Host Agata Lisiak meets with artist and academic Heba Y. Amin at the Zilberman Gallery in Berlin. Professor Amin gives us a tour of her exhibition, When I See the Future, I Close My Eyes, and discusses how colonial and imperialist violence continues to shape our present. Her art demonstrates that technologies – even, or perhaps especially, those that appear to be “objective” – are inherently biased in favour of some populations and actually violent against others. Her art practice involves meticulous research and rigorous, subversive engagement with archives. She uses simulation, appropriation, restaging and humour to contest and disrupt dominant geographical imaginations.
We'd love to hear how art inspires you to question geographical imaginations. Is there an art piece that made you reflect on how you imagine the world and your place in it? A performance, photograph or film that has prompted a shift in your perspective? Please take a moment to fill out this form and share your thoughts with us.
Episode Credits
Host: Agata Lisiak
Guest: Heba Y. Amin
Writer and Producer: Agata Lisiak
Senior Editor: Susan Stone
Sound Producer: Reece Cox
Production Assistant: Adèle Martin
Music: Studio R
Artwork: Bose Sarmiento
Special thanks to: Zilberman Gallery
In partnership with: The Sociological Review Foundation
Funded by: Volkswagen Foundation
Find more about Spatial Delight at The Sociological Review.
Episode Resources
Doreen Massey’s work quoted or mentioned in this episode:
Heba Y. Amin’s work:
Find more about Heba Y. Amin's work at The Sociological Review
Host Agata Lisiak meets with artist and academic Heba Y. Amin at the Zilberman Gallery in Berlin. Professor Amin gives us a tour of her exhibition, When I See the Future, I Close My Eyes, and discusses how colonial and imperialist violence continues to shape our present. Her art demonstrates that technologies – even, or perhaps especially, those that appear to be “objective” – are inherently biased in favour of some populations and actually violent against others. Her art practice involves meticulous research and rigorous, subversive engagement with archives. She uses simulation, appropriation, restaging and humour to contest and disrupt dominant geographical imaginations.
We'd love to hear how art inspires you to question geographical imaginations. Is there an art piece that made you reflect on how you imagine the world and your place in it? A performance, photograph or film that has prompted a shift in your perspective? Please take a moment to fill out this form and share your thoughts with us.
Episode Credits
Host: Agata Lisiak
Guest: Heba Y. Amin
Writer and Producer: Agata Lisiak
Senior Editor: Susan Stone
Sound Producer: Reece Cox
Production Assistant: Adèle Martin
Music: Studio R
Artwork: Bose Sarmiento
Special thanks to: Zilberman Gallery
In partnership with: The Sociological Review Foundation
Funded by: Volkswagen Foundation
Find more about Spatial Delight at The Sociological Review.
Episode Resources
Doreen Massey’s work quoted or mentioned in this episode:
Heba Y. Amin’s work:
Find more about Heba Y. Amin's work at The Sociological Review
Heba Amin reading Doreen Massey 0:01
"The way we understand the geographical world, and the way in which we represent it, to ourselves and to others, is what is called our 'geographical imagination'. It is through this geographical imagination that people and societies understand their place in the world, and the place, too, of other people and other societies. Such world views vary between societies and through history. They may also be contested. They are social products which reflect a balance of power."
Agata Lisiak 0:39
Welcome to Spatial Delight, a podcast about space, society and power inspired by geographer Doreen Massey. I'm your host, Agata Lisiak, Associate Professor of Migration Studies at Bard College Berlin. Massey understood that maps express "particular representations of the world" rather than universal truths. She insisted that "no representation of the world can be neutral. Each representation (each geographical imagination) necessarily has a particular perspective. We always need to be aware of this". And maps, as Massey acknowledged, "are by no means the only way of depicting the world. ... There are many other means by which we come to build our understanding of the geography of the world about us."
