Power and Sorrow in Berlin

Patricia Kaersenhout, born in Holland of Surinamese parents, developed an artistic journey in which she investigates her Surinamese background in relation to her upbringing in a Western European culture. The thread of her work raises questions about the movements of the African Diaspora and its relation to feminism, sexuality, racism and the history of slavery. She considers her art practice to be a social practice. Her work often focuses on colonialism in relation to her own experiences within a Western European culture. In December 2018, she spent a period of time in Berlin.

Every year I manage to escape the Netherlands on December 5. As if the universe senses that it's better not to be in the Netherlands, every year around that time I get invited for a project abroad. So too in 2018. Students at the University of Potsdam organise an annual conference entitled Minor Cosmopolitanisms. One of the students had once seen a presentation of my work at the Maerz Festival entitled Staging the end of the contemporary and had been trying to get me to attend their conference for two years. The conference took place in the legendary Haus der Kulturen der Welt and I decided to give my performance for the very last time. Stitches of Power. Stitches of Sorrow to perform there. Partly because, after four years, I thought it was time to call it a day, and partly because the work fitted in perfectly with the theme:

Around the turn of the millennium, academics and politicians predicted that the world would grow together as one and that people would become less bound by national affiliations. Almost twenty years later, there is little left of this vision. This is not such a surprise when we consider that the cosmopolitan ideal (as articulated during the European Enlightenment) wholeheartedly embraced the promises of a globalising economy, yet has remained oblivious to, and even complicit with, capitalist exploitation, slavery, and colonialism. Yet should we abandon the cosmopolitan idea because of this corrupt history? Or should it rather be reviewed and rethought in the face of rising nationalism? What are alternative traditions and practices of the cosmopolitan from across the globe?

I developed the performance in 2014 on behalf of Art Labour Archives, founded in Berlin by Alanna Lockward. Every two to three years she was the driving force behind BE.BOP the Black Europe Body Politics conference in Berlin, where artists such as Quinsy Gario and Jeannette Ehlers and great thinkers such as Walter Mignolo, Rolando Vasquez and Gloria Wekker come together and consider the world from a decolonial perspective. Each time there is a different theme. In 2018 it was Coalitions Facing White Innocence. Artists are asked to develop performances and perform them in a theatrical setting such as the Gorky Theatre and Die Volksbuhne. BE.BOP was my intellectual fuel. And it was wonderful to step into a warm bath of critical thinkers every time again and thus to be presented with several paradigms on the world.

Much of my work stems from black radical imagination. Stitches of Power. Stitches of Sorrow combines my interest in invisibility with moving image, sound, three-dimensional objects and audience participation. Through the revelation of the inherent violence of the seemingly innocent act of embroidery, I explore the importance of epistemic disobedience. Black Consciousness consists in part of embodied knowledge shared with rotating members of the audience in approximately thirty minutes. They change seats and the portion of a shared piece of cloth on which their stitches are permanently embroidered, as a collective memento. The silence is ritualistic, while Angela Davis' voice in a loop challenges the white reporter who keeps asking her about her views on violence.

By suturing wounds together we create a communal body that can be healed.

Without the public being aware of it, they embroider the body of a black female warrior. The penetration of the body with a needle symbolizes two meanings. On the one hand it stands for the violence done to the black female body at the time of slavery, colonialism and the resulting violence towards black and brown bodies in our current society. On the other hand, penetrating and threading symbolizes the healing of wounds from that colonial past. By stitching wounds together we create a communal body that can be healed. On the ground we see the image of an enslaved black woman climbing out of a well. This scene is looped from the movie Cobra Verde, a controversial film by Werner Herzog about the transatlantic slave trade and the warriors of Dahomey [1].

