ISSUE #28
about Tverbakk/Abukhadra/Meister/Nash
by Cameron Downey
But the Skin of The Earth is Seamless by Kieran Myles-Andrés Tverbakk emerges as a chorus of senses. From etchings between hues of dust to pinnings of what looks (and feels) epidermal, Tverbakk makes central to all who visit that what’s left of the body sits kindly by its possibilities. The oeuvre of Kieran Myles-Andrés Tverbakk’s show reads sleek and delicious. Resin-coated black planks share a world with gestures of hair and other fruits of the earth. An airy shelter– absolutely black– cages flowers at center stage. Each object beckons to a voice and their calls and responses streak light across the room, reminding us that with each sky is a chasm.
If what Tverbakk’s world implies is heaven and its below, then Lamia Abukhadra’s The Shape of Thin Air by all means looks into and through that chasm. The real meets, over land, the ultrareal by way of drawing and rememory. Within Abukhadra’s exploration of bodily and institutional form surfaces a mapping greater than those which produced it. Huddles of people blur into one another. Screenprints and screenshots reinforce the gathering’s tenor. Huddles of people sink into rubbles of building. Huddles of people– serial on paper– grid themselves as a guide. To what they guide is not as easily accounted for. What’s clear and poetic is that question which Abukhadra piles high: Whether the path to, from and within escape is easily known.
Not far from the intangible findings of Abukhadra, Austin Nash reveals a testament to expertise over monochromatic video. Revision, the lasting documentation of habit, comes alive as ink screens discuss their variances with one another. The entirety of the video, showcasing three screens side by side, gyrates and writhes without ever fully rupturing. The explanation of Nash’s process arrives as a proof that leaps.
Plunging into the world of Kelley Meister’s Fallout shelter demands at first, a suspension of disbelief. Pristine walls share corners with leviathan imagery of non-perishables. On sanitary, sparsely filled shelves sit containers of Everything I Miss alongside Ingenuity.They face a bounty whose images make windows of the basement gallery space’s walls. Pastures and green giants run atop and between cans of vegetables and other items deemed necessary for one of many world-ending events. In Meister’s ontological landscape, preparation leaves a wall for fear. To be more precise, a scale of it. Meister’s charting of possible happenings invites, quite literally, a collective mapping of how what-ifs show up across preparation and expectation. The spattering of colored dots swirls the coordinates of safe and afraid and answers without question the overlap between escape and protection.
Cameron Downey is an anti-disciplinary artist and environmental scientist from Minneapolis, Minnesota. A recent graduate of Columbia University in New York City, she explores concepts of world-building and liminal space by way of Black, fantastical and precarious bodies. Cameron uses sculpture, film, photography, the written and the performed to engage and engulf a language of epics out of the minutiae.
Downey’s art has been exhibited by HAIR+NAILS in: her solo show “Three Things Last Forever” (2020), and group shows: HAIR+NAILS at 9 Herkimer (Brooklyn, 2019), FUTURE FUTURE (2020) and “The Human Scale” at Rochester Art Center (summer/fall 2021). Downey guest curated HOLDING SPACE, an exhibition of video, image, light and sound, in the H+N frontyard (summer 2020).
Help Me Fill Our Shelves
by Emmett Ramstad
Presented as three separate shows, the works in “But the Skin of the Earth is Seamless,” by Kieran Myles-Andres Tverbakk, “The Shape of Thin Air,” by Lamia Abukhadra, and “Fallout Shelter,” by Kelley Meister, inform each other. Themes of the ephemeral body, the connection to bordered lands, the ways we (can maybe) come together intermingle throughout the gallery, unencumbered by exhibition designation. Kieran’s work asks us to consider the body both protected and linked together, Lamia’s drawn and photographed bodies assemble and layer like stones and Kelley’s work acknowledges the land, the grief, the fear, asking that we may fill our shelves of preparedness together.
