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zelle 05: Kreuzungen
Kloster Altzella 2005



Zelle 05: Kreuzungen
Kloster Altzella 2005

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Reframing Otherness

One of the most recurrent leitmotifs in the current agenda of globalized curatorial practices is that of the multicultural analysis of identity. A great many of today s curators, artists, writers, musicians and filmmakers, successfully build their whole oeuvres on the shaky foundations of a multicultural rhetoric which is primarily based on the concept of  Integrating the Other . In general terms, one can safely say that humanity is still at a stage in cultural history where  The Self  can only be satisfactorily identified by realizing the  Difference of the Other . The power politics of new millennium capitalism have lead us to think of multiculturalism and universality as one and the same thing, but hypothetically speaking, they are two very different cases of cultural discourse. Multiculturalism, the more popular of the two ideologies, seems to be based on a somewhat naïve socio-political preoccupation with the diversity of morals, customs and beliefs that people embrace throughout the world. On one level of its structure, multiculturalism perhaps carries a latent fear of these  Different  models of cultural existence, thus attempts are made at integration by imposing a kind of manufactured  Sameness . On the other hand, universality as a doctrine is relaxed with the fact that  Difference  is the way of the world. It is an outlook that accepts  Otherness  while making a sincere effort to recognize the underlying and sometimes hard to perceive  Sameness  inherent in the cultural anthropology of societies. Greatly influenced by the domineering codes of a media backed globalization process – many of today s art practitioners are either unable or unwilling to make a distinction between these two standpoints.

Egyptian / German artist Susan Hefuna is one artist who has been able to make the distinction between the multicultural and the universal. Her heightened understanding of the socio-cultural politics behind both phenomena has allowed her to devise a tactful, conceptually based discourse which is rooted in universality but which also plays on the ethics of multiculturalism. As a multidisciplinary artist, Hefuna mostly uses the mediums of drawing, photography and video to challenge the expectations of a global audience by now well accustomed to, and comfortable with the concept of multiculturalism. Central to the success of Hefuna s exercises in
universality, is her ability to identify the well established, prefabricated metaphors of the orient and then focus her discourse on their destabilization. One such metaphor is that of the mashrabiya. Mashrabiyas are windows of latticed woodwork that have been an intrinsic part of Islamic architecture since the Middle Ages. They were used to beautify buildings, especially domestic ones, with arabesque ornamentation while protecting their inhabitants from the harsh Egyptian sunlight. As well as being visually pleasing, the mashrabiya is a considerably practical architectural element born of a specific cultural and vernacular climate, and it is this practicality that led the Egyptian modernist architect Hassan Fathy (1899 – 1989) to rediscover and reinterpret its usage in his building designs. Fathy saw in the mashrabiya an  Appropriate Technology  that provided sufficient cooling and privacy. However, 19th century Orientalist harem scenes using mashrabiyas as backdrops seem to have made a lasting impact on how the mashrabiya is culturally interpreted up until this very day. Further complicating this comedy of semiotics, Orientalist paintings are still being reproduced in the thousands all over the world from London and Beijing to Cairo itself -- a fact that reveals a lot about our so called  Post-Colonial  but ultimately consumerist, globalized culture.

The ancient craft of mashrabiya making depends on the craftsman’s ability to join small knobs of wood together, interconnecting them to form a complete and unbroken pattern. In the late nineties, Susan Hefuna began to realize the similarities in construct between the interlocking patterning of mashrabiyas and the microscopic images of molecular and DNA structures. With this association in mind, Hefuna’s drawings were directed towards realizing the full potential of the mashrabiya as a trans-ethnic metaphor for a  contemporary universality , one that seems to be objectively different from the type of  Sufi universality  felt in Islamic ornamentation yet manages to retain some of its visual qualities. Over the years one has witnessed Hefuna’s drawings evolve from what seemed to be actual abstract representations of mashrabiyas to less static, multi-dimensional and multi-tonal conceptual renderings of cityscapes that carry stronger social significations. In this later body of work, Hefuna successfully combines subtle, low-key conceptual and minimalist structuring with a progressive form of automatism. The artist produces each drawing spontaneously in a single session, not allowing ink to leave paper until she considers the drawing complete. The result is one of subtle seismographic alterations in shape, thickness of line, size and tone, which are the principle factors behind the illusion of staggered movement suggested in the artist’s drawings. All in all, Hefuna s drawings seem to be intuitive exercises that explore the possibilities of interconnectivity and intersection. While the artist intimately expresses the aesthetic qualities of  intersection  in her drawings, she concentrates her photography and video work on examining its personal, cultural, historical and social manifestations by employing a more dialectical and premeditated approach.

