renewal.”
It cannot be stressed enough that rites help the participants not just to
recognise “the truth” cognitively but also serve as direct source of emotional
power and certainty.37
News about sports, the environment, and other catastrophes are built on
the dramaturgy of disaster films. The mixing of this dramaturgy with the
expository, persuasive documentary is an obvious choice.
Expository documentary is an ideal mode for conveying information or

mobilizing support within a framework that pre-exists the film. In this
case, a film will add to our stockpile of knowledge but not challenge or
subvert the categories by which such knowledge gets organized. Common
sense makes a perfect basis for this type of representation about the world
since common sense, like rhetoric, is less subject to logic than to belief.38
The film contains talking head interviews edited as described above (giving
the opportunity, although manipulatively, “to both sides” to tell their
narratives), shots of the mourning rituals and fictional scenes depicting
the reconstruction of the night of the murder.
I would point out the importance of these scenes in the interpretational
framework based on the parallel with the Dános-case. The reconstruction
in the early cinema newsreel resulted in the mixture of “popular ethno-
graphic inscenings” and press photos as evidence. In the Cozma-film the
police investigation method, staging the crime at the scene, became a re-
enactment used mostly in historical documentaries. It begins with the
arrival of the future murderers in a petrol station in Veszprém. They are
represented as the “dark power”; their Gypsiness is used metaphorically
for crime, and staging them suggests rather aggressive behavior during
everyday action, which increases the anxiety of normal citizens. The dan-
cing and murder scenes in the night club are performed by famous
Hungarian genre film stars like Szonja Oroszlán and Sándor Csányi, who
either out of loyalty to their producer or for money, or out of conviction,
lend their names to the project. Thus it is neither an official investigation
reconstruction nor a “real” re-enactment, but rather another persuasive
device in order to manipulate the audience.39
IMAGINED ENCOUNTERS OF IMAGINED COMMUNITIES

Unfortunately we do not have enough relevant historical sources at our
disposal to examine audience responses after the screenings of the Dános-
newsreel. As I mentioned before, authenticity is used in reviews of other
early cinema products as a criterion, but as we know this is a blurred term
depending on the “contract” between filmmakers and their viewers, which
150 A. PÓCSIK
also depends on a certain cultural, social environment. We can follow the

Dános-case reactions in the press as mapped and analyzed by media
researcher György Gaál. He argues:
The Dános-case had two important consequences. On one hand it shows the
Gypsy image of the Hungarian society. Through the documents about the
investigation, the press and the reactions about the murder we can reconstruct
what prejudices, beliefs and—except for a few—hostile emotions people had at
the turn of the twentieth century toward Gypsies. Majority held them a low-
caste race that genetically carries proclivity to criminality. ( . . . ) Most of the
opinion holders thought force therapy (labor camps, ergastulum, penitenti-
aries), forced integration into modern society was held the only beatific method.
Apart from that this only case was proved to be convenient to stigmatize
(travelling) Gypsies collectively murderer. The press strengthened further the
negative stereotypes toward Gypsies and thus increased the tension between the
Gypsies and Hungarians. Meanwhile travelling Gypsies were used as a device to
propagate political views and explanation of important social issues.40
The historical consequences of these sensational cases, the following public

sphere debates and the lack of political and social solutions, were tragic as we
all know. The labelling of Gypsies was continued a few decades later with
racial hygienic research from real collection camps in Germany and deporta-
tions from several European countries into Nazi concentration camps, end-
ing with Pharrajimos.
Identifying similar patterns in visual representation and related discur-
sive fields does not mean that we should approach them with the same
analytical strategies. The film about the Cozma-murder is a powerful
symbolic construction of public moral identities and cannot be described
simply as racist propaganda. If we look closer at the reception of it we
might gain a deeper understanding about the subsequent political events.
The production company distributed the film simultaneously in twenty-
nine large cinemas, which is without precedent in documentary film dis-
tribution practice. (The premiere was organized in Veszprém, in the big
sports center where the handball team trains and plays. Thus, viewers,
friends, team members, local patriots, and handball fans took part in the
huge, mediatized mourning ceremony.) The producer also wanted the
film to participate in the annual Hungarian Film Week in the competition
for “creative documentaries,” but it was refused. He decided to place an
advertisement in the film week catalogue, announcing that his most
viewed documentary was not allowed in competition for political reasons.
This argumentation is based on the same principles as the argumentation

of the present government (elected in 2010) in introducing undemocratic
laws that are against European legal states, referring to the “two-thirds”
they reached in the Hungarian parliament.
This research was presented in November 2015 at a conference in
Budapest41 organized in the framework of the exhibition “Imagined
Communities, Personal Imaginations. Private Nationalism.”42 In his cur-
atorial introduction art historian Edit András stresses the importance of
the rise of nationalism all over in Europe, not just in Post-Communist
countries. She points out the shifting focus of the study of nationalism that
resonates in the title.
The traditional approach, the macro-political perspective focuses on nation-

alism as political ideology. The more recent approach applies a micro-
political perspective, and is concerned with the active participation and
engagement of ordinary people in the process of nation building, regarding
them not just as passive consumers, but active producers of national senti-
ments and belongings.43
“Imagined community” is an influential term used by Benedict

Anderson,44 quoted by Edit András as follows:
Nationalism and nationality for Anderson are cultural products of a limited

and sovereign imagined political community, a kind of horizontal comrade-
ship in which despite the absence of face-to-face relations, individual mem-
bers “have strong attitudes and beliefs about their own people and about
others who feel their attachment to their nation passionately.”45
The members of imagined communities in our late-modern media

environment are connected through endless ways on the internet, so
a local event is spread quickly and more effectively. The murder of an
innocent night club customer in a sleepy countryside town would
have woken up the inhabitants anyway, but in this case they might
have felt injured in their local patriotic (with the victim their favorite
successful local team player) and national feeling (with the perpetra-
tors as Roma) at the same time.46 They started to build their local
identity around the tragic murder of Marian Cozma. His monument in
front of the sport center Aréna is an explicit expression of these emotions
and an important public memorial. But if the DVD edition of the
152 A. PÓCSIK
Kálomista-documentary, with its manipulative devices, becomes a recol-

