Kader Attia

Our contemporary world is haunted by wounds from the past.

Over centuries multiple inequalities have arisen—between rich and poor, between men and women, between races, between cultures. From the dawn of Humanity, one hundred billion humans have lived on the Earth. The trace of their existence remains in our psyche. But the traumas resulting from the worst moments in history such as wars, famines, and genocides have left lasting material and immaterial scars which, like a phantom limb of an amputated part of the body, are still there. They demand reparation.

The Tunisian psychoanalyst Fethi Benslama made this observation in the film Reflecting Memory, “In modern countries (…) in Europe or elsewhere in the world, (…) the streets are named after dead people. We travel through arteries of the dead. The world in which we live is a kind of psychological tomb where dead people live on as ghosts.”[1]

It’s this permanent proximity to the world of the dead that requires us to listen to their calls. Of what traces are the dead the name? What are these traces asking? Why are these mental phantoms not at peace?

The exploited of the capitalist mechanism applied to slavery to develop modernity. The humiliated and the dispossessed of all forms of occupations claimed through colonisation to bring progress after slavery whereas they were but a modified version of it. The victims of genocides, of fascism, from the Nazis to the Khmer Rouge, and all the deported and victims of communism’s famines—all have common denominators, namely to have undergone and succumbed to Western scientific modernity, and to have fashioned with their disappearance this call to Reparation. These common denominators interact, from extraordinary wounds to intimate wounds, from social groups to individuals.

It was by extending to the human psyche the body of my political research on the concept of reparation that I fathomed the importance of the immaterial character of wounds, and the silent cry that they emit between official History and the one lived endlessly in the secret of family and community stories. Mass traumas and injustices or those of simple individuals last far longer than the initial act; they are maintained by the dominant power’s stories while the mind imposes, troubles, and hides the necessity of their denunciation. This absolute, quasi-religious conception of science as a factor of modernity dominates the human psyche by the universalism of its conception of progress. This hegemony has led inevitably to the production of opposed reactions.

Already in his seventeenth seminar from 1970, Jacques Lacan cautioned us about the victory of science associated with a universal, global capitalism after the collapse of communism that he felt was near at hand.[2] For him the twenty-first century was to be one of belief in science and of global capitalism. But inevitably this universalisation of belief in science would produce contrary reactions: communitarianism, inward turning, individualism, radicalisation, fundamentalism, jihadism, and so forth.

As is pointed out by the majority of psychiatrists who have worked with radicalised subjects—that is candidates for suicide bombings whether in conjunction with a terrorist cell or as a lone wolf—nearly all of these individuals have passed through psychiatric services many times and/or through the prison system where they are radicalised. Of course it is customary to explain every Islamic attack by an action related to psychiatry or delinquency. However the mentors of radical Islam, from Al Qotob (…) to Al Zawahiri, the mentor of bin Laden, are far from being irrational subjects. On the contrary, they have constructed perfectly ordered discourses and strategies that recall those of officers in wartime and take inspiration from a specific history. Far from isolated, these leaders are at the head of immense networks, and the fascination that they exert on solitary fanatics through different media channels recalls the master as described by Jacques Lacan and before him Etienne de la Boétie in his essay on submission to the tyrant.[3] Their propaganda techniques manipulate lost souls living in poverty and emotional misery and who are turned inward while yet seeking to belong to a social group. But even though there is a great chasm that separates the brainy leaders of radical Islam from the small groups and lone wolves who decide to act at a precise time and place, there is a guiding thread that links them, namely the desire for reparation for the loss of the golden age of Islam. The call of the phantom Caliphate, the Muslim empire that ruled the world and the sciences for centuries, acts on the Muslim social body like a phantom limb of an amputated body. It is clear that the rise to power of Occidental France, England, and Spain signals the gradual end of the grandeur of the Caliphate.[4] It’s also clear that modernity in the Orient is achieved with canons not with the spirit of the Enlightenment. Indeed, reason will be violently refused by the ulema guardians of Islamic tradition who look with suspicion on the idea of “equality between all beings” claimed in one instance while elsewhere force is used to impose its will as Napoleon will do in his 1798 Egyptian campaign.

The phantom Caliphate is always calling ever louder within the Muslim psyche for the recovery of the Caliphate’s grandeur. It’s calling on the group and the individual, while the emotional, economic, and political inequalities of science and of neoliberalism daily make it grow across the world. One of the paradoxes of this quest is that it adheres to tradition and the past while also using all of today’s technological means (the Internet, cell phones, and so forth) to federate its attacks.

Modernity cultivates paradoxes. Indeed it’s modernity’s permanent Achilles heel. It preaches one path, but it never goes in a straight line.

While it praises the merits of equality that have come with progress, it deepens inequalities in order to progress. For example, take speed, one of the most celebrated technical criteria for progress. However, what roads and especially trains have brought to the world releases a succession of counter-reactions. As the Senegalese philosopher Sulemane Bachir Diagne has noted in my work his study Reason’s Oxymorons, the most striking and paradoxical action of modernity and colonization in Africa is that they have contributed to the Islamisation of inaccessible sub-Saharan African interiors that were still animist. This detail of modernity has gone totally unnoticed by European ethnologists who are more preoccupied by their desire to collect the remains of authenticity to elaborate their identitarian classification of peoples.

On the American continent the development of railroads led to the conquest and transformation of immense tracts of land, wounding forever the natural landscapes that had existed unchanged for millennia. All this while alienating with alcohol and poverty the peoples that had lived there for so long, humiliating them to the point of requiring them to live in open-air prisons—the reservations.

It is also fundamental to recall the role played by rails and trains in the deportation of millions of human beings from Stalin to Hitler, humans who have left lasting phantoms that call for reparation. If there is an element of scientific modernity and Western technology that ought to be held to account before humanity, it is transportation systems. From slave ships to locomotives, speed remains at the heart of our blind obsession with progress, at the peril of the life of millions of human beings who haunt our present, because their wounds are there—the past is there. One must only look at it straight on.

“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real,” Cormac McCarthy tells us.[5]

Haunted by this idea, I have walked through the forest alongside the abandoned rails here in Germany. Alone with my camera I have tried to understand why and see how the wounds persist. From a landscape wounded in its entirety to the intimate traces it carries within itself, I have perceived the silent cries that inhabit it.

They appear in the abnormally hilly land, on the wood of deformed trees, and especially on the railroad ties where each crack, a gaping wound, makes one’s glance stop to wonder and calls for reparation.

The rail lines in Germany, Africa, Asia, and America all incarnate the wounds of a conquering modernity subjugating nature and culture. At once poetic and political, their identical alignment seems to annihilate all humanity, and yet each piece of wood, like each human being, ages in its own way—from one railroad tie to another, the wounds of time are always different.

I undertook to repair these wounds by pursuing what my research into reparation taught me was fundamental—that reparation is an oxymoron that also includes the wound: to deny it is to maintain it.

Whereas ancient societies from Africa to Japan repair while leaving the wound still visible (with kitsugi, for example, which consists in painting in gold the repaired crack in a ceramic object), the modern West applied to the letter the etymology of the word (from the Latin reparare which means “bringing back to the original state”) by totally erasing the wound and claiming to return to the original state of the wounded thing. Keeping the wood’s wounds visible, by repairing them with metal staples that allow the wound to look at you is to accept the real. What Western modernity denies by forever erasing the wound is the history and therefore time. These cracks, wounds deep in the aging wood, are testimony to its history, as tragic as it is, and define it as such in our correlative relation. To suppress or replace them with concrete railroad ties in order to go even faster produces the opposite effect: the stagnation of a certitude.

A society’s certitude is amnesia that pulls it sooner or later toward the repetition of its mistakes. The title of the installation, “J’accuse!” revives not only the headline of Emile Zola’s article publicly engaging him in the defence of Captain Dreyfus who was condemned for spying because of an overlay of anti-Semitism, but also the film by Abel Gance who after World War I decides to make an immense pacifist work that will describe the disasters of war. When in 1918 Gance decides to film actual broken faces to make visible the horror of war and terrify crowds to dissuade them from repeating the unimaginable, all the soldiers he invites to take part refuse. So he’s forced to make the film with actors wearing make-up. Almost two decades later at the time of the rise of Nazism, Gance decides to reconnect with the broken faces to show to the world what war produces in a scene where a character calls to the dead of the Great War from every nation so that they return and dissuade man from starting all over again.[6]

With my assistants in Dakar who are descended from Senegalese colonial infantry, the Tirailleurs Sénégalais, I sculpted into hundred-year-old trees the broken faces I found in hospital archives in France and Germany. To play the phantoms of the war of 1914-1918 as the film of Abel Gance is projected on a screen in front of them, I constructed the silhouette of a marching column of broken faces frozen in time and space staring at those who file past.