In his book Camera Lucida (1980), Roland Barthes wrote,  we must surely classify, verify by samples, if we want to constitute a corpus . Indeed, the act of classifying seems to be a human necessity, a method we apply to make sense of, and put in order the many conflicting details of our existence. Most likely, systems of socio-cultural classification aided by the decisive lens of the camera have played an important role throughout history in shaping and restricting our definition of  the Other . Susan Hefuna s photographic strategy is to produce images that allude to these systems of classification yet work against them. Using low-tech aesthetics, Hefuna takes close ups of the interlocking frameworks of mashrabiyas with a pin-hole camera. Due to the use of this ancient and amateurish technique, the images are full of imperfections. Tainted with dust, the yellowness of aging and an uneven quality of light, at first glance one may be easily tricked into thinking that these photographs were taken by a 19th century expeditionary recording the architectural elements of the Middle- East. But, interpreted in light of their collective title Cityscape Cairo they become abstract metaphors for Egypt s capital, a mega-city bustling with over fifteen million inhabitants, but that is still largely conceived of through its historical past. Here, one notices that Hefuna subverts and plays down her position as  the author  of these photographs, deliberately taking a distanced but reflective stance in her attempt to counterbalance the powerful coding systems of cultural classification. Does this imply that a true trans-cultural position can only be attained by the process of creating some sort of  neutral zone , where the personal, historic, vernacular and global characteristics of an artist’s cultural identity can freely associate and interconnect? Whether it does or not, what is clear is that this process is a very different tactic than that used by artists working within the framework of  Multiculturalism , who often simply base their practices on the juxtaposition of diverse cultural and historic references. Hefuna’s subverting of  the author  is particularly evident in the photographs she incorporates her own image into. In these photographs, that are allusions to late 19th and early 20th century orientalist daguerreotypes and the picturesque but stereotyping postcards of Lehnert and Landrock – Hefuna literally walks into the picture to intervene and disrupt its predetermined cultural signification. These somewhat hazy images feature the casually dressed Hefuna in various everyday situations such as, walking in the Nile Delta village where her father originates from, drinking water from a clay pitcher on a Cairo street and sitting in-between her paternal cousins. Despite their somber mood and their obvious autobiographical references, these photographs resist being labeled as self-portraits. Instead, they can be seen as representing the moments or lapses in time in which the artist has been able to subtlety highjack the domineering photographic documents of cultural history, armed with little except a highly developed visual language and a sense of displacement. Susan Hefuna chooses not to inform us about the presence of  the author  inside these photographs preferring to title her images with non-personal and general morphemes such as, Woman Cairo and Woman Nile Delta. In doing so, Hefuna encourages a universal reading of the image unbound by the assuming mindset that cultural specificity and the unnecessary details of ethnicity make us fall into.

Bassam El-Baroni
Alexandria
July 2005







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Cairo Crossroads
By Amira Pierce

The year is 2005; 1426 in the Muslim.
Somewhere in downtown Cairo:
In daylight, the streets here are heavily trafficked. Today, as on many days, they strike the woman in the dress as loud and crowded. Dusty, hot, and alive. These streets are for hanging about more than they are for moving, lined with plastic chairs, stools, thrones, stumps. Living streets of yelling matches that break into laughter at the moment an outsider might expect fists.
And here there is less skin, more cloth, less women, more men.
On the corner that joins the side street to the main street she passes her kishk, run by a family. Each morning she walks by as the father, snow-white-haired and galabiya-clad, opens the padlocked chain that guards it. He swings open the tiny metal door and begins to pull out merchandise, beginning with a small fridge holding bottles and boxes of over-sweetened juice, and then unstacking cartons of cigarettes and gum. Before he has finished this work of unpacking and opening, he is surrounded and pressed by customers in need—of cigarettes, of candies and chips and cookies. They call his name and call him  uncle,  they jostle each other, pointing their bills towards him as they hurtle requests. He is not fluent with the group, being old and slow, and voiceless.
The father’s four garrulous sons will join him later in the day. As crowds gather and consume, a pile of trash will grow nearby, flooding the street’s gutter, and his wife will also appear. She will mostly likely be wearing an olive-green dress, a long olive-green scarf covering her hair, only allowing for view the window of her face, which will most likely be scowling, the corners of her down-turned mouth echoing the steeliness of her eyes. She will sit on her throne, a small folding stool at the kishk’s door, helping customers, yelling to her sons for change. They keep their money in a rough cardboard box hidden inside the shadows of the kishk, bills thrown in with no separation between denominations. This morning the woman in the dress watches the father root through the folded and tangled papers, adorned with palaces and presidents and, if you hold them up to the light, watermarks of the sphinx.
She walks on, past a bicycle cart piled with bananas, a beggar praying from his wheelchair, two young men sheepherding brown and white goats through the narrow street.

The woman in the dress has never known such a separation of public and private as here, such a wall between inner and outer, such a stark divide. She can’t remember what she expected anymore, but it wasn’t this layered life, this life within life, these shadowed walls.

