Reflexive essays | The February Journal

Angela Stiegler

Friends with Benefits: On Working with Ambiguity in Artistic Friendship-Collaborations

Friends with benefits was the title by which we—a group of three artist friends, Samuel Fischer-Glaser and Yulia Lokshina as well as this essay’s author—were invited to an exhibition in an artist-run space in Munich, Germany. The result was a 20-minute video installation that we framed as a music video for our imaginary vegan punk band by the same name: friends with benefits (2018/2023). We used this title as a name for our collaboration addressing the entanglements and sexual connotations that go along with it and expanded it to a diverse understanding of artistic collaboration. In this essay, we deal with what it means to be artists working in capitalist times and during multiple crises. We suggest a method for artistic collaborative work in Germany today. We embrace our working and living together, maneuvering continuously through problems and conflicts that emerge with the proximity of both work and life, friendship and love. Our common artistic strategies of collaboration include methods such as reading our own or others’ writings to each other, producing videos and re-using material already produced, a procedure we call ‘arte povera,’ and adding new layers of interpretation to it, thus exercising what in German is popularly known as ‘Verfremdungseffekt’ (literally: defamiliarizating effect). By reading and speaking in different registers, we gave the video material from 2018 a 2023 sound layer, in which we used our voices to perform different ideas of authorship and artisthood. By confronting ourselves with popular and problematic positions and by embodying them, we claim this as an ‘inconvenient’ method to develop critical thinking. Some of these voices that resound lead back to Munich as a site of avantgarde cultural production of New German Cinema as well as of two legendary and controversial figures of that movement, the director and actor Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945–1982) and the actor Klaus Kinski (1926–1991). We also present ourselves as fictional musician characters that go on tour with their latest hit: Nie wieder Tier (‘Animal Never Again’). Through this setup, we ‘hope’ to approach ‘problematic’ situations in the present and address the symptoms of a still post-war German culture and the continuities of fascism.

Pasha Tretyakova

Homework—Hopework

What is possible when a home is not home because home is love and love contains hope? Do you not have hope? Does your place of origin hang around your neck like a problem? In the wake of the war that Russia has been perpetrating in Ukraine, with the full-scale invasion beginning on 24 February 2022, the author negotiates in this autoethnographic essay with performative elements what it means to see, love, lose, and have hope in your home.

Keren Poliah , Vashti Suwa Gbolagun , John Yuen Ka Keung, Hannah Helm, David Junior Gilbert

An Act of Love: Three Experiences of Self-Decolonization in the Academic Community of the United Kingdom

This narrative essay presents testimonies that uncover the fragmented identity of members of minoritized ethnic groups in the academic context of the United Kingdom. It discusses outcomes of a project which, as part of an Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) scholarship from the Doctoral School of the University of Salford, gathered testimonies and stories of international postgraduate doctoral researchers highlighting that the process of decolonization should start from within. Demonstrating how deeply coloniality pervades lands and people, these narratives unveil realities of not fitting in, performing unconventionality, and placing marginalized voices at the forefront. The authors of this essay narrate their journeys towards recognizing their commitment to decolonizing themselves, and underline how this process can provoke change in others.

Sofia Gavrilova

Autoethnographic Reflections on One’s Own Imperialism

The essay mixes the genre of autoethnographic reflections with an attempt to conceptualize the challenge that members of the Russian academic community in exile are facing on both individual and collective levels. It frames the questions of responsibility, guilt, and identity transformation, and traces the evolution of my personal responses to them as an attempt to document and conceptualize the unavoidable shift in the research field, agenda, positionality, and methods that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine brought to Slavic/area studies.

Libby King

Suppose We See Ourselves

Narrative form is often taken for granted, a set of storytelling rules that go unnoticed and unseen; similarly, colonialism benefits from an internal invisibility that resists observation. This autotheory essay considers the interplay between colonialism and invisibility, and explores how narrative form can act as a cultural intervention. The essay suggests that autoforms—such as autotheory, fictocriticism, autofiction, and autoethnography—expose invisible cultural rules and intrinsically alter the way content is understood. It is especially concerned with how colonialism uses authorship to limit internal observation and critique and suggests that by refiguring the ‘I’ and the ‘we,’ autoforms expose these invisible internal rules. It argues that autoforms actively reconfigure the boundaries around many of the early twenty-first century’s major cultural conversations about representation and appropriation, lived experience and expertise, and public space and private space, as well as notions of identity, othering, consciousness, and embodiment. The paper approaches form not just as narrative structure, but also as a tool, a technique, a strategy, and an intervention that inherently impacts content and changes how the cultural landscape is seen and navigated. Through comparing the yellow soils of southern Australia and Gaza, the grammar of Derrida and Wittgenstein, and the path of water and rivers, the essay explores how the form we use to tell stories is often as important as the content.

Nicola Kozicharow

Russian Colonial Sickness and Decolonial Recovery: Revelations of Autotheoretical Practice

This autotheoretical essay explores self-decolonization as a personal, embodied process through the author's experience of displacement and chronic illness. Russia’s full-scale invasion of and ongoing genocide in Ukraine have drawn the world’s attention to the brutal history of Russian colonialism. The fact the author was largely unfamiliar with this history blew a hole in the foundation of her scholarly expertise and sense of self. Amid long months of sickness at the author's family home in the US, she sought to exorcize imperial myths from and find decolonial truths in her knowledge and family story. Learning from the lived experiences of Ukrainians and discussions with her father on Ukrainian identity was transformative, demonstrating the pedagogical power of listening to voices erased by colonialism.

Melanie Garland

Attempting to Decolonize Oneself: Sonorities between the ‘West’ and the ‘South’

The two parts of this contribution—poetic sonority and essay—are poetic and theoretical experiments in response to the challenge of decolonizing the self. In particular, the author is interested in contrasting and intersecting past-present histories of the European diaspora in the global ‘South,’ drawing on her own family history marked by mestizaje and hybridity. Through voice narrative and sound archives, this sound piece challenges linear narrative by playing with the idea of fragments. In it, traces of oceans and seas overlap, reflecting through sound and theory the histories of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, as well as the Mediterranean and North Seas, as containers and corridors of entangled past-present colonial histories. The piece opens new ground for interpreting hybrid cultures, a possible starting point for decolonizing oneself when standing between the so-called Global ‘West’ and ‘South.’