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Racial silencing and censorship aesthetics through the use of colonial technology in the digital context

Rodrigo Ribeiro Saturnino

 

In the colonial distribution of seeing, the desire for either objectification or erasure, or an incestuous desire, a desire for possession or rape, is always there. But the colonial gaze also serves as the very veil that hides this truth. Power in the colony therefore consists fundamentally in the power to see or not to see, to remain indifferent, to render invisible what one wishes not to see. And if it is true that “the world is that which we see,” then we can say that in the colony those who decide what is visible and what must remain invisible are sovereign.

— Achille Mbembe (2017, p. 111)

 

On 4 October 2020, by invitation of the organisation of the Feira Gráfica de Lisboa (FGL) [1], I took part in an online conversation about "Graphic Activism: The publishing territory as a space for affirmation of identity/ies." Five other people participated in it too. Throughout the conversation, which lasted 1 hour, 33 minutes and 30 seconds, each participant was able to express their thoughts about the subject. Before the debate ended, I asked a question to two of the artists in it about the creative process of one of their latest works: a photograph inspired in Rosa von Praunheim's film Nicht der Homosexuelle ist pervers, sondern die Situation, in der er lebt (1971) [2].

For it takes into consideration a certain evolution that has been experienced as regards an affirmation of different sexualities, genders, and bodies in comparison with previous decades, the fact these artists deployed an aesthetic extremely tied to the heteronormative body standards of an earlier time caught my attention. I wanted to try to understand the reasons that had led them to reproduce such linear, similar body shapes. The conversation thus proceeded in a tone of debate and common dialogue, comprising different opinions and sometimes discordant points of view—a fruitful, democratic debate overall. After the talk, and following the uploading of the resulting video onto YouTube via a non-institutional account, I got a phone call from the FGL organisation in which I was told they were experiencing a conflict: the artists, as well as another speaker, had requested the respective panel participation be removed.[3]. The reason, according to the organisation, was they had not been aware that the talk was being recorded and that it would be made available online as soon as the debate ended, so they would not agree to the use of their image.[4] The FGL would later state on their Facebook and Instagram pages they felt compelled by law to remove the requesters' participation, since the organisation had not asked for permission to use their or any of the ​​​​​​​other participants' images.​​​​​​​[5]. The video was not fully removed; instead, it was edited. Part of the requesters' participation was suppressed, as well as the parts in which I was talking to them.​​​​​​​[6]

Over the following months, the Lisbon City Council (CML), the event organiser, would take no stand. Nine months later, as one of the fair curators that had protested against such silence resigned and as several artists bound to take part in the 2021 edition withdrew from it, on 7 July 2021, four days before the start of the event, the FGL organisation issued a statement on social media: it did acknowledge this incident as an act of racism and censorship—that is, a crime punishable by Portuguese law.​​​​​​​[7].

The Feira Gráfica de Lisboa is an event organised by the Lisbon City Council through public funding. As such, it is necessary that what happened be read and analysed from a perspective that favours an understanding of what it means in the context of public transparency policies and the fight against discrimination. So, the aims of this text are: a) fixing this incident into an analytical-documental form, and b) understanding how it structurally and systemically fits into a historical process of institutional violence against people who are on the margins of a system that has inherited colonial models of operationalisation of meanings which have given rise to Portuguese culture.

The first factor to consider is that this incident brings to mind and relies upon a colonial attitude: that which is shaped by unilateral decisions in which the other party cannot and should not take part. It is not about the concept of individuality or self-determination, but rather about the suppression of horizontality in the acknowledgement of the other as a peer. A particular example of colonial technology (sophisticated enhancement of repression and domination) is based on the exercise of dissociation of intentionality. It is a performative act in which asking for permission is not part of the racial grammar. In racist didactics, a hegemony of the will predominates—a deliberate act performed by social histories that show the way to a paranoid, hideous whiteness when it runs into conflict, confrontation, and discomfort. It cannot help but yield to the hard-on for command. Losing a place that has been elaborated through meticulous economic and symbolic capitalist strategies is an unconceivable task for those who embody a permission of full existence.

