Everyone Told Me I Would Love Berlin
What is passed is still present
Noor Asif
Berlin does not know itself.
In a voice note from sweltering Rome, an American friend of mine suggested that I take the opportunity to indulge in the exceptional brand of sadness that one could enjoy only during a summer spent in Europe. She tried to convince me that there was something particularly satisfying about being alone and at a café, sipping on a cappuccino, incognito. When I tried to follow her advice last summer—living the perfect picture of a sad girl overcaffeinating herself, from café to café, around a beautifully monstrous city—I almost, just almost, made a haven out of my malaise. I was dealing with heartbreak and consequently felt dejected, ruminating over my failure to be what I thought was expected of me: white, European, refined. I wanted to be completely immersed in my misery, wanted to make it a defining feature of my existence for those several weeks, so that I had at least something to hold onto. Suddenly, what Freud meant when he wrote “by taking flight into the ego love escapes extinction” in “Mourning and Melancholia” felt all too real to me. That summer, I tried everything I could to eject myself from my melancholia. But when I’d gather the strength to lose myself in Berlin—by going on a walk, stumbling upon a park, or going clubbing—I was met with hostility, parody, or, most devastatingly, indifference.
It boiled down to a matter of otherness, so predictable and disappointing that to rehearse my grievances to Stateside friends only seemed to put me at risk of becoming a killjoy, instead of instilling uproar. They were confused. Indeed, as Freud writes, “the melancholic seems puzzling to us because we cannot see what it is that is absorbing him so entirely.” They expressed surprise, as if the racism I was giving vent to was colored by deeper insecurities that colored my reality. Perhaps they were right, but maybe they weren’t. “But isn’t Berlin supposed to be super diverse?” was the constant refrain I’d hear when I opened up to others about the heaviness in my mind and limbs, a heaviness I recognized as adjacent to but not quite that of depression. Berlin wasn’t depressing me. Because to be depressed is to have sunk into depths, to have been swallowed whole, to have become stagnant. In fact, I desperately wanted Berlin to pull me down, so that I could identify with the city and we could be one. Instead, what I felt was that the city was trying to repel me, not only from its grounds, but from myself, too.
In The Undercurrents: A Story of Berlin, Kirsty Bell writes, “Berlin resists me . . . so hard to integrate into its flow. To even do anything. The city has no flow. Sinks into the sand and is forgotten.” Incited by the cold anguish of her recent divorce, Bell neurotically charts the evolution of Berlin’s canals, roads, railways, parks, and landmarks across its sociopolitical landscape in order to both evade and reconfigure her heartbreak. In the book, Berlin is a palimpsest so thickly sedimented that time and space come to a halt, its various layers threatening to blur into muck.
Bell blames Berlin’s sands for contaminating the city with a “strange lethargy,” a “shared sense of inertia.” She writes, “Things tend to disappear in a city built on sand.” The insidious quality of this specious downward pull culminates in a passage on the city’s “swampy origins” as “a fundamental but invisible aspect of the city”:
“You cannot see it, so you don’t often think about it. But sometimes you catch a whiff of subterranean swamp in the air. Smells that hint at the presence of hidden things. Things that belong to secret realms. . . .There is something shameful about it, though its exact point of emanation is difficult to determine. It is as if something that should have been discretely removed is returning unbidden but can’t be seen.
Sometimes things that were supposed to disappear rise to the surface again and overflow into visibility. Like the body of Rosa Luxemburg, thrown into the Landwehr Canal, which reappeared five months later, floating down the water. Most things, however, sink without a trace. Does the swamp’s capacity for swallowing evidence and closing up again after every action also have a role to play in Berlin’s strangely amnesiac relation to its past?
Sometimes, sinking things drift up again, breaking the surface. But most of the time, these things stay lost, confined to turbid depths. And yet, a peculiar smell of unclear origins might strike you when you least expect it to, gesturing toward, perhaps even illuminating, the presence of something hidden.”
Bell’s description of Berlin’s voracious sands recalls Freud’s conception of the unconscious as a zone of confused thoughts, desires, and memories, some of which struggle to break through into the conscious mind and suffer distortion in the process. Not unlike Luxemburg’s body after five months in the Landwehr Canal, what emerges looks quite different from what it once was.