The work of art plays a crucial role in the reparation process. Besides the fact that it constitutes itself a reparation, it also questions a political horizon touching all the categories of society. It is always discussed, even hated, but never meaningless. Why? Because it incarnates the field of emotion! It is both a projection and a necessary mirror of society that seeks to exorcise its evil in order to find inner peace—“to purify oneself,” said Aristotle, and thus to restore peace in the community. He called that catharsis.[7] I call it the field of emotion.

Works of art—written, painted, or performed—are mirrors, for better or worse, of histories past, present, and future.

The History of thinking on power, the inheritor of slavery, of colonisation, and of genocides, writes tirelessly a hegemonic, universalist story, and denies by its certitude that of the phantoms of wounds that it generated, and which ceaselessly grow, despite the distance in time from the trauma. Like a phantom limb, these wounds are there and the works are a means to recall the necessity of their reparation even when they are irreparable.

[1] Kader Attia, Reflecting Memory, 2016, single channel HD vidéo projection, colour, sound, here : 13’:45”– 14’:13”.

[2] Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire Livre XVII, L’envers de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1991).

[3] Discours de la servitude volontaire ou le Contr’un [1576, Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, or the Against-One] (Paris: Flammarion, 1993).

[4] This becomes very clear from the simultaneity of the Reconquista and the Exploration of America under the flag of the kingdoms of Portugal and Spain. The first phase of the Reconquista in the 11th century coincides with the end of the Caliphate of Cordoba in 1031 after Berber uprisings, which was a precondition for Alfonso VI’s conquest of Toledo in 1085. The Reconquista finally culminated in the fall of the Islamic State of Granada and the triumph of the Catholic Kings: Muhammad XII’s surrender took place on January 2^, 1492—the very year that is generally identified with Columbus’s discovery of America and the beginning of the Spanish and Portugese expansion on the South American continent.

[5] Cormac McCarthy, All The Pretty Horses (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 135.

[6] Abel Gance, J’accuse, Pathé Frères/United Artists, 1919 ; Abel Gance, J’accuse, Forrester-Parents-Productions, 1938.

[7] Aristotle, Peri Poietikis / Poetics, chapter 6.

Narrative Vibrations, 2017

The Loop or the Vortex, 2016

In 1996, I was living in the Congo Brazzaville during almost 4 years. I was working with an NGO on cultural heritage. One afternoon, while killing time with my friend Armand, he showed me a dead tree lying on the street, and started to explain that, during the night, this tree would turn into a large 747 Boeing plane … then taking off from this street of a poor suburb of Brazzaville, it would fly into the sky toward Paris, to lend there on the Champs Elysée avenue. All this during the night. There, the witch and his colleagues would leave the aircraft, and open the doors of the shops, which sell technological goods, such as plasma screens, fridges, computers etc… to bring them into the aircraft. After that, they would take off from Paris Champs Elysées avenue and fly back to Brazzaville, until this street of the Bacongo neighborhood. Then they would unload the magical aircraft of all these goods, and transform it back into its original shape: an old dead tree… Believe me or not, this is true.

What my friend Armand, who was a computer analyst, described without any single doubt, remained stuck in my mind for many years, as an echo of the Western theory of the Cargo Cult in ethnological studies.

The Cargo cult was first described as a Melanesian movement encompassing a diverse range of practices and occurring in the wake of contact with the commercial networks of colonizing societies.

In traditional societies colonized by the modern Man, a form of reappropriation of the freedom to enjoy the attributes and technological goods of the invader has always occurred in many different ways.

The analysis synthesized by ethnologists, in the wake of the emergence of such myths, which show a break in time of the group’s traditional cosmogony, has come within the scope of social sciences as a way of reacting to the frustration of the native’s desire, that de facto confirms the superiority of the white man and above all of his modern attributes.

The modern scientific Thought has summarized as the “Cargo Cult” the production of beliefs relating to Modernity’s objects, such as domestic appliances, computers, etc… But no one has ever asked the question of traditional societies’ perception regarding the fact that traditional everyday objects or sacred ancient ones have been collected and gathered in Western modern institutions like ethnology museums.

And yet it seems that, in many respects, the way ethnological objects are worshiped and gathered in museums, where you have to line up, wait and pay your ticket to have the chance to admire such or such fetish, continues another form of belief, these objects refer to… The French ethnologist Monique Jeudy-Ballini used to live in the South of New Guinea, where the conservation of old masks has never existed, because the Papua New Guinea communities, especially from the Sepic society, used to destroy the masks as part of the ritual…

There, she explained to people living in very remote areas of New Brittany, that in Europe, we were installing old masks and statues from their area in places, where people could pay and see them. Here is what they answered: “So you get our old objects to put them in temples, worship them and meditate in front of them?”

Thinking about things in a complementary way (in an endless reciprocating way) is fundamental when one thinks the complexity of Human Kind’s structure.

That’s why it is important, beyond this theoretical and rational scholars’ synthesis, to be sensitive to the incredible flexibility of the magical that binds the technological in the “Cargo cult”. Because what sounds, for a Western anthropological modern mind, as an invention of myths due to ignorance and frustration, appears as another form of philosophy.

As the Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne says in “ African Art As Philosophy ”: “sacred or secular objects in traditional societies devoid of a system of writing, embody not an Art but a Philosophy”. The fascination for Western objects, observed as the “Cargo Cult”, leads to a production of new concepts, as an answer to the Western modern hegemony, helped by colonization.

But the core stake here goes beyond the social-economical and social-political injustice.

From the concrete limited social order to the immaterial infinity of beliefs, the widely open minded thought, the Cargo cult is about, draws the perspective from an animist conception of the universe, to the digital and its complex endless agency, which has no limits because based on algorithms…

The story of the transformed plane shows indeed clearly another form of repair, beyond the political position. From one natural element (a tree) to a cultural and technological one (a plane), this repair mimics a natural instinct for improvement, which has always existed within Nature, but here doing metaphorically the movement from Nature to Culture.

And there is more…

From a natural state to engineering of steel and gas, the myth of the appropriation of modern power is built here on a transformation helped by a belief in the magic. This transformation allows the fellow of the group to be part of the modern order, and then adapt to the new technological environment he’s confronted to.

Struggling for centuries against their environment by developing an endless ability to adapt, traditional cultures, newly colonized by the Western modern agenda, had to readapt to a new environment. An environment, where the secular relation between the individual and the social group you belong to was not more important, than the relation between the individual and the machine within a dogmatic hegemonic order called Modernity…

A metaphor of the movement between the natural gregarious instinct, the individual and groups shared in all traditional societies since Neanderthal, and the individualist cultural environment brought by the colonializing modernity, recalls de facto one of the main criterion of the theory of the evolution of species: adaptation to the environment’s shifts in order to survive…

So two polarized crucial issues emerge from this phenomenon named the cargo cult, in the light of the repair as a concept, and so, from the political to the magical…

On the one hand, the concrete one, the Repair articulates a socio-political and socio-cultural adaptation. On the other hand, the immaterial one, the Repair articulates a virtual adaptation that the rhetoric of illusion animist beliefs and digitalization share…

From where does this instinct of adaptation come?

The Human mind constantly questions its time, its past, and its future, in order to endlessly adapt to its changing environment. It comes from thousands of years of teaching its brain to understand the world. This reaction repairs a state of unsuitability toward a new environment. The conclusion of my article “The Loop”, published in Supercommunity, day 44, answered the question: “Is the Universe a gigantic computer ? ” by “ The Universe is not a gigantic computer, but Human Kind is mimicking one. “

Adaptation to change is only a mimesis of the natural order of things, to which Human Kind is subordinated. They only reproduce the model of resistance through adaptation that exists among all living species.

It seems fundamental here to come back to the theory that has forever fixed the universal structure of the evolution of species.

This notion of natural evolution through adaptation has been at the core of modernity’s naturalist scientific thought, in the midst of the 19th century’s colonial and industrial era.

But it’s important to remember that this theory was not only put forward by Charles Darwin, as people commonly think.

While Darwin, already celebrated by the Linnaean Society, slowly works for 20 years on the writing of his theory of the evolution of species, he receives in 1858 the book of someone unknown in the scientific scene, named Alfred Russel Wallace.

Alfred Russel Wallace is a British naturalist, geographer, explorer, anthropologist, and biologist. Darwin barely knows him, because they just exchanged letters on the issue of evolution, but nothing more. Wallace is an autodidact, who had to drop from school at 16 to work with his brother because their father was broke. Darwin comes from sciences’ aristocracy. His grandfather Erasmus Darwin had left an important mark on that time’s contemporary sciences. Wallace is 35 when he sends his book to Darwin, who will be deeply depressed after reading it. Indeed, this book, gathering Wallace’s observations on the Malay archipelago, is word for word the theory that himself his writing, but with lightning reasoning and a quickness to conclude in a clear-sighted way.

