Natascha Sadr Haghighian.

unternehmen:bermuda,
Bus stop Invalidenstrasse,
Berlin, 2000/2001.
Performance, video installa-
tion. Photo: Stefan Pente.

126
 Night Crossings
ANSELM FRANKE, AVERY GORDON, NATASCHA SADR
HAGHIGHIAN, TOM HOLERT, AND INES SCHABER

This conversation took place in December 2005 in Berlin following a work-

shop in preparation for the exhibition “No Matter How Bright the Light, the
Crossing Occurs at Night” by Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Ines Schaber,
Judith Hopf (who could not be present), and Anselm Franke, opening at
the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin in September 2006. The
conversation was joined by Avery Gordon and Tom Holert.
—Anselm Franke

Anselm Franke: When Grey Room approached me for their subjectivity

issue, I thought it worth connecting to “No Matter How Bright the Light,
the Crossing Occurs at Night,” for which, with the exception of Tom, we
are gathered in Berlin.
We’ve been talking about what we called the necessity to “speak with
ghosts.” These are social realities that are rendered spectral, that have no
representation whatsoever or are being entrapped by normative repre-
sentations and the display they are given, displays that make it impossible
to recognize someone as a full political subject or social person. We
spoke about the necessity and possibilities of speaking to the ghost rather
than talking about it and in so doing were questioning the capacity of
either activist or artistic practices to initiate dialogues under impossible
conditions, conditions of blindness and determined identities, where each
one is caught in its own scripted monologue.
To speak about subjectivity in meaningful ways, we first have to create
a space in which things that are normally nonnegotiable can become a
matter of negotiation. I think that’s what your artistic practices do, Natascha
and Ines, create spaces in which the forces and power relations that form
one’s “position”—through interpolation, address, and dialogue—can be
made accessible. Whereas Ines’s practice appears more media related,
seeking historical embeddedness, Natascha’s work seems to me always to
be asking “What does this do to me?” This opens up a space of sensitivity
for the ecology of address and dialogue in shaping one’s subjectivity—
maybe a good point from which to begin.

Natascha Sadr Haghighian: In confronting certain power structures and

social functions, one does start asking what does this have to do with me?

Grey Room 24, Summer 2006, pp. 126–142. © 2006 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 127
Yesterday we talked about Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological exper-
iments in the seventies. They are definitely related to the idea of creating
a space able to question the functions by which one is addressed and the
positions in which one is put. What happens when I confront myself
within such a situation? How am I part of the ethnomethodological
experiment, shifting the functionality of a situation toward the absurd or
the unusual? What is needed to create a space or a temporary gap with
no preconceived agenda, where you can actually start to communicate in
an open and emancipatory way? To me, that’s the crucial question: How
do we actually participate in the production of social life, knowledge,
etc.—all those things we define as a culture?

AF: Can you give an example?

NSH: Whatever you do trying to keep up with communication is, in a

way, to stay sane, to not lose your ability to participate. One example that
comes to mind was an invitation by German industrialists. Twenty people
from the BDI (Bund der Deutschen Industrie), the German industry and
their cultural association, wanted to do a studio visit. They support art
because they know it’s important, and they do these studio visits for a
prize they give every year. I tried to find a way to meet these people in a
situation that would at least make it possible to talk. I suggested we meet
at a bus stop instead of a studio visit. The bus stop was located between
institutions I thought would be interesting for our discussion: an art
museum, a natural history museum, and a hospital. I gave a lecture and
then we had a discussion. Interesting for me was that at the same time
that they were totally disoriented—at least that’s what I think, none of
them had been at a bus stop for twenty or thirty years—we were on equal
ground, and in a sense they were open to a discussion. I see this encounter
as a collective performance piece. There were only certain things one could
do, but at the same time what happened and how long it took was com-
pletely open. Although I can’t really say how productive it was in bringing
my point across in terms of a certain critique of the role of industry in
financing art and science, I think it at least caused a certain confusion
about how we can produce together and who’s producing for whom.