She thinks of last night. In a room off three floors up:
Storybook windows open wide to darkness, and mosquitoes and air enter the room. Outer becomes inner so that inner can breathe.
Street sounds have long-faded and someone forgot to put more music on the stereo.
The group of them sits—sipping, smoking—heads tilted up to the high ceiling, to the pattern made by the lamp hanging down from its middle, a naked bulb covered in a woven shade.
The effect is a large circle of light at center, and emanating from it, following the pattern of the weave, there is a pattern of light and shadow. The tightness and the sharpness of it expand and drip as the shapes and shadows move further from their origin, down the walls of the room. The spectacle that engulfs them invites wonderment, begs the question: What do the playing shadows look like to you?
The photographer says it first, voice filling the silence:  I see a setting sun, a vast horizon, the patterns of light through clouds.  I see earth and sky and the ways light plays. It’s glory-colored and sublime.
And then the musician:  It looks like the visual depiction of a really tight drum beat that keeps going and going and then all of a sudden goes crazy.  I see sound in steps, sound’s construction. The beat, the blare, the crash.
We inhabit other worlds in our minds; we find ways for those worlds to live in the world we touch and share. We talk about shadows and light.
The woman wearing the dress has sat in this room many nights, spanning months (not years or decades—this is only a crossroads) with visitors and friends. She doesn’t like the light, which, after dark, casts a dull, orangey glow, and this pervasive, strange shadow across the room. The shadow is so dominant that when the fan is on or when there is a breeze, the woven shade shakes and so the shadow shakes, making it feel as if the whole room is at sea, a small fishing boat being jerked about by waves.
These passengers have all had other homes across the seas, but home now is the city below them and around them and beyond them, dark and sleeping. And they are shrouded, in this shadow, in this net, this mashrabiya.
As a thief who steals the thoughts of the woman wearing the dress and gives them words, the writer says:  It makes me think of a mashrabiya.  
He is talking (and she is thinking) of those ornamental—artful—wood constructions of time past in this city, that covered the windows of harem rooms in now-ancient buildings. They were screens, behind which women wearing dresses would sit, unseen from outside, though they who were inside, but not unaffected. They could see full well that world from which they were separated and protected.
While it may seem a dark, unprivileged place, a seat behind a mashrabiya affords the hidden seated one a scene, and a breeze. To be cooled without being exposed. To see without sitting in full view. To perceive at your own pace, in your own good time, with your own power.

She often watches the street from above, on her bedroom’s balcony, her own mashrabiya. She is outside, but above—unseen, untouched. It is nearly the perfect place. She had been surprised at first that no one looked up, no one noticed her here, suspended in her small cage, jutting out far above their heads and bound in old metal tracery. Then one day she began to take it for granted, wearing clothes baring her shoulders and her legs, which she propped on the wooden chair facing her.
She looks down at her street, through the trees that shroud her: the man who parks cars is drinking tea and watching traffic pass, the doorman of the building adjacent is dining sitting on a stool in the bed of a parked pick-up truck, the boys at the kishk are flirting with girls wearing brightly colored scarves who drink sugary sodas out of heavy glass bottles.
She almost likes it better this way, when they are not reacting to her, but she can’t hear them up here, or see their eyes. The exchange is gone.
Apparently, these side streets used to have gates that were locked at nightfall. Apparently some of these streets were limited to foreigners. She has heard it in pieces: a few decades ago and these streets were other streets entirely. And she looks down, trying to imagine those cages and those rules.
The mosque begins to sing. Sunset.
Sunset and an army of birds takes to the tree opposite the balcony, singing loudly in a chorus of twittering light, singing for the bodies below them and for the woman in the dress.
Tomorrow is Friday and in the early afternoon, the disembodied voice from the tiny mosque across the street will not sing but shout, and she will look down at the men who have come to listen, sitting—shoe-less, their legs folded under them—on a carpet of green Astroturf that has taken over the street. She will listen from her room. But she won’t hear.