Darwin later answered Wallace to invite him to develop the theory on the evolution of species with him, which will lead to the terminology “natural selection”.

They will remain friend all their life, despite a fundamental controversy on the issue of the natural selection, of adaptation, to which we shall now come back.

So Wallace reached the same conclusions as the old naturalist Darwin regarding the evolution of species. However, he does not use the expression “natural selection”, and considers the mechanism of evolution as the result of environmental pressure. Whereas for Darwin, it comes from a competition between the members of the same species. The difference is tiny, and they anyway worked together on the theory, until Wallace created a fundamental controversy. It will lead to a discord that will make Darwin write: “I hope you haven’t totally killed your and my child”

In 1869 he announced that, in the end, he wanted to limit the scope of the natural selection, when Man is concerned. One of his main arguments was that the brain of prehistoric men was disproportionate compared to their needs, which was a clear contradiction with the fact that natural selection works following the principle of immediate utility. He wrote: “Man comes from an inferior animal form, but (…) has been modified in a special way by another force, the action of which has come in addition to the one of the natural selection.” This force had an impact on Man’s environment and vice versa…

Actually, Wallace claims that basing the theory of the natural selection on the adaptation to a constantly changing environment or a competition between members of the same species means denying an absurd aspect of evolution of the human species. Indeed Human species had no reason to evolve since Neanderthal, because it was already able to survive in its environment with hunting and gathering, fishing, etc… Why then has it evolved until the era of the industrial revolution, the moment that marks the beginning of the end of environment because of pollution.

In both cases, the natural selection based on the superiority of the members inside one species, or on other species, for Darwin, and on a superior capacity to adapt to the pressure of environment for Wallace – the theory of evolution, has one mistake. An error due to the fact that the more Human Kind adapts to its environment, or grows, the more it develops, the more it destroys its environment and itself. Destroying its reason for being: environment. This environment that gives birth to it and makes it evolve, with which it has always had an interdependence connection, incredibly unbalanced by the human evolving intelligence and the basic need to survive. From this non-sense, naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace started to think that there is something else, a superior force that has produced this disproportionately useless cerebral capacity of Man, who at the Neanderthal stage was already able to survive for centuries, while at the same time creating the environmental pressures that have triggered Man’s capacity to always adapt more…

The questions Wallace raises here are : if the environment has pressured species in their evolution, why has the human species been privileged physically, whereas it is one the most vulnerable? And why does the interdependence relationship between species and the environment have the destruction of the environment as its unique outcome?

This unexpected conclusion articulates two types of repair. First of all, the natural selection of a weak individual giving way to the strong one, according to Darwin’s thought, or of the one the most able to adapt to their environment and its changes, specific to Wallace. So if the environment, as Wallace thinks, is in a process of destruction, then there is an even more complex issue, which is the adaptation not to the environment anymore, but to the human being. Because if Wallace thinks the intelligence of an extra-human force has maneuvered illogicalities like the overdeveloped capacity of the human brain for simple activities, Human kind has been able to adapt to its changing environment, to dominate the other weaker species, as well as to its weaker fellows, but would it be able to adapt to its own superiority…?

What Wallace unveiled is the crucial stake of the human species adapting to the human species, to survive in the post industrial revolution era. For Darwin, this other force that would have created the illogical conditions of evolution for Man, and its superiority is a blind chance.

Wallace disagrees, because, for him, the theory of evolution proves that it comes from a succession of causes and consequences, and not from chance, otherwise Mankind would be a mistake.

Chance or mistake, the crucial question is :

– is it still time to repair this auto destruction agency, defined by Wallace, or is this unavoidable destruction agency the repair of the mistake, of which mankind would be the name ?

First of all, we need to understand that, according to Wallace and Darwin, a destruction of mankind means either, the end of Human kind through the end of the environment, or the end of Human kind, replaced by another superior intelligence created by him or that created him.

The question of Human kind’s destruction is not new. Cinema, literature, painting, music, religion, etc… have often treated this topic widely; it is still at the core of our contemporary images and haunts our minds. Within the contemporary psyche, the end of human kind is either coming from environmental disasters or from the competition between human and other superior technologies created by him or alien.

Without any modern technology, the Dogon people from Mali, like many other civilizations: the Incas, the Persians, the Arabs, used to practice astronomy. The Dogons have observed with naked eyes that every 60 years, a very bright star, was coming back in the sky. They named it Siguitolo…They have made it the main temporal axis of their cosmogony. Then every 60 years, they celebrate it with a ritual, named “ Sigui ”. Old and new masks of the Dogon country, like the famous “Kanaga”, dance from one village to the other for more than a year until the star leaves the sky…

We had to wait until the middle of the 20th century and new telescopes, to at last observe this phenomenon, and discover that it was in fact two stars joining on the same axis every 60 years: Sirius A and Sirius B.

Visible and invisible physical phenomenons have influenced the cosmogony of several civilizations, and the beliefs that came from them have also been at the basis of other discoveries. The grammar that was used, as scientific as it could be, wasn’t always figures, but words or images.

Because one always believes above all in images.

During the 9th Century, Ibn Al Khawasimi, who gave his name to algorithms, wrote his fundamental essay Kitābu ‘l-mukhtaṣar fī ḥisābi ‘l-jabr wa’l-muqābalah or Abstract of calculus by restoration and comparison. This book consists in 6 chapters. It does not contain any figure. All the equations are expressed with words. The square of the unknown is named “ the square ” or mâl, the unknown is “the thing ” or shay (šay), the “root” is the jidhr, the “constant“ is the dirham or adǎd. The word al-jabrn 3 was taken by Europeans and later became the word algebra.

From the 9th century until now, algorithms have changed our lives. They are everywhere, even where we don’t know yet that they exist. That’s the case of algorithms that look for things that we don’t know, and even more of those that deal with things we don’t know yet that they do not exist… Producing a formula to describe universes that we don’t even know that they don’t exist: this is the definition of algorithms, to which mathematicians like Donald Ervin Knuth refer as « Black magic ». The industrial revolution, that Alfred Russel Wallace was considering as the beginning of the end of mankind, has been transformed into an era of high technology, where the binarisation of everything is constantly increased.

We slowly slip toward a world, where the decaying physical environment will give way to another digital environment, which we build like this other perfect individual, mirror of our superiority. This virtual alter ego, made of billions of algorithms, some of which we have no idea of, has probably, given its superiority and the agency of repair that deeply defines the human species who created it, the goal to repair this mistake that has been human species.

To adapt to this human kind superiority, Wallace was warning us about, means actually to adapt to our artificial superiority, which is increasing disproportionately comparing with our average brain ability.

We can not compete with the velocity of algorithms combined with technology.

Regarding “black magic”, to which mathematicians refer in term of algorithms, that describe worlds we have no idea of, it is crucial to remember that this conception of immaterial powers parallel to the human world has always existed in ante-modern animist beliefs. It had the freedom to describe what we didn’t know and to enjoy this non-knowledge. Why ? Because the non-knowledge avoids any civilization to fall into certainty, as certainty is the beginning of madness and decadence…

This ambivalent relation between an artificial power described by Wallace, which seems to be more and more embodied by the endless digitalization of the universe, and old animist cosmogonies and their beliefs in immaterial powers, seems to describe a loop. A loop or a vortex, which endlessly reenacts itself, from the immaterial beliefs to the belief in virtual technology. Remember what I told you at the beginning of this lecture: “We do believe in images…”.

Matrix, the story The Wachowskis have put in words and images, is particularly eloquent on this question. Especially the second part of this trilogy, when the Matrix is “reloaded”.

In this story, the hero “ Neo” reaches the center of the matrix after having overcome and destroyed almost all the obstacles, excepted agent “ Smith”, whose goal is to stop Neo. But Neo then discovers that two artificial intelligences of the matrix, the “ Oracle and the Architect ”, who have created and manage the matrix’s net, might have created him, and that he has already reached the center of the matrix five times before. But he doesn’t remember, because each time the matrix was reloaded. They have created him to challenge and destroy all the obstacles they have built in order to improve them, and protect the center of the matrix even more, from human rebels, agent smith, and Neo himself. So the more they reload the matrix the better its protection system is…

The only uncontrollable fact is that Neo is also human, and human are unpredictable. But even though, when he decides to sacrifice himself to kill agent smith, the matrix can be reloaded again.

Like Sisyphus and his rock, mankind is prisoner of an endless loop, condemned to be ruled by the machines and the algorithms.

This loop or more correctly this vortex process, because it is not perfectly repeating itself by going back at its original state, helped us to understand one of the crucial points of the repair of this unbalanced relationship between human kind and the disappearance of his concrete physical world into a virtual digitalized order of representations…

Remember that we do believe first of all and after all in images…

It is because we do believe in images that, at the Age of Reason, a concept, named by Emmanual Kant “ Correlation ”, emerged.

