Ground Sea

This page introduces Hilde Van Gelder’s publication Ground Sea. Photography and the Right to Be Reborn (Lieven Gevaert Series, vol. 30 – Leuven University Press, 2021).

Imagine a world in which every individual has a fundamental right to be reborn. This idle dream haunts Hilde’s associative travelogue that takes Allan Sekula’s sequence Deep Six / Passer au bleu (1996/1998) as a touchstone for a dialogue with more recent artworks zooming in on the borderscape near the Channel Tunnel, such as by Sylvain George and Bruno Serralongue. Combining ethnography, visual materials, political philosophy, cultural geography, and critical analysis, Ground Sea proceeds through an innovative methodological approach. Inspired by the meandering writings of W.G. Sebald, Javier Marías, and Roland Barthes, the book develops a style both interdisciplinary and personal. Resolutely opting for an aquatic perspective Ground Sea offers a meditation on the indifference of an increasingly divided European Union with regard to considerable numbers of persons on the move, who find themselves stranded close to Calais. The contested Strait of Dover becomes a microcosm where our present global challenges of migration, climate change, human rights, and neoliberal surveillance technology converge.

In what follows here, Hilde sheds light on how a specific book by W.G. Sebald both encouraged and inspired her to start up a process of slow writing, of which Ground Sea is the concluding outcome. You might want to read it as a letter from Hilde to you. It starts with a short report on how she set the first steps to dealing with the disorderly ordered collection of “objects of interest” that forms Allan Sekula’s last project The Dockers’ Museum (2010–2013) [TDM, as researchers name it for the sake of convenience]:

While editing Allan Sekula. Ship of Fools / The Dockers’ Museum, a book published as vol. 19 in the Lieven Gevaert Series (Leuven University Press, 2015), I looked around for relevant examples of researchers who had worked on posthumous book publications. This led me to purchasing the second edition of W.G. Sebald’s Campo Santo, carefully edited by Sven Meyer, which came out in August 2013 with Fisher Verlag. As is well-known, the prose part of this book contains a report in four sections of Sebald’s journey to Corsica, and may be understood as a tribute to the culture and beauty of the island. Coincidentally, it was on the last day of a family vacation in the small village of Lecci near Porto Vecchio on the « Île de Beauté » in August 2013 that the tragic news of Allan Sekula’s untimely passing in Los Angeles came through early one morning.
In Campo Santo Sebald’s Corsica pieces, as gathered by Meyer and translated into English by Anthea Bell, end with a section bearing the French title « la cour de l’ancienne école » [The courtyard of the old school]. Quint Buchholz’s pen and colored ink drawing on paper from 1989, entitled Die Befragung der Aussicht (III) [Questioning the View (III)] closes the text part. As we learn from the narrator’s short comment on the picture, Buchholz first sent the image purposefully to Sebald, after which Sebald mistakenly mailed it to one of his Corsican regular correspondents. However, Sebald’s erroneous inclusion of the picture in his letter to this woman, who he identifies as Séraphine Aquaviva, turned out a lucky shot. She — although a bit bewildered and puzzled that he had sent it to her — identified the illustration as a representation of the closed gate in the yard of the old school at Porto Vecchio that she had attended in the 1930s. The view beyond the gate and wall remains indeterminate.

Below, I explain how this indeterminate aspect triggered my imagination. But first, I want to address a key element of Sebald’s text. In Corsica, he reports (English ed., pp. 29–30),

…the dead … were not regarded as beings forever at a safe distance in the world beyond the grave, but as family members still present, although in a different condition … There are many stories of their appearances and the methods they used to announce their presence. Until the very recent past, there were people living who … heard a dog howling at the wrong time, or … the beat of drums from the darkness of the maquis.

