Episode Six: Behzad Khosravi Noori and Edgar Schmitz
þ thorns þ
In this episode, Behzad and Edgar reflect on their joint interest in the art of necromancy as a metaphorical and methodological tool to reinterpret history.
This episode is a conversation between Behzad Khosravi Noori and Edgar Schmitz. Edgar works on and through dispersed materialities of the choreographic and distributed forms of inanimacy and Behzad is an artist, writer, educator, playground builder, and necromancer. In this episode, Edgar and Behzad reflect on their joint interest in the art of necromancy as a metaphorical and methodological tool to reinterpret history. They discuss Behzad’s films on this topic and explore themes like, the political distribution of the sensible, decolonization, the incompleteness of history, and the labour involved in memorializing the past.
Find out more about Behzad and Edgar on our page.
To the Glossary Edgar donates Four-Plus-Dimensional 
This series is produced and edited by Hester Cant.
The series is co-curated by Emma McCormick-Goodhart and Martin Hargreaves, with concept and direction by Martin Hargreaves and Izzy Galbraith.
Transcript
Martin
Hello, you're listening to þ thorns þ, a podcast where we bring you conversations between artists in relation to concepts of the choreographic 
As part of the ongoing imagination of the school, we are compiling a glossary of words that artists are using to refer to the choreographic
This episode is a conversation between Edgar Schmitz and Behzad Khosravi Noori. Edgar works on and through dispersed materialities of the choreographic and distributed forms of inanimacy. He is the founder of the Choreographic and Animate Assembly Research Clusters and Director of the Art Research Program at Goldsmiths, University of London. Behzad is an artist, writer, educator, playground builder, and necromancer. His research-based practice includes films and installations, as well as archival studies. He is a professor in Practice at Habib University in Karachi. This conversation was recorded in a studio in central London.
Edgar and Behzad reflect on their joint interest in the art of necromancy as a metaphorical and methodological tool to reinterpret history. They discuss Behzad's films on this topic and explore themes like, the political distribution of the sensible, decolonization, the incompleteness of history, and the labour involved in memorializing the past. The transition sounds you will hear in this episode are clips from two of Behzad's films, which he and Edgar discuss, Behzad made them in collaboration with Magnus Bärtås, and we have more information about these films in the resources linked in the episode description.
Edgar
We had a series of moments when things seemed important, right? So, we both responded to them. And for me, that started with you coming into the fold at Goldsmiths, us meeting, and then the one of the seminal moments, of course, was when you screened the Tito film. And we both got very excited, and talked a lot about, in the most broadest sense, historical materialism of various takes, on snippets of Walter Benjamin, and notions of history, and what his opposites might be. And that felt both really intoxicating and somewhat airless and we realized then that we needed to give that some more space. Which is when we organised a day, a couple of months later, where we screened your other film, and invited a bunch of colleagues, allies, friends comrades, into this day on necromancy. Which I think, for me, is when the term first took hold as something to be played with, to be inhabited, to be messed about with. So, I'm really pleased to have this as a, you know, another format to both reflect on that, but also see where we go with it. Why don't I start with asking you about Tito and the parrot?
Behzad
Yeah, I really like the way that you describe it, and I feel the same when it comes to the film, which is kind of a collaboration with Magnus Bärtås. So we did these two films, three characters together. Me and Magnus, we both are very much interested in the history of Yugoslavia, for different reasons maybe. And I was working on the other project, which is about history of animation in Yugoslavia, focusing on the form of relationalities between Zagreb animation film and the statical regime that they use as a form of production, with the Non-Aligned Movement and the notion of internationalism of the global South. And I was talking to Magnus about that project and Magnus mentioned that there's an island in Croatia, and in that island there's a parrot, and that parrot says ‘Tito!’. And I was in residency in Zagreb for that project and I told good friends of mine, a curator based in Zagreb, Ana Kovacic, that I want to go to Brijuni to meet the parrot and she said, that I will come with you. And without knowing anything about Brijuni Island, I went to Brijuni Island to meet the parrot, who says ‘Tito!’.
It was during the summer, the parrot was relocated somewhere else, in the kind of summer location and I forgot my SD card, the camera, the main, my main camera was useless, I had my mobile phone, twenty percent charge. We were walking around in the island, trying to find the parrot and Ana was with her kid, so she couldn't follow me. I just ran away and tried to find Koki. I found Koki and he performed the best dramatic saying ‘Tito!’ in front of my mobile phone, and I recorded that. And I came back and I saw Ana when her kid is coming and Ana said, ‘did you meet Koki?’ And I said, ‘yes’. Ana said, ‘can I see the footage?’ And I show, and it was so emotional for Anna because, you know, it just, there's a myth that he's saying ‘Tito!’, but it became the best footage ever of Koki saying ‘Tito!’. And I was so excited. And I look at the other things in Brijuni and I told Ana that this is a very interesting island, It's a project! And everything is started from that parrot saying ‘Tito!’, the ghost of the past, which is still there, unwanted heritage, that everybody is trying to, politicians mainly of course, the new nationalist right wing political party, they try to ignore, reject that past.
