Justice and Injury: Interview with Adelita Husni Bey | Noam Segal
Figure 1. Blue still with 3 figures. Source: Chiron, video still, 2018, 4K video, 18:13 min. Courtesy
the artist and Galleria Laveronica.
In 2017, Raoul Anchondo and Christian Diaz, board members of New York-based migrant advocacy organization UnLocal, began conversations with pedagogue and artist Adelita Husni Bey, commissioning a workshop in 2018 on behalf of the organization to explore feelings of emotional depletion among its legal aid staff. During the workshop, Husni Bey employed performance as a pedagogical method, drawing on histories of political theater for her methodology, making connections between performativity, law, and injury. The resulting 18 minute film-installation is displayed in a large darkened room, laden with stage-like platforms and a “forest” of semi-transparent, luminescent banners hanging from the ceiling, that have to be traversed to reach the screening area. The banners are emblazoned with extracts of immigrations acts from the 1880s to 2017, forming ghostly connections in the dehumanizing language of law between past and current struggles for mobility. The work was premiered at the New Museum (New York, January 2019) and was on view at RedCat (Lost Angeles, September 2019–January 2020).
Noam Segal: What struck me about this collaboration was the willingness of a legal services provider to integrate an artist’s ethos into their working process. I wanted to address these questions with you, in light of our mutual experience of the United States as a new home. While there is no equivalence in the precarity and the degree of brutality bodies are subject to, a common denominator seems to be the weaponization of time, in that it is “acceptable” to make the other wait – this doesn’t appear to be violent or a breach of one’s humanity at first, but it often results in processual violence. Can you talk about the ways in which these acts unfold through the conversation you held with the team at UnLocal?
Adelita Husni Bey: I want to specify that I am not attempting to speak for experiences I cannot possibly fathom. Chiron was born out of conversations with the group of legal advocates who commissioned it, and it is in conversation with them that I gained some insights on the personal process and legal procedures of immigration, to which I and you too – in less painful ways, with less at stake – have been subjected to in the U.S.1 I want to point out that foreign bodies are not only made to wait, sometimes indefinitely, but during their processing they are also “weighed,” as if “heavier” materially than those marked by citizenry. The weight of the body that doesn’t belong is also the fantasy of a mass that cannot be lifted, or a mass that weighs the rest of the social body down. Under Section 212(a)(4) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), bodies inscribed with the potential of becoming a public charge or a social burden are flagged as inadmissible, as already too heavy. The suspended, heavy body sinks below the surface of the visible – it sinks into a place where it can both be held and where it cannot be helped, below the surface that other bodies walk upon, bodies who have been promised rights. This reference to the inadmissible weight of the other is really a desire to cut the other loose and not recognize our cohabitation. It is also a way to inscribe the other with something that is already too much, something that doesn’t fit into neoliberal procedures and operations. “Weighing the weight” of one’s claim to stay, is often used to exacerbate the conditions of those who are held hostage to the proceedings. A lawyer at UnLocal – the group I worked with for Chiron – described this tactic as “waiting people out.” After 10 years of holding on, some people who were initially looking to call the US their home had begun to build a life elsewhere and dropped out of the process altogether. Then there is the brutal form of detention, at sea, in detention centers, which is the place where those who have no recourse are held, because “holding out of sight” – often indefinitely – is more justifiable than removing or denying.
NS: Is this why you chose to refrain from including images of spaces of detention in Chiron?
AHB: I think it is important to see immigration as more than an image of prostration, the image of the detention center – the image of the border – the image of the wall, and think of it, instead or in addition, as networks of disciplinary power and capital flows. The work of Angela Mitropolous is very helpful in this respect: she situates the border in relation to a larger industrial detention complex, extracting value from bodies en masse.2 As Mitropolous points out, the “bed quota” that ICE has to fulfill annually since its introduction in 2009 is a quantifiable measure for this industry, where every bed has a price tag, where each detention center profits from every single body that it captures, detains and processes. Her analysis lets you see the situation structurally. On a political level, shifting our attention from morally obscene images from the border (cages, teargas, walls), all centered on the spectacle of someone else’s suffering, allows us to stop perpetually victimizing those who are already brutalized and recognize forms of implication, connectedness and the proximity of this system’s operations.
NS: Can you tell me about this work, the process of working with the group and how temporality figures in the work?