Neither an image nor an object can think by itself that it is an image or an object, and our mind as well. The thought depends always to a connection between the object and the mind… This connection, going back and forth between the object and the mind, has been conceptualized by Kant under the name of correlation. Renee Descartes’ “ Discourse of the method ” enhanced this concept with the use of inference. Between two different things the mind always draw an analogy, which is the “difference” they do share.

For a couple of years, a new way of thinking beyond and before the correlation, from the simple concrete thing to the universe, has emerged from French Philosopher Quentin Meillassoux in his essay “After Finitude”. A focus on the possibility to think beyond and before the Kantian correlation, which always drive our way of thinking, means thinking the thing within the thing, independently from the belief process based on the relationship. Actually, independently from the secular factor of causality. This new orientation from the classic modern standard of thinking correlatively, by considering the concrete object, shows how much this theory stigmatizes a fear. The human fear confronted to the endless disappearance of the physicality, first of all because of the “dataization” of the universe, called rationalism, second of all by the binarization of everything.

This fear of artificiality leads to artificial intelligence… The main actors of the global digitalization, like Bill Gates, Steven Hawking and other mathematicians, have been warning us about artificial intelligence for years now…

As said before, artificial intelligences are our alter egos. But to understand how artificial intelligences think, we have to build their archeology. Artificial intelligences continue the human modern mind’s creation. They are therefore also ruled by the principle of correlation. Like images, in which we do believe, artificial intelligences are actually algorithms thinking by the use of images on a process probably similar to correlation… Remember that the father of Algorithm, Ibn AL Khawazimi, did only use words and images in his fundamental equation. Here is one of the crucial frames of modern philosophy, which lasts until our contemporary digital era, through algorithms using the correlation to endlessly grow. As correlation is the keystone of our perception of the world, through the concept of the significant and the signified, we might have transmitted this dialectic of reading the images to artificial intelligences.

Conclusion :

So the real stake is weather the frame of the thought, within this very limited pattern of the significant and the signified, will be able to be reinvented.

Monotheistic civilizations all have a system of writing, which makes them based on an eternal cognitive dialogue between the object (the significant) and its referent (the signified). The book is an object, but it does refer to an immaterial reference. What Serge Gruzinski explains very well regarding the system of writing and the psyche of civilization, which have disappeared, and their cosmogonies, is that when you look at a codex and watch drawings (ideograms), you think that the piece of corn for instance refers to corn and food. But actually it also refers to human flesh, as Aztecs were anthropophagous ( man eater ) during their ceremonies… The link between those multiple referents, a simple piece of corn can refer to, is even more complex for us, when we understand that it could also refer to the mountains or the sun, as well as to a bird… Non modern antic civilizations did not frame their thought within the limited geometricality of the significant and the signified, but on a variable geometry, where a continuum between things structured the endless universe. Beyond the object and the correlation, we have to reinvent an unpredictable way of thinking outside modernity’s old dialectic of the significant and signified.

The Loop, 2015

e-flux journal 56th Venice Biennale

This special issue of e–flux journal is published in cooperation with Wuhan Art Terminus (WH.A.T.)

The Loop …

Peoples from ancient times have left traces of astronomic observations, the origins of which are still mysterious. Indeed, it seems impossible to have seen or understood certain cosmic phenomena without the technological means that are at our disposal today. Even if Sumerians, Egyptians, Greeks, Dogons, and Mayans may have benefited from exceptional conditions of observation (wave pollution from big cities didn’t exist at the time), many questions will remain unanswered.

Tradi – Cosmic

How could, for instance, the Dogons, from Mali, observe and build their whole cosmogony around one star (the star of Sirius), which they named Sigui Tolo? This star is in fact a double star, made of Sirius A and Sirius B, which seem to be aligned on the same axis only once every 60 years. That’s also the rhythm at which Dogons celebrate the Sigui (the “ invention of speech and death “ ).

In July 1998, Jean-Marc Bonnet-Bidaud, an astrophysicist, goes to visit the Dogons in Mali to research the central role of the Sirius star in the Dogon cosmogony. He is taken to a place where two huge stones stand—one named Sun, and the other one Sirius—near a cave with a window that’s used as observatory. At this precise point, Bonnet-Bidaud observes the common rise of the Sun and Sirius, as described by the Dogons since always. How could they know this? How could they know about the “white dwarf”—which they named “the companion of Sigui Tolo”—and know that it revolves around Sirius every 60 years? This small star, visible only through large telescopes, could be observed for the first time only at the end of the 19th century.
From the concept of the infinitely big, present in Mesopotamian sciences, to the concept of the infinitely small in the works of the Greeks like Democrite, the common denominator of all these civilizations is without a doubt the fact that they added an intuitive imagination to the logical sciences.

On the altar of human knowledge, on each side of which stand sciences and arts, mathematics and arts are opposites. I am referring here to artistic creation in its unlimited and unexpected aspect: the perpetual and illogical movement that determines its development. A biological, physical, historical phenomenon can be explained, but it is impossible to write the equation that would answer why the human mind has always sought, and will always seek, to enhance the creation of emotion. Metaphorical formulas can be developed, but what endlessly changes the nature and purpose of art can never be logically explained. Even if unsolved equations do exist, it is impossible to build a mathematic reasoning to structure the unstructurable, where neither causality nor effect are controllable.

Emotion remains an unexpected juxtaposition of cognitive functions that, all gathered together in a certain moment and space, will activate the senses. This kind of bio-communicative system can be mathematically interpreted (which is, by the way, not only methodology used by human beings), but the causation of the talent that generates emotion from new shapes and concepts is totally irrational.

It is always surprising to see that when Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart used to write his masterpieces, there is no trace of marks or redactions on his scores.

What is important here isn’t so much the contrast between the unstained aspect of the work and the “humanity” of the individual (who makes mistakes by nature). What is striking here is the feeling that for music to come out of a human brain as perfection, the whole basis of the mathematic structure of the music must have existed beforehand, before even Mozart’s existence. Music shares with mathematics that both are discovered. Mozart does not invent a symphony, he discovers one that already existed somewhere and organizes it during month or year in his brain. Einstein discovered the theory of relativity, Higgs the one of boson particle. They didn’t invent them: the theories were waiting to be discovered.

It seems like music’s structure can be explained with mathematics, indeed, but not the irrational origin of the urge that triggers the process through which it will be ordered in a certain direction, and then renew itself indefinitely. What is a masterpiece if not a mysterious coincidence—an immeasurable quantity of totally unexpected and paradoxical circumstances merge in a particular moment and space: point T. This phenomenon, rare in any artistic discipline, keeps in itself the enigma of its unexpected and extra-human origin, which makes it forever fascinating. Of the billions of factors that converge toward this one point, only one is fundamental: the factor of repair. Why? Because it translates from one space/time to another one, an improvement.

The omnipresence of repair in the universe is without a doubt the only reason for being that mathematics and art share. Without the process of repair, there would be nothing—neither chaos nor stability. Everything is led by a determinist agency: repair.

One of the most characteristic phenomena of human biological and cultural evolution is repair. I first perceived this phenomenon through simple observation in the social-cultural and social-political fields in a concrete sense. From non-occidental tradition to occidental modernity, I have conducted many years’ worth of research that led me to reconsider the totemic dimension of traditional cultures and their connection to the immaterial worlds of the ancestors, as well as of the cultures of modernity and their dogmatic connection with its motor: progress, which turns it back on the past, toward an ambivalent relation between the artistic avant garde and the wars of the world.

I have been working on the visual and physical aspect of this issue and its virtual ramifications, but always from the cultural field.

Little by little, reading Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace’s theory on the evolution of species, synthesizing the “natural selection” necessary to any species to survive in their environment with a process of repair, my research has gone beyond the level of “bricolage” of the savage mind dear to Claude Levi-Strauss.

from the magic mind to quantum physics…

A discovery of 2012 Physics Nobel Prize winner Serge Haroche opened my eyes to other horizons where repair seems to be omnipresent. When trying for years to imprison an elementary light particle (a photon) between two mirrors, he and his team could capture it only for a tenth of a second. What comes next is fascinating: after the one tenth of a second, this photon disappears. Where does it go? No one knows. Why does it disappear? “Because nature isn’t perfect,” says Haroche. These two words put together tackle a fundamental issue: nature, and imperfection. Would that which the human mind misses or mistakes also be imperfect? Would that which culture does not understand be totally imperfect? Extra-human phenomena belong to an order of things that surpasses us, and then reappropriates tirelessly what belongs to it—repairing a situation that, for a short moment, takes away its power. Because the “imperfect” interpretation of nature, from a human’s point of view, has its virtual symmetry from nature’s point of view: the abnormality triggered by this experience. From the quantum order of things’ point of view, it is the situation of this experience that is imperfect. Taking the photon “anormaly isolated” back after a tenth of a second, the quantum order of things repairs this fault through which this subtraction has been possible.

