Geopoetics Under Censorship (2): Typographic contestations

I’m on the Berlin study trip with my third year students again. Today was a free project day, so everyone could pursue their own interests. I ended up going to three exhibitions, although only two had been on my list. On the way to the Treptow Museum, I followed signs to a ‘Documentation Centre for National Socialist Forced Labour‘, taking a small detour. The centre turned out to be on the site of an actual labour camp, the exhibitions taking place in the former barracks. The camp had been modified and repurposed during GDR times as a vaccine research station, but it was pretty much preserved. As I found out, the site was under threat from housing developers, and one of the exhibits featured a public consultation.

The permanent collection displayed hundreds of photographs, index cards and items from the workers’ lives. I was particularly drawn to the many contrasting biographies in the middle part of the permanent exhibition. They made me think about the many different choices that people can and do make in extreme political circumstances. The connections of many established German companies to forced labour were also well documented. Amongst the archival material, I noticed a familiar place, the Otto Fuchs metal works where one of my uncles worked as a chemist until his early death from brain cancer (ironically, another uncle participated in a post-war film that criticised the collaboration of German industrialists with the Nazi regime – the story is narrated from the viewpoint of an industrial chemist at IG Farben). Many of the documents in the exhibition were produced by the workers themselves, such as photographs, diary entries, legal contestations, customised or sabotaged items. It worked really well to underscore the agency and humanity of the workers who were treated as subhuman by the Nazis. This theme was also continued in the next exhibition on the Berlin colonial exposition of 1896.

Treptow Museum had initially been on the list for my guided day, but I had managed to get the opening hours mixed up. Instead, we went to the excellent Trotz Allem/Despite Everything exhibition and to the the archive around anti-racist struggles in Berlin, both at Fhxb Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum (some great materials there to work through for the students!). The ‘Trotz Allem’ exhibition followed the lives of families that had migrated to Berlin during colonial times. It contested the view that migration into the city was just a recent phenomenon.

The Treptow exhibition, by contrast, looked at (mostly) temporary migration – for the purpose of participation in the colonial exhibition, as ‘exhibits’. ‘zurückgeschaut/looking back‘ was a collaboration between the museum and the civil society project ‘Dekoloniale Memory Culture in the City’. A previous version was put together with the Initative of Black People in Germany (ISD) and Berlin Postkolonial. The exhibtion is to be continually updated and expanded through new findings – hopefully we can go on a guided tour (contact Miriam Fisshaye at Zwedi for tours). As in the previous exhibits, the method was to bring people closer to the viewer by telling their life stories. These stories named people, showed their motivations for participation, their negotiations about the work conditions, and also sometimes their prior life in Berlin, where they were involved in apprenticeships or ran their own businesses. What was special about this exhibition: individualising people visually, e.g. by showing individual portraits, removed from their background context and coloured in to bring them closer/closer in time. Another means was by challenging and creating not only alternative language but also visual performance of language. Specifically, the performed neutrality of language (in this case written language) was being contested:

The Treptow exhibition statement also reminded me of the much cited method by artist Jean-Michel Basqiat: ‘I cross out words so you will see them more. The fact that they are obscured makes you want to read them.’ Although the exhibition designers used a similar method, I did not feel that the crossing out drew more attention to offensive language. To me, the over-written parts felt very natural, as if they should always come in this form. They made the text feel more like an orchestral score where the elaborated bits became a musical score, a silent soundtrack, with the overwritten parts becoming noise or pauses – like thinking pauses that should have occurred to prevent colonial crimes. But now the crimes and the words and pictures are there. Indeed, not only was this method used with writing, but also with photographs and other visuals:

I had to think back to the Fhxb exhibition poster and its typography, but also typographical experiments at the German queer feminist Missy Magazine with regard to race, gender and ability. Having studied some graphic design as part of my fashion studies (I have a BA and MA in Fashion), I know how much typography is being obsessed with by designers, and for good reasons. It makes political statements. When the students walked to the Reichstag building, explained the debate about the font above its entrance (‘Dem Deutschen Volke’/To the German People). Politicians could not decide whether to go for a ‘Gothic’ font, symbolising German tribal connections, or whether to pick a ‘Roman’ font, echoing the empires of antiquity. What kind of history did these politicians want to write?

