Gallery Hours:     12:30-5:00 Tuesday through Friday

1:30-5:00 Saturday, 2:00-4:00 Sunday

Diasporas and Dreams

Allegheny College’s 2010-2011 annual theme is "Global Citizenship," but there is no agreement about what might constitute a notion of citizenship that exists beyond political borders and cultural boundaries. In this exhibition we propose that diasporic peoples, whatever their reason for leaving "home," are as close as one gets to finding a “global citizen.” As a field of study, diasporas and migrants of which they are constituted have garnered increased attention, due in part to the unfortunate proliferation of intrastate conflicts, environmental disasters and economic catastrophes around the world. This interest is reflected in the growing number of conferences, courses and graduate programs, and an increasing number of scholars who define themselves as specialists. But while diasporas certainly refer to a people abroad, away from their ancestral lands, could people living within their homeland also be part of a diaspora?

We believe humans migrated across the globe from an ancestral African habitat about 100,000 years ago.1 Asian peoples may have crossed the Bering Strait and settled in the Americas about 10,000 years ago. The concept of a Diaspora is not confined to any particular peoples or geographic areas, although it has been traditionally used to refer to the Jewish community scattered outside of what is today Israel/Palestine. The two thousand year old Jewish Diaspora is perhaps the most widely studied, but Islamic and Christian peoples, engaging in multi-century imperial projects, exported their religions and cultures around the world, sometimes creating new, multiracial polyglot communities in the process and, other times, reducing the influence of certain societies and replacing them with their own. These diasporas were quite different in their motivations and manifestations, but the net effects were the scattering of populations, fracturing established cultures and creating new ones. Diasporas have been crucibles of both destruction and invention. The five artists invited to be a part of this show invite us to examine the personal and political dimensions of human displacement, including in diasporas.

Bonnie Donohue, a multi-media artist based in Boston, creates stunning photographic panoramas of abandoned military installations in Vieques, Puerto Rico -- along with Navy aerial surveillance photographs -- to recount the displacement of farmers, fishermen and tenant sugar-cane farmers who lived on and worked the land before the United States' military turned the eastern third of the island into a bombing range, and the western third into munitions storage. Donohue's images imply the silence and heartbreak that are likely outcomes of such expropriation.

Rebecca Heyl is an artist and human rights activist based in Boston and Perugia, Italy. While living in Israel from 2001 - 2004, Heyl worked with the Israeli/Palestinian non-profit organization, Windows: Channels for Communication. In her 2008 book, Windows in the Wall (Skira), Heyl explores the false notion of "Land without People for a People without Land." She focuses on the consequences of containment, conducting photographic interviews with Jews and Muslims who live on both sides of the separation barrier being constructed by Israel that divides Palestinian territories from Israel, and creates multiple non-contiguous fingers of land.

Pittsburgh artist Andrew Ellis Johnson draws lines of inquiry into continued construction of continued Israeli settlements in Palestinian territories and encourages viewers to consider how the constant pressing of such settlements affects the very survival of Palestinian populations.

Vasia Markides is a painter and filmmaker living in New York City and Cyprus. Her 2008 documentary, "Hidden in the Sand," chronicles the story of Famagusta, the idyllic home city of the artist's refugee mother, that was evacuated of its Greek Cypriot population by the Turkish army during the 1974 military invasion. Markides says, "The media institutions, the educational system, and the government all foster a general attitude of victimization amongst the Greek-Cypriots.  Very little in the society encourages people to take responsibility for their current situation, and this creates a sense of powerlessness.  The perpetual feeling that we’ve been wronged… which of course we have – but the full story is much more complicated… keeps us pointing fingers while we gaze over the rigid demarcation line between us and a solution.  Making this film woke me up to this by allowing me permission to form valuable relationships with incredibly intelligent people whose stories helped me shape a new history for myself and to break down restrictive barriers of ethnic and national identity.  It made me completely reevaluate the meaning of being “Cypriot”.  I wanted the film to convey this idea and to encourage people to question the institutions and social structures around them, which keep them tethered to a painful past and a grim future." 

Susanne Slavick, named Artist of the Year by the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts in 2008, creates paintings and works on paper by digitally and manually transforming photographic images of the wreckage created by American military actions in the Middle East.  Using hand-painted elements and motifs from the very cultures under attack, she reminds us of what is being eradicated and supplants what has been lost in a project of empathic restitution.

Each of the aritsts offers creative pathways for communication in the midst of conflict. Their work helps us to see gaps in understanding, and allows us to question how privilege and unequal divisions of power contribute to injustice. Al-Salam, Shalom, Eirene, Baris, Paz, Peace in 2011 and beyond. May we all become citizens of a just world.

--Darren Lee Miller, Assistant Professor of Art
Director, Bowman~Penelec~Megahan Art Galleries



1 "Becoming Human, Part 2: The Birth of Humanity" NOVA. Written Produced, and Directed by Graham Townsley. Narrator, Lance Lewman. PBS, November 10, 2009.

Conflicts, Diasporas and Global Citizens

Diasporas are ancient experiences that take on new meaning where the forces of globalization are in tension with nation-state boundaries, both physical and cultural. Individuals who are forced (or choose) to flee in protest from their native lands are often now referred to as being part of a diaspora when a large number of their fellow people also migrate, although historically the term had a more specific use. In contemporary usage, the word “diaspora” is often used to describe major migrations from an ancestral homeland, whether the forces pushing the migrants away from their territory of origin are war, politics, or economic factors.

Scholars of international relations often view diasporas as integral players in conflicts.  They are particularly important agents in the relationship between civil and interstate wars.  There are several reasons for this.  Civil wars often generate massive population displacements, both within the country and outside its borders.  These refugee populations become diasporas as they spread further abroad and their new homes become more permanent. 

Diasporas may be especially likely to intervene in conflicts on behalf of their co-ethnics, or ethnic kin (those members of the group who remain in the home country).  The reasons range from sympathy, to guilt over having escaped the conflict, to dense networks of information that keep those in the diaspora informed about events in the home country.  In some conflicts, combatants use these ethnic networks to coerce "donations" from the diaspora that help to fund their struggle.

Diasporas' active involvement in wars takes several forms.  Perhaps the most common is through lobbying and demonstrating on behalf of their kin.  For instance, the East Timorese diaspora played a central role in publicizing Indonesian atrocities in East Timor in the 1990s.  The Jewish diaspora also is well known for its political engagement in the Arab-Israeli conflict.  Diasporas often provide the combatants with weapons or financial support.  This was one important tool employed by Irish-Americans to support the IRA during the 1970s and 1980s.  The Tamil Tigers (LTTE), a rebel group in Sri Lanka, drew most of their funding from the hundreds of thousands of Tamils living in Europe and Canada. 

Finally, diasporas in neighboring states can offer training sites, bases, safe havens, escape routes, and smuggling routes.  Kurds in Turkey, Iran, and Iraq have sometimes benefited from this type of support, and this aid is part of what has fueled conflicts in Kashmir and the former Yugoslavia.  When co-ethnics in neighboring states intervene in this manner, the war itself often spreads.  Militarized refugee populations are especially likely to spread conflict to weak neighboring states.  Neighboring governments also are especially likely to join a conflict as a result of "hot pursuit" operations to curtail this cross-border assistance. Although the conflict is complex, this is one reason that the Great Lakes region of Africa -- including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Angola, Rwanda, Burundi, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Chad, Libya, and Sudan -- spiraled into "Africa's World War" during the late 1990s and early 2000s.  

Ironically, diasporas who intervene often simply prolong the war, generating more casualties.  This is because the support they offer is rarely enough to allow their co-ethnics to triumph, but instead merely staves off the combatants' defeat.  In many cases, intervention also complicates negotiation and bargaining attempts by adding interests that need to be resolved in order to end the conflict.  For instance, the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh between Azerbaijan and Armenians became seemingly impossible to resolve when the Republic of Armenia and both Azeri and Armenian refugee populations became involved.  In sum, diaspora interventions at best may leave their kin in a better bargaining position for peace negotiations by bolstering the combatants' strength, but only after tremendous cost.