“But the Skin of the Earth is Seamless,” Kieran Myles-Andres Tverbakk: Poet and activist Eli Clare posits in his 1999 book, “Exile and Pride,” that pride transforms shame, adopting and adapting the body. The art in Kieran’s show does not celebrate, but appears like adaptive forms, adopting a media that works for the moment. Canvas, nails, paint, epoxy, undergarments, fake flowers. But as the borrowed title of this exhibition suggests, the skin of the earth is seamless; the canvases only represent a partial story, a sample. And there is always a reckoning with fragments (some may say binaries or borders), because they are not complete, they separate. But when they are attached, like a land without borders, or a body without labels, a more holistic narrative forms. Using nails as adhesive bridges, Kieran is holding fragments in place, piecing them together like tapestry. The nails snug and bend over each other, spoon into chains, pierce the surface and adorn the perimeter of the work. In Bandera, a nail chain lives along the shaft of a skin flag, a bandera. Could this be a flag for the pain of a separated body? Or a pride flag for skin pieced back together?
The nails are curling around themselves in a protective communal pose, reimagining a way for nails to work that is not described in the instruction manual. In this exhibition, Kieran reimagines nails as chains, skin as clothing, hair as symbol, hardened vaseline-like epoxy as the earth grappling with being a body artificially bordered and splayed. The hand of shiney black fingers protects the forever beauty of the fake gorgeous flowers. Standing among this work, I find myself wondering where pleasure lives.
“The Shape of Thin Air,” Lamia Abukhadra: When the house is destroyed and we congregate, do we become the land which has been transformed? Lamia’s exhibition includes layered transparent drawings of piled and clustered people and rocks deliberately pinned together. They depict walls that are rubble and then re-built. I am reminded of time not as in human historic time, but in geologic terms where this moment is but a blip. Limestone is strong, long lasting, can shift and tilt yet maintain its form by staying stacked together. Perhaps leaning this way or that towards the fall, together.
I am reminded of looking at a book about evolution with my young child and trying to describe just how old the earth is and how humans have only been on it for such a short time. This is a really hard concept, even with a diagram. And when we go to pipeline protests, I try to describe how much harm is being caused to this ancient earth through fracking, drilling and more. And then when I try and calm my child down in bed at night, because the world is really gigantic when you are small, we breathe and ground into the very huge earth which holds us.
There is history in these layers of earth. Skeletal remains. Describing her 2019 work, How to Shrivel, which depicts dried citrus “stones” next to limestone architectural diagrams overlaid with poetry, Lamia says: “I see ruins existing as both physical spaces such as an abandoned home, and metaphysical spaces such as memory and human relationships.” And in this 2021 exhibition, Lamia continues to connect images of ruins using layering and text, and in this work she depicts humans too- clustered in a corner, in a gesture that becomes stone memorials. In these drawings, people barricading a door become the very limestone that has been used to make settlements that displace them. The drawings, some transparent, some opaque, are all pinned to the wall with T-pins, reminding me that this is not a fixed narrative. T-pins are advertised as “a great solution for securely affixing items to wood, cork, fabric, and other seemingly impenetrable surfaces.” Secure but temporary. In this show, T-pins hold transparencies like skin flakes reminded of their relationship to the body, these drawings make their way back home and show the absence and growth of the body who made them.
“Fallout Shelter,” Kelley Meister: I associate basements with musty wet smells and the memory of a special “grocery room” in my grandma’s basement. She would send me down there for a can of my favorite black olives that she had stocked up on when it was on sale and she had a coupon. My grandma was super resourceful at deals and at being “prepared.” She learned to do this in the depression and never relaxed into regular prices even when she could eventually afford them. She spent her retirement days driving between Cub and Aldi with coupon slips in hand, dying with a large sum of money which she gifted to her sons. And here is Kelley Meister’s exhibition, Fallout Shelter, asking me to reconsider my values around survival and what it means to be prepared in the face of imminent hardship. Could we, as Kelley suggests, join together to “fill our shelves” with needed resources?
