AN INTERVIE WITH BATOOL ABU AKLEEN, GAZAN POET ON WRTING, DURING AND AFTER GENOCIDE
“Poetry is a curse.”
Batool Abu-Akleen (21) wrote her way out of the Palestinian genocide through poetry. She wrote and composed her debut collection ‘48kg’ in 2025 with the help of the British publisher Tenement Press, amid forced evacuations and massacres in Gaza. Thanks in part to a crowdfunding campaign, she received a scholarship to the Sorbonne and managed to leave the crushed country where she was born. She does not want to be seen as a ‘survivor of genocide’, but as a living voice that makes people feel what it means to be displaced. “As long as politicians in the West continue to spread their lies, it is my duty to tell people what is really happening in Gaza.”
Visiting the young poet in Paris. Batool points to the place where she wants to sit. This is the table where she finds peace and most likes to write. She has just returned from Venice, where, at the invitation of the Biennale, she was able to read her poems at the ‘Poetry Caravan’ in the Giardini. A day later, she learned that her debut collection is being reissued by Penguin. ‘I still can’t believe it,’ she smiles.
Batool Abu Akleen
Batool first gained recognition in 2020, when, at the age of fifteen, she won the Barjeel Poetry Prize with the poem ‘I didn’t steal the cloud’, which is also included in her debut collection. She subsequently published poems in journals such as ArabLit, The Massachusetts Review and Modern Poetry in Translation, which appointed her as poet/translator in residence in 2024. In June 2025, ‘48kg’ appeared in a bilingual edition from Tenement Press in the UK*. It received glowing reviews from Caryl Churchill, Ghada Karmi and Max Porter. And now Penguin too.
The dates reveal that she continued working right through the genocide. In the introduction, she writes that during the first months she refused to put even a single letter on paper, because she thought poetry could not change the world. During those months of total destruction, forced displacement and famine, she somehow found the strength to write and work on a collection. “I have no idea how I managed it. I truly worked during the most horrific moments.”
When they were driven from Gaza City to the south of Gaza, the family lived for a while in her aunt’s house. “There was a large garden with an olive tree, where I could write while watching the people in the street.” After that, they were pushed towards Rafah. “There I climbed a hill from where I could see the entire city and the sea. There was a jasmine tree and many olive trees. I was completely alone.”
Batool says she often felt guilty. And there were several forms of guilt. The guilt of the survivor. The guilt of someone who chooses death and grief as material from which to carve beauty. “I admit that I cried while reading my poems. They are so beautiful, but they are made of pain. My pain, and that of people dear to me.” But also because, by writing, she could put her family in danger. Her teacher, the well-known poet Refaat Alareer, was the victim of a targeted assassination one month into the genocide. More and more often, journalists and writers became targets. “I felt responsible for what could happen to them.”
And yet she kept writing. Because she wanted to give shape to her feelings in order to understand them. “Poetry is a curse. It was never a choice. I never wanted to tell my story, or that of my family. I love playing with words. It brought me relief in that hopeless darkness of fear and pain.” The idea of bringing together 48 poems as a decreasing number of kilos came at the end. “I often referred to my poems as ‘my body’, which I wanted to hold together. That is where the idea came from to have my body weight count down. It runs parallel to the changing relationship the ‘I’ has with death; from rejection and fear, it moves towards a kind of friendship, where it asks death where on earth it is.”
Death may be omnipresent in the poems, yet at the same time the ‘I’ dances through them with a kind of lightness. A touch with light that leaves both sparks and deep traces. It is no coincidence that Batool dedicates her work ‘to my fingertips’. “Touch is often the beginning of a poem. It is so much more intense than when I see or hear something. Right now, I can feel a scratch on the ear of this coffee cup. These are the impressions left behind by people before me. And I imagine that visually. Before I write them down, I already see my poems as a kind of scene in a film.”
In her diary notes, parts of which have been published in the eyewitness account ‘Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide’**, she writes that at one point, out of sheer horror, she stopped naming things. “As a poet, you die then, because you no longer manage to question things.” Metaphors were sometimes a lifebuoy. “They keep me alive. When I put an image on paper, I step into the scene myself. I become part of it. Only in that way do I understand what is happening.”