Diasporic peoples are often heavily invested in their country of origin, and even more so in maintaining a traditional cultural identity in their new surroundings.  Their children become important bridges between old and new not only because they can usually speak both languages more easily than their parents, but also because they are often more able to understand the cultural traditions of the new country.  This ability to communicate on behalf of their parents also gives them a strange, and often unwanted, power of their parents’ experiences.  These children grow up within both the new and old cultures and bear the burden of having to navigate contradictory expectations.  Often they feel torn between their parents’ cultural traditions and the search for an identity in their new land.  It is often their children, the third generation, that will both be most assimilated into the new country’s culture and also most interested in re-discovering, often in a very romanticized way, their “ancestral homeland.”

--Jacqueline Gehring, PhD
Assistant Professor of Political Science

--Shanna Kirschner, PhD
Assistant Professor of Political Science

Bonnie Donohue
detail from Bunkers in Storm, 2005
Image courtesy of the artist

Interview with BONNIE DONOHUE

During and after World War Two, the United States expropriated two-thirds of the island of Vieques, off the eastern coast of Puerto Rico’s main island, displacing thousands of sugar laborers to the center of the island. The Navy used this area for a firing range and a missile and bomb testing ground between 1948 and 2003 when, following years of protests, the Navy withdrew from the island.

Shanna Kirschner: Who are your influences?

Bonnie Donohue: In general, artists who engage with the world – those who engage both socially and across cultural divides – are important influences for me. I had the opportunity to make a film with Robert Frank on an extended basis while in graduate school, and this experience was a big influence on finding the personal core of my practice. I incorporated that as I developed my own approach toward examining other people’s lives, which was an evolving process over time.

Because of my interest in the embedded histories of landscapes, I am drawn to the work of others with similar approaches, such as Andrew Freeman, who photographs the repurposed and relocated barracks that housed Japanese-Americans in internment camps during WWII, and Paul Seawright, from Belfast, who photographs precise locations in the seemingly innocuous and peaceful landscape where sectarian murders occurred.  Fred Wilson, Francis Alys, Alfredo Jaar, S. A. Bachman and David Attyah of the collective THINK AGAIN, Bill Burke, Emily Jacir, Fiona Tam, Ashley Hunt, and An-My Lê also inspire my work.  I greatly admire the work of Omer Fast, Haroun Farocki, Trevor Paglen and Chris Verene.  There are so many significant artists working today in a variety of ways that make us contemplate anew what we think we know.  They force us to think politically about our places in the world.

SK: What is the catalyst for making your work?

BD: I’ve done major projects in Northern Ireland before the peace accords; in South Africa before the end of apartheid; and in the 1984 Olympics, which were rife with political debates. This is my fourth major project, which began in a period of major grass-roots protests over the Navy’s presence in Vieques. 

The first time I worked politically was in 1981, when my friend Warner Wada and I travelled to Northern Ireland to work on a dramatic film directed by a friend of ours. We were carrying newly portable video equipment, and we stepped into another world during the great hunger strikes among Irish Republican political prisoners.

Bobby Sands [one of the prisoners] had already died on hunger strike, and several more individuals died while we were there.  Margaret Thatcher refused to intervene, refused to recognize them as political prisoners, and would only refer to them as common criminals.  She let them die.  Over 100,000 people would march for miles in the funeral corteges, and the funerals themselves were huge political events, with paramilitary color guards appearing and disappearing in the crowd that took up half the cemetery.  We found an electrified community of activist protestors during the hunger strikes, and it made for very striking images and interviews.  This experience changed my art-making practice instantly and permanently.  This kind of political activism became one of the main catalysts for my work.

The political and social situation in West Belfast was so urgent that Warner and I began to collaborate on a variety of video and photo installations, as well as a book entitled Control Zone.  We returned to Belfast repeatedly over a four-year period, interviewing some of the same people over and over again.  Our work was directly inspired by the chaos of our surroundings in Northern Ireland and could only be produced in a multi-stranded way. One could not represent Republican prisoners without representing a history of conflict; one could not describe the Catholic/Protestant divide without understanding the Republican/Loyalist divide or the Irish/British divide.  One could not attend an Orangemen’s parade in July, celebrating the defeat of a Catholic king by a Protestant one in the 1690 Battle of the Boyne, without comprehending the conflict’s history.

In Northern Ireland, things normalized after negotiations and violence subsided, as did state violence toward the people.  In South Africa, the apartheid apparatus was so powerful and the oppression was total, and yet the long-oppressed majority enjoyed such a sweet victory after decades of struggle.  In Vieques, after decades of military occupation, producing both a military service state and an occupation psychology, a nonviolent, popular, grassroots movement ultimately drove the Navy from the island. There are ongoing legacies of very serious illnesses and improperly conducted cleanup operations; and the landscape, coral reefs, and sea beds are deeply damaged and scarred from decades of bombing, but at least the bombing has stopped. 

In general, from the perspective of making art out in the world, I’m interested in grassroots movements against hegemonic power -- such as in these three cases -- as source material, and I am generally on the spot in the months or years before liberation. In each project, I’ve incorporated aspects of the day-to-day existence of ordinary people whose lives have been altered by extraordinary political situations: ordinary people who united and fought back, and prevailed in many cases.

SK: How do you balance hope and cynicism in your work?

BD: Over the years, from Northern Ireland in the early ‘80s to my current work in Puerto Rico, I feel that I’m more optimistic, but I’m also more acutely critical of things I see that are wrong.  My work was darkly chaotic and emotional when I was working in Northern Ireland.  I stripped all the color out of the video, and the atmosphere was heavy. In the Northern Ireland era, I was working with an anti-aesthetic – gritty, raw, black-and-white imagery in barbed wire and concrete installations that might make you claustrophobic.  It was quite effective, but it’s in the past for me. The work itself has lightened up somewhat. Now I embrace the pleasure of making a beautiful photograph of something that may still be horrifying, or at least disturbing, upon close examination.  There’s still a bit of terror in the images, but there’s an aesthetic quality that seduces you to look closer.  It’s a kind of metaphor for the island itself, which appears as intoxicating and exotic as any other Caribbean island, until you look closely at its history.

SK: Can you describe your methodology?

BD: My initial attraction to a project is based on information I can glean about the particularities of a place, coupled with a strong intuition that this will be productive material – that there is a visual narrative therein.  I have mentioned that I am interested in exploring situations where there is an obvious power differential between the state and the ordinary people who call a place home, and where grassroots movements are poised to displace the dominant power.

Often, there is not much media attention to these situations, and I attempt to discover fine-grained detail on the ground.  I begin by walking around, meeting people, gaining access, and being a diligent listener.  I usually start by interviewing, either formally or through casual conversation, trying to get a sense of some of the essential issues.  At some point, I become irretrievably committed, and begin a journey of painstaking research.  One of my friends, observing my all-encompassing but productive sleuthing, joked that I must have been an investigative journalist in a former life.  But I’d be a lousy journalist, since there are few situations that could grab my undivided attention over a period of years.

There are times when I change my tools for gathering images and information. For example, when I first set out to Vieques, I was certain that the product would be a documentary video, showing two sides of the divide between the Navy occupiers and the citizens of the island.  After two years of that, I realized that what I really wanted to do was to photograph the landscape, and to research its history, which led to the large-scale panoramic photographs of the abandoned munitions storage bunkers.  The first time I encountered the bunkers, I had a visceral, emotional, response to them, and I just knew that this was the place I wanted to photograph.  It took quite a while, and a number of visits to the island, to settle on what was the perfect emblem for me: that is, the architecture – or warchitecture – of empty structures erected to house objects of destruction, standing in the place of the architecture of a densely populated communities of sugar laborers who lived and earned a living there.

So, I suppose that my methodology is an evolving one.  It took hundreds of hours of conversations with people who were protesting the Navy’s presence and, ironically, I settled on these mute structures that sat on a deafeningly silent landscape.  I would photograph for hours without encountering a living being, except for the wild horses that run free on that end of the island.

My exhibition strategies range from producing conventionally mounted photographs, to building complex video/text/photo installations, to creating hand-made and offset printed books. I have included sculptural aspects, sound, and found objects.  There are obvious continuities from one exhibition to the next; however, the actual materials and mediums will vary according to the task at hand.  My exhibitions almost always are emotionally affecting, and can produce tears, laughter, and astonishment with regularity.

