Maha Maamoun: Your academic and film practices interweave throughout your work and across the span of many years. In retrospect, do you identify certain changes, waves, or stages in the development of your practice and interest in the field?
Matthias De Groof: These changes might be the story of my self-decolonization. I say “decolonization”, while being completely aware of the ways in which this term has been instrumentalized and abused, which actually points to the persistence of coloniality. In retrospect, I think that what drove and drives me, in practice as well as in theory, is trying to continuously dismantle this persistence. The film ONDER HET WITTE MASKER: DE FILM DIE HAESAERTS HAD KUNNEN MAKEN (Under the White Mask: The Film That Haesaerts Could Have Made), which will be presented at Forum Expanded’s exhibition, uses the words by Aimé Césaire. But, in retrospect, it all started with him. For me, reading his “Discourse on Colonialism” when I was 19 was an eye-opener. Not the colonized, but the colonizer is the brute! I remember giving it to my grandfather, who was a colonial doctor, as ultimate proof that his views on colonialism were wrong. He read it in one go but didn’t say anything, except through silence. I then felt he was either shocked, or that he relativized it; or both. I guess people who will see the film UNDER THE WHITE MASK, with Césaire’s text, might likewise pick up that relativity card, dismissing it as “Césaire’s point of view”, as just one amongst other points of view. But for me, and I hope for many viewers, I could not possibly relativize it, precisely because of Césaire’s explicit subjective point of view and his blunt reversal of dominant views on civilization and savagery, which colonized me.
For me, reading Aimé Césaire’s “Discourse on Colonialism” when I was 19 was an eye-opener. Not the colonized, but the colonizer is the brute!
Maha: I wondered if in retrospect you can see certain links and shifts in your work or different strategies that you’ve employed?
Matthias: I think there are two elements of continuity. One is the friction between theory and practice. Practice liberates me from the impasses that I stumble upon in theory. It’s this continuous back-and-forth. In theory, we can say that the imagination is limited, due to certain hegemonic centrisms such as phallocentrism, eurocentrism, anthropocentrism … But in practice, imagination can be created in order to transgress these centrisms. The second element, in retrospect, is the archive. It started with my film JERUSALEM, THE ADULTEROUS WIFE (2008)—a political critique of propaganda films in which I use Israeli films about excavation to make a point that excavation is politically embedded. It strikes me that with UNDER THE WHITE MASK I got back to a point of thinking the archive as a technique in the way Ariella Aïsha Azoulay does, all the while constituting a counter-archive. While in LOBI KUNA (2018) and PALIMPSEST (2019), for instance, I only use fragments of the archive as illustrations, in UNDER THE WHITE MASK I make my point at the level of the archive itself.
Maha: So we can say that your use of the archive has transformed from using excerpts from it to interrogating it, or “sabotaging” it. You argue that the archive could have been different from its very moment of inception. Which maybe brings back the retort of relativity. Can you elaborate on this point?
Matthias: The Archive, with a capital A, is often a state institution with a hegemonic discourse meant to legitimize a certain ideology. It’s not a neutral space. Nevertheless, the archive, or at least the meanings you can ascribe to sound and images and the relations between both, can be altered. Now, this change occurs, for instance, in films by John Akomfrah and Vincent Monnikendam. What I meant by saying that the archive could have been different is that Paul Haesaerts, whose colonial film I appropriate, could have made an entirely different (anticolonial) film. I prove this with my film, since all the elements I use in addition to his images, such as text and music, were already available to Haesaerts. By doing this, I also question the idea that we progressed towards an increased postcolonial awareness. In 1958, we already had anticolonial films, music, literature and military struggles. We had Pan-African and tricontinental conferences, independentist politics, and so on. The fact that Haesaerts did not inscribe his film into these global movements, or even ignored it, says more about Haesaerts. By making colonial propaganda, he is not “a child of his time”, but on one side of history, which corresponds with the side of the Archive. UNDER THE WHITE MASK “detaches” his images from the Archive.
Paul Haesaerts could have made an entirely different (anticolonial) film. I prove this with my film, since all the elements I use in addition to his images, such as text and music, were already available to Haesaerts.