lection-object saved on the bookshelf of ordinary Veszprém families
then it is a sign of distorted, ill social consciousness.
We cannot know how popular the reconstructed newsreel about the
murderers of the restaurant owner Dános and his family might have been,
but we can easily postulate their solidarity with the viewers of the Cozma-
film in our imagination. The exhibition “Private Nationalism” has proved
the following curatorial thoughts:
Art and culture have always been part of the nation building process.
However, they have also been able to interrupt the hypnotic effect of its
operation, to expose the manipulation of the masses through subverting the
imagined naturalness of national identity, and to uncover the process of
naturalization.47
Only if one is brave and wise enough to know where and when to start, I
would add. In 2014 my colleagues and I were planning a guerrilla street
theatre performance with the artists of Independent Theatre48 in the
framework of the OFF-Biennále Budapest.49
When we conducted interviews and asked the opinion of artists and
teachers from Veszprém they all agreed that we should not go on because
it hurts. We understood that the Veszprém inhabitants are “definitely
stabbed in their heart,” and they don’t know how to pull the knife out.
NOTES
1. The occurrence of this photo is also interesting—but takes us further from
the context of this essay. It was used in the monography of sociologist Csaba
Dupcsik (on the front cover of the book) and its introduction (titled “The
Gaze of Power”) referring to the responsibility of researchers, discussing
shortly the connection of power and knowledge after Michel Foucault.
Dupcsik refers to anthropologist Péter Szuhay who also analyzes it in similar
context in an earlier article. (Csaba Dupcsik, A magyarországi cigányság
története. Történelem a cigánykutatások tükrében. 1890–2008., Budapest:
Osiris, 2009; Péter Szuhay, “Egy régi kép,” in Beszélő, Vol. 7–8, 1998.).
2. I am using the designation “Gypsy” in two different but connected contexts.
First is the designation of the turn of the century when this term was used
for the whole although socially very different groups (musicians, travelers,
etc.) The other context involves the politically incorrect and yet in public
speech accepted term of “Gypsy criminality.”
3. A kóbor cigányok élete—A dánosi rablógyilkosok (The Life of Travelling

Gypsies—The Dános Murderers, Projectograph, 1908) was made about the
so called Dános-case but was lost or demolished as was 95% of Hungarian
silent films. The film historian Bálint Magyar reconstructed the plot from
press releases (Bálint Magyar, A magyar némafilm története.
Némafilmgyártás 1896–1931, Budapest: Palatinus, 2003, 72).
4. See György Gaál, “A dánosi rablógyilkosság és ami mögötte van,” in
Médiakutató, Spring 2007, http://www.mediakutato.hu/cikk/2007_03_
osz/01_danosi_rablogyilkossag
5. Many reviewers of early cinema shows point out the “authenticity” of the
shots. According to Bálint Magyar, a film historian specializing in early
cinema, these are critical fragments without any overall system of aspects.
(Magyar, 46–47.) And yet, based on these subjective observations we are
able to form conceptions about the reception of these mixed genres.
6. Jeremy Bentham, Panopticon. Or, the inspection house, London: Payne,
1791.
Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison, Paris: Gallimard,
1975.
7. Csaba Dupcsik, A magyarországi cigányság története, 57.
8. Austro-Hungarian Empire (1867–1918).
9. During the trial experts like the biological anthropologist and inventor of
the craniometer (used for measuring skulls) Aurél Török were asked to
contribute. Cultural researcher Melinda Mátay reveals the relation of the
scientist to Lombroso-principles that found a direct connection between
physiological features and aptitude to criminality. Although Hungarian
lawyers rejected these views they found the new science of biological anthro-
pology useful for doing research on “professional criminal” groups—e.g.
travelling Gypsies.
10. See György Gaál, “A dánosi rablógyilkosság és ami mögötte van.”
11. Emese Révész, “Kép, sajtó, történelem. Illusztrált sajtó Magyarországon
1850–1870 között,” in Argumentum, Budapest: OSZK, 2015, 147–172.
12. Péter Szuhay, “Az egzotikus vadembertől a hatalom önnön legitimálásáig,”
in Beszélő, 7–8. szám, July–August 2002, 98.
13. Éva Kovács, 2009, “Fekete testek, fehér testek,” in Beszélő, January, 2009,
80–81, http://beszelo.c3.hu/cikkek/fekete-testek-feher-testek
14. Laura Polyák, “Cigányok Mucsáról. Az élclapi karikatúrák cigányképe,” in
Beszélő, VII. évf. 7–8. szám, July–August, 2002, 96.
15. Volksstücks were entertaining theatre plays traditionally performed in the
Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy.
16. Antal Herrmann was the initiator of ethnographic research in Hungary
and an influential scholar abroad. He founded the first ethnographic
journal: Ethnologische Mitteilungen aus Ungarn and contributed to the
154 A. PÓCSIK
work of the international platform of academics the Gypsy Lore Society.

He called the new social science “Noah’s ark”—researchers must collect
and categorize traditions, since changes caused by modern industrial
societies make them vanish and transform folk life into something
different.
17. “Civilizatoric approach” is a term used by Csaba Dupcsik (and juxtaposed
with “critical approach” in his monograph about the history of Roma
research) (Dupcsik, 173). The former argues that the Roma population is
not integrated in society because of cultural differences; the latter names the
relation of the majority (discrimination, segregation) as a cause. “Because
Gypsy race is infant, more or less unable to determine his own fate. They
should be educated, taught and led by functionaries, the government, the
state. ( . . . ) We have to be a bit cruel in the name of humanity.
Governmental power has to introduce the restriction of individual freedom
in order to teach real human freedom to a race presently free as wild
animals” (Antal Herrmann, “Jelentés,” in A Magyarországban 1893.
január 31-én végrehajtott cigányösszeírás eredményei, Budapest: Atheneum,
1895, 29–30).
18. Statistics was also a new science of the time. One of the first overall surveys
was the “Gypsy Survey” in 1893. The report (data analysis) was written by
Antal Herrmann, and one can see that scientific argumentation of the time
did not aim to separate personal opinion based on subjective observations
and facts based on numbers. The interpretation of data argumentation is
based on a mixture of a paternalizing public opinion “to educate” the “low-
cast” Gypsy population and a scientific interest to salvage their cultural
values. (Csaba Dupcsik, “A magyarországi cigányság története,” 82–83.)
19. Ibid., 87–88.
20. Attila Juhász, “A ‘cigánybűnözés’ mint ‘az igazság’ szimbóluma,” in
Anblokk, 4. szám, 2010, 12–18.
21. Andrea Pócsik, “Közszolgálatiság és diskurzus. Az olaszliszkai tragédia a
médiában,” in Beszélő, XII. évf. 5. szám, May, 2007, 60–71.
22. Tímea Junghaus, “Opposition is not enough. The Role of Roma Art in the
contemporary constellation,” in Romológia, III/8., Spring 2015; W. J. T.
Mitchell, “What Do Pictures “Really” Want?,” in October, Vol. 77.
Summer, 1996, 71–82.
23. Julia Kristeva, “Bevezetés a megalázottsághoz” (trans. Ágnes Kiss) in Café
Bábel, 20, 1996.
24. Angéla Kóczé, “A rasszista tekintet és beszédmód által konstruált roma férfi
és női testek a médiában,” in Apertúra, Summer-Autumn, 2014.
25. Stephen Morton, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Routledge Critical Thinkers,
London: Routledge, 2003.
26. Pierre Bourdieu, “La domination masculine,” in Actes de la recherche en