AHB: In 2017, I began conversations with Raoul Anchondo and Christian Diaz, who are part of the board of UnLocal, an organization that offers pro-bono representation for persons facing deportation in New York City. Raoul and Christian were interested in my pedagogical methods and commissioned the work on behalf of UnLocal. We began to talk about what the lawyers and legal aids working at UnLocal were experiencing through their day-to-day involvement with the immigration system, which means doing things like translating accounts of violent events, putting together testimonies of these experiences, asking probing questions, preparing a case and finally advocating on behalf of a person in a very precarious position in front of a judge, and oftentimes having their cases denied. On top of the frequency of denials, which is in and of itself very difficult to live through, what had been affecting the lawyers is the immigration system’s structural investment in other people’s pain and how working in the system had made them complicit in the narrative. Asylum cases demand the constant display of “how much people are suffering,” as one of the lawyers put it, the more you suffered the better chances you have at winning. At the same time, “winning” is entirely predicated on sustaining a system that asserts that some places are “bad” and that the U.S. is “good.”
NS: So, you are describing a system that exploits pain as a policy and as an instrument. Subjects are obligated to perform their suffering for the gaze of another. How do you propose to situate this logic in relation to the performance of “care”?
AHB: U.S. exceptionalism is based on the fantasy of the other in need of rescue. In this sense I felt it was important to try to break down that fantasy while recognizing its effect upon the activities of UnLocal and other similar organizations working with the legal system. That paradox was and is always at play. At the same time the goal was not just to express that paradox but understand its effects – that was the act of care, from our perspective. This means in practice that we started by describing the work the lawyers do and how they feel about it: many legal aids described something akin to “feeling the world crumble” when they lost in court because so much of what you do as a legal aid has a direct, often incontrovertible effect on a person’s life, people who already endured a lot and will probably continue to endure more: bureaucracy, isolation,
Figure 2. Exhibition view. Souce: Chiron, 2018, 4K video, 18:13 min with 26 translucent banners, 114 x 460 cm each. Installation view at RedCat, Los Angeles. Photo: Brica Wilcox.
confinement and violence. 3 We began with what they were feeling, with affect , which is the outwardly structure of feeling, and “ guilt” came up. Lawyers felt something akin to “ guilt” at not being able to do enough, although one of them described taking public transport for hours to home-counsel a grandmother and her young nephew who were unfamiliar with the city, and another recounted buying gifts for and often visiting a client in hospital. In what profession would that client-service provider relationship not be considered “ enough” ? If this was not enough – what could possibly be “ enough” ? This feeling of insuffi ciency and inadequacy and consequent attempt to “ plaster that hole over” with an exhausting investment was possibly a more complicated way of manifesting that they were sorry for what the people they were representing were going through. That they felt somewhat helpless and responsible, when faced with the structural injustice of a system that only promised justice but didn’ t quite deliver it. Accompanying these feelings were the constant specter of exhaustion and fatigue – we began to unpack clinical models of looking at these affects.
NS: Was this when you began to unpack clinical models based on secondary trauma?
AHB: What is clinically described as “ secondary trauma” or more problematically “ compassion fatigue” is what is deemed in psychology to be the transference of traumatic experience from one “ damaged” body to the next and the destructive effect of that transference. In working with UnLocal’ s legal aides we recognized that justice was amiss in the process and that the deep dissonance was one of the roots of their suffering – so the trauma was in the impossibility of doing the work itself, not in the act of care, of listening to those they were trying to help. In some ways, following theorist Michelle Castañeda’ s brilliant work on the subject, the lawyers were “ performing justice” where there was no justice to be found, where justice was, in her words, a “ no show” .4 They, that is to say we, are caught up in this painful state of advocating for something within a system that cannot, structurally, deliver it. The affective experience is excessive – I would like to think of it as something other than trauma, which is often isolating, pathologizing and stigmatizing. Through the workshop, which involved a great deal of research and organization beyond the actual contact hours, I sharpened my awareness that the framework of trauma – as a signifi er of grief caused by systemic dysfunctions – is counter productive and even damaging, and that trauma-centric approaches limit the way we understand the roots of pain. During the workshop we used liquid as a metaphor to describe this “ excess” of pain and crafted narratives about where that liquid came from and where it could be go. Theater makes many of one’ s individual pain, and in making many it assumes that something larger, beyond the self, is at play, although it fi nds its expression in the self. In this vein, I found Sara Ahmed’ s notion of emotional depletion 5 helpful in framing how to respond to pain differently, structurally. Ahmed posits that trauma-centered approaches are “ economic” in that they assume what is being used is being “ used up.” That there is a fi nite amount of emotion we can invest when we try to fi ght against another’ s social death. Instead, Ahmed’ s model relies on the fact that depletion is structurally present when one is faced with the task of “ transforming the institution.” It is the confrontation with the largeness of the structure rather than a minute interaction with another’ s story of violence, which should be the focus of change. It is not by “fixing” the minute interaction or the individual body that healing, or replenishing,
Figure 3. Still with street-view. Source: Chiron, video still, 2018, 4K video, 18:13 min. Courtesy the artist and Galleria Laveronica.
