In Portuguese, ‘atropelar’ is the act of running over something or someone; in Brazilian graffiti culture, the term is used to describe the act of running over someone else’s visual intervention by spraying on top of it. It is considered a sign of disrespect, an invitation to further conflict, in an ongoing battle of visual marks and linguistic encounters. In colloquial Brazilian Portuguese, the term can be used to describe the act of talking over someone – an act of silencing that is often gendered or racialized. As part of the 2018 Walk&Talk Festival, Luiza and I travelled to three locations across the island of São Miguel, marking each site with an evolving visual 'billboard' of pasted words and images. As we moved from one location to the next, a copy of the previous billboard was taken with us, becoming the canvas for the following intervention. We wanted to highlight the complex colonial narratives that criss-cross and overlap in the Azores islands. Our acts of “atropelos” were designed to turn each act of dissent into positive, affirmative interventions, eventually building a series of overlapping inscriptions that addressed various systems of power that have marked the history of the Azores.
In Portuguese, ‘atropelar’ is the act of running over something or someone; in Brazilian graffiti culture, the term is used to describe the act of running over someone else’s visual intervention by spraying on top of it. It is considered a sign of disrespect, an invitation to further conflict, in an ongoing battle of visual marks and linguistic encounters. In colloquial Brazilian Portuguese, the term can be used to describe the act of talking over someone – an act of silencing that is often gendered or racialized. As part of the 2018 Walk&Talk Festival, Luiza and I travelled to three locations across the island of São Miguel, marking each site with an evolving visual 'billboard' of pasted words and images. As we moved from one location to the next, a copy of the previous billboard was taken with us, becoming the canvas for the following intervention. We wanted to highlight the complex colonial narratives that criss-cross and overlap in the Azores islands. Our acts of “atropelos” were designed to turn each act of dissent into positive, affirmative interventions, eventually building a series of overlapping inscriptions that addressed various systems of power that have marked the history of the Azores.
Lucas Odahara’s Atropelo is based on a Marian devotion that him and his mother often appeals to: Our Lady Untier of Knots. The devotion stems from a German painting by Johann Georg Melchior Schmidtner , ca. 1700, and is known in Brazil for solving everyday problems. For this image, a prayer is written for the untying of history’s knots. The images are part of Lucas’ current visual research at the Gemaeldegalerie in Berlin in the search for knots in their painting collections as a way to re-navigate art history.
The prayer, translated:
Our Lady Untier of knots,
Our Lady Untier of knots, Is it from unknot to unknot that history is unmade? Mom said that a knot is the end of the future passing by the rising start of the past without intention to stop. Unknot is the unopposite: the end of the past surpassing the pace of the future. Which ties that untied can decolonize an endangered body? Our Lady Untier of Knots, guide my untying, which I promise, bare no unintentions.
Full of Loops takes the ‘Old Time’ portrait studio as its starting point. Having visited and photographed one such portrait studio, Jennifer Martin was interested in the inherent problems of such places in which race and gender are usually stereotyped for an experience of ‘fairground fun’.
Each vinyl print originates from Shutterstock images of costumed models. Their constructions align with the binary narrative of their particular character. The vinyl prints are arranged in pieces, they cover each other, cling, and peel from the wall. The faces of each figure are scratched out; the viewer confronts only the character—the cowboy, cowgirl, bandito, native girl, and the submissive slave girl. There is no ability to stand behind these figures, to put one's face through a hole and take up that role for the banal, narcissistic exercise of dressing oneself as hero or sex symbol for the camera. There is also no possibility of judging the individual model whose identity is now obscured. Instead, the characters become confronting, they confront each other as well as the viewer.
My Atropelo seeks to reclaim ownership of the artist’s body, devoid of any layer of meaning ascribed by the Other. As a female Lebanese artist, my body often becomes a battleground for stereotyped colonial narratives of gender and race, intrinsically cattle-branded as Arab, Westernized, Oriental or Secular, independently of the artwork itself. The level of ‘Arabness’ of my body, my voice and my work is often used, and by all parties, as a measuring tool of my belonging, alternatively leading to my appropriation or rejection by one or the other. The collaged layering of multiple cut-out photographs of my body—self-portrait material used as studies for one of my past projects—is used to amplify the voice of resistance presented through the statements in Arabic script. “I am not your Westerner” / “I am not your Lebanese” / “I am not your body” / “I am not your woman” / “I am not your Arab” My intervention is an attempt at denaturalising my own body and subsequently reclaiming it as my own.
Dissenting and affirmative, the atropelo competes with the established history, but maybe it also competes with itself, because it is in flux. It uses whitewashing and ripping as a means to create new ground. The laughing/crying camel symbolises the exotic Orient, the one from the Delacroix paintings and the tourist rides to the pyramids. My questions are: How do I acknowledge my heritage without becoming defined by it? and How do I engage wih the Other despite my ignorance of the Other?