Upon descending the stairs into the basement gallery, I immediately feel small next to the grandeur of the acknowledgement scrolls that meet me at the bottom: Land, Grief and Fear. My family here never acknowledged the land beyond a place where our relatives immigrated to- working class whites moving to Northeast and South Minneapolis seeking employment and traveling to dances once a month on trolley cars. Yet here, introducing Fallout Shelter, is the acknowledgement from a white artist that “we are standing on Dakota homeland” an introduction to the great river and the polluters that line her shores, ending with a suggestion we could prepare for an end point to colonialist, carceral, capitalist, white supremacist society together. Whoa. Yes! My grandma was considering her own family’s physical survival needs, not the land, certainly not the emotional well-being or collective struggle to end conditions that made white families like mine landowners and wealth bearers.
In Fallout Shelter, there are images of canned food, depicted in lavish scale and variety, pasted all over the walls and stacks of faux boxes on the interior replete with new ingredient labels like truth. On metal storage shelves are homemade ceramic cans for non-perishables like courage, mutual aid, dance parties, self love, security, and more that Kelley, along with participants in hir workshops, has begun making. What will I contribute to this shelter? Creative thinking? Empathy? Love? Shortly after the pandemic started I got a fever and Kelley told me to write a list of all the things I would do with my time in quarantine so that I didn’t feel awash and hopeless. This loving aid and re-direct is what helped fill my shelves and made quarantine seem manageable. This is also what I would also like to contribute to the collective shelves! I want to use my creative thinking as an artist, educator and parent to support innovative ways of navigating (and potentially transcending) old problems.
With consideration and vulnerability, Kelley’s work asks us to consider preparedness not simply from a material perspective, but what it actually means to be prepared emotionally, physically, and collectively. This isn’t the apocalypse of arming up or of an individual larder, this is the suggestion that we are facing a great many hurts and could come together “to fill OUR shelves.”
Emmett Ramstad’s sculptures and participatory works explore body maintenance and the intimate collectivity of public space. His achievements include solo exhibitions at Minneapolis Institute of Arts and Rochester Art Center, and numerous national exhibitions. He has received many awards including a Jerome Foundation Fellowship, a Forecast Public Art Grant, and Minnesota State Arts Board Grant. He is a lecturer at the University of Minnesota and a huge fan of HAIRandNAILS. www.emmettramstad.com
The Sublimation of the Mound: Lamia Abukhadra’s The Shape of Thin Air
Brooks Turner
Over four days in July of 2019, Israeli military forces violently removed residents of Wadi el-Hummus, a neighborhood of Jurusalem in the West Bank, before demolishing over a dozen buildings capable of housing hundreds of people. This action violates the Oslo Accords of 1995, which secured Palestinian control of the area forbidding legal interference from Israel. But a treaty only lasts as long as it serves an imperial power; Israel has over 230 settlements on occupied Palestinian land, some extracting resources from the landscape, all enforced by military power.
These recent events set the stage for Lamia Abukhadra’s exhibition, The Shape of Thin Air. In “Sunrise in Wadi el-Hummus July 21, 2019,” nine digital photographs printed as a contact sheet depict a number of people blocking a large door. Each still image flows into the next, as if frames in a film, the camera blurring and moving across the subject, capturing a frenetic energy to what I read as an act of resistance to imperial power, to invasion. July 21st marked the final ruling of the Israeli Supreme Court that denied Palestinian appeals to stop the demolition of these buildings, which had been built legally, with permits (as told by hand drawn text in “Formations” hanging on the left adjacent wall). Hours later, the neighborhood was raided and people violently removed, forced to watch the destruction of their homes, their livelihoods at a distance.
The filmic quality of Abukhadra’s work continues beyond the contact sheet. The huddled figures I referenced above repeat as fragmented drawings and rendered images. In one drawing on translucent paper, the conglomerated bodies become an abstracted mound of white lines and grey shapes blocking the doorway, a shape which is further conceptualized in a handwritten note included as part of another work titled “To Mound”:
A CLOSE GROUPING OF PEOPLE
OR THINGS.