At Treptow Museum, the combination of ‘Shu-Mom‘ and Rammellzee suited the exhibition really well in terms of style and purpose. It also prepared be for my next exhibition visit, Malicious Mischief by the artist Martin Wong. Wong (1946-1999) was a gay Chinese-American painter and sculptor whose art worked with and against stereotypes around his multiple identities. The first thing I noticed was his writing style, which features prominently in his earlier work. Here is an example:

Image: Martin Wong, Psychic Bandits (1972)

Wong clearly experimented with Chinese-American aesthetics, not just in his paintings but also in his written pieces. The fusion of graffiti and Chinese script is even clearer on his CV:

I like how the font initially appears messy and difficult to read, but is actually easy to decipher. Despite its apparent messiness, it is aesthetically coherent and even pleasant. The resonances it carries are both overt and subversive. I had to think of questions such as: How much does typography influence perception? What amount of detail does our mind need to complete or question an aesthetic of cultural stereotype? Where are graphic boundaries/overlaps between writing systems? How much does our writing reflect individual or group/dominant identity? (Such questions may have featured in the associated conference On the Languages of Martin Wong.)

What both Wong’s typographic experiments and those of the ‘Trotz allem’ exhibition further made me think about is the aliveness of both spoken and written language. Even when transformations sometimes happen through violence, such as invasions, these seem to not only occur one-way. This has not prevented some people from trying to save ‘their’ language from ‘mutilation’, especially dismissing innovations that relate to new cultural influences (read: race, gender, ability…). However, looking at examples such as Chinese character development, more generally transformations in sounds, transcription or meaning, such arguments do not hold. I understand some of this desire, for example, I feel it when the German character “ß” is being progressively eliminated, or when I learn about the many languages and related world views (I need to write that ‘word views’ blog post that has been on my list for ages!) that are dying out right now. I think it depends what we feel attached to or nostalgic about and why. In my view, if we don’t ask about this ‘why’, then the prejudices embedded within land reproduced through language, have done their work. But if we do question our motivations, then the resistant elements that are also contained within, have done theirs. I am hopeful that the latter will continue to assert themselves in interesting ways and spaces, presenting openings even in situations where we suffer from an excess of control.

Geopoetics under censorship: Tom Zé’s ‘Todos Os Olhos’

In the run-up to the RGS session on Geopoetics under Censorship (with Aya Nassar), I am going to post a few examples that inspired the session, as I won’t be able to fit them all into the paper. I want to start with one that came up in conversation with friends last night: Tom Zé‘s notorious album cover for Todos Os Olhos. I saw Tom Zé many years ago in London after reading an article about his experiments with instrumentation. Zé is most known as an earlier contributer to the Brazilian Tropicália movement, a collective of artists that sought to cross boundaries between the everyday and the avantgarde. It was also a political movement that was banned by the government, but later became popularised around the world, especially through its musical output. While Tom Zé separated from the movement, some commentators feel that he encapsulates Tropicalia’s ethos of continuous experimentation.

The concert I attended took place in a rather sterile seated space, but Zé’s energy was palpable even in this kind of environment. The occasion of his visit was to present his new album and theatrical production, the ‘operetta’ Estudando o Pagode. The material for the operetta exemplifies the experimental and often satirical nature of Zé’s work. It uses mundane ‘instruments’ such as leaves and body parts, messes with an increasingly commodified samba genre (pagode), and somehow also centres on the history of women’s oppression as a sort of ‘advice column’ to men. Because of the varied connections of his work with politicial and social issues, Zé calls his style ‘sung journalism‘.

When I told my friends about the performance, they pointed me to his earlier work, and especially an album that was legendary for its ‘carnivalesque’ engagement with censorship. When I looked up the events surrounding the production of Todos Os Olhos, I realised that there was not just one ‘legend’ but several, which seemed to be typical for work produced under censorship, but also for Tom Zé’s jester-like personality. The core of these legends is that the album (lyrics and cover image) was supposed to be a critique of both the censorship under the Brazilian military dictatorship and of fellow political singer-songwriters who still manage to flourish under this regime. While the lyrics are pretty clear in terms of their references, opinions diverge on the function of the image, and especially on what the image actually shows. The first thing I heard was that the image was Tom Zé’s anus, holding a diamond, but looking like a sunset. The second thing I heard was that it was supposed to look like an eyeball, but it was a picture of his girlfriend’s anus with a marbel inserted. I later read that it was perhaps just a mouth holding a marble, but that Zé was told that it was an anus and he believed it. It is worth tracking some of these stories to take in all the bizarre detail.