sciences sociales, Vol. 84, 1990, 2–32.
27. Richard Shustermann, Pragmatista esztétika. A szépség megélése és a művészet
újragondolása (trans. Kollár József), Pozsony-Budapest: Kalligram, 2003,
484–485.
28. Anthropologist Péter Szuhay analysed for several articles and interviews the
ambiguous function of “woiwodes” in Roma communities. Similar to the
tradition of “Gypsy law,” “Romani kris” is known to the public as the real
and almost unique power that is able to keep order among the Romani
people. Many times, when criminalization of the Roma is thematized in
public debates, the role of woiwodes is highlighted—particularly for those
representing the civilizatoric approach, which seems to be an “inner” legal
system. The community-elected leader has a real opportunity to discipline,
and thus a solution to integrate the Roma. No doubt exoticization is tightly
connected to all these false views and beliefs. http://romasajtokozpont.hu/
cigany-hatalmi-konstrukcio-lanccal-a-vajda/
29. According to media researcher György Gaál, an investigation textbook
published ten years before the Dános murder was a basic methodological
guide for policemen and gendarmes. In it, a separate chapter discusses Gypsy
criminality, since it is different. “They are lazy, revenger, extremely coward
and stink. This fact is important for investigators, since they can decide, at
the crime scene, if the criminals were Gypsy.” (Géza Endrődy, A bűnügyi
nyomozás kézikönyve, Budapest: Egyedül Jogositott Kiadas, 1897, 175,
193).
30. Bálint Magyar, A magyar némafilm története. Némafilmgyártás 1896–1931,
49, 91.
31. Bill Nichols, “What Types of Documentaries are There?” in Introduction to
Documentary, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001, 107.
32. Lóránt Bódi, “Szíven szúrt nyilvánosság,” in Belügyi Szemle, 59. évf.
2011/9, 71.
33. Media researchers who analyse Roma representation in the Hungarian press
with content analysis argue that criminalization is the most stubborn
approach that has not changed measurably for decades, although after the
change of the political system reference to ethnic origin in the news was not
politically correct (Gábor Bernáth, “Hozott anyagból. A magyar média
romaképe,” in Beszélő, June 2003).
34. Bódi gives an example of a TV2 public life magazine “Facts” where shots of
a press conference were used. The participants were Dr. Ákos Hunyadfalvi
lawyer, the social president of the handball club and Tibor Navracsics,
FIDESZ member, presently European Commission member.
35. Michael Renov, “Toward the Poetics of Documentary,” in M. Renov (ed.),
Theorizing Documentary, New York: Routledge, 1993.
156 A. PÓCSIK
36. Lajos Császi, “A rituális kommunikáció neodurkheimi elmélete és a média,”

in Szociológiai Szemle (2), 2001, 3–15.
37. Ibid. 15.
38. Nichols, 109.
39. After the Olaszliszka lynching an experimental documentary was made by
the neo-avantgarde film and theatre director András Jeles (Parallel death
patterns, Párhuzamos halálrajzok, Hungary, 2008) in which he used—and
naturally contextualized completely differently—the police investigation
videos on the reconstruction. His documentary is mixing (again using
Nichols’ typology) reflexive and performative modes: the former
“Increases our awareness of the constructedness of the film’s representation
of reality,” and the latter “emphasizes the subjective or expressive aspect of
the filmmaker’s own engagement with the subject and an audience’s respon-
siveness to this engagement. Rejects notions of objectivity in favour of
evocation and affect” (Nichols, 34). These approaches of course raise aware-
ness of our responsibility, teach critical thinking and questioning, and do
not manipulate the audience.
40. See György Gaál, “A dánosi rablógyilkosság és ami mögötte van.”
41. http://visualnationconference.hu/
42. http://kozelites.hu/leporello.pdf
43. Edit András, “Imagined Communities, Personal Imaginations,” in Private
Nationalism, Budapest, 2015, http://kozelites.hu/ leporello.pdf
44. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the origin and
Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, [1983] 2006.
45. András, “Imagined Communities, Personal Imaginations.”
46. Visual constructions seem to prove this argument. For example, a still from
the beginning of a public television screening representing the map of
Hungary with the title of the film in the middle and drops of blood all
around it, forming the well-known “Greater Hungary” as shaped before the
traumatic Trianon Treaty after the First World War in 1920. (See visual at:
http://keyframe.nava.hu/service/gallery/keyframe/2009/09/08/m1-
24696/m1-24696-17471000.jpg). The fact that the film was screened in
public service media is also important and was examined in the press:
http://hvg.hu/itthon/ 20090908_mtv_cozma_sziven_szurt_orszag
47. András, “Imagined Communities, Personal Imaginations.”
48. http://independenttheater.blogspot.hu/p/introduction.html
49. http://offbiennale.hu/hu/
Andrea Pócsik (PhD) is a senior lecturer at Pázmány Péter Catholic University,

Budapest, in the Communication and Media Studies Department. Her main
research areas are film history, documentary/anthropological film (theory),
cultural studies, Romani studies (Roma representation), and media archaeology.