In the edited video (59 minutes and 11 seconds long), the questions I ask are no longer answered. I talk to silence. I ask a question. Silence. I argue. Silence. I enquire. Silence. And finally, I am forcibly censored. It is as though I were living the empirical representation of what Achille Mbembe called "the link of separation," that is, that which links me to a violence that tries to push me aside and away from a community. It is as though the effects of a mutilation of my right to speak stood out—a wound that has been publicly inflicted by the absence of the other, who, due to a historically apathetic inability, cannot share with me the sensible, the affective, perception, and the word, for they do not carry within a remembrance that is peculiar only to black people: the remembrance of loss (Mbembe, 2017). In the pedagogy of silencing, I exist alone. I speak into the dark, and I am thrown through a cut into the void. Pause. 

Can a mixed-race person be heard? Going back to a seminal text by Jota Mombaça (2015), this is an exercise that asks the following question: can a subaltern occupy a place of speech in which they are heard by the dominant party? Looking at the incident, it is clear that, in fact, subalternity speaks in physical and discursive terms. There I am, consciously donating my voice, my pain, and my image as a pedagogical tool to the antiracist struggle, as I hand over free of charge to European whiteness the knowledge I have gathered within as a black queer person living in Portugal. Teaching. However, such evasion of the conversation, concealed as it was behind legal arguments posed by the two parties involved, creates a scenario in which these "hegemonically consolidated" agents' ability to "acknowledge our differences" is called into question. What is a place of speech worth to me if the other will not listen to me? What is the other worth to me if we are not to inhabit the same ontology—if we have not even got the chance to share the same screen? 

Social commotion. Drama. A digital storm of protest. Convergence of focus. With the original video being replaced with a revised, edited one, the FGL took on the position of the participants' request. From the requesters' side, the misunderstanding formula persisted. A statement was made on social media saying such edit had not proceeded from any request whatsoever; rather, it had been an autonomous decision on the organisation's part. According to the requesters, their initial will was that the entirety of the conversation be removed from YouTube. The question arises: was it ever taken into consideration that there was another will there—the will of the discriminated one in this incident? No. Colonial behaviour reproduces a system that asks for no permission; only a certain will is fulfilled to the detriment of no other party. A trading post. And the effects of such misappropriation are ever more devastating in the lives of people who are not able to rely upon the infrastructure of whiteness.

To use Reni Eddo-Lodge's words (2019), I encountered an intimate emotional disconnect: that which is found in the formation of whiteness. It was an act comprised not of antiracist alliances but rather of a one-sided, capricious will that is only allowed to exist on account of a dominant desire negotiated between the requesters and the organisation. How can one talk about racism with white people who will request a video or parts of it to be removed, accordingly editing a violent piece through the full exercise of their will? What made these people believe the issue was the way the video had been edited, and not the very idea of themselves not only as owners of their image and speech but also as enjoyers of a social status that guarantees them the predatory fulfilment of their desire? How can one utilise the idea of freedom when it suppresses the right to dialogue? What is the price to pay for upholding such freedom so as to keep the upholder utterly alienated from such concept? The price of censorship? The ridicule of the Estado Novo?

The resulting public debate retained a logic that is peculiar to the operation of racial technology: attention was directed toward looking for someone to blame, while the remaining participants, me included, remained in oblivion. This stealing of the scene is characterised by a silencing strategy whose purpose is to shape the invisibility of some flaw. Ornamented with amateurish-, crude-looking artefacts, in such dynamic lies the schematisation of a colonial culture. By looking the other way as a tool of distortion, they reiterate how much of the performative production of a hygienic image is deeply embedded into the way of life of Portuguese whiteness. Let us note that, while the empiria of Portuguese colonialism has ended both legally and territorially, the legacy of its history as a foundational element of a national culture is still rather recent, and therefore real, although hysterically denied. The denial of this heritage, according to Grada Kilomba (2019), remains an ever-recurrent element in the social repertoire. As such, in the clash that took place during the incident, we witnessed an on-site demonstration of the colonial politics of image preservation through a contest within the visual field. 

