Fieldwork

"You Don't Have to Believe Me"

Uzbek Poem 50

Langston Hughes

From the 1934 Uzbek Translation of S.[anjar] Siddiq Prepared in English by Kevin Young, from the notes of Muhabbat Bakaeva

You don't have to believe me,

But we are stronger

Than thunder cutting heaven,

Than hurricane,

Than death's silent eye -

We who feed and dress

Everyone else,

We are miners, laborers, peasants -

The pack mules of the world.

Only now you'll follow us,

Past and Future watching our dust.

detail, Writers Hands, 2023, cyanotype on cotton

2024: Chapter 9, "You Don't Have to Believe Me," by Farrah Karapetian, available here.

2023, Presentation, The Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University

This ongoing project privileges the personal narratives of cotton laborers over the institutional narratives that have predominated both visually and verbally since the end of the U.S. Civil War. It also considers the roles photography has occupied in the liberal project of raw material production: boosterism, propaganda, and news on the one hand and personal photographs on another, no one type telling a complete story. How can I turn the medium on itself to reveal its blindspots? Fieldwork is a transparent meta-ethnography that uses material as metaphor. Although the story of cotton after the U.S. Civil War is international, I focus here on the U.S. in northern Mexico near California and on the U.S.S.R. in Central Asia, especially Uzbekistan. I feel most implicated by these two regions' histories and am most interested in the presupposed ethical binary between them, which loosens when one looks closely at cotton.

Select images

Social Engagement Project in Uzbekistan, 2022

Who to Cotton, 2022, single channel video, 40:03

Who to Cotton: Songs From the Field is a video made through a residency at the Ilkhom Center for Contemporary Art in Uzbekistan through the CEC Artslink Art Prospect Network. "I worked with locals to collect oral histories of people's experience picking cotton. The songs that came up in the interviews were quite diverse, including Roma, Soviet, American, and German sources that suggested multiple generations, ethnicities, and transnational connections. I decided to set these songs to video appropriated from the internet that showed the evolution of the cotton industry from the 1940s to the last few years. I made a video that is about 40 minutes out of this collage, including a couple of voice excerpts from the interviews. This resulted in a picture of the people’s experience that was both anonymous and quite specific. It also reveals the evolution of cotton at least since Soviet times, up to the more recent boycott and changed labor laws in the field. The video makes it possible to observe dynamics between different ethnicities and urban/rural populations' relationships to the field as much as the evolution of political relationships to planting and picking over time."

With great thanks to Irina Bharat for her coordination of this residency and for her delightful engagement with the process, and thanks to Арлайим Гувайды and Мохира Мулляджанова for their help with the interviews. Thanks also to Susan Katz and CEC Artslink for the network that has changed my life.

Oral histories:

I collected eleven narratives via three local interviewers and one email. I paid two of these interviewers, and one volunteered her interviewing labor after I met her while she was volunteering on another project at the Theatre.

Prints from live performance:

I purchased ikat patterned cotton fabric in Tashkent and Bukhara and brought photo-sensitizing chemicals from home (cyanotype chemistry), which I painted onto the fabric in my apartment in Tashkent. In the museum in Tashkent and also in artists’ studios in Bukhara, I noticed the way text is incorporated into local miniature painting, and I considered this as I selected excerpts of the stories and decided how to deploy written narrative as part of the photographic exposure. I fabricated clear “negatives” to accommodate the text, and staged a day of engagement with four young participants, who enacted key postures from the stories on the ikat alongside the text. At home afterwards, I worked for a week to round out the prints with other aspects of the stories. Because the process results in silhouettes, the narratives could remain anonymous despite certain textual details from the stories themselves.

Performance:

I also gave the songs and certain textual excerpts to local musicians – a singer and a guitarist – so that at the exhibition’s opening, they could perform the diverse range of music, accompanied by a dancer who would move improvisationally in concert with the sound and narrative. The dancer moved behind a cotton curtain, backlit, so that her movements too were in silhouette and thus anonymous, but also rhyming with the silhouettes on the fabric prints.

Booklet:

I printed the stories in a booklet with blank pages, so that anyone who visited the show could also add to our collection of anecdotes.

After the residency, Irina Bharat and I spoke about our experience here.

Kama Moon in shadow theatre on cotton. Photo: Анатолий Ким	Arlayim Guvaidi reading excerpts from various interviews about cotton experiences, and singing excerpts of the songs people remembered from these experiences. Photo: Анатолий Ким	Kama Moon in shadow theatre on cotton. Photo: Анатолий Ким
Arlayim Guvaidi reading excerpts from various interviews about cotton experiences, and singing excerpts of the songs people remembered from these experiences. Photo: Анатолий Ким	Ян Добрынин (Yan Dobrinin) singing and playing guitar with respect to the songs people remembered from their cotton experiences. Photo: Анатолий Ким	open mic regarding experiences from cotton
Scrapbook available for more stories, being filled with pictures as well	Scrapbook available for more stories, being filled with pictures as well	The artist looking through the scrapbook. Photo: Анатолий Ким