Hubert Fichte: Love and Ethnology. Lisboa

Hubert Fichte: Love and Ethnology. Lisboa
23.09.2017 – 05.11.2017

Proceeding Fichte’s novel Eine Glückliche Liebe (1984/1988; A Happy Love), recently translated by José Maria Vieira Mendes (publisher: Cotovía), the exhibition Mistake! Mistake! said the rooster… and stepped down from the duck features the artists Gabriel Barbi, Ramiro Guerrero, Ana Jotta, Eurydice Kala, and Simon Thompson, together with Fichte and Mau’s work from their stay in Salazar’s Portugal in the 1960s. The exhibition, curated by Jürgen Bock at the Lisbon venue Lumiar Cité, confronts key themes from Fichte’s work, such as torture, human rights, and bisexuality, as well as interrogations of Fichte and Mau’s aesthetic interventions. Fichte’s attempts at expanding the literary work itself as well as art write as a kind of “total method” have been worked out in Lisbon, the project’s first station, and leave their mark on the subsequent ones.

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The first project station of Hubert Fichte: Love and Ethnology is Lisbon (including the nearby seaside resort of Sesimbra). This stop refers to Fichte’s novel Eine Glückliche Liebe (A Happy Love), set in 1964, and completed by Fichte during his visit to Grenada in 1984. Even before he completed it, it was apparent to the author that this working holiday for a writer and photographer from Germany would serve as something of a prelude to Fichte and Leonore Mau’s multi-year research trips on both sides of the Black Atlantic. Nevertheless, Fichte narrates from the vantage point of the not yet successful but already recognized young author who would go on to write a best-selling novel (Die Palette) during his stay in Sesimbra and Lisbon.

Not only is the novel a working journal and detailed documentation of Portuguese society under Salazar, particularly the human rights situation in general and especially for gay men. It is, more than anything, a love story: a “happy love” between the mismatched couple of Jäcki and Irma, Fichte and Mau’s alter egos. But more than anything it is sexual love, which manifests itself in many forms, the gay and heterosexual subcultures of a small fishing region in the midst of a transformation to tourist center, and Jäcki’s love for Mario, whom he cannot bring himself to invite for dinner with Irma. And even more than this it is a revelation of a new side to gay love, which Jäcki discovers for the first time on the now penniless couple’s chaotic return trip across the better part of Europe: „– I don’t think you’d let yourself, Irma remarked. — I’m letting myself now. To Jäcki it seemed like the only transformation, other than birth itself, offered up by nature. That was the something else entirely. (…) Jäcki had been transformed once more.“ Jäcki’s shattering sexual experience in a Parisian steam bath contrasts with the extraordinary harmony and intimacy detailed in the dialogue between the couple, Jäcki and Irma, on the topic of happiness.

Eine Glückliche Liebe is the fourth volume of Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit (The History of Sensitivity). It is preceded by the novel Hotel Garni, set in the late 1950s, in which Jäcki and Irma recount their earlier lives to one another. In Die zweite Schuld (The Second Debt), the setting is Fichte/Jäcki’s residency at the Literarisches Colloquium in Berlin, and the interactions of the German literary elite of the early 1960s with their gay, Jewish, and surrealist colleagues. In Der kleine Hauptbahnhof oder der Lob des Strichs (The Little Main Station; or, In Praise of Cruising), a depiction of cultural and literary life in Hamburg in the early 1960s is set against scenes from the city’s sexual subcultures.

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About the project

The online journal Hubert Fichte: Love and Ethnology accompanies the eponymous cooperation between Goethe-Institut and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, with the support of the S. Fischer Stiftung and the S. Fischer Verlag and with the collaboration of numerous partners, and runs from 2017 to 2019 at the following exhibition and presentation sites: Lisbon, Salvador de Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, Santiago de Chile, New York, Dakar, and Berlin.

The point of departure for Hubert Fichte: Love and Ethnology is the ethnologist and author’s all-encompassing novel-cycle Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit (The History of Sensitivity), which Fichte worked on from the early 1970s until his death in 1986. Nineteen of the planned 24 volumes were largely finished by Fichte upon his death; the remaining five are incomplete or have gone missing. Between 1987 and 2006, seventeen volumes, some fragmentary, were published, which engendered a renewed critical reception in the German-speaking world. The project Hubert Fichte: Love and Ethnology focuses on several of these novels, which have been translated for the first time at the initiative of the S. Fischer Stiftung, to engender a similar critical reception in a number of the countries where Fichte and Leonore Mau pursued their travels and research interests from the 1960s into the 1980s.