SK: This exhibition is part of Allegheny’s Year of Global Citizenship, but that means different things to different people. What do you think “Global Citizenship” means?

BD: It’s a good question, in an era when citizenship itself is contested in so many places. To me, “global citizenship” means trying to understand what’s happening in different parts of the world in ways that one cannot understand from following conventional media coverage.  And, of course, I try to unpack this through my art practice, which requires me to engage in various ways with various sectors of communities.  Global citizenship is about developing empathy and trying to understand issues from an empathetic view, rather than just a sympathetic view.  In other words, it involves engaging in a discourse with individuals and their wider communities about their experiences.  I visit places on an extended basis and often return time after time, interviewing people on the ground about how their lives have changed as a result of larger events.  I’m a tactile learner, and it is an interesting proposition to comprehend how ordinary people’s lives are altered by larger political developments.

SK: To me, your work conveys some clear political messages. Do you see your work as commentary or description, or more advocacy?

BD: I’ve tried different strategies, but I look for contrasts.  Often, there are multiple interpretations of what it means to be a citizen or a resident of a place.  These debates exist in all the places of conflict where I’ve worked.  I try to present both sides, but I don’t pretend to be neutral.  I’m usually on the side of the ordinary citizen.  I will insert the dominant voice into my work, and I insert the voice of the ordinary citizen.  I don’t think I can solve these problems, but I think I can expose problems: pose questions, expose power structures and ideas of resistance, ask good questions about what is wrong with an existing power structure.  I advocate for individual empathy or awareness, in order to nudge a less passive view of world events.

SK: Much of your work seems to be about juxtaposing images – either those from the past and the present, or images of concrete military installations with natural reclamation of those spaces. How do you think those juxtapositions affect viewers’ perception of the Navy’s activities in Vieques?

BD: I think of the residual architecture, history, memory, and landscape as layers of events, and of vastly different narratives that occur in the same place at different times.  For example, I’ve been exploring an emblematic story of a local bartender who was murdered in 1953 by some sailors he had earlier served at his bar.  I am unpacking all of the characters, actually tracking them down, and writing a play about it, based on a Rashoman-like structure, and re-photographing the new structure that was built around his bar.  When the sailors went to courts-martial, they were acquitted.  I am exploring questions like how we get to the truth, when the dominant forces cover for each other.  What kinds of truths do different subjectivities bring to eyewitness accounts?  How do I bring a 57-year-old story, of what was supposed to be a long-forgotten murder, to life and keep it interesting?  These are complicated interactions and complicated questions; I’m trying now to unearth the story, bit by bit, and put it together in an empathetic way.

If I just illustrate how bad the military is or how wonderful the people are, it’s skewed to sympathize with one side or another. There are a variety of perspectives – pro-military, anti-military, and opinions in between – among the citizens of Vieques. When you put the elements together, you have a more problematic and nuanced story. I don’t want to just make the Navy people into cartoons of evil and make Vieques citizens into cartoons of noble suffering. I would rather humanize both sides and think about the colonial relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico.

SK: What do you see as the role of individuals in conflicts or social movements, such as that over the disposition of Vieques?

BD: Vieques is really interesting because people from all over the world united to help end the Navy bombing and occupation on the island.  An individual can’t really effect major change on her own; one needs to have allies.  I could stand alone, shouting about injustice for days on end. No one would care, and they might think I was unhinged.  But if there are 200,000 people in the streets of San Juan demanding change, it makes a real difference. 

Even bolder than the peace marches, there were thousands of people who risked their own lives by occupying the Vieques bombing range for over a year. They built a town, with a church, a supply depot, and even a house with a poured-concrete foundation. They found abandoned Navy vehicles and made them run. The fisherman brought in supplies and took out waste by boat. They united to halt the bombing exercises. It was an incredibly inspiring non-violent movement that brought the Navy era on Vieques to an end, after 60 years of unpopular occupation.

I went on a fact-finding mission to Vieques with The Fellowship of Reconciliation in 2001.  My roommate was Jane Kava, the Inuit mayor of the Yupik village of Savoonga, on the Alaskan island of St. Lawrence.  St. Lawrence Island had been a military outpost that was abandoned after the Cold War.  The Army left a tremendous amount of toxic waste, introducing a very high cancer rate on the island.  Jane traveled nearly 6,000 miles from St. Lawrence to Puerto Rico in order to form a sister island relationship between Savoonga and Vieques, which has a very high cancer rate as well, as a result of thousands of tons of ordnance dropped over the decades.  This island is so remote – it’s closer to Siberia than to the US, and it is the actual location in Alaska where one can “see Russia” – and it is small, just under 2,000 square miles.  Vieques is even smaller – only 135 square miles – but when the mayors unite and share information, and share, in turn, with Okinawa and with islands in Hawaii, they can do big things.  The issues in each place are unique, of course, but they’re also incredibly similar to what’s going on 10,000 miles away.  When individuals are willing to care, they can collaborate and make a big difference.

Rebecca Heyl
Tanji family home, Tulkarem refugee camp, 2002
Image courtesy of the artist

Interview with REBECCA HEYL

Jacqueline Gehring:  Where did you grow up?  Has your background affected your view of the world?

Rebecca Heyl:  I grew up in New Paltz, New York, a college town, maybe like where Allegheny is.  It’s a New York State (SUNY) college town.  My father was a Protestant Christian, and my mother is Jewish.  I consider myself culturally Jewish, rather than religiously Jewish, even though I did attend religious school and had a Bat Mitzvah.  I grew up doing Christmas and Hanukkah--having it all! I considered myself Jewish, in part because I was closer to my family on that side.

I grew up learning about Israel at Hebrew School. We studied maps of Israel, learned about the Holocaust and sent pocket change off to plant trees in the deserts of Israel. However, I did not grow up with an emotional attachment to Israel like some Jewish people do.  But, I did grow up with the myth “of a land without people for a people without land”.  Never was there a narrative about an indigenous population- the Palestinians, that was not part of the teaching.  

It’s hard to know what you knew before you know what you know! I try to think back to what I knew about the Arab-Israeli conflict before I went there.  I thought these people are fighting, always fighting.  There’s no way out, this is the way it has always been and the way it will always be.

JG:  How did you become interested in Israel as a topic for your art?

RH:  I lived in Italy for about five years before I went to Israel.  That’s where I actually started identifying myself more as a Jewish person and I became interested in what the Italian Jewish traditions were there.  When you’re in a foreign place you seek out things that are familiar to you.  During that time, I was exposed to the Palestinian cause and criticism of Israel for the first time. People would say to me, you are Jewish, what do you think about Israel?  I came to understand that being Jewish directly connected me to that land that I've never seen.

JG:  How did you respond to those questions?

RH:  I didn’t really have a view.  I didn’t have a pro-Israeli view that some might have, but I didn’t have a pro-Palestinian view either.  I hadn’t really given it much thought.

JG:  Did the European media play a role how you came to understand the conflict?  I know from my experiences there, they talk a lot more about the rest of the world, and especially the experiences of the Palestinians.

RH:  Yes, the American press highlights pro-Israeli stories while in Europe the pro-Palestinian view is more common.  Also, a lot of young people wear the Palestinian shawl in Italy as a social statement.  It was all around me; the Palestinian cause was a part of the environment.  Whereas in the US all I heard was pro-Israeli viewpoints.

In America the average person, certainly the average Jewish person, has a certain attitude about Israel (these are generalizations of course), but we don’t hear much about the average Palestinian, we hear about the bombings, terrorists cells, or whatever, but not the common folks.  In Italy, people seem to pay more attention to the news and talk about what is going on there and abroad.  However, I felt like there wasn’t anything about the average Israeli, both sides polarized the situation.

My book of photos was actually published in Italy in English, for an English audience.  But, I thought about how it could be relevant for both sides of the debate.  In the end the story that it tells, about the peace activists on both sides (Israeli and Palestinian), is relevant to both Americans and Europeans.  Because in Italy you never hear about the Israeli peace activist going to meet the Palestinian farmer.  And the same here.  In the U.S. people asked me “what is a Palestinian peace activist?” They didn’t get it.  My aunt asked me, “are you a Palestinian peace activist?”  And, I told her “no, the Palestinians, the actual people that live there are who I am talking about.”