Freud did not believe that the goal of psychoanalysis was to cure, nor did he believe that psychoanalysis could completely make that which is unconscious conscious. Rather, he saw psychoanalysis as a means of interpreting the distorted parts of the unconscious mind that make their way to consciousness, and of providing the tools to understand the insights that these parts might possess by virtue of their sojourn. The analysand comes out of analysis not necessarily happier, but more able to know herself. Yet, if certain instincts remain repressed, swallowed up like the evidence Bell touches on, or if they surface only to sink back down, closed up again after every action, that which is unconscious remains unconscious. The psyche is trapped in amnesia, and a barrier continues to dominate and divide the individual’s conscious and her desires, so that she cannot know herself, even if the obvious is right under her nose.
The psyche is trapped in amnesia, and a barrier continues to dominate and divide the individual’s conscious and her desires, so that she cannot know herself, even if the obvious is right under her nose.
Ambling about Weinbergspark near my sublet on Invalidenstraße or the parks down by the canal in Neukölln, I noticed the bizarre intrusion of sand winding its way into otherwise lush spaces, as proof of Bell’s geologic history of Berlin as a city of unlikely swampy origins. But I started to notice other things, too, that made me feel uncertain about the ground beneath my feet. I noticed that nearly all the food delivery men around the city were of South Asian descent; the quiet streets of Mitte would reverberate with fragments of Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, Bangla, flung from motorbikes fitted with bright delivery bags by men who used their commutes as a chance to check in with family back in the subcontinent. It was strange to observe that, in a city that many praise for its claims to multiculturalism, the service workers who kept clubbers fed at 4 a.m. were predominantly Middle Eastern immigrants. Gentrification was transparent in neighborhoods home to Nigerian, Vietnamese, Iranian, and Afghan residents, whose shops and cafés were increasingly infringed upon by sterile coffee shops catering to young Berliners and visitors from the West.
In the wake of these unsettling observations, stranger things began to happen to me. I encountered an Australian expat who told me that Berlin’s political Left had fractured into two divergent paths. One path, the Antideutsche, had emerged from intergenerational guilt born out of the Holocaust. Young Germans had felt so terrible for the way their country had treated the Jews that becoming passionately pro-Zionist offered them a way to deal with and practice their remorse. His ancestors, he told me in an abrupt segue, were heavily involved with the British colonization of India, but he himself, he emphasized, was very progressive. He offered to buy me a drink as a “form of reparations” to console his own remorse, a joke that horrified me more than it convinced me of his politics.
Another friend of mine, whose visit in Berlin was like a miraculous oasis to which I’d crawl a few times over the course of the summer, said Antideutsche sentiments were rising, their effects emphatically felt at certain clubs or bars, like ://about blank or Klunkerkranich, whose owners and bouncers had become bolder in their xenophobia or Islamophobia, sometimes even kicking people out for having pro-Palestinian sentiments. I myself was blocked from entering a queer bar called Roses; the bouncer made an X with his arms and told me and my white, gay friend to go stand across the street, while he let a group of all white people in. Later, we found out that the bouncer, a recent hire, was known for being a xenophobe. I couldn’t tell what was more humiliating: the fact that I had been barred due to the color of my skin or the way the exclusion worked to reinforce a bad, regressive form of identity politics in my psyche, a Manichean logic that I am otherwise intellectually at odds with. In the chaos of the Alexanderplatz Bahnhof, a group of non-German Europeans visiting from another city stopped me to ask me where the kabob shop was, then laughed in my face; it happened so quickly I didn’t even register it as a slur in the moment even though my body, which went very hot all of a sudden, did. And, while passersby would usually not so much as look me in the eye, on the day I wore a T-shirt that had the Dome of the Rock illustrated on it, framed by Arabic script, I received countless stares, some expressing irritation, others expressing, almost amusingly, fear.