So, the idea started with that form of relationship with the non-human and the ghost of the past. Its about death, its about the past, which is not the past because it's still alive. And yeah, well, it's necromancy. Okay, what is the necromancy in that sense? There's a past, there's a dead, which is not dead. You can bring that they know the current, they know the future. How's it possible to talk to Tito about it? But it's not just about Tito, it's about Paul Kupelweiser, the Austro-Hungarian businessman who bought the island. And it became some sort of psychoanalysis about the place, about the characters. That was the point of departure of everything. So, Koki plays a very significant role in that sense.
Edgar
I think one of the things we have to conjure into the conversation is the visual density of that film. The way in which the film operates on a really committedly cinematic register, really struck me when I first saw it. Both in terms of cinema's capacity to precisely enact these cross-temporalities, that in a way we recognize in film before we recognize them in real life very often. And we're also conditioned by film to think about them as available. I loved the film, and I'd recognize in retrospect now that for me that resonated with two things I was trying to work with and through at the time. One is the ongoing choreographic constellation, let's say, thinking about an extended set of material realities that co-produce movement forms, in the broadest possible sense, right? So, really thinking of, I've coined it somewhat awkwardly, Four-Plus-Dimensional
So, I was coming out of that somewhat really nebulous, but beautifully intoxicating space. And I also realized, and that was prompted by you talking about the animation studios in Zagreb, how much of this resonated with the Animate Assembly project I'd been involved in with Esther Leslie, Verena Gfader, and Anke Hennig in Berlin, which started off with some Zagreb animation, actually, in our first screening in one of the launch events. It was a cluster of research interests where four people came from different understandings of animation; animation studies in a film history sense, notions of animacy, notions of animism, Japanese anime. We could all converge around this term without having to clarify which definition grasped it most convincingly. And what that led to over the years of commissioning people into conversation, staging screenings, and again, thinking about film a lot, was this question, not so much of animation, but animacy.
You know, how particularly in the current moment, it seemed to us plausible that the current geopolitical, but more specifically scientific technological, moment really needs to be understood as a fundamental redistribution of the animate and the inanimate. And we still have a habit to think of as distinct. There's the animate world, there's the inanimate, and both, in terms. And this preceded the hyped conversation on AI, I mean, it's something that feeds into these conversations, but really happened before that became so pornographically available as a conversation, right? For me, this question of that redistribution of the animate inanimate boundary suddenly became available as thinking also about death. How come we are happy to rethink these differentiations? We can think about reality and narrative. We can think about the human, the more than human. We can think about network constellations, but we do not seem to be very predisposed or equipped to think across four dimensions and particularly to think that temporally.
So, all the fluidities that current thought and current practice, they prompt all sorts of things, but the ones that are taken up normally don't extend into the temporal, let alone beyond the kind of life-death boundaries. And that, of course, then came back into force in our conversation through, in your words, the notion of history. What does it mean to delinearise history? How do we think differently about the relationship which we are trained to think of as one from the past through the present into the future? And what are the ways in which we can rearrange those? Necromancy, the way you describe it and put it forward with Tito, certainly is one that is not a relic of a past, but an iteration of something we think of as past, messes with the present and therefore gets involved in the shaping of the future in some way, shape, or form.
TRANSITION SOUND: Excerpt from BRIJUNI, a necromantic theatre
What we realise, thinking about Benjamin and this idea of the instability of history, history as that spark that has the capacity for change, by creating a charge between the present moment and the past moment, under the condition of danger. All the Benjamin passages we both love so much, and we can talk about that in more detail. To think about history as something that might have to exit not just the direction of the linearity, but the very mode of linearity, right? And this was the second event when we invited you back, and Magnus came over, and it was called something like Necromancing or the Necromancy, which is something we can also talk about because it made a different claim on a set of established practices. But it had a subtitle along the lines of Necromancing and other forms of activating the present-past-future continuum. And the succession of present-past-future rather than past-present-future or the other way around, I think was a placeholder for some of that thinking, to really rethink how these relationships and influences bounce and in which directions. There was a sense, I think a shared sense between us, that linearity is insufficient for this, but also a sense that the understanding that they come one after the other, seems somewhat very uninspiring but also insufficient to the task, right? And I think that's where the second day was so interesting for me, because we had your film which concluded the day in a way, the second film. Which was, very suggestively, bringing the idea of hospitality into this, what is hospitality as a motif? How does it play out in the setting? What does it mean to be hospitable to the dead?
What are the terms of hospitality through which we might rethink, re-imagine, re-emote, re-metabolise, if you want, our relationship to the dead? You know, hospitality seems a really interesting way of framing that. The last thing to say about that day, because it's been haunting me ever since, is that this was a day in November, which came in roughly about four or five weeks after the 7th of October attacks. And I remember very vividly on the day reading a post by Rosalind Nashashibi, which was prefaced with Paul Klee’s Angel of History as an image, which of course was prefaces the most important passages in the Benjamin text we keep referring to. And really putting that forward as an urgent ethical catastrophe. Are we in that position? What kind of other position might be available to us? ‘As artists’ were her words, ‘as subjects’ would be my words, in view of these horrors. So, what are the conditions under which we might rethink our relationship? And that for me has stayed there as a really unresolved but really strong prompt. How do we equip ourselves to remain available to those kind of realities, and tool ourselves up to be able to start responding to them? Or to each other in view of them, not quite sure which way it works.
