Derivas Analíticas Journal - Nº 20 - March 2024. ISSN:2526-2637

 

EDITORIAL 

Diving into the Dark Continent

Virgínia Carvalho
Psychoanalyst
Member of the Brazilian School of Psychoanalysis (EBP)
and the World Association of Psychoanalysis (AMP)
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In the immensity of the Tate Modern, an art gallery located in London, in "lovely, free and magnanimous England"[1], I came across the beauty of Aïda Muluneh's work, colouring the walls of "A world in common", an exhibition of contemporary African photography. In this exhibition, the artworks, like a "Black look (back)", brought down "the mask of our worlds", as said Colin Wright, our Jamaican colleague, a member of the London Society of The New Lacanian School.

Along with these works, there were four photographs of the Water life series 2018, whose poetic force made me get to know Aïda´s work better. Her images include important social criticism, which allows her “to advocate through art” and, at the same time, they bring a fantasy dimension that allows some contour to the unbearable. So, the image above is named “Star shine, moon glow” and “Sorrows we Bear” is the name of another image. This collection evokes the situation of women working for hours to fetch water in Ethiopia in dire circumstances, and the artist invites us to read this terrible insistence not only through her lenses, but also through Maya Angelou’s verses in the poem “Woman work”: “Star shine, moon glow. You´re all that I can call my own”. We strongly recommend an attentive and unhurried tour of Aïda’s website, https://www.aidamuluneh.com/. We warmly thank her for gently letting us use some of her images in the 20th number of our journal Derivas Analíticas.

She was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1974. Aïda got a degree from the Communication Department of Howard University in Washington D.C. with a major in Film. Her artwork has travelled the word and won several prizes. It can be seen in prestigious museums around the world. In 2019, she became the first black woman to co-curate the Nobel Peace Prize exhibition and in the following year, she returned as a commissioned artist for the prize. She has also participated in important photography competitions, and she has given important lectures in festivals on this subject. As an educator and Canon ambassador, she founded the Addis Foto Fest, the first international photography festival in East Africa, which has been held since 2010.

Her work, committed to a “visual activism”, gives a place to the African look in international photography. Aïda believes that in photography it is not the photographer who chooses the photo. He is chosen by the photo. That is close to what Jacques Lacan said in Seminar 11, where he affirmed that the one who looks is already in the painting, because it is deep inside the eye that a picture is painted.

In an article of June 25, 2022, called “The artist shining a light on water poverty in Ethiopia”, Aïda says, "Our continent has many layers, however, we have been at the mercy of the international media that does not show the complexities of our challenges. My approach has been to tell a story from my perspective, not based on cliches often covered by foreign photographers”. [2] Aïda invites us saying that if we want to get to know Africa, we have to go there.

Sérgio Laia helped us name the encounter with Aïda's work based on a controversial but not abandoned expression: that femininity is a dark continent. Freud used this expression in “The question of lay analysis. Conversations with an impartial person”, in 1926. On page 240, of the volume released by Editora Autêntica in 2017, on the Fundamentals of the Psychoanalytic Clinic, in the Incomplete Works of Sigmund Freud, we find his indication that an adult woman's sexual life would be a dark continent for Psychology. Gilson Iannini, editor of the collection, writes a note on page 312, explaining that this expression, which can be translated as “dark continent ” (but also, “black” or “obscure”), was popularized by the best-seller of colonial literature “Through the Dark Continent “, published by explorer Henri Morton Stanley in 1878, in London. He recalls that much has already been written about this metaphor by Freud. Some critics consider it the vestige of a “phallo-Eurocentrist discourse”, while others, defenders, believe that the metaphor brings the idea of a reduplicated radical alterity, at the same time that it points to the limits of psychoanalytic discourse itself.

In “Sporadic testimonies of the not-whole”, published in this edition of Derivas Analíticas, Heloísa Bedê points out two logical ways of considering that expression. She indicates that “a continent, by definition, only appears to the eye once drawn by the asymptotic horizon of the sea”. In this sense, she invites us to “take the continent in terms of what is alive and non-delimitable in it, since it is bordered only in the fleeting dimension of its encounter with the waters of the ocean”. This idea is in line with what Clotilde Leguil had pointed out in her editorial for issue 52 of the Journal Ornicar?, published in 2018 under the title “Dark Continent”. When she questions the relevance of the Freudian expression in our age of knowing everything, she concludes that, if this metaphor is not obsolete, it is because it is not just a question of the failure of psychoanalytic knowledge in the face of the continent of femininity, but of the encounter with a different territory. This territory is what Aïda's work seems to me to interpret: an “obscure clarity”, to use Leguil's words, whose brightness and opacity present themselves to our gaze. But also to our ears, as indicated as well in this issue of Derivas by Raquel Guimarães, in “Fatoumata Diawara’s obscure clarity”, discussing the “hypnotizing” song by this Malian artist, whose beautiful music video, of which we present some excerpts here , was directed by Aïda Muluneh. “Nterini”, the name of the song in Bambara, can be translated as “something to say”.