Sebald notes that the dead — though invisible and largely intangible — nonetheless continue to dwell among the living. For centuries, people have called these invisible presences the Muses. Sebald’s Corsica texts somehow transmitted, from the world beyond the grave, that it would be fine to take as much time as needed for studying and observing carefully the uncontrollable amount of research materials that I had at my disposal, which seemed at first sight rather obscure, and, yes, at times quite intransigent. From that time on, I rested assured that the objects under investigation would in due course come to “speak” to me as if they had sourced me instead of me having found them — and here I am referencing Daniel Palmer’s fascinating study Photography and Collaboration, published with Bloomsbury in 2017.

I started sending out various emails to potential interlocutors, and requested installation views from all the places where Sekula exhibited Ship of Fools / The Dockers’ Museum (or items from it). Bruno Serralongue sent wonderful shots he made in San Francisco, where he and Sekula jointly exhibited work in late 2011, in a show curated by Hou Hanru, bearing the title Oceans and Campfires. Sekula there integrated elements from Ship of Fools / The Dockers’ Museum in order to engage in a dialogue with Serralongue’s selection of works. It turned out from viewing these installation shots that Sekula there, on the mezzanine level, also exhibited a much older work bearing the same title “Ship of Fools.” For a long time, I did not know what to make of these small-size photographs, and simply presumed that the work must have been chosen because of the similar title “Ship of Fools.” As a result, I initially paid fairly little attention to this work.

This changed, however, when the Vancouver Maritime Museum turned out responsive too, and sent installation shots from their exhibition entitled Lured, organized in late 2012. From observing these views, I understood that the older “Ship of Fools” sequence was only the second part of a larger, quite unknown photographic sequence bearing the title Deep Six / Passer au bleu, largely produced in 1996 in Calais and Dover, and completed in 1998. The other part, Part One, was not present in the exhibition. Yet, by means of a wall text, Sekula had made sure to indicate to his audience that it existed, and that it bore the title “The Rights of Man.” This rather coincidental find rang a bell. I went back to my notes and indeed recollected that, in 2005 already, Sekula and I had considered a new collaboration that would investigate the situation in Calais, building on his 1996 project. Back then, I had merely doodled this in the margins, but now this extremely tiny detail became the central focus of my research:

Upon inquiry with the artist’s widow Sally Stein and Allan Sekula Studio Manager Ina Steiner it turned out that hidden away in Sekula’s archive there were original installation views of how he exhibited the work in 1998 in the museum of Valence (France) before it traveled back to its home base, the then Museum of Fine Arts and Lace in Calais, which originally commissioned it. After its return there, it remained in the Calais museum as a “sleeping beauty,” and it took almost twenty years before anyone aside from the museum staff took any interest in this “precious jewel” (as I call this work in my book, Ground Sea). We exhibited it in Barcelona in 2017 as part of the exhibition Allan Sekula: Collective Sisyphus (and made a publication). It is important to emphasize that this sequence of thirty-three photographs bears the bilingual title Deep Six / Passer au bleu: in both the English and French languages the verbs “deep six” and “passer au bleu” are synonymous expressions meaning to “make something disappear, to take away all trace.” So, this work somehow appeared to have performed a perfect vanishing act. Not only did its subject matter deal with “sending someone or something to the bottom,” as Sekula wrote in a letter to Annette Haudiquet, then director of the Calais museum; but also he himself buried it away in what Orhan Pamuk, in his fascinating novel The Museum of Innocence (2008), has fondly called an “empty museum” (p. 679). Of course, these empty museums such as the small Museum of Fine Arts in Calais are not literally empty; but the fact is that they own collections that hardly anyone ever inquires about. Contrary to the work that immediately precedes it, Sekula’s well-known Fish Story (1989-1995) (with which we combined Deep Six / Passer au bleu in Barcelona), the Cibachrome photographs of Deep Six / Passer au bleu are framed without overmat, giving them a very dark shine, a glow — when looking at them it is as if you are observing a disassembled film noir.

