Jerūiyq

Journey Beyond the Horizon

Fig. 1: Sketch for the Kazakhstan Pavilion 2024, exhibition model by Konstantin Petruk, © Kazakhstan Pavilion 2024 1_Decolonial Futurism as Creative Disruption Fiction Making Future Geographies It is believed that this socio-utopian legend reflects a specific historical situation in the mid-15th century, when the decline of the Golden and White Hordes led to the migration of several tribes to Moghulistan under the leadership of the khans Kerey and Janibek, and the founding of the Kazakh Khanate. [1] According to Danagul Tolepbay, these aspirations resonate not only with the current global situation, in which every person is searching for their place, but also with the main project of the 2024 Venice Biennale, Strangers Everywhere, as set by the curator Adriano Pedrosa. [2] Thus, geographical imagination finds itself at the center of the project. It connects the question of identity with decoloniality through spatialization. Like the fiction of Wakanda [3], it consciously strives to go beyond the horizon of existing social systems and corresponding systems of knowledge, engaging utopian imagination and science fiction. However, the elements of fiction are not arbitrary: they are based on deeper and more fundamental components of identity, necessarily including presumably pre-modern non-Western and non-capitalist elements. The effectiveness of decolonial futurisms—from Afrofuturism, Sinofuturism, and Ethnofuturism to certain readings of Russian Cosmism and endeavors to establish “comparative futurism” as a research field—is rooted in this combination. [4] Decolonial futurism is an attempt at a creative disruption, a transgression beyond the existing social and imaginary systems. Artistic decolonial futurisms often strengthen the mutual penetration of art and geography. Researchers have already elaborated on the concept of artful or experimental geography, as well as on art as geographical practice. [5] The opposite is also true: “the ‘expanded field’ of geographic knowledge-making now includes creative practitioners, who see their creative practices as part of the ‘doing’ of geography.” [6] Furthermore, “we could perhaps claim that geography is an emerging exhibitionary discipline, the focus of which is the geographical research exhibition.” [7] Geographer Denis Cosgrove wrote at the beginning of the 1980s that “geography takes over landscape from the hands of the painter.” [8] Today it can take over from the hands of artists decolonial futurism as the practice of making future geographies. [9] Forging new spatial identities and future geographies can happen with speculative artistic imagination or Störungsfiktionen (‘disruption fictions’)—“experimental drillings into the discursive subsurface of reality.” [10] But how exactly do…

Stickering through Grief

Subverting Normative Practices Through Mourning and Memorial

In 2021, my friends and family experienced the sudden loss of our dear friend Justin. Justin was essentially my older brother; a childhood friend to my older sister who spent many nights at our dinner table discussing music, art, and all things culture. Justin was a rebel through and through, and following his creative nature, he discovered graffiti as an outlet for expression and subversion. With his deep intellect and equal appreciation for everything unpretentious, Justin taught me everything about being cool. In the weeks after his passing, a mutual friend and artist, Michael Vickers, had the idea to print copies of a sticker Justin had made with his tag on it and distribute it among friends, a way to ensure we could all share in this altar building. I agreed to scan the sticker, and together we printed thousands of copies. A mailing list of familiar and new names was built across Canada. Through mailing envelopes and distributing Justin’s work, a community art practice was initiated. Calling on the histories of mail art, graffiti, relational aesthetics, and social art, we spread the stickers across the country and then the world. Justin unwittingly brought together everyone from mothers to school teachers to coworkers to commit petty crimes in the name of grief and memory. In this paper, I frame the collective sticker project as an example of communal grief, affective mapping, and anti-temporal mourning, combining concepts from the scholarship of Dominick LaCapra, Kelly Oliver, Judith Butler, Leigh Gilmore and Shelley Hornstein. By reflecting on the project, I aim to expand our current understanding of the legibility of mourning in public spaces and remembrance practices through graffiti. I will explore how the collective initiative speaks to the tensions between past and present, embodied and empirical ways of knowing, and the ephemeral qualities of graffiti and human life, as well as the tensions surrounding who can (or should) participate in such a particular subcultural experience. The stickering project exemplifies how creative practice can bear witness to the autobiographical nature of graffiti, while also expanding the form into a communal grief practice that subverts expectations of the cultural context in which it was produced while acknowledging the difficulty of time, distance, and logistics. Fig. 1: Justin’s original sticker, scanned Grief is terribly absurd; it weighs down as much as it reorients, making navigation seem impossible. Socially, it is commonly understood that grief unfolds…

“Within the Gates of the Master, Is There Any Such Thing as a Prime Minister?”