Agata Lisiak 1:24
What this comes down to, is that we develop our geographical imaginations through the images, texts and sounds we encounter every day in the news, advertising, social media, popular culture, art and history books. Those images and words are hardly innocent. They are steeped in various ideologies that may not always be immediately apparent. Massey was interested in unpacking and critically interrogating the politics of geographical imaginations. In this episode, we'll continue addressing the questions she raised, but, this time, we'll come at them through art.
Agata Lisiak 2:05
To meet with this episode special guest, I went to the Zilberman Gallery in Berlin's Charlottenburg district.
Gallery voices 2:12
Hello. Hello. Welcome. Thank you. Good. How are you?
Heba Amin 2:16
My name is Heba Amin. I'm an artist and I live in Berlin.
Agata Lisiak 2:21
I've been following Heba's work for many years now. I've attended her shows and talks all over Berlin at the Biennale, Savvy Contemporary, transmediale, to name just a few. Originally from Egypt, Heba works internationally and travels extensively. Her art has been exhibited across the globe: from Bamako to Warsaw, from Marrakesh to Karachi. I was lucky to catch her while she had a show here in Berlin last summer. Heba's art practice is research-based, with a special focus on geography.
Heba Amin 2:52
To start, I think my interest in geography really comes from the fact that I studied in North America and now live in Europe. And so I'm really looking at geographies at a remove. And I think a lot of my work is in reaction to being a non-western or a Global South person living in Europe.
Agata Lisiak 3:14
Heba's interest in geography is firmly and carefully rooted in postcolonial theory. Her artistic toolbox includes a wide range of media, from video work through photography, installation and performance. Her art practice involves meticulous research and rigorous, subversive engagement with archives. She uses simulation, appropriation, restaging and humour to flip the dominant geographical imaginations and reveal their politics. Heba's art demonstrates that technologies -- even, or perhaps especially those that appear to be "objective" -- are inherently biased in favour of some populations and actually violent against others.
Heba Amin 3:54
When you begin to study the ways in which technologies that were emerging in the 19th century visualised geographies, you very quickly see that it's anything but universal and that there is very much a biased perspective built into the technologies that basically went hand in hand with colonial imaginaries. And so this is really what I became preoccupied with in my work because it very much affects the context that we live in today. And I think as an artist I became preoccupied with how to contextualise and explain the politics that we're living today and how we're still very much affected by them, but that they're not only contemporary, they don't only come from a contemporary context, but we have to situate them historically. And I've just always discovered that when I try to situate certain politics historically, it always goes back to the geographic imagination and the visualising of territory. And so I really became quite concerned and interested in the concept of western visuality and the tools that were used to perpetuate -- in a propagandistic way even -- a western visuality and a sort of construct of the world from the western perspective. And we're still very much living with the impact of that today. So this is really, I think, the starting point of, in fact, most of my work.
Agata Lisiak 5:23
Heba gave me a tour of her exhibition titled "When I See the Future, I Close My Eyes". You can find the images of the artworks in the episode notes and look at them as you listen to Heba speak. We start with a large black-and-white woven piece that looks strangely pixelated from up close. But when you take a few steps back, you can make out some shapes: a gate, a building, a landscape.
Heba Amin 5:48
So this work is a woven reconstruction of the first documented photograph taken on the African continent. It's called "Windows on the West" and the photograph itself was taken in 1839 by orientalist French painter Horace Vernet. He was traveling in Egypt with his nephew, and this was only three months after the Daguerrotype was essentially "gifted to the world" by France. And you had this rush by several, particularly painters, in France to travel the world and document those first photographs. And what's really striking to me about the photograph that was taken is that, as you see, it's a photograph of a building. It, in fact, is a photograph of a palace in Alexandria. But that's not what makes it interesting. What makes it interesting is that Horace Vernet decided to focus on the harem wing of the palace. And when it was exhibited in Paris for the first time, it created a commotion because of the excitement that it elicited around this fantasy that was a complete construction of the harem in Europe. And so this was very telling for me because even though you don't see any figures of women in the original photograph, it was still considered an erotic image. And that says a lot, particularly when you have a situation in France 150 years later where the French are still obsessed with undressing the Arab woman. And so this was a direction that I was interested in exploring about this colonial fantasy and the ways in which these images were contrived, and once they encountered the geographies and discovered that these images didn't actually exist, they fabricated them to fit their fantasies and not the other way around. And so you find that a lot of the early photography that was taken, particularly in North Africa, was staged: where the women that they encountered were not the fantasies that they had imagined, that they had painted for 100 years or more, and so they staged them. They would pay poor women to undress and photograph the people that they hoped to find there.