AF: What exactly happened in this moment of confusion? How prepared

were you? How much of a script did you have?

NSH: I had a script for the performative parts: I made a drawing on the
information board; I gave a short lecture about the relationship between
art, science, and industry; and then I had a suitcase of slide viewers that

128 Grey Room 24

I passed around so they had something to look at. These were prepared
“gestures.” The meeting was about money, and I tried to introduce elements
that make it sort of, you know, half legal—meeting at a bus stop, carrying
a metal suitcase, etc.

Ines Schaber: I found it interesting that there was a moment when they
said, “We are already a part of your project,” which changed their posi-
tion. You also had a camera crew photographing the industrialists while
they were looking. They were part of the picture, but it was a picture they
didn’t define, making them part of your representation. Originally, they
arranged and controlled the whole structure, but you turned it around,
and I think that happened in large part because you had a camera crew
that made them feel even more strange or uncomfortable, in that they
were also observed and recorded.

NSH: It was part of the experiment: you chose me, so I am going to choose
you, and what you’re going to get in the end is an image of yourself. Turning
their gesture around was part of creating a common ground on which we
could meet.

Avery Gordon: Did they fund you? Did you win the prize?

NSH: Yes. One of them said they were already part of the work and so
they should see what came out of it.

Tom Holert: Shouldn’t the question be who actually escapes or doesn’t

escape which trap? For instance, one could say you fulfilled or even over-
affirmed your role as an artist by acting as the agent of this particular
situation, as the author of a certain confusion about roles and perspectives,
putting people into a place they might not be used to. As a strategy or task,
this resembles certain modernist definitions of art’s function: a common
expectation vis-à-vis art that it offer new ways of looking at the world and
at oneself, of changing one’s subjectivity and producing new subjectiva-
tions, or of producing temporary or even durable states of irritation, uncer-
tainty, and reflection about social roles and psychological conditions.

NSH: You can’t escape it.

TH: No, you can’t, and I think the topology of escapism and entrapment
is interesting. Who is actually entrapped by the process of searching for
contact with art that displaces or by providing a certain artistic displace-
ment? I think the way you read the power structure of BDI jury members,

Franke | Night Crossings 129

this very embodiment of power, if you will, doesn’t necessarily differ
much from their own understanding of their role. The jurors decide who
will be funded, included in or excluded from this particular institutional
support structure, and you acknowledge that function by attempting to
invert it, putting them in a situation where they’re trapped or where that
function is exposed. I think this is interesting because it creates a situa-
tion in which control over one’s position in a power structure was, as you
said, made explicit, put on the table, an object of negotiation. However, there
is a strong desire to identify insecurities and anxieties in the presence of
art with aesthetic experience tout court.

NSH: For me, the experience was interesting or successful not because it
shifted the power structures. On a more general level, I didn’t shift any-
thing, but in this moment, something became accessible or at least present.
The same happened in terms of failure, in terms of the limits of such
a meeting.

TH: How did it finish?

NSH: With my erasing the drawing, closing the suitcase, them driving off,
and me standing at the bus stop with the suitcase.

AF: It reminds me of a question from our previous discussions: How does

one enter the political arena? How does what you say become more than
just your own, individualized expression and achieve a more universal,
political dimension? Thomas Keenan writes about this in relation to human
rights, drawing upon Jacques Rancière’s discussion of the plebeians and
patricians in ancient Rome. The patricians did not understand what the
plebeians said; it was unrecognizable to them as political expression.
The plebeians then started to imitate, to mimic, the patricians’ language,

130 Grey Room 24

 Opposite and left:
Natascha Sadr Haghighian.
present but not yet active,
2002. Performance, video,
photos. Manifesta 4,
Frankfurt am Main.

and suddenly their voice had to count.

