Healing as Re-Membering
Note to the listener / reader
We suggest you listen to our conversation, and eventually scroll through the transcript below using the text as subtitling. We would prefer to not overrule the circular, oral quality of our exchange and to decenter from written words, therefore we encourage you to not read the text without the audio.
It is January 6th, 2021, 9:30 am Paris & The Hague time, a greyish day.
(Nighttime. Sounds of stray dogs. Water flows. A door opens).
Sophie Krier:
Welcome, Saodat Ismailova and Rolando Vázquez. So happy to have you here today. My name is Sophie Krier and I have asked you both to join me here in the context of Faju/Healing – a session convened in Dakar and online by Maya V. El Zanaty, Alessandra Pomarico, Yayra Sumah and Esther Poppe as part of The New Alphabet School, a program of Berlin’s Haus der Kultur der Welt (HKW). Today’s conversation is one of many weaving on the way to the forthcoming and fifth book in the series Field Essays, of which I am the founder and editor, and which is channelled by Onomatopee since 2008. And this particular book is one I am so looking forward to – making it with both of you together. Allow me now to shortly introduce both of you, for our listeners, before we move into our conversation. Saodat Ismailova, you are an Uzbek artist and filmmaker – you are considered among one of the most internationally accomplished of a generation of artists from Central Asia who came of age in the post-Soviet era. Today you live between Tashkent and Paris. All your work seems to summon the fabric of which the soul of the Uzbek and the Turkic peoples is made. And you do this by giving a voice to dreams, to myths, to legends, to rituals. And through a lot of archival research work – I know this is a big part of your work – but also encounters in the field, immersing yourself in different places, and at the end when your films are made, you still take your work further by experimenting with how these films can be viewed and perceived in space. Large themes run through your work, which somehow all connect to mourning, are: matriarchy (Zukhra 2013, Chilla & Gulaim 2014, Chillpiq & Qyrq Qyz 2018); extinction (The Haunted 2017, Letters 2019). More recently, in spring 2019, the new Center for Contemporary Art (CCA) in Tashkent hosted a first retrospective of your work, entitled Qo’rg’on Chiroq. Can you shortly, for our listeners and readers, describe the meaning of this title, Qo’rg’on Chiroq?
Saodat Ismailova:
If I say it without Uzbek pronunciation, it will maybe sound easier: qo’rg’on – you know the kurgan, it’s a burial site, mostly typical for the steppes. And chiroq is a light. We have a ritual that calls for the soul of the ancestors, it’s a very old ritual. The reason I called the show like this is that the new Center for Contemporary Art opened in the old diesel electric station – the first station that provided electricity in the city of Tashkent. And I had this sensation of qo’rg’on – it’s a contemporary art site, the first one in Uzbekistan, but there is never new without old, so somehow it’s a place of qo’rg’on, or a place that might become a qo’rg’on in the future. So it was related to that [intuition, ed.]. And chiroq, light, refers to my practice of cinema that is directly based on light.
Sophie:
Thank you. Those two things bring us to Rolando Vázquez, who is our second interlocutor in this conversation. Rolando Vázquez, you bring with you to our virtual table here today the ancestral geography of México / Abya Yala, another part of the world. You are currently Cluster Chair at University College Utrecht, Utrecht University in the Netherlands. For over a decade now you have coordinated the María Lugones Decolonial Summer School with Walter Mignolo, the last edition of which took place in partnership with the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, with whom you are also engaged in an initiative to decolonize the museum. In 2013, you and Walter Mignolo published a manifesto titled Decolonial AestheSis: Colonial Wounds/Decolonial Healings. In 2016, with anthropologist Gloria Wekker et. al., you co-wrote the report of the Diversity Commission of the University of Amsterdam – which is still a reference today for many institutions engaging in decolonizing their institutions. One of the topics you have written about in the past years that interests me most, is the task of listening. Your luminous last book “Vistas of Modernity, decolonial aesthesis and the end of the contemporary” was released by the Mondriaan Fund, the most important visual arts fund here in The Netherlands, last fall. And it features an artist’s page on Saodat Ismailova. So in a way this book represents the first weaving movement between the three of us. And it’s wonderful to move forward from this book. Could you point out for our listeners and readers why you decided to use the word aesthesis and not decolonial aesthetics?
Rolando Vázquez:
Thank you Sophie. Well, it is a movement that Walter Mignolo proposed. And it is basically to separate the history of modern aesthetics – so the formation of an aesthetic field that is attached to western philosophy, to people like Baumgarten and Kant, and to separate [this field] from the aesthesis of all the peoples of the world that have their [own] ways of sensing and experiencing and enjoying the world, and existence. That’s why we speak of decolonising aesthetics to liberate aesthesis. It is a device. Of course there are others that might use the same term of aesthetics for both sides. But I think the proposal of Walter is to separate them to put the emphasis on how the West regulated the senses and the experience of the world. This is very important for us: to understand aesthetics not only as a movement in the arts but as a way of controlling experience – the control of human experience in general.
