Dialogues on Opacity

Dialogues on Opacity
Exchange Circle

As part of his larger project of articulating a vision around the relation of identities, cultures, and communities, the Martiniquan poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant¹ writes that at the base of the western idea of difference lies a reductive gesture of grasping (each other’s) realities and ideas, a requirement for full transparency. »In order to understand and thus accept you, I have to measure your solidity with the ideal scale providing me with grounds to make comparisons and, perhaps, judgments. I have to reduce.«² In response to this dominating motion of reduction to the transparent, Glissant offers the concept of opacity, as a framework for relation that is based in illegibility and generosity in action and perception.

While the notion of opacity after Glissant, as formulated in Poetics of Relation, was introduced in the 1990s,³ it remains crucial against the backdrop of today’s regimes of visibility,⁴ censorship, and surveillance, also (but not only) affecting art and discursive contexts. Beyond that, the concept is specifically nurturing to the community context of Akademie Schloss Solitude, which is a contact zone for fellows from a broad and diverse range of cultural and social backgrounds. Because the constellations of fellows tend to mirror global circumstances (including social and political tensions), sensible and solidaric communication is always at stake, but this also holds the potential to rehearse relation in unlikely and rich ways. The concept of opacity introduces a perspective that can be productively considered for the ways in which this community comes together.

A discussion that stayed with me from the first gathering revolved around the notion of giving-on-and-with as an approach to relation, translated from Glissant’s original French formulation donner-avec. Following Glissant’s translator Betsy Wing,⁵ we considered the term as a substitute for comprendre, the French term for understanding, which originates from the prefix con- (with) and the word stem prendere (to take). Tracing its etymology, the term seems to signify a gesture of gaining knowledge that seizes, assimilates, and through this motion attempts to pull everything into its world, to render it transparent. The English language is equipped with a similar term, to grasp, which similarly aligns with the appropriating motions of the explorer and the colonizer. Donner-avec, on the other hand, proposes an alternative approach and way of perception (In French, donner can mean »to give« but also »to look outward«) based on generosity and softness, and drawing from a sense of yielding and giving in.

The second exchange circle expanded the discussion on opacity toward the theme of silence and the various layers of the phenomenon, while also touching on the notion of community itself. We engaged with the themes through somatic and listening exercises, sharing personal stories (which will remain private) as well as dialogue around the politics of silence. Silence was approached as a layered phenomenon that encompasses the suppression of voices, the barely audible, defiant silences, as well as the possibility for a language of silence.⁶ One of the critical questions we encountered was why we are once again leaning on academic reading and lengthy speech to approach the fragile phenomenon of silence. Can we subvert dominant speech while also staying specific to the ideas we talk about?

While our responses to this question remain distinct, what emerged in the discussion is a reflection on what is at stake; not so much an opposition of academic and non-academic vocabulary but the implicit and latent qualities of exchange. Turning back to the framework of the opaque, the creation of a welcoming environment for dialogue may start with attunement to intervals and pauses,⁷ to the unspoken, and to who doesn’t speak, while also valuing nonverbal forms of exchange. Attentive listening, in the sense of donner-avec, may aid this process of coming toward each other. Listening-with stands in for listening not for revelation, but amid our different backgrounds and tuned to the resonant overtones that weave together the temporary community. As we rehearse a form of paying attention that leans toward others, we open up to a sensation that can disrupt positionality, expectations, and internalized knowledge. Perhaps subtle gestures of active and generous perception are the invisible threads initiating communities that – without mixing ideas and identities into a flattening amalgam – emerge through the opaque complexities of many worlds.

Depth Attunement: turbid images, opaque imaginaries
Presentation and workshop

As part of the exchange gatherings, I invited artist and ocean scientist Mae Lubetkin to host a presentation and workshop for the fellows that introduced a specific and situated angle on the theme of opacity. The format emerged from Lubetkin’s previous workshops and research, and drew from our conversations around opacity, muddy ways of sensing, and submerged memories. »Depth attunement« opened up currents to engage with the turbidity of image-making and the right to opaque imaginaries, finding fluid ground within deep ocean worlds. The attunement began with a corporeal listening moment of sensing place together, then slipped into oceanic depths through Lubetkin’s presentation.⁸

Thinking through the question of visibility, the presentation traced genealogies of subsea imaging and oceanic imaginaries. A plural space of many meanings, the deep ocean is also a contested zone shaped by extractivist and colonial continuums. One argument to ban internationally proposed seabed mining points to the uncertain magnitude of destruction it would inflict, and the limited scientific knowledge of deep-sea environments. As Kathrine McKittrick notes,⁹ science has yet to »question the analytical work of capturing, and the desire to capture« more data, while legal frameworks overlook the ocean’s right to opacity (Glissant).

