Such a distant home
Sasha Huber, Katerina Verba, Elena Ishchenko, Maria Sarycheva and Joana Monbaron
22nd May 2021
In several online conversations, Katerina Verba and Sasha Huber talked about the search for their own identity through artistic practices, about the past as an unstable historical process that we can transform and change, and about art as a way of caring for the wounds borne by our ancestors. The dialogue between the two artists was mediated by the League of Tender - a fictional organization represented by curators Elena Ishchenko and Maria Sarycheva, which studies the concepts of care and play within various collectivities, as well as the independent curator Joana Monbaron.
Sasha Huber
The starting point of my art journey was informed by my own situation of not being allowed to visit my mother’s home country. My mother is from Haiti, and my father is from Switzerland. The last time I was in Haiti was in 1987, when I was 12, and I always wanted to go again to visit my family that remained there. My mother said that it’s too dangerous and I could be kidnapped as it happened with two of our family members because of the poverty due to the political situation. Meanwhile I returned twice, but at the time it prompted me to look into Haiti’s history. I have my own background coming from completely different places — Switzerland and Haiti — assumingly as opposite as you can imagine. But there are actually links between the countries, which I learned about while reading the book by Hans Fässler about the Swiss involvement in slavery and the slave trade. The history of Haiti is also one that was and is still affected by colonialism. My engagement with a history relating to my own family history became from the start informed by a decolonial perspective. My artistic engagement has helped me to understand the history better and how it affects the present. It reminds me of the quote by Suketu Mehta: “We are here because you were there”.
There is a book by Gloria Wekker about the role of the Dutch in colonialism. Wekker writes that there is a belief that you have to be white to be a “real” Dutch. But a huge number of the Dutch population is of African descent because of colonialism, yet to this day, Black people are not seen as Dutch. The same paradox applies to many other countries too. Thus it provokes a situation where you feel like you don’t belong because you do not fit into stereotypical notions of what it means to be Swiss or Dutch or whatever. That's why Black Lives Matter is so invaluable as a movement — we don’t live in a society where everybody is equal. Somebody says: all lives matter. Yes, of course, in an ideal world all do, but because it’s not like that we can’t say it. We have this situation of fighting for equality, which is not about revenge. It is about being equal and seen as a whole human being. I react artistically on behalf of my ancestors that still live in me. I have an opportunity to give them a voice, eliminate generational silence.
I have a very mixed heritage from my mother’s side being, Taíno, African, French, German — the Caribbean is a huge melting pot. I’m very much drawn to my African heritage. One area I have been engaging in within my work is to understand the origin of racism and how it affects the community. So, for me, the theme of decolonization evolved automatically because of my own history.
I portrayed Christopher Colombus and others, as it was a kind of an urgency which I wanted to react to. How could one interfere in such painful history or at least point out what happened — now in a very concrete way with Columbus and having this method of shooting back. For me personally it is a way to deconstruct this colonial ideology and start my dismantling process from the basis, which of course deals with this unbalanced power dynamics that is still in place When I showed my Haitian artist grandfather my portraits of the Shooting Back Series – Reflection on Haitian Roots, he said that he couldn’t have done that kind of work at that time, because it would be dangerous for him. But I’m in a moment of time and place where I can do that, where I can bring up these issues. This series is important for me because they were the starting point for me.
Katerina Verba
For me, the question of decolonization of history is secondary. In my opinion, a person is always moving from private to shared, and starts from herself. It is interesting to observe that the question of identity is usually more critical to those who do not have a “pure” identity, those who are called half-blooded or mixed race. As if this matter is more important to them and they are looking for an answer to who they are and where they come from. When one starts to search for answers to these questions, one becomes aware of the necessity of decolonization, the emancipation from history.
It always seemed to me that my own identity of Crimean Tatar is a very personal story, but now I am leaving these constraints. It was not permissible to talk about it, and everyone tried to avoid indicating their nationality in passports and usually changed their Crimean Tatar surnames to Russian counterparts. These days I speak about it publicly, thus transcending this topic from the personal practice to the public artistic field.
My last work, Cypress Rehabilitation, is dedicated to my identity and the history of the people I belong to. For many years, Crimean Tatars existed under repressive circumstances. And only in the 1990s were they given an opportunity to return to their land, yet not to their homes. Now we are trying to get them back. In the 1950s the Crimean region witnessed massive deforestation of cypress trees, which at the time were believed to be poisonous. My family and other Crimean Tatars used wood in the construction of houses. The trees were ravaged on Stalin’s order, and although the objective behind this decision is still unclear to this very day, a couple of versions circulate. The first version speculates that Stalin believed that cypress trees were overtly bourgeois. According to the second version, which was told to him by Roosevelt - charnel. The third version explains that the trees might’ve been a hideout for snipers, which was pointed out by Beria. I perceive the logging of cypresses as a symbolic counterpart to the deportation of Crimean Tatars, also initiated and executed on Beria’s order In this piece, I deploy a 200-300 years old cypress beam to sprout new young cypresses. The tree itself used for the beam is even older than that. This process becomes a symbol of the rehabilitation of cypress trees, which have the right to live just like Crimean Tatars do.