I discussed this situation with quantum physicists, and all agree that the symmetry of connections exists at the quantum level, the universe being symmetrical, or rather each particle having its symmetry in the universe. There are different reasons why this wave disappears from our world, but what is sure is that, to reappear somewhere and be pieced together again, the information that defines it must be stored somewhere.

In the universe, the only known phenomena able to make anything disappear, from matter to light, are black holes. Their mass depends on the quantity of matter they swallow, and keeps increasing.

The black holes are invisible and can’t be observed with the naked eye; they can only be noticed through the gravitational influence they operate on their close environment (which has recently been observed by astrophysician Andrea Ghez on the black hole at the center of our galaxy : Sgr A*), or through a “mathematical journey” that, with the help of equations, makes it possible to get close to its periphery and ultimately, to its center: its singularity.

Different astrophysical theories have debated what happens at the surface and the inside of black holes.

In 1976, according to Leonard Susskind, the British theoretician Stephen Hawking claimed that “black holes did violate the fundamental principle of the keeping of information because of the process of evaporation that leads to their progressive disappearance: Hawking’s radiation.” And yet, still according to Leonard Susskind, we should consider the concrete example of a computer. The information stored in its hard drive can be erased. But in reality it is only ejected in the atmosphere, as a quantity of energy absorbed by the molecules around it. But it hasn’t totally disappeared.

Here is what Susskind says: “when a particle interacts with another one, it can be absorbed, reflected, or also disintegrate in several other particles. But its initial state (electrical charge, mass, impulsion, etc…) can be rebuilt from the product of its interactions. The information borne by this particle is, then, always kept.” This is a fundamental law of quantum physics, and maybe even the most important one were it quantum or “classical.” Since Leonard Susskind developed the Holographic principle, we know that when a black hole swallows an object, it keeps the information that define the latter at its surface called its horizon of events.

The name given to that principle comes from the analogy with an hologram, a process through which an image in three dimensions is built from the projection of coded details in a two-dimensional film. The holographic principle then stipulates that the horizon of a black hole contains the totality of the information included inside.

The information contained in a black hole isn’t forever lost, but coded on the surface of its horizon as data.

Why keep them, if not to use them again?

“The horizon would then keep all information borne by all the elements that gave birth to the black hole, but also of all the objects that attracted by the force of gravity, have gone through the horizon. They would then be returned through photons produced during the evaporation process. Information associated to black holes would then be rejected in the Universe, even if in a blurred form,” writes Leonard Susskind. “From then on, they should not be seen as devourers, but as some kind of information tanks.”

Because of the acceleration of the circular movement on the black hole’s horizon of events, a disk of accretion forms that works like a dynamo: the more it swallows, the more it turns, and the more it turns, the more it rejects energy.

The more a black hole attracts matter, the more it rejects its elementary information. Let’s try, for example, filling a dog’s plate using a fire hose… a huge quantity of water will spilled out. The movement created by acceleration generates a huge and powerful electromagnetic issue that creates, on both sides of the black hole, two gigantic jets of gamma rays, electromagnetic eruptions and rejected gas.

What seemed, for decades, destructive, is now clearly acknowledged by every astrophysicist as creative. Even Hawking admitted he made a mistake. Through Susskind’s theories and the phenomenon of reject, it is now clear that black holes contribute toward the forming of new stars and galaxies. This intermediary cataclysmic phenomenon leads in fact to a cosmic act of creation. It illustrates, at an extraordinary physical scale, a fundamental principle of creation: repair. From the death of a massive star by an explosion into a supernova new other stars are born.

Repair in the cultural sense of the word can apply to politics, economy, art, and sciences, but it is above all the continuum of an extra-cultural activity. What we claim to control, gathering information to re-use it, is only pure imitation of fundamental physical phenomenon that structures an order of things which precedes us and will succeed us…

It is not the universe which is a gigantic computer, but us who are mimicking it.

“Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything transforms,” wrote Antoine de Lavoisier.

The Universe seems therefore to be then a gigantic fractal vortex swallowing itself and endlessly regenerating.

Kader Attia

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From the policies of distance to the abolition of spaces. 2015

From the policies of distance to the abolition of spaces.

Since the beginning of time, images have shaped our thoughts. Before being made of letters and signs, words were images.

As Victor Hugo wrote in his travel journal ‘Alps and Pyrenees’ : « Two rivers that run down each side of a mountain and join at its foot to form a single river make the letter Y. Two synergies giving birth to a superior force, the letter Y, that could also be the silhouette of a praying man, raising his hands to the sky. »

The fact that thought will always be fond of semiological reflexes illustrates through the fascinating history of letters how much we believe above all in images…

Over the past decades, our relationship to image has gone through an unprecedented evolution. The technological ease of video production and reproductability has considerably amplified the illusion of how we perceive our world through space and time. This mutation hasn’t stopped accelerating since September 11th 2001, thanks to the improvement of two growing technologies: the global digitalization of network communication and the nomadisation of communication tools. At any given moment and almost everywhere, we either have access to images as a source of information, or are in contact with images that were filmed on the other side of the world and this no matter how tragic they might be. The spontaneity with which violence is retransmitted on personal screens has become part of mass culture. Escalating dramas determine the power games that will in turn be instrumentalized through politics of fear. When George W. Bush used the pretext of « War on Terror » right after the September 11th attacks, he was setting the conceptual foundation of « the axis of evil ». It gave purpose to the fear that would allow him to govern and be re-elected.

Similar to Western political power, radical Islam takes part in the new geopolitics of fear through images. Martyr operations – brought to its paroxysm with the 9/11 attacks – are nothing more than a military strategy befitting unbalanced power relations.

The images of hostages being executed while facing the camera, the macabre setups and cold indifference of terrorists who are both authors and performers acting in God’s name, now characterize our perception of a world being sucked into the spiral of a new form of violence.

But, beyond and beneath these setups, the main issue isn’t religious although it might seem like the contrary. It is the result of a human tendency to become the machine that produces thoughts on the basis of images. Because we believe in images above anything else…

To understand this, we need to fix the disasters these images create every day within our psyche by unfolding the archeology of their meaning, the history of their existence and their reason for being broadcasted, their construct, and their setup. In other words, to decode them as Erwin Panofsky would have done.

In the West’s relations with the Muslim world today, political powers (of any type) reactivate daily through the media a secular fear that was initiated during the Crusades. Its iconography and western hegemonic iconology, both Christian and Modern, hasn’t ceased to permeate the psyche of the people for centuries.

What the media and political powers are trying to raise on the altar of fear as a form of new violence which has never before been reached and that doesn’t cease to escalate, is in fact prolonging centuries of a Manichaen construction of the Other. One where alterity is inevitably harmful. The invention of evil – as for example the Axis of Evil and its repercussions that were dear to George W. Bush – is a determinant factor of the politics of fear that was slowly constructed over centuries. Today, it has finally been reclaimed by the people who were targeted – the others – and now, it goes around in a circle like a boomerang thrown into perpertual movement.

Why does this fear persist and what threat originally provoked it?

The History of the Crusades includes East and West over an ambivalent period: the most groundbreaking Muslim civilization, where Sciences, Arts and beliefs enriched each other, while in parallel the Western Christian civilization, still deep in the Middle Ages, is going to separate Sciences from philosophical thought and the Arts.

European thought, which was alienated from the Church, will progressively be freed by Muslim philosophers who revalorized Greek thinkers, as did Ibn Rushd (Averoes) in his famous Commentary on Aristotles or Ibn Khaldoun, who set the foundations of Social Sciences and Modern History, in his emblematic Book of Examples. In Mathematics, In Al Khawazimi was the father of algorithms and also gave his name to a fundamental concept of modern Mathematics. He was also a Muslim and contemporary to the Golden Age of Islam that then faced a piously blind West.

But what about today ? Have the tendancies been reversed?

The 21st Century is in this regard an era of fundamental change. One of the two civilizations is fighting against the other to not fall back into the Dark Ages, while the other seeks its Golden Age and most of all, to take part in Modernity. The promised modernity – from the fall of communism overthrown by consumerist capitalism assimilated to freedom until the Promethean myth of technological power, conveyed by the hegemony of colonization. Since the end of the ideological model of communism, that most of the independent Muslim states had adopted, Capitalism has become an unavoidable road towards Modernity.

With frustration on one side and fear on the other, the Golden Age of Muslim civilization infiltrated differently the psyches of its people and those of the West. Whether it is the battles won against the Sarasin close to Poitiers in 732 or the occupation of Southern Europe during many centuries, or again, later on and more towards the East, the siege of Vienna by the Ottoman Empire, Europe has been profoundly, materially and immaterially, marked by the power of Islam.

