Re-visioning #3: A conversation with Lina Issa
This is the third in a roving and open-ended series of conversations in the context of the interruption of everything by COVID-19. For me, in March 2020, I was about to set out on a 220 mile walk on foot, collecting and sharing acts towards and visions of a positive future society. In the deep uncertainty of the present moment, I find myself, like many others, embarking on different trajectories of unlearning, destabilizing and re-visioning. These conversations are part of that process. They begin through some convergence of ideas or space. Transcribing them is not making art but a way of temporarily living inside the ideas they contain, an act of deep listening. Publishing them is not exhibiting them but extending the invitation.
Lina Issa is an artist who works and lives between The Netherlands, Sicily & Lebanon. She works alone and in collaboration with others, in a range of media, to explore tensions between the personal and the universal. As an immigrant, her performative work is inspired by issues of place, otherness and cultural identity. Using ideas of physical displacement, Lina puts herself in situations that create the conditions for the unfolding of new relationships and real and imagined narratives. In her work, Lina questions the ways we construct and (re)enact our subjectivities. She was recently invited to make work in the context of COVID-19 by Studio Rizoma. The text that resulted from that work can be read in full here . I really encourage anyone reading this to go on and read it, it’s a beautiful piece.
IN: Lina, to introduce our connection, last October we met in Sicily, where you introduced your practice to a group of artists and cultural workers gathered in Palermo. We will delve into your work but first, I wanted to invite you into this series of conversations because earlier in the year you shared two pieces of writing — by Kuba Szreder for L’Internationale and Max Haiven for Arts Of The Working Class — that imagined the potential for a post-Covid emancipation of the arts. Although they were written in April and May last year, so much and so little has happened since, and I wanted to return to those early days of the pandemic and see how or if things have changed. How do those articles feel to you now?
LI: Both, for me, outlined the potential for a sense of comradeship. They spoke to me of how artists could align with others who share precarious working and living conditions, and how it might benefit artists to conceive themselves as part of a wider social structure and class. They envisage a precarious class of people that need to be in solidarity with each other in order to make any change within a system of capitalism and exploitation. So nothing has changed about that. And, in fact, these were my thoughts before too, the pandemic has only brought them closer. The urgency of the writing struck me at the time, and I still feel and share the revolutionary spirit.
IN: I re-read them too, but it felt to me that the revolutionary portal of those early pandemic moments had closed up again. The writing excited me at the time, especially the question of how we as artists connect with people who aren’t artists. I think very few artists do that successfully. For socially engaged(1) artists, the tension between establishing and maintaining that connection, and at the same time having to present as art this activity that doesn’t look like art, is extremely difficult. Most of the time, the art audience will never know whether the work on the ground was good, because it is the successful artwork that is presented.
LI: I never found myself caught up in the machinery of this art world, neither in the production of the work, nor in the way it connects to its audience. These types of relation are not part of my world, nor of the places that I believe in. Sometimes my work appears there, but it always feels as an attempt to intervene or leave a ‘note’. I try to build an intimacy that has no place in the art machine, so I keep fighting to preserve that space.
IN: There’s been a growing conversation over the last couple of years around the failures and pressures of the process of the work, which get sidelined in the presentation of ‘the successful artwork’. In your writing about the work you’re doing at the moment, you engage these tensions head-on. It would be good to hear you talk about that.
LI: Ok, so I’ve just written a piece about this work for Pandemos, a project by Studio Rizoma. The piece is called ‘A Space to Hold’. Here in Palermo, there is an abundance of fresh fruit and vegetables that is grown and harvested very locally, by migrant workers under terrible conditions. During the lockdown, as I sat at home eating three meals every day, I began to feel uncomfortable - a physical pain in my stomach - when I thought of the workers picking these fruits and vegetables so that they may continue to uninterruptedly arrive at my plate. I felt so disconnected from them, despite being so closely connected to them, not only by distance but because they have literally picked the food that is in front of me. We are in a relationship but not one that we manage or choose, so I wanted to try and interrupt that dynamic.
During the lockdown a new law came into being — a ‘sanatoria’ that meant some of the workers could work legally for six months — but it was made without consideration of whether it would actually benefit them, which it did not. I wanted to go to a camp of Senegalese workers near Palermo to sit with them and talk about this law — to ‘eat’ it together, to digest it, and maybe to imagine an improved version of it. I received a small amount of funding so when the lockdown finished I went there with my partner and 9 month old daughter to propose a way of working together by giving them the money. I proposed to pay them what they earn picking to talk with me.
IN: Did you pay yourself?
LI: No. I was also trying to recognise the problems that arise from this kind of work as I was doing it, to be idealistic but also realistic, and to respect and not create problems. My work is about how to create conditions for an encounter, how to establish relationships, and how to do it with care. I want to ask how the systems I represent impact on others? Can I dismantle those systems, can I transform them, by forming relationships? And how can these encounters create alternative methods to the dominant systems of knowledge creation? For example, what knowledge is held in the body?
IN: So did you do what you set out to do? Did you eat the law?
LI: We could not eat it. It was, how do you say it, past the date. It was inedible. Also, these are people who are outside the law in any case, so in fact it is the Italian people who need to eat it.
IN: And what about your questions, or is it too soon to think about answers?
LI: In Italian law these workers are described as ‘Braccanti’. which means arms, referring to manual labour. They are dehumanised in this way, so I began by asking about what else their arms have done, what memories do they hold? It became clear that they are displaced even from themselves, through the stress of the journeys that have brought them here, so that access to memory and a sense of identity is not available to them. And here they are now, in a society that reduces them to ‘arms’. One man said ‘Give us time, these are places in our minds that we don’t have access to anymore.’
IN: That’s such a powerful insight. You yourself are a migrant, a Lebanese woman in Sicily. Where are you in this work?
