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- Convenors:
-
Valerie Haensch
(Anthropological Museum Berlin)
Katarzyna Grabska (Peace Research Institute Oslo)
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- Discussant:
-
Samuli Schielke
(Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO))
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Peter Froggatt Centre (PFC), 03/017
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 27 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Revolutionary struggles take place in public spaces. This panel explores the role of and the relations between aesthetic practices, actualized hope, inspiration and the (re)claiming of public spaces. We examine how protest aesthetics intervene in public spaces to create alternative futures.
Long Abstract:
Over the years, revolts and revolutionary movements around the world struggled against political oppression. Protests are inherently aesthetic as they visually, acoustically, materially and performatively intervene in public spaces to create alternative futures and narratives of social justice. While research has shown that the occupation of squares as sit-in involves intense emotions as mobilizing force (Ayata/Harders 2019), in this panel we explore creative practices and their affective dynamics in the process of (re)claiming public spaces through protests. What kind of emotions, narratives, imaginations and sense of hope or despair do these multisensory practices express, evoke and actualize? How do artists and activists re-appropriate, transform and redefine the commons such as streets, public clubs, gardens or street corners and to what effect? How do new aesthetic forms and practices in the context of protests evolve and travel across time and space? And in turn, how do revolutionary aesthetics across translocal spaces inspire political engagements locally and transnationally and in what forms? As a site of political contestation, reclaimed public spaces are usually challenged by counterrevolutionary forces (Riyadh Bseiso 2018). In this panel, we are also interested to explore how these spaces are kept alive in the revolutionary process against repression and with what effect. How does this challenge the movement's aspirations, hopes or disappointments? We invite ethnographically grounded discussions that address the relations between revolutionary aesthetics, actualized hope, inspiration and the (re)claiming of public spaces.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 27 July, 2022, -Benita Heiskanen (University of Turku)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the ways in which various groups appropriate public space for visual messaging in Havana, Cuba. Based on visual materials collected during fieldwork in Havana, the paper exposes urban space as a contradictory site with multiple linkages between politics, ideology, and identity.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the ways in which various groups, both top down and bottom up, occupy and use public space for visual messaging in Havana, Cuba. The cityscape of Havana entrenches a nexus that intertwines aesthetic practice, the appropriation of space, and formal and informal modes of communication. Based on visual materials collected during fieldwork in Havana between 2015 and 2020, the presentation particularly considers how revolutionary and counterrevolutionary visual statements convey consensus/dissensus viewpoints that seek to either impose status quo meaning or contest such views. The ways in which groups and individuals appropriate, claim, and reclaim shared space for their own purposes prompt important questions regarding individual and collective agency, quests for visibility, and spatial mobilities.
The paper’s focus on both official visual displays (billboards, posters, and roadside signs) and informal visual statements (street art, graffiti, and ad hoc exhibits) exposes urban space as a contradictory site with multiple linkages between politics, ideology, and identity. Particularly in contexts in which freedom of expression may not be self-evident, visuality provides a window into individual participation in public dialogue, penetrating discourses that might otherwise remain hidden or beyond reach. By situating the discussion in specific spatial locations within the city, the paper analyzes a range of place-based, practical ramifications as well as broader theoretical implications of visual-spatial maneuvering in Havana. Ultimately, the paper demonstrates that revolutionary and counterrevolutionary aesthetics reveal multiple un/intended consequences related to for quotidian power relations and knowledge production processes.
Lara Sabra (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper examines the affective and agentive power of graffiti in Beirut after the Beirut port explosion in August 2020. Enchanting passers-by and engendering solidarity, these graffiti enact a refusal to accept a certain reality and a will to imagine another.
Paper long abstract:
The period following the August 4 Beirut port explosion in 2020 was marked by an atmosphere filled with extreme anger and vengeance. The most popular repeated slogan from that time was “hang the noose”: a collective expression of the desire to take revenge from the regime responsible for the explosion. It was repeated in the streets as a protest chant, drawn in the dust of destroyed car windows, and spray-painted on the walls of Martyrs’ Square.
As the months progressed and the momentum from the initial anger-filled protests dissipated, the phrases filling the city streets changed in their nature, meaning, and affective power. The anger was replaced by expressions of melancholy and loss, or poetic and subtle aspirations of hope. This paper will study the agentive and affective power of graffiti that emerged in public urban space following the August 4 explosion.
