Between "Black Annotation" and "Black Reduction": Artistic Strategies of Working With Archival Material

• In Event: 31.025 - Beyond In/Visibilities: Working With and Through Visual Methodologies

Abstract

Objectives:
The aim of the presentation is to shed light on a part of the African Diaspora that is often marginalized within this very Diaspora – the German-speaking context. By doing so, not only will artists from these contexts be introduced and the specificities of the German-speaking context be discussed, but possibilities and limits of adapting theoretical concepts from the US-American context will be interrogated.

Perspective(s) and theoretical framework:
The lecture draws on theoretical works from the fields of Black Studies, Queer of Color Critique, Visual Studies, African Diaspora Studies, Critical Race Studies, and Performance Studies.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry:
The presentation takes the form of a lecture performance that creates a space dedicated to opening up a conversation between artists and theorists alike. It makes use of a set of methods that can best be described as a scavenger or queer methodology (Halberstam, 1998, 13; Wekker, 2016, 26), relating to the fields of Black Studies, Queer of Color Critique, Visual Studies, African Diaspora Studies, Critical Race Studies, and Performance Studies. The following concepts and methods will be addressed in detail: Unsettling Innocence (Tuck & Yang, 2012; Wekker, 2016), Black Annotation and Black Reduction (Sharpe, 2017), and Black Care (Warren, 2017).

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials:
Drawing on artistic works, texts, and qualitative interviews with artists and art-based researchers like e.g., Amoako Boafo, Grada Kilomba, Julia Phillips, and Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński, the presentation will highlight how questions of “Black Annotation” and “Black Reduction” can be read as attempts to go beyond the representational level by creating ways to see Blackness otherwise.

Results substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view:
The presentation will provide an opportunity to point to connections and conversations of theories and artistic approaches between the US-American context and the German-speaking African Diaspora. By doing so, it gives insights into heterogeneous understandings of Black Life, Blackness, Antiblackness, and the shared understanding of the relevance of talking about enslavement and colonialism in a geographical context that is often not considered when talking about these specific systems of oppression.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work:
The presentation is an outcome of the ongoing PhD-in-Practice project The Non-Human. The Believer. The Alien. Unsettling Innocence which confronts three historic constellations with contemporary approaches from the field of Black Studies and Queer of Color Critique in order to analyze the performativity of Blackness in relation to Austrian coloniality. One aim of this project is to fill a void and foster a discussion of Austria’s role in the history of colonialism and enslavement. Contrary to opinions that render Austria, and oftentimes the whole German-speaking context, as neutral, the presentation underlines the effects of race and Blackness and by doing, the importance of artistic works that challenge what the African-German scholar Fatima El-Tayeb calls “strategies of amnesia” (El-Tayeb, 2011).

Author

• Belinda Kazeem-Kaminski, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Austria