But are the wounds of Muslim World History only linked to the loss of their past scientific, artistic and military splendor?

On one side, the immaterial wounds of Muslim civilization are rooted in the progressive rise of the European Enlightenment: the West progressively changed its perspective on the world as well as the thoughts it produced. Its regimes of distancing transcended the daily alienation of the religious proximity of the Middle Ages. On the other side, the wounds are also rooted in the rise of the Age of Reason.

We go looking far into our past, towards Classical Antiquity, and rediscover the greatness of Imperialism and its taste for reason. We push the Muslims far away towards remote eastern areas, while speculating on a new world even further away: after being present for seven centuries in Spain, the fall of Grenada – the last Muslim European city – coincides with the discovery by this same country of the New World, both events taking place in 1492.

The other change that will mark a rupture with the classical Muslim psyche occurs with a radically new way of thinking the production of images which begins to appear in Tuscany: the world is transposed from a point situated on the horizon line. Here, the origin of forms is kept at a distance where the axonometric perspective of the High Middle Ages wasn’t able to ‘go deeper.’ In 1425, Filippo Brunelleschi leads an experiment for the first time on the square of the Baptistery in Florence, which will sign the transition between Middle Ages and Renaissance representation.

All vanishing lines are drawn from a single point and distance is represented by the shortening of measures the further away an object is from the observer.

Even though Persian miniature is often used to oppose the dogma of non-representation in Islam, it remains an exception that is specific to the history of the Shiite people before the European Enlightenment. We will get back to the reason of this exception that the Sunnis and iconoclast Islam – from whom abstraction is the ruling dogma – have always refused.

Transposing reality from a virtual vanishing point onto the horizon line will reactivate for centuries the mimetic relationship with the world that Classical Antiquity had placed at the heart of the Arts.

Christian religious power quickly took hold of what was then perceived as a revolution in representation. In fact it was only a pale echo of Greek thinking, which the Church had demonized for centuries even though the revolution had broken the visual dogma of the past.

And then heaven became secular…

Prior to this, the background was not a sky but was often a gold monochrome applied vertically. The technique of perspective wasn’t necessarily used for this surface. It represented a sacred, holy space. The characters were mostly Saints, God or the King by divine right. During the Enlightenment, the heavens became blue, with or without atmospheric shades, with or without clouds, vertical, similar to the backdrop in a theater or horizontal like a high ceiling. The space is real, human, rediscovered by humanity, secular at the very least.

Altarpieces and other frescos – including the ones from the Sistine Chapel commissioned to Michelangelo by Pope Julius II and Pope Paul III – are undoubtedly the most brilliant examples of the Church’s appropriation of the revolution in representation.

If Enlightenment tolled the death bell of Islam’s Golden Age, the coming of Descartes and Kant’s fundamental questions regarding reason were the final blow.

The Age of Reason didn’t only harm Islam, it also threatened the other major monotheistic power of that time. But, as opposed to Islam, although Modern thinking was a threat to the Church, it was also able to evolve jointly with the modernization of economy, politics, sciences and the Arts.

From the Enlightenment until the Industrial Revolution the expansion of European colonies will give the possibility to the Church to catch up with Modern thinking. The dogma of progress will become the main pretext for the development of the Colonial Empires.

« We will need to build a new world, and to do so, the old world must be destroyed ». Taken from a speech given by Lenin, this sentence illustrates perfectly Modernity’s dogma. Omnubilated by the conviction of technological superiority over tradition, 19th Century Vatican colonial enterprise will also function as a relay of Modernity in remote regions of Africa.

The partaking of the Church in the colonizing of cults, knowledge and spaces occurred in Africa in a unilateral manner. In accordance with Modern eurocentrism, dogmas of the Church were founded on progress. On one hand, the missionaries devalued, confiscated or destroyed traditional ritual objects: nkisi, masks, sacred figures, divinatory baskets etc.… While in the other hand, they used the indigenous people – children and elders alike – to build churches, missions and farms to occupy and transform physically, for ever and to the furthest extent possible, the mind and spaces of these other people. Occupation of the land, of beliefs but also the dispossession of cult objects that ended up either being publicly burned or exposed in Wunderkammern, and later on, in Western museums. The Museum of the Vatican owns today more than 90’000 objects and no one has ever dared question their ownership.

Just as most great empires, and in the same manner as the Islamic civilization at its peak was trapped by the certainty of its own power, the Modern political project slowly began to trap the West in its opposition to the Muslim world with its own drive: progress.

Indeed, the Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne explains that the modernization of public transportation in West Africa also contributed to the penetration of Islam into very remote places that couldn’t have been accessed before then. Isolated societies that had remained animist despite the Islamisation of Sub-Saharan Africa during previous centuries were converted to Islam by travelers originating from the bigger cities, thanks to the development of western railway lines.

During the second half of the 19th century, the Western and Christian colonial expansion will paradoxically carry Islamic proselytism to remote African regions. Islam’s resistance towards the Christian conquest will become one of the major issues in the common fight for colonial politics and Christianization. The multiplication of visual and written forms of propaganda, which will be relayed by the newspapers of that time, will not cease to ramify this conflict.

The awareness of the fact that Islam during the second half of the 19th Century continued its expansion and resistance will reactivate the daemons of past western Christian crusades.

The Christian West is walking along two paralleled yet separate paths: religion and Modernity, or one should say ‘modernities’. Every European nation pursues its Modern political project: France by universalizing Reason and the Church; the English crown by capitalizing goods, human beings, services and local elites in the administration of almost every one of its colonies.

Even if each European country is pursuing its specific concept, a common denominator appears in the European psyche: the invention and control of the image of the Other and its representation. History has brought this together under different terminologies, one of which is inherited from the Crusades and functions both as a bond and a separation with Islam: « Orientalism ».

Contemporary to the era that followed Romanticism, the second half of the 19th Century conveyed in the Arts and in the press an image of the other as a foreigner. An exoticism that embodies fears as much as fantasies of distant places to be conquered, but haunted by the ghost of Islam. The Arts depict scenes of non-western landscapes where people with neither faith nor compassion execute women and children with blades. In « The Death of Sardanapalus » as for instance in « The Massacre of Scio » the Oriental is portrayed as a murderer, a cold-hearted persecutor, described with the esthetic traits that identify him with Christianity’s ancient enemy: the Mahommedan…. Even with scenes of soft eroticism, such as the ones representing a woman at the hamam, beauty is always underlined by violence: she appears in contrast to the presence of a close-by companion, a eunuch or a black slave, giving the languished white feminine figure by the water a more prisoner-like dimension.

In what way are these purely mythological conceptions of History a construct for the actual world? What ramifications are still at work in the convoluted politics of our contemporaneity?

The world as it was known during the 19th Century, and more particularly during its second half, underwent a revolution in the way information was treated and perceived through images. The Industrial Revolution and its numerous technological developments intensified the ever-increasing circulation of information. That which at first was found in poems, stories and paintings rapidly found itself on the cover of daily newspapers. During the Industrial Revolution, the acceleration of the distribution of the press had an impact by far superior to the acceleration of a broader diffusion of the Bible and New Testament, in which Gutenberg’s press played a key role.

This influence on populations, educated or not, is also comparable to the much more recent revolution in virtual social medias. In all three of the following cases, the invention of printing, the explosion of the written press and the Internet revolution, religion – the perfect example of hegemonic political power – made use of the evolution in communication tools to increase its power on the people’s psyche. In the same way as religion, pornography, that also grows on people’s psychological deficiencies as for instance frustration, has for many centuries taken advantage of all three stages of the evolution of the reproduction of representation enabled by modernity’s technical developments. Connections between pornography and religion can be noticed in many aspects, since frustration is in both cases fundamental to the belief in a better life. It is indeed not surprising that the jihadi martyr’s most bizarre myth – the 72 virgins they will be given in paradise – coincides with the development and accessibility of pornography on the internet these past 15 years.

The representation of the world has always been a major issue in the conflicts between religious and political powers, and even more so after the first shifts that western modernity produced.

Within the continuum of the West’s representation of the other, what iconographic and iconological connections subsist today?

Many contemporary images show us jihadists of radical Islam, as for example Daesh, whose dress and violent behaviors seem to have gone through time. From a distant past, reminders of the Mahommedian fighting the West and the Christian faith still function as a reference for our modern psyche’s wounds.

How and why do these images scare us?

Because they stigmatize the stereotypes of the Modern Western psyche that were reactivated during the 19th Century by the explosion of mass communication during the Industrial Revolution. Hence, this concerns almost every country in Western Europe that took either directly or indirectly part in the Crusades.