One poem that illustrates this is ‘Blazing sun’. Everything in this poem is about feeling: about how pain, comfort, destruction and grief all merge into one another. How it becomes food, becoming one with the still-breathing ‘I’. But even that ‘I’ melts, burns up like a match, suffocates beneath that all-scorching sun. The war that never stops.
I’m burning my fingers
they’re melting one after the other
slowly, as war passes slowly:
And then she goes through all the fingers, setting them down in quiet lives and speaking images. Until the final, suffocating line.
nothing remains but the fire
flowing between death’s fingers
fire may choke death
but I am the one who is choked to death.
The burnt fingers have their origins in one of the many episodes of flight. In the tent camp of Deir al-Balah, there was only a wood-burning stove to cook on. “My mother’s eyes watered when the smoke blew into them, so I baked the bread. And then I would always get angry when I burned my fingers yet again.”
We talk about the power of metamorphosis. As in the beautiful opening line of ‘Seagull’: When I saw I was white I knew I was a seagull. Becoming someone else is not just a technique, Batool says. “In the Arab world, poetry has a tradition that sees the poet as the mouthpiece for a kind of inner devil. Every poet had their own devil and gave him a name. That meant you could excuse yourself by saying that you were simply giving voice to him. I quite like that (laughs).”
The poem’s final three lines contain two recurring motifs, which intertwine here: the sky and the sea.
my wings were nothing but a wave
my sky was nothing but a sea
my white colour nothing but foam
“I love the sky very much. But death and destruction also came from the sky, with the drones that never left you a moment’s peace. It remains deeply ambivalent.” The same is true of the sea. “I grew up by the sea. When I stood by the sea in Italy, I felt again how important it is to me. The breeze made everything clean again and gave me back my senses.”
The poet lives through perception. They are painter, writer and scientist at once. Batool hesitated between science and poetry. She was very good at biology and physics, but she wanted to conduct research in her own way, outside the straitjacket of fixed methodology. “Poetry gives me the chance to search for answers to the questions I ask myself. It is observation pursued to its ultimate consequence. It is daring to see everything.”
This brings us to the function of poetry. “I write because I love it. If I can contribute to awareness, that obviously makes me happy. But I am also realistic. If the blood of the thousands of children murdered in Gaza does not bring people to understanding, what can my words change? The only reason I continue to speak out clearly is because politicians in the West simply keep spreading their lies. It is my duty to tell people what is really happening in Gaza.”
The feeling of being completely abandoned to your fate runs through many of the poems, but most clearly in ‘Cemetery’, a poem in which she comforts her mother, who grieves at the thought of having to live in a camp. It ends with a blow. Western indifference becomes complicity:
no one will wash us clean of our fear
they won’t do anything
we’ll be so light
they just cross off the word ‘camp’ and write
‘cemetery’
This is one of the 38 poems that Batool translated herself from Arabic into English. She describes the process as ‘healing’. In her mother tongue, she felt only the pain and the loss, the fear of dying, of her body being torn apart and finding no place to rest. “But when translating into English, I felt more distance from the images I had created. My fear ebbed away. I made peace with death.”
In October 2025, she managed to be evacuated to France. She was able to continue her studies in English literature and translation at the Sorbonne. She has now temporarily interrupted those studies. “To give myself some time. I am suffering from the symptoms of the traumas I have endured. So I am resting. And trying to find balance again. So that I can become a properly functioning machine in this capitalist world (laughs).”
She is currently writing a new work, in English. It is moving towards the essay form. But that too will be poetic, she assures me. Translation also continues to fascinate her deeply. “It forces you to turn a poem inside out. You ask questions and enter new dimensions.” When we talk about my tentative attempt to translate ‘This is how I cook my grief’ into Dutch, she becomes enthusiastic. It is about how ‘grief’ in the title sounds like ‘raw’ in Dutch, and how that clashes with ‘cooking’. “Beautiful paradox, I love it!”