Heba Amin 8:19
And so I wanted to think about how to remove that male gaze from this original photograph, especially the first photograph. But I was also thinking in the ways in which that colonial gaze is already inscribed into the technological device and the way in which I could no longer use a camera without thinking about the politics that were inscribed into it, the problematic politics that were inscribed into it. And so this is why I decided to reconstruct the image through another means, not through photography, not through the lens, not through that gaze. But how can we construct it another way? So I landed on the idea of reconstructing it through a particular weaving method and that was Jacquard weaving. And the Jacquard weaving loom is essentially a predecessor to the modern day computer. It's a loom that uses a punch card system to create a pattern. And so what's interesting about it is that it's a sort of pixelisation, still, of an image that's constructed line by line. So you don't get the overall image as you would with the lens, but you construct it line by line. So once I intervened and wove it myself, it allowed me to think about whether this was a different configuration that might remove that colonial male gaze. I don't know if that's the solution, really, but it's an attempt at critiquing the way in which these early photographs of landscapes in particular, were really used as a propaganda machine for the colonial imaginary.
Agata Lisiak 9:58
It's so interesting to hear about the connection you build between weaving technologies and modern computing because of how differently they are gendered, right? Weaving is very often gendered as female whereas computing, as popular films and TV shows want us to believe, is very male and very white.
Heba Amin 10:20
Right, and I think I also considered weaving with those assumptions as well. And actually, I think, I focused a little bit more on the ways in which the female subject in this case becomes part of the landscape. They're alluded to, but they're invisible. You don't see them in this image. I became fascinated through this image about how, in the colonial project, women became part of the landscape itself. They were often described as part of the landscape. Again, just their objectification of their bodies. But in this case their bodies don't even exist and they're still the subject of the image. And so I think weaving was my go-to medium as it is often associated with women. But actually, historically, especially in the region and especially in Egypt, it wasn't women who would typically weave. Egypt was at the centre of the textile industry for hundreds of years, and it wasn't women who would typically weave. And so this is why it was interesting to go to Jacquard weaving, this kind of computing system that, as you say, has this male gender built into it somehow. But it was important for me as a woman to reconstruct this image. And what does my intervention mean and my embodying of the image mean in reframing it or renarrating it. And my hope is that... And I don't know if I've done that successfully, but my hope is that I would love for this object, for example, to live in a French museum, a French institution that could then negate the original narrative of the photograph, and that this then becomes the normalised or popular narrative about this particular image.
Agata Lisiak 12:12
Next, we walk into a room dominated by a huge pyramid. It looks pretty surreal here in Berlin, in this early 20th century room, with its tiled oven and stucco ceiling. It feels like a provocation, or what Doreen Massey called a space invader. And despite its immediate associations with ancient Egypt, this pyramid is actually a poignant reminder of Germany's horrendous World War II crimes in North Africa and their lasting legacies.