Sophie:
You have also said that in your work what you try to do is to ‘bring into dialogue the European critique of modernity with Latin American and Caribbean decolonial thinking’. You are trying to go beyond modern forms of hegemony to, I am quoting you here, ‘open up a space of epistemic justice where other knowledges can thrive’. And I was wondering, because today I bring you in contact with Central Asia, which we could see perhaps as the birthplace of another Europe – [hosting] other knowledges, again – maybe a Europe we have forgotten about, a Europe from before it was internally colonised. A Europe from before the 15th century witch hunts, for example, comes to mind now… How do you feel about this attempt that we are engaging in today with this conversation: to weave an alliance between mourning and healing practices between Abya Yala, the context you come from, and those from Central Asia? How do you feel about trying to build that bridge?
Rolando:
Well, when you brought us together in that first meeting with Saodat [in 2018, ed.], it was immediately apparent to me – not just apparent – I realized immediately that the experience of Central Asia is so close to other experiences like the ones in Abya Yala, in the way in which ancestral worlds have been subdued under the logic of western modernity. And [in the way] the task of healing in all these geographies has to do with the ancestral, with different experiences of time, with different experiences of the body, with the possibility of remembering who we are under conditions of erasure, which is the condition of coloniality. When we speak of the limits of the critique of modernity we are speaking of the internal critique like the western critical thinking that remains intra modern, whereas decolonial critique is a critique that speaks from the outside of that modernity, [a critique] that experiences that modernity not just as progress and salvation but that experiences that modernity as coloniality, as erasure, as loss. It is a critique that brings about not just a question to how things function but a question of existence, or re-existence of the possibility of all those worlds that have been dismissed or erased, to continue to exist or to re-exist, as we say.
Sophie:
Rolando referred to a meeting two years ago in May 2018; it was the morning after your matriarchal epos Qyrq Qyz premiered in Paris, Saodat. An incredible work: opera, music, film. A lot of things are coming together in that work; it seems to me like the end of a journey that you started with Zukhra in 2013. And I had the feeling that in that first meeting two years ago – somehow I remember being a bit shaky – the table we were sitting at in the Marché St. Quentin was shaky, but I was also a bit shaky – and I am today again! Because I feel that a lot of worlds depend upon the meeting, the encounter between your thinking and Rolando’s thinking. And I was wondering Saodat – I know you’ve received Rolando’s book, if you hold this book in your hands, what does this book do?
Saodat:
I think that I mentioned it back then in our meeting. It’s like when you find a reconfirmation for your intuition. Because intuition can be very unstable. It appears and then it can be easily shaken and doubted with questions and be gone. So I believe that this book that Rolando wrote, these types of works, when you read the theory [as an artist] it reinforces your thinking – not just thinking; I would say intuition first of all. It of course helps you to move on, and to believe in what you are doing, and see logic in it. [A logic] that you are not aware of when you are [making a work] as an artist. Definitely when I was doing Zukhra and maybe even until Qyrq Qyz, so maybe for five years, I would not say it was clear for me [why I was doing what I was doing, ed.]. The word healing I heard from Rolando that morning.
And it felt that it was exactly right. Even when we were working with the [musician] girls for Qyrq Qyz I was always telling them: “It’s not just a performance, don’t think about an exterior expression, first of all it has to be a ritual.” But what kind of ritual? I never thought of it as a kind of healing. I would describe it as reconnecting to your ancestors, because this ancestral connection in our culture is very strong. But when I read part of Rolando’s book I understood that it widens your understanding of your own practice, it creates a fundament – your practice becomes solid. So I think that these encounters are incredible for further development – for not only reconfirming your voice but actually to go further on and grow into a certain vision or belief.
Sophie:
It’s beautiful that you describe this idea of things coming down to earth or becoming solid because I think many of your works are about levitation Saodat – as an audience, we don’t know if we are in the past, present or future, we don’t know a lot of things when we contemplate your work. Let’s move forward with this conversation and move into your work. I would like to discuss the work of Zukhra in this conversation, and to discuss it in three main movements. The first one concentrates on the notion of the body; the second one concentrates on listening and re-membering, re-connecting to different parts; and the third movement closes back to mourning and the number forty that I know is inhabiting you this year. So for our listeners, we are going to listen to a fragment from the beginning of the film Zukhra. It’s a portrait of the memories and dreams of a young Uzbek girl who is visited by her past.
(Birds. An elderly woman’s voice recites or prays. Grass? Sound of pouring water. Purring cat. A match. Ambient sounds. Breathing, gasping. Sounds of fire burning. Breathing. A string chorus. Sighting.)
