Futures and Fictions Read online

  For me painting was never just about depicting an object or a landscape. It is very important for me to go beyond that. So I start with information that comes from my own cultural archive and negotiate these complexities in a limited space, a canvas or a performance space. My work is heavily research-based and nurtured by a complex culmination of information stored in my own cultural archive. One would not necessarily be able to reveal all the layers of information that are present in most of my paintings and performances. Painting allows me to work with layers, I can take advantage of the synergy of multiple interacting layers. If I prime a canvas yellow and, after several layers, end up painting it blue, the yellow will still matter. A colour will generally have a very different presence depending on what other colour is underneath. This is true for all items that come from my archive, not only in relation to colour. All layers and their content, abstract or representational, simultaneously matter — independent from their materiality and position.

  HG: I want to follow up a bit on this complex layering of paint in your work — which allows a colour to disappear and reappear elsewhere, to resurface differently, as you mention. In addition to the layers of paint, you include charcoal lines, defining scriptural fragments and figurative elements. The scriptural fragments are often visible as sequences of letters that refer to fragments of a word that we cannot see in full but can often still make sense of. It draws our attention to the idea of fragments, of what is left — the residue, in a way. This way you create this in-between space that you referred to earlier and that you relate to the diasporic experience which first and foremost means moving in and out of space differently, understanding space differently. An experience that in a way extends beyond the canvas and can be found in unlikely spaces, in the extraterrestrial, for example — or as Jared Saxton puts it: “Black life is not lived in the world that the world lives in, but it is lived underground, in outer space” (2011: 28).

  So we clearly have this spatial dimension in your work. But your art practice, the conscious layering of paint, also produces a complicated temporality. Whether you use over-sized canvases or miniatures your work is created in stages. As Tobias Nagl has pointed out, your work is “separated by breaks, in which [Daniel Kojo Schrade] applies layer upon layer of paint, demarcates, sticks, modifies, scrapes away, or recontextualizes through added figurative or scriptural elements” (2010: 17). So you literally leave your work for days and weeks before you add another layer to the work, which brings in the element of duration (in a Bergsonian sense of conceptualising time) to your art practice, in itself a temporal process that allows the palimpsest of time to emerge in your art works. In addition to your use of archival material, your work produces its own force to think about and act upon time (not only on space) and hence provides a very specific form of time-travel — a time-travel that is not understood as moving between clearly distinguishable dimensions of time. In fact, your painting practice subverts the layers of time as clearly distinguishable between past, present and future. As such your abstract paintings operate similarly to montage and collage — both used as conscious temporal practices in Afrofuturist works, as the works of Wangechi Mutu or Ellen Gallegher, for example, show, or the essayfilms of John Akomfrah.

  We have mentioned earlier the practice of collage in relation to Mingiedi’s work which combines practices of cut-up of existing images, which also always means cutting the line of association, and the subsequent, at least partial re-assemblage of new associations, a form of montage of previously disparate fragments, that are reassembled into new worlds. Hence, we have an understanding of collage as possibly creating visual fictional spaces from fragmentation, as a form of world-making in mutation. It is this fictioning element of montage and collage that interests me and that I can also see in your art practice. You have elements of this in your painting — in your use of the archival figures, for example, in your inclusion of references to inspirational figures and texts, such as the crown as a reference to Basquiat, in your layering and reassemblage of fragments that provide a complicated temporal relationship between the different elements. Similar to the practice of collage, you also propose worlds within worlds while consciously working against a linear understanding of time by proposing a rhythm, in a way, that presents itself as an open-ended narrative that visually enters our historical consciousness.

  Figure 5. © Daniel Kojo Schrade (2008), Afronauts (Brother Beethoven) 08C04, oil-acrylic paint on canvas: 215cm x 380cm.

  DKS: The repeated stacking and overlapping of various layers within the painting above (Afronauts 08C04), indeed works like a painterly palimpsest. The viewer is asked to sense the content in-between the layers. My paintings provide space for multiple cultural dialogs in which the consideration of the conditions and options of such a dialogue is just as important as the dialogue itself. Icons, signs, letters and figurative fragments, which aggregated appear homogeneous, carry subtexts within multiple semantic levels. They allow a flip-flop between heterogeneity and ambivalence. Similar to Lee “Scratch” Perry, who confronts his vis-à-vis with mirrors, this painting holds a mirror up to whatever the viewer is able to decode and pigeonhole.

  My non-representational painting is challenged by rather obvious icons, letters and figurative elements, while the painting as such refuses to be decisive. In 1999, after I had produced my first painting entitled Afronaut, I turned this title into a leitmotif for an ongoing series of Afronaut paintings. Although the Afronaut often appears as a figure that can be interpreted and read as human, carrying some kind of tool or device, Afronauts function as icons on the same level as symbols or written texts. Before the Afronaut series, other series entitled Brother Beethoven, Du Bois, Gong Gong or StopLookListen contributed and still contribute their leitmotif to my painting. A motif is something that is moved, like a locomotive, a place that moves. In painting, the motif is thus something that has been moved, maybe something that has been moved into the picture from a different context. There are not only motifs in painting, but also in songs, in music of course, but the accusation that motifs can deceive is mainly restricted to the visual arts, to painting — to the “icons” in pictures. The Afronaut, however, symbolises/stands for the stranger on the fringes of society, in-between cultures. The stranger who can use this position of exceptional strength to unhinge topoi, symbols and fragments; alienate them and present them beyond common rubrics.