In the dynamic of silencing aesthetics, it is important to note the production of an image is essential. Other people's opinions form from it, and people and institutions feed off of it too. Paraphrasing bell hooks (2019, n/p), control over images is central to maintaining any system of racial domination. That is why it is crucial to establish a practice of implacable critical enquiry to break the barrier of denial that white people "construct so as not to face that the real world of image-making is political—that politics of domination inform the way the vast majority of images we consume are constructed and marketed." (hooks, 2019, n/p)

Using Butler's words (2020), in this clash there seems to be a crisis in the certainty of what should be visible; a crisis in which a decision is made as regards what should be visible and what is produced by means of a technique of saturation and schematisation derived from the idea of white paranoia. "It wasn't our intention," "We've been misunderstood," We've already apologised" are schematic sentences which fit into the grammar of such contrivances. When activated, they become dissociative elements of a structural truth. For Portuguese whiteness, the social exercise of elaborating a self-critical profile, concerning both itself and what establishes it as a schema, becomes unbearable. In this alienation of meanings, there is also another schema where different pains, struggles, and activisms are brought into dispute—a space that becomes opaque as the players in it embellish a biased sanctity. An extraordinary effort to be present takes place. For whiteness, it is impossible not to. It is impossible to stop occupying any place whatsoever, even if it is one of suffering, pain, and sorrow. Contradiction.

It is fitting to call to mind the understanding that colonial technology is usually deployed as efficient, creative devices in cases where racism and censorship are denounced. These devices are designed to produce filters that distribute the gaze. They teach the white community how to see, how to interpret, how to evaluate, how to decide. This is all part of an infrastructure that feeds off of a utopia of autonomy. It sees itself above and beyond—a vision self-defined as an owner that is based off a repercussive process of preservation of a culture of erasure. After all, what is the foundational history of countries such as Portugal if not that which, bearing Mbembe in mind (2017), formed from a predatory fantasy that has since established and preserved the western way of existence of white people? 

The fabrication of the censored video is an image of abuse—gratuitous violence through colonial techniques of abjection, humiliation, civil death, and loss of familiarity of the other with citizenship; a movement of deliberate use of my name by strangers in an act of total vampirisation of a black person as a token in public disputes. This is a return to an inherited strategy—that of the plantation, where the other put the subaltern through a process of self-falsification via the ontological impoverishment that made it impractical and difficult to participate as an equal within a community of belonging—the indifference of a symbolic potentate who still today decides what should be visible and what must remain invisible, and who, as such, is sovereign (Mbembe).

A letter-manifesto was written collaboratively and signed by hundreds of people who had felt sympathetic with the situation.​​​​​​​[8]. The original video was reuploaded.​​​​​​​[9]. According to the FGL, the requesters went back on their decision as they allowed their image to be published. With the reupload, I now am once again graphically eligible to dialogue; to be publicly seen in my place of speech with a right to being heard assessed by a decision which did not fall to me to make. Once again, I depend upon the logic of a social extractivism from which these agents directly descend.

The reupload of the original video reproduces an exclusive way of alienation from what words such as reparation, reconstitution, and justice mean. This act is symptomatic not only of the apocalyptic power of the pandemic as regards the use of digital technology as a space for exploiting people's vulnerabilities, but also of a culture based on objectification and on the symbolic consumption of others' rights—a deep mark of a systemic situation concerning the structures of knowledge and power production in Portugal, namely in the field of art, in which violence and exclusion continue to be readily available devices for sectarian action. It is in this sense that the work developed by the FGL, as well as that developed by other institutions and curatorial instances that schematise culture in Portugal, must be an object of criticism so as to throw light upon the way in which such European whiteness-dominated structures keep on operating off of a clearly colonial aesthetics—a field that still preserves the project of one single world, a world of possessions that is not to be relinquished. After all, is it even possible to leave out or negate the project of whiteness when it constitutes the epistemic and ontological reason that validates the existence of European white people's identity as a being? Will it ever be possible for whiteness to carry out a "negative programme," that which will make it lose its place of distinction, as Mombaça highlights (2017), when the racial system is at last reckoned to be the elementary basis of formation of the entirety of its theory of being?

