Like Footwork in a Boxing Match: Refusal as Movement in Cultural Labour – An Interview with Saba Innab

 

In this conversation, Samira Makki, the co-founder of Divesting Magazine, reflects with artist, architect, and researcher Saba Innab on the urgency of refusal and its possible iterations as cultural labour. The exchange emphasises the particularities of Innab’s practice while addressing larger questions on the time of resistance and its futures, liberatory approaches to knowledge production, and divesting as a political proposition. Makki and Innab’s conversation, translated by Rayyan Abdelkhalek, will lead to a feature in the charter issue of Divesting Magazine. 

Samira Makki (SM): Upon encountering your work, I am left with the impression that, instead of delivering verdicts, you thoughtfully attend to the intricacies of the material at hand, which in turn demands that the reader take heed of these complexities. This process-based approach, which becomes methodical, is evinced in the forms that repeat across your writings and drawings, such as lines, fringes, and scenes. In your capacity as an architect, artist, and researcher, how did this method come into being?

Saba Innab (SI): This methodology, if we want to call it that, is a way of reading and seeing that manifests in the making of the work. I find myself working with a mental map, which sometimes resurfaces in the work exactly as it is, at other times it becomes necessary background noise, invisible labour, or a reading of something else. It is rooted in years of reading and analysing space as a matrix of meanings and signifiers. On one level, you deal with the material and the immaterial; on another, you try not only to read the unspoken but also to give form to the irrepresentable, while undoing tools of representation such as maps and models. By irrepresentable, I mean not what is left out but rather what cannot have a specific form.

My methodology emerged as a rebellion against how urban research, its history and futurity, are taught and written. A material way of revolting against ‘critical’ academic ways of questioning, which tend to cater to an abstraction of justice and liberation, or reproducing the same systems in question. In my practice, there is also a lot of movement between the disciplines – like footwork in a boxing match. The canons I know and try to subvert belong to architecture as a whole: from its theorisation to its capital manifestation in the built environment and its socio-political ramifications. There is also the architect side I inhabit sometimes, so how to understand the implications of this role? How the work exists and what space it occupies is another question: this tension feeds into the process.

SM: One thread across your writings that I would like you to unpack is the idea of abeyance: first, in its temporal aspect or what you refer to as ‘permanent temporariness’ ( المؤقّتيات الدائمة); and second, in terms of how the abeyance in/of time activates pathways of knowing that are yet to materialise.1 How can we invoke any sense of futurity today in the midst of a genocide without entertaining defeatist tropes that have already declared ‘the end of time’? Here, I am thinking about how your writing explores the tunnel as a form of knowledge that at once marks and is itself marked by the time of the resistance.

SI: Deconstructing defeat as a condition for liberation is different from transforming defeat into a structure of thought and as an estuary for political action. Without this distinction, we see an incomprehensible time where values and meaning are muddled. This structure of thought goes beyond the symbolic immediacy of defeat to become a space for subjugation. Most criticism tends to reinforce the outcome of the confrontation with, and resistance to, the Zionist enemy as a defeat and as an end of time, a fait accompli. What are the implications of this, given that there are still resistance fighters and people resisting on the ground in Gaza, despite the insurmountable grief? Similarly, thinking about the future and futurity is an empty endeavour unless it makes Gaza its centre, and not a set of associations, such as: ‘imagine this is your city’ or ‘imagine this is your child’. This cannot be the only logic that drives us. What is happening in Gaza is a manifestation of the new world in which we all have to live.

When we look at suspended time, ‘permanent temporariness’ is a term I use to refer to the relationship between ‘dwelling’ and Palestinian displacement and refugeehood. It is a structure of waiting that, once viewed from this perspective, becomes a condition for return. Permanence is dependent on the structure of the building, while temporariness is dependent on the state of the dwelling awaiting return. Through this lens, I looked at Amman, one station in my family’s trajectory and consequently my own, and at Nahr al-Bared, where I worked as an architect during the camp’s reconstruction process. Between the two places lies a wide spectrum of permanent temporariness: spaces collected as a realm resistant to permanence and are in constant confrontation with the nation-state, national identities, and the question of who plans, who builds, and who dwells.

The model becomes the carrier of this realm not as a mock-up or prototype. It strips a spatial moment down to complex layers of references to building materials and know-how, class, labour, memory, and regional references. The Euclidean space is constructed as a ‘perspective’. This approach takes shape in Al Rahhalah (2016).2 

In contrast, I view the tunnel not as a contradiction but as a resurgence.3 I imagine the tunnel as a transformation of the same stolen body and image of the dome in the traditional Palestinian peasant’s house. The dome’s curve in a depopulated or destroyed dwelling by the ongoing Nakba becomes the arch of the tunnel. One became an image, the other is the movement and the return to that image. This hybrid constellation is a knowledge that renews itself against its own abduction faster than it can be used by the coloniser. My interest in the tunnel stems from the horizons it carries through this structure, and the meanings of what is above ground and in the belly of the land.