Maha: There is this Wikipedia entry for Haesaerts that describes him as “a multitalented Belgian artist with a celebrated documentary film practice,” which made me wonder in general about the reach of decolonial revisions to public platforms. Haesaerts’s film, for example, was an art documentary film that participated in, or reaffirmed, a colonial discourse. 50 years later, you are countering Haesaerts’s film, using it and flipping it on its head. I was curious about the contexts of circulation that you seek for your film, or that seek your film, do you think about the circuits of circulation for your film as a way of furthering this decolonial discourse?
Matthias: I hope to provoke any spectator into a similar feeling to the one I had when I first read Césaire’s Discours, although through a different medium. The idea is to share the simple fact that colonialism turns the colonizer into the savage, rather than the colonized. The idea that colonialism makes Europe into the animal was something that was both shocking and revelatory to me. The second idea that the film wants to share with the spectator is Césaire’s destabilizing of the artificial boundaries between colonialism and fascism. Césaire was one of the firsts to see fascism as an internal colonialism. When I speak to peers, I see that these artificial boundaries are being protected in collective memory. The film is thus targeted to an audience who might learn these two things through film, and might encounter the striking fact that these are relevant today, given the rise of fascism, but also given the colonial present, such as for instance, in our relation towards nature.
Maha: It’s extremely relevant and as you said in another interview “We now know that colonialism is alive and kicking”, and so is fascism, hence the importance of highlighting this connection again, a connection which has maybe not become as evident as it should be. In an earlier discussion of your film PALIMPSEST, you said that looking at the budget breakdown of the renovation of the Africa Museum revealed how governmental policy emphasized, through the way it divided its spending on this renovation project, the physical renovation of the colonial museum much more than the aspect of deconstruction and revision of the museum’s colonial politics, which remain embedded in its museological practices. And so, the renovation of this museum, which may have been spurred at the outset by a desire to decolonialize the museum, ended up being immune to a deep revision of its colonial politics—the discussions in parliament, the governmental policies that in effect approved the renovation of the museum did not truly engage in or fund the process of decolonizing it, or deconstructing the colonial premises of this colonial museum. Which brings to mind a recent backlash in French academia against racial and decolonial studies, which were framed as divisive studies. And so it seems like there’s a double isolation in effect. An isolation of decolonial discourse, firstly, from public discourse and policy, and secondly, an isolation within the Academy. This being your field of interest, both academically and artistically, do you feel that decolonial discourse is being pushed against the wall?
“Not for one minute does it cross his mind that, all things considered, it would have been better not to have needed them.”
Matthias: Surprisingly or not, the French minister of higher Education, Frédérique Vidal, recently linked postcolonial studies to new forms of militant radicalism and Islamic Leftism, basically trying to delegitimize postcolonial studies. Postcolonial studies explores, among many other things, colonialities in cultural expressions, in international relations, in law, in artificial intelligence, and so on. It studies how coloniality transforms and reemerges today. Decoloniality goes further than postcolonialism, and tries to undo coloniality, sometimes building on postcolonial analysis. So you could say that the film I made is a decolonial move. Not long after Vidal’s words, the UK Minister of State for Universities, Michelle Donelan, compared “decolonization” of history to “Soviet Union-style” censorship. This is interesting because it points to the too often overlooked link between decoloniality and anti-capitalism.
Moreover, I think the attacks on post- and decoloniality might be a very productive crisis, if I’m allowed to be a little bit optimistic. They break the decolonial echo chamber in which all members share the same premises. The real decolonial challenge, however, is to speak with people outside the echo chamber who do not share that same premise, that is, the right, the far right, the alt-right, and the moderate right. The problem is that this dialogue is often “cancelled” or censored, especially in the more conservative media. Nevertheless, I think the challenge resides there, which is why this may be a productive crisis since it destroys this decolonial echo chamber and forces us to see the very obvious links between capitalism and coloniality to which Césaire points, coloniality only being the “dark” side of capitalism.