After completing the book on Sekula’s Ship of Fools / The Dockers’ Museum in 2015, I started to research Deep Six / Passer au bleu in greater depth. Initially I largely pursued this with the intention of better grasping why he connected it to TDM, about which by then we at the Lieven Gevaert Centre in Leuven had a large research project underway, in collaboration with M HKA, Antwerp (now the home of the TDM-collection). At the same time, its subject matter led me back to some of my earlier research interests on the Calaisis, and as a result I continued to simultaneously keep looking for contemporary artworks treating the dire situation in the former Pale of Calais, hoping to find more case studies to discuss it. My colleague at the university in Leuven and also a long-term collaborator, the artist Wendy Morris, had sailed from Cherbourg to Portsmouth to search for traces of the infamous sinking of the SS Mendi in 1917, resulting in the drowning of 600 passengers who sailed from South Africa to aid in the war. The first try-outs of Morris’ Letter to Plaatje (2017) had inspired me for their unfathomable enigma (note the trace of purple paint on the ferry’s window).

However crucial Morris’ work was for my trajectory she obviously had been dealing with a historical subject. In 2016 I was looking for a more immediate contemporary take on the topic, which – in a counter-journalistic vein – could make us aware of the sharp discrepancy between media reports based on what the official sources communicate in relation to Calais and the realities on the ground. On June 23, 2016, the EU rocked on its foundations as the result of an insufficiently anticipated pro-Brexit vote. A couple of months after the Brexit vote, in October 2016, the French authorities indeed dismantled the infamously named “Jungle” at Calais, and laconically announced that herewith they had dealt with the problem for good.

Toward the end of 2016, another long-term friend and collaborator, Herman Asselberghs, was working on his film For Now, and he showed rushes to his friends-interlocutors. For Now (2017) pays tribute to the life and legacy of Walter Benjamin, and contains a long sequence at the municipal cemetery of Portbou, on the French-Spanish border, where Benjamin is buried. There is, as you can see, a gate similar to the closed gate at Porto Vecchio. Yet here, the gate at Portbou, stood wide open, toward the sea.

This somehow proved the final encouragement that I needed: from then on, it was clear that I had to go myself to the maquis of Calais, as Sylvain George identifies the marshland near the Port of Calais where the infamous Jungle once used to be. Sebald, in the Corsica texts, identifies the maquis out there in Corsica as “that vast space still almost untouched by human hand” (p. 30). I desired to verify with my own eyes a similar space in Calais about which certain fellow humans wanted to pretend as if it was still untouched by human hands, and I was determined to wander around everywhere where it proved necessary to go. Whereto would these inhabitants of the “other Calais” have gone? It seemed impossible to believe that they had disappeared entirely, as some news reports wanted to make us think. From inquiring around with acquaintances at the Museum in Calais (with whom I already was in touch in relation to the Barcelona exhibition), it became clear that this was a complete fable and that, in order to hang out safely around there, I would need some camouflage to protect myself. So, I went alone, well-prepared (or so I hoped) in an old car with a Belgian license plate (which in France always connotes a sense of innocence) and I was accompanied only by my dog. The first trip turned out to be a game changer. From then on, I was convinced that I would have to step out of the indoctrinated logic of learned specialisms/divisions/ parochialism (hokjesmentaliteit, we say in Dutch), in which some art historians and perhaps so many others find themselves. I also came to understand such logic as a cage for both thinking and writing to which people tend to confine themselves, voluntarily.

The disastrous situation in Calais required me to move away from any possible complicity with the stigmatizing logic of “migration crisis” or “transitory migrants.” Even the label “humanitarian crisis” seemed entirely inadequate, because nothing — neither an outcry for humanitarian help, nor any expression of indignation — appeared to be effective for changing one single damn thing over there. It was Walter Benjamin who encouraged the author to become a producer, and so I decided that I had to start right there and then with unlearning to exclusively be a photo theoretician; and that I had to start integrating a certain practice involving fieldwork without however creating works of art; as the art world today, unfortunately, is subjected to a range of complicities with highly problematic hegemonic mechanisms from which I wanted to keep steering clear. In the relatively untamed way of proceeding that was the result of all this, I tried never to lose sight of precision or detail.