Before she gets up, she tells me she is working on an essay about what ‘home’ means. “Paris has slowly crept into my clothes. Only when I travelled more often did I begin to long for the city. Since being in Venice, I have felt that home can also be elsewhere. I think I will keep travelling until I feel at home everywhere (laughs).”
* Batool Abu Akleen, 48Kg. / ٤٨ كغم, published by Tenement Press, UK (June 2025). Available via the publisher’s webshop – the book will be published by Penguin in September 2026
** Batool Abu Akleen, Sondos Sabra, Nahil Mohana, Ala’a Obaid, Voices of resistance: diaries of genocide (Comma Press 2025)
MARJAN SUFFYS AND WOUTER DE BROECK IN CONVERSATION
Marjan Suffys - the creator of ‘Suzanne’, a short story published in the first issue of NU - is a criminology student, radio-host and a cat lover. Amongst other things she believes that writing is not some harmless pastime, but that fictional characters can actually be real people and vice versa. NU's co-editor Wouter De Broeck recently sent Marjan some questions and got back this intriguing video piece. Click the link below to watch it over at Vimeo.
STEFANIE BRAUN, CO-EDITOR OF NU REVIEW, IN CONVERSATION WITH JULIA SYRZISTIE, GRAPHIC DESIGNER, WHO DESIGNED NU REVIEW’S IDENTITY AND FIRST ISSUE
SB: First of all I was interested to find out about what lead you to study design, what inspired you to take that direction? Also, I was wondering if you could talk a bit about the artistic and creative community you encountered in Glasgow where you studied.
JS: My experience with design was quite a whirlwind one, and it took me a while to get into art school. I wouldn't say I was very creatively gifted as a teenager, and it was perseverance more than talent that lead me to study design. After a few attempts, I ended up on a course which focused on experimentation rather than teaching hard skills, which I think shaped the way I think and work as a creative and the direction my work has taken. I studied at Glasgow School of Art (graduating in 2019), where the course was rooted in a studio environment and I feel really lucky to have made friendships and a network that will continue to evolve past art school. Being a relatively small city, Glasgow's art scene feels encouraging of non-commercial, experimental ideas; a nice bubble to have found myself in at the beginning of my creative journey.
SB: One of your previous projects was looking at the Doves Type which was lost in the Thames in 1913 - quite a dramatic story involving a bitter feud between the two owners of the celebrated Doves Press - but then rediscovered a century later and digitally reconstructed by Robert Green. You retold this story in a beautiful, self-published book. When did your interest in letterpress printing start? What draws you to this centuries old, analogue process?
JS: One of my favourite things about GSA was the amazing Caseroom: a printing workshop where my adventure with letterpress begun. I was unsure of my place between graphic design and illustration during my studies, and letterpress was a way of combining the two areas. I used the facility as a way of generating new ideas and imagery, and in my final year concentrated on a story through which I could explore historical aspects of printmaking. I'm drawn to the visual quality of letterpress, but also the process itself: I find it more engaging than sitting in front of a screen, and I feel that I make better visual choices when I see the product in a physical form in front of me. I tend to work digital at later stages of briefs, but it's really satisfying to be able to work freely and play around in the initial phases.
SB: As you have just mentioned, you enjoy illustration as well as graphic design - how do you marry these two interests?
JS: I am still trying to figure out how to define what I do, and how that relates to the design industry. I'm a designer and image-maker, with a particular focus on printmaking. Illustration for me is a part of my design process, and I usually incorporate it as a layer of a bigger project, for example illustrating chapter spreads of a book I am designing. I'm interested in image-making within the context of design, but not necessarily in illustration as a stand-alone profession.
SB: What is good design for you?
JS: For me personally, good design comes from research, experimentation and a balance between innovation and applying relevant design principles. These are just rules I set for myself, and there is plenty of good design out there which inspires me despite originating in completely different ways.
