Art-Cure: Image-work between the Spiritual and the Political

Stefania Pandolfo (UC Berkeley

A man paints mural frescos in his Rabat apartment during an episode of his illness of the psyche/soul. Later he reinterprets his visions in the mode of ta`bir and taswīr: an unconscious work of form born in the midst of crisis­–psychical, mystical, political–as a force of expression, and a bridge between the visible and invisible. Ilyas’s visions are at once intimately personal and collective. They disclose a vocabulary of agentive forms, which bear witness to the forms born of crisis in the dream of a suspended collectivity. My paper will reflect on what I call “art-cure” through two scenes: the first is my ethnography of psychiatric illness and liturgical healing in Morocco, through the world of Ilyas’s paintings. 

The second moment reflects on the artistic practice of the Syrian film collective Abounaddara, whose work I am curating in collaboration with them in the exhibition The Ruins We Carry, and which I suggest, could be pondered from the perspective of the imaginal-political practices discussed above, in Abounaddara’s terms, a “utopian realist” practice. Best known for the short open access videos they made during the Syrian revolution and war, Abounaddara’s work is characterized by a capacity to capture the spiritual essence of a world through “image events”, which are visual interventions at the threshold of the invisible. Yet the group developed their practice of the animated image from an apprenticeship at the image-work of master artisans, seeking the capacity of form to disclose other worlds, at the border of the visible and the invisible, where that which cannot be said or represented can only been "shown". 

Stefania Pandolfo is a professor of Anthropology, Medical Anthropology and Critical Theory at UC Berkeley. Her recent work has focused on the articulation of psychic, spiritual and aesthetic experience in a context of violence, trauma, and madness in North Africa and the Middle East, in conversation with psychoanalysis, Islamic thought, and artistic practices. She is the author of Knot of the Soul: Madness, Psychoanalysis, Islam (Chicago 2018), and Impasse of the Angels: Scenes from a Moroccan Space of Memory (Chicago 1997), and co-author with A. Lovell, V. Das, and S. Laugier of Face aux désastres: Une conversation à quatre voix sur la folie, le care, et les grandes détresses collectives (Ithaques, Paris, 2013). In her ethnographic exploration of imagination’s formative and transformative power, she relates to the experience of mental illness and domination in the Maghreb, and to an Islamic understanding of imagination as sensory and divine imprint in practices of healing and image-making. She guest-curated Matrix 274, a contemporary art exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum entitled J’Accuse, featuring the work of Kader Attia (2019) and co-curated the exhibition The Ruins We Carry, featuring the image-work of the anonymous Syrian film collective Abounaddara (2024), conceived in a long collaboration with Abounaddara and premiering the three-channel film installation “The Imagemaker”. She is currently working on a book entitled Art-Cure: Image-work at a Time of Catastrophe, based on her ethnography and collaborations with several artists.

During my research on the aesthetics of revolt in Tunisia, I was confronted with a double absence in the improvised ways I made sense of the ways subjectivities were formed, as the authoritarian spectacle was turned against itself by the people who wanted “the fall of the regime!” … But what did I want? Not properly speaking Tunisian Darija or Arabic, generated an important gap and distance between my interlocutors and me, but also between my field of research in general and me. Mediated by the French language, the knowledge I built was necessarily partial. Along the way, I convinced myself it was the very language barrier that compelled me to delineate my subject and to look into the aesthetic, (in)visible and more embodied movements of revolt, analytically opposing the concept of aesthetics to that of culture. Maybe admitting the difficulties to learn the local language properly, would have been more generative? I propose to look back at my own process of becoming a passionate researcher in times of planetary revolt, somewhere in between Brussels and Tunis. Moved by a dialogue with visual artist Bouchra Khalili, I will reconsider the figuration of the storyteller as hlayqi·a. I will ground the stories I tell in the poetics and relational forms of study and (un)schooling we are presently enabling in the Kitchen, a collective space always in the making in Brussels. By telling stories against ethnography, or even refusing the category of (auto)ethnography altogether in favor of storytelling, I will try to share the feeling of impossibility of doing research otherwise, all the while finding my own ABC, my own words, language, and poetics to speak or tell stories nearby, staying close to the trouble of my own lived experiences. The urgency of the present moment compels us to slow down and improvise different methods, to envision and enact exit plans that can prefigure a world to come, a more loving and caring world, a world where many different worlds fit.