And so the pieces of the puzzle fell into place. I could now understand Sekula’s Deep Six / Passer au bleu as a work marked by a firm sense of premonition, or what Pierre Bayard, in Le Titanic fera naufrage (2016) called a “sleeping anticipation” (p. 169). Works of art and fiction, such as novels, do not exactly predict the future. Yet some among them have indeed anticipated historical events before they actually happened. The principal importance of such hypersensitive works, says Bayard, resides in the fact that they “help thinking the unthinkable.” In his remarkable book, of which the title translates into English as The Titanic will be shipwrecked, Bayard takes as his point of departure a novel published in 1898, which he saves from oblivion. This novel by Morgan Robertson, entitled Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan, sketches the story of the ocean liner Titan sinking in the North Atlantic Ocean after having hit an iceberg. Fourteen years later, on April 15, 1912, this sadly came true. To James Elkins I owe numerous insights on what artists actually know, but here I point at one element only, which is the “tacit knowledge” that they appear to possess, and subsequently convey via their works (see Elkins’ What Do Artists Know?, 2012, 48). Although this knowledge remains very hard to define — is it non-verbal, implicit, intuitive or, on the contrary, highly procedural and methodic? — the consensus reached involves an agreement on the fact that this type of knowledge adds different insights to the present-day hegemonic knowledge economy, as Elkins calls it. Tacit knowledge is intimately connected with the artist’s hypersensitive ways of being in contact with empirical reality. I want to argue that tacit knowledge contains both abovementioned aspects: it is as much intuitive as this non-verbal type of pursuing research is methodic and needs to follow strict, if rather idiosyncratic, protocols. It can be highly anticipatory and predictive of realities that are not yet there, but which may happen in a not so faraway future.

In an interview with Jean-Pierre Rondas shortly before his sudden death in 2001 (published in »Auf ungeheuer dünnem Eis«, 2011) Sebald shed light on how he pursued research: in a diffuse manner. Proudly he clarified that for refining his approach he had been contemplating at length how dogs run through a field. His was a way of proceeding exactly as a dog searches: to and fro, back and forth, sometimes slowly and at times fast until, eventually, there is a find. One should never think that this way of searching for the unknown is marked by chaos. On the contrary, it requires precision, focus, discipline, and skill. “As a Dog finds a Spoon” is the title of this conversation. Early in the morning on January 31, 2020 I paid a visit to Sebald’s grave in St. Andrew’s Churchyard, Framingham Earl, Norfolk, UK — what my dog and I ended up finding later that day is revealed in Ground Sea. It was a “kairological” day, to borrow a term from Tim Ingold (The Life of Lines, 2015, 21): a time of rupture and departure for the UK but also a space of twenty-four hours that showed in an exemplary way how we might continue to aspire for more harmonious relationships of “kinship,” as Ingold has it (p. 26).

I close with a short coda that pays tribute to the lives of people on the move, many among them tragically lost, and whom Georges Didi-Huberman has named firefly-peoples (in his Survival of the Fireflies [2009] 2018, 84). It shows you a clip of the opening scene from Sylvain George’s film May they rest in revolt (Figures of Wars I), as recorded in the park opposite the street from the Calais Museum of Fine Arts, where Sekula’s Deep Six / Passer au bleu is preserved. Three anonymous Ethiopians engage in rhythmic hand clapping while singing Orthodox Christian church songs in Amharic. You will watch and hear them sing, first, a song about God’s miracle, God who protects them and who is believed to never leave them alone. Then, follows a song about the Virgin Mary, who will salvage and rescue them, and who will dry the tears of Ethiopia. Since one cannot reproduce songs in a book, this page is an optimal platform for sharing a moment of communality together by means of a song. Right after finishing this ritual encouragement and moving tribute to the faraway homeland, as George made us understand, the men straightly say to the camera: “Thank you. Now we are ready for loss.”