You have to invent a double language.
Not just what you say but the stage
on which you say it has to become
recognizable for those you speak
to. In a way it’s similar to Natascha’s
piece. The scenery she created allowed
her to be heard in a different way,
denaturalizing a relationship that
would otherwise appear natural.

AG: The project with the German

industrialists sounds similar to the
one you did with curators at the zoo.
There are different ways to critique
institutional power, in this case that
of the art world and its funders. One
is to bring those who hold institu-
tional power into a situation in which
they’re forced to reflect on their own
position, which seems to be what
you’ve done in both instances. You
bring them to a locale where some-
thing happens that forces them to
confront and acknowledge—whether it’s expressing helplessness or
disorientation—what they do. They are forced; it’s part of what you
invoke and perform with them.
One aspect that’s striking to me about these experiments/perfor-
mances—and correct me if I’m wrong—is that you do them without
anger. I don’t know whether you’re angry or not, but the performances
themselves, in the way you describe them, are not confrontational and
combative. They have a militant pedagogy whose effectiveness or effect
does not rely on rage or shock or bullying. It’s very difficult to produce
something that requires or necessitates an experience of self-reflection.
That you’ve been able to do so is impressive. We could compare your
nonart art projects to Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological experiments because
they also include an inevitable moment of transparency when the rigging
is exposed. Unlike in Garfinkel’s experiments, in yours, distance isn’t
permitted. It isn’t possible to stand outside the process by which the
exposure has taken place and view or consume it as an external object.
By contrast, the very process by which the institutional art world is pro-
duced and reproduced is disrupted, and in consequence, the people who

Franke | Night Crossings 131

are important players are forced to pause a moment with you. The
funders cannot simply say, “Ah well, we are having an art experience, this
is good!” They begin to get concerned about other things: What are we
paying for? What are we not paying for? What are we looking at? What’s
looking at us? Unwittingly and without their choosing, they’re having
another conversation that starts to get at the power networks that lie
behind the ideology of the art patron.

NSH: To return to what you said about anger, I can’t just present without
including myself, because the power relation involves me too. Of course
there is an anger behind it, but to work it has to be constructed, in order
to reveal something to me.

AF: It needs not only to be constructed but also constructive, in that you
create a stage, a framing that’s somehow artificial.

NSH: The natural experience doesn’t exist; there’s always a stage. If

twenty patrons come to your studio, that’s a stage setting. Playing the
artist showing artwork, which they might or might not buy, is completely
a stage setting.

TH: But this setting can be more or less disruptive. You’ve been talking
about the relationship between the institution and the artist. The evidence
of this relationship becomes the subject of negotiation and critique. We
may agree about the constructedness of such evidence, the social and dis-
cursive mechanisms that bring it into play, but there are varying degrees
of acceptance regarding the “evidential” normality of the art-institution
nexus. Twenty visitors to your studio is normal compared to meeting the
same people at the bus stop. This displacement makes a difference. I
think the question is how that difference is contextualized within the
history of art and art institutions, of reading contemporary art practices
as political acts in relation to other ways of acting politically.

AF: That’s a crucial question, but what strikes me is how certain norms
and “naturalizations” always haunt such moments of difference and dis-
placement. That’s the space of affect, and affect strives toward something
like an “authentic” experience, a paradoxical “original reproduction,”
implementing a certain order around discursive centers of gravity. We all
know about the constructedness of whatever “authentic” experiences
and social essentializations, but knowledge about constructedness and
historical contextualization doesn’t really explain the miracle of the
appearance of this stability as “natural.” The gap, the space of negotiation,

132 Grey Room 24

it seems, can only be opened temporarily before it closes. But maybe that’s
specifically the case in the art context.