JG:  So living in Italy first raised your interest in the Israeli-Palestinian situation.  How did you end up going there and getting more involved?

RH:  We, my husband and I, ended up going to Israeli in 2001 because he had a post-doctoral fellowship there.  My trip was not an ideologically driven return to the Promised Land, but was simply because of his post doc. We lived at the Weizmann Institute, a very peaceful and secure campus.  It was over a year before I actually went to the occupied territories.

The period I was there was 2001-2004.  Even the average Israeli would say that was a pretty tough time with lots of bombings. It was before the wall was built, or the security barrier, or whatever you want to call it.  And I wanted to do a project about this moment. I started doing research on different organizations, I wanted to find Israelis and Palestinians that maintained a dialogue.

JG: How did you find groups to work with?

RH:  I contacted them on the Internet.  They would have meetings to go to the West Bank and collect olives with the Palestinians.  My first trip was with a group of Israelis and internationals into the West Bank to help farmers collect their olives.  The Palestinian village was located near an Israeli settlement.  The previous year they were not able to collect these olives due to frequent attacks by the settlers. So, the farmers called on an Israeli organization to help them collect the olives, but more importantly to act as a buffer between the settlers and the farmers.  We were 100 meters from the gates of the settlement.  Settlements get more and more land by scaring off the local farmers from collecting their olives.  Sometimes they attack them and shoot at them.

JG: Is that the organization you worked with the most?

RH:  Actually, as I found more organizations I started volunteering with one called “Windows- Channels for Communication”(www.win-peace.org/).  It is an NGO that brings Israeli kids and Palestinian kids together.  The kids produce a bi-lingual magazine and about 10,000 copies of the issue is distributed on both sides.  I felt like this group was doing great work and I wanted to help them. I worked as a coordinator and I started photographing the events as well.

JG:  How did you identify with the Palestinians since their experience is so very different than our own, as Americans?

RH:  I eventually traveled with a Palestinian group of kids to bring them to Italy for a workshop.  That was the real first time, even though I had been back and forth into the West Bank and Gaza…  Once I traveled “as a Palestinian” I realized for the first time how oppressive it was, the challenges that a Palestinian faces everyday to get to work or school. The number of barricades, physical and psychological, to get out of their local area.  And then to get to Jordan, and the Jordanians don’t want you there either.  That was when it really clicked for me, that’s where I really began to understand.  
Understanding is gradual--picking olives next to a settlement and seeing the tension. Understanding the proximity of space and then going to a refugee camp and understanding that these people have been living here for so many years, now more than 60 years!  Why haven’t they been settled? And then traveling with the Palestinian kids, even if you have all the documents, it should be easy, in our society there might be bureaucratic hold-ups, but things should work.  When you’re a Palestinian, an 18 year-old Israeli soldier at a checkpoint can detain you at the checkpoint for hours because he can, because he wants to.  It’s not just about security, all these terms that are used, like “closed military zone” imply its about security, but often it’s an 18 year-old kid making this decision and there’s no rhyme or reason for how he acts.  Palestinians don’t have any recourse in that situation.  Even at the Hague (International Court of Justice) they can’t represent themselves because they don’t have citizenship to any nation!

JG:  Do you think you are a global citizen?

RH: Living in Italy for an extended period of time, especially under the Bush administration, made being an American very political.  I actually remember when he was elected in 2000.  I was disappointed and my Italian colleagues were disappointed.  I said to them “it’s only four years.”  The Italians said “no.”  They were older and wiser, and they said “this will have an effect all over the world.   Many countries will start to move to the right.”  And soon after the American election, Berlusconi was elected in Italy and Sharon came to power in Israel.  I remember hearing this and being naïve.  Even though I didn’t live in America, it was the first time I saw how the politics of America affects world politics.

JG: Did you vote in 2004?

RH:  I did vote in 2000 by absentee ballot and in 2004 I voted in Boston.  I think it’s crazy not to vote for a president.  I couldn’t think about not voting.  I have voted since I could.

JG:  Why do you think you have always voted?  Many Americans do not.

RH:  Maybe it is because my parents always voted and I remember going with them. I just never considered not voting.

**Gehring:  Let’s get back to your work.  How did***

RH: There was so much misinformation about Israel and Palestine.  The way I thought I could have the biggest impact was by going back to my country, a country I now knew impacted the rest of the world. And I thought, maybe the biggest way for me to have an impact was in the US with the Jewish community.

JG:  How did the American Jewish community respond to your message?

RH:  There’s something like Jewish social justice called “tikkun olam.”  It’s the idea of “repairing the world.”  The idea is that if you see injustice you should not shy away from it, you should put a light on it.  I see it as my duty to talk about it, even though it’s hard topic to talk about, since most American Jews have a strong emotional attachment to Israel.  In fact, it is much easier to talk to Israelis about the conflict because they don’t have this emotional idea of Israel, they are more realistic about it than Jewish Americans.  In the U.S., except for the ‘enlightened’ people who have become activists, you can be as left wing as you want, but the sentiment is ‘don’t touch Israel.’  Most people don’t want to know about the Palestinian narrative because of their emotional attachment to Israel.  Although I do think that with each new generation there is less of an attachment to Israel.

JG:  Are you hopeful about the Middle East?

RH:  I had a lot of hope about Obama, because I thought he could play a key role in the region.  He came out very strong after the election with his Cairo speech and faced a backlash at home. At least in the four years of his presidency we will be more educated about the region, even the nomenclature has changed in the mass media.  It feels like people have knowledge of things that four years ago they didn’t even talk about.  Even Netanyahu uses words like “settlement” and “occupation” that before no one wanted to utter.  With those words people can understand what’s going on better.  When I was in Israel, the Israelis didn’t understand the idea of occupation and they certainly didn’t think the Palestinians were occupied.  I think now it’s different.  I think part of it is Obama, because he’s pushed them to talk about it. 
Netanyahu’s return to power seems like a set back, but I think back to Prime Minister Rabin’s statement, “that you make peace with enemies not with your friends.”  Perhaps you need these strong right-wingers with a lot of power to make these concessions, maybe the doves can’t do it.

JG:  What affect would you like to have on your viewers? 

RH: While in Israel, I had to sift through information and make my own narrative.  I don’t expect someone will look at my piece and say ‘oh I get it’ right away, ‘now we need to go fix it.’  I imagine I’m planting a seed of doubt that what they’ve been told (or understood) about the conflict maybe wasn’t completely true.  Then, maybe they will seek out more information.  That’s the best case scenario.  Maybe the seed planted by my work will grow into a peace activist!

JG:  American peace activists or are you also interested in an Israeli audience?

RH:  I want to reach an American audience, especially the Jewish community in America.  It is very difficult in Israel.  Israelis who are activists become very isolated from society.  As an international, there just for a few years I had the mobility to come in and look at the situation and figure out my own narrative from what I’m learning from both sides.  If I were Israeli, I don’t know if I would want to know all this information.  To find out that much of what your country was founded were myths, puts your entire identity on shaky ground.

JG:  In your work you use maps.  Why are they so important?

RH:  The first key to understanding the conflict, for me, was understanding how close everything is.  The proximity.  To see how small the piece of land is.  Once you see how small Israel and the Palestinian Territories are you can better understand why they’re fighting over it.

I want to show the viewer where the borders are, where the walls are, where the settlements are, where the refugee camps are, etc… showing the proximity of it all.  What does it actually look like?  Another way of understanding is to look at the history.  By layering maps to see what it looked like at different moments in history, how this land has become smaller and smaller and smaller.  The maps give you a perspective of how Palestinian land has shrunk.  I think maps might reach a person for whom the photography isn’t immediate.  I want you to be able to hold the maps in your hands and combine them as you choose.

JG:  the viewer becomes active in demarcating territory?