Berlin’s unconscious, I thought, is alive as much as it is repressed. Shots of libido threatening to break the surface only to sink back in and reroute as a strange and contradictory set of symptoms. For if the city was becoming more xenophobic, it was also doubling down on its commitment to multicultural liberalism. And amidst its horrific expressions of antisemitism, Zionism was becoming ever more palpable. Haunted and restrained by the pressure of opposing imaginary ideals imposed by its variegated politics, as the bifurcated Left makes more than clear, Berlin does not know itself.
*
He offered to buy me a drink as a “form of reparations” to console his own remorse.
My visit coincided with the Twelfth Berlin Biennale, a show that promised to be an antidote to the mental breakdown that I felt was both ongoing and ominously yet to come. Titled “Still Present!” the multivenue exhibition ran parallel to the uproar that took place at Documenta, where an art collective came under fire for displaying allegedly anti-Semitic imagery. It also coincided with the commotion in the wake of the Goethe-Institut’s decision to disinvite a Palestinian journalist and poet from a conference. Spanning six venues and featuring the work of seventy international artists, the biennale was curated by the French Algerian artist Kader Attia, who was accompanied by a team of five curators: Ana Teixeira Pinto, Do Tuong Linh, Marie Helene Pereira, Noam Segal, and Rasha Salti.
Art makes known that which might otherwise be occluded. As Melanie Klein might say, to make art, and to attempt to comprehend it, also serve as ways to work through our unconscious fantasies of love and hate in their sublimated forms. D. W. Winnicott writes, “In the artist of all kinds I think one can detect an inherent dilemma, which belongs to the co-existence of two trends, the urgent need to communicate and the still more urgent need not to be found.” The viewer and critic play a game of hide-and-seek with the artist and the work of art, scouring clues through which to suture together the manifest content—the medium, the form, the subject—with its latent content, which is composed of not just the artist’s fantasies but perhaps those of the historical sociopolitical context from which the artist is working. What the work of art communicates might contradict what it hides. This internal contradiction animates the conflicts through which it has emerged. Interpretation sets the stage for not only diagnosis, but a form of criticism that is psychically and socially attuned.
Art mediates not only the encounter between viewer and object but also between the psychic and the social. In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud develops the notion of ideational mimesis as a way to think about how we are able to identify with the idea enclosed in a joke by empathetically inhabiting it. We imagine that we are someone else by using our own experiences to fill in the blanks and imitate, and thus understand, the other. He expands on this in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego when he writes, “A path leads from identification by way of imitation to empathy, that is, to the comprehension of the mechanism by means of which we are enabled to take up any attitude at all towards another mental life.” Looking upon a work of art commences an exchange between subject and object in which a deep sense of affinity can be established. Drawing on Freud, Klein, and Winnicott, we can understand the act of viewing a work of art as a reparative process. In the context of artwork that deals with the material and psychic effects of decolonization, a reckoning is initiated in which one’s feelings of guilt or shame—of complicity—are either placated, or, ideally, galvanized into action.
In an interview with Adela Lovric for Berlin Art Link, Attia explains that the biennale “maps the legacy of modernity’s failures, such as colonialism, slavery, imperialism and fascism. On the other hand, it shows artists’ and thinkers’ proposals to decolonize this legacy.” The desire to make visible modernity’s fraught inheritances, and subsequently offer a space for repair in the present, was central to the biennale’s organizing principle. As the title suggests, our lives continue to be haunted by the residues of colonial violence in the form of global capitalism, climate change, and gendered violence. We are pursued by these spectral injuries, Attia explains, because of the West’s ongoing assumption of “denial—or, I call it the regime of invisibility—of the colonial crime. Because of this invisibility, we need to confront it from the inside.” Following Attia’s logic, visibility is not equal to repair, but provides the conditions for its possibility. It makes us confront the belly of the beast itself. To organize “Still Present!” in Berlin, then, was a deliberate choice; it was an attempt to confront Berlin and hold it accountable for vestiges of modernity and Enlightenment values that continue to be naturalized by the city.