She has also been working as a curator, program advisor, and project leader of film
and contemporary art programs. Her academic activities are also devoted to
purposes of domesticating engaged scholarship and building cultural resistance,
working out new higher education methods of teaching film, media, and cultural
studies. In the framework of PATTERNS Lectures 2013 she developed a film club
and university course in Budapest at ELTE University and DocuArt Cinema. The
Roma Visual Lab has been functioning for six years now as an independent
intellectual and activist community film club devoted to the analysis of Roma
representation and documentary filmmaking, based on the concept of “changing
registers.”
CHAPTER 11
The Painting and Its Histories: The Curious

Incident of Rembrandt’s Painting Quintus
Fabius Maximus
Jelena Todorović
For centuries great works of art have inspired admiration, devotion, but
also myths and legends often created around them. Some of those myths
were provoked by the curious subjects of the artworks, while others were
generated by the destinies of the works themselves. Paintings like
Holbein’s Ambassadors, Bronzino’s Allegory of Love or Titian’s Allegory
of Prudence still intrigue and bewilder their beholders. A special place in
popular mythology is often given to works of art that are lost or have
perished under strange circumstances. Scholars are still searching for
Leonardo’s lost Battle of Anghiari and Vermer’s Concert, while the history
of both works is the subject of many hypotheses and rather fantastic
stories. However, in some cases the true history of a work of art is far
more intriguing than any myth could ever be.
The lost Rembrandt painting Quintus Fabius Maximus from the State
Art Collection in the Royal Compound in Belgrade (SAC) has such a
curious history. Its destiny is far greater than its myth, while its con-
structed past has never approached the wonders of its true history.
Purchased for the SAC in 1933, this painting acquired its mythical status
J. Todorović (*)
University of the Arts, Belgrade, Serbia
e-mail: jelena.a.todorovic@gmail.com

160 J. TODOROVIĆ
much later, after the Second World War. According to popular belief, in
the 1950s President Tito gave it as a gift, directly from the State
Collection, to Pepca Kardelj, the wife of a notable party official. The
reason for this curious state gift was never discussed nor was the highly
problematic issue of mishandling national heritage ever analyzed. Myths
rarely require explanations. Through the decades Pepca’s Rembrandt
changed its subject matter, its place and its dimensions. There were
some “eyewitnesses” that swore to its existence, while the majority only
pondered the real value of the masterpiece. The true history of this
painting is rather different.
Pepca Kardelj could not have had a chance to see Rembrandt’s Quintus
Fabius Maximus, and even lesser chance to possess it. Painted around
1653/55, Rembrandt’s Quintus Fabius Maximus (179 × 197 cm) depicts
a famous scene from the Roman republican history. Although
Rembrandt’s authorship of this painting is still contested by scholars,
until the Second World War Quintus Fabius Maximus was considered to
be not just an undisputed Rembrandt but also one of his masterpieces.1
The hypothesis of Rembrandt’s authorship is strongly supported by a
recent discovery of a small pen and ink sketch in the Berlin Museum print
room (inv. No. 956/R), while the only image of the lost masterpiece is a
black and white photograph from Bredius’s notable monograph on
Rembrandt from 1935.2 Although quite blurred, this photograph gives
a sense of that “great visual poem” that inspired art critics of the early
twentieth century.
With its monumental setting, the painting represents the triumphal
entry of Quintus Fabius Maximus, one of the main generals of the
Second Punic War. The entry of Quintus Fabius Maximus into Rome is
well described by Plutarch in his Lives of Fabius Maximus, where he
compares Maximus to great Pericles and glorifies him as one of the main
tacticians of Roman times. From Plutarch’s work the painter chose the
most rewarding scene: Maximus’s triumphal entry into Rome.3
The entire grandiose image is composed around the central depiction
of the triumphant figure on horseback, placed on the intersection of two
powerful diagonals that define this painting. With his magnificence and
solemnity, like the statue of Marcus Aurelius, the victorious general pre-
sides over the entire scene as the key figure of the composition. He is
surrounded by his solders, carrying the standards of the Roman legions,
and exhilarated Romans gather to greet him. As often in the works of
Rembrandt and his followers the light is used here to denote the main
THE PAINTING AND ITS HISTORIES: THE CURIOUS INCIDENT’S . . . 161
protagonists and endow them with a sense of otherworldliness. Although

the photograph is black and white it still transposes the flickering reflec-
tions that must have been glowing on the armor and the helmet of
Quintus Fabius Maximus, glimmering on the parade fittings of his white
steed. On Rembrandt’s palette used in this work, now a completely lost
quality of the painting, Camille Mauclair gives a particularly inspired
account in the magazine Les Arts in 1911:
A particularly grandiose aspect of this work is its palette, and the intensity of
colours on a painting that in reality is almost monochrome. Few red, blue
and gold accents are singled out on the seemingly uniform surface of ochre
and red sienna. It could be said that the entire work looks like the relief
made of burning earth, red and boiling, like the earth from the Roman
countryside. His brushstroke is strong, honest and fiery, like the souls of the
painted protagonists. The scene in the far background, of the group of
soldiers entering Rome, is depicted in a technique so free that was not
surpassed even in the most daring experiments of the impressionists. The
painting is vivid and captivates our imagination ascending the work on the
level of sublime poetry.4
The very origin of this painting as well as its initial function has not yet
been clarified, but it is supposed that it was commissioned for the Hall of
the City Council in Amsterdam. The choice of the subject matter that
glorifies republican virtues, the monumentality of the composition and the
grand dimensions of Rembrandt’s paining support this assumption even
further.
In modern historiography Quintus Fabius Maximus is first mentioned
at the beginning of the nineteenth century as a masterpiece shown at an
exhibition in Amsterdam in 1808 (cat. no. 57). The painting was exhib-
ited several times in the nineteenth century: in 1836 in Gallery Far in
London, and in 1898 as part of the collection of Lord Ashburnham in
Shernfold Park in Sussex. At the turn of the century it was presented in
Leiden in 1906 and in the same year was viewed in London as a work in
the collection of the London banker James Newgrass. The exhibition in
Leiden was accompanied by one of the best texts ever written about
Quintus Fabius Maximus:
The key work in this exhibition is undoubtedly the monumental canvas

175x197 that was discovered last year in England in the collection of Lord
Ashburnham (now in the collection of Newgrass), The Triumph of Roman
162 J. TODOROVIĆ
Consul. Signed and dated in 1655 the painting enchantes with its complex
composition and presents an important document in the history of art as
dating from the richest years in the ouvre of this artist. All the details in this
painting denote Rembrandt’s great knowledge of classical antiquity, while
the entire scene is not a mere illustration of the past, but possesses the
intensity of life that only a rich imagination could create.5
Quintus Fabius Maximus was soon transferred from the collection of