I consider myself to be Russian, but I also have a Crimean Tatar heritage. My grandfather's family, together with other Crimean Tatars, was deported from Crimea on May 18, 1944.
I notice this desire for clear definitions around me: this is Russian, Tatar, Ukrainian. Yet, the idea of "pure" blood in the modern world is non-existent: if one examines the DNA of any inhabitant of this planet, one will discover the combination of different genes. Many ethnicities came from the amalgamation of various nationalities, including Crimean Tatars.
Sasha Huber
Yes, it's a very interesting point. People usually want to know from which country you come from in order to easily put you in a box. When you visually differ from being white, which is still seen as the norm — they ask you what country you come from, what my ethnicity is. And when I say I come from Switzerland they don’t look happy with the answer: you don’t look Swiss, what’s your mix?
My friend Lesley-Ann Brown, who is a poet, writer, and educator, gave a lecture once where she invited the audience to say the word "country" many times outloud. Country — country — cuntry — cunt-tree — suddenly you hear the word “cunt” and the word "tree". Lesley-Ann says instead of saying from which country, nation or state you come from you could say the name of your mother — from which cunt you come from, which mother gave birth to you. That’s the place we come from. And there will be this mothers’ tree. Lesley-Ann invited the audience to remember those mothers. What are their names? How far back can you remember their names? Ok, I can tell my mother, my grandmother, her mother — and unfortunately that’s all. This is about humanity. We’re all unique, we all come from different people, and I feel it’s really nice when one starts to think like this. The European way of thinking about family trees is based on fathers’ names. The women lose their own names, they are not in the tree. A daughter loses her family name because she marries a man, and she joins another family tree. It’s interesting how that mother tree suggests a different point of view.
The European tradition of tracing family trees relies on patrilineality. Thus, it’s interesting how Brown’s mother tree suggests a different point of view.
Katerina Verba
This made me think of a joke that goes like this: a woman says that she wants to keep her maiden name, but a man responds to her, “Your maiden name is your father’s family name. You never had your own family name anyway.”
Maria Sarycheva
This is a very dark joke! When you were describing the tree of cunts, I remembered how I was sitting and talking with my father once. I found this picture in our family photo album, which depicted some unfamiliar women, and I wanted to ask him about them. When I did, he couldn't remember who they were. He could only remember their father's names (patronyms). But it was impossible to recall their actual names.
Sasha Huber
I think in some African countries, there is not the patriarchy, but a matriarchy in which the women are those who are leading. And there, the oral transmission of family members and stories is passt down from generation to generation. It is interesting and what I feel a lot: it is an important work when one engages with these histories so that they don’t get lost. And I think art can be a good way of helping this. Usually there is one person in each family who is interested in family history and ancestry, it is not an artist in that sense but anyhow it is the person who keeps the family together well. And usually when that person dies, someone else should be interested in it and continue. It is in the interest of the families to make sure that there is someone who is going to do that. I have worked with family members. For example, my mother suddenly sent me three short stories explaining, kind of anecdotes of family members. She’s 81, she’s now the eldest, and she feels that I value these histories so she shares them with me. I call them micro histories, those family histories.
I also remember that Katya was expressing her difficulties with all these categories of people through different races etc. I also find it problematic. There is this book, "The Mismeasure of Man" by Stephen Jay Gould in which it is explained how scientific racism was invented to create categories, and to try to figure out which race was the most intelligent one, and convince that the white race stands above, and blacks are inferior and everything in between. It is a huge mistake that happened with these pseudo sciences and it takes so much energy to try to correct that mistake. That is also why I engage with the Demounting Agassiz campaign because it focuses on one of the persons with responsible and highlights that history. This helps me to understand why we still have these problems with racism today and that’s why anti-racism is so important today as it actively helps to tackle racism. Art reflects our humanity. I heard that recently and I feel that it is very true.
In 2007 Hans Fässler founded the Demounting Louis Agassiz campaign addressing the history of this racist scientist from Switzerland, who was a glaciologist and geologist - that is why about eighty places, even on the Moon and on Mars, and more than 7 species are named after him. He was born in 1807 in Switzerland and in 2007 there were celebrations and exhibitions devoted to him, but all of these events completely missed that he was a very influential racist of the XIX century, after he emigrated to the U.S. in 1846.