RH:  Yes, I want the viewer to be active and to see the facts on the ground.  If enough American Jewish people came out and said I’m Jewish and I don’t support what Israel is doing that could make a big difference.  We all know that elections depend on people speaking out.  In fact, there’s a new Jewish lobby called J Street.  It is a counterpoint to AIPAC which has a lot of influence on American politics.  J Street started just a few years ago.  They are pro-Israel and pro-peace.  They seek a just and peaceful resolution.   They speak with Obama and they’re at the table.  I think the fact that there’s this other Jewish lobby that is an alternative to AIPAC makes a big difference.  It gives a voice to Jewish people like me.

JG:  Thanks for talking with me today.  Where should people go if they want to know more about your work?

RH:  I have a webpage for my book  www.windowsinthewall.com

Andrew Ellis Johnson
Pressed: When Words Were Earth, 2005
Image courtesy of the artist

Interview with ANDREW ELLIS JOHNSON

Jacqueline Gehring:  Could briefly describe your exhibit for the Diaspora and Dreams show?

Andrew Johnson:  I’m presenting the central image from my installation “Pressed: When Words Were Earth”.  It is a full-scale digitally manipulated photographic image of the back of a D-9 Caterpillar Bulldozer, that extends from the floor to the ceiling, and its tracks that extend from the wall fifty feet across the gallery floor.  The images are printed onto mirrored acrylic that is then cut into thousands of patterned tiles.  Light reflects off both the printed ink surface and the mirror beneath the clear acrylic— so you get this double reflection. What you see changes dramatically depending on where you're standing. As you change your position, the color shifts radically, literally highlighting different parts of the image and obscuring others.  I want the viewer to actively explore what they perceive and become aware that their physical vantage alters what is represented.

JG: Will the viewers also see reflections of themselves?

AJ:  Yes, it depends on where you stand.  You might see yourself as in a clear mirror in light areas of the image or more obscured in dark passages.

JG:  Is this to draw the viewer in to your piece?

AJ: Yes.  I want to provide a magical realm of illusion that entices the viewer to enter just as King Solomon’s palace seduced the Queen of Sheba to lift up her skirt before crossing what she thought was a pool of water.  Reputedly it was the high polish of the marble floor that she mistook for the pool.  I want to also create a palace where a visitor can confuse the factual and illusory and be conscious that they are in such an environment.

Each piece of tile is cut into a shape that can be recognized in and of itself just as a single puzzle piece makes us aware of the larger whole and how it must interlock with it. We must shift our modes of recognition and understand that we are continually looking through layers of filters.

JG:  This makes me think of Saïd's Orientalism, and how we see the East through this Western filter.  Is that what you were thinking?

AJ:  Yes, exactly, the mirrors are representative of the three prophetic religions, with interlocking hexagonal Stars of David, octagonal stars of Islam and what can be read as Christian crosses.  There are symbolic levels of identification, physical and perspectival distortions and one’s own shadow and reflections that get in the way, that implicate us in the image we perceive.  We feel culpable.

JG:  Culpability?  In what way?

AJ: The bulldozer in the exhibit was photographed in a Pittsburgh construction site, but it's the same model that has been sent to Israel and used to destroy Palestinian homes and orchards to make room for Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza.  I think it is important that we can’t extricate ourselves from such an image.

JG:  So you are trying to remind your viewer of responsibility, but what is their responsibility?

AJ: There are myriad difficulties in the world but much of my work is focused on turmoil that U.S. citizens support, if only through their taxes, and therefore have the ability to change if we have the will. Lately I’ve been addressing issues in Haiti, Iraq and Afghanistan.  In Palestine we perpetuate the apartheid regime and we needn’t.

JG:  What do you think "Global Citizenship" means?

AJ:  I certainly think of myself as a global citizen.  It's isolationist to think otherwise. Our major corporations are primarily housed abroad and yet we still peddle to our citizens that there is this separate American identity that can exist.  I think that's a very dangerous message. I think part of global citizenship is an awareness that our obligations are constantly evolving.  

The late poet Mahmoud Darwish writes about the journey, and the road, and the perpetual becoming, and how that plays off against the conception of a homeland.  He suggests that it is important not to think of the exile as "other." I agree because thinking of exile as “other” is itself a form of quarantine.  I believe we can create a greater sense of empathy by realizing our own sense of displacement, longing, erasure, distance or loss.  They are among the commonalities that unite us. 

JG:  Why are commonalities important?

AJ:  Without identification, empathy, there is little desire to act for social and economic justice.

JG:  It’s almost like an international consciousness for our actions as Americans?

AJ: I don't mean that as a global citizens, we need to impose our views on others and pass judgment on people’s histories and cultures about which we are ignorant.  There is a danger in trying to enforce essentialist rhetoric about ideas of justice or democracy.  Yet, when we try to claim the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is religious, when it's actually about power, about water and land, about access, about oil…

JG:  How do you imagine your role as an artist? Is it to educate? To shock?

AJ:  To seduce. Then incite. You suck someone in through beauty, through humor, through pleasure. Lure a viewer in, offer delight, and then the realization that all is not well, but still malleable. 

JG:  Who are your influences?

AJ:  My heroes as a child were muckrakers whose images were able to highlight problems and actually change the regimes of power.  People whose imagery is deemed dangerous, such as Thomas Nast’s images of Boss Tweed in the 1870s or George Grosz’ criticism of the Weimar Republic in pre-WWII Germany.

JG:  It’s a very political imagination.  Do you see yourself as part of a particular lineage?  Is it the muckrackers?  A political approach to art?

AJ:  Yes.  All art is political.  It's a question of how consciously it is using those forces.  So even if you're painting…

JG:  (Interrupting) That is a statement, “all art is political,” that many people might disagree with.

AJ:  Well what art do you think isn’t political?

JG: I’m a political scientist, I think everything is political.  But, for the sake of argument, how about Thomas Kincaid?

AJ:  He has a school in Korea--it's amazing.  What we think of as local is actually an international corporation.  He has branded himself the "painter of light."  That used to be what we called Rembrandt.  Don’t you think that is a very political discourse shift?  How about what his work does and does not make you think of?  What is your reward for seeing his images?  They seem innocuous, but they create a particular complacent frame for how to see the world.  His art is telling you how to see, in the same way a newspaper caption leads to an interpretation of an image.

JG:  Are beauty and politics mutually exclusive?

AJ:  Art is very much about aesthetics, whether or not we use the world beauty.  There is no distinction, the political is the use of something, the aesthetic is the form of it.  As form and content are inseparable, aesthetics and politics are inseparable.

JG:  What is the goal of raising the consciousness of the viewer?

AJ:  Action as well as contemplation.  At the most concrete level I had hoped that people would boycott Caterpillar until it divests from Israel or Israel ceases utilizing its equipment for illegal ends.  In February, 2003, when I first exhibited “Pressed: When Words Were Earth” it was in response to the ongoing killing of Palestinians during demolitions of villages.  Within weeks of the opening, 23 year-old US peace activist Rachel Corrie was murdered by the same Caterpillar bulldozer model that I depict.  Her family has been fighting in the courts since then.  Last October, through the Corries’ perseverance, Caterpillar began delaying its delivery of D9 bulldozers — valued at $50 million — to the Israeli military. While only .6 % of Caterpillar’s business is in Israel, this delay is a symbolic gesture that is an iconic victory. 

Now place that along side the 2.8 billion in F-35 Lockheed Striker Jets given in the same month, despite continued Israeli refusal to cease building new settlements, and we see that the pressure to prevent such policies must only intensify.  Wouldn’t it be great if we could see the Caterpillar Bulldozer exhibited in “Diasporas and Dreams” as an icon of successful ground up pressure that can galvanize greater opposition to apartheid?

JG:  What about people who don’t think what they do matters or are just apathetic?

AJ:  In my teaching I point out that one's apathy leads to a restriction of one’s on own rights.  With the G-20 in Pittsburgh last year, some of my students were roughly treated and arrested for being in certain areas, not because they were protesting, but just because they were “swept up in an atmosphere of “de facto marshal law” as another beaten bystander and arrested student Second Lt. Ryan Kingston has said.  My students were really surprised by the police round ups.  They thought the police were there to protect them and told me “ I wasn't even doing anything.”  I reminded them that one needs to take a stand, because our rights are being eroded constantly.  For example, we need to realize that not voting and not doing anything has enormous weight and consequences.

JG:  Does your work have an element of hope in it?

