To view the article with images in “The Museum of Mental Furniture” click here

I was five years old when, I remember, my parents put me on an open pick-up truck along with several other children. We were all associated with the non-governmental organisation Oxfam Fair Trade, a shop in our village near Antwerp (Belgium). The town administration organised an annual celebratory fair, and invited all hobby clubs, shops, and civil society organisations to participate. The fair had market stalls and a parade with decorated cars. We were there as part of the celebration, chanting a song dedicated to the people of Nicaragua, who were suffering under a dictatorial regime. I sang with all my heart: ‘You bleed, Nicaragua, you bleed, and we all know who is responsible’. Yet I had no clue where Nicaragua was, what a dictator meant, what global suffering was, what fair trade meant, or what non-governmental organisations did… I just knew that my parents thought it was very important that I sung this song. Later I understood that through such experiences my parents initiated me into a world where asymmetrical power relationships ruled and I was taught that I could critique, change, and help the world. As a kid, I too wanted to fight such injustices, help my parents in the Oxfam Fair Trade shop, going from door to door asking for money for good causes, and parading in manifestations and demonstrations. There were many moments in my youth filled with laughter, joy and bliss. My parents taught us about friendship, solidarity, vanilla pudding eating while camping and discussing the world until very late at night.

Yet as I grew older, I felt less and less inclined to follow the path of my parents. I started to realise that I was growing up in a left-ideological bath and that other possible baths exist, even other furniture and all-together different (water) habits. I was looking for a place where I could nurture the dreamy, sensitive, and imaginative ideas that I had, and so instead, I turned to the arts. I loved every second of my film education in Brussels and eagerly began making films. I think that my parents’ passion for political activism soon found its counterpart in my drive and urge to make films. I had picked up from them what urgency, ambition and passion mean. However, the world of arts too, I soon discovered, was filled with injustice, discrimination, uneven power relationships, and exploitation. It seemed that my parent’s world, with its critique on uneven power dynamics, spilled over into the world of art. They wanted to correct these injustices, yet I was looking for another way to counter these mechanisms. Exploring the dreamy, and poetical imagination was a start, but it did not suffice. I desired to critique the ideological schemes in which I was enmeshed, to try to question epistemological notions such as the paradigm, the ideology, the cultural bias,… in which I was raised and educated. And so, I started my first public film, ‘Visitors of the Night’, with a quote by Michel Foucault — or so I thought. The film began by saying that it is inspired by the following text:

Ce texte cite une « certaine encyclopédie chinoise » où il est écrit que les animaux se divisent en : a) appartenant à l’Empereur, b) embaumés, c) apprivoisés, d) cochons de lait, e) sirènes, f) fabuleux, g) chiens en liberté, h) inclus dans la présente classification, i) qui s’agitent comme des fous, j) innombrables, k) dessinés avec un pinceau très fin en poils de chameau, 1) et caetera, m) qui viennent de casser la cruche, n) qui de loin semblent des mouches ». (This text quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ where it is written that animals are divided into: a) belonging to the Emperor, b) embalmed, c) tamed, d) suckling pigs, e) mermaids, f) fabulous , g) free-range dogs, h) included in this classification, i) moving like mad, j) countless, k) drawn with a very fine camel hair brush, 1) et cetera, m) which have just broken the jug, n) which from afar seem like flies)

I read this passage in Foucault’s work ‘Les mots et les choses’ (1966), in which he critiques certain scientific patterns of thought that are not contextualised but presented as universal, such as taxonomy and classifications. The citation is, perhaps, a caricature but is not really different from scientific classifications. This attracted my attention as it revealed that although a classification looks orderly and scientific, it can actually hide an absurd or even a dangerous worldview.