The way I find inspiration is quite sporadic and specific to a given project I'm working on, and it can range from looking at 20th century graphic design movements to something more niche and unrelated to the field. When I was a student, I had access to an art library with an amazing collection, and found that the physical act of looking through books was a more unexpected source of inspiration than browsing the internet. It also felt more accidental, picking up a book which could introduce me to an entirely new topic.
SB: It’s interesting that you say that. How important looking through books is for you and also the environment of being in a library, being able to access knowledge through physically turning the pages of books and getting lost in them which is very different from gathering information online.
This leads me to talk a bit about NU. Even though we live in a world that is getting more and more ‘virtual', you, Wouter and I agreed from the start of working together that we wanted an actual printed publication for the first edition of NU. What do you think is the ongoing allure of the printed page? And tell us a bit more about your ideas for NU's identity and cover design which has received such positive feedback.
JS: I think the allure of the printed page is a combination of readers wanting to connect to something physical in a digital world, and also the recent renaissance of specific print techniques. I like to buy publications which I know will be relevant in years to come, but also ones which capture something about the present moment. I recently saw a quote by the iconic book designer Irma Boom, in which she talked about a book being a vessel which is produced to capture something from the present moment and bring it into the future.
When starting the design process for NU, we agreed that we wanted to have something quite simple, bold and elegant for the cover without giving away too much. Using the capital letters NU, I started experimenting with typography in a more image-centred way, the same as when using letterpress. Unfortunately I wasn't able to access a print studio at the time due to lockdown, so had to improvise a new way of working with typography. Ultimately I wanted to come up with a logo which would be clear and easy to read and associated with the name of the project, but which would also represent a more image-like form in itself. I tried various different shapes and positions of the letters on the page, but in the end the suggestion of a circle moving across the page seemed to be the most fitting graphic expression of the ideas addressed in NU. For the interiors, I tried to come up with layout solutions which would work for and respond to the variety of different texts - such as short stories, poems, essays and journalistic reports - as well as images across the publication.
SB: You have just designed a fantastic cookbook - ‘Cooking with Parveen’ - together with Mafwa, a community theatre company based in Leeds, which looks wonderful. All the proceeds of the book will go back to the organisation to help fund future projects with refugees, asylum seekers and settled communities. How was that experience of working together with an organisation as well as a large group of participants?
JS: Working with Mafwa Theatre was a fantastic opportunity, and I feel really lucky to have been able to gain an insight into the work they do, and to have been trusted to take on the project. Our biggest aim was to make sure that the participants felt that the cookbook represented them well, and that the final outcome felt true to Mafwa Theatre's work. Despite being constrained by lockdown and not being able to meet participants in person, the book is full of personal recipes, as well as being heartwarming, genuine, often funny, and relatable to a wider audience.
SB: Looking forward, what is next for you?
JS: I was recently awarded the House of Prints graduate bursary which will allow me to work on a personal project with access to letterpress facilities at Hot Bed Press at some point in 2021. I also designed some festive posts for Tate Collective's social media channels just before Christmas. I feel like I've been really lucky with the commissions and opportunities which came my way in 2020, though my main goal for now is finding a full-time design job or internship. I like working with people and interacting with others on a daily basis, and adjusting to working alone since graduating has been one of the toughest changes. Graduating not long before the pandemic started has been quite a roller coaster, so I am hoping to gain experience in a more steady environment soon, as that is when I feel most productive and creative.
February 2021
Images by Julia Syrzistie:
1. Workspace, coloured pencils on paper, 25 x 38 cm, 2021
2. Hammersmith Bridge, linocut, 29.7 x 42 cm, 2019
3. Trowel and Type, linocut and letterpress, 29.7 x 42 cm, 2019
STEFANIE BRAUN, CO-EDITOR OF NU REVIEW, IN CONVERSATION WITH PHOTOGRAPHER AND NU CONTRIBUTOR MELANIE STIDOLPH ABOUT HER SERIES ‘LAST SUMMER’ WHICH SHE STARTED IN 2017 AND IS ONGOING.