This popular iconography that was founded in fear is a central issue in the invention of Evil: Politics of Fear. The installation is a compilation of Western newspapers from this era, which are put in relation to their contemporary alter egos. The loose clothing, the turbans, the sabers, the long beards have all been crystallized in our psyche: they can be found in images from the 19th Century as well as the 20th Century. On either side of this conflict, the same misunderstanding is present.

Whereas members of Daesh pretend to dress, look and even execute as they did at the time of Prophet Mohamed and his contemporaries, they are in fact honoring the reproduction of orientalist characters from paintings by Gleyre, Géricault, Gérôme, Vernet or Delacroix. These works that depict massacres, slave traders and ruthless sultans are at the origin of what Western media used during the second half of the 20th Century to support their propaganda for colonial expansion.

Members of Daesh have developed a politic of terror through images that originally come from colonial West. It was in fact developed and applied to their ancestry with Orientalism. « The West has Orientalized the Orient to better control it » as Edward Saïd had explained. But Daesh, who pretends to mimic the dress codes of an original Islam, has also been trapped by its own ignorance of the esthetic canons of the time, since it has indeed founded its iconography on Orientalism.

Furthermore, similarly to Daesh but indirectly, the West is now again caught up in its own trap.

Daesh’s filmed executions of western hostages re-enact once again all the criteria’s of orientalist paintings from the 19th Century. In front of desert landscapes or biblical reliefs with Greco-Roman ruins, Daesh is as technically savvy – from the point of view of image and sound quality – as a Hollywood production.

The technical means they deploy, affirm clearly a desire to compete with the use of imagery in western communication skills. Nonetheless, the re-appropriation of the ultimate propaganda weapon – i.e. image as communication means by Dash – is clearly a sign of their Promethean desire for modernity. While believing to be true to the past, to the Prophet’s tradition and archaic values, it is in fact a perfect illustration of Daesh’s misunderstanding, since they are resolutely Modern.

This radical Islamism caught up with the considerable delay it had with visual communication. In comparison, films from other similar militant movements such as the Hezbollah from the 1980’s, had a much more amateur touch. Their ordinary settings ended up limiting the psychological and geographical impact of their operations.

But the question of this movement’s modernity doesn’t only reside in their reclaiming of the power of control that images have thanks to western visual communication technics. Above all, at the base of their movement lies the concept of a Caliphate planned by Mahomed.

The main reason for Daesh’s expansion is to extend the project of a Caliphate beyond the boarders of Iraq and Syria, further East, and in accordance with the Prophet Mohamed intentions to establish the foundations of Islam beyond boarders on the basis of a universal project.

This universalist aspect of Islam is resolutely Modern since anyone from any race can be converted, become a Muslim and lead the prayers in any Mosqu. There is no hierarchy. This is one of the reason’s why many self-proclaimed Imams present themselves as members of Daesh, or of any other radical movement. Alike democracy that was erected as a dogma for freedom by the Enlightenment long after Mohamed, the project of Jihad (sacred war) to establish an Islamic and universal caliphate, reclaimed by Daesh, is founded on a political basis that anyone who converts to Islam can be integrated, no matter their class.

If Daesh was born from its own paradoxes, the West has also done the same. Because, if Daesh has done nothing else than reclaim images of a violent Islam, constantly reactivated by the West since the Crusades and disseminated to Westerners and non-Westerners alike, the West, completely absorbed by its technological progress, has entirely ignored the new generation’s capabilities to adapt and learn very quickly everything that daily technological developments have to offer. Ever since the multiplication of information highways has destroyed distances and spaces, the amazing accessibility to communication – that the digitalization of the world is giving us a glimpse at alongside its manipulative terror – has become the backbone of Jihadism for whom cyberspace and reality go hand-in-hand.

If there is one territorial battle that the West has already lost against Daesh then it must be the regimes of alienation that it imposed on Eastern and other cultures alike since the Enlightenment. For centuries, the West and its project of Modernity focused on what stood at a distance: first the conquest of the New World, followed by slavery and then colonialism which reactivated in the Western Christian psyche of the 19th Century an ancestral fear of the Other.

Yet, regimes of alienation have broken down today and Daesh along with other radical movements make use of this very skillfully. From now on, technological progress allows us to be informed through images, and almost simultaneously, of events that took place in locations that used to be far beyond our sphere of interference or of direct influence on our daily lives. They now appear spontaneously on the screens right next to us. This abolition of spaces has condemned us to unsustainable proximity with images of crude violence that are permanently feeding into the politics of fear which governs both worlds, both gravitating around the question of Modernity.

The emotions that Daesh’s destructions awaken are inherent to the speed at which the act is broadcasted. Technology is its fundamental vector.

Without technology, images couldn’t be rapidly sent and then no one would be aware of the events. Just like Islam in the past fighting against the colonial expansion yet taking advantage of the technological development in transportation, Daesh has reclaimed control over its own image and has turned it into a weapon.

While recruiting ever-increasing numbers of candidates for the Jihad, Daesh has produced with elaborate means extremely violent images mainly to terrorize the West. Images that the abolition of spaces has disseminated globally and simultaneously.

But this group does nothing more than respond to the violent and systematic images that exploded since the 1970 in mass media, and that are produced and distributed by the Western world either to denounce Muslim political movements, or to terrorize the minds of their opponents. A process that Georges W. Bush’s politics of fear after September 11th did nothing but accelerate.

The appearance and the violence of the extremist Other was immortalized by the clichés of Orientalist painting and the spectacularisation of our society shows us every day that radical islamists such as Al-Qaida, Daesh or Boko Haram are proving Guy Debord’s theory right.

The spectacle of clichés that reassures and confirms the Western way of things in eurocentrist modernity: the black anthropophagous savage, the sly and bloodthirsty Arabe, the cold, torturing and sadistic Asian…

By reenacting what our psyche expects of them, the ultraviolent strategy of terrorist groups such as Deash are opening the Pandora trap of the politics of fear, doing nothing but nourish the escalation of cruelty on either side.

How does one resist the accelerating global politics of fear when the abolition of spaces and the digitalization of information call for more and more proximity with the reality of death, as witnessed with the multiplication of suicide attacks in public spaces from Bagdad to Paris and Beirut? The suicide attacks that are so regularly part of the news since 9/11 ended up becoming something abstract to indifferent viewers, one macabre story following the next, because of the sensibility of the viewers. The new turn that radical Islamism seems to have taken with the attacks in Paris on November 13th 2015 is to materialize the ghost of Death.

Victims of suicide attacks scattered in the news for the past 15 years in a burning and bleeding Middle East finally became an abstraction. To fight against this, the strategy to export death in Western reality through the most radical Islamism has become just as important as the visual communication it also generates. The strategy of reclaiming the representation of death in the media, which became abstract with the daily increase of news that no longer surprises or touches anyone (because surreal, when in reality we only die once) is actually the major issue for terrorism. It is advocating martyrs as their ultimate weapon in an asymmetric war against the West.

But the particularity of this contemporary self-destructive tactical attack is that martyrdom wasn’t born from the Crusades. It comes from a conflict opposing Muslims, the Shiites and the Sunnis, on the basis of a struggle for power, and more importantly, in the asymmetrical power struggle between two sultans. One of them, Imam Hussein, the great grandson of the Prophet, faced an army and decided to sacrifice himself and his men. Imam Hussein’s martyr ended with his beheading and the presentation of his head to the sultan of Damask. This event is the foundation of Shiism, and it is celebrated with much violence every year during the Achoura festivities. But Ayatollah Khomeiny’s Islamic revolution reclaimed martyrdom as a contemporary political act and founded a new type of armed conflict. The Pasdarans – young Iranian soldiers during the war between Iraq and Iran – sacrificed themselves at the front carrying a small key around their neck. This key is supposed to symbolize the key to Paradise. They died while crossing the minefields set by Sadam Hussein’s army, opening strategic passageways for the Iranian tanks, which in the end allowed Iran to take over.

The little keys that decorated these young adult or adolescent necks very rapidly ran out of stock. Iran imported from China thousands of little plastic keys ‘ made in china’ and every new martyr-to-be would hang one around his neck before being blown up on Iraqi minefields, their great Sunni enemy who at that time was supported by the Americans and Saudi Arabians. The celebration of martyrdom reactivated by the Islamic Revolution was born. Lebanon’s Shiite party, the Hezbollah, reclaimed suicide attacks as the ultimate act of martyrdom during the occupation of Lebanon by the Israeli army in 1982.

The impact of the Shiite Lebanese Hezbollah in the Arab world transformed this act into a political one throughout the Arab world. It finally made its way into Sunni communities where for the longest time suicide had been considered as an unforgivable sin against Islam.