AJ:  I think all artwork can be viewed as hopeful (even Kincaid is hopeful) in proposing an alternative world.  The act of making something shows that there are alternative views of what can be.  It's also why I embed humor in my work and why I strive to have my work be seductive, to work on multiple levels so that you can come back to it and experience the others sides of it.

We've focused on the political aspects, but there are also sociological, philosophical,  psycho-sexual layers.  There are just so many ways that one can engage with a work of art.  The richness of art offers hope.

JG:  What is your process like? How long does it take for you to complete a work?

AJ:  They can take years. From the research and conception through technical logistics and execution — this was a long project.

JG:  What got you started on this particular piece?

AJ: In retrospect I would say the role reversal of David and Goliath needed to be pointed out and the media hasn’t done that.

JG:  Speaking of the media, where do you get your information from, especially for this exhibit?

AJ:  We are fortunate now to have so much information easily available on and off line.

JG:  How do you filter the information you find on the internet?  I know our students wonder about how to filter information and what good information is. 

AJ: You do have to cross check your sources and it's very important to be looking at bias ahead of time, asking yourself ‘In whose interest is this?’ and ‘How much credence do I want to give this?’  Not all arguments are sound, claims relevant or warranted or opinions valid. 

When I work on installations, I try to get primary sources.  I use them to sound out the themes of the exhibit, to make sure that contrary to my own intentions I don’t inadvertently create inaccurate or offensive portrayals of my subjects and to gain new insights.  When I worked on Pressed, I met with Palestinians and talked with them about my ideas and how I wished to realize the work.  I got first hand information that went directly into the exhibit.  For example, the idea of the fruit spilled on the ground came from those discussions as did the fact that the orange is symbolic for both Israeli and Palestinian nationalism. 

JG:  Can you describe some of the meanings of the fruit?

AJ: Haim Gouri, the Israeli poet, sees it as a pride of Jewish agricultural power while Palestinians view it as emblematic of ‘a world destroyed’ during the first Arab-Israeli war.  In the bulldozer treads in the exhibit you can see squashed oranges and other detritus that I scattered in the mud of the construction site that I photographed. They refer to Palestinian farmers, 90 percent of whom live below the poverty level, whose fruit rots at Israeli checkpoints because they are not able to bring it to market.  The barriers prevent movement within Palestine and into Israel and there are often deliberate delays so the fruit will spoil.  The rotting oranges can also represent the current state of peace, prosperity and progress, as can the strewn olives.  In Palestine, home to world’s most ancient olive groves, a million trees have been uprooted for Israeli settlements.
Art cultivates a stance of unsettlement.

Vasia Markides
Still Image from Hidden in the Sand, 2008
Image courtesy of the artist

Interview with VASIA MARKIDES

The Mediterranean island of Cyprus’ population is primarily ethnically Greek and Turkish.  Inter-communal tensions escalated to violence by the 1960s.  In 1974, Turkey invaded the island following a Greek coup.  After hundreds of thousands of Cypriots were displaced, the island was effectively partitioned.  Despite several negotiation attempts and easing tensions, Cyprus remains divided.

Shanna Kirschner: Who are your influences?

Vasia Markides: I draw inspiration from a lot of different areas of my life, and from many different artists and activists.  I’m mostly influenced by my family and my upbringing.  My mother is an activist and professor of Conflict Resolution and Sustainable Development and my father a professor of Sociology and writer on mystics and healers within the Greek-Orthodox tradition.  My brother is primarily a fiction writer but also a journalist who worked for the Cyprus Mail, the English daily newspaper of Cyprus.

I was raised back and forth between Cyprus and Maine.  The rapidly changing landscape in Cyprus offered stimulation and insight into a challenging political and social reality, and living in a family of academics in the woods of Maine offered the chance for creativity and intellectualism to flourish. Later on, I was involved in the activist movement of San Francisco and was reading a lot of Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Arundhati Roy, and Helen Caldicott, and then went on to explore documentary filmmakers like Ken Burns, Werner Herzog, and Errol Morris.  Many artists have also influenced me, and making a documentary while in art school, and not film school, was certainly a unique opportunity to do something different. Studies in performance video and video art certainly had an influence as well.  But mostly I’m inspired by my life experience. My viewpoints change day by day.  My greatest influence while making this film was my encounters with Turkish-Cypriots when traveling to the north of Cyprus to shoot.

SK: What was it like traveling around Cyprus?   Was it hard to meet with members of the Turkish community [Vasia is Greek-Cypriot]?  How did that change your view of the conflict?

VM: I was born in Nicosia, which is one of the only remaining divided capitals in the world.  Traveling around Cyprus was a mixed bag.  At times it was nerve-wracking, for example when encountering Turkish troops in areas where photo and video were forbidden.  I was stopped a few times and even interrogated and searched another time – that was intense!  At other times, it was quite emotional seeing the city behind barricades; this is my family’s home, after all.  Somehow the camera protected me from becoming too overwhelmed emotionally.  I needed to do my job and get the shots, so I guess adrenaline kept me from breaking down.  But mostly, because I was traveling with Turkish Cypriots throughout the North (after 2003 when the checkpoints first opened, there was interchange between the two communities for the first time), I developed extremely close friendships with them, and that’s where my own process of transformation begun.  Any biases and preconceptions that I had had before quickly crumbled and I felt like I was meeting the other half of my family or something.  I felt very connected to them.

SK: How did your upbringing affect your view of nationality and of the Cypriot civil war and its ongoing effects?

VM: I was partially raised in Cyprus, and was there from kindergarten to fourth grade.  The history of Cyprus that was taught in our schools was very limited.  It only told the Greek-Cypriot version of the story.  We learned of our struggle for independence against the British in the 1950s, and then we learned about the 1974 invasion by Turkey and subsequent suffering of our community.  There was so much in between that wasn’t covered.  For instance, about how the Greek-Cypriot fundamentalist groups who wanted Enosis (union with Greece) began staging attacks against Turkish-Cypriots, who were eventually forced into enclaves.  The Turkish-Cypriots suffered a lot, and the history fails to tell their version of the story.

So we grew up with a picture of all Turks as “barbarians” who came and stole our homes for no reason.  In fact, Turkey decided to intervene after seeing these atrocities and this fervent movement for Enosis.  Of course, their intervention went slightly above and beyond just protecting the Turkish-Cypriot minority.  So I grew up with only a partial story, and images on TV showing elderly Greek-Cypriot women holding photos of their missing husbands and sons with the words Then Xehno or “I won’t forget” under it.  That’s bound to affect your psyche in the long term.

Luckily I was raised in a very open-minded family – my mom initiated the Peace Studies department at the University of Maine – so ideas of conflict resolution were not foreign to me. As soon as the checkpoints between the Greek and Turkish-controlled areas opened and I met my first Turkish-Cypriot, any preconceptions immediately dissolved.  They were far from barbaric, and actually very welcoming, loving, kind people.

The problem in Cyprus though is that people are too scared to say or do anything that’s contrary to the status quo.  And though generally the sentiments between Greek and Turkish-Cypriots now are quite good, there’s still an underlying block there that I feel will take decades of intermingling to fully dissolve.  There’s too much influence by the media and government that continues to foster this attitude of victimization.

SK: You’ve said in other interviews that making this film led you to reevaluate the meaning of being Cypriot.  How did you see this identity before making the film, and what do you now believe it means to be a member of this community?  Do you see that transformation as part of what the larger communities need to undergo?

VM: The more we identify with our “Greek-ness” in Cyprus, the more we continue to exclude people, and the further away we move from a solution.  When Greek flags are waved, this agitates an already fragile situation.  We are an independent country.  We have our own flag.  We’re the only country who uses another nation’s national anthem (Greece’s).  A little pride in being “Cypriot” could be a good step towards reconciliation.  There’s such a rich cultural heritage to the island, which is an amalgamation of all the countries that once colonized us - Persians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Venetians, Ottomans...  There are so many shared foods and words between Greek and Turkish-Cypriots.  Everyone knows that we used to all live in the same villages and that culture and language intermixed as a result.  Maybe that’s one area where we all agree.  The only thing the two communities share at the moment on a structural level is the sewage pipes in Nicosia.  The system was never redesigned following 1974.  So the sewage all merges beneath the ground.  Everything else is separate.  Quite ironic, no?