For Fichte it was a matter of principle to stimulate a new post-colonial world literature and world art by means of a intensively engaged dialogue with the arts, as well as a manifestation of the sensitivity which finds expression in his novel-cycle. And thus Hubert Fichte: Love and Ethnology moves toward the Black Atlantic (Paul Gilroy), the widespread regions of the African and Afro-diasporic cultures which fundamentally affected both Fichte and Mau’s output as well as their understanding of ethnology.

Proceeding Fichte’s novel Eine Glückliche Liebe (1984/1988; A Happy Love), recently translated by José Maria Vieira Mendes (publisher: Cotovía), the exhibition Mistake! Mistake! said the rooster… and stepped down from the duck features the artists Gabriel Barbi, Ramiro Guerrero, Ana Jotta, Eurydice Kala, and Simon Thompson, together with Fichte and Mau’s work from their stay in Salazar’s Portugal in the 1960s. The exhibition, curated by Jürgen Bock at the Lisbon venue Lumiar Cité, confronts key themes from Fichte’s work, such as torture, human rights, and bisexuality, as well as interrogations of Fichte and Mau’s aesthetic interventions. Fichte’s attempts at expanding the literary work itself as well as art write as a kind of “total method” have been worked out in Lisbon, the project’s first station, and leave their mark on the subsequent ones.

The exhibition Implosão: Trans(relacion)ando Hubert Fichte, curated by Max Jorge Hinderer and Amilcar Packer at the MAM Museum of Modern Art in Salvador de Bahia and Centro Municipal de Arte Hélio Oiticica in Rio de Janeiro in November 2017, focuses on Fichte’s 900-page novel Explosion (1993). Beginning with Marcelos Backes’ translation of this crucial volume in Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit (publisher: Hedra), a number of Brazilian and international artists have developed works that respond to Fichte and Mau’s research into the Afro-diasporic religion Candomblé, as well as Fichte’s conflict with French photographer and ethnologist Pierre Verger.

The exhibition at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago de Chile, curated by Mario Navarro, opens in 2018 and is related to Fichte’s sections on Chile and his novel Explosion, translated by Cecilia Pavón (publisher: Metales Pesados), as its point of departure, together with the radio feature Chile: Experiment auf die Zukunft (Chile: An Experiment with the Future), first broadcast on Norddeutscher Rundfunk (Northern German Broadcasting) in 1972. Drawn to Allende’s political project, Fichte and Mau spent part of that year in the South American country. Fichte’s interviews with Allende and Carlos Jorquera, former press secretary for the Allende government, are testimonials to Fichte’s intense engagement with Latin American socialism, and are the central point of reference in this affiliate project station in Santiago de Chile.

Adam Siegel’s English-language translation of Die schwarze Stadt: Glossen (1990; Black City: Glosses, publisher: Sternberg Press) is the point of departure for exhibitions at Participant INC and E-Flux Space, curated by Yesomi Umolu (2018). Between 1978 and 1980 Fichte spent a substantial amount of time in New York City. It was here where he experienced his engagement with Afro-diasporic cultures as a culmination, for it is in New York where they all may be found — for the first time they appeared to Fichte in their entirety as a single counter-universality, coherent alternative to Western art. Fichte expands these insights at greater length in his interviews with artists, activists, and chance acquaintances.

The station Dakar extends to Fichte and Mau’s lengthy stays in countries such as Benin, Togo, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Guinea Bissau, and Tanzania, as well as Fichte’s political insists and his investigations into Yoruba culture, particularly its medical and psychiatric practices.

The final station on the project will be in Berlin at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in 2019, curated by Diedrich Diederichsen and Anselm Franke, the artistic directors of Hubert Fichte: Love and Ethnology, who take up the themes and artistic stances of the six preceding stations and critically challenge them in their broader historical and current contexts. The planned exhibition and public conference expand upon the questions that have arisen and open them up into the present moment.