James Newgrass to the Munich collector Charles Sedlmayer, only to be
sold in 1911 to the famous antiquary and dealer Marczell von Nemes.6
Von Nemes was a notable Central European collector of the time. He is
considered to be the first collector of Spanish Baroque art and a man who
defined the art market in Budapest in the first half of the twentieth
century. Von Nemes liked to exhibit the works from his collection, so he
loaned his Rembrandt to the great exhibitions throughout the 1920s. At
the exhibition in Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in 1926 (cat. no. 454)
Rembrandt had the place of honor, while only two years later it was
presented in the Old Pinakothek in Münich, and in 1929 both at the
Exhibition of Dutch Art 1450–1900 and the show in the Royal Academy in
London (cat. no. 92). In 1930, Marczell von Nemes even sent his
Rembrandt oversees to the exhibition in the Art Institute in Detroit
devoted to Rembrandt’s masterpieces (cat. no. 55).7
At the beginning of the 1930s, when Nemes was already at the close of
his career, he decided to sell almost his entire Old Masters collection at a
grand auction in Munich organized by the auction house of Mensing en
Zoon (16 November 1931).8 The importance given to Rembrandt’s
Quintus Fabius Maximus in the 1930s is most visible in the four pages
of the auction catalogue devoted to its detailed analysis and filled with
substantial quotes from the most important contemporary sources. In the
introductory essay to the auction catalogue, written by one of the most
eminent scholars of the time, Friedlander speaks of Quintus Fabius
Maximus as one of the great works not just of Nemes’s collection but of
Rembrandt’s ouevre itself. At this auction the painting was acquired by one
of the most important dealers of the age—Joseph Duveen.
Often called “the king of the antiquarians,” Duveen is still considered
to be one of the greatest art dealers of the twentieth century. From the last
decades of the nineteenth century when Duveen took over the leadership
of the family company he turned it into an international corporation with
headquarters in London, New York and Paris. He purchased some of the
most important collections of his time, such as those of Rudolph Kahn and
Samuel Benson, and fashioned the taste of many European and American
collectors. Thus, the old master collections that were created in the 1920s
were often called “the Duveen collections.” Among his clients were some
of the leading collectors of the period: J.P. Morgan, Henry Frick, Samuel
Kress, but also Prince Paul Karadjordjevic, who was one of the creators of
the SAC in Belgrade.9 Until the end of Joseph’s life Prince Paul remained
not only his devoted client but also his true and close friend. A great art
connoisseur with a discerning eye and refined taste, Prince Paul would use
his knowledge and connections to shape the identity of the European
collection of SAC.10 In a letter to Prince Paul from October 1933,
Duveen acknowledged sending Quintus Fabius Maximus to Belgrade for
a month for the final approval and the King’s decision before purchase.11
Unfortunately the details of this acquisition were lost, but already in
Bredius’s monograph on Rembrandt the painting is credited as a work in
the collection of King Alexander of Yugoslavia.12 It is also the last
recorded mention of Rembrandt’s painting before the Second World
War. During the time of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia this painting was
never exhibited.
After the war there is no record of the Rembrandt, and this is when its
mythical history commences. None of the inventories of the Commission
for Government buildings of Federal National Republic of Yugoslavia
(FNRY) from 1946 record Rembrandt’s painting among the works kept
in the White or in the Royal palace of the Royal Compound in Belgrade.13
Moreover, Quintus Fabius Maximus is not present in the lists compiled by
the Cabinet of the President of the Republic immediately after its founda-
tion in 1952 (that lists all the art works in the state collections on the
territory of Yugoslavia). The absence of Quintus Fabius Maximus from the
meticulous government records does not imply an improper state gift but
rather denotes its true history. At the time when these records were made,
first in 1946 and later in 1952, this painting could not be found; it had
already been lost, forever.
Shortly after the German bombing of Belgrade in April of 1941 the
Government of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and King Peter II
Karadjordjevic visited the monastery Ostrog in Montenegro before
finally fleeing the country. In this monastery they hid a large quantity
of state treasures, among them a painting by Rembrandt rolled as a
carpet.14 The Archive of Yugoslavia in Belgrade keeps a detailed
account of the Abbot of Ostrog, Leontije Mitrović, who described in
164 J. TODOROVIĆ
great detail the hiding of the State treasures in Ostrog on 13th April
1941, as well as the subsequent arrival of German troops to the
monastery on the 26th of April. Under the threat of death the
German army seized all the treasures, including Rembrandt’s Quintus
Fabius Maximus. Beside gold, money and works of art, German troops
looted other treasures from under the monastery vaults—a great quan-
tity of famous Montenegrin prosciutto, several dozen rounds of Njeguš
cheese and more than 200 bottles of good wine.15 Then the convoy,
according to Abbot Mitrović, took all the goods, including the art-
works to Münich. For a long time after this tragic April of 1941 there
has been no mention of Rembrandt’s Quintus Fabius Maximus. This
lack of information and the unresolved circumstances of the painting’s
disappearance made a perfect setting for the birth of a popular myth.
In reality the painting was meticulously searched for, especially after
the war, and it is possible to reconstruct its real history through the
archival documentation of the Monuments Fine Arts and Archives
(MFA&A) Division.16 This special unit of the Allied troops was founded
in 1943 in order to protect and preserve the art treasures in occupied
Europe, and it should be noted that the great amount of Europe’s
cultural heritage was saved by this unit. After the end of the war the
main role of the MFA&A division was the quest for lost works of art and
their return to their rightful owners throughout Europe. If one considers
the scale of looting of precious cultural heritage that the German army
undertook during the war it is clear why this specialized division was
active until 1952. However, regardless of its devotion, expertize and
thorough research, some works were never found, while a number of
owners were never identified.
Research in the classified archives of the MFA&A Division reveals the
true story of Rembrandt’s lost masterpiece. It is first mentioned in the
request for the restitution of Rembrandt’s painting that Major Pawson
sent on behalf of the Chancellery of the King of Yugoslavia in Exile on
22nd October 1945, less than a year after the Armistice.17
It is also quite unusual that together with this request Major Pawson (a
liaison officer for the Chancellery) sent yet another request where he listed
three rather unusual items: golden wreaths from the tomb of King
Alexander in Belgrade, several oil paintings from the collection of King
Alexander, and two or three Serbian military banners from the First World
War.18
In other words, the request for the repatriation included unidentified

artworks as well as an undefined number of military standards. Despite
such inaccuracy the Headquarters of the Division replied to the
Chancellery as soon as December of 1945, stating that none of those
items, including Rembrandt’s painting, were found in Neuschwanstein
or in any great German depository in the region of Hessen.19
The quest for Rembrandt’s painting continued on several fronts. In the
following year, on 9 September 1946, the exiled king Peter II repeated his
claim for the restitution of Quintus Fabius Maximus to Richard Howard, the
head of the MFA&A division in Berlin. Several days later Howard ordered all
units of the Division to collect as much data as possible about this lost artwork.
Intelligence officer would be greatly facilitated if the claimant could give the
name of the German officer in whose possession the Rembrandt painting
was last reported, or any other pertinent facts concerning same. It is sug-
gested that photographs, documents, published reference, statements of
history of ownership and detailed description including subject, identifying
marks, material and measurements be furnished.20
On that same day, in another letter, Howard gave detailed instructions to