The idea of the campaign was to rename the Agassizhorn, a mountain in the Swiss Alps, and to name it Rentyhorn. Renty was an enslaved Congolese man. In 1850 Agassiz commissioned photographs of Renty and six further men and women stripped naked from all the sides. With these photographs, which were the first photographic pictures of enslaved people, Agassiz wanted to ‘prove’ the inferiority of black people. The aim was to rename the mountain in Renty’s honour and to those who lived through similar faiths. This story felt very personal to me because in my family we also had enslaved people. The campaign’s founder wrote letters to all needed officials which were met without support. It was then when I decided to take action. I made a sign with the new name and installed it on the peak of the mountain and symbolically renamed the mountain in a physical way. When I made this first reparative intervention, I didn’t know that this will become an ongoing, over a decade long project, like a kind of a mission. All the works I made in close cooperation with Hans Fässler as my advisor.
Elena Ishchenko
To comment on this concept of mixed race: I think about an artist group, kreolex.center, that consists of two artists from Kazakhstan - Maria Vilkoviskaya and Ruthia Jenrbekova - who are now based in Vienna. They place the concept of creolity at the core of their artistic and theoretical practices. They think of creolity as a methodology of mixing different heritages that grants an opportunity to be more open to different definitions and take different roles, imaginaries, and identities. Creolity is a method for overcoming the trauma of colonization. Now we are all creole people. I think that it is fascinating how these mixed-race and mixed-identities can become a source for imagination.
Sasha Huber
It is interesting that they use the word "creole". As far as I know, creole originally refers to the ethnic groups from the colonial era who originated from West Africa and French colonies.
Maria Sarycheva
Yes, they use it as imagery since it also corresponds to their individual biographies. For instance, one of the duo’s members, Maria Vilkoviskaya, is a Russian who started to live on the territory of Kazakhstan during soviet period, she grew up being Russian in Kazakhstan. After Kazakhstan got autonomy and separated from the USSR, during the 90s, she stayed there. She has family there and a Kazakh passport, but the whole policy of contemporary Kazakhstan moved to a portrayal of the soviet regime as an enemy, as a dictator regime. And the other member of the duo, Ruthia Jenrbekova, is a Kazakh, born in Kazakhstan. So for them, I suppose that the notion of “creole” is a metaphor so that they can be equal as a duo, no matter what you experienced or where you were born, you are equal inside your collective work.
But also, when we were talking about kreolex and how to be half-blooded, mixed-raced etc. I also think of other experiences in society, which deal with a strict dichotomy, like experiences of bisexuality for example, or transgender, or non-binary sexuality. I am also working a lot with the community of deaf people, and it is a really complex community, which is often hierarchical, in which partially hearing people are sometimes perceived as others by those who are deaf. But at the same time, they know sign language, and thus they are also part of the deaf culture. And when you were describing this internal conflict, it helps me to not only consider this historically, but also to look at this in-between situation in various contemporary forms.
Joana Monbaron
The other day I was listening to some demographers. Interestingly, Emmanuel Todd predicts that in twenty years in America, the majority of the population would become mixed race. This is probably something at stake today, when you look at Trump’s supporters and the fears of the “little white men”: whether they will be overcome by something else, and what it means in terms of their dominating position. And that’s maybe what makes things even more tense today. For me, when you think of the history of humanity as a bigger picture, the fact that people have always been moving, and mixing with each other, and that, as many anthropological studies show, we are all coming from the African continent in the first place, is something that allows you to understand that people have always coexisted in various forms. But for some people on the other hand, it is a source of stress and anxiety about the way the world will be reorganised within a few years and how they can keep it as it is now. These questions are crucial.
Elena Ishchenko
I would like to add by returning to the role of art within this process. I think that the exploration of one’s own identity or return to the experiences of those who were colonized, deported or repressed, gives a chance to conceive creolization as an opportunity. In this case, artistic projects play a crucial role in the speculative exploration of complex identities.
I would like to initiate a museum and residency program in my ancestor’s house in Crimea in order to invite my friends there to research the local context.
Katerina Verba
I think that everyone wants not only for the problems, pains, or joys to gain visibility but for the visibility itself to be followed by an actual action - everyone is longing for justice. Our return to the past, our desire to correct mistakes, to decolonize history, for the most part, is a desire for justice. It seems it has several prerequisites. For some, it is seemingly a pursuit of revenge, a vendetta, or, as they say, "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" Art, in this sense, becomes the opportunity for revenge, like in Sasha’s works with a stapler, where she is seemingly shooting everyone guilty of colonization and past dictatorships. I impede myself from making a work that would portray as pigs the leaders, the perpetrators of the deportation of Crimean Tatars - Stalin, Beria - as a way to reverse the dirty tricks they used against muslim people. I try to follow another trajectory in which I don’t perpetuate the mutual resentment and make peace instead. And it is not easy. In both cases, we can introduce a person who is not an artist to care about these issues by creating art. She can be occupied with other important things - treating, building, growing crops - yet she also carries unresolved internal issues that can be asked, and perhaps solved, on her behalf again and again by artists.