A Space without Frames in the Zhuangzi

The Zhuangzi, one of the two main classics of Daoist philosophy (along with the Daodejing) is a collection of reflections, dialogues, and anecdotes replete with surprises and striking imagery. It is attributed to the philosopher of the same name, who lived around the fourth century BCE, although there is close to a consensus that the complete collection is the work of several authors. [39] Reading the Zhuangzi, we are drawn into a whirlwind of transformations, confusions and clarities; into a free-flowing perspectivism that seeks to cultivate openness towards all existences, a going by them through a forgetting of the self and a cultivation of an appropriate response. Rigid framings, be they social, moral, or even spatial, are under general threat of dissolving in this water-like free flowing. However, the Zhuangzi does not simply abandon the world of human forms, interactions, and roles. Part of the richness of the text lies in its wrestling with how to live in the human and social world while resting securely right in the whirlwind of transformations. One anecdote in chapter five of Zhuangzi makes this tension particularly vivid. It is the encounter between the ex-convict Shen Tujia and the famous prime minister Zichan in the halls of their common master, Bohun Wuren (Eng.: Uncle Dim Nobody/Non-human), who instructs them in the Daoist practices of “sitting and forgetting,” of resting in the bright mirror-mind and the “tranquil turmoil” of continuous transformations. [40] First, we will explore the anecdote. This will naturally give an opportunity to elucidate the Daoist practices in question and their complex relation to social space, while moving through a series of reversals and questions typical of Daoist philosophy. Following this, we will transpose gleanings from this discussion onto the parallel problems between the social and the meditative in contemporary meditative practice. Here’s the short anecdote, slightly abridged: Shen Tujia, a one-footed ex-convict, was a fellow student of Zichan under Uncle Dim Nobody. Zichan said to him, “When I leave, you wait behind for a while, or if you leave first, I’ll wait behind.” The next day they were again seated side by side in the same small hall and Zichan said, “I said you should wait behind when I leave, and I’ll wait behind when you leave. Now I'm about to go—will you wait behind or not? You see a holder of political power and you don’t give way—do you think you’re…

Reframe

Breaking through the White Gaze, Photographic Traditions in African Countries

1_Introduction In 2016, a photo of a woman from the Himba tribe in a Namibian supermarket circulated on social media. She was wearing the usual red-ochre-colored body protection and had her hair covered in a mixture of ochre and grease, resembling pictures in calendars and travel guides. Nevertheless, a media outcry followed. Lower-tier, sensation-seeking tabloid newspapers went as far as to suggest that the woman was looking at washing powder because of the mud on her skin [64] For many people in the West, it was unimaginable that a woman could follow such traditions and enter a modern supermarket at the same time. For them, it was an oxymoron whose elements were too far apart to exist together. This scene is seen/witnessed almost every day, even in Namibia’s capital, Windhoek. A scene that almost everyone who lives in Namibia has seen and can imagine. This example epitomizes a larger problem in the Western perception and documentation of African countries, including Namibia. Apart from the pictures of the Himba people—an indigenous tribe in Namibia—travel guides and calendars rarely depict people. Spectacular savannahs, endless expanses, towering dunes, or the Etosha Pan—these are the images that a Western audience associates with Namibia. These are landscapes that can be romanticized. Anyone looking at the history of photography will not be surprised by the iconographic expectations of the Western public. The camera came to the African continent with the colonial rulers. And with it, the white gaze. Although almost everyone owns a camera today, there is comparatively little documentary photography in Namibia, especially practiced by Namibians, not visitors. Even two well-known photographers who documented the Namibian liberation war did not originally come from Namibia. John Liebenberg was a South African photojournalist who depicted Namibia’s bloody liberation struggle in Ovamboland and later went on to cover the civil war in Angola. Next, Tony Figueira was a photographer of Angolan-Portuguese descent based in Windhoek documenting the protests leading up to Namibia’s independence as well as Sam Nujoma’s, Namibia’s founding father, return from exile. There has always been a social hierarchy and intimacy involved in the relationship between a photographer and their subject. But there is a lack of Namibian photographers taking an active part in documenting Namibian everyday life. This means that narratives are strongly characterized by an outsider and often Eurocentric perspective. Parachute journalism, in which Western journalists are flown into countries to report on pressing…

“The (In)Visible Man”

Renegotiating Asian American Masculinities in the 21st Century

1_Context The experiences of Asian American [65] masculinities throughout US history should attract attention from artists and scholars. From 1875 to 1965, a series of exclusion policies and legislation enacted by the US government, which limited the immigration of Asian women into the US and prohibited miscegenation between Asian American men and White [66] women, led to the celibacy of Asian American men en masse. [67] The image of these men doing ‘feminized’ jobs in laundromats, restaurants, or service sectors created the stereotypes of Asian American men as effeminate, submissive, asexual, or even hypersexual. [68] In American cultural products of the 19th and 20th centuries, Asian American men were either portrayed as supervillains like Dr. Fu Manchu, who lacked heterosexuality but posed great danger to White women, or effeminate subjects in movies such as Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) or Sixteen Candles (1984), the sitcom series The Simpsons (premiered 1989), the play M. Butterfly (premiered 1988), or the novel The Joy Luck Club (1993). [69] All these features developed into emasculated stereotypes of Asian American masculinities and gave birth to remasculinization movements in Asian American literature. Pioneering this were the masculinist cultural projects in the late 1960s and 1970s helmed by Asian American male authors, such as Frank Chin, Jeffrey P. Chan, Gus Lee, and others, who called for a radical reconstruction of Asian American masculinities in art and literature (even though the projects are now viewed as androcentric and nationalistic). [70] The 21st century has witnessed notable changes in representations of Asian American masculinities in cultural products. With increasing economic and cultural exchanges between (East) Asia [71] and the US, contemporary literary approaches to Asian American masculinities now choose to embrace intersectionality and substantially deviate from masculine norms. Features once marked as masculine shortcomings such as ‘bottomhood’, or being ‘effeminate’ or ‘submissive,’ and are now turned into a new power, challenging boundaries and dimensions of masculine ideals. Critically acclaimed and commercially successful films such as Searching (2018), Crazy Rich Asians (2018), Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), and Past Lives (2023), and literary works by authors like Julia Otsuka, David Chang, Ocean Vuong, Ken Liu, John Yau, etc. have helped to bring Asian American narratives into the mainstream, and shift perceptions towards Asian American masculinities. Recent empirical research also reveals that Asian American men are increasingly perceived as more “desirable romantic partners” in the US, as “soft” masculinities are now…