AG: There are different historical contexts into which Natascha’s piece
could be placed. I could put it in the context of the bus riders’ union,
which has nothing to do with art per se. Instead of organizing bus drivers,
who weren’t interested in bus riders, a group started organizing bus
riders because the Los Angeles public transportation system, as you can
imagine, is of little interest to anyone other than the poor people who use
it. The city was cutting back on bus services, and it was extremely diffi-
cult for people to get around and to work. So some people started orga-
nizing bus riders, a new political constituency or subject that didn’t
really exist before. People who regularly take the bus do tend to think of
themselves as bus riders because it’s distinctive in Los Angeles not to
have a car; on the other hand, they didn’t think of themselves as a union
of bus riders. The bus riders’ union won important reductions in bus
fares and service improvements. Then the bus riders’ union became a
catalyst, a meeting point for organizing communities, particularly Black
and Latino, who hadn’t been organizing together but were crossing the
city together by bus. It was part of an interesting moment in the history
of new forms of labor organizing in Los Angeles, including Justice
for Janitors.

TH: In some French suburbs there have been efforts since the 1990s to
include unemployed youth, with their knowledge of the neighborhood
and the people, in the bus system. A TV documentary made a couple
years ago, shown again after the 2005 French riots, brought together the
issues of sociogeographical exclusion, youth, the banlieue, and mobility
(the burning cars). It showed young people trained by public-transporta-
tion staff relating to bus riders, using their social knowledge to protect
the drivers and passengers from harassment, graffiti, etc. Many things
coalesce there: mobility, the banlieue’s exclusion, the dependence on
public transportation, and the anxieties that go with it. You’re dependent
on this system but also anxious about using it. One motivation behind
the initiative was to use the youth—the origin of the anxiety, the subjects
of the anxiety—to create a new atmosphere, a different, safer situation.
The interesting thing was that giving them work as part of the system
created a community and a sense of belonging among the people usually
hanging around the bus stations. In this case bus riding becomes a case
of subject formation—of agency production, so to speak—in an environ-
ment of fear.

Franke | Night Crossings 133

AG: The RATP, the French rapid public transportation system that Tom
refers to, is quite innovative. They’re involved in several progressive and
creative social activities. I attended a conference they organized on
homelessness. They are as unlike the MTA, the LA rapid transit author-
ity, as they could be. The MTA was neither serving the people to whom
they were entrusted nor organizing with them. The people they served
were seen as combatants. I brought up the bus riders’ union for two
reasons. One has to do with one’s standpoint or references in thinking
about “the subject.” Personally, I dislike the phrase “the subject” because
I’m interested in people. I’m also interested in how they’re turned into
“subjects,” but that’s another part of the question. The other reason has
to do with trying to be free to be more creative in thinking about people,
subjectivity, and subjection.
About twenty years ago, Donna Haraway gave a fantastic lecture—
a bit of a performance really—to the department of the History of Science
at Harvard University, the mainstream center of the field. She already
had a devoted audience, but she was still a younger well-known person
at the time and there was a lot of excitement about what she would say.
And, she started by talking about the sexual life of ferns! I’ll never forget
that lecture, which was all about subjectivity. She said, “One of the
things I love about science is that it’s non-Freudian. Think about the fern.
The fern has twenty-five different kinds of sexual behavior, and we
apparently have only two. Two sexes? How boring! Why are we limited
to those two? How did we get stuck with the story of Oedipus?” I’m para-
phrasing terribly and can’t convey either her eloquence or her mischie-
vousness. But I think it is so important to get out of the box and be more
creative in our own domains. So you say “bus,” I say “bus riders,” and the
sense of who we’re talking about expands as do the activities, traditions,
histories, and practices that you could be aligned with and attached to.
More creative and playful, but also more serious. When you start think-
ing about people or subjects, about whom are you thinking specifically?
With whom do you keep company, literally and intellectually? When you
take the businessmen to the bus stop or the curators to the zoo, you’re
taking a stand: to stand with those who stand at the bus stop and with the
ones who are caged. And to me that’s the political moment, the moment
in which the destiny or fate of those you care about and care for is
revealed and nurtured.