Sophie:
These were two minutes from the beginning of Zukhra. We hear the voice of an elder woman, it sounds like she is praying; we hear a cat, we hear water, we hear a match, breathing; and towards the end images start to appear on the wall. Could you describe for us a little bit the scene? There is a room, there is a bed, there is a body, but we don’t really know who’s body it is…
Saodat:
Basically for 30 minutes the audience contemplates a sleeping body of a young woman and it’s not clear whether she is sleeping, or if she is having a lethargic dream, or if she is on her deathbed; she is in between the three states. And to be honest if you would ask me whether she is dreaming, dying or suspended, I would say probably the three would work. With the only difference that the culmination of the film is the sound that I have recorded in the South of Uzbekistan, which is an exorcism ritual of the body being possessed. So there is definitely something related to [a state of] possession. And what you hear in these two minutes – I think this fragment is a nice choice – are two voices. The first voice is the voice of my mother; the bed I have filmed is in the house where my father was born in Tashkent. It’s in an old part of the city, and at the moment when we filmed the house was abandoned – nobody was living there; the bed is the bed where my paternal grandmother has died.
The sound is a prayer. [My mother] is not reciting holy text but she is rather asking for a healthy future, stability, peace, and so on. That would normally be the traditional way of closing the prayer, by making a wish. And then we hear the sound – this is a very specific sound – of dry grass being crushed. Normally we burn it and then we smoke our space with it. Initially and still very often it is used as a ritualistic plant to clarify the space when it is taken by bad spirits, a bad eye or a spell, and this is how you purify it. But on the other hand it is also used when you get a flu or any type of light viruses, so today it is used more as a medicinal plant. But traditionally when you burnt this plant there was a very clear text and movement in the space: you burn it, you smoke each corner of the room, and you move around three times. Meanwhile there is a certain text that is recited, and this is what the grandmother is doing. We call it Issryq (harmala) but this grandmother is Tajik, and she calls it Hazorispand which means one thousand spirits. That’s the title of the plant and it’s also a way for the ancestors to come [into presence], protect and clean. And about the cat: I grew up with a cat, so this is a very dear and comforting sound, it creates a warm and intimate space. This part of the soundscape is an introductory part of the film that then slowly starts growing into a certain narration.
Sophie:
(Searching for words) How do you see this body [of which] we don’t really know in which state it is… I mean I was even wondering if we know who this body belongs to? Because you also speak, Saodat, about the fact that this body is perhaps possessed or represents other women’s bodies, other bodies, that have been possessed by souls throughout their life. I’m curious to hear from you about this question Rolando, because I know that you are working on different notions of the body. You make a distinction between the body as an anatomical body that we would see with the western gaze as a body lying down, and the body that can also be conceived as a communal body: a body that belongs to many times and many places at the same time.
Rolando:
Yes, there are many things to talk about… It is an important distinction, the distinction between the anatomical body, that is a body of western medicine, and the communal body, the ancestral body. And I think in the work of Saodat we are made witness to this ancestral body that is not just a set of organs and an anatomical description, a medicalised body. But rather it is a body that is inhabited by different temporalities and different voices. And I think this is really important – the connection between sound and memory that Saodat is making tangible here. On the other hand it connects to what you were saying before Saodat, how what you call ‘a ritual of connecting’, we are calling ‘healing together’; this brings us to the questions of healing, not as a healing of the anatomical body, not as a healing of the body that is sick, but a healing that requires connecting back, relating again. And how part of the violence of modernity is to separate us, to [produce] a body that is isolated, in which we are separated from our own communities, our own memories, our own dreams. When Sophie says that a lot of your work is about levitation, I would see this levitation not as an abstraction but as a grounding, as a way of connecting back, of relating to this, through dreams, through sounds, through remembrance, through places. It is a way of relating to this absence that has been forced into so many people. [An absence] that is not an absence where there is nothing. It’s an absence of these worlds that are there, in their absence. So in this way the exorcism, the smoke, the incense, the plant are all exceeding the present of the anatomical body, or the present of what I call in the book [Vistas of Modernity] ‘the surface of the present of modernity’. It’s not just about what is there in the now, but it’s about this relation with what is there in time. That’s how I see it. When I saw your work, the opera Qyrq Qyz, I immediately recognised this work of healing that has to do with relating back, with recovering the possibility of remembering who we are. When I say ‘who we are’ I’m speaking of who we are beyond the individualized self, which we are made to be in western modernity. For me, and also as a question for Saodat, the question of healing has to do with this possibility of remembering who we are, and also with crossing the fear of recognizing what have we become. When we can remember who we are, we are also forced into understanding ‘what have we become?’, which is something difficult to behold.
Sophie:
Perhaps it’s nice, Saodat, if you respond to that because the upcoming exhibition that you will hold about Zukhra in Kazakhstan at the Almaty Gallery is called “What was my name?”, so that connects very nicely to what Rolando just talked about?
