e-flux podcast

Hallie Ayres talks with Shimrit Lee about her forthcoming book, Decolonize Museums.

Shimrit Lee is a writer, educator, and curator based in Philadelphia. An interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of visual culture, performance, and critical security studies, Shimrit’s research interests relate to the cultural production of security narratives in Israel and the US. She holds a PhD in Middle Eastern Studies from NYU, and currently teaches high school history as well as community-based adult education at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Her book, Decolonize Museums, will be published as part of the series “Decolonize That” by Warscapes and O/R Books in 2021.

Bodies exceed humanity. They remind us that we are part of something vaster—and smaller—more complex, more connected than our mere existence as an atomized species. Our bodies, and bodies in general, are comprised of heterogeneity and multitudes. All bodies are wet collective bodies defined by how they link to other bodies, places, environments, technologies. Think of breathing, clogging, decomposing, discharging, flushing, lubricating, melting, menstruating, transfusing. Bodies exist as trans- and extra-territorial beings. They live in hybridity. This porous condition produces a planetary wet-togetherness, a “commoning” force that constitutes all bodies as collective hydro-subjects.

Wet-Togetherness is a collaboration between e-flux and the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water, curated by Andrés Jaque, Marina Otero Verzier, Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos, and YOU Mi, and organized and promoted by the Power Station of Art. It consists of nine sound pieces in which 21 artists, activists, and researchers enact aqueousness through sound. The series has been edited by José Luis Espejo and Rubén Coll, with sound design by Tomoko Sauvage, coordination by Roberto González García, and locutions by Yang Yang.

Episode 7: Clogging. With two independent sound pieces by artists Vera Frenkel and Ibiye CampMaterial power resides in the containment and control of flows. Far from avoiding friction, it is precisely the disruptions and systemic imbalances in flow itself that keeps the system running and allows for uneven forms of distribution, accumulation, and advantage. Latency, clogging, inertia, and slowness are instruments to both enact and challenge power.

When artist Vera Frenkel was working on A Challenging Word and a Prescient Work, her sound piece, she heard the unexpected news that a neighbourhood “developer” was demanding that her city cancel its heritage by-law in order to give space for redevelopment, threatening to force her out of her home and studio. Under these painful circumstances, Frenkel wrote a letter to Andrés Jaque, in which she reflected on how neoliberal approaches to hydrocommons, such as Toronto’s coastal line, have manifested polarized economic, social, and political divides. Since the 1980s, and accelerated in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, neoliberalism operates through the redevelopment of cities’ waterfronts, disarticulating through violence the social, architectural, ecological, and productive practices and associations that historically grew there. These waterfronts become sites for money placement, tax evasion, and capital laundering. Citizens who live in these areas encounter segregation, victimhood, and vulnerability. Frenkel’s monumental work ONCE NEAR WATER: Notes from the Scaffolding Archive traces the grief that late neoliberalism and architectural complicity produce in citizens dispossessed of visual and physical access to water. In this related sound piece, Frenkel ultimately reflects on how an economic system that claims universal dynamization operates, in fact, by dispossessing citizens of their mobility and communal relationships.

Ibiye Camp uses Injiri fabric to reflect on how automation forcefully transforms our bodies. Injiri has its origins in another fabric, the Madras, which circulated through the world during the transatlantic slave trade. In Buguma, Nigeria, where part of Ibiye’s family is from, Kalabari craftwomen recondition and re-imagine the cloth by cutting and removing threads to reveal new patterns. The resulting Injiri fabric is worn as wrappers in Kalabari ceremonies. In recent years, the pulled cloth is no longer made by Kalabari women, but by factory machines in China. The female creative position has been displaced by machines, triggering a shift in social roles and spaces in Buguma. In Ibiye’s piece we hear the sound of Kalabari drums communicating stories of goddesses, gods, and spiritual beings. We also hear the traces and ghostly presences resulting from this transformation in the manufacturing process.

You will first hear a letter from Vera Frenkel to Chief Curator Andrés Jaque. This is the full letter, replacing any previous version. It is followed by a sound piece on the same word by Ibiye Camp.

Bodies exceed humanity. They remind us that we are part of something vaster—and smaller—more complex, more connected than our mere existence as an atomized species. Our bodies, and bodies in general, are composed out of heterogeneity and multitudes. All bodies are wet collective bodies, defined by how they link to other bodies, places, environments, technologies. Think of breathing, clogging, decomposing, discharging, flushing, lubricating, melting, menstruating, transfusing. Bodies exist as trans- and extra-territorial beings. They live in hybridity. This porous condition produces a planetary wet-togetherness, a “commoning” force that constitutes all bodies as collective hydro-subjects.