The quote connected with my experience of making the documentary, ‘Visitors of the night’. As the narrator-ethnographer, in the film, I embark on an expedition to encounter the Mosuo, an isolated, matrilineal tribe in the mountains of South West China. I had read that their society was built on the principle of the ‘axia’-relationship — ties between ‘visitors of the night’. The texts that I read explained that a man only stays in his wife’s house at night and during the day, he works for the benefit of his grandmother. As men and women do not have any economic obligation, their unique and polyandric relationships are based on love, according to what was written. As a feminist (which I had learn from my mother) I was attracted to a society where women could choose the number of romantic partners. However, when we arrived there, we found that due to funding by the Han government, the region had turned into a major tourist area, where tradition and modernity clashed — particularly when polyandry was seen as prostitution by outsiders. I was dazzled by the large contradictions and paradoxes that rose between (my) textual knowledge based on mostly Eurocentric sources, and our experience during the cinematographic journey.

We, therefore, chose to focus on the failures of our ethnographic endeavour, in the film, using our clumsiness and lack of information as the primary topics, instead of pretending that we could explore any relevant material about the Mosuo. Our producer did not like this unsettling of documentary codes, as we did not depict a knowing subject with a voice-of-god, who analyses the world without any reference to his mental furniture, so as to design a seemingly objectified vision. Instead, we made “a documentary that collects all the scenes that normal documentaries cut out”, as a visual anthropology professor told me. I think ‘Visitors of the Night’ was a way of exploring a text by the Chilean writer Raoul Ruiz titled, Poetics of Cinema of 1995, that I had read in a class by Trinh Minh-ha at UC Berkeley. I learnt that a (mainstream) documentary film is, more than anything else, a matter of selection, construction, and intrusion, structured by narrative devices to guarantee the viewer the so-called representational qualities of the film. According to Ruiz, these narrative devices create a formatted mould, which he defined as a central conflict theory. Ruiz analysed that this theory has transformed into a predatory theory, “a system of ideas that devours and enslaves any other idea that might restrain its activity”. He also stated that this theory yields a normative system. The products that comply with this norm have not only invaded the world but have also imposed their rules on most of the centres of audio-visual production.

With ‘Visitors of the Night’, I was exploring a film narrative that moved away from this central conflict theory. Yet, I was not aware of the western narrative that was ingrained in my mind, into my mental furniture. When I read the citation of Michel Foucault again, while preparing for this contribution, I was shocked to notice that it is actually a citation of Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentinian writer. Borges wrote it in ‘La langue analytique de John Wilkins’, in: Autres inquisitions, in 1952; 14 years before Foucault had used it. I am not implying that Foucault did not reference Borges, but the automatism with which I attributed the quote to Foucault in my film instead of Borges, wildly shocks me now. Revisiting ‘Visitors of the night’, I find it very telling that for the introduction of the film, we had photographed two taxidermist animals, a jaguar biting a deer on its neck, on display in the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Tervuren. The taxidermist image reinforces the Eurocentric frame in which I was born, raised, and educated. This rather specific frame of reference, with its traces of exploitation and colonialism, white saviourism, and privileges, is ingrained into my mental furniture. Such furniture is made of the mental categories instilled within us and creates the frames and moulds that shape how we think about ourselves and others. It helps us to see what we were taught as children and our ongoing struggle to decolonise our minds.

By remembering the song about Nicaragua, and the specific ideological environment in which I was raised, by being shocked by my preference of Foucault over Borges, by detecting in me traces of the imperialistic Eurocentric frame, by reading Raoul Ruiz, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Bernardine Evaristo, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and so many others, this mental furniture shakes, rattles, and becomes less stable. I try to move it around, to put it upside down, to break it down in pieces, and to rework it. It is with this unstable messiness that I need to work, questioning my actions, decisions, and automatisms, therefore, stumbling clumsily. Watch Visitors of the Night here: https://vimeo.com/217539536

REFERENCES

Borges Jorge Luis. 1963 “La langue analytique de John Wilkins” in Enquêtes, puis Autres inquisitions (Otras inquisiciones, 1952), trad. Paul et Sylvia Bénichou, Paris -Gallimard.

Foucault Michel. 1966 Les mots et les choses. Une archéologie des sciences humaines. Paris – Gallimard.

Raoul Ruiz.1995 Poetics of Cinema. Paris – Dis Voir.

van. Dienderen An.1998 Visitors of the night (Film). Sophimages & desire productions.