Behzad
Yeah, it's very interesting. And there are some aspects of history that we could talk about. One thing that is quite interesting, of course, back to maybe classic historical materialism, a very important point that I have to make here, that in our practice we are not trying to, visualising theory, in that sense, so we are creating that story. And then somehow, of course, we believe in historical materialism by default, because we believe that history is not completed. The incompleteness of history plays a significant role in the way that we are looking at the past, and the notion of the present and the future, which comes very kind of naturally after that.
Within that, leaving in the notion of incompleteness of history, we have to try of course to locate that form of historiography in different locations, and some of the locations suffers from historical invisibilisation. So, we don't have enough material to talk about what happened and it creates a grey part of history, the grey part of history that epistemologically we cannot really describe it clearly. There is a lack of document and that document sometimes, of course, when we are talking about Tito, there's no lack of documents, there's a kind of very well historicized documented character, one of the most well documented character in that state. But how is it possible to look at some sort of psychoanalysis, his relationship with a specific place? That is the part that history hasn't documented. And in that sense, of course, narrative strategy, storytelling 
One thing that you mentioned that is quite interesting about the quality, cinematic quality, we were in the first film that we made, we call it the Brijuni, A Necromancy Theatre, and the theatre came into the frame that the whole Brijuni Island is the colonial theatre. Bringing exotic animals, creating some kind of open zoo during the Yugoslav time, bringing celebrities there. So, there's a theatre is happening there. How's it possible to look at it? So, there is some sort of attachment to the social-political agency 
Back to one of the moments that we organized at Goldsmiths, I think adding '-ing’ to necromancy was very interesting for me. You created a sort of emancipatory action, into the act of necromancy. Because necromancy by itself is very descriptive. But when you say it's not necromancy, it's necromancing, by default, you're activating, provoking the mind of the reader that there is an act is happening. And there is ‘-ing’ attached to that, which I very much enjoy and engage into the idea of not necromancy, but necromancing, as the continuation. And I think necromancing perhaps defines it better than necromancy, because one thing that is very important is the permanent state of a storytelling. How's it possible to locate yourself within the history? How's it possible to bring the past, tell the story? And then when you think about it, again, academically thinking, you're not really doing something very new, unique. Always you're reading theory and trying, of course, to bring theory and philosophy to interpret their idea in the subject that we are exploring, for example, Marx is dead, but always we are writing that if Marx wanted to describe the situation now, according to the current political condition, for example, in London, how he could describe it. So, we call it theory. We call it kind of like, what is your theoretical background for that argument? It's very kind of boringly, of course, academic writing, you know, so, but it's an act of necromancy. You're imagining Marx, that how he could describe London today, for example.
Edgar
What's super interesting in that is this notion of narrative and this is the reality of film. You said something as you started talking about the film, just to clarify, like, of course, we don't illustrate theory. And yes, granted, of course, I think it's important to state that. But it's also then, the next step is to really think about how these necromantic encounters are made available. And one of the things I started thinking about a lot coming out of this conversation, and thinking about the capacity of film in particular, to enable these points of contact. A couple of things seem really important, one is that film in general, if that makes sense as a category, of course has a very complicated temporality, which is experiential, representational, and then some, depending on the filmic material. And that is already a strange form of collapse, of different temporalities and what's available, what's not available, in its various permutations, whether you go Brechtian or full on in immersive, doesn't really matter. But there's a, there's a collapsing of dischronic and discontinuous realities that collapse some experiential possibility, however mediated.
I thought that as you were talking earlier, Behzad, the same applies to narrative in all forms, whether it is written narrative, whether it is spoken narrative, the collapsing of these different temporalities is one of its key capacities. Whether we want to dismiss that in some kind of rationally informed analytical modus or otherwise, it's really important to recognise that capacity. It's not a representational encounter, it's a collapse of different world-time-space things. And if that is true, it becomes really interesting to think about aesthetic forms as modes of necromancing. Again, in some of the ways which are obvious, but maybe we're spelling out in this context, which are about the ways in which we are able to pay attention, and to what? So, thinking about film, what is being articulated, but also how is it being received? How is that negotiated? That form of articulation and reception, that being exposed to, being available to the articulation.
Cinema, classically, has a particular spacio-temporal way of organizing that. Cinema theatre is important, the conditions are important. But if you acknowledge that as something that happens in film, what becomes super important then, and that struck me in your films is, not so much necromancy as a talking to the dead, or the dead talking to us, but really as a form of dialogue. And if necromancy is a form of dialogue, what does that mean through the Victorian forms into your films? It means different things. It means that something manifests physically that we think has no physical reality anymore. The table wobbles by something that we think has no empirical material capacity to move things. A sound changes and that change is caused by something that, again, we do not accord physicality that we think is necessary for sound. Yes, there's trickery in them in the Victorian age, possibly. And I'm trying to do this from a strictly secular perspective, so I'm not really arguing this religiously or from a spiritual perspective in that sense. Trickery, yes, but that's shorthand. But what really there is, is enabling yourself to receive those kind of articulations, the capacity for necromancy is a two-sided attunement, that becomes a really important aesthetic proposition.