SB: In your text for NU you use this intriguing expression ‘the theatre space of the beach and the riverside’ to describe your preferred location as well as this lovely term of ‘co-habitation’. The beach has been photographed countless times and generates expectations like no other – most of us document each detail of our trips to the seaside in our own amateur photographs. What I like very much about your images is that the groups you photograph seem on the one hand very composed and directed, as if the rocks or the beach act like a theatre stage, the figures perfectly in harmony with their environment, folded into it nearly. Yet the images also appear very accidental, nonchalant – observations of groups where the intimacy between the individuals is very much present, it is preserved and felt. What is your relationship to the groups photographed? Do you ask permission? Do you think this is an important factor?
MS: That’s a beautiful phrase Stefanie – ‘folded into it’. Sometimes I ask permission, if I need to be close to capture the scene and if people will become more easily identifiable because of that. I’m nervous about it, partly because I don’t want people to say no (if I’ve worked up the courage to ask them, I really want the picture) and partly because as soon as you ask, the scene changes. I’m not sure if that’s because in the slight shift of attention and posture that happens, we become more aware of the subject, or more aware of the photographer. When I’m close I ask, I don’t want to take liberties, and people so far, have always said yes. I compose quickly, so the moment of taking isn’t long, but I’m often around in the scene for a while, going swimming, or sitting in the sun, sharing the space and making it obvious I am taking pictures while making eye contact. That’s part of what helps me feel my way into finding the photographs. There’s a few I haven’t taken because they felt too intrusive, and some I’ve taken but only shared with the subjects.
To read the full interview, which was conducted in November 2020, head over to https://photomonitor.co.uk/interview/melanie-stidolph-last-summer/
Image: 50.2034° N, 5.4198° W, 2019 (Gwithian, Cornwall) by Melanie Stidolph
WOUTER DE BROECK, CO-EDITOR OF NU, INTERVIEWS DEBORAH SIEBENHOFER, IMPROV COACH AND NU CONTRIBUTOR
What do we know about improvisation theatre? That it goes way back to the Commedia dell'arte for example, that most Asian dance theatre makes use of improvisation techniques and that there was a specific course created for it, in the 1950s in Chicago, when the Second City Company started to work with impromptu scenes based on the ideas of the audience. Eventually this developed into so-called 'theatre sports', improv performances that are built around various competitive 'game' pretexts that are judged by the audience.
It is this kind of improv theatre that the NU contributor Deborah Siebenhofer is practicing and coaching. In this podcast, she talks about how to create freedom to improvise in your head, how trust can lead to that freedom and many more and unknown aspects of the art to go on stage without knowing what exactly you are going to do there.
December 2020
AN INTERVIEW BETWEEN WOUTER DE BROECK, CO-EDITOR OF NU, AND JAMES BACCHI-ANDREOLI, ARTIST AND NU CONTRIBUTOR
The conversation focuses on the ideas behind James Bacchi-Andreoli’s linocuts in response to James Peake’s poetry, and also discusses the idea of the ‘periphery’ in reference to some of the other contributors in the current issue of NU.
Wouter De Broeck It is great to have some of your work in our first edition of NU. One of our aims with NU was to act as a platform, a place for people to connect. You took this idea to a very concrete level by creating new artworks that react directly to that of your friend, the poet James Peake.
James Bacchi-Andreoli Firstly, thank you for the opportunity to be part of this exciting publication. When James, or Jim as I call him, showed me some of his new poems, I was very excited about the mood and vision of his work. Touching on ideas about time and memory (among many other thoughts and images), his visions of spaces conjured in the poems, whether physical or virtual, immediately spoke to me. As with his previous collection, ‘Reaction Time of Glass[1] ’, I felt that there were tangible motifs and feelings that could be expressed visually through the print medium. I read the poems numerous times and images would reveal themselves at different paces, some quickly, while others would evolve slowly.
