– by Irene de Craen
Welcome to the eighth issue of Errant Journal. An issue that, as previous ones, finds its origin in an ongoing unfolding of events and thoughts. This one started in the late summer of 2016, when I had the luck of attending a talk by Françoise Vergès in a community living room a stone’s throw away from my home in Amsterdam. The talk was on the policing of Muslim women and men in Europe, and the criminalization of the Black body in society and focused in particular on a recent incident that happened in France.[1] Just a month prior, the social and political debate in Europe on the wearing of the hijab and other Islamic face coverings had reached a disturbing and simultaneous absurd height. Photos circulated of a woman enjoying a day on a French beach when four men in police uniforms approached her and ordered her to undress. The woman also received a fine that read that she was not wearing ‘an outfit respecting good morals and secularism.’ In the news article about the incident, the restriction on wearing a burkini is directly related to an attack in Nice where a Tunisian man drove a truck into a crowd, killing and injuring a large number of people.[2] In a peculiar extension of this violence, the woman’s clothes were considered dangerous, a threat to public safety even.
In a book published several years later, Vergès writes about this and other such incidents that ‘[i]n summer, a “woman” should undress and not be ashamed of showing her body, because this is how she shows her freedom.’ This freedom, however, is not the individual kind that is usually heralded in neoliberal societies, otherwise the woman’s personal freedom of being covered would not have to be disputed. This freedom, we are led to believe, is a matter of freedom as a society, one that all of our freedoms depend on. ‘Wearing a bikini indicates women’s adherence to secularism, since feminism, the Republic, and secularism have become interchangeable.’[3] As the many details of the incident show – the men in uniform, the woman low on the ground surrounded by others showing appropriate levels of nakedness, and the wording of the penalty – the very ideals of the free western society, in the name of safety and feminism, conflate in this oppressive show of state power and control.
Pondering these events over, I was struck by the parallels with the insistence on making visible and public in museology, particularly within the discourse on restitution in ethnographic museums. As if our lives and freedom depend on it (something so disturbingly ironic as all ethnographic museum collections have cost the lives and freedoms of so many non-European people). Although by now, the discourse on restitution has somewhat shifted to being more favourable to unconditional return, a very persistent ideal of the museum remains that of access. For years, the main argument against restitution of looted artefacts was that at least in western museums the objects would remain visible, where the general public and researchers alike are able to learn from them, and where they become part of the ‘world’s culture.’ The greatest fear of the traditionalist museum curator is that objects would ‘disappear,’ out of sight in the hands of the rightful owners. Simultaneously, this is attached to the ideal of perpetual visibility in the guise of restoration, and the idea of objects being already dead, and therefore not allowed to die. Errant’s fifth issue ‘Learning From Ancestors,’ aimed to critically question this way of thinking and proposed a reversal of perspectives. Part of practising this reversal was to not reproduce any image of cultural heritage whose restitution has not yet been completed out of respect for the objects as well as for the people and lifeworlds they were taken from. The issue before you now is a continuation of that line of thinking that aims to go deeper into one aspect explored in the earlier issue and connect it to other discourses. ‘Against Visibility’ therefore, is also a proposition of a refusal of the paradigm of visibility and access that permeates all areas of western thinking.
In Vistas of Modernity, Rolando Vázquez explains how his book’s inclusion of postcards invites us ‘to see, in the most habitual, and sometimes iconic, the morphology of the white gaze, its formation, celebration and its underlying violence.’[4] Made for enjoyment, the postcards are emblematic of ideas of progress and universality. They represent a very specific way of seeing the world. In all their mundaneness, Vázquez states, these images are illustrative of modernity, and therefore of the colonial difference. ‘The gaze of mastery, the sovereign gaze, enjoys the modern/colonial order as spectacle. The act of seeing itself becomes the enactment of the colonial difference as aesthetics.’[5] As modernity’s ways of seeing can be thought of as an epistemology, this issue therefore tries to think of how we can approach seeing itself differently, question modernity’s emphasis on access and un-covering, and start to unlearn the ingrained paradigm that aligns sight with freedom and progress.
One way of seeing modernity’s very specific way of seeing, is to look at the myriad of cultural practices around the world that rely on secrecy or are specifically intended for a select community lest they lose their power and meaning. In Potential History, Ariella Azoulay recounts the story of the Balot sculpture representing a colonial administrator that was killed at the start of the Pende rebellion in 1931. The sculpture remained hidden for decades, visible to select members of the community. Only in the 1970s, after it was obtained by a western museum, did it acquire an ‘exhibition value.’ Referring to the sculpture, Ariella Azoulay writes that ‘[s]ince this sculpture was not created in order to be displayed, the farthest we can go in approaching it, without colluding with imperial violators, is to acknowledge its alterity: whatever its precise role was, its functions included keeping this role hidden from outsiders.’[6] Azoulay frames examples such as these as opportunities to learn how to engage differently, subverting the colonial institutions – the museum, the university, the archive – that modernity’s epistemology is based on. It points us to the question of what ways of being have been erased in a world where everything must always be visible?