SM: Over the past couple of years, divesting has become an increasingly pressing question to cultural workers, in relation to, yet also beyond, its economic dimensions. Many of us are reconsidering what we already know about existing models of divesting and imagining other ways that might require us to adjust our terms of engagement with divesting as a notion and practice. You have previously questioned the efficacy of ‘rethinking’ and ‘unlearning’ as critical tools of refusal, which might spawn liberatory models of knowledge production. You remind us that these tools might not bring about the required breach in the structure they claim to disavow. How do you read this crisis? Is it a question of finding adequate forms, or is it a question of scale, or both? Might it be something else entirely?

SI: My contestation with the concept of rethinking as a liberatory approach stems from the constant need to return it to the ‘original’ thought in question. This return reinforces the intellectual structure of defeat as a space of subjugation. When we say alternative knowledge – alternative to what? This establishes a hidden hierarchy and immerses us in a binary. The aim is to find a language that doesn’t cling to the systems that generate its absence.

It’s essential to consider the simultaneous separation and rupture this moment offers. What do we do when we are certain that no individual emancipation is possible, even if it seems possible and attainable? What do we lose when only individual deliverance is sought? The goal is not to judge production in the age of carnage as immoral; rather, it is necessary to recognise and review the extractive and utilitarian relationships between the artist or knowledge producers and their subject matter at all stages of the work. On the one hand, how can we reflect on the relationship between artists and institutions, or artists and the market? On the other hand, how do we read the insistence on solidifying the status quo (business as usual) as a matter of continuity for the sake of continuity in the absolute sense? The concept of resilience is practised as both a manifestation of this continuity and as the only political act possible. I find this puzzling.

The early days of the pandemic and global lockdown confronted us harshly with our precarity within systems of production and exploitation. A complete militarised standstill was imposed on us, punctuated by successive shocks. This prompted many of us to consider breaking free from a world that tightens its grip on the most vulnerable. In the early days of the genocide, it was clear to many that ‘the world must come to a halt’. Yet this cannot happen without organising so that those facing severe precarity are not exposed to overwhelming harm. Given the absence of labour and union organising or mutual aid, this feeling did not materialise into organised action. However, organic networks did form quickly when the Zionist-American aggression against Beirut and Lebanon intensified. I see a possibility of learning from the organised solidarity practised here and mirroring it in the circles of cultural workers. My relationship to my work was disrupted after the Al-Aqsa flood, which is natural as it relates to questions of meaning and purpose. It has become more manageable after I realised that my question was not accurate – it is not about meaning in general, but rather about the meaning of devotion and indebtedness to blood, to the martyrs, to every blown-up roof, every devoured tree, every fighter, every person that resists. It is about defining one’s work through this devotion and how it is directed to create cracks in the form of cultural production and the churning of power and capital accumulation, while continuously placing those to whom we are indebted at the centre.

SM: In your work for Transition Exhibition (2021), you asked: ‘How to think of revealing without exposing?’ How does this commitment figure in your practice, as a writer and artist, as you refrain from trivialising absences, take issue with the logic of proof, and very much challenge the strict divide between appearance and disappearance?

SI: I think this method started unconsciously. As simple as it may seem, it’s respect. Respect for the subject and oneself. This requires being aware of the forms of abstraction or extraction any position may entail. At the micro level, Transition Exhibition is an attempt to confront the colonial legacy of Karl Schmidt-Rottluff’s collection, which originated largely from former German colonised lands.4 Like other modernist artists, Schmidt-Rottluff appropriated the formal characteristics of artifacts from colonised contexts as motifs for his art. It’s ironic to view this work after the Al Aqsa flood, not only because I have removed myself from specific circles in the cultural field, but also because attempts to confront and problematise decolonial discourse in relation to Palestine always reveal layers of violent abstraction and extraction, which we have long been aware of. Yet the present moment has revealed another threshold of this violence. The exhibition questions the extent to which it can serve as a transitional model for its objects, in preparation for return or restitution, while troubling the history of collecting and display. I was invited to propose a spatial intervention that hosts the collection, a display that questions exhibiting methods and hierarchies that reaffirm existing frames of violence. I pondered: How can we recognise the colonial uprootedness and appropriation of an object, while recognising that, for decades, this object has been present only as far as the colonial canon permits? How can we recognise this violence without reproducing it through exhibiting methods? How can we think beyond the anthropological gaze, which is a fundamentally colonial tool?

Ethnographic colonial collections, museums, and states are increasingly being required to confront their coloniality across a spectrum of commitments. At best, colonial history is dealt with by acknowledging the violence an object was subjected to and addressing the how of acquisition, which cements the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised. The shortcoming of such an approach lies in the position of inquiry: colonial history is treated as a closed chapter. To interrogate this violent abstraction, one must recognise how ‘past’ colonial structures metamorphosed into forms of neocoloniality, in connection to ongoing settler colonialism, dispossession, extractivism, and ethnic cleansing in the present, and how these systems maintain each other. This set of questions shaped the display and its structure of controlled visibility, where hiding takes up more space than showing. The collection ‘observes’ the viewer as a confrontation: the viewer becomes the object.