Joachim Ben Yakoub is a writer, researcher and lecturer operating on the border of different art schools and institutions in between Tunis, Tunisia, and Brussels, Belgium. He is affiliated to the MENARG and S:PAM research group of Ghent University, where he is conducting research on the aesthetics of revolt somewhere in between Tunisia and Belgium. He is guest professor at LUCA school of Arts Brussels and lecturer at Sint-Lucas School of Arts Antwerp, where he is also promotor of the collective action research The Archives of the Tout-Monde. As part of ‘The Kitchen’, a safe house in the center of the capital, he is currently experimenting with different rhythms of hosting and sharing fugitive aesthetic praxes.

This seminar will be organized online. You can register for this session here.

By the middle of the twenty-first century, war, famine, economic collapse, and climate catastrophe had toppled the world's governments. In the 2050s, the insurrections reached the nerve center of global capitalism—New York City. This book, a collection of interviews with the people who made the revolution, was published to mark the twentieth anniversary of the New York Commune, a radically new social order forged in the ashes of capitalist collapse.

Here is the insurrection in the words of the people who made it, a cast as diverse as the city itself. Nurses, sex workers, antifascist militants, and survivors of all stripes recall the collapse of life as they knew it and the emergence of a collective alternative. Their stories, delivered in deeply human fashion, together outline how ordinary people's efforts to survive in the face of crisis contain the seeds of a new world.

https://www.commonnotions.org/buy/everything-for-everyone

Eman Abdelhadi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. She is a mixed-methods sociologist studying gender, migration, and religion, with a substantive interest in Muslim Americans. Her qualitative work examines the interplay between community and identity among migrants, and her quantitative work uses survey data analysis to ascertain how religion intersects with economic, political and cultural outcomes. Her research project, a book manuscript entitled Impossible Futures: Why Women Leave Muslim American Communities, charts trajectories of embeddedness in Muslim communities in the United States. She finds that Muslim institutions place anxieties about cultural assimilation onto women’s shoulders, creating unintended pressures that drive them out. The book asks what happens when individuals face future expectations that are impossible to actualize.

M. E. O'Brien writes on gender and communist theory. She co-edits two magazines, Pinko, on gay communism, and Parapraxis, on psychoanalytic theory and politics. Her work on family abolition has been translated into Chinese, German, Greek, French, Spanish, and Turkish. She received her PhD from NYU.

LIGHT UPON LIGHT

A fieldtrip into the mystical traditions of Islam exploring people's search for light at a time of darkness and political tension in post revolutionary Egypt. Sonia sees light streaming into her heart from a person’s finger. Aya is lifted into a luminous space in the midst of a ritual. Maher travels to the shrine of a holy man to find out if the light and love that people are referring to is real. Meanwhile the film crew, Muhammad, Amira, and Christian tries to find out how they can film these experiences of light and how there can be so much light and darkness in this world and inside themselves.

Documentary, 78 min, Hassala Films and Persona Film, Cairo–Aarhus 2022 

Directed by Christian Suhr, produced by Hala Lotfy 

Written and edited by: Muhammad Mustapha and Christian Suhr 

Filmed by: Christian Suhr, Amira Mortada, and Muhammad Mustapha 

Trailer: https://vimeo.com/680959384?share=copy

Christian Suhr is a filmmaker and professor of visual and multimodal anthropology at Aarhus University. He is the PI of the ERC-project: “Heart Openings: The Experience and Cultivation of Love in Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam” (2021-26). His previous research has focused on invisible spirits, psychiatric illnesses, demonic and divine forces, and how film can be used to approach unseen dimensions of human life. He has explored these topics during fieldwork projects in Egypt, Papua New Guinea, and Denmark.