Saodat:
Definitely, Zukhra is a work that embodies many other women and many other women’s destinies, and where the time cycle does not go the way we are used to in our pragmatic world, in our rational world. The time works there in a different logic, I indeed think so. So yes, it’s definitely not about the anatomical body. There is one leading voice that keeps on coming back in Zukhra: the voice of a girl that says that she cannot decide [on the course of] her life [herself]; that it’s like a water flow; that it’s not in her hands to envision and make decisions in her life. It was an interview, which was recorded much before the film was made as a part of a research for my script for Chilla (40 Days of Silence). I was researching how people go through their ritual of 40 days of silence. It’s a ritual of self isolation that lasts 40 days. In our culture there is the calendar of Chilla, of 40, which we call Chilla Taqvim. Where the year, the change of the seasons, the 21st of March and December – all these depend on cosmic laws. [In this calendar] the role of Chilla, 40, is very important. We have the 40 coldest and 40 hottest days – because we are in the sharp continental weather in central Asia. This number 40 is a very wide subject, and the interviews come from these girls who made a vow of silence during the 40 days. [This retreat] is normally done at different levels; it really depends on your need. Most of the time it is practiced for either depression or what they call possession (medically we would call it psychological problems like schizophrenia). The fact that they call it possession means that for them there are spirits that enter [the body]. The way [these interviews] are explaining what these girls are going through is really interesting, because normally you would read it from books, but from real life accounts. So they were forced to take a vow, 40 days of silence, to get through [their state of depression/possession]; they would not call it purify or clarify, but ‘go through it’, because you never come out from it the same as you were before. So that’s the major aim: it’s a transformation period, it’s a period where you learn how to deal with what you have, what you are – with the help of some people in the community that can lead you. So it’s a work not about the external body, but rather an internal state. Of course another question it raises is, why do these moments happen to such young women. This is also very interesting, because normally they come out as fortune tellers afterwards, as the continuation of a tradition that can lead the other coming generation. Because the 40 day ritual also involves certain knowledge, rules, and prayers.
Rolando:
Hearing you speak, you are making me think of our dear mentor and friend María Lugones who just passed away. And I think what you are describing – I will put it in relation to her teachings – has to do with a healing that is about transformation, that is about a crossing, a becoming that implies a coming to voice. María would put a lot of emphasis on the coming to voice. It’s a completely different reality where she is thinking through/from, but she realizes that what keeps her in that state of fracture is the impossibility dictated by society, by a dominant society, of being plural. She says that we need to cross beyond that single subject and enter the possibility of the plural self, where she recognizes – being for example herself a woman of colour – that actually her way of thriving, of healing the colonial wound, of healing the violence that has framed her existence is this crossing towards a coming to voice in which she allows for herself to become plural, [in which] she learns to be all those women that she is.
In what you are describing I see these women that instead of being medicalised and diagnosed as schizophrenic and then put into whatever medical treatment, or given substances to numb them, they are, to the contrary, given the tools if I understand you correctly, the ancestral tools, to become that which is happening through them, so that they can then put it at the service of the community. This would be my question… If I am understanding this correctly or not? And [if] this would be a realisation of their potential instead of numbing them into a normal being, into what is assumed as a single self, as a normal being that can only have a single voice etcetera etcetera.
It is very powerful to think of these young women bearing the deeper connection, or the more open connection, to that past, to that ancestrality that is threatened… I will add a second layer here. A big impact that your work had on me that evening at the Musée du Quai Branly, was that of recognizing a very powerful culture – these are not really the good words, but let’s leave it at that – a very powerful culture of dealing with loss, like with the loss of the mountains, the loss of the animals, the loss of the sea. Because still today, [across] the whole continent of the Americas, what we call Abya Yala, there are so many “indigenous people”, First Nations, that are struggling and giving their lives to protect a world that is still there. They are denouncing, they are saying: “the mountains are being lost, the rivers are being lost, the animals are being lost”. And they are telling the western world to stop, for example very clearly the Kogis and the Arahuacos from the Sierra Nevada in Colombia are sending this message – that they see that this is coming. But when I saw your work about the history of Central Asia, I see particularly these women, these voices, these instruments, these colours and forms, already dealing with the loss of Earth, what I call in my writings “earthlessness”, and the loss of worlds, (where, for example, the tiger only remains as a dream). I wanted to bring this together because I think the connection between the experience which Sophie called extinction, which I would call the experience of loss that Central Asia has gone through: the loss of Earth, the loss of languages, of worlds, of meaning, of animals. This is something that is so important for other regions of the world where there are still things to safeguard, where the mountains are still there, and the animals are still there. Even though in great danger. This is one of the things that really interests me a lot about bridging these two worlds, because in a way you are already dealing with the task of mourning something that is irretrievably lost, like a sea, like a mountain, like a language. And it is so powerful, so deep to see that it is in the body of women, in the experience of young women where this capacity of mourning and re-membering is so vivid in your work. For us it is also clear that in indigenous or First Nation resistances, women and young women are having a leading role, in the struggle against the loss of earth, the loss of languages… These are the things that I wanted to bring to the conversation that I think go really to the core of what we call healing the colonial wound. That is a wound that comes by the imposition of a world that is based on the destruction of the earth, and the destruction of women’s bodies, and the destruction of other worlds or other languages.