can occur. I think this is related to the earlier point of the image of pain being insufficient and not generative because it doesn’t allow for analysis but only impact. In the same way, care in the guise of appeasing one’s guilt becomes an impossible task, unachievable, because it has no end, it cannot “repair” or “replenish” the bonds broken by that structural condition when the focus is only individual.
NS: Are the dialogues that we hear and witness in Chiron recordings of your exercise with the lawyers?
AHB: There are several exercises that I have either adapted or created for use in the workshop. One exercise we see clearly about half way through the film is originally Augusto Boal’s “Siren’s Song.” In this exercise the participants start out in a circle where everyone faces forward, bodies touching and eyes closed. For a few minutes each person thinks deeply, silently, about instances when this “emotional depletion” was generated. This might conjure multiple moments of “generation” or a specific scene. Everyone then associates a sound to the their sense of affective loss/depletion. The sound could be a rhythmic sound or a drone, it could vary in volume, it could be comforting or disturbing. At this point the circle is letting out a cacophony of different sounds, while everyone still has their eyes closed. Through a series of steps others are drawn to each other’s sound, forming small clusters. Then a conversation ensues. Almost magically, people in the clusters, who have been drawn there by a sound someone else was making, often find similarities in their narration of hurt. Beginning with non-verbal expressions induces a certain type of intimacy that words cannot provide. In another part of the film we see the participants lean on each other in an exercise that was originally called “Person to Person” by Boal and which I redubbed “Dependencies.” The pairs in this exercise are instructed to touch a part of the other person’s body. The instructions are cumulative, so that by the third instruction the pairs are trying to touch each other’s knees, shoulders, feet, heads and as they are doing this they are striving to maintain balance and sometimes falling because of how entangled their bodies are. The weight of each other’s bodies become palpable, the weight causes the struggle, but the weight can also be the rootedness, cause the sturdiness of structure. You become one, and that fragile organism has to support itself. Here I asked the group to think about their relationship to those they work with at Unlocal, to rethink the notion that they are the only ones in that entanglement “offering something,” which is how the client-provider relationship frames work.
NS: Could you talk a bit about the pedagogical models that you work with? Which do you find to be the most relevant to our times?
AHB: I think intersectional pedagogical methods that analyze relations of power are very generative, they remain relevant because power-relations never go away. By this I mean approaches that take into account ways in which class, gender and race hinge on each other and posit embodied subjects that emerge from their conjunction and mutual overdetermination. I think disability studies and friends who are part of that community have certainly offered me a really expanded understanding of what access means. In this sense I am committed to pedagogies that are invested in structural analyses of power, which is also a way to say “about access,” which is also a way to say redistribution and anti-capitalism. There has to be room in all this for expanded notions of feeling, of embodiment and performativity so that the framework is responsive and not prescriptive, a blueprint but not a rigid structure, a place that allows for emergence and not a fixed script. I have used in various ways, at various times, the ethos of the Freedom Schools, Zapatista Schools, Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, Jerzy Grotowski’s theater, CA Conrad’s somatic poetry exercises, the Paideia Collective who still operates as an anarchist school in Merida (Spain), Emma Goldman’s writing and the Ferrer school which to me respond or a grounded in the framework above. I am invested in a crip pedagogy, a feminist pedagogy, a haptic pedagogy, a pedagogy born of collectivism and committed to seeing power as a historically produced dynamic that can be invested with different actors and brought to different ends. In this I am also committed to communist and anarcho-collectivist presents.
NS: How do you decide on working with a specific model with a certain group? Is it a question of instinct, tendency, adaptability, or compatibility?