LI: The migrant identity is forever migrating. I found a way through my work to constantly displace myself, and to make the pain of that, because it is constantly painful, a generative process. These processes ultimately bring me home to myself, but I gain ground each time. There is a desire in this work to approach this idea collectively, but it is too early for that, or even to know whether it will continue. I felt a fascination from these men around my questions, but also a silence. It is like he said — ‘give us time’. For me the question now is not where I am but what is the work? I can consider the work in artistic terms, of course, but what does that mean to them?
IN: I know that your work, like mine, is very much concerned with sharing physical space. One of the questions that I keep trying to work my thinking around, although it is very difficult and also quite painful, is this question of working collectively. Of course, it concerns not only the great majority of socially engaged artists, but also grassroots activists, for whom being together, occupying space, is at the heart of everything. Because these conversations operate on one level as an attempt by me to re-negotiate my own practice, I’m interested to hear how you are managing the ongoing impossibility of being together.
LI: Well actually, becoming a mother and being with Luna this past year, this distance has been more natural, and I haven’t so much felt the pain of losing it yet. But I also think that it might be a useful way to shift the role of the artist. For example, what if it were to shift the emphasis away from working with large groups, to working by phone, by writing, by drawing with just one or two people? What if this could be an opportunity to shift our position, and the position of the podiums we use, away from the centre, to offer others and other spaces the possibility to emerge? Probably there are many other ways than ‘our ways’ — we just need to look and listen well.
IN: Do you see opportunity for these connections in digital space?
LI: I have a very intimate relationship with voices, especially those coming through the phone, since it is the space of communication at a distance with my family. I am excited about the new spaces of multiple voices all gathered to listen and to speak that have become a norm since the pandemic have started. I am sceptical about the camera option though, where we need to perform a certain presence all the time, but this might also be interesting to explore from a performative perspective. However, I am more excited about the collective sonar experience through these digital and internet platforms, the seemingly slower rhythm it has, and the possibility to listen deeper it offers. I never thought the digital could make me emotional, but hearing the background sounds in the room of someone who has forgotten to mute himself during a meeting, and then asking everyone to unmute their microphones when it was my turn to speak, and instead of speaking inviting everyone to listen was really beautiful after months of digital meetings’ exhaustion. The intimate seeped through and insisted on being included.
IN: And with intimacy comes vulnerability and risk. In Palermo, you presented your works ‘Where we are not’ and ‘What if, if I take your place?’, in which you literally put yourself in someone else’s shoes, or someone else in yours. By taking the risk of putting you the artist and you the person into such an intimate process, you create strength out of vulnerability. I spent five years working with just one individual to make my last film Acts Of Quiet Resistance. Having spent three years shooting and working on the film, it began to look like it wasn’t going to happen, because of parallel tumultuous events in both our lives. So when it finally came together two years later, it felt such an achievement. As the sole subject of the film, and co-director, Michael had so much more direct input into the process than in any other project of mine. Because the borders between our roles were so porous, I learnt so much more about how my work appears and relates.
I also think it’s interesting to consider what working with very small numbers of people means for social artforms. We’re pushed towards working with as many people as possible by funding platforms, so you could see rejection of that as a logical step for those who wish to resist the way in which socially engaged practice has become institutionalized, instrumentalized, and even weaponized against itself by major art institutions, the state and corporations such as housing associations and building contractors over recent years. I’m interested in the relationship with intimacy in your work.
LI: I would like to think of the spaces I create with my work as the limbs of others; spaces that are dependent on how others hold, or drop, what is encountered. They are spaces where I would not ask anything of others if I am not ready to offer it myself; where the personal is foregrounded as political, where intimacy is a form of solidarity and resistance, and, as you said, where vulnerability is a quality of presence and relationality to explore and surrender to, and derive strength or insight from. I also think a lot about the bodies involved in the making and viewing or experience of the work I make. I am always interested in inviting them to be present with what they embody. Trust is also an important dynamic; trust not given in a solid form, but as something that is negotiated and grows in layers as the work progresses.
In all my work there is a tension between the spaces that I create and unpack in the process and those that need to be created and proposed to an audience. I am often scared of representation, of the risk of turning things into a spectacle, of appropriating what others have offered me and the process. As you said, I feel that the ‘wider art context’ is not prepared to be political and responsible towards engaging in practices like ours. For example, ‘what if, if I could take your place?’ is still an open process for me after many years, and after taking the place of thirteen people in different situations in their lives. I am still contemplating the necessity to transform these ‘performances’ in real life, to bring them into a different space to share with a public. During this process with the agricultural workers, the emotion I was constantly struggling with was the urge to destroy. I wanted to destroy every artistic idea instantly, as soon as it emerged. The moment I could conceive of it as work, I felt I needed to destroy that instinct in me. There is so much injustice, so much exploitation of these people, their lives are so hard, and I’m coming here, then I’m leaving and going home. This is the constant dilemma of this work - that to capitalize on this contact in any form simply further highlights the inequality. So I decided that I wouldn’t make anything. But after conversations with my partner Luca, I began to feel that working through these emotions is also an important part to share with other artists, on an artistic platform. So that became the writing. And this is being an artist, to know what works, and where is the momentum in any given context.
- ’Socially engaged’ is “a contested term for an art medium that focuses primarily on human interaction and social discourse. It describes work in which engagement in social situations is not only a part of the process of the work as it develops, but also where the social interaction itself is at some level the art; an aesthetic in itself. Artists working in this field may co-create their work with a specific audience or propose interventions within social systems that inspire debate or catalyze social exchange. Socially engaged art may aim to create social and/or political change through collaboration with individuals, communities, organisations and institutions” (definition courtesy of Social Art Network).