the base in Karlsrue that the quest for the Rembrandt ought to be
continued through official channels: the claimant (the exiled King Peter
II) had to direct all his requests to the only institution with which
MFA&A can communicate officially—the Institute for Reparations of
the FNRY Government in Belgrade:
5. Present United States policy concerning looted cultural objects which

were moved into Germany from outside its boundaries provides that
such objects will be restituted to the government of the territory from
which they were removed by the enemy.
6. It is therefore suggested that you advise the claimant that his inquiries
be directed to the Yugoslav Government for the Institute for
Reparations, Milosa Velikog 12, Belgrade, Phone no. 29–124. The
Yugoslav Restitution mission, U.S. zone Germany is also competent
authority on Yugoslav restitution claims for that zone.21
From that moment the search for the lost Rembrandt painting was con-
ducted jointly by the Institution for Reparations in Belgrade and the
MFA&A Division in Berlin. Owing to the good collaboration of the two
166 J. TODOROVIĆ
institutions, only five days after Howard’s letter Major Brejc, the head of
the Yugoslav Reparations Mission in Berlin, sent two photographs of
Quintus Fabius Maximus from the famous monograph by Bredius as
well as details on the dimensions and provenance of the painting to the
headquarters of MFA&A. Almost two years of searching in dilapidated
warehouses and hidden mines throughout Germany passed with no
results. The details of the lost painting were distributed across the entire
territory of the U.S. Military Government for Germany. In the beginning
of 1948, the Yugoslav Institute for Reparations repeated its official request
for Quintus Fabius Maxmius. Time passed and many artworks were
returned to Yugoslavia, but not the Rembrandt. The final conclusion
came only on 4th August 1958:
SUBJECT: Application for Restitution of Yugoslav property File no.226

TO Restitution control branch
Property Division
Office of Military Government for Germany APO 405 U.S. Army
Attn: Yugoslav Restitution Mission
1. Reference is made to application for the restitution of Yugoslav

property, file no. 226 (Rembrandt), dated 17th of March 1948
2. Investigation made by MFA&A authorities in Bavaria revealed that
claimed painting was destroyed by bombing. Statements to this effect
were delivered by former holder of the painting Dr. Alfred
Guggenberger and his sister Erna Guggenberger respectively.
3. Case closed.
Richard F. Howard Deputy Chief For Cultural Restitution (MFA&A)22
Case closed – A simple statement put an end to the long quest for the
famous masterpiece. Rembrandt’s Quintus Fabius Maximus could never
be retrieved. It was lost in the allied bombing of Augsburg at the begin-
ning of 1944. Too late for restitution, too late for Tito’s generous gift, too
late for Pepca Kardelj. It is time for some new myths to be created.
NOTES
1. In the greatest database of Dutch art, RKD, this painting is presented as the
work of a follower of Rembrandt. It also states that the painting was lost after
the Second World War, but it does not give any details. See RKD Follower of
Rembrandt, Quintus Fabius Maximus, no. 204157, www.rkd.nl
2. Abraham Bredius, Rembrandt-Schildrijen, Utrecht, 1935, cat. no. 477.
3. Plutarch, Life of Fabius Maximus, vol. III, London, 1916.
4. Camille Mauclair, “Rembrandt,” in Les Arts, 1911, 225.
5. Frederik Schmidt-Degener, “Le troisième centenaire de Rembrandt en
Hollande,” in Gazette des Beaux-Arts, October, 1906, XXXVI, 268.
6. RKD entry for Follower of Rembrandt, Quintus Fabius Maximus, no.
204157, www.rkd.nl accessed 5.9.2015.
7. See auction catalogue Sammlung Marczel von Nemes, Munich: Mensing en
Zoon, 1931.
8. Sammlung Marczell von Nemes, 44–48.
9. Maryl Secrest, Duveen A Life in Art, London: Random House, 2004.
10. For more information on the role of Prince Paul in the creation of the State
Art Collection of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia see Jelena Todorović, “The
Pursuit of Tradition . . . ,” in Catalogue of the State Art Collection in the
Royal Compound in Belgrade—European Art, vol. I, Platoneum, 2014,
14–41.
11. Getty Research Institute, Duveen Brothers Records, 1925–1940, box 497,
roll 352.
12. Bredius, Rembrandt-Schildrijen, Utrecht, 1935, cat. no. 477.
13. Archive of Yugoslavia, fund 804, the database of the Commission for
Government Buildings.
14. Archive of Yugoslavia, Reparations Commission of FNRY, fund 54, 319–
483.
15. Ibid.
16. The Archive of the Monuments Fine Arts and Archives Division is kept in the
US National Archives. www.archives.gov
17. MFA&A, 22.10.1945/226 1571289.
18. MFA&A, 22.10.1945/2/226 1571289.
19. MFA&A 16.12.1945/226 1571289.
20. MFA&A 21.9.1946/226 15711289.
21. MFA&A 21.9.1946/2/226 15711289.
22. MFA&A 4.8.1948/226/953.
Jelena Todorović (PhD) received her BA in the History of Art (1993–1998) at

the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade. Afterwards she continued her graduate and
postgraduate studies at University College London (UCL—1998–2004) where
she also worked, first as a teaching assistant and later as a part-time lecturer. In
2005 she transferred to the University of the Arts in Belgrade where she presently
teaches in the Faculty of Fine Arts as a Professor. She is a visiting lecturer at UCL
168 J. TODOROVIĆ
London and holds visiting professorships at the University of Technical Sciences in

Novi Sad, Serbia and the Universita degli Studi di Trieste in Italy. In the previous
four years she has also been working as an external advisor for the Civici Musei di
Storia ed Arte in Trieste. For the past eight years she has been in charge of the State
Art Collection of the Royal Compound in Belgrade and head of the project for the
Ministry of Culture and Information of Serbia. Although an art historian by
training, her interests have been directed toward early modern cultural history,
including the broad areas of festival culture, art and propaganda, the concepts of
time and transience, and the understanding of liminal spaces in the visual arts. One
of the important subjects of her research and also the topic of her dissertation is the
spectacles of state and, more widely, the festival culture and performance space of
early modern Europe.
INDEX
A Berlin Wall, 23, 81

