Interview

In 2017, the Vera List Center for Art and Politics responded to an invitation by filmmaker Amar Kanwar to “look at a ‘darkness’ in [our] context, something that needs further investigation although it’s visible in bright daylight.” At that moment, in the wake of the presidency of Donald Trump, the very foundations of freedom of speech were hindered and abused by the administration itself. From November 2018 through September 2019, the VLC dedicated seven seminars to re-evaluating this bedrock of American democracy, joined in partnership by four organizations: ARTICLE 19, the National Coalition Against Censorship, the New York Peace Institute, and Weeksville Heritage Center. The anthology Studies into Darkness: The Perils and Promise of Freedom of Speech is the outcome of these prolonged engagements. Co-published in 2022 by Amherst College Press and the VLC, the book was designed by Nontsikelelo Mutiti and Julia Novitch, whose aesthetic intervention plays with the concept of “darkness” as both a tonal variation and a factor of legibility.

The following conversation took place in New York with artist Amar Kanwar and co-editors Carin Kuoni and Laura Raicovich on Saturday, March 4, 2023.

Laura Raicovich: It’s funny thinking back on the beginning of this conversation.

Carin Kuoni: How little has changed! It began with you, Amar, inviting the VLC to identify a “darkness” in our environment, in our culture, in our society, something that needs deeper probing. And my response was immediately that we need to better understand freedom of speech. That was, I believe, in 2017. Trump had just been appointed and there was nothing more urgent than to acknowledge the violence of the words and language he chose without any hesitation. It just continues, now it’s six years later and that challenge of violent, harmful language is as vibrant and as much in our face as when he was abusing it back then.

Amar Kanwar: Yes, I remember when we met you had asked, “What are the 49 darknesses?” referring to Such a Morning.

Carin: Yes.

Amar: And I said, let’s figure it out together. What would be for you the most critical issue just now, or at least what would be a zone of uncertainty. That’s how it started. Several times I felt that it was even the loss of speech because this whole situation had made any speech meaningless. And so, somehow there was this need to go back to the basics and start trying to understand from the very beginning again. That’s what I was feeling at that time.

Laura Raicovich: I remember at first really thinking about this in very particular terms around the law and speech and around rights. But over time what became clear was that there was a limit to imagining speech as something that was given as a right, and the need for that to be an undercurrent in the book, but not to be the main proposal of the book. I think that for me, that was a key moment, a turning point in thinking through how any freedom might be articulated.

The lens of the rights are actually far more limited than almost any other way of imagining a darkness or a potential. So when we got to the design point, jumping to the end of the process, at that point the idea was to almost flow the material history, the timeline, into the book in an unusual way to subvert some of its authority and to make space for alternate approaches to the subject, without excising it altogether. 

Carin: You mean like here?

Laura: Yes, like here, through the timeline of really significant moments in US freedom of speech—

Carin: Legislation.

Laura: —legislation, court histories, these things that have presumably in many cases preserved the right to freedom of speech, which became an underpinning but it had to swim in another sea. It had to swim in this sea of other kinds of imaginations, whether poetic ones or just different ways of speaking about speech, or talking about its withdrawal or its withholding. This is an important aspect of the book—to make it something that isn’t this academic exploration or legal exploration of rights in this much more UN kind of way.

Amar: The timeline was something that we spoke about quite a few times. We should be able to look back at every moment when somebody has fought for something and how they fought and why they fought for it, and what the meaning of it was, and so on. So in that sense, I’m really glad that it’s here because it allows you to give a continuous reference. No matter in what vacuum you feel today, you can connect to this timeline, but as well as from—

I still remember when we were starting off, there was one thing that is still always stuck in my head, which I also loved about the whole process of this book coming together, with all the various people who came in that you invited who brought in and put things on the table. It was to somehow not start this exploration from a position of knowing. That if we began from a position of “we know” and now we are proceeding to unravel or discuss. Somehow I wanted to find a way to get out of that position as well, so that some of us may know or think we know, but can we find that zero moment, at least for a certain period of time, to sit across the table even with something that we don’t agree, do not understand, had not thought of.

Carin: I think a very important aspect of that was the collaboration with these partner organizations and to understand that despite our deep interest in political matters and realities, there are people who are out in the front fighting who have developed expertise that we simply don’t have. So the partnership with ARTICLE 19, the National Coalition Against Censorship, and Weeksville was crucial. Also with the New York Peace Institute, a mediation service. All of them we engaged with early on to acknowledge that speech is practiced very differently in different contexts and that we start from a position of not knowing and need to learn for starters.