Belief in art’s reparative potential also played a large role in Attia’s curatorial ambitions for the biennale. Indeed, Attia has long explored the themes of injury and repair in his own art practice for the past few decades. He explains, “I have always thought that repair emerges out of a sense of urgency and that it can be found everywhere. I also think artworks are a form of repair. To organize, to create dialogues, to invite the audience to follow different correlations through a narrative—for me, all of this is an attempt to repair something.” Attia’s faith in art’s ability to promote repair is echoed in the biennale’s catalogue, which revealingly opens with short prologues penned by government employees who worked to fund it. In one of the introductory pieces, Claudia Roth, member of the German Bundestag, writes, “Focusing on the themes of colonialism and decolonization, [the biennale] also calls on the city, the country, and society to participate in the discussion. In this context, art presents itself as an opportunity to repair the lingering effects of colonization.” In a separate introduction, the German Federal Cultural Foundation’s former artistic director Hortensia Völckers writes that Attia’s curatorial project “liberat[es] our knowledge, thinking, and action from colonial patterns. . . . Making this happen requires resolve on both sides. Only then can the 12th Berlin Biennale become a clear step in a process of colonial repair.”
The essays in the catalogue call attention to how, for Attia and those who supported his curatorial vision, the biennale was an opportunity to kindle radical empathy between spectator and artwork as a means of repairing long-standing injuries. Yet the statements quoted above also raise questions about the relationship between visibility, awareness, and change that feel awfully tied up with the rhetoric of liberalism. After all, museums are spaces of learning and aesthetic experience as much as they are ideological sites for subject formation. In other words, museums are agents of ideology that appear to encourage spectators to freely develop critical skills and aesthetic appreciation, but in actuality churn out good subjects of the state. This begs the question: If something is made visible—or more precisely, put on display—in an exhibition that is funded by a state whose recent political decisions have been informed by Zionist and xenophobic sentiments, is repair by way of art even possible? Even if those who fund an exhibition invested in decolonial praxis oppose themselves to dominant state narratives, does the exhibition remain uncontaminated by the state’s crimes? And if art institutions produce subjects, what kind of subject is the spectator sculpted into when she attends an exhibition like “Still Present!”?
*
I first attended “Still Present!” on a particularly hot and inhospitable day. The KW Institute for Contemporary Art is an unassuming white building in a hushed street in Mitte. Inside, the warm and damp air was made more so by a high turnout of spectators, intrigued by the prospect of seeing a show that openly criticized imperialist legacies of capitalism and colonialism. The main gallery presented works in a variety of media, ranging from Mayuri Chari’s I Was Not Created for Pleasure, an installation of pungent linseed oil–infused cow-dung sculptures mounted on the wall in the shape of clitorises, to Deneth Piumakshi Veda Arachchige’s Self-Portrait as Restitution, a life-size model of the artist herself holding a skull, evoking the history of crania stolen from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) by nineteenth-century Swiss naturalists. Yet, while most of the works on display, like Chari’s and Aarachchige’s, relied on the logic of visibility to make their point, others were more subtle.
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s project, The Natural History of Rape, was an installation comprised of texts and images of Berlin following the end of WWII. The installation featured a mounted timeline of political upheaval, and included tables presenting various scholarly texts, political pamphlets, and more personal materials like epistolary notes and journal entries. According to her statement, Azoulay had organized these disparate media together as a way to contend with the mass rapes of German women by Soviet soldiers. While the texts directly related to the mass rapes and to the subject of gendered violence, the photographs were benign, mostly unpeopled, representations of different areas in the city. The installation opens the viewer’s critical eye to see beyond the obvious, or beyond the regime of visibility, and helps her discern residues of violence in seemingly unlikely places. It gently guides the viewer through an assortment of material, so that she can become more attuned to the effaced histories of gendered violence that took place in the otherwise mundane sites captured by the photographs. The installation, then, functions as a sort of reparative pact between the artist and the spectator, mediated by the work of art and its moving pieces, which were strategically organized to promote a new way of thinking about and seeing spectral violence without imposing how one should think or see.