Heba Amin 12:40
The impetus for this project is not unlike the first project that we just talked about. I was, again, really interested in the way that landscapes are being dealt with from this imposing colonial perspective. I have been doing research in Northern Egypt for several years now, particularly close to the Mediterranean coast and in a region called El Alamein, where the Battle of El Alamein in World War II took place. I was initially drawn to a very problematic story about landmines that were embedded in a very large region during World War II by the German army at the time under Erwin Rommel, a region that he called the Devil's Garden. And millions of landmines were implanted and remain in the landscape in the earth until this day. Now, what's really problematic and troubling about this story is that the German government has not taken accountability for those landmines and more people have been killed by those landmines since the war ended than during the war itself. And I was really struck by, first of all, how horrific that was. In fact, Egypt -- unofficially, not in the official listings, but -- is the most landmine infested country in the world, and most of it is attributed to these landmines that were planted in World War II. However, it's off the record because there seems to be an agreement between the governments in which that is not meant to be public knowledge, right? Part of it has to do with the fact that it's a region where local Bedouin communities live and local Bedouin communities are considered second class citizens in Egypt. But in fact, I started doing research on, again, who is accountable then for the deaths of the over 8,000 people who have been killed by the landmines themselves.
Heba Amin 14:42
So I've been working with local communities to understand more, only to discover that nobody's willing to talk about it. And it's actually probably very dangerous to also talk about. So in doing my research, one of the locals that I've been working with for a long time now took me to this pyramid that's essentially in the middle of nowhere. You wouldn't really know that it exists unless you're taken there. And I was really struck and appalled to discover that, in fact, this pyramid was not an ancient Egyptian pyramid, but rather a memorial for a Nazi era fighter pilot named Hans-Joachim Marseille. When I did further research on Marseille, I discovered that he's historicised and heroised through various means, films, literature, online presence, as one of the greatest fighter pilots Germany has ever had. In fact, he was dubbed 'der Stern von Afrika' which translates to 'the star of Africa', because during this war, he shot down the biggest number of planes. Now, it turns out he had a very short life and, in fact, he died from engine failure and not from being shot down by the enemy. And this is important because on the inscription of the pyramid, it says that here lies Hans-Joachim Marseille undefeated, right? And so his comrades marked the place in which his airplane crashed and the site on which he died. And for many years, it was, I'm not sure in what form, but a sort of unmarked territory, but in 1990, they decided to build a permanent pyramid to memorialise him. So if you really consider the dates and the context, it's quite a scandal.
Heba Amin 16:32
And so I decided to work with this object as a representation of, again, these landscapes elsewhere and how they're erased, particularly because of the colonial context. So Germany is just only recently coming to terms with its history as a coloniser, as a colonial entity, and this story directly connects it to that. And so my approach was to build a replica, almost a one to one replica of the pyramid and bring it to Germany so that we can talk about that narrative and address why actually the activities of Nazi-era Germany that were happening elsewhere, outside of Europe, are not treated with the same regard in which they are treated on the European continent. Why are the colonised who fought the wars on behalf of their colonisers completely erased from those histories? And I was interested in bringing to the forefront the stories of those who have been affected by these wars, particularly locals on their own geographies, on their own landscapes, and have been written out of those landscapes. And so this object is an attempt to bring that story forward.
Agata Lisiak 17:47
The replica of the pyramid pretty much fills up the room in which we're standing right now and it's accompanied by a TV screen on which we can see you and another person in an interview situation. Can you tell us about it?
Heba Amin 18:02
This other person is a German celebrity by the name of Roberto Blanco, also significant because he might be the most famous Black person in Germany, particularly for a certain generation. And the reason that I'm doing an interview with him here is because in 1958 he played a role in a film that was the biopic of Hans-Joachim Marseille. And Roberto Blanco played the role of the butler in the film. Since the making of that film, it launched Roberto Blanco's career, and this is a whole other interesting story, but today people mostly know him as the famous Schlager musician. However, the character that he played in the film was in fact based on a real person and that person was a South African prisoner of war, and he was captured in Libya and then gifted to Hans-Joachim Marseille as basically a servant, as a prisoner of war. Now, what's interesting about both Roberto Blanco and the character that he plays, the person that he plays, whose name is Mathew Letulu, is that they both were instrumentalised by the German narrative as a means to relay the ways in which Germans are not, in fact, racist and have gotten over this World War II history. And this is really important because it goes hand in hand with this memorial of the pyramid and again, the heroising of Hans-Joachim Marseille, that he was one of the good Nazis, he was not actually part of this Nazi-era politics.