TH: That’s an interesting point: the question of standpoint, the question

of how to address not only the subject but a specific subject. In some
respects, however, conveying one’s own “standpoint” is historically linked
to political technologies of putting oneself and others in a situation to be

134 Grey Room 24

 “It Takes Courage to Be
a Refugee.” PR campaign
of the United Nations
High Commissioner of
Refugees (UNHCR) at
the occasion of the
World Refugee Day,
June 20, 2005.

better monitored and surveilled. “Tell me

where you stand” (“Sag mir, wo du stehst”)
was an old song of the GDR youth brigades.
To be accepted as a member of Socialist
society you had to publicly identify your-
self with your (that is, the party’s) line
or standpoint. Anything clandestine or
ambiguous was automatically suspicious.
In the context of neoliberal governmental-
ity, the terms of identification have shifted
from “standpoint” to something else, for
instance the complete performative devel-
opment of one’s “personality.” But to be
vague or insecure about your identity can
still be a problem.
The imperative to identify yourself is
particularly pressing for people who have
lost nearly everything except a sort of identity, which is the identifica-
tion or classification as a refugee. Last year in Croatia, I visited the United
Nations’ Human Rights Commission (UNHCR) in Sisak, a former indus-
trial center fifty kilometers southeast of Zagreb. The UNHCR officers not
only took me on a tour to several refugee and returnee camps, they also
handed me all kinds of UNHCR promo materials: pencils, posters, post-
cards, etc. Among the postcards and posters was a series of images of
refugees photographed in front of dark cloth, wearing either modern or
more “traditional” clothes. The women and men who lost their homes
have been photographed in this series, “Courage,” for the 2005 world
refugee day in the style of Vanity Fair celebrity shots. The text reads, “It
takes courage to be a refugee,” which I can only understand as cynicism
in humanitarian lingo. Typed over the image of a (Bosnian?) woman is
the brutally summarized and sloganized story of a refugee: “Home
destroyed. Family gone. Former friends are now enemies. Weeks of walking.
Years of waiting. Then, at last, sanctuary. And a determination to start all
over again in an unfamiliar country.”
In these picture-texts, the frailest, weakest, most vulnerable subjects
are also the subjects (and agents) of an insistent ideological interpella-
tion. The refugee is the one who’s supposed to have the “courage” to
become the entrepreneur of his or her fate, to be the model subject of a
certain doxa of self-responsibility or self-determination that fits well with
the concepts of neoliberalism. How the individuals who appear in the
posters and postcards are selected and represented is highly questionable.
They pose as model subjects fulfilling the programs of empowerment

Franke | Night Crossings 135

 “It Takes Courage to Be
a Refugee.” PR campaign
of the United Nations
High Commissioner of
Refugees (UNHCR) at
the occasion of the
World Refugee Day,
June 20, 2005.

scripted by the international community.

What is one to think about the contradic-
tion between the assertions of weakness
and strength, or about the history of images
of portraits of power into which these
people are inscribed against all the apparent
evidence of fragility and nakedness? Where
is the subject? Who is this subject for?

IS: The note on the back is really crucial.

It says, “the text on this printed item does
not represent the situation or story of
the person depicted.” In other words, we
are given a picture of a refugee, a frontal
portrait, with a story of hardship, courage,
and escape and then told in fine print that
there’s no actual relation between the per-
son portrayed and the story. The postcard pretends to do something other
than displace the person already displaced, but really it does the same
thing—and it writes it down!

AG: I don’t know if I’m going to say this very well, but I’ll try. What’s
really important to me at this moment of critique, which Tom and Ines
have expressed so well, is that we don’t abandon these individuals
because they’ve been treated badly or represented badly or stupidly by
the UNHCR. You’re right to show how they are being put into the service
of a bootstraps individualistic ideology that is at the same time about the
importance of humanitarian intervention since this advertisement is,
above all, for the U.N. The equally important challenge is to make the cri-
tique and not stop there but continue on to figure out how to abolish the
conditions that create the refugee and the “humanitarian crisis” in the
first place. The reality of the conditions faced by people who are treated
as abstractions must be broached. Bad mediation can’t be an excuse for
avoiding or deferring addressing the needs of refugees and solving the
problems that produce them. Otherwise, critical understanding comes at
the expense of further suffering for refugees or aggrieved people.