If we celebrate some of our similarities, rather than emphasizing our differences, there’s a greater chance for reconciliation.   Of course, it’s perfectly fine to embrace our roots and respect those differences.  The history of Cyprus is too loaded for us to be stamping ourselves merely as “Greeks” or “Turks.”  In fact, I had a Turkish-Cypriot once tell me that she felt more Greek than Turkish because she lived on an island and in a culture that has been majority Greek in the past.  I think I always made the distinction when people introduced me as their “Greek friend” to say that I’m “Cypriot,” but now I’m even more of a stickler about it.  I think Greek culture and heritage are absolutely amazing.   Sometimes, though, I’d like to do away with all national identity.  Even Cypriot.

SK: This is, among other things, a show about diasporas.  What do you see as the current role of the Greek and Turkish diasporas in the conflict, and how would you like that role to change (if at all)?

VM: I’d like to see both diaspora communities return to Cyprus and work towards a solution.  They’re more likely to return now, after Cyprus’ entrance into the EU, because there are more opportunities and more cosmopolitanism.  It’s really important for people who have been away from the island to return not only with fresh energy and hope but also with different perspectives as people who have existed outside of that sphere for a while.  At the same time, members of the diaspora often get criticized as naïve or arrogant when we go back and try to present new ideas.  It works both for and against us.   So I guess I feel that we should all go back there and play a role in the process of reconciliation.  I was there this summer working for a UN community media center, and I’m trying to do that with this film.

SK: Among many other things, this seems to be a film about remembering, especially by those who lost their homes in the 1974 conflict.  Do you think that remembering is necessary for conflict resolution, or does it hamper reconciliation and the search for a settlement?  

VM: I think remembering is okay, but when there’s too much emphasis on remembering and thinking about the past, we’re not able to look at the situation objectively in the moment.   It’s like anything in life.  If a child has experienced a trauma in the past, it may not be good for her to always revisit that trauma; instead she needs to find ways to manage as best as she can in the present time.  This is why that “I won’t forget” chant is detrimental.  Sometimes we need to forget.  It’s the only way to let go. I think constructive remembering is what’s important for conflict resolution: remember the things that worked, and make note of the things that didn’t, so that you can proceed with caution and not repeat the same mistakes.   Hanging on to a past that will never be again (and maybe never even was –the fantasy of what was is often better than the reality and is the thing people hang onto) does not allow for forward movement.

SK: I am also interested in how you create films and about this film in particular.

VM: This was my first film, and my process was a little convoluted.  That is somewhat evident in the lack of structure or storyline in the film.  I didn’t start out with a story or structure already in place.  I had no prior filmmaking experience when I started shooting.  I just bought a small camera when the checkpoints loosened in 2003 and started shooting everything I encountered when I traveled to the North [the Turkish-controlled area].  

Throughout the years, I kept upgrading cameras as I learned more about video-production, and began to construct different segments of the film while in graduate school.  I didn’t know what the final piece would look like, and it went through many, many manifestations, which was both thrilling and slightly torturous at times.  This film was my initiation into filmmaking.  I learned how to make films because I had to make this one.  

It’s not finished.  I’m planning on doing one of two things.  If I get funding, I’ll make it a more comprehensive piece that will be around an hour and fifteen minutes long.  Or if I don’t manage to find the funds, I’ll cut it into a shorter, tighter piece so that it fits into the shorts category at film festivals.  Right now, it’s in between and lacks a clear structure. I’ve been away from it long enough now that I’m ready to tackle it once again, this time with a little more experience under my belt.

SK: To me, your work conveys some clear political messages.  Do you see your work as commentary or description, or more advocacy?

VM: I see it as a humanistic experimental documentary.  I’m trying to emotionally move people, in whatever way possible, more than anything.   For the Cypriots, the Greek and Turks in the audience, I’m trying to motivate them to think outside the box, to move beyond what’s comfortable and to act in whatever capacity they can.   For the other viewers, I’m trying to inform them of what’s happening in Cyprus and motivate them to do their own part within their own communities, to question their own biases and break down their own walls.

SK: This exhibition is part of Allegheny’s Year of Global Citizenship, but that means different things to different people. What do you think “Global Citizenship” means?

VM: I think it means to exist without too much attachment to nationality.   It means taking responsibility not only for the people in your immediate community and culture, but for every human being on the planet, since we all inhabit this country called Earth together, and our actions within it directly impact every single one of us. So I guess global citizenship is about getting out of our wormholes and saying “hello” and “I care about you” to all our neighbors.

Susanne Slavick
Reassure: Beirut Birds, 2008
Image courtesy of the artist

The September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, led by al-Queda, prompted American military retaliation in Afghanistan and the toppling of the Taliban government there in 2002, and an American invasion of Iraq in 2003 (as part of the "Global War on Terror"). A NATO coalition, led by the USA, has worked to secure Afghanistan against insurgency ever since. Despite being the longest war in US history, there are no concrete plans for ending the American-led occupation of Afghanistan, though president Obama recently expressed hope that troop "draw-downs" might begin at the end of 2014. There are plans for a "complete" withdrawal of American military forces from Iraq at the end of 2011.

Interview with SUSANNE SLAVICK

Darren Lee Miller: When I described your work to a friend on the phone, I said you were combining contemporary photographs of bombed-out places with found illustrations and paintings primarily from historical Persian art. I can describe the forms, but I wonder about your appropriation of middle-eastern images. In some cases it looks like mending or rebuilding is going on. The images convey hope.

Susanne Slavick: I approach cultural appropriation as an act of empathic unsettlement (to use Dominick LaCapra’s term) or empathic restitution.  But I am also well aware of Leo Bersani’s skepticism of art’s hubris in its claim to salvage damaged experience and thereby redeem life.

Adopting existing representations from cultures other than my own is problematic and complicated. I do so acknowledging my outsider status and as an admittedly tentative gesture at bridging cultural divides that are both real and constructed. In my case, replicating and incorporating imagery from the former Islamic Empire is one way of dispelling prevalent stereotypical notions of its regions and religions as proponents of malignant fundamentalism. My re-worked representations counter the endless images of invasion and insult, militancy and martyrdom, juxtaposing the highest aspirations of a culture with evidence of its eradication.

Some of the images are suggestive of nesting, whether in new or transformed territories or upon returning home.  In any of these scenarios, I don’t mean to suggest that one can just stamp Persian art onto anything and then have viewers read it as vaguely “middle eastern,” but I do think the images and patterns represent the former Islamic empire, not in the religious sense, but as a political power and culture that once stretched all the way from the India to Spain. Architectural motifs from the former Islamic empire play out in new ways in my images, creating new possibilities.

When possible, the origins of the appropriated imagery are linked to the locations of contemporary sites. For example, in Regenerate (Gardening the Robber Hole, 2008), the figure of a gardener, from the 12th century Book of Antidotes of the Pseudo Galen (in the style of the first school of Baghdad), is painted over a scene of “surface scatter” in Iraq, a field of remnants from raids on unsecured archeological sites. The gardener begins shoveling in the desert, cultivating anew. It is another kind of antidote, a visual metaphor of restoration.

DLM: In other images, we see birds being released from cages, and you talk of nesting and return. To what extent do you consider diaspora — or more generally, displacement — when making the work?

SS: I wasn’t thinking directly of diaspora when I made these pieces, though displacement is certainly a consequence of any war. I’m looking at the birdcage as both a prison and also as a symbol for longing, yearning. The cage is open and the birds are fluttering around – what do they do with their freedom? What is life like in Iran or Iraq or Afghanistan, and how will it be in the future? Will the “freedom” supposedly gained during these wars really flourish or will their societies deteriorate or regress?  Can the people who have been displaced actually return or resume their prior lives? The nests in Regenerate and Refuge  are settled in ruins, and we know that there are plenty of Iraqis who have stayed behind in their blasted neighborhoods. Do they stay of their own free will or out of necessity? Do they have a choice? Birds have traditionally symbolized rebirth/regeneration and peace. A single bird means something different than a flock. Separated or with family intact, can life begin anew? People can start over, but their beginnings are fraught with both joy and sorrow.