On the macro level, we can learn from the Palestinian Prisoners and the camp as well as the tunnel as an abolitionist model and a form of embedded knowledge. They are all essential lenses through which I read invisibility and visibility. I can trace this method to my site-specific work, Time Is Measured by Distance (2016), at the Marrakech Biennale. I tend to shift from the inner to the outer in a back-and-forth movement. The domestic became public, then the public became the private. From the dwelling to its impossibility, to movement and its impossibility. I was thinking with the verse ‘بضدها تتبين الأشياء’ (Things are better known by their contraries) in how we recognise movement when we are still. A gate is a gate because it can be closed. Analysing architectural elements as concepts – stairs, bridges, arches, and finally the tunnel – as movement and the impossibility of movement, marinated and resurfaced in other formats. How to think of tools of representation as tools of exposure? This lens became a way of questioning: can a tool produced from an epistemic/power structure liberate itself from the system that produced it? These systems vary: from the legal system and evidentiary logic, to academia, archives, and abstraction, to name a few.

SM: This brings me to testimony as a form of political expression. Testimonies, in a personal form, have surfaced online among many cultural workers through withdrawal statements from festivals, exhibitions, projects, and refusing grants or jobs associated with Zionists. How do you relate to this tactic, and do you think it can lead to an outcome beyond personal deliverance, such as collective acts of withdrawal that provide a more critical insight into the question of labour? I am thinking here of Saidiya Hartman – whom you reference – who writes about fugitivity and flight against confession. I do not wish to negate the significance of such public statements. I believe that they can create a sense of affinity and trust between people, but I am wondering if testimony is a first step towards activating more clandestine forms of organising; or on the flipside, might it be an expression of an organising already in the making?

SI: To answer your question, we must deconstruct this process of withdrawal. I view crafting a testimony as political labour that relies on precise language linked to concrete politics. Crafting the why and how of withdrawals creates a base of collective understanding of the battle and how one relates to it from their position. Withdrawal is also an act of refusal and disruption. To refuse that which has been refused to you, according to Fred Moten, which is essential here. There is a weight to withdrawing labour from contexts claiming criticality, but that are only performative. Withdrawing labour must not be only reactive, but pre-emptive, to build different forms of knowledge production against the capital accumulation of such cycles of production.

In 2021, ‘A Letter against Apartheid’ went viral during the war on Gaza. This letter instigated a serious discussion on the term ‘apartheid’ in the Palestinian context. A few cultural workers and artists didn’t sign it, questioning the use of the term and how it jeopardised discursively unnegotiable demands in the Palestinian struggle, such as the right of return, and how the term either refers to 48 lands or 67 lands separately. Rejecting the language of the letter was misunderstood as claiming a higher moral ground. By foregrounding the term, the essential tactic of drawing parallels between struggles is reduced to constructing an appeal to the Western context, a diluted version of a struggle as an end goal. This discussion is a perfect example of where tactic overpowers the substance of the matter; a settler colonial occupation will naturally use apartheid.

There is another statement that became a work of its own. I withdrew from the exhibition Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915–2015 after learning of funding from the Israeli Embassy in London when its logo suddenly appeared on the art institution’s website. The withdrawal was a swift no-brainer. No public statements were made, save for a few procedural public clarifications, as I had been promoted as part of the show. For a few years, I kept thinking what refusal and withdrawal in this context meant. I was eager to be in proximity and in conversation with a school of thought I felt adjacent to, Russian Constructivism, as the show explored the relation between abstraction and politics from 1915 to 2015, referencing Kazimir Malevich’s square. This questioning became a love letter addressed to Malevich, to think of the missed encounter between us, while also assuming or acknowledging what blind spots Malevich’s personhood, legacy, and the epistemic structure he belongs to, could have carried towards Palestine. The letter became the basis of my solo show Station Point (2019), a technical term referring to a point on a plan from which a perspective is constructed. Anything behind this point, or on its sides, would be invisible in the drawing. Such practices predate the Al Aqsa flood, but what is missing, as you say, is organising, or what exceeds the announcement of the death of language, and the collapsing of all masks and apparatuses, from international law to its subsequent evidentiary logic, which are born dead on arrival. Such declarations become the labour itself; therefore, the declarations remain abstract. There is no lack of critical outlooks among cultural workers, but the situation remains extremely individualistic and collectively fragile.

This fragility revealed itself when discussions around ‘labour’ and who would identify themselves as ‘workers’ grew. With these terms being challenged, clear actions of striking, or withdrawing one’s labour, are also challenged. I mean challenged by the ‘workers’ themselves rather than concepts in the field, as this is another issue. It is already complicated to think of a strike in a gig-based economy, or the kinds of disruption that can happen, which are totally legitimate angles to tackle. What surfaces in these discussions is who can 'afford' to withdraw, and I reject this premise as being the catalyst for action. I believe structures of support could be created if the idea of withdrawing labour were not so ridiculed. The question of withdrawing labour is not pegged to whether or not it’s ethical to ‘make art’. However, it must not turn a blind eye to how the art world functions, between the appearances of abstract critique it creates, and its structural connection to privilege, accumulation of wealth, and extraction. Having said that, there is an accumulation of comradely instances that are leading somewhere.