Studium Generale

Rietveld Academie & Rietveld Uncut

Relating (to) colour

2019-2020

Affirmative action! Towards radical solidarity.

Make a difference to something or someone.

Easy to understand.

Binding contract.

Clear-cut identification of right and wrong.

Overly simplified.

Without colour.

Hierarchical colonial tool of oppression and slavery as racial abstraction that through deduction divided humanity: those who were not white, were black.

BLACKFACE: A person painting their face black, and therewith creating a caricature of a black person typically based on the American nineteenth-century minstrel figure. Part of this racist tradition is the Dutch Black Piet figure, a remnant from the time when the Netherlands was involved in slave trade (ca. 1500–1800). Black Piet is an effeminate minstrel figure and aid of the white-bearded Sinterklaas to whom children tell their heartfelt
wishes while seated on his lap as he pretends to listen from his throne. [footnote: Perhaps all holidays operated by white-bearded, throned men of affluence, who break into one’s home at night, gifting gifts, is an effective pacification of children’s politics through a coercive instilling of desire, and are to be considered part of the continuation of a corporatist and consumerist agenda of washing.]

Blue (person) in Dutch, pejorative term turned nickname for people of post/ colonial Indonesian decent, with mixed Indonesian-European (Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch) blood and specifically without any of the rights or privileges of the Indo-Europeans. Blauwe is one of the synonyms for indo (not to be confused with capital letter Indo, the post-Sec- ond-World-War generation who organized themselves against Dutch culture in the Netherlands), along with: liplap, sinjo, halfbloed (literally: a half-blood as mixed ethnicity) all indicating mixed Indo-European heritage (Birney). (See: MESTIES)

Blacklight blue.

Military attack on one’s own side, (accidentally) causing harm.

A material object whose space and identification is a representational reality (Bhabha xxxii).

Stark light and dark contrasting for dramatic effect in representation of the (moving) image and language.

Botanical term of abnormal plant colourings, where parts of the plant that are usually green are otherwise coloured. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak employs the term to identify racial discrimination of skin colour determinations in relation to global economic developmentalism, as ‘the visible difference in skin colour [being] a revision of racial discrimination to naming “people of colour”’ as “third world people” leading to absurdities as it is part of a nomenclature based on the implicit acceptance of “white” as “transparant” or “no-colour” (Spivak 165).

Subtractive colour model and coding system, using Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-Key (black) in printing and screen technologies.

The language of nature has a queer bent (Derek Jarman crushing Charles Blanc).

Discrimination based on skin colour. Also called: shadeism.

Media outlets coin specific colours characterizing mass political movements and popular uprisings, such as: the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, Blue Revolution in Kuwait, and Cedar Revolution in Lebanon.

Anyone who considers themselves able to assess levels of consciousness has become part of a neocolonial-imperialist agenda.

Presence of sunlight depending on where you are on the planet.

A decentring (Spivak on Roland Barthes 347).

A derailment of the mind, going off track.

Every language and every dialect forms a way of thinking (paraphrasing Fanon paraphrasing Jacques Damourette and Édouard Pichon 53).

Ahistorical classes in society without privilege (Michel Leiris in Fanon 55).

Shows the organi- zation of wavelength movement as the way we receive the world around us. Our senses are located on various parts of this spectrum, a very small range of which is visible to the human eye (380–760nm). Despite hosting all our non/human senses, most of the spectrum is imperceptible to us, which we may call out as a spectral quality of our existence: we are not able to receive most wavelengths, at least they are not received consciously. Wavelength frequencies (their movement) depend on the medium through which they travel, which is any kind of material including the atmosphere and weather conditions.

The affluent language/s that pose/s as our un/welcome common d(en)ominator/s.

Process of interiorizing, a getting under the skin.

Ay ay me!

‘…has never saved anyone’ (Fanon 17).

Approaching a topic from perspectives radiant in all directions as a method that includes the intersections of connected and overlapping topics, events, processes, systems.

Wrote the infamously popular portrayal of colour among artists: Zur Farbenlehre (1810).

Symbol showing the measurement of wavelength and its frequencies as measurement on the electro- magnetic spectrum.

Symbol for ‘cripple’.

Symbol for gay liberation, as a complete exchange of energy. (Footnote: by graphic designer Tom Doerr)

Tongue.

Reincarnated soul (Fanon on M. Mannoni’s The Cult of the Dead and the Family, 118).