I think what your film, particularly the second one, does so convincingly is to invite us, I believe, to never quite settle on one or the other, surface of contact. But to offer a range of different points of contact, points of proximity, points of touch, points of recognition through which that form of dialogue is enabled. For me, one of these strong moments was the coffee cup, and her talking about the importance of serving coffee and a particular version of hospitality. And if we agree that a working definition of necromancy is that it's about points of contact that take different shapes, that take different carriers, that have different carrier mediums, if you want. I think it becomes a really interesting proposition.
Also, it works in ways that we are very good at working discontinuously with. We're very good at putting different, um, anecdotes together. I was thinking about Jalal Toufic’s writings. I was thinking about the way in which his writings challenged the materiality of the empirically available world, past the surpassing disaster in that book. But also remember how he came to Goldsmiths to talk about dance as part of the Animate Assembly. And there's no recording of that conversation, he confiscated my phone afterwards, was really not happy for that to be publicly available, but sent us a link to his book. But more importantly, I found two years later in my notes, found something, a note literally saying, ‘Jalal, the coffee stirrer kept moving’. And it took me months to remember what that was about. And it was a mental snapshot of the situation in the cafeteria before we went into the lecture where I bought him one of these generic cafeteria cappuccinos, and he started with this wooden stirrer, let go of the stirrer, and once we were talking, that thing kept stirring. That is one of these moments where something becomes-
Behzad:
Something else 
Edgar:
Available. You know, something becomes something else
TRANSITION SOUNDS: Excerpt from On Hospitality – Layla Al Attar and Hotel Al Rasheed
Behzad
Well, the second film is called On Hospitality - Layla al Attar and Hotel al Rasheed, a place and a person, and is the history of one of the most elaborate hotels in Baghdad, which was built in the 1980s by Swedish company Skanska. But the whole foundation is being narrated by Layla al Attar, and Layla al Attar was very well known in Baghdad. artist in Iraq, and she was very much close to Saddam Hussein, the dictator, and the Ba’ath party. And after the first Gulf War, she made a mosaic of the George Bush portrait in front of the hotel with the sentence that George Bush is a war criminal. And the stones that she used to build that portrait was from her own house, which was destroyed by Americans. So, she collected the rubble, it's a very conceptual piece in a way, and built that mosaic, the portrait of George Bush, that George Bush is a war criminal. A significant part of that mosaic, installation, conceptual art, we could define it in different ways, is that Hotel al Rasheed became a very important hotel in Baghdad, in the green zone of the city, that all the politicians, foreigners were coming to Baghdad, they were located in that specific hotel.
So all of them, they had to walk on the face of George Bush, a war criminal. She died, she was killed in 1993 by missile attack during the Clinton, uh, Bill Clinton. So, the history of the hotel, which was supposed to be the location of the Baghdad summit in 1983, which was sabotaged by Iranians, because it was during the war between Iran and Iraq, is being narrated by a dead female Iraqi artist.
And how's it possible to talk about Layla al Attar? Fascinating, interesting artist, but she was very close to Saddam Hussein. And we don't like Saddam Hussein, I must say. How epistemologically could we locate, celebrate, could we celebrate? No. Could we ignore that? Well, she has been ignored, of course. How is it possible to give her opportunity to reclaim her own history?
So, that is what necromancy does, in that sense. And how is it possible to make it, of course, you mentioned quality. If we think about ghosts of the past, so, maybe the first things that come into our mind is that they're kind of like a blurry image. And usually, of course, again, when you look at the Victorian photography of ghosts, everything is kind of blurry, because whatever that is just blurry in front of the camera, because of the time that they couldn't clearly control, they call it ghosts, that the ghost is, is blurred. But now we are, in all the films, there is no blurring. It's a high definition quality. It's a cinematic lens. You see everything in their faces. So the quality in that sense, of course, it gives another value, the materiality of that, that that materiality is very present, is very visible. And it's very much related to the point of conduct that you, you mentioned.
TRANSITION SOUND: Excerpt from BRIJUNI, a necromantic theatre
Behzad
For the first film, we said, okay, Paul Kupelweiser, Austro-Hungarian. And he possibly wanted to show how to have a colony because the Austro-Hungarian Empire was the only European Empire who didn't have a colony. And we started to write a hypothetical narration that maybe buying Brijuni, creating that kind of utopia, was to show the Austro-Hungarian Empire how to create and take care of colony, and there is no empire, there is no civilization without an island. So, he said that. I don't say it. It's kind of interesting that we wrote the text, of course, but always we are quoting them for that what they have said to us. It's a kind of, it's very serious, because sometimes me and Magnus, we were talking about it, and he said, But Tito said that. I said, Oh, no, we wrote it, actually! Tito didn't say that! We could change it, you know. It doesn't matter, really. Kind of internalize the fiction that we are making. It's quite interesting.