DLM: This exhibition is part of our Year of Global Citizenship here at Allegheny College. What do you think it means to be a “global citizen?”

SS: I am mostly concentrating on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the ongoing conflicts between Israel and its neighbors is always hovering in my consciousness. I think the idea of global citizenship is an invitation for us to stop thinking about our own narrow interests, which we as a nation and as a species can no longer afford to do. It’s about thinking and acting humanely, responsibly and peacefully on a global scale.

DLM: How did you begin working on this project? How did it evolve?

SS: During my sabbatical in 2006, I began to make work to address the psychological conditions of perpetual war. I am being critical of the folly and tragedy of wars in general. I began simply by taking images of destroyed infrastructure and restoring, with drawing and painting, what has been lost. I started by thinking I was going to take pictures of destroyed buildings and paint them back into their wholeness, but that was too restrictive and didn’t allow my ideas to grow. I then began repairing bombed roads and bridges in source photographs by hand-painting them back in, and eventually began to appropriate images of flora/fauna from Islamic and Persian art: symbols of rebirth and life. I wanted to show domestic details of laundry hanging and other banal evidence of the daily process of life that one discovers looking more closely, even in the illustrations for heroic Persian epic poems. This culture -- and the memory of a culture, the markers of a culture’s aspirations -- is being eradicated through bombing, destruction and also just through neglect.

My project, R&R(…&R), counters art historical and contemporary media representations of war with restorative interventions drawn from cultures now in conflict. Its title converts the military abbreviation for “rest and recuperation” to words like “regret and restitution.” I appropriate images from the art and architecture of both the invader and the invaded, modifying them to acknowledge the erasure of cultural memory and to advocate for its regeneration. Referring to scenes of construction and cultivation from the workshops of Persian miniaturist Bihzâd to the court arts of Safavid Iran, I paint images of resurgence over scenes of devastation across Afghanistan, Iraq and the Middle East. Sources for these scenes are “documentary” photographs found on the internet — from military and news media sites, flickr and webshots, and blogs by soldiers and others in the midst of war.

DLM: Who are some of your contemporary influences?

SS: I grew up in an activist family and my work has always had a political dimension. I am primarily a painter.  My family has been hugely influential. My parents were active in the anti-war  scene during the Vietnam war. On any given day, our house guests might have included poets and activists like the Berrigans, Herbert Apteker, Dorothy Day, or Robert Bly. It was an incredibly heady and exciting way to grow up. My parents are still activists, working most recently in Haiti and with the Catholic peace group, Pax Christi Maine.  My dad still writes op-eds about the occupation of Palestine, and he recently ran as an independent for senate in the state of Maine. We were all expected to live and work for social justice, to question the status quo. It was the example my parents set. We have a rather large family by today’s standards: I’m one of six children, and all five of the girls studied in the arts.

DLM: Do you see yourself as part of a particular art historical lineage?

SS: I spent a long time looking at maps and using cartography, but I wouldn’t call myself a map maker. I don’t have an affinity to any particular group at the moment, but, of course, so many artists and conceptual movements inform my work. Mel Chin is one of my heroes because he finds a way to make beautifully provocative pieces from materials that are already laden with rich references, but are then transformed to create new meanings and fresh experiences for the viewer. I love the work of Lida Abdul, an artist from Kabul. It’s gorgeous the way her videos show regeneration in the midst or aftermath of war. And there’s always cross-pollination of ideas with my sister, elin o’Hara Slavick and my partner, Andrew Ellis Johnson.  I’m also currently working on book OUT OF RUBBLE, which showcases the work of 30 - 40 international artists who deal with the aftermath of war, and I am influenced by their ideas, too.

DLM: What opportunities have recently come your way? I notice that both you and your partner like to play with words in your work. Do you ever work collaboratively?

SS: Last May, Andrew and I did a residency at Blue Mountain Center in upstate NY. The theme  of the session was “The Costs of War.” Together with a small group of other resident artists, writers, activists, and public health professionals and therapists, we worked to launch a website to raise awareness of the length of our involvement in “The War on Terror”, particularly in Afghanistan: http://10yearsandcounting.com/. I’m pretty much a studio artist, and while I sometimes work on collaborative projects, like the website and my book, I usually work alone in my studio on drawings and paintings. My partner and I bounce ideas off each other, and we work through concepts together, but we still consider our work our own and not a team effort.

DLM: What does it mean to be a “studio artist?” Do you have a set methodology for making work? Can you describe a typical day in the studio?

SS: I’m making objects that are still oriented toward gallery walls rather than a wider public sphere,  though the OUT OF RUBBLE book project and other print and online publications are becoming increasingly appealing ways to disseminate and distribute my ideas and images. I also teach in an environment that is very fluid in its approach to media -- we don’t have many walls or silos. Carnegie Mellon takes pride in working outside the traditional confines of disciplines and mediums. My methodology really shifts from project to project. Right now I’m doing a lot of work on my laptop computer: correspondence, searching for images, modifying them through photoshop, emailing images to the printer and having them mounted, taking them home and painting on them, and then taking them to the framer. This work of Google searching and manipulating digital images is a very different process from my process of the past when I used to just go to my studio and paint. Searching the web has become a generative process for me.

DLM: How is internet content changing the way you do your work? Are you influenced by other mass media outlets?

SS: I think we’re all influenced by media, but what I’m doing is not like Thomas Ruff’s work, where he’s culling iconic representations from the internet (like the collapsing World Trade Center), enlarging the images and intentionally showing us pixelated artifacts. When I scour sites I look for specific images in high resolution, particularly rubble and bombed cars, or things that connect to and contrast with motifs and structures I see in Persian art. A lot of my source materials come from flickr and soldier’s blogs. The intentions of the original authors are very different from mine, and I manipulate heavily to suit my needs. My works are not documentary, even though people may see them as such because they’re photographs.

DLM: You are an activist artist. What do you think your work does to effect change?

SS: I have no illusions that art alone will change the world; however, art does act on consciousness. Marcuse argued that art can remind us that life can be different. Art cannot reproduce life or reality; it inevitably offers us an altered reality, and so reminds us of the possibility of change.  I’m trying to help us imagine an alternative to self-destruction. I’ve just begun to wade into the field of trauma studies. Geoffrey Hartman argues that art’s truest reason is encapsulated in the dictum, “art expands the sympathetic imagination while teaching us about the limits of sympathy.” Some people may charge that my work — or any figurative work dealing with war — aestheticizes violence and compartmentalizes conflict for easy digestion or dismissal.

In his essay The Documentary Debate: Aesthetic or Anaesthetic?, David Levi Strauss counters this charge: "The idea that the more transformed or aestheticized an image is, the less authentic or politically valuable it becomes, is one that needs to be seriously questioned.  Why can’t beauty be a call to action?” I think all art is about aestheticizing and transforming. It allows people from different cultures to recognize each other in one another.

DLM: Do you have any closing thoughts?

SS: Responding to the ongoing disasters of war and the policies and conditions that lead to them, artists can condone or condemn. The challenge lies in finding a constructive stance. In The Act of Seeing, Wim Wenders says, “The most political decision you make is where you direct people’s eyes. In other words, what you show people, day in and day out, is political. And the most politically indoctrinating thing you can do to a human being is to show him, every day, that there can be no change.”

Art is basically a generative force. Creativity is inherently iterative and redemptive. These works —these gestures of debt and discovery — are attempts at renewal among the rubble and undoing some of the damage. Confronting and considering the cultural heritage of peoples and places under attack reminds us of what we stand to lose — the humanity of those we revere or are urged to revile. Ignoring this would leave us with no culture at all.

This exhibition is part of the Year of Global Citizenship at Allegheny College.

Gallery events are free to the public and wheelchair accessible. Call to verify (814) 332-4365; programs subject to change. Art Galleries are located east of North Main St. between College and John Streets.

The presentation of these exhibits and lectures is supported in part by Pennsylvania Partners in the Arts (PPA), the regional arts funding partnership of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state agency. State government funding comes through an annual appropriation by Pennsylvania's General Assembly and from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency. PPA is administered in this region by the Arts Council of Erie.

Curatorial proposals are accepted on a rolling basis and may be emailed to the Gallery Director. Click for gallery floorplan.