COME CLOSER TO ME
CUE THE CHORUS
LINE
YOU ARE TOGETHER OR
YOU ARE ALONE
TO MOUND
IS TO ENCLOSE OR FORTIFY OR
HEAP INTO PILES
Through this excerpt, Abukhadra turns the mound (heap, pile) into a force of resistance by defining it as a shape of disorder, a shape that cannot be categorized or delineated. The note is pinned to a drawing of a hand holding a single rock atop a mound of others. I read the pile of rocks as heaped ruins following the demolition of the targetted Palestinian buildings in Wadi el-Hummus, but a zine by Abukhadra sharing the same title as the exhibition contextualizes this mound as a Palestinian cultural practice. Each stone is called a witness stone, and the pile a memory or memorial emanating from an individual, a family, or a community experience. Collectively, the decentralized network of stone piles and pillars across Palestine becomes a protective web against evil spirits, and further materializing as a poetics of physical resistance to imperialism: mounds disrupt colonial organization, mounds block the invasion of vehicles, mounds offer protection from projectiles. Abukhadra conjures a complex semiotics of this amorphous shape where individual stones join individual people, becoming a chorus of physical and spiritual memory and resistance written into a landscape.
We can hear the individual voices of the chorus in fragments of text throughout The Shape of Thin Air. “To destroy this house… death. An early death” is the only work to occupy its own wall, fitting the somber tone of the title, which appears as hand drawn text—a voice—in a smeared and blurred field of greytones on translucent paper, pinned over what I read as a drawing of the Palestinian landscape. This title page is wrinkled and creased through aggressive mark making, manifesting the loss felt in the text. In the drawing behind, a hill rises above a ring of buildings as if the land itself resists occupation, a mound standing in defiance.
Abukhadra’s use of translucent tracing paper implies a way in which the structures of imperialism and resistance to it map from one context to another; the mound as a form of resistance need not be isolated to the imperialist conditions of Israeli occupation. Even though a mound does not appear in Abukhadra’s last two pieces in this exhibition, the idea of resistance becomes an essential aspect to a second narrative of imperialism: the destruction of Spirit Island, a sacred space for the Dakota people once located at the center of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis. Fragments of text in “A warning of the emptiness to come” lead us towards this historical context. Over generations, the extraction of sandstone, valuable to colonial settlements on occupied land, turned the island into a shell, until finally in 1963 it was removed in entirety and the river made deeper to increase shipping capacity. In reading her text, I fixate on one line: “The end of the world is a grid.” In the Heideggerian sense, worldhood is the embedment of people in space and time; a world is a conglomerate of living and nonliving entities that become interconnected through experience. In this sense, the end of a world is a kind of apocalypse, one that can happen to one world while another world continues to exist. The streets of Minneapolis are the grid that marks the end of Dakota worldhood in this landscape while settler-colonial imperialism persevered; the West Bank wall is a grid in process that represents the destruction of Palestinian worldhood. The grid is a way to categorize and delineate a landscape, functioning literally as a tool of imperialism, and abstractly as a system of laws that enforce erasures.
The final work, “Free as Air,” presents a pair of birds—which Abukhadra connects through her zine to a Palestinian folktale—drawn at the center of collaged translucent papers. Text in the upper right corner reads:
THE BODILESS BODY
SUCKED CLEAN
CANNOT RETURN AS IT WAS
IT MUST MUTATE
TRANSUBSTANTIATE
I can’t help but recall the final lines of “To Mound”: “The noise and the bodies / in formation.” A heap of figures becoming a mound is a kind of bodiless body, bodiless not in physical absence, but in categorical absence. Similarly, air cannot be categorized, air floats through and between the spatial structure of a grid, air is the shape of transcendence.
Abukhadra’s hand performs an alchemical merging of people, politics, cultural practices, histories, spirituality, and resistance. Across these works we feel individual voices through text and mark making, we see their shapes and sense their movements as together they become a united chorus. The Shape of Thin Air sublimates the mound into vapour vibrating with voices that sing resistance, deny the grid by refusing its rules, transcend imperialism, and reject settler colonialism.