Heba Amin 19:41
And so I do an interview with Roberto Blanco, who, in fact, when I first showed this pyramid, I exhibited it in an institution called the Centre for Persecuted Arts in Solingen and we decided on a whim to invite Roberto Blanco to the exhibition, not ever imagining that he would show up. And, to our complete surprise, he agreed. And so we spent two days with him. And it was then that I discovered how interesting his own story is. But I do an interview with him in front of the pyramid where I talk to him about his character, only to discover that he didn't actually know that his character was based on a real person. At the time, he was just an 18 year old reading a script and was excited about the fame that came with that. And we start to unravel the parallels between this character and his own life, but you start to see how he quickly adopts that narrative. And, in fact, when we had the opening of the exhibition and we had a panel discussion, he quickly began to narrate the story of his own character as this prisoner of war.
Heba Amin 20:45
And so this is another avenue or another thread of the story that I'm following because, again, there is this concerted effort to rewrite certain parts of these narratives so that the responsibility and the accountability is not confronted. And I'm interested in bringing up the ways in which the German Africa Corps and the German colonial endeavours that were occurring on the African continent, particularly in North Africa at this time, were somehow completely erased from German memory and German history. And that it's really important, again, to contextualise the contemporary context, the contemporary racisms, the contemporary political disparities by including those narratives. And so that, I would say, is the goal behind this work.
Agata Lisiak 21:35
Confronting and unraveling the dominant narratives of nationhood, war, imperialism and colonialism will sound familiar to those of you who have listened to our episode with Nirmal Puwar. Nirmal frames postcolonial interventions in spaces of power as acts of space invading. Heba Amin's art also defiantly disrupts spaces to tease out their layered meanings. She reveals how colonial and imperialist violence continues to shape our present. She demands accountability, or what Massey called, political responsibility, not only for past crimes, but also for "present wrongs, including those distant in space".
Agata Lisiak 22:13
After contemplating the pyramid's haunting meanings in the sunny Berlin gallery, we entered a darkened space with a black-and-white photograph projected onto one of the walls. The image depicts eerie figures standing in the desert, and it's mirrored by an installation in the middle of the room of a group of dummies that look exactly like those in the photograph. They're placed on the sand looking ahead at the large-scale image of themselves. It's like a scene from a post-apocalyptic horror movie.
Heba Amin 22:44
So this work is called Atom Elegy and it also deals with a not so nice narrative. It's looking at the French atomic bomb testings that took place in the 1960s in Algeria. Quite shocking because it's quite recent in history, again, something that's been written out of history, and only recently is it coming to the fore again because of French government's declassified files. The title of the work is inspired by a text that I came across, a book of poems by the French-German poet named Yvan Goll, a book that was called Fruit from Saturn. And in that book is a poem called "Atom Elegy", which was essentially a love poem to atomic energy and it was written in the early 1940s, before the atomic bombs were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. And to go back to the original title of this whole exhibition, I was really struck again by the way in which these technological developments are often not questioned and perceived through these utopian eyes, as was the case with the way in which Yvan Goll professed his love to atomic energy. Then the bombs were dropped and we saw the full devastation of what this technology is capable of and what these inventions were capable of. And so he re-wrote the poem and, in fact, the first version of the poem was never officially published and I discovered it in the collection of the Centre for Persecuted Art in Solingen where I exhibited the pyramid.