The issue of art as both mediating and educating is taken up by writer, artist, and educator Samira Ghoualmia in the biennale’s catalogue in an essay called “Can Art Mediation Be Repaired?” The essay foregrounds the biennale’s complicity in Western modes of knowledge production and control, as if to name this complicity is to eradicate or ameliorate its presence. The essay both recognizes and disavows the biennale’s entanglement with structures of power by adopting a tone that is critical as well as cautionary. In other words, the essay performs a sort of guilty conscience with the intended effect of clearing the biennale from perpetuating the crimes of the state by association with it. Ghoualmia writes, “Instead of a missionary mindset that understands art mediation as a caretaker that creates dependence while disciplining visitors on how to experience art and engage in its discourses, art mediation should be an open space for critical dialogues and new perspectives on what a reappropriation of art mediation could be.” As a spectator at KW, I felt that the biennale’s curation gave me space to breathe and ponder the artworks in a way that felt grounding as much as it made me feel like I was anywhere but in Berlin. Perhaps this is the effect that most white-cube art institutions have; they share an aesthetic that seems to transcend national borders, and yet they remain tethered to the sources that fund them. If art institutions are sites of subject formation, then this exhibition did succeed in positioning me, however temporarily, as a member of an international community of artists and thinkers trying to come to terms with historically grounded social injustices suffered all over the world.
But upon leaving KW, I was hit once again by that now-familiar feeling of alienation, of unbelonging, of the pressure to fit myself into the mold of something I was not and feeling bad about my inability to do so. If, as those who wrote in the introductory essays in the catalogue believed, repair was a process that the biennale would help instigate, in my experience, it felt more like a twig that had been snapped in half the second I breathed fresh air. The stark difference between inside and outside made me second-guess the power of art to really repair beyond the scene of ideational mimesis.
*
Though the biennale and its organizers used the language of repair, I saw few instances of works that attempted to undertake the actual labor of repair, as if soliciting empathy were somehow more desirable than reparation, or a necessary precondition for it.
Not every artwork or installation was as adept in forging a reparative connection between spectator and object as Azoulay’s and some of the other works at KW. Still others ended up doing more harm than good, even despite their intended effect of promoting a curative function.
A week before I left Berlin, I visited another leg of the biennale at the Hamburger Bahnhof with two close American friends whose visits coincided with mine. Built in 1846 as the starting point of the railway route between Hamburg and Berlin, Hamburger Bahnhof was transformed into a museum in the early 1900s. The facility was wrecked during WWII and unused for several decades, until its renovation in the late 1980s and ’90s; it was officially reopened as an art space in 1996.
Inside, we found ourselves in a large, bright, and airy space with high ceilings curving under iron archways. In order to get to the galleries, we had to venture along ramps and stairwells preserved from its history as a railway station. It was like walking down a U-Bahn station, fitted with posters and graffiti. The biennale extended down a series of connected rooms with cement floors, built over tracks where, presumably, the trains would have run, recalling Bell’s palimpsestic representation of Berlin as a city where history layers upon itself.
By this time during my stay, I had visited two other venues organized under the biennale, at Akademie der Künste (Hanseatenweg) and Akademie der Künste (Pariser Platz). The novelty of the biennale had well worn out. With the exception of a few works like Khandakar Ohida’s Dream Your Museum, a beautiful short film about a hoarder’s attempts to assemble his belongings since the Partition of India, I felt inundated by artwork about suffering, violence, contamination, and depravation. In fact, the only thing really tying the venues and their displays together was the overarching theme of suffering. And though the biennale and its organizers used the language of repair, I saw few instances of works that attempted to undertake the actual labor of repair, as if soliciting empathy were somehow more desirable than reparation, or a necessary precondition for it.
By this time, what remained of my initial feeling of intrigue had morphed into an attempt to put together the skeletal remains of a body that was no longer coherent. As writer, curator, and editor Jesi Khadivi writes in a critique of the biennale, “the body that Attia presents as being in need of healing comes to feel like a sort of Frankenstein’s monster. Its broken and alienated body is a fitting cipher to work through the legacy of European Enlightenment; yet without clearly articulated interrelationships in the works’ installation, it is difficult to parse the differently nuanced perspectives and contexts to which they are addressed.” Khadivi’s critique is astute. Though the art on display was supposed to grapple with damaging inheritances as a means of instantiating repair, the sheer quantity of pieces about such harms undermined their quality and profundity. Each different work of art seemed to be one more version of the same, so that the biennale began to feel more like a site where the opportunity for repair was commodified, and the works’ remedial power diluted.