AHB: All of the above, in different measure. In some ways because the central part of the work for me is the pedagogical experience, it can be shared with anyone, which means the sense of affinity is produced through collaboration and mutual support rather than preexisting the pedagogical situation. For example, I am currently very invested in using pedagogy to foster connection through haptic and non-verbal modes of communication between subjects – myself included. I try to incorporate more physical, improvizational theater techniques in the work I am doing and this immediately produces a kind of closeness. I am also aware of how inaccessible some of these exercises are and try to think of ways to make them generative for a multitude of bodies and capacities. While the central question of the workshop might be developed in advance, it always changes after the first encounter with the group. I am about to embark on a workshop with the VAC Foundation in Venice which will center on digital technologies, their birth and distribution, yet the first question I will ask the class of high school students I will be working with will be: “What does it feel like to be alive today?” By developing an understanding of our group’s perceptions and questions we can often develop a collective sensitivity to each other’s demands and this will drive us to amend the structure of the initial workshop. This is what I borrow from an anarcho-collectivist framework. In some ways, as the Italian philosopher Bifo would say, somewhat following Audre Lorde, working with a group in this way is a way of reintroducing the erotic, the use of the body, the feel of the body, in a historical moment where virtualization has depoliticized and devalorized flesh connecting to flesh and the way capitalist subjects are governed.
Notes
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I am a Libyan-Italian national with dual citizenship who migrated to the U.S. in 2012. I received a green card 2 years after my initial application. ↩
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https://thenewinquiry.com/cross-border-operations/ - Cross-Border Operations By Angela Mitropoulos and Matthew Kiem in The New Inquiry, 18th November 2015 ↩
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To be clear by violence I don’t mean that every single person who seeks counsel from UnLocal—or similar organizations—is fleeing violence, I find that narrative is damaging for groups persons who have varying motives and histories for traveling—devaluing some of those motives or histories and setting up the terrain for the “good migrant/ bad migrant” or the “victim/ not victim” paradigm; which in turn serves the interest of the nationalistic savior complex the US articulates to justify imperialist ventures. What I mean is that violence is pervasive in the experience of the legal system, from filing an application, to waiting endlessly, often in detention and so on. ↩
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Castañeda, Michelle. “Virtual Judges in Immigrant Detention: The Mise-en-scène of No-show Justice.” In Law and New Media: West of Everything, edited by Delage Christian, Goodrich Peter, and Wan Marco, 169-96. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. Accessed February 19, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctvnjbghh.13. ↩
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https://feministkilljoys.com/2013/11/17/feeling-depleted/ - Feeling Depleted by Sara Ahmed, in Feministkilljoys.com, 17th November 2013. ↩
Notes on contributors
Noam Segal is an independent curator and researcher based in Brooklyn, NY. She holds a Ph.D. and MA in hermeneutics and culture studies (Bar Ilan University), and a BA in Philosophy and Political Science (Tel Aviv University). Her practice is focused on curating, contextualizing, and producing new media and performance. Segal’s work deals with social positions and communal models in contemporary art. Segal collaborated with international art institutions such as Palais de Tokyo (Paris); Performa NYC; BAM (Brooklyn, NY); the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago); Tel Aviv Museum of Art; MoCo Contemporain (Montpellier); Castello di Rivoli (Turin); Kunstverein Nürnberg; Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin); CCA (Tel Aviv); among others. She was the curator of 2020 Aurora Biennial in Dallas, Texas. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts’ Department of Performance Studies. She is a faculty member at the Curatorial Studies department at SVA in NYC, and is a visiting faculty member at the MFA Program of Virginia Commonwealth University, in the Department of Painting and Printmaking.
Adelita Husni-Bey is an artist and pedagogue interested in anarco-collectivism, theater, law and urban studies. She organizes workshops, produces publications, radio broadcasts, archives and exhibition work focused on using non-competitive pedagogical models through the framework of contemporary art. Working with activists, architects, jurists, schoolchildren, spoken word poets, actors, urbanists, physical therapists, athletes, teachers and students across different backgrounds the work focuses on unpacking the complexity of collectivity. To make good what can never be made good: what we owe each other. Recent solo exhibitions include: New Museum, New York, RedCat, LA, White Paper: On Land, Law and the Imaginary, Centro de Arte dos de Mayo, Mostoles and A Wave in the Well, Sursock Museum, Beirut, 2016, Movement Break, Kadist Foundation, 2015, Playing Truant, Gasworks, 2012. She is a 2012 Whitney Independent Study Program fellow, a 2016 Graham Foundation grantee and has represented Italy at the Venice Biennale of Art, 2017 with a video rooted in anti-extractivist struggles.