  So the multiple layers within the subject can be explored in many ways, beyond fascinating space travels outside of the solar system. Tricksters, similar to Afronauts, for example, are traveling space and time in different, actually more sophisticated ways. They are not limited to conventional measures of time and space. Tricksters are not restricted to conventional technologies; they are very creative in their traveling.

  HG: I think you are right, your Afronaut is in a way a trickster and hence operates differently from the Afronaut figure proposed, for example, by Christina de Middel in her photograph essay book The Afronauts (2012) — in which she visually tells the story of Zambia during independence, alongside this historical moment’s hopes and aspirations, hinged on the person of Edward Makuka Nkoloso. Nkoloso, founder and director of the Lusaka National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy, and an elementary school teacher with many futuristic visions, imagined a “space-age Zambia”, which he formulated in a 1964 newspaper article with the title, “We’re going to Mars! WITH A SPACEGIRL, TWO CATS AND A MISSIONARY”. He trained ten men and a woman, who was supposed to be the first woman in space. The missionary was warned “not to force Christianity on the people of Mars if they didn’t want it”. Nkoloso’s aim was to launch the rocket from Zambia’s Independence Stadium — Zambia would have been on Mars only a few days after independence. Nkoloso’s dream was never realised, because, among other issues, the spacegirl as well as the two cats had gotten pregnant, and the seven million pounds applied for to the UNESCO were not granted. This past future project is also taken up by Frances Bodomo in her fil
m Afronauts (2014) — a still of that film is the cover image of this book.

  de Middel, however, takes this narrative as a starting point and translates it into an imagery which uses familiar references to an astronaut figure into an “Africa” context by fabricating the space suit with supposedly “African” cotton textile and next to an elephant. In a way, there is a resemblance to Yinka Shonibare’s Space Walk (2002), in which the space explorer is similarly identifiable as an Afronaut due to the “African” fabric used — and here it is important to remember that Shonibare was already working with African cloths in the 1990s, so long before de Middel. What is not acknowledged in The Afronauts photo essay — and what is so visible and compelling in your work — is the alternative ways of moving in and out of space. You do not seem to be really interested in space travel as such — or whether projects like the one by Nkoloso were in any way realistic or (rather) disillusional. This is not what you are interested in in your own conceptualisation of the Afronaut figure, as you have just pointed out. Your work points to a different conception of space altogether — acknowledging that the violence that constitutes blackness necessarily means moving in and out of space differently, which is also clearly articulated in your insistence on the in-between space. As such the normative dimensions of space — and time as we discussed earlier — do not hold any longer, and your work forces us to theorise and acknowledge both concepts differently. Your work insists on a sense of otherworldliness — in a temporal and spatial sense — that is always already implied in blackness — through movement, alienation, conscious mutation and practices of disidentification in fabulation.

  Works Cited

  Nagl, Tobias (2010), “Afrolization (Blueberry Hill Dub)”, in AfroSat-1 Catalogue. Bayreuth: Iwalewa Haus, 16-20.

  Sexton, Jared (2011), “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism”, in InTensions, 5: 1-47.

  AUTOMATE SEX: XENOFEMINISM, HYPERSTITION AND ALIENAION

  Luciana Parisi

  The collective Laboria Cuboniks is a timely conjunction of artists, writers and computer programmers, who only came together two years ago, but since then have collaborated to write the “Xenofeminist Manifesto”: a work in progress or scaffolding document (as the collective calls it) that addresses theoretical and practical efforts to think — and construct — political models with and through technology and science. As a manifesto, it lays out a series of claims whose axiomatic value is however ampliative or revisable to the extent that it presents itself as a continuous dialogue between entries: Zero, Interrupt, Trap, Parity, Adjust, Carry and OverFlow. Each of these entries can be read autonomously even if they evoke diffracting series of meaning as they accumulate together and pair up, or double to be followed in four verses or directions. The Manifesto is then written as sets of entries that can be expanded upon, added up — and yet each entry gives us specific constrains, directions, rules. What is offered here is a kind of mathematico-geometric architecture of reasoning that orders thoughts as sequences and vectors, but also exposes the dialogical dynamics of the entries, the collective quality of thinking marked by the guerrilla tone of their statements. In short, the Manifesto presents itself as both an axiomatic and experimental thought and indeed, read as a whole, it seems to repeat for us the mantra or question: how can experiments be turned into truths?

