Category Archives: Humanities and Social Sciences

Crossing the Mediterranean sea by boat: human dignity and biophysical violence

El Encanto: artist Freddy Dewe Mathews explores spectral histories of the rubber industry in Colombia

What drew you to this project in the first place?

I remember being first drawn to the subject from having a vague understanding of the process of tapping a rubber tree; being somehow indirectly aware of how a tree produces this rather spectral white material – and that was something that made me curious. While it’s never been something I have consciously developed, an identifiable thread in my work is whiteness and the aesthetics of whiteness in nature.

In 2013, I was on a residency in Bolivia and I used the opportunity to start talking to an NGO in Santa Cruz, where I was based, about whether there were still producers of rubber in Bolivia. I made a rather eventful journey out to search for some of these small-scale producers in the Bolivian Amazon towards the border with Brazil. It turned out these producers didn’t actually exist where I had been told, but the trees still did and a local man, whose uncle had tapped rubber some 40 years earlier, guided me to them and with the same tool his uncle would have used, opened one of them up. Seeing that process in the flesh really drew me in – especially the idea that the tree still held the scars from when industry existed.

But this was really before I began to read about the history of the industry and became familiar with what happened not only in the Amazon but on to the plantations in Asia, even in the Congo with King Leopold and more recently with Firestone in Liberia. My particular interest in the Putumayo came when I read Micheal Taussig’s book, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man. It was then that I decided that if I wanted to make a project on this material it would need to focus on that particular site, so I began to work out how I would make my way there.

Tell us a little about Sir Roger Casement and how he fits into your interests.

Casement’s part in this story is that he was sent to investigate the Peruvian Amazon Company, a rubber collecting company run by Julio Arana, that was accused of abusing indigenous populations in the Putumayo. Casement arrives there in 1910. While in the Putumayo, he wrote various diaries which would become a key element of his trial when he was arrested some six years later smuggling arms to topple the same government that was his employer in Peru. There is a huge amount of context that is needed to understand his story, something Jordan [Goodman] or Lesley [Wylie] would far better explain than I can when they are here for the ‘Landscapes of Abandonment’ roundtable, 6 April 2017.

But what really interested me in his story were certain aesthetic aspects of it –in the context of the rubber industry and those processes I had first seen in Bolivia. Casement was a gay man and was having intimate relations with men during his trip to the Putumayo as we learn from his diaries. These revelations at the time changed the public impression of him and still, to this day, complicate how we remember him. This sexual element of the story appeals to the visual nature of the tree being tapped, which is itself an intimate relationship between the tapper and the tree, where the body of that tree is manipulated to produce a white substance, something that happens deep in the forest away from the gaze of others. While these parallels may seem crass, having seen that process first-hand they were extremely striking. I was further drawn to make these parallels when I was in the Putumayo and I heard about the mythology – common throughout Amazonia – of the pink dolphin, a river dolphin common in the Amazon that has a widespread belief associated with it: it can transform itself into a man dressed in a white linen suit that tempts youngsters into the water, never to be seen again. The debt these ideas and the images connected to them have to the rubber industry is very strong.

You had a long period of fieldwork in Colombia. How did this influence your work?

It was a great privilege to be able to spend nine months in Bogotá on a residency (British Council Residency Programme at FLORA – 2016). It gave me access to a lot of materials I would not have come across in London and the chance to meet anthropologists based there. And it also allowed me to travel further into the areas I was interested in.

It also gave me the opportunity to see the story from a different perspective. Somehow the way the history is written from the UK seems to focus on the British as a kind of saviours and their involvement in the investigation and trial of Casa Arana is given a greater significance that it might deserve. Whereas in Colombia you are told that if the Casa Arana hadn’t been able to register in London and receive British investment it would never have been able to expand in the way that it did, to reach the areas it did and exploit the communities it profited from. Profits that were enjoyed by the Britons who had financed it.

And while the trial may have been a noble effort it had very little actual effect in the Putumayo, where the company continued to exist for some years until the price of rubber was driven so low by plantations in Asia.

These stories are far more complicated than the reductive terms I am using to explain them but it was interesting to see it nevertheless from two contrasting perspectives.

Re-assessing the past seems to be a recurring theme in your work. Why does it appeal to you?

I am attracted to the idea that history is malleable and deeply subjective and I feel that the histories that I have tended to look at, which are of remote subjects, represent this particularly succinctly. To the extent that the explorers that were drawn there and even someone like Casement who was tasked with being objective are actually fairly un-reliable and consequently make for interesting reading. Especially when you can see the narratives created as they develop, becoming ever more difficult to separate from the reality.