AF: We were discussing this point in a recent conference that I coorganized

with Eyal Weizman and Thomas Keenan at the CCCB in Barcelona. A
central concern was the political economy of humanitarian missions and
their relationship to politics. The dilemma discussed there is somehow
similar to the one you mention: We know that the “apolitical” character

136 Grey Room 24

of humanitarian action is an ever more instrumentalized political tool
that allows some governments to act outside of politically legitimized
spaces. One example is the occupation of the West Bank and the way that
international humanitarian aid somehow renders the occupation invisible
and thus feeds and enables its specific economy. But from both an ethical
and a political point of view, this does not mean we abandon this area or
field at all; quite the opposite, we’ll attempt to develop the space of this
dilemma as a space of politicization.

AG: It’s an enormous question in the prison abolition movement because

historically prison reformism has been one of the primary causes of
prison expansion. I know it sounds paradoxical, but it’s true. It was, in
fact, the Quakers’ desire to reform the practice of capital punishment that
lead to the nineteenth-century, modern penitentiary. The prison was pre-
sented and considered a reform institution, an institution that would be
an improvement over being tortured and killed, often gruesomely. Whether
intentionally or not, prison reformers tend to expand the system, not to
abolish it.
One of the big questions for the prison abolition movement is how to
pursue a politics and a strategy of abolition, which aims to abolish the
massive prison system as we know it, while nonetheless dealing on an
absolutely crucial, urgent, daily basis with the needs of people who are
imprisoned: overcrowding, lockdown, violence, and ever-increasing forms
of dehumanization. This tension, which is an old one politically, and
which we used to think about in the language of reform and revolution,
still persists. In the abolitionist movement, there’s always an attempt to
identify what constitutes an “abolitionist reform.” An “abolitionist reform”
is a reform that minimizes, rather than expands the prison system. Here,
you have at least some kind of criteria by which you can judge, if you
like, the humanitarian moment. This judgment is never easy; it is never
given in advance. But abolitionism characteristically takes the question
on: Does this reform or this humanitarian act, gesture, procedure, or
policy meet the abolitionist criteria, that is, does it advance the abolition
of the system or its perpetuation and growth? In the case of refugees,
what is the equivalent of the abolitionist goal that will form the criteria,
the test, against which reforms are measured?

NSH: The UNHCR wouldn’t exist if there weren’t refugees. They need the
refugees, and that’s the main message. It comes back to the question
of ghosts or spectrality. How can you actually talk to the ghost? Because
it’s impossible to address the people depicted on the posters and cards.
The text doesn’t belong to the image, and you don’t know whom to

Franke | Night Crossings 137

address other than the UNHCR, and that’s what it’s aiming at.

TH: They’re stock refugees in a way.

NSH: And UNHCR is the mediator, which raises the question of how one
can actually read an image—this blindness in front of an image, this
hypervisuality. “Here they are. These are the refugees.” But in fact, you
can’t read this image without a really big footnote about the UNHCR.

IS: I have a question here: Who is the agent for what? You say ghosts, but
the figures are placed, they are staged. They all have the same light, the
same position, the same kind of clothing. They are obviously photographed
in a studio. Pictures like these spring out of strategic considerations,
media and advertising strategies. They have a clear message. But I feel
that there is a lot missing in theses pictures, which is not very easy to
communicate and if it would need, very likely, more time and space.
Most of the humanitarian projects picture people within strategic con-
sideration, but mostly fail to communicate with the pictured subjects
themselves. They speak and communicate with the viewer, the one who
is addressed by the picture. But in doing so, I wonder, if we could say that
the pictured subject is rendered ghostly.