Given the amount of ‘legends’ that surround the album cover, whether there is an actual anus in the picture or not does not really seem to matter. Whatever is on the cover, Todos Os Olhos represents, as a blurb on Tower Records puts it, “a little jab at the Brazilian dictatorship’s office of censorship, which apparently didn’t recognize a mirror when they saw one” (indeed, Todos Os Olhos translates as ‘all of the eyes’ or ‘all eyes’). There is immense satisfaction in the thought that an eye looking at a sunset is actually an arsehole shoved in the face of an ignorant censor. It sounds like a classic ‘low trumps high’ case: the uncensored cover of an an ‘anus eye’ not only signifies as a perfect inversion, but perhaps also an act of reclaiming freedom, joy and, as ironic as this may seem, dignity. Because of this, the image also works so well as a commentary on the image of the musician as hero, including as a potential critique of Zé himself.

There are other examples of multidimensional parody that came to my mind when looking at Todos Os Olhos. The first is an academic ‘legend’ surrounding Russian literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin who wrote a parodic PhD thesis under Stalin. After nearly costing him his life, it later became the book Rabelais and His World. Ostensibly about medieval carnival and its inversion of the ‘high’ and the ‘low’, the work makes clear contributions to literary theory and medieval history, but it also comments on Stalinist dialectical materialist (‘diamat’) doctrine and related academic complicity. Bakhtin’s movement between Marxist materialism and banned Nietzschean philosophy feels like a cat and mouse game with the censors. There are paralles regarding ‘base’ body imagery, in Bakhtin’s case including shit, piss and arses whose presense is academically well justified, but also incredibly and subversively funny.

An author who pushed the genre even further, though (because?) under less deadly conditions, is George Bataille. In his essay The Solar Anus, he not only attempts to subvert Western ideas of rationality, by mocking both philosophers and their apparent antagonists, but also the concept of parody itself. There is a great article on this by one of Bataille’s translators, Leslie Anne Boldt-Irons, in which she explains the relation between Bataille’s first target (philosophy’s self-imposed limitations in explaining the individual in relation to the universe) and his ‘parody of parody’. As far as I understand it as a non-philosopher, Bataille sees no value in taking down these high minded ideas about the sun and its association with clarity, rationality, or hierarchy. Although he has engaged in a substantial amount of parody, for example, mocking materialism’s dislike for the mundane ‘base’ of life in his essay The Big Toe, or turning pretty much everything into porn, he feels that parody can merely stay within the boundaries of the existing order and not go beyond this system. In fact, as he writes, we already perform this system by turning our eyes equally away from the ‘high’ (e.g. the blinding sun) and the ‘low’ (e.g. sex, death, darkness).

Rather, parody, as Bataille argues, works like a mise-en-abîme: everything is a parody of another thing. It is even mirrored in the physical environment. Life is parodic by default, as its parody already exists in the world: “Everyone is aware that life is parodic and that it lacks an interpretation. Thus lead is the parody of gold. Air is the parody of water. The brain is the parody of the equator. Coitus is the parody of crime”. This might sound a bit far fetched, but Bataille has a point when it comes to difficulties of transcending an established system. Philosophers, poets, artists, all try or claim to transcend, but they may just be imitating or performing a different aspect of the same system. Does that mean that parody has no use politically or artistically? For Bataille, the reason for pursuing parody seems to be greater clarity about the system. As with Bakhtin, I like how “grotesque” geographical imagery becomes a reminder that so much is being ignored that would disturb the orderly system that we would like to impose. If you are not clear about what it is you are attacking or doing, you are probably more likely to participate in maintaining things as they are. Through this, the geophysical imagery performs a refusal. More so, it hints at a world in which things could make sense differently. Tom Zé might call this strategy ‘Explaining Things So I Can Confuse You‘ (a line from his song Tô).

