This is my newsletter #25: Najiba Yasmin
This Is My Newsletter (and now yours)
I have been wondering for a while what has characterized most of the last year that I have spent in lockdown for months in a studio by myself in a foreign city and the way my interactions have shaped with the people in my life. As we gradually grew used to losing physical touch and started finding comfort in faces on tiny screens, disruptions across the world continued to remind us of the growing polarity that has manifested in our lives. Having invested the last eight months in whole-heartedly researching how museums can work towards achieving values of climate and racial justice in order to stay socially relevant, I increasingly became uncomfortable with the ways in which the art industry has become economically driven. Whilst imagining and formulating alternate value systems for museums, I developed newly grown faith in the power of empathy as a transformative tool that allows us to build systems and relationships based on care and intimacy. As opposed to virtues of kindness and generosity which often come to us naturally, building empathy is a process and to a large extent, an embodied practice that requires us to unlearn our prejudices and willingness to put aside our differences.
In her book Empathy: A History, Lanzoni traces the historical roots of empathy in the German concept of Einfühlung. This concept renders itself a certain poetic beauty in Robert Vischer’s description of Einfühlung as the process of our bodily displacement to an inanimate object such as a painting or a book. In this issue of the newsletter, I will take you through some wonderful resources that have helped me reimagine my worldviews and develop empathy over the past few months.
Istanbul Design Biennial 2020-21: ‘Empathy Revisited: Designs for More than One’
With the aim of revisiting empathy, the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial reimagines design as a way of sharing and celebrating commensalism by raising questions of how the process of designing can contain and benefit multiple perspectives. It gives the notion of design a new role by contextualizing it in a reality which is constituted by feelings and affect as opposed to mere functionality.
The Biennial’s ‘Critical Cooking Show’ allows us to explore the kitchen as a space central to design thinking and production via the modes of films, lectures and performances. My particular highlight from this programme has been the short film titled ‘Cooking With Stories’ which provokes us to think about the design of mundane kitchen tools and their socio-political entanglements. Using intimate, personal narratives, the film uses food to traverse borders, discuss appropriation and visibilize power relations in the kitchen .
Watch here: Eleştirel Yemek Programı / Critical Cooking Show: Hikâyelerle Yemek Pişirmek / Cooking with Stories
Johny Pitts - Afropean: Travels in Black Europe
18th September - 1 November 2020, Exhibition in FOAM Photography Museum
UK-based Journalist and photographer Johny Pitts’ Afropean exhibition was fresh, authentic and vulnerable, all at once. His photographs allow us to peek into his experiences of his travel across Europe where he went searching for the Afropean identity. Through these encounters, empathy is employed in his photographs not as a means of projecting himself onto someone to understand them better but as a way to reimagine his hyphenated identity. In doing so, he creates some refreshing and piercing works that push the boundaries of our perceived idea of Blackness.
“Visually, what I was keen to do, was avoid a Black identity of superlatives; like on the one hand, super successful people in public roles and on the other hand, people in the ghetto. I was searching for an everydayness to try and demand a human experience connected to Blackness”
-Johny Pitts, excerpt from conversation with Gloria Wekker, October, 2020
View full discussion and photographs here.
99% Invisible: Episode 419 ‘Take a Walk’ (Podcast)
If there was a way to walk in someone else’s shoes, it has to be done while tuning into this podcast episode. I’ll refrain from writing about how this episode brought me to tears and let these wonderful guests take you on a journey to remember.
Keti Koti Table: A Ritualized Meal
Keti Koti refers to the breaking of chains and is symbolic of the abolishment of slavery in the Dutch carribean in the year 1863. Inspired by the Jewish Seder tables, Mercedes Zandwijken & Machiel Keestra developed the Keti Koti Table in the Netherlands as a way of facilitating reflection and conversation on the shared histories of slavery. Inviting participants from diverse backgrounds, this meal consists of a prayer, rubbing each others’ hands with coconut oil to rub away the pain of being chained, and food that was eaten by formerly enslaved people.
This table can be organized at home using the manual http://www.ketikotitafel.nl/uploads/9/4/8/2/94820406/keti-koti-table_manual_2018.pdf
Empathy Museum: ‘From Where I’m Standing’ - Nurses
This project by the Empathy Museum uses storytelling to invite us into a process of active listening and learning. By engaging with people from diverse practices and how they faced the pandemic, the project allows us to step out of the walls of our homes and take a deep dive into stories of kindness, compassion and warmth.
https://fromwhereiamstanding.empathymuseum.com/
In the hopes that these resources have inspired you to rethink your positioning in this world and encouraged you to push the boundaries of how we build empathetic systems for ourselves as much as it did for me; here is wishing that the new year treats you with kindness.
Thank you for reading.
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Najiba Yasmin is a visual artist from the tea gardens of Assam and currently pursuing a Masters programme in Museum Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her artistic practice aims at maximizing the visibility of mundane objects, exchanges and structures that shape our world. Her personal projects such as mixtape exchanges and archiving family recipes aim to revive otherwise waning cultural practices. You can follow her work on instagram @ajeebnajeeb