The massacres of Sabra and Shatila, the asymmetrical war fought by the Palestinians against Israel and the American strike force in the East will all give to the Sunni communities the justification to use suicide attacks as « the atomic bomb of the poor ». Like the nuclear weapon, the suicide attack is first and foremost a deterrent weapon: it generates fear since it can strike anywhere and at any time. From self-sacrifice to universal martyrdom, the pursuit of the Jihad is founded on the uncontrollability of the martyr-to-be. As the leaders of Hezbollah say « the enemy’s only weapon is to put lives in danger. It is only effective against those who seek to live », adding « martyrdom is victory ». (Gilles Kepel, Beyond Terror and Martyrdom, p.98)

Suicide attacks terrorize the obsession that Modernity was founded upon: measure and the categorization and control of individuals, groups and universe.

Abstraction is still celebrated by Sunnis as a representation of death and life alike. If suicide attacks were adopted with difficulty as contemporary warfare by Sunni terrorists of Al-Qaida or Daesh – when the Shiites invented it – it is because the political forces of Muslim civilization are undergoing a radical transformation, just like the rest of the world. This transformation is interdependent of another phenomenon: the great digitalization of the world. This is where difficulty lies for the modern western Christian civilization that seeks to reinvent its future.

If we consider that there is a specific aspect of modern western thinking with regards to images that brings suffering and restrictions, then it would be causal reasoning. It governs not only the signifier and signified, but the understanding of the world through images. Even though we believe above all in images, we are incapable to consider them in an endless and continuous flow.

Great civilizations that were founded on the written word, be it Islam, Judaism, Christianity or Asian civilizations, have formatted people’s psyche into a dialog that is framed by the object (the book) and what it refers to (divinity). It is almost impossible to imagine within Christianity, Judaism or Islam continuity between book and Divinity. Whereas in animist African, American Indian or Asian civilizations, the mask, the statue, the fetish are what it represents: one and same thing.

The signifier/signified dialectics, thanks to which Modern western monotheistic thought has convinced itself of being far superior to animist tradition from the perspective of Reason, is in fact due to its blindness to other possible worlds. Beyond and beneath this restriction in Modern thinking, that has unconsciously imprisoned and alienated us today into a Manichean manner of understanding the world, there must be something else. Something that would link animist cultures and cults of the most distant past to the most distant future of a world whose algorithms, while digitalizing the universe, would meet ancestral beliefs…

Scarifications, the Self-Skin’s Architecture, 2015

Complementary Conversations, 2015

Mimesis as Resistance, 2013

Writing published in the catalog of the exhibition «Hlysnan The Notion and Politics of Listening»

Order

If I am interested in “natural order of things”, it is because it binds us to our hidden human genealogy. In the spectrum between nature and culture, behaviors such as mimesis, raise a lot of questions.

Through the ideas of Renée Descartes – that the past should be removed in order to build a new world, to follow reason and the logic of categories and measurements – modernity and rationalism have cut us apart from nature. One of the main aspects of modernity makes us believe that humans invent to evolve, when in fact they only repair. They repair to resist; they attempt to resist disappearance, the extinction of the human kind and death. In the evolution of the human species repair has been as a creative and artistic practice. I would like to understand art and artistic practice in this context as any form of creation, which aims to improve a state of being and/or to transform a space/time of death to one of life.

The development of a culture of death could be considered a first form of such human artistic creation. For example, the Neanderthal when they started to become aware of their finiteness. Due to their desire for some kind of continuity for their dead beloved ones they developed practices and rituals like burials, or mummification, or representations in stone or wood. These practices are based on the desire to fill the absence of someone disappeared with something both concrete and abstract: a memorial of beliefs of a life after death.

“Repair” is an endless oxymoron; it carries both, the notion of destruction and reconstruction within the same terminology. It took me years of observations and investigations to understand that ‘repair’ is the core reason (“la raison d’être”) of the existence of “reappropriation”, and that in fact, it applies to culture as much as to nature.

When any social or ethnic group is ruled by another cultural order – for example during colonialism or times of slavery – forms of creative or artistic ways of operating that carry signs of reappropriation instinctively emerge among the oppressed. My grandmother’s story might be a good example to explain how I understand reappropriation: During the Algerian War of Independence my grandmother, a single mother whose husband had been killed by the French army in the area of Setif, was a partisan. Her job was to collect all over the “Douar” (the Algerian countryside in the eastern mountains) jewelry from women that they had received as brides. When her buckets (she had two) were full, she had to bring them to a cave located in a cliff nearby her farm. She would do this day after day until after two or three weeks, the jewelry would be transported at night with donkeys through the mountains to Tunisia. Tunis was the headquarter of the Algerian Liberation army during the War of Independence. There, the jewelry was melted into silver bars that subsequently bought Kalashnikovs. In circumstances like these, the notion of reappropriation is strongly linked to death and survival.

Another example for reappropriation could be the artefacts that the soldiers in the first World War would make to “kill” time while waiting in the trenches inbetween attacks. They were made with leftovers of deadly engines, bullets or shells of bombs welded together with gun powder.

Remember the sentence by Breton: “l’art sauvage n’existe pas“ (wild art doesn’t exist). To create something to enhance a situation through a gesture, I would consider as art.

During my research on reappropriation I discovered that already at the end of the 19th century, right during the Industrial Revolution, one of the fathers of Anarchism, Pierre Joseph Proudhon, created a theory from an axiom: Property is theft!. He was the first to use the terminology «reappropriation» in 1840. Later, in the 20th century – first in Brazil with Oswald de Andrade and his Manifesto Antropófago (1928) on cultural anthropofagia, and later in Algeria with Franz Fanon who theorised the concept in relation to anti-colonialism (The Wretched of the Earth, 1961) – the term takes its political dimension. Processes of reappropriation still continue today all over the world, where men and women instinctively attempt to reappropriate the freedom from which they have been dispossessed. They first start by absorbing, integrating and mimicking the oppressing power, to then one day dominate it. Mimesis as Resistance.But what looks like a political phenomenon – a product of human thought – is in fact rooted in what has preceded and what will go beyond us: The “natural order of things”.

The Lyrebird for example is a ground-dwelling bird in Australia that is most notable for its superb ability to mimic natural and artificial sounds from its environment. It perfectly mimics sounds that range from other birds’ extremely complex singing to the aggressive sound of the chainsaw that cuts the trees of its habitat and environment; it is a good example of nature’s absolute superiority over culture. Nature’s superiority determines the temporality of the human species, what human’s coming days of technological evolution and its blind course towards “progress” will be: an ephemeral superiority.

In the ideas of Naturalist thinkers such as Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace the challenge of the human being is to adapt to its environment, whereas in reality, human kind needs to adapt to itself. Both Darwin and Wallace, who first formulated the “Theory of Evolution” by means of natural selection, thought for a long time that the biggest stake for evolution was the species’ ability to survive in its environment. The human race so far has been the best to do so.

But Wallace raised a question that caused a famous controversy between the two, and that questioned that if the Neanderthal was able to survive in the savannah and the forest, why did it develop further into the Homo Sapiens, when it easily could have survived and remained at its stage of evolution forever? For Darwin, in a determinist way of thinking, human’s evolution is led by pure chance. According to him, the environment is changed by the human in order to help its own development; hence it is an ambivalent relation that is constantly changed by itself.

Alfred Russel Wallace did agree with this theory in principle, excepted for one detail: If the human species is constantly transforming and adapting to its environment for its survival – and thus indirectly contributing to the adaptation of its species – then why did the human race reach this extreme point at which it destroys its own environment? Bear in mind that these conversations took place during the industrial revolution, when the destruction of the environment started to become obvious and illogical to the conception of “harmony” between the human and its environment. For Wallace, the end of a harmonious state between the human and its environment as part of human’s evolution is absolutely illogical. He argues that, only if there is another element, an artificial intelligence that has a strong impact on evolution, it could mean the end of the human species, while its environment would survive.

There is no hierarchy in Art, 2013

Mimesis as Resistance, 2013

Kader Attia

Remember the sentence by Breton: “l’art sauvage n’existe pas“ (wild art doesn’t exist). To create something to enhance a situation through a gesture, I would consider as art.

Countering the Virtual Dispossession, 2019

The Field of Emotion, 2018

Narrative Vibrations, 2017

The Loop or the Vortex, 2016

The Loop, 2015

From the policies of distance to the abolition of spaces. 2015

Scarifications, the Self-Skin’s Architecture, 2015

Complementary Conversations, 2015

Mimesis as Resistance, 2013

Order

There is no hierarchy in Art, 2013

Mimesis as Resistance, 2013

Reappropriation as Resistance, 2012

Signs of Reappropriation, 2011

The Colonial Modern, 2009

Ghardaia-Le Corbusier, 2009

Rochers Carrés, 2008

Myths and Poetry of emptiness, 2008

Black and White – Signs of Times, 2008

Faults, 2003