Laura: I think this presumption of not knowing is an unusual position to take when you’re beginning a research initiative because most initiatives begin with a hypothesis, but we began with the anti-hypothesis. Let’s say, we actually need to reconsider our subject from the very beginning, from the presumption of knowledge. Sometimes this position might have been a little bit confusing for our partner organizations because they, of course, work from that place of implementing their methodologies day to day.

I think that tension was very productive because it allowed for us to move into a space of learning about how, for example, the Peace Institute deals with speech, deals with hateful speech in the context of a mediation, how conflict—seemingly unresolvable conflict—can emerge in a room within a very specific time frame—each of their sessions was an hour. It’s not like they go on for ages. We could consider how to translate that into something that might be useful in a totally different context. 

And going back to your Such a Morning film, Amar, in a way that’s what the professor is trying to enact as a way of reopening all of these things that we think we know.

Amar: The professor was in the story. I think in many moments while doing this as well it was, at least if you agree to get into a position to receive, to allow something to come to you or to develop. Even before you do that you have to get into that zone or that position to be able to receive. In order to get to that zone you need to be prepared to be there. You can’t just get up one morning and say, “Okay, I’m ready and I’m open.” How do you prepare to be open and how do you prepare to understand a totally different meaning of what speech means or what freedom means.

Carin: We did have one guide—your Letter 7 from Such a Morning, which describes in such incredibly beautiful language, very succinctly, the trajectory of people arriving at a place, being ready to share something, spending time together, and then learning from each other while all along scribes as part of a larger expanded community are getting ready to take notes and to receive the knowledge that is being arrived at among the speakers. And we, very deliberately, then decided to take that story as the structure of the book.

It was the scaffolding and the narrative and the beautiful and gentle and generous invitation to come along and join these discussions and approaches to freedom of speech, which the narrative of Letter 7 provided.

Laura: Yes, and I particularly think that this approach created spaces of both confluence and dissonance for the texts in the book. For instance  Vanessa Place’s contributions to both the seminars and to the book stake out a different kind of territory that is very useful to put alongside some of the other suggestions. I also think of Aruna D’Souza’s rejection of empathy as empathy not being enough. She says, “there’s no reason to accept your empathy” and makes an argument for both a rejection of compassion, as well as the potential of misprision. So these kinds of conflicts emerge within the book itself, between the texts, between the offerings, which was part of what we hoped would happen.

Amar: Yes, it’s absolutely critical. If there’s somebody who says, “I have never spoken. How do you want me to discuss the freedom of speaking when I feel I have never spoken?” Or if somebody says that, “My language has disappeared so I can’t say what I feel in your language.” So where do we begin this discussion now? Of course, in a more practical sense, if you’re talking about mediation where you have an immediate conflict between two entities or two people or two groups, and you are in a realistic situation of having to deal with that, then how do you understand speech and how do you negotiate how open you are. What are you willing to accept and for how long?

All of that is real in a totally different dimension. For me, it was really exciting that you brought all of these strands in. Sometimes it may not have been that visible, this tension that you referred to but It definitely came together. I think in some way having a timeline also helps because the timeline continues. It’s not just a dream.

Carin: And suggests that.

Laura: Yes, it suggests that there is something beyond the book as well, an ongoing effort. I was also thinking about the ways in which the rejection of speech, the withdrawal of speech also plays a significant role in the way that we think through, “It’s my choice whether or not to contribute to a discourse.” Perhaps withholding is something that makes me safer or perhaps I have no choice about it because of who I am in society or, as you say, because of a language barrier. But I think recognizing that that is a position that can be taken is important.

Carin: The position of speaking the—

Laura: A position of speech.

Carin: If I look at all the contributions, what strikes me most now in hindsight is the close connection between physical presence and language and communication. Whether you actually articulate words or whether you are just present. I’m thinking, for instance, of the contribution by Silvia Federici and Gabriela López Dena where they’re talking about manifestos, Spanish manifestos starting with one in the 19th century and how they need to be presented in public space and enacted and pronounced and shouted. Then another example would be the seminar we had in Weeksville Heritage Center, which was also a partner organization and where they decided to restage the speech by Henry Highland Garnet calling for sedition, calling for a disassociation with this country that was articulated by Garnet in, I think, 1843. To speak that today, a couple of years after Trump’s election, and loss of the popular vote, on the grounds of the place where African American people had created one of the first communities of free “men” was astounding. It was again the enactment of speech in a body and in a space.

Another example of merging of place and speech is this insert. It is a mapping of lyrics that were written and captured by Mendi + Keith Obadike and follows certain markers on the land—streets and such—so that the song is actually part of the map that’s spoken in the song, providing true direction.