Saodat:
If I may add a few things to clarify, and share the thoughts that visited me while you were speaking: you said that these women are supported by the community to continue this tradition: I would like to add that in fact it’s a struggle. These rituals and traditions are fading and they are under control and restriction. Especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It’s curious, somehow I can still not tell that I’m totally right but my feeling is that while being under the Soviet Union we were (sighs deeply) locked in this big atheistic machine, and our culture was somehow conserved. So when the borders opened up there was a big inflow of islamic belief. It generates a very insidious fight against all the animistic and pre-islamic rituals of the region. And this is a very devastating thing to feel, because I grew up with these rituals, thanks to my grandmother, and 20 years ago these rituals were alive. Even when I interviewed these girls [for Chilla in 2005] their knowledge was still easy to access, while today if you go and you want to access it, it is way more complicated because there is a war waging against it. I mean it is not an open war, but the war is there. Also, there is something about the young women’s struggle that I want to return to. Perhaps this is a right way to say it but before they get married and become a part of the big societal institution, the family institution, the patriarchal institution of the society we live in – and again the dogmatic religion is part of it – [the young women] have a different connection to their true nature, thanks to a female intergenerational connection within the families. Probably this connection lives on until a certain transition – until the marriage, it can be explicit. For all these girls that I have interviewed, their dramatic point, the crucial point that overturned their life, was their marriage: they got married, they would live in the marriage for a maximum of two years, and then all kinds of problems started. And they would start turning around – turning against these institutions, finding their own way to become a shaman, or of a female leader who continues to protect and to lead, and so on. I know it’s not accessible and visible in the same way today, but it still exists, and I really hope it continues existing. We will see what will happen. But there is this interesting fact: the Soviet Union was a big cultural trauma for our culture and language, but then with the time we have come to understand that certain parts were conserved [during this occupation]; people managed to take [their ways of life, their ways of knowing] inside and hide them and defend them, while when the Soviet Union collapsed, another type of influence arrived. And this influence is challenging to resist.
Rolando:
Yes, you know, there are so many things in common… For instance, what First Nation indigenous peoples in Abya Yala have been doing is to safeguard, or to preserve their ways of existing in the world under all sorts of violence that comes from colonial times, that comes from the state, from the school system, or from the evangelical churches today. So there are all these sorts of attacks against their way of living in the world. And I think the task of healing has to do with recovering this possibility of becoming world, of worlds that have been erased under all these forces. And these worlds in the modern colonial system have to do with patriarchy, very strongly. The patriarchy of modernity that imposes a system of gender, but it is also the patriarchy of the monotheisms. So all these [religions]: Christianity, Judochristianity, Islam come from the same root of the monotheistic way of thinking. [This means they] imply on the one hand the patriarchal system but on the other hand they also imply ecological devastation, the superiority of the human over the Earth. What might be called animism or shamanism in Central Asia is what in the Americas we call ‘relational ontologies’. It goes beyond the patriarchal division of gender and beyond the separation from Earth. The way I often summarize it is by saying that: In the face of earthlessness, the task of healing is a task of re-membering ourselves earth, our body-earth; recognizing how we are made of the earth and how this connects us to plants and animals, not as objects, also not just as actants but actually as ancestral beings that have deep relations with our ways of sensing and understanding the world. In the face of the loss of our communities, what I call “worldlessness”, the loss of worlds, of meaning, of languages, of ways of eating, of cultivating, the task is to remember ourselves as community – who are we, which was the question that we were speaking before. And in the face of the loss of time, which is this enclosure into just the present of modernity, or contemporaneity, or profit, the task is to re-member the ancestral, our ancestrality – where do we come from. All these systems of oppression force us into these three losses. I mean there are many others, but for clarity: we are facing the loss of earth, the loss of our worlds of meaning, of communal worlds and the loss of our ancestral memories. Somehow it is barred by critical thinking of the West, because critical thinking of the West thinks that remembering is conservative by definition whereas this move of re-membering, the one that you are doing in your work Saodat, is very radical: it’s a re-membering that goes against the structures of oppression. It is a form of relating to time that can bring radical change. In a way we are not deluded with the idea that change comes from a utopia in the future, but that real change is to remember who we are, and to bring about the multiple possibilities that are there. Coming back to Sophie’s question in the beginning on hegemonic critique, this is what the critique misses, because for western critique, whatever is about remembering is conservative by definition. And conservative in the wrong way, of just not wanting change and defending the status quo. Whereas when Saodat and the Arhacuo’s in Colombia are speaking of re-membering they are not speaking about preserving the status quo of the dominant power but they are talking about the healing, the survival, the safeguarding of the possibility of continuing to exist, and to create alternative worlds. In my work and in dialogue with people like Tony Fry, I see this as the question of “defuturing”, when we lose our memories and we lose our mountains, our rivers, our animals, our plants – then the future becomes completely impoverished. There is nothing other than just the artifice of production and the spectacle. Whereas in your work, I think it is so clear that there is so much that needs to be safeguarded in order to enrich and transform the present, in order to open possibilities of being that are being endangered by these forces.