This creeping judgment crystallized for me the moment we walked through the horrific spectacle that was Jean-Jacques Lebel’s Poison Soluble. Scènes de l’occupation américaine à Bagdad. We were warned, it’s true. A sign had been installed outside the room stating that the contents of Lebel’s piece were possibly triggering, and that if one would prefer to skip it altogether, one could follow an alternative route through the galleries. But we paid no heed and were instantly confronted by a maze of partitions featuring blown-up images of the all too familiar but no less sickening scenes from the Abu Ghraib prison. Once we were inside the installation, the only way out was through these gigantic and pixelated visuals of American soldiers smiling in front of the dehumanized naked bodies of Iraqi prisoners. We were all nervously silent, uncomfortable, as we worked our way as fast as we could through the nightmarish labyrinth. I remember feeling hot, my pulse quickening. My disgust was intensified by the realization that some of the images were duplicates, an artistic decision that felt egregiously excessive for an installation that already was egregious in its pornotroping of violence. The installation almost immediately retrenched me in the time of my youth. I was in second grade when 9/11 happened. I was raised in a Muslim household. I lived in a predominantly white suburb of New York, close enough to the city that we were evacuated on the day the towers fell and a touch of gray permeated the sky. It was all too close to home. I remembered my peers’ taunts—are you a terrorist?—as well as their more silent, yet no less harrowing, modes of reminding me of my own proximity to the enemy. Walking through Lebel’s installation was like being launched back into the racial trauma of my childhood, and into a voyeuristic horror of the plight of the prisoners. I knew that I certainly could not be alone in this. Art need not always be kind, nor safe, nor pleasant. Art should sometimes scare us; it should sometimes make us grieve. But as a matter of curatorial acuity and integrity, art should not be credited with doing something that it absolutely is not. Was this the kind of confrontation that Attia had called for as a means of exploding the West’s attachment to invisibility and paving the way for repair? No, I thought.
After finally escaping the claustrophobic maze, I felt that my disgust was less directed at the smiling American guards and more directed at Lebel and the people who wanted his work to be shown. Indeed, as I learned afterward, Lebel’s installation had posed a problem for the organizers since the biennale’s opening, perhaps even earlier. One of Attia’s co-curators, Ana Teixeira Pinto, had chosen to resign from her position on the biennale’s opening day because of Lebel’s work. Her resignation coincided with the withdrawal of three Iraqi artists from the biennale. They, too, did not want to participate in an exhibition that would include Lebel’s work, and Attia, it seems, strangely prioritized Lebel over these artists and his fellow curator. To me, Attia’s decision speaks volumes, more so than the actual installation itself.
In a letter published on Artforum and cosigned by more than 400 artists, Rijin Sahakian writes the following incisive critique of Lebel’s installation and calls out the biennale for reenacting violence: “This edition of the Biennale is said to be centered on decolonial engagement, to offer ‘repair . . . as a form of agency’ and ‘a starting point . . . for critical conversation, in order to find ways together to care for the now.’ Yet the Biennale made the decision to commodify photos of unlawfully imprisoned and brutalized Iraqi bodies under occupation, displaying them without the consent of the victims and without any input from the Biennale’s participating Iraqi artists, whose work was adjacently installed without their knowledge. Who is given agency in this form of ‘repair’?” (emphasis mine). Like Attia, Sahakian seems to believe that it is vital to confront injustice and colonial crime from the inside. But while Attia seems to see the biennale as separate from these crimes (though Ghoualmia’s essay is a reminder that it is not), or even as a balm for them, Sahakian recognizes the hypocrisy of the biennale as an organization that does not practice the kinds of care or engagement that it preaches. In a rather paternalistic response to Sahakian, Attia writes that he “deemed it important not to indulge the impulse to turn a blind eye to a very recent imperialist crime—a crime conducted under military occupation that was quickly brushed under the rug with the intention of prompting a swift forgetting,” for “this is how imperialism fabricates its impunity.” Without falling into the trap of quantity or identity politics, I want to ask: Wouldn’t including the works of three Iraqi artists in a biennale about colonial violence, of all things, do some of the work of interrogating recent imperialist crimes? What seems abundantly clear to Sahakian, myself, my friends with whom I saw the installation, and many other critics is that, not only by presenting an installation that made brutally visible the harm inflicted on Iraqis by Americans throughout the War on Terror, but also by prioritizing the offending artist over three Iraqi artists and a co-curator, the biennale ended up reenacting and reinforcing those very harms for the sake of spectacle and its commodification, rather than repair. It wasn’t so much the blown-up photographs that were the problem, for the photographs do represent a crucial part of recent American and imperialist history that we should not efface, even if it means we must continually confront it. But it was the logic behind their display. It was an anti-intellectual logic of brute visual force, without any kind of artistic mediation. In this case, visibility belongs to the realm of market relations. Visibility is no longer a means to instantiate repair, but a sensationalist mode of attracting noise. Visibility cancels out anti-capitalist, anticolonial projects, so that opportunities to heal and connect with one another and our environment are lost to the thrill of sadism.