I want my work to create a space where these stories can be looked at in a very conscious way, examining how we regard these histories once we are aware of how our sense of them shifts with the perspective of time.

You use different media in your work. How do you decide which one is more adequate to express your art? Could you let us know, for example, why are you using 16mm in this show?

There is no specific rationale for why one subject may end up expressed in a certain way. It’s more that techniques and processes are developed alongside the research and journeys that I make. Sometimes, in fact, the same ideas may be expressed in various different media in the same exhibition, almost as a way to make an example of something.

I always want to create a world that can be inhabited in my work and want that world to have many facets and materials, and that is why I have always been drawn to using different media.

16mm specifically is something I was looking at when I started to think about video loops. I wanted these to be made manifest and tangible in the exhibitions I was making and really the materiality of film was the best way to do that. The idea with these works is to make the audience aware of the way their perception of something that is essentially unchanging, a loop of film, evolves the longer they look at it.

Here, in this work specifically, using 16mm creates an exciting tension in the work, referencing the material that was used to first relay images of these remote areas by explorers and anthropologists. Often people will see the images without being certain whether the footage is archival or not. This is something that plays with the idea of the distance we have from these subjects.

Associated events:

Is morality relative?

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This article was written by Dr Michael Garnett, from Birkbeck’s Department of Philosophy. The article is taken from the introduction to a study guide on moral relativism, written by Dr Garnett and Professor Lillehammer, ahead of the conference and essay competition on the question ‘Is morality relative?’, which will take place on 28 June 2017.

I used to be a moral relativist—I used to think that moral judgements could be true or false only relative to a culture. Not just that: I used to think that moral relativism was obviously true. I struggled to understand how anyone could not be a moral relativist. Denying moral relativism, I thought, meant thinking that you were in possession of the one, true, universal, objective morality—and who could be so arrogant as to think they had that? I mean, maybe if you were religious you might think you had that. But even then, there are many different religions, and religious teachings require interpretation; and so who could be so arrogant as to think that they, out of everyone in the world, had hit on the one true interpretation of the one true religion?

My mother is a social anthropologist, someone whose job it is to study different cultures, and growing up I was keenly aware of the huge differences in moral ideas and outlooks between different human societies. As a kid I’d sit through dinner parties listening to my mum and her anthropology friends swapping stories about the distant peoples with whom they’d lived: the things they’d had to eat (live grasshoppers and stewed goat’s placenta were particular standouts), the different kinds of family structures they’d been welcomed into, and the different ideas about ethics and the cosmos that they’d learned about. For as long as I can remember, then, I’ve known that the ideas I happen to have about things like property, marriage, suicide, homicide, incest, cannibalism, the natural world, and so on, are mostly just local to me and to my little corner of the world.

So how could I not have been a relativist? Perhaps I could have believed in a universal, objective morality if I’d been ignorant of the extent of these cultural differences—if I’d somehow thought that everyone in the world shared more or less the same moral ideas as me and the other white, middle-class Londoners in my neighbourhood. But I wasn’t ignorant: I had a front row seat at the theatre of human cultural diversity. So to believe in a single true morality I would have had to believe, arrogantly, that somehow I (along with the rest of my ‘tribe’) had some special access to the moral truth, a special access denied to everyone else on the face of the planet. What could possibly justify this? After all, it’s simply an accident of birth that I grew up to have the moral ideas that I have. Had I instead grown up on a Fijian island, or deep in the Amazon basin, or in rural China, I would have had an utterly different moral outlook. Clearly, I had no better claim to the moral truth than anyone else. And that’s why I thought moral relativism was obviously true.

But I’m not a moral relativist anymore. So what happened? What happened is I studied philosophy. Philosophy showed me that I was muddled about what exactly did and didn’t follow from these facts about cultural diversity and disagreement, and it helped me to see everything more clearly. I eventually came to understand that, of the various things I thought about this topic, some of them were correct, but weren’t moral relativism; and some of them were moral relativism, but weren’t correct.

It took me a few years to get this all straightened out in my head. I’ve written a short Study Guide to pass some of this on; this is the essay that I wish I’d been able to read after sitting through those anthropology dinners, my head spinning vertiginously at exotic tales of cultural difference. And at our conference on 28 June, some of my esteemed colleagues will share their own perspectives on the topic of relativism. We very much hope to see you there.