I draw on testimonies from activists and civilians, ethnographic photography, and participant-observation in political mobilizations to argue that graffiti represents but also intervenes in relationships of power. By considering the way in which opposition groups and individuals use graffiti to present/amplify their own narratives and voices, the paper reveals how graffiti functions as a creative process that transgresses hegemonic ideas and values. Further, through examining the enchantment or affective hold of graffiti on passers-by, the paper studies how this aesthetic process creates an urban solidarity engendered by lived experience and shared emotion. In this way, these writings on the walls enact a refusal to accept a certain reality and a will to imagine another.
Valerie Haensch (Anthropological Museum Berlin)
Paper short abstract:
Moving beyond the sit-in of Sudan’s December Revolution, this paper explores the ongoing struggle to re-appropriate privatised public clubs for the common good by examining aesthetic activist practices that convey a sense of hope and change.
Paper long abstract:
Since the start of the December Revolution in 2018 and the overthrow of president Omar al-Bashir during the sit-in in Khartoum in 2019, competing struggles over access to and control of public spaces have been going on between supporters of the ousted Islamist regime and supporters of the revolutionary movement. In the 30 years of its rule, the old regime had increasingly privatised public spaces such as clubs and parks for monetary purposes and restricted public access. In this paper, I discuss the struggles to reclaim the famous family club in Khartoum through aesthetic practices. Neighbourhood resistance committees, activists, residents and artists occupied the club by painting revolutionary murals and organised public discussions, concerts, art exhibitions and everyday events for children and adults - activities which had been banned and labeled by the previous regime as “un-Islamic”. The impulses to reinterpret this place as a place of people were interrupted and challenged by the military coup in October 2021. Based on ethnographic research, I will explore the process of re-appropriation as a struggle to realise “concrete utopias” (Bloch 1959) of the ongoing revolution and ask how the perceived space and aesthetic practices create shifting experiences of hope and despair for the activists and residents involved.
Derya Özkaya (University of Graz)
Paper short abstract:
Analyzing hope as a relational formation of affective state, this paper explores the potentials and limits of mobilization around and cultivation of hope and desire for change based on empirically grounded analysis of affective politics of anti-government alliances under Turkey's authoritarian turn.
Paper long abstract:
Following the popular uprisings during the summer of 2013, Turkey has witnessed the proliferation of local urban alliances including neighborhood solidarity groups, consumption cooperatives, urban defense initiatives, democracy assemblies, etc. Building solidarity networks around the urgent needs, spreading the pleasure of collective action, and generating affective attachments of belonging, enthusiasm, and trust, they have mobilized the political dissent around the affective archive of the uprisings and (re)produced moments of hope for democracy, freedom, and change under Turkey’s recent authoritarian transformation. Besides functioning as the manifestations of the desire for change, they have also actively constituted and distributed hope through collective action. Bringing affect studies and political theory into dialogue, in this paper, I discuss if these alliances contributed to envisage a new political opposition and explore the role of hope and desire as aspirational political horizons for Turkey's dissent. Building on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork in Istanbul and Eskişehir, Turkey, and the analysis of data collected through in-depth interviews with the constituents of these local alliances and participant observation during their regular meetings and public events in 2016 and 2017, I argue that the politics of hope has unleashed political opportunities for collective resistance under the rising authoritarianism in Turkey. However, it has also confined the political dissent into the realm of the fantasy of democracy and freedom of choice reproducing a “cruel optimism” (Berlant 2011) for change within the existing system and investing affective attachments to an alleged democracy whose limits are defined by the ruling regime.
Alberto Gerosa (Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Paper short abstract:
The analysis of a 5-years dreams and scriptwriting ethnographic laboratory among local filmmakers engaged in the 2014-2019 Hong Kong protests. Tracing the appearance of affects and communitas among activists, I witness the emergence of audiovisual practices of resistance, from dreams to shared myth.
Paper long abstract:
Between 2014 and 2019, the youth of Hong Kong went through a political coming-of-age by organizing and participating in many collective actions of protest. This ethnographic account investigates the emergence, experience and results of collective rituals of resistance in the Hong Kong youth’s rite of passage towards a collective political maturity. Specifically, it aims to engage with the shared emotions and the resulting sensorial vivid memories of young filmmakers taking to the streets and facing the police, the translation and creative processing of these memories into videos as participative creative media, and the percolation of their creative acts throughout the community and society at large.
How will participating in impressive and politically charged events reappear in the informants’ filmmaking practices, and how will they mediate them? I analyse people’s accounts and dreams of their protest experiences, engaging them in a participatory script writing laboratory for an ethno-fiction film. Through these encounters, this study is committed to describing and creatively rendering the emotional experiences of protesters as singularities within the multitude of the crowd, tracing them throughout different ethnographic moments.