  This question however is not rhetorical and is instead detonated or forcefully unleashed within and throughout the entries. The question is more an invite and not simply a remark to be raised and left. To pose this question already requires a collective effort to imagine which possible answers are here to be engineered, pushed forward, leaped into, bravely conjectured.

  The question is thus posed in and through hyperstitional statements that have future consequences as they direct a political thinking aiming not simply to debunk norms and truths but also to invent structural and systematic models of alien feminisms that can speak to the historical complexity of gender, queer and sexual politics. This is to say that the Manifesto and its statements require us to use a “public key” to make explicit the encrypted data it contains and should not therefore simply be read lyrically, or from what it gives to us at face value. The Manifesto rather asks us to become abstracted from this or that political position. Simply said, it is not telling us to embrace one or the other position, include or exclude this or that gender politics, dismiss or embrace this or that practice. More fundamentally, it is an invitation to redirect our efforts to think together the question of how: how to force the localism of gender politics to construct general strategies for a trans-politics; how to develop models that address the specificities of practices and yet enable these practices to scale up towards common aims, extending out from physical and cognitive constraints; how to increase particular knowledge in order to increase collective action for the structuring of new truths.

  The Manifesto should not be read as a declaration of intent, but must be addressed as an exercise in hyperstition: a thought experiment or an enabler of the future. Here the inexistent can be made explicit by and through a practical and theoretical enforcing or naming of truths in the face of indeterminacy, of engineering politics in the face of the relativism of positions. This hyperstitional exercise is, however, part of a wider history and shall be discussed here in relation to critical theory and the political propositions of Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” and the cyberfeminist writings of the 1990s.

  Central to critical theory is the view that technoscientific epistemology — or knowledge generated through technoscientific rationalisation or conceptualisation of the real — determines the ontological condition of thought, thus reducing the possible configurations of political subjectivity mainly to what can be known, measured, calculated. If being is restricted to its technoscientific explanation, then it is argued that the political project for an autonomous thought beyond technocapitalism can be declared as defeated. This anti-technoscientific view that works to preserve the ontological truth of thought (that is, of political thought autonomous from the technoenvironment in which it operates) necessarily identifies technology with power on the one hand and separates the sacredness of human thought from the mechanical and automated systems invented by humans on the other. Whilst this sacredness is precisely what has become annulled by the neoliberal paradoxical condition for which the means of politics are the same as the means of profit (i.e. machinic and deterritorialised subjectivity), the cultivation of the human spirit in critical theory is at best idealistic as it assumes that the ontological condition of thought must remain immune from what humans actually think, do and make. The longing for a common state of immunity from the technoscientific instrumentalisation or artificialisation of thought constitutes, one could argue, the bedrock of critical theory.

  Importantly, however, this argument for the separation of ontology from epistemology has been challenged by a feminist critique of technology, deploying a hyperstitional activation of material imaginaries (i.e. the future activation of material situations) that irreversibly breaks the equivalence between nature and woman on the one hand, and human and non-mechanical reasoning on the other. Hyperstition here concerns not the longing for a lost past or the wish for an impossible future, but the meticulous weaving of parts, enveloping the unknown in the present, gnawing at the futurities of the moment.

  One cannot underestimate how Haraway’s theory of the cyborg, so central to second-order feminism, profoundly challenged the naive view that nature is given and that technology can only mystify the operations of capitalism, that critical thought or the enquiry into the unexplainable is ultimately limited and shall resign itself to the ontological finitude of being. Instead, through a hyperstitional activation of the potentiality of machines, and against the naturalist rejection of technology as an extension of patriarchal logocentrism (and capitalism), the figure of the cyborg radically embraced the constraint of a historical situation in which “epistemology gives us ontology”, to use Haraway’s p
hrase (1985). The historical condition of the universality of information and communication systems declared by cybernetics had radically shortened the distance between the “what is” and the “how is” by challenging the biological ground of subjectivity but also pointing at the material becoming of thought.

  There is no doubt that the cyborg figuration of the post-millennium has played a central role in the feminist critique of technology through its direct anti-essentialism and anti-naturalist propositions. By arguing for the constructed-ness of subjectivity and the artificiality of being, the cyborg figuration can be perhaps conceived as a radical hyperstitional attempt at exposing the alien or denaturalised fabrication of gender. Similarly, it can be argued that the cyborg as a political figuration was already able to reveal the paradoxical condition of neoliberal technocapitalism in which the (epistemological) making of subjectivity overrides the a priori form of being, and the presumption of an “all too human” thought. This co-existence of a double position in which the technocapitalist making of subjectivity absorbs the transcendental condition of being/ thought has defined the political situation of the late part of the last century in which the universality of the cyborg was politically contrasted with the situatedness of local — yet networked — configurations of subjectivity. In other words, by challenging the first order of feminism — and its essentialist ontology based on the claim for the biological difference of being — Haraway’s cyborg manifesto pushed feminist critical theory of technology towards the unsettling ground of a denaturalised form of subjectivity, living off the artificial technoscientific constructions of a no-longer-given thought.