With Disappearance
With Disappearance, Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman
I think that with very important things we do not overcome our obstacles. We look at them fixedly for as long as necessary until, if they are due to the powers of illusion, they disappear.
In the early 1940s, Simone Weil, exiled by war and Nazification, wrote this in a letter to Reverend Father Jean-Marie Perrin, a Dominican priest and friend. With these words, by proxy and unintentionally, Weil leaves instruction for future generations facing unimaginable horror…that the most valuable tool is enduring attention.
From the B R U N A archive, I have found and curated printed matter that works within, from, or toward the concept of disappearance. The crisis of disappearance. The opportunity of disappearance. The future of disappearance. The roots of disappearance. In Israel/Palestine. In Minnesota. In the Korean Diaspora. In Vancouver. In the unceded lands of the Nooksack people. In Kosovo. In the global archipelago of irradiated communities. In post-migration.
While Weil writes of disappearance (the disappearance of, perhaps, misconceptions and presumptions) as that action through which truth becomes legible, disappearance can also, in a more frightening sense, precede what is traumatic. The writers and artists included in this exhibition, engage with disappearance politically as a condition of assault and also, productively, a means to reparation. Disappearance, as a form of negative manifestation, is the making of or subsequent working through absence; it is ambivalent and multi-valent.
The Balcony: An Idea in a Void, Makan Art Space, 2010
In Amman, Ola El-Khalidi founded an artist-run institute in exile in 2003 called Makan, a word in Arabic which means place. And through Makan, El-Khalidi created a new space where the concept of place was unmade for her. She writes:
I started Makan because Saddam invaded Kuwait… Maybe I created a space through which to communicate with the city.
As Makan’s book The Balcony: An Idea in the Void in my selection of the archive narrates, the ephemeral, organic participation and thinking of others
inside, with, and because of Makan essentially made Makan a place. Makan is, therefore, the growth of a community, having taken a void to foliate it:
Makan is a force of nature.
Different Ways Not to Say Deportation: Unshowable Photographs, Ariella Azoulay, 2012
When the International Committee of the Red Cross prohibited Ariella Azoulay the right to show photographs of the Nakba (the Arabic term referring to the displacement of Palestinians from their homes to create the state of Israel in 1948) from its archive in 2009, the Israeli-Jewish author, theorist, and curator invented a new kind of curatorial practice regarding their “exhibition,” about which she writes:
I have therefore titled [the photos] Unshowable , enabling them to exist beyond my own memory of them. Since the photographs were unshowable but not inaccessible, I could draw them and show their substitutes.
Weil’s statement, like the texts in this exhibition, has guided me to intervene in my own feasible way against a human ecology chronically marked by demolitions, evictions, exploitations, and genocides that function in tandem with the politics of distraction, apartheid, and mass incarceration. About a decade ago, I began to intuit disappearance as being a critical part of a tradition in which politics traumatizes us. At the same time, I began to see it as a medium with which one can and must invent radical reclamations, and, for me, this took the form of remediations inside the orthodox Jewish ruins of my great grandparents’ apartment in the Appalachian foothills. This is a xenophobic region where I grew up and where my friends, like my mother’s friends during her childhood, would ask, “What is Jewish?”
I contemplated this question inside these ruins, and waited for the ruins to speak to me, every day, all day, for a week over three consecutive winters from 2008 to 2010. By simply being present in the space that my family once inhabited, I imprinted in my body, a kind of witness to the experiences of that space, which were experiences that essentially formed me, but which had been cut out of me, too, so that I could participate more or less in racist, monocultural power structures. When Luis Ramirez, an undocumented farmworker, was brutally murdered by four white teenagers in the region, followed by a region-wide cover up, I had a way to encounter my own transgenerational participation in the culture and structures that produced and protected the hate crime. To search through my conflicted participation, as a white Jew, was to search for an intervention, one situated with disappearance as context, condition, and medium.
Here in Bellingham, several blocks from the house I rent in the Lettered Streets stand the concealed ruins of the oldest synagogue between Seattle and Vancouver and the most significant artefact of a Jewish presence in Whatcom County. The synagogue congregation was founded by Yiddish-speaking observant refugees from villages in Tsarist Lithuania between 1880 and 1924, a period defined by the flight of 2.5 million Russian Jews from institutional antisemitism, race riots, and nationalist warfare. The synagogue itself was built in 1925. Younglife, an international Christian mission for youth, whose local intention is to make available life with Christ to every student in Bellingham public schools, recently bought the structure.