I remember a Q&A after a screening of PALIMPSEST and a student said: “You know, decolonizing the museum and so on is very good but why isn’t there even a word for decapitalizing [undoing capitalism]?” Indeed, the deep entanglements between colonialism and capitalism are the elephants in the room whereby decolonial-ism sometimes functions as diversion. The colonial tusks are severed and displayed on the wall as a trophy, but the Capital elephant itself remains untouched. Decolonial-ism then thinks itself as disruptive or subversive, whereas it is a reformism. It happens when decolonizing the museum does not question the museum as such. Césaire says it like this: “Not for one minute does it cross his mind that, all things considered, it would have been better not to have needed them.” I saw an interview with Marguerite Duras who said in 1969 that we should begin totally anew. “On recommence tout. Le depart à zero”. This utopia of erasure is more subversive. Given the crisis, the decoloniality must be subversive in Duras’s or Césaire’s way, rather than reformative, and thus conservative.
Maha: The reference to the utopia of erasure and that some forms cannot be made right brings me back to the question of form in your film. I remember in an earlier correspondence between you and Forum Expanded, we were wondering whether we should see the Haesaerts film, and you said that there have been two approaches in this regard: one that sees an importance in showing the original, albeit racist, film, and the other that chooses not to disseminate it further. At the beginning of UNDER THE WHITE MASK, you call it a “re-edit” of Haesaerts film. Can you tell us more about these different strategies, and the form you chose for UNDER THE WHITE MASK?
Matthias: Now I call it a “coup”, a “sabotage”, following Spivak’s term “affirmative sabotage”: disrupting the archive from the inside. Instead of making a new voiceover commenting on the original film while denouncing Haesaerts’s colonial gaze, we chose to change the film completely into a new film. Rather than critically repeating the imagery and making colonialism into a hereditary disease, we changed it with an already existing anticolonial discourse. There’s really no urge in reproducing problematic images and there might even be a danger in saying that “in this time they were talking like this”, because it pinpoints coloniality and racism to a remote past and denies the fact that this language is transforming to the effect of saying we made progress. The whole point of the film is that everything was already said then.
Exhibited masks mostly speak through silence: the refusal to adhere to the language of the colonizer that functions as a vehicle for colonial epistemes through grammar and syntax. If silence was not an option, we thus had to translate them.
Maha: In your re-edit, you replaced Haesaerts text with a text by Césaire read in Lingala. Did you also re-edit the image sequence?
Matthias: Yes, though I don’t know if it succeeded. I only selected the images in which you might have the impression that the statues are looking directly at the spectator. Of course, it is only very small fragments of Haesaerts’s long film in which the statues are mainly objectified and put at a distance. I tried to imagine them as speaking subjects. The words they speak are the ones by Césaire, but we translated them into Lingala. It is true that masks, when exhibited, mostly speak through silence: the refusal to adhere to the language of the colonizer that functions as a vehicle for colonial epistemes through grammar and syntax. If silence was not an option, we thus had to translate them.
Maha: There is also the tone of the performance of the text. It is very confrontational.
Matthias: That is thanks to Maravilha Munto. She’s a slam poet. Césaire’s words brought out many emotions in her. It wasn’t my directing at all, and it’s surely not how Césaire would have read it. His tone would have been different, although he never read the text out loud himself. She was very moved by what she read and could relate very easily, which does not go without saying, because there’s a time gap as well as a space gap between Munto and Césaire.
Maha: Would you situate your film in the lineage of Chris Marker’s STATUES ALSO DIE, for example?
Matthias: Yes. That film is also a film that Haesaerts could have seen, which he probably did. Nevertheless, you see enormous differences between Marker and Haesaerts. STATUES ALSO DIE starts by asking the question if the statues are dead or alive, the “museal botany of death”, and ends with the possibility of transformation of the artifacts. These “objects of belonging” received an entirely new ritual function in the museum after they were looted. New colonial meanings were ascribed to this heritage while being objectified to serve as tools in an ideological institute to legitimize occupation. The artifacts were thus killed and given new life, including “aestheticization” and “decolonization”. I do also ascribe new meanings and functions to these belongings, but now through Césaire’s very clear voice in the debate. In short, Alain Resnais and Marker’s film inspired me because their film shows that the meaning of statues can transform.