Animal species who are far out on the electromagnetic spectrum, they have up to nineteen cones in their eyes instead of three cones used by the majority of humans.

Dutch colonial pejorative terminology identifying skin colour of (former) enslaved people and those without rights from mixed black to mixed white: carboerger, mulat, mesties, casties, and ‘white creole’: poesties, testies. Carboerger would be someone who is on average three quarters blackandonequarterwhite,mulat or mulatto one half black and one half white, testies one thirty- second black, etc. This name calling derived from and coincided with Portuguese and Spanish terminology (Hoitink; Donsselaar).

Visual identification of mixed ethnic heritage or half-blood- edness is often abbreviated as simply mixed (French: métisse).

Celestial body and satellite orbiting the
Earth in a cycle corresponding to average menstrual or fertility cycles (27/32 days) influencing the movement of water on the planet, such as the tide of seas.

Absence of sunlight depending on where you are on the planet.

Indigenous women from one of the tens of thousands of islands of what is now Indonesia, in the former Dutch East Indies lived with Dutch men as their slaves, concubines, life partners. If a child was born in this setting the mother would be expelled from the household.

Ons soort mensen, ‘our kind of people’, degenerate and accepted Dutch expression in self-identification of upper class or elitist privilege. There are internal debates on who actually classifies as the epitome of such old wealth chic.

Very happy.

A place where there isn’t any trouble.

System for colour mixing and shorthand for its Pantone Matching System (PMS), a colour standardization in which an ever-expanding range of colours can be found through its codification system in six-figure letter and number combinations. (See: HUMANAE)

Blurred identifications.

Painful identification of illnesses by researching body tissue samples.

Neurosis of excessive and overwhelming fear of something present or merely existent as such.

Colouring material made from animal or plant tissue.

People of colour.

A magic potion.

Lightreceptive black hole.

Graphic vampiric bites (Avital Ronell, Crack Wars).

Human ‘races’ are a social Darwinist construct and distinctly not a biological identification (Paul Gilroy bites race/s in The Black Atlantic).

Violent form of discrimination based on different human ‘races’, based on quasi-physical features as character traits continue to shape socioeconomic relations today. Racial discriminations show social hierarchies: as always
‘unresolved ensemble[s] of antag- onistic interlocutions between positions of power and poverty, knowledge and oppression, history and fantasy, surveillance and subversion’ (Bhabha xxxvi). (See also: AA, STRATEGIC ESSEN- TIALISM [Spivak])

Considers racial inequalities [colonising] societies’ building blocks, being a persistent feature of social, economic, and political systems, that are actively continued and supported to this day (Glossary for Understanding the Dismantling Structural Racism/ Promoting Racial Equity Analysis, The Aspen Institute).

Considering racism from an inter- sectional perspective as racisms come in many forms (Clelia O. Rodriguez).

Symbol of variable colour spectra repre- senting various ranges of intersectional identifications, and specifically diversifying a/sexual and non/gender positionings.

‘There is nothing more traumatising [for the young child] than its encounter with what is rational’ (Fanon 128).

Additive colour model mixing and coding system making use of Red-Green-Blue in printing and screen technologies.

Parts in the eye organs that respectively identify light-dark and colour.

Starts to delocate colour.

Ranges on the spectrum from 380–740 nanometres.

Removal of the largest organ of a non/human animal body.

G/host.

Cosmetic product used to whiten skin made from poisonous
materials such as lead oxide.

Grouping together or self-organ- ization of a minority group as political tactic as coined by Spivak. Juxtapose with: racism/s.

Is always out.

A mixing of the senses where someone can smell colour, taste names, see music, etc.

Alcoholic drink.

Artist Anish Kapoor acquired the legal rights to the blackest black pigment, which absorbs 99.96% of light.

Colour washing is used to create a false image: white washing, green washing, pink washing – possibilities are endless like the colour spectrum.

WAVE: Swaying movement.

Makes people drunk and able to forget (Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth) and is always built on enslavement of interspecies-others.

Speaking about the weather is is a potential form of climate activism.

Colour codification and abstraction for Eurocentrism and subsequent negation of violent colonial heritages. Marking people white or people’s whiteness aims to identify deep-seated ignorance of heritage and historicity in keeping to unproblematized neo/colonial governing agendas.

Other people, especially Europeans (Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks).