VII of Wands
September 27, 2015. It was a sunny Sunday morning, and thirty-something of us were gathered at the If I Can’t Dance offices on the Westerdok in Amsterdam for an Open Reading Group led by Denise Ferreira da Silva and Valentina Desideri.
The text we had come to read (to reread and misread) was da Silva’s Reading Art as Confrontation, recently published online as part of e-flux’s ‘Supercommunity’. It focuses on a performance by Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh from 2013, On Violence, which da Silva reads as an anticolonial artwork that does not simply denounce (as part of a postcolonial academic’s intellectual exercise) but aims to actively dismantle the effects of epistemic violence, by ‘corrupting’ the form of presentation, and turning it into a ‘confrontation’.
Most of us – myself included – did not see this performance, but through da Silva’s reading we are told that part of the anticolonial, corruptive move was a refusal of representation. “That late march afternoon in Dublin,” da Silva writes, “for twenty-three minutes, Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh refused to represent.”
At the start of the Open Reading Group, Desideri proposed that we read the text in order to draw out questions, rather than read it to try to get it right. (At least, she said something along those lines – recollection of this sort always involves some ventriloquism.)
I recall somebody asking about the difference between refusing to represent and representing a refusal. Somebody else wondered how useful or desirable it is to rely on distinctions between ‘thinking’ (writing theoretically) and ‘doing’ (performing live). I also recall da Silva vividly describing the physical distance that stood between Eid-Sabbagh and her audience that day, and how that distance was not empty but “filled with affect.”
We had been asked to ask questions, and the main question I was asking myself at this point was: how am I going to go about writing a report of a reading of a text that is itself a reading of a work that I haven’t seen?
And: what sort of written response to this reading group would do justice to this mode of refusing to represent, which the assigned text both describes and adopts?
“In Eid-Sabbagh’s performance that day,” we read, “confrontation was imaged as a refusal to give the audience access to anything – images, her own facial expressions, sounds, body language – that could become pieces of evidence, that could introduce the position of a spectator. Unable to manifest the violence of spectatorship, that is, to occupy the position of the ‘objective observer’ before the artwork, we learned of but did not access the intimacy the artist enjoyed, because it was described rather than exhibited.”
Following the morning discussion we all rode our bikes half an hour out from central Amsterdam, to the Bijlmer. We arrived at If I Can’t Dance curator Susan Gibb’s apartment in the Florijn building, where lunch was waiting for us.
During lunch I learned by observation and mimicry that one can quite easily crack and peel a boiled egg in one hand while holding a plate of food in the other. I remember recommending the documentary The Ister to a stranger, though I now forget how our conversation came to it. I drank orange juice from a white paper cup, and I hoped that we would all go back out into the sun once we had finished eating – which we did.
Sitting close together on picnic rugs, with loud aeroplanes passing semi-regularly above us, we look at tarot cards – one of several tools that Valentina and Denise incorporate into their practice of “poethical” reading, with view to “expand the horizon of interpretation.”
Valentina lays the cards out (she’s using the classic Rider-Waite deck), and in the position that points to a ‘possible outcome’ of our situation we have the VIII of Wands. The card shows the ends (or beginnings) of eight wands hurtling across a bright blue sky. The wands are all neatly parallel, but the spaces between them vary. I keep looking at the fourth wand from the top, which is significantly shorter (or slower, or faster) than the rest. There are no obstacles in the way here, except perhaps an unsustainable reliance on momentum…
Somebody points out that the VIII of Wands doesn’t show any human figures, making it strange in a deck otherwise full of pictures of bodies and body parts.
Can we read it as a card that represents the calling into question of representation itself? The scene appears to show optimal conditions for visibility; an elevated perspective and an expanse of clear sky. But it’s also obvious that we’re not seeing the whole picture. The wands are all abruptly cut off on the left edge of the card, continuing beyond the bounds of representation. Way off in the background we see some trees, a river, and a hill, but they’re so distant from us that it’s hard to make out much (is that blob on top of the hill supposed to be a castle?).
Everything rendered visible in this picture without bodies is either too close or too far away; one part is a fragmentary detail that lacks context, the other part is so generalised that details are indecipherable. And so, part of what we read in the VIII of Wands is the distance between the foreground and background – the space within the image where no image takes place.