AG: Tom, do you know anything about to whom they give these postcards?

TH: To everyone.

AG: They’re like little calling cards, you mean?

TH: Yes, they’re part of the 2005 merchandising campaign. They had lots
of posters in this little office in Sisak, and they didn’t know what to do
with them, so they gave them to us. It was an interesting situation. Though
it was obviously a topic for critique, it was impossible to start a discussion
with the people working there because they do great work in many ways,
and they are aware of the contradictions into which they’re placed. They
have a really difficult job. What becomes problematic for me is that this is
the substance of a cultural studies seminar, but it’s not something you
could do in the field. It’s absolutely impossible. The UNHCR was proud
of this campaign, they liked the pictures, they were happy with it. I
didn’t bring up those cards, because I know everything about the appro-
priate discourse with which to handle them. It’s more about questioning
my own methods of critique vis-à-vis those representations. Here, it’s
quite easy to find common grounds for critique. If you asked the people

138 Grey Room 24

pictured, however, you’d get a completely different discussion. They’re
probably quite happy with how they’re represented, though that’s just my
speculation. The question is whose agency is represented here and what
our agency in this situation is.

AF: Avery, I understood your point about the “abolitionist reform” and
the dilemma of the politics of the lesser evil: you need to intervene, but in
order to do so you become a collaborator since you accept, at least par-
tially, a frame that is unacceptable in the first place. So the question really
seems to be: Where do you draw the line?

AG: Partially, politics is about drawing a line as you go because these sit-
uations are not static and won’t hold still for a permanent line to be
drawn in advance or once and for all. My practical experience is that peo-
ple tend to do the work that’s most comfortable for them and try to avoid
too much complication regarding this question. I was struck by how
cleaned up these images are. This is another part of the humanitarian dis-
course, but it extends a bit beyond it. It has to do with the requirement
that people be “good.” All these refugees are good people. They’ve suf-
fered unjustifiably and they have come out ahead. It’s much more diffi-
cult to help people who are supposedly “bad.” These refugees lack the
criminal stigmata: they are neither presented as threats to national or
social security nor as undocumented aliens who have forcibly and ille-
gally entered a country to which they have no right of entry. Part of the
impulse to criminalize the impoverished, the refugee, and the migrant is
to install the taint of criminality and guilt. The postcards present the
innocent. There are a whole other set of political challenges in arguing
on behalf of people who are considered “bad,” criminal, or guilty.

AF: Could I come back to an earlier point? When you referred to the
absence of anger in the situation Natascha created? What is your experi-
ence with anger in your work with prisoners?

AG: For prisoners, whatever their levels of anger, to survive in prison

they have to be disciplined in their emotions. There are complicated
ways prisoners accomplish that emotional control, whether it’s to learn
to tamp them down and repress them and then refine forms of external-
ization, controlled or not. But if you show anger toward the police and
guards, you’ll get isolated and punished. So, as best you can you learn to
control your anger. My experience is that a lot of us working to abolish
mass imprisonment are also very angry. There’s profound rage. And
rightly so. The question is the articulation of it in public and political

Franke | Night Crossings 139

contexts. I think it’s good to send that anger out there. But sometimes
people can’t hold it, they can’t carry it, they can’t catch it. I was just really
struck by the tone of Natascha’s projects, the generosity in the pedagogy.
They seemed to be saying, “However I feel about you, I’m going to bring
you into a situation where I’m actually going to try to enable you to learn
from it,” as opposed to just holding up a mirror to you and saying, “That’s
who you are, that’s what you do, that’s what you mean to me. You fucking
deal with it!” I’m a teacher so I tend to ask it this way: When must you be
teacherly with your opponents, and when can you stop?