Further information:

Open Cultural Data: Discussing Digitisation

Adoption Beyond Access

The theme discussed by the first panel of the day was ‘Adoption Beyond Access’. Dr Rebecca Sinker (Tate), Dr Mia Ridge (British Library) and researcher and curator Natalie Kane each set out to question what, beyond publication alone, institutions can do – or indeed are doing – to facilitate the use of their digitally accessible archives, collections and cultural data.

Dr Rebecca Sinker began by delineating the issues of scale and scope faced by institutions wanting to provide digital access to collections and facilitating associated outreach. Rebecca highlighted the importance of institutions committing to comprehensive infrastructural change and sustained investment when undertaking digitisation initiatives to avoid ad-hoc forays into collections access. However, Rebecca noted that resource limitations oftentimes make this an unattainable approach. Further, since it can take significant effort to establish digitisation and publications systems alone, the importance of facilitating audience engagements with the published collections risks going unrecognised.

Yet the online publication of collections does not guarantee the material will be accessed by widened audiences. Using Tate’s Archives & Access project as a case in point, Rebecca demonstrated how offering a range of ‘entry points’ to digitised collections can support varying levels of participation: from the additional access afforded by large-scale digital publication, to the entrees supported by online learning resources (such as explanatory films and blogs), to the in-person facilitated engagements, which can support audiences with differing levels of familiarity or confidence with cultural collections. Digital affordances allow new and exceptional modes of access, but some audiences may need support as they gain confidence and awareness of cultural collections before they take up that offer. In offering outreach in conjunction with digital access a more comprehensive cultural repositioning of cultural collections may be achieved in the long-term. However, with limited resources in mind, and a growing understanding of the role of outreach in engendering participation, advocacy remains necessary, the message being: publication and outreach in conjunction make for accessible – or rather accessed – open cultural data sets.

Dr Mia Ridge (British Library)

Dr Mia Ridge’s presentation followed. Mia suggested that we begin by problematising the notion of cultural data. She asked the room to firstly take into consideration the quality of any data set that may be made open – what errors might it contain? Is it viable as structured open data? – and secondly to take into account the historicity of the set itself and its context of production. Does it contain any degree of cultural bias? Would it impart any degree of cultural bias if it was made open? To elucidate this point Mia references the digitally accessible Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913 ‘A fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London’s central criminal court’ – which is an amazing resource – detailed and accessible, but also a necessarily limited one. Exposure to open access data sets poses a risk, insofar as cultural bias may be created by over or under representation in open cultural data collections. The lives of non-criminal Londoners 1674-1913 are not so easily accessed, for instance, which may effect how literature or historical accounts are researched, written and interpreted. Further, individual issues of data set quality have the potential to impact on intra-institutional structured cultural data sets. “Every institution catalogues its archives in very different ways”, noted Mia, which will inhabit the ability for data sets to be joined up, and stymie the ambitions of those who wish to make horizontal journeys. She suggests that staff involved in open cultural data projects would benefit from increased understanding from scholars and other institutions alike – joined up conversations help to navigating this complex and dynamic topic, and events, such as hackathons and roadshows, can help in this regard as well as break down barriers to participation. Data in all forms, from published to collections to outcomes of practice sharing, flows both ways,

Natalie Kane gave the final presentation of this panel; a fascinating talk that asked the room to challenge the politics of the archive, create parallel narratives, disrupt the space work occupies, interrogate categorisation and explore absence. “What might a postcolonial or feminist search engine look like?”, Natalie enquired. Pursuing this line of thinking, she showcased work from a range of artists who have explored this idea: 3D printing is mooted as a form of cultural reconstruction; a bust of Nefertiti is subject to a guerrilla-style digital scan as a challenge to colonial art theft; archival imagery is repurposed in unexpected ways, exploring absence and the tolerances in historical narratives. Natalie draws the audiences’ attention to Cécile B. Evans’ Agnes, a digital commission produced for the Serpentine Gallery’s website. Agnes is a bot in possession of an ‘aim-to-please’ character that playfully offers website visitors information both direct and tangential in nature. Agnes’ contributions can delight, confuse or frustrate and ultimately showcases disruption and frustrated forays into cultural collections. Natalie seizes upon this lack of structural totality as a distinguishing characteristic for anyone person exploring immaterial collections, and expounds the limits, but also the potential, such terms of distinction offer.