Digital technology, while having many advantages, is also a tool of the Empire – created by the empire not only for social but also economic reasons. This tool has the power to render us as its own propaganda, keep us in its malls, and sell a more desirable versions of ourselves back to us. How can digital modality be a weapon for us to strip away the very fabric that cover our true selves and our communities? In what way can we use these digitised tools to build new images and subjectivities, away from the commodification and oppression of our identities?
While Maori art is a popular home decoration in Aotearoa (New Zealand), a very small percentage is authentic. In fact a majority is made by pakeha (non Maori) businesses/souvenir shops. In galleries it is rare to see Maori art made by Maori artists, sold at the same value. This creates a huge disconnection between Maori and our art. Pushing us out of the galleries and away from exhibition work. In effort to reclaim and reconnect with the colours of the Maori and pacific world, I visualise Te Ao Maori through the eyes of early colonial documentation. Rendering their depiction of Maori with a new more colourful new gaze.
"This work is part of a six-piece series called "Gold of the Amazon". The cow arrived to the margins of the forest and is going deeper. Magnificent and terrifying, this is what lies beyond the mining and the devastation, another feeling of 'atropelo'. The cow climbed above the trees, above man who lives under the trees."
Umber Majeed Dil (Heart) is an image produced from a larger research project, “Atomi Daamaki Wali Mohabbat (The Atomically Explosive Love)”. Using state and familial archives, the project rearticulates the history of nuclear power in Pakistan, the first ‘Muslim nuclear state’ through a feminist lens. The excerpted quote is an English translation from, “Jawab e Shikwa (Response to the Complaint)” by Allama Iqbal, a prominent, deceased poet, philosopher and politician. My grandfather, Pirzada Waheed, an amateur analog photographer used this quote to accompany a photograph that he gifted to Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of the nuclear project in Pakistan. His imagery juxtaposed analog film techniques, flora imagery, and state-religiosity to depict an explosive blast of national beauty. Dil (Heart) illustrates the persistent atropelos specific to the digital interface over subjectivists outside of the patriarchal state.
The year 1492 AD is the year in which Christopher Columbus, supposedly, “discovered” America. Peculiarly enough, 1492 AD in the Arab Collective Imagination, is the year in which the last muslim stronghold of Granada has fallen. Creating the New Western World has put a final accord in creating “The Muslim” as total other of the “Old World”. Europe as a pure “Western Christendom”. But this has created many discontinuities in the story. Was the muslim rule in Andalusia a colonial presence? when does a colonizer become native? The GIF drawing here is created by digital brushes extracted from found images of muslim monuments in Spain, so prevail in Arabic travel forums, romanticizing that far moment of muslim renaissance. The slogan, “No Conquerer But Allah”, is an engraving in Alhambra Palace in Granada. The esthetics imitating a neon lights in an immigrant shop front. Hopefully the GIF can raise ambivalences toward this contemporary moment of otherness between Muslims and Europe, the contemporary western world and muslim migration, Muslims and post-colonial theory.
Muhammad Jabali https://muhammadjabali.com
Neda Saeedi “Two shades of green” (in progress) deals with the sudden appearance of a decorative sterile invasive tree (Conocarpus) in the urban landscapes of the Gulf countries since the 1990s and later in the beginning 2000s in southern Iran. Its plantation’s negative side-effects are visible and invisible. It takes away the visual features of the new habitat and eradicates the Invisible cultural roots that has been existing in that land. In lieu, its only contribution to the new environment, is a false visual identity that it adds to the cityscapes. The image of an evergreen city, closer to the image of European cities, of a greater culture or civilization with evergreen gardens. Its plantation resulted in the annihilation of regional flora, the economic supplier for local agriculturist, farmers and beekeeper. The difference between these two shades of green, is the key to understand the drive behind its plantation. As one represents the evergreen gardens of western developed countries, other one represents dusty green of dry lands’ landscape.
Buketan.
Batik consists to decorate a piece of cloth by coating with wax the part that aren’t to be dyed. The Javanese Batik has a deep philosophy where motifs and colour has meaning. Its importance make this piece of fabric the only object that people are buried with. The stamped Batik, called Cap, is a metal stamp allowing the process of making the print way faster. This new technique was developed by Indonesian for Dutch people in the beginning of the 19th century. The important fabric exportation during Dutch occupation symbolised the beginning of mass producing. Buketan, which means literally Bouquet, is a motif that reflects the European influence. This new motif was very popular during the Dutch oppression era. This motif is even more interesting ; it shows the contrast between the Indonesian Batik as a witness and symbiosis with Nature and the act of Buketan which is the idea of controlling Nature. My work aims to stamp on top of composions made by the previous artists as a metaphor of domination.
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