The workshop then attuned to physical fragments and digital traces of deep-sea floors. Workshop participants got in contact with oceanic remnants – iridescent, ancient, soft, odorous – then rendered them into 3D models. Aligned with Bridget Crone’s Turbid Image,¹⁰ each digital reconstruction was compared to its material counterpart, asking: What gets enveloped in the turbidity of image-making? Which imaginaries persist without digital mediation? Beyond these waters, the session ended with a collective dialogue on turbidity as a shared condition, and opacity as a politics of sensing, being, and imagining.¹¹ We continued our conversation well into the evening, sitting in solidarity and reflecting on the deep ocean as a space of multitudes.

Opacity : Transmission
Group exhibition and sonic program

With contributions by Swati Arora, Lukas Beyer, Kosmas Ðinh, Hanieh Fatouraee, Louis Henderson, Saghar Hosseinpour, Atsuko Mochida, Matilde Outeiro
Assembled by Kosmas Ðinh, Matilde Outeiro

Building on the exchange group that assembled several times in the space, the format gathered encounters and resounded conversations around the topics of opacity, silence, and translation. Resonating with the format and methods of the exchange circle, the barn offered a space for refuge, dialogue, and attentive listening at the edge of the Open Solitude event.

Through installations and a sound-based program, the lenses of opacity and transmission were proposed as a continuum – an echo chamber of broken rhythms, communal dialogues, and structures of support and power. Through a collective voice the exhibition posed the questions: What is at stake in the moment of translating an internal conversation to a public? When does quietness and speaking with a trembling voice become acts of resistance? How does migration and war shape voice and silence? And which communal languages outside of dominant speech can we tune to?

The sonic program opened with an audio essay by Louis Henderson on the disappearing voice throughout different versions of Words (1973–77) by Sangie Davis and Lee Perry, continued with a radio piece of Saghar Hosseinpour,¹² and closed with a live set by Lukas Beyer, in which he sonically deconstructed Emily Dickinson’s poem I dwell in possibility.

The exhibition featured an installation by Atsuko Mochida on structures of support, a work by Hanieh Fatouraee based on her research on different ways of knowing as well as hydro-spatial and temporal relations near the lake Urmia (Iran), and an interactive installation by Swati Arora on the epistemic violence of borders. Matilde Outeiro and I set up a research library that gathered referential materials of the exchange group as well as contributions by fellows of the academy related to the format’s themes.¹³

Conversation Library – list of contributions

Swati Arora: »A Manifesto to Decentre Theatre and Performance Studies,« in Performance Research. Vol. 27, no. 2, 2022, pp. 1–12 (available online at: doi:10.1080/14682761.2021.1881730).

JJJJJerome Ellis: The Clearing: Music, Dysfluency, Blackness, and Time. Bak Online, 2025 (available online at: bakonline.org/en/research+publications/prospections/the+clearing+music+dysfluency+blackness+and+time/).

JJJJJerome Ellis: Thank you, Elder PPPPPPPPPPPhytolacca. From the series Exposure, 2023.

Fabian Faylona: Fragment of the absent Other. Decalcomanies, 2025.

Édouard Glissant: »For Opacity,« Betsy Wing (trans.), in: Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor 1997.

Betsy Wing: »Translator’s Introduction,« in: Glissant, Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor 1997.

Amelia Groom: »Hush Now: Terre Thaemlitz and the Languages of Silence,« in: The Contemporary Journal. May 24, 2021 (available online at: thecontemporaryjournal.org/strands/sonic-continuum/hush-now-terre-thaemlitz-and-the-languages-of-silence).

Louis Henderson: Words of my mouth. Unpublished manuscript, 2023.

Harriet Ann Jacobs: »Chapter 21: Loophole of Retreat,« in: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. 1861.

Brandon LaBelle: Sonic Agency: Sound and Emergent Forms of Resistance. London 2018.

Herman Melville (Translated from memory by Kristen Brande): I Am Bartleby the Scrivener. Bordeaux 2021.

Trin T. Minh-ha: »The Image and the Void,« in: Journal of Visual Culture. Volume 15, Issue 1, 2016 (available online at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1470412915619458).

Film stills from Trin T. Minh-ha, Forgetting Vietnam. Moongift Films, 2015.

Martin Herbert: Tell Them I Said No. Berlin 2016.