And then we know, historically, that the first visit in Brijuni Island, because it was one of the major problems that Brijuni Island had, was malaria. And he invited Professor Koch to take care of malaria in. And it's one of the experimental labs for Professor Koch to examine how to get rid of malaria. He got bitten by malaria mosquito. So, even when you're dead, you have malaria. When you're coming back from dead, you have malaria. So, always you have fever. Always you're hallucinating. You're thirsty. So that's why the first thing that he's asking is just, ‘can I have a glass of water?’ And we don't give him a glass of water until the end of the film. And Tito is very iconic. He was visiting the United States and he holds a cigar, which was a gift from Fidel Castro when he was visiting. He was meeting the president of United States and said, okay, that is again, the point of contact. Yeah. So he asked, can I have my cigar back? And we gave him cigar and he's holding a cigar. But again, we gave the fire at the end of the film. So he fired the cigar at the end. And Layla al-Attar, she wants to drink coffee because she wants to kind of recollect all the memory. And coffee is refreshing. She wants to drink coffee from the cup, which was built by a Swedish company in Sweden.
Edgar
I mean, one thing I want to pick up just in passing, because it's super important, is this question of quality and film. And the history of, so called, documentary media, which means photography and then film. And the reality and capacity of this media has always been fabulatory 
You look at the way in which the Surrealists mobilized photography, the way in which montage was mobilized. If we weren't so invested and habituated to thinking that this has an indexical relationship to reality, we'd be much better equipped to deal with AI in the current day. In the same way in which, the different moments of the earlier avant-gardes were very happy to use these new technologies in the service of their projects, rather than feeling victimized by them. I think it's again, it's a misunderstanding perpetuated by a particular version of Western-North European-type art history. To think that the advent of photography made some documentary claim on reality.
But I think in terms of the capacity of media forms to reconfigure, or make available different relationships to the kinds of realities we're talking about, I think there's a richness there. Whether that is a richness that articulates itself in smoky lack of clarity originally, or now operates over the top, at the other end of the hyper-specificity of super visibility, that has completely lost any indexical relationship. My suspicion is we need to think those two together, as inherent ontologies of the cinematic image. And then we can start revisiting histories outside the Western European canon. And it's no coincidence that the kind of work that comes in, from outside of those industrialized distribution circuits, is gaining some kind of visibility. Because there is a need for richer and more complex visual propositions than the ones that reside within regular normative narrative cinema.
TRANSITION SOUND: Excerpt from BRIJUNI, a necromantic theatre
Behzad
Based on the conversation that we had, you mentioned the distribution of the sensible. I think that is a very interesting introduction into what necromancy does, in relation to the way that you described the distribution of the sensible, back to Rancière.
Edgar
I came back to something that I've always been really inspired by in Jacques Rancière's writings. And it's two things. One is this notion of what is normally mistranslated 
It's mistranslated as the distribution of the sensible, because the French term is richer. The French partage du sensible has two aspects to it. One is what we would translate as partaking in English. So, the participation in the sensible, how we participate in what we, how we have access to the sensible, what our ability to be involved in that, is one. So really as a form of emancipatory access, if you want. The second connotation is more like partition. So, you have the participation in the sensible and the partition of the sensible as two of the ways in which the political is constituted. The friction between those participating, but also recognising the partitions in place and positioning yourself in relationship to those, taking part. Maybe partaking is closer to the partage.
What I've been trying to stick with for a while now, with that, is to think, again challenging the life death boundaries which we have so normalized and naturalized, we in a particular western paradigm, and to really think what it means to disavow particular noises, particular phenomena
One aspect of that takes me back to Benjamin, but the horror of the Benjaminian invocation of the Messianic. So, if Benjamin suggests that under the condition of danger, which is shared by the dead and the present, and under that condition of danger that affects both, a spark of redemptive potential might emerge out of the constellation that erupts between that image of the past that flashes past us in a moment of danger, and the conditions of urgency and precarity of the present. That's the Benjaminian formula. He finishes that type of conversation by saying that even the dead are not safe from the winners of today, and the enemy hasn't ceased being victorious for a long time now. Which we can wholeheartedly adopt you now.
This is just the condition of, I call it history. So, for me, what seemed interesting was then to think the other way around. It's not how do we talk to the dead, but why can't we talk to the dead so often? How is it that they are excluded, that they are being erased, silenced, deaded? If you wanna call, how do you dead in the dead? How do you, how do you make them unavailable? How do you disrupt? How do you sever that connection? And I would go so far, if we suggested that the challenge was not to reconnect with the dead, but if we assume that that connection is always already there, and that the problem is the moment when that becomes unavailable, right, so the problem isn't that the dead are dead. The problem is that the dead aren't dead, which means the dead aren't unavailable to us, but they become unavailable to us under certain conditions, under certain impositions and prohibitions.