There is a constant population of men on the street—among them the man with the gray face who parks cars, the portly man who runs the antique shop and can usually be found sleeping on a wooden chair outside its door, the bright-eyed man who runs the music store on the ground floor of her building. She may have learned their names once but has now forgot. Still, in the evening coming home, she greets each one:  evening of peace.  And each responds:
Evening of Peace. Evening of Light. Evening of Jasmine. Evening of Cream…
The boys at the kishk tease her again today, asking when she will come away with them—all the way to Spain on the back of a camel, through the deserts of Northern Africa, or at least to their family house in the oasis of Fayoum. Tomorrow? But she will only see them here, on this street corner. They will populate this street corner in her dreams when Cairo is a city in her memory.  Inshallah,  she says. If God wills it. And then she imagines it: trolling deserts on camels with these shimmering boys, these yammering, delighted boys. They beseech her endlessly, forcing her to walk away mid-sentence, smiling.
The antique dealer, not sleeping as she passes, mutters his response to her greeting, curt and prompt, in a voice somewhere between a hoarse whisper and a girlish song.
The music man answers with a rapid trail of words, falling from his lips. He praises God, hopes God protects her and keeps her and bestows peace upon her. She listens and ends up repeating:
may God give you peace, may God give you peace, may God give you peace,
more interested in the posters behind him, of blonde Lebanese pop stars, their eyeballs gouged out over a series of many nights by her painter friend. After an exchange with the music man she comes away thinking about what God means here and how much chitchat is based around God, how it might be to talk about nothing but.

What is it that you keep locked inside the inner rooms of your body? What are your secrets and your hopes? What are your most wretched thoughts? And what parts do you tell? To your wife, your children, your brothers, your friends… What parts do you tell the woman in the dress? What passes through the screen?

She is accepted on the street but there is a distance. The woman in the dress is not of these people. Always a transient, her whole life, she thinks, her being heavy in the bag of her skin.
She fumbles with their language; the Egyptian dialect is so unlike the Lebanese her mother spoke to her at home in America. She never thought there would be such a difference until she came here, to walk this street each day, going to and from her new temporary home.
Anyway, her thoughts are in English, and her dreams are in English, that language the boys at the crowded café that spills out of the alleyway behind her building shout to her, bold and broken, as she passes in the evening:  Welcome! Come sit? Have some tea? Sheesha!  The cloying sweet anise smell from the smoke hits her. In the beginning she would say  No, thank you,  but now she has adopted the technique of a horse in blinders, staring straight ahead and walking on, her pace unchanging. And unchanging still as she walks beyond the coffee shop, past the perfume shop, windows showcasing rows of delicate glass bottles, a few doors from home. In the evenings the young owner is outside, sitting with friends on green plastic chairs. He yells at her as she walks by, in a surprisingly American accent:  You, you. I know you! What happened to your red shirt? Please wear your pretty red shirt!  
The woman in the dress doesn’t usually get angered by these men. Their attention is unwavering and somehow curious. Sometimes it grates. This man is her neighbor. He sees her every day. The novelty of her existence should have worn off.
And so this night, she breaks through the barrier.
Mid-stride, she stops, turns to face him and says in even English:  What’s your problem? Why do you talk to me like that?  He looks stricken yet doesn’t seem to get it. She switches to very careful Egyptian, surprising him with the language he understands at his core. She doesn’t consider hurtling the curses her friends have taught her, but says, instead, as if she is his mother:  Why do you yell out to me in this way? Isn’t it rude? Aren’t you better than that?  To hear the words like this, at a distance so close, makes something click. A simple plea in his own language. He plummets; he averts his eyes, turns his head downward and whimpers apologies.  Ma’alesh,  she says, embarrassed. It’s no big deal.
She walks on, relieved the bright-eyed music man isn’t outside his shop to wish God’s multitudinous blessings on her, and goes upstairs, swallowed by the peace and shadow of her temporary home.

The woman in the dress is at sail in a boat that is a room enshrouded in shadow on the sea that is this foreign city. Cairo is a temporary home that speaks in a language different from her own, that opens its walls and its doors, that holds her close in the folds of its patterned shadows, behind its mashrabiyas. Each time she crosses out of that protected space, she is born.
Born a woman in the dress, who sails the streets, crossing into and out of a culture she can’t claim. Giving and taking: an image, a greeting, a story, a wish.

Late at night the woman in the dress remembers that her temporary home has many shadows besides the patterned shadow in the orange room. Lights from the street invade through the apartment’s tall, framed windows, filter through the trees and play on all the walls in all the rooms.
Lying in bed, seeking sleep, she watches them:
The shadows bow and dance and talk, it seems. The shadows might be the ghosts of the souls that have lived in these walls, this mashrabiya. Creeping, as she climbed the three floors to her door, the shadows followed her up the twisty stairs and into these rooms. Each corner took her breath away, with expectation of the shape it might hold.
The moving shadows speak of lives buried and contained. She feels it here, more than anywhere, that thing about the present existing separately and yet in absolute addition to everything that has come before. A past she doesn’t know weighs on her like an anchor.

That night, she dreams a voice:
If you are looking, Cairo will show you her mashrabiyas. Hands hundreds of years old beveled the wood and put it together, geometrically, methodically. Hands put them together and then put them in place, between the spaces women would sit, protected, and all that wide world outside.
And in the time between the putting and now, they have been sat behind and looked through.
They have been looked at from outside. They have gathered dust. They have been photographed and drawn. They have been moved and ignored and imitated and restored.
They allow a breeze.