Objectification— João Figueiredo
Objectification was first conceived as a workshop for the educators enrolled in the I am landscape| frontier (2019/2020) program. Its starting point was a James Baldwin quote taken from I am not your negro (2016): “What white people have to do, is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place, because I'm not a nigger, I'm a man, but if you think I'm a nigger, it means you need it”. Taking up Baldwin’s challenge, the workshop proposes a quick guided tour through more than twenty centuries of ‘Western’ Judeo-Christian culture, situating present day racism against black people in its historical longue durée – and asking: “what next?”
The method adopted to structure this seemingly impossible task is drawn from Aby Warburg’s famous incomplete work, Mnemosyne Atlas (1924-29). Following Aby’s lead, a number of photographic reproductions of iconic Art pieces, photos of decorative bric-a-brac, stills from popular shows and movies and educational material (from colonial propaganda, to present day textbook illustrations) will be ordered into three “panels” while discussing its placement with the participants. The three emergent ‘constellations’ (Walter Benjamin) will hopefully illuminate some of the different cultural threads that constitute present day racist imagery, clarifying and confronting the reasons “white people” might have to feel emotionally and intellectually attached to them.
From Aristotle’s dreams of fully automated slaves to Michel Serres’ and René Girard’s theories about scapegoating and sacrifice, while also mentioning William Bunge’s Nuclear War Atlas (1983) and Ephraim Lessing’s Laocoon: An essay upon the limits of painting and poetry (1766), ‘high’ theory will be playfully mixed with popular imagery.