The programmatic nature of events such as the FGL follows a logic ruled by the idea that white alliances are the first partners in letting minorities into spaces of debate and performance—a service that functions as an argument for sanitising an existence based off stealing the place and preserving an exclusive domination of such spaces of symbolic production by heteronormative cisgender European white people. Apologies will not clear off the past nor the present the physical, moral, and intellectual damage inflicted upon those who have been publicly assaulted. On the contrary, apologies will highlight all the more the place of privilege these structures occupy. 

 

The European white-centrism that characterises the productive structures of art and culture in Portugal keeps on deploying a positional monopoly. Precarious identities function as an energetic material to feed the predatory machine that organises them and puts people in a place of narrative seclusion. This is a project that is based on the intellectual servitude drawn upon by such spaces, like the one in which I have published this text, using my story as fuel to validate an agenda. Oil matters.[10] When we look over the veil covering the entirety of this incident, we encounter in the production of censorship the perpetuation "of an unequal system of resource distribution, which allows 'enlightened' white people to control the agendas of racial debate in those fields" (Mombaça, 2017).

A structural change in terms of historical reparation and restitution within the racial system that shapes Portuguese culture could only be conceived of if there were a real commitment from European white people and cultural institutions to carry out projects of critical intervention upon the world of their own images; a change that immediately tackled the utter destruction of the meanings which they have constructed and which still underprop the idea of whiteness (hooks, 2019). Utopia.

 

Rodrigo Ribeiro Saturnino is a digital sociologist, visual artist and graphic activist. Post-Doc Investigator in Comunication at Universidade do Minho, searches the algorithmic racism through Internet's digital platforms.

Develops an artistic practice guided by graphic arts, street art, painting and ilustration which focuses in the critic of the ideals created about colonial and racialized masculinity. IG: @rod_lx 

 

 


 

 

Notes:

[1] The Feira Gráfica de Lisboa is an event that happens anually since 2018 and it's main aim is to promote the editorial sector and the products that emerge from it. It's an event organized by Câmara Municipal de Lisboa with the support of EGEAC Cultura in Lisbon. Anually, external people to the Câmara Municipal de Lisboa curate the selection of participants. www.feiragraficalisboa.pt/sobre. Access on 01 of July 2021.

[2] Rough translation: “It is not the Homossexual that is perverted, but the Situation in which he lives"

[3] The statements of Feira Gráfica de Lisboa about this affair can be read in the profiles of the event on Facebook and Instagram.

[4] Full vídeo of the online conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OXuz2w6Ms0

[5] Only on the 02th of July of 2021, after 9 months, the participants received and e-mail of the organization indicating that the vídeo would be moved to an institucional account of the FGL on Youtube, and that the email would serve as a resquest to cease the use of audio and images.

[6] The edited video with parts of the conversation removed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4mn0IpeOrI&t=9s

[7] FGL's statement: https://www.feiragraficalisboa.pt/comunicado-feira-grafica.pdf

[8] The document: https://afrontosas.medium.com/a-arte-portuguesa-é-racista-2388d9d1eb2

[9] An explanatory vídeo about the whole situation made by the artist Dusty Whistles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVc2kcjRxQo

[10] Fundação Gulbenkian's campaign: https://afrontosas.medium.com/art-b̶l̶a̶c̶k̶-̶l̶i̶v̶e̶s̶-matters-448960cfe427

 

 

References:

 

— Butler, Judith. (1993). Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia. In Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising, ed. Robert Gooding-Williams London: Routledge.

— Eddo-Lodge, Reni (2019). Por que eu não converso mais com pessoas brancas sobre raça. Belo Horizonte: Letramento.

— hooks, bell (2019). Black Looks: race and representation. Boston: South End Press.

— Mbembe, Achille (2017). Critique of Black Reason. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Translated by Laurent Dubois.

— Kilomba, Grada (2019). Memórias da plantação: episódios de racismo cotidiano. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Cobogó.

— Mombaça, Jota (2017). A coisa tá branca. Available at: https://www.buala.org/pt/mukanda/acoisa-ta-branca; 

— ___________ (2015) Pode um cu mestiço falar?. Available at: https://jotamombaca.com/textstextos/pode-um-cu-mestico-falar/

 

 

 

Edoardo Brusco's photograph of Rodrigo Ribeiro Saturnino's installation Injustaposição. Bairro em Festa, 2021.

 

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