I spent a few days, a couple of years back at the, in the choreographic devices symposium at the ICA talking to André Lepecki a lot, who made a very clear distinction at the time. Coming out of lockdown and coming out of resurgence of fascism, within the Brazilian context where he spent the lockdown time. And he said, ‘No, death is one thing, killing is another thing. Killing is what the fascists do, fascists kill, right? Death is a different reality. Fascism isn't concerned with death. It features in fascism, but fascism is concerned with killing and the dead or death is a different category.’
So, for me then, the question becomes not so much how do we speak to the dead, on the assumption that we should be able to have those points of contact and dialogue anyway, the question then is, how does the killing happen and what do you do with the killing under which conditions are, which dead not available to us? What is it to deaden something? What is it to blunt the receptors to something, to the point that it becomes unavailable?
I mean, is genocide that act through which the dead are killed? Is genocide, for instance then, that killing through which something is erased beyond reconnection? Something really is being made available. If the premise or the aspiration of genocide is to make something unavailable in the present, in the past, and in the future. The narration normally is a beleaguered present that risks the future of a people. But the project, it seems to me, across its various iterations, is one that attacks the past at least as much as it attacks the present, in that it eradicates the source. They target culture, they target language, they target livelihood, they target the land and the territory on which a people identifies.
But it is the deep ‘making unavailable’ of the dead and the ancestors, and the futures of that culture. And for me, that becomes then a really troubling but also really useful provocation to myself. To think, how we think the other way around from a position of necromancing ,as a being in touch with, to spot the prohibitions, and the killings that act against that.
TRANSITION SOUND: Excerpt from BRIJUNI, a necromantic theatre
Behzad
It's a very interesting interpretation, of course, and it reminds me of a film by Forensic Architecture about historical site in Gaza, which is being bombed by Israelis. As an attempt to kill the dead, and that killing the dead. Because in that sense, of course, we're talking about historical site. But the act of killing the dead, too, is a form of revenge of history or kind of cleansing, cleaning the historical background of any form of settlement in that region, before partition for 1948.
One very interesting part that possibly, of course, you're proposing in relation to necromancy as a form of investigation and exploration of history, is that necromancy and the act of necromancy, necromancing has emancipatory characteristic. So, it has a capacity to emancipate yourself from attachment to the grand narration of historical order, which is, of course, very hegemonic, of course, bringing Gramsci into the frame of exploration and of history. However, majority of the subject that we are thinking in relation to the necromancy and the practicing of art, is very much contemporary. And contemporary archaeology, or as the way that I describe it, Contemporary Ar(t)chaeology, so just how the act of art could potentially dig into the history, and excavate the evidence of the past, which is not very old.
Because one of the major distinction between, maybe, classic archaeology and contemporary archaeology, is contemporary archaeology digging the new grave. And that new grave, the smell of flesh and bone is still there. When you're excavating the old grave, you ended up in the bone, which doesn't have a smell, it doesn't bring any human connections. But when you dig into the new grave, you're not really digging into the past because it's your presence that you're looking at. So that act, of course, is not necessarily pleasant.
The notion of emancipatory act is not very desirable in that sense. It doesn't propose freedom. It creates another form of captivation, of miserability of human condition, in a way. So, the act of death, killing. So of course, in that sense, it's a quite interesting metaphor maybe. However it's not really a metaphor, it's kind of, it's happening now, it's front of our eyes. Genocide, of course, is a kind of very much the reality of our time, and the danger that we are normalizing that notion, that is actually one of the major problems that I think we are going to face. And the result of that comes in the very near future.
Particularly, looking at the notion of necromancy, based on the process of invisibilisation of history, is very much connected to the process of decolonization of historical background. So, in that case, again, when you're talking about what necromancy does, possibly, of course, has a capacity to emancipate ourselves, not in a pleasant way.
But partly trying to propose alternative way of looking at history within the context of Global South. This is very important. For example, last year while I was in London in a Goldsmiths, one of the major things that I was doing was digging the colonial history of South Asia, particularly the city of Karachi, the place that I work and partly live. And you see that, how limited document that we have, from one of the largest metropolitan in Global South, which was built by British, by the way.
After almost a year digging in two major, two or three major archives, I can really claim that I got into the abyss of, of empire. And I received, actually, an email from the Head of Asian and African Study in British Library, that said ‘Some of the documents that you're looking for, nobody has ordered it for more than a hundred years. We have to relocate that.’ It was actually quite an interesting sign for me that, okay, so that is actually the belly of the empire in a way. So, what could we do with that document? It's not enough. Again, back to Benjamin, incompleteness of history. How is it possible to create the history for the place which has a history, but doesn't have any document? How could we emancipate ourselves from the colonial memory of the city? Is it possible to decolonize that city? The city which was built by British. So, the heritage of the city is, is, is colonial heritage.
Edgar
And what's the labour involved in that? What form of narrative does it take? What different forms of relations to death might play out in that? The dead and death and killing. You know, if we take this as a triad of things that are no longer the same, because we understand that they are in tension with each other.