Sophie:
You both spoke about so many beautiful things… Healing not as not bringing the body down to a normal state, to how it should be, but healing as a form of opening up, or as you Saodat said, a way of augmenting: the incense, the smoke, the plants, the chanting – they allow the body to be augmented, in terms of temporalities, or in terms of other histories, or other trajectories. I want to share with you now another fragment from Zukhra, which is even more polyphonic in nature when we hear the story of Zukhra being told, but we also hear voices of women who have been possessed and that share how that was for them.
(Uzbek voices. English voice-over. For six years, I was imprisoned in my body. Every night Zukhra was secretly leaving her house. Her family started suspecting the girl of dating a man. The girl’s brother decided to follow her to see who her lover was. He goes with a knife ready to punch the sister. // I could not say what was happening. // Zukhra walks through a village, fields, and gardens towards a mountain. // I was born again at the entrance to a cave. // She turns around and looks at her brother who is hiding behind a tree. // I never thought that human life could exist // She entered the cave… and never came out. // Nowadays I still cannot stay in crowded places // Her brother went to look for her in the cave but Zukhra had disappeared. // I cannot speak to anyone I want, I cannot do what I want. The spirits decide my actions, if not they suffocate me. I cannot control it. I am the last light that makes it to the morning. Voices speak in Uzbek. Rhythmic sound. Chanting.)
Sophie:
It sounds as a very terrifying and very limiting experience, as a sacrifice. Is that how you also heard it, when you collected these witnesses? And could you tell us something about that – how you as a filmmaker actually access these stories that you weave into your films?
Saodat:
I think that for me it’s more related to the transmission of [these stories]. And of course making videos and moving images is a new way of storytelling that unfortunately doesn’t let me improvise or react to reality – it’s static, it’s fixed and it’s there. But still what I would like to do in my work is what my grandmother would do for me: it’s telling the stories that back then were just stories, fun to listen to, they sounded like tales, but then with the time I understood how precious these stories were to connect to myself. And they became more and more precious with time. Rolando repeated several times the sentence “we should remember who we are”. I remember very well this being told to me by my great grandfather, the father of my grandmother. He told me once: “you should never forget who you are.” Maybe [it was] the way he told it, the intonation, or the way I used to see him (it was this amazing beautiful old man): it laid a deep responsibility [on me]. There is a very clear definition [in Central Asian culture] that [your responsibility as continuation] is up to six ancestors, backwards and towards – both ways – so it makes 12 [generations to care for]. [My grandfather] would say that the responsibility and the memory of who you are is there, in this time of the 12 generations. And I understand that these very intimate stories can be questioned [in terms of] whether I have the right to make them public and accessible, as they are so private. But on the other hand I believe that this is a way to communicate and transmit, the same way as my grandmother was transmitting to me by telling the bedtime stories, but through sound and image. And I should say that when I made Zukhra or other works I would be really worried for the audience in Central Asia – thinking that they would not connect to it because they are used to a different experience of an image and what an image is. But actually, it works. In a way I’m glad it’s related to memories: people start excavating memories, because my films provoke [a] going inside of your intimate space and remembering certain memories and fragments, and smells. Maybe touch and smell are the most powerful ways of transmitting ancestral knowledge, rather than information. So I acknowledge this responsibility of using these interviews. In terms of accessing these women, of course because I’m a woman it was easier for me; I don’t think it [their knowledge] would ever be accessible for men. And yes, there is a dark side, I think that this feeling of yours [of being] a little bit scared by her text… It is frightening, but what they go through, it is! This is an interesting question because in my work The Haunted there is also a voice of a young man [the voice of the man is in Stains of Oxus, from where The Haunted got inspiration, ed.] that I use. And actually [it was] through him that the character of the tiger became so clear, because he would be visited by the spirit of the tiger that would really make him bring a lot of physical pain, like scratching and torture, before he would become a healer. And here [in the Zukhra fragment] this girl also became a healer, the girl that we listened to. So this is very widespread, we know about it, if you have in your ancestral line somebody that was healing, it will come back during the 6th generation and if you don’t take the sign immediately, then you will go through some turbulence, like pain. So using this sound is a way to provoke the memory and to make people remember.
Sophie:
I would like to ask both of you if there is something that has been left unsaid that needs to be said, otherwise I have a last, small surprise question for both of you.
