metropolis m

Years ago, in the basement studio of MART Radio, Felix de Rooy called himself ‘a colonial orgasm’. He said it with such gusto and determination that it became one of the most memorable moments of my radio career. The listeners of my program had come to know my show as a space for unconventional topics and conversations. Yet this time I think they were thrown for a loop. Why would the preeminent artist, curator, writer and filmmaker celebrate the colonial wound in a such a profound manner? In such a personal and libidinal manner?

Thinking back on that conversation it struck me that it was not as such a celebration of the subjugation of people and suppression of knowledge here and elsewhere by European colonial powers. It was actually a celebration of everything that Mark Rutte, Stef Blok, Thierry Baudet, Geert Wilders, Hans Janmaat, Anton Mussert and others in the history of the Netherlands rejected. De Rooy’s entanglement with the violence of the past and present was not something that he could deny or venerate as something to be proud of, but a definitive statement of the wound that needs to be spoken about for it not to be forgotten; the existence of the colonies and the people it produced not to be a footnote in history, not to be something to think back on with fond memories over what was lost, but a pillar on which Dutch society was formed and which continues to shape it and its bodies. 

By saying it out loud it becomes something that we have to deal with, face and attempt to dismantle. But this dismantling process is not as new as some would want you to think. This dismantling process was set in motion the moment Dutch colonizers set foot on lands to violently conquer them and commissioned artworks to celebrate that conquest. Those of us who have been at the other end of the violence done through colonial structuring and extraction principles have resisted those from the word go. We have created works that tell other tales, communicated other ways of being and presented the Dutch European understanding of the world as one of many options. 

What it comes down to is: how do we in the art world attempt to acknowledge this contemporary entanglement and dismantle the historically rooted oppression that it still produces? How do we, like Felix de Rooy, joyously exclaim our presence in this world and simultaneously fight to present other ways of sensing our place in it? How do we propose grounded ways of existence through our critiques of the continued colonial and fascist practices of the state? The question is: how do we reconfigure our own complicity with these practices through our funding structures, our business models, our human resource practices, artistic reflections and political propositions?

I was presented an avenue to attempt to answer these questions as a fellow of BAK’s new research project called Non-Fascist Living. I still have not quite found the answers, but my contemplation on them has been formed by the engaging and wonderful conversations with the other fellows and my experiences with institutions during the fellowship. From receiving a guided tour of an exhibition that included a violent artwork around ‘black schools’ at FOTODOK that purported to intelligently promote diversity in education settings but was actually harmful, to being kicked out the library of Utrecht University (one of the institutions behind the fellowship) by the guards after speaking out against their ethnic profiling when they first approached a group of us, to being assaulted after my performance at KunstenFestivalDesArts Brussels where one of the organizers told me to be an example for others and not defend myself against the violent white man who attacked me. This is not to forget the border control after disembarking from the Thalys in Paris for our visit to Kader Attia’s La Colonie when I was singled out, my ID card bent to check if it was fake and then asked if I had hashish with me. 

My non-dominant body is made to endure a certain type of fascist violence from the very same structure that is supposedly there to support me to think through how to live non-fascistly. I have now come to actively reject that proposition: you can only be anti-fascist. Non-fascist living is a tautological fallacy. This is all to say that there is an imperative for our art institutions’ acknowledgment of their entanglement with fascist state procedures to lead to different practices in the field. Entanglement as a concept for me gives us a responsibility to think about our place not just within structures but also within history. What have we done to ensure that our presence and power within toxic and violent regimes of control and affect ensures their dismantling? With awareness alone some of us will not survive and the recognition of these regimes as optional should drive us to entangle otherwise.

Quinsy Gario

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