Sasha Huber
I was saying earlier about revenge and it’s not about revenge itself, it’s more about gaining equality. Shooting back still deals with it, it feels like a non-violent revenge, it’s a metaphor, and the title, Shooting back responds to that. I very soon stopped working in portraying those men. I realised that it doesn’t feel right to spend the energy to create their images. But instead of telling the histories of people who had already been heard, I decided to tell the histories that have been silenced. This change in approach is happening exactly because of similar reasons, as Katia’s, that it should be more about healing, caring for those wounds. So the stapling becomes a stitching of those wounds rather than bullets.
Maria Sarycheva
That’s interesting that you correct yourself while speaking about healing. What’s the difference between the process of healing and the process of caring for the wounds?
Sasha Huber
Healing is a very big word. In a way it raises the question: can you ever heal from this kind of history? Of course, it can be about acknowledging those wounds. Complete healing is probably impossible. There is a saying that “time is supposed to heal, but that it is rather a burying” and another saying “They tried to bury us, but they didn't know we were seeds.” I find this to be a beautiful thought. That’s why I felt that care corresponds a bit better to what’s possible with the art with the situation where I personally participate. The descendant of an enslaved person I got to know after starting my artistic practice demonstrated the way art can have an impact on real life It’s not fiction. But it’s also something I couldn’t anticipate before. So it's also interesting that you don’t know exactly what will happen when you enlish what you do. That’s the power of the moment of letting out your creation and it’s getting life of its own. And when it happened it showed me that it is really possible to make work which is going to lead to caring and some sort of healing process. In this particular example being able to engage with a person who is directly affected and getting a powerful response! This is an amazing initiative you do about my great great great grandfather!
I like the idea that we have the ability to return to the past and change something in it. For my practice, it is pivotal to understand history not as something as fully formed and established but as something that can be continuously discussed. It is important to realize the privilege of having a voice to talk about who we are without hiding it.
Katerina Verba
I like this expression - “to care for the wounds.” It is impossible to resurrect something, to turn back history. So how can we work with the history that haunts us? It seems that we can only care for the wounds and accept ourselves for who we are. I recall Artur Zmijewski’s exhibition at the Typography Art Center in Krasnodar. It included videos that depict men, soldiers who fought in the Chechen war, and were injured and their missing body parts were replaced with prosthetic implants. Six videos, in which one follows limbless men while they are doing exercises and slowly undress, expose their physical absences. Once you appear in this space, surrounded by these video pieces, you become accustomed to sight; it does not frighten you anymore. We can not change the person, but we can shift her attitude toward herself and make her relationship with others less painful. As Sasha said earlier, it is crucial to seek ways to speak about this. When Lena and I were talking over my work about Crimean Tatars and the series of discussions within the exhibition’s framework, we thought about how important it is to invite representatives of Crimean Tatars diasporas as a way to avoid manipulations that at the moment are extremely active in the political field. The dispute around Crimean Tatars is actively used both from the Ukrainian and Russian sides. Nevertheless, it is exactly the artists who have the capacity to address these or other topics, not for their profitability but because they cannot remain silent.
The conversations took place within the framework of the "Aimless Sessions" project, supported by the Swiss Council for Culture "Pro Helvetia."
Sasha Huber is a visual artist of Swiss-Haitian heritage, born in Zurich, Switzerland in 1975. She lives and works in Helsinki, Finland. For more than 15 years, the artist Sasha Huber has been researching and reworking colonial history from Haiti, where her ancestors lived, to Switzerland, where she was born and studied. Since over a decade she is working on a project dedicated to the debunking of Louis Agassiz - known primarily as a natural scientist and glaciologist who also was an ardent supporter of colonialism and racial segregation, which did not stop naming many places after him all around the planet on the moon and on mars. She started this endeavor after joining the Demounting Louis Agassiz campaign as committee member in 2007.
Katerina Verba is an artist from Novorossiysk. She is dreaming of creating a memory museum in the house where her ancestors, deported Crimean Tatars, lived. Her project "Cypress Rehabilitation," which connects the personal history of her family, the legend of the shot down pilot Joseph Beuys, and the massive felling of cypress trees in Crimea in the 1950s, can be seen at the Training Fantasia exhibition at the Typography Center for Contemporary Art (Krasnodar).
Translated by Tamara Khasanova
Edited by Ira Konyukhova and Lina Iliaeva