Wet-Togetherness is a collaboration between e-flux and the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water, curated by Andrés Jaque, Marina Otero Verzier, Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos and YOU Mi, and organized and promoted by the Power Station of Art. It consists of 9 sound pieces in which 21 artists, activists and researchers enact aqueousness through sound. The series has been edited by José Luis Espejo and Rubén Coll with the sound design of Tomoko Sauvage, coordination by Roberto González García, and locutions by Yang Yang.

Episode 2. Decomposing: Daisy Bisenieks and Royce Ng (Zheng Mahler) and Tuo Wang Organic bodies break down and decay, aided by other bodies. As microorganisms feed on dead plants, and animal and human remains, they deconstruct intricate life forms into their simplest components. Water, carbon dioxide and nutrients are building blocks of earth beings and their socio-natural collectives. We are in a continuous process of body breaking and making.

Image © Paula Vilaplana.

Bodies exceed humanity. They remind us that we are part of something vaster—and smaller—more complex, more connected than our mere existence as an atomized species. Our bodies, and bodies in general, are comprised of heterogeneity and multitudes. All bodies are wet collective bodies defined by how they link to other bodies, places, environments, technologies. Think of breathing, clogging, decomposing, discharging, flushing, lubricating, melting, menstruating, transfusing. Bodies exist as trans- and extra-territorial beings. They live in hybridity. This porous condition produces a planetary wet-togetherness, a “commoning” force that constitutes all bodies as collective hydro-subjects.

Wet-Togetherness is a collaboration between e-flux and the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water, curated by Andrés Jaque, Marina Otero Verzier, Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos, and YOU Mi, and organized and promoted by the Power Station of Art. It consists of nine sound pieces in which 21 artists, activists, and researchers enact aqueousness through sound. The series has been edited by José Luis Espejo and Rubén Coll, with sound design by Tomoko Sauvage, coordination by Roberto González García, and locutions by Yang Yang.

Episode 5. Melting: With two sound pieces by the artists Cao Minghao and Chen Jianjun (in collaboration) and Michael Wang It is precisely at the melting point of a pure substance that solid and liquid forms coexist and produce each other. Glaciers and seas. Mountains and rivers. Molten rocks, soils, and climates. Entire worlds—several hundred to several thousand years old—melt into other worlds, making unexpected currents, struggles, and living conditions emerge.

Cao Minghao and Chen Jianjun reflect on the impact that local policies and post-disaster reconstruction plans had in the Minjiang River after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, and the way they were mitigated and responded to by local traditions, ancient wisdom, and more-than-human intelligences.

Michael Wang’s sound piece is attuned to the complex territorial entanglements that connect Shanghai to the melting glaciers of the Tibetan plateau and to the course of the Yangtze River. Ultimately, this work interrogates the power and intrinsic violence of reversibility.

Bodies exceed humanity. They remind us that we are part of something vaster—and smaller—more complex, more connected than our mere existence as an atomized species. Our bodies, and bodies in general, are composed out of heterogeneity and multitudes. All bodies are wet collective bodies, defined by how they link to other bodies, places, environments, technologies. Think of breathing, clogging, decomposing, discharging, flushing, lubricating, melting, menstruating, transfusing. Bodies exist as trans- and extra-territorial beings. They live in hybridity. This porous condition produces a planetary wet-togetherness, a “commoning” force that constitutes all bodies as collective hydro-subjects.

Wet-Togetherness is a collaboration between e-flux and the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water, curated by Andrés Jaque, Marina Otero Verzier, Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos and YOU Mi, and organized and promoted by the Power Station of Art. It consists of 9 sound pieces in which 21 artists, activists and researchers enact aqueousness through sound. The series has been edited by José Luis Espejo and Rubén Coll with the sound design of Tomoko Sauvage, coordination by Roberto González García, and locutions by Yang Yang.

Episode 4. Breathing: Torkwase Dyson and Itziar OkarizSeemingly a banal act of taking air into the lungs and releasing it, breathing connects bodies to other bodies and bodies to the atmosphere. In breathing, bodies enact their existence and their interdependence across territories and identities. Yet breathing is too often unequally distributed, and the deprivation of air itself reminds us of the contentious, violent relations dictating the right to life.

Torkwase Dyson interrogates the violence contained in the way human bodies emerge through the infrastructures outside of them, and the forms of resistance and invented freedom enacted in the circulation, affirmation, and dissolution of bodies into the material exteriority they are to be part of.

Itziar Okariz focuses attention on breath understood as a zero degree of identity; and on how air enters and leaves the bodies, the flesh, and the fluids that compose them and their relationship with the atmosphere. Relations of fragility and interdependence.