In “Boys and girls are not (yet) men and women”, another text in this edition, Sérgio Laia gives, in my opinion, a reading of this “something to say”, indicating that, if the feminine jouissance is defined as “that which cannot be said”, we must not back down from this. Thus, “the challenge that arises is: how to approach and talk about that which cannot be said”. We consider that “Woman does not exist” because “we cannot speak of the totality of women, nor is it absolutely certain that we can do so for one by one in particular – 'we can only speak about the feminine jouissance as that which is different for each one', including for one in relation to oneself and not just for one as different in relation to another”.

Each text in this edition is an invitation to read this message, without backing down in the face of the impossible to say. Because “language does not confine the soul of women [...]: it revolves around them, touching them”, as Walter Benjamin shows us, read in collaboration with Maria Josefina Fuentes, who, in turn, relates Benjamin’s writings to the way Lacan advanced in his “passages” through feminine sexuality. In “Feminine Passages in Walter Benjamin”, she indicates that “in learning a foreign language, the essential thing is not the one that is learned, but the abandonment of the one considered as one's own – which requires the expropriation of cultural identities to accommodate the foreigner that inhabits the familiar each language.” Aïda's work, which I found in the “foreignness ” of England, seemed to me like an opening to a new language, an invitation to a journey.

Maria Cristina Giraldo, a colleague from the Nueva Escuela Lacaniana, tells us, in “The enigma of the shadow”, her journey through the rejection of the feminine and the double racism she experienced firsthand: as a woman and as a black woman. This approach also dialogues with the work of Bárbara Afonso, “Considerations on necropolitics and the feminine” because, according to the author, both the field of the feminine and that of black nomination involve an otherness, a void, a not-whole. These elaborations lead us to the Lacanian orientation developed by Jacques-Allain Miller saying that races are constituted by the way symbolic places are transmitted in discourse, a point Miller works on in his text “Racism and extimity”, published in 2016, in number 4 of Derivas Analíticas.

Marina Recalde, a colleague from the School of Lacanina Orientation, shares with us her experience of analysis, indicating her crossing of the white-black, women-men, rich-poor... us-them binaries, “a necessary crossing to find another way of inhabiting the world". In “On collectives and singularities”, she starts from Aquiles Mbembe’s idea that “when power brutalizes the body, resistance takes on a visceral form”, seeking to answer, in her text, the following question: “in which way can an analysis that comes to an end allow someone to overcome this tension between the collective and the singular?”

In “The awe of literature faced in 'The most secret memory of men'”, Ludmilla Feres Faria brought us her reading of a book by Senegalese writer Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, winner of the Goncourt prize in 2021. She shows us how, for him, writing slowly emerged as a solution to deal with the impact of a certain indelible and traumatic mark, “of the encounter of words with bodies, which makes it impossible to unify subjects into a same class, 'all colonized'”.

Daniela Viola encounters this impossibility to unify at the São Paulo Biennial in the carpets and dust clouds of South African artist Igshaan Adams entitled Choreographies of the Impossible. Taking advantage of the fact that “the cloud, this fleeting suspension of particles, is an image of contingency”, she takes us back to Lacan’s flight over the Siberian plains and his theorization about the letter in the text “Lituraterra” written in 1971 to arrive at the figure of the whirlwind or “redemunho”, a term that evokes the backlands of Guimarães Rosa. The text “About clouds and whirlwinds: notes from a visit to Choreographies of the Impossible” is illustrated with beautiful and impressive images provided by Fundação Bienal de São Paulo/ Levi Fanan, whom we also thank.

Vinícius Moreira Lima interviewed, especially for this issue, Igor Simões, curator of the exhibition Direito à forma (The right to form), which takes place at Inhotim. The change of the title of this exhibition to “The right to formlessness”, carried out in his text, allows us to value the proposal of this curatorship not to essentialize the idea of a “pretended black place”. It is worth taking a look at the beautiful images of the exhibition included in this text, which were kindly provided by Inhotim, to whom we are grateful. “I am atlântica”, a phrase by Beatriz Nascimento that appears as the epigraph of this exhibition, evokes the lost (the famous Atlantis) and anticipates that the Atlantic Ocean bears both the marks of the diaspora and “the beyond, through movement, through flows, which point in the direction of non-identity, a dimension at play in artistic creation and, particularly, in formal abstraction”.

The ocean, the sea, the water... We invite you to read this issue of Derivas Analíticas as a journey into the foreign and the unknown, not in a search for the construction of borders, but as an opening for a fruitful and unique dive into the water life that the feminine holds in its very dimension of dark continent.

I thank all that have participated in this issue.

[1] These expressions are attributed to Sigmund Freud, at the entrance to the Freud Museum, on a sign that answers the question, "Why did Freud come to London"? It says, “Freud was the most famous person in the community of Jewish refugees who escaped the Nazis and settled in this part of London. He was grateful to ´lovely, free, magnanimous England’, but ended his life far from home, and fearful for the fate of friends and Family left behind”.

[2]  “Our continent has many layers,” she says. “However, we have been at the mercy of the international media that does not show the complexities of our challenges. My approach has been to tell a story from my perspective, not based on cliches often covered by foreign photographers.” Cf.: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/ gallery/2022/jun/25/the-artist-shining-a- light -on-water-poverty-in-ethiopia-in-pictures.

 English version by Ana Helena Souza