He is the author of the book Descending with angels: Islamic exorcism and psychiatry, a film monograph (Manchester University Press 2019) based on a feature length film of the same title. In addition, he is the director of the award-winning films Unity through culture (with Ton Otto, DER 2011), Ngat is dead (with Ton Otto and Steffen Dalsgaard, DER 2009) and Want a camel, yes? (with Mette Bahnsen, Persona Film 2005).

Social scientists and anthropologists study the real world and try to meticulously record and describe what happens “out there” in an objective manner. But, what if this assumed premise wasn’t as simple and the “world out there” is not there to be grasped. This inaugural seminar will be the opportunity to unpack and explore the notion of speculation within social and anthropological theory and philosophy. Through a dialogical exchange between Maryam Kolly, Isabelle Stengers and Benedikte Zitouni, we will inquire into the intellectual genealogy of this approach, and how it invites social scientists for a different account and understanding of the “real”. We will engage into both the epistemological as well as the methodological aspects of “speculative thinking” and how it unsettles conventional research practices and invites for different and creative ones. The lecture will address the idea of "thinking with" rather than "thinking about." How can the idea of experience and experimentation be translated in the field of social sciences? And how does it relate to collective speculation and knowledge-building? Faced with the Anthropocene, the Capitalocene, or racism, how can alternative narratives make their voices heard, influence the world stage in order to propose futures, ways of acting, resisting, and thinking?

Maryam Kolly was a social worker from 2002 to 2013. She holds a doctorate in Sociology and is a researcher and visiting Professor at Université Saint-Louis Bruxelles since 2012. Her research interests include youth (sub-culture, migration, religious identity, social work and the epistemology of fieldwork. Her publications include : Maryam Kolly, Diplomate au pays des Jeunes. Histoires de travail social, de quartier et d’école. Histoires de flamands et de drari, Louvain-la-Neuve, Academia ; Maryam Kolly (dir.), HERstory, Féminisme, minorité et visualité, Bruxelles, La lettre volée, 2023.

Isabelle Stengers is a Belgian philosopher of science and a prominent figure in the field of science and technology studies. Isabelle Stengers has made significant contributions to the field of social sciences, challenging conventional ideas about the objectivity of science and the separation of science from society. Her work continues to be influential in discussions about the role of science and technology in contemporary society. Amongst her numerous publications : Isabelle Stengers, L’Invention des sciences modernes, Paris, La Découverte, 1993 ; Isabelle Stengers, Au temps des catastrophes. Résister à la barbarie qui vient, Paris La Découverte, 2008 ; Isabelle Stengers, Réactiver le sens commun. Lecture de Whitehead en temps de débâcle, Paris, Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond/La Découverte, 2020

Benedikte Zitouni is Professor in Sociology at Saint-Louis University, Brussels. She is interested in collective intelligences and has written empirical tales, based on archival work, conveying people’s ingenuity and societal changes at work. Such tales involve urban ecological experiences or communities’ and prisoners’ struggles, but also civil servants’ and technicians’ successes, as well as the tactics involved in peace camps or neighbourhood occupations. In several papers, she tackles the connections between knowledge-making, narratives and empowerment and she has written about situated knowledge, otherworldliness and matters such as remembering and memory-making. Her publications include : Benedikte Zitouni, Agglomérer. Une anatomie de l'extension bruxelloise (1828-1915), Bruxelles, Academic Scientific Press & VUB Press, 2010 ; Benedikte Zitouni, Terres des villes. Enquêtes potagères aux premières saisons du 21e siècle, Paris, éditions de l’Eclat.

What do critical epistemologies look like in authoritarian times?