All this is not to say that I don’t see the importance of representation of marginalized and silenced people and of countering hegemonic narratives. This remains a crucial anti-colonial practice that is also at the forefront of Errant’s activities. However, especially the art world tends to speak of absences, of untold stories and gaps in understanding, making it sound as if these absences were a dark continent that needs to be discovered. And so I have long wondered if this constant uncovering of what is hidden is always in the interest of the marginalized; whether it in itself has occasionally turned into a mechanism that seeks to control the narrative once again and could possibly inflict harm. Understanding modernity’s insistence on always making visible, leads me to consider that maybe not all gaps need to be filled, that some absences and misunderstandings should remain just that, especially considering the position from which these gaps appear as such.
Alongside the need for representation, exists a prerequisite to remain opaque in the eyes of hegemonic powers as a strategy of resistance. Nowhere is this perhaps shown more clearly than in the current discussions on face coverings during protests, especially those against the genocide of the Palestinians. In a news item published on the website of the Dutch government, it states that its cabinet is working on a law to ban face-covering clothing at demonstrations. Minister of the Interior and Kingdom Relations Judith Uitermark stated: ‘The right to demonstrate is a fundamental part of our society. […] Precisely in order to be able to protect this right properly, it is important that we prevent people from abusing the right to demonstrate by violating other laws. With this in mind, the government is looking at possibilities for a ban on face-covering clothing.’[7] It seems that once again the right to be invisible is undermined by the government’s need for visibility and control, for the possible apprehension of non-law-abiding citizens, and the argument used is our collective right to freedom and safety. Is it a coincidence that this discussion on face-covering clothing at protests, one I cannot personally remember to have occurred before, coincides with large scale demonstrations against Dutch complicity in the genocide of the Palestinians? Demonstrations that equally try to expose the west’s hypocrisy and islamophobia shown by its selective silence on the suffering of its ‘Other’? As with the example of the woman enjoying a day at the beach, we must keep asking ourselves whose safety is being protected, and whose freedom and rights are ignored in the process.
Of course, considering all these thoughts and connections, I could not escape Édouard Glissant’s famous credo of ‘the right to opacity.’ And yet, I was hesitant to refer to Glissant directly. I ended up placing his dictum in brackets. Not to diminish its relevance, but rather to approach it with a fitting amount of caution, preventing the all-to-easy pitfalls of the trendiness of Glissant’s words. For all too often, Glissant’s right to opacity gets coopted in a way that leads to self-indulgence and alienation, because it is often forgotten that Glissant wrote from and for a very specific position, and – at least in my view – his words should therefore not be thrown around without due respect for the specificity from which they came. Additionally, this issue’s focus on the visible does not exactly align with what Glissant intended with his theory of opacity; for the opposite of opacity is not visibility, it is transparency.[8] It is the right of the oppressed not to be reduced in order to be accepted or controlled. However, as a journal that thinks from the world of art and culture, it was important to me to include the role that images and the visible play in western hegemony’s oppression in the name of freedom. But more than a theory, ‘Against Visibility,’ aims to be a practice embedded in the concreteness of our everyday lives. From there, it moves in and out of focus, from the personal to the collective, the imaginative and distinctively historically or geographically situated. For ‘[o]pacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics. To understand these truly one must focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components.’[9]
Footnotes:
[1] The lecture was organized in the context of a neighbourhood festival on migration titled Sorry, We’re Open, organized by The Side Room, a discursive platform for eccentric cultural practices and intersectional thinking (2013-2016) by Amal Alhaag and Maria Guggenbichler.
[2] Ben Quinn, ‘French police make woman remove clothing on Nice beach following burkini ban,’ The Guardian, 24 August 2016, theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/24/french-police-make-woman-remove-burkini-on-nice-beach.
[3] Françoise Vergès, A Decolonial Feminism (Pluto Press, 2021), 67.
[4] Rolando Vázquez, Vistas of Modernity. Decolonial Aesthesis and the End of the Contemporary (Mondriaan Fund, 2020), 3.
[5] Ibid., 5.
[6] Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Verso, 2019), 71.
[7] Judith Uitermark, ‘Kabinet werkt aan wet om gezichtsbedekkende kleding bij demonstraties te verbieden,’ 15 April 2025, rijksoverheid.nl/actueel/nieuws/2025/04/15/kabinet-werkt-aan-wet-om-gezichtsbedekkende-kleding-bij-demonstraties-te-verbieden. Translation mine.
[8] Thanks to Rory Tsapayi for pointing this out in these words.
[9] Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (The University of Michigan Press, 2010), 190.