Activism, 67, 70, 82, 91, 97 Biopolitics, 24, 26, 30–31, 33, 50, 83,
Aesthetics, 2–4, 6, 14, 29–30, 34, 36, 98, 100
39, 86, 105–106, 126–130, 132, Black Republic, 6, 105
134, 136 Body, 3, 6, 17, 19–20, 25–26, 31–32,
Affect, 4, 6, 24–25, 26, 85, 89–90, 93 36–37, 68, 80–81, 90, 92–93, 96,
Affective constructions, 2, 5, 90, 91, 98, 105–108, 115–117, 121, 146
93–100
Africa
African, 81, 95, 98, 105, 109–112, C
114, 117, 119–121, 144 Capital, 13–14, 17, 20, 22, 24, 31, 47,
Afropean, 6, 105, 116 49–50, 53–58, 94–95, 98–99,
Agamben, Giorgio, 31, 135 130, 148
Ancestry Capitalism
ancestors, 104, 107 global, 1, 14, 24–25, 48, 50–51, 83,
ancestral, 112 96, 98, 100
Appropriation, 62, 82, 89, 100, 107, neoliberal, 3, 13, 24, 77, 82–83, 97
130, 132–133, 136 Caribbean, 6, 104–105, 108,
Archives 110–112, 114, 116–118, 121
archival, 8, 34, 36–37, 164 Cinema, 15–19, 21, 24–25
Avant-garde, 7–8, 93, 97, 109, See also Production, cinematic mode
126–130, 134 of
Class, 1, 4–5, 18, 23, 29, 68, 78,
92–93, 95–96, 99, 113, 115
B Collection
Bare life, see Agamben, Giorgio; collector, 120–121, 162–163
Mbembe, Achille Colonialism
Beller, Jonathan, 3, 17, 24 neo-, 32

Theory and Culture, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55173-9
170 INDEX
Colonialism (cont.) Eastern, 5, 23, 78, 97–99

post-, 5, 65, 68, 70–71, 146 Western, 144
Communism Exhibition, 4–7, 29, 38, 43, 86,
post-, 151 125–136, 151–152, 161–162
Contemporaneity, 80, 86, 89, 93–94, Exploitation, 3, 5, 31, 49, 53, 78, 82
97
Criminalization, 83, 115, 142, 147
Cyberspace, 22–23 F
Fascism
anti-, 49
D Italian, 126, 128
Database, 3, 4, 29–30, 32–34, 36, turbo-, 87, 93, 97
38–39, 85 Feminist, 64, 87, 108, 146
Decolonial Film, 3, 6, 14–21, 24, 83–86, 91,
decolonization, 93, 95–96 104–105, 108–109, 111–112,
decolonizing, 95 115, 117, 136, 142, 145–150,
Dehumanization, 26 152
See also Humanistic; Humanization Forensics, 29, 35, 42, 43
Deleuze, Gilles, 3, 15 Foucault, Michel, 4, 30, 152
Digital
digitalization, 20, 32
Discourse G
discursive, 4, 26, 53, 56, 58, 64–65, Gay, 62–63, 68, 70–71, 83, 94
91, 127, 147, 150 See also Homosexuality; Lesbian;
Discrimination, 2, 5, 13, 63, 67, 69, Queer; Gender; Transgender
77, 83–85 Gender, 1, 4–5, 20, 29, 61–71, 78, 83,
85, 93–100, 107, 111, 114
Globalisation, 63
E
Economy
global, 17 H
Emancipation Haitian Revolution, 6, 103, 108–109,
emancipatory, 4, 14, 29, 39, 84 115
Emigrant, 32, 143 Hegemony, 49–50, 52–56, 58, 64
See also Migrations; Migrant; Historicization, 1–2, 45, 50, 79, 83
Immigrant History, 1, 3, 5, 7–8, 14–15, 19–20,
Epistemology, 2, 50, 55–56, 63, 65 24, 26, 38, 54–58, 64, 66, 83–85,
Epistemic, 55, 64, 113, 115, 117 97, 100, 103, 106, 109, 110,
See also Epistemology; Production, 115, 117, 126, 127, 129, 131,
knowledge 133, 136, 142, 145, 159–160,
Europe 162–164, 165
INDEX 171
Homosexuality, 63–67 M
Humanistic, 48, 58–59 Masterpiece, 7–8, 160–162, 164, 166
Humanitarianism, 31, 32, 39, 49 Mbembe, Achille, 3, 30–31, 50, 98
Humanization, 14 Media
See also Dehumanization archaeology, 156
Hungary, 7, 142–143 new, 2–3, 19, 29, 34
post-, 5, 90–91, 97
Migrant, 83, 95, 110
See also Immigrant; Emigrant
I
Migrations, 54, 99, 116
Identity, 4–5, 62–71, 89, 94–95,
Modernity, 6, 31, 45, 62, 98,
98–99, 127, 133, 151–152, 163
105–107, 109, 111, 116, 127
Ideology, 32, 45–46, 49–52, 56–57,
Mussolini, 125, 128–129, 135
65, 91, 93, 95, 97–98, 151
Myth, 7–8, 23, 64, 97, 113, 159–160,
Image
163–164, 166
financial-, 3
movement-, 3, 15–18, 21–22
time-, 3, 15–18, 21–22
trophy-, 25–26
virtual-, 21–22, 24–25 N
Immigrant, 115 Nationalism
Imperialism, 48, 54, 56, 61–62, 64 inter-, 132
India, 5, 64, 67–71 national-socialist, 97
Invisibility, 1–2, 13, 33 Necrocapitalism, 4–5, 26, 51–55,
See also Visibility 57–58, 77
Italy, 26, 126, 131–133, 136 Necropolitics, 3–4, 14, 24–25, 31,
50–51, 53–54, 56–58, 83,
98–100
K
Knowledge, 3–4, 29–30, 33–34, 36,
39, 47, 54, 55, 64, 83, 92, 94–95, O
112, 117–118, 149, 162–163 Object, 4–5, 14–15, 30, 35–38, 90,
117, 126, 145, 152, 165
Objectified, 36, 111
L Other, 2, 4, 6–7, 14–15, 24–26, 30,
Labour, 2–3, 78, 82, 85 34, 36, 39, 46–49, 53, 55–56, 58,
Law, 4, 30–35, 39, 52–53, 63, 69, 85, 62–65, 70–71, 77–78, 82, 86, 89,
91–92, 106 94–95, 98, 105–112, 114, 116,
Lesbian, 62–63, 70–71, 83–84, 94 127, 133, 135–136, 143,
Liberalism 147–149, 151, 159, 164–165
neo, 107 Otherness, 7, 141–142
172 INDEX
P Racialization, 1–2, 4–5, 13, 24–26,