Critical research within the Western academy has for some time interrogated and critiqued the symbiotic relationship between science, knowledge production and the state, noting the central role of the science and social science disciplines for furthering the needs and desires of the liberal capitalist state (in both its domestic and imperialist forms) (Foucault 2007, Said 1978).  For the imperial state, social science research enabled more productive management of both its domestic and colonised populations while the broader institution of education has been pivotal for instilling key ideological norms. The paradox, as such critical research demonstrates, is that education is never ‘exclusively associated with domination’ (Giroux 2006). Education offers also promise; a tool for enabling democratic politics and participation, can be liberatory and empowering (Adorno 1998). For all the positivist social science methodological approaches core to normative parts of the academy there is also (at least in the UK) the strong legacy of the cultural turn, the work of scholars such as Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Avtah Brah and Gail Lewis amongst others who helped to pave the way for alternative forms and approaches to research and analysis. Within the cannon of work on the national security state against the research produced in the mould of state disciplines such as criminology and security studies, there has been a plethora of research that has sought to engage in participatory methods, auto-ethnography and collaborative forms of knowledge production to provide alternative frames of thought.

Yet the critique of sciences and social sciences as tools of state power presumes the continued centrality of the university, as an institution of knowledge generation and scientific legitimation, for state power; that is, it assumes the continuity of the liberal state outside of the global authoritarian turn which is shifting and reorienting the place of Higher Education. Rather, with this shift towards hardened and normalised authoritarianisms in a context of burgeoning data capitalism, higher education is increasingly pursued solely as a site of ‘vocational training’, regarded as outdated to some degree by the capacity of data technologies, and dismissed within culture wars by a growing populist right as site of far-left radicalism. This authoritarian turn legitimates an assault on the liberal elements of the state including liberal principles and ethics embedded within social science research. Consequently how we think about the disciplinary aspects of knowledge production and what critical epistemologies of state surveillance might look like are made all the more complex. In this paper I explore this development drawing on my research on the security state and examples from India and the UK.

Surrender: The Death of the West, Caribbean World-Building, and the Future of Us All

Sovereignty has become something of a disavowed category among those committed to Black thriving.  How can one imagine sovereignty in a context in which the specter of Black death on the plantation remains an ordinary parameter for organizing social and economic value?  How can one enact self-determination when new forms of dispossession are continuously rewritten over earlier removals and displacements?  These questions suffuse our engagements with notions of freedom, liberation, and justice, and seem to negate the possibility of sovereignty in Black life, insofar as sovereignty remains tethered to the state, or to the parameters of its institutions.  For many of us, however, a particular understanding of what we might term collective self-making or world-building – something sometimes popularly glossed as “sovereignty” – remains a discursively pertinent frame, insofar as it speaks to the necessity of living outside of but in relation to the juridical structures that govern modern Western political and social life.  In this talk, I will argue that reaching toward a sovereignty “otherwise” requires that we plumb other terms that might afford a clearer articulation of the histories and futures of (in this case) Caribbean freedom.  I will posit “possession” as a kind of companion term to sovereignty, one that both aligns with and disrupts imperialist and nationalist aspirations, and one that will ultimately lead us to another term, “surrender,” which can attune us to relations of repetition, recovery, return, and repair.

For registration, please send an email to hamza.esmili@kuleuven.be.

Urban policy, racialization & (in)security: Notes on space, politics and ideology

What are the relations among urban policy, processes of racialization and the problematic of security? In this talk, I approach this question by focusing on the centrality of racialized geographical imaginaries of danger in expert knowledge produced for urban and security policies that target racialized marginality in imperial metropoles. Based on four years of ethnographic work in Toronto, Canada, a city that is often celebrated as a leader in diversity and inclusion, I engage with the transformed continuity of colonial thought and ideology in the making of Toronto’s “immigrant neighbourhoods” (areas of urban deprivation, populated by majority non-White residents) as spaces of racialized ungovernability, as spaces that are simultaneously in need of securitization and tutelage. I underline the central roles of urban policy, liberal multiculturalism and liberal humanitarianism in this process of making. In doing so, my aim as a critical researcher committed to social and racial justice is to draw attention to the imperative of engaging with the productive power of the state in normalizing racism and racialization. The case of Toronto makes visible how territorial stigmatization, securitization and racialization heavily build upon the liberal humanitarian ethos of compassion, inclusion and empowerment. I conclude by highlighting the lessons we can take from Toronto for engaging with these questions in the European context. This talk is based on my recently published book, Fearing the Immigrant: Racialization and Urban Policy in Toronto (University of Minnesota Press, 2022).