I had been to the Dulwich Picture Gallery last year to see ‘Cutting Edge’, a brilliant show which included well-known modernist printmakers such as Cyril Power and Sybil Andrews, and this propelled me to investigate the lino print process further. Also, the memorable Robert Motherwell ‘Works on Paper’ exhibition (at the Bernard Jacobsen Gallery, London) came to mind. Motherwell, in his later and increasingly gestural work of the 1960s and 70s, had responded to a series of texts and poems, such as James Joyce’s Ulysses, through printmaking and drawing and this body of work on paper became ‘notable for its enigmatic brevity’[2]. Motherwell had also been very interested in the modernist poet Charles Baudelaire, whose vision of modern art was ‘the ephemeral [and] the fugitive’.[3] I hoped I could approach the print medium with a pared-down but energetic quality.
‘I read the poems numerous times and images would reveal themselves at different paces, some quickly, while others would evolve slowly.’ (James Bacchi-Andreoli)
WDB In what way did you connect to the poetry?
JBA I thought it would be good to have some form of fixed starting point for these new works and to have a set of rules to give myself - such as only using black and white, only using single lines and limiting myself to a number of lines per image. I have often found that in many ways restrictions bring freedom in the creative process. I started by picking key phrases or ideas from various parts of the poems and then made some preliminary designs and sketches. Whilst this initially seemed like a good idea, it became too illustrative and too laboured. In frustration, I decided to furiously eradicate the images with more intense mark-making and whilst this gave the work a more vigorous quality, it did not seem to express my feelings when reading the poems.
So I decided to read the poems again afresh and attempt to encapsulate and express a general mood or feeling. I recalled the power of the instinctive approach that Howard Hodgkin for example uses, a painter I am a great fan of, and the fact that he does not do preliminary sketches, but recalls and keeps alive first-hand experiences in the paintings. I too wanted to aim for a purer experience devoid of obvious representation but enough to allow the viewer to make their own connections.
‘I started by picking key phrases or ideas from various parts of the poems and then made some preliminary designs and sketches. Whilst this initially seemed like a good idea, it became too illustrative and too laboured.’
Another connection and inspiration was Cy Twombly’s art. Jim and I have always had a shared love for Cy Twombly’s art, his immediacy and the way he attempts to decode an idea in front of you, with his strong and impulsive scrawling. A few years ago we actually visited two of Twombly’s major shows together - at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and then Brandhorst in Munich in 2017 where you Wouter were also there! For me the primal quality in his work is something I enjoy very much and as defined by Twombly himself in his 1957 manifesto, 'each line now is the actual experience with its own innate history. It does not illustrate—it is the sensation of its own realisation.’[4]
WDB I remember vividly the visit to the Brandhorst, especially because of Cy Twombly’s impressive Lepanto cycle. The whole spectrum of emotions of a sea battle splashes out of the canvas. How did you turn this into fertile ground for your creation?
JBA In making the prints, I considered notions of repetition, marks, traces, shapes, micro-views such as envisaging the texture of the threads in the ‘rutted carpet’ that Jim talks about, or the tyre surfaces that are evoked in The Resort – possibly details the eye might fleetingly focus on whilst passing through the mental and physical spaces one inhabits whilst in the poems. With this mark-making and the different speeds at which it was actioned, perhaps there is an attempt to grasp and notate that which is slipping away, or, coming back into focus. Linocut printing can often be seen as a laborious and repetitive medium. I wanted the mark-making to be free by using as limited means as possible, through stripped-down compositions and allowing the negative space to be as important as the white lines that are revealed. I really like the schematic directness of black and white. In the end I made about 50 different linocuts and finally, together with your co-editor Stefanie (who is also my partner!), narrowed the selection down to the four that are in NU - companions to Jim’s poems but certainly not representations. I decided to title this body of work ‘Notations’, a word that has often been used in reference to the work of Cy Twombly. I liked this word because it suggests a form of sketching something out, an abbreviated expression of something that is fleeting or has a resonance.
‘In making the prints, I considered notions of repetition, marks, traces, shapes, micro-views, possibly details the eye might fleetingly focus on whilst passing through the mental and physical spaces one inhabits whilst in the poems. With this mark-making and the different speeds at which it was actioned, perhaps there is an attempt to grasp and notate that which is slipping away, or, coming back into focus.’