Increasingly concealed, de-formed, and unrecognizable, the synagogue stands as perhaps the sole material witness to this region’s palimpsestic legacy in asylum, semites, and multilingualism. Along with few other active historical structures, the synagogue up until recently served as an architectural and religious alternative to the power and visibility of churches and cathedrals that act as testaments to Christian hegemony. In its new, concealed form, the synagogue joins other ruins in Whatcom County, like that of the small assemblage of headstones of Japanese Americans buried in Bayview Cemetery before legislated deportation and mass incarceration permanently evicted and displaced the entire community. It is worth noting that these graves are mostly for victims of accidents and stillbirths because Japanese Americans were not allowed to live here long enough for their people to die of natural causes.
There are ever new traces and ruins here where we live. On August 29th, 2018, Immigrant Customs Enforcement (ICE) raided a local business to separate families and incarcerate workers. 16 community members were imprisoned in the privately owned and operated immigrant-only detention center in Tacoma. As of October 11th, eight were deported, two are still imprisoned, and six are out on bond without state-sanctioned opportunities to work.
These disappearances, traces, and breaks, whether we are conscious of them or not, wield tremendous power over our daily, sensuous, and political lives.
This selection from the B R U N A archive, which we have named, With Disappearance, traces a timely thread that can be followed throughout our archival collection of printed matter, art, and media. We hope this introduction will serve the people of Whatcom County as a viable resource to develop new and holistic approaches to confronting our region's systemic crises.
Poisoned Men in Need of Some Love, Petrit Halilaj, 2013“Published on the occasion of the solo exhibition of Petrit Halilaj, Poisoned by men in need of some love, organised by WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels (September 7, 2013-January 5, 2014), and curated by Elena Filipovic. The book reproduces almost the entire contents of the archives of the now-defunct Museum of Natural History, Pristina, as found by Petrit Halilaj in July 2013.” — wiels.org
Hardly War, Don Mee Choi, 2016
“Hardly War, Don Mee Choi’s major second collection, defies history, national identity, and militarism. Using artifacts from Choi’s father, a professional photographer during the Korean and Vietnam wars, she combines memoir, image, and opera to explore her paternal relationship and heritage.” — wavepoetry.org
Trash Value…Sam Gould, 2016
“Written as a ‘critical murder mystery’, the work addresses Gould’s former neighbor who committed suicide after losing his house to the city due to owed back taxes. As the city moved in to rehab and flip the property, Gould gleaned wood from the site and constructed furniture (much of it inspired by Enzo Mari’s Autoprogettazione project), ultimately used by conversants interested in issues around the social residue of objects, structures of power, collaboration, recognition, and more. Elements of the same wood was used to construct the exterior and furniture at Beyond Repair, an artists’ project managed by Red76 which takes the form of a book shop and publishing site in South Minneapolis’s 9th Ward.” — printedmatter.org
The Irradiated International, Lou Cornum, 2018
Diasporic Diné writer traces a genealogy of the atomic massacre in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Dene and Diné indigenous people exploited and poisoned by uranium mining and war machines. A counter-history and decolonial manifesto, the author calls for “the irradiated international… a world reorganized.”
Nooksack Place Names: Geography, Culture, and Language, Allan Richardson & Brent Galloway, 2011
“The first comprehensive study of Nooksack place names in Washington State and southern British Columbia, based on historical records and field trips with elders.” — ubcpress.ca
Anamnesia: Unforgetting, Vivo Media Arts Centre, 2012
“Consists of an introduction by Sharon Bradley on the history of the Satellite Video Exchange Society (SVES), and the emergence of the Crista Dahl Media Library & Archive. Amy Kazymerchyk contextualizes the curator’s programs, and their collaboration with VIVO over the past four years, within the history of social and cultural production at SVES. Alex Muir extrapolates upon early artist-television pioneer Byron Black’s international practice, his Images from Infinity program on Cable 10, and his affiliation with Robert Filliou’s Eternal Network, Image Bank, and the Western Front. Donato Mancini situates his curatorial frame within broader discourses on polytemporality, polyrhythmia, and the archive, in literature, cinema, and poetry. Cecily Nicholson reflects upon the legacy of the Oglala Sioux and American Indian Movement stand at Wounded Knee, prison asylum activism, and the civil rights movement, on contemporary movements, and political and cultural engagement.” — vivomediaarts.com
Inventory for a Voyage [Da capo sin’ al Fine], Christine Leviczky Riek, 2017
A publication of Vancouver-based artist Lois Klassen’s project, Reading the Migration Library, which is an archive of multi-form publications (images, poetry, narrative texts, and more) that describe personal experiences with human migration and displacement. Leviczky Riek creates an experimental book object out of the “inventory” of her family’s flight from Hungary circa 1956.
