
Confrontation and Confession
Organizing a symposium is no easy undertaking. On the one hand, a clear and well-delineated framework is required; if this is lacking, you simply end up with a series of talks and lectures hardly touching upon or engaging with each other, not really constituting a whole that is greater than the sum of its individual parts. On the other hand, however, a symposium also needs some self-reflexive dynamism to stay interesting; it constantly has to challenge, negotiate and re-negotiate its own precepts and paradigms. Landings: Confrontation and Confession, a symposium held at the Stedelijk museum on January 11 and 12, testifies to these typical challenges.
The symposium itself presented a single episode of the ongoing research project Landings – conceived by Natasha Ginwala and Vivian Ziherl, and concerned with crossover readings of land histories, geological agency, and constructions of rurality – centered around the notions of confrontation and confession. Landings was reinforced by a small exhibition, containing work by Waswo X Waswo and archival photographs of the Indies from the collection of the Tropenmuseum. The relevance of the former notion with regards to geopolitical and -historical issues is, of course, more than obvious. The same, however, can not be said of the term confession, which formed the starting point for Daniel C. Barber’s opening lecture.
Barber’s lecture, Opacity and Intermattering, was expected to be a philosophical inquiry into the subversive de- and reterritorializing potential of confession, and therefore to define one of Landings‘ main concepts. While Barber’s critiques of confession (which he considers to be all too often accomplice to the powers that be, since it usually facilitates power’s dealing with its own instability) and of debt (which he, following Maurizio Lazzarato, also considers accomplice to power), tied together by the Deleuzian concept of fabulation, were more than convincing, the final conclusion of his highly intricate lecture was less so. By concluding that the more potent form of confession is the so-called confession of confrontation – the confession of the incommensurability of debt – his lecture ended up saying more about how to deal with the notion of debt (in postcolonial conflicts specifically, it seemed), than about the potential of confession; a key term for the entire symposium.

Willem de Rooij’s subsequent talk about the realization process of his installation Intolerance, shown at the Neue Nationalgalerie in 2010, formed a somewhat peculiar highlight of Landings. Sure enough, de Rooij’s contribution was most engaging and interesting in its own right – it was after all, a highlight – but it still was more or less out of touch with Landings as a whole: de Rooij discussed the provenance of the d’Hondecoeter paintings and the Hawaiian feathered objects he used in Intolerance, as well as how the installation was conceived, but connections to the programme of Landings were hardly established.
What was a fortiori true for de Rooij’s contribution, held true for the others as well. First of all, it should really be emphasized that all talks, as de Rooij’s, were interesting in their own right. But even though the various talks and lectures delivered at Landings all oscillated somewhere between good and excellent, their relation to the whole of Landings was nearly always probematical.
A sole exception to this was, perhaps, Adrian Martin’s talk Figuring the Land: Its memory, trace and reinvention in Australian Indigenous cinema. Martin, a professor in cinema using Mitch Torres’ film Whispering In Our Hearts as a case study of how indigenous Australian filmmakers are dealing with geopolitical discussions, was more or less the only speaker to stick to the land as land. For most of the others, the land became the territory, the soil, or the earth, to name but a few of the many various concepts that came up.
On a more practical note, it is worth mentioning that quite a number of speakers – Martin, but also, for instance, Yasimina Dekkar, who discussed the question of terrain within militant Algerian cinema – responded to film materials that were shown in a separate screening program. This program constituted for most of the content of the second day of Landings – on which there, apart from the screenings, also was a performance titled Glimmer: Fragments by Otobong Nkanga, but no talks. Since the screened films and the talks were so tightly linked, however, it seems likely that the program had been more stimulating if lectures and ‘artistic content’ hadn’t been so strictly isolated from each other.
It really should be stressed that the high overall quality of all individual contributions – theoretical as wel as practice-based – made attending the entire program of Landings more than just worthwile. Still, it was very clear that the event was an episode an ongoing research project; as a consequence of this, the much-needed framework for the symposium seemed to still be in the process of being articulated. Though Landings: Confrontation and Confession hardly benefited from this conceptual openness, since a genuine dialogism between the various contributions failed to arise, this might also just have been one more necessary step in the process for Landings as a whole. In any case, it will be interesting to see what the next episode of Landings will be, and what it will be like.
Landings: Confrontation and Confession
a symposium held at the Stedelijk museum on January 11 and 12
Steyn Bergs