Brooks Turner is an artist, writer, and educator. His recent work engages the history of fascism in Minnesota, and has appeared at the Weisman Art Museum, St. Cloud State University, MnArtists, and as an Exhibition-in-Print in the StarTribune. He has taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, St. Cloud State University, Ridgewater College, and is currently Chair of Visual Art at St. Paul Conservatory for Performing Artists. In 2017, he wrote A Guide to Charles Ray Sleeping Mime, published with Paperleaf Press, and continues to write essays for HAIRandNAILS Gallery and Temp/reviews.
HAIRandNAILS Exhibition
The Shape of Thin Air, Lamia Abukhadra
Fallout Shelter, Kelley Meister
But the Skin of The Earth is Seamless, Kieran Myles-Andrés Tverbakk
by Lisa Marie Brimmer
I walked into hair and nails and into a gallery exhibition that seemed to gather the intricate skirts of our natural and social world in order to bound towards some sort of collective note punctuating our transition with shiny resin, translucent layered sketchings, and ceramic canned goods.The work of Lamia Abukhadra, Kelley Meister, and Keiran Myles-Andrés Tverbakk flashes us a collective delicate ankle.It exposes us to our own (sometimes brutal, sometimes whimsical, always complicated) assumptions that shape the truths of our times.
We live in a built and inherited crossroads. And while I’m alone in a gallery, I descend into three installations that have me mining trans narrative possibilities and confronting my own vulnerabilities. Sometimes in the hints of my varnished reflection in one of Tverbakk’s mixed media pieces, or the wonder of Abukhadra’s fine stenciling and intimate poetry, or the sincere, gilded humorous and loving collection of containers found in Kelley Meister’s Fallout Shelter.
***
Kieran Myles-Andrés Tverbakk’s But the Skin of The Earth is Seamless simply pulsates. By that I mean it is living. Organic. Mended.
I marvel at the sleek, shine, and texture of both the natural and human-made developments in Tverbakk’s collection. I have entered their story beginning with a childhood dress in steel grating (bound), and witness chains made of bent nails (self-portraiture, untitled), the tiniest open window slit of corn and soil (herida abierta).
Skin is our largest human organ. It breaks. It bleeds. It scars. It’s composure is a lie. Kind of like the lie of national boundaries. Like the lie of capitalist land use. As I enter I notice resin covered wood, a used/worn chest binder, delicate clay eggs…and it feels good to be surrounded by the hard and rough and smooth.
“la bandera” is textural and prominent. Dangerous, maybe a little too… tactile? The stretching. I will always remember the stretching. I feel it in my own body, the sense of torsion and contortion. The trying of learning how to make myself fit.
I have become a sort of digital zombie this past year.[1] So much of my interaction has been so flat and virtual this long pandemic year. My pants have all been elastic. I choose to slip on my shoes. But more deeply, I struggle with an unstable and insatiable gender. Tverbaak suspends the viewer.
To see an extension of the human tethered by plied nail to assorted leather pieces, I am stunned by the strength and gravity of each image. The collection is graphic in the way that nature is a graphic: often, a place of things in various stages of thriving and decomposition.
Our process of growth, of weathering change is sometimes visible on our beautiful marked bodies. As the suggestions of light grab the resin, as velvet frollicks through chicken wire, playful flowers are carefully nested and seem to consider what it is that keeps us here. What keeps us us? How far are we from nature? How near?
The glint of form from the chain of bent nails asks us questions about force. The artists’ hair is a shed skin. An offering.Reminded of the protesting “But” in title, But the Skin of the Earth Is Seamless, I suddenly question the maps I’ve been admiring for the past ten minutes. As I have been studying the difference between living and what is said to be alive, I’m charmed by the sense of maturity and futurity in Tverbakk’s mixed media work.