Rolando:
I’m so glad you speak about transmission, because again the notion of the past in western modernity has to do with something that is gone and that becomes an archive, and that is fixed, that is not changing. Whereas when you speak of transmission, then you see that re-membering is an imperative. The imperative not to forget. Not to forget who we are. I mean it was an imperative when you heard it from your great grandfather, and this imperative ‘not to forget’ implies a transmission. This is the task of the storyteller. And in most vernacular cultures, or all vernacular cultures where knowledge is transmitted from body to body, and where sound is always before language, it is a transmission before language, that has to do with the memory of the body, and the memory of earth, and with a very immemorial origin. What I wanted to say when we were talking about healing, and healing as remembering, is that of course storytelling is a practice. It becomes a practice of healing, a practice of remaining ‘one’s own’, remaining ourselves, in the face of this loss, in the face of this absencing, of this erasure, that is coming through, let’s say, through the systems of domination be it the textuality of modernity, or its logic of contemporaneity, all those things that are threatening the possibility of remembering. And that’s where I see some of the greatest dangers, that is, when transmission is lost. When you see those worlds that are being preserved in their transmission from one generation to the next, you understand the danger of those moments in history where the violence has been so great, genocidal violence for example, that the transmission has been cut; moments where there is not anymore a possibility of remembering, so where the loss becomes irretrievable. What I see you doing, Saodat, is struggling in the face of this grave danger, sensing that the possibility of this transmitting is lost. I see you trying to use the tools of today to keep the storytelling going, because it remains meaningful. This is where I would make the connection with the discussion today in the arts. I would see that this work is not about contemporaneity; it is not about claiming to be radically new or in the present; but it is about re-membering. It connects to what we call decolonial aesthesis, because it is about this re-membering, this membering back, this cultivation, where you receive a seed, and the seed needs to be cultivated in order to grow, for others to have the seed. It’s not just a re-membering for your own property but a transmission that is a task of the storyteller. It is very beautiful to arrive at this point in the conversation, where healing becomes storytelling, or storytelling becomes revealed as preserving the possibility of healing – even though it does not take the powerful places that the institutions are taking today, like the institutions of capitalism, or the state, or the big religious institutions. But it still has this power of preserving, of carrying on, of transmitting.
Sophie:
If storytelling is revealed as a practice of healing, but if also at the same time, Rolando, you have been thinking about how we need to move from the position of enunciating to the position of listening, and that task of listening is perhaps the most important one, even before we start to tell stories and transmit them… What then is a form of storytelling that can teach us to listen again, I would nearly want to ask…? And perhaps that is what Saodat also can also give us through her work? Because your films Saodat really ask, they summon us, beyond asking, more as a kind of summoning of presence, a presence of the viewer or of the listener… And because you compose so intricately with different archival footage, you lose us a little bit, you make us lose our ground, that’s what I meant with levitating, you make us lose our bearings maybe, nos repairs. You make us lose nos repairs and in that space we have to kind of navigate blindly. Maybe we are a bit like blind viewers…! Which brings us perhaps, yes, to a new place.. For me this is also really what Zukhra does: in only 30 minutes you come out of it and you are in a different place, which you have really engaged with, as a listener, as a viewer.
Rolando:
You are right, Sophie, when you mention this movement from enunciation to reception. As I would see it, and also to give the word to Saodat, the practice of storytelling starts by the reception. It’s not the practice of the author that is busy with what to say, with the enunciation, but it’s a practice of the one that has received first, that only then can speak, you know, the storyteller is not an author in that sense. And that’s why it is as I would see it not as an exercise of enunciation, but primarily as an exercise of reception and transmission.
Saodat:
Of course, listening goes before telling. We should accumulate certain knowledge, and feelings to share before telling anything. With Zukhra, it’s the sound that narrates. Image wise it’s a still shot, there is not much happening. It’s my first work where I start to intuitively work with the sounds so closely as a driving force. And of course, when you work with the sound, you probably understand the importance of listening to the sound differently. This is one part, but then on the other side thinking about receiving the stories that you are told is another way of listening. Because, one can tell the stories, and you don’t always reach all your audience, [only] some of them [really] listen. Related to the Qyrq Qyz, of course the driving force is music [in this work]. This matriarchal story about 40 women that rule and that protect their land is an oral story that has been passed from generation to generation by telling, and retelling, and retelling, and transforming. And I think that the epic oral stories of Central Asia are beautiful, yet not discovered, and not studied knowledge [source] for artists, I believe. Because it has such a – not only amazing language of storytelling – but it’s so free and so specific, the way they communicate. It could be an amazing source for filmmakers or musicians, writers: how you reinterpret, or how you retell these stories. I believe this is also [a form of] listening to this knowledge.
Sophie:
If we follow what Rolando just said, that storytelling as a practice could be healing if it’s also developed as a practice of receiving, of listening, then [here is] my last question to both of you, and you can answer personally, as you wish to: I would be curious if there is a moment in your life when you received something, when something was transmitted to you, that you also felt allowed you to heal something bigger than yourself?