NSH: I think the picturing of a society for someone outside of it might be

a very crucial question of how to make a media or information campaign.
Maybe I’m taking the aesthetic part of representation too seriously, but I
think there’s always too big a gulf between political movements and the
critique of an aesthetic as a way of normalizing people and structures.

AG: I agree. That’s part of the reason I raised the point earlier about the
refugee postcards that these were “good” people. When you’re thinking
about and working with “criminal” populations, the “bad” and the
“dangerous,” there’s a strong temptation to show them as good and inno-
cent in the belief this is necessary to a campaign’s success.

TH: There are always different types of media campaigns, and this pre-
sentation of “good” refugees or prisoners has to be seen in relation to
pictures of misery, catastrophe, and human desolation, which produces
what has been called “compassion critique” and is only useful for cam-
paign work in the initial days of high media attention. In the long run,

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Opposite: Ashley Hunt, relief work uses methods of glamorization and languages of visibility or
the Corrections picturing that are not so different from those in advertising and other
Documentary Project.
Prison Map #1, 2002. spheres of visual culture, being the usual way of dealing with images and
Courtesy Ashley Hunt. copy text, as in the UNHCR pictures.
Above: Ashley Hunt, There is a saying that for capitalism in the postmodern period sub-
the Corrections jectivity has become the main battlefield or marketplace or both.
Documentary Project.
Prison Map #2, 2002.
Subjectivity is getting highly commodified and commodifiable; it’s what
Courtesy Ashley Hunt. everyone is interested in owning, trading, engineering, and modulating.
What’s interesting is that the figure and the space of the locked-down
prisoner, as a subject who’s taken out of circulation, whose access to the
marketplace and its means of subjectivation is strictly limited, are
infused with media images. Self-presentation is very much informed by
media images of the imprisoned subject. There was a Hans Peter Feldmann
exhibition at Barbara Wien gallery recently. Feldmann depicted female
prisoners and exhibited their biographical and nonbiographical stories
and statements. The interesting thing was to experience myself being a
viewer of those photos and a reader of those testimonies—which weren’t
simply testimonies or diaries but sometimes literary texts, surprisingly
elaborate and oddly out of tune with my image of prisoners, which is
informed by prison movies and prison-themed television series. Maybe
we should ask, are there ways beyond representation? Because this is
part of the discourse about alternative subjectivities, which don’t obey
the rules of representation. Or is there no way beyond representation and
subjectivities that are always already informed by visual and textual rep-
resentations? Which is why representation is always part of a critique of
regimes of subjectivity. You cannot do without it. However, there’s a
permanent process of subjectivity formation going on that, while it might

Franke | Night Crossings 141

rely heavily on prefabricated, found, and even oppressively invasive
media imagery, at the same time is constantly inventing the unexpected.

AG: One extremely difficult question is not so much how to represent the
subject but how to represent the system. That strikes me as very chal-
lenging. One interesting aspect of the movement and organization Critical
Resistance is that they have developed innovative and creative ways of
showing what a prison-industrial complex is, where and how we can see
it, and what it does (and doesn’t) do. The Corrections Project’s (Ashley
Hunt’s) extraordinary maps of the complex, Craig Gilmore’s comic books,
Todd Clear and Eric Cadora’s maps of what an abandoned neighborhood
looks like—these and others are trying to creatively render a complex
system literally pictorially, and their choice of subject (the effect on a
urban neighborhood of losing large percentages of its members to rural
prisons or calculating the social costs of prisons) is as creative and diag-
nostically important as the aesthetic mode of representation. The chal-
lenge is great. How to effectively represent a system and systematicity
itself without either reducing the system to the person or losing the
person in the abstraction.

AF: I think part of that problem is that you can’t really represent or map
what agency is, the space of agency. Instead, the map itself is the agent,
on someone’s behalf. Thus, in a way, the more complex and subjectified
a system is, the more it gets impossible to identify it and to represent it,
since it always already interlaces the person and the abstraction.

142 Grey Room 24