TRANSITION SOUND: Excerpt from BRIJUNI, a necromantic theatre
Behzad
The point of departure of the practice of necromancy in our work, is very much a filmic practice that we are looking at it. And the way that we are continuing that looking at the history, and the observation inquiry of history, exploration of history, is very much a filmic narration. So, the way that I'm thinking about it, all the time with Magnus, is really kind of the film, how to materialize it within time-based material. And it's very much character based, character and play. So, there is some sort of individuality in the way that we're looking at it. But it's quite interesting to see that, how different forms of method of engagement, could have potentially a necromancy characteristic or necromancing characteristic. Possibly, of course, the continuation of our investigation in the notion of necromancy, is to investigate the possibility, the methodological possibility, of engaging, of form of relationalities, of communication with the past. How art could actually help us, in order to describe that past.
Even historically, there was a very interesting 19th century painting about the incident that happened in, I think, the 17th century. It was very much, a kind of, new classic painting, that the new king took out the corpse of the old king in the court, and accused him for the crime. The dead was dead, but he created the court against the dead king, and it's not just metaphorical, physically he took the body from the grave and accused him, and he was of course, a criminal. He couldn't defend himself. So there's a very interesting kind of very romantic painting.
And in that sense, of course, there is something in the act of necromancy, possibly. There's a kind of potentiality that we are talking about. It is a historical revenge. So that, how we revenge, how we practice the act of revenge about the past, that we don't have any control, we cannot really do that. It's very much emotional in that sense. You're questioning the past.
Edgar
And there is, on the margins of this, it would be interesting to really think, ambitiously, about how this relates to different forms of memorial culture. I was thinking about silence. I was thinking about silence in all sorts of ways, as a space, as a form of deadening. So, silencing in that sense, by which it designates erasure and making inaudible, withdrawing from perceptual availability. But I was also thinking the other way around about silence as a space that might, you know, be a space of reconnection.
So, I was thinking in that instance, and still now, about the 8 minute 46 memorials after the George Floyd murder. Which became emblematic of, of course, the time it took Daryl Chauvin to kill him. But also then, a time that was reclaimed at the original memorial service by the attendants of that service, which I was hoping would be interesting to listen to if it wasn’t for the background music, that gives it a gives it an atmospheric quality that was fully appropriate for the memorial service, but doesn't really speak to the silence that I experienced in some of the protests later on.
And so that silence is, in a way, is this the opposite? It's not a revenge on the past, even though it is a kind of pulling out of the crime of the past, into the present. In all its monstrosity as a time space, but to also think how these gestures might fit into our schema. The kneeling, the connection between tarmac and a neck, and a police uniform, and the knees that bow in reverence to that afterwards. And what kind of material choreographies we've maybe also overlooked in that.
I'm not sure I understand it yet, but as part of our thinking further, to really also take stock of more or less, conventional and maybe less conventional, forms of memorializing, as a way of giving space to that past in the present, in order to make some claim on the future.
Behzad
I can see very clear, interesting connection between the distribution of sensible and that idea. Because the memory politics, what to remember? What to forget? And based on that notion of documenting the past and celebration of the past, so you create, eventually, the specific form of distribution of sensible. And based on that distribution of sensible, the political act could be defined in a different way. Memory politics, of course, could be a very interesting part, which has kind of connection, of course, to the notion of necromancy. Because just what we are celebrating, as a monument of the past, is very much, kind of, connected to the consequences of the Black Lives Matters. Which was the Urban Decolonial Act. And iconoclasm has started, of course, in the large cities in the West, that we need to kind of relocate ourselves, within the memory of the past. That they are being celebrated without any question. So, in that case, of course, there's an action that how to remember the past.
Edgar
In a way, whatever the aftermath of Black Lives Matter might have been, or whatever we aspire to it being an outcome. Which it wasn't. But I'm also remembering very vividly, with that in mind, how clear this notion of the present was put under pressure, in that moment. This was like this really odd reality, where the lockdown reality of COVID pandemic response mechanisms, collided with the temporality of a long-standing protest that found, yet another, tragic trigger. They generated maybe different responses than before, like that moment on the 25th of May [2020] because the world was attuned to thinking about itself as being in an exceptional situation. Sometimes these things register a bit more clearly than they would otherwise.
And that's the other part of the necromancy, I think, is all of the things we've said about talking to the dead, of course, also work forward, if you want to follow that orientation, right? And that's the other part of the conversation. What does it mean to know that already? What does it mean to think back to the present, from the future, as articulated by the dead? So, I think that's the next dimension to this. You know, for our purposes, there's other cultures who have much more elaborate technologies available for that. I remember Francisco talking about the Parliament of the dead.
Behzad
Yeah, I was going to mention that actually.
Edgar
As a form of democratic governance, by which no major decision would be taken without recourse, to a conversation with the dead. Because there would be madness, on the fallacy of the present to make a meaningful decision about the future of the people. It would be absolutely unconscionable to impose that level of arrogance, on the capacity of the present, to understand that extended temporality, right? And then again, it's interesting that that is something that isn't very available yet, to a lot of the conversations we derive from largely, let's say, aesthetic propositions. But they're trained within a set of Western paradigmatic ambitions as to what aesthetics allow for, right? And I think there's a whole other universe once you flip that direction.