In 1980 Bruce Chatwin wrote the partly fictional and partly historical book The Viceroy of Ouidah which tells the story of a 19th-century Brazilian slave trader who makes a fortune in West Africa, relying on his ruthlessness and instincts. Because Chatwin was both a novelist and a historian, his work jumps back and forth between past and present, exploring the relationship between the moment of the slave trader's intervention and later historical developments in the West African nation, Benin. Although it is based on The Viceroy of Ouidah is the film Cobra Verde (1987) by Werner Herzog is selective in its choice. Cobra Verde is an unusually beautiful film, but is not accurate enough about the consequences of the slave trade as Bruce Chatwin describes them in his book. Herzog chooses to let Klaus Kinski, who plays the slave trader, be the focal point of his film, thereby pushing aside many of Chatwin's important historical questions.

Rather than making a film about how racist ideology influenced the slave trade, which would have been consistent with the book's aims, Herzog emphasizes that racism was both motivated and used as a justification for African imperial expansion in the nineteenth century. Rather than highlighting important connections between racism and European imperialism, he criticizes the bourgeoisie in general. Because of these assumptions, his film ends up reproducing a number of stereotypes traditionally associated with Western European depictions of Africa. Like for instance the women's army of Dahomey which really existed. The last warrior died in 1979. Their uniforms consisted of leather tunics, but in Herzog's film we see them in reed skirts and bare breasts. The woman who climbs out of the well will be raped so that she will become a ruthless fighter in the army of Dahomey according to Kinski, while these women lived completely in celibacy and were completely loyal to the king of Dahomey. I myself am sitting on the stage, embroidering a Dane gun that was developed and produced in Denmark and used as a means of exchange with African kings in exchange for slaves. The paradox is that these weapons were later used by Africans in the wars of freedom against their colonial oppressors.

They picked the cotton in the fields from which the fabric was produced for white women to embroider innocent images on.

During slavery and the colonial period, embroidery was an innocent activity for white women of higher social status, while black women faced daily horrors like rape, being separated from husband and children, and hard work. They picked the cotton in the fields from which the fabric was produced for white women to embroider innocent images on.

While all this is taking place on stage we hear the voice of Angela Davis. She is being interviewed in the prison where she is being held for a false charge of complicity in a murder. She is on hunger strike. The journalist asks her why the Black Panthers feel it necessary to use violence. Angela Davis criticizes how a focus on violence by the police, politicians, or the media, for example, takes away the power of the political and social goals that the revolution is trying to achieve (Davis, 1972). The question that arises from this is why is the focus on violence silencing the social, economic and political necessity that is being expressed? Within the system of modernity/coloniality, violence is often associated with the 'primitive' and the 'uncivilised' thereby erasing every other aspect of the revolution. The interweaving of the components that make up the work of art reveals the violence of silence and the violence of innocence, and thus problematizes the way in which we understand violence. The work is also a plea for approaching violence in all its complexities. Angela Davis says the following in the interview: When you talk about a revolution, most people think violence, without realizing that the real content of any kind of revolutionary thrust lies in the principles and goals that you're striving for, not in the way you reach them.

The interrelatedness of the components that make up the artwork reveals the violence of silence, and the violence of innocence, and thus problematizes the way we understand violence.

To perform this performance on the immense stage of Haus der Kulturen der Welt for the last time was, in retrospect, the right decision, not knowing that much more would be concluded. A few days after my return to Amsterdam, Alanna was in Berlin to defend her dissertation, for which she graduated cum laude. We missed each other, but I would contact her because there were plans again to organize BE.BOP next time in the Dominican Republic. Her homeland where she had emigrated to. It was not to be. On January 7, 2019, I received the sad news that my dear mentor, my great role model who encouraged me to start doing performances passed away very suddenly.

My grief was not only a personal one, but a grief for the world, because I believe that the world cannot afford to lose someone like Alanna Lockward right now.

pkaersenhout.com
alannalockward.wordpress.com/artlabourarchives/

1 The Ahosi were a military unit of the African Kingdom of Dahomey (in present-day Benin) composed entirely of women. The name 'Ahosi' means 'our mothers'. In Europe the unit was nicknamed the Dahomey Amazons because of their resemblance to the Amazons in Greek mythology.

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