Painting, 8, 80, 91–92, 129, 159–166 31, 48, 56, 83, 115
Performative Racism, 2, 4–5, 48, 56, 77, 83, 116,
acting, 94 145
discourses, 81 Real-time, 21–22
drawings, 82 Refugees, 2, 32, 80
gesture, 54 Rembrandt, 8, 159–166
video, 81 Representation, 2, 7, 14–16, 25,
Performativity, 39 37–38, 48, 65, 95, 98, 141–146,
Poetics, 86, 97 149–150
Politicization Roma people, 145
depoliticization, 50
Politics
political, 2–6, 8, 13, 15, 23, 26,
29–31, 33, 37, 39, 47–53, S
55–56, 58–59, 63–64, 77–85, Second World War, 8, 46, 48, 134,
87, 90–93, 95–98, 100, 107, 136, 160, 163
111, 126–127, 129–130, 133,
Segregation, 5, 78, 145
136, 145, 147, 148, 150–151
Sexuality, 4, 62, 64–66, 68, 70, 97,
Poverty, 7, 142, 145
112
Production
Socialism
capitalist mode of, 3, 25
post-, 5, 77, 97
cinematic mode of, 3, 17, 24
Sovereignty, 31, 54
cultural, 6, 100, 126–127, 131, 134
Subject, 4, 8, 13–15, 30, 35–36, 39,
digital modes of, 24–25
46, 64–66, 83, 87, 92, 94–97,
knowledge, 3–4, 29–30, 33–34
108, 110, 116, 118, 126, 127,
symbolic, 126
145, 149, 159–161, 165–166
theoretical-artistic, 94
Subjectivation
Publicness, 127
de-, 13, 22
Subjectivity, 13, 22, 46, 65, 93
Q
Queer
Queering, 62 (see also Lesbian;
Homosexuality; Gay; T
Transgender) Technology, 2, 4, 19–21, 24, 30, 34,
37, 52, 82, 85
R Teleology, 45, 56–59
Race, 1, 4–5, 14, 26, 29, 47, 78, 93, Time-space paradigm, 21
99, 128, 150 Transgender, 63, 66–67, 69–70,
See also Racialization; Racism 83, 94
INDEX 173
U W
Unconscious, 3, 13, 24–25 War-state, 32
Utopia Weizman, Eyal, 4, 33, 63
anti-, 97 West, 5, 18, 30–31, 46, 54, 64, 68,
70–71, 78, 94–95, 98, 109, 112,
117
V Western
Venice Biennale, 128, 130, 133–134, non-, 4, 62, 64–65, 67, 71
136 society, 4, 66–67, 71
Video, 5, 14, 19, 38, 77, 79–82,
85–86, 91, 93–94, 98, 108–110,
114–115, 118, 146 Y
Visibility, 2, 4, 26, 30, 34–36, 38, 68, Yugoslavia
83, 85, 93, 145 ex-, 79
Vodoun ceremony, 6, 108 post-, 79

Regimes of Invisibility in Contemporary Art, Theory and Culture

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Regimes of Invisibility in Contemporary Art, Theory and Culture

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Regimes of Invisibility

ISBN 978-3-319-55172-2 ISBN 978-3-319-55173-9 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017951242

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Cover illustration: Sunny

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

1 Introduction: Image, Racialization, History 1

Part I Theoretical-Political Interventions

2 Racialized Bodies and the Digital (Financial) Mode

3 Politics and Aesthetics of Databases and Forensics 29

4 The Emancipation of Necrocapitalism: Teleological

5 The Impact of Western Society onto the Identity

Part II Visual and Curatorial Deconstructions

7 Affective Constructions: Image—Racialisation—History 89

8 Spiritual Revolutions: Afropean Body Politics and the

Part III Histories Disclosed

9 “Contingent monuments:” Constructions of Publicness

10 Screened Otherness: A Media Archaeology

11 The Painting and Its Histories: The Curious Incident

Table 7.1 “Affective construction” created by Miško Šuvaković 100

Introduction: Image, Racialization, History

Miško Šuvaković, Aneta Stojnić and Marina Gržinić

The idea for the book Regimes of Invisibility in Contemporary Art,

M. Šuvaković (*) · A. Stojnić

© The Author(s) 2017 1

regimes of in/visibility and representation in Europe. The aim of this

wider range of art practices, including contemporary presentation/exhibi-

minorities in colonial and post-colonial India, investigating the problem of

domain of aesthetic, epistemological and political attraction. In the con-

disciplinary practices suggested by other art historians as well. So far, as

such work is a long-lost masterpiece—Rembrandt’s “Quint Fabius Maximus”

Miško Šuvaković (PhD) is Dean of Faculty of Media and Communications,

Aneta Stojnić (PhD) is a Belgrade-born theoretician, artist and curator. She

study program (2013) and an artist in residence at Tanzquartier Vienna in 2011.

Racialized Bodies and the Digital (Financial)

I want to radicalize the status of images of the digital (ﬁnancial) mode of

© The Author(s) 2017 13

of neoliberal global capitalism produce only a subject that from a tradi-

PART 1: FROM THE CINEMATIC IMAGE TO . . .

We can turn our attention to several political genealogies of the image, no

THE MOVEMENT-IMAGE—INDIRECT-TIME INTERVAL—

THE TIME-IMAGE—DIRECT-TIME INTERVAL—ANTERIORITY

TIME THROUGH SPACE

The Time-Image—Direct-Time Interval—Anteriority

THE MOVEMENT-IMAGE—INDIRECT-TIME INTERVAL—

THE TIME-IMAGE—DIRECT-TIME INTERVAL—ANTERIORITY OF

temporal and spatial relationship of the events is open to question. At a

Shifts in the Space-Time Paradigm

is used to shorten this difference between time scales. That is why it is

Furthermore, it is important to grasp that without technical devices

PART 2: IN CYBERSPACE WITH THE VIRTUAL-IMAGE

SPACE THROUGH TIME

THE VIRTUAL-IMAGE—REAL-TIME INTERVAL—NON-SPACE—

It is important to emphasize the constructed character of the discourse

PART 3: IN THE MIDST OF THE TROPHY IMAGE, OR EUROPE’S

RACIALIZED SPACE AND TIME

From Abu Ghraib it is possible to talk about trophy-images as selﬁes

THE TROPHY-IMAGE—WITHOUT TIME—ERASED

Politics and Aesthetics of Databases

The database is becoming one of the dominant means of knowledge

© The Author(s) 2017 29

This text aims to open a discussion on the politics and aesthetics of