It is curious about our human desire for trophies and tropes. It is not that nature was not neglected here, but that nature is composed. Organized. Fragile. Tverbakk’s work pulls the lines and charges imagined registers of places un-named. Maybe it is a possible exhumation of our present moment: mixed metals, a foreboding awareness of the past as a trap. Sometimes a flag of surrender is just the beginning.
***
As people living in so-called Minneapolis navigate present or threatened military occupation, as we hobble home early for curfew, or fail to catch the last bus in time to make it home safely, as we are haunted by a national guard presence on street corners with long guns and armed vehicles two men high, some of us hold the tension in our throats of how guard members quartered by local restaurants very near the gallery while protestors of state sanctioned violence are kept ziptied on crowded inhospitable busses and maybe processed for felony charges.
Here again we have had another police killing of a civilian, and this time it is while we wait for a verdict on Derek Chauvin who killed community member George Floyd by suffocating him to death in broad daylight with incredible surveillance.
Soon encampments housing Native folks will be busted up on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women awareness day. When I cross the threshold into Lamia Abukhadra’s The Shape of Thin Air and my body becomes a hesitant lung. Bright velum scrims of various shapes and sizes play with light and seem to breathe — rummaging words and phrases from the artist draw longing, decrying death in repetition… still all of my impressions are hazy. Hazed.
How are we so constantly asked to patch together what must have been, from what is now missing? From who is now gone? How do we remember each other?
Abukhadra provides a palimpsest that is delicately straight pinned to the walls of the intimate back atrium. The Shape of Thin Air ruminates on collective witness and the occupied and emancipated imagination. The mutable forms the artist invokes map an open city. On in which each flinch could be deadly. “To destroy this house… death. An early death.” ushers a strike of images displaying erasure and loss in landscape. How material is the evidence of bombardment? How something that was here, now it is not? Any ruins that exist, what we see, only tell us part of the story.
Impermanence is a global condition.[2] Abukhadra’s jacklight gaze is accompanied by a zine of the same title. In it Abukhadra composes a flash essay on so-called cultural and traditional resurrections in the face of “surpassing disaster”.[3] She discusses how cultural and physical erasures are resisted in the bodies, minds, and he(art) of cultural producers. She displays in the collection how people survive. How cultures may mend. Polyvocal stories and images arise from an area annexed by colonial force. Any re-tellings of a happening animate as they complicate. Buildings, homes, castles compose themselves from state-sanctioned evaporation.
In the digital art print “Twelve to sixteen bodies” pop wisdom runneth over. Is it a slowed film? A dance? Is it a frame of defense?[4]A cultural preservation mashahid of bodies. What assumptions do we make of these bodies, these (surveilled) images?
It asks if visibility and intelligence matter in terms of such subjects as our/their bodies living and breathing? More than grievable, Abukhadra views our lives and culture as alchemic. The series “Formations”, “To Mound” and “Chorus”, flirt with rhythmic transparency; the images seem to double, or parrot themselves. Am I seeing clearly? This is where I seemed to fall into the sunken place of the exhibition. I don’t just supply but become mashahid or a witness stone.[5]
Lately, I become dislocated in my bodymind simply trying to reckon with whatever the latest local headlines.[6] Alongside Abuhkadra’s Palestine is so-called Minneapolis, sacred land of the Dakota and Anishinaabe peoples, home of the Bdote and sacred birthplace of the Dakota, and Bde Maka Ska. A holy confluence of rivers. A sovereign lake reclaimed in name. This translocal artist seamlessly mines both sites of empirical violence and bears witness to the mashahid. “within this form of cultural production, the supernatural, the traditional, and the literal are seamlessly woven together, asserting an imaginal primacy within societal and kinship structures and creating a natural dialectical relationship between the worldly and unworldly.” (Abukhadra “The Shape of Thin Air” zine). More simply this project considers our oneness in time and space. It considers solidarity and with-ness as well as witness.
***
In the basement exhibit Kelley Meister’s Fallout Shelter offers commodified nourishment that fills various registers. Cans of various meats, stews, vegetables are depicted in mural sized displays and ceramic pieces gathered from workshops hosted by the artist. The haphazard inkjet printed signs are embellished with gouache, watercolor and ink.