'Notation 18', 2020, Lino print on cartridge paper, 20 x 15 cm
WDB Can we consider these two separate creations with a third layer? Or should we rather consider the dynamics of two interacting disciplines, each with their specific creative potential for a reader/spectator? Reacting to pre existential works can be very enriching. Did the fact that it is the work of a friend give any extra dimension to it?
JBA ‘Both artistic expressions become companions, passing images back and forth- a dialogue waiting to be continued by reader and viewer.’[5]
I feel that an extra layer of significance and strength (to my prints at least) has been achieved through the partnership. The fact Jim is a friend has enabled over the last 10-15 years a creative dialogue to take place. We have had countless discussions about poetry, art, the truculence of Twombly, film and the ups and downs of the creative process and have collaborated before. There are not many situations artistically where you get the chance to respond so directly to someone else’s work and it is the friendship that allowed this to happen and a mutual respect for the ideas being put forward. Ultimately though, I was faced with words on a page and I wanted to tackle the essence of them without too much deliberation, almost ‘automatically’,[6] to maintain through the prints a ‘first-hand’ experience of the texts.
Often I find very exciting work comes from collaboration: directions and results are arrived at that could not have been foreseen. In my job of teaching art, I also see the dialogue between teacher and student, and, student and student, as a form of positive collaboration where ideas are thrown back and forth. The juxtaposing of different ideas in NU is clearly a very good example of how different creative platforms can operate side by side and create new partnerships. Having read the magazine a few times now, the strength is both the variety but also the fact that everyone has an individual voice even though they are brought together through the similar concept of ‘habitat’. Every time I have read it, I have certainly gained something from the re-visit.
WDB Are there connections you see with other works in NU issue01? How would you d describe that connection?
JBA Although 'habitat' was the initial starting point for NU, I also felt when reflecting on the contributions, an additional word that came to mind was 'periphery': many of the works address (not solely) the idea of spaces or places and ideas that exist on the margins of society, the edge of conurbations or the limits of the perceptible: mental spaces on the borderline between the conscious and unconscious[7]. A text that I have always been drawn to is Bernard Tschumi’s chapter ‘Questions on Space’ in Architecture and Disjunction[8]. He attempts to unravel ideas about how space is occupied or inhabited through a series of numerous proposals, for example,
‘If the understanding of all possible spaces includes social and mental space without any distinction, is the distinction between living, perceiving, and conceiving space a necessary condition of that understanding?’
Through the first issue of NU, we are presented with a variety of spaces that we are probably aware of on the periphery of our mind but are made more invitingly concrete through the text and images presented. I think the contributors are also processing the habitats they find themselves in.
‘An additional word that came to mind was 'periphery': many of the works address (not solely) the idea of spaces or places and ideas that exist on the margins of society, the edge of conurbations or the limits of the perceptible: mental spaces on the borderline between the conscious and unconscious.’
WDB Periphery can mean both a limitrophe place/edge or a 'marginal' position. While the latter is clearly used in negative contexts, the former is a neutral description. Would you say that the contributions to NU are circumventing this in order to try to grasp what is habitat? Is that outsider position a condition for that? The contributors of NU have claimed their territories to explore and so invite the reader to unravel or define the spaces presented. Could the spaces the contributors have documented or used as a backdrop for their narratives, now be called a ‘place’?
JBA The main reference that came to mind when considering this question was ‘Non-spaces’[9], an essay by the French philosopher Marc Auge. He discusses how ‘in-between’ spaces such as walkways and airport lounges have no real concept of ‘place’ due to their transient nature. I would extend this notion of the transient into the spaces depicted in NU, such as the refugee camps Frank Willems worked at in Grand-Synthe, the traces of human activity in the woods on the edge of the urban space that Danny Treacy is investigating, the internal and external landscapes of emotion that Igor Moritz captures indoors or the locations that are on the edge of our memory as witnessed in Jim’s poetry. This is not to say that the fleeting, transient or ‘marginal’ is not significant, it is more a state or space that must be ‘captured’ but through its very nature remains difficult to define. I feel new or current ideas of habitats and spaces are being confronted by the contributors in NU and the power of the work is that it allows the reader to also consider what these spaces might conjure in relation to their own history and experience. Interestingly, the word ‘limit’ comes from the Latin for ‘border’ and ‘limitrophe’, whilst it has historically been a French diplomatic word for a frontier dating back to the Roman times, for me conjures this physical or mental idea of being on the edge of something that is perhaps unknown.