Behzad
We are starting, actually, to imagine the next step of necromancy, and widely we are imagining the capacity of that term. that practice, that ideas. And how much diversity and multiplicity it has and how much possibility it could offer.
We started with that term necromancy from necromance, to necromancing from thinking about the notion of death and killing. That killing distribution of sensible memory, politics, historical revenge and visualization of history, coloniality. So everything, of course, could be part of that idea. And epistemologically, of course, within the Western canon of knowledge production, we have all of them. But the question that we're missing here, is exactly the act of necromancy. For particular character within particular location. And that is the things that we are lacking. Again, in that sense, the art could actually really emancipate this character, this potential. Because it's not really, kind of, talking about the possibilities of what actually creating the narration, hypothetical, fictional narration that is not necessarily a fiction.
Again, maybe back to Ranciere, that there is, kind of sort of, a relationship between seen and unseen. So, that is the very interesting quote from him in future of image that, you know, that particular interconnectivity or intersection between the things that you see and the thing that you don't see. And of course, in Deleuzian term, the notion of before and after image, there is something before image, there is something after image.
TRANSITION SOUND: Excerpt from BRIJUNI, a necromantic theatre
Edgar
And what that brings us back to, is what we started with. Which is, it was prompted by you bringing the term within my horizon of thinking, at the time when we first started talking about this. But also it was prompted by a response to a film. And I think going back to this notion of labour and effort, the fact that we can speculate these possibilities is, I think is useful. The tool up with different references, universes, you know, and suspend some of the ways in which we've habituated a whole bunch of things, we now understand aren't fit for both, comprehending the present, and or, working our way through it, let alone beyond it. Granted, and I do, really do believe that there's quality emancipatory potential. Or just simply the need to catch up with the kind of worlding we are already in the process of, the end of this world and the emergence of some other formation that might still accommodate us or otherwise.
What's been running through this has been precisely, I think, a shared belief we have, that certain aesthetic propositions, by which I would include things we describe as art and others, I don't think it's a medium 
There's a much broader range of terminologies for this than when I trained, right? Whether you metabolize reality or you understand it, or you sense it, or you experience it, or you think it through, or you work it through. There's a broad range of different terminologies. And differently carried modalities of how we process are being in the world, if you want to call it that. But the fact that a lot of that is often prompted by things that we describe as aesthetic propositions of art in the broader sense, also puts the labour back in the court of those who are interested in making these propositions. It's non-linear, it's non-quantifiable. It is erratic to a certain amount, you know, it's a proposition.
It's a reconfiguring, it's a rearrangement that may or may not resonate in the secret alchemies of the ways in which resonances happen.
Behzad
It has a very kind of dynamic identity in that way, that we have to keep it in that way. And yeah, and I was thinking, of course, the end of the world, and the building a third temple, and all the acceleration that's happening, of course, to reach the end of the world. To kind of clarify everything and release yourself from that history in a way. And it's quite interesting for me to think about that reaching the end of the world, as being actually practiced literally.
Edgar
And again, thinking back to the heroic versions of that, as a proposition on the nominal left, right? Understanding how we've had to put energy somewhere else. Because what we realize now at this point is that the end, taking this place down, is not the difficult bit. It does that by its own internal dynamics, right? And no matter how much we might have liked the idea of being able to participate in that in some redemptive way, because whatever comes after might be more like the thing we were hoping would be liveable, looks increasingly less and less plausible. Right, so what's coming by the internal dynamics of this, is something that will not grant life spaces that are worth inhabiting. As far as we can gather that for the moment.
And that is also that other shift which underpins some of this, I think. Trying to think about the energies needed to nurture, sustain, foster forms of resilience. I daren't call it sustainability, but forms of resilience that allow certain things to survive for a bit longer on the off chance that they might germinate. And I don't mean this in a doomsday speech, but I think it's a real reorientation of what you keep referring to as the emancipatory project. It's a different kind of energy, a different kind of labour required.
And of course, the problem is that destruction is that which is much more efficient and ruthless than the affirmative labour of creating possibilities. And that's the race, you know, under very uneven terms.
Behzad
That sounds like a conclusion to me. Very nice conclusion.
TRANSITION SOUND: Excerpt from BRIJUNI, a necromantic theatre
Martin
Thank you, Edgar and Behzad for this chance to listen in as you conjure up the potentials of necromancy. For the transcript of this episode and links to resources mentioned, go to rosechoreographicschool.com. The link for this page will also be in the podcast episode description wherever you're listening right now.
If you'd like to give us any feedback, give us a rating wherever you're listening to this. Or email us on info@rosechoreographicschool.com. This podcast is a Rose Choreographic School production. It's produced and edited by Hester Cant, co-curated by Emma McCormick-Goodhart and Martin Hargreaves, with additional concept and direction by Izzy Galbraith.
Thanks for listening. Goodbye.
Bibliography
PUBLICATIONS:
Choreographic Devices 2022 ICA
Brioni – a necromantic attempt
On Hospitality – Layla al Attar and Hotel al Rasheed
PEOPLE:
MORE REFERENCES:
8 minutes 46 seconds - Memorials