Welcomed with a land, grief and fear acknowledgment, the artist honors the land as it reminds us of our location. A reminder we might need. How long will we be trapped inside? How many of us will make it here? Will we be alone or together? Will we open the door to let anyone inside?
At times the installation feels whimsical, with hidden words like truth, self-love and courage commodified alongside cans of green curry and corned beef. Foolhardy evidence that food is not the only provisions we’ll need to survive. Even the bathroom is activated as a site of hoard-play. There is almost humor in these stores — if it weren’t for the reminder of nuclear disaster and a looming apocalypse. How do we collectively manage our anxieties about our collective doom? How do we store the broken bits? What happens to the waste we create through our survival? How do we make room for creativity? How do we bring our empathy with whatever comes next?
Throughout the installation, manufactured by many incredible twin cities based artists, and their varied lineages and mediums, the forms seem to collapse into a dystopian Disneyland. Here we are asked to parse fact from fiction — after all it’s not all fun and games. This is not disposable art for art’s sake. Although size play suggests proportion might be a challenge.
Although we are asked to index our fear collectively in the interactive “Fear Scale” it feels as though we are part of an emergent community activation. Like the participatory performance experiences that Meister produces, maybe even like the foreboding race war brimming on doorsteps, and in our occupied streets, we know too well that we are only one safety, one trigger, one finger away from collective wasteland.
In the corner a video plays on repeat with sound by Jaffa Aharonov. We see found footage from the Department of Education archive. We watch the explosion on loop in Fallout Shelter (Duck and Cover). We are reminded of the transnational project of nuclear catastrophe, the threat that might still be the glue holding nations together. When does the role play end?
[1] I borrow this term to describe my participation in the technosphere. In Critical Art Ensemble’s Aesthetics, Necropolitics, and Environmental Struggle, the collaborative author generates a synthesis matching the description of the perpetrator/victim I’ve become. “In the “happier”
places within the complex technosphere, we see endless populations of digital zombies armed with phones, pads, and laptops an permanently at work – either intentionally and directly working in the virtual marketplace in order to survive, or working unintentionally by doing “recreational” personal and social data entry for corporations and security agencies.” (p23: Autonomedia, 2018)
[2] I think of 1921 Tulsa. The layers of truth and paper around such a massacre. A race riot to insurers, genocide to the Black community, government subsidized domestic terrorism to citizens of this settler colonial nation-state so called United.
[3] She cites Lebanese artist and filmmaker Jalal Toufic.
[4] As opposed to a frame of war a la Judith Butler.
[5] Abukhadra mentions mashahid, from the Arabic, the place from which something is seen or the place where a pilgrim testifies his unity to god.” ) Tawfiq Canaan, quoted in “the Shape of Thin Air” zine)
[6] I borrow this term from Sami Shalk, who posits “Bodyminds is a materialist feminist dsiability studies concept from Margaret Price that refers to the enmeshment of the mind and body, which are typically understood as interacting and connected, yet distinct entities due to the Cartesian dualism of Western philosophy (“The bodymind problem and the possibilities of Pain 270). The Term Bodymind insists on the inextricably of mind and body and highlights how processes within our being impact one another in such a way that the notion of physical versus mental process is difficult, if not impossible to clearly discern in most cases (269). (p5; Bodyminds Reimagined (Dis)Ability, Race and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction, Duke University Press, 2018)
Lisa Marie Brimmer is a writer and educator born on Ho-Chunk/Sauk/Miami/Meskwaki land. They have published in The Public Art Review, Gasher Journal, The B’K’ and multiple anthologies. They teach as adjunct English Faculty at Century College and this fall will join as affiliate faculty in Arts and Cultural Leadership at the University of Minnesota. Brimmer lives on Dakota land in so-called Minneapolis, MN and is a recently committed MFA candidate at Randolph College. online @leesuhmaroon & lisamariebrimmer.com