‘One can obviously create new connections to a space or place, and the contributors in NU have, I believe, through walking, inhabiting or circumventing new spaces, put forward their experiences for the reader to ruminate on.’
In my own work, I have always considered how we occupy physical and mental space and so I also thought of Michael De Certeau’s book ‘The Practice of Everyday Life’[10], in which he discusses how people can influence environments around them by everyday actions: Individuals create meaning when walking through a space. I also liked the way De Certeau defines the verb "to walk" as an action of "lack[ing] a place”. Many of the spaces described in NU have involved some kind of journey (whether mental or physical) to find or experience thresholds, marginal positions or peripheries. Irina De Herdt’s, journey in ‘City Belts in Vialand’ is a form of pyschogeographic delineation. Your walk, Wouter, to the now approved lithium mine in ‘Montalegre’, as with De Herdt, seems to have a ritualistic quality to it, but reveals that ‘Nature’ is under threat: this peripheral area has now been adulterated and the future is uncertain. Danny Treacy, as ‘post-ethnographer’[11] is ‘drawn to territories where people gather as there is nowhere else to go’[12]. He exposes the remnants and traces left. On the edge of a conurbation as well, Kathrin Blum (in her essay ‘My Home the Forest’), has found stability, and quietly confronts this innate desire to feel part of something, to have a sense of belonging.
Ultimately, I was left thinking what happens when spaces on the periphery that are not meant to be inhabited by people, industry or activity become occupied, even just for a short time? Do the inhabitants or the ‘artists as ethnographers’ take on a new identity?
One can obviously create new connections to a space or place, and the contributors in NU have, I believe, through walking, inhabiting or circumventing new spaces, put forward their experiences for the reader to ruminate on.
With this in mind, maybe it is good to end on a question by Bernard Tschumi:
‘Does the experience of space determine the space of experience?’[13]
December 2020
[1] James Peake, 2019, Two Rivers Press
[2] Sam Cornish, Introduction to Robert Motherwell, ‘Works on Paper’, originally published 11.10.2011, Bernard Jacobsen Gallery
[3] Ibid
[4] The Art Newspaper, ‘How to read a Cy Twombly’, Kenneth Baker, 28.11.2017
[5] Stefanie Braun in NU issue 01, September, 2020
[6] The idea of ‘accessing material from the unconscious mind’, as outlined by Andre Breton in the 1924 Surrrealist Manifesto referenced from the Tate website.
[7] In reference to one of my favourite exhibition catalogues, ‘Rites of Passage: Art for the End of The Century’, 1995, Tate Publications by Stuart Morgan and Frances Morris. In the introduction it mentions the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep. He coined the term ‘the liminal’ (from the Latin word līmen, meaning "a threshold”) in his book ‘Rites of Passage’ (1909). This concept in my mind can be extended to a marginal or peripheral place where a new identity might be discovered or be in the process of transformation.
[8] MIT Press, 1994
[9] ‘Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity’ by Marc Auge, Le Seuil, 1992, Verso
[10] It was originally published in French as ‘L'invention du quotidien. Vol. 1, Arts de faire' (1980). The 1984 English translation is by Steven Rendall.
[11] After the essay by Hal Foster, ‘Artist as Ethnographer’ in Return of the Real MIT press, 1996 / annotation by Brandon Hopkins (Theories of Media, Winter 2003). The essay considers that reflexivity is essential for the artist but also there must be a balancing act between having too much distance from the ‘other’ or subject, or, to little.
[12] Danny Treacy for NU Magazine Issue 01, Introduction to ‘Collective Territories’, 2020
[13] 2.72 p58, ‘Architecture and Disjuncture’, Bernard Tschumi, 1994