Minn Fejn Int? (exhibition)

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Minn Fejn Int?

Where are you from? is an exhibition by the artist Norbert Francis Attard.

In many cultures and societies it is often assumed that physiognomies classify and taxonomize. But do they really do so? Or is the assumption itself that is of interest?

It is this play on identity through physiognomy that the artist wishes to explore: our assumed certainties and uncertainties in language and thought about what constitutes “us” and “them”. All of us make implicit assumptions in our perceptions of strangers about who they are or might be – assumptions that are sometimes supported by other signs when we observe more closely, such as through clothing, posture, mannerisms, ways of acting, etc. Sometimes we may be right, and sometimes we may be wrong.

A single “sign” may throw us off-balance and confuse us. The artist has produced a collage of photographs to engage the viewer with the problem of identity/physiognomy/expectation/ assumption. But let us tease out the baggage of assumptions contained in physiognomies, and therefore implicitly in what the eye sees – or more precisely in how culture (that is our mental frameworks) imposes its classification on what we see. What is contained in physiognomies? Not just heredity (who we resemble – our parents or ancestors), but also expectations – expectations of sharing features, identity, and also (often unknown) histories. And in our contemporary world an intrusive guest imposes itself at our dinner table - sometimes frustratingly disturbing, at others reassuringly shambolic. That “guest” is Genetics: the study of human evolution and of human populations. One of the “lessons” our guest teaches us is that human populations have been interacting throughout Man’s evolution. There are no discrete, hermetically sealed, self-reproducing human populations. It is culture and history that gives a people its specific “characteristics”. But that history also includes varied and complex genetic inputs from often surprising sources.

The artist’s aim in this installation is to explore and pose questions about the complex relationship between physiognomic expectations of a culture and its genetic underpinnings. Attard has collected a whole series of physiognomies from the Mediterranean island of Malta both to highlight the complex history of the island as a central meeting place of populations throughout its long pre-colonial and colonial history, and to pose questions as to how a shared commonality is created. To begin with, his aim is to subvert common notions in the island about “typical physiognomies” – for, as his photographs show, there is perhaps no such thing. This inversal of the classificatory logic of a colonial physical anthropology through its intellectual offspring, biological anthropology and genetics, then leads to other questions. If a people or culture can display such varied physiognomies, which are themselves traces of a place’s history, how is unity achieved through the eyes that continually scan those physiognomies in their daily interactions? “Culture” is too general an answer. It explains everything and nothing, especially because genetics is itself part of culture – both because it “explains” and because it needs to be “explained”. So the artist wrestles with nominalism, and he suggests, echoing Derrida’s writings on difference (or more precisely differance), that difference is more than just socially produced. Rather, it ontologically makes the social world. Derrida suggests, contra Plato, that at the heart of existence is not “essence” but an operation of différance. There are no absolute identities; nothing is itself by virtue of its being. If that is accepted, then the notions of ‘presence’ and of ‘Being’ are themselves unstable concepts. The answer to the question “Where are you from?” therefore is not one of place, or even of origins, but of pre-origins (if such a ‘thing’ were possible) – an almost unimaginable a-temporal a-topos – of differance, that is of deferral both temporal and locational. “From Difference, for my name is Difference” is thus the only logically and universally true answer by each one of the persons looking at us, and by us the viewers. Freud was thus perhaps “right” when he spoke about “the narcissism of minor differences”, for it is through such differences that we create our identities. But at what costs?

Paul Sant Cassia
Anthropologist
Durham University, UK.

Exhibition

Exhibition Photos

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External Links

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