Laura: I think at that seminar at Weeksville, another one of those very powerful moments about speech came up when Michael Rakowitz was talking about the amount of communication that happens outside verbal articulation. The gestures, the non-verbal communications, the expression in our eyes. Anything that is non-verbal, it’s a much larger percentage of what people take in than your words. I don’t remember the exact figure he quoted but it’s quite an astonishing percentage that comes to us outside of the actual words we say. So speech in terms of communication of words becomes very different depending on who is speaking them and how.

Amar: For me, this has become really valuable. I always felt that if I was a parent or if I was a teacher or if I was in a group and I wanted to start talking about all these things, what could I have that could help me to begin this conversation? I think it’s just something that I was hoping for. This thing of going to a position of not knowing and then accumulating, accumulating. Not necessarily positions that I totally agree with, but different positions, different routes to get into the same subject.

Laura: Well, because I think in a way, we started in this position of not knowing, of wanting to create a curriculum for not knowing [laughs] and how the not knowing could—

Amar: —allow us to reformulate maybe. Maybe come up with newer positions even if they’re temporary but at least we get into a new understanding. Otherwise, we don’t come to a new understanding if we—

Laura: —if we just retread the same ground.

Carin: Let me just have the book again. I’m not even sure if we decided to have a book from the get-go but the whole project began with these seminars where over the course of a year and a half in six or seven seminars, we mined this idea of freedom of speech. I think it really is phenomenal what the designers Nontsikelelo Mutiti and Julia Novitch did, literally taking the idea of darkness as that element that actually allows you to see something and have that darkness compose the actual content—the words on the page—of the book.

You’ll remember—and see!—that all the text is printed with three inks, and the three inks vary from section to section of the book and are then combined to give you the black that is legible. This accumulation of information through a calling of inks and colors and dyes that only in combination become—

Laura: Legible.

Carin: —legible. That’s just exactly what we tried to do with the live seminars.

Laura: I mean, Nontsi and Julia converted the idea of the project into a physical manifestation. This still blows my mind because of the subtlety of it but also the perfectness of it. But now that you talk about the seminars, I remember us discussing very early on that we had a real interest in actually creating a bibliography of some kind, a resource.

One of the things that I really like about the book is that it not only names sources from a footnoting standpoint but it provides a very clear set of bibliographic information about texts that informed the process that we went through in each seminar, where we pulled together the resources culled with our partner organizations and also in the making of the book. Even though this is by no means what I would consider an academic book, it does provide this wealth of citations that one could use in a more academic setting, in this pedagogical way that you were talking about. I think that I feel like was part of your vision from the very beginning and I love that it actually—

Amar: Happened.

Laura: —happened. [laughs] It’s no mystery why. We did try to do that. But it’s very gratifying to see it. One of our challenges in making the book and sharing the learnings was: How do you explain a year and a half’s worth of seminars to people who haven’t been to them and have it feel meaningful? I think consolidating the seminar content in the back as we did in these summaries is one way of doing it and not foregrounding it as a prerequisite to reading the book. 

Carin: The whole question of time and depth and commitment of course resonates throughout the book as well, and I feel it captures some very specific exchanges and quotes on some of the seminars. At the same time, you also have the sense of a long time span. And it’s not unlike your story, like Letter 7, where people are ready to receive the information and the knowledge but we don’t know when it will happen.

Laura: Well, and I’m not sure there are many organizations that would host such an in-depth long-term—

Amar: Precisely.

Laura: —discussion as we have had through the Vera List Center because that was really the gift; to allow the process to unfold; to allow for the project to require a year and a half of seminars, and a significant amount of resources and time to commission the essays that then were massaged into this beautiful publication. That element of time is very important, it doesn’t come too commonly in the world.

Carin: No. It was a very fortunate constellation of forces.

This exchange has been edited for clarity.

Studies into Darkness: The Perils and Promise of Freedom of Speech is co-published by Amherst College Press and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. Edited by Carin Kuoni and Laura Raicovich with contributions by Zach Blas, Mark Bray, Gabriela López Dena, Natalie Diaz, Aruna D’Souza, Silvia Federici, Jeanne van Heeswijk, shawné michaelain holloway, Prathibha Kanakamedala, Amar Kanwar, Carin Kuoni, Lyndon, Debora, and Abou, Svetlana Mintcheva, Obden Mondésir, Mendi + Keith Obadike, Vanessa Place, Laura Raicovich, Michael Rakowitz, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Nabiha Syed.