*
Throughout my time in Berlin, the ground beneath my feet seemed to escape me, as if it were all sand. Bell was on to something, I was certain. And yet, there was something lacking in her account of the city and its energetic pull into inertia.
In Wilkie Collins’s nineteenth-century detective novel The Moonstone, an ancient Indian diamond is looted by a British soldier, then bestowed to his niece in England, and subsequently stolen, instigating a feverish search. Numerous characters are enlisted in filling out the blanks of its mysterious fate. Some suspect the diamond may have been cast into a stretch of quicksand near the family’s estate. Known as the Shivering Sand, it is described as “heaving,” with an “awful shiver that crept over its surface—as if some spirit of terror lived and moved and shuddered in the fathomless deeps beneath.” The Shivering Sand is portrayed as having a “false brown face” that evokes “horror.” We are told that it looks “as if it had hundreds of suffocating people under it—all struggling to get to the surface, and all sinking lower and lower in the dreadful deeps.” The Shivering Sand, then, becomes a metaphor for Britain’s repressed flipside: its colonies and colonized subjects on which it economically depends. The novel is loosely based on the theft of the Koh-i-Noor, a well-known diamond looted from South Asia following the annexation of Punjab in 1849 and rumored to have cursed those responsible for its theft. Yet, while the Koh-i-Noor lives in the crown of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, in the world of the novel, the Moonstone is eventually restituted. Even if Collins did not intend for it to be read in this way, I read The Moonstone as a novel that seems to demand a form of reparations.
The Shivering Sand, with its terrible convulsing and semi-concealment of grotesque entities beneath, functions like Bell’s notion of Berlin’s sands: a sedimentation of densely packed histories, many of which, were they to break through the surface, would threaten to unravel a sense of manufactured security. The Shivering Sand, however, more directly points to a social and cultural critique that Bell evades. For the Shivering Sand does not just conceal and disturb, it is also racialized. It exemplifies the entire subcontinent, or perhaps going even farther, it represents the subjugation of countless colonized subjects the world over. It signifies the horrific nature of the British Empire’s transgressions.
It would seem that the twelfth iteration of the Berlin Biennale was built on a similar desire as the one I’ve interpreted in The Moonstone—a desire for reparations. Yet, while Collins’s rendition of the Moonstone’s trajectory ultimately attains what I read as a triumphant end, the biennale’s success remains dubious. The organizers of the biennale thought it was helping to set this process in motion by framing the exhibition in the language of repair, but whether it actually made good on its mission remains up for debate. To put the Shivering Sand into conversation with the Twelfth Berlin Biennale is to emphasize the biennale’s complicity in the ongoing violences toward racialized people in the era of late global capitalism, an era that we’re all struggling to find some way to make livable.
By the time I left Berlin, I was glad that it hadn’t brought me down into it, that it had repelled me instead. By being repelled, I was granted the freedom to carve out a space for my disgust that wasn’t smothered by the version of Berlin I was supposed to love. I was glad to not be stuck in the sands. Perhaps the answer is not repair, then, but finding ways to begin anew without turning our backs on the past.