Legalities and Logistics of Digitisation

Fred Saunderson (National Library of Scotland), Bernard Horrocks (Tate) and Mahendra Mahey (British Library)

The second panel of the day focused on the “legalities and logistics” of implementing and maintaining large scale digitisation projects. Our three presenters, Fred Saunderson (IP Specialist at the National Library of Scotland), Bernard Horrocks (IP Manager at Tate) and Mahendra Mahey (Project Manager at the British Library Labs) outlined some of the pragmatic difficulties that can potentially stand in the way of a project’s lofty open access ideals. All three presenters dispelled the optimistic notion that the online environment could somehow alleviate the need for material spaces and physical “leg work” in relation to these projects. Fred Saunderson opened the panel and helped extend our discussion beyond the confines of London. He highlighted the efforts made by the National Library to provide access to its collections to users across Scotland, despite being physically centred in Edinburgh. Online resources are not the only answer to this problem, he revealed, as onsite copyright licences can be considerably less restrictive and not all users gravitate to the digital realm. In response to these factors, the library has just opened a new film archive access centre at Kelvin Hall in Glasgow, with dedicated onsite terminals. While the library has currently been focusing on “low-hanging fruit” (material readily available for digitisation under various existing copyright exceptions, such as preservation requirements), Fred noted that there are considerable “scaling up” challenges ahead as the institution is committed to having a third of its collection available in digital form by 2025.

Bernard Horrocks focused on Tate’s recent Archives and Access digitisation project funded by the Heritage Lottery and involving approximately 53,000 archival items. While these items are all wholly owned by Tate, their copyright is not – a situation which introduces some considerable IP challenges. The scale of the problem was made clear when Bernard revealed that, despite belonging to 53 distinct collections, the items involved in the project could be traced back to some 1,500 rights holders. The number of human hours and amount of chasing involved in securing these rights (including a flight to Zurich) was clear and rather daunting, yet Bernard highlighted the level of success Tate achieved, with 98% of rights holders agreeing to some form of creative commons licences. Bernard emphasized the mix of due diligence, risk assessment and judicious use of copyright exceptions necessary for a project of this magnitude.

Finally, Mahendra Mahey outlined the impressive number of projects that have been supported by the British Library Labs since its inception. The BL Labs is an initiative funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and charged with encouraging public use of the library’s digital collections and data. The nature of the projects supported by the Labs varies considerably and Mahendra introduced a number of recent competitions, residencies, collaborations and events. Again, the success of these digital initiatives required considerable “real world” leg work, as raising awareness of the BL Labs was dependent on going out and talking to people. Mahendra emphasized the importance of “learning the story of the collection” as the origins and background history of the data in question largely determines the challenges involved in making it open.

Ethics and Organisation

The final panel of the day took a turn towards the ethical and organisational challenges surrounding open cultural data. Initially, we were supposed to be joined by a representative from HEFCE, who was sadly laid up with an illness. In his stead, however, Mia Ridge rejoined the panel, which also consisted of Dr Mark Coté (Lecturer in Digital Cultures, King’s College), and Bill Thompson, Head of Partnership Development, Archive Development, at the BBC.

3. Bill Thompson (BBC) and Mark Coté (King’s College)

The paper given by Dr Coté was provocative. Arguing that many corporations are already collecting quantified behavioural data about users, he suggested that it was necessary for us to consider the opening of personal data as a site of political struggle. The suggestion seemed to be that because these corporations already act in this way, they remain the only entities who benefit from data analytics, leaving other actors out in the cold. But this suggestion came with many privacy challenges that left me feeling uncomfortable. I also was unclear over what political transformation we might see; do social justice organisations, for example, have the wherewithal and technical expertise to efficiently mobilise such data profiling – and how would it be used anyway?

Bill Thompson followed this with a talk about the institutional difficulties of working within an organisation such as the BBC at this time. Noting that the most recent charter for the organisation specifies little other than “programme making”, in contradiction to its founding remit of developing technologies for the public benefit, Bill pointed to the precariousness of his situation, working with the BBC archive; an amazing and diverse body of materials that are of enormous cultural significance.

The day closed with discussions evolving into wine but one final point struck me, that Mia brought home. In this final twist on “data produced by humans as cultural data”, Mia noted that the temporal distance between recording and exposure is now so limited as to cause problems. In a previous era, if one wrote a personal diary, one would expect this to remain private. Not so of the public documentation of lives on social media, which can affect employment and many other aspects of one’s life. Indeed, though, how can we know which elements of our practices might be troublesome? How can we possibly evaluate the transactional benefit against the (only moderately) deferred risk? How does such open cultural data lead to a change in our own behaviours? These are the challenges of open cultural data that arose in the final panel.

More photos of the event are available on flickr.