Hito Steyerl vs. Jumana Manna

Hito Steyerl’s classic 2013 video How Not to Be Seen, or a Fucking Didactic MOV. File is a sober and hilarious dramatization of the editing technologies that make images and people disappear. In a series of ‘lessons’, narrated by male and female robotic voices with an English accent, Steyerl lists the tools of image manipulation and social engineering that erase objects and subjects from a variety of panoramas, existing both offline and online. The work is held in many European collections, it is often exhibited and referenced. In 2022, Hito Steyerl invented a new way to disappear, declining to participate in the INLAND collective’s program at the Documenta 15. Citing troubling reports of working conditions at the exhibition and the show’s curators, ruangrupa, inability to deal with the accusations of anti-semitism, Steyerl, who was at the time No. 4 on the ArtReview’s Power 100 list, just a few points below ruangrupa in the top slot, professed “no faith in the organization’s ability to mediate and translate complexity” in a statement for a German daily Die Zeit.

Jumana Manna’s short film Foragers (2022) has no coincidental stylistic or narrative points of convergence with the work by Hito Steyerl, but it does present an expansion, of sorts, to two of the strategies of disappearance listed in How Not to Be Seen’s lesson 5. It is easy to disappear, says the electronic narrator, ‘being female and over 50’ or ‘being undocumented and poor’. Of course, there are political contexts that can make one’s poverty and old age even more decisively invisible. Foragers tells the story of Palestinian peasants who gather wild thyme, Greek sage, and akkoub in the neighboring fields and face steep fines for doing so. Foraging on Israel’s territory is illegal, the film tells us, because these greens are supposed to be cultivated by farms. But Palestinians cannot afford land insurance, unlike state-sponsored farms, and even if they did, they have no intention of halt the practice that exists for several generations. The Israeli farmers cultivate the plants to sell to the ‘arabs’, making a living off of agricultural policies that privilege their businesses. Palestinian peasants, though, may be invisible to the image-making machines of contemporary media, but there is always someone watching, in their case — a police patrol that ambushes the foragers and imposes fines, or a judge that implores a detained Palestinian to respect the law.

Tending to similar points politically, How not to be seen and Foragers could not be more different formally. Jumana Manna is in her film for a couple of minutes, off-screen, interviewing a plantation manager. Hito Steyerl is her video’s protagonist, the only person with a face. Foragers is a series of staged situations that are based on real events and feel like a documentary. Steyerl’s work betrays the Western intellectuals’ unceasing enchantment with political conventions of Brechtian theatre. While enjoying the circus-like machinations of the dancers, performers, and interlinked layers of the video’s animation, we are constantly reminded of the film’s artificiality. It takes an abandoned resolution target, built by US Air Force in a Californian desert to calibrate analog aerial photography, as its formal starting point. An asphalt polygon no bigger than a courtyard, this construction could serve as scenographic blueprint for a Brecht play or Lars von Trier’s Mandalay. In employing a US military edifice as a narrative environment, How Not to Be Seen underscores the most important difference between two videos. Steyerl can’t help but be awed by feats of ingenuity displayed by the world hegemonic power, and all but tries to adopt the power’s point of view. Manna’s film is grass-level, sometimes literally, with the camera swishing through the wilderness in pursuit of its heroes.

Notable divergencies in method and style should not, as it seems, constitute an ethical divide between the videos’ meanings, but at this particular moment of the planet’s history they actively do. How Not to Be Seen is indicative of the Western leftist intellectual’s insistence on games of language and image. Geopolitics, mass culture, and Frankfurt school quotes rhyme, therefore they are true. It’s not that this activity is futile: Hito Steyerl’s art makes the world a better place for those who are ready to produce similarly structured critique. And she, like every aesthetic revolutionary in the age of de-skilling since at least the Sex Pistols, makes it look so easy. And fun: some of her videos, How Not to Be Seen included, joyfully break the fourth wall by including production notes instead of actual images. One can extend these doubts to Brecht himself: for him, breaking the fourth wall meant a call to action. But what if his trick resulted in turning the audience into theater actors instead of the political ones? Neither revolutions were started nor power grabs averted by a performance of The Threepenny Opera. But you would certainly feel better knowing the exact formal recipe of how to produce a righteous sentiment and make it look politically pointed. Imagine that you are faced with a controversy too bothersome to deal with. Call it a failure to ‘mediate complexity’, and sleep well, knowing that your hands are conceptually clean.

Foragers has no theoretic embellishments, a stark and modest Kiarostami to Steyerl’s hi-tech Godard. Palestinian peasants are arguably further removed, identity-wise, from a given audience member in an American museum, where Foragers were first shown, than Hito Steyerl’s constructivist concoctions. Still, the peasants are people that most other people can feel for. Their plight evokes sympathy not because they are who they are, that is, Palestinians, indigenous to the land that is removed from their jurisdiction, and we, as the predominantly white audience for contemporary art, are supposed to root for them, especially in the current moment. Their state is universal because most of the property that surrounds us offline and online is colonized by someone who has financial and political instruments to own it. In a closed circuit of online rage and consequent feelings of increased helplessness, individual economic and political agency seems elusive, even in the so-called First World. More and more often, Western workers, creative or blue collar, steal the things that are supposed to be theirs, be it food or time, all the while wondering why they have to break so many laws in the process. Foragers is not an allegory, in fact, there’s nary a metaphor in the whole movie. Still, it’s much closer to showing the contemporary human condition than any of How Not to Be Seen’s layered witticisms.