To me, geographical and political context also matters. In Zé’s and Bakhtin’s environments, parody was a different performance, even a psychological necessity. Even if the two men did not design these parodies themselves (in fact, many of Bakhtin’s writings cannot attributed to him with certainty, since writers sometimes transferred authorship for safety reasons), or if they had different intentions, they became a base for ‘legends’ that continue to give sustenance to activists who edure similar conditions. The on-going mutations, as well as the geographical contexts in which these enduring ‘legends’ appear occupy me as much as the new things that keep appearing.

RGS-IBG 2023 Call For Papers: Geopoetics Under Censorship

Thai democracy protester and duck. Photograph: Jack Taylor/AFP/Getty Images

Organisers: Angela Last (Leicester), Aya Nassar (Warwick). We are aiming for a hybrid session to allow for anonymity of some of the speakers.

Sponsor: Political Geography Research Group

Deadline: 10 March 2023

Whichever form geopoetics take, they involve creative engagements with/against officially sanctioned relations with the natural or built environment (Hoover, 2021; Madge, 2014; Magrane et al, 2019), as such we propose they are inherently political (Last 2015, McKittrick 2020; Nassar, 2021; Noxolo and Preziuso, 2012). As recent protests around the world have shown, geographical imagery continues to be used as a means of subverting, confounding or revealing censorship. They have also shown that geopoetics are not limited to academic or literary endeavours and publications but there are very much a political practice of dissent and refusal. In this session we invite contributions that grabble with the (im)possibilities of geopoetic engagements under, against and beyond censorship, or what geographers might interpret as such.

The session recognises that subversions of censorship are not always intentionally constructed as geopoetics but might become interpreted as such by academics.  In this session therefore we hope to unpack some of the questions raised the potential ambiguities, opacities, potentials and problems of geopoetics. The many incomplete, un/intentional or mis/interpretations of geopoetics show that ambiguity can lead to subversive tools for different times and contexts. Yet there are some questions that emerge about decode-ability, especially across time and spaces (Liu and St André, 2018; Maximin, 2012). How much can be read and by whom? What happens when knowledge bases, political references and geographical meanings change? Further, the idea of ‘un-intentional’ geopoetics raise additional questions, not just about intention itself, but also about interpreter motivations: what is the purpose of this deliberate re-reading? Finally, is there perhaps something to be said about forms micro censorships, for example in relation to academic self/censorship, modes of writing or grammars of knowledge production?

We welcome academic, activist and experimental submissions. We invite contributions, academic or otherwise, that relate to –but not restricted to:

• historical and contemporary examples of geopoetics produced under censorship
• practising geopoetics under censorship
• questioning the geographies of censorship
• censorship vs self-censorship
• geographical specificities of metaphor
• accidental/intentional misreadings of subversive or censored work
• legacies of misinterpretations
• risks of producing/distributing subversive geopoetics

Please send abstracts, or descriptions of the interventions to Angela Last (al418@leicester.ac.uk) and Aya Nassar (aya.nassar@warwick.ac.uk)

Works cited:

Hoover, E.M. (2021) Poetic Commoning in European Cities – Or on the Alchemy of Concrete. GeoHumanities 7(2), 464-47.

Last, A. (2015). Fruit of the cyclone: Undoing geopolitics through geopoetics. Geoforum, 64, 56-64.

Liu, L. H., St. André, J.(2018) The Battleground of Translation: Making Equal in a Global Structure of Inequality. Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 38

Madge, C. (2014). On the creative (re)turn to geography: poetry, politics and passion. Area, 46(2), 178–185.

Magrane, E., Russo, L., de Leeuw, S., Santos Perez, C. (eds) (2019) Geopoetics in Practice. London & New York: Routledge.

Maximin, D. (2012) Introduction. In: Césaire, S. The Great Camouflage: Writings of Dissent (1941-45). Maximin, D. (ed). Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press.

McKittrick, K. (2020). Dear science and other stories. Duke University Press.

Nassar, A. (2021) Geopoetics as Disruptive Aesthetics: Vignettes from Cairo, GeoHumanities, 7(2), 455-463.

Noxolo, P, Preziuso, M (2012) Moving Matter. Interventions 14(1), 120-13.