Heba Amin 24:26
I was really interested in that kind of in between space of what our imagined perceptions of the future of these technologies are and what the realities of them are. So in doing my research about the atomic bomb in particular, I came across this archival image that you see here from 1960. And basically it depicts two rows of these propped up dummies with these metal rods or stakes coming out of their backs. And I was really struck by the uncanniness of this image. At first glance, it looks like human figures that are pierced with these rods. And then at the second glance, you realise that they're dummies that were made to look realistic. And this was at one of the atomic bomb testing sites that were conducted by the French. Again, using these landscapes elsewhere to test these dangerous substances and in 1960 we already know the devastation and the impact of atomic bombs. But recently, scientific research and tests that have been done have indicated that the nuclear fallout from these particular tests have gone as far as Sudan. So the toxins have basically covered the entirety of North Africa. So again, incredibly appalling, nobody's taken responsibility for it and I had to find a way to deal with the horror of this image. And particularly this image because you see the moment in between where the testing hasn't happened yet, the explosion hasn't happened yet. So you're only left with your imagination of what is obviously going to happen to these figures and then you transpose that onto human life. And so the way that I felt like I could better understand it is to again reconstruct it as I have with the other two works. And so it's this forensic archeological approach where you start to extract data and information by reconstructing the scenario. So you also see in this space a three-dimensional reconstruction of the image through these small dolls or these small dummies. And it's in the reconstruction and the duplication of the original image that I started to think about actually how disturbing this scenario is. Initially, I thought by recreating the individual figures that I'd somehow humanise them, only to discover that it does the complete opposite and that, in fact, I became very disturbed by the detail in which these dummies are presented, including a purse and a water bottle, and that they really were intentionally made to look human, and how gruesome that actually is. And so it revealed a lot of this information of the political hierarchies through the technological imagination and in these very specific landscapes, of course, the desert being the quintessential colonial landscape of imagination and a way to relay that these territories are unpopulated, that humans don't exist here, so therefore it's okay to take them. And, of course, we know that these are all fabrications.
Agata Lisiak 28:01
Orientalist fantasies, like the ones Heba addresses in her work, have disastrous, long-lasting effects. Such imperialist, racist fabrications continue to be reproduced in schools, in the news and in popular culture, so it is crucial to dismantle them through whatever means necessary.
Agata Lisiak 28:20
As an artist interested in historical cartographies of North Africa, South-West Asia and the Mediterranean region, Heba spends a lot of time studying different maps. Maps shape our geographical imaginations. They affect how we understand our place in the world and, as Massey insisted, "the place of other people and other societies. Such world views vary between societies and through history. They may also be contested. They are social products which reflect a balance of power".
Heba Amin 28:49
I think actually maps are very telling of the cultural and political constructs of how we imagine space and geography. And that's why I think it's so ironic and almost comical to think of this universal perspective of space and geography, there's no such thing. And time and time again we see the ways in which the conquest of territory is visualised in a way to suit the conquerer. And so I became interested in looking at, historically, what the overarching visions of these regions have been. So if you look, of course, under the Islamic empire, it's a very different visualisation than under a European colonial perspective. And of course, the contemporary maps that we're working with today stem from the colonial perspective. The borders that we live with today stem from the colonial perspective. And so that can't not affect our contemporary societies. It's a direct connection between those two things. And so how do we extract these individual narratives to help illustrate that? And that's what I'm attempting to do with my work.
Agata Lisiak 30:00
From the subversive reproduction of the first documented photograph taken on the African continent to the replica of an outrageous pyramid commemorating a Nazi pilot and the restaging of nuclear test dummies, Heba Amin's works contest and disrupt dominant geographical imaginations.
Agata Lisiak 30:17
We'd love to hear how art inspires you to question geographical imaginations. Is there an art piece that made you reflect on how you imagine the world and your place in it? A performance, photograph, or film that has prompted a shift in your perspective? Please take a moment to fill out the form linked in the episode notes to share your thoughts with us. To learn more about the things we discuss today, visit the podcast page at thesociologicalreview.org. That's where you'll find a reading list and links to Heba Amin's artworks.
Agata Lisiak 30:47
Today's episode was created by Susan Stone, Reece Cox, Adèle Martin, Bose Sarmiento and me, Agata Lisiak. Spatial Delight is funded by the Volkswagen Foundation and hosted by the Sociological Review Foundation. Big thanks to our guest Heba Amin and the Zilberman Gallery for their hospitality. Thank you for listening.