Saodat:
It brings me to another essential part, in my culture at least: the relation to dreams. This is something that is kind of trained from childhood, but again in a very simple, playful way. When the first question you’re asked in the morning is “what did you dream about?”, I believe you develop a memory, or attention for your dreams. And they become very complex. And again, dreams are a space where you never know what is rational, and what is non-rational. The nomads, or the people on the north of the Amu Darya river have a very strong ancestral relation to their dreams. I’ve heard from some scholars that it is very specific, there is even this brotherhood called Uwaysiya which works on telepathy through dreams. It’s incredible, I think. But just speaking about myself and my practice, and my relation to my ancestors, the dreams have always played a very important role. I know that it is a very dangerous space – you don’t know where the truth is, or if it’s just an accumulation of a certain day time experience [that got] imprinted. But I think that there is a way to feel and define where the dreams speak from, and when it’s just an illustration of some impressions and experiences. So dreams are another tool. This is an interesting tool because it is something that you can work on. You can widen it by working with your memory, and I guess by reading or talking to people of the older generations. Dreams, I think, open a door to your deeper memory that you cannot rationalize in time; it can go beyond your lifespan, it has another time, it can go really far, far, far behind. So I have to say that I’m always very careful to step [in the spaces of] dreams, but I know it’s a possibility. A possibility to find another space that we lack.
Sophie:
Thank you.
Rolando:
I think the question of dreaming that is also so particular for Saodat’s work is also very common to all the indigenous, First Nation cultures in the Americas in Abya Yala, where dreaming is, we could say, trained, and it’s an activity. Some people are more capable than others, I suppose. And this shows you how this anatomical body has its counterpart in the mind that is individualized, and where the modern mind is just dreaming of fictions of the imagination, or of its own individual psychology. You know, Freud will have dream interpretations. I mean for some of my friends it’s very clear that for them, the dreams are a place of remembering, a place of relation, of relation with the ancestral worlds, and a place that can be consulted, where you can heal, where you can understand who you are, where they can also communicate among each other. I think this shows the impoverishment of the modern subject that is just imprisoned in an anatomical body, and in an individualized mind. Whereas this transformation that you give testimony to in your storytelling is a transformation towards what is more capacious, being broader, a broader plenitude of life, where you can connect to others in your presence but also before you. Where dreaming is a fundamental part of experience, of our life experience, and not just a fiction of the imagination, or a place of traumas. I think this, instead of being interpreted as a mythology, should show us how impoverished the individualised modern mind is.
Sophie:
I want to thank you both, the way we have been listening to each other in a very concentrated way this morning. I think we managed to weave many different parts of your work, Saodat… We mentioned, I think, all together fivr different films of yours, so I will make sure we mentioned this also in the references of the transcript of this talk, so that our listeners and our readers have something to hold onto if they want to dig deeper and find out more. And the same for you Rolando, it’s possible to read more about many things you spoke about in some of your writings, in your last book of course, but also some of your earlier writings. Thank you again, both of you!
Saodat:
Thank you Sophie, thank you Rolando very much.
Rolando:
Thank you Saodat, thank you Sophie.
Acknowledgements
Field Essays is channelled by Onomatopee ; the forthcoming issue “Q. Meanderings in worlds of mourning” (expected release: winter 2021) is supported by Stroom Den Haag.
References
KRIER Sophie (ed.), ISMAILOVA Saodat, VÁZQUEZ Rolando. Q. Meanderings in worlds of mourning, Field Essays 55.4, Onomatopee, forthcoming. www.fieldessays.net
ISMAILOVA Saodat, Zukhra (HD, 30 minutes), Uzbekistan: MAP productions, 2013.
ISMAILOVA Saodat, Chilla (40 Days of Silence) (2K, 88 minutes), Uzbekistan/Tajikistan/France/Germany/Netherlands: MAP Productions, 2014.
ISMAILOVA Saodat, The Haunted (HD, 24 minutes), Uzbekistan/Norway, MAP Productions, 2017
ISMAILOVA Saodat, Qyrg Qyz (40 Girls) (HD, 88 minutes), Switserland/Uzbekistan: Aga Khan Music Initiative, 2018
ISMAILOVA Saodat. “Menim ismim kim edi?” (What was my name?), Aspan Gallery, Almaty, Kazakstan, 20 February – 6 June, 2021.
ISMAILOVA Saodat. “Qo’rg’on Chiroq”, Centre for Contemporary Arts, Tashkent, 2019. https://www.ccat.uz/en/blog/qorgon-chiroq
MIGNOLO Walter and VÁZQUEZ Rolando, “Decolonial AestheSis: Colonial Wounds/Decolonial Healings”, in: Social Text Journal Periscope, July 15, 2013. Accessible online at: https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/decolonial-aesthesis-colonial-woundsdecolonial-healings/
VÁZQUEZ Rolando. “Towards a Decolonial Critique of Modernity Buen Vivir, Relationality and the Task of Listening”, in Raúl Fornet-Betancourt (ed.) Capital, Poverty, Development, Denktraditionen im Dialog Vol 33, Wissenschaftsverlag Mainz: Aachen, 2012, pp 241-252.
VÁZQUEZ Rolando.Vistas of Modernity. Decolonial Aesthesis and